Mike Patton has been called a lot of things over his career, including but not limited to: Man of 1000 Voices, Godfather of Nu-Metal, and “a complete and utter musical visionary and a mind-blowing and standard-warping genius.” But ask anyone he’s collaborated with, and one word is sure to come to mind: Workaholic. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Patton was on fire; the collapse of Faith No More had only increased his drive to create, resulting in an impressively huge if somewhat inconsistent body of work, where Patton was putting out some of his most and indeed least…

“There is something more important than logic: imagination.” — Alfred Hitchcock

Mike Patton has worn many hats during his long career, you could practically fill a walk-in closet with them. In addition to his contributions to a vast and ever-expanding list of musical projects, he is also both a screen and voice actor, and has composed the scores for a number of feature films. Patton’s love of cinema is well documented, and has become one of the defining characteristics of his identity as an artist. The name FANTôMAS is itself a reference to a supervillain from a series of 1960’s…

Oh shit, I forgot about this one.

Ever get ahead of yourself? Ever get so excited you make careless mistakes? Well I have, and I want to apologize. Between releasing the spastic first FANTôMAS album and the masterful final Mr. Bungle album, Mike Patton put out a record called She, under the name Maldoror and in collaboration with arguably the most revered and legendary figure in the history of noise music, Tokyo’s own Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow. Now, Merzbow is known for a great many things, including but not limited to his expansive discography consisting of over 300…

Like most of the internet’s favorite music critics, I have a very active presence on Twitter. In fact, part of the reason I created The Mike Patton Corner was to redirect some of my irrepressible admiration for the man from my Twitter feed into a long-form blog. While I’ve tried to keep my inflammatory opinions to my timeline and my rapturous hero-worship to my essays (not always successfully), I’m going to allow one of my blinding hot takes into my review: California is the most overrated place in the country, possibly on Earth. I recently spent close to a week…

During the slow demise of Faith No More, Mike Patton found himself artistically restless. By 1998, the band that had made him a global superstar was basically dead, and in addition to reconvening with Mr. Bungle to write new material (tune in next time for that one), he had also been recording a series of demos for avant-garde grindcore songs. Intending to form a supergroup, Patton sent these demos to three people: his longtime friend and Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn, fellow prolific alt rocker and formidable Melvins frontman Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne, and Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura’s drummer Igor…

In taking on this project, I figured I would have to decide at some point where to draw the line between experimentation for the purpose of challenging the boundaries of what music can be, and experimentation for the sake of making a bunch of weird bullshit. Does the answer lie with the artist’s intent? With the audience’s interpretation? Will only time tell? All questions I have been forced to ponder as I listened to the self-titled one-off collaboration album Weird Little Boy, an album which is neither well known nor particularly well loved, especially by the artists who created it…

As someone who’s been a semi-semi-professional music journalist for close to a decade, I feel confident in saying that critical acclaim is quite overrated. It doesn’t matter how much praise a film, album, TV show, or novel receives upon initial release; it is ultimately the audience that decides whether something holds up, which is why oftentimes art that was panned in its time ends up being infinitely more culturally relevant than the critical darlings of its day. This is not to say that 1997’s Album of the Year, the Patton-fronted Faith No More’s fourth and, until recently, final record, has…

In the music app on my phone, Mike Patton sits comfortably right underneath another one of my favorite enigmatic musical geniuses, hip-hop supervillain MF DOOM. The two actually have a lot in common: both have carved out their own unmistakable and influential style with a trademark sense of humor, both have made some of their most acclaimed and groundbreaking work in high-profile collaborations with other widely celebrated artists, both are known for their playfully antagonistic public personas, and most importantly, both have made concept albums about food. DOOM’s culinarily-focused record, the anagramically titled MM.. FOOD, is underground rap at its…