Several hours later, when the band is on stage, The Faint is restored to all of its complex, mechanical glory. Strobe lights pulse, high-contrast images flash across a screen behind them, and orange and blue stage lights splash color over the entire scene. The band members themselves—each of whom is tall, thin, and mostly limbs—dance to a slightly different beat than any of the others. Most of them adopt sharp, jerky, precisely-timed movements, and, as a group, they look like marionettes controlled by some passionate and unseen puppet-master. They neither engage with each other nor with the audience, maintaining expressions of intense neutrality. The overall performance blurs the line between man and machine. Even singer Todd Fink’s vintage aviator goggles and white lab coat make his humanity ambiguous. And, well, it fits.   

   The Faint’s music is a melding of electronic and electric that has tinges of a sci-fi dystopia to it. As a case in point, they employ both a drum machine and a live drummer: it’s a coexistence that begs the question of who follows whom. When asked how much of their live performance is sequenced, sampled, or played, Fink glances at the ceiling as if a parade of digits is floating above his head, and randomly picks two: “Ninety…eight per cent.”

   Drummer Clark Baechle takes over from his non-answer: “Any time you see us playing something, we are really playing it.” He pauses. “But there’s only five of us, so…”

   Petersen adds, “There’s some impossible parts.”

   Baechle continues, “We don’t write our songs in the way where, when there’s five parts, we’re done. We just keep making the song until it’s done, and then, when we play live, we have to figure out if one person can play multiple parts, or put a few samples in the background to help fill it out…for the most part, it’s us playing, but there definitely are samples that come in and out.” This symbiotic relationship between man and machine—like any sci-fi novel will suggest—is, of course, prone to pitfalls. “[Things break down] pretty much every day,” says Fink, while the others laugh and mutter.

   “All the time!” chimes in keyboardist Jacob Thiele.

   “The more stuff you have, the more stuff you have that can break,” guitarist Dapose adds in a calm baritone. “And it does. Unfortunately.” 

   This particular interaction between synthetic and organic is the hallmark of The Faint’s sound. It’s also responsible for the impossibility of contextualizing them in a scene. Though terms ranging from “hipster” to “techno-geek” get tossed around in conversations about the band, their audience is a surprisingly diverse and non-stylized assortment of people. “I don’t have any problems with labels…I can’t imagine one that would stick and actually last,” says Dapose.

   Thiele jumps in, “…That was kind of the inspiration behind the title [of the band’s 1999 release] Blank Wave Arcade, because so many people were like, ‘you guys are dark-wave’. Or ‘you guys are goth-wave’. Or New-new Wave. Or Nu-wave with an n-u instead of ‘new’…” It’s an in-joke that the band extrapolated: their newest album, Fasciinatiion, is released on their own label, which they wryly titled Blank.wav.

   “…Of course, .Wav files are sound files, uncompressed sound files, and a blank one that you’re trying to sell people seemed funny,” explains Fink.

    “Yeah, a blank .wav file. Files are the future of music, actually,” adds Dapose.

   “They’re not even the future; they’re the present,” Thiele says. “But they’re the future too, for awhile. Until it’s, like, some kind of cell or something, maybe, that you put into your brain?—I don’t know what’s after files. But files are gonna be the way--the way music is shared and sold for long time, I think.”

   “It’s true!” adds Baechle. “They will be able to, eventually—I don’t know about you and I, we might not live long enough—but you’re younger, so maybe you [might live long enough to get a chip implanted in your brain]. I don’t know how healthy you eat.” The mildly facetious, sci-fi turn to the conversation isn’t surprising—very human themes of sex, birth, and death are constants throughout The Faint’s discography, layered over mechanistic beats, self-consciously electronic buzzing, and jarring shifts. It’s gritty details of human experience mashed against dark electricity. Given this aesthetic focus, a human-computer amalgamation might not be too far-fetched. 

   Ultimately, The Faint has been making music long enough to have outlived several different—uh—waves of trends. In its over-a-decade existence as a band, the members have carved a niche, then inhabited it. In sound and in performance, five men embrace technology (and often battle it), and the product is consumed by ravenous fans. And, right now, in a down-time moment on a rigorous tour, they’re tired. They are, after all, just people. Thiele excuses himself to answer a phone call, Petersen disappears, and the others scatter in search of food or a cat-nap after the interview. The digital voice recorder, for its part—the only bit of technology employed during the conversation— started beeping and malfunctioning halfway through, and it took prodding from all of us to get it back to working order. Relying on technology, then being betrayed by it? How apropos.