Addicted To Noise staff writer Gil Kaufman reports: Nothing exceeds like success. So, after more than a dozen years of struggle and psychic damage, the Butthole Surfers finally surfed to the top last year with their album, Electriclarryland, mostly on the strength of the trippy single "Pepper." And if it was any other band, you might think they'd rush back into the studio and pound out some more of the same. Uh, but this is the Butthole Surfers. So, when we caught up with drummer King Coffey yesterday at his Austin estate,  we asked what the group was up to and what we can expect on their next album.

"Well, right now we're just shopping for computers and samplers and some new toys," said Coffey, his dog barking in the background, as AOL crashed his computer for the third time that morning. "The next record is what we've wanted to do for a while, which is to say it will be a lot looser, more like Rembrandt Pussyhorse or Locust Abortion Technician, where we had no idea where we were going and we just started getting some basic ideas together and kept building up on them."

Coffey said the band has been listening to "a lot of sample-oriented music lately," and so they've been shopping around for new samplers and computers that will allow them to collage the sounds they're aiming for. "We need to find a sampling system that will work for all three of us, where one of us comes up with an element, then we give it to the next one and he adds his element and so on. We all want to be trading samples and elements and building this strange sound. Kind of a Butthole stew." Tasty.

Although, the Buttholes are still in the research phase, Coffey said they're in no hurry to get back into the studio, and are certainly not itching to hit the road again. "The success of the last album hasn't really changed us that much," Coffey said. "Actually, we're more burnt-out from the last record and tour than we have been in a while. For the past year we've been a full-on rock band, doing big rock shows, the full-on rock thing, and that's not really in our heart.

"At the root, we're not a conventional rock band," he continued. "We prefer to do smaller, more experimental types of things and not have to do the big rock thing every other night."

Coffey said the group are ready to just take some time and fool around with the new gadgets they hope to buy soon and make a less structured, more experimental type of album, which will come out, "sometime, when we're done with it."