The secret to making an independent album. The concept for 'Genus' first came to me when I saw a piece of artwork by Lauren Marx called 'From Our Flesh'. It is a stunning piece of work, as are all her works, and at the time I had been writing a lot of new music and needed a theme to tie it all together. I also needed a 'band' name. The inspiration for this came from the title of a poem by Muzahidul Reza which I read around the same time. Thus The Animal State was born and t