However it happened, I think that was important. Alongside this encounter with American experimental music, there was the friendship with Ariel [Rosenberg]. I let him use my eight-track and I was just blown over by this music [he was making]. They were two disparate trajectories. Fusing it with the other only watered one down. I wanted to put a garbage bag over my head. The point in either case is to go after the truth of that distinct path.
I still more or less hold on to this belief, though maybe less militantly than I did early on. It was those records largely, as I said, which distilled the boxes of vinyl that were lying around the room. Some of it turned me on. I mean, a lot of the outsider stuff was great. Aside from that it was essentially the canon of vanguard punk. For me, it was always more interesting to put on one of his tapes than to go too far into any of that.
He did that listening for me, so to speak. I could never get anybody into the Baroque stuff — I learned that early on. So it had to be my private passion, as it was not something I could really share with any of my peers. When you started making music with Ariel, what did that sound like?
It was definitely out there. So there was that [element] in the music he was doing. Not in some sort of disinterested scientific way, but in an affective, emotive way.
Nevertheless, they can still be described in a way that has a pretense to objectivity of some sort — in terms of its language, at least. From the start there was an interest in what details from entirely different musical situations I could mobilize and bring into the post-war popular music language. Not at all. I was actually going to ask you about Songs. Besides that interest in objectivity, what else was on your mind when you were recording that album?
It was five years of work, after all. I was in despair about it. I wanted to put a garbage bag over my head or put myself in an oven or something.
It was really horrifying, because nothing worked. Nothing did what I felt music ought to do. Believe it or not, I really thought these songs were comparable to other independent releases and could have been heard on the radio alongside celebrated music from that sphere.
I really imagined I was destined to get a breakthrough with the work I was doing. When I first made the tracks that were collected together on Songs , in and , I sent tapes to many independent record labels.
Then I made a bad joke about an Elliott Smith t-shirt. I was at least able to articulate mythology that satisfied me intellectually. I was no longer able to hide behind the curtain of ugliness, fear and despair. How did you refine your approach for Love Is Real? Did you still have the impulse to want to be on the radio? That was recorded four or five years after the tracks on Songs.
By that point I had bought the party line that everybody wants to make a living out of what they love, but just have to get a job to pay the bills. It was probably the only one I could get into because it was private and you pay to get in.
Because I was playing in his initial band configuration, he let me open for him sometimes. I opened for him in London and Upset The Rhythm saw me play. After that they said that they wanted to put out my stuff, which is how Songs originally came about. Coming so late, it defied any expectations that I was going to be able to do something like that and earn any bread at all. This was the situation that I was moving into when I started to write songs for the second record, Love Is Real.
I was in a deeper place than I was for the other album. I started to feel the joy of humility and gratitude just to be who I am. This spirit found its way into my work. Because I was doing the philosophy stuff at school, I was at least able to articulate mythology adequate to this spirit that satisfied me intellectually.
There was already a sense that people were going to hear it, unlike before, and I was comfortably in my element. I had that lightness that only comes through reaching out, helping others and not just thinking of yourself all the time. It strikes me that some of the stuff I was doing on Love Is Real , if you cast aside all of the lo-fi ineptness, has found its way into the mainstream.
Some of the little musical details, particularly. I lament that — not because I think I should have got credit, but because it left me with zero tricks up my sleeve in terms of being able to adequately set the music in relief.
To some extent, yes. With Pitiless Censors , I boiled it down to the search for the perfect pop song. The other day a guy had a Mark Ronson song on in his car. That finally led me down a rabbit hole. I was at breaking point. At this point I was going into sensory deprivation tanks and just trying any trick I could think of. I became solely obsessed with this at the expense of anything else.
For the first time ever, as a year-old person, I tried these things. I even tried one of those synthetic cannabinoids. There was a couple of experiments like that and none of them paid dividends in the music.
Do you revisit your work a lot? No, I do not revisit my old work very much. It took me back to each of those moments, where I was and the assumptions I was operating on at the time. It took me back to different times and situations, good and bad. It was a little bit heartwrenching at times. By Paula Mejia on October 26, Shawn Brackbill. What is the first song you remember being cognizant of? What electrified you about Starship?
What is the first song you remember hearing on the radio? Nirvana — Smells Like Teen Spirit. What were those songs like? Then, after the Second World War, these structures start exploding. The walls come down; we have a global market. All that is solid melts into air.
And that only accelerates by way of the smart media. I think of masons and the age of enlightenment, that sort of thing. We sure are! What did you mean by that? But the moves that I have seen seem to be after something altogether other than post-war pop music as I understood it: music based on riffs, on harmonies, on melodies.
With EDM or dubstep or whatever, the focus seems to purely converge on tone colour, where you have some melodic fragment just repeated over and over again, and maybe a filter sweep or something that changes the colour of that fragment. It will exhaust itself in fumes and give over to other things, like this melodic fragment repeated and those same mechanisms of control. Just a few years ago, artificial intelligence was primarily being used for classification and identification.
But it will get real time. Marketing analytics and all this stuff just gets more precise, more intelligent. As someone who was born in the s, I detect a lot of cultural reference points in your music.
But maybe that leaves us rudderless in the face of having every record you want at your fingertips. I can give it 30 seconds and decide whether I want to skip to something else. I was also unpacking that idea that everything becomes mediated through the screen — even the way you remember. Then in constellation with the cover, which is an old tube television set… maybe there is some nostalgia. That giant thing that took two people to carry has multiplied and proliferated; you can carry it in your pocket.
It mediates everything. What was it like growing up in Minnesota? I had no access to any vanguard pop culture. None of that stuff. Just Top 40 radio, the classic rock station and MTV. You ride a snowmobile. You can hear the wind in the grass and the sound of the one freeway that goes through the town — with no other aural interference.
I hate this. Especially a world that wants everything done for it in terms of listening and attention and everything like that. Okay, well… Finally, then — do you feel like you have anything to prove as an artist at this point? Most of that is going to go underneath the ears of anyone who hears it.
I had hoped to achieve some sort of unworkable, irreconcilable tracks that would just objectively present themselves as such. You know? Maybe that idiom is at its end anyway and something else is on the rise, the same way jazz or whatever was supplanted before. I appreciate you talking to me. I enjoyed getting to riff on the s. Screen Memories is out on Domino. Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Share this Photo by Nicolas Amato. The rap duo discuss finding their feet in an industry dominated by men, and why a salacious sense of humour is at the heart of everything they do.
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