1) You are from Houston, which I like to think of as being the musical center of the world. Essentially, if there is a particular genre of music that someone likes, Houston has an answer for them. What are your thoughts about H-Town?
1. Houston is an amazing city, for the reasons you've indicated and more. In terms of music scenes, we aren't as insular or cliquish as that of other cities: no doubt due to Houston's sheer size. It's big enough that pretty much any kind of act can attract an ample body of listeners. We are a metropolis brimming with talent - and all of the local bands are very supportive of each other. I've never worked as a musician in other cities, but it seems that places like Austin - due to the saturation of bands, coupled with there being only about two blocks of prime venue real estate - are, by their very nature, more competitive scenes. Then again, Houston may be more competitive than I realize - playing live is something that my band does rarely. That will change once I find some musicians to help me translate my music into a live environment: I have all the gear, just no players.
I would be a completely different musician outside this environment, that's for sure. For example, there's a retro nightclub in Houston called Numbers that I visited religiously as a teenager. That provided great experiences, because people at Numbers are so unafraid to be themselves. Witnessing that kind of extroverted enthusiasm for music firsthand played a monumental role in inspiring me to pursue music as a career. And that's just one example: a few years back, they put on this bizarre after-hours festival at River Oaks theater called Winter Wonder Glam. Downstairs were the glam and punk acts, while upstairs featured a kind of music I had, at 16, never encountered before: harsh noise and so-called 'experimental'. This random dude got on stage and just ran a sine wave through about forty guitar pedals for 45 minutes. He called himself, probably ironically, 'bone crusher'; seeing that raw and totally mind expanding performance left an indelible mark on me, for good.
I could go on and on. Houston is a great city, if you like any kind of music.
2) In a somwhat related question, something is going on right now in Austin because none of my normal music people are mass emailing me ten times a day. (Nor are lots of them posting to Facebook) What are your thoughts on SXSW?
2. I've never actually been to SXSW, but I did get a chance to check out the lineup this year. It seemed like a regular who's-who of great contemporary hip-hop. Austin is another great Texas center for musical activity, even if there are a few too many rote Stevie Ray Vaughan cover bands there. It seems as though the local government there is very supportive of their live music scene. I always love their Fun Fun Fun Fest, and I'll probably be going to Psych Fest later this year.
3) The Catholic Church just chose a new Pope. In 2016, we'll elect a new President. Who is pulling a greater hoax: The government or the Catholic Church?
3. Great question! Tough call. While the doctrine of Papal infallibility is as ludicrous as it is insulting, from my perspective the Catholic Church has no real power any more. Little cracks have been forming in that religion's foundation for centuries, so much so that it seems to be a shell of its former sinister eminence. They've basically been de-clawed by widespread secularization and the sex scandal ordeal - though their strange insistence on not using condoms is still doing a lot of damage to the societies of predominantly Christian, developing nations.
The government probably represents the biggest 'hoax', insofar as it lacks transparency. Insofar as people believe it works one way, while the actual machinations of government operate very differently. We Americans, on average, seem to greatly confuse the role of the Presidency, for example. Everything from gas prices to the economy invariably gets blamed on the Executive Branch; while the issues that the President actually is accountable for usually gets overlooked. There are probably a lot of factors that led to this degradation of the U.S. political infrastructure into a popularity contest, but it seems to me that it has a great deal to do with the way news channels dumb everything down. There's always a spin on everything, one way or the other. Advertising agencies have come between the voters and political efficacy, because every issue is invariably obfuscated by the way it gets covered in the media. There's a prevailing belief that you have to make the news interesting and dramatic, or else people won't watch your program. That trend has greatly diminished public awareness, as the only stories that get widespread attention are the ones in which editors believe will sell. I'm specifically thinking about the U.S. government's recent efforts to curb internet privacy rights, as well as Pres. Obama's ratcheting up the Patriot Act, as examples of pressing issues that were hardly covered by mainstream media sources.
Despite my derision for the current political climate, it needs to be said that I am not a supporter of the recent Texas Secessionist movement, which I feel is unpatriotic to the point of being treasonous. I'm not speaking in absolutes, but it seems most people who are on that particular bandwagon are under some very mistaken impressions. Texas barely survived the thankfully short period that it existed as a Republic. Mirabeau B. Lamar nearly ran the Republic into the ground when he tried to institute a Texan national currency, and he wasted a fortune in development of a Texan navy. There's no precedent in place to suggest we'd be better off as a free nation. And in general, threatening to secede merely because you don't agree with who won the last Presidential election is not just petty and childish, it's anti-democratic.
4) Not to disprove my last question or take any sort of merit away from it, but once a hoax is known it no longer really becomes a hoax so in some sense aren't all hoaxes modern?
4. Well, some hoaxes never die, no matter how aware you are of them. I use the term 'hoax' here loosely, as a stand-in for Roland Barthes' conception of 'myth'. Just as an easy example, take gender performance. I know that there's nothing essentially male about myself, but that rather I am performing my gender every minute of every day unconsciously. I know that the prevailing gender hierarchy is also a hoax, insofar as women are not passive prey prizes for my gender to harvest like corn. Yet if I'm walking down the street, or eating in a restaurant, and I see a female I find sexually stimulating/attractive, I find it next to impossible not to slip into the phallocentric tradition of converting that person into my Obscure Object of Desire. Of thinking of her body as a prized possession. Of speculating what sex with her would be like, etc. I'm not trying to get crass here, I'm merely shedding light on the way my mind has been conditioned to view the opposite sex.
It's not that I'm not aware that the female in question is just as much of a person as I am, with thoughts and feelings and emotions like anybody else. It's not even that I'm not aware how intrinsically chauvinistic my thought processes really are. I'm also completely aware that these inclinations are soft-wired, i.e. changeable. Yet there they still are, and they flare up in general whether I'm aware of them or not.
This is just one example. There are others. I'm a big proponent of Post Modern theory, which in general argues that myths and hoaxes are everywhere. Some are ingrained into the very fabric of our society, others in language itself; so deeply entrenched that nothing will completely dissipate them. There is a hoax of progress - that idea that, with every new leap in technology, the human race is getting better and better. That culture is on a perpetual trend upwards toward increasing sophistication. Or even that technology and products bring happiness. These are just a few prevailing hoaxes that stick with me, no matter how aware I am of their presence.
5) Your debut album is called "Sleep is the Cousin of Death". But isn't it true that if you don't sleep, as a human, you will die? So lack of sleep could become your cause of death? Sharks never sleep though, those lucky bastards. (I do enjoy sleep I just find my frail body having to do it more than I'd like)
5. Sure that's true. But the title of that album is actually a reference, oriented around the conceptual framework that lead to its creation. Y'see, around the time I made that LP, I was listening to quite a lot of 90s gangsta rap. But not in the most typical fashion: instead of looking up to these violent characters as role models or powerful figures of masculine authority, instead of mindlessly celebrating the music's wanton depiction of violence, misogyny, and social decay, I thought of the music as an expression of some deep and profound pain. Hip-hop is basically urban folk music, and if you listen closely or maybe in a new way, you'll find rap music's own model of itself irrupting. Instead of being some ultimate expression of strength and bravado, albums like Nas's Illmatic (the main inspiration for 'Sleep...') ends up sounding like transmissions from the mind of a person who is trapped in hell. Trapped in an environment that mainstream society pretends doesn't exist and tries to ignore. Locked in a prison that you inherited basically from the legacy of slavery, which you obviously had no say in but are forced to find a way to survive in. Under this light, songs like 'N.Y. State of Mind' are beautiful and tragic: snapshots of life underground, where "each block/ is like a maze", where the walls are closing in and you are put at odds against your own humanity. In that environment, Sleep really is the cousin of death. Metaphorically, of course. Resting, relaxing, or taking it easy in any shape, form, or fashion, is completely impossible. You're living basically in a lawless war zone, struggling to exist every single day of your life.
'Sleep...' was basically my attempt to put that bleak nihilism to music. It was a deconstruction of the hip-hop ethos from something extremely powerful and strong into something that's literally falling apart from paranoia and stratification. It also had a lot to do with my, at the time, borderline phobia of death. I was having what they're now calling a quarter-life crisis: the realization of death just showed up one day, and it dogged me for months. I became freaked out by the irreversible progression of time. Every night when I would go to sleep, that would feel like one step closer to death. The colorless silence of sleep is basically a little morsel of what death will be like, which is the meaning I get out of the line Nas says in 'N.Y. state of mind':
It drops deep as it does in my breath
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death
Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined
I think of crime when I'm in a New York state of mind
6) Your newest release is called "Magus" and it just came out. Now there was a little bit of... shall we say differences of opinions between your first release and your second release, "Maboroshi Childrens Museum", which actually lead to you releasing "Felix Culpa". Did this at all affect you in any way, as if to say, "Well, 'Magus' needs to sound this way" or "If they don't like 'Magus' then I can just make a 'Felix Culpa' version for it too"?
6. Consistency is definitely something I've never worried too much about. The differences between those records reflect a lot of things: what music I was into at the time, what mood I was in when I wrote the tracks, etc. If there's one aspect to MH that is consistent, it would be my dedication to tearing down what I just finished building up. There are exceptions to this, but in general, I hate the idea of ever becoming a Rolling Stones sort of band, where thirty albums of my music are all in the same idiom, where I'm saying the same shit over and over again. Conceptually MH's two biggest influences are the Fall and Throbbing Gristle: two bands that were dedicated to doing whatever the hell they wanted, whenever they wanted, without worrying about alienating their fan base. I'm appreciate of anyone who takes the time to listen to my music, but at the end of the day, I make these songs for myself. Each song, each record, is like a little experiment for me. I'm always trying to get over my head and out of my league; I always want to be a little bit unsure of where I'm going. Because that's what excites me as a songwriter: to always push myself towards experimentation. I never want to become a 'legacy' band, and I never want there to be an identifiable MH 'sound' for too long. Even if that means that I run into a great deal of unworkable road blocks and/or failures in the process of writing new material, I'd rather always be a dilettante than ever become a self-obsessed Dinosaur. The minute that you start thinking of your band as a 'brand' is the minute you've missed the point of musical expression, from my perspective, which is to always seek to break new boundaries.
Somebody once pointed out that this insistence on always changing is, in of itself, a cliche. Which is why I don't even follow my own mission statement every time - Magus and Maboroshi are very similar records, for example. In that case, I did not want to move on from that 'sound' until I got it down perfect. I still haven't even done that. The next MH album will still probably feature a 60s guitar-oriented feel. But eventually, I will move on to the next idea.
Concept-driven music has always excited me the most. Without a concept, without a driving theoretical framework, I don't really see the point. At that point, it's just bubblegum. This is why I generally refuse to think of my music in terms of 'singles', 'marketable potential', or even in terms of what my audience will be like. This is a big reason why MH has stayed a very small and obscure project - because I am hesitant to get involved with the corporate aspect to music. I don't want to hustle my music to people who aren't even going to listen closely. I'm just going to keep doing what I want, and if people get into it, then that's fantastic. But either way, I have to stay true to my own instincts and character. Music for me is all about self expression.
Felix Culpa was just a compilation of about twenty or so tracks that had been hanging around my hard-drive for years. MH has gone through a number of permutations over the years, I thought it would be interesting to group all of those disparate sounds and ideas into one super dense package. That comp. is my valentine to lo-fi, garage based teenager music, which is primarily what MH was when there were more people in the group other than myself. It's me saying 'sayonara' to the first chapter in the MH story. It's me getting closure on that time, and clearing my slate for the next era of the band.
7) Final thoughts? Possibly about the Astros new-old uniforms? /
Bonus Question: You have free releases and your most expensive album on Band Camp is $2. Do you feel that in this digital age we should be able to stream/download music for free and then those who like it will pay for it in vinyl, cassettes, etc. and by going to shows, buying other merch, etc.?
7. I'll use this space to answer your bonus question. I'm a huge advocate for the Internet revolution, which nobody will admit is the greatest achievement of Socialism in ages. I sincerely believe that downloading a digital copy of a record is completely different from getting, say, the same record on vinyl. You're not getting the same sound quality (even in FLAC), you aren't getting the physical copy or artwork, and you probably won't be spending as much time with it. In other words, digital versions of records (in my opinion) are basically samples of an album. If people are into a record enough, they will buy it. They will go to shows to support the band. And even if they don't, so what? Who says that musicians deserve to be exorbitantly wealthy? What's wrong with a part time job? I have long accepted that I will never be able to do this thing as a full-time career. I'm perfectly content to do it on my free time. And anyway, all I want is for people to hear my shit. I don't really care whether they wind up paying me for it, because it cost me nothing to record. Moreover, I download the majority of my music: and if I really love an LP, I'll buy it on wax. What kind of hypocrite would I be if I took Prince's outlook, and became the stingiest bastard alive towards my own music?
I believe it's a bit of a stretch to call digital downloading of music copyright infringement, as you aren't stealing anything: your downloading a digital replica of a hardcopy. Is it illegal to download a .jpg of the Mona Lisa? Of course not. It occupies no physical space, and it can be replicated infinite times over, precisely because it isn't the real thing. It's a copy. Record companies and artists alike have been bitching and moaning non-stop about how they're hemorrhaging money, while anyone who knows the first thing about the "biz" knows that record sales don't bring the actual artist much cash anyway. These values come from a dead era, where musical success was measured relative to financial success. Only the most naive person still believes that musical talent/worth is dictated by number of units shifted. Pop's most seminal, forward thinking bands generally never became rich and famous. Why should this generation expect to?
I am so twisted that I see downloading of my music as people supporting what I'm doing. I don't think every recording artist should feel this way, but it's how I react to people downloading my material. I personally put up torrents for MH albums on piratebay, and send music blogs mediafire links myself. I encourage people hearing my music, in whatever way possible.
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