1.Can you give us an update on what has been going on with the musical project since the recording and release of the new album?
Sure! Typically, I'm recording at least a few albums simultaneously. I started what became The New Twilight in 2018 and finished the audio about a year ago. I did the packaging earlier this year, but I was still working on several albums at once during this whole period. TNW is the 17th album and my second with Cold Spring, but I've got five or six other albums that are in various states of release, two of which will come out in the next three or four months on other labels. I'm finishing up the packaging for those two albums currently, along with working on a video for a song from each release with my friend and video collaborator Felix Burford-Connole. Felix and I also recently completed a long-form video collaboration called VHS Nightmare which was a whole lot of fun to make. It's very trippy and weird and funny and straddles the line between just fucking around and avant-garde.
2.Recently you have released a new album, musically how does it differ from the stuff you have released in the past?
So, The New Twilight is kind of a companion piece to two earlier releases. Tonight of the Living Dead (2008) in which all audio and packaging was all built from the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. The other being Nights and Profecy (as a split cassette in 2020, and then expanded as a solo album in 2022) which was built completely from the 1981 Italian film known in the U.S. as Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror.
While both of those albums each focused on a single horror film, for The New Twilight each song is built from a single horror film, all from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s really kind of a hazy remembrance of some more obscure films from that era. I was always seeking them out and the whole genre at the time was a huge influence on me. There's an art booklet that comes with TNW and the imagery on each page of the booklet refers chronologically to its corresponding song / film. The titles for each song were also derived from its source film.
Musically - regardless of whatever source material I use (as I primarily use samples), these three albums all have a certain consistency: 100% sample-based compositions, typically with a shifting ratio of slow-burn menace and a kind of sublime but grimy beauty, which I try to steer into directions that, to me, feel hypnotic. I’m usually drawn sonically to a kind of balancing act between texture, drone and melody. Ultimately, whether using samples or not or whether doing conceptual work or not - I think that description can apply to the entire 400 Lonely Things catalog. I know my lane with this project as I've defined it over the years, but it's a pretty wide lane to work in.
3.Over the years you have brought a lot of science fiction and horror themes into the music, which aspects of this genre have you covered so far musically?
So for horror, it's all been cinematic, and typically doesn't extend past the 1980s and is thus far limited to the above three releases.
For science fiction, I've recorded two albums called A Barsoomian Lullaby (Vol 1 in 2008 and Vol II in 2009). These albums were written to accompany my re-reading of the Mars books written in the first half of the 20th Century by author Edgar Rice Burroughs.
My next science fiction themed album is complete, but unreleased. It's a sprawling (160 minute) collection of songs called Goodbye Cruel World.
The first half of the album is a kind of Hauntology for the Space Age we were once promised that never arrived, which is honestly something I still have a hard time coming to grips with emotionally. I have a perpetually low-key broken heart because I'm earth-bound and earth is on such a frightening and backwards trajectory currently.
The second half of the album pretends that we actually did get that Space Age and is the soundtrack to imaginary intergalactic adventures. However, this second half is so drastically different from the first half, that I will likely release this album as a split single release between 400 Lonely Things and my electronic shadow project, Phobadrena, or as two completely separate companion albums.
4.On one of your albums you also have covered occult and conspiracy theory themes, can you tell us a little bit more about your interest in these topics?
In the 1980s in my early teens, my Dad got into the right-wing Christian conspiracy world (before it was "cool", lol) - trading underground VHS tapes about Christian concentration camps and the Antichrist with weirdos we would meet at gun shows - so I was exposed to that kind of stuff at an early age. I was never a true believer in the conspiracy, the politics, or the religion although I thought the fantasy / science-fiction element was kind of fun.
In the 90s, I was reading a lot of books by Robert Anton Wilson and other authors, which dovetailed with the occult edge of the industrial / art / anti-music scene that I often listened to. With the "help" of drugs, I went down the rabbit-hole of Operation Mindfuck for a few years, before remembering the true nature of that mission as originally formulated by Kerry Thornley (to parody conspiracy to reveal its absurdities) and, more valuably, Wilson's take on it - which was to engage in a thought experiment to examine how one is capable of believing anything and how that belief transforms your perception of reality. I was fortunate that I was able to extricate myself from O.M. (and the drugs), while others (like Kerry Thornley) couldn't.
I was never truly interested in the occult, although I have friends who have very much incorporated that into their conspiracy-free lifestyles. I respect it and I get it, but t’s just not for me. Although I do love the imagery and art and music that can often be associated with it, especially well-crafted films.
I revisited all of this intertwined occult and conspiracy nonsense with an album earlier this year called Apophrenia as a response to the mainstreaming of conspiracy here in America. I remember what that kind of thinking felt like as an insider and it was as mind-altering, destructive and addictive as any drug - so I put together a collection of songs that reminded me of what that experience felt like. I just couldn’t stay quiet about it.
5.You refer to your music as being 'dark new age for the new dark age'', can you tell us a little bit more about this term?
6.What is the meaning and inspiration behind the name '400 Lonely Things'?
I'm going to combine these questions as the answers are related.
My late best friend and musical partner, Jonathan McCall and I started recording together in 1988. We were very unfocused as our tastes were all over the place and we just recorded whatever music happened in the moment. This resulted in us having like a dozen different projects at any given time and that made it hard to find a through-line of consistency with everything being so fragmented. People would ask us what kind of music we made and that was honestly frustrating as we just didn't have an answer.
In the early 2000's, I was looking through a little yellow pad that I would just jot down phrases and words on - things that might make interesting song titles or whatever - and saw that at some point I had written "400 Lonely Things". That name showed up at the same time that I was finally noticing this one consistent strain of music that we'd always been making since the very beginning - melancholic ambient pieces that often had samples at their core and fell somewhere on the border between drone and melody, and I thought "that's 400 Lonely Things".
At some point many, many years later, I stumbled across this turn of phrase "Dark New Age for the New Dark Age" and thought it was cute but also pretty accurate. I'd like to think I made the phrase up, but I really have no idea exactly where it came from. Anyway, traditional New Age music has always been so soft and fluffy to me - Diet Enlightenment, Transcendence Without Struggle - but I still liked it because it was soothing. My background is one that is rooted in struggles, just like everybody else - including the people making that New Age music - and I thought something like "what would New Age music sound like if those struggles were actually acknowledged? Especially in these times where civilization always seems on the brink of backsliding or being erased." And I thought it might sound a bit like 400 Lonely Things. It's New Age music but often haunted by the various ghosts and poisons of life. I was just so thrilled to finally be able to answer the "What kind of music do you make?" question that I went full slogan with it.
7.Can you tell us a little bit more about the artwork that is presented on the new album cover?
I'd love to, but I can't. For two reasons. The first reason is that while I feel the way I use samples (be they audio, visual or whatever) falls squarely within the domain of fair use, others might have lawyers who feel differently, and I want to avoid any legal drama. The second reason ties into the first in that there's a fun little source material guessing game as a by-product of that deliberate obscurity for horror nerds like myself that might end up with this album.
8.You have been recording since 1988, what is it that motivates you to keep going after almost 30 things?
Because it's fun! I love recording. The whole process. And I love the end result. I make this music specifically for myself and I enjoy listening to it. It's the one aspect of my life that I am 100% self-indulgent with, the one thing in life that I have 100% control over. I'll keep doing it for as long as I feel this way.
9.The current releases have been released by Cold Spring, how would you compare working with this label to other labels you have been a part of in the past?
Cold Spring is great. Justin is a super easy guy to work with and his history with the music he's released goes back decades. And with the direction his label has been going in the past several years, I think 400 Lonely Things is right at home there. It's also incredibly meaningful (and kind of mind blowing) to me to see my releases alongside works by musicians that I've been listening to since I was a young teenager who now also have releases on Cold Spring.
As I mentioned earlier, I have two releases coming out in the next few months on different labels. These are labels that I've either never worked with before or have done some compilation contributions for. I'm curious to see how those shake out.
Other than that, my label experience with 400 Lonely Things was limited to split cassette releases on Rotifer (with Transmuteo) and The Helen Scarsdale Agency (with Fossil Aerosol Mining Project) and I didn't really have any interaction with the labels for those.
Everything else 400 has done has been self-released, including earlier albums on my own former label Pimalia which I folded shortly after the 2008 recession.
Jonathan and I did release one album together under the name LOOM back in 2000 that was inexplicably on an amalgam of practically every major label on the planet, but the primary label imprint folded within weeks of it being released and the album just disappeared. It's just as well. We had originally given them an album that sounded a lot like what later became 400 Lonely Things, but after hearing it, they said they wanted something more electronic so LOOM album ended up being a mashup of the early 400-sounding stuff with primitive, oddball IDM with decidedly mixed results.
10.On a worldwide level how has the reaction been to your newer music by fans of dark ambient, drone and experimental?
Honestly, I really don't know. For so many years, I just did the work. I would record an album and then just dump it on Bandcamp and wouldn't do anything to promote it. I didn't care if anyone else heard what I was doing as I was the only audience member. I just liked Bandcamp because I had a place where I could look at it.
That changed with my first Cold Spring release Mother Moon. I knew that was a special album and - against my instincts - I actually wanted other people to hear it. I reached out to a bunch of musicians I'd admired for decades for advice, and to my surprise they all really liked it - William Basinski even offered to shop it to labels and shockingly let me use his name as Producer. Ben of Zoviet France and Andrew of O Yuki Conjugate even blurbed the hype sticker. And the reviews were all universally positive. That whole experience was perfect. The kindness and encouragement will never be forgotten. I had received validation at a time when I no longer even craved it and that's probably the only healthy way to receive validation. So, thank you to all of you.
I do have regular listeners and they come from all over the world. I correspond with a few of them or chat on the socials and they seem to like this stuff and they also seem like great people and we often have a lot similar interests. I'm glad they like it. Thank you to all of them. But I'd still be making it even if no one was listening but me.
11.Where do you see yourself heading into as a musician during the future?
So - other than Goodbye Cruel World - the next few 400 Lonely Things albums are not going to be conceptual in any way. They are just collections of songs with no agenda, no subject matter - just straight audio diaries. And that's something I've been needing to do after so many conceptual / thematic releases in a row.
Where I'd like to go with 400 Lonely Things would be to contribute some music to some film scores and / or video games. There are so many modern horror films I would have loved to have been involved with - even if just peripherally - and the same goes for a handful of games.
Outside of 400, I'm keen on finding a home for my electronic side project Phobadrena.
But the big thing for me down the road will be to properly release some pre-400 archival projects. Especially Jonathan's 1980's experimental recordings as Seeping Beauty and his 90's religious noise terror recordings as The Lice Methods. And I really want to release Dinner Music, which was a collection of tracks (mostly recorded to 4-track cassette in the 80s) that we did just to make each other laugh. They are pretty fucking funny and often weird as hell. Just terrible strong bad fun.
12.What are some of the bands or musical styles you are currently listening to nowadays?
I've ceased trying to figure out why I'm listening to whatever it is that I'm currently listening to, as I can find no rhyme or reason or pattern of any kind to it. I spent the first three months of this year only listening to With Sympathy era Ministry and I still have no idea why. Then the next couple months just listening to their industrial metal stuff, which I hadn’t listened to since the early 90s. I'm just as likely to listen to old dub by Prince Far I or Scientist or 70s / 80s prog rock by Jethro Tull or Rush or Yes or classic post-punk and new wave as I am to listen to artists that feel influential to me, or whatever is the latest thing I've been exposed to usually through friends on Bandcamp (Mark Hjorthoy, Daktyloi, Autumn of Communion). Also, I'm happy to recommend the new Seefeel album along with the O Yuki Conjugate offshoot called Open Yellow Circle. I'd also LOVE to recommend the new Boards of Canada album, but that doesn't exist, so damn.
13.Before we wrap up this interview, do you have any final words or thoughts?
Yeah - thank you for the questions and the interest. It means a lot. People like me tend to toil away in obscurity, and it is nice to know sometimes that we're being heard.
https://www.facebook.com/400LonelyThings/
No comments:
Post a Comment