DUBLAB PRESENTS KRAUTROCK CLASSICS WITH NITE JEWEL, CARLOS NIÑO, PHAROAHS, DNTEL, DAEDELUS, SUN ARAW, AND MORE ON FRIDAY JUN. 1ST AT THE FORD AMPITHEATRE, 2580 CAHUENGA BOULEVARD, EAST, HOLLYWOOD. 6:00PM/ $15/ ALL AGES

On Saturday, Oct. 15 dublab is holding their 12th anniversary happening at Atwater crossing and we have tickets to give you! Email us at rsvp@larecord.com and tell us about your favorite dublab event or memory from the last twelve years for a chance to win! Winners will be announced Friday, Oct. 14th.

Performing:

DIVA, TEEBS, DAEDELUS, DUBLAB DJS, TAKE AKA SWEATSON KLANK, JULIA HOLTER, HIGH PLACES, SFV ACID, JONTI, ESP + more guests and surprises!

ALSO:

dublab film retrospective and premiere screenings: Film Flash debut, Secondhand Sureshots, A Labrat Matinee highlights, Light from Los Angeles preview, plus an Experimental Popcorn seasoning station by Jenn Su.

HIT+RUN live screen printing on t-shirts donated by 2K.

Food trucks: Mandoline Grill, The Dim Sum Truck, Dosa Truck, Lomo Arigato, No Jodas.

Special cafe menu and wood-fired flat breads from Atwater Crossing Kitchen.

Cash bar featuring Lagunitas Beer and select wines.

Free bike valet thanks to the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition.

This is an ALL AGES event. $10 donation requested for admission. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE ADVANCE TICKETS or enter our contest to win!

Click HERE to win free tickets to this event!

Photo by Dan Collins

Bomba Estereo on the main Coachella stage were playing the best midday Cumbia it might ever be my pleasure to hear.  Though I wouldn’t have minded more of their psychedelic flourishes, singer Liliana Saumet’s enthusiasm was infectious and invigorating, and reminded me in no small part of Drew Denny’s exclamatory “yips!” in Big Whup.

But I found myself gravitating over to the Outdoor stage to catch Here We Go Magic.  There’s something about a red Fender bass that just screams summer (maybe because it’s the same ruby red as the vintage low-riders that appear in Hollenbeck Park every June).

Here We Go Magic by Dan Collins

Once again, here was a band proving that moody vocals over bright chimey reverb compliment hot sunny days more than ice cream and sweaty nooners.   A couple of the songs seemed a bit shaky: maybe the band was feeling a little nervous, or maybe there were sound issues, and it would be hard to beat Warpaint from basically the same slot the day before.  But Here We Go Magic was making the summer spread before me like warm butter on toast—and it’s not even Easter yet!

I headed back to the press tent to prepare for some interviews, just in time to be VIP side when Gogol Bordello hit the stage.  And this is where you, fair reader, and I will likely part.  Because unlike you, I find Gogol Bordello to be the most overrated, unimaginative band to hit the big time since Phantom Planet.  Have you ever seen Michel Basquiat in the seminal post-punk film Downtown 81 and wondered why a movie about graffiti and No Wave would feature three whole songs of Kid Creole and the Coconuts?  Gogol Bordello is the exact same thing for the Kill Your Idols crowd.  They’re a band that somehow conned their way into the No Wave platform through spectacular hucksterism, and history will leave them on the dust heap with the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

I’ll admit, their acoustic guitar and accordion did seem to fit the 4^th of July atmosphere of mojitos on the green in the VIP area.  And everyone else, from my fellow L.A. RECORD writers to the staff at the press tent to the bartenders, all loved this shit.  But if you closed your eyes and couldn’t see all the leg kicks and moustaches, you’d basically be hearing ska punk with a little accordion, and I’ve heard better from the Red Elvises on the 3^rd Street Promenade.  I love gypsy music, love polka, love Klezmer, love punk, love international folk music, and even love ska, but the “Hey look I’m foreign!” shtick of Gogol Bordello is a scam to hide the fact that they have no artistry or ideas whatsoever aside from becoming actors and colluding with Les Claypool.

But maybe I’m a hypocrite, because I left Erykah Badu’s lovely set early to see a child actress and her boyfriend play country music, and I loved it!  Part of me felt dragged towards Jenny and Johnny at the Mojave because of seeing Jenny Lewis in movies like The Wizard, and part of it was because she has the most gorgeous smile, dammit (I can’t help being white)!

Jenny Lewis by Dan Collins

Jenny and Johnny by Dan Collins

But the main reason was that Johnny and Jenny’s 2010 CD, I’m Having Fun Now, was the type of album you want to like but feel like you just can’t get into, and I was hoping their live set would show me the way.  Instead, I came away really respecting Jenny Lewis as a performer, but appreciated more the contributions from boy-toy Johnathan Rice (his song “We’re All Stuck Out in the Desert and We’re Gonna Die” was the anthem of the fucking WEEKEND), and slide guitarist Farmer Dave, who gave the whole shebang more of a country feel than any Jenny Lewis project I’d ever heard, including that tease she pulled with the Watson Twins.  True, this wasn’t country, or even squarely alt-country, so much as it was indie rock with a twang.  But the best-kept secret of country music is that it’s the musical genre that pays the least attention to its traditions: otherwise, we’d all be wearing Jimmy Rogers caps.  And there were definitely times when Farmer Dave’s crazy slide and Lewis’s voice, which somehow echoed both Jessi Colter and the Divinyls chick, approached a haunting exuberance that was a thousand times more country than whatever Toby Keith video I saw while bowling last week.

Jenny Lewis and Dave Scher by Dan Collins

Now, if you’ve never been to Coachella, you probably aren’t aware of how odd the teeming masses of people are.  Columnist Albert Ching sees the positive in this, and I felt that, too—but when I again and again found myself surrounded by tens of thousands of people splayed out on blankets, going out of their minds on ecstasy, with glow sticks around their necks and  LED lights strapped to the tips of their fingers, dancing HARD to rock bands I have only heard once in passing on KROQ, well, that’s a form of soul-sucking loneliness that’s hard to endure. That’s why all weekend for me had been a lead-up to see Wire.

Wire by Dan Collins

I had seen the Buzzcocks live in recent years, and they were one of the best live bands I had EVER seen.  And since Wire was even more agro and had even MORE of a snarl and was even MORE hip of a pivotal punk influence, I expected equal vivacity and icepick-to-the-heart bombast, with some Situationism and political-is-personal rage thrown in.

Wire by Dan Collins

What I got instead was a gaggle of tired old men who seemed to go through the motions like pack animals, with only long-haired youngster Matt Simms on guitar to prod them into anything like the vivaciousness of “Three Girl Rhumba,” which they may or may not have played, since I was incapable of staying for the whole show.

Instead, I took a plate of delicious vegan thai noodles out in the direction of the Outdoor stage, where Big Audio Dynamite was playing.  I am only roughly familiar with their oeuvre, and most of that is from hearing Big Audio Dynamite II as a kid, which wasn’t so good—basically Mick Jones sampling his old Clash material and writing songs about ravers that you couldn’t rave to.  Well, fuck it, I should have been here instead of at Wire, because B.A.D. was G.O.O.D., even if I couldn’t really get close enough to see more than the big projection screens due to the dense throngs of folks captivated by this performance. I’ve gotta say, the Coachella video capturers were getting great angles, and the chemistry between Mick Jones and Don Letts was contagious even halfway down the polo field.  Well played, old men.

There was a solid throng of glow-lit children stretched from the Outdoor stage to the Coachella stage, with no division, and I almost literally waded through them in semi-darkness in an attempt to see Animal Collective.  I couldn’t see them, but I did hear them: a lot of the time they did in fact sound like prescient geniuses, though at other times they sounded exactly like the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give.”  And so I figured it was time to see the London Suede.

The London Suede by Dan Collins

And I chose right.  I remember these gentlemen from the nineties as being dandies in foppy glam wear, and though on the Mojave stage they dressed all in black (more or less looking EXACTLY like the Riverboat Gamblers had at SXSW, they still made up for it in triumphant poses and an excellent usage by singer Brett Anderson of the little monitor platform at stage center: maybe playing in a tent was “camp” enough, ha ha!  Anderson is a handsome man—I’d tried and failed to be gay in my youth, but watching his face, which was lithe yet beefy, brown, and with veins popping, like well-marbled pork, I honestly felt like maybe I understood what I’d been missing with this whole dating-dudes thing.

And the energy just kept up!  With the Animal Collective and Arcade Fire fans distracted by the main stage, we had a core of enthusiastic Brit-pop fans to adore and roar along for the ride, crowded but not too crowded.  Was Suede now the best band of the weekend? Surely each song, from “Killing of a Flash Boy” to a fuck-me-gently rendition of “The Drowners,” was a classic, played better here than in most live footage I’d seen of any Suede era.  And when they slowed things down for “The Asphalt World,” I was touched by the sentiment and the melodic bassline, yet also a bit amused by the lyrics about supplying a girl “with Ecstasy.”  Has Brett Anderson looked out into a Coachella audience to see how unromantic Ecstasy use can be?  I wonder if this is how all drug trends start—one day you’re floating around with slurred giggles drooling out of your mouth on a brand new pill, and the next day the frat boys are spiking their dates’ drinks with it.  Arg.

My crew and I headed over to see Daedelus at the Gobi tent, but things were running behind schedule (shocker!) and Raphael Saadiq was on stage, which was AMAZING.

Raphael Saadiq by Dan Collins

This cat can fucking dance, and he wears the same pants I got at a thriftstore and wore to Seventies day in 1993 (I’m talking serious Jack Nicklaus).  He and his band were in final call, let’s-pull-out-the-crazy-on-stage-antics mode, so I didn’t see as much tight soul as I did wailing, audience-fluffing, and balloon dodging (a yellow balloon somehow followed him around the stage like a lost spherical puppy).  But fuck it, another great set by another great artist!  I’d almost completely forgotten that Gogol Bordello even existed.

And then Saadiq ended, and the buildup for Daedelus’ set began.  Normally there’s not a lot to do to set up someone like Mr. Darlington—just let him plug his Monome into an iMac and you’re ready to bleep.  But no, this time Daedelus had something special, and pretty soon we saw him wheel out three huge walls of crazy-looking mirror segments attached to little hydraulic motors.  Theoretically this was called the “ARCHIMEDES” and he’d built it at his parents’ house or some such thing, but would it work?

Indeed it would!

Daedelus by Dan Collins

Now, I’m not part of the Plug Research/Daedelus cult that some people fling themselves into madly, partially because D-Dog and I have a long personal history that involves USC, house fires, and dublab: I think of him less as a guy on stage and more as the dude I used to play Bust a Move with at TV Cafe in college while waiting for our $1.95 beans and rice.  I just can’t idolize him, but I do adore him, and I loved seeing the thought processes crawl across his face as he strung all his disparate elements together via the Moneme into a mad genius concoction (my favorite sample being from Crystal Waters), the occasional incorrect Monome punch revealed by a bemused smile or a lick on his thumb.  He even did something that could in lesser hands signal the death of the beat—a switch to waltz time, and back again, without losing one dancer!  And let’s not forget the simple bravery of adding Bjork and Smashing Pumpkins into the mix.

Daedelus by Dan Collins

It was such a great set that my crew stayed until the end of Coachella’s evening—a bitter mistake that meant hours stuck in the parking lot going nowhere, while we watched strangers walk to their cars with odd-looking balloons in their hands.  Why would anyone buy a soggy plastic ball thingie with an LED light in the middle?  Only later did we hear that Arcade Fire had dropped their balls into a gleeful crowd while we’d been looking at our reflections in Daedelus’s wall of wizardry.  But who cares!  We were just gleeful to have seen so many great artists and that we could catch up on some sleep for the long day ahead of us Sunday.

—Dan Collins

My Dry Wet Mess makes beats in Barcelona that sound like they come from L.A. and it all started with an Atari and MPC given to him by his father, a bass player in Ennio Morricone’s orchestra. He seamlessly blends art and sound with Daedelus for his live shows, and on his new imprint, Magical Properties. He speaks now from his parents’ house after Christmas about why everything is difficult for him, his inability to get a visa, and his affinity for twisting pop songs and mashing them with noises from unidentifiable sources. This interview by Lainna Fader.

You said My Dry Wet Mess came out of a creative crisis in 2009. What was the crisis?
I got stuck. For a couple of years I wasn’t really making music. I kind of lost track of what I wanted to do. At some point I just realized a lot of stuff was happening and I hadn’t been aware. I decided I had to start from scratch and try to do something completely different. I gotta say—seeing all these artists working the line around hip-hop and playing with the elements I wanted to play with, I learned that sometimes it’s good to have a fresh start. It can really help. For a year I was doing stuff that was really bad. Now some of my stuff is actually good.
What’s the most encouraging thing anyone’s ever said to you?
I can tell you about the first time anyone ever really listened to me. It really, really changed things a lot—the fact that Alfred—Daedelus— when he listened to my music, he really liked it and was interested. He was the first person to show me … the first person to judge it. He said straight out, ‘I want to release this.’ From that moment I gained a lot more confidence in my work. That’s meant more to me than any advice I’ve ever gotten.
You sound like you’d be at home at Low End Theory. Why don’t you live in L.A.?
I would just love to live in L.A.! I just can’t. I don’t know how to get a visa. It’s really expensive but it’s something I really want to do. I was in L.A. for two months—I actually moved there for two months. If it was just like moving to another country in Europe, I’d be living in L.A. right now. I think I have more friends in L.A. than Barcelona. It’s really frustrating if you make so much music and don’t get to get feedback from other people involved in the same thing. That just doesn’t happen where I live. I feel isolated. Frustrated. You’re not going to shows—not connecting with other people.
What do you do when you get frustrated?
Nothing—what can I do? That’s the main thing I’m suffering from. Most of the time I’m working at home and I’m by myself all day making music, which in a way is really fucking awesome and I’m so lucky to be able to do that, but at the same time it’s really frustrating. I don’t really have a solution for that—yet. This is the time in my life that I’m really trying to do this seriously. I’m only making music. I’m interested in a bunch of things and before this I was studying, I was working as a programmer, whatever. Always a bunch of things at the same time I was working on music. Now this is a full-time thing, the first time where I decided, ‘OK, I want to make music, this is what I’m doing now.’ I do it all day.
What’s something that scares you and excites you at the same time?
Right now—freedom. Freedom in the sense of being able to do what you want in your life. Pursuing your dream. It’s awesome but it’s scary because you never know if you’re good enough. You always think maybe you’re not, but since you’re able to do it you don’t have excuses. A lot of people do exactly what they want to do in a way. They want a job, they need a family, so they do that. That’s their priorities. They know what they want, or think they do, and they do it. You kind of have an excuse if that thing that you want to do doesn’t happen to you. But if you actually are able to try, it’s really exciting but scary—because what if you find out you’re not good enough? You don’t have any more excuses.
What was the first beat you ever made like?
I had this kind of rap band. Me and two friends of mine. I wanted to rap and I wanted to find out how to make beats. My father, he used to make some studio work at home, music for commercials and stuff, so he always had a computer at home and basic studio gear. He bought me this really old … How you say? Atari? The computer brand. I had this really small sampler to put samples in. I had this general MIDI thing that had all these different sounds. That was my set-up. The first one I made had a beat stolen from some other beat instrumental, and it had sampled voices. It was really average. Most basic hip-hop thing you could ever do. Drum loops stolen from somewhere. Sampled rap voices in there for the chorus. That was it. It’s funny cuz that’s pretty much what I’m doing now. It’s really similar, but I had to go through so many things to go back to that.
Any interest in classical training?
I would like to know more about music theory. I really have no fucking idea. I never studied and I have no idea why I never did. Most of my life, I had this ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude. ‘I don’t need theory.’ I guess that was fine for a while. It let me focus on different things. I never really liked to learn an instrument. I never liked to spend time trying to do something that was that kind of skill. I’d rather sit in front of a sequencer and move things around. Completely different skill. Because of that, I never got classical training. Right now I feel so stupid because these things that I am writing, sometimes … I’d like to write more complex music, in a way. So I am always thinking that at some point I’d like to learn.
Why do you feel closer to writers than most musicians?
I feel closer to writers because I can sit there and create my own whole world and I don’t need anyone else. There’s no translation between what I do and the final work. What comes out of my computer is what people experience. That’s so similar to writing a novel.
I read an interview where you cited Squarepusher saying his music is ‘between a monkey and a cliché’ and you said you feel very close to that definition. Why?
I love that definition because I feel like he was saying that he was trying to mix elements that are played by humans, in a way, and elements that are artificial—electronic, whatever. When you mix them, you never know what you’re listening to. You don’t know if those drums are sampled or programmed or someone’s playing. What he was saying is that you have to use … doing really weird shit, but always have elements in your music that people can hold on to. I’ve been making so many different kinds of music in my life and there’s one thing I’ve always been sure of: trying to do new things, but in a context that people can relate to. This is something I always find in things that I like the most. Let’s say, when I watch a movie, what I like is for a good part of it, you follow an ordinary plot but at some point things get twisted and you find yourself in a totally different place. You don’t know who is who, and things get messy. It takes you to a totally different context. For music, I don’t want to do really crazy music that people won’t understand. I want to do things with pop elements— things that everyone can relate to—and then twist it. Take the listener to a place he knows and can relate to, and at that point try something new. When he said that, I thought the definition was perfect. Between something that is so ordinary that everyone knows, and something that is really fucking weird. And mix them together.

MY DRY WET MESS’ IRRATIONAL ALPHABET OUT NOW ON MAGICAL PROPERTIES. VISIT MY DRY WET MESS AT MYSPACE.COM/MYDRYWETMESS.

Download: Daedelus “Tailor-Made feat. Milosh”
(from Bespoke out now on Ninja Tune)

Daedelus is a perfect Victorian gentleman who makes beautiful records about wars no one cares about and the virtues of handmade clothing. 2011 marks ten years of his recording, celebrated now with the release of his latest Bespoke on Ninja Tune, as well as a third Magical Properties tour, and shows at SXSW and Coachella. This is truly his year, as it should be. He speaks now from Susina Bakery about this world’s many failings and the oncoming alien battle we’re all going to face. This interview by Lainna Fader.

You said Bespoke is a ‘term employed to mean an item custom-made to measure.’ Do you miss when the craftsperson hadn’t been replaced by the assembly line?
Absolutely! Entirely. Conceptually, and in every possible way, I agree. Certainly our lives are easier now. Can you imagine living in a city where there’s only one person who makes shoes? And there’s only so many sizes of shoes, and if you’re not that size of shoe, you gotta make your own. Or if you don’t like the style? Too bad! But it really is for the haves and have-nots. If you have money or influence or power you can get things you want and if you don’t you’re stuck. At the same time, things were made to be purposeful. It’s absurd that we use these devices— cars, phones, and whatnot—that aren’t really made for us. They’re made for some version of us—some estimate of us—but when it comes down to it they don’t really fit. I’m left-handed, so I feel it all the time. Just trying to use a butter knife somewhere and realizing, ‘This is a right-handed butter knife!’ It’s very uncomfortable. And there’s only like 20% of us, so of course they don’t take us into consideration—much less the unique snowflake of yourself. I know—okay, there’s the cliché of being doomed by technology, our children will have some other understanding of technology, and we’re doomed to never being hip to it. Which is fine. But it isn’t even made for them. It’s made for some weird perfect person that doesn’t even exist.
What one-of-a-kind hand-made object do you own and love most in your life?
A lot of the suits that I have. It’s funny— this record is about clothes. And one of the reason it’s about clothes is because there are so few things in my life that are handmade. Well, the caveat to that is my wife is very crafty, and she makes me things all the time. Things I don’t share with the world as much as coats. Coats are easy. Coats I wear out— some of these coats date way back—70 or 100 years—but they’re not super easy to wear on stage cause they fall apart. But the fact that I know someone put their spit and vinegar into it makes it mean a lot. My wife’s stuff is the same way—she’s made me things that’ve blown me away. Certain Valentine’s Days or anniversaries—I’m just astounded. I love it, but it’s tough to stand up to it! I can write her a song but I’m not very crafty.
How would your music be different if it was made by hundreds of Dickensian child laborers in a beat mill in the north of England?
Perfect! It’d probably be awesome—child laborers tend to do wonderful things. Put a hundred kids in a room and an amazing song comes out. It’d probably be just as playful, but maybe a little more downtrodden than my music. My music is a little more optimistic. I imagine I’d get more sad songs. But you know, tiny hands do great work.
Nobody said that now we’re the children of hip-hop the way a lot of British bands were the children of rhythm and blues. What do you think the metaphorical children of Daedelus would be like?
So if people were so inclined to do something influenced by what we’re doing? It’s a messy group of us, isn’t it? There’s a lot of continuity to the L.A. sound—a lot of similar mindedness. Something about hip-hop, for instance—we’re bred on commercial airwaves. We have radio—Power 106, The Beat, K Day—it’s really easy to have a really focused lens. Each year, throughout the ‘90s, you can point at three or four songs—the big songs in each year. The big meaningful group-thought songs and names. We don’t have that anymore. Sure, there’s radio, but it’s really so spread out. Internet kind of provides an interesting juxtaposition. I think all the children these days are going to be really schizophrenic. People who are into music and birthed from this … it isn’t going to be three of four bands that really form a person anymore. I’ve already seen it. People go through stylistic changes. Baths is the perfect example, making kind of abstract noise, kind of techno, went to a beat concert—
And it changed everything for him?
Yeah, and he’s already flowing away from it. It’s good. It’s the natural progression of things. It is harder to rally the troops when there’s no banner to raise.
What hardships and challenges do you think musicians who come after you will never know? What successes will they never know either?
The machinery of their demise is going to be largely dismantled. You have everyone on a pretty even shake, whatever they can summon, be it nepotism or actual talent or whatever it is. The machinery that they build—the commercial machinery, the payola, the ancient systems of how music is disseminated—are all gone. We’re moving back to a patronage system like in classical music. If you have a thousand to ten thousand fans, you can pretty much make a life at this, depending on what range they want to spend on you and how many concerts they want to go to. We’re living in a world with billions of people and they’re pretty much up for grabs. People in the farthest reaches of the Internet. There’ll be fans of this odd music. I’ve experienced this very generously myself. I played a show in Malaysia and met my number one fan out there. It’s awesome. So they’re not going to know that failing of the system, which is a good thing and a bad thing.
Do you think not knowing about the failing of the system would make them more fearless?
At first. I think there will be a more people making music who aren’t professional musicians. Which is cool. It’s already that everyone’s in a band anyway, and it’s a lot less daunting than art or something where you need to have a truly unique idea. With music you can put your slight variation on a well-trodden path and it can be something significant. Can you imagine the terror—I think about it for kids who are just getting interested in music. There’s no safety net, there’s nothing. Even just getting notoriety. I was the beneficiary of a lot of weird moments in time. Like Myspace. I was featured on that page once and it got me hundreds of thousands of listeners in single days. Not to say that means anything now, but it did then, for a brief moment. I got a feature on YouTube early on. But does it mean anything currently? Not necessary. But if you can imagine like a kid now, you don’t get features on Facebook or Soundcloud.
What’s the best they can hope for?
I think people—if they live a little harder— have a lot of fun. But making a career out of it? You have to be really savvy, make a lot of connections, and be doing something really significant that stands out and alone. That’s terrifying. Do something significant that has depth and meaning and it resonates. I think that purity means something. The whole pop system really rewarded whatever was kind of like slight changes to a formula. Maybe a slightly different color hair. Brunettes. Blondes. Then it all just kind of fades away. But it’s for the best. Music as we knew it was only thirty or forty years old—a modern invention. It’s like communism—or democracy. A failed system.
We asked the Monks about the biggest revelations they’ve had in their lives and they said, ‘The idea of being in love is a revelation because you become more than just yourself.’ Is that why love is so valuable? Because it’s the only way for people to get outside themselves?
On the one hand, I’d totally agree. I just love the swooping romanticism of it. I disagree as well because I don’t think we can ever transcend ourselves. Wow, that sounded spiritual. I mean traveling, sure, but not really outside of yourself. I think that love is a form of—I don’t think it’s a chemical imbalance but—it’s a form of concentration, of going outside of yourself. It’s a form of being just simply because you can quiet yourself. Ourselves are so overly important, and we make such a big deal out of things. It’s very temporal, our lives. If you can make a significant impact in someone’s life, much less a lot of people’s lives, it’s a form of love. It’s a form of gift. If you can really be in a concentrated love affair, it takes up all your attention. It’s like you’re still there, but you’re gone. Not to sound stalker-ish. Ha ha ha!
Strangeloop is into the idea of searching for the divine through technology. What’s something that you’re searching for?
There’s a wonderful thing about jazz—or about live music—where you can quiet yourself in the same kind of way as love and really reach a lot of people and you can be in such a crazy moment where you’re kind of bringing something down, like lightning or rain. It’s like a very natural force. It’s quite like magic. You can have a moment where you’re not brainwashing people nor are you yourself exactly there. You’re conducting something. You’re being a grounding force for something very powerful when it really works. As much as I love technology—it aids me in every single way, and honestly if the AC went out I’d be pretty low on work since I don’t have any other skills—if it did go down—it is also literally just a tool. The meme of it, the metaphor of it, is what quickly connects us. It’s our organs, externalized. So if you can just find that other organ, that sensory organ, you get that telepathy thing going and it’s crazy what you can do. I really like that stuff.
You’ve said you’re into civility marred by acts of terrible violence. Why?
So many ways that it expresses itself. The modicum of decorum. The idea that we co-exist with all these people all the time and we impact them in all kinds of horrible ways we can’t figure out all the time. A single gesture, a single snipe, a single bad comment on YouTube … and suddenly someone’s life can travel terribly out of control. Butterfly effect. But not like the movie. Totally unlike the movie! We’re always impacting people. It’s a crazy game of pinball. In the real world, what I’ve seen, simply being part of the military industrial complex of America is a headtrip and a half. If you travel even a small bit you see how much our culture invades other places. We invented cool basically. Certainly other countries have ideas about fashion and things but it was always something about the high class and the low class. Every once in a while someone from the lower class might impact the upper echelons. America somehow invented the idea of rock ‘n’ roll cool—this idea of heroin chic. It’s the craziest, most terrible device that’s ever been propagated. This hipster meme that’s been circulating around the world—not necessary from America but it’s all the same. Different ideas but in the same sellable box—it’s terrifying! And people are living and dying over this stuff! We should all be farmers raising our own livestock.
You’ve said that electronic music should have heavier subject matter than parties and drunkenness—why? What makes you think it’s important to pursue heavier topics?
I love having a good night and sometimes a good night means—wherever you’re at on the intoxication scale—you need to be open. Willing, able, whatever it is. I’m a participant. I’m not gonna call any names cuz I’m part of the issue but if you allow yourself to dream a little bigger and imagine the audience is more than just a bunch of liquor sponsors … If you think of them as something that has more capacity for emotional depth they’ll surprise you as well as fulfill you. I’ve been very surprised. I don’t mean to be emo, but some of my records that I want to be about darker places. That’s what we deal with. We’re dealing with stories to a certain degree. If we don’t try, it’s a failure of music. A lot of music I really love—like jazz, for instance. Charles Mingus was a big influence on my younger musical years. None of the songs are about anything I can sympathize with—they’re about race, the 1950s, the 1960s, struggle—but it’s something you can immediately relate to because the music is so powerful. But I have no conditioning to put myself in that place. Same thing goes with all the film scores that I love from the ‘50s and ‘60s—John Berry, Michel LeGrand—these movies are about assassinations and intrigue and I get swept up like anybody does. I really want my records to do that but I think they’ve always been failures.
Why do you think your records have been failures?
In that way that electronic music is maybe a failure, or maybe all of music is a failure. I feel sometimes—it’s very easy to think that it’s all hoodwinking yourself into thinking that it all has meaning. You meet a few people occasionally who do seem to be really moved. But I’ve poured so much weird minutiae into my records—so many odd storylines. I feel like I’m so obvious that I don’t want to speak on it because it’s practically screaming off the songs and I don’t think anyone really gets it or understands it. I think that failure is a gift though. At least I hope so. I’m certainly betting a lot of my life around it.
What’s the hardest part about finishing an album for you now?
The powers of ten thing kind of happens a lot. All aspects of finishing or making a song are the same as finishing a record. The beginning of it is really hard, the end of it is always really hard. Knowing when it’s done is really hard. There comes a certain point with music and especially with records that you have to surrender it to somebody. You give it to the label, you have to give it to an artist to do the cover, you give it to a video artist. Your perfect little sphere of influence—your bespoke piece—your creation—gets hemmed and altered by somebody else and sometimes it feels like they’re ruining the cut of it, the feel of it. It’s intrusive. It’s violent. And yet at the same time it produces the children, the thing, the actual product, the sum of something more than yourself, and that’s what makes it powerful. I can only wonder what it must be like for bands, where somebody has this beautiful melody in their head and then it gets crazy altered—ruined—by someone else in the end. As an instrumentalist, you must understand, you can play as part of an ensemble sometimes or you can be solo, but music gets changed by area. Or when your hands are tired, or your throat doesn’t let loose the notes properly. There’s something real to that—something terrifying. You always have to surrender yourself.
How did you learn to let go?
I did—in my young musical life, as a classical musician—everything in the service of the music. Always trying to serve the music. Maybe at some point it’s so egotistically muting—it’s so difficult to find a voice in that thing because you’re so in service of the song which is beautiful but a lot of the songs you play in that world are a hundred, two hundred years old, and they almost speak the language that we are digesting, talking. Eventually in that music you find a freedom that is comforting and beautiful. I don’t know. Have you tried playing any music?
I played piano when I was a kid. I really didn’t like the style of the teacher, and begged my parents to let me quit. I guess I hated it so much I blocked it from my memory how to play anything at all and now of course I really regret it. I’d like to learn again.
It never ends, of course.
I went to high school with a lot of musicians, so I’m kind of thinking I should learn how to play music rather than just write about it.
Well, those people—they all went through a period of time—at least from the way I know them—where there was a lot of confusion morally, musically, and then finding something that clicks with them. Sometimes it’s worth being a little confused and abandoned. It makes for good fertile soil to till. Were you in a music academy?
I was a history nerd. I got really excited about your last record because it’s a soundtrack to the Boxer Rebellion. That’s so cool!
Nobody cares, though.
Why doesn’t anyone care about the Boxer Rebellion?
Not to go back to old stories, but people don’t know that there was a modern war fought with magic. It’s so crazy. Why isn’t anybody talking about this?
What war is the most creatively inspiring?
In a lot of ways, the Crusades—terrible as they were. They were fought for the stupidest reasons. But they are incredibly interesting in terms of the intrigue, the deception, the chaos. You have these great empires that kind of didn’t necessarily compute. They were founded on very different principles but they existed in the same time period and were all mixing and mashing. Huge fluxes in culture. It’s the terrible thing where war does breed a lot of invention, a lot of cultural exchange. The oncoming alien battle that we’re going to have—either in movie form or real-form, hopefully—it’ll be terrible but imagine all the great things we’ll be able to create. As a child of history, you must know that the slinky comes from war, same thing with silly putty. These great things that have affected so many lives just … falls down stairs for them.
What inspires you most that doesn’t come from within you or within music?
In the context of this record, it’s really fashion. It’s funny because the record doesn’t really talk about fashion. It talks about the have and have-nots and some sadnesses and some joys but it doesn’t really talk about fashion. But fashion is a mute muse. You wear it and it says so many strong things without saying anything unless you wear terrible words across you or you’ve gone that direction and are wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and shouldn’t be saying anything at all. I’m not trying to insult anyone. It’s amazing how it has become an individual idea. These mass produced items made in these countries’ bright tiny hands—China, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam especially—we have this crazy dialogue going on of really instantaneous ideas—design, how many units should be made, how cheap, how to propagate it around the world. Kids are wearing what’s in one country is a political statement, but they’re just wearing it because it seems right. These thing are swirling around so fast, and the smallest things can set off—it’s like ikebana but everyone’s wearing it. Everyone’s wearing flower arrangements. It’s crazy. When you take it really seriously, and see what people are saying in these coded languages, it’s extremely impactful. It’s extremely similar to music—music says so many things without actually saying it, if you want to listen.
What’s the most ornate hat you own?
I have a topper that is my go-to but it’s a little unfortunate—I love it very much and it’s old so I don’t feel as bad—but it’s beaver skin. Beaver fur—resistant against water, hooray!
It’s weird to wear animals but beside that it’s just a beautiful piece. Everyone’s heads were really small back in the day—everyone was small and had tiny heads because they were so malnourished. I found it in Canada were everyone was beefier—lumberjacks, maybe— but it’s old. It’s very old and I still wear it on occasion. Very rarely to shows. It’s delicate.
When you played bass at comedy nights at Largo, what three notes worked best to save a flopping punchline?
Well, the truth of the matter is that if you have a flopping punchline, you have a flailing stand-up comedian and you can see the fear set in as soon as it starts to fall flat. The real good comics just hide it completely and move on to the next profession—the comedians who are mid-range tear into the audience and get angry and do a little routine to get it back. The real inexperienced ones rip into anything around them with flailing arms and sometimes that flak came our way. It’s surprising, the people who died a lot were professionals. Or comedians who weren’t standups. Like that gentleman from ‘Kids in the Hall,’ the gay fellow….he had a legendarily terrible time. And that guy from ‘Seinfield’—Larry David—it was terrible. Terrible comedian. No jokes were funny at all. Jokes from a different time. Largo’s more alternative comedy and people like Zach Galifinakis and Patton Oswalt would kill—they’d slay. Nice people, too. Paul F. Tompkins—so wonderful. Maria Bamford—super good as well, never had any issue. You could tell the people who were really stand-up comedians and knew their craft and people who just wrote jokes. A big difference. The three notes that would save them would be me, the guitarist, or the drummer— the Mashnotes, basically. I looked like Abraham Lincoln at the time. I had a crazy beard that may have been a bit Lincoln-ish so I’d get that a lot. The guitarist looked like Buddy Holly but miniaturized. Scrawny dude. Ben, the drummer and guitarist was a bit of a larger guy and had a teddy bear demeanor and comedians can be very cruel to save themselves.
Did they ever turn on you?
Oh yes, very much so. It’s okay though—it was part of the gig. It was an amazing gift to get on be on stage and see how these people operate. Such a different world. Largo is such a special place. This was a spell ago. I was playing there twelve years ago? Crazy.
You’ve said in an interview that your proudest moment was when an 8-year old sent you a letter telling you how he had played ‘A Mashnote’ over and over again on a roadtrip, driving his dad nuts. What is most rewarding about warping the minds of children with your art?
I think I mentioned the misfit child thing earlier and how I think I felt a little out of touch in high school and how that was a gift but I also so desperately wished that at any moment when I was younger I had someone that A) would tell me that everything was going to be all right and B) make my weird sound and find my own voice. I was very confused for a very long time about sound—how it was made—and I didn’t feel any strong mentorship for a long time until dublab came around and I felt a lot of freedom there to create. All the ‘90s, I was so alone and so lost and I loved certain sounds but I was so marginalized. The rave community had no mentors.
If you had one, how would it have changed the course of your musical development?
It would’ve absolutely—I had great teachers but in terms of actual mentorship, in terms of moving forward—I’ve taken a long path, and I like that. I feel like I’m only able to still be around because of that long path. But if I had known at an early age that maybe to just be myself and make my weird sounds and that would’ve been okay. And even to have just had someone, good or bad, be critical. I’ve met so many young music makers who are so advanced at such a young age—Shlohmo, Baths—these enormously talented young kids. Flying Lotus. I met him at a young age and he was honest and great and it just made sense to see him shine like he is. I think it would have changed a lot but it’s so hard to know. Maybe I would have quit a long time ago. Having to live up to something is a terrible curse.
What kept you from quitting?
I had nothing else. There was nothing else. Now I have my wife—that’s something. But there’s nothing else. I’m not prepared for any other career. Maybe I could be somewhat useful as a janitorial something, a manual laborer. But I’m terribly fixated on this thing, and it’s all I have. It’s important to have a battle.

DAEDELUS WITH TOKIMONSTA AND SHLOHMO ON SAT., APR. 23, ON THE MAGICAL PROPERTIES TOUR 3 AT THE GLASS HOUSE, 200 W. 2ND ST., POMONA. DAEDELUS’ BESPOKE IS OUT NOW ON NINJATUNE. VISIT DAEDELUS AT DAEDELUSMUSIC.COM