-Kristina Benson

TOKiMONSTA – Bright Shadows by BRAINFEEDER

Tokimonsta is a piano-student-turned-producer who makes beats for Brainfeeder. Her new Creature Dreams EP is out now and fans of her All City and Art Union releases will be happy to know that she picks up where she left off. Toki speaks now about girls, touring, and the danger of knowing too much. This interview by Kristina Benson.

You said you started listening to hip-hop because you grew up in Torrance and you didn’t want to be like the other kids.
The kids I grew up with were listening to Green Day and Blink-182 and stuff. I felt like there was more to music than that. When I found hip-hop—even at that point West Coast gangsta rap or New York rap or local underground hip-hop, like L.A. hip-hop—I found something that really spoke to me. That was an age where hip-hop didn’t have this weird hip-hop-pop fusion. Hip-hop was very much its own category, and not pop. It could get popular and not the same. I found it fascinating—it’s not even just the lyrics. When I listened to rap, I didn’t listen to the rhymes—just the cadence. Which is probably why I make beats. I liked the idea of instrumental music a lot. With early rap, you just heard how they could kind of rock the beat with their rhymes.
You said in another interview that you like things that are really chill or really angry. What’s missing from the middle?
I pull from really diverse things that are polar opposites. I think people feel like they have to maintain a certain consistency—like all their music should sound like one style and it should all sound the same. That’s not how I am. One minute I might listen to bossa nova, but I also love death metal or something random. With my music and taste, I suppose it’s just a matter of how that translates into my music, since I’m just a product of my influences. And my influences and who I am is like the calm and the crazy. There really is a middle but I draw from the opposites.
You said you were an ‘unfocused student of classical piano,’ but you stuck with it for ten years. Why?
That was by force. It wasn’t willingly so I don’t think I was a very good student. With my family, it’s a running joke that I couldn’t play a single song from beginning to end. That’s because when I like to play music, I actually only like to play the parts of the songs that I like. It’s like my early rudimentary form of sampling, I guess—only taking the parts I like and then playing them until my family went berserk on me.
But Mozart did that—he just called it ‘Variations on a Theme.’
I should bring that up to them! They always say, ‘You’re a musician now but you weren’t very good at playing piano!’ I try to kind of convince them there’s a reason why I played piano the way I did, but it doesn’t quite click with them.
What do you think you got out of piano lessons that you bring to your music now?
Musical sense and musicality. I have that music theory kind of ingrained into me. Because I had piano lessons, I’m able to translate my taste in music into actual musical notes. I kind of came from the hip-hop scene originally and most of the beatmakers I knew didn’t know how to play an instrument. They were just really good at doing the drumming and picking samples. I felt I had the opportunity to play more complex melodies, more layers. Maybe my music doesn’t have the razzle-dazzle and as many effects as some other people, you know, but it’s really technical—I kind of brought the technique to what I was playing instead.
Do you ever feel hindered by knowing so much theory?
It has definitely placed a box around how I approach music. I really taught myself not to be bound by the rules. There are things you’re taught that work and things you’re taught that don’t work. The inspiration I had was just from looking outside. I realized someone like Sun Ra—who can play very straightforward, very musical jazz—never felt obligated to theory. He went really out there and the stuff that came out was so meaningful. Even with my peers and friends and the people at Brainfeeder, it’s not like many of them took lessons and learned to play instruments. Except Austin Peralta. That’s different. You get more creative the less you know, so with people who never took piano or any kind of instrument as a kid, the way they approach music is really refreshing. They’re not just going the way they were taught because they were never taught a specific way.
Mary Anne Hobbs referred to you as one of her favorite ‘female producers,’ and I think every time I read something about you, it’s like this main point: She’s FEMALE and she MAKES BEATS! Does that get old?
It does get old pretty fast. The way that people referred to me was, ‘She’s a female beatmaker,’ but it’s not even that—then they go, ‘Oh she’s Asian,’ so it gets compounded. ‘She’s an Asian female beatmaker.’ It’s like, ‘Come on! I’m so much more than that!’ As a musician, you don’t want people to focus on superficial things—you want them to focus on the music, you know? I don’t want people to really get stuck on these really kitschy points. Who gives a fuck if I’m a girl? Who gives a fuck if I’m this or that? What matters is if the music is good or not. One thing good about this scene in particular is it’s not like any of us are plastered on TV where your fans rely on how you look. It’s kind of a faceless scene—unless you go out a lot, when are you ever going to see these artists? You realize people can’t rely on what you look like, so they have to rely on the music. I’ve had conversations about this with Steve [Ellison, a.k.a Flying Lotus]—about how it really bothers me that people want to find a theme and kind of run with it. Like with him: ‘Oh you’re Alice Coltrane’s grandnephew or whatever.’ But if something like that gets someone to say, ‘This sounds interesting—a female beatmaker? I’ll check it out!’ and that person likes it, I guess it’s not a bad thing. It could be a blessing in disguise. My whole career I’m sure I’ll just have to struggle to get people to focus more on the producer aspect and less on the female aspect.
Do you think it matters if there are other women in music?
I just don’t want to be stuck in a box and be about femininity and woman power and all that … the music matters the most. I guess it doesn’t matter, I suppose? If they want it to matter, that’s cool too because at least I know that some people will be more motivated by seeing me—a girl will be more motivated by seeing other female musicians. I know a few little girls that have spoken to me and are like, ‘How do you even get started making beats? How do you get into it?’ If they see I can do it, they might be motivated to try a little harder.
When I was an undergraduate, one of my voice teachers said to me that she quit singing opera professionally because she became a slave to her voice—her voice had become so important that she as a person wasn’t important anymore. Do you ever feel that way about music?
I’ve kind of come to terms with the fact that people don’t pay for music anymore so most of my income is from playing shows. It’s exhausting and I feel like I don’t exist when I’m on tour. It’s fun and not fun at the same time. On tour you kind of feel like you’re in limbo. I’m starting to get a little better at making tracks when I’m away. I feel like people glamorize it. ‘You get to go to all these foreign countries—travel!’ Yeah, but I don’t really get to look at anything! You meet a lot of really cool people—which is one good thing. And very inspiring.
How do you approach live sets? Is it different than what you put out as recordings?
When I play live I use Ableton and a controller and it’s like arranging music live. It’s more like live remixes of my own music. You pick and choose what you want to play—put one drum pattern onto a different song. The audience can feel more involved that way because being behind a laptop is kind of a cold visual aspect. I’ve done this live set so many times that I have it at a level where I can turn off the music and talk to the people in the audience. I did that at Low End Theory for my birthday. There was a couple that was dry-humping in front of me, and I called them out and poked fun.
Why does your music arouse such wanton sexual impulses in the audience?
I didn’t know my music brought this out of people. I’m still on that tip where I want people to relate to it more emotionally. To make people a little bit more sensitive to themselves. If they hear something and it makes them want to move, or that song makes them think, ‘This is what I want to listen to when I’m in love!’ or something like that … that would be more rewarding to me. Let’s put it this way: If the world ever gets underpopulated, I guess I could do my part to help.

TOKIMONSTA’S CREATURE DREAMS EP IS OUT NOW ON BRAINFEEDER. VISIT TOKIMONSTA AT TOKIMONSTA.COM.

Flying Lotus and Thom Yorke played surprise sets at Low End Theory on April 30, 2011. Gari Askew was in the building!

[View with PicLens]

Austin Peralta “Algiers”
(from Endless Planets out now on Brainfeeder)

Brainfeeder is a label of ever-expanding invention, the cosmic heir to the pioneering spirit of Impulse! Records and Strata-East. Like those jazz giants before them, Brainfeeder thrums with a collective energy, synthesizing each artist’s unique sound and story into a single, shared cosmology. To those reared only on squelching electronics, Austin Peralta’s Endless Planets must seem to exist somewhere out on the periphery of that universe: pure, instrumental jazz beyond even Ras_G’s solar-myth approach. Peralta picked up piano at age 5 and was already touring internationally while the rest of us were grappling with the intricacies of parallel parking. Endless Planets is the 20-year-old’s first album released stateside, and one that more readily recalls jazz history written by Charles Mingus and Max Roach than records spawned in the alternate reality of Madlib’s Yesterdays New Quintet. More often than not, Endless Planets laces up its desert boots and treads the same territory as McCoy Tyner’s Sahara, sandy winds blowing hot across “Capricornus” and “Algiers.” Peralta strikes with speed, fast-fingered flourishes bubbling up from the currents of “The Underwater Mountain Odyssey” and a sweet solo sapping “Ode to Love.” But Peralta also knows when to recede into the background of his band, which has the young, eminently talented Zane Musa on alto sax, Ben Wendel on tenor and soprano sax, Hamilton Price on bass and Zach Harmon on drums. There are celestial electronics courtesy of Strangeloop and the Cinematic Orchestra, too, but Endless Planets isn’t about bridging electronic music and jazz. For Peralta, and Brainfeeder, they’re one in the same.

—Miles Clements

I’d only been to Coachella once, in 2004, when the horse-flavored dust was hot enough to scorch my nostrils on its way to my lungs. By the end of the weekend, I was more than glad to leave: as my crew headed for the car on the last night, I got on my knees and pounded my fist in the dirt, screaming “NEVER AGAIN!!!!”

But time changes a lot of things, as does a free VIP wristband and a press pass. And so with a tinge of trepidation, I found myself in the early afternoon hours on Friday in a Coachella parking lot in Indio, California, loaning some of my precious sunscreen to a jeepload of bucking bros, who were slathering their muscular chests and explaining to me how to hide drugs when going through the guard checkpoints: socks could be checked, but probably not sacks. “Just put it in your underwear, next to your balls—last year they rolled down the elastic band of my boxers, but that’s the worst they’re gonna do.”

I headed in, and after two checkpoints, the first being suspiciously more laissez-faire than the final one (where my sack was only slightly brushed during a hearty leg-pat), I found myself within the Coachella grounds, which seemed peppier and less barren than I remembered them seven years before. There were T-shirt stands and help desks and water carts, but also more installation art and domes and carnival rides, extra little structures here and there where skin-saving patches of shade could be savored. It felt like they were making a stronger effort to get every dehydrated kids out of the sun and under a giant metal tarantula. The only thing there was less of was people—was attendance down this year, or had they somehow made progress on getting the lines shorter, the parking easier, and the hassles less hassly?

Excision by Dan Collins

Excision by Lainna Fader

But I didn’t question things as I rushed to the Safari tent to see the last dregs of Excision’s set, which was making the early Coachella crowd go apeshit with dancing, screaming, and adoration straight out of a church. This Canadian’s wobbly-based dubstep, spun from behind a giant desk/platform that would have looked good with Mao Tse Tung behind it, didn’t match the sunniness of the afternoon for me, so I was forced to wash him down with a $9 tequila sunrise at the adjacent VIP rose garden, and an $11 margarita at the VIP tent near the Coachella main stage, where Ozomatli were sounding exactly like what you’d expect them to sound like if you’ve ever heard fourteen seconds of their music at any point in their recorded history.

It was in the VIP lounge that I realized how different the Coachella experience would be with a press pass than how I’d spent it in proletarian misery seven years before. The big VIP area had a fountain, an air-conditioned tent bar, free wifi for the press, delicious Woodfire pizza, and close proximity to the main stage itself! Sure, you were still too far away to see the actual physical performance, but you could hold a drink while not seeing it. And anyway, despite the near-nudity and the “Adamandeve.com” banner being pulled behind a plane in the sky, Coachella is not exactly about the intimate experience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0BbKAJ9c0I

Warpaint by Dan Collins

Perhaps because of that lack of intimacy, I craved seeing bands I was familiar with. So after a brief interview with YACHT, I headed over to the Outdoor stage, Coachella’s second largest, to see Warpaint. Margaret Wappler from the L.A. Times says they were dressed “like the shipwrecked daughters of a one-eyed pirate captain and Stevie Nicks” but aside from singer Emily Kokal’s amazing Sheila E. coat, the other members actually wore the kind of billowy nineties dresses you’d see models in Sassy wear circa 1992. They were great—Jenny Lee Lindberg on bass danced around and boogied it up with Stella Mozgawa on drums, and Kokal and guitarist Theresa Wayman more or less swapped singing duties every other song. Their pretty, dark wave, shoegazey-chimey-crunch worked great on a blistering spring afternoon, like sprinkles of cold water on your back. And maybe this is what Coachella’s alternate stages are best at—letting bands you’ve only heard on the radio wow you with how good they sound on a big stage, with a roaring crowd, clean vocals, and the natural lighting of the sun!

Ariel Pink by Lainna Fader

Ariel Pink by Lainna Fader

And all that Vitamin D was giving me a delicious energy, which I should have used to watch Cee Lo’s famed meltdown, but instead used to get to Ariel Pink early, at the Gobi stage. Aaah, a shady side tent, where the crowds were small and I could zip right on up to the photographer area in front of the stage. Drummer Aaron Sperske spotted me in my photographer’s perch and gave me a little “sup bro” head nod: it was an isolated moment of connection with a band in a weekend where the barriers between artist and audience were rigidly enforced. And that kind of isolation can lead to trouble—perhaps this is why Ariel Pink stormed off the stage, telling us that we must “hate” him, when in fact we were all really enjoying the souped-up Gary Numanisms on display, vocals and all. Ariel, I’m sure there were no monitors and a whole lot of ‘tude from the sound guy, but maybe you could have just rolled with it?

Same goes for Lauren Hill, who on the main Coachella stage had a tiny little tizzy about the sound that delayed her set uncomfortably close to the “will they pull the plug” threshold. But I liked that she dressed just like I would if I were a woman—hoop earrings, a funky knit hat under a second hat (trés Bartholomew Cubbins), and a stripey dress so big and billowy and protruding in the front that she’s just got to be pregnant again with her sixth kid.

Drunk with the power of my media wristband, I took a first saunter into the very front of the Coachella stage, only to have an authoritative white woman looked at my wristbands and tell me “You don’t have a photo wristband: you have to leave.” I walked out, sullen and confused, but not before I got a good glimpse of Ms. Hill’s hijinks close up, the way they look best. Though the big video screens on the sides of the stage captured her swagger, they did NOT capture her slight figure, her frail, crazed humanity, or the baby bump, which I repeat is DEFINITELY a baby on the way and not a trick of the light or media hyperbole. And it was a good listen: lively versions of Fugee and solo Hill songs bopped, booped, and poked out at us from the stage. Hill had a damned good backing band, with tubas as tight as the bass, and when they closed with “Doo Wop (That Thing),” I felt like maybe it was going to be a pretty cool weekend.

That feeling dissipated later, when I foolishly departed from Interpol’s sunset performance to check out Kele and Sleigh Bells. Really? Is this what the kids are into these days: anthemy showdown music with the most boring guitar punctuation in the history of power chord cheese, and vocals that were 45% just “Whooooaaaaaaaaah?”

Marina and the Diamonds at the Gobi stage were more entertaining. Though some of their actual recordings are rather overproduced (I doubt you’d ever play them in the car for your friends), the band had a real patchwork charm live, like Bjork trying to cover Annie Lennox while dressed in Josie Cotton’s outfits. Principal songwriter/performer Marina Diamandis enticed me with her glitter and Raggedy Ann hair, but she nailed my heartstrings to a fucking cigar box and picked a chord on them them when I realized her earrings were little bananas. And the crowd went a little bananas when she jumped into the hit single “I Am Not a Robot,” her arms outstretched in an unironic Bono pose.

I heard glimpses of Cut Copy and then the Black Keys on my way back to the press tent, but being unable to enjoy any band from the Coachella stage without feeling like I was just at a movie with good surround sound, I headed to the Dome, where I saw the best performance of the night and possibly of the whole weekend: Beardyman, a UK hip hop import who would fit right in on Fake Four or Plug Research. More than that, he was possibly the best beat boxer I’d ever heard, and I’ve seen Doug E. Fresh live. Beardyman clearly had his mouth in the game, and could do great block-rocking beats a capella, but his technique of recording mouth loops on the fly and then manipulating them into Low End Theory-style glitch hop/dubstep beats was more than impressive—it was clever, and soulful, and made me think he was a force to be reckoned with, even if he was playing all the way out here on the furthest outreaches of Coachella (albeit in the most awesomely decorated stage of all Coachella stages, which was adorned with spray-painted tatters of cardboard sculpted into an Avatar-esque tree creature seemingly imbedded in a 1960’s style monkey bar set for giant toddlers).

Leave wanting more, I thought, and since Flying Lotus was scheduled to play at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs that night, I grabbed Associate Publisher Lainna Fader and headed for the exit. At least, I thought it was the correct exit, but after a wrong turn supplemented by bad instructions from completely clueless guards, we ended up walking for miles against incoming Coachella traffic, taking random lefts and rights around stables and golf-cart garages, each dusty trail leading to more guards who couldn’t direct us to Lot 4 but still wanted to search our bags and beep our wristbands.

At last we found the car, and liberated from the dust, the glow lights, and the Chemical Brothers, we headed to the oasis of the Ace Hotel. After a day in the dirt, I didn’t want to pound my fist in the ground, but it was nice to see a quality DJ spin in an intimate environment. Flying Lotus and friends reminded me that while a desert spectacle can be impressive, music is better when it’s part of a community. Hopefully the next day at Coachella would provide a little of both.

—Dan Collins

—Kristina Benson

(Photos forthcoming!)

You probably missed out on Radiohead’s Thom Yorke’s surprise DJ set at Low End Theory last week, so you’ll be happy to know that it was filmed!

“We have a very special guest tonight … act like he’s one of us. He is one of us,” said Daddy Kev, the Low End Theory co-founder. (via Pop & Hiss)

Rumors started that early that afternoon he might show up, but it wasn’t until Flying Lotus texted him photos of the crowd that he was convinced to come out. He spun an hour-and-twenty-minute a set of Kraftwerk, Burial, Modeselektor, Major Lazer, and Squarepusher, and danced adorably.

Filmed by: Theo Jemison, Grace Oh, Arthur Mor, Alter
Editing: Strangeloop

Pianist Austin Peralta has been traveling jazz’s interstellar space ways since he was 15 and his new album, Endless Planets, hangs naturally in the Brainfeeder universe. He speaks now about life and death and the few feelings worth feeling in between. This interview by Lainna Fader and Miles Clements.

How did it feel to be the first and last jazz band ever introduced by Gaslamp Killer yelling at the crowd to ‘MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE’?
I think this is what it needs. Jazz can be so stuffy and the audiences can be so pompous that it needs that kind of reception, it needs that kind of audience, it needs that kind of energy. It needs to make people feel like they’re having a deathgasm. And it can be through jazz—why not? Who’s to say that punk rock is more hardcore than jazz? It’s not true.
Why is your ensemble called Deathgasm? What is a deathgasm?
It came to me a few months before the album release show. That was sort of the debut of Deathgasm. I had seen this film called Enter the Void by Gaspar Noé and I had been interested in the Tibetan Book of the Dead long before seeing the film. I felt like music has the power to evoke spiritual places akin to death or the orgasm or love or whatever. I just thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s call it Deathgasm.’
As a jazz musician, how do you think you fit into the Brainfeeder universe?
I think Lotus, coming from the Coltrane family, is deeply rooted in the jazz tradition and he feels an affinity for it. I would even consider him a jazz musician in a more post-modern sense. He wants to make that very much a part of his universe, the Brainfeeder universe, and as you saw with Cosmogramma, clearly there’s that influence. It’s also a way of saying that we’re not trying to uphold genre boundaries. All music is acceptable; it’s all part of a bigger plan. All these different musics can say the same thing and they’re all interrelated. Flying Lotus said the sound of Brainfeeder is the sound of the seeker—someone trying to understand this world through music. How are you trying to understand?
I guess I would start by saying that for me, music has always been the way to connect to reality or to the world. It’s been my life—ever since I was 5, that’s what I’ve been doing. So it’s a very natural way to get in touch with both myself—emotionally, spiritually—and the world. I couldn’t pinpoint it to something specific but it’s always been there for me.
Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?
Absolutely. Not in the sense that I follow a specific religious doctrine, but I feel like I’m in touch with the cosmos in a spiritual way and mostly through music. I think music is deeply spiritual and can take you to cosmic places.
You got started playing classical music first. Why the switch to jazz?
I still continue playing classical to this day, but around age 10 [after playing for about five years] a friend of mine gave me this CD of jazz pianist Bill Evans, who played with Miles Davis, and I don’t know—something clicked. Before that I was very turned off to anything besides classical music and then once I heard that, I was sort of bit by the bug, if you will. Ever since that moment I’ve just been trying to learn how to play it and going out and playing in jam sessions and whatnot.
How many instruments do you play?
I really play the piano as an instrument. I can mess around on soprano saxophone and play a little bass and a little drums, but you know—nothing that I am proud of.
In Miles Davis’ autobiography, he said that the Fender Rhodes has only one sound, and that sound is itself. Are there any other instruments that are that individual—that embodied in one sound?
In a sense, every instrument, if you play it authentically, is the embodiment of itself. For me, soprano saxophone is a very unique sounding instrument and it can only be itself. Sort of like an Indian snake charmer.
What does it mean for an instrument to sound authentic?
I guess it’s necessitated by the performer in that they are coming at it with a sense of their own musical authenticity. They have at least a decent know-how of the instrument in order to express their ideas but then they take that beyond just the technical aspects to create something truly honest and musical.
How does Strangeloop’s aesthetic suit your music? Why do you work so well together?
First and foremost because we’re really great friends and we’ve known each other for several years. We met at a coffee shop two blocks from here actually. I walked outside with my coffee and there was this guy sitting there and he just started ranting to me about the Apocalypse. I just nodded my head and he took that as a cue to launch into a tirade. I thought, ‘You know, this must be a like-minded cat.’ So we ended up connecting through that and it was serendipitous and it totally worked out and we’ve been best friends ever since. I felt like the record [Endless Planets], before I asked him to participate, it had something missing. I said, ‘I’d love to tie this together with some of your work.’ A melding of the acoustic and the electronic worlds.
Is that what you’re working towards?
I think everything is possible and anything is acceptable to me. Anything can be used to create the art. I’m not trying to create limits or box it in.
Sonny Rollins said that jazz is unique in that it can absorb all these different types of music and still be jazz. Do you think there’s ever a point where it will absorb too much and not be jazz?
No. Absolutely not. I completely agree with him. I haven’t heard that before, but I think that’s a beautiful statement. I think that’s what jazz means. It means everything. It means, ‘Fuck it.’
Do you believe in life after death?
I do but not in an egoistic sense. I think that in order for a body to be alive in the first place, there must be some energy keeping it alive. In the sense that matter cannot be created or destroyed, once the body perishes that energy will continue to exist in some form. Not that it is me or you but that the energy will continue to exist and will recycle itself.
Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?
A couple times. Mostly through music in those rare moments when you’re caught in an improvisation or something and you just reach transcendence and it’s no longer you and the instrument and the audience but it just becomes pure connectivity to the ‘Other’ from whence the music derives. That and I’ve also had some strange sort of astral visions or projections. I’ve tried to practice astral projection and it’s very difficult. But there’s been some moments in the early morning when you’re sort of in that liminal space that I’ve found myself leaving the body and like actually getting freaked out and reeling myself back in.
Is that something you can teach yourself?
From what I’ve read, yeah—in the sense that you can command your physical body you can also command your astral body. It’s definitely fascinating to me.
I had a horrifying dream the other night where my teeth were all falling out one by one and I woke up totally freaked out and anxious and paranoid. When’s the last time you had a hard time distinguishing reality from a dream?
I have that all the time. Sometimes when I’m dreaming I’m convinced it’s reality. But it’s funny because the lines do blur. A lot of times I’m sitting around in what I think is physical, waking reality and I’m like, ‘Man, this is very dreamlike.’ And in that sense I don’t place one higher than the other or in a hierarchy. I think they’re both equal parts of a continual reality and have as much importance as the other. Has it ever freaked you out when you can’t tell the difference?
Not really. It’s all just as real or ‘unreal’ as the other. I know we place so much importance on physical life but who’s to say that this is more important than the dream life? The dream life is half our fucking existence.
In an interview, the director of Enter the Void said he enjoyed the idea of doing a movie that would portray a collective dream, like flying saucers or a collective need for people who need to believe in flying saucers. Why do people need to believe that there’s life after death?
I think the notion of life after death is very tied into the notion of the infinite. Without the infinite, to me at least, this would seem so pointless—if it was just this and that was it. I think the very fact that there is this means that there is the infinite. You can’t have one without the other.
Why do you think it’s important to find meaning in your life?
Life without meaning is a very dark thing. I’ve been there and I’ve struggled with it for years actually, just being in a dark place. When you have the love and the music—which I think are the same thing—it imbues your life with a sense of meaning and a sense of place. Despite how foreboding it can be, we’re supposed to be here. This is a beautiful thing even though it can be dark.
When you get to a dark place how do you get yourself out of it?
I guess just by going through the darkness. Plunging as deep into it as you can to come out the other side with the wisdom of what you’ve gained.
Do you think it’s important to go through these tough experiences?
Everyone has a different relationship to reality and the universe, but to me it’s definitely helped even though it was very difficult. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Why the hell is this happening to me?’ But in retrospect it’s always a learning experience and well worth it. I wouldn’t change a thing.
John Coltrane said that he thought most musicians are interested in truth. What are you interested in? All these words that we’re throwing around like ‘spirituality,’ ‘truth,’ ‘love,’ ‘music’—to me, they’re all synonyms. Life after death, infinity, truth, God—whatever you want to call it—that’s all what music and any art is getting at. True art is truth.
How do you get closer to truth?
I don’t know—by trying to remove your ego and authentically engage with the source that provides you with the inspiration. Acting like a conduit for that higher energy to come through. Not being egoistic and trying to act as a secretary for a higher force. Being open. You were already touring Japan when you were 15 and 16, which are formative years for everyone. What did you learn?
It’s funny because you’re right. I was so young. I’m still young, but looking back I was almost too young to know what I was doing in a way. It was very surreal. I wish I didn’t receive such high praise at a young age. It got to my head and I had to have a few reality checks since then to put myself in place and realize I always have things to learn. It’s hard as a young person to get your praises sung so highly. The ensuing years have provided me with a much better sense of perspective.
I read that you didn’t promote the first two records you released in Japan because you didn’t have total creative control. How have you been able to make sure that you have total control over your art?
Well luckily after that I haven’t encountered that problem. Those records were controlled by a producer so they weren’t my artistic vision. That’s precisely why I don’t promote them. But with Endless Planets, I produced it and wrote it entirely on my own and then gave it to Flying Lotus. He’s an incredibly open-minded guy who’s all about artists’ visions and he’s not trying to tamper with them which is why I respect him so much. He just said, ‘I’m going to give you a platform to do what you wanna do.’ That’s what Brainfeeder is.
I didn’t realize the album was finished before you took it to Brainfeeder.
Yeah, it was finished and I was looking for someone to put it out. David [Strangeloop] introduced me to Steve [Flying Lotus] and I got a call the next day and he said, ‘I love this. I want to put it out.’ It took awhile, about a year. It’s still a small label but they’re growing rapidly and doing great things.
I’ve always thought that Brainfeeder is kind of like a younger generation’s and a different generation’s Impulse! Records in that there’s kind of a distinct vision and everyone involved is friends and collaborators. Do you see it that way?
More and more it’s like [Flying Lotus] is letting all kinds of different voices speak. This is why it’s hard to classify Brainfeeder because it’s becoming this real open platform for artistic dialogues in so many forms. There’s a photographer on the roster, visual artists, a whole array of musicians from all different genres.
What’s the next direction for Brainfeeder?
I’m not exactly sure and it might be better to keep it a surprise. It’s definitely going to defy categorization. We’re going in all sorts of great directions.
Back to Bill Evans. He used to get annoyed when people would pick apart jazz intellectually because he said for him it was a feeling and not a theorem.
I completely and utterly agree. I hate when people get caught up in overanalyzing the harmonic sequence and all that. I don’t mathematically plot my music. I feel something and I just go with it. Having knowledge of the history is good, but once you have that knowledge your music is breaking all the rules.
What do you feel when you play jazz?
I feel the same thing when I’m surfing or making love—it’s just beauty. It’s all the same thing. It’s not a specific feeling, just one of warmth and happiness and love.
We saw your album release show at the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock and I get the impression that a lot of musicians would have a hard time keeping up with you. Who have you worked with that you’ve had a hard time keeping up with?
I still practice a lot of classical music and I’d say I have a hard time keeping up with the composers’ demands, such as Chopin or Rachmaninoff. I’ve also worked with a lot of exceptional jazz musicians who have very much pushed me. I had the chance to perform with Chick Corea years ago and that was incredibly intimidating. I was so young—I was 15 and not anywhere near his level as a musician. Any time I work with great jazz musicians of a high caliber it always pushes me. But any different musical setting presents its own musical challenges. Playing on a hip-hop session or working with Strangeloop. Everything is different and every situation has its own unique challenges. I could be afraid of these challenges but I force myself to address them for the sake of bettering myself.
John Coltrane said people thought he played angrily. But to him, what he was doing was playing every idea in his head all at once and it was all pouring out in search of the one perfect idea. How close have you come to that feeling?
I have experienced what I think he’s getting at. It’s weird because I’ve been playing before and things that would appear as anger in the music aren’t anger. It’s just another side of how profound the universe can be when it gives you information. It manifests itself in many different colors, but they’re all beauty to me. With Coltrane, everyone has their own process, and he had his process of playing everything he heard at once to sort of find the one ‘essential,’ is I think what he called it, but it’s definitely not anger. It’s visceral exploration. It’s so passionate, it’s so fiery, but it’s love.

AUSTIN PERALTA’S ENDLESS PLANETS IS OUT NOW ON BRAINFEEDER. VISIT AUSTIN PERALTA AT AUSTINPERALTA.COM.