On getting rid of guilt

What inspires you to keep creating in the face of encroaching decay and present fascism?

Making music is a frightening and thrilling adventure. For me, there’s been a gradual attempt to test my own abilities via software and collaboration, to reach places that give me pleasure and scare me in equal measure. Music is a way that you can break character. I think that’s the opposite of the idea of, “I have this thing in my spirit and I must share it with the world.” Some musicians are like that and they aren’t lying. I don’t think that’s me. I think I’m trying things out of an attraction and desire that requires a little distance.

How have you maintained the pursuit of joy and pleasure while simultaneously engaging with the sorrow all around us? What do you think comes from the marriage of these things in your music?

The arrangement and structural choices are a way for me to deal with highly mixed emotions. I feel gratitude and love and joy all the time, and I’m not going to stick my head in the sand. The ugliness of our present world, the drabness of life under fascism, and the depreciation of the meaning of art is inescapably present to me. Now, how do you make that show up in a composition? For me, there has to be movement across an emotional space. What would it mean to overthrow the people that constrain us and how might musical form be a way to think about all that? To me, it’s totally fine if someone just hears it as music.

You’re a professor. With school back in session, what does your daily creative practice look like? How is that different from when you are in the throes of making something, whether that’s writing a book or making a new record?

It’s great to see if we can mesh routines with obsessions and see whether we can routinize obsession or not. Martin and I try to go for a walk every day. Starting with a walk often opens up my mind and lets me process a problem that interests me without realizing that I’m doing it. It’s a way of reconsidering an issue. With the creative life, I often have to decide whether to spasm or to binge. You can have little spasms—and with writing, especially with a book, it’s quite true that writing first thing in the day is a good idea, if you can get used to it. Just get up, open that computer, open that file, start writing as you’re eating breakfast or having coffee.

Music is pretty different for me. Music is often late at night. I’ll try something out and I’ll wind up spending two or three hours just tinkering with a pattern or learning some new software or experimenting with some process. There’s morning thinking and night thinking. I have the professional and economic luxury of being able to take a long time with things. There are people that can work faster and I envy them because I can’t. I want to get into a faster rhythm with writing the next few books that I have in mind. I have, like, three book projects that are all kind of fighting for dominance in my brain. I don’t think it’s easy to be multiply obsessed. I don’t say this to slight polyamorous people. Maybe they can do it.

There’s a lot of guilt in our culture. We wake up guilty. We always feel guilty before our parents, our bosses. It’s not a great motivator for creativity. Doing something because I have to isn’t a positive motivation. There’s inner compulsion, and inner compulsion is really just attachment. You love a form so much that you can’t stop thinking about and playing with it. We’ve all felt that kind of inner drive or flow at points in our lives. High states of inhibition and stress don’t really assist you in that. It sounds very glib when I put it that way, like I’m being a personal trainer or something.

It’s hard to push through, even if it’s just waking up and forcing yourself to write.

Maybe this is obvious about a creative life, but you need to be constantly encountering art that amazes, moves, or astonishes you. Not everything is going to have that kind of seismic impact. It’s often why people really imprint on whatever art they encountered when they were in their teens. Artists need to think about what their standards are. That’s part of reading widely, or watching a lot of movies from across the history of film, or listening to a lot of music from across the history of music—rather than staying in your impacted micro-genre lane all day.

You can’t determine your own standards without experiencing art externally. No one can completely generate these standards internally without being informed by anything. At least, if they say they are, they’re probably lying.

I don’t want to get all name-droppy, but when I read an essay like Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” or Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” or listen to a piece of music like Asterism for Piano and Orchestra by [Toru] Takemitsu, I’m floored at how much they fit into it, and how beautiful and angry and alive it is. It can be stifling if you feel like, “Oh, I need to wake up, eat my Wheaties, and now I’m Bach or Coltrane.” That’s sort of crushing. You’ve got to check your ego. The standard of asking, “What am I doing and why?” doesn’t mean your art has to be bombastic or massive. I think of the soft power of something like Apichatpong [Weerasethakul]’s movies. They’re not clobbering you over the head, but the boldness of the willingness to be in the world that they model is incredibly inspiring. We’re often encouraged to settle and make do.

How do you juggle all of your different ventures and mediums? How do you find time for leisure, not just reading or listening for projects on which you’re working?

Reading is important to me. It’s like breathing. I have to do it constantly because of teaching and being an academic, but it’s also important that I do things beyond my specialty. That’s how I retain my sanity and escape the feelings of constraint and suffocation that everyday life induces in all of us. Some kinds of reading are better as a community. I’m very in favor of reading groups; I’ve been a member of many over the last several years. There’s a free group that reads German idealist philosophy and anybody can join.

Not everything I read is snobby—like, “Oh, Hegel, fuck off, dude.” I read mystery novels constantly. For $2.99, you can get an omnibus of Ngaio Marsh’s Golden Age mysteries. She’s this maybe-lesbian, super-conservative New Zealander Agatha Christie—there’s always evil communists or evil homosexuals in her writing. It’s not always ideologically kosher, but it’s delicious as far as inhabiting a genre. Sometimes the things you do just as a joke or for pleasure actually matter. You’re the same person, even there.

Do you think that the different facets of your creativity all stem from the same root, regardless of the medium? Do you pursue these varied things for shared reasons or does everything feel very distinct?

I’m balancing some kind of internal conflict in the difference between the scholarship and the music. To put it bluntly, the core problem for me is tragicomedy. With certain facts about mortality, death, and the irrevocability of loss, time’s arrow would tell us that the truth of life is tragic, but the lived experience of being in the world is being aware of all the comedic possibility of things not working. At the center of what concerns me, as an intellectual person, is the reality of comedy in the midst of tragedy, of tragedy punctured constantly by comedy. I’m trying to do justice to the complexity. These are very broad terms to throw around. It’s like saying life is a conflict between coldness and heat, or wetness and dryness.

It all comes down to cosmological dualism.

This sort of mini-chiasm, the need to wield a binary… I don’t know. If there’s a schtick to what we do as Matmos, and what I do when I’m on my own in my office trying to understand Shakespeare, it’s doing justice to this complicated emotional weather system that keeps changing. Art that has moved us for centuries often has a complexity that’s rooted in that, but you could take pot shots at what I’ve just said by saying, “Well, that just sounds like liberalism. You just don’t want to commit. You want to sit on the fence.”

Well, have we considered the other side of things? Have we heard from the Nazis?

I’m probably the last person that could answer the question honestly because I’m stuck inside myself. So of course I feel terribly self-consistent, but that’s probably a fiction. I’m attracted to a quote of Graham Greene’s: “When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” When you’re young, you have this huge surplus of futurity that is virtual and unexplored. I’m 54, and as the timeline of your life progresses, once there’s more of your past than there will be of your future, you figure out, “Oh, I don’t really like ranch dressing.” My future doesn’t have a bunch of ranch dressing in it because I figured out what I like and don’t like. The flip side of that would be that there may be a time when suddenly you need ranch dressing. Maybe you can’t rule it out.

You can know that you’re using different parts of your brain for each respective pursuit, but when you’re stuck inside yourself, there isn’t really an ability to separate. Life isn’t tragedy versus comedy. They’re superimposed over each other and that’s the horrid comedy of every day.

It’s not optional. The self’s consistency is always dynamic with the scene that surrounds it. I was a certain way in Kentucky because the hardcore scene in Kentucky was a certain way. I was a certain way in San Francisco in the ’90s because I was where software, tech, and raves were happening. I was a different way at Oxford because I was surrounded by people that were Oxonians. Now I’m in Baltimore. In that sense of self and world, you can pull like a carrot out of the ground and ask, “Why is this carrot the way it is?” It’s all about the soil. The soil is why the carrot is what it is. It’s the same with artists. Not just artists, but with people.

As both a critic and an artist, how do you resist the framework of superiority versus inferiority and “rating” in general? I remember seeing your piece in The Quietus about refusing to pick your favorite records. That’s a really interesting way to think about things as someone who has both released music to critical response, and written about music as a critic.

It’s a funny one, because the evaluative mode is obviously incredibly valuable for readers, like, “Should I buy this record or not?” I came up in an era when you had to decide, “Do I want to spend $8 on this new True Sounds of Liberty album? Is it good?” And criticism tells you, “Yeah, this is great. You should buy it,” or, “No, this sucks. Don’t buy it.” I can relate as a listener to wanting that kind of advice. We’re in a different media world where people can just hear the record for themselves. There’s a shortcut around the question of “to buy or not to buy”… Sadly, that has devalued criticism, and we can see this in the declining word counts and declining pay that critics get. That doesn’t distract at all from the value that is inherent to reading a thoughtful person’s response to art in a descriptive manner, that lights up what it tried to do and how well it did or didn’t achieve what it sought out to do.

Evaluative, descriptive criticism will always be valuable. I take great pleasure in the literary world and takedowns of super hyped people—if they’re bad and someone finally gets the guts to say, “I don’t think this works.” As a musician, I’ve always resented what I see as a world of quantification served by circular media narratives about how well or how poorly a work of art meets the moment, reflected as a numeric score. The bigger issue is the capitalist game of, “This is a five-star album, buy it; this is a three-star album, don’t buy it.” As an artist who wants to live, I obviously have a dog in the race here. I want the five stars because I want to flourish.

My issues are in part about quantification and they’re in part about capitalism. They’re also maybe about an internet culture in which sharing and ranking is just something that people love to do, which I’m very ambivalent about. I love to learn from other people’s lists. I follow people who have great lists. But I’m not necessarily swayed by their ranking structure. I’ve tried to do it and I always struggle with figuring out, “Why this one is #3 and that’s #7?”

The use value of music is different from its actual value.

Frequency of play is another issue here. There’s some music where I’m only going to listen to it once, but I’m never going to forget it for the rest of my life. Sometimes I’m stressed and put on something chill that helps me focus. We can comport ourselves with art objects in a lot of different ways. Frequency of play doesn’t necessarily equal “most successful act of composition.” There are horror movies that I watch once. I don’t need to see them again, but I’m absolutely glad I did experience them. There are black metal records I’ll listen to all the time and there are ones where I don’t need to hear it [more than once], but I’m really glad I did.

What do you do to nourish yourself creatively outside of music, literature, and teaching? How do you make time for rest?

Truly nothing terribly special. Going to the gym lets my mind wander as I do repetitive stuff with pieces of metal. It actually does “nurture” me to get absorbed in a task. It’s not that different from doing needlework or embroidery, which I also enjoy, which is also soothing and manual and yet frees up the mind to drift and re-settle. There’s the butch/femme polarity! As far as actual rest, around 11:30 P.M. I get in bed and we read for an hour, then go to sleep and get up at 8 A.M. I think that reading before bed is always for pleasure; it’s not about work or being prepared or productivity. Before bed, we often watch movies together. Luckily, Baltimore has a great place called Beyond Video that has a killer selection of cult, weird, old movies on DVD that you can rent. Martin and I do puzzles together in the morning every morning, silly letter scrambling word games on the phone. It’s a happy way to start the day, collaborating on something that gets your brain going.

What is something that you love about your own creativity?

It’s a great question, but a disarming one because the risk of self-pleasuring in public looms pretty large. I remember a bunch of people transfixed around a chinchilla in a pet store because the chinchilla was slowly and languorously sucking its own dick. The opportunity to “tell us something you like about yourself” sort of reminds me of the chinchilla problem. I’m going to boldly press on and bracket that memory, having brought it up.

I just learned about the concept of a “pleasure wizard.” In utilitarianism, supposedly there are people who are black holes—no matter how much you give them, they’re not happy. Then there are pleasure wizards, where you give them a tiny thing and they’re incredibly happy. These are brought up as thought experiments to consider the fact that utilitarianism is committed to the maximization of happiness. It would presume that if we equally allocate resources, we will maximize happiness for everyone. That is true with respect to minimum wage, right? If you raise the minimum wage, the rates of suicide go down; it’s just demographically true. A pleasure wizard, as a concept, is someone who can get tremendous joy out of very little. In a lot of my practice I’m looping, holding onto and caressing a loop, building around it and extending it, and I’m able to tap into that capacity to be a pleasure wizard. Anybody can be a pleasure wizard.