We had different names, as garage bands would. I think at different points we were the Janitors, Syphilis and Fascist God. The drummer died five years ago, either of drugs or suicide.
And then the guitarist is in prison for child pornography, so I guess I had good company in my adolescence. Then, when I was probably about 16 or 17, I became obsessed with Baroque music, Handel in particular. It was through an interest in Baroque music — and some of the classical stuff that I began to get interested in — that I wanted to learn how to write it down. I think one is in good company if they are admirers of Barrett.
I think that album is a great example of where pop music exceeds its boundaries. When you went to Los Angeles for arts school, what kinds of things were you being exposed to?
Right before going out there, maybe in my last year of high school, I started to get into film soundtracks, Hollywood film scores. Baroque and film soundtracks were what I was trying to start writing down when I went off to [art] school.
All of a sudden my pals are guys that have been vinyl diving for the most obscure krautrock tracks and this sort of thing. I was just a rube. I had a ponytail and wore paisley shirts. Maybe everybody thinks like that. On top of all of this there was the initial adjustment of being thrown into the reality that there was universes upon universes of pop detritus.
Just garbage, whatever the word is. In the music school itself I was being exposed to worlds that were far more experimental. A composer called James Tenney, who was part of the Fluxus movement, and a famous early electroacoustic composer called Morton Subotnick were both members of the faculty.
So there was a moment when I was looking down the barrel of truly experimental music. Four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Or it forced its way in. However it happened, I think that was important. Alongside this encounter with American experimental music, there was the friendship with Ariel [Rosenberg]. I let him use my eight-track and I was just blown over by this music [he was making]. They were two disparate trajectories.
Fusing it with the other only watered one down. I wanted to put a garbage bag over my head. The point in either case is to go after the truth of that distinct path. I still more or less hold on to this belief, though maybe less militantly than I did early on. It was those records largely, as I said, which distilled the boxes of vinyl that were lying around the room.
Some of it turned me on. I mean, a lot of the outsider stuff was great. Aside from that it was essentially the canon of vanguard punk. For me, it was always more interesting to put on one of his tapes than to go too far into any of that. He did that listening for me, so to speak. I could never get anybody into the Baroque stuff — I learned that early on.
So it had to be my private passion, as it was not something I could really share with any of my peers. When you started making music with Ariel, what did that sound like? It was definitely out there. So there was that [element] in the music he was doing. Not in some sort of disinterested scientific way, but in an affective, emotive way.
Nevertheless, they can still be described in a way that has a pretense to objectivity of some sort — in terms of its language, at least. From the start there was an interest in what details from entirely different musical situations I could mobilize and bring into the post-war popular music language. Not at all.
I was actually going to ask you about Songs. Besides that interest in objectivity, what else was on your mind when you were recording that album? It was five years of work, after all. I was in despair about it. I wanted to put a garbage bag over my head or put myself in an oven or something. It was really horrifying, because nothing worked. John Maus is a man of many talents.
He's a composer who met Ariel Pink at music school and was part of the original Haunted Graffiti lineup. For all the talk about hauntology, retromania, and all the hand-wringing about how the current moment is a tail-eating cultural dead end, Maus' aesthetic is much more considered, and ambitious. Maus has spent years studying towards a PhD in political philosophy, and he explains how his songwriting choices are made in protest against neoliberal ideals.
He's looking to write music that uses elements from the 80s soft-rock palette and action film scores, as well as medieval modes, to create something both of this moment and beyond. It's not about literal copying, but choosing the right sonic responses to articulate a universal response to right now. Maus is a talker; he gets excited about ideas and then describes and re-describes them to communicate precise lines of thoughts, like the kind of lecturer who really wants to make sure he's understood and hopes he's challenged by his students.
Transcribing this went well over 20 pages and gave me carpal tunnel, but that's cool. His main argument is that we need a new language to talk about how people relate to each other that goes beyond lofty references to theorists with tongue-twister surnames or the kind of blogging that is so subjective and neophiliac that it degenerates into slanging matches of who got where first best.
So where this conversation goes is also where it falls apart, suspended between talk of singularities and theorists and all the filler of 'awesomes' and 'you know what I mean's and lots of other vocal tics that happen when your brain's racing faster than your mouth, when you're trying to talk about important and complicated things without coming off as an alienating, pompous asshole bling-flashing the cultural capital. Can music offer the tools to bridge that gulf? John Maus is giving it a go: it's worth thinking about, until language catches up.
It seems like you met with a whole group of people that share a certain sort of romanticism for old technology, certain sounds, certain visual and sonic textures that kind of evoke a sonic spirit of video nostalgia--you know, the whole thing of hanging around in the late 80s, early 90s and just watching crap VHS tapes and hearing these kind of distorted sounds come out, sort of filtered through having grown up listening to soft rock and that certain kind of synth sound from fantasy themes.
And then JJ, it was kind of interesting, she just got kind of got in contact with me, I'd never met her face to face - and said she wanted to do a video for the song that wasn't on any of the albums. We corresponded, and we have a very strong interest in Giallo film, and we both feel that this is a neglected, critically neglected form, that it offers possibilities and these kinds of things that the so called art films just don't afford.
So we united around that mutual wager. She came out here a few months ago from LA and we did some videos. When you're talking about genre, especially horror or action, as being sort of a language that you don't see in art films, you've talked about this in other interviews, about music, about pop being able to say things that serious art music can't.
What are your thoughts on what kinds of different vocabularies both in film, and in sound, can contribute, how you can use them to communicate different things. JM: There's just something about a metal skeleton coming out of fire that's really poetic and just extraordinary.
The idea that dominates the mainstream conversation, is that it's, 'oh, that film, we should just forget about it, because it was merely about effects and car chases and all this kind of thing', but it seems to me that there's a tremendous amount of imagination, and even a sublimity to some of these action set pieces, that they're very much expressive and spectacular and afford all kinds of possibilities in that regard that the so-called psychological just falls short of in many, many ways, you know?
It's hard to be on point in conversation like this, it's hard to articulate on the spot, but yeah, because we no longer have recourse to these ideas of high and low, none of us - I just see in these films all kinds of possibilities. Now that we can go online and search anything in two seconds, find out the whole history and backstory of anything, nothing is really like that hard to access. But at the same time, stuff that really is accessible to everybody, like the big blockbuster action films, there isn't really a kind of language for talking about them critically.
Is there's maybe a freedom there? JM: Maybe it's over, the instance that there is, but it would seem to me that that thought has not risen for this moment, in that sense. There's plenty of cultural studies, cultural theory, but in terms of a rigorous philosophical equivalent to this language, to these films, to that music, I haven't seen it yet and I really think that that's a challenge for us, for our generation, for want of a better way of putting it, to articulate these things.
I just think that we need to rise to that. In our situation we have no other language than the tired one of genius and the work and all this kind of thing, and it doesn't seem as well suited to us? I definitely see a need for a new language in terms of music journalism. I could be absolutely wrong, but when I read that against the old men, you know the dead old men, it doesn't seem to have the same depth.
I don't believe personally that it's blogs and Lester Bangs-type language, or David Hickey type - I don't think that's the equivalent of Total Recall. So all we're left with, all we've got are these old guys. And they're great, I love 'em, but I just can't shake this idea that they seem to be speaking to me as if from another situation. I appreciate it very much and it does indeed speak, I hear things there, but again, for want of a better way of putting it, my generation, they're old French guys who talk about 'the night of the world' and these kinds of things.
It's foreign, in some ways. And that's not to diminish its truth or its singularity, it's just not pop, it's not punk rock. And I'd really like to see some kind of theory or language or philosophy that's punk rock. It probably exists, and I'm just not familiar with it. I guess there are barriers to getting into something that requires a certain amount of prior knowledge.
If you are reading a bunch of critics who are really old school, then you need to have the world of 19th century history behind you, or you need to at least have this grounding in canonical texts, stuff that you're listening to, and you've got to be initiated, and the initiation's hard work too, and it's not a language you can speak with someone who's not been initiated.
JM: We need to figure a way around it, of course, with any kind of thoughtful reflection. This is what al the old guys would indict us for, and perhaps there's radical possibilities to it, but yeah, what I'd want to say is, maybe there's an immediate apparent truth to anything that's in the artifact that's worthwhile, in other words it doesn't pose a familiarity with the conventions and everything, on the part of the listener, the viewer, whatever.
But yeah, it does, it always does, right? You have to be somewhat familiar with that stuff in order to appreciate it. A lot of the sounds you use, especially a lot of the synthesizer stuff, they are sounds that we are all familiar with, and a lot of it is through film. They're culturally familiar.
JM: they're transcultural, expressive Maus makes an unlikely rock revolutionary. A long-time cohort of LA freak scene luminary Ariel Pink , he delivers his desolate sermons in a lugubrious baritone over gloomily anthemic sounds, vaguely like a pre-cocktail bar Human League.
Now he's beginning to amass a cult following for his curiously hypnotic songs and intense one-man shows. A postgraduate student of political philosophy, his latest album, We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves — one of 's best — is titled after a quotation from leftist thinker Alain Badiou ; amid a tide of apolitical, irony-drenched blog rock, his earnest zeal is refreshing.
We're all just playing on our smartphones, popping little texts back and forth and saying nothing at all. What the album title means to me is: come on guys, we should struggle to interrupt that, we should pitilessly censor ourselves. I'm sure I sound like the most ineffectual type of clown who's just as complicit with that world as anybody else, if not more so.
But the idea is that no art stands a chance unless we struggle, unless we make some kind of effort to think. Maus's attempts to convey his idealised vision of the future apply to his music as much as his lyrics, which is why he gets frustrated when people hear the gloomy synths and immediately dismiss him as an 80s revivalist.
The palette was there in the 80s so why was it set aside and forgotten?
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