Category Archives: Interview

Interview

HAAi Contemplates the Future of Humans and Machines on HUMANiSE

Haai Humanise press photo by Sophie Webster
Photo: Sophie Webster

It’s an unusually muggy September afternoon in Los Angeles and HAAi (aka Teneil Throssell) is in town for a brief stay in between gigs in Miami and Washington D.C. “This city has been really kind to me with support, with everything,” she says, mentioning that she was planning a free pop-up party in town with her friend, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, during her stay. At the moment, though, we’re talking about HUMANiSE, the album that HAAI was readying for release. By now, you might have heard it. HUMANiSE came out on October 10 via Mute.

For her sophomore full-length, HAAi considers the rapidly-evolving connection between humans and machines. She describes her relationship with technology as fickle. “It’s one of those things that I’m fascinated by and terrified by it at the same time, like, I think, most people,” the London-based DJ, producer and singer says as we chat in the lobby of a downtown hotel. 

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Interview

Colin Newman and Malka Spigel Ask “WTF??” on New Immersion Album

Immersion Malka Spigel Colin Newman press photo
Malka Spigel and Colin Newman of Immersion (photo courtesy of the artists)

A funny thing happened last year for Colin Newman and Malka Spigel and their project Immersion. “We suddenly had a tour last autumn and we only had a half-hour set,” says Newman. “Instead of adding a few oldies and fleshing it out, we wrote a bunch of new material.”

Newman and Spigel have made a lot of music. Newman first gained acclaim with Wire in the late 1970s. Spigel co-founded the post-punk band Minimal Compact in the early 1980s. “If you try and sell Immersion as being somebody from Wire and somebody from Minimal Compact, they come with with a whole expectation that it’s going to be those things or both and it’s neither,” says Newman. “Immersion is Immersion. It’s its own thing and for us it makes much more sense to build that organically.”

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Books, Interview

Jeff Copeland on His Memoir Love You Madly Holly Woodlawn

Jeff Copeland author of Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn press photo
Jeff Copeland tells his Hollywood story in Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (photo courtesy of Jeff Copeland)

Jeff Copeland was, maybe, 12 drafts deep into Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn when he took a step back and reflected on one particularly awkward dinner scene. There is no shortage of awkward meals in Copeland’s memoir. After all, it’s Hollywood at the turn-of-the-‘90s and the writer is a broke twenty-something with big screen ambitions who befriends a middle-aged former Warhol star. On this particular night, though, Copeland and Woodlawn meet up with a neighbor, Maila Nurmi, you might know her better as Vampira, and her friends. An elderly theater director hijacks the conversation, steering it into dark, and, tbh, hysterical, terrain. Copeland’s younger self is mortified. His present self, though, has an altogether different take.

“Fame was fleeting! Money dwindled! And so what if their youth and beauty was gone forever. It was their ebullience that remained, and it was as bold and incandescent…and as bright and vivid as any theatre marquee on Hollywood Boulevard,” he writes.

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Interview

The Cords Channel Classic Indie Pop and Shoegaze Sound on Debut Album

The Cords press photo
Photo of The Cords by Marc Tedeschi

It’s not every band whose first gig is opening for the Vaselines. The Cords, though, did just that at Glasgow venue Mono two years ago, not long after sisters Grace and Eva Tedeschi had formed their duo. 

“We had just made social media, so I think someone there might have seen us on Instagram or something, a video,” recalls Eva. 

“It was busier than I expected it to be,” adds Grace, the elder sister by two years. “It was scary. It was like, oh my god, there’s like a million people here. I was just nervous.”

The two banter back and forth about how many people might have been in the venue when they played. “It was full,” says Eva, who plays guitar. “I don’t remember. I was so nervous I think I just stared down at my drum kit,” says Grace.

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Interview

Moviola Captures the Difficulty and Absurdity of American Life on ‘Earthbound’

Moviola press photo by Carrie Klein
Credit: Carrie Klein

In the video for “Slage Wave,” the first single off Moviola’s recently-released eleventh album, Earthbound, the employees of Don’s Tiny Weenies toil over the grill as they dish out Doge Dogs and Pigs on a Golf Course.  “You’re a wage slave, from the cradle to the grave,” the song goes, “you don’t work, you don’t get paid, you don’t get nothin’.”

Fate- or, rather,  the labor movement- intervenes in the form of a customer in a Johnny Paycheck, who hands over a “Take This Job and Shove It” sticker. A Pete Seeger-like musician follows, sliding a union handbook across the counter. It’s a video that almost has a happy ending, until the hot dog vending machine arrives.

“We debated on how to end it,” says Jake Housh, who plays guitar and piano/keys in Moviola and also shot and edited the video, “but it seemed kind of realistic maybe that the machines will win.”

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Film, Interview

Decoder Is the Punk Sci-Fi Film, and Soundtrack, You Need in Your Life

Christiane F. and F.M. Einheit in Decoder
Christiane F. and F.M. Einheit in Decoder

Sometime during lockdown, I stumbled upon a movie called Decoder via Tubi and streamed it not knowing what to expect. By the time I reached the end, I wondered, how did I not know this film existed? Released in 1984, Decoder is a German sci-fi film with serious counterculture cred. It stars F.M. Einheit, then a member of Einsturzende Neubauten, and Christiane F. and also features appearances from Genesis P-Orridge and William Burroughs. P-Orridge composed the film’s main theme with Dave Ball of Soft Cell, whose song “Seedy Films” is featured prominently in the movie, alongside music from Neubauten, Einheit and The The.

The Decoder soundtrack, which was just re-released on CD via U.K. label Cold Spring, is killer, which one might expect with that caliber of contributors. The movie, though, is even better. In it, Einheit plays a young man who realizes that the muzak playing in the fast food restaurant is a form of mind control and that he can manipulate the sounds to elicit a completely different response from the public. 

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Books, Interview

‘Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass’ Author Aug Stone Releases New Single of His Own

Aug Stone musician and author of Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass and Sporting Moustaches "Rachel on the Rooftops" video still.
Aug Stone in a still from the video for “Rachel on the Rooftops” (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Aug Stone has been making music for decades, but it wasn’t until last week that he released his first single under his own name. “Rachel on the Rooftops” is power pop-tinged rock jam that showcases the musician and author’s knack for narrative. The single also features backing vocals from Rachel Love, best known for her time in Dolly Mixture, the seminal British indie pop band that would later sing backup on Captain Sensible singles like “Happy Talk.” 

“They’re one of my all time favorite bands,” says Stone of Dolly Mixture. “It’s punky in attitude, but it’s like all the great girl pop of the ‘60s. I love all those songs.”

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Interview

On Lead Into Gold’s ‘Knife the Ally,’ Paul Barker Urges Musicians to ‘Challenge Yourself’

Lead Into Gold Paul Barker Press Photo by Mahsa Zargaran
(Photo: Mahsa Zargaran)

“I really don’t want to listen to any of the music that I listened in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I just don’t. I know that music so well, I don’t want to hear it anymore,” says Paul Barker. “It’s like listening to the Beatles. I love the Beatles, but I never listen to the Beatles because it’s part of our consciousness. You just grow up with it.”

Barker’s urge to lean into less familiar musical terrain extends to his own work. Active since the early 1980s, he played in Seattle post-punk band The Blackouts before going on to spend close to 20 years in Ministry. He released his first album as Lead Into Gold in 1990 and the most recent one this year. Knife the Ally is the name of the latest Lead Into Gold full-length, which was released via Artoffact Records in June. “The ally is industrial music,” he says and the album is, in a way, a call to arms, to do something musically different.

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Interview

On Birds of Paradise, SAADI Reflects on Human Nature and Digital Lives

Press photo of Boshra AlSaadi as SAADI by Laura Moreau
(Photo: Laura Moreau)

The urgency in “Cowboy in a Ghost Town” is potent. A galloping beat drives the song and the whip-slap sound of the snare comes in as SAADI sings, “You are a cowboy in a ghost town/You leave a dark legacy.” When I first heard the song, from the L.A.-based singer/multi-instrumentalist’s recently released sophomore album, Birds of Paradise, I thought it was about social media. There are references to shadowbans and people living in an “alternate reality.” 

“It’s about Gaza, actually,” Boshra AlSaadi says when meet up for a video call.  AlSaadi has written a number of songs about Gaza, but “Cowboy in a Ghost Town,” she says, is her most overt. Listening to it again, I’m struck by the poignancy of it, from the mix of anger and helplessness that’s in AlSaadi’s voice to the protest-like chorus that rises near the song’s end to the clear references to social media. AlSaadi captures not just the horror of watching a genocide unfold on your phone, but the frustration of knowing that you can’t stay silent, even when you’re posting into a void. 

“Seeing it unfold on your phone is horrific,” she says. “It’s unprecedented also.” 

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Interview

Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra Captures Our Fractured Reality on Have an Existential Crisis

Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra press photo by Becky DiGiglio
SPO-20 (the robot) and Professor B. Miller (the human) of Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra (Photo: Becky DiGiglio)

The first time I dropped the needle on my vinyl copy of Have an Existential Crisis, guest vocalist Spencer Moody kicked off the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra album with “Pick ‘Em Up.” 

“I’m picking up the pieces/Of my belief system,” he sang in a voice that’s instantly recognizable if you ever listened to Murder City Devils. 

On my second listen, the same song played. This time though, Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra’s usual lead singer lamented the loss of core beliefs. 

“It’s crumbling apart,” the robotic SPO-20 declares, “Fact/By fact/By fact”

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