Text from the Lab of Cosmic Chatter, or I take some time to chat with Bee Mask

Hey, last week I got the bright idea to interview Chris Madak, aka Bee Mask about his new record and a bunch of other stuff. We chatted on phone, text, email and gchat. Check it out:

Wassup. What are you doing. Describe the room you are in.

Usual stuff: drinking some tea, spinning "Upstairs at Eric's", and working on tape layouts.

 

Nice. Always had you figured as  Vince Clark guy.

Yeah, very much so.  Mister Matthews and I have discussed this point at length in the past, so I should've guessed you'd concur.

 

Bee Mask seems to come from a tradition of a specific synthesizer camp. What were the roots, the music you listened to that inspired you to make the music you make?

With regards to the formative stages of Bee Mask?  That's a tricky call as the emphasis of the project has shifted quite a bit over the years...

...which would lead into this question - Bee Mask was set up for certain parameters, did they ever break, change or morph into anything else? What were those original ideas?

They definitely did, and the history of their doing so is -- broadly speaking -- the history of my own ideas about what it means to make "experimental" music evolving.  It's not easy for me to put myself back in the frame of mind that informed the beginnings of Bee Mask, but I suppose I was interested at the time (c.2005) in applying some of the really heady and quixotic ideas about time, presence, formal coherence, etc that I found most captivating in the discourse around the reductive impulse in the plastic arts of the 1960s to the practice of a kind of pure phonography.  Basically, I wanted to make records that one encounters like a gas emanating from the speakers, rather than records that one experiences as a magical world under glass or whatever.

Those concerns come with some baggage about medium-specificity, which made me sort of averse to doing anything that I thought of as "cinematic" on records for a long time.  However, that aversion has ebbed over the last few years in ways that I couldn't necessarily have foreseen as I've had occasion to think at greater length about the ways that records and cinema share an ability to hold a really compelling funhouse mirror to our experience of hypothetical/unreal space and to reveal subtle and wonderful things about the importance of what actually happens in that space.  So, to answer your prior question about records and camps, one pleasant aspect of this development is that I've found myself really getting into a lot of things, like Francois Bayle's "Erosphere" or Fellini's "City of Women" -- or even the way that someone like Grant Achatz really pushes the envelope of his craft in order to really get under the hood of our relationship with time -- that I might have been a bit more ambivalent about in the past, due to some sort of residual angst about narrativising or whatever.  While I have a hard time relating to some of its more utopian and McLuhanesque aspects, the discovery of Morton Subotnick's idea of "music as a studio art" was instrumental in this shift in my thinking.  It also turns out that playfulness is really important.

 

Your roots are in  the Cleveland underground scene. Everyone is hip to Emeralds, but if someone wanted a broader view of what was and is going on there where would you point?
Hmm...I've been in Philly for a few years now and every time I've come back, something new seems to be in the works.  Fragments, for example, only really got going as I was leaving.  Moth Cock (who are actually from Kent, I'm aware) and Synaptic Foliage have both done great things in the past couple years.   As far as the actual milieu that Bee Mask was part of, new projects from old friends -- including Colored Mushroom and Radio People -- have continued to delight and I can't overemphasize the importance of Wyatt Howland and Ryan Kuehn's work in laying the social and aesthetic foundations of that whole scene.  I'd say that any heads who really want to get at the crux of it should start listening to The Record Exchange on WCSB and scouring the earth for Thursday Club cdrs and old SKSK releases.

 

Your label was recently called "impeccably curated" by Keith Fullerton Whitman on a write up about your new record over at Mimaroglu. I'm always laughing about how people are willing to throw the term curated on anything these days, but I didnt wince at all when I saw that. One of the main things that I think goes over people's heads in regards to curation is the written aspect of it, the study and research of curation. When you started DI did you have a grand vision in mind, or was it just a way to put out some of your own and friend's material and it became what it is?

Of course I was flattered to read that!  The answer to your question is "yes and no."  Like most other people with small labels, I started out by releasing my own work as a means of having something to trade with friends, but I did have a background as a gallerist and once the label really acquired a life of its own, I began to look at it as a way to satisfy the same sort of curatorial impulse, which is basically the role it's played in my life since then.

 

What was the first really out there record you ever heard?

That depends on what you mean by "out there."  I had a pretty square childhood, culturally speaking.  My parents were both lapsed classical musicians whose record collections ran about the aesthetic distance from Haydn to James Taylor, so I have all sorts of formative memories of stuff like hearing thirty seconds of AC/DC on headphones at a mall kiosk and being totally blown away by the idea that records could sound at all impolite, or hearing Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" and being shocked that anyone would pan drums like that.  But really, the first actually profound experience of weirdness on a record that I can recall involves the Muppet Show LP, which is full of conversations about what aspects of vaudeville schtick can/cannot be accurately represented on phonographic media and "The Flight of the Bumblebee" overdubbed with chewing noises.  "Highest possible recommendation." 

 

Ah cool. I think mine could be the flexi disc that came with the book Our Universe... incantations to Ra and the sound of planets... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh7K3V9yTMg

Listening now!  This explains a lot. 

 

So where did you discover out there music? Usual channels? Sonic Youth? Working at a Record Exchange or something like that and something weird came across?

Both/and.  I grew up playing guitar, coming at the "out there" from a weird punk angle and a weird jazz angle simultaneously, and Sonic Youth was indeed an important factor, as were the usual things like My Bloody Valentine, King Crimson, and Ornette Coleman, and stuff like Sonny Sharrock, Tony Conrad, and Ash Ra a little later on.  Actually, speaking of Sonic Youth, "Confusion is Sex" was the first record that really blew the proverbial doors off and set me off on a quest to figure out exactly how and why a band would arrive at the idea to sound like that.  This being Cleveland in the 1990s, I was very, very lucky to find my way into bricks and mortar shops such as Platter Puss (R.I.P.) and Bent Crayon and to be among maybe the last generation of people to have the associated experience of being initiated into something deep, weird, and life-ruining.  I actually did do the obligatory couple years working at the Lakewood Record Exchange as well, and at the time it was a great place to sit back, skim trades, fill in the gaps in my awareness, and get the whole collector/completist thing out of my system at a relatively early age. 

 

So what about digital versions of your music? You ever going to include a download code?  Is there a worse feelign than hearing a crappy rip of your tape posted somewhere? If so, I haven't felt it yet.

It always strikes me a bit funny when I hear other artists talking about their being put off by low-quality rips...  I think I find them less offensive insofar as they point to the existence of an original, where one can hear surface noise, wow and flutter, or whatever.  Masters are another story entirely, because they seem to reduce one's work to files, and one of the things that motivates me to do what I do is the sense that I'm making records, not files.

Still, I'm as much a part of a post-death of the author reality as anyone else and I don't have any illusions to the effect that I can somehow avoid the complication and destabilization of my own intentions once my work is out there in the world just by making some sort of extravagant gesture of validating the co-creative role of the listener.  That role is a given.  It's not mine to bestow and to pretend otherwise would be irresponsible, unbecoming, even patronizing on my part, and artists who act as though they're doing something radical by acknowledging that the ends to which other people put their work are basically unknowable just end up sounding like "cool dads" or something.

What I do instead is to try to keep my head down and make work that comes from a desire to share, perpetuate, and advocate for the kind of experiences that I find most rich and rewarding in the culture of records.  In my case, that means trying to make the sort of records that you might make a point of putting on when you come home out of your head at the end of the night, rather than the sort that you'd check out on the train the next morning.

Ultimately, I don't have any kind of categorical opposition to digital releases (full disclosure: "Canzoni" is also distributed digitally), and I can see a lot of perfectly good reasons to have them, but not exclusively and certainly not as the endpoint of any sort of narrative of obsolescence.  The whole download code thing seems pretty silly to me, but I suppose that's because specialness and the imperative to make time for listening are part of what attracts me to records and I have a hard time putting myself in the shoes of someone who would eschew buying an LP because it didn't come with one.  Then again, convenience and amnesia are always the carrot and stick of the pharmakon, right? 

 

So what are your 5 favorite new tapes? Current jams?

Tapes specifically?  There are far more than five answers to this question but I'll try to keep it relatively concise.  The new Gift Tapes batch is really, really stellar, especially Matt Carlson's "Gecko Dream Levels" and Spare Death Icon's "Survival", which is easily some of Jason Anderson's finest recorded work to date.  The "Chicago school" dominated my late 2010 with releases like Chemtrails' "Final Society" (Cylindrical Habitatat Modules), Quicksails' "Madison Lakes" (also CHM) and Positive Shadow's "Replication Slave" (Catholic).  Fluxmonkey's "Sorry Jack" (Everyone Else Has a Record Label So Why Can't I?) is absolutely essential - probably the only studio session that scales the heights of Bob Drake's best live performances.  John Clyde-Evans' "Go Gracious Kiki Change" (Autumn) and Robin Fox's "A Handful of Automation" (eMego) are both fantastic examples of contemporary electroacoustic music with very high production values being done exceedingly well on cassette, and on a completely different tip (albeit one with an equally tight connection to the history of the medium), H.N.Y.'s "How I Learned to Live" (Ranky Tanky) is my current favorite in the minimal songcraft dept.  For that matter, all of the Social Junk-related solo projects (H.N.Y., Dick Neff, and Night Burger) are doing great things right now.

 

Currently reading?
As usual, too many things at once.  "The Alinea Book," Jon Sterne's "The Audible Past," Sadie Plant's "Writing on Drugs," and bits of "The Glenn Gould Reader," which is a perennial favorite.

 

Favorite venues you have played?
These days, anywhere with a really nice soundsystem (depressingly rare in the world of experimental music) and a good spot where I can listen to myself through the mains rather than the monitors.  Voice of the Valley 2009 is still the gold standard in both departments.  I'm not exactly a prolific live performer right now and I don't find my way into too many basements anymore, but I have really fond memories of the old Diamond Shiners house in Akron, the Lambsbread house in Delaware, OH, and the laundry room of Wyatt's old apartment building in Lakewood.  All places where one could relax and get weird sans the usual vibekillers.

 

Origins of the name Bee Mask? You told me once that you found bees repulsive, but in the end of the day you have to admit they have been good to you, no? You can't look at a bee and not think of yourself, can you?
The name "Bee Mask" originated in a private joke between myself and an old housemate, referring to a series of pranks involving an actual mask which was left at our house in the aftermath of a halloween party.  At the time, I don't think I had any intentions beyond using it for a show or two and moving on to the next thing.  Maybe a year or so later when I realized that I was truly stuck with the name, I figured that I had sort of assumed a responsibility to deal with its implications, or at the very least to work through my ambivalence within the context of the project itself.
It's interesting, then, that you pose the question of whether bees have been good to me.  One of the results of this process of coming to terms has been the articulation of a private mythology that guides decision making within the project in what you might call a quasi-oracular fashion.  The fact that this mythology is grounded in my very real visceral aversion to bees lends to the whole enterprise a faintly satirical echo of the great neurotic and prohibitive modernisms of Greenberg, Adorno, et al in that it is no more inherently ridiculous a creed than theirs.  At any rate, not wanting to get into the guts of it at inappropriate length, I'll suffice to note that one of the questions posed by this mythology is whether or not bees have truly "been good to" anyone.

 

Any weird religious convictions you've never shared with anyone?
I'm a pretty superstitious person, but unless you count a conviction that everyone -- regardless of what they tell you -- is essentially an animist, no.

 

Current gear list? What was your original set up?
Gear is funny stuff, at once much more and much less important than its often made out to be, and my approach to it has been shaped by a really unhealthy combination of insane perfectionism and limited means.  The other caveat that I'll add before proceeding is that studio gear and live gear involve wholly different considerations, or at least they do for me.  That tendency of studio and performance practices to diverge has been a difficult one to manage, particularly as I'm really much more of a studio artist and not especially motivated to pursue performance as an end in itself.
But anyway, the raw material of Bee Mask records comes from a compulsive home recording habit that I've had as long as I've had the means to record myself at home.  I got into taping over the erase head of my parents' tape deck at a pretty young age, was promptly given a four track for christmas (probably to discourage me from messing with their stereo any further) and went into the rabbit hole from there.  My relationship with the cassette has everything to do with practicality and a basically contrarian bent and nothing to do with the pursuit of any sort of nostalgic patina, so I worked on various DAWs for several years, despite hating them all.  I've recently reorganized everything around a hardware sequencer/sampler, however, which has been a really nice change of pace.

So to answer your actual question, in the studio I use whatever's most compelling to me at the time, or if I need to be goal-oriented, whatever seems like the right tool for the job.  This has included a handful of different keyboard synths (none of them especially rare or coveted), a few pieces of boutique tabletop modular stuff, a medium-sized diy frac modular in a really shocking state of disarray, a few other handmade pieces of the low-rent "Tudor box" variety, the aforementioned sequencer/sampler, cv to midi and midi to cv convertors, a heap of assorted percussion (including some hand-cut copper chimes, which are a particular favorite right now), a couple guitars, a few different tape machines, a few pianos (recorded on location), a perpetually rotating collection of effects, etc etc.

The live setup needs to be able to split the difference between all this stuff and deliver something that's at once open-ended, responsive, and recognizably Bee Mask.  Its earliest "complete" incarnation consisted of some tape loops, a few effects and a handful of modules.  Now it's a sampler, a few effects, and a monosynth.  I don't like to name names because there are very, very few pieces of gear in the world that I would recommend without reservation.

 

Favorite Philip K. Dick novel?

"VALIS", probably.
 

 

Ever been contacted by or have contacted alien intelligences?
Not "extraterrestrial," no, but the SETI question isn't one that I find terrifically interesting anyway so perhaps I'm not really looking.  If you mean "nonhuman"/"transhuman", yes of course, but anyone could say as much. 

 

Thinking about titles of your tapes - they seem to have taken a real heavy hadron collider view in the last couple of years. They used to be sort of sweet and homestead reflecting, like how softly sings the kettle or honey and salt, then started getting weird, then now exploded into something really out there. Will Less Gigolo of divinity to the gore splattered lion on his own hearth... odysseus etc... like 4 epics on their own combined to something else.

If by "hadron collider view", you mean that they reflect an essentially apocalyptic outlook, that's certainly part of the puzzle.  A sort of mannerized or aestheticized domesticity verging on scary insularity ("How Softly Sings...") is another.  "Honey and Salt," incidentally, figure prominently in the process of mummification, so I recall there being this whole other angle about the record as embalmed sound and the idea that the making of records is part of a larger human project -- a tragic and futile one, of course -- of attempting to manipulate time by trapping it in some material form, say a paycheck, a cigarette, or a reel of tape.

For what it's worth, most of the titles ("From a Will-Less Gigolo..." for example) refer elsewhere, and many of them now refer to each other in various ways, so I've tried to use the naming of my work as a means to stitch it into the already existing world in as preposterous and unweildy a fashion as possible.  There's definitely an element of self-parody in it as well, a sense in which it's both an outlet for the sort of compulsive ordering that's forever creating chaos and a way of blowing off steam about the inevitability of always working from the middle of something and never being able to see all the edges at once.  I like the idea of their forming a parallel body of work with sort of a misanthropic relationship to the records themselves, if that makes any sense.

 

So what do you have coming up? Anything you want to plug?
2011 is pretty wild so far! There's the reissue of "Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico" on Spectrum Spools, which showed up on my doorstep a couple days ago looking and sounding incredible.  John, Peter, Rashad, and everyone else involved in the process did amazing work and I'm very grateful for it!  I've also got a split 12" with Envenomist coming soon on A Sounddesign in a completely bonkers package designed by Daniel Baird and a double LP retrospective which is sort of a guided tour of my favorite corners of the earlier Bee Mask catalog due later this year, also on Spectrum Spools.

Aside from all that I'm working on a ton of new projects including a collaboration with Autre Ne Veut (who made what's almost certainly my favorite record of last year), new releases on Deception Island from Outer Space, Alterity Problem, Quicksails, Night Burger, and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, and a ton of other stuff that's still under wraps.  Finally, I'd be remiss not to note that I'll be playing the first Philly-area Bee Mask show in a really, really long time on April 22 at International House, with Oneohtrix Point Never.  Just trying to stay busy/stay weird, as ever!