Photo by Chris Leung
Interview by Mitch Strashnov

Since Emika is releasing a new EP (3 Hours) through Ninja Tune next week—not to mention currently hosting one of the most compelling remix competitions we’ve ever seen on Soundcloud—self-titled thought we’d finally share an interview from the producer/singer’s tour with Amon Tobin late last year. That’d be the one where she bowled sold-out crowds over with nothing but cold-pressed synths, sub-atomic beats and steely-eyed melodies.

Discussed: Interning for Ninja Tune; normalcy in East Berlin; improv; defending one’s lyrics to an elder statesman of German electronic music; respecting sound; “beautiful melodies and bad-ass beats”

“All I want to do is have a sandwich and have a nice day”

self-titled: Let’s backtrack quickly; you interned for Ninja Tune? How did that happen and how does it feel being one of their artists now?
It feels really cool! I think it’s very important to appreciate what happens in the process of releasing music, and you will only really appreciate that if you sit an office and do it yourself! That’s what inspired me to work with Ninja Tune. I like their attitude towards creativity, as well as the independence that flows around the world. I didn’t earn any money from it; I did because I loved it, and partly to test them out as well. It feels right.

How did your tastes change and what were you doing when you moved from Bristol to Berlin?
The reason why I moved to Berlin was not because of the music culture; it was more about the people and society. The time I spent in the UK and Czech Republic, I observed lots of things that I didn’t like in Western society and without realizing it when I was teenager, I created this idea in my head that I could be the adult I wanted to be and with Berlin. I found that idea within five hours of being there. I found it in the architecture, the language, the history, the way there isn’t much bullshit marketing in Eastern Berlin, the activism amongst the youth, as well as their livelihoods. Everyone is poor and is happy to be alive. All I want to do is have a sandwich and have a nice day. I don’t want a fucking mortgage and to worry about having my kids getting an injection, or shit like that. East Berlin, to me, is the closest thing to normalcy.

Those experiences definitely formed a sound that has evolved considerably. Your Price Tag EP early on was a welcome contrast to your full-length album. Do you think you’ll continue to explore more tunes in a techno-laden context?
Well, [Price Tag] was a collaboration with MyMy, and all my LP stuff is written solo, but the next batch is definitely going to be more direct. My legato template, where I’ll get really obsessed with a couple of things and just eat them. It’s that whole process of devouring something.

To understand underground music, you need to have a notion of pop music. I’m curious to develop my voice and work with more obvious beat sounds as opposed to textures from sampling. Be more upfront and pure and simple. For example, I love Omar-S, early Kenny Larkin and a lot of other stuff from Detroit and the Midwest. That’s all the music I buy on vinyl. However, now that I’m performing, I realize what works and doesn’t work. It’s all about being in my bedroom and discovering new energies to bring to the crowds in front of me. All these experiences are inspiring me to be a bad-ass improvisational artist.

What was the process of making you album like? How personal was the experience?
I’ve been writing songs for ages. The actual album on Ninja Tune took nearly four year. For two-and-a-half years, I worked with the brilliant Rashad Becker. He was very critical about my lyrics and such, which I would have to defend and explain to him. As a 21 or 22-year-old, you think you’re self-aware, but he is 18 years older than me and has seen the industrialization of dance music. I did all the composition and recording myself, and everything else was done in his studio on analog gear. It’s had very careful, detail and considered treatment; it’s not a pop record and neither an underground thing. It’s a unique experience that turned into something of its own.

Some tracks on the record are expertly designed, yet the composition is quite minimal and very euphoric; how did you strike a balance that was suitable for vocal exploration as well as instrumental, not giving into one or the other?
I respect sound; I compose sound in a way that features and honors the individual sound. I don’t have a big, loud pop voice so I simply don’t compose melodies that would suit that type of voice. I really like crunchy, metallic percussion and I like to listen to each individual sample that I’ve made; the composition is always informed by the sound. Sometimes it’s the opposite, and I get pissed off and hear something and work for it. Either the phrase informs the instrument or the sound informs the phrase.

The atmospherics on the album are stellar. Did your field recordings at Berghain attribute to that at all?
No, that comes from years of listening to music and getting into that head space. I used to spend all money on records and wish I could go out but I was young and not allowed. It’s just being with your own thoughts, and that’s what comes out in my records as well. The Berghain thing is a completely other vibe; that project was fucking challenging—this huge idea with so much potential.

You’re already working on your second album, right? What can people expect from it so far?
Beautiful melodies, bad-ass beats. You think you know what beats are but you just don’t fucking know. I got some new analog kit that no one’s got. It’s gonna be raw; it’s gonna be crunchy and Germanic. Functional. Nothing more, nothing less.

Recording Under the Influence is a recurring self-titled feature where we ask artists to ignore their musical inspirations for a minute and share what really went into the making of a particular record. Since the Twilight Sad have been so forthcoming about the influences on their third album—a slight reinvention that dials their hail storm hooks down in favor of steely beats and oil-slicked synths—we asked guitarist Andy MacFarlane to talk about some of the movies that marked the trio’s No One Can Ever Know sessions…

I always over think things when we’re writing/recording, so I tend to put films on in the background, or project them in the studio so there’s something else to focus on. So again, not in any specific order, some of the films we were watching…

There’s obviously a lot of iconic scenes in this film; it looks great, especially for being made in 1927. The anime film with the same name and similar storyline is also one I had on. The way they use Ray Charles’ version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You” over the sound effects of the Ziggurat collapsing is amazing.

I still have no idea what is going on in Tarkovsky films, but they do look good.

I really like grim, kitchen sink style films, whether it be something like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Scum, Withnail & I, This Is England, Tyrannosaur, etc. I find them good to have on when writing for some reason or other. This one was written and directed by Gary Oldman. It’s definitely worth a watch.

We projected this into the studio. David Cronenberg and Debbie Harry—enough said.

John Carpenter and synths; also Rowdy Roddy Piper.

Photo: Anna Hrnjak

AN APPEARANCE IN THE PARK
A halting conversation with Mark Lanegan

By J. Bennett

When we meet Mark Lanegan at a picnic table in a nearly-empty public park in Burbank, it feels like one of us should be carrying a briefcase full of money. Like there might be a sniper in the bushes, watching two guys in sunglasses make some sort of shady handoff. But really it’s just awkward, mostly because Lanegan clearly doesn’t want to be here, and essentially says as much before we even start the interview. A notoriously reluctant and guarded interviewee, he presumably picked the spot because it’s close to where he lives but not so close that we might actually get a glimpse of his pad. Fair enough, we figure: Privacy is a precious commodity these days. Still, there’re a lot of painful pauses and one-word replies, many (but not all) of which were edited out of the following transcript. But first, some basic facts…

As the singer of the Screaming Trees in the ’80s and ’90s, Lanegan just might be the only Seattle frontman who both made it through the grunge era alive and the aughts with his musical dignity intact. Aside from a brief stint in North Carolina—where he says he lived so far out in the sticks that he had to drive 20 minutes just to get coffee—he’s resided in Los Angeles for most of the last 15 years. And he’s done a lot of moving around, even here—from Pasadena to North Hollywood to the Hollywood Hills to Echo Park to Glendale and finally to Burbank.

Lanegan is either unwilling or unable to explain his inability to settle into one place, but it might not be a coincidence that his musical path mirrors his domestic restlessness. Over the course of the last decade and a half, he’s recorded multiple albums—nearly all of them superb—with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, the Gutter Twins, the Twilight Singers, ex-Belle & Sebastian songstress Isobel Campbell and English electro-gospel gurus Soulsavers while releasing five excellent solo albums, marking each with his own inimitable and smoky singing style. His latest solo record—which, like 2004’s haunting Bubblegum, appears under the banner of the Mark Lanegan Band—is entitled Blues Funeral.

Photo: Steve Gullick

self-titled: Do you play or write music every day?
I used to. Now I pretty much only do it when I have something to write for. And then, I approach it like it’s work. I get up in the morning and do it.

Does the fact that it’s work take any enjoyment out of the process?
Well, I’ve been making music for a living for a while, so that would mean that the enjoyment went out of it like 20 years ago. [Laughs]

Does making music mean something different to you since it’s become a career?
Well, for a long time I was just figuring out how to do it. I was in the Trees for a long time, and made a lot of records before I even started really writing songs. It was kinda like that Rush song about the guy who discovers a guitar in his hands. “What is this piece of wood?” It’s kinda like that for me. I’m not really proficient on any instrument, but I know enough chords to write a song. I learned how to play stuff out of necessity. I’m still figuring it out, really.

So you write mainly on the guitar?
With this record, I wrote a couple of them on the keyboards and some with a synthesizer and drum machine, just to give it a different angle. But then I hand all that stuff over to a guy who can really play. But yeah, mainly guitar.

Did you write all the songs on Blues Funeral yourself?
Yeah, with the exception of “Ode to Sad Disco,” which came from a series of films by a Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn, called The Pusher trilogy. The second film has a great soundtrack, and there’s a piece of music in there called “Sad Disco,” so I lifted the music and wrote my own song to it. Hence the title, “Ode to Sad Disco.” So that’s the only one that wasn’t specifically written by me.

What other kinds of things inspired the songs on Blues Funeral?
Well, I try to be open to inspiration no matter what I’m doing. For a large part, stuff starts from memory. Maybe a real experience, maybe somebody else’s experience, maybe something I heard about. I don’t know. Or it could be other people’s music. Wherever the spark comes from, I can’t really give any specific examples, although I’m sure there are some. I really don’t even think about where it comes from. I just let it go where it’s going and don’t really question it too much. I think it just comes from life in general.

Like your last solo album, Blues Funeral has some electronic elements—they’re especially present on “Ode To Sad Disco” and “The Gravedigger’s Song.”  Do you program that stuff yourself?
That stuff was mostly done by Alain Johannes on this record.

Is that something you specifically wanted to incorporate, or did it just work out that way?
We started to incorporate it on the last record, but with this one I wanted to use it in a less noisy or abrasive way, which is how I’ve used it in the past. This time, I wanted it to be more unabashedly beautiful. But those elements are things that people have been using since the ’60s, really, so it’s nothing new.

The press release for the new album says you have two dogs. Why did you want to include that information?
Well, the record company had somebody write a bio, and it was really long and really…well, personal. It was filled with facts that bored the shit out of me, and it also included a review of the record for people who were gonna review the record. It drew my ire immediately, so I wrote a really brief bio, just a couple of lines long. At the end, trying to be funny, I put in that I live in Los Angeles and have two dogs. That was the personal aspect of it. I didn’t really intend for them to use that—especially not the dog part—but they did.

It reads like a statement of exactly how personal you’re willing to get.
[Smiles and turns palms upwards]

You recently recorded a Johnny Cash song for the Hangover II soundtrack. Was that something you had kicking around?
No, they specifically asked me to do it for the movie. The Cash version is actually a cover of a Nick Lowe song, but the Cash one is the definitive version. When they asked me to do it, I thought, “Okay, but it definitely won’t sound like Johnny Cash.” [Laughs]

Were you hesitant to do a song for a movie that’s essentially a goofball comedy?
No, I’ll pretty much do a song for anything. Back in 1986, maybe I thought that was something that reflected on me. But in 1986, I was also afraid of having a record that sounded good. But music is music. If it’s anything remotely in the ballpark of something I can handle, I’ll usually think about doing it, at least.

You’ve been more prolific than ever in the last few years—making music on your own, with Isobel Campbell, Greg Dulli, Soulsavers, Queens. What do you attribute that to?
I’ve just been blessed with a lot of opportunity in the last ten years or so. That’s just the way it’s panned out. I can’t really tell you why. I’m glad it has, though, because I’ve enjoyed the music I’ve made and I’ve enjoyed playing with different people. But you’d have to ask someone else why that is.

Obviously, all those people I just mentioned play different styles of music. Do you specifically seek out projects with different styles to challenge yourself?
Well, I’d say for the most part that they seek me out. But the things I’m interested in are definitely things that I probably wouldn’t do left to my own devices. But then again, I guess what I’d do when left to my own devices is anyone’s guess at this point. [Laughs] But generally the criteria is that it’s someone whose music I enjoy without me being involved in it. It’s really not much deeper than that.

Do you feel less pressure in projects for which you’re not writing the music?
Well, there’s pressure in every situation. I’m not sure writing my own music changes that.

Do you work on your own material while working in these other projects, or do you generally concentrate on just one thing at a time?
It depends. I usually have several things going at once, and just concentrate on whichever one is most pressing—the one that’s gotta be finished soonest. Right now I’m just working on stuff for myself because I don’t really have much else going on. Although I’m kinda working on Gutter Twins stuff at the same time.

Are you involved in the new Queens record that’s reportedly in the works?
No.

Are you doing anything with Soulsavers?
No.

Isobel Campbell?
No.

Do you have a backlog of material—stuff that hasn’t come out or isn’t quite finished?
Well, there was an entire bag of cassettes that I’d been carrying around for years—some of them were songs, some weren’t quite songs yet, and whenever I was working on something, I’d reach into the bag. But when I went to do that for this record, they were all de-magnetized from all the moving around I’ve done.  So I have a few new cassettes, but I just got a new digital thing. I haven’t figured out how to work it yet, though.

Is there anyone left on your wish-list of people you’d like to collaborate with?
I’m sure there’s a million of them. If Brian Eno asked me to do something, I probably wouldn’t say no. But that’s probably not likely to happen. He’d be great to work with, though.

The long-lost final Screaming Trees record, Last Words: The Final Recordings, was released last year. Are you happy that it’s out?
Let me clarify that that was not a record and it was never meant to be a record. It was from different demo sessions done over a period of two years. I’m fine with it coming out; I thought the songs were okay. The other guys really wanted it to happen, but it wasn’t a record.  When I listened back to the songs, I was surprised that I thought they were as good as they were.

Do you stay in touch with those guys at all?
Sure, we send texts at the holidays and stuff. We talk occasionally. We’re like family.

But you’d never play shows with them again?
As Screaming Trees? I’d never say never, but I’m pretty damn sure it’d be never. [Laughs] You gotta really want to do that. We played together for so many years, and enough’s enough, really.

What kind of things have you been listening to lately?
Whenever somebody asks me that, I immediately draw a blank. [Laughs]

Okay, let’s talk about Queens. Your MO in that band was to walk onstage, sing three or four songs, and then walk off.  It seemed like the best job in rock n’ roll. Was it that way for you?
Absolutely. [Laughs] When Josh [Homme] first asked me to do it, I thought it was crazy. But I quickly took to it. It’s a great job if you can get it. [Laughs] Have we met before?

Yes.
In those days?

Yes.
You were on Lollapalooza. I remember you.

Yeah, you told me you thought I was a cop.
[Laughs] I probably thought everyone was a cop back then. Don’t take it personally.

I didn’t understand that—I had long hair back then. I looked even less like a cop than I do now.
That’s how you were trying to get me.

You know, the impression I get from your records…I don’t know if this is going to make sense to you, but it’s like someone is telling you about not their private life but rather their inner life, the life of the mind—but not in forthright terms. It’s up to the listener to decode what’s really being said.  Does that seem even vaguely accurate to you?
I couldn’t tell you. I think it’s cool that you think that, though, if that’s how it strikes you. I know that the music I enjoy usually has some element of mystery to it, where I’m left to draw my own conclusions and so on. If that’s the way the music I’m making strikes someone else, I think that’s fantastic.

You strike me as a very serious guy. Are you, or does it just seem that way because we don’t know each other very well?
It’s because we don’t know each other very well. I’m not David Caruso on, uh… goddamn, what is that fuckin’ show, where he’s so serious at all times, like:  “I will catch you!”?  CSI: Miami, that’s what it is. I’m not like him.

Does music in general mean something different to you now than when you started?
Not really. There’s two kinds of music in my life—the music I’m making, that I’m part of, and the music that I’m listening to for personal enjoyment. That’s never changed. The music I’ve been a part of has changed a bit over the years, and I think I’m finally figuring out how to do it in a natural way. But the music that I listen to as a music fan, that’s always been the same, luckily. That’s why I started making music in the first place.

While it’s nearly impossible to make sense of all the music that floods our mailbox, inbox, and various Web browsers every day—not to mention the shelves at self-titled’s favorite record stores—we’re constantly looking for artists who make us stop what we’re doing and actually listen. Here’s one of them…

The Artist/Album: Blouse, Blouse (Captured Tracks, 2011)

The Vibe: Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s bassist (Jacob Portrait) provides the low end lashings in a steely, synth-glazed landscape that reminds us of the closing film credits from many a moody ’80s film. It’s more than that, though—quite possibly one of last year’s most overlooked acts in the not-quite-new-wave department.

RIYL: Graveyard sock hops; glassy eyes; synths that’re so expressive they oughta get a guest vocalist credit

Available At: Amazon · Insound · iTunes · Spotify

Lilacs & Champagne had us at goodbye—namely the line in their bio that promised “something like the sound of Nurse With Wound collaborating with J Dilla.”

Not that any of this loop-led tomfoolery should be all that surprising. After all, Emil Amos—one half of the Grails-related duo alongside Alex Hall—lent us a library music mix in late 2010, calling the cult favorites a “hidden pinnacle for those who can afford to dig around in the upper echelons of obtuse record collecting in these troubled times.”

Luckyily, the following artists have done the digging for us over the years…

Emil Amos: While avant-garde and popular music generally stand opposed to one another, hip-hop exposed its relationship to experimental music early on. Its easy to forget that crate-digging is a humanist practice—largely celebrating and obsessing over the accomplishments of others and paying tribute to them. Afrika Bambaataa led the charge on pure record knowledge, borrowing melodies from Kraftwerk and John Carpenter on some of his first releases. Meanwhile, Russell Simmons pulled Bruce Haack out of the cultural refuse to build an early imagining of futuristic hip-hop (a wise decision):

Instead of trotting out the hip-hop classics that built the industry we know today, we’re going to babble about our personal relationship to sampling as it slowly brewed over the years and developed into this new project…

Along with a few hundred thousand kids around the world who were also buying SST records and skateboarding, my artistic outlook was changed when I heard “Poledo,” Lou Barlow’s tape collage contribution to Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me. Before this, I’d maybe digested the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” but never really perceived the emotional power of how samples can ruthlessly alter the context of a record when they are juxtaposed against ’songs’.

I remember sitting in English class sometime around ‘89 with a Walkman, baseball cap and bomber jacket on when “Poledo” unapologetically exploded into a war of static, howling, and voices chanting “Jesus” for a couple minutes. Hearing “Poledo” changed a legion of kids’ lives, definitely opening up an artistic void to be explored beyond your average “1, 2, 3, 4 = punk rock.”

A cult developed around this sound. About a year later, I was at a rollerskating rink in the backwoods of North Carolina that let skateboarders have the floor for 30 minutes at a time and put on their own cassettes. “Poledo” came over the speakers from my mixtape and a kid waiting to drop in on the ramp next to me said, “Fuck, this is my favorite song!” (The camaraderie in the air was heavy; I’d probably have trusted that kid for the rest of my life.)

Later on, records like Weed Forestin would further my understanding of sound experiments and the profundity of how a well-placed sample can cause the listener’s mind to drift in a psychedelic sense, as well as focus on the meaning of the surrounding sentiments even more (see: the way “Sky Pilot” was sampled in the segue above). Every member of Sebadoh developed their own tape experiment style, all educating and scarring my young mind with the power of noise and selected incoherence. I cooked the video below up as a tribute to Bob Fay’s “Mor Backlash,” from one of the lesser known crevices of their discography.

I’ve always been a want-to-go-back-in-time kid. It either started with seeing Michael J. Fox getting towed on a skateboard by ’50s-era Cadillacs or growing up on Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I’m not sure. I relate more to the era when Todd Docstader was scaring the shit out of little kids who’d snuck the radio under their sheets late at night during his peak period from ‘61 to ‘64. He was his time’s lonely lab sound-technician, working tirelessly to develop an alien/future language of musique concrète and noise as a mood-altering device. Docstader re-organized samples into a sort of audial nightmare; cutting and warping found sound and developing his own radical methodology—he approached the sample of a guttural scream like a guitar solo.

Although Eno will always get all the ink, Docstader ought to be in the running as the American counterpart for the invention of ambient music.

A quick scan of YouTube is all it takes to see that as soon as anyone buys a sampler, they are quick to adopt a legendary-sounding pseudonym and call themselves a ‘producer’. Never to mess with trivialities or wasted words, Dr. Dre brought hard work and perfectionism to the table and helped build the entire template hip-hop relies upon today. His songs betray a signature cleanliness from the beginning of his career but never lose their dirty swing. He’ll be remembered as the Adam Smith of hip-hop, a founding architect with a monastic work-ethic.

This solo record was a forward-thinking take on mixing instrumentation and sampling into an impressive stew, and still remains relatively unheralded. Ju Suk Reet Meate (from tape-collage/multi-genre pioneers Smegma) is a kind of Docstader for our era. Consistently listenable and rewarding on repeat, he recorded this material in ‘78/’79; it was repressed to CD by De Stijl in 2007.

Madlib’s work made me circle back to my earliest experiences with Sebadoh’s tape collages and feel like I wanted to contribute something to the larger dialectic of sample-based music. After having wrestled with 4-track recording daily throughout the ’90s, blasts of hiss, tape-drop outs and low-end distortion are all entities that still get me high. Madlib leaves these frayed edges on his recordings like scattered keef around a Doobie Brothers record—always displaying a certain spiritual confidence that’s generally lacking in the world of rigid beat-making. In a genre that is often referred to as ‘the most lucrative music in the world’, Madlib’s work represents the fact that there’s still more fundamental work to be done on the ground floor, and that there will always be vitality where there is true insight or the willpower to look for it.

Alex Hall:The thing I remember most about going to the public swimming pool as a kid was how much cooler late ’80s Top 40 radio sounded from underneath the water. Several years ago on an overseas flight, I read a shitty Rolling Stone interview with Scott Weiland in which he admitted to writing one of his radio hits after hearing Zeppelin distorted and filtered through the spray from the hose he was using to wash his Porsche.

Fairly trite anecdotes here, but I have to think that these kinds of experiences are pretty universal, and not at all unlike the story of Eno’s inspiration to create Discreet Music—being bedridden and unable to adjust the obnoxiously low volume of the classical record that was playing just out of his reach. Familiar sounds, when heard from within a compromised or manipulated context, seduces the brain into filling in the cracks for itself—sometimes arriving at something new along the way, a sort of compulsory active listening. This toying with the familiar is a huge part of the psychology of sampling, a process of sound begetting sound. And like hearing “The Final Countdown” while submerged in the deep end of the pool, I like Eno’s version of “Canon in D” way better than Pachelbel’s.

I’d been reading The Wire casually for years before I actually got around to hearing Philip Jeck’s music (who’s name-checked in every issue). When I did finally hear it, I was blown away by its visceral aspects. Jeck’s turntablism can be as menacing as Wolf Eyes or as soothing as Popol Vuh, sometimes within the same piece. In terms of sampling, Jeck rarely borrows a whole melody or phrase; instead processing and breaking his source material down into its elemental form—basic building blocks for composition. And perhaps more than any DJ-centric genre, Jeck’s music could be the ultimate example of vinyl fetishism, with the actual music pressed in the grooves at times being less important than the crackles and noises of the wax itself. I guess Christian Marclay is usually credited with bringing turntablism to the avant garde, but it’s Jeck’s music that brings the, well, music.

It’s intimidating to qualify Donuts, a record so closely identified with a dude that meant so much to so many people. I’ll just say that there aren’t many records I’ve heard in the last few years that have had such a huge emotional impact on me as a listener. At first glance, it could be just a collection of beats and sketches—albeit, a really killer collection—but as with most art, process and product can become inseparable, and the heartbreaking story of Dilla’s illness and his completion of the album just before his death reveal layers of subtext and a remarkable focus of intent. Like magnetic poetry on a fridge, samples are chopped and skewed with precision to deliver a totally new message, which also happened to be his parting message to the world. Certain tracks here, with the mental image of the man in his hospital bed with his sampler and records, have nearly brought me to tears more than once.

Recording Under the Influence is a recurring self-titled feature where we ask artists to ignore their musical inspirations for a minute and share what really went into the making of a particular record. In the case of Pop. 1280, that means influences that are as illicit and nightmarish as their surgical tool sound—a strangely alluring blend of the Birthday Party and Lower East Side era Swans—from the pulpy sci-fi novels of Philip K. Dick to speed-addled sleepless nights…

1. Pulp
Philip K. Dick, Jim Thompson, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Martin Amis.

2. Speed
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, William S Burroughs, Lou Reed. No sleep.

3. Headlines
We mostly keep politics out of the band, but the surrealism of modern mass media has seeped into a lot of our music. Headless body in a topless bar. Long Island Ripper. Kitty Genovese.

4. The American Southwest
Traveling there has provided us with lots of inspiration for music and imagery for lyrics. Bisbee. Tombstone.

5. Alcohol
Ernest Hemingway, William Holden, Under the Volcano. Hangovers. The Horror.

Photo by Emir Eralp

If Dylan Baldi had to pick his favorite LPs from last year, “90 percent of it would be the Men,” he insists, alluding to self-titled’s current cover stars. So instead, we asked the singer/multi-instrumentalist behind Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings—who just released an early candidate for record of the year, Attack On Memory—to highlight his life in listening for the past 12 months…

Read and listen to our enhanced iPad edition here.

While it’s nearly impossible to make sense of all the music that floods our mailbox, inbox, and various Web browsers every day—not to mention the shelves at self-titled’s favorite record stores—we’re constantly looking for artists who make us stop what we’re doing and actually listen. Here’s one of them…

The Artist/Album: Trust, Trst (Arts & Crafts, February 28th)

The Vibe: We weren’t sure what to make of Trust’s moon-bathed debut at first. Sounding like a leathered-up alien’s idea of Depeche Mode, the Canadian duo of Robert Alfons and Austra drummer Maya Postepski know their way around a hook—nearly every song sinks its synthetic teeth into your ears within seconds—and yet, they don’t mind pinning their pop instincts onto vocals that are as decidedly strange as, say, Fever Ray. That said, a sense of humor creeps into “F.T.F.,” as a background ’singer’ grumbles like a sleep deprived demon. Or maybe said demon is dead serious. Judging by the blank stares on their press photo, it’s hard to tell. At any rate, Trst immediately establishes Trust’s position at the head of the cold/dark/new-wave pack, threatening to swallow Postepski’s day job—a project we also adore—in the process.

RIYL: Black lights in dank basements; dark alley discotheques; Bill Hader (if Bill Hader fronted a Wierd Records band)

Photo by Jimmy Fontaine

As our old buddy Ryan Schrieber pointed out on his Twitter tonight, the Men just uploaded all of their out-of-print material to Mediafire for mass consumption. Don’t feel like downloading every last release? We’ve got you covered with individual Soundcloud playlists below, right alongside the band’s first cover story…

Photo: Basia Jacaszek

Recording Under the Influence is a recurring self-titled feature where we ask artists to ignore their musical inspirations for a minute and share what really went into the making of a particular record. Under the microscope this week: Jacaszek, an old neo-classical favorite who recently graced us with the carefully orchestrated—and delicately paced—doom and gloom of Glimmer (available now through Ghostly International)…

1. Polish Weather Patterns
Lots of people here complain about the weather, depression, stagnation in social life, low quality of culture and entertainment offers. The fall/winter and winter/spring transition period can be really hard, but for me, it’s a really comfortable situation to work. I love those foggy little cities with empty streets, closed people, grey, cloudy skies, distant, disappearing horizons. All this generates a kind of melancholy, a trance mood that exists in my head. It is a really great creative time.

2. Visual Arts
I am deeply fascinated with painting and the visual aspect of music. Hopefully I will get close to a musical equivalent of great northern European art one day. Here is a list of art and painters who are very close to my heart, more or less influencing my music…

Medieval/Renaissance/Baroque decoration art. Golden backgounds present on sacral paintings; gold patterns on altars; colorful glimmerings of stained glasses. This is just pure music for my eyes.

Distant horizons in the Flemish and Nederland landscape paintings of Patinier, Bosh and Brughel cause some kind of longing and nostalgia. The distant space really calls me. I can hear it!

Dark landscapes and the deep symbolism of Friedrich’s works creates some kind of “positive anxiety.” The melodies and history behind these paintings are very inspiring.

Polish modern painters like Tadeusz Dominik. His rhythmic landscape compositions have extreme musical potential.

3. Poems
Aside from some classical music examples, it is really hard to find a satisfying poetry-meets-music crossover. I dream to work on it anyway. Among the many poets I love (mostly Polish), I especially admire English metaphysical poetry. Robert Herrick’s or William Blake’s poems about paradise really drive me to turn those words into songs. It is again a matter of nostalgia and melancholy these poets generate in my heart. I found many inspiring phrases in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ work. Lots of his sensual expressions were used as titles on my latest album, Glimmer.

4. Women
I make music for women, particularly for my wife. It is a subconscious matter, but it really works like that. A real, probably most archetypal reason I do music is a need to be “someone” to  “her”—someone satisfying, important, significant. I have realized that every time I release an album or play a concert, her or “their” positive feedback is the one I anticipate and get the most gratification out of.

5. My Studio
I love the place. Being a bit isolated, playing with my toys. My workshop, with all the software, hardware and instruments, offering endless possibilities to create or shape the sound is really lovely and an inspiring playground. Looking at those little buttons, knobs, pads, keys and strings, I just can’t stop myself from constantly creating music.

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