As expressive as Svenonius is, though, the musician doesn’t think everyone is entitled to an audience. He took that stance during his June appearance on WAMU 88.5’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show, and he drives it home in newest collection of essays, Censorship Now!!, out Nov. 3 on Akashic Books.

The man who once argued in song that “Music’s Not For Everyone” devotes a chapter of Censorship Now!! to the idea that rock ‘n’ roll’s “legacy machine” — including your favorite band’s attempt to reserve a place in the canon — must be stifled.

Excerpted from Censorship Now!! copyright 2015 by Ian F. Svenonius, used with permission of Akashic Books.

DIY was the byword through post-punk and on to the “indie” era. Now, with the economy destroyed by computers, DIY is no longer a philosophy as much as a requirement. Everyone is required to look after each aspect of their own art-making/proliferation because — ever since the Internet demonetized art, photos, film, writing and music — there are few resources to support adjunct workers and technicians.

DIY now extends from the production of records, fanzines and show-promoting to all aspects of the rock experience, including fandom itself. Once, people venerated others. Now, under indie’s DIY paradigm, people must venerate themselves. Historicization of the group is therefore now its own responsibility. Not only must the records and tours be DIY (arranged and administered by the bands themselves), but the hype itself — the historical biopics, the “remember when” nostalgia, the reunion demands and the reissue records — is all self-generated.

Ironically, The Beatles — the biggest group of all, whose “invasion” unwittingly ushered in the corporate takeover of rock ’n’ roll — started the DIY self-historicizing trend with their 1995 TV special Anthology, designed to hawk the group to an audience who had grown up without them.

The Beatles were, at the time of its making, three distinct and fractious individuals— as well as a deceased member who had been sainted in death after publicly disavowing the group and heaping scorn on their achievements for a full decade. Each Beatle’s competing agendas and recollections are on display; the group members are perverse and contrarian, with the exception of Paul, whose pride of the group’s songs, success and what they meant to people is resolute and unflinching. George, on the other hand, nurses old resentments, Ringo is a slightly melancholic bon vivant with a cranky, sentimental view, and of course Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, is the anti-Beatle in many respects, who claimed not to know who The Beatles were or that the group even existed.

“For all of the punk rockers’ stoic claims to independence, societal rejection and aversion to fame, they really long to have their flesh rended by a Dionysian mob of shrieking Beatlemaniacs.”

John Lennon, meanwhile, is a ghost who hasn’t been absorbed into a modern context or narrative. Lennon is stuck in time as a ’70s self-help house-husband — isolated, manic-depressive and revisionist — shrilly denouncing the crimes of the Fab Four. Throughout, Paul tries to put a brave face on the malaise of the other members. The group is collectively hungover from the trauma of Beatlemania and the toll it took on them, the expectations and alienation it engendered.

Their myth, with all these conflicts muddying what would seem like a straightforward tale of unprecedented popular success and innovation, will continue to thrive, not in spite of these conflicts but because of them. Other, more stable groups — such as The Rolling Stones, The Who and Oasis — have contrived similar fractious interpersonal dynamics in order to give their own groups some Beatles-esque resonance, and thus generate more mystery, conjecture and sales.

Punk and indie rock’s DIY hagiographies, though, don’t suffer the same internal contradictions and therefore feel more like the desperate advertisements they are. Typically not nuanced by democratic infighting, they are usually dull veneration, utilizing hapless stand-ins as directors to pretend that every shot and quote wasn’t designated by the star of the film. These are often “crowdsourced”; paid for by the fans themselves before the abomination becomes public and makes money as a commercial item, propagating more revenue for the star-turned-“icon.”

Such a status for their star is what these films strive for, as “icon” is essentially a brand, and a brand is something that’s digestible to the fully detached, the otherwise oblivious; the reduction of the person to the slimmest, slightest object for the marginally engaged. This is self-objectification in the hunt for immortal status, like a poignant Greek myth wherein the hapless mortal, in a search for foreverness, reduces her or himself to a piece of plaster so as to have a place in the halls of Olympus.

For all of the punk rockers’ stoic claims to independence, societal rejection and aversion to fame, they really long to have their flesh rended by a Dionysian mob of shrieking Beatlemaniacs. The fearsome promise of these barely adolescent “maniacs,” occupying hotels, breaking police barriers and screaming nonstop for blood, constitutes a formative ur-text for the rocker, one which he or she can’t shake. Its cosmic portrait of danger, magic and Lord of the Flies anarchy figures centrally in the early programming of the group member, who wants, expects and needs some version of it. Therefore, the modern DIY band — faced with the nonchalant peer-fan — looks outward to the masses for their own “maniac” mob, and takes what it can get.

Ian Svenonius reads from Censorship Now!! Oct. 27 at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street NW. Elsewhere: Check out Bandwidth’s February interview with Svenonius, and read the musician on how NPR killed college rock.

“Chocolate City”
Parliament
George Clinton
Otis Redding
Atlantic Records
The Beatles
Wilson Pickett
James Brown
Juliette Lewis
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Mad magazine
Burl Ives
The Surrealists
André Breton
Public Enemy
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
The Futurists
The Nation Of Islam
The Final Call
Sub Pop
Mudhoney
Nirvana
White Fence
The Slauson gang
Kevin Bacon
Bill Clinton
The Washington Post
The New York Times
CNN
John Lennon
Billy Childish
Mark E. Smith
Terry Hall
Ian MacKaye
Stereolab
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Bruce Springsteen
Mötley Crüe
John Waters
NPR

The magazine is deliberately pocket-sized, says its creator, Maryland resident Vicente Gutierrez. But its first issue, which came out in October, is thick with content ranging from archival band photos to long-form interviews with people on the fringes of independent music — some of whom don’t actually make music.

Gutierrez says he’s particularly interested in those folks in the background, like music photographers and writers.

“I decided to start the magazine because I felt there was a need to include these other voices,” the publisher writes in an email. “They are just as valuable in the way we experience music culture. All of these personalities feed into a ‘scene.’ And in a way, our comprehensive experience is a life with music, which is one key facet of the magazine’s editorial approach.”

While HIGHWAY is technically a D.C.-area publication — Gutierrez, 33, is from and lives in Montgomery County — the magazine embraces both local and global culture. Its debut issue covered Los Angeles’ KCHUNG radio, German-born composer Hildegard Westerkamp and Yugoslavian new wave and punk, but it also tossed in an essay from D.C. rock ‘n’ roll icon Ian Svenonius and an interview with photographer Glen E. Friedman, who logged many hours shooting photos of legendary D.C. bands.

“Since I’m from D.C., I always like to include something from the D.C. area,” Gutierrez writes.

Gutierrez has contributed to music publications like Wire and Pitchfork and worked as an editor at a media studio, and he’s spent a lot of time living, working and studying abroad. He moved back to the area to hunker down and work on HIGHWAY, which he’s been doing since the summer of 2012. But he wanted to ensure that his new project would reach an audience far beyond the beltway. That’s why HIGHWAY also has a mobile app.

“There’s always talk about how widespread smartphones have become, and there’s also talk about how people stare at their phones all the time, peering into the cyberspace matrix,” Gutierrez writes. “I thought it’d be a good idea to get the magazine in the iPhone as a simple app, which would allow us to deploy the issue and have it reach more and more people.”

The app, which is a bare-bones presentation of the magazine, helps offset the downsides of print — namely steep international shipping costs, a major obstacle to distribution.

One thing HIGHWAY doesn’t try to do is mimic the blogosphere, with its frantic coverage of super-current bands. That’s not Gutierrez’s focus.

“One reason why we decided to not cover the most current acts is because it’s a fervent conversation already happening in a number of vibrant outlets,” Gutierrez writes. “Independent music couldn’t ask for more. As a publication, the focus shifted because I didn’t feel we could add anything to that conversation.”

HIGHWAY‘s own conversation is slated to continue this summer, when Gutierrez plans to release Issue No. 2. He says he’s hard at work on it now.

“Publishing twice a year gives us time to evaluate and present stories which we feel are worthwhile and able to provoke thought and trigger conversation,” Gutierrez writes. “The publication is meant to be a conversation starter, and that’s one reason why we made it pocket-size — so you can bring it with you.”

HIGHWAY is for sale at Smash! Records and Som Records in D.C.

Second image by Sebastian Mayer with Beastie Boys photo by Glen E. Friedman.

The former vocalist for Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Weird War and Scene Creamers has been on an anti-freedom kick for years. The 2009 debut from his now-main band, Chain & the Gang, was called Down With Liberty… Up With Chains! A song on its third LP, In Cool Blood, chanted, “I don’t believe in free will!” And this fall, Akashic Books publishes Svenonius’ latest book, titled Censorship Now!

But Svenonius doesn’t practice much self-censorship, at least not when it comes to art. He’s got several active creative outlets — a solo act called Escape-ism, various speaking engagements and writing ventures, regular gigs with Chain & the Gang and now, a (somewhat) new record: XYZ, his one-off synth project with France-based rocker Memphis Electronic.

The self-titled album first came out last year on Memphis Electronic’s label, Mono-Tone, and today Svenonius drops a limited edition on his own imprint, Radical Elite.

XYZ contains 10 tracks, most of them skeletal and sermonlike, with Svenonius fully in character. “Everybody wants to be poor,” he intones on the record’s eighth track. “But some people are rich. They can’t help it. That’s just the way they were born. Don’t judge them.”

It’s not always easy to square Svenonius’ philosophies when he vacillates between sincere and provocative, as I was reminded when I spoke to him on the phone Monday. He moves easily from decrying gentrification as “undemocratic” to calling himself “anti-democracy.” But Svenonius seems ever-strict on the idea of artistic value, and the importance of preserving what he thinks is left of it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

XYZ

Ian Svenonius: When I play in France, I sometimes get to play with my friend’s band, my friend Didier [Balducci], aka Memphis Electronic. I’ve played with his band over the years, and one of them is this group Non! I’ve toured with them and I toured with another one of his groups called Dum Dum Boys, which are an historic French band. He lives in Nice, the French Riviera… the Cote d’Azur. It’s kind of like the Florida of France. It’s right-wing and beautiful. And weird, ’cause I think it’s a tax haven for English rock stars and stuff. And Monaco’s right there.

So he lives down there and it’s kind of anomalous because there’s not a lot of cool culture happening. The French don’t think of it as very cool. So it just seemed interesting to go down there and work with him on some songs. We have similar tastes, but maybe he’s more sophisticated than I am. He played with Kim Fowley, his bands played with Johnny Thunders back in the day.

You know, the French, they just love pointy shoes. Everything’s gotta have a little bit of sexy. They’re kind of like naturally camp, the French. They have a very particular perspective on rock ‘n’ roll and I think it’s interesting.

On this record, you have 10 interludes. What is the utility of the interlude?

Its supposed to create the ambience of being in an arcade. Didier is like a pinball champion in France, and there’s a little town that we visited right across the border right near Monaco in Italy. There’s just a lot of pinball and arcades down there because it’s a beach town. So the idea was just to create this ambience of a pinball arcade.

Wait, Didier is a pinball champion?

He’s a champion. I mean he’s not the champion. But he’s a pinball champion.

You always have so much going on. How do you keep track of all your ideas?

Did you ever see that Woody Allen movie [Crimes and Misdemeanors] where Alan Alda walks around with a dictaphone?

Yes!

“Idea for sitcom!” [Laughs] No, I don’t know… I think you have to write things down or record them, and then you can always go back to them when you’re feeling stuck.

Do you really do that — record your ideas into your phone?

Oh yeah, sure, of course. Or you just write ’em down. It’s so sad what they do to these people, though, these people they excavate your journal, like Kurt Cobain. Think of how horrible that is. Can you imagine that? Someone publishing your notes? That’s so disrespectful. Whatever scumbag vampire did that should really be haunted eternally. But it’s normal — it’s the treatment the artists get.

Are you worried that someone is going to find your thoughts one day? Ones that you didn’t want publicized?

No. I’m not too worried. First you have to have success.

“Right now everybody loves pop music. It’s kind of the vogue to be accepting, and not only accepting, but enthusiastic. But I feel like if you get involved in the conversation about the Grammys, you really should go see your therapist. ‘Cause that s**t is just horrifying.”

Did you read those comments from the Google executive who said we’re headed toward a “forgotten century” as our technology becomes obsolete?

I’ve been saying that. You know, I think that guy read some interview with me, because I’ve been saying that for quite a while, that exact thing. At this point, think of how many computers you already have that are full of things — photographs, writing, music, whatever. And it’s inaccessible. Because even if you had the plug, you have to plug it in, none of the operating systems are up-to-date and they won’t reveal what you’ve stored on there. It’s kind of like every computer is a house burning down. … So I definitely think that people are gonna look back on this era and see it as a void in culture.

If you think about the way we look at the Greeks, we look at Athens and we think, “Oh, they were so creative and wonderful.” And then you look at the Spartans, and they have very little to show in terms of achievements. But who knows? Maybe they had some incredibly rich oral histories or perhaps they had computers. And they were storing everything on computers, and Athenians were primitive and just made sculptures and stuff, so now we think the Athenians are the geniuses.

It seems like you’re playing a consistent character in your music. Do you have a favorite?

Well, maybe that’s just a lack of imagination. Or consistency. Either one. [Laughs] I think that when you make music, you need to make some rules. You meet these old punk rockers and they still have the same biases — they still hate Fleetwood Mac or something. And it always seems, “Oh, that’s a little stunted.” But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s really important to have these kind of rules. Because once you decide that everything has worth… Maybe that’s not good for the art. It’s important to have some kind of sophomoric prejudices against certain art forms.

What are some of your sophomoric prejudices?

Oh, you know. [Long pause] I don’t know. I just like dynamics. And I like a little bit of personality in the music… there’s some sort of discernible personality or the idea that the thing that you’re seeing has a point of view. Those are the things that turn me on. And the things that don’t turn me on are kind of like just — obfuscationist music.

I guess I don’t like all this modern music that sounds like The Lion King, you know?

Did you say The Lion King?

Like all the modern pop music, pop music and hip-hop that all just sounds like Disney, you know? It’s pretty horrible.

Sounds like Disney? I’m trying to think of what you mean.

Sounds like a Denny Elfman soundtrack, you know?

“We can’t rely on the state to censor the bad things, we have to rely on ourselves. We have to create a people censorship.”

I’m struggling to think of examples.

So much of it sounds like that. It’s kind of an epic, goofy — it’s horrible! It’s f*****g horrible. So yeah, that’s a sophomoric prejudice. Right now everybody loves pop music. It’s kind of the vogue to be accepting, and not only accepting, but enthusiastic. But I feel like if you get involved in the conversation about the Grammys, you really should go see your therapist. ‘Cause that s**t is just horrifying.

There was that New York Times Magazine essay about “poptimism.” The author was raked over the coals for it because it was seen as an elitist perspective, but basically the argument was that as a reaction against rockism, the poptimist emerged.

Yeah. I can see that. So much of what people announce as their taste has to do with… “I’m not one of those people.” But the end result is that you’re encouraging this culture — it’s an idiotic culture. It’s — ugh! Really bad! It’s the voice of Wall Street. To me, that’s all that music — ugh! Really! It’s terrible! [Laughs]

You almost seem like you’re at a loss for words.

That’s what my book says — Censorship Now! That’s what it’s about. Censorship. Censor it! We can’t rely on the state to censor the bad things, we have to rely on ourselves. We have to create a people censorship.

[We talk more about the book, but later Svenonius says he doesn’t want to discuss it publicly yet because he suspects someone will steal his ideas.]

This seems in line with some of the anti-liberation ideas you’ve been putting out there, especially with Chain & the Gang.

Yeah… Like I said, I’m just a one-noter.

Your “Devitalize” song, which took an extreme stand against gentrification, seemed philosophically similar. I saw some stupid reactions to that song. There was somebody in some comment section who said something like, “What do people like Ian Svenonius really want? Do they want urban neighborhoods to go back to what they were?” I thought that was a thoughtless reaction, personally. Do you think people understood what you were saying with that?

Well, the thing about music is, it’s based on an emotion. It’s poetry. It’s allowed to be a little bit absurd, or totally absurd. And that’s why artists are powerful, because it can say these massive things without parsing words or putting footnotes down. And that’s why, when people respond in ways like that, essentially they don’t understand rock ‘n’ roll at all and they shouldn’t be part of the conversation. …

It’s just pure rock ‘n’ roll. Everybody feels like that. When you see your city being erased, and the culture being erased, by people who don’t even live here — by investors and architects who have no relationship to the city, and you see not only neighborhoods being erased but the whole cultural history… You wake up one day and you jog down the street and it looks completely different. Who, who has a real emotional attachment to the place they live, wouldn’t be offended by that — when you realize nobody was consulted? It’s so undemocratic, you know? It’s just this money thing.

So you react emotionally to that, and then these people who don’t understand rock ‘n’ roll are like, [in a dorky voice] “Oh, this is not a feasible city planning [policy] —” [Laughs] It’s just extraordinary. People like that should really be put in jail.

“Personally I was into The Make-Up and the mission of The Make-Up. I think it was an interesting group that was ambitious. It wasn’t always good, but it was an ambitious idea.”

When your old band The Make-Up reunited, that was the most I’d read about you in national publications in a long time. Did you want to get The Make-Up back together?

Oh yeah, I definitely did. I was totally into it. Because I loved that band, and I felt like we could do a really good job. …

For me, selfishly, but also politically, I wanted to reform The Make-Up because in a way I think a reunion of a group serves the same function that a reissue used to serve. Reissues used to be a way of [reassessing] this group and think[ing] about it, and us[ing] it. But now there are so many reissues that that’s not really a thing. It’s harder for it to have the same impact as the Velvet Underground reissues in the ’80s. Or the Nuggets reissues in the ’70s. Those things were pivotal. …

Personally I was into The Make-Up and the mission of The Make-Up. I think it was an interesting group that was ambitious. It wasn’t always good, but it was an ambitious idea. I was interested in that. But it was hard.

Why?

Because you can’t do the thing where you’re listening to the music and you’re trying to imitate it. You really have to get into the spirit of what it is. So we only played like six shows or something, or seven shows. I think the first one we did — after the first one, after we got over the hump, it was like, “OK, I understand how to do this.” But at first I felt like I was imitating myself.

Back to the XYZ record quickly: Tell me about the lyrics you wrote for “Drum Machine.”

It’s just that dream of autonomy that everybody in a group deals with. Like, we all wanna collaborate and collaboration is what usually makes the music interesting, but then you’re like, “Well, could I collaborate with this machine? Could there be a relationship?” So in a way, it’s a lot of the same issues that lonely people feel with their erotic devices.

So a drum machine is like your vibrator.

Yeah, or the Real Doll or whatever people use now.

OK, one last question. What I’ve always liked about Chain & the Gang is you’re playing with all these young people. What’s it like playing with young people who haven’t been in a big touring band before? Has there been a learning curve?

Not really. There’s been a bunch of different people involved. Right now we have sort of an ideal lineup, and it’s really great. There were a few people where was like, “Oh, OK… they have different ideas about how to do this.” But I’ve always just played with people who were friends and who it feels right [with]. And people who are enthusiastic.

And ultimately, the people who are playing music who aren’t as precious about being the administrator, or the king of the hill, they’re typically younger. … I’m just lucky that the people I play with are really awesome. They really flesh it out. Because Chain & the Gang is a skeleton. It’s essentially a soliloquy. And then I have these amazing people who help me create this drama and add all this personality.

So there’s no question that you’re the king of the hill in Chain & the Gang.

Well yeah, I’m Chain. But it’s actually pretty egalitarian, beyond the fact that I’m the mouthpiece. But besides that, the decisions are more democratic than I would like. ‘Cause I’m anti-democracy.

Some of this year’s most unforgettable local songs didn’t come from comfortable experiences. They sounded fed up, and particularly urgent in a year marked by growing inequity at home and multiple slayings by police in places that didn’t feel far away.

In one of the year’s rawest rock songs, Thaylobleu cranked up its guitars to tell a personal story of police harassment. Chain and the Gang and Jack On Fire assailed gentrification with wit and hyperbole. Punk band Priests declared everything right wing. Two remarkable hip-hop works channeled frustration and fatalism among young black Americans: Diamond District’s Oddisee cried, “What’s a black supposed to do — sell some crack and entertain?”, while Virginia MC GoldLink rapped about all the glorious things he imagines happening to him — when he dies.

Not that peace and love felt impossible in 2014: In a touching song released two years after his death, Chuck Brown sang of a “beautiful life” enriched by the warmth of community. Promising newcomer Kali Uchis made us kick back with a soulful number steeped in giddy infatuation. Experimentation thrived in D.C. music: Young artists built on the region’s strong punk pedigree and expanded its boundaries. Mary Timony’s band Ex Hex embraced a classic sound and made one of the country’s best rock ‘n’ roll records. Local bands with shorter but distinctive resumes — like Laughing Man, Two Inch Astronaut and Deleted Scenes — sounded better and more creative than ever before. A Sound of Thunder and Gloom reminded us that the D.C. area is still a reliable producer of top-notch metal.

As expected, Bandwidth contributors faced hard choices while making this list of the year’s best local songs, and not only because it’s our first one. Up until deadline, we were still hearing new D.C. songs we wanted to include. But in a place where mounting wealth has created a challenging environment for art, that’s not a problem, really. It’s a testament to a music scene that perseveres despite long odds. —Ally Schweitzer

Warning: Many of these songs contain explicit lyrics.

Through much of the ’00s, Wyatt was part of an extended local crew of ex-punks and video-store heads who were building dance-oriented record labels such as Peoples Potential Unlimited, Future Times and Awesome Tapes From Africa. He initially made his name with work he called “video mulch” — skewed, collaged VHS-vault footage combined with sometimes nutty winks and nods to decaying cultural memory — that graced, among other things, the PPU label’s two Video Party DVDs of obscure regional funk.

But music was in Wyatt’s future: After ditching the District for Brooklyn at the turn of this decade, his own compositions — instrumental, sometimes experimental, often groove-oriented and usually grounded in synths and/or guitars — took off via tastemaker New York label L.I.E.S., run by Ron Morelli, an ally of the D.C. crew.

From “Because Of M.A.S.K.”

Most of that work has been under the name Torn Hawk, including two LPs released this year: the well-received Through Force of Will and Let’s Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time. (The latest video from that album, “Because of M.A.S.K.,” is as good an entry point into Wyatt’s brain as anything.)

Wyatt, who now lives in Berlin, is a thoughtful interview subject, and prior conversations often turn to how his art balances machismo and vulnerability. Other facts: He’s in a relationship with Sheela Rahman, who makes music as Xosar. (She’s all over the “Because of M.A.S.K.” video.) His stepmother ran an indie movie theater in Charlottesville, where he was born. He grew up in New Jersey, where he learned guitar from Charles Bissell of The Wrens. He’s comfortable doing an exegesis of Dire Straits, likes to read and occasionally will drop a Michael Nyman reference.

I asked Wyatt about D.C., love, energy, exercise and his own sense of how people view and hear his work. The interview — conducted entirely via email, at an almost surreal pace over the course of a few weeks — has been footnoted and edited (but not mulched).

Bandwidth: You’ve been gone from D.C. for awhile now. When you look back, what did the city give you? What sticks with you — musically, creatively, intellectually, whatever — from your time here?

Luke Wyatt: One human, one persistent clever elegant generous and kind force of nature: Andrew Morgan. PEOPLES POTENTIAL UNLIMITED.

Yeah, there are a bunch of other guys, people in his wake that led to me being in the position where people regard my expression seriously, but Morgan* made it happen. Morgan led to Morelli — these are two guys I force the Angel Gabriel to play pool with. (I Force Angels is the name of the next Torn Hawk record.)

From “PPU Video Party, Volume One”

I mean, everybody pretends to know about how Morgan puts out good records or whatever, but have you experienced his snack display, or the way he wipes down a counter while flipping the side of a record and adjusting the lighting in one minimal gesture?

He and his wife Danni saved my life in D.C. and directed my nascent weirdness towards love and sharpened expression … by employing me as a fixer at his claymation camp (where I shepherded the brainstorms of gore-obsessed 12-year-old boys towards a union of purpose with always fastidious and classy 12-year-old girls) and as a fake carpenter and MealBuster pizza-eater around his house.

There is no D.C. without Andrew for me. I love all those man-children that crawled out of their postpunk cocoon and started making dance music but ANDREW WAS DOING HIS THING ALL ALONG.

I think D.C. is a s**t town unless you are in politics, in which case your life is like an episode of True Blood and you have to keep regular waxing appointments.

Andrew has a way of making D.C. tolerable — he loves to go down to the waterfront and order a grilled cheese and start to get casually drunk.¹ Then we’ll get back in his Acura, and pretend that people we see on the street are walking in time to the bad songs we are listening to on the radio.

Elsewhere in the landscape, you have suave gentlemen eloquent hipsters like Svenonius² who somehow exists with the other Ian³ — and this coexistence shines a light on the frailty of both those guys’ poses. Though I love Svenonius — I am just annoyed that he enables D.C. by his existence. (Move to Krakow please!)

Less Flexible No Sense of Humor Ian Fugazi: Please realize you are simply a sharp businessman, great rhythm guitarist and gutturally emotive singer that creates articulate tantrum music for workouts. “Repeater” is so good like that! “Repeater”= reps.

Those comments about D.C. — if you don’t mind me aggressively summarizing them — are all about “love” and/or “energy.” Even some of your weirdest creations, musical or otherwise, seem to have undercurrents of love, or at least affection. Am I right about that?

From “Melodrama Camp Three”

Yeah I would say a lot of my creations have dealt with me caring about people or things or whatever. It’s nice to push an undercurrent of positivity out there if only as a contrast to the harsh other elements I have put in play. I was also a little preoccupied with “love” for awhile, like many humans before me. As much of a worked-to-death theme as love is, I think you can still break some original material off that old tree.

Let’s talk about “energy,” too: I hear that you like to work out a lot. You’ve even got a song on the new album called “Return to the Pec Deck.” For you, what’s the connection between music and fitness? One is about sharing energy with people, the other tends to be about expending energy. (Obviously, people like to listen to music when they work out; I suppose I’m asking about how you frame “music” and “exercise” in your own worldview.)

From “Bad Deadlift”

To go back to your question for a moment about the “undercurrent of love” in the things that I make: I have a mood disorder where I manufacture my own MDMA. This happens if I don’t sleep enough for a day or two or if I drink enough, past the point of drowsiness, to a plateau of clarity and emotional generosity. In this state I will say things to people that are true but sometimes unnecessarily gooey.

Other people have this chemical issue, it has different names.

I just try to manage it and not make a fool of myself.

But I also try to never be embarrassed by saying something loving, as over-the-top as whatever I said may sound to me later, when I come down. Embarrassment is the most useless emotion. If you can’t be embarrassed you are kind of invincible.

As for exercise: it is a way I try to manage my runaway moods so I don’t just exist in these extremes of gooey-ness or withdrawn ice throne. When I discovered exercise I started getting a lot more done and stopped getting arrested.⁴

“Embarrassment is the most useless emotion. If you can’t be embarrassed you are kind of invincible.”

Music is a drug that helps sculpt moods; it dovetails with the exercise to put me in a place where I write positive movies about my future and come home from the gym ready to take the snail steps to make the movies real.

Alternatively, I could take Zoloft or something to be a functional person, but I have found that is not a sustainable routine. There are a number of studies about the efficacy of regular exercise versus these drugs, and exercise “works better.”

This is not to say I don’t struggle with a sort of seesaw existence. I hate/love alcohol, wish we’d never met. Looking for other nondestructive ways to blow off steam: Somebody give me a call if you have a good idea. (If your idea is parasailing, don’t bother, I have heard that one.)

With all of that in mind, what does the new album represent, to you? Is there anything about it that people are misperceiving?

This is a good question.

Through Force of Will is the (hopefully) obvious aesthetic antecedent to Let’s Cry….

With TFOW I went all in with the smeared, distressed tattered sound that had occupied me since the first L.I.E.S. releases. This was the first time I was able to present an album’s worth of tracks of this sort.

From “Born To Win (Life After Ghostbusters)”

But the truth is that all the tracks with this sound, on L.I.E.S. releases or otherwise, and including Through Force of Will, came from the same four-month period of recording; a controlled spill of formed song and sound ideas that felt quite predetermined as they came out; probably because I had obsessed over the process for so long — the (for me unique at the time) abusive handling of the tracks to achieve this cohesive sound. It was a concept I had to get out of my system.

The music I had made for a long time before that was all about delineation and crispness — very computer-sounding guitar and synth music. I got sick of the hard edges and always undoable decisions of computer workflow, so I went into the smudge zone for this four-month freakout.

Coming out of that, most of the tracks on Let’s Cry… were forward-looking experiments where I tried to lead myself out of the tape-dominated, smeared production system that had cleansed my palette for those four months, back towards the sushi music I had made (pretty much) privately for years before that. I began to add more overt layers of cleanliness, putting fresh frosting on …

Spray-painting dead leaves

Drawing on old denim with crisp metallic markers

Now I am impatient when people limit their idea of what Torn Hawk might sound like to this “tapey/VHS” sound. I get it — a lot of my video work uses VHS. But it is VHS in a hi-fi terrarium, or contrasted with heavy-handed digital brush strokes. At least that is how I see it. And my video work operates on a different track from my music (holding two conversations at the same time, with intermittent eye contact).

Of course it is foolish for me to expect that everybody will have paid attention to a few other things that I have done, especially since they are under other names, but the future I imagine for Torn Hawk embraces the whole available spectrum of fidelity and instrumentation, and being aware of these releases (here, here, here) will give a rounder reading of what I am about.

Let’s Cry and Do Pushups At The Same Time is simply my summation of a fruitful detour into forgiving smudge, my final report from the frontiers of duct tape and moth-gnawed sweaters. It is important for this and for holding production bridges to the future (past) with its hints of clarity.

Of course I hope it is observed that the through-line in all my music, regardless of surface aesthetics, is strong melody, and that anything I feel fit to release attacks people at that level. That is all I really care about.

* I asked Morgan for some insight on Wyatt. This is what Morgan wrote back: “We all knew Luke was gonna break into the biz, just didn’t know where. Late night New York networking led him into the music video-mulching world, he was making better music than any of the artists he was making videos for and titled his songs like no one has done before. Comical to a casual listener, accurate for those that know him well: “Life After Ghostbusters”! I heard Luke’s next move is stand-up comedy.”

¹ Unconfirmed.

² Ian Svenonius.

³ Ian MacKaye.

⁴ Unconfirmed.

In it, Betsy Wright (Ex Hex), Francy Graham (Dudes), and Anna Nxsty (Olivia Neutron-John) join Chain & the Gang’s Ian Svenonius in a low-budget tour through urban decay. Everyone is wearing chains, fake-looking fur, and denim vests as footage of impoverished, boarded-up and industrial landscapes roll by in the background. “Rip! Bite! Shred! Tear! Just about everywhere,” Svenonius sneers.

“Devitalize” will be released on Chain & the Gang’s “Minimum Rock N Roll,” out May 6 on Svenonius’ Radical Elite label. It’s the band’s fourth (!) LP.