Leah Loscutoff How is the tour going? John Maus Its good.

We are about half way through and its grueling but its going well. LL Did you just come back from Europe recently? JM Yeah, I had a little bit of a break but I was recently over there for about a month. LL Didnt you live in Switzerland in for awhile? JM No, I didnt live in Switzerland, but I would go out there in the summers. LL When you went to the European Graduate School, right? Can you talk about that a little? JM Its like that Black Mountain thing that they did over here years ago, where they bring out all of the heavy hitters and you can study with them yourself. Its a little unorthodox with respect to academia, but theres a real appeal if you want to work with all of these people in person. LL Are you still teaching at the University of Hawaii? JM No no, I was teaching out there but then I moved away two years ago. I moved to Austin, Minnesota, where Im originally from. I got a little house there and thats where I finished my last album and Ive been working on my dissertation. I thought it would be a good idea because of the solitude, the romance of solitude, but it wasnt for me. Youve got to be surrounded by people. Ive come to realize thats the most inspirational thing to do. You know? LL What do you presently feel inspired or motivated by? JM I kind of feel motivated by . . . that we need to develop our own language in this situation. Ive spent a lot of time now with these older dudes and they certainly did a remarkable job of singularly articulating their own time and their own situation, of emancipatory potentials. Their thought rose to their time. I dont thinknot by farweve done anything close to that. That is what I am interested in today, and what Id like to see unfold. LL Ive already read a little bit about the title of your album and how it was derived by Alain Badious 15 Theses on Contemporary Art, so how do you censor yourself? Was the isolation part of it? JM Oh no, not isolationin fact the opposite of isolation. I mean censorship in this sense would be not leaving the world as it stands, and the world as it stands is precisely this world of isolated individuals, which isnt to say that I am interested in some kind of communal situation. I am interested in precisely the opposite of that, of the pre-individual singularity that is always already with others. But it appears in the element of singularity. So we would have this infinite moment of multiplicity of singularities that are all absolutely disjunct, but its pre-individual, its not some selfevident human being thats defined in terms of rights and things like this. LL Is your idea of utopia still sharing mix tapes with Ariel Pink? JM Yeah. But that was a little bit taken out of context. But yes, very much my idea of utopia is us sharing our tapes with one another, but really what I meant by that of course was that whatever medium we feel calls to mobilize and take up . . . it could be mathematics, it could be ideas of

physics, it could be new ideas about collective mobilization against these inhuman mechanisms that put us to work towards something other than each other. These are all creative enterprises. And I think we want to share and give ourselves . . . in the sense of sharing our mix tapes with another it would be something like this . . . sharing work with one another, whatever our work is. In other words, I dont think that in a conversation like this, or in run-of-the-mill, everyday life we appear very much, where I kind of take advantage of these old-fashioned ideas, and that by and large we are reducible to language, culture and history, and by and large we are prescribed or spoken by that language, and that agency is not something that is self-evident. Where there is the singular human being theres nothing, theres just kind of a police controlling everything. But every once in awhile there is an eruption and the work is definitely one of those places where something else then erupts, and so thats what Im saying. Bring it to there, bring it to share with others. Thats utopia. Its precedent isit is anticipated in mind, precisely in the community of literature, in the community of musical works. These are the . . . the constellation thats created when the singular artworks are in constellation with one another, and anticipates the kind of utopia I believe we politically should be converging upon. So thats kind of what I meant by that. LL Is there anyone presently that you are interested in collaborating with? JM Oh yeah, Im lucky that . . . well, Ive got to be suspicious of myself because it is mainly people I know, you know, like Gary War is someone that Im interested in collaborating with. I think he really took up the thread with . . . even though its not the focus of his work, he really took up the thread with technology and production using that as an expressive dimension of work in a really interesting way. Geneva Jacuzzi is another one, her use of a rhythmic section, so to speak, is really complicated and interesting. It would be interesting collaborating with both of them. Of course, I would be interested collaborating in the future with Ariel Pink again. But yeah, besides a handful of my friends there are not really very many people that I know of. Its not that they dont exist. Then there are people that do interesting work but its in with another musical procedure like pop music or punk music . . . whatever you want to call it. Then you have Michael Pisaro at Cal Arts, and hes doing really interesting experimental music. That involves longer durations of silence and re-imagining the live situation. These kinds of things are interrogated in the way that they only could be, working in the ideas of Cage and Feldman, and stuff like that. LL Well I was just thinking about this because I just saw her last week, but what about Genesis POrridge? I also just think she has really intelligent things to say about the state of the world. JM Oh yeah, I do too. LL Especially along the lines of ending the patriarchy and a long overdue feminine takeover? JM I havent spent enough time with Genesis other than Throbbing Gristle, this initial encounter with it, but of course you recognize that immediately as an event, as something profound, as something that needs to be reckoned with, and something . . . and even though Im not as familiar as I should be, I see myself as kind of exercising a fidelity to. You know the YouTube video of them doing Discipline together, you know that is it, that is the event of rock n roll, or pop, or punk or whatever you want to call it.

Thats what I see myself trying to have a fidelity to. Yes I know shethis whole idea . . . I know that on the cover of my album is a lighthouse. It didnt occur to me until long afterward that this is some sort of phallic image and Ive been troubled and bothered by this idea that a part of what Im doing musically and part of the way that I contextualize it can kind of be seen as this violent, old-fashioned, phallic going-for-the-truth kind of thing. But if we always understand the feminine jouissance as an explosion and there is no representation for it in a phallic symbolic order, if the feminine position only appears within that scheme as an eruption, I would say thats what Im marching towards. The economy of desire is not towards my phantasmic object of desire, my narcissistic projection. It is the woman, it is the woman that would explode with the only precedent for this which we have, which are the mystical intoxications of, you know, like Hildegard of Bingen or something like this, and the famous Bernini sculpture of Theresa. Its the kind of enjoyment that isnt bound up with restrictions and conventions that put us all to work. Of course Im interested in that above all, but perhaps this is a political question as opposed to an artistic one? Emancipating humanity from this cruel scheme. I actually have a song on this album called Pussy is Not a Matter of Fact and there are many different ways that you can read that, the most obvious and vulgar being that I dont have sexual intercourse as much . . . you know its just not a matter of fact for me. Hopefully its more thought provoking than that in the sense that firstly, gender could be something that we can all agree, by and large, is symbolic. Its an effect of language, its an effect of culture, down to the materiality of the body in the sense that it would name genitals and name the differences, its an effect of language. Gender is purely and simply an effect of language. Above that there is an even more radical thought there, I think, which is that there is this kind of Draconian idea, right, that woman has no language. Woman, within the bounds of the economy, is just a symptom of man which becomes a commodity whose enjoyment is not admitted, for even when a man has intercourse with a woman the pleasure he receives is really just imagining other men giving him a high five for it. So, like pussy in that sense is not a matter of fact, and thats what we ought to possibly make a matter of fact, because then we are done once and for all with matters of fact all together, and weve exploded into the chaos of the feminine. LL So, words were the worst thing that happened to music? Which is a Beckett quote, or you attributed to Beckett? JM Yeah, I attributed it to Beckett but Im not sure who exactly said that. It might have been . . . LL Actually, I dont think it was Beckett, but my question is more about, are lyrics more of an afterthought for you? JM Oh yeah.Yeah, the way I sort of think about lyrics is, Im interested in this language of pop, a conventional language, a language that I see as part and parcel with our world, and I believe we should have no pretense of being superior to it. If we want to undo it we have to mobilize these languages and stuff and with that in mind alright, is that the idea in mind is that the lyric is merely a convention of this language. Like pop songs have lyrics just as symphonies didnt or whatever, so we need to use them. But I resist this idea and Ive said this before that these kinds of things cant be put alongside poetry or something, or philosophy, which language itself answers that question. I mean

they really are just . . . . the music comes first and foremost of course and so it just arises out of a necessity, an objective necessity of using this kind of language, is what I kind of think of it. LL I know that when you first met Ariel Pink at Cal Arts, he was listening to Faust and Amon Duul. Did he turn you on to that stuff at the time? JM No, no, no I know exactly the context of that . . . I did this little video and talked about that experience. Coming from rural Minnesota and before the age of the Internetalthough I dont know how much difference that actually makes todaythe only culture that I could really discover was what was on TV or . . . there were no older kids that were reading Julian Copes Krautrocksampler that could make me feel stupid for liking what I liked and turn me on to cooler stuff, know what I mean? There was nothing like that there, so when I got out to L.A., everybody just had much more at their disposal. Much more to draw upon. And yeah, yeah he was definitely a fanatic in that regard, everything that has kind of become fashionable in the last several years I mean he had already digested pretty thoroughly, all of the kraut rock and lo-fi Cabaret Voltaire type of no-wave British stuff, all of this stuff. He played it for me and I appreciated some of it but just like so much else, any relation I have to that comes mediated through his music. I think this is especially interesting when people talk about, John Maus sounds like the eighties, because I didnt listen to the eighties! Obviously Ive done something terribly wrong where I could have been taken up into a generality like that. Besides from maybe stuff from my childhood that was just on TV and everything like that, as a teenager I was just listening to grunge, I was listening to this kind of thing, maybe Syd Barrett. You know what I mean? But, ugh, the whole eighties to me was something that comes from listening to Ariel Pink, like Young Pilot Astray, The Doldrums and this kind of stuff. That was the first I heard a sound like that and wanted to take it up myself. Which isnt eighties at all, and moreover, not only is it not eighties, but being in music school and getting all of these silly frames to think about music through, it occurs to me that prior to being some kind of genre of popular music, just in terms of the pure harmonic ideas, this is modal harmony. Maybe Im getting too technical, but its the kind of chords that would arise if one was not within a major/minor tonality scheme but rather the kinds of scenarios that arise if you are using a Dorian or Mixolydian, so it has nothing to do with eighties but has something more to do with modal harmony or whatever, but I dont know. LL Yeah, thats interesting because I dont think your music sounds eighties at all, its more like outer planets or something else. I dont know. JM Oh yeah, yeah. LL Is there an album that completely changed your perspective on music? JM Oh yeah. Three pop albumsbecause it becomes more and more problematic when like blogs ask me what Im currently listening to because I dont know much about what is going on today. I spent the last 15 years digging through Mahler and Schoenberg and that kind of thing, and you cant cop anything from that. Its just you behold it as if you are listening to another language. But in terms of pop its pretty mundane. You know Im living in Minnesota in 1992, Smells Like Teen Spirit comes out and then for the next ten years I subject my harmonic imagination by, like, listening to Bleach and Nevermind, and you know what I mean, its wonderful music but just imagine what that does to you, to a fragile harmonic mind to hear power chords repeated over and over again like four

times. I subjected myself to that, not to say its not wonderful music it just might have foreclosed possible avenues at such a critical age of musical imagination, so that was the first one of course, that early event, a teenage event. And then, as I said, later on in high school, I got into Barrett, Floyd. Im in the Midwest, we got classic rock stations and there wasnt really anything else to reach for. And that was around the time that I got interested into all of this other older music, Baroque music. LL You like Monteverdi? JM Oh yes, of course, hes like the threshold right there. A really radical . . . you know the Florentine Camerata? They were a radical event in music that kind of shifted the high Renaissance to the Baroque. I spent a lot of time with that stuff. So I go to composition school thinking that this is the kind of work Im going to be doing, interested in this, and then I meet Ariel and so were peers, were friends and things but he reminded me that this thingthe pop sensibility, rightis a question mark, just as radically provocative as any other question marks of German romanticism, or the Renaissance or whatever. It became a possibility to be reckoned with, or a truth to converge upon, and I didnt really see that anywhere else in our situation. That was really an event for me, those initial collaborations and the work he was doing on his own, that was kind of the deciding factor in moving forward with that, throwing my eggs in that basket. You know, Okay, maybe Im not going to do experimental music anymore, because I was doing that kind of stuff, like working with Pisaro and doing all of these performances like Feldman and Cage. I had pieces, for instance, where it would just be a tone that goes up a half step for 30 minutes or whatever. You know, interrogate the concert situation. I really think that stuff is interesting and easy to mock if youve never experienced it, like 433that just sounds so stupid, its just silencebut then listening to it, Wait whats going on here? But I left that aside and took up pop as the best bet, largely because of my encounter there with Ariel, and the early work he was doing. LL It seems like early on when you got started you received a lot of negative criticism, but that seems to have changed as of more recently . . . JM Yeah, yeah, I was lucky. That was a sign that I was doing something right. We could have a whole conversation about . . . In fact in my thesis on punk rock, in a footnote I claim that it usually speaks to a works untruth if it can be easily taken up into these mechanisms, you know, and then in a footnote I actually mention Pitchfork and NPR by name. They both represent it. But I also leave a space there, because then I say what can also happen there sometimes is that, and this happened with Nirvana, and I claim it happened with Elvis Presley and the Beatles, none that I could fancy I am anywhere close to the radicalness of, but what could happen also is some kind of rupture so potentially catastrophic it opens up the mechanisms of power that just closed around it and names it, and begins describing it and begins talking about it to kind of bound up that potential within its actuality. Know what I mean? Its kind of like this idea of the reversal of the political axis of individuation where previously maybe things that had names were the things that had power, like kings and whatever, you know? But now today its the things that have names that are the things that are put to work by power. With his idea that the reason everyone went to . . . the state went nuts over the Beatles and the state went nuts over Nirvana, the discursive regime created so many things around Elvis because they were trying to arrest this emancipatory element. But of course, I cant claim to be anything like that. I suppose Im just lukewarm enough that I can be taken up into the conversation, the conversation that perpetuates a world of barbarity and subservience so easily.

LL From those 15 theses from Badiou the one that really stood out to me was, It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent. JM Yeah, nothing at all. I love that. Ive had this conversation before. Because it would seem like, No we ought to try, but its importance is that its better to do nothing at all then to contribute to formal ways of rendering visible that which empire already recognizes as existent. If we wanted to put it into some other termslike musical terms or political termsthen essentially what this is sayinglike, using Twitter or something as an exampleit is better to do nothing at all then to post something up there on the footwear that you just purchased. That, of course, with a mind towards its imperative to use that, to get us the collective organized against the state. Like, it is better to do nothing at all then to keep perpetrating and endlessly praising this world that we see on our television of, like, a naked human pyramid of Guantanamo or Abu Graib detainees with American soldiers giving the thumbs up. And what that is met with is the satire of John Stewart or something. Thats our answer to that? I really believe in the last ten or 20 years there has been radical art. People have done interesting things with pop, people have done interesting things with cinema, but in terms of having a militant political thought, our generation has got to beso far as I can tellone of the most reprehensible generations that has hitherto ever existed. We really sat on our hands, we really just sat on our hands. I could be making another caricature out of the ignorance, but the few tightly-controlled marches through the streets and these ridiculous satires that dont come up against the limit of satires . . . And then some stuff on the internet, but no Molotov cocktails. If someone would make a medium of politics that could articulate an idea met with at this time, I think it would be met with enthusiasm. Met with enthusiasm on all sides. Then what happens, of course, is that all of our theory, and all of our revolutionary guile is put to work standing in line at the primaries to make sure Obama gets in there this next time round. I mean, couldnt you just feel like you were being duped in that situation? Like, Yeah, hes better than Bush, and yeahit just goes on, it just goes on. Ive completely lost any shred of hope that liberalism is our salvation, or that there is any hope of that way of thinking about human beings like that in the world. But I think that music can anticipate this world to come. Some of my favorite theorists talk about the idea that, in the world that we want to bring about, art would no longer be necessary. Art imagines a utopia that once fulfilled, will no longer need to be necessary to imagine. I dont know about any of that, but I like that idea, and in what is anticipated in music, and of course music is always political to the extent that it does mark a redistribution of the sensible, and imagines those people . . . but it is just not a substitute for the collective action against the state. The protest lyric is a poor caricature and a poor substitute of a radical political philosophy or some kind of guerrilla entering into the logic of insurrection. Thats all that Im saying. One is great on its own. Art is great on its own, politics is great on its own. Lets not mix them. It would be to the disadvantage of both. Just like mixing science and music. They are both great, but to mix them together into this childish science where we have computers making the tones and stuff, it seems to conflate two disparate creative human enterprises. LL Would you ever consider performing live with a live band?

JM I dont know, I dont know. Ive tossed it around but I think that there is . . . I still really feel that there is something more interesting in the way that Ive been doing it. Its too bad that some people are really rubbed the wrong way by it. Its not the intention whatsoever. I think it speaks to performing in a more accurate way. Its objective in that sense that of representing the world as it stands. Some guy asked me in a magazine, what was it, about Brittney Spears at the VMAs or something, about that moment when the karaoke went haywire or something. This has happened on Saturday Night Live and stuff, when the lip sync goes off and everyone is just stupefied because the curtain is lifted and the heart of the situation that has opened up before that is just . . . and they have no idea how to behave and no idea how to act because the things that control all of that are gone, suspended for a moment. Something like that is what Im after perhaps. What is a live performance about? I mean this live situation has been interrogated in so many ways, by theater, avant-garde theater and experimental music. Pop musicpunk rockhasnt asked very many interesting questions about the live situation. Perhaps it could. Is it about watching people play instruments? Is it about people coming together? I dont know. Getting up on stage and standing above everyone else. I dont know. I dont have any idea. It seems, by and large, that it is assumed by some kind of mentality that it is indeed about people playing instruments or something live in front of you and recreating a recording. I certainly hope its not about this metaphysical thing of presence, like, They are really there with me. Am I really that much more there with you then as on the recording? I mean, I dont know about that. So yeah, its a big question mark that I dont have any answers for. LL You should write a book. JM Thats what were doing right? Arent we after the book? When the book no longer makes a difference, this becomes the book. It could become the text.