Q&A with an avant-garde Swiss army knife

IS: With the direction you're going in, you're taking experimental music and then you're throwing it into that tangent of hip hop and turntable that hasn't been done, that nobody yet in the space of avant-garde has really messed around with.

MP: Or in the world of hip hop. I have been fascinated with the turntable for a long time because of the sheer speed they can work at. You can change genres and sounds as quickly as you can drop a needle. I really wanted to showcase that and highlight that because I don't think that side of it gets shown off enough. When it does it's more in a sporting context in those DJ battles. And no one's really listening to the music they're watching guys do backflips, basically.

IS: Breakdancing for each other...

MP: Yeah. They're watching technical aspects, instead of musical ones. I wanted to make music and really, like you said, this is a love affair with the turntable and I really wanted to really take what I do and weave it into that. There's times when I definitely take a backseat because I wanted to do what these things can do. It's really a powerful instrument and I think that it doesn't get exploited enough, you know?

IS: You see sort of this weak use of the turntable in some of the recent bands like Limp Bizkit and all that crap.

MP: It's like a f------ token.

IS: Right. They throw a guy back there who happens to have a couple of records, and he's Asian or something, and they just say "Ok, go ahead. You go be Mr. DJ."

MP: Just stand back there and look cool, yeah.

IS: You talked about the last Fantomas thing being one side, where you have extreme spaces, and then this record with these extreme small cuts. It seems to me like the middle ground is something like Tomahawk, where there's still that rock-oriented stuff.

MP: Yeah yeah, Tomahawk's a rock band...

IS: And stuff like Handsome Boy Modeling School and Lovage... it's more of a middle ground.

MP: All of those examples are really other people's projects that I try to add something to. Which is kind of a nice challenge in a way. I'm kind of a sideman. I try and maintain a balance in the things I do. Especially when Tomahawk came along, as well with Lovage, I think I was doing a lot of improv stuff and a lot of extreme noise stuff and I thought really I don't want the teeter-totter to go too much one way. I really have still a lot of pop music in me, I think. And I think you can hear it a little bit in everything I do. The idea of really having a visceral rock band to play with live that I didn't have to think about too much seemed really appealing to me. Same with Lovage. Lovage is really more of a cabaret show. It's fun stuff to do and really kind of like small vacations for me in context of what I normally do.

MORE FROM INDEPENDENT STUDY

Joyous pop from Los Campesinos!

Joyous pop from Los Campesinos! ’70s-style rock from The Lonely H Sugary pop from Ladybirds Dappled Cities’ exciting romantic pop Pop from The Good Listeners Just don’t call Glossary alt-country Cortney Tidwell’s country goth Sunlight and dread from The Clientele   Add Independent Study headlines to your news reader: