Visionary artist behind projects like Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Typhonian Highlife, Fourth World Magazine and many others in conversation about his creative aims, music industry and crossing cultures
[MOŻESZ PRZECZYTAĆ TEN WYWIAD PO POLSKU]
Spencer Clark might easily be one of the most interesting people you can currently meet on this planet. And it’s not just for his extensive body of work, spanning from a debut alongside vaporwave pioneer James Ferraro in psychedelic noise duo The Skaters, all the way to the myriad of solo projects and collaborations, mostly released under his own Pacific City Sound Visions imprint, all remarkably coherent in their thematic and aesthetic variety. I’m also talking about his unusual life, which catapulted him from the US musical underground through multiple continents and living arrangements until current residency in Athens, Greece. But most of all, this man’s brain operates on a level of its own, to the point of the utter impossibility of getting a dull or unthoughtful statement on any conceivable topic. I hope that this interview, conducted after Spencer’s concert in Kraków, Poland this summer, managed to capture at least a tiny shard of this unusual mind.
Jessica McComber: A lot of people interviewing you or discussing your music seem to focus on what could be described as metaphysical contexts of it. And yet, I can’t help but notice how physical your work also is, from emphasis on analogue media to even your stage presence. Is the physicality of sound something you think about in your process?
Spencer Clark: I’ve grown up with a lot of rock music and even though I was into another vibe, I still tend to have its spirit in me. With all the rock music that’s around you when you’re growing up in California in the 80s and 90s, even when you didn’t listen or pay attention to it at all, there’s so much of it and there’s something really cool about how it captured the zeitgeist inside of it and frame of mind of people around. I’m not intentionally trying to put it in my music but it comes out because I’m always interested in a visceral, shredded, dark positivity being there. I’ve always felt that all the stuff like, say, Jefferson Airplane or Jimi Hendrix, even though I don’t listen to this kind of music at all, has that vibe where it’s super dark, but also positive and eerie, and I like that a lot. It’s more about the feeling of it. It’s almost like when I remember Coil and then listen to it, I’m sometimes like: it’s not as good as my memory of it. Not that it’s bad, but it makes such a strong impression in the beginning that my brain almost invents a new sound that’s not even there. It’s the same with rock music for me. I don’t really like analyzing things as they are because I think there’s other people to do that. I’d rather analyze them subjectively.
I guess what I was getting at is how a synthesizer is this often bulky machine with electricity running through it, and you are somehow able to translate some pretty far out there ideas into knobs and buttons on it.
You have to remember that I wasn’t born into a situation we’re having now, where there are barely any instruments anymore and it’s just Ableton. I was born into having only physical stuff. Obviously, people made computer music in the 90s or 00s, you could definitely do that, but what was around me at the time when I started making music were other things. There was a piano at my university and I would take breaks from class and try to invent whatever piano could do. If there were computers around when I was jamming, then it would be that. It’s just the intention in the brain, all the other physical stuff doesn’t really matter. Yes, I am going to Germany to buy a specific keyboard, but in the end what will matter will be the moment when I decide to play the keyboard, not the keyboard itself. It will be how I feel, how happy I am, how much joy I will have in myself. If I decide to do that at the right moment of that joy, then that will be the music. Not that keyboard. People can talk about presets and stuff, but I don’t really care. I value people who are synthesists, but I’m not one of them. Even though I know how to program a keyboard, I don’t care that I know that.
You are talking about joy, and somewhere else about how your work is supposed to reflect the wonder of creation. But in that image that you paint, is there a place for darkness or pain?
I don’t know if I’m accessing pain in my music. I think it’s pretty evident that I’m not commenting on that in a way that industrial or noise music does, and as far as darkness is bad things that happen or are done by people, and positivity is good things that happen in people’s lives, I don’t really like to think in that way. Darkness for me is more like staring at the shadows for long enough to see what comes from them. What manifests can bring some temporal pain that’s not miniscule or meaningless, but there has to be a grander thing at play. It doesn’t mean that what I’m looking at is more complex, it just means that I’m staring at something and I don’t know what it is. Pain, our human suffering and all that stuff – not that I do know what it is, but I’m confronted with that a lot and I don’t feel that my art needs to comment on that. Again, I think there’s other people who can do that.
Weren’t you anyhow tempted to make some kind of thematic link to the health issues you’ve faced in recent years?
Not at all, not one bit.
Then you’ve avoided a pretty common trope of dealing with illness through art.
That’s my own, private life. I don’t mean “private” as in: I don’t want people to know about it. It’s just like how I used to drink beer or play basketball, but didn’t make any records about beer or dunking. Maybe I just don’t use art to express my personal life. I think I use it to study sensations or use it to find an example of a reply to a hypothesis I have had. One thing is for sure: I’m not looking around the room for inspiration. That shit is hitting me in my head at all hours of the day and especially when I am asleep. There’s this world that exists in my imagination and it can go far if I allow it to be joyful and go into itself for really long and I think whatever that can be, I don’t need to comment on it. If it can help people, that’s cool. I want there to be evidence of how hard the light of inspiration hits me in my head from above.
When translating ideas into sound, do you try to avoid this scenario?
My music rests pretty much solely on translating my imagination into sound symbols, and then activating those symbols together to form a feeling or statement about a juxtaposition of zeitgeists, or a juxtaposition of things that aren’t normally combined. In order to find the thing within an idea that is hidden, I use another idea, another template, and layer it on top of that, and then the essence or side-vibe of the original idea, for instance the true nature of the beings in James Cameron’s Avatar. Those beings seemed really cool to me at first, but when it came down to it, the movie didn’t really have much to say about them. So I wanted to say something about what the beings could be. And so I made an album where I juxtaposed those beings into the precambrian era. This to me fleshed out their meaning in my head, maybe in other peoples’ heads too. So, if I end up being literal or not is sort of not the point. The point to me is: do I have a destination or a hypothesis? When that exists then the translation is beautiful, it defines my destination by filling in the colors and details. A world can remain hidden and quite upfront at the same time, like in punk music. A lot of that music seems to have these hidden energies going on while someone is singing about something obvious. It doesn’t occur to me that experimental music ever has to constantly invent obscure forms for it to exist. In fact experimental music suffers from too much abstraction at times. Like let us live!
You always provide some context for your records. People say that it’s worth buying your albums on vinyl for the liner notes alone.
I really like writing. As much as you can interpret your brain with music, you can do it easier with writing. It’s way more direct.
How do you feel about someone experiencing your music without any of this context?
I think it’s like a cigarette – if you give it away to someone, you can’t tell them how to smoke it. When I was a kid and wanted to find out about things like Nurse With Wound or Hirsche nicht aufs Sofa, I engaged. I was on the phone with record labels just to ask questions of how the artists were working and where to get their shit… You learn fast what it’s like to be alive from other, strong perspectives. David Keenan, the guy who wrote about my music first, he was a journalist for The Wire and apart from just writing articles and reviews, he would go to the artists’ place and stay at their house. It doesn’t mean that effort is the most important thing, but something like that is like a journey in itself and you know you’re gonna get a lot from that. When I was in college, making photographs, I didn’t have a lot of ideas. So I figured that I’m going to work really hard to achieve bad stuff, so at least I’m going to know how to work hard once I actually know what I want to do.
You mean honing delivering things as a skill in itself?
Just making an effort to go a really long way. It doesn’t mean that it makes the music better. Someone can just wake up and make something completely beyond, all before breakfast. But I like to go on a really long escapade, you know?
The relationship between your music and text unwinds in one more obvious place: the track titles. You often manage to expand the core idea of an album with them, like on H.R. Giger’s Studiolo, where each track title offers some curious little corner of that world you’ve created. How do you think about this relationship of sounds to words in how you title your works?
In the case of that album, I went to Italy with someone who put on a show for me and then had their family’s car, so we drove to like ten different pagan renaissance spots to look at grotesqueries. It was like a two week adventure, at some point during which H.R. Giger had died. I was in northern Italy at the time, so I went to his expensive museum in Switzerland with the last money I’ve had. When I got home after all that stuff, I made the entire album in a month, super fast. If you’ve done all that work and you don’t even think, all that stuff just comes out, and it comes out really fast. Sometimes what comes out this way just is what it is. With song titles it was kind of the same. They just wrote themselves. That’s always the best, when I don’t even need to think about it or plan it. That shows that it’s not me, I’m just a vessel. That’s a perfect example of that. I want to blast it out for people’s imaginations so they can feel it. If some of my song titles are weak, that’s probably because I didn’t do enough preparation before I’ve made a record. If you have a crazy experience before making a record, you just feel it, and when you’re forcing it, you’re going to feel it as well.
When preparing for this interview, I was listening to a lot of your music in the middle of a heatwave in Poland and realized that almost all of it has this warm, usually tropical or mediterranean vibe to it. Have you ever made music that feels cold or wintery?
Well, that’s where I’m from, and where I’m from it’s always hot. Apart from that, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo is probably as cold as it gets. I made it when I moved to Belgium. It was winter and there was a cathedral outside of my house. I mean, there is some stuff on some of my other albums that’s darker and colder. I’m always interested in adding a bit of lighter, airer melodies to stuff, but The Skaters is quite dark, and James’ [Ferraro’s] music is definitely darker than my own. I’m into both at once, but I think in myself and where I’m from there’s lightness that comes out a lot. I can’t and don’t want to control it because it’s just what it sounds like for me.
This vibe is often created with allusions to what’s unfortunately referred to as “world music”, i.e. music from non-Western traditions. How do you approach taking those influences without being exploitative?
I think exploitation and appropriation are usually brought up in situations when the art or music is coming from a place that’s been terrorized by the industrialists, and we’re all succumbing to the terror that they are manufacturing. Whether I use didgeridoo or flugelhorn in my music, I think if one would try to focus on why I chose to use that, they would be really missing the point. I don’t think that’s what people would want to do if they were looking for something they’re into. Let’s take an example of those Picasso’s paintings where the ladies look like African masks. I don’t really think that those paintings are amazing, but when I look at them, the first thing I see is not French colonialism. Some people would think of that and they wouldn’t be wrong, but in my frame of mind, what comes out of it is the possibility of piqueing an interest in where those African masks come from, studying African magic and maskmaking in rituals. The roads you can take to experience life are really interesting, and when there’s evidence of those roads that you can keep going on, that’s cool. If there’s a track that has Malinese keyboards, bongos or whatever, and someone doesn’t like it for that reason – that’s fine, I really respect that. But I’d say that usually if someone thinks the track is a banger, they wouldn’t talk about that. When people say that something is inauthentic and they don’t like it, it’s most likely because it’s just not good. I know it’s not that simple, but I’m not an industrialist. I like to pick my clothes off the street, you know? Having to defend yourself really sucks. When I was in Australia, I was making an album called World of Shells and had a roommate that was very concerned about the culture her country murdered to take over the land. I’m concerned about that as well and agreed with her, but she was constantly like: “hey, are you using didgeridoos in your music?”. I think that’s a huge distraction. If and when a problem can be fixed, there will be a new one because industrialists run our world. Be careful not to spend your life on focusing and wondering if everyone is acting right. If you engage evil it can sometimes make it stronger. There is a larger, complicated movement of the world. One can look at the situation in Australia and say that the buildings have all been built on Aboriginal land and it’s not right. I completely agree with that, but isn’t it also sort of true that Aboriginal people lived for at least 40 000 years, and the buildings have been there for less than 50 years? So it could be, and I’m not saying it is, but it does come to mind that when people express the horrors that their forefathers do, and how wrong they are, they are also giving their forefathers a lot of credit, assuming that they are in power. Sometimes that assumption is psychologically telling, that they believe in their forefathers power as a way to make themselves feel comfortable. When in fact, if justice is in heaven, and not in the courts of waste here on earth, then who is succeeding in this life is not so cut and dry. Take for instance where I am from. The aboriginal people from California. Their art reflects the colours of the landscape and the world they are from. It’s beautiful. It also is exhibited almost nowhere. An artist in a contemporary museum now in LA, I have no idea who they are , but I do know what my eyes see. They seem to reflect money and information. So who has lost here? If we are solely judging what someone has left for the earth, then a successful life exists within those sand paintings to an extreme degree. I guess what I am saying is that sometimes people actually believe their forefathers’ own hype, even while they abhor it.
I think it’s usually pretty easy to tell when someone has done their homework and actually engaged with the culture they are referring to, as opposed to someone who just took something as an ornament to decorate their stuff, not caring what it actually is in the original context.
There are many reasons to make music, or any art really. A lot of people do it because they have free time, or they think they have to do it because all of their friends are doing it too. All of those reasons are good. If there are people there who are fakin’ the funk, and sometimes maybe I am one of those people, I think that’s fine too. Just say it and we can move on. I just hope that people look out for stuff that makes their lives stronger, rather than just things to be mad about. You can feel the energy in the world. People are upset, I am also, so I get that. When you’re in the moment and think about how bad shit can be, you need to ask yourself what it’s gonna be like when you’re about to die. Are you really going to be like: “yeah, I’m really glad I was telling people what they are doing wrong!”?
I started with pointing out my interest in the material aspect of your work, but there is one important part of it that we haven’t touched upon yet. If you don’t mind me asking, how does one make a living from making otherworldly, often long pieces of instrumental music on vintage synthesizers in the age of Spotify and TikTok? Do you think anyone can replicate your position of uncompromising independence?
I think people who use this new technology give it more credit than it really deserves. So everyone’s on Spotify? Not really, I don’t think so. I was hanging out with Christoph Heeman and Af Ursin, and they were totally not on Bandcamp, and had no problem selling their records with only an e-mail address. There’s lots of different worlds out there. And my world is yes, Operation Stackola [title of an album by 90s rap group Luniz that caught Spencer’s attention while crate digging a day before]. I think what the question really is: are you afraid to be living on edge? When I started with James, we were constantly cruising around and selling our tapes and CDRs. There were a lot of ways to get money, but the less money you spend, the less time you have to use up making merchandise and hustling the monies. Sometimes making the jump involves giving up some shit you might think you need. Definitely Europe helps with that right away. It’s less easy over here, but there are more ways to live cheap.
Most currently active musicians probably consume some sort of short-form content on their social media, bombarding them with career tips: if you want your music to be heard, make sure to post 3-5 reels per week, follow this template of posting schedule for album rollout and so on. Yet you keep the lights on while refusing to do basically any of those things. How do you even maintain people’s interest in what you do?
Wanting your music to be heard is entirely dependent on your music being dank. Unless it’s not dank, then I guess you need to pay somebody to represent you. I actually don’t know if I need people to listen to my music. It’s more like: does this music have to be listened to? Are these thoughts on a level that is commensurate with how crazy it is to be alive? Like, a lot of people just make music that they want to bump, and it starts there. If you are down to listen to your own music alot, then prolly other people will be too.
Is Operation Stackola a reason why you’re sharing only one track from each album on Bandcamp?
I’m not making any money on Bandcamp. What I do is I use Bandcamp for contacts. I’m sending out messages on Bandcamp that say: “The album’s out. Don’t use Bandcamp, they take my and your money. Write me an e-mail and I’ll give you a deal”. That’s how I do it for the first two weeks, and then I put it on Bandcamp for a higher price, because they charge 15% plus taxes, and they’ll keep charging more, until it becomes obsolete and nobody will know what to do anymore. That’s always how all of that works. All those technoindustrialists can only jump in it for a second and leave it behind. For instance: Discogs completely changed the way record stores work. Since then, they’ve added so many fees and taxes that it’s being used so much less that it’s almost becoming obsolete, and in the meantime they’ve destroyed the record stores. Great, thank you! The next time someone from that zone says: “hey, why don’t you do this?”, I’m just going to say: “just erase that shit”. Maybe for a moment everyone feels connected and gets money off it, but in the end they’re just gonna burn you. The only thing you have is your friends and yourself. All that outside shit means nothing. The music business was already good before they came along. People who think that they’ve made it better probably just want to be happy that they’re alive in the time of their life, because there’s no way that it’s actually better. It doesn’t matter that more people hear your shit and there’s a number on your page saying it. Less people hearing your stuff is actually cool. The excitement of how happy people are listening to your music or going to your show is everything. When we started with The Skaters, a lot of music back then wasn’t necessarily that good, but the amount of enthusiasm from people being outside or getting tapes was really high. That’s the feeling that people should be commodifying or working to hold onto, when people gather together and talk about music. That’s an artform in itself and the thing that means to stay alive. All the other shit is just so temporary.
So you choose community and more direct contact over trying to increase your reach to people?
I choose life. In the purest of visions one needs no concepts or angles to take, or strategies. The strategy is the juice out of my brain. I want to reach tons of people, but that doesn’t mean I should be spending most of my time trying to find new listeners. That’s crazy, build and they will come. Sorry, was that what you were asking?
Well, I was really curious to hear your perspective on this, especially since some people seem to treat you like this naive, almost childlike figure. And yet, you seem to have an entire business model figured out for yourself.
Well, where I’m from we talk and act a certain way, but you should always be careful how you judge people because you never know how crafty they can be. The main weakness for smart people is underestimating how intelligent other people are. Some people’s problem definitely is that they wouldn’t realize how sneaky some shit can be. Operation Stackola is real, you know?
Do you often feel misunderstood by the audience or press?
No, not at all. I don’t really care about this.
I’m asking because in some interviews you seem to exhibit this tendency to address and maybe correct some underlying assumptions behind the question being asked, rather than just answer the question directly. Sometimes it reads like you’re quite annoyed, but doing your best to stay polite to the interviewer.
I think where that may come from is this, and I should explain this really well because I don’t want to offend anyone: people who are journalists and asking me questions are not going to get a lot of money from what they’re doing. That has to do with the fact that my music is quite underground and not very popular, so I don’t begrudge them for spending zero time preparing. But it doesn’t negate the fact that I am a thinker and I think about shit on a lot of levels. A classic thing with interviews is that you have to answer in a way you want to talk about things you want to talk about, because if you follow people’s questions directly, generally you’d go nowhere. I don’t mean to be rude, but this goes all the way to the major mags. Those people don’t get paid anything and they ask stupid questions. There’s been a lot of times when some of my concepts or adventures were considered kind of pop culture, because I deal with movies and stuff that you’d call not “high concept”. So when someone from some magazine comes with something like “your shit’s low concept”, it’s like that line from KRS-One: “You claim I’m selling crack, but you be doin’ that”… Who’s from the magazine with Björk on the cover? I didn’t do that, you did! If I wanted to know the life of the people who have just walked by us [the interview was conducted in a frequented area near Wawel castle in Kraków], I wouldn’t do that by insulting them. I’m not offended by people thinking that I have low concepts or anything like that. They are definitely entitled to that opinion and I don’t want to change it at all. But I do think that if artists put in the same amount of effort as journalists put into asking us questions, nobody would have ever heard of our music.
As a very prolific artist, is there anything about making music that you wouldn’t know without accumulating such a huge discography?
I think it’s the same as with anything else. The further that I take my ideas, the more rewarding it gets. My art is not my diary, but it kinda is, so I can remember the ideas that I’ve had or things that were happening to me while I was alive at a certain point. I could make the album Spectacle of Light Abductions because that’s just what I was into: watching a lot of UFO movies and reading books about different consciousnesses. I remember that in a much cooler way because I’ve made the record. It’s like a footprint in the stars, you know? You remember so much more when you interact with it. I think the act of me making music almost doesn’t even matter. It’s just remembering and maybe other people also remembering at the same time, the interpretation of reality, you know?
Have you ever felt that you have to push yourself to keep going and stay creative?
If you’re thinking about going to see your favorite painting, read your favorite book or watch your favorite movie – that’s how I feel when I wake up and I am about to record. It’s so exciting to me to know that I’m going there and something will happen that I didn’t know would happen before. That’s why I go to the studio, the magic room – to see what will come out of the other side. The further, longer and harder you go, the stranger the results will be later. Or maybe not stranger, but more of the depth. You need the depth of your experience. When you go for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week into a month long, you will have those experiences that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. That’s all there really is for me. All the other stuff like the labels, the interviews, is just the afterword. At the end of it, when I hear the music, I’m not like: “yeah, I did a good job! I perfected what I was thinking about!”. It’s not like that at all. It’s more like when Kawabata Makoto from Acid Mothers Temple was 16, he would listen to records in Japanese stores, but there was this other record that he wanted to hear, but couldn’t find it. So he started making it. That’s really obvious, but it’s super sick.
Your train is departing soon, so just one last question: what do you have in the pipeline for the rest of this year?
My new record called Sandstorms is going to come out by the end of the year, with a 12-page magazine with the art of Amy Roselynne Faust and I, as well as a poem about an alien consciousness stranded on a deserted planet, and they can’t remember where they’re from. They are trying to retrace their steps by making an equation or a magical formula that can help them remember the name of the place they are from. And after that, throughout 2027, I’m going to record this new thing I’m working on called Warlock Eyes. It’s hopefully a novel and an album, kinda like Werewolves in Love, but bigger and danker.