A Conversation with Joshua Eustis / Telefon Tel Aviv

Josh Eustis has an amazing musical life. Along with his high school friend Charles Cooper, he created Telefon Tel Aviv and opened listeners' ears with the groundbreaking album Fahrenheit Fair Enough (2001), followed by Map Of What Is Effortless (2004) and Immolate Yourself (2009). He has been involved in a number of other projects, including as co-producer for Puscifer and touring musician with Nine Inch Nails. Among his current projects is Second Woman, a collaboration with Turk Dietrich of Belong, which takes the concepts of time and rhythm in new directions.

Tom sits down with Josh on a brisk LA morning for coffee and a chat...

So, tell me about when you first became aware of Max....

I first became aware of Max in 1997 or '98, I think. I downloaded my first kind of standalone Max patch of stuff in maybe '99. Then, for the next few years I would tinker with simple patches, even though I really didn't know what I was doing. I would basically open other people's patches and change values and see what was affected, trying to learn from it, but it didn't convey anything to my mind as far as how to do it.

I would open patches and it would just be, like, nothing to me.

But then Shawn Hatfield made Drool String Ukulele, and that was a really big one for me as far as a stand alone Max patch that we just got tons of usage out of. Specifically on Map of What is Effortless. A lot of stuff on that record was done ... The original sound design made in Drool String and then cut later.

I think in 2002 I started doing tutorials and stuff like that. I got a little bit into it, and then I had to stop because I had to make this record. I had a day job, and there just wasn't enough time. Excuses, excuses. Since then I'd always get the new update and do a couple of tutorials and tinker, but I never went anywhere with it until maybe about year and a half ago when I really dug in.

The Kadenze course, right?

Yeah. Dr. Wright's course.

I recommend that to anybody who wants to get started doing Max. It's terrific.

You said something to me a few years ago when you did that course. You said it got you over the hurdle. What is the hurdle?

Dr. Wright talks about it a little bit. The hurdle is knowing how to teach yourself how to use Max.

The hurdle is knowing how to say, for example, "Okay, what are the types of things I can type into a sprintf object?" "When do I use expr versus vexpr?" - this is the hurdle. The hurdle is knowing how to open the help file and how to decipher what's going on there, and knowing how to navigate all of the resources. Cycling ’74 has preposterously, exhaustively documented everything. You just have to know how to navigate that.

Once you're over that hump, you're just memorizing words, basically. You're memorizing this word, this object. It's a language. You're learning this language. You're memorizing words so you know what vexpr does, and that conveys something to your mind about when and where it fits into the hierarchy of what you are doing. The sprintf object and all of the externals start to fit in a list, and your vocabulary gets bigger. You start looking at the help file less and less.

It's been 2 months since I've programmed anything. So, if I got into it again it would be slow going for the first couple of days, but then I'd be well on my way.

Part of the learning thing is also going through the Facebook group and going through the C’74 forums and pulling other people's code down when they post it and looking at it and learning from it. Just try to go through it step by step. If I'm trying to build an LFO then I go and find 3 or 4 different people that have built LFOs - I open them all and I look at them all. I try to look at the things that I like and look at the things that I don't like. Then I close them and then start from scratch and build my own.

You just summed up my personal favorite way of learning Max patching: breaking down something that you don’t understand. What's this object? Why's this here? Check the ref file. Ah-ha, that's what it's doing!

What I'm really hoping is that Dr. Wright and the CNMAT people find a way to do a gen~ course.

I hear you. Gen~ has become very popular over the past 18 months.

Once I'm done with the record and I really wanna get back into learning the programming side of things. I was thinking about trying to hit up Alessio from K-Devices. I would go to Paris and learn Max. I just don't know if he's got time.

Let's go back to the late 2000s. You mentioned that you used Shawn’s Drool String Ukelele?

No, we had stopped using that. Once OS9 turned into OS10, we pretty much had to stop using it. I went through a period where I really didn't touch Max or Max patches at all. I started tinkering again in 2008 when Max 5 came out.

In early late '07 or early '08, I got a Monome and started tinkering around with MLR. But then I got kind of sucked up by having to figure out my tour, and then Charlie died, and then all this shit went down. I just set everything aside from there. But there was really not that much going on in the late '00s up until Immolate Yourself came out.

We didn't use Max on that record if I remember correctly. That record was a lot of hardware and a lot of tape and a lot of, you know, just kind of smashing the console harder than it's supposed to be smashed. It wasn't as much micro-editing kind of stuff that we had done on the first 2 records.

So you were doing a lot of just setting up a bunch of hardware and letting it run, sequencing it, recording it?

Yeah, it was mostly recording quick takes of everything that we needed and then smashing it in the computer somehow.

A lot of stuff was getting reamped - it was a different process. It was attention to detail as far as long form texture kind of stuff was concerned. Stuff that we'd done on the first few records, but wasn't ever really the focus; it became the focus in the third record, I guess.

What about in recent work? You seem pretty amped about music right now - making music, finishing albums. Does this new drive come from something that you can pinpoint? When you've talked to me recently, it seems like getting into Max was a thing that got you excited.

Yeah, Max is... actually it’s two things that are motivating me right now. I'll speak about the positive one first. Max has been a terrific inspiration because I remember when Charlie and I first started doing Fahrenheit Fair Enough, we knew exactly what we wanted to do - but we didn't know how we were gonna do it. We were wandering aimlessly in the wilderness of "What is this process gonna be?"

And that was an incredible feeling of just dragging stuff around in the screen and trying to figure out what it's gonna do. And then we got good at it, and then better at it, and then it got to the point where we knew exactly how to do it - and that got boring.

So that's why we constantly kept changing our work flow and changing the rig we're using to make these records: to constantly sort of put ourselves in a situation of, "What the hell are we doing here?"

Max is the single thing most responsible for that feeling that I've had in over a decade. I'm looking at it and thinking to myself, "What the hell is going on here?" - what a cool feeling! Let me start dragging things into the window and connecting them and seeing what happens, versus also knowing a little bit about how to get certain things to happen and then trying to connect things together with unexpected results. The unexpected results are deeply inspiring to me.

The other thing that motivates me is time. We're all gonna die. There's not a lot of time left, and there's too much that I want to do. There's too much that I want to get out before I'm dead and I wanna make sure that I have enough time to do it, which means I wish there were 36 hours in the day. I'm 40 now. I'm gonna turn 41 in July. I don't know how much time I have left, so I wanna make the most of it.

I hear you on the time thing - it feels like I was 18 just the other day!

Yeah, I mean, the last thing I remember was falling asleep on my desk in homeroom in 9th grade when I was 14 years old and drooling onto my desk and then waking up and going, "God, how am I gonna get out of this chicken-shit outfit. When am I gonna be done with this? This is just such a waste of my time. I have to do all this homework and all this paper writing. I know I'm supposed to be doing electronic music. Why am I here right now? This is literally preventing me from doing what I'm supposed to be doing."

That's pretty amazing that you already kind of felt that at school. "I need to start making music NOW!"

I was already saving up to buy my first synthesizer and sequencer and drum machine. I'll never forget this one day where this exact thing happened, and I'm thinking to myself, "This is trash. School's great, love my friends. My teachers are great. I'm learning shit. But, literally none of this matters to what I'm gonna be doing with my life. I know that this is completely irrelevant. None of this is gonna save me. I do not need to be in biology class right now, which I'm fucking acing. I don't need to be here. I'm not gonna be a doctor."

And then the feeling of, "Ah, it's gonna be forever before I'm old enough to be with an attractive woman and have a career and be a rockstar and do all this wonderful stuff. Everything that's cool about life and being a grown up, I'm never gonna experience that. It might as well be an infinite amount of time from now."

And then I thought, "You know what, when you are old you're gonna remember this day, and thinking back on it you're gonna think how stupid you are about everything you're thinking right now." And that's exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm looking back and thinking, "God, what a dumbass."

And, of course, time flew by. Here I am. I'm 40 and about to be married and making electronic music 26 years later, and it went by in a blink. I don't remember any of it, you know. It's so weird.

Do you feel like you're just getting started even though you have this amazing career behind you?

(Laughs) I absolutely feel like I'm just getting started. I feel like I'm building it from the ground up right now. I'm lucky to be able to go play shows where more than 10 people show up. I'm stoked about that. But, yeah, I do feel like I'm starting over because in a lot of ways I really kind of am.

I wonder if a lot of established artists still have that feeling?

That's David Bowie.

Yeah. I don't want to speak dogmatically for other artists because everybody's path is different. I get that. But if I didn't feel that way not only would I not be inspired to make anything anymore, I would feel like I've messed up and I lost something along the way. I'd lost the path.

Someone who comes to mind who is rather established and doesn’t stop experimenting is Herbie Hancock.

Yeah. Herbie's always been that way, and he's gotten trashed by his contemporaries for it. He got trashed in the 70s when he made Sunlight, the disco album with all the talk box on it (which is a sick fucking album). It's amazing. And then he got trashed when he made Rockit. But that guy - he is just busy innovating, man.

Jazz came out of crazy innovation and flipping other people's tunes, and, "Oh you made giant steps and that's the shit. Now I'm gonna do my version of giant steps and totally flip the head. It's gonna be crazy, and it's gonna be awesome, and watch. Everybody's gonna love this shit." And they did.

And then Jazz got so set in its ways that somebody comes along like Herbie Hancock, wildly talented, preposterously innovative, and they just trash him because he's not sticking within the strict confines of what they think is acceptable for jazz. But that's why he's had a decades long career now and is still relevant and still doing weird cool shit.

And People want to see him play all over the World.

Yeah. He'll sell out wherever he wants to play.

It why so many of these other jazz guys have just kind of faded off in the sunset, you know. Because they got stuck. You can't get stuck. You've got to grow as an artist. Or, you gotta at least be open to the idea of growing or open to the idea of change.

I just always thought that when I was going to university and would walk by the Jazz School, “How can you teach Jazz from a textbook?” I always saw it as this highly experimental/innovative genre, learning to be experimental didn’t make sense to me (at that time).

It's funny. I had a similar experience when I was in college because I was in the composition/theory department, but I had a lot of homies in the jazz department. Some of these guys were really strict and really just dogmatic about the way music is, and other guys were just lunatics, man. They were crazy. They had insane ideas about what music is and saw no rules and no boundaries. It was always interesting to me seeing like, oh okay here's these guys sweating each other over a flat 7 flat 9 chord, or arguing over whether a flat 2 is actually a flat 2 major chord or a tri-tone substitution

This shit going on and on all day long. A lot of the really dogmatic guys are the ones that aren't making music anymore. And here I am. This is going on 20 years now. I'm still making music because I'm not dogmatic about it, I think. That's the only reason I'm able to stay doing this.

So, I feel lucky that I wasn't good enough to understand the rules. I wasn't really the smart one in college. My grades weren't that great. I was kind of dumb and slow on the uptake with the theory stuff, just behind on all of it.

I remember when you spoke on the Art + Music + Technology podcast about how you were just not interested in making Techno because it's got too many rules and regulations, and that's where you're kind of interest in syncopation and time not being ... You said this great time quote when you were talking to Darwin Grosse about time being ...

Oh - "Time is a Flat Circle." It's Rustin Cohle from Season 1 of True Detective. He talks about time being a flat circle and how it repeats itself constantly over and over again.

I love making techno. It's so hard for me because it's so rule-based. When I'm making it I feel like I'm kinda in a prison a lot of the time. I've made a lot of techno now, and a lot of it's gonna get released (word on that to be announced later). I love the challenge of having to make something within a rule set, but then when I'm done with it I feel really glad to be done with it.

(Laughs) “You can go back to being experimental and free.”

(Laughs) Yeah. Can I take these training wheels off? It's like riding your bike in a predetermined rut that's in the street. Techno, literally, is as if you're riding your bike in the street but there's like a trolly track in the street that your bike fits perfectly into and you can't steer out of it, and you just pedal. You're just pedaling, and the divot kind of takes you where you need to go. Or, it's like when you're bringing your car to an automatic car wash, and you bring it up to that track, and the car locks in, and the car just goes.

So, you have to work within that very narrow band of what's acceptable in the world of techno - and don't argue with me about this because techno has a very narrow band of what's acceptable. It needs to be broadened again. Techno is losing the plot here. There's just so much really truly standard techno being made that fits all the rules and fits in all these neat boxes...

Everything's compartmentalized into neat little spaces just so that it sounds good on a sound system at Berghain or whatever the club is that you're gonna be playing at. And, the obsession with futurism and experimentation is a little bit lost at this point.

It's very, very stiff right now. Somebody - I don't know who it's gonna be - needs to come along and kind of twist all that.

I wonder if some of these folks, maybe yourself and others, someone with a strong history of experimentation might join in and could be the ones that are like, "Hey, Techno. You can elaborate."

That's the thing. Of course there's always people who are experimenting within a rule set, and they're pushing it as far as they can push it while still having it function properly. I don't want to name names of people I think that are snoozing on the job or people that I think are doing terrifically because I have some friends that I think are doing outstanding work in the field of techno.

I wonder if one of these friends is Dominick Fernow. I've been listening to some of his Vatican Shadow records lately. His last few records are pretty amazing, and to me they have this playful experimentation within the confines of Techno...

I produced those records.

(laughs) I didn’t even know that?

Yeah, I produced those with Dominick. We did 'em here. He sat right there - (points to the sofa where Tom is sitting)

So, I was listening to one just yesterday and was thinking this is challenging techno - he wasn't giving it to me on a silver platter. It wasn't like, "Oh, I know how this is gonna go for the next 5 minutes." But there were elements of unexpectedness. But it still fits the overall umbrella realm of techno for me.

I think that's a credit to Dominick, cause he's an outsider. He came from noise and punk and DIY scene, and liked ripping his shirt off and lighting himself on fire and screaming into distortion pedals with a feedback loop on repeat.

Do you think the hardcore three-decade-long-careerist-techno guys find him a bit offensive?

I'm sure they probably do. I can tell you having been in it kind of peripherally for a little while now, that it's ... Actually almost 10 years now. That it's pretty clique-ish.

There's cliques, and there's a lot of infighting and a lot of people sticking their noses up at other guys. If you do one set where you play 3 tech house tracks, techno bros will totally eye roll you. It's really kind of dumb and silly at this point.

But yeah, Dominick, I think people are really polarized about him. I mean, I've been a fan of Vatican Shadow since the first cassette on Hospital. I was obsessed with it. Then Type did a reissue of it.

It was Kneel Before Religious Icons, I want to say.

It's the first one I heard. And then Type did a reissue on vinyl, and I bought the vinyl and was just in love with this music. And then, you know, we became friends a year later. I met him through ... I forgot who introduced me to him. I want to say it was Gibby from Dais Records or Zane Landreth maybe. I don't know. It was at a dinner.

Then we ended up working together years later, and I'm still a huge fan. I still love working with him because his brain doesn't work like anybody else's. But, if you sit him down in front of a keyboard and hit record, he'll just play incredibly musical stuff just like that, without thinking about it, without tinkering too much. He just kind of sits and starts playing, and it's meaningful immediately. He's just tapped in somehow.

I think the Noise realm he comes from also has these rules we talked about earlier - as found in Techno.

Yeah, man, there are so many noise bros that talk so much shit about Dominick, and it's so laughably dumb. My question is: how many people's lives have you improved with what you're making?

And then let's weigh that against how many lives have been improved by one of the 7,000 records that Dominick has made. A fucking ton of people. A lot of people are way happier with Dominick having made what he made than you having made what you made.

So, aside from somebody's completely valid reason of making music to express themselves or to get something out, or to exercise a demon, or just to experiment - aside from that (which is primarily why I think making music is a great thing), what has it done for everybody else? I'm not saying your audience. I'm saying what are you doing for society? What are you doing for the World?

Creativity to express oneself and fill a desire/burden - that reminds my of what a friend once said to me, that, as an artist, the compelling drive to create is as if there’s an additional organ inside of you.

That's so accurate. That's the best description I've ever heard!

He said to me once, “I wish I could go to the doctor and be like, take this thing out."

That's what the appendix is doing (laughs).

Yeah. My friend swore by it. He got drunk and was crying one night about it.

Unbelievable. I have that same problem.

He was like, "I tried to just do a normal job, and I lasted 6 months because I just started drawing on the walls at work and they didn't like what I was drawing."

Extra organ that's it. That's so true.

So there's that element, too. Apart from the creating to satisfy yourself. How much do you think about where your creative work is going to go? Do you like to give this to people - like an offering?

I think I maybe have a different view of it than a lot of people. I don't really believe in the exaltation of celebrity or anything like that, and I also see what I do as largely blue collar. I don't see it as elevated academically or spiritually or any way from what anybody else is doing, especially when it comes to playing shows. I'm not on stage to get clapping or to get cheered at. I'm not on stage to get praise. I'm there in supplication to the audience. I'm there to offer something to them. I don't need something from them. I'm giving something to them. I'm the help. I'm blue collar. I'm there in service of them, not to be praised by them. The praise is great. I love it. It validates a struggle, but that's not what I'm up there for.

That's not what making records is. I'm not making a record to wow everybody. I'm making a record to please people. There's a difference. There's a delineation there that I think is really important, at least for me personally, that ... First of all, whatever I'm making I have to be able to sleep at night with it. It's gotta satisfy at least my personal edification and my personal ego and all of that. There is ego involved in it, of course. All of that has to be satisfied by it.

But ultimately, it's done in the service of others. Because otherwise, art in a vacuum is pointless to me. I want to know about it. I want other people to know about things. I don't want it to exist in a vacuum because then what's the point? Then it's just personal exercise, what’s the point.

The ego's a funny one.

There's inherently something egotistical about making a record. Here's my reasoning behind it. There's something self-righteous about the idea of, "I made this."

"It's for you to listen to." - that's pretty presumptuous, if you think about it. If you think outside of yourself for a minute and think, "Wow, I made something, and then I offer it to the world and expect people to listen to it, or even pay for it. My God, or pay for a ticket to come to a show. Who the fuck do I think I am? That's crazy." You know what I mean? Sometimes I look at myself and go, "Jesus, dude. You're out of your mind." Because it's really sort of the pinnacle of self righteousness to do that. There's something weird about it.

Other artists - I hear them saying, you know ... this has always been a really funny one to me. No dig on anybody who says this, but I've definitely laughed at you internally if you've said it to me, is like, "Oh, my music is such an extension of myself. It's me. It's who I am." I'm thinking, "Wow, dude. Not a single note of music, not one quarter note, not one sixteenth note, not one tiny fucking high hat snipped that I've made has anything to do with me. At all. It didn't come from me. I didn't make it. I didn't invent..." I'm just here. I'm a conduit. Something ... I don't know. I mean, I'm an atheist, but I mean something somehow - chemicals fired in my brain over which I have no control. I'm not responsible for them. The chemicals in my brain fire and put ideas there, and then I try to execute.

I can't take credit for that. That's idiotic. If I'm like in the grocery picking out apples and a kick drum idea comes into my head, I didn't make that. It's there. It appears. Assuming responsibility for that is just ridiculous to me.

At least that's how it happens for me. Maybe other people really can sit down at a piano and hammer out some parts, and they really write the part, then they decide, "Oh this chord's good, but not this one. Let me change it to this chord. Oh, okay, that's nice."

I just feel like my music is not an extension of myself. I'm like a happy, pretty positive guy, and nothing I make is. Everything I make is completely morose miserable shit.

So when you make that morose miserable shit (laughs), is there a certain emotion you wait to be fired, or you feel like a neuron fires and you're like, "Okay, this is hitting the mark!" ?

Yeah. I think so. It's hard to say. OK - For me, it's the ecstasy of melancholia. There's something about committing yourself to grief, and allowing it to repeat itself, you know. It just kind of washes over you, and you hit this enlightenment moment.

... where you all of a sudden realize you're able to cope with this or that, or whatever it is that's the problem, and there's this ecstasy moment. There's this moment of total rapture. I don't hit it all the time. I've only hit it a few times, but I've experienced it. And I've experienced it in the studio, and that's how I know the thing's right.

It almost sums up forms of Buddhism. I mean, one of the classic Buddhist sayings is ‘life is suffering’.:

Yeah. Life is pain. Pain is created by desire, to eliminate the pain, to eliminate desire.

It's painful especially if you make the kind of music I make and, I think, a lot of what you make too, which is ... You know, as weird or experimental as your stuff is, it's still rooted in melancholia. It's still a little bit somber. It's heavy. It's emotionally pregnant.

Maybe that’s where you can just grab the Techno rule book, jump in the trolley track (laughs)

Well, yeah. It's easy. But techno isn't trying to elicit an emotional response from somebody. That's not to say that it has less value. Techno does something else that's very difficult that most of my music can't do, which is to make people move.

Yeah. Physically!

It's equally hard to make somebody move as it is to elicit an emotional response. Maybe some Techno is specifically not trying to elicit emotional response? That's also difficult. There's a million ways to skin that cat. I don't want to sound like earlier like I was really taking a dig at the techno scene.

Oh no, not at all. I know you have a deep love of Techno!

Yeah, half of these records right here (points to large piles), and this is about a quarter of my collection, half of these records are techno. I'm obsessed with techno. I love it. I've been a student of techno since the early, mid '90s.

And DJing it since the mid '90s. I love to play it out.

I feel like, you know, I don't want to discredit the really hard work of what the function of techno is. It's difficult to do that. And that's why there's so much, because of the availability of tools now, hardware and software, that's why there's so much uninspired kind of pedestrian techno that's really just being very safe.

But then it's also why somebody like Peder Mannerfeldt just stands out like a fucking sore thumb. Because he's pushing ... Or Machine Woman, Jesus Christ. She's pushing the absolute edge of what's acceptable for dance music.

Do you think the availability of quality entry level hardware and software has changed things?

Yeah. It was hard.

In the '90s it was hard, man. I had to start my own record label and go through all that bullshit just to get the music out there. It was a lot harder. "Oh I want people to hear this? Cool. Start a record label and get it manufactured and test pressings and mastering-"

And then send it to record stores across the country and hope like hell they're gonna stock it for you.

Yeah, like calling Sonic Groove and begging ... Or begging Dietrich Schoenemann to buy some of my stock.

That must have been hard.

2 clicks. You can literally export from Ableton directly to SoundCloud, can't you?!

There’s an export function ... I mean, I think this is a great thing.

It's a challenge. There's just an ungodly amount of SoundCloud Trap. You know what I mean, there's just literally so much SoundCloud Trap and so much SoundCloud EDM and so much SoundCloud Techno.

I hear that. Can you tell me what you have coming in the next 6 months or year?

I can't tell you any of it. (laughs):

You can't tell me? (Laughs) But it's so exciting.

There's Telefon Tel Aviv stuff coming. There's Second Woman stuff coming. There's Black Queen stuff coming. There's Vatican Shadow stuff coming. There's a lot of all of it. I can tell you that all of those things are gonna have releases. But that's about all I can tell you.

Exciting. One last thing, What's your one Max hot tip?

Using the fetch command into multislider, the one that you gave me. Max hot tip. Hold on, let me look at a patch real quick...

I probably already said it earlier, it's the Kadenze course.

My pointers for people that are kind of like where I'm at with it, that are sort of beginners or whatever, I think it's good ... Don't be afraid of the learning curve. The Kadenze course is there for that. Also don't feel like you have to know all of it because you'll never know all of it. Because I think maybe even the engineers don't know all of it. I think the other thing is to, yeah, don't be afraid of what other Max users are gonna think on the forums or the group or any of that because everybody's there to help you.

The community's amazing. Everybody's super supportive, and there's 20 different ways to do one idea. If somebody asks, "Hey what's the best way to populate a line from a message box," then people will show you ... You'll see an infinite amount of ways to do that. I really find that to be the beauty of the community is that, if somebody comes in being snobby about, "Oh well, why are you asking such a beginner question," but then you see serious geniuses like Chris Dobrian and these guys, Gary Lee Nelson, a lot of these other guys chiming in saying, "Okay, well, here's how I would do it. Here's 3 different ways. Here's another way you could try. This is the weird way to try it. This is fun."

And these people have nothing to gain from being in there except for just sharing knowledge.

I think because there's really no established Max programmer or any kind of Max person who can't remember learning Max. So everyone can relate to that.

Yeah. They know that Max is like, it's the creative dinghy that's like ... We're all sticking our fingers in the holes trying to keep it from sinking so we're all in it together.

Let's make it nice for each other. You know what I mean? Everybody knows the first month of learning brutality, "What is this? What am I doing?"

Mate, this has been fun. Thank for spending the morning with me.

Yeah, man. Thanks!

https://www.telefontelaviv.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefon_Tel_Aviv
https://soundcloud.com/telefon-tel-aviv