Show Notes
Rain welcomes John Vanderslice to LaunchLeft today. John launches Spacemoth, and together we discuss how getting away from the handbook and taking risks can make a lasting piece of art. John doesn’t hold back on his views of creativity, production, artists' treatment, and more. Spacemoth joins in to discuss recording studios and her music. Stay tuned to the end to hear Spacemoth’s vibey track ‘UFO Bird’.
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LaunchLeft Podcast hosted by Rain Phoenix is an intentional space for Art and Activism where famed creatives launch new artists. LaunchLeft is an alliance of left-of-center artists, a curated ecosystem that includes a podcast, label and NFT gallery.
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IN THIS EPISODE:
[01:08]John discusses his journey through what, how and why he writes his music.
[07:28] What two artists inspired John to step out of his comfort zone.
[10:27] John’s examples of ‘whatever it takes to get by’.
[11:55] John talks about his collection of instruments.
[13:57] What would John do if he ever stopped making music?
[17:31] What non-attachment means to John and how grieving informs an artist.
[20:29] How John spends his time in and out of the studio and his views of this creative art.
[27:51] Spacemoth talks about finding Tiny Telephone and the different vibes in studios.
[36:40] Listen to Spacemoth’s song “UFO Bird” from the album, No Past No Future.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Artists must always find something inspiring. They are constantly looking for gems in music and others.
Sometimes when “accidents” happen in the studio, they can result in fantastic music.
Collaboration in music is the key to making lasting records while the artists have fun and find joy in making them.
BIOGRAPHY:
The Reintroduction of John Vanderslice
by Grayson Haver Currin
Nearly 20 years ago, or just after the start of this century, John Vanderslice made some of his generation’s most masterful singer-songwriter records. Life and Death of an American Four-Tracker, Cellar Door, Pixel Revolt: Every year or so, he’d release another set of engrossing songs set expertly on edge, vulnerable excavations animated by a new dawn of endless-war unrest. Those albums sounded like little else, each blown-out drum line or warped calliope melody or sun-baked synthesizer layer a testament to Vanderslice’s laborious process and tireless ingenuity. (There were rumors, possibly true, he once cut 500 hours of tape for a single album.) This dovetailed, of course, with his emergence as a keen analog revivalist and the proprietor of one of the best studios in the country, San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone.
But on a sunny winter day in his gently sloped Los Angeles backyard, feet from the little green cabin where he now makes music, Vanderslice beams as he disavows all of it. “I went from this scrappy dude who wanted to own a studio to someone able to record in a big room with a full orchestra, like fucking Frank Sinatra, the end result of an obsession with songwriting,” he says of his maximalist apogee, 2011’s White Wilderness, brushing hair so blonde it sometimes seems white from his suddenly trenched brow. “I should have wrapped it up right there—no more tape, no more reel-to-reel, no more linear format. Let’s blow it up. It took me a long time to learn how.”
Let’s round it, in fact, to a dozen years: Crystals 3.0—the culmination of a span of ecstatic experimentation with harsh noise and hard drugs, curious samples and cascading sequencers—is both a new pinnacle for Vanderslice and the manifestation of a revelatory outlook. A seamless 19-minute sequence of melodies so memorable they belong in an ice cream truck, static bursts so meticulous they belong on a Merzbow tribu
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