Perseph One is “pursuing music and art as a remedy for daily life”.
COTFG – Tell us how you got started
Perseph One – Beginning my music entanglement in Kansas City, Missouri in the rap group Ces Cru in 1996 birthed a young rapper that called herself 1st Lady of Ces Cru. Later in high school her mythology teacher introduced her to the name Perseph One and before even knowing the full story she immediately adopted the name as her rap alter ego.
She as a solo artist has opening for countless big name acts and releasing music on an independent level every since.
Recent albums releases include Perseph One “Machine Mammal” and Trieyevision “Everything IS Energy“.
COTFG – What were your musical or general artistic influences for your historical work or current projects?
Influences with music included for sure Ces Cru forever in my veins and heart
Aesop Rock a big fan, Mick Jenkins I love his message and cadence
I listen to a lot of Japanese synth minimalism as a soundtrack to life (Hiroshi Yoshimura, etc.) or producer influences of 14KT or Devante Swing instrumentals.
Music clears out and charges energy so i choose what’s needed.
Chorist – COTFG Interview Series
COTFG: We’ve been following Chorist online for a bit and decided to find out a little more about him. As usual, there’s always a lot more to know about someone than you can tell from their social media digital output!
Chorist:
I’ve been making music here and there for about 20 years in various forms. It used to be playing guitar and songwriting. These days it’s mainly in the form of electronic music. I’ve released a couple of EPs as “Chorist” in the last couple of years.
Outside of releasing music, I’ve collaborated with friends on projects, such as “Wander” a sculpture/choose-your-own-adventure that you can see/experience at the downtown library. And I did sound design/music for Animal Facts Club’s live performances and videos over the past few years, with more performances to come post-pandemic.
COTFG: What were your musical or general artistic influences for your historical work or current projects?
I listened to a lot of Hot 103 KTFM (shout out to Sonny Melendrez) growing up in San Antonio, and the Miami Bass and Freestyle tracks they played are some sort of deep foundation of what I like to hear.
A lot of the music from Warp Records in the late 90’s and through to today. Aphex Twin and Autechre are the big ones.
Kurt Korthals (The Buddy System) was an inspiration as being the first person I knew to make music that I really liked and was in the vein of what I wanted to make.
And then various visual artists’ work and writings have influenced how I think about the creation process. Baldessari’s stuff regarding making up systems of rules and asking yourself interesting questions. Donald Judd’s woodcut prints. Robert Irwin’s biography “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees”.
What other ways of expression do you hope to explore using recorded video or live streaming ?
So far I’ve completely avoided video. I don’t think I want to be on camera. If I did it, I would probably make something sort of didactic, or about showing process. Performance on video isn’t very engaging, but I’ll watch endless videos of people talking about how they work.
I’ve thought about doing a podcast where I talk about making tracks. I’d like to do interviews with electronic musicians about how they work at a “bigger picture” level… not so much what gear do they use or where the sounds come from, but rather how do the larger elements come together to form a piece? That doesn’t get talked about as much.
What have you been listening to lately?
William Fields’ “Shackamaxon” is something I’m still wrapping my head around.
AceMo is consistently releasing good stuff!
Corduroi’s latest EP is right up my alley.
And the latest Oneohtrix Point Never album is great.
What does experimental/avant-garde mean to you?”
Experimental work, in the sense that appeals to me, is about exploring a new idea, learning the aesthetics of it, and creating something beautiful from it. Like having an idea for some new unknown process for creating a piece. You make it up, try it out, and see if you like it or not. And you keep doing that and refining it until it’s something you like. What keeps it “experimental” is avoiding the habit of doing what you already know “works”. I find it hard to do. “Avant-garde” is a historical term. 🙂
You can find out more about Chorist music on his website and instagram.
mari maurice – COTFG Interview Series
In this new series, COTFG will be interviewing artists in Austin and beyond about their influences, how they’ve been adapting to the new musical landscape, and what “experimental” means to them.
For over five years, mari maurice has been performing as more eaze and in that time has become a fixture of the Austin experimental music scene. She has also collaborated with many other artists including local legends The Octopus Project, and has recently stated the imprint label new computer girls ltd.
COTFG: What were your musical or general artistic influences for your recent work?
mari maurice: musically, a lot of my recent work has drawn from sources that are equally contemporary and nostalgic. I’m always interested in revisiting and learning from maligned artists or genres from the recent past and often find that there are crucial elements in that work that are being manifested in a lot of the most interesting music currently being made. i love thinking about how different stylistic worlds interact and am always drawn to the idea of blurring the lines in between.
I’ve also been super influenced and inspired by collaborating a ton recently. this was taking place in more of a live setting last year but covid has obviously shifted that focus more towards recording. actually sitting down and working on a track with someone remotely is amazing and helps me break out of myself so much. I love seeing how other people structure their music as they’re writing it and hearing how personality shines through in decisions they make. also, it feels refreshing to finally let go of some control after primarily working as a solo artist for years.
more generally, I’ve been influenced a lot by ASMR, reading and watching a lot of heady sci-fi, trying to navigate friendship, romance, & intimacy in the midst of a plague, and exploring the potentiality of quotidian activities and moments.
What’s an ASMR vid you’d like to share with people who have no idea where to start in that world?
I think a lot of people truly get freaked out by ASMR because of the regular whispering and the vocal aspect of it. Personally, I love it and truly enjoy how subliminal and barely there the voice in ASMR often seems. I think people sometimes find the use of voice and roleplaying voyeuristic but to me it really invokes the warm sensation of nodding off while listening to a story or conversation. However, I also truly find the sound design and purposefulness of this world very wonderful so, for someone who is interested in ASMR but is maybe intimidated by the vocal aspect, I’d recommend this video and anything else like it. The small panned scratchy sounds are so calming and get me kind of choked up because of how simple and beautiful they are. I like listening to this one with no visuals and just hearing the slight changes in surface and texture.
I also really love this video which is perhaps more on the side of what people tend to dislike about it but there’s something about this one that just instantly produces a tingle for me. I actually made a track a few years ago that sampled parts of several classroom/language asmr videos because they often involved similar arcs or specific tics and I wanted to randomize them and see how they’d overlap. This video is not the most amazing but it just gets me every time and immediately produces the phenomenon for me (I think a lot of older videos are a bit more consistently conscious of that).
What have you been listening to lately?
some things that have been in heavy rotation:
galore by oklou, “discuss and come” back by AIR Krew, euphoria by insides, the colour of spring by talk talk, spring summer 2020 by special guest dj, hotel nota by Romeo Poirier, dumb luck by dntel, primrose avenue by space afrika, i let it in and it took everything by loathe, more than friends by himera, trash eaters and face down in meta by pet shimmers
I’ve also been generally revisiting/rediscovering a lot of early 4AD stuff and early 00s screamo/post-hardcore.
(links by COTFG)
What other ways of expression do you hope to explore using recorded video or live streaming?
I haven’t done much in the way of live-streaming yet but I really like how it changes the idea of what a “performance” is. I’d like to eventually perform/record a live set and essentially build videos around footage/audio of me performing. the idea of things cutting out and just becoming more of a video piece is very appealing to me.
What does experimental/avant-garde mean to you?
personally, I think that experimental and avant garde are often problematic terms that get thrown around equally for labelling and branding or worse as a method for a politics of exclusion. is there really something “experimental” or cutting edge about a drone or harsh noise record when both of these genres have existed for decades? at this point, there are signifiers in tons of subgenres branded “experimental” that are just as formally embedded as verse/chorus song structure. I often think that these terms are applied to more extreme/obscure genres as a way of othering anything that doesn’t strictly follow a narrow and limited view of what “experimental” means. for me, experimental is when any work of art is trying to challenge or push forward a new and/or distinct conversation about whatever medium they’re working in. to me, records like ar kane’s sixty nine, chief keef’s thot breaker, and farrah abraham’s my teenage dream ended are all a million times more ground breaking and experimental than any record of pipe organ drone or modular synth noodling. I don’t think experimental or avant garde music is fixed to a particular genre or a set of aesthetic signifiers. for instance, all three of the records I mentioned are all so truly bizarre and unidentifiable but all these artists would be excluded from most institutions that claim to champion the avant-garde because they fail to adhere to an antiquated notion of what experimental music is. I am always looking for the records/artists pushing the boundaries of whatever respective world they inhabit and to me that action, whether intentional or not , is what’s truly experimental. I should note that I mean none of my examples listed here to be read as criticisms of any particular style of music as I love many things that fall into the categories of noise, drone, etc… I mostly mention these examples to hopefully illustrate the complicated nature of the term experimental as a stylistic signifier.
Daniel Johnston and Friends
Daniel Johnston at Optimus Primavera Sound 2013. Photo by Nari Mann.
Daniel Johnston was an artist. In a world with tightly circumscribed roles, Daniel was a true original. In a time where there are only so many ways to fit in, he was boldly and unapologetically himself, defying categorization.
“Hi, How Are You?” is the phrase Daniel Johnston will be associated with for as long as Austin still has its weird bleeding heart. It is the name of an early album of his, as well as the phrase scrawled above the famous frog mural on the drag where Sound Exchange used to be—a work of Daniel’s visual art.
“The first time I moved to Austin, my boyfriend and I decided to complete a rite of passage and go record shopping at Sound Exchange. Our friend James Minor was working there, and he’s now the head of SXSW Music. The first thing we bought was a Daniel Johnston cassette. The cassette that he bought me had Worried Shoes on it. When I heard that song, I thought, “Wow,” I don’t feel so alone, because I feel like I wear worried shoes every day. I didn’t know that he was mentally ill until my boyfriend told me the story about him. He was like a legend, an underground guy in town. There was an air organ on that song, and the first thing I did was get an air organ shipped to me and try to write songs with it.” —Leslie Sisson of the band Moving Panoramas
“Hi, How Are You?” could not be more fitting for his legend. It is a friendly pleasantry that opens up a connection between two willing people. But for people who are different—socially awkward, on the autistic spectrum, or just vibrating on a different wavelength—Hi, How Are You can be a barrier to entrance into social life, and as such, a barrier for functioning in the normie world.
“His creations were honest and although troubled they’re pure. His art and music create a home for misfits to realize that they do fit—we all fit together.” —Kendra Sells of the band BluMoon
Daniel Johnston was not a normie. He is a cultural phenom who has become the patron saint of misfit romantics. His songs are largely autobiographical, even when they seem at first not to be, and have a certain genuine sentimentality about them that fans find endearing. He swings from ditties about an anxious boy, to many songs about love, the nature of love, the elusiveness of love, and the inevitability of love. From a man with physical and mental health disabilities came revelatory music and art.
“Daniel Johnston lived in a world that I’m sure was difficult to live in because I think it required a lot of pain, but at the same time there’s a lot of beauty there too. He was an artist, and conceptually front to back he was doing his own thing.” —Zane Zor of the band Thanks Light
His lyrics are plain but they are not simple. He did not need flowery language or overwrought constructs to sing about the deep issues of life, and to do so with poetry and emotion. His childlike voice reveals the truth of his nature and music—earnest, authentic, and direct, with a thematic maturity forged in the cauldron of a difficult life.
Listening to his early work reveals a process that sounds like shattered pieces of the psyche being reassembled into raw yet coherent musical and artistic statements. It affirms bricolage—the process of assembling a document or piece from disparate ideas and inclinations, distilling it into form through iterative reassembly, like you would with a pile of lego blocks—as a legitimate approach to making art.
“The thing about it is, the music and the lyrics are not complicated at all. He’s writing pop songs, and not in a sophisticated or pretentious way. But in the performance and in the recordings and in the artwork, you just get a strong sense of his personality, this person behind the music. It still is to me so unique to get so much of that across and have it be such a singular thing. There are very few artists that can do that with a tape recorder, a guitar, a piano, and a voice.” —Walker Lukens
Daniel’s burden to carry was his lifelong struggle with mental illness. While his diagnosis remains murky, the 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston recounted episodes of psychotic breaks from reality, as well as social peculiarities. During one long hospital stay, his manager arranged for him to negotiate his music contract from the ward. Over the years, his psychological deterioration weighed on him, causing him to eventually move home in the care of family. As he sang on the 1982 album Don’t Be Scared, “And I feel just like an empty eggshell, and / My yoke is heavy.”
“There’s this myth of the mentally ill artist. Daniel Johnston was a living example of what that is. But I don’t think he ever had any awareness of that or cared about that. I think in a lot of ways he was also a victim of this myth. Nobody told him that he needed to take care of himself as a person, and that he needed to live his life, and have full relationships. I think he started a conversation that caused people to look at that and to realize that artists are people who have problems just like anybody else. In a way artistic aspirations toxify your mental health, because you sort of live to serve your art rather than live to be well and have a full life and relationships. I think Daniel Johnston lived an example of how that balance could be difficult for people.” —Marcos & Chris of the band Luvweb
Daniel’s art included a preoccupation with the divine and the profane, a theme that ran throughout several albums and artwork and revealed what likely was a battle for his grasp on reality, a battle waged in his mind. From what can be gleaned from the documentary, he did not invoke spiritual references abstractly. Daniel became obsessed with, if not terrified of Satan and supernatural consequences. I have no way of knowing what this symbol meant to him, or how much he bought into the representations of evil from the Christian tradition. I only know that when you name your demons, it gives you something to struggle against. And make no mistake, Daniel was consumed with the struggle.
Johnston’s music poured over many other intimate themes that recurred throughout his body of work: cultural criticism, music and art, love and loss, angels and devils, the blues, awkwardness, and relationships with the self and others. Namely, all the important stuff. While his sentiments resonate with a broad audience, they carry a special poignancy for those in the throes of mental illness. The example of Daniel’s life holds within it the hope that you can not only survive, you can have a voice in this world, a way of expressing yourself through art or otherwise that even those more privileged could understand, respect, or in Daniel’s case even revere.
“His songs are about everything. Sometimes I don’t even know what they’re about. But what he’s about is just his art. He’s always very excited and proud of his art, and I don’t think he cared what happened with it; he was just excited when people liked it. He wasn’t trying to be this rock star. He was 100% pure and sincere. There’s a lot of music out there that is a commodity, and people are writing songs to make money. I think that Daniel was writing songs to share his heart.” —Leslie Sisson of the band Moving Panoramas
“Hi, How Are You?” will continue to signify Daniel’s legend in more ways than one. It is a rallying cry for the social misfits. It is the name of a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring conversations around mental health. But the phrase and the associated iconic mural in central Austin is also fitting of a hometown hero like Daniel in another way—it is emblematic of the genuine friendliness of this town, and, by extension, how we collectively choose to treat those in our community who are on the margins.
Austin is a sanctuary city, a haven for the housing dispossessed, a great place to be a musician if you’re looking for healthcare or mental health care thanks to the HAAM and SIMS organizations, and a place where people truly do put “love thy neighbor” into practice. Whenever a member of this community falters, or an injustice goes unrighted, ordinary Austinites organize to address the need—I’ve seen it time and time again.
The Daniel Johnston celebration at the Mohawk on October 10, 2019 titled “A Celebration of the Late Great Daniel Johnston,” where I met the artists interviewed in this piece, is just one of countless examples of musicians and event coordinators organizing quickly to put on a happening that fills a need in the community. Living in a city like Austin, one is inspired every day just to connect, to contribute, and to be their unique selves in a way that makes the city all the more special.
“One time I saw a picture of Gibby Haynes, Roky Erickson, and Willie Nelson all in front of a texas flag. I jokingly said to my girlfriend at the time, you know who’s missing in this picture? Daniel Johnston.” —Zane Zor of the band Thanks Light
Daniel Johnston passed away on September 11, 2019 at the age of 58. His legacy, already quite impressive, remains to be seen. It is a legacy that’s larger than art, larger than music, and larger than mental health. He is a public figure to an audience that grows all the time, and he will live on in the people, organizations, and artworks that he inspires.
“Love is for everyone.” —Daniel Johnston
– Nari Mann