Jack: Hey, John. Hey, Mike. Nice to see you guys. Nice to hear from you guys.
John: Hey, Jack.
Jack: Hey. I'll start with you, John. What's your background? You grew up in Cleveland.
John: Yeah, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Grew up in a suburb a little bit west of Cleveland. Stayed on the west side for my whole life, for the most part, except for a couple of stints, one in New Mexico, a few other places. But for the most part, I've remained here. Been a musician in the area my whole life and have a small business here as well.
Jack: How did you first get exposed to music? Were your dad or your mom into music? Was it through friends? What was the introduction into music and then also into more underground, DIY, experimental music stuff?
John: So my dad used to buy and sell records for extra money when I was a kid. He was a really big Beatles collector. Sometimes I'd go to the record shops with him, and one of the ones that I used to go to was one that Chris Madak, who plays as Bee Mask, used to go to a lot called Platter Puss. It was there that I saw some records that were really impressionable for the first time, records that I knew because I think I was in third grade at the time. My dad used to take me and I remember seeing a purple vinyl copy of Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins there. And I remember seeing - I don't know if this is real, but I swear I saw it - a clear vinyl 12" with glitter of the "Smells like Teen Spirit" single. So I would dig through the bins with my dad, and then he had a record player set up in the basement. And instead of picking a record that was my favorite, I would just listen to all of them because I wanted to know what they were like. My favorite was Listen by A Flock of Seagulls, it has, like, a circuit board cover. I'm trying to think of some of the other ones I used to listen to. I liked the first Men at Work record. Then as I got older, I think I was in sixth grade, there was like a big street punk sort of thing in Cleveland. There always was kind of a garage rock type of scene. A girl in my class's older brother had a band called Solid State Ignition, and they made a 7" and I bought it at school and took it home and listened to it. And then I was like, "Oh, wow, I've always had access to this record player," but I didn't ever think that there would come a time in my life where I'd be getting records from people that were just a couple of degrees of separation away from me that I could take. I could get these records and take them home and listen to them. So then I got into punk music and going to local shows and, you know, being 11 or 12 or 13 years old, if you went to the merchandise table back then, the vinyl was always cheaper than the CDs, so I would always buy the 7" for a couple of dollars. I collected those and records, a lot of them I wish I still had because I probably could have sold them for a lot of money now, but I just don't have them. Once I was old enough to get into other punk music, I just hocked all my dad's records too. [laughter] Some of them were probably worth some good money but by the time I was a teenager, he didn't really care about his records anymore, and he just gave them to me anyway. Another cool record that I found in my dad's collection was the Peter Laughner record.
Jack: Wow. That's so awesome, some local...
John: My dad went to high school with him, he was only a couple of years younger than me.
Jack: Wow. Hey, that's why we're doing this podcast, man. That's amazing. I had no idea.
John: Yeah, he signed my aunt's yearbook because they were actually closer friends, my aunt Cassie and Peter Laughner were homies. But my dad always thought he was kind of an asshole because he said that he was blind drunk at school all the time.
Jack: I mean, he died when he was like 30...
John: No, he was in his early 20s. From drugs. But he said he would just spam my dad with Velvet Underground info. He was just so obsessed with The Velvet Underground, like, would not shut up about them. My dad wasn't much of a Velvets guy. But as I got older, got into punk music. There were a couple local bands that were more on the fringes. They were more extreme. There's a venue called Speak in Tongues, which was, I found out later, run by this guy Ralph Hausmann, who was a mentor to me and very formative. I learned a lot from Ralph. But he had this venue that I used to go to called Speak in Tongues. And that's where all the at the time, the kind of fringe early aughts type of hardcore, post nonsense screamo shit. The Party of Helicopters used to play there. Forstella Ford played, and all that kind of stuff. So once I started getting into that stuff, I really felt like I was finding out new stuff. The Locust, some of the Three One G artists that were coming around that time, but that was my first experience with mail order. I saved my dough, I was working at an ice cream shop and then I sent a money order to Three One G to get the first Locust record. My parents hated it, they did not like that music, and that's when I felt like I was finally getting into music that felt transgressive or different. And I was like, "Now I'm finally finding stuff that's cool." So then from there, I just kept going, kept going, kept going. The weirder rock stuff, Lightning Bolt, the White Mice, that kind of middle aughts Load Records stuff, you know, then Growing, Double Leopards. It's actually a pretty logical progression if you think about it.
Jack: I mean, that was definitely my progression in a very similar way, like Dad's record collection into punk stuff, into weirder punk stuff that then crossed over with electronic music in a way, and then onward and upward. But I think that's definitely, especially for people our age and a little older, growing up with boomer rock 'n roll or parents and that being the kind of standard from which everything is based. Now I think it's different for a lot of people 20 years younger getting into music and it's, like, their parents maybe didn't grow up with rock 'n roll at all, you know?
John: Yeah, or, like, Silverchair. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
John: Something else that is pretty noteworthy is there is the band 9 Shocks Terror, who are famous in Cleveland and elsewhere if you if you know good music, their name was around so often and so frequently flyers that I was convinced that I had to see them and they were playing a benefit show with Cider and the Darvocets. I was in the ninth grade and no one would go to the show with me. And so my dad offered to drive me and wait in the car.
Jack: Amazing. So for, like, 3 hours...
John: He let me go in without looking lame, without my dad. [laughter] The show was completely insane. I got shot with a Roman candle.
Jack: People were, like, tearing the ceiling tiles down?
John: It was insane.
Jack: I got shot with the Roman candle at an Inmates show one time.
John: Yeah, exactly. I got hit with a front door at an Inmates show, a wooden front door. [laughter] Just stupid. But, yeah, I feel like my progression of getting into these things has been pretty logical and straightforward for considering what it is.
[Imaginary Softwoods “Positive Ruin Court Garden”]
Jack: Well, I think that's a good segue for origin stories... Mike, you grew up outside of Chicago. What was your kind of upbringing and getting into music?
Mike: Yeah, I'm from the suburbs of Chicago, Southwest, about 25 minutes outside the city. I think I first got introduced to music through my cousin who lived with my family when I was nine or ten. He had a Compaq computer with a CD burner and Napster and taught me how to use IRC and chat rooms and stuff. So my introduction to music was really kind of through digging the Internet. I think it probably started with looking up stuff in skateboard magazines that guys recommended as stuff they liked and then using IRC to download skateboard videos, and then waiting for the end credits and seeing what the songs were, and then downloading each track one by one, and then burning the CD of the soundtrack to the skate video. So I had that for Black Label Label Kills, Emerica This Is Skateboardings, Emerica Yellow, Blind Video Days. So these were all these kind of things where I would also use Photoshop and make my own jewel cases and make covers.
John: Very industrious, Mike. You've always been very industrious it seems like.
Jack: Not shocking, not shocking.
John: Just making things.
Mike: I remember when I was, like, five, I got Greeting Card Maker for Christmas and I would just make little greeting cards for no reason, like a comic or a digital little card.
Jack: "Greetings."
Mike: In second or third grade I made a Titanic zine with this girl in my class that we sold for five bucks or whatever.
Jack: Holy shit.
Mike: So, yeah, I would say that digging online and then my dad had records. They don't sound like they were as good as your dad's records. [laughter] I think for eighth grade graduation I got a record player, and that kind of began... I'd go to Reckless in Chicago, I would go to Dave's on Clark Street. Dave's always had pretty good stuff that would come up on Pitchfork. Seems like I remember getting those Paw Tracks records there. I'm going for honesty here. [laughter]
John: That's good stuff, there's some good stuff!
Mike: Here Comes the Indian or whatever they call it now. [laughter] I think the first record I remember buying at Reckless was the Red Krayola The Parable of Arable Land. Clear red, definitely.
Jack: How old were you?
Mike: 13. I would say like around that time [I began] using message boards online. The Sonic Youth message board, the Animal Collective message board. I got connected to more internet communities around music. Viva la Vinyl.
John: Oh, yeah.
Mike: These are words I haven't thought of in a long time. So, yeah, I think there's this trajectory from using the internet to find any music, then getting into physical records and then finding the way that they met up together, which would be small run labels. I think the first mail order experience was probably Marriage Records came from probably trying to get something by Thanksgiving after seeing something related to Mount Eerie, The Microphones. And then very quickly I think at Marriage there was something on Not Not Fun, like a compilation maybe that had Yellow Swans and then Yellow Swans was the gateway into basically everything else, very quickly.
John: That's so funny that you say that to me because I'm 38. You're what, 32?
Mike: 32.
John: So for people in your age group, for whatever reason, it really seems like the Yellow Swans was the way in for those people.
Jack: That was an early noise show for me.
Mike: You know, the Xiu Xiu connection as well.
John: And then for people my age, it seems like it's either Wolf Eyes or Nautical Almanac. It's one of those two. And for whatever reason, for people just a little younger than me, it's always the Yellow Swans.
Mike: This is funny because I remember the first time I bought records on eBay from one seller who I think was in New York. There was the Yellow Swans record with all the musclemen, I think it was a one-sided record. Then I also got a Nautical Almanac record from him.
Jack: Did you know what it was or did you just get it?
Mike: That was, like, looking at what else the guy had, seeing what was cheap enough and looked cool. And then that began a pretty big addiction to buying records online.
Jack: Pre Discogs! Or early Discogs.
John: It was strange because me and Mark [McGuire] and Steve [Hauschild], all my Emeralds buddies, we would go to see all the local music and try to go to whatever the most far-out thing we could find was. We were just on the cusp of getting into some really far-out stuff. We went to see Nautical Almanac on their Cover the Earth tour in a snowstorm, with Max Eisenberg on drums. I think we were one of five people there. Let me tell you, they were at the peak of their powers. To this day it was one of the most, like... None of the audio was lining up with what I was looking at, somehow none of it. It was just so disorienting and amazing to see. Then from there, our minds were open, but just seeing them play in that era was amazing. They were unbelievably cool, a really good band to see.
Jack: Could we go on that and could you talk about how you first met Steve and Mark? I mean, I guess there's probably a lot in between from the point at which you left when we switched over to Mike. How did you start before even meeting them? How did you actually get involved, coming from the punk scene, in more of the noise scene, that transition.
John: Well, it's funny. Emerald's is one of the bands where we've actually all known each other, with the exception of Mark and Steve, who met after high school. Steve and I went to kindergarten together. We probably went to birthday parties growing up together, but we didn't really start hanging out until after high school. I've known Mark since I was in the sixth grade. He grew up a city over from us and he was also a guitar player, so me and Mark would play in punk bands together. But when we started working on experimental music before Emeralds, there was a band called the Fancelions, and even before the Fancelions, there was a band called the Leaflets and the Fancies, which was me, Steve and Eric [Gamola] from the Fancelions.
Mike: That's a good name.
John: We started playing on the bills of all the punk shows and all we did was we would play television sets, or I guess I was the only one playing a television set, and Steve and Eric would drag their PCs out and Steve would do AudioMulch patches on a PC.
Jack: Like a desktop.
John: Like a fucking LAN party on stage.
Mike: And then you would play a TV like John Cage playing a radio?
John: I would just play a TV and get whatever channel I could get and run it through a delay pedal. And yeah, all of my peers growing up who were musicians were like, "Well, this is coinciding with John discovering hallucinogens, clearly. He's been trying to sell them to me and now he's playing a television." [laughter] But so we started going in this other direction that not a lot of other people in Cleveland were doing. There were like noisy rock bands, but as far as noise artists or people that were doing avant garde stuff, there was one guy who used to go by Steve Dracula, George Viebranz, and then fluxmonkey, Bbob Drake, who was playing a Frac Rack synthesizer in 2004 or 5, he was an OG. But outside of that, there wasn't really anything going on, so we kind of created our own scene. The thing that was so helpful about the Internet at the time and with anybody that's trying to do this is that if there's not a scene in your hometown, you could make music to export and people think there's a scene there. We would just make up a band name, get a duo, get a new configuration, that's a band, that's how Mist was, me and Sam [Goldberg]. There was Tusco Terror, who was the big influence on everybody. Once we found out about Tusco Terror and the house shows they were doing in Akron, it was just like... So I remember finding out about Michigan noise stuff from looking at the Hanson Records website and looking at the tape descriptions. The tapes were usually sold out or there was not a way for me to access them, I remember, so you would download them and then, like, every iteration of everything... Back then, the label was such a good way of finding out what you were going to be getting into. Troniks, Hanson, Chondritic.
Mike: I think that way of talking about labels as being a kind of entry point is super important.
John: Huge, huge.
Mike: Especially when you talk about the introduction of the Internet and needing a kind of port of entry to dig online versus the record store being your entranceway to physical music and you would have the guys at the store that you liked and you could trust the way they stacked stuff or there were certain sections that you knew to look in. But online, you need a different kind of entry point and I think labels definitely did that. I would say for me there was handful of labels that I quickly became introduced to. I don't know, the way I remember it, and it might not be correct, is probably within one or two months of making a mail order purchase I was starting Arbor, sending out emails, just realizing it was as easy to make and release music as it was to purchase it. Almost like I would be emailing the same guy to be like, "Hey, can I buy this?" and then it's like, "Hey, I'm putting together a compilation, do you want to put a track on it?" And I think part of that was I wanted to hear more music by people and if I'd heard all that was accessible then I was just like, "Can you send me tracks before you send them to anyone else? And then I'll burn them on a CD and sell them for you or dub them on a tape."
Jack: It's amazing and it's an experience that not a lot of people have, that all of us have been able to have in different ways: getting into music that we really like and it being so underground that not only do they have their email available, but they actually respond your emails and then actually are extremely excited that someone is interested in their music and are more than happy to send it out. It's a personal connection to music that not everybody has and if you've had it, you understand the power of music and the power of community.
John: Especially in a post-COVID world. The other thing that people forget - time moves weird and it kind of erases itself as it goes forward - is how uncertain and weird those times were from 9/11 going through the Bush administration into those Obama years. That era in America was one of the few times, probably the last time ever in our lifetime, where it just doesn't feel surveillance heavy. It felt like America was pointing outward at everybody else after 9/11, almost forever, obviously. But at that time, it seemed like everything that happened at home, happening in America, was like... It felt like the country was wide open in a lot of ways. It felt like getting into a van and going on a two week or three week tour with your buddies was totally doable.
Mike: It was wide open. I would say the kind of stuff that we're talking about, like using Web 1.0 era Internet like a mailed newsletter or like sending postcards around, it was just a little bit faster, but it wasn't immediate yet, so there was still a period of anticipation and a period of reflection and waiting.
John: And most of it was being executed in real life.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. Thinking about mail order, we're talking about time before SoundCloud and before easy previews of new music, you read this little description of something, you send $5 or $6 in the mail or through PayPal, and then you wait one week, or three months if you're buying it from James Ferraro. [laughter] And you just have that description and you kind of, like, hear the music in your head, knowing what you know about the artists from before and reading the description. I don't know, I think there's something really productive creatively in that kind of disconnect between wanting to experience something and then getting it delivered. Anticipation is really productive and I think that is something that kept that kind of ecosystem together.
John: Yeah, definitely. And let's be real, not getting something you order sometimes is kind of cool if you think about it because it was all being done by hand. Like, I'm not advocating ripping people off and taking orders and not sending them anything now. But, like, I mean...
Mike: Of course not.
Jack: Who would do that? [laughter]
Mike: But that's Wild West, that's wide open. You send some guy $10 in the mail.
Jack And there's kind of no recourse and let's be honest, who's going to go through a fraud claim? Nobody's doing that.
John And your buddy across town got it but you didn't and it was like, man...
Jack: "It got lost in the mail, sorry."
Mike: Or your friend saw them on tour and he lived in a different city, and he told you he got the last one and there's none left. You sent them money for it before the tour and they just used that money to fund the tour and double sold everything.
Jack: Jeff [Witscher] and I have run into that recently, of selling out of merch on tour and coming home to mail order. But fortunately we actually pay them their money back. But not everybody has to be...
John: Not everybody's so generous.
Jack: Exactly. Mike, can you talk a little bit about what we were going with with John, from getting into that music and the Internet and mail order, etc., and then the foundation of your label, Arbor, and how that came about and the trajectory of it.
John: One of the greatest labels ever, by the way.
Mike: Oh, come on.
John: For real! I hear that all the time from people. They're like, "You're so lucky you had an Arbor released, that's sweet."
Mike: I'm blushing. Like I said a little bit ago, it really seemed pretty immediate to switch from realizing that I could contact people to buy their music from them to being able to message them and ask them for tracks. The first Arbor release was a compilation, probably took about six months to put together. I remember going to probably my first house show, noise show.
Jack: How old were you at that time?
Mike: 14 or 15. It was at Mr. City in Chicago, which was the band Coughs. And it was a Raccoo-oo-oon show and I remember meeting them and kind of pushing them to make sure that they turned in a track.
Jack: Because you had already contacted them.
Mike: I had contacted them and talked to them but I think that was also the time when they realized that they were talking to a kid. [laughter]
Jack: I'm sure you've had a lot of those moments, in the early years.
Mike: Yeah, it's like nobody on the internet knows you're a kid. I think I benefited from that one. Then I think there were some times... I think I did a 7" with Karl Bauer, Axolotl, and at some point we got into a fight over email, I forget why. Then I think when he found out that I was, like, 16, then he apologized. [laughs] I guess I hadn't developed all the proper manners or ways to observe signals.
Jack: Right, so he was like, "What the fuck is wrong with this guy?"
Mike: I think he thought he was getting screwed by a jerk and not an ignorant kid.
Jack: Instead of a 16 year old who doesn't know the ways.
Mike: But yeah, I'd say the transition to being into music and releasing it was so small. I remember it was probably a couple of months in, a couple of releases in, there was a compilation, there was a Robedoor 3" CD-R.
John: Oh yeah, Robedoor.
Mike: There was this guy Horse Head. Horse Head is now in GothBoiClique, Lil Peep's thing.
John: No way.
Mike: This kid, Chris Thorne, Horse Head, was the third release on Arbor.
Jack: And you said that you are still sort of in touch with him, didn't you reach out to him?
Mike: I DM'd him on Instagram to check out Nina, but he never responded. So anyone out there if you have contact to Chris Thorne, I would love to reminisce. Maybe bring him on this podcast.
Jack: Absolutely. Please get in touch and reach out.
Mike: But so my parents confronted me and they were like, "Mike, what's going on? You get ten packages a day in the mail, you stay up all night long, your room's a mess...".
Jack: Drugs, it's obviously drugs.
Mike: "Are you selling drugs?" And I was like, "No, I have a record label."
Jack: It's kind of like selling drugs. So what was their reaction to that? I assume they were probably relieved.
Mike: They were definitely relieved. Yeah, they were supportive.
Jack: Amazing. The transition from putting out CD-Rs to actually pressing vinyl is kind of big. How did you get into that? Or what was the first time like?
Mike: I had always wanted to and I think it was very precious or something, it was like, it's got to be the right one, it's got to something. I think that the first one was a one-sided…
John: Warmth?
Mike: No, it wasn't. That was maybe second.
Jack: We got an Arbor historian on our hands.
Mike: The first one was Robedoor/Haunted Castle, a collaborative thing.
John: I don't have that! I still got the Warmth record, that's a good one.
Mike: I remember silkscreening that in the basement.
Jack: Wow, you silkscreened it?
Mike: It's pretty shitty, probably. It's sticky, it's puffy. I could never get the consistency. I was no Shawn Reed, though I tried to be.
Jack: I have the Privy Seals/God Willing 12”.
Mike: Ren [Schofield] did that. There's a funny story with that one. That's the one where I was a freshman in college and Ren was like, "I have the records, I'm driving down." And I was not in town so I told him to drop it off at Hospital, which was around the corner from my dorm. And I forgot to ask Dom if that was okay. And then he was very, very angry at me.
Jack: Wow. Very, very angry?
Mike: It was disrespectful, looking back on it.
Jack: This was like 2008, 2009?
John: That was peak noise conservatism, too. They're not trying to let any more people in. It was very conservative. Lots of tension.
Jack: Talk a little more about that.
John: About noise conservatism?
Jack: Yeah, please. This is a freeform podcast.
John: I was working with McGuire the other day, and he told me that Shane from Lambsbread once told him when I wasn't there that he said, "There's some people that want to kill John." [laughter]
Mike: One of my favorite things ever that I probably think of on a weekly basis is just the title Bullshit Boring Drone Band that you guys used.
Jack: Hell yes.
John: That's something that the Haunted Castle gal said right after we finished a set. [laughter].
Jack: Hey, it all comes together.
[Emeralds “Untitled” (from Bullshit Boring Drone Band)]
John: Then we went home and made a CD-R for [John] Olson and named it that. And there's another story, it was the same with What Happened, the Emeralds record. At the time I think a lot of the noise scene record label people, even if they didn't like us, realized they could probably sell some of our records. So we started getting a lot of offers at once. We had an offer from Carlos [Giffoni] from No Fun, and then we also had an offer from [Aaron] Dilloway, and I think the offer from Dilloway came in just like a little bit before Carlos, but I think Carlos was more prepared to do the record. But we ended up doing Solar Bridge with Dilloway. I'm not sure if that was ever going to be for Carlos, but he sent us an email after Solar Bridge was announced and it said "Emeralds LP on No Fun - What Happened?" [laughter] And so we made another record for him and called it What Happened.
Jack: You're like, "There it is."
John: Yeah. Not a question anymore, "What happened?" But "What happened."
Mike: "This is what happened." Not like Hillary Clinton's biography. [laughter]
John: Oh my God, right. Yeah, so there was that. But Emeralds was never... It didn't seem like we could be put in any kind of box. It felt really good to be able to be all over the place. And at the same time, it felt like everything we did was upsetting to someone, having a melody caused outrage.
Mike: I think that we're getting to an interesting time period. 2008, 9, 10. I think we all knew each other at that point.
Jack: Yeah, I met John in 2009 when Mist played my basement in Western Mass, that Ben [Kudler] booked.
John: Oh, wow, yeah. First Mist gig out there. That was the first time I met all you guys, actually.
Jack: Yeah, totally. Mike and I met in 2007 at the St. Louis Noise Fest. Noise FeSTL.
John: Oh my gosh.
Jack: Just a little background.
Mike: I feel like we probably met at the Flower Shop.
John: We met at the Flower Shop.
Jack: What year was that?
Mike: 2007, maybe.
John: That was on the Emeralds and Birds of Delay tour. That was the most fun I've ever had on a tour in my whole life. It was amazing.
Jack: Fun people.
Mike: But I think I think 2008, 9, 10 is when a lot of stuff really changed. This kind of stuff we were talking about like 20 minutes ago was gone.
John: iPhone, Twitter, Insta.
Mike: Yeah, I wonder... I don't know, I haven't really thought about it in a while, but there was this sense that people were paying more attention, maybe like magazines, stuff was spreading more. It wasn't just like you need to know where to find the info to find the music. The music was actually kind of breaking out.
Jack: There were some breakout successes. Emeralds was one of them.
John: Totally.
Mike: 2010: The Year the Drone Broke.
Jack: Yeah, for sure.
Mike: I don't know, I'm interested in trying to think through that a little bit.
Jack: Well, I could see a couple of things with that: it's obviously the iPhone, the rise of social media and the decline of the forums.
John: Definitely.
Jack: The rise of an open and non-exclusive, non-focused place of discourse, which would be social media versus the forum, which is a niche, closed network.
Mike: But were noise people hanging out on Facebook in 2010 in a regional, noise community?
John: Seems like they are now more than they were back then. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, because they're all in their forties and fifties now.
Mike: That's kind of what I mean, I kind of don't think that people from this kind of world where success was maybe selling 40 copies of four tapes every two months or something, very active, hands-on mail order stuff, hands-on assembly of records and tapes and CDs... Even just things became getting produced at a higher price point.
John: 300-500 records selling quickly.
Mike: I guess that's the kind of part that I want to think about a little.
Jack: It's true, and to add on to that, what happened to the ability to post about a release... Because we know so many people who did it, Mike included, any of these people where they would pay their rent and completely fund their lives by just posting that they are releasing an edition of 50 cassette or version of 100 cassette, and it would sell instantaneously.
Mike: But that translated for a while, like 2010, 2011. When I was putting out 0PN records, James Ferraro records, that was still happening that way and so there would be a month where I would put out three or four records, and within like three or four days I would have $20,000 go through my PayPal.
Jack: Would it be just through your site or would you post on the forum?
Mike: Forum posts, I Hate Music or I Hate Noise. And then just an email list. Every person who ever bought something would go on a list and that list would get hit and there would be these monthly batches. It definitely got pretty intense for a while, I feel like the distributors played a role, people started buying a record from James or Dan, it all just went to distributors right away.
Jack: Who would be the distributors?
Mike: Forte in the UK. Revolver and Forced Exposure would be the big ones, but then there would also be Volcanic Tongue, Mimaroglu, but it would be a kind of thing where most of the run of the record would go to the people who had put them in shops and then not really pay you and then one day mail them all back to you.
John: Right.
Jack: Psychotic, yeah. It continues to this day!
Mike: So I think the experimental music scene was playing with leverage.
John: Yeah, it truly was.
Jack: It all came crashing down, obviously.
John: It's strange now because it seems like we're... It's so hard to get a feel for it because I can make a physical edition of 100 or 200 things, 300 things, and I can blow through them. I can pretty confidently sell some of my own music. But...
Jack: You can still. I see that whenever you launch stuff you have a pretty devoted base.
John: Totally, I'm super grateful for my listeners. I'm super happy that I have people who are still checking me out because I work really hard on my stuff still and I like what I do as music. That's what I love to do. But it really seems like there's kind of a ceiling and it just feels like with younger people, they just like... Maybe it's that they don't know where to buy it or how to find it, but it really feels like there's a barrier of trying to get people to learn about you, of trying to find a different audience. Is there any kind of definable audience now or do people just get fed by algorithms?
Mike: That just connects back to the thing right before, the 2008, 9, 10 moment. I think something that happened then was people started buying ads in The Wire. And that changed the direction. That changed things from the best you could hope for would be being in Bull Tongue or the Size Matters column of The Wire to getting an actual full review or cover story. And that definitely took the shit out of the Midwest.
John: Big time.
Jack: For sure. Yeah, it is crazy to see, like, we've never really come back from that moment in terms of the underground, at least the underground American scene. In terms of that being an option, you know, we're still living in the wake of that. And I think that really profoundly affects the way people make music still, even in the "underground" music scene or whatever, especially electronic music, noise music, whatever you want to call it. People are still operating under the principle that while maybe because it works for [redacted], that if I am a good enough boy, I can also get this level of success. And so I think that to an extent, it depends on the type of person and it depends on the type of music, the niche of it or whatever, a lot of people are operating with that in the background. And I do think it can kind of poison it a little.
Mike: The success wasn't really part of the equation.
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
John: Absolutely.
Mike: There was just a total phase change. It's kind of like the iPhone moment. It's like there's this day where like the underground was not anymore, it wasn't underground. It was all on the same media of communication with the whole world.
Jack: That's true, exactly. Especially with Twitter and social media, you're constantly put next to these people who are not in any way doing the same thing as you and all you see are the metrics of "likes" and reposts, and you're judging yourself against that constantly.
Mike: I've always kind of felt like the underground exists because you need to know coordinates to find information. So it's like something in the back of a zine that has an address or a phone number or even an email address that you hit up to get information and there's this level of effort that involves knowing the end points. But then when you get to the point where you follow 0PN and you follow Skingraft and you follow Bruno Mars and all their information outputs are just right next to each other, you're dealing with a flat level of information which gets rid of the nuance that we were thriving on in the early 2000s.
Jack: And it gets rid of any context.
John: The Internet has brought so much self-awareness and so much of people feeling self-conscious and, like you said, people measured against "likes" and clicks. Wasn't it R.H.Y. Yau at No Fun Fest, didn't he just, like, eat celery? He just ate snap pea celery and everybody was going crazy. [laughter]
Mike: Yeah.
Jack: There was definitely a shift in that era and like you said, it felt like a door closing.
Mike: It turned me off!
John: Yeah, I understand!
Mike: That was why I exited, because I got this feeling that... I had been doing it since I was so young and it had kind of covered my puberty in music. My development of taste was fully reflected in this label that had different paths at different points in time, you know? There's singer songwriter stuff in the early days and rock stuff, noise stuff. And I think at a certain point when I became more aware of things outside of that activity, on the one hand, I want it to have a kind of... I wanted to grow up and cut a tie with this thing that was this developmental thing, but then also there was just this kind of sense where the pressure that I felt that was being put on me as being a springboard to more success, that was not where the interest was. I didn't want to turn this way of dealing with boredom at home as a 14 year old into a big drone music business machine.
Jack: Big Drone.
Mike: Yeah, Big Drone! I feel like that's kind of how it began to feel, from artists or otherwise.
John: I mean, it was the same with Emeralds. We were on tour from 2007 until we split. We couldn't even... There is no room to breathe, to be able to make an album. By the time it was getting later into our band, we were just touring. And then when we were home, we were just trying to regroup. It was definitely a whirlwind. It just felt like a grind, it just started becoming not monotonous, because it was amazing to be able to do that stuff, but it was just, like... We were almost stuck in this one mode.
Mike: I felt like I was no longer in control of my life, sort of.
John: Yeah, maybe that’s what I'm trying to say. It just didn't feel like we could take time to make a record or anything. At least that's how I was feeling, I mean, I think a lot of people were feeling that way.
Mike: I felt like a factory.
John: Right.
[Last Exit Music “Transparent Radiation”]
Jack: John, do you feel like you were ever presented, maybe at the peak of Emerald's success, with a way to make music your career for the rest of your life? You know, with doing the Caribou tour or other stuff... A path that, if you follow these steps that they told you to take, whoever "they" is, if there even is a "they," that you could make some choices and be able to make even a meager living off of your music continuing that path.
John: Well, as a band, we probably could have. We had record label offers but I feel like we didn't really know how to approach the business aspect because, whether we all would even admit it or not, I think we all had different ideas of what we wanted our band to be like and what we wanted to do with it. At the very least, Mark, I feel like he could, even still if he wanted to, make a living off just playing shows. And I know Steve does sound design and I know he does music full time, mostly. It's not easy for anybody, but we had some like bigger record label offers, but I'm not so sure we could have made a record that was, I don't want to say palatable... Our music, at the time that we had our success, kind of achieved a peak.
Jack: Emeralds walked so the band who did the Stranger Things soundtrack could run.
John: Oh yeah, so those fellas can run. You know, a big thing with the noise scene back then is there wasn't a lot of analog synths. There weren't synth bands.
Jack: God, I mean, that angle of it, from then to now, 2010 to 2020, that change...
John: At the very least, I wish one of these synth companies would just hire me on and let me just make YouTube videos.
Jack: Hey, for anyone who's listening right now...
Mike: That can be arranged, right?
John: I hope so.
Mike: You know, that's really interesting.
John: Yeah, there was not a lot of synthesizer music back then. There was not.
Mike: But when there was that, there was. Something that's hitting on me is the way in which virality entered into the subconscious of the underground. I think that it was a little delayed to kind of, like, the Internet in general. Like, I don't think people were actually aware of the way in which these memes, like analog synths or a certain concept of success, were changing as these networks became closer together. I don't think people really realized how much of a...
John: It was a thing! It was definitely a thing.
Mike: Hypnagogic pop was psy-op!
John: What about Salem? Salem was a psy-op.
Mike: Salem is a psy-op still.
Jack: Definitely. I mean, I really think the concept of the "like" is just... If there isn't already a book or a paper on it, that is something that truly shifted culture, especially for creative people, the concept of doing things for the "likes." It's twisted.
Mike: Yeah, you know, earlier we were talking about what does success look like? There weren't these kind of universally shared signifiers of public facing success that there are now.
John: I'll give you a good example of one: I was talking with one of the record labels that I'm with and they were recently saying we're going to do this record and so we're going to come up with a game plan. Spotify offers a new service where, if you take a royalty cut, less money per stream, they will supercharge whatever track they're going to try and jam into the algo, and then you get paid in clout, essentially. Let's be real, in the music scene, a lot of these people that have success or the perception of success are being paid in clout because they don't need the money. People that don't need the money generally have it coming from somewhere else and a lot of the people that do need money, that want to do this for a living, are going to struggle a lot harder with being paid in clout because it doesn't pay the bills, it doesn't keep the lights on.
John: No, that's insane.
Mike: And it's also from the perspective of Spotify, where them supercharging your track is injecting it into passive streams. You get the vanity metric of your numbers going up on your main page, but you are probably not having more people know your name as an artist.
Jack: No, it's going on at your local coffee shop or somebody's studying and they're talking to someone else and that just comes on for 3 minutes and they go on to something else and it's not catching their attention. Even if it did, a lot of people who listen to music like that are not going to pause it and be like, "What's this artist? I'm going to go look into their catalog." That's not the way people consume music.
John: Oh, definitely. One of the most ironic things ever, just like the dumbest thing ever, is that my most popular track on Apple Music has over a million streams, I think it's 1.3 million streams, but it's on a sleep playlist. So I was like, no one listened to it. [laughter] So they just jam this when everybody's in bed, then no one listens to it.
Mike: It's six and a half hours into the sleep playlist. [laughter]
John: Yeah! It's like 4:30 in the morning.
Mike: I think Spotify is good for what it's good for, but it isn't good for people like you.
John: It's not good for the 99% of artists that wish to be heard.
Mike: But it's good for most people who use it to listen to music. It's good for artists that make a certain kind of music that's about catching someone's attention. Maybe they're like, "Oh, I know all these songs, but I don't know this one. What is this?"
John: Well, the big problem with that is most of the time, you're right, it's good for everybody except the artist who's making the music.
Mike: It makes no sense that you get paid the same amount of money for a stream that, like, Bruno Mars does. That isn't where your music making practice and life began. There was never that kind of equivalent, ever. And then technology, one size fits all kind of models, just make it so that regardless of your consent or thoughts, you're basically being processed at the same level as everyone else. You don't really get to choose.
Jack: And that's the same thing of social media, of your Twitter being put right next to Drake's Twitter and you're both tweeting about your new record or whatever. Or even, you don't even have to use Drake, you could just use someone from the more independent music scene, but who has thousands, tens of thousands of followers and makes popular music.
John: More than ever music is either very financially backed or it's not at all. It's almost binary. You do not really find medium sized artists being funded by a label, that would never happen.
Jack: And that's America right now, that's the shrinking middle class, where you either have the people at the top or you have people who can't fucking afford to... That's where the Midwest was this beautiful thing for a certain time, where somehow these very middle class people, people who do not have, like, intellectual parents, or whatever, but somehow getting access to this culture that is extremely cutting edge. But I feel like that is harder and harder to come by now. Just like in terms of economics or class or whatever you want to say, you know, it's so stratified.
John: Time to abandon all the platforms and get back to what's real, what's really good.
Jack: That's right.
John: No, it's time. I'm really excited to get my Hub set up. It's something I've been working on behind the scenes because I want to do another record label, I want to do a post-Spectrum Spools record label and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how it's going to be, what it's going to be, etc. But I do not wish to put the music on streaming services. I wish for it to just be on Nina. I love the idea of having a record label project where you have to go somewhere else entirely that you don't normally go to find the music.
Jack: There's intentionality to it.
John: To access it, you have to go somewhere else. I feel like especially people in our age group and maybe even a little bit younger than us... These platforms just have to die. I was just telling my partner Isabelle the other day, I was like, I can't wait until I have to look at Wikipedia to mention Twitter to somebody and it'll be like, "This is what a retweet looked like." It's going to be gone and it's going to be amazing. Anyways, I should split.
Jack: Yeah. John, thanks so much for talking with us.
John: Let's do it again!
Jack: I would love to.
John: We have to get deep into the Nina zone.
Jack: We have a lot to talk about. Thank you, John!
John: Good to see Jack, good to see you Mike!
