Luke: Hi.

Jack: Hi. 

Lili: Hello. 

Jack: Hello. So I'm going to ask the first question that I always ask: how did you get into music and what was your introduction to it? Family, friends, parents? What was your first experience with music and how did that develop? How about Lili first.

Lili: So, growing up, my earliest memory of recorded music was my father playing vinyl records. He has an extensive collection of free jazz and various traditional music from around the world. He was like an OG hipster. So he would play his records on the weekends, I'd dance around. The other early memory I have of music is just being driven to school in the carpool. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC There is the oldies station, Oldies, I think, 100? I can't remember. But that was what my mother listened to. She always, whenever The Shirelles came on, would talk about being a teenager at the time. 

Jack: At the sock hop. 

Lili: Yes. So that's like what my mother would listen to when it was her turn to drive. Then we carpooled with another family, actually was the wife of one of the main rabbis at the school and at the synagogue my parents went to. But she would put on WHFS, which was the alternative rock station. So she was pretty cool. But actually music, like recorded music, whatever you want to call it, you know, the world of music that you know, when it became my world... That sort of started, I guess when I was around ten or so. I was intrigued by the Columbia House music club advertisements.

Luke: Oh yeah. 

Jack: That's the first time we've talked about that on the podcast. That's, I think, really important to a lot of people. 

Lili: It was the visual aspects. A little backstory, my family was religious, Jewish Orthodox, so on Saturdays there really wasn't much to do. But the Sunday paper would come on Saturdays and from The Washington Post there would be the Parade magazine section. I love Parade because the first page was always like the celebrity gossip. But on the very back, oftentimes Parade magazine had the Columbia House or the BMG music club. It was just this mosaic, it was so colorful and it was just very intriguing. 

Jack: All the little covers. 

Lili: And I was like, "Oh, you tape a penny to the..." 

Jack: "How is it that cheap?!" [laughter]

Luke: Even then I was like, "Why is this not going to be right for my life? There's something sketchy about this."

Jack: Yeah, something's not adding up, how is it only a penny? 

Lili: For me, I'm the middle child of six kids. I didn't ask, I just sort of did it. That's how I started to discover contemporary music. And I just randomly selected based on the album cover for that first purchase. 

Jack: Do you know some of the ones you got in the batch?

Lili: Green Day Dookie, R.E.M. Monster, Sheryl Crow Tuesday Night Music Club, Boyz II Men II, I think TLC CrazySexyCool, Janet Jackson, Rhythm Nation. 

Jack: Oh my God. 

Lili: I think The Offspring was in there. 

Jack: You got like the spread of American music from the mid '90s. Those are all records that I would listen to right now. 

Lili: The Cranberries, because I remembered The Cranberries from WHFS. And yeah, that's how I...

Jack: That radicalized you. [laughter]

Lili: It radicalized me. It became my private world that I would... 

Luke: Start your own pyramid scheme: "Mail me pennies!" [laughter] 

Lili: I sheepishly would approach my mother to write a check. Because with my father, I didn't want him to know, he was very stingy. 

Luke: You got to the check part with them? I never got past the pennies. What are they going to do, show up at your house? "You owe us money, we're the Columbia House." 

Jack: Yeah, "You didn't pay 12 pennies."

Lili: So for a few years, I would [do this] but then I discovered music stores, like...

Jack: What was the transition for you from getting into music from Columbia House and BMG and getting into independent music or underground music or whatever? 

Lili: Well, I learned that there's a scene in Washington, DC, proper. Usually it was on the weekends and I just learned how to... My family is close enough to the Metro, which is like the subway system, but I'd have to walk a bit to take the bus to the train. But I learned how to get myself downtown. I would see shows at the 9:30 Club and from there it was just learning more and more about the local scene. 

Jack: The Dischord-adjacent scene. 

Lili: Yeah, totally.

Jack: Are you from Virginia? Or outside... 

Lili: No! [laughs] From Maryland, Silver Spring. 

Jack: Right, right. I've been to Silver Spring. 

Lili: And I started a band when I was a teenager. 

Jack: Oh, I want to hear about this. 

Lili: I forget, I went to a show at the 9:30 Club. It was Love and Rockets and that band Orgy. 

Jack: Oh yeah. 

Lili: But I met a young person, a teenage person my age. We were hanging out, I used to hang out after the show and smoke. 

Jack: How old are we talking here? 

Lili: I was 15. 

Jack: Okay, wow. Sorry, Mom! Sorry, Dad! 

Lili: I didn't smoke regularly, but I thought it was cool. 

Jack: It is cool.

Luke: You smoked what? 

Lili: Cigarettes. I didn't get into weed until later. 

Luke: Okay, so not crack.

Jack: Heyo. Can't say that on TV. 

Lili: So I got into glam music at that time and I randomly met this girl, Carmen [Clark]. I don't know if she said it, but the legend is I overheard her saying that wanted to start a glam rock band and I said, "Wow, me too." And we exchanged AIM messenger names. 

Jack: Let's go. 

Lili: She was PunkFloyd7. Mine was like MyBloodyIsabelle or something.

Jack: That's amazing.

Lili: So that was cool. Then we started writing music together. And her ex-boyfriend was the drummer. And that's how we got involved in the scene. We were so young and precocious. Carmen wrote the lyrics. Pretty suggestive, like teenage... Yeah, thinking back a little, you know...

Jack: A little salacious for a 15 year old. 

Lili: Yeah, salacious. We had a lot of fans, maybe... 

Jack: Older male fans? [laughter]

Lili: There was a free concert series during the summer called Fort Reno. Did you go for it?

Luke: Yeah, of course.

Lili: That's how we started talking to Ian Svenonius. We would see him hanging around looking cool. I remember he wore raincoats when it wasn't raining, just because. Like, "What?!" 

Jack: What was the band called? 

Lili: Pocket Rockets.

Jack: Hell yes. Okay. 

Lili: We had a CD on Teenbeat. 

Luke: Oh, I forgot that shit. 

Lili: What? Whoa, okay. Cue a Pocket Rockets song.

[Pocket Rockets “The Youth Can Have It All”]

Jack: I'm curious about, like many people of your era, our era, you know... 

Lili: I'm older than you.

Jack: You're older than me. But like, make the transition from like more or less indie rock or whatever adjacent...

Lili: Twee pop.

Jack: Right, I'm sorry.

Lili: Twee glam.

Jack: ... Make the transition to electronic music.

Lili: A really good question. 

Jack: I'm very curious about what your path into that was. 

Lili: So when I was in university I kind of lost touch with my bandmates from the teenage band. They had gone away to school and I was sort of getting more into collecting records, a lot of Nonesuch Explorer Series... 

Jack: Oh my God, I love the Explorer Series. 

Lili: The koto ensemble and the Balinese gamelan, I was more interested in exploring non-Western approaches to sound. And my major was art history with a focus on non-Western art. 

Jack: Oh, I didn't know that. 

Lili: Yeah, I got really heavily into Japanese art and African art. So with my involvement in those ensembles, I had a koto that I was borrowing from my sensei and I had to bring it with me to and from school. So I wanted to be able to replicate that experience somehow, just knowing that my time with the koto was coming to an end because I was about to graduate. I was about to move across the country. So I learned how to record music onto my laptop with just a preamp and a microphone. I started by experimenting with just the koto that I was borrowing and just playing the sounds. And I even was using a delay pedal because I played guitar in my glam band. I was using Audacity basically to manipulate the sounds of the koto and then ultimately other handheld instruments. When I moved to the West Coast I no longer had a koto, but that's where I got really experimental. Glockenspiel, and then slowing that down and and trying to replicate the gamelan experience and from there, because also in DC alongside the more rock, post-rock, punk, there was Manhunter. 

Luke: Oh yeah.

Lili: So there was a little electronic music. I procured, I inherited a drum machine, Boss DR-5, I think, and I started just messing around. But yeah, there was also Jan. Shout out Jan Woo. 

Luke: Oh yeah, he had the newsletter. 

Lili: Yes. 

Luke: He had a mass email.

Lili: That's how I got into minimal wave stuff. 

Luke: That's how I learned so much shit through that. 

Jack: Wait, who had the newsletter?

Luke: Jan Woo. 

Jack: Wow, really? Shout out Jan. 

Lili: Aurora [Halal] is from the DC area, shout out Aurora. I'm like all over the place now because there was Body Actualized [Center], I mean that's later...

Jack: Well, this is all important for me, because I feel like I've pieced together so much stuff from Greg [Zifcak] and Andre [Ferreira] and you.

Luke: I'll wait until my turn, but you're reminding me... 

Lili: Anyways, I moved to SF literally ten days after I graduated. I didn't really put much thought into it, I had saved up $2000... I don't know, in San Francisco, there was the scene in Oakland and punk and noise, but I didn't really get into that. I didn't really get into the noise scene until I moved back east. In San Francisco I knew I wanted to leave. I went to Japan for a while, from SF I knew I was going to move to New York. It wasn't like, "I'm going to move to New York and I'm going to be an artist." It was more like, "This is where my parents are from." It's not, "All my other friends are moving to New York." It's just where I'm going to end up. It just made sense in between SF And New York. I stayed in Tokyo for a while and I would go to Club Yellow and other electronic music parties. That's where I got more into the experience of going to a techno party, at a club, and staying out until 5 a.m., 6 a.m. or whatever. We'd go to Saizeriya, it's an Italian family style restaurant that was open 24 hours. We'd go there after the club night. 

Jack: So it's a steady, like, getting more into it.

Lili: A slow burn. 

Jack: As it always is.

Luke: This is good shit.

Jack: Slowly getting pilled on electronic music, club music, weirder music. 

Lili: Yeah. There was this blog called 20 Jazz Funk Greats. 

Jack: Oh my God. Yeah, of course. Super formative. 

Lili: The guy ended up doing Tri Angle Records. I forget, I didn't follow it religiously, but I don't even remember if I had submitted this track or if he just found it on my MySpace. But I did a cover of "Give Me Your Love" but I did it on my very minimal electronic equipment I had, which was that Boss drum machine.

Jack: We might have to play this. 

[51717 “Give Me Your Love”]

Lili: Just in terms of putting myself out there, it's always come from a place of naïveté.

Jack: It always is. 

Lili: Yeah, because also when I lived in SF, going back to those literally kitchen table experiments, glockenspiel and whatever, I put together a CD-R and I brought it to Aquarius Records, which I heard is no longer there. I was like, "Oh, if you guys wanna sell this." And so that was my first foray into the experimental electronic music scene. 

Jack: Obviously, they took the CD. 

Lili: They did! I don't know if anyone bought it. 

Jack: We'll have to track down the copies.

Luke: You did it on consignment and you're still going back for your $20.

Lili: I bought one from Discogs because I wanted a copy for my records. But I should have mentioned my band HITS in DC. Do you remember HITS? It was before I moved to the West Coast, I was in a free jazz band. Me and my two female friends, Jessica and Lindsey, both of whom were not musicians and actively hated music. [laughter] They were, like, party girls. Although Lindsey is a lawyer now. But we started a band and I played recorder and guitar, Jessica played the drums and Lindsey played saxophone and we just basically existed for a summer. But that was also, like, I realized we could just do this and it's just fun. 

Jack: Was it like The Shaggs or something? 

Lili: It was just like... Yeah. 

Jack: Sounds great.

Lili: So if anyone has a copy, probably someone in Japan. 

Jack: There's recordings. 

Lili: We put out a CD-R. 

Jack: Oh my God. We need this. 

Lili: This guy, Shino, who's obsessed with the DC music scene. He probably has a HITS CD. 

Jack: We need to track this down. If I can't track this down by the time the podcast is out, I'm going to say, if anybody has a copy of this, please contact me or contact Lili. Don't contact Luke. 

Luke: Yeah, I'm like, "Yeah, contact me." I'm getting phone numbers. [laughter] You gotta play the tracks, I like that idea. 

Jack: Yeah. I think I will. It's going to be every 15 seconds there'll be 30 seconds of music.

Lili: I think that's where the sort of trolling, I don't want to say we were trolling, but we were also like... 

Jack: But you have a mischievous side to you.

Lili: It's a Gemini thing.

Jack: Of course. 

Lili: Dragon Energy. 

Jack: Absolutely. That's why Lili and I are close friends. 

Lili: You're my brother. 

Jack: That's right. All right, so how about we go and we start it all over again with Luke. What was your first experience with music? 

Luke: So earliest shit was... When Lili was saying that she would hide the listening, I always thought that was odd. I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but I did that as well. It's good to know I wasn't the only weirdo. I would listen to stuff on the way to swim meets. When I was super nervous, my mom would play Dire Straits, the self-titled record. "Sultans of Swing" and all that shit, but "Down to the Waterline" is great, all the lesser, not "Sultans", tracks. She would play cassettes on the way to the swim meets and I would get all jazzed up. And my dad played tapes from students, who would give them to him. He tried to be cool to me when he would visit me and be like, "I have young people music." Talking Heads, which was not new at that time, but Remain in Light I became obsessed with really quickly.

Jack: One of the greatest records ever. 

Luke: It's still, like, top shit for me, but we would play that cassette with him. My mom would play her own shit and also just like soft rock on the radio, mom stuff that is enduringly deep for me. I mean, that's me in a nutshell. Mr. Mushpile over here. But so I would have those private moments of like, "Oh, I'm not going to tell my mom that I like this song." Like, I'm secretly excited, I wouldn't tell her to rewind shit. Why not like, "Wait, can you play that again, Mom?" That I was having that kind of enjoyment felt...

Jack: Like it was illicit or something. 

Luke: Yeah, it was like, "Why?" And then later I also did the Columbia House joint but I literally did not own any... No, Nelson, I think was the first cassette because I was blonde back in the day. I was like, "Those men look like me." Anybody blonde I thought looked like me. Didn't make any sense. 

Jack: You were naturally blonde back then?

Luke: Yeah, dirty blonde.

Jack: What happened? Just For Men? 

Luke: If I go in the sun it gets lighter again.

Jack: Wow, okay.

Luke: You know, my eyebrows are always dark. It came out completely orange and my skull was like this. Those are other details. But it took me until I was, like, 13 to buy my own music. Besides the one Nelson. I bought two Nelson cassette singles or whatever. I like the guitar part on that "Love and Affection" song, I still listen to that at the gym actually. Kind of 12-stringy sounding arp thing. But yeah, 13, 14, seventh, eighth grade. I was literally breaking away from my parents, mom specifically, and trying to be, not consciously doing this, but forming an identity in a really hackneyed, teenage way and just having a sense of that music was a way into a particularity of a point of view, which I had no idea about because my mom doesn't have that way of seeing the world. Kind of like a secret society of cues and tonal stuff that you can share and use code words through aesthetics or something. I was like, "Oh, that's the kind of person I am." I'm becoming that as I'm getting, you know, zits and growing pains and grew a foot in a year and all this shit. I'm like, "I gotta listen to stuff that reflects a change for me," not thinking that, but Sonic Youth Dirty was on the fucking Columbia House ad in '92 and I got that and I remember playing that the cassette on this boombox. I did a haunted house. My parents were away and I made my little sister sit behind the couch. She was, like, 6. I was like, "Say 'chocolate chips' over and over." And then I played Dirty on this boombox in my room, turned all the lights off and invited my friends over. And there was just that "Drunken Butterfly" song playing like, "Bzzzzz." I was in seventh grade. They come in, they're like, "What is that cacophony coming from his room? What is that little girl voice saying, 'chocolate chips' from somewhere?"

Jack: Wow. That's insane. 

Luke: It's kind of sick, all the lights are off, I was like, "Come by!" And then I'm hiding in my room, giggling insanely, probably pissing in my pants, you know... I understood that that record as, like, prank music. I was like, "This is just not understandable." I would read Spin and stuff and, like, these are the important records this year. Even at that age, I was like, "I want to know."

Jack: Like 13.

Luke: Now I react against this idea of a "canon," like what's happening now, you know? But I was like, "Really?" Like, I need to be hip, not knowing that I was even doing that, you know?

Jack: Because even at that point, it's the canonization of rock. It's like, "Velvet Underground, greatest band of all time." 

Luke: Yeah. I started to take guitar lessons in seventh grade. 

Jack: With:

Luke: Charles Bissell from The Wrens. At that point, they had not done that record where they had a good success with it, Secaucus, but the Wrens existed at that time. Amazing guy, at Woodside Music School in Washington Township or Park Ridge, rather, Jersey where James Gandolfini is from. But this all kind of happened in one year of like, "I'm going to start to take guitar. This is my identity that I want to take on as a project." There was an issue of Interview magazine where they covered innovative new guitarists. This was when Interview was still big, you know? And it was these really cool photos of, I forgot who else was in it, but it was [Stephen] Malkmus, you know, Pavement dude, with a Gibson Les Paul on top of his head, like a profile. And he just had pieces of paper taped on the guitar with words on it and duct tape, which I always loved. I always loved duct tape my whole life. I was like, "That's cool." It's like, "I don't know why I like this," but that's still my aesthetic: duct tape and pieces of paper on a guitar. The way into music, through this visual pranksterism and beauty or whatever, which I was like, "I'm going to go buy Slanted and Enchanted."

Jack: Formative record for a lot of people. 

Luke: And I bought that and drove around in my dad's car like, "This is like, whaaa." So there was taking guitar lessons with Charles. I would bring in... I was also listening to borderline bad shit, which is good. 

Jack: Like what? 

Luke: Like The Lemonheads. 

Jack: Oh, come on! 

Luke: I was obsessed with Evan Dando. My dad brought me to one of the first shows I saw, this big show at Virginia Tech. The Lemonheads. But I would bring in cassettes of The Lemonheads, but then, like, Royal Trux to my guitar teachers.

Jack: How old were you at this point?

Luke: 13.

Jack: Wow.

Luke: Because I was just reading the fucking magazines, like "I have to get this, this and this." And then there was no internet, really.

Jack: If this is 1993 or '94?

Luke: I would listen through the whole cassette. I would take it like a student thing where I'm like, "Somebody in authority said this is good. So I'm going to listen to it four times back and forth."

Jack: There's, like, 2 good songs on it. 

Luke: But I would then have patience for the stuff that wasn't good. 

Jack: Which is extremely important, [but] since the iTunes era, where people just get the one song... 

Luke: I have to discipline myself now not to do that, just to skip through shit. Like, if you can find structural interest in almost anything, you know. And I learned so much from that. I would roll up fucking quarters, I would steal quarters from my parents and take a $10 roll of quarters to the Sam Goody down the street and buy these cassettes. And they almost never had what I had read about in Spin or whatever fucking dumb mag.

Jack: My dad used to write for Spin. 

Luke: I didn't know that.

Jack: Isn't that weird? So from there, what was the next step, making the move from "I like this weird music" to "There are people my age who are into music like that," or "There is a scene that exists that is accessible to me."

Luke: Well, all I ever wanted to do was make a record. This is, again, pre-internet. So objects mattered a lot to me. I just wanted a square of expression on a shelf with my other... This is why I try to kind of lay off myself when I get mad about, you know, crawling around in the fucking DJ booth, at Good Room, whatever my misbehavior might be. I'm like, "Dude, all you ever wanted to do..." 

Jack: We're getting hints about what you did last night. 

Luke: Friday, Friday.

Jack: Okay, right.

Luke: All I ever wanted to do was make a fucking record that's going to sit on the shelf with those other records. And I've done that 15 times over. So what? Can I cut myself some slack?

Jack: You should, hopefully.

Luke: I wasn't lucky like you motherfuckers to play in a band when I was 15, I kept searching, and now I don't want to do that, because the computers have saved my life. But at that time, I was obsessed. I was like, "Just fucking come and play!" And just knowing how to do, like, chord notes and things within a scale. I got a delay pedal and just played with myself. I would make a loop and just wank off over my own shit. And that's basically what I did forever. Even college. I couldn't connect with a meaningful collaboration so I still just played by myself. 

Jack: And you went to Bard? 

Luke: Yeah, just for a year. I got kicked out for starting a club called Club Destroy. 

Jack: Talk about that just briefly, if you could, please. 

Luke: It's funny, man. I gotta find it, there's a really funny photo of me in the school newspaper: "Two drunkard maniacs take over the Budget Committee meeting." And it's just a picture of me, like, somehow with a double chin, I'm making this weird face. I almost want to use that for the Toxic Sincerity album cover.

Jack: Coming soon on Flea and Valcrond Video!

Luke: Club Destroy! Anyway, there was no music shit there that happened. But I did record electronically for the first time, there was this guy Joe in my dorm who had an MPC. The track is actually pretty good, I found it the other day. It's guitar over these really basic MPC beats and an Orson Welles vocal sample. It sounds cool. 

Jack: Cue track. 

[Luke Wyatt & Joe Carey “Untitled”]

Luke: Yeah, but I just wanted to buy a 4-track, that's all I wanted to do, and record over myself. And after I got kicked out, I moved back to Jersey and bought a digital 4-track and worked at the Mahwah Deli. Shout out to Les Hosier at the Mahwah Deli. I saved up, it was fucking expensive, at that time it was like $900 or some shit for the MiniDisc one.

Jack: Oh wow. The MiniDisc one. 

Luke: Yeah, and I just got obsessed with recording. I didn't use any percussion or anything and would just record layered guitars and got really into U2. I was obsessed with, like a lot of folks, The Edge's clean, glistening delay thing. And as soon as I got the delay pedal, that's all I'd do. Okay, so I got kicked out of college, then basically got kicked out of my mom's house, I was just sitting around, wanking off. So I went down to DC because my dad had an apartment. He wasn't really there all the time because he's on sabbatical teaching in Maryland. So that's how I got down there. And pretty quickly... DC is so small that, if you have any sense of taste or ambition to have that and project taste, you can find those people. 

Jack: You'll find all of those people in a week. 

Luke: I worked at this place called Sparky's. Remember Sparky's Coffee Shop?

Lili: Yeah!

Luke: It was around the corner from this store called Meeps, which is a second hand store, that Danni Sharkey, who is Andrew Morgan's wife, now a great, great old friend of mine. She owns that place with her partner. And they would come by Sparky's and just yap it up with me or whatever, you know, joke city. 

Jack: As per usual with Mr. Hawk. 

Luke: And Ian would come by all the time, Svenonius, too. He was a real latte freak. 

Jack: Is that code for something else? [laughter]

Luke: No, he just loved the coffee, that's his only drug, man. I just lucked out because they literally just would come by every day. And Andrew Morgan, who was her boyfriend at that time, we became super tight. He was my best friend down there. Yeah, but he ran this label PPU was at that time for real but he'd only put out a couple records. This is like 2000. Two or three. 

Jack: I didn't know he's been around that long. 

Luke: Well, I don't even know if he'd put anything out, I'd have to look at the Discogs, but yeah, he'd been flipping records since he was a teenager. 

Jack: He's like a super digger. 

Luke: Oh yeah. That was his hustle since he was a kid, almost. I'm not sure that's completely accurate but he was really good at it. He'll put on a record... I haven't seen him too fucking long by the way. But anytime you see him, he'll get this look on his face. He'll put on this record that will just, like, crack you up or blow your mind in the end. Just a look of suppressed glee. I was only into noise guitar shit or, like, melodic, good, noisy guitar shit and I didn't have much interest or patience with electronics, really, at all. And him playing a lot of boogie shit, there's often a drum machine or a keyboard, obviously. But the way into electronics for me was, I think, really just hearing that music all the time then,  so I got inured to it and found an interest in the specifics of that. And then the other thing with Andrew, he knew the younger guys Ari [Goldman] and the other Andrew, Field-Pickering. And they, as I mentioned before, would have these parties at his dad's place outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I went to this one, I guess I only went one time. And Andrew brought me and my other friend John, and that was the younger scene, like Lili mentioned, which was much more engaged with the potentials of electronics. I forgot if I'd met Aurora before. I don't know, I don't remember. But she was there. Jan was there. Jason Letkiewicz, Steve Summers, you know, and then the [Beautiful] Swimmers, I don't think they were calling themselves that yet. 

Jack: What year was this? 

Luke: 2006 or 7, I think pretty soon before I moved up here. It was like an all-night, taking substances and listening to... I never really understood that you could have this kind of relationship with dance music and or non-dance electronic stuff.

Jack: That’s this visceral, experiential thing.

Luke: It's interesting that it's also wild and not fucking douchey. It was the foundation of an entire weekend for these young, really engaging seeming people that I basically just met that one time and that opened up... I got on Jan's email list, he started sending me the frickin' newsletter. Lovefingers, I started checking his shit out. Ron Morelli was actually at the time I went, the first person to ever give a fuck and ask me for anything. I sent some fucking demos to some stupid, like... I just didn't understand the electronic context, like what labels were doing, anything that would make sense for my voice or whatever. So I would get this weird feedback or just no response. But he actually solicited shit from me. He really dug that shit and then did the first, Tarifa, for that white label. Pretty soon after I did the Jason video and then, yeah, just boom, boom, boom. And then the Lili video before I moved to Berlin. 

Lili: Shadowlust.

Jack: Oh yeah, of course.

Luke: Have you watched that?

Jack: I don't think so. I'm familiar with Shadowlust but I don't think I've seen the video. 

Luke: That's a great one. I had two cameras, but this one particular VHS, which had this... Each VHS is like a frickin' human, the camcorders, they have these weird tonal specifics. There's just, like, a weird haze to one corner of the frame, you know? There's just something about it with this bouquet of flowers which became the cover, like the way that it just washed out. But it's also kind of saturated.

Jack: I remember that cover. 

Luke: The last scene she's pushing the bouquet across the floor, it's so cool looking. It's cool. 

Lili: To me, it was very meaningful to be in your space, which was in South Williamsburg, which is where my grandfather grew up. It's a lot of heavy sort of ancestral devotion, as the name of this track was "Devotion." There was a very haunted feeling for me. And when we did that one scene in the elevator. 

Luke: The crazy freight freight elevator? 

Jack: This was when you were living at Lorimer? 

Luke: Yeah, at 79. 

Jack: So, when did you meet Ron? 

Lili: I think I must have met him in the late teens. He would come down and DJ. 

Jack: So for a while before. 

Lili: I remember he did a house party in D.C. and then I remember being in Philly, I think with HITS, my girl group. We had a gig in Philly, and then there was a party that Ron DJ'd. So I always knew who he was and I always recall every time he DJ'd I had a fun time. It was just always a good party. Again, I also knew Jason and Ari from WMUC and that whole scene, Manhunter. And when I moved to New York formally in 2008 I started playing music with Matt Morandi, in 2009, right? He and I and Daren [Ho] actually had a band for a while. 

Luke: I went to that show with Jason and Aurora! 

Jack: What was that?

Luke: That was at freaking Irene's or...

Lili: There was a show, Pendu Disco, you know, Todd Pendu had a gothic party thing. So I knew Matt and Ron knew each other. For me personally, I don't know, I guess I felt more empowered about like, "Oh, I can keep experimenting, making music on my own." Then I reached out to Marquis [Cooper], Svengalisghost, who lived in Chicago. I had never met him but Ron had put out... 

Luke: That 285 [Kent] show he did was the first time he performed ever or in a long-ass time? It was so amazing. People were like, "This guy's never played or it hasn't played in so long." 

Jack: Like, live ever. 

Luke: It was incredible. 

Lili: Like, a 3 hour set.

Luke: Was that a Mutual Dreaming thing? 

Jack: This is so funny because this is, like, just right before I met you. 

Lili: Ron put out Svengalighost and he had a track called "High Heel Sleaze" and I remember I just sent him a message on SoundCloud, I was just like, "Fuck it." I really loved his vocals and I just sent him a message like, "Love your track, if you ever want to collaborate, I'd be really interested." We started riffing on just more non-musical influences, like architecture and film. And we started trading sounds back and forth over email and that's how Shadowlust began. We jammed in the same room for the first time ever on DJ Speculator's radio show, it was Christmas 2012. 

Jack: Yeah, totally. That's right after I moved here. 

Lili: You can find it on SoundCloud. And then we recorded our double LP, a 2XLP, is that what they call it? [laughter] In Porkchop's studio that winter. 

Jack: Shout out Porkchop.

Lili: Yeah, shout out John. It was all just sort of a few nights, we'd meet up and that's how the Shadowlust record came out. Then from there, I guess my professional relationship with Ron...

Jack: Blossomed from there.

Lili: But then I recorded a tape for Opal, this British guy who runs Opal Tapes. He contacted me, he was like, "I want to put out Shadowlust." And I was like, "No, no, no." In my mind I said, "That's a L.I.E.S. band." But I said, "Unfortunately, yada, yada, but I have some solo experiments if you'd be interested." And then that's how my current iteration of my moody, electronic, yada, yada, thing. That tape came out I think in 2012 or 2013. My first solo tape. And then that empowered me. 

Jack: Wow, that was really your first solo tape? I guess I didn't realize that, that's so funny, because that's right when I met you right in 2013.

Luke: How did you guys meet?

Jack: We met at a party, we met through our friend Chad [Corbi]. 

Lili: You had gotten a haircut from Container, a bowl cut. [laughter] 

Luke: I heard about this! Amanda told me about this shit. I'm always hearing about you getting prank haircuts. 

Jack: Yeah, Ren [Schofield] had given me a haircut, this was, like, 2013. 

Luke: What's up with the honey badger haircut? 

Jack: Oh my God, yeah.

Luke: Amanda was talking about your honey badger haircut. 

Jack: Yeah, that was a result of that because it was so fucked up that I could have just Bic'd it but I was like, "You know what? I'm going to let this go." And then the only way to make it usable in any way is I let it grow and trimmed certain sides of it and I had the little Dutch boy haircut.

Luke: There should be a Jack haircut podcast. Jack's grooming podcast.

Jack: The best of Jack's haircuts. Yeah, that's right. Ren, Container, had given me a haircut. One of his legendary haircuts. He called it The Bodega. There's probably a photo that exists of it somewhere. But that's funny, Luke, I remember we met briefly at a party or a show at The Schoolhouse that Jason and Nik Bookworms played. You were just there, maybe you played, I forget.

Luke: I played there like with my girlfriend the night that I got dosed on fucking methedrone or whatever. 

Jack: Methedrone? What is this, a Philip K. Dick novel? 

Lili: Remember that gig in that basement? You were on ketamine?

Luke: The one that Marquis played? Yeah. I'm not going to call out people, but it was the first time [redacted] and I had ever even seen ketamine. Some guy, a fucking fat dude with sweatpants and like a white plate, he's cutting up ketamine. The plate was white and this guy's all chubby with sweatpants. Forget the chubby part, no body shame over here. [laughter] But I'm like, "I can't even see what you're doing, it's white powder on a plane and this is a new powder to me?" But there was this girl just rolling around the floor like, "Bleah!" This kind of sounds wild but we had no metric, I thought about it like cocaine or something. Like, "This is how much you should do."

Lili: Someone was ripping Jason's shirt off. I remember that.

Luke: Yeah! 

Jack: Where was this party? 

Lili: Danny Moore had a... 

Jack: The Ho_se! Yeah. Dude, I was probably at that, I was at, like, every show there. 

Luke: I didn't know I was sitting without a seat beneath me. [laughter]

Jack: That's where they ran the Showpaper out of.

Luke: Marquis just let his shit play, he let his machines play and went upstairs and was just hanging out with us and I was like, "Dude, are you playing your set?" He's like, "Yeah, it's being played, by my machines." Like, "I'm up here now with you."

Jack: Wow. 

Luke: It was hilarious. 

Jack: I probably was at that.

Lili: I was wearing a trench coat. I think you said I looked like an obvious assassin.

[Shadowlust “Fluid Distortions”]

Lili: Well, for me in terms of my further path in the scene or I don't want to use that word... But when I learned about Yellow Tears it was very formative for me because of their ritualistic use of water and because for all of these years I was trying to differentiate myself from the family I grew up in, this very stoic kind of... The environment of the synagogue, I don't know how to even describe it right now, I'm drunk, but it's very minimalist, let's just say, and when the service is being led, the cantor, you know, in an Orthodox setting, his back is to the congregation. Something about being introduced to these rituals by Yellow Tears and then going to noise shows, I felt a sense of belonging that I hadn't felt really ever in the music scene. 

Jack: That's right. 

Lili: There's, you know, the dance music where I could get lost and I didn't feel judged for just naturally being like a wallflower. I'm much more comfortable if I can observe. So that was really important, to discover this other world. 

Luke: But I didn't know any of that shit, though, which is bizarre to me. Well, because I moved away, partially.

Jack: But also there's things that coexist, you know, at the same. 

Luke: Now that we're pals, it still sometimes boggles my mind that that didn't happen in 2014, you know? But I was gone for three years or whatever. No, I will just say that like leaving New York, I'm not sure that I rep... Going to Germany was the nail in the coffin for me about taking dance music or electronics seriously, because I literally never got to that level of a thing. And I still can't get into Berghain on my own volition. 

Jack: I heard it might be closing by the end of the year. 

Luke: Good! [laughter] I joke, I joke!

Jack: Oh! But you moved to Berlin, you were there for three years, and then what? What made you not want to be there anymore? 

Luke: I got signed to Mexican Summer and started making, like, NPR music, not knowing that, like... 

Jack: Which is what we know and love you for. 

Luke: It's just my obliviousness, like, I'm fucking making fun of you about, like, "Jack, why didn't you eat before the podcast?" Whatever my quibbles are, I didn't know that my bread and butter was playing gigs, because I was just playing two gigs a weekend or whatever, the dream shit that I was taking for granted because everybody in my community was doing the same shit, you know. I kind of was looking down on it as well, as it was happening to me. I didn't realize that I kept putting out dance-ish records, not like I ever really put out dance records, but they thought I did because bookers don't even listen to your shit, they just... 

Jack: They just see that you're on L.I.E.S. and they're like, "Oh, so you make techno." 

Luke: "Oh, you're kind of cute." [laughter] 

Jack: That's the other thing that really unifies you guys. You guys are the only people on L.I.E.S. who...

Luke: We're both cute!

Jack: You're two hot people who...

Luke: The only cute L.I.E.S. artists! 

Lili: For me, to make a room of Europeans dance is, like, traumatic for me. 

Jack: Oh, I'm sure. 

Lili: Europeans who are on drugs, that is harsh. 

Jack: And you're just doing this, like, soundscape thing.

Lili: I don't know what I'm doing! I don't want to make a room full of Germans dance, chas v'sholom!

Jack: No, no, no.

Lili: That's why Shadowlust didn't work out, honestly, because I just couldn't get into making Europeans move their asses.

Jack: Because you were there, I remember in late 2013 or something. You spent six months there, right? 

Lili: In Europe, I was in Berlin, Paris. 

Jack: Right. But this was before Luke had moved over there. 

Lili: That was my French period. 

Jack: Ouh la la. 

Luke: I remember talking to you about that experience, but I forgot that was before. But yeah, I stopped getting gigs, that's why I moved back, because I signed exclusively to Mexican Summer, not really realizing I should be putting out 12"s with other labels to keep people... Just for the bookers, not to pay attention to the music, but see the label pop up like, "Oh, he put it out on this." [laughter] I could put out the NPR music on the other labels. Mexican summer had no fucking clout obviously in that context, it did not endear me to clients.

Jack: To Tresor.

Luke: Yeah.

Jack: But you moved back, you still have the records on Mexican Summer, that you almost bankrupted them with. 

Luke: Yes, I drove them into...

Jack: Insolvency.

Lili: You had a Scientology kind of looking one, like self-help.  

Luke: Oh yeah! Yeah, this self-help, which I'm still trying to do. 

Jack: With the NTS show. 

Luke: For my Patreon. [laughter] Yeah, but that was one of the first gigs I did over there, playing at NTS, the old one in Hackney, right next to the jerk chicken spot. With AFP too, that was a fun time. With the funny-ass British plastic public urinals. I got a good pic of him peeing... From behind! That square where they had the spot with people playing soccer and making chicken. But they love my shit.

Jack: It's a very popular show, I must say. 

Luke: Yeah. I don't look into it. I get postcards, they send postcards to NTS. 

Jack: Wow. Yeah, I would say it's notorious among... I'd say at this point, people know your show as much as they know your music. 

Luke: I was at Clandestino and some motherfuckers heard me talking and... 

Jack: They heard your voice. No shit.

Luke: Did I tell you this already?

Jack: No!

Luke: They heard me talk and were like, "You are the dude that does that show." 

Jack: No way. They're like, "Ivan! Ivan! A round of drinks!" That's amazing, that's great. That's kind of the best you could ever... 

Luke: And we're engaged. [laughter]

Jack: I mean, hey, this is why we all make music with our voice, you know? What's better than being recognized in public for the obscure-ass art that you make? 

Luke: The speech thing, just to put a bow on it or whatever, which brings it back to a Jack-connected thing... Once I started focusing on speech, really through the radio show, now I've done it for three, four years. How long has it been?

Jack: Crazy.

Luke: Before the show. I didn't know that that was a thing that I could do performatively consistently that was going to be engaging to my own practice. This record I put out on Rush Hour, the no label shit that Mark [Cremins] does, I had a song called "Not Quite Music" where I'm making fun of Bob Dylan, I'm just singing, I'm talking over a track and I'm like, "This is not quite music, Bob Dylan's not quite music." I was really against words in music. Music should be an escape from words.

Jack: Hey, I completely feel that. For years, I literally could not connect with lyrics to songs, whereas I was so into notes. And now it's the other way around. 

Luke: Now all your shit is all speech up the wazoo. 

Jack: I can't connect to music, but I love words. [laughs] 

Luke: The synchronicity of us doing shit that's around language is wild. 

Jack: It's amazing. And now, for people in radioland, we're putting out Luke's new LP. 

Luke: You were really the first person that heard that record and galvanized, like, that it was a good work. 

Jack: It's an incredible record. 

Luke: It's the only time I've ever let another human name one of my records. 

Jack: That's crazy. Well, I mean, I don't think I've ever named someone else's record.

[Torn Hawk “Thoughts”]

Jack: So you did your half a year in Paris in 2014 and you were really gunning. You were making a lot of music.

Lili: No, I wasn't, really. 

Jack: Really?!

Lili: I had some gigs that didn't work out. That's when I recorded a record that ended up being released by Jealous God, Silent Servant and Regis's boutique label. Because I had gigs with Shadowlust that just… I’m not going to go into why they didn't work out.

Jack: Sure, sure. 

Lili: But yeah. Blah, blah, blah. I didn't have money, so I was recording music in this little studio. A friend of mine whose mother is an architect let me stay there for free. I just made some music.. I forget, Juan [Mendez] was a fan of Shadowlust. I sent him a message, I was like, "Thank you for your support, it means a lot." We just started corresponding and I just happened to have some music. It came from a very lonely place. Pretty dark period. But I do believe every American artist should have their Parisian phase. 

Jack: Believe me, man, I'm about to.

Luke: I remember some shit you told me that I'm not going to say, some funny-ass shit. 

Jack: Because you came back and you moved in with me.

Lili: I came back and Luke was the one that was like, "You should be a cocktail waitress." I don't know why, how, or what the...

Jack: You were working at Sel Rrose, and you got Lili the job?

Lili: No, other way around.

Jack: What?! So you [Luke] suggested to Lili to be a cocktail waitress...

Lili: I came back to New York and quiet-quit my job at a very high end boutique, which is now doing very well. 

Jack: God bless them. 

Lili: And I was like, "This is actually a kind of a good idea." I knew working nights would be conducive to doing more music gigs, blah, blah, blah. And I got this job as a cocktail waitress at Sel Rrose and I started working. It was still kind of word-of-mouth, it wasn't super busy yet. And then it became a very popular place. I ended up being a manager there just because I had been there for so long. And Luke, you started working there.

Luke: Yeah, when I came back. 

Lili: It was fun.

Jack: It's so funny, we used to go there all the time because you were working. That was always the move, where it would be like, "Ding Dong's playing." Meet up at Sel Rrose, go over... Aye, aye, aye. 

Lili: Now I can barely stay awake. 

Jack: Yeah, me too. That's what I'm saying. 

Luke: Do you still wake up at 6:45 still or whatever?

Lili: I don't get up that early, but... 

Jack: Well, I would say we've come to a good point to say that at this point our collective scene of people... 

Luke: Is that what this is about? It's about getting it back to Jack. 

Jack: It's about me. Back to me. 

Luke: Back to Jack, that's the title of the podcast. 

Jack: Back to Me. Seven Degrees of Separation from Jack. 

Luke: How do these people connect to me. 

Jack: Me. Me me me me me. 

Luke: Fast forward, I have to say, this can be on the record, Jack being a very intuitively warm friend presentation to my pops and stepmom, and orchestrating a fairly autistic boy-hang at Gottscheer [Hall], where my stepmom held forth about jazz and film, that was a high point for this motherfucker over here. 

Jack: That's sweet. That was good, we talked about Lennie Tristano and some other stuff. 

Luke: From the get-go you came in, like, "You know about this stuff?" And just very reflective and listening vibes. She was super happy.

Jack: Well, on that note, I want to say thank you very much. 

Luke: You should leave that part in. 

Lili: We'll see what makes it to the final cut. Thank you very much, Lili, my dear friend. 

Lili: Thank you. 

Jack: And Luke, my dear friend. 

Luke: Thanks a lot.