I sat down with Daniel Stewart, known to most as DX on a midsummer’s afternoon to sip on some cheeky frozen margaritas. The courtyard of Mexico 2000 seemed appropriate,we were alone save a few kids screaming and running around in Minion gear. It was sunny and cheerful but decorated with fake plastic flowers. The place feels secluded and a best kept felt secret in a neighborhood where there are no secrets left but was not immune to the elevated J trains incessant rumble, a reminder every ten minutes of where you are. DX and I had corresponded through email a few times last year. Though Total Control’s Typical System was one of my favorite records of 2014 (probably tied in First place with Amen Dune’s Love), I never anticipated a chance to speak to anyone in the band for an interview. Despite fan’s expectations of a tour after the stellar album dropped, the Australian group decided against it and there were seemingly few transmissions with the public afterwards. I was utterly delighted at the opportunity to speak to DX, while he enjoyed some time in New York City before a few U.S. Total Control shows this past August.

Typical System felt like a grand leap from Total Control’s freshman full length, Henge Beat. That is not to say that Henge Beat is not stellar, but Typical System transcends genre, expectation or any hint of redundancy. I can’t forget the first time that I ever heard it; I grew exceedingly more excited with each track, completely enamored. It is very rare that you listen to anything for the first time in that way, hanging on every note and word, floored, wondering where things might go but unable to cheat yourself and skip around a bit. Typical System is mysterious, sexy, smart and completely hard hitting.

Spending time with DX is a interesting because he is uniquely aware of himself, his world and his intentions. He can revel in carnal pleasure one moment and dissect philosophy the next, not that these two things should be considered inherently opposites. We had a chance to talk a bit about some books, about his bands and about the utility of a bad trip.

You have made yourself known as a loyal fan by publishing your own art and music zine, Distort as well as addressing your relationship to the Kinks later on with your zine Life Stinks I Like the Kinks.  As a fan of yours, I was wondering what your personal relationship is to fandom?

I first started listening to punk music in a small industrial town outside of Sydney. For a town that small, there were about twenty straight edge kids and about five or six fanzines going. I just considered that part of being into punk was contributing to it, straight away.

So a natural expression of fandom took on a very participative role?

Just part of being interested in music was wanting to make a band and part of being interested in the appreciation and criticism of the music and the building of the scene was making a zine. It was one of those unique moments in a scene when everything was accelerating rather rapidly and it was an exciting time, and I wanted to be part of it. I realized immediately that if I was interested in something that I might as well explore it to the utmost. The obsessive fanatic aspect of music appealed to me.

How do you respond to people who are massive fans of your bands? Do you ever feel alienated by fandom while also participating in the culture of fandom yourself?

It doesn’t happen very often. I am a big fan of what I do as well though, so I appreciate other people who feel the same way.

In terms of music writing- I started off doing it for myself. After doing it for a while I realized that there were opportunities to perhaps pursue music writing as some sort of career path. After attempting that, I was really disappointed by the realities of freelance writing. I hated how many people who are writers are only writing to make a quota or make some money and have no passion for what they are producing at all. I notice that you do not publish Distort online. I was wondering if there is a particular agenda to keeping your work exclusively in a physical realm or if that is just the way that you are accustomed to doing things after all these years.

It is a bit out of force of habit and having a work routine that I am comfortable with. I also feel like the physical side of the publication is really important to me. I do not read very well online. It is hard to pay attention. I read an article about the way that people tend to read online and it matched my behaviour exactly- you tend to read the first paragraph and then skip around from there on, grabbing information as it pleases your eye. It is hard for me to stay solidly focused on an entire block of text online with the exception being the Paris Review Interviews. I could spend hours or days on end reading every one that I could.

I went pretty crazy digging through the Paris Review archives finding interviews with Joan Didion, Hemingway and Faulkner.  That is one of the only times that I find myself being an online reader. Even when I am reading something from an individual that I find quite interesting, I find it hard to get anything from them online. When I have a physical product I read it better and I absorb the information better, and I feel like all the extraneous information that comes with it- the introduction to it, the photos that come with it… the product then seems to encapsulate a moment. You can put it down and five years down the line you can still see this moment that someone sweated and put it all together. So the way that I read is how I want to present the work that I make in the end.

I agree. I think it is kind of funny that I present most of my work online.  On the other hand I am happy to give access to my work for free to anyone in the world if they care to look at it.

That is very important. I think that it can be done well, I just don’t think that I can do it well- from reasons that range from a strange almost Luddite suspicion of online culture to an apprehension of what is does to my brain. I do not want to present myself as a person who is hostile towards the internet though. There are parts that I think have damaged my life, social media in particular, circulating drama but I do appreciate the access of information. I can find music that I could never have listened to otherwise, or be at a party and instantly be able to share a song that I love so much. I am not anyone who wishes that they grew up without the Internet, which is not my sort of scene. I do have a way of working and I do not see the benefits of becoming entirely involved with the online world.

Speaking a little more about books, I purchased the Institute Zagreb 1986 / The Air of Conquerors novella split by S.T. Lore off of your distro last year and thought that it was exceedingly brilliant. I was wondering what your relationship was with the author and if there is any sort of underground literary scene in Melbourne like there is in New York City. 

I lived with him for a couple of years and he is a really important person in my life. When I moved in with him he was working at a sleep hospital. He worked there about one night a week doing the overnight shift and that was enough to pay rent and get by. The rest of the time, eight to ten hours a day, he was writing. Watching someone that devoted to their craft was really inspiring to me. We would have conversations as he was coming out of two or three days of intense writing with the need to talk. Watching him go from an isolated place and then sitting down with me and reengaging with the world was so inspiring but there were things about his craft that I knew I couldn’t do. I was prioritizing music over everything. I love writing and I definitely reserve the future years of my life for becoming that single minded about writing after I have all this band stuff out of the way… but he was also a little older and had reached a point where he realized exactly what he wanted to do. It was very exciting to be around.

He wrote that book sort of while I was living with him. Our friend Helen published the book. She is an art theorist, she does an art journal called Discipline named after the Throbbing Gristle song. I took some copies on with Distort because I just knew that people would like it.

After the book was published, I had just done Life Stinks I Like the Kinks and S.T. asked me to do a reading at the launch. I had never done anything like that before. I had been publishing Distort for years but there was no reason to ever launch it or do readings from it. So he was also the first person to put me in front of a group of people and have me explain what I do. Because of the way that I operate I almost treat Distort like it is a secret life. I very rarely even give someone a copy physically or invite conversation directly. It was the first time that I had to explain myself and it was really uncomfortable and nerve racking but also really rewarding. In many respects S.T. Lore has been a pivotal figure in my life. And I am really excited about the book and I am glad that you brought it up because I really urge people to check it out.

I loved it completely and it was right up my alley, but I never would have heard about it if it were not for your distro.

It is a strange, absurd experience of reading and it is very well done. He has been writing more and living in Sydney.  S.T. is a great hustler with lots of great stories. Like once he was living in Canada and walked into a restaurant that said that they needed a chef. He wasn’t a chef but he immediately got the job and went back into the kitchen. The chef asked him to cut something and he was up front and told the chef that he didn’t know what he was doing. The chef hated the boss enough that he just sort of took S.T. under his wing and let him fake it and after about two months of making chef wages- pretty good- the boss came around and saw him cutting carrots. The Boss was like ‘you’re not a chef, are you?’ Simon was like ‘no’ and he was told to leave immediately. But he’s got so many stories like that. A wild character who has endured psychedelic mishaps. He has traveled extensively. I sure whatever he is working on right now will reach a wider audience and I would urge anyone to track down S.T. Lore and become involved in a very strange world.

Do you consider yourself a book lover? What are some of your favorites?

I really like Michel Houllebecq. I had read everything that he has written. He is a pretty divisive person. He has been condemned within the media for making pretty divisive comments about Muslims and religion. He went to court because he said that Islam was a stupid religion and was on the cover of Charlie when the magazine got shot up. He doesn’t reserve his ire towards any religion in particular but he is not afraid of being confrontational.

Overall… The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the Carson McCullers’s book. She wrote it when she was 23. Everything coming to mind right now is Southern… Flannery O’Connor… OK, Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal. I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus. [Kraus] started Semiotext(e). I Love Dick is a great exploration of fandom and obsession. She becomes obsessed with this guy but also talks a lot about art theory and the female experience of desire and obsession. Susan Sontag.

But my favorite experience with literature, and I have been talking to Elias [Ronnenfelt] about this a lot is Henry Miller. He was the guy who threw me into everything head first.

I am reading Tropic of Cancer right now and it was on my coffee table one morning after Elias slept on my couch after a heavy night. We got talking about the book and spent the rest of the morning watching Henry Miller interviews online.

I have been talking to him a lot about it. Henry Miller has a reputation of a misogynist and a crude individual but his books are so full of life. I really like books that writers write about other writers, also, and he wrote a book about Arthur Rimbaud that is phenomenal.

Ha! I am reading Edmund White’s book about Rimbaud right now as well! 

Edmund White wrote a book about Genet as well. It is a brick. It is the biggest book I own.

This book is easy! I just love Edmund White’s writing. I don’t want to talk too much about myself but I wrote my thesis on the evolution of queer language in literature from a historical context, exploring certain queer staples and experience and how time allowed for different narratives and language. I wrote a lot about Edmund White’s A Boys Own Story and while I loved the book, it is so repressed. I have just started his book on Rimbaud and I love it so much because his style is so present but the content allows him to be more open about his own life using parallels about this other writers life and the effects his writing many years later. He seems to find strength through Rimbaud, which is why he is writing about him, but he is also older and able to look back and is no longer than young man writing about his life at that time.

Rimbaud, at the same time as Miller, was one of the first experiences I had with writing that really blew my head off. But I try to read all the time when I am not drinking too much. The list that I am giving you is mostly recent obsessions but I think that most times that I have had a massive shift in thinking it has been because of a writer. I think the biggest shift was when I discovered Nietzsche and properly engaged with it. That was when my life fell apart, because it was much too powerful. And that was when Total Control started.

That would make sense with most of your lyrical content. You paint a modern dystopian landscape with many of your lyrics and I wonder if there were any general themes that come to mind regarding that bleak moment when you were starting Total Control?

At the time that Total Control started was about the time that I started getting into psychedelics. Phillip K Dick is an important thing to mention because he was instrumental in my curiosity of psychedelics. I hadn’t taken drugs in over a decade but when I read him as I was getting further and further away from a hardline mentality towards drugs but he really pushed me. I realized that I have always been attracted not towards the brilliant, shimmering good trip but the bad trip. All the cultures I am attracted to and all the moments within culture in the last fifty years were all of the bad trip moments. Punk to me was the bad trip after the hippies.

I love the hippie vision but punk, industrial, hardcore and metal always seemed to be the point in which…

The hippie possibility had ended…

Everything was closed down. Everything around you, instead of looking delightful seems horrifying. When I started Total Control I had a few bad trips and I was interested in music that spoke of the psychedelic experience but instead of focusing on the eye opening wonder it confronted reality and un-shifting horror seemed far more potent to me. I guess that would be the primary place that Total Control came out of, as well as our influences from the start- which was a lot of punk and post-punk stuff like Rikk Agnew… Christian Death always sounded like a bad trip to me.

Pretty Hellish.

Gary Numan also. He never sounded psychedelic but has very dystopian lyrics that referenced Phillip K Dick and stuff. All these things came together when Total Control started. I always had this dream of writing a sort of utopian novel as a response to all the dystopian novels of the fifties and sixties, because we are just living in that dystopian reality now. We are in the hell that visionaries painted. I dream of writing the utopian response to all of that, but I just can’t.

I don’t think that the time that we are living in is any more or less horrifying than it has ever been or that we are any closer or further away from the apocalypse than we have ever been but I think this is a thing that every generation and every life is just forced to deal with. When I look at what I am doing with Total Control and I look at all the bands or writers or artists that I like I think they are all battling similar things. I just think we have far more awareness of how horrific we are as a species but we’ve always had a suspicion about that anyway.

I kind of want to go back to the beginning of Total Control. I was looking up old interviews and saw Mikey talking about why you guys decided to expand from experimenting with a couple of synths and a drum machine to a full band and he said that ‘full bands are more fun to watch’ yet it seems that you guys are pretty selective about playing shows live and choose not to tour after releasing Typical System. You are about to play a few shows, including a couple shows in New York and L.A., however. Can you explain what role live shows play in the band today?

We are a really strange band when it comes to these sorts of things. Every step that we have taken has had no real planning behind it. Most of our decisions are incredibly spontaneous and just allow ourselves to align together. We all do other bands and stuff. At first it was just a project of Mikey, I and James. When we were offered a show, we took it. That is when the band came together. With the coming together of records, it has always been the sort of thing when we have enough songs to do a seven-inch, we do a seven-inch. When we have enough songs to do a record, we do a record.

Part of it comes down to Mikey being really busy. He works from home doing mixing work and mastering work and make movie scores. He is far more occupied with his living where as for the rest of us, we all do bands but we are working jobs at the same time. For us, touring is an escape from drudgery. For Mikey, it is still music and it is still part of his everyday life. I think that is part of the reason it takes us a while to get us to do stuff.

I also think, that as a group of people that our band has a really good dynamic. Not like any other group of people. I guess in many respects we must take things slowly while the expectation most people would have is that we should be accelerating. Whenever it seems that we are at a point that it would seem to be to our advantage to put a record together we don’t, or we go on tour. We have intentionally put ourselves in a position where we are not beholden to anyone. The label that we are on does not have any great expectations for us. Personally I would like to pressure us to get stuff done but the pace at which we work is our own. It’s not the normal thing where you put out a record and then you go on tour and shake everyone’s hands and build the next record to excel to some other place or a whole new level of exposure.

This sort of interview is really ideal for me; I prefer to talk to people face to face. Phone interviews and that sort of promotion have worn me down. Our exposure will probably shrink as we become more interested in doing things like this and decide to to talk to people from another world that we don’t have access to. We are a difficult band. We are a pain in the ass.

How about your relationship to live music?

I go and see bands live all of the time. Melbourne is really busy, there are shows going on all the time. A lot of my friends play in really good bands, I am fortunate. I suppose the bands that have been really impressing me lately are not rock bands. I guess that sort of explains what Mikey said about our band: there is an excitement to rock music. The best band that I saw last year are called Armour Group, they are a power electronics/ industrial band. I have not seen a phenomenal rock band in a while, but rock music will always be what I gravitate towards.

I try and play shows in small venues. I try to play shows inside because I hate being outside. I try not to play festivals because I hate festivals. I guess the ideal place to see anything would be a place where the PA is burning out, and it’s really loud. I’m not too smashed in there, but there are people around me. We can feel that we are part of something.

It is interesting that you approach your band at your own pace and there is also a sort of music machine that you guys have managed to avoid. The whole make a record every year, tour after every record, talk to pitchfork and all of that. There is nothing wrong with the system, really. But it is funny to be on the other side of your decision not to participate- after I fell in love with Typical System I just sort of assumed you’d tour the states to support it and I was incredibly bummed that you were not. It’s funny that fans do have certain expectations…

We’re not contrarians at all- we didn’t try to fuck with people’s expectations. There was no plan to it.  But us doing this tour is as weird as anything else that we have done… It just happened.

I had finally gotten rid of the immense anxiety that I had when the record first came out. I spent most of last year wanting to play the new songs. I was sort of treating the record with a sort of reverence that was borderline horror. It was an object of complete horror. I would play the songs and want to play them so much but knew that we couldn’t. I am excited.

We played a party recently in Melbourne, and it was pretty much the first time that we had played there in a year. Hearing the songs come together felt good. Since we are not incredibly active enough time had passed that I was excited to hear them.

That is really nice. I feel like half the time that something finally comes out that you grow sick of it or feels passé in your life. I had a tape come out recently with Ascetic House but the recordings were mostly a year old, from when we just started playing. When I first listened to the tape I wanted to run away with my tail between my legs and hide under a rock.

Typical System took a really long time to come out. I was ready for the elation of the record coming… It just didn’t come out for months and months and when it finally did come out… All of the themes and feelings had really soured and I was worried that if I listened to it that I would have a massive panic attack.

I defiantly feel that. The tape I was talking about starts with this embarrassingly raw song about a person who broke my heart and I can’t listen to it without feeling really stupid. Anyway, do you feel comfortable talking about some of those themes of the record?

The most direct thing that makes me feel uncomfortable is that there is a love song. The two main themes of the band have always been sex and death. I want to make records that would sound good to listen to when people are being intimate together, but a lot of the songs are also about death. It’s good; a lot of my favorite records are like that. The Stooges… They are one of my favorite bands and that has always been my experience listening to them. I can listen to them and think it sounds like really sexy music or if I am not in a good place listen to it and think that it is really dark and scary.

I never wanted to flirt with romantic sentimentality and this record stroke those themes at a couple of points. There are songs about a relationship that fell apart before the record came out.  I felt a little apprehensive about it. That was just me being afraid for no reason though, romanticism is not going to burn away or fade. Its just part of me. Now I think it is sort of charming that I was able to write a love song, which is really hard to do and beautiful when it is done right.

Which song on Typical System is the love song?

Flesh War is a love song. It is a song about love, but obsession as well. There a couple other ones that could be considered love songs but they are about other things as well and I wouldn’t want people to listen to them and think of them as love songs specifically.

Flesh War was intended to be a great pop song and a lot of great pop songs are love songs as well.

Typical System is the record that elevated me from a Total Control fan to an utter fanatic, but I think my favorite song still endures… “Carpet Rash”. It always registered to me as one part long distance longing for someone… something built up between two people but also dystopian sci-fi imagery.

I am not sure if I had heard the Roxy Music song “Every Dream Home a Heartache” or the song came afterward… but in that song the singer is in love with a latex doll. Anyway, I had a dream about someone having sex with a robot. It was a really erotic dream. The person having sex with the robot didn’t seem to have a gender. So they were just two blobs, one of them metal and the other one flesh. That inspired one of the images in the song. But that song was a song about direct intimacy with no connection in the end. I guess it was in many ways about me struggling with issues of intimacy and sex myself.

I would consider “Carpet Rash” to be one of the sexier songs but I suppose I morphed the lack of connection as being a result of space or circumstance and didn’t realize it was a misfire.

I suppose I also thought that I wanted Total Control to be arousing to incredibly asexual people and objects. I imagined if there were ever robots that were capable of communicating with us that we could write songs that would turn them on. That song falls into that idea. Songs with a real electronic pulse with real human feeling to them. Typical System, “Glass” in particular aims to arouse things that have never been aroused. There is another song that I am thinking of but people always think it is about something else- so I don’t want to say. I am entertained by that. Sometimes when I read interviews with bands I feel sort of betrayed because my idea of something was much ricer or more exciting than what some idiot made meaningful to me. This seems like a situation where I should take a step back.

I think this is important. I was talking to Mose (Institute) about this. I don’t present my lyrics to the band. Thankfully my band just trusts I am not singing about anything especially perverse or potentially racist or whatever. They just trust that I am not a dickhead in that respect. But every once in a while they will question what I said… and I will cross out my lyrics and write in what they thought. I like the idea that someone can mishear something but slam the idea home in a way, add to the absurdity of it. Absurdity is important to me- I am Australian and we don’t take things very serious at all.

As an entire nation?

Yes. We are frying under a horrible sun on inhospitable land and we have a queen that lives on the other side of the world… It just doesn’t make sense. We need a great sense of humor. I think that is why we can get along well when we travel.

Back to lyrics… Elias (iceage) pointed out your nearly autistic ability to remember every lyric to every song.

He was the first to confront me with that. But I have always loved singing. I used to write down lyrics as a kid in notebooks and sell them to kids at school. I’ve always been one to sing along to songs. I am happy now because I am doing what I have always wanted to do: sing for a band.

Back to recording, you mentioned in passing that you are interested in dabbling with auto-tune. I was wondering what possessed you.

One of my favorite records that came out in the past couple years was Burial’s Rival Dealer. I had only really heard auto-tune via American hip-hop. I was entertained when Cher did it. I was a bit attracted to it when Daft Punk used it. It just never sounded like something I would want to fuck with until I heard Burial.

Burial is a UK guy who was introduced to me as ‘post dubstep’ and at the time I didn’t even know what dubstep was. I was getting into UK techno at the time though…

Post dub step sounds a bit rough… 

Yeah sounds great, post dub step that dabbles in auto tune.  But I think that Burial is one of the most important artists I have discovered in the past decade. He has put out a series of phenomenal records and he is very thoughtful and composed about it. He put out a statement about Rival Dealer, which really made me check it out. He uses a lot of samples of someone speaking about trans identity and he wanted the record to give people who feel marginalized or bullied a feeling that they are being watched over or protected. The record is meant to make people feel strong.

Anyway, when I read his statement about the record I thought it was one of the most beautifully un-cynical and un-modern things I had seen written by an artist. It seems like the sort of thing that people are just going to laugh at because it is so naïve, it’s really lovely. It made me check the record out and it blew my head off. That was the first time that I heard auto tune and realized it was something that I really wanted to fuck with. I then got really into getting heaps high with my roommate and listening to Young Thug and Rich Gang and Atlanta stuff. Ultimately it is just so strange and alienating and none of my friends are doing it.  That being said I don’t know what I would do or how I would fuck with it. I should not have said it until I had done it because I am setting myself up for an atrocious failure.  But you should check it out, there are some songs that might take some time but I think there are moments you would like. Loke (Posh Isolation) is the only other person who I can connect with about Burial though. Other than that, I have not come across too many burial fans.

Well to continue on with studio tricks- last night we were talking about Black Sabbath and you told me that the band recorded the music slower so that they could speed up the recordings to have Ozzy’s vocals sound higher. You called it ‘cheating’ yourself and then when I acted a little bit disappointed you told me that Total Control had pulled off similar maneuovers with electronic songs in the past. I am a musician who only uses synthesizers, so I am in no way adverse to ‘faking it’ or doing what you have to do in the studio to make things sound better. I just wonder if you think that sort of manipulation affect the integrity of the music at all?

Not really. My first experience with this sort of thing was with break beat and hardcore techno when I was younger. Especially Austrian stuff like Bloody Fists used tape cutting and computers to make things glitch and strange. I think there is power in the production of that stuff. In many respects somebody like Sabbath… who are presented as a straight rock band leads you to assume that they are recording thing in a straight forward way. The physicality feels so important. But with electronic music there are no limitations to what you can do. With rock music there is sanctity in the studio. You want to think that they just fuck with the levels a little bit.

It seems especially strange though with rock music when is seems like someone cheating at a contest- other metal bands singers were singing higher and higher and they wanted to achieve that in a way that comes across as a dupe. 

I also think it reveals the sort of religious revere that people hold to rock music, it is meant to be sacred. Profanity in electronic music seems like the intention. I like that when the code is cracked in rock music, that you feel a little bit betrayed. You believe that they can play that fast or sing that high.

After years of playing electronic music I have been growing increasingly nostalgic towards playing in a punk band again. Do you ever feel the same way? Do you miss Straightjacket Nation?

No, because it is still going!

Oh man I didn’t realize that!

We just recorded a new record, because Emily is pregnant. That meant we only had a little but of time to record our tribute to the Boston straight edge hard rock sellout record. But when we actually came down to write the record we were all doing so much other stuff outside of hardcore. I feel like a lot of hardcore bands who wrote those sort of records did it because they wanted to explore ways of playing other kinds of music, but we already had that experience so when it came down to recording, we realized that we just wanted to play hardcore. The new record is an 8 song 12”, which is being mixed right now by Mikey.

Sometimes I miss doing hardcore when I wasn’t so into drugs and alcohol, when it was the only experience of ritualistic mental derangement that I had was playing that music. I sometimes miss the purity of feeling like I am tripping just from fast hardcore music, but I prefer doing it when I’m fucked up, it’s a lot more damaging to the mind and the body.

You make a lot of references to intoxication in your songs. After we had a chance to go swimming a couple times, and we were speaking of how some simple pleasures bring on a sort of appreciation for the animalistic aspect of our being. Certainly, that is an intoxication of a specific kind. I was wondering if you think chemical intoxication is a more cerebral way of achieving animalistic pleasure. Other animals seek the alteration of the minds, naturally. But I was wondering if you think that intentionally intoxicating yourself as something that is carnal or a more far out cerebral experience? 

I think intoxication makes you reevaluate your ego. You can become more thoughtful. I have had trips where I think my critical thinking was accelerated that that felt very rewarding.  I felt that it connected me more to myself. But there isn’t really a separation of the mind and the body. The mind is always affected by the body and the body is always affected by the mind. Depression is a bodily feeling for me that the mind responds to and anxiety is always a bodily experience. Happiness, anger, these are all bodily reactions that trigger the mind.

In the most banal level, intoxicants allow you to relax your body. I rarely try to have mystical journeys with drugs anymore. It is all about just being around people and having conversations with your guard a little dropped. It is always about contact, intimacy, egos mutually dissolving.

It is good to let go of the tyrannical impulse of the ego to assign rational order to every single thing that happens to you. That can be dangerous. I have had horrifying experiences when doing that. It’s usually when I am apart from other people and forget that I am a body and just become entirely mind focused.

I read about the way that the brain functions. We act, our brain tells us that we have acted and our ego tells us that we were the ones who decided to act.  Impulse and action comes first and then reasoning and explanation afterwards. It really fucked with my idea of who I was. It removes responsibility and accountability. We can’t exist as a species without the ego, but that is not actually how our brains work. Social structure enforces that we must be accountable for what we do, because we are a body, and we need a reason why we don’t just tear each other to pieces.

It is strange then to think about our concepts of creative ‘inspiration’ also. Often when artists talk about inspiration, it is like something that just comes to you…

That is why I attempt to not impose too much structure at first. I like to allow images to dominate along with visions and dreams and fragments of conversation. I try to come from a place of confusion and bewilderment and then narrow it down to something more structured.

I feel like I work the opposite. I start with an outline, worth from a structure and then need to pick it apart.

Well, you’ve been in New York for a week. What has been your favorite experience of your trip so far?

I have not traveled since I was in Copenhagen last year. I need to do this because when I am home I am very focused on working, Distort, the bands. It’s winter in Australia right now, so I couldn’t spend much time outside. But being here and swimming and sitting on the roof, Coney Island. I love this city and I always have. I went to see the King and I, the musical. The best thing about traveling though is meeting people and through a mutual lack of expectation being able to have insightful nice conversations. What you expose to people and what you hide from people when you are not around your everyday friends. When you discuss intimate things with a friend, they know your history and they can give you advice or impose their expectations. Even though I have met you before along with a lot of people here in New York, no one knows who your ex-girlfriend is or where you are from. Sometimes people can tell you what you need to hear- people can be a bit more frank with you. That is my favorite part of traveling, getting to know people in that very moment without having to drag the past with you. New York city is great, though.

I’m tempted to say that it is the best city in the world, but that is probably a lie.

I was hanging out with this old man from New York who was fascinated by Australia and asking me a lot of questions about it. I told him that New York was the greatest city in America and he was so proud of me. I said I would say that it is the best city in the world, but I love Copenhagen and Krakow… and he got grumpy about it for a second. Probably what I love most about New York is that no matter what social class people are from or what atrocities they must face everyday living here, no matter how much they hate it, everyone is fucking proud to live here. Endure here. There are people who have never left Brooklyn, but they know it is better than anything else.

New York Attitude.

I love it. It attracts me. From watching Sesame Street as a kid or Taxi Driver when I was a teenager. It’s a whole country of it’s own.

We should secede. 

Totally! Except you have nowhere to grow food, so you’ll need to have people send some food. That story you were saying last night about when your sister was being born and your father looked out of the window and saw the car getting stolen…

Our pride stems from simply surviving. It’s part of the reason I had to move back here. Everywhere elsewhere feels false, in a way. I have a real ‘fuck you, you don’t understand’ sort of mentality towards other cities. Wanna live other places before I die, but I know I am going to die here.

To live and die in New York.

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