“Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.” – Alain Badiou, 15 Theses On Contemporary Art

Speaking to John Maus, the first impression one gets is that the experimental artist doesn’t do anything half-heartedly. Enthusiastically rapid-firing his thoughts about everything from the political role of pop music to the forthcoming apocalypse, Maus apologizes multiple times throughout the course of our interview for going off on a tangent.

And yet it’s precisely this – the way Maus’ intellectual and philosophical ideas infuse every aspect of his musical identity – that makes him such an engaging figure.

In 2011, having already amassed the cultish devotion of his audience over two albums worth of synth-drenched, lo-fi post-punk that was as dissonant as it was danceable, Maus released the sublime We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves. Quickly garnering praise from every corner of the indie blogosphere, Maus – who first appeared as an early collaborator with fellow hypnagogic pop luminary Ariel Pink – became seen as something of an enigma, his music every bit as influenced by 1980s new wave as it was mid-Renaissance harmonies and Gregorian chants.

There was an earnest sincerity in the way Maus carried himself on the album that made clear its philosophical foundations, and the artist used the accessibility of pop to create something radical, and genuinely subversive. Maus toured widely in support of the record, delivering intense, one-man performances that largely consisted of him thrashing his body around the stage while howling over the top of a backing track – a performance style he’d later refer to with tongue firmly in cheek as his “karaoke show”.

And then… mostly nothing. After his brief dalliance with the indie hype machine, Maus largely retreated from the public consciousness. Followers and critics alike lamented his absence, and his online message board remained more lively than those of many active bands. Over the following years, the experimental pop figure turned to academic pursuits, completing a doctorate in political philosophy before spending several years preparing, writing and recording what would become his new LP, Screen Memories.

“To me, it seemed like it was about five seconds. I’d wake up sometimes in the middle of the night sweating, horrified that so much time had gone by that quickly,” says Maus. “I’d always kind of planned to come back around if it seemed like the next indicated step. After I was finished with school stuff I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to try and make another album.’”

It was an altogether meticulous recording process for Maus – although he did eventually get to the stage where he had no choice but to call the album done. “I actually wanted more time on it, but I felt like I would have fussed over it forever if I let myself do that. In that sense, there was maybe a need to put it to bed. I gave myself more latitude with it [than Pitiless Censors], but it was difficult in different ways”.

The wager is to wrest the inhumanity from those [technological] mechanisms by using the same mechanisms; to be as cunning and clever.

Like the albums that came before it, Maus recorded and produced Screen Memories himself in his Minnesota home, a solitary and isolated locale in the corn plains of the rural American Midwest. Unlike previous records, Maus took an even more hands-on approach to actually producing the music, opting to build the modular synth that appears throughout the album himself.

“I thought that somehow having command of the most advanced instruments would enable me to kind of mobilise the sonic dimensions, so I spent a fair amount of time putting all that together. My wager was that I could produce some strange synthesis of the two – the pure analogue signal path and the continuous voltage of the synths calibrated using a 3Ghz Pentium computer. I thought that could allow me to somehow produce a high fidelity recording of the lo-fi – if that makes sense.”

Maus is reluctant to say whether or not the gamble paid off, suggesting that it’s possible he could have achieved indistinguishable results by using a budget software synth instead. However, he explains that the motivation behind building and utilizing the machines came from a desire to humanize the technological. “I thought it was important to walk that razor’s edge – to have command of the same machinery and weapons that are being used against us.

“Let’s just suppose there’s inhuman mechanisms partitioning and distributing all these vanguard technologies – the wager is to wrest the inhumanity from those mechanisms by using the same mechanisms; to be as cunning and clever. When we do this sort of thing, we really roll the dice. Sometimes there’s a crack”.

Form And Chaos
“The only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial. This also means: it does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.” – Badiou, 15 Theses

Screen Memories is an ominous collage of ghostly synths, driving bass lines and Maus’ signature reverb-soaked baritone. He notes the distinct heaviness of the album, acknowledging that it doesn’t contain the same melodic ease of his earlier work.

And certainly, listening to Screen Memories, that becomes apparent pretty quickly. There’s an apprehension that underpins every note, with even the sunnier songs vacillating between anxious energy and crushing darkness. Opening track ‘The Combine’ depicts a future which “dusts us all to nothing” while tracks like ‘Touchdown’ and ‘Find Out’ feel like the desolate echoes of a haunted video arcade on the edge of town.

Needless to say, the menacingly dystopian presence that permeates much of the album feels eerily timely, given the current climate. “The tone of the album is pretty apocalyptic, and there’s definitely been a sense of apocalypse that’s quickened since the American election. There was some urgency in that sense. Screen Memories is about the end of the world, and, well, I couldn’t wait until the world actually ended.”

Lyrically, Maus was particularly inspired to reflect on what he perceives to be the growing complacency around the dominance of the Silicon Valley set, and the ways in which we allow technology to sink its claws into every facet of our lives. In this way, it feels like an organic continuation of the themes explored in the Alain Badiou-quoting Pitiless Censors, which called for a conscious uncoupling of our identities with our technological counterparts.

“The ideology or spirituality of techno-Gnosticism has only continued to gather steam, and, certainly back in 2014, seemed to be without any sort of critique. It’s just kind of held court and received applause from everyone: the way there’s this impulse to reconfigure the social and reconfigure the human being and all those sorts of things. There’s this sense that the human being is a line in the sand getting blown off.

“These are the thoughts that were on my mind for sure. From a socio-political point of view, I see these impulses as only continuing to gather force across every domain. The bizarre counterpoint to that are these trans-historical notions of the end of time: we can think about the question anew from the standpoint of how exponentially things are accelerating; how they’re fragmented or molecularised. This trans-historical fascination takes on a different life.”

Screen Memories is about the end of the world, and, well, I couldn’t wait until the world actually ended.

Maus stops; reflects for a moment. “I guess that there would be those that would claim that this end – as in, the end – could be used to celebrate the idea that everything is finally going to be justified from within time itself; from within history. And then there are those who don’t suppose that time could ever be given any justification from within time; that life cannot be given its due from within, or along the trajectory of history.”

Maus has been thinking about these things a lot recently, but not just from some kind of grand, dizzyingly zoomed out point of view. He has been forced to confront things he might not otherwise have wanted to confront; to confront not just the death of the universe, but the death of the part of universe called John Maus. “There’s that kind of mind-bending idea of there being some standpoint outside of time – the end of time – and that of course relates to mortality.

“I finally got around to googling the etymological roots of eschatology [the theological study of death; or, the science of the last things]. I thought it was interesting that the word does not mean the ‘end’ as such, but that it relates to the furthest thing, the most remote thing – that which is most beyond the eschatos. That’s how I’ve always understood the end. It’s the end that would be the end of ends.”

Cultural Capital
“All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept [the] permission to consume, to communicate, and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.” – Badiou, 15 Theses

In the past, Maus has been vocal about how pop music, as the most visible medium of contemporary culture, can be subverted to enact a kind of social and political dialogue. When I ask what it means to use pop music as an instigator of change in the modern day, Maus admits it’s mostly a matter of using what tools he’s got. “If I could go and create some politics that were adequate to this international situation – if that was my vocation – I’d certainly prefer it. If I could build a time machine or make some new mathematics, I think that’d be a lot more appreciated.

“I think pop’s political effectiveness is as it has always been. Pop, from the standpoint that I occupy, it’s the idiom – it’s the proper. To make a free use of the proper always has consequences.

“There’s a determined irreconcilability, a determined unworkability. I’ve got to be cautious about that cynicism, though. I mean, what’s unworkable? That some blogs are going to say, ‘That new wave synth guy is back’? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful – in fact I mean the very opposite. That’s what the consequence would seem to be, but maybe it’s always weirder than that. If what I’d hoped to achieve in this was achieved, it might not be immediately apparent.”

If I could build a time machine or make some new mathematics, I think that’d be a lot more appreciated.

That juxtaposition – that unworkability – has stood at the heart of Maus’ aesthetic for years; he has used the tools of convention to facilitate subversion. “I certainly think it’s that weird tension or contradiction that music of any epoch, especially our own, stands in. On the one hand it mirrors the social relations and reinforces them and is part and parcel with the idiom and the conventions, but at the same time it portrays something else than all of that, and holds possibility.

“There’s no real simple pragmatic answer. The real work, when we encounter it – there’s no readily on hand concept through which to adequately describe it. It seems to invite something else: something new, the creation of something. Here we have music that, on the face of it, has got the regular meter, is using melody and harmony and is a few minutes long and the parts are distinct – it’s par for the course on the one hand. But, on the other hand, maybe something else happens.”

When it comes to re-emerging after years of relative solitude, Maus says it’s been a fairly dramatic shift “coming from the middle of nowhere and getting back into it”. On his current tour, Maus has been playing with a live band for the first time. “I did the karaoke one-man show for a long time, but at a certain point it proved itself inadequate to audiences of a certain size,” he explains. “It just settles once and for all about whether I’m trying to do some performance art or something. I’m playing a rock’n’roll show, you know what I mean?”

For his part, Maus continues to believe that the triumph of the human can challenge an increasingly inhuman world – one that is simultaneously plugged in and disconnected at all times. For all the doom and gloom on Screen Memories, it still demonstrates Maus’ conviction that to appear is to do something radical. In its haze of sub-zero synths and end of days aesthetic, there’s an impossibly human heart beating underneath it all.

Screen Memories is out Friday October 27 through Domino.

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