INTERVIEW: JOSH MCKAY (THE CORSICAN, DEERHUNTER, MACHA)
A decade in the making, The Corsican is a passion project by current Deerhunter bassist and former Macha frontman, Josh McKay. McKay has long been a maker of eclectic, experimental, and psychedelic sounds but The Corsican presents an exercise in pop. This past Valentine’s Day saw the release of the The Corsican’s first single. The a-side “Fever Believer” is hard hitting rock’n’roll ripper that breaks out a wide array of synth sounds building up to an ecstatic, libidinous freak out. Following the intensity of “Fever Believer” is a lush cover of The Gist’s “Love at First Sight,” a long-time favorite of McKay’s to which he contributed a new verse. We caught up with Josh on a sunny Sunday afternoon to discuss his recent output, the creative magic of Athens, Georgia, and his journeys through different cultures and musical traditions across the globe.
hope: I want to start by thanking you for doing your cover of “Love at First Sight,” because I really love Young Marble Giants but I had never heard The Gist record and so this was my introduction. Do you remember where you were at in life and in music when you discovered Stuart Moxham and discovered that song in particular?
Josh: Oh, very cool. It was after I was already familiar with The Marbles and I was still living in Texas. I was in college and I think I ended up ordering that from a mail-order catalog of a record store in Boston that had a bunch of Rough Trade stuff I hadn’t gotten yet because Rough Trade singles were the premier obsession for me.
hope: Before they had their Brooklyn megastore and all that.
Josh: Right, exactly, though I haven’t noticed that the Brooklyn megastore keeps great stock of the old stuff. I think those Rough Trade releases got totally scattered to the wind in all this time. I think I find some of the most tempting ones ebay-listed in Japan. Japan got a fair number of unique releases, unique compilations of the Rough Trade stuff.
So I got “Love at First Sight,” that was my first solo Moxham single and then “This is Love.” It’s just as good. I think his “This is Love” single is fantastic and I hope to maybe do something with that song as well. It was a bit tricky to commit to “Love at First Sight” because “This is Love” has charms of its own. But anyway, I had that song for years and I guess I did my first demo of the cover of “Love at First Sight” ten years ago and it was pretty much the same. I changed a little bit of the structure in the time since then, but I’ve been waiting for quite some time to finish what I started with that song.
hope: With the lyrics you added were you trying to write them in Moxham’s voice or were those your own words?
Josh: Really I think the words were guided by this standard, this bar, where the song was already at, really the song is so human and and the feeling is so intimate that I could tell immediately when lines I was coming up with were straying from that very in-the-moment, intimate, realism; so it took some revisions, especially the effort to basically retell the first verse again which is really what I was hoping to achieve, to not complicate things any further because a really lovely aspect of the original lyric is the hovering, sort of timeless moment. It doesn’t necessarily resolve and there’s even aspects of nonsequitur to his original lyric, so I wanted to be respectful of that aspect of it but develop it further still. I had read an interview where he expressed misgivings about not having fleshed out a whole lyric and instead singing that one verse twice.
hope: Was it a trip when he gave his blessing to do the cover and add lyrics to it?
Josh: I was really on the edge of my seat, because it is a bit cavalier and it was only out of admiration and respect and a desire to celebrate his song, but through a creative development, through a creative augmentation and so it was just beyond exciting. It did take a while, I had to wait at least a week I think, and since then he’s offered additional cheers on the topic of having completed this thing. It’s been a really really sweet little love story as far as covers go because I don’t think when someone covers someone else’s song that they necessarily ever interact with the author.
I did another cover where I took a large licence. I think it’s the only other cover that’s been properly released of mine.
hope: Didn’t Macha do “Believe” by Cher on Macha Loved Bedhead?
Josh: That’s the one. That’s my other guilty pleasure so far and on that one I did not ask for Cher’s blessing and if I had to do it all again I don’t think I would.
hope: Did you get in trouble?
Josh: No, I think it fell under the radar enough because I think honestly I could have gotten into trouble because you can’t change the lyrics of a cover without the permission of the author. My idea for the Cher cover was that I wanted to turn it into a murder ballad. “Life After Love” being like, ‘do you believe in love when you’re dead?’ And so I put all the lyrics into the past tense and it immediately became this much more morose thing and using the funeral organ setting for it and the lonely telephone call. That was my other foray into reinventing a song through a cover of it. I will always be very proud of that thing. I recorded it on my cassette 8-track. A big motivation for doing that song was that I felt like when that song came out, that was the premier event of auto-tune arriving on the scene in the music world. It bent my ear.
hope: I was a little kid when that came out and I remember my parents, who listen to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, were so furious about the auto-tune in that song.
Josh: There you go, exactly. It was exactly the experience that auto-tune is, it’s heinous but it also completely distracts your attention.
hope: I heard Ghostface talking about how with auto-tune in rap, he feels like he doesn’t hear individual rappers’ voices anymore and that’s something he really misses.
Josh: That hits home completely. I can’t believe that everything sounds like this now. Literally it is the worst thing about music ever created. There’s no bastardization of the human spirit as heinous as auto-tune. I literally cup my ears with my hands when I’m out sometimes because it’s so insulting that people have just bent over and taken auto-tune like it is required of them now. I mean, folk singers, all the auto-tuned folk music? It just makes you want to cry. And so that “Believe” cover, I did it as a kind of, ‘this will be the death of music, do you believe in music after death?’ It was such a bad omen.
I put the song in the position of 86 [on the track listing] at the end of that EP, really stupid, I wish I hadn’t done it, and I filled all these little tiny sound clips so that the ID number on the CD would just be clicking down until it got to 86, 86 being the nixing of something.
Fuck that auto-tune. I am by no means finished with auto-tune, I have a song specifically now called “The People Vs. Auto-tune.”
hope: Is that going to be a Corsican song?
Josh: It is, but it’s a stupid enough idea that it’s probably not going to see the light of day publicly anytime super soon. But I’m serious with hatred for auto-tune.
hope: Relating back to The Gist. One of the things I really love about the Embrace the Herd record is that there was so much freedom that Moxham had. He’s got field recordings in there, he’s got wacky synth tones, coming out of Young Marble Giants which was kind of a very specific minimalist sound, and then having the freedom to do whatever he wanted. I feel like you’re feeling that same kind of freedom doing The Corsican, is that the case?
Josh: For sure, I had not consciously registered what a big jump in pallette The Gist really was. I’ve always felt interested in his songwriting, unfiltered pure Stuart, writing for his own voice, et cetera. But the fact that the palette, the vocabulary just blew out, exploded in so many more directions. That’s the thing about Young Marble Giants, that minimalism is the genius of it, the magic, the power.
I’ve always been working in kind of an art-pop, trying to highlight instruments that break me out of the pop tradition. Most of the time now I’m working on this thing called A.T.E.M., which was called Abandon The Earth Mission originally, and I’m working on an album of that stuff and it’s all about pallette and blends of instrumental timbres and arrangement, and conceptual concerns surrounding lyrical narratives and the sonic interpretations. It’s a lot more like visual music, whereas when I pick up a guitar and I pick something out I’ll be singing in no time. Pop songs have always been this sort of private passtime for me. I haven’t put out pop songs so much and so they’ve been building up, I’ve got a fuck ton of them. I’ve just been waiting for a couple for a couple things, waiting for a drummer and wanting to get the first A.T.E.M. album finished before I let myself indulge in The Corsican but then this Valentine's Single just kind of rose up and bit me very last minute. I started this in the middle of january and that was one month before the valentines deadline so there was this sudden outing of The Corsican.
hope: “Fever Believer” feels very in-the-moment.
Josh: Definitely, I was pulling out all the synth parts the morning of the mixing session. I just layered ten moog tracks and then had to listen back to even know what I did when the mix was happening, so it was very much a spontaneous completion of things that were just kind of rolling around in my head. Super fun, I can’t think of the last time that something took shape so quickly with so little preparation.
hope: Your lyrics in that give me a big Joey Ramone vibe. It’s a love song but you’re also talking about brain damage. He was very romantic but was open about the darkness of his health issues and wrote a lot of lyrics specifically about the brain. Was that a conscious influence on you?
Josh: No, but I was going through some early versions of that song and I noticed one of the first times that I sang the whole lyric out, it was definitely a Joey Ramone sort of approach that came out. But I wasn’t really conscious of it and it went away, it became this other thing. I don’t think the way I sang it on this single would remind me of Joey Ramone per se.
I secretly sing like Joey Ramone a lot, my first actual band with my brother was a Ramones cover band so I’ve been channeling Joey since High School. It’s funny you should say that because I’m sure it was clearly an influence but I wasn’t really conscious of it until right around the time where it was all recorded and before the mix I was scrolling through voice memos to see if I had any other ideas I had forgotten about, any last little overdub melodies or whatever, and I found this really early version of it where clearly I woke up in Joey Ramone’s body singing into my voice memo straight out of bed. He cornered the market on brain damage for sure.
hope: Do you think you’ll do a Ramones cover with The Corsican?
Josh: I’d love that. It would be a tough call but I’ve got my favorites for sure. Hell yeah, of course, it’s bound to happen.
hope: Would you mind disclosing what those favorites are or you trying to keep it in the hopper.
Josh: That’s a tricky question because it usually takes me about ten years to do anything, I’m a bit cagey about talking plans until they’re happening tomorrow.
hope: I feel the same way, I often just feel embarrassed about if I talk about something a lot and then it doesn’t end up happening or it ends up happening years later.
Josh: That is absolutely the case, I have not been talking much about The Corsican to anyone because I’ve been sitting on it for a really long time. But now it’s out and I’ve got so much else to follow that up with, I’m super psyched.
I’m really happy to have found this reunion with this drummer I’m working with, this guy named Keith Crutchfield. We had a band together in Athens when I first moved here and it was both of our first bands here in Athens together. We hadn’t played together in forever and he just moved back to Atlanta and jumped on it. He was completely cool with the two songs being in such different modes and everything being so last-minute. He was game the whole time, super gung-ho. That’s been the thing that’s been tying up The Corsican, I’d been looking around and I just couldn’t find someone with that caveman gene that was going to be necessary for the brain damage that was built in to some of these songs.
hope: How long have you been in Athens?
Josh: I’ve been here 25 years.
hope: Did you move there to play music specifically?
Josh: Yeah, I had been fantasizing about Athens, romanticizing since college when I started hearing all the amazing weird sounds. Actually I guess since junior high when I got turned on to The B-52s, that’s when Athens got put on the map. Coming here was a culmination of everything in my life in Gainesville, Florida, where I’d been living for six years, coming to an end. I lost my band I had down there, a long term relationship ended the same year, my mother passed away the same year, my grandfather passed away the same year and there was nobody to play with. I literally had no musicians there to do anything with anymore and so I went and traveled in Indonesia for three months with the last of my money. I got back with $50 and Athens was the nearest place I could land with $50 and some musical potentials on the horizon.
I knew some people here and had a very very soft landing. I got a room for $130 a month and immediately started washing dishes at the local vegetarian restaurant, The Grit.
hope: What was the music landscape like at that time in Athens, was it the era of Neutral Milk Hotel or was it a little before?
Josh: A little before, the name change was happening for Olivia Tremor Control, they were moving from Synthetic Flying Machine. When I got there, honestly, what was visible at the time was the nineties-aggro-male thing which was very different from the Athens norm. The arty and magical weirdo scene had kind of slipped away a little bit.
hope: Was that the wake of grunge happening?
Josh: For whatever reasons there were stylistic changes. I think it was that more dudes got inspired to let out their angst. They found each other and there were just a bunch of those kind of bands. I guess my favorite band in town when I first moved here was Harvey Milk. Just blindingly heavy, powerful and elegant somehow. Existential dread as the focus rather than anger per se, not the same kind of screaming-male, mass-adrenaline 90s style. They were really powerful to experience live and they played here pretty often. Downright scary sometimes, in the best way.
And then it started getting a little more typically Athenian-arty-magical again in the mid to late 90s and the Elephant 6 collective was of course a very fertile center for a new growing community.
hope: You brought up your travels to Indonesia, that was clearly a huge influence on Macha. Had you been exposed to Indonesian music at all before you went there.
Josh: Yeah that’s what my trip was based around. I had been collecting indonesian music for years before then. I had all these different favorite genres from different villages. Different villages in all these different cultures all across Indonesia, there's such incredible variety. I charted this route where I hoped to go and record in person. Sometimes it would just be one cut on one indonesian compilation of just flutes, multi-part flute interpretations of Balinese rhythms and I wanted to go and get a lot more of that so I charted this route across three islands, Bali, Java and Sumatra and was able to find what I was looking for. Walking into a town and asking, “anybody know somebody who plays ‘The Frog Song’ here?”
“Oh yes, he’s right down the road, the guy who invented it.” It was like that.
hope: Were you getting to play with those musicians or were you just listening?
Josh: I mostly just tried to document. I did a few little jam sessions late-night around the fire, but I wasn’t carrying any instruments of my own and I certainly would just be faking it on their instruments because at that point I didn’t have any Indonesian instruments in my possession until that first trip, the ones that I took back.
hope: What did you take back with you?
Josh: The first time it was all flutes and reed instruments and little cymbals, the second time it was bigger pieces, gamalans. But the first trip, because I was backpacking and I had no idea how long I would be there, I didn’t buy 50lb metal bars to lug around. And just lugging around my stupid little recorder which unfortunately wasn’t really as good as the situation warranted. But anyway it was a romantic effort and I did get to hear an incredible amount of stuff. The trip was life changing and I got back home alive, which was uncertain a couple of times during that trip.
hope: It seems like Macha was lumped in with the post rock world?
Josh: Yeah, it was unfortunate.
hope: Musically you were doing something so different, did you feel like you were a part of that world or were you a kind of peerless band?
Josh: Well, I understood, but it was super frustrating and really galling that because I would use a vibraphone in my music, which I got in 1986, I had been using vibraphone as an integral instrument of my rock music way before Tortoise ever hit my ears. At the time I sort of held my shoulders high that I was the only guy on the block using vibraphone as a central part of his rock music. But then along comes Tortoise and the whole world was like, “Wow, who would’ve thought? Vibraphone in the middle of a rock band. Rock dudes with vibraphones, it’s so novel.”
So then literally every other reference was, “Oh, you must like Tortoise. You must listen to Tortoise all the time.”
I got the vibraphone as sort of a cheat for getting into gamelan-style melodic percussion and so it presented itself as a tool to break out of the regular harmonic/melodic rules of guitar or keyboards, being able to just have one note in each hand and build from the minimalism imposed by that instrument. It was an unending source of inspiration in the early days.
I started to feel the burden of trying to have vibraphones when we’d fly overseas and how risky and dicey it was to have your music based around the vibraphone when it’s such a beast of an instrument. So I have dialed back on the vibraphone, I just kind of pragmatically indulge myself at home with it but I won’t be basing my sound around the vibraphone anymore most likely.
hope: I heard Thurston Moore say something similar. Right after Sonic Youth I saw him play acoustic and he had a harpist with him and he said the harp was just so expensive and such a pain to load in and out of every show that he just got rid of the harpist and started Chelsea Light Moving, the electric band.
Josh: (laughs) I swear, I mean it’s such a cranky, unromantic sentiment to say, ‘it’s too hard, it looks so cool but what a pain in the ass.’ It’s with remorse that I speak resignedly, that the vibraphone just got beat to hell. I got this Deagan, the same one that I’ve had since college, it just got beat. to. hell. It nearly didn’t survive touring with Macha, getting kicked to the ground on the street by drunk people, it went through so much.
hope: You were traveling with a lot of instruments during Macha I’m assuming?
Josh: Yeah, I wanted it to be the whole deal, so I brought my hammered dulcimer and the vibraphone and steel drums and the fun machine organ, which is like bringing a bureau desk with you, it’s like a big piece of furniture. I kept a good upper body tone because there was lots of lifting, moving that shit up stairs. I am not giving up on that, I believe that is what music deserves. The big, unwieldy spectacle of a bunch of shit. You look back on all these groups from the 70s, these keyboard players who had ten boards all around them. I just love it, I love the gear mania and I don’t get that feeling from all this discreet 12”x12” squares with knobs and triggers. I am going to stand by the heavy lifting version of all that and then cross the bridge when I get to it. If I get to go overseas maybe then I’ll fall in love with Akai trigger pad technology, but in the meantime it’s fun to carry a bunch of junkyard treasure around.
hope: Are there any other areas of the world where you’re fascinated by the music and local instruments?
Josh: There’s almost not a place that I’ve not pursued. I want to know everything everywhere and the more you look, the more you venture outside of the big familiarity... basically the crossroads spots. We all have heard the typical sound of Chinese music and the typical sound of Indian music, but there’s so much in between the two and in some cases there’s literally a hybrid splice right between the two at one intersection. I’m not a person who’s very good at picking favorites, so I would say pretty much every place is fair game to me. I may be a little less familiar with Scandinavian folk music. I've got a couple of favorite Norwegian and Swedish folk records. I’m not going to hate on any particular spots.
I would say it’s an equal spread between Asian instrumental timbres, African rhythms and vocal arrangements, and then a lot of Eastern European influences are taken. I spent a good bit of time focused on Bulgarian folk, and Hungarian and Romanian. I’m all over the map and I’ve definitely got favorites, Corsican music [as well].
hope: The Corsican as a project is very rock, how would music from Corsica relate to this new project?
Josh: I don’t know. There will come a time maybe where I make a special effort to select a song from Corsica, because there are a few that I love, but everything I’ve heard has been powerfully sincere and earnest and I can’t say that’s really where my music is coming from right now. There is existential heartbreak in the sound of Corsican folk music and I would say it’s just another emotional world entirely. Right now in the mode of the Corsican I’m getting out a lot of happy frustration and lusty angst.
hope: Is music always a cathartic thing like that for you?
Josh: For sure, I’m pretty solitary. I’m the kind of person that generally never receives visitors in my own home. It isn’t like I told anybody, “don’t come over to my house,” I’ve never said that to anyone but for some reason my house is kind of quarantined from social activity. I spend a fair amount of time sitting, staring out the window at the trees and some feeling starts to become a song. Having the solitude allows for the song to come in and then I get caught up in it and usually it really starts grabbing me around midnight and for quite some time these days I’m up ‘til dawn in the grip of the little epiphanies or revelations of where to take a song idea to get it to the finish line. I’ve been in a very feverish mode this last year when I’m home because I toured the most, possibly ever in one year, in 2019. And I would notice when I get back home going through [my phone], because I’m constantly putting things in my notes on my phone and voice memos, constantly singing into my phone, and I would notice that it just didn’t happen when I was surrounded by ten people on the road. The only solitude you might get is walking out during the day or in your bunk, it’s not really the place to be singing, but one day home and once again it just flips on and content is just streaming for the entire time I’m home left to my own devices. So I’ve just been grabbing all that time in the service of getting songs finished. I’m living for it.
I’ve been in a long-distance relationship so that’s another kind of isolation that’s been a part of my surroundings. I’ve only been getting to see this person that I’m dating every two or three months for a long weekend. So my life has just been sort of positioned to stay obsessed. I feel really lucky.
hope: That sounds like a great place to be in creatively.
Josh: It’s still looking alright. Deerhunter is taking a break right now and the only thing I’ve got to worry about now aside from finances in general is that they built this subdivision right across the street from me on what used to be forest and fields and these half million dollar homes that are literally right across the street from me right now. Somebody’s going to get bothered by my playing the same terrible bassline all night for hours, so I'm getting ready for having to dial it back a little bit at home. I’ve been very lucky to be able to run music here without bothering anybody. All it’s going to take is one person who works from home, to be in their house sitting in front of the computer looking for any distraction and not aware that they can put in earbuds to drown out the outside world and instead just calling the cops on me because I’m learning how to play the drums that afternoon.
hope: You joined Deerhunter right before Monomania, correct?
Josh: I made Monomania about two weeks after I joined the band.
hope: I love that record. It’s a very kick-out-the-jams, intense, garage-inspired record and coming off Halcyon Digest which is super dreamy, it feels really abrasive. Was that a kind of rebellion against the previous record?
Josh: Most definitely, I mean in production approach it is clearly a complete 180. At the heart of it, the new batch of songs Bradford had been writing was coming out of a very gnarly personal experience he had. I don’t think it was conceived as a response to Halcyon Digest per se, but the production style I think was a choice to not be a hi-fi, traditional, “now let’s take Halcyon to the next level,” professional audio recording. It was definitely wanting to jettison any memory of what had just been done. Bradford’s chosen system of how to record the songs was a complete Frankenstein, mad scientist scenario the whole time making that record. It was true brutal experimentation with human endurance in the studio. We recorded from 7pm to 7am for over a month and didn't see the sunlight for a month. It was snow bound, 20 degrees, just this bizarre living dead state.
hope: I think that comes through on the record in a really great way.
Josh: I’m glad you reminded me of that record because I just got my cassette deck hooked up finally after getting it fixed and I have a ton of cassettes that I have not yet listened to and one of them is the Monomania limited edition cassette that came out. It’s been seven years now and I’ve never gotten to listen to that thing and I’m wondering if it just slightly warmed up some of the harshest moments that I really can’t listen to at the volume that I prefer to listen to music at because of the digital damage that the thing was spiked with. I’m excited to pull that out and check it out. It’s going to be the premiere of the kinder, gentler iteration of Monomania. I don’t even listen to that thing in ear buds, it just gives me a headache.
This is good news. I’ve got a bunch of cassettes, a lot of my friends are putting things out on cassette now so I’ve been building up a collection. One of my favorite Athens bands currently called Immaterial Possession, I debuted my newly repaired cassette deck with their cassette. They’re one of the first things in a while that I feel like there’s some element in there of what I guess you would call the poetic, early Athens sound, between REM and that band Oh-OK and maybe some of the sounds of Love Tractor, there was this sweet, sort of a little bit spooky quality and Immaterial Possession really fits into this southern gothic, romantic, poetic thing that I haven’t heard as much of in Athens in a long time.
hope: Do you feel like things have gotten homogenized and that the sound of a city is something that’s fading away?
Josh: No, Athens is staying very interesting. There was a dip for sure, maybe three years ago. We lost a key venue and things were changing. Not as many bands were coming through and people were really starting to stay home, it was the beginning of the Netflix takeover and the phone and all that. I mean people really stopped going out, which is where we’re at now still but watching it happen was really weird. And those same people staying home with Netflix were also no longer practicing in their bands, so it’s suddenly becoming harder to have a band because everyone’s all distracted. So of course, you’re finding more solo artists with a sampler. We had that period, that kind of evolutionary movement, and then it really drifted to a lot more completely free ambient improvisational artists in a lot of different modes, a lot of different instrumental modes, a lot of different moods from artist to artist so we really got this much more abstracted surrealist musical movement in the last couple years, which has been great. Not the kind of thing that is for everyone trying to come out on a friday night but Athens has still got a tremendous creative spirit. A lot of good music right now in Athens.
I’m very happy we have the remaining places it can happen because they’re folding all around us. We just lost this incredible hub of creative outpouring, this place called Go Bar. Go Bar had been the freaks open oasis for years and years. Basically on the 20th anniversary of Go Bar they had their last event, that New Years Eve.
hope: That’s rough when something that went that long has to close.
Josh: And it’s directly because of the new multi-use housing building that got built across the street where there used to be a church.
hope: You were talking about Netflix being a distraction, do you feel like hanging on with the physical media, tapes and records, keeps you kind of focused in the world of music where you have to commit to things and you can’t just change what you’re watching or listening to so easily.
Josh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s an obsession that has just never slowed down. Touring has afforded so many strange and wonderful vinyl shopping opportunities around the world. I’ve been finding stuff unlike anything in my collection. Really unusual records, very often I have no idea what I’m looking at even and it turns out to be musique concrète from 1973 where it looked like the thing might have been a religious record or something, lots of fun. I guess because the curatorial standard has just continued to grow at the shops. The shops are more and more aware that people are looking for more and more kinds of music and so the shops just keep getting better. It’s just incredible how many resources we have now. I’m even starting to get sweet on whatever algorithms have been insidiously creeping into place with my IP address, because I’m getting great recommendations from the one streaming service that I subscribe to and as much as I would like to have found those records on my own in the racks somewhere it’s kind of amazing to have something recommended to me that came out in 1980 that I have never once heard about.
hope: I actually just discovered The Flowers through a Youtube recommendation.
Josh: Oh yeah, yeah!
hope: Great band.
Josh: Great band, that was definitely a Youtube discovery.
hope: Youtube is kind of lawless still with releasing obscure stuff, no one’s coming after anyone for the rights to that. There is a lot of cool stuff to dig for.
Josh: It’s insane, the CD I’ve got playing in my car on repeat these days, I found this random Japanese thing from ‘85, all in Japanese on a Youtube posting, I guess I was just down a rabbit hole and I was just clicking on everything and luckily I clicked on this. I had a screenshot on my phone of that and when I was in Tokyo I was going around to the record stores and just holding up my screen because they could read the Japanese on this thing and would just be scratching their heads. And then at one shop, [the clerk] had been speaking English with me but then she just held up one finger like, “hold on a minute,” and then she walks over and pulls the CD reissue of this stuff and it’s just one of my favorite things I’ve heard in years and I still don’t know what they’re called.
hope: That’s so fun.
Josh: Yeah, and I thought I had heard it all from Japan because I had dug very long and hard into Japanese indie, DIY weirdos because it seems like there was just a finite amount and no, not at all. There were so many independent cassettes and flexis and shit, it’s incredible how much there is to dig around. And then you come to have a taste for a certain way, I notice certain recurring themes in Japanese new wave and you start to get a feel for which things you like the most. Like, I like this certain type of screaming vocal on top of not-aggressive music. There are these interesting juxtapositions that you’ll start to notice might have been trending amongst communities in the scene.
hope: That sounds amazing, it’s great that you have the opportunity to go there with music and just discover.
Josh: I feel very very lucky, very lucky for that for sure. I have absolutely no problem spending two of my five days in Tokyo just in record stores just tearing through, seeing what all I can dig up during my precious time there. I suppose pretty soon it won’t be necessary, pretty soon it will all be online. But there’s nothing like flipping right in front of your eyes. It’s tough though because all of their sleeves are good over there, you’ve got to have a turntable in the shop because the covers of Japanese records rarely look shitty. They’re all just weirdly appealing, but may not be that great to listen to.
hope: I had a disappointment recently where I was in a record store here in Burlington and I found a seven inch by a band called Schema which I thought it was the Mary Hansen Stereolab side project and did not listen to it and then I got home and it was just some emo band from the ‘90s that was pretty mediocre.
Josh: Ahh, heartbreak. I just noticed Macha isn’t on Spotify. There’s one song I did for this compilation, this graphic novel turned into a compilation album sort of thing and so there’s one Macha song on Spotify. So I went to look that up and there was this other Macha artist, a hispanic artist, and in the popular hits section of this artist my song is there at the bottom lumped in with the more recent Macha. So I’m assuming people going and looking for Macha are going to get that same experience you got with Schema.
hope: I think you would connect with a lot of new listeners via streaming. I know a lot of people who are really fanatical about bands like Khruangbin or Kikagaku Moyo and I think what Macha was doing would relate to people who dig that sort of psychedelic sound.
Josh: That’s cool. I’m dead curious if anybody would notice because we kind of slipped through the cracks of the just pre-internet era and [we had] no vinyl, just CDs that got dumped in the great CD purges of the early aughts. So it’s weird, I will wait and see. I want to remaster the first Macha record anyway. We’ll see, thank you for the positive nod to Macha, it’s nice to think there might be a place for that music today, I think it seems really of another time.
hope: I definitely look forward to hearing the remaster, what else do you have on the horizon?
Josh: I’m going to be sprinting to get the next seven inch put together before too long. Definitely staying put in Athens, just working on recording, not really touring. The Corsican recordings have begun and that’s just going to be the focus here.
THIS ARTICLE WAS GRACIOUSLY CONTRIBUTED BY:
Forrest Brandt is a visual artist from Burlington, Vermont who enjoys talking about music. www.forrestbrandt.art