Stanleylieber is to me perhaps one of LJ's biggest mysterys, depending on who you compare him to though(The exception is NicePimmelKarl). But I like his music and his friendly gestures alot. And he likes my album too. This interview was made because I wanted to know more about Stanleylieber. But it did make me ask some more questions aswell. Anyhow, here is the lenghty(in a good way) interview of Stanleylieber!
CS: How many songs have you made up to day and why did you start making music? SL: I started classical piano training when I was about seven or eight years old. For many years afterward I found it difficult to plink around on my own compositions without inadvertantly reproducing something that already existed. I would launch into an improvisation only to have it morph seamlessly into a piece I had memorized from my lessons. Everything would collapse into lines of Mozart or Bach. This was immensely frustrating and I basically just gave up on composing alltogether, figuring I had some sort of strange mental block -- simply wasn't meant to be a composer. I continued with my classical lessons for about nine years, without really going back and trying to write any more music, though scenarios were always playing out in the back of my mind and on occasion I would sit down for an "improvisational freak-out" at the keyboard. A few times I discussed starting a band with classmates or friends, but it never went anywhere. I sensed that I wasn't ready. In life I've found that I'll frequently take something I have an intense desire to do and set it aside for a number of years, hoping that the submerged longing will somehow mutate into a full-blown talent if I leave it alone long enough and give it time to gestate. I'm still waiting to develop an aptitude for foreign currency trading, for example. I went through several teachers during this period, as they all kept either moving to larger cities or simply passing away from old age. My last instructor was partially deaf (and wholly senile); by that point I was 16, kicked out of school, and could no longer practice during the week because my grandparents didn't own a piano. I was really only getting to play when I would be taken to this woman's studio for my lessons. I had managed to acquire several books of sheet music featuring transcriptions of a handful of Prince's albums, and this last teacher was disturbingly enthusiastic about some of his racier lyrics. Eventually it was discovered that my older sister was exploiting the trips back and forth from my lessons to move large quantities of marijuana (at the behest of an older man she was dating at the time), and so in short order all the adults in my family decided that I had to stop taking lessons entirely, since the only place to take them was several towns over, and the only person willing to drive me there was my big sister, who was quite obviously batshit out of control. By that point, given the increasingly uncomfortable physical closeness of my teacher on the piano bench (the space between us was closing with every lesson, in spite of my attempts to rationalize away the fact that a 60 year old woman was coming on to me), it was not entirely heartrending to at last abandon my training. Perhaps understandably, my interest had already begun to wane. So, after many years of playing the piano every day, being made to practice before and after school, I would not touch a keyboard again for quite some time. I became wholly absorbed in working on my comics and zines. Didn't think about music at all. That lasted about six months. By the time summer rolled around I was back living with my mother and had managed to secure a job at the local bottling plant. I used my first paycheck to purchase a secondhand electric guitar from one of my co-workers. Not sure why. Knowing precisely nothing about guitar tuning or maintenance, and possessing absolutely no recording equipment, I was left to experiment with the various pieces of junk lying about on my bedroom floor, which included:
Inexplicably, it had suddenly become imperative to get something down on tape. And so I got to work. I rigged up a lot of wires between the various stereo equipment and cobbled together a set of very primitive effects, such as "mild distortion" and "slightly less mild distortion," but ultimately most of what I did concerned manipulating the playback speed of cassettes using the pause button. I also did some primitive scratching and turntable tricks with various quarter-bin vinyl I had managed to procure, to add "flavor" to the mixes. My guitar playing was laughably inept, but I threw some in anyway as it had become my primary instrument. I was experiencing some strange psychological reactions to hearing myself on tape, embarrassment, whatever, and yet still couldn't stop recording. It had become almost compulsive. I wrote to my girlfriend that I thought music was driving me insane. Coincidentally, that same summer I was undergoing involuntary psychological counseling, so the effects of the material I was creating on my mental state was something I brought up during the sessions, just to see what they'd say. My therapist claimed his son (then a college student) had told him my music sounded like "techno." He seemed proud of himself for getting that all out correctly, and as I recall there was an extended pause while he waited to see how I would respond. I remember sort of losing track of the conversation a few times as the diamond-stud earring in his left ear kept drawing my attention away from his face, toward the giant poster of Eric Clapton on the wall behind him. I suppose I was meant to infer from these trappings that he was "hip" to my "youth culture." It's likely my incedulity was apparent. I'm not sure how they got "techno" out of what I'd put on that cassette -- there were no percussion sounds to be heard anywhere in my earliest material. After discussing it with him for a while it was fairly clear he'd not actually listened to it. I should have tried to talk him into putting it on and demonstrating some rave dancing. He probably would have done it. Eventually, I filled a 90-minute Denon ceramic tape with experimental noise and carried it around with me for the next few months, listening to it over and over again on my Walkman. Unfortunately I've no idea what became of this cassette. I can still remember many of the short compositions (probably most averaged about 1-2 minutes) and I wish I had them now so that I could rip my teenage self off, mix those early pieces into my current work. I had developed this system whereby I would play notes on the guitar by twisting the tuning knobs rather than trying to use my fingers on the frets, and I'd come up with some interesting transitions that I wish I could reproduce. I wonder if my therapist still has a copy. The next recordings I completed, collected on cassette as Eve, were intentionally designed to integrate as a single work, and may be downloaded here: This I circulated to a handful of friends in the fall of 1994. People told me that it reminded them of doing acid; some of my older friends would say that it sounded like the kind of stuff they used to noodle around with in their college bands back in the '80s (presumably, also while under the influence of acid). I got it reviewed in a local zine and verdict was, "a bunch of fucked up noises that are practically inaudible." All of this made me roll my eyes since I had never done drugs and "fucked up noises" were precisely what I was going for! I mean, "no shit," right? By this time I'd been exposed to a wealth of underground experimental and noise material, so the old "this stuff is weird" digs rolled off me like water off a duck's back. I decided to start claiming I was trying to sound like Prince (which may have been true in its own way, but still sounded preposterous enough to amuse me greatly). The reviewer I mentioned above actually heckled me from the stage once while he was performing with his band. The one live show I played as a DJ resulted in the promoter mocking me from the audience. I reacted pretty badly to all of this and burnt a lot of bridges in the local scene by going on the attack and basically overturning the tables of moneychangers everywhere I went. I put out a free zine and gave away free tapes at every all-ages show I attended. For the longest while I would just mass-produce runs of cassettes and force them on people on an individual level. I even sent copies to my parents, who I was not otherwise in contact with anymore. I would go to the Salvation Army and buy boxes full of discarded commercial albums, stretching a little piece of tape over the write-protect notches so I could record my own material on them. They were better quality than the blanks available at retail shops, and also the cases didn't crumble in your hands when you tried to get the tape out. These I began putting in the mail with zines, giving away at shows, and leaving in strategic locations just about everywhere I went. I probably heard back from four or five people over the next ten years. I started to realize that what I was doing had very little in common with the "pop" dynamic that so appeals to music lovers of whatever nomenclature. It didn't sound like warmed-over Beatles and it didn't make your girlfriend take off her shirt and that was that. (Or, quite possibly, I simply didn't have "the goods"; couldn't operate at the level of quality necessary to sustain an audience.) Whichever. I'm afraid I've sort of lost track of what I'm saying here, and I don't think I've actually answered any of your questions. Let me refocus and try this again; this time leveraging the technology of the itemized list: 1. I would estimate that I've recorded over four hundred individual tracks since 1994. Many of which are vanished forever as a result of my having given away the last copy I had to people who likely threw them away, or the inevitable catastrophic hard drive crashes that have periodically set me back at square one over the years. 2. I do it for the same reason a child draws pictures: I don't know any better. No one has successfully socialized me out of it yet. I'm perpetually immature. I "just don't give a fuck." CS: What are your main inspirations for your music? SL: Headaches. To a lesser extent, the desire to express complex, abstract thought, if only to myself (see my zine, 23). When I started recording music it was not with the intent of ever sharing it with anybody else. It was sort of a spontaneous action. It's now become more of a situation where the music is a form of a personal journal, for me to encode the thoughts and ideas that are swirling about me at a given moment in time. Sometimes I will pull out old tapes or CDRs and think back to what was going on in my life at the time they were created. In some ways it preserves the mood of a given era much more effectively than my paper journal entries. Memory mapping to sound or some such. It's only been a coincidence of the circumstances of the Internet that in the last year or so I've begun to get some feedback via livejournal and have now actually started to interact with other musicians. Kind of a weird sensation, in a way. I'm not used to anyone being this up-close. Wonder how it all translates, outside of my head. CS: Would you be able to sit through one whole night, if you could, with a song just to get it the way you imagined it? SL: I have done this many, many, many times. I generally compose while the tape is rolling, one layer at a time, and since I don't write down my music or really bother to memorize it, I usually try to finish whatever I'm working on in a single session. This has become less of a truism since I've started using digital tools and, on some projects, editing purely visually from remote (without actually hearing what it is I'm working on), but by and large it's still the rule when I'm using analog instruments. I would describe my recording process as "perfectionist loose sketches," if that makes any sense at all. Fast but purposeful. Loose but directed. CS: In some ways you have adapted an "mysterium persona" on LJ. What made you think of doing that? Or is it a part of your real personality you just happen to have to be able to scare your boss? SL: Reflex from early days on the Internet. Real names are for marks or grown-ups. This isn't the only name I use, either; taking a page from the intelligence services, you compartimentalize to minimize exposure. Let me provide what I hope is an illustrative example: When you type my real name and the word "resume" into Google groups, you find my old address, phone number, e-mail address, and work history. The only reason you don't find my current information is because I've taken pains to make sure that material stays off the Internet (at least for the most part; so often you can't control what a company does with your personal data). And don't even get me started on Zabasearch and similar services. Do I really want to paint big neon arrows towards my private info by linking all of these facets of my life together in a permanent, global medium, especially while I'm as yet not wealthy enough to insulate myself from the resulting loss of privacy? The answer to that rhetorical question is a resounding no. Conversely to the above, if you type the name "Stanley Lieber" into Google all you will find is a metric fuckload of my artwork; comics, music, writing, etc., etc. I'm the first five hits, even beating out Stan "The Man" Lee, who is inarguably more successful and well known than I am, and, obviously, the personage I borrowed this name from in the first place. In this case all inbound connections and links are welcome and very much appreciated. But which do I want a potential employer, credit agency, law enforcement official to be confronted with, when they're researching my background on the web? I try to think of the situation from multiple angles, backwards and forwards. "If someone is going to run a search on my name, what are they going to find?" Or, perhaps more directly: "What do I want them to find?" Certainly not that song I wrote last year called Fucking A Girl That Was Born In The '80s. CS: Which kind of blog would you prefer to read: A personal blog which reveals alot of personal secrets that updates everyday or an artistic blog that updates every now and then? SL: A little of both, I think. A dark secret about my lj reading habits is that I often skip text-heavy posts that don't have any graphics or photographs to accompany them. How terrible is that? I think the thing that interests me the most about livejournal is that, much moreso than other journaling or discussion systems, it seems to encourage the integration of multimedia elements into the general stream of its entries and reader replies. Facilitates it, even. My favorite livejournals all read like interactive comic books. With occasional audio or video. With instant responses from the author. With RSS syndication, if I like. In other words, livejournal behaves like the natural culmination of creative personalities exploiting multimedia technology as a matter of course, rather than having the technology itself be the singluar focus of their work, its bare existence overriding any other possible content or concern. We're using the hammer, not merely pondering it's significance (though of course I'm a quite ponderous chap myself and see nothing wrong with it per se). For example, I've utilized MFeeds.com to create podcast feeds of journals that regularly post multimedia content so that my podcatcher program will automatically download whatever songs and videos they link to. I archive a lot of my own stuff using lj tags and then rely upon those resulting links to organize my material, to allow others to view my work according to category. I get e-mail notifications of comments to my livejournal, which link me right back to the fully interactive page where the content actually resides. These tools are making it possible to operate in all conceivable media simultaneously. I tend to gravitate towards journals that take full advantage of these possibilities. Which reminds me: I wrote an entry in my paper journal a couple of weeks ago describing a nightmare I had, wherein I woke up one morning and it was 1995 outside, none of the modern Internet tools I use every day existed, and I had to make do with a 14.4 connection and .au sound files and people who didn't understand the basic visual metaphors of hypertext, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum. All while still knowing what the future had in store for us once CPUs and bandwidth could be made to shoulder the burden. Gah! On the one hand this would have been a great opportunity to exploit my knowledge of the future and invest a considerable sum in Yahoo!, but it also terrified me that my entire working process has become so wrapped up in technology I still pay a monthly fee for, which could be rendered totally inaccessible or inoperable by the slightest of global economic fluctuations (I'm still not sure I believe all of this about the Internet having become the dominant lifeform on Earth, employing us all to propagate itself like some sort of manmade analogue of the selfish gene, so let's just assume here for the sake of argument that it is still an essentially "killable" beast, and that everything we upload to the web isn't being archived in more-or-less permanent form by intelligence agencies or commercial entities like Google). In a lot of ways I suppose that, no matter which sort of blog I prefer, I'm just sort of sitting around waiting for a new set of barbarians to come crashing in and burn this digital Alexandria to the ground. It all feels very fragile. Fun while it lasted, and now the context of my work is vanished. Poof. Politics as usual. Aw, I hope not. CS: Where do you find your inspiration for CD art? SL: French novels. Toy packaging. Alfred Sisley. CS: Are you able to listen to a Noise track directtly after a chamber pop piece without blinking an eye? SL: Yes. Something many conniseurs of "straight" music don't realize is that a lot of Noise artists are creating complex, structured compositions; it's not always an amorphous blob of aimless chaos. Rather, I think the impeutus behind much Noise music is analagous to the yearning for a "clean slate" expressed by Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and other non-literal or non-representational movements in the fine arts. Starting over, attempting to transcend the common influences. I think the relatively unfamiliar base sounds in a lot of this material convinces the casual listerner that whatever it is, it ain't music. It's common that when a friend of mine will put one of my CDs into their stereo for the first time, once it starts playing, they'll bang on the side of the device, or start adjusting knobs and dials -- thinking there must be something wrong with their equipment. Some individuals will take this further and suggest that the failure to conform to musical norms is evidence that your piece is not really music at all. As if purposely recorded sound of whatever stripe could be divided into an intrinsic, gradated hierarchy of intentionality! It's like your aunt with the bad dye job and the Tammy Faye makeup asking you why you "cover up your pretty face and do all that to your hair." It makes no sense to differentiate, at this level. Consciously organized sound is consciously organized sound. Even if that just means "curating" a field recording or soundscape by choosing where the piece begins and ends. Even at greatest reduction, the curator is still an editor, and editing is what this is all about. (Granted, there are some songs I wouldn't put next to each other on a mixtape...) Imagine being the guy who invented "Middle C." Of course, given enough time many of these seemingly directionless innovations will be absorbed into a new norm (each according to its overall fitness as an aesthetic meme), and a whole new generation of musicians will be taken to task for daring to violate the sanctity of the new auditory normalcy. Such is the relationship between artist and audience. I don't think that cyclical process is ever going to change. CS: Were you into music making during schools and did it affect your early social life? SL: No. I had to write a composition for a music class once, in high school, but I didn't have access to a piano and I just sort of put down a bunch of notes on the page, not having any auditory reference for what they'd sound like. I got a good grade because I know how to read and write music, and the composition was technically valid musical notation; but when the teacher went to play my song on the piano it was somewhat less than warmly received by him and my classmates. Not very musical, emotionally touching, by their standards (which stands to reason, given the method of composition!). I wish I could say I enjoyed the result more than they did, because it would tie this story in nicely with the rest of my spiel above, sounding like some sort of precursor to my experiments with oplocromodalization, but such is not the case. I didn't put much time or thought into the piece and it showed. It was plainly awful. I of course continued to write dramatic and melancholy lyrics throughout my school career, but had no idea where they'd end up, if indeed they were to end up anywhere at all. Years later I would return to these notebooks in seach of material. CS: Do you enjoy your work? SL: Sure, why not! If you mean my day job then I'll have to amend that to a "no." Since 2005 I have managed to combine the two forms of "work" by oplocromodalizing many songs over a VNC connection to my home network, all from the economic safety of my cubicle at work. This probably sounds like a "I got fired" story waiting to happen... CS: Do you find persons who are a bit dreamy/"cloudy thinkers"(I. E they think alot of big issues and might come up with ideas some never thought of) as people you have hard to understand or hard to reach? SL: Since I'm often accused of being one of those people, it would hardly be fair of me to talk smack about them here. Sometimes I forget to eat, or absentmindedly run into doors and that kind of thing. I frequently block people out and don't hear them when they're speaking to me. I won't remember your name ten minutes after I first meet you. These kinds of people rarely suffer a shortage of enemies. CS: Would you rather listen to someone elses advice or your own intuition? SL: I'm notoriously suspicious, dismissive of, advice. It's probably easy to manipulate me in that I tend to take off in the opposite direction of wherever a given person is trying to point me. I've been this way as long as I can remember. Go on, try me! CS: If you got a way of working and tells about it to a friend who works in the same field and he says "But you don't always need to do that" would you mind it or would you make it an big issue? SL: No skin off my teeth. To me advice is just another source to sample from. I do find though that sometimes those who like to give out a lot of advice are detrimentally affected, emotionally, if you choose not to follow it. Probably the ability to gracefully offer and receive advice is a beneficial quality in a civil society. CS: What kind of fashion do you find interesting but you would never wear yourself? SL: Papal regalia. Actually I've worn Papal regalia. CS: What kind of fashion do the people wear that you would avoid at all cost? SL: Beats me. I find a lot of things profoundly ugly, but if I'm to start nitpicking people's clothing then I'll never have time for anything else. My work is more important to me than your shoes. Though I do fancy a nice pair of shoes, and I would be sure to appreciate them if you were wearing a pair that met that standard. But you see, you are not. In fact, please get rid of the ones you have on, for they are hurting my eyes. What's wrong with you? How could you wear those in public? GUARDS! And so on. CS: Thank you for this interview? SL: Thank you for interviewing me. It's been a while since I've had to come up with coherent background material for Stanley Lieber. At least, I hope this has been coherent. If I were to fill this out tomorrow, the answers would probably all be different. |
