What were your beginnings like?
I started playing bass when I was 15. I had a friend that had been playing guitar for a while already. Sometimes he would show me riffs and stuff. I think the first thing I learned was the My Sharona riff, lol. It’s actually a good first lesson because it teaches you about octaves. For the most part though, I just screwed around and learned for myself. I remember making up riffs very early on, probably not very good ones. I always treated bass as a lead instrument I think because I was mostly playing by myself. I had a little Yamaha sampler that I would make loops and beats with and record stuff on a little Tascam 4-track, a primitive version of what I do now, really. I had another friend that played drums and we would jam in my attic sometimes. Good times.
When I was in college I played in sort of a nu metal/post punk band. This would have been around 2004 I think. We had a MySpace page, played the Whiskey A Go Go here in LA a couple of times. We were together for a few years and then unfortunately the guitarist, who was really the founding member and glue holding it together died of cancer. The band kind of started with me and him actually, at a time when I had basically given up on playing music with other people but his optimism was infectious I guess. We were all kind of different in that band but the comradery was really pretty special. That’s what I miss most I think.
After Strofik broke up, there were some sporadic attempts at joining or forming bands, including a little two piece in which I played drums. Nothing really stuck. I sort of took it for granted before but it’s really hard to find chemistry with musicians. It’s like a marriage between multiple people. It was also around this time when I got more into recording on my own, trying new instruments, getting more into experimentalism. By the time I got my first cracked copy of Ableton, it was all over as far as looking for a band to play in. Aside from a few virtual collabs here and there, I’ve more or less been pretending to be an entire band for the last 12 years. I guess I got tired of looking for people to play certain roles and I just started playing those roles myself. I find too that working on my own in the DAW, it’s much easier to explore experimental ideas than it would be in a band.
The moniker, Modus Pony, is just a play on “modus ponens” a type of logical argument (I majored in philosophy for a time). To tell the truth, I kind of hate the name after all this time but I’ve built a little following with it so, as a practical matter, I keep it around.
What inspires you?
I would say I get most inspired by people I know, either in real life or virtually. It’s not that celebrity “geniuses” like Brian Eno aren’t inspiring to me. They are (he is), but I guess there’s something about knowing someone and being close to their mind, their talents, having conversations with them or collaborating with them that gives you ideas, makes you see things in a different way, see new possibilities. Some of the people that have inspired me in recent years are my friend Celina who got me more into zines (a new art form for me), Suko Pyramid (Madrid based musician I’ve collaborated with), My friend Zach in Maine who does really unique abstract sound art (also a collaborator, 1/2 of Wife Eyes), My friend Eamon who runs Strategic Tape Reserve and is a great conceptual composer (also has objectively the best Twitter account), Marc Weidenbaum who runs Disquiet Junto giving me and hundreds of composer/producers something new to think about every week, Bill Harkleroad (AKA Zoot Horn Rollo of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band) who I took guitar lessons from, and Larry Wish who runs the Bumpy label and is just an inspiring, magical weirdo.
As far as what (rather than whom) inspires me, I would say nature. Every time I go on a hike it seems to have a renewing effect and gets me back to a blank slate for new ideas to come.
Why do you make music?
I guess I can remember caring about things before music, skateboarding for instance. But once I got bit by the music bug, that was it. It’s probably a standard answer to say that an artist creates out of an inner need, but it’s also true in my experience. It's simply who I am. I have an artist friend who talks about this phenomenon unironically as a curse. It kind of is when you think about it, especially in a capitalist society that simply doesn’t value art unless it appeals to the masses. But another, more positive way of thinking of it is: at least I’m not actively making the world a worse place. Hopefully, it gives someone out there a different experience of reality, an escape from everyday drudgery and constant news of our ecological collapse.
What's the album or track of yours you're most proud of, and why?
This is a tough question for me because I’m pretty critical of my past work and I always relate to my next thing as the ultimate thing (until the next thing). That being said, I’m still pretty proud of the second Wife Eyes album (self titled), for a lot of reasons.
“Wife Eyes” was my first chance to implement some of the weird music theory Bill showed me and I’m pretty proud of my guitar work/composing on that album. But it’s unique for other reasons too. My parts have an element of aleatory to them (I had an elaborate system for choosing what to play next), and of course Zach’s more intuitive approach, his abstract remixing of what I had sent him adds yet another textural dimension to it that glued it all together. The theme Zach and I talked about was recursion, the circularity of time etc. This was also sort of a theme in our fist album. But I just feel like the second album is a unique, multi-dimensional thing that’s held up over time, for me anyway. Hopefully, Zach feels the same way.
What are your nearest plans?
Well, there’s another Wife Eyes album coming out probably in January of next year. We worked with another artist from Detroit, nnirror, this time. He does these great textural, noise pieces using a lot of tech, coding with Max MSP and so on. I don’t completely understand how he does what he does but I’ve always kind of been fascinated by it. So, the new album is interesting because there’s essentially three radically different approaches to music and sound there. Much more textural I would say than previous Wife Eyes releases.
I’m also working on another guitar based solo album. I’m sort of balancing a desire to become a better musician with the need to keep composing. So, the deal is that I’m writing on guitar, it has to be one track (there’s percussion tracks but no guitar overdubs and no other melodic instruments), and I have to play the song all the way through when recording. So, imagine a two piece: guitar and percussion and the percussionist has all sorts of unconventional knick knacks giving it sort of a concrete element. I’m a shitty minimalist so I tend to go overboard, especially on percussion sounds. Something I’m also experimenting with is naturalizing the tempo (making the tempo in Ableton slave to that original take so that it fluctuates naturally).
Not clear whether there’s a market for a guitar album like this. People aren’t into guitar as much anymore but I don’t really care. It’s for me. If someone else likes it, that would be great but it’s not necessary.
What would you like to say to the world?
You can’t control how others perceive you or your music. Of course, I’d like others to get something from it but I can’t control how or even that they’ll enjoy it. I think John Cage said once (I’m paraphrasing) that when he tried to be sincere, people thought it was funny, and when he tried to be funny, people took him more seriously. I can sympathize with that. In fact, a lot of people have said my music was funny over the years. I just got a Soundcloud comment the other day to that effect. I’ll take it. As long as it makes people feel or think something. The worst reaction would be no reaction.
I guess I act like I don’t care how others take it, but if I’m going out of my way to be different and stand out in certain ways, I obviously care to a degree. If there were no one else on the planet, I think I’d still be playing music for myself. But it would all feel kind of empty, not to mention the music I would create would be far less interesting because all the people that inspire me wouldn’t be around.
What is your favorite drink?
Coffee. But then again, am I just saying that because I’m addicted to the caffeine? Would I drink it otherwise? Would I have tried it to begin with if we didn’t have a simultaneous fascination with and taboo of drugs in our culture? Would I have had the chance to try it if not for the global coffee trade and the resultant successful marketing campaign in the imperial west? Would I like it even if our pro-business culture didn’t value productivity so much? Are any of us really free to choose our “favorite” drinks, or is our entire reality and therefore our tastes, entirely socially constructed, a result of an arbitrary chain of cause and effect we have no control over, let alone time to reflect on?
But yeah, I’d say coffee. Coffee is my favorite drink.
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Grab the music at
http://moduspony.bandcamp.com/
moduS ponY -- Ulterior Frequencies ((2020))
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