Jack: Hi, Jacob. Hi, Cory. Thanks for joining me today, I'm extremely excited to talk to you guys. I guess I'll just kick it right off and follow up on that, Jacob, first of all, where did you grow up? And what was your experience with music growing up, were your parents into music? What was your early journey into music?

Jacob: Yeah, great question. Well, the first 12 or 13 years, I was in Lexington, Kentucky, and then my dad got a job in North Carolina and we moved to Chapel Hill. And in Lexington I was in a boys choir, so that's the first thing. [laughter].

Jack: Wow, okay, right off the bat.

Jacob: I think Cory is a classical guitarist and I sang and learned to read music through choir. I went to camp and it was a part of the Anglican tradition of boys choir, so it wasn't the kind that was secular, it was a part of the Episcopal Church. So anyway, I really got into music that way. And I remember getting into D&D through that, too. As well as...

Jack: Wait, wait, talk about that for a sec.

Cory: Yeah, slow down. [laughter]

Jack: You're going too fast! [laughter]

Jacob: I just think there's a lot of crossover in young, geeky music kids that are into classical music and Dungeons & Dragons in the late '80s. And that was how I found out about metal, too.

Cory: Wasn't D&D in the late '80s also... Did you have to hide it from your rectors?

Jack: It was satanic or whatever, right?

Jacob: The Devil's music, yeah. I mean, loosely. I think honestly we were more worried about our parents. I remember my mom was not excited about it.

Jack: Were your parents pretty religious?

Jacob: No, they were actually more... Well, my mother and father both grew up Christian. And then in the '60s they got into eastern spirituality. You know, you can think, like, Ram Dass or something like that. But then by the time the '80s rolled around they were still into the eastern stuff as well as into, like, me being in church youth groups and singing in a boys choir. So that was my pre-Chapel Hill thing. In Kentucky I was the weird, cool kid. Everybody was pretty straight. And then when I moved to Chapel Hill, I was not cool anymore. And that's the story I always tell.

Jack: Because it was more metropolitan or something?

Jacob: Chapel Hill was ground zero for indie rock and college radio. It was a college town. I was the one kid who would wear Birkenstocks and tie dyes.

Jack: Thanks mom and dad.

Jacob: In Kentucky that was me but Chapel Hill was, like, the future. Everyone was wearing, I don't even know, whatever you associate with a true indie rock subculture in the early '90.

Cory: Oh, try to remember it! What would it be?

Jacob: It was thrift store stuff, you know, which was all new for me. I had no clue.

Cory: What year would this be?

Jacob: We moved in '92. And that was the year that articles started getting written about Chapel Hill indie rock. And, you know, Thurston Moore wrote... Well, Sonic Youth wrote a song called "Chapel Hill" the year that I moved there.

Jack: The Year after Punk Broke, '92.

Jacob: Yeah, exactly. So that was a huge mind work for me and it took me a couple of years to adjust but then I figured out my groove. And got into, of course, indie rock, and then through the radio station discovered noise music and that was the gateway. I think John Zorn was the gateway into noise for me.

Jack: This is high school still.

Jacob: Yeah, this is mid-. And then free jazz. You know and you're just buying CDs randomly. I'm sure Cory and you probably also, Jack, remember going to record stores and just dropping $15 on something because someone told you that something related to something cool and you get it home and you have no idea what it is.

Jack: And then also maybe it's an artist but they don't have the "good" one, so then it's just like B material, B album or whatever.

Cory: Mine would be Anthrax. I had that experience, like, three times over with Anthrax. Anthrax is awesome and then you would get some mid-level Anthrax.

Jack: You're getting their, like, fourth record or whatever: "They really phoned it in on this one." [laughter]

Jacob: Since we're going to spend a couple of minutes on this, do you remember the tape clubs? Cory, what were they called?

Cory: Yeah, you would get mailed a sheet of paper with things on it. What were they called? Penny...

Jacob: I don't know, but you would get, like, eight free tapes to start.

Cory: It's like we're talking about the 1800s. [laugher]

Jack: People who don't know, cassette tapes were these things that had actual magnetic tape.

Cory: You had to mail a check to a P.O. box or something in these clubs.

Jacob: Yes, and so the reason I bring it up is because my sister just checked every box on the "alternative" section and what showed up was so diverse and strange that I still to this day don't understand some of the bands that were included in this initial cassette blast. I mean, obviously I understand what the Grateful Dead is now, but to get the Grateful Dead in the same section as, I don't know, the Ramones or Sonic Youth... Even trying to understand how Fishbone related to Sonic Youth was really confusing to me, you know?

Jack: Yeah, I still don't think history has been flattened enough that that makes sense today in any way.

Jacob: Yeah. So Chapel Hill. You know, the issue I had in high school was I really wanted to be a part of this scene, but it wasn't like a hardcore scene where the shows were all ages and young kids were invited. It was a bit more closed off and... We wouldn't have used the word hipster in the '90s, obviously, just it was pretentious, I guess. I wanted to be a part of this indie rock scene in Chapel Hill and it didn't really work. I just stayed friends with my high school buddies, a lot of whom were music nerds like me. And then I went to Oberlin and there I was able to meet, well, Cory, obviously, but a lot of other people that I felt were really... They were cool, but they were excited to be friends with me. I was thinking about it recently and I was thinking, at first I thought they were just nice, but I think they were actually, like... Oberlin's a tiny college and anyone that shows up that's into weird new music stuff, immediately you just become friends with them, like, there's no choice.

Jack: Well, how about at this point, we go back and we do the same thing with you, Cory. Can you tell us a little bit about your origin story?

Cory: Yeah, definitely. I grew up in... The short answer is Buffalo, New York, but the longer answer is the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. And it's kind of an easy answer, it's my older brother Justin, he's six years older than me. He's 50 now, so he was early '70s. Music always came through him. So this would be, like, Kiss, right? So he would have been, like, eight when Kiss came out. And Kiss was a real turning point band for any kid that was that age. And then my brother went to, like, Van Halen, so I remember growing up with Van Halen records under our bunk bed and just paging through them. And I should explain here that my brother had an extraordinary love for this music, a lifelong love, so he manages heavy metal bands now. So he was doing that and I was just always kind of around and just picking it up second hand. He was so into it that when Van Halen came to Buffalo in '84, he got my parents to take him to the show at the hockey rink. And he would have been, like, 12 or something. So this kind of thing was going on in my house and one thing I would say is that the way that I have always dealt with the music has never really changed. I'm not like Jacob, I don't search anything out. I don't collect. For me, it's always just been who's around me. And everything comes kind of in a fog. Things just come in and out, and I like that very much. So then of course Van Halen went into thrash, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer. In high school I was definitely a huge metal kid and started to play guitar and was really into shredding.

Jack: Were you also into D&D?

Cory: No, never.

Jack: Ah, interesting! That's a fork in your relationship.

Cory: Yeah, definitely, so I was not into D&D.

Jacob: Cory was into hockey.

Cory: Yeah, it's a Buffalo thing. Hockey, metal. Yeah, I guess very Buffalo, in a way.

Jacob: Like Wayne's World.

Cory: Definitely.

Jack: I was about to say.

Jacob: Yeah, Bill & Ted. That was real, those characters.

Jack: "It's a true story!" [laughter]

Jacob: Yeah, those are true stories.

Cory: So then my brother goes away to college and I have my high school years. He was no longer around and I had to bump into my own thing in a way. And that's when, you know, raves started and made their way to the Midwest, or we would have been Western New York. So then I started getting into techno, basically, and that would have been through Humber College, outside of Toronto. They used to have this radio station that I could get in Buffalo. I would take my really long guitar cord and attach it to the antenna and then wrap it around the living room.

Jacob: Oh my god, that's so awesome.

Cory: And if I did that, and maybe the wind was blowing the right way, I could get this radio station from outside of Toronto. Because Toronto has this relationship with London, a lot of people don't really know, the two music scenes are kind of in parallel. So they were playing a lot of jungle music, drum & bass. And so I started just listening to that kind of stuff. In the UK it would have been pirate radio but in Toronto it was just, like, college radio.

[music]

Jacob: Cory, I'm just curious, because I bet your brother would have been like, "Why are you listening to this dumb dance music?" Or would he have been like, "That stuff sounds great." How did you decide it was cool deviating from metal?

Cory: Well, it wasn't that far of a leap, actually, from metal, because by that time the metal thing had gone into, like, Nine Inch Nails and then Godflesh and then Type O Negative.

Jacob: Drum machines.

Cory: Yeah, so, like, drum machine metal and it's really not that much difference, in a way.

Jacob: Yeah, okay.

Cory: And especially Godflesh, that was a big band for me and my brother.

Jack: Justin Broadrick.

Cory: Justin Broadrick! Another one of these musicians who has stayed with me my whole life, actually.

Jacob: Yeah, totally.

Cory: And I remember they came to Buffalo to open up for Type O Negative.

Jack: Wow, that's a show right there.

Cory: Yeah and their van broke down and it's actually still something I'm annoyed at myself for, but we were like, "Yeah, nevermind." We didn't go see Type O Negative, which is really dumb. I think we didn't know who they were or I don't know, there was some clear huge miscommunication, but I never got to see Godflesh, is the point. But so we were on that kind of tip and then I get to college and then techno kind of takes over and Detroit techno...

Jack: Were there raves happening in Ohio or around? Would you go out to stuff in college?

Cory: Yeah, so actually there's one thing I wanted to... You had asked what was the first kind of culture thing I saw. It's related because we had raves in Buffalo and I remember I went to one, maybe it was my first one ever, and in the chill out room or whatever it was called... There were two DJs in Buffalo, one was called God Morgan and the other one was called the Christ Sinister. [laughter]

Jack: Oh my God. [laughter] The other was Mark Lord.

Cory: And I remember I walk in and I think one of them was just wearing, like, an American flag and nothing else. [laughter] And he was playing one record of bird sounds and another record of waves.

Jacob: Yes.

Jack: Now we're talking.

Cory: That was a real turning point for me and I would have been 16 or 15 or something. So it's funny, I'm going to a rave, but really what I was going to was seeing, like, advanced experimental music.

Jacob: Art music.

Cory: That was a kind of moment for me that I always remember and kind of should have hinted to me that that's what I was interested in, basically.

Jacob: Right.

Cory: And I have a funny story because I actually entered as a classical guitar major, if you could believe.

Jack: Wow, amazing.

Cory: And then computer science. Like, make-your-own-major. And then I dumped classical guitar but I ended up just graduating from the conservatory with a kind of electronic, like, electroacoustic/technology/music kind of degree. But what that meant was I had that real kind of traditional conservatory education: oral skills, music theory, music history. And that stuff was so tough because I just had no connection to any of that music. It'd be like, you get to class at 9 a.m. and then they would play some Mozart on the piano and you would have to write it.

Jacob: Cory, you obviously liked playing classical guitar in high school.

Cory: Yeah, definitely. [laughter]

Jacob: What was the moment when you were like, "I can't. This isn't going to be me. I gotta do this other major."

Cory: It was, I think, my third year. I had done three years. Or maybe it was halfway through my third year. I really liked it, I love the kind of monk aspect of it, practicing six, seven hours a day alone. I just quit. I quit cold turkey and basically never really played guitar again, like, at all. Well, except in our band.

Jack: Damn. [laughter]

Cory: Oh, and the other thing that happened is the internet happened, basically.

Jacob: Right, yeah.

Cory: So that, of course, was taking a lot of my attention and a lot more exciting.

Jacob: Or computers in general, too. I mean, you were taking programming classes. By that point, you were making all of this music on your computer?

Cory: Yeah, exactly.

Jacob: You even made music on your computer in high school, right?

Cory: Yeah, definitely.

Jacob: Wait, can you talk a little bit about that?

Cory: Yeah, I just had an audio editor which had been like Audacity, you know, and I just would make things with sine waves. That's all I knew how to do, but just really basic, like, putting chords together. Of course I was trying to make techno, but I couldn't. I didn't realize you needed, like... I was never smart enough to go ask somebody, so I just made things on whatever weird little audio editor I had. So computers happened and Jacob and I, of course, spent a lot of time together in college.

Jacob: Yeah, that's how we bonded.

Cory: Yeah, like, years, basically. Because there was a media lab in school in the library with a couple computers that had CD burners, if you could imagine that's what made them media computers. And Jacob and I would stay in that room for hours a day.

Jack: Did you guys enter at the same time?

Jacob: Yeah.

Jack: Wow, so you guys literally were... What day do you think you guys met each other? Because I remember meeting people on my first day who I'm still friends with.

Jacob: Yeah, totally. It's all burned in my brain. None of my thirties or forties is, I don't remember anything. [laughter]. But everything that happened at Oberlin is.

Cory: That's so true, like, today I can't remember. Like, how did I get here, in front of this mic? [laughter] Let's say it both at the same time. We'll both speak at the same time.

Jack: Yeah, really slowly.

Cory: We'll say the same exact sentence. No, I'm just kidding.

Jacob: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, Cory, you probably think it was the media lab.

Cory: No, actually!

Jacob: I think it was meeting up in the VHS editing room on the top floor of Mudd library.

Jack: Wow.

Cory: Oh, okay, yeah. So I have a kind of short and long answer. I think that's the long answer but my short answer is I first became aware of you in freshman year, 1996, HyperCard class, because we were in that class together.

Jacob: That's true.

Cory: We do have a funny story when we met editing that video.

Jacob: Yeah. [laughter]

Cory: I'll tell that story. So it's, like, year end. I don't remember what year it was, like, freshman, sophomore, I don't know. In the top of the library at Oberlin there's there's two video editing suites. And it's really the last few days of school and Jacob and I are both in a position where we have to hand in some kind of video for, I don't know, Jacob, you had a class, I had a...

Jacob: No, they were both independent studies, I think, me and you both.

Cory: That's right.

Jacob: So of course that's why we waited until the last minute, because no teacher was on our backs.

Cory: And so I think we ran into each other in the hallway and we were both like, what's the word...

Jacob: In trouble. [laughter].

Cory: We fucked up. I had nothing, Jacob had really nothing. Well, not "really." Basically what ended up happening, we end up talking and Jacob was like, "I have this half finished thing," and I was like, "I know how to edit." So what we did is we basically joined together on a project and handed it in to both places.

Jacob: Incredible. Unbeknownst to the other teacher.

Cory: In a way I don't think they would have cared, but it was still very smooth, it was perfect. And that was an amazing experience too, Jacob. That was an incredible film, if you remember. It was, like, somebody had left the film on a heater at a point, so the whole thing was purple.

Jacob: Yeah, it was basically... My parents were into these Eastern gurus and one of them was this guy Meher Baba. He was a guru that a lot of Westerners got involved with and I was super into it in high school and early college.

Jack: I think I remember seeing that in a Paper Rad thing.

Jacob: Oh yeah, it's all over our stuff. So there was a center in Myrtle Beach, of all places, where his followers and devotees would hang out. And there was this painter who was blind and was making collaborative paintings in the '70s and I went down and made a documentary, an experimental documentary, about him. But the footage was all, like Cory said, like, melted, so it was only pink and white and purple. It was interesting because he was a blind painter and the footage was basically... You could barely make any of it out. And Cory was like, "Okay, I'll edit this." [laughter]

Jack: Like, "I guess." [laughter]

Jacob: What did you think, Cory? Because Cory was a raver, basically, and a metalhead.

Cory: That is true.

Jacob: Were you like, "This is some new age shit"?

Cory: Yeah, exactly. I don't know, I was just like, "Yeah, cool, sure." [laughter]

Jack: That's a good diplomatic way of...

Jacob: One thing about Cory is he's always been really, really open minded even though he might have his own vision or agenda.

Cory: With collaboration, yeah. Definitely that's why I love to collaborate because I, in my own work, am such a... I have so much trouble, I'm so tight and such a psycho, but when I collaborate, I love it because I'm just like, "Cool, whatever." Yeah, that's how I've always loved working with Jacob because it's just like, "Yeah." I become so calm in a way because all that psychotic psychosis melts away. So I had a great time. I do though remember we accidentally put, I think, this one clip twice. Do you remember that Jacob? So I still have a kind of, like... [laughter]

Jack: Wow, you're still ashamed of it all these years later.

Cory: Can you believe it? Like a quarter of a century later I'm still like, "God damn it." So then a couple of things about Jacob I'm just going to bring up. [laughter] Jacob used to dress in only primary colors.

Jack: Yes!

Cory: Which was really amazing, and it wasn't in an annoying way.

Jack: When did that start?

Jacob: It was the black era. The cool kids at Oberlin were wearing navy and black and, like, high waters and, you know, white belts. You remember that? Looking like a little kid, primary colors, was sort of an affront to the darkness of what else I was seeing at Oberlin. I was like, okay, I would be really innocent and look like a 12 year old then instead of looking like a... We didn't call them hipsters, we called them "pomos," if you can believe it or not.

Cory: Yeah, that was the phrase.

Jack: Wow, as in "postmodern"?

Jacob: Yeah. Hipster didn't exist until, like, two years later.

Cory: Yeah, it's true, actually, because hipster was, like the Williamsburg thing.

Jack: Earlier you said you guys played in a band, or bands, together. Could you describe what those were like?

Cory: Jacob?

Jacob: One was called Daddio's Tape Disk, which was a name of a mixtape cassette my dad sent me in, like, junior year of college that probably had, I don't know, classic rock, I don't remember. We were using Macs but also, Cory, were you also doing your... No, there wouldn't have been an Atari or a Commodore in that band.

Cory: There might have been.

Jacob: There was definitely guitars.

Cory: I think it was also, like, high Casio, this was late '90...

Jacob: Lo-fi.

Cory: Yeah, if you remember the Casio era, like, 4-track era.

[music]

Jack: At this point were you, at least Jacob, aware of the DIY scene or circuit? Did you play in bands in Chapel Hill?

Jacob: Yes, I played in bands, but we weren't cool, we just played in the teen center.

Jack: Okay, so you weren't playing, like...

Jacob: That was what I wanted to happen, I wanted to be playing, opening for lofi indie rock, like Superchunk or Portastatic, whatever. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. And then at Oberlin, I felt like, "Oh, I am able to open for these bands," that are... I don't think we ever opened for a band that was touring, but at least there were people at Oberlin that were in legendary bands outside of Oberlin that I was friends with. So that built my confidence to the point where, post Oberlin, I just would force my way into things. But yeah, I was not a part of the scene in Chapel Hill, but I at Oberlin learned about all these scenes. I learned about the biggest one, obviously, which was the Providence scene. I learned about it from two kids who had older siblings. They went to RISD and I was like, "Okay, this is this is everything." You know? I got every comic I could from there.

Jack: What year did you start college?

Jacob: '96, so it was '98 that I think I learned about Fort Thunder.

Jack: Fort Thunder started in, like, '95 or '96?

Jacob: Yeah, I think I heard about it when it really started to totally take off.

Jack: How were you finding out about this stuff?

Jacob: Just friends, literal word of mouth. And maybe radio station compilations, like, I think there was a Load Records... Or, no, Bulb Records? No, actually before Bulb there was Troubleman Unlimited. There was a few other labels that were putting out, like, No Wave-y compilations and I just grabbed every single one of them and was, like, "Okay, who's this?" And again, it's like, no internet means you're just so confused about context all the time. You're like, "Is this band a part of it? I can't tell, I don't know." You know?

Cory: Graffiti was also around, so there was even bigger things...

Jacob: Hip hop.

Cory: Yeah, hip hop. Jacob, you're forgetting...

Jacob: Indie hip hop.

Cory: Jacob was a huge backpack hip hopper.

Jacob: I was insane about it.

Cory: He's forgetting this part. [laughter] I remember you would sometimes sit me down and play me records and be like, "Listen to this snare." MF Doom, I remember listening to all these people in your dorm room, or whatever.

Jacob: Yeah, it was crazy.

Jack: Wow.

Jacob: It was a wild time because, yeah, I was into No Wave and that stuff, but then I would order 12 inches...

Jack: Like Anticon.

Jacob: Yes, every single one of those. I just, again, ordered them without listening to any of them and I'd get them and I'd be like, "Well, this sucks." [laughter]

Jack: Hey, but that's great. I was just talking to someone the other day, you know, actually getting a record and not knowing what it is and it sucking is in some ways better than getting a record and it's awesome.

Jacob: I know. It's a completely 180 shift from how people consume music right now. It's like, if you buy something, you're buying it as a collector because you know exactly what it is.

Jack: Exactly, 100%. It's not a discovery based thing.

Jacob: No. That was a research practice that we were doing, you know? And I don't think that what people do now is really research. They're not putting their money towards research anymore.

Jack: No, no, definitely not. Because also when you have access to everything, everything has way less weight, you know? And it's a tough thing because now we're trying to figure out as a society, if you're faced with such an overload, what is the best way to deal with it? You can't go backwards and you can't be like, "No one should be able to hear anything anymore and we should go back to you have to mail order or something," or whatever. [laughter]

Jacob: Right, yeah.

Jack: But we're trying to figure out some way to bring context or weight or something back to music, at least digitally. And who knows if that can even happen ever. It's definitely different. But there's something in both of your arts... Specifically your art, Jacob, has dealt with information overload.

Jacob: The cheapening of culture, which tends to happen with digital technology.

Jack: Totally, 100%.

Jacob: And I think Cory speaks to that as well often.

Cory: What would a young person say, though, if they heard this?

Jack: "Shut up, grandpa!"

Jacob: No, they would. They would say like, "I can't relate to this."

Cory: Because for them it's not cheap, right?

Jacob: I was thinking about that before we started today. I was like, a lot of the things we're going to talk about are going to come off like, "Oh, things used to be this certain way." But I think actually me and Cory are really aware of that. It's not that things were better back then and worse now. I think we've pretty much always embraced this nonhierarchical approach to history, or culture I guess. And it sounds stupid to say things were just different, but I think as an artist I'm really excited by just looking at the differences and not judging them or pointing them out. It's really fun to be like, "Can you believe it? Can you believe this is what it was and what it is now?" Everything's a mystery kind of a thing, you know?

Jack: Cory, how did you get involved in visual art stuff from being a raver who played classical guitar? [laughter]

Cory: A Godflesh fan who was also a raver.

Jack: Yeah, exactly.

Cory: Well, I had always made videos, I made videos as a kid on a camcorder that my aunt let me and my sister borrow for a few weeks every year. And then, it sounds insane, but I had a video art class in my high school, and to remind you, I grew up in Buffalo, so video art is the kind of art of that city.

Jack: Right, yeah, of course. Tony Conrad being the one that comes to my mind.

Cory: Yeah, exactly, so him and all those other people that were around in the '70s, '80s and '90s kind of shifted the culture of that city. So when I was in high school, I just thought making experimental video is what every artist did.

Jack: Who are some of the other artists for people, for me, and for people who don't know?

Cory: Yeah, so Steina and Woody Vasulka were there in the ‘70s.

Jack: Oh, yeah. Right.

Cory: And they, of course, started the Kitchen and, of course, went on to a very long and amazing career of experimental video and media art. Tony Conrad taught, of course, until 2015 or '16 at the media studies department at the university.

Jack: Wow, I did not know he was still teaching then.

Cory: Yeah, it was amazing. I used to go once a year to his apartment in Greenpoint and we would Skype to his class in Buffalo.

Jack: Incredible.

Cory: Yeah! He would do a thing where, like, half of the classes were remote. And then just to go to Tony's apartment was a total trip because it was just filled with violins and drums and looked like he'd live there for, like, a hundred years.

Jack: Incredible.

Cory: So anyway, point being is I had always made video and I couldn't go to art school for video in the late '90s, so I didn't even bother. So that's how I ended up in the conservatory at Oberlin. And I kept making videos the whole time.

Jacob: Yeah, some of Cory's earliest videos are some of my favorite things. Well, you know, back to that idea of the things in your early twenties, late teens are burned in your brain.

Jack: Yeah, can you talk about some of those videos?

Jacob: Okay, yeah.

Cory: Can we legally talk about them? [laughter]

Jack: You don't mind!

Cory: Hold on a sec, let me just check with my counsel.

Jacob: I think that my favorite era was when you started... Oh, shoot. Well, he was making all of these Aphex Twin sounding songs and then he would put videos, like, found footage, video from the internet or VHS tapes. I remember one that was a super slow motion VHS of somebody losing a, what was it, log rolling competition from ESPN? [laughter]

Cory: Yeah, it's not so different from my work now.

Jacob: No. And some of it was, like... There was a lot of slow motion stuff, slow motion video of, like, hot dogs spinning on a hot dog machine, which then I think eventually turned into an ASCII piece way later.

Cory: Yeah, yeah, this stuff always kept with me. But it was like, Bill Viola I had learned about in high school.

Jacob: Slow-mo.

Cory: Very much influenced by some of this '80s, '90s video art.

Jack: Yeah, well that stupid edge, honestly, that's massively influential to my own work. Both of your art is just incredibly stupid, you know?

Cory: That is true.

Jack: It's just sublime.

Jacob: Strongly agree. I wonder where that sensibility comes from beyond character traits of the individual. Is there something that we saw, Cory, or Jack, that you saw as an early person that... Well, I guess I could think of something: Andy Kaufman.

Cory: Andy Kaufman.

Jack: Absolutely.

Jacob: He's not an artist. Or he is an artist, I guess, but...

Jack: He's not generally thought of first as, primarily, an artist.

Jacob: I think also going to Oberlin, there's a lot of seriousness around music and art and after a certain time I wanted to try really hard, but I didn't want to fall into the overly sincere... problem. Maybe? I don't know. But Andy Kaufman. Who else would have been the jokester template, I don't know.

Cory: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, maybe we weren't really looking at art then in college. We were looking at music.

Jacob: It was all music.

Cory: Or I would say the art of Barry McGee and Stephen Powers.

Jacob: Oh yeah!

Cory: That stuff we were looking at, you introduced me to that. So that stuff was definitely on the radar.

Jacob: Early Deitch. [laughter]

Cory: Early Jeffrey Deitch and Alleged Gallery kind of energy.

Jacob: Yeah, totally. [laughter].

Cory: And then, of course, like we said earlier... The other thing I wanted to say about Jacob, which is important: Jacob was the first person who ever sat me down and showed me Angelfire.

Jacob: Oh, wow. I don't remember this.

Cory: And Jacob was like, "Look at these websites." And they were just, like, personal websites on Angelfire. Now, mind you, Angelfire was a current site, it was not retro. It was where people had their homepages and, Jacob, you were really the first person who was like, "No, no, no. Look at these."

Jacob: The vernacular, right.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, it's got a bunch of little spinning emoticons.

Cory: Yeah!

Jacob: And also what the people were saying, again, back to the sincerity thing, it was a lot of sincere... I can't even remember, diary stuff, and just the weird window into people's lives, I think.

Jack: Pre LiveJournal, for those younger...

Cory: Yeah, I mean still the '90s, if you can imagine. And so that I remember very clearly, that you were the first person I ever knew who was very tuned in to that stuff and it took other people many years to tune in to that stuff.

Jack: Yeah, right. What year do you think that was?

Cory: Probably '98, '99.

Jacob: I would say that maybe that I saw the window there through outsider art, which is a term that isn't really used so much anymore. But this idea of vernacular, studying vernacular expression, which I guess could come from Harry Smith, actually, thinking of it that way. I didn't know about Harry Smith at the time, but I knew about this idea of whatever you would call non-trained or folk practices and I think that I probably, because I was at Oberlin College, was like, "Oh, this is actually the new version of that."

Cory: Yeah, and while all that stuff was happening, early net art is starting, it's also coming across our radar. So like jodi.org, Olia Lialina, this stuff is making it in... That is art we were looking at, but it was not through any official channel, it was coming through just email, I guess.

Jacob: Links.

Cory: Yeah, links. [laughter]

Jacob: Link pages. I don't know if you know this, Jack, but pre-social media, obviously if a website wanted. . . they would just have a page called "links"? What would it be called? And it would just list all the stuff that you are inspired by and that's literally how I found out about everything.

Cory: It's important to remember those pages were needed because search engines didn't exist yet.

Jack: Yeah, totally.

Jacob: Totally.

Jack: People would be connected literally click to click, one person linking to the other direct. My version of that with the links page is the early '00s blog scene where they would just have "friends of the blog" and it would list 20 other music, illegal music, upload blogs.

Jacob: Those blogs are such a big deal.

Jacob: I don't want to fast forward too much, but those blogs, the blog era of music .mp3s was another huge kind of seismic shift, I would say.

Cory: What era was that? What are we talking about? I think I wasn't paying attention in these years.

Jacob: You were there, you were there. It was all the reissue, obscure, like Mutant Sounds.

Jack: Mutant Sounds is the one that's for me and so many people...

Cory: 20 Jazz Funk Greats?

Jack: 20 Jazz Funk Greats, totally. For me this is 2006, I was 16. This is how I got into weird music.

Jacob: This is your radio station from Toronto.

Cory: Yeah, exactly.

Jack: But I'm curious, maybe even just rewind just a little bit, to the link page. I feel like there was a little bit more that you were going to say in relation to that.

Jacob: I think that I found myself interested... You know, we were talking about how we didn't really get a proper art education. I think instead what we got and maybe what Oberlin allowed me to get was an education where I just got interested in almost all of the peripheries to mainstream art, like everything but painting and sculpture basically. [laughter]

Cory: And it's funny, I liked hanging out with you in the art area because I was kind of magnetized by the whole idea of contemporary art, which I knew nothing about, but I knew that I could hang out with you in the art area and I just like it. I was like, "Huh, this is interesting, these people just have these little rooms and they're messy and," this is something is really important, "they all have a very good taste in music. And they're listening to very cool music and they're just, like, making a mess." [laughter] I just couldn't quite figure it out.

Jacob: Another moment that I remember from Oberlin, and this was a senior year, and I think I remembered it because it was actually in my studio where Cory was visiting. I think I remember, Cory, you saying something like... How do I put this? Like, "Computers, Jacob, computers!" It was burned in my brain because I realized later, not so much that he was right, but that it was what we did on computers that was what was important.

Jack: The material, yeah.

Jacob: And nobody else was doing that, really, at Oberlin and then nobody was doing good art on computers in the art world. [laughter] So, I don't know, do you remember that moment, Cory?

Cory: I don't. I do remember having a lot of conversations with you about the brushstroke and what it meant to put...

Jacob: Oh, yeah.

Cory: And it was related because I remember we were making pixel paintings together, painting a pixel image on the wall. We had these long conversations, we were trying to figure out, like... What is it? How to get it out? What does it mean that the hand is touching the acrylic? And we were kind of wrestling with these kind of ideas. And in a way, it was still, how does it need to come out? What is it? What is it compared to, like, classical art?

Jacob: You're right, we were literally having that same conversation that I still have, which is like, okay, I know this image is amazing on a computer...

Cory: Yeah, exactly. [laughter]

Jacob: But what do I need to put, do I need to print it out or should I just leave it on the screen?

Cory: Yeah, totally. So I do remember things around there, you know what I mean? And we were just wrestling with it. And people are still, of course. I mean, maybe the generation after us kind of got over it, but in our generation that was the big...

Jacob: Yeah, we had a lot of hangups about that.

Jack: Like, the surface, or pixel versus brushstroke, maybe?

Cory: Yeah, pixel versus brushstroke is really simple way to put it, basically.

Jacob: And also, like, why fuck with a gallery, why fuck with physicalizing something that is so pure and awesome online.

Cory: Yeah, totally, exactly. And that was a huge...

Jacob: We couldn't figure that one out. [laughter]

Cory: I'm still trying to figure it out. It's still really tough and Paper Rad was a kind of response to that. I mean, I can't speak for you all, but...

Jack: Yeah, actually, do you want to talk about the genesis of Paper Rad?

Jacob: So I was talking about when we were at Oberlin College, how I found out about this Providence scene and I can't remember, Cory, did you start applying to jobs your senior year at the end, like spring?

Cory: I did, yeah. Such a go-getter I was. [laughter]

Jacob: Well, it was the first dot com boom, so a lot of our friends from straight out of Oberlin moved to Boston or New York and worked for these dot coms, none of which exist anymore.

Cory: Pseudo dot coms.

Jacob: So I applied to a lot of jobs and the one I got was in Boston, it was a graphic design job. And I did it mostly because I wanted to hang out with Providence and Western Mass and Boston people, even though I didn't know any of them. So anyway, Providence, I was obsessed with Fort Thunder and Boston stuff. I moved in with my sister and then we got to be friends with this one guy who is named Andrew Warren, who was older than us. He's a teacher, but he also was an artist photographer and he introduced us to Joe Grillo, who was a very young, younger than us, artist from Virginia Beach and Joe was already tuned in and tapped... Tapped out? Wait, no, what is the phrase? [laughter]

Cory: Tuned in and dropped out?

Jack: Turned on, tuned in, dropped out.

Jacob: And so through Joe and Christopher Forgues and Ben Jones - it was just those three people - we just started hanging out all the time. And Paper Radio was Christopher Forgues’s project, which, I didn't realize until that show that you put on in the summer, Jack, that Chris was actually making his own radio stations even in high school.

Jack: Okay, so what was Paper Radio?

Jacob: That's his project, I don't know if it's only his or it was with Ben Jones. Zines, comics, you know, underground and stolen copies, again, peripheral to the art world.

Jack: When do you think he started doing that?

Jacob: My guess would be, like, 2000, but it could have been earlier, late '90s. And again, it was this research project for me of "who are these people?" Like, go to the comic shop every day. Million Year Picnic had a zine section and it was filled with local stuff and some of it would say Paper Radio and some of it wouldn't and it would all look so similar and none of the names were on there or anything. So I was studying doodles, trying to figure out who was who, you know? And so then Paper Rad was me, Jessica [Ciocci], and Ben when we decided to make that website.

Jack: The legendary website! Everyone I talk to is like, "Dude, I just remember going to the website." It was a fucking cool website.

Jacob: I think it was definitely the best thing we ever did. Actually, the weird thing is we had three really amazing hits in a row, which was our website and then our DVD and then our book. So there was just this really crazy wave of success that we had in a three year period. I didn't think of it as success at all, by the way.

Cory: What year do you consider the success starting?

Jacob: I would say, 2003 for the website, maybe. And then I think 2005 was the DVD and 2006 was the book. I guess what I want to say is that what was special about it was that it wasn't just, like, all three of those things were in the same scene, it was that simultaneously Paper Rad was the coolest net art website and it was the coolest, like, noise music DVD, video art group, and it was the coolest book art, like, comics book, Printed Matter book.

Jack: Yeah, that book, the giant book, was a marker, like, you knew somebody was cool. For me, when I was 18, if they had that on the shelf it would be like, "Oh hell yeah."

Cory: I could just jump in.

Jacob: Yeah, please.

Cory: Why separate any of these things? For me, they're all the same. Of course, I have a thing where I don't consider individual works by artists.

Jacob: Hmm.

Cory: It's the space in between the works, that's the interesting thing, right? But why rate them like horses? It's the whole, it's all the races together that are the thing.

Jacob: Do you mean, Cory, as in separate by scene or separate literally, like, a book is different than a DVD which is different than...

Cory: I meant just when you say, "We had three hits." But that's show business.

Jacob: Yeah, there's a lot of other...

Cory: For me, that whole project, it was hard always to distinguish one thing from another, it was all together. So for me it was like a book that I started reading in 2000 and I didn't really stop reading until 2008 or 2009.

Jacob: Right, like it was a continuous stream.

Cory: Yeah, that's how I experienced it. I mean, of course I understand, like...

Jacob: No, you're absolutely right.

Cory: To have those three kind of things happen really affects you as an artist. It puts a lot of pressure. It really will fuck up the the vibes, you know?

Jacob: It did, yeah, for sure. [laughter]

Cory: So I understand it, but I'm being... Is it the word facetious? But also I'm being quite honest as I experienced it as a whole. I'm just thinking, like, Market Hotel, Toronto 3. I'm thinking, like, Northsix, Dr. Doo, the first times I saw Extreme Animals 2001 or maybe 2002 in the Knitting Factory basement.

Jack: When did you start Extreme Animals?

Jacob: Well, we started it around the same time, and David [Wightman] I've known since high school, but it's still going.

Cory: Yeah, it's a little bit like Suicide. That's how Suicide was, really never broke up and they would just, like, show up, you know?

Jacob: Yeah, it's a life project.

Cory: Exactly, exactly. And it never went down a notch, that's the other kind of amazing thing.

Jack: Yeah, it doesn't age. I was taken aback at that show, I was just like, "Holy shit, this still hits." It's so funny, it's great.

Jacob: I would say that a lot of that is due to David Wightman, my bandmate, who I've collaborated with since high school. Our collaboration is similar to what you guys were talking about, where it frees me because it's no longer just me and so I can be sillier and he, I think, can be sillier too. Silly is really underselling it. [laughter] The point is the humor and when you get together with another artist you tell jokes and if there's a way to funnel the jokes into the work it becomes a manifestation of your relationship with that person in a more authentic way than... I mean, we have many long, serious conversations about what we're doing and how we're doing it, but I think that jokes are the things that drive. Like, "Oh my God, that's such a good idea." That moment is usually something either slightly funny or off. Cory, I remember there was this era mid, late 2000s, where we would hang out in New York and Brooklyn and you would just, like, pitch me art ideas, basically.

Cory: Yeah, yeah.

Jacob: And it was almost like you were waiting to see which ones made me laugh.

Cory: No, totally, it's like being a standup. I still do it, you know what I mean?

Jacob: It was a big part of our hanging out time in that apartment.

Cory: Yeah, and now I write them all down, I go back to them, and if they're still funny a couple of years later... And actually during those years I used to do a lot of artists’ lectures and half of the lectures were just me pitching ideas and trying to read the crowd and kind of, like, R&D for my own stupid shit.

Jack: So you would just be up there with a mic and you would be...

Jacob: He would have his laptop open. He would open it up and he would show you a list, a text document, of various ideas to see which ones made people laugh.

Jack: That's incredible.

Jacob: It was called something...

Cory: Yeah, "Continuous Partial Awareness." Again, now that I think back on that I'm like, "I don't know how I did that, how did I do that?" Like, "Was I drunk? No." I don't know, but in a way, what I learned doing that over and over again and hearing people come up to me years later, is you never know, because it's art and it's not comedy, you actually never knew when you had a bad set. Because it's art, and art has a different type of humor. It's art humor. And it stretches through time and it's such a bizarre...

Jacob: It sticks with people in a different way.

Cory: Yeah, totally, so you don't need to get the laughs. And I was confused about that back then. I mean, I was confused about a lot of things then. And am now! And actually as I'm older, I find like, "Oh God, I'm just going backwards." You'd think things would get easier, but things get harder. You get more confused, it's very bizarre.

Jacob: I know, yeah. I agree with that.

Cory: Being a mid-career artist, it's very bizarre.

Jack: What do you find challenging about it? It's just that you know too much or you're not as naive as before?

Jacob: Yeah, it's every time you say, "Okay, this is what it is," then something comes up that makes you realize that's not what it is. And so you're left back at ground zero again. For me currently, I'm back at this place where I'm like, "Do I even make art? Am I even an artist?" Which is exactly how I felt when I was 22. You know what I mean? You'd think I would have figured that out, but somehow, I would say, it's because I'm still engaged, because I'm still passionate and trying, I'm staying confused, which I think is a good thing. Maybe that should be the name of this episode, "Staying Confused." [laughter]

Jack: Staying confused, damn right, damn right.

Cory: And the more, you know too much, that just works against you because once you realize, "Oh shit, what I thought..." Exactly what Jacob said, the the more confident you are, the more things are going well, the more you have some hits, as Jacob said, the second you realize, oh my God, all that stuff I thought that I did to make that happen is not true or I misunderstood it, it makes it that much harder.

Jack: Yeah, totally.

Jacob: Or the zeitgeist has moved completely.

Cory: The vibe shift, yeah. [laughter]

Jacob: The vibe shift!

Jack: The vibe shift, god damn it.

Cory: Oh, were we not supposed to say that? You're going to beep that out?

Jack: No, no, no, I'm agreeing with you.

Cory: But, I mean, Jacob and I, how many vibes have we been through? Like, three or four now.

Jacob: And I didn't realize, actually, apparently there was a huge Paper Rad backlash.

Jack: Really? Well, I was completely unaware.

Cory: Who were you talking to? [laughter] Dump those friends.

Jacob: I know. Again, just vibe shifts. We've been through them and all I can say is I heard later of people really dissing the style, dissing all of the... And that's fine, I was totally like, "Yeah, exactly. That's what you do. You move on." Well, actually, this is a good segue, really quick. I wanted to just say, so you know how we were talking about underground music and zeitgeist-y stuff? It struck me and, correct me if I'm wrong, but that maybe music isn't even a part of underground culture in the same way that it was when we were younger, that things like podcasts or books or YouTube videos are... Is that accurate to your experience, Jack?

Jack: I'm not sure in a way, because I'm also approaching the status of becoming old.

Jacob: Elder statesman.

Jack: So all that to say I kind of don't know what younger "underground culture"... Because I sort of feel estranged from what is going on now. But I feel like for every thousand kids who don't give a shit about any of this, there's one who will get obsessed with the history in the same way that people your guys's age and older have asked me, "Do people your age care about rock & roll?" Or whatever. And it's like, probably not, but I do. You know what I mean? I know a lot about this kind of stuff and I think that's probably been the case in terms of historical knowledge of stuff, probably the majority of people don't care but there will always be the keeper of the flame or something like that. So I'm not too worried.

Jacob: That's a good way to end it, it's positive.

Jack: Yeah, definitely.

Cory: We're not worried.

Jack: Not worried, exactly.

Jacob: Still confused, but not worried. Wait, "staying confused"?

Cory: Yeah, "staying confused but not worried" is a very good way to put it, although actually to be honest, I'm worried a lot of every day. But about other things.

Jack: That's true, but things unrelated to this.

Jacob: Dietary needs.

Cory: Yeah, not, like, the overall historical arc of the avant garde, that I'm not worried about. [laughter]

Jack: Exactly. It's all about staying confused. I would say as a postscriptum, when I make work, I know it's successful if I don't know if it's good.

Cory: Wow.

Jacob: Yes. I hear that.

Cory: And the thing is, you'll never know that it's good, because you're not in charge of it either, so you actually literally are not involved in that process at all, which is even scarier.

Jack: Exactly. And what the fuck is good anyways, so... [laughter]

Jacob: Podcasts are really good.

Jack: Podcasts are good.

400 Floor - Cory Arcangel & Jacob Ciocci

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400 Floor - Cory Arcangel & Jacob Ciocci