$quib is a solo/duo project from NYC. I stumbled upon them with the song Stockade, which I would highly recommend checking out. We sat down over video call last week and chatted about all things subjectivity, self-commodification, aesthetic, perspective, genre, realness, artistry, and collaboration. I hope you enjoy reading!!

$quib. Where did that come from?

I really wanted to call it Squib because I saw an electrical diagram with the word and thought it was funny and I didn't have any other ideas. It turned out that there was another artist called Squibs, and I was like, I don't want to get in trouble, so I guess I double changed his homework, if you know what I mean. It’s also a word that has a lot of meanings, oddly. It can mean a short satirical writing piece or a little explosive. I'm not sure if I knew it when I was coming up with it, but a blood squib is like when people have a fake gunshot effect in a show, which feels pertinent.

How do you feel about stealing as an artist?

Oh, it's okay. You’ve just got to give credit when credit’s due and money when money's due, but I'm not one to be protective of my own things at least. The reason I make music is mostly because I am neurotic and I like things to be a certain way. Oftentimes, I'm listening to music and I go: “I would change this about that.” And so sometimes I make little edits of songs where it's not even a remix. I just loop a part or take out a part or add one instrument or something just to, like, fix the song.

What do you think realness is?

I think realness is pretty constructed. I mean, I would definitely say there's things that are real in real life, like I'm not like one to be like, “all this shit's a simulation, da da da...” But I think authenticity is definitely a construct because it has to do a lot with what are understood ways of communicating. Communication is where things get very subjective because you're encoding things and decoding things. And so, realness gets really confusing because, when it's been a long time of people communicating with each other, there are understood ways of accomplishing goals, and that can get kind of dicey. When is something being candid versus signaling something? Because it's like, I'm clearly taking time to decide what I want to say with this emotional output. So does that contaminate what I'm doing? The image of vulnerability, whether or not that's real. And that's where I get in my head about realness and unrealness, but I'm never like, “is this fucking cup real??” There are a lot of clothes in my room and these objects are very real and I gotta put them away, is where I'm at.

How does your music grapple with subjectivity?

The project started out as a beat music project. I technically wasn't even in it. It was the other member who's a fake band member, not a real guy, and I was just making hip hop beats as if my name was Fish and I was a cyclops or something. And then I wanted to add vocals, so I joined lol. And there's been a mission creep over 7 years of it becoming more and more singer-songwriter-based, because I think I have a fascination with the medium as this kind of deeply manipulative thing. Singer-songwriter music is kind of predicated on the idea that you can self-narrativize and have control over a kind of understanding of yourself, both for yourself and for others. And so a lot of the music I write is informed by this very overwrought process of trying to understand how to communicate things without letting it be a means to an end. Maybe I'm feigning some kind of ‘all cards on the table’ thing so that I can have control. There's a lot of second guessing my own processes of feeling things and communicating the feelings. And so what better way to do that than to do something which is all about the craft of pathos or something? Making these songs where it's just as much about catharsis and self-expression as much as it is about self-commodification. I would say a lot of catharsis has this kind of manipulative element to it, and when it doesn't, it's not as effective, because it's not optimized for others or something. Yeah, I just find singer-songwriter music to be this very interesting dilemma.

What do you mean by self-commodification?

I don't even mean for money. I'm sure that'll creep into my life increasingly, but, on aesthetic grounds, I guess. I think aesthetics are really freaky because they're like a vessel for some of the most truthful truths and vulnerable things, but also these shorthands of how you can utilize different feelings and associations. People glean this and then exploit it. And I think that's where tropes come into play for me; sometimes I like to get kitschy with things, see what pieces of gum have been chewed up, which signifiers still have, like, I don't know, a half-life left in them.

From your point of view, what is the difference between aesthetic and perspective?

These two concepts don't feel comparable, or at least they feel like they're parts of one mechanism as opposed to being two disparate things. I would say I think of aesthetics as these pathways of sensory decisions that have been proven to be effective... though there can be conceptual aesthetics too. It doesn't necessarily just have to be how it looks or how it sounds or something, but there are understood methods for achieving a certain kind of effect or understanding of something. And I think perspective is nested into that. I think people put their perspective into these decisions, and I think it's deeply idealistic to think that there's no kind of language learnt from the aesthetics you're taking in. Like, think if somebody told me like, ‘just be yourself,” I'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? I do think the most genuine moments in my music come from when I try to do something and I fail, but I think there's always some kind of backboard for a hoop that I'm trying to get into. It's not like I come to a blank page and shit falls out of me. Definitely not. I put my head in my hands and I go, “well, I was trying to make it like this, and it ended up like this.” So I think aesthetic and perspective are honestly very interrelated. I think my perspective has to do with what I've found that I'm able to do and what I'm not able to do. Like, I think of $quib very much as this kind of negotiation between what I can control and what I can't control. And I guess that's why there's a fake band member who's canonically incapable. I like this idea that there's this dialectical process between my abilities and inabilities. There's one song where I tried to make a Clairo type-beat and it turned out to be like the grimiest, weirdest fucking song I've ever made. And I was like, why is it? Why was it this one, you know?

When you sit down to make a song, where does the music come from?

I think it comes with building a vocabulary with yourself, whether that's like finding lyrical approaches that evoke certain things or, the way that I write melodies—there's certain ways of moving that I find satisfying. I don't go scalewise, exactly, but I have these very circuitous, wormy melodies, I think because I like outlining things. If I were to get really dry about it in terms of describing it, I guess it would all be functional, like building from of a path of least resistance to address broad questions. How can I use this stock sound? Laziness. But in terms of if an idea actually strikes me or not, that often has to do with collecting these crapshoots and being like, “this aspect is wrong, let me fix it.” I would love to be like Agnes Martin and just like sit in a chair blankly and then finally go, “I got it!” But, it very much is kind of like this dialectical process with myself, a little push, pull, push, pull. What do I know how to do? What did I accidentally do in a cool way? So like trial and error and then curation. Though I think even the word ‘trial’ connotes a kind of randomness, and I don't think it's necessarily random. Maybe I'm just giving myself too much credit. It almost feels like trying to guide something that knows less than me, like trying to guide a hamster through a maze to a destination. Of course, the hamster is myself.

I noticed that you do a lot of collaborations with other artists. What is your collaborative process and how does collaboration fit into this process that you've been describing?

Collaboration is definitely a way of relieving myself of the kind of hydraulic press feeling of working on music by myself. The moment that you have to cater to someone else's preferences or needs, it's actually such a relief. There's something to bounce off of. It feels like having a conversation with someone. Regarding my collaboration process, there's a lot of people in Oberlin that I work with in real life, and some people in New York that I work with in real life, and occasionally, I'll work over the internet. I used to do the latter a lot when I was younger. But I definitely think these 2 different kinds of working inform how the music sounds or feels. Like there's this project I made with Bryce Hayashi called fyp, which is a really kind of evil sounding TikTok music plunderphonics album, where we used different DAWs (she used FL Studio, I used Logic) and, like, we would usually just send each other bounces without separating stems. And then I would take that into Logic, be very destructive and irreverent with it, because it almost felt like the project’s attitude necessitated a very material, audible process of what's being done, akin to TikTok song edits. And so it felt really cool to basically just take a song and decide I'm going to chop it here and I'm going to change the speed of the whole song or something. Whereas, I think with the $quib collaborations that I was doing with, w/lson or Ben Hochster, the immersion of the pop song is prioritized. To create an effective pop song, it helps to be able to have control over every element in service of songwriting. It’s nice to have everything out in front of me, and it's really fun to write songs with other people. It definitely exposes how people would, like, organize shelves differently or something.

“Tomato” and “stockade” are some of my favorite $quib songs, tell me about that EP?

A lot of that comes down to Naomi aka w/lson. He is super, super smart in terms of making a song that is so sugary whilst maintaining a kind of friction. He recently released this EP that I helped produce, and things are stinkier and weirder, but also every song is an earworm. I can't take too much credit for Naomi’s sauce. The EP is called Anterior posterior. I'd like to think that it's doing something new. If I'm bold enough to say that.

What's the newness of it?

You think of music like, what Dean Blunt was doing or maybe what, before then, what David Kanaga was doing, people that were using what felt like discarded sounds, like MIDI sounds or maybe mixing in a way that feels beyond amateur. Perhaps antagonistic? I’ve been calling it hypopop. Naomi’s vocals are so loud and unprocessed, and it's communicating a kind of materiality or like some kind of process where it's like, I know exactly what he did to make the song, or at least I have some preconception, which is that it's like, instrumental, vocals, here you go! Here Comes… Rocketship by Rocketship comes to mind. And so there is this kind of, maybe not antagonism, but a kind of, um, feralness to like the presentation in a way that feels almost unprofessional. But I think the songwriting and the production feel intentional enough where it has this uncanny feeling. It doesn't feel like we were trying to make something clean and that it didn't work out, which is a bad feeling I have faced before. For lack of a less loaded phrase, the EP has an outsider music element to it.

How do you feel about genre?

In a way that I guess I was speaking about aesthetic, I would say I have a lot of deference towards genre. I really don't mind people codifying music into categories or something. It's really fun. I see it in the same vein of aesthetics, which is that genres are culturally understood—whether small scale or large scale—methods that you can either exploit or react to or submit to or something. I'd feel like a modernist prick if I was like “my music defies genre...” Though I usually don't give a genre to my music aside from saying it’s pop music on a structural basis. Maybe glitch pop? But I think it would be setting up people's expectations to try to describe it in a granular way. In regards to people who participate in the “yeah, I'm kind of like chamber pop mixed with ambient mixed with etc.” thing... it feels like that's essentially marketing, which is fine, and I should try to get the bag myself, but I don't know how I would market myself like that. I just say experimental pop music, and that seems to work well.

What are 3 songs that you want to leave the reader with?

I would say one of them is “Sleeping” by Tirzah. If anyone has a really good, measured take on how to balance what feels like smoothness and sexiness, and then also like irreverence and amateurishness, it’s Tirzah. Not to say she doesn't know what she's doing, but these aesthetics of amateurishness versus smoothness... That song is really inspiring to me because it's like this dissonant electric guitar loop, and super noisy mic room tone, and this really dinky snare drum sample, and it just all feels so tongue-in-cheek. But at the same time, it's like the most genuine song about motherhood and it has this lullaby aspect to it. It’s a good blueprint for how to communicate these really genuine feelings, despite how symbolically contaminated everything can be. But yeah, it's so cool. I've also been listening to a lot of Lucy Bedroque, thanks to my friend Kayla aka roxy phantom. She put me on. There's this song “How to Pretend.” Lucy Bedroque definitely knows what the fuck they're doing regarding autotuned, plugg-nb inspired stuff. Things that have a history on SoundCloud. Lucy is so exacting and intentional with how they composed “How to Pretend.” It’s kind of like a J-Pop song fused with melodic SoundCloud stuff. It's like you wouldn't be able to do it on just one autotune setting because of the chord changes. So you know that they are going ham in the DAW. Anyway, that is an angelic song. And a 3rd one... let me think. I'm gonna say, “Letter to ZZ Top” by U.S. Maple. They’re a rock band from the 90s and their philosophy was almost like, how not overdriven can this be while still being really gritty, twisted rock and roll music. And it's funny that the song's called “Letter to ZZ Top,” because the song is like a microcosm of their whole thing being like a reaction to the canon of rock and roll or something. And the chords are so broken but so satisfying in that song. And the singer sounds crazy. It sounds like he's always winded and there's just nothing that sounds like that band. Yeah, that's a cool song.

$quib Interview

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$quib Interview