What’s the story behind your latest album?
It’s not just one story. It’s multiple narratives. Farewell, My Lovely is an album borne of hypnagogia, trains, virtual anime girls, and Raymond Chandler novels. It’s about traveling to Fallbrook to find a retired famous musician and interview him about one guitar. It’s about waking up at the crack of dawn to help a green and white automaton girl trebuchet the mayor of a coastal town into the sea, then escaping through the backcountry and avoiding fighter jets hunting you down. It’s about burying the Dead Man’s Chest in the Carrizo Gorge, in the shade of wrecked boxcars. It’s about watching someone you love be led to the gallows, sentenced to hang, only for her to suddenly grab a bishop’s ceremonial dagger and cut her own throat. It’s about true stories from places that don’t exist.
Who or what has been inspiring your music lately?
If you want me to name a band that people might know, it would be Pere Ubu. They’ve always been a mainstay in my influence bin. (RIP the true king of rock n roll, David Thomas.) There are a few like-minded musicians I have been working and exchanging ideas with for years now, among them being Monsieur Herr and D. Jefcoat, who have had a notable impact in my trajectory as an artist. Even more recently, I took a road trip out on the historic US-80 from San Diego to El Centro and back. The things I saw out there–and just as much the things I didn’t see–can be called the greatest inspiration for me going forward.
How do you handle creative blocks or self-doubt?
The creative moment is a hidden place, an eye of a hurricane encircled by the chaos of the human condition. It doesn’t conform to our sense of time or urgency. You can’t force it to bend to your will. I deal with “blocks” by waiting them out. I don’t give myself deadlines or impose expectations. The well of ideas might be dry at one moment, but I’m confident enough that it may be full the next time I come around, whether that’s the next day or the next month.
Self-doubt is an inevitability when it comes to exposing your art to an audience for the first time. The instant a third point of perspective, an Observer, is introduced, you become acutely aware of all the strengths and weaknesses of your creation in a way that you weren’t when it was still in progress. While working on Farewell, My Lovely, I gave myself a set of ten “guiding light rules”, based on David Thomas’s Chinese Whispers methodology, specifically designed to curtail second-guessing myself. Among my rules were “trust the first idea you get”, “deliberation is the enemy of the process”, and “don’t worry, it’ll work out”. As someone who is not great at improvisation and can succumb quickly to “analysis paralysis”, I had absolutely no idea what to expect from restricting myself in this way. I found pretty quickly that with these self-imposed limits, I was more confident in the material as it came together.
What’s a piece of advice you wish you had received earlier in your career?
“Ars Longa, Spectatores Fugaces”… Art stands the test of time, the audience comes and goes. As the artist, I follow a course that I have set for myself. The audience has their own course that they set for themselves. Every so often our respective paths will intersect, but only for so long. We put our work up for display in our personal galleries. The audience passes through, focusing only for the moment, imparting their judgment, and moving on to the next thing. They don’t live with the thing their entire life. Therefore, the only option left to an artist is to do nothing short of exactly what they want to do, regardless of outside pressures or judgments. That’s not to say I don’t care if people like what I do or not–I’m a human being, I care immensely about social approval. But confidence in my artistic course, i.e. creating a body of work that I will be satisfied with for the rest of my career, is paramount to everything else.
What’s next for you—any exciting projects or goals on the horizon?
The next Zhir Vengersky album is already underway. The thesis of the album is as follows: “Liars own all the words… but geography is a language they cannot get their hands on”. The album will be a journey down the US-80 and the Old Spanish Trail, from the Imperial Desert, through the In-Ko-Pah Gorge, into the Live Oak-covered mountains, and finally ending where the city of San Diego is halted by the Pacific Ocean. New production techniques are being adopted for this project, namely junk-o-phonics. With the right components and a soldering iron, almost anything can be fashioned into a decidedly lo-fi, idiosyncratic microphone. Baby monitors, speakers from toy drum machines, guitar cabinets, and even a coffee can with a piezo disk inside are all being pressed into service. Could this be done with a graphic EQ? Yes, it could be, but where’s the fun in that? Perfection and accuracy gets old quickly. I would rather take the long way around and get the sound naturally. Like taking the scenic route as opposed to gunning it down the Interstate and missing all the sights. As you can see, it’s all connected!