Ian Svenonius Dives Deep into Escape-ism, Communication, and the Future

Ian Svenonius has indefatigably devoted his professional life to building an extensive and formidable body of work that feels as vibrant and urgent as ever in 2019. Known internationally via bands The Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Chain and the Gang, and Weird War among others, he has also authored three books and numerous articles and essays while somehow still finding the time and inspiration to work as an actor, TV host, and DJ. And diverse as his work may be, the core concerns of communication, immediacy, and truthful artistic expression run throughout, regardless of the medium or moniker associated with any given Ian Svenonius project.

As gracious as he is prolific, Ian kindly whiled away an evening with Weirdo Music Forever recently, discussing new recordings and touring for his project Escape-ism, past work, contemporary online culture, and more. We are also delighted to present a new fantastic photo set of Ian and Alexandra Cabral by one of our favorite photographers, Miriam Marlene.

Bobby Weirdo: I wanted to ask about Washington D.C., which has music traditions that are very different from each other. It feels like mainstream music media has never given much attention to that city, and I’m curious about the music that has come out of there and how it might have informed what you do.

Ian Svenonius: It’s always been real backwater, and that used to be kind of a cool thing. A lot of people have come out of there or lived there. Bo Diddley lived there most of his career. He had a studio there, cut a lot of records there, and he scouted soul bands there [like] The Four Jewels or the Jewels and Billy Stewart. Link Wray lived there and had a record label. Bunker Hill, Gil Scott-Heron, Eddie Floyd, and Eddie Hazel lived there. Marvin Gaye is from there, Van McCoy who wrote “The Hustle”…

When you think of the area [including] Virginia, then you have a lot of people like the Carter Family, Gary U.S. Bonds, and all the rap from there. So the area is very musical, but nobody would ever make it in D.C. It’s a place that’s defined by the South.

People don’t see it as the South, but if you know anything about history, Virginia was the seat and the largest economy of the Confederacy. All the founding fathers who were slave-owning plantation guys were from Virginia: George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington…slave-holding, D.C.-area people. So it’s very black, racially-segregated, and has an old sense of class division. There’s an aristocratic idea – the ruling class of the South saw themselves as aristocrats, and Virginia is called The Old Dominion because it was loyal to the crown after the Puritan Revolution, and it’s where a lot of royals escaped. The Pentagon and the C.I .A. are there, and it’s a deeply conservative place.

It’s not a part of the industrial North, and not a place where you could ever make it in music. But it’s got a few distinct traditions, and I think that’s because of its relative isolation. But now D.C. is not just a horrible shit hole because of the developers and the condominiums. It’s lost whatever character it had. It was never cool, but it was more beautiful.

*Ian Svenonius and Alexandra Cabral, 2019. Photo: Miriam Marlene*

BW: You mentioned Gil Scott-Heron, and you’ve said before that you’ve always wanted to do a spoken word album. I’m guessing that Escape-ism comes close to spoken word, even though it doesn’t feel totally like a spoken word project.

IS: I’ve been doing that for a long time – I’m very into the idea of gospel music. Whenever you think about making music, you should think about immediacy and communication. Gospel music is really interesting because the sermon is part of the song and that part can always change and go on for as long as it needs to.

So like all of my groups, Escape-ism is based on that idea. It has incredibly simplistic repetition with breaks where we can talk or communicate. Black gospel music is the basis of rock ‘n’ roll. Everybody always says [it’s] blues, but really it’s gospel music because it’s frenetic and cathartic. Blues is more like marijuana – you know what I mean?

BW: The immediacy, the sermon, the communication…those are things you’ve pretty explicitly outlined as being ingredients in The Make-Up with its “gospel yeh yeh”. Was it during The Make-Up era that this concept became consciously part of what you do?

IS: It was always an idea, but it all depends on who you’re working with when you’re in a band. So if the context is a lot of people playing really loud, there’s not as much of a chance for communication.

BW: I feel like I got to see a great example of that sort of direct communication when you did the welcome at Desert Daze last year. You were drawing the audience out of passivity…

IS: Oh yeah, I did the bill of rights for the audience. I don’t know how well that went. I thought it was going to create an insurrection -- the first day of the revolution. But then that weather thing happened, so we’ll never know what would have happened.

BW: Did you improvise that, or was it written out already?

IS: It was improvised, but I’d kind of given that speech before in different forms.

BW: Cole [Alexander] and Zumi [Rosow] were up there with you in robes, though I didn’t know who it was until afterwards since you couldn’t see their faces. Was that also planned, or was it spur-of-the-moment?

IS: They had a hard time getting there. I told them to get there four hours before it started, and I think they got there four minutes before. It was cool; they always come through. Have you seen Crush? They’re a great band, and a real inspiration.

BW: I’ve gotten to see them on a few occasions. I wanted to ask you about them, since they’ve appeared on Escape-ism recordings, and Zumi is in the “Nothing Personal” video. What was the connection between you and them in the first place?

IS: I know them both through music; we just hit it off. They’re like Pelé – people so legendary they each just have one name.

BW: Your use of social media is effective and deliberate. I feel like you give people insight into not only your life and work, but also a glimpse into that of other interesting artists. Also, I realized I unconsciously used your take on Jack Name, and describe him to people as “L.A.’s most mysterious musician”.

IS: He is very mysterious – he’s always lurking, and then he leaves without saying anything. He’s cool.

We’re forced to comply with these multi-million dollar platforms, and they’re a fact of life and a fact of a band’s identity. It’s a part of how you shape an esthetic and present yourself in a context. Every group imagines themselves in a context and nobody else is really privy to what that person’s references are.

When you’re at an airport with your drum set, people see you and think you’re in a band like Green Day or Aerosmith, but to you, you’re in a band like you’re favorite band. You’re thinking about The Move or something, so the tradition that you see yourself as being part of is maybe really different than the tradition other people imagine you as being part of. So in a weird way, an Instagram account levels the playing field.

I don’t have the press agent that David Bowie had, where he could alert everybody that he was into Philly soul and create a narrative around his new record, but I do have an Instagram account where I can do that.

There are a lot of things I hate about the Internet, and one of them is the bogus democratization rap that we were all fed in the beginning. I knew it wasn’t going to democratize everything. In fact, it’s made everybody’s references exactly the same.

If you look for something on the Internet now, everybody ends up with the exact same thing. And now they’re telling everybody to get rid of all their stuff with this new book about cleaning your house, so pretty soon the Internet and people at Google – or whatever – will own all the information and are going to tailor history according to their desires. There won’t be any underground artists – there will only be the things they decide to let you know about. None of this detritus that people like you and I own is going to exist anymore. The only reason anybody knows about a Skip Spence record, or a lost tape, or a weird record, is because somebody had them lying around.

Those are idiotic examples, but you know what I mean. There are things that you find that really change history, and change the notion of what happened during a period, and what was important to people and what they were thinking. That’s what history is – creating the narrative that informs what we think now.

BW: Your Instagram account has a positive and helpful message and I think you’re blurring the lines again by playing your own music, writing about music, and acknowledging other people’s music. Your ego and identity don’t seem too attached to any one of those roles in particular.

IS: Thank you. I grew up in an era when nobody was famous – you were just famous with your friends in a very minor way. There was no money or success, and because of that, people were pure in a sense. You just wanted to be the coolest band, and you weren’t making decisions based on what would play in Peoria. Because of that, people were outrageous, provocative, and would say socially unacceptable things. That informed all the groups that I’ve been in.

There’s a fear of content now in music because of the way that people think it might play out, and I feel myself being affected by it. It’s affecting everybody, and it’s making the music very boring. Rock ‘n’ Roll is getting very boring because people are afraid of doing anything interesting. There’s a real consequence now.

BW: Are we talking about expressing something, and then having it put under the microscope to see if it’s acceptable or not?

IS: Well, there’s that idea…things that are stripped of their nuance or context, and that’s because the audience is [now] potentially much broader, and there’s no longer the same narrative. The framework is now wide open. All of our references are different, and the culture no longer has a center that you can critique in the same way.

But what I’m really talking about is that because you can make money now, you’re afraid of offending people. Whereas with punk, nobody was ever going to make it, so they weren’t afraid of offending the rich benefactor.

Instagram is like an ad stream where people are the products, which is nefarious and sinister. But it’s useful, because – as you said – you create a world-view and a context. People resent it because it’s vulgar and saying “Look how great my life is,” but you can also use it the way The Jam used record covers, showing their references and what they were into. It’s old-fashioned in that way.

Once upon a time, a band was a thing you defined yourself with. Now, bands have no worth. They’re no longer an identity marker, but they used to be the identity marker. They used to be everything.

*Ian Svenonius, 2019. Photo: Miriam Marlene*

BW: I’m curious about the Chain and the Gang song “Experimental Music”. There’s a sincere feeling to the music, but then there’s also lyrically what might be a friendly jab at experimental music and some of the posturing possibly associated with that scene, which is reinforced by the video.

IS: Well, it’s funny, because Escape-ism fits right in with the noise scene. I always think the way a band can be successful is if it fits right in the crossroads of several things. The Make-Up was successful because a lot of people -- the ‘60s people and the art people --could see themselves and invest themselves in it.

With Escape-ism, we want to sit right on that crossroads. Experimental music – or this noise table thing – is quite a big scene. Those people don’t like Escape-ism really, and they’re not active fans, but it would be great to get some of them at the show. I have a lot of pedals just like they do – there’s a lot of wires.

But when I was making Escape-ism, I was thinking about those kind of shows – how they’re so introverted and how much I hate that. The thing about music and a band is that there’s schism between the singer – who’s in one time cycle – and the group. The group is doing their thing. You can have the worst show and the group can think it went great because they’re in their own head when doing their thing and if they hit all their marks then [they think] it was great. But the singer is really engaged with the audience, having a personal conversation with the audience. So they’re on a completely different schedule.

When you see the people at the noise table in the experimental music crowd they’re not typically engaged with the audience, and they’re having a very introverted experience with music. So when I started Escape-ism I wanted to make one of those groups because it’s attractive and you can do it on your own. But I’m going to do it in a where we are still going to rock the house and it’s going to be engaging. That’s been the whole struggle with Escape-ism – to have it be self-contained and have that autonomy, but not be self-involved.

That being said, I do like experimental music. I love Delia Derbyshire – that stuff’s great. But there is a little fun in the video. I really love that scene for being anti-commercial, in an era where everyone has become very commercial, and there’s a formula now to being successful in rock that’s really insane. You buy the publicist and they get you the good review in Pitchfork, the Pitchfork review gets you in the festival…all this stuff that’s happening with the fame game in rock is really turning rock ‘n’ roll into art.

And by that, I mean that art is something that’s always been unattractive to me, because there’s no actual relationship to the worth of an artist, and the effect that it has on an audience. It’s all speculation by the experts who are determining the worth of something. That never existed in rock [where] a group would live or die by a real-life relationship to an audience. With the festivals and these influential magazines, you’re really seeing that disappear, and that’s why all these people get famous overnight and are touring the world playing these festivals. You’ve never heard of them before, and suddenly they’re huge.

It’s just like art now, where essentially if you get a good publicist, and are in a Gagosian Gallery, suddenly you’re a famous artist, regardless of whether you ever did anything before. It’s quite disgusting.

BW: There’s the Chain and the Gang song “Certain Kinds of Trash”, which is a fun but philosophical song. It’s almost from a Seinfeld point-of-view with its core observation that seems mundane but has a profundity. I feel it’s asking why things go away, what are they replaced with, and how did we used to live compared to how we live now.

Similar to “Experimental Music”, there’s an underlying…

IS: Wistfulness.

BW: That seems to be particular to Chain and the Gang and not to Escape-ism. Or did that somehow end up in Escape-ism in a different way?

IS: That’s interesting that you say that. I think Chain and the Gang is more hapless, and Escape-ism is more positive. I think you’re totally right – the personalities of the two groups are very different.

BW: Escape-ism is going on tour this spring and summer. What is the personnel and the setup going to be for those shows?

IS: I’m playing guitar and singing, and Alexandra Cabral is on keyboard, playing a little bass, singing, and doing some percussion. We have a drum machine, and a couple cassettes.

BW: I was going to say that a lot of Escape-ism’s music is either overtly blues, or blues-influenced, but you also mentioned gospel as being more of an influence. In either case, it might have been expected that you’d have a lot of fuzzy guitar and in-your-face drums, but instead Escape-ism is more synth-based with small, electronic drum sounds. What led to that approach?

IS: I just had this drum machine, and it really came down to that and my inability to play music. It was minimalism that accentuated the idiocy of Escape-ism, [which is] as simple as you can make music. You think about all these bands and their reunions, and their best song is always the first one that they made. When Alex Chilton made records, he wouldn’t let anybody in the studio if they could play well – he only wanted people who could play like a 7th grader. And that’s what I like doing too.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is about inability. It’s about the gesture and making it work. In the same way, you don’t want a rock star to be really beautiful unless they look weird. In L.A. there are all these models in bands, and that doesn’t work. If you’re too good looking, you’re not supposed to be playing this music. I like the Clash, and Paul Simonon looks like a model, so there are exceptions. Sam Cooke was an exception. But typically you want someone who looks a little weird because music has to be poignant and there has to be something grotesque about it. You shouldn’t look like Matthew McConaughey.

BW: A phrase you’ve used in association with Escape-ism is “found sound”, though Escape-ism doesn’t strike me as “found sound” in the traditional sense.

IS: When the group started, it was just me with a tape recorder. I was trying to make music mostly out of sound effects. So I said it was a “found sound dream drama.” It turns out Pink Floyd tried to do that too with Dark Side of the Moon, and they gave up. It was supposed to be a musique concrète record – all sound effects that they orchestrated. They gave up, and the only thing that survived from their concept was the sound effects on “Money”. And that’s what happened with Escape-ism – not many of the found sounds have survived, but we still have a couple.

BW: And you’re saying “we”…is Escape-ism at this point you and Alexandra?

IS: Yes.

BW: Is there a reason that “Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day” has two versions – one on each album?

IS: The idea was that it would be on all the records, because it’s a real good, positive theme. It’s like “It might take hundreds of years, but we can destroy civilization.” So it’s a real positive message. Rome is the gold standard for imperialism, and the song is saying that it might take a while, but we barbarians can destroy the ruling class.

BW: What’s coming up for Escape-ism?

IS: A 45 just got released for “Bodysnatcher”, which also has a B-side called “Where Does One Kiss End and Another Kiss Begin?” Then we’re going on this European tour, and we’re going to play some shows in America.

Escape-ism Tour Dates Spring/Summer 2019:

April 30 Margate, UK (Arts Cool)
May 1 London, UK (Moth Club)
May 2 London, UK (Whitechapel)
May 3 Glasgow, UK (Old Hairdressers)
May 9 Venice, IT (Biennale di Venezia)
May 11 Bologna, IT (Covo Club)
May 12 Firenze, IT (Arci Progresso)
May 14 Zagreb, HR (Mochvara)
May 15 Vienna, AT (Venster 99)
May 16 Graz AT (Sub)
May 17 Ljubljana, SI (Metelkova)
May 20 Esslingen, DE (Komma)
May 21 Bruxelles, BE (Atelier 210)
May 22 Amsterdam, NL (Cinetol)
May 23 Hamburg, DE (Hafenklang)
May 24 Leipzig, DE (Conne Island)
May 25 Würzberg, DE (Cairo)
May 26 Prague, CZ (007)
May 29 Mannheim, DE (Volksbad)
May 31 Düdingen, CH (Kilby)
June 3 Ravenna IT (Beaches Brew)