text-interview with elias and the error! -- magenta
<the interview follows> notsleeping: hey so first up, what are your pronouns? elias: I'm they-ing, but am not offended by any pronoun spoken with respect. Ideally, my physical body is an amorphous alien with features of all genders, but that's a work-in-progress. notsleeping: so thanks for joining me here virtually in this text file to converse! do you wanna say hello to the readers? how's it going? elias: Hello to the readers! Thanks to everyone who makes this little corner of the internet what it is.
notsleeping: before we get too far, shout out your details for the readers! gimme the links!
notsleeping: so how long have you been making music? elias: I "officially" started in July 2004 when I was 14 years old. I started making really bad synthpunk/synthpop songs on a yard sale Casio that I multi-tracked using a karaoke machine with two inputs. The first song I ever recorded was called "Jalapeno." It was about eating so many jalapenos you end up in the hospital.
notsleeping: have you always released under this moniker? elias: I started as "Mighty Mohawk Man," some stupid alliteration based on the fact that I have a pretty large mohawk in my teen years. Eventually, I thought that name was too goofy so I became the dark and gothy "Elias Iscariot," based on a character from a sci-fi story I had written when I was 15. A few years later, I felt "Iscariot" was way too edgy and wanted something that felt a little less serious, so I became "Elias and the Error." I like alliteration, I thought it sounded vaguely sci-fi and technical, and a lot of my favorite bands at the time had "Blank and the Blanks" type names.
notsleeping: i notice you have an awesome love of stagecraft. where did that start? was kid ELIAS into the same stuff? elias: Doing the live show is my favorite part of everything. When I first started performing my songs as a teenager, kids at school would ask me to come perform at their birthday parties. It's a long, sad life to be a clown. People didn't really know my music at the start but they knew my reputation as The Punk Who Would Do Anything To Entertain You, so I would set up in some family basement and start throwing things at people and jump off the furniture and make a mess. Everyone loved it and kept asking me to do it. I added a guitarist and keyboardist to my group. We used to go to the dollar store before every set we played and spend like $20 buying balloons and toys and children's instruments and stuff. We started driving to the city so we could play in real dive bars. All these other bands would show up with a drum kit and be all serious and we would roll up dressed like cartoon characters with a bag full of toys. I saw Daft Punk live in 2007. Their production design blew me away. I wanted to figure out how you imitate that on 1% of the budget. At that point, that's when I got into lighting design, video projection mapping, and all the other stuff that comes together to make the modern Elias live spectacle. I've just always had this "If someone can make this, I can make this" attitude and was never shy about buying gear for a new hobby and forcing myself to learn how to do it. Most 17 year olds were having sex and doing drugs, but I was in my attic learning how to program stage lights and building weird props and shit. Since I was a little kid, I just loved the spectacle of music performance and was always obsessed with executing my own ideas on a big stage with lights and props and videos and stuff.
notsleeping: what are you working on right now? any recent projects you want to shout out? elias: I'm working on the fifth Elias and the Error album. It is very early in the process, but so far the new songs are very fast, very manic, very shout-y, and very analog that exists in the space between noisy 80s post-punk new wave and 90s digital hardcore. I have a "life goal" of releasing at least 10 albums as Elias and the Error. I have drawn out plans for the genres, moods, and looks I want to visit on albums 5, 6, and 7 and hope to get there as soon as I can. I am also working on some original score for Vera Drew's "The People's Joker" film, which I am very excited about. I've got lots of smaller collaborations with other artists that I've finished, but I have no idea when anyone is releasing the anything so I'll just let them announce it :) [sounds like you should follow @Elias_Error on twitter for updates! -magenta]
notsleeping: describe ELIAS AND THE ERROR. what kind of music do you like making elias: Elias and the Error is the place where anything is possible. I have a lot of reverence for the great "chameleon career artists," like David Bowie and Prince, who always had a new look, a new vibe, and a new sound. I enjoy dreaming in "eras." I started mostly making sort of bratty teenage electropunk on my "Lucky" album, moved on to more singer-songwriter depressed industrial pop on "Help Yourself," kept it kooky and theatrical for the "As Creeped Out..." record, then mostly recently made nightmare hip hop and tense industrial house music for "BLACKPILL." I really like making all kinds of music and challenging myself to expand my range, but I'll always be most beholden to the 90s. When I was growing up, I listened to stuff like Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy, KMFDM, nu-metal, 90s techno, and 90s bubblegum Europop stuff like Aqua.
notsleeping: what is something you feel like you try to get across with your music elias: I just want one space in my life where I feel like I can tell the truth without repercussion. That's what Elias and the Error is for me. If hearing me claim that for myself helps someone else claim that for their own self, then that's great.
notsleeping: do you find that doing a more visual act allows you to tell more story with your tracks? i feel like some of your videos you are doing visually what most people are just doing sonically. elias: Having strong visuals is a goal for me. However, I don't have a budget, and I don't feel strongly about being a visual artist, so I just have to learn as much as I can and do it all on my own. I watch a lot of movies and music videos and make little lookbooks of what I want. That usually helps.
notsleeping: are you making the videos in your head as you make the song or is it something where you are done and it comes together?
notsleeping: you document a lot of your process, and give a lot of behind-the-scenes looks at what you do. is that you are thinking a lot about during the process or is it something you gather after the fact? elias: I love talking about what I do. I have a lot of energy and I'll gladly share it with whomever will listen. I always love hearing artists talk freely and passionately about their process. notsleeping: do you have any tips for people getting started with making music videos? elias: Create three times as footage as you think you'll need. If you don't have a budget, figure out how to make your stuff look cool in post. Simple ideas can go a long way if executed well. Watch other music videos and mimic what you see. Break the song down into 4 or 8 bar sections and write down scenes for each section. Draw storyboards if you can. Challenge yourself to spend a few hours pre-writing and doing "YouTube research" to dream up a music video and I bet you can come up with something cool.
notsleeping: so you do more than just release music personally, you also run events! do you wanna just do a quick rundown of events you got on the horizon and hopefully we will catch up in a live interview and i can ask you about what we don't cover here!
notsleeping: so you've been broadcasting some semisecret pirate transmissions of cult media lately, what are some of the ones that you've been having fun with? were they new watches or old favorites? elias: I love watching weird movies with people. My brother and I grew up in early internet times, so we would find Geocities and Angelfire pages about "The Most Fucked Up/Weirdest Movies Ever Made" and try to watch them all. I wanna keep that spirit going. I end up playing Akira, Dead Alive, and the Basket Case and Puppet Master franchises a lot. Most of the movies we watch are old favorites. notsleeping: do you consider yourself a movie person? do you have a favorite movie? elias: I really enjoy watching weird movies. It's so hard for me to pick favorites, but I'd be happy pointing out Peter Jackson's Dead Alive/Braindead as one of my all-timers. I just love cartoon violence and absurd, over-the-top situations.
notsleeping: so i know you have been dealing with some wrist rest issues, and i myself am kinda dealing with spicy shoulder. do you have any personal tips for young professionals for helping their body go the distance? elias: If you are some kind of nerd like me and spend your entire life sitting at a computer, you have to consider ergonomics. It sucks. But it's like an athelete training for their sport. You need a decent chair. Good posture. Consider trying different input devices, like trackballs and footpedals. If any one part of your body is doing the same motions for hours and hours a day, that can be harmful, so figure out how to mix it up. notsleeping: and finally, if someone had to interact with just one work in your catalog, what would you you pick? elias: My 2013 album "Help Yourself." I don't think it's my best album anymore, and it's definitely not my best produced work, but I think there's a particular intensity to it because it was the first time I REALLY figured out how to capture "my truth" in song. I'd been trying for years, but that was the first work I did where I think people "got it," I think. It will always be special to me because that whole period of my life was one of great trauma, and the uncovering of suppressed trauma, which pivoted into the first real period of great healing for me, the first real period of acceptance of who I was and what I was capable of doing. However, I do not believe I've made my best record yet, and am hopeful that powerful new heights in sonic-execution and truth-telling are in my future.
Elias and The Error interviewed by Magenta Skull |
