Tag: interview

I first met Jefferson Mayday Mayday at a Chicago Art Festival called Version in 2007. Jefferson was there to build and perform music in a hexagonal dome that he wallpapered in his distinctive, and unapologetically psychedelic, visual art. Over the next few years I was able to pay several visits to Jefferson’s home turf, a reality warping cloister called the Immaginarium in his former childhood home in Cayce, South Carolina. Jefferson’s practice involves the careful curation of spaces, actions and experiences, often to an obsessive degree than can feel like he’s even intervened in the arrangements of individual atoms. As much as I despise the cliché of invoking drugs in Art & Music Journalism, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the way in which LSD often makes me feel supernaturally attuned to the harmonies between individual elements in a visual tableaux seems to be Jefferson’s native element.

He now lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and creative partner Maia, in Immaginarium’s successor – Fatamorgana. On top of what can feel like a never-ending fountain of visual art in a number of mediums, Jefferson makes films, music in a variety of both solo incarnations and ensembles, and has provided cover art for bands like CAVE, Crystal Antlers and a long list of lesser known names. We had a long discussion about life, the universe and everything via Google Chat, across what were two Saturday evenings for me in Northern California, but Sunday afternoons for Jefferson in the Kingdom of Oz. We’re both Virgos and talk not only a lot, but often over each other, however through the magic of editing, I’ve Frankensteined the flow into something more reader friendly. We set certain structural parameters for this interview/conversation which I was magnanimous enough to pull the curtain back on early.

Grab a snack and get comfortable because this is going to be a long one…

Part One: The Past (1976 – 2001)

OWW: What’s the first thing you remember?

JMM: This is a really great question and I do wonder > my earlier years, and on ’til I guess about 7 or so, were just plagued by night terrors, usually weird, ominous, apocalyptic and often glowing things flying in the air, sometimes like tons of missiles and rockets, sometimes ridiculous but still scary, like glowing NASCAR racers floating out the window > like when you see the room and dream with your eyes open > I do recall quite a bit and I’m gonna have to say, possibly it’s most likely (if not a dream) me listening to very loud music in my dad’s van, but specifically it was probably this time we went to a drive-in theatre which we were not allowed into.

I’m assuming it’s this because I couldn’t walk, I was still on my back ~ they didn’t let us in because it was an R-rated movie with two girls in a shower. I remember it quite vividly and the ticket guy looking at me and my parents, being annoyed because I was a baby. Somewhat revealing and perhaps embarrassing but it is a thing that I have often thought was probably my first memory ~ my parents were definitely freaks like that, very yang, and it did often make me contrary to them in some ways ~ like I was quiet and shy in those early years due to being around Southern yang attitudes. I just remember a lot of loud speakers and very loud classic rock, deafening even.

OWW: I know you were born in the Immaginarium and it belonged to your father but I’ve never once heard you talk about your mother. Can you tell me about her?

JMM: We love each other very much and we can get along, but we agree on close to nothing, unfortunately ~ at the beginning of this year I made a huge life decision to kind of give up on trying to work with her. She was from the Deep South you know, Eutawaville South Carolina ~ she can speak pretty good Gullah even, I know it well enough from spending summers with her parents that I was able to read it well enough in my African American History class that they wanted me to make recordings for them. Her father, my grandfather, was one of my biggest influences and I sorta see those days as wizard training, he worked with wood a lot, making very realistic birds. She was in the medical field and kinda worked her way up from the bottom.

She went from being a secretary to being a gangster of sorts, working with the people who pull the strings. When she retired she was given some chair they only give to their best doctors (despite this I was never able to get health insurance, so if someone with my connections couldn’t, who can?) > I think if there was a single way to frame it in terms of my upbringing, it would be that we went from being in the Immaginarium in the 80’s, where it was like my friends wouldn’t come to this place that everyone called “low income housing”, a neighborhood trying to be taken over by mines (the neighborhood rose up and fought against that) > where everything we had was kinda dodgy > to her making a name for herself, divorcing my dad, and buying me my first keyboard by the end of High School, and then she sorta just started disappearing from my life a bit, living her own life. I guess she was happy, she had money ~ I never saw her much but she did help me stay in school for sure.

OWW: I can’t remember if you were an only child or if you mentioned siblings. Do you know your parents’ origin story – what the kids call a “meet cute”?

JMM: I can’t remember exactly where my parents met but they were really into each other. I was her only kid but my father’s 4th. They were very different, and my dad was sorta off limits to raise me because she wanted this straight-laced musician artist kid, and she pushed me to do those things and be creative ~ Dad was this kid who grew up a greaser in Chicago, orphanage bad boy who became a biker/mechanic and she didn’t want his life of debauchery influencing me ~ my brothers were KISS Army types who grew up to be Deadheads and went to the shows ~ they’re who pushed me to play synths (I got a piano and was like what is this? Ha! because they wanted me to be like Van Halen) >> there was always loud music in the house because they played guitar and drums.

OWW:You were born in 1978, when did your parents get together?

JMM: I think they got together in maybe ’68? My dad just died a few months ago so I’ve been looking at lots of photos and I think it was around then, they used to travel the states a lot and go camping a lot before me, often to see his mom in San Diego. She had a farm there, we always had peacock feathers in the house for example from there, if you ever saw me wearing them it was to remember my grandmother. They were a lot of fun in those days and had crazy jolly ball parties in the backyard in the early 80’s.

There were things that began to tear the family apart and it was always a mix of never having money, my parents working a million hours ~ and a lot was due to always being in court for my dad’s brother, who went away for life for reasons I won’t say, and my dad’s business partner at his mechanic shop was stealing tons of money from him > it wore on my mom and she just wanted to run away from it all, but he was too traumatized from the orphanage to be adventurous and was more into being a homebody and doing weird creative things like gardening, which I loved ~ lots of hot peppers, big part of our upbringing.

OWW: I’m sorry to hear about your dad, it’s a very intense moment as a creative who likely sees themselves in their father to go through that. My father passed away in 2009 – so the bad part is I had to deal with it younger but the good part is I didn’t have to older, if that makes sense.

JMM: It’s totally ok, I was super happy he was no longer suffering ~ and I’m soooo glad I got back stateside last year to see him while he was still coherent, as he went downhill very fast, as well as my grandmother who now is going downhill very fast. Everyone last year said “you will be shocked” about them > but they were the only two people that didn’t feel completely insane. America has really done a number on the consciousness of the Southerner, it was a very, very eerie experience.

OWW: I thought it would be more fun to bring the readers up to speed on how we’re structuring things. We decided on doing a past/present/future structure with 25 year cycles. Instead of your birth we’re starting with the bicentennial in 1976 so the past can end on September 11, 2001. Exactly 25 years, two months and one week later. Definitely an acute end to America’s “Summer Vacation”. Is there anything in 1976 you could point to as your genesis?

JMM: Yes. I think those are really great numbers to see as moments of reflection ~ watermarks where you stop and assess the situation. Well yes, I think I can actually, not because I remember 2 years before being born ~ but because I went to school with people born then, and this is what I know: life has felt in limbo for me for almost my whole life ~ even now ~ people have become really concerned with the concept of identity over the last decade or so, but it always felt to me like I’m a non-existent being, maybe a ? psychedelic ?  one.

I was born in a moment of transition, and those two years older versus two years younger marked the end of a less futuristic paradigm, and the beginning stages of everything we know now I feel. For me it made me a referee ~ a communicator ~ yet someone who doesn’t play, not because I wasn’t interested, more so it was that there was no place in the game for someone with old traits in the new and new traits in the old. This non-placement issue formulated my future ideas, as it led to severe isolation in many cases ~ when you have a life of seclusion you tend to build systems of coping through that seclusion ~ and then you begin to mirror those who also experience it.

OWW: You’ve mentioned a lot of loud Classic Rock in your early childhood. Did you like that music in your adolescence or were you more into other stuff?

JMM: I always loved music ~ I still love music very loud ~ but on the flip side I’m very involved with organizing academic shows, and part of experimental music is minimal Conservatorium musicians and such, and you get a lot of very quiet music where you can’t hear, say the paper rip because the traffic outside the venue is too loud >  there was this kid, I think from Chicago, who was breathing through his clarinet during a performance, and the media photographer was on the front row of, like a crowd of 10, and his camera click kept upstaging the sound. Don’t get me wrong. It’s all great, I myself often explore the eerie subtleties. Like last year I was playing with an incredible supergroup of 8 geniuses and somehow we were still insanely quiet.

OWW: I’ve been through that with quiet artists. I booked a show with Ezra Buchla in LA where he was doing that “gentle music” style but he had to stop playing because the church next door was drowning him out through the wall.

JMM: Well: you can be LOUD & still get upstaged as well. I was playing in a backyard with a young kid on tour from the US who did a lot of dates with Lucas Abela. They seemed to have lots of new gear, possibly their first foray into harsh pedals outside of being in bands?, and literally the very moment they kick it off  – screaming in the mic, eyes shut, fist clenching: some really amazing bicycle parade passes by, covered in LED lights and playing circus music, and turns everyone’s heads as it was undeniably glorious.

I  also like when music is so loud that you can push through your thoughts of the week, and stress and anxiety dissolve away: when you can formulate the conclusion and see the puzzle from all the pieces spread apart > music can bring those thoughts together into a picture through the arousing vibrations it makes. We have serious sound here at my current place: 8 subs > my roommate builds sound systems for outdoor raves.

OWW: Speaking of puzzles, I used to love books with weird hidden cyphers, like certain letters seem out of place until you try putting them together. Anyway…

My brothers used to hold up records like Rorschach tests, “do you like this album”? I guess that’s how I got into making album covers, being trained from birth. My brothers would also hold up fan mags and, say point to Motley Crüe, and be like: “see, they had make up like KISS so they’re cool too.”

OWW: As a kid I thought rock music was kind of a let down because it never sounded how the album covers looked to me. I wanted Leon Russell’s Will o’ the Wisp to actually sound like a glowing green owl.

JMM: I heard one time my parents came home and my brothers were stoned, watching speakers walk, it was so loud.

OWW: So wait, you grew up with your brothers in the Immaginarium? That I didn’t know.

JMM: My two brothers and my sister lived there for a while, we had walls made out of sheets, then eventually they started living with their mom.

OWW: Not too different from the later era then. Cool prints on the sheets?

JMM: I was only really close to my brother who was 6 years older, the others were 11 and 13 years older. He’s who got me into drums. They’ve all become very politically polarized, well the older ones that is. As much as it’s a tragedy, it’s given me sacred information into how indifferent a human can be, and also that when you are bound by blood, how you must learn to understand people for what they are, not what they have been made into ~ and read them by actions, not how the poisons they have ingested make them react. I see these earlier times as very wholesome ~ and this is why I resent that people called us a “slum”, it is after all a situation where we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us > My dad’s house was the first house there > the steel mill, the dynamiting strip mine and the massive train yard that enclosed the neighborhood, all trying to buy us up, came later and I just didn’t agree with the idea that just because people in that neighborhood were not well off that they were somehow lower valued citizens, you know?

They were people from my neighborhood, they were my friends ~ I feel rich really, because I was given the joy of having a very integrated life with immigrants and every race imaginable, but particularly a very African American neighborhood ~ and it stuck with me how bizarre people have become, where they have lost the ability to talk with their neighbor, the more they consult with their screens and become more and more xenophobic.

Listen: I may have worn a lot of hand-me-downs for a minute, but we had a 2nd TV with a game console, which is pretty futuristic leisure in the 80’s if you ask me. I feel humans lose sight of what rich and poor is really like, they fail to discern between the policemen of the past and today’s Robo-Cops. There’s some kind of psychological-shortcoming-glass-ceiling-mind-jail with how society orientates itself to zoning; often working in concert with developers and industry ~ Long story short: the whole neighborhood came up by the 90’s, and by the time of the Immaginarium years, neighborhood patrol is trying to fine me $1000 for having grass taller than 2 inches and year long Halloween decor out front, while the haunted road that leads to my front door is becoming a heritage preserve. (possibly even a national park one day?)

OWW: I want to know what the sheets looked like, white sheets or those nice kind of ‘70s psychedelic, screen printed sheets?

JMM: Haha, ok so the decor: We had pretty ridiculous green shag carpet > earliest Immaginarium was hard wood floors but that was all after the divorce, my dad did all that, he took the carpets out and sanded/stained the floors ~ we had that classic 80’s couch that was like, synthetic velvet with the waterwheel-house printed kinda golden brown. The sheets were just bedsheets or weird blankets ~ I kept one for years that was in a proto-Immaginarium in ’97 as a curtain, it looked almost like shapes of sea horses with purple and lilac bubbles, which was quite hallucinatory. We always had those really intense mirrors with the strange marbling on them, in fact they were also in the front room and were made into diamond patterns.

OWW: We’ve talked a lot about records and record covers but what were your first experiences with live music? Did you grow up going to church?

JMM: My dad was Catholic, with the orphanage and all, my mom was fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist. Her mom’s church had this crazy thing where the preacher was corrupt and then a tornado knocked the steeple off. Together they had this whole progressive idea of church, they would take me to some Methodist Church as it was open to whatever ~ and I kinda ran havoc on conservative standards there, and made all the kids start wearing jeans, untucking their shirts and I wore all these awful loud ties. The preacher I think ended up working at the Wal-Mart after getting firedfor being a bit of a perv ~ My dad despised the church and thought it was against everything the Bible stood for and in general just didn’t go. My first entrance into real live music, like I mentioned, would be my brothers’ bands. I played in band at school. I went all the way and led drum line and started teaching drum line straight out of High School ~ all my instructors were involved with the Universities and the drum corps.

OWW: Did it have an organ? The Methodist church I mean.

JMM: We had an organ at my dad’s shop but they traded it in to get my piano >  the first songs my brother taught me (he was like “you sound terrible, you need to learn a song or they will get rid of this thing”) were Pink Panther and Home Sweet Home, he tried to teach me the theme from Halloween but I thought it was kinda boring. Yeah they had a church organ, they had insanely good singers, but my memories from church are more like > I had one of those new speakers that attached to your walkman and the youth leader guy got mad and took my Eazy-E tape away.

OWW: You sound a little bit more Bart Simpson badass than I was. I was the quiet kid staring at the stained glass and listening to the pipe organ.

JMM: I was definitely at my core a heavy enough daydreamer that my 2nd grade teacher called my parents to complain about it. I was always fixated on the shapes and coloring of stained glass. However while organ is arguably my main instrument these days; church organ bored me to tears. 

OWW: What kind of piano was it? Upright or Fender Rhodes?

JMM: Ha! I wish I had a Fender Rhodes then, the Fender Rhodes at Immaginarium was given to me in like 2005, but for years I never could get it to work ~ it wasn’t until I met Maia that I got it fixed > I’ll never forget the first time really playing it , I was playing along to this heavy electronic album and had a legit out of body experience like watching my hands being guided > she fixed it with a paper clip.

Playing the Rhodes was transformative. Growing up I was quite a nerd in the sense of being into computers and video games, I grew up playing a lot of GALAGA with my dad and brothers ~ and rap which wasn’t exactly cool en masse in the South yet ~ but then I fell in with all the rejects like the metal kids and the kids trying to get expelled just before high school and changed quite radically.

OWW: What was the house computer? I was a Commodore 64 kid.

JMM: We had a Tandy 1000 ~ which I made a lot of paint program art with, I got obsessed with the zoom function where you could write every pixel, and was starting to try and illustrate comics I was making in like 1990. My dad was really avid that I get literate with computers and that I didn’t work with my hands like he did.

OWW: Was your brother’s band a metal band?

JMM: My brothers were more into 80’s metal I guess, but then they started getting into Grateful  Dead covers ~ I remember my brother bought some Les Paul and had sixty different Dead covers worked out and wanted me to be his drummer and I just looked at him like, “you gotta be kidding me”.

OWW: Would you place those first metal bands in what I refer to as the “American Underground”? What was your induction into that world?

JMM: Yes, but in a weird way. If I ever come into money I’ve always wanted to make a film about the early 90’s with this: I think early Thrash in America is a really important art form for the States, especially how it has liberated a lot of the Eastern world and helped develop tour circuits in those countries > Latin American and Asian countries really identify with Metal and it’s, in a lot of ways, kind of like our Classical Music.

When I got my first drum set for a birthday, it was originally my brother’s and he had taken all the facade plastic coating off, and sanded and varnished the wood so it was kinda groovy > which helped a lot later in High School when I started getting into heady psychedelic sounds > it helped me ground myself I think ~ so I had just turned 15 and was getting more into Metal; like a friend gave me 3 Deicide tapes for example > and you know it was like ’92 and Grunge and Lollapalooza and all that is happening, Rap and Thrash are getting accepted en masse and football bros are wearing Metallica shirts all of a sudden ~ but there was this thing happening where all these Metal guitar guys I was playing with were more kinda trailer park redneck upbringing and so they were, in a way, their own form of outsiders, I guess you’d say, and there was a lot of unifying going on with liking different genres and mixing sounds > so I feel this is where Metal kinda becomes more DIY > I always call it “Backyard Metal” where you maybe have kids playing Metal covers on patios like a garage rock scene not dissimilar to something like 13th Floor Elevators playing by the poolside.

OWW: I think the first Hardcore record I really loved was In/Humanity’s History Behind the Mystery. That cello intro is so heavy! I heard it in 1998, when did you?

JMM: Is that really the first hardcore album you came to love? that’s interesting ~ Hardcore here was definitely bubbling up, with lots of kids putting a great deal of effort into looking homeless chic and then also lots of the generally dangerous (in different ways) Fundamentalist Straight Edge & Christian Hardcore in the early 90’s~ I think I heard that album, and the cello really got to me too, when we were coming back from Myrtle Beach after seeing Fear and Loathing (“elevated”) in the theatre, lol, in ’98 > and I made it a point the next day to go talk to Chris Bickel (singer) at his store about how awesome it was, because it, for me, seemed like noise (a term we’ll be trying to void) music > even though vofd was not what I would call “voyd” then, as in the genre we came to call it, or vood as in things that had existed like Hanatarash or The Boredoms > what we felt we were doing was voud in the late 90’s as a way to sorta transcend Punk, Metal, Hardcore all of it.

Honestly we were just trying to run these genres through the most intense psychedelic approach ’til we destroyed it really and that’s how it felt like vohd and I remember being excited to hear that album cuz In/Humanity as a live thing was kinda more like a campy joke comedy act of sorts that was hard to put your finger on. That’s why publishing is so important > your ideas can get formulated into a real cohesive picture; when you play live it’s on or off and it comes down to word of mouth, or critics to be like “fill in the blank” to sell the picture but their picture is different from the next critics.

OWW: Yes, In/Humanity was the first. Hardcore never interested me before I heard that cello, even though I come from San Diego where hardcore was really big. The 7 inch that came with that record is voud. The Anakrinomphocon one with a pentagram label. I always wished Bickel would have come to my (Bleak End) shows at Immaginarium because I never would have screamed without him.

JMM: Chris Bickel is a peculiar individual who never came to Immaginarium, except once to see Meneguar: Jeremy Earl of Fuck It Tapes, who ended up using some of my collages on cassettes for Oxl Xounds and part of one on Hush Arbour. I know he also really wanted to that one time Bunny Brains came through, we collaborated together on his Banishment Rituals for The Disenlightened.

OWW: What was the first full-on vomd band you saw?

JMM: I used to see void bands in ’94 and ’95 at this great venue called Senseless Beauty ~ as a venue it wasn’t much more than a room ~ they had free coffee and lemonade and that still resonates with me, I’m always wanting to do that but I stick with water and free lollipops. There was this band, I think they were called Brujo Loco> It was this kinda early, I guess you’d say, psycho jazz > this guy Trey on sax who I got to know in the late 90’s and he was nice and gave me tons of advice about the industry and music in general ~ later he was playing in this band called larB which was him on sax, a sampler player, a Moog and I forget the 4th instrument > it was pretty full-on really but the things his early band was doing were more like goofing around.

Sorry, theremin player was the 4th, my good friend on theremin who played a lot of my bands on his pirate radio station, which to me was more important than the college station. All these things influenced me quite a bit but maybe less musically and more in terms of how to be on guard, how to be anti-capitalist, how to be anti-music industry > how to not be a total idiot or a toy. It was kind of like a free education really.

OWW: So when did you move away from Metal and start playing more experimental and psychedelic stuff?

JMM: Well, as I got into High School I started making tape collages around ’94.

OWW: Did you have a four track or just dual decks like a karaoke machine?

JMM: I would take like boom box recordings of my punk bands, weird outtakes from rehearsals or messing around in the band room at school with timpanis and drums and xylophones, or just strange samples from records and CDs and mix it all up > I was working with tape since I was in like 2nd grade making fake radio stations > commercials, radio DJ voices, weird field recordings, whatever so it came natural > I had this stereo I could mash tape+record+radio+cd all at the same time and record them, then I routed a second tape deck in through the aux with RCA’s and it had EQ sliders, so I was playing everything at once and mixing it to one tape, then I could start over with that tape in the decks. I had a 4 track by like 1999, but I honestly was more into playing it like an instrument. People wanted me to record with it but I was attached to my lo-fi stereo method.

By the time I was music directing a few years later at the radio station I was using that idea with the whole mixing board, I don’t really do anything like that anymore > but when I play piano it’s sorta like that > it’s like trying to attain a hyper-connected mind and wreck multiple ideas on top of each other as montaging > you get all these things going and then through them a new thing arises. In a way drumming with people making tons of votd, running guitars through tons of pedals and such you try to latch onto things to bring them together and develop a picture that is cohesive. I had a friend once tell me one of the best compliments I’ve ever had in my music career, that when he was driving and listening to my show he had to pull over to get his bearings.

OWW: I went to SFSU in 1998 and you could use the library listening stations to do that – tape, CD and vinyl all layered. I would do that with Stockhausen records and William S Burroughs spoken word but I never thought to record it. I would just fall asleep to it in the afternoons because I went to college full time and worked full time. It’s a lot like Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method.

JMM: In retrospect it’s all great and sounds fun but I fear there is no song to pass on to the kids > everyone has all their gear and they make all this beautiful, or intense or horrific, music and it all sounds so great, but in the end it can all just disappear as there’s not much of a way to reproduce it ~ and although that’s fine and all, especially if ephemeral is the mission at hand > there’s a sort of break in passing on wisdom when there is not a song to give to the listener. I know people who deal with synths like me, especially modular, are confronted with the inability to recreate things, like even in his older years Klaus Schulze is open that there’s no way he can recreate what he’s doing ~ and there’s definitely very important scientific things we learn about the art of nature and geometry and emotion and intuition and being in the moment ~ really a wealth of knowledge > but I do worry to some degree that we’ve gone so inside ourselves that we’ve lost a sense of narrative.

OWW: Sometimes it seems like we’re just dumping music into the trash can but stuff gets through. Once I went to the McDonald’s in Spring Valley (suburb where I grew up) and the kid behind the counter had seen me play on The Bus. The song was the lifestyle if that makes sense. That (lifestyle) was the song that first brought me to the Underground.

JMM: The Bus? like John’s Swat Van bus? I have heard a great deal recently from people about how in the 90’s you sometimes bought a CD and did not like the music at first, then you listened to it over and over and learned it was your new favorite music > nowadays there is so much just cranking product out.

OWW: Yeah but the second iteration. Larry Bus. It was a San Diego show around 2010 and then I ran into the kid at McDonald’s like 2013/14. I think you’re discounting the power of memory. Like all the music media are great but there’s nothing like memory. That’s what all music, live or recorded, ultimately makes.

JMM: It’s crazy how now you can just be some little kid that is uploading screen grabs of your Twitch stream to YouTube of you playing a video game, or maybe watching another person’s game, and then YouTube helps you provide a t-shirt line for that > I feel that’s almost how people release albums on the internet now. I think publishing is so important but more so in the sense of some very well intended thing you bring into the physical world > because it makes a memory, it lives a life. it gets lost in a car, It makes you ask yourself who you give or sell it to.

OWW: I just discovered John Chiaverina’s (Juiceboxxx and now Rustbelt) music blog today. It was really reassuring to see someone else get so encyclopedic with Underground music lore. The lore is the song too.

JMM: We (me and Juiceboxxx) played a few shows together and I kinda felt they were some sort of spirit guide for a second, due to when things happened. I relate to their issue with changing their name, as I’m currently about to have my first release with a new name I’ve been using & asking myself if I leave my old name of almost 25 years, or if that even matters as that’s just how people know me.

OWW: Reading his blog today made me realize how similar our paths are. I think he’s younger than me though. A woman I used to be in a Rap trio with got into rapping because of him. On the name thing: the nerds will know who you are and nobody else will care. That’s my theory anyway. I’m about to play a show with a new name too. What was your first label for releasing music?

JMM: My first label I’ll just say was a kind of fake ~ I was playing with this guy in this strange ambient band before we started a heavy psychedelic experimental kind of progressive act together > he was an older goth-industrial guy, and we’d just go heavy on reverb on synth and guitar while an operatic lady sang > we were like we got ALL these side projects in the closet, TONS, we should release them > we wanted to just make them normal and as important as a main project.

OWW: Was it a tape label?

JMM: We called it Pure Enjoyment Archives, I eventually changed it to my own thing as PUREST M4J1CMYKXXX. It wasn’t exactly a label in all truth > we were sorta weaponized I think by the idea you could burn CD-Rs, this is like 2000. What’s your new name?

OWW: Stercoranist – in Catholicism it means the belief that the Divine elements of the Eucharist are digested and become feces. Yeah, that made releasing music so easy – the desktop CD Burner days. I feel like CD burning and file sharing were the end of the old Underground. Like before that you could only spread your music through van (touring) and vinyl (physical releases), maybe write ups or college radio. Then there was these new ways. Tell me more about the label.

JMM: I was making tons of covers from paper and doing origami > we had this idea that we would all just promote ourselves through this and almost operate like, blasphemously to industry capitalism, like fake pyramid schemes getting people to circulate us somehow > we’d do things like record what the hell ever on a cassette and leave it in a Thrift Store for kids to stumble upon > but it ended up being how I met so many people > years later when bands started touring through Immaginarium I would load them up with like 10 CDs, as well as other things like cuttings off of my rugs, a plate from my house I’d draw on, Random zines > I treated it all like “stock” with value. (though everything was given away for free) Obviously the advent of CD burning was great but then came online music and it just became, for a while a lot of fun, but again I think it got out of hand and now it just feels like it’s almost all about making money, or product at least, despite how good or bad the product is, or how helpful to the public, and less concern for how dangerous it can be for the environment.

OWW: Yeah, I almost exclusively stream music, because homelessness really messed with my object permanence, but I know streaming has an ecological footprint that’s almost never acknowledged.

JMM: Totally! Metaphorically-comparatively (like in terms of air-speak) we imagine the internet as ethereal, yet it is very much physical with real world encroachment. There is always an actual “trick” behind the magic trick after all. Just to agree with you > yes the new millennium in its air nature so far, the last quarter century > the big change has been losing that grounding of seeking information through publication or, at a bare minimum, going to a record store and “listening before you buy”.

OWW: Air nature? Is that like Chinese astrology cycles?

JMM: Well, the Aquarian age is air, and from what I understand, we had three main 20 year cycles of moving into air: one ending in 1980, one in 2000 and one in 2020, so now we are completely air. Leading up to this it was all about millennialism, there was mass fear of mergers and a one-world government. It was kinda like we were afraid of what is happening now really, but everything was merging and all the companies were adapting the all seeing eye logo and it was pretty unsettling. It got so out of hand, in a kind of “selling time” way, if you will, that I was making a 4 hour documentary called “Cashing of the Millennium”, where it was a mix of just filming millennialism, and whatever boring things me and my friends were doing. I had this idea that we were about to live in what sci-fi people of the past called “the future” and so it did not matter what I filmed > it was all important. By the advent of YouTube I went 180 and quit filming for a few years, I remember my first YouTube channel had a description that was almost anti-documenting, it referenced my brother-in-law and how he filmed my niece’s childbirth > how he sorta missed out by doing that (he was a nurse). Luckily I never finished my next film, a 6 hour piece about the collective unconsciousness lol.

OWW: Ok, so you meant Western astrology. My mom was really into midwifery so I grew up with a VHS of my birth in the house. I could never watch it. I probably would now but it’s gone. Devil take. We’re coming up to the 9/11 event horizon. I think the foreshadow of this event kind of distorted the two years leading up to it. What do you say?

JMM: When you say foreshadowing: you mean like with Die Hard? like the fact that it felt so normalized, I didn’t think twice at first and then literally did a double take > I was getting an apron downstairs at work just after the first tower was on TV, it was strangely a very normal archetype by the time it actualized.

OWW: Yeah I was walking in Chicago and I thought everyone was talking about an action movie playing on network TV too. I mean like how we talked about you existing two years before you were born. Obliscence. Like somehow the ripples from 9/11 extend before 9/11 in time.

JMM: Ok, this is interesting: I have this idea I’m working with I call a ‘time radius”, that I’d ideally make a large part of a time travel film I want to make > it’s this idea that in the present you can sense things, maybe not in the literal sense, yet some kind of intuition forward and back, and it stems a lot from notions that I’ve heard Major Ed Dames speak about, remote viewing where you can only remote view things that are bound to mass emotions, like mass distress or joy, for example.

OWW: This idea of Obliscence I mentioned is from an exhibit about someone called Geoffrey Sonnabend at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I don’t even know if he was a real person but it’s about time and memory existing as the intersection of two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional cones. Anyway, we’ll never live in the future and the past isn’t real as far as I can tell. There’s only the present and it’s already gone.

JMM: I’m not so into dogmatic ideas about time: I’m too agnostic I guess > I’m more into trying to understand it. When people say things like “there is only the now” or whatever other idea, it’s kinda like “ok, maybe?” I’m rather open to the idea of time travel though, not particularly INTO actually doing it though, as it seems like a bad idea, possibly very destructive even.

There DOES seem to be some sense of a reoccurrence going on though, and I’m just curious how much of time is connected to nature: like “time is a resource”, time warps have been proven essentially. Time is different on different celestial bodies > man’s impact on earth has altered time and the revolution of the planet has been shortened by how we have altered resources. What bothers me though about people’s mindset of why they think we can’t travel time is: why do we conclude this so quickly and so easily?

OWW: So even with everything I said about the past not being real, I do think time travel is possible. I think all of time is like a higher dimensional physical structure. I know I contradict myself – Hypostatic union. However, I feel like time travel would add a temporal footprint to go with the carbon one – like all of our current issues with travel infrastructure but worse.

JMM: A zillion percent! It’s less about time travel and more a concern of openness to possibility, when it’s like 100 years ago we didn’t fly, unless you’re gonna claim some Vimana things that we’re uncertain about > When Jack Parsons first put a jet engine on an airplane it was like how Les Paul strapped a telephone, I believe, to a rail road beam and made an electric guitar. Earth kinda seems like a place to make dreams possible, and strict orthodoxies seem like things intended to create paradigms of thought limitation through the implementation of things like governance over us and nature.

OWW: I recognize no human authority but I crave it from nature. She teaches with a stern hand. Nature is one bad mother.

JMM: We’re taught this idea that time is a higher dimension, and the three dimensional physical world moves through it ~ and although I, as a person who was somewhat obsessed with physics, astrophysics, astronomy and so on, who was all over this stuff, especially in the late 90’s into the early 2000’s when a lot was starting to take off with, like CERN and whatever, I just don’t have any legit proof we are not traveling in time all the time > and it’s becoming a household concept now that time can move backward or speed up and slow down > I like to use the metaphor of a ramp or inclined plane, and how it can take you from one level to another, and it itself is more 3 dimensional in relation to the 2 dimensional road it rises up from > so with time travel could we just simply walk from one time into another, without the use of a vessel, or any power or Stargate at all?:

Is magick essentially a means of controlling time by mass intention and is the way we experience it now simply us seeing what certain people have altered, through media saturation, manipulation of consciousness – the altering of reality into a paradigm that: yes it’s like the past but also no, it’s very different and quite radically bizarre and alien ~ how far can human intention take us? Can we walk straight out of a dystopian reality into utopia, if every single person was on board to mold this into Earth’s present? It may be important and it may not: do we need to stop imposing our understanding of time on ourselves? When we clearly only have opinions, speculations and very minimal understanding through scientific research as to its mechanics?

But most important, I think we have to pass song down: as someone who was curious in the late 90’s about what happened to certain civilizations that were advanced and the mystery of what their disappearances or whatever was, I began to be concerned that if we all disappear into the digital world could the physical world vanish too? Or be deleted so easily like digitized records can, like a new library of Alexandria or show posters disappearing from light poles creating echo chambers for the youth to be locked out of the underground? Do we have songs that we can pass our wisdom through? To encode our secrets? Are we too wrapped up with trying to encrypt ourselves and data that we’ve forgotten how to encode sacred information to be given to the next generation to keep time alive? Like a story I heard about Thoth, that an ancient ruler was mad he created writing because it would destroy the storytelling power of word used for passing myths down.

OWW: I think trying to pin down the exact nature of time might be a bit like pinning down a butterfly. Sure you can better study the patterns on the wings but it kills the butterfly. Give me your last thoughts on the past and we better put a pin in this and bivouac when we do our next session for the “present”.

JMM: Time may be the synthesizer that cannot sound the same the next day, no matter how hard you try to have the settings exactly the same, the environment is different the next day, and the emotions within you are as well, and change is life and every day we transform and time may just be living and breathing, if time is just that connected to the Earth, and I should specify the Earth and the Moon, and their relation in the solar system. 

OK, we’ll check in at the present XO.

******************************************************************************

Part Two : The Present (2001 – 2026)

OWW: Last time we talked about the past (1976 – 2001) and this time we’re covering the present (2001 – 2026), but I wanted to touch base on one thing: I’m in California and you’re in Sydney, Australia so you’re in my future right? A day that hasn’t come yet for me?

JMM: YES, and there to some degree is a lot of truth to me being in the future regarding how information is distributed, like I get American news first sometimes which is mysterious, and regarding everything we said, I thought it might be important to make a blanket disclaimer about everything I mentioned. It can be close to impossible to sum up so much time.

What I say to represent it is only in that moment and what you get is the cube version of the hypercube, you have this tangible thing you can get your hands on yet there are so many vast encapsulating aspects and details and backstories you can’t see in the grand hypercube picture.

Well basically I think it’s really important to not project onto my words ideas that may seem to be conveyed because I’m just pulling the memory drawer open and seeing what’s inside, and they say you not only change memory when you do, that but you also refile it differently each time.

OWW: Oh yeah, we’re definitely quantum observers of our own recollections. I won’t expect you to break through the third physical dimension, no worries there. I like blankets, I’m under one now.

JMM: I just don’t want people to think I was cool or anything, everything was, not just a struggle, but an inner struggle of growth. We were always learning, always trying and never fitting in, like if I say my first bands were playing metal, that doesn’t mean that was the wallpaper or the narrative of the day even if it’s leaking through into the public’s eye > there’s always these other things going on and you’re always amidst the stories and narratives of the day > you may be rehearsing one thing in the bedroom, but you’re listening to the polar opposite in the streets, you may be discovering satanic panic in the headphones or brutal trippy piano music on the college radio, but you’re hanging out with kids playing spades listening to Outkast after school, you know.

So no coin is just 2 sides, there’s the ridge as well with all its grooves.

OWW: Sure, genre is a fairly flawed term outside of BPM and beat specific dance music like Cumbia.

JMM: I just thought it could be good to say that and be encouraging to kids to just always try to break out of the expected, try to do what’s in your heart, if you need to upload a million albums a day do that if you feel guided to do so, be true to what you feel you gotta do, and don’t be too hard on yourself and don’t feel everyone is judging you if you feel you don’t fit into society because no-one does, society is the whole “we are smarter as a whole than as individuals” game.

Yes, BPM can transcend cultures and unify experience that’s an extremely great representation, it’s like that Bill McClintock guy really understands music somehow and he was able to a million percent put into actuality what I always was sensing, where certain musics align deeper than just some mash-up, how Rick James can align with Dio or The Temptations with Sabbath, everybody is affected by everybody.

OWW: T-Pain just did a great Sabbath cover. Let’s get more into bands though. Last time were we talking about Avoid the Band, Kurse Go Back or neither? I engaged with your bands in the last interview in a very “wallpaper” kind of way but let’s iron out some specifics.

JMM: I was talking more about Avoid The Band, and mentioned Kurse Go Back but I was reluctant to just use those names because it wasn’t just limited to that, I mentioned experiences from other acts, call them side projects if you think that way, but similar faces > the main reason I’m reluctant to speak specific names is I’m speaking in broader terms > like Avoid The Band from late ’97 – 2001 was our first attempt to take all our progressive ideas and make real, life changing psychedelic music.

I tested that album in the swamp with the singer (elevated) and then we got lost for 6 hours despite going like every week and thought we might die (we stumbled around for 2 hours at one point only to return to the same spot, it influenced the album cover of a DJ playing us in the future but it looks like swamp trees sorta) and we wanted to break out of what a band meant because we saw that as so 20th century and we also had a bigger crew we called Embrace The Family and we just were doing more developing of cultural things and experimenting on each other to be honest, and so Kurse Go Back was like the next level of that going into the 21st century, when me and the guitarist lived together the first of multiple times in 2001 and we had this idea of an Immaginarium home base to not just do music, but make art, make things, make ideas, engineer concepts and big plans really.

OWW: A swamp in Columbia, SC?

JMM: The swamp was near Immaginarium, basically we were the other half of the river > if you walked a block up the street you got to the riverwalk, which was this heaven of untouched nature on one side and the other side was more industrialization, and if you travelled further up you got to the swamp. If you went up Old State Road in front of my house there was the heritage preserve, we would go looking for, and documenting, snakes, alligators and other nature with cameras and video.

OWW: Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever been there specifically but every time I’ve gone swimming in the Carolinas, I get out when I see the water moccasin. That’s when not if… I always see one. Who was the guitarist, do I know him?

JMM: Kurse Go Back was mostly two guitarists, the first I had played with since I was like 16 in many incarnations so we had developed a psychic relationship like bands with family members do. I guess like that thing The Carpenters must have and he was an electrician left handed type and built Kurse Go Back‘s electronics. I ran the light show which became part of Immaginarium’s light show and he was good at engineering sound design where his guitar sounded crazier than a synth with effects.

Moon, the second guitarist, was the guy I lived with and we became extremely good friends and when he moved into the Immaginarium that you know, which was the final boss incarnation that was more the touring circuit out of town band version, he had this idea that we make the studio from hell and we just plugged every imaginable device we had together > like he somehow made my Wurlitzer organ run through a Casio keyboard and the Moogerfooger, just for one track kinda thing. He was a real shoegaze type and if you ever hear the heaviest reverb lacquered e-bow guitar on any of the songs that’s him.

OWW: Was he in other bands I might have heard of?

JMM: These guys were absolutely antisocial people. You would not have heard all their obscure-as-it-gets music they made on computers and such, they rarely made public appearances. By the time you met me these people had all left town.

OWW: I think of the couple years right after 9/11 as a moment of the “Underground” taking a breather. Like everybody went to their parents for a minute and started using file sharing, but I know it was different for everybody. Was South Carolina on a breather or did things run pretty unabated right after?

JMM: There is this period from 2001 to the beginning of 2007 where all these things happened, there were about 4 or 5 Immaginariums, but 2 main ones. During this time I do so many public events, we become the leaders of the music scene for a minute, we run game on the airwaves but it was more this master plan, almost to create the sound of the future and I just happened to be the sorta face of it all, because I was, again, that person from two realms that spoke the language of the old and the new, and negotiated between the two > but mostly it was because I had started doing art shows as an excuse to be able to play a show, because it was hard to get shows > by the time we were being asked to open for every amazing out of town act we had gotten so frustrated with sound people hating all of our set up we just went into house show mode so we could set up our sound and leave it for 2 weeks straight.

Well, my breather was more 2000, and then in 2001 I began to start my first public events after a test run at an early Immaginarium. We predicted 9/11. I had this band play called Air Jordan, who simulated a plane crash with van seats and this Moog Sonic 6 as the captain’s controls. This was in May of 2001. 9/11 is said to be a copycat of a 4 plane hijacking in Jordan in the 70’s, on a September 12th apparently. Going into these “public dilemmas”, as I called them, my goal was to get all the side projects to play, all the most extreme artists, like weird live drawing sketches some crust-punk would do, or get all the more Dada inspired artists to participate, have freak-markets and make something a bit more like a ‘60s “happening” with  entertaining antics. Like the first one had a big food fight with my roommate, he had a performance act that got real naked and debauched, that’s where I met Moon. He was looping a record through a computer as the soundtrack for that.

OWW: It’s gonna get confusing if we talk about a bunch of different Immaginariums. Should we do a breakdown and give them nicknames, or is it unimportant to the narrative? I was just reading about the guys in Les Rallizes Denudes hijacking a Japanese plane to defect to North Korea in the ‘70s. I forget the date though.

JMM: Les Rallizes and The Silver Apples ordeal as well have strange effects on me, and I just wonder if it’s a psychological paradigm of me going into using a post 9/11 name of Mayday Mayday (taken from my uncle’s CB handle Jefferson Starship). I saw a CB as an unconventional instrument for singing > Avoid was, for example, so commercially out of sync that we had no mic, we used a pair of headphones.

Ok, so let me give you two things: One, a quick Immaginarium timeline and maybe I should also give you a list of the things that were on my psyche going into the 2001-onward era, and when I say my psyche, I’m very enthusiastic about life and so anyone around me gets inundated with my ideologies. I was majoring in music in ’97, for example, and still, despite learning since age 6, was a bit messy on theory and developed it innately. In regards to my orientation to doom chords, I got everyone around me using that same self-developed theory.

OWW: I had a real dark experience with philosophy during 9/11. I had this concept called “urban shamanism” that centered on taking over-the-counter drugs like Coricidin as a kind of paranoid city vision quest. I took it with this boy who became my boyfriend (but platonic) the day before 9/11. Then he tried to internalize my philosophy and went insane over the next week. It was a lot to deal with. 

You wanna tell me every meal you ate in 2001 too? (Kidding, just kidding!)

JMM: I drank juice everyday (still do). Ok, so in 2000 I move into this beautiful place and kinda take a break from life, due to Avoid the Band more or less ending when the guitarist ran away for the 10th time. That is the first place Moon also moves into, and we have our first strange house shows, where we do things like ambient experimental music ’til someone buys the building and kicks us out. This is also the first place I make a mural to draw out a doorway to a parallel dimension of sorts, like Narnia, which I based around drawing my social security number > I got annoyed that people are so scared of everyone stealing their lives, and so I’m trying to be wide open ~ This is essentially what a lot of my University studies were based on – taking lots of anthropology. 

OWW: I lived in a basement in Chicago in 2000 with a tiny doorway that had “Old Spanish Trail” written on the frame in chalk. I always figured it was a portal and it scared the hell out of me.

JMM: Well, I guess the first spot was right before that (that one was actually 2002, this earlier one was 2000-2001). I moved into a place in that area near the swamp (why we went all the time) and that’s where we had the first “public dilemmas”. Sometimes, like that first food fight one, they were a big success, sometimes 5 people show up because it would be at like a random park. Then Moon got a place just next to that one in 2002 that we first called Immaginarium, so that was our first home base really: recording, study etc.

Then we decided we needed a big place. So we got this amazing place next to an abandoned asylum, it was crazy, it was an old business with tons of doors that didn’t make sense and we would take the door knobs out and play games with the public, this is where we really start becoming very involved with engaging with the house as a magick zone. It ends when a police chief moves in behind us and we have our first real out of town (not just regional) act Ghengis Tron play and it becomes clear it won’t work out for shows. My brother had just given his house to my dad and my dad needed to keep paying his mortgage, so he gave me his old place to rent.

So that’s where the one you know begins at the start of 2005, but it doesn’t really get too crazy for a year or two, for a minute it’s like a lot of very heavy, very progressive post-hardcore, for lack of a better term, acts touring through. We had 4 or so people booking, and then this great band from Atlanta, Blame Game – one of those heavy screamo acts that had kinda turned free jazz, which was happening a lot, play and I set the band up differently which ended up getting lots of void complaints > after that I decided when I started up again I’d start booking vocd, I think my first voad act was A.M. Salad maybe?

I should also mention that around 2004 Adam Keith from Cube started an incredible venue I named Castle Olympus and that was so cool because it was this literal castle of sorts that was an old Masonic two story building with a ballroom on top > I did a thing at their opening where I made a yin/yang out of vanilla and chocolate pudding in a kiddy pool that was a remake of another kiddy pool I’d made at a party once, filled with anything I could find in the kitchen.

OWW: How long did you take anthropology classes?

JMM: I took anthropology and writing as an interdisciplinary thing to “help me find gateways to parallel dimensions hidden in walls by unearthing them via murals” from 2004 – 2006 > sounds schizophrenic but I was more idealistic, eccentric, if not seeing hilarity that I could actually get away with this, but also genuine in the sense of being prone to the potential of magick and physics and, well to be honest > history.

Ok, and one real quick thing: a quick list of the ideas that were the engine behind a lot of this. The new millennium and the idea of “what is art”, almost like the energy of singularity or perhaps the prelude towards it if you will. Things like: alphabetized information> like I convinced Avoid we name the album (and even the band for a second) “ZYGOTE SUICIDE” because alphabetical filing was a thing with digital so its easy to find us at the bottom of the list, or a “centrist” art movement because everything is done so you gotta be the most in the middle. I found out later that there was not just a centrist art movement but it was from my town, lol.

Or THE Movement as you had to be the ONE and so we were all about movement and atoms, how science can’t figure out why they vibrate as they do, or before mapping the human genome was complete. These kinda ABSOLUTION concepts – everything is complete so where do we go from here? you know > this was I think that early 2001 guerrilla show energy where I wanted to play at train or bus stations or on transport because it moved > I was talking with this guy in a grindcore band who owned a hearse, about me and his band doing drive by shows with my van.

OWW: Zygote’s at the end of the alphabet but everybody starts as one. It’s almost “before A”. I know I first met you at Version in Chicago in 2007. You almost built a miniature Immaginarium there. But speaking of concerts in vehicles, did Friends Forever ever play down there? (SC) They were the first band I saw play in a van in August of 2000. Never in motion though. John Benson’s band Hale Zukas toured with Friends Forever in 2003 and then after that he started doing The Bus as a mobile concert venue. I think they were a big inspiration for that.

JMM: I played the bus at INC 2008 but it wasn’t moving. I’m not sure if I saw Friends Forever. Zygote Suicide was the idea of rejecting reality, where you reverse from the start as I was studying a lot of stuff about past lives and infinite regression in the late 90’s. I was also all about trying to cater food at these public dilemmas. Going into rethinking what a show was I thought we needed to feed the public, I really wish I had known about the Black Panther’s food initiatives back then. 

Maybe this is a good segue out of the early Myspace music early 2000’s into the second half of the first 10 years, and again I think it’s important out of all this to note vond is whatever, it’s not exactly cohesive as a market that critics think is valid and are willing to invest stock into yet. Last decade’s Emo band singer has yet to buy some pedals. I mean it was all the way into 2009 even, that I was working in this kitchen with Cube & Ronny from Mansion, and this drummer from this Christian grindcore band is folding his arms shaking his head looking at me in the kitchen saying “silly vopd bands, silly silly vold bands”. We were literally listening to a prog metal band, they just had effects rack freak outs.

Like you watch that Squelchers road documentary of girls in voad, where they show off the artist that made Jason Wade’s band’s cool clothes, (sooooo incredible by the way) and Val from Unicorn Hard-on talks about how they had just started making things on the computer and messing around > that to me is the heart of experimentation, where it’s non-formulaic. Especially with new technologies that have no catalogue of albums that can be used to to cross reference. There was just everyone trying things > that’s really how things start, and if you’re lucky you all find each other > a big part of those first 2000’s years is, I feel, America finds its groove and sheds this NY/California persona and all states become aware of what everyone is doing everywhere all at once.

OWW: I was just listening to this 1994 voyd tape by this dude Aphasia who later joined Al-Qaeda and was killed by US drone strike in 2015, how’s that for void cred?

JMM: Wowzers, that’s pretty wild, like joined Al-Qaeda when they still worked for the CIA?

OWW: No, he converted to hardline Islam and became a full blown Jihadist. Or so they say. Adam Gadahn. He was killed in Pakistan. 

I first saw you and Maia together at 2008 INC on Valentine’s Day. Nothing like finding true love to shift your life trajectory eh?

JMM: Maia had just returned after her first visit and she stayed as long as she could which was about a year, like she arrived right before Valentine’s and I had made this massive heart out of chocolates on this awesome mystical bedsheet and I show her and she’s all like ‘ohhh its so beautiful’ and before she can think I just throw her into it and mess the design all up haha we were so happy. Then we headed to Miami like a few days later.

OWW: Wait, so y’all hadn’t just met at INC in 2008? I always thought you had.

JMM: We met in 2007 when she was on a tour of sorts I guess you’d say? she stayed in a few places, like for a minute she was playing with Super Pizza Party in Florida where they would bum rush a Chucky Cheese guerrilla style and play a bunch of circuit bent toys (that era) in bizarre costumes. Maia was making music solo in those days as S.S.G.B. > in case anyone thought that was me? She made a limited edition of one CD called “Alter Destiny”, where she does things like running Sadistik Exekution through a Kaoss Pad and lots of Sonic 6.

OWW: I knew it was her from her MySpace page.

JMM: Maia is easily the greatest thing that happened to me and no-one ever believed in me or pushed me as she did. I think there may have almost been close to no real Jefferson Mayday Mayday music seriously made were it not for her, and often she is a member of that as a project.

OWW: I weirdly played my first Bleak End shows in Australia Summer of 2008 but Maia was probably still with you in the US. I played with Toxic Lipstick at both. That was before my bandmate Dr. Groove got so bad from his previous drinking problem in Carpet of Sexy he couldn’t play drums anymore.

JMM: Oh, that’s so cool you played with Toxic Lipstick! Emily from that crew (she collaborated in a band with Kate from Toxic Lipstick)  hangs out here at Fatamorgana (current venue/home)

OWW: And Toecutter. Oh nice! Tell Kate I said hi and I couldn’t have asked for a better first band to play with ever.

JMM: Toecutter is my roommate and Emily’s good friend too > he reminds me a lot of this bass player from this band from my hometown called Confederate Fagg that played hyper-gay hair metal, and I see a lot of parallels between people here and southerners, Toecutter has some paradise called Ponyland > he had a sick promenade belt cut to say that.

OWW: Ponyland is a great Skullflower record. Well it is the Southern hemisphere (and NSW is fairly South compared to Brisbane) I have pics from that show. Dual Plover night Consolador de dos Caras in that Spanish restaurant basement.

JMM: Nice! So for me, like 2008 onward is where, I hate to say it, but I rode my own coattails and reaped the benefits > because these very antisocial people I dealt with in music all left town because, I mean, it’s pretty hard to stay in a pond, big or small, where you got Confederate flags as your main narrative and the music scenes don’t lend very well to experimentation (not that any town lends well to it – big or small)

I’d say 2007, when I meet you in Chicago, where I was absolutely thrilled to meet all these people I literally had dreamt of in the late 90’s (as well as people in Austin TX) and sooooo thrilled to be playing with someone who I think maybe did a split with Cock ESP? (at my CD release party where I broke Bobby Conn’s piano, whoops.) Cock ESP was my early 2000’s harsh inspiration > there was a minute in 2002 where I downloaded stuff for a year > like hundreds of mixed disks and got an overnight schooling of everything I’d read in WIRE times a zillion.

2007 – 2011: This is the sorta second period of that decade for me up til I move over here the last day of 2011. I remember telling you and you were like woah 2012, haha. There were so many amazing shows in those years.

OWW: Yeah it was so wild to go from reading about a band and maybe finding records years later to just downloading everything. Oh yeah 2012 and the last b’aktun were huge changes for me, that’s when I met the love of my life!

JMM: It was just so convenient to live above Florida when people toured to INC and so then that created a stop, which created a buzz> back to that guy Trey who played sax > when he started up a club (that only just closed as it moved across town to become an official institution) he said that SC was important because there was nowhere between North Carolina & Atlanta > so I already knew my “angle” like I think half the times you came either to play or hang you were there on the beginning and/or end of INC.

OWW: I always loved playing Immaginarium. First was with Rotten Milk, INCish 2008. Then on Generation tour 2010. My final time there was that 2014 Solstice Party.

JMM: And this time is where I begin to engage with a system of boardgames or “psychic boardgames” I’m reluctant to name it because the reader can take this wrong but I’m hyper secretive about it because it is just that real to me. In 2001 I started researching a lot about DMT and NDE’s, or Near Death Experiences, I’m very enthralled by the collective unconsciousness and the notion of operating in there, I was fixated on a movement trying to create NDE’s and mapping these non-physical worlds > I started meditating a lot on these ways of thinking and making music for that > so like all that, Kurse Go Back and my music, and everything we were doing, I was trying to make it worthy of dying to.

OWW: I know the Grateful Dead drummer has “Music To Be Born By” but the only record I know for dying is In/Humanity’s “Music to Kill Yourself By”

JMM: Well ironically enough I had a mild NDE of sorts one night doing a very strong medicine. I got stuck where I couldn’t move for a few hours, and Mickey Hart came on the 60 disk changer > a CD my brother gave me and I actually loved it > I mean I was never a hater of GD and when I was in high school I’d listen to a Dark Star bootleg, admittedly it’s as much of a gateway as Interstellar Overdrive.

OWW: I always wanted to have a dark Halloween jam band called the Hateful Dead.

JMM: That Generation show was outrageous by the way and it was such an ideal time as I had Adam Drawdy and Cavedweller living there and so there were all these fresh younger faces from the Space Ideas crew getting their minds blown by the rawness and the visuals with them being hooked to chains. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Adam Drawdy is one of America’s greatest painters.

OWW: Speaking of board games: I brought up Friends Forever, the drummer of that band has a board game company with Mat Brinkman from Fort Thunder and FORCEFIELD. One other dude but I don’t really know him – it’s called Emperors of Eternal Evil.

JMM: That’s soooo crazy and I need to track that down because that New England scene with Forcefield was and is one of my biggest influences. When I met CF, he held up the DearRaindrop record to a collage I had on my wall and it almost perfectly mirrored it which freaked me out. He was like “you don’t know about this?” and left me with the Pick a Winner! DVD that had the Forcefield video that rocked my world, using video synths.

OWW: A member of FORCEFIELD dropped a VHS of their early videos in my suitcase in 2000. They were like the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy – I met them as people but never knew their alter egos.

JMM: Things like being exposed to those videos on that DVD, set gears in motion. It takes so little to change a person’s life and trajectory, but it takes a whole lot to get to that point to move them in that trajectory. So that poster CF mirrored, that was a game board. This period where I had free printing, I’d made a 44 page full color front and back ‘book” that had very difficult binding procedures and it came with a full color deck of 78 cards and this poster that was a tree with a hidden Vimana craft schematic inside it, where the fruits of the trees were spaceships, which were a photograph of a sculpture I made that was supposed to be a sea creature operated sky craft. I had read that there are books and schematics for flying craft hidden in, I think, areas of Lebanon or Palestine in places that the powers that be cannot get to them to preserve them, kinda like books hidden by Thoth ’til the time is right to find them.

Who knows? but I had these various schematics claiming to be Indian Vimana craft and it was my first really, really successful 3D artwork with glasses. I had been making 3D art for a few years.

OWW: I was thinking about Hermes/Thoth because he’s called Trismegistus and my Halloween video corrupted on me three times.

JMM: My first 3D works were in this book with glasses called “The Evicted Riddlebook of Unoccupied Knowledge”, the first of many “boardgames” was made in 2005. The name for them is taken from my childhood hero Harriet Tubman as a means to prevent them from ever becoming unholy and made for money > they must remain as practices, which is called “Outerground Railroad”, referring to praising her efforts but combining the idea to consciousness and non-physical freedom.

OWW: Did you ever do Cyan/Red 3D?

JMM: In 2011 a friend brought me these newly developed 3D glasses called “Chromadepth” which are clear and are more like light diffraction sorta, and I only use those now. What I was doing with the red/blue ones was, say it started with a 4 pass copy machine we called the Empress, and you could scan 4 things – C (cyan) then Y (yellow) then M (magenta) then K (black), and so you get crazy chaos then you find an image within and you make something built around it.

OWW: Oh yeah, I used to have a Godzilla book with that same spectrum based 3D method. I loved that kind of color copier, I would make weird effects by repositioning an original on every pass! I worked in copy stores 1998 – 2000. I would do hand color separations too by switching out the image with white paper after letting one of the four colors scan.

JMM: I realized at some point that the color fibers getting ripped apart looked like 3D books, so I tried glasses on my collages in like 2002 and realized I just needed to tweak a few things and this is really how I meet people and get opportunities out of town, because I load people on tour up with my art. One of the collages from that first boardgame became the cover for a Crystal Antlers album because the Guggenheim was slapping them with a cease and desist for stealing Max Ernst’s imagery > so they just reprinted a sticker on top lol.

OWW: Are South Carolina and Australia the only places you’ve lived?

JMM: Yes, I tried to move too many times but it always failed because I planned to move with other people, by the time I met Maia I had money saved to move to Philly, one of the guys from Ospreys > Tom Bubel proposed we start an Immaginarium in one of those incredible Dracula houses up there. Tom is one of America’s most incredible painters by the way. So about the game boards or psychic board games I think this is some important information that I can show to anyone trying to either run a DIY space or do anything at all.

(takes deep breath)

I used them for years and I intend them like everything I made as “life enhancements” but maybe I didn’t expect them to enhance my own life so greatly and I maybe only now fully understand why as we enter this 2026 new line of time we live in, systems, and systems are procedures or habits, but like the internet seems magical. It is also physical cables creating change within yourself, like be it getting into something new, be it beating depression, be it transitioning, be it whatever you need to change,  you create new hardware, your brain grows when you learn. If you don’t do anything new you don’t grow new neurology systems to benefit in these practices and procedures.

So the strangest thing is I used “Outerground Railroad” as this fairly complex system of rituals and practices to prepare for shows leading up and then after the splashdown. It helped me to expect things and to anticipate what I knew from past experiences, it helped me make things full proof, it’s helped me make things top notch, and mystical as well and even for many people from reports – life changing. There obviously is an aspect of, you don’t want to impose certain things on the public that are too personal, but simple things go a long way and it, for me, is putting a great deal of intention into a show, almost like it’s an art work. I physically almost cannot. between working full time and then drawing full time, and my place is massive, so there is so much to cater to, so I’m at peak capacity, but because I’ve done it for so long there is a means to pull it off that is habitual and practice oriented, it becomes a process that is like any groove you get into.

OWW: I did want to talk about your teaching work just because I worked in teaching too and it’s relatively rare in the “votd scene”. At one point you were like a “fun mad scientist” like Bill Nye or Beakman right?

JMM: Yes and teaching is my main career. I did work in kitchens quite a bit, but that was in large part because I couldn’t teach in those times, like literally the week America said they were going to war, I was a bit confused what the declaration was but it was in late 2002 (I think we started bombing Iraq in march 2003? openly? so insane) that week funding in education was cut > we lost our jobs teaching, marching, drumline and like a friend at the art museum was laid off INSTANTLY.

OWW: Do Aussie kids give you crap for being a yank or do you hide it well?

JMM: I often fear being from the states, probably every day more than the last, but in general they think I’m so cool or whatever > parents see it is as some higher level of perspective often and see it as the good aspects of America usually.

OWW: That’s cool. I feel like an essential part of my teaching jobs is the kids thinking I’m some lame buster because it starts a context for us to relate to each other. I worked jobs that were funded by No Child Left Behind. I hate that program. Literally every child was left behind by it.

JMM: Oh wow, so you were in some funded initiative? That sounds comparable to the science thing.

OWW: No, I just worked for private tutoring companies that siphoned the funds. I was public school 2002 – 2008 but when I moved to Oakland I had my employment rescinded for being a genderqueer goth. C’est La Vie.

JMM: what happened was, how I got into that role > I was working at Hobby Lobby and the plan was to just stay to get certified in framing then leave but I think the girl in charge had a power trip and wouldn’t certify us? Anyway I had to change jobs and saw an ad for a NASA and Aeronautics geared teaching job so I applied and for ages they wouldn’t give me any work, just the worst roles, really far out and I really needed money (my state was 13% unemployment in the financial crisis in 2008 which was starting) > then they saw I could MacGyver and fix broken stuff so they offered me a non-gig job being lab manager> so when the crisis took us from 150 kids per class to 5 all the scientists lost their work and so I ended up being their main person and I learned the ins and outs of it all running the business > when I moved here they closed down.

It was some program to wow kids and they targeted girls because only 2% of American girls became scientists. Every class almost taught something about rainbows and I was curious why so I started really thinking and studying them and it became intricate to my art and understanding of 3D to this day and just in life and for almost 3 years now have developed rainbow halos (very vivid bright ones) around lights if I’m in a good mood> I’ve researched if it’s mineral deficiency? or maybe its an eye injury but doctors find nothing. So I wonder if it’s a sensitivity thing of always existing at night being nocturnal, using low light and working in this rainbow medium and UV medium as well.

OWW: I think about light diffraction daily. There are so many awesome female scientists who just got written out of stuff – like the lady who helped discover the structure of DNA with Watson & Crick.

JMM: I think it’s good people are learning more about how NASA relied on female coders for example > it’s a man’s narrative and it’s a white normative narrative and it’s all too often absolutely false. I teach here. I’ve taught music here since 2017 and it’s changed my life so much. I used to make piano improvisation recordings a lot to deal with America falling into crisis and develop my skills between 2017-2020. Then I switched jobs, I got tired of the glass ceiling and there was a day I said, it’s not enough, I need to be in a situation where I can have posters of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane on the wall, all this curriculum is (yet again) white normative > I mean it’s so white supremacist that Beethoven had to hide his Moorish nature from his mother’s side by having stand-in whiter guys in his portraits and they say he’s from Germany but it literally didn’t exactly exist yet and he made all his music when he moved to Vienna anyway.

OWW: “Er war un Punker und er lebte in der grossen Stadt” (Amadeus by Falco) I’ve somehow found a way to avoid learning anything about music even though I’ve made it my whole life. I don’t know any chord on any instrument and hope I never will. I like looking up modes though, like Hypolydian.

JMM: I used to love that Rock Me Amadeus song when it came out, especially the really bad version with the break down.

OWW: That whole Falco album is genius. Really under-appreciated dude (RIP)

JMM: I hear you about avoiding learning, however I think this is maybe not dangerous for you, but this kind of thing surrounds the psychology of experimental music and gets into even what some might call music hate. The guys I played with for years were like this, and in my opinion it gets to be more trouble than it needs to be > you wanna build a spaceship look up how to do it instead of spending 100’s of hours trying and making the same errors that have been made before.

OWW: It’s not like I’m purposely avoiding it, it just hasn’t been relevant to any music I’ve made. If I ever needed a chord I’d work it out. I like dischords and microtones though. I wrote a 5 line BASIC microtonal synthesizer on my PC in High School.

JMM: I feel a good example is microtonal like> and in itself that’s bordering on being a racist term because who’s to say it’s micro anyway? It’s like Middle East? East of who? Quarter steps, for example, are standard in many Eastern musical languages.

OWW: I mean if I was in a Gamelan or Partch ensemble I’d learn the intervals but I just got my first guitar and see no reason to ever tune it. It was a coincidence with my sound program. I just put ASCII codes through a function to make them audible frequencies with steps in between. It didn’t land on any “real notes” but I wasn’t avoiding that either.

Are you starting bands with your students? I had a four track club when I worked at a High School, all experimental music boys and rappers, but the tapes are lost. Then I had a band with Spencer from Skaters girlfriend’s little brother. We played with HEALTH at one of their first shows. (Oh yeah he was a student at the High School)

JMM: I show them things like Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, I show them Keith Moon blowing up his drum set on TV, I show them things that are in the public eye where people destroy things, I show them prepared guitar and teach them how to do that, I show them Sun Ra when he does that wild out solo from A Joyful Sound where he looks like when Grandmaster Flash does the behind the back style in the kitchen, I teach them how it sounds great to play every single note on the piano at once if you listen to it and mean for it to sound a certain way you know.

I do encourage them to start bands, there’s some kids performing a Queen song soon, and songs they wrote as well, I do things like on the holidays bring in synths and drum machines > the main thing is perspective, get them out of this limited perspective. I teach them women and underrepresented voices because in most piano books they are nonexistent.

OWW: I played John Cage’s 4’11 at my High School talent show but they made me cut it in half. When I played it the other kids were yelling for me to get on with it but then their friends would nudge them and let them in on it so everyone was cheering by the end. I had a real piano and a score. You should upload some videos, I’d love to see.

JMM: It’s not just like > you can do the worst sounding hellish sounds and its ok its still music > its also normalization > its showing them that people might tour the world making tons of money playing one note for an hour and how its important they don’t feel odds are stacked against them because they can’t play Mozart > its about allowing them to see what the internet does not show them which is there are people who WANT to hear these things like loud feedback and turn out to see it. 4′ 33′ is a thing I show them because it definitely breaks their brain. (side note: Avoid the Band had a song called 5 minutes and 55 seconds of silence or something, maybe it didn’t have a name? but our idea was that John Cage didn’t own this experience that it was a universal sound). I will definitely never upload videos of my students, lol.

OWW: What about the school doing it on its own page? I mean obviously everything should be on the up and up.

JMM: I have no control over what my school does online, I run a music school they developed outside of their franchise.

OWW: Sure, no control but don’t pretend like you don’t have influence. You can say “these kids sound great, it would be a cool recruitment tool for future students if their parents are ok with it.” I mean if it’s a band it’s not weird for there to be videos.

JMM: Speaking of franchise I failed to mention working at that NASA franchise, the owner didn’t believe in science, it was absolutely eerie, I found out he knew my brothers and sang not just in the choir with their mom’s husband but would hang at her house when I worked there lol > he just saw it all as money > taught me a lot about how franchises lose their narratives when it comes to the bottom line. It was so much fun taking chemicals home that you and me, for example, would play with after shows, flash paper, besides getting to take home Tesla coils, and plasma balls, and Van De Graaf generators, or cotton candy machines to make weird music with. I do the cotton candy thing here but they call it fairy floss, we got a machine that this lady left who was studying Theremin under Leon Theremin’s grandniece > crazy to have her zooming into the theatre room.

OWW: “Fairies eat floss and you better believe it” – Ozzy (almost)  I got really into decadent alchemy when I found a bunch of chemicals in an abandoned Detroit school in 2012.

JMM: My new job correlated with my new place too so I had a huge life change for the better coming out of the lockdown years > for a minute I was teaching music in 4 places and a 5th job on the side (and drawing as well) but then they made the school once they realized I was their guy > all the parents liked me saying “my kids having nightmares from piano class” because all the other teachers were really strict and I’m just a goofball.

I’m very influenced by the art and the ideas of alchemy and my spirit resonates with it, but if I started going down that path I was maybe not headed in an ideal headspace. I feel Outerground Railroad as the psychic boardgames practice is aligned with alchemy but a very different experience as I’m not trying to make things, it’s more about divination.

OWW: Yeah that’s why I’m a decadent alchemist. I don’t want to “ennoble” anything. Not my spirit, not metals. I’d rather taint them and make them less pure.

JMM: Yeah like see I can teach Fairies Wear Boots now to kids and then go into the lineage of swing music and Duke Ellington’s influence on metal with double bass and Bill Ward as well and no-one is gonna come up and question me about these lyrics because firstly they don’t remotely care, but also they don’t speak English and so they see the music for what it is > the groove, the complexity, the energy, the feel > I WOULD teach that because it’s integral to history > I see myself as a revisionist. I am slowly working up hundreds of songs that I feel will be left to the crate diggers > piano renditions of either what I feel NEED to be new standards of old songs or lost to the crate, obscure absolute classic deep cuts that often you can not find chords or anything for.

OWW: I hope you show your adopted nation some respect and teach The Birthday Party.

JMM: Nick Cave I think is valued as a fairly not so great guy here, I’d probably be more inclined to introduce them to Australian groups like Black Feather.

OWW: I’m sure Cave’s an ass but Junkyard is essential. See if you can find any Jesse Shepard/Francis Grierson scores. I really wanna hear his music and right now nothing is recorded. (He was a spiritualist who channeled on piano)

JMM: I’ll look into it for ya. Teaching has def made me a better person and teacher here too cuz they’re like you’re not strict enough so I had to learn how to communicate in all these new ways and still keep it holy and live up to certain expectations.

OWW: Let’s talk about Maia some more. I’m a sucker for romance, tell me about the wedding.

JMM: We got hitched at the court, neither of us is into that concept though in all truth. She put a galactic grape ring pop on my finger after we dropped the papers off, that took 24 hours, but it was not about her staying, it was totally “the love of your life absolutely has found you”, and she claims she knew of me when she was young. I believe it.

I e-mailed my mom and I guess you could say the doors closed to the public, turning my back on my life repairing old books in a room at the bottom floor of the university’s reference library where i’d get paid close to nothing, but i got to draw most of the day after reaching my quota and my office just happened to be literally right outside the occult book section. I quit driving my beloved painted van, borrowed my dad’s Crown Vic for a minute as he was getting more into riding around then. It all felt very undercover, no one could find me that way. We hit the road quite a bit, he helped take the back seat out so i could fit the Rhodes in there.

She got to see all these acts at shows she liked and she returned a few times to travel more. We got to meet the TOTALLY WRECK crew in Austin, she met her friend Tommy Boy there doing live video. We stayed with her friends Telepathic Friend for a week with Justin & Ralph in Texas all living together, jeezsh!  Acid Mothers Temple was there (Makoto sleeps 1 hour a day)

We got to curate a huge show at Space 1026 with tons of people, where we erected the hexagon portal from the backyard. Folks like the homies in Virginia who loved my place & would come specifically just to hang sometimes but she actually knew them better than me. They had us sleep in Lil Ugly Mane‘s bed when they all first had that art gallery, Church of Crystal Light, where she’d had this prophetic dream about his future that absolutely came true. We slept on the beaches, we took her to Americana roadside attractions, like those giant dinosaurs in Tennessee, we explored diner culture as i dragged her into my “sleep-spell” as she calls my nocturnal life and militant dream state and bed worship. It was really endless fun, truthfully all a pretty good time for her, drinking homemade absinthe with melted fairy floss from work’s cotton candy machine. There was snow, there was Halloween, there was tons of Mexican eating. 

All pretty great except dealing with immigration was total hell on earth, though mostly for her, but stressful for us both. Then for me to do it again here, you know they wanna know what planet you’re really from. What kept us going was constant seemingly moments of impossibly explained, other than divine intervention assistance level mystical occurrences that allowed us to get her massive microchip green card.

OWW: That all sounds dreamy, Can you touch on the creative sides of your partnership?

JMM: Well, most importantly in those times we got really into ourselves and the house, we birthed very specific things at the Immaginarium. Things like the Ultra-Violet attic, much of that is her influence and the beginning of the crystal room, which i have brought that energy here and is in a lot of ways how i visually communicate the seasons to the public. We were really into a kind of bubble bath and thunderstorm portal spirituality that was really powerful in my eyes.

She brought talents out in me, she really helped me get my fire under control that was becoming severely unbearable. Around that time just before she arrived I basically felt compelled to email her on this insanely hot day, dealing with physical agony from a recent fairly severe car crash I was in & then my friend arrives and said he had this omen of a snake on Old State Rd. It leads up to Immaginarium‘s front door, where Sherman marched down to burn the town and the snake was definitely there, so i emailed her and she said she was ‘coming to the states to visit very soon’. 

For a long time I, and the crew in Florida, all kinda felt that she was some very high level spy. I remember getting a letter just before she arrived, and looking up and down the street like kinda alarmed, running inside and locking the door before opening it which held the key that we first opened the great door with.

We used to play music together quite a bit at Immaginarium, we filmed lots of strange things, acting & such, or chemical reactions. Remember the role you played as a merchant in that filmspell? That was a recreation of her role in the crystal room from another film, we were studying the Sonic 6 and there would be days where we’d have it on very elongated settings, generating for several days. My musical life really is divided by the moment it is dropped off at Immaginarium. (which I’m pretty sure was also that night you were there after Miami)

Eventually she lost interest in playing music because of that thing that happens, where once you learn to play, you hear music differently, often segmented into the instruments. Working with lo-fi recordings is often a method I use to cohere music back together into a oneness. I still get her on board here and there, in recent years often it’s poetic vocals, as I love her writing. The most recent work i made is an album about the eons of Earth starting from the present and working backwards to the birth of the earth, moon, and sun; and then there’s a non-sound song for before that.

OWW: I did want to ask about your more recent music…

JMM: The album is called Շɧɛ Gɾҽαƚҽʂƚ Dɾҽαɱ Eʋҽɾ Fσɾҽƚσℓԃ, referencing creation mythology and questions of linear time, as it’s a journey in reverse. but also general narrative, or foretelling as invocation of life. Reverse order was rather hard to keep track of when writing,  especially when we wrote her narration for between songs because writing forward from that point period, inch-worming backwards. if you know anything about the sublevels of the eons it’s hard enough to keep track of all the neo-archeon, meso-archeon, paleo-archeon, eo-archeon etc. because those categorizations, or subsects, are confusing already in forward time, let alone backtracking. It’s similar to how in a romance language (Spanish, Italian, French etc.) rhyming can spin you out.

The aim here is to help people, with a perspective of deep time, to get away from these intricacies. Like we’re speaking of, with the triviality of year to year, and learn to foresee bigger pictures. This can, for some possibly, even lend to learning to predict perhaps? also knowledge of history, seeing as we compartmentalize things, people think of dinosaurs as T-rex, not three separate, very long millions and millions of year periods until they get to that stage and then there’s Proto-dinosaurs, and then what led to them and so on.

Sometimes if you learn the more vast complexities, it can relieve a great deal of anxiety by becoming awestruck with the understanding that your life is tiny, or 100 years is microscopic. It’s great and all, but the appreciation for how long it took things to formulate and develop, to allow for us this reality is astounding. That is quite calming and humbling in its staggering magnitude, to know that there is not just Pangaea but MANY super-continents that come and go, and that there are several Earth incarnations.

Like there’s obvious reasons we speak of dinosaurs because, woah, but there’s a lot of overshadowing with them in the grand scheme and there’s also a lot of downplaying the now, as if nothing’s new and I hope through this people can learn that’s not true at all that we are on the razor’s edge of an absolutely fascinating story, and only now do we have so much technology that we, not just only understand this deep time so well, but I can wrap a graphic up of the 4.5 billion years within 30 seconds, front to back like the snap of a finger at the end of a music video.

There is a VERY interesting aspect here as well, that Maia’s grandfather was one of the people highly involved with the designation of the most recent addition to the ages of earth, the “Ediacaran” period, which is truthfully the beginning of the modern Earth, with complex life as we know it following this incubation-seeming period, where it was a snowball forever, although we still don’t understand the lifeforms from then and they have yet to be classified, some even consider them aliens. Her grandfather helped to discover certain fossils from then in South Australia: the fossil “spriggina floundersi” is named after another guy and him, so it’s somewhat relevant that she narrates the information about the points in time. In that song I play this beautiful crystal flute someone gave me.

This album is a huge success for me and probably her favorite, the release itself played with time, and that idea that I am in between realms, as it was released in two different years simultaneously – New Years Eve in the states and New Years Day in Oz. It’s the second that i’ve made here at Fatamorgana (along with this new album in the works about to drop that is under a different name i’ve been playing under in recent years)

OWW: Yes, the future you Aussies live in! That reminds me, I could listen to this all day but if we don’t get back to time in the present sense, it could run out on us!

JMM: So talking about cycles looking back at the first 25, ’76-2001 then I’m into solar cycles so I look a lot into 11 and 22 year cycles > I compare things often more than most and I look for concordances. This is essentially how I play the game as well > I look for relationships in themes and developments. I not only was able to use what I knew from the early 90’s to ’99 to help with Immaginarium,

I was able to use both those decades to help with the current one > it’s important to note the sun cycle issue, as I’ve been waiting for this one to peak and it seems it is peaking NOW > solar cycle ’25 has made it’s crest > I began bringing the notion of the sun’s activity as a plasma solar wind affecting earth regarding latitude in those early KGB shows with strange graphics of the X flares from those days. I’ve always since then been heavily intrigued by how the sun affected humans and society as well as plants and animals and there have been studies into how escalation of the sun’s activity with flares and spots does seem to correlate to war and such.

OWW: All conflict comes from the Sun, it provides the energy for plants to make sugar and then all living things fight over it.

“There is unrest in the forest / Trouble with the trees / For the maples want more sunlight / And the oaks ignore their pleas” -Rush

JMM: I felt sun activity bypassed pseudo science concerns that arise with things such as astrology when dealing with people so I was grounded in the practical nature of it > and so in a lot of ways I’m looking to see coordinations > and I do but besides all that I can sorta see as well correlations to the past 2 years, with the world coming up, ending with the state of America and its involvements with facilitating the horrors of genocide and tech fascism globally, as comparative to the panics in 1999-2000, and 2026 being much more of a 2001 energy and there’s one huge thing I’m gonna say, that is perhaps somewhat of a bold claim > and I don’t want people to particularly check themselves, but if the shoe fits wear it….

OWW: Is the other shoe about to drop?

JMM: In those 2001 years there was this undefined energy of defiance, or maybe not resistance, but somewhat in that spirit, and since then we’ve seen a lot that is way more impressive from Occupy to BLM, to general strikes and the like. In 2001 and early 2000’s you saw people going off the cuff trying things, acting in ways that might have felt unhinged and it felt hot and it felt alive > Russian Tsarlag in the video wearing skates playing at a bus stop comes to mind, Google Earth did some illegal show that was documented which turned heads online > these things were kinda fun > well now…

What I’m seeing at these protests for Palestine, which really need to morph to include Congo and Sudan, and not in a compartmental way, but in a “it’s the same problem” way > I’m seeing these kids scream > little kids,  kids that are like 5 years old into megaphones that has vo!d musicians in a headlock > this stuff they are doing in the public’s eye is infinitely more visceral and emotive than the guy flipping the table.

OWW: Yeah I realized recently there’s no such thing as apolitical art.

JMM: They are doing all this while the old guard is collecting coin rather successfully which, I’m very happy these friends are getting theirs and providing stories and collecting artists into labels to be preserved and to create a culture and continue and hopefully provide a path for continued music with our infrastructure of venues and diy spaces > they are sooooooo important it’s where networking is done > but is that all they want?

And they’re doing it in front of ROLEX and PRADA and every other massive brand store, these kids are bearing it all.

OWW: Oh yeah I’m hardline when it comes to private sector in the arts. I want zero.

JMM: And they have that energy I used to see but I’m not seeing it in the venues, I’m seeing it in the streets from kids who sometimes haven’t even hardly opened their eyes. I have no real advice ~ I do have a perspective though that I often have felt I witnessed the more non-political end of a response to the unfoldings of the world are more on a male end of the experimental underground of America, and it it’s most often the women that are speaking out and being more openly political and so I do think men need to question if they are strong holding this avenue. Be as political as you wanna be online but the best place for action is a can of paint and a wall.

OWW: I’ve always been Team Girl.

JMM: I think “LOL” was the quietest laugh we never heard. I think we need to look at the codes put in quilts that helped Harriet Tubman show people what to expect. I think we need to formulate clear ideas and code that information into something we can SING, we can vocalize, the ball for that is maybe right now in the hands of the memes and they can disappear whenever corporate decides to end the websites

Part Three : The Future (2026 – ????)

OWW: Well we might want to talk about the future some but not until we finish with the present. It should be simple enough for us to look back at 2026 and talk about what happened. What sticks out to you?

JMM: So looking at 2026-20????? what do you think we might see my friend?

OWW: It’s hard for me to see but I’m not in Australia. It’s easy to feel very apocalyptic but the earth abides. (The above was a dry joke)

JMM: Obviously the problem on everyone’s mind is Terminator > AI data centers being this ecological endgame when they need a New York and San Francisco amount of energy combined to run and some want nuclear to run theirs, and anyone living near one is looking to die from the poison in the air it creates and all for the next level of information surveillance, to find the new terrorist which is seemingly > Americans.

OWW: Living on 20 acres of forest has really changed my perspective. As desperate as most things seem nature’s on the rebound in my watershed. Tons of cool fungus and my newts and salamanders are great. Last night I dreamed of two salamanders caring for their offspring.

JMM: Personally I’m hopeful AND delusional; enough to think anything can happen and tables can turn, but I’m, as a person who writes music for birds to carry my song onwards to the next world testing synth sounds on them > I like to think parts of my recordings can confuse AI data mining and images. I can complexify them. There was a song on my last album after all that screwed up file conversion changing it from one to another and I suspect it was these background sound effects of natural occurrences during narration parts like sounds of volcanos and earthquakes (all music songs were made by me) kinda like that frequency that can break laptops they find in certain songs.

OWW: So the song must be passed on, how does it go?

JMM: Well the song that is passed down is our story > if we rely on it to be passed down by the web we risk, at the most obvious it’s deleted and more optimistic it’s eaten by sharks at the bottom of the sea hungry for cables.

OWW: I think this touches on our different ideas about music. I think everything around the song is the song – lifestyle, attitude, lore. You want it written on sheet music but I’m just interested in the paper, the blank spots.

JMM: I write close to nothing on paper in fact it is a time restraint I negated in the beginning of the millennium. I sound anti-internet but I’m really not, but it’s been stolen from us and I crave a complete new one free of big tech, there’s no song written down around the fire, Homer was not written.

OWW: Homer, does that mean “The Moor”? I know Aesop was Ethiopian. “Internet is over if you want it” – John & Yoko (almost)

JMM: I simply mean can you give the song, be it by singing, to a child and then they give it to their children? No matter what or how or when it sounds like song is really a vessel for information.

OWW: I think if the kids watched a video like Woodstock or Gimme Shelter with the sound off there’s still a song there.

JMM: Or are we too reliant to perform this task on the thing to do the song for us and thus we have become redundant, but what if there is no means for media?

OWW: I mean I love Child Ballads, I just love everything else too.

JMM: To watch Woodstock requires some means of preservation that is non-human or non-animal or non-plant, where is the oral tradition? in 2026 where do we pass existence of what we have accumulated in terms of wisdom and information onward>?

Here’s a hot take > we brutalize pigeons with spikes, some roosted on Maia’s balcony once and she realized they’re terrible at making nests…

OWW: Yeah they are. We had them outside our window in Tijuana. When I boated through downtown Providence there’s huge pigeon colonies under the bridges in these weird endless caves.

JMM: We raised them, we trained them, we helped make them who they are, these beautiful little doves to send our messages, our love to the world and now we do not allow them into our existence, much like how dogs raised us to be better after we bred them into existence from wolves, they made us more in tune with emotional intelligence and natural instinct > the internet is like an extension to mail which is like an extension to our relationship with this form of making words and image fly into the sky to reach each other from worlds apart.

OWW: I want to try to make pinhole cameras with construction paper as film. What medium is a fossil? Stone? Ever heard a song called lithic scatter?

JMM: Fossil is stone > you can make a camera obscura on the right day with your curtains.

OWW: Right, I meant make a permanent photo with it. We’re sadly running out of time. Imagine you are reading a book by candlelight. The candle burns out. You have to burn the paper to make light to read the paper, what does it say?

JMM: The candle speaks.

OWW: What wisdom has the cold wax?

JMM: The candle says the reason I am beautiful is because, like a flower, to be this gorgeous I must last temporarily and that experience, that is within a place in time, I must be experienced, or else I do not exist within you. Stare into the light and then stare into the dark, see the light in the dark, the cold wax is the memory, the cold wax can be a new candle, the cycle can start again like the song passed on.

end

https://jeffersonvimana.com/

https://jeffersonmaydaymayday.bandcamp.com/album/-

https://kursegoback.bandcamp.com/