Jeph Jerman has been making weird music/sound art/whatever you want to call it for a very long time. His interest in strange sound started at an early age when he encountered an old Ken Nordine record featuring a track of “sound paintings”, which led to him experiment with recording devices he’d found around his parent’s house, making tapes for his own enjoyment. Eventually he came into contact with the local experimental music scene after moving to Colorado Springs, and the international tape trading network via his Big Body Parts label. Jeph has participated in countless recordings and live performances since the mid 80s, both solo as Hands To (which he dropped in favor of working under his own name in the late 90s), as well as with Blowhole, City of Worms, Domaine Poétique, Animist Orchestra and Jerman/Barnes, to name but a few. For the last several decades his work has steadily moved towards an unaffected merger of acoustic ecology with deep listening, a practice he likens to attempts at “stopping the monkey mind.” Jeph was kind enough to indulge the questions of a blithering fanboy such as myself over the phone from his current home in Cottonwood, AZ a few weeks ago. The results are transcribed below:

Mutually Assured Marginality: I guess we can start with your initial recordings involving groups like Atrocity Exhibition, City of Worms, early Hands To etc., which were released on your label Big Body Parts in the mid 80s. What can you say about this time? How did you come into contact with others interested in this kind of experimental music locally? I’ve read that you’d been in bands before this but didn’t like playing the same songs repeatedly. How did you begin making the sort of music you still do, broadly speaking, today? 

Jeph Jerman: I tell this story a lot, but the first thing I heard that wasn’t songs, or symphonic music or jazz was a record by Ken Nordine called ‘Word Jazz’. There’s a piece on there where he takes you into a “Sound Museum” and plays you these “sound paintings” and they’re pretty phenomenal. Even today I think they’re kind of unique and in the context of being an 11 or 12 year old kid who had no idea that sort of thing existed, I’d heard underground FM radio but I wasn’t aware of anything like that. 

MAM: Was that a record your parents had around the house? Were they really into music? 

JJ: Yeah, my mom played it for me and my sister. But they weren’t all that into music, they played it around the house but it was mostly light stuff. My dad was really into Roger Miller, and my mom would sometimes play Andy Williams records, or they had a bunch of Kingston Trio, stuff like that. If my dad put something on the stereo it was usually, I don’t even know what you’d call it now, muzak I guess, stuff that kind of plays in the background. I’d heard stories that my dad used to sing when he was much younger but he wasn’t all that into it. It was just something he did. So my family isn’t particularly musical. My brother took sax and my sister took piano when they were kids, but nobody was serious about it. So I don’t know why I took to it like I did. It’s just always been something I was interested in. And I’ve always leaned towards the weirder end of things. I liked Pink Floyd records growing up ‘cos of all the weird shit on them but not necessarily the songs. Like the freaky parts after they stopped singing and the song would open up into jamming, for some reason I was instantly drawn to that. 

MAM: That’s funny, it reminds me of something Steven Stapleton said, about buying all these psychedelic and prog records in the 70s, and of course he was in London so he had access to all kinds of exotic imports, but he’s talked about getting these records, and even on pretty common stuff like Pink Floyd or King Crimson, just honing in on the short freakout sections, or like segues with just ambient feedback and creepy animal sounds or whatever, and wishing there were records with nothing but that. So I guess it makes sense that it would be a common experience for people whose interests naturally veered sort of left field, that they’d be fixated on that before there was anything approaching a recognizable ‘scene’ or widespread availability for really ‘out there’ kinda shit. 

JJ: Right. And then as far as finding other people, I’d known people growing up that were sort of into the same kind of music, and into it for the same sort of reasons as me, but maybe not as intensely. I started collecting records around age 13-14, but it wasn’t until I moved to Colorado Springs and got a job at the college radio station that I met a lot of people into weird stuff. 

MAM: Are you still in touch with anyone from those days? I saw that George Ericson recently uploaded some old City of Worms tapes to Bandcamp with the backstory of their recording process. Do you know if people you collaborated with a lot back then still make music? 

JJ: Dave Montgomery is still recording. I talk to George about once a month, and we email pretty frequently. Yes, that’s what he’s been doing. He’s going to digitize the entire City of Worms catalog and then he’s gonna do Big Joey. It will probably take him anywhere from 2-3 years. 

MAM: Yeah, lots of material I guess. 

JJ: Yeah and he’s also teaching himself how to remaster, it’s all new to him. So it takes him a while because, well for one the recordings aren’t uniform, they were recorded on different machines and the quality is really variable. And then he had to learn the remastering process. And he’s very meticulous. He’ll send me like five versions of one thing and ask for comments and so on before it’s finalized. 

MAM: Well, that’s exciting. A lot of those tapes are pretty rare now so it will be great to hear them. So what about the tape trading network in general, and your participation in it? Did it just evolve naturally as in you’d get a hold of something you liked on, say, Sound of Pig or Cause and Effect, write to the address on the tape and then work through the mail trading new tapes and material for collaborations? How did you first find that stuff? 

JJ: I’m pretty sure, again, it was through the radio station. We’d receive copies of ‘Sound Choice’ and ‘Option’. They wrote about the DIY stuff people were doing at home, making home recordings and trading cassettes and all that. We read about it long before we heard any of it. There was a little of it hanging around the radio station because people would send homemade tapes and, there weren’t as many records then, but occasionally they’d send in records as promos and we’d check them out. And I’d been playing in bands since I was 16, playing in bars and I thought, ‘ya know “I don’t want to play other people’s music all the time. I have my own ideas.” 

MAM: Were the early Big Body Parts tapes your first physical releases? 

JJ: There was stuff before that, not a lot. Similar to some of the stuff on BBP, just fucking around with tape recorders. Trying to overdub using two tape decks ‘cos I didn’t have a multitrack unit until much later. So you’d record on one tape player then play it back on another and add something and then keep flipping back and forth. Sounds horrendous but it works! [laughs] But then I like horrendous sound sometimes. 

MAM: So do I! [laughs] Why did you stop doing Big Body Parts around 1990? And how does most of that stuff come off to you now? Does it hold up, in your opinion? 

JJ: I stopped BBP mostly because I lost my job and didn’t have much money. I was still playing in bars but the money was sporadic. Sometimes I even had trouble paying rent and buying food. So I thought I can still play and record occasionally but I can’t afford to keep sinking money into this. And it pissed a lot of people off but it was like “Are you working? I don’t have money to fucking eat!” [laughs] And listening back, I still like a lot of it and find it interesting. Then there are some bands and some tapes that are pretty embarrassing, mostly the ones copying other people’s music. Which I guess is what you do when you’re starting to play, you learn by emulating the things you like, the mechanics of the instruments and all that. I did start up another label, Animist Recording, around 1994 when I was living in Tucson. I kept that going until after I moved to Seattle around ’95.

MAM: When I think of your work, the solo material and Animist Orchestra in particular, the first thing that comes to mind is a natural atmosphere that sort of organically molds the sound, though not so much in a straight field recording way. This is of course reinforced by the types of sources you often use, the found objects, stones, cacti…. What got you interested in these natural sounds and materials?

JJ: Just pure sound. Anything was fodder, a squeaking sign blowing in the wind, I just took stuff from the environment because that’s what was there. I’ve flip-flopped between staying completely away from instruments and then using them a lot. I get bored with something and try something else and then go back to the first thing or develop a third. I get ideas, sonic ideas, and they nag at me until I do something about them. I can’t seem to think of a real reason why I’ve stuck with everyday sound so much other than just, it’s there and I have a recorder in my hand. Like last night some asshole was shooting off fireworks, and I mean professional-grade, large-scale fireworks…

MAM: Oh man, now of all times! 

JJ: Yeah exactly. And there’s just these “booms” going off. My girlfriend is like “Oh my god is that a gun?!” and it really did sound almost like a cannon. And I went out a little later, it was sporadic and every five minutes they’d set one off and you’d hear this massive “boom” and I’m thinking “What the hell is going on?” She had the same reaction, just like that’s really stupid with the fires and all, but anyway that’s an example of something I’d try to capture. I might have an idea to use it right away or it might sit on a tape for years until I find it again and think “Oh yeah there’s that thing I got. That could fit here, blah blah….” 

MAM: Yeah and so I guess with field recordings it is different but with drumming, you played drums in Blowhole and a lot of your work with found objects has a percussive quality to it. Do you think that background informs how you think about music/sound? Would you consider yourself a drummer or percussionist? 

JJ: Sure, among other things. I’ve thought about this a lot. I know a lot of people who started as drummers, playing conventional, or slightly leftfield of conventional music, punk rock, or whatever, who now do sound work. I think it’s really interesting and I don’t know why that is. Like Lawrence English is a drummer. 

MAM: Oh, I didn’t realize that. And Tim Barnes, right? 

JJ: Yep. A lot of people started like that and I’m just not sure why. I’ve talked to other people in the same situation, and nobody I’ve talked to can come up with a real answer as to why there are so many of us.

MAM: Did you have formal training with drums? Or any other instrument? 

JJ: I took drums lessons for two years when I lived in Phoenix when I was around age 13-14. I told my drum teacher that’s what I wanted to do as a living and he tried to discourage me! [laughs] The focus was on how to read music. The only practical way to make a living as a musician is to become a studio player, so you have to hone your ability to sight read really fast, which I never really was into. I had to do some of it in school because I played in concert band and what they called “stage band” which was kind of big band jazz type stuff, so you had to read charts. And I could figure out what went where, the time signatures, eighth notes blah blah, I could do it well enough to get by for that but I wasn’t interested in knowing the mechanics of music really. And the older I’ve gotten the less interested I’ve become in Western music in general. ‘Cos so much of it is the same, ‘ya know? Just the sphere of popular music, everything is in 4/4 time. There’s very little change in time signatures or anything out of the ordinary. People are starting to incorporate noise and weirdness now but it’s more for the sake of novelty. Everybody’s trying to catch your ear ‘cos everybody’s attention span is so short now you need to smack them in the face. 

MAM: Do you have any thoughts on repetition? Many of your early works utilized tape loops but even when you moved away from that and the use of tapes/electronics in general there are still a lot of repetitive actions. Or even when you incorporate that kind of “purposeful stumbling” as I’ve heard you call it, ways to break out of patterns through ‘error’, it often has a meditative effect for me, at any rate. So maybe this goes along with the drummer thing but does that have anything to do with your work? Maybe not so much repetition but just kind of turning your mind off and getting lost in textures?

JJ: The last part of that question, certainly, about turning off your mind, that’s what a lot of it is about. Specific to repetition it really just depends on what I’m working with, what I’m going for. I’ve done a lot of drone work, which is repetition of a kind. I tend to steer away from strict periodic rhythmic repetition because again I’m just not so into those kinds of Western structures. A lot of the Hands To stuff was loops because I was using a sampler and trying to make it not sound like loops, but then you have stuff that repeats within that. It’s sort of like wallpaper, you know? It’s a pattern but if you don’t look close it might appear random. What happens with a lot of the early Hands To stuff is your mind will latch onto one thing. Say the piece consists of three loops of the same sound playing at different speeds, your mind will latch onto one of them, and then it’s really hard not to follow that the whole way through. Not all the pieces are like that but quite a few are. Someone pointed that out to me a long time ago and that’s one of the reasons I stopped using samplers. One of the big ideas I always work with is density or mass, just this mass of sound, so that’s where a lot of that is coming from.

MAM: Yeah that’s one thing that’s always struck me about it for sure. What about things like titles and artwork? How do you choose those and has it changed over time? A lot of Hands To tapes have titles that are nonsense words like “Maesh”, “Invesh”, “Plastinery”. Was there a particular idea behind that? 

JJ: Portmanteau. Yeah, they’re generally 2-3 words smashed together. I don’t remember what most of them originally were now. I thought at the time that the words “fit” with the sounds without attaching specific meaning to them.

MAM: And what about packaging and things like that? It seems to me like as your approach to music itself has changed some of that stuff has also changed. You’ve got more recent releases just called ‘Sound’, ‘More Sound’, ‘Birds, Bees, Insects’ for instance. And I know you’ve talked about your previous work being “idea based” whereas now it’s more “sound based” so I’m wondering if all the other stuff that goes along with a release has also changed? 

JJ: Not entirely. Sometimes if I’m working on something I’ll have a title already, sometimes not, generally I’ll just wait for something to come to me. I’ll come across a word in reading or listening to NPR at work on Sundays in the background, stuff sticks out, for some reason it will just resonate and it’ll take me a while to figure out why and whether I want to use it in the presentation or not. With the ‘Sound’ series it was just this idea of presenting stuff at bare face, just “Here’s a bunch of sounds I’ve recorded. I think they’re interesting, you might too” kind of thing. So there’s the bare sound stuff, and then there’s stuff where I take field recordings or sounds and collage them to make something else, but I don’t really see them as separate. The way the presentation has changed is partly because of my access to computers. In the beginning, all I had was a typewriter and the local copy shop.  I’m always looking for images, constantly looking through magazines, textbooks, things like that. At some point, someone gave me a pile of medical textbooks so there’s a lot I use from that. I use a lot of Native American imagery because it seems to fit. 

MAM: But I guess in terms of it moving away from “idea based” is a lot of it I guess, intuitive? Like in the same way you’re just recording sounds without any initial agenda other than they catch your ear for whatever reason, and figuring out what to do with them later. How do you pick things that go together without leading the listener in some direction or making, I don’t know, a conceptual gesture? 

JJ: It’s all pretty intuitive. For the stuff that’s mixing sounds a lot of the time I sort of hear it in my head. I have a sonic idea in my head as to how I generally want it to be, and so I’ll have a recording or I heard something I want to record and then I try to find stuff that compliments it, sonically. Sometimes it’s trial and error, then sometimes it’s “boom, right there.” I’ll get, very generally breaking things down, I’ll get three different sounds and they just snap together and it works, almost like I’m not even there. I think the best stuff works that way. When it’s sort of mindless in the right way. [laughs]

MAM: Not trying to convey a specific message? 

JJ: Right, and if I force it, it almost never works. I’ve never been able to work on stuff that’s using some guiding concept, and the stuff I’ve made like that I have big doubts about. I can give you a perfect example. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Amplify 2020 Bandcamp site? 

MAM: Sure, I’ve seen that. 

JJ: Yeah, well Jon [Abbey] asked me for a piece and I gave him one. And that one does have an idea behind it, and I don’t like it very much! I think I rushed it. I’ve had a lot of people be complimentary about it, and it sounds like my other stuff because it’s “lo-fi” or whatever. The sonic quality is similar but the fact that I was trying to convey a simple idea just doesn’t work for me. I should’ve waited. It was during a point early in the pandemic when everything was starting to fall apart. The music scene stopped, no more gigs. I stopped doing anything for about two months because it just didn’t feel like a thing that could be done. And when Jon asked me for a piece I figured “Yeah I guess. I guess I can still do that.” And I tried different things, kept recording. I’d go out every morning before work for, I don’t know how many months I did this, but I’d go out every morning to vacant lots around town, bash things together and record it. And now I’ve been doing that, but with words. Like that list of words I read to test the audio….

MAM: Yeah, so is that related to the “sound diaries”? 

JJ: No, this is it’s own thing. 

MAM: Is it what you were doing on the ‘Voiced’ cassette? 

JJ:  Kind of, it’s along those lines. With ‘Voiced’ most of those pieces were about trying to convey a certain feeling about place, or place in time, but they don’t, they’re very vague, like Poésies, for lack of a better word. But these are more just strings of words. I don’t know how many, 100s or 1,000s of words, layered on top of each other so that when you play it back it’s just this constant “bleaugh, bleurrrgh” yammering, with all the tape edit noises, from turning the tape deck on and off after every word, so it’s all clicks and yammering and this mess, really dense.

MAM: That sounds awesome! Have you released anything with that? Or you’re planning to? 

JJ: Not yet but I plan to. It’s gonna take me a long time. I’m trying to get around 15 minutes of that and after a month, maybe six weeks I have around 4 minutes. 

MAM: Where do the words come from? A stream of consciousness type thing? 

JJ: Yeah, just pull them out of the air. I try not to put words together that mean anything. Sometimes they do, if you look at them all in a row and it’ll be something kind of humorous. I try not to use words that are super ordinary but sometimes they make it in there, but more just words that sound odd or you don’t hear in everyday conversation, since so much of everyday conversation is just jargon anymore. 

MAM: What got you interested in using voice? Correct me if I’m wrong but until recently there wasn’t a ton of stuff with you talking on it. There’s a piece on a record with Tim Barnes a few years ago and then ‘Voiced’ but it’s not something you use very often.  

JJ: I started writing more, in a way that was different than I had before. I’d always kept journals and I did the sound diaries which I still do occasionally. Or if I go on an expedition to get sounds I’ll keep a journal of that so I remember where I went and what I did, for my own reference. But at one point I started writing these texts like the one in ‘Versatile Ambience’ where there are words crossed out and it’s specific but vague at the same time. You don’t know what I’m referring to, not giving exact details, just impressions. So I started writing stuff like that and thought it would be interesting to try and record it because at one point I’d written a book of mesostics, if you know what those are?

MAM: Not ringing a bell. 

JJ: An acrostic is where you take a word and write it as a column and then each letter of that column is a new word, and a mesostic is where the column is in the center of the text. So you could write a person’s name let’s say, you write “James Joyce” and you pick up a James Joyce book and you look for the first word that has a “J” but no “A” somewhere in the word, then you write that word where the “J” is then you look for a word that has an “A” but no “J” and no “M” and you write that down and on and on. It’s a thing John Cage came up with, he has a book called ‘Empty Words’ with a lot of them in there. So I made a whole book of those because Eric Lunde asked me, he said “I need so and so many pages. If it’s messy, with things scratched out that’s OK, that’s great” so I did it and he published it. And at one point he was gonna put out an accompanying audio thing, so I recorded me reading it in an idiosyncratic way, using tape recorders and the pitch control, constantly adjusting the pitch, did four takes and then stacked them and overdubbed, and I liked the way it sounded so I just kept doing it in different ways. At first I was using other people’s voices and words but then I had these texts, that weren’t mesostics, they were just phrases that popped into my head, ‘ya know “What a weird phrase”, so I’d write them down and then something else would come and fit in a certain way so I’d write that down and a word would come in and be wrong so I’d cross it out and I liked the way they looked and then I started making audio versions and I liked the way they sounded and I got a lot of positive feedback. Like Troy, the guy who put out ‘Versatile Ambience’ was all “Oh wow, this is art!” Oh really? OK. [laughs] And then I did the book and the tape, or it was a CDr first and then the tape version was done for a guy in Holland, Counter Culture Chronicles, and it took two years to come out. But the original version of that is a book that has all the audio stuff written out. And again why it happened is I just get these weird ideas that nag at me and I have to do something about them or they won’t stop.

MAM: So you were saying kind of sarcastically about considering it “art”, do you do stuff often outside of working with sound? Like obviously there’s the writing but what are your thoughts on different kinds of art? I guess that’s a huge question, just your own output outside of the sound stuff? 

JJ: I’ve done a lot of stuff. Writing, paintings, a lot of graphic work but not much is ever seen by anyone. Really crude drawing. I’ve done photography off and on. In high school, I had access to a dark room so I went nuts. I’d do the assignments but then I would spend all my free time outside of class in the darkroom, and I even went back, after I graduated the teacher told me I could use the darkroom whenever I wanted as long as the school was open, so I went back from time to time. 

MAM: But that stuff isn’t as widely circulated? 

JJ: Not so much. I haven’t done darkroom work in a long time. A lot of my photographs turn up on the tapes and CDRs and things. You’ll probably never find a copy of it but there’s a double tape that came out on Dead Mind records called ‘Cobbled’ and there’s a little booklet in there with a bunch of my photographs. And I do destroyed photographs which not a lot of people have seen. There’s a tape that came out a few years ago called ‘Exploded View’ and the cover of that is a destroyed photograph. 

MAM: Oh I have that. I didn’t even realize it was a photograph. 

JJ: Yeah so what you do is take a photograph and bury it in dead leaf litter and leave it there for a couple days, and the tannins in the leaves eat at the photo emulsion. You have to know when to stop it because if you leave it too long it will eat all the emulsion off and you’ll be left with a white rectangle. But I’ve gotten it down to a pretty repeatable process and at one point I even had a vat in my studio where I would stick photographs in and leave them for a day and a half, two days and then see what they looked like. I have a whole stack of those which one day I’d like to exhibit or publish. I talked to a friend not too long ago about exhibiting them and he started asking all these questions about “Why?” and “What’s it mean?” and I’m just like “No, no I just want to put them on a wall somewhere!” [laughs] “Why are you framing them?” and I’m like “Because they’re pictures.” So that’s my big problem with art is that you have to be able to explain its meaning and I think that’s kinda dumb. And I think because of that process and because there are so many people involved in that process it tends to leave the work itself behind. Then you’re in this rarefied atmosphere of talking about concepts and ideas and how well they’ve been displayed or articulated and you’re totally not dealing with the thing itself anymore. 

MAM: Yeah, that’s definitely something I wanted to ask you about. With regards to sound or I guess it extends to anything considered art, is all the talking about it. Like we’re talking about it now, we’ve said a lot, it’s kind of unavoidable in a way, but I’m wondering if you consider it its own form of communication. Not to say “Oh my work is so profound it defies description” but like, one of the things I like about your stuff is that it’s not “rarefied” as you say, or there is nothing precious about it. So I guess what I’m getting at is do you feel it’s a waste of time to talk about art? Or impossible? 

JJ: Well, I find it impossible to talk about in that way. It really kind of annoys me! [laughs] Philosophy, in general, annoys me. I’ve always been really matter of fact about things, and that’s maybe what you’re referring to when you say it’s not precious. There’s a matter of factness in that it’s just something you do. And a lot of art speak and art criticism seems to me like another form of entertainment. You know, you hear this thing, now let’s play with it. I think it’s fine and inevitable that people are gonna do that, and people are gonna have questions I may or may not be able to answer satisfactorily, and a lot of people get disappointed that I won’t engage in that way beyond a certain point. I think you’re missing the experience if you’re thinking about it and not paying attention to what the thing is. Like Mark Rothko’s paintings have a profound effect on me, but I can’t talk about it. I’ve read countless books about him, and even the way he talks about it I’m not sure is satisfactory. 

MAM: So you think there’s just a lot that we can’t explain and that doesn’t need explaining?

JJ: Yeah, I think the need to explain is one of those human traits, like that’s what your mind does. So wouldn’t it be interesting to try and stop that? Stop doing this thing everybody does because that’s what your mind does? I think that’s what meditation is about. Stopping the “monkey mind”.

MAM: That seems to be a theme, with everything, but especially your sound work. I guess it’s always been there too but has become more pronounced in the last decade or so. I know you’ve spoken about this in other interviews but in terms of like, focused listening, how significant do you find the act of listening without seeking meaning? 

JJ: I think that’s the thing that I’ve moved closer and closer to over the years. And then finding like-minded stuff, and seeing the parallel in certain other kinds of creative work, realizing a similar practice. Ya’ know, maybe I shouldn’t be putting any of this out into the public sphere? Maybe I should just be doing it for myself since it helps me. That’s a constant nagging thought. But people are always, this has been increasing in the last couple years, people ask me for stuff and I have a hard time saying no. I don’t know if that’s an ego thing or I just want to be accommodating.

MAM:  Yeah and I guess if someone is interested in your work it can form a nice relationship or, it’s one of the nice things about doing this is meeting like-minded people. Then it’s like “Oh, you record weird shit too?” and it becomes a mutual thing. 

JJ: Right, and I’ve noticed in this way of dealing with things, the matter of factness, is spreading. There are more and more people not intellectualizing art. I see that in people who maybe don’t even consider themselves artists. Like my girlfriend has an Instagram account and I’ll look over her shoulder at it sometimes and there’s some amazing stuff, like “Oh here’s what I’m doing” and it’s an amazing photograph. And they have no intention of trying to get any meaning across, they’re just showing you what they’re doing, and I think that’s encouraging that there are people looking at things that way. Because I came up studying art speak and all these things and thinking this is just what I had to do and I’ve never been able to do it satisfactory so at some point I was like “You know what? This is bullshit” and I think reality has born that out. And I’ve since found a number of high profile, more famous authors or thinkers that have put forth that idea. Aram Yardumian showed me a quote from Susan Sontag that was “The problem with most art is that people won’t let it alone.” [laughs]

MAM: In terms of what you do and why, there is this quote I read in an interview years ago that I was hoping you could elaborate on. I’ll just read it in full: “Once I started improvising with seasoned players and began really listening, I started noticing things. These led me to thinking about what it is that I’m doing. What music is “for”.” The last sentence specifically, what do you think music is “for”? 

JJ: Well, it follows from what we’ve just talked about. Is it for people to sit around and discuss or is it for listening to and participating in? I knew some people who I improvised with who loved to sit around and talk about it and that never helped me. The only thing that helped me was to do it. To see what worked and what didn’t work. Whether or not the idea of something “working” is even valid. One of the things I like so much about improvised music is there’s not a lot of conceptualization, “Well this piece is meant to represent blah, blah…”, none of that. Just people sitting in a room making sound together in a way that is enjoyable for them. It’s like doing an activity with someone whose company you enjoy. Whatever that may be, having a meal or taking a walk. Some people seem to think that it’s for something else. There was a large contingent of people in Seattle who really believed creative music was gonna change the world. And I was like “Yeah, but no.” [laughs]

MAM: It’ll change your world maybe…

JJ: Exactly. It’s not gonna catch on fire and be this big idea everyone gloms onto and decides to live by. You’re always gonna have people who are contrary, and you can’t regulate people’s behavior because that will bring out even more contrarians. But that’s what I meant by what music is “for.” Why do it at all? At its very base, the initial impulse is enjoyment, you get something pleasant out of it. That’s why you want to repeat the experience. 

MAM: Kind of like what you were saying about people asking for releases, and you’re thinking “Should I just be doing this for myself”? Really as a form of art therapy, is how I’ve come to look at it. But then with improvising with other people, there is a genuinely social aspect that can be rewarding in its own right. So maybe balancing that? Everybody will of course have their own views on it, but I think about those things a lot too. 

JJ: Right, that’s why I kept doing it. When I was living in Seattle it was constant. There’d be one or two sessions a week at someone’s house where you’d just go and play. And then every week or every other week I’d have a gig somewhere, sometimes more than one. So every couple of days I’d be going somewhere to play, and I really got a lot out of it. 

MAM: Did you develop some of your ideas or, in the past I know you’ve had trouble talking about influences but maybe just by osmosis…

JJ: Yes, you’re immersed in this atmosphere of creativity and after awhile it starts to work on you and just opens you up, all these things come to you that you could try. I remember certain days walking around with my guitar all day long, constantly playing the guitar while doing other things. I didn’t want to put it down because the flow of…whatever was there was just constant. Eventually you have to eat and sleep but it was really just enthralling. That happens less now because I don’t play with anyone very often, and certainly not right now, not seeing anyone. I hardly know anyone here [Cottonwood, AZ] except for the people I work with and my neighbors.

MAM: What are your thoughts on live versus releases? Obviously, there’s some overlap, with things being primarily improvised on both, but is your approach to live pretty much always geared around using the sounds at hand in the moment, the room and all that? 

JJ: That’s pretty much it. As I’ve gotten older I’ve tended to hedge my bets a bit, and prepare like halfway. I’ll know kind of what I’m gonna do but not exactly how it’ll go together. Not what order it might happen, and I leave room for mistakes, spontaneity, “Oh hey, I have this in my hand now…” ‘ya know? The main difference between playing live and making a release is with making a release you have all the time in the world to put it together whereas live you have 30 minutes to do your thing. I think live is more fun, ‘cos a lot of the time you have another person there. I play a lot with my friend Steve Jansen. And for a couple of years I played a lot with Tim Barnes, we did a lot of touring. 

MAM: Yeah, I saw you guys here in Philly, like five years ago maybe. 

JJ: Right, you saw us in Philadelphia? I remember that show. It’s funny, the day before, or it might have been that afternoon, we played with Jack Wright. We did this massive improv session in the house where Jack was staying, with Tim and this guy named Zach, a guitar player. And then we went to the gig and did our tape and drum schtick. 

MAM: Is that the only time you’ve ever played Philadelphia? 

JJ: Yes. I haven’t done much touring at all. Blowhole did one tour of the West Coast in ’96 or ’97. And then I didn’t tour again until ’04, which was with Tim and Sean Meehan and David Daniell. Because I’m really horrible at setting things up and I find the process really nerve wracking. 

MAM: Yeah, it’s a lot of work. 

JJ: And a lot of praying that things will fall into place! [laughs] “I have one day between these two gigs, I wonder if I can fit something in” and then “Well, this guy will give you this day but not that day” so I just tend not to do it.

MAM: Do you miss playing? I mean obviously things are so up in the air now, who knows when they’ll be back. I guess some people are trying to do them outside, small crowds, and things like that, but it won’t be the same for a while. Do you miss it though, not playing all the time like you did in Seattle? 

JJ: It scares me that I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. I miss that there’s just nothing happening right now. I never went to shows much since I moved out here because you’d have to drive like two hours there and back. If it was somebody I’d really want to see I would do it. But like you could go on YouTube and “Oh look, Michael Foster has a new concert video up” and I miss that, even though there’s a catalog of old stuff to be found. I miss the fact that there aren’t people doing it now. I found it really encouraging that all these people were constantly playing music of every variety, that was outside of the music industry. I think it’s great that people just said “Fuck this I’ll do it myself. I’m gonna pay for it and if I don’t make enough money to live off of then I’ll find some other way.” And I really admire people who stick to it. I find that encouraging as well.

MAM: Yeah, well you’re pretty much a lifer, right? Were there many points, I guess besides what you said about the beginning of this pandemic, where you weren’t really doing anything for a stretch of time? ‘Cos it sounds like, wrapping this up, creative activity is so much a part of your daily life.

JJ: Sure. There’ve been points where I thought “OK, enough.” And it lasts a couple weeks and then I get some idea that nags at me again and I have to do something about it. I don’t know, maybe I’ll keep going until I drop. My joke is that I’ll make a t-shirt that says “Stop me before I record again.” [laughs] I have fairly mild arthritis right now, so I do wonder how much longer I’ll be able to physically manipulate these little machines with tiny buttons and things like that. 

MAM: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of live footage and it strikes me how physical it is. Like you’re hunched over on the ground moving around all these objects, I’m in my early 30’s and am kinda like “Damn, that would kill my back!” I admire your endurance. [laughs]

JJ: I’ve wondered about that too. I’ll sit on the floor to record sometimes and after an hour, hour and a half, I stand up and it’s “Oh, that was a bad idea!” I played in Colorado Springs about a year ago, and my whole family saw me for the first time and one of my mother’s comments was “You should sit on a chair, Jephrey!” 

MAM: That was the first time they ever saw you? 

JJ: Well actually my parents had seen me a couple years prior. And my brother was at that show. My sister saw me play in Austin about ten years ago. But this was the first time everyone was in the same room together, including brother’s wife, who had never seen me. They didn’t bring their daughter unfortunately, I thought that would be interesting since she’s a teenager. ‘Ya know “So what did you think?” “Yeah whatever, it was OK.”

MAM: What did they think of it? They must be aware you’ve been doing this stuff most of your life. How did they respond other than being concerned for your physical well being? 

JJ: First thing my mom said was “You have some imagination, Jephrey.” It impressed them more when I told them how much money I was paid for it. They’re of that generation where you don’t do something if it doesn’t pay. They would see this more as a hobby. Which maybe it is. But it’s a hobby that a lot of people share and that a lot of people know about. And I think my brother was basically “This is what you’ve always done, it’s great there are people who pay attention to it.” 

MAM: Before we end I guess we can do the standard wrap-up question. Any upcoming releases, things you’re working on, anything else you’d like to mention? 

JJ: I do theoretically have quite a few more things coming out, because people have asked for them and I’m preparing them. But I never know what’s gonna happen with the mail being so weird and everything else happening. Chris Donaldson asked me for something for his label [Hologram] which I think I’m ready to send him. And I’m supposed to do another tape for Grisaille. He put out a tape of mine called ‘Albuquerque.’ 

MAM: OK, I don’t have that one. 

JJ: Good luck finding it! A lot of the people that ask me for stuff are in Europe. So I send them whatever, they get the thing and make the release and then it takes me months to get copies because of the mail, or I never get ’em. And then there’s a label called Tsss, he’s asked me for something which I’m pretty much done with. There’s supposed to be this thing on a label called Spleen Coffin, if you’ve heard of them. 

MAM: Sounds sort of familiar. 

JJ: He puts out records and tapes. He’s putting out a double 7″ compilation, I did a piece for that, each side of the record is a different person, and last I heard about that he said it’s at the pressing plant. So it may be getting ready to come out soon, and people should be able to get a hold of it because it’s a domestic release. That’s what’s happening in that sphere. Other than that I’m just trying to stay sane.

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Do you record marginal music to keep yourself from going insane? Would you like for it to be reviewed? If so, e-mail crisisoftaste [AT] gmail.com. Only physical releases will be considered, and reviewer reserves the right to discard upon unsatisfactory listening experience, but if what you send is good then that shouldn’t be a problem.

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