Gavin Rayna Russom

Aaron Gonsher

Please join me in welcoming our lecturer today, she is a performer, synthesist, multi-disciplinary artist and a true unsung hero of American electronic music, Gavin Rayna Russom [applause]. I started things off with a song that we were listening to just now. It’s called “Love Song #1” and it’s under your Black Meteoric Star alias. This is an unusual song for you under that name in that it has your vocals. What can you tell us about the story behind this particular love song?

Gavin Rayna Russom

It’s a good story and I would be happy to share it. I did want to just do one thing before we get started, and forgive me if y’all have already done this but did y’all do any First Nations acknowledgements in the session and stuff?

Aaron Gonsher

There was one yesterday, but it would be great if we did another one today.

Gavin Rayna Russom

OK, awesome. Yeah, and I want to make sure I’m just right, that this is Niitsítpiss-stahkoli, Tsuu T’ina, Métis, Ktunaxa, and Sarsi land. Is that the same as what y’all heard yesterday? OK, awesome. I think it feels more important to just say those names and stuff so I want to make sure I’m right about that.

As far as the story of this music, yeah, this record kind of has an interesting story in that Black Meteoric Star is a project that I started in 2006 and have done in various different configurations, like putting out records, playing live, performances, collaborations. In this particular case, when I wrote these things, it was because I had a friend who’s in a punk band called L’Amour Bleu in New York, a really cool band and they were doing a record release party and it was just like a house party and they were like, “Would you play?” I really wanted to do it. They’re good friends and it seemed like fun and I grew up playing in people’s houses so it seemed like a cool thing, something I hadn’t done in a while, but I didn’t want to bring a ton of gear and I wanted to do something really quick.

I basically went through my studio and picked the two smallest things. I picked the smallest things I could find and tried to make some songs with them. Then I just went and did these songs at this house party. My favorite moment of that was like at some point, when I do this particular performance I usually have a costume and stuff and I actually wear sunglasses when I play so I can’t see anything at all. You know, at somebody’s house and at some point I accidentally stepped on the power strip that was powering just the PA, not the equipment. It was one of the performance moments where suddenly I was like, “Oh, that’s what happened,” and I kept a count in my head, which I think is just from DJing, and turned the power right back on, on the one. So suddenly everything dropped down and came back in and nobody realized what happened, because the whole PA had turned off and back on again. I had no idea what I would do with that material, it was just kind of for this thing, but I really liked it, so I was like I’m going to make a record. It was also a thing, I think it started even with The Xecond Xoming of Black Meteoric Star, which is kind of the double album that I did before this, that when I would do this project live I would do a lot of vocalizing. There’s kind of like an improvisational way and I would sometimes sing over songs that had been released on records as instrumentals, and sometimes I would sing, there was one time I sang the lyrics of [Stevie Nicks’] “Edge of Seventeen” over “Dreamcatcher.” Just trying different things, but that had never really made it onto records, like the last song on The Xecond Xoming has vocals on it. This was also a thing too of trying to capture a bit more of the sound of what a Black Meteoric Star live thing is like.

Aaron Gonsher

I think this record in particular, and one of the reasons I wanted to play it all the way through, is whether under Black Meteoric Star or not, it represents a lot of what I associate with your solo productions and electronic music, of things that are very hypnotic and propulsive, but also have very unique timbral worlds. I was curious if you could share what your earliest entrée into these sounds were when you were growing up in Rhode Island and how you sort of came to this type of electronic music.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, well, I think from a bunch of different angles. Just in terms of sort of beat-driven electronic music that sat in the 117 to like, 127 BPM world. It was kind of around in a lot of forms so…

Aaron Gonsher

Even in Providence?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, I mean Providence…

Aaron Gonsher

What year would this have been that you…

Gavin Rayna Russom

In 1988 maybe, 1987. I mean I think probably I started having those experiences of hungering for music that wasn’t easily available when I was kind of like 12 or 13. Even earlier. I just was that kind of person. I was always just kind of like… I mean maybe it’s just being contrary, or maybe it’s kind of like an eagerness, but I remember when all the kids were listening to Rick Springfield, I was listening to oldies radio because I was just hungry for something that was, just came from a different place or something.

Aaron Gonsher

Was there something about your family or the community that you were growing up in that you felt encouraged that sense of contrariness or discovery?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, probably. I mean I would say my family, I think we’re sort of outsiders on multiple levels; and that, like, my dad was not just an academic but an academic of some very, very obscure stuff. And my mom grew up overseas and worked with technology and stuff so it was just kind of like, I never had that feeling of sort of being in the fold of what other people were doing. And also musically, they were just into kind of cool stuff.

I was just into sound from when I was a little kid. When I was even a little tiny kid, I was begging my parents to buy me bagpipe records because I got super into bagpipes, because it was something just compelling about that sound, which wasn’t just a sound; it connected with me with the whole idea of Scottish mythology. I had one of those little plastic organs that a lot of kids do, and my favorite thing would be… like, it has the keys and then the chord buttons and [I’d] just hold all the chord buttons down together for as long as my hand would take it.

Aaron Gonsher

The love of drone came in early.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, early. Yeah, it went like womb, drone, now. As far as the first time I heard, let’s say, some of the dancefloor-oriented electronic music coming out of the Midwest and stuff, was on late-night radio in Providence, and Providence was a very cool place. And I think partly because it was such a small city, it had this effect of all kinds of cultures like really bumping up [against] each other. In a way, actually – I’ve lived in New York for a long time – it’s actually much more than what you experience in New York. It was really wild how there’s just all this overlapping all the time, and not even overlapping, just everybody kind of jammed in together.

I think, so that mix of kind of urban life with art school life, and there being a college there, it just created a really cool environment and so there were lots of great late night radio stations; and I mean, I’m not sure this was the moment, but I definitely… like, there was some moment where I was 14 and in the back of somebody’s van, and it was way later than I should have been out, and the radio was on, and just being like, “What is this? What is this music?” And hearing a pretty wide array of things, like some things that were coming from the Midwest, some things that were coming from Europe, some things that were more on the industrial side, but hearing music that was made by machines and just being like, “What is this?”

The thing that most grabbed me was acid house and just being like, “I’ve got to get involved in this.” It was also in a very… I was 14, [so] it was also in a very childish kind of way too of not really knowing where it was coming from, and what it was, or how it was made, but just being like, “Whatever this is, I want to know more about it.”

Aaron Gonsher

How does a 14 year old in Providence go about making acid house?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Well, I went over to my cousin’s house who lived a block away and we were about the same age, and his dad was a computer programmer. So I think he had a bit more of a relationship to technology, and him and his older sister were both classical musicians. They took music lessons and stuff, which I did too but I didn’t have the… like, OK, his dad was a computer programmer and his mom was a piano teacher, so that kind of made this sort of, there was a better environment for music and technology over there. My house was more like, I don’t know, talking.

Even when we were kids, he had some gear. He had an Alesis HR-16 drum machine, and he had a four-track. We both had reel-to-reels, which was a big thing because our parents had them from the ’70s. He also had a Siel synth I think. He had some gear, and then he also had this friend who I think maybe had a bit more money, who had this little electronic music studio in his basement, like built around a Commodore 64 and four-track and stuff.

Aaron Gonsher

Do you remember the first acid house record you actually had?

Gavin Rayna Russom

No. That I had?

Aaron Gonsher

Yeah, that you bought as opposed to you hearing on the radio.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, the first record that I had was this compilation called House Hallucinates, that’s like a British compilation of stuff from Chicago. The track that I really remember from that; I mean I had it on a cassette but I bought it on vinyl like 15 years ago. But the track that I really remember from that time was Lidell Townsell “As Acid Turns,” mostly because like the vocal is just like… I was like, “What world, where is the world where this is what is happening?” Because he’s just going like, “Flail.” It’s a beat and it’s not even a 303. That track, it’s like a strange synth pattern and he’s like, I think the lyrics to that are, “Flail. Lidell.” I was just like, “Where is the world where you go and that’s what’s happening? I want to go to that world and I want to be in that world.” We started our acid house crew that was called the Acid Barons and we made T-shirts…

Aaron Gonsher

Good name.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, thanks – by like cutting out manila folders that our parents had around for files, like making stencils and spray painting Acid Barons T-shirts…

Aaron Gonsher

Do you still have any of those shirts?

Gavin Rayna Russom

I wish, I wish. We made a tape. There was a tape. I don’t know, I don’t have…

Aaron Gonsher

Probably going for like $1,000 on Discogs somewhere.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, because what it was, was like we would take a boombox that had the two decks where you can record the one deck on the other deck, do you know what I’m talking about?

Aaron Gonsher

Sort of.

Gavin Rayna Russom

It was a very popular thing where you have a radio and two cassette decks and one deck only plays and the other deck records, and you can record what’s on the first deck to the second deck if you want to copy a tape. I kind of figured out this technique that you can make a loop by putting record and pause on the second deck and then playing the first one right before the loop you want, un-pausing when the loop comes, and then pausing it again, and then doing that over and over again.

Aaron Gonsher

Pause tape mixes.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah. We’d take like a Kraftwerk record or like a Tangerine Dream record and just do that for four minutes and then try to get a drum machine to sync up sometimes but it didn’t work that well and then we’d go take the phone off the hook, like the landline off the hook in one part of the house and then put a mic on it in the other part of the house and talking to the phone so that it sounded like technological, or it sounded like a sample. We were trying to make it sound like a sample. [laughs]

Aaron Gonsher

Well, before we talk about Bard, let’s talk about Under the Hut.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yes, I think it’s so important.

Aaron Gonsher

It connects to the skaters that you were just talking about as well.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Totally. Yeah, so, well the Skate Hut was this place that I don’t actually know too much about. It must’ve been a legal venue because it had huge skate ramps in it. I can’t imagine that they… although in Providence at that time, it wouldn’t have been inconceivable that somebody would’ve just built a bunch of skate ramps in an abandoned building and nobody cared. I mean it was in Olneyville, which I think became quite popular in the 2000s when kind of the Load Records scene started to really get some attention in Providence. And Olneyville, it’s a neighborhood in Providence where there was a lot of industrial production in the late 1800s, a lot of big mill buildings and stuff. Then like so many American cities, the economy just collapsed and there were a lot of just abandoned buildings, and a lot of crime, and a lot of mob activity, a lot of super corrupt police activity and stuff. So in the ’80s, Olneyville was like a real open area. It was a place that had not been monetized in any way so nobody was paying attention to it. It was a place where probably police went to go do illegal things. There was no police presence or like a gentrification type, carceral model. I mean there was a place where cops went to get hot dogs and stuff; but it was a place that nobody was watching.

It is possible that maybe that it was even illegal, but it must’ve been, I think to some degree a legal venue. But it was like an indoor skate park, kind of, with these big skate ramps and definitely always music playing. I think they did sometimes have bands play their stuff too. It also just became like a hang out. I think by that time I wasn’t even really skating anymore and it was also super intimidating. There was no way. There was some pro skater that owned it I think, that owned it or ran it or whatever and it was very intimidating for me if I was going to try to go skate there. But it became this cool hang out of… like, just again, in that sort of drift from, “What are we going to do? Oh, cool, let’s go to the Skate Hut.” Just a place. I think I could drink there probably. Again, nobody was watching. It hadn’t been monetized and nobody was watching, which was cool for me as a teenager because I could do a lot of things that older people were doing and I couldn’t go to clubs because they still carded at clubs.

Aaron Gonsher

Like it was sort of a club, not a club, but there was something that was a part of the Skate Hut.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, it was like a scene. It was open late at night, and there were always people there, and it was like one of those things where if you went there with two people, you’d meet ten more and hang out. It was in an industrial building in Olneyville and at some point – I wish I could remember who it was, I can’t – but somebody figured out that there was this basement and it was empty, and nobody was doing anything with it. And whoever owned the Skate Hut was leasing the building so they were just like, “Let’s start a club in the basement.”

I know there was a person who was in charge, sort of, or a group of people, and I can’t remember who they were. But it did seem like it kind of naturally grew out of just the scene of people that were hanging out there and became, I think, kind of collectively run. And while I certainly wouldn’t say I was actually part of running it, I felt like I was involved with that. I watched it happen. I knew it, and my band played there. My punk band played there and opened for cool bands from out of town. I remember the first show there, there were all these rocks, because they had been doing construction in the building, so it was just like these piles of rocks. It was, like, people just sitting on piles of rocks watching punk bands play. It really became a thing. It very quickly took off and at least every weekend if not more, there were punk shows there and I could go. Nobody carded me. There was no security. That was really compelling to feel a part of that.

I think it was sort of around the same time that the ABC No Rio scene was happening in New York, so a lot of those bands were coming and also bringing that energy of activism. And a lot of anarchists; a lot of radical politics; and a lot of thinking about the punk scene in a context of radical politics, like not just as music, not just as a fun way to get all your aggressions out, but a genuine testing ground for new social models, and a place where we could talk about things.

Aaron Gonsher

That felt like an ethos that has really stuck with you since?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Definitely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean that became my context in a lot of ways, is this idea that music is part of a social whole, in which people are able to connect in meaningful ways and develop new ideas about how to live. That happened while simultaneously that experience was happening, I was also sort of – it’s one of those things where I don’t really know. I was a teenager. I was failing out of school. I was cutting school all the time. I was doing drugs. I was hanging out with like super shady people. I was getting bullied – not bullied – I was getting jumped and beaten up a lot. I was around a ton of violence.

I’m not sure how it happened but basically, there was a decision between myself and my parents that I was going to go to this art school where my cousin had actually gone. Because I had taken cello lessons as a kid and studied classical music, but I’d never been that good at it to be honest, and it had never grabbed me. Visual arts became the thing that I was going to go study there, and I was accepted and it’s just an interesting thing. It’s like simultaneously while I was having this pretty profound experience of getting into the Providence scene and experiencing the depths of it, I was also sort of preparing to leave. This was before college, this was like the last two years of high school. I moved out of Providence in 1990 when I was 16. I think that has a lot to do with kind of what you were starting to ask, of like how did it shift from being hanging out, listening to late night radio, going to punk clubs, hang out on the street to thinking seriously about music and composition and art in an academic way.

Aaron Gonsher

What was that like, sort of combining those environments?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Pretty, like, kind of a head fuck that I’m still unraveling. I mean, it’s kind of now become… I think my life’s work is to try to, at least for myself, but I think also in the world, negotiate those dynamics in meaningful ways. Because it’s not about intelligence. A lot of it is class, I think. It’s not like people in academia are really smart and street kids are really dumb. In my experience, in a lot of ways, honestly quite often, it was the opposite. A lot of kids that I grew up with, some of whom were sex workers and stuff, some of them were in and out of mental institutions, you know, were very deep thinkers, and really had powerful, meaningful ideas about creativity and about the world.

My dad’s an academic. It’s not like I discovered academia when I went to college. I was certainly aware of it. I also found people talked a lot of shit. My educational experience was one of tremendous frustration. I mean, the arts were obviously exciting and dynamic. Having the experience of studying painting without any real formal background, studying musical composition without any real formal background, coming into the level where I was so insistent on my own aesthetic concerns, and also was old enough, too. A little too old to be shaped, but then having people who were like, “Oh wow. Like, you’re not really doing what we’re trying to do here, but you’re obviously not going to do that, so let’s talk and figure it out.” It was like, I was into graffiti and stuff, so I was like, “Can I paint like I’m doing graffiti?” I mean, it’s cool. Teachers are cool. I got exposed to abstract expressionism. They were like, “Well, this seems like kind of something you might be into. It’s messy, and it’s kind of punk.” It was a lot of navigating those dynamics, but also feeling like that experience of sort of being involved in some kind of counterculture, or whatever, actually having power, I think to some degree, it was almost this illusion created by how small Providence was. That we could actually have this club, and be talking about political stuff, and making things happen, and feel like it was so big, because compared to the size of the city, it was big.

So, it was a lot of things. That’s such an interesting thing. That’s still stuff that I’m unpacking. What it kind of crystallized around was that I began to be exposed to what I found to be really interesting ideas, particularly radical ideas about structure, and how through the creative arts, it was possible to reimagine structures. Reimagine musical and creative structures, but then by extension of that, to reimagine political structures and social structures. By diving deeply into, not just the creative arts, but the theory around the creative arts, one could start to shape really radical models of how society could change, and how human beings could interact with each other, and all of that stuff.

That kind of bumping into this thing that felt so important about like, “Yes, but this has to be a real thing. This can’t just be like some people in a room talking about this. It has to actually penetrate into people’s actual lives. How does it do that?” One of the ways, for me, was by connecting it with spirituality. Feeling like there’s some way in which art is spiritual, and spirituality is radical, and that kind of created this constellation of meaning for me. It was an intense thing. My period of doing academic study, it was not easy. It was really fraught.

Aaron Gonsher

How did that academic study and this increasing reflection on spirituality manifest in the music that you were making at that time, and that you were starting to make as you moved out of Bard towards New York City? You moved to New York City in the ’90s?

Gavin Rayna Russom

January of ’97.

Aaron Gonsher

How was this manifesting in the music that you were making at that time?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Mostly, I think at Bard it manifested in me really slowing down. Really starting to make very long compositions in which not that much would happen. Starting to move from an idea of improvising to an idea of composing in time, which is a really subtle difference.

Aaron Gonsher

Can you describe the differences?

Gavin Rayna Russom

For me, the main difference was in the depth of listening. I think of improvising as a very expressive act. For me, shifting that to an idea of composing in time meant that it was much more expressive/reflective at the same time. I might sit at a piano for, let’s say, 45 minutes, and play maybe that amount of notes, and start to notice things that, when I approached things from this idea of composing in time, that I would have... Like, for me, improvisation is maybe a bit exploratory. I love improvisation, and it’s not a super important distinction, but for me, just at the time, it was an important shift, just in my own story. I don’t think either of these things is definitions. It was just in how I thought about it.

Like, certain things where I would be just sort of composing in time, and developing a kind of structure of sound, and then have this impetus like, “Let me try something that feels really outside of this,” and try and note the change completely. Like, it would break that pattern. It was a cool thing, pretty psychedelic thing of realizing, “If I create this pattern by the notes and structures that I choose, and then I break this pattern by the notes and structures that I choose, I can then, actually create a bigger structure and pattern by what comes later.”

I think that was the kind of distinction of this thing of starting to build musical structures in time that became kind of my practice at Bard. And doing that also, not just with music, but also doing that in space, with visual objects. The thing that I got really excited about was creating environments and creating music to put in those environments. But then, actually, my composition program collapsed a semester before… I had this amazing, I would say, kind of a people experience where I went back to Providence for a summer. I started going to a ton of the newer underground illegal clubs that were there, which were kind of focused around a like, much more connected to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] and the art school, and where there was this very punk stuff happening, but it was also very performative. Bands would always have costumes, and it was very much connected with the noise scene. So it was this cool thing where I just went back, and because I was from there, just dropped straight into this scene that was happening, that was like, “Oh, shit. People are doing experimental music in clubs, and it’s kind of punk, and people are dancing.” That was super exciting to me, and then I went back a little bit like, “How is this all going to work?” I mean, I was also playing in bands at Bard.

So, it was like these things all came together, and then suddenly the composition program that I had been in no longer existed. They just removed it from the course curriculum, and put the professor on permanent sabbatical, I think. It was this thing right before I left college, everything kind of fell apart, and I was also getting this new influx of stuff. I was already going to New York a lot. It was just kind of like, ramping up, and I moved to New York really on a whim and a chance. One of the women in the art faculty at Bard, who wasn’t even my teacher, was always like, “Come and hang out in my studio.” And she was like, “You should move to New York.” And I was like, “OK.” She was like, “My friend is subletting her apartment. Take it. Go, move to New York.” So, leading up to that, it was like, suddenly all, like I had gone to this place, so for me, my whole relationship with music was so quiet, and so introspective, and reflective, and slow. That was really good. It was really good for me to clean house, and have this really open thing. And then, suddenly, all of this stuff started coming.

Aaron Gonsher

Can I play some music that you were making at that time in New York?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Totally.

Aaron Gonsher

And then you can talk about some of these influences.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yes, that sounds great.

Aaron Gonsher

This is a project of yours called Paper Eyes, that was recently reissued, then it’s a song called, “Synthesis Energy.”

Gavin Rayna Russom

That’s a good one.

(music: Paper Eyes – “Synthesis Energy” / applause)

Aaron Gonsher

So, that was Paper Eyes, “Synthesis Energy,” and the reason why I wanted to play that is because, in it, I feel like I hear so many different elements of the music that I assume you might have been listening to at this time in New York. It’s sort of funky, but there’s the noise influence that you were just mentioning. It sounds like something, dance music that someone would be playing at a noise event.

Can you just talk a little bit about your time in New York in that era? It’s obviously been spoken about a lot, but I think your perspective is really valuable in reframing what it was actually like to be a working musician in the city at that time.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, totally. And too, I just remembered, I wanted to read this quote from the person who I studied composition with at Bard, because I think it’s a good lead in of where I was coming from to where I was going.

Aaron Gonsher

What’s their name?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Benjamin Boretz. I would say this is a pretty typical indicator of the stuff we talked about every day in six- to eight-hour classes. “Do I have to tell you about the spiritual cannibalism of the culture, our culture, which has been bombarding us with ultra-sensory, overstimulation, aiming to reprocess us into full-time consumption machines. Stealing, above all, from us, our time. Not an inch of time without an imprint of message. And even our sense of time, to be measured in length of no more than one message unit each, under the guise of entertainment, and even of art, commoditizing the eternal, hyping the primal. Our time is the sine qua non of our identity. We need to take extreme measures to reclaim it for ourselves and each other.” Which is super radical, and it’s still really is like, very resonant for me, that statement.

Aaron Gonsher

It’s only gotten worse since he wrote that.

Gavin Rayna Russom

He wrote that in the ’80s. It’s pretty, also, foreshadowing. That meant a lot to me. To have that idea, even that specific thing, of like, the way in which our time is stolen from us, and the way in which music provides this opportunity, particularly music – any kind of creative structuring, but especially music – provides this opportunity to reclaim one’s time, and that is this very radical, actually inherently political thing. Like, “If you are making music, you are working with time.” Is that time your time? Or is that time somebody else’s time? But it’s a very deep idea. It’s also a lot for a kid. I was in my early 20s, so that’s what I was coming from, and what I was going towards was New York, where that’s what goes on. Where everything is, in a sense, in the marketplace. That was this kind of mindset of absorbing all these new things, hearing all this music and hearing it because it was around me.

Aaron Gonsher

Did this sense of wanting to reclaim the time, and what you were contributing to the time the people were spending, is that in any way connected to when you started to build your own synthesizers, and sort of make a decision that, not only were you going to make music, but you were going to make music on the terms of the things that you were constructing on your own?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah. I think it was something that I didn’t even realize was anomalous at the time, and maybe wasn’t as anomalous at that time. Also, I think a lot of people were maybe also creating the means of the production of their music, too. Because I was coming from this idea of like, that to make... Let’s see. Let me think. So, I think one of the most important insights that I got from studying music at an academic level was this idea that there is no default of how music goes. There is no baseline of what music is, and I think mostly, that traces back to this woman, Susan McClary, who’s like a theorist and musicologist. There are always social and political agendas embedded into every choice that manifests itself as music. And I think, then, what my professor had added to that was, as a composer, one should then try as much as possible to start from scratch, because the degree to which one picks up where somebody else left off, is the degree to which you’re implicitly endorsing that agenda. For example, it’s very easy to study from the Eurocentric Western classical tradition. Picking up that tradition means also picking up the politics of that time, and the class dynamics of that time, and picking, like, slavery, and picking up colonialism. Picking all that stuff up while you say, “Oh, well yeah. No, it’s just like, you know, I just like the way that stuff sounds.” But there is no “just the way that stuff sounds.” At least that’s the idea that was very meaningful to me.

To some degree, I felt like it was necessary to do as much starting from scratch as I could, and that meant not just creating music, but also creating the methodology of the music that I was making. For example, with those Paper Eyes things, with those tracks, I didn’t just make that music, but I created all of the techniques by which I made that music. Like, yes, I had a cassette deck, and I had a reel-to-reel, and obviously those are pieces of technology that exist for recording, but the way that music was made, was something that I developed by taking pieces of gear and using them in unconventional ways, by using recording techniques that developed because I wanted to create certain sounds, or because it was just necessity. Like, “Oh, I want to make a multi-track recording, but I don’t have a multi-track recorder, so I’ll just play the old recording back into the room and record it while I’m playing the new thing live.” A lot of it was just what was available, but without even realizing what I was doing, it became critical to my creative practice to not just make music, but also make the means by which I was making music. I couldn’t get my hands on a synthesizer in any easy way. The easiest way was to learn electronics engineering and learn how to build one, because I just had this feeling that it looked like a tool that would help me make the kind of sounds that I felt like was the kind of sound I wanted to make, and that sounded like, that it felt meaningful.

And then also, to bring it back to where, I think maybe, we started, I was going to a lot of different kinds of clubs, and hearing a lot of different kinds of music for dancing. That was also part of that constellation of, “Well, what’s meaningful to me? What do I think is important? What is the kind of culture I want to live in? What is the kind of world that I want to live in? How does the music I make reflect that?” And there was something about that physicality of the way that, when you’re in a space with other people, especially if that space was a marginal space of some kind, when there is music, especially music of a certain kind, these kinds of social interactions are possible that wouldn’t be possible in other circumstances.

That made me also want to make music that somebody could dance to, and want to bring this sort of like, kind of wide abstract, compositional idea into music that would also operate on a physical level, and that you could dance to. A lot of what was happening for me in New York was like, going to all these different places. Going to some places that were more like... And like, I wasn’t alone in that. There were rave type events where that was kind of what was happening. Again, it was something I more observed than participated in, I would say. I was going to all these places and soaking up all these different kinds of things, and being in places where it was not clearly defined what kind of thing it was. Like we were talking earlier about my suddenly discovering like, “Oh, right.” Like in 2015 like, “Oh, this is like a techno place. So, everybody that DJs here plays techno, and everybody that comes here wants to hear techno.” And that’s like, so foreign to me, that idea, because what was so meaningful to me about nightlife spaces was that lack of definition, and that lack of transparency about what was actually happening; and more of like, an ambiguous, opaque experience of people interacting and exploring things.

Aaron Gonsher

You were also, at the time in New York though, sort of falling in with a label. A particular label, or collective of people. But the music that you first put out on that label, DFA, was very different from everything that they had released at that time, or by that time. And I’m talking about The Days of Mars record in particular. I want to play something from that, but because I need to get the record out, I was hoping you could tell everyone a little bit about who Delia Gonzalez is, first of all, and how it felt to sort of be a part of this group, but simultaneously, not a part of this group, despite the fact that you have become very associated with them in that period of time.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah. One of the many scenes that I was kind of hanging out in New York in the mid-’90s, was this kind of like, I think a bunch of art school kids from different cities that had kind of all moved to New York. It’s sort of the beginnings of gentrification, to be honest, which now I feel like a lot of the work that I do around gentrification is because I definitely know that I contributed to it at this time in my life, as well. And it was the beginning of Williamsburg becoming a place for artists to hang out before it became what it is now. There were just lots of like… I don’t know, it was very punk, but also way more fun. Not super aggro-like, punk, and one of the people that I connected with in that scene was this woman, Delia Gonzalez, who is from Miami. She was doing work that I just thought was really cool. It was just this fun kind of party scene of doing parties in illegal venues. People would put on plays and puppet shows, and dance performances. Delia was in a dance company, and then later, [Black] Leotard Front, this dance company that we had together, kind of grew out of that.

So, we kind of met each other, and hit it off, in that sort of ambiguous way. Got together, and started making work together, which initially was kind of growing out of this scene. At that time also, the art world was kind of discovering that scene, so there was a little bit of an interesting overlap between the art world and this more punk thing.

Aaron Gonsher

Can we just be specific, when you’re saying, “that scene,” who were some of these people? What were some of the labels that we’re talking about?

Gavin Rayna Russom

There was no nothing. I mean, the thing that came out of that scene was Fischerspooner. The thing that actually, I think, went somewhere was Fischerspooner. As far as I could tell, it’s the only thing. One of the many things I was doing at the time, I was in this band called Sweet Thunder, with this woman, Kelly Kuvo, who had been in this band called the Scissor Girls, from Chicago, that was a super, super important, influential band for me. So, I was kind of geeked out that I got to play in a band with her. And then she brought in all these other people she knew from Chicago, one of whom was Casey Spooner, and I think it was his kind of introduction to doing music and that grew into Fischerspooner. Lizzie, who was on the early Fischerspooner records, was also in that band.

Then we just sort of started just venturing out to try to make it in New York City as artists and doing a lot of different things; and one of the things that we started doing was making electronic music together with the synths that I had built. And I was like… classic New York broke artist. I didn’t have... I was like, “What am I going to do?” And I got this job, like the whole long story of that, I’m happy to tell if you want, but I’ve told it many times, of how I got hired at DFA.

Aaron Gonsher

Long story short, you emailed a bunch of labels saying that you could fix synths and James Murphy was the only one that responded.

Gavin Rayna Russom

The only one that wrote back, like three minutes after I sent out the email too.

Aaron Gonsher

He must’ve had a lot of broke synths.

Gavin Rayna Russom

And he was like, “We have all these synths that we bought on eBay and none of them work. Please, please, please come and fix all our stuff.”

So DFA was my job. I got hired to be like the studio tech at DFA. Also a lot of that was building stuff where they would be like... The first thing I ever got hired at DFA to do was, James was like... It was 2002, I think. He was like, “I made this track and it kind of seems like it’s catching on and I didn’t ever intend to actually play live with this project, but it looks like we’re gonna have to play this song live and I don’t know how to do it because it just was made by this crappy old Casio boombox. Could you build kind of like a super Casio that’s super tough and I could take on tour and everything?” That was “Losing My Edge,” which at the time was a song that he thought was catching on a little bit, which then became…

Aaron Gonsher

I think it caught on.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, I think it caught on. But just to place it in time and space, that was the kind of thing that I was doing. Or they would have... A lot of times, it was just, “We have this synth, can you do something cool with it?” And I’d build a mod into it or something. A lot of it had to do with the stuff that I was interested in at the time, which was trying to get ambient sounds to sync to rhythmic sounds in an interesting way and using analog synthesis to do that. And that was really up their alley. I think especially a lot of the remixes you can hear technology that I built, the DFA remixes time.

So that was my job and at some point, James was on our… and Tim and Jon, who was at that time, the label was James Murphy, Tim Goldsworthy and [Jonathan] Galkin. It was just these three dudes running this label. And Jon and Tim came to a screening that Delia and I were doing and we played a live soundtrack and at the time, it seemed like they were like, “This is cool.” And they were like, “Do you want to put out a record?” That journey that I described... I was coming from way out there. I did not know what DFA was. I didn’t know what the scene was. There were a lot of things about New York that I did not know. I was coming from a very, very outside place because after having this time, I basically hung out with this one person, like me and Delia hung out and sometimes did dance performances with this other guy. But I was just coming from a very different world, like a world of reading books and doing witchcraft in my house and building synthesizers in my sink. So it was this thing. It was like, oh, these people have a label and it seems kind of cool and they want to put a record out. Later, I understood that it was part of building that story of that label, to be able to say, “And we even have this,” and that was the role that I played as an artist on the label is, “We even have this out-there, psychedelic electronic music.” And that’s where I was used to build this more known DFA aesthetic of the punk-funk and... What is it that James called it? And synthesizer bass and real drums or something like... There was a very strong aesthetic of what DFA sounded like and this was very different. But it was sort of used to build that story, to set DFA even further apart from the other labels at that time.

So that was kind of what it was like. It was like I’d show up for work and then sometimes James would be on tour and we’d get to work in the studio. Sometimes Britney Spears or Duran Duran would show up at the studio, ’cause DFA was a cool hot label.

Aaron Gonsher

Britney Spears?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah.

Aaron Gonsher

There was a point where he was maybe going to produce a record for her.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, she was there. She spent two days at the studio. I actually have this notebook where she was brainstorming lyrics and she took my tech notebook and did it, brainstormed all her lyrics on my legal pad tech notebook, which I still have.

Aaron Gonsher

Let’s listen to Days of Mars, because I think there’s other production questions that it’s going to bring up afterwards. This is “Relevee” from Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, The Days of Mars.

(music: Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom – “Rise” / applause)

Gavin Rayna Russom

I think it’s worth mentioning too, that’s what? 14 minutes long?

Aaron Gonsher

No, it’s almost like 17 minutes long I think. If we had a full hour just to play this album, I really would. That was “Rise.”

I think there’s an interesting point to make about this album that the song we were originally going to play, “Relevee” is also like a 13-minute, 14-minute kosmiche track that then took on this entirely new second life when Carl Craig remixed it and it became a very, very popular dancefloor track.

Gavin Rayna Russom

It’s on a Sven Väth compilation CD and they played it at Love Parade the year it came out. So just... [laughs]

Aaron Gonsher

I think the interesting thing to me about tracking that relationship is seeing how this was an album that you’ve mentioned DFA was using as, “We don’t just do this sort of punky dance thing, we’re doing this serious, out-there music,” then it then crossed the boundary into becoming a fun club thing. I’m curious to hear your take in general about how you think your music nowadays is traversing this more serious/fun boundary and in general how you can, as a musician, transcend that sort of “or” thinking and make it be more about “and” thinking. Like it can be fun and serious and not fun or serious. I just thought this would be an interesting jumping-off point to talk about that.

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, absolutely. For sure. That dynamic was certainly in play, even at this time. When this came out, I didn’t realize it at the time how radical it was, in a way, to have this thing of it’s a two LP, double LP, with four songs on it and each one of them is around 15 minutes long and it came out on a label that, at that time, was pretty much famous for “House of Jealous Lovers” by the Rapture and “Losing My Edge” by LCD Soundsystem. So it was really like, “What?” But for me, I was kind of operating in this world where I had already been like, “Yeah I’m super serious about music and I also really like going to clubs.” And I think partly because Tim Goldsworthy, who really worked a lot on this record, I recently found the demo tapes of this record and it’s wild to hear just the difference from what me and Delia’s demos were like versus what happened, which I think had a lot to do with Tim. But he was British and he was from that scene, so we kind of talked about acid house a lot and so it was in the process of working on this record too that I kind of remembered and reawakened my teenage interest and love of that music and started getting some records that I didn’t have and pretty much also, when I DJed, I just started playing acid house all the time.

And at that time, also, I think because of our interest in dance, Delia and also Chris and some visual artists that we hang out with, we’re going to Harlem and we were going to vogue balls. That’s still the best. I don’t know. It’s so complex the way that that culture has been appropriated in the last, I don’t know, ten years. So it makes me reluctant to talk about it, for me as a queer kid who was trying to figure myself out, as somebody who values deep and complex art, but also deep and complex art that actually connects with daily lives, it was a very powerful thing for me to spend time as a guest in that scene at a time when it was between Madonna co-opting vogue and the current wave of that now, so it was also, nobody was watching and it was really interesting. So I think there’s, yeah, the idea of serious and fun. For me, I would say one of the things that I’ve dedicated my life to is trying to find ways of living outside of all kinds of binaries. And that’s one of them that I’ve been working on for a long time and to dichotomize that has not been super significant to me, to think of those as polar opposites. Like oh, there’s serious music and there’s fun music. That didn’t work out so well for me. So I’ve really worked to find different ways of thinking about it and even the idea of listening to music and dance music is a little bit weird to me, because I’m always doing both of those things when I’m engaged in music. But I think the thing that became more and more important to me and now I think has become the thing is this way in which an environment, like a club in which dancing is sort of the default ritual behavior, let’s hope, on a good night, not just like a bunch of terrible dudes trying to make girls feel uncomfortable, provides this opportunity to engage with music in a way that shifts it away from the commodities market and more towards something that is physically experienced; and because it’s experienced physically, it enters the whole cognitive apparatus of the human organism in a different way. And what’s, for me, I think a little bit of a more significant way. Like if I just have a relationship with music that’s my ears and my brain, I’m losing so much of the spectrum of what it can be. No matter what kind of music it is.

So that even this record, which I think... I had hoped at the time that it would be part of the asset of releasing it on a dance level, I think maybe became part of the liability of releasing it on a dance label. I thought of this also as dance music. This is music that speaks to the body and I think because it emerged in a context which was very drum, beat-driven and it’s not drum, beat-driven. None of the tracks have beats on this record, if you don’t know it. It came across as, oh, this is Eno, like Tangerine Dream, this is ambient music where[as] I thought of this as really physical. I think that in fact set it very broadly apart from things like Eno or Tangerine Dream stuff. Also it was feminist music, very intentionally, and coming from a really different place than this, what I think of as a male dominated history of electronic music.

Aaron Gonsher

What’s your definition of feminist music?

Gavin Rayna Russom

I think that feminism is too broad to be defined, but when I have to, I always go back to a quote from Angela Davis in a lecture that she gave called Abolition in Feminism, where she talks about feminism as the ability to make connections between things which don’t in patriarchal culture seem connected and discover that things which are assumed to be connected in a patriarchal culture are not actually connected. That’s as good as I can do on the definition and it’s not mine. It’s somebody who’s done a lot more of that work than me.

Aaron Gonsher

So this sense of categorization of music, is that something that, as a producer and as a composer, what techniques do you do to actively work against that impending categorization just in the process of composition? It’s very... The motivation is to put the name on these things all the time, but I assume you have some sort of strategies, whether it’s philosophical or even technical that you’ve accumulated over the years that you would hope pre-empt this in some way?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah, just being unrelentingly complex and authentic I think is the best one, which is not easy at all. I think that’s also where that spiritual thing comes in too. The market is extremely alluring and the market in its current state thrives on categorization. That’s sort of, that’s how it works. Categorization is, in large part, something that comes out of Enlightenment-era European thought and... Colonialism, slavery, those things emerge from that worldview. So I did actually make a track that’s called “Hostile To Categorization” and that is my position on it, mostly for those reasons. And I do think that complexity tends to be the thing that consistently upturns, like, categorization. I do think liberation really lies in acknowledging the complexity of the human experience at every point.

That’s the sort of philosophical approach. I try to make music that comes from a place of an authentic acknowledgement of human complexity, mainly my own because that’s the one that I’m most familiar with. But it’s definitely fed into the ways I’ve collaborated with people in certain ways and the ways that I’ve chosen to disseminate my music and that stuff. But also it’s deep in the production. It’s very deep in the production. Again, coming from that place of not just producing music, but developing the methodology of production is really about how to create sonic work that doesn’t immediately tick off these buttons of, “Oh yeah, that’s what that is.”

Aaron Gonsher

You’re practicing all of these technical and conceptual philosophies in your solo work and with your collaborations with people like Delia Gonzalez or with Viva Ruiz and the Crystal Ark. But at the same time, you’re also a member of frankly, one of the biggest bands in the world and you’re put in a position as a member of LCD Soundsystem where you’re going on stage every night, and you’re playing something that people have come to expect, that have this sort of sense of familiarity that they want to have. They have a relationship with these songs and specific elements of them. I’d be curious to hear more generally what it’s like being in this experience of going from working with a guy who didn’t think that his Casio drum machine track was going to take off, to backing him on massive world tours, huge festival stages, and how that impacts your own solo creativity as well. Take us into this experience, because I’m sure it’s a little bit of a mind fuck.

Gavin Rayna Russom

It’s complicated. And it’s my job. I don’t mean that in kind of a dismissive way of it’s not really my thing, it’s like my job. Because it’s much more complicated than that. It’s a job that I... The job working for James, building the super Casio or modifying the synth in 2002 is still the same job, more or less, of me going on stage and performing the synthesizer parts of LCD Soundsystem songs night after night on world tours. It’s more or less been a fluid thing that’s just grown. Even in the very beginning, James would say, “Oh, we really want to play “Beat Connection” live, and there’s that crazy synth part at the beginning. I know you’d be the perfect person to do it. Could we work that out?” And it was mostly the financial limitations of the band that meant that wasn’t possible. Not that hiring me was going to break the bank, but there was a certain amount of gear, there was a certain amount of logistics to do that and it just never worked until James was getting ready to make This is Happening. I think there was enough support behind that, that he felt like he could do this thing, which I think was something he had always wanted to do, which was hire me to actually play in the band.

Aaron Gonsher

You also have songwriting credits on This is Happening, right?

Gavin Rayna Russom

I do. But in these totally weird ways. I have songwriting credit on “Drunk Girls,” which of the songs on that record, I think anybody would be like, “What is...” I have a songwriting credit on “Drunk Girls” and “One Touch.” The “One Touch” is a vocal. I do backing vocals on that. “Drunk Girls,” that song, really different than I think almost any LCD Soundsystem song, came out of some musicians actually jamming in a room. Most of LCD is James by himself creating those songs and the back... It’s like it’s him making that. And I think “Drunk Girls” was a song that he had, but I don’t know if he played drums on it when we did it live. Maybe that was still already recorded, but it was definitely me and Tyler Pope, the bassist, and Al Doyle, the guitarist, in a studio room playing. I was just like... I had just moved back from Berlin, and I was like, “What?” It was the first thing maybe I ever did with LCD in the context of the band. And I was just kind of like, “OK, let me do something interesting here.” And playing this kind of out of time synth thing that got edited in there somehow. James took that and cut it up. And I have some songwriting credits on the new record as well. But they’ve always been in interesting ways. They haven’t been because I’m in the studio working so much. Mostly I’ll get a call from James and he’s like, “Hey, do you want to come by and do a little synth on this thing?”

Aaron Gonsher

And what has the touring been like? Because you’ve probably been on tour with them now for years and years, since 2010.

Gavin Rayna Russom

So I did one tour with LCD in 2010 and ‘11, that was about a year and a half long. And then I did another tour for American Dream that started in 2016, January of 2016, and ended in June of 2018. Two and a half years on the road, which is really unusual, especially nowadays. But I think there was so much excitement that the band had gotten back together that we toured for one whole year with no record out, and then a record came out and then we toured for a year and a half. That was wild and pretty all-consuming. It was pretty fast-moving and I think LCD songs become something very different when they become live songs. LCD records are mostly, I think, the outcome of James working in the studio and crafting those things layer by layer. But when we play them live, they become something really different.

Like I said, even from the very beginning, that’s sort of been a part of where I’ve been brought in is, “I did this thing in the studio, and I did this totally nuts thing where I plugged this one synth into another and I don’t know how to recreate it live and if I did, how could we do it every night?” So a lot of my work on the design end has been to figure out how to design synthesis systems for LCD to take on the road that measure up to the degree of timbral complexity that James gets into in the studio.

Aaron Gonsher

In brief, what are some of those comprised of?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Well, I think the main thing that happened... In 2010, kind of again, one of the first things that James used is the EMS Synthi in the studio all the time, like constantly, constantly. And it’s super unstable. Even back in 2002, one of the first jobs I got hired for was, he was like, “Can you stabilize this thing? It’s so all over the place.” So I rebuilt the power supply and stuff like that. But then to go on the road, he was like, “Well, how are we going to do this? All the songs are centered around this one synth and we can’t take it on the road. It’s too unpredictable.” So I was just doing a lot of researching and sourcing and that was kind of the beginning of Eurorack stuff. So I found, there’s Analogue Systems, I think. There’s so many different synthesizer companies that are “analogue something with an S.” So I think it’s Analogue Systems, not Analogue Solutions or any of the other ones. But I think it’s Analogue Systems. There was a British company that did all of these Eurorack EMS Synthi modules. So that was kind of the beginning of that, of, “Oh, OK.”

Then it would be like, “Oh, but there’s this one thing that they don’t make. Let me find that from another company.” So as Eurorack kind of grew and became this big thing, it went from this challenge of seeking out the few, one weird person that makes these modules to wading through this just massive field of synthesizer modules, most of which don’t do things that James is really interested in, and finding, “OK, what are the things that people have created to be able to reproduce these things?” It’s like the Intellijel envelope whatever, envelope generator. It’s like that is very close to the Arp 2600 one, because it uses the sliders and it has three speed settings so you can get the ultra-fast Arp envelope. So that was a thing of sourcing out, “OK, there’s 1,000 different envelope generators. What’s the one that’s going to sound like an Arp 2600, because there’s those two things.” There’s a lot of that. Then it’s kind of interesting because having designed these things, not from scratch, but essentially from curating from what’s in the world and building systems, then I have a really deep relationship to playing them every night because I’ve sort of built the whole thing and understand how the system works and it was several years in LCD before I could hire a tech to help me, so I just also had all of this technical information in my head and was, at the same time, doing this tech thing and this performance thing. So re-patching a synth during a break in the song while I’m playing another part of a song. It’s a really interesting, weird headspace. It’s the closest thing to being a waitress. I’m just constantly moving and having to manage all these different things and finding all these, like, “Oh, there’s a tiny space here. There’s this one song where I play on this microKORG over here, but there’s a break in that one song and during that part I can go over there and then re-patch the module so that when the next song comes, that thing’s set up”. So this very sustained kind of constant attention to, “Oh, I can do this and this.” And then do that every night.

Aaron Gonsher

There’s so much that’s been written about LCD Soundsystem as sort of a band, a creative unit. Are there things that you feel you’ve seen from the inside or that you’ve experienced as a part of this creative unit, that maybe haven’t gotten the attention that you might think they deserve, or that you think are a really compelling aspect of this community of people that has been overlooked for one reason or another?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Well, I do think one thing. I think genuinely people will say that LCD is a great live band. But I don’t think much of press attention, because it’s just not geared this way, it goes beneath the surface with that. For example, say we were touring from 2016, 2017, 2018. Mostly big club shows, some smaller arena shows, and a lot of festivals. And if you look at the lineups of those festivals, if you look at who was going to play that club the next day, if you look at the bandwidth that LCD was in of successful bands, every single other one of those bands would be running their live show off a laptop with most of it just recording backing tracks. The live show of essentially any other band operating at that level would mostly be their CD turned up really loud, with maybe some live guitar over it, live vocals, but also the vocals recorded. It’s just how people do things. LCD is zero, zero, zero, zero track. There’s no track. There’s no laptop. The closest it gets is there’s an MPC with a couple of drum beats because it’s just not possible to carry the 15 different vintage drum machines that were used in the studio. That is a pretty remarkable thing that... There’s zero track…

Aaron Gonsher

Nine people in the band touring?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Well, on stage it’s always six and then there’s two swings.

Aaron Gonsher

OK.

Gavin Rayna Russom

And then there’s obviously a huge tech crew. We’re sometimes 50 deep on tour. Three buses, three trucks. It’s a huge production. And I think it’s also to James’s and the band’s credit that it doesn’t feel like that. Whenever I tell people that, they’re surprised. Like they kind of still think it’s the six of us in a van, just pulling out the synth. But it’s a huge production. It’s like working with management and production designers that then will go work with Beyoncé or with Gaga or whatever. It’s with people who work on a very high level in the music industry, but it still feels like it’s just some people playing some songs really loud.

But that thing of it having... There’s a piano on stage. There’s a CP-70, but it’s a real piano. I have five different analog synths that I’m playing. Almost everybody else has multiple analog synths. There’s two other modular systems. It’s all very crafted on a really deep level so that what you get when you go to an LCD Soundsystem show is really, genuinely something that is unique to that night, even though coming from a place in my own work where I’ll never play the song the same way twice, we are playing the same songs, and they go through the same parts, and the words are the same and all the parts are the same, but it is really different every night because it’s all alive. It’s not to disparage people who do it in different ways, but it is just the sort of standard practice that most bands that operate on a certain level of touring and success will run most of it from Ableton, behind the scenes. That’s a really special thing that I haven’t seen that many people talk about.

Aaron Gonsher

Whether it’s LCD Soundsystem or the Crystal Ark or your work with Delia Gonzalez or with Peter Gordon and all of these other collaborations that you’ve done over the years, how do you get yourself in a space where you feel like you can sort of dissolve your own biases in favor of the group’s better interests?

Gavin Rayna Russom

I’m happy you see me that way.

Aaron Gonsher

I’m not saying that it’s you specific, but I think with collaboration in general, people come in with different goals and preconceived notions. I’m curious just how you navigate that as a working musician for the last 20 years who has made a lot of solo work, but also done a lot of collaborations?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah. I mean, it was interesting because when I was reviewing those questions you sent me I think in the one about collaboration you listed many more than the average person would list. I was like, “Wow, that is a lot of people.” I’ve also collaborated with each of those people in really different ways.

You know, I don’t know. It’s such an interesting thing about art and ego and interpersonal relations. It’s funny that we didn’t talk about it, because it’s such a big part of my musical development, but after I graduated from this arts high school and I moved back to Providence, I had this experience of starting this kind of improvisational, psychedelic noise band with my cousin and some people that I had been in more of a punk band with many years earlier. It was my first experiences of improvising. It was really my first experiences of stepping outside of my preconceived ideas about music. Instead of being like, “I want to make acid house,” to being like, “What happens if I hold the bass guitar in front of the amp for a while?” It really was this really fertile time to explore sound in a group setting, and it was really amazing for a while. It was a really amazing thing where we just sort of all get together, we didn’t really know what we were doing. It was drums, bass guitar but then we had like an M1 keyboard. At that time, it was weird. It knocked it way out of the box of what it was. And then it turned into a classic band situation. We went in the studio and sat there and mixed a record. The drummer was like, “The drums aren’t loud enough.” The guitar player was like, “I can’t hear my part.” It just turned into... you know? You’ve seen a lot of rock documentaries and stuff. And I mean I also was in that as well. My particular flavor was like, “I want this to be more experimental.” But it became this push-pull of egos. That made a big impression on me. That, for me, was a really painful experience to have a thing go from this really magical thing where I felt like I could fluidly operate within a group, maintain my own identity but also feel it to be a kind of negotiated exchange. It just seemed like this powerful energetic thing, to have that move to this, “Well, I don’t like that part.” I think that was such an intense experience for me. First of all, it really drove me to making solo work for a long time. But then it also meant that I tended to engage in collaborations in a really thoughtful way, and to try to find different ways of having interpersonal experiences with music.

Like I said, those things have been super different. Like you mentioned the collaboration with Traxx... I mean I’ve done some different stuff with Traxx, but the psych-y stuff that we did. He came to my studio and he was like, “I have this idea. I want to make these two covers of these psych-y tracks.” It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about, but finally I got it. I was like, “OK. That’s what we’re going to do. You want me to recreate the sounds that are on these psych records, and we’re going to play together and we’re going to recreate these tracks. That’s cool. I get that. We can totally do that.”

And Peter Gordon, he was like, “I would like you to come play this 1973 Arthur Russell piece that’s never been performed live, except for the three times that they did it in the ’70s.” Or James saying, “I want you to do this.” The Crystal Ark was a case of me saying to this artist that I’d met, Viva Ruiz, it’s like, “Hey, I made this music. I want somebody to do vocals on it and I want those vocals to be in Spanish. I want you to write something that’s meaningful to you.” I mean, so some of it is also having some clear ideas about what is the nature of the collaboration? I mean my collaboration with Delia I think was the opposite. It was a total melding and mushing of things. It was interesting because we don’t actually have that much in common, so when we did that coming together thing, it created this really interesting thing I think.

I don’t know, it’s definitely a complex thing. Collaboration is really complex. I think like other things, it’s been helpful for me to not take things for granted about it and not just be like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody knows this is how you collaborate.” But to really think about it and take it apart a bit and be like, “OK, well if we’re collaborating, what does that really mean? What is the nature of that collaboration? What am I bringing? What are you bringing? How is that going to happen? Are we going to spend some time making music together? Or am I going to send you some tracks, and have you do something and then send them back?” I think it becomes that thing too of trying to pull away the layers of assumptions about how it has to go, and get a little bit more active about, “OK, we’re doing something together.” Just like if you’re in a relationship with somebody. The only real rules are the rules that you come up with. Yes, you can go into it and be like, “No, I know what it means. This is what it means to be in a relationship,” but those are assumptions, whereas if you actually have those conversations, it pulls those layers apart a little bit.

Aaron Gonsher

There was a particular quote. You released The Xecond Xoming of Black Meteoric Star in 2015, ’16?

Gavin Rayna Russom

I think it was ’16 by the time it came out. That was also a long time between when it was finished and when it came out.

Aaron Gonsher

And it was Xecond Xoming with second coming spelled with two Xs instead of an S and a C. There was a quote. You had previously described it as, “Territories of self-discovery,” that accompanied the making of The Xecond Xoming, which was a really resonant quote for me at the time when it came out. And then it felt like it became even more resonant at that point in 2017 where you decided to publicly identify as a trans woman for the first time.

We’ve spoken a lot here about the history of electronic music and that connection to identity. I was just hoping that you could speak a little bit about how that resonates with your own journey as a musician, in this context?

Gavin Rayna Russom

Yeah. Well, it’s really cool, I appreciate you bringing up that quote. It was interesting. There was this interesting parallel that the first Black Meteoric Star sort of suite of 12"s that came out on DFA in 2009, which we all finished I think three years earlier; no, four of them were done in 2006, the other ones were done in 2009. It sort of marked the end of the period of time where I was collaborating with Delia and working on this synthesizer music, and sort of marked a personal emergence from what had been a collaborative time. The Xecond Xoming is sort of a similar thing with the Crystal Ark. That also was like emerging from this time where I was very invested in a collaboration, and then having this kind of foisting up of a deeper more personal vision kind of push out of that.

That was definitely a big part of the experience of working on The Xecond Xoming stuff. And yeah, I mean Black Meteoric Star, really it was my transition lab too. I don’t know what the gender of Black Meteoric Star is, but as I explored what was significant for me musically, and what was significant for me about the night club experience and started to build the Black Meteoric Star character and how that character would dress, the blurring of gender boundaries was one of the most significant things. The Black Meteoric Star character always had this very long wig, so I got to wear a wig. It’s a common experience among trans folks that a lot of trans folks really love Halloween because you get to blur that boundary. For me, if I could put a headscarf on my head, I was like, “He, he, he.” I get to be the person that I actually am in the world for a minute. And Black Meteoric Star was definitely like that. It was one of the many things that was happening. It was like, “I get to put on a wig and be out in the world. Be in this room full of people because I’m in a club.” I’d usually wear lipstick. Especially in the early days of Black Meteoric Star, really work with feminine modes of performance through dress.

I mean, there’s lots of performative things. The one that was most significant to me was I was in São Paulo and there’s one of the important figures from Afro-Brazilian religion, this Pomba Gira. I don’t know, all that stuff is very complex. It’s something I’ve studied on a really, really, really deep level, and it’s a very significant part of how I do my work, researching things like that and researching along multiple lines. Not just through a Eurocentric mode of research, but anyway, that’s a whole other thing. So I wrote a special Black Meteoric Star track called “Pomba Gira” and changed my outfit and was dressed in this “Pomba Gira” outfit. It was always this sort of lab for experimenting with the things about nightlife that had been significant to me, but also, you know there is that thing about that type of excavation on a creative level. It’s like, “OK, I’m into this, but what’s really under that? Where can I go with this?” That, for me, is inextricably connected with personal authenticity. And as I do that work and try to push my creative work towards where I think it wants to go, I’m inevitably confronting things about myself that are in the way of authentically being the person who can create that work.

I mean it’s again, going back to... My composition professor would always say, “The creative process is one of weeding the bullshit out of your soul.” That really has been... Whether it’s because he said that and I adopted that philosophy, or because it’s just how it is for me, that has definitely been a big part of my experience. If I want to continue to evolve creatively and grow and work towards whatever is the more deep aspects of my concerns, I inevitably have to confront things about myself which are problematic, or which are difficult, or which are standing in the way of me actually being the person that I was sort of born and destined to be.

Trans experience is broad and very differentiated. I’m a trans-feminine person who was aware of that for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a neighborhood where there was lots of people out on the street and talking. I remember really vividly walking down the street and having two women who were sitting on a porch being like, “Oh my god, look how she’s throwing her hips out. She’s like a grown-up.” And then realizing that I was assigned male at birth. And being like, “Oh my god, that’s a little boy,” and loving that. I was like six years old and being like, “Oh my god, I do kind of throw my hips out.” Those experiences stuck with me, but there was always some way in which... Well there’s two things. There was some way in which I was not able for myself to relax into the truth. There was also the thing that I didn’t understand; it’s so strange, but that... I don’t know if it’s because to some degree I’m a public figure, especially because of my work with LCD Soundsystem, or if it’s because of the way that our culture works, but I actually didn’t become real until I stated it publicly, for whatever reason, despite the fact that I knew this. If we had bumped into each other in a bar in 1996, I would have told you, “I’m a girl.” But there was what I think was a simultaneous inner inability to deny the truth, coupled with an outer necessity to share that truth. Which is weird, because it kind of goes against a lot of things that I believe about what’s it like to be a person in society, that you don’t need to share everything. There can be an opacity. The person that you are publicly doesn’t have to be the person that you are privately and at depth.

I do know that, for me, it was necessary because at the time I was on tour with a band that was very popular. I was about to play on Saturday Night Live. When I started really getting, “This is what’s going to happen on my transition,” I was like a month from playing on Saturday Night Live. Talk about head fuck. It was an amazing blessing that somebody in my life who worked in the field of PR kind of pulled me aside and was like, “If you don’t control this story, somebody else will because you are in the public eye at this moment for this reason.” There was this necessity to say, “I’m going to need to tell my story publicly because otherwise somebody else is going to tell it.” And as a person whose story has been told incorrectly so many times, that was a major moment of being able to say, “No, actually, it’s not your idea of what this is. This is what this is.” And that did have a powerful inner corollary and that experience of then going on tour for another 18 months and every single night being in front of a bunch of people and being like, “How am I going to work this out? What am I going to wear?” Even though it at the time seemed like, “This is so hard.” I slept a lot. I played shows and slept basically, but in retrospect, in a way, it almost kind of made it easier because it’s like I couldn’t let my fears control me. It was my job, and I had to turn up for my job. I guess I could have been like, “Sorry guys, I’m not going to do this.” In the beginning I was like, “Maybe I’ll just put off transitioning until I’m done with this tour.” I remember... I’ve been in therapy for like 20 years probably, and my therapist being like, “I don’t think that’s an option.” And being like, “Yeah, it’s true.” It wasn’t an option. It really had to happen the way it happened. Definitely that kind of complex interplay between the public and the private was, and continues to be, something that is worth unpacking and thinking about.

It’s also changed the way I think about a lot of things too. I mean, visibility is obviously a very complex issue for trans folks. Traditionally, I think we’ve been either invisible or hyper-visible but have not had the ability to just be people in the world being ourselves, which is, I think, the experience of other folks who have marginalized experience as well. That is something that I do feel and has been interesting to negotiate. I do feel like what this whole bunch of things we’ve talked about today, this whole complex of different experiences and different influences and being around different people and hearing different things, that as well as many other things has given me different tools.

Initially creativity was my only tool. I was the kid who grabbed onto creativity for dear life because it was the only thing that made sense to me. At a certain point I found I had to really find other tools too. Creativity was amazing, but it wasn’t capable of doing everything that I was demanding from it. It still is an incredibly important part of that process because of its ability to illuminate things about me that tend to remain hidden if I don’t keep making stuff. I mean, I know I just talked for a super long time, but the last thing I’ll just say about that too is that a big part of that is the experience of being in my body, of not just experiencing the world intellectually, but actually being inside my body. Ultimately, it was my body that telegraphed to me the truth about gender and things beyond gender and all of that stuff. So much of that experience of being in my body happened on dancefloors, and in movement and with music. Whether it be like being on tour as a dancer with Black Leotard Front, or going to Berghain. you know, or like whatever, across the board one of the baseline critical experiences was the experience of like, experiencing music physically. Moving and feeling, like if I’m in my authentic experience of this music, what does that look and feel like? Which I think is something different than the experience of somebody who occupies the socially constructed identity five days a week, and then like cuts loose on the weekend. Not to sound judgmental or critical of that, but I think it’s more that I want to make a distinction between something that I think is so significant about the potentials of not just dance music and club culture, but the entire kind of social hold that it forms a part of. The commodification of that in terms of the way in which that’s sort of sold as a dream in our contemporary culture where that stuff has now become like hyper commoditized, like in festivals and stuff. You can pay a bunch of money and come to this place, and then you get to be free in this place. I’m talking about something that’s very different than that, you know, but that has similar, it’s similar to the thing that I was talking about, about trying to find terms to describe alternative culture, but within the consciousness that those terms have all been so co-opted. While I think 125 BPM, 4/4 kicks, you know, strange synthesizer sounds, compelling vocal samples, like all of those things have at times driven me to a point of very deep embodied self-awareness. Like they are not actually really the point. The point is something else that was constructed in a much more complex, deep way that connects to, like you were saying about Traxx, that connects to lineage, connects to ancestry, connects to where things come from. That isn’t art objects, that’s like removed from a social whole and then made into a product that you go and consume for a little while and then go back to what you were doing.

Because of that, those experiences were for me genuinely transformative. Like, they didn’t have the flavor. I didn’t just get like the transformed t-shirt, but I was genuinely transformed. Hopefully will continue to be.

Aaron Gonsher

I think that’s a really beautiful point to end on. Thank you very much. [applause]

Gavin Rayna Russom

Thank you.