Name: Andy Schiaffino aka body / negative
Occupation: Producer
Nationality: American
Current Release: body / negative's new album Everett, mastered by Simon Scott, and featuring various collaborators including Madeline Johnston aka Midwife and Megan Searl, is out December 8th 2023 via Track Number.
Recommendations: Sappho’s “Fragments” and Croatian Amor’s “Love Means Taking Action.”

[Read our Simon Scott interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with body / negative, visit them on Instagram for recent updates on their music.

For an even deeper dive, we recommend our earlier 15 Questions body / negative interview.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

For my music, the creative impulse typically originates in one of three ways.

First, I may have a melody in my head that I feel compelled to record before it vanishes. Alternatively, I might encounter a sound, whether in another piece of music or in the world around me, that I am eager to replicate. Lastly, there are moments when I find myself feeling bored or upset, and playing one of my instruments becomes a way for me to cope.

That being said, all of my music emerges from a place of sorrow and isolation. It's almost impossible for me to engage in musical creation when I am happy. Furthermore, all my lyrics are drawn from poems housed in my various notebooks, each penned in different states of misery.

The common thread tying all of my work together is loss - all of the people and things I have lost through the years. These have been: friends who have died, family who have died, romantic partners who have died, and relationships that have ceased to exist.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I've never actually visualized a completed work before starting it. I write as I record. My songs always begin as these nebulous, fragmented ideas and bits of sound that gradually evolve into a cohesive composition. I never know where it's going, and I never really feel like anything is truly completed.

That's where the name for my last record, Fragments, originated—I view my music as unfinished pieces that exist in their imperfect form. I feel as though it's more true to its genesis that way. It's all about chance.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I have to keep my “studio” (various instruments and pieces of gear strewn across my living room floor) fully set up at all times, otherwise the process of gathering cables, plugging things in, and troubleshooting stuff that isn’t working right takes too long and I lose my inspiration.

I'm not much of a demo person. In fact, my friend Dylan Neal (Thief), who mixed and mastered my debut EP Epoche, once told me I had “demo-itis.”



My completed songs don't differ much from what I originally recorded. I seldom re-record anything; I always keep ‘first takes’ and focus on production.

The songs on Everett that Madeline (Midwife) didn't play on are all demo-itis songs. Fragments is 100% demo-itis, except for 'Figure 8,' which was recorded in a proper studio by someone who actually knows how to engineer (ha).



I'm pretty DIY. I don't like music that sounds polished and sparkly clean.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

Coffee definitely helps; it's a bit of an 'idea aphrodisiac' for me. I don't pay much attention to anything else; I just need to be at home and alone. I never write with other people in the same room as me. My mind doesn't work that way—I hate playing in front of people; I get too shy.

Although, because you mentioned poetry, ingesting literature of any kind is a great resource for me to find lyric inspiration, even though it never arises intentionally. I'll come across some flowery language and bookmark a really great word to use as a later song title or incorporate into lyrics.

Reading always gets me in the mood to write poetry, which then becomes lyrics.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

I always start with the music first, and then lyrics come last. When the time comes for lyrics, I go through my notebooks to find something that fits with the song, adjust it to match the vocal melody, and often do a handful of rewrites to get it where I want it.

When starting from the very beginning, the first note always comes when I least expect it. I could be sitting at my Wurlitzer, engaged in free improvisation, and suddenly, I'm playing a melody that I like. In that moment, I grab my phone or a tape recorder—whichever is more convenient—and record it.

Sometimes the melody stays in my head, and I'll revisit that little recording to start writing a song around it. Other times, I forget it forever. If it's meant to be, it'll stick in my head.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

My favorite lyricist is Brian Molko. I love his wordplay. That’s something I admire a lot in a song, is really creative wordplay. This isn’t the greatest example of his wordplay, but the classic Placebo song “Without You I’m Nothing” is a song that has been really close to my heart for years.



I love that Brian Molko uses these words that you wouldn’t ordinarily find in a song - see: “spleen” - but still manages to really evoke a powerful reaction in the listener. I can’t tell you how many times I have cried to that song.

I’d like to write some lyrics one day that could elicit tears the way he does, but I haven't gotten to that point yet. It’s still too difficult for me to claw out all the dark stuff inside of me and approach my most vulnerable subject matter. One day, though.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

I’m always scared that my melodies are stolen. Sometimes I’ll hum into Shazam just to make sure, haha.

David Lynch has a really great philosophy about ideas. This quote is long but worth the read (and so is his book, Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity) -

“Ideas are so beautiful and they’re so abstract. And they do exist someplace. I don’t know if there’s a name for it.

And I think they exist, like fish. And I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along. If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment, of, like I say, a feature film or a song of a lyric or whatever, but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash …

So, you get an idea and it is like a seed. And in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes like it’s got electricity and light connected to it. And it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea, in an instant …Then, the thing is translating that to some medium. It could be a film idea or a painting idea or a furniture idea. It doesn’t matter. It wants to be something. It’s a seed for something.

So, the whole thing is translating that idea to a medium. And in the case of film, it takes a long time and you always need to go back and stay true to that idea …”

From your experience, are there things you're doing differently than most or many other artists when it comes to writing music?

I think I’m definitely doing things in a much more rudimentary way than my peers! I’m self-taught and kind of a contrarian when it comes to doing things by the book, or even learning music theory. I’m convinced it’ll somehow ruin the integrity of my music, as incredibly pretentious as that sounds. I can’t even play you a chord on the guitar. I have no idea what I’m doing!

I also have significant hearing loss in my left ear, which makes high end frequencies sound agonizingly harsh - so i’m always EQing stuff in a way that sounds good to my fucked up ear(s).

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

I follow things where they lead me - I just hear stuff in my head, and I try to record them as close as I can to what I hear, although sometimes it’s impossible to get it exactly right, either because I don’t have the right tools or skill set, or because I lose the original idea and it morphs into something else.

When I was finishing up Everett, I got stuck in this seemingly never-ending loop of endlessly revising songs - I could not for the life of me settle on a final mix. Finally, I asked some fellow musicians how they could get over that hurdle, and someone told me that I need to just let go and let those songs belong to the world and not to me.

That definitely got me to the point where I was able to let go and stop stressing over the minutiae.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

Time fades away, and suddenly five hours have passed, and my body hurts from sitting on my living room floor “studio.” When I'm in the zone, I just forget that the world exists.

Maybe I go to that pond that David Lynch was talking about.
 
What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? In terms of what they contribute to a song, what is the balance between the composition and the arrangement (performance)?

I like to produce and mix everything myself - I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to my own music. However, when co-writing a song with someone else, I'm open to co-producing and co-mixing, though I still need to have a significant role and not relinquish complete control. I would love to learn how to master so I can truly do *everything* myself.

I have such mixed feelings about collaboration - part of me itches to create with other artists that I admire, but another part of me wants to have complete control over everything, and not allow anyone to hear or give feedback on anything until the final product is finished.

I think my albums thus far are about 50/50, half of the songs are collaborative, half are made in total isolation. All of my songs, at least the ones I’ve made entirely on my own, and were not co-written, are made from a place of thinking about the production exclusively. There's nothing better than a good loop (see: William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops”), am I right?

[Read our William Basinski interview]

I produce as I record. I don’t ever think about intro / verse / pre-chorus / chorus / bridge / outro. Structure just isn't important to me, sounds and texture are.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

I haven’t felt that personally. I’m always writing, whether that’s prose or little iphone voice memos of piano or guitar riffs, or singing some off-the-cuff lyrics into a tape recorder. Even as Everett was being mastered, I was already writing stuff that will likely be on my next record.

I do sometimes take long breaks when I’m not inspired (i.e, not depressed enough to write), but there isn’t an emptiness that comes with it. I know the inspiration will always return.

Music is a language, but like any language, it can lead to misunderstandings. In which way has your own work – or perhaps the work of artists you like or admire - been misunderstood? How do you deal with this?

I often encounter people misclassifying my work as darkwave, post-punk, or even harsh noise—labels that I find perplexing. While I incorporate eerie sounds in my work, I've never played a synth or anything sonically typical of those genres in my work, except for one track on my debut EP that had some very sound design-y weird synth soundscapes. My approach is firmly rooted in an ambient, shoegaze, dreampop, and experimental mindset.

To navigate these misconceptions, I try to understand the reasoning behind them. I suspect I might be lumped into those genres because when I initially started this project, I was socially connected to the Los Angeles darkwave/post-punk scene. Although I wasn't creating that kind of music, I worked at a record label (shoutout to Dune Altar Records, which released my debut EP) that primarily focused on post-punk at the time.

Additionally, I interned for a local promoter organizing mostly darkwave shows. My very first body / negative show was opening for two post-punk-adjacent artists, Cold Showers and Tamaryn, which was also thrown by a post-punk promoter, Dream Recordings in San Diego. Mystery solved, maybe?

As for the 'harsh noise' label, that one remains a mystery to me. Perhaps someone reading this can shed light on that, haha.