Name: Josh Mason
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, producer, guitarist, modular synthesizer player
Current release: Josh Mason's An Anxious Host LP is out via Students of Decay.
Recommendations: In an age where everyone has a platform, and everyone feels the need to speak endlessly (and at volume) I find the notion of language rationing in Apostle Islands by Will VanDenBerg particularly interesting.
Also, A Colt Is My Passport (1967) has one of the best shootout scenes ever.

If you enjoyed this Josh Mason interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Soundcloud.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

It depends somewhat on where I am and what I am listening to at the time. More often than not, in my mind’s eye, I see people. People I used to know, people I used to play music with, people I haven’t spoken to in decades.

Often I close my eyes, and I am with them again, when music was all that mattered … or at least, when it was what so many of us used to connect to each other when we were young and didn’t have the vocabulary of our own or courge to speak our mind.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

My first musical steps were in line with my first physical ones, and they were often directed by which records of my parents were playing at the time.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up in a period of time (while the Internet was still in its infancy) when sitting down to listen to music was still a group experience. If it was my mom’s pick, it could have been anything from Simon & Garfunkel 45s to America’s self-titled album.



If I was home with my dad, everything from Gentle Giant or Yes’ Close To The Edge to Pat Matheny or Flim & the BBs "Tricyle" was fair game (and loud too, I might add).



Sound was always a part of my life and has continued to be an expressive avenue … whether I was languishing in a school orchestra or jazz band, or operating in the miasma of death metal in some beer soaked DIY space as a teenager.

It seems to me everyone is inherently creative, and I think there is a distinction to be made with regards to training to be creative, vs training to be a capital-a Artist. Anyone can be trained to be anything with varying degrees of success.

The way I see it, the problem arises when one is funneled into one of the already elevated positions of Artist (painter, musician, sculptor, etc.) which isn’t always in someone's best interest to do or be. I’ve known plenty who have communicated their vision or passion more effectively through something as mundane as tea blending or cooking, or as complex as civil engineering or drug synthesis, than most painters or musicians I’ve met.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

When I was a teenager, music was equal parts community, and antidote for all of the frustrations that all kids share at that age. Records like Reversal of Man’s This Is Medicine was appropriately titled and taught me a sense of honesty and gave me an expressive vehicle for said quality, which was something I knew was important right out of the gate.



Very little has changed over the years, the exception being that there are just less people involved with what I am doing now than there was then. But one adapts and begins to see how, as The Grateful Dead put it, “Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”



I still try and approach everything I do when making strange incidental sounds with the same intensity and passion as I did back then when I was throwing guitars across the room.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

For years now, I’ve attempted “personal music” — music that is made for me, by me, with the tools I have access to, inspired and shaped by what I know: family, location, personality. That anyone else enjoys it is a byproduct of something I’d be doing even if no one was paying attention or cared (which is not dissimilar from being in a punk band).

Which is not to say that “If I don’t create, I’ll die” or equivalent hyperbole you often hear from creative minds. If it couldn’t be sound, it would be something that examined the things that are important to my being.

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?

These days I’m more inclined to think that one has discovered it. You’d have to go pretty far into the weeds to unearth something that was truly created.

As more and more simultaneous invention occurs due to the nature of information exchange in the modern world, there is very little room left to stand, except on the shoulders of giants.

The question becomes, how much of oneself is baked into the idea, as you are really all you have left.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I’ve been told I have a sound, though I can’t always point to what I think it is they hear. I know what I try to inject into it, and that is a synthesis of location and experience.

There is a reason my work sounds the way that it does: sputtery, buzzy, humming. There is a reason, unlike others who run in similar circles, you don’t hear field recordings of bubbling streams, the crunch of snowfall or the sounds of forests, because that is not something I experience daily or know firsthand. I live in a sub-tropical climate, but not in an exotic or sexy way. My world is made manifest by the secret lives of AC units, refrigerators, lawn equipment, inefficient street lighting, bugs, pool pumps, etc. and all that in turn plays a role in the compositional process.

So, if what I compile mirrors that, then it’s deemed successful on a personal level. Whether the listener agrees or not, well, that’s out of my hands, but I hope at least the sincerity is recognized.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

In addition to all the things previously mentioned, as the kids would say, the sound of the ocean lives in my mind rent free. I spent my childhood listening to it out my window as I fell asleep. I have recordings of it on my phone that I listen to when I am anxious in claustrophobic spaces.

The sound of the world is musical (in that it ceases to be noise) when you desire it to be there.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

Something that I have always enjoyed in music is the crossroad of angularity and harmony, whether it’s the blistering pace and execution of Discordance Axis’ The Inalienable Dreamless or the small ancillary transients of Motion’s Every Action.



As long as these things dance around a melodic phrasing (however fractured it may be) there are these moments of dynamic quality I find pretty fascinating even after repeat listens, because sometimes pattern recognition becomes difficult due to the pieces moving so fast you can’t keep up with the changes, or so glacially slow that you’ve already forgotten what’s occurred.

It often feels like listening for the first time, even if it’s possibly the thousandth.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

To use “Skull of Cortázar” off of An Anxious Host as an example: There is almost always some kind of narrative, however ephemeral, running in the background as I work which usually is drawn from something I am reading or something I have been philosophizing about.



For many years I have enjoyed the writing and mind of Julio Cortázar, and as I began working on the record, (which in many ways is an ode to wayward minds) it began to remind me of things like Raffaëlli’s The Absinthe Drinkers or Club de la Serpiente from Cortázar’s Hopscotch novel, this notion of barely-there bohemians waxing poetic in some dark room off some unnamed side street.

In this way, a feedback loop began in my mind where the sounds conjured the visuals, which directed the sound, which reworked the visual, etc. etc. until it became a symbiotic experience of writing and recording. And since my music has no words, this narrative backbone feels important with regard to sincerity of sound.

Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

Probably not as much as I used to. I generally know what a piece of equipment or instrument is going to do or sound like, and for a long time now, I’ve not really been too concerned about doing something “correctly” (and really, what does “correct” even mean?)

My gear perhaps isn’t the nicest, my gain staging probably could be better, and my EQ choices probably make mix engineers' heads spin, but to some extent, I believe this is what makes my work my own. Occasionally I’ll stumble across some notion or principle I wasn’t aware of before, but then I pretty quickly decide to adopt or ignore it, for better or worse.

If you aren’t careful, it’s easy to fall into this hole where you are forever manipulating the chain or the code while chasing some notion of “correct” or “better” and you end up capturing nothing.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I suppose that I don’t really view music as being inherently more or less revealing than any kind of in depth vertical analysis of something (vs. a more limited horizontal acceptance of all things).

More and more you begin to see that, on a long enough timeline, everything is the same as everything else, and all any of us are doing is trying to find something interesting to do until we stop breathing.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

What matters to me is that it is a genuine expression of creative thought. If music wasn’t the vehicle, it would be something else, and I’d still find a way to put myself into it, in whatever capacity the venture allowed.

I would expend the same energy designing a circuit or compiling a list of books for a friend as I would preparing a live set for an audience.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

I have similar experiences when reading certain Shakespearean works, or Anonymous 4’s arrangement of “Þe milde lomb isprad o rode” — which, if I had to guess, is probably due to the odd linguistic nature of trying to read or understand Old/Elizabethan english having only really ever been proficient in Modern english.



I mostly know what they are saying, but often it throws me, and there is a certain dynamism in that that can be really interesting, especially when trying to speak or sing it, it exercises a part of my brain that otherwise is left to atrophy.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

At least when it comes to creating it, personally, I’d like to see more people not listening to the “hot takes” of others. What I mean by that is, I hope to see more musicians engender their own voice by not trying to be what others are … and it’s not lost on me what a slippery slope that really is, since so many of my own discoveries came about over the years by very very poor emulation.

I guess I just see more and more regurgitation as a consequence of social media where everyone thinks in 30-60 second chunks, or focuses too much on the “I did xyz and you’ll never believe what happened next” thumbnail, and isn’t really developing beyond that because Likes and Shares are the currency of the realm. I understand fully that you have to start somewhere, but I hate to see the momentum halted due to the invasiveness of this bizzaro world we’ve created for ourselves online.

Other pipe dreams include an alternate answer to the quagmire that is cloud/server hosted streaming audio monopolies, and physical media that isn’t incredibly wasteful or taxing on smaller ventures … but, I have no idea where to even begin with these. Hopefully greater minds prevail.