DeForrest Brown Jr.

I feel like you’ve been working and performing in New York for a while. How long have you been living here?

Eartheater

I’ve been living here for ten years now, but I go through periods where I’m wafting in and out of different circles and went away…

DeForrest Brown Jr.

There have definitely been a few cycles of social groups and scenes over the last ten years in New York. Your previous releases, Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis, aren’t specifically tied to any of the sounds that I feel defined Brooklyn, and have a sonic language of their own.

Eartheater

It’s surprising to me that there is an actual flavor that has made up its mind, that laces through all of my work, because I feel so often like I’m negotiating all these conflicting or contradictory impulses. I like a harsh heaviness rubbing up against luscious or pretty delicate sounds. They kind of create a place of minutiae and obsession within the songs, or even come from this other place which is totally reckless. Inspirationally, I love hardcore, but I also really love classical music.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

You used the word reckless in your press release next to the word romantic. And I thought that was really funny… recklessly romantic music. Maybe that’s the best way to go about merging all these things together. It’s just kind of hysterical.

Eartheater

Totally! There’s definitely an element of hysteria. I’ve been thinking a lot about romance. I realized in my late twenties that I’m a chronic romantic, and I think that I’m not a schemer… I’m not good with money, I’m not good with strategy and I think it’s because I’m perfectly happy with the bare minimum because I can find romance in literally anything. People are always like, “Damn, she’s such a stoner…”

DeForrest Brown Jr.

But that’s how you get through capitalism. You have to respect material possession and experience.

Eartheater

Oh my God! I’m actually like, “thank God.” Because otherwise, I would be stamped in some robot army. [Laughs] I’m not cutthroat enough to play the social game. There’s these weird lyrical motifs that I drop a lot on the record. It’s probably like a sixth or seventh listen type of thing, but I say “body a non-profit” a lot. And it means that I only use what I need to survive. And it’s sort of like an anti-capitalist…

DeForrest Brown Jr.

Yeah like an acknowledgement of carceral capitalism…

Eartheater

There’s an obsession with excess that I find so oppressing. I find myself beating myself up over not having a financial safety net or whatever.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

Or even an intellectual one. The English language as it’s used in America leaves so much to the imagination and there’s such an excess of words that are unused or not understood. I was talking to a friend earlier about the Chinese language and how it’s dimensional and meant to create a pool of information that you can dip your mental hand into. Whereas English is linear, just like an A-B-C-D. In the context of enlightenment-era or Kantian thinking, there’s a lot to be desired about the state of the world outside of one’s own head.

Eartheater

We use words so willy-nilly, and it can be triggering. I feel limited to tags that are affiliated with trends. I started using the word poetry and poems really abstractly when I started thinking about the idea that there is so much unwritten poetry that is hovering around, and that I will actually never be able to articulate all of it. I was really relieved of a sense of frustration when it comes to my work because I no longer have to fully understand anything yet, and that’s okay, and I’m just gonna wait. And to me, I call that willingness to wait for meaning poetry. I call that a poem.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

Alfred North Whitehead wrote a lot about intuition and leaning into the possibilities of processing reality and possibility as a poetic act. Poetry is what you process.

Eartheater

I love that you just dropped intuition, because that to me is the thing that takes me into a lot of the reckless territory that really challenges trend culture. For instance, I knew I was being cheeky using these seemingly immediately palatable tracks that are based on an already very dated beat style. Maybe I’m a masochist for this, but I knew this was very “uncool.”

DeForrest Brown Jr.

I thought of this, actually, when listening on my way over. I can’t remember what track it is, but there is a half-time trap section that you kind of mumble over really quickly, with a wink and a nod.

Eartheater

The track that I think is the densest lyrically is over one of the most basic instrumentals, which I think was an important decision. In spite of me being on PAN now, which I think is a very long elbow-rubbing kind of audience, I still would love to talk more with Bill [Kouligas, founder of the label] about lyrics. Finishing the package and really kind of giggling about this record—because there aren’t too many releases on his label that feature lyrics.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

The only other person I can think of is Steven Warwick, who I collaborated with as Elevator to Mezzanine. He has a kind of fluxus-minded lyricism that’s like… like cybernetic poetry. Or like Burroughs’ concept: ripping up previously written lines and stitching them together into a single thread.

Eartheater

I love that and I do that too. I would love to talk to him about that. There’s some ways that I’m like—I don’t wanna use the word troll, because I think that sounds too antagonistic. But when I am choosing to use only slightly dated sounds while playing with a very fresh new, new style there’s an exponential information exchange that causes these trends to turnover even quicker. When does Moore’s Law intersect with trend culture? When will we reach a static point where everything breaks down? I don’t know—but I like playing with that. And I do think about what I wish I would have heard lyrically when I was inspired to be a musician as a teenager.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

It’s funny, when you think about the notion of angst and how it’s placed into concept of the teenager, but it’s like… you really need the intense emotions that are usually reserved for your teenage years when you’re 27 and broke.

Eartheater

Totally! That’s actually what I’ve been yearning for. I’ve been totally regressing back to that angsty time, actually. I think it’s probably because I’m having one of those post-quarter-life crises. It’s been making me think about the idea of age fluidity and my love of extremes. I like to push the limits of my physical ability.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

Yeah, when you’re performing live, I’ve seen you kind of moving from head and chest voice while bending backwards… It ends up being really physical.

Eartheater

Super physical. There’s a lot of high tension head voice… It’s actually really hard and heavily relies on an emotional state. If I’m at all flustered, it cannot happen. I have to be so calm because you need your heart to be beating quite slowly.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

Sounds like the sort of hysteria that’d you can find in everyday life.

Eartheater

Right, any adrenalin requires you to breathe more and consume more oxygen. But your heart needs to be beating really slowly, so that you don’t need even more oxygen… I’m gonna have to be a huge diva to be able to sing some of the songs on IRISIRI live. I’m gonna need to pull a Mariah Carey and have somebody wheel me onto stage or something. [Laughs]

DeForrest Brown Jr.

I love Mariah Carey…

Eartheater

I love her, too. Who cares if she’s hard to work with.

DeForrest Brown Jr.

She worked for it, and she deserves to get carried out on stage. Her just being there is the performance.

Eartheater

Vocal cords are so delicate and so sensitive. I wish I had more of a routine. I need to take care of my voice more, do more exercises. It might be beautiful to flex more of the gentle side of my music, because I think I go pretty hard. I have that impulse that I always go with it—maybe because it is so immediately gratifying. I definitely have an excess of emotion and physical energy. I just have a big body, a big strong body. The body is natural, but when you’re in public, you must behave within the institutional model of a proper feminine form. I have a tendency to exaggerate my feminine sexuality as opposed to trying to neutralize everything. That’s body non-profit.