It was pretty long. We drove in from Los Angeles. We got up pretty early. I didn’t really have breakfast…which is an important part of my day. So I was a little cranky. But we got sushi here, so now I’m riding the sushi vibe.

The sushi was maybe the best meal so far. I got a yellowtail and scallion and mushroom roll.

Yeah, this is my first time playing my own music here in San Francisco. I played bass in Porches last year for their North American tour and we came here and played at Bimbo’s 365 Club, which was maybe my favorite venue that I’ve ever played at or been to.

It’s all like, original 1930’s…they’ve kept most of the details pretty accurate, I think, to the original design and construction of that place. I think it’s owned by the same family, like Bimbo’s great-grandchildren or grandchildren?

It’s both. It’s incredible.

Will’s a mutual friend of mine. We met through a friend of mine, Arlo, who is a really amazing guitarist. Will knows Arlo from Cambridge, like the Boston area.

Yeah, but that’s like Western Mass, which is kind of out of that scene. I wasn’t in Boston very much. It’s more rural, where I was.

Yeah, like a college town and a lot of farmland. There’re a bunch of colleges over there, it’s kind of like a college conglomerate or something. But a really special place for me…we’re talking about Will?

I think he got introduced to my music by our friend Arlo. And then he came to my show at Scribble a few months back. In Los Angeles. Yeah, he said what’s up to me and I got his contact and saw that he also had a similar…we both have TikTok hits, songs that are really big on TikTok, or algorithmically favorable. I’ve been slowly meeting more people who have that kind of success, but it’s weird and really rare to find other musicians who get that kind of success. I take a lot of issue with this being a standard of how artists are making a living these days—making algorithmically favorable artwork. A lot of what I’m doing now is trying to resist that in ways. But in ways you can’t…what’s the analogy…you kind of just have to flow with the current sometimes.

Thanks! I try to do, like, just enough.

You wanna know something funny, I used to listen to Duster on my iPod while I was making all my Memo Boy stuff.

And now it’s like weirdly…I don’t know, they’re in the same realm. On the internet, it’s strange how these things happen sometimes.

Yeah, I’ve been considering it. I kind of have put my glockenspiel project on hold. I think just the labor involved in personally bringing that thing around, maintaining it, and – when I would bring it to venues – pissing off the sound staff…it became a really delicate thing, that I do want to continue doing. But after doing that for a while, I wanted to lean into a more human expression and connection with people. I think to an extent, in making a robotic project, I was trying to maybe make fun of or make a bit out of backing tracks and digital music and that awkward interaction between a human performer and digital accompaniment. My sincere belief is that human music, human connection through music is…I don’t know, that’s all that I’m really focused on. It's the core of the…you can call it a spiritual thing, or cosmic connection that music presents. And I think that gets lost when digital technology comes between us. I think it can enhance [but] there’s an awkward interaction. Recently, my stance has been to just shed it completely and instead bear my heart with acoustic and singing music.

Kind of, yeah! I started taking gigs where I would just show up with a guitar. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a little while but it used to suck, like I was really bad at it. I would show up to places and it would be really awkward, and I’d kind of make a fool of myself. Eventually, I started to figure out what things people were responding to, and building up a way of connecting with people. And then I moved across the country and pretty much had no gear. I was borrowing people’s equipment and bought a Ditto Looper, like the really cheap one-button looper.

I started playing guitar when I was maybe 10 years old. My parents were very supportive of my music interests.

They definitely were. They aren’t musicians themselves but they’re visual artists. Their lives and practices are informed by music in a really deep way. My dad would play a lot of Kraftwerk and ‘Neu!’ My parents were really obsessed with Germany. Like, post-war Germany, the kind of modern, industrial, new ways of thinking, like Bauhaus. Even beyond that, though, they really like a lot of minimalist art and minimal music. So I grew up listening to a lot of really minimal music, and kind of [had] a personal permission to approach things with a more minimal intention. The first songs, which aren’t out there anymore, that I released on the internet or even recorded were just paths and a bunch of notes sustained for, I don’t know, ten minutes or something. I didn’t really know what ambient music was, but I was essentially making ambient music, at first. And that’s kind of the lens they gave me.

Um, I’m vaguely familiar. He made DotA. I don’t really listen to that. But I do appreciate that kind of music. Is that in like the “Donk” or Gabber realm? Yeah, for sure. I really like that kind of music.

Joanne Bliaud? Bliaud! Oh, is that how you pronounce it!? That’s how I pronounce it. I had a main Soundcloud account, and that started to collect a lot of followers…it was this main account that was building a following and a lot of eyes on the work I was doing. I just wanted personal outlets to explore other ideas. Once you create a musical identity on the internet, usually people will hold you to that identity in kind of an intense [way]. It can create a weird, toxic working relationship.

Yeah, it just became the easiest. People were calling me Otto Benson anyway and were tracking me down no matter what I changed my name to. Now I’m maybe trying to have that privacy with individual albums. I feel like I’ve earned a reputation at this point for doing something pretty different each time I make a record, for better or worse.

Yeah! I read it, or tried to. It’s a beautiful document. I read it in college. I took a really great class. Unfortunately, it was over Zoom, it was the beginning of the pandemic. We read that and a bunch of really great essays. There was a lot that I responded to. I got really into the idea that “technology” and engineering are born from a masculine, reproductive envy that men have. I just related to that somehow. I feel like songs are little babies, in a way. They have this insane life that they live. They grow and have lives of their own. People interact with them and have whole relationships that are so beyond anything that I would have ever planned for. And also just the practice of engineering being a very male dominated field with a lot of really…strange…to me, kind of idiot things that industrial, military and engineering efforts are striving towards. I feel like they’re coming from a bunch of really frustrated, young baby men who wanna watch the world burn or something…and hate that they can’t create children? (laughs) I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But that was one realm of that reading that I [took away].

Right now, all of my attention is into my guitar playing and my singing. Singing is the biggest frontier of my personal development as an artist. I would describe the experience of bringing around an electronic glockenspiel as a “limb extension” of my own body—I’m trying to create an extra limb to play melodies and parts that I couldn’t on my own. It’s like a prosthetic limb. Singing is like the core of my body. It’s very related to my breath, it’s very centered in my being. Being out in the world of electronics, it led me deeper within myself. Now, I’ve gotten really into breathwork, more into meditation, using all these different technologies to control my breath a little more and get better at singing. I’m practicing my singing and also accepting my singing for what it is, in the same way that I had to accept the range of the glockenspiel for what it was. Guitar is kind of the same, as well. Like, it’s just my hands! You’re just hearing my hands running on a couple strings. I don’t know, it’s pretty…

I don’t know if I could pinpoint specific artists. I really like this guy Rolando Simmons. He makes really beautiful, melodic electronic music that I was trying to maybe approximate when I made a lot of that music. I would say that music is also informed by hyperpop and the anti-consumerist sentiments of SOPHIE. That was a lot of what I was listening to in college when I made that. The direction of hyperpop is different now. It was co-opted by big labels and Spotify. A lot of genres that seek to interrogate an idea usually end up just supporting that idea. So, right now, these days I just lean into being really sincere.

For me it’s about nondualism. Do you know what that is? In Eastern mysticism…I mean, I’m not an expert in this, but generally, I believe that everything is connected, or that there’s a continuum that exists between me and everything that I’m conscious of. So like, plants have a…there’s a soul in there. Even on a molecular level, everything has some kind of consciousness and shared consciousness and you can interact with things and they will respond to you. Instruments—like we were talking about the glockenspiel, or my guitar, or whatever—they all have a soul and an identity. So putting a face on something, to me, is a visual representation of that relationship.

Recently it’s been the hibiscus flower. I’ve been using the “smirking cat” a lot recently. Oh yeah, I love the cats. Like the cat crying.

I don’t really know much about him, except that we share a name. And he’s also a white man, right? Yeah. He made that one song (singing): “I want you, I need you right now.” If I heard it, I’d know it.

That’s my goal. I mean, be nice to me. (laughs) I’m one person putting out these records and I’m gonna try to keep it that way, so it’s a lot of work. I like New Year’s Eve releases, I think it’s a really silly time to release music. It can be a lonely evening for a lot of folks and I want to have some kind of a presence—whether or not you want it—on the internet, for that evening.