Interview with Simsies

Conducted by Matt Roman

11/12/2018

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I caught up with Simsies after a recent lecture at UCLA in California. We arranged the interview in advance. He’s currently working on a book and sent me an advance draft. I was eager to sit down with him at UNTITLED, Cafe on campus to see how the lofty lecture I had just seen relates to the thumping music he releases

Roman: This coffee is pretty good for an on-campus spot.

Simsies: Yeah I’m a bit of a coffee snob but I’ve learned to adapt giving all of these on-campus lectures to drinking some of the worst coffee. Even if it comes out of the vending machine it’s better than being under caffeinated you know what I mean?

Roman: How much unreleased material of yours is in “the vault,” so to speak?

Simsies: My best estimate: about five days of music.

Roman: Will we see more of these releases if Deltrem is successful?

Simsies: Probably not. I’m focusing more of my efforts on multimedia art lately. I think the general population has almost entirely forgotten how to listen. Most people listen to lyrics these days, not music. I’d rather keep these songs to myself until the time is correct.

Roman: Do you think the internet has granted you more or less control over your music and how it’s released?

Simsies: The internet has granted us too much control! Control is not always a good thing. Control is only good insofar as we as humans are able to control the control.

Roman: What artists inspire you?

Simsies: The old masters for sure. Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, etc. Not enough people are listening to composers like this. If more people were there wouldn’t be so much simpleton bullshit on the charts. Of course simplicity is only bad if it’s an unconscious choice, like the path of least resistance.

Roman: What about “comfort music?” What records can you put on at any time and just enjoy?

Simsies: Comfort music? Like just hanging around the house? Kind of all over the place, I go through phases. There’s been a lot of rainy weather around here recently so I’ve been really digging a lot of jazz like Coltrane and Monk. On nicer days though I like more electronic music. Rezz is one of my favorites now.

Roman: In your forthcoming book you mention the importance of psychedelic drugs in creativity. What drugs should artists looking to enhance their creativity look into?

Simsies: Well I definitely don’t think everybody should be doing psychedelic drugs. You need to look into your family history to see if there’s any mental illness there and make your own decision for yourself. That being said I think for individuals that are willing to risk having a rough time for a few hours they can be super valuable for discovering latent creative impulses. People get really hung up on the visual and hallucinatory aspect of them but the really important part of psychedelics to creativity is the greater sense of purpose and better artistic understanding that you get out of them the things that aren’t the visuals. In my book I write extensively about the role that these drugs might play in a creative life but somebody actually thinking about taking these drugs should also read Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna for proper dosing information and other more boots on the ground stuff.

Roman: What about marijuana?

Simsies: Marijuana is a hindrance for most people whether they admit it or not. I see a lot of people especially in California with legal smoking marijuana and becoming kind of lazy. I used to think that the laziness is a misconception until I saw it happen to a lot of my friends. I saw this one guy who was a colleague of mine in grad school just abuse the shit out of the stuff and he got really fat and lazy. He’s not an isolated case either - I see it happen to a lot of creatives. It’s kind of like a pleasurable death. I personally don’t use the stuff I hear enough voices in my head without it.

Roman: What is post modal art?

Simsies: Post modal art is a term I coined to talk about the genesis of a new multimedia art that we’re seeing occur virtually everywhere. The watershed moment for the creation of this new art was the invention and widespread use of virtual reality as seen by the Oculus and Vive headsets recently. Developing for these platforms brings in expertise from so many disciplines which in and of itself is not new and we have a term for that - multimedia art. So you gotta ask yourself why is this different? And it’s different because the paradigm is constantly shifting this isn’t like the movie industry where there are set rules for all of the creatives that are working on a feature film, there could be 100 different VR applications and video games in each of those hundred apps and video games the creatives could have completely different roles and be thinking about if you’re in a completely different way. So on the backend us creatives need to start thinking of art as abstracted from medium. Post modal art is the study and creation of art liberated from any medium with the intent of arriving at an overarching set of principles for developing artistic works.

Roman: Sounds kind of esoteric, why should people care?

Simsies: It’s only esoteric because it’s ahead of the times. People will need to wake up and pay attention to it in the next five years or so because mediums are rising and declining so rapidly. It used to be that a medium might be around for 50, 100 years, but now you can have a medium like Vine that’s only around for a few years and then completely disappears. Because of this rapidity it’s not very useful to sink a lot of time into learning one medium especially if it’s easy to produce content in that medium already-look at what’s already happened to music. Artists have to obstruct the creativity from medium so that they can use whatever medium is useful that day to realize their ideas and then move onto another medium as that other one falls.

Roman: A theme I see a lot in your work is the juxtaposition of really serious stuff and banal things. Why do you put these elements together?

Simsies: I’ve had a lot of weird shift happen in my life. Even when dark stuff happens though I can usually crack a joke about it and laugh. I think whatever this prankster spirit is inside of me is also present in my heart and my writing.

Roman: Where does the “Simsies” name come from?

Simsies: Simsies was a nickname for my alter ego during college. I’m just gonna leave it at that.