to prepare for their new supernatural-themed podcast, i went ghost-hunting with Mickey Blurr. we spent the better part of a night in an undisclosed, abandoned house in western connecticut. Mickey packed the EVP recorders, laser thermometers, and coffee, and i brought a Bible and little-to-no courage. as we explored this semi-haunted house, i asked Mickey about his music (future and past). i would have posted the audio recording, but my voice was too shaky, and spontaneous gusts of cold wind (?) made most of the conversation inaudible.
if you haven’t check out Mickey Blurr’s music before, hit the bandcamp button below, and let it play while you read this transcribed interview below!
ok mickey blurr, you know the rules. first question: where’s your favorite place to be in connecticut? and if you say on a train to new york city then this interview is over. (it can be a place to eat, sleep, play music, whatever you want!)
In Bethel, there’s a coffee shop called Molten Java, which has always been like a second home to me, so I guess I’ll say Molten Java. The clashing colors and absurd decorum doesn’t align with my aesthetic preferences 200%, but everyone there is so kind and gentle and welcoming. Wendy, who owns the place, is one of my favorite people. So, yeah, let’s say Molten Java.
how have you been?
Incredibly tired! I’ve been remaining very busy with duty as a new father and trying to remain sane amidst everything, but there’s a renewed energy I feel coming on, it’s not quite there yet but I feel it coming, if that makes sense.
and in that renewed energy, you cut your beautiful hair. how could you?
Haha, I had to! It was getting to be too much to maintain and my partner was getting tired of finding strands of it everywhere. I have horrible eyesight, too, so finding my own stray hairs isn’t exactly my forté.
as a mutt with a thick coat of fur, i can relate. i want to talk to you about your music. is that ok?
I guess, if you really have to.
you teased me a week ago saying that you have a new project you’re working on. let’s talk about that.
Let’s! Yes. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of things to work on going forward. I have a 1TB external hard drive which has 127.5GB of demos on it, most of which will never see the light of day but plenty of which I intend to use for something. First off, Dionysus was, much to the confusion of a lot of people I’ve spoken to, and blogs for that matter, a demo. I want to redo a few of those songs in the future on an album, which would likely be the first one. I’ve held onto a lot of these songs for a while, and I’d like to get them out there so I can let go of the past I guess. Going forward from there, though, I have a lot of ideas for multimedia projects like album/films and maybe some more interactive things, but that’s mostly speculation. The big one is a sci-fi concept I have which I’m fleshing out by sort of studying speculative fiction and using RPGs to lay out storylines and better live in the world I’m looking at.
so that picture of D&D that you posted was for “research”.
Yes. Now, roll for insight to see if I’m telling the truth or not.
the songs on Dionysus point towards a unified sci-fi narrative – is that what you’re building on? or will it be completely different?
There was a vague narrative, for sure, but it mostly came from the fact that the themes all felt relatively connected, and with the track sequencing I was essentially able to string together these ideas into a short story about time travel. But, no, going forward, I have an entirely different story to tell, much less romantic and more in line with my own anxieties regarding our collective relationship to media, spectacle, advancing technology and how these things can be used to influence us for the worst, even when we’re convinced of the opposite.
what is it about “concepts” that appeal to you as an artist? your demo had a storyline; your appearance was very specific and stylized. does having a concept in place make things easier or more challenging for you to create art?
I just work best in terms of story telling, I think. I went to school to make comics and have a real affinity for the medium, so by that logic I’m a very visual story teller. So, to me, the idea of telling your story through image can be just as important as telling your story with words. That’s also why I really appreciate film as an art. Actually, for my first school project, I did a loose comic adaptation of the Faustus myth which I had based on both Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play and the F.W. Murnau film from 1926.
we talked briefly and you mentioned some your influences. i was surprised to hear that they ranged from david bowie’s Hunky Dory all the way to david bowie’s Station to Station. just kidding, you said that some songs on Dionysus were informed by kendrick lamar. could you tell me a little more about that?
Hey, man, I like David Sylvian, too! Yeah, Kendrick is big for me. I’ve been a fan for a long time and when To Pimp A Butterfly came out, I was blown away by the overall musicality. It sort of went over my head on my initial listen because I was expecting Good Kid/Maad City 2, but it’s one that rewards more and more with each listen. So, that kind of informed my approach in writing rhythmically and which chords I ended up using. Actually, I think those songs overall took a lot of cues from hip hop and R&B more than rock music.
do you think Untitled Unmastered is his best record?
yes.
you lie.
I do as far as the musicality goes. I think that DAMN. resonates with me lyrically the most and it fits the zeitgeist mood overall by being so apocalyptic, but as far as the musicality, yeah, Untitled Unmastered is my favorite in the way it toys with structures and form, and the sounds it uses, too. It takes enough elements of fringe/experimental stuff, or I guess ‘avant-garde’, to push its boundaries, but it also keeps mind of its own limitations enough to remain accessible and to grow on people. I think, anyways, I don’t want to tell you what to take from either record.
i didn’t notice the hip-hop influence until you pointed it out. what other things influence your music that you think might be unexpected? [you can open this up to talk about books / movies you like!]
Musically speaking, with regards to the Dionysus demo anyways, I was drawing a lot from Frank Ocean and Moses Sumney. I’ve gotten a King Krule comparison once and what’s funny to me about that is, now I can see it, but at the time I was so upset to hear that because I hadn’t even really been too into his stuff.
i’ve heard someone say that King Krule sounds like a teenager trying to sing in a mic under his bed so that he doesn’t wake up his dad in the other room.
He’s grown on me since, but that was a funny one. But then I guess other things that inspired that demo were some Kurosawa and Kenneth Anger films I was really into at the time, the art of Francisco de Goya was really on my mind, and I was spending a lot of time at museums, so I was just learning a lot about peoples’ creative processes in my spare time. Then the photo that my partner took – which I think I look really silly in, but anyways – was inspired by the cover of FKA twigs’ LP1, but the lighting we did was modeled after Dario Argento’s film Suspiria. Oh, and I guess some fashion was on my mind, too. We went to London, Paris, and Berlin and spent a decent amount of time at little boutiques and whatnot and I found I was really drawn to stuff by Yohji Yamamoto, Vivienne Westwood, and sometimes Rick Owens, but I have a weird relationship to his work because sometimes its almost too off the deep end, even for me. Going forward, it’ll be very different. I already have a lot of new things on my mind. We’ll talk about that then, right?
when i asked about a “SATYR DAY V”, you seemed doubtful that there’d be a sequel to that. what’s your next release going to sound like?
Ha! Well, if you wanna get down to it, my next release will, for all intents and purposes, be my actual real debut release. Why make a “V” if I’m just gonna bring back IV and hopefully better?! We recorded those songs over the span of, like, a year and a half at my friend Tom’s studio, the same one Quiet Giant recorded their first LP at. It was 3 different drummers, who were essentially just the drummers shifting in the live line-up, and by the time we got to the final set of songs (“Satyr Day”, “BADSTAR”, “Kuroneko”) my drummer, Nick Morcaldi, had only played maybe 2 shows with me so they were still very much unrehearsed. I also mixed that whole thing myself in Logic with no idea of what I was doing and just playing with ideas I had, so I like it as a demo but as a “real” release I think it can be done better, and hopefully will be!
nice job name-dropping Quiet Giant, trying to get on my good side, i see. next thing i know, you’ll be talking about Crag Mask. going DIY like that, do you have any tips or recommendations for other new artists that are trying to get their music out there?
QG are my family! I love all of those people so much. I went to school with Will and Dani was always that friend’s-cool-older-sibling figure back then. But I’m very close with Dani and Jared and Will, I love them. But anyways, I don’t really know! Just do it, right? I don’t think any advice I could come up with would really be revelatory to anyone. Just have fun and do it because you love to, or have too, or whatever.
My best advice, really, is totally unrelated to the music and more on the social side. Music is intuitive and you can figure it out on your own, really, but what I think is important advice to people who want to take on music and getting involved in a ‘scene’ or what have you is to drop your ego, don’t be a sociopath, make sure you’re still a real person in your spare time, and understand that everyone is telling a story from their perspective with their own unique skill set. They have every right to do so, don’t be a jerk.
oh and hey, while we’re on the subject of making new music, what can you tell me about your new single?
It’s called “Fortune Teller”, it’s centered around a D minor chord, it’s partially inspired – musically speaking – by Chopin’s Funeral March from his 2nd Piano Sonata and partially inspired by 1960’s novelty Halloween records. It’s an impulsive hymn to divination, I guess. Impulsive because I wanted to finish it quickly so as not to over-intellectualize it. Did you know there’s a form of divination by spider called arachnomancy?
no. like spider prophets?
That was on my mind while I wrote the lyrics, but I didn’t want to complicate them because I felt like they would work better if they were simple.
is “Fortune Teller” a standalone song, or does it fit in with the upcoming material you mentioned?
It’s a standalone song for now, but we may do another arrangement of it later, which I say just because we did toy with the arrangement a lot. There’s a lot of room to play with that one, but as I said, for now the point of it was to be impulsive. It reflects the divination process of trusting intuition better that way, too, I think.
it’s a spooky song, fit for halloween. what would i need in order to dress up like you for halloween?
A good steering wheel that doesn’t whiff out of the window while I driving.
and speaking of halloween, you’ve got a new podcast that comes out on halloween too!
yes.
what made you interested in doing this podcast about Connecticut’s supernatural history?
I have always been fascinated by things of that nature, really. I first experienced death at a very young age so I’ve always sort of been drawn to concepts of what lies ‘beyond the veil’ and what have you. Naturally that leads to either religion or the interwoven worlds of the supernatural and the occult; so when the first one failed me, I stuck to the latter, and have been in a complicated relationship ever since. Plus then, growing up, you hear a lot of urban legends about your home state, and having a morbid curiosity sort of meant being predisposed to taking an interest in that stuff. I still wish I could come up with a better name for the show, but unfortunately Occult Connecticut was the one that had the best ring to it.
i like that, but what about CONNECTOCCULT. think about it, mickey. do you see this as something totally separate from your music, or is this podcast part of your larger artistic picture?
Absolutely separate, I would hate to conflate the two. It’s really important to me to have more than one outlet – whether I share the outcome or not – or I’ll burn myself out in whatever field I’m focusing on too much. I am composing the original music for the show, but I’m not taking it so seriously. It’s all mood pieces and themes and such which, to me, feels very similar to cartooning and painting.
what would be your “white whale” so to speak for the podcast? are there any places that you would definitely want to cover but don’t have access to yet?
I would really love to speak with Nick Bellantoni, who was Connecticut’s state archaeologist for quite some time and was heavily involved in the rediscovery of the Jewett City Vampires. That story is the podcast’s first episode! He seems to be someone with a great wealth of knowledge on things that fascinate me, and I’d love to hear what stories he has to tell, ‘supernatural’ or not. I have a rough outline of places and topics I plan to cover though, such as Fairfield Hills in Newtown and the White Lady of Easton, Dudleytown, et cetera. And then I have a whole Pandora’s jar to get into with the Warrens.
i saw timothy croke play bass with you. did he try to look like john lennon on purpose or was that just a happy coincidence?
Timmy Blurr is my beautiful baby boy, and he just looks that way. Actually, I share band DNA with Donnie Alexzander, we basically trade members every other week. Hi, Donnie!
donnie’s definitely not going to read this. how do you think i could get his attention?
Offer him a bottle of wine. Donnie is the truest Dionysian cultist in this great state, frankly.
the last time i saw you play live was in NG2BC in new haven. you were wearing some killer ray bans, and a few seconds into the first song, you whipped them off over your shoulder. that was really fucking cool. was it because you suddenly realized how dark it was in there?
Thank you! Honestly, yes, that is why.
if you were me, what question would you ask you next?
I’d ask if I were really a wizard.
ok and then what would you say to you?
I wouldn’t give myself a good answer.
yeah no one ever wants to roll a bard, am i right?
Pfffft. You’d change your mind on that if I suggested an ORPHEUS, PART II.
wow, what a hyper-specific joke. extremely well done. what questions do you have for me?
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
… an african or european swallow? i don’t know the answer to that.
R.I.P.
