Olivier De Sagazan: “I can only answer you with my creations, not with words.”
“I run every day, running is like an amplifier of presence for me, a time to reconnect with myself and the world. The sound of footsteps and breathing already creates music and incites the beginning of a dance.” Olivier De Sagazan.
Olivier De Sagazan blurs the lines between sculpture, painting, and performance, between surrealist dreams and your worst anxiety-ridden nightmares. The phrase ‘the art of decline‘ easily comes to mind when I look at his work. However, I’m told this observation is somewhere between cliche and ‘old hat’ when I put this to De Sagazan himself. I’m delighted to be told I’m wrong even though I’m correct! What cannot be denied, however, is that De Sagazan uses himself and others as a canvas, vehicles for expression. For me, De Sagazan recalls some of filmmaker David Cronenberg’s most complex ‘body-horror’ material, and the more I look through his creations, the more I find cinematic splendor. – namely, Apocalypse Now and Colonel Kurtz’s famous lament, ‘The horror, the horror’.
In this exclusive, brief yet fascinating interview, I do my best to get the slightest sense, the mildest hint of what goes through De Sagazan’s head and what makes him the artist he is. Although unsurprisingly, we barely scratch the surface.
Mr De Sagazan. You often talk about culture and fear, and the impact of each. Can culture have a stronger effect than fear?
I think that with age, people like me generally learn to lose interest in or be less affected by fear. Culture and art are the things that motivate and interest me most. As far as I’m concerned, the world isn’t at all screwed up. There are certainly people who make a pact with the devil, i.e. with the economic concept of endless growth and who have no empathy for our planet, but the important thing is to see, each at our own level, how we can act to become aware of our community of interest with our environment.
What does your experience as a biologist bring to your art?
I still have a biologist’s eye, which helps me enormously in my artistic work. For me, there has to be a connection between a work of art and a living organism. When you look at a sculpture, you have to feel its presence, and it has to be like an active fetish.
Your work seems to me to focus on horror rather than beauty – but at the same time, your work has a certain beauty, if that makes sense.
“Beauty is the last step before the terrible.” said the poet Rilke, and here we must understand that beauty is the feeling that everything can change at any moment, and that it therefore lies in this acute awareness of our fragility. There’s nothing mortifying about my work, just a sense of urgency as I try to awaken my eyes and my whole being. Most people only look at my work in the first degree, i.e. that boy who disfigures faces must be a violent, mentally ill type. I have to admit I’m dismayed by such considerations.
What do you think an artist like yourself does, or what effect does it have on the wider political or cultural landscape?
I hope that my images will produce an awakening of thought. I think we’re living in a kind of trivialization of reality, and the aim of art is to shake us out of this torpor. But I’m an artist, not a political scientist.
You’ve said previously that you were religious when you were younger. As you get older, do you ever feel that same longing for religion or divinity coming back?
It happens to a lot of people, including me who’s always been an atheist, but as I get older, I start to feel the need to believe in something. Maybe it has something to do with Freud and his essay “The Future of an Illusion”: as long as we are aware of our own mortality, we can always be attracted by the idea of an afterlife, and so on. Yes, there’s always the return of the repressed, but I’m on my guard. The tragedy of religions is their tendency to want to explain everything, and in this, they become a poison that freezes you in your certainties.
What are your major personal traumas that keep you working and being creative? Or even your own personal triumphs?
I left my father’s faith at the age of 20. It was very hard at first, but then I realized that if life had no meaning, I would give it meaning by finding one, and that gave me enormous energy.
Do you believe in the meaning of “the art of decadence” or “the art of decline”? I like that expression and I think of that when I look at your work.
No, it’s an old concept that comes up regularly, as in the last century with Max Nordeau …
Which philosophers are most important to you, and why?
Aristotle with his key concept that the foundation of the soul is touch. Then came phenomenologists like Merleau Ponty, who went so far as to think that this inner touch would already be present in matter too, hence that wonderful concept of the flesh of the world that I love so much. So there would already be a form of sensitivity in the earth and matter in general.
Which work has been most important to you?
My inaugural gesture was to go and physically enter my work, to cover myself with clay and paint, to become with my body a kind of hybrid between art and reality, or rather to abolish this separation between art and reality so that everything becomes art. Thus was born my performance ‘Transfiguration’. ‘Transfiguration’ is a good example. I wanted to bring one of my sculptures to life, and I’d been working on it for weeks with no results.
What was your life like in the Congo, where you were born? What was it about Central Africa that inspires you?
Central Africa is my cradle in the poetic sense and in terms of my inspiration. What I love about African art, and primitive art in general, is the immediate link with life, in the sense that there is no separation between the two. In the belly of a Teke sculpture, there are pieces of the deceased, and so there is life after death for the deceased and peace for the living. Masks and sculptures are like crutches to help them walk through the “night” and go further in their perception of the world. That’s how I understand art too.
What are your main motivations?
We’re still trying to get out of this collective hallucination that makes us believe that everything down here is normal, that it’s normal to be born, normal to exist, normal to die, and that the world has no mystery left in it. I don’t know, I hope to produce a kind of jolt or awakening to the strangeness of the world, to give it a metaphysical dimension.
Do you have any regrets about the work you’ve created or things you would have done differently with experience?
I [have previously] probably lacked method and always moved forward instinctively. But assurance that has enabled me to push my experiments further and harder.
What projects are taking up your time?
I’m still pursuing my research in painting and sculpture, which still fascinates me. I’m also preparing an opera on Mozart’s Mass in C with Roland Auzet and the Limoges Opera for February 2024.
Mr De Sagazan, anything to add?
I can only answer you with my creations, not with words.
Milan Kundera (1929-2023) specialized in writing about philosophy, women, memory, love, sex, life’s absurdities, melancholia, betrayal, loss, communism, nostalgia, and most importantly, sex, lust, love, and women. At this current moment, with the loss of this most life-changing of authors (for me at least), I’m struggling for words to summarise his importance. Rather, I’ll just let you sample the greatest and profoundly heart-breaking passages yours truly has ever read. And yes, for those reading who know me, it involves the death of a dog.
“Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. Karenin walked on three legs and spent more and more of his time lying in a corner. And whimpering. Both husband and wife agreed that they had no business letting him suffer needlessly. But agree as they might in principle, they still had to face the anguish of determining the time when his suffering was in fact needless, the point at which life was no longer worth living.
If only Tomas hadn’t been a doctor! Then they would have been able to hide behind a third party. They would have been able to go back to the vet and ask him to put the dog to sleep with an injection.
Assuming the role of Death is a terrifying thing. Tomas insisted that he would not give the injection himself; he would have the vet come and do it. But then he realised that he could grant Karenin a privilege forbidden to humans: Death would come for him in the guise of his loved ones.
Karenin had whimpered all night. After feeling his leg in the morning, Tomas said to Tereza, “There’s no point in waiting.”
In a few minutes they would both have to go to work. Tereza went in to see Karenin. Until then, he had lain in his corner completely apathetic (not even acknowledging Tomas when he felt his leg), but when he heard the door open and saw Tereza come in, he raised his head and looked at her.
She could not stand his stare; it almost frightened her. he did not look that way at Tomas, only at her. But never with such intensity. It was not a desperate look, or even sad. No, it was a look of awful, unbearable trust. The look was an eager question. All his life Karenin had waited for answers from Tereza, and he was letting her know (with more urgency than usual, however) that he was still ready to learn the truth from her. (Everything that came from Tereza was the truth. Even when she gave commands like “Sit!” or “Lie down!” he took them as truths to identify with, to give his life meaning.)
His look of awful trust did not last long; he soon laid his head back down on his paws. Tereza knew that no one ever again would look at her like that.
They had never fed him sweets, but recently she had bought him a few chocolate bars. She took them out of the foil, broke them into pieces, and made a circle of them around him. Then she brought over a bowl of water to make sure that he had everythng he needed for the several hours he would spend at home alone. The look he had given her just then seemed to have tired him out. Even surrounded by the chocolate, he did not raise his head.
She lay down on the floor next to him and hugged him. With a slow and laboured turn of his head, he sniffed her and gave her a lick or two. She closed her eyes while the licking went on, as if she wanted to remember it forever. She held out the other cheek to be licked.
Then she had to go and take care of her heifers. She did not return until just before lunch. Tomas had not come home yet. Karenin was still lying on the floor surrounded by the chocolate, and did not even lift his head when he heard her come in. His bad leg was swollen now, and the tumour had burst in another place. She noticed some light red (noy blood-like) drops forming beneath his fur.
Again she lay next to him on the floor. She stretched one arm across his body and closed her eyes. Then she heard someone banging at the door. “Doctor! Doctor! The pig is here! The pig and his master!” She lacked strenth to talk to anyone, and did not move, did not open her eyes. “Doctor! Doctor! The pigs have come!” Then silence.
Tomas did not get back for another half hour. He went straight to the kitchen and prepared the injection without a word. When he entered the room, Tereza was on her feet and Karenin was picking himself up. As soon as he saw Tomas, he gave him a weak wag of his tail.
“Look,” said Tereza, “he’s still smiling.”
She said it beseechingly, trying to win a short reprieve, but did not push for it.
Slowly she spread a sheet out over the couch. It was a white sheet with a pattern of tiny violets. She had everything carefully laid out and thought out, having imagined Karenin’s death many days in advance. (Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!)
He no longer had the strength to jump up on the couch. They picked him up in their arms together. Tereza laid him on his side, and Tomas examined one of his good legs. He was looking for a more or less prominent vein. Then he cut away the fur with a pair of scissors.
Tereza knelt by the couch and held Karenin’s head close to her own.
Tomas asked her to squeeze the leg because he was having trouble sticking the needle in. She did as she was told, but did not move her face from his head. She kept talking gently to Karenin, and he thought only of her. He was not afraid. He licked her face two more times. And Tereza kept whispering, “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, you won’t feel any pain there, you’ll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you’ll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don’t be scared…”
Tomas jabbed the needle into the vein and pushed the plunger. Karenin’s leg jerked; his breath quickened for a few seconds then stopped. Tereza remained on the floor by the couch and buried her face in his head.
Then they both had to go back to work and leave the dog laid out on the couch, on the white sheet with tiny violets.
They came back towards evening. Tomas went into the garden. He found the lines of the rectangle that Tereza had drawn with her heel between the two apple trees. Then he started digging. He kept precisely to her specifications. He wanted everything to be just as Tereza wished.
She stayed in the house with Karenin. She was afraid of burying him alive. She put her ear to his mouth and thought she heard a weak breathing sound. She stepped back and seemed to see his breast moving slightly.
(No, the breath she heard was her own, and because it set her own body ever so slightly in motion, she had the impression the dog was moving.)
She found a mirror in her bag and held it up to his mouth. The mirror was so smudged she thought she saw drops on it, drops caused by his breath.
“Tomas! He’s alive!” she cried, when Tomas came in from the garden in his muddy boots.
Tomas bent over him and shook his head.
They each took an end of the sheet he was lying on, Tereza the lower end, Tomas the upper. Then they lifted him up and carried him out to the garden.
The sheet felt now wet to Tereza’s hands. He puddled his way into our lives and now he’s puddling his way out, she thought, and she was glad to feel the moisture on her hands, his final greeting.
They carried him to the apple trees and set him down. She leaned over the pit and arranged the sheet so that it covered him entirely. It was unbearable to think of the earth they would soon be throwing over him, raining down on his naked body.
Then she went into the house and came back with his collar, his leash, and a handful of the chocolate that had lain untouched on the floor since morning. She threw it all in after him.
Next to the pit was a pile of freshly dug earth. Tomas picked up the shovel.
Just then Tereza recalled her dream: Karenin giving birth to two rolls and a bee. Suddenly the words sounded like an epitaph. She pictured a monument standing there, between the apple trees, with the inscription Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee.”
Excerpt from ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera (1929-2023). RIP.
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Prussia Snailham “I’m reading my diary out loud. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious.”
[UPDATED 12 July 2023] Prussia Snailham is fucking wonderful, in case you wondered. And I feel totally privileged, maybe one day verified, at having the chance to talk to such a tremendous and talented ‘new’ musical and visual artist. I say that because she is not currently signed with a record deal, which is a catastrophe, and does not have any music on the usual mainstream outlets like Spotify or iTunes. Instead, you can sample her work on Bandcamp, YouTube or catch her sounds in a live setting – which I would urge you to do so. So please do it at the next given chance. The following interview took place over a few weeks via email which I believe will give you, dear readers, a great insight into the mind, workings and talent of an artist I know will go very far. Think Lady Gaga, Perfume Genius or Broadcast being covered by Radiohead with a slight taste of Buckfast tonic wine. What’s not to love?
On her Bandcamp page, she describes herself or is described as creating ‘karaoke sermons’, with an output that is ‘non-defined, for it’s constantly evolving’.
“Based in GLA, Prussiahas spent the last 3 years quietly cultivating a dedicated fanbase & self-released an impressive catalogue of DIY videos on YT. A POP SENSATION with an edge. Her music soundtracks all feelings & there’s constant apprehension that it all may be capable of falling in on itself!”
Upon listening I think that sums her up better than I ever could, for I am truly still overcome having recently witnessed her live deliverance which is absolutely magical. I shit you not.
Enjoy the following.
Prussia, first of all – Prussia Snailham – I would love it if that was your real name, is it? Side note: I read Karl Marx was born in Prussia. Boring fact for you.
I’m very happy to tell you that Prussia Snailham is my real, birth name. ‘Prussia’ after the failed German state (my dad’s idea) and ‘Snailham’ is an old English name.
I understand you used to play football. What was your position and were you any good? The wonderful writer Albert Camus was a great goalkeeper, apparently.
Goodness, that’s a blast from the past… I don’t play football anymore but I think about it often and still love it – love to play it, not watch it as they’re all just a bunch of posers now in my opinion… I was left defence or left mid/wing… I really enjoyed tackling people!! I think I was alright, I was bloody relentless and so strong back then!
Do you have plans to make your music more widely available, online I mean – I’m a Spotify man, but I can’t really find your tunes aside from on your YouTube. My cousin is in a band and tells me that putting music on a platform like Spotify is expensive.
Hmm, I haven’t heard that putting tunes on Spotify is expensive but it is a bit technical and definitely stressful… or that side of music stresses me the fuck out! I’m just trying to find the best way to do it that makes ME happy, and the least anxious, because MAKING the music is the only thing I truly care about! And with that, I am actually planning another video series, which will be out on YouTube! YouTube is my absolute favourite way of sharing my work nowadays – I made a video series during covid and loved it. I definitely think music with a visual is best! So yes, lots planned and lots a-coming! The first video in my new series will be released June 18th. I am making a video series to songs I have written. I want to do one a month for the rest of the year. ‘Mess at Best’ is the first one and the imagery is from/based on Snow White – the other videos include crab meat, orcas, Pocahontas, and birds… all made by me using Final Cut Pro.
Are you signed currently to a label to put out any official music and if so/ or not, what does the future hold for that?
I am currently not signed to a label but if you know anyone? I would NEVER say no to that type of opportunity! But I’ll still write and sing and play and share my music forever regardless of that kinda thing.
Who’s your most valued or important collaboration? is it your intention to be more of a solo artist?
I am a solo artist through and through! I have worked with a couple of people over the years, and definitely enjoyed it and learnt from it, but the most important thing it taught me, is that I like my solitude and I truly work best completely on my own. Like, no-one-else-can-even-be-in-the-house alone! Just so I can be totally honest and ruthless with myself lyrically… I would never say never but my work is so personal… And I think that’s what makes it decent and relatable… I’m reading my diary out loud, ya know? I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious.
Do you work with anyone to help on the production side of your work at the moment? Green Door Studios in Finnieston is a place where tons of great Glasgow-based bands tend to end up (Thinking mainly about Jacob Yates/ Rosy Crucifixion / Amazing Snakeheads etc.)
I’ve been over to Green Door a good few times and it’s a great wee place! Ronan and Sam have the patience of saints because I know I am annoying… haha. All my production is me though. I have no help and don’t really want it… I know what I like and I know what I want! I’m shit at engineering though! I’ll hold my hands up and say I desperately need help in that department! But it’s just me, my laptop, my nord, my Rode mic and my vocal pedal–less is ALWAYS AND FOREVER will be more – Orson Welles: “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”
Can you tell me about your relationship with the wonderful band PreGoblin? ( Have you seen their remake of the Shawshank Redemption with Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family? It’s bloody hilarious.)
I met Alex Sebley and Jessica Winter in 2019 when they played in Glasgow during a wee UK tour and I’ve stayed in touch with Alex since – he’s a genuine great soul, who just wants everyone to succeed, which is hard to find! He’s been tremendously encouraging of me and my music. Shall I just be painfully honest and say I haven’t…? I’ve seen the odd clip! Shall I just be painfully honest and say I haven’t…?
And of course, you also recently opened for them and Peter Doherty – How did that all come about?
I literally got a phone call from Alex the day before the gig to tell me I had got the support slot – it was fucking nuts and probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had! Pete was just chill and lovely – we spoke briefly about flat Earth and had a fish curry. He spoke to me about my music, my songwriting, my voice and I appreciate him greatly for bothering/wanting to do that because he didn’t have to, ya know? He’s a busy guy and everyone was wanting his attention, as you can imagine. Truthfully, I spent more time with his dogs than him though, but that was equally as amazing.
Are you still doing open mics and where can someone expect to find you?
I am determined to get back into the open mic scene! Old Bohemia (Marc and his girlfriend, who are just the sweetest people) put on open mics in the west-end Thursdays and Sundays! And Broadcast open mics are crazy friendly and encouraging – I would recommend them for any newbies!
What’s the best way you find on getting your music ‘out there’ and especially when it comes to a live setting, how do you go about booking gigs etc? Is it just down to the old thing of ‘who you know’/ ‘quality of work’?
It is 1000% who you know! And it is hard, I won’t lie. I do not know what I’m doing and to be candid, the more business side of music doesn’t interest me… I want to write and produce and make videos!!! Gigging is of course thrilling and fun and great exposure, but I don’t have that same itch to gig that I see in other people… I think everyone should just do what makes them tick, and as long as you are being unapologetically authentic, life will find a way to fall into place. We have to believe true art will always wiggle its way through and prevail!
Are you self-taught on musical instruments – how did you start?
Self-taught! When I was around 15 my dad showed me Ludovico Einaudi and gave me his old keyboard and from there I started learning and writing compositions – I tried to write lyrics but I was absolutely rotten at it… but I never stopped trying and it wasn’t until I was around 21 that I finally wrote my song called ‘Take it Easy’ and something just clicked and I was like, ‘wait… I think this is MY thing. ‘Take it Easy’ does still exist – don’t all songs always exist? haha, it may or may not be part of the video series… I wrote it about a boy that had undeserving power over me a very long time ago.
Do you drink or use drugs to assist creativity? Do you really enjoy Buckfast (Bucky as we call it in Glasgow) OH YUCH (my opinion!)
I may have a blunt while editing/producing a tune but it goes no further than that, and I would never write or perform while drunk or on anything, because I genuinely struggle to sing in tune once I’ve got a drink in me – my relationship with drink and drugs worries me sometimes and I write about it a lot… The only way it “assists” me, is it gives me situations I’ve found myself in to write about! (and yeah, who doesn’t LOVE Bucky!?)
What path are you on? Sorry, that’s a bit of a philosophical question but I have a habit of these!
Cliché, but I just want to be happy. I want to make the younger me so proud of the person I’ve become, ya know?! I also want to get really fit and strong and flexible. The older I get the more important my physical health becomes to me. I think I ultimately just want to finally know how to look after myself and genuinely fall in love with looking after myself.
What made you turn to music? Who were the artists you found early in your life to maybe make you decide ‘ok I want to do that, and I can’?
Kate Bush, Massive Attack, Ludovico Einaudi, Regina Spektor, and Bon Iver are my top 5 (don’t hold me to that!) but they didn’t make me decide to make music. I honestly don’t know what did… I just kinda stumbled into it because it was so therapeutic, and to be cliché, I found writing the best way, and sometimes the only way, to express myself. A lot of the time I found I was sitting down to write a song about something really specific, and then when I’d be finished, I’d realise that I’d written about something completely different… So, I actively started to write in order to figure out how I was feeling. I kept this all very private for a long time too, before I eventually showed it to someone close to me and they told me, ‘to not share art is selfish’ and I thought about that for a while and ultimately agreed!
I think you have an amazing natural voice if you don’t mind me saying. Your cover of ‘Cry Me A River’ is tremendous. Maybe related to another question here, when did you find that voice?
Woah, how did you find that…? I must be 20/21 in that video. And thank you! To be honest, I always knew I could sing from a young age but being able to sing isn’t hard because you are either born able to sing or you aren’t, in my opinion! I know I’ve definitely found my own sound and style though. I acknowledge, understand and really emphasise the distinctiveness, the accents and the cadences in my voice. And you mustn’t be afraid to be “weird” and do things “wrong”. I love a good grunt, gasp or clack of the tongue while singing, You know!?
Where does your own (well-substantiated) confidence stem from?
Can you recall the time when you first started playing in front of people – or maybe the first gig which helped you grow?
My mum always told me to channel my nervous energy into my performance and use it as motivation because, if you aren’t nervous, it means you don’t care! And I always remind myself before I play, in front of anyone, that I would rather try and fail than not try at all, and I am not doing this for anyone else other than myself.
Aside from animals and life, are there any other main themes you’re writing about in your work?
There definitely seems to be a theme of water and the colour green in my writing… I love writing about the mundanity of life – the simplest of things that mean so much at the end of the day… food and eating, communication, honesty, death… I write a lot about relationships and love – be that romantic, sexual or mother-daughter love; also fearing love, etc… It’s very hard not to write about love and pain!
What’s the biggest blocker or hurdle you have to overcome as an artist?
Don’t mix business with pleasure, and that’s all I want to say about that…
Right. The boring and standard question now which I always ask artists, but the response is always interesting. Give me your main influences – this can be artistic or even just from life.
I get most of my influence and inspiration from films and TV – I watch films and TV way more than I listen to music… I religiously re-watch The Fifth Element, Big Fish, The Lady in the Water, Legend, Ever After, Unbreakable… I could keep going…! I also like to travel with my headphones on but with no music and listen to strangers talk because people say such poetry without realising it. My mum and dad inspire me a lot too.
What are you most curious about or interested in?
Curious is an interesting word… True crime, competitive weight lifting (watching not doing), conspiracy theories like the ‘Mandala Effect’ – I am also a hat and jacket collector! I cannot step foot in a charity shop without buying a hat and/or jacket.
What is it you find so interesting about weightlifting?!?
Weightlifting is just amazing – it’s so impressive and crazy inspiring! People and our bodies are capable of so much – you should watch this.
I’m not in your world as I’m not a musician – what’s the toughest part of it all?
Social media 100% (and I hate it) I’ve always been such a believer in ‘the music will do the talking’ but with social media, you have to be a personality, constantly pushes out “content” and appearing so cool and unbothered! Even just captioning Instagram posts, I used to get so stressed out that I wasn’t saying the ‘right’ thing… Bloody stupid and sad how important all that stuff is.
Its been years since I was always in Glasgow city centre constantly going to gigs. Because I’m ancient, I view that time as one of the best of live music – I was at every Amazing Snakeheads, Fat White Family, gig etc – who are the bands these days I need to get my arse up and go check out, apart from yourself obviously?
Now, see, I suck because I don’t know… I don’t really go out much but if I do, I usually hit up Audio, Flying Duck or Broadcast and try and catch a Cenote, Jungle Testaments, Bass Injection or Midnight Bass night! I looooooooove a good skank!
What do you do with yourself when you’re not making music?
I work front of house at a tattoo parlour, so I do all the bookings, admin, customer service, etc. and I honestly love it! I’m pretty anal, so I LOVE organisation, planning, spreadsheets, to-do lists! There’s nothing more satisfying than writing a list and ticking it off! But I’ve also been getting back to the gym lately and I love a good circuit class, cross-fit style!
What’s next for you – please self-promote as you see fit!
Gigs!! I’m playing in London for the first time at the end of June and then I’ll be at Endless Summer in Glasgow at the start of July and also playing at Youth Beatz this year too! I’m playing in London on June 29th at Jaguar Shoes, supporting Speedial. I got asked to after the Pete Docherty And hopefully, the gigs will just keep snowballing from there! And of course, my video series is a-coming (June 18th!) which I’m so fucking pumped for!
Prussia, thank you!
Keep up to date with all things Prussia Snailham on her instagram
And you can listen to her visual and musical output on her YouTube channel
Carlos Dengler: “I can never rest and I can never rely on my environment. I’m always moving.”
By his own admission, Carlos Dengler suffers from ‘creative ADHD’. It’s a condition he says makes him miserable, which I can understand. On the plus though, it is a side of his nature, given the quality and quantity of his creative output, I would argue that has been put to tremendous use over the years. Carlos Dengler has proven himself as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer of essays, and over the past few years, a respected screen and stage actor in his own right.
I dare say many readers here will be well familiar with the name ‘Carlos D’, the former Interpol bassist who played a pivotal role in the success and creation of that group’s first three (and best) records. The Carlos Dengler I have the pleasure of speaking to has already given his opinions of that time, so it’s not a subject to expect much about in what follows here. [As a side note, I urge you to read his tremendous essay on Turn on the Bright Lights, Interpol’s monumental and now classic first album.]
With his new record ‘Private Earth’ now released, Carlos very kindly took the time to talk about his career to date, his new album, transitioning into acting, as well as New York vs Nature’s importance on him as a creative.
Read (and dear reader, I hope you like to read) this exclusive interview and delve into the creative mind of Carlos Dengler.
Carlos, we’ll get to your musical output later. First, I’d like to know about your ‘transition’ into acting. Has acting and the desire to appear on stage (or screen) always been ‘in you’? Did your desire to become an actor come prior to music?
I would say that, in a manner of speaking, acting has always been in my blood. I’ve spent a lifetime switching in between roles, defined by clothing, style, interests, taste, discipline, etc. Usually when the constellation of those factors shifts—and they’ve tended to shift with a frequency I haven’t seen in my peers—I dive in 150%. I think this is one major reason why I was attracted to acting after I left the music industry in 2010. It seemed to hold within its own practice this changing of roles which I’d been doing anyway in real life. It fostered an actual technique for that sort of thing and that attracted me very much. And, even though I’d not been conscious of any desire to pursue acting prior to the relatively late age of 35 back in 2010, when I began pursuing it, it felt like a perfectly natural, perhaps even familiar, endeavor to explore.
Do you see acting as a natural sibling to creative work such as music, and writing, and does a person usually have a ‘need’ to tackle as many creative projects as possible?
I don’t see acting as related to those other art forms any more than, say, painting. In fact, one of the reasons why I’ve chosen these three forms of expression in my life is precisely because they are so very different, at least to me they are. As for frequency of output, I’m actually fascinated by the fact that you can’t really correlate quantity with quality in the arts. There have been many great artists who are surprisingly prodigious and others who are more minimal. David Lynch has more or less ten films under his belt and the Cohen Bros., who started out later have probably three or four times as many films under their belt. You could fit the entire oeuvre of Anton Webern, a giant of 20th Century Viennese modernism, onto a CD even though it would take you twenty of them to put the same by his contemporary Stravinsky. And they’re all geniuses. It doesn’t really matter.
But in music, I love thinking of someone like Frank Zappa, who used the model of jazz and its exhortation to abandon preciousness so that the artist could simply lay something down onto tape and move on. Zappa used that model instead for rock. He didn’t permit the record labels to tell him when he could release something. He had his own metabolism and it was quicker than a chipmunk’s. You go to his Spotify and it’s overwhelming. I love that. It’s all just culture and expression.
How does that relate to your current work?
I’m trying to do the same with my current work, to stop trying to perfect every album, or construe it as the distillation of some years-long process, and just simply put it out there as an experiment, one that can succeed or fail, but whose success or failure has no impact whatsoever on the general output, because the artist has already moved on to the next experiment. It boggles my mind how an entire industry can gamble on the one 50-minute long expression of artistry that comes only once every three or so years in an artist’s output. I think it’s absolutely bonkers that all that money is put down on that bet and it also puts an incredible load of pressure on the artist. I say, just do stuff and move on. I love looking through the catalog of people like Miles Davis and just getting inundated with his output. It’s like looking at an entire life. When I see a pop band’s catalog, who’ve been around for ten years, and see only four albums, I always have to ask myself, “What were you doing in between those albums? Surfing in Maiorca? If so, why didn’t you release an album during that time that was inspired by surfing in Maiorca?” (I’m not certain if you can actually surf in Maiorca, it just came into my head).
Does someone like yourself ever have a ‘main focus’ in terms of output?
No. I have creative ADHD. It’s a horrible condition. I can never rest and I can never rely on my environment. I’m always moving. I hate it because it makes me miserable, but I have no choice. It’s the only thing I can do in this life. I simply can not tolerate focusing on just one form of expression. I’m too split. Every time I dive deeply into one tradition, I suddenly get nervous, like my oxygen tank is running out and I have to swim back up to the surface. I use the experience of focusing on three different forms of expression—acting, writing, and music—to inform whichever form of expression I happen to be using at any given time. The highly specific discoveries I make, while I’m acting, are discoveries that shine a light on a process I am experiencing as I’m searching for something while I’m writing, and so on and so forth.
From what I understand you’re based in New York, and speaking as an outsider – what is the scene like currently in NY for creatives and especially for you as you’re involved in productions which allow you to pursue an acting career?
When I was coming of age in the late ‘90s, there were many scenes you could choose from. You picked up the Village Voice, looked in the classified section for things going on at night and off you went to your scene of choice. Grandpa Dengler has no effing clue what “the kids” are doing these days because that system I just described is over. I suppose it all happens online which to an old fogey like me is absolutely bonkers. We are in a disembodied time. We are all cyborgs and have offloaded the connectivity of our bodies to the connectivity of ones and zeroes. I touch on this idea in one of my essays (“Bodies of the Night”) and I’m planning on fleshing that out even more when I adapt the essay for the book I’m writing.
There is one scene which I prefer to call a community that has been putting up what I like to call “process theater” at secret locations in the city and I feel grateful to have discovered it and to be contributing to it. I call it process theater because it’s theater that charges a ticket price for unfinished work. The point is to bring bodies together under one roof to express themselves as frequently as possible and see what happens next. So far, a lot of great stuff has happened and it is always being used for the next “process.” It is a complete rejection of the elitist, donor-based, patently absurd business model of the mainstream theater which charges ticket prices that only the wealthy can afford and only permits work to be shown that has undergone some arbitrary vetting process fueled by NGO-funded grants. You can guess what kind of material usually comes out of that process. I feel like Broadway and Off-Broadway have become expensive, high-class institutions. I guess it’s been that way for a long time, but it feels like you used to be able to see a lot of compelling theater more cheaply, at rundown experimental houses that are all now dying or gone. A lot of the stuff that is put up on stage in the theater district seems like it’s screaming “I was Properly Vetted.” Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe new stuff is on the way. I hope so.
On that note – Tell me about your current acting or film projects…
I just finished working on two tiny DIY theater productions that went up in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. The first one was called Daddy Issues and I played a cotton gin owner from mid-century Mississippi from a one-act by Tennessee Williams called 25 Wagons Full of Cotton. It was heavily adapted to fit the campy, hyper-sexualized theme of the entire evening of one-acts that it was part of so the name was changed to The Good Neighbor Policy which is a quote from the script. Then I was in a new work from a young playwright in the city where I played a dissociated English professor in an upper-middle class household in modern day Arlington, VA. The play is called Washington and it features an ensemble cast. The play is set on Christmas Eve in the home with family and it was a really intelligent and sincere and sad story about mental illness, college life and family dysfunction. Both of these productions were virtual non-budget affairs with all of the actors supplying props and costume and people doing favours by bringing their labour to the production, all part of the community, like late ‘60s Factory or early ‘80s No-Wave cinema. Just a bunch of hungry artists in the city desperate to work with each other and make compelling art in the raw. I was one of the older members of this community but it featured a varied group of actors and playwrights and directors nonetheless.
How have your career experiences or life influenced what choices you now make and the approach you now take?
I’m hungry to give answers to these kinds of questions that can help change the conversation around ongoing notions about why artists do what they do. I love it when I hear an artist clarify their previous work in a thoughtful way that gets you to see what they were trying to do in a different light. I feel really satisfied with the level to which I’ve honed my craft in music, writing and acting, to date. And it’s difficult for me to see how any of this would’ve been possible without my early career and even a lot of the explorations that I was undertaking as a young man that had preceded by early career. Before I was a club kid, I did a lot of writing and that fuels my writing today. And before Interpol blew up, I was doing a lot of synthesizer exploration which then turned into my keyboard instrumentation which I contributed to their oeuvre. And now I’m picking up where I left off there, as well.
I trained for a very long time as an actor and now when I get up and perform in front of folks I feel confident and like I’m expressing myself in an authentic way. For a while, I thought that I had to really push the idea that I was going to be this successful actor who was going to get cast in a TV show, but I realized that the reason why I was trying so hard to make that happen was because I wanted to influence public opinion about me. I wanted to do something about the way the public thought about me and that is not a legitimate artistic goal. My art is not my publicity.
Can you expand?
I always have to check this tendency of mine to try to manipulate public opinion. It strains from my time in front of so many eyeballs and when I was getting enough attention that it felt like I was having a conversation with the press and using the press to cultivate a persona. Most public figures do this sort of thing one way or another but I had to leave that all behind me as I went on these new explorations. It happens sometimes with the book I’m writing where I think “oh I should include this little bit because that’ll really help with sculpting the idea of myself I want people to have.” It’s such a pernicious and toxic element and it has no place in the creative process.
The pandemic was an essential component to the way that I rethought this whole idea. It took the world to shut down for me to abandon this type of public profile sculpture I was trying to do. Being at home and away from people made me surrender the quixotic effort to use my acting career as a replacement strategy for my old reputation. It deepened my writing craft because of all that time alone in front of the laptop. It also reunited me with something precious that I had built before I started acting school, which was my old home project studio which I’d had stowed away in boxes in storage. I took it all out and brought it to one of my bedrooms and dusted off all of my old gear and set it all back up again, replacing parts that had long gone obsolete. It’d been about ten years since I’d set up any of that recording and music production equipment and a lot of stuff had gone out of date. You should’ve seen some of the weird adaptors I had hooked up to make all the parts be able to talk to each other. But it was with the reconstruction of my project studio that I realized that one critical missing piece of my artistic palette had been ignored for way too long, the music composition side of my creative process and I’ve been going non-stop since.
Carlos, can you share what fuelled the making of ‘Private Earth’ and what you wanted to achieve?
About half of the material dates from the time when I was composing and recording Aqueduct, my first full-length. All of my work is atmospheric and my latest is no exception. However, it’s much more acoustic and live-sounding. My goal with this record was to create a New Age prog rock hybrid where the tracks are really long, epic and layered, like prog rock, but the textures are soothing and the chord changes are extremely simplified, like New Age. My main influence on this album was Patrick O’Hearn whose albums have these types of elements. Like me he comes to electronic music by way of the bass guitar (though he was steeped in jazz while I was steeped in rock). He made his debut playing with Zappa in the late ‘70s and I think that influences his compositions in the New Age genre in their grandeur and maximalism, something that prog rock excels at.
What interests you in this genre?
I’m fascinated by the ability of really broad strokes and by decorative art. I think New Age music is sort of the aural equivalent to landscape painting, in this regard. I love how someone can buy a really well painted landscape painting and put it up in your living room and forget about it but, every once in a while, come back to it and appreciate it. Private Earth tries to accomplish this, to paint a grand scene but one that easily slips into the background, a piece of art that is not designed for full conscious engagement. In this sense, I see my music as being the opposite of, say, classical music, which on the whole is a genre of music that demands unerring attentiveness.
To me a lot of your music is very cinematic, meditative, obviously atmospheric – do you have visions for doing soundtracks?
I’ve done some soundtrack work so far and I would love to do more. I definitely see what you mean about my music. Others have made the same comment. But it’s interesting because the stuff that comes out of me as a result of scoring to picture, as opposed to simply starting from scratch, is so very different than what’s on my albums. I love scoring for this reason because it disabuses me of the imperious self-talk while I’m composing of having to ego-identify with the output. I can just say that I’m fulfilling someone else’s vision and that this music doesn’t “represent” me, it represents the need for this picture to have an underscore.
This is why I try to achieve a decorative standard for my albums. The need to decorate takes precedence over my own psychological need to express myself. It’s a healthy craftsmanship that sets realistic standards and limits and enables others to come to the output by way of how closely the music meets those expectations. It creates a context for the artist and the audience.
What does taking trips into ‘the wild’ do for you—you seem to enjoy being ‘off the beaten track’—how does taking trips like that improve mental health or even benefit creativity? (Assuming it does—do you get ideas with such explorations?)
This is going to seem like shameless self-plugging, but I actually just finished writing a little bit about this very part of my life in the context of the book proposal I’m crafting to acquire a deal for my coming essay collection. The following is part of the chapter outline for an essay I’m tentatively titling “Land and Water” and I think it answers your question well:
“Hiking alone in the forests of New York and the national parks of the West, I was initially gripped by a collection of fears. Fear of bears, fear of the cold, fear of starvation, fear of getting lost, fear of disappearing, fear of being forgotten, fear of being alone. It wasn’t always fun and worrying often kept me from enjoying myself. One time, hiking in the Gulf Hagas canyon of upper Maine, I happened upon a middle-aged woman standing next to a waterfall with eyes shut and the sun glowing in her face, in a state of total unity with her environment. She became my inspiration, my psychological goal. I stayed the course, despite being far out of my depths, holding on through solitary physical and psychological tests. Confronting my fears, I came to see them as irrational. The woods sublimated a lesser part of myself.
I hadn’t intended for this exposure to Mother Nature’s feminine embrace and for my achievement of a new, heathy masculinity to yield access to a new creative process. That hadn’t been the point, but it was one of the benefits all the same. Going through these trials had dynamited my psychic edifice as a miner dynamites a cliff. I returned home after every backpacking trip with precious unrefined ore to use for new creations. It was a boon for my artistic process, yielding musical, theater and literary creations that are far more reflective, meditative and vulnerable than the art of my youth.
My creative process in my early career, aligned as it was with a certain punk rock spirit, had grown from the hardened, stifling grids of the urban environment and sought, in the spirit of creative destruction, to grenade them. It was a potent form of expression and a compelling one, too.
But Nature was the next step for me. I was asking questions that couldn’t be answered in the city. It didn’t feel authentic to continue on that way. The curvature of the trees, the abolition of Euclid out in the wild, gave me access to an organic healing center within me, maybe for the very first time in my life, I learned how to relax.”
Can you provide any update on your forthcoming book? Is it a memoir? And I know these things take time, but what are you adding to your story?—You’re still very young, so maybe that has an influence on wanting to close a chapter, so to speak.
Thanks for calling me “so very young”! I was depressed up until just now when I read that in your question, so you’ve lifted my spirits for the rest of the day. You’re absolutely correct that a major element to the writing of my book—if not the most important element—is the desperate need to close a chapter. Firstly, however, I want to make sure I’m clear in saying that I’m not writing a memoir, but a personal essay collection. The distinction is material in that a personal essay demands much more objectivity than a memoir. The best essays ask deep questions that open pathways for the reader to reconsider key subjects of the human experience. Personal essays have to walk the fine line between providing autobiographical content while adhering to that definition. When they’re done well, like in the case of someone like Leslie Jamison, they are profound and exalting experiences. I aim to do something similar with my collection.
All of those questions which I will be asking in my essays—and, critically, NOT answering, because an important and beautiful aspect of essay writing is to allow questions to be asked without too much stridency and answering—are essentially geared around the question of authenticity, both in the creative process and the developmental one. It’s going to be, as well, an exploration of reflective masculinity, since so very much of my experience was motivated by questions of “manhood” and adult, male individuation.
Right now, it looks like I’ll be finishing my manuscript in December, and I expect to have a book deal by then.
Last question – about you know what (sorry, I simply had to) – what are your thoughts here and now, now you admit you feel older, about your time in Interpol?
I will always have such fond memories of that time. I experienced a lifetime’s worth of excitement and fun and exhilaration touring the globe, meeting such interesting people from all walks of life and creating music that touched the hearts of so many. As with all of the journeys I’ve gone on, life has been made all the richer as a result.
Carlos, thank you for your time.
Carlos Dengler’s new record ‘Private Earth’ is out now and you can purchase via his Bandcamp page or listen via Spotify .
Lula Is In Trouble: “I consider myself a loner with a lot of imagination”
Sometimes one comes across an interviewee who really understands the attraction of mystery. This is the case with Lula Is In Trouble (real name undisclosed). Fine details are not to be found with this artist, one of the few I’ve ever come to be really interested in via the plagued medium that is social media. Something we can establish is that Lula, as I’ll call her for short, is a brilliant photographer and graphic artist with friends in hip and extremely cool places; Her relationship with the tremendous filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is one which I try to delve into, but alas, with no real insight. Still, what follows is a fascinating (critics may say ‘limited’) study of a real creative and someone who seems to have no limits when it comes to artistic output. If nothing else, I strongly recommend you check her work.
A brief chat with the enigma that is ‘Lula Is In Trouble’ follows:
You’re heavily into producing photography, music, and artwork. How would you describe yourself in your artistry and what you create?
I’d say I’m heavily into everything that helps me craft a surreal, fantasy world. Any medium is fine for me. Photography, illustrations, music, collages…I study and experiment continuously. If the result looks like art to others, then I’m an artist. Personally, I consider myself a loner with a lot of imagination.
Do you often have conceptual ideas for the work you produce? For example, you’ve proven again and again that you, the woman, yourself, are important as a study…
Most of the time the idea is born, grows, and stays in the back of my mind for a while. Then suddenly that idea becomes a feeling and when that happens I throw it out. I try to make it concrete. It’s difficult to explain. Every artist has their own process I guess. Mine looks a lot like a headache. Yes, the women I portray always look like me. But am I all those women? Are we looking for the same thing? Seeking the same peace? I really don’t know. My girls are on a journey. I like to document it. See where it leads. How does it end?
How do you go about transforming an idea into a conclusion?
There is little rationality in my process of transforming an idea into a work. The technicalities always come later. But the idea is like a bullet. It can’t be stopped.
How did you start – in terms of creating the work you do – what was it that made you begin?
I can’t remember a moment in my life I didn’t spend in the company of art. I’ve always been an ‘atypical’ child. I used to zoom out a lot when teachers or classmates talked to me. Never really enjoyed others people’s company, since childhood. I’ve always preferred books and music. Art in general. I don’t think I ever wanted to emulate anyone. I’m more interested in trying to express the turmoil I always felt inside. I’m not particularly good at communicating in words. And that’s why I chose art.
What would you most like to photograph or use for your art?
I do have a photographic project that is very dear to me; the subject is delicate and I don’t feel like talking about it now. We’ll see when (and if) the project will take form.
Please let me know when you want to talk about it. Regarding your work, what is it that interests you most to allow you to create?
The need to be seen and at the same time to hide from the world is what drives me to make art. Perhaps it is difficult to explain.
What’s given you that very particular style, theme, and overall genre to allow you to produce what you do?
Some of my influences are more or less explicit, but let me tell you this: social media distort reality. People call me “Lynchian”, see references to Lynch films and style in almost everything I do. But it’s other people’s perspective, not mine. Don’t get me wrong, I love Lynch. I love his films, I love his paintings, but I rarely think about other people’s art when I make mine. I feel flattered when someone tells me that what I do reminds them of David Lynch or other established artists, but it’s not my goal. It’s art itself that influences me. To say it better, it’s a thousand ways art can communicate something that truly inspires me. The absurdity of life inspires me. Love, pain, despair. Human behavior. Especially human behavior. Humans are weird creatures.
How important is beauty in relation to your work?
Humanity is important in the concepts I share through my artwork. The “beauty” you talk about it’s just a trick by which I attract the viewer. Something pleasant for the eyes that will likely get a disturbing second view. I want my audience to be forced to watch and rewatch until they see that what’s lying underneath the surface might differ from what they think.
Do you have a muse?
I have a source of inspiration that transcends the concept of “muse”.
When does a work of art become important? Do you need external confirmation, or is it something explicitly personal?
Oh, I definitely need external confirmation [haha!] Not in art though. Once an artwork is finished, I give it to the world. I’m not even jealous of my art. Also, what does external confirmation mean, these days? Many likes? Social engagement? More followers? I don’t understand these things. I create something and put it out. People see it and it often has a completely different meaning to them. It’s fascinating. I do my little things, but the audience always adds something that comes from their own heart. I love that.
What kind of artistry interests you the most, or what is it you do? What is it you find most stimulating and worth pursuing?
Analogic photography is so incredibly fascinating. Even errors in analogic photography are amazing. They can create a whole new world. And the developing process is so exciting…
Your photography work is very cinematic. Iconic. Is that intentional or accidental?
Probably both. I always say that, in my next life, I would like to be a DOP. What a fascinating profession. I studied photography, and the use of light is essential to create a particular atmosphere. Preparing a scene, “a set”, is a moment that I love very much. The influence of cinema is strong, of course. Cinema is an amazing medium. Whether it’s more or less sneaky, I like to mention the cinematic world in my shots. In film, everything is possible! But sometimes accidents happen and from them, you can create something new and unexpected. And it’s so good when that happens. An adventure inside an adventure!
This would bring me to a huge favorite in terms of movie directors—Jim Jarmusch. What’s your relationship or connection with Jarmusch – I noticed some social media images with his band Squrl.
Oh, Jim! He’s such a humble person and a supportive friend. And he makes some very funny impersonations! Having one of my illustrations hanging in his writing room still feels surreal to me.
Do you consider the photos of your art also artworks in and of themselves?
It’s all part of the same journey, yes.
What music is currently stirring your senses?
I’m currently listening to a lot of harp concerts. To be totally honest, my playlist is confusing. You have Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but also Angelo Branduardi. Julee Cruise’s angel voice but also 80s heavy metal. What can I say, I have multiple personalities with different tastes probably [ahah!] Jokes aside, the range of music I listen to is wide. But I pour a little “Sleepwalkers” by David Sylvian into my life every day. That is a flawless record. I absolutely adore it. All my personalities do!
Lastly, can you tell me about any projects you’re working on you’d like to promote?
In early 2020 (pre-pandemic) I composed some tunes for a short film, hope to see it released sometime this year. I’m a self-taught musician, not a particularly gifted one. But writing music is one of the most therapeutic activities I’ve ever experienced. Wish I had more time ( and more instruments) to focus on that. I wrote an opening theme for a podcast last year. I loved doing that. It’s called “Midnight Coffee”. A jazzy tune for night people.
Olivier De Sagazan: “I can only answer you with my creations, not with words.”
“I run every day, running is like an amplifier of presence for me, a time to reconnect with myself and the world. The sound of footsteps and breathing already creates music and incites the beginning of a dance.” Olivier De Sagazan.
Olivier De Sagazan blurs the lines between sculpture, painting, and performance, between surrealist dreams and your worst anxiety-ridden nightmares. The phrase ‘the art of decline‘ easily comes to mind when I look at his work. However, I’m told this observation is somewhere between cliche and ‘old hat’ when I put this to De Sagazan himself. I’m delighted to be told I’m wrong even though I’m correct! What cannot be denied, however, is that De Sagazan uses himself and others as a canvas, vehicles for expression. For me, De Sagazan recalls some of filmmaker David Cronenberg’s most complex ‘body-horror’ material, and the more I look through his creations, the more I find cinematic splendor. – namely, Apocalypse Now and Colonel Kurtz’s famous lament, ‘The horror, the horror’.
In this exclusive, brief yet fascinating interview, I do my best to get the slightest sense, the mildest hint of what goes through De Sagazan’s head and what makes him the artist he is. Although unsurprisingly, we barely scratch the surface.
Mr De Sagazan. You often talk about culture and fear, and the impact of each. Can culture have a stronger effect than fear?
I think that with age, people like me generally learn to lose interest in or be less affected by fear. Culture and art are the things that motivate and interest me most. As far as I’m concerned, the world isn’t at all screwed up. There are certainly people who make a pact with the devil, i.e. with the economic concept of endless growth and who have no empathy for our planet, but the important thing is to see, each at our own level, how we can act to become aware of our community of interest with our environment.
What does your experience as a biologist bring to your art?
I still have a biologist’s eye, which helps me enormously in my artistic work. For me, there has to be a connection between a work of art and a living organism. When you look at a sculpture, you have to feel its presence, and it has to be like an active fetish.
Your work seems to me to focus on horror rather than beauty – but at the same time, your work has a certain beauty, if that makes sense.
“Beauty is the last step before the terrible.” said the poet Rilke, and here we must understand that beauty is the feeling that everything can change at any moment, and that it therefore lies in this acute awareness of our fragility. There’s nothing mortifying about my work, just a sense of urgency as I try to awaken my eyes and my whole being. Most people only look at my work in the first degree, i.e. that boy who disfigures faces must be a violent, mentally ill type. I have to admit I’m dismayed by such considerations.
What do you think an artist like yourself does, or what effect does it have on the wider political or cultural landscape?
I hope that my images will produce an awakening of thought. I think we’re living in a kind of trivialization of reality, and the aim of art is to shake us out of this torpor. But I’m an artist, not a political scientist.
You’ve said previously that you were religious when you were younger. As you get older, do you ever feel that same longing for religion or divinity coming back?
It happens to a lot of people, including me who’s always been an atheist, but as I get older, I start to feel the need to believe in something. Maybe it has something to do with Freud and his essay “The Future of an Illusion”: as long as we are aware of our own mortality, we can always be attracted by the idea of an afterlife, and so on. Yes, there’s always the return of the repressed, but I’m on my guard. The tragedy of religions is their tendency to want to explain everything, and in this, they become a poison that freezes you in your certainties.
What are your major personal traumas that keep you working and being creative? Or even your own personal triumphs?
I left my father’s faith at the age of 20. It was very hard at first, but then I realized that if life had no meaning, I would give it meaning by finding one, and that gave me enormous energy.
Do you believe in the meaning of “the art of decadence” or “the art of decline”? I like that expression and I think of that when I look at your work.
No, it’s an old concept that comes up regularly, as in the last century with Max Nordeau …
Which philosophers are most important to you, and why?
Aristotle with his key concept that the foundation of the soul is touch. Then came phenomenologists like Merleau Ponty, who went so far as to think that this inner touch would already be present in matter too, hence that wonderful concept of the flesh of the world that I love so much. So there would already be a form of sensitivity in the earth and matter in general.
Which work has been most important to you?
My inaugural gesture was to go and physically enter my work, to cover myself with clay and paint, to become with my body a kind of hybrid between art and reality, or rather to abolish this separation between art and reality so that everything becomes art. Thus was born my performance ‘Transfiguration’. ‘Transfiguration’ is a good example. I wanted to bring one of my sculptures to life, and I’d been working on it for weeks with no results.
What was your life like in the Congo, where you were born? What was it about Central Africa that inspires you?
Central Africa is my cradle in the poetic sense and in terms of my inspiration. What I love about African art, and primitive art in general, is the immediate link with life, in the sense that there is no separation between the two. In the belly of a Teke sculpture, there are pieces of the deceased, and so there is life after death for the deceased and peace for the living. Masks and sculptures are like crutches to help them walk through the “night” and go further in their perception of the world. That’s how I understand art too.
What are your main motivations?
We’re still trying to get out of this collective hallucination that makes us believe that everything down here is normal, that it’s normal to be born, normal to exist, normal to die, and that the world has no mystery left in it. I don’t know, I hope to produce a kind of jolt or awakening to the strangeness of the world, to give it a metaphysical dimension.
Do you have any regrets about the work you’ve created or things you would have done differently with experience?
I [have previously] probably lacked method and always moved forward instinctively. But assurance that has enabled me to push my experiments further and harder.
What projects are taking up your time?
I’m still pursuing my research in painting and sculpture, which still fascinates me. I’m also preparing an opera on Mozart’s Mass in C with Roland Auzet and the Limoges Opera for February 2024.
Mr De Sagazan, anything to add?
I can only answer you with my creations, not with words.
Milan Kundera (1929-2023) specialized in writing about philosophy, women, memory, love, sex, life’s absurdities, melancholia, betrayal, loss, communism, nostalgia, and most importantly, sex, lust, love, and women. At this current moment, with the loss of this most life-changing of authors (for me at least), I’m struggling for words to summarise his importance. Rather, I’ll just let you sample the greatest and profoundly heart-breaking passages yours truly has ever read. And yes, for those reading who know me, it involves the death of a dog.
“Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. Karenin walked on three legs and spent more and more of his time lying in a corner. And whimpering. Both husband and wife agreed that they had no business letting him suffer needlessly. But agree as they might in principle, they still had to face the anguish of determining the time when his suffering was in fact needless, the point at which life was no longer worth living.
If only Tomas hadn’t been a doctor! Then they would have been able to hide behind a third party. They would have been able to go back to the vet and ask him to put the dog to sleep with an injection.
Assuming the role of Death is a terrifying thing. Tomas insisted that he would not give the injection himself; he would have the vet come and do it. But then he realised that he could grant Karenin a privilege forbidden to humans: Death would come for him in the guise of his loved ones.
Karenin had whimpered all night. After feeling his leg in the morning, Tomas said to Tereza, “There’s no point in waiting.”
In a few minutes they would both have to go to work. Tereza went in to see Karenin. Until then, he had lain in his corner completely apathetic (not even acknowledging Tomas when he felt his leg), but when he heard the door open and saw Tereza come in, he raised his head and looked at her.
She could not stand his stare; it almost frightened her. he did not look that way at Tomas, only at her. But never with such intensity. It was not a desperate look, or even sad. No, it was a look of awful, unbearable trust. The look was an eager question. All his life Karenin had waited for answers from Tereza, and he was letting her know (with more urgency than usual, however) that he was still ready to learn the truth from her. (Everything that came from Tereza was the truth. Even when she gave commands like “Sit!” or “Lie down!” he took them as truths to identify with, to give his life meaning.)
His look of awful trust did not last long; he soon laid his head back down on his paws. Tereza knew that no one ever again would look at her like that.
They had never fed him sweets, but recently she had bought him a few chocolate bars. She took them out of the foil, broke them into pieces, and made a circle of them around him. Then she brought over a bowl of water to make sure that he had everythng he needed for the several hours he would spend at home alone. The look he had given her just then seemed to have tired him out. Even surrounded by the chocolate, he did not raise his head.
She lay down on the floor next to him and hugged him. With a slow and laboured turn of his head, he sniffed her and gave her a lick or two. She closed her eyes while the licking went on, as if she wanted to remember it forever. She held out the other cheek to be licked.
Then she had to go and take care of her heifers. She did not return until just before lunch. Tomas had not come home yet. Karenin was still lying on the floor surrounded by the chocolate, and did not even lift his head when he heard her come in. His bad leg was swollen now, and the tumour had burst in another place. She noticed some light red (noy blood-like) drops forming beneath his fur.
Again she lay next to him on the floor. She stretched one arm across his body and closed her eyes. Then she heard someone banging at the door. “Doctor! Doctor! The pig is here! The pig and his master!” She lacked strenth to talk to anyone, and did not move, did not open her eyes. “Doctor! Doctor! The pigs have come!” Then silence.
Tomas did not get back for another half hour. He went straight to the kitchen and prepared the injection without a word. When he entered the room, Tereza was on her feet and Karenin was picking himself up. As soon as he saw Tomas, he gave him a weak wag of his tail.
“Look,” said Tereza, “he’s still smiling.”
She said it beseechingly, trying to win a short reprieve, but did not push for it.
Slowly she spread a sheet out over the couch. It was a white sheet with a pattern of tiny violets. She had everything carefully laid out and thought out, having imagined Karenin’s death many days in advance. (Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!)
He no longer had the strength to jump up on the couch. They picked him up in their arms together. Tereza laid him on his side, and Tomas examined one of his good legs. He was looking for a more or less prominent vein. Then he cut away the fur with a pair of scissors.
Tereza knelt by the couch and held Karenin’s head close to her own.
Tomas asked her to squeeze the leg because he was having trouble sticking the needle in. She did as she was told, but did not move her face from his head. She kept talking gently to Karenin, and he thought only of her. He was not afraid. He licked her face two more times. And Tereza kept whispering, “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, you won’t feel any pain there, you’ll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you’ll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don’t be scared…”
Tomas jabbed the needle into the vein and pushed the plunger. Karenin’s leg jerked; his breath quickened for a few seconds then stopped. Tereza remained on the floor by the couch and buried her face in his head.
Then they both had to go back to work and leave the dog laid out on the couch, on the white sheet with tiny violets.
They came back towards evening. Tomas went into the garden. He found the lines of the rectangle that Tereza had drawn with her heel between the two apple trees. Then he started digging. He kept precisely to her specifications. He wanted everything to be just as Tereza wished.
She stayed in the house with Karenin. She was afraid of burying him alive. She put her ear to his mouth and thought she heard a weak breathing sound. She stepped back and seemed to see his breast moving slightly.
(No, the breath she heard was her own, and because it set her own body ever so slightly in motion, she had the impression the dog was moving.)
She found a mirror in her bag and held it up to his mouth. The mirror was so smudged she thought she saw drops on it, drops caused by his breath.
“Tomas! He’s alive!” she cried, when Tomas came in from the garden in his muddy boots.
Tomas bent over him and shook his head.
They each took an end of the sheet he was lying on, Tereza the lower end, Tomas the upper. Then they lifted him up and carried him out to the garden.
The sheet felt now wet to Tereza’s hands. He puddled his way into our lives and now he’s puddling his way out, she thought, and she was glad to feel the moisture on her hands, his final greeting.
They carried him to the apple trees and set him down. She leaned over the pit and arranged the sheet so that it covered him entirely. It was unbearable to think of the earth they would soon be throwing over him, raining down on his naked body.
Then she went into the house and came back with his collar, his leash, and a handful of the chocolate that had lain untouched on the floor since morning. She threw it all in after him.
Next to the pit was a pile of freshly dug earth. Tomas picked up the shovel.
Just then Tereza recalled her dream: Karenin giving birth to two rolls and a bee. Suddenly the words sounded like an epitaph. She pictured a monument standing there, between the apple trees, with the inscription Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee.”
Excerpt from ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera (1929-2023). RIP.
Prussia Snailham “I’m reading my diary out loud. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious.”
[UPDATED 12 July 2023] Prussia Snailham is fucking wonderful, in case you wondered. And I feel totally privileged, maybe one day verified, at having the chance to talk to such a tremendous and talented ‘new’ musical and visual artist. I say that because she is not currently signed with a record deal, which is a catastrophe, and does not have any music on the usual mainstream outlets like Spotify or iTunes. Instead, you can sample her work on Bandcamp, YouTube or catch her sounds in a live setting – which I would urge you to do so. So please do it at the next given chance. The following interview took place over a few weeks via email which I believe will give you, dear readers, a great insight into the mind, workings and talent of an artist I know will go very far. Think Lady Gaga, Perfume Genius or Broadcast being covered by Radiohead with a slight taste of Buckfast tonic wine. What’s not to love?
On her Bandcamp page, she describes herself or is described as creating ‘karaoke sermons’, with an output that is ‘non-defined, for it’s constantly evolving’.
“Based in GLA, Prussiahas spent the last 3 years quietly cultivating a dedicated fanbase & self-released an impressive catalogue of DIY videos on YT. A POP SENSATION with an edge. Her music soundtracks all feelings & there’s constant apprehension that it all may be capable of falling in on itself!”
Upon listening I think that sums her up better than I ever could, for I am truly still overcome having recently witnessed her live deliverance which is absolutely magical. I shit you not.
Enjoy the following.
Prussia, first of all – Prussia Snailham – I would love it if that was your real name, is it? Side note: I read Karl Marx was born in Prussia. Boring fact for you.
I’m very happy to tell you that Prussia Snailham is my real, birth name. ‘Prussia’ after the failed German state (my dad’s idea) and ‘Snailham’ is an old English name.
I understand you used to play football. What was your position and were you any good? The wonderful writer Albert Camus was a great goalkeeper, apparently.
Goodness, that’s a blast from the past… I don’t play football anymore but I think about it often and still love it – love to play it, not watch it as they’re all just a bunch of posers now in my opinion… I was left defence or left mid/wing… I really enjoyed tackling people!! I think I was alright, I was bloody relentless and so strong back then!
Do you have plans to make your music more widely available, online I mean – I’m a Spotify man, but I can’t really find your tunes aside from on your YouTube. My cousin is in a band and tells me that putting music on a platform like Spotify is expensive.
Hmm, I haven’t heard that putting tunes on Spotify is expensive but it is a bit technical and definitely stressful… or that side of music stresses me the fuck out! I’m just trying to find the best way to do it that makes ME happy, and the least anxious, because MAKING the music is the only thing I truly care about! And with that, I am actually planning another video series, which will be out on YouTube! YouTube is my absolute favourite way of sharing my work nowadays – I made a video series during covid and loved it. I definitely think music with a visual is best! So yes, lots planned and lots a-coming! The first video in my new series will be released June 18th. I am making a video series to songs I have written. I want to do one a month for the rest of the year. ‘Mess at Best’ is the first one and the imagery is from/based on Snow White – the other videos include crab meat, orcas, Pocahontas, and birds… all made by me using Final Cut Pro.
Are you signed currently to a label to put out any official music and if so/ or not, what does the future hold for that?
I am currently not signed to a label but if you know anyone? I would NEVER say no to that type of opportunity! But I’ll still write and sing and play and share my music forever regardless of that kinda thing.
Who’s your most valued or important collaboration? is it your intention to be more of a solo artist?
I am a solo artist through and through! I have worked with a couple of people over the years, and definitely enjoyed it and learnt from it, but the most important thing it taught me, is that I like my solitude and I truly work best completely on my own. Like, no-one-else-can-even-be-in-the-house alone! Just so I can be totally honest and ruthless with myself lyrically… I would never say never but my work is so personal… And I think that’s what makes it decent and relatable… I’m reading my diary out loud, ya know? I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious.
Do you work with anyone to help on the production side of your work at the moment? Green Door Studios in Finnieston is a place where tons of great Glasgow-based bands tend to end up (Thinking mainly about Jacob Yates/ Rosy Crucifixion / Amazing Snakeheads etc.)
I’ve been over to Green Door a good few times and it’s a great wee place! Ronan and Sam have the patience of saints because I know I am annoying… haha. All my production is me though. I have no help and don’t really want it… I know what I like and I know what I want! I’m shit at engineering though! I’ll hold my hands up and say I desperately need help in that department! But it’s just me, my laptop, my nord, my Rode mic and my vocal pedal–less is ALWAYS AND FOREVER will be more – Orson Welles: “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”
Can you tell me about your relationship with the wonderful band PreGoblin? ( Have you seen their remake of the Shawshank Redemption with Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family? It’s bloody hilarious.)
I met Alex Sebley and Jessica Winter in 2019 when they played in Glasgow during a wee UK tour and I’ve stayed in touch with Alex since – he’s a genuine great soul, who just wants everyone to succeed, which is hard to find! He’s been tremendously encouraging of me and my music. Shall I just be painfully honest and say I haven’t…? I’ve seen the odd clip! Shall I just be painfully honest and say I haven’t…?
And of course, you also recently opened for them and Peter Doherty – How did that all come about?
I literally got a phone call from Alex the day before the gig to tell me I had got the support slot – it was fucking nuts and probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had! Pete was just chill and lovely – we spoke briefly about flat Earth and had a fish curry. He spoke to me about my music, my songwriting, my voice and I appreciate him greatly for bothering/wanting to do that because he didn’t have to, ya know? He’s a busy guy and everyone was wanting his attention, as you can imagine. Truthfully, I spent more time with his dogs than him though, but that was equally as amazing.
Are you still doing open mics and where can someone expect to find you?
I am determined to get back into the open mic scene! Old Bohemia (Marc and his girlfriend, who are just the sweetest people) put on open mics in the west-end Thursdays and Sundays! And Broadcast open mics are crazy friendly and encouraging – I would recommend them for any newbies!
What’s the best way you find on getting your music ‘out there’ and especially when it comes to a live setting, how do you go about booking gigs etc? Is it just down to the old thing of ‘who you know’/ ‘quality of work’?
It is 1000% who you know! And it is hard, I won’t lie. I do not know what I’m doing and to be candid, the more business side of music doesn’t interest me… I want to write and produce and make videos!!! Gigging is of course thrilling and fun and great exposure, but I don’t have that same itch to gig that I see in other people… I think everyone should just do what makes them tick, and as long as you are being unapologetically authentic, life will find a way to fall into place. We have to believe true art will always wiggle its way through and prevail!
Are you self-taught on musical instruments – how did you start?
Self-taught! When I was around 15 my dad showed me Ludovico Einaudi and gave me his old keyboard and from there I started learning and writing compositions – I tried to write lyrics but I was absolutely rotten at it… but I never stopped trying and it wasn’t until I was around 21 that I finally wrote my song called ‘Take it Easy’ and something just clicked and I was like, ‘wait… I think this is MY thing. ‘Take it Easy’ does still exist – don’t all songs always exist? haha, it may or may not be part of the video series… I wrote it about a boy that had undeserving power over me a very long time ago.
Do you drink or use drugs to assist creativity? Do you really enjoy Buckfast (Bucky as we call it in Glasgow) OH YUCH (my opinion!)
I may have a blunt while editing/producing a tune but it goes no further than that, and I would never write or perform while drunk or on anything, because I genuinely struggle to sing in tune once I’ve got a drink in me – my relationship with drink and drugs worries me sometimes and I write about it a lot… The only way it “assists” me, is it gives me situations I’ve found myself in to write about! (and yeah, who doesn’t LOVE Bucky!?)
What path are you on? Sorry, that’s a bit of a philosophical question but I have a habit of these!
Cliché, but I just want to be happy. I want to make the younger me so proud of the person I’ve become, ya know?! I also want to get really fit and strong and flexible. The older I get the more important my physical health becomes to me. I think I ultimately just want to finally know how to look after myself and genuinely fall in love with looking after myself.
What made you turn to music? Who were the artists you found early in your life to maybe make you decide ‘ok I want to do that, and I can’?
Kate Bush, Massive Attack, Ludovico Einaudi, Regina Spektor, and Bon Iver are my top 5 (don’t hold me to that!) but they didn’t make me decide to make music. I honestly don’t know what did… I just kinda stumbled into it because it was so therapeutic, and to be cliché, I found writing the best way, and sometimes the only way, to express myself. A lot of the time I found I was sitting down to write a song about something really specific, and then when I’d be finished, I’d realise that I’d written about something completely different… So, I actively started to write in order to figure out how I was feeling. I kept this all very private for a long time too, before I eventually showed it to someone close to me and they told me, ‘to not share art is selfish’ and I thought about that for a while and ultimately agreed!
I think you have an amazing natural voice if you don’t mind me saying. Your cover of ‘Cry Me A River’ is tremendous. Maybe related to another question here, when did you find that voice?
Woah, how did you find that…? I must be 20/21 in that video. And thank you! To be honest, I always knew I could sing from a young age but being able to sing isn’t hard because you are either born able to sing or you aren’t, in my opinion! I know I’ve definitely found my own sound and style though. I acknowledge, understand and really emphasise the distinctiveness, the accents and the cadences in my voice. And you mustn’t be afraid to be “weird” and do things “wrong”. I love a good grunt, gasp or clack of the tongue while singing, You know!?
Where does your own (well-substantiated) confidence stem from?
Can you recall the time when you first started playing in front of people – or maybe the first gig which helped you grow?
My mum always told me to channel my nervous energy into my performance and use it as motivation because, if you aren’t nervous, it means you don’t care! And I always remind myself before I play, in front of anyone, that I would rather try and fail than not try at all, and I am not doing this for anyone else other than myself.
Aside from animals and life, are there any other main themes you’re writing about in your work?
There definitely seems to be a theme of water and the colour green in my writing… I love writing about the mundanity of life – the simplest of things that mean so much at the end of the day… food and eating, communication, honesty, death… I write a lot about relationships and love – be that romantic, sexual or mother-daughter love; also fearing love, etc… It’s very hard not to write about love and pain!
What’s the biggest blocker or hurdle you have to overcome as an artist?
Don’t mix business with pleasure, and that’s all I want to say about that…
Right. The boring and standard question now which I always ask artists, but the response is always interesting. Give me your main influences – this can be artistic or even just from life.
I get most of my influence and inspiration from films and TV – I watch films and TV way more than I listen to music… I religiously re-watch The Fifth Element, Big Fish, The Lady in the Water, Legend, Ever After, Unbreakable… I could keep going…! I also like to travel with my headphones on but with no music and listen to strangers talk because people say such poetry without realising it. My mum and dad inspire me a lot too.
What are you most curious about or interested in?
Curious is an interesting word… True crime, competitive weight lifting (watching not doing), conspiracy theories like the ‘Mandala Effect’ – I am also a hat and jacket collector! I cannot step foot in a charity shop without buying a hat and/or jacket.
What is it you find so interesting about weightlifting?!?
Weightlifting is just amazing – it’s so impressive and crazy inspiring! People and our bodies are capable of so much – you should watch this.
I’m not in your world as I’m not a musician – what’s the toughest part of it all?
Social media 100% (and I hate it) I’ve always been such a believer in ‘the music will do the talking’ but with social media, you have to be a personality, constantly pushes out “content” and appearing so cool and unbothered! Even just captioning Instagram posts, I used to get so stressed out that I wasn’t saying the ‘right’ thing… Bloody stupid and sad how important all that stuff is.
Its been years since I was always in Glasgow city centre constantly going to gigs. Because I’m ancient, I view that time as one of the best of live music – I was at every Amazing Snakeheads, Fat White Family, gig etc – who are the bands these days I need to get my arse up and go check out, apart from yourself obviously?
Now, see, I suck because I don’t know… I don’t really go out much but if I do, I usually hit up Audio, Flying Duck or Broadcast and try and catch a Cenote, Jungle Testaments, Bass Injection or Midnight Bass night! I looooooooove a good skank!
What do you do with yourself when you’re not making music?
I work front of house at a tattoo parlour, so I do all the bookings, admin, customer service, etc. and I honestly love it! I’m pretty anal, so I LOVE organisation, planning, spreadsheets, to-do lists! There’s nothing more satisfying than writing a list and ticking it off! But I’ve also been getting back to the gym lately and I love a good circuit class, cross-fit style!
What’s next for you – please self-promote as you see fit!
Gigs!! I’m playing in London for the first time at the end of June and then I’ll be at Endless Summer in Glasgow at the start of July and also playing at Youth Beatz this year too! I’m playing in London on June 29th at Jaguar Shoes, supporting Speedial. I got asked to after the Pete Docherty And hopefully, the gigs will just keep snowballing from there! And of course, my video series is a-coming (June 18th!) which I’m so fucking pumped for!
Prussia, thank you!
Keep up to date with all things Prussia Snailham on her instagram
And you can listen to her visual and musical output on her YouTube channel
Carlos Dengler: “I can never rest and I can never rely on my environment. I’m always moving.”
By his own admission, Carlos Dengler suffers from ‘creative ADHD’. It’s a condition he says makes him miserable, which I can understand. On the plus though, it is a side of his nature, given the quality and quantity of his creative output, I would argue that has been put to tremendous use over the years. Carlos Dengler has proven himself as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer of essays, and over the past few years, a respected screen and stage actor in his own right.
I dare say many readers here will be well familiar with the name ‘Carlos D’, the former Interpol bassist who played a pivotal role in the success and creation of that group’s first three (and best) records. The Carlos Dengler I have the pleasure of speaking to has already given his opinions of that time, so it’s not a subject to expect much about in what follows here. [As a side note, I urge you to read his tremendous essay on Turn on the Bright Lights, Interpol’s monumental and now classic first album.]
With his new record ‘Private Earth’ now released, Carlos very kindly took the time to talk about his career to date, his new album, transitioning into acting, as well as New York vs Nature’s importance on him as a creative.
Read (and dear reader, I hope you like to read) this exclusive interview and delve into the creative mind of Carlos Dengler.
Carlos, we’ll get to your musical output later. First, I’d like to know about your ‘transition’ into acting. Has acting and the desire to appear on stage (or screen) always been ‘in you’? Did your desire to become an actor come prior to music?
I would say that, in a manner of speaking, acting has always been in my blood. I’ve spent a lifetime switching in between roles, defined by clothing, style, interests, taste, discipline, etc. Usually when the constellation of those factors shifts—and they’ve tended to shift with a frequency I haven’t seen in my peers—I dive in 150%. I think this is one major reason why I was attracted to acting after I left the music industry in 2010. It seemed to hold within its own practice this changing of roles which I’d been doing anyway in real life. It fostered an actual technique for that sort of thing and that attracted me very much. And, even though I’d not been conscious of any desire to pursue acting prior to the relatively late age of 35 back in 2010, when I began pursuing it, it felt like a perfectly natural, perhaps even familiar, endeavor to explore.
Do you see acting as a natural sibling to creative work such as music, and writing, and does a person usually have a ‘need’ to tackle as many creative projects as possible?
I don’t see acting as related to those other art forms any more than, say, painting. In fact, one of the reasons why I’ve chosen these three forms of expression in my life is precisely because they are so very different, at least to me they are. As for frequency of output, I’m actually fascinated by the fact that you can’t really correlate quantity with quality in the arts. There have been many great artists who are surprisingly prodigious and others who are more minimal. David Lynch has more or less ten films under his belt and the Cohen Bros., who started out later have probably three or four times as many films under their belt. You could fit the entire oeuvre of Anton Webern, a giant of 20th Century Viennese modernism, onto a CD even though it would take you twenty of them to put the same by his contemporary Stravinsky. And they’re all geniuses. It doesn’t really matter.
But in music, I love thinking of someone like Frank Zappa, who used the model of jazz and its exhortation to abandon preciousness so that the artist could simply lay something down onto tape and move on. Zappa used that model instead for rock. He didn’t permit the record labels to tell him when he could release something. He had his own metabolism and it was quicker than a chipmunk’s. You go to his Spotify and it’s overwhelming. I love that. It’s all just culture and expression.
How does that relate to your current work?
I’m trying to do the same with my current work, to stop trying to perfect every album, or construe it as the distillation of some years-long process, and just simply put it out there as an experiment, one that can succeed or fail, but whose success or failure has no impact whatsoever on the general output, because the artist has already moved on to the next experiment. It boggles my mind how an entire industry can gamble on the one 50-minute long expression of artistry that comes only once every three or so years in an artist’s output. I think it’s absolutely bonkers that all that money is put down on that bet and it also puts an incredible load of pressure on the artist. I say, just do stuff and move on. I love looking through the catalog of people like Miles Davis and just getting inundated with his output. It’s like looking at an entire life. When I see a pop band’s catalog, who’ve been around for ten years, and see only four albums, I always have to ask myself, “What were you doing in between those albums? Surfing in Maiorca? If so, why didn’t you release an album during that time that was inspired by surfing in Maiorca?” (I’m not certain if you can actually surf in Maiorca, it just came into my head).
Does someone like yourself ever have a ‘main focus’ in terms of output?
No. I have creative ADHD. It’s a horrible condition. I can never rest and I can never rely on my environment. I’m always moving. I hate it because it makes me miserable, but I have no choice. It’s the only thing I can do in this life. I simply can not tolerate focusing on just one form of expression. I’m too split. Every time I dive deeply into one tradition, I suddenly get nervous, like my oxygen tank is running out and I have to swim back up to the surface. I use the experience of focusing on three different forms of expression—acting, writing, and music—to inform whichever form of expression I happen to be using at any given time. The highly specific discoveries I make, while I’m acting, are discoveries that shine a light on a process I am experiencing as I’m searching for something while I’m writing, and so on and so forth.
From what I understand you’re based in New York, and speaking as an outsider – what is the scene like currently in NY for creatives and especially for you as you’re involved in productions which allow you to pursue an acting career?
When I was coming of age in the late ‘90s, there were many scenes you could choose from. You picked up the Village Voice, looked in the classified section for things going on at night and off you went to your scene of choice. Grandpa Dengler has no effing clue what “the kids” are doing these days because that system I just described is over. I suppose it all happens online which to an old fogey like me is absolutely bonkers. We are in a disembodied time. We are all cyborgs and have offloaded the connectivity of our bodies to the connectivity of ones and zeroes. I touch on this idea in one of my essays (“Bodies of the Night”) and I’m planning on fleshing that out even more when I adapt the essay for the book I’m writing.
There is one scene which I prefer to call a community that has been putting up what I like to call “process theater” at secret locations in the city and I feel grateful to have discovered it and to be contributing to it. I call it process theater because it’s theater that charges a ticket price for unfinished work. The point is to bring bodies together under one roof to express themselves as frequently as possible and see what happens next. So far, a lot of great stuff has happened and it is always being used for the next “process.” It is a complete rejection of the elitist, donor-based, patently absurd business model of the mainstream theater which charges ticket prices that only the wealthy can afford and only permits work to be shown that has undergone some arbitrary vetting process fueled by NGO-funded grants. You can guess what kind of material usually comes out of that process. I feel like Broadway and Off-Broadway have become expensive, high-class institutions. I guess it’s been that way for a long time, but it feels like you used to be able to see a lot of compelling theater more cheaply, at rundown experimental houses that are all now dying or gone. A lot of the stuff that is put up on stage in the theater district seems like it’s screaming “I was Properly Vetted.” Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe new stuff is on the way. I hope so.
On that note – Tell me about your current acting or film projects…
I just finished working on two tiny DIY theater productions that went up in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. The first one was called Daddy Issues and I played a cotton gin owner from mid-century Mississippi from a one-act by Tennessee Williams called 25 Wagons Full of Cotton. It was heavily adapted to fit the campy, hyper-sexualized theme of the entire evening of one-acts that it was part of so the name was changed to The Good Neighbor Policy which is a quote from the script. Then I was in a new work from a young playwright in the city where I played a dissociated English professor in an upper-middle class household in modern day Arlington, VA. The play is called Washington and it features an ensemble cast. The play is set on Christmas Eve in the home with family and it was a really intelligent and sincere and sad story about mental illness, college life and family dysfunction. Both of these productions were virtual non-budget affairs with all of the actors supplying props and costume and people doing favours by bringing their labour to the production, all part of the community, like late ‘60s Factory or early ‘80s No-Wave cinema. Just a bunch of hungry artists in the city desperate to work with each other and make compelling art in the raw. I was one of the older members of this community but it featured a varied group of actors and playwrights and directors nonetheless.
How have your career experiences or life influenced what choices you now make and the approach you now take?
I’m hungry to give answers to these kinds of questions that can help change the conversation around ongoing notions about why artists do what they do. I love it when I hear an artist clarify their previous work in a thoughtful way that gets you to see what they were trying to do in a different light. I feel really satisfied with the level to which I’ve honed my craft in music, writing and acting, to date. And it’s difficult for me to see how any of this would’ve been possible without my early career and even a lot of the explorations that I was undertaking as a young man that had preceded by early career. Before I was a club kid, I did a lot of writing and that fuels my writing today. And before Interpol blew up, I was doing a lot of synthesizer exploration which then turned into my keyboard instrumentation which I contributed to their oeuvre. And now I’m picking up where I left off there, as well.
I trained for a very long time as an actor and now when I get up and perform in front of folks I feel confident and like I’m expressing myself in an authentic way. For a while, I thought that I had to really push the idea that I was going to be this successful actor who was going to get cast in a TV show, but I realized that the reason why I was trying so hard to make that happen was because I wanted to influence public opinion about me. I wanted to do something about the way the public thought about me and that is not a legitimate artistic goal. My art is not my publicity.
Can you expand?
I always have to check this tendency of mine to try to manipulate public opinion. It strains from my time in front of so many eyeballs and when I was getting enough attention that it felt like I was having a conversation with the press and using the press to cultivate a persona. Most public figures do this sort of thing one way or another but I had to leave that all behind me as I went on these new explorations. It happens sometimes with the book I’m writing where I think “oh I should include this little bit because that’ll really help with sculpting the idea of myself I want people to have.” It’s such a pernicious and toxic element and it has no place in the creative process.
The pandemic was an essential component to the way that I rethought this whole idea. It took the world to shut down for me to abandon this type of public profile sculpture I was trying to do. Being at home and away from people made me surrender the quixotic effort to use my acting career as a replacement strategy for my old reputation. It deepened my writing craft because of all that time alone in front of the laptop. It also reunited me with something precious that I had built before I started acting school, which was my old home project studio which I’d had stowed away in boxes in storage. I took it all out and brought it to one of my bedrooms and dusted off all of my old gear and set it all back up again, replacing parts that had long gone obsolete. It’d been about ten years since I’d set up any of that recording and music production equipment and a lot of stuff had gone out of date. You should’ve seen some of the weird adaptors I had hooked up to make all the parts be able to talk to each other. But it was with the reconstruction of my project studio that I realized that one critical missing piece of my artistic palette had been ignored for way too long, the music composition side of my creative process and I’ve been going non-stop since.
Carlos, can you share what fuelled the making of ‘Private Earth’ and what you wanted to achieve?
About half of the material dates from the time when I was composing and recording Aqueduct, my first full-length. All of my work is atmospheric and my latest is no exception. However, it’s much more acoustic and live-sounding. My goal with this record was to create a New Age prog rock hybrid where the tracks are really long, epic and layered, like prog rock, but the textures are soothing and the chord changes are extremely simplified, like New Age. My main influence on this album was Patrick O’Hearn whose albums have these types of elements. Like me he comes to electronic music by way of the bass guitar (though he was steeped in jazz while I was steeped in rock). He made his debut playing with Zappa in the late ‘70s and I think that influences his compositions in the New Age genre in their grandeur and maximalism, something that prog rock excels at.
What interests you in this genre?
I’m fascinated by the ability of really broad strokes and by decorative art. I think New Age music is sort of the aural equivalent to landscape painting, in this regard. I love how someone can buy a really well painted landscape painting and put it up in your living room and forget about it but, every once in a while, come back to it and appreciate it. Private Earth tries to accomplish this, to paint a grand scene but one that easily slips into the background, a piece of art that is not designed for full conscious engagement. In this sense, I see my music as being the opposite of, say, classical music, which on the whole is a genre of music that demands unerring attentiveness.
To me a lot of your music is very cinematic, meditative, obviously atmospheric – do you have visions for doing soundtracks?
I’ve done some soundtrack work so far and I would love to do more. I definitely see what you mean about my music. Others have made the same comment. But it’s interesting because the stuff that comes out of me as a result of scoring to picture, as opposed to simply starting from scratch, is so very different than what’s on my albums. I love scoring for this reason because it disabuses me of the imperious self-talk while I’m composing of having to ego-identify with the output. I can just say that I’m fulfilling someone else’s vision and that this music doesn’t “represent” me, it represents the need for this picture to have an underscore.
This is why I try to achieve a decorative standard for my albums. The need to decorate takes precedence over my own psychological need to express myself. It’s a healthy craftsmanship that sets realistic standards and limits and enables others to come to the output by way of how closely the music meets those expectations. It creates a context for the artist and the audience.
What does taking trips into ‘the wild’ do for you—you seem to enjoy being ‘off the beaten track’—how does taking trips like that improve mental health or even benefit creativity? (Assuming it does—do you get ideas with such explorations?)
This is going to seem like shameless self-plugging, but I actually just finished writing a little bit about this very part of my life in the context of the book proposal I’m crafting to acquire a deal for my coming essay collection. The following is part of the chapter outline for an essay I’m tentatively titling “Land and Water” and I think it answers your question well:
“Hiking alone in the forests of New York and the national parks of the West, I was initially gripped by a collection of fears. Fear of bears, fear of the cold, fear of starvation, fear of getting lost, fear of disappearing, fear of being forgotten, fear of being alone. It wasn’t always fun and worrying often kept me from enjoying myself. One time, hiking in the Gulf Hagas canyon of upper Maine, I happened upon a middle-aged woman standing next to a waterfall with eyes shut and the sun glowing in her face, in a state of total unity with her environment. She became my inspiration, my psychological goal. I stayed the course, despite being far out of my depths, holding on through solitary physical and psychological tests. Confronting my fears, I came to see them as irrational. The woods sublimated a lesser part of myself.
I hadn’t intended for this exposure to Mother Nature’s feminine embrace and for my achievement of a new, heathy masculinity to yield access to a new creative process. That hadn’t been the point, but it was one of the benefits all the same. Going through these trials had dynamited my psychic edifice as a miner dynamites a cliff. I returned home after every backpacking trip with precious unrefined ore to use for new creations. It was a boon for my artistic process, yielding musical, theater and literary creations that are far more reflective, meditative and vulnerable than the art of my youth.
My creative process in my early career, aligned as it was with a certain punk rock spirit, had grown from the hardened, stifling grids of the urban environment and sought, in the spirit of creative destruction, to grenade them. It was a potent form of expression and a compelling one, too.
But Nature was the next step for me. I was asking questions that couldn’t be answered in the city. It didn’t feel authentic to continue on that way. The curvature of the trees, the abolition of Euclid out in the wild, gave me access to an organic healing center within me, maybe for the very first time in my life, I learned how to relax.”
Can you provide any update on your forthcoming book? Is it a memoir? And I know these things take time, but what are you adding to your story?—You’re still very young, so maybe that has an influence on wanting to close a chapter, so to speak.
Thanks for calling me “so very young”! I was depressed up until just now when I read that in your question, so you’ve lifted my spirits for the rest of the day. You’re absolutely correct that a major element to the writing of my book—if not the most important element—is the desperate need to close a chapter. Firstly, however, I want to make sure I’m clear in saying that I’m not writing a memoir, but a personal essay collection. The distinction is material in that a personal essay demands much more objectivity than a memoir. The best essays ask deep questions that open pathways for the reader to reconsider key subjects of the human experience. Personal essays have to walk the fine line between providing autobiographical content while adhering to that definition. When they’re done well, like in the case of someone like Leslie Jamison, they are profound and exalting experiences. I aim to do something similar with my collection.
All of those questions which I will be asking in my essays—and, critically, NOT answering, because an important and beautiful aspect of essay writing is to allow questions to be asked without too much stridency and answering—are essentially geared around the question of authenticity, both in the creative process and the developmental one. It’s going to be, as well, an exploration of reflective masculinity, since so very much of my experience was motivated by questions of “manhood” and adult, male individuation.
Right now, it looks like I’ll be finishing my manuscript in December, and I expect to have a book deal by then.
Last question – about you know what (sorry, I simply had to) – what are your thoughts here and now, now you admit you feel older, about your time in Interpol?
I will always have such fond memories of that time. I experienced a lifetime’s worth of excitement and fun and exhilaration touring the globe, meeting such interesting people from all walks of life and creating music that touched the hearts of so many. As with all of the journeys I’ve gone on, life has been made all the richer as a result.
Carlos, thank you for your time.
Carlos Dengler’s new record ‘Private Earth’ is out now and you can purchase via his Bandcamp page or listen via Spotify .
Lula Is In Trouble: “I consider myself a loner with a lot of imagination”
Sometimes one comes across an interviewee who really understands the attraction of mystery. This is the case with Lula Is In Trouble (real name undisclosed). Fine details are not to be found with this artist, one of the few I’ve ever come to be really interested in via the plagued medium that is social media. Something we can establish is that Lula, as I’ll call her for short, is a brilliant photographer and graphic artist with friends in hip and extremely cool places; Her relationship with the tremendous filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is one which I try to delve into, but alas, with no real insight. Still, what follows is a fascinating (critics may say ‘limited’) study of a real creative and someone who seems to have no limits when it comes to artistic output. If nothing else, I strongly recommend you check her work.
A brief chat with the enigma that is ‘Lula Is In Trouble’ follows:
You’re heavily into producing photography, music, and artwork. How would you describe yourself in your artistry and what you create?
I’d say I’m heavily into everything that helps me craft a surreal, fantasy world. Any medium is fine for me. Photography, illustrations, music, collages…I study and experiment continuously. If the result looks like art to others, then I’m an artist. Personally, I consider myself a loner with a lot of imagination.
Do you often have conceptual ideas for the work you produce? For example, you’ve proven again and again that you, the woman, yourself, are important as a study…
Most of the time the idea is born, grows, and stays in the back of my mind for a while. Then suddenly that idea becomes a feeling and when that happens I throw it out. I try to make it concrete. It’s difficult to explain. Every artist has their own process I guess. Mine looks a lot like a headache. Yes, the women I portray always look like me. But am I all those women? Are we looking for the same thing? Seeking the same peace? I really don’t know. My girls are on a journey. I like to document it. See where it leads. How does it end?
How do you go about transforming an idea into a conclusion?
There is little rationality in my process of transforming an idea into a work. The technicalities always come later. But the idea is like a bullet. It can’t be stopped.
How did you start – in terms of creating the work you do – what was it that made you begin?
I can’t remember a moment in my life I didn’t spend in the company of art. I’ve always been an ‘atypical’ child. I used to zoom out a lot when teachers or classmates talked to me. Never really enjoyed others people’s company, since childhood. I’ve always preferred books and music. Art in general. I don’t think I ever wanted to emulate anyone. I’m more interested in trying to express the turmoil I always felt inside. I’m not particularly good at communicating in words. And that’s why I chose art.
What would you most like to photograph or use for your art?
I do have a photographic project that is very dear to me; the subject is delicate and I don’t feel like talking about it now. We’ll see when (and if) the project will take form.
Please let me know when you want to talk about it. Regarding your work, what is it that interests you most to allow you to create?
The need to be seen and at the same time to hide from the world is what drives me to make art. Perhaps it is difficult to explain.
What’s given you that very particular style, theme, and overall genre to allow you to produce what you do?
Some of my influences are more or less explicit, but let me tell you this: social media distort reality. People call me “Lynchian”, see references to Lynch films and style in almost everything I do. But it’s other people’s perspective, not mine. Don’t get me wrong, I love Lynch. I love his films, I love his paintings, but I rarely think about other people’s art when I make mine. I feel flattered when someone tells me that what I do reminds them of David Lynch or other established artists, but it’s not my goal. It’s art itself that influences me. To say it better, it’s a thousand ways art can communicate something that truly inspires me. The absurdity of life inspires me. Love, pain, despair. Human behavior. Especially human behavior. Humans are weird creatures.
How important is beauty in relation to your work?
Humanity is important in the concepts I share through my artwork. The “beauty” you talk about it’s just a trick by which I attract the viewer. Something pleasant for the eyes that will likely get a disturbing second view. I want my audience to be forced to watch and rewatch until they see that what’s lying underneath the surface might differ from what they think.
Do you have a muse?
I have a source of inspiration that transcends the concept of “muse”.
When does a work of art become important? Do you need external confirmation, or is it something explicitly personal?
Oh, I definitely need external confirmation [haha!] Not in art though. Once an artwork is finished, I give it to the world. I’m not even jealous of my art. Also, what does external confirmation mean, these days? Many likes? Social engagement? More followers? I don’t understand these things. I create something and put it out. People see it and it often has a completely different meaning to them. It’s fascinating. I do my little things, but the audience always adds something that comes from their own heart. I love that.
What kind of artistry interests you the most, or what is it you do? What is it you find most stimulating and worth pursuing?
Analogic photography is so incredibly fascinating. Even errors in analogic photography are amazing. They can create a whole new world. And the developing process is so exciting…
Your photography work is very cinematic. Iconic. Is that intentional or accidental?
Probably both. I always say that, in my next life, I would like to be a DOP. What a fascinating profession. I studied photography, and the use of light is essential to create a particular atmosphere. Preparing a scene, “a set”, is a moment that I love very much. The influence of cinema is strong, of course. Cinema is an amazing medium. Whether it’s more or less sneaky, I like to mention the cinematic world in my shots. In film, everything is possible! But sometimes accidents happen and from them, you can create something new and unexpected. And it’s so good when that happens. An adventure inside an adventure!
This would bring me to a huge favorite in terms of movie directors—Jim Jarmusch. What’s your relationship or connection with Jarmusch – I noticed some social media images with his band Squrl.
Oh, Jim! He’s such a humble person and a supportive friend. And he makes some very funny impersonations! Having one of my illustrations hanging in his writing room still feels surreal to me.
Do you consider the photos of your art also artworks in and of themselves?
It’s all part of the same journey, yes.
What music is currently stirring your senses?
I’m currently listening to a lot of harp concerts. To be totally honest, my playlist is confusing. You have Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but also Angelo Branduardi. Julee Cruise’s angel voice but also 80s heavy metal. What can I say, I have multiple personalities with different tastes probably [ahah!] Jokes aside, the range of music I listen to is wide. But I pour a little “Sleepwalkers” by David Sylvian into my life every day. That is a flawless record. I absolutely adore it. All my personalities do!
Lastly, can you tell me about any projects you’re working on you’d like to promote?
In early 2020 (pre-pandemic) I composed some tunes for a short film, hope to see it released sometime this year. I’m a self-taught musician, not a particularly gifted one. But writing music is one of the most therapeutic activities I’ve ever experienced. Wish I had more time ( and more instruments) to focus on that. I wrote an opening theme for a podcast last year. I loved doing that. It’s called “Midnight Coffee”. A jazzy tune for night people.
