Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week Dobbin and Emily Cole chatted to Dylan Desmond, best known as the bassist of Bell Witch, about his recently released ambient album Flatworm Mysticism under the moniker Je Est Un Autre. We conducted this interview directly after interviewing both Dylan and Jesse Shreibman of Bell Witch, which you can read here.
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Spotify stream can be found here.
Dobbin: Could you tell us a bit about the philosophical ideas that inspired this project?
Dylan: The name is a reference to ideas in the letters of Arthur Rimbaud. He explains this idea that, when anyone is making something, even thinking something, or doing anything, there’s almost this separate “entity” – “I is another”. A dual aspect to everything we do. This entity would almost dictate what we are doing. Not a doppelganger, or ‘devil on your shoulder’… Maybe something like that, or different. His analogy was a violin: if you don’t play it, it doesn’t do anything. However, when one puts their hands on it and starts plucking the strings, there’s music coming out of it, an idea being expressed, and there’s something being communicated. So the violin turns from an entity to a dual entity – there’s two things speaking through that. If one were to think of themselves as the violin, there’s almost this separate being that would be dictating what we are doing. I think we could say that’s an aspect of ourselves, an unconscious or subconscious, or perhaps even a collective consciousness shared between us, expressed in its own little weird ways and outlets. I think that’s what he was trying to get across. This is even more nerdy than the bass discussion in our previous interview! If Rimbaud was here, he might say we were full of shit!
Dobbin: Is that something that literally translates through any of the sounds on this record?
Dylan: I think so. I started noticing through Bell Witch, when writing those songs songs, there was this feeling that things weren’t done yet. Emily, as an engineer, maybe you feel this too when you’re mixing – this feeling that “this isn’t done yet”, it’s not quite complete. How do I figure out what that is? I don’t even know. I noticed that with the Je Est Un Autre songs there would be something that was not complete. I’d tinker with it, and then, there it is! That moment where that part completes the song, and everything else that is in the song is correct or justified. I don’t know where that comes from. It’s almost like in the process of writing the song, there’s an idea of what the song is in my head, but I haven’t quite, say, opened that file yet. The puzzle needs to be put together. I think that’s something like what Rimbaud was referencing – it’s already done, it just has to be realised.
Dobbin: In terms of genre, I felt myself assigning the term “ambient” music. Do you relate to that? I’m always a bit careful about genre terms. They’re helpful from a certain perspective at a certain time. They become a bit useless when you are the musician yourself, you want to escape from them.
Dylan: Yeah, I think you could say that. Drone, dark ambient, those words. I agree, they’re useful at a certain point of time, to get the point across. It’s up to whoever listens to decide what they think of it.
Dobbin: Who are your influences within the ‘ambient’ world?
Dylan: William Basinski, I love that guy, and Éliane Radigue, from France. I love her stuff. She was doing it all on a modular synthesiser where all these different voices come in and shift in a direction, it all kind of works together – it sounds like there’s this force behind that’s moving it. Obviously she knew what she was doing, there’s a level of intention behind it. But there’s also some improvisation going on too, because, how can there not be? I just imagine her driving that car and dealing with the turns on the road, because once it’s moving, it’s going. She was recording that all to tape – if you fuck up, you can’t undo that.
Dobbin: Her releases came before a time people were calling things ‘ambient’ or ‘dark ambient’. They kind of subvert those modern definitions completely because they feel so ambiguous in mood.
Dylan: Ambiguous is the perfect word. When you listen to any of that stuff, there’s no words… It’s like watching someone dance – what’s the meaning behind that? There’s no meaning behind it. It’s something that transcends our natural instinct to try to place meaning on something. Electronic and especially ambient music taps into that same gesture where we subjectively assign meaning to it in our own mind. And maybe that meaning is not logical – it’s more like a raw emotion, something that can’t be charted out. It’s not something that can be easily classified. It’s a fucking cool thing that we can do.
Dobbin: You also mentioned Michael Hedges in another interview. It’s nothing like what you’ve produced on this record, but he’s associated with the new age scene, so it’s somewhat connected.
Dylan: Something I like about Michael Hedges is that I think he was running out on stage, just doing the craziest shit, playing the fuck out of a guitar. He probably got used to the audience being like, “woah, what is that?”. It takes guts to go out on stage and do that, to make a room full of people react like that, it takes courage. Obviously he had the “skills to pay the bills”; he was an incredible musician, and he could deliver on stage. But the compositions he came up with and the unique technical approach to playing guitar is untouchable, un-fuck-with-able. What a fucking legend. There’s not a lot of people who do things like he did, and he came from the middle of Oklahoma. I grew up not too far away, and there’s nothing going on there. I like to think of him being in this isolated pocket, and coming up with these ideas. Obviously, he had influences like we all do, but he took them really far and dug in, in the most honest and real way.
Dobbin: Je Est Un Autre’s music is quite linked to gear and effects. Without giving away the secrets of the record, such as specifics about how many layers there are, what are the sounds going into Flatworm Mysticism?
Dylan: Be careful here, because I’ll probably start nerding out real hard! There’s probably a common structure throughout. There’s generally always a droning low end which comes from a Moog Sub 37. Then there’s a Korg 770, Prophet ‘08… There’s generally a mid and a high sound, probably not too different from Bell Witch. But they’re more liquid-y, they flow together a bit more, just because I was able to control and blend the synthesisers easier than a bass guitar.
Dobbin: The single “Death, the Musagetes” is very consciously structured. There’s a build up to a conclusion, then it falls away really quickly. Have you thought a lot about structure on this?
Dylan: The first three tracks (“Ein Einzger Gedanke”, “Time of the Assassins”, and “Corpse Signal”) blend together smoothly, but then my computer started crashing when I tried to incorporate the fourth one. Having seen Billy Anderson working on our Bell Witch records, that happens too, even with stronger computers. I’m not that much of an engineer, so I decided to keep songs four and five as separate tracks. In a movie from Hollywood, there’s explosions that build up to the biggest explosion happens right towards the end, and all the problems are solved. That normal plotline, we can hear that in music too. Sometimes songs start with the biggest explosion, but I think that a song can follow a similar plotline to a story, and often they do. I was trying to approach structuring of these songs like plotlines. But what if there wasn’t just this big explosion at the end – what if the structure was completely different? A loop, or like the waves on a synthesiser… I was trying to make different structures on this album. Admittedly, some of them have that ‘Hollywood’ plotline, but I was trying to keep it varied, avoiding the standard storyline.
Dobbin: Since you mentioned William Basinski, of course, his Disintegration Loops are a great example of non-standard structure in ambient music.
Dylan: When you can kind of zoom in on an ambient song and grab little pieces, and you can notice them in a new way. ‘Hooks’ is a good way to think of it too. In pop music, the hook is supposed to make us feel good. They’re all designed to make us communicate in a homogenised way. Which is fine, I like it as much as anyone else. But ambient music has its own idea, where you will hear things you’ve never heard before. You have to approach it, maybe, like a symbolist painting. You have to be able to see things from new angles each time. The Disintegration Loops are a great example. It’s kind of the same thing over and over, but if you listen to minute twenty compared to… hour three, for example, it’ll be completely different.
Emily: I’ve thought about that in terms of “ear candy”, is that something you’ve put into your work at all?
Dylan: I hope that I have, I’ve tried to! “Ear candy” is the perfect way to put it. A lot of that happens naturally. When you tinker with a synthesiser, you try to make it to a ‘thing’ but all of a sudden it does something completely different. You think “wow, I want to use that!” and you try to find a way to put it in. Lucky for us, it’s easy to capture that and put it in, compared to the days of tape. I hope there’s ear candy on Flatworm Mysticism, little shimmery interludes that sneak in and do their little thing… Track 2, “Time of the Assassins”, has a lot of that. Stuff you won’t hear on your first listen but should sneak out on repeat.
Emily: I’m a massive analogue snob. When it comes to the analogue vs. digital music war, what are your thoughts?
Dylan: You’re asking me to get even more nerdy that I’ve already gotten! I’m into it, that’s good! I’ve recently installed patch bays on my synthesiser so I can use all of these cool effects. If I’ve got something recorded already, but there’s no effect on it, I can repath it and add to it. It’s fucking fun. You can do that with plugins, but the just don’t sound as good. Analogue is unmatchable. You can’t make a plugin growl like a real circuit with actual physical components, as opposed to something that just somehow, in my laptop, reproduces it. I suppose there’s components in the laptop, too, but I can’t really wrap my head around it. I’m on your team, I’m way more into analogue. As time goes on, it seems like the digital world is getting vast, and there’s plug ins for everything. Maybe someday the analogue equipment will be a thing of the past… There’s a weird nostalgia in the analogue sound, too, that we all collectively identify with. As a kid, I listened to things on tape, on my walkman, it kind of “sucked” – it would slow down and speed up, the tape would get chewed up, it became wobbly and weird… I kind of loved that. It was unintentional and unfortunate in the moment, but now there’s something nostalgic in that. Analogue equipment captures something of that, it transports you back to your childhood.
Emily: Is there any philosophical work that would be your top reading recommendation?
Dylan: You guys are really getting the nerd out of me today! I really like poetry. That’s not for everyone and I understand why. My answer is Paul Celan, a Romanian poet. He was in a concentration camp in Germany in World War Two. His family was systematically murdered in the camps. He was Jewish. He survived, and continued writing poetry, and worked as a translator – he spoke something like ten languages. Most of the poetry he wrote was in German. People asked him why he was writing in German, if those people slaughtered your whole family? He said “Death is a master from Germany”. Which is scary, and complicated – he was trying to get a lot across. I think he was trying to confront this idea of the ‘shadow’ which we spoke about earlier. He was trying to confront the shadow in his life. He ended up killing himself, but he was trying to confront this fucking terrifying experiences – I don’t know how you’d explain it. But the poems are fucking wild. The English translations have words that are combined, and it’s almost cryptic and absurd. You read two stanzas, and you don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. But our mind starts to assign a feeling to it. Whatever you ingest from it, the creative imagination of the reader will take it and assign their own meaning to it. There’s this really natural creative process to it, that’s inherent to it. When most people read a poem, maybe they’ll say that’s fine and move on. But when anyone digs into Celan’s poetry, you could really dig into them and think about them forever. It’s sometimes so much vaster than philosophy, which almost limits itself with all the words and technicalities. For me, it’s hard to grasp what they’re talking about, but with a poem, it’s the same thing with less words. Some poetry is wordy, but Paul Celan is not. He creates a universe with two stanzas and you can look at it forever and see new things – much like we were discussed earlier with ambient music.
Get even deeper into our conversation by listening to the full podcast. Flatworm Mysticism can be ordered through Cestrum Noctornum Recordings (US) and Cloudchamber Recordings (EU).