Audioccult Vol. 123: Peaks For Nothing

Light a candle. Draw the required sigils. Now, raise your arms above your head and slowly, gently, exhale your soul. You won’t need it here. This is Audioccult, and it’s time to get low. Illustration: SHALTMIRA

Aside from the one recliner with the sobbing and vividly-saturated preemie on it and all of the cat photos, everything in David Lynch’s house is really subdued and normal looking. There’s a lot of afghan throws and a vague cherry popsicle smell. I really expected more, to be honest. Disappointing.

After an hour of hanging in his bathroom texting all and sundry, “GUESS WHERE I’M DOING BOOBOO GAS,” I’m left standing by the curb, holding a recorder with nothing more than a mumbled phrase—”This is America the way it once was”—and a pastrami burp, wondering what to write about. Lately, my interview encounters have yielded little fruit. Waka Flocka refuses to talk about his anger issues with me, despite the fact that adding power drills to his a cappellas basically makes him Whitehouse. My comparisons of Miley Cyrus to Lumpy Space Princess keep getting me in trouble every time I tweet them at her, which is a lot. Blood Orange’s management respond to all interview requests with .rar files full of his Egon Schiele self-portrait recreations, where instead of masturbating he’s checking Tumblr. David Guetta and Snoop Dogg ring me constantly at 3AM, do the Beavis laugh, and hang up. “They keep calling me,” wails Ian Curtis from the stereo, and my hands won’t stop clenching into fists.

My long history of alienating my interview subjects with rambling tangents about their dreams or becoming bosom pals and forgetting my purpose there entirely means that most of the contacts I make in the music industry develop in interesting ways. I’ve danced pantsless on stage with Grimes, had long and incoherent conversations about the New World Order with Roseanne, and repeatedly referred to Terry Richardson as Dov Charney for an hour while reciting Jezebel headlines.

Today I’m in Poland to cover Unsound Festival, and I have high hopes that I’ll get on with the bands there. For example, I know Pharmakon dislikes rudeness, so I’ve been repping a “Mean People Suck” sticker on my math class binder to take the haters down a peg. Based on sonic algorithms I’ve dreamed about after listening to her new album, I assume we’re also both intensely interested in the vulgar forms of language, which in this case means the unrefined zone where so many modern languages have their origins, not to mention the staggering number of cusses I’m going to use in our first (and assuredly not last) conversation. I’m sure we’ll have much to discuss.

Published October 17, 2014. Words by Daniel Jones.