An Interview with Slauson Malone 1

Slauson Malone 1 discusses the making of his new record “EXCELSIOR”, finding inspiration in boredom, building an Ondes Martenot in Max for Live, and so much more in our latest interview.

“EXCELSIOR” is out now on Warp Records. Listen to it here – https://slausonmalone1.ffm.to/excelsior
Check out Jasper’s Max for Live devices – https://maxforlive.com/profile/user/jaspermarsalis
Learn more about “Generating Sound and Organizing Time – Thinking with gen~ Book 1” (also known as “The GO Book”) by Gregory Taylor & Graham Wakefield – https://www.amazon.com/Generating-Sound-Organizing-Time-Thinking/dp/1732590311/ref=sr_1_1?crid=29IJI8OI3TIS1&keywords=generating+sound+and+organizing+time&qid=1666722946&sprefix=Generating+%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-1
Join the Max Discord – https://discord.com/invite/cycling74

Credits:
Interview by Jillian Olesen
Music by Slauson Malone 1, from “EXCELSIOR”
Engineering by Sam Darwish

Featuring clips from:
“New Joy (Official Video)” by Slauson Malone 1 – https://youtu.be/C2_-bavZcLo?feature=shared
“Voyager (Official Video)” by Slauson Malone 1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiDfM-ASkzE
“Half-Life (Lyric Video)” by Slauson Malone 1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wL1hZSrO2U
“Slauson Malone 1 Performs in Honor of Sam Gilliam | Pace Live” from Pace Gallery – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDgotX7qFKY
“Slauson Malone – THE MESSAGE 4: Museum (live) (see page 32, 203, 198, 223, 219, 104, and 24)” from NTS – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcWG08_zgjk
“Slauson Malone 1 [DJ Set] – @barnradio / 09.16.2023” from Barn Radio – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8r3qDFnLEU
“Event 15” (2022), “Event 21” (2022), “Event 22” (2022), “Event 24” (2022), and “Event 26 (Cinema)” (2022) by Jasper Marsalis, provided by Emalin – https://emalin.co.uk/artists/jasper-marsalis

My name is Jasper marceles AKA SLO and Malone one I first started getting into music through DJing my father’s a jazz musician so I had a familial relationship with music um but it wasn’t until I um bought my first sampler which was a um SP 404 that was

Like my my first time I started to really have a personal relationship with making music I’d also been studying Fine Art uh went the Cooper Union um so I’ve always been trying to find ways to intersect you know the world of music in the world of art I

Think a lot of the paintings that I do are kind of Acts of remembering various parts of a performance like the closeness of a person or the taste of a room or the stickiness of a floor the lights and then the performances kind of look back on the paintings like how we

Arrange ourselves in the space but also you know painting is most most times you know it’s a rectangle and a stage in most scenarios is a rectangle so they kind of are constantly completing each other you know I’m also always thinking about performance art thinking about the

Body and you know an audience also being made aware of their own body also Excel here is my second album It’s Loosely follows the story of a person who finds the sword that doesn’t stop growing in their possession and then the album ends with the sword becoming so long that it

Splits the Earth in [Applause] half it’s like bootleg Excalibur you know that’s how I was thinking about it excelsia means ever upward um it’s also the on all the license plates in New York um pretty much what it’s about bring DRS brings I think I kind of let the song

Tell me what it wants to do you know I think about the first song the weather which was started as a complete mistake with a I made a tape Loop and I just had some sound playing out of my computer and then that was just what the tape

Loop got on the I I just would have recorded and then I started to think about what is weather like what is the process of weathering like how could that also translate to different techniques um and I think I got really into fft forms of like delay and

Distortion cuz it’s like reminded me of clouds and stretching and spectral noise like expanding and then also like underneath the song There’s this envelope of noise opening and closing which I was thinking is kind of like waves in the most literal sense you know the medium is the message

Massage so I think all those textures also mean what the album needs you know I don’t think they’re it’s not like you’re going to hear the lyrics and be like oh yeah I get it no you know I think it’s more a feeling fly I think a really great example would

Be on a hear a new world hear a new world I wanted that song to feel repulsive but in the same way a lollipop can become very repulsive after like the after it’s just sitting in your mouth and sugar can kind of become it’s like Corrosive so there’s a super saw which is like one of the most saturated overwhelming sounds the harps Accord which is this kind of it’s now become like a a sound of horror almost and even how the strings are voiced there’s a line in there that I was thinking about psycho

Um um so yeah there’s just these instruments that have that carry a sort of yeah societal cultural meaning yeah and then putting them together is my favorite part also think about something Brian Wilson talked a lot about when they were recording Pet Sounds which was like creating a new instrument

By combining two instruments that shouldn’t necessarily be Together I am always thinking about like untrusting of um self-sufficiency as a mode of art making uh or like the idea of a masterpiece or something that can be fully selfs saying I like leaky things you know things that are kind of maybe oozing out on one side

Uh or leak into something else or the feeling of General incompleteness um cuz I think then it will hopefully Inspire someone to keep searching you know rather than feeling like they’ve arrived at the end you know also just feel like a theme is never really finished even though you might

Finish a song there’s probably elements in there that you might want to re considerer So I think any creative Endeavor is you’re accumulating sounds it could be even like information ideas but then it’s kind of what you erase and take out and What’s Left Behind is kind of I think how I approach a lot of um things that I end up feeling okay with

Presenting to people aaser can be a really liberating feeling CU it’s you’re you’re not holding it to be so precious if you can break it then that probably means you could put it back together I actually quite like that feeling of being like like world is around the World I think boredom is kind of what I’m most fixated on right now I think music is or sound is time or the perception of sound is time so I think it’s a really boring form of art because you it requires people to sit and experience time to my dismay I think a

Lot of my music is hyper fixated on keeping people on the edge of their seat or like pushing them to a new realm that they weren’t expecting to be put in um but I find myself gravitating more towards this state of nothingness or Boredom I I think about going to hardcore shows and those moments in between songs when there’s just feedback playing I don’t know I just always love that moment like right before the song ends or right after um the song Wait no right before yeah you know what I’m trying to say

That middle space I really wanted that sound on my computer so you can hear it at the end of New Joy there’s this like thing that sounds like a square wave kind of like um ascending that’s the just the J Macky I first was I understanding concepts from from its like most granular scale I think is really important to me cuz I’m always asking why um like how I guess and that’s what actually got me into max cuz I wanted to know why and how cuz I think using a

Computer is a bit abstract as like a tool for creating anything really cuz the gooey kind of hides what’s happening I think working with Max is similar to maybe using like a guitar or something cuz it’s like you hit the string and then it makes the

Sound or it’s like Max you code the thing and then it does the you know what I mean I had a sound art teacher Zach Poff and he built a machine to scan 16 mm film and I just like how do you how did you do that like what he’s like it’s Max

And then I downloaded Max and then I started making like following the tutorials but it just didn’t make any sense to me um and it wasn’t until years later when I started performing as a solo act uh I just wanted to add a temp tap Tempo feature to the Ableton Echo and I

Was like why is there no tap why can’t I do this in Ableton without Shifting the whole transport so then yeah I just started getting really fixated on trying to figure out this very seemingly simple problem and then after that I just kept finding new problems that I was like I

Want to do this how do I do this you start to realize how many arbitrary restrictions there are in computer programming sometimes you can feel weirdly political even like why does someone want why did someone make it that way like why can’t it be this way

You just do whatever you want almost you could do almost whatever you want um and that’s really Exciting I’d say probably like 70% of the live set is uses Max devices to either get things to move a certain way like mechanically or effects there’s a lot of stuff I found from the community like program changes for my for my foot pedal like found that on Max forlife.com

Uh and that’s a really important part of the live set just getting the messages to get sent back and forth um and there’s like other effects that I’ve built like a freezer fft freezer fuzz Reverb but a lot of stuff that I haven’t released publicly I use on the

Um on the record there’s a lot of instruments that I haven’t released yet cuz they kind of explode sometimes there’s this one that’s like a string uh instrument that uses uh polyphonic expression but I was like learning how to use MC I didn’t really quite understand it so there are these weird

Glitches that would happen uh that ended up sounding really cool there’s a Odyssey clone that I use quite a lot on the record and then there’s like a j j as I call it uh which is like a own uh Clone yeah different waveforms know octave then you have uh sign Square parason noise filter really it was just trying to copy Johnny Greenwood that really all it was I think I read some interview well I watched the Phantom thread and then I was like who and then

I was remembering There Will Be Blood and I was remembering some of the scoring work and then there’s this one sound that like keeps reoccurring and then I then I heard about then he said something about thrity pendi piece the sound of it is just crazy I don’t know

It’s just a intense sound there were a lot of parts on excelsia where I knew I wanted the sound of this kind of fretless almost thein like instrument it was just out of obsession and necessity that I started working on this Max device like I can’t afford to buy an all

So that’s why I wanted to make one and same thing with like all the resonators like the Palm like I don’t even know where to get a pal you know it’s not even like I can’t even afford one it’s like where do you even get one a lot of these more

Elusive sound pallets are behind pay walls so then I’m like also like well if someone wants to just try it out for free they should be able to just have it So I use Jen a lot because of the single sample feedback option like that is just allows you to do so much I got that book whatever the go book um and that just but I I think I was talking to Tom Hall and he was like saying there’s really

No difference in terms of efficiency between using like the native Max objects and then the Gen objects and I did feel I had to like check myself maybe on some weird elitism like trying to do everything in gen so I’m starting to use the other objects more now I was

Like thinking to myself at like an earlier stage of my Max exploration I feel like how important it is to the ecosystem of having it be somewhat accessible sharing is caring you know that mentality the learning is really like a communal based learning even the Discord or the the the chat or

The um the forums um YouTube um and it’s all free which is crazy that is my favorite part I mean Max is not free but um the knowledge is free which is super sick Don’t be afraid to ask questions I think there’s like such an ego thing about like wanting to figure something out but there are people out here that have probably tried to solve similar questions as you um and I think that’s what makes all of it stronger um so yeah ask questions Yeah