October 8, 2017
In this interview, I had email correspondence with an anonymous electronic musician associated with the Alt Right movement. I originally used parts from this interview for a school paper on the "fashwave" micro-genre, but this is the first the time the interview has been available to others in full.
What are some some of your musical influences? Other artists, genres, philosophy, literature, film... I'm interested in philosophy especially, because of some of the discussion that surrounded vaporwave a few years ago. A number of those artists would cite Marxist philosophers as inspiration.
I have always been a person with a certain attachment to the past and a lot of nostalgia. The fact is that this nostalgia is something I share with a lot of other people on the Internet. We make an analysis of our present and look back at the past, and it comes to mind that we have missed something in this evolution of our society.
Over the years, while learning music theory, I was thinking about what my era lacked in order to feel it as a whole. I was born in the 90's so the only memories of that time come to me when I see the pictures of when I was a child. From a very young age I got down to listening and playing classical music on the piano, so I started to know the classical and contemporary composers, so I began to perceive that in the popular music of those times (mid 2000' s) only a small emotional spectrum was offered.
In my adolescence, thanks to internet access, I was fortunate to find other musical genres that were not offered through mainstream channels. This is how I came into contact with the world of metal, which I saw very closely linked to the language of classical music. The years went on and I continued to follow the germinal seed of everything that was produced in those magical 3 decades, and I reached the point of connection of that musical tradition and the music I enjoyed at that time: Symphonic rock.
Symphonic rock gave me a series of groups that offered me a much more complex and complete music, which I could listen to over and over again and find a new detail in every listening. There was something that sounded very familiar about all that, and it wasn't their relationship in some streams of the misnamed classical music, but the way it influenced Japanese composers in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the composers of our childhood games and animes were Japanese, and they were heavily influenced by the symphonic English rock (Gentle Giant, ELP and others) besides being educated in Western musical theory.
Once the vaporwave appeared, I finally discovered the unknown nature of my questions. We have lost the aesthetics, and the great corporations of the audiovisual world sold us unsubstantial music, simple and on many occasions, with messages that incited to social degeneration. I have never opposed simple music, in fact, much of the music I produce now is not very complex, but one thing is clear: we are what we hear. In other words, the property we have to feel and understand music makes us act as reflected in our musical aesthetics. I would venture to say that even the musical aesthetic itself could be explained from a sociobiological background.
Music is therefore an ideal instrument for social cohesion, and people must be educated in it. The ancient Greeks were already talking about how the spirit could become clouded by listening to unsuitable music, and they were not at all misguided. I have finally come to understand that the basis of human education must be music and physical exercise. Everything else is important, but secondary. This is what the fathers of European civilisation called the doctrine of ETHOS, and what I propose is to rescue it.
The aim of the Fashwave is therefore to align and educate people in the same supreme good, and this means entering into a cultural war against the inferior musical genres, phagocyting and adhering to the supreme good.
2. Are you familiar with vaporwave? Do you feel that it has influenced your art in any way? From what I've listened to of your music and of similar artists, this comparison made by other writers seems a bit loose to me (haven't come across Muzak sampling but I could be wrong), musically. Although some of the graphic art does evoke vapowave.
The Vaporwave has been essential to the development of my ideas about music and art in general. (As I told in the first question)
You could say that both fashwave and vaporwave have some common sources of inspiration. We like harmonic complexity, melodic developments, nostalgia and spiritually elevate the listener by educating his or her E T H O S.
But the vaporwave ends in the vaporwave. The Fashwave, by not having this aesthetic dogma and being merely a tool of fascist social cohesion, can reach many more aesthetic frontiers. However, we must admit that the Fashwave exists thanks to the Vaporwave.
By the way, it's interesting that you mention Muzak, since his stimulus progression could fit perfectly into the ETHOS doctrine.
3. I could broadly describe the genre you're working within as electronic. The term "synthwave" also feels reasonable. Why do you choose to express your ideas in this genre? Why not country or rock?
The main reason why I produce electronic music is because you don't need practically any means to perform it. I work in a small room where I also sleep, living away from recording studios or musicians who agree to work with me in a small village lost in the mountains.
Secondly, making electronic music means saving myself the ego of some idiotic musicians who always want to get their hands on the musical composition and never agree with the rest of the band. This also means avoiding rehearsal sessions where people go without studying the songs, expensive recording studios and uncreative sound engineers.
With just knowing music theory and how a MIDI controller works, you've already got the door open to a lot of possibilities. No one asks you for live music so you don't have to shatter your back carrying 20kg synthesizers and sleep in vans while touring where concert halls pay you with a pair of brilliant coins.
Of course, electronic music is great when you have no choice but to produce your own music.
Then there is another part, which is aesthetics, which has been adequately explained in the first question.
4. Do you appreciate the term "fashwave"?
I don't see the Fashwave as a unifying genre, but as an attitude towards art.
We have started our special crusade by infiltrating the genres more in keeping with our social nature, but as long as a minimum of aesthetic taste is followed, it should be possible to make Fashwave.
As you can see, there are enormous differences between the sound of each fashwave artist, as it does not ask you to dogmatically compose a series of cliches as it happens in conventional genres. Simply make music that a fascist can enjoy. So, I like the concept of Fashwave and it sounds good.
4. What tools or software do you use to compose your music and create graphics? Are you self-taught?
I am self-taught, in fact, and that is evident in my two published albums. Until almost weeks ago I had practically no idea what a basic concept of the mixing process such as Frequency Slotting was.
I'm learning by watching tutorials that I find on the Internet, reading magazines on the subject and above all, practicing in the sequencer.
I have a little home studio in my room like I said before. This consists of a desk, a chair, two speakers, a headset, the computer and the screen. In front of me I have a very inexpensive Casio electric piano that I use as a midi controller. All this is connected to an audio interface that goes to the computer, where I work with Logic X and Fruity Loops. Thanks to the money obtained from my two published albums, I have been able to buy most of my current equipment.
5. Do you think your style will evolve, or that the style of fashwave might evolve? It seems to be framed as a sort of permutation of seapunk, vaporwave, PC Music (personally waiting for this iteration to be over)... but perhaps fashwave will differentiate itself enough to not be discussed tangentially with these things any longer?
It depends a lot on the artist.
For my part, I think that yes, something is evolving, not only in quality, but conceptually. I have several long-term ideas of where I want to take the aesthetics of my music, including organs, large orchestral displays and complex rhythmic passages. If I'm not publishing a lot of music right now it's because I'm spending my time studying how to bring something like that into reality.
6. Do you aspire for fashwave to become more mainstream or would it be "dead" if that happened?
The fashwave here is different from the other genres of the music scene. It is not a fashion or musical trend, but a need within the alt right to have music that serves as a sign of identity and can be used without fear of copyright.
My goal in starting this project was to provide music to the content creators of that incipient Alt Right. And this is because the administrators of Youtube and Google took advantage of this copyright infringement to be able to shoot down videos that were very well made.
Now, as they can no longer tear down those videos because they do not infringe copyright, they have looked for other ways to shut us up like the famous youtube jail or big blackouts like the expulsion of the Daily Stormer from the normieweb.
But honestly, I couldn't expect anything else from our enemies. Fashwave will be dead when no one needs it.
7. Do you think fashwave has already made some way into mainstream culture in a way that someone on the outside would not even realize? (For example, Rihanna did a performance on SNL a few years ago that featured some seapunk style graphics. Hipsters caught the reference and were annoyed/upset, but the average SNL viewer thought nothing of it, I'm sure.)
Not at all.
Although I would love to have some kind of reference from us in productions like The Man In The High Castle, Iron Sky or Wolfenstein.