T.O.P. invites LXV an artist from Pennsylvania for an interview. His album “Clear” was the one that triggered our interest and called our attention a lot.
The album is a full-length LP of original content on the Catalan label, Anòmia. The album is also very much about the more desolate aspects of urban life: modern ruins, wide, empty streets in industrial neighbourhoods.
These muses instill in ‘Clear’ a mournful quality and, at times, a redemptive one. The fractured voices in ‘Clear’ represent the existential churning of the world, a churning which suggests there is a world underneath this imposed reality, just under the surface, wavering in and out of view.
We are presenting LXV and his words for T.O.P.
T.O.P.: Where are you based and how do you find the local music scene?
LXV: I am currently living in Philadelphia. I find my local scene to be pretty cool and weird.
T.O.P.: The LP sounds like scattered dreams and fragmented conversations, does this sound take influence from or even compliment any other art form like cubism for example?
LXV:I have spent a lot of time in my life studying the history of art and practicing visual art. I think my brain is inclined to think visual-conceptually. Sound prohibits me from following the immediacy of some of my ideas, which I enjoy about it. It allows me to present my dreams, narratives and personal mythology abstractly through cryptographic compositions.
T.O.P.:What aesthetics do you try to portray when you enter the studio as LXV?
LXV: I think aesthetics I am conjuring represent purely the absurdity of our five sense reality. I think maybe, in LXV, what is better represented is the breaking down of aesthetics and subsequent path towards some primordial, proto-symbolic language.
T.O.P.:Do you find it important for music to represent certain aspects of life?
LXV: Certainly. For me personally creating music is only worth it if it has some foundation of conceptual meaning, even if that meaning is obscured to the audience. I am rarely compelled to make music without this precursor.
T.O.P. What kinds of things in life inspire you to be creative?
LXV: I think consciousness is already such a strange thing that it doesn’t take much to get me going.
T.O.P.: Where would you find the most ideal place/ venue to enjoy your music?
LXV: Maybe abandoned Olympic stadiums of yesteryear. I personally enjoy to listen to music in states of transit. Something about being in motion. I think this is a good setting to listen to LXV.
T.O.P.: Do you find any new pieces of musical hard/software pushing things forward in terms of experimental music?
LXV: I usually find myself pretty unimpressed by the software/ hardware itself. I think when the work becomes about the technology I lose interest. I am much more enthralled by someone viewing the world suspiciously and using technology to realize their ideas as opposed to inspire them.
T.O.P: Psychofonia is a method to treat migraine with music, what album/record would you put on to heal the mind?
Tales of Psychofonia 