The newest EP by Los Angeles musician Nick Malkin, Interrupted Verse, is a collage of field recordings from hypothetical land scapes – rand omized, abstracted ‘non-spaces’ that exude an elusive sonic familiarity. Loops of stalled engines, spinning turnstiles, digital feedback, and bird song evoke fragmented visual worlds, alluring but unreal. Malkin’s work as Afterhours tends towards the nocturnal and romantic but under his own name the mood skews more opaque, the approach more deconstructed.Across two multi-movement pieces Malkin interweaves chaos and coherence, a glitchy, enigmatic collision of feeling and technology.
Facts
1: Half of the people can be part right all of the time.
2: Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
3: All of the people can’t be all right all of the time.
Questions
1.What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Fleeting moments of sonic-aesthetic harmony; looking out the window at the right time while the right sound is playing, an instant vignette, that kinda thing.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I’ve been playing music for as long as I can remember, starting with endless tapes of sub-sub-Nirvana guitar thrash as a little boy and into whatever else as time and tastes moved on.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Joni Mitchell – The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Vrioon
Jand ek – You Walk Alone
Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of Love
Jan Jelinek – Loop Finding Jazz Records
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Cold rooms thick with cigarette smoke, bomber jackets, haircuts.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
The labyrinth of beautiful, dystopian industrial lots in and around Downtown, the Self-Realization Fellowship Headquarters in Mount Washington, a corner booth at Ye Rustic.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead
I’d be a happy, healthy, well-adjusted human being.
7. What was the last record/music you bought?
Magda Mayas – Terrain
Mark Isham – Vapor Drawings
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
A generous benefactor.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
J. Albert at Directory, Visible Cloaks at MOCA, the guy from Philadelphia who performs every week at the Comedy Store open mic, Terry Riley at the Geffen. That’s not bad for 2017.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
It’s become more important to me the longer I’ve been making music. Whether I’m using the internet to find sounds and field recordings that I can’t or don’t want to source myself, familiarizing myself with new software in an effort to disrupt my stand ard methods of composition, whatever. It’s ultimately very frustrating to spend so much time on the computer, but for now it’s an integral part of what I’m doing.
11. Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your career/art?
None and they love it.
