The Dark Arts Of Bradford Cox
The songwriter behind Deerhunter discusses getting over the trauma of making his band’s last record, moving on to a new phase in his career, and what he sees as a lack of vitality in indie music.
4AD
Deerhunter's seventh album, Fading Frontier, is the latest entry in one of the most consistently excellent bodies of work in rock music over the past decade or so. The new record isn't a huge departure from what Bradford Cox, Lockett Pundt, and the rest of the Atlanta-based band have done in the past, but much of it has a serene, clear-eyed quality that is distinct from the more depressive or hysterical music in their back catalog. It's the sort of record that is tempting to classify as "mature," but that may imply that the band have lost their vitality, which isn't the case at all.
This is my third interview with Cox, who also records on his own as Atlas Sound. He's a remarkably candid conversationalist, and interviews with him tend to feel more like a heart-to-heart than a purely professional exchange. The first time I talked to him was for an extremely emotional Q&A at Rolling Stone not long after he had what he described as a nervous breakdown. The second time was for BuzzFeed, and it basically amounted to him making fun of Morrissey for a half hour. This time around, he spoke very openly about this new phase of his career, his alienation from the current indie rock scene, and what he calls the "dark arts."
My impression of the new record is that it feels like the calm after a storm, or like coming out of some period of intense emotion. Like coming out of depression, and not necessarily feeling happy, but just knowing you're on the other side of it. Is that at all what you were going for?
Bradford Cox: Fading Frontier was recorded mostly in the daytime, and we were always in this garden behind the studio. It was that perfect time of spring, when it's not that humid. It's cool at night, warm during the day, and lots of blue skies. Once summer rolls around in Atlanta, it becomes gray, humid, damp, a wet laundry feeling. Whereas in spring, it's really refreshing. Everyone wants to read into the record, like "Bradford's happy now!" but, like, let's just take it as a physical thing. Can't we just talk about the weather? The weather was really pleasant when we made it, and we got to experience a lot of daylight hours, which was the complete opposite of Monomania. Recording Monomania was perhaps one of the unhealthiest experiences of my life. It was just a record of utter pitch-black darkness. Just dark, dark, dark. I'm not just talking emotionally or psychologically.
Did you consciously decide to avoid doing anything like that again?
I don't think anyone in the band could survive doing that again. It was almost hexan, or like witchcraft or black arts. It was hyper-magnetic and draining, like some kind of perverted alchemy. I know to most people it just sounds like a garage rock record, but it was very cathartic. I recently found this hard drive — we had filmed the entire recording sessions with a friend of mine in a home video kind of way. I was looking at the footage and I was just like, "Jesus, I look like a walking corpse!" It's not like I'm so much happier now, but like, damn, anything would be an improvement.
When I say "black arts," I am not being funny or referring to Satan or some conservative historical view of the black arts as an actual terminology for witchcraft. It's just the forms of art that are, I don't know, more…primal. Patti Smith, I think, is a practitioner of dark art. John Coltrane, in his later period in life, like Interstellar Space, that's definitely a record of black art. A Romanian composer like György Ligeti, that's very much black art. I think that someone that practices black arts isn't concerned with immediate returns, or the failure of one experiment or another. I think Radio Ethiopia is a great Patti Smith record, but I guess people were very dismissive of it, and commercially it was a disappointment. I like to think that maybe Monomania is a Radio Ethiopia for us. It was vital, the message was intact, but it didn't really float with people. But it doesn't make it any less special. It wasn't a comfortable record to make and I don't look back fondly on making it. It gives me the heebie-jeebies, frankly. It was just witchcraft. That's just where it came from. I had no control over it; I don't like that kind of thing.
Do you carry those associations over to when you play those songs live?
BC: The Monomania tour was very dark and any kind of humor was sinister, you know. I was in a zone. I would like to say that zone is gone. That was very much, here's just the dark part of me. It's not an act. I don't take it too seriously, it's not high art, but it was an exorcism.