by Pat Pilch (@apg_gomets)
The perennially chill and funny Asher White may be described as “prolific” or “whimsical” or even “pretentious” during the press cycle for her excellent umpteenth album. The aptly-named 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living bears all sorts of esoteric references and allusions, and that’s partly because White’s music, until now, has more or less been only for herself. Since she was a teen, the Brooklyn-by-Chicago artist has blended the apples and oranges, cutting both pop tunes and musique concrete from the same cloth. On her latest, sweet folk melodies are flipped and shattered beyond recognition into doom metal and breakbeat interludes, asymmetric on paper but carefully balanced in practice.
A painter herself, White’s music is tracked on canvas with broad strokes, layers, accents, and delightful blends of influence and genre. 8 Tips is remarkably cohesive and hints at the artist’s genre-less future pop. Post-Trash spoke with Asher White about the influence of the Chicago noise scene, a teenage acid trip, concurrent apocalypses, and her Joyful Noise debut.
You're a big walker, right?
I love walking. Walking is very important to me. It's a good activity.
Where do you like to walk?
I'll just walk. It's the default mode of transpo. I was just living for the past six years in a city that is unwalkable but also has no public transportation. So I would walk along I-95 a lot. Biking and walking.
I largely moved to Brooklyn because of the MTA. I needed to be in a place where it's not nightmarish for me to go to a party on the other side of town. My walking has probably technically plummeted within the past year that I've been in New York because I've been so hyped on like a working bus system again. Which people also don't know about Chicago, which is that the buses are good in Chicago.
I worked at Drag City in 2019, which was the off the 77, the Belmont bus. It's attached to a gallery space off Cicero and Belmont.
As far as Chicago goes, you were going to a bunch of noise shows in Chicago in your teen years, correct?
Yeah. Club Rectum. Learning Machine. Mortville. Mortville might have closed down in 2015 or 16, probably.
There's a bunch of new spaces that are so awesome now that are a little more legit, like Cafe Mustache. What's the one in Logan Square? It’s a park building?
Elastic Arts? Oh, Comfort Station?
Comfort Station. They do some really cool stuff. For a while, it was just a generator. Even though it's on an intersection.
When I was in Logan Square in 2014, there were the first $17 chai milkshakes. It really was not chai milkshake world yet. That was novel at the time. I do also love Elastic Arts.
Tell me about the music scene growing up.
I love Jack Henry Lickerman. Bailey Minzenberger. Nicest people in the world. Jack is sweet, sweetheart to his core. All these people in Evanston were very cool, very knowledgeable. They were also all cool stoners.
I didn't smoke weed because I had a bad acid trip when I was young. I went to ETHS. I feel like I missed a lot of it, because I kind of kept to myself. At the time, the music that I was making was very recorded. I wasn’t playing out.
I was in a few people’s bands. Occasionally, I drummed. I drummed for Noah [Roth], and I recorded Noah's album when we were 15 on GarageBand with a blue snowball USB mic. They, very charitably, were like, “you're a producer,” even though I was a year younger than them and not [a producer].
You have a snowball mic. Of course you're a producer.
And, a drum kit or something. I feel like Evanston and the particular geopolitical circumstances of Evanston had a really profound impact on me and the freedom that it awarded me. But I didn't feel that part of a music scene within Evanston. I felt like I was kind of outsourcing and going down to Pilsen where I was an absolute gay dweeb baby from Evanston. And it was like, “why are you here?” But I feel like that was my initiation. That was the first music scene I felt engaged in. I was witnessing it and going to the shows and stuff.
Were there any key people in that community that kind of served as role models or mentors for you?
Natalie Chami, who performs as TALsounds. There's also this band Good Willsmith with Doug [Kaplan] and Max [Allison] who founded Hausu Mountain. They are the nicest people. When I met Natalie, she was a high school teacher. She immediately identified that I was nervous and awkward because I was 13.
She would come and talk to me and be like, “hey, what's up?” It was so nice. And then I remember Doug and Max were so sweet. And I asked them the year Hausu Mountain started, I was like, “can I intern?” They were like, “you can get us McDonald's. There's literally nothing for you to do.” But he worked at Thrill Jockey at the time. He was like, “I'll send you their info and you can intern there.” And I did. It was really nice.
Travis from ONO was really sweet to me. He took my Facebook photo for a while. He would just take photos of me. He was so sweet and lovely and 79, which was crazy.
Angel Marcloid too. I saw her do this amazing analog music concrete set with all these contact mics and it was so life changing. She was very influential. I don't think she knows who I am. I think she has a true direct line to God and is a real genius.
How did your exposure to these scenes influence your art, both musically and visually? I read at one point you felt self-conscious about the music you were consuming and the music you were putting out there.
I felt like it primed me to be into fucked up shit. Yeah. It just blasted everything open. I think it's Bruce Springsteen that talks about how, after hearing the opening drum fill to “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was like Bob Dylan kicking down the door to his mind, which is actually a beautiful thing to say. For me, [those experiences] blew out the door to what I understood music to be and instilled in me a real thirst extreme and difficult stuff. It's so galvanizing to think that you can incorporate the sounds of your everyday into whatever.
And then I did acid when I was a sophomore in high school and it made me so upset. It, like, ruined my life. It's like I had a reverse Brian Wilson experience where I vowed from that day on to only make normal music. I think I needed to be really clinging to order and discernible meaning and coherence. Not in any super intentional or principled conviction way. But I think I was disenchanted, disillusioned with chaos for a second.
So I made this major pivot from making noise tapes in my basement and going to these noise shows and being really thirsty for obscenity and vulgarity to being like, “I'm going to make banjo music because I love beauty now.”
But it allowed me to get this head start on getting freaky. By the time that I was pivoting to much fussier or milder music, I still had a love for a compulsion towards, or at least some awareness that there's this roiling world underneath the surface. There's this undercurrent of real violence and danger in music that exists and wants to be tapped into. And I could pull from it as I saw fit. But it felt more challenging and more exciting to me to be working in an idiom that I knew less about or felt less experienced in.
Then I also began to consume more pop, pop, pop music. Like sweeter stuff. Olivia Tremor Control, Of Montreal. I feel like that's when I was also like, “oh, there's nothing better than a good melody.” And I think before then I was like, “there's nothing better than a good, like white noise texture.”
There are contradictory elements within your music and within your art. But it feels sometimes it's like two sides of the same coin?
It's all interconnected, you know? And you want them to be like. It's really exciting and really it's existentially affirming to hear them both.
Not to get corny philosophical about it, but you want chaos to encroach on order and you want to put order in chaos. One wants to believe that the most ornate manmade structures will be weathered by time. And men believe that we have some influence on the inexorable march of time and fate that we otherwise have no bearings in.
You want to believe that you can do a good chord progression and also knock down the structure if you if you want. I can't imagine doing one without the other. And now I'm kind of turned off by people whose projects or methodologies veer too far in one direction.
I want to know that people make room for both of those things. And when I see pure destruction now, I'm kind of I'm not that enthused by it. In the same way where when I see pure structure, pure formalism, or pure skill.
I was super obsessed with pop music growing up and the radio. I slowly sifted through my parents CDs and my dad got me into Radiohead when I was a kid. There was the whole noise punk kind of thing happening at the time when I was in high school. I was really into poorly recorded punk music that was super catchy. Like No Age, Vivian Girls, and Times New Viking. I fucking love Times New Viking.
I would listen to Times New Viking off my Chromebook speakers. That's fucking awesome.
That's the way you're supposed to listen to Times New Viking.
You know, do you know what, though? I actually I'm revising my answer because you're reminding me that shortly before the acid trip or maybe concurrently with the acid trip, I discovered that strain of making stuff. Like the first Wavves albums. Eat Skull. All these Siltbreeze and Load Records bands. Times New Viking is the one that was majorly for me. And No Age’s Nouns.
Did getting press, getting Pitchforked, and signing a record deal impact your approach to writing a transgressive record like 8 Tips?
No, it actually didn’t. If I knew that this is the first time I'd ever had any press cycle, I’d be freaking out.
I don't want to overstate I'm getting a lot of buzz because I'm not. But I've never had interviews before. If I knew that I would have interviews, I would absolutely not have made this album. I would have made the album that I just made that I finished a few weeks ago that I really, really would like to be my breakout album.
[8 Tips] is not an album that I would really want to be promoting. I feel like this album is going to flop. I kind of think that it's going to be a sort of demanding and insular and slightly masturbatory album. I think that there's a lot of interesting ideas on it. And I think that people who really like music and are really interested in engaging with a sort of large-scale, somewhat pretentious piece of work will find stuff to think about there. But I don't think that it's going to be particularly successful in any other regard.
I got to the point where I'm regretting having made art and anxiety about this record not doing well is entirely a latent and new experience that I'm having. I've been making music for so long with the assurance blanket that it won't be heard, with the only metric for fulfillment being whether I like it and whether I thought that it was some step forward or some articulation of a new idea that I'm having.
I had that metric in mind while making 8 Tips, too. I was just like, “this is great.”
Did I read their strings on the next record?
Dude, there's so much.
Do you have any mindfulness techniques that you use to cope with the apocalypse?
I try to put into perspective the fact that there is no singular apocalypse. There's thousands of apocalypses all over, at all times. It is constantly germinating and regenerating and taking place. And the reason why we're like, “it's the apocalypse,” is because the time has come that America is finally getting its apocalypse, which is overdue.
But over the course of the preceding 300 years, there have been a bunch of other apocalypses for other people.
For the first time, we’re [Americans] implicated by it, as opposed to it being virtual and elsewhere. But the human project and justice and love lives on through apocalypses of all scales. Once we're out of this one, there's gonna be way less apocalypses.
You got to just believe that it'll be fine. Not that it won't happen, but that it will be fine.