Bradford Cox has became one of the most fascinating, polarizing figures in American underground music. The electric frontman of space-rock-ish garage-psych outfit Deerhunter, Cox also records, solo, as Atlas Sound. Under both pseudonyms, Cox has freely posted reams of material on his blog, building the bands' fanbases in direct fashion. In 2008, Cox accidentally allowed two albums worth of unmastered new material —Atlas Sound's Logos, and Deerhunter's Weird Era Cont.— to trickle onto his blog. Discovered by fans, they were soon disseminated via filesharing wires, against Cox's most fervent wishes. The outspoken artist suffers from Marfan Syndrome, which, coupled with his Kurt Cobain-styled penchant for wearing dresses, makes him quite a frightening sight on stage. A most charismatic performer, Cox's stage presence has lead Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O to call Deerhunter shows "a religious experience." Cox spoke on the eve of Record Store Day, 2009.
Interview: 16 April 2009
So, where exactly are you at the moment?
“I’m in Low Yo Yo Stuff, an amazing record store in Atlanta, looking at thousands of records. I’ve got a Stereolab bootleg, I was looking at some Pere Ubu stuff, and I’ve got a boxset of Robert Wyatt EPs under my arm. This is probably the best record store in Atlanta. This store was my favourite record-store growing up, in Athens, in its original location. I used to come in, and was quite a handful to these people, I’m sure, but they always humored me. Now they’ve moved out to Atlanta, and I’ve moved out to Atlanta.”
Doesn’t going to a record store and buying actual records make you an archaic aesthete? Aren’t record stores dying?
“It’s now or never! I think the kids are definitely buying records again. Get off the fence!”
What was the most formative record you bought from La Yo Yo Stuff?
“Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall, or maybe Can’s Delay. Both when I was a teenager. I didn’t have a large knowledge of music, but Todd and the gang would suggest things. Weird tape-machine music, musique concrète; stuff any teenager needs to hear.”
Were you making your own music at that point?
“I was, but it was quite insular. It wasn’t really inspired by all the weird stuff I’d get into later. If you can imagine a young kid banging on instruments on a cassette recorder, trying to discover what sound was, how you made it. I don’t think it was that great.”
So ‘insular’ in that you were just stumbling down your own path, rather than taking influence from others?
“Well, I didn’t know how to take influence. Also, I was just really interested in how guitars and drums sounded on tape. That was an interesting thing to me, finding out where to put the microphone in the room to get the drums to sound cool. It was before I had any type of motivation or influences that I was using.”
How and when did the motivation arrive?
“Mainly just finding out more about music. Bands like Stereolab; seeing them and feeling so strongly that I wanted to be on stage doing that kind of thing, wanted to be making those kind of tapes. This was the early ’90s, when all this rough lo-fi stuff was coming out: Sebadoh, Guided by Voices. People in basements using the same cassette recorders I was using. I didn’t have any crazy ambition, but I also didn’t have anything holding me back.”
Can you draw a line from what you were doing then, and what you’ve been doing the last half-decade?
“Wow! Um, well, music always takes special forms when it’s intertwined with nostalgia, and you find that you’re going in circles a lot. Sometimes you’re really influenced by one thing, sometimes you don’t want to hear that at all. Different periods I’m inspired by different things. So, there’s not really much of a difference between what I was doing then and what I’m doing now, but at different times I’ll be working under the influence of different things. The earlier stuff I did was like primitive garage-rock, then I went into super-strange territory, then I went back to the more primitive stuff. Now I feel more inclined towards pop music.”
How has knowing you have so many willing ears eager to hear what you’re doing changed the way you think about, or even approach, your music?
“It really doesn’t change that much, because when I’m recording I don’t think about really anything, much less what someone’ll think of it. If I was too conscious about what I was doing, I’d never be able to do anything. I make music very stream-of-consciously, to the point where I almost feel like I’m not responsible for the results.”
Andrew Bird told me that recording is like “being on a bender,” and that he often has no recollection of what he’s done in that time.
“I totally relate to that!”
Have you been on any benders of recent?
“I actually just recorded 30 new songs this April. And, like what Andrew Bird says, I don’t even know what they are, where they’re coming from, or where they’re going. I don’t know if they’re for Deerhunter or for Atlas Sound. I have an Atlas Sound album done, and there’s this new Deerhunter EP that’s going to be released. It definitely hasn’t been a dry period.”
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