Hi Dakota, thanks for chatting today!
To start - could you tell me a little bit about what you do and create?
Totally, I'm pretty split evenly between music and visual arts. I've been playing in bands and producing records for a long time now. I also illustrate and make comics and graphic novels. I direct music videos too. So, I’m always bouncing between mediums.
What are some of your earliest memories of creating?
I got pretty lucky early on. My mom was an art teacher. She would bring me around with her to her art classes. I was like her little teacher’s assistant.
I was always surrounded by art at that time. My parents put me in piano lessons when I was five. So from the very beginning, I always had something to do with my hands whether it was an instrument or art supplies.
Sounds very nurturing and encouraging, right?
Totally. It feels like I wasn't even given a choice. My dad isn’t a musician, but he's an avid listener. For example - just yesterday, I put out this song with an artist I produced. When I was going through the mental references I had for the song, I noticed most of them were songs my dad made me listen to as a kid. It’s cool seeing things come full circle.
Yeah, it's a common thread. When we dive into their parents' record catalogs to hear what they grew up listening to, it’s a formative experience. What artists do you look to for inspiration today?
I'm pretty all over the place. Oftentimes, I spend a lot of time studying other guitar players but also dive into other realms, because I find inspo from a lot of places.
I'm really into the 70s and 80s Japanese music scene because it feels so fresh and foreign to me. I like getting inspiration from movie scores. I'm really obsessed with Hitchcock and the Bernard Herman scores for those movies, and a lot of 80s and 90s thrillers. I think my visual brain informs my recording process and I like to approach a song from a cinematic place and I try to picture the scene or story unfolding even though there’s no film involved.
You mentioned putting out a solo record in November, and that most of it was autobiographical - about living all over Los Angeles. How has the environment inspired you?
Over the last couple years, I feel like when I drive across LA, I’m going on a ride that’s a tour of my past and whole life. I feel like the city is a character to me. I can look at any street corner and be reminded of some memory from my life. So the city is embedded in my dna and shaped me. At times I’ve been estranged from family, and the city has been the only constant. Sometimes LA is hostile, but it’s my home nonetheless. The record is called “Search Engine” - alluding to the never ending search for meaning within my hometown.
This environment is factored into my art, it’s inescapable. It’s directly inspired my comics too, all the random people I interacted with at random cafe jobs or just see in the streets inevitably get drawn into my fictional world that’s essentially a weird version of LA.
Are you familiar with Throbbing Gristle or Genesis P-Orridge?
No.
I always think about this quote from Genesis I heard in an interview, something my friends who have lived there have agreed: “It’s as if the whole city is a big set, and when it’s not being filled with scripts, it sucks in energy from anywhere, whether it is dark or positive.”
What escapes me about the city and that region is the weird liminal quality it has.
It's really peculiar.
In any other major city it’s totally normal to be a pedestrian. But I can’t tell you how many times that when I’m out for a walk in LA and I’ve been the only guy on the street for miles.
In that respect, you know you’re in a massive city and everybody else on the road is in their caris in traffic right now, but the fact that you can also be alone in a sort of liminal state is an interesting balance to me. It’s equal parts luxury and alienating. It’s like a secret, does everyone know that you’re allowed to walk?
Also, I think about the fact that you're inevitably going to see a celebrity factors into the weirdness in this landscape. The lines between reality and what you're watching on screen are always getting blurred. Since so many people are living here work in the industry, you see the “making of” in your daily life. It’s like the quote you just shared. It can be like one big movie. Wherever you go, this is a part of the conversation.
Like being on set all the time?
Absolutely, yeah. You can drive by any part of town and encounter trucks with a film crew and you're like “oh, what's going on over there?”
Conversely, whenever I go to New York and pass by film crews, I ask myself “Are they filming Law and Order right now?”
Beyond film and the spectacle – let’s talk about your recording project Night Columns, that specifically touches upon the liminal qualities of the desert.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I've made a lot of different projects with a lot of different collaborators, but that one is one of my favorite things I've ever done.
Me and my friend Jarond Gibbs made that in the peak of the pandemic. He's originally from Arizona, but has lived in LA for a long time.. So we have a very similar experience and perspective of the dry, liminal, dull desert life. In the midst of what felt like a never ending pandemic - we wanted to have a project that we can use as a means of an escape of that harsh reality, so we gave ourselves the challenge of making a record that sounded like one long song.
We spent pretty much all of the lockdown sending files to each other and working remotely. It felt like one long sentence to me anyways. It was a healthy outlet too.
As far as subject matter – we made a myth of the desert. To us, we felt like it was a magical space where anything can happen. That’s what the record alludes to, the weird drifters come and go. He and I changed our identity per song.
Much of what the desert can be is a space where identities change, from the Wild West to Hollywood.
In old Hollywood people changed names quite a bit. Marilyn Monroe is a notable example and beyond that, too many to count.
It's an interesting concept to think about. Someone changes their persona to act, in order to endlessly change personas.
I really like that concept since I'm not an actor at all and I can't do that. Instead, I use songs as a means to explore different perspectives. When I first started writing songs, everything was written in “I” statements.
Then I realized “Wait, you can sub all those words out”. Now, I can sing from the perspective of the person I was talking about. Or why don't I try seeing what it's like being the villain you know? I learned some malleability for my songs.
Dope. Whenever songwriting and recording in the studio, what's your setup like? What gear do you use?
I am all digital. I would love to use tape eventually. I have a simple interface and I record to Logic Pro X. I have some synths, and a lot of guitars. I track one layer at a time - and the song builds from there. If I'm working with somebody, we ping pong back and forth.
I have a collaborator in Australia, who's a pen pal that I met during the pandemic. He and I will send tracks like that to one another. These days with artists I produce with, I feel like we’re directing each other at times. I’m trying to get a specific performance from them, and then when I pick up an instrument I become a malleable tool for them to get a specific sound from. I enjoy that interplay in the creative relationship too. It's like a never ending conversation.
What do you think has been the most challenging part of creating? What’s the most rewarding?
The challenging thing is doing everything yourself. It’s been a lot of teaching myself, learning and reading interviews from other artists or asking more experienced friends. I’m wearing a lot of hats and occupying different roles concurrently. It can be challenging but the more I do it, the more normalized it gets.
And now it's really rewarding also to work with new artists who hadn't put out music before. I enjoy being the guy that can help them bring their work to life. I have no interest in working on my own solo material anytime soon. Right now, I find it so much more stimulating to see somebody else's outline come to life. I just want to keep doing that. It's really refreshing and everybody that walks into my studio has a different story that needs to be told.
What advice would you give anyone who's starting their own musical endeavor?
I recently encountered a couple people who I felt actually were kind of steering in the wrong direction.
I feel like sometimes the Internet or Instagram has messed up the beginner's mindset of how to go about things.
Artists get a little bit too organized and think “Oh, I gotta get this song and I gotta get an EP together and then I got to do this” and they get a little too boxed in. My advice is to give yourself like the most amount of room and time to be weird and to fuck around and experiment without an agenda.
The only reason why I can do what I can do now is from hours and years of aimlessly messing around. You need to get the bad ideas out first. Whatever your instrument or medium is, you got to be fluent in fucking around. I'm such a proponent of this.
When I’m making music videos I like to plan it out to a certain degree but leave enough room for improv as well. It’s the same when I'm writing dialogue for a comic. I like to sometimes not write out the whole script right away because sometimes a random idea off the cuff will happen. I’m sure you have that writing stream of consciousness as well. I would say: don't be rigid and improvise and experiment as much as possible.
Any final words or things you’d like to plug?
I do have a new band called Nice Wave. We just put out this song and music video called Warm Glow. It's a nice change of pace from my last solo work. I was working in a way darker, grungier zone – my bandmate Bella has a a really pretty voice and is a great songwriter. We’ll have a new EP coming soon…
Thank you Dakota!
Watch the Music Video for Warm Glow’s “Nice Wave”
Keep Up with Dakota and his work at No Zone Studios