Autre Ne Veut Would Rather Tingle Your Spine Than Make You Dance

Autre Ne Veut’s explosive second record, Anxiety, landed earlier this year. It's a work of sadomasochist emotional triggers that tickle and twist your spine, soul, mind and crotch. A bittersweet, booming and very immersive experience that wakes you the fuck up and makes you really wish you could sing like a diva too.

ANV aka. Arthur Ashin, was born in the darkly glittering cradle of Brooklyn’s noise and club scenes; before being coaxed into getting his music out by Daniel Lopatin. The latter’s Software Label studios, shared with Mexican Summer, played host to Anxiety’s recording. And now he's touring the world, pretty sweet outcome right? I caught up with him during the tail end of his tour, the afternoon before he duly blew everyone in attendance away at Electrowerkz.

Noisey: Hey. So how did you begin writing Anxiety, did you already have a sketch book of ideas?

Autre Ne Veut: Nothing gets written down except for patch names and presets on synthesisers, and even those get scratched. So it’s very hippy-dippy, singer-songwriter style writing. It’s more just about the feel.

Did you feel that there was an undercurrent leading it in a certain direction at all though?

I certainly wanted to be nodding to more contemporary pop sounds than I had previously. My older recordings were a function of me trying to take classic soul and reggae style song. With this I was thinking about contemporary pop form which tends to be more sprawling parts and more bridges.

Did you always know you were going to end up in music?

I always wanted to, but I never thought I would.

So you just started out making music for yourself?

Yeah, even if all this stuff crashes and burns I’ll always make music. It’s necessary for me. Dan (Lopatin) has been an incredible adversary for me in the world of music. I was playing noise shows on concrete floor DIY spaces for years and then he gave my demos to Todd who ran Old English Money who made my first record. He’s done everything for me. I’m not very good at being proactive on my own behalf, so it’s been really great to have someone that’s so supportive.

Is that where your hyper expressive performing style came out of? Having to grab people’s attention at noise shows?

In the context of Brooklyn: noise, tweakers, a lot of dudes with beards sitting on the floor with keyboards and Behringer mixers; that was a thing for a while. Post-Wolf Eyes. So those were the shows I was playing, to kids who were obsessed with those bands, or maybe Black Dice, or whatever, and I was doing this weird, burlesque-y freak-out performance with an iPod. I needed to get the same level of “what the fuck?!” to break the ice.

Were there any literary influences, or any texts from your clinical psychology masters degree, that fed into the record?

I was reading a lot of Freud when I was dealing with this record. Most of my critical background is more continental, dealing with society and paranoia.

I’ve been reading this novel by Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, that feels really apt. A lot of my lyrics are non-lyrics in a way, and I really like the discourse around the failure of language to communicate. The Flame Alphabet is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the mid-West where children’s language, the post-YOLO type of language, is extra potent. It actually kills people but the children are immune to it until they grow out of it and the next generation's language becomes toxic.

I definitely need to read that.

It’s great. I’ve been tweeting quotes anonymously from it. I should probably give him credit.

What musicians do you feel are doing incredible things at the moment?

I’ve loved The Knife for a really long time. I get really excited about two things in music. One is just classic song writing, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and to me Majical Cloudz falls into that category. Really incredible songs that get to emotionally salient issues. And the other one is when someone is doing something that, despite the fact that we’ve all heard everything, it still feels unique somehow, and feels novel and like it’s pushing certain boundaries between what feels comfortable and listenable.

I love that you toured with Majical Cloudz, such a great pairing.

We had an incredible tour in the US together, it was perfect. We approach things differently ultimately, but the way we think about things seems to be related for sure.

Does the repetition on a tour kill the vibe for you a bit as you invest so much emotionally?

It is definitely harder to get to that place if it’s every day, unless the audience brings the energy. I mean it’s in the music to a degree, but that repeats even more in a way than the performances do. I get terrible stage fright before I go on and I mostly try to covert that into externalising if that makes sense.

Do you ever utilise any specific samples or notes to underscore the anxiety theme?

I didn’t do that. The anxiety is not necessarily supposed to be a visceral, physiological anxiety as much as a existential anxiety, societal capitalist anxiety.

Do you think that’s something that is largely down to an exponentially greater volume of stuff to be anxious about getting thrown at us online and in the media.

I can speak to before Internet unfortunately, but as a kid I was anxious for a whole other set of reasons. I was anxiously bored. What did we do before we had smartphones right?! But I do think it’s worse. We’re constantly being monitored in a way like no period of time. Our private moments are in the public sphere in a way. There’s interesting things that come out of it as with any technology. The best art that’s ever made is referencing the dangers of technology , that’s where art comes from in a way, but I do think it’s stressful. It stresses me out. I’m in Europe now and my smartphone doesn’t work and I’m like what do I do?!

Did you see the piece in Wired about the toddler bloggers? A new generation for whom it’s implausible not to share absolutely everything online before they even get to school.

Anyone can deal with anything if it’s naturalised into their systems. We’re relatively adaptive creatures. It’s always the transitional generations that have problems. It was like “The Beatles are ruining culture”, for the people that didn’t grow up with them, then for us it’s proto building blocks for how we think about music culture.

Seeing as you’re about to go to Berlin, I was wondering if you ever go looking for escape through dancing?

Dancing used to be my primary catharsis, but for some reason I lost my ability to do that. I used to have to go dancing twice a week. It was totally narcissistic, bubble-world dancing. I would close my eyes in the middle of a group and ignore everyone and freak out. I was a little too obnoxious. Then one day I just didn’t want to.

And now you perhaps try to make other people dance?

People don’t dance to my music they never have.

Never mind then, thanks for your words.