That’s How You Don’t Get Stuck—an interview with 3mouth
Back in May, DJ/producer/bangerateur 3mouth dropped RELIGIOUS XP, a 9 track systasis of omnifarious electro-fuckery that you, and you all, are obligated to listen to right now.
Polymerizing, to use 3mouth’s own words, “pure, primal hardcore jungle breakcore and more emotional and experimental electronic music that I struggle to define genre wise,” RELIGIOUS XP controverts the sonic expectations, indeed the sonic demands, of Tiktokable contemporary trend-dm.
3mouth became 4mouth when I had a lil chat with them about the album.
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So, I was listening to RELIGIOUS XP. And when I take in your music, I experience a simultaneous call to dance, but also a call to straight up mosh like one would at any sort of grindcore or skramzy type of gig. Something along those lines. When you're making this music, these bangers, are you wanting people to rage? Or is this more an invitation to “release yourself in the cathartic way you need to.” Is this something you're thinking about as you're producing?
That's a great question. It's hard for me to imagine playing a lot of these things live because they're so crazy and also their craziness would make them hard to mix to.
But I will say that when I was first getting into music, around like 2016, 2017, it's also around the time me and my friends were going to punk shows and the punk scene was really popping off in New York. We were going to Trans-Pecos and we were going to punk shows.
And so, I definitely have a lot of punk kind of sensibilities that I inherited from that. Also, my mom was a teen punk, so I definitely inherited those sensibilities from her too. Shout out to my mom.
I would love to have people mosh to my music. But I definitely don't have any envisioned one reaction. I think it's just whatever release comes to you from my music, I'm going to be happy to see.
But, I could definitely see people moshing to it. At the last show that I saw Angel play, Angel was playing jungle music and some people were moshing to it. It was pretty crazy.
Was there any particular band that you remember from the formative years that you would say “yeah this is super important for me right now.”
I can't. They all ended up like being outed as a bunch of predators. They're all fucking assholes and creeps. Like it was really fun at the time, but looking back, they were all creepy and preying on underage girls.
And then the scene was also almost completely white, especially the performers. All white people. Looking back, I'm like, I'm so glad I'm now in this extremely diverse, extremely queer scene that is so unbelievably different from the punk scene.
Even though I love moshing and I love the anti-establishment stuff, there were definitely some major issues. So I can't shout anyone out.
Okay wait. I'll shout out the one non-problematic band. They’re not still together, but I remember seeing them specifically at Trans-Pecos. They went by the name Cannibal Girls. So, shout out Cannibal Girls.
That's a deep cut if anyone remembers.
Yeah. Core music. It's got some problems. It has. got some. problems. Back to RELIGIOUS XP: It really reminds me of other sorts of avant-gardist approaches to rave music.
I really love Shitmat, and was hearing that, and I also was thinking about Duran Duran Duran or Doormouse any other more experimental breakcore artists. There's this cheeky thing that these producers do. They regularly disrupt the consistency of the beat. And a lot of times, it's sort of a metacritique of EDM culture.
But with your work, I definitely hear a bit of that legacy, but I also found myself locking into a more stable, danceable pulse. There's a sort of push and pull between chaos and control. How do you go about negotiating an approach to production that is simultaneously really open to unconventional compositional decisions, but also is not purely metacritique or electronic sound art.
How do you approach keeping the actual fun of dance within dance music?
I think, at the end of the day, so much is informed by going out all these shows that we play where I'm always kind of thinking—even though, as I said, I know a lot of it isn't going to translate super well to the dance floor—I'm definitely thinking that I want to be able to dance. Even at a crazy break show. I want to be able to play a track even if there's a BPM change, or something like that, that makes the song so ridiculously hard to play for many DJs.
So I definitely try and make it relatively danceable and relatively stable, while still having as much fun with it as I possibly can. I definitely don't veer too much into the pure sound art sphere. Maybe I have sometimes—unreleased stuff— but, I definitely like to keep it danceable.
A lot of this project was inspired and informed by this mix I put out on SoundCloud, it was a break/jungle mix. I worked really hard to put it together, and it really helped me get out of my creative rut because I suddenly was feeling super duper inspired.
I don't think I had played any Duran, Duran, Duran, or Shitmat, but I love those guys so much. And they definitely are the kind of style that influenced my stuff. And I think that a lot of my favorite tracks by them are still pretty stable. I feel like I can play them at shows.
A question about dance music and electronic music over the last 10 to 20 years now. When I was a teenager—over 10 years ago now—EDM was having its big sort of 2010s explosion with the Flo Rida's and the David Guetta’s and the Diplo’s and all that stuff. Super euphoric, popular, big festival, DJdom. The very last gasp of strictly millennial pop.
And at the time, this stuff was largely reviled by indie producers. But now, you hear that Pitbull-Ne-Yo “Give Me Everything” single, and there’s a nostalgia to it. I'm noticing that a lot of hyperpoppy artists, and a lot of producers in the UK and Ireland too, there's an ongoing rehabilitation of 2010's big vibes pop house. Or, at least, people are taking some of its sonic tropes and trying to redo them in a less explicitly commercial type of way. That Frost Children album from last year comes to mind. What's your take on this? Is this a gimmick? Does it have staying power? Is that sound something you think could be potentially deconstructed and reformed for your own purposes? Or, is that totally crass?
It’s funny because, during the time, I went to stuff like Gov Ball. In New York, Gov Ball is like the “coolest” thing you can go do basically. People like Major Lazer would perform and I just remember being, “Fuck that corny ass bullshit. We're not listening to no fucking EDM. We're here to see the rappers. We’re here to see, fuckin’, Childish Gambino and Wu-Tang Clan.”
That was super awesome. But now, even the old stuff has started to grow on me. Maybe it's a lot of nostalgia, but I'm like, “damn, the shit is kind of fire.” And I really do like the like Frost Children take on it, like a cool kind of inspiration. Yes, Sister is very inspired by 2010s electro pop. But, it also kind of goes hardcore at times. And I really, really love it.
Me and my friend, Jen, babygh0st—who played the first Cult Mag Cathedral show—we're working on stuff after hearing that Frost Children album. I was very inspired. I've been wanting to make some electro pop, while still being experimental and weird. I’ll make some beats and Jen will work on them with me and she'll sing. She's pushing me to make it more and more experimental: use breaks, use really crazy distorted bass.
I think it's back because music is cyclical. I hate the fact that it is, but I think there are these cycles and everything comes back. And people are saying it used to be a 20 year cycle. And now it's a 10 year cycle. And they also say, “oh, it's because we feel that we have no future we can envision because everything's so fucked.” Obviously I didn't come up with that. But I feel like, damn, that's kind of accurate, sadly.
The slow cancellation of the future idea, it has understandably been so prevalent for the last 15 years, at least. It's really true in a lot of ways.
But also, to be fair, in regards to reaching backwards, there's a lot of cool synth sounds that a lot of those producers were using. One of my biggest guilty pleasures from back in the day was an Afrojack song, I think it was “Take Over Control.” The drop features such a cool, scything saw wave synth sound. Even back then when I was usually going, “Oh man, I hate this stuff, " I still was admitting “dang, I really I love that sound.”
I think you can do a lot of reaching back in a way that isn't just nostalgia bait, or like “there's nothing to look forward to.” Again, shout out Angel. Angel is so tapped into the history of footwork. And yet, their album felt so future forward to me. I think that's what they were going for. No nostalgia bait nonsense. Same with the Frost Children stuff.
That kind of music runs the risk of falling into that trap. Hyperpop artists, they toe the line. My partner and I were listening to that Tiffany Day record from this April. It got marketed as hyperpop. But, as we’re listening, we realized: “There’s a lot of eurodance here. This is pretty much just electro pop really.”
Electro pop, yeah.
It was either Fader. Or, I think it was Dazed?
They were trying to call it “sleaze pop.” And everyone was reaming them and saying “this is the stupidest shit ever.”
I think people forget that with the hyperpop stuff, originally there was this meta thing: “we’re kind of making fun of pop music.” They were doing breakdowns with harsh noise.
I was never super into hyperpop. But, when I think about “what is hyper pop?” I obviously think of SOPHIE and 100 gecs. It was super weird and trying to go against the grain. It wasn't just electro pop.
I remember that, in the late 2010s, so much hyperpop would be a remix of, like, a Taylor Swift song, but then there’d be 190 BPM gabber kicks. Let me pivot to a quintessential subgenre question.
There's a market logic that pervades—and burdens—basically all genres. Historically, DJs and producers have been, both implicitly and explicitly, encouraged to stay in their own genre lane: “I do tech house, I do psytrance, I do UKG.”
Do you think if more producers opened themselves up to breakcore, or other experimental rave techniques, do you think they would discover “hey, you know what? I don't have to rigidly tether myself to a style just because I can tag my music as that on SoundCloud.”
I've often found breakcore artists to be more attuned to experimental approaches.
I think that literally everyone, every single producer and DJ, but producers in particular, can benefit from being more experimental. Obviously, when you listen to my stuff, it's listenable enough. You're not gonna be going “this noise and it's insane.”But every time I open up my DAW, I'm thinking I need to do something different, something I’ve never done before. Every single producer could benefit from that mentality. That's how you don't get stuck. And that's how you keep pushing these genres forward instead of just rehashing these same things every time. And all of my favorite artists are like doing some weird shit that I’ve never heard before.
I do think yes, breakcore producers, we love to experiment. We love to fuck around with genre. And we often do like 10 different genres in a track. I fucking love that.
What DAW do you use?
I started out on FL in 2017, maybe 2016. I want to say 2016, because I want it to be 10 years. But I think 2017 is, unfortunately, more accurate. My friend who was teaching me, he was like, “dude, everyone who makes rap beats is on Ableton now.” I don't think it was true. But we switched over to Ableton. And I've been loyal ever since. But I think it's really just a tool at the end of the day. I'm not an Ableton elitist.
Yeah. I tried my hand at Ableton when I was way younger. And I was wayyy too young for it.
Yeah, I think with Ableton, when you open it up, I love it, but it is so intimidating and so stressful. With FL, you open it up and you don't feel as nervous.
I’ve got a question born from the fact that I'm a writer. I listen to electronic music. I like electronic music. I make it. What advice do you have as a producer of electronic music, and especially as a producer of forward thinking electronic music, for producers of literature, be that prose or poetry or what have you? I think there's a lot of instructive interchange that can happen between the two artforms.
I will say writing is really hard and really admirable. I have a lot of writers in my family, and I've done some writing. One of my things I'm proud of is I did a good write up for jungle network zine. It's like a jungle based zine and they put out mixes and a lot of cool stuff.
I’ll say, and this is just my general advice for like all artists: Be experimental and be weird. And work on something every single day. I remember Pete Rock, a huge figure in rap, he had this rule: 30 before Thursday. He'd make 30 beats before Thursday.
And I remember being like, “that is fucking ridiculous.” I could never, ever do that? But if he can do that, then I can work on one a day. And so then it was locked down.
I try to boot up Ableton and, at least, put down a little 10 minute sketch every single day. I don't always do it. But I try. If you draw or if you write, just put a little something on paper every single day. Because if you wait for inspiration to hit, it's going to be way too inconsistent. Lowkey, you need to force yourself to do a little something every day. Make it weird.
I think that's so true. So many people think of artistic production as, you know, the muse coming to you randomly. But, it's a craft; it's a muscle and you have to practice.
I've had time, especially recently, where I'll start something and it just clicks and you just get into that flow state and all of a sudden, a fucking hour has flown by and you've just been locked in working on something you're really proud of. It’s such a good habit. I also believe in being compassionate with yourself too. If you're really not feeling it, don't kill yourself to do it. But if you are able to do a little something every day, it never hurts to just work that muscle.
3mouth will be performing at Cathedral 2 on August 7.
Their most recent album is RELIGIOUS XP
Photos by Malik Chatman and fotosbywaldo.
