Interview: Carey Mercer

Carey Mercer makes music as Frog Eyes, Swan Lake, and Blackout Beach. Here’s a Blackout Beach song from the latest album, Skin of Evil.

Blackout Beach – “Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star”

I first heard Skin of Evil back in March on a long, long bus ride on bad roads in Laos. The country had been burning and there wasn’t any wind, so the sky everywhere was smoky for a week. When this song came on the bus broke down. Three donkeys ran by. It started raining ash; like the outside world was in art class, and the exercise was to “do” Mr Mercer as a three-panel comic. And it didn’t get it, really, but it was cool. As long as we have the real songs (and we do).

MBV Ronnie: What is art for?

Carey Mercer: Years ago I read a survey. I read somewhere that, given the choice, the “average” (this survey is made dubious by this term) British person would prefer the little knick-knacks, and Anne Geddes photos, and Irish meadow paintings, to any modern “art.” So art is for rich people.

“Don’t forget: the worst bands, garbage bands, bands that no sane person would say ‘but this is my favourite band!,’ have made at least one hundred thousand dollars from TV. Smart little dudes!”Allow me to extend this survey to music: I suspect that this lumpen prototypical “average” person would prefer Shania to Dirty Projectors. In my mind’s eye I can see an “average” hand angrily switching the radio dial from what we call “art music” to something a little familiar. The anger dissipates as the air is filled with the sweet strains of Shania’s honky-tonk. Of course, anything that is repeated enough becomes familiar, and that gives us hope, but I don’t know what for. Real hope likely contains an absence of concrete ends or aims, and seems to have something to do with “freedom.”

So art is for rich people and art lovers. Art lovers will either have some “shameful” link to wealth, or they are revolutionaries.

MBV Ronnie: What does the term “artist” mean?

Carey Mercer: Someone who has contacts. Someone who can make contacts to the wealthy. A Gallery is like the pope. A medium between lowly man and God, but in this case it’s the lowly artist sending his or her art up to the wealthy.

Music is not so different – do you know that there are publicists? Publicists are hired by labels and artists to convince magazine writers to write articles on their bands. They also convince TV people to listen to their bands, and they pitch their artists as the perfect music to play behind Zac’s breakup scene or Debbie’s first affair or Remington’s drug addiction. “6 billion expressions being hurled into a blank void. Everyone writes, and no one reads.”The idea here is that the naive viewer will be so moved by this song that they will remember the tune, and blindly walk into the specialty record store, humming the chorus. This fictional person, of course, will be met with a bit of scorn.

And don’t forget: the worst bands, garbage bands, bands that no sane person would say “but this is my favourite band!”, have made at least one hundred thousand dollars from TV. Smart little dudes! My lord, Ronnie, what I would do with even a couple thou…

Smart little dudes!

Two disclaimers:

1. Publicists aren’t bad people. It’s actually altruistic, given all the nasty jobs out there, to go to bat for someone else’s art. I just wish to suggest that the difference between the bands that you will “hear” about (this “hear” is almost archaic, as I suspect that many listeners read about music before they ever hear it), and the bands that you ignore, involve a publicist somewhere in the chain.

2. I know that the world teems with counter-points to the cynical exposition. I know about warehouse-shows and artist run centers and bands that only release music on cassettes and people who only buy cassettes. I respect all of this. But the macro-nature of these questions demands an “alien’s” view. And: is it all a bit passive?

So an artist is someone who can convince other people to persuade lots of other people that his or her art is…brilliant. Hamsun’s hungry bohemian is ultimately irrelevant.

MBV Ronnie: What does an artist use art for?

Carey Mercer: See the above.

MBV Ronnie: What is the artist’s mission?

Carey Mercer: The artist’s real mission is to disorientate us, to make the familiar horizon sway and buckle, as if we are suddenly placed on the deck of a ship without a captain. For that is, perhaps, the real truth of our lives.

MBV Ronnie: Are artists egocentric/self-centered?

Carey Mercer: I am surprised I am even trying to answer these questions.

The worst artists look only to the self: people who write down their dreams and relate their drug trips and describe, as close to truth “A Gallery is like the pope. A medium between lowly man and God, but in this case it’s the lowly artist sending his or her art up to the wealthy.”as their side allows, their painful break-ups. The second worst artist looks only at the external: didactic faux-revolutionaries, critical theory poseurs, Foucault fucks, nature writers. The best artists find the point where the self co-mingles with the external. The self and the state. You and your partner. Fathers and Sons. It’s really really hard to sit on this point and it shifts, which accounts for the varying quality of work in a person’s career–this balance is constantly in flux.

This is why I sing sometimes about hunters, since I think 2001. But this is a boring path and must be abandoned.

MBV Ronnie: Are artists realists?

Carey Mercer: You tell me. Is Weber a realist?

MBV Ronnie: Do you have what it takes to be an artist?

Carey Mercer: No. I need love. I’d torch all the Guernicas in the world for one day of love.

MBV Ronnie: Why do they call film the seventh art?

Carey Mercer: I generally don’t answer questions that contain the abstract “they”.

MBV Ronnie: How do you express what you think, feel, want, and like?

Carey Mercer: On my blog, of course. Isn’t that how everyone expresses how they think and feel, and what they want and like?

6 billion expressions being hurled into a blank void. Everyone writes, and no one reads.

MBV Ronnie: Are you a painting aficionado?

Carey Mercer: I am a dilettante, and an aficionado of nothing.

Interview continues here…

- Ronnie Scott