LIFE STORY
LCD Soundsystem’s synth guru on how he went from being a Providence hardcore kid to one of DFA’s most valuable players. My father’s side of the family is very musical. He plays piano now; he played the guitar when I was growing up. He’s actually an academic who studies poetry. I think he got into playing music because he was a jazz fan growing up. There’s that connection between improvised elements. When I was a little kid, I remember getting a tape recorder for Christmas and that being incredible. I loved recording sounds, making little radio shows and using it as an instrument. My parents also had an old reel-to-reel, and by the time I was a teenager, I realized some cool stuff you could do with that, like echoes and slowing shit down. I was always in bands. That’s one thing that’s cool about [my band now] the Crystal Ark: I played in bands as I was growing up, and I did my own recordings, but those things never met until now.
I was in a radical post–John Cage program at Bard. It was called Music Program Zero. I took it for two and a half years, but I ended up graduating in the art department because I was doing installations with sound and visuals. If I had stayed in the music department, I would have felt boxed in. A lot of people go to college to figure out what they want to do. I always had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. When I was studying music, it got to this point where I thought, “I want to make music, but I don’t really care about this stuff.” I was more interested in healing, energy and magic than music in its purest sense. Did you see that Ramones documentary End of a Century? Well, there’s one part where Joey Ramone talks about having OCD and how listening to the Stooges calmed him down when he was a kid. I don’t have OCD, but I got into music because it really does something for me. ST—076