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John Maus Words: Gemma Samways Photography: Teddy Fitzhugh
The confounding musician searches for meaning with his first album in six years
Nobody can reach John Maus. He doesn’t answer the call that took a week to schedule. The next day, his publicist gives me an update from Maus’s manager. “Seems he’s dropped off the grid momentarily,” he admits. “I’m assured it’s nothing to worry about – and this is a regular occurrence.” A day later, there’s a sighting – albeit in photo form – via Memphis underground rap legend Tommy Wright III, who tweets a shot of them, arms around each other, with the caption “The white Tommy Wright & the black John Maus.” When I finally catch up with Maus over the phone two days later, it transpires that the picture was actually taken at the end of August, at HOCO Fest in Tucson, Arizona. And the reason for his recent disappearance? He was honeymooning in Hawaii.
MUSIC
It's a suitably disorientating introduction to John Maus, who's something of a reclusive polymath. A former collaborator of Animal Collective, Panda Bear and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Maus released his first solo album, Songs, in 2006. He rapidly became a cult figure, renowned for his hypnogogic synth-pop and frenzied – bordering on feral – live performances
that regularly collapsed into histrionics. He now lives with his wife on the border between Minnesota and Iowa, “two hours from a metropolis of any kind”, in a farmhouse they refer to as ‘The Funny Farm’. Having lived in Los Angeles and Minneapolis previously, he now prefers “the sound of the wind in the grass over helicopters and the garbage man smashing cans against your window, if you know what I mean?” Most of Maus’s fragmentary – and often part-mumbled – monologues conclude with him seeking reassurance with an anxious-sounding, “Do you know what I mean?” or, “Does that make sense?” In truth, it can be difficult to keep up with Maus’ digressions, which careen between Freud and Silicon Valley, 19th century German poetry and human fallibility. As he becomes tangled in manifold complex ideas, you get a sense that his mouth struggles to keep pace with his brain. Maus has been off the radar since completing touring his 2011 record We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves. When I enquire about the stretch of time ahead of his latest LP, Screen Memories, he sounds genuinely amazed by his absence: “You know, it