My Favorite Things with Steven Archer

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with award-winning artist and musician Steven Archer, whose art will be featured on Donna Lynch’s upcoming Choking Back the Devil, which will be released July, 17th, from Raw Dog Screaming Press. Also, his newest album, Technology Implies Belligerence, is coming out July 12th!

What does Steven love when he’s not making cutting-edge music and creating covers for Stoker Award winners? Spoiler alert: tools of the trade that are must-haves for both art and music, a music-making process that’s like “throwing a bunch of poetry magnets at the fridge,” a space to create art, books that have stuck with him for years, and a gift that has lasted for nearly thirty years. Curious? Read on to learn more!

I’ve been asked to write about my current favorite things, which isn’t a problem, I like a lot of stuff. The second part of the assignment is harder: It should be the kind of thing that changes from year to year.

I’m a simple dude. I order the same things at restaurants all the time, not because I don’t want to try different things, but because I know what I like and what I don’t. Consequently, I don’t have a ton of new and different things all the time.

But let’s see what is what…

Currently I’m loving my iPad Pro and Pencil. From an art dude point of view, it’s great because I can knock out digital paintings ridiculously fast. And when I’m doing something with traditional media I can pre-vis the entire piece without having to put brush to canvas, which I think makes the work far more cohesive.

From a music dude perspective, it allows me to work on the road. The new apps sound great, but it’s the interfaces that are truly remarkable. They are worlds away from traditional music-making interfaces. Sure there are the usual virtual keys and piano rolls, but you’ve also got multi touch-sensitive sliders and rings and virtual knobs, and really whatever you want the thing to be, it can be. Last year I wrote the better part of a record over about a week while sitting in the van before and after shows.

My next favorite thing is rediscovering sampling as a musical art form. In about a month, my new Stoneburner record Technology Implies Belligerence is coming out, and part of what makes it different is how it was built. Instead of starting tabula rasa and building everything from scratch, I went prefab and then tweaked the hell out of it. I went through my entire music collection and sampled anything that made sense. Then when it was time to write I used those samples as starting points. The beauty is, by the time I was finished you couldn’t tell. They have all been mangled, pushed, pulled, twisted, and rearranged into their own thing. Or rather into my own thing. It was a very fast and effective way of working. Kind of like throwing a bunch of poetry magnets at the fridge, finding the good bits and filling in the blanks.

I’m currently very into having a garage, because I’ve been able to use it as a big empty room for shooting videos in. I built a green screen rig for one. A 9-10 foot wall of x-rays in forest of trees suspended from the rafters for another. Having access to a space to use as a blank canvas has been quite nice.

See, that’s part of the problem for me writing this, I guess. I can’t say “Well, I’m really enjoying this pop culture thing” because for the most part, pop culture is just there to me in the background. Sure, I enjoyed the Stranger Things of the world and other bits and pieces that leak through into mine, but for the most part they don’t stick with me in any real way. The ones that do make it through, though… they are with me for YEARS.

Books like Blindsight by Peter Watts, Nightfilm by Marisha Pessl, and the Minotaur of all labyrinths: the sublime House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski are examples of works that upon breaching the skin of my awareness have grown deep roots. Their impact can be seen on my art, music, and even understanding of the world and how it all works. (Yeah, even House of Leaves. Consequently my worldview is pretty bent). Books like that come along rarely and fill so many needs in such an all-encompassing way, that there’s very little room or interest when it comes to newer external stimuli.

So what’s left when you eliminate things from the outside world?

Tools. The things that help you do the thing. And again, when you find one that works, you tend to stick with it. Like my easel. I love my easel, my mom gave it to me almost 30 years ago. Now it’s covered in the residual paint of thousands of paintings, and it still does its job. Occasionally I find myself sitting at it, thinking back to its arrival in my first apartment, and thinking, “Holy shit. It worked.”

Steven Archer is a multi-faceted musician, composer, visual artist, sculptor, and writer. He is best known for his work with the dark electronic rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records), the abstract electronica project ::Hopeful Machines::, and his industrial/ electronic project Stoneburner (NGP). His music has been used in several soundtracks, including the award-winning documentary Small Small Thing. He was also commissioned by NASA to score the promotional video for the OSIRIS-REx mission.

His art is shown in galleries nationwide, and has appeared on numerous album and book covers, including several Bram Stoker Award winning works. He lives in Maryland with his wife and collaborator Donna Lynch.

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