Embark on a journey through the innovative soundscape of Jasper Marsalis, known artistically as Slauson Malone 1, in a conversation that transcends the conventional boundaries of music genres. As we sit down with Jasper, we uncover the multifaceted layers of his album "Excelsior," a fusion of the avant-garde, alt R&B, and lo-fi rock that defies easy categorization. He talks about his rich heritage, his father being Pulitzer Prize winning jazz legend Winton Marsalis, yet this ain’t no nepo baby: Jasper is an acclaimed exhibiting visual artist and his music feels like the communication of a true outlier.
In a broader exploration of artistic expression, we tackle the subjective nature of art evaluation and the complex dynamics of inspiration. Through discussions on alter egos in music to the legacy of 60s experimental composers, we navigate the interwoven themes of music, societal commentary, and the creative legacy that define our cultural landscape. Jasper's reflections on balancing the weight of a musical family name with his individual path provide a candid glimpse into the world where personal history and artistic aspiration converge. Join us for this compelling episode, where we dissect the essence of what makes music a timeless form of human connection and self-expression.
Excelsior is out now on Warp Records
Presented and produced by Paul Hanford
Paul Hanford on Instagram
Lost and Sound is proudly sponsored by Audio-Technica
Paul’s debut book, Coming To Berlin: Global Journeys Into An Electronic Music And Club Culture Capital is out now on Velocity Press. Click here to find out more.
Subscribe to the Lost and Sound Substack for fresh updates and writing.
Lost and Sound title music by Thomas Giddins
Embark on a journey through the innovative soundscape of Jasper Marsalis, known artistically as Slauson Malone 1, in a conversation that transcends the conventional boundaries of music genres. As we sit down with Jasper, we uncover the multifaceted layers of his album "Excelsior," a fusion of the avant-garde, alt R&B, and lo-fi rock that defies easy categorization. He talks about his rich heritage, his father being Pulitzer Prize winning jazz legend Winton Marsalis, yet this ain’t no nepo baby: Jasper is an acclaimed exhibiting visual artist and his music feels like the communication of a true outlier.
In a broader exploration of artistic expression, we tackle the subjective nature of art evaluation and the complex dynamics of inspiration. Through discussions on alter egos in music to the legacy of 60s experimental composers, we navigate the interwoven themes of music, societal commentary, and the creative legacy that define our cultural landscape. Jasper's reflections on balancing the weight of a musical family name with his individual path provide a candid glimpse into the world where personal history and artistic aspiration converge. Join us for this compelling episode, where we dissect the essence of what makes music a timeless form of human connection and self-expression.
Excelsior is out now on Warp Records
Presented and produced by Paul Hanford
Paul Hanford on Instagram
Lost and Sound is proudly sponsored by Audio-Technica
Paul’s debut book, Coming To Berlin: Global Journeys Into An Electronic Music And Club Culture Capital is out now on Velocity Press. Click here to find out more.
Subscribe to the Lost and Sound Substack for fresh updates and writing.
Lost and Sound title music by Thomas Giddins
Lost and Sound is sponsored by Audio Technica and right now I'm wearing a pair of the ATH M50 headphones. I love them. They fit great and snug. They're for the studio or for out and about, like where I am right now in a courtyard of Berlin speaking to you. Audio Technica are a global but family run company that make headphones, turntables, cartridges, microphones, studio quality yet affordable products, because they believe that high quality audio should be accessible to all.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to episode 120 of Lost and Sound. I'm Paul Hanford, I'm your host, I'm an author, a broadcaster and a lecturer based in Berlin, and this is the show where, each episode, I have conversations with the musical innovators, the outsiders, the mavericks, the artists that do their own unique thing, and we talk about music, creativity, life, the things that inspire us to make, the things that we make. Previous guests on the show have included Peaches, suzanne Chiani, jim O'Rourke, Chilly Gonzalez, cosy, fanny Tutti, jean-michel Jarre, mickey Blanco and Thurston Moore. We've been to LA a lot recently and we're back there again today via the miracle of digital communication technology, aka Zoom, that is, to talk with Slauson Malone 1. Meanwhile, my book Coming to Berlin is still available in all good bookshops or via the publisher's website, velocity Press. Here we are, as I mentioned before, a little bit of music. I'm in sat in a courtyard in Berlin right now speaking to you. It's a cold, but not too cold Tuesday morning. I hope wherever you are where you're listening to this, you're having a really lovely one.
Speaker 1:Today I speak with Slauson Malone 1, which is the current musical identity of artist Jasper Marsalas, who last year released what I think is a really incredible, interesting album on warp records called Excelsior, more of which in the moment Jasper, before Jasper started releasing music, he'd already established himself as a visual artist, working across painting, sculpture and text. He's been exhibiting for about five or six years, maybe seven years now. If his last name, marsalas, seems familiar, it's because well, it's possibly because, he's the son of Winston Marsalas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz and classical musician. But I want to be very, very clear about this. Let's be clear One listen to Excelsior, the album, or even just a cursory glance at his artworks on his website, and it's obvious that this is no nepo baby, no nepo baby relying on a glossy editorial in Dazed and Confused magazine to give them a sense of legitimacy. This is a really, really, really interesting artist.
Speaker 1:So I was really excited to have a chat with Jasper, and the anchor of the conversation we have is about this album that he made, as I mentioned, on warp records, called Excelsior, and I don't really know where to start when describing it. It's kind of conceptual, it's a piece of art, it's bloody good fun to listen to and it really takes you on a journey. In a way, it kind of reminds me of like the kind of rock opera, in that it's got all these recurring motifs. Sonically it switches gear consistently, but it feels like a whole cohesive piece, like there's something anchoring the music that the work is somehow trying to tell you, maybe not through anything explainable, but just through the sonics of it. It's sort of somewhere between avant-garde composition, alt R&B and sludgy math slacker rock. I mean, I sort of feel like it's like if Steve Lacey met Pavement backstage at a Frank Zappa concert, it might sound like that fucking hell.
Speaker 1:That's a glib description, isn't it? Sorry about that, but anyway, our chat explores connections between visual art and music, as well as lots of other stuff, and I think that's something that is like a recurring motif to the interviews that I do as well and something I'm always really interested to pick up on artist is what are the commonalities between all art forms? Like, we all do different things, so many of us are multi-hyphenates in some way you know, making art, making music, but also doing different jobs and stuff like that and what are the things that connect them together? Yeah, wow, you're going to find out. Well, you're going to hear what happened when I had a chat with Jasper Marcellus, anyway, and it goes a little something like this How's it?
Speaker 1:going? Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's good. Thank you. Yeah, it's kind of very cold in Berlin. You're in LA, are you? Yeah, I'm in LA right now. It's morning, isn't it? Are you a morning person?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, it's morning. It's a little overcast so it's a bit chilly, but yeah it's, and I don't know it's it's. It's rare to see the weather change in LA, so I'm grateful for the overcasts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Are you an LA native, or have you? Have you moved around quite a bit beforehand.
Speaker 2:Sort of I was born here, but then I moved to New York when I was 12. And then I moved back four years ago. Yeah, what about you?
Speaker 1:You don't sound like you're from Berlin. No, no, don't. But. But you know there's supposed to be. I think 20% of Berlin is native English speakers. So but yeah, no, I'm definitely definitely not German. I'm English, but I've been living here for about six years now. Now it's just enough time to kind of really notice it too well. But still, I have to apologize for every German I meet for how bad my level of speaking German is really. Thanks so much for speaking with me today. And I'm loving, I'm loving the album. It's, it's exelcia, so it's just like this kind of massive I hear is just this massive sort of kaleidoscope, just how my ears respond to it, and it's it sort of feels like one of those albums that feels like a whole vibe. I was wondering if you could talk me through what the process of the album was like, how it developed.
Speaker 2:Well, it was over the process of five years and I started working on it, but I knew I didn't have the technical skills to complete the album, so it just kind of was always lingering in my mind. I've been working on it for years, touring, working on other people's albums, and it was just a process of learning to the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you had like a kind of a concept in your head or a thing that you were trying to sort of strive for with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was definitely some like technical things I wanted to accomplish. Like you know, I was always really inspired when I was living in New York, being on the subway and how your sense of time is always interrupted. You know you'll have an earbudded and then like it'll get pulled out of your ear and then like you're hearing the noise of the street or you're hearing someone else's music that they're playing, or even personally, like you don't like a song anymore. So then you hit skip on the phone and I was thinking like what if that could be a compositional element in a recording? So it's a bit manic, but I feel like it's a very relatable experience with the advent of like the MP3 where you can just kind of like cycle and shuffle.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I mean, that's really interesting as well, because I think that's quite how our minds work as well, isn't it? We don't like when we you know, when we drift, we don't think in a linear way, like everything kind of you know memories, kind of jump backwards and forwards in time. Was that something that kind of you wanted to kind of encapsulate, just this kind of sort of kind of find a connectedness within randomness?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I was also kind of inspired by the idea of a theme which is like such a musical trope, you know, in Western music. You know you just have this thing, that, and then you return back to, to like sort of anchor the musical experience you know. So, yeah, it's maybe like core memories, is like a similar. You know you'll hear this interval and it's like okay, even though it's aesthetically different, it's still the same, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you kind of approach it in different ways or you have a different perspective, depending on what's gone on around it. I guess Exactly. And what were these core themes for you that you've caught them, that you wanted to return to? What was that about for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's like really. So they're kind of these sweets. And the first one is kind of thinking about this like merging between the body and in a physical space and how they can kind of move in between, select. The first song is like the body and the ocean as like one unit, and then the second one is the body and the house.
Speaker 1:I think it's a bit more vague after that, but um, yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess also it's one of those things where it is kind of tricky because I guess, like art does represent itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And do you feel like it's quite important to hold back certain kind of inner meanings and stuff from?
Speaker 2:I think the experience is more valuable than it being like a problem to be solved or like a math problem, that you're going to sit here and listen to this recorded music and then be like, oh yeah, and then this lyric means this and this, for me at least. I find the experience to be more enjoyable and also, when I was younger, I was never good at listening to lyrics, so I often would misinterpret things, and I found that to be more exciting than you know, going on the website and reading the lyrics or reading the liner notes or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I'm still like that. To be honest, I do. I love, I think I'm more attracted to the sound of the voice than actually what the word and even the shape words than what they actually necessarily are. And and I mean, as someone described to me once, that people are either sort of slightly more on a spectrum of being sonic or lyrical, and but you know you do use lyrics, so do you? Do you feel like you know, when it comes to your own lyrics, is there something that you do feel that is more important for you that you, that is, to be there?
Speaker 2:I like challenging the dumbness of words sometimes and just kind of really trying to I don't know, just trying to find combinations that are a bit unsettling or words that you wouldn't maybe normally associate to be in a piece of recorded music, like on the song new joy, I was like I was like excited about using the word hentai, which is like a type of pornography, as was like wow, I really need to use this word. I need to find a way to make it work, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean, I guess it's like there's a visual element to two words as well. And you know you are kind of quite primarily known to as a visual artist. You know, how do you sort of is there a relationship between sight and sound for you? Do they overlap at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fine. I'm just working on this lecture for, for Pauline Oliveros, deep listening. I think my relationship to senses is a bit untrustworthy because they're informed by maybe so much historical baggage, like that being taste. You know, I like the sound, I just like this sound, and it's kind of almost irrelevant to me. I think what's more important is the physical feeling I feel while I'm working on something. Does it achieve the this, the sentiment in my body, more so than in the ear or in the eyes, and with that comes disappointment, sometimes to like maybe it's just not good, but if it gives the sensation, then it's successful. I think, in my opinion, like a perfect example is vision for drums, piano and voice, like that's an awful piece of music, but it does the this really does what I wanted to feel in my body, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think sometimes like film music to me, something that I'm interested in, like that. But you know, obviously it has a purpose, like you know, in a visual element. But you know that the idea that you know you can make music that is deliberately designed to sort of unsettle or kind of create like a kind of physical feeling in you that isn't necessarily nice, like what do you think music can do, that visual?
Speaker 2:art can't. Well, it's time, you know, and you really, with the music, you're feeling existence in a way, not to be so dramatic but whereas a piece of art, it's like you're not beholden to its existence. You can walk away at any point in time and I think with that maybe there's a certain level of entitlement listeners have, because it's like you're literally wasting my time. If this is not interesting to me, I have only, I have like only 80 more years to live. Like why am I going to sit here and waste, literally waste my time? So, but I don't know, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, and like on the flip side of that with visual art, is it ever, you know, does it ever become frustrating that visual art doesn't have that kind of demand of attention for you, I think?
Speaker 2:I think that's its strength. In a weird way, it feels, because it's maybe viewers are a little less entitled to be pleasureed. In a certain way, it's sort of allowed to break more rules, maybe, like I think art is not concerned, whether it's art or not, and I feel like music is still like, is this music? Like it's such a big question, you know, like, can this be music? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean of course all music, but you know yeah, yeah, yeah, I think something about music really, really, really is very divisive with people, whereas I mean art is. But yeah, like you say, people can just take it or leave it in a way, can't they, you know, and move on, and, and I mean, how do you feel, like, also as well, working in the industries, how do you feel that the art world differs from the music world?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, most of it to me is a financial thing. It's it's. Art is usually funded by extremely wealthy individuals or like companies you know that are subsidizing projects, whereas art is kind of. I mean, music is more like the people's choice and funded by people's personal on a much larger scale. You know people's interests. I don't think either it's better necessarily because, again, I don't know if taste is the best way to evaluate Whether something's good or bad. So in the case of music, yeah, I don't know, that's maybe that's a slippery slope to go down, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a little bit of a like never ending dialogue, isn't it, I guess? Really you know, and I guess it's something that like, maybe we have different opinions on on different days as well. Yeah, and I mean, I definitely felt for myself that, you know, I didn't go to art school and I sort of felt that fine art was something that I felt there was a certain amount of exclusion from if you didn't have the education from it.
Speaker 1:Whereas like maybe music, I mean maybe I know there are like millions of gatekeeping ideas in music, but it sort of maybe feels that music is more accessible.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's the institutions now, because I find, like new music, classical music, any sort of institutionalized music, suffers from the same dilemma. I think art is maybe a bit worse because it's material, whereas music is like, doesn't have a form to exist in really, so you have to put the art somewhere. I mean, it would be amazing if every person had their own collection and you could just walk into their house and look at some art, but unfortunately that's the system we agreed on. So, yeah, but I guess if you want to listen to, like a Schubert piece or a Bach piece, you you have to go to the institution to hear it, you know.
Speaker 1:So that's true, yeah, I mean also, like with the music work released, music has lost in Malone one rather than Jasper. You know, was there sort of? Is this an alter ego?
Speaker 2:I think it was at one point for me. But the one makes it really dumb in the way that like your identity in like the email universe, like there's someone else out there that has the same name as you, so you have to put it yeah, and I just like this sort of sort of dumbness that someone will be like why is there one, like what is the one mean? But also there's like a hip hop reference with you know, krs.1. Or I don't know I'm blanking on other people that have numbers at the end 454645AR. So all people that have like numbers, you know, yeah, I just aesthetically was interested in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean ones aren't used that often as well, because I'm a big film fan as well and you know like, obviously, you know sequels begin with like two. You know you don't get many ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Very funny With the album as well. Did you have any like sort of set musical references that when you were going in of like any artists that kind of really inspired? Because to me it's such a collage of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's, there's so many, I don't know if it's even really possible, because it's like someone is always going to be left out, you know. But I guess the first thing I'm thinking about is William Buzinski, like caretaker for the first song, ghost of my Life. Mark Fisher, that first song, because I just wanted something to feel like disintegrating and just what else. John Fahey, you know, I really wanted to write a piece of music that was just guitar and vocals, which I don't know. I mean. Wendy Carlos, huge influence. There's that one section, arka, huge influence. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. What about Joe Meeg? Because obviously I hear a new world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean huge, huge influence. I mean it also was like when I was reading about his like parts of his biography, it really struck me that he couldn't play any instruments and it was just acts of listening that he was able to compose music and I thought that was just so radical and amazing because he was probably able to hear things that most people couldn't hear because he's not concerned with, like structural rules of music, you know. But then I was also thinking about that same kind of relationship with dub music and certain composers that also, like, didn't have any formal classical training but were able to imagine or hear a sonic world that was just so beyond what people could imagine. It was really exciting to tie those two universes together and also like having a subtle or maybe not so subtle narrative about, like historical colonialism between, you know, jamaica and the United Kingdom. I don't know. It was really fun to work on those two songs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And it also makes me wonder, because these, you know, like some of these artists couldn't like, like I mentioned, joe Meek weren't musicians in a technical, linear sense and he's sort of saying like they had this kind of amazing music in the head. I wonder how far like something like I hear in New World is in terms of what they actually imagined. You know, I feel like for quite a lot of us, when we do creative stuff, even if people really like it, there's a slight sense of disappointment that we don't quite get to something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the thing that struck me the most about I hear in the world is, I'm almost certain that the core of the song is a sample actually from this like instrument called the optagon, and it's just a loop of a bass and drum track. It's so beautiful to me that the chords are changing around this bass line. That doesn't modulate, it just stays the same. And there's one point where it's sort of dissonant because it's not following the structure of the song and I just thought that was such a such a beautiful moment, that was like so inspiring. And I'm sure that was just because, I mean, who knows what, I'm imagining that it was just because you couldn't play bass. So it's like, fine, we'll just use this, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's interesting because that was like, I mean, when was he make? That was like early 60s, was it that he was 59? 59, that's it. That's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, I mean I guess it is as well. It was like so. I mean, I remember the time, I mean maybe even a bit after that, you had things like the BBC Radio Phonic Workshop and D Lea Derbyshire. You know, even then it was still so sort of like. You know, I've read stuff about D Lea Derbyshire, about how, like the kind of going back to the institutions, how, you know, she was kind of kept out of the institutions quite a lot and had to kind of rake into the BBC at night to kind of make tape loops and things like that is it sort of feels like. You know, about that point in the 20th century people were just beginning to catch on that you know, in Western music that you didn't need. You know music could be made outside of like an educational context.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, well it's. It's like a new education is formed. You know what I mean new type of relation to the world, or something I think of, like even scientists, or King Tabe or all these people, like they invented a whole new universe. You know so, the ruins of like an empire. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's amazing, definitely, and I mean you come from a musical family yourself yeah, your dad's Winston. How was it kind of growing up, was was music something? What was your kind of attitude towards music, sort of being in the midst of a musical family?
Speaker 2:Well, I think this is like where my my deepest like anxieties form, I think mainly because of like nepotism or privilege or these type of things. You know, I always was backstage seeing all of these performances and hearing music from backstage. So it was never exciting like because I was just seeing how all of these things work mechanically, you know. And because of that, I think, when I was younger I never wanted to play music because it was like the magic of it was just kind of gone to me.
Speaker 2:You know, then when I started to get, when I started to learn about electronic music like specifically, I think, justice or Daft Punk, homework when I first, oh, wow, okay, yeah, I was just like whoa, like how do you even make a sound like this? How does one even go about? It seemed like the sound was coming from nowhere. You know what I mean. And I just became fascinated by that process. So that's how I really got into making music and DJing. Also, I wanted to go to go to DMC, be like a scratch DJ, but they don't work out. But but the same interest in manipulating sound and time and space, I just was a lot more interested in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and was that like a kind of way of also kind of claiming music for yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I didn't know. There's also like spatial separation. You know, I grew up in Los Angeles when I was a kid, so it wasn't until I was like 12 that I really spent time with my father. So there was a bit of disconnectedness between the sense of lineage. But I would like to believe that it's still being carried on, whatever that is, just as my grandfather carried on whatever it is from my grandfather, and so on and so on.
Speaker 2:So I think it's less about the rules. Is this kind of music or is it not? But it's like an emotional sentiment. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Is that me?
Speaker 2:I don't want to be too vague.
Speaker 1:No, I mean well. I mean I get an impression of what you mean, whether it's but like so you'll carry, you know you're. It doesn't have to sound or be connected in a sort of linear way or to what your father did or grandfather, for example. Grandmother, but it's passing something on and there's like a sort of it comes from some, there's some part that comes from the same place, do you mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I don't know, Maybe you're a great, great, great, great grandfather, I don't know or grandmother, I don't know what they were up to, but I'm sure at one point, like there's something that you think about that they were thinking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that's more valuable than like, let's say, I don't know what, or it's your last name.
Speaker 1:Hanford.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, okay, I was going to say because maybe it's like a trade based last name, because then I you know if they're buying it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know one thing is, my grandma was supposed to be, she was supposed to have been an incredible pianist, but she grew up with a working class family and in the 1930s the father didn't let her go to a music school, even though like some kind of Madame von French composer woman kind of wanted her to go to a conservatory, because it was that kind of thing about being a woman from a working class background. So I think some I you know I do sort of. When she told me that it was quite late in her life and it was definitely reminded me of, sort of I thought, well, maybe we do. Have we kind of arrived at the same at music, completely separately, unconnectedly, but maybe that was like a connecting point. It also reminds me of that. Have you seen that film? Was it all the book, cloud Atlas?
Speaker 2:No, but I know, I know the, I know the, I know the book, I know the movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I mean the movie isn't that great, but the books are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:How now do you feel that surroundings influence your work? You know, do you draw on like your? You mentioned earlier on about the kind of the subway in New York, but is it, is it very important for you to draw on like your surroundings to find inspiration, or does it come from somewhere else more for you?
Speaker 2:Weird. I mean, I think right now it's mostly technical interests, you know, getting obsessed with certain phenomenons, Like right now there's this thing called FFT, this process of analyzing and manipulating audio. I think the most common practice of FFT is noise cancellation on computers, on phones, where basically the computer takes images roughly of audio and then manipulates it. In that domain I'm being super, I'm not explaining it super well, but basically FFT is like a very uniquely digital process and it sounds very unromantic and disgusting, warbly and yeah, I've just been obsessed with understanding how it works and you know, if there are deeper meanings to FFT, so yeah, yeah, I'm not like it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean because you know you mentioned earlier on about, like you know, the one at the end of Slousen Malone and I think there was something else you mentioned as well, like sort of, oh yeah, getting hentai as a lyric in, Like I mean, I don't want to sort of be like kind of psychologist or anything, but do you think there is like a kind of a bit of a common theme in your work to kind of transform sounds and words or just to kind of, you know, transform sounds and words or technology that might not be, I don't know in various ways appropriate into something that, yeah, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've always been impressed by still life painters because I'm like how can you make something so uninteresting like art, you know? So I think it's something I'm always considering, yeah.
Speaker 1:What is for you, like an ideal state, to kind of be creative in? What are the sort of conditions and surroundings that you sort of feel good into?
Speaker 2:I mean communities at the top. You know, I don't think it has to be necessarily like physical space that people are, but in communication with people, depending on people for stuff, I think it's really the ultimate creative space.
Speaker 1:And there were quite a few collaborators on Excelsior. You know was that quite an important process to work with these particular people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean Nicky. Nicholas Weatherall Plays cello, also amazing guitarists we play together in the live performance. I mean he put me onto so much music, so much, so many things to study. I mean Pauline Oliveiros never knew about her work really, before working with Nicky. Same thing with John Fay, you know? Peasant, who did peasant?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have to Google it yeah.
Speaker 2:Richard Doffin. Oh, yes, yes, yes yeah, and then Andrew Lappin, who I met through working with Taja Lorraine and, yeah, just infinitely expands. Whatever it is that you're thinking about when you get to share ideas, yeah.
Speaker 1:What was it about Richard Dawson? Because I personally just love the kind of way it's sort of really English, but then it goes off on really unpredictable kind of chords and things.
Speaker 2:Well it's. I had been thinking about this world that excels here existent. It's kind of like temporally parallel to this world where it's like set in 1605, but it's the same. Now. Does that make sense? Yeah, we have computers and we have everything, but it's just 1605 or something like that. And yeah, when Nicky played me peasant, I was like, wow, it's amazing how much of a universe this is, with just very little. You know, you can feel the time period that this exists and you can get a sense of narrative or something. So I wanted to achieve the same thing on excels here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I would love to see a film of excels here. Do you think that that could be something in the imagination?
Speaker 2:now, I mean, yeah, I actually, when I was in school, I studied film and I wanted to be a filmmaker but it was too expensive, Like resource wise, like to create a beautiful image, you just need so much, you need so many people, and I guess I'm always thinking of images composing things, you know.
Speaker 1:And like I mean also the album being on war as well, and you're kind of talking about having like this big electronic influence coming into your life to death. You know, and obviously warp is just, I don't know, it's one of the top. It's been one of the top electronic labels for like 30 years or something. Did you feel like you know, was this like wow, this is war.
Speaker 2:You know it's funny, not really. It's only because of one of their less known releases that I really thought adamant about wanting to work with them, which is the Mark Leckie Florian Hacker recording, because it felt like warp is probably one of the very few music institutions that can understand art. Maybe or have patience for it maybe is the word Maybe they would be willing to give me one more minute of my time for something a bit more speculative or something you know. So that was really what attracted me to the label, and it was just a one off release too, which I think is really bold for a label, because it's like how do you even monetize? Yeah, it's like a drain, that record, you know. So I think that was sick, you know.
Speaker 1:It's great. It's like they helped bring out a piece of art rather than kind of thinking of the long term of a goal and, you know, greatest hits packages and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, the long term goal is that they put it out you know on the catalog, like that yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's like.
Speaker 1:Definitely it has its warp number, yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, jasper, that was it. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you so much. Thank you, paul. Okay, so that's Jasper Marsalis, aka Slousen Malone One in conversation with me, paul Hampford for Lost and Sound podcast, and we had that chat on the 24th of January 2024. The album Excelsior is out now on warp records, and Lost and Sound is, of course, sponsored by Audio Technica, global but still family run company that make headphones, turntables, cartridges, microphones. They make the headphones I'm speaking to you right now in and they make studio quality yet affordable products because they believe that high quality audio should be accessible to all. My book coming to Berlin is available in all good bookshops or via the publisher Velocity Presses website, and the music that you hear at the beginning, at the end, of every episode of Lost and Sound is done by Thomas Kiddens. With your doing, I hope you're having a really, really good one. Take care and I'll chat to you soon.