DJ Knix of WERU's The Knix Mix Q&A

I've done a few Q&A profiles of artists and other WERU programmers along the way, and I thought it would be a bit of fun to answer a few questions myself.  Of course, you know I spin electronic music on The Knix Mix every Friday night from 10 p.m. to midnight. If you don't, you can listen by going to weru.org and live stream or listen to a previously recorded show.  I'd always been aware of WERU being from this part of Maine. I graduated from Brewer High School in 1988, which happens to be the same year WERU was getting underway at the Hen House in Blue Hill. When I returned to Maine after a decade in Massachusetts I moved just down the road from the station. There's a great sense of community at the station, and it doesn't hurt that I get to play the kind of music I wanted to hear. I've been at the helm of The Knix Mix for over two years and counting.  Which is, come to think of it, one of the reasons I coined "Knix Picks." So I could keep track of all the new music in that span of time that I love, love, love!

1. Favorite genre of music? My heart belongs to electronic music, which encompasses a range of styles. Basically, I’m a total child of the 80s. British New Wave was the soundtrack of my youth, and I subsequently love anything that has synthpop origins. Ah, nostalgia!  Electropop, electro house, electro clash, French house, club/dance...Sensing a theme here? Really, I adore anything you can dance to.
2. Favorite band? It’s hard to name just one, but there is exceptional music to dance to coming out of Europe. Artists like Röyksopp, Etienne de Crécy, Autokratz, Vitalic, The Bloody Beetroots, Yuksek, Simian Mobile Disco and Soulwax. I also love music to brood to. Bands that have that angst-ridden post-punk influence like Motorama, The Juan MacLean and White Lies.
3. Favorite song? I’m really crushing on Etienne de Crécy generally, but “Someone Like You” on Essentials (Best of) is amazing. It also appears on Super Discount 2 as “Fast Track.” Other tracks that I adore are Vitalic’s “Poison Lips,” “On a Train” by Yuksek and Simian Mobile Disco’s “I Believe.”
4. What was the first LP or CD you bought? The first album that I picked out on my own was Shaun Cassidy’s second studio album Born Late. I was kind of obsessed with Shaun Cassidy in elementary school. I swooned over him as little brother Joe in The Hardy Boys. I remember bringing the album to my 3rd-grade class’s show and tell. I sat up front and held the album cover open while the teacher played the record for the class. I couldn’t have been prouder.
5. What hobbies and interests do you have outside of music? I love hiking and snowshoeing, which I get to do a lot of living in Orland. Besides conveniently living very close to the station, I also live very close to the Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust trail system and a short drive from Acadia National Park. I love nature photography, and I take a lot of photos on my hikes. I have two rescue dogs who are my hiking partners and frequent subjects of my photography. This doesn't mean I'm especially outdoorsy. I'm not the person you want with you on a mountaineering expedition.  I wouldn't last a hot minute. I have a romantic notion of nature and am fascinated with natural history and anthropology. I’m a voracious reader, and I love to browse the library or used bookstores on Saturdays. I love all things vintage, so flea markets and antiquing are fun for me too. I value learning new things. I’ve dabbled in acting and working with clay, and I’ve continued to take writing classes over the years.
6. If you could hang out with anyone, alive or dead, who would you pick and why? I would love to meet Gary Numan, who is one of the pioneers of electronic music. I’ve seen him in concert a couple of times, which was great fun. He smiled at me when I yelled for him to sing “Down in the Park.” I’d especially love it though if I could hang out with Josh Gates for an Expedition Unknown adventure or two. He’s kind of cute (and very married), true, but I’m also exceedingly envious of his job. Something that combines travel, adventure, history, archeology, and anthropology? Sign me up! Just don’t sign me up for a spelunking adventure because the movie The Descent scarred me for life.
7. If you were an animal, what animal would you be and why? I would want to be an owl. Owls symbolize intuition and have highly evolved senses - seeing what other can’t. They seem wise and cerebral, but they are also stealthy and can use those talons pretty effectively when they need to.
8. Favorite food? I could probably live a long, long time on pizza and cheesecake. I won’t. But I could.
9. Favorite book? Honestly, I could probably expound more on books than on music. Music I like specifically. Books I like generally. Though I’ve come to prefer reading nonfiction. I think everyone has a story to tell, and real life is often more interesting than fiction. Devil in the White City is a great example of compelling historical nonfiction. I read a lot of adventure books where people overcome – or don’t – seemingly insurmountable obstacles like Touching the Void, Into Thin Air and Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. I love satirical memoirists like Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris too. Laugh out loud hysterical!
10. Favorite movie? Henry and June, 1984, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children, The Shining, and Out of the Blue.
11. If you could have any super power, what would it be? To know the unknowable and solve life’s mysteries. Like where did the settlers from the Roanoke Colony go? What happened to Amelia Earhart? What’s up with the Bermuda Triangle? That kind of omniscient knowing.
12. If you could visit any place in the world, where would it be? New Zealand is at the very top of my bucket list. Amazing flora and fauna sans large land predators or snakes. Perfect! Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to summit Everest, was a Kiwi!
13. What would people be surprised to know about you? I have two teenage sons who are amazing. They spend their school year in Massachusetts. They’ve co hosted The Knix Mix a few times. Keston, my youngest, has a boy band aesthetic, plays piano and prefers dance pop. Keegan, my oldest, looks like he could have been a Seattle rocker circa 1990, plays guitar and is into progressive rock.  They both love WERU but neither are into electronic music, and they are spectacularly unimpressed that their mom has a radio show.
14. What three words would best describe you? Complicated, introspective, sentimental.
15. What three words would your friends use to describe you? Honest, loyal, intelligent.

The Knix Pick for Best New Album: Liars Mess

Mess is dance-punk veterans Liars seventh full length album since the release of They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top in 2001. The Los Angeles based trio, consisting of Angus Andrew, Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross, has undergone a number of paradigm shifts since their early years as an art punk band. Mess is a synthesizer album to be sure, but unlike the 2012 WIXIW, Liars first foray into heavy electronic instrumentation, they know what they're doing. Recording WIXIW (pronounced 'wish you') involved a steep learning curve and the prolonged reading of manuals, but the pay off of their prior labor was that the recording of Mess was a more spontaneous and immediate process. And most of all, the band wanted to get back to the place where making music was just plain fun.

Mess focuses on the theme of duality:  a mess as beauty to some, disaster to others; choice as possibility or consequence; look to the past or toss it out, art as a cerebral exercise or a fun pursuit. And, as Angus unambiguously declares in the track "Mess on a Mission," the concrete paradox that 'fact is fact and fiction's fiction.' The concept for the album cover art makes this duality stylistically clear with simple yarn in bold colors forming a pseudo wig. The yarn makes appearances in other images such as stuffed down a pair of tighty whities and as accessory to the band's white suits. In a well played move, Liars carries the concept to physical form by producing vinyl with string embedded into it, as well as a limited edition run of 500 vacuum-sealed 2xLP's with string stuck on them by hand. The artistry, or alternatively the mess, is in the perception of the beholder.

The album starts off with the up tempo intensity of the track 'Mask Maker." Angus Andrew's voice, masked through a voice manipulator, implores the listener to "take my pants off," "smell my socks," and "eat my face." The ploy is both innocuous and vaguely disturbing but gives the listener an early clue that Liars are as eccentric as ever. The second track is the danceable "Vox Tuned D.E.D." that has more of a darkly moody electro industrial sound. "Mess On A Mission," the album's frenetic lead single, is all quirky synths and catchy lyrics. (The official video for "Mess on a Mission" is done on a green screen and ridiculously watchable for all its simplicity.) "Pro Anti Anti" (See, even the song titles are ripe with dualism.) is Liars at their most dance worthy.

Though as much as the beginning of the album is intently up tempo, it can't really be called a dance album. The sequence of songs, according to frontman Angus Andrew, was chosen to pound the listener through the first half of the record and move to more ambient, abstract songs on the second half. Songs like "Dress Walker" and the 9 minute "Perpetual Village" have a decidedly more minimalist vibe, but there are still plenty of the experimental electronic elements that define the earlier tracks. Everything slows way down for the surprisingly beautiful "Left Speakers Blown" that concludes the album.

I think that one of the reasons I like Liars so much is that, despite their American homeland, they have the keenly idiosyncratic and detached demeanor of the Euro electro bands that I love so much. Maybe this has something to do with the art school beginnings of Andrew and Gross, or the fact that the band spent time in Berlin, having recorded their third album Drum's Not Dead there in 2004.  Germany produced the iconic Kraftwerk after all.