Sam Fauchon interviewed by WTC
Californian noisenik Sam Fauchon has been one of my favourite purveyors of ear blasting, chaotic bullshit ever since he started around 5 years ago. Here's a interview with him in order to get a (much needed) look into his practice.
First of all, would you be able to give a bit of a background on who you are and what you've made? I'm also aware you've constantly been reinventing yourself over the years, a lot of your output encompassing genres such as glitchy ambient, old school breakcore and more abstract noise...why the shift into more extreme sounds and music?
My name is Sam Fauchon, creating is very important to me.
I just spent like an hour writing an essay but realized it was just me explaining to myself why I do what you mentioned. In short, it's all so rooted in my subconscious. I won't go out of my way to change styles, I really don't even know how style connects to what I do anymore (at least in terms of how I feel making it in the moment, the inspiration, of course I can connect the output to categories such as abstract and noise), a lot of what I'm interested in at the moment I don't really know how to explain with words. And I have concepts I plan on executing as soon as possible that I cannot categorize and will sound totally stylistically different from whatever the previous release is, then it'll go back, then it'll go to something completely different again, etc. I just do what I know is correct. I just try to share myself in the most honest way as much as I can. I guess one inspiration that stands out in this moment is still hard to define but has to do with fulfilling my interest in time, dates and human culture, there's a huge sociological inspiration for what I'm doing now. And it's fulfilling to maximize my output partially for these reasons.
It's totally fair that you don't know how to categorise what you make and I can totally sympathise with that feeling, but I'd like to ask what other sort of things inspire or influence you? I'd be interested to hear what else you consider, especially sound-wise.
There's definitely personal things I don't wanna talk about that inspire me to maximize my output at the moment. I'd say anger and the need for relief are still a big deal for me but that was my primary influence from 2019-2022. Shit really hit the fan for me around 11, ended up in a psych ward at 15 (which is where I discovered Aphex Twin). That's all the detail I'll really get into but I was a fucking angry kid. When I got more into breakcore I found it to be an incredibly cathartic purging of my anger where I largely wasn't judged. Nowadays I feel pretty numb to and separated from the anger I felt then, so I don't feel a need to make things with a similar energy, but I still feel anger in different ways that my current output helps relieve.
These days, surrealism for sure is a huge influence. I always really liked Shaye St John, Eric Fournier has been a huge inspiration ever since I was a teenager, but I didn't really even get into surrealism as a whole until 2023. Anyone that knows me well knows that was the worst year I've ever had, you can be pushed to really alien places mentally, and I found a lot of comfort in surrealism since it's the only "style" that really captures even some of that weirdness. Reflections of Evil, Inland Empire, Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, and Beau Is Afraid inspire me a lot in a way that's hard to describe I guess. The freedom in surrealism is similarly cathartic to me now as the freedom in expressing anger bluntly was as a teen.
I also love the freedom of noise itself. There's a problem with other scenes that make them so fucking restrictive. It feels like you're following a fucking rulebook instead of just making what you want. Noise is by far the most free just because it's so open ended. However I am very interested at the moment in pushing even that boundary. Once you make normal people uncomfortable with overly camp insanity noise for long enough, you want to make even noise freaks uncomfortable, applying noise ethos to more traditional sounds, creating a sort of uncanny valley that makes people question if you're like, ok. That kind of thing is funny as fuck to me. I have a few concepts in mind that I haven't executed yet but plan on doing as soon as possible.Yeah, I also think noise is probably the freest sort of music genre I've seen, definitely sound-wise and community-wise. Since everyone is on the same page, I would argue there's still a ton of support even for the sort of stuff you just mentioned where you want to push boundaries! In turn, I'd like to ask if you have any processes or systems you use in order to collect sounds or create music - or is it completely freeform?
Yeah. Totally freeform pretty much. The laptop is just a tool used to express another language. I will say I'm not a fan of hardware and if I'm using sounds from outside of my laptop it'll pretty much just be from my mic. I like using my voice. I feel like I don't have enough power outlets in my room for hardware so I don't fuck with it. I'll sometimes record things on my phone if I like the sound of something. I feel like a lot of it is just meditation. It gets me in the moment and allows me to express my subconscious, and I think that's interesting in that it may highlight certain elements of myself that I was unaware of when returning to them in the future.
I think I should also mention that I don't really know why it's music that comes much more naturally to me than any other medium, because I wanna do video art and short films (which I have as you know, gave away 15 DVDs to random people at a college art event, most of which are probably in a landfill by now or used as some kind of freakshow "you gotta see this" type thing they show relatives.) I also wanna start writing short stories and putting them on my website as a free PDF.
But for whatever reason there's a blockage there sometimes that's never there for music, I feel like I'm less free with those. There's a vagueness to music that makes it really easy to capture ideas that are hard to explain. But yeah I just like worldbuilding and music is a pretty effective way to do that.
Would you be able to discuss further about your other works in mediums such as visual art, writing and film?
In late 2023 I made a DVD called "Memories from My Real Life as a Turning Car" which was just me vomiting every thought that came to my mind into things, vaguely resembling scenes in which I "acted" in. For the intro I stole A Clockwork Orange's opening sequence and edited it so that Alex was staring at the viewer for a solid two minutes without moving all while the music was still going. After that it was a bunch of loosely connected scenes glossing over some very abstract personal ideas and epiphanies that I would have to jumble into English words as much as I could, for example I kept repeating the phrase "your soul lives in a pink moment forever". really drilling it into the viewers head that your soul in fact does live in a pink moment forever. Shit like that. It was about 12 minutes long and as batshit crazy as I could've possibly made it on no budget and nobody to help film. I do remember the end result looking extremely lonely and somewhat depressing, which it was. That was a lonely time. But it made sense as a story to me since it was entirely idiosyncratic, anyone else would just have to try and guess.
Since then I've had one major idea for a film script that I would still like to translate into a piece of writing soon, I haven't thought about it in a bit so I'd have to refresh my memory but from what I can recall in this moment, it was something about this airport-centric dystopia run by the "purple waterslide gods" and their oppressive world that wasn't earth but basically another earth way out in the universe that, because of the number of possibilities, spoke our languages and was pretty much identical to us, just really fucking weird. On this planet is a sorta Pangea that looks like Latin America but is called "The Extended Bay" and it's basically a dystopian nightmare as I mentioned. The airports farmed humans for their blood to fuel "airplane sprinklers", that's all I can remember off the top of my head about the world itself.
There's many more very short ones I want to write, it's just you have to be a lot more explicit with this and visuals you know, that's where music comes really in handy. Visuals are really difficult though and I feel like I'm not able to be spontaneous about it if I want a quality result.
I've noticed most experimental/noise musicians nowadays such as yourself centre around the internet in order to share their output - do you think it's the best possible way and how do you think its affected the way you work? Do you think there's a better chance of getting involved with similar minded communities online?
Yes. When I started up Devoid of Rekerdz I originally wanted to do CDs but that whole process kinda pisses me off and I find it quite radical to just fucking throw everything out there digitally with no obligation to purchase. It's not as radical as it would have been 25 years ago but there's still something nice about it regardless of how oversaturated it is, and we're still very much in the early days of the internet and I like to take advantage of that as much as I can. The oversaturation used to discourage me but now it encourages me because I like that there's so much creativity out there and it provides so much to look at. And you can find some really surprising things, and yes it's great for finding new people to hang out with. Physical media isn't a necessity anymore obviously and is more of an artistic medium when it comes to DIY stuff. The mailing shit is something I'm just not interested in at all anymore and I find I can share everything I create digitally - art, writings, music, all of it.
I very much appreciate the opportunity to talk in depth and the articulate answers, so thank you so much. Any plans for the future or final words you'd like to add?
Create create create!