Magick Flavour Station is scoring your home video memories
"It's almost like the cassette tape itself becomes an instrument within the process."
“I make music that tries to sound like memories, and memories aren't clear.”
This is how Raymond, the artist behind Minneapolis’s Magick Flavour Station, describes her sound. Take a listen to the slushy haze that is Tomorrow Is My Birthday, and you’ll get the vibe right away - with all the distortion, looping, and tape echo, it sounds like a disc rotted memory, like finding a home video that was taped over.
Analog is very important to the Magick Flavour Station vibe. There’s no emulated “vintage” here, no downloaded VHS camcorder filters or manufactured static. She tells me that she’ll often record herself with a Tascam Portastudio 2, run it through a tape deck, then rip the audio from the tape deck. The result is that dreamy camcorder-ish sound. “With how I learned to record music in general, I've stuck with mostly physical equipment,” she explains. “It’s a little bit more expensive, but it just works way better with my brain. I get attached to the recording equipment I use. They almost feel like friends to me.”
Recording like that can be a little unpredictable, but it’s that “whatever happens, happens” mindset that’s key to capturing these emotions. Her and I hopped on a Discord call together and she told me all about how her music serves to preserve memories and capture her in the moment. Below is an excerpt of our conversation.
Can you tell me a bit about what you’ve been working on lately?
I was working on an album, and then I scrapped the whole album and started over. I started over at least twice. Originally, it was going to be a shoegaze thing I recorded on my computer. But then it felt weird because, like, everything else I've done is with cassette equipment and acoustic guitar stuff.
And then while I was doing all that, I found this album, Ode to Quetzalcoatl, by a guy named Dave Bixby. It's this album that's 90% just vocals and guitar run through an old tape echo.
I have the tab for this album open now, and I'm going to listen to it later.
I love the sound of it because it was made with a bunch of stuff that I'm just really into. I really like recording stuff with cassette equipment. I love the sound of the album and I love the emotion. He was this hippie dude in the 60s and he took LSD like, every day. And essentially, what happened is that one day he decided to do a complete 180° and went from like, crazy psychedelics every day to none. And so he recorded this folk album while he was going through a depressive state related to that, so the whole album is him recovering from this years long drug binge and finding Jesus.
And it's simultaneously about all the guilt and shame from drug abuse and him figuring out how to be normal again, while also having this air of optimism and hope, you know, like - “oh, I can recover through God, I got this.” I'm not religious at all, but to me it almost goes from being like, “I love God” to “I love the world and my life,” through the context of thanking God. My favorite artist of all time, Daniel Johnston, kind of has the same vibe in a lot of his music.
That's who I was thinking of when you were talking about the Bixby album, actually.
Yeah, sometimes I listen to [Johnston’s] happier songs about God and Jesus. I mean, there are a lot of dark ones, too. But on Song of Pain specifically, there's one called “A Little Story.” Again, as someone who's not religious at all, it just makes me happy because, like, “oh, this is helping this person who's very troubled, and they're getting through it because of this.” And I almost want to thank this God for helping them, even though I don't necessarily believe in them.
Have you found yourself writing more of these “spiritual” or celebratory songs?
Well, I think in general, regardless of the project I'm working on, I just kind of shut my brain off and I let whatever happens come out, you know. I have a vibe I want in mind and I hope I can achieve it. But if I don't and something completely different comes out, that's cool too. It's more like I can almost go on cruise control, to a degree. And I think specifically for this project, it almost becomes a form of meditation for me where I set up my recording equipment, try not to think, and I just let whatever comes out come out.
I wanted to know a little more about your live shows. I just watched the Suede Studio set - was that recorded with a camcorder? Or edited afterwards? It looked cool as hell.
So when I originally asked them to do that show, I wanted to run the finished footage through a VHS tape. And Sam, the guy who does videos there, didn't want to do that. But then we ended up meeting up to talk about it and he had all these great ideas where he's like, “why don't we just use the output on your camcorder? And then why don't I use this old camera I have and then we can all kind of combine this and make this work.” And so that's what we did basically, and it turned out really cool.
I was slowly experimenting with doing more and more distorted music at live shows, and what was cool was - they do a live stream and then they cut the live stream up and make a proper video edit of each song, and then that's what you saw when you watch it on YouTube. The live stream audio was very distorted by accident. I love the way it sounds, I thought it was so cool, and it brought a different context and emotion to a lot of those songs. And I was like, I should try to do this live.
That was a thought in the back of my mind, and then maybe like a month or two later, I got asked to play the album release show for whenthedustsettles. And I decided that morning I was gonna switch back to the acoustic guitar so I could use all these new pedals I had, but with that guitar instead so it would feedback more when I wanted it to. Then literally, like, the morning of I decided to turn the gain up on my amp settings so it'd be really distorted from the get-go. And I don't know if I would have had that idea to do that if I didn't do that live stream. It was one of my favorite sets I've ever done.
That's so funny you say that, because I also thought the audio on the videos sounded awesome. I figured it was intentional.
Yeah, that was completely on accident. They actually made a clean mix of the audio, and I have it downloaded somewhere. They ended up making a new mix that was distorted, but slightly less, but still really distorted. And that's what's on YouTube. I'm glad it happened. It reminds me of one of my favorite bands of all time, Les Rallizes Dénudés. I just love them so much. Takashi Mizutani is, like, my favorite guitarist of all time. I think it's really badass that one of the bass players hijacked an airplane.
When you get up on stage in the full corpse paint, do you think anybody's ever surprised when you start playing folk-y electronic stuff instead of black metal?
Early on, yes. And that was kind of like, the whole point of why I started doing it. I would get booked to play with punk bands, but I wasn't at all punk. I needed something to draw people's attention, so I used the corpse paint.
I just thought it would be a really funny bait and switch. Exactly like you said, where it'd be like, “oh, this person's wearing corpse paint. I'm excited for black metal.” And then I just whip out an acoustic guitar. Now that I'm doing noisier stuff, though, it doesn't necessarily surprise people as much. But I'm usually just honest with people, because I don't listen to any black metal at all.
Do you have any metal influences at all?
No, I mean, maybe subconsciously, because I've been around it and I like Lil Ugly Mane’s black metal project. But, yeah, outside of that, I'm very unfamiliar with that world.
I just thought there was an emotional thing there as well, where it was like, I'm trying to appear like someone I'm not. And that unravels almost instantly within the first song, because it melts off. You make it look like there's a person coming out on stage who wants to appear very strong, but almost as soon as you hear them start to sing, you see how their face contorts and melts while wearing the corpse paint.
And it does melt. I do sweat a fuck ton.
The makeup sweating off is kind of great, actually.
Yeah, I love it. It also adds to the performances because sometimes it'll get into my eyes, and then with all the sweat and my closed eyes… I mean, I usually do get really emotional when I perform, but that'll make me look really emotional and really sell it for people. Because I am, in fact, physically in pain!
It sounds like a lot of the stuff that comes out in your performances end up being like happy accidents, between the super distorted live show taping and the sweaty makeup.
Yeah, I mean, I do just kind of try to let it happen and then I figure out what it means later. And so as a result, you know, the distorted stuff happens and I'm like, “oh, this is cool, I'll do that.” Or like, I'll write a song and then like a month later I'll relisten to it and realize it was about something going on at that time.
I try to kind of extend that “whatever happens happens” mentality to the live performances too, which has its benefits and drawbacks. Maybe this is just me being too self critical, but I find with my live show specifically, it's very hit or miss.
I like the messy experimentation vibe a lot. Sometimes that's better than sounding "clean".
I think a big thing that influenced how I think of music was just my experience with it growing up. Before I started doing all of this like, weird, emotional, but not the best played music that I do, I was a bass player and that was my main thing. I was like, “I'm gonna be like the best bass player ever of all time!” And I'd practice really hard. But over time, I got burnt out on it and it stopped being fun.
I'm really into bass and I'm really into jazz and shit. And there's music from that whole world where, like, on a technical level, it's so good. Everyone is crazy good at their instrument, but it's just not interesting. Some people can play their instruments really well, they can objectively sing really well, but they just don't have the sauce. So I just don't want to listen to it.
Like, Jacob Collier is a great example of this. He has all the musical theory knowledge in the world. He can play any instrument he wants to any degree of skill that he wants. And then he just makes fucking boring Target music! I think finding Jacob Collier's music, hating it, and then finding Daniel Johnston's music and having it connect to me as much as it did is what really turned me into the musical artist I am. Daniel Johnston, you know, he wasn't the best at guitar - he was pretty decent at piano, but there's not a lot of technical proficiency there. But it makes me cry, it makes me feel things and it makes me so emotional and I don't know, it's like I saw both of those at once and I realized, I want to be Daniel. And it just completely changed the way I viewed music.
And when I was in high school, one of the things that turned me on to recording stuff with cassette music was - not Mac DeMarco's main discography, but his demo albums that he would drop like a year after the original album dropped. I thought those sounded so cool and way cooler than like the actual finished album. Half of the songs would be songs that ended up on the album, but like the cassette four-track demo version of it. And then the other half would be these like really weird cassette recorded instrumentals that were all grimy and stuff.
No, I know exactly what you mean, because I do tend to prefer stuff that sounds like it’s been run through 7,000 different tape recorders and compressed and deteriorated. I like that a lot.
Yeah, well, it's like, I try to make it feel like this weird, dreamy soundscape or whatever. And so the cassette recordings and the lo-fi production really works well with that. It's almost like the cassette tape itself becomes an instrument within the process because it takes these sounds, and if you recorded clean they wouldn't be as cool.
And then with Magick Flavour Station stuff, just because of how I record as “whatever happens happens,” a lot of it tends to become these snapshots of who I was exactly when I recorded. It makes me feel like I'm watching a home video, you know, like I popped a VHS tape in from when I was seven, and I'm watching it and the audio fidelity is really bad. And I hope this vibe maybe comes across to other people.
Support Magick Flavour Station over on Bandcamp, and follow on Instagram here.
