SWIMMING IN THE TEMPLE OF DENDUR: Interview with John Fell Ryan of Excepter
For the initiated Excepter needs no introduction. I think of them as a quintessential NYC act in the continuum of the Velvet Underground, Suicide, Sonic Youth, or Wu-Tang. That they aren’t canonized as such probably has more to do with the laziness of critics than the fact they’ve been in Chicago for a few years. Like their legendary peers, Excepter’s music dredges the dreams and dread of megalopolis life, traffics in both sophisticated experimentation and improvised recklessness, and is transmitted via a dense discography that offers so many daring points of entry new converts may be overwhelmed. Readers may want to start with their latest music video.
Bold claims from passionate fandom aside, it’s a fool’s errand to pin Excepter’s genre. In a single set they may journey through cosmic synth mandalas, haunted minimal house, or ominous industrial dub. Arguments could be made their music is a delayed aftermath of post-punk or the warning shot of the occult techno boom. But it’s a mistake to think eclecticism is the only appeal here. If it were their star would’ve faded along with the rest of the 2000’s psych underground. It is Excepter’s spiritual disposition that makes them an enduring source of fascination. And in that regard they find para-genre kin with the transcendental longing of free jazz, the journeyman storytelling of folk, the righteous antagonism of reggae, and the culture jamming of the justified and ancient. As they’ve pushed through the years in ever shifting combos those qualities have never settled, only deepened. If one second they sound like Pere Ubu and the next Gucci Mane it’s only testament to the magic of profoundly gifted musicians who play their instruments like an ouija board, who get you feeling and believing in sound as a portal to new worlds.
The incarnation of Excepter playing Alphaville this Sunday April 2nd is the husband-wife team John Fell Ryan, who founded Excepter, and Lala Harrison Ryan, who’s played with Excepter since 2006-ish. I talked with JFR for a couple of hours and we touched on some of the ideas and practices that he has developed throughout his life with music and art. His penchant for endurance stunts that began with his first act Black Lotus, the wild collective improvisation of No Neck Blues Band, the application of those approaches to electronic music in Excepter, that band’s inventive use of internet distribution, and the renegade film research that landed him in The Shining obsessive doc Room 237 for his monumental film The Shining Forwards and Backward. We also touch on road trips, belligerent bouncers, and the ins and outs of survival as a committed artist.
JFR: I’ll talk about anything except for things that, on the advice of council, I’m to remain silent about.
Miles: Got it. Well, why don't we start with the upcoming tour that kicks off Friday?
JFR: It's not really a tour, we're just playing one show. Later in April we’re playing a show here in Chicago. At this stage, I guess that’s a tour for us. You have to prepare for anything to happen live. Move your studio out of your studio.
Miles: Lots of logistics. Is the line up you, Lala -
JFR: It's just me and Lala at this point.
Miles: Cool. Are you and Lala promoting anything or is this a jaunt to get back in the swing of shows?
JFR: We are working on an album, an album that we spent 2021 making demo recordings for. We took it to a studio-studio here in Chicago, ESS, last May and have spent the past year mixing, editing, overdubbing, that kind of thing. We’re maybe half finished at this point.
Miles: Doing demos, is that a typical Excepter process?
JFR: No, if anything, in the past, if we made a recording we'd just put it out.
Miles: Right.
JFR: Now that it is just Lala and I, now that it's just us two, we're free to experiment with not our traditional ways of a producing a record. We’re also outside of the culture of label excitement as it were.
Miles: Do you think that that's across the board though? Is there a culture of label excitement to be outside of?
JFR: For everyone of our generation. We caught the falling star of indie rock or whatever in the zeroes, and even then there was a sense that we were getting away with it. Being able to put out a release a season for a few years in a row, that was maybe unique. A unique time not to be repeated. But we also caught the wave of “no one is gonna pay for music anymore.” We were putting out that deluge of releases in the peak of bootlegs, piracy, in the years before Spotify came in and bulldozed whatever was left still standing. I’ve been doing some research and I don't think there is a tunnel beneath Ocean Avenue.
Miles: That record must be selling though…
JFR: Everyone says “no one buys CDs.” CDs still sell as much as vinyl. That's true. I don't know if that's true for underground music. It's definitely true as far as total numbers go.
Miles: Excepter definitely took advantage of the speed of internet transmission and I think that some of the entries into the STREAM series are up there with the official albums as high quality, top performance documents of the band.
JFR: As far as the work that went into them, yes — especially STREAM 10 to 20 or so, as much work went into editing those as the albums.
Miles: Yeah, there’s very off the cuff, inventive use of field recordings and disorienting techniques. You used this phrase, "getting away with something” and it does seem like there's not much to get away with or a benefit to streaming like that now…
JFR: No, it's so controlled. Let's say 10 years ago when social media was a novel thing it felt like a town square where you could communicate with people, but now it's so very clear it’s a great way for government and corporations to spy on you. Like, you get busted for stuff you say or do on social media.
Miles: Outside of government and corporate snooping, I think it encourages a mediocrity in terms of how and what people communicate because only a handful of things are really rewarded.
JFR: That goes along with the twin forces of our time of woke culture and whatever you wanna call evangelical/Trump culture. Both chipping away at concepts of artistic freedom or liberation of expression or whatever.
Miles: When I was a teenager and had access to some high speed internet I think that Excepter STREAM series felt like dispatches from another world because the Bush era wasn't a great time for creative expression either.
JFR: Yes and no. When I said I put time into them, they were still coming out once a month, I’d spend a month on them and put them out right away. There wasn't that delay of reception that putting out physical releases would have. Let’s say that's a creative peak where you have a language that you're exploring and things come out really fast, so it's like working on a series of paintings instead of working on a feature film that takes years to make.
Miles: What role does improvisation play now in the Excepter duo incarnation?
JFR: We're starting to bring it back. The last show we played in Chicago at the gallery TriTriangle we had a set all programmed, we played it, and then we were like... I guess we're done. Mark Morgan, who was there touring, said "You can’t. You have to keep playing, we came all this way.” We do this synth improv and it was great. Improv's still there. But we’ve been working on programming, songwriting and studio-craft and we’ve been absent from playing all the time. We play once or twice a year. In the aughts, we were playing once a month plus tours where we'd play as many shows we play in the year in a couple of weeks. When we play in New York, expect there to be improv.
Miles: Besides improvisation, Excepter’s notable for a commitment to endurance. You've performed feats of endurance throughout your life with music first with Black Lotus and then No Neck Blues Band. Excepter’s played notably long concerts and held the Guinness world record for longest mp3.
JFR: I wish we could have made it in.
Miles: Oh, you weren't actually in the book?
JFR: I don't think so. I think you have to pay to get in. That might have been hyperbole on my part, or somebody else’s part.
Miles: I have questions about you and hyperbole too.
JFR: Endurance is one of those things that I realize is one of my powers. Even in my work life — I spent my 40s being a professional mover and doing insane physical work day after day. I’m a lousy basketball player, but I can push a rock up a mountain for a year.
Miles: That's nice. Do you see Excepter performing feats of endurance in the future?
JFR: Living five years in Chicago, that’s a fucking feat of endurance.
Miles: Well, being a band for over 20 years is a feat of endurance.
JFR: Excepter really hasn't been a band-band since Clare died. Unless marriage is a band. It kind of is a band. A band of gold.
Miles: There's a lot of married couples in bands. No, there's many bands that have married couples.
JFR: When we were touring Europe in the teens almost every act was either solo or a duo. Everyone. If you were an electronic act to have more than two people would be really weird.
Miles: When I moved to New York City, I noticed that shift almost immediately. A few years earlier it seemed like people were coming together to make noise bands or novel pop acts. But when I got here it seemed like electronic musicians were performing solo and very rarely seeking each other out to play together. Even when it made sense, you know what I mean? When a collaboration would boost what someone was doing and give it more of an appeal or extend the concept. It was really curious to me, I think part of it was just that a certain un-livability was taking hold. People had to have multiple hustles and couldn't find time to play together. It was depressing to see bills where four or five acts would all be working on the same moods, themes, and not want to be more than the sum of their parts. It made music less exciting and less risky.
JFR: Excepter never rehearsed past 2003. There were a lot of rehearsals that went on 2002 to 2003. Our initial half-dozen performances I thought were total failures and the audience thought they were failures too. I was surprised we were able to pull off getting gig offers after that, but we didn't even have to seek anything out. We got offers and we were able to play at least once a month for 10 years.
Miles: Why do you think it is that people don't form bands around electronic music?
JFR: Money.
Miles: Do you think that there's a benefit to playing electronic music in a band that's being missed out on?
JFR: Playing in the band more than two people?
Miles: Yes.
JFR: Absolutely. Yes. Energy. The energy is unbeatable. There’s a reason the four person group defined the 1960s. It's also drama. Drama is not two people in conflict, it's three people. There has to be a tiebreaker.
Miles: On the subject of drama, word about Excepter also spread through rumors. Member dismissals, conflict with other bands, venues like the Knitting Factory banning Excepter. Stunts like playing three days straight during a blizzard or blinding a room with a fog machine and stalking the audience with machetes in mouths.
JFR: We brought weapons on stage. We had fights on stage. We really did get kicked out of the Knitting Factory. For some reason the bouncer instantly hated Lala and threw both of us out literally by the scruffs of our necks because Lala sassed him a little after our set. But the legend came about because I contacted the press about it and got the story in the Village Voice. So a bit of myth-making.
Miles: I recently read a Steve Stapleton interview where he mentioned the strange parts of records were always his favorites and the wish they were longer and trippier led to the Nurse With Wound project. I feel that with a lot of experimental acts that’s the beginning and end of their mission statement. With Excepter I sense this other type of guiding inspiration that I'll try to articulate. Anyone can tell there’s record enthusiasts in the band, but more so there’s rock mythology fans, people interested in the folklore and legends and stories around musicians. My note here says "the tribal excitement that forms around music." Stories and stunts are a lot of people’s entry into Excepter. Maybe it might seem an artificial difference to you, but I find its notable because there’s so few acts where their story, their lives, conflicts, connections play such a big role in the appreciation of the music.
JFR: I was just thinking about that very aspect, having spent a long time reflecting on the past after being asked by Keith [Connolly] to write that piece on No-Neck. I decided I was going to write a first person narrative of a very focused period of time, instead of trying to make a mission statement or analysis of the methodology or whatever of NNCK. I wanted to explain we were young student types who were really enthusiastic. And I was linking that to my thoughts about, let's say, folk music culture in the late 50s or 60s, where you were simultaneously doing research, but also putting yourself into the work. You would go around collecting songs, but you're also performing them outside of what was then understood as the past. That folk culture that existed in the past: the blues guys or old bluegrass people, and here we are, Peter, Paul, and Mary interpreting this stuff. Dylan, of course, is the prime example where he came out of that scholarly culture, but then once he started performing and putting on the folk mask, it led to his genius finding a way to become this singular creative force that still... He still is that force.
Miles: For sure.
JFR: And of course, trade in tales, folklore, mythology, road stories, all that stuff is like part of the party. My years in No Neck, we were definitely those people, we were super into records, super into rock history, avant-garde history, and New York history. We were not just students, but also teachers. Our interpretation of all that cultural knowledge was funneled into the practice of making art.
Miles: You’d think that with electronic media, social media, there would be a multiplication of this student / teacher transmitters of culture.
JFR: The problem with social media is there are not enough barriers to keep the dopes out. I'm thinking about that fantastic comedy record called How to Speak Hip by Del Close and John Brent. It's an interview between a beatnik who's trying to explain what beatnik culture is to a straight guy. And he's talking about the rules of cool. “Yeah, you break the rules of cool, you get put down, it's true. But when you break the straight rules, they put you in the slam.” That idea that there's a subculture that has codes, secret codes. In the beatnik days, the context of this comedy record is to make sure that the cops don’t bust you for smoking pot. Now, that pot is kind of legal, there isn't maybe a need for people to be secretive and to have this push back to make sure that only the illuminated ones are part of the party. So, if you're in social media and you look at the comment section, you’re like "who am I communicating with? This is terrible.”
Miles: This is true, the demand to broadcast yourself to the entire world doesn’t produce the best results.
JFR: Who you end up broadcasting to is the cops, they’ll put you in the slam for the crimes that still are crimes, copyright, what some people might say is improper speech or sexuality or whatever. Or improper speech about sexuality.
Miles: You mentioned research as part of your practice, what are you researching these days?
JFR: Film, literature, poetry, music.
Miles: Any hits?
JFR: I'll get on jags and focus in or revisit things intensely. Like in 2021, I went through a super heavy Elvis period, Dylan’s always a constant, I reawakened the Kubrick research, and started doing David Lynch research. My idea of film research can be kind of weird. I’ll break away from a family visit to drive out to the Stanley Hotel. When I’m in California for work, I’ll go and drive up and down Mulholland Drive, that's my idea of doing David Lynch research. Drive around Los Angeles in a heightened ecstatic state. When I visit my folks in Seattle, I go up to the town, the fictional town of Twin Peaks and try and find tree stumps that were in the show. Enter into a fictional space though its real world locations or inspirations.
Miles: Do you find that you gain more insight into the fiction or the real world?
JFR: Definitely no insight into the fiction, but insight into my thoughts on fiction. Yes.
Miles: The last Excepter show I saw, you had a projection of a drive through Glacier National Park where the opening of the Shining was shot, and…
JFR: No, that wasn't Glacier, that was footage from my visit to the Stanley Hotel, what Glacier National Park would have been imitating in the Kubrick film, that road I took from Boulder to Estes Park in Colorado.
Miles: And your most recent video is a drive through the Florida Keys.
JFR: A lot of that has to do with taboo breaking.
Miles: How's that?
JFR: For someone with lefty politics like myself to take trip to Florida is like visiting cursed earth. The politics there are completely against humanity. The “Florida Man” is like the ultimate fool of lefty culture. Florida. I don't know. Our attraction to it is irrational. It’s something beyond politics. We find ourselves drawn to it, and drawn to the Keys. Key West is the end of America, the same way that Big Sur is the end of another end of America. The literal furthest point you can go. And it also ties in to Dylan. Dylan was the first concert we went to see after the pandemic. His latest album has a song about Key West. And we happened upon a Dylan painting retrospective while we were there. And it's also where Hemingway made his life in exile. We visited his house and cats. It's all part of continuing an artist's life and doing the research on how you do that. Maybe you've noticed this phrase I keep using in social media “the sacred sites.” It's all part of that. You have to physically go to certain magical places that are tied into creativity. I had never been to the Keys before, but how it was described to me is this three hour long car drive on a single lane highway that goes out through these succession of little islands to southernmost point in the United States. I had this fantasy of driving on this highway that's almost just a highway and nothing else to see the ocean and the horizon and the sky, cosmic concepts that are fascinating.
Miles: It is fascinating, thank you for sharing your research as you go.
JFR: Yeah, I can show you more films that I have hidden in different spots.
Miles: Will this be a continuing thread in Excepter this type of travel?
JFR: If not Excepter at least, you know, me... This is all stuff that's been encouraging to me.
Miles: Traveling in a creative way is a subversive thing. Even before lockdown people started to become stratified into bubble worlds and moored to whatever location their job is in. Restrictions financial or not were already bad, lockdown made it worse. I had never really thought about traveling as a serious, maybe the most serious creative pursuit until fairly recently.
JFR: Yes, I started doing it.. I don't know, it's weird, it's creepy. When I say it's creepy it’s like, when you start doing it you think, "am I just crazy? I rented a car and I'm driving into the Rockies alone.”
Miles: In David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything he talks a bit about vision quests and the role that they played in allowing individuals in some indigenous societies to create meaning for their lives distinct from their role in the group. And that was respected as a sacred right of the individual, that a necessary part of social life is allowing individuals to choose what defines their life. Most of the quests involved long travels, like to get a seashell from as far as south as they could walk or whatever.
JFR: I've got some rocks from Sedona, Arizona in my pocket right now.
Miles: Well, so your driving videos feel like a transmission to me of practices that have mattered a lot throughout human history that are now neglected or forgotten or tightly governed now.
JFR: Vision quest, that was definitely a word that was thrown around a lot more in the late 90s. Funny. I can tell a story of when Excepter was recording our last proper LP, Familiar, in Prague 2012. We recorded at Faust Studios the same time as Jaz Coleman. We got to meet him, he's a cool guy, and a really enthusiastic person. He said “this weekend we're gonna have a party.” We were all excited that this post-punk, occult hero would be so friendly to us. Friday morning, he was having an intense phone call with somebody and he was upset about something. Whoever he was on the phone with was also upset. He’s saying, “Don’t worry darling, have a glass of wine, take a walk in the sunshine, everything's gonna work out.” A couple of hours later, I see him with suitcases in each hand and an assistant with another suitcase. He left the studio. This is a studio inside an apartment building, so we were all living there. It’s where Keith Levene made his final record.
Miles: A lot of post-punk going on there.
JFR: I think Killing Joke even has a stake in it. The place is haunted. Anyways, we ask around, “Is Jaz still here?” “No, he left." We didn't think anything of it. Other then we're disappointed we don't get to eat Czech smoked meat with Jaz. A few weeks later we were in Copenhagen and reading some like heavy metal magazine. There's a headline, “Jaz Coleman Disappears.” He walked away from a package tour of Killing Joke, Mission and the Cult. He shows up after the proposed tour is over and says “I was just on walkabout in North Africa, man.” The idea that he would just go somewhere without communicating, completely alone. I mean, he obviously told some sort of manager character that he was gonna do it, but he didn't tell his band.
Miles: Beautiful story.
JFR: I could understand why Killing Joke wouldn’t want to be in this oldies tour. Killing Joke definitely evolved and continue to evolve in the 21st century. Their 2003 self-titled LP is great. I mean, was super into The Cult when I was like 12 and I still cherish those records, but I can see why he wouldn't want to be associated with that kind of nostalgia. I mean he was making some crazy didgeridoo record in the studio.
Miles: Walkabout, you gotta go for it.
JFR: When we got to Chicago, we were playing around, socializing and meeting peers here, but then after the pandemic, maybe this isn't special to Chicago, I think everyone became a little more guarded. A lot of like, well, we're just going to try to go back to the way things were. And that means that we're not looking for any newcomers here or making new connections. This might also be a function of being middle aged, but I find that the only people I communicate with are a select group of correspondents that I can count on one hand.
Miles: I think that it might be deeper than just age. In my own age group and I talk to Gen Zers sometimes who want to start bands or work on other projects. They can't because they have to make so much money for the landlord. And they don't have the short-term goals that drives creative activity, like "Where do we wanna play? Who do we wanna play with? Do we wanna make a video? Who would hype it?” So much is closed or tacky. There is context collapse around music and creative stuff in general, where it's like, unless you commit to a really proper career track, get an MFA or work through internships, it’s not understood why you would want to do anything creative. It’s very hard to engage with that attitude coming from romantic folkways or any subculture. I don't know if that makes sense, but it seemed like things were heading toward this professionalization and lockdown slammed the casket lid down. Maybe I'm missing something.
JFR: Is graffiti the only real art? Is there still a folk culture?
Miles: I think back to McLuhan and how electronic media was meant to create a global folk culture, oral culture. So far it's been the worst, lazy, pedantic, pandering activities that have been offered by the internet, which is how an individual can participate in electronic culture. And it makes people crazy, they're always angry or they're always jealous or they're always horny or they run through all these really high arousal emotions fast. They’re always in their heads.
JFR: Yeah, that's a feeling I was feeling super deeply, especially last summer. In all this vision questing and travel to sacred sites there's an intense loneliness to it that I wonder: has it always been this way? Have i just been distracted by cities or youth? But yeah, there’s a deep sorrow that permeates almost everything. I don't know. New York is a special town, special city. Being away from New York City is historically not that great for me. Well, being in New York City is also not great for me, but that's just about money. You're always not gonna have enough money. What William Burroughs in The Western Lands was on about, it's one thing to kill someone, but it's another thing to kill their soul as well, to kill them permanently, all the way.
Miles: And that's your feeling about money?
JFR: No, no money is just the stuff that you need to survive — survive in this world — if you have money, but you let your soul die then you are truly dead.
Miles: Yes.
JFR: So even having a New York State driver's license to me, like when I had to relinquish my New York license and get an Illinois one, I was really upset. Also because I feel like I'm a New York driver and I'm really, really upset about the driving manners here in the Midwest. It's a vast cultural failing. I would be disturbed to learn that it has nothing to do with the Midwest and is in fact a global problem.
Miles: Only New Yorkers know how to drive?
JFR: I talk about these vision quests and spiritual road trips and driving is a big part of that. I've been a professional driver as well, so it means a lot to me on many levels. I think New Yorkers are the best drivers in the country.
Miles: Is driving the last folk culture in America?
JFR: It's definitely a culture. I would say driving in cars is the biggest cultural expression for Americans. I think New Yorkers are better at it because they don't have to do it. The people on the roads in New York City are either professionals or people who choose to do it.
Miles: They're driver dandies.
JFR: We’re driving from Chicago to New York.
Miles: Incredible.
JFR: Yeah, we've done the Chicago to New York stretch so many times.
Miles: You drive through Amish country.
JFR: Pennsylvania just goes on forever.
Miles: Oh my God, yes. Are you gonna pick up Faygo for the Excepter / Juggalo crossover fans?
JFR: No, I'm kind of a health food guy at this point. I’m actually bringing my own seltzer on the trip. It’s not available 15 minutes out of the city. Hmm. Looping back, I’m trying to think of the last time I got kicked out of something ... I got kicked out of a David Lynch fan group on Facebook.
Miles: Trashing transcendental meditation?
JFR: No, I suggested that the Italian poster for Blue Velvet that they used on a recent reissue of the soundtrack LP was misogynist.
Miles: What?
JFR: It’s garbage. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's a painting of who we presume to be Dorothy Vallens, but you can't tell because you only see her from the waist down with her ankles shackled to a pool table and a bloody cueball in the pocket. You see up-skirt into her underwear. Her crotch is in the center of the image. David Lynch likes to explore that line between objectification and humanity and this is a situation where the humanity is absolutely taken away, there's no faces here, it is just legs and genitals. The moderator or whatever was like, “this is an important Italian artist who are you to criticize this amazing thing.” And I was just like, why don’t you use this Ghanan poster? The Ghanan idea of Blue Velvet is a werewolf with a snake for a tongue licking a severed head in a blood spattered suburban nightmare. So they were like, you're gone, you’re done.
Miles: Well, how do you talk about that movie without talking about misogyny in some way?
JFR: I was talking about the internet audience being so low. If you're a fan you’re expected to be slavish fan of something, you can't criticize or have a conversation or argument with anyone. You can't disagree with anyone. And definitely being a smart-aleck, sarcastic man like myself, it's not appreciated.
Miles: What an unforgiving and shitty medium that is all of our homes.
JFR: Maybe it all ties back to the MET. You used to be able to go in there for a quarter, but now it costs $30.
Miles: I still pay a penny with my City ID.
JFR: The Temple of Dendur, I'm going to take a swim in that thing. That’ll be my next sacred site. I have one of those cameras you can take underwater. I'll dip it in the pool and get kicked out of the MET.