Nick: To reel it back to the very beginning, I’m curious to know what life was like growing up for Mr. Clark. I heard that the true origin of your style came from gaining consciousness near the San Diego Zoo. Is that true?!  

 

Spencer: Yes, I grew up being taken to the zoo everyday during nap time, which is the best time for the animals as they begin to wake up, cuz they sleep late, and be alive. So I spent many days dreaming while the animals alivened.

 

Nick: I also heard from the interview I did with Yellow Swans that you have a cousin who lived with you and James and was involved in the same scene at the time. Is a chunk of your family tree from an artistic background?  

 

Spencer: I have no idea what they are talking about, My parents played me little to no music at all, I never had any lessons whatsoever. But in my fathers bookcase growing up there were tons of books like John Cage “Silence” and books of painters like Kandinsky and poetry books by Charles Olson or whoever. So I would stare at those books and just imagine what was in them, until then I could read them, and i think when i ventured to read them I didn't understand them hardly at all, so i began to make up my own idea of what they were about, and that led me to imagining that they were even quite more mystical than they ever were, and so i developed this aside way of thinking about the materials that were in front of me. And when I was in college, studying photography and whatever, I would on my breaks go to the music department and play piano in the practice rooms, which were always empty. I would play piano forever and ever, and then I sort of learned something about where the keys layed and which keys sounded good to me.  This led me to where I would go, which was to meet James.

 

Nick: Outside of that, what artists did you gravitate towards growing up? Outside of mere enjoyment, were there any specific artists who directly contributed to your sound?

 

Spencer: Around that same time my friend got me a job at coat check at the SFMOMA, and there on my breaks I would walk around the paintings of the abstract expressionist, pretty excited, but the one that really hit for me was Roberto Matta, who was a surrealist who was kicked out of surrealism for using the influences of science fiction and religion in his work, and was then kicked out of the NYC abstract expressionist movement for telling them that they ought to go further past just their interest in their strokes and shapes. He was booted out, as at the same time the critics were pumping up abstract expressionism so much, and he was in the way. Later it was of course discovered the CIA helped some of those critics along in their judgements so that a non-political, less meaningful artform would be influential. Anyway his son was Gordon matta clark, who many people know more. Well Roberto Matta was a huge inspiration to me because his paintings were about the fourth dimension. Sort of like arshile gorky and picasso but more alien. I went to the research department at the SFMOMA, and the librarian gave me all the interviews with Matta, and there I read that his hugest influence was PD OUSPENKY’S “TERTIUM ORGANUM.” I took the train to Berkeley to the big bookstore and got a copy of tertium organum for $1.95 and then that became a huge inspiration for me. He begins to explain, and this is before he met Gurdjieff, how to exactly imagine the next dimension for humanity using math and occult or spiritual motifs to help him. He was a journalist and a mathematician of Russian origin, and his explanation of explaining what you cannot know, the thing within itself, his endeavor to describe that left me with real inspiration. Because in order to reject Kant, he embraced Kant, so in order to explain the thing Kant said he could not, he embraced Kant, he went against rigid philosophical laws, and so then I wished to forever record myself trying to describe essences that are not known. This is also a huge beginning point for The Skaters.

 

Nick: Were there any interests that you pursued outside of music? Do you still keep them around?

 

Spencer: Music is so beautiful because it allows itself to be a medium in which you can express yourself quickly in a really modern context, and, so actually my music is my outside interest. I use music to explain what my main thing is which is recording and reflecting the real and dreamed world as it is presented to me each and every day I wake up, and at night I stare at the stars and I realize, whether I am amidst company or not, that on this specific day i spent time aligning myself with the creator and that act is just a natural thing that humans do, and there is no hierarchy to who does this more or better than others because studying the nature of reality is what the human body was constructed to do.

 

Nick: Could you walk me through how you met one of your biggest collaborators, James Ferraro? Did either of you know about one another, whether through word of mouth or finding each other's music, before hitting it off? Where did you guys meet?

 

Spencer: James and I met at this community center by the beach in the hippy part of town where I grew up in San Diego. It was a place run by this guy Jim Bell, who was like a progressive local politician. These UCSD music students had got together with locals and started a group that had concerts and performances. The ring leader was this cool guy, Charles Curtis, who made music with La Monte Young. I had just returned from living in Berlin, this was 2001. The local SD leader so to speak was this guy Dan Bryant, who was the third Skater originally. He met James and his dad at a record show. James was 18 and was interested in Jandek records, so Dan invited him to this group jam on the Mexican holiday, “THE DAY OF THE DEAD,” which is celebrated pretty heavily in San Diego. There James and I met and quickly zoned together and then started meeting up to make our own music. 

 

Nick: What fell in place for you guys to start a duo? 

 

Spencer: James was already in touch with this online forum called “ROUTES AND WARS FOR TRAVEL,” he had a label, was making a compilation, and was recording as The Wooden Cupboard. In the beginning, we would just meet up and make music, but then we started hanging out and going to parties. It happened really fast, I would get off of work at 2 p.m., drive to pick him up, then we would go to make music until dark. We did this everyday for like a year or something, and then we moved to San Francisco, and then it sort of all took off internationally. Our main connection in the beginning was like Ren and Stimpy, but we both read a lot of philosophy and I was reading “Tertium Organum" by PD Ousspensky, and we both read that and talked about it. I had no musical training and hadn't really played any instrument at all. My house burned down and I got a Walmart gift card from the government. When we first started playing, we didn't have any equipment, so at the space where we practiced they had keyboards and guitars laying around that people would leave behind. I don't know how we got these keyboards, but we did, and James could kind of play anything really and I tried to basically keep up. But we definitely linked up on this personal spiritual connection and our jams were obviously evident of that. It was very little about musical gear or anything, we made connections to each other and in the air to spirits while we played and at its best was like our spirits that we invented talked with one another. 

 

Nick: Since James isn’t here to talk about it, I think it’s best we shift focus over to your solo work. However, since James already expressed what his favorite is in that old RedBull Music Fireside Chat, what are some of your personal favorites out of The Skaters discography or do both of you see eye to eye in that final release being the gold standard of the duo?

 

Spencer: The best Skaters music that is recorded is the stuff at the end, right before we left San Francisco to tour and travel. But the actual best music was playing in our house when we privately jammed. There is nothing comparable to that whatsoever, because we recorded on religious thrift store tapes on a handheld tape recorder. To add to that, we played through giant guitar amps. One was a fender twin reverb, which my friend had left behind at the house when he moved, and the other thing we had that was crazy good, he also left behind. It was the tape deck that we used to digitize our jams, a high end Nakamichi. It somehow saved how crunchy our shit was. So yeah, our jams that we played in the house were on another level, and James would do some wild shit that you cannot always hear on the recordings. I think the power that other people know of our music solely rests on how blown away we were in our private spaces. Like we knew some shit had been created, and when we played live sometimes, it was almost that good, but hardly ever. But our live shows still had the aura of what we had unearthed in our private jams. So the best Skaters music is the music that we heard, or our roommates heard, cuz we blasted so loud and so hard, sometimes the cops would come to the door, and they hadn't been called. They could hear the music from streets down the block in a busy city. They would be like “what are you doing?” and I would just say we were jamming. They would be pretty nice actually and sort of surprised that it was music, cuz i think they thought we were like slaughtering animals or doing religious ceremonies. There actually was a Chinese couple that lived next to us and they would slaughter their own chickens, and I remember seeing them do that through the fence and then thinking about our jams, which were so wild and intense, and then just feeling as though that life was like that. Like shit was just being slaughtered mentally and physically and it was visceral beyond belief. The music scene was so inviting and good at that point, I guess, 2003, that we spent really only two years at most recording. Then it was like 10 years touring and making solo records when we weren't touring. When David Keenan of Subcurrent Festival invited us, we just left America and didn't really come back. I mean, we ended up back and forth, but when we got airplane tickets, our minds were blown, and we just went with the flow. When we would tour in the UK and Europe, we would end up running into lots of other bands and mostly everyone was so cool and together, like Smegma, Wolf Eyes, Birds Of Delay, and in SF we would hang with Rock bands like Comets On Fire and Glenn Donaldson's bands. It was a super community, genres had nothing to do with it. That was my favorite, always having a Rock vibe on the road, that was the coolest vibe. Rock was this free energy that made people link, but almost no one was playing Rock really, it was just like that energy. I like shredding and Free Jazz and shit everywhere. What made that time so cool is how much people cared and got excited for just about anything. Like not all the jams were always great, you know, there were lots of bands that weren't amazing, but it was just vibes. It was crazy. We were really lucky to be taken in by the Double Leopards and to some extent, Wolf Eyes, and Matthew Bower of Sunroof!, Mick and Neil and Bridget from Vibracathedral in England. We sort of just flew into an already really cool underground vibe. Slowly you would notice bigger labels getting interested and Indie bands and Techno bands coming in, and I think that freedom sort of got trapped in some ways. People who wanted to make it big got attracted to the underground scenes, like they would come in, use the enthusiasm and then bust out on a bigger record deal. It's not like anything is over, or most of these people don't still Rock, it's just that period that I witnessed was crazy for me. I think once the CD drive left the laptop also, it was like “oh shit.” At least from my vantage point, that changed some major shit in how money was made for new artists. Like in NYC when we lived there, I was basically homeless, but I think I was selling like 200 CDRs a month or some shit, and James more. Like that was out of control, cuz you could go over to anyone's house and use their computer to burn CDs and then make some copies and then it was lunch, dinner, and drinks and more! We would wake up in SF, have no money, and then just print some CDRs and go to the aquarium and then it was lunch money. That shit made the music making process better really. like you know that if you could make some fresh shit, that you would then get reviewed by magazines and distros pretty quickly.