STARCADIAN | “Shadowcatcher” + Featured Interview

By Vero Kitsune

It’s not too often that I come across someone these days with whom I can immediately bond over Fantômas, Mike Patton and Mr. Bungle. I feel those who share the same appreciation are part of a very particular species of musicians that had gotten more and more rare, and who can sniff each other out in a crowd with thrilling, pleasant bewilderment.  Last November, I had the honor of opening for Brooklyn-based electronic maestro STARCADIAN who was headlining at Berlin Under Avenue A in New York City, where we basically ended up happily carbon-dating ourselves backstage, nerding over Mike Patton on top of our respective joys in filmmaking, visual arts, and his vast experience in Europe as a touring artist. (I also got to see the face behind the mask!)

Fast-forward several months later, I found myself uprooting my entire New York City life and moving across the Atlantic to live right at the northern-most tip of the Iberian Peninsula. The move brought me closer to my new muse - the ocean. I have been spending immeasurable amount of time getting to know her and her contents — an endeavor which I am happy to obsessively dedicate the rest of my life to. Coincidentally, I found out STARCADIAN was also working on an ocean-inspired collaboration with investigative reporter and journalist Ian Urbina. With the drop of his latest documentary-series The Outlaw Ocean, Ian chronicles serious off-shore crimes such as sea slavery, illegal fishing, stranding of crews, stealing of ships, along with the heroic deeds by ocean vigilantes from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. In a highly unique maneuver to heighten and bridge awareness, Ian took a more visceral and artistic approach by inviting musicians and artists to generate a compelling backdrop to promote the cause, resulting in the ingenious cross-pollination between investigative journalism, art, sound… and the ocean.

STARCADIAN was one of the artists who answered Ian’s call and “Shadowcatcher” was unveiled: A stunning, fast-paced 5-track EP filled with exhilarating waves upon waves of oceanic material driving thru shimmering arpeggios and the call of nature coming thru a combination of organic eastern tribal instruments, massive modern beats, odd rhythms, dark bottom-ends and wailing synths. I got lost in it at one point, gasping for air and trying to think of any another concept record that fully satisfies and effectively articulates all points of its primary objective with emotive, effortless cultural bridging. I can’t think of any. Regardless, the collaboration worked as some of us are now fantasizing how to become oceanic crime-fighting vigilantes. (I’m dead serious). Ok, at the very least the awareness is being spread around. Anyway, I figured it’s the perfect time to catch up with our favorite star farer and see what else he’s got cooking.

STARCADIAN, for those who are still getting to know you and your music, tell us how you got started in this crazy world of music making?

My terminal case of artistry started around 2010, when I released my first album under a different name. Vastly different to what I'm doing now, but my then boss and now co-director, Rob O'Neill was incredibly supportive, helped me make music videos, slack off from work to study music software etc. I think it was around that time that I discovered SebastiAn and it just made me completely rethink music production and composition, so I kind of scorched the earth of what I was doing musically and started learning how to make electronic music while making my first album on a dinky little laptop. I had no concept of synthwave or anything like that, I just put together all the stuff I like and tried to match French levels of productions and settled on the name Starcadian pretty quickly. It's been a weird little ride since then, playing around the world and creating an entire mythology, song by song, video by video. I tend to call my stuff ear movies, because the intention is to cause a minor case of synesthesia and make you imagine the movie this song would soundtrack.

I think many of us are immediately drawn to you and your work because of the visual artistry you combine with your music. What usually comes first? The vision for the visuals or sound? 

For the song to flow, I need to be able to visualize it in context, be it a movie trailer, or a scene from a movie. It's incredibly hard for me to write otherwise, unless I'm directly homaging something. I find it's similar to all artistic concentrations, you need to know and feel how your piece connects to a larger puzzle to be good at it. Painters need to know what their framework and exhibition location will be and the same goes for musicians.

Who are your biggest musical inspirations? How about visuals?

Musically, I don't know that it would show in my music, but I'm absolutely a student of Mike Patton, Jaz Coleman, Alain Johannes, Stuart Price and SebastiAn among others. I relish people that find the line and just careen past it.

Visually, I always aspire to get a look like Gary Kibbe and John Hora, hard lighting, lifted darks, borderline expressionistic is very inspiring to me, provided the budget allows!

Your latest EP “Shadowcatcher” is a stunning and supremely moving achievement. How did this project with Ian Urbina come about? We picked up “The Outlaw Ocean” after hearing about the project. How was the process for you of drawing inspiration and insight from an Oceanic crime documentary and heroic deeds in the creation of a sonically-diversed EP?

It was such an honor to be involved in this project. When Ian contacted me about potentially contributing, I had already read the article on NY Times, but I was not ready for the extent of lawlessness he put himself smack-dab in the middle of. Nothing makes me feel more alive and motivated than being humbled by another person's passion, accomplishments and life story and Ian has those in spades.

The Outlaw Ocean Music Project, to me, is such a revolutionary concept; A hybrid synthesis of music and journalism is the perfect way to make incredibly complicated conversations entertaining for a lot of people and to give music a purpose, something which it has been lacking for a while now, sadly.

I poured over footage and documents that Ian supplied and immersed myself in this vast other Wild West expanse that most people don't know about. Very quickly, I started constructing a fictional narrative in my head that placed my character, Channarong, a young Thai kid grifted into joining the maritime life, in the middle of all these real scenarios that Ian described. The journalism was so evocative that it just wrote itself.

I took a crash course in Thai culture to make sure that I represented as much of it and as best I could, which is also very rejuvenating from a musician's standpoint.

Have you ever aspired to become an actual ocean vigilante? Because some of us do now! :)

Well I am an islander with, as you're well aware from our discussions, very very strong opinions on colonialism, imperialism and this capitalist hole we find ourselves in, so if this Starcadian thing doesn't pan out, it's not an unlikely plan B.

I will say that reading about the conditions aboard those vessels has completely transformed my diet and purchasing habits. I have no delusions about changing the world one dinner or product at a time, but there's nothing wrong with doing a little bit of research and making sure you're eating locally sourced, cruelty free and buying things from places that don't have suicide nets for workers. It's very hard to rationalize and empathize with numbers larger than the Monkeyspheres we all live in, but reading stories of real people going through real trauma puts it sharply into perspective.

We’re big fans of your music film “Freak Night.” What was the inspiration behind it?

Me and Rob have been planning and laying out this intricate mythology around Starcadian for close to a decade now and Freak Night was the first time we were able to fully visualize one branch of it. I can definitely tell you that it is NOT quite what it seems in the grand scheme of things. To tell you what really inspired it narratively would spoil the twists that we've worked into the story, so I'll stick to visual inspirations.

I'm a huge Joe Dante fan and very few people have managed to toe the line between horror and comedy as well as he has. Also I'm such a huge sucker for late 80s theatrical lighting, so this was a chance to homage both those things. Even though I'm a VFX artist by trade, I have no interest in CG personally, it's more of a cost cutting tool.

You could argue we've achieved photorealism, sure, but what we don't have is restraint with camera motions, hence all the awful Peter Jackson-style wooshes all over the place. When you have a real puppet and a heavy camera, you have to pick how the camera moves, limited by the weight, distribution, set space etc. Your tangible real world limitations inform the framing and composition and I think that's something that is unchecked in CGI, which mostly makes for bad composition. This was our way of honoring that and letting the shoot define the aesthetic particulars, not the other way around. Also we just wanted to play with puppets.

Have you ever thought of pursuing filmmaking in congruent to your musical career?

I very much have, that was my first love and will always fight for attention with music, hence Starcadian being a multidisciplinary project. I figure i'll keep making videos and songs until one of the two hits big!

Favorite films and film directors?

Best directors currently working for me are Jeremy Saulnier, Ari Aster, S. Craig Zahler and Paolo Sorrentino. I don't know that I have a favorite anything of all time, it would be such a disservice, but I distinctly remember having intense reactions to Joe Dante, John Landis and Francis Ford Coppola movies in my formative years.

And finally, what’s next for Starcadian?

Now that Shadowcatcher is out, I'm moving back to working on the follow up to Midnight Signals. It's a slow process, but I'm over the moon about it, there's a special energy in this album. It makes up a trilogy with Sunset Blood and Midnight Signals and it ties everything together in new ways, while adding some spice to the mix. I couldn't be prouder of it. I just wrapped up the first music video for it last week and currently sketching the last song on the album, so it won't be too long until I start wrapping up, however, I'm going to stay well away from the elections, since the world needs to work through some issues to make more time for art.

For more updates on all STARCADIAN, visit www.starcadian.com