Dark Victorian Fairytale Science Fiction: An Interview with Psyche Corporation

When I started college, one of my friends tried to work with a producer who said he would shop her music to major record labels.  He turned out to be kind of a shady character, but hearing about it also made me think about working with a producer to do a solo project.  I answered a Craigslist ad, and by total coincidence it ended up being from the same jerk producer (who will go nameless).  We worked on 3 songs together (“Minor Demon,” “Universe,” and “Raise the Dead”).  Even though I was intensely involved in the music composition process and started making increasingly detailed draft versions of the instrumentals for each successive song, I was frustrated by not being able to make the music sound …More.  He didn’t treat it like the composition of his soul, since it was just a job to him, so his compositions were very limited even though the production values were good.  I started making my own music at the computer music studio at school in Columbia and pushed myself to get better.  Around the same time, I made a MySpace page, got a booking request from 169 Bar, and performed “Minor Demon” there with a classmate who learned the guitar part so we could perform together.  Somewhere in that series of events I became a more committed musician.  I think for me, “deciding to become” something is something I avoid.  I just do things until I either AM whatever it is that I might have wanted to become, or not.

I feel like I am still in the process of becoming a musician.  There’s so much I still need to learn, like how to play guitar.

So, in an Amanda Palmer-esque fashion, I heard that you sort of picked up musical training in bit and pieces as opposed to having a lot of formal training.

I started taking piano lessons when I was 4 or 5 but had stopped by age 6.  Supposedly I showed a lot of promise and I remember playing a concert at some point at (I think?) some chinese community thingy in New York, but I don’t remember much about it except it might have been the first time my mom made me wear lipstick.  I stopped lessons after age 6 though.  I liked playing with the piano, but I was very independent and stubborn (not always in a good way) and liked to do things on my own.  I started taking opera singing lessons for a few months when I was 13 and I really enjoyed them.  I think my voice teacher moved though, and my mother tried to find another voice teacher for me but nothing much came of it.  We went to a few different people and stopped seeing them after one or two lessons.  Then during senior year of high school I took opera again for about 6 months.  That’s all of my formal training. I never took music theory or ear training.

I took 2 or 3 music classes in college but they were both very self-directed.  One was the intro computer music course which I took because it grants you 24 hour swipe access to the school music studio (the actual courseload was incredibly laid back and we had to do 2 musical pieces but I ended up doing my first two albums in that studio in the nights and during vacation times when others weren’t using the studio). The other was an independent study where I just turned in all the music I made during the semester at the end as my final.  I think I was only accepted into this course because the director of the computer music department remembered me as the one who was always working in the studio even though I wasn’t a music major.  I did some variant of the independent study a second time too.

How long have you been writing music? How did you start?

I started writing music around age 12, composing piano pieces that were supposed to be the soundtracks to various stories in my head about elves on alien planets being born out of trees.  I’ve always played around with the piano but it would be random banging for a while after I’d practiced what pieces I remembered from lessons long ago.  I didn’t try to make something I’d remember and play the next day until around age 12.  I also didn’t write sheet music and still am not terribly good at it.  I just memorized which piano keys to hit next.

How did you get into using electronic equipment to create your music? What kind of equipment do you use?

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