INTERVIEW: Loss Works on Multiple Levels, A Conversation with Mark Solotroff

A variant for the cover of Black Openings, Anatomy of Habit, 2023. Image courtesy the artist.

INTERVIEW
Loss Works on Multiple Levels, A Conversation with Mark Solotroff

By Meghan Lamb

Mark Solotroff is a compelling person: both deeply sincere (or, at least, convincingly generous and self-effacing) and darkly enigmatic (as someone whose work explores the dark enigmas of violence, loss, and erasure). Solotroff’s art spans the course of three decades and several projects, including BLOODYMINDED and Anatomy of Habit. Anatomy of Habit recently released a phenomenal album, Black Openings, which is an uncanny potion of doom metal, post-punk, death-rock, and shoegaze that sounds like all and none of these individual ingredients. My own band, Kill Scenes, had the honor of opening for them at the Cobra Lounge alongside burndy (a gloriously brutal noise project featuring Solotroff’s BLOODYMINDED compatriot, Megan Emish).

Mark Solotroff met with me over Zoom on a mid-April evening two weeks after the Black Openings release show. On his side of the screen: an elegantly dressed man — all in black, of course — sipping a glass of red wine. On my side of the screen: a woman nervously fiddling, painfully aware that she’s speaking with a singular artist, a longstanding figure in the Chicago music landscape.

I feel compelled to give you a little bit of background on what I know of your work, because there’s just so much out there. I discovered Anatomy of Habit at an Empty Bottle show the fall before last. I honestly don’t remember who else was playing, but we went to see someone else, and you were one of the openers.

Human Impact?

Show poster for Human Impact, Child Bite, Anatomy of Habit, 2021. Image courtesy the artist.

Yeah! But Anatomy of Habit was magnetizing, the band that I really remembered from that show. After that, my partner and I went about trying to acquire as much of your oeuvre as we could. But it’s kind of like getting into Nurse with Wound or something. It’s a magnanimous pursuit, overwhelming in the best way. Not only to discover Anatomy of Habit, but to discover that you’ve done so much. I’ve listened to all of the Anatomy of Habit albums. I’ve listened to some of the BLOODYMINDED albums. At this point, I believe I’ve listened to a majority of the music that you do under your own name. But I have yet to delve into Intrinsic Action, Super Eight Loop, Ensemble Sacrés Garçons. And then there’s the work you’ve done with other projects that I admire as well, like Wrekmeister Harmonies, The Body … your work spans a lot of territories!

Well, thank you for diving in.

To begin: So much of your work explores the interactions between human bodies and the spaces that they occupy and move through, the blending of internal things and external things — internal and external processing — and the ways that we process liminality and the changes in space, such as your music that’s designed as a kind of soundtrack interacting with the actual physical environment (with a space like, in your words, a “pre-sterilization Times Square”). And I’m curious to hear about your changing experiences with spaces, the change exemplified by your black and white images of architecture in You May be Holding Back and Not Everybody Makes It. Those books were kind of designed to interact with your electronic albums of the same names. There’s so much I’m curious about related to these sound projects that aren’t simply replicating or performing an experience, but interacting with liminality and change, and also — to some measure — loss. Namely, I’m thinking of how you included images of structures in both of those books that no longer exist.

I know you want your music to speak for itself, largely. And the last thing I want to do is to diminish your work or diminish the magic of those projects by explaining them away. But I’m particularly interested in hearing about loss, and vacuities, and how your work gestures to things that are unseen, things that are beyond recognition, or are simply no longer there. I’m also curious about your relationship with the different cities you’ve occupied, especially Chicago, since I’m interviewing you for a Chicago-based independent publication.

Well, with Anatomy Habit, I’ve been incorporating terms like “love” and “loss” for things like press releases just as a simple way to talk about some of the themes involved. I have — a little bit slyly — referred to all Anatomy of Habit songs as love songs, and, in a certain way songs of loss. If you look at Anatomy of Habit, BLOODYMINDED, the solo work, the idea of loss works on several levels. There’s the loss of humans: As BLOODYMINDED started being built on more internal thoughts and concepts (as opposed to more observational narratives), loss definitely came more and more into play. One song that really jumps out is the song “Ten Suicides” from the album Gift Givers. It really is based on people who are gone.

Gift Givers, BLOODYMINDED, 2005. Image courtesy the artist.

This is probably way too much pulling back the sheets, but there was a song when I was a sophomore in high school that was a huge song for me: “People Who Died” by Jim Carroll Band. I had already picked up on his music before I’d ever read anything by him and before I completely figured out his place in this timeline of writers and poets in New York — from Lou Reed to Patti Smith and moving on — and it really was just a roll call of a lot of people who died in his life. And it was sort of wedged in the back of my head as a way to process a lot of people — particularly several music scene people, people I’d recorded with or performed with — who had taken their own lives. And that song started to take on a life of its own. We started playing it live before it was recorded. There was a show we played in Brooklyn — at No Fun Fest — where … I don’t remember what happened, whether the PA went out, or the power in the whole building, but it went dark. The sound and light went out, and we just kept going through the song, just with me on vocals. All the synths were gone. And people were pretty shocked by the result of it. And so, I think we were doing a show in Detroit on the way back, and we just decided to do it without synths going.

“People Who Died”, Jim Carroll Band, 1980. Image courtesy Meghan Lamb.

And then, we recorded it, and Mike Williams from Eyehategod did guest vocals on the track, and it seemed fitting in certain ways. I won’t get into detail about how it relates to my relationship with him. I’ve known him for a long time.

I’m so excited to see Eyehategod at the Empty Bottle soon!

Oh, yeah, they’re amazing live. He’s had a lot of loss in his life, and it just seemed like a great song to work on together.

And then, Marc Fisher (co-founder of Temporary Services and publisher of Half Letter Press) had a piece in the Whitney Biennial that was based on a mutual friend of ours who had taken his own life, Malachi Ritscher. He included some of the lyrics from the song “Ten Suicides” in his publication with the Whitney Biennial. That was just another example of how this song has continued to evolve. That was about losing people in a very direct way. Loss also incorporates loss of friendships, lost relationships. Also loss of our corporeal self, as we increasingly become digitized online entities. And it also encompasses emotional states. I mean, an obvious one might be the loss of innocence. Loss of innocence actually really ties into my relationship to the city. Chicago is where I grew up and lived for my first 20-whatever years. I went to New York for five years, and when I came back, the city had changed a lot. That was the height of the development of Wicker Park and Bucktown.

When was that, specifically?

I was gone from 1992 to 1997. That area was unrecognizable from what I remembered in the mid-80s, going to bars and playing early shows with Intrinsic Action. I am not against progress; I love other aspects of Chicago that are very much about addition, development, building, change, the evolution of the city, but I do miss things and places and memories of what Chicago was in the … [laughs] Okay, look, I’m old. So, the late-60s and 70s, 80s. Whether it’s movie theaters that are gone, or clubs that are gone, or stores that are gone, restaurants, all those things. So, there’s loss in terms of what I remember the city having been. I live downtown with my wife, and I can walk out our door, look down Randolph, and see theaters that used to be grimy movie theaters where my dad used to take me to see The Warriors or whatever, you know, exploitation films from the 70s, horror films, a Godzilla film, and now they’re very cleaned up Broadway in Chicago kind of theaters.

W Randolph Street at night, photograph by atlantic-kid,1968. Image courtesy Getty Images.

So, that’s part of how I process what the word loss means. Because, some of it, I don’t like. You mentioned the Times Square thing, and I have some very distinct memories of Times Square from when I first started going to New York in the 80s … even what it was like when I first got there in 1992. And what it is today is just … unrecognizable from what it used to be on every level. So, how I process changes that I’ve seen happen — how that affects me, how it affects my memory, how it affects me emotionally — that kind of plays out in the processing I do with my visual work, or sound work, or lyrics. Loss works on multiple levels.

Speaking of your lyrics, I recently looked at the lyrics on your website for the first time, and I really love how they’re not only interesting phonic, but visual artifacts. Your punctuation — the ways you use slashes and dashes — kind of reminded me of my partner Robert Kloss’s syntax in his writings. Robert doesn’t write anything in full sentences anymore: For him, slashes and dashes kind of take the place of commas and periods. I use ellipses in a similar way, but I think there’s a really interesting violence — or, perhaps, a violent disruptiveness — in that kind of punctuation.

I won’t ask an insipid question like, “How do you come up with your lyrics?” [laughs], but I’m really curious about your process with that punctuation. Do you see it as its own expressive language within your music? Do these slashes and dashes tell you anything? Do they communicate anything to you and others about the sound of your music?

MS: Those slashes and dashes are involved in the pacing of how I deliver vocals. I just fill books [flips through dozens of filled, handwritten pages in an Anatomy of Habit notebook]. I’m not going to show you specific things, but there are tons and tons of fragments of ideas, lines, things I’ve captured or heard or whatever, that I’m constantly jotting down in small notebooks. Things have evolved in the last — I don’t know — 10 years, I think because things start as these short phrases. You can definitely see how BLOODYMINDED and Anatomy of Habit lyrics are built on these really concise statements or phrases.

And repetitions!

A lot of repetition, yeah. And certainly with Anatomy of Habit, that comes through in the music as well. But yeah, it’s then starting to find the bigger picture — find the bigger story — in a lot of these fragments that I am constantly writing down, and a lot of those kinds of tight statements just live that way. I think I’ve even gone further and further into editing, removing unnecessary words. I often write things out more fully — or in a more grammatically correct form — and start removing words, thinking about delivery and how to keep the delivery either punchy or aggressive for BLOODYMINDED, or fit more smoothly for Anatomy of Habit, and then it depends on the mood of a song.

Anatomy of Habit and BLOODYMINDED lyrics (from the artist’s website). Image courtesy the artist.

So, when you’re writing ideas down, do you not necessarily know which project they’re going to fit into immediately?

Not always. There are notebooks that are just Anatomy of Habit notebooks, and there’s usually one that’s a BLOODYMINDED notebook. But what’s ended up happening in the last several years is that I end up having a lot more written down for Anatomy of Habit records.

Certainly with the last BLOODYMINDED album that came out, as well as the one that we’re endlessly working on (and need to finish this year), those songs were more purposefully written. There were notes for them. But they took on more — I don’t know if spontaneity is the word — but they came on with less background work. There was reading and research, and I do feel I can use the word research because that’s kind of what I do for a living. With BLOODYMINDED, and even The Fortieth Day — which is instrumental music, but has song titles and album titles as clues — there’s a lot of reading that goes on to know what’s going to happen. Most likely, this new BLOODYMINDED album will have the least of that.

But somehow, I wrote an album without … committing myself to attacking a certain topic and reading as much as I could about it. This is a little more … I don’t know, I’m not even sure how to explain it, yet. With this new BLOODYMINDED album, there’s just tons and tons and tons of editing, partly for my own benefit, and partly … the band was really demanding it. [laughs]

[laughs knowingly]

They wanted a little more involvement in how we were going to pace the vocals and whatnot, which was great. It’s a little more collaborative in terms of thinking about a recorded or performative approach to the vocals. Which is excellent, because I’ve seen how

BLOODYMINDED has continued to evolve to be this more collaborative, vocal thing, but it was still always my lyrics. So, I like that we’re taking it another step further. Different approaches, but a lot of it has to do with just working through combinations, and a lot of editing.

That plays into one of my questions related to the colossal builds so much of your music is known for, particularly with Anatomy of Habit or BLOODYMINDED, or any music project that involves working collaboratively. I’m really curious about how you develop those builds, those swells of sound. How do you communicate to develop them throughout the process, from lyrics to being in the room with one another? How much is conversational (like stuff you try to translate from language into sound), and how much is based on the interaction between different musicians as you’re playing? How much of it is a kind of serendipitous je ne sais quoi that just occurs in the process?

So, it’s definitely different for Anatomy of Habit and BLOODYMINDED. Regardless of the lineup, Anatomy of Habit has always been extremely collaborative. Sometimes, I walk into the practice space with a challenge. I’m like, “Hey, what if we try this, and then try to do that backwards?” You know, not absurd challenges, like, they have to be things I actually think we can accomplish, but, for example, when we’re thinking of a song structure, I’m not going to say it in a way that a musician may understand. There are some incredibly talented musicians in Anatomy of Habit. There always have been. I’ve been blessed with kind of crazy musicians and composers and people who’ve studied music theory and whatnot. Arrangers.

So, I can walk in and say something, and immediately, people start working to figure out what I’m trying to get across and do a version of it. And then, we may play with that for a while, could be for some hours, or multiple practices. The song “Black Openings” was very much that kind of challenge: “Let’s come up with this song, and then let’s play it in reverse.” And they were like, “What do you mean, in reverse? We can’t play it in reverse.”

Black Openings album cover, Anatomy of Habit, 2023. Image courtesy the artist.

Now, I do a lot of recording in reverse with my solo stuff through The Fortieth Day. Intrinsic Action had a bit. BLOODYMINDED may have a little bit of backward stuff here and there, but not too much. So, I didn’t literally mean it should be played like a mirror image, the way the notes are, but it was an interesting challenge to come up with something like that. And then, we just kind of worked on it and ultimately decided that the first part of the song was going to be a little more moderate than the third. Well, what’s now the third part: the original was going to be the second half, which ultimately became the heavier crushing part. And through the way we were playing it in practice, we realized, “Well, it could be cool to actually split them apart.” And instead of having this sort of weird, not really mirror image, we could do a whole other thing in the middle.”

So, there’s a lot of trial and error. We’re not a band that just walks in with a ready-made riff. Alex isn’t, you know, coming to practice every week, like, “I got three new riffs, let’s check these out.” Skyler doesn’t walk in, like, “I just discovered a new beat.” We start a little bit more with ideas and tempo. Sometimes, I’ll bring some lyrics so I can do something with them once we have a little structure. But generally, I put lyrics to songs after we’ve made good headway with them.That said, occasionally, Alex does have a riff he wants to share, but we’re not that kind of band. We’re not toiling away in isolation, then coming together and announcing, “Here’s what I got. Okay, here’s what I got.”

Of course, and it doesn’t sound like that kind of band.

From the very first practices, when Skyler first joined and then when Alex joined, and when Sam joined, and when Isidro joined, it was incredible how fluid it was. And I remember that the first lineup was like that as well. We had a certain ease of working together; the first line up just labored with things much longer. We seem like we’re able to reach a point of resolution sooner, and then get a song polished up and ready to go. That said, compared to most bands, we still haven’t written that much, but it just seems like this lineup is the most prolific of all.

I mean, it seems like you’ve been pretty prolific to me!

You know, when you’re writing 20 minute songs, or whatever, or even 10 minute songs, you’re just getting less done. But we’re picking up the pace.

Speaking to the length and the cumulative nature of these songs: When I’m listening to your music, I feel like so much of the experience is about inhabiting these pans between the very small and minute — maybe the deeply internal — and the large, the looming, the colossal. On your website, you have these drawings that almost look like the interiors of cells or something like that. And I guess I’m just curious about your interest in the contrasts or maybe the parataxis between big things and small things … the weird overlaps, the conversation between big and small.

Your work almost feels like one of those enormous, many-layered Gerhard Richter paintings where you notice the small details by merit of the great big whole that engulfs them. In this analogy, I guess the giant painting is a 20 minute song — a long, big thing — that compels you to listen closely to the small things, the ways it builds.

Drawings by Mark Solotroff. Image courtesy the artist.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve definitely always played with contrast, like those drawings that you mentioned, which I was really actively doing in the early ‘00s, and still do a bit. They’re very much about macro and micro environments. Some do absolutely come from a more cellular place, and some are much more like galaxies. The first Anatomy of Habit record had an inner sleeve with a galaxy photo. I was definitely playing with that idea: From deepest space down to the deepest, deepest within us.

With Anatomy of Habit, especially, there’s a lot of contrast between light — and lightness — and darkness. The fact that I’ve talked about love and loss … you can interpret that as a contrast, as far as the positive side of love, and the loss of that. Contrast is a huge part of it. I mean … volume, silence, versus either crushing volume or discordance, or just pure noise.

Color, certainly. I mean — you mentioned the photographs, and what I’m working on right now is a book that’s really going to be an accompaniment to Black Openings. Kind of based on what you’ve seen in those other books and those photos, but the approach that I took for the cover of Black Openings was more of like an accident between pieces of architecture as opposed to just fragments of existing — or once existing — architecture.

Variants for the Black Openings album cover, Anatomy of Habit, 2023. Image courtesy the artist.

On the last BLOODYMINDED album, I talk about things like “precise surfaces,” which is a song lyric. Since we brought up liminal spaces: Living downtown, I’m around a lot of office buildings and they provide a lot of what I think of when it comes to the liminal — transitional spaces, lobbies, staircases, pedways, tunnels. I grew up in apartment buildings, and there was one building I lived in when I was in grammar school. It was built in 1968. So it was a 30-story concrete structure, and there were two emergency stairwells. Just full-on concrete with steel railings and the like. That was our playground, in a way. We used to just run up and down those staircases and across the hallways.

ML: Oh yeah, I always thought those steel stairwells were so romantic when I was a kid!

It was amazing, the stuff we’d find! One of them had a kind of garbage area, and people would leave things in the stairwells. [muses for a moment] There were a lot of places we shouldn’t have gone in that building, but those sort of “off-limits” areas were always fascinating

to me. Subway tunnels. When you get off an airplane and head through a sterile corridor to get through Customs and Immigration, places that don’t even necessarily exist as part of the city you’re in or the country you’re in.

Yeah, spaces that are just corridors to other spaces.

On the last album, BLOODYMINDED played a lot with that theme of liminal space. Not knowing there was going to be a pandemic, a lot of the solo stuff started to really transition to that. I was already taking and collecting photos for the BLOODYMINDED album, going back to 2016. By the time it came out in 2019, all the posters for the shows for that period of time included processed architectural images. Then it transitioned into the fact that, suddenly, where I lived was vacant. I went from being on a busy street that during rush hour is choked to: empty.

It was silent around here. And I had … you know, there were days where it just felt like I had downtown to myself to wander around and find other types of liminal spaces, such as those not- quite-alley, not-quite-streets in the Loop that nobody really walks down.

I was living in Szombathely, Hungary when the pandemic first started, and I craved visuals like that, of what it was like in Chicago, back home. When people started sharing those pictures of the deserted downtown, it was particularly alienating, seeing them from that geographic distance.

And then, you know, some of these spaces still are relatively deserted, downtown. And if you go along, say, Milwaukee Avenue through Wicker Park and Bucktown, up into Logan Square, there are still tons of vacancies. And that counts as far as interesting spaces.

An empty lot on Milwaukee Ave (photo by Meghan Lamb). Image courtesy the artist.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve had a little bit of a personal project where I take pictures of empty lots to have a kind of visual, a means of tracking the evolving narrative between empty lots in this city. I find that most of my empty lots are in that Wicker Park / Bucktown area.

Yeah, and even during the pandemic, there was a pretty steady drumbeat of development and construction in the Loop in the West Loop. And just looking out the windows, it’s kind of amazing to see how much has changed … these skyscrapers going up in a place where you never saw skyscrapers before, you know, west of the expressway, looking into the West Loop. And I’m excited by that. Unless one pops up across the street, which probably wouldn’t be so exciting for me. But it also plays with your mind a little bit to see the actual view out the window. I’ve been in this apartment for nine years. To see how much it’s changed is disorienting and fascinating.

That gestures well into another question I had. You have such a long and rich history with Chicago communities and music scenes specifically, just because you’ve headed or participated in such an incredible range of projects. You’ve interacted with a lot of different groups over the years and seen a lot of change, I’d imagine. What are some of the ways the landscape has changed for artists specifically? I’m particularly curious about what’s maybe no longer there community-wise that used to be there. Stuff that I probably don’t even know about as a relative newcomer. I’m very curious about how the landscape has changed over the years.

Well, I mean, spaces to play in. You know, there are a few things that have remained the same since my very first show ever was at Metro. Metro is still there. But a lot of places I’ve played over the years no longer exist. If I think about all the places that Intrinsic Action played in the 80s and into the 90s, they’re just about all gone besides Metro. I’m trying to think … Lounge Ax, and Industry, and Shelter. Yeah, I mean, tons of clubs are gone, and even in New York, with Intrinsic Action. I don’t know if anything is left, other than, say, the Knitting Factory moving to another location. But the Knitting Factory we played at is gone. CBGB is gone. Pyramid. So a lot of clubs, a lot of venues, and then also unlicensed venues, you know, have come and gone.

Reversible Eye, another venue BLOODYMINDED performed at in 2006, here shown during a performance by mr.666. Image courtesy Michael Workman.

One that’s endured better than some was … what’s now Archer Ballroom and used to be Texas Ballroom. It seems like they’ve managed to have some continuity. BLOODYMINDED has played there. Anatomy of Habit played there last year. And it’s a beautiful space. Great. The way the rafters are, it almost looks like the skeleton of an old sailing ship. Kind of placed as … not quite an arch, but however they built the ceiling for the original ballroom. It’s a cool space. But yeah, tons of unlicensed clubs and spaces have come and gone. Scene-wise, what used to be called industrial — before, even, like, Wax Trax! industrial — what, what now people would call the noise scene. I mean, that’s really gone through major ups and downs over the years. It seems like there’s some really motivated people right now who are doing a lot and trying to keep shows going. There’s always been one or two anchor people. I guess at one point, I was very much involved in being the person booking and organizing shows and promoting shows, and then other people took it on. Maybe they had a space, maybe they just had a passion for doing it. But definitely, there’s been more ebb and flow in that world.

The metal scene seems like it’s definitely gone through some huge changes. I mean, compared to when Anatomy of Habit started, very few of the bands we were more involved with are doing anything. Some disappeared, broke up. Some kind of became national or international touring acts and just don’t play Chicago very much. But then there’s a new scene, especially for like, slower, doomier, heavier post metal doom rock, blah, blah, blah. There’s a bunch of great new bands.

So, that’s pretty typical of what I’ve seen. People come, people go. Some people are like cockroaches — me, you know. [laughs] They just always kind of have some foot in the door somewhere to do stuff. But again, it’s people and places. And then audiences, I guess, like the noise scene, the audience for that, and a lot of cities including Chicago really started to grow beyond what I ever thought it would. And that’s because, you know, certain artists or bands really kind of started to transcend, whether it was Wolf Eyes or Prurient or Pharmakon. Certainly Lingua Ignota started branching out into different audiences. And so, suddenly we were playing in front of much bigger crowds than maybe we had at other points, just because of changes in the scene.

With BLOODYMINDED, it’s weird, because for a long time we avoided playing “noise shows.” We played metal shows, we played with just punk bands, we played with improv bands, whatever. So, I’ve never really been a fan of limiting myself to just being attached to one scene, but certainly BLOODYMINDED has seen those ebbs and flows and types of people, numbers of people, the types of venues that welcome us. Right before the pandemic we played at the International Museum of Surgical Science. I would have never thought we’d be invited to play a show like that. It’s weird, some of the opportunities that come along.

ML: What was that like, as a venue?

MS: Well, it was a little nerve racking because we didn’t want to damage anything. [laughs] We were careful. And the crowd was very reserved. It was a little weird to work my way into the crowd. And I was being a little more delicate than usual. But it was great, in its own way. It was a fun night. I think we were just holding back a little bit. But, you know, really, we were so happy to have the opportunity to do that. And that was through the Empty Bottle. All those people have just taken such good care of me and all my bands for so many years. That’s an important space.

The Empty Bottle (drawing by Maura Walsh). Image courtesy the artist.

Yeah, they are so singular among venues in the city.

Their endurance and the growth of their entire organization … Anatomy of Habit has only played Thalia Hall once, but that was because of the relationship with everybody at the Empty Bottle. And certainly, things like that period of time where I played with Wrekmeister Harmonies, the shows we did at Bohemian National Cemetery. That’s just because of J.R. from Wrekmeister’s relationship with the Empty Bottle people and just brainstorming something interesting to do so. That’s an important group of people and important in my life. As you know, since you just spent the weekend there [for two-nights of FACS performances].

What a great weekend!

Most of these other questions are really just things I’m curious about. I’m curious about your relationship to Owen Land. You mentioned that he’s a relative of some kind. How are you connected? How did you make the discovery of your relation?

“Remedial Reading Comprehension" (1970), a short film by Owen Land (ne George Landow). Click to play.

I knew him when I was a kid. I didn’t see him very often. He was my dad’s cousin. Owen’s mom was one of my grandfather’s sisters. So, I remember him being around a little bit when I was a kid. And then, I started going to the Young Artists Studios — I don’t even know what they’re called now — but it was like a youth program at the Art Institute. When I was in elementary school, I would take weekend classes there. And he had a bit of a presence … that would have been in the 70s. My dad taught there for a while. So, I went to school there later. But my dad also taught Graphic Design there, and I think he and Owen overlapped a little bit when they were teaching there. And then, I became aware of his…I don’t know how you say … his health, his emotional well-being or whatever. Because he clearly was not a part of the family, and like […] you just hear family things. So he wasn’t well, I guess you could say. And I just started becoming really interested as I started learning more about film and I started wondering, “Why is Stan Brakhage so huge and Owen isn’t?” Actually, George Landow is his name: his last name was converted into his public name (as a kind of portmanteau).

As I started looking into other experimental filmmakers, and yeah, when I wrote about Owen Land [in the description of the short film “Return to Pleasure (Body into Voice)”], we (The Fortieth Day) were playing a show that was very film based with Bruce McClure, and Lisa, who does the video/film with us. It goes through a lot of processing. But that’s what she does with Isidro and me when we perform as The Fortieth Day. Lisa Slodki goes under the name Noise Crush, and her background encompasses film as well. She’s also done stuff with Haptic; she did some work with them for an installation they had at the Museum of Contemporary Art several years ago.

I was just thinking of her lineage, like, how she ended up where she is, the way she manipulates the moving image. And it kind of got me thinking of Owen Land again, and this lineage of Chicago people working on film. And as I was learning more … I knew a little bit about Bruce McClure, and I tried to understand his place in film and sound. It was also at the time when that Velvet Underground documentary came out, and I was thinking about that entire early pre Velvet Underground period, Tony Conrad … There were a lot of people involved then with film, pre Andy Warhol even.

So, that’s my little connection with Owen Land. Just sort of a mysterious figure. I can remember him being at a party at my house when I was a kid. And he was a character, you know, there’s little glimpses of him.

That’s so interesting. I love how your work is not exactly an homage to that, but more of an homage to his mystery.

Yeah, I don’t remember what year it was, but I recall that The Fortieth Day performed a set at the “Pictures and Sounds” series for the University of Chicago, and then I did one solo … You’d have to pick from the library of films that the department had at the University of Chicago. One of the solo pieces I did accompanied a Stan Brakhage film. Ambient film — non-narrative film, which is what Lisa does — is definitely very interesting to me, and how sound relates to it. I tried dabbling in it a little bit with my last solo album just because my publicist was like, “You know, it’d be great if you had some videos,” and I was like, “Agggghhh, this is probably” … but you know, it was pandemic. I had a little time. I feel like one of them was successful enough and one of them was not, but I’d like to play around a little bit more with that because the first one definitely tied into some of the visuals that I do anyway.

Are you open to telling which one you feel was more successful than the other?

The black and white one, “Charged Matter (The Problem from the Inside)” — I felt that one was a little more effective than “Return to Pleasure (Body into Voice).” There’s a reason behind that subject matter, but it could have been executed a little bit better. But I liked how the black and white one came out because I processed it kind of how I process still images. I tried to think how I process a lot of images that I use, like in the books. I tried to think of it from the standpoint of how I process sound when I’m doing more electronics and synth, because I use a lot of analog processing and four track cassette and do things like reversing direction and changing speed. And I’ve taken that approach to how I process images if I’m using Photoshop.

Mark Solotroff, “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside),” The first track from the 2021 album "Not Everybody Makes It" by Mark Solotroff. Click to play.

So, I have a photo, which goes to my computer — quite frankly, computers aren’t that interesting to me — so I’m like, “How can I do to this photo what I do to sound?”. So, I run it through some rudimentary changes: the resolution, the dirt, the direction, or the orientation, and play with stretching things, or just changing things in a way that reminds me of how I process sound. And so, I’ve tried to do that with those videos as well, but I just don’t have as much of a vocabulary, or the tools. I think it would be nice to try to do some more of that down the road.

ML: Yeah, that film especially was very exciting to me! There’s such an uncanniness to seeing a landscape that’s familiar to you slowed down and abstracted in that way. I guess I’ll ask one last question. You mentioned the research that you go through when you’re working on things, the books that you’re reading. What books are you reading right now? I just started reading this book that I think you would really appreciate [holds up a copy of An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky].

MS: What’s on the top of the stack is The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis … just because I enjoy his writing. It’s like … he’s my favorite bad writer. He makes me laugh. This book’s not making me laugh, actually, but I’m enjoying this book a lot. I wanted to read the four main novels by W.G. Sebald, because there’s a lot there about loss, memory, spaces, landscapes.

So, I’m traveling the boundaries between things. I’m just finishing his last book. And I’ve enjoyed those a lot. I saw an exhibition in London a little over five years ago that was called Melancholia, Sebald ... I can’t think of the exact title right now (Melancholia: A Sebald Variation – held at Somerset House). There were reflections on W.G. Sebald, and it was a very moving exhibition, and it took me a while to get to him. I committed to reading the four novels, and they’ve been really rewarding, but unusual in a way I didn’t expect, because they’re sort of at the pace of his travels and walking.

I read a lot of dumb like … music bios. I’m trying to think of what I just read … Oh, there was the oral history of Some Bizzare (sic) records, Conform to Deform: The Weird & Wonderful World Of Some Bizzare. Some Bizzare (sic) was a label that had a huge impact on me when I was really starting to delve into more underground music, even though they’re a gateway, and the gateway drug to their entry is Soft Cell. But that opened me up to like so much because of all the people that collaborated on that label. So that was really enjoyable.

I also love Francis Bacon — the painter. There are endless amounts of books, so I just kind of, like, tackle one of those in between. There’s a series that his estate has been publishing by a combination of academics and art historians, but also psychologists and psychiatrists trying to understand some of his motivation, so I’ve got the fourth one of those on deck to go.

The conversation continued for several minutes after our recording ended. Solotroff described various bookshelves filled with thematically linked texts — on plague, illness, and self harm — that informed BLOODYMINDED and The Fortieth Day albums. He’s a voracious reader (particularly enamored with the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore) and a great deal of invisible research informs his albums.

To engage with Solotroff’s work is a process of discovery akin to his own process: equal parts gathering and losing, foggy wandering pierced by violent epiphanies. Moments of recognition rise up (sometimes long-anticipated, sometimes surprisingly) from an uncanny architecture of language and shadows.

BIO
Mark Solotroff’s artwork and music focuses on several related key themes, including how cities develop, both organically and through organized planning, how the human body navigates urban environments, and how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation.

In the music world, Solotroff is best known as the vocalist of both the doom band Anatomy of Habit and the heavy electronic band BLOODYMINDED, and as the founder of the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action. He also has a long history playing analog synthesizer. As a solo artist, Solotroff focuses on recording and performing tenebrous analog synth music. His bass-heavy soundscapes have been said to unsettle some listeners and calm others. He views these recordings and performances as possible soundtracks for movement through metropolitan terrains, whether by foot, car, or public transportation. His synth work has been at the core of Intrinsic Action and BLOODYMINDED, and he recorded and released 100 hours of lo-fi analog synth music under the name Super Eight Loop. He remains an active member of the dark-synth trio Nightmares and the Milan-based post-industrial band, Ensemble Sacrés Garçons.

Solotroff has also collaborated with and contributed synth, remixes, and/or vocals to numerous bands, ranging from a four year role in Wrekmeister Harmonies, to live appearances and/or studio work with diverse electronic, experimental, and metal bands, including The Atlas Moth, Azar Swan, The Body, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, Snow Burial, The Sodality, and Statiqbloom.

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