‘It Does For Me What I Assume Meditation and Prayer Does For Other People’
A Mask and a Coffin of Bronze
Bronze Coffin. A vault, a convoy of extremely precious and passing cargo. The burial of fleeting moments. ‘Bronze’ was a word that spoke loudly: if one’s aura is coloured bronze they possess wisdom beyond their time. An Instagram account, if you’d believe it. A logbook of faces, ageless and whirling, collected in their discomposure. It was tantalising to imagine where all these beauties had come from so I’d marvel, daily, at each beautiful eruption, wondering about its constant flow. Looking at the grid began to feel familiar, they existed as their own thing without the orchestration of the person behind them. No face animating the creator but many singular features as guardians of moments experienced. It was the honesty of the pencil I couldn’t get enough of. I’d scroll continuously, up and down, going cross-eyed and confusing one face and limb with the next. I didn’t know who they were and where they came from. Somewhere familiar? I’d return often looking at the myriad faces, tentacled hair and limbs outreached. The blocks from their bodies collecting together, mismatched and in unison. Just when I figured I had familiarised myself enough I’d lose track of them again. Photographs of daily life would emerge as proof of the hand’s existence. They would bring me back to the present, only to disappear again, engulfed by drawings in pencil and imprecision. The other people who look at this account, do they also wonder? Do they also get lost? Do they know who’s pencil?
The unfamiliar always strikes a comfortable chord so imagine my relief when I noticed the addition of a link to Bandcamp. Bronze again, this time a Mask. Coffin and Mask, burying and hiding. I revelled in the secrecy and beauty of this concealed entity, sharing the possible voices and sounds behind the beings on the paper. Emerging, pieced together, were unnoticed memories and moments collated by the face and held by the sarcophagus.
I don’t know if I ‘unquietened’ this for myself or for the drawings or the music or for the others who also know of this masked coffin of bronze. What I found behind was an unpresuming testament of what it means to exist and memorialise the daily, exactly as the lingo, sounds, faces and shapes in your head want you to.
‘I love including things outside of my control. When the process involves things out of my control, there’s less of a sense of me staring at myself. It’s like I’m interacting with unseen forces. (That’s also what’s liberating about drawing! I don’t know how to draw, so I’m not in control.)’
I’m a library worker in the Midwestern US. I worked for many years as a direct support staff for adults with developmental disabilities and as a record store clerk. 41 years old. Any pronouns work; most people go with he/him, and that’s fine with me.
Is there a particular process that you follow for your drawings? They seem like they spill out of you spontaneously?
It’s something I do every morning. I wake up early, journal, write a brief 3-5 line nonsense poem, then draw. Each drawing takes between 10 and 40 minutes. It’s all spontaneous and improvised. Drawing focuses me and frees my brain from language. Normally, my mind is a frenzy of rants and counter-rants, so I love to just put a line on a page and see what happens. And because I don’t really know how to draw, something as basic as making a straight line takes a lot of concentration. It does for me what I assume meditation and prayer do for some people.
Do your drawings tie in with your day to day at all? And your music?
They’re an important part of my morning routine, but I don’t really think about them once they’re done. Drawing and making music is a way to add weirdness and a kind of half-formed spirituality to my life. At work, I spend most of my day unpacking boxes of books for a large library. There’s no possible way to read them all. I love that fleeting contact with worlds I’ll never reach. That sort of unresolved yearning is all mixed in with the spontaneity; you sort of encounter something, then it’s gone.
But basically, I enjoy drawing and making music more than I enjoy watching TV or messing around online, so that’s what I spend my time doing.
When did you start drawing? Did that time have a particular significance to you?
I started drawing in July of 2022, and I’m 41 now. I’d just started a new position at work, a lateral move, after doing direct customer service for the library through the worst of covid. That had been awful. My brain was teeming with nervous, ugly energy, and I wanted to do something creative that didn’t involve fiddling with gear and gadgets, which is an unfortunate aspect of making music. And then I just kinda started doing it every day.
I’d dabbled a handful of times in my twenties and thirties but had never been able to keep it up for more than a few days at a time until then.
Do any of your drawings have titles or do they just exist as they are?
I’ve never thought to title them! Drawing was supposed to be a quick little side thing when I started. Titles would have felt like an extravagance! So I never got into the habit of naming them.
I did title one a few weeks ago! It was called For Doris Piserchia or something. I’d just stumbled across her bizarre 1981 novel Doomtime and needed to shout her name somewhere!
Have they ever been exhibited or shown anywhere? Or played?
No. I don’t know much about the art world and wouldn’t even know how to begin doing something like that. My spouse and a few of my friends are the only people in my real life who even know I do any of this stuff.
I spent most of the 2000s playing in punk rock, noise rock, and experimental bands. Those performed a lot. I loved rehearsing, writing, and recording, but I hated playing live. Even when a show went well, there was something humiliating and exhausting about it.
Is there a reason behind the use of ‘Bronze’ as titles for your projects?
Nope. I was posting some music to bandcamp and needed a name, so I typed in some random words. And when I started posting drawings online, I thought I’d connect the two projects somehow. I was probably thinking of Nick Blinko when I used “coffin.” I do like the image of something ancient, obscure, and inscrutable, though. And “bronze” feels like that.
Can the drawings exist without the music and vice versa?
For sure! I don’t like to think too much about anything I do (these questions have been very useful for articulating all this to myself, thank you!), and there’s no big conceptual point to any of it.
Weird visual art is more accessible to people than weird music. The drawings get a little more attention than the music. There are 10 to 20 people who give the drawings likes. NO ONE listens to Bronze Mask; I think I’ve made about ten dollars since 2017 on that stuff, and when I put something up, the app usually tells me that a handful of people listen for less than 30 seconds before moving on. It would be brutal if I were more invested in attention!
I noticed some field records in your songs, how do you collect these? Do you follow a certain process with your music?
I love taking walks, and I hear interesting sounds all the time. I like field recordings because I love including things outside of my control. When the process involves things out of my control, there’s less of a sense of me staring at myself. It’s like I’m interacting with unseen forces. (That’s also what’s liberating about drawing! I don’t know how to draw, so I’m not in control. I just use my phone for the field recordings. I used to have a little tape recorder thing, and I Ioved that, but it broke. Most of the “album covers” on my Bandcamp pages are also just phone pictures I take while out walking.
I like listening to field recordings sometimes. Kate Carr, framework radio, stuff like that. I don’t know a ton about that world, though.
Is that your voice speaking in some of your recordings? do you follow a similar process with writing and titles?
Yeah, that’s me. Like I mentioned, I write a weird little poem every morning after I wake up, so I have a ton of words lying around. They’re more or less improvised. Many of the titles I don’t come up with until I hit “save” and the computer forces me to name the files.
Do any of your creations come as a direct response to your own experiences?
Not directly and not consciously. I have a strong sense of unreality and dreaminess that follows me around all day. And as I mentioned before, I have intense internal monologues that never stop. I’m lucky to have vivid dreams, and I’m decent at remembering them. Life is mysterious to me and also terrifying. I pay attention to the world, and it’s of course very upsetting. I also read a ton of horror fiction, so my head is stuffed with bizarre, bad imagery!
Are there any artists and musicians that have particularly inspired you?
More writers and musicians than visual artists. I love writers like Joel Lane, Fleur Jaeggy, Tanith Lee, Cassandra Khaw, Emily Brontë, and Ramsey Campbell. People who are simultaneously intense and obscure. Last week I was shaken by AC Wise’s novella Out of the Drowning Deep.
Musically, I like frantic, stubborn creators with a ton of stuff. Dead Moon, Sophie Cooper, David Tibet, Billy Childish, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Jandek, the Legendary Pink Dots. I’ve recently been listening to a lot of Cosey Mueller and Yara Asmar.
I’m unfortunately not very knowledgeable about visual art, but I’ve been learning over the last few years. I love Remedios Varo, Aleksandra Ionowa, Ithel Colquhoun, Madge Gill, Alma Realm, and Mehrdad Rashidi. Also comics artists like CLAMP, Shuzo Oshimi, Richard Sala, Tove Jannson, Julia Gefrörer, and Katie Skelly.
Is anonymity important to your creativity?
Kind of! I like privacy. Frankly, you’re the first person to reach out to me, so I haven’t had to think about it a lot. I guess it could make me feel uneasy if there were lots of people paying attention. But the sort of person who likes this sort of art tends to be forgiving of messiness and eccentricity, so maybe not. Mostly, I don’t like the idea of an employer or someone like that looking me up and finding my private stuff.
Is there a reason you decided to start sharing your drawings?
Honestly, the reason I started posting them was that it was the easiest way to preserve them. Even though I think of them as ephemeral and don't return to them often, I do like knowing they exist somewhere. I'd be upset if I lost them to water or fire or something. I have two cats who love to cause general chaos, and that puts them at risk as well. Once my phone ran out of memory, I thought I'd just let the internet preserve the backup copies. I really wish I didn't have to use social media for this but social media has been surprisingly effective at getting them a small amount of attention, even though I've never promoted them.