"That DJ: Maxwell Maxwell." Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 25 July 2017.
"I should probably start with the DJing and the music production, but right now I'm all about escapism. I feel like it's fairly likely the world as we know it is going to end soon — maybe Trump, maybe some kind of massive social upheaval caused by decades of unchecked neoliberal capitalism — so I'm trying to just enjoy stuff like food, my partner, my friends, and my consumer electronics."
UBC's campus radio station CiTR hosts Victoria Cruz, Saina Chiba, and Max Kuhn.
It All Started When...
I first met Maxwell Maxwell when he was running as a candidate in the UBC student society elections. He was swinging for the fences in the race for president and had all kinds of flare.
Seriously. I'm not quite sure how to describe, so I'll try my best: imagine if a futuristic lovechild of Andy Warhol and Oliver Wilde somehow existed and was then mysteriously transported to Vancouver, where this majestic creature sprouted as a character in campus radio by day and flourished as a club DJ by night. With the help of his alter ego Maxwell Maxwell, the artist, Max the person, struck me as a subtle provocateur (others might call him a "shit disturber"), with a biting sense of humour.
If you're in Vancouver, you can catch Max spinning gay anthems on August 5th at the Biltmore.
A pre-smartphone camera snap of Max at UBC's annual AMS Club Days, taken on a shitty mid-2000s era digital camera. What a fresh-faced 'lil angel!
What's your passion/hustle/profession?
I should probably start with the DJing and the music production, but right now I'm all about escapism. I feel like it's fairly likely the world as we know it is going to end soon — maybe Trump, maybe some kind of massive social upheaval caused by decades of unchecked neoliberal capitalism — so I'm trying to just enjoy stuff like food, my partner, my friends, and my consumer electronics. I used to be a full-time nightclub DJ, and now I'm lucky enough to have a cushy office job with nice people that gives me enough money and free time to do art stuff. I still love DJing, but it's nice to not have to rely on your art to make rent in Vancouver. Along with playing music for people, I'm making a virtual reality game where an enormous baby leads you through squats. It's still buggy, so right now all the baby does is vibrate horrifically and emit a buzzing noise.
What kind of music helps you focus at work?
It's not so much about genre or mood as it is medium. I just need a steady supply of something to listen to which is more or less indistinguishable from one song to the next. It's kind of an obscene way to treat other people's art, but it's the future: #content is interchangeable. Mostly I listen to minimal techno, ambient stuff, video game soundtracks: anything repetitive, without lyrics. I'm fully aware it's the middle-class version of putting a painting in your living room because it matches your sofa. It goes in one ear and out the other. Spotify has allegedly been creating fake artists to make more of the kind of thing I want to hear: noodling piano that sounds a bit like the Minecraft soundtrack. It's terrific!
When you’re winding down?
I love torch songs. Before bed, I want to feel a little sentimental, so I listen to torch songs, and I want to be nice and cold, so I have my air conditioning on from about April through October. Going from something like Freda Payne's "Band of Gold" to Aretha's version of "I Say a Little Prayer" to some early Anohni when she was recording as Antony & the Johnsons. I love Anohni's voice, but sometimes the songwriting is a little too precious for my taste. Anohni singing other people's music is unbearably beautiful — her version of "If It Be Your Will" is amazing. I wish it had been on the Shrek soundtrack. Eventually I transition to rain noises, or just listen to my AC unit or the thrum of the dishwasher.
Working out?
Everyone works out in Vancouver. I don't get it. I'm convinced there's a conspiracy where everyone tells each other how good working out makes them feel and they're all lying. I feel like garbage when I work out. Ten minutes on the elliptical and I get nauseous and start having a panic attack. The Daft Punk live album (Alive 2007) helps, a little.
Cooking?
Activities like cooking are a good time to catch up on Important New Music. I don't really enjoy music until I've listened to it a lot. Sometimes new music feels like eating vegetables. The songs that are already etched in your brain are like carbs loaded up with grease and salt: instantly, easily digestible. Music lately is particularly difficult to get your head around. I think this probably has something to do with politics. Artists react strongly to a Republican in the White House. Democrats are also pretty good at perpetuating inequality, structural racism, and that kind of thing, but it's hard to have a straightforwardly antagonistic relationship with an authority figure who invites Kendrick Lamar to the White House. Anohni had "Drone Bomb Me," but that was about it. Right now I'm trying to get my head around Tyler the Creator's new album to figure out if he's a gay icon or not in time for Pride. Relevant Music right now is not really about immediately accessible bangers, so I don't really know what I'd play from Scum Fuck Flower Boy at the club. Probably "I Ain't Got Time."
Kickin’ it with friends?
This summer is all about traditional summer activities. I've made a lot of mayonnaise-based cold salads, and I bought a folding chair for camping and the beach. I've tried to quash anxieties about politics and money with a lot of energetic, hyper-compressed 1980s yacht rock. Eddie Money, Pat Benatar, Stevie Nicks, Heart, Don Johnson. I'm also revisiting a lot of late-00s and early-10s indie pop with jangly guitars: "Archie, Marry Me" by Alvvays, "Lust for Life" by Girls, "The Heart of Juliet Jones" by Tough Age (who are really terrific people and absolutely deserve all the success they've enjoyed since leaving Vancouver). I'm kind of over the period in my life where I want to impress people with my taste in music, and I've found a lot of joy in the lowest common denominator.
What’s your most memorable musical moment? This could be a live show or festival that really stuck with you, meeting a music icon, etc.
My first concert was James Brown with Tower of Power at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. My bass teacher managed to get some tickets and I got to go to soundcheck and meet people backstage. I shook hands with a succession of ancient black men in a dark backstage corridor, one of whom was James Brown —I was too overwhelmed by the experience to process much. I stood there mute and staring while famous strangers were kind to me, and then I waited around for the show to start, and then I was absolutely transformed by the music in the kind of way you can't really describe without falling into cliches.
Favourite love song? Slow jam? Between the sheets track?
Fuck tracks have never really appealed to me as much as the songs you play when you're pining over somebody. Tolstoy has a good line about happy families being boring. I've been in a really happy stable relationship for a long time, but I remember loving the multi-part 69 Love Songs album by the Magnetic Fields as something wonderful to mope to. The Velvet Teen does a really good cover of "No One Will Ever Love You." I have a great story about this friend who I had a crush on, and we hooked up the day before Valentine's Day, and we listened to the whole record, and then we went out for food and he started going off about how he didn't believe in romance and all the people with flowers and stuff were deluded, and right after thinking "I actually would have liked some flowers," I started getting excited about what interesting emotional baggage the album had suddenly acquired.
You need to hype up the crowd at a house party real quick. What do you put on next?
Mariah Carey ft ODB, "Fantasy (Bad Boy Mix)." It's the best parts of two really fucking good songs, with Tina Weymouth's bassline given centre stage. ODB acting as hypeman is the cherry on top. I have a lot of respect for Mariah Carey as an entertainer and a businesswoman. Every time Christmas comes around, she's laughing all the way to the bank.
If you were stranded on a desert island with only one album, which would it be?
Any bit of music, however good, gets annoying if you hear it too many times. I'd have to listen to it once a month, maybe once a year even. I think probably Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster EP because it provides the best connection to civilization. There are six nearly perfect pop songs on the album ("Speechless" is a mawkish preview of late-period Gaga at her dreariest and "So Happy I Could Die" combines shitty lyrics with the production fuckup of using Autotune on someone who can already sing well). Pop music is conformist, sure, but it's conformist in the service of reaching everyone at once. Good pop music connects you with society on a gut level. If I were stuck on a desert island, I could listen to this record and pretend I was in a shopping mall.
Best format? Cassette tape, CD, iPod, Vinyl, etc.
The best format is 320k mp3. Lossless formats create files that are too big. Cassettes and vinyl aren't really about music, they're about tactility. It's fun, but it's just more merch: there's really not a difference between my Hidden Cameras vinyl records and my Daft Punk Christmas ornaments.
You thought for a minute, maybe these didn't actually exist. But they do.
What’s the most prized album/mixtape/musical memento you own? Your home is on fire and this is the only thing you can grab before it all burns down. (Sorry, that one’s grim.)
All the music that's important to me is digital and backed up across multiple cloud services. I have some vinyl records I like, but I can get a new copy of any of them for under $40. I'd probably grab my favourite guitar, which is a 1977 Gibson SG. The person who owned it before me did a really bad job of refinishing it from when the person before him, who was in some kind of death metal band, painted it black with the kind of paint you use on the side of your house. I was in a series of punk bands in high school and liked to wear spiky belts, so it's absolutely beat to shit.
Dinner with any artist, dead or alive. They're paying. Whom do you choose?
Meeting artists that are important to you is almost always disappointing. It's like finding out how the sausage is made, or looking into how Amazon treats the people who work in its warehouses. Better to pick somebody purely for the food. How about Elvis? He was pretty famous for flying people around the United States to eat huge sandwiches at weird hours of the night. That seems like fun.
A still-trim Elvis Presley enjoys a sandwich in 1958. His love of fatty foods hadn't caught up to him yet. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Bonus question: What's your go-to karaoke jam?
Dolly Parton, "Jolene."
Merçi, Max!
*mobile-only.
"That DJ" Track Listing
Antony. "If It Be Your Will." Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (Motion Picture Soundtrack), The Verve Music Group, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc., 2006.
Pat Benatar. "We Belong." Tropico, Chrysalis, 1984.
Aretha Franklin. "I Say A Little Prayer." Aretha Now, Atlantic Recording Corp., manufactured and marketed by Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group company, 1968.
Freda Payne. "Band Of Gold." Band of Gold, Invictus, 1970.
Kelis, Too $hort. "Bossy (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke Remix)." Bossy Remix EP, Zomba Recording LLC, 2007.
Mariah Carey, O.D.B. "Fantasy (Bad Boy Mix)." Fantasy, Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, 1995.
Alex Newell. "Nobody To Love." POWER, Atlantic Recording Corporation for the United States and WEA International Inc. for the world outside of the United States. A Warner Music Group Company, 2016.
Adam Joseph, Aja. "Linda Evangelista (feat. Aja)." Linda Evangelista, JAH Records, 2017.
Kylie Minogue. "Love At First Sight." Fever, Parlophone Records Ltd, a Warner Music Group Company, 2002.
Hercules And Love Affair. "Blind (Frankie Knuckles Remix)." Blind (Radio Edit), DFA LLC This label copy information is the subject of copyright protection. All rights reserved. Parlophone Records Ltd, 2008.
The Knife. "Heartbeats (Rex The Dog Remix)." Deep Cuts, Rabid Records Under Exclusive License to Brille Records Ltd, 2006.
Dolly Parton. "Jolene." Jolene, Sony Music Entertainment, 1974.
Breakbot. "Baby I'm Yours (feat Irfane)." By Your Side, Ed Banger Records Under Exclusive License To Because Music, 2012.
For more Max, check out his Soundcloud and catch him spinning gay anthems on August 5th at Vancouver's Biltmore Cabaret.