Recently Ian Svenonius, front man for the Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, and Weird War, among other legendary D.C. bands, and author of the essay collection The Psychic Soviet (Drag City Press), added “talk show host” to his resumé. His show, called Soft Focus, is a project of Vice magazine’s online TV network, VBS, and it has a simple formula: Svenonius, another musician, a couple of chairs, and conversation that gives the usual cookie-cutter promotional-tour chitchat a wide berth, sounding instead like something you’d read in a slightly cosmic version of Maximum Rock‘n’ Roll. Last Tuesday he brought the show to Chicago to film an episode with Steve Albini and Dirtbombs mastermind Mick Collins at the Logan Square Auditorium. Afterward I had the opportunity to ask the asker a few questions.
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Do you get the same sort of feeling being onstage in this respect? How is it similar and how is it different from performing music?
I like lyrics to be very simple and to have a lot of reiteration. I’m not really into the bards of rock ‘n’ roll—Elvis Costello, more literary songwriters, they’re not really my bag. The thing about being a group is, the group phenomenon has subsumed all of the other artistic endeavors that used to exist simultaneously, like theater, poetry, mime—all the different things people used to do. So a conversation, it’s just another aspect of performance, and it has been ever since Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
Yeah, y’know, I didn’t really mean to talk about that stuff, because it’s something that people are talking about so much, but it’s kind of inevitable. Albini’s a real champion of analog and everything about that’s being challenged by economic factors. Paradigm shifts are usually financially motivated or economically motivated. The industry invents a gizmo and they enforce its proliferation through making it cheap and accessible. A reel of tape is $400 and a gigabyte in a computer, whatever. When I was a kid a contact lens was $100 and now they’re 100 for $100. These prices are pretty much arbitrary, so when suddenly audio tape is $400 a reel you can’t help but think these things are related.
It’s not just a promo stop.
