Start Listening To: Josh Augustin

The Vansire co-creator gets personal, talking Oberlin, old-timey Russian cinema, and collaborating with Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from, and a little bit about the music that you make?   

For sure — my name is Josh Augustin. I’m originally from Rochester, Minnesota but I’m currently in Minneapolis. I live with my friend Sam, the other half of our project which we called Vansire (a hypnagogic/dream pop band we started in high school). We play all the instruments and do all the recording and releasing. I also do vocals for that project, but under my own name, I release music that skews in a more experimental and instrumental direction. My new album, a score for the Russian silent film Man with a Movie Camera, is the LP-formatted version of a recital I did for my degree in Technology in Music and Related Arts at the Oberlin Conservatory. It draws from late Russian Romantic and Modern composers, minimalism, and experimental ambient composers but there’s also a good dash of tape-warbled hip-hop inspiration and other reverb-laden cues that might feel at home on a chamber pop record.

What is your songwriting process like?   

With Vansire it’s a very riff-oriented project; we spend a lot of time building up different progressions and licks to create the tightest and most appealing song, fleshing things out as it goes along. With a couple of exceptions in our back catalogue, I generally add vocals at the final stage and then we mix and master until it’s ready for release. Man with a Movie Camera was entirely different. I fell into a haphazard workflow based entirely around the film’s structure and started bridging the gaps musically as I got closer to covering the full run time. In that sense, it’s sort of like working on an album. The early stages are incredibly nebulous but the pieces gradually grow into something more cohesive.  

Can you tell us about what went into your most recent album, Man with a Movie Camera?  

The entire album was recorded in my apartment in Oberlin, Ohio during my senior year. I  think just about every sound came from a Nord Keyboard, a Fender Jaguar, and a Juno-106, all being run through tape pedals or an actual reel-to-reel. It took about five months and probably a hundred cumulative viewings of the film.  

The first step was developing interesting leitmotifs. There’s probably 25 to 30 minutes of original harmonic material out of the roughly hour-long run time, and the rest of it is re-pitched,  harmonically or metrically modulated, reinterpreted, played with different instruments, reversed, etc. Working on a regular album, it’s also important to have those leitmotifs in one form or another, but there isn’t really source material per se. I guess the source material is just your life or whatever you find intersecting at the moment. In film, audiences already expect a degree of self-referentiality, which is an advantage for the composer. It’s an especially intriguing task working in the early Soviet paradigm of montage theory which eschews traditional western narrative structures.   

How’s the Oberlin life?  

I actually graduated in January! I loved going to Oberlin, but I was ready to leave by the time I finished there. This double-degree program where I was attending both the liberal arts college and the conservatory as separate institutions was a five-year program that I managed to shave a semester off, hence the halfway-through-the-year graduation. It happened in the depths of the pandemic. Friends from my grade had already graduated and things were very locked down, so it kind of felt like the most significant portion of my college years had already gone by. I hope the college and school experience for everyone, in general, can safely move back to something more normal and social in the coming year or two.   

When did you know that you wanted to create music? 

I started playing piano in 1st or 2nd grade and picked up the drums somewhere around 6th,  but it was probably the Bandcamp scene of the early/mid-2010s that really got me stoked about making music. I saw people selling tapes of their lo-fi pop projects and thought that was the coolest shit ever, so I started singing into my parents’ old laptop’s webcam mic, and with a very rudimentary synthesiser recording tunes. Then I’d print j-cards, record it to cassette, and sell it on Bandcamp in limited quantities. Things didn’t really take off until a couple years after working with Sam on Vansire though.   

Who would you say are your biggest musical influences?  

Narrowing it down to three I would say Pauline Oliveros, Alice Coltrane, and J Dilla.

What do you hate most right now?  

A Canadian oil company called Enbridge is building a pipeline called Line 3 through northern Minnesota, violating a bunch of indigenous treaties with the land they’re cutting through and putting the entire Mississippi River/lots of the Minnesota fresh water supply at risk. Sam has been very active in the protest scene raising awareness. I hate Enbridge, their lobbyists and lawyers, and the politicians letting this slide the most right now.  

What do you love most right now?  

My girlfriend Kate.

In terms of themes, what are the ideas at play on your recent album? 

My working thesis was to have impressionist interpretations of diegetic moments, which means that events occurring on-screen which would directly correlate to a sound. For example, a bell ringing or a biplane passing overhead would be emulated in the score, lined up precisely, but executed as part of the score itself in a melodic manner. So the bell is sampled and turned into the primary element of the next piece, or the plane’s hum appears to be mechanical but the note is actually being plucked up out of it to set up a new tonal centre. I’ve seen other recent scores for the Milm which would stick in awkward foley with babies crying and phones ringing, which was incredibly jarring next to its weathered celluloid appearance, and it really took me out of the moment. This was my way of trying to get over the technological uncanniness of composing in a digital medium for a Milm that’s almost a hundred years old.

What was it like collaborating with Benny The Butcher and Conway the Machine on Man with a Movie Camera?  

That was amazing — there wasn’t a whole lot of communication in-between, but I think there’s still value in that kind of collaboration where you just send it off and it’s entirely up to that person’s own artistic interpretation of the material. I thought the album version of this score needed some human voices on it, and the sound world of these tape-fluttered keyboards and strings felt like it was one set of boom-bap drums away from landing in Griselda’s sample-centred lane of production. I’ve seen a couple hip-hop Youtube channels post it just credited as a Benny and Conway track, and in the comments, people are saying really nice stuff but they’re confused about where it came from. Which is fair because it’s a really weird project to explain (people rapping on an album-only version of a score for a 1920s Russian silent film!). 

Now that things are easing up around the world, do you have any particular plans for live shows?  

We hope to tour again in 2022! Feels like it’s been forever since our last string of shows in 2019.   

Do you have anything else in the works for this year, either from your more personal moniker or with Vansire?   

We are working on a new album at this very moment!   

What would you consider your albums of 2021 so far?  

Probably the Pharaoh Sanders / Floating Points / London Symphony Orchestra LP, that new Madlib album, Mach-Hommy’s Pray for Haiti, and L’Rain’s Fatigue.  

Is there anything else you would like to add?   

Thanks for talking with me!