M: Umbrella. It informs all of the weird decisions. You can plug it all in.

K: Maybe it doesn’t inform them. It allows the weird decisions.

M: It facilitates all your decision making. Because it’s time-based, and visual, and audio, you could make an object, put it in your movie, make a track put it on your movie...

K: Yes, but the whole thing with the media aspect of this stuff, the video and audio, has been challenging because there is a learning curve – and especially so with audio because I am so unfamiliar with making music even fundamentally – I’ve had to fake my way through playing and singing – using technology to help me do those things.

M: But you kind of get off on that, the technology.

K. I do.

M: I only have a couple more questions. One maybe totally irrelevant. But most people don’t know about your experience with rave culture. I don’t know. I think it’s, like, when I think rave culture I think Terrence McKenna. Maybe not that many people know that about you, but your were not that far from Chicago, I wasn’t in Milwaukee, and I have no idea, but I’m sure it had a big rave scene and you were a part of that, and do you think that had any influence on your growth? I know it’s like 15 years ago…

K: It’s a somewhat embarrassing subject but I’m happy to talk about it…

M: Only because you’ve had a couple drinks?

K: I think you’re right. When I was in high school, I had spent a little time in London, where the rave culture was in full blossom, and shortly after returning to the Midwest, the scene was just budding in Chicago and the coasts of course. And Milwaukee had it’s own thing starting as well. My involvement with rave culture, led me to people like Terrence McKenna and thinkers who came out of the Timothy Leary tradition of promoting psychedelic mindsets, but who carried those ideas into all the things that were exciting at that time – cyber culture, the New Age, etc. So not only was I reading these people, but I was participating in this counter culture that promoted it and I thought a lot about the potential of these ideas. I mean, the first time I heard of ayahuasca was reading McKenna’s Amazonian adventures as a sixteen-year-old on my mothers couch. Then going off to art school, I for some reason let all that go as important part of my life. And it just got shelved at that point.

M: There were different interests. There was identity politics… Not that we did that, but I mean…

K: Sure.  And, for whatever reason, in the last years, these subjects, that I was introduced to then, resurfaced, and became something that I missed as part of my experience.

M: Like a comfort food. Like the Beastie Boys, the same way when they made Paul’s Boutique, they went back to their funky roots, all the shit they listened to growing up. I think about it for us that way. I mean I wasn’t a rave culture dude… but…

K: Well, what I’ve discovered now, in reconnecting with these subjects, is that, while all the same problems exist with them today, I’m convinced that there is a plethora of untapped knowledge and uncharted territory to discover in this field. And this domain is the closest one aligned with what I am concerned with as person and artist.

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Links to Karsten Krejcarek and Matthew Ronay