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The Qualia

How did you first get into music? Were you involved in any other projects before forming The Qualia?

Casteen: Music's been a big part of my life since I was a kid. My brother played guitar a lot around the house, generally acoustic bluegrass stuff, and I think to rebel I picked up a guitar and started trying to figure out how to make weird electronic music with it. I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, which, despite its mainstream reputation as the home of the Dave Matthews Band and scores of copycats, is also really supportive in terms of gothic and industrial music. I was never really a fully-fledged part of that community, but having it around really exposed me to a lot of great music and helped me figure out an alternative to the jam bands that always got coverage in the local alt-weekly newspapers. I played in a bunch of bands growing up, including one or two with JDavyd Williams of the recently disbanded In Tenebris, and then started focusing on figuring out how to pull together a one-man thing that made music I was happy with. Something like eight years later, I had a record completed.

'Qualia' is a term from philosophy. For people unfamiliar with the term, can you explain what it is and why you chose it for your project?

Casteen: 'Qualia' are the sensations that one experiences while one is experiencing things. So basically when you look at a red piece of paper, for instance, you have this visual experience that you recognize as the color red. You're not really able to fully communicate to other people what it is that you're experiencing, so there's not really any way to be sure that you're experiencing the color red the same way that others do. My understanding is that in serious academic philosophy circles, it's a sort of debunked idea, since it depends on there being a 'self' that is separate from your senses, but I'm not really that well versed in that.

I chose it as a name for a few reasons. First, I knew early on that I wanted to focus this project around releasing albums, each with different feelings, genres and styles, and I didn't want to back myself into a corner with something really futuristic or western or whatever, and with a broad concept like 'qualia,' there's a lot of room. The other reason for the name is that as a musician, you don't get anywhere if you're ramming your intentions down the listener's throat. After all the writing, performance, recording and production that I do, I have to depend on the listener to take something real from it, essentially to carry out the last step of the process. Without the translation and interpretation by the listener, I don't think there's really that much value to what I do, so I figured I'd put that idea front and center.

Your album combines Wild West imagery with electronic elements. How did that unusual combination come about?

Casteen: I've loved all sorts of electronic music for a really long time and had been producing instrumental demo tracks that were pretty well within the EBM vein. I knew that I was working towards creating fully-fledged songs and that I wanted to use my voice, but didn't really get satisfaction out of trying to work with the futuristic subject matter and singing style that was dominant in EBM at the time. So I started looking other places, and found a lot of inspiration in the storytelling-focused songwriting in a lot of country and western songs, even though a lot of those artists made music that I didn't immediately appreciate. As soon as I happened upon the central conceit of the 'Nevada's Greatest Man' song, I knew I had enough fuel in the idea of exploring western-style storytelling with a sort of high-tech bent for an entire album, so I ran with it.

You're based out of New York, but your album is full of desert and Wild West imagery. Have you spent a lot of time in the American west? What is it about that landscape and imagery that inspires you? Why Nevada in particular?

Casteen: I haven't spent a ton of time in the west, and maybe that's why I was so into the idea. I didn't really want to record an album about what was actually there; I was more interested in what I believed was there, so I just sort of indulged in this weird fantasy I had about that area and how it has evolved through the years, and used that as the background for the record. What inspires me about that area is how there's this sort of endlessly hostile environment that has in recent years been sort of homogenized and turned into an endless string of suburbs and strip malls. I once visited the house of a friend who lived in a fairly affluent suburb outside of Phoenix, and he had a swimming pool inside his fenced-in yard, but just outside the fence, there were coyotes running around, howling and killing things. Some people seem to be really into using their own comfort as a way of taming the hostile world around them, and I got a lot of mileage out of that in my writing. Plus it tied really well into the western storytelling style that I was writing in.

I chose Nevada in particular because during my few trips to Las Vegas, I've found it to be one of the most terrifying and exciting places in the world. It's cliché at this point to talk about Vegas as a den of sin and exploitation, but honestly, if you're of a certain temperament and you go to Las Vegas for the first time, it will shock you just how much energy the businesses that exist there put into exploiting every weakness in the human spirit that they know about. But then, alongside that, it's been the fastest-growing metropolitan area in this country for the last 10 years or so. There's this community with families and commuters and all that other American middle class stuff that's building up in the middle of the desert, around this deeply weird core. My limited understanding of the state's history is that since the area's always been so inhospitable, yet so popular for capitalists and cowboys, thanks to its many mines and brothels or whatever, it's always been pretty explosive, but grounded in the base reality of how to survive and get rich in the desert. OK, I sort of made all that stuff up, but when you're writing music, as long as you believe it, you can make compelling songs from it.

Although you don't have any overtly country western elements in your arrangements, there seem to be samples of what sound like Ennio Morricone compositions in the mix. What did you use for sample sources?

Casteen: There aren't really any samples on the record, with the exception of percussion loops that I chopped up and mangled and the classical sample towards the end of the record. I hear the Morricone influence as well; I've never listened to a huge amount of his music—I just have a few compilations of his stuff on CD—and I think the fact that his influence wound its way into this record is a testament to how profoundly he's reshaped the way that people sonically think about the Old West. That's kind of an incredible accomplishment for an Italian composer born after 1920. I have immense respect for him, but there are no samples of him in the record. I'm not sure I could have afforded them, anyway.

On a similar note, what are your favorite Westerns?

Casteen: I don't have a particularly deep knowledge of them. I was more inspired by my own perceptions of Westerns than of Westerns themselves. I recently saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which is one of the best movies I ever saw, but that was after the record was completed. I've read a bunch of Western books; I'm a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy, especially his book Blood Meridian, which is really staggeringly violent, exciting and thoughtful. I think that the iconography of Westerns is so well established, with the loner hero, the lack of morality, the influx of Eastern influence and privilege, the villains, and the bloody violence, that you can go to sleep and dream a pretty compelling Western on your own. Which, I guess, is sort of what I tried to do.

The album's signature song, 'Nevada's Greatest Man,' seems to be about a robot cowboy. Is there more to the story? What was the inspiration behind that particular character?

Casteen: You got it. That's what I was going for, although I've also heard somebody tell me that they hear the song about a knight in a suit of armor, like a Don Quixote in the desert, which actually kind of works with what I was going for as well. I think part of the story behind that song is pretty personal. I had just come off a couple relationships with people where I was accused of being unfeeling and distant, and I was grappling with mild mental health issues, and both of those things sort of spilled into the song. I think the song is about being out of place, trying to maintain strength through that, and then ultimately failing. Why a robot in the desert, though? I'm producing this sort of European-styled electronic music, coming from this tradition of singing about automation and robots from Kraftwerk onwards. But at the same time, I'm writing in this American story-song tradition. The two just sort of joined up easily with the subject matter, and that gave me a lot of room to write about the personal stuff I was feeling at the time.

With the guitars and the western imagery, your music is a lot different than most of the electro-pop coming out at the moment. What is your opinion of the electronic music scene today?

Casteen: I think that there's an issue in electronic music that nobody's really talking about, which is that there's just a phenomenal amount of it being made. There's a real glut of people who are picking up some software and then putting material up on MySpace, and the quality of it ranges from terrible to good. But I think that in the face of this massive influx in material, listeners are having trouble figuring out what's good and what isn't, which has led to some conservatism in what it is that people are willing to get into. On the industrial/electronic side of things, there really aren't any very many new bands that people in the scene really care about that they didn't care about three or even six years ago. So there's a weird problem with people being hit with tons and tons of music that they don't have the energy to get into, so even though there may be a lot of interesting things happening in electronic music, you wouldn't really know about it from what's popular, just because the bands that are doing different sorts of things aren't organized enough to play off of their similarities and get an audience excited, and then there are tons of bands in the EBM world that aren't really bringing anything new to the table. I think that Caustic is a great example of band that's getting it right. That guy's done an amazing job of bringing a sense of humor to what he does, and while he's a humble, normal guy, he's managed to make what he does really entertaining, not just in terms of the music, but also the image and personality that he puts forward through his shows and on the Internet. He's gotten tons of people psyched about what he does, and there aren't many others right now that have done that. I've never met him, and my music is obviously different from his, but his success is pretty inspiring.

Have you had the chance to take The Qualia live yet?

Casteen: Not yet. I'm working with Chvad SB of Things Outside The Skin on putting a show together. We've been working on it for a long time, and we're ready to break through and start playing shows around New York City in the near future, before heading out to who knows where. Give us some time, and we'll come through and hopefully impress.

The picture on your MySpace page features you wearing a karate headband. Will your next album be about martial artists instead of cowboys?

Casteen: That's funny. That's a headband I keep around my apartment that pops up at strange times. I'll lose it for months, and then suddenly, right when I'm moving or taking photos or whatever, I'll find it, and then put it on and look like an idiot. I've had it since I was really young, so no, there are no hints there as to what new material is like. The next record is going to be different, I think a little bit looser, but still dealing with interesting themes, but I can't really talk about that yet. Maybe I'll do that, though. Robot ninja, maybe?

Now that Nevada's Greatest! is out, do you have any upcoming plans you'd like to talk about?

Casteen: Aside from the preparations for the live show that I mentioned earlier, and the new record I've been compiling material for during the last year or so, I also maintain a quasi-daily photo blog at TheQualia.vox.com, where I try every day to take a quotation from a book, then pair it up with an image from my daily life and a short paragraph attempting to connect the two, give readers news on what I'm working on, what I'm thinking about, and so on. Plus, it keeps me creating stuff and stretching myself to write something interesting every day, so I'm pretty happy with the project.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

Casteen: Thanks for the questions and for all the support. In this area of music, it's tough right now for musicians, music writers and listeners, and I appreciate everything you guys and your readers do to keep this alive.