Jenks Miller (Horseback/ Mount Moriah)
1. What are your top five albums that were released in 2013? (In order 1-5)
- Marginal Consort - INSTAL. Glasgow 2008
- The Stranger - Watching Dead Empires in Decay
- Arckanum - Fenris Kindir
- James Plotkin & Paal Nilssen - Love: Death Rattle
- True Widow - Circumambulation
2. What band did you discover in 2013 (can be a brand new band or an older band) that had an impact on your life? What made them significant?
I'm not sure Marginal Consort is actually a band; from what I can gather, it's a loose association of improvisers that meets occasionally for epic live performances. PAN released one of these live sets, recorded in 2008, as a four-LP set. Eight tracks, each in excess of twenty minutes. This is totally free music, made without a single concession to rhythm or melody; some wouldn't even call it music and that's fine too. But the experience of listening to this set is what I want when I listen to music: it's immersive, absorbing, and alters the reality of a moment, if only slightly slightly. I had heard music these guys have been involved in -- a couple members of the collective also play in Fushitsusha -- but this is the most monumental and overwhelming release I encountered in 2013. I'll be finding new avenues through these sounds for years to come.
3. How will you remember 2013? (In terms of music)
Mount Moriah toured a lot in support of Miracle Temple. We were on the road for much of the spring and summer. There are a lot of great memories from those tours, and I saw more of the American Midwest this spring than I ever have before in my life. Being on the road slowed down the pace of my recording work, so I didn't make as many new records as I made in recent years. Relapse released a Horseback retrospective called A Plague of Knowing. That was great because it allowed me to sift through previous work and get a wide-angle view of that project's history to this point. 2013 was also the first year I had a release under my own name get label support (Northern Spy) and distribution across the country. That record, Spirit Signal, was more spontaneously constructed than either Horseback or Mount Moriah's records are, which was a breath of fresh air and helped revitalize my creative drive.
4. What can we look forward to from you in 2014?
With luck, at least one new Horseback record, a new Mount Moriah, and a couple solo records.
5. What records are you looking forward to most in 2014?
Honestly, I'm not sure! I'm not up to date on what's in the queue. I know there's an Order from Chaos box set that Nuclear War Now has been promising forever. I'm definitely looking forward to that.
6. There is a lot of debate over streaming sites and royalties, namely with Spotify. What is your stance on the economic policies behind the current streaming services? Do you have a preferred one?
It probably goes without saying that streaming platforms do not provide most artists with any income at all. My projects' returns from Spotify are just insulting; we're talking fractions of a cent. My own preference is for physical formats and I don't use Spotify myself so I have little use for Spotify as it's currently configured, as either as an artist or as a consumer. Ever since Spotify launched, I have wondered why artists and labels didn't use it purely as a promotional tool: make sure your releases are represented on streaming services around their release, then pull them after that. I could understand the platform as a promotional tool in that respect. But as a source of revenue it's a joke -- I mean it's literally a punchline. "Got your check from Spotify yet? Hahahahaha!"
