Jamie Stewart & Martin Hargreaves

So maybe a place to start is with this idea of the apocalypse, and Mine's proposal to us came through a reading of Oksana Timofeeva, who's a, a Russian scholar based in Berlin, who has been writing in relationship to the apocalypse away from a kind of Western notion that the apocalypse will be this day of judgment that we are all waiting for, that will come along and somehow both punish us, but redeem us.

And instead, she's proposing that the apocalypse has happened, is happening, will happen.

We're, we're, we're constantly dealing with catastrophe in some ways, and she does distinguish between catastrophe and a more sort of personalized notion of trauma.

If I think about Shudder, [chuckles] I do, I do think of catastrophe in some way as, as-

That's fair.

Yeah.

[laughs] Because in some ways you, you, you are thinking about how to broadly make art in conditions that are far from ideal and asking the question, what is it that we're doing when we make art? Why would we make art under such horrendous conditions that we live through? And if I think of-- maybe if we start with Eraserhead Shudder, the most recent album, there's something really nice in the liner notes where you describe Eraserhead, the film by David Lynch, as a planet, and you imagine yourself to be the kind of space junk that's orbiting, like dead extraterrestrials, satellites.

There, there's something about this relationship to Eraserhead where it's not a copy.

It's almost-- It is an homage, but it's a strange kind of an ho-homage.

You're kind of acknowledging there's some kind of gravitational pull that, that trapped you.

And I'm interested maybe to start there in this thing of one of the ways that we survive the ongoing apocalypse is to really avow the things that hold us in relation.

Well, [sighs] there aren't a lot of things that humans have done that are really any good.

[laughs] And, and one of-- Probably the number one is aesthetic expression or ex-aesthetic exploration.

And I haven't thought about it and not 'cause it's not very present on my mind, but it's-- I'm s- probably just too terrifying to think about as I'm a catastrophizing person and extremely worried all the time anyway.

And so I haven't thought about it formally, but it's very definitely in my psyche and certainly in my physical body.

But, I mean, in the midst of the apocalypse, leaning on art-- Like, really, what else is there to do other than violent, bloody revolution?

[laughs]

There's not a lot left, I guess.

I mean, I probably certainly believe that.

I don't want to believe that, and this, this is probably the first time I've said it out loud.

But, I mean, what else are we gonna do other than in the time that's left is just to say thank you to the one main thing that humans got right in the midst of humans destroying everything else that humans have tried to get right but haven't gotten right? I don't know.

I don't know how else to think about it.

I t-- You know, I have little to no power in the world to do anything other than that.

I'm not brave enough to- Participate in targeted assassinations, so [laughs]

[laughs]