Q&A-004: “ARE YOU BEING CRITICAL OF THE MEDIUM YOU ARE USING?” - an interview with Cher Tan (Peripathetic / ESP Mayhem)
+++ an interview with Cher Tan, author of 'Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging' and singer in ESP Mayhem
Cher Tan is a writer and critic (Overland, Liquid Architecture, etc), an editor (LIMINAL mag, Meanjin), a vocalist (ESP Mayhem; previously of Spiteward and Grimalkin) and a friend. For over a decade, she has published an incredibly wide-ranging body of work that dabbles largely in subcultural matters, ranging anywhere from music and literature, to politics and tech. I know that every interview introduction has gotta start with a flood of praise, but I can’t recommend her writing highly enough to those with any interest in trying to live and create in the contemporary, and you should be lining up for a copy of her first collection of essays out now called Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging. The below interview was conducted within a [browser based word processor] and touches on some things she has written about in the past: the DIY impulse, subcultural practice in the now, the interplay of punk and the internet, and much more. Read ahead and if you see the book around in shops, consider picking up a dozen copies to distribute among your friends.
This might be starting in the middle, but I wanted to start with your 2021 essay ‘By Signalling Nothing I Remain Opaque.’ It hit me really hard when it went online and it stuck with me: the opening paragraphs touch on so many nameless anxieties I’ve carried around for years regarding ideas of subculture and underground art, this in particular: “Remembering when the goal was to make popular culture irrelevant, so we could create something else. Remembering when the goal was creating unpopular culture.” I feel like we think similarly on this matter and I’m interested in your thoughts on the topic since you wrote that essay. Is this...a launching point for a Q&A?
Oh, definitely! We seem to be somewhat in sync in terms of how we’ve observed our surroundings in this little corner of our world(s), so it makes sense to begin with the relatable thing. I must start by saying that the quote above is not from me, but from The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Reading and re-reading it helped me anchor my thoughts when I was writing the essay.
I remember that essay being perplexing to write. It was actually in response to an artist program I had been asked to participate in. There remained a feeling that I had been co-opted as the program became more and more bizarre. Someone let slip at the inaugural meeting where mostly everyone who had been selected were present, said they were “looking for certain kinds of people”. It was very diverse—not only in terms of identities but artistic forms and preoccupations—in a way that felt curated, like someone was ticking off a list. And of course I was paid well.
This series of events got me thinking about politics adopted as a lifestyle instead of an ethos, a life's work—which led to the realisation that this dynamic was immediately apparent to me because I have been ensconced within it, just in a different way. I wrote a sequel to “By Signalling…” actually. It’s titled “The Lifestyle Church” and it’s a massive dive into that particular lifestylisation, using my personal experiences coming of age and growing older within DIY scenes as the essay’s axis—what punk novelist Virginie Despentes once described as “a very poor preparation punk rock had been for later life”, particularly when you view it from a class perspective. I’d be curious as to what you think of it!
I can’t wait to read it! In your discussion with Shoshana in Radiation zine, you described punk and DIY as giving you the tools to hack your way through life without the prerequisites of money, university, connections. I feel like this is a familiar experience for a lot of our peers. Do you think discovering this form of music and its underlying ethos led you to spend a large portion of your life thinking, writing and sharing?
Totally. There was absolutely no way my love for thinking and writing and sharing could’ve been nurtured if not for DIY hc-punk. I grew up in a psychically unstable and dysfunctional working class household where no one read or even listened to music. I didn’t really have any friends as a kid. So reading (both offline and on, as soon as I could access it) became this weird addiction to escape my reality, but it also led me to discover worlds I never thought existed before—but in real life—which is how we're even having this conversation now. I still think it’s so cool and it still does marvel me. I think it might be like that for you too? The thing is that we don’t really understand the full gravity of this kind of background until our 30s and the class divisions start to show. Someone close to me describes it as “the time where we more or less decide how we want to live the rest of our lives” and it’s more articulate than I could ever describe it so I’m citing that.
Oh yeah, that experience of reading to escape and discover new worlds is very familiar to me. I was thinking recently that going to a wildly under-resourced public school really forced me to learn a lot of stuff on my own, and how that felt very lonely up until discovering punk and DIY in my twenties. It was like all the ‘DIY-like’ things that I had to do by necessity (a class of two teaching ourselves chemistry from a textbook, etc) became a choice, and I don’t know where I would have ended up without that community to turn to. On that thread, can you tell us about how you came to play in punk bands? What was that process like, and do you think that had a broader effect on your work than just being able to hit those impossible frequencies as a vocalist?
Exactly! I always say I now have social and relational skills because of punk and DIY; it taught me how to conduct friendships and relationships in a way that allows space for mistakes and growth. It's like family, in a way, except you get to have choices.
It’s funny when people ask how first bands start because often the answer is “it just happened” … one thing leads to another and another—that’s the best part of it; the constant element of throwing yourself into the unknown, at least creatively. I booked tours for international bands for around nine years when I lived in Singapore (where I was born and raised), until the point I decided to move away. In Adelaide it was just the usual enter-a-punk-scene-get-wasted-have-a-few-rowdy-nights-with-a-carousel-of-people-that-you-eventually-become-close-to. This was during a time when more and more women were wanting to start bands—we were beginning to actively resist the actually quite massive gender parity; this was 2013 or so—as those who had been exposed to third- and fourth-wave feminist thought.
So that was how my first band Grimalkin was formed: a random idea one night at the local warehouse space. I was originally meant to be the bass player, but I could barely play for shit and often panicked like I was undergoing maths tests. Then the original singer decided to move away for a permanent job, and seeing how I was struggling my friends asked if I maybe wanted to try and do that instead. At the time I was working as a line cook at a cafe in the CBD that had an open kitchen, and an acquaintance would come past every week to get a coffee before he began his job postering the walls in the market next door. Having seen an older band of his, I asked him if he wanted to play bass and it ended up working out really well both on a creative and social level. So that’s how it happened. And after the first band it’s easier to start more bands because people in the scene would have already been aware of you from seeing you perform live or hearing your recordings. That said I don’t think music and writing have much of a crossover for me—they occupy different parts of my brain. Music is catharsis while writing is interrogation.
You’ve written and spoken in the past about the internet facilitating your pathway into punk and DIY culture, and I’ve taken a lot out of the many articles you’ve written exploring the internet (especially your piece outlining writers’ inability to ably render the internet in fiction, because that’s something I have huge difficulties with in my own writing!) I’m curious about your thoughts on the interaction between hyper-connectivity and the pathway to punk.
I think you pulled it off pretty well in Paradise Estate! Hmm as I mentioned before it was discovering DIY hc-punk that allowed me to nurture my love for thinking and reading and sharing. The internet did the same thing, and coincidentally they worked in tandem to further encourage that. I think most people in the scene would tell you a similar story. It feels so complicated to me though … like they are two negating forces, yet they somehow exist in harmony. That said, if you speak to older folk who wrote each other letters instead of emails or DMs, traded tapes through the post instead of swapping Bandcamp or Spotify links or was introduced to new theory while reading a zine cover to cover instead of scrolling through LiveJournal or social media, you might hear a slightly different version of this story. Ultimately, like any art-making endeavour, punk is a pastime mediated by media, and whether you choose to politicise it or not is contingent on the person. This obviously wasn't the case at its inception since it emerged as a reaction to the status quo, but it's gone through so many cycles now it's forked into varying directions, responses and assimilations to the current internet-mediated system.
Thank you for a sane-making response! What you’re describing is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: the line between punk as a genre, and punk as a practice. I know that’s something that has haunted the whole thing since its advent, but I’ve been thinking of things like physical networks and the interactions across communities (nationally, internationally) as something that has been in a process of devolving. Maybe that’s just me showing my vintage, but I feel it as a twist on Wendy Brown’s ‘left melancholy’: a mournfulness that I feel when I see the things that made me fall in love with punk lose their clarity. What’s your feeling around the current state of the DIY impulse? Not so much on a musical or aesthetic level, or a scene health check, but the impulse itself to avoid relying on larger structures? I sense there’s been a weakening of the motivation towards DIY over recent years, but I’m not sure if that’s just been an exposure thing for me...
It may very well have something to do with getting older, lol… it is after all at its most alluring as a “youth” subculture and there aren’t very clear continuities between generations. But it also depends on what scenes you’re talking about—if you’re talking about cities or towns. Some larger cities have more than a few dozen subgenres now, the umbrella having split off into several directions. Plus it becomes trickier to measure when we start comparing cities which are experiencing different stages of gentrification. Some can view DIY through an entrepreneurial lens more than others, not unlike a start-up; that’s how chain vs. egg got invented as a simplified version of this observation, right? And in certain towns in the world it’s still a mix of so-called incompatible genres, like the algorithm hasn’t touched them yet.
But if we’re talking about scenes that exist in cities which are experiencing the metamodern capitalism we are living in now—especially those closer in moral alignment to the US imperial centre, with its various ironies and paradoxes—then my answer is broadly yes. I must also say though that DIY in this context (bearing in mind that the ethos was appropriated from the working- and under-classes anyway) is moving elsewhere, onto, say, raves, and renewed within left activism due to the fallout since 2020; I think punk as a concept—more so in the western world—is largely irrelevant because it’s reached a point where it’s been completely co-opted by its increased lack of political resistance engendered by the somatising, instantly gratifying effects of social media, not to mention the increasing dearth of third spaces (warehouses, squats, etc) that aren’t facilitated by capital. Pubs very rarely serve as a third space, by the way, since it involves dynamics like the employer-employee relationship, as well as potential voyeurs or vultures. It’s like what Mark Fisher wrote about some subcultures “ossify[ing] into Trad, remain undead … become lifestyles not ways of life”. I guess it relates to what I said about punk and the internet being two negating forces; it’s about the fork in the road, sort of. Like, are you being critical of the medium(s) you’re using? Is your understanding of punk and DIY rooted within a materialist analysis? What is your relationship to real estate, both online and off?
Punk and the internet being negating forces hits hard! It makes me think of all the online tools that are so easily depended on, but inherently compromised. I succumb to them so easily, from bands, to running a record label or publishing zines… I’ve relied on crowdfunding platforms, Patreon, Square terminals, this Substack, even Bandcamp; all these little fees and T&Cs and data harvests. I know I’m a part of a niche market that contributes to something I’m fundamentally against. It sometimes feels like there’s no way to ably pull off these DIY projects from within a commodified online space without enormous compromise, and yet, I keep going back…
Yeah, it’s fucking hectic. I write a lot about this in “The Lifestyle Church”. I think we are reaching a point where our brains have become so assimilated to the platforms we use. Big Tech’s allure during its nascent years obviously contributed to this; many of us got sucked in by that! But I think there is room for subversion, but it involves an intimacy with the system, kinda like knowing the enemy well before we know how to defeat it. It involves cultivating a vigilance, but because they are so all-encompassing (i.e. you wake up and you begin looking at Instagram or whatever) it takes more conscious effort to develop an offence against it. The pro-privacy and anti-surveillance movements offers us some clues.
To return to writing: since moving from music journalism to literature, I’ve been surprised to find that the spirit of autonomy and independence that underlies the DIY music realm is more or less absent. Sometimes there’s some discussion around the differences between self-publishing, small publishing and major publishers, but not in the kind of separatist way that we’re more familiar with in punk music. There's almost no chance that I would listen to a new record released on a major label, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with books. Do you feel as though this instinct is missing in publishing (the book industry!), and if so do you have any insights into the difference?
Yeah, spot on. I agree with you about not generally caring about a major label record yet I don’t think twice about buying a Big 5 book. Most likely you’d judge a punk band you like signing on to RCA but you’d feel I’ve “made it” if I got a deal with Penguin Random House. I’ve been turning it around in my head for a while (since Dan Hogan tweeted it actually), and I attribute it to class. Music is broadly understood as “for everyone” (you either feel it or you don’t, even if it’s not considered “mainstream”), whereas books are a little bit more alienating for the typical person (there are more steps involved, it’s imbued with an inherent prestige, and this doesn’t really change whether it’s “mainstream” or not). I’m excluding what is considered “high art” here. There tends to be more of a “share and share alike” mindset that exists amongst musicians more often than it does between writers.
Also, music requires intense practice, but you can repeat the same set once you think you’ve nailed it, but with writing, while it also requires intense practice, there's weird unspoken rules around things like “self plagiarism”. Further, there is less of a cottage industry around analysing music than there is for literature. So I think the problem here comes back to how the forms are inherently classed, in terms of how ‘novelty’ is valued, obscurity as a class position, what knowledges are accessible or given power, how tastes are formed, etc.
I’ve said this a hundred times already, but I’m really looking forward to Peripathetic, and feel like reading it is going to scratch an itch in my reading that’s been following me around a long time. How has the collecting and writing of that been? Going back through your body of work and finding the missing pieces seems like a daunting but exciting process.
It was admittedly the hardest creative experience I’ve put myself through in my entire life. So much excavation and distraction, then guilt you’re not paying enough attention to the people around you whom you love because you’re so completely in your head. But you can’t fucking help it, you absolutely have to and you don’t even know why exactly. I don’t know if I found the missing pieces as much as they found me; like my subconscious was really working me out. I think that’s why it was so hard. The craft aspect was fun once those fell into place.
As an editor, you’ve been a part of fostering a really interesting group of writers and critics through Meanjin, Liminal and recently Debris. To me, looking through those contributor names is as good a guide to the interesting writing happening in this country as any. How did you turn to editing, and what is it that you’re looking for in a piece of criticism?
It was purely by accident, actually; I harboured zero editorial aspirations. Very early in my practice I remember bragging to a mentor that I’d never want to be an editor because I didn’t think I’d have the patience or grace. But then I needed money quite badly one time and saw in a Facebook group where someone I know had posted that they were quitting their job, and that if anyone was interested in taking over she can talk them through and hopefully get them in the door. So I enquired about it and I managed to get the (freelance) job, which in retrospect was thankfully shared with one other person every other month. I just sort of copied the style of editors I’d worked with whose editing I’d enjoyed, commissioned work I personally felt excited about, and from there gradually developed my own style and learned to be more intentional. Who knew it could be so fun? Never say never, I guess. It’s like figuring out a puzzle with someone else. I’d attribute my initial ignorant bravado to a misunderstanding as to what editing entails, which is annoyingly not common knowledge! It's not just moving words and sentences around; it's a responsibility, an ethics, an art form and a collaboration.
The pieces of criticism that I like are those that are informative but also opinionated. I want to feel like the writer is feeling something that they really want to tell everyone about, and not regurgitating received ideas, resorting to prejudice or leaning on didacticism—it's like a short story of your experience with the thing, whether that's an object, idea or experience. Often they will leak into each other. It's like when you want to chat about a TV show with your friend or on Reddit, but laid out more precisely. You're thinking about the people who are already familiar with it but also you're thinking of the people who have no clue. So how do you bridge this distance?
Recently, you stood down from the book recommendations column at the ABC in protest of their lack of editorial integrity when it came to reporting on Palestine, and have started a new column (called Cooking the Books) to continue that work on your own terms. Firstly, hell yes to that move, and I look forward to reading the book recs to come. I feel like large media and cultural institutions have always deserved some level of contempt, but in the last six months, they’ve really gone to work to openly demonstrate the worst of their behaviours. To see the ABC go anywhere from mis-reporting of Palestinian solidarity protests, to playing apologist for the destruction of Gaza, to interviewing IDF members in defence of ethnic cleansing, to censuring or firing their journalists for trying to do their job properly has been sickening. In a broader sense, how are you feeling about large, moneyed institutions in recent months? And in your step away from the ABC, do you feel like there’s an echo there in some of the things that motivated you to operate on a DIY basis?
It’s made me feel more certain of their utter uselessness, how they have blindsided so many due to their cultural capital in the social atmosphere—which, as we know, is accumulated through monetary capital that projects such spectacular representations.
The complete ineptitude of government and media is particularly infuriating to witness at this time, but if we were to follow the trajectory of neoliberalism it might as well be inevitable. The people are getting fucked left right and centre and we have had it to up to here! It’s pretty exhilarating how institutions are starting to show their asses—slowly, but surely, the cracks are showing. I think it’s a pretty crucial juncture in time: it’s up to us to build the future we want to see now, brick by brick, block by block.
I touch on this in ‘The Lifestyle Church’, and another essay titled ‘Influenza’, which is about the “artist-as-influencer”. Cultural prestige may be considered by some to be a drug, but this moment, as awful as it is, is blowing that lid wide fucking open. I was talking about this with a close friend with a similar history actually: having been formed through DIY thought and its attendant politics (whether that’s anarchism, Marxism, etc) feels as if we’ve been preparing ourselves all along—a kind of intellectual prepperism, maybe—whether this means we use our skills and experiences to disseminate otherwise obscure knowledges or information, quickly analyse cultural products, not fear reprisals from authorities for doing things so-called polite society frowns upon. We never actually held them in high regard other than understanding that we were “supposed to”, so—sucked in. The mask is off! It speaks to what I said above about developing a materialist analysis; the momentum is building and we really need to sustain it as a collective. It’s like that meme: get in loser, except we’re imagining a new world.
Thanks heaps for your time in answering all these questions Cher! As a thank you, here is a clichéd finish: what kind of music and writing has been catching your eye recently? It feels to me like there’s a regeneration of energies shining through what was a pretty bland landscape the last couple years.
I think so too. Global crisis does tend to do that, lol. Rem Koolhaas has a term (’junkspace’) and I’d argue we are living in the junkspace era. Nothing makes sense so we take our imaginations and run because it’s all we have within capitalist realism, where our margins of refusal are shrinking and we have to consistently renegotiate the terms of our existences and politics in order to live as ethically as possible. I’ve been listening to a lot of folk noise and the new wave of metal that seems to be a more proactive move to the left—whether that's radical or not remains to be seen—for heavy music enjoyers. Bands like Anatomia and Mortiferum. Anti-imperialist punk like Zanjeer and Inqirad. My friends in Singapore have this duo (“dystopian darkwave”?) called Prospexx that’s pretty great too. Blood of a Pomegranate is top-notch anarchist folk noise as well, based in Naarm. I tend to listen to music on repeat when I find something new so that’s all there is at the moment.
It’s a similar current within literature too. I mean the DEI industrial complex elevated some truly mediocre people, but it’s also paved the way for more interesting-ness because it’s less disproportionately limited to one type of ontology. I think this is a big deal, considering how much more the literary arts is gatekept as opposed to music; I can only hope it doesn't fall into liberal self-satisfaction. I read this book called Hangman recently that coalesced these thoughts: it’s a surrealist novel about a guy who returns to an unnamed location in sub-Saharan Africa after being in exile in the US for twenty-six years. Sounds pretty stock standard but Maya Binyam writes it such that we are literally inside the alien familiarity, and then takes it even further by injecting an inherent unreliability even while reintroducing motifs until everything collapses. Authors like Momtaza Mehri, Jackie Wang, Isabella Hammad, Isobel Waidner. I’m drawn to writing that reimagines current absurdities and prods at the many senseless contradictions around us, so we can hopefully crawl our way out.
+++ Order Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging from NewSouth Books ___