Conversation 06: Ben Streaks (aka Architecture in Tokyo aka Young Muscle)
This week I spoke with artist Ben Streaks about his music practice, with a focus on what has shaped it, among other influences. Ben has two aliases that he is known by: Architecture in Tokyo and Young Muscle, with each encompassing different sounds. He is the first artist we feature whose primary medium is music. Throughout this conversation we unpack a lot: influences of the abject, noise music, video art and psychedelics. And to accompany it all, I asked Ben to curate two playlists: one for Halloween (spooky stuff), and one composed of his 10 essential influences.
Enjoy!
–Danielle
Conversation with Ben Streaks (Transcript)
This conversation has been briefly edited.
Danielle: Today is Tuesday, October 20th, and I am here with Ben Streaks. Ben is a musician, he’s a music artist—I don’t know what kind of term you prefer in that regard. I think artist, I think I can just call you an artist, but primarily your medium is music. What would people know you as?
Ben S.: Architecture in Tokyo was my old alias that I used, mostly for the disco and house production that I did. My other alias that I use right now is Young Muscle.
D: I love that.
BS: Young Muscle is more oriented toward techno and all sorts of other genres that I like to explore. Down tempo, ambient, bass music, that sort of stuff
D: So you and I are the same age (I was born literally the day before Ben). I love hearing you talk about when you were 18 or 17 as opposed to when I was 18 or 17 because it actually feels like you were 23 when I was 17 [laughter]. You were experiencing so much more than I was when I was that young. I know that you’ve mentioned before, in regards to music and your art practice, that your formative years were between 15-17. What was your coming of age like with music and how was that informed by your experiences—what were those experiences?
BS: Formative years were definitely 15 to 18. 15-18 was definitely weird for me because it was more of not only ingesting all that musical material, but also the notoriety that I experienced. I think 17 was when my music was like… when I was getting hundreds of notifications everyday on SoundCloud and Youtube about my music
D: You have so many Youtube views! I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe I was hanging out with a famous music artist [laughter]
BS: You know at 17, it was all in front of me, but after a year of that I kind of put myself on hiatus. Even while I was on hiatus, all my stuff continued to gain steam but mentally I wasn’t invested in any of it anymore. I had kind of pushed it away for my own mental sake, to try and not get too caught up in all these imaginary expectations I had for myself now. I was trying not to get myself too wrapped up in all of it.
D: That sounds like the “child star” story, but a more condensed version of it. That is a lot to happen all pretty fast to just a 17 year-old, or someone who is still trying to figure themself out. Especially how, I can imagine, your music journey wasn’t done. At that time had you felt like you found your sound? I know you just said that you’re experimenting, so I can’t imagine at 17 you were really sure what you wanted to do with your music path.
BS: I felt like I had carved out my own little niche for what I wanted to do, but carving out my own niche I feel like is different from what I wanted to do. I almost—and I still do—feel like I pigeon-holed myself into a position that I didn’t necessarily resonate with. I feel like I got wrapped up in something that I didn’t strongly identify with. The music that I was making was something that I enjoyed but not necessarily something that I wanted to do for a long time. It was fun in the moment but then I started realizing that I felt cornered with what I wanted to do, and also limited with my ability. With the Architecture in Tokyo project, a lot of it was sampling, it was very much based on samples and not a whole lot on my own synthesis. That made me feel very constrained because I felt like what I was doing wasn’t my own stuff, I was just re-hashing other sources. It wasn’t really genuinely creating something myself.
D: What was that revelation like, then? When you decided that you wanted to take the step toward something different, toward a path that was more you. What were your inspirations in that transitory period?
BS: Right around when I moved to Detroit, around 19, that was around the same time that I really started digging into the synthesis material that I had on hand. Learning how to build things in Ableton, which is the program that I use, learning with some synthesizers that I already had as a teenager, learning how to use those more so than just a tool for sampling—learning how to actually create with those things. Around 18 or 19, when I first moved out, the things that really inspired me to start creating were being in Detroit proper and hearing Detroit techno. They sampled things, but they didn’t rely on samples, whereas I felt like I was relying on samples before.
Listening to this sound it was very apparent that these people created their sounds from the ground up and didn’t really rely on the base platform of sampling to structure their songs. They could put down a drum machine or make a synthesizer in Ableton and could start to get things spinning from there. I had a sort of idea of what those things were about, but I never really took the time to invest myself in it. Once I started exposing myself to the sound of Detroit—not just Detroit techno, but UK-based and some of the other ambient techno and experimental stuff like that—that’s when I really started to dig into it, and decided that I really need to learn how to do this and not just rely on rehashing things.
Ben Streaks, image courtesy of the artist.
D: You were kind enough to make a playlist of your ten influences, or inspirations, and I noticed that a lot of them are UK-based artists, which I thought was cool, but I also noticed that there’s this Japanese influence, not just in some of the music, but you’ve also shared some visual art that are your influence. The video-works that you shared with me, such as the one by Toshio Matsumoto—where do the inspirations that you pull from these video artworks come into play in your own art?
BS: I am very influenced by Japanese culture. There’s something about Japanese culture that is very fascinating, and I know there’s this common trope of white men being very fascinated by Japanese culture. There really is something about the way that Japanese people produce that even the artists’ level of meritocracy is higher than what I’ve seen before. They have a very high base for how they handle the arts, and even from the base it’s good, and then everything beyond that just gets better. It’s funny because in regards to the video art, the Japanese influence was all incidental. I didn’t seek out Japanese video artists, I just sought out video art and a lot of the art that I did find was Japanese.
D: When looking at the video art that you shared, I was thinking a lot about if you can separate visual and physical experiences from music? When I was watching For the Damaged Right Eye by Toshio Matsumoto, I think that multi-media and multi-sensory experiences are so apparent and so at the core of the work. I’m wondering if in your own art, do you see that to be as equally important (especially when performing)?
BS: I agree with you, I think that it’s hard to separate visuals from the source of audio.
There’s this musician I like, Actress, who put this idea in my head when I was reading an interview. He has films he likes running on mute while he’s working on tracks so that he has these art films running in the background that kind of serve as an aesthetic influence to what he’s doing. Even when I’m not running any sort of visuals in the background while I’m making music, I still kind of put myself in the headspace of if I were in the club playing that track for a group of people. I have to have some sort of visual connection to what I’m making in order to be successful with it. I definitely have to put myself in the headspace of not just the sound of the track, but also think where would this track resonate? And ultimately if I could associate this track with one liminal space, what would it be, and what purpose would it serve in that space?
D: We’re not talking specifically about “psychedelic” art that was in the age of the hippies, right? Is psychedelic art still a thing?
BS: I guess psychedelic art is a bad word for it, because it’s psychedelic to me, but I don’t know if I could tag it as psychedelic art. When I think of things that I would consider psychedelic art but maybe aren’t necessarily tagged that, I think of that sculpture I shared with you
D: The Roxy Paine one?
BS: Yeah, of the blob kind of melting. Stuff like that. I guess “weird art” would be a better term. I was and I still am definitely attracted to art that holds that weird, sort of abject feeling to it.
D: Yes! That other video you shared with me, Dog Star Man (Part III), was so abject. Half the time I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I understood that it was flesh and there was like, some weird liquid material as well. And I couldn’t tell if the bodily nuances that I was witnessing were good or bad, but overall it was kind of abject.
BS: I’ve always been attracted to this sort of abject art and expression that sort of defines comfort
D: It’s repulsive, in a way.
BS: Even down to noise music and other experimental music. I’ve always liked it in the sense that there’s a part of me within my core that doesn’t like it, and that’s why I’m so attracted to it because I know that it doesn’t please me in a sense, but I like the fact that I’m moved by it in a sense that I don’t find comfort in it—it’s not a comforting sort of movement. It’s a sort of “this is disgusting” movement that attracts me to it.
D: It’s compelling.
BS: Exactly.
D: So that’s your experience with art that is somewhat external to yourself. What about your own art? Have you ever attempted to make your own art abject? That feels like it’d be extremely challenging, especially because when typically people make art, they make what they like and continue working on it to get it how they like. I can’t imagine it’d be easy to make art you're repulsed by.
BS: My very first experiences with music were making noise music, which is this sort of formless sound. I was sort of working in experimental music that I guess it was sort of music that I couldn’t listen to on repeat. It was a one-and-done thing and I would kind of set it away because it wasn’t something that I would enjoy listening to again. It was ugly and abrasive and not really made for repeat listening.
D: How complex.
BS: Noise music shares that aspect. Some people really enjoy it and they can listen to noise music over and over again. I’ve always appreciated it in the fact that I can listen to it and like the different textures of the song, and the tonal modulation that they have going on, but I’ve never been someone who can sit down and listen to an entire noise album and be enthralled by it.
D: Speaking of discomforting music, you made a fun, spooky little playlist for us [laughter]. What was your thinking behind this playlist for Halloween?
BS: The playlist that I put together is sort of a mixture of music that has sort of spooky, odd themes. A mixture of some occult references. Music that has a weird sort of ethereal feeling. And then music that has some sort of...I guess upsetting, abrasive music that would challenge people a bit to listen to.
D: I put it on while putting away laundry recently, and I felt like I was in a movie, being watched from somewhere. Some of it felt really dark, too, like psychologically dark. I like the playlist. It’s a spooky playlist that goes beyond Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the Monster Bash
BS: I kept thinking about what I wanted to do for a spooky playlist, and I kept thinking I don’t want to do solely Halloween songs. I wanted to do an atmospheric playlist that’s more about actually terrifying music as opposed to things that just reference Halloween and nighttime and things like that.
D: I think atmospheric is the perfect word for it.
End.
Ben on a hike! Image courtesy of the artist.
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