Offering ‘Perspective’: Justin Von Strasburg Talks Exploration & his New LP

(EDITOR’S NOTES — Justin Von Strasburg has been omnipresent on the Buffalo scene for years, playing drums in an array of bands which traipse across a plethora of musical styles from punk to indie to experimental to noise rock and everything in between. Widely known for his minimalist kits, Justin these days is a member of the indie bands Peak Fun and The Step Down, the avant-garde noise rock trio Arrangements, and the experimental duo Regional Headbutting Techniques just to name a few. A former member as well of the recently disbanded punk outfit Neon Fantastic, Justin has also released numerous solo albums in the electronic space, and two days ago just dropped his latest LP in that genre called ‘Perspective.’ 1120 Press caught up with Justin in Allentown recently to discuss his intriguing new album, his process in creating this type of music and what attracts him to this sound. We appreciate his time. Please read our story below.)

1120 PRESS: Congratulations on the new LP! This release is certainly different from the many indie projects and bands we mostly know you from. How would you describe this album?

JUSTIN VON STRASBURG: That's what I've been trying to figure out myself. (laughs) So, the electronic music I've done for the longest time is what is called ‘glitch.’ It originated with artists like Oval and labels like 12K in the early 2000s, and late '90s. It was all just electronic guys playing with different sounds, whether it was ambient music or house music or hip hop or whatever. Back then, you could find any kind of glitch artist playing any assortment of different electronic music. They would just replace, like, a bass drum with a click. And what they did too was they would purposely damage CDs and then played the CDs back in the players and record the skipping they heard and turn that into music. That's where the glitch sound kind of originated from.

And so, people would just use glitchy sounds, broken sounds, things like that, to create different genres of music, and I found it fascinating. And so, in the early 2000s, I started creating my own style of it. My first album was done in 2002-2003 called ‘I'm Fragile Again,’ and it was my take on that whole style. I wanted to try to make a human-sounding version of it. I'm a big fan of Midwest emo and things like that, so that kind of stuff just trickled into the way I wrote melodies. You don't see that in the electronic music space very much. You do when you're hybridizing it with different rock genres. But straight electronic music, you don't see it that much. So, to go back to the question of how I would describe this album: The closest genre or term I have come up with is ‘Microhouse,’ or ‘Minimal Techno.’

1120: What is it about this space that appeals to you?

JVS: I just like sound in general. I can sit here in my apartment and just listen to the sounds around me and find interesting things going on. So, any album or anything that I came across that had a weird thing happening in it, I just was into it. And I found that I liked all kinds of music: anything from Gregorian chant, which was big in the '90s, to extreme metal like Darkthrone's ‘A Blaze in the Northern Sky.’ I like sound organized in different ways. So, when the glitch stuff came along, it was my outlet outside of my traditional rock bands. A lot of my friends were not into weirder stuff. They were metalheads or punks or whatever. I started to collect this folder of sounds that I still use to this day. I recorded guitar. I did field recordings. I collected digital debris of things. I won't delve into that too much, but I just collected this folder of sounds, and I started building my albums from this folder.

1120: We feel there’s something different about the music on this album compared to the electronic music we’re used to. But we can’t put our finger on it. If we’re correct about that — because we aren’t electronic music experts — can you shed light on what that may be?

JVS: I think what’s different is my melody structure. Like I said, I’m a fan of Midwest emo, so that structure or the indie rock melody structure, or straight-up punk/indie structure, is what I think appeals to people not normally into this genre. A lot of electronic music is like jazz in a sense in that jazz has different melody structures, so a lot of people can't get into jazz because it's different than what a traditional pop song has or a traditional punk song. Blink-182 and Miles Davis are very different things. So, I think what makes my stuff a little different are my melody structures.

1120: How much traditional instrumentation are you using in this music?

JVS: Guitar is the primary instrument. And the recordings have been chopped to shit. (laughs) It's just small fragments or big fragments. Most of the percussive stuff that's in there is built from field recordings or maybe bits of guitar in-processing. But guitar is the only primary instrument. There's no drums in the traditional sense, no bass guitar in the traditional sense, no keyboards in the traditional sense. All the melodies are built from guitar or just random things that might've shown up in a field recording that would be like, ‘Oh, I could pull a melody out of that.’ So, I'll take a guitar sample that's 30 seconds to a minute and then chop that into 100 samples: a half a second, or quarter-of-a-second. And the longer they get, you can build different styles from that.

1120: It’s noted on the album you also used ‘digital artifacts’ and ‘sounds captured around the guitar.’ What does that mean?

JVS: When you record acoustic guitar, you have the room sound too. I did my stuff with an electric guitar just kinda plugged either directly into a computer or potentially into an amp, so the room sound is involved in that too, especially the sounds before I started playing and the sounds after; those are included. So, I like to say ‘in and around the guitar’ because those sounds are used.

Digital artifacts can be, for example, when you record with, like, a Zoom recorder, the turning on-and-off of the recorder can be captured in the mix, especially when you export that sound file. Or another example is where I outputted a recording, but for some odd reason it sped up. But I liked it, so I left it. So, it's just digital artifacts of happenstance that occur when you're transferring things from one format to another. That's pretty much what the digital debris is.

1120: Is that why in the liner notes you say the album was ‘constructed’ rather than ‘written’?

JVS: Yeah, because it’s the sound and the samples that are telling me what to do. I'm not deliberately going in there and trying to write, ‘A, B, E-flat,’ or something like that. It doesn't exist like that. So, I'm literally just going in there, and I’ll find a sample, and something will just hit me. And then I’ll say: "Okay, let's see: What if I group this sound with that sound, and then with this sound. Let’s see what happens." And then I'll build out from there.

1120: You worked with sounds recorded from as far back as the early 2000s thru 2024. Are you just constantly stockpiling sounds? And how do you determine between a sound you are moved to record, compared to the everyday white noise of life?

JVS: If I'm sitting in my apartment and I feel the influence, I'll turn on my phone and just start recording. In the summertime, it's great because there's a lot more activity going on outside, and I'll just start recording. Same thing at my mom's house or wherever I'm at. And so, then I’ll have a straight field recording that I chop into parts and put them at the end of a track to kind of act as an ending, or also as a bridge to the next track. So, it's meant to be a palate cleanse to kind of set you into a place. It's also like you're flipping through a dial on a radio station. There’s a lot of different concepts that come with it.

A lot of times, too, it comes down to people. So, where I live (in Allentown), there's a lot of people that walk around, or just people in general, especially on Fridays or Saturday nights. And you might just hear a random sound. And I’ll be like, ‘what the hell was that?’ And then you hear it again. Then, I'm like, ‘Oh, shit, I gotta record this,’ because it might be some person across the street yelling, "Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep." No joke; I have a field recording of someone saying “Yep” for a couple minutes straight. Just randomly saying, "Yep.” So, I threw that into something. It's stuff like that that I capture. There’s a lot of fun and crazy things I’ll hear and record. Then, I’ll go back and listen to it and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I didn't even notice that car revving down the street.’ That could be something that could be a cool ending to something or an intro to something. Or you hear a random bit of the radio coming from somewhere. It's kind of a fun little thing to catch, and sometimes, I won’t even know I caught it until I’m playing back the recordings I made. You just have to be open to what’s there. Not everybody is always actively listening, but I am.

Justin Von Strasburg

1120: Does the album title, ‘Perspective,’ mean anything?

JVS: I like my albums to have Easter eggs, and this album is a great example. It’s called ‘Perspective’ because you can look at the album in different ways, you can give it your own perspective. Is it a ‘Microhouse’ album or something else? Is it an eight-track album, or two four-track EPs that mirror each other? Are there eight field recordings mixed throughout the album or one single field recording that reemerges as the album progresses? Even the album cover plays with your perspective. If I angle the camera down, the building no longer feels alone, as it’s at the heart of Larkin Square. Or at least it was. Not sure if it’s still there. The album title is kind of messed up too. It should be called perception. But I want to play with people’s perspectives. Change their point of view.

1120: Talk to us about the tracks on this LP and their titles. All the songs have cool, but strange names, like ‘wild lemonade,’ ‘sexy tennis,’ ‘laundromat karate’… Do you just pull these names out of thin air? Or do they relate to the music in any way?

JVS:  I have a very long list in a text file that I've been holding onto for over 10 years that has random band names that I throw down into it here and there, because you never know when you have a band that needs a band name. But sometimes I use them in other ways if there is a fit. I also keep a text file for my band, ‘Arrangements.’ Because of what that band is, those track titles are a little weirder. But sometimes I will pull titles from that list as well to use someplace else. The track titles on ‘Perspective’ mirror each other. They could almost be alternates of their respective counterparts:

‘light maneuvers’ and ‘static dream'

'sexy tennis’ and ‘artful dodge’

‘wild lemonade’ and ‘laundromat karate,’

‘tale chaser’ and ‘weekend flashback’

In regard to the first four tracks and the last four tracks being mirrors or of the same vibe:

The first and fifth songs — ‘light maneuvers’ and ‘static dream’ — use the same sound set. In fact, the base melody in one is reversed in the other.

The second and sixth tracks — ‘sexy tennis’ and ‘artful dodge’ — are both controlled, loopy chaos that gradually get more intense.

The third and seventh songs — ‘wild lemonade’ and ‘laundromat karate’ — are adventurous, have many changes, are very melodic, and are very danceable. They are my club tracks.

And the fourth and eighth tracks — ‘tale chaser’ and ‘weekend flashback’ — are simply loops: catchy and interesting but simply loops, and their names reflect that loopy nature. One is stuck chasing their tale/tail or the other is reliving a great time.

1120: By the way, we also noticed in the liner notes that you made the following suggestion: "Listen, if you can, on headphones." Will people have a different experience — or even differing perspectives — based on how they listen to this album?

JVS: The ‘listen with headphones’ is kind of a leftover from doing the glitch albums because the glitch albums were never meant for big sound systems. They were never sonically put together for big PA systems, and I still like that mentality. I personally love listening to techno on my headphones or earbuds. It pulsates into my brain a little bit more. If you listen thru a car stereo, you're gonna hear the bass more. If you listen on a Bluetooth speaker, you're not gonna hear necessarily the bass lines that appear in ‘weekend flashback,’ for example. They won’t necessarily be as clearly defined as on a sound system that can pull that bass up. Mixing house music is tricky because you want the bass to be the driving force, but you don't want it to overpower everything. Really, though, you can listen to it however you want. I left that suggestion in there because that's kind of just a thing I've put on all my releases.

1120: Thank you so much for speaking with us, and again, congratulations. Before we go, is there anything else you want to say about the album that we haven't touched on?

JVS: I hope people like it. I hope people buy it on Bandcamp. It'll be on all the streaming services. But yeah, I just really hope people enjoy it and people buy it.