Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Paul Maffi

MP You’ve described your work as anti-neoliberal. In the past, you’ve been quoted as saying, “Any worthwhile political or artistic agenda should be seeking an undoing of the situation as it stands.” 

JM The world has been neoliberal since the Second World War, and the music we make is part and parcel with it. But by being an exponent of the prevailing tendencies and their sworn enemy at the same time, you can open up some space for alternatives. I’ve riffed on it by intensifying aspects of my music, which set it apart from earlier epochs of music. More recent eras, such as the Galant of the 18th century and or Baroque of the 17th century, were about major-minor tonality and the journey of the key. But we’ve since chucked that out. Now you have a guitarist, a bassist, a keyboardist and a vocalist playing these diatonic melodies that move horizontally. The harmonics and the correspondences between them are not a major-minor tonality anymore. It’s this modal space, similar to medieval music. Adorno notes that there’s no thematic integrity with modern music, and this was his biggest indictment of it. Any section of the form is substitutable for any other section because no motive or theme is being developed that links the whole to the part. It’s these crude fragments that come one after the other.

MP Crude fragments that come one after the other with no thematic integrity sounds like TikTok. Didn’t you recently open an account there?

JM Yeah, hopefully it’s clear I’m taking the piss a little bit. These platforms are totally on top of us now, gathering in force, and there’s no way out but through.

MP If the future belongs to algorithmic governance by social media companies, is there any space left for political will?

JM When they had the ICE encampments this summer, people still appeared out in the streets, you know? But it doesn’t seem to be adequate for the beast right now, and I’m not sure it ever is. This moment is coming to its culmination: there’ll be a transition phase, and it will probably involve disasters and the implementation of smart machines and algorithms. As long as there are human beings, there’ll be new forms of art and resistance. Maybe I’m just getting “blackpilled”, as the kids say, but my understanding looking back is that the final consummation never comes, and it won’t until the end of time. In the world, we’re under the dominion of the archons, principalities and powers. Under that, we can bear witness to the light, and that’s radical, but until it ends, it’s always going to be a disfigured and untrue world. The children are going to suffer, and TikTok and social media will continue to put their tentacles into our veins and blood cells. You can scream: scream as loud as you can, that’s one way to do it. 

MP You seem sceptical about policy having real power to disrupt underlying systems.

JM My takeaway from the post-Marxist theorists is that you don’t enter the lesser of two evils game. Politics takes place in the streets, not at the ballot box. At the same time, I’ve got lib friends who say, “What’s wrong with you? That’s childish nonsense, this has real effects and real life.” But here in the States, the major difference was between one side saying, “Yeah, we’re going to fund the genocide, but we’re sad about it and we reluctantly are doing it”, versus, “Yes, we want to fund the genocide because Israel is our greatest ally”. Either way, you’re getting the same thing.

MP You were present at the Capitol on January 6th, as you reference in the press release for your new album Later Than You Think. What did that moment mean to you? How was your presence read or misread?

JM We went down there with this filmmaker [Alex Lee Moyer], and we filmed people climbing up the walls. Earlier that summer, there had been revolution, protest, and bearing witness to the irreconcilable contradictions of the thing, so of course there was going to be a reaction against it. At that moment, that’s how I saw it. How I was perceived in relation to it was that 99% of people assumed that I was a Donald Trump supporter. That hasn’t been fun, but what are you going to do? 

MP You were reported to have donated to his campaign in 2020.

JM  I did donate. I donated to the Democrats, too, and Bernie. But then the Democrats conspired on Super Tuesday to make sure Bernie didn’t get the nomination, just like they did in 2016. Every time the libs loop me into the idea that the residues of 18th-century powdered wig liberal institutions are what will help us achieve our desired end, that they still have power – I get kicked in the nuts again. I’m coming from a context that is suspicious of these institutions and believes that any participation in them is complicity with and perpetuation of the status quo. That’s where I was coming from in 2020. Punk rock Gen Xers argued that selling out was bad, that doing a Coca Cola commercial was evil. Now you’re cool if you are selling skin cream or you’re a toothpaste girl. Maybe the toothpaste girl is uncanny, just like hyperpop where this overidentification doubles back as a critique of the whole toothpaste industry.

MP Let’s talk about Later Than You Think. Did the production process differ from your last albums Screen Memories and Addendum?

JM I had my head on a bit straighter for this one, I wasn’t trying to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I just went down to my basement every day and worked, and then went to bed. When I was younger, I was willing to try anything to come up with a musical idea, which ended up causing the ideas to come less. When I  was 25, I subscribed to Badiouian ethics – the idea of fidelity and the truth of art. If something serves you, or gets in the way of a pursuit – that’s how you know whether it’s good or evil. Now, I feel that I’ve opened up that there might be many truths. 

MP If your music is a warning, what is it warning us about? Is there music on the other side of the catastrophe? 

JM It will be pure music, and it will be beautiful. The transcendentals of being are beautiful. All the great stuff labours to bear witness to that possibility. With pop, through the stupidity, there are zebra stripes that imagine the age to come, an already presented mystery. .

John Maus will be performing at End of the Road 2025.