Five Questions For Joshua Fried
1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?
I grew up in LA but NYC controlled me like Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”. I always knew someday I’d live in an apartment, hang with artists and go on adventures worth telling stories about. I went to college upstate and moved down soon after graduation, to spend as much time as possible in clubs and lofts. Not all of those adventures are worth telling stories about.
2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?
Probably a tie between Another Green World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both share an impersonal sheen, flat affect, consummate technique and formal rigor, while evoking an intense individual experience. And that experience can be transpersonal as much as emotional.
3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?
The ability to channel obsessive energy, meter it, and charge by the kilowatt. Seriously though obsession takes me places but it’s a wild horse.
4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.
I listen to recorded conversations for the NSA, wrap them up in canvas bags and insert them manually into non-volatile RAM. That’s on Mondays. Then on Tuesdays I extrude the best parts, sneak them out the trash chute, and run them over to Santos Party House where the DJs pay me in Twitter Dollars up front. The rest of the time I gig with RADIO WONDERLAND or else I kick back, but I do shave my head every other day.
5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?
Yes, starting from about age 20, but I didn’t know it at the time. I realized much later that the choice was always arf, I mean art. The outcome was pre-ordained by the Rent Stabilization Board.
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ICMC “RED LIGHT” CLUB EVENT
11pm Tuesday, 1 June 2010
@ City Winery
155 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013
(212) 608-0555
Corner of Vandam & Varick: 3 blocks below Houston, 1 block west of 6th Avenue
1 train to Houston, C/E train to Spring
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Robert Ratcliffe/Sarah Watts [UK] Bass clarinet hits the dance floor
David Casal [UK/USA] AI-enhanced dubstep on homemade instruments
Prisoner of Vampires [USA] Harmonious strata of synthesized tones for public consumption
RADIO WONDERLAND [USA] Turning bits & bytes of mass culture into the backbeat for our dance of independence