The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.

Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.

Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.

The Obelisk Questionnaire: Jason Hoopes of The Atomic Bomb Audition

—

How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?

Great question that I almost never want to answer! It’s all circumambulatory. We’re a rock band with eclectic interests and influences. We write songs. We try to do the best work we possibly can by our own standards. That’s usually definition enough for me. So many beautiful things in life are ruined with attempts at definition. Poetry is ruined this way. Spirit, too. What is it? It is what it is. We follow our instincts. They push us toward quiet, loud, heavy, light…whether we borrow from Bowie or Cocteau Twins, Sleep or Badalamenti, Prince or Scott Walker…makes no difference to us. Whatever activates us emotionally, whatever sound makes us excited to play, is good and pursued. We get a sense of what we want to hear and off we go into the work. We analyze and overthink with the best of them, but the process is not a linear path toward a fixed destination. We feel and love the poetry and irrational drama of life. That’s where our faith and trust as artists ultimately lie.
We try to keep our analytic skills in service to the emotive qualities of our music. We want to move you in some way. We don’t want to just be “interesting”. At the same time, we don’t want to sound like anyone else. We don’t sound like anyone else. We love vulnerable love songs. We love loud heavy guitars. We love surprises and subverted expectations, and we also crave grounded unisons. We love chaotic noise and we love a 3min G-major 4/4 pop hook. It doesn’t matter how it’s best said, but it matters absolutely that we feel we’ve said something real, personal. I agree with Tarantino when he says about scriptwriting, “it should embarrass you a little to share it”. That’s how personal the work should be. How did we come to this place? I don’t care to define that so much either. We found each other. We began working together. Here we are, approaching 20 years on the clock and apparently we still have things to say. What is it? It’s beautiful and alive. That’s enough for me.

Describe your first musical memory.

I have a couple musical memories competing for the “earliest” slot. One is my mother playing acoustic guitar and singing – her own songs, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac, misc gospel tunes. She was a gifted songwriter and vocalist. Her and my aunts also loved listening and dancing to Motown and Little Richard et al so that was in there. Another memory is my dad playing his country music records early on Sunday mornings. Some of the first records I heard include George Jones, Tom T Hall, Charley Pride, Hank Snow, Jim Reeves. There were plenty others. My grandfather singing along to Marty Robbins albums is in there. Johnny Cash’s “Bitter Tears” record made a deep haunting storyteller impression on me from those days. And playing my small drum kit to Buddy Holly records when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. That was my first go at an instrument.

Describe your best musical memory to date.

I’m going to pick two out of many. The first is of being on tour in 2017 with Fred Frith and Jordan Glenn (as Fred Frith Trio). We were in Warsaw, Poland. After the show we walked back out to play an encore and when I stepped on stage and waved to acknowledge applause, time suddenly suspended and I felt for a flash of a second that I was floating in stillness and silence. I felt a deep calm personal validation, something I knew I’d been seeking most all my life to that point. I say, seeking validation due to certain relational dysfunctions I experienced as a child. I felt in that moment that I had done at least some of the important things in life well and was living a life I was meant to live. A deep grounding pivot point in my life. Reminds me to continue striving to do what seems to be the right thing even if I don’t completely understand it at the time. The second memory is again of being on tour in 2012 as the drum / bass duo Satya Sena (with drummer Peijman Kouretchian). We played 16 shows in a whirlwind 14 days, all over the west coast from the SF Bay Area down to San Diego, over to Reno and Las Vegas, up into the PNW all the way to Vancouver, BC. The whole tour and that short lived band were a massive shift for me musically, in what I understood to be possible professionally, and personally in terms of my character. All the shows on that tour were powerful, but after one of the shows in the PNW a guy about my age walked up to the stage right after we played, shook my hand and with tears in his eyes just said, “thank you, brother.” That exchange and memory have brought tears to my own eyes several times since. When we honor our work as it deserves, and pour our souls and hearts into it, there is never any telling who we can affect and how. There’s just no telling. We make the right sacrifices and trust that the light breaks through. And it does. Someone will see it. It’s totally worth doing.

When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?

Tested, and destroyed. In the first few years following a suicidal breakdown / hospitalization and divorce. Coming out of that experience I was confronted with an existential demand to reexamine everything, how I viewed the world and myself, top to bottom. North is now South. Up is now down. Yes is now no. I had to consider the possibility that everything I had been putting my faith in up to that point was now “wrong” or insufficient as a set of navigation tools going forward. I had to face realizing I had spent a significant amount of time living falsely. I began striving passionately to un-politicize my mind. I am a deeply liberal person, radically open. Boundaries seem to dissolve just by looking at them. I embraced this for years in a deeply ideological and naive way. After such a radical breakdown, I saw in my rejection of all things “conservative” some grave errors. For many years I harbored deep ideological criticisms of all sorts of social institutions and phenomena of human nature – religion, government, masculinity, many things… tradition itself. But I was broken down to a place where the only language that made any sense when trying to understand the vision I had was religious language. As my ideological perceptions shattered, I began to see the truth in my projected enemies, and the lies in my own familiar objects of faith and trust. I dared myself to re-approach religion, government, masculinity, tradition…all of those things I had ideologically rebelled against, at least internally… with a more innocent and now violently humbled beginner’s mind, to find redeemable qualities in them all. Because I also had to find redeemable qualities in myself, to find a way out of self destruction. To locate and understand the falseness in my own immature rebellion and the mature truth and wisdom of tradition itself. To learn to separate wheat from chaff. Because of this experience, I now believe deeply in the personal work of recalling one’s own shadow projections, our ideological demonization of the Other. All of us do it, no matter our station in life. Not that we all have to agree or share the same values. We don’t.
But disagreement does not inevitably lead to war between “right and wrong”. We’re losing the ability to constructively navigate disagreement. We move so immediately and dangerously to using war language when we encounter someone who does not share the values we deem most important. For me, this work extended all the way to “the Other” being literally my own reflection in the mirror. I hated what I saw with passionate rage. Because he wasn’t what I thought he should be and he was everything I rejected. I wanted to destroy him. In some important ways I did. But I’m glad I didn’t die in body. I love being alive. I am glad I died in personal wrong-mindedness. There’s a line in “Dream Flood”, one of the tracks from our new album FUTURE MIRROR – “dry is my faith / above us the dream is a fist unfurling”. This lyric comes from somewhere close to what I’m describing here. Firmly held beliefs. Letting go. Tested. Destroyed. Reborn. Such is the way. Thanks for the good question.

Where do you feel artistic progression leads?

Hopefully somewhere approximating the desired vision, with a few exciting and unexpected surprises. It depends how you define your terms. “Artistic progression”…it’s a little different for everyone, no? It depends what the artist wants. It’s the scariest question – “what do you want?” As soon as we define what we want we clarify our terms for failure. And who wants to see their own personally determined terms for failure?! Well, the best answer is to raise your hand and say “Me! I want to see them!” We should want to clarify terms of failure so that we know when we’re going off the rails. Unless ignorance is truly bliss. And if it is then fuck bliss. As an artist I feel I am a hunter. I pursue an idea along the trail of instinct. It leads me into the unknown wilderness, where I encounter familiar things with fresh faces, where I find myself again, my bones, my wildness, after being lost for so long in the grids of civilized living. I feel an honest artist is venturing into the unknown not because they want to explore the void per se, but because exploring the void is a means to an end, which is to return to an ordered defined reality with fresh information. That’s full circle. I like that. Where an artist ends up in their own pursuits or “artistic progression” depends greatly on how honest their heart and soul are while working. By “artistic progression” we often assume, I think, to mean something like “the civilizing function of human creative nature”. That somehow an artist progresses “forward” toward something better, helps us define and understand our so-called higher natures more clearly. But that sometimes seems a bit too suspiciously self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing to me. What if “progress” also sometimes means something like “resisting unnatural change”? What if “progress” is to be found in staying within the circle built by ancestors, resisting the shiny new innovations, and steadfastly maintaining a fire that has been burning for generations? What if “progress” is more to do with absorbing and retelling the old stories over again with fresh voices? Do we even know what we mean by “progress”? I’m not so sure. All that to say, if we assume we all understand the same thing when we say “artistic progress”, then I would say it leads us to somewhere better than where we were when we began the creative journey. Even if that better place is new knowledge of somewhere we don’t want to go. The artist also shows us this. Even if it’s simply to find ourselves where we started from, seen through new eyes. Where does artistic progression lead? To something we didn’t see before, or did see before and for whatever reason forgot.

How do you define success?

Success: The experience of living a life in which what I feel, believe, think, say and do are in harmonic alignment. If I can achieve this sort of an aligned state of being, the particulars of the work in front of me become secondary. Whatever work I do from that place I trust will be good. Add to this – when the energy you put out to the public through the work is digested and returned to you in forms of societal support…this also smells of success.

What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?

This is the best and most disturbing interview question I’ve ever encountered. I like where I am in my life right now. Everything I have seen in my life has contributed to my current position. So I regard everything I have seen as, in some big picture way, necessary and I accept them. Having said this, here is a short list of answers to the question “I wonder if I would have been just as well off not seeing this?”
– video of an Isis beheading / snuff film
– a friend’s bedroom after a break-in & gunshot suicide on his bed
– the Lars von Trier film “Dancer in the Dark”

Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.

A school.

What do you believe is the most essential function of art?

The poetic revealing of truth.

Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?

Getting into my painting studio. I have 5 large blank canvases waiting for me currently. The solitude…the beautiful solitude of painting…the dynamic ritual of painting…the sacred private physical dialogue of painting…the dance of it…aside from making love, it’s hard to name something more therapeutic.

Photo of The Atomic Bomb Audition, by Rex Mananquil

http://facebook.com/theatomicbombaudition
https://www.instagram.com/theatomicbombaudition/
https://theatomicbombaudition.bandcamp.com/
https://www.theatomicbombaudition.net/

The Atomic Bomb Audition, Future Mirror

(2022)

Tags: California, Filth Wizard Records, Future Mirror, Oakland, The Atomic Bomb Audition, The Atomic Bomb Audition Future Mirror

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2022 at 8:54 am and is filed under Questionnaire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.