MAN LEE and Arthur Moon Lean Into the Weirdness

Sam Reichman and Tim Lee are the Brooklyn-based art rock duo MAN LEE; Lora-Faye Åshuvud is the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist who performs as Arthur Moon. Lora-Faye produced MAN LEE’s new record Hefty Wimpy — which will be out tomorrow — so to celebrate, the three sat down to catch up about it. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Sam Reichman: Do you have any advice for how we should be feeling as we release our first record?

Lora-Faye Åshuvud: I think there can be this heavy, alienated, sad feeling on release day sometimes. I’m sure you’ve experienced it with the singles, maybe, where there’s all this hype and you put in all this work and been so thoughtful about it, and then it comes out and it’s sort of like you’re just sitting there on the toilet, living your human life feeling like, Well. What the fuck? 

Tim Lee: [Laughs.] 

Lora-Faye: It can just be really isolating. So I feel like the thing to do is to build in community celebration, even if that’s just going out to dinner with friends or the two of you doing something fun or whatever. I think that can really help, to just find a way in advance to mark space. Just to make sure that you’re not sitting sadly on the toilet alone.

Sam: [Laughs.] Because it would be so easy to do that. That’s perfect advice, thank you.

Tim: Yeah. And I think maybe many artists are tempted to do this — already, we’re looking to what’s next. I think that’s natural, but especially because of how long we had been working on this initial crop of songs, I think the topics still resonate but it was a different time in our lives. And I think thematically, we’re dealing with much different things now. 

Lora-Faye: I think that’s definitely a part of the letdown of release date, too. It’s like, Man, not only did I finish this recording a gazillion years ago, I wrote it even longer ago, and I don’t even fucking identify with that person or those feelings or those ideas anymore, let alone care if anyone else does. And the advice that I often give people is: making music, making art, is working through some shit, and even though you have already moved on to the next big problem to solve, somebody else still needs to work through that shit, and they’re going to hear the song and be super stoked. I think finding a way to honor both the person who you were when you made it and also the person who needs it right now can also help with that feeling of alienation.

Sam: Totally. 

Lora-Faye: How has it been having the singles come out in the context of putting out your first record as a band?

Tim: It’s been exciting and fun to share, and I think for me, it has encouraged the sharing aspect of making art. It’s been actually a really nice way to connect with people. I think initially, it felt a little weird being like, “Hey, listen to this song that I made,” but just seeing how different people react to it and being able to enjoy their enjoyment or see what resonates, it’s been very cool.

Sam: Yeah. And I’ve definitely felt that emotional roller coaster with releasing singles and seeing the Spotify stream count and internalizing it. It’s terrible. And so we’re just not going to do it anymore.

Lora-Faye: I had to delete the Spotify For Artists app years ago. I was like, I can’t. This is a torture device. 

Sam: Yeah. It’s just like someone’s fucking with you all the time, intentionally. So all of the things our friends who have been making music for years have been telling us, we’re now experiencing, and it’s terrible. [Laughs.]

Lora-Faye: Yeah, dude.

Sam: But worth it in all of the other ways, of course. But that’s just such a specific example of being set up to fail.

Tim: Yeah. I think after after releasing the first single, I remember trying to explain to someone at a house party why Spotify is terrible. And my explanation has gradually gotten better and more concise with the four singles that we’ve released. [Laughs.] 

Lora-Faye: Yeah. Welcome. [Laughs.] But what about the new shit? Tim, you were saying you’re thinking about different themes. Does it feel like a continuation of a set of ideas and projects that were started with the first record, or is it just a totally different ballpark?

Tim: Yeah, I think it does feel like an extension of the first record. Because we talk about the weight of expectations, or feeling alienated from who you should be through whatever lens. For myself, that was very much the space that I was in at the time. And I think in the months since then, I’ve kind of come to understand why I’ve felt that way and realized that a lot of it has to do with these big themes that resonate with other people, too. And I think my trajectory of political radicalization during that time has made a lot of sense there, so I think it’s given us a lot to process with the next record. So I think it is an extension, but it’s also learnings from the first record and leaning into the weirdness.

Sam: Well, we were already making a slight left turn at the fork in the road, and now we’re making a hard left. And so much of the stuff that we worked on together with you was the foundation for that. I’m not going to gush, but all I want to do is gush about how much we learned in that process. Just following our gut on when an arrangement feels right or not has made some interesting choices happen. And we’ve acquired more gear.

Lora-Faye: As one does. What have you acquired? The 404, I feel like, was the last thing I heard about. There was a MicroKORG. We went in on the Zvex.

Tim: Yeah, we did. 

Sam: Nothing really crazy, but we took the MARIS out of retirement. We’ve had it for years, but we didn’t really know how to use it, and now we do. Which is very exciting. 

Tim: You ever use one of these?

[Tim holds up a pocket operator.] 

Lora-Faye: Oh, yeah. Super fun.

Tim: They’re fun. And then I got the the drum log, too. 

Lora-Faye: Have you been writing with that?

Sam: We’re starting to. 

Tim: We pair that with a waveform generator and an envelope filter, and it’s pretty cool.

Sam: And it just makes us want to make dance music. Which, can you relate to that at all?

Lora-Faye: No, no. I don’t like dance music.

Sam: [Laughs.] 

Lora-Faye: I mean, the new Arthur Moon record is a dance record. But I feel like it’s so hard to make dance music. I’m constantly blown away when I’m sitting in my little room making my little dance musics that this is how people do it. You know? Because it feels so far away from the context in which it’s intended. And I think that actually ends up being an interesting thing for me. I don’t know if you guys experience this — making it that way, I end up imbuing so much of the crazy shit that’s happening in my loneliness into the communal dance music such that I think if you tried to put on this music that I’m working on in a club, people would be like, “I absolutely cannot dance to this. This is terrible, terrible music.” [Laughs.] 

Tim: If there’s one thing I learned from being in the raving community, there’s a subgenre of people that it will resonate with. [Laughs.] There’s so many subgenres and so much of finding the parties you want to go to and the dance floors that you want to be on is just finding the people that the same stuff resonates with. I think that we’re doing what feels right with music this time around, and we’ve learned that just from going out with our friends and dancing. I think we’ve done that a lot more since the first record. 

Sam: But I know what you’re saying too. It might not translate, but that’s OK. 

Lora-Faye: Yeah. It’s almost not meant to translate. It’s like, I made this in my underwear sober at 3 pm on a Wednesday while taking breaks to eat M&Ms and watch Gilmore Girls. So it would feel inauthentic to then have it be playing at some very hip [club].

Tim: No, but I think that’s right, though. I think the songs that a lot of DJs — very cool DJs — are playing out are made [like that].

Lora-Faye: That’s true. And like, all the best music is made by losers. I will die on that hill.

Tim: [Laughs.] 

Lora-Faye: [Recently] I was realizing that my love language in friendship is actually making something together. And that’s why most of my best friends are musical collaborators, because we get together and we just make things. And sometimes we don’t have any conversation at all. That’s the way that we show our appreciation for each other.

Tim: Yeah, that resonates. That’s how we feel too.

Lora-Faye: Yeah. And also create such beautiful friendships coming out of that. I feel like I definitely experienced that with you two. The time spent together, making things, you really get to know people that way.

Sam: Absolutely. But also you have to be willing to tolerate the other people, right? You have to be OK with uncertainty at first. But it was just the best ever, making this record. 

Lora-Faye: It was such a joy. I’m so glad that you’re taking your time putting it out too. It’s nice to see each song get the space it needs to kind of percolate in the atmosphere and have its little visual world. You’re really honoring it, even though I’m sure you’re, like, fucking over it by now. [Laughs.] 

Tim: Yeah, but the longer timeline bumps up against the things we were talking about earlier. 

Sam: And the making of every music video—

Tim: You’re the one doing that labor. [Laughs.] 

Sam: Even if they are simplistic, it’s a lot of time in After Effects that I didn’t budget for. I’m still coloring the last one. It’s taken me over a year.

Lora-Faye: I can’t wait to see. 

Sam: I hope it’s good. It just needs to be done at this point.

Lora-Faye: I remember when you first told me the music video idea for “Chicken” — I, like, lost my mind. Absolutely unhinged. 

Sam: I’m like, “Guess how many chickens I’m tracing by hand?” 

Tim: What was the final number? 

Sam: Oh, it was just a couple hundred. [Laughs.] It took a really long time. But it’s just been so fun to think about the visuals and how they can evolve. And that in itself is a huge art project, but in a really good way, that’s taken up every ounce of my free time.

Tim: Yeah, Sam’s been doing some historical research on the agendas of the wealthy and linking it to this next video. Dancing, history, culture. It’s been an anthropological undertaking.

Lora-Faye: Wait, what? Are we doing a Marxist analysis of dance?

Sam: Well, that does sound very cool, but no. It’s about how anytime you think there isn’t some shady underbelly or racist dealings or, like, hetero-Kellogg-anti-masturbation-level corporate agendas — anytime you think that couldn’t possibly have been happening for the last 200-plus years, it did. It was always some guy at the top of a corporation, Severance style, that just was really messed up and took it out on everyone else. 

Lora-Faye: So Marxist, but not.

Sam: Yeah. I guess dancing probably falls into social reproduction under Marxist theory or something like that. I’m gonna have to find a book on that one. [Laughs.] It’s just been a lot of reading. Reading theory, and then remembering that intellectualizing everything is actually maybe a problem, more broadly. But what can you do?

Lora-Faye: I really like juxtaposing reading theory or history into the process of writing a record without forcing it. I feel like the shittiest music I’ve ever written has been when I’m like, “I’m gonna write a song about Roland Barthes!” or whatever. But if you’re letting it simmer and then just seeing what comes out in relation to that, I feel like that can often be really helpful in getting you outside of your silly nonsense. [Laughs.]

OK, so, the next record: do you have a vision yet? And when are we going to get the MAN LEE record that’s all analog? 

Tim: That’s going to be record three, all analog.

Sam: Yeah, we’re thinking about the next set of songs being in a not-too-dissimilar process from the last one we did together, in that we’re working off of the demos and layering on top of that. Drums are the most important thing to record in a studio for us.

Lora-Faye: Correct.

Tim: So I think that’s what we’ll do. We’ll do drums [in the studio].

Sam: I mean, it would always be such a hoot to go into the studio and have less of a plan. That’d be really fun, because we’ve never really done that. It’s just about finding the time.

Tim: But building off the demos: I think just because of how our process works, there’s a lot of sounds in there that I think have become very embedded in our psyche as it pertains to certain songs. And they’re either hard to reproduce or there isn’t a point to reproducing them because they’re cheap. [Laughs.] So I think we’re going to end up having a lot of that carry over, and add some live drums. We keep meeting people who are on the trajectory of, “Yeah, I used to do a lot of studio time recording, but now I’m moving more towards bedroom recording.”

Sam: It nets pretty similar results if you know what you’re doing.

Lora-Faye: Well, I think one of the things that was such a cool tension on your record was half the songs really feel like they honored and actually incorporated a lot of original parts from your demos, and then the other half of the songs were first and foremost people in a room, a band. It really felt like they came from that space and not from the bedroom demo space. And I feel like, at least for me, one of the exciting challenges of working on that record with you is finding the ways in which those two worlds spoke to each other and having them overlap. You know, having those live drums come in on the demo-ier tunes, having voices from the demos come in on the band tunes and figuring out how they were in conversation with each other. I’d be curious to hear — and it sounds like this is what you’re planning with this next record — the next Iteration of playing around with that tension between you guys being both a band that is interested in live performance and band dynamics, and then also very much being this duo of people who make freaky, weird shit in your bedroom.

Tim: [Laughs.] Yeah, I think that’s right.

Sam: It’s just been so fun to generate this time around, knowing what we know now, and be able to push things further. When we get to the point where we can share it with you, I’m gonna be, like, dying. [Laughs.] I’m going to die, then I’m going to have a Negroni, and then I’ll come back to life and we’ll chat about it. 

Lora-Faye: [Laughs.] Great.

(Photo Credit: left, Tayler Smith; right, Merissa Blitz)