Operator Music Band is the longstanding creative partnership between New York-based artists Dara Hirsch and Jared Hiller. Their latest EP, Four Singles, is out now.
Dara Hirsch and Jared Hiller are the founding members of the New York-based Operator Music Band; Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele are the DJ duo behind Love Injection, a music and culture zine and record label. OMB’s latest EP, Four Singles, was just released earlier this spring, so to celebrate the two duos caught up about it, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Dara Hirsch: Something that I have been wanting to ask you guys about [is] balancing. You’re constantly putting out your zine, and you have your show on the Lot and are planning parties and traveling. It’s really admirable. You know, nightlife is not an easy thing on the body — how are you able to strike a balance where you’re also taking care of yourself?
Paul Raffaele: I guess I can’t answer that question without acknowledging our day jobs, which we both have on the side of the music stuff: I’m a graphic designer and Barbie’s an account manager, so our skills are complimentary. I was at Vice for five or so years til September 2019 when I went freelance. During that time, our passion projects were done after hours when we got home from work, so: designing the zine, preparing for the radio, setting up parties, et cetera. And it was always a dream of mine to be like, What if I could leave this 9-to-5, have a freelance design career, and then fit all the extracurricular stuff into my actual day and I could switch between work-work and work that I love? That’s basically what we did in 2019. We got a head start on the whole working from home thing. Every day is a mix of things and the lack of commuting allows for exercise, healthier eating, etc. It took a while for us to get a good balance, but we got there eventually.
Barbie Bertisch: Yeah. It took a little while for me to be able to join what became our studio — I managed a record shop for about two years [until] late 2019, following my last job kind of perma-lancing. As soon as there was enough work, I took the leap and we’ve been doing that ever since. Prior to this current iteration,we were working 10-to-6 and change for somebody else and then working from home until 1 or 2 AM most nights on our projects. Now, everything feels better integrated. So that’s kind of the preface to your question. I think we’re now a little bit older and maybe more regimented, whereas before, we were burning the candle at both ends. Now we are enjoying the fruits of this shift to consolidating our work and spending time more thoughtfully, both as DJs and as people. We definitely don’t, you know, party. We’re very tame. I don’t want to say “sober,” but we’re there for the music and we don’t really drink or partake in anything that can compromise that — no judgment otherwise. But we have a lot of work to do and we pick where and when we let loose.
Dara: Right.
Barbie: But yeah, it also helps to have a person with management skills around, because I’m very regimented with time.
Dara: Amazing. OK, that’s the secret. [Laughs.]
Paul: [Laughs.] When it started, we had all this energy — we were 10 years younger, so I didn’t feel particularly exhausted working my 9-to-5 and then working into the night. But then as you get older, you listen to your body. I think the pandemic accelerated some of that slowing for everyone. When things started to re-open, we were like, “We’re not going to rush back into everything we were doing before. We’re going to take everything slow and roll things back out as it feels comfortable.” So we’re a lot less frequent than we used to be. The zine was monthly pre-pandemic, and now we’re lucky if we’re quarterly. It doesn’t feel like a permanent decision, it just feels like what’s possible with our lives right now. But hopefully that could change in the future.
Barbie: But what about you? How do you balance a creative career alongside the financial realities of living in New York?
Dara: Ugh, yeah. I mean, with time management stuff in general, I’m trying to figure out where the focus is. I basically worked from home before COVID as well, so I was sort of used to that lifestyle. Jared builds pedals and synth modules and fixes hard outboard gear, and he has a studio separate from the apartment, so that was kind of essential. Over time, we’ve switched our spots where now I have a studio that’s outside of the home and Jared’s taken over the apartment… But yeah, I wanted to ask you that legit because I’m having my own time management struggles. When I’m working on a podcast and I have to get something out, these companies that I’m working for have their own deadlines and their own schedule and I have to get it out at a certain time. Whereas creating deadlines for myself does not come as easily. I sort of need an outside force. And that’s why with our band, it really works when there’s a show. Like, “Alright, we’re going to be leaving for tour next week, we gotta work backwards and see how many rehearsals we can squeeze in.” I think having that kind of external factor forces me to be able to squeeze everything in and really take a look at what’s coming up.
Jared Hiller: Yeah. I think also, as you guys mentioned, you do have this kind of limitless energy when you’re younger, but it gets focused on so many different things. Then as you get older, you find out not just what’s feasible, but what is important. I think that if you can focus on a couple things really well and not necessarily spread yourself too thin, it is possible. But it’s about what you value. You have to ask what you want to do and what you want to finish.
Paul: I feel like every day, there’s something that the world wants you to react to. It could be really serious and or it could be really dumb — social media makes you feel like you’re never doing enough. You know, when you’re talking to a label and they start asking you to make more TikToks, and more of this, more of that…
Jared: We’ve been down that road. It never works. [Laughs.]
Paul: Yeah. The world that is demanding that of me is making me want to go the opposite way. I don’t know if I’m a millennial—
Jared: Wait, are you a geriatric millennial such as myself?
Paul: I think so, I’m 37. But I don’t know, I relate more to my Gen X friends than my Gen Z friends…
Jared: I’m 39, so I totally feel you. I think there’s a little bit of a break — people approaching 40, I think, have a different understanding of culture in a sense, because I do feel a kinship with Gen X as well.
Barbie: Yeah, same. I’m 35, but I do feel the same way. There’s a sense of everything moving at hyperspeed so when I pause to think about it, I’m like, Who does this serve? Who is the receiver on the other side, and what is the reason for doing this? If those questions lead me to answers that feel very antithetical to what I believe in, then I’m going to just plant my feet and say, “I’m not going to do that.” As an artist, especially now, I see where this may be shooting myself in the foot. Because we know what the algorithm wants, what the machine requires. But I think it ultimately has to come down to what you value. How do you each deal with that?
Jared: It’s been a long trajectory for us, because we started this band in 2014 or 2015, and we’ve gone through a couple iterations of it. It’s always been Dara and I, and it’s always been kind of a rotating cast, and at that time, it just felt like the goals were very different. The community was very different. The scene was very different. We were coming from a DIY indie rock world. You know, I go back to 2009, show booking warehouse stuff like Death by Audio, Silent Barn — that kind of cultural world. And I think the goals always change. 2014, 2015, it was like, “Oh, you want to be on one of these four labels.” And then 2017, 2018, it’s like, “Well you want to get this opening spot for this one band.” And then 2019, 2020, everything falls apart. It felt like we were building and building and building, and then the bottom completely fell out. What we want to do now has been constantly in question. Because we start getting the motivation — we love making music, we love playing music — but we really don’t know right now what form that is going to take. Because the infrastructure in which we came up, and the way we prepared ourselves to make and share art, is gone.
Barbie: Yeah, it’s a totally different world.
Jared: So we find ourselves in a place where we’re questioning what it means to continue. We want to continue this project and to make art in that way, and we just put out these singles. We got some of our favorite DJs and remixers to work with us on that, and it’s been probably one of the most successful — internally, I mean — things we’ve done so far.
Paul: That’s great.
Barbie: What do you think was different about it? I’m hearing that there were all these things about — I’m going to just call it “the indie world.” But indie today is so different from where we’re coming from. I was really into bands growing up and would go to Glasslands and all these places, and I think of the benchmarks from back then and the benchmarks being so different. You said this was the most successful — at least internally — experience releasing music so far, could that mean that now there’s no rules and you’re just going to do your own thing, and it feels better than doing what was perhaps normal before?
Dara: I think that’s exactly it.
Jared: Barbie, oh, my god. [Laughs.]
Dara: [Laughs.] You’ve cracked the code. No, you said it before — “Who am I doing this for? To what end?” I think that’s also why we gravitate towards your work and what you do, because it feels really genuine. It’s hard to foster that as a musician or a band. There’s a lot of different hats to wear as a professional musician — like as an entertainer, as a character — and it’s hard when what you want to do doesn’t line up with how these systems are set up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the set up of — there’s always talk now in dance world of, face the DJ [or] face away from the DJ. In rock, it’s always the band is on stage and everyone is facing the same direction — at the audience, at the performers. That’s why I love H0L0. Being in the round is dope as hell and just a totally different experience for us as newcomers in night life. The dance floor is where it’s at — although, I still think that there could be more of a we-all-face-each-other kind of situation. But that has been really cool. What we’re working on with our live show now is, we have our drummer who’s on an electronic drum pad, SPD, and then Jared has his modular rack with a sequencer. I’ve minimized my set over time, and now I’m doing vocals through a pedal and I’m running the drum machine.
Jared: It’s live improvisational dance music.
Dara: Live techno.
Paul: Before “EDM” really hit in the US, you didn’t have a lot of this DJ idolization. Clubs didn’t design their spaces with the DJ booth in the center, they were out of the way, sometimes up on a mezzanine with a window that could be closed. As these DJs started charting, making it on to mainstream radio, the clubs moved from a pay at the door model to a hard ticket model, much like concerts. And those customers felt entitled to be able to “see” this “performance” so things started to change in order to support this new type of clubber. The whole industry changed within a few years.
Dara: DJs as icons. So that’s an EDM thing?
Paul: Yeah. That probably changed around 2012, 2013, when David Guetta started charting.
Dara: That makes a lot of sense.
Barbie: It’s really refreshing hearing you guys talk about dance music as this new, exciting world.
Dara: Oh, yeah, we’re babies.
Barbie: Because, I think on our end — especially after the discourse of this week concerning Grimes at Coachella and just the general state of things for people who are elbow-deep in dance music discourse — it feels like a really interesting time to be a DJ.
Paul: I think there’s too much discourse. There’s more people talking than there are contributing. And like I was saying before, the internet’s asking you to react to something every single day, whether you have a real opinion about it or not. Then people feel like if they don’t say something, they’re left out, but they’re not contributing anything meaningful…
Dara: It’s a whole spiral.
Paul: It has nothing to do with the art form.
Barbie: There is a general feeling of frustration, particularly coming from seasoned participants, [over] the current state of the electronic music business. When any genre or subculture blows up, it becomes a circus. Everything is cyclical and very few things are truly new nowadays. We have all the information at our fingertips so this is easy to discover. I do think that dance music has been going through huge changes, especially post-pandemic. We had a reintroduction to the clubs, quite literally, because we couldn’t go for so long, and a new young audience was there. It opened the floodgates and all of a sudden we’re all on the same dance floor and it’s like, “Who are you?”
Dara: Yeah. How do you guys feel about that?
Barbie: I want to say that hopefully things will settle, and it’ll even out in a way, but I do think that from the bigger economic bird’s eye view, the industry is a very different place than it was when I first started clubbing and DJing. There’s room for everybody but this current dance music cash grab feels concerning.
Paul: Taking it back to you guys, it sounds like you’re inspired by all the right stuff. It’s about decentralizing the DJ and dancing together. And I think as people pass the “right stuff” down, it keeps getting better.
Dara: Yeah. It’s interesting too how — I mean, I’m sure you experienced this when you play parties in other cities, and I’m sure that as we’re kind of newcomers to New York City nightlife specifically — there’s a certain expectation that we have of these dance floors, depending on the venues. So we’re kind of like, “Ooh, I wonder what this is going to be like.” Like, we just got tickets to MUTEK in Montreal and we’re like, “Wow, I wonder what like the dance floors in other cities are going to be like.” So it’s new for us. I’m reading the Theo Parrish Blank Forms interview, and there’s this part where he’s talking about when he plays Nowadays, and how he loves the safer spaces spiel at the front. He was like, “If you’re in Detroit and you tell people how to be, they are not going to fuck with that. There’s no way that you can tell people how to act.” But yeah, the combination of being in different cities, different kinds of dance floors, newcomers in this new generation of that hyper excitement that you were just talking about in nightlife… I don’t really have a question, I’m just reflecting.
Jared: What’s interesting is — yes, you can say that Dara and I are part of this new wave of interest. But at the same time, we have our own cultural context for understanding it. I think that dance music can be a very welcoming place, and I think a lot of culture should be welcoming in that way, but there has to be an understanding of a certain etiquette. And not in a gatekeeping way, just kind of in a respectful way. I think that a lot of people come in and they’re not necessarily interested in learning, they’re just interested in being. I think that if you don’t have that interest in what has already been established and the etiquette of things, it can be a very jarring experience. And for you, as people who have been around and have watched it change, it’s funny to get all this attention on your art form. Which is good, but then also, it comes with that bad attention — or not “bad attention,” but that discourse, in a sense.
Paul: Yeah, like Beyonce’s last record, the dance record—
Jared: Oh, my god, yeah.
Paul: All of the house music history pieces that were just flat out wrong, and you just find yourself as someone who cares about this stuff like, “Wait, that’s just incorrect. Who’s the editor?” Then it becomes like a full time job to, like, police all these conversations and all this misinformation floating around, because she gave the culture such a spotlight. Which I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I do think her team did a good job of inviting relevant DJs to open her shows, commissioning great remixes…There’s a lot of good that came with that too.
Jared: Of course. I think you have to arrive in a curious and respectful place, with any culture, really. I think that’s the hope, and I hope that’s the kind of thing that we can bring to this new thing that we’re acclimating ourselves to.
