Interview with Zan Hoffman
Zan Hoffman started a cassette label in 1984 and has been doing extensive sound works under different names (e.g. Zanstones) and international collaborations under a variety of names since then. Zan, originally from Louisville, Kentucky lives in Spain and works primarily across Europe. |
How did the DIY activity of your own collaborative work and your label affect your mindset in terms of how you function now and how you are feeling about music and arts in general?
It cannot be underestimated how deeply my home taping has influenced both my current trajectory and how I approach the arts. DIY spirit helped me break free of systems not built to accommodate unbridled individuality. So running my own label including the “full stack” of production gave me skill sets out of necessity. My 20c jobs after college were largely in the advertising and graphic design fields and I was constantly taking advantage of technologies and supplies at my disposal to further my DIY exploits. At the same time I was learning dynamics of this field which helped with philosophical and psychological grounding. Integral to this is what we now call “personal branding” - or as I say “Apple has no monopoly on skillful branding”.
Equally important is to have peers that are my favorite artists whose ideas and work influence and inspire me. It’s important to me not to gauge my efforts in reference to stars and famous people because I can never close the gap between their successes predicated on them being part of system that has afforded them commercial opportunities I won’t ever have. But seeing my friends “succeed” has always given me hope. Their feedback about my efforts has been equally positive.
The outcome is that I’m comfortable in my own skin as an artist. So any remaining nervousness is a natural consequence of trips into the unknown.
Every artist has a starting point where it's all downhill from there? What were your or were your most pivotal moments?
I’m kinda thankful in some way that I did not peak too early as an artist. So each pivotal bit was another step forward but not a destination in itself. I remember the thrills of having my tapes played on radio shows in USA and abroad. Getting my tapes released by other labels was a big boost. Francisco López dragging me to Spain for the Zan Francisco tour in 1994 was enormously thrilling. Having an international breakthrough always meant more to me than any local successes. When I was featured on a Famlende Forsøk vinyl was a hint of how good it feels to have works in that format. My albums Bodycocktail Starring Skjit-Lars and our Bodycocktail All Stars 7” felt like I had finally arrived. My Norwegian peeps got me on wax! My most recent crowning moments have happened since I started my creative trajectory in Lithuania. How putting my best foot forward there has paid off still thrills me.
Linking up with contemporary dance theater Aura in Kaunas, Lithuania offered me such a grand opportunity to shine in a professional setting. It had been ages since I played classical violin and to come back to doing work “for theatre seats” was a treat I never saw coming.
Collaborations are one of the many points of your career. Which ones were interesting and most memorable?
My label was not even a year old before I felt the need and had the opportunity to collaborate by post with others and I took to it like a fish to water. Forty years later I’m still into it. My first in-person collaboration was with Hal McGee and Debbie Jaffe at their studio in Indianapolis where they ran the Cause & Effect tape label. What became my 3rd Zanstones release came out of a session of just a few days in 1984. The work “Crawling Up The Wall To Trip Over The Ceiling” still retains much of its charm.
My very early postal work with Ken Clinger when he was running his Bovine Productions label in Pine Street in California I have great fondness for. Combining my ZIDSICK label name with his as Zidbovinesick we did a whimsical combination of my experimental approach with his classic autoharp musics.
Two California artists loom large in my experimental collaborations - Minóy and Damian “Agog”. Bisiglia. Here I got deep and heavy with perhaps 100 releases featuring our works.
But likely the most personal and long- running work was with Mike “Mystery Hearsay” Honeycutt. We visited each other in Memphis and Louisville (a 5 hour drive) and our in-person recordings were subjected to endless reworking from 1986 until Mike passed away last year. Good humored and wide ranging our “Larb” project came from funky set of inside jokes based on the 1990’s trendiness for 4 letter band names (Lush, Blur, Ride…) and our passion for crazy ethnic foods. There was a very spicy Thai dish we loved called Larb, and the restaurant in Memphis we ate at had a menu full of delicious typos. The dish was billed as being “Slikely Hot” promising to “make you cry silently” - we used these in our titles.
I’ve done so many international collaborations it’s near impossible to mention highlights but one of the biggest joys was Kazuhiro Ohtsuka would send me a tape from Japan with the words “finish and return” written on it. As long as the envelope would withstand it we would reuse the same yellow mailing package for years on end. These would arrive randomly across a few decades. No letters. No other communications - just pure work.
Since I started touring in Europe my Nearly Twins recordings at my buddy David Chazam’s house in Brussels and my aforementioned Skjit-Lars work above the Arctic Circle in Norway bring me the most pride.
What is your instrument, your musical voice?
With so many years of musical activity how is your approach changing towards the production?
A decade ago a member of the Pendennis Club asked me my favorite instrument and before I could answer he correctly guessed - the synthesizer! And technology has unleashed decades of hardware in software form eliminating my need for gear. Despite touchscreen knobs being nearly useless in performance there are other innovations to compensate.
I view my experimental work differently but shifting all my studio processes to GarageBand has been a stellar investment. I’m allergic to mastering the fine points of studio production so ever since I moved to Europe I went iOS for everything. I have an iMac now and then to serve as backup and when I need to do elaborate graphic design.
For a few years I was transitioning to leaving behind the computer I would remix all my works on the iMac. I moved to Lithuania and this option disappeared. Took a while for the iPhones to be good enough to use for vocals but with my iPhone X I made that final leap. One thought I have with Apple is they have obsessed over the “full stack” of hardware and software employing top talent in the field.
I’ve always had a bit of a DIY mindset with production and got used to being happy with my cassettes and how they came out. So it’s not hard for me to recognize things as “good enough” - where the distinction in quality between what I call acceptable and what’s professional standards is lost on the general listener.
It the various PA systems at shows of mine that are the final proof. If it sounds great there I don’t need to hassle over improving production values. I just played a show in Valencia where things sounded amazing. So, as I was joking with my neighbor yesterday- the people who can tell the difference - it matters nothing to me to have them as fans.
Distribution is the key these days? How are you feeling about physical releases and the digital distribution?
My achilles heel has been and always will be distributing my works. The need for a physical edition, beyond how good it feels to my ego, is of dwindling significance. I’m surely shooting myself in the foot by now publishing on Spotify. I put my recent works up on Bandcamp and have created various forms of merchandise with download options instead of physical media.
It’s a luxury when people buy my works but my experience with physical media in the 21c is it only sells at shows. The postal costs now make it a dilettante’s game to collect physical media like vinyl and tapes have lost the two things that made them so meaningful to the last quarter of the 20c: their ubiquity and the cheapness.
And part of my streamlining of live shows has been to minimize the weight and bulk of what I travel with. So I design still for CD and tape sized editions but rarely do they hit print any longer.
Getting others to make editions of my works is good for my vanity but doesn’t move the needle for my fame or fortune up to this point.
How has working outside of your context been in terms of cultural differences and pros and cons of those? I was thinking of your experience in the Baltic states and Spain.
Phillip B. Klinger was recently mentioning this aspect of my work commenting that it’s not a novelty game for me. The most obvious thing to do is sample and appropriate aspects and I can’t bring myself to go there. Galicia is the first place I fell totally in love with. And that meant a multitude of things that shifts over time as my passions develop.
What intrigues and inspires me are the exotic and curious things that set these places apart from others. The freaks and their quirks across time are speaking my language. For instance the notion of the Galego playwright Ramón Valle-Inclan of Esperpento resonates perfectly with me. So I ask myself what these things say about the people who live there?
And it’s the answer to that question that informs how my good humor and artistic skills will shine this light back on the locals.
So in my view there are two mountains in front of me - a language mountain and a cultural one. So by climbing the cultural one I’m working on getting at the essence of Lithuanians and Galegos. Using this language gets to my people on a level language isn’t pertinent to.
The cons are the other mountain. Not having language skills means barriers are everywhere. These manifest themselves usually in mechanical instances of not getting how others do things, from knowing how public transportation works to knowing search terms to get to information.
Was watching my Korean friend Lee of Aura dance theater one day enter Korean characters to search for videos of artists he likes and the barrier became so clear in a moment. How would I ever do a search for the same thing?
So the cons of language for me have two benefits. I don’t have an information bias when approaching the unknown. I’m allowed to think freely when I cannot easily determine what is going on. And it makes me work harder to overcome ignorance. The reality that these two things are error-ridden I use to creative advantage. There’s nothing keeping me from inventing fantastical explanations and in there is the kernel for artistic fun.
It’s too much fun pulling the legs of my friends. So an assumed ignorance has a charming quality as well as possibly messing with people’s heads. And frankly if someone leaves an encounter with me more confused than before then I’ve done good work. Getting inside people’s head is an art form.
For those who don’t know me my unspoken caveat is that I think it’s childish to be nasty or unpleasant to create an impression. Because if I’ve broken through some barriers and guards that people put up against the world I’m uncomfortable as they are if I take advantage at this point.
What are you working on currently and what are the plans for the near future?
There’s a balance in my creative life between self-sufficiency and collaboration. DIY makes us masters of all trades and not beholden to others to see our projects across the finish line. But there’s a risk of navel gazing when the whole creative and production cycle is self-led.
I accept a good number of invitations to collaborate and I instigate a few of them myself. I’ve got a great friend in Santiago for the ages who I’m discussing doing just a couple hit songs with. Alfonso Espiño is such a precious character whose passion for 60’s psychedelia is a wonder to behold. He’s long been my man for translating songs into Galego. One hard learned lesson in Spain is to only pressure propel to do things they fell skilled at and so I’ve kept my powder dry, as the expression goes, with friends now ~ only the high level plans do I bug friends about. So I told Alfonso, who is very busy with other projects, that we don’t need to form a supergroup. No need to go on a big tour. But we do need a couple hit songs.
I’m in the early stages of discussing a collaboration with my Kentucky friend Reginald Stockum about working together on Season 3 of my graphic novel Hórreo No Espazo. He’s a musician, author and publisher of his own books and our shared passion for corn could be a fertile ground for imagining a new plot for Hórreo (corn drying barns of Galicia) spaceships.
Somewhere along the line I have a wealth of ideas for when I return to Kaunas, Lithuania including a third collaboration with their contemporary dance theater Aura. I’m eager to pick up where I left off in my talkshow podcast Kaunasapians which I began last fall under the auspices of my Kaunas 3022 residency. Other contacts in the creative fields there are due exploration for collaborations.
The one thing I learned with the Kaunas 3022 experience is meeting in person with the people running cultural organizations is how I move mountains. There was an adorable learning moment for my Kaunasapians interns when I explained there is nothing to achieved by making advanced contact by email or phone with people running museums. I just arrive unannounced in person. The worst outcome is this isn’t a good time and I can reschedule from there. But in reality, I find the people do have a little time for me. And in this moment I use a very important skill - respecting that these people’s time means something to them. So I try to keep to high level points and don’t use it as a social occasion.
Im fundraising to ship my home taping archive from USA to Galicia and to that end I encourage people to support me and get some personal enjoyment by getting some of my recordings on Bandcamp. Furthermore there is a great deal of works I’ve not put online. If you’ve gone down a wormhole and found something you are curious about that I’ve done which isn’t available please contact me personally.
So there is always archive work to be done and that probably a lifelong commitment.
In summation there is backward and forward looking work. Inward and outward facing activities. And a great openness to allowing unforeseen opportunities to give me new purpose.
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