is waif
185668232
A few blocks from the L train in Bushwick sits an apartment building. Like many apartment buildings in Brooklyn, it’s attached to a row of other apartment buildings, each indistinguishable from the rest. I enter one gate and stand on the steps. I text iAm, the person I’m meeting, to let him know I’m outside. He emerges from beneath the stairs. “Zach?” He asks. It’s me. We’ve only met once before, about a year ago, and I’ve been following him on Facebook since, another profile in my periphery. I meet people like this all the time, attending performances, talking with them briefly and agreeing we should add each other on Facebook or other social media, and then never really crossing paths again - Facebook is inconsequential enough to allow this to happen. Surprisingly enough, Facebook is what brought me back to iAm.
iAm performs as Avant Abstract Alchemical Activist, 185668232. “I’ve been using those terms for five years — more than that,” he explains. “And this has been more consistent than ‘noise’ or ‘glitch’ or ‘emo’ or ‘psych trans’ or any music words to describe my sound.” I’ve seen iAm perform once before. We take a second to try to pin down which performance we met at, a task that proves difficult, but we ultimately figure it out. I tell him that, when I saw him, he was performing with someone else, holding t-shirts up to a camera whose feed was being projected live onto the back wall. I ask him to describe what he does —is he making music or something different? “Thank you for making that distinction,” says iAm, grateful that I’ve recognized what he does as unique.
“I feel like a fucking national terrorist but all I did was post a picture of a boob.”
“The avant part,” he lays out for me, “is the ‘what did you just do?’ - the edge of understanding.” iAm exudes avant-ness, not in a dangerous or pompous artiste kind of way, but as someone with a vision of the mainstream that feels like a synthesis of the zeitgeist into futurism. It’s easy to fall into iAm’s orbit - his vocabulary is challenging, but only in that it’s more thoughtful than the colloquialisms I default to. In his explanation of Avant Abstract Alchemical Activism, he cites memes, not as a means of making a joke between near strangers, but as a way to contextualize the lofty in the concrete. The internet being just as intangible as it is tangible, this comparison is important.
“I feel like a fucking national terrorist but all I did was post a picture of a boob.” I reached out to iAm for an interview after reading his account of being in what he calls Facebook Jail. “It was actually a video of my live performance,” he explains. “Fourth of July, so everyone is going to be a little rowdier. But [the performers] were professionally body painted. It looked like they were wearing skin tight clothing, but nothing explicit.”
The video was deleted from Facebook, and upon petitioning Facebook’s decision to remove the content, they first suspended his artist page and ultimately deactivated it. “My entire archive from the last decade, everything, the last ten years of my artwork, gone. Apparently it’s still in their system, but I don’t have access to my own intellectual property.” According to the ever-so-sneaky and ever-so-mandatory Terms and Conditions checkbox at the signup of every social media platform, what you post as a user belongs to the platform, rather than you as an individual. When your content is flagged, and in this case subsequently removed, without a backup saved offline, that material is gone. “Every time I see someone online just vaguely not giving a fuck online - omg you don’t know if you lose this shit, you’re fucked.”
Seeing as iAm has never had any problems with online censorship before this instance, I was curious what made this instance such an anomaly with extreme consequences. He thinks his work fell victim to an internet troll who flagged the content from several accounts. Effectively running the 185668232 page up the Facebook flagpole. From there, iAm posits the Facebook employee assigned to his profile review was having a bad day and turned this “Community Violation” into their personal project.
I offer an alternative that feels essential to the consumption of any artwork - that a zeros and ones approach was applied to a subjective work, that regardless of the degree to which the content was “explicit,” the protocol at Facebook runs closer to “better safe than sorry.” iAm tells me that some of his peers suspect a conspiracy, but that he himself doesn’t subscribe to that idea. “Conspiracies are just sloppy companies,” he says.
“The Abstract,” iAm continues, “is my concept-based work - you can actually feel it right-brained, what I’m doing, when I’m actually doing something. ‘Oh shit this is what it feels like to shave,’” —sometimes, he records the sounds of his shave kit to use as samples during his performances — “It’s boring, but those sounds are cool though.” These are what he refers to as lowercase sounds, “tiny sounds that if on stage you tried to amplify them, it would become feedback.” I point to an iron that’s on the floor next to some of his recording gear. I ask if he samples the iron, a lowercase sound if there ever was one. To my surprise, the iron just happens to be in the right place at the right time, but he says I’ve inspired him to try it out.
Typically, at a performance, iAm will, “sit down and record the ghosts. My spiritual friends say I’m cleansing rooms when I go to a room and compose it. They say the room feels better when I leave, especially when I give them a copy of what I made.” What iAm does is in some way informed by music, but it’s clear that “music” is a reductive and incongruous term for 185668232.
iAm practiced music growing up, referring to himself as primarily a drummer. “I had ADHD and would tap on everything.” His self- described individual minimalist sound design builds from his training in music theory, “tak[ing] these concepts and bring[ing] them together into a pop scenario. Using these unique styles and applying the aesthetics of glitch noise and vapor to make it special.” The application of aesthetic to sound points to one of the tenets of 185668232: the assertion that the future of audio and the future of video rely on the increased entwining of the two until neither medium stands distinct from the other - a trend iAm attributes to the rise of social media.
This weaving of audio and video greatly contributes to iAm’s live performances as well. “I’m getting really high on doing Spotify and YouTube DJ and VJ (video jockeying). Video has become the standard for multimedia consumerism. If there’s no music video for the music, you’re like, ‘this is not professional, but I like who you are.’” With this mindset in place, iAm then uses his lowercase capture techniques to sample his location. “I’ll build a whole set from those lowercase sounds in the room. Venues love it. When this becomes a more standard medium, people are going to have so much fun. Rather than installing your typical Roland 808 ‘boom-bap’ machine, you’re actually using the sounds in the room to create an ambience. I sample the ghosts, the people, I’ll play a couple songs remixed and remastered, show it off, normal requests, mangle that into a set, special especially if I go quicker and don’t talk too much on the mic.”
Similarly to iAm’s commitment to the symbiosis of audio and video, I am captivated by how iAm’s URL presence is closely woven to his IRL presence. Without the internet, there is no live show. What’s so devastating about iAm’s page being deleted is that not only is his decade-long archive of music and video no longer there, he now has no access to the community he has carefully curated via his artwork. “It looks like I’m a brand new art project that started July 20th,” he tells me. “I’m an artist, I’d rather create than socialize, but the art scene is made up of socialization, I do the bare minimum by going out and performing and I don’t go and hang out personally unless it’s someone’s birthday or someone’s in the hospital and I have to give them my energy and support.” For iAm, the internet gives him an opportunity to make connections on a global scale and using tactics he has worked to hone through his art: “You get to control the silence.”
iAm talks with me about the bars he frequently plays, in Brooklyn or otherwise, as sort of avatars for the real community he finds online. He notes that IRL trolls are not silenceable. “You can walk away, but that’s how you get a stalker. Facebook is helping us learn how to handle these people in the real world:” the formal, quasi-lawyer tone of voice we all adopt when the guidelines we as users set for our own online social communities are breached. On the other side of this, when the platform for the community falls away, so does the community. “I create music to deal with reality, I use music to go out into reality, if I go to a show, if you saw me at a
show that I wasn’t performing at, you’d see I’m actually really uncomfortable there. I would try to get totally trashed just to deal with it, but I wanna leave.”
This certainty in his social contract may be borne from anxiety, but iAm has flipped the picture to entreat this self-awareness as part of his project. “Alchemical is understanding my reality - I have a good grasp on my reality. I know when I’m going to die, basically. A lot of creative people feel that. I’m probably going to be very old and I’m trying to set that up to be very comfortable for me when I’m old.” iAm tells me that this notion comes from the volume of waking hours he spends actively creating, a work ethic manifested by the backlog of lowercase sound recordings he has on hand as a result of the endless fascination he has with the world. In an effort to understand what’s at the heart of this project for me as a consumer, I ask who this work is for - a mass audience or a niche audience? He assures me it’s for a mass audience, but with the caveat that those masses haven’t been born yet.
“People who need to know where humanity came from are very bored in the future. They don’t have time to sit down and read a book, they have audiobooks and those books are always censored and turned into some sort of promotion of an individual in the book. It’s so rare for someone to talk about what life was like. Now it’s like an activist thing, like journalism, self-bio. This is basically a receipt I’m leaving for people with the most contemporary things I can find on the planet. My experience on the planet is not too unique, although maybe by me writing about it and exploiting the void and showing off that the shit that sucks can be your largest and most sturdy stance. You got something terrible in your life? You can launch off that. Don’t create something terrible for yourself.”
Though many of the four characteristics of the 185668232 project overlap, as they are designed to do, the Alchemical and the Activism blur together most for me. These aspects feel like the music and the video iAm suggests will be so entwined we will forget they ever were separate. The understanding of one’s own reality seems tantamount to enacting change at any scale. Activism as a concept can take many different forms, but I find iAm’s definition simplest. “Activism is doing it rather than thinking about it, talking about it,” he borrows a line from a track on his latest release, VaPORWave, or maybe he borrowed it from someone else first. Activism, in this sense, is enaction, plain and simple. No bells and whistles, just a call and response. Understanding activism as the final phase of a cycle that understands and requires an intense and erratic synthesis of information is incredibly liberating, for me and I think for iAm too. “When you combine it all together, it really doesn’t feel like anything other than a meme.”
And this activism always looks different, depending on the circumstances. For iAm and for me as the journalist, our interest lies with bringing to light that “Community Guidelines” are relative and Expression is Radical. Out of the erasure of his Facebook page, iAm’s aim is still to create. During my 90 minute interview, he records sound and video which he has since utilized to create a new music video chronicling these last few months (premiering now in Waif Magazine). From here, he’s planning a trip with his band out to Menlo Park, California to visit the Facebook HQ, hard drive in hand and ask for a quick offload of his archive.
In the meantime, iAm is looking to alternatives. He tells me about the Contacts Book on Apple’s iOS and how we can connect to each other by keeping a blog in the notes of our individual contact “profiles” in order to avoid mainstream social media platforms. Or even simpler: “just use text messages.” iAm notes that to promote his upcoming events, he is and will continue to pay for his posts to be circulated, just to account for the audience that is no longer built into his profile.
Despite the circumstances, and as it seems is a direct result of his creative practice, iAm seems optimistic: “I’ve learned how to deal with stress in a way that no one can take from me. The only way I’d die younger is if someone tried to kill me. Jail is not gonna kill me, a mental hospital is not gonna kill me, I’ll never be homeless on the street because I’m prolifically creating art. Someone always has a place for me. I’m not a troublemaker, I’m not making trouble. That’s how I know I’ll be stuck on this asteroid for awhile. Do yoga if you’re gonna live forever.”