By: Kelly Stith
Influenced by noise rock and Japanese fashion, writer and musician Julien is not afraid to break molds and has an eclectic sense of style that subverts normative aesthetic boundaries. With a love and appreciation for art from a young age, Julien’s diverse tastes have become their creative signature. In this interview with contributing writer Kelly Stith, Julien shares their thoughts on their initial influences, their favorite bands and fashion companies, and how they see their intersection between style and music.
Kelly: What led you to get interested in fashion and music?
Julien: I can vividly remember being in the backseat of the car listening to a Modest Mouse song when I was maybe four or five. It was really beautiful to me. I continued to get into music as a kid in the early or mid-2000s just as YouTube was becoming a thing. I was watching music videos and one of the bands I got interested in was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I love them. Karen O and Nick Zinner were both cool to me too. They made me think, “Oh you can be like that.” That's where I developed a lot of ideas about fashion, but I wasn't exactly knowledgeable about it yet. That happened as I got older and started researching brands and history.
Kelly: What were some of your initial music and style inspirations?
Julien: It was such a mess at the start, because I was just listening to anything that was interesting to me. It was anything from Modest Mouse to Basement Jaxx. It seemed to me that their music sprawled over into their cover art.
Kelly: What are some of your favorite fashion companies or brands?
Julien: There’s one brand I like, Jennyfax, which is based in Japan. The stuff John Galliano [the creative director of Maison Margiela] makes is a nice fit for me. And of course, a lot of Japanese street fashion brands. Like right now, I'm wearing this white top; it looks sort of like a doily. It's from a brand called Candy Stripper.
Kelly: What would you say are some of your favorite bands and musicians that you've been listening to lately?
I've been listening to a lot of bands like Pg.99, The Blood Brothers, and The Locust. Today I was listening to Fad Gadget. I look at what those bands do as an aesthetic influence. They have a strange visual component going on, which is also broadly related to the early 2000s with bands like Black Dice and the whole Rhode Island noise scene, like Arab on Radar. All of those bands and their visuals were fascinating because they were all going to the same design school. They were doing a whole weird, colorful kind of violent psychedelia.
Kelly: How do you see the connection between fashion and music? What does that mean to you?
Julien: So many bands do it in so many different ways. The Locust have an anti-fashion statement. They would go on stage wearing ugly reformulations of Kamen Rider costumes that made them look like locusts. It’s this weird 50s B-movie thing which matches their really fast, really ugly synth sound which incorporates some grindcore.
That presentation for the audience is what makes the fashion and music cross section so interesting to me. A lot of times, bands just think, “We want to look good,” or things like that. Of course, I would like to look cool and sound good, but it's only interesting to me if there's tension present. Like Iggy Pop, how he would move on stage. That's not necessarily fashion, but it is a visual component. It’s not about “authenticity,” it's about projecting something and using yourself as the projector. The ability to mobilize yourself towards complicating what your music is doing is an exciting aspect.
Skinny Puppy are a good reference too because they’re also drawn to things I'm attracted to in art, like early surrealist works by Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. There's a dissident posture in their work.
Kelly: What would you say is something that's part of your, “go-to” outfit? Or that you rely on as part of your aesthetic?
Julien: I'm always very interested in 1960s fashion; I keep those silhouettes in mind. Another thing I'm prone to doing when creating an outfit is excessive layering; I just like wearing a lot of stuff. The way it acts as an obfuscation is cool to me.
Kelly: Is there a specific musical subgenre or fashion subculture that you’re really drawn to?Julien: I move around a lot. A few years ago, what I was really attracted to musically was electronic music, like DJ mixes of jungle music. LTJ Bukem and stuff like that. But for most of my life, I've been drawn toward excessive, almost annoying music. Noise rock has been with me since before even high school. I was hearing stuff like that and not really seeking it out; I would just happen into it. Even when I was listening to my mom's Bauhaus records, my favorite songs were the weird and harsh ones where it's just tinny guitar sounds.
Kelly: Do you have a typical method of recording music?
Julien: When writing music, most of the recording process for instruments is entirely digital. As a riff comes into my head, I can just get on the computer and write that out in MIDI and go from there.
But with recording vocals, there's more of a routine for that. I want to “wake up” my voice so it doesn’t sound funny or whatever. I try to drink tea during and before. I also do some working out; Leg lifts and that kind of thing. It helps me wake up and helps with the diaphragm.
Kelly: How about your style routine?
For styling, that's a more difficult process. With vocals, you can do it a million times and just end up frustrated, but with makeup and getting ready there's a much worse time constraint. It’s exhausting in a different way because you’re thinking, “I have to look good for other people.” There's a sense of labor in it.
Kelly: Is there a piece of fashion or style advice you would give someone, or is there something people should know that you wish you knew earlier?
Julien: You should only buy things that can last a long time, that you really like, and that you can put in any context you want; whatever that means to you. Of course, people are always going to have their own spin on things, but having enough basics that are high enough quality to last you for all of your life is really important, and that's where you should start accruing clothing from.
If you're focusing on trends, you should look at things that move between trends really easily. And if there’s a style of clothing you really like that's “out of fashion,” just pick that hill and die on it. For example, I still like skinny jeans and I feel like they're coming back now.
Kelly: What genre of music do you play and where can people find it?
Julien: l’m on SoundCloud as HospitalTerrorizer and I'm also on Bandcamp and Spotify.
I make synth punk that has a lot of variance in it. The first two releases that are out right now, they’re very weird, because I was engaging with a bunch of things like general MIDI sounds and I just wanted to see how to record with vocals. I wasn't able to program tom fills how I wanted, so I said, “I'll just sample Killing Joke and Joy Division.” But now I’m writing really fast hardcore. I like catchy stuff. Or songs that have that tension of consonant sections followed by bizarre dissonance. I feel like I've dialed that to ten recently. But it's still there in the earlier stuff; there's some connective tissue.
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