This December brings with it the release of two different works titled Lisa 2, v.1.0. The first is a novel by Nicholas Rombes about a playwright working on a new project, the a possibly haunted computer she begins working on, and the surreal occupation of the playwright’s husband. The other is an album by Mike Shiflet designed to act as a soundtrack and companion piece to the book in question. Shiflet and Rombes conversed about their respective works, their collaboration, and — as the saying goes — What It All Means.
Mike Shiflet: I really appreciated the tonal shifts in Lisa 2, v1.0. David and Lisa’s voices initially feel authentically unique and the jump from one to the other is quite abrupt. What really fascinated me though is that Lisa, who we hear from second, starts sounding more and more like her husband David as her account goes on. I imagine it’s hard enough to establish a character’s voice, but what’s the process for then manipulating and distorting that and/or introducing elements of another, established character into it? Did you have any specific inspiration for this? Or techniques you drew on?
Nicholas Rombes: That’s nice to hear about the authenticity of the voices. Even though I pretty much had the entire story arc in my head, I deliberately wrote those sections separately so that I could stay in character, so to speak. I think Lisa’s voice begins to creep more towards David’s because, for all their differences, they’re both living under the reign of paranoia, sharing the same suspicions, but coming at them from different angles. In this regard, Lisa 2 was more inspired by films than other books, specifically David Lynch’s Lost Highway, where there is this exchange involving the husband and wife and a detective:
Detective: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Detective: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Although Fred’s wife doesn’t share her husband’s paranoia, and perhaps psychosis, in a sense she does simply by tolerating it, enabling it, and choosing to exist in his narrative web. I wanted Lisa 2 to capture this co-dependent dynamic, but sympathetically. The Lisa 2 computer is simply the object that magnifies the couple’s warped relationship.
Both Lisa and David see themselves as creators: Lisa as a playwright and David as a re-writer of history through his small “reiterations” machine. In this sense, both of them are destroyers, as creating something involves manipulating, distorting, and vandalizing reality as it is. There’s a film critic I love—André Bazin—who, in the 1940s and 50s, argued against montage/editing in film in favor of the long, unbroken take, as the long take did not “break up” and distort time, like editing does. Bazin understood that the act of creation in Modernism—with its distortions of time and place and chronology—was a destroyer of realism. In a sense, both Lisa and David are punished for their creative acts which involve the blatant rearrangement of reality.
You use the words “manipulating” and “distorting” in your question, and, knowing very little about how you create your music, do those terms apply at all to your process?
Shiflet: Funny enough the answer for Lisa 2 is a bit different than what I would normally say. I typically prefer to create an all-encompassing wall of noise – something maybe not as harsh or grating as a noise purist would prefer, but very dense – and then work my way backwards from there. That might mean a frequency jumps out that could be emphasized with some guitar or a particular layer of static happens to feel just right right in the moment. Finishing anything is often more a reductive, filtering process than one of distortion and manipulation. Those are more like the pre-work.
But for this project, I was starting from a different place. Instead of a formless aural mass, I had your words as the base and rather than pulling from the ether I was trying to do justice to the imagery. That meant starting from a different, often simpler and slightly more musical place and building up, layering until everything felt right. That probably highlighted some of the individual engineering tricks more than I would normally.
Speaking of that translation process, when I sent you Handshake, the first recording I made for the soundtrack, I had made it explicitly thinking about the handshake scene in the book: There are two elements, just slightly out of sync with each other, awkwardly failing to coalesce. Your feedback that it captured “the way Lisa and David find themselves spinning in their own minds” made me rethink my approach for the remaining tracks and consider how I should incorporate larger macro themes – disconnect, specifically – while also honing in on the fragments that jumped out at me as inspiration and I tried to do that in some small way with most of the remaining tracks, mostly manipulating the stereo field and the left/right channels.
Do you have a favorite phrase or scene that captures some of that disconnect in a way that might not be as immediately obvious as it is in some of the more direct accounts the characters give?
Rombes: I remember listening to Handshake when you first shared it with me and thinking, how did you get into my head?!? The sound felt so organic to that specific scene that, in the future, “remembering things my own way . . . not necessarily the way they happened,” I might actually relate a version where you wrote the track first, and then I wrote the scene in question later.
For me, a key moment involving David’s disconnect comes late in the book, as Lisa recounts how David’s obsession with the Lisa 2 computer obliterated all other connections: “But for David, it had everything to do with Lisa 2. In fact, the moments after Marin’s eyes shifted to mine, David’s shifted to the computer.” Here, David can’t even concentrate on his most precious gift: his young daughter Marin who, after seeing this, bolts over to him and offers him a page of a story she’s just written, as a way to try to pull him out of the quicksand of his darkening thoughts.
The fact that she can’t save him is, for me, the sadness of the book. And yet, the disintegration Marin witnesses between her parents is fodder for her own budding imagination. Although they don’t know it, this is Lisa and David’s gift to Marin: her fucked-up family will be the source of all the stories she will tell through her art. If the stars align, the next book, Lisa 3, v2.0 in what I hope will be a trilogy, will feature Marin as the teller of the tale, offering her own corrective to Lisa’s and David’s self-interested and unreliable versions of the Lisa 2 computer fiasco.
I’d like to ask about your process for this project. As you read the book, did ideas relating to sound come to you, and, if so, did you act on them right away, or did you wait until you finished the book before beginning? Related to that, do you save drafts or versions of the tracks you’re working on and come back to them? If so, how pronounced are the differences between early and later versions? I ask, in part, because in writing Lisa 2, parts came out fairly quickly and fully formed, while others I went back to several times to revise and tinker.
Shiflet: There were a couple instances where sounds came to me instantly, I could almost hear them while reading. I was drawn to the greenhouse right away as a place full of life, but also secrets and all the other messy stuff that comes with life – and also our personal history with the greenhouse in The Removals. In fact, it was a minor struggle not to conflate the two. Conversely, the tower: Marin’s description of the tower was so vivid, I could feel the ominous pulse I wanted to be the core of that track.
I didn’t do many drafts for this because I am prone to overthinking and complicating things into paralysis once I start down that road, but along those lines sequencing was an issue for me and there were probably four or five different track orders before the final form emerged. Despite that, Greenhouse and Tower were always the opener and closer.
Is sequencing something you wrestle with when writing or does it emerge fairly organically? I read David’s account as pretty linear, while Lisa gets to kind of pick and choose when she comments on various aspects of David’s version of events. Is framing one of those harder than the other?
Rombes: I think David’s account is more linear because he is more object-oriented than Lisa and because his world is upset by a fairly contained event: the discovery of the Lisa 2 computer. His mind works more along the lines of how I imagine an engineer’s might work, as a logical problem solver. This is mirrored in how he tells his story as he attempts to collect evidence of how Lisa is changing. He is fundamentally a rationalist.
Lisa, on the other hand, is a different story, and tells her version in a more loosely networked way in part, I think, because, as a playwright, she’s a better storyteller. “Better” isn’t the right word. Let’s just say she’s the true artist here, the playwright, someone familiar with how complex stories work, often disregarding strict chronology—“cheating with time”—I like to think of it. Lisa is more in control of the narrative which is sort of funny because although David—through his sci-fi-like reiterations—has the literal power to alter the past, it’s Lisa’s ability to tell stories better that makes her the victor in their struggle.
You mentioned our film The Removals, which we made in Columbus under the umbrella of Two Dollar Radio back in 2016. Lisa 2 is part of that same universe—the greenhouse, the reiterations, the anxieties about how creativity necessarily corrupts and poisons the realism of the natural world “as it is”—these are all ideas swimming back and forth between Lisa 2 and The Removals.
This is probably a naïve or poorly expressed question, but how do you think of your tracks spatially, if at all? I ask this because when I’m writing something like Lisa 2, I’m dimly aware on some level of where I am in the unfolding story and, as someone who came of age in the analog, pre-cable TV, pre-Internet era, my foundational narratives—whether from TV, film, or music—are discrete and finite units: a TV show, a movie, a song, with stable and relatively defined beginnings, middles, and ends. What I admire and find transfixing about your music is how it happily disorients me when it comes to a secure, familiar, spatial sense. Something like The Betrayals would be an example. Feel free to make sense of this weird question however you like.
Shiflet: Don’t worry, my answer will be expressed equally poorly. The idea I am most fascinated with is that there is so much happening in the world, the universe, simultaneously. This overwhelming hyper-network of every human and non-human experience running non-stop. Culture – pop and otherwise – factor into that in my mind too, but they are usually less direct influences and more like ingredients in an over-complicated soup. The Silver Jews and orca migration might butt heads with Toru Takemitsu, deep space images from James Webb, and the sound of my neighbor’s kids outside.
The last work of art that singularly inspired me was the Lucrecia Martel film Zama. I immediately recorded six tracks after watching it, but never did anything with them – at least not in whole. I deconstructed them and used some of the parts for other projects.
It’s astute that you highlighted The Betrayals in this regard because it is one of two previously recorded tracks incorporated into the soundtrack. It had been sitting around a while without a home and I decided to include it here and give it that title because it felt like its own self-contained meta-narrative inside the collection of tracks.
Getting back to your inspirations – an item I already had on my shortlist of potential topics – something I’ve always appreciated is your ability to pay homage to and incorporate the media you reference with such delightful obfuscation. Everything gets run through the ‘Nick’ filter and comes out almost unrecognizable. The Lost Highway scene is an almost too perfect encapsulation of this that beat my question to the punch. So instead of asking for example, I guess I will ask if there is any source material or inspiration you think would particularly surprise readers? Anything where the journey is so convoluted or inherently personal that it would be imperceptible without being explicitly pointed out?
Rombes: As someone who suffers from, for lack of a better phrase, imposter syndrome, I appreciate this question because it makes me a little uncomfortable, which is a good space to be in, as I tend to work best and be most productive in states of unease. This probably comes from something I don’t directly write about: the long and bitter break-up between me (and my siblings) and our parents.
For many years I strove, with unhealthy desperation, to prevent this from happening, and in this emotional and psychological cauldron I forged what I consider a defensive weapon: writing. However, the further I get from this family catastrophe, the more I fear I’ll lose the anger or whatever it’s called that boils beneath what I create. I think Lisa 2 is maybe the softest thing I’ve written, maybe even a little bit sentimental. I struggle to trust myself enough to accept this new dimension, but a book like Lisa 2 had its own way with me, so I really had no choice but to follow this new, more tender path.
Shiflet: Thanks for sharing that. I was planning to ask a question about family – in a completely different context – but wasn’t sure if we’d circle around to it and am glad I didn’t because that’s more insightful than whatever generic question I would have asked. You certainly did a great job of showing the dynamics and perspectives at play in an extremely fraught familial situation. It makes me even more curious to see what insights Marin’s version of events will reveal.
Rombes: I hope Marin’s version see the light of day. I’ve been extremely fortunate—and lucky—that my work has found a home in indie publishers like Two Dollar Radio, CLASH Books, and Calamari, who take risks with books like mine in the true punk, DIY spirit, so my hope is that Marin’s story, in Lisa 3, v 2.0, sees the light of day down the road. But it doesn’t really matter. I’m going to write it anyway, even if I am its solitary reader.
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