Episode 23: "ADULT CONTEMPORARY" feat. Physical Therapy *FULL EPISODE ON PATREON*

You're listening to the free version of CloudFarm for the full episode sub the Patreon Deezer. We are farmers. We are farmers. I'll stick to the finger here. Cloud Fire. Cloud Fire. Okay. Uh, yeah. Hey, what's up? We're inside of physical therapy's home. Physical therapist. Physical therapy. Music person inside of New York City. We sullied the sanctity of his space. We rifled to his Nazi literature. We smoked his ass out. He's kind of tweaking a little bit. What do you have to say for yourself? I think I would have to move after you guys being here. Yeah. It's okay. Sorry about that. That's probably the experience. I will actually reiterate what I said earlier, that the relative cleanliness of this space is a breath of fresh air. This city is filthy, and you have a lot to answer for. I heard that while you were in China, you did sort of a short 20-question-style interview. Yes. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how that went? It went well. i'm just feeding you the question rob's already like left the interview sure i was fucking pissed yeah it went well i had to memorize the questions but can you give us an example of a question they might have asked you just for my own personal reference um well now i forgot them um they were like asking me about my car and stuff and they asked me what music should be in the background of the interview and they asked me what my favorite movie was. They didn't ask me a lot about music. I hope we're not going to talk about music either. What's your favorite movie? Has it changed? In the last two weeks. Wait, this was two weeks ago? Give or take. You were emailing us when we were trying. Yeah. I think I said Pretty Woman. Great movie. Can't argue with it. Sex scene on the grand piano. Come on. I haven't seen it. Don't look at me when you talk about the sex scene.

Dom has an ongoing theory that Rob is the most chronically horny of the three of us on the podcast. I'll decide after the end of the show. Yeah, yeah. That initial impressions. Who do you think is fucking the most? Well, that's the difference. Well, fucking is different. I'm not giving a lot of risk from anyone. I can't believe this shit. This is outrageous. You were also on another podcast, I've been told. It goes by the name of how long gone. They seem to be pretty good at their jobs. They're good. I didn't have to feed them any questions. They just opened up the dialogue and just went. Yeah. How did they do that? You know, they professionally talk for two podcasts every single week. So yeah, they just, they have to get it together. They have to get it together. You think it's a time in the industry situation and there is hope for us. That's a big leap. But we'll decide at the end of the interview. Okay. I'll let you know. It's a lot riding on this interview for me, man. We were actually on the hunt for, we were trying to get some scoops, some crazy deep cut exclusives. Part of the research process was asking you for some scoops and deep cut exclusives. Yeah. Nardware style. But the people that we approached while we were trying to investigate, we were trying to go deep, came back with one recurring theme. Okay. Can you guess what that might be? I have no clue. I'm curious who you asked. I, uh, I, I had to, so all this gear got ordered to the Nina office and I had to go pick it up yesterday. And I said that we were interviewing you and everyone was like, he'll make a great interview. Um, and just make sure to ask him about workouts. Oh, that's my only hobby. Oh yeah. I just came from the gym right before you guys got here. It smells like it, man. Thank you. That's pure pheromone. Pure pheromone. What's the split? What's the split? The split, we're doing chest and tricep, back and bicep, leg, shoulder. Iconic. Iconic. You know. Is it painless? Can you tell me? You have to take a show off the camera. This is a video podcast.

We'll do that. We've got to wait until after. Yeah, that's Patreon. Oh, man. We don't want that in the first 30 minutes. Yeah, we need business advice from you, clearly. What was your physique like as a kid? Or what's motivating you to work out? Were you like a chronic shrimp coming up? I mean, I was a very small child. I didn't break five feet. I don't know what that is in meters, but I didn't break five feet until I was almost 16. Yeah. I still haven't done it. I was really tiny. I was the same. But that wasn't my motivation. My motivation was that I hurt my back. So then I was like, I need to get jacked so that I don't hurt my back again. What happened then? Well, it was during the COVID-19 pandemic. As you remember, there wasn't a lot of DJing opportunities. So I used to do art handling type stuff. And through that, someone offered me this job. at the brooklyn botanical gardens a gig which every year they have a show of model trains but they hire very sick art handlers to install it because the plants are like precious so they don't want anyone to like buck up the plant so they hire all these art handlers to basically just do landscaping and i was just like you know i had spent eight months on my couch and then suddenly i was just like digging like a ton of dirt every single day and i threw out my back oh man wait so you went into working out before that i mean on and off but that's when it became my number one right right right wait what does that have to do with art so what i've never heard the i mean i've heard the phrase art handlers but no and i've i mean so to me it just sounds like it's like a moving company but for limp-wristed effect cowards that's pretty much the end yeah um a lot of our handlers are failed or aspiring artists yeah it's basically just like you need someone with extra liability if they're handling like a million dollar work of art versus just like your moving company that's just like drawing your shit. Yeah. Whether or not the moving company would do a perfectly fine job. It's about insurance. Probably. Okay. Or and then you just like specialized in that. My specialty was actually I only did a little bit of art handling but I worked for a company that cleaned and installed chandeliers for almost 10 years. Oh sick. You are forklift certified? No. But I can clean

a chandelier like nobody's business listening yeah so was that going into manhattan and doing a lot of like i don't know 30th floor manhattan penthouse apartments the hamptons they would fly the company to places like to clean chandeliers oh shit okay it's specialized uh there's no nda's but i don't really remember any like famous people of note it would just be like Okay, this person seems really rich. They have, like, a giant mansion in the Hamptons. Right. And in that case, actually, you never even meet the person. They just have a house manager. Right. A house manager. You wouldn't even know whose house it was. So it's, like, discreet old money. A friend of mine is Tim Burton's gardener, actually, or, like, works on the team. Sounds like a similar scenario. Yeah, they just, like, you know, they don't want to know how the sausage is made. It's just, like... They come out to their house and it's all clean and nice. And someone else's full-time job is just to make sure that all that stuff is good to go and the toilet that were clogged, et cetera. A friend of mine is Tim Burton. That's the best you could come up with. You really are out of practice. Let's take that from the top. So the name physical therapy precedes any interest in being a buff dude? yeah actually the name is just completely random okay wait there's no story though uh i guess the story would be that i had well i don't want to blow your your other scoop oh yeah we have a we have an organic scoop you want to tee that up yeah let me tell you something crazy were you aware that you used to record music as j holiday quill oh my god i can't how did you find this how does he know yeah just a little just a little a little a little deep a little deep tidbit um i am aware that i did used to do that very briefly uh and then my dear friend mickey blanco who was my college roommate oh wow we moved to new york around a similar time and they were taking me out to clubs and stuff and i had

vaguely started making music and trying to dj and i was really uh set on this name j holiday quill based on the uh excellent but no longer popular r&b artist j holiday and also my like pharmaceutical thing yeah well you know keeps coming up uh and then he was just like this is such a bad name like it's funny right now in 2010 or whatever but no one's gonna get it okay yeah or two and i was like that's but we were just walking and we walked by a physical therapist office he was like literally anything is a better name physical therapy nice dad that's it whoa that was it i feel like that's the scoop that's the scoop i was actually yeah it's in other interviews though so it's not a scoop it's like okay audio scoop video my friend is doing video scoop there we go you're the first one to get it on video yeah there we go video killed uh niche music press hey hey what's what's mickey blanca saying Yeah, we're done asking physical therapy questions. They are getting their some kind of degree in art in Switzerland. Oh, nice. Trying to get on that. Yeah. Don't want to get involved in the rat racing one. Did you read that Artwell diatribe in The Baffler recently? Word that video artist was telling their life story. Yeah, yeah. It was so good. yeah funny right i kept wanting to relate to it more but i felt like it didn't really have anything in my life but i wish it was a whole book yeah me and david were saying it's just the the fact that you can get paid 90k to teach art in like stuttgart even that's like just a crazy thing i want to teach like yeah some kind of electronic music theoretical thing where i don't have to teach anything practical because obviously like an 18 year old with youtube would know more than me yeah but where i was just like Vibe space, electronic music teaching. Yeah. Have you done any kind of teaching? Teaching? You know, I mentor people now. Getting back to the streets. Any teaching. I remember one time a friend asked me to do a DJ demonstration at a public library in New York. Yeah. Like a workshop style thing. It was like, the kids were like eight.

I really was just like, this is how you DJ. And then I let them press a button on some borrowed CDJs. They seem excited. They're probably all hard dance DJs right now with 150,000 followers. And you're responsible. Yeah. I'll take the credit. You want to take that credit? So wait, you come from an art world background? And then going into music? I was in art school, but I went there for like... a little less than two years, or maybe two full years. But I never really got all the way into the art world. Okay, so you dropped out of art school? I did drop out of art school. What were you making? I mean, I came in kind of making, like, these bad paintings, and I literally remember my first critique. Someone said it was Basquiat-esque, and then I was like, I don't think I need to make any more paintings. I feel like everyone wants to, like, every mean kid who's not satisfied with their own art in art school wants to say that to someone. So I don't think that's like, they were like weird little cartoons. And then eventually I kind of moved into like sound art and video art. And, uh, this was at SAIC in Chicago. Okay. And there's actually a lot, like I was in sound art class of like Ozma from Guzu and Guzu. Oh, right. Okay. The guys from Salem were, uh, in Chicago around that time. And like Brenmar. There as well. Uh, I don't know if we, overlapped i know him now um aids 3d that whole era oh okay yeah yeah the bubbling of the witch house era yeah yeah because that that's how i first came across your music was that alicia key said it there we go and then i kind of didn't i don't want to talk about that you don't want to talk about witch house only new music oh no well like slurge strippers are you friends with five yo foreign who five year foreign the rapper five year foreign he's from new york he's from he's a current rapper yeah reference all right okay but if he wants to come over fifth mike yeah we can make him up

i mean rob was saying he kind of associates you with um i mean it's definitely like the same era but like yeah to mind who else was he said we said asthma from goose and goosey right yeah i would say like right in the beginning like coming from chicago and just like music blog era that was like witch house and then shortly after that was like i was going to there was a party in new york uh called mr black which is like was a long-running gay party and then In one room, the residents, they called themselves Castle, were Michael Magnin, Telfar, and Kingdom. Right, okay. So that was kind of like, yeah. So meeting, I met them, and then yeah, like Total Freedom, Fade to Mind people. I remember the first, one of the first parties I went to when I moved here, there was a DJ called Girl You Know It. visiting who would later change his name to girl unit really oh damn that's another scoop i didn't know there's your scoop in case you can uh god damn i think he already changed kind of changed his name again he was doing like a house music also another buff dude hysterics yeah yeah good shit man yeah i've heard you know the like sound um sound effect that's in all that stuff Yeah. No, not that one. It's a different one. It's like... No, I don't know what you're thinking of. Yeah, yeah. But it's a different, like, yelp. And I heard it in, like... Do you want to vocalise it? Yeah. You can put it in post. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll cut music in. I feel like when he debuted the Hysterix name, it was with... I can't remember the name of the track, but it was huge all that summer. But anyway, I heard that sound effect in the NAD, and I wonder if he, like, does sound design stuff. Could be, or he could have lifted it from somewhere else, I guess. I hope Hysterics are doing really well. Yeah. Because I had to chat today. I thought you were on that Blasting Voice compilation. I thought your kind of affiliation with all that stuff. That was a game changer. Yeah. Do you remember that? Was that like a Total Freedom thing? Yeah, it was like the vinyl compilation that he did way over 10 years ago now. Early Felix Lee track on it. Loads of that kind of stuff. Anyway, I thought you were on that. I wasn't.

is that like people i remember that like that was like the height of people being blown away by the then like disruptive quote-unquote notion that you could play dj sets that were multi-genre yeah and that was it yeah and did that did it feel as kind of like mind-blowing as like the kind of like press was breathlessly saying it was to you uh well i felt it was very like organic in new york because it was just like a bunch of people who didn't really know how to use cdjs like i was djing a lot with shane from hba at that time and like he didn't do beat matching and he was one of the first people to like teach me how to dj so you're just kind of like blasting in a song and you weren't really like you know using the cd days like percussively or something but it definitely wasn't about like how can i make these like two house tracks blend together seamlessly um so i don't think anyone really noticed until it was like and also at that time like the dance music tradition in new york was really small so it wasn't like there was some house music or techno club that people were going to and like rebelling against that they were just like i just found a bunch of random music on youtube i'm just gonna play it the best i can kind of jam it together and then it was like you know like hunters from the uk coming over being like wow they're playing like rap into hardstyle like it's not this is bloody mental wait so you wait so you think it was like a uk press jumping on it i think that yeah that's when it became more like uh people noticed than it was right or like you know ashland total freedom he was doing a bunch of parties that were love ash uh mixing different genres and like one of the first people to like be doing like global niche micro-genres mixed in and stuff. And he was also doing a deep house party called Grown, which was really fun. It was a sick man. It was a sick man. So then, yeah, I think people just realized that it didn't really matter. I guess that's Grown with an A, no, a W. Grown with an... No. With a W. With a W. Grown and sexy. There was no dancing allowed either.

oh i thought it was like a one-off thing that was like a party that ran for a while wait how was that enforced um militantly no i don't think it was just kind of this like weird uh bar that had like a giant bar in the center i can't remember what it was called so there wasn't really a dance floor and then there would be like DJ or live performer, there'd be like someone playing house music and like a live saxophonist. Oh, wow. I saw a super early E plus E live set at that party one time when I came out. Oh, wow. That was a... It was mind-blowing. Like, I imagine so. We still have our minds blown. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You feel like nothing's new to you anymore. It's all in there. Yeah. You're listening to the free version of Cloudbar. It's a... I don't know. almost like the like overlords no like the multi-genre thing has been established to the point where i'm seeing this sort of like tide turning where people are now um almost purposely almost like out of a point of principle playing genre based sets yeah i mean so like we've come like full circle where that's now the sort of like cutting edge i mean i do i like to do that on my radio show and stuff but i literally remember like coming up in new york and like just being exposed to like random parties and stuff i didn't really get what house and techno were in like the historic sense and then i really thought that like especially techno was this kind of like i don't know minus like really like bleepy normal thing which now i appreciate but at the time i was like yeah and then going to berlin for the first couple times and seeing someone play just like

four straight hours of perfect industrial techno i was like this to me is more like mind-blowing and edgy than just like a bunch of people playing like 30 random tracks in 45 minutes but i guess you know people coming from that tradition they would come here or wherever or hear those djs and then they would have the opposite feeling and so seeing something like that in berlin is that kind of what led to you moving towards doing something more kind of house and techno uh i think definitely techno like house i had already been i'd been working with uh michael magnan okay who i do uh dual called fatherhood with okay and michael's been a dj in new york for like i think probably since like 2006 or something like that a while um and you know he plays everything but he also was like coming from a lot of gay parties he played a lot of house music and he already knew about that stuff and i didn't really know it And we had decided to do a mix together for Diss Magazine. Okay. And it was called Thinspiration because I had this like weight loss hypnosis tape. And so we kind of made like a down tempo mix with the... With the tape over it. With the tape coming in and out. So nice, nice. It's still... Are those Diss Mixes still up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're all on SoundCloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I would become one of the music editors there shortly after that. Okay. It was like me and Fatima Al-Qadiri. And then later it was Finn from, what's the label? Like that's Sophie and A.G. Cook were on. PC music? Yeah, I think. Or numbers? No, no, I think he had something to do with PC music. Oh, okay. That would make sense. Yeah. You know, the tide was shifting into hyper pop. Um, but yeah, we had worked together on that mix and then we were just like, we should, we threw a party called, um, gifts for my father, GIF or gifts for my father. Uh, I love good party names in this. Uh, Todd Edwards and

lol boys oh wow that's fine on the same lineup yeah yeah that's amazing and no one came it was like before it was before random access memories like yep wow todd was just like he drove from new jersey i think he slept in his car after damn what a loser but even that programming is crazy because again i feel like that type of like multi-genre programming now is like so ten a penny yeah but like yeah yeah when i was coming into things like 10 years ago 2014 2015 i'd try and do stuff like that and no one would get it either but so the idea that you guys were doing that yeah i thought i was original that's what i'm trying to say yeah now uh venues will be like genre focus night yeah it'll just be like wasn't it just all genre focus lights up until yeah yeah yeah or i just think it's much more common to see like a dj who for want of a better phrase kind of exists in a world of playing music from soundcloud alongside a dj who's kind of like much more to do with the like established techno world yeah yeah whereas like yeah maybe even five years ago i feel like that was incredibly uncommon whereas yeah now lineups are much more diverse the barriers are broken down you can have a name like dj fart in the club and you can play on yeah who is that who is that person from yeah i thought it was a new york no no berlin oh dj fart uh yeah sorry yeah dj yeah she's from berlin yeah i was thinking something else what about farts in the club when are we going to allow those i mean i don't think there's a rule against it i feel like it's scorned upon you know well i'm in the dj booth so i have my kind of zone to farting yeah don't don't come in there yeah yeah fair enough i mean the protein farts are gonna you know it's gonna hit it's gonna hit i have to ask this is i've noticed this um frequently while being here why do you guys what is the what is with the insistence on single ply toilet paper Do not care about the environment. I care more about the state of my, of not being hemorrhoidal. I grew up with it. I didn't know you were like two-ply insistent guy. Dude, I'd like to pamper my. That's a really good rap as well. Two-ply insistent guy. I don't know that. You know, the two-ply role, it's like gone in a second. But I feel like you have to like overcompense. You have to just, all you wind up doing is using as what toilet papers you would. Still last longer. Does it really?

Okay, I need to A-B test this. Just wipe delicately, bro. Take a walk on the... I'm a busy man. Take a walk on the single ply side. And I'm in so much pain. Yeah, that is... Are you bleeding? I mean, I'll show you later. Yeah, okay. You tell me. Yeah, I would agree. Maybe a little gentler on the... Yeah, it's a technique thing, not like a ply. I was in... Or in Taipei and Seoul, they both have like the toilets where it's like... heated sea yeah built-in vide and i had kind of been a little bit like who needs this but then i was like wait everybody needs this this is insane that we live like savages and we don't have that i think part of growing up is accepting insane luxury and not not looking down on it yeah absolutely each and every day i grow in that regard yeah exactly i got a cleaner recently it's amazing yeah maybe you can come clean my chandelier soon the amount of money i'm making off this podcast uh that brings me to my question which is why don't podcast yeah why don't we pay our guests i think that would require some amount of money right that is that's kind of a stumbling to give you a serious answer i think there is a point at which you probably should start paying people i think yeah some do when they're really like transparently kind of like not a real thing right that's just like generated by a podcast company and you need to like get other people whose like entire job is just being on podcasts like menfluencers and stuff like that michelle obama exactly oh actually that's a good point where i used where i used to work not whichever where i used to work did that and the podcast i worked on had no listeners even though they were paying to get people on yeah but like but they were playing to get like regular people on who they thought were like interesting and it just wasn't yeah It wasn't interesting? No. But, like, you know, I don't think, like, Joe Rogan, your guys' kind of idol, is... Our colleague. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a peer. I like the idea of knowing Michelle Obama because you're a big podcast fan. I think the defense is to fall back on the idea that we constitute journalism and to pay would be some kind of a violation of our ethics. Well, that was the problem with the crossbow guy.

was the you said it was on it so there was this crossbow shooting in london about a month ago yeah yeah and dom knows that one of the guys that got shot it's also right by where i lived you wanted to have him on the pod we wanted to talk about what it's like to get shot with a crossbow and that was going to be an hour and a half episode oh no it's going to be like a 15 minute patreon only second and i said like i will we will i will do whatever it takes to get him on tell him i'll give him 100 pounds he may as well get something out of his trauma and then david said no that's unethical yeah do you think the sun no i know i think thank you thank you sometimes you gotta you know we gotta go tabloid but for me the exposure of being on this podcast it could be career changing exactly yeah yeah trust me you're gonna get so much bigger in china after being on this podcast i'm gonna i'm gonna listen to me to your music after this actually on that on that note uh Your song, 421. 421, yeah. Ring a bell. I do remember it. Good song. Thank you. That's next Sunday. It's after the length. Oh. The length? Is it? Is it? I see. I never clocked this. Oh, sorry. I thought it was like a penis. It's like a wry allusion to John Cage or something. If anything, it would be all... rye allusion to 420 yeah that's what that's what i was heard of that but pre-podcast like in the your because we were looking you up like to figure out who you are beforehand and you went you had like a fatherhood interview with vice where you and the other guy just interviewed each other wait really yeah yeah yeah i don't remember that at all i'm guessing like i'm guessing you didn't get paid for that uh no i guess if you don't remember but to be a part of history to have been in yeah yeah um I mean, my greatest regret is never having been in the do's and don'ts, the fashion show. Oh, yeah, yeah. But Mickey Blanco was in it several times. Nice. I think mostly in the don'ts. Did they get just torn down? Okay, yeah. Was that while Gavin McInnes was still doing them? I think that's like original OG first season cast. That is like bucket list, if you have that on your CV. Yeah. To have been torn down by one of the most hilariously shit people of all time.

well i was gonna say about 421 it was on um so the physical therapy song 421 spelled four colon two one uh it was on like constant rotation for me like like around 10 years ago at this point when i was like no maybe like eight years ago when i was like peak drug use it was like how old were you if you don't mind me i would have been like 21 22 something like that and uh It soundtracked a lot of self-damage. I'm so sorry. Well, yeah, that's exactly my question was, what do you have to say for yourself, and how dare you? Yeah, the reparations. God, that's a lot to take in. You know, you have to separate the art from the artist. And from the listener. And from the listener, yeah. Separate the artist from the listener. Right. Uh, it was mainly like MDMA. Okay, that sounds great. I mean, it was good. That was a lot that you felt bad. Yeah. That was, that was, that was great. When you said like, drug, kind of like a drug, I thought it was like, yeah. You're listening to the free version of CloudFarm for the full episodes of the Patreon teaser. For the full episode, sub the Patreon user.