Hello and welcome back to our ongoing sexification of Staff past and present and hopefully present-and-future by way of deep-diving casual-reading power-lifting interview posi-sharking antics: Sputnik’s very own Meet the Spartans. Steel yourself as impossible questions are posed and the Staffers you wish you’d had the courage or attention span to acknowledge surpass your wildest expectations.

Hide your kimonos and prepare your most shrewd takes, for today we vie for forum dominance with a veritable king of typed discourse, a reformed metalhead, and a bloody cheeky wee jokester to boot: JohnnyoftheWell!

*quickly dons Joe Pesci voice imitation* Hey cutie. How does it feel, huh? Not so easy on the other side of the Google Doc, is it?

Who gave you this number I must relieve myself immediately hello.

Staff Wars is your baby yes and a chance to get to know your fellow co-conspirators and staff writers, but are there any particular colleagues you’d fear would turn this interview back on its maker? Why? 

I wouldn’t call this my baby! I was all for anyone else on Staff stepping in, similarly to what we’re seeing with Sowing’s freshly founded singles blog series. Needless to say, no-one (apart from you!) wanted to, and here we are. 

If you mean having the interview declined outright, then I had a hunch that Rowan would step further into the Mr. Robot brief and get camera-shy. This technically proved half-correct; he passed it up due to Covid last I asked, but we’ll hopefully get a chance to fix that at some point. I hope he’s in better health by now, but send your thoughts and prayers along anyway.

In terms of how a confirmed interview was going to go, though, I was anxious about giving Wines enough to chew over (this proved a lot of fun) and a bashful about interviewing Chan – I’ve been here for over a decade now, but my most active stretches of years have limited intersection with his, so to me he’s like a near-mythical community figure as well as a writer I respect a great deal. I enjoyed trying to be a little pushy or playful with, say, Sowing or Xeno, but Chan was the first time I felt a little senpai’d out. You can judge the results of that for yourselves.

****The Chan interview is all wrapped, and will presumably be published before this one

On the back of that, why do you think the general user base would find [Staff Wars] informative? Did you really think they’d care about the fantasy football leagues that are [or are not] hosted in the staff forum? 

Heh, before it gained traction, it was 100% an attention grab to see if I could get the userbase to remember we existed in advance of the year-end lists. Dirty laundry and bait were the first order, though this quickly got toned down. I quickly realised how interesting it was to get to know these people I was familiar with on an e-distant pos’s and pleases  basis a little more closely over specific things that had often been lurking around in the back of my mind for however long. I hoped that the userbase would have shared a few of the same curiosities, or at least find the results interesting, and I dare say it panned out okay.

The one thing I mistakenly did think people would care more about were Pon’s hysterically apt alignments between Dark Souls characters and Staff members. Shame on everyone who failed to appreciate these on the level they very much deserved. 

Were there any other working titles for the segment?

In my head, it was always going to be Staff Stories, but then I realised that the reason this was funny to me was that it riffed off Star Stories, a terrible and long-since axed celeb satire show from mid/late ‘00s Channel 4. Staff Wars originally came as a shite pun on Star Wars, but I think it sounds alright on its own terms.

You’re part of an exclusive group of users whose diligence keeps the decrepit locomotive that is Sputnikmusic creaking along with frequent, thoughtful content. Congrats! I had attributed your success in this realm to blackout curtains and a sturdy Irn-Bru habit, yet my operatives have intel that suggests you have a more than fruitful life in the land of the living. Aside from Triadic amphetamines, what secrets drive your boundless productivity?

That’s flattering and kind, but my sunlit life is in a stagnant patch at the moment and I’ll shortly be uprooting it and moving back across the world for better career and/or study prospects. As for productivity, I drink a lot of coffee and probably more alcohol than I should, but I think the more productive you are, the easier it is to keep it up. I’m good at doing spur-of-the-moment things but not so much at longer projects, so short-essay length reviews fit in quite nicely. I like to loop things round into other things: play video games so you have enough time to listen to music properly, listen to music so you have something to write about, write about something to keep your mother tongue alive in a land of non-native speakers and filthy Americanisms, etc.. It all stays afloat somehow.

I’ve realised that it’s much easier to be productive than inspired, though. Over the last couple of years there’ve been a handful of wonderful records that really pushed me to bring the very best I can as a writer (Carnage was a great one last year), but overall I found it easier to feel excited about going inside-out over ambitious but tasteless artists like Black Midi, Deafheaven or St. Vincent. I think I’ve learnt a lot from that, but I hope the music that inspires me to write and the music that inspires me to love music sync up more this year. I’m keeping this in mind a lot more.

You once publicly 4.5d Machine Head’s Unto The Locust. Hooray! Describe your reviewing character arc since then, and re-rate the album using your ultra-developed final boss criticism brain.

Hahaha, aww!!! I bought that disc in store on a Metal Hammer exclusive the day it dropped and binged it for hours while squaring off against the hardest quest on Runescape. Precious times. It was everything I wanted from a commercial metal record at the time; some of it has aged awfully, but a lot of its heavier or more complex moments still have a kick. Thrash elitists loathe Machine Head (probably the Locust record in particular given its Gothenburg vibes), and those people are wrong about everything so I’d give it a generous 3.5 and leave things there. The closer is still one of the worst songs I have heard in my life, but bygones etc.

I haven’t really seen anything you’d steer away from when tackling a new review – what is your process for picking out new music? 

Anything goes, I guess. Apart from some things: I can vibe hip-hop sometimes, but would rather learn from other writers than double down on my takes. Conversely, I’ve written so much on some genres that I’d struggle not to repeat myself (that’s very much the domain of Japanese pop-rock/power-pop/punk-poppy-amp-rock girl groups). 

Honestly, I just pick whatever looks new and shiny that I feel confident on. It’s not much of a process at all, and last year I think I spent too much time covering major releases and not enough trying to find undiscovered stuff that people would have benefitted from hearing. My radar of artists together with Sputnik autopilot are more than enough to tide me over, but I want to be less complacent about this. Feel free to help me out here; drop any hotshit new records in my shoutbox and nag me!

Do you overlap with [any] of the staff in terms of content? Any fist fights over review dibs [yet]?

At first I had the most in common with Fripp, who’s less active now, and Talons. He’s a Tool diehard who considered Tame Impala, Fleet Foxes and Phoebe Bridgers the greatest three records of 2020, so take that with a pinch of salt. Since last year, you [Milo] and I have certainly have a lot of overlap, but I don’t believe we’ve ever crossed paths in dibs (and we somehow ended up in full sync on the 2021 blurbs?!). 

Honestly, the dibs thread is one of the least confrontational places on Sputnik. Most of the dib envy I get comes from when Rowan or Sowing put their name on something I know is going to get the full soppy hugs and kisses treatment, but those chaps know their game. Actually, I do recall pointedly suggesting that you [Nocte] would be better off approaching the world of Toby Driver from the ground upwards rather than landing on your arse with the new Kayo Dot last year. That record, while excellent, was mercilessly dull to write on in the end, so I guess that debacle had a sting in its tail.

Your ratings divulge a steadily increasing amount of 4.9/5 albums. In your guarded, well-valued way are you really trying to tell us these are actually 5’s? 

They are 4.9s. They are not 5s.

Is this a conspiracy no-one has insofar noticed? Which of your 4.9 rated albums would more likely be:

1. a) a dubious 5/5 

Erm, Bjork – Post was a dubious 5/5 for a while, which is how it ended up in the 4.9 bracket. Same goes for Unwound – New Plastic Ideas, although I may have been mistaken there. That album would justify a bump, as would Kalk Samen Kuri No Hana, Highvision or Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue. I adore all those records to pieces. 

Highvision or New Plastic Ideas would probably make the best 5s, but being right next to Choirs of the Eyes would always make Dowsing Anemone look a little dubious in most people’s eyes, so I guess that’s the one. 

4. b) the inaugural 4.8_oftheWell

I think I just named every non-meme album in that bracket other than Post as 5 material, so there’s your answer. I’d rather bump a 4.7 though: Henry’s Dream or Reconstruction Site, maybe.

You are yet to bestow a 4.8 upon an album. What’s up with thaaaa?

This feels like every thread ever. I went to the same party every day for 1000 years and nothin changed! 

4.8 is off-limits and I’ll never use it for a permanent rating. I don’t use some increments because I think that the more precisely you try to represent your taste with them, the faster your ratings will become obsolete as your opinions or preferences shift. I don’t think there’s any point in leaving that many reference points if you’re constantly having to update them. The main increments I use align directly with what users describe as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ ratings, like 

3.9 = soft 4

4.2 = hard 4

4.3 = soft 4.5 

Trying to decide if this or that album is a hard enough soft-4.5 to warrant a 4.4 rather than a 4.3 is a waste of time and I don’t bother with it. 

I make an exception for review ratings: when you click publish, you’re cutting the opinion in the review loose and it takes on an eternal existence of its own. I think it’s fair to give that a more precise score. 

Let’s talk about promotions for a second. After all, that time when users put on their best smock and shake their shit in front of the pantheon is just around the corner. Please enlighten our ignorant users on the difference between contributors/staff/whathaveyous, preferably highlighting the best and worst tendencies of each subset.

I loved being a Contrib – everything felt so fresh and gutsy then. I wrote a load of stuff I’d never express the same way now, but I don’t care: whatever I did felt like real growth, and I think that role can be wonderful for anyone trying to find their feet as a writer. One of the best and worst parts was that I always felt like I had to prove to the higher-ups whose gigs I wanted to poach, myself, and virtually everyone else (in that order). This grew into a chip on my shoulder, which took some working through in Staff (and maybe still does), but I’m really grateful for the grit and drive it gave me at the time. The Contrib groups are always lovely and well-coordinated; Staff tends to be more each-to-their-own, which has its merits but is less of a team affair. In keeping with that, Staff writers have to self-motivate a lot more: you can basically do whatever you want, but you also have to find your own reasons to make it worthwhile.

What’s your best advice to the prospective writers who may be standing at the edge of the kiddy-pool, water wings firmly equipped, blubbering about how they were never taught to swim? Maybe a few points specific to what you want to see from a new generation of reviewers. You just want them to review metal albums off Bandcamp’s knee-high shelves right?

Oy vey.

Lol.

Do we need more content balance (especially in regards to genres etc) in the staff and/or contributing tiers?

Yes, we need reviewers with substantive knowledge of electronic music and the enthusiasm to write about it on a frequent basis. 

We need people invested in specific scenes with zero purchase on the Rym/Fantano/Pitchfork triangle of online weirdo purgatory, determined to bring them to a wider audience. We do not need this from the metal end of things. 

We need writers with developed international and cross-lingual interests who are capable of turning language barriers and culture clashes into sources of intrigue. 

Any of these would be a blessing. 

I’d hate to be that ‘guy’, but swing back to early-to-mid 2020. Covid lines are popping up in reviews everywhere. Paraphrasing, but you’ve been [quite] vocal that writers shouldn’t lean on the pandemic just to fill out an introductory paragraph. We’re the best part of two years into this global pandemic. Do you still stand by your thoughts on writers using covid as a crutch to get their think-pieces going?

Yes, in that writers were interpreting the initial novelty of the pandemic in an uninventive and largely undeviating no shit ways that usually scanned as some kind of collective hysteria more than anything particularly insightful about the record on hand. Obviously I could feel where they were coming from, and that approach did appropriate for certain albums (Nine Inch Nails, say), but the shock of the pandemic brought us such a range of distinct and striking reactions on record that it seems a waste to immediately repackage those into a dull summary of the same experience virtually everyone had. 

As for two years, well, we’re far enough in to accept the pandemic as the everyday now, so it’s more moot than ever. Maybe you’d use some part of daily life as a way into a record from time to time, but it’s not something you’d emphatically highlight every time you type a paragraph. Nine times out of ten, if your idea of an engaging opening is reminding me that Covid has happened, I’m not going to get my hopes up about making it to the end of the piece.

What are your thoughts on reviewing the same band over and over again, either back to back or keeping up with the discog? Are you destined to review Deafheaven albums until the digital age is over and the time of the orc has come, or will you let other people jump in to comment upon the band’s hue of the moment? 

I don’t see the point in continuously reviewing a band’s discography one album at a time lol. Unless their evolution is uncommonly interesting, you’re going to end up introducing the same points on the same traits over and over and caring less about them every time. The idiocy behind this was equal parts what inspired and killed the Tentenko saga. Far better to go the Mark Prindle route and do the whole lot in one swoop, so each installment benefits directly from the last with minimal cross-referencing; the Sputnik blog supports this just fine.

On top of that, there are artists like Hatchie, Lana del Rey, Hannah Diamond, Black Midi, etc. whom I’ve very much said my piece over. I’d defend any of those takes, but I don’t want to reiterate them for the sake of strong-arming the artists’ narratives, or whatever. Where’s the joy in that? Let someone else take the reins. Deafheaven’s next move is more of an unknown quandary, so we’ll see. 

Same goes for artists I like; I don’t want them to be my monopoly, and it gets me down when there’s no-one else going for them. There’s no shortage of well-versed staffers who could have taken the new Boris, say, and there is no way in hell I’d call first dibs on whatever Ichiko Aoba releases next. This is a little hypocritical since I’ll be writing on the new Cult of Luna soon, having covered The Raging River last year, but the predictability of my thoughts on the (good!) new record are making me regret this already. 

Major exception to all this is Seiko Oomori, because her work is bracing and inspiring and vital and I’d happily write on it forever, plus there are very few people on Sput I’d trust to translate the subculture and platform properly. One day someone will prove me wrong and I will evaporate from the internet forever.

Describe, in detail, your dream arc for Deafheaven’s career. Any form of hiatus is not an option.

Tough one. From what I’ve seen, the members of Deafheaven don’t have much personality outside of their music, so it’s hard to get into the backseat of that tour bus. Everything they do sounds like it’s supposed to be dramatic and forward thinking but is somehow stuck in the past, so I guess my dream is that they swing both feet into the future. 

Where do they go from Infinite Granite? 

Technology. We get some 65daysofstatic style man vs. machine dual percussion. Drill n doublebass and blastbeats. There are IDM outings thrown in like shrapnel from past Dillinger Escape Plan records. Autotune all fucking day. Collabs with Fire-Toolz and Bladee. Their live shows are off the charts. Everyone is a hologram. Projections of dead animals. Deer skulls to make it all real for the metalheads. Smoke and smoke and lasers. 

All of this happens in the next 3 months. 

There are no people. 

Holograms. 

Youtube. 

Shoegaze. 

They break up in February 2023 after a hacking attack deletes their entire stash of VST plug-ins and George Clarke posts a video to Insta from his bathtub about how he’s going to rehab for caffeine addiction and doesn’t trust his bandmates to take care of his cat or some bullshit. The end. 

While most people on the internet have deluded notions about Japanese culture after having watched all of One Piece and listened to one Dir En Grey album, you, theoretically, should have a firmer grasp on what Japan is actually like. What major misconceptions irk you most?

Japan has a ton of rough stuff I think most people are at least vaguely aware of but leave out of too many discussions: its culture confuses group harmony with individual contentment, its education system is tailor-made to crush individuality from age twelve onwards, its expectations for overtime would be considered criminal in the UK, and its social hierarchy is rigid and deeply sexist. The flack from these things is internalised and you don’t see nearly as much popular satirical or subversive works as in the West. We don’t talk about mental health in Japan.

I don’t think any of that exactly flips the table, but if we’re talking misconceptions, I think most of the Western crowd is either naive or overly dismissive over the space saccharine art occupies in that kind of society. For example, it’s easy to weigh up a lot of J-pop as pure gratification or empty thrills depending on your stance, but I think it shifts the angle on its candyland qualities that it’s produced with such a taciturn, highly pressured audience in mind. Even in the most euphoric stuff, I tend to hear a kind of longing that we’d auto-file under nostalgia or bittersweetness if it came from a Western artist, but I think there’s often more to it than this.

For an ‘edgier’ angle on that, a lot of the Japanese artists I was first drawn to (Haru Nemuri, Seiko Oomori, Shinsei Kamattechan) are very good at taking the gratifying qualities of that often false mainstream positivity and turning them into a foundation for something desperate, provocative or raw. I’d recommend them all to anyone prepared to do a little extra legwork over the kinds of themes and voices their music represents. 

On a recurrent sidenote, I find it frustrating to see people whose primary awareness of Japan comes from anime filtering everything they know about society, music or culture through that lens. There’s a lot you can learn from anime, but it’s always an eyeroller when people extrapolate off this instead of building a more grounded cultural awareness out of it. Moreover, your idea of Japanese culture comes first and foremost from your stereotypes of those Western anime diehards and at any point you consider this the basis for a pithy hot take, do the world a favour and log the fuck off. That kind of bullshit isn’t even worth engaging with.

Please don’t treat me as some kind of authority on Japan, though; I learn more about it every day and I feel this question deserves a full dissertation that I’m not yet ready to write.

Do you have any recommendations regarding Japanese art that is more representative of the realities of the country and its people? Directors, authors etc are perfectly valid answers.

Hirokazu Kore-Eda – Shoplifters (movie)

Mieko Kawakami – Breasts and Eggs (book)

are widely known and generally well-liked and recentish and I’d recommend them as starting points. Both take marginalised but representative perspectives (an impoverished family, and an author looking to become a single mother via artificial insemination) and have a poke at the less functional parts in the big ol’ society machine. Good beans / bad beans.

On the absolute other end, I enjoyed parts of Netflix’ The Naked Director. It’s about a guy who dominated the Japanese adult video industry in the early ‘90s (not something I have much wider knowledge of, I promise); some parts were very funny, some seemed overly sanitised/glamourised/otherwise problematic, but once the wheels were in motion (mainly S2), I thought it was a pretty fascinating mapping of company infrastructure, unconditional loyalty, and the way Japanese society idolises perceived male genius within that framework. These things are all deeply rooted parts of the culture, and it’s amazing how they hold up even in that kind of extreme context (which renders them extra visible). If you know a tiny bit of Japanese (basically just formal courtesies and a couple of workplace titles), I’d recommend it for that.

If you’re a real masochist, want a deep dive, and can find it with subtitles, watch all 4 hours of the BiS x Cannonball documentary. Sadistic manager of an edgy idol group signs up a gang of documentary-style porn directors for one-on-one behind the scenes work with each of his girls on the day of their farewell concert without their knowledge: there’s mercifully little explicitly sexual content, but you’ll never look at the Japanese entertainment industry the same way again. Blegh. 

You’re on an after work trip to Konbini. What do you typically bring home? 

Heh, there’s a 7/11 on my commute (on everyone’s commute!!!) – I grab their chocolate twist doughnuts big time. Sometimes pancakes too, and crisps for TV hours. Orange juice if I don’t already have it, Coke if I need a kick.

On many occasions I’ve subtly tried to get a rise out of your Scottish side. Failure has been my sole bounty. What are your deepest, most revealing thoughts concerning Sunshine On Leith, and how do you rate the Trainspotting soundtrack? What aspects of Scotland do you miss most?

Hahaha my Scottish side is fraudulent as hell – I lived there for almost half my life, but I grew up in nowhereville England and don’t think I changed at all when my family moved north. Edinburgh won’t do that to you; Glasgow would have been another story. I miss Edinburgh though! It’s this lovely gorgeous chilly big small-town for 11 months of the year and then absolutely loses its shit for the whole of August. I have never seen Sunshine On Leith :[

Rumours abound regarding your surreptitious dealings behind closed forums. What’s the worst suggestion of site-fixing that you’ve ever rejected from a conspirator?

Uhhh, JustJoe and I were at one point going to do a blog ranking of every -core on Sputnik ranked in order of awfulness (deathcore, Sowingcore, Doofcore, Neoliberalism etc.). No-one ever rejected this, but it never got off the runway and is maybe better off that way. I’m bad at saying no to things, really.

To follow that up, can you recall an occasion on which you’ve had a snekky idea that you could manipulate and found no others to collude in?

Lol no, most folks here love collusion. The closest thing to what you’re describing was Hamasakigate. This would take all day to describe in full detail, but it was basically a ludicrously complicated honeypot designed to bait out whose-alt-is-whose info using a fake Ayumi Hamasaki fancult on Discord (a cogent choice for reasons) anonymously. It was ultimately surprisingly successful, but would have worked a whole lot better if I’d collaborated with anyone closely enough for them to realise that the “private” channels in my purpose-built server were openly visible to any new arrivals…including the person we were supposed to be hoaxing. Oops. 

Would you like to occasionally arm wrestle? And who?

Haha yes! Arm wrestling is great and dumb and I like it. Most recent ones have all been with students, unfortunately; they had a short phase of working out who the strongest guy in each class was, and they’d occasionally rope me in as an endgame boss. I get paid for this.

Imagine you’re the judge of a contest. The contestants? Well they’re your fellow staff and occasional emeritus and only one participant can claim each title. The categories are:

• Perfect dad-bod

Japanese kids get their b’s and v’s confused a lot, and it’s rubbed off on me: Voivod.

• Too cute to smoosh

Ahhh robertsona / granite / Blush / Rowan (if stroppy) / Sowing (if sassy) /  Asleep

• Best bikini

Wines, as if that’s even a contest

• Best festive avatar

Jots duh

• Most likely to be on the [never-to-be-rebooted] COPS series

MACMAN

• Largest feet

Rowan

• The Billy Corgan’s alt account award

Rowan

• Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes

Endpoint of Asleep’s 5-year character arc

• The kid with a boner on the diving board

I feel this is a perfect description for most of Gonz’ review demographic, so there must be a story there

You’ve been spectating from Olympus’ lofty heights for a little while now. Which Sputnik personas have you seen best throw off their trike’s training wheels, climb out of soiled nappies and contribute to the site in a manner that could be considered wholesome? Are there any users that could benefit from some molding and maybe a fresh set of socks? 

I wouldn’t call it spectating or lofty; my hands are dirty and my arse is red. I’m more mindful of working on myself than ‘molding’ users, but if this is an encouragement space, then normaloctagon, someone, Lacedaemonius, Fogza, park and anat are all users from whom I’d like to read more words more often, JesperL needs to get his heart broken and fast, porcupinetheater should come back from the dead and publish our erotic Chat Pile x Portrayal of Guilt fan fictions, ian b should stop ghosting me, Kompys2000 should write every review on Sputnik especially mine, and Pheromone needs to delete every image I have ever sent him of my feet.

Quick responses on the following please:

Job hunting

Will let you know when I’m single

Metacritic

However dubiously weighted their aggregation metrics, they can’t be worse than whatever birthed our 2021 top ten.

Name-changing on Sputnikmusic

Fine if you want to knock a couple of letters off your name. Less fine if you suddenly mascot as an obscure JRPG character no-one’s ever heard of.

Objectivity scoring

We all listen to enough shite music without putting an imaginary number on it

Colin Marston

The drum recording engineer from Blue Lambency Downward? Great fucking record.

Glitch-pop

Schrodinger’s genre

What’s next? How are you going to approach your inevitable final interview with Jeremy Ferwerda?

Make a point of paying my taxes and email him imaginary defamation lawsuits before he’s even thought of inviting me. I’ve heard it works wonders. 

Parting thoughts?

Thanks to anyone who made it to the end. This was fun!!

Thanks for your time here and elsewhere. See you in the Fear Inoculum thread!

Previously on Staff Wars:

Dewinged・DrGonzo・Trebor・Xenophanes・Sowing・Winesburgohio・Pon・BlushfulHippocrene・Nocte・mynameischan