Asher White's Short, Strange Trip

On May 16, 2024, I woke up on the floor of a friend’s basement in Cleveland and absentmindedly looked at my phone. There was an email from an address I didn’t recognize, which was not in itself unusual; as a music journalist, I get unsolicited promotional messages from publicists and artists all the time. I was in the middle of a tour with my band that morning, and probably hung over. It was not an ideal time to reach me about anything other than a cup of coffee. 

But the subject line of this particular email intrigued me. “Inquiry,” it read, and then, “andy cush vs. the excruciating love of life.” In the tone of an old friend resuming sporadic correspondence, the writer told me what had been going on with her recently: a move to New York, a nasty cold, a comic mishap at a rotisserie chicken joint. She offered me well wishes on tour. And she discussed my work as a writer, which she’d read closely. She quoted a line from a review of a small reissue from several years before, one I’d almost forgotten writing. She drew out a thesis of sorts from other pieces, something about transcendence expressed in sound, and pondered how my apparent interest in the ineffable dovetailed with my life as a player of improvised music. She told me about albums I’d championed that had “changed, ruined, or repaired” her life. Then she did something more familiar to a music journalist unaccustomed to such thorough attention to his work paid by total strangers: She asked me to listen to her new album. 

I was both deeply flattered and mildly freaked out by the care and intensity put into this message, which, through no doing of mine, has already entered the annals of Asher White lore. In a piece about her brilliant new album 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living in Paste that mentions me by name as the recipient, the young art-pop multihyphenate talked about worrying that she’d “blacklisted [herself] from the entire music industry from this Unabomber email.” 

White wasn’t blacklisted, though it did take me a while to listen to Home Constellation Study, the album she dropped in my inbox that day. When I did, it blew me away immediately. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the lushly orchestrated overture and pulse-heightening rush of percussion that opens the album, nor the melange of styles that followed: noise rock blasts, dime-store disco heaters, guitar-pop tunes that tensed up and resolved with Rube Goldberg intricacy and whimsy. The music had an unusual combination of a young person’s dizzy enthusiasm and a veteran’s confident craft. White was 24 at the time, and had been releasing albums on Bandcamp since she was a tween. Home Constellation Study was her 16th. I wrote a rave Pitchfork review, which turned out to be my last before leaving to co-found Hearing Things. White soon signed to Joyful Noise, the label home of fellow purveyors of anything-goes pop destruction like Deerhoof and Marnie Stern. 

8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living does not feel much like a self-conscious followup to a minor breakthrough, perhaps because White had already made it by the time Home Constellation Study found its audience. (The 8 Tips follow-up, too, is now already in the can.) Where the previous album opens with a woosh of forward motion, this one takes its time: a metronome clicks audibly in the background, a synth blinks hesitantly like an old pinball machine coming to life. White, who produces her own music and plays just about everything herself, uses her electronic-acoustic arrangements both to heighten her songs’ effects and to subvert them. As the album draws to a close, “Country Girls” delivers a giant emotional climax and then immediately takes it away, setting its anthemic chorus to guitars that sputter and die out as if piped in via a finicky aux cord. White says, only half jokingly, that she intended this particular production trick as a “whippets simulator,” evoking the way a hit of nitrous can take you from feeling high to hollowed-out in a few seconds flat. Side two of 8 Tips begins with a charred doom-metal instrumental that opens into a delicate ballad. The stunning “Beers With My Name on Them,” one of my favorite songs of the year, begins as frantic power-pop and ends as even more frantic breakbeat techno.

White and I met in person for the first time on Sunday evening, two days after the release of 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. We sat across from each other at a stone chessboard in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, just on the other side of Avenue A from Nightclub 101, the buzzy downtown venue where White would soon recite a monologue about Anna Nicole Smith for a packed room at a reading event stacked with other musician-writers. She’ll be there again tonight—Wednesday, September 17—kicking off a month-long tour in support of 8 Tips. 

White, who dabbled in music criticism a few years back, is an ideal interview subject, excited by big ideas and prone to zigzagging asides, eager to interrogate her own tendencies and motives as an artist where others might play taciturn. Like a true critic, she began by mercilessly dissecting her own new album’s supposed failure to meet the zeitgeist. These days, she’s more interested in playing within the confines of genre rather than in constantly blowing them up. “I don’t know if I would change anything about it, I just think that I, and a bunch of other listeners, seem to be interested in a different thing now: in form and stuff,” she said. “It actually gives you a greater margin for irony and distance and disaffection within it, because everyone’s working within the same premise. I’ve been feeling really cynical about being like, Every song, I’m just going to make it what I want to make. If you just allow yourself to do that, I think you lose something historical. This is pretentious to say, but I’ve been listening to 8 Tips, being like, I actually wish I was more conformist about this.”

White nibbled on dumplings as we spoke, because, she said, eating during the interview made it feel more like we were conducting a magazine profile in the 1970s. Periodically, she gripped the corner of the chessboard with both hands, as if bracing herself against the oncoming force of her own train of thought. Don’t be fooled by the artist’s objections: 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is a marvel.

I want to ask you about your early life in music. I can’t help but be interested in the fact that you’ve been doing this since you were a kid. I get the sense that you were maybe more driven about it than the average teenager is. 

I grew up at a time when it was really easy to spend an hour after school going through your dad’s iTunes library—which is, like the Counting Crows and the Chicks—and putting songs in GarageBand and putting distortion plugins on them. It was very accessible. I actually didn’t feel studious or disciplined. I was kind of petulant, or obstinate, in a legitimately ugly and annoying way. I was like, I’m not going to do school, it’s not worth my time. I was a C and D student. I never took instrument lessons other than a year of drum lessons in second grade. And then I wouldn’t practice. I’m still pretty bad at all the instruments. I just edit them.

The first music that I loved was, like, Aphex Twin, Nurse With Wound, Butthole Surfers. I loved the Butthole Surfers thing of like, this track on side B of the album is just the first one slowed down and reversed. If I unprivatized the 10 or so Bandcamp releases that are not available to the public, you’d be like, wow. I was making a lot of albums in middle school. Things I would call albums, because they were 30 minutes. Even if it was field recordings and a MIDI synth under it. I’d be like, This is my album. It counts. But eventually I figured it was good to develop things and chart out my territory. 

You’re thinking about your territory as an artist even when you’re in middle school. 

I think so. My parents are in the valley of people who are not young enough to know that the internet had snuff films on it, but also not old enough to be really afraid of it for some other reason. They were like, It’s probably fine. You can use our computer after school. And I was consuming an enormous amount of music. 

And you were into weird, avant-garde stuff. 

I was 12, so I was Googling, like, “most inappropriate song ever.” And the result was, like, Throbbing Gristle. I was Googling “scariest video in the world” and it was Aphex Twin’s “Rubber Johnny.” I was just doing it in the way that 13-year-olds are like, I want to see something crazy. There was a list on Rate Your Music that I found when I was 11 and recently re-found that was “most disturbing songs ever.” And it’s like, Korn, Butthole Surfers, Hair Police, Whitehouse. Some really weird, deep stuff. It’s all this noise music. And I remember finding it, and just Googling, like, “Throbbing Gristle lyrics,” and just reading them and being upset. It scared me and it fascinated me and it was disturbing and I wanted to make it too. But also to kind of debunk it. 

Did you have friends who were also into noise music at that age?

No. I was only friends with cis girls, and we would watch Pretty Little Liars, and then they would leave, and I would open up my dad’s computer and learn about Coil. It’s very galvanizing music to be exposed to as a young kid because the bar to entry is pretty low. You kind of just have to be off your rocker.

Your music can be quite experimental, but there’s also this side of it where you’re clearly into this sort of old-school idea of the craft of songwriting. Where did that come from?

I had been interested in making downtempo and ambient and noise. Then, when I was 15 and a sophomore in high school, I had this really bad acid trip. No one should be doing acid when they’re 15. You’re already having the psychedelic experience of being 15. But I had this bad trip and I, like, swore off chaos. Not even in a principled way, but just as cope. I was like, I need to make music that has beauty and is twinkling and concrete and tactile and I can’t be doing any of this darkness bullshit. I have to swing toward the light or else Satan will grab me. 

Was it in actual religious terms like that?

No. It was more like: Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m going to die, and I was born in the wrong body, and my life is so short and corrupted by the fact that I was born in the wrong body, and there’s a great, churning, grinding machine of chaos that exists on either side of my life, and I’m being hurled toward the end of my life at all moments. I must make Bon Iver-inspired twee folk music. 

Was this roughly coinciding with your coming into consciousness of being trans?

Totally. I came out really early, when I was 15 and a freshman in high school. I was probably six months in when I had this acid trip. That’s nothing. I was still fresh to the game and confused about what was going on. Glee would have you believe that the hardest part of being trans is people yelling at you, or coming out to your parents, or whatever. But the hardest part is it’s actually just a horrible condition to have. Not to be, like, Andrea Long Chu about it. But it is very unpleasant and confusing all the time. And scary to admit to yourself. And I was still really new to the sensation of having located the thing that I had felt for a long time. It felt crazy.

Did you have a vocabulary for what it was? 

I weirdly did. I was on Tumblr at the time. This was 2015. To Pimp a Butterfly came out. It was a moment when young kids were obsessively and hyperactively conversant in social issues. 

I was rereading the review I wrote of your last record, and it occurred to me that I never mentioned that you’re trans. 

That made me and my mom cry. 

I’m glad. I was concerned that it could have gone the other way, like, This is an important part of who I am as an artist and you’re acting like it doesn’t exist. 

Not at all. It is important to who I am as a person, but it’s not really so present in the music. I came to consciousness as a trans person at a time—and it’s still sort of this way—that the selling point of a trans artist is that they write and speak about trans stuff. And the premiere cultural figure roles that were eligible for trans people to apply to were like, Janet Mock going around to schools talking about being transgender, or Kim Petras being super femme. The sense that, as a trans musician, you could have ideas that were not limited to being trans was relatively new. I still think it’s sort of novel.

I loved when Fox News tried to doxx Ethel Cain for being troublesome, or whatever, and they didn’t even know she’s trans. They invented this whole thing about how she’s evil, and they didn’t mention it. If they knew, they would have, for sure. They were like, She has ties to Satan! It was really cool to see. They were going after her for her vibe, not that she’s trans. That was a big win. 

The idea of being a trans musician when I was 15 was like, You can be Sophie and make work about posthumanism. I would hate to make work about posthumanism. Snoozeapalooza. I wanted to be like PJ Harvey. I wanted to be like Kim Gordon. I didn’t want to be like fucking Arca. All due respect, but I just had no interest in techno-bot trans discourse. 

This is all to say that I felt like I was being reviewed as like a cis female musician. I never feel like I’m being approached or understood as one of the girls. I feel like it’s always a curio. 

Who were the musicians you were looking toward when you made that turn toward songwriting as a teenager?

The foundational songwriters for me were people who were all midway through their careers and coming out of weird music. Animal Collective was huge. [Natalie Mering] leaving Jackie-O Motherfucker and starting Weyes Blood. Salad Days came out. The biggest example I can give was Lost in the Dream by the War on Drugs. That came out when I was a freshman in high school and all the discourse on it was how they were a hazy four-track shoegaze band who’ve gone widescreen, and it’s awesome, and it’s a good thing to temper your abstraction and create good songs, and you will be rewarded for that. Ariel Pink, Pom Pom, same thing. In 2014, for a 14-year-old, the overwhelming narrative was, If you’re crazy, it’s cool that you’re crazy, and that gives you the ability to make real music. 

I feel like your harmonic and melodic vocabulary is a little more sophisticated than that of, say, the War on Drugs, though. Listening to your records, I often think about older music, like the Beatles or Burt Bacharach. Does that music mean anything to you?

Hugely. The bands I named were symbolic signposts in the turn toward songwriting, but I wasn’t actually writing songs yet. By the end of high school, I was really interested in writing songs. And by then it was Paul Simon, Paul McCartney. I was really into D’Angelo at the time. Burt Bacharach. I’ve always been really into Copland and Gershwin and stuff like that. I was getting really into Lalo Schiffrin, who did a lot of arranging for easy listening music. Herb Alpert. Sergio Mendes. I was really attracted to enormous swooning, very romantic and colorful stuff. 

It’s rewarding to write a song that you can play for your grandparents and they go, Oh, this is substantial. It’s rewarding to make something that I can have in my head, instead of something that I can just, like, find cool. And in a truly young-child-burnt-out-on-psychedelics kind of way, it was something to cling to, a form of concrete accomplishment. I was getting really interested in making contraptions, so to speak—making songs that were very intricate and complex and had a lot of moving parts and still had a strong armature behind them. I was finding that increasingly rewarding as a craft. I feel like nothing’s better than a melody.