ME OH MYRIORAMA - Interview

COSMOS.PRESS

Tell us about Me Oh Myriorama...

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ME OH MYRIORAMA

Me oh myriorama is my new project / persona and the successor to Clk, which is how I refer collectively to all of the Coin locker kid / C'est la key / Come look with me material. 

Aesthetically, and spiritually Me oh represents the act of seeing, and how that relates to the nature of light and shadow in the universe.  The idea of waking up to reality or experiencing various forms of enlightenment is probably the main focus of all the art I've created, and one might argue it's the main focus of everyone's existence, but I believe that the Me oh material will more explicitly and viscerally illustrate that central drama, in audio as well as through visuals and live performance, territory I never truly entered with my previous work. 

It's it's own thing as well as a continuation of the Clk world, the new paradigm born from the previous one's collapse, experiencing reality kaleidoscopically through a spiral lens.  

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COSMOS.PRESS

During your career, you have gone under several pseudonyms, not limited to Coin Locker Kid, C'est La Key, Joan of the Stockyards, Come Look with Me, and most recently Me Oh Myriorama. How do changing/crafting pseudonyms support your creative endeavors?

ME OH MYRIORAMA

When looked at in chronological order the Clk projects begin to expand philosophically as the Coin locker kid world begins to open up to new people, and the family and environment that's introduced in the C'est la key material. I see the Come look with me projects as a third expansion into the nature of mythology, and ultimately the introduction to the abstraction that I think defines Me oh's sensibility. Technically Coin locker kid is primarily music, C'est la key is primarily radio play or narrative, and Come look with me is primarily sound collage, so the different pseudonyms gave me the opportunity as an artist to experiment fully in different modes of audio creativity.

As a narrative device for the project as a whole however I'd like it to be seen as an illustration of various modes of consciousness, where one doesn't perceive reality in the same way even in one moment in time.

I might be mildly hungry, thinking about a mundane conversation, worried about a payment, haunted by a repressed childhood trauma, and replaying actions from a previous life as a space dolphin all in the same moment, with very little awareness of any of these realities coexisting. So the three different Clk pseudonyms are a way of expressing existing on different layers and how one's awareness of these layers may expand as one grows and evolves as a human being.

On a practical level the use of a pseudonym can encourage and empower an individual to act out very different parts of themselves than they normally might, so a collaborative project like Joan is a good example of that, a venting of various emotions somewhat outside the range of my personal material.

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COSMOS.PRESS

Can you talk to us about your release with C'est la key titled, 'Superflat'...

ME OH MYRIORAMA

Some people on TikTok have very strong opinions about C'est la key's Superflat!

COSMOS.PRESS

What inspired the album art on 'Superflat'?

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ME OH MYRIORAMA

Superflat the album is named after a Japanese postmodern art movement founded by Takashi Murakami (this is basically verbatim from the Wikipedia page). I've always been a fan of provocative art and a lot of Superflat art seems to examine sexual fetishism and consumer culture and that kind of stuff through a very fascinating critical lens. So the album art is kind of like my take on that, an amateurish dream conflation of an anthropomorphized phallus with the bright red lips of traditional American blackface depictions to illustrate a pivotal scene from the album as well as the interior state of its protagonist. There's a lot of concern about fame and popularity within consumer culture in Superflat, and I believe these are often domains of extreme levels of toxic objectification and fetishization, a perspective that plays a large role in propagating the distorted self-image seen on Super flat's cover.

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COSMOS.PRESS

Recently, your album art has become increasingly distorted and saturated, especially with releases like ds-1-3, new to me, and fiberglass. What prompted this shift in physical design?

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ME OH MYRIORAMA

I believe it's meant to illustrate a visceral sense of fragmentation and the breakdown of the senses as one continues to evolve and ultimately transcend certain aspects of the physical form.  

I think there's both a creative and destructive element equally at play, especially since I'm approaching this from a limited human perspective and it still exists primarily in a three dimensional plane.  They could be a poetic illustration of seeing physical reality from a more enlightened point of view but it's also indicative of how, just in the span of my existence alone, art itself has evolved from something physical like paint or reels of tape and film, CDs or whatever, into the abstraction of invisible information traveling between various devices that also serve as the linchpin for many other things deemed vital to modern existence in the dominant culture, such as money, transportation, personal body statistics, even romance and sex.  

I'm talking about streaming on one's cell phone of course, but basically just the Internet in general, and the looming promise / threat of the metaverse, or rather a bid to actualize this abstraction into a virtual physical plane.  

So essentially the dissolution of one's senses seems to exist on many different levels in the here and now, whether it's just a natural observation about the process of death within a conscious physical being or a discussion about human activities shifting into an increasingly nebulous sphere of perception through the use of modern technology.  I believe some of the new art styles you mentioned from me are a reflection of this, or at least how I currently understand these concepts.

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COSMOS.PRESS

Tell me about your SoundCloud bio, 'A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view,' what is the significance of this statement?

‍ME OH MYRIORAMA

It goes hand in hand with a lot of what I said in the above question, but more specifically there's a meta joke there. 

That line comes from the song in Disney's Aladdin, both the 1992 cartoon as well as the 2019 remake.  The remake itself can be said to be a whole new world and fantastic point of view compared to its predecessor as we witness a shift from two dimensions to three (although they both appear on a flat plane to the viewer regardless unless you got 3D glasses). This has been a trend not just in Disney's work but in pop culture as a whole, to remake things again and again at a quickening pace.  Pop culture might be said to just be Disney at this point as well, at the very least in the US, but that's another discussion. 

Anyway it's a silly way of implying a seismic or rather cosmic shift in perspective akin to gaining the ability to observe additional dimensions of reality, which is what Me oh is all about to me.

COSMOS.PRESS

What sounds/styles have been inspiring you recently?

ME OH MYRIORAMA

SOPHIE, 100 Gecs and JPEGMAFIA have been nothing short of a revelation to me, particularly SOPHIE and JPEG.  I only began listening to them within the past two years and they all have really helped to open my mind up sonically.  So I guess I can say the genre most commonly referred to as hyperpop in the press has been really inspirational in general, but I've always kind of liked that sort of sound.  I think I've been able to listen more studiously now.  There's also a lot of young people on Soundcloud and stuff that are making really radical wild sounding stuff that blows my mind a lot, especially with regards to how lo-fi and unhinged a lot of it can be, being made seemingly without any adherence to a fake set of rules or any inclination towards accessibility, whatever that may mean in 2022.

COSMOS.PRESS

Creatively, if there is one thing you could achieve in your career, what would it be?

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ME OH MYRIORAMA

I'd like to be more widely acknowledged within the greater public sphere as being the thoughtful and revolutionary artist I often believe myself to be, and / or achieve a sense of confidence and assuredness within myself so as to not care about such things, for I'll know intrinsically that I am a valuable and worthy human being just by being myself. That's two things but it's kind of like the same thing.

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COSMOS.PRESS

What's next for Me Oh Myriorama?

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ME OH MYRIORAMA

I'm moving to Baltimore Maryland and I'm working on completing the first Me oh myriorama album, which I intend to perform live.  Thank you very much for this interview and the wonderful questions!

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ARTIST LINKS: BANDCAMP