How long have you been making music?
Bliss Master D: On and off since I was a kid. My mother sang and played acoustic guitar, mostly folks songs probably to relax. I originally started making music on a Time-Sinclair 2068 computer around age 12 in 1981, programming a drum machine and synthesizer in BASIC. I made some recordings, and it was fun.
A few years later my older brother relented and let me play his guitars including a 1976 Gibson Flying V. I learned some music theory watching Frederick Noad’s Classical Guitar remote learning TV courses for Chicago City Colleges.
Freshman year of college in Champaign-Urbana, a bunch of dorm kids and I coalesced into a thrash-rap group called 4WBoys. Playing with others was a lot more fun.
What are your influences? Who or what inspires you?
D: What comes out in my playing, and in the music of The Bliss Machine probably has vestiges of Dead Kennedy’s, Public Image Limited, Chic, Judas Priest, Living Colour, Pink Floyd, Devo, Led Zeppelin, King Krimson, Jeff Beck, Chicago, Parliament-Funkadelic, Ministry, Prince, Primus, RATM and Steely Dan (believe it or not).
What can you tell me about your band The Bliss Machine?
D: The band originally launched in a dorm room at University of Illinois at Chicago in late 1990. When our bassist quit, we could not find a suitable replacement and ultimately went on hiatus in 1993. Shortly after that I launched a seminal online new music service called Planet StarChild for indie music; this in turn led to launching a Web agency which took me in the digital advertising and media business.
Fast-forward to the pandemic; I had been meaning to rehab that same Flying V that had a broken neck and was unplayable for 30 years. For over a year I searched for a luthier to repair the guitar. During this time, I decided to transfer some old DAT recordings from a 1992 practice session to cloud storage. Definitely lo-fibut the fun came through. The more I re-listened to the music, some of the tunes that I had written like Kuwait, Telemate and Lost-in-Space seemed somehow to still be relevant. I decided to re-engineer the audio and release them via DistroKid.
Fortunately, I was still friends with TBM drummer/collaborator Minister EZD who lived nearby and was game to reboot the band. We found a major talent in our new bassist Dr E. FunknBass who was into what we were doing based on the original tunes. We all have day jobs/careers, but set out to make some new music, have fun jamming and maybe even play out. To start with we re-recorded those aforementioned tracks, but it didn’t take long before new ideas started bubbling up. We did a re-interpretation of Pink Floyd’s Sheep, which was fun but a lot of work to make it our own.
Do you create art with a specific message, or do you prefer art for arts sake?
D: Both. It just depends on what inspires the band or a song. Ideally the music/ideas expressed are transcendent for listeners and are interesting and/or get them rocking out and potentially thinking in new or different ways.
What is your creative process like? What tools and methods do you use to make your songs?
D: Ideation is all over the place. For me, chord progressions and rhythms come together early; I have a bass guitar for composing. Sometimes lyrics spawn themselves separately or take shape from the emerging song. Often I work up basic drum parts in Ableton as a reference. Once Dr FunknBass and Minister EZD get their hands on things, you never know which way it is going to go.
Minister EZD plays a Roland drum kit and also plays guitar; sometimes he records audio and sometimes MIDI; sometimes with accompaniment. Dr. FunknBass often comes up with bass parts sometimes with lyrics sometimes not; sometimes with a canned Garage Band drum track. From there I’ll layer on guitarand/or vocals. I’ll pull the mix together in Ableton.
How long have you considered yourself a libertarian?
D: Since the late 80s/college; I started as an arts/architecture student. Not surprisingly, I studied Marx & Engels a bit early on which was interesting, but I was not sold on the reality. It sounds great on paper, but I could not reconcile the soul-crushing authoritarianism that it always evolved into.
That said, in school I was surrounded by virtue signalers. You may recall the “slacker” chic of the 90s, which is best explained by the Cake song “How do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle.” Most musicians that I knew spent too much time getting stoned. The peer pressure to “be cool” to conform evolved into a passive aggressive form of manipulation that was opposite of the 60s liberal mantra of live-and-let-live. The cognitive dissonance in my mind was significant.
With that context, I became aware of libertarianism while taking a recommended economics class and reading Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose." The world around me began to make sense. That led to me changing majors from art/architecture to business; I took even more econ classes. Later in the mid-90s, after working for a big company I co-founded one of the first Web agencies in the country. Being a bootstrapping entrepreneur was eye-opening as to how the government impedes everything and has a corrosive effect on businesspeople. I actually ran into some Libertarian Party folks that had a booth at an indie concert and thought – wow, their politics make a lot of sense!
What do you think the role of art should be in the libertarian movement?
D: It is essential that artists take up charge of our own messaging and presence in our over-mediated world. We have to shepherd the growing voices of liberty, civil society and free market solutions. I’m a proponent of the "Reaching the remnant" concept called Isaiah’s job and discussed on Mises.org.
Towards that end, finding LWMA (Libertarians Who Make Art) was a godsend - the light bulbs went off. In promoting The Bliss Machine, I ran across a novel collaborative playlist technique by which artists could support each other. The Indietarian playlist combined both: it is curated with indie libertarian-friendly music and musicians. While it is also promoted to normies via social media, the true purpose is that by working together we can boost each other's plays simultaneously train the algorithms. Most of the streaming platforms rely on a machine-learning technique called collaborative filtering. Unfortunately, it has a “cold start” problem, i.e. new bands have no audience and won’t get exposed to other listeners until they get some listeners. So, software is the new gatekeeper.
While The Bliss Machine will continue to put out tunes, the Indietarian project is separate with about 25 artists and over 40 tunes. That is bigger than any one band and all have their own niche followers. We welcome free-thinking musicians that want to partner and grow their music’s reach.
Beyond that, I would like to see the day when there is a TV network/app of libertarian-oriented information and entertainment content. To try to deprogram society after generations of cultural Marxism.
Are you working on new music?
D: Yes, always. In September we released a new tune called Phake (Nooze + Munny). It is a collaboration with another libertarian artist that was recently mentioned by LWMA - Slick Will & The Layabouts. I really enjoy collaborating, and Slick Will just rocked the core of the song up to another level with his intense and distinctive lead guitar.
Our prior released tune, R U Down w/Me featured backing vocals from another LWMA/Indietarian artist - The Roaming Bandits.
All told, I have had the opportunity thru Indietarian/LWMA to meet a lot of interesting and talented musical artists. That they are also interested in more freedom is the cherry on top for me. The bigger message here is that collaboration can have an exponential effect on creativity, quality as well as reach. Not to mention fun.
And so, if The Bliss Machine is not your cup of tea, do check out the many other musical artists across many genres in the Indietarian list. Indietarians are collectively working at it. These artists were hand chosen and stepped up to purposefully move the needle. Hey, at the very least give the playlist a follow and like the songs you are into!
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