An interview with 400 Lonely Things
We were drawn to the work of 400 Lonely Things after hearing Mother Moon. The album's subject was the Banning Mill, a decaying textile factory that once stood in the forgotten backwoods of Georgia - a place which, during the 1970s-90s, became a psychedelic artists' colony and haven for outsiders. It was here that Craig Varian first encountered Mother Moon, a curious painting which, together with his experiences of the mill, would continue to inspire the group, eventually culminating in the album released by Cold Spring in 2023. Mother Moon is more than an album, though; it is a sonic evocation of that place and time - of the people, art, and strange energy that haunted the mill's rooms and corridors. Produced with William Basinski, the album channels the mill's spectral atmosphere through ghostly piano loops, distorted voices, and dreamlike drones. Follow-up releases continued to shape memory and mystery into sound. Apophrenia delved deeper into the paranoia and unease of apocalyptic conspiracy culture, transforming obscure devotional music, film fragments, and cult recordings into an unsettling yet strangely beautiful meditation on belief and delusion. Children of Eidolon, curated by Lawrence English, presented a phantom counterpart to their work - a spirit-image woven from unreleased tracks spanning over a decade, full of melancholic drones and spectral atmospherics. With uneasy atmospherics composed of sample based textures, ghostly melancholia and eerie ambience, the music of 400 Lonely Things remains strikingly personal. It is music as séance, as remembrance - for ghosts both real and imagined. The history of 400 Lonely Things stretches back to 1988, when the group was formed by Craig Varian and Jonathan McCall. After McCall's passing in 2020, Varian carried on alone. In this serialised interview, we look back to the origins of the project and onwards through their extensive discography - and hopefully, you'll understand why we consider them one of the most beguiling and distinctive voices in experimental ambient music. Who are 400 Lonely Things? 400 Lonely Things has been: me and Jonathan McCall me with the occasional participation of Jonathan McCall (Jonathan didn't provide much audio - but was around the edges) and just me. 
What are the origins of the name 400 Lonely Things?Both the music for 400 Lonely Things and even its initial visual representation definitely came well before the name. In 2000ish, I was living in Florida and pretty isolated because of work and family life - having recently left a diasporic group of long-time friends and creative partners in Carrollton, GA. I had a studio, though, and spent most of my spare time in it. Jonathan and I even managed to record in it together a little during a visit before he settled into his family life in Indiana, having also left Carrollton. That was an amazing visit and was probably the last time that we actually recorded in person - in the same room together. I think that was 2002. I don't think we were in the same room together for the next 15 years, but we spoke frequently and collaborated over the internet quite a bit. Jonathan and I always had our together projects and our solo projects - even though both categories had a shared library of recordings from the collective pool of what we'd done previously, alone or together. 400 was one of mine. It came about by connecting dots between a phrase I had randomly written down - "400 Lonely Things" - which was just something I'd scrawled previously in a pad of random phrasings that was grist for band names and album / song titles. That 400 Lonely Things dot connected to this forlorn little wooden thrift store dog that was hanging in my studio - and that connected visually to all of these musty little songs we'd done going back to the 80s but had never grouped together: music that sounded like a thrift store smelled. These songs had sneaked their own pissy little micro anti-genre into our catalog - a thread of songs with aggressively sentimental, melancholic, lo-fi psychedelic sampling at its heart, all in service of a vague hauntological agenda, although we'd never heard that term before. Weapons grade imaginary nostalgia was natural territory for us. So, I drilled into those existing songs and started making new ones with a similar feel and Jonathan would sometimes send me contributions to use as raw material or the occasional complete song. Once even (while still alive) we did an album of basically just his stuff (Minutes A.D.), and once (while not alive) another album of his stuff (Deep Hearted Vol 2) but we'd always talk about the music, and I would routinely bounce tracks off of him just for his perspective. Something about that scrawled 400 Lonely Things phrase (which was scanned into the logo), that dog, and that thread of thrift-store dark ambience we had by the bucketload gelled into whatever this [gestures vaguely] is. Finally, and thank God. It was nice to finally commit to an idea after what had felt like a lifetime of floundering with projects that never really made it past the toddler stage. Does it have a meaning? Generally, Yes: To me, it started as Mildewed Little Moments of Our Lives. The number 400 is random and arbitrary but also numerically serves as an ultimate goal - of recording 400 songs ("things"). If I reach 400 recordings, I would regard this vague mission of 400 lonely things as vaguely complete. Does it have a meaning? Thematically, yes: On a personal level, I've always felt lonely but in a mostly positive way. Content to be alone anyway. I grew up poor mostly raised by a single mother - but I was an only child and life was mostly safe and mostly happy for me - especially when I was left to myself and away from authority figures and institutions and their confusing and unnatural social demands. As a child and as of now, I was just as happy to be alone as I was to be with friends. The times that loneliness has been negative were typically times where I was surrounded by people or rules that made me feel lonely. That personal ingredient makes this music perhaps overly hermetic and insular, but this music is for me. These are my protection spells. Beyond the personal - there is a quality of loneliness found in these tracks that are more broadly impressionistic and decidedly existential. Just the background noise of a pleasant loneliness and an unpleasant loneliness, in a disturbing but reassuring balance. This facet feels like a placid but wearily detuned radio in the background of our nothing little miraculous lives. 400 Lonely Things have been around since 2003 and released over a dozen albums, how has the group evolved to where it is now? So I categorize 400 into three pretty distinct phases. 
Phase one: 2002-2008/9 (400LT 1-8)The first album [self-titled, vinyl only] was assembled in 2002-2003 and released in June of 2003. Trying to sell that record fucking sucked. I hated it. I spent at least a year trying to break even and at some point realized that I'd much rather be making music than trying to talk people into paying to listen to it. In fact, I'd rather do anything than that. The process was the exact type of loneliness I had assembled the album to combat, and trying to sell it was keeping me from making music while simultaneously draining me creatively and financially. I eventually just gave up on it and boxed up the dead stock and moved on. In hindsight, yeah, fuck yeah. I kept recording and In 2007 my brother-in-law Georges had a digital distribution deal with a few labels he was involved with and wanted to know if I was interested in starting up a label of my own. That became Pimalia. I envisioned it as a genre-free home for 400 as well as for friends with their own musical projects. I was able to release quite a few albums pretty quickly - all of which I'm really proud to have been involved with (I think my favorites were Fishy by Mookoid, My Lord Honey by Robot Buckwheats, Call It What You Want by Hawaiian Garbage and a reissue of Cross Purposes by Forms of Things Unknown). But then the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began. I was working two full-time jobs and doing the label - which was really stressful even before the recession, but then one of the companies I worked for dropped me and the other company kept sending me work but never paying me. This went on for a year. Around this time, I was building out this complicated social media page for Pimalia and the next day it was just gone, web error of some kind. It just vanished and it had been so much work built spending adrenalin based energy that I did not actually have. That was the last straw. I had started breaking out in painful welts and feeling like I was being electrocuted. I went to the emergency room and found out that I had shingles and it was brought on by stress - but also by a lifetime of undiagnosed free-floating anxiety. I went on Zoloft and to this day it was the single healthiest thing I've ever done. I would be a poster boy for Zoloft. I mean, I have a beautiful wife and we have a beautiful kid and we have a home and electricity and food, and animals and love and this emergency room visit still became the best thing I'd ever done with my life. It's impossible to overstate it. I let go of a lifetime of meaningless anxiety (and its cohorts, anger and depression) and quit fighting everything and just became my version of a rock in the stream. 
It helped that, the next morning - while driving home from the emergency room I made a verbal commitment to protect my mental health and excise that gratuitous worry and to forever swear off anything that felt like bullshit* and at some level the label kept getting flagged in my mind as an example of it. I stopped the label in its tracks and started looking for freelance work and moved on in a pretty definitive way. I realized soon after that what bothered me about the label was the implicit neediness. And fuck that.*I know it when I see it. Musically, I started messing around with my electronic side project called Phobadrena and just had fun with it. That went on for the next seven years at least. I didn't think I'd ever do another 400 album and I was certainly done trying to sell music or spending my time on projects other than my own. And for chronological order: Barsoomian Lullaby 2 was where I was at in my release cycle when I ended the label. The Forget Me Knot was the album I was writing at the time and it was about 90% done and would have been released that year. I revisited it a couple years later, just to finish it so it could be removed from my own personal honey dew list. But I really didn't think I'd ever do another 400 album. Phase two: Fireside Favourites 2017 I was sitting on my porch in the mountains of North Carolina with my laptop one time and recorded a song. It was called 'Love Me' and it became the first song on what became Fireside Favourites, and it was the first blatantly 400 song in nearly 10 years, and it started the whole process of that album (our 9th). Which was crazy. I really thought I was done with 400, and here was this song just happening out of nowhere. I didn't plan it - in fact, I was almost alarmed by it. I wasn't sure I was ready to go back there. But I loved the song. A little time passed and it happened again - I recorded another song ('Winter of our Disconnect') and realized that it was also a 400 song and I could tell it was the final song on an album I didn't know I was about to write - all I had to do was fill the space between these audio bookends. That area between those two songs ended up becoming about 4 hours of music, written outdoors on a laptop in autumnal months. And with that, 400 was back in my life - as some kind of intrinsically positive force of pure obsessive negativity - wildly comforting psychedelic over-produced lo-fi eeriness. I was really happy about it. Hello darkness, my old fwend. 
Phase three: The Morning People to now...Almost immediately after releasing Fireside I recorded a track on that same porch called 'Parlor Tricks'. I knew this song signified the start of this next phase of 400 and knew that this was the beginning of Mother Moon - an unspoken project that had been awaiting its Manchurian activation in some cobwebbed corner of my heart for YEARS. I got a little more than halfway through that album before a bunch of terrible life-altering events happened. The first thing was finding out my Dad had cancer in 2017. I loved my dad so much. We did not always see eye to eye and there were qualities about him that I did not like at all. But there was never even the shadow of a doubt of our love for each other. During the next couple of years he lived and fought and died and I was able to visit him often and those visits meant a lot. In 2018, Jonathan and his family moved to NC from Indiana, about 20 minutes away from us. It was kind of understood that with Jonathan's grave heart condition that this would be his last move. After nearly 20 years of living apart, we were finally able to regularly see each other again and our families spent a lot of time together. But not enough. In April of 2019 my Dad died - literally within the same 24 hours that I'd had to tell Jonathan I'd been transferred by my job to the company's home office in Wisconsin, after almost 20 years of working from home, and only about a year into Jonathan's move. We left our dream home and Jonathan and our friends and our beloved North Carolina behind and I will never stop regretting it or playing it out differently in my head and the scars I carry from it are muted but permanent and occasionally pop stitches. So mote it be. While I was in Wisconsin, I experienced the first actual loneliness I'd had in decades - that surrounded by people who make you feel lonely kind of loneliness. The work environment was toxic - grueling corporate hustle exploitation with a hostile veneer of positivity and can-do care from the tiny oligarchs behind the glass. I hated the state and hated the cold. My wife's job was killing her. We missed our mountains and I missed working from home with all of my heart. I missed my friends and family. Then COVID. Then I got laid off. Then Jonathan died. Then I found out I had diabetes. My wife and I looked at each other on New Year's of 2020 / 2021 and said "fuck it, let's go home" and moved back to NC just two months later, but months too late. During that period in Wisconsin after getting laid off and before moving back, I finished recording and released The Morning People. I nearly finished recording Mother Moon - as well as starting a bunch of other albums - some of which have been released, some of which are finished but unreleased, and others of which are still in process. This phase, while born of so much turmoil and grief, was the one I'd been working towards. I realized in a visceral way that art can be a life raft, but because it's a life raft you can't pack too much or too little if it's going to support you and there's no room for second guessing. Getting that balance just right literally saved me. It gave me an ultimately wholesome tool which was the ability to see that at this moment, there was room in this life raft for me and my grief and not much else. And music just started pouring out and I still can gleefully barely keep up with it because regardless of the source material or subject matter, the end result soothes me and gets me out of the muck. I'm still in this phase, and even if I stopped it would take a couple of years to get all of these backlogged albums out. But I can start to see Phase 4 on the horizon (and it looks like ants!). Key Resources: 400 Lonely Things on bandcamp Phobadrena on bandcamp 400 Lonely Things on instagram 400 Lonely Things on facebook |
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trawling the margins of (un)popular culture