Meet Jib Kidder

Jib Kidder, Jib Kidder, Jib Kidder…say it ten times fast, I dare you. 

A bit of a tongue twister, a bit of a brain melter. Much like this guy’s music! The project of artist and musician Sean Schuster-Craig, Jib Kidder delivers some acid-country-pop tunes that will toss your brain around, left, right and center. 

Schuster-Craig is nothing short of an experimenter, splicing lyrics and sounds into a giant collage. This guy will put all of your macaroni collages to shame, my friends. 

Below, we pick Jib Kidder’s brain about his collage process, the influence of dreams, and his most excellent rap education. He also offers up some pretty mind boggling philosophy, so grab some tea and settle in fellas. 

Read on and prosper.  

A Self-Portrait by, Jib Kidder

Would You Rather…

have a magic lasso that would make people tell the truth or everyone believes every lie you ever tell? Why?

Everyone already believes every lie I ever tell! I'll take the lasso and sell it to the exactly right cat for cash. I’ll use the cash on exactly the right thing I’m needing to make art which right now is more vibrators, more hangable metal buckets, more dry-erase whiteboards, more bungee cables, sexy, comical or mystical dresses, a sturdier handtruck, ample Tacky Glue, animal drum heads and a great number of AAA batteries. 

Some Questions with Jib Kidder

Did you ever get detention in school? If so, why?

I got ISS for smoking but I only ever got detention for a longsleeve Jane's Addiction shirt that has an angel on it. The Baptists of Fayetteville, Georgia prefer clothed angels. There does happen to be a fountain there, spraying on the angel. 

What draws you to collage, as both a method of making music and as an artistic expression?

Collage was my first artistic act - I traced a raccoon as a 2 year old. An artist's practice is a cascade of intuitions, and if you have any luck, you arrive quickly at your strongest intuition, your greatest power. My chief skill is association. Because I can associate two ideas long before I can understand what that association means, association has further reach for me than other modes of thinking, especially with regards to reaching into the future. But even beyond it just being the way I am, I have this belief that my process illuminates the huge capacity for thinking that exists outside of language. Everyone who has engaged in the generation of new knowledge is familiar with the difficult to describe process of accessing and harnessing the non-language places in brains and all technologies exchange godlike power for human diminishment, language is a technology and its benefits come at the price of diminished experience. Now, a separate fact is that all thinking is collage and all artworks are collage. All this and all that is the same thing: innovation and recombination among a palette of incompletely understood existing totalities. An artist seemingly engaged in the pure act of songwriting is, in fact, recombining existing pieces of pieces of music in (hopefully) novel ways. As a result, collage is actually the pure creative act, it is more pure and more generous because it leaves in tact the parts of its roots that are not fully understood. It says 'I can interact with you without changing or concealing you'; it says 'I'm not embarrassed to say you taught me this'. Its true distinction, however, comes in its indifference to market forces, its flipped bird at the thought of thought property.

Do you have a drink of choice? What is it?

Well, my attitude towards beverages rests on a strong foundation of opposing alcohol. And that foundation rests on an even stronger, uglier, messier foundation of alcohol abuse. As an artist, I prefer the productive beverages - black tea, coffee, mate, ganja lemonade. I am also fond of spa water, seltzers, tonic water. If I’m tripping I like to drink Frank’s Hot Sauce by the thimble, but for a while. Peak drink for me is a shot of espresso followed by a shot of ganja lemonade followed by a shot of seltzer followed by an afternoon of figuring out the best way to play doggie water bowls with sex vibrators. 

How do you begin to "collage" a song?

Songs start with a problem. For me, these can be various problems, but one such problem is a crush. A crush is a feeling that is a problem because it changes you, it compels you, it reorients you. So, you could say, I often begin a song with a crush on a sound, a crush on a passage. Another kind of problem is a regret. Regret plays out in the world of collage as a redo, a change of context. So, you could say, sometimes I begin a song with a desire to change a sound, change a passage.

Where did the name "Jib Kidder" come from?

The name came from a dream. Dreams were a thing that, before I had children, I would listen closely to.

How do you choose what source material to use in your music?

The secret to all human accomplishment is in the limitations and myopia of individual human will and the sprawling infinite magic of human habit. I choose source material thru multiple-lane accumulation by following the spine. I cultivate a web of habits and I follow directions from my spine. Accumulating through eBay, thrift stores, trash piles, digital trash piles, spheres of piracy. But also the accumulation of little bits of words, from books, from space, from cyberspace, from eavesdropping. You’ve heard of ASMR, a lot of people talk about ASMR. But is anyone talking about its purpose? ASMR is a guide to what’s right! ASMR is your spine’s endorsement! I skip the language, let the spine decide. Scan a full body with a tongue, ASMR provides all the data for an erogenous map. And it’s not just that, I have a process and a shadow process, that there are these lanes of shadow habit as well and they are informing the main process, the primary accumulations, in ways that cannot be fully understood. I have a faith in coincidence, an infatuation with coincidence that leaves me no choice but to oppose the algorithm, to fear the coming war on accidents. And just a real belief in repetition, as a means of justification. So, for example, there are beer or soda cans that are flattened by that which litter endures, I collect these when I find them. At least, I collect them when I find the right kind of them. And then I Gorilla Glue them into this painting I have with these balloons and party hats. And my daughter, in seeing me pick up a squashed can from the curb, brushing it off, checking it out, seeing if it’s as good as it seems, might say something to me, and say it with a great deal of novelty, and I'll capture her words among space, pause them, put them down in a little book I carry in my pocket instead of a smartphone, because this book is cheaper and more useful and all around just a general improvement on carrying a phone around, where they will sit among other words and one day become a poem or song of mine. And when she sees me pick up the 9th can, when she sees me grab the 10th, my action is no more scrutable than it was initially, but now it makes the same unquestionable sense all sensible things make - and that’s what I mean by repetition as justification. This manner of attending to various interlocking lanes of accumulation requires a special gift, and one with a lot of frightening modern relevance  - the Eagle Eye, you know, constant vigilance. 

If you could run away and live anywhere in the world to write a new album, where would you go and why?

I can run away and do that, I absolutely can. I am going to Vietnam because of the food and the guitar music the promise of greater numbers of insects and the difficulty you’ll have finding me. 

How do you see yourself maturing further as an artist after this most recent release?

I have already matured, what's ahead is regression, decline. I see myself as declining beautifully, of being a truly great decliner, of being more beautiful rotting than I ever was thriving. Actually, what’s been happening with me the last decade is the integration of compartmentalized parts of me and what you can expect forthcoming is the further collapse of these internal separations.

How has rap influenced your music, if at all?

I grew up in Atlanta! I studied rap like kids used to study Bach! Actually, on my way to classical guitar lessons as a teenager on MARTA kids would ask to me to do like the “Beat It” riff so they could freestyle while their friends played the seats for drums. I've programmed entire Mannie Fresh cuts stab for stab. When I was first doing computer music I was buying bootlegg Gangsta Boo CDRs from the Georgia State courtyard. My rap blog and weed mixtape were probably more popular than my music ever was. Freak Nasty once sent me a positive youtube message, re: Windowdipper, and this was coming at a point where I was worried he might sue me, so I just went to check for that message to quote it and youtube has gotten rid of all messages! Damn! I should have screenshot that shit! I know I told him I was real into PMW, his old weed-themed group. Oh well, it all disappears eventually. But yeah the influence - the syncopation, the holes in the zone, the ongoing roll, the absent resolution, the psychedelic float, the napkinlike folds - for the entire time I have been alive rap music has been the central music on this planet! And let me tell you something further, IT’S BEAUTIFUL THE WAY MOZART IS, THE WAY QUAILS ARE.

If you could give one animal species (besides people) the ability to fly which would it be? Why?

Cows, to flee us.

What three colors, moods, or textures describes your sound?

Dopamine, Serotonin, Epinephrine.

Do you take influence or inspiration from any visual artists? If so, who and why?

Max Ernst, due to his expertise with adhesives and his sight into the future. Forrest Bess for his clarity of vision and attempt to unify. But really, there is more influence in my work from films. For example, recently I was really moved by the use of sound in Lucretia Martel’s films, its three-dimensionality and mind effects. Thinking deeper, I could never have made “All on Yall” without “Blue Velvet”; maybe not even without “Videodrome”. Video editing and modern computer-based audio production are close processes. Film is the real visual art now. Really, with making records, we’re making listening films. 

What instrument do you want to learn, if any?

Percussionists and horn players, monophonic instrument players, they have access to a thinking that I don't. So I would learn drums and bass clarinet to open that up for myself. And I always want to improve my piano. I always want to slow time enough to make space for working on my piano. 

Any final comments? (This is your electronic soapbox for one last answer.)

I believe in cycles, I believe in repetition. And I find Thomas Nagel's recent idea of a teleological universe really compelling, that the universe is, like us, goal-oriented, and to ponder the mystery of that goal is spine stimulating to me. But I also wonder if perhaps we are all well aware of what we are currently engaged in together as we watch it play out in slow motion across dystopian screens - our death by technology. The alternative is possible, which is the transfer of the universe from the hands of life to the hands of tech, and I allow for the possibility that the universe is doing this and this is what the universe has always intended. But, my intuition stands with the former thought, that we are fulfilling a cyclic stage that every evolved intelligent species completes with as the rate of information creation exceeds their capacity for adaptation. But I'd add, if we are entering the hospice stage of man, if the death of all of us is as inevitable as the death of anyone of us, the rewards of shedding all illusions, of piercing the veil, are higher, not lower, than the other stages. As truth becomes scarce it likewise becomes more valuable.