P.H.F. & 99JAKES: BUDS WORLDWIDE

The two musicheads and mutual fans share tips and takes from opposite sides of the earth, touching on everything from using weed to make music to synesthesia to the always avant-garde P.H.F.'s upcoming album Purest Hell, set to be his most beautifully brutal output yet.

99JAKES: What is your favorite part about making music?

PHF: I love the community aspect of it. You just meet so many people that are on the same buzz as you. Not all the time obviously but you can find people quite easily. That’s literally how we know each other. I feel like the people I make friends with in terms of music are always friend-first, music-second in a way. 

99JAKES: What is a huge inspiration of yours musically that people might not expect coming from your sound? 

PHF: That’s a really hard question. I feel like I make so many different kinds of sounds. I think when I properly started making music or writing songs, it was like 50’s and 60’s pop music. Even really old crooner shit. I was really into Perry Como, Elvis, Buddy Holly. 60’s girl groups. The more I listened to it, the easier it became to write a pop song, I reckon. It’s formulaic in a way and after you start figuring it out, you can hear so many songs in one song, if that makes sense. Chord progressions, melodies, etc. I had a massive Carter Family phase. 

How does weed play into your music making?

99JAKES: Weed helps me a lot musically, in terms of telling my ADHD to shut the fuck up and let me actually make some music. I'm bipolar. It helps a lot with that. It kind of helps me remain calm and not think too much and honestly, explore a little bit more with music. Not that I can't do that sober, but it definitely is a different way of approaching music. I won't lie, it is really nice to be grinding on a song for eight hours, you're fried and you're like, “okay, I need to stop with this. So, you render it out and then you smoke weed and then listen to what you have. I’ve gotten ear fatigued thinking “oh this sucks.” And I smoke weed and try to listen to it and I'm like, oh no, this is really good. I'm just ear fatigued and I can fix this tomorrow.

Does weed play into your music making?

PHF: In terms of sitting down and writing a song, I love to smoke a couple bowls, get my guitar out, kind of just fuck around or whatever, and then sometimes I’ll be able to make a song out of that. And I feel like that is a really good use for weed. It quiets a lot of stuff. I’m not thinking about some dumb thing I said three days ago. It gives you a different perspective. I’ll hear new things that I wasn’t listening to before. I’m sure that’s pretty common, but it will inform other new ideas.

99JAKES: Why does your music feel so dynamic?

PHF: I really like the combination of making something that comes from a dark place, but making something that is really triumphant and happy. I like those two elements. Catharsis, but using it for something good. And hopefully people listen to that and relate and can think, “I feel better now.” It’s good having that mix. It makes it dynamic. Sometimes you do, but you don’t always want to listen to something that is just slow and sad. Overbearingly depressing. Sometimes that shit has its place. When I don’t feel good, I go into sort of manic episodes, so I need shit to be quite fast and poppy and off the walls. 

I like the dichotomy of aggressive and positive. One of my friends described my music as “fun but vaguely hostile,” and I was like, yeah, that is fucking it. I love the mix of two opposing forces and that combo making something cohesive. 

Do you see music in your head?

99JAKES: I envision everything in my head. What's the word, synesthesia, right? Is that the word for it? It can show up as different things. For me it is color based but it's also shape based. I visualize music as a bunch of shapes and how they fit together. That's where a lot of  inspiration comes from too. If I look at an object I usually can hear sound in my head. I'm just like, okay, that's what the object sounds like. Living in the desert, we have a bunch of mountains and something about that landscape makes me hear piercing saws in my head and art melodies. 

Give me three sounds that you think are integral to your sound?

PHF: Distortion, definitely. Distortion and compression. They go intandem. Maybe echo. The only things I can think of are for vocal processing. Chorus and flange. More recently formant-shift. I remember, maybe ten years ago, when I was listening to all that 60’s pop music. I basically wanted to write a girl group album. I decided that I was going to sing really high. So I made all this shit called Girls in Love. Super obviously referencing that. When I first started, I wanted to be anonymous and not play shows, have this interesting…not experiment, but I wanted to make music and put it out there without having any face to the music. I remember when Gorillas came out. I was fucking obsessed with that shit. Even though now that I’m older I know it’s the guy from Blur and a bunch of other people, but I really liked the idea of having an avatar for your creative shit. Like a character. It’s almost some prog-concept shit. Like, I’m this character for this song. 

PHF: What is happiness to you?

99JAKES: If I am 40 and I have a studio and have a job I am happy with, I'll be happy. If I can just work part-time and then supplement the rest from music, have my own studio that I can go to, that's the dream for me. Am I gonna be 40 just still making happy hardcore and gabber? Probably the answer is yes. Most likely. I can't see why I would have stopped.

99JAKES: When you're writing lyrics, what do you generally like to write about?

PHF: It’s just a train of thought, I feel like. Usually I’ll make the music first and just sit there. I feel like I’ll listen to something and get the melody. Then I’ll just mumble something, moving my mouth around, hoping it forms a word at some point. I really like alliterations in music. So for one line of a verse, starting a lot of the words in that verse with the same letter. It gives some sort of structure. So if you were using a lot of ‘b’s or ‘d’s, it’s easier to find a word. I like the limitation. I also really love using rhymezone.com to write lyrics. In general, having a limitation like rhyming. I also buzz out when I’m listening to music and the lyrics don’t rhyme at all. I need some sort of framework. I know a bunch of people that are the same. I feel like that is pretty common. I like the old school way of things rhyming. It helps you find a word. The lyrics don’t even have to make sense.

On the new album, there’s a song called ‘Special,’ that was written when I was with my boyfriend at the time. Probably one of the very few, positive, cute, happy songs. I feel like that part of making music, I need to get more into. Or am I just going to make really depressing music for the rest of my life?

THIS CONVERSATION HAS BEEN EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.