image//kyle dean reinford words// liz pelly
A conversation with Philip Seymour Hoffman after his show at Big Fung Loft in Boston’s Chinatown on April 16, 2010.
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Everything In My Cupboards Is Moldy
Phillip Seymour Hoffman is sitting on the floor, legs folded, playing guitar, holding a microphone with his knees. For his last two songs, 20-year-old Noah Klein (a.k.a. Philip Seymour Hoffman) has the crowd sit on the floor with him. These quieter songs differ from the rest of his set: he mostly plays pre-recorded experimental psychedelia on cassettes, sings honest lyrics, plays tom drum and melodica. He sometimes wears an animal mask, and hands out toy instruments to the crowd for added percussion.
To the left are a kitchen counter, oven, refrigerator, dishes drying in a dish rack. The space, Big Fung loft in Boston’s Chinatown, is clearly someone’s home.
Hours later, after Truman Peyote closes the show around 2 a.m., Noah and I are sitting on the stairs in the hallway. Noah is telling me about “The FMLY,” an artist collective of sorts, whose members in New York, LA, Santa Barbara, Austin, San Francisco, Portland and San Diego book shows and run a blog together.
“FMLY is whatever you want it to be or whatever you need it to be,” Noah tells me.
“I always thought it was a blog,” I respond.
“It’s an online forum, but it feels more like an orphanage for traveling musicians,” says Noah, who frequently has friends of the FMLY crash at his place in NYC. “I feel like it’s creating these little underground railroads.”
The FMLY was born when Noah and his friends in LA were all leaving for college and realized they needed an online forum to keep in touch. Noah helps manage, edit, and write up interviews for the site. He now goes to the New School and helps set up FMLY shows in LA, New York, and at CMJ and SXSW.
“It’s a safe place for anyone, a collective for people who feel that social change needs to happen,” he says. “It’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Noah tries to keep Philip Seymour Hoffman separate from The FMLY, but they are ultimately really similar. Themes of Philip Seymour Hoffman songs are microcosmic examples of themes running throughout the entire FMLY collective: community and connectedness, opening up and caring about the people around you. The idea of collectivity and being around other people is recurring.
Tonight at Big Fung, Noah played “Flying Missiles,” a song that he tells me is about community and realizing one’s potential within a community, as well as “Serenity Now,jpg,” which is about “actually doing something and not just sitting around.” (The latter is usually a collaboration with Cop Magnet.) He also played “Everything in my cupboard is moldy” which he says is “trying to express how much he love pretty much everyone that he meets.”
“That’s pretty positive… do you feel like most of your songs are pretty positive?” I ask.
“I think they’re depressingly positive,” he responds with a laugh.
Noah pulls all of his songs from what he calls an “audio journal,” basically a Garage Band file where he records his feelings and memories. “If I have a feeling I don’t want to forget, I’ll pick up my guitar keyboard and start recording the first thing that comes to my mind,” he says. “They’re like little time capsules for me.”
Tonight they sounded different, without all the usual reverb drench. “You could hear the words really clearly tonight which is awkward for me because I am putting a lot out there,” Noah says.
When I ask him to sum up his sound, he tells me that he can’t really describe his music because he doesn’t listen to it and doesn’t really even like it.
“You don’t like your music?” I ask. “Why not?”
“I don’t know, I can’t listen to it,” he says. “Writing for me is really cathartic, so my songs remind me of really important memories. I am usually either way too attached to what a song is about, or I am way too past what it’s written about… There are some songs that have taken me a really long time to get over. At Total Bummer Fest, I definitely broke down at one point…”
“What happened?” I ask. “I mean you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“Oh it’s cool, I just started freaking out. I mean it wasn’t a public thing. No one realized except for me.”
“You can tell from your facial expressions that they’re really real, specific things you’re singing about.”
“I still can’t open my eyes when I play,” he says, laughing.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman has one cassette out now on Breakfast of Champs Records. His next 7″, Semi-Marxist Like Us, is out this summer via FMLY Records. He also has a cassette out in October via Impose.
For more info, check out the his MySpace or the FMLY site.
