Today we’d like to introduce you to Todd Huber.
Hi Todd, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born in Louisville, Kentucky. My parents divorced and my brother and mom and I moved to a small town in the Indiana Coal Valley, called Evansville. I played in a Goth band named Wormwood and an industrial band called The Forcemeat Horse-show as a teenager. I graduated high school in Evansville and then moved off to college at Indiana University, where I studied (first) Psychology, and then Fine Art. I then moved to Boston in 2001 to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. My focus was Sound Art, and I was the Teacher’s Assistant to David Watson, who was an experimental musician from New Zealand and who had played music on a few Sonic Youth albums. Wow. This is boring, isn’t it? Anyway, I moved around a lot, and studied History, Environmental Science and Political Science at numerous Universities in California and Oregon. Then, in 2012, my girlfriend, her son, and I moved back to Evansville, Indiana, because I had an opportunity to open up an all-ages music venue, art gallery, and cafe, which had been a lifelong dream since going to the all-ages punk clubs in Evansville as a teen. Doing this took every moment of every day and every night for 6 years. Until, through rather dramatic and almost mythic circumstances, we lost the space to the drug-dealing bar owner across the street, who turned it into a yuppie Cigar Bar with 20$ Steaks. A documentary was made about me and the space, and I won numerous awards, one was a plate with a llama on it that the Mayor of Evansville handed me. I tried to hug him afterwards, because it was an anxious situation, and the crowd laughed. I’ve made copyleft politically charged collage-based music for over 20 years, have played hundreds of shows, and released an album on my childhood idol’s record label. The band is Negativland, their label is called Seeland, and our duo was/is called Gitar. I have done short tours with The Evolution Control Committee, The Bran Flakes, and played shows under probably 50 or more different names throughout the last few decades, throughout the country. This is getting really long, and I’m not sure even if I’m on the right track, so I’ll sum this up… Now, I’m in Minneapolis working on a sort of Cosmology of the Past Present and Future, which takes a lot of the methods of cut, copy, paste, and reformulate, from my decades of visual collage work, installations, and sound work, and transfers this to the loaded world of text.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The 20th-century philosopher Walter Benjamin had a knack of bad timing that haunted him throughout his short life, chased out of Germany by the Nazis, he finally committed suicide in 1940, after trudging through the mountains of France in order to escape to the United States on a visa for German-Jews seeking refuge, only to find the entire option closed off. Had Benjamin tried to leave a day earlier, he would have made it through, a day later he would have known that the gate was closed and would not have made the journey.
Was this a smooth road? Absolutely never. But I have come to a certain awareness that the struggle is always on a sort of pendulum-esque swing, and when it gets rough, as it always does, i try to remember that if I hold out for just a moment, things might make more sense.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am known for words. My family has this camcorder video of me and my cousin in a sandbox, and I’m maybe 3 years old, and my cousin, Adam, is probably 2. And my mouth is just saying every single word that it can possibly recall, and Adam is just all “uh huh”, “yeah”, etc.
I chop up words and put them everywhere. In sound, in text, in painting. But, like life, everything is a montage/collage/assemblage of elements from the past, forming the present, and pointing toward the future.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I was an uber sincere, overtly serious, goth kid, who lamplit as a comedian. I got straight As in school, probably because my entire family were teachers. I loved music, I tried to play guitar, I made endless amounts of themed cassette tapes, and when my family got a computer in the early 90s, I saved all my money up and bought the software Sound Forge, so I could make remixes of songs and make long mixes that blended songs together. I was the singer in a Goth band in the 90s, when Goth was only semi-retro. Lolz. I read a lot and wrote really sad, self-absorbed poetry. It’s difficult and embarrassing to read now, but also endearing… my mom keeps everything.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ellipseelkshow.bandcamp.com/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rlYy7Vo9DE
- Other: postgenre.bandcamp.com, thothmoses.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Todd Huber
Todd Huber’s Mom
Black and white photo of Todd Huber is by David Worthington.
