The Alex Homan Interview
Alex Homan is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and frequent musical collaborator most recently based in St. Petersburg, Florida. His collaborative projects include Delaware Dan, Plake 64 & the Hexagrams, and Heumann Homan Highway, among others. His new album “Noise Foley” release today on the great Sun Cru label and we couldn’t more happy to premier this interview along side a wonderful, intimate release from Homan.
When and where were you born? What was your childhood like? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Were these things that were relevant around your household growing up? Do you have any siblings?
I actually grew up in Delaware, then failed out of college halfway through in Philadelphia, then returned to Delaware for a little bit, and then lived in Baltimore for about 7 years. At the time of writing this me and my spouse Sam are about to move to Vermont in a few weeks. But throughout it all, even going way way back, I can't really remember a time where music wasn't part of my life. It was always playing all around me growing up, and feels like it's always been a part of my being. Both my parents love a lot of popular music, but they got divorced when I was 6 and with each parent came a different blend of music taste: mom being into classic rock and dad enjoying mostly world music (and later on, country.) Having been born at the very end of the '80s, it was popular for pregnant women to play classical music before, during and after the birth so I guess I've always just been absorbing that and all the sounds at least. My earliest lucid memories of music are of movie and video game music like Zelda and Final Fantasy and stuff like that. We always had loads of tapes. My earliest favorite ones that I had were Zeppelin 2, the Macarena remix single tape and the Space Jam soundtrack.
Growing up mostly with my mom we'd always listen to a lot of Van Halen, which my mom has some pretty far-out otherworldly stories about Eddie Van Halen (out of respect to her I won't go into details) I can't say for sure that Eddie Van Halen himself was actually involved in these psychedelic stories, at least not in the physical sense, but in some way my mom created this whole world in her mind that he inhabited, and once in a while I'd laugh and say, "Hey you know, she harmlessly believes this stuff to be true, it's pretty crazy and funny and beautiful. How about that!" Kinda opened my mind up in this new way, like waking up to an absurd and beautiful psychedelic reality. Right around that time she bought me an electric guitar as a birthday gift, I think I was 14. So my mind was already absolutely blown by the time I started gripping the fretboard. Despite her difficulties, my mom has always been very nurturing and encouraging with my music. I have a brother who's one year younger than me and has a very different life trajectory, but we're still very close. I'm actually currently using his guitar, from when we were kids. We have a lot of respect for what each other does. He's kind of a work-at-home tech bro soccer star kind of guy and I love him so much! We like to laugh and have fun.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing music?
By the time I came "of age" me and my friends would sometimes sneak out and get into trouble, you know, spray painting and kinda hanging out in the woods and stuff. There was a venue called the Harmony Grange right up the street from my mom's apartment that I could walk to and they'd have live DIY bands and stuff. It was mostly like emo and screamo kind of stuff which just never was really my cup of tea. However being exposed to those kinds of intense stylings of music and instruments and vocals all being performed live definitely all kind of left an impact on me. Right around that time is when I found out about Animal Collective, I was still in high school, and that certainly I think has obviously left a deep imprint on me. I grew up kinda sheltered, I didn't really know too much about what was happening outside my little bubble for most of my time coming up. We had dial up phone jack internet up until 2007 (I had a flip phone until 2022!), so I was a little bit behind on discovering new music and stuff that was considered cool or upcoming. It wasn't until I got to college in 2007 that my world opened up into learning about more contemporary stuff from music blogs, as well as diving deep into experimental music and noise and John Cage and synthesizers and Delia Derbyshire and stuff like that. I became obsessed with Broadcast and Acid Mothers Temple. Basho and Fahey came not long after that. I befriended some local Delaware noise heads (who now run the Tabs Out Podcast) and that opened me up even more. Booking and being at noise shows definitely changed a lot for me. My time failing out of college sort of became the pivotal segue into spending a lot of time and energy into home recording and playing weird music, which honestly is a compulsion. I make music very compulsively for sure. I do it whenever I'm not sleeping, working, or hanging out with Sam. The college I was failing out of was an art school and I was a film student so I kind of just replaced making films with making little bundles of tracks.
You're a prolific artist having released dozens of albums via bandcamp. What have been some of your most favorite projects to create and why? Walk me through your particular approach to writing and recording music. What elements are most important when exploring and expressing yourself?
Since 2009, I've used Bandcamp as a personal archive. I've always had bad luck with computers. Whether it be spilling liquids into it or dropping it or whatever, I always was losing access to my files. I'm pretty clumsy. I just wrapped up an era of my life in which I was recording and performing most of my solo and collaboration projects under the moniker "Plake 64 & the Hexagrams." I came up with that name partially because of a dream I had about this greyhound bus and partially because of my preoccupation with the i ching and Nintendo. What I loved about using a bizarre moniker is that it kind of created this buffer between my ordinary self and my decision-making self. I could pretty much have a completely open-ended approach to world building through sound and so I've really enjoyed pretty much anything I've created under that name. Specifically "All Hail Yeah" and "Saga Dawa". "Shrymprovisations Volumes 1 & 2" are pretty dope too. I also have had this alternate persona since 2010 named Delaware Dan who hosts this psychedelic bizarre podcast and he talks to fellow artists like Frank Hurricane and Palberta and stuff. I've played a few live shows as Delaware Dan, which in the Delaware Dan universe are called "live business marketing seminars with supplemental materials".
I feel like, in any of these projects, the most important element is working with what's immediately happening and being completely in the moment. You know like not over-grasping certain ideas and not completely just 'floating into space" either. Sort of finding that magic middle ground where chaos and order kind of harmonize. It's really important in collaborations with other people as well as with oneself. Listening is key. I tend to work pretty quickly, probably sometimes to my detriment. Generally, when I make an album that goes on bandcamp or something I just kind of jot out sketches and then build them up into songs or movements or whatever and then try to find interesting ways to sequence and patch them all together. I have a pretty limited setup that involves a digital 8 track recorder and various tape decks so once I start building it's hard for me to go back and make changes. Each move I make needs to count. Most of the time I'll just leave things be in a sort of "wabi sabi" sort of way. Me and my friend Suzie Doogan just wrapped up an album that very much has this minimal "wabi sabi" approach. I'm very attached to working that way. I have a lot of fun salvaging ideas from improvisation. It's definitely a type of meditation for me.
Let’s talk about your new record on Sun Cru entitled “Noise Foley”. How did you initially meet those guys? What was the overall vision and approach to this record? How did the deal with Sun Cru come about? Would you mind walking me through some of the songs that are featured on the album and a little back history to them?
A good friend of mine, Dave Heumann (whom we've played together as "Heumann Homan Highway"), released his "Guitar Tapes Volume 1" on Sun Cru, so I've been following the label for a little while. I'll definitely be able to speak more to this later on, but me and my spouse got into a head-on collision during our honeymoon tour and Josh from Sun Cru reached out and offered to release some of my music. In the back of my mind I sort of had a plan to send demos to him at some point anyways, so in a weird way the crash had a bit of a silver lining. I wrote about 90% of the lyrics while traveling on the first half of our tour prior to the crash. There was a long, arduous and painful journey to get back home (by the grace of our amazing friends), but as soon as we did, I had nothing but time to record music. It was very therapeutic. I matched my lyrics up with some songs that I was coming up with and that's basically how "Noise Foley' was made. I came up with the name "Noise Foley" because I'm a huge fan of both noise and Blaze Foley, and I've been curious about seeing what happens if I combine these two influences. I've always been interested in the intersection of sound and song. Also I'm a fan of puns. Being a former film school student I thought the name was funny, "foley" being essentially noises that are constructed to enhance the reality of a scene in a movie. I've always thought of my albums as weird little short films that people can create their own visuals to in their minds. The lyrics on the album are all over the place. There is one that stands out though.
The title track has lyrics that were written before the crash and lyrics written after the crash. There's sort of two sides that come together in it. It kind of has to do with this like egomaniacal rambling that I think I was sort of exorcizing, and it kind of helped me process not just my current situation with being injured but also a lingering feeling I've been struggling with, that my music doesn't all the way fit in with either noise or music circles. But then the song has this fun, comedic feeling, so it's really about kind of just letting go of all that stuff and having fun and laughing. It's absurd to worry about "fitting in". It's just a bad habit that our society has us stuck in. "Just Woke Up Blues" is a weird little ditty about how most of the information that I consume on my social media I've consumed before I've had enough time to wake up from sleep. And so we're all on the internet in these raw, hyper-reactive and emotional moods and I think that inhibits a lot of meaningful discourse between a lot of us. It disturbs our center which we need to be alright in the world. I think it's extremely important to challenge, be challenged and face reality (despite the cesspool of disinformation floating out there), but we should know better than to check our phones before we've fully woken up for the day at least. Mental health wise, in a dying world it's important to take these things in stride. I recorded the album pretty quickly, as I normally do, using a limited setup. I have fun working within those limitations because they help establish the architecture of the project as a whole. Each album is unique. I feel as though the rawer and less edited something is, the more potential it has to open the listener up to the reality of the moment.
I understand you and your spouse were in a terrible car accident. We’re happy to hear everything is okay! What else have you got planned this summer other than your anticipated new album?
Thank you so much! We are healing up slowly and surely but just fine. It's honestly been great having time to just work on music. I'm probably in the middle of like five projects right now! As far as the rest of our summer, we're going to be living with family in Vermont while we try to get back on our feet and bounce back from this accident. I was a line cook up until this accident and this injury certainly has put a stop on that type of work for me, at least for the time being. So now we just have to figure out what our next step in life is. I'd like to reschedule and finish the tour that was abruptly ended by the wreck but that probably won't be until sometime next year. So in the meantime we're just going to keep chillin and working!
Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
I'm very grateful to share ideas and music with all kinds of amazing folks. I'm especially grateful to Sun Cru for releasing it and to y'all for taking the time to ask me some questions! And most of all I'm grateful to our amazing friends and family who have helped us during this time! Just want to say how important music is, both in times of crisis and in times of peace. Music is truly a universal language and it brings people together, which I think is extremely valuable today because of how much technology and social media and stuff has us all isolated from our own and each other's humanity. Sometimes it's best to rest, not take everything so seriously and be able to just laugh together, even just for a moment.
