The totally wrecked, awesome empire of Ben Aqua
"Create stuff, get things out of your system, and don't question what you're doing or why you're doing it ’til later."
Victoria Renard
Ben Aqua is a restless New York transplant whose prolificacy in the Austin art and music scenes—dividing his creative time among the blog The Awthum Empire, photography and graphic design, and performing as both one-man metal machine Assacre and disco terrorist MVSCLZ—is matched only by his fervent eccentricity, a dedication to noise, confusion, and a general fucked-upness epitomized by the work of local fringe culture collective Totally Wreck. In the next few weeks, Aqua will host both a DVD release party for his surrealist cable-access show Everything In Heaven Is TV—featuring a reunion set from much-missed synth-pop Dadaists Zom Zoms—and Cosmic Thrust, an “outer space inter-dimensional costume dance party.” Aqua recently talked with The A.V. Club about the nascent days of his artistic collective, the influence of the late Michael Jackson, and what people of the future will think of his work.
The A.V. Club: These days you’re known for The Awthum Empire, but what can you tell us about its roots in the Totally Wreck music scene?
Ben Aqua: It's pretty crazy that it's already been, like, six years since we were doing all that. This was back when a majority of the Totally Wreck clan was still in school. We would find any location with a working electrical outlet and set up late-night, poorly organized, anything-goes shows—parking garages, Laundromats, the UT art building. We were really inspired by that famous show with J Church on the Lamar Pedestrian Bridge. Most of the recordings were made in really limited-edition mix-tapes for friends and such, so most of that stuff is out of print. I have a huge amount of unmarked CD-Rs from these kids, super scuffed-up and all. One of them came with a few shards of broken glass. Quasitropic Dexadreams was one of the only "official" Totally Wreck releases besides the Assacre album. [Laughs.] Maybe we should just release a Totally Wreck 2003-2006 mix-tape that's just a bunch of razor blades. That would be so avant-garde. That's kind of the way our mentalities were, though: Create stuff, get things out of your system, and don't question what you're doing or why you're doing it ’til later.
AVC: MVSCLZ is mostly disco, while Assacre is all about metal. In the debate of disco versus metal, who wins?
BA: Both are equally capable of extreme amounts of joy and suffering. I see disco and metal as very similar entities. Both seemed extremely confrontational when they were first emerging—disco as extreme happiness and metal as extreme darkness. But there’s some pretty goth stuff in disco, and even some sunshine-worshiping stuff in metal. It's kinda like a heaven or hell type thing. They both exist in theory, but they stay in their zones. They're too busy living in extremes to even cross the line into the other realms. Though, they will shit-talk each other to the death—that's for sure.
AVC: Was the name MVSCLZ inspired by that Diana Ross song?
BA: Actually, I heard the Diana Ross song "Muscles" after I started MVSCLZ. Then I did some research and apparently Michael Jackson wrote that song for Diana Ross. The MJ thing absolutely blew my mind. It was more exciting than surprising, especially considering how homoerotic that song really is. So I thought, “Perfect.” And I started using "Muscles" as my intro song while I change and crap. I owe so much to Michael Jackson.
AVC: How did Everything In Heaven Is Television get started?
BA: We started it because we kept seeing those zany late-night shows, like the one with the Insane Clown Posse-looking dude answering messed-up, probably intoxicated calls from people at 4 a.m. Or, my personal favorite, Jordan, who—along with her team of cohorts—sings bizarre, pseudo-Christian, pseudo-New Age songs with intense video feedback and trippy green-screen stuff in the background. My friends and I are such a huge fan of this type of stuff.
AVC: Describe a typical episode.
BA: Typically, the themes of the show involve fake interviews, funny, stupid, bizarre sketches, animations… We do a lot of stuff in character, with purposefully awkward editing and extreme close-ups of my toes and stuff. It's definitely a variety show. I do a talk show segment called “Tower of Power Happy Hour.” In the last segment, I interviewed a friend of mine who played a fashion designer, ambiguously from Europe somewhere, who was introducing a new line of Christmas-themed fragrances called Simply Christmas, which is a mixture of eggnog and musk. It's to die for. We do a lot of fake call-ins, people asking ridiculous and hilarious questions. There are real ways of contacting us, but honestly, I'm not sure how many people are watching. It goes with the ambiguity of local-access TV, like it's just kinda there constantly going, perhaps on an infinite random loop. I could see people watching our show and definitely thinking it's for real. In fact, I hope that's what people believe.
AVC: You’ve also announced plans for a futuristic mobile multimedia art project for Totally Wreck. What can we expect from that?
BA: It's gotten a lot more involved than we’d originally planned, with a short film attached to it, props, cult rituals, fake interviews... It's gonna be a big production. That's all I know so far.
AVC: A lot of your work seems obsessed with futurism. What do you imagine people will think of your work in the future?
BA: Hopefully by that time, robots with feelings and stuff will have taken over everything. I get a lot of joy thinking about weird, organic machines digging up the remains of the human race, and stumbling upon a time capsule, taking out photos of us, recordings of our voices and music, art, and being like, “What the hell?!”
