issue 6: Warren Realrider
Discussed: raw materials, artificial sinew, AUBE, American Indian Movement, Oklahoma, pow wows, ceremony, every- day objects, Love & Fury, water, MiniDisc, tradition, Native art, liminal space, blended worlds, progress, etc.
Warren Realrider, AKA TICKSUCK, is an indigenous (Pawnee/Crow) artist living in Norman, Oklahoma. His performances often incorporate homemade instruments that combine the natural world and the industrially manufactured.
The interviewer, Taylor McKenzie, sings in the band Karger Traum and runs the Fixed Rhythms label. He resides in Oklahoma City.
Photographs by Taylor, except for above, courtesy of the artist. Additional questions and edits by Adam.
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What I’ve always thought was very singular about your approach is how you use a lot of raw materials from your environment. On the recordings you’ll list things like “stone found at __ River.” You pay tribute to something that people literally step on every day. Has that always been something you’ve been interested in?
Those elements come from my art practice before I started doing sound. In some pieces, I was using specific materials. I think that’s how I was trained as an artist. When I was in school, the stuff that I learned at that point just carried over into the sound thing.
I wanted to use very specific materials, whether it was like a sample or from a certain recording or a certain material that related to sound or a place that I could work into what I was doing. Listing those things is a kind of tribute to certain noise artists. Like, on the credits of the album they would list out the equipment they used, the different types of synthesizers or whatever. But it’s also a reference to the traditional art gallery. Descriptive tags, like “this is an acrylic painting with grease dripped on it.” Maybe it puts it more in that realm of an art piece.
There’s always a crossover between those two worlds, experimental music/noise and the art world. People try to fight against it, but I’m not going to. I’m fine being called a sound artist, noise artist, noise musician, whatever people call me, I’m fine with it.
There’s a Japanese noise artist that wasn’t one of the bigger names, AUBE. I never really listened to a lot of his recordings, but I was influenced by the approach. He put out maybe a hundred recordings or more, a huge amount. His recordings were all based on a certain theme. A recording would be like, “this is the processed sound of water,” or “this recording is all made from the sounds of metal.”
So you embrace the art world?
Yeah, I do, because that’s where I come from. That’s my background. Like I said, there’s a crossover there, no matter how you want to deny it or work against it, or embrace it. It’s been there since the beginning. If you want to talk about noise, the beginnings of it, people start referencing the Futurists and Surrealists and those kinds of things, composers, experimental composers from the ‘50s or whatever. Even back then, music and art were always closely linked. They’re coming out of the same social conditions. Whatever’s going on in the world, they’re always addressing those things in some way.
What are the social conditions you are addressing?
I’m always coming from my background, growing up in Oklahoma. The history of what Oklahoma is, this place of removal or displacement, where my family and the people I’m from ended up, out of, you know, not anybody’s choice. My art hasn’t always dealt with that in a straightforward way, but it’s always been very influenced by that history of conflict, and trying to hang on to things, or revive things. I have been focusing on water as a subject matter in my work for the last several years. Pre-1492, the rivers were an important part of my tribe’s way of life, so I’ve tried to center those natural waterways in my life for the purpose of reconnection. All modern people can easily lose touch with those systems and their importance. For me, water protection is a pressing issue not just for the indigenous nations but really all nations, peoples, and forms of life. Clean, safe drinking water, livable water environments, etc. are all pressing because you or I or anything won’t live without it, which really ties into the environment as a whole. Water is a very important part to maintain, but it is one part of a larger system that lives on this Earth. The system is large and moves at its own accord, but we should not be actively self-sabotaging the parts that we can save or improve.
Politically, this planet seems a hot mess and looks to only get messier; too many pressing issues, it seems. As indigenous people, we still have to defend our sovereignty, culture, and selves from the white supremacist state, oil companies, and modern land thieves that still would love to see us go.
There have been activists around me since childhood, Native activists, environmental activists, and beyond. The older I got, the more of the people I came across were Native activists on a bigger stage. It was like, Oh, this is stuff going on all over the place. It’s not just my state or my area. There’s a lot to feed on there and to take inspiration from. And maybe those things aren’t totally apparent in what I do, but that’s why I do what I do.