Ripples of Distortion

In 2008, Andrew VanWyngarden had the strange experience of becoming famous for music that made fun of becoming famous. As the origin story goes, he formed MGMT with bandmate and fellow college student Ben Goldwasser in 2002, and the duo would swill champagne and dress up in fake-fur coats to play living-room shows for their friends, recording music on shoddy RadioShack equipment. Those songs eventually became their debut album, Oracular Spectacular (2007). The lyrics of the opening track, “Time to Pretend,” exemplify the healthy skepticism that the band held toward celebrity: “I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars / You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.” 

The album—which also included the singles “Kids” and “Electric Feel”—became an international hit, even if the heavy dose of irony and deadpan humor was at times overlooked. Billing at Coachella and Bonnaroo, and an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman, followed. VanWyngarden said, “When you’re playing in people’s living rooms, it seems a lot funnier to act like a rock star, but then suddenly we were on Columbia Records, playing music festivals, and that same humor equation didn’t really fly. It’s harder to be sarcastic on a grand scale like that.” 

Surfing became a much-needed form of escape. It also guided VanWyngarden toward influences that made their way into the four MGMT albums that followed—as well as recording projects for surf films Spirit of Akasha (2013) and Self-Discovery for Social Survival (2019). 

Today, VanWyngarden surfs regularly in Rockaway, New York. We spoke about his favorite sound in surfing, how riding waves informs his creative process, and the parallels between music and surfing that become clearer with the encouragement of psychedelics.

KD    Going back through MGMT’s earliest work, there are allusions to the ocean and riding waves, so I’m curious about how you got into surfing and when that was in your life as a musician. 

AV    It’s definitely closely related to my experience in MGMT. I graduated from Wesleyan in 2005, and we were in New York doing a bit of touring and writing. I kept having these dark, apocalyptic dreams that would involve surfing and waves. I had never surfed, but I skateboarded, and I always knew that I wanted to start surfing at some point. Some of the songs we had on Oracular Spectacular had surfing imagery. The “Time to Pretend” music video has a psychedelic wave of cats or something like that. It’s funny looking back because we shot that video at Fort Tilden, which is at one end of Rockaway, but at the time I didn’t know you could surf out there. 

Then, 2008 was the craziest year of my life. It was when we went from touring in a van to suddenly playing Coachella. After that, we ended up in Malibu to record our next album. We set up a studio in the living room of this house we were renting, and the son of the owner had a key to Little Dume. I started surfing there, and I just got thoroughly obsessed with it. When we finished recording in Malibu, I came back to New York and started waking up early with a friend to go out to Rockaway, and we’d surf 90th Street. That’s still probably the spot I surf more than anywhere.

KD    Did you ever figure out why those apocalyptic ocean dreams kept recurring for you?

AV    At the time, I was reading a lot about archetypes and the collective unconscious in the writing of Carl Jung. He would go into dream symbolism and archetypal images in dreams, and to him the ocean and water represented the collective unconscious. So, for me, it made sense: I was experimenting with psychedelics and wanting to make psychedelic music that affected people on a large scale, trying to somehow give a voice to my subconscious. 

KD    How do you think surfing coming into your life at that moment influenced the album you were recording and the music that came after?

AV    I kind of instantly took to surfing as a more meditative escape after such a wild year. It was a way to be by myself. That definitely made its way into a lot of the lyrics on our second album, Congratulations, which was the album we were making when we were in Malibu. There’s a lot of surf-music influence on that album. There’s a song called “Siberian Breaks” that has references to tides—and all over the album, there’s surfing imagery. The cover art, by Anthony Ausgang, who we met through our producer, Pete Kember, has a cartoon wave, and his work really seemed to connect with where we were at. It’s categorized as lowbrow art, but it’s really meticulously painted, beautiful, influenced by psychedelic experience, and a perfect match for the music we were making. 

Immediately when we released that album, it was characterized by media and a lot of people who loved our first album as a reaction to our success, almost that we were trying to commit career suicide or something—which is ironic, because, in my mind, when I think about those songs on the second album and how surfing came into my life, it feels more like getting in touch with something that’s more true to myself. When we were making it, we were having a lot of fun and expressing ourselves in a new and strange way. So that led to a whole other thing where we had to battle this idea that was almost the opposite of what we were actually doing. 

KD    You mentioned surf music. What were the specific experiences or reference points from surfing that were formative for you?

AV    In terms of surf film, I think the biggest one was George Greenough and Crystal Voyager. I like surfing that’s set to more-experimental music, and I find a lot of clips I watch online now sound like music for a car commercial. I’m thinking to myself, Who likes this stuff? It’s not what I want to hear when I’m watching surfing. 

Then, in terms of travel, whenever we were touring around the world, I would try to go surf anywhere I could along the way. It would usually be a friend of a friend who would pick me up and take me somewhere the day of the show. I met so many people through surfing, and it was such a cool way to get to experience each place. I surfed outside Tel Aviv, all over Europe, and Australia. I met Danny Fuller on the North Shore, and Rusty Miller, Dave Rastovich, and George Greenough in Byron Bay. One of my favorite places to surf is Guéthary, in southwest France. When I was there, I met Bob Simpson, who was Miki Dora’s attorney toward the end of his life. Bob has an amazing apartment overlooking the water there. Whenever we were touring in France, I would go to Guéthary, notice the apartment, and wonder, Who is that guy? One time, I went with a friend, knocked on the door, and met Bob. Now, whenever I go there, I usually just borrow a board from him. 

Through surfing, I got to enter all of these worlds in a new way, and they were welcoming probably in part because I was in a successful band, but also because I was obsessed with surfing. 

KD    You’ve also recorded music for a couple surf films: Spirit of Akasha and Self-Discovery for Social Survival. How did those projects come about, and what are your memories of working on them?

AV    With Spirit of Akasha, I met Andrew Kidman when I was traveling in Australia. At the time, he was working on the film. Years before, I’d heard the original Morning of the Earth soundtrack, including the song “I’m Alive” that I covered for Spirit of Akasha. I remember thinking it was such a beautiful song when I first listened to it. Then I also recorded another song, for one of the sections of the movie at Kirra, which came together from improvising in the studio while we were watching the footage. Andrew’s films have such beautiful shots that seem to capture people’s style in a really true way, and that’s the kind of stuff I’m drawn to in surf films. 

Self-Discovery for Social Survival came about through my friend Connan Mockasin and the recording label Mexican Summer. We tried to do it starting with a trip to Nicaragua in 2014, but the footage never saw the light of day. Then, in 2016, things got a lot more organized. They had four or five different sections planned, and the section Connan and I worked on was a trip to Iceland with Stephanie Gilmore, Kassia Meador, Lee-Ann Curren, and Beau Foster. I like cold weather and cold-water locations, and I’d been to Iceland once before, so I was excited to do it. I had known from my first time there a couple years earlier that there were psychedelic mushrooms growing all over the place. They were really mild, and everywhere we went, we could just eat them right off the ground.

“To Carl Jung, the ocean represented the collective unconscious. So, for me, it made sense: I was experimenting with psychedelics and wanting to make music that affected people, trying to somehow give a voice to my subconscious.”

KD    In other interviews, you’ve talked about wanting to make music that encapsulates the psychedelic experience. I’m interested to know which aspects of surfing you find inherently psychedelic and what your experiences have been using psychedelics while surfing.

AV    Well, just the fact that you’re surfing on waves of energy is about as psychedelic as it gets. On that 2014 Nicaragua trip, we took some really strong acid, stayed up all night, walked down to the beach just after sunrise, and got in the water tripping really hard. I was in just a pair of boxers, and I could feel the trees breathing. I remember thinking to myself that it’s amazing people have surfed Pipeline in that frame of mind, and how it puts you so in tune with your surroundings. I would never do that now, as a 40-year-old, but at the time it felt totally safe, even if that was an illusion. I think the other thing it helps with is feeling possessive, and all of the bullshit that it’s easy to get caught up in with surfing—people being aggressive or stuff like that. Psychedelics make it easy to not engage and to accept that a wave will come to you or it won’t, and that’s just the way it is. It helps you come  to see how silly or pointless it is to fight over waves.

KD    Have any of your experiences with psychedelics tuned you into parallels between surfing and music? I’m thinking of the way that both come in waves—the same basic unit of measure.

AV    Yeah, given how much time I’ve spent recording, I do find myself seeing waves in a musical way a lot of the time. For example, phase cancellation is the same as a double-up—when two waves multiply on top of each other. When I see ripples or wind on the water, I think of distortion, or I sometimes think of backwash as echoes. I like to believe that the experience of making music does start to give you some intuitive sense of how to read waves. So much of surfing is about learning a new language—reading the ocean, and very subtle ways of observing it. It’s definitely not just about riding a surfboard.

KD    You’ve said before that you don’t follow a set creative process. But have you noticed ways that surfing interacts with your work as a musician?

AV    Even though I don’t have a set way of working, I’ve made a lot of progress on lyrics while I’m in the water. I like to sit by myself and avoid the social side of surfing. It’s an easy way to get rid of distractions. Surfing takes you away from your phone and everything else. Usually at the beginning of a session, my head will be swirling from everything going on that day, and by the end I’m often able to focus on something that helps me write lyrics. By that point, I’ll have a title, or some melodic or lyrical idea that guides me. That’s what I find helpful to play around with when I’m surfing, sometimes for years at a time, working on things in my head, and usually a rhyme, word, or couplet will occur to me and I’ll write it down.

KD    Why do you think you don’t have an established process for writing music? 

AV    I just never want to do the same thing over and over. I gravitate toward trying something new and difficult. That’s how my bandmate Ben is too. We’ve never tried to re-create a song like “Kids” or “Electric Feel.” We just sort of look at that as a true part of who we are, but we want to keep moving on. Even when we were playing live all the time, I would want to do something different. There are a lot of musicians who operate almost by a script when performing live. They go talk about somebody’s birthday in the crowd, or tell the same joke every night. I’m not knocking anyone for doing that. It’s just not my idea of fun.

KD    Given that inclination toward trying new things, I wonder if that’s what has given surfing an enduring appeal for you.

AV    A big part is just the challenge of it. It’s similar to music in that way. There’s always something new to figure out, and that can make me become obsessive. At the same time, I’ve never had the ambition to shred. All I really want to do is hear the little sizzle that happens when my trim line is just perfect.

[Feature Image Caption: Hunting oceanic and sonic crossovers in Iceland. “I find myself seeing waves in a musical way a lot of the time,” says VanWyngarden. “When I see ripples or wind on the water, I think of distortion, or I sometimes think of backwash as echoes.” Photo by Andrew Kidman.]