Car Culture on Indie Rock, Shifting Gears, and the Lost Art of Becoming a DJ

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

I've been very into what Daniel Fisher has been up to across his career, dating back to his earliest work as Physical Therapy—but his latest project Car Culture is a truly fascinating new turn in his varied musical catalog. I loved the project's first record Dead Rock back in 2021, and on October 9 Fisher returns with the really stunning Rest Here, which takes the ambient aesthetic of Dead Rock into pure indie rock territory without losing an ounce of the production sensibilities that's propelled his career thus far. I've wanted to talk to Daniel for a minute now, and I was very pleased to get into it during a phone convo last month about all things Car Culture as well as his survey of the musical landscape at large. Check it out:

You're from New Jersey—and as someone who also grew up in the same county you did, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the state and what makes it what it is. Personally, I know plenty of people from the area—myself included—who generally looked to get out of there as soon as possible.
I mean, I think anyone who escapes a suburb has a chip on their shoulder about it—and New Jersey's the ultimate suburb. Because we're suburban to New York, which is the biggest city, we have the extra big chip on our shoulder about it. It's so different, meeting friends who grew up in New York and were exposed to so much music and stuff—friends my age who were living in the city, going to Motherfucker, and taking ecstasy at 14 while I was reading about that in Brooklyn Vegan and buying pure cough syrup so that me and my friends could trip because we didn't know a drug dealer.

Growing up in the suburbs, when did you start getting into dance music? In our age range, there's a high probability that you discovered dance music online before you got to go out to the clubs and really experience it. That was, at least, my trajectory.
I mean, I was so Pitchfork-coded in high school, so I had some exposure to the Books and when they'd highlight one random dance thing. But when I moved to Chicago, the scene was very hip-hop-oriented in what people wanted to listen to at parties, as well as '90s R&B and stuff. I was drifting away from indie rock into "Wanting to have fun" party music.

I'd been roommates with Mykki Blanco at SAIC, and they had moved to New York just before me. I dropped out with the plan to come back to New York and transfer to the New School, and Mykki is the ultimate connection-maker—like, someone should do a feature-length documentary on what scenes have come out of connections that Mykki has made. So Mykki started taking me out clubbing, and at that time it was the tail end of the open-format era, so there were a lot of socialite girls playing a mixture of hip-hop and '90s pop music—post-electroclash, just like random people playing fun music. A lot of the DJs weren't technically proficient, they were just playing songs off VirtualDJ.

Then Mykki was taking me to gay parties like Mr. Black and stuff that Ladyfag was doing. I remember getting my fake ID taken while trying to go see Honey Dijon at Hiro Ballroom. So I'm starting to get into general dance music—weird edits on YouTube and house music—and right around then was also the Hype Machine bloghouse era. It was all happening simultaneously, where I completely lost interest in indie rock and just wanted club music.

You mentioned the open-format era, and there is that delineation between people who are actually learning the practice versus people, like, playing music off of Spotify.
I've been thinking about this a lot. The professionalism of DJing, I think it's the worst thing that's ever happened to parties. There's a million young DJs who are extremely well-practiced at Pirate Studios, and they all want to be professional touring DJs, and they're filling up every party. But when I started going out, DJing was someone who would just be cool with good taste in music and playing music at a party—and it meant that the music at the parties was always diverse and fun.

It might be a fashion person DJ'ing, or it might be Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance—although, he's a really good DJ. But you know what I mean. It wasn't about every single person playing the exact same Bandcamp club music. It was about playing some music, and people will come and dance, and the party will be cool because the people involved are cool. That's such a better vibe for developing musical taste than everyone fighting over the opening slot at Bossa and promoting
their Soundcloud mixes.

I think they should outlaw practicing DJ'ing. You should only be allowed to learn how to DJ in a bar or a club. That's how I learned what fun music is at a party.
Over the years, as I started to play more serious house and techno parties, my skills progressed to match that. But when I was playing in a bar, I was playing music for a bar—and that's rare now.

Do you think social media has accelerated this war between professionalism and just getting out there and racking up experience?
Yeah, because everyone is exposed to these Boiler Room and radio sets, and they see these very practiced DJs as the ideal. There were so many cool people who were beloved DJs in the city who just played music. Maybe they'd just bring some records, or maybe it's the guy playing music off Spotify—but it was fun, people liked them, and there was a community aspect to the party. Now, people are seeing these Boiler Room sets, they're on their XDJs, they're practicing these perfect transitions, and they don't really have a sense that parties are just supposed to be fun. A select number of parties are very serious about the music—for the heads—and those are amazing too. But 90% of people who go to parties just want to have a good time, and I miss the era when the focus was on the music. Not everything is like a giant festival set or whatever.

I've become more radicalized on this topic in the last couple of years. It's about encountering a new generation of DJs who came up during the pandemic and didn't have access to the era of just going out to random bars, so their views on dance music came out fully formed when they were of an age to start going clubbing. They didn't come to house music because they accidentally showed up at a house at a dance music party and took a pill and were like, "My life has changed forever. Before they've ever entered a club, they know what a quote-unquote perfect DJ set sounds like. A lot of younger DJs who might play before me, they're playing these really intense full-on club music sets, and they don't have that sense of the fact that this is just a room where people are hanging out, for now.

You're getting at something there that's interesting to me, which is the IRL experience gap with the younger generation. I think about this especially with writing about music right now, because there was such a dearth of opportunity created by the COVID vacuum that you have more young people with more opinions on how things should be done than you have young people who have actually done the things.
Absolutely, and it's because it's so easy to have access to that knowledge base. You can see it in a lot of the bands that are forming now—these very young bands who have very evolved, cool influences. They'll be referencing a very specific era of post-shoegaze because the music is so easily accessible on streaming, whereas in the past, only the most freaky people may have been able to discover those sounds. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, because there's so much cool music coming out right now. But it is very different. It's so much easier to find these obscure bands and digest them as influences than it used to be.

I think of the phenomenon surrounding Duster as a pretty good example of that.
And Midwest third-wave emo records. They're massively influential, there's a billion bands doing that sound, and if you weren't in that scene, they weren't being covered by anyone, basically. Me and you came of age during the height of American Football and Duster and probably had fairly minimal exposure to it.

I love this new record, and I was really struck by the last Car Culture record, too. You're doing some really interesting things on both of these records that I really haven't heard you do before. I'm curious to hear you talk about what the project represents in terms of what you're exploring aesthetically.
It's funny, I was hanging out with a friend in Miami a couple days ago and I was telling him about my first record on Hippos in Tanks. He couldn't picture it from the description, so we went and listened to some of it, and he was like, "Wait, this sounds like Car Culture but with breakbeats under it." I'd never thought of that, but I was like, "I guess there is a full-circle to the sound palette and emotional tenor."

The project started when I did that big compilation in 2019 where I'd been developing a few aliases I'd put out. I was making so much music, and I'd become really obsessed with this Atom™ compilation called Acid Evolution, and it was only after listening to it for many years that I went and looked and realized they were all him—and I was like, "That's a cool idea." I'd been looking for some more ambient-leaning stuff, and while continuing to segment my productions, I figured Car Culture would be the ambient one.

The first Car Culture record came together where half of the tracks were made with the project in mind. The other half, I went back to a lot of older demos—some from the Hippos in Tanks era—and just took out the drums and built them up for the sake of filling out the record. I'm insanely hyperactive stylistically, where I'm constantly changing. If you listen to this new record, obviously there are ties to the first one, but there's also some songs that are incredibly different.

It's never intentional. It's so rare that I have a plan when I sit down to make music—it's just a natural evolution. Also, during the pandemic, I took a pause from listening to so much dance music. I used to like wake up, get on Discogs and Beatport, and start looking for techno. Obviously, I didn't want to do that, because it was triggering to think about dance music at a time when my life's pursuit was completely put on hold. So I was going back to a lot of the indie rock that I listened to in high school.

My friend Jonny From Space showed me Title Fight's Hyperview—another one of those albums that is now considered this important classic, but was pretty niche at the time. That led me into getting into more of this Midwestern sound and then going back into shoegaze. That was seeping into the music that I wanted to make.

How was your pandemic experience?
I think I had what a lot of people had, especially being in New York. There was this visceral trauma of it being terrifying. I've heard from some people looking back where they're like, "I kind of miss it a little bit, because there was this certainty in that you can't do anything," and maybe that allowed you to work on some projects. I went back and put out some compilations of older music, and this album started when I got COVID on Thanksgiving in 2022 and had to miss my whole family thing. I was locked in my apartment for a week, and I was like, "Let's just make some music." Those slowdown moments are harder to find now, even if you get COVID. No one really stops doing whatever they're doing.

But it was right before I started to get to the level with touring where it was like, "I'm making a good living off of music," as opposed to just DJ'ing whatever and getting shitty jobs in between. That all felt like it was taken away—but, coming out of it, and with the explosion of dance music, things not only went back but got even better for me. People who came out of the gate—people who kept releasing music during the lockdowns and came out swinging—were able to capitalize on the insane burst of energy that happened with the reopenings.

The people who took a little bit more of a pause had a lot of trouble getting back. I know a lot of people who had pretty solid bookings and followings pre-pandemic, and they just waited a little bit longer to try to put themselves back out there, and there were so many new DJs coming out at that time, that it was much more competitive. If you hadn't been extremely proactive, you could've been fucked by it. For super low-key people—a lot of DJs who don't put out music and have just developed a career on reputation—they're suddenly competing with so many people who are so self-promotional and put out so much music, which I guess I consider myself in the latter category.

One thing I've been hearing more from people of all stripes is this admission that, during lockdown, they're like, "Well, maybe I wasn't really social distancing the way I should've been." Was that your experience, or were you witnessing that in others' behavior?
Early on, I was pretty locked -down. But by summer 2021, I was out—and that was one of the most fun times in New York. There were all kinds of illegal park raves and really fun stuff happening. I also think a generation that came out of that was because a lot of the more established DJs didn't want to be seen playing stuff during that time, because you could get in a lot of trouble online. So there were a lot of younger and queer DJs who were playing these parties, and that was fertile, in a way.

You mentioned ambient music playing a role in Car Culture, and something that came out of COVID was that people were making a lot more ambient music. In that sense, I'd actually hesitate to refer to this new album as ambient, since there's a lot more going on here. At points it almost reminds me of trip-hop.
Yeah, a handful of tracks on the last album skewed more towards that, but this album pretty much abandons that. When I started making this record, there weren't drums on it, and over the course of two and a half years of working on it, I started adding in more drums and breaks—but there's also a lot of live drums on the tracks that have been sampled down so they sound like breaks. Obviously, I like trip-hop, but it wasn't something I thought about while making the record. I was listening to it in the car with a friend, and she said, "It sounded like a Len track." And I was like, "Yeah, that's more where my head is at than, like, Portishead."

Talking more about intersecting with indie rock—Will from Hotline TNT has covered "Nothingburger," and Ella from Squirrel Flower also contributes vocals on "Doesn't Really Matter."
Brian Piñeyro showed me the Hotline TNT stuff and I was listening to it like crazy, and on a lark I was like, "Would you do a cover of this song?" Will did this incredible cover of it. I don't even know if he took anything from the original other than the lyrical refrain, but he really captured the original spirit and brought it down to this more live, real place.

With Ella, I was just listening to a ton of Squirrel Flower records. I just chanced upon them and listened to all of her records, like, a million times. We connected when I put one of her songs on a Car Culture mix, and then I went to see her play a few times when she was in New York. When I was writing "Doesn't Really Matter," it went through so many phases. The original is so different from where it ended up. I'd put together some scratch vocal ideas being like, "This would sound cool with a singer," and I sent it to Ella being like, "Do you want to sing on this and write a vocal topline?" She ended up singing back what I'd written, and then I went back and re-recorded my own vocals and it became something of a duet. That's the first time I had sung on something.

Ella seems super underrated to me right now. I've spent a lot of time with those records as well, and I think she's really talented as a musician and songwriter. Talk to me about what draws you to her music.Every record that she makes, I think she keeps just getting better, which is almost improbable to me.
By the time I'd encountered her, I Was Born Swimming was already out. The way that our music economy works now, her cover of the Caroline Polachek song had gotten a lot of traction—but then I found those early records of just her and the guitar, and they're so good. The last one was incredible. She has this really good fusion of grungy indie rock and a little bit more of a country influence. Each record feels bigger and more well-produced without losing any of that original feeling. which is so rare. I'm the type of person who, whenever I discover an artist, I go back and listen to their first album—and over the course of their discography, I'm usually like, "Oh, they lost it. They got too good." But that hasn't happened with Ella, which is amazing.

The biggest influence when it came to this more rock record—the more full-on indie production—was working with Patrick Holland. The record would not exist without him. I'd been playing in Montreal, and I've been friends with him forever, and him and Priori have this amazing studio, Jump Source. james K was in town, who sang on my first single, and they'd just started work on her new album Friend, fleshing out some of the demos. Seeing what they were doing was incredible, and I'd been sitting on five or six of the demos for the new Car Culture album, and I was like, "Would you consider doing what you're doing to my record?" I went back a few months later, and the three of us sat down and did that over three or four sessions.

It worked so well. A lot of the original stuff is based on samples—not necessarily whole chunks of samples, maybe just one kind of note played on a guitar that's repitched into a bunch of different notes, and then I'm writing the other melodic stuff on synths but trying to make it sound like guitars through processing. We got to go back and replay that stuff on the actual instruments, and that took everything to a completely different level. It was no longer this lo-fi loopy thing—they were starting to become songs.

Patrick has such good producer instincts. Yes, he's a technical whiz and can also play every instrument, but he also guides you to taking things to the next level. I'd never worked with another person in that way—I'm usually sitting there, endlessly tinkering alone, and then forcing my friends to listen to a thousand versions and being like, "Is it better here?" And they're like, "I honestly can't hear the difference."

Patrick is something of a secret weapon to a lot of people at this point. I had him on the newsletter last year as well, I love his work.
It's just a matter of time before he works on an absolutely huge record and is the new master producer—before he moves to L.A. and is a millionaire. For now, a couple of us who are not massive, major-label artists are lucky enough to have his input on the records. I'd work on this record in New York, and if he was in town, he'd come and we'd listen back, and then I went back to Montreal a few more times and we kept adding stuff. But the initial sessions were me, Priori, and Pat, and their combo together is something really special because they have very different approaches and sonic palettes. When you combine them, it's so powerful.

You put out an Allergy Season compilation last year. I'm curious to hear you talk about the overall arc of running the label and what that's meant to you over the years.
When I put out that comp, I posted this essay about what it meant to me, and wanting to keep it going. I haven't put out anything since then on the label, and a lot of that had to do with just wanting to focus on Car Culture this year. I'd worked so much on this record—more than I've ever worked on anything, by miles and miles—that I wanted to give it the airtime that it deserved. Even though I constantly have a million dance things that I'm working on that I could put out on Allergy Season, I was like, "Let's just take a beat."

Also, in the last couple of years, the label had started to shift from putting out other artists to mostly putting out my own projects. That was me feeling like, with the way that Bandcamp and the music attention economy works right now, I didn't really fully know what my value was as a digital-only label putting out someone else's stuff. I talked a lot with OSSX about putting out a second record, but they're doing great putting out their own stuff, so what's the point of me taking a percentage of that? Then, I'd stopped putting out my music on other people's labels, because I was also like, "Well, what's the point of this?" I had so much of my own music that I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna put that out." I wasn't, like, A&R'ing for the label. Most of the stuff that had come out was just friends sending me music, and I just wasn't encountering stuff that I wanted to put out.

I'm not sure where the future of the label lies. I'm sure I'll get antsy and start putting out music on it again next year.

As you've alluded to several times, you've made a lot of different music under different guises in the past. Talk to me about how Car Culture represents who you are at an artist at this point.
When I started working on it, Car Culture wasn't that different from the other projects—although it was the most personal thing that I've done. It was very important to me, but over the course of making the record, I was like, "I should take this moment to focus on this one thing and really point people's attention in the direction of it." Over the course of putting in so much work on this and developing a live show, it's become an equal pillar to Physical Therapy in my mind—whereas, before, Physical Therapy was everything and all the side projects were just these fun little things. The music that is coming out of Car Culture feels equivalent to the breadth of the Physical Therapy catalog.

I'm an artist who plays with identity a lot. I have all these different names. I'm always doing my little faux-Cindy Sherman photo shoots. I started to feel my own musical identity drift towards this project, and it was also a time when I wasn't enjoying DJing that much. I was feeling like it was a drop in the bucket when I'd release dance music. "Here's another techno track on Bandcamp." Like, who cares?
Being able to fully throw myself into this was so reviving, and it brought me back to feeling more like a musician than I have for the vast majority of my career. There's no functional element to this music. It doesn't need a DJ to play it. You can just listen to it, and that was feels really good to me.

It also brought me back to before I discovered dancing, when I was listening to indie music. That's what I considered to be the pinnacle of music, and as I got older, I was like, "No, the pinnacle of music is if you make a track that several hundred people can dance to in unison." Now, the individual connection is way more important to me than music that's made to move bodies. But I already have such an insane backlog of dance music from not putting anything out this year,
so I guess it also depends on people's reaction to the record—if that breeds more opportunity to continue to focus on Car Culture.

It's such a weird time to put out music—it's the worst time. There's such a narrow window to reach a broader audience because of the volume of music, and you're so beholden to algorithms or some kind of viral moment that allows it to break through some of the noise. There was more of a slow build in how people built up projects before, and now it's all or nothing. I hope that people hear it, but I'm trying to be very realistic.