The Creative Asylum Podcast

Few artists have reinvented themselves as relentlessly as JG Thirlwell. Born in Melbourne, Australia, the composer, producer, and musician has spent over 40 years releasing music under a seemingly endless rotation of alter egos and identities — Foetus, Clint Ruin, Frank Want, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia, Xordox and Wiseblood — each one a different sonic persona, from industrial noise and post-punk to big band and orchestral composition. In this episode, I had the great pleasure of talking with Thirlwell as we trace his path from London in 1978 to New York in 1983, the city he's called home ever since. His extensive musical catalog is near impossible to classify as he's expressly known for his mashing up of different genres into a canon that can only be identified as coming from his mind alone. Thirlwell is a true polymath, always restless, and always looking to the future in whatever capacity he has the time available to expand his catalog of genius. I ask about his prodigious compositional work for adult animation, specifically Adult Swim's The Venture Bros., which he composed from the show's 2003 debut all the way through its 2023 HBO movie, which was the closing chapter of the franchise. Further, his Emmy-winning work scoring FX's Archer, which he took over is another body of work for another one of my favorite adult animation series. We discuss how he approaches scoring animation differently from his solo work, what it's like juggling so many creative identities at once without losing the thread between them, and why — decades in — he's still releasing acclaimed new records like 2025's Foetus album HALT. This is a conversation about staying unclassifiable, not as intention, but simply as a result of the specificity of JG Thirlwell's busy creative mind. * * * * PLEASE FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:Website: https://www.TheCApod.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheCApod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CreativeAsylumCA/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As founding guitarist of Austin's Big Boys, Tim Kerr helped invent a distinct flavor of punk-funk in real time, fusing a DIY aesthetic with skater energy and horn-driven grooves that influenced everything from grunge to garage rock, a history that is documented in the new film, You Can Color Outside the Lines. In this episode, we explore Tim's kinetic path through different musical outfits . After Big Boys broke up in 1984, he played in the gospel-inflected garage blues of Poison 13, the raw alt-funk of Bad Mutha Goose, the garage-blues swagger of the Monkeywrench (alongside members of Mudhoney and Gas Huffer), plus Jack O' Fire, Lord High Fixers, and his current old-time and acoustic folk project, Up Around the Sun. The other area that cannot be ignored when having a conversation with Tim is his parallel — and arguably primary — identity as a visual artist. An art-trained outsider painter and photographer who studied under Garry Winogrand, Kerr has built a raw, primitive-style body of work spanning album covers, gig posters, skateboard graphics, and gallery paintings shown in museums worldwide, much of it collected in a career-spanning art book reissued by Monofonus Press. We talk about why music and painting have always just been the same impulse toward self-expression, an urge that is as natural as breathing itself. * * * * PLEASE FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:Website: https://www.TheCApod.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheCApod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CreativeAsylumCA/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melissa Monroe is arguably Portland, Oregon's most playful outsider artist, creating work that is both whimsical and joyous. The self-taught artist picked up painting in 2013, went full time in 2014, and has since made and sold over 1,500 pieces. Her masks, sculptures, textiles, and acrylic paintings are loud with color and pattern, but there's also something tender and heavy underneath. She describes the work as a mask that radiates beauty while holding life's harsher truths, with sadness, love, and joy all vibrating together just below the surface. What started with paint, eventually shifted to working with yarn as sculpture, and now Melissa has become one of the leading names in the contemporary tufting movement. What's tufting you ask? Watch this conversation and you'll know more than when you started. Melissa first got involved in tufting in 2021 and in making the shift, she applied her painting approaches and her love of abstraction, antiques and nature into a tactile artform that feels musical and childlike. Her work has been featured on Oregon Art Beat and in Hi-Fructose, Fiber Art Now, American Craft, and the Tuft the World book, and has shown at the Outsider Art Fair in New York, SCOPE Miami, and the Seattle Art Fair. This is a conversation about following your own weird instincts and building a full creative life around those instincts, never second-guessing the inspiration that comes to you and through you unexpected. This are exactly the kind of process that Melissa Monroe embraces , and the result is a pure delight.https://shop.melissamonroeart.com * * * * PLEASE FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:Website: https://www.TheCApod.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheCApod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CreativeAsylumCA/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Larry Crane started out scrappy, playing bass for the Chico, CA-based Indie-darling band, Vomit Launch. The band called it quits and Larry moved to Portland, where he became a producer and engineer, and was also where he founded Tape Op Magazine, a publication devoted to the process of making records and the creativity that goes into the process of recording. Hi interviews include conversations with John Cale, Steve Albini, Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison, Herb Alpert and Danny Elfman just to name a few, His recording credits stack up just as impressively: Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists, Cat Power, Stephen Malkmus, Quasi, Jenny Lewis, M. Ward, the Go-Betweens and so many more. We explore what it takes to earn trust from artists across many decades, and—as the archivist for the Estate of Elliott Smith—his examination of the history that he's played a part in.Tape Op is released six times a year and is essential reading for musicians, producers, and engineers, specifically if you want to explore how others think about how they capture their creative output in the studio. This is a conversation with an old friend who has a deep appreciation for the values of building community tempered with the perspective of working DIY and the understanding that sometimes you have to be open to stepping beyond your tribe, because sometimes you're forced to work with other kinds of interests that arrive with a different set of expectations. * * * * PLEASE FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:Website: https://www.TheCApod.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheCApod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CreativeAsylumCA/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Leary co-founded one of the most gleefully deranged bands in American rock history — and came out the other end living a decades-long career producing other bands. As guitarist and de facto sonic architect of the Butthole Surfers, Leary helped build a catalog of cult-classic noise-punk landmarks throughout the '80. From Psychic Powerless...Another Man's Sac to Hairway to Steven and the band's brief brush with mainstream success via their song "Pepper," the Butthole Surfers left behind a stream of chaos that can only be celebrated for it's sheer audacity and mayhem.In this conversation, Paul dips his toe into how two Trinity University accounting students turned into art-punk provocateurs. The band's outrageous, legendary live shows are documented in the new documentary Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, directed by Tom Stern, which traces the band's history and cultural impact through interviews, archival footage, and multimedia elements. We also discuss Leary's parallel life and subsequent career as an alt-rock producer, with an impressive resume including bands like Sublime, Meat Puppets, Daniel Johnston, Reverend Horton Heat, the Toadies, U2, Weezer, and Jane's Addiction. In his current place in life as a "boring adult," we talk about what it takes to bring order in the studio after building a career on total chaos in his own band. This is a conversation about weirdness as a discipline, the accidental producer, and staying gleefully uncategorizable for over four decades. * * * * PLEASE FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:Website: https://www.TheCApod.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheCApod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CreativeAsylumCA/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.