In SOUND CHECK, we check in with some of our favorite musicians.
Prism House is an electronic audio/visual experiment that got its inception when Brian Wenner and Matt O’Hare were in grad school together at New York University. I caught the duo act at Cameo Gallery as the sunset highlighted the New York City skyline, just over the river from the Williamsburg venue. O’Hare is the half that mans the trippy live visuals—a chopped and manipulated collage of grab bag assortments: comic strips from the Akira manga series and nude selfies unearthed in the lingering hours of the night, for example. This “found scrapbooking” approach is also applied in Wenner’s audio contribution, which chops up field recordings of city walks into confetti bits and restructures them into tunneling dance music that mimics lucid dreams—but with a great bass line. Witnessing the two seamlessly converge for a multi-sensory experience was both beautiful and mesmerizing.After releasing their first EP and playing countless shows in the New York area, Prism House's second EP release titled Landfall came out on April 29 through Ceremony Recordings. I caught up with Wenner the morning after his set to talk sound sampling, escaping Ohio, and his love for Kendrick Lamar.
RIKA NURRAHMAH: Our band is __, and our music is __.
Brian Wenner: Our band is versatile, and the music is fucking Internet because all I do is sample the Internet.
You grew up and went to college in Ohio. What brought you to New York City?
I’ve been writing a lot of electronic music in Ohio. After my four years at Ohio University, I was in Akron, basically living with my parents and doing shitty IT work, and I was trying to find any reason to get the hell out of there. I applied to NYU’s grad program and got in. I moved here because I got into school, but I really moved here because mostly I just wanted to make music in a city that would actually respect what I’m doing; also meeting other artists that are doing something really cool and learning from them. It kind of sucks being the only one in town doing a particular thing. I’ve been here for, I guess, four years now? I love it.
How did you and Matt meet?
I met him in the grad program; it was really technical, turbo-nerd style. What was cool about Matt was that he was one of the few people who was actually making cool shit, or was like an artist of any sort. And I just liked making music, so we kind of met up and just decided to work together. He actually started Prism House—that was his name. He was making really dense, ambient drone music, and our friend, Pia, was doing visuals for it. And then she got a full-time job and just didn’t have any time, and Matt was like, "I’d rather do visuals."
When did you start exploring electronic music? Who were some of the artists who set up the foundation for you?
In terms of a foundation, I think a lot of it was like Radiohead initially. Through Radiohead, getting into like '90s Warp records like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher.
What percentage of your songs, or even live set, is s