Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Max Feldman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Max, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I released six albums of experimental music between 2021 and 2023 through my Spa Water project. I loved making them all but I’ll mention “COW PLAN” from 2022 and “Weak Planet” from 2023, both released through my friend Myles Byrne-Dunhill’s online labels. At the time of making these albums, I wasn’t freelancing yet and I was working very stifling office jobs, so creating these albums felt like building a space for myself in which anything was possible. I felt very alive and really believed in what I was doing because I had this feeling that there was a wild world out there for me to discover one sound at a time. Office jobs can make you feel like there’s not that much worth getting excited about, because your boss is always trying to hype you up about “exciting new initiatives,” and what they mean is an AI driven sales platform or a new way to organize Excel spreadsheets, so you start to think gosh if that’s what ‘exciting’ means I guess life just isn’t worth getting excited about, but that’s not true because art is the space in which we recover that sense of discovery that makes genuine enthusiasm possible. Everything I was repressing trying to be a normal 9-to-5 citizen came out in these two albums. COW PLAN is the happier side where I try to find possibilities for free exercise of imagination and Weak Planet is the more sinister side where I try to acquaint the listener with the feeling of impending disaster — but it’s also a very fun and catchy album at least to my ears, so hopefully it’s not a miserable listen. I made a visual collage accompaniment for Weak Planet too which I’m very happy with because it conveys a real sense of cosmic doom.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

For as long as I can remember all I have ever wanted to do with my life is make art, but of course every step of the way I’ve had to balance that with the need to do well in school, get a good job, make money, etc. For the first phase of my post-college life I didn’t make any money from creative work and had office day jobs, so I poured all my effort into making experimental electronic music usually in collaboration with the great Myles Byrne-Dunhill. For the past year and a half I’ve been freelancing instead, which means I get to make money (albeit much less money) doing things that actually matter to me. These days a lot of my work is in improv theater world. I got into that scene a few years ago by taking classes on weekends and have stuck with it since then. Now I perform all around the city with my teams Ephemera and Hey, Handsome! and through a great company called 8 is Never Enough I do interactive shows/workshops for kids and families, as well as teaching classes and working various corporate gigs and murder mystery parties. I pride myself on playing strange, larger-than-life characters but inhabiting them with a degree of realism and emotional sincerity that to me is funnier than being ironic.

I also work as an improv pianist, which means I get to make up songs on the spot while performers (also making it up on the spot) sing along. I play for an improvised fantasy show called The Legend of You, and for them I get to underscore the whole show with my improvised music which is a ton of fun. I also love to do sound design, and last year I got a chance to design sound effects for a drag opera called Slaylem at the Heartbeat Opera Company. I got to make these eerie ship crashes and thunder clap type effects, as well as a haunted house soundscape that played in the lobby while people were coming in.

I think what I’m most proud of is that whatever I’m doing I try to be a real team player and foster a feeling that we’re all trying to have fun telling stories together and there’s no pressure on any one person to be the most talented or the funniest or whatever. When I’m at the piano the performers know that if they miss a beat I’ll be right there to support them so the audience won’t even notice. And when I’m on stage, my scene partners know that I’ll do my best to make them look great, which isn’t too tough because I’m lucky to perform with really talented actors. I think I have a good amount of technical knowhow since I play the piano well and know about music theory and production stuff, but I have to remember that that stuff is more of a means to an end and only to be used insofar as it’s helpful for communicating with my collaborators. Really it’s all about having each other’s backs. I always try to keep my attitude light and silly, because life is short and if I can make someone laugh or someone makes me laugh that’s what I’ll remember fondly seven decades from now (knock on wood) when I’m on my way out and presumably preparing to being reincarnated as some kind of deer or waterfowl.

I love teaching improv too. My teaching philosophy is that anything you might take a kind of insecure comfort in (your wit, your intelligence, your charisma, your musical talent) will not serve you if you cling to it. You must lay down your weapons. It’s like meditation. Of course I don’t tell the students this explicitly, I just try to offer guidance and exercises that give them the space they need to be authentic with each other. Hopefully letting go feels like a relief to them.

I have less time these days to do my own independent projects, partially because I’m totally overworked always running around the city so I need my free time to rest my weary bones and deal with chronic pain and stress. It can be very hard trying to manage client relationships and also always keep on hustling for more work. At the end of the day, temperamentally, I’m an artist not a hustler and I’m never going to be someone who fits easily into capitalism, but I’m doing my best and I have a lot to be grateful for. To be clear I’ve only been able to choose this life because I come from a very kind upper middle class family so if I fail I never have to face the threat of homelessness or starvation. Nonetheless, I have a lot of angsty feelings left over, and these days those mostly go into writing sad folk songs about the fall of civilization and what it would mean for humanity to reintegrate into nature. As I write this Myles is producing and orchestrating an album of these tunes.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

We must empower unions and build a strong safety net! Artists need the freedom to take huge risks, and it’s harder to do that if failure means homelessness. If you know you have a roof over your head and plenty of food to eat, why not take a chance and write a sixteen hour concerto for electric banjo, bassoon, and dishwasher? There’s nothing to lose. Meanwhile, if you’re paycheck-to-paycheck and rent just went up and your boss rejected your PTO and your health insurance is expiring… well, another album of lo-fi beats for Spotify just might be your ticket out of hell. But even if you do win the lottery and get Spotify famous, where does that leave your collaborators and colleagues and day-job coworkers? If you can, join a union today and fight for your right to the stability — not to mention the free time — you and your friends need to thrive as artists!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I’m inclined to think we should not invent new things that are bad for the environment. We are already screwed enough with our existing lifestyle of cars and airplanes and whatnot. Do we really need to further destroy the planet just so we can exchange pictures of monkeys and get addicted to gambling?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://maxfeldman.net
• Instagram: @maxfeldman100
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@maxfeldman1000
• Other: maxfeldman.bandcamp.com
  spawater.bandcamp.com

Image Credits

Pam Rice, Jumbo Tsui, Walt Frasier