Interdisciplinary artist Jason Voltaire on being in touch with what makes you happy

When you were first starting out, did you have a goal in mind? Have you had to adjust your expectations and if so, how do you approach that?

Honestly, it’s such a yes and no answer for me. I’ve wanted to be involved in exactly the category of music I’ve been involved with since I was like 6. As I grew older, just with the normal thing of your parents pushing careers on you and stuff, I went from this innocent idea of like, seeing a Daft Punk or Armin Van Helden music video and being like, “Oh, okay, I want to do this,” to then being like, “Ok, my parents want me to go to university, so I’ll be a software engineer or something.” And eventually I did that, but a year before college, I resumed my interest in DJing and nightlife in Montreal. And then by sheer osmosis of meeting people that I would work with at Bluedog [Montreal bar], I ended up falling back into this thing that I almost willed into existence when I was young.

In terms of expectations, maybe to my own detriment, I’ve always been very modest about my skill set or where I’m at in my skill set. Slowly, I realized I was a bit above hobbyist level and then started taking it more seriously. Coming from that more humble position, I guess I was always kind of good at managing my expectations, and in showing genuine interest in others artists’ work, people who are contemporaries of mine saw me like less of a culture vulture and more someone who’s just generally interested in participating or helping or what have you.

What do you think brought you to working with artists such as The Blessed Madonna and Jacques Greene?

I think the common ground for all these people is being lifers in their art, and having similar, resonant drives. I sense that the more confident and in touch you are with the music you like, or the art that makes you happy and the things that bring you joy, the more you connect with those people that resonate. You have to think of yourself like an antenna of some sort. If you have a strong signal, the communication channels will be very strong. And if you have a weak signal, it’s going to be a bit more cloudy.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not gonna end up in the rooms that you want. You can get lucky and someone could be dialed into your frequency. But you’re increasing your chances of connecting if you’re confidently giving out a strong signal about what you’re about. This goes back to if you’re giving a strong or convincing performance, you’ll command attention. But if you’re giving a kind of haphazard, not truthful performance, or not a high fidelity performance, it might be tougher for people to relate or connect to what you’re doing.

What has been the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path? And what is your biggest obstacle to creativity? How do you approach it?

The most surprising thing is that sometimes the thing that I’m either the least excited about in terms of my own creative output, or the things I can come up with the quickest sometimes have the best reactions. Maybe it’s due to spontaneity and just pure, unadulterated creativity, I guess.

Last November, I had pneumonia and I finished doing vocals on a song and I was like, okay, I have a fever, my lungs hurt, and I did the vocal and sent it to the label just to meet the deadline for this compilation. The compilation comes out and then all these people are loving the song, and it’s reaching the top streams—it’s funny, just thinking of that. It’s a testament to unadulterated decision making.

To the second point of your question, the biggest hurdle for me is to reach that mental state of unadulterated decision making, like not second guessing myself, not overthinking, just allowing free flowing creativity and not trying to mediate myself too early in the stage. [It’s challenging] to hold off mediating until a later polishing stage.

So just diving in and doing it, editing and thinking later.

Yeah. Alleviating myself of that performance anxiety to start a project or to just like, start and keep going instead of thinking and editing too soon. Which can be tough as a musician as well, especially in the advent of digital recording technology, because you can literally make it sound like a mastered radio ready song the second you come up with the beat, so I have to limit myself to not reach that stage.

How do you approach your work day to day?

I wake up, check my emails, and begin working on what my brain is leaning more towards, whether graphic design freelance work or like, 3D work. I’ll do that for a bit. Then I’ll smoke a joint or go to the gym or for a run or errands, and try to forget what I did. And then I’ll do the other thing, so music or whatever I didn’t do in the morning. If I do that, without fail, I’m gonna have a productive day. Like honestly, just having that reset for yourself—and it’s even better when I wake up really early. The days when I wake up at six and work, do the errand or the break, and then get back to work, I’m like, wow, I’ve done five times the amount of work I did the other day.

As a multidisciplinary artist, you have such a strong presentation of who you are that transcends each artistic medium that you create in. Do you have a public facing self, or do you blend your public and private self in your work, and how do you go about that?

I want to say like 50/50? Because I have to market myself like everyone else on social media—that’s just a very social media age thing. For example, Madonna would market an album, and she’d be like, “Now I’m a cowgirl, right? And this is my music album and all my music videos are going to be very cowboy themed and I’m in my cowboy era,” and she had to market [her art] as such. Whereas now, if Billie Eilish is like, “I want to dress like Eminem, I’m a tomboy, I’m making lesbian references,” she’s gonna make lesbian innuendos on her instagram story, and she’s subscribed to the subculture, and she’s like, “This is now my personality, this is how I’m marketing myself now.” And then maybe next year she’s like, “I’m going to be evangelical Christian, like, I’m a tradwife, I don’t do lesbian stuff anymore.” And everything she’s going to post in her stories is her going to church.

I think we’re in a different world now where before, you could just be like, this is the show I’m putting on, this is what I’m marketing. But now,I think every successful artist is good at intertwining the “This is what I’m doing right now, this is my personality,” with the “This is who I [actually] am,” whether it’s real or not.

Like Charlie XCX’s Brat campaign. She announces the album and she’s smoking at nightclubs and doing all these things, broadcasting these things like, “This is me, I’m brat, this is brat, this is the world, this is what I’m doing on my Instagram.” But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what she morally believes—she’s selling you this lifestyle and she tricks you into thinking it’s her day to day, even though we know it’s not, it can’t be sustainable.

So social media is the self and a performance of the self.

A thousand percent, yeah.

How do you think that affects actual performances outside of social media, when you’re performing for a live crowd of people in a room with you?

I could get very cliché with this, because I remember having one professor be like, “Are you performing the truth?” And it sounds very cliché, of course he was like a white guy with red rounded glasses, a salt and pepper beard saying that in a turtleneck, but he was the first person to articulate it like that: Is this [performance] your ultimate truth?

Obviously there’s your idea of performing the role, and then there’s the objective idea of like, you’re being observed by other people, and you need to convince all these people unanimously of a performance. You need to be convincing. Nicholas Cage for example, in his most recent film, I get the sense that he is acting like what he thinks a psycho killer would look like, but not finding the truth of how it would be for him, in his experience. I think performance is about finding that truth, and then directing yourself from the outside so you’re protecting that truth while conveying it. You have to dissociate in a positive way, where you know your truth so well that then you can articulate it for others in an earnest way by repeating your experience.

Some people have an analogy for specifically DJing, where there’s a difference between playing with and playing at. Some DJs are like, these are my records, I’m going to play them at you. And then there are DJs who are like, these are my records, and now you’re going to be involved in them. Some people are just marketed and hyped and these people do well, but in terms of judging their artistic merits, that’s when I’m able to say something is bad because they’re just playing music at you and it doesn’t feel like you’re a part of it. Versus DJs like Moody Man or Omar S, they just envelop you in a moment and you’re like, whoa, I’m convinced that this is a real thing, and it’s unmatched because no one else could do it like that, it’s singular.

So it’s a valve: I could turn on my ego valve and say ok this is my set list and it is what it is. You can let your ego take the front seat for a bit, but you have to be able to bring it back. Working at Santos [a bottle service club in Montreal] was the perfect learning ground for that, where if you don’t play the right song at the right time, the bar manager’s going to get mad at you. Then, if a Hell’s Angel guy slips you a 20 and you don’t play a song at the right time, he’ll get mad at you and it could literally have real repercussions. If you don’t play the other song for this girl who’s really drunk, she’s gonna maybe vomit on you or throw a drink at you or not leave you alone for the rest of the night. So there are many variables and obstacles and you have to learn how to mediate so many different energies and people at the same time, or sacrifice things–so you’re literally doing all these calculations and being thrown into the lion’s den of DJing because you have so many spinning plates happening and you can’t let one fall, or you can, but you know it’s to the detriment of another one.

Is performance a vulnerable act for you?

Not as much as it once was. Now that I kind of understand it, I feel like I can kind of turn on the taps. If I need to be very vulnerable, like if something horrible happened, I think I would know how to broadcast that [on social media] in a way that would actually be serious. Whereas if I’m telling a really crass joke, I know how to be snarky and sarcastic, and it’s just a different valve to turn. When people get really consumed by social media, the valve turning gets mixed up. When I read my Facebook memories, I cringe at the way I would speak on facebook, it’s very interesting. And I think progressively analyzing that and looking at the trends of [social media], I’ve come to see it as more of a system than just a marketing tool.

So, you have these valves that are earnest, cynical–an array of emotions, and you just have to broadcast for what that [specific] moment or scene needs, or what needs to be conveyed.

So what do you do if you’re not able to reach that sweet spot, or if you mistuned your valves?

I don’t know, I feel like everything is kind of cumulative, and even if it’s not great, it’s kind of all about repositioning yourself for the next thing. Since I started playing tennis, even just watching professionals do it, they’ll have like a really good set and then the next one is garbage but they just need to reset because there’s a new ball coming, and all they have to do is return it and hit it. You can’t replay the last game. So you just have to play the next one.

It seems like you have a lot to say yes to. Are there times when you say no? And if so, did you have to learn how to create boundaries or is it something that comes naturally to you?

I’m getting better at saying no. There was a point when I was not good, but I’ve gotten to a better place with the concept of one door closing and another one opening. If you say yes to everything, there are opportunities you’re missing. That’s what you have to think about. There are a plethora of pathways to things, and if you say yes to everything—think of it like a tree, and tree branches. If you say yes to this thing [one branch], then you keep going on that branch, and there are these three other things that would make three new branches. So saying yes without consideration means you didn’t reset and renegotiate these other possible things. So it’s always going to be the same if you don’t develop new branches.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sophy Drouin.