The music that influenced Max Blansjaar’s False Comforts
Magana image via press photo
Max Blansjaar’s musical journey is a tapestry woven from his eclectic life experiences. Born in the vibrant city of Amsterdam, raised amidst the academic charm of Oxford, and recording his debut album, False Comforts, in the artistic heart of Brooklyn, Max’s music is as diverse as his background.
Recorded over two transformative weeks at Katie Von Schleicher’s home studio near Prospect Park, Max poured his experiences into this debut album. With the collaborative efforts of Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn, Max’s intricate demos evolved into ten richly textured songs.
The songs that follow are the records that shaped this latest project.
“I started writing the first False Comforts songs in early 2020. It felt like a lot of talk happening around me was generational—the news covered generational challenges, my friends professed generational anxieties over Web 2.0, table service, and global crises they did not cause, I gave in and read Spotify’s apocalyptic ‘Who is Gen Z, Really?’ report in the search for self-knowledge—yet I struggled to ever identify with that category, which always struck me as more of a buzzphrase than as a genuine connection. At the same time, I was at the threshold of what was, for me, a new world: just finishing school, between two states of being, all the freedom in the universe suddenly feeling somehow like less freedom that I’d ever had before. I felt the need to assert myself, to make music that reflected where I actually fit into the world of rituals and allegiances that was unfolding around me. Or, at least, that reflected the powerlessness of not knowing my place.”
“I challenged myself to get straightforward. Stop chasing complexity and Follow Your Nose! Amongst others I owe a debt of gratitude to The Velvet Underground and to Elephant 6 for teaching me the power of the harmonically simple, to Beck and to Cate Le Bon for lyrical inspiration, and to a couple of experimental music groups I started playing with that got me to be bolder in my choice of sounds. It all made sense, finally, partway through our two weeks of recording the album. I came across Brad Liening’s poetry collection ‘Are You There, God? It’s Me, Whitney Houston’ at a bookshop in Dumbo one day (one of the last copies out there, he’s since told me), and when I opened it, there was the line: some explanations / last forever and never / answer a thing. Yahtzee! There doesn’t always have to be a solution, or a resolution; it can be rewarding, even necessary, to linger in a snapshot of a feeling for a while. In that sense, I knew these songs would be False Comforts. They wouldn’t fix anything, they wouldn’t give me answers, they wouldn’t help, they were pointless, unproductive hideouts, explanations lasting forever. And I found a strange comfort in them for that. Maybe someone else will, too.”
— Max Blansjaar
Katie von Schleicher — ‘You Remind Me’
Katie co-produced my album with Nate Mendelsohn of Market. It was Katie’s album Consummation that made me want to work with them in the first place, and ‘You Remind Me’ is the opening track off that album. It really shows the genius of Katie’s production, I think. The song itself isn’t massively bloated or complicated, it’s neat, but it’s presented to us in this wild sound world — all these timbres that are kind of cranked but so perfectly placed at the same time. It’s dirty, it’s crunchy, it’s sparkly, it’s huge, and it makes you feel everything.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Daniel Johnston — ‘Mountain Top’
A lot of people hate on this Daniel Johnston album because it’s a lot fuller and more produced than his other stuff, but I love it. Plus it has one of the best album titles ever: Fear Yourself. The harmonic simplicity of this track is so effective, it creates this sense of naivety but also draws you right into the subtlety of the vocals. That’s definitely something I tried to play with on False Comforts, too.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Cate Le Bon — ‘Crab Day’
Cate Le Bon is a big lyrical influence on me. I love how her songs feel like strange dreams, but also paint these very detailed pictures somehow. I’m interested in trying actively not to be straightforward sometimes, because things rarely feel so simple, and for me music is really good at capturing feelings that resist quite being articulated. I could’ve chosen any number of songs, but I chose this one because of the line words like “glassy beading / they decorate for now…” I mean, so true. And her kind of monotone delivery in that thick Welsh accent. Amazing.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Lou Reed — ‘Andy’s Chest’
Sorry, sorry for being basic! Sorry. But I couldn’t help it. It’s no secret that I’m a big Lou Reed fan, and that I think The Velvet Underground is the best band of all time. The way I thought about songs changed forever when I first heard them, to the point where I can’t really say exactly what part of them I’m being influenced by — I just am. ‘Andy’s Chest’ is one of Lou’s most beautiful solo songs. ‘Perfect Day’ is even more beautiful, but I can’t really listen to it because I’m too scared of losing my cool. As for David Bowie, who obviously had a big hand in making Transformer, I’ll say that I’m a big fan of basically all his work except the David Bowie albums.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Beck — ‘Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)’
Beck’s production style is a big influence on me — the kind of collage quality it has, almost a kind of absurdity. There’s a bunch of little guitar distortion flourishes on this track that I think you can hear on False Comforts too. Definitely on ‘Saturnia’ there’s something about the percussion loop that I owe to Beck, to this track but also tracks like ‘Devil’s Haircut.’ It’s repetitive, but he messes with the texture so it’s never boring.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
When you’re done here lose yourself in our full library of features.