"Plan A is sort of working out:" An Interview with Elias Vier by David Allen Elias Vier opens the door before I knock. I’m somewhat unnerved by the idea that he was standing behind the door to his two bedroom Lake Cable apartment, listening intently as I climbed the humid stairwell. “Let’s do this,” he says, moving to the living room’s sprawl of minimalist furniture. Each piece is either a solid black, white, or red. Sexual and surreal artwork line the walls, including a small ink drawing of a man and a woman having sex in a Chuck E. Cheese style ball pit. In the bathroom, a framed canvas print of Marilyn Manson fondling the exposed breasts of ex-wife pin-up star Dita von Teese accents the toilet. Surrounding the glossy white coffee table are piles of hobbyist tabletop games, music equipment, cat toys, and heavily worn paperbacks (including rock music history texts, sexual psychology books, and most of Chuck Palahniuk’s bibliography.) “I had one of my bookshelves explode a couple months ago,” Elias explains, gesturing to the mess. Through the duration of our conversation, Elias’s legs maintain a distracting, jittery bounce. The wall across the room keeps his attention when he responds to my questions. He speaks frantically, making me glad I tape record my interviews now. His answers are often punctuated by asking me to remind him what the initial question was. When last I left the story of Elias and the Error, he had just returned from a two year artistic dormancy, citing his job, his education, and a series of unfortunate mishaps (such as a hard drive failure and health issues) as the circumstances that kept him from creating. Void of obstacles, Elias returned to the prolific drive that he was once known for. The first two years of Elias and the Error generated two albums, four EPs, several elaborate live productions, and a cover song compilation that took on artists like DEVO, Gwen Stefani, and Smashing Pumpkins. In the spring of this year, the collective released the Séance and Sacrament EP and took their David Bowie inspired surreal video projection live show on a short tour of the Midwest. The stage production presented a scenario about a computer program that could mimic the work of dead artists and continue creating new works in their fashion. Upon returning home, they released the 7” vinyl singles Arcane and Annul and produced the 50-minute live album Project Séance Live. Elias is surprised when he looks back at his busy year which also saw his marriage to photographer wife Alta Sandy. “When I was working and going to school, I already sucked at both of those things, and there was just no time or energy to give to music,” he adds. Elias, now emancipated from his day job, will receive a Bachelor’s degree from Kent State University this fall (he is quick to remind me this is his fourth college degree.) However, this achievement means less to him now as he attests that “Plan A is sort of working out." On August 19th, Elias and the Error will release their first album in three years, titled As Creeped Out As You Are By Watching This, I’m Living It, a quote uttered in a candid video by Elias's friend Jessica where she confronts a giant spider occupying her house. In the coming months, Elias will make his television debut as the music composer for Magic Funhouse, a new half hour comedy series by increasingly visible YouTube comedian Brandon Rogers, most famous for his viral characters Grandpa and the titular matriarch from A Day with Mom. Earlier this year, Rogers had signed a development deal with online content house Super Deluxe to develop a half-hour television pilot. After receiving the greenlight for a full series, Elias was brought on board to provide music crazy enough to match the on-screen antics of the degenerate characters struggling to understand each other as they produce a zany, Pee-Wee-style public access children’s show. “Brandon texted me and said ‘Hey, I hope you don’t mind, but they asked me if I had anyone I was thinking of to do the music and I only gave them your name,” Elias recalls. “I freaked out. My stomach is dropping now just telling you. I cried a lot. I kept asking my cats if I should do it.” Though Elias is only midway through his commitment to the first season of Magic Funhouse, he’s been splitting his time between the show and the completion of eight new songs that continue the absurd punk-gone-electro-Vaudeville sound that scored him over 500,000 streaming plays of his 2013 single “As I Was Going to St. Clair.” At one point during our discussion, Elias shows me a playlist he has curated of internet videos that utilize his music. I’m bombarded with fifteen second previews of hand-drawn cartoons, teenage backyard shenanigans, videogames, and Japanese anime characters all set to his unlikely viral hit that employs shrill, post-punk noise guitars and hot jazz call-and-response to express the terror experienced during a hospital stay for mental health concerns. He shows me six or seven clips before he puts his phone away. “My fans are the biggest f****** nerds on the planet,” he laughs. “I love it. I’m not really hip to videogames or anime and a lot of the stuff [the fans] like, but I sat at that lunch table. I knew girls who were obsessed with [anime hero] Inuyasha and My Chemical Romance. I knew gay guys with long hair that listened to Cradle of Filth and played Dungeons and Dragons. I’m very proud that my identity has resonated enough in my music that the people who enjoy it are exactly the sort of people I’d hang out with in real life.” The notion of identity is tantamount to Elias and the Error. While it would be inappropriate to call the previous releases Aren’t We So Lucky To Be Alive? and Help Yourself proper concept albums in the style of dad-approved classics like The Wall and Tommy, the new recordings found on As Creeped Out… make clear that a mythos has been bubbling under the surface since the project started in 2011. Whether known as defiant punk Elias Iscariot, sensitive crooner Elias Gowins, imaginary journalist David Allen, the PVC-clad Galactic Dictator, mad scientist Elias Vier, or the twisted folklore reimagining of Rapunzelias, the singer/songwriter seems to have an endless supply of masks that allow him to dramatically frame his experiences. The weirdest of the bunch is called Rapunzelias. She is the focus of the track “Song From the Spire,” a song from the spring EP now re-recorded for this release. “A couple years ago, I was discussing with my therapist this flippant idea,” he recants. “I was saying that I wished I could just hole myself up somewhere and only have to tell people about things that I happened to me by using songs. When big things happens, like after I got the TV show or my marriage, I just hate having to call people and tell the same story over and over again. It’s boring to me.” Forming his hand into the shape of a telephone receiver, he jokingly mocks a series of phone conversations. “Hey, I got married, click,” he jokes. “Hey, I got a TV show, click. It’s just so f****** boring to me. From that [conversation with my therapist], I just had this bizarre Rapunzel fantasy where I live in this twisted castle spire, I don’t say a word to anyone, and I just send these songs out to the world and that’s the only way they get to know me. Oh, and I’m guarded by a little person based on the backwards talking guy from Twin Peaks. It’s absurd but ultimately I’m making a statement about my feelings in a way I find interesting and very specific to me. I don’t want to be seen, only heard.” As Creeped Out… lays the concept on thick with “Gods Behold (Hell Unfolds),” a mock Danny Elfman budget theater piece that sees Elias voicing five unique characters across three musical keys. “Gods Behold is my creation story,” he says. “These four imps called Emito, Excoti, Entopra, and Erzatu are tasked with making this potion that’s supposed to resurrect this long dead deity called Elias, but he is being resurrected in a crippled, deformed state as an eternal punishment for betraying the gods, but they f*** up the process and while he comes back mortal and damaged, he is given the one gift that the gods fear and that gift is a voice and influence.” When I ask Elias what he’s trying to say about himself with such a song, he first says that he is unsure, but as usual, he is never afraid to tackle a question he doesn’t know the answer to. “I had Mike Sparks, my video and staging guy, over one day. We had work to do on a project and things were running late but I told him I had to go to the bathroom. I kept apologizing for delaying things. I’m notoriously late and unprepared for everything,” he adds. “But later [Sparks] confronted me and was just like ‘Dude, you have a lot of guilt. Stop apologizing for being human.’ That really struck me. I think about it all the time now. I grew up in a non-churchy Irish Catholic family and guilt and shame are basically hardwired into me. I consistently feel guilty for being alive or present. I have no idea how to handle it when someone tells me that it’s okay for me to be in their presence or even exist. It’s amazing how these core concepts that sort of make up our identity… we can be so blind to them.” Though I’m not sure my question was addressed, conversation moves to the stark and harrowing album opener “Pierre’s Lion.” The track is a dark and whimsical swing-time jaunt not unlike “As I Was Going to St. Clair,” though the lyrics presented are much more affecting and direct. The lyrics are a take on 1974’s “Pierre,” a Maurice Sendak-penned cautionary tale urging a young boy to take an interest in his life and relationships lest he allow a lion to eat the boy because he didn’t care to resist. Through the nearly eight minute ballad, Elias off-pitch croons about a 2012 suicide attempt that spurns a soul-wrenching afterlife reunion between himself and his dog, Zero, who passed away from jaw cancer. The lyrics start off with desolate statements that would have you making sure everything was alright if you read them on a friend’s Facebook status. “Sitting above in the loft / Drug-erased / My last living moment / Smile on my face,” he belts. “The most terrifying emotion I’ve ever felt in my entire life is the sense of peace I had before I tried to kill myself,” Elias says. “It haunts me to this day. I was laughing. I felt like my soul had shed this insane weight. I felt free. I’ve never felt that good since.” He assures me he has “grown past” suicide being a desire for him. The song targets the listener in a redemptive finale that features Elias crying out: “So I say to you / If you're like Pierre / You must find your truth / I can't take you there / You are somebody / And somebody cares.” Similar themes see rumination on the icy trip-hop pastiche “Polykron,” which attenuates Elias’s penchant for the dramatic and bombastic to an unusually understated level. Glitchy electronics and digitally manipulated violins are punctuated with a soft-spoken admission of secret sadness: “No one will ever know I feel sick / I must go / Take me home / Won't be missed / Find a way for me to not exist.” Elias and the Error appears to rest on their laurels on electro-punk fist-pumper “No Is My Favorite Word” which features a crowd chanting “No!” to various queries such as “Do you feel like you are free? / Don’t you desire to belong?” The song ends in an ironic crack at industrial death metal as Elias assumes an unfamiliar guttural bellow, driven by harsh double-time kick drums, and shouts “Go f*** yourself / You’ll have to beg for my help.” The band’s Canton, Ohio roots are exposed on the chaotic, anti-labor “Blue Collar Blackface,” which occupies a sonic realm familiar to anyone who has heard Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar or the Nine Inch Nails opus The Downward Spiral. “I had my own experiences with being in this metaphorical industrial meat grinder [while employed at a food processing plant] but I found some poetry written by Xu Lizhi, one of the Chinese workers that killed themselves at the factory where they make Microsoft and Apple products. I was thoroughly disgusted by the effects of consumerism and capitalism,” he says. “There are literally people killing themselves because they can’t bear to be the providers of the world’s cheapest manual labor anymore. That chilled me. So I took Xu’s poetry and some of my own writings, hung them on the wall in the basement of the house where I record, and I made up all the lyrics and melodies on the spot in two takes. It was nice to find new ways to challenge myself and be on my toes artistically.” The album closes with its most danceable entry, “Everyone’s Waiting,” which compares Elias’s invitation to work on Magic Funhouse in Los Angeles to the final episode of the beloved cult HBO series Six Feet Under. “The finale of Six Feet Under is the highest rated finale for any TV show in history ever,” Elias claims with excitement. “I was absolutely f****** crying hysterically the first time I watched it. Claire [one of the program’s female leads] gets an offer to work her dream job as a photographer in New York City, she backs out of it because she feels guilty, she feels like her family needs her, and her mom sits her down and tells her she can have the family savings if she promises to get the f*** out of there and take the opportunity. I pretty much experienced the exact same thing with my grandmother this year in regards to the TV show. I just felt like there were all these reasons why I shouldn’t take the job or even continue to pursue music and she said ‘You’re young. You have to throw everything into this. Don’t worry about money, just do this. You never know what might happen.” Over forlorn synthesized strings and a thumping club beat, Elias sings from the perspective of the “women in his life” that support his career. “You can borrow what we have / Even if it’s not much / We’re with you all the way / Even if you f*** up / You don’t have to earn our love.” “I’ve only cried three times ever while recording music,” he admits. “The opener and closer of this album are two of them [Pierre's Lion and Everyone's Waiting]. ‘Let the Music Go’ [from 2013’s Help Yourself] was the other. Two of those songs are about making the decision to keep creating music and art.” Elias stops for a second. His eyes are wide. An “a-ha” moment. “I’m just now putting that together. Two of the most meaningful things I’ve ever created were about my decision to keep creating. How’s that for meta?” he laughs. “But that’s what I love about doing this. It’s self-discovery. I learn more about myself from making music than anything. It really is the most important thing in my life. It is literally the one thing that excites me above everything else. I have and will gladly go without things in order to be able to keep doing this.” “Everybody’s Waiting” finishes out the back half of its six minute length with a rare instrumental section that sees arpeggiating sequencers battling against one another while a thundering, tribal tom drum rhythm trades off with a complex handclap pattern. We reach the end of the album’s slim 36 minutes. “I’m incredibly lucky that, after sticking it out for 12 years [of recording music], not only do people give a s***, but people want me to be me,” he emphasizes. “Well, I’m not lucky, but fortunate. I did the work. I never gave up. While my artistic voice, and my singing voice, aren’t for everyone, I feel like I have a very unique identity. I am the only person who could create Elias and the Error. Why the f*** would anyone else [make this music]? Who thinks an album that starts with a 7 minute piano ballad about killing yourself so you can talk to your dead dog followed by an electro-punk song with circusy orchestra parts followed by an 80s synthpop song… you get the picture. A big part of this album was putting aside my self-consciousness and just letting the music happen. I was so terrified that this album would suck and always be compared to Help Yourself. But the worst thing I could do is try and form or mold my expression. People listen to Elias and the Error because I’m the only one doing this. People pay me to make money for their TV show because they can’t pay someone else to do what I do. Money and popularity are fleeting. Maybe my ship already sailed. But you better believe that I so wholly put myself out there with this music that the only way you could replicate it is to have lived my life exactly as it happened to me. You can’t buy a unique voice nor can you create one.” Elias cites newfound musical discoveries such as King Krule, Jonathan Richman, and Dan Deacon as making him feel more comfortable with being an unusually passionate, if somewhat unpracticed, artist. “I’m not a good singer. This is reality. I’m not a good instrumentalist,” he laughs. “But I love making songs. Would you tell someone to throw away their coloring books if they couldn’t stay in the lines? That’s a s*** metaphor but you know what I mean. I’m not going to stop doing this just because I’m not exactly adept at it. Whenever I see fan stuff online, like videos they make using my songs or just their own artwork they do, I always try to leave some encouragement. I wish more people weren’t afraid to have a good time expressing themselves, even if they’re supposed to be embarrassed that it’s not good or whatever. This is the s*** that saved myself. I want everyone to have a relationship with themselves and their own expression like I do with myself and my music.” Spurned by the recent Bo Burnham special Make Happy, which Elias has called “a huge, huge influence,” I ask a simple, familiar question. “Are you happy?” “Sure. I’m having the time of my life right now. I’m not rich, s***, I’m actually in the most debt I’ve ever had in my life,” Elias says. “But I have things to look forward to. People want to talk to me online. People are making videos singing along to my songs. I can drive to a city I’ve never been to and people pay money to come see my show. I’m going to doing music for, hopefully, a lot of episodes of this TV show. On one hand, I want to say that I don’t need attention to feel artistically validated, but on the other hand, do you wanna f****** hit a tennis ball against a brick wall forever? You know what I mean? Elias and the Error is by me, for me, about me and is my place to explore my own head because I still don’t have that sh*t down 26 years later. And now I’ve been given this insane gift. People are supporting me doing this and supporting me doing it my way. I’d be a real c*** if I was anything but happy right now.” As Creeped Out As You Are By Watching This, I’m Living will be released digitally on August 16th and will be available on iTunes, Spotify, and other digital platforms in the coming days. A deluxe CD release is planned for the fall.