Conceptualize Brooklyn as an elementary school playground. Williamsburg's a modern ergonomic playstructure with rubber mulch instead of sand, lab tested for optimal safety. Bushwick's a four square court packed with competitive athlete kids, and Park Slope's an ice cream truck around the corner. Far Rockaway, meanwhile, is a clump of bushes way past the cafeteria where a kindergartner found a condom once. Its obvious why Max "DJ Dog Dick" Eisenberg lives there—he's a lifelong outskirts inhabitant, a junkyard dog scavenging the detritus of North America's brief flirtation with capitalism. DJ Dog Dick thrives at the intersection of vulgar flesh and corroded machinery, busting raps over the distorted squalls of un-nameable machines he's built from discarded tapes and circuitboards. He finds common ground between Wolf Eyes and Wu-Tang—his verses coat screeching, exposed wires in the oozing bio-hazardous material of his own lyrical psyche. If you socialize in New York's murkier substrates you've probably caught his revelatory live set at some point. He straps a synth to his chest and writhes over the mic like, well, a dog with a bone. After years on tour he's finally tracked muddy pawprints into a studio to record his debut LP The Life Stains—the first single "Rot Is Hot" is gloopy, acidic, and hard as fuck. Check out our exclusive premiere, and read below for an interview with the Duke of Debris himself on topics including rust, noise music, and finding inspiration in amateur porn.
Max Eisenberg: I was always drawing and into music. My sister and I entertained each other a lot as little kids. As a teenager I did graffiti.What was your tag?
I was Omen 36. Sear before that.Were you in a tagging crew?
The Mad Skills Crew. Same group of guys for about 3 years, spending our time along train tracks, in tunnels and under bridges. Bombing the highways and rooftops of Greater St. Louis.What was St. Louis like?
I grew up outside of St. Louis, around Clayton Missouri. Clayton’s a real prominent kind of utopian suburbia. I lived in a town right next to it called Richmond Heights, a sort of wrong-side-of-the-tracks included in the Clayton school district. Clayton had a very modern façade and was progressive in certain ways. The school system was a marvel of public education. Black kids were bussed in from the inner city to provide diversity and equality, but if you were a black kid and a white kid roaming around Clayton together outside of school there was harassment from its police force. Doing graffiti’s how I came to know the greater city of St. Louis. A theatre-playground set with abandoned factories and warehouse buildings. Rusted out automobiles and Mississippi River muck oozing upon all the crumbling structures there. Monolithic disrepair in tangles of old steel and iron like whiskers on a giant hobo yawning. All the American Railroads crisscrossing St. Louis and its outer parts, their tracks and yards winding together the manicured suburbs and grim urban wastes. From tall weeds behind its county shopping centers to the broken foundations of its old riverfront mills.So, you were absorbing a lot of the imagery of the decay and broken former industrial areas.
Oh yeah. I had acquired an appreciation for that very early in life. In the 80’s and early 90’s my dad owned and operated a factory that recycled ink cartridges for printers. It was in an enormous old warehouse building. He almost exclusively hired ex-cons and Vietnam War Veterans. He’s a felon himself. I spent a lot of time there exploring the building, being entertained by the inky old guys. They’d tell me gory war stories and raunchy jokes in a haze of cigarette smoke and sputtering machine oil. It was the perfect inception of that pursuit of my youth that his business fell into the same sad, failed history as the rest of the Industrial American Dream.What were your first musical inspirations? Who did you listen to?
Dad took the family to see the Grateful Dead when I was 11. He hung out with a scene of smoky bohemian musician-types. His favorite band, the Geyer Street Sheiks, played old folk and blues standards, ballads, bluegrass, and Americana. My father’s best friend was their washboard player. He was like an uncle to me in those days. I saw them perform many times or otherwise went with my family to their gatherings in the Ozark Mountains. I remember on one occasion a woman of the group looking grim as she stumbled out of the dark woods, into the light of our fire. She was shaking and her skin was white. A terror was in her eyes like I’d only seen in movies. Other adults of the group surrounded her with a collective sigh of relief. She’d been missing for hours. I realized years later that she’d gotten lost in the woods on LSD and stumbled into a bad trip. The Sheiks gave me a bass guitar for my Bar Mitzvah. One of the first CDs I bought was the Clockwork Orange soundtrack and I was obsessed with it. I got it in early there with a love of emotive-avant electronic music via movie scores. A little later I had a VHS tape Best of the Red Hot Chili Peppers featuring all their music videos. I watched that tape ritually. My palette of tastes has always been of many genres but for a certain time the major focus was rap. From 5th grade when I’d listen to Geto Boys six-inches from the home stereo so my parents couldn’t hear how fucked it was. Eventually I didn’t care what they thought, and I'd blast Wu-Tang Clan, UGK, Do or Die, Bone Thugs, Triple Six Mafia, Master P from my tagged up and musty basement bedroom chamber.Grimy southern shit?
Yeah, that pretty much dominated the time, but East Coast hip-hop was there for me too. I had a Hot 97 DJ Evil Dee’s bootleg mix tape I bought at a local record store in 1996 or 97. It had all the east coast anthems in one double cassette, explicit versions only. I listened to that over and over. It had Shook Ones Part II, Slick Rick: The Ruler’s Back, Protect Ya Neck, Camp Lo Luchini, so much ill shit. The cover had a cool looking graffiti character busting some kind of jive b-boy move.Did you ever knock a freestyle in those days?
Oh hell no, I was so awkward. I couldn’t have fronted such a confidence. I didn’t have it then and it’s still not always certain. But times are different.When did you encounter the American noise scene?
My senior year at Clayton I was working as a busboy at a restaurant in the city. I met some cool people there and started hanging out at this DIY space they helped create in Little Italy. I became a part of that collective and discovered a whole new world of music. At 18 I moved into the city with new friends who had huge collections of music on vinyl. Punk, indie, alternative. The Velvet Underground. I met some guys who jammed free improvisations for hours in the night and the first time I took my bass guitar to one of those sessions was of many to follow. I acquired a drum kit—playing free jazz drums was all I wanted to do. I smoked a lot of weed and listened to jazz constantly, from Coltrane to Brötzmann. Fresh. Free. Ecstatic. Cathartic. Noise music was starting to be talked about a lot. Many people I was hanging out with had grown up with John Weise. His Moon Landing compilations and the debut Sissy Spacek album were the first definitive Noise records I heard. They blew my mind. I was getting turned on to more and more sick contemporary music—Harry Pussy, To Live & Shave in LA, Wolf Eyes, Nautical Almanac, Andrew WK, Hair Police, Force Field, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Sightings, Cock ESP, Panicsville… You’d listen to these wild records and be completely absorbed in a whole mythology of the bands and their connectivity. Seeing Wolf Eyes during that time was a metaphysical experience like you were witnessing simultaneously the end and beginning of music and the world. When Animal Collective first played in St. Louis they gave us all CDR copies of their Danse Manatee and Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished albums. Those were quickly cherished disks.At what point did you transition to a solo career?
I’d make tapes in the basement whenever I found a lucid night alone. After discovering Nautical Almanac and Wolf Eyes I became militant in searching out my own electronic sounds. I found my main axe in taking apart old transistor radio devices and feeling around the circuits with my fingers. They’d become expressively alive like some kind of entity was summoned there on the copper patterned boards. Interactions with that entity gave me the rawest feeling for electronic sound. Finding hot spots. Attaching wires, knobs, and switches. It was a mess of exposed circuits, whiskers of re-wire, percussive junk and contact microphones when I played my music. A call-and-response ensued between my energy and the other there leaping around a pile of plastic, metal and wood. I probably sucked half the time, thrown off an unbroken horse, but it forged in me a unique ability to perform. Prairie Pusher became the name of that project. In 2003 I went on my first tour. Two months around the USA opening for an opera by the French Absurdist Jean-Louis Costes. I booked and promoted the whole tour on the Hanson Records/American Tapes Yahoo-Groups message board. I was 21.So how did DJ Dog Dick get started? What was the first use of the name?
I was a member of Nautical Almanac touring extensively and producing many things on my own. Tapes, CDRs, comics…things to share on the road. DJ Dog Dick started in the midst of that. I wanted to rap because I wanted to narrate. I wanted the content of my music and my life to reflect the whole of my history. Dog Dick was everything, past present future. There was sex in it. It related to the dilapidated slum that I'd arrived to like some sinking end to the whole pursuit of that vibe. Half of our roof was caved in and the only electricity was rigged to a couple small rooms in an otherwise massive space of black mold and jagged edges in the dark. The street outside was heavily trafficked by lively drug runners and the wandering specters of crack and heroin addicts. One night I heard a drive-by murder. The man’s dying utterance was a gasp of panic over a deep mortal sigh. I never bought drugs from the corner boys but I befriended some. We were neighbors. I gave one of the early DJ Dog Dick releases to a dealer named Monk and the next day he grabbed me with a huge arm around my shoulder.“Yo, that shit hot but you think you a freak? This my girl suckin' my dick!”On the grainy screen of an obsolete media device was a lady choking and slobbering and gibbering all over this enormous throbbing mass with veins coursing, her face stretched to its rawest extent. The shots all dissolved in and out of each other in an artful video collage set to bizarre R&B music. I was impressed. The name DJ Dog Dick came from Carly Ptak. We had just returned from our European Nautical Almanac tour and she called me that one afternoon in the kitchen of her house.When I first heard your recently released "My Identity" it felt like a strong statement. How would you describe the message ?
“Here I am, this is what I am” pretty much that with a question mark at the end. I’m telling a coming of age story and making a statement of identity. It’s a personal narrative of the years around 1996 when something both glorious and terrifying was born into my life.What was terrifying about it?
Reality. Future. Drugs. My Identity.
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Noisey: Walk me through your background. What were your first creative outlets?
Max Eisenberg: I was always drawing and into music. My sister and I entertained each other a lot as little kids. As a teenager I did graffiti.What was your tag?
I was Omen 36. Sear before that.Were you in a tagging crew?
The Mad Skills Crew. Same group of guys for about 3 years, spending our time along train tracks, in tunnels and under bridges. Bombing the highways and rooftops of Greater St. Louis.What was St. Louis like?
I grew up outside of St. Louis, around Clayton Missouri. Clayton’s a real prominent kind of utopian suburbia. I lived in a town right next to it called Richmond Heights, a sort of wrong-side-of-the-tracks included in the Clayton school district. Clayton had a very modern façade and was progressive in certain ways. The school system was a marvel of public education. Black kids were bussed in from the inner city to provide diversity and equality, but if you were a black kid and a white kid roaming around Clayton together outside of school there was harassment from its police force. Doing graffiti’s how I came to know the greater city of St. Louis. A theatre-playground set with abandoned factories and warehouse buildings. Rusted out automobiles and Mississippi River muck oozing upon all the crumbling structures there. Monolithic disrepair in tangles of old steel and iron like whiskers on a giant hobo yawning. All the American Railroads crisscrossing St. Louis and its outer parts, their tracks and yards winding together the manicured suburbs and grim urban wastes. From tall weeds behind its county shopping centers to the broken foundations of its old riverfront mills.
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Oh yeah. I had acquired an appreciation for that very early in life. In the 80’s and early 90’s my dad owned and operated a factory that recycled ink cartridges for printers. It was in an enormous old warehouse building. He almost exclusively hired ex-cons and Vietnam War Veterans. He’s a felon himself. I spent a lot of time there exploring the building, being entertained by the inky old guys. They’d tell me gory war stories and raunchy jokes in a haze of cigarette smoke and sputtering machine oil. It was the perfect inception of that pursuit of my youth that his business fell into the same sad, failed history as the rest of the Industrial American Dream.What were your first musical inspirations? Who did you listen to?
Dad took the family to see the Grateful Dead when I was 11. He hung out with a scene of smoky bohemian musician-types. His favorite band, the Geyer Street Sheiks, played old folk and blues standards, ballads, bluegrass, and Americana. My father’s best friend was their washboard player. He was like an uncle to me in those days. I saw them perform many times or otherwise went with my family to their gatherings in the Ozark Mountains. I remember on one occasion a woman of the group looking grim as she stumbled out of the dark woods, into the light of our fire. She was shaking and her skin was white. A terror was in her eyes like I’d only seen in movies. Other adults of the group surrounded her with a collective sigh of relief. She’d been missing for hours. I realized years later that she’d gotten lost in the woods on LSD and stumbled into a bad trip. The Sheiks gave me a bass guitar for my Bar Mitzvah. One of the first CDs I bought was the Clockwork Orange soundtrack and I was obsessed with it. I got it in early there with a love of emotive-avant electronic music via movie scores. A little later I had a VHS tape Best of the Red Hot Chili Peppers featuring all their music videos. I watched that tape ritually. My palette of tastes has always been of many genres but for a certain time the major focus was rap. From 5th grade when I’d listen to Geto Boys six-inches from the home stereo so my parents couldn’t hear how fucked it was. Eventually I didn’t care what they thought, and I'd blast Wu-Tang Clan, UGK, Do or Die, Bone Thugs, Triple Six Mafia, Master P from my tagged up and musty basement bedroom chamber.
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Yeah, that pretty much dominated the time, but East Coast hip-hop was there for me too. I had a Hot 97 DJ Evil Dee’s bootleg mix tape I bought at a local record store in 1996 or 97. It had all the east coast anthems in one double cassette, explicit versions only. I listened to that over and over. It had Shook Ones Part II, Slick Rick: The Ruler’s Back, Protect Ya Neck, Camp Lo Luchini, so much ill shit. The cover had a cool looking graffiti character busting some kind of jive b-boy move.Did you ever knock a freestyle in those days?
Oh hell no, I was so awkward. I couldn’t have fronted such a confidence. I didn’t have it then and it’s still not always certain. But times are different.When did you encounter the American noise scene?
My senior year at Clayton I was working as a busboy at a restaurant in the city. I met some cool people there and started hanging out at this DIY space they helped create in Little Italy. I became a part of that collective and discovered a whole new world of music. At 18 I moved into the city with new friends who had huge collections of music on vinyl. Punk, indie, alternative. The Velvet Underground. I met some guys who jammed free improvisations for hours in the night and the first time I took my bass guitar to one of those sessions was of many to follow. I acquired a drum kit—playing free jazz drums was all I wanted to do. I smoked a lot of weed and listened to jazz constantly, from Coltrane to Brötzmann. Fresh. Free. Ecstatic. Cathartic. Noise music was starting to be talked about a lot. Many people I was hanging out with had grown up with John Weise. His Moon Landing compilations and the debut Sissy Spacek album were the first definitive Noise records I heard. They blew my mind. I was getting turned on to more and more sick contemporary music—Harry Pussy, To Live & Shave in LA, Wolf Eyes, Nautical Almanac, Andrew WK, Hair Police, Force Field, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Sightings, Cock ESP, Panicsville… You’d listen to these wild records and be completely absorbed in a whole mythology of the bands and their connectivity. Seeing Wolf Eyes during that time was a metaphysical experience like you were witnessing simultaneously the end and beginning of music and the world. When Animal Collective first played in St. Louis they gave us all CDR copies of their Danse Manatee and Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished albums. Those were quickly cherished disks.
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I’d make tapes in the basement whenever I found a lucid night alone. After discovering Nautical Almanac and Wolf Eyes I became militant in searching out my own electronic sounds. I found my main axe in taking apart old transistor radio devices and feeling around the circuits with my fingers. They’d become expressively alive like some kind of entity was summoned there on the copper patterned boards. Interactions with that entity gave me the rawest feeling for electronic sound. Finding hot spots. Attaching wires, knobs, and switches. It was a mess of exposed circuits, whiskers of re-wire, percussive junk and contact microphones when I played my music. A call-and-response ensued between my energy and the other there leaping around a pile of plastic, metal and wood. I probably sucked half the time, thrown off an unbroken horse, but it forged in me a unique ability to perform. Prairie Pusher became the name of that project. In 2003 I went on my first tour. Two months around the USA opening for an opera by the French Absurdist Jean-Louis Costes. I booked and promoted the whole tour on the Hanson Records/American Tapes Yahoo-Groups message board. I was 21.So how did DJ Dog Dick get started? What was the first use of the name?
I was a member of Nautical Almanac touring extensively and producing many things on my own. Tapes, CDRs, comics…things to share on the road. DJ Dog Dick started in the midst of that. I wanted to rap because I wanted to narrate. I wanted the content of my music and my life to reflect the whole of my history. Dog Dick was everything, past present future. There was sex in it. It related to the dilapidated slum that I'd arrived to like some sinking end to the whole pursuit of that vibe. Half of our roof was caved in and the only electricity was rigged to a couple small rooms in an otherwise massive space of black mold and jagged edges in the dark. The street outside was heavily trafficked by lively drug runners and the wandering specters of crack and heroin addicts. One night I heard a drive-by murder. The man’s dying utterance was a gasp of panic over a deep mortal sigh. I never bought drugs from the corner boys but I befriended some. We were neighbors. I gave one of the early DJ Dog Dick releases to a dealer named Monk and the next day he grabbed me with a huge arm around my shoulder.“Yo, that shit hot but you think you a freak? This my girl suckin' my dick!”On the grainy screen of an obsolete media device was a lady choking and slobbering and gibbering all over this enormous throbbing mass with veins coursing, her face stretched to its rawest extent. The shots all dissolved in and out of each other in an artful video collage set to bizarre R&B music. I was impressed. The name DJ Dog Dick came from Carly Ptak. We had just returned from our European Nautical Almanac tour and she called me that one afternoon in the kitchen of her house.When I first heard your recently released "My Identity" it felt like a strong statement. How would you describe the message ?
“Here I am, this is what I am” pretty much that with a question mark at the end. I’m telling a coming of age story and making a statement of identity. It’s a personal narrative of the years around 1996 when something both glorious and terrifying was born into my life.What was terrifying about it?
Reality. Future. Drugs. My Identity.