SCALED ALPS — WRITTEN INTERVIEW
Los Angeles, California — United States 🇺🇸
Experimental Rock • Art Rock • Post-Punk • Psychedelic Rock • Electronic • Spoken Word • Avant-Garde
INTERVIEW PREPARED BY
Gordon Lawrence Taylor
Voice In The Void
Infectious Unease Radio
Subterranean Zone Radio
INTRODUCTION
Scaled Alps is a Los Angeles-based experimental music project whose creative identity reaches beyond the conventional boundaries of a single genre.
The project developed around the creative partnership of James Quentin Devine and Anthony Percoco, while the 2026 recording lineup for Let the Alpine Play expanded to include Sean McCarthy on drums and Steve Fishman on upright and electric basses.
Together, the musicians create a language in which experimental rock, post-punk, psychedelia, electronic sound, improvisation, jazz-informed musical ideas, spoken language, visual culture, humour and conceptual art can occupy the same space.
Devine brings voice, lyrics, wordplay and a wider interest in writing and transmedia ideas. Percoco works across keyboards and guitars and contributes heavily to the compositional and instrumental identity of the project. McCarthy brings drums as well as the perspective of a songwriter and multidisciplinary artist who also works as Joan Darwin. Fishman contributes a substantial musical history of his own, including work with experimental psychedelic rock group Chrome, alongside an unusually broad approach to upright, electric, fretless and synthesizer bass.
The Scaled Alps name can be traced to recordings preceding the project’s most recent work, including an appearance connected with Devine’s material in 2022. The eight-track Peak Arousal followed in August 2024, preceding the much larger undertaking that became Let the Alpine Play.
The latter began through a highly productive series of demos before sixteen compositions were recorded with engineer Stewart Tuttle at The Altar Studios in North Hollywood. Yet the importance of Scaled Alps does not rest upon a single album.
The project raises wider questions about collaboration, improvisation, language, physical media, visual art, Los Angeles geography, independent music, technology, streaming culture and the increasingly uncertain boundary between human creativity and automated production.
For that reason, this interview is intended to explore the complete Scaled Alps story and the perspectives of the musicians participating here, rather than concentrating exclusively upon Let the Alpine Play.
ORIGINS AND THE IDENTITY OF SCALED ALPS
Infectious Unease Radio: James and Anthony, how did the two of you originally meet, what first drew you towards making music together, and at what point did that collaboration become something you recognised as Scaled Alps?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE:We met when we were kids. At the time I was in a band whose reach exceeded its grasp, the other players involved just didn’t have the skill to execute the vision. We were all into hyper-technical complex “mathcore,” “math-metal,” prog, jazz, art rock. Not exactly “starter music.” Our guitarist was notably, uh, underwhelming, to be kind.
So we’re like 13 or 14 years old, playing all these weird shows in basements and VFW halls, making up half of the songs as we went along, basically a heinous loud evil-sounding jam band. Good fun for kids but not the kind of thing that was going to attract a “Serious” audience in any sense.
Through some Real Life Whisper Network — somebody knows somebody who knows somebody, “hey there’s this kid who’s crazy at guitar,” distant rumors of grand talents, that sort of thing, we became aware of Anthony and phoned him up, would have been analog landline days, and he agreed to come to one of our basement practice sessions.
So Anthony rolled up, lugged his gear down the steps to the drummer’s parents’ basement where we made all that noise, set up, plugged in, and ended our existing guitarist’s involvement in the project in short order. Just yeah, you know, “Sorry Tim.” I hope he’s out there muffing palm muted chugs somewhere.
We had a good run for a few years before the band split, and we lost track of each other for a while thereafter.
We reconnected during early COVID lockdowns, when all of the collaborators I had in Los Angeles evaporated — everyone either fell into a mountain of drugs and went off the deep end or Ran the Program and got married or had kids and moved to the suburbs, but either way those people were not going to be around. It made me wonder what the old boy was up to, and as it turns out he was posting strange neo-classical pieces to Soundcloud and had since become a jazz/classical conservatory-trained Capital-M Musician.
Infectious Unease Radio: The name Scaled Alps creates several possible interpretations involving geography, magnitude, perspective and artificial landscapes. Where did the name originate, what did it mean when you first adopted it, and has its meaning changed over time?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: The various nested meanings are all intentional. Even if I didn’t mean to do it. Especially if I didn’t mean to do it!
The first song we wrote upon resuming our collaboration, not having seen or spoken to one another in over a decade is titled “Cynical Ploy.” We recorded it remotely. Anthony sent me that guitar bit, I went on a walk with headphones, and he had a voice memo about five minutes later with more or less the entire song. “Cynical Ploy” contains the line “we are long-lost reptiles.” I can’t remember if that line or naming the band came first, but the line definitely functions as a seal in the magical sense, and I mean that as literally as I mean anything.
Infectious Unease Radio: The Scaled Alps name can be traced through recordings preceding Peak Arousal, including material associated with James in 2022. What did Scaled Alps represent during that earliest period, and when do you personally consider the project’s history to have truly begun?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: “Cynical Ploy” was the beginning. Our first recordings as Scaled Alps, including “Cynical Ploy,” were collected as an album entitled Very High. The record demonstrates a lot of interesting ideas but it’s utterly fucked, to be very direct. Totally alienating to nearly any audience you can imagine, dissonant, discordant, fully disinterested in people-pleasing. We don’t disclaim it but we don’t actively promote it. We’re probably going to resurface two songs from Very High on our next record — “Cynical Ploy” and “Xenochroma.” We gave the resurrection treatment to “Throwaway Lines (The Leo)” from Peak Arousal on Let the Alpine Play, built it back from the ground up, polished it up, and put it out as “Throwaway Lines (Leo II).”
Infectious Unease Radio: There is also an important question about the structure of the band itself. James and Anthony are frequently described as the central creative partnership, while Let the Alpine Play formally credits James Quentin Devine, Anthony Percoco, Sean McCarthy and Steve Fishman. James, how do you define Scaled Alps today? Is it a fixed four-member band, an expanding collective, or a core project whose personnel can change according to the work being created?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: Scaled Alps on a formal level is Anthony and I, whether he’s physically present or not. We’re open to expanding that at some point, but the top-level creative direction is coming from us.
Infectious Unease Radio: James, before considering Scaled Alps specifically, what experiences in music, writing, performance and visual or conceptual art were most important in shaping the artist you eventually became?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: There is a quote from the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work I encourage anyone reading this to familiarize themselves with: “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
I suppose I took my queer, divine dissatisfaction and ran with it.
Anthony and I grew up angry and alienated in Ohio, and as kids we saw a lot of cool independent art — we’d either be playing or going to shows multiple times a week, and at the time Columbus was still cheap and off-the-map enough to be something of a hotbed for weirdo outsider art and music. There was a very high degree of cross-pollination between the indie kids, the hip-hop kids, the metal kids, electronic music people, you get the idea. We were able to see bands like Mortimur and Silencio, artists who had very little concern with anything so lame as “genre constraints.”
Whether any one thing was “the most important” in terms of my artistic development I’m honestly not sure. I was never really a part of any “scene,” never really attached myself in that way or sought clout. I just tried to take in as much as I could, good bad or otherwise.
Infectious Unease Radio: You have released work under your own name and pursued projects extending beyond conventional music into writing and transmedia practice. What can Scaled Alps provide creatively that your individual work cannot, and conversely, what elements of your independent work inevitably enter Scaled Alps?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: My solo output is considerably more chaotic and in most instances less friendly to commercial audiences. It’s all self-produced, and I have no formal training as a musician, a producer, a singer, or anything, really. My childhood effectively tracked the defunding of the arts in American public schools, so I never received any meaningful musical education beyond listening to records or the radio and making my own music. I got kicked out of high school and never looked back, so I’m as anti-academic as it comes. Honestly at this point I’m so put off by credentialism and the sad state of all existing institutions that I have no desire whatsoever for sanction. Scaled Alps provides legibility where a lot of my solo output, whether it’s music or writing or art, can veer into “somebody medicate or arrest this person” territory. Elements of the practices invariably contaminate one another, though — a flashing red example is the sonic and lyrical connection between the song “Southerly” from Let the Alpine Play and the song “Dead West,” which will be on a 52-track odyssey of exhaustion I’m calling LIVEPLAYERDEADSERIOUS, coming out right around Halloween.
Infectious Unease Radio: Your lyrics frequently combine humour, sexuality, death, memory, religion, commercial language, geography, cultural references and wordplay. You have used the expression “quantum entendre” to describe part of this process. How did that method of writing develop, and do you prefer listeners to discover meanings you never consciously placed there?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: Anyone who’s gotten this far can tell that I often express myself unusually. If it’s a bit or an act that I’m not even aware of anymore it’s one that I’ve been very committed to for a long time, a lifetime. Given entropy, given the nigh end, given a world where attention spans approach nil, I am tasked with nesting meaning into highly-condensed forms.
Listeners’ experiences are always going to be subjective. Some people are going to drink deep of your work on headphones in the dark, a lot more people are going to play it backwards and upside-down out of a shitty cell phone while it’s being interrupted by ads. As artists we no longer control the frame, to the extent that we ever did. The “content” cannot be meaningfully contained.
I have effectively no concern with people taking “what I mean” directly. If “Space/Time” is about your ex-girlfriend or some guy you go to school with, then sure it is. If “I Think We May in Setagaya (Maybe It Was Seville)” is about a party you went to once, great.
Take it. It’s yours.
Infectious Unease Radio: Anthony, I would like to explore your history independently of Scaled Alps as well. What was your musical path before the project—your formative instruments, musical education, early bands or compositions, and the artists or traditions that most significantly changed the way you understood music?
ANTHONY PERCOCO: I am formally trained in classical and I have done formal jazz studies. I’ve continued jazz on my own, deciding to study principles of bebop, including guide tone-targets, syncopation, enclosures, upper structure arpeggios, etc. I have composed for orchestra and have also played in progressive rock style groups. I think bebop and the various periods of classical music from Gregorian Chant to Modernity have had a profound effect on my musical thinking. My first formal training was on guitar, but I gravitated toward piano very strongly later; first improvising from an early age, and later through classical and jazz lessons. I am currently interested in Chopin and Liszts’s etudes. Coltrane is the most important contemporary composer to me.
Infectious Unease Radio: Within Scaled Alps you move between keyboards and guitars, meaning that your role can shift from harmony and texture to rhythm, noise and melodic lead. How do you decide which instrument or sound should carry a particular composition?
ANTHONY PERCOCO: I find keyboard instruments more personally stimulating due to the polyphonic capabilities. But guitar has great expressive power with chords and bends/vibratos. When I want to write a more polyphonic, functionally layered accompaniment texture, the keyboard is a likely option. The guitar works well for more powerful rock style arrangements and also does well with expressive solos. I like having the two instruments as options. It creates a broader palette of ideas to draw upon. I don’t like feeling “boxed-in” with either. I also like to expand the keyboards with synths, but I like that we can use an acoustic piano well in a lot of our compositions. We play everything live with no MIDI, and an acoustic piano is the opposite of MIDI programming.
Your comments about the recordings reveal an interest in improvisation and in allowing unexpected studio performances to survive. On pieces where the band reaches something none of you had planned, what tells you that the accident is actually better than the arrangement?
ANTHONY PERCOCO: Yes, improvisation is a musical necessity to me. I like to have pre-determined rules when I improvise. It tends to be a welcomed break from playing things exactly as expected all of the time. Many of our best conversations in life are unrehearsed, but we have general guidelines and a surrounding context/expectation. When music functions thusly it has a chance to take us somewhere new and unexpected, analogous to those best conversational moments in our lives.
SEAN McCARTHY / JOAN DARWIN
Infectious Unease Radio: Sean, before Scaled Alps, what musical experiences shaped you as a drummer, songwriter and artist, and how did your path eventually intersect with James and Anthony?
SEAN MCCARTHY: I started as a jazz drummer and found my way into just about every genre after that. The improvisational and active listening parts of jazz stay at my roots. David Bowie’s Black Star was huge for me. It gave me this mentality that music as a whole is an evolving creature and there is nowhere it won’t find itself. I had to be part of that exploration. I met James at an art show in LA where we bonded over Scott Walker, which provoked a bond over the avant-garde. I liked his view and his connection to his muse. I met Anthony when James asked me to be part of this album!
Infectious Unease Radio: You also create music as Joan Darwin, giving you an identity beyond your role as drummer in Scaled Alps. How does being a songwriter yourself change the way you approach drums? Are you listening primarily for rhythm, or are you also thinking about melody, lyrics, tension, hooks and the overall architecture of the song?
SEAN MCCARTHY: Yeah being a songwriter definitely affects how I drum. I approach playing as a way of aiding the emotional story happening in all other parts, while also acting as a direct communication to the bodies of the listeners. The goal is to entrance but to also participate with the other instruments in an expressive rhythmic story. And vice versa, drumming affects my songwriting. I often arrange and write as if the other instruments are part of a drum set. An example being my song “Build Yourself and Share It.”
Infectious Unease Radio: James has described your playing as possessing a strong instinct for serving the composition and leaving space. In music as dense and unpredictable as Scaled Alps can become, how difficult is it to recognise the moment when not playing is more powerful than adding another rhythmic idea?
SEAN MCCARTHY: When I was young, I was such an overplayer, and as I started writing and producing my own music, I became so much more aware of how much overplaying can take away from the overall composition. As I touched on earlier, I’m very into active listening and improvisation while playing so when I play on music that has a lot going on, I like to be soaking everything in, rather than just adding another thing.
THE MUSICIANS TOGETHER
Infectious Unease Radio: James, when Scaled Alps is working as a group, how democratic is the creative process? Does somebody normally arrive with a clear composition, or can one musician’s unexpected contribution force everyone else to reconsider what the piece is supposed to become?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: Democracy is not in the room. Whatever we’re doing vacillates between Can-style anarchism and Steely Dan-style studio autarchy. I’m always willing to hear an idea but we do have very specific visions that we want to enact. The pleasure in working with quality collaborators lies in trusting that their divergences will serve the pieces.
Infectious Unease Radio: James, rather than asking for a simple list of influences, which musical ideas has another member of Scaled Alps introduced you to that you might never have explored on your own?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: An odd thing happened in the intervening years when Anthony and I had lost touch — he took up the piano, and it’s probably, at this point, his primary instrument. I’m not sure I’d have organically arrived at the sound-set he brings to the table otherwise. “Keys in guitar music” can code as “weird” to some people, but we’ve overwhelmingly received feedback that the combination of the expressive piano, lyrical guitar, and vocals is refreshing.
IMPROVISATION AND PERFORMANCE
Infectious Unease Radio: Several moments on the recordings emerged through improvisation, including performances retained from original takes. What is it about improvisation that remains important to Scaled Alps, particularly in an era when recording technology makes it possible to edit almost every imperfection out of a performance?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: “Impro (The Imp of the Perverse/The Pimp of the Inverse)” appears on Let the Alpine Play. The song is named after, among other things, a book written by Keith Johnstone about theatrical improvisation and performance. The lyrics of the song, I think — I hope! — are informative: “You know / That I know / That you know / What you’re doing.”
Improvisation keeps you canny and sharp, and leads to the kinds of happy accidents that, in today’s day and age, can define a piece of work as utterly distinct and separate from glossy, samey, mannered productions, to say nothing of the machine-generated horrors which have begun to infiltrate the airwaves.
Infectious Unease Radio: Some of the material has also been discussed in terms of how it may expand in concert. If Scaled Alps takes these pieces further into live performance, should audiences expect faithful versions of the records, or could songs become longer, stranger and substantially different each night?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: Audiences should expect the unexpected — as you’d expect. Perhaps the most unexpected thing we could do is play it straight. I come from the mentality that everything’s a jam, everything’s a demo, everything’s a suggestion. None of this is codified or canonical. One night we might be playing everything 15% faster and screaming and destroying things, another night might be low-lights and candles on the piano. Maybe you showed up on gamelan night. Enjoy yourself.
THE STUDIO AND THE ALTAR
Infectious Unease Radio: The sessions that developed into Let the Alpine Play reportedly produced more than thirty initial pieces before sixteen were selected for the finished record. James, what was happening between you and Anthony during that extremely productive period, and why do you think so much material appeared in such a concentrated space of time?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: I picked Anthony up from Burbank Airport and immediately whisked him off to The Altar Studios in North Hollywood. Stewart had set up a small studio for us to write and perform basic tracking. We just went and went and went and kept going. Both of us can write at inhuman speed, and when we’re in a room together, it compounds. I don’t know that I’ve ever really experienced “writer’s block,” so the bigger challenge is in selection and editing, being sure that the right threads are being followed.
Infectious Unease Radio: Engineer Stewart Tuttle became another important participant when the material moved into The Altar Studios. From your perspective, James, how much influence can the engineer have on a band such as Scaled Alps, where atmosphere, spontaneous decisions and communication between musicians appear to be central to the result?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: Stewart’s contributions and relation to the record were explored pretty thoroughly in a piece I wrote after we completed LTAP called “Make It Sound Like Amphetamine Teeth.”
Scaled Alps’ output calls for an engineer who possesses traits that don’t typically overlap: high openness and high disagreeability. We took a call the other week with an engineer who’s worked on some huge records, been at it for decades, but he just kept telling us he was “here to help us,” offered no perspective, no direction, seemed very unwilling to really give opinions, seemed almost intimidated.
I don’t do well with that and neither does Anthony. Whether we’ll take your suggestions or not, we want you to have the ability and willingness to voice them if you’re going to be in the studio with us.
LOS ANGELES AND PLACE
Infectious Unease Radio: Los Angeles—and particularly North Hollywood—is present throughout the conceptual world surrounding Scaled Alps. Streets, commercial spaces, nightlife, cars, violence, glamour, memory and isolation all enter the work. Could Scaled Alps have developed in the same way somewhere else, or has Los Angeles effectively become another instrument within the project?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: I don’t think any other city in the world’s going to yield “Muffler” or “I Think You Got H-O-R-S, You Want E Too?”.
Whether that’s complimentary to us or to Los Angeles I have no idea . . .
PHYSICAL ART, BLUE HELL AND THE ALBUM AS OBJECT
Infectious Unease Radio: Blue Hell seems to operate as more than a simple release imprint. James, how do you define Blue Hell? Is it a label, design environment, publishing mechanism, conceptual world, or something deliberately able to occupy several of those roles simultaneously?
JAMES QUENTIN DEVINE: Scaled Alps is a corporation masquerading as an art collective — or maybe it’s the other way around, I forget sometimes. Blue Hell’s the parent company. In time Blue Hell will produce all manner of media and megalomania, clothing and art and objects, signs symbols and wonders.
Infectious Unease Radio: The physical presentation of Scaled Alps includes printed materials, individually considered artwork and the idea of the compact disc as an art object. James, how important is physical media to you, and how much of the artwork, design and visual presentation of the band do you personally direct?