Andrew Douglas Rothbard is a US-based musician, currently based in San Francisco. After stints as bassist and keyboardist in the bands VSS and Pleasure Forever (and their precursor Slaves) in the 90's, he decided to start recording solo albums, a planned five-record series outlining the Discordian concept of the Law of Fives: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, Parenthesis, and Paralysis, each of which represents a different stage of maya.

He started this project in 2003; and so far two of the planned five productions has been released: Abandoned Meander (2006) and Exodusarabesque (2009).

I got in touch with Andrew and here is his answers to my questions.

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Just to start with, please tell us more about your background and why you took up music.

I started playing piano at the age of six. I came from a place where you had to create your own fun, so I spent a lot of time at the piano learning how to play most days.  I  wanted to be in a band, and that's what I spent most of my teenage years trying to do.  I would just make up cassette tapes of fake bands that I was a part of.  I remember trying to record my alarm clock on a hand held cassette recorder in the fifth grade because I wanted sound effects on my fake band's album. I  grew up with a lot of eighties pop music.  That was what was on the radio.  Lot's of Roland keyboards and drum machines.    There was always some kid with the hippy parents who still had all the old LP's from the 1960's.  It was those Beatles records from '66-'70 that interested me. Music made in a complete vaccum hermetically sealed from the outside world.  The tones actually started to implode as you get deeper inside.  I did not have the vocabulary to describe what I thought that I heard on those albums, so I just listened over and over. I had a copy of the White Album on cassette with no track titles, no cover, nothing but "White Album" hand scrawled across the tape.  Think back before the World Wide Web,  24 bit remasters, digital booklets explaining each song, and the scores of books about the sessions at Abbey Road, and reduce it down to this cassette recorded from an LP that at the time was twenty years old itself. The Beatles just scared the sh*t out of me.

The epoch came to me when I was about 13.  It was two things really: Syd Barrett and marijuana.  I actually bought the double album, "A Nice Pair".  The cover seemed like it was going to be another Dark Side of the Moon (Hipgnosis design), but it sounded so similar to those freaky Beatles records.  Everything that was so nightmarish about those Beatles records became a daydream.  The vibe was much more light.  People always talk about Syd in this dark kind of way, but that first Floyd album destroyed every bad dream I ever had.  I no longer was mourning my lost adolescence.  You could be a child forever on that stuff. I have to admit though, I really could not shake the darkness of the White Album upon first listening.  I had no idea about Manson, Apple, Maharshi, LSD, etc.  Just an 11 year kid who a year earlier was listening to Michael Jackson...

Please tell us more about VSS and Pleasure Forever, the bands you played in before going solo. Why did you branch out on your own as a solo artist ?

The VSS and Pleasure Forever were a rare and fantastic combination of people that slogged through the trenches in various configurations over the span of eight years.  I owe a lot to those guys because I was the youngest member, and they had to put up with my antics while trying to get out on the road, put out albums, etc.  The VSS was the first band that I was in that actually left town, and I needed a trip out into the world. This group of people just had a real work ethic.  We started the band, and within a month were touring California. I was just in awe of the entire situation for a long time.  I had no idea how I even got to be in this group. I had just turned nineteen and the year was 1995.  The history of The VSS is not exactly well documented, although the four of us have tried to keep the memory of that band alive to some extent. There is a wonderful re-issue of our our one and only album as well as a DVD of live videos out now from Hyrda Head.    After we made the aforementioned album in 1997, I decided that I was going to quit music. At 21 years old, I felt that I had made the penultimate musical statement  with this band. I put everything I had into that album, which was recorded in the span of just one week, although it was years in the making.  It was just such a complete experience for me, that I thought the only logical conclusion was a sort of death.  Perhaps it was the psilocybin talking.  Too much Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Chasing ego death through the music.  So anyways, I told everyone that I was quitting, and that was that for about a week.  Some of the guys in the band found me holed up in my girlfriends apartment and basically told me that I was not finished with music. I thought that was an interesting idea, so what next?

Please tell us more about your first album Abandoned Meander from 2006.

Please tell us more about your second album Exodusarabesque from 2009.

The five albums in the series are related to the concepts of These, Antithesis, Synthesis, Parenthesis, and Paralysis as outlined in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's 'Illuminatus! Trilogy'.  If you dig around the appendices in the back of the volumes, the are specific elements relating to each stage including Astrology signs, Tarot cards, and I Ching hexagrams.  Right now I am working on the last three albums of this series, and trying to correlate the appropriate sounds accordingly.  

How is your writing and creative processes ?