Ivan Anderson, otherwise known as Cyberattack, is among the internet's premier authorities on glitchy textures, weirdo pedals, and thinking outside the box. With seemingly no creative stone unturned, Anderson's pursuits have brought him to visual design, animation, YouTube editorials, and good ol' fashioned rock and roll.
We sat down with Anderson for a talk all about glitchy effects, guitar technique, Sega Genesis games, Six Flags: Great Adventure, and staying competitively creative.
Check Out Cyberattack on YouTube
Russo Music: Can you give us an introduction of who you are, what you do, and where someone might find you doing it?
Ivan Anderson: My name is Ivan Anderson, my performance name is Cyberattack. I always intended for Cyberattack to just be my original music project. I thought band names were cooler. You know, I always thought it was cooler to say, "I'm in Slayer," than it is to say, "I'm in the Ivan Anderson Quintet," you know? I named this project Cyberattack. I wanted to have it be what Nine Inch Nails is for Trent Reznor.
A couple years into that, I also started putting gear videos on the Cyberattack YouTube channel, which had previously just been original music videos. The gear videos started doing pretty well, so I now think of YouTube as the home base of the larger Cyberattack musical project. I put my original music on the YouTube channel, I put music videos on the channel, you can find me on streaming. I basically think of myself as a freelance musician, but my landing page is a YouTube channel.
What first brought you to making gear-forward videos on the Cyberattack channel?
Anderson: I had already put out the first Cyberattack album before I'd ever put a gear video on the YouTube channel. I thought the first Cyberattack album, Hard Feelings, had some truly incredible sounds on it. I was proud of some of the "What the fuck" moments we got, you know?
When I was in college, I took a class called "Computers and Music," and I wrote a term paper about Nine Inch Nails. In the research for the paper, I read an interview with Trent Reznor where he talked about, at one point in the nineties, some guitar magazine ran a transcription of a Nine Inch Nails song. At one moment in the transcription, there was just a measure or two where it said, "This passage is un-transcribable." Trent Reznor described that as a success.
I thought we got a bunch of that on the first Cyberattack record. I thought that could be my angle. I'd already sensed that simply announcing that you are an indie artist with a new album is not enough of a scoop. I thought, well, we got some really bananas production on some of these songs, so I thought I could get attention for that.
I came out of the record feeling like I had a lot to say about how you can use gear to do some weird shit. I had this idea after the record came out that I should make a gear video. I was watching Andy and Knobs on YouTube myself.
My big secret is that when I make a video on YouTube that's a commercial for a pedal, it's really a commercial for my original music and all the jams, the footage, the animation, the look, the feel and the whole set of artistic presentation of all of it. It's just a commercial for what my album sounds like. I was happy to stick with them.
As a musician, you're very ingrained with glitchy pedals and glitchy sounds, but even more so, I feel like you're more ingrained with what people might call "normal" guitar playing. What's your philosophy in playing guitar?
Anderson: (Laughs) Thank you for saying that. Yeah, I agree. I think that my ability to do normal guitar playing is part of why it sounds good when I do abnormal guitar playing. You know, being able to play straight, being able to make the melody good I think is important. I think that it's possible to be so talented and to be so insane that you can just make stuff that is cool and good without being normal at all.
I had to learn how to play straight and I took it pretty seriously. I was kind of annoying for a long time. I didn't believe in effects for a while, I was like, "Effects are for people who can't shred," you know, from age fourteen to my early twenties. I don't think it's good to have that kind of chauvinistic attitude, but I do think it's good to force yourself to be able to play.
There's this great avant-garde performer named Ryosuke Kiyasu. He uses a drumstick to play, not drums, while also sort of, falling down and dropping things. I gotta say, I really think this guy produces phrases. His ability to fall down and tap on a table, it's like, rhythmically hip. He's expressing statements musically with it.
There's a difference between listening to two people speak a foreign language and listening to a jackhammer demolish pavement. Both of those are sonic events where you cannot understand the meaning of the words, but one of them recognizably consists of words you don't understand and one of them consists of meaningless noise, right? I think the goal for a musician is to make every sound belong to that first category.
In our interview with Emily Hopkins, she described you as "very discerning" with gear. When it comes to being discerning with gear, when is it important to be discerning versus when isn't it?
Anderson: All I ever really think about is, "What is this sound good for? What could you do with this sound?" I also think about, "Is it a pain in the ass to use this pedal or not? Do I always have to look up what the secondary functions are and do I hate having to do that every time or not?" Sooner or later, the ease of use starts to come into the picture. Which is a different mindset than, "Is this what I expected?"
Before you turn it on, you might have some expectation about what that's supposed to sound like. The moment you hear it, you're going to judge it against what you thought. It's a completely different mindset than just being like, "I don't know what I was expecting."
I'm just going to listen to what's in front of me. "What is the thing that I could play that would make that sound good?" I think that's what I'm good at. I think I'm able to listen to the thing and react to it.
In your video, "What Mortal Kombat Taught Me About Art," you indebt your music career to discovering a glitch in the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat II. Can you recount the video and how that game impacted you?
Anderson: When I was a kid, I was a child during the explosion of fighting games, you know, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat. I bought the strategy guide and learned the moves and I could beat my friends. Sooner or later, my friends would then just learn everything about the game and then the person who was the best was the person who had the fastest reflexes.
I was more interested in the artistic and creative aspects of the world of the game, so I spent a lot of time playing by myself. When I realized that there was a certain glitch you could do by being Shang Tsung and morphing into different characters mid-Fatality, that was the kind of thing I turned to. What if we just engaged with it as an art object, instead of a competition, then what? When I discovered the fatality glitch, that was what was interesting to me.
You're bringing yourself and three music gear content creators to the X-Men beat 'em up arcade cabinet. Who are you bringing and who's everyone playing?
Anderson: I would pick Emily, she's like actually my friend and she's actually a geek, you know. Alex from Superdanger, that guy's also an actual friend of mine. Knobs was a big influence on me and I like him, so I'm going to pick him.
So then who would be who? I like to be Colossus in the X-Men arcade game. You know, strong, silent type for sure. Also, his power in that game is easy to spam. Knobs to me spiritually is Nightcrawler. I just feel like that works. Alex SuperDanger is Wolverine. That guy just feels like a Wolverine to me. Emily...
I feel like Storm is like one of the most easily recognizable representative members of X-Men, even in the larger Marvel universe. I feel like Emily has become one of the most recognizable representative YouTube musician people. That's a pretty good reason for her to be Storm, I think. The other female character in X-Men Arcade is Dazzler, and there's something just unapologetically dorky about Dazzler that actually reminds me more of Emily's personality. I feel like Storm is cooler and more powerful. I feel like, as a friend, I'm obligated to say that Emily is Storm.
In your musical catalog, you've written songs about growing up in New Jersey. With that, I'd like to dedicate a couple questions about growing up in the great Garden State.
How successful do you think The Sopranos was in representing North Jersey living?
Anderson: Did it accurately capture the feeling of North Jersey in the early 2000s? I think it did. I also think, more significantly, The Sopranos sort of invented "Jersey Pride" in a way that hadn't really existed in the culture before. You know, you had Bruce Springsteen, who was a superstar, but he was also sort of the guy who "got out." A lot of his big songs were about escaping. By the time The Sopranos comes along, the fact that the show starts with him driving from New York into New Jersey, I consider that radical. The show starts with "We're coming back to Jersey." Like, "This is where we're happy to be going."
When I say I think they invented "Jersey Pride," that's kind of what I mean. You either became a star because you made an anthem about leaving New Jersey or you became a star because you ended up being relatable to people who don't know anything about New Jersey. The Sopranos was like, "People are going to wish they were from New Jersey."
You've described the amusement park Six Flags as one of your main non-musical influences. One's gotta go: El Toro, Batman, the Great American Scream Machine.
Anderson: Oh, wow. Unbelievable question. You know, this one is actually not that hard for me, I'm sorry to say. I would lose Great American Scream Machine.
Of the three rides, El Toro was my favorite. I think El Toro is the best ride of those three rides. I mean, it's tall and steep and fast. The other unique feature about El Toro that I love is that when you get to the top, you don't immediately go back down. You get to the top and then you do this little U-turn while you're up there. I love that little twelve seconds where you get to be up high at the park without having to immediately go back. I think that's a unique little moment in your day at Six Flags.
Batman has a version of that, but you have to sit in the front row and all the way on the right. If you're in the front row all the way to the right, you flare out and you're going to the side and looking at Skull Mountain. It's a cool little view.
I think El Toro is like a really classic wooden roller coaster that's violent and Batman is a really classic old somersault ride. I guess Great American Scream Machine is also a classic old-fashioned ride, but I feel like El Toro beats it at its own game in a way. I eliminate that one just because for me it doesn't have a distinct feature the way the other two rides do.
Aside from the CVS, what else from your hometown would you describe as beautifully artificial or artificially beautiful?
Anderson: When I was a teenager and I was bored out of my mind, you have two choices, right? You can either decide, "I just live in the most boring place in the world that sucks," and I feel like a lot of people made that choice. It was the nineties, they made it very easy for you. You could just become a sort of gloomy, disaffected teenager who's sarcastic about everything.
Or you could be, "What if the weird fake horribleness of the suburbs is also kind of a vibe?" What if I was trying to make Backrooms, the movie, out of my surroundings, you know? I just ended up trying to do that. What if somehow there is like a secret world and it's just here in suburbia? I tried to become interested in the artificial, the fake grass of it all. To me, it was either that or just be bored.
What's on your Mount Rushmore of glitch pedals?
Anderson: I have a signature pedal coming out, but I can't reveal anything about it. Once the signature pedal comes out, I'm not going to have top four glitch pedals. It's just going to be that. That one pedal is going to represent everything I would want.
Since that's not out yet, if I could pick four glitch pedals, the Bit Commander from EarthQuaker Devices. I think that's one of the all-time greatest pedals ever. It sounds glitchy, but you can also use it to play rock. It can do new-school glitchy or it can do one generation back, like Queens of the Stone Age, when "glitchy" meant Velcro-y fuzz. I think every knob position is usable and good.
Syntax Error from Alexander Pedals, I have to include. I love that pedal. If people ask me, "What's your favorite pedal?" Sometimes the answer is Syntax Error.
I'm going to include Lossy by Chase Bliss, the pedal that sort of makes your sound like an MP3. I love the idea of treating MP3 conversion as an effect, the sonic equivalent of a bad JPEG. I also think, if I didn't know that's what it was doing, there are sounds it can make that I would also like even if I didn't know the premise.
Maybe the Boss PS-6 Harmonist. The glitchy stuff it can do, I still love. The video I made about it was big for my channel.
There's some Electro-Harmonix pedals that I could have included that I feel bad about not including, but that's a good four.
What can we expect next from Cyberattack?
Anderson: I got to finish the next album. I'm in a very dysfunctional procrastination place with it, but it's going to be great. I don't listen to the first Cyberattack album and think, "Wow, what a masterpiece." I think, "Oh my God, I'm so ready to blow that away."
The signature pedal's coming out when the album comes out. They're going to come out together. I'm excited to try to broaden the channel out a little bit and start talking about larger topics than just gear.
What keeps you pushing for the next thing that excites you?
Anderson: You know, my producer, Geoff Stanfield, he's producing the next Cyberattack album. He produced the first one, I played on some of his stuff. He's had a big influence on my life as a musician. He once said to me, "If you ever listen to the last record you made, and you think it's perfect, you're dead."
I like that. I think that's a good way to live because we all think that's the best thing that could ever happen, right? You finish the thing and you listen to it and you're like, "Wow, it really is perfect." You spend the whole time working on it, fantasizing about that's how you're going to feel when it's done. You imagine that that's the best-case scenario, but what if it's actually the worst-case scenario? I think when you realize that that's the worst-case scenario, I think it keeps you young and competitive with yourself.
Check Out Cyberattack on YouTube
