In the time I’ve known of him, he’s moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Detroit to Ypsilanti, Michigan to Portland, Oregon to Pittsburgh and Dayton, Ohio (where he’s originally from) to Brooklyn, from Brooklyn, and back again to Brooklyn. Jono, like his work, is transient and without borders. So for me, Jono has been absent as someone I speak with directly, but present as someone I peripherally know, someone who’s always popping up on my Facebook feed with a new project, a new album, or a new piece of Net art with hundreds of likes. Before sub-genres became a big to-do, we lived in the same town in Michigan for a few years, then adjacent towns, and eventually just bumped into each other at shows in Detroit. Jono’s had his hand in several different sub-genre scenes: vaporwave, what he calls the sea punk “movement” and, most recently, health goth. Over the past seven years, I’ve seen his development as an artist mostly over Facebook and Twitter. So he thought this would be perfect for me.” “I really wanted to come back and do more work here, but you know rent’s so expensive and it can be tough trying to get anything started. Jono is back in Brooklyn after a brief hiatus in Pittsburgh he returned here when he scored a spot at Silent Barn. “One of my homies that runs sound downstairs, he kept tagging me: ‘Oh the open call, the open call,’” he said. The place is jam-packed with artists, so space is understandably pretty limited in here, but the guy under the table was evidently used to this sort of thing and stayed right where he was for the next hour or so. Before we sat down at a long wooden table to talk, he pointed under the table and apologized for a slumbering man. Jono and I met at an apartment above the Silent Barn, the home for artists-in-residents at the DIY-space-gone-legit located in Bushwick. Jono utters words like “post” and “tag” without feeling the need to qualify these actions with “on Facebook” or “on Twitter.” The stream of proper nouns and names isn’t completely unusual for people deeply embedded in certain “scenes,” but Jono’s way of blurring the lines between the physical world and the digital, I imagine, can be a bit of a challenge for people not as hyped on Internet culture. vaporwave, chillwave, seapunk, health goth), making sure to nod and scribble down the rest so I could look them up later. When speaking with Jono, I recognize about a quarter of the allusions he was making to other Net artists and Internet sub-genres (i.e. It’s hard to blame him, though, for going full throttle on the esoterica, because as a Net artist, founder of a new tape label ( Afternoons Modeling ), musician (Daytime Television), and tireless collaborator, well, this is kind of his thing-and he’s really good at it. It can be hard to keep up if your understanding of it all is rudimentary (or worse), and if Jono were made to stop and explain the backstory of every underground tape label–Orange Milk, I Had An Accident, 1080p–and every piece of animation or audio software that he references, well, that could take hours. Sometimes talking to Jono Milo can be a little dizzying: He drifts between IRL and Internet existence seamlessly and seems to know everybody in the world of Net art and ambient experimental music.
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