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Part 2

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

With music, I often start with improvising, chasing a sonic idea, attempting to track/record something that sounds like what is going on in my head. This varies from project to project on the specifics but generally speaking this is the genesis of all pieces I work on. Eventually, after letting things marinade for weeks and often months, I end up stitching these ideas together in the past tense. Time + Experimentation have been kind /key to my process and it pays to trust in that process for me I’ve learned.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

I don’t personally know if there is anything to force creativity. There are ‘states’ that I want to be in when I write, but ultimately, I cannot replicate them at a moment’s notice. Getting outside yourself is important, getting inside yourself is also important. I don’t really know. ‘Ritual music’ is a key element to my process meaning that I’m always recording FOR something, a feeling, a project etc and it often just doesn’t present itself. But when it does its very magical and important part of my process. It’s very rare that I’m ‘jamming’ and just happen to find what I’m looking for vs it’s a lot more common and I happen to find some technique worth exploring when messing around”, that might make sense to me after the fact

How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

They’re about as far as they could be in relation to each other. The studio is grounds for me to do what I want how I want. While I find limitations inspiring, I do not find the live limitations inspiring at all as I’m not and have never been interested in replicating something live. Nor am I interested in sitting at a synthesizer while people watch me at a rock club. I try to make every performance unique, sometimes with multiple people involved, sometimes its playback with a film, sometimes it something else. I’ve performed live pieces of previous works before but they’re 100% of the time reimagined and reconstructed. There are elements about performing live that I find inspiring but playing back songs I wrote the year before on stage like a rock band is the furthest thing from my interest.

How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

I pretty much exclusively work with sound and timbre to meet production ideas and communicate whatever it is I am trying to express. I do not really possess a set of tools that encourages a common sound that I naturally go to, like a guitar player sitting down to write at their guitar. I am much more interested in crafting a sound specifically for what I’m composing and not leaving anything arbitrary. Starting from absolute scratch is very inspiring to me and allows me to control every element. The (in some ways) opposite approach to this is working around certain sounds, using a set of sounds as a base and working from and around that. This is much more of my focus for live performance work.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

When I began writing The Mansion, this overlap became the centrifugal force of inspiration and a big part of the ‘function’ of the album. For years I have gravitated toward sound tracking feelings, places and hard to say how this begins or ends. It’s common for me to sense something (be it smell, sound, etc) and immediately be transported back somewhere. I’m very fond of the more extreme case of this and sensing something that takes you back to something you never remembered for the first time.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I operate (seemingly to me) unwary of my role or approach to being an artist. I have a few ways of expressing this, literally or computationally thru the uses of music and visual art, but the ‘why’s’ are not very literals or even practical. This is something I crave to do out of human necessity and would be doing in different physical ways with different tools under different circumstances.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

When Autechre released ‘NTS Sessions” in 2018, a 4+ hour document of sorts of great newer material, I read something where they mentioned that it wasn’t an ‘album’ per-say, and wasn’t a collection either. It can be digested any which way and that even they weren’t entirely sure what it is. I found great solace in this… Some years back I released Multiple Hallucinations (Hausu Mountain, 2018) which collected 30 1-minute tracks. I always imagined it being released as a loop, or a radio broadcast that you could just start and tune in/out ad always come back around in due time. I think there are infinite opportunities for musicians to make things beyond a a ‘new record’ and I think about this a great deal in 2020. It could be a unique performance, a video, these things we’ve seen. But i think the simple document of an album is important, but not 100% necessary in our current times and hope to see new ways of releasing art into the world.

 


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