Part 2

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
 
The seeds of “Nowhere”, the opener from the new album, were initially planted during a cross country road trip with my brother (Benjamin Bennett).



We drove all the way from NYC to Oregon, and spent some time on the way camping pretty deep in the South Dakota badlands wilderness. It’s a very surreal place, and I spent a lot of time just taking in the feeling of the landscape. I think this an important part of my process in general - taking in spaces and landscapes and trying to crystalize something about them, abstract or otherwise.

My brother had been playing a lot of classic country and pedal steel guitar music during that drive. A lot of it was new to me, and was absolutely perfect road music. But I did get the sense that it wasn’t translating the feeling of vast, sparkling empty-ness coming from these prairie lands and deserts. So when I finally got back to my loft in NYC several months later, I bought a lap steel guitar on craigslist (much more portable than the pedal steel) and started developing a minimal playing style, keeping my time walking through the badlands wilderness in mind. This development continued into the summer, when Christina and I decided to base ourselves in an extremely remote part of Southern Crete.

I set up a mobile studio and the framework of that piece started to come together in earnest. After several months I was able to do a small recording residency at a venue here in Brussels and properly track the piece. This particular recording was done on the night before Christmas, when not a creature was stirring (not even a mouse). Quiet hours. I love to work doing special times like that.
 
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
 
Composing my own music solo is a very different process for me, I tend to be much more strict about the final results. I’m very particular about tone, and as I mention above … I don’t really want it to sound exactly like anything else.

Collaboration loosens this process up for me a bit - I tend to feel freer to just play without analyzing the results - the blame can be spread out a little thinner! Sometimes things just crystalize in a way that doesn’t happen so easily when working alone.
 
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
 
“The role of music in society” varies across cultures and is the subject of many books and dissertations and Twitter threads and I’m not really prepared to get into all of that here.

Though perhaps my particular role in society as a musician is to help people get through the looking glass a little. To color their day to day experience in a way that sparks some awareness of how amazing it is that we’re all here, conscious, and together in this infinite plane of jiggling dots and lines. To blow off a little steam and sink into themselves (or out of themselves), to be able to appreciate the leaves blowing in the wind, if even just for a moment.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
 
It’s a way to cope with and make meaning out of the chaos.

In my days as a noise musician I was responding to a deep sense of existential dread - and the performances were definitely serving as a catharsis for that.

Now, on a good day, I can sometimes have an inner vision of some kind of bright, beaming energy before a performance. Sounds cheesy but this can occasionally bring tears to my eyes. It’s a good feeling that doesn’t typically surface during day to day life. It almost makes the drudgery of touring worth it. That and the hangs.

Maybe it’s all about being able to connect with other people on my own terms, to express myself in a way that I couldn’t in any other way …
 
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  
 
I try not to be too scientific about my music making, but there are many things that science can reveal about the human body and the world around us that have direct links to music. Connections are everywhere if you want to look for them.

And I suppose music composition can in some ways mirror the scientific method - observation (inspiration), hypothesis (idea), experiment (play and composition), analysis (listening to the results) and conclusion (release). If your hypothesis was correct, maybe you end up with some good music.

But also … it’s okay to keep experiments private if they don’t work out. You don’t need to publish everything you make for peer review!
 
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
 
I mean, maybe I’m missing out on the cutting edge of extended barista technique now that I don’t live in Brooklyn. I don’t know, I love coffee, and don’t necessarily think of stuff like that as ‘mundane’. Everyone has their passion.

Making music is pretty different from making a cup of coffee but I don’t feel a need to draw hard lines in between different creative activities. Japanese tea ceremony can take years to master and be incredibly satisfying to practice or even just to watch.
 
It’s important to keep in touch with the simple side of life in order to remain a well balanced human being. Carry the water, chop the wood. And as a reminder, making and performing music can also be ‘mundane’. It’s all relative and I think you can find excitement and magic, or mundanity, in just about anything if you look at it hard enough.
 
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation for how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
 
We ascribe meaning to vibrations in the air in the same sense that we do lines and dots arranged on paper as language and image. Like words, certain sounds and melodies are coded with specific meanings that can be culturally decoded. But music can express things that words just aren’t capable of, things that can’t be easily communicated within the more outlined boxes of language.
 
Ultimately the universe is chaotic, but music allows us to find patterns and meaning among the fields of waves. It’s powerful. We are living physical beings with hearts that beat faster or slower depending on how excited we are. It’s really not that hard to connect that to music.