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Part 2

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

I dabble in prop buying for film and TV by day, which involves getting up at 7am, working from 8am till 6pm then coming home to research and record radio shows. When one film shoot finishes and I’m waiting for another to begin, I focus on my own music, on the Extra Normal label and on organising Contra Pop Festival on Ramsgate beach. My work on the festival feeds directly into my own music production as I take huge inspiration from the artists who perform there.

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?

As with my visual art, the Grusha OST was conceived as a work of criticism, in this case a critique of the trend for boutique labels reissuing apparently long lost, exotic soundtracks and charging exorbitant prices for them, sometimes without remunerating the original recording artists.

I think the creative process for the production of Grusha was akin to carving from stone, which is all about subtracting matter. Having built up beats, rhythms and melodies, I gradually started to remove the ones that I felt were not 100% necessary to composition, leaving a collection of minimal tracks with plenty of room for the rhythms to breathe and for listeners to use their imagination.

For Errors, I took something of a clay sculpting approach in that I focused on building up layers rather than taking them away. During the making of ‘Error III’, for example, I used a Maddy Prior vocal sample as something of an armature, building rhythms and melodies around it before eventually removing the armature completely and allowing the song to support its own weight.

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?

There is a myth that the most tormented souls make the greatest art, but I would like to think that such souls might have made even greater art had they not been so tormented. Similarly, capitalists seem to believe that humans work harder and achieve greater feats of ingenuity under difficult conditions and that being comfortable leads to laziness. I believe the opposite is true, in that the more someone is supported and nurtured, the more creative and imaginative they will become, whereas the more challenging someone’s circumstances are, the more distractions they will have and the less creative they will be.

On a more day-to-day level, the strategies people use to enter into a creative state will differ depending on their circumstances, but, for me, it’s all about shutting off from the outside world for as long as possible and allowing the ‘flow’ to take over.    

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?

Performing live is a relatively small part of what I do, but theoretically, I think playing live gives you the opportunity to get an immediate, unfiltered response from listeners as they react in real time to specific moments in your music. If you were a cynical marketeer, you’d apply some audience segmentation analysis to the situation and ascertain which kinds of audiences responded in certain ways to certain parts of songs and then you’d tailor your musical output to these respective audiences accordingly.

In terms of the relationship between improvisation and composition and on a more communistic note, as double bassist Dave Kane said in an interview after his performance at Contra Pop 2018, “Without improvisation you wouldn’t be able to make any music... I think it is the ‘present moment’ thing and awareness, which is something that is not really taught or practised a lot... So, when you’re improvising in a group, all each of us is trying to do is achieve complete awareness, to create something together, because you’re not only playing your instrument, but you’re trying to listen to all the other people on stage, and then, as a result, everyone else who’s in the room is on that energy frequency listening to the energy that’s being created in the moment.” In this respect, I think improvisation can be seen as real-time composition and that improvisers should be credited as composers not just performers of the music they create.

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 think that sound is as important a factor in music as composition and that, by definition, the anatomy of sound is part of composition. By this, I mean sound waves have a physical form and when sound waves are combined, their forms collide and coalesce, fundamentally altering each other’s shape in the process. So, when a composer decides that two sounds should be made simultaneously, a consideration must be made of how the sounds will affect each other’s physical properties and ultimately their reception by the listener.

Delia Derbyshire’s execution of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who score is a prime example of sound taking on compositional qualities. While Derbyshire was credited as a technician rather than the co-composer, the sound sculptress clearly transformed the very fabric of the piece from a standard, but admittedly catchy, BBC theme tune to an utterly terrifying and timeless piece of soundtrack music.       

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?

Conductress of the Psychedelic Rites of the Motherbeat, Eris Drew often talks about the relationship between psilocybin, synaesthesia and the creative process. She says that consuming mushrooms can lead to the sensation of seeing rhythms and song structures materialise in the air as they are emitted from the speakers and that this synaesthetic phenomenon aids and abets the sound sculpting process no end. Amen.

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?

Art is about empathy, community, and collaboration. The idea of the artistic genius is a myth and only serves to perpetuate white male privilege and promote arrogance, bravado, and individualism. However, the notion of ‘engagement’ is by no means an antidote, it is often used by large arts institutions to justify their existence by essentially pretending to connect with the community around them. Huge galleries and concert halls are parachuted into deprived locales with a grand vision of regenerating the fabric of the community and alleviating poverty, when all they actually do is alienate people, push property prices up and, by extension, force people from their homes. Artists are expected to engage tokenistically with members of the local community and bestow upon them ‘the civilising wonder of the arts’, when, in reality, members of the local community already have their own vibrant and humanistic culture far removed from the bourgeois façade of the arts.

So, yes, art should take on a social and political role, but engagement must be genuine and based on mutual respect, rather than misguided paternalism or vanguardist misanthropy.      

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?

Music is fundamental to being human. I do not know what the notion of music will encompass in the future, but I would like to think that everyone could consider themselves musicians rather than the title remaining the preserve of a privileged few. Instead of relying on the market to sustain themselves, I would like to think that musicians will be supported spiritually and financially by their society. Suffice it to say, this future is not a capitalist one.  


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