Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

BM: I feel like a lot of artists being asked this question would say something about how they wake up and immediately just jump into the studio. Which honestly sounds kind of terrible.

For me, I wake up most days and say good morning to my girlfriend and then have as slow of a morning as manageable. I can’t speak for the other guys but I’ve always been someone who needs a lot of time to mentally prepare for most things. The days where you just have to jump in are usually met with a cup full of anxiety.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

NP: Thanks for saying please! Our song “Jumprope” was one of the cutest collab experiences we’ve had as a band.

If my memory serves me correctly, Michael and I were in my apartment and Sabine and Peter were on their way over when we came up the basic synth bass-line on my Juno 106. We played it on loop for P + S when they got there and passed a microphone around the room and all tried to come up with little ideas for it. Michael’s shirt said the word “jumprope” on it and she started singing it over and over, and that was how that song essentially happened. We did a lot of touching up and reworking of course, but that was the impetus, and it was super fun.

[Read our Creative Tools feature about the Roland Juno 106]

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?

NP: Collaboration is king in Psymon Spine. Sometimes one needs to be totally alone to access certain ideas, and often one of us will show up with a partially written song ide. But ultimately everything is touched by the whole band.

We all respect each other’s talent and preferences a lot and in a way are really just writing song ideas to impress one another.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

BM: I think at the core it has to come from our personal take on an experience or a moment in time, I think.

NP: And that was the moment Michael had to leave for work. This is a big question, one I am unsuited to answer on a societal level. On a more local level, i.e. for me, music is about connecting to other people. It is a structure that literally forces me to endlessly interact with other people. I love it. I get to travel and talk to people I might otherwise not have gotten to. That’s pretty much the whole point for me.

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?

NP: When I start a song, I very rarely know what it’s going to be about. There are exceptions, but typically I’ll start with an instrumental composition and sing gibberish over it until I have a basic form I like. Then I start to fill in phrases that have the correct number of syllables. Somewhere along this process I realize the song is in face about something, because guess what, even the most seemingly nonsensical ideas are coming from somewhere.

The most therapeutic thing to me is writing lyrics that I thought were purely aesthetic drivel and realizing a week later that they are definitely about some recent situation I was in.

Jeff Tweedy talks about this process sometimes and how initially writing lyrics in this almost prescriptive way actually allows him to bypass his own ego, therein making his songs more personal.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

NP: My relationship to music is not inherently functional, but I love to use systematic approaches to composition as it helps me to get out of my own head.

There are also endless fascinating intersections happening between the worlds of music and science. I had a music professor / advisor in college named Anthony Holland who was working on developing a non-chemical cancer treatment that would involve determining the resonant frequency of cancer cells and destroying them with sound, a la opera lady who breaks a wine glass with her voice. There’s a good TEDx talk about it.

There was another named Jeremy Day-O’Connell who wrote a paper demonstrating that across hundreds of different languages and cultures, people tend to “sing” a minor third when they greet eachother (think “He-llo!” and play an F and then a D in quick succession on a piano). How fucking cool is that stuff?

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?

NP: I don’t have any hard and fast rules about that. Music can be mundane. Mundanity can be beautiful. An oat cortado can be exciting if you are a barista and spill it on your customer’s white pants. Not speaking from experience, or anything.

There is tons of music that excites me less than a great cup of coffee, but then again, I’m more excited by most things right after I’ve had a cup of coffee, so ....

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

NP: I’m going to pass on this one because it’s deep as hell and I’m fighting a head-cold and it took me 30 minutes to write that sentence about the minor third interval two questions ago. But there are a lot of psychological, sociological, and physiological reasons why music affects so many of us so deeply, and a ton of good literature about it.

My friend bought me Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks a couple years ago - read that if you want to hear about some people getting their entire asses kicked by the power of sound.