Name: Megan Alice Clune
Occupation: Musician, composer, artist
Nationality: Australian
Current release: Megan Alice Clune’s Furtive Glances is out via Room40.

If you enjoyed this interview with Megan Alice Clune, visit her website. Or stay up to date on her work via Instagram, Soundcloud, and bandcamp. We also recommend our earlier interview with her about a wider range of topics.



For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

My work is always grounded in process and the materials I have at hand. I spend a lot of time researching – reading, looking at things, thinking – and get a broad idea of what I’m interested in doing. Ideas around early computing / technology have been an ongoing interest in the last few years, the relationship between the body and sound, listening in contemporary contexts.

I initially spend time thinking up a kind of framework for the work. Sometimes this can be quite literal, or at times a bit more intuitive and difficult to describe. I never talk about it, but there is always a nebulous aesthetic sense that follows different eras in my life and floats through the music I write during those times and into the furniture in my apartment and the clothes I wear.

It’s often a particular colour: I wore a lot of green and also white from 2017-19 (We Make Each Other Up, Alaska Orchestra), then 2019-21 was a very yellow era (If You Do, a living room) and have recently been gravitating towards purple (Furtive Glances). You can see this in the work, costumes and album art from each of these periods.

Now I think I need to transition out of the purple phase before I turn into Marian Zazeela.  

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

It’s good for me to work within limitations. As my career has progressed, I’m finding I have more resources for writing and can buy more stuff, but this can often push the music in a certain direction as the tools employed shape the work.

I’m currently trying to move away from writing music from the computer, which has been a big challenge,

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

Not really. I read The Artist's Way a really long time ago and find the morning pages, 3 A4 pages of free-writing as soon as you wake up in the morning, are really effective.

I just try and look after myself so it’s easy to access whatever I need to in that moment. I do listen to Donna Summer’s ”I Feel Love” before I perform though.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

It always starts with improvisation. I sing or play something and work from there, layering things or singing over them to form harmonies. I have a huge folder of voice memos (organised thanks to my friend Elise’s naming convention. She is the ultimate Virgo and the most organised person I know.) that I’ve recorded since I got my first iphone more than 10 years ago. These are often forming samples that are looped in the background or, in the case of Furtive Glances, the composition itself.

Honestly, I find the first note quite easy and enjoyable.

Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?

The middle part is a bit harder for me. Forming it into some kind of structure and uncovering what kind of album it’s going to be can be a little difficult.

It usually starts by creating a lot of layers and then, at some point, realising it’s not working and taking half of them out. I hate deleting things and get a bit precious about this, but it’s usually always what needs to be done. I’m grateful for the ‘save as’ function in these moments.

Furtive Glances actually started off as a totally different release, until I got to a point where it wasn’t quite sitting together and realised I had enough piano tracks to form a whole album.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control over the process or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

I’m always searching for a sense of flow when I work. On a good day, there is always this slightly out of body feeling where I work super quickly and decision making is very easy. I trust this feeling more than anything, that this will lead to the best work.

There is often a sense of uncovering what it is that I’m doing rather than forcing a particular vision. I also walk a lot and let my eyes / ears gravitate towards certain things, collecting them.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

Yes this does inevitably happen, and I’m usually happy to follow it. But I refer back to the initial research and the nebulous framework I mentioned earlier and think whether it fits into this project or is maybe for something else.

It’s usually a ‘save as’ moment, where I keep the initial version before moving on.  

Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?

I just know. I try not to over think it.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

I’ve mixed almost all of my releases – I see this as an extension of writing music. I do have a bit of technical knowledge here, but am generally just feeling my way through.

I always try and listen on a variety of headphones and speakers to get a sense of how it’s going to be consumed, but often am changing the music as much as the levels, particularly when I write using overlapping layers of samples. I want to create a sense of balance, but in my own way.

I’m not interested in making things slick or perfect. It’s about capturing more than that: leaving a trace of a particular moment in time, the technology it’s been recorded on or made with.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing 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?

Maybe it’s the same for some people, but music is a true obsession for me - something I’ve followed and pursued my whole life (for better or worse). There is a quote from this essay on Robert Ashley, one of my favourite composers, that I love: ‘Composing is a way of living, reading, and listening together. Music is a way of talking, thinking, and being in the world’ (by Alex Waterman, from the collection of Ashley’s scores Yes, But is it Edible).

[Read our Robert Ashley interview]

That said, my friend Elico Suzuki told me about this amazing coffee shop in Tokyo where they have a whole page of rules for how you must consume the coffee (including not using your phone, talking or reading while drinking the coffee) and the cheapest cup was around Au$20. When I visited, they made sure I understood the rules before I could sit down even though the café was totally empty.

Those guys have as much reverence for coffee as I have for music.