Name: Michael Begg
Occupation: Composer, sound artist, musician
Nationality: Scottish
Recent release: Was ist das? have just re-issued 2008's Human Greed album Black Hill: Midnight at the Blighted Star. The double cassette release features the entire album on cassette one and the unreleased companion album Moonsuite on cassette two.

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Michael Begg and would like to find out more about his work, all of his profiles can be found via his linktree. To keep reading, we recommend out earlier Michael Begg interview about Data Composition and Music for Human Survival and his personal biography in sound.

Over the course of his career, Michael Begg has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Chris Connelly, Clodagh Simonds’s Fovea Hex, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

[Read our Chris Connelly interview]
[Read our Hans-Joachim Roedelius interview]
[Read our Hans-Joachim Roedelius interview about Ego as an Energy and doing IT]
[Read our Hans-Joachim Roedelius interview about Collaboration]



Where do you find the sounds you're working with? How do you collect and organise them?  

I try to be organised. Honestly, I do. But it just repeatedly turns to shit. I conceive of a system, but then it becomes modified. I’ll try and work around the modifications by adding tags, colours, and a titling system for files, then exceptions arise, and it just always spirals out of control. I just can’t find a system that fits.

I am dimly aware of commercial sound design libraries and their standard metadata requirements, but I just can’t bring myself to take the time out to  learn the system. Consequently, my fall back is a large number of external disks marked by date, and handwritten diaries.

I always carry something with which I can quickly grab recordings, wherever I am. I’m presently enjoying very much my new Sennheiser Ambeo headset. The quality of binaural recording I can get directly into my phone now is amazing considering how little it cost. Otherwise, the H6 still proves to be a flexible enough hub for whatever mics I have to hand. A Rode NTG2, JRF contact mics and an Aquarian H2a hydrophone are all usually in the bag, but I tend to bring along cheaper, expendable piezos for sticking into places from which there is little chance of getting them back - like wood burning stoves. So, nothing fancy. Nothing too pricey. Simply effective and fit for purpose.

Because I live by the sea that is one of my main locations for grabbing new material - but it is not so much sea water as the bordering land where the bulk of the material comes from; the sun drying moss, the movement of sand, and, my favourite at the moment which is an old Scots Pine woodland. The trees are really tall and in any kind of wind they creak and tap against each other.

Since beginning to work with scientific collaborators, I am making increased use of the sound files that they gather on their own field trips. This was particularly useful in the case of the Arctic work because it was impractical for me to get up there so I had to rely on recordings they had made as part of their work, or the recordings they grabbed on their own phones, such as the ice breaking on the hull of the ship.

One scientist told me that it was like trying to sleep while grand pianos swung down to smash into the hull.

From the point of view of your creative process, how do you work with sounds? Can you take me through your process on the basis of a project or album that's particularly dear to you?

The process has been similar since, I guess, Black Hill, in 2008. And I think my most successful recordings have been those that adhere most clearly to the template; Fortress Longing, World Fair, Sonambulo, and the new record, Moonlight and Sentiment. But the one that remains dear to me, where perhaps I realised what the template actually was that I was working to is Dirt on Earth.



I first become pre-occupied by two or three ideas or subjects. Usually nothing to do with music, and, critically, unrelated to each other. With Dirt on Earth, it was an extended period of time in which I was obsessed with Tarkovsky and Parajanov. In particular, the fact that I could only watch those films alone, and that when doing so the experience was not at all like watching a film. It was more like becoming hypnotised. Time was undermined in a manner almost insurgent in nature.



Hand in hand with this I was equally obsessed by a book by Joseph Koerner called Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, backed up by a deep revisiting of Kafka’s short stories. It was also the moment in time where I fell under the spell of John Berger’s writing and began to find a political position for myself.

With one’s obsessions to the fore, I begin walking, and on those walks, I take notes, I draw, I make recordings. That particular pace of activity is what I find most conducive to allow thoughts to come clearly. Computer keyboards force a pace that is too fast. Talking is a messy business. But handwriting, and thinking quietly whilst looking at things and drawing them … stuff just comes forward.

From there I try out ideas in the studio, while the ideas are beginning to rub against each other and form their harmonic relationships. I don’t think about what is going on in the studio. I am just dimly aware that time is passing and content is amassing.

With Dirt on Earth the flip around was so sudden. I was alone in the house, late at night, and it came to me that there was probably enough there to make an album. I thought this would be the part of the process where I sit in the studio and begin piecing it together, arranging the layers, drawing the narrative lines tight - but it was all there, ready, complete and waiting. I didn’t need to do anything to it. I stepped out into the garden and took a photograph of the moon, so that was the sleeve taken care of. I mastered it between 2am and 4am, then created the DDP, and completed the artwork by the time the sun came up.

I thought the whole thing was doomed as I think of it as my least accessible recording, but to date it is the only one of my solo works to have sold out in its CD edition. Got some nice reviews too.

A couple of weeks ago I started watching Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors on my laptop and was genuinely surprised that my record was not on the soundtrack! It occupies the territory so completely. That record is so full of snow, and it allows you to slip in time. I remain very proud of it.



How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

As I mentioned already, I think that particular relationship only became undermined with the birth of recording, and that there should be more of us now making use of that same technology to restore, revisit and reinvestigate the relationships.

For Titan: A Crane is A Bridge, my Cryptic Sonica commission, I was asked to create an installation for the Titan shipbuilding crane in Clydebank’s old ship yards.



It’s a local icon, as brutal and industrial as you might imagine. But, through the course of spending a summer alone up on the structure itself, recording the fabric of the crane, the channeling of the winds, the resonance of planes flying overhead on the flightpath to Glasgow airport, I became slowly aware that it was proving challenging to get any of the harsh dissonance I was expecting to find in such an uncompromising landscape. The harmonics were always incredibly clear and true, and I became aware of a tenderness to the underlying sounds of the steel and cables.

I spoke with an engineer who was serving out his retirement years looking after the crane, and I tried to explain to him about what my recordings were uncovering. He laughed, and said it should be no surprise at all that a piece of well thought out industrial design should be harmonious not only in appearance and fabrication but in sound. And of course, he was so right. And it is something that we are subconsciously tuned to.

When the Titan installation opened up in the wheelhouse of the crane, 150ft above the river Clyde, some of the old guys from Clydebank who had worked in the yards came up to see what all the fuss was about. Their reaction to what on the face of it was a dilettante cosmopolitan affectation was incredible. They identified the tenderness, the sonorous gentility underpinning this groaning metal beast. A special time, for sure.

As creative goals and technical abilities change, so does the need for different tools of expression, from instruments via software tools and recording equipment. Can you describe this path for you personally starting from your first studio/first instruments and equipment? What motivated some of the choices you made in terms of instruments/tools/equipment over the years?

The first Human Greed record (Consolation, 2000) made use of a CD ROM containing pirated audio software, bought from a Sunday market near Edinburgh airport. I had a P60 desktop computer and a pair of headphones. All the sounds were processed in Wavelab with a bunch of long forgotten VSTs and I arranged it all in Cakewalk. All of the narrative excerpts were grabbed from the internet, largely from early online evangelists and commercial cosmetic surgery firms. Samples from CDs were also brought in as priming materials for the processing. A small, simple and effective toolkit with which to begin my training.



I moved to a mac based studio round about the time that Clodagh invited me into Fovea Hex, so I started using Logic in order to avoid any tricky import-export scenarios. I started making more use of MIDI and virtual instruments, and, shortly after began to bring together a number of mics, contacts and hydrophones, and a Zoom H6. So, I think the sound capture, sound generation and music composing aspects were evolving more or less in line with each other.

I started to learn basic music theory and began to make more use of the scoring functionality in Logic, and more discerning use of sample libraries in Kontakt. That led to Sibelius having to make an appearance in the studio, particularly when I put Black Glass together and needed to pass to the musicians something that they would understand. I could then use my recordings of the musicians playing to generate samples from which I could create my own instruments in Kontakt. You can see how I become enthused about dissolving boundaries between performance, rehearsal, recording, playback.



I make a point of dumping whatever plug-ins I’d use with each record to keep the palette fresh. That said, I still have to make use of 32Lives in order to continue to use a couple of 32 bit plug-ins that I simply MUST HAVE close to hand.

I started using Max whilst researching the best way of getting sound out of datasets. Then I had to use javascript in order to set up connections to JSON APIs to bring live data into the set. It has now become a core pillar of the studio and the stage. Its influence can be heard through out the Black Glass record, Arise from the Twilight, and the Witness series of recordings made through lockdown as a means of marking anchors in time. The data is at the heart of Light Water Is Black Water, and in my current work with the EU Marine Board - in which I am working with climate scientists in three different countries finding new ways to articulate to a general audience just how acute the situation is in the Southern ocean and Western Antarctica.



It’s maybe as a result of working more with musicians rather than relying entirely on myself to provide all the ensemble roles, but I am beginning to develop a sense that I cut away a little more from the palette with each project, and I have stopped upgrading both hardware and software unless absolutely necessary.

This leads me to the prediction that in 10 years I will be producing minimalist scores for human voices. I joined a Georgian singing group, actually, and opened Black Glass shows in the summer with some Georgian singing, for no more reason than its the most beautiful sound form I can conceive of. We’ll see.

The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?  

I’ll admit to my early reading of Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape being a keystone in my own development. I have done listening walks with groups of children, and investigated environments in terms of isolating individual sounds, and evaluating which sounds are pleasurable and which sounds generate anxiety, and so forth. I have seen them bring their sound collections back to class and I have worked with them to create some astonishingly good compositions from their recordings.

From that perspective and increased public awareness of the role sound plays in shaping emotion is a good thing. I do worry, more generally, that, rather like youthful rebellion, the wellbeing movement has been co-opted and cynically monetised and rendered largely toothless.

The thing that I do find interesting about acoustic ecology is that it is one of the very few forms that we have that allows for such a longitudinal fruition. For many of these acoustic studies monitoring the change, over time, to a soundscape, there is a built in requirement that the studies last for several years. It would be nice to engage more fully with that longitudinal form. Conceptual visual artists - I am thinking of Katie Paterson, in particular - have grasped this.

The flip side of this, of course, is that we do not have the luxury of time in which to express these concepts fully.

The possibilities of modern production tools have allowed artists to realise ever more refined or extreme sounds. Is there a sound you would personally like to create but haven't been able to yet?

The road drill that makes you break down into inconsolable fits of sobbing.