Part 2

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?

My last record was Wrong. Airport. Ghost. which started as a couple of days improvising with a string player in Rajasthan, India who plays an instrument from which many other string instruments were formed the world over. It’s a monophonic instrument with a bunch of resonant strings beneath the one you play which echo and resonate, creating this incredibly mournful wail with an accompanying spectral blur. I was excited to work with the player Krishna for a few days as someone who knows the instrument intimately and who could dig into certain qualities I found exciting.

After this, I brought the recordings home to my studio in Berlin where I processed the sounds as far as I physically could, really delving into the qualities of the instrument beyond the playing style itself. I would dig into single notes, isolating harmonics and recombining them, or isolate the echo and create reverbs from it. Ultimately the game becomes “how much sound can I find in this single instrument” and how far can I push this small, single stringed instrument that I’m curious about.

This material was performed live with Hildur Gudnadottir and Kjartan Holm, bringing together another less familiar string instrument, the Haldorophone as well as slide guitars. The aim was to embrace the lack of tuning on the original source material and create this nightmarishly powerful string trio.

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?

I just finished a computer game score for Battlefield 2042 and we got to dig into some pretty progressive experiential techniques for the sound creation.

My favorites in this was using a Machine Learning algorithm to perform style transfer on recordings. The easiest way to explain this technique is “teaching a computer what a saxophone sounds like so that I can play a violin into the machine and it will transform one instrument into another”.

We were curious to take this approach further, training the algorithm on various material sounds such as recordings of glass, metal, sand, etc and then feeding other location recordings through it. We would ask ourselves, what does cracking ice sound like when it’s turned into metal, so we would take recordings made of Ice Pings, the strange pitched twang that moves through Ice when it’s cracked, and then force the algorithm to reinterpret it.

You can hear these exact ideas in a track called “Irreversible” on the soundtrack.
 
How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

My wife and I talk a lot about patience in music and how, in times when every second is vying for your attention, patience might be the hardest trick to learn.

Composition seems therefore to be the dialogue between sound and space, one being patient enough for the other to finish before starting.

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’ve spent nearly half my life in cities but I grew up next to a cow farm in south-west England. I went back there recently and couldn’t really get over how intense the silence was. I’m not sure we realize how much filtering we are constantly doing when surrounded by the lives of millions of busy people.

I also read that marine life often cannot navigate properly. The oceans become too noisy to travel, almost like pollution covering the stars. To be able to find silence on planet earth is a real privilege and I think the study of sound and the consequences of it is important as we set about cleaning the mess we have all made of planet earth.



We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

Oh, fun question! How to answer …?

There’s a video of John Cage sitting in his New York apartment with the window open, talking about how he liked the street sound more than the radio because it never repeated itself. When my brain takes a moment, often when meditating myself, my awareness regularly stays with the sounds in my environment. There’s a lot going on in the city.

That said, I also have a kid that is obsessed with Justin Beiber and I can confidently say I know every single word of the Bieb’s last 4 records. In a different way, my experience of listening to this music with my kid is as focussed as when I’m hunting for a frequency in a recording, or sitting in open-awareness practice and my attention lands on an environmental sound. It’s conscious, joyous and really present.

In all these examples I would say that I’m an active audience and I’m truly present with whatever is making the sound.

Then there is background sound which the brain filters unconsciously. This can be music in a restaurant, sound in a street, whatever, wherever. In these cases my listening is passive, the contents is incidental and often I just filter it out.

My wife and I often talk about a deep listening practice (ala Pauline Oliveros) and how being an active listener is a practice all of its own. As I learn to listen better I find myself enjoying so much more music and sound than I used to. I am less consumed with how that style or artist relates to me, and more drawn to the experience of listening deeply to someone’s expression in whatever form that might appear.

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

Again, super fun question :) I’m not sure how I can answer without seeming stoned or pretentious, but let’s have a go ...

Firstly, I think that lots of spiritual traditions have a relationship to sound as we humans have a strong relationship to this sense of ours. It follows that Christian Hymns, the Mantras of Theravada Buddhist practices or whichever ritual approach one might take employs sound in very effective ways as it’s homosapiens doing the worshiping.

We love sound and we’ve developed remarkably effective ways of transcending our immediate selves and accessing something bigger by employing song or speakers as much as possible. This is why Church Organs are so big – the Christian God needed your belief and if the words didn’t work, Mass would.

That said, claiming sound is fundamental to existence is a pretty anthropocentric perspective. We hear a relatively small frequency band of specific type of energy and have spent thousands of years fucking around with the 20,000 available Hertz to great effect.

I’m fairly sure there’s a planet somewhere in the simulation where everyone has double our range and synesthesia comes as standard and they think of us in the same way we think about snakes - as mere sensing objects, incapable of a truly transcendent relationship to the way that energy vibrates through matter.