Part 2

Working predominantly with field recordings and sound can be an incisive step / transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

I do work with field recordings but for me this is probably more a case with my gallery installations than my music releases. I am attracted by the idea that while you make a 1,000 decisions about how to approach the field recording, there is a lot to surrender to.

The sound in the world is largely beyond one’s control and so there is this vast field of potential material to work with that you didn’t ‘create’. This encounter can be pretty amazing but it also takes a lot of patience and this is usually the challenge for me. My good friend, Joshua Bonnetta, works within this field in highly committed and evocative ways. I have a lot to learn from him.

[Read our Joshua Bonnetta interview]

For me, I’m often more interested in “wrong” ways of field recording more so than “proper” ones. In a research project run by artist/curators, François Martig and Emily Roi, in Verdun, France, we were working on the World War One battlefields and I did a half hour recording in a wind storm in a forest at night.

I placed the left and right microphones 50 feet apart as that was some of the closest distances the two sides’ listening positions were located. And so the recording is far from a proper stereo recording as we hear the two mics that distance apart. So some events are ‘micro’ to each mic’s location while some sounds are macro and detected by both mics. It’s a strange recording from a haunted place.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and working with sound? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?

I definitely see myself as part of a tradition. I’m not so interested in originality, really. Obviously there are instances of it but then it is often connected to a capitalist model associated with genius and the individual and marketing. I’m much more interested in ideas of connection and influence and lineage as you mention in the  question.

I love how ideas, technologies, process and influence travel. For me, it reminds me of how music travels and moves around and spreads connections like a network. I can appreciate that sometimes there is a desire to “destroy tradition”, the Viennese Aktionists may come to mind here as an example where the crushing weight and influence of a small segment of culture, the wealthy, lays this claim over the whole of a society and there is a need to smash this influence or control. But I’m usually more interested in the connections than the ruptures.

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?

Drums were my first and to this day probably my favourite instrument. But I sold my drum kit for a motorcycle at some point. Then I got into guitar. I always describe my guitar playing as a wrestling match. I have terrible technique. I’m sloppy. My rhythm is off. I have clumsy fingers. But still I love to play it so I try and find a way around these limitations. And if I think of my favourite guitar players I always prefer melodicism over bonkers solos.

It’s why J Mascis can be one of my favourite guitar players. His melodies are more interesting than how many notes he plays. Dean Wareham. Loren Connors. Bernard Sumner. Bill Orcutt. Okay, Bill Orcutt might be the odd one out here but he’s just so amazing.

I’ve always used sound from the radio whether it is a snippet of classical music or static. It always makes me think there are a million ways to make music and it changes the way I listen to things.

For this record I made one rule which was to not use any guitar. It’s mostly made with a Casio SK-1 as I’ve been trying to learn the keyboard a little. It felt easy to make new sounds and not rely on familiar riffs. And because my SK-1 is a partially broken one, it samples inconsistently and shuts off randomly so there was always an urgent feeling when recording something. It could shut off at any moment.

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

I can quote here from one of my Black Seas projects.

“Sometimes the voices are close at hand, sometimes far off, and in different directions. They may be concealed above the head, under the floor, may come from a neighbouring house, from the chimney, from a bedpost, a bureau, a bed, or anything. Madame D hears voices far off in the fields; they are hidden under a tree; and she replies to them as if she had a speaking-trumpet. Voices may proceed from heaven. Lord Herbert, the greatest deist of the age, heard a sound from heaven, which decided him to publish his work against Christianity.”

Alexandre-Jacques-François Brierre de Boismont. Hallucinations, or, The Rational History of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism. (1845)

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

Maybe there are, unintentionally, two questions here! One is space in composition and the other is composition in space.

I appreciate space in composition. Dynamics and shifting intensities are important in my work and usually in my favourite music. Or, conversely, a crushing repetition can also be captivating.

Composition in space is fascinating because it brings things into the social and political realms.  I know many artists find this a problematic imposition and something to try to deny. But I’m fascinated by how sound/music interacts in these realms. What is the social context of sound and music. How do we navigate this? What are the rules? How do we challenge them? Who is included? Who is excluded? How do we change or enforce this? Who is it for? Who is it against? What works where and why not, if not?

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?  

We are definitely affected by the sound around us for good and bad and everything in between. There is important research happening in the field of acoustic ecology and as one who is interested in sound, I should pay attention to the field.

Living in Canada, it was relatively easy to see R. Murray Schafer’s ideas around acoustic ecology spread pretty quickly and be embraced by a significant number of people involved in sound after the publication of The Tuning of the World was published. I was also enamoured with the book when I first read it and still grateful for some of it. While there is a lot of important information in that book, thankfully we are now living in a time where people have taken some critical analysis to it and rigorously challenged some of the positions taken. In particular the overt Western European positionality of some of his propositions.

I interviewed him once when I was around 25 and relatively new to the world of sound art, and coming from punk and hardcore and then experimental music. He was open and friendly and very confident in his thinking. While I wish no real harm to his legacy, I do wish I had conducted a more rigorous and critical interview.

Acoustic ecology can sometimes take the position that the “broadband” sound of nature is all good and the narrow soundscape of the city is bad. But we know that the sounds of the city can be critically important cultural signifiers for people so it’s a lot more complex and nuanced than saying urban sound is bad.

I think there is good and bad thinking in contemporary acoustic ecology. The contemporary conversation is much more sophisticated than the earlier days of “noise is bad.”