The transcript from our radio interview on wluw, with post script questions included. This is available in cooperation with Roctober and Special Interests Magazine. More information on J.G. Thirlwell can be found at WWW.FOETUS.ORG. In print there is an extensive, comprehensive introduction. For those of you who are regular listeners, this artist hardly needs an introduction. All photos courtesy of www.foetus.org.
How was your trip to Australia? How was your performance?
The performance was really good. I went down with my percussionist Peter Wise
and piano player David Broome from New York, and we added the Zephyr Quartet to
the ensemble down there in Adelaide. We
rehearsed there and opened for the Kronos Quartet. That was my first ever show in Australia,
then Kronos played one of my pieces on the bill as well, so it was kind of a JG
extravaganza. That was the only show I
played down there, and my first ever show in Australia. Actually, until last year, I hadn't been down
to Australia for 32 years, so now I've been down there twice in a year. It's kinda crazy. I went to Melbourne for a few days and saw my
mom, now I'm back.
Were there any personal memories, being raised somewhere
and then having not been there for 32 years, was there a distinct change?
Well, that hit me much more last year so this time I knew a
little bit more what to expect. I went
down last year because my father was on the way out and I figured I wanted to
see him before he died. When I arrived,
I didn't recognize anything of the skyline.
I stayed with my mom and she lives near where I grew up. When I got to that vicinity, I drove over the
crest of this hill, and then I recognized that there was going to be a railroad
track on the other side of the hill.
That's where it was and then things started to click into place. One of the notable things was that the trees
were all thirty years taller. It's weird
to blink and... you know, things usually
look smaller and then when you go back somewhere they look bigger. Everything looks fancy now, nothing’s run
down. Within a couple of days, I had that kind of feeling that I had that drove
me to want to leave Australia in the first place, just this kind of suffocation
and a feeling of isolation down there.
I should say, I'm sorry for your loss.
Well, thanks.
I get a similar feeling going on tour to smaller cities
than Chicago and last month I was able to go to New York. I sort of understand how someone could even
have that feeling in Chicago now that I've been to New York. It has such a unique energy that is only
really comparable to New Orleans, but still distinctly different. It's pretty hard to imagine living in New
York and then also living somewhere else even just in America.
Chicago's not exactly a hick town!
Yeah, but you know, but it felt like the suburbs compared
to New York. I'd go to Cleveland or
Denver, and very highly populated places and that's all fine and good, but it
seems sort of like one neighborhood of Chicago by comparison.
Well you know, at the same time, Australia is in a distant
hemisphere, and it's almost in the fucking South Pole. When I was growing up, I really felt
isolated, and I think a lot of people like myself might feel a kind of cultural
inferiority or maybe the feeling that you're surrounded by cultural
inferiority, or the feeling that you're displaced and you're somewhere you're
not supposed to be. My mother's
Scottish, so I spent a bunch of time in the UK when I was growing up and I
really felt that that was where I was supposed to be. Where there was snow at Christmas, and not
barbeques! I had always vowed that as
soon as I had the where-with-all, I would leave that godforsaken place and
never return. And I never did, until
last year.
Well that's admirable, I read about how you were an art
teacher at the age of 17 and such... You
definitely had that concept of a big fish in a small bowl covered. I don't know very many people who are able to
pull that off.
Well I was a student teacher. Let's not say I was a fully
fledged art teacher with a degree or anything.
I graduated high school when I was 16 so I was already out doing rounds
as a student teacher when I was 17. I
went to art school for two years.
London, after some time, fell short of what you hoped
it'd be?
Well I was in London at an amazing time, it was between '78
and '83. I'm really lucky to have been
there then, it facilitated what I did and what I wanted to do. Then when I got to New York, after being in
London for five years, New York was like the polar opposite of London. London is very dispersed geographically. It takes a long time to get around, whereas
at that time New York was very East Village-centric. Everything was in a concentrated area, you
could walk everywhere, it was a 24 hour city, the bars were open until
4am. Exact opposite of London. It had this incredible energy, and that
immediately captivated me, and made me want to stay.
I am sort of curious, and if it's none of my business,
that's okay, I'm curious about the gap...
You were on tour with Immaculate Consumptive and you sort of decided to
settle in New York? You didn't have
much time between starting to do records and being signed to Some Bizarre once
you got there…
I was already with Some Bizarre by the time I came to New
York. That year in '83, I'd gotten
involved with Some Bizarre, and I think between May and September of that year
I did a whole bunch of recording, which was all of the 12 inches and HOLE, and those things weren’t released
until the following year, I think. So
I'd already recorded all that material, and started some other material, which
became NAIL. I got to New York, really liked it here,
just kind of stayed here, went to LA, spent some time in the states, and
started some other projects (like Wiseblood and Stinkfist), and then kinda went
back to London and did some further recording, and went back and forth a bit
like that. It wasn't like I arrived
there and then said “Okay, I'm getting an apartment here today”. It was a little bit more gradual than that.
Well, for me at least, it's still very inspiring, because
I see that you went from squatting in London, and having maybe a couple of
synthesizers and working on an 8 track from time to time, to being signed to a
label and just kind of flying by the seat of your pants I guess, in the
states.
That was an evolution that happened over a couple of years. I guess things went kind of fast, I guess I
was very prolific. At the same time, I
was holding down a full time job but every time I had a vacation I'd go into
the studio, and work pretty fast, and have the whole thing composed
beforehand. It's a different process
than I have now. Working with Some
Bizzare was timely because I had kind of gone as far as I could in this 8 track
studio environment.
That's one of the situations where you had your notation
charts, and you were sort of working with what you can find in the studio? I just imagine you squatting and just having
a couple of keyboards, sort of just trying to chart things out and then going
into a studio where they maybe have some more instruments for you to work
with.
I didn't really use that many instruments. There was piano and keyboard, and not much
guitar. Some percussion, my synths, some gadgets. Probably no bass either. Sometimes I would find things on my way to
the studio and bring them in with me!
I definitely want to ask you a lot of questions about the
more experimental side of your work. So
I have to ask, you were coming up with aspects of noise music with the band
that would become Whitehouse. I remember
reading that you were cutting apart tape loops and working with white noise,
and manipulating tape loops from there.
I think I remember you also saying that you were using the razor blade
as sort of an instrument for tapes and things like that?
Oh, the razor blade is a very multi faceted instrument. To clarify the Whitehouse thing, that was
really William Bennett's domain, and I contributed vocals to one of his
albums. That was kind of the extent of
our work together even though we hung out a little bit. Conceptually, that was his deal, although I
think I sold him my first WASP synthesizer, which I kind of regret. Yeah, there's a lot of audio manipulation in
my early work, and tape loops and things like that.
When you were working with Some Bizarre, you all of a
sudden had a free studio to work with but you'd have these pressing deadlines,
so you'd work for 36 hours sometimes.
Well, that wasn't because of pressing deadlines. It wasn't a free studio either, it was studio
time in a 24 track studio which is a jump up from where I'd been
technologically. I paid for it in the end! But yeah, sometimes I did long
sessions. The longest session I think I
did was 80 hours, which was insane, but that was on the track “Bedrock”. We'd gotten it mixed and it'd taken 24
hours. It was on an SSL desk and tape op
pushed the wrong button to save the automation and erased all of our fader
moves. We thought it wouldn't take long to get back to where we were, and we
ended up working around the clock 'cause I had to leave the country. It was like from Monday to Thursday working
on the mix of that track. That was the
longest mix though.
Coming back to present day, you're still doing a lot of
experimental work. A lot of people are
sort of calling you a musician, but maybe for lack of a better term, depending
on how you want to approach it, but I was recently reading how you made the
track for the split 7 inch with Teho Teardo.
I'm really interested in the manual ways that someone can generate
frequencies. I know that you do
“freq_out”, and I've got the first CD of that.
I was wondering how you deal with that territory, beyond laptops. I know that there're plenty of ways to do it,
and I saw that one of them was dripping water into a bass drum and having it
run through a pipe that would go through the other room?
That was a thing that ended up on the split single with
Teho. That was actually a sound
installation called “Ecclesiophobia” [fear of churches] which I did in
Santarcangelo, a town in Italy. One of
the impetuses on my installation work is the environment where it will be. They'd sent me some pictures of this grotto
where they wanted to place me. That was
sort of what inspired to come up with some of these ideas and research some of
the elements I wanted to use to create that work, which ended up using an intravenous
apparatus to drip water onto a bass drum head.
The bass drum was lying on its back.
That was below the vaulted ceiling of this grotto, which was deep
underground. You had to go down some stairs and down a dirt tunnel to get to
it. Underneath the bass drum, there was
a light shining upward towards the intravenous drip, so when the water would
drip onto the bass drum head, it would cause a ripple, and then that ripple was
illuminated by the light below it, and that sent a shuddering reflection of the
ripple into the vaulted ceiling. I had a
contact mic and was sending the sound of the drip hitting the bass drum head
into the computer which opened a noise gate and sent a low frequency into the
next room, in which there was another bass drum. I had a subwoofer under that
bass drum. The subwoofer was vibrating
the bass drum head in there, which also had a pool of water in it, so that also
caused ripples. There was another light
under that, and that sent another phase of reflections up into that ceiling. So that was visual component, and the
conceptual backbone of what that piece was about. Then, there's a lot of churches in that town,
so I made a bunch of field recordings of the church bells striking. It was a very quiet in the day, very little
traffic on the hill where I was, so it was a good place to record the
bells. I combined these recordings with
a bunch of other bell recordings that I had sourced, and I had some bells of my
own. In that way, I was bringing the
bells from above down underground in this grotto, and they became some of the
audio components as well. I had 4
channels, a 4 channels speaker set up in that room as well. It was a composition that I slowly came up
with using tones, and the bells coming in and out, and various other elements. I performed that live a couple of nights, I
can't remember-- 3 nights, 2 nights or something. So it was kind of a combination of
installation and live performance/manipulation.
At about 2 hours long, then I had to distill that down into one side of
a 7 inch, which was kinda difficult, but the essence is there on that 7
inch.
Wow! That's
amazing! That's really incredible. I'd like to ask you about a lot of the other things that are highly complex that
you've done. Your installation with LED
lights, and your installation for 47 channel [audio] sculpture...
The one with...
that's actually a sculpture.
That was a mirrored sculpture that I did with controlled LEDs yeah,
“Narcissum Ascenda”. It was an eternal
mirror box which was suspended from the ceiling. Inside there were 27 LEDs hanging at various
angles. I got this piece of one-way
mirror which, after many attempts, I finally contorted into a tube which was
held together with bolts, and that went up inside this mirrored box. The idea being that when it's suspended from
the ceiling you crawled under it and stuck your head in the tube. Between the tube and the walls/interior of
the cube were 27 LEDs hung at various angles, which were controlled by a
circuit on top of the box, and they went through various programs of strobing
and fading and flashing and so on. You
put your head into the tube, your head would disappear but you just saw this
eternal field. That was a for a group
show in Ostersund, in Sweden.
I was really dying to try to find more images of
that. Maybe it's one of those that you
can't download a sculpture.
No, you have to stick your head in it. I'm all for the non-downloadable
experience. It's now sitting in a crate
in my hallway. Maybe it will get
exhibited again one day.
You did a sound installation that was 47 channels within
a huge metal sculpture?
That was in Vienna, that was last year. That piece is called “The Morning
Line”. It was created by Matthew
Ritchie. I think it actually has 54
speakers, and 47 channels. Commissioned
by TBA21 [Thyssen-Bomemisza Art Contemporary].
There was a round of compositions guest-commissioned by Franz Pomassl,
and so I was invited to write one. I
ended up writing a 38 minute piece that was something like 75 stems, and we
didn't have too long to spatialize it, but I think it turned out really well.
At the opening I performed along with that and now it's in the sculptures
archive of compositions. If you go to
Schwarzenbergplatz,in Vienna, at a certain time of day, that composition will
play. The compositions play back daily 9am to 10pm
The 75 stems, I probably should also ask this as it
relates to the 5.1 album with Manorexia.
Was it a lot of complimentary pieces or is it intended to be 47
different things happening?
It was one composition with 47 channels, each speaker doing
something discretely different. The challenge that I found was that you're
working with an audio field which is say 20 meters long and 8 meters tall. The speakers are secreted in the structure of
this sculpture. The listener can walk
through the sculpture, and where-ever they stand spatially, whatever speaker
they're standing next to, is obviously the loudest thing they are going to
hear. So if there is a part in the
composition where there are multiple sounds that are important to hear at the
same time, but they may be coming out of different speakers and locations, how
do you spatialize them? One sound is
maybe 20 meters away from the other sound.
You're working within the limitations of it being outdoors, sounds
dissipating, the speakers aren't very large, that is a challenge. I worked with a system where I split up the
priority of the sounds into primary sounds that I wanted to be heard throughout
the system and then secondary sounds that could be throughout the system in
spatial areas, and then the third category of sounds, they could float, so they
could pan and move between speakers. And
then there were maybe 5 sections to the composition, so each section had to
then be considered in those permutations.
We had to set up the program to do that and Tony Myatt designed the
software and the system and he and his team did an amazing job of figuring out
how to place these things in the program.
So it was a lot of placing the sounds, going into it and adjusting the
volumes, and getting it as close as we could, as quickly as we could, to my
sonic vision of the piece. There’s a
shack on site, which housed the hardware and the software, and they had a
computer that could remotely change the parameters of the system while you were
standing inside the sculpture thirty meters away. We edged towards it and I think it was
successful. Again I responded to the
space and my knowledge of what other composers had created, and I wanted to
create something that reflected the grandeur of the surroundings in its climax.
I think I achieved it.
Speaking of spatial elements, with freq_out, I've got the
CD that they came out with, and you know, some of the stuff is hardly audible
within the human ear, and I wonder if you keep that in mind when you're
assigned a certain frequency if some of
the collective or some aspect of the collective is working with subsonic
frequencies to affect a person in the same sense as binaural beats (an online
sound program stocked with sounds to cause “euphoria” and “relaxation” etc) or
things like that where frequencies are supposed to cause a reaction in people?
The idea behind freq_out is that the sonic spectrum is cut
up into twelve slices and each artist is given a slice to work within, and you
can't go above or below that frequency that you're delegated for that sort of
event. The lowest frequency is actually
0-25 hertz but most sub woofers don't even go down that low, and even if they
do, it's difficult to to get subwoofers that can handle that down low without
just cracking up. Its difficult for it
to resonate. The next frequency up is 25-60 I think, something like that, so
there's kind of a crossover of those frequencies so, when working in those
frequencies, you have to be mindful of what each other is doing. That's one of the reasons that the project is
created with the sites in mind. Each
time we do it, we go up one frequency, so if you did 0-25 at one freq_out,
you're going to be doing 25-60 and then going up the frequency spectrum. Usually we have a space where we work and
you'll kind of get glimmers of what each other is creating or you can get a
sense of the space, what you might want to say about the space, what you might
want to use to generate the sounds that you're working with. We all come from kind of different
disciplines so we all bring something different
to the table. As a composer and I
can't help but bring compositional elements into the way that I structure my
frequencies.
From the pictures, there're a lot of mixers and a lot of
cables but I don't see exactly what they're working with. Is it exclusively laptops? I read that Throbbing Gristle was using a
synthesizer to use subsonic frequencies to terrify their neighbors [with
frequencies that cause reactions in people].
I don't know much about electronics so I wonder how many ways you can go
about conducting certain frequencies.
Usually we're not doing it to experiment on the bowel
movements of the audience. Normally the pieces are created with laptops and
burnt onto a CD. Those soundfiles are
looped and are all various lengths. It's
kind of a piece of eternal music that never repeats and it's installed into the
space that we're working in, usually on a multi channel system of 12 to 24
speakers. The space restrictions or the
parameters that are drawn by the nature of the space definitely influence the
placement of the speakers and the way that it's going to be experienced by the
audience, and also the duration. We've
done it overnight, 24-48 hours of it, we've done versions which have been like
a museum opening, we've done versions where it's been up for a week at a time
or two weeks. It really depends on the
space. In museums, underground, outside,
we've done it in a former strip club, the Communist Center in Paris, it's taken
on a lot of different forms. There are
parameters suggested by the environment and the resonance of the room, and the
amount of speakers, the physical space it is situated in. It's variable
proportions.
I'd like to ask what “Miasma” (or “Murnau”) was, “A
Meditation on Dimensional Densities Through Concurrent Temporal Passages”?
Is that the thing I did with Lary 7? That was Brooklyn Lyceum and I can't really
remember too much about that but I think it was a collaboration with Lary
7. I don't know if you know who that is,
I don’t know that he's so well known outside of New York but he's a fixture on
the experimental avant garde scene here.
He’s like a mad scientist, works with a lot of analog and vintage equipment,
making them do things that they're not supposed to. That particular night he was making
projections with glass slides, and in that environment there was some kind of
pyramid structure. I came up with some kind of audio piece to accompany that based
on a concept I had of temporal simultanaeity.
The other thing, “The Pinch of The Baboon” (formerly known as “Murnau”),
that was another name for a different version of this improv ensemble I've had
with Oren Bloedow and Ed Pastorini called “Murnau”. We've
done that a few times.
Which one of those had something to do with the
“aquasonic” which was sort of a string instrument that was made from water
vibrations?
Oh, the aquaphone? I
might've used that in the pinch of the baboon.
I got hold of that to do this piece with Tony Oursler where he did this
piece where he filmed a bunch of people playing solo instruments and then
combined them in a video installation, so everyone was “improvising” with each
other via their prerecorded video performance.
Are you aware of any plans of this stuff getting released
in any way?
That stuff? No, it's
ephemeral.
What are your feelings about the recording as the
artifact in present day? I notice that a
lot of the older stuff isn't being reissued on physical releases, at least not
yet.
I'm a strong believer in the recorded artifact, and I'm a
strong believer in the physical object as an artifact and fetish object. That's kind of how I started. I believe in the hard object. I don't really
release files, I release albums.
Some of us are kind of burning to get a reissue of “DEAF”
or something like that, because it's like 50 or 60 dollars just to get a
damaged version, even on CD.
There's kind of a few things ahead of the queue for that,
before that would happen. The next
thing that's going to be off the ramp is this Foetus companion album to HIDE, which I'm finishing in the next
few weeks. That's got about ten or
eleven pieces, and then that will be rapidly followed by the soundtrack to a
film I scored a couple of years ago called “The Blue Eyes”, which is being
prepared as well. Those two albums will
be out this year.
Is this companion album still going to be inspired by
“the culture of fear”?
There are pieces on there that were written around the same
time as HIDE and have the same kind
of conceptual thoughts behind them, yeah, that didn't quite make it onto the
album. Some of them were actually
written since then but they fit into the same mindset. Parts of them are being culled into this
opera that I'm eventually working on.
“Cosmetics” (opera piece on HIDE)
is kind of a public workshop of what...There's another piece on the companion
album which is also another kind of large scale piece... [phone cuts out]
We were talking about your companion album to HIDE is going to be something of a large
scale opera once it's finished.
The album's not a large scale opera. There's a piece on HIDE called “Cosmetics”.
That's kind of a work in progress. With these pieces I'm workshopping in
public for an opera that I hope to
realize in the next five years, and there's a piece on this next album which
will also evolve into that opera as well.
If there's a god in the sky, then hopefully there will be
a big production.
That's the intention, I want to make it as difficult as
possible.
One thing I like about HIDE is that while I know it does have a
political underpinning, it can be widely interpreted. I prefer that to
someone preaching specifically about something immediate such as
"Bush". I think things last the test of time and speak more
universally that way. Looking back on your old interviews, in one of them
you spoke adamantly that preaching should be something that's upheld, or held
in high regard. I wonder if you still feel that way now. How do you
regard temporal affairs in your work?
First of all I don't take responsibility for anything I said in
old interviews. I agree that HIDE is
quite a political work, and draws on the culture of fear, post-homeland
security control, paranoia, the rapture etc. My other works have been political
too but often more about personal (inter-relationship) politics. I try to veer
toward universal themes, they are more timeless. My old works have some
references to culture in the lyrics (Frank Sinatra, Jackie Collins, Sartre,
James Brown etc) but I don't do that now. Not today anyway.
If there's anything else that you'd want to share as far
as the meaning of it, for instance, the video for “Here Comes The Rain”, it's
well, there's a lot of symbolism there, obviously there isn't any rain in there
[in the video]. I see teeth being
removed and prescription pill bottles in abundance. I was wondering if that's also a side effect
of the culture of fear or there's another subtext to it …
It definitely echoes the ideas behind HIDE embodied in that video, but in some ways when you do a video,
you're making a visual interpretation of that song, and then sometimes it
becomes inextricably linked with the song in a way where that's the only
interpretation of it. In some ways,
that demeans the song. Sometimes, when I
see a video for a song, it makes the song worse, you know, I don't like the
song as much because it was better without a visual interpretation. However, I really do like the video for
“Here Comes The Rain”. It's probably one
of my favorites. It's obvious in the
first half of the video that something terrible has happened - I'm finding
these figures in the woods and they have their heads bound in burlap, and I go
through their pockets, and find prescription drugs. I'm going from body to body
finding these drugs, then this goat appears, which is, to me a symbol of
life. That was partially inspired by
being in Oman, seeing a lot of goats around.
The goats there wander around like stray dogs. They give milk, they give meat, they're very
hardy utilitarian animals... So anyway,
next I disappear into my lair, and in there amongst my large collection of
prescription drugs is this girl with six arms who I'm tending to. To me, she is another a symbol of life, and
if she dies, the world will die. At one
point, her eyes flicker open, and it's very fleeting, but the goat's eyeballs
are transposed into her eyeballs. That's
some of the things that are running through that. Also, you know, the 6 arms, a figure that's
not really supposed to be a reference to Kali [a Hindu figure of time, change,
and eternal energy, sometimes represented as dark and violent] but I'm not
going to deny that there wasn't that that thought there. I really saw her as more of a spider
girl.
If you're going to pick a video that would have what you
might call a finite interpretation, that one is wildly open for
interpretation.
Yeah, I didn't want to get too specific in it, you know.
The red, black, and
white Foetus color combo was at first inspired to some extent by propaganda and
pop art. Now that you have evolved, but kept with this concept, what new
meanings have you found with it and what keeps this limitation pragmatic?
Are you now inspired by the loud advertising of urban areas, as it
relates to the meaning in your recent work with Foetus?
The Red, White, Black and Gray
motif still has a lot of possibilities to me. I was always inspired by loud
advertising and where one’s eye falls when scanning a room. Lately I have been
exploring my palette in the context of minimalism. Interestingly I dig up some
screen prints I had made about 35 years ago, and hadn't seen since, and they
already hinted at that direction. There is a track on the new Foetus album,
"Red and Black and Gray and White", where the
lyrics came about partially thru researching cheerleader chants and military
cadence, where I use the idea of my palette as team colors and the flag.
In the last two albums or so, you've become more, I don't
know, maybe not, you've become more outright with the symbolism, and I've
started to appreciate that. For
instance, your piece that you wrote that was about the fear of deserts, one
would superficially assume that it's just maybe a whimsical name, because it
was around the same time as there was a piece that was about having the fear of
naming things. Now I come to read that
it was inspired a desert that makes sound just naturally by the wind....
Yes, the singing sands.
That's a phenomenon that happens in various sand dunes. Excellent examples of it in Oman. I traveled to Oman and made some field
recordings of that. I went with my
friend and colleague Jacob Kierkegaard,
and we crossed the country and searched out the environment, and made
recordings of the call to prayer. A lot
of those things were kind of rolled into that piece, but the backbone of it was
that I was writing a string quartet commission for Kronos Quartet, and that
piece starts and ends with the sounds of the singing sands. It's kind of a moaning type of sound which is
caused by the wind pushing the sand up the dunes - it reaches kind of a
critical point, the sand starts to roll back down again. They're not quite sure what causes the
moaning sound but the sand drifting down possibly because of the shape of the
grains of sand or something but you get this kind of low moaning sound. I came back and wrote the string parts.
Hopefully that'll come out on a recording some day, but …
They played it live in Australia when I was down there.
Hopefully they'll make a nice recording of it one day. Our relationship is continuing, I'm planning
to write my third piece for them this summer.
Oh cool, so you've got at least one more season, maybe
two of Venture Brothers under your belt.
Season Five is finished and that starts airing on May 19th. And yes, I think we’re doing season six.
Great! I wanted to
ask, especially with that material I was surprised to hear as much synthesizers
as I did, but it begs the question, if you're ever going to do maybe a purely
synthesizer album or something that's purely electronic, because I know that
you've done solo electronic performances.
It's possible. I've
been doing some work at the Elektron Musik Studion in Stockholm, and plan to
return there in May, we'll see what comes out of those recordings.
Is that where you were posting all of those pictures of
the old synthesizers that, some of them that Brian Eno favored and things like
that?
The VCS3, that was actually at STEIM in Amsterdam. Another electronic music studio workshop
place. I visited recently and also made
some recordings there.
Do you think there's a potential of maybe a solo
electronic tour? I know that you've done
some serialist pieces within the last few years.
I don't think a solo
electronic tour, maybe very special dates. The next tour I'm doing is actually Manorexia
in April/May in Europe, ten dates. I'm
not big on touring, I'm more about doing isolated shows and events.
I can understand that, it's probably pretty rough to tour
…
It's difficult for a seven piece ensemble that is not really
appropriate for playing in rock clubs.
Do you think the piece that you did that was inspired by
France Gall will ever get released anywhere?
No, that's highly unlikely.
Some pieces are just meant to be played once and disappear.
I find that to be admirable, but as a fan, you know, it's
painful!
The Residents had this theory of obscurity many years ago
before they released this album called Not
Available, and they decided that they weren't going to release the album
until they'd completely forgotten it existed.
Sometimes it's good to do something, and then forget it exists. Maybe I could do some self-archeology in 15
years time. Otherwise there's not going
to be anything to unearth when I die.
I guess that means I don't ask anymore questions about
reissues then! Hopefully you didn't have
a falling out with this person but I'd really like to ask about Raymond Watts,
because I read an interview that he did where he said he was only interested in
noise, like um, just, he was only compelled by the sound of plastic bending and
things like this until he heard about your work. That he came to work with you and obviously
was influenced by you, I mean it's pretty evident in his work. I wonder if he ever told you anything about
that or how that came to be.
It's fairly blatant that he was influenced by my work. One of his songs was such a rip off of me
that he dedicated it to me. He played
keyboards with me on one tour, the first European tour with a live band in
'88. And then we did some pieces
together on the first Steroid Maximus and that was about it. I'm not in
touch.
Being that you've got a lot of covers under your belt, do
you think that there's a cover album in the future?
Actually, there are
a three covers on this satellite album, so that should be enough to satiate
you. Two that have been released but
haven't been available widely. One of
which is a cover “Warm Leatherette” and the other was a cover of a song by Nino
Ferrer .
As far as sampling goes, how has that been something that
you have to deal with in the past? I know that there's been a lot of concerns
about clearing samples. I know that it's
often been very difficult to be able to tell whether you've been sampling or
whether you're playing something in the studio.
I do samples as building blocks, as textures, and sometimes
as a muse, and sometimes I dissect things.
They're very much part of my process, but not exclusively. I work without samples as well. I don't
usually use such large chunks that I've ever needed to clear one, or that I've
ever cleared one. I don't use them as a
backbone of a song like say The Black Eyed Peas might or something like that.
Yeah, that goes without saying, I mean you definitely
make a piece your own.
I use them in kind of a sculptural and layered way. Or
repitched and otherwise altered.
It's pretty impressive how you're able to restore some of
that stuff. Not necessarily concerned
with sampling, but that song “Wild Irish Rose” (on Steroid Maximus's first
album, an old woman singing with a very strained voice, almost mournfully), I
never would've thought of that, I don't know many people that would.
The vocal of that piece was actually brought in by Don
Fleming [best known for producing Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, and Hole and
his bands Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L.. and Gumball]. He was working at a tape copying house where
people would bring in old tapes to have them transferred, and that recording
that of the voice in “Wild Irish Rose” was someone's grandmother singing that
folk song in their living room. We added
accompanying elements on top of that, it's such a haunting recording.
Yeah it's definitely something of a masterpiece as far as
found sound goes.
Yeah. That was a good
gem.
I'm also wondering how your stance
on Constructivism has changed, because it came up a fair amount in early
interviews?
Uh, I don’t remember having a stance on Constructivism. Of course
I deeply admire the design qualities and aesthetics and they have effected me
greatly but I don't work with the same social agenda as they did.
With scrapping material, you're obviously someone who has
a great deal of concern for their work.
Would you say that you've got 80% material that doesn't make it off of
the cutting room floor or is it a certain thing where if it's not going right
you try to chisel it out? Amon Tobin is
a type of person who said that if he's not feelin' it, he just scratches it and
moves on, he doesn't try to push forward with it. But maybe you're a type of person that tries
to squeeze it out.
Yeah, sometimes I'll look at folders of albums that I've
been working on and I'll find 30 pieces that were started, and I'll look at
them and I'll see that I maybe spent the morning on something or sometimes a
bit longer, just forgot about it, and usually I don't really return to those
things. But then there are other things
which don't seem to be going anywhere, but eventually I revisit them. I may see that there's potential there and I
work on it a bit more, and it can evolve over the course of several years. On the last Manorexia album, Dinoflagellate Blooms, there are pieces
on that that I worked on over the course of maybe 6 years, coming back to them
and revisiting them, and going “oh that's no good” and then coming back to them
and saying, yeah, I like the essence of this, what do I do to draw out the
essence? Revisiting and editing and
editing and then getting it down and finally realizing, yeah, this is actually
really good. It takes patience. And then sometimes I know something is good,
and then the mix will take forever. So
it really depends, it's not like I use every scrap of stuff that I do, I don't
know if I could really give you an accurate percentage rate of the
fallout. Having said that I would love
to hear Amon Tobin’s rejects.
When you started doing Manorexia,
you sat down to do an ambient or minimal album, and what resulted was not
necessarily ambient nor was it always particularly minimal, per se, depending
on how you approach it I guess. It was a sort of organic composition where each
movement fed off of the last, from what I recall you reading. The new
Manorexia album, despite being also in 5.1 surround, struck me as much more
minimal and ambient in overall effect, more transcendent in overall effect.
Was that something that was a natural effect as another dimension to
your more bombastic/epic output, or is it something you have been striving to
do? In other words, have you been striving to develop your more
minimal/spacial side over time, or is it a natural expression to counter the
otherwise hyperactive side of your work?
Yes it is a reaction or balance to my epic output, but it comes
out organically. I guess I need to have outlets for both of these sides and the
spatial side is winning a bit right now. I do think the last Manorexia is a
real distillation of what I've wanted to achieve with that project, and it was
carved out over a long period of time
The questions I would have now are sort of dealing with
causation. It's multiple layered, it's
like now you're much different than you were about 15 years ago, and New York
is much different than it was about 15 years ago and I know that you do yoga now
and your area of New York is …
Is a great town for yoga!
[Laughs] You said before that there's starting to be a
lot of fratboys and useless stores. The
fact that you used to not be able to take a cab home before. And I wonder how much you think that's
influencing your current work.
You mean the gentrification of New York?
It seems like you're maybe not necessarily dealing with
pleasant material but you're dealing with it in a more positive way.
I think that any city evolves, and any city builds until it
dies and changes, and the process that surrounds me in New York is just a
repetition of what happened in Soho and then happened in Tribeca, and happened
in Williamsburg and has happened in
Dumbo. Artists move into a neighborhood
where rents are cheap, and maybe build up some kind of community and make it
attractive to people who wouldn't have moved there in a million years in the
first place, and eventually those people move in and push the artists out, and
the artists go somewhere else. That's a repeated pattern in this city and a lot
of other cities. The landscape changes
and Brooklyn is, I've been living in Brooklyn for 25 years, and it's a very
different aura than when I moved here. I
spoke earlier about the New York that I moved to, how very centralized it was,
how it was very East Village-centric.
It's not that at all anymore, it's much more dispersed and a little
eccentric. A lot of what's happening
culturally is mostly happening in Brooklyn, and in a wide area of
Brooklyn. Not just Williamsburg or
Bushwick, and Queens, and all over. But
I'm still very drawn to New York, there's so much going on here culturally,
it's such an overload of that. That
really inspires me.
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