Because I refuse to perform my music in a traditional sense of instrumentation, I don't have an amazing live stage spectacle to provide, and I don't want to go there. I don't see how the music would stay true to the spirit of the work.
I'm not an anti-online person. I get what the modern world's about and I understand that that's the nature of music dissemination.
I've been playing music all my life. I wasn't really fostered in a musical family, it was something I did despite the kind of limitations put on me. It was a series of misshapes and failures and things that didn't work out and other opportunities that kind of presented themselves. I just followed a journey.
I don't feel like music is getting more intense; I think generally the channel for deeper harmonic saturation is not just a sine wave - but a really crunched sine wave. The trend in music is towards a harmonic saturation. I wouldn't say I'm reacting against that. It's just a personal choice to move into some weird space. This also allows me breathing room in the future. It just felt like the right thing to step back on.
I work with digital audio, which is like sculpting, a form of chiseling down metal or wood. And I take audio and move it back and forth between the analog and digital realms and work with it almost like a plastic art until it takes forms in different shapes. And I use those figurines that come out of that type of work.
I love vinyl, but I'm not a 'vinyl person'. I still collect, but most of my stuff is digital.
If I was completely satisfied with an album, I'd probably give it up, because that'd mean I had attained some kind of state that was greater than I'd ever hope, so I think I'd just give it up. But I don't think that's going to happen.
I'm really sensitive to the beginning of a motif or a phrase or something that's kind of the backbone or becomes kind of the spine that you grow muscle tissue onto. You know from that, if you have that good beginning, it's like everything that grows off it often has potential. Maybe I'm good at that early bit of recognition of pieces of potential. I'm not sure.
I'm trying to find a way to make music work as a living. People used to make their living selling albums. Those days are over! It's kind of an odd time. I guess it's kind of like writing.
I take the literary or textual aspect really seriously and I really enjoy writing weird album titles. I did a PhD; I enjoy writing.
You can't be sure there's not a God, so why live your life in hatred or the denial of that. It's better to be open to the possibility of it. Just because the whole conceit of scientism... is that our world is explained by two atoms smashing, right? Our green planet came out of that. But I just don't buy where the original line comes back to, those two atoms. The explanations aren't fully in yet.
I wouldn't say that I'm a consummate live artist. Album work is kind of just like quilt weaving or something. But live music is just like a method of emptying out the mind through volume. Volume as a form that allows you to do different things. And that doesn't really translate to recorded music, like how do you listen to that, on Spotify or in your car? It's not the same kind of effect. I would say that the loudness is a huge part of what I do live.
It depends on what kind of minimalism you're talking about, of course. I love both those artists - Brian Eno and William Basinski. I would say my minimalism references are early American minimalists from the 70s.
Sometimes it's a fraught, kind of laden world of performance that I think can be really dubious, but it's also super fun to almost desecrate an instrument that for 500 years has been associated with God.
I'm not a peak oil person. I'm not a biohazard apocalyptic kind of freak. I don't have a supply of weapons or gold bars under my house.
I really support criticism as a craft and as a vocation. People who devote as much time to thinking about sound through writing as I do practicing and forming it, the whole system of journalism seems to not yield rewards sustainable as a craft. So few can spend enough time to be serious about it and approach it with confidence and a kind of depth. And that's good on one level, because you have some leveling, that's kind of maybe leveled the petty fiefdoms of undeserving people but it's also made it hard to make a living as a writer.
My peer network is international. It's people all over the place who I know, and respect their work. It's not really delineated by traditional nationalist ideas.
You have to make rough decisions with sequencing and work within the limitations of having good audio for 15 minutes on a vinyl side.
Working with devices and guitar pedals and mixers and synthesizers is what I do, and I prefer people not focus on that because it's kind of distracting from what the point should be. At least for me, it's to have the primacy of aurality in the experience of that evening.
There's a limit of any form of representation; it's the same about writing about visual art. I still think it's useful for people to think through things in a deeper way, and use adjectives even if they're not sufficient, you know? I always find it interesting what terms they use to refer to the work. It's always different, and that's kind of intriguing. Sometimes it's clichés, but often it's really creative ways of paraphrasing or reformatting what to mean seems something else. I like that, personally.
Vinyl's just a fun endgame step. I work with analogue signal chains too, but the mp3 is the way I listen to music.
I did dance music for a short period of time but I felt like the fruit for me was in the outer dance world so I stopped doing overt techno and I think, in terms of rhythm, I enjoy things that feel like they're falling off, like they're just barely holding on.
I definitely enjoy liturgical work and choral work from the 15th century and 16th century, but I play in churches with a bit of trepidation, and it's not something I enjoy because there are all these problems. It's an implication that you're part of the theological apparatus, like for atheists or something, and I don't like that. I like playing with the form, inhabiting the tropes of religious music without that promise of angels at the end. It can be awkward, you know?
I download music just like anybody else, but it's a weird relationship when you're a musician.
I'm not a nostalgic person for the glory days of 8-track sales at the local K-Mart. But there's a little bit of flattery and a little bit of horror. It's a mixture. It's like sublime shock and awe, but also terror. That's always the way I feel about how music flows through those types of networks. I'm mostly cool with it, but I definitely appreciate when people support the work.
