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Part 2

Listening is also an active, rather than just a passive process. How do you see the role of the listener in the musical communication process?

To be honest, I can only understand it from my perspective as a listener.

I still actively love listening to and discovering music as much as I do making it. For me, I’m looking for emotional soul mates or something that excites me and perhaps leads me to think differently about music.

Reaching audiences usually involves reaching out to the press and possibly working with a PR company. What's your perspective on the promo system? In which way do music journalism and PR companies  change the way music is perceived by the public?

Interview-wise, I sometimes find that my extrapolations get in the way. Ultimately, the music on the album I’ve just made is what (I think) I want to say.

Reviews in the mainstream music media are, by necessity, pretty insubstantial and can’t really get to the heart of things. But as reviewers are often working from low grade streams on their computers and having to write 150 words to a deadline, that’s to be expected. As a consequence, online analysis has become more vital as it can be as long or short as required and isn’t working to a magazine’s specific agenda.

That said, in the UK, the genre press is good. There are a number of magazines with a surprisingly wide remit (Prog, Wire, Louder Than War, Shindig!) despite seemingly being focused around one particular genre. By comparison, the mainstream media and newspapers often project a limited and flawed narrative about the music industry and the artists that should be promoted.

Do you have a musical vision that you haven't been able to realise for technical or financial reasons – or an idea of what music itself could be beyond its current form?

About 11 years ago when downloads were gaining in sales, I had an idea about the album as app (containing videos, perspectives, album notes, works in progress etc). Basically, it was a way to make the seemingly intangible appeal to collectors.

Subsequently, I’ve seen a couple of similar things on the iPad (an app dedicated to Bethoven’s Ninth Symphony and an app dedicated to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland) and I’m guessing several big name R&B stars have developed things along similar lines. The problem is that these things are incredibly expensive to develop and require rare expertise plus unlimited bandwidth (the latter a reality now in a way it wasn’t in 2006).

As mentioned earlier, I like the idea of creating an epic music that’s as narratively complex and detailed as a Charlie Kaufmann script and one that transcends genres in a similar way, while occasionally obviously drawing on them. Mmm…Progressive Rock, then!

Please recommend two artists to our readers which you feel deserve their attention.

It’s a difficult question, because I believe sometimes there’s genius worthy of further attention in the mainstream.

The lyrics of Joni Mitchell, the melodies of McCartney, the wildness of Neil Young, the uniqueness of Robert Fripp and Kate Bush, the voice of Guy Garvey, the transcendent beauty of Miles Davis’s sound or Arvo Pärt’s compositions are all worth a deeper look even though they’re already firmly in the public eye.

As an example, a band like Pink Floyd is ludicrously popular, but they’re still worth analysing. Dark Side Of The Moon is still a wholly satisfying album statement and in the band’s wilfully experimental early years, you can hear the birth of many musical styles and ideas that influenced anyone from Air to Porcupine Tree to Jean-Michel Jarre to Throbbing Gristle to Swans to Barclay James Harvest to Nick Drake to Talk Talk to Soft Machine to The Damned to Tangerine Dream and dozens of others.

In terms of undiscovered gems, I’d recommend Keaton Henson’s Romantic Works, which he describes as being DIY Classical. In some ways it’s like a more organic and fragile version of approaches by Eno, Max Richter or Virginia Astley.

I also liked the 2016 album by Ryley Walker, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. He’s a young-ish US based singer-songwriter who’s developed his sound out of influences from Bert Jansch, Tim Buckley and John Martyn, and taken these traditional approaches somewhere fresh (adding hints of Post-Rock production etc).


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