Part 2
Composing has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?
This tension is right at the heart of what I do. My goal is to make music that sounds both futuristic and incredibly ancient, like alien hieroglyphs carved in ancient sandstone.
On both “To Shasta Mill” and “On The Needle And The Wound” I’m throwing super-contemporary electronic ideas of texture, rhythm and form against much older harmonic and melodic sensibilities.
How much potential for something “new” is there still in composition? What could this “new” look like?
I think lots of potential … that’s the exact goal.
What role do electronic tools and instruments play for your creative process? What does your creative space / studio look like and what tools does it contain?
I’m a sucker for weird tape recorders and strange little gadgets like the Wingie and the Brand New Noise devices. And my iPhone is essential - I sing ideas into it all the time, wherever I am, and record whatever sounds catch my imagination.
The noises on “Dark Boots Choral” are the sound of the Victoria Line train to Blackhorse Road. And distortion, whether natural, analog, or digital, is such a key component to producing interesting sound.
The distorted synths on “Herve’s Goodbye” bring the piece into the modern era, as do the distorted pads and strings on “Fear And Violence.”
It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?
Artistically it’s just another ingredient, useful or not, depending on the concept. I often do create as part of a bigger conceptual vision, but it can also remove the beautiful Brian Eno idea of drawing the target around where the arrow lands.
I do tend to see my records in a conceptual framework, but sometimes the record precedes the concept. I don’t think that’s wrong.
I like reinterpreting the work’s meaning to me with the same lack of preconceptions a new audience might have. Often I simply hear a sound or phrase in my head, and the idea or initial meaning for me forms along with the music. “Thursday Optimism” was a feeling as I sat at the keyboard, the title came later but was an honest description of where the piece came from.
Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?
I like short forms. Tracks like “From Pain Magic” or “Apart Together” to me are perfect in their brevity.
Perhaps it comes from scoring films and TV. But a piece that makes a short emotional experience and then disappears is strangely beautiful to me. I also like the oratorio form … many short pieces making up longer work.
A piece like John Luther Adams’s brilliant Become Ocean might not come from my brain at this point … perhaps in future.
For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. Few works these days, however, are performed beyond their premiere. What, do you feel, does this mean for composers, and the music they write, and how does this reality influence your own work?
Maybe the life of a composer has always been beset with that reality.
While the works of a select few end up in an enduring repertoire, that wasn’t a guaranteed outcome even for Bach. Without rediscovery after years of neglect, his work might well have languished in obscurity.
I do think it’s a possibility that faces all artists, which is why I have the utmost respect for anyone courageous enough to make it their life.
How, would you say are live performances of your music and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?
Early next year I’ll be playing the score of Carousel, my long-gestating collaboration with filmmaker Dan Popa, live as the film is screened.
I’m aiming for an ultra-modern version of the old-school cinema pianist. It’s an opportunity to reinvent an old idea as something super-contemporary, which fits nicely with my creative motivations.
To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?
My current take is that it’ll be a great tool for generating happy accidents, but I’m not convinced it will ever be able to do anything “intentional” other than a glorified imitation. To focus on making deeply personal work that aspires to innovation will serve both audiences and keep artists safe.
I used AI for the video for “E-Car Soul,” as I wanted to experience it as a creative tool before it was an artistic offense! I found it very interesting once I started trying to deliberately subvert its process by asking things of it that were perhaps hard to implement or understand.
I probably won’t use it again, but that experience was very creatively interesting, and I’m very happy with the video, I don’t feel it removed my artistic agency at all.
The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?
Painful as it is to the composer’s ego, perhaps it doesn’t serve art well to have everything an artist ever made available for ever?
NZ composer Douglas Lilburn wrote,
“we composers are now faced with a musical continuum that has …expanded enormously in breadth, geographically, and in depth, historically. We know, from a celebrated anecdote, of Mozart's delight at discovering a Bach motet. But I wonder whether Mozart, teeming with his own inspiration, would have had much time or inclination for the 45 large volumes of the Bach Gesellschaft Edition, and the collected works of other masters.”
Spotify’s all-you-can-eat buffet has had a kind of Vegas effect on music appreciation I think, and I think I was happier with older models where scarcity perhaps bred a deeper sense of value.
