Part 2
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
My writing process starts out in a very solitary place, but then I bring it to the studio, or to the band, and the writing process continues. When you play the song with a band, it goes in different directions. When you bring it into the studio, it goes in different directions. I want as many ideas as possible from everyone in the band. At some point, I have to sift through all those ideas and then it goes back to being a solitary process. I feel that the writing process hasn’t truly ended until the song is arranged, recorded and mixed.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
It’s possible that music should exist outside of society. Society isn’t eternal, it isn’t nature, it is an often-flawed system created by people. Music can help you deal with living inside of a flawed society, that is probably where it helps the most. That’s the origin of the blues, that’s where most of our music comes from. Music can also be a little vacation from life, something you enjoy the way you’d enjoy seeing the Aurora Borealis. Outside of everything, a little beautiful escape.
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
When I’m writing, just getting ideas down, not second guessing them, I find that the personal comes out without you being aware of it. You think you’re writing word salad but it all comes from your psyche. I’ve written about a break-up months before it happens, because I felt it in my subconscious, sensed it coming long before it actually happened. When you ask your brain to create something, I think the first instinct is to be honest, to tackle ideas that matter to you. The big ones are love, loss, pain, hope, desire, it comes out whether you want it to or not.
There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
It is ultimately science, it’s math. The relationship between sounds, frequencies. The music of the spheres. It’s fun to think of music as something cosmic. I think the appeal of a band like Kraftwerk is that they connect music with science, they SOUND like music and science. I personally love manipulating sounds in my computer, putting midi through echos and arpeggiator. It feels like a legitimate art, like learning to play an instrument. So music and science are always interacting in my creative process, however hidden.
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
There are creative ways to approach anything in life. Music is something that you perform, you record it, you sell it, it is a very visible form of creativity, but there are so many ways to express yourself privately. The way your home is decorated, the food that you make. I’m in awe of the creativity of chefs, I’m in awe of someone that can design and build an instrument or furniture or a house.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
I think the listener has to do a certain amount of the work there. We all seek some new kind of magic, in my humble opinion, and music can provide that. It can be alien or familiar, whatever you’re looking for at the moment. It stretches the definition of communication, it can say things we’ve never heard before in that particular way. Not always but it can.
