Name: Adulkt Life
Members: Christopher Rowley (vox), John Arthur Webb (guitar), Kevin Hendrick (bass), Sonny Barrett (drums)
Interviewee: Christopher Rowley
Nationality: British
Current release: Adulkt Life's new album There Is No Desire is out now.
Recommendations: Apartment House doing Morton Feldman’s piano and strings on Another Timbre, or their version of Julius Eastman’s ‘Femenine.’
The French film Hotel Harabati, directed by Brice Cauvin. It’s from ten years ago and stars Laurent Lucas.
Anything by Olivia Laing

If you enjoyed this Adulkt Life interview and would like to stay up to date with the band and their music, visit them on Instagram, and bandcamp.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

In my body, different things happen, depending on different musics and the environments I hear them in. I will say I love that pulse quickening, sharpening feeling, heart to tummy to eyes to lips ratio when hearing something “moving.”

Emotionally manipulative in the old money, but to be honest I do a large part of new / discovering / listening in the tub after a long day at work and eyes will close, patterns and shapes will emerge - usually listening to something on another timbre. So the entire soundworld grows anew, that becomes a horizontality in my head …

Or!! Dancing shoulders to hips to legs. These are the main three!

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

I first started to make music “consciously” during a training period, being part of Huggy Bear, and then it was hitting stuff / rhyming to match the hitting of things / tapped out on phone book urgencies to create racing and circulating patterns for revolutionary punk rock. Well, that was the idea/l anyway.



Having no musical training in any academic fashion and never really having sung before, it was a physical matching of words to actions / actions being things heated up / let loose. I guess that’s a training of sorts? Rehearsing and finessing whatever that wild or unhinged part of yourself is to fit in with others hitting, rubbing, stomping.

And even in Adulkt Life, twenty five plus years later, the principles aren’t a lot different: make a sharp noise, a burning sound, follow it, twist it, throw it, then give it a semblance of rules based on your own notebook.

This is how we fake our way to being music based.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

13-16 is pretty seismic isn’t it. Bowie and Talking Heads, Wire and Slits were my first “touchstones.”



You listen so hard because you want to be them, be the material of the songs and their narratives and you do this nearly every time you play something or find something new: prise the scenery of the apparatus open to feel, not grown up, but more experienced!? Sonically grown??

Enriched and thwarted by desire, as you get older you reorientate why you listen or why something’s of great importance and you still find yourself amazed and animated, concerned, thrilled.

But whether you like it or not, your removed by a few degrees because you did grow and start experiencing love and hate and wonder for yourself rather than via the lips and twist and firedancing of your favourite artist

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

I want to create worlds, small worlds, localised places that are recognisable, and pepper them and infect them with patterns of emotional relevancies to everyday life. So my eyes are opened and those who listen become open / they’re really a call to arms!! A shared space of narrative rock chucking static tearing.

They’re love songs for the discontent, for the blankets of ugliness to be ripped off for soft, tender spotlit moments to be recognised as axiomatic to existence!!

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

Ooh that’s a good one isn’t it? – I think in a collaged way, and have slightly synaesthetic senses to sound and words and compositions of the aforementioned ...

I think I unlodge something that’s probably pre-existing, even as a looser idea or essence, even within politics, within the daily grind, within desire or love or community - those mainly - and I hold it to something seemingly disparate, juggle the image, see if I can find a new way to illuminate something??

So discover, then create upon the discovery maybe. Not like building a cemetery on a ancient burial ground but a den within a municipal stronghold, a new book using an old book. It has to resonate with what’s lived and recognisable but then can be dragged out or placed as a spy.

The best espionage takes a while, if ever, to be uncovered. Of course I’m only that successful ... I’m bound to get caught and then sing like a drugged canary.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I listen to sound first, so I’m just like Paul Simon which I find funny and comforting >/

Definitely I associate a rush or flow of sound with a picture, an a image. Then I piece it together more, not necessarily to make it more cohesive because it's adhesive and absorbs meaning and peels and sticks like a flier walls stickiness in a club.

If I get something straight away it’ll fade. If I get confused by it, I’m enthralled a lot longer. That’s the erotics of listening. Pleasure's, I suppose, pulled in, rebuffed, confused, thwarted, consoled, reopened ...

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Everything’s musical isn’t it. The older you get, if your still into music as an art form and not just entertainment or whatever, all sounds and genres you become exposed to heighten pleasure, pay off, concentration, and that collector instinct, for better or worse, to know, discover, label, appreciate.

When I started listening to Japanese onkyō or AMM or Chris Watson’s field recordings, you retrain your ear and totally replenish the narrative bubbles. Bernard Gunter, Pauline Oliveros, Porter Ricks ...



Like the Slits sighed “silence is a rhythm too” and nothing’s truer than that statement or that song - it's life!!



[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I love a ragged short story in a block of flats. I love a drawn out longing in a bucolic field with real instruments. I like a virtually silent electronic code sequence to become part of … love to find a lover emerging coughing and rubbing eyes out of a train’s steam.  Very romantic ... the proposition of clean tissue ...

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

“Art of Boxing” - it’s on the new record. It’s got a lot of different parts to it, these, to me, are the stories in a tower block. There’s a sense of verticality / tension / drama.

For quick reference, it was a love song to Tricky. I wanted to answer a question he hadn’t asked and the song was a plod of imminent violence-asking, a no hoper character to do some dirty work for them. In late capitalism, there’s nothing other than vigilantes, money, and desperation.

Our protagonist is saved by John Webb’s guitar motif that twists the song and daubs the building in not just baked sodium but fireworks. There’s hope of a way out that Kevin and Sonny try to open the spaces. So our boxer, cos we’re all boxers in this century 21 “fight,” can sing clear and defiant from the roof.

That song is beautiful to sing and to be in the midst of.

Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

The experiments are accidental, they’re relative to heightened senses, bad moods, transcendent, messed up ness. There’s little scientific about them other than the occurrences of amplification, buzz and currents running through them.

But I love science and experiments in other's music. It makes me appreciate the rawness of our own and the filigree in their difference.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

Adulkt Life music to me sounds like the way we live and experience in the locations we pace and crave and create in each day with whatever means we possess to get beyond the meagre or flaccid and make our monsters and saviours walk together.

We make songs that come from hope and fear so we can in turn be infused with their supports and antidotes. Love as a valued bi-product slips out like a sneeze in a crowded train, mucus membrane stuck to the back of your hand to save embarrassment.

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?

I feel the things should be linked, each thing you do should be the best you can do it. Even if you don’t perform it this way, life’s so full of sights, sounds, actions, compromises, interactions, beauty, function, ugliness, regret. But they’re not boring or mundane until you sit and realise they’re the elements that move you, move us in music.

I feel more in control or able to bear witness to something more creative and in that process something closer to a real me, a better me, than one making a coffee or a meal would be, however much that sounds tacky. I’m more excited singing than washing up or helping in the garden.

Still, for how much longer who knows. But then the time, conditions and imperative should increase the thrill of it all and show us death in the corner warming u, round seven

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

Gas do this. Oval do that, Cocteau Twins, Labradford. They’re the first ones that come to mind.



If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I wouldn’t make a wish for the future. I wouldn’t even want my imagination’s vanity to steer me in that direction.

I like to come across genres and aspects, hidden treasure, stuff to customise my thoughts to, duel with my expectations, have illicit considerations thereof, be Robinson Crusoe not Tom Hanks but find shit thereabouts and wanna find someone to ask what the heck is this or still have you been exposed to ...??