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Part 2

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

My schedule tends to shift a lot in normal times, but for the past six months it’s been pretty regular, which I really love. I wake up, have some toast and tea, then I draw a tarot card. Learning the tarot was one of my lockdown pastimes and I really enjoy starting my day with this simple ritual. I then dig into whatever work is on my list. Lately, it’s been a lot of emails and administration surrounding the album launch. Still, I may find some time to sit down and play something. If I’m recording or editing, I’ll head into my little home studio. I generally break for lunch around one, work again in the afternoon for a few hours, and then either go for a walk or exercise. In pre-Covid times, I was going to a nearby gym. These days, I work out at home. In addition to physical training being the main way that I care for my health, I consider it to be integral to my creative process. My gymnastics rings now hang in the doorway to my studio so there’s TRULY no separation.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

“Best I Can” is one of my favourite songs on the new album. It began as a meditative plucked old-time style fiddle tune. I love old-time tunes, especially the ‘crooked’ ones that have extra beats added here and there, creating a kind of lopsided hook. I wrote the initial melody using improvised lyrics, then began revising and adding verses. The song grew into a love letter to my younger self and to my ancestors, inspired by my fascination with epigenetics, intergenerational trauma and resilience.

When I went to record it in the studio, I realized the melody was sitting really high in my voice and it needed to come down a bit. I transferred it to the viola (which sounds a fifth lower than a violin) but it felt too heavy. So, we tried it with only a drum loop and two different Juno keyboard patches outlining the chord changes. Something about the regularity of the beat mixed with the irregularity of the changes just worked. I then added a third verse and some very sparse background vocals. Lastly, Alexander added some sweet Mellotron woodwind pads. I’m really happy with the way it turned out – poised between light and dark, both sonically and emotionally.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

When I’m at my most creative, I feel I’m listening with curiosity and trying to sing or play back what I’m hearing, without the goal of making anything. Or sometimes I’m just letting physical sensations take the lead completely. In some ways it feels very similar to dreaming. In fact, I get a lot of song lyrics from dreams so the states must be somehow connected.

I’m not able to consistently create this state, but there are things that help. Putting my phone in another room and turning off entirely is essential. Walking often get things flowing. Just sitting down with an instrument, especially one I haven’t played in a while, or one I barely know how to play, helps also.

How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

I always try to play a song live before recording it, since it never feels done before I’ve played it live. Playing to a live audience gives me information about how a song works or doesn’t work. This comes partly from how I feel while I’m playing it and partly from how the audience responds. It feels like having two wells inside of me, one that gets filled by the internal gratification of having made something, and a second that gets filled when I’ve delivered that thing to an audience in a satisfying way.

To me, improvisation and composition have a different kind of relationship. One flows into the other. When I decide that I’m going to write a song, or compose a piece of music, usually nothing comes out. It’s only when I sit down to improvise, or just play, that interesting things happen - things that feel compelling enough that I’d like to repeat them or write them down or record them. There is, of course, craft involved in shaping those initial ideas into more fully formed pieces, but the most integral piece is always the initial nugget yielded in improvisation (even IF it gets thrown out eventually).  

How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

I use many different instruments to compose, and I’ve often noticed how much using a particular instrument can influence what I write. This has to do with the specific timbral quality of the instrument, the kinds of patterns that the instrument’s physical setup lends itself to, mixed with my own technical abilities and taste. Several years ago, I began to take songs written on one instrument and move them to another. I was often amazed at what a difference it would make to the overall effect of the song.

The most profound example of this is when I began to use the Omnichord, which forms the foundation of the Linaire album. The Omnichord is very limited in what it can do tonally, as it only plays root position triads and dominant sevenths and is only capable of playing one chord at a time. As someone with a tendency to work with harmonic complexity and specific chord voicings in my writing, it was a refreshing challenge, forcing me to write more simply and deliberately. Adapting my existing songs for Omnichord involved a lot of simplifying, and I think that all of the songs were actually improved as a result of that process.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

I don’t have synaesthesia under normal circumstances, but I find that my wires get crossed at the extremes. For example, if someone suddenly shines a bright light in my face, I experience it as being “too loud.” Similarly, if I hear a sudden loud noise, I usually experience a lapse in my field of vision. I’ve always had profound physical/emotional sensations when listening to or playing music and as I’ve become more in touch with my body (through physical training and somatic work), this tendency only seems to get stronger.  

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

Much of my writing focuses on things that are largely hidden or private – intimate relationships, ancestors, internal processes like incubation, emotional states. If the world were a farm, my job would be to till the soil, turn the compost heap and occasionally plant seeds. Although this work appears to be less glamorous or important than growing the prize-winning squash, it is an essential part of the process. I believe that for there to be lasting change in the world, those same changes need to be present on the deepest, most personal level. I feel drawn to work on that level.

I’ve been reading Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown. Its basic premise is that movements and societies can be modelled on various processes that that occur in nature. What each process has in common is that each individual organism is intimately connected to the things that are directly adjacent to them. And through that, all things are connected and cared for. The focus is on building relationships, nurturing one’s immediate surroundings, each member contributing what it is they truly have to give. It makes a lot of sense to me.

In this spirit, I try to also spend time educating myself, sharing my skills with others, caring for my close friends and family, and participating in movements I feel drawn to in whatever capacity I can.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

I don’t really think it’s that remarkable. Music remains this mysteriously compelling organization of sound that humans have always gravitated towards in some capacity. And, it’s always been at the mercy of whatever other things happen to be going on in a culture.

We live in a troubled society where very few people feel secure in having their basic needs met. I think this really damages creative incubation and expression, as well as the basic enjoyment of learning something new without pressure of being good at it right away. We don’t get to go deeply enough into the thing we’re trying to do because we’re always trying to perform or progress quickly. We’re also often competing or actively trying to resist competing, something that has derailed me many times.

My vision is really just that we as a society progress towards taking better care of each other so that we may take our time to really engage deeply and thoughtfully with the incredible wealth of resources available to us, and then make things from that place.


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