Part 2
Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives through, for example, file sharing, jamming or just talking about ideas?
I think this all depends on which project I’m working on. There are certain projects that are very narrow and personal on purpose, and there are others that absolutely require full partnership. I have one collaborator in particular who I’ve done two records with named Sangam. He and I have a really amazing relationship musically, and our workflow certainly reflects it. Neither of us are overly precious about what we make, so we end up just simply passing stems back and forth with a lot of openness to how each may interpret what either of us has made. When we get the end results, we very rarely have much to say, because that’s the process that I think we find most interesting. It’s really exciting to see what someone else may do with your sounds and ideas when you choose to have faith in the person on the other end.
Other projects, like my latest Reflecting on a Dying Man, I choose to be largely isolated in my writing, and am very meticulous on my own. Instead, I try to find people that can do certain particular thing’s and work with them on giving me interpretations of certain parts, that I can then use at my discretion. I had a fair amount of featured players on this record, and almost all of them I basically told exactly what I was looking for, and got recordings that I could then use however I though made sense.
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?
So every record I’ve ever made, I’ve made while also having a relatively strenuous job at the same time. My day job has always been as a creative and a writer, so I’m always working on something creative in one way or another. When I first started working on music, I thought this would be more limiting than it has really been. I find that what I release intellectually and creatively is very different than what I release in commercial creativity, so I tend to be a little more eager to pursue certain more experimental concepts with music to counterbalance my day.
Because of this, I actually like to get up early and write when I can, which is a good way for me to get some initial thoughts down, and usually quite efficiently too. When I’m working on specific music ideas, I like to have Ableton open throughout the day, partially just in case I have an specific idea that I want to get down, but also because I find that the stream of consciousness of my process with music can help jumpstart my brain for other creative concepts I may be working on in other ways.
Otherwise, I don’t know if there’s a specific rhyme or reason to when I work on music. I find that when I isolate myself specifically to work on music, I almost get intimidated by my own intentions, vs. when I try to just sit down and let myself work pretty freely.
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?
Absolutely. So my most recent album is called Reflecting on a Dying Man and is narratively about my experience moving back to my small Appalachian hometown to be with my father in the last few months of his life. Going into this experience, I didn’t necessarily intent to write this album, but I did intend to focus on the specific emotional experience and try to turn it into something substantively creative. Once the experience was over, and I had done most of the initial grieving, I sat down and decided that I wanted to create an album that could in some capacity convey the experience I went through while I was in this strange place and strange time in my life.
It’s difficult to spell out something of this emotional magnitude through mostly instrumental music, but the adjective I most often hear to describe my music is “cinematic”, which I think ultimately just means that people can feel a sense of narrative momentum within the music, so I wanted to take the stories of the experience and apply this idea. To do this, I knew I wanted to make an album that flowed fluidly from the beginning to the end, with a real plot arc that could be detected across the whole body of work, when heard in the order of the songs. Because of this, the songwriting process was very particular. As I wrote new songs, I had a pretty immediate idea of what purpose they served in the plot arc of the album, by the feeling and energy of the song. And by this same logic, I knew what kind feeling and song was missing when I was starting to finish the complete project. The last song I wrote on the album was the second to last song. I knew this song specifically needed to serve as the calm and contemplative valley before the peak which ended the album, so I specifically sought to write something that was sad and soothing, and sort of lonely, a resonant thought that dominated the experience that inspired the entire album.
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?
I heard a quote once from a famous author, maybe Hemmingway, that the best place to write is in front of a window facing a brick wall. I’ve always really liked this statement, but I think for me, it applies more to people. I definitely feed off the energy of others, particularly when I’m working in something creatively. However, I don’t like working with other people in the room necessarily. I like knowing that people are around, maybe in another room, or maybe just in in a neighboring studio, but not with me. I think I can get more lonely than I give myself credit for, and this can get distracting sometimes, so I like knowing that if I start getting stuck in my own head, or I start feeling consumed by the typically darker themes that I write in my music, I can go outside and find someone smoking a cigarette. I also think I really cherish the feeling of other people being creative around me as well, but isolated within their own corners. As long as I have a dark room, with a fairly narrow field of vision and some soft ambient lights, I feel like I can work for days. Too much light is distracting.
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 actually really enjoy the process of deconstructing and re-assembling a live show because it feels like there is a “right way”. It’s much easier to know what doesn’t work in a live show, than when you’re writing a song, and you’re trying to express yourself in a unique way. With a live set, or at least how I devise my live sets, it’s so much more about trying to figure out an optimal adaptation of songs that have already been written, and trying to figure out the correct puzzle pieces that will make it all fluid, which is methodical and mathematical for me. Sometimes it will spawn specific creative revelations that then turn into really interesting compositional ideas, but usually it’s just about taking the pieces I’ve already built, and turning them into something both new and familiar.
With my live set, there currently isn’t a ton of opportunity for improvisation, just by the nature of the way it’s programmed. However, I’m starting to build more pieces designed to read the room, and adjust tones that can capitalize on the energy, or lack of energy, in a situation. I’m always trying to find new ways to build sets that incorporate songs people haven’t heard live before, but it’s challenging because that also takes away from the time I’d like to spend on creating new music in general.
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?
They’re inextricable. You can play the exact arrangement Samuel Barber’s adagio for strings with a bunch of saw wave synths and it will mean absolutely nothing because the sombre warmth of the strings make that song so rich. By the same logic, you can write a song that’s intended for a Ukulele, and play with a Harpsichord to make something completely different and maybe better, because of the relationship that the chords have with the instrument. With my particular musical sensibilities, I think the timbre and tone is almost a higher importance, or at least equal to the composition itself.
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?
It seems to me that this is exactly why people tend to first call my music “cinematic”, when they try to explain it. There’s an inherent relationship that it has with visuals, and there are visual accompaniments that people immediately experience. I think the phenomenon of this sensory synaesthesia with music is most apparent for me in nature, particularly with rain and wind. When I go for walks at night, I like to listen to music with a long of swaying strings, and every once in a while, I will catch a wisp of wind in the trees with the sound of a stretching in strings, and at that moment, I truly believe in God. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s so frequent I feel that it’s something I look forward to now.
On this note, this is largely the categorical inspiration for the monthly show I host on NTS radio titled ‘Night Shift’. The show is really about that time of night, around 4:30-6:00, when most people are not yet awake, and night shift employees are just starting to head home after their work day. This time, all those little moments of sensory connection with music are especially profound because there’s so little sound and pollution, which makes tiny sounds especially interesting. I always use the sound of a lighter being dropped at a gas station as my example for some arbitrary reason. Again, it’s all about the narrative that the connection of senses creates, inviting you as the sensory participant to fill in the blanks of the story on your own.
It’s a truly beautiful thing, and honestly the reason why I make music today.
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?
I suppose that with my most pensive art, I want to create a dialogue with the listener about the subtle story I want to tell. With Reflecting on a Dying Man, I wanted to create something that was simultaneously wildly universal, and completely personal to the point where you may never truly understand the affectation of the story. When my father died, I used to tell people who would kindly try to console me that it would happen to everyone twice. So in that way, the story is completely universal. However, my specific take on it, and the conversation about atrophy, and the way I tried to communicate that through this specific medium, should feel very personal and nearly impossible to understand to its full extent without having a long conversation with me about it. This is the best art for me - it invites people in through its aesthetic, but then continues the invitation with further examination that never full feels satisfied. It constantly pushes the viewer or listener to continue contextualizing. I think that this will always be my approach to what I do musically and artistically with projects as dense as this one in particular. I’m already spending a lot of time thinking about the next project, and the stories that will comprise it, and I’m excited to push the artist / consumer relationship even further, and build on that universal / impossibly personal dynamic. Life is wildly complicated for everyone, and I want to make things that investigate my understanding of it, in the way that I feel like I’m capable of investigating, so that other people can feel like they can go into these territories in their own way, but through what I make to nudge the process.
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 think we’ll always challenge ways to deconstruct the way we think of the relationship between music and sound itself. We’ve made the same song thousands of times over and called it new, but sound collages continues to feel fresh by comparison sometimes, and I think we’re going to continue to push that idea further and further. I don’t know if it’s always going to be good, but we’re going to push it as far as we can until we see that the original chords and structures of music were always designed to be a celebration of universality, not an attempt to create something new.
