Part 2

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these?

I think learning to be comfortable playing music for audiences has brought out, or encouraged, certain aspects of my personality that I wouldn't have expressed had it not been for performing. I have never really been an outwardly social or extroverted person, and definitely not a natural performer or entertainer.

As far as within the music itself, that's a really interesting question. I think it partly depends on what music and sound mean for an individual, like how I might identify certain aspects of music as metaphor, or ways of representing emotion, for example.

I am prone to reach for an emotional resonance with sound and music, definitely not an intellectual one, and of course certain combinations of sounds, timbres and rhythms have the potential to evoke any number of emotional states for both musicians and listeners. I think it's analogous to writing in the sense that certain combinations of words might set a tone or a mood depending on how the writer assembles or uses them, or the context and placement of the words within the structure of the work as a whole.

With that in mind, I am less acting out, and instead perhaps trying to reflect deeper inner states through the creative process with the abstractions and ephemerality of sound.

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility [...] to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that?

I totally agree. it's difficult to see why any artist would want to limit themselves creatively.

Given that, I also think one musician's ideal way of expressing themselves might be another musician's version of being limited. Any musician can utilize any manner of sounds or tools and still be limited, just as another can focus on a single instrument and push concepts of music forward.

I guess it's really less about the specific musical genre, textures or sounds a musician works with, and more about how willing one is to push against the limitations of what's considered acceptable or familiar.

Do you feel that your music or your work as an artist needs to have a societal purpose or a responsibility to anyone but yourself?

I guess the question for me depends on how (or if) one places value on the role of art in society, like what function it might, or should serve. I think some people (places, institutions, societies) place great value on art, while others seem to background or even undermine its value.

As someone who was educated around and given an opportunity to understand the importance of art at an early age, I place very high value on it as an essential part of a healthy society. Generally speaking, I make art for myself in the sense that I try to work from the inside out. Through that my aim is to create something that has the potential to relate to others.

Not to sound flippant, but I think what I am trying to say relates to the idea that in order to fully love others we need to first love ourselves.

For me personally, music has in many instances influenced my decisions and views and literally changed my life. What has this been like for you and how do you think does music make its power felt?

This has definitely been true for me as well, and was especially true in my formative years as I was developing my sense of self. I grew up in and around Chicago in the 80s and 90s and the music scene there was incredibly potent and diverse. I had the privilege of participating in that scene through seeing live performances and connecting to communities, which had a profound impact on my life.

I think the emotional power of music is undeniable, especially when aligned with a politically charged ideology, poetics, charisma and collective values. Music has the inherent power to create change. The 60s movement is the most obvious example, like the ways music mobilized a generation of people toward political and social change. Music was clearly as important a part of helping create those ideas and actions as it was for responding to them.

That same notion carries over for me in a personal way, anchored as I was (and continue to be) in sentiments expressed through the languages of music. I think of it more like a cultural feedback loop that has played out in many different ways over the course of my life. Minutemen, The Fall, and Bad Brains are some more obvious lyrically driven examples of music that impacted me growing up, and they are directly tied to how I understood myself and the world around me. The list goes on, with varying examples depending on the types of music, etc.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about or the impact it had on them – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

The criticism I have received has generally been positive, and always presented in a constructive way. I am not averse to negative criticism, and more than anything I appreciate honesty. It does seem harder to get people to write about the music these days, which is very different from my experience releasing music in the early 00s.

As far as misunderstandings, I don't feel there's been that as much, though early on I felt I got a little pigeonholed as a 'drone' artist which I didn't really identify with. I have always sought more dynamism in the music, and perhaps as the result of a few writers referring to things that way I leaned away from the category as much as I reasonably could. I appreciate drone as an approach, it just felt like some of the nuances in the work were being overlooked, or a blanket category was being deployed to describe what I felt was something else.

To be fair, the music, especially the earlier stuff, was very drone-esque, and I think it could still get categorized along those lines, which is fine - I'll take what I can get.

As far as insights, it's always a pleasure to receive feedback of any kind generally because it means someone finds something compelling there. Also, people's feedback is sometimes very different from my intentions for the work, which is ideal really.

Within my practice I want to provide something that encourages a personal response, so when someone offers insights I hadn't considered, that's an opportunity to better understand myself and my process.

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”?

I have been sensitive to sound as long as I can remember, but didn't fully understand it in terms of its musicality until much later.

I think the first time I really started to pay close attention to everyday sound as a creative tool was when I was travelling in Turkey in the late 90s. I was used to capturing images with still and motion picture cameras, but hadn't translated that practice to sound. While there, I found a cheap cassette recorder at a market and started walking around Istanbul with an 'ear' toward recorded sound, thinking about and paying attention to all the noises of this unfamiliar place. I remember the process of analyzing the sounds as I was recording them (like turn-styles in the rail station, or the clamour of workers repairing rail tracks at night), considering what might make one sound more interesting than another, and how natural reverb or other environmental factors interacted with what I was trying to record.

Though I had related everyday sounds to music at that point, and was inspired by field recording as a practice, I had never intentionally done any myself, and eventually discovered the process much the same as taking photographs and shooting film. My experience on that trip began my regular practice of field recording, as well as my pursuit of the interrelationships between image and sound. I think as the result of all that I hear things differently now, and also informs the reason I prefer not to wear headphones or earbuds when outside the house, which I find distracts from the pleasure of environmental sounds.

I would most definitely describe sound as musical, but again, I never really focused on it that way until after I started doing my own field recording. One example is the rhythmic yet seemingly random sounds water in an old steam radiator makes. I have recorded this many times and am always struck by its musicality from a percussive standpoint, as it often sounds like an impossibly virtuosic drummer.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I am also delighted with being surrounded by sound every second of the day. Additionally, since John Cage's contribution to the concept of silence, I think it is generally understood that true silence is basically impossible.

That said, I appreciate the contrasts of living in an urban setting and then going somewhere in nature that is otherwise silent (or different), as in the mountains during winter when the snow accentuates the quietude almost to the point where the silence seems loud.

Conversely, I can be at the ocean confronted by the unrelenting din of crashing waves, and experience tranquility through all its white noise.

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?

Clearly the way we do a thing can be just as important as simply doing it, and so the question for me becomes why do we do some things with more persistence and care than other things?

I need coffee because I am addicted to it, but I also like coffee and take pleasure in it. As a result, I am necessitated by taking my time to make the best cup by using fresh beans and so on. With a creative endeavor that may compel artists to spend hours and hours practicing, redoing or reworking a thing, for example, returning to the work each day despite its lack of cooperation, or never feeling done or right, is a curious thing.

I think that level of compulsion is a byproduct of a deep love that makes the 'work' part a pleasure, or a necessary moving toward or even just circling around the loved thing. Like I think certain artists and musicians aren't necessarily more talented or better so to speak, they just love what they do so much that they are willing to subject themselves to all the failure, difficulty, pain, frustration and time necessary to arrive at (or circle around) the thing they love.

We don't often bear witness to the 'work' part of what makes any given artwork appear a 'success', for example. Like we aren't generally given access to process, to hear all the terrible songs and failed experiments Prince made, or view the discarded photography experiments of Cindy Sherman, for example. I suspect in those cases there is far more hidden or discarded work than finished or published work, which is at least true for me (and I am not comparing my artwork to theirs).

Basically, there is a ton of the mundane in any creative practice, and yet I think it is the persistence (compulsion) in its wearisome monotony that brings compelling work to the fore, which again I think is driven by a deep unrelenting, even unrequited love or passion for a thing, etc., which is true for me as well.