Part 2

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Ya ok ... So I use the KORG Ms-20 module, an elektron machine drum, my voice with a few hardware and digital processing tools, and also the moog werkstatt.  I also use Ableton Live for recording, processing, mixing. I write lyrics in a notebook when I’m feeling lyrical, and work them into a song later.

I like hardware because I like using my hands when making sounds and music; having gestural control. I like certain pieces of hardware because they provide a knob / switch etc. per function, so I don’t have to dive into menus on screens. I have a poor memory so I have a hard time remembering menu structures.

I like this setup because I can easily set up conditions for improvisation - sequences, patterns, timbres … and then I can play around. As people like to say, limitations = creativity!

In terms of my voice, the most useful strategy I have employed is to not just see it as a tool for singing, it also makes some completely disgusting and disturbing noises, screeches, and whispers ... and it also speaks. It can do a lot of interesting things.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Oh I wish I had any kind of order to my life ... but I don’t. Sometimes I write all the time, and other times I really don't.

Generally I eat breakfast, and I go to bed between 11pm-1am. Everything in between is a mess and changes every day.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Sometimes the very best things I make are out of spite.

I once had an incredible live performance after another performer’s set that I felt was ... morally and emotionally vacant. A vacuum of flat soda lyrics and clean and clear structures, no edges, a smooth, stain-resistant, marketable product. Nothing to say and taking its time to say it.

Now sometimes I find marketable products fascinating. There are these big pop songs that are like the idea of an idea of music. They pull you in like some kind of black hole. It’s kind of neat, in a morbid curiosity/ death-wish kind of way. Like ... take me into oblivion please pop music daddy, take my mind away, it all hurts too much ... Hahahah. Sometimes you just let the void take control. And the mix and production are usually very good ... hahahaha.

But on this night, I was filled with rage. And the courage it gave me helped me to perform the best set of my life. I felt like I was holding up a god damned sword. I felt BLOOD LUST. I screamed and belted and groaned in giant heels, It was WONDERFUL. I recommend it.

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?

I mostly work alone. I see music as world building, as writing fantasies, and it feels like a solo activity. A personal escape.

But I have had some exciting times making music remotely with an incredible artist, Erin Corbett, a Toronto-based electronic music artist. She is one of the most inspiring performers and producers I’ve ever heard, and it is a complete joy to send ideas to her and hear what she sends back.

We started working together during the pandemic, sending bits and pieces back and forth. But now I have no idea how to perform any of this work, because it has all this wacky vocal processing and huge sounds haha.

I have also worked with my partner, Dot Starkey, who is an amazing 3D visual artist (she made the album artwork on Chastity Platinum: Dead Scream) and experimental electronic music producer under the name Hex-a-Decimal, and we’ve also worked on a few tracks and put out a secret noise album.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

If I could choose an ideal role for the music I make in the society I live in now.. I would say that I hope it offers some succour to someone who feels like I do, that it could reach and have some kind of meaning to one other person. That would be pretty special. So it’s about personal expression, and sharing that with someone who understands.

But music doesn’t have to be about this at all … it can serve many different functions. Sometimes I think what I want to try to do next is make music that breaks speakers with impossible transients, digital distortion, DC offsets … The function is the destruction of the means of dissemination. That would be neat.

I would also very much like to be able to make music with animals and plants and insects. Using sound samples, and for / with real live plants and animals maybe!

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?

Sure. Yea, my first drive to make music ... write songs ... was crushing heartbreak. And then it continued to be that for ... ten interminable years. Love unfortunately lasts, and as others have said, it always ends in grief.

If anything, one of the trickiest things as an artist is navigating your adult self. When you start to get over or at least get tired of lovesickness and heartbreak. And then what is your art about? And if you start to see yourself as something other than a victim of love, then who are you? Maybe ... just maybe … you’re a bit of a dick? Maybe you’ve really hurt people. And maybe you should think about that …

There is a song on this album about how I deal very poorly with other people’s expressions of grief. I shut down, I get angry, I close myself off, when really ... What they wanted was someone to listen and offer solace, maybe offer a hug. I’m about 100 percent sure this has to do with my father dying when I was 12, and feeling like I was alone. I kind of act like a cat hiding and hissing under the fridge when it’s sick or dying.

It’s not great, and it hurts people. I’m working on it.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

I guess in terms of engineering, there are so many useful tools in terms of hardware and software that have shaped my output.

But ‘hard science’ doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with music as I see it. Science can be a source of inspiration. I admire scientists. I just listened to a cool podcast on nematodes and soil biodiversity. But I don’t really think music has much to do with science.

Now … I don’t actually know a ton about science, but in music you don’t have hypotheses that you test using experiments. I kind of dislike the term ‘experimental’ music for this reason. What you are really doing in experimental music is fucking around. Which is great. I love fucking around. It’s very liberating and joyful. But I don’t think there is a way to really test a sound. I either find it compelling, or I don’t. I think it’s aesthetic, personal, and / or cultural.

I don’t think there are absolute truths in music and sound, and personally I would be kind of horrified if there were - if music had to sound a certain way to always elicit a certain response. What a paint-by-numbers nightmare. And the thing is, that across cultures music serves different purposes. It isn’t universally about emotions and aesthetics, about affect. It can be about other things.

I don’t know ... there are some basic things about the world and our bodies that seem to have shaped music because they influence our emotional and physiological responses - the speed of biological rhythms – walking / running, heartbeats, breathing, sex, the frequency range of our ears, the harmonic series. But they aren’t like ... rules ... haha. You can think about them and use them if you want, but you don’t really have to. We can do pretty much whatever we want, so long as we can imagine it.

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?

You know ... this is a neat question. I think a lot of artists live like ... ‘art monks’ haha. Which is to say, that even though they can seem like they are living these wild lives, mostly they spend a lot of time alone dedicating themselves to mundane and repetitive tasks and face constant and fresh failure. OR MAYBE THAT’S JUST ME HAHAHAHA.

So making music can be mundane. But also it’s not. It is otherworldly, in that it can take you, even briefly to other worlds. I guess what I love most about making music, and art, is that it extends me beyond myself. I can lose myself and become something new. Using different tools, I can extend my capacities and senses.

I love that shift, when the world starts to look and feel different. It’s like falling in love and it breaks through my depression. When an instrument becomes like a new extension of your body. Cyborg 4 lyfe.

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 able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I’m also a sound designer, so I don’t have a music-only perspective haha. I think that there are lots of levels of meaning in sound. And not just at the ear drum - but in a haptic sense as well.

I mean ... meaning is constructed on a personal level, on a social and cultural level, and I guess some sounds have a meaning on a physiological level - a loud sound is shocking for example and can elicit a reflexive response.

I don’t really know how to answer this question to be honest. Why do we sing to babies? In this one psychology of music class I almost flunked ... the professor asked everyone to bring in their favourite piece of music and discuss it. Almost everyone brought in something with a single voice over sparse arrangement, singing slowly and melodically. It was a small sample size, but I did seem to notice that almost every one brought in something that sounded like a lullaby.

And so ... I think music is able to function as a kind of instruction tool maybe, to show humans who we are and what we do. A first instance of care of empathy. A tether. A way of saying: ‘hey - I’m here ... can you feel me?’

And you can hear it, even in music with no lyrics, what someone feels. Joy, lust, anger, sadness. I don’t know ... that’s just one idea.