Part 2

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?

Hmmm … it sounds kind of like there might be some context missing because philosophically it doesn't make sense to me … If you didn't limit yourself then by that rationale would you include every possible texture and every sound all the time? Would it sound good to have chat gpt or some producer find all the sounds in the audible realm and use them all? Would that alone make for good music? What is the definition of good?

To limit is to define. To define is to have a basis for making a statement. If you say everything you are saying too much, or maybe you are saying the same as nothing. If you chose 50 sounds or textures that no one has ever used before, and made an album, maybe everyone would be like wow that's so new. But actually you limited yourself to only 50 damn you suck you're no revolutionary. There's a billion more sounds you could have used and you chose THOSE? Why would you do that?

Maybe Sophie was just trying to say don't use all the same plugins and software and guitar bass drums setups as everyone else because guys we've had enough let's hear some freshness? But actually still that's kind of foolish because you could just go listen to the other musics in the world including lots of music from non-western unbroken ancient traditions and find a lot of beautiful largely unheard sounds there.

Anyway I don't know who Sophie is or why they care about the poor musicians and their lack of imagination but I would just say relax bruh, the computers are gonna win in the end anyway.

Once a piece is done and released, do you find it important that listeners understand it in a specific way? How do you deal with “misunderstandings?”

I don't find it important for them to understand it in a specific way. But I have been bothered when reviewers who clearly did not know what was going on talked shit about my work. Those have been good self-improvement exercises.

I don't hear from listeners who don't like my work, so that kind of doesn't matter, and my numbers have always been low, and listeners who like my work just listen. So it's really just about positive and negative review writers.

I will just say that these days I think people who write music reviews don't have that much deep listening experience with the kinds of music they are reviewing. The tendency now seems to be to approach an album and rely heavily on press release info, googling key terms, googling artists and watching videos or interviews, categorizing and labelling genres, and then looking up a bunch of other related stuff that could be good to write about. Then they exercise their often decent writing skills to sound well-informed on a broad range of topics spanning many genres and periods.

Anyone who knows one genre and one period knows how long it takes to listen to music to really know it. So obviously someone who is 35 can't know that much about 10 different styles of music each spanning 50 years because they couldn't have listened to that much music. Add to that talking about track titles most of the time and not recognizing or mis-recognizing instrument sounds, structures, musical ideas, etc.

All that stuff has happened in most reviews of my work and usually my first reaction is fuck you guys, and I also think that idea that “all press is good press” or “even bad press is still press” is wrong hahaha. But then I come around and I know that these people are just trying to write something for fun and a check and it's not personal, and I wasn't trying to stop the war with that album anyway, so I can relax.

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”?

As I mentioned, a variety of nature sounds are truly my bag.

I love the frogs in my little garden pond. There is a bigger pond with a massive frog chorus in the village where I often take my son to listen. Bird sounds in the trees are great especially in the mountains and forest. Obviously if you are going into a deep noise meditative perspective you can open your mind to musicalize traffic, subway noise, even the drills of a neighbor breaking down their walls.

It's a shift in perspective. For example if you love metal, or it can apply to you, you can really get into those nasty drill sounds next door. I think one of the hardest sounds to musicalize is a baby screaming in anguish. That is really hard. Once you musicalize a sound in your mind when you experience it, it is like you are just listening to a song that you like or that you never heard before and can marvel at its details as it flows by.

Obviously volume can make a great difference. Two of my favorite nature recording sounds are whale sounds from the deep ocean and the variety of Nasa space recordings that have been altered to be within the range of human audibility.

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 think that statement is wrong. We can't not be around sound. There's the famous John Cage quote about him doing a listening experiment in a soundless chamber and he says he was left with the sound of his pulse. Anyway, I don't really know if that's true I haven't done it.

But anyone who is into meditation or deep listening knows that silence is a concept, not a phenomenon that can be experienced. There is no forest dark enough or mountain high enough or basement deep enough where you could still your being and be left with no sound. Your ear always finds the next quieter thing to hear. And yes, your breath or heartbeat are at the end of that list. So either you are deaf, which would be silence, or you are in space (but you can't be in space without equipment so there would be some sounds probably), or you are dead.

And despite that we can't escape sound, we are constantly adding more of the drug of sound to our days, mostly to block out sounds that we don't like and use the sounds we like to create the moods that we want. One of the things I love about my village is that adjacent are many square kilometers of vegetable fields. In the middle of the night you can go out where there are no streetlights and truly experience something close to darkness. Darkness is like silence in that respect.

Although with vision we can close our eyes and really experience something like blindness. But a vast dark landscape is very cleansing, and decreasing the amount of sound in your consciousness on a regular basis is a healthy practice.

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?

Music is superior to all forms of coffee. Musicians are gods how dare you hahaha.

I think the idea of expressing is also something slippery …When I am in the music there are some things happening that I can't experience doing other things, and there are maybe even two or three different kinds of states ... Meditation and prayer can maybe be similar in certain states but still not exactly the same. But that's really focused on my experience, whereas expressing should be referring to the transfer of some information from me outwardly to like a frog or something, right?

So I could shred on a pipa in front of a frog, or I could give him a cup of tea … would he interpret these two expressions as equal, or as different but having an equal amount of expressive zest, or as different altogether?

What is a music related question that you would like to ask yourself – and what's your answer to it?

If AI develops so that it makes music so pleasing and personalisable to everyone in the world that it fulfils all human musical needs and even evolves into being able to fullfil those needs without even needing to use sound (or maybe a collection of synthesized technologies including vibrations but also pills or injections etc) and all human musical behavior is in the museum and completely cut off from future generations living experiences, what medium will you use to return to this realm to haunt or help the living at that time?

Smell, if it still exists. If not I will try humor or some hopefully existing remnant of sarcasm.