Part 2

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I often think I’m writing something incredibly “simplistic” only to have its complexity revealed to me when someone else responds to it. I’ve wrestled with length, as working in film and advertising often has me writing incredibly short pieces that never have time or space to develop. I have to remind myself that if an idea is good, people would love to sit with it for a while. It’s okay to revel in a moment.

I’m currently exploring more delicate things than harsh ones. I like the complexities that can exist within so-called “quiet music.” Like when you learn to listen to another person talking and pay attention to more than just their words. Their body language, tone, and idiolect give as much away, if not more. I was listening to a lot of Hiroshi Yoshimura and Harold Budd during the pandemic they were masters at exploring the quiet.

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriads ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

The cliché is true that form follows function. We need walls to a sandbox or edges to the frame. It helps orient the listener so you can challenge them with something new inside of that frame. Chaos can make it hard to connect with anything.

My music school experience left me so obsessed with form that I often tried to create one before I had anything substantial written. That mostly delayed my ability to finish something rather than providing the intended framework for composing. I’m now able to consider and construct a form more instinctively.


Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

One technique I’ve used over the years is to take an existing piece of animation, delete the audio and rescore it, trying to highlight as many small moments or movements as possible until the piece becomes its own thing. On my album Waiting Room, a piece called “Turn” began as a re-score of the 1938 avant-garde animation piece by Oskar Fischinger called “An Optical Poem.” If you play my piece over that film, you will see how many musical phrases and ornamentations only exist because I was trying my hardest to match the picture. At some point, the piece's personality grew legs and required freedom from the image.


Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

I didn’t think so until exploring this question but I’m frequently converting elements from analog to digital and back again, just to see what changes bring about new ideas. The bass line in the piece “Respir” came from sending the main piano through a plugin that slows everything down but breaks it up by bar in a very unpredictable and haphazard way. From that, an entirely new musical line emerged that provided a wonderful counterpoint that I don’t think I would have ever written. I now use the spirit of that “experiment” rather frequently.


How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I write music for a living and as my art, so the former is my means for the latter. I must be very structured with everything else in my life to find literal and emotional time to create music for myself. I say this with varying degrees of success, mind you. My music-making process is deeply enmeshed with how I live my life.

The tools and techniques I use for my art-making come from my daily work with creative collaborators. Learning to work efficiently for my clients has helped me when I sit down to work for myself. I can make decisions quickly and mix my own work in a way that I don’t think I would have if it weren’t also my day job.

I think understanding any art on a deeper level can help a person develop an openness that can lead to the possibility to change.


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?

As someone very proud of my ability to make a good cup of pour-over coffee (as far as my satisfaction is concerned), the emotional expression is chiefly missing. I’m not sure I’ve ever made someone connect with a sense of melancholy about their life from my coffee, but I have done that with music. Music is a process based on language(s) that is a means of expression that creates an art object that can be experienced and interpreted in many ways. It sounds similar to coffee, but music is particularly good at giving those small, emotional voices inside you find resonance.


Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

Chopin’s Etude Op., 10 No. 3 in E, is a heartbreaking melancholic piece that has been rearranged and reinterpreted many times over. It has a chord change that inexplicably gets lodged in my throat if I’m feeling particularly open. When the primary phrase/verse is quoted a second time, it has a lovely melodic arc that rises and falls back down with this chord progression (V - vi - iii - IV - I) most famously featured in Pachelbel’s Canon. Even after breaking it down to myself, it still grabs me. Chopin’s melody is more emotional to me. My favorite non-Chopin version is the great Bob Russell/Paul Weston song “No Other Love” recorded by Jo Stafford in 1950, which itself is an adaptation of “Tristesse,” a 1939 hit for the French singer Tino Rossi. There’s also a great rearrangement by Jack Nitzsche.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

My wish for music is the same for all forms of art: That we, as a culture, can let the 20th century appropriately fade into the past rather than being a monument we continue to worship as the ideal. Our obsession with our recent past hinders our ability to dream of the future. I hope incorporating developing technologies into our work continues to be as human-centric as possible and that recordings and live performances reflect that, conveying it to an audience in a manner that helps them feel it on such a deep level they value it more.