Part 1

Name: Jamie Tolagson
Occupation: musician
Nationality: Canadian
Current Release: Little Folk on We Are Busy Bodies on November 24th
Recommendations: The White People by Arthur Machen / ‘Revolution In The Head’ by Ian MacDonald.

If you enjoyed this interview with Mount Maxwell, you can keep up to date with releases and show on hothamsound.com

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a synesthetic experience like you describe, although I love the idea of it. I tend to think of pieces of music in more environmental or geographic terms; as places to be. Or as emotions to inhabit.

What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

All my steps are naive. The first music I ever made was me singing and playing guitar into a tape recorder at the age of ten. I had no idea how a guitar worked or even what a chord was, but somehow managed to write and record four ‘songs’ to send to my dad at Christmas. It was all very intuitive, very Jandek. As an adult, I know a little bit more about music, but not much. And I honestly don’t think my process has changed all that substantially. It’s a very precocious, fumbling experience. I think most electronic musicians would laugh if they saw the way I put my tracks together.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

At that age music was much more a badge of identity, especially amongst my small group of friends. We made punk and hardcore music in my friend’s garage, most of it terrible, but again, all of it imbued with that same precocious spirit. One of the great lessons of punk is that you don’t need to wait to begin. Just start with what you have and go.
Around that same time, I was also very into film music. I used to record movies off the TV and listen to them on my Walkman. I would sit on the bleachers at school listening to my home recordings of ‘The Shining’ or ‘Never Cry Wolf,’ and this ended up having a weird effect on me, because later in life when I ended up tracking these soundtracks down, I was shocked at how naked they sounded without the incidental sounds of the film behind them (foley effects, dialogue, room tone, environmental sounds). I had kind of inadvertently ‘imprinted’ the sounds of the films themselves onto their soundtracks in my brain, and they were now inseparable. The music seemed somehow better to me with these added textural elements, and this is probably the reason I ended up using field recordings and voice samples in my music later in life.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

The synthesizer has been the only real constant. As a non-musician it was a way in for me. It allowed me to engage with sound in an exploratory and intuitive way, without worrying too much about whether what I was making qualified as ‘music’ or not. Lately I’ve been more and more drawn to acoustic sounds, and I now think of the microphone as equally important to what I do, but the synthesizer is the bedrock, the old friend.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

The goal is to communicate. All the ideas and emotions and memories that swarm endlessly around in your head just disappear when you die. So you have one life to try to get them down in some form that other human beings can understand. Language is good for this, but art can do it in a way that’s somehow more honest to the ambiguity of your original experience. And if that experience resonates with just a few other people on a fundamental level, you’ve done something incredible. You’ve bridged this unbridgeable space. Having a complete stranger reach out to tell you something you’ve made has deeply affected them is one of the most moving experiences in an artist’s life. Not in some careerist way, but in the realization that you’re not alone and that you’ve made someone else feel less alone.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

It comes from so many different things. What I do is classified as electronic music, but the influences for it come from a million sources. Can, Moondog, Joni Mitchell, Sun Ra, Boards of Canada, JJ Cale, Cocteau Twins, Mark Isham, Elizabeth Cotten, Kraftwerk, Lee Perry, Bruce Langhorne, Panabrite, Cluster, Tod Dockstader, The Congos, J Dilla, you name it. What I find myself returning to again and again is this goal of trying to meld the organic qualities of folk and outsider music with the precision of electronics. There is this sweet spot where the tension between the two creates this third unnameable thing. There’s a track on ‘Littlefolk’ called ‘A Long Road’ that is a good example of this.

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”?

The sound of the ocean is always moving to me in some kind of primordial way I can’t really describe. The same with wind in trees. It could be because they both sound similar to the constant cycle of rushing blood that we hear in the womb. The field recordist Bernie Krause called those types of sounds the ‘geophony,’ which is a really beautiful term for all the naturally occurring sounds that exist in a given environment (excluding the sounds of people and animals). When you then add in the sounds of animals, especially birds, I think things get very musical. I mean, there’s an entire industry of lo-fi ambient producers who are banking on the musicality of those sounds to kind of ‘cushion’ their tracks in a context that feels conducive to the moods they’re trying to achieve. I don’t have a problem with this because I genuinely think listening to those sounds is good for human beings, regardless of whether or not someone is adding some randomized notes from a modular synth in the background or whatever.

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 like certain types of extreme music, like really durational stuff or incredibly quiet pieces, but overall I think I’m too invested in the idea of dynamics to engage with those approaches in my own work. This might come from listening to too much pop music as a kid. I like albums with really pronounced aural and emotional dynamics, where each track is either complimenting or contradicting the previous track in an interesting way. I also really love albums that sound as if what you’re hearing is only a tiny fraction of a very idiosyncratic world that the artist has created in private and is now living out through music. So the album is just like the tip of the iceberg. Some great examples of this for me are Paul’s Boutique, Bitches Brew, Donuts, Music Has The Right To Children, and Selbstportrait. In all of these records there is the constant feeling that you are only getting snapshots of a much larger and weirder whole.