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Part 2

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

I usually wake up at about 7/7:30 AM. I meditate, which can look like a few different things, sometimes it’s 8 min, sometimes it’s 45 min, sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I listen to the ringing in my right ear, sometimes I hum. Then I usually do some form of an embodiment practice, e.g. qi gong, yoga, dance, self pleasure. Then I make breakfast and coffee (an almond flour pancake and berries is my current most common breakfast). The rest varies from day to day. I’m currently scoring an animated sci-fi series for HBO and so that’s what I’m spending much of time on. I also have a healthy practice of woodworking and painting that I try to throw in as much as possible. Before dinner I typically go to the gym to get my body moving and blood flowing, maybe yoga if I’m feeling more of a chill vibe. I cook dinner for myself then I may meditate again or do breath work or draw or something if I’m still feeling the need to create. I usually cap the day off by smoking a bowl and watching a movie, or Painting with John or something. I’m typically in bed by 11:30 PM.

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

Let’s take the first track off of the new LP, “Veil of Forgetting, Mother”. This thing was crafted over time with many elements forming without me even knowing where they would land.

It opens with a pitched down clarinet plugin and a pitched down dulcimer. I just liked how spare and clean it was. This was composed in ProTools, sitting at my desk, me playing these melodies pretty stream of conscious, and then editing them pretty aggressively, taking everything away that wasn’t crucial. Then I just had the urge to make it feel like it’s blossoming like a flower or like there’s some sort of sonic birth canal that opened into a new brighter world. At this point in the track I pulled out a library of field recordings I had made months prior. I call these samples “thups”, because that’s what the sound is like to my ears.
It’s basically me holding a microphone very close to small branch and plucking it. It’s inaudible to the naked ear, but if you crank the input on a mic and hold it very close it makes a note, a sometimes much deeper note than you’d think too. So, I have hundreds of these that I made without knowing why and I just sporadically dropped in a few dozen at this “blossoming” moment. I also scotch-taped down all of the keys that make a big strange D major chord and then scrape the strings on the inside of my upright piano with a chopstick. This all creates a unique texture of opening to me. Moving through something into the sun maybe. I then let the track tell me where it goes from there. It’s maybe a week-long process, working only a couple hours, at most, at a time. There’s everything from the sound of a horse snorting to me playing this Baltic flute that I had made by some craftsmen on Etsy. It’s a real melting pot of sounds and approaches. There’s also an accompanying poem that I dictated to my partner at the time while we were on a road trip.

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 must say, I’ve preferred music as a solitary act for a while now. Going back to an early question, I think it’s been important for my trajectory to experience and make music without the input of others. Also, what I do for work is very involved in the opinions of others. I’m crafting something with a very distinct purpose. This cue needs to convey the sadness of losing your closest friend and lifeline, or this music needs to feel like a giant creature is looking at you. So, all the more reason, that when I make music for music’s sake, I prefer to rely only on my inner guidance.

But I’ve also begun to perform live again and in spaces that are pretty different from the nightclub/bar space where live music has predominantly existed the majority of my lifetime and that’s been exciting and intriguing. I think that’s a new direction I’ll ease into.

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

I think there’s a thing that happens when an artist creates from deep inside themselves and doesn’t think about the world or the art’s reception. If it comes from a true place, it will indeed speak to people because there’s a unique essence imbedded in it. It may take years or may need a different context, but people find these nuggets of truth and beauty eventually. Take Henry Darger for instance, or Lewis Baloue.

As far as the role of music. In my opinion, it’s a universal language. I don’t need to know what’s being sung in Hausa to know that the Nigerian music speaks to me with a beautiful energy. I don’t need to know Mauler’s biography to know that his symphonies carry a palpable melancholic energy. It conveys feelings beyond the immense limitation of words. There are few mediums that can compare to its power.

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?

I mentioned before how my Dad is a musician. He was in this kind of bar rock band in the late 70’s. Their best song, in my opinion, is the only one he wrote and sang called “Old Man Bar”. It’s very sad and basically maps out his trajectory as a loner alcoholic. It’s such a strange foreshadowing and holds such a particular awareness that it in some ways makes his plight feel poetic despite the obvious trauma that came in tow. I’m not saying it makes his choices OK, but to me it’s almost as if in this song, he’s admitting that there is no choice. This is his path. Who he is. It was about his father, actually. But it was almost as if he was saying this is me too. I don’t know what my point is, but it feels appropriate.

I guess, I’m saying that I think music has the power to manifest, or maybe know. It has the power to heal and the power to affirm. In 2014, I made an LP I never released. It was a vocal album about self-acceptance and love. It was powerful for me to create that in song. One day it’ll be in the world.

I next want to make an album that’s really romantic and sexual.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

I feel like, aside from the obvious technological advances science continue brings to music, science in regard to what I think you’re asking me about, is proving that which is already there. Like essentially saying, “yes, this is good for your brain.” It’s just proving it and explaining it. I think that’s super cool and very useful to the rational mind, but these things
are already there. I went down a wormhole a few years ago trying to understand the whole 440 hz vs 432hz thing. But I stopped and thought, “wait a second, I like dissonance, I like when things sound a little off, this is all about getting things to harmonize perfectly, but I like when you hear a band of Peruvian pan flutes and they’re all a bit off from one another, I like when people don’t sing perfectly on pitch. Where is this all going?” So, I kind of put that down.

I think music will play a major role in the psychedelic therapies that are being experimented with now, and this will ideally evolve our society toward a more connected and loving place. And this is something I intend on being a part of. But I don’t think you need perfect solfeggio scales to get there.

The most beautiful sunsets are the ones with clouds. The distortions and dissonances are just as perfect as harmony, and I don’t need data to tell me that. But I’m thankful people are exploring these things and I do find it interesting.

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?

I think one of the most powerful things you can do with music is reveal the divine in the mundane. You put on some Gregorian Chants while you make that cup of coffee and all of the sudden this has become a divine act. Anything can be that way, but music is a channel that can help the least enlightened of us get there much quicker.

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?

Personally, I think all of existence is a note being played out into infinite fractal versions of itself, bouncing off of itself, creating new songs and new harmonies, new dissonances. I think when you play with the realm of sound you’re just cutting to the core of that. It’s the most direct path to frequency. I mean, all things are literally clusters of particles vibrating in space. How is that not music? Though I’m sure he’s not the first to do so, I thank John Cage for pointing out that there's music everywhere, everyday, but there is no doubt that there’s a certain realm of music that just really expresses deep feeling, Mozart’s Requiem for example. You could live in a cave your whole life hearing nothing but the bats, and one day someone comes along with a radio and plays that for you, I imagine you’d know that this thing is about deep deep sorrow. I honestly don’t know how that happens, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s when a person’s soul gets baked into the music.


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