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Part 2

Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives through, for example, file sharing, jamming or just talking about ideas?

Any type of collaboration I have had over the years, in any activity, has always been valuable. People have different ways of working, sensing and reacting, and collaboration opens up new space. Perhaps because of my background, I am most drawn to collaborations with people working with visual elements, such as light, video, film, projection.

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

I have a fixed schedule usually for five days of each week. Typically, I wake up around 5:30 and meditate for an hour. Then I have breakfast and listen to some music. I go to my sound work around 7:30 and work until 12:30 or so. Sometimes I take a mid-morning break for a walk and a coffee. The afternoon is spent with all of the other activities in my life. Sometimes, especially if I am in the thick of a project, I may work again for a couple of hours in the evening.

My involvement with Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy both as a practitioner and as a  teacher definitely has had an impact on my sound work.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

My most recent piece, "Plains of San Agustin" is the one that holds the greatest interest for me right now. The piece gradually works its way toward a 2-3 minute period of very unstable percussion at the end. The quality and emotion of this sound is new territory for me, and thus of great interest.

Plains was created in the same way I have used for several of my recent pieces. As I said earlier, I don’t have an idea or concept as starting point, I simply begin freely experimenting and improvising and gradually, by resonance, a set of sounds and processes takes form. This usually takes 3-4 months. The second stage is a period of exploring and improvising with the sound set, both as a way of getting to know it and also to see if there is a deeper layer that needs to come forward. Invariably, I begin to gravitate toward certain “improvisational pathways.” In the third stage, I focus on making recordings of my sessions.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

My answer will probably be similar to what many people report, whether in music, sports or other pursuits. Sometimes you just enter a “zone” where things flow effortlessly. In my experience, you can’t force this, but one thing that has been a helper for me is to consciously let go of thinking and planning as much as possible and allow myself to be absorbed in the phenomena of the sound.

How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

I’m not sure I can make this separation between “sound” and “composition” with my type of music. “Sound” is definitely the starting point for me, but it seems that any action or decision that I make with the “sound” is an act of “composition.”

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

This is the deepest question of the fifteen, and I don’t really have a good answer for this one. I can only offer an association that came to my mind immediately upon reading the question. When I first moved to New York City in 1978, I studied Nada Yoga for a couple of years with a teacher from India. This work, in a simple definition, is the yoga of sound and chanting. Some of the core ideas are: it is sound energy rather than physical matter which forms the cosmos; different sounds can activate energy in different parts of the body; and sounds decay in volume but radiate outward and never end. In practicing this yoga, sound plays a role in helping a person to sense a deeper unity with self and with cosmos. One of the skills or attunements of this work is to learn to “listen” from the heart, not just from the ears and brain.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

Recently, I had the chance to attend a concert at the library of a small town in the Hudson Valley of New York. There were about sixty people in the room that Saturday afternoon. The closing piece on the program was the Cello Sonata No. 1 in E Minor by Johannes Brahms, not my usual fare. Everyone in the room was blown away by the music and the by performances of the players. The standing ovation at the end seemed like a shared moment of exaltation. I heard one woman leaving the space saying she had been “transformed.” Moments like these seem just as essential as directly working for social justice or to protect the environment.  

From my point of view, any piece of art regardless of intention or context holds the potential of being both a social and a political act. Allowing an emotion, intuition or thought to arise from within, take form and then move out into the world is inherently a contribution to the well-being of the biosphere.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

My guess is that if the basic concept of music has survived this long, it will go the whole way, to the end of the human era. If we look at the past 100 years, say from the Rite of Spring forward, we have seen incredible growth in the diversity of forms of music. I think this dynamic will continue at a steady pace, with all the current forms experiencing permutations and new ones arising. This expanding diversity will eventually begin to feed back on itself changing how people make and listen to music, and it will increasingly become one of the great pleasures of humans, providing inspiration and sustenance in the complex times ahead.


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