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Part 2

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?

I wish I could. But this is the most mysterious part.

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?

You must allow yourself to relax. When you’re relaxed you’re more likely to draw intuitive connections. The best moments are gifts from the gods, and you don’t know when they’ll come, so you have to be open minded and not attached to outcome. You have to listen to the music and see where it wants to go. And you have to quiet the doubting voice in your mind, because it will tell you to just return the gift.

How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

They end up talking to each other more behind the scenes. When I play live, it’s important to me that I’m actually doing something live and not just going through the motions. I suppose it’s tempting to try and make your live set as smooth a record, but then you can paint yourself in a corner and get stuck in playback hell. I’ve always avoided this. Coming from punk, it made no sense to me to deliver a clean, polished and risk-free set. So I leave a lot of room for spontaneity and improvisation.

But in the studio it can be maddening trying to recreate that energy. So when I’m working on a record, I just work on the record. No matter what I do, the energy will be different. I do a lot of overdubs, layering, mixing and dubbing in the studio. It’s its own world.

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?

This is a really theoretical, hair-splitting question. If this has to do with pitch / harmony / rhythm vs sound design / mixing, well … it would be impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. Whether you’re working on something high concept or jamming with friends, hopefully you’re moving towards those ah ha moments, where things just feel right.

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?

I’m not sure where sound’s “outermost borders” are located. But I do appreciate sound in its more tactile forms - subbass, very quiet sounds, very immersive loud sounds. Certain records, like Eno’s “Ambient 4,” sound invisible to me. Then there’s sound which stretches beyond composition - ritual sound, for example. I once had a recording of Bhutanese monks performing at their monastery in the Himalayas. The sound of the group throat singing and blowing huge horns at these mammoth peaks is beyond words.

Electronics are able to do something to the brain. It doesn’t really have to do with the other senses, but maybe it has to do with a cognitive dissonance. They have an inherent strangeness.

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?

This binary division of “art as art” and “art as social communication” is false. Art addresses the personal, subjective and undefinable. But it does so by moving through concrete reality, which includes politics. Art makes a political statement (not always a thoughtful one) just by existing. It doesn’t really matter what the artist intends. Everything is revealed on the page.

And this doesn’t even get into the social function that art serves once it’s out in the world. Politics and commerce continually cannibalize the arts to articulate reductive worldviews. America loves to ruthlessly repress and starve the most radical arts, then sanitize their most crossover-potential qualities, and finally lionize those same original creators as exemplars of our sickening addiction to unwavering individualism.

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?

I could not agree less. The basic concept of music is far from intact - it has gone through mammoth upheavals over the last few hundred years, and even in our own lifetimes. People will reshape music into whatever they need it to be at their own historical moment.

To that end, one thing that makes me uneasy is the way (soft, chill, downtempo, not-too-emotive) music is working to provide an ambient padding against the horrors of late capitalism. There’s a major reward system in place for music not even as “mere entertainment” (aka pop), but as a true background (not actually listened to).

I’m struck by the fact that, in the 1990s when I was a youth, there were multiple dominant strains of pop music which seemed incredibly threatening to the status quo. Post-Nirvana alt rock often addressed themes of crippling drug abuse, self-loathing and suicide, while rap detailed the horrors of the drug trade, brutal violence and the racism of the police and the dawning industrial prison complex. Now, in the face of looming environmental collapse, decimation of job security and the middle class, untenable student debt and a broken healthcare system, horrifying police violence, endless mass shootings, the opioid epidemic and on and on, it seems like our generation is really excited about clean, well lit “positive vibes only” spaces and music. There’s a global proliferation of this creepy, checked out, delusional aspirational myth of strangely isolating self-reliance, the hyper control of “living your best life” and a compulsion to constantly broadcast oneself as a commodity. Music plays a big part in maintaining this narrative by providing the cushiony bounce to its step. People used to joke about cubicle culture as a Beckett-worthy iteration of modern, post-industrial dehumanization, but our new nadir is the chill-bro WeWork $5 coffee airpods locked into Spotify hellscape.


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