Part 2

If music is a language, what can we communicate with it? How do you deal with misunderstandings?

Music is vibrations, waves; and in that sense I think it has the power to both physically and metaphorically move you. It communicates things you feel in the bones, things we do not have words for, it triggers the organs, there’s something deeply primal and visceral, both in the receiving and the creating of music.

Misunderstandings are inevitable but I don’t tend to think of them as such; I think the perception of music / sound is so deeply personal, based on personal experience, mindset, mood, I think what I’m trying to create are worlds of possibilities, and those worlds have countless different interpretations, the way our own experiences are a complex jumble of emotions and thoughts and expectations.

And it’s wonderful to feel a kinship with those who receive the same message I think I’m communicating, but it can also be very revealing and surprising and inspiring when others understand or receive something quite unexpected. Language is about communication, and learning how to understand each other is an ongoing dialogue.

Having made a lot of participatory work, you start to get a sense for just how different people can respond to what you put in the room; I think if you don’t get too bogged down or attached to how you want people to see your work, and remain open to how people actually experience your work you come to a much deeper understanding of what you were trying to say in the first place.

I always feel that a premiere is not at all the end point of a process; it’s rather the beginning of the last step, the first moment you really start to understand what you’ve made, what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?  

Play is super central to my work, both as a voice artist and composer, although it has become very important for me to begin with concept and text – I like to frame play with a fairly clear notion of what I need or want to say or communicate. Then based on what the ‘story’ is, and by story I definitely don’t mean any kind of traditional narrative, but what the world is let’s say, I can start to play, eventually making choices based on the framework.

I really think directional play in this sense is the richest for making new discoveries, I generally hate starting completely free; I feel like you just end up doing things you already know when the playing field is too open.

I think it’s also really fun and surprising to decide what tools you need based on the ‘story’, whether it’s theatrical, sonic, performative, visual, participatory, process-based elements. What are the functions of the different elements that make up a piece and why are they there? I think this helps against taking things for granted, or being gratuitous about the choices you make.

But also knowing where you can lean into things, where you can be generous and take space. I find being super critical about these kinds of choices are a great way to keep challenging myself and finding new approaches and ways of thinking towards the tools I use.

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”?

I think whether something can be called musical is really a question of context, whether situational or as a way of listening, so in a way this doesn’t really matter to me. You can organize it on paper, on recording, or in your mind, and there it is, music.

Being very voice centered, I think the most memorable sounds for me are usually when I hear or experience communication – once when I was hiking in Australia with my partner, we came across an adolescent male lyre bird and by making some weird sounds somehow got him to stop foraging, perch on top of a tree stump and I ended up doing like a voice battle with him (which I obviously lost) for several minutes! That was pretty mind-blowing.

Being in the ocean near a pod of dolphins and hearing their extraordinary clicks and squeals, waking up to the sound of a beautiful clear birdsong in the middle of The Hague and just listening to that sound lying in bed, or waking to the sound of weasels fighting in a tree and tumbling to the ground while camping. The sound of my cats purring out of contentment or their goofy little squeaks.

And of course falling asleep to the sound of the sea while camping out in the open under the stars on the beach is maybe one of the soundtracks of my life.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

Well, I did a double bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and music at UC Berkeley so I guess I feel a connection!

I think math gets a bad rap, in the sense that we limit the way we understand its scope. To me math is in everything we do, how our mind calculates how and where to literally take each step as we walk, how we can know it’s safe to move forward, when we need to wait, how far forward to reach an arm, a hand, how much space there is in your backpack for stuff. It’s all math. Or it all includes math. So in a sense I find it inseparable from the rest of life, and sort of impossible to parse.

I think when we reduce math to this analytical branch of data sets, as some kind of finite, or discrete mathematics, you necessarily exclude aspects that cannot be expressed in numbers, and that modern computing is still grounded in this approach. I think within each human body that makes music there is an uncountable number of experiences and traits that affect choice, that deliver endless variations that are somehow still grounded in a context that limit certain possibilities, or bear new variations in revolt of or response to existing options.

Things like machine learning can currently mimic this process but it has no understanding of how it makes choices, novel or not, beyond statistics and combinatorics.

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 have a very internal process when it comes to creating work, and I definitely believe in the application of this in life in general. A lot of my work is staring vacantly into space, mulling over ideas, letting the mind wander, and just shelving things and letting the unconscious mind do its work. It’s about cultivating the intuitive mind I think.

We’ve been taught that ‘working’ means going through the gestures of working, spending time on things from an outward facing perspective, in other words ‘showing’ that you’re working, even if only to yourself. But what I once learned from a singing teacher that I found so critical to working and learning in general was that a good practice session involves much less singing than you think. If you just keep going, repeating without reflecting, you just hard code mistakes, forget to take time to reflect and analyse.

Learning to give the body time to process brings a different kind of understanding, even a different kind of efficiency, a kind of economy of effort. It’s not about removing yourself from reality; we have to deal with deadlines, limited resources, other people’s schedules, production schedules. I think it’s about listening to the body, what it feels like doing, what it’s ready to do, trusting that it knows its own capacities and needs while understanding that things need to be done on a certain schedule, but not jumping the gun and brute forcing process.

So there’s still space for ambition and drive, being reliable and accountable, but within that learning to follow the flow.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I sit in silence most of the time! I need a lot of silence; I find it so hard to ignore sound when I hear it, so I tend to prefer silence, certainly at home, at the studio. My brain is very noisy.

When I’m out in the world I do love to let all the sound in in a way, it gives me energy, information, input. So when I’m in more controlled environments I like to minimize sound so I can process.

On the train sometimes I like to listen to music but it tends these days to be the same artists over and over again, a place where I can sink in and be by myself, rather than actively listening for new sounds.

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?

That’s a tricky question. In a way I think art happens where there is a certain non-functionality, when it goes beyond our basic needs, there is a luxuriousness in it. So in order to make something meaningful you need to find an extra purpose, beyond simply making sound, in order for it to become ‘functional’.

So for me, making a great piece of art is about this extra purpose, within the confines of finding a poetic or abstracted way to communicate this, otherwise it becomes gratuitous. Whereas even a bad cup of coffee can still serve its purpose in principle.

I don’t know how to answer this question! I think given the right context, there are many big and small gestures that can be expressed both in art and ‘mundane’ tasks, acts of love, of spite, of anger, political statements, so much can be contained in a single act depending on the context.

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

I don’t think I have any particular wishes, there’s already so much fascinating, inspiring, confronting, moving work out there – what I trust in, take for granted even, is that there will always be makers who surprise and inspire, who will fight for different ways of seeing and hearing, who find interesting ways to challenge conventional ways of thinking, who forge new pathways.

So I guess in that sense I hope I’m right!