Part 2
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 went through a period of interest in noise music. I still do appreciate it. I will happily put on a grindcore record with back to back sub-minute songs. We have a song on our new album that is 13 minutes long and at a painfully slow tempo. We still bicker about it from time to time.
Extremes are interesting to me. I think it depends on your execution - are you able to get anything across to your audience beyond “oh that was a long song”? Etc etc
I think one extreme in music that myself and many peers are drawn to isn’t necessarily related to any musicality or arrangement as you described but more so related to obscurity. It’s more of a social extreme. For me it's this lingering behaviour of when I was younger, wanting to be cool and differentiated from others.
Its funny how defensive we can get about our musical taste, wanting to have cornered some particular niche of musical recordings to feel special.
From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriads ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?
Recently I have been understanding the beauty of traditional forms. Simple chord progressions, etc.
Think about a bluegrass jam - I can show up with a bunch of strangers, call out a simple chord progression or even just a song name in any key and the players will have the capacity to create right there with me. This is the beauty of form. It creates a shared vocabulary for everyone. You can really understand the voice of a player by how they work within the form.
When songs get overly complex with their form, listeners spend too much time decoding what the form is and devote less time to understanding what the content of that form is. (The same thing goes for a player trying to get their voice out on a song.) We have talked about this as a band - a lot of our songs are quite punishing in terms of their form. We have wanted to explore more conventional forms more and more recently.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?
The first thought that came to mind was making our first record. We all listen to it now, 5 years later and are amazed that we had such energy. It is insanely raw and unconstrained. I don’t think we can ever tap into that energy again.
There wasn’t really a thought out creative process to the recording and that was the beauty of it. We just played the songs how we knew to play them. It is totally untamed - coming in from the wilderness. We recorded it within less than a year of becoming a band, live off the floor over the course of a couple days. I could hardly play properly at that time. I was nervous about missing chord changes and about not being able to correct my mistakes.
Everything about that perfectly captures my sentiments towards life at that time and the social dynamics we were engaging in.
Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?
A “good” arrangement can deliver somewhat of a scientific understanding of the human perceptual system.
I spent some time learning about a theory of auditory perception called auditory scene analysis. A lot of the basic concepts are shared with arrangement. I mentioned earlier, for example, colouring certain areas of the auditory spectrum - something that a good musician will have an implicit understanding of without having to call it science.
Sure, there are analytical ways to decompose this, to explain why it works, to explain what voicing of a chord you should use to sit in a mix well, but again, I don’t really think that’s the point. I don’t think you have to apply the scientific method to creativity - it's the wrong tool for the job - I don’t think it is the right tool for a lot of creative work.
Musicians and creative people have their own understanding of the scientific method, but it doesn't matter whether or not they choose to use it, and it doesn't have to be scientific for it to be meaningful.
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?
Don’t do things alone, listen to other people, learn to express yourself, be weird, etc. Remember that music has always been for the people and recognize the ways this has been taken away from us.
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?
One difference in this context is that music affords a lot more representational possibilities than a cup of coffee.
Music gives us a more open ended space of creation and of expression. It is more of an abstract concept - that is why there was a question asking about whether or not sounds in nature are musical. Could we ask such a question about a cup of coffee? It is far less abstract.
I read somewhere that the beauty of a good poem is its ability to present the experience of your own perception back to you. Language works on us like that - very subtly, allowing us to construct our own narratives. I think music can do the same thing (through lyrics or otherwise), and I don’t think coffee can.
Maybe there is someone out there who will dive deep into contemplating some facet of human experience by tasting a certain note in a cup of coffee, but on the whole I think there are a lot more perceptual constraints provided by the stimuli of a cup of coffee. These limit the narrative that its audience (coffee drinkers) can construct.
Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?
I usually try and reflect on why I am feeling a certain way when I hear a piece of music. Whether or not I can properly explain why is a different story.
I think the hardest thing to explain for me is not things I like but things I don’t like. I have never been able to get into Radiohead and I don’t know why. It feels emotionally sterile to me I guess
If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?
Understanding and appreciation (and some $$ wouldn’t hurt too) for community based arts practice. Valuing music as a cultural engagement and not as cultural output.
I sometimes worry that we’re working against this in some of the things we do - engaging in promotion and selling and streaming and etc.
