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 enjoy surprises and freely moving between known forms, which means trying to know just enough about each form to meaningfully contrast them.

The collage I enjoy the most often takes from the widest possible number of sources (Charles Ives’ whole thing was less atonality than pantonality, wanting to make music out of everything), but it has to understand enough about how all those sounds came about in order for it to click. Samplers let you use any sound, just merely as a sound: one of Pierre Schaeffer’s key concepts for Musique Concrete is “reduced listening”, the idea of a purely aesthetic sound object, which can be appreciated regardless of its source.



You can try anything just because it’s possible, but if one does get lucky and you get something interesting, it’s usually because there’s a clear through-line back to all the reasons why those sounds came about. In the end, those sounds all did happen for specific reasons — initially it’s enough if those sounds are beautiful, but over time, as you listen, the complete list of reasons why those sounds happened become just as important.

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriad ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

I think in terms of albums, and I like those albums to be varied yet connected. With Negativland, the semantic samples guide everything — even if something sounds like a song, the musical structures grow out of the texts, the sampled words determine the flow far more than any kind of verse / chorus form. Songs are the hardest.

The new album Additional Kids is filled with things that date back 15-20 years, each song a collaboration with friends as a way for us to blow off steam after playing freeform. At one point I noticed a shared concern in all the lyrics, and it was only then that I was able to finish those mixes — once I heard the shape of the album where they could all fit.

The rules for mixing songs are often strict, and the rules for mixing traditional instruments are even tougher — it is not easy to mix acoustic drums and guitars and vocals. I’ve been playing with Thurston Moore’s band, and he asked me to try mixing a few tracks on his last album, and I simply could not find the right balance — I don’t know the rules. But I learned a lot trying — and when I joined in on a live studio session with him and the Dead C, that I felt more confident with — with the Dead C, any rules you find would be the wrong ones.



In the wake of those projects, I realized I’d finally learned enough to finish mixing another album of songs, recorded 10-15 years ago with my friend MaryClare Brzytwa called ‘Amen Seat’ — there, the songs came out fully formed during improvised concerts — I have no idea what that one is, but it’s great.



The other new record this year is an electroacoustic duo album with the composer Cheryl E. Leonard, who creates these unbelievable electroacoustic instruments out of detritus she finds in the wilderness — bones, driftwood, stones, feathers. Those started as simple edits of live improvisations, but once we had those, we built up a final fifteen minute studio track — the structures there are totally free. I’m seriously proud of that one.

Next up is a live record assembled out of five very free concerts with tenor sax player Zoh Amba, who taught herself playing along to 60’s Fire Music albums in her backyard, and a studio album with Jennifer Walshe growing out of our obsession with the influence of machine learning on our emotional lives.

My penchant for collaboration and my need for every project to sound radically different has definitely made it a bit of work for anyone to find the through-line, but I can hear it: trying to find my way through as many different contexts as possible.

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?

Halfway through working on the ‘Variations’ podcast, I completely burned out on making sample-based music myself. Mashups, vaporwave and social media had mainstreamed the aesthetic beyond anything I could easily relate to. It was around this time that the ecology of music apps for touchscreen iPads really took off, replacing all my hardware gear until I realized — they were the piece.

If I’m using these oscillators to talk to birds when I’m on hikes, what does that say about the music? Pitch-to-MIDI algorithms date from the 1970s, but showed up as built-in features on most software platforms around 2010; launch one on your phone, and whatever it hears with its built-in mic, it begins singing along with. Run four to six of them through a mixer, feed it one sound — or daisy-chain them so they’re feeding back on themselves — that’s ‘Monitress’, which has been my main piece for solo live performance since 2014, and it’s especially magic when you throw acoustic players into the mix.



I like that the process of the piece — how deeply these personal devices listen to us — it sounds like a metaphor, but it’s not, it is literally the music you’re hearing.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

My parents met in grad school, both studying physics, each going on to long careers in science within civil service. No musical instruments in the house, but lots and lots of very interesting books.

The answer to this one is short: the history of music mirrors the history of technology, countless parallels between playing music and understanding physics.

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?

Back to the ‘Elephant-hunt Song’ … there’s no word for music in a village that small, because the sound is an artifact of the activity. A village of 150 people doesn’t have room for more than one shaman, and even he doesn't spend his entire day singing.

Music under Capitalism handles this by suggesting we all define music as surplus entertainment, with any music worth hearing being made by full time musicians. That’s less of a lesson than it is a trap:

I learn almost everything through music, but living for music might not be the real lesson. Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift’ is still worth reading.

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 love the sound of my coffee maker running through tape delay. Which is easier to do now that we all have tape delay apps running on our phones, and lightening-port contact mics.

Another way of putting it is that listening is often even more important than writing or performing.

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?

But those numbers and values represent entire worlds, you’d be insane not to choke up (you have to aim carefully with Vangelis, but his greatest moments launch genres).

This goes back to music modelling the world. Sometimes it models old ones, but because it’s so abstract, it’s particularly good at helping us model the one that’s coming into being. You just know the feeling when that sound means more than just what you’re hearing.

For me, recently, it’s Tibetan ritual music. The chanting, the crashing percussion, the prayer bowls. Every harmonic is perfect, but try playing along with it; what key is it in? The historical purpose was to alleviate the suffering of the world, and of course it sounds like the world is being absolutely destroyed; what does it even mean that we’re now able to hear it?



Well, we’re hearing a recording of it. It’s pretty impossible but we’ll figure it out.

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

I clocked quite a lot of time listening to all those waveform renders posted by Open AI through early 2021. Of course all of the stuff we hear is culled — edited, chosen by humans — from an infinitely larger database. I hope we can stay away from the self-realizing fear of automating ourselves out of the act — the business models involved always seem to put things in terms of total replacement / entertainment, and that’s evil.

But going back to Louis & Bebe Barron and David Tudor, there are decades worth of moral and creative solutions to the ethical problems of automation worth looking to as we find ways to keep humans in the loop. It’s at an inflection point but this isn’t new; I hope more of the people working on the design of these new tools look to that musical history.