Part 2
Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
I don’t have any kind of structure.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
Well, I’m currently most proud of the newest album, as I wrote and played everything on it.
After the initial writing/recording, I utilized an almost Aleatoric method by handing the tracks over to Ben Greenberg and saying “do what you want. I trust you.” And that trust was more than justified.
Outside of that, I don’t know that I’d want to blueprint my process too much! Gotta keep some mystery, you know? I don’t eat pork, so when I learned how the sausage was made, I thought it was gross!
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
Listening to recorded music is usually a solitary thing - I mean, there’s always happenings and dance parties where I know the DJ and they’ll likely play some stuff I dig, but that’s cos I came on to that stuff on my own first. I guess years ago there were parties like Shout or Wierd, and more recently anything my friend Jonathan Toubin DJs, where I may not know the bop I’m dancing to, but they play great stuff so it’s a good time.
Live music, of course is a beautiful communal thing. The Arabs call it tarab, which is like a collective trance-like euphoria. It’s a conversation between the artist, the musicians, and the audience. The performance is a sort of snare that enraptures the audience. Mel Brooks covers it in his documentary, History of the World, Part 1.
Writing this record was very much a meditative practice. The impetus was to connect with the subconscious “voice”. It was guiding the process in the first place. Like a good therapist it was pulling me towards, like, a breakthrough watershed moment. I was too fragmented, and the sounds that made up the bones of these songs was the unifying thing.
I guess that’s called catharsis. In the truest sense.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
Musicians are mirrors - I think. They reflect all aspects of being human, be it social, political, emotional and it completely transcends language and cultural barriers. It’s a balm for all and it can create / shape communities.
In society, music serves a bunch of functions. From entertainment to, like, vehicles to galvanize the disenfranchised, to spur social change, from protest songs that call for an end to injustice and inequality, patriotic ditties, and like a good Bond or World Cup bop. A banger for every occasion.
Music is the closest thing we’ve got to alchemy - I mean, it’s really actually so much cooler. You know, the shape of disparate frequencies, how they’re patterned - it’s wild, the systems in our brain and body that interact with sound, and process it in a myriad of ways.
It’s really wild; sound creates vibration, and our bodies tune into that - our brains love dancing and connecting modalities. You get to be completely present - in the moment and just totally enmeshed. I do love gold, but I like dancing better.
Oh I completely forgot about religious devotional stuff that can be so beautiful you just can’t wait to die to get to the real stuff up in heaven or down in rock n’ roll fun hell.
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
Art is, in many ways, a redress to those strong feelings and/or circumstances. I make art specifically so I don’t have to address grief and pain consciously. I don’t know if that’s healthy, but that’s the truth.
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
The synesthesia I referred to in question 2 - it hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t how everyone’s brains worked until I was deep in some Oliver Sachs tome, trying to deal with my blinding migraines that really caused more anxiety than pain.
Reading his work on brain anomalies, and neurodivergent people, and the very specific ailments they faced — some of which lost access to the very part of their brains that was their life force, like a novelist who overnight could no longer read - he could see, but no longer make sense of the shapes - the work arounds and coping strategies were so incredible, it gave me the impetus to rewire how I dealt with the more obvious neurodivergent features hardwired in me that would really bother uppity pearl-clutch types.
I try to be careful in the ways I talk about how very visual sound is in my brain in terms of texture and hue and vibrance and movement - it isn’t too far a casual stroll to the land of detailing your ayahuasca spirit quest through ancestral psychic connections. Prejudice of small difference, maybe. I know it’s a “thing” to rag on people who say they have it, but I think synesthesia is actually a bit of a feature in how most folk perceive things. t’s kind of how we are taught to write similes (or how we talk, how we try to describe the external world or sensations).
Maybe I’m not being exact but I also think people who are quick to just dismiss how people say they encounter sensation are being a bit … obtuse? Or maybe now I’m being mean. But they started it!
So much of music, chords, notes, keys, rhythm is intensely visual for me, but of the “on the spectrum” shit my brain deals with, it’s the one I don’t consider an ailment and I wouldn’t get rid of because I’m not sure what the alternative is.
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. 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?
There are people making coffee with, like, mongoose droppings and whatnot. That’s creative! I know these communities exist. If you go on Reddit there are people that consider trolling an art. And I try to empathize and understand.
But it’s not something I’ve tapped into. I can only make the art that I make. And I do suppose that the social aspects play into it as well. Old fashioned as it may sound, I do think more kids are going to shows than are going to coffee mongoose droppings conventions.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
I’m equally fascinated by that question. I’ve pondered it myself for years. How something that starts from something intangible twists into something more nebulous but more magical. How electricity becomes a sound wave. Juxtaposing that with human qualities like voice and instrumentation (and how the world has become such a stew of the human and the technological).
From all that synesthesia, these things become actualized. We can take all that information and put onto a record, a tangible thing we can hold and smell and visualize. This will never not be as close to heaven as we’re ever gonna get.
