Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

No routine! Sort of like tech I like making new routines for new projects. I’ve tried basically every type of routine there is and they stick for a while, but not for too long. I wish I was one of those artists who has a really consistent schedule and you can make a cool circle graph from it.

I like the novelty of switching it up. It introduces chaos and sometimes new ideas I wouldn't come by normally. Last week was very much about sourcing wood for a new instrument and working on a film score. Today is very much about disc golf and my F1 fantasy team.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

I think ‘Solar Plexus’ from Everywhen is a special one. It starts with a pop, which is a measurement of the reverb of the area called an “impulse response”; several of these form the bulk of the percussion. Then Jocelyn Barth (who is key for the whole record) begins singing. She’s recorded free of any reverb and really close up, but the recording you hear at the start has a bit of an echo.

‘Solar Plexus’ was recorded outdoors in the Rockies (Kananaskis). I hauled seven speakers out and placed them in a circle about 20m away from a ton of microphones (in a 7.0.4 array – again for the nerds). Jocelyn’s voice is blasted, with the blessing of many acoustic ecologists, into the forest and it reverberates, gathering the characteristics of the place. It is slowly replaced by the dry studio version until there is no relationship to the mountains. This theme is somewhat all over the record, and the music video is made of forests of trees whose wood is replaced by glass and plaster. The piece then introduces all the ingredients from the record; more vocals, including those of Bryan Funck of the metal band Thou, field recording/processing, pure sine waves. The whole thing is done in Atmos as well, and the final file was maybe 100 gigabytes of sound all collaged together.  

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?

As I get older, I meet more collaborative soul mates that I can lean on and trust, so it becomes a less isolated activity. And it’s better this way! Instrumentalists know their instrument better than you ever will as a composer, engineers spend as much time at their thing as you do at yours – why pretend to be an expert in everything?

I think Everywhen has around 60 people credited and at least triple that who aided or gave advice. The idea is not to be exacting in the creation, but brutal in the edits – I’ve used less than 5% of everything we recorded for Everywhen I’m sure. I’m really inspired by Terrence Malick’s process, the way F1 teams are structured, and Kanye’s “Rap Camp”. It’s about creating an environment where people can do their best in the direction you have in mind, but without micromanagement. You enlist help to make the marble from which you will sculpt.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

What music does changes for me constantly. Are artists documentarians of subjective experience? Is music “auditory cheesecake”? Is it just like, this sacred pleasure and nothing more? Is it a return to bicameral possession? A way of experiencing boundary loss between your body and something/one else?

I always chase the same emotion, especially because I can’t put it into words. It’s the feeling I get in the Rockies, a thin place between myself and deep time. Everything is or was once alive. You’re looking up at a mountain that’s three thousand metres and a couple hundred million years of dead sea life. There it’s anxious, it’s fearful, it’s calming, it’s hallowed, it’s physical. Emotionally, temporally, sensorially, the Rockies are everything at once. That’s what I’m trying to trap in music.

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?

Music for me is a total celebration, and I cannot write or sometimes even listen to it when I’m in a messed-up place. I feel very much like an athlete, I have to be healthy in body and mind to do my thing.

On the whole of “writing as self-betterment”, I feel like there is something there. I met John Luther Adams once, whom I think has written himself into having a beautiful life and into being a beautiful and caring person. I realised “wow, I am not going to get there like this” and I really changed my s— around. So artists (who have become as they are through their work) have put the more prickly parts of life in place sometimes more for me than the art they make.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

I think at their best they are not so dissimilar: trying to extract something close to truth from observation of the world. I work with these researchers who took what I think might be one of the largest multichannel recordings ever produced (microphones covering 90 square km) to track birds. This is gold I simply could never dream of mining, and likewise they don’t know how to smelt such a complex thing into something simple, emotional.

So science and art are great team mates and miserable clones. I don’t think music should put on the clothing of institutional science. Music that considers itself science fails at being both science and music and succeeds at being ferociously boring. It’s SO cool to gather weird research and use new tech, but that is the starting point. It’s cool to interrogate how music is made and play with process and procedure, but that’s a prerequisite. In the end, music should be uncomfortably affecting. It is not only for the mind, it is not for only the body. Use the whole person. Blow every part of me away.

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?

Oh, I love this. I mean, I'll probably change my mind about this but it seems to me that everything when done at its best is finding astonishingly good ingredients and presenting them while getting in the way as little as possible. This is the mantra of basically every episode of Chef’s Table.

For Everywhen I had no effects on the whole record: no EQ, no compression especially. I have recently gone on a deep dive with coffee cupping: same same. Find a good bean and don’t obscure it. Small scale farming. Woodworking. Lifting weights. Always the masters are bringing in influence from totally unrelated fields. I might gather and process my world through organized sound, but I believe that is what a good pizzaiolo does even though to the rest of the world it might look like “just pizza”. It’s just music.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

ZERO CLUE. It’s like emotional telepathy. That question feels like one of the last great mysteries. Or at least a huge mess to explain. If I had to guess it probably has something to do with Atlantis or ghosts.