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Name: Michael Begg
Occupation: Composer, sound artist, musician
Nationality: Scottish
Recent release: Michael Begg's new album Moonlight and Sentiment is out via Klang Galerie. Together with The Black Glass Ensemble, he is also exploring "new musical forms for the anthropocene in the margins of classical and experimental music."

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Michael Begg and would like to find out more about his work, all of his profiles can be found via his linktree.

Over the course of his career, Michael Begg has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Chris Connelly, Clodagh Simonds’s Fovea Hex, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

[Read our Chris Connelly interview]
[Read our Hans-Joachim Roedelius interview]
[Read our Hans-Joachim Roedelius interview about Ego as an Energy and doing IT]
[Read our Hans-Joachim Roedelius interview about Collaboration]



How would you describe the shift of moving towards music which places the focus foremost on sound, both from your perspective as a listener and a creator?

I’m not sure that statement reflects my position. It’s all music.

I use a lot of found, field, located, situated and processed sound, but it is all ultimately in the service of music. There may be certain layers of recorded sound that pin the composition to an exact place or period in time, or, in the case of the more recent climate science collaborations, like Light Water Is Black Water, where the sounds on board ice breakers, or of ice and wind appear frequently and contribute to establishing the context of the work.



But the end objective is that this material is in the service of a piece of music.

In recent years, this has reached its full realisation with forming the Black Glass Ensemble. The ensemble comprises strings, brass, tuned percussion, atmospheric receivers, sonified weather stations, Arctic data modelling, field recording and bespoke instruments contrived from objects found on the shore. We have been embraced, to an extent, by the classical community, which is as gratifying as it is unlikely.



Classical players find the challenges of improvisation, and responding to abstract material deeply exciting. They leave their comfort zone and join Ben Ponton and I in the no-mans land of sound seeking form and context. I often have them playing against archival recordings of their own playing, just as a means to undermine time, and blur the boundaries between performance, rehearsal and recording.

Given that I have surrendered much of my time in the past couple of years to residencies and commissions resulting in works that act as a kind of climate activism, it is really exciting, really nourishing to see works with such abstract foundations - built on data streams and the output of climate models - realise a music that people find to be both intimate and moving.

Time and the internet are probably the two central agents in securing my fate. Over time - decades - one amasses so much material and so much experience that you lose track of the fact that you are the only one doing it, and your parameters become increasingly self drawn, which liberates you in a sense.

The internet allowed me to reach a small audience, and to open my eyes and ears to the wealth of material I had previously missed. I found friends, collaborators and fellow travellers which doubtless saved me from a very lonely existence as I still maintain only a small handful of physical friendships, for sake of a better term.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and working with sound? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?

Musically, I can trace my lineage to John Downland, Thomas Tallis and the 16th century preoccupation with melancholia. And, if cornered, I would admit that my musical ambition remains to touch people in the existential small-hours places bordering the secular and the sacred.

I haven’t found God yet, but you might say that I have found the place where God should be, and I address that location, first and foremost, in my work.

The key idea is informed by a written piece I delivered a few years ago concerning the divorce of music and sound that was occasioned by the birth of recording technology at the end of the 19th century. There’s a lot of material to extract from that, but the main point here is that prior to recording all music took place in a context in which ambient sound of one sort or another was always present.

With recording came the studio, and the increasingly fetishistic pursuit of the pure signal. For me, this opens the opportunity to use the studio to subversively reintegrate the sound material, the indicators of time and space, back into the recording. This shifts the listening experience and challenges the border of the work and the location of the listener in relation to it.

In theatre and cinema, this post modern consideration results in challenges to the fourth wall, or various film maker games around diegetic and mimetic sound, but we have yet to see such challenges faced in music itself.

We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

Again, the fact that this observation exists is a very recent development and is down to the perceptual landslip we encountered simply by inventing recording. I think you have to open it up to music versus field recording versus the sound around the recording you are listening to versus your physical proximity to the sound versus your involvement in the sound creation … on and on and on.

I have been thinking recently about the fetishistic search for the ultimate listening experience. The cleanest signal. The most advanced monitors housed in the most optimised listening space. My sense is that to lie in such a space and listen to music you would actually be more focused on listening out for the crack, the flaw, the atom of interference. It is the inverse of how we most become lost in music.

Metaphorically speaking, we climb over the wall, the veils, the imperfections and limitations of fidelity, in order to reach the music. Once over the wall we are lost in the sound. It’s been a factor in my production technique for a while now but it is very clearly to the fore in Moonlight and Sentiment.

I set out a stand of murky sounds, poor, handheld production, foggy curtains of indistinct and out of time material, multiple demo versions of a single melodic line - and behind all that I locate the heart of the work.

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

Nada Brahma is a woolly co-opting of an eastern mystic tradition. The concept was lightly picked from the tradition and isolated for our own interpretation, particularly by cynical and seedy self appointed spiritual healers and life coaches. “In the beginning was the word” is an erroneous translation featuring in the King James bible of the original intent. The original intent was only to say that before anything at all there was God.

The world is frothing with wide eyed and earnest mystics plundering the basements of pseudo physics, cryptic alchemy and empty esotericism trying desperately to align themselves and their work to some unified theory of God, the universe and everything. I am just one of them.

The main development impacting my work is the relative ease with which previously unheard sound can now be surfaced. and here I mean data, rather than microphones and other receivers. It always floors me to take, say, observed data of phenomena such as surface ice, salinity, plankton vertical migration patterns, air pressure … All of these things that have been made available to me by scientist collaborators.

I pull the data in and listen to how the overall environment creates an ensemble piece. It’s not data sonification, however. There is aesthetic reasoning and input that comes in to play. It is data composition.

With the Arctic, and now the Antarctic work I had expected the data to tell a picture of a planet in crisis. That didn’t happen, however. What emerged was a planet that achieved its own balance, a balance that would reassert itself upon our demise. Our survival is dependant upon such fractional changes in the elements.

In that revelation is my activism. In that insight is my sense of the hidden world made flesh. In this time, data is the common vocabulary of science and art, and, for me, it is essential that at least some of us use this realisation to construct new work to serve us, console us, and lead us away from harm as we enter the anthropocene.