Name: Michael Begg
Occupation: Composer, sound artist, musician
Nationality: Scottish
Recent release: Michael Begg's most recent reworking of his 2012 "long-form erosion of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium" is out now. He also recently released his new album Moonlight and Sentiment via Klang Galerie.

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. To keep reading, we recommend out earlier Michael Begg interview about Data Composition and Music for Human Survival.

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]



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it?

I was born in Edinburgh in the mid sixties. My first four years were spent in a tenement in Viewforth, next to the big breweries of Fountainbridge. The first sounds I remember are horses. Milk and coal and beer were all transported by horse and cart, and I remember the sounds of the iron shoes on cobbles and the groaning of the laden carts, and the clatter and raging steam of the brewery courtyards.

When I was four, however, my parents moved us out of the city to what was then a quietly emerging suburb, crouched in the north east corner of the Pentland Hills.

Until that point, thinking retrospectively, of course, sound had been an upfront, viscous medium that impressed or imposed itself upon me. Out of the city, sound became unpacked. Sound became related to space, related to landscape, related to silence.

That experience, right from the start, with the early shift from city to country, gave an extraordinary breadth to the experience of sound, and probably sowed the seed for the importance of landscape, or location to my work.

I’m not sure that there has been any single epiphany regards the convergence of sound and structured music and their shared capacity to emotionally impact a listener - but I remain fastened to a moment in my twenties when I was living in London. I passed a roadworker pummelling the tarmac with a pneumatic drill, and I felt tears well in my eyes. This brutal, relentless wall of noise filled me with such a sense of melancholy. No better word for it.

There is no sense in it, but for the longest time I have been trying to unpick the link between that particular sound and that particularly tender internal response. It continues to be the main mystery informing my work, and why I choose to be led by factors external to me in my compositions. I think it is there right from the first Human Greed record, Consolation, in tracks like “Dei,” or “Wonderful”, and certainly informed early live shows.



Maybe not so much in recent years as I became increasingly involved with other ideas demanding a quieter approach. But it remains.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using sound in an unusual or remarkable way captured your imagination in the beginning?

First, it has to be understood that none of this was planned. I did not go through my youth with a single, fully formed vision of what I was looking for. Quite the opposite. So, the best I can do is consider what I do now and look for the origins of those considerations.

I think at some point I became aware that I was being continually hooked on peripheral information - sound associated with, but not an integral part of the record.

For example; 1983. Stevenson College for Further Education. Art studio on the fifth floor. Lead grey sky and hail thundering off the windows. There are some albums untidily stacked on the floor. The sleeves are covered din paint splashes, and the disks themselves are generally in poor condition. I put one on the old Dansette that's been recovered from a skip somewhere. It was Tuxedomoon’s Scream With A View ep.

“Special Treatment for the Family Man” just plunged me into a trance from which I have yet to recover.



That combination of muddy, low rent recording, surface crackles, dull stylus, torn speaker and ambient hailstones in the room. it was in the room. It was in me. Everything seemed so emotionally aligned. It was perhaps my earliest appreciation of an ensemble form that would pull instrumentation and field sound away from their own familiar place and into a shared no man’s land.

For this convergence to happen, it is essential to be open to chance, and I never get too hung up on clean production quality as I find it so often to be the case that good material arises from the artefacts introduced. It’s another layer in which the more interesting sounds become manifest.

Do you remember David Lynch talking about how he preferred the older generation digital cameras because of their lower resolution? More capacity for shadows, for artefacts, for mystery. Same thing.

What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?

My schooling was outer edge suburban, largely uninspiring save for a couple of gifted and dedicated teachers whom I recall with huge affection. Notably, English and History. Equally notably - not Music.

I had few friends, but the few I had I held dearly. Consequently, I seldom went in to school. Time was better spent drinking in graveyards and developing a keen sense of lustful isolation, whilst absorbing the weekly music papers. At night, John Peel would be on the radio and I could look out of my window and see Edinburgh’s lights flickering in the distance. The whole period was marked by long long hours of walking the hills, abandoned railway lines and mill paths, day and night. All day. All night.

I grew to become acutely aware of the difference in sound field during the night than through the day. I tuned myself to the night.

My parents were pretty hands-off, and accorded me whatever freedom I required. If I stepped out of the house and turned right I would quickly be deep in the Pentlands. If I turned left, a bus would take me into Edinburgh. Both parents were working so I had the house to myself a lot, thereby further diminishing the encouragement to attend school.

It was during that time that Deryk Thomas and I began fooling with primitive multi tracking, and feedback. We were aided by my father’s interest in amateur electronics, and the fact that he had been a guitarist in the 50s / 60s and still maintained a beautiful one piece Burns guitar. Articles in electronics magazine had given him the circuit prints for creating his own effects pedals. They seldom worked as planned. These things contrived from plywood and snipped tin panels would howl and fart and spit with vicious unpredictability.

However, when placed in a signal chain with a guitar stuck into the back of a Peavey valve combi, then recorded on to one device, then played back into a second recorder while we tried to modulate the feedback, the results were, for us, deeply nourishing. These things emerged as textured landscapes, rich with contours, punctuated with tectonic violence.

And, of course, being isolated boys from good homes in the suburban wastes it went no further. We had no city network to tap into, and could not really associate what we were doing with anyone that we were actually listening to - which was a staple diet of Banshees, The Cure, Eno, Velvet Underground and Leonard Cohen.

The point I am trying to make with all this wilful nostalgia is that I was feeling my way slowly, intuitively in near complete darkness. As I said earlier, the aesthetic values and processes associated with abstracting music away from song, and abstracting sound into music has been a slow, slow process governed by ongoing self reflection and serendipity over and above any kind of alignment to a school of thought

The consequence of this freedom is that there was seldom any direction, and precious little formal training. My mentors were on the radio, or in the music press, or in the literature and movements in art history that resonated with me. I am not at all sure how I feel about it now. Progress would, I think, have been easier if I had secured my direction earlier. But would the formality of training, and a single point of focus have brought me to the same place? Probably not.

There was always a struggle between the noise and the quiet, the unyielding and the lyrical, and I could never decide where my position was. Then I saw John Cale play a solo show in Edinburgh. He played Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, and it was so tender.



And as he played it struck me that here was the man who was in part responsible for "The Black Angel's Death Song".



There was no need to keep these aspects of sound and music so far from each other.

What are the sounds that you find yourself most drawn to? Are there sounds you reject – if so, for what reasons?

Curiously, given that I consider my work as landscape, I find myself drawn to sounds of interiors. I was a big fan of Pietro Riparbelli’s Cathedrals project.

In fact, I submitted some field work to this project - capturing the organ tuning at St Giles Cathedral in 2014. St Giles has recently become widely known again as Queen Elisabeth lay in rest there for a few days. I note that none of the news outlets mentioned that Colin Potter and I drew similar crowds for Fragile Pitches a few years earlier when we damn near blew the roof off the gaff!



I am drawn to sounds that are veiled in some way. Hidden behind other structures, or otherwise folded into the landscape. This may be part of the process of pulling all of the elements out of their normal context in order to make them equal players in a common no-mans land. I think this can be illustrated most clearly with the Sonambulo record I made in Mexico.

Ostensibly, this was a musical response to the paintings of Leonora Carrington, but the material, the content, came from all around me on the trip. So there are horses, Catholic masses, informal Mayan whisperings in the cloisters of cathedrals, beggars calling for food, insects crawling on piezos, crowded markets, and bubbling pots in kitchens, all folded into the compositions. Some are explicit and easily identifiable, while others are veiled, becoming part of an overall acousmatic fabric.

The sense of narrative, emergent or pre-considered, is perhaps paramount in the sourcing and alignment of sounds.

As to rejected sounds, it should be noted that I cannot bear the sound of hairdryers, magpies, small aircraft, flies, dogs and Hans Zimmer.