Name: Nathan Davis
Occupation: Composer, percussionist
Nationality: American
Current release: Nathan Davis's new album Earthworks, featuring spoken word by Sylvia Milo, is out via Sono Luminus.
Recommendation for New York, USA: Prospect Park in Brooklyn!
Topics I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I feel I am lucky to have an outlet for many of those things by being a teacher with a lot of freedom.

If you enjoyed this Nathan Davis interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I am fascinated by sound itself, by the sonic characteristics of objects and the acoustic phenomena of their interaction.

Form, structure, presentation medium, the decision to use electronics or not, placement in space — all these follow from the voices of objects themselves.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

When beginning a work, there is just material, a primordial soup. I play with this material until it sticks in my ear.

Once it begins to make connections in my mind’s ear, especially if I’m away from my instruments, then I start to find an overall form, suggested by the material.

I like to graph my pieces as I’m working on them so I can follow the trajectory of several different parameters over the entire duration.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

It’s different for each piece or project. But consistent elements include a cycle of improvising-recording-listening-reflecting, repeating that process until I have material that I like.

I also go down a lot of rabbit holes reading about some phenomenon, or a speaker design, or an instrumental technique that I wasn’t familiar with.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

Good coffee. Good pencils. Post-it notes.
Walking. Staring out the window.

I often find that an investment of time up front that may feel like I’m not getting anywhere is just an advance payment for moments of explosive creativity to follow, sometimes weeks later.

For Earthworks, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

This project began with a prompt from a team of architects (Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, and Gabriel Vergara) who were creating a gallery installation piece called “Planetary Home Improvement” around off-the-shelf building materials. They asked me to create a sound design for it.

I ran with the idea, choosing plywood, metal sheet, polycarbonate panel, acoustical ceiling tile, crushed stone, and foam insulation as raw materials, and I picked them up at Home Depot.

It was immediately clear that these materials should be the sound sources as well as the speaker soundboards, and that these materials could tell the story of their formation, the violence of their extraction, and their place in our built environment.

Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.

I gathered samples through making field recordings of these materials in situ, in their environment.

And I made recordings of myself and of several colleagues from the International Contemporary Ensemble using their instruments (fashioned from similar materials) reacting to text prompts I wrote to loosely guide improvisation. I used text from several YouTube instructional video for DIY home improvement, voiced by actress Sylvia Milo.

I fed all of these samples through a patch I made in MaxMSP which stutters through sound files according to parameters I set. I experimented with my settings as I performed various versions, choosing to use different sets of sounds and materials for different sections.

Each speaker panel is made from a transducer attached to a sheet of different material, so each has the sonic characteristics of its material and colors any input accordingly. The patch makes channel assignments to randomly spatialize the output amongst the 6 speaker panels so the movement of sounds allows the listener to hear the differences amongst them.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

I love working with texts by others, because it feels like a collaboration, pushing me to find rhythms and textures I wouldn’t have found without them.

I also enjoy editing text in compromise with the needs of the music. But I don’t write my own texts.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

It’s a negotiation. Often my graph or plan is very generative and serves as a scaffold for my ideas.

But once I begin to fill it with actual material, I find that it needs to bend or change based on the needs of the music.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

Absolutely. Once I’ve done all my preparation and the pan is at exactly the right temperature to cook, then I lose all sense of time.

My mind works quickly, with a clear focus. And the sounds are speaking to me in another timespace.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece?

There’s a point at which I consider a piece to be finished creatively, but unrealized. In a piece such as “Earthworks”, that exists primarily as a recording, there’s still a good bit of refinement to be done to the production details once the “piece” is done.

I spend a lot of time on nuance. I’m pretty obsessive.

How do you think the meaning, or effect of an individual piece is enhanced, clarified or possibly contrasted by the EPs, or albums it is part of? Does each piece, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

For my albums, I like for each piece to feel like part of a whole. But those consistencies can take many different forms.

In terms of what they contribute to a song, what is the balance between the composition and the arrangement (including production, mixing and mastering)?  

In the case of this piece, “Earthworks”, they are kind of inseparable.

In pieces of mine that are performed live, I have more of a sense of separation between the piece and its realization.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Yes, I do. It’s also a relief to open my mind to the next things. I enjoy putting my tools away, sorting out instruments, cables, notes, files, etc. I also enjoy being able to listen to music by other people again.

If I’m able to jump into the next project, sometimes I find that it goes much more quickly from already being in the flow.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about or the impact it had on them – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

I gain insights from the generous comments from listeners all the time! Connections I hadn’t made consciously but recognize once they are pointed out to me, and associations that I don’t have but am delighted to have inspired in others.

A lot depends on the point of entry or points of reference.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing 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 certainly take pride in making a fine cup of coffee and have my rituals around that as well. But I don’t think that I express myself through that or similar activities.

Making music is an expression of how I hear my environment, or an action of creating what I wish to hear from it.