Interview conducted by Jack Chuter
Your new album Guts is an assault/dissection of a piano. Can you tell us about the piano in question?
About 10 years ago I was driving around, and I saw this old piano
sitting on the street. I had a pick-up truck so I pulled over and asked
the folks in the house if I could take it and they were very happy to
know I wanted it. So there were about six neighbors helping out lifting
this damn heavy piano into my truck and then when I got home I couldn’t
get it out of my truck alone because as you know, pianos are really
fucking heavy! So I cut up the piano inside my truck with a big power
saw so that all there was the iron piano soundboard or the “guts” as I
would refer to it. Even trying to get the “guts” moved was extremely
difficult; I had it outside at my house and used it for sounds here and
there, but to be honest it was best used for neighbor children to bang
on it for fun, which was really fun to watch and hear as you can
imagine.
Finally I had to get rid of this massive chunk of wood and metal so I
put an ad in Craigslist for free scrap metal, and then after posting it
I thought, “Oh crap! I’ll never have my piano guts again!” So I ran
outside to the piano guts and put a Zoom digital recorder inside the
sound board, and proceeded to smash the hell out of it for a hour until a
metal scrapper came to take it away. For an hour I was throwing big
rocks at the strings like a baseball player, trashing the strings with a
huge wooden stick or taking a garden rake and thrashing the strings to
hell and back. The whole neighborhood was wondering what the fuck was
going on at my house – rather funny actually! I mean, my time with the
piano was hot so I got the most intense noise out of it before it went
away. After that I took the high-res raw recordings and mangled them to
hell and back with a lot of computer granular synthesis and such.
I feel it’s a good relationship to the acoustic and the electronic
world in which I am always trying to find the perfect balance. I never
really do pure digital computer noise and nor do I ever create pure
acoustic music, so the marriage between the two is always important for
me to get a strong weld. As far as location goes it was at my house, so
in a sense it’s like going out to my backyard to get some fresh lettuce
from my garden, but instead it’s grabbing some fresh piano noise from my
rusty old piano. I really like that “hunter and gatherer” mentality
with making music. I’m not sure if there was an inspiration to choose to
use a piano because it all seemed to fall together in a coincidence of
sorts. As I was working on it I did get feeling I was onto something. I
really like a lot of other deconstructed piano work from other artists –
Anthony Pateras is one of my all time favorites – yet never would I
imagine I would do something like this. It sort of all fall into
place…or rather crashed.
You’ve used an X-ray of your dog Arrow as the album cover. Why is this image appropriate for Guts?
About three years ago my tiny Chihuahua got attacked by a huge
Labrador, and it was so awful that I had to pry open the large dog’s
jaws top get my little doggy out. Horrible incident! He should have
died! He was okay after all with some internal bruising, but the vet
gave me the x-rays and they were brilliant to behold. I said to myself
that some day this will make a great LP cover or sorts and I waited for
the right recording to come around. As with all of my recordings, the
most difficult work is actually coming up with a title. Hard to believe
but it’s true. I struggle the hardest with titles and never in my DNA
brain could I come up with even track title, let alone the ability to
make lyrics! Making sounds and noise is natural to me but words are
another thing. As I was working on this piano recordings I was going to
call it “Piano Guts” and then I remembered my doggies x-rays and it all
fall into place to just call it Guts. I’m not sure if most
other people have referred to the inside of the piano as the “guts” but I
always referred to anything inside of something as “guts”, so the title
and the doggy X-rays fitted and all was fine from there.
Does creating this music have a particular function for you?
Well it’s something that I “have” to do because it’s in my DNA
wiring. I can’t stop working with sound because it’s simply what I like
to do passionately. Nothing more or less. It’s just a pure passion of
mine. When I say “What Does Blood Sound Like?”, this is referring to
what is the gasoline that fuels your engine to create and invent
yourself. For myself, I divide each day with equal proportions of mind,
body and spirit. For the mind, I will read books and educate myself, for
body I will exercise and practice good health, and then for spirit I
simply work on art; whether it’s photography, video work, writing and of
course music. Keeping everything in balance is very important. Poor
health will infect the mind and spirit and so forth, backwards and
forwards and so on and on. It sounds almost corny and trite but really
it’s true and it’s a solid system to live by.
Is it cathartic in any way?
I don’t think it’s cathartic in any way to be honest, because it’s
just a natural feeling to me and fortunately technology is very good
tool for me to create what I want in sound.
Do you believe your music to have an ideal listening setup or environment? If so, what is it?
Probably not during a nice date…or maybe? Well, what I mean that my
work is best for loners and so is most weird music. It seems to be
simple math that avant-garde music is created by solitary individuals
for solitary listeners, and it’s always been that. I’m referring to
recordings of course, and it’s true that this music is demanding to be
heard alone without anyone around or distractions. It’s loner music by
loner musicians, and for the most part and that’s a beautiful thing! For
myself, my work has been intended for a one-to-one experience and what
it means to have a personal-emotional relationship with the drama
contained within the sounds and noise. After all, I feel I’m more of a
dramatist with sound than a musician, so drama plays a strong role on
how the listener can get lost. The thrill and danger of getting lost
alone in a dense forest is the ideal feeling I hope to achieve with my
sound work. If you ever have been lost alone somewhere, then you’ll know
the feeling. There’s some fear involved in the unknown, yet there is
also comfort in the loneliness. This is where music plays the important
role to all of us. The Romanian philosopher Emile M. Cioran
once said about music: “Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by
happiness.” I think that saying is a bit true in regards to how us
humans are so spiritually weak compared to the animal kingdom in that we
“need” music, so there’s a sense of humor in what Emile Cioran is
saying.
You’ve recently started uploading a series of raw field
recordings of various locations (empty school basements,
waterfalls/rivers). What does these soundscapes possess that makes them
worthy of capturing?
I’ve been recording a lot of nature sounds since I scored a simple
digital recorder. Since I hike a lot, I take my camera and snap a lot of
photos and if at a position of interest then I will record sound;
typically at far away places away from any urban sound whatsoever,
although planes can fly by and ruin a pure recording. So far I can say I
have recorded days worth of nature recordings, and I have mixed and
edited them down for anyone to hear online through Soundcloud. Some of
the mixes are so scattered in time and place but the cross-fades and
arrangements work really well on their own. So in short, I make raw
nature recordings just like I take photos – basically stealing the soul
out of my subjects just like what the Native Americans used to say about
white man and their early cameras! Occasionally I’ll record something
not very natural like, say, loud sizzling electrical power lines that
are crackling with a zillion volts of electricity. I really like those
recordings a lot, and the power lines that I recorded were deep in the
mountains. And then there was a high school I used to work at…in the
summer, when there were no students, I walked around the huge basements
recording just the ambience of the rooms. You can hear these loud
cracking sounds; that is the sound of my ankles cracking. I used to
skateboard a lot and my ankles are really crunchy. I was amazed how loud
my ankles cracked in those quiet rooms! It just added to the
recordings. I can say that the element of adventure is what makes a
recording worth while – not really planning, but simply finding an
amazing situation to capture a sound. “Hunting and gathering” is still
the main urge within us.
What’s next for yourself and your music?
Right now I am working on a huge gigantic collaboration project with
the duo-group Mamiffer, which will be a very shocking recording for sure
complete with multimedia audio and video. This will be quite the
surprise for many who are familiar with Mamiffer and even my work.
Hopefully there will be live collaborations as well with this
relationship. Beyond that, I have other ideas and such but it’s too
early to spill the beans on them as of yet.
What can be expected from your upcoming string of live European dates?
I’ll be performing (hopefully) with my video work – that is if the
venues have a projector. But if not that’s fine, because I perform two
different types of performances: with or without the video. I make these
videos of billions of animated nature photos flickering in a strobe
light manner, and I perform with live electronics and simple contact
mics on my body and objects in my hand. I’m very excited in performing
now because I feel I am making some of my most intense work. There’s an
odd thrill in being able to create intense work as I am getting older;
typically aging inspires a mellowing of sorts but I’m at a different
angle. The closer to my mortality I am, the more intense my output has
become. When I ask the metaphorical question: “What does blood sound
like?” I better be walking the talk with that. So expect a crimson
tsunami!