Tone Glow 100: John Wall
An extended conversation with English composer John Wall
John Wall
John Wall is a London-based composer who has been active since the early ’90s, when he acquired his first sampler, a Casio FZ-1, at the age of 40. Beginning with more recognizably plunder-based sampling works, he has gradually scraped and scoured his sound to a razor’s edge, reducing his basic material from the “block” to the fragment, the sliver, the millisecond. Wall’s meticulous, constantly morphing process has resulted in works that bend and warp an astonishing complexity of raw sound materials into dense, arcing auditory constructions riven with contradiction: between the highest and lowest frequency spectra, between concussion and stasis, between near-silence and the klaxon. In his work we hear the constant working-through of a problem, the ever-torturous escape from the terminal trap; process, thought, is laid bare just as it is obscured and folded into that at-times brash, at-times austere, always agitated torrent of organized sound.
This is not an interview—Wall did not want to do one in a traditional sense—but simply an amended series of conversations Wall and Sunik Kim had over the course of two days spent at his and his partner Kay’s home in London, June 11-12, 2023. Before we begin, we enjoy a lunch of halloumi, salad, hummus, eggplant, zucchini, olives, Beyond Burgers, rolls, and butter.
John Wall: …When I listen back to the live recordings I've done, nothing really stands out for me. There’s always inconsistency. I did one in Huddersfield. It was 25 minutes. I listened back to it and I felt like, I can’t bear this. I got away with it because I played it loud—it’s the bombast. Then I edited it down and it got to four minutes (laughter). Just ridiculous. The thing that really matters to me is that the social situation is more important than the end result. I was invited to play at Michael Speers’ CD launch. That was good. That seemed like a good combination. Lots of people turned up, it was just after the COVID lockdown. It had a social purpose. So I wanted to ask you: Where do you expect to go with this? I mean, friends of mine who become much more successful, they now play to over a thousand people. I couldn’t bear that. It just isn’t me. The only time I’ve played to an audience that big was at a GRM event in Paris.
Sunik Kim: I think I’ve read interviews where you’ve talked about it.
It was really clear to me that I just didn’t like it. It made no sense.
I remember you said you felt that you were placed on a pedestal—literally.
The way the people who were working there approached me made me feel uncomfortable. I mean, at one point I was helping lift some speakers. There was a weird look, like, don’t do that, this is not what you’re meant to be doing.
You’re not meant to dirty your hands.
I didn’t even think twice about it. But again, it’s that strange situation where, well, this is not right. I’m not a godhead (laughter). Years ago I did something at the ICA. It was playback and Paul [Richardson] was my sound engineer there. And, I wish I could remember his name... anyway, one of the big names in electroacoustic music from that particular period. Parmegiani’s mate (laughter). I’m not joking, he came up to me with his wife—his long-suffering wife, you know, you could tell (laughter). He came up to me, and I swear to God, he put his hand up to me like he was the pope. Said how much he appreciated my work. And there was this huge sense of: Well, who are you?
Who gives a shit?
It just went against all of my politics. And that’s why I was interested in your own position on this. Because you’re obviously doing live stuff, you obviously want to get people to know you. But it’s a fine line: What’s the ambition you have in this situation, given your politics?
That’s a fantastic question. To be honest, where I’m at right now is as “far” as I'd ever want to go.
Really? That’s interesting.
Really, what the rest of my life is going to be about is deepening and finding relationships with individuals like you. That’s what really changed for me in the past couple of years. Music is not just a stepping stone to meeting people—that’s not what I’m saying. It’s about organically finding the people that politically, especially, you know you’re meshing with. Yet there must remain an undying passion for the art, stripped of all the bullshit. Those people are very few and far between, ultimately—not to be pessimistic. I think they’re out there, but when you find that person, it’s an instant, lifelong thing. Obviously in a logistical sense, I want to continue to have opportunities to share my work. But scale? I don’t care.
How, then, do you control this? Because if what you’re doing hits a certain type of zeitgeist… people who listen to your work will know that what is around this music is your politics, right? People could hone in on this thing to the point that it could scale. I’ve said this before, but I can afford to be cavalier about this. I’m not in a situation where I’m really desperate for the money or I have to see this as a career. Friends of mine are not in that situation, and there is that idea of accepting privilege a bit: Oh, you’re uncompromising. Yes, but my uncompromising position is based upon the fact that I can afford to mess with this.
That’s exactly what I was going to say. A long time ago I gave up completely on making money out of this. So I just work a full-time day job. And that has actually been the best decision of my life in terms of freeing myself of any kind of pressure or expectation. That allows you to be discerning, as you said, and to be able to approach being uncompromising and not care about cadence. It also allows life to bring you those moments where you do feel like: Okay, something has to happen right now.
We have talked about this in the past, about how you align yourself politically with the music. Your latest thing with Henry Cow is a good example. People trying to create a sort of progressive music which can be aligned to a progressive social movement in some ways. Somehow, I’m not sure this works.
I’m very pessimistic about it. I don’t think it does, and I wouldn’t say that's necessarily what I’m trying to do. What I’m more trying to do is just—not to be very subjective about it, but—bring myself, put myself into the music. And what my self consists of is all of these different modes of thought. That’s why I value writing so much. Because if you stumble on this piece of music and you’re like, “Oh, what is this” and you dig in a little more, then you’ll find these nodes. Pieces of writing. Pieces, of course, of history, that flesh out the picture. And then hopefully the goal is that you start to draw connections, whatever your entry point may be. But through music alone? No. I mean, I’m almost more pessimistic about that than others. To me, it’s just naive. I guess the other missing part of this is that I spend a lot of time doing political work that’s completely separate from music. I don’t feel any kind of need to get that political satisfaction or end result through music itself.
For me, at one stage, I flirted with joining a Trotskyist party. Once they realized I did music, they were very keen to have me play some of the benefits. The first thing I thought of was, if they heard my music, they would lump me in with some sort of bourgeois, reactionary, violent…
Decadent… (laughter).
So I thought, no, not a good idea. In terms of them expecting a sort of optimistic, euphoric, and supportive sort of music…
Rousing…
Rousing, for a rally… (laughter). I just thought, this is not a good idea. That was an eye-opener for me in that it laid bare this whole failure where your music is considered progressive and radical, and at the same time, many radicals outside of that would mostly consider it to be deeply reactionary, oppressive, and pessimistic.
The funny thing is that I am ultimately a very optimistic person. I never want to buy into or accept existing stratifications. And so even though my music is… I mean, it’s not rally music… (laughter).
And in fact, for a lot of people, it must be considered to be extremely oppressive music. I must say that there is a strange contradiction, for instance, where I can handle certain types of extremely challenging music. I mean, Xenakis is a good example of this. But I need to be in a good headspace. I need to be, in a sense, in an almost contrary position to the music’s implications. So if I feel extremely oppressed by the general climate of the world, somehow I’m not sure I want to emphasize that with the music I listen to. It’s an odd thing.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m always trying to push against being pigeonholed as this “noise” person.
Oh, yeah.
But on a passing glance, that might seem like what’s going on? I hate most of that stuff. We’ve talked about this.
Absolutely. And the thing is, that’s the reason why I actually found it much easier to edit your music, in terms of understanding the shaping and seeing things which I thought maybe survived too long. Little edits like that. I could do that. Whereas with most “noise” people, I would have lost interest. And it’s not just because I know you and we’ve talked. I think Mark Durgan is a good example of someone who was profoundly disillusioned by this process of producing a quite rich form of noise. Any shift from that particular tight thing brought out the conservative nature of the fanbase. I mean, straight away, they were telling him: You can’t do that. In a sense it all fell away for him because of this inherent conservatism. You’d go to some of these gigs and you’d see these people—it all had a strong macho element.
I hate that.
And I think he was very disillusioned with that as well. That process of—well, hang on a minute. You’re out there challenging the straight world and you’re making a stand for something, but the minute anything shifts out of your particularity, then you’re deeply reacting to it?
Absolutely. That’s very interesting. What I’ve been trying to work through is: I still value the word noise, but in a completely polar opposite way than it’s perceived typically. Noise in terms of perfect clarity, actually. Noise in terms of structures. There are such things as noisy structures. But that doesn’t mean it’s on a scale of cleanliness to harshness.
No, not at all.
It’s maybe simplicity to complexity… but that’s not quite it either. Noise as intensity, perhaps. But that has nothing at all to do with anything like volume or density or anything like that. It’s intensity of thought.
Yes. And it’s not to do with the idea of some sort of catharsis.
Fuck no.
Well, you listen to some Xenakis, the orchestral pieces—some people would consider that to be horrible grating noise. So we’ve got to define exactly what’s being said here, because everything survives. Your stuff in particular survives on the idea of its form and the events. Do I dare say… there’s a story? Some narrative arc that works?
No, that’s perfect. And to be honest, that’s something I learned from listening to your work. Not to get gushy… (laughter). Valuing the sequencing of events and how one thing becomes another. It’s not a matter of just the sounds themselves.
That’s making me think... if I do a gig, say, and somebody would come up and say they enjoyed it and I’d show them the patch, I’d say, “I can give it to you.” They would be like, “What? You’ll give me the patch?” As though somehow, what they heard had been manufactured by the patch itself. It was this strange situation, as though some musicians have said, “No, no, keep away, this is my little software secret.” As opposed to this generosity where it’s what you put into this patch that makes this work or not work. I’m being generous because I’m interested to see what people do.
Exactly! It’s just a tool.
It is! And yet people don’t assume that. They automatically assume that the work is being done by this automatic process and that you’re just lucky to get it.
At a performance in Cologne just a couple of days ago, some of the audience members were students studying composition and sound. A lot of them came up right away and asked, “What are you using? How do you use it? I saw something on your screen.” And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be asked, I’m glad there’s curiosity. But I was just like, first of all, I’m a terrible coder. I write the worst code. Your instructors would cry if they looked at my code. Second of all, I’ll gladly share this patch with you, if you can even make sense of it because it’s just garbage code. And finally, it’s just a tool. It’s just something that works for me. I might throw it all away tomorrow.
I was always trying to push that idea of—please sample this, sample whatever I’ve done. And if you do, send it back to me. I want to hear exactly whether or not you’ve actually recontextualized this particular sample, which might actually have come from somebody else in the first place. It goes on and on and on. It seems very democratic, but in a sense, it’s down to you.
Another thing I have really pulled from your approach is, and maybe I’m conservative, but at the end of the day, it has to come back to that act of assembling together the audio fragments by hand. There’s no automated aspect to any of that. I was joking that there’s no sentient program making all these decisions for me—it’s just me, as if I am sculpting an object. I kept qualifying: Maybe I’m old school, maybe I’m conservative, because it comes back to the hand and the object.
The interesting issue this raises is that of gut response—intuition—as opposed to intellectual decision making. I’ve done so many things in the past where you work for a really long time on certain sections of the piece. And I then put it in the context of all the other bits, and if I listen to it, it either stands out and is all wrong, or I say, oh, no, I love that little section, but it just simply won’t gel. So that process is a bit of intellectual decision-making after an intuition or struggle. I love it when something seems to just feel absolutely right. And I’m not sure exactly why it does. But if I then try to change it… Why am I doing battle with myself? I suppose it’s something to do with length. Whenever I’m trying to lengthen something after a certain period of time, it just refuses. Like it’s saying, no, I’m afraid not... (laughter).
But you don’t know who’s saying that and why, right?
It’s the music. Talking back at me (laughter).
…The one thing I had to take liberties with in your piece [Potential] was creating those little gaps. I feel I want to capture this idea of light and shade. Instead of it being this relentless thing, I want there to be elements of humor. I always quote this situation of, say, Mozart, in terms of being able to shift the emotional space. With him, you’re in a space that’s very melancholic and then, on a pin, somehow the logic of the music shifts into this joyful moment. And you think, how the fuck has he achieved this convincing transition? I think that most of the work I do has a certain limited range of emotions. But I like the idea of that being a possibility. I think some of those early pieces in the SC series had elements of humor.
Yes, they did.
They had some whimsy.
I hear that completely, even in some of the Muta stuff. For me, that humorous aspect comes from the structure and the short durations. If I can call them studies… I think “loopy” is the wrong word, but there are shapes and squiggles. And that’s silly in its own right! (laughter). The sine wave is a squiggle, obviously, but it’s become this very serious thing, right? But when you’re just riding these waves, so to speak…
Well, I’m glad you picked that up, because the form has to somehow embody these emotional qualities, too. And if it shifts into something slightly light and whimsical, then I don’t mind that.
What you said about Mozart is actually really funny because that’s what I value the most in music: Things becoming their opposite throughout the course of a piece. You can’t shortcut that. You can’t short-circuit that by just juxtaposing. I know you’ve always been against this idea of straight plunderphonics, or a “sample CD” idea where you’re stitching together disparate materials. The hard part is making the new development a logical conclusion of the previous development. If that new development is completely different, there still has to be the structure in place to push you into that new development. Things growing out of other things.
Through time, the logic is being set up. You’re setting up a certain type of logic sonically. And if you really start fucking with it in some way, you’ve got to be really certain what’s going next. If you don’t have it, it’s just clumsy, provocative, pointless. Again, we’re talking about this story, this arc. There’s a very anti-compositional attitude that seemed to emerge from Mego and various other areas as well. I wasn’t really sure how to take that, because in one sense it seemed interesting, but whether or not it works... I mean, years ago there was a photography book that came out from Lee Friedlander and the artist Jim Dine. They sent each other drawings and photographs, and they just would put a photograph and a drawing together in a very arbitrary way. And then they would compare whether or not they both chose the same visual relationships. It was really interesting because you were seeing these strange juxtapositions. Your brain would just link them. It was forcing you to make this link. A dog, a photograph, a dog holding tin foil and a drawing of a beard (laughter). There was an element of that within this act of decision-making: There’ll be this sound and there’ll be that sound and that’ll be it. How do you feel about that? I was never really 100% with that situation. I like the idea of it, because the idea of serious composition…
It can be overworked. It’s interesting you say that because I’m working in longer chunks—the basic fragment is bigger. That’s very intentional. At the same time, as you saw in the file, there are micro-edits. But… I think laziness is one way of putting it, but really, I’m trying as much as possible to limit my ability to fiddle. This is why I enjoy coding, even though I’m very poor at it. The structure of the code and the way that I set up various temporal and tonal relationships is an organizing element in its own right. It has its own voice, its own sense of time and structure. But that’s not enough on its own. The fragment has a stamp. It has a particular unifying temporal approach to it, a particular color and weight that is unique to the way that I’ve built the program. So I trust, then, that that a five-minute fragment can be overlaid with another one-minute fragment produced by a variation of that program, and that the complexities of the different fragments and their interactions can just work.
To some degree it would move back to the same old thing. What’s the end result? Does the stitching together you’ve done somehow just work? The logic of the piece prior to that moment determines its success or failure. That’s not easy to do. Can this piece that I’ve just done using the same theory, the same piece of software, the same coding—will this in fact line up with this bit or does it need to be further away? Decision, decision, decision. Farmers Manual would produce the most incredible juxtapositions, and for some reason they got away with it, which I thought was good. That’s almost the complete opposite of my own particular approach. But there’s something you can learn from this.
Exactly. And as critical as I am, I’m just happy for things to exist. I blow very hot and cold on music. One week, something will be just it. And then the next week I’ll never want to listen to another second of it. How can you predict that? But that’s what’s exciting about it. It's fun to contradict yourself, too, over time. It’s not fun to feel like I have these fixed preferences and my life is then a matter of carrying out those preferences. For me, it’s fun to realize how fucking wrong you were last week and having that ability to make fun of yourself, laugh at yourself.
That’s very interesting. There’s that classic thing where you listened to an album many years ago and there’ll be one track that you played to death. And then a few years later you realize it’s actually one of the weakest ones, and the one that you didn’t like the first time has actually grown in stature. I miss that!
Also, if you’re keyed into that as a listener, can you factor that into the creative process? I don’t think you can. At that point, you’re just wishing and hoping (laughter).
It’s almost like you’re a conduit to this thing. At a certain point, all decisions are off. In many respects, when you’ve written about one of my pieces, you’ve almost always enlightened me to it in a way which I would never consider. I want that ability to just be hitting spaces which I myself may not have actually deliberately been aware of in the first place.
This is making me think about a major contradiction in the kind of stuff we’re trying to do, in which we’re very wedded to this idea of an object. Permanence. The idea that wherever I may be at this point in life, this object represents a fixed point. It’s not going to change. It’s fixed because I made every decision. I could justify every decision I made, and I hope it’ll last. I want it to last.
But then, what’s going to be built into this piece that allows that constant reinterpretation?
Exactly. The contradiction there is: If you take that idea of the fixed object, there is a way to read it in isolation from the world, without caring about anybody else and how it’ll be received. Because you have committed to fixing this object in time. At the same time, we talk about the social aspect. Reading someone’s writing about your work exposes something about it that you didn’t think about, right? So where does that social aspect come in?
The way that your friend, Gretchen [Aury] wrote [the liner notes for Potential], I thought that was really fantastic... I mean, Rob Holloway’s a friend of mine, a poet, and he wrote a very interesting piece, a critique [of cphon]. And in a sense, he tried to create the form in language that he felt was being expressed in the form of the music. He wrote a fantastic piece as well about the drummer, Mark Sanders. Using not only straightforward language to convey what he felt about music, but also creating a language which conveyed what was being said in the drumming. It really worked. It would be nice to think this stuff is going to last a little longer than a few months. But at the same time, there must be sufficient ambiguities in it.
The question mark.
Yes. That there’s sufficient depth in the work to shift to other various concerns. Ten years from now, we may be concerned about getting enough food to eat. Who knows what the fuck. We are in a weird historical position. We’re facing utter barbarism. This is capitalist barbarity.
It’s here.
And you just wonder whether or not anyone’s going to have the time or patience or willingness to be subject to what we are doing. I must admit, I spoke to some guy yesterday about this and I said: All I want to hear now is more violence in music. The period of time in the ’80s when things were, relatively speaking, comfortable—relatively! The music was extremely violent. Challenging music, you know. To do it now would be naff. And yet at the same time it feels the context for it is absolutely perfect now that the situation is so...
Threatening.
On so many levels. And yet there seems to be a resurgence of passivity in terms of the music. There’s a sense of: No, no, no, no, no. Just calm the masses down.
It’s depressing. Like I said, I’m always very optimistic about just about everything. But I feel like we’re in this moment... I broadly call it anti-intellectual, but this idea that you have to calm people and that you have to hide certain things. Where one is expected to present and parcel things out in such a way that’s digestible and not frightening, upsetting or disturbing.
I think you and I may have differences on this point. I personally feel a lot more pessimistic than you appear to be. There’s a sort of sense of, well, I’m just clinging on to what I’m doing. But I just have to do it, it’s a compulsion, regardless of whether or not there’s going to be any opportunity in the future for anyone to even have the time or sense of whatever it is that you require. I mean, look at the situation we’re in at the moment. Nice set of speakers in the room. Comfortable. I’m not homeless. I’m not threatened with the idea of having heat waves that could fucking burn my brain out. Well, what then? Oh, yeah, we’ve got to listen to that little John Wall piece... (laughter).
I want to comment on this, actually. I also want to ask you more about your pessimism and if you’ve felt like that has changed over your life. I’m actually incredibly pessimistic in a very specific way, which is about music itself—in that I’m ready to drop it at any point, because I’m actively trying to orient my life to the conditions of the moment. Because I’ve been putting more time into political work, I don’t have the same spiritual or emotional attachment to music as before—to the extent that if I had to give it up for five or ten years, it would be okay. Ultimately my mind and eyes are directed to the world and to shaping the conditions of the world. Maybe there is a pessimism there in terms of what music can do to shape the world. At the same time, you know me, and music is the thing. It gives me life.
I suppose there is a difference in the sense that I’m now older. There’s this sense that I don’t have quite the same stake anymore. I don’t have children. And I’m constantly surprised by friends: they’ve got lovely kids, love them, you know? But they never go to a demonstration, ever. They never go on anything that’s about the climate crisis. Kay and myself do. I know that going to a demonstration isn’t going to change shit, but we are aware that something has to be done. I personally have to bail out for a lot of things because I just don’t physically have it. There’s no way I can confront the cops. At the same time, there’s been some incredible sacrifices over here in terms of people being banged up for years, for just being in a demonstration.
People in Atlanta recently—not even people at a protest, but people who were helping to bail them out of jail—were arrested just for trying to bail people out of jail. It’s gotten to the point where you’re not even legally protected to support people who are in jail.
Again, that’s feeding my grotesque pessimism. And again, I contradict, I’m still going to sit here and I’m still going to continue working.
And you should.
It’s not just me grasping at straws. It’s because I think there’s something important about doing just this.
I agree. I don’t think that you should have any reservations about that if you do.
I mean, the idea of giving up music altogether, from what you’re saying, there may come a point where, for instance, things have to be done. This has to be put on the backburner. It just can’t be. And I think that will happen.
How do you feel about that?
Well, it depends very much on how I decide to act. And same with Kay as well. She has lots of illnesses. She’s not in a good way. So there is a tendency within us to a retreatism, which I don’t like. But somehow it’s very difficult not for that to take place at our age, you know? At the same time, I also do not want that to completely close down everything, in terms of going to see interesting events musically, intellectually. To be aware of things. When you say active politically—in what area?
Among other things, I’m organizing tenants in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Working with a tenant union in one building in Chinatown, fighting the landlord. I’m also very interested in labor organizing. So a lot of time goes to all of that. It’s changed my life in a way. It’s made music both less and more important.
The period of time when I felt that I was most politically active, even though I knew from the start that it was doomed because the implications were so profound—was the miners’ strike.
What years?
It started in 1984. A major confrontation with Thatcher. And the implications were so important that they could not be allowed to win in any circumstances. At the same time, everyone threw themselves into it and there was a situation with the miners where there was complete unity except for an area in Nottingham which broke away and was not involved. You could call it a huge chunk of scabbing. But within that area, there were villages where certain people had gone on strike. So in a way, for a lot of supporters of the strike, they adopted a town and every miner was out. Whereas we adopted a mining village called Edwinstowe. It was in that region, Nottinghamshire, where most of the people were working. So you could scab. But the people who’d come out were really isolated, they really needed support.
It was interesting because you were seeing real conflict, families being torn apart. You also witnessed people whose consciousness rocketed. So you got situations where you’d go along and people would be miners and their wives were suddenly confronting their ideas of their relationship to who does work. Miners were saying, “I do all the work and you’re just at home.” And then, of course, somehow it ends up that the miner is now home looking after the children, looking fucking shattered (laughter). He’s learning things like that, too. And then there’d be situations where, for instance, they would embrace levels of politics which you would never imagine. For instance, the question of Ireland suddenly found an array of support from people. Gay men and women, you know, flamboyant, were coming along through the villages. Haven’t seen this type of person in the village before. Real transformations in terms of consciousness, because they fucking had to. There used to be this band called Test Department.
Yeah, of course.
They really did some interesting stuff because they would go to these places and play this uncompromising music in the context of these strikes. It just opened up everything. And so that would be the cause for optimism. It can actually happen so quickly. When people really are under pressure, it can actually go the other way, as opposed to absolutely saying, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to follow this fucking right-wing nut job.” But it’s not easy because there’s always the situation of having options or not having options and somehow not being forced right to the wall. It does tend to create more of a militancy. There’s always this background. My life is fairly comfortable and it’s comfortable because my parents lived in a period of time when capitalism wasn’t too brutal to its own workers.
Can I ask what they did?
Well, my father worked at Kodak. And my mother worked in factories. She ended up with a pretty decent pension. They bought their house because they could. So in the end I inherited the house. That period of time was fortunate for a lot of working-class people. Because for many reasons, here in Britain, capitalism was just a bit more generous to its workers then. I’m a recipient of that, and most of the young people now aren’t recipients of it now.
Not at all.
But again it’s about the material conditions: If you don’t understand the process and the context of which you are a part, where you are, what all your options are or lack thereof… the number of people you encounter who have somehow been fed the belief that their individualism, their survival skills are somehow all down to themselves. It’s the most obvious thing to say: Well, hang on, do you make your own clothes? Shoes? I mean, have you made them? And yet they say they’re completely independent. This mutual dependency thing has been deliberately sidelined. And it’s a political act. There’s a guy on the television. A loud mouth. He goes to factories. And it could be a factory that makes cakes or tins. It’s fantastic because you suddenly see the mechanisms of production. Absolutely every material object that’s just taken for granted. It’s just amazing. And you think… get humble, man (laughter).
Over a midnight snack of bread and hummus, we discuss, off the record:
Class suicide
Cadres in the Trotskyist party
The “McLibel” case where McDonald’s were taken to court
A descendent of aristocrats who joined the IRA
Family histories, family estrangement, family trauma
John’s father, painter and member of the Communist Party
Legal, government-controlled heroin
K2, the movement for legalization
60 Days on the Estates: about Easterhouse, Glasgow
The healthcare system in Ireland, nearly as bad as the one in America
Disability and how we have the scientific, technological, and productive capacity to ensure every single person can live a good and fulfilling life
Kay’s hometown in Ireland, the effects of deindustrialization, tourism and gentrification
Going vegetarian, maybe even vegan
The neighbors, who are from Cuba and Catalan; learning Spanish
Being raised in a multilingual household
Greenflies and ladybirds in the garden
Koreatown, Los Angeles; its demographics
Their former neighbor, a cab driver, who recently passed
Questions of nationalization, privatization
American hedge fund managers; pharmaceuticals
The slow collapse of the NHS
The East Palestine train derailment
The price of baked beans
…It’s interesting because a lot of times people will ask, what software were you using? Well, in fact, you know, it’s impossible.
Everything!
Anything and everything that comes to mind. It’s just more to do with having a sound with a hint of reverberation, and then having bone dry one next, these types of transitions. I mean, why not? And it’s quite interesting that I could even survive collaborating. I’m not really good at collaboration. Do you play music with just headphones?
I do have speakers, but I can’t go very loud because of the neighbors. So if I really need to feel the volume, I use headphones.
That’s interesting. That’s not quite the same.
No, it’s not the same at all. I don’t like it.
That’s one of those weird things that raises issues about, well, who is the audience? You know, to live in a sort of environment where you’re comfortable with some expensive speakers and a hi-fi system. What young people can afford this type of situation? It’s going to be headphones and little earbuds. Paul [Richardson] often asks, do you want this to be mastered so that it works really well in these tiny earbuds (laughter)? And everyone says, well, what about the streaming situation? It’s going to be low-res. The other day I came across something... LANDR.
The plug-in company? Oh, the online mastering service. Oh my god... (laughter).
I sent it something completely mental just to see what happens.
What did you get back? Bad?
It wasn’t bad… I was really gleefully hoping it was going to come back really crap. But no, it got a little louder. They tightened up the detail.
I’m shocked. I was ready to be like: How bad was it exactly?
It was really disturbing. I thought, Fuck it. I know I need a human. But it wasn’t bad, I have to say. I started following a lot of people on YouTube, and they all use it. Yet another process of standardizing, flattening…
Well, now you’re making me want to try it. I’m going to give it a whirl.
Give it a whirl. Send it something which you think really pushes its limits. I sent something which had incredible dynamics and also all sorts of weird frequencies—out of control. And it managed somehow. It learned something from me.
It did. It actually did. Now I’ll be able to use it because you’ve used it.
Yes, exactly. That’s how it works. My ideal would be to have, say, a number of assistants who are just making sounds all the time. And at the end of the evening like some grand renaissance painter correcting his assistants’ work, you know, I’d wander around and say, I like that sound. I’ll have that and I’ll have that—making these decisions based upon the sound. With the sampling that I was doing before, there was lots of terrible improvising. And yet, within, there were these wonderful little moments. And I thought: Right, that’s for me. I never had a problem with the idea of taking ownership of it, which is a very odd thing. But it’s a certain type of ownership. Regardless of how bad I thought some of this stuff was, there’s still that respect for the rights of the players. I’m going to make something of this sound in this new context.
I’m lazy, but in a productive way (laughter). I want to get a sense very quickly of what’s worth putting time into. I’m not ever going to say people shouldn’t learn, for instance, how to synthesize a realistic snare drum from scratch. I’m not going to say don’t do that, because you learn through picking things apart. But if I know that ultimately what I want is that end result, thousands of people have done this way better than I ever could. I don’t need to waste three months teaching myself how to do it, I’ll just fucking steal it. Or there are programs, plug-ins. None of that stuff matters except the end product and what you decide to do with it.
It is very much this idea of the artist being in a position where they make the decisions. I decide that this is going to be this way. I mean how far back do we have to go, to Duchamp? It shouldn’t be up for debate anymore. And yet for some reason there is this controversy of sampling and originality…
It’s this egotistical thing where it’s almost frightening, the idea that you feel like your work can be dispersed beyond your ownership, beyond your domain. If you’re very invested in this craft as your identity, you have to believe that this is mine.
It’s a very weird thing given that surely by now everyone has realized that everything is up for grabs. And all that matters now is just whether or not those who grab it can do something of value with it.
It’s very much a minority feeling, I think, still. I remember in an interview you did a while ago, you said if someone invented a Parmegiani plug-in that just did his sound, then it’s up to us to continue to develop music using that tool and move forward. There are all these GRM plug-ins that capture in one tiny piece of software decades of research. Run with it! Why copy?
There was a lovely interview SOPHIE did. She said something like, if you can make a sound that is like a huge piano dropping from a cliff, why would you not want to be using these things and going forward? I was transformed by some of that stuff she was doing. Just astounding. This was more significant than some of the stuff that was coming from, say, contemporary classical composers of the moment. It was just, no, you can’t ignore this person at all. But you have to imagine people being very resistant to this.
Very resistant. If, say, you’re in a very specific niche, maybe an academic niche where you’re studying synthesis and you’ve been toiling for decades, making minor adjustments to this or that algorithm, and then suddenly someone comes in and they’re like: I taught myself on YouTube and I use like all of these cheap free plug-ins and I’m coming up with the most out, ridiculous sounds. Wouldn’t you feel threatened? My life’s work has been invalidated overnight by this outsider. So there’s this very much a desire to protect your domain. Obviously I'm very resistant to that.
…I realize now that I virtually never listen to music. I just find it almost impossible to do so, I can’t seem to concentrate. Yet the other day, I was in a sort of mood. And I played a Heinz Holliger piece, String Quartet No. 2. When it was on, I was subconsciously aware that I was engaged in a way that I haven’t been for a long time. I don't know why that’s come about. I always used to moan on about this to other people, about the idea that people are unwilling to make an effort to listen to stuff. And yet I was becoming more and more like that myself! I think this idea of short attention span problems seems to have affected me to some degree.
You think so? Really?
I don’t know why that is. That’s why it was very interesting for me to work on your material. I was prepared to work on it because I could see something in it, but also because I felt like I had real respect for you, for what you were doing. Somehow it seemed easy to do it. But that’s rare. In the old days, for instance, you’d buy an album and you’d sit down and you’d listen to it, you'd engage with it fully. And then that sort of changed and it became CDs. And again, it’s that situation where I could have the room to myself, Kay would be working nights, and I could actually concentrate and it wouldn’t be something where I’d be lying there pretending to be listening. Nothing else would intrude. It could almost be a sense of being unaware. You can’t just fucking plop into a Lachenmann string quartet. You’ve got to be committed. It makes no sense otherwise.
So you feel that’s less and less...
Yes, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe being agitated about the world.
Do you feel like it's partially because you’ve heard it all? And that if you hear the first five, ten seconds of something, you’re just like: I’ve already heard this.
There could be something about that. That’s a familiarity and a sense of having once been intensely involved in the listening process. And now feeling, I’d say, ill-equipped. I can concentrate like a devil when it comes to my own work. Go over and over it. Detail, detail. But when it comes to the other situation of that real in-depth listening thing, it has definitely changed. I can’t really explain it, other than... age? Weariness? It could be a mixture of familiarity as well, since I certainly have got to the stage now where I’m making decisions about what is good and not good in microseconds. On Bandcamp, for instance, flitting around checking things within two seconds.
I joke with other people who write about music that it takes me five seconds to know.
It could be just that it’s a bad opener...
Usually not (laughter).
I’m trying to be generous here.
Have you had moments of thrill or excitement recently, or is that very few and far between?
Well, I tell you, the last time was Playboi Carti, Whole Lotta Red.
Tell me what that was like.
Well, I just thought this was great. I couldn’t stop playing it. So many tracks. I gorged myself on certain tracks. I loved all the criticism as well. Everyone was giving him shit because it was all cheap synth sounds. I thought: You people just haven’t a clue. And regardless of the fact he might be coming out with some verbal dodges... that raises the whole issue about the nature of that. Does an artist get judged by the rest of his caliber as a decent human being?
It’s an eternal question.
So he might come across as totally fucking sexist in some respects. But a lot of times it sort of seems to get sort of smothered in this other thing, where he might be saying one thing, but the actual form of the thing is saying something else.
…What’s the difference between stealing and sampling, for instance? Like, do you feel that same sense of, oh, I’m diving into something that I shouldn’t be.
I did feel that way about—did you ever hear Fear of Gravity?
Of course. What did you feel in that one?
Well, it was things I was nicking stuff from. There was one from a Congolese group. I used a little bit of that in something, it was just like: Yeah, okay, I can just pop around all over the world and nick stuff. And I felt unsure of whether I really wanted to be doing that. So after that I tended to plunder from what I consider to be more of my own culture, if that’s the right word to use. I just didn’t feel comfortable about that.
Do you still feel that way?
I don’t know. Would you feel comfortable doing something like that?
I guess I’m just not in that zone right now. I’m just generating sounds.
But you’re taking them from Western cultural instrumentation.
Those are the references. That’s a good point. Technically I had an album in 2019 which was somewhat transitional, but more free jazz influenced. And in that I had recorded myself playing Korean folk instruments. But there’s an interesting dynamic there because I don’t know how to play them. They are, of course, embedded in very specific historical and cultural traditions that I can’t lay claim to just because I happen to be Korean. So in a sense, if you want to be extremely critical about it, it was a kind of self-exoticizing thing, or putting my own culture on a pedestal in a way.
But that’s interesting because if any culture has embraced the so-called Western thing, it’s South Korea. I mean, look at this stuff that’s coming out of South Korea now. The stuff that we like as well. Talk about taking something and throwing it back at you. So I don’t know... But in that particular incident in Fear of Gravity it just felt: Yes, I’m going for the cheap emotions here. It was a very plaintive song, and I had no idea what it was meant to be conveying. There’s an intuition there, too, right?
Absolutely. So what is your domain, then? What do you call it (laughter)?
…I suppose if another culture is co-opted, and they’re throwing it back at you, it’s an interesting thing. I would feel much more at home in that situation than if it was something completely... For instance, there was a period of time when traditional Irish music wanted to be a little bit more contemporary. And of course, the only way they could do that was by sounding like fucking Weather Report. That jazz stuff. And I thought, oh please, this is not the answer. This is not how you make profoundly complex folk music that comes out of very hard historical and material conditions. It was soft jazz stuff. In fact, if a tradition came from Ireland that actually embodied something with computers, that would be more like a contemporary folk tradition, as opposed to this idea of just transposing beautiful folk traditions and then giving them a bit of drumbeat and bass and soft synth sounds. That’s not contemporary. That’s just trashing something. So what's my area? Plunder, I suppose. How do you feel about that earlier work of yours?
I’m critical about it, but I’m still proud of it as a product. And if anything, it’s taught me that increasingly, what I try to do with any kind of recorded output is work through a problem. At that particular point it was a problem of politicized or political music—is it possible, feasible, desirable to merge the two or to try and attempt some kind of synthesis? At the time, I believed, maybe. The purpose had to be—and I have criticized this now—to match the intensity of the materials to the historical experiences that you’re trying to convey.
That would make sense. Say, for instance, in a period of time of violent upheaval, you took a particular Korean instrument and processed that sound into a cacophony of chaotic violence, then there would be some validity in that. You would be saying something, a statement would be implied illustrating it. It would be an implication that this is the truth. This is what is taking place. A violent confrontation, a destruction of the culture. And I’m using this as an expression of that.
That actually was what I was doing. So that’s why I do think there is something to it. But it’s not something I’d try again.
See, I wasn’t doing that. I was just trying to make it nice (laughter). So there is the distinction. You are doing the right thing. Because it’s coming not just from your own political perspective and an acknowledgment of the situation. You’re actually transforming that sound into something else. So even if it’s in passing or completely sped up... the violence of it is saying something else.
There is this whole other aspect where these instruments were already embedded as such into the Korean labor and protest movement. They are used at protests. So from that perspective it’s a kind of transference into the musical realm. But still, because I’m very self-critical, there are some things that I would not do again—but not in such a way that I have regrets. It’s more: Now that it’s been a few years, I see certain flaws, mostly to do with the thinking that political music has to bludgeon the listener and shake them into consciousness.
Now, I’m trying to take a much more patient approach. I’m going back to shaping consciousness being the entire goal of everything that I’m doing. You can’t bludgeon someone into consciousness; there’s no instant, overnight process. At the same time, like you’re saying with the miners’ strike, things can happen very quickly. But that still requires very specific conditions and it never comes out of nowhere, it’s always in development. So what I’m trying to do now is have a larger body of work, with writing and history, and allow space for those connections to be made. But ultimately, the person experiencing the work has to be motivated themselves to undertake that process. It has to be an internal process, and that can take years and years. That’s what I’m trying to do with all of this stuff—but, like I said, I’m also pessimistic.
Well, I sometimes wonder whether I’m just operating on one aspect of it, on quite a superficial level where I’m content to some degree with the sensuousness of the sounds themselves, the workings of the sounds that relate to each other, without trying to bring to bear on it any other implications. I know that they are there, because of the nature of the form in which I’ve chosen to put these sounds together. There is a particular challenge. At the same time, the paramount thing is this idea of the sensuousness of the sound, the textures. And that’s why it’s intriguing and interesting and why it’s important that the work has all this other stuff, which I may not necessarily be fully conscious of when it’s being composed.
There are readings that feel wrong to you, I’m sure.
Oh, there are.
And that indicates that there is something more than the surface.
Friends will say, you’re interested in dance music, why don’t you do something like dance music? And it’s a ridiculous question because it simply is not feasible for me to do this.
Why not?
Well, because it would come out naff. I know the limitations when it comes to producing good dance music. There are far better younger people out there who just know; it comes to them very directly and spontaneously. I’m not coming from that point, I’m coming from some self-conscious decision making later on in life. No way, forget it. I’ll deal with this.
And what is “this”?
“This” is in some respects an appropriation of some of those elements. I respect so much of the stuff that’s going on, but I’m not going to do it. I couldn’t. The point is I don’t live SOPHIE’s life. I don’t have the technical ability to produce what she did. But I like what’s going on there, a lot of the implications. And I’m going to find some way in which that can find its home in this abstracted music or sound world. I feel like I have a very valid reason for doing just that.
You can express admiration for it, right?
Right. I never felt any real loyalty to the most important areas of music when I was young. I was on a little camping trip when I was thirteen years old. I heard the Kinks, “You Really Got Me.” Which was just mindblowing. The Kinks, the Stones, Beefheart, the Velvets. Everything keeps moving forward. In dance music, certain things would be significant then, but then something else would crop up. So in one sense you could say: Oh, it’s just superficial because of the latest trends. But it’s all real. I was totally taken by the ragga stuff, the grime stuff. I felt my body was actually responding to it. Not theoretically. And so when you go to a wedding and then some Rolling Stones track comes on and a certain age group suddenly gets up to dance, it touches me because it was significant for them. Then their interest in newer music dies off at a certain age. Well, it never did for me. I just kept on moving forward in a very real way. It wasn’t like I was artificially constructing my love of this beat. I feel pleased that I can still be alive to this. So I love that Carti beat, for instance, it hits me. Genuinely. I like the idea of being alive to this. And I hope that you would feel the same way.
You’re describing exactly what keeps me going.
It’s important because you see how many people have a certain period when music was significant to them. And certain types of beats touch their bodies. And then it locks. And that’s it.
No, that’s exactly right. You’re touching on something so important to me. On one level, I think there are people in this niche who take popular music, popular forms with a kind of mediation. They say, “Oh, I enjoyed that,” while knowing that it’s a “lower” form and it’s like, I’m special, I’m standing out from my uptight, cloistered peers for liking Playboi Carti or whatever. But for me, while I’m not saying everything exists in one pot, there is no high or low divide. You just know when something hits you. It’s often very unexpected things. For the last four months I’ve been listening to only guitars (laughter). This is just what I want to hear right now. I want to hear something pleasing and yet I also hear something deeper, that there’s some quality to it that draws me in. It’s funny to surprise yourself in that way, rather than having a fear of it.
That’s good, because you have trust in the idea that this stuff is seeping in. As it percolates, it’ll find its way out in some form. But not necessarily forming your own rock band (laughter). This is the interesting thing with your reviews because they’re very diverse, and I like that. I mean, you reviewed something I checked out and I was a bit baffled.
Was it a positive review?
It was a very positive review. The music wasn’t to my liking. But at the same time I took notes because if you say something, then I’ll take notes with all respect. Maybe I’m missing something here.
…It’s weird given that, in a way, classical music was the formative thing. My father listened to a lot of it. Even being a member of the Communist Party. So I was brought up, for example, on the string quartets of Shostakovich. I mean, he was one of those working-class people who was self-educated. So we had a lot of that, we had Bach and Shostakovich, Beethoven.
What’s your relationship to classical music now?
I’m afraid to say if it’s anything I will listen to at any length, it would be something like that. I’m afraid Bach is definitely one.
I return to Bach all the time.
In a sense, I find that more palatable. If I’m honest, I haven’t really listened to anything by Xenakis for quite a time.
Same.
I’m not sure why that is. What would your reason be? Because we definitely talked quite a lot about classical music in the sense of how important it was to us.
Yeah. Even Nono, to be honest, I’m finding it hard...
Why? Can I interview you now? Why do you think that is?
Part of it is the political tape works. When I hear this cacophony of voices in different languages, interspersed with chaotic sounds, I feel like he’s being too direct. He’s being too straight, he’s being too representational, illustrating the rebellion or illustrating a revolutionary process, as opposed to exposing the hidden links that actually push such a social process forward and the way that manifests. There’s no reason for music to sonically match the sound of a protest or the sound of upheaval. The other part is just what applies to classical music on the whole for me right now, which is: There’s something about classical and acoustic instrumentation where I keep seeing the ceiling, the limits to it, and my interest keeps diminishing. Where you have something like Lachenmann, for instance, you hear these extended techniques, you hear the intensity of these scraping and scratching sounds. But at a certain point, it’s just: Then what? Not in a futuristic sense of “this must keep moving forward.” But then what?
To me, it was something to do with the idea that an area, a sonic area, had been explored and it had been explored thoroughly. And I know it’s a dangerous thing to be saying.
I know, but you’re right.
So when we had this sort of lowercase music, I thought, this is ridiculous because you get this repressed sound world, whereas at least with Lachenmann, you could expect the imposition, a compositional imposition, where it would have these, as you say, scrapings and sounds that were textural and then suddenly there would be this burst. A chord, a strangely conventional chord brought right in, then the volume would shift and there’d be some sort of dynamic and something which you would never get in an improvised setting, no one would dare. So it’s almost like it’s been done. And whether or not you can return to it, that’s another thing I don’t know. There may come a point where people see more in it. History will hopefully change the way you look at it. But I’m with you on this. I tried to put something on by Lachenmann recently and just found myself drifting, almost instantly. Maybe it’s because I’ve listened to it enough. I’ve exhausted it.
Do you think that’s possible? To truly and permanently exhaust...
I don’t know. I would hate to think so. Because that wouldn’t bode well for us either (laughter). Someone’s going to come along and they’re going to love what you do. They’re going to play that to death. Then it’s like, “I’ve moved on.” It’s brutal.
There’s a brutality to all of it.
It’s definitely left a hole, I have to say. The only thing that concentrates me is that hunt for samples, you know… when you made that comment about Mr. Bill. I mean, Mr. Bill, he seems like a nice enough bloke, and produces very useful sample-able sounds. He just knows the technology. He’s an Ableton expert. But this complex dance music is not my area of interest. So for me, that’s the only time I listen intently is when I’m on the hunt. I’m afraid it sounds cruel.
No, not at all. Part of the difficulty, too, with classical music, is this question of audience and that even with something radical, like a Lachenmann piece, if he tries something new, something unheard, for some reason, I just picture this very staid audience being like: (imitates concert hall audience). I’m just so far removed from this idea in general. The baby steps, so to speak, and the timidity.
Well suddenly I have so many anecdotes... I saw a Ferneyhough piece. And he’s not easy. It was a piece for cello and delay pedal. That, to me, was exactly what you just said, this idea: “Right, I’m a radical composer, and I hear in the wind that there are all these pieces of machinery about. And I’m going to employ one of these pieces of machinery in a new and radical piece.” And it was just so naff. I thought, don’t do it. Don’t try. Leave it alone. Because if you’re pussyfooting around, even though it’s just a naff piece of delay, you’re using it in the most clichéd way possible. Just get another cello in there. I mean, for fuck’s sake, what’s the point? You’re not actually really doing anything with the situation. It seems feeble, and yet at the same time, it was embraced in that sort of concert hall way.
Exactly. With this timidity—and this applies beyond the classical world—the solution is not about being aggressive or anything like that. This timidity cuts across a lot of experimental music as well. People can see certain moves made and observe from the sidelines and be like: That’s wrong. Or that’s too far. Or, all of us know about the rules, yet this person doesn’t. And on the other end of that, there are provocateurs who are aware that these institutions and these ways of making music are so conservative. We need to break out of them. But then they become clowns, actors, in intentionally trying to subvert those rules.
There’s somehow this idea of being unwilling to accept that what we are doing still falls under the category of some form of entertainment. It has to have some sense of its journey from us. The selfish artist. Uncompromising as it may be, there’s still got to be some flow.
One question I wanted to ask you is just: How the fuck did you end up here (laughter)? Not physically, but just, what is this? Look at your Reaper file, what is that? How did you end up here? Show that to your thirteen-year-old self and say: This is what you’re going to be spending eight hours a fucking day on (laughter).
It’s the strangest thing, the idea that I came to it late. For a long period of time I was involved in music. I listened to a lot of music, I was always listening to music. But nothing ever really took place, until the sampler. I don’t know. Coming to it at a late stage has contributed to my stubbornness. You could call me someone that refuses to grow up. I mean you’re 73 and you’re still hopping around like an idiot. You know, you have more dignity, you should move on (laughter).
But yes, for whatever fucking reason, we’re in these very specific zones. What I always think about if I’m going to put out a recording or something, is club music. Not sonically, but from the perspective of immediacy. And just imagining the social experience when a certain drum'n'bass track comes on and it’s understood and it hits you.
Yes, it hits you.
We need to capture that immediacy in this kind of work. That’s why I am disappointed by work that seems to believe that that’s not possible in these realms, or that we’ve somehow culturally or historically exhausted those potentials. I’m not saying you’ve said this, but I know there have been interviews where you’ve said: I feel like I’m hitting an end zone.
Yes.
Like around the hylic piece, for instance, just narrowing and narrowing.
After the cphon piece, there was an exhaustion about the whole idea of composition. And hence the miraculous meeting of people who could do this live thing. My first outing into the world of live improvisation was with Lee [Gamble] at a venue now demolished. Someone who was a great fan of his before this change of direction was almost outraged. But strangely enough, I’m back in this process of reduction.
And that’s fantastic.
But it took that step to find this—and it's to do with the idea of creating new sound worlds.
Did it feel like a risk to you?
Not really. It just felt like a necessity because I felt the compulsion to keep going. It felt extremely natural, to be honest. It’s serendipity, I think, meeting certain people and enjoying the possibilities there. And then of course you know the initial thing I did with John [Edwards] and Mark [Sanders] was fantastic. It seemed to really gel. They could keep up with me and I could keep up with them, because of the nature of what I’d done and how I’d designed the software. So that opened up a whole lot of possibilities. It now feels like I’m not sure whether I can do that anymore, but I don’t really know if I’m comfortable doing playback either. I want to be in a situation where I’m surprised. So I’ve got to think about: How can I create situations? How do I devise software—which I have to get someone else to build because I can’t do it—where I can surprise myself? I did an improvisation and there was a point where I was treading water for a little while. People accept that. But then suddenly three samples clashed in a way which just completely threw me—it sounded fantastic. But I didn’t know how to get out of that situation, so I made a clumsy move after that really pissed me off. I thought: Oh, that’s the failings of this. When it first happened, I started smiling. It was fantastic. The sounds were just so intriguing.
Living their own kind of lives, right?
In Reaper, I’ll just start grabbing a sample and placing it totally arbitrarily below two others. And then it might be a tiny section where something really works. I’ll cut that section up. The building blocks start from there, but it’s a very slow process and it certainly is not something that is by design. Some composer friend of mine described the way in which they lay out the plan for their work, the shaping and the arcs. And I just have no idea how to work like that. For me, it’s one set of sounds, and I build up from it in all directions. And then somehow that could get distorted in some way. So there’s this sculptural element to the nature of it, but it’s a very long, arduous process.
That’s exactly how I work. I don’t know what the volume of source materials you have when you go into a new project, but for me it’s often 200 or 300 files, hours and hours of material. And what really gets me is this question of intuition. You’re never even programmatically going to be able to test every combination. At a certain point you’re just trying it out. And there’s a part of you that might think, maybe I missed some magic combination in here that I’m never going to be able to discover. But in a way, you kind of just have to let it go. Do you feel that way?
Yes.
Because when you’re doing it by hand, you can’t capture every possible overlap of every sample. In terms of duration and process, for me, when I started making music years and years ago, my main problem was fiddling, editing. So I’ve actually ended up in a very ascetic zone, where I have to intentionally restrict myself. I have three simultaneous audio tracks in my project. And if I have three full already and another fragment, I must punt something. Even if it hurts me.
This is to do with the time factor more than anything else?
It’s not about cadence and needing to release things, but more about decisiveness. I work better not regretting decisions. And I like being surprised by what seems like a compromise which in two weeks I realize was the best possible decision. It’s almost like the specialized audio editing tools are an emergency operating room.
Well, you’ve got me there. I work something to the bone for two years, it lasts about ten minutes and then ten people listen to it and that’s the end of that. But I find it very comforting and easy.
I’ve pushed things over the tipping point and overworked them, and then it becomes suffocating.
And it shows itself in the work as well.
Exactly. You can hear every over-manipulation. Also what happens is, if you’re focused on a 10-second stretch, that’s, let’s say, 15 minutes into the duration of a piece—you forget what that sounds like after 15 minutes. So you have to sit through that whole 16-minute stretch multiple times just to get that 2-second stretch.
Whereas I don’t have quite that problem because my longest pieces are only a few minutes (laughter) so I can find its formula very quickly. But I’ve done exactly that. I have gone through the experience of putting a lot of work into a small section and loving it and then seeing it in context and thinking this is just dreadful. I’m very reluctant to get rid of it, but it’s got to be got rid of. So we start again.
What’s funny is, in earlier drafts of my work where you’ve cut four or five minutes. If I go back to those first few drafts, there have been things that you cut where when I first hear them, I’m like... oh no, you cut that one (laughter)? But then I trust you so much that I just listen to it for what it is. Then the thing comes out, it’s done. Sometimes for fun, I go back to the earlier drafts. And all those extra sections just stand out.
The one thing I could grasp in your work was an overemphasis on something that was unnecessary. Like too much of a good thing. The transition out almost becomes a relief. And I know that was purely gut and I felt like I could do this. Editing is not something I really do, but I felt it came very naturally to me.
That’s amazing.
And I’m glad you liked what I did.
Yes. You changed the pieces quite radically.
It’s that idea: How long do you need to say something? Some people would argue it takes 45 minutes to say this thing. But most of the time I hear pieces that just go on too long, and they change very little. So what’s it saying? It’s said almost everything it can possibly say in 10 minutes, not 45. What is this? Are we now in that weird world of immersion, immersive work? Does that just mean escapist? Like this organ music that’s popular right now. It is pleasing to some degree, but what else is there? What’s it actually doing? Is it like paracetamol or something? Are we now producing a sort of music which is designed to cater to a despair of the world?
Somewhat, yes. Escapism is at the root of it as well.
I think that disturbs me. I mean, I do know that I want something that is agitated, has anxiety in it to some degree.
Absolutely. I also want to make a very queer music.
Like in the old sense of the word?
Both (laughter). Something very strange and almost delightful, but still very serious and intentional. Something that shakes loose something inside you, your relationship to the world. If you capture a good thing, it’s enough for that good thing to be said very quickly.
It’s an odd thing. I was talking to Lee Fraser about this. I think the maximum is nine minutes within the work we are doing. Because if you have these levels of agitation… well, your thing works because in a sense the agitation becomes a textural, ongoing shape in itself. So we’re not dealing with the same levels of what we are dealing with in something like hylic. If you had 25 minutes of that, it would be too much. You just check out. But your work is so dense that it somehow then gels into a very intense ambience, if I dare say the word. A textural momentum. Somehow the fact that so much is being thrown at you doesn’t impinge on the way you listen to it. So duration does matter. But when Lee and I were talking about this, it seems that the nature of what he does works really well because he knows how to combine the agitated and shifting, beautiful textures of his computer into things which do also have a sustain. He manages to do that very faithfully, which I’ve tried.
I’ve heard that! But when you do sustain things, it works.
But not now. I can’t do it now. It’s all very agitated now. At the most I could possibly get 30 seconds of a semi-drone.
When you’re working on something, are there people in the room with you? Because if you’re considering attention span, if you’re considering exhaustion—who’s in the room with you when you’re making these decisions? Where’s the audience in this process?
How do you mean?
Do you think: Oh, this stretch will be too much, or too exhausting to experience?
No, no, not at all. It really does feel like these fucking things have got a life of their own. And they’re basically saying, don't touch me. I can find no fault with it, and I can’t bear to listen to it anymore, you know?
Resignation, but also confidence.
And a desire for riddance. I want rid of this. It has to be gone. That’s what I used to do in the past. In the past, I’d be in a situation where the album comes out and I would just get rid of all the samples. I’ve got no way back. And I felt that was really quite a good thing to do.
I have started doing that after I saw you were doing that. To counter this fiddling kind of tendency.
It’s like almost forcing yourself to have no option. I really would love to remove two tracks of Constructions I-IV. Because I embrace that glitching thing.
Ah, the CD skipping thing.
I feel in a way that I failed miserably. That really is one of the regrets. Oval did something quite interesting with it, but not many others.
They’re basically the only ones. Maybe Yasunao Tone, but that’s something different. You know, I feel very warm to past versions of myself, or I try to, because my tendency is to be incredibly harsh and be like, who was that idiot (laughter)? In general I do try to be generous and just see it as a process and a continual working-through.
Over a breakfast of baked beans with garlic and spices, bread, margarine, and veggie sausage, we discuss, off the record:
A well-known experimental musician staying in the gentrifying hotel in their neighborhood
dingn/dents, Dotolim, Chang Park, Ryu Hankil, M3g, the Korean experimental music scene
The queer community in Korea
The Korean reunification movement
The O.C.
Experimental music in Europe vs. America
Blank Forms, Issue Project Room
Finding communists in the music world
Inter-imperialist rivalry
Histories of working-class militancy in Los Angeles
American Chinatowns
Anti-homeless rhetoric; a homegrown L.A. fascism tied to homeownership
Factional struggles in the Amazon Labor Union; the struggle for the contract at JFK8
Lenin’s critique of economism; trade unions as schools for the working class
Big unions as fiefdoms
The 2023 Los Angeles UTLA/SEIU strike action
Radicalizing others as an act of gardening
Evangelism and dogmatism in the newly radicalized
Complexities and contradictions in ideological struggle
Heat waves and death; blackouts
Topographical and geographical changes stemming from climate change; seas becoming deserts
Buried bricks in the Berlin countryside
Histories of Maoism in the U.K.
From the Black Panthers to the Black Liberation Army
Eco-terrorism
The Patriot Act
Non-profits; the Ford Foundation
Swampy, the environmentalist
Robert Owen and the utopian socialists
The struggle at Hillside Villa; the concept of eminent domain
…There are a number of people who I really am fond of and who I really rate, and they've all backed off to some degree.
Alex [Rodgers], right?
To some degree. But again, that’s partly because he’s just not writing at the moment. Sam Ridout is another. He’s stopped completely. And I’d say he did two things that were just fantastic. Theo Burt as well.
That Gloss record is amazing. This is making me want to ask you about being marginal, marginality. On one level, we shouldn’t care because it’s the object, right? Music happens. Whether to ten or a thousand. It’s the same object. But it makes a difference. So I don’t know. I’m sure you have complicated feelings.
I do. It’s a bit like the scale question, isn’t it? I feel as though to some degree I deserve a little bit more recognition. But I want it to be very finely calibrated where I’m in control of the situation in such a way that it doesn’t get too insane. It’s all these weird contradictions. There is that weird thing about, okay, being marginal is accepted. It’s the nature of the game, right? But at the same time, I’m looking at other things that are cropping up. Same old, same old. This is ridiculous. I’m not thinking that it should be me. But then isn’t that always the way?
It is.
I would actually feel uncomfortable. It’s due to the idea of this idea of elevation, being elevated, people treating you in a certain way. It’s this situation of mediocrity. You and I are utterly mediocre at most of everything. We’re mediocre people in relation to a lot of things. I mean, are you good at, say, chemistry?
Of course not.
So what’s the big deal? It’s just that I have this particular thing that I’ve actually spent a lot of time trying to get better at, sadly. So let’s not get carried away here (laughter).
Exactly.
And people who get that attention take it on board and you can see the results. Some of the people I knew, they changed their language, they changed their behavior, who they want to spend time with. All that feels really unpleasant to me. I’m not comfortable with that at all.
You might not even be able to control it.
Exactly. In fact, if anything happened, say, I got a revival because I got a review in the fucking Guardian. And suddenly is everyone clamoring to hear John Wall. I think I’d shit myself (laughter). Whereas some people are absolutely fucking hungry for it, you know, they want this. They feel like they are alive. And I’ve enjoyed being on stage. I’ve noticed, in performance with your computer and the playback thing, you’re not actually doing very much moving. You know, I’m usually moving around, offering a slight entertainment physically, if you want to call it that. And you will just be sitting there. So in effect, what you could do is you could press the button and sit back and have a fag or something. You could say, this is playback, I’m going to get up and walk around. And have a full conversation with the people who are not in the room. Could be a piece of theater or something.
For me, it’s very intentional. To be as still as possible. Yet focused. Because for some reason the velocity and density of the music is given more power with the complete stasis of the performer. I’m not telling you what to do. If I’m moving in a certain way, then it’s like: Oh, that’s what this is.
Don’t start doing free dance (laughter).
Being completely still makes it very opaque as to what the hell am I even supposed to do in this situation as an audience member.
So it becomes almost like a structural element.
Yes. Yet I am laser focused on pretty much nothing. I am doing tiny little fiddly things, but nothing structural. And so that creates this very interesting opacity: What the hell is going on? Not in a clownish way, but I want to create structural humor. For instance, in these newer pieces I’ve been playing, there are very abrupt silences that separate sections. People have not known what to do with those silences when they come. At one performance, they clapped as if it was the end of a movement. But they didn’t have enough time to finish clapping, because two seconds later the music came right back. So then they’re almost embarrassed that they had done that. I’m not trying to be confrontational. I just want to see people attempt to make sense of this very strange experience, this strange object. If I’m signaling what to do, that precludes that kind of experience, in the same way that if I just sat back and was smoking, then it’s like: Oh, I get it. They’re making some kind of statement about performance.
…Actually there was this plug-in called Ominsphere. They had all kinds of things where the people doing the sound design would, say, set a piano on fire and record the sounds.
If that isn’t a sort of a process of serious co-option... Nothing must be left to this anarchy that exists out there. I think there’s also this other idea of locking down misuse. But the only areas which actually seem to be creatively interesting are when people do exactly that.
I call most computer music technical demos. You find the right algorithm and then you just let it run. There’s no compositional element. Do you hear yourself in anybody? Do you feel like there are people that are following you?
Well, definitely…
I can't think of anybody that actually sounds similar other than maybe Sam [Ridout].
There’s very few. And he took on board something and pushed it somewhere else. He’s one of those people that takes a long time, thinks about the relationship of one sound to another. I was just so impressed with his work, you know? I haven’t spoken to him for a little while. I get this strong feeling that he’s just backed off completely.
I wanted to hear more in this direction as well. Maybe he’ll be back.
…I only use iTunes and it’s a very important tool for me.
But in what way, though?
It’s like having a vast but very organized library. First of all, I still focus on the album format. Even the way I view the screen is pictures of albums. I am also constantly deleting things from my library. I trust that whatever has remained is worthy of my attention.
The reason I brought this up is—do you feel this relationship of ease and accessibility is inducing in you a certain casualness about listening? Because it definitely has for this friend of mine.
No, for me it’s actually created more discipline.
I would say that’s relatively rare.
I think it is, too. There are even tools that facilitate discipline, depth and immersion—for instance, the repeat tool. So if I really want to stay with something, I don’t have to pick up the record and flip it back over again, I can just sit with it for hours and hours. But the way I listen is very specific. Like I said, it’s usually two or three artists, two or three albums, for months at a time. And then I’ll exit very rapidly and feel like I’ll wake up on a Tuesday and can’t listen to this garbage for another second. But I’ve learned so much through that process.
My fantasy is that the work has a survivability and a returnability which includes something new that you haven’t quite crossed before... like, “Oh, that piece by Sunik. Wonderful. I haven’t played it for ages. I must get back to it. Wow. I missed that the first time.”
It’s about long time cycles. I spend three months with Henry Cow. I spend three months with DJ Screw. Then I burn out. But that makes the coming back to it that much more thrilling. There are also situations where I burn out and come back and realize I can’t go back.
…That poses an interesting problem for me of difficulty versus ease, because on the one hand, I try to construct works that impel the listener, motivate the listener to continue along. That’s why the transitions matter. The way that that transition manifested was almost addictive. And I need to hear it again.
There must come a point for a lot of people where that level of intensity requires a certain amount of stability in yourself. Because otherwise, it would really push you to spaces where you think, well, why am I going here? There is this masochism in the way in which Kay and I will continuously read what is fundamentally very depressing information because we want to know what’s going on in the world. Somehow we’re feeding something that could be seen as quite destructive to ourselves, because we’re not translating it into some sort of action that then counters it in the same way you’re doing. So I know there’s something masochistic about asking, have you heard the latest misery from the world? And then you carry on with your life. So in a way that felt, to some degree, the same with the music, the intensity of an orchestra.
…Parliament is an immensely clever way to slowly sap any radical position that you might take through procedural things that you must do, otherwise you’re thrown out of the thing. Everything whittles away. You could start out militant, angry, but things about rudeness, what you’re allowed to say, not to say, everything is on about this. It’s by design. That’s why, for instance, Sinn Fein refused to attend, because they knew that it corrupts in this way.
It’s tough because your ears are constantly changing. They’re never stable.
The fact that you apply this level of intensity—investigation—of the pieces. Do you leave almost exhausted by it?
Well, for instance, with Henry Cow, if I spend months and months diving through their discography, finding all the live bootlegs and finding every possible vantage point on this body of work, and then I exit that phase… then there’s absolutely an exhaustion. But then what’s exciting is to slowly creep back to it and wake up one morning, six months later, and be excited about it again. In Praise of Learning!
And the other thing is this idea: If you encounter, say, a contemporary group which somehow piques your interest. And you know it’s failing. The reason is because this area they’re exploring has already been explored thoroughly.
Right. And so what happens in the intensive act of diving into a body of work is you absorb it into your own circuitry. You just feel it. So regardless of whether you actually get pleasure from listening to them again, you understand them on this very bodily level.
There was this situation of a young guy I encountered who was quite arrogant in terms of his computer. He went on to become quite well-known in the dance thing. He played me some of his pieces, computer electronics, Mego-style stuff. And I said, you should listen to this. Paul Dolden, Walls of Jericho. When I played it to him, I’ve never seen this sort of expression, you know, like: Fuck. Fuck, no. What is this? It’s me! It’s me, but a million times more powerful. Cruel, wasn’t it (laughter)?
Cruel but necessary. I think about this as well. There’s this romantic idea that music-making has to be this expression of the self. And regardless of where it fits in history, even if you’re completely repeating something that someone’s already done a million times, it’s still valid because that's your personal expression. But for me, in that instance, if I were making some Paul Dolden-lite type of thing, I would just give up immediately. Or move forward. And it could even be something very silly. Like, okay, I’m trying to make Sun Pandämonium, but with fucking, I don’t know, a tin whistle. A ukulele. Just fucking try it. But don’t do the same thing.
Sometimes blind innocence can actually somehow still manufacture some serious originality.
That’s why intensive listening is so important to me, because you uncover all of those things that have already been done. So that you can then situate yourself.
I mean, you’re taking on a big challenge when you say, right, Cecil Taylor (laughter).
The funniest thing there is that I never went into what I was doing in 2021 with an attitude of: Yeah, Cecil Taylor. I really just did this thing and then people started describing it as such after the fact. But then the funny thing is after I got that feedback, I then approached the next project with a conscious attitude of, I’m going to spend six months listening to Cecil Taylor and see what happens. And it produced work that I’m very proud of. But it’s not like I'm saying, yeah, I’m trying to be Cecil Taylor. And it’s funny, with Cecil Taylor, I’ve had interesting conversations with people who are very into alternative tunings and basically attack the theory of Western notation and the limitation of the piano keys. And maybe I’m just this arch reactionary… but I don’t think I give a shit. Because you listen to Cecil Taylor for 10 minutes and it’s all there, there’s still so much to be exposed. I’m not saying don’t explore those alternate tunings because that’s a very important historical and musical task. But if you’re taking that alternative tuning as the foundation and the entire justification of the new approach, it’s not enough. You still need to make good music and it still needs to be structurally sound.
Where this idea of alternative tunings comes from is really interesting because when I’ve heard albums in which this has been going on, I’m still not convinced. There are of course vast riches of music which exist outside of this cloistered realm. It’s more to do with the idea of it being implied that somehow there’s a great emptiness within Western music. And especially in the piano.
Yes. The piano is an object of hatred.
So you get to a situation where it’s about co-option as well. A lot of people hate Mozart. And they hate Mozart because Mozart is now this old music that accompanies the bourgeoisie. Putin likes Mozart. So you can see why people react so strongly. If you listen to Chopin’s pieces, and maybe they’re just simple tunes, but it’s more than that. You need to come at it at a later stage when it suddenly opens up. You suddenly see how radical some of these things actually are.
The associations are messy.
Beethoven, the late string quartets. Nothing like it.
Unbelievable.
Right. I mean, I would imagine that you might reach a stage, because of your intensity of investigation and the absorption of so much stuff, that gradually there’d be surprises.
You’re describing a lot of my working-through of figuring out my listening process. I was actually very dogmatic about it before, maybe five or six years ago. I used to be very impulsive and decisive in taking faux-“political” stances within music. I’d be like, “I’m never going to listen to another guitar again.” I’ve had moments where I declare the guitar to be a fucking reactionary tool that generates lazy music (laughter). I literally deleted huge swaths of music from my library and spent the last five years very sheepishly going back and being like… oh, I actually like that one.
This is interesting in the sense of, who’s imposing this guilt on you? It’s the idea of having secret vices.
Yes, exactly. And there’s no such thing as guilty pleasure. There shouldn’t be such a thing. If it speaks to you, then you know it matters.
That’s why I took notice of the things you wrote about Playboi Carti, for instance. It signaled to me that you were open. There’s not this little closed shop of intolerance. I want to embrace this. And if this weird mutant pop music from this group I’ve never heard of before gets me, I’m going to write about this and I want to write about in such a way that suggests my own investigating, my own sense of process.
I take everything that matters to me equally seriously. It doesn’t matter where it comes from. I want to approach it very intensely and seriously, on the same plane of investigation.
Absolutely. I think it is extremely dangerous to start imposing these limits. You have to look at survivability as well. Why is it that certain types of music continuously keep on surviving? Blues music. Relatively simple. Why does it keep coming back? What is it about it that keeps refreshing itself?
…In some respects this has also been an interview of you.
Yeah, absolutely.
I’ve got to the stage now where I just enjoy your company now. It refreshes my brain. Because of the COVID thing and because a number of my musical friends now no longer live here, conversations like this are becoming rarer. I mean, yeah, the last time I had a conversation like this was with, say, Lee Fraser.
The one thing I’m wondering about is what you were doing before picking up the sampler. That’s a long period of time.
It’s interesting because I really do think there was some real advantage about coming to this late.
In what sense?
In terms of having the ability to sustain it and keep going. Whereas when you’re younger, it’s flexible and it can easily die out. Before that I’d been playing in bands.
Can you tell me a little more?
Well I was doing a whole lot of listening in this period. I quite liked the idea of playing bass, so I got somebody to build a fretless bass for me. I really loved the sound and got into it and formed this band with this guy, Mark Van Gogh (laughter), a fantastic drummer. And there was another guy called Oran who played guitar like the guitarist from Killing Joke. And so we formed a trio and we always changed our name every gig we did. Talk about self-destruction. The first one was something like Spock’s First Kiss—idiot names, you know. And then on another occasion we called ourselves Shatters. So there was no sense of building a career. I had something on tape where I had a distortion pedal on the fretless—fantastic harmonics, but it was definitely rhythm-orientated. And so I was having a little bit of a flirtation with music in that setting. Near my 40s, I had a relationship with somebody and we sort of formed a punk-y band. I was never really that interested in it going anywhere, I just enjoyed the social scene. So anyway, there was a play-acting of this thing because basically I was earning money painting and decorating. That’s all I was doing—painting and decorating, for years.
And were you happy doing that?
Well, there was a period of time when I had an antagonism to culture, almost. I just wanted to work and fuck off and have little holidays, visit people in places. That’s when I was drinking a lot as well. It never became a serious problem. I was drinking a lot because I enjoyed that culture. So there was a friend of mine who was a brilliant guitarist in this thing called The Demolition Decorators. And they were very much the spontaneous sort of group that would just turn up. Instruments would suddenly emerge out of nowhere and they’d just do something. They were very good. I went to see him and he had this sampler and to me, it was a revelation. I never thought of it in terms of stealing. I had a floppy disk, it could take about ten seconds or so, but it was enough. I loved this process. It just felt like I’d really found something I wanted to pursue to the end. So Fear of Gravity happened. You had to build up the samples very slowly, using the keyboard and such. I just went from there really. At 40 years old. I had accumulated quite a vocabulary of interests already. Hence Fear of Gravity was packed with all sorts of samples. I can just grab, without ever thinking about the implications or the legalities. When that came out, I put on the packaging, “this album is made entirely of samples.” It was a bit like time and place because not that many people were doing it. That’s another thing. I was there very early on, the sampling thing. So we now get [Carl] Stone eulogized, and various other people. But there’s never any mention of me.
It’s true.
I was working on Fear of Gravity in 1990. So that sampling thing was really beginning to take off. It’s interesting that it sold an enormous amount. I sold 3000 CDs. It was partly based on the time factor. There weren’t that many people doing this type of work, but that’s only a minor quip. An ego quip. Why am I not mentioned in this history of sampling? I can’t say I’m a great fan of much of that stuff. I think the one thing that put them off is that I was actually using samples to recontextualize them into a proper composition, as opposed to making statements about sampling. And yet at the same time, I think that one by [John] Oswald, Plexure… I think that was brilliant. But again, because there was an overarching compositional shaping of the thing. So, yes, I had a normal life. I was living in a communal situation, trying to live by reasonable socialist principles. There’s all sorts of contradictions there. It was just a particular sort of life in which music was just part of the situation. Very early on I’d picked up on This Heat.
Were you going to gigs?
Yes. Just general normal life. But being receptive to things, of course. So [John] Coltrane was listened to a lot, and Beefheart, The Fall. And it just felt, okay, I’ve accumulated all this, like we talked about before, in the body. So when this thing with the sampler came on, it just felt like a natural realization. I can take this on board now.
You were ready.
I’m not the listener now, but I’m going to be the producer.
In a way, what you’re saying is that moment couldn’t have happened when you were 25. Even if the technology had existed.
No, I don’t think so.
It required a full life experience.
I think so. It was something to do, maybe, with the stability of the life that I had. Made it possible for me to keep going. In many respects it’s quite a weird thing. I remember going to this club in London. I went with Lee [Gamble], and it was a ragga night. I think it was the guy from The Bug, and I thought it was fantastic. It just hit me, and yet I was by far the oldest there. A lot of those people I could’ve been their granddad. And in fact, some young fucker came up to me and said, “What are you doing here?” (laughter). Not in an aggressive way, but… it confirmed this idea of wishing to remain alive to these new things. Sadly that club closed down pretty soon after as did many more due in part to gentrification.
The last thing I’m wondering is if you have thoughts on what you said about Stone and Oswald and the history books. What are your feelings about that? Your “legacy” and where you sit in this history. Do you have egotistical feelings about it? Like, “I need to be an entry in this book.”
I’ve not given any thought except maybe occasionally when I’m reading something about it. And then it’s about a microsecond of resentment, then it disappears. This is what it is. And I don’t really care. I feel as though I’ve continually moved forward and have perpetually challenged myself. I feel they’ve become old guard.
So you feel the work is all that matters at the end of the day.
I do. And weirdly enough, I feel the only thing that I’m aware of that is important to me is the idea of some sort of relevance, and relevance to people who are younger. And that somehow I have something to say to people who are younger and have come from a different sort of musical background. As opposed to the old electroacoustic… where, you know, the age group is locked. They are all growing old together. I’m interested in what is going on with younger music and newer music. Is that conceit or ego? I’m not sure. I mean, I lost a lot of people.
I was going to ask if you feel like a kind of outcast.
Well, the minute it started shifting from Fractuur into the more computer-orientated sound realm, it was definitely a decline in terms of what people were buying.
Did you have difficult feelings?
No, not at all. It was just the conviction that this is the right way to go. And again, we’re back to that thing—because I can afford it. I’m not dependent on the sales. So in a way, I accept the obscurity because I can afford to be in this situation.
I feel the same way. And I’m obviously younger…
No, that’s an essential political position to take. As for that idea of being resentful, that’s so fleeting. Fear of Gravity came out of pure innocence. Now, that’s an interesting example of this situation of having absolutely no idea, of nothing self-conscious, of just enjoying it. In fact, when I first started doing it there was no intention of releasing anything. It was just the sheer genuine pleasure of doing this thing. It seemed to come so naturally, so easily. And then, of course…
Has that pleasure gone, then?
No, but it’s now considered more like work and it’s harder. Alterstill, I think, was the breakthrough. It became a lot more sophisticated. There was more self-consciousness. And then the minute I started shifting away… I think it was Constructions V-VII. When it became really stripped down. That’s when it started drifting away. People started going elsewhere. When I did the live thing, it was a cut-the-strings sort of situation. This guy who had written about me a lot in The Wire, who was a great fan… When I performed cphon, he almost attacked me, he was so upset. And I very gently said: You must trust me in this. I can’t do anything else but be this way at the moment, even if you hate it. Trust me.
It’ll reward you.
If you suddenly shift around. I mean, look at all these stories of people who completely flip out... Morton Feldman and [Philip] Guston. I mean, my Christ, it was the thought: My friend has gone mad.
It ended their friendship.
And yet at the same time, I think I was just the most utterly bold move ever imagined.
It’s incredible. I don’t even like his abstract work. I go to the late work.
Exactly. And to be able to do that transformation in such a short space of time, I mean, he must have been giving people hemorrhages. When you tell an audience, “I can go anywhere I want, and you can come with me.” Nine times out of ten, a lot of them won’t.
John Wall’s music can be found at Bandcamp.
Thank you for reading the one-hundreth issue of Tone Glow. Let’s all go on our own paths, and follow those who do the same.
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Thanks for continually publishing this kind of stuff. Tone Glow is really an inspiration.
amazing read, thanks for the continuous effort