TOWARDS AN ENSEMBLE FOR A MULTI-STORIED SUBJECTIVITY

...Considering past details, the what-ifs, the "ors," but it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is this, whatever is being done in the moment.

What doesn't matter? It doesn't matter what we do in the past?

It doesn't matter how you think about it, how you consider yourself in the past, or situations in the past.

I would like to hear you say a bit more about why you think that is, because I tend to think that who I am in the present is defined by the being I am now who is a person defined by their past experiences and accumulated instances, in terms of memory of the self I have been, remembering how I felt in certain situations to inform what I'm feeling during this situation, or perhaps remembering through notebooks or evocative pictures or other externalizations of my mind, but the present is also defined by how we orient ourselves towards the future: who we are now is how we speak now about who we will become. Who I am now is how a style of articulation in describing who I want to be, a story that I tell, and seeking out a being beyond my description feels like chasing a mirage that can't be perceived directly, a flickering illusion that can only be glimpsed from its sides. So it's quite provocative to hear you say that the past doesn't mean anything, or that you want to not address it or attend to it. I wonder how that's possible, but mostly why you think that the past is undesirable.

Ultimately it's not completely possible. We all carry our own ideas of what the past is and how we were involved in it, how something was and what shape it makes, and that's only our individual realities and memories, captured from our own vantage points, which are completely different from everyone else's perspective no matter what scenario - the dynamics of a relationship, a trip to the lake, a vacation to New York - these are remembered by a singular point of view, your own. I don't know...

I don't know either... not to say that what you are speaking about doesn't have merit, but that it doesn't seem like we can go anywhere with it, that we are here now reveling in this idea of what it could mean to forget the past, as an opportunity to restart our individual histories or redefine ourselves, to become a new person.

Then with this concept of present, can't we constantly become different people?

I would think so! But then people re-memeber you to be a certain way, are always putting you back together in the same way, the way that they think they know you to be. People say "___ is this way."

Yeah they do.

So there's two points then, there's the story that you tell yourself about yourself, and then there's the story that other people tell about who you are, maybe even conflicting stories about who you were or strange ideas of who they perceive you to be, even in relation to a projected future. Then these stories are combining like a chorus...

... People agreeing "yeah ___ is that way!" But I wasn't! I don't feel like that person.

Hey look at this ghost tree.

Why is it so white?

It looks like it was underwater and there was a bunch of algae in its branches that dried out and became bleached in the sun.

Eww it stinks.

Look at that loner crane out there in the puddle, next to an old tire, looking at his own reflected image.

Thinking about his past.

Thinking about death. "Look at this shimmering bird in the water that looks like me but is not me because I'm here now."

A dystopic tire stuck in the mud forever.

Yeah, so these stories that people tell, they follow us around, all of them, the stories we tell and the stories that others feel inclined to tell for us or about us or even against us, and all of those stories create dissonance and confusion and tension. I think of all history... take any person from history, like Napolean to pull a random example, and how one of the first things any random person might say will concern his "little man" complex perhaps, and even though it is based in his actual physical stature being below average it's also probably a story that followed him around his whole like like a looming ominous shadow over head... "No I'm not that way, I'm this way!" ... And it's the story which may have grown into a complex which spurred his warring nature. You hear similar things about Hitler being a failed painter then instigating the war, and we're all always going to war in this way, all talking about being in love and becoming attached to someone or something or some idea, or losing an attachment and going off to war over it...

(bird squawks and flies away)

I don't think one can completely stop thinking of themselves in relation to the past, but I think that people can and do live through their past too long, or too much, re-live it more than living from it. I see them dwelling in it, what they've done and who they were.

I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of rewriting those stories. Ok, so stories of ourselves to ourselves and then others telling our stories for us - whether we like it or not - right? So how could you rewrite your own history by choosing to tell it differently, and yes, become another person? Also, the implications of me approaching you and saying "___, you remember this thing about me, but that's not the truth, because actually it happened like this..." and then to go about living in such a manner as is this story is indeed true. Doesn't this render it true in a way, at least in a literary sense, to make it believable as a kind of truth through the telling? To go around changing other individuals perspectives of you.

Seems like that's trying to prove something...

Well, can you prove that you exist? Maybe it's trying to prove that. How do you exist? When do you exist? "No, it definitely wasn't like that, remember? It was like this!" And then everyone becomes disrupted, and begins asking themselves how it really happened, and the story becomes internalized to be told a different way, at least in terms of style if not content. "Oh well if that's what you did then I don't know who you are." Yeah, you're right, you don't know who I am, so let me tell you... to the extent that one would want to reinvent themself. Speaking of which, I looked up that author you mentioned to me, Klaus Ove Knausgård... his first books were given a lot of praise which laid the seed for him writing a 35,000 word 6 volume autofictive biography of his own measly existence, struggles with his father, boring stuff.

I read a chapter. He's just drinking coffee and talking about his days listening to New Order and how he remembers being punk and how much he hates his ex-wife, so personal and dull.

I read a review in the NY Times and the critic was associating him to Proust, a "Nordic Proust" or something... "It calls attention to the unavoidable meaningfullness of all the small details and how they are swimming in an ocean of meaninglessness filling up the silence in between." Something like that. Describing it as a project on the scale of life, filthy with all the minutiae. This critic said he was interested even when he was bored.

I read that too. All the reviews made me fascinated by the book, but I'm not going to read 6 books about this guy...

Of course, because that would be incredibly tedious. Proust wrote a huge work like that, In Search of Lost Time I think it's called. It goes on and on... my sense is that it's a description of the ennui of the modern subject, the melancholia swelling up from enduring a meaningless life that hardly seems worth living, and yet persisting to live...

Finding a reason to live amidst the meaninglessness of existence...

...Or maybe not. Maybe just living and feeling like nothing has any meaning.

Then why is he writing about it?

Well, maybe to tap into that feeling of listlessness, of ennui, to make that meaningful. Proust is heralded as the creator of some of the most important work of 20th century literature, so to compare Knausgård to Proust is essentially a declaration of his importance for our contemporary condition, even if we can't currently recognize it because we lack the distance of history... writing about coffee and waxing nostalgic about punk is mundane to us but will be rubbed into a high shine by those that write the glowing reviews, a predetermination of the boring history to come I guess. I mean he's Norwegian so how punk could he really be anyways?

(laughter)

Fucking richest country in the world, maybe not then, but certainly now. Your father molests you, puts an axe to your head everyday... brutal, but still some first world Scandinavian dramaturgy.

Scandinavia is dark and they brood in some fucked up relationships with each other, for a variety of reasons, regardless of the social support extended by the government. Their whole life is so comfortable that is inverts, becomes incredibly boring, constantly stricken by the melancholy of winter or the ennui of summer, psychologically internalizing all that comfort into a rebellion against nothing, anger towards the void, a whole culture based in self-repression and angsty retaliation against the father.

A culture of lack of communication... strange.

I've been trying to think about these things in terms of narrative, story telling, how things become more boring as the approach the space and time of life itself, so much more tedious. Yet when there is more imagination, more creativity, it's faster, full of electricity, so different from life, at least from the majority of our daily existence in these strange times. So how might this translate to music? If music is the medium which most directly evokes our affect, an immersion of experience that doesn't need to have words put on it to make sense, then what emotional space do we want to be in (when we collaborate on this project)? Do we want something long and boring, closer to life, like Morton Feldman perhaps, or something more eruptive, trying to smash the mirror, to break the monotony to pieces...?

Or both? Life is often both at the same time.

Yes! So what kind of story are we going to tell and how are we going to tell it?

What kind of story do you want to tell? What is the story that needs to be conveyed in music?

I'm not so interested in drama, in staying at the level of the human, but more drawn to the comedy and tragedy, the power of myth concerning the absurdity of existence, or stories that exercise imagination to describe where we came from or the place we will inhabit when we die, gods building and destroying as allegories of humanity, how tragic and fucking dark it all is. So I guess I'm saying I'm interested in a certain level of theatricality...

How do we convey that? Are you saying you want to push that through the sound, or in a text or a score?

I think it will come through the sound and doesn't need to be spelled out, through the feeling not the words. What I don't want to do is repeat life, because if art comes down to just that then I choose just to live - no art needed. I don't need to make music, don't need to write. If experience is the priority then I can go prioritize it without needing to contain it in something else, go on a hike instead of being in the studio, go have a conversation without recording it instead of always thinking about the ideas that are being drawn forth and attempting to pin things down into projects. I want music to be something more than... to create spaces for hearing, listening to sounds that don't mimic... (birds singing in the background) don't mimic bird sounds for example. Maybe we start from birds and then make more than birds, not end on birds, but do things that birds can't do, that nature can't do, or that we wouldn't be drawn into doing otherwise... otherwise what stops us from just making field recordings, to capture what is, of everything, then playing them back... and now we're changing the speeds, making more of the experience of listening again than there was in the first listen, adjusting and manipulating the world of sounds according to another sense of attention. That's where the music begins. The recording of birds is just a document, not yet music.

Ok, so our piece, this thing we are working on together, is a story that we want to tell, and it's something can concerns us directly but doesn't repeat our lives. Where do we start? How does the composition process begin? I know you have specific ideas about what you want out of this...

Kind of, but I'm mostly interested in being open to what might come forth. Rules are important to be able to recognize what we have made, to differentiate it from everything around it, and to make it better right? To learn from what we have made and keep refining it into something better, to sharpen it, to hone the edges of the frame... so we have to build these rules. There's many ways to tell a story - as many ways as there are stories - many ways to illustrate the scene. It can be representational, presenting an image that you can superimpose yourself onto or into. "Here's a picture of a tree," and you can observe its details, what kind of tree it is, how the leaves look. If I illustrate the place you can put yourself in it, go there, with an extension of your senses through the framing device of the medium. Or I could show you an abstract picture, an image that represents nothing but is still full of content. When you try to put yourself in that place you may find that it's a more of a non-place or no-place, defined more by how it is described that what it is describing. So I would propose that the more representational our music will be the more details we must be dedicated to providing the listener, the more resolution to the image, and if we are focused on telling a more abstract story then we must remember to attend to the open spaces, to meditate on the process of offering entrance into the piece so that the listener can describe it for themselves without our concrete definition. I'm certainly interested in both of these techniques, and also in pursuing other ways which can be told through other strategies, other stories of feeling and hearing altogether. In terms of your question concerning where we can begin, it seems we could begin exploring some spaces and take account of what they are telling us, or how they are telling, through music of course. What's the difference between abstract and literal music? Between really free music and rigid or constrained music? Between conventional forms and experimental forms while working under the strain that everyone thinks everything has been done before? What's a music of reduction, boiling sounds down to their elements, a music of abstraction of space and feeling, opposed to communicating an image-idea with more clarity? Or fidelity, as I like to say...

It seems like a difference in how it's approached, how to enter into the space, an understanding of the agenda in the exploration. Being in a band is about articulating the agenda that everyone is bringing to the table, which sometimes becomes clear and aligned and sometimes doesn't.

I agree. To be more specific with the question of how to begin, perhaps we need to decide what we can do. What can we play, or how do we play? A question of technique or styles, a form-language. I mean string tunings, chord patterns, and how these structures create different feelings, what they can describe. The speed of the notes - if we associate playing to speaking or music to language we could say the speed of articulation, our ability to recall certain vocabulary and to improvise upon what is being said. When speaking there inflection, intonation, enunciation... the form of the word, what its describing, and the feeling that propels it. I don't want to get too hung up on the idea of music as language because I really think it's something else, or capable of going places where words aren't, but maybe that's a place to start then. What can we say? To do two things: to make a space to let the feeling what is said take precedence over the form or content of the words, and then specifically focus upon a vocabulary to carry our content. Those are the decisions that happen, then the performance is working out how to put them together. What to do and how to do? For my own part, I'm obsessed with the "what to do" and perhaps as a seasoned musician you could be occupied with the "how to do" - how to move the fingers, how to manipulate the strings, how to play the instrument...

Based on your direction...?

It's all "us," because you have to get me to understand the "how" as much as I must articulate clearly our "what" so that we can work through an understanding together, and that process of exchange becomes the arena for our collaboration, whatever spews forth. Eventually we will bring in other people to play with us, so we both have to be clear about what is happening so we can communicate it to them, both "how" and "what" they are responsible for, and then encourage them to move around freely in the spaces that we designate... then something really weird and amazing will happen. To be even more specific I would say that today's conversation is a good place to begin. This feeling of melancholy, of ennui. We want to make something real, on the scale of life, but is not fucking boring or monotonous or tedious, unless we can use that tedium to put more meaning into the process. When it begins to feel dead or flat, either too close to life or too unbelievable to hold meaning, through the feelings of these spaces we are exploring, well then that creates a rule so that we don't do that again. The rules are the limits, the parameters, the language that we agree upon so we can continue speaking, and language is living right, living through us by being put to use. How we're gonna begin is to try to make some rules, even if it's what it shouldn't be or what we don't want. We don't have to say why...

I think it's OK to say why, and to write it down. I think the next step is to start writing down rules and parameters, what we do and don't like, do and don't want, or what is or isn't a good idea in support of our "what" and "how" to act. I don't think we should linger too much on how we want it to sound, to see how it will sound, how it may become. That's how it's improvisation, because it can't be predicted... but I'm not interested in making purely interpretive music, translating a feeling into a music form.

This conversation is improvised, but we also make sense. We're figuring out what we're talking about by talking about it, and hopefully when the conversation is over we will have gained an understanding of many things that we didn't (necessarily) have before we began. This continues to be interesting, so long as we continue trying to figure out what we are describing and agree that we aren't just babbling nonsense at each other, right?

Setting rules around the ideas, of tonality and chord structures, is a way for us to understand what the other is saying and keep it from being an onslaught of incomprehensible noise. I like your idea of using images as a tool or a guide to feel certain ways, to instigate exchange through the vehicle of a symbol or an image.

In opera there's a relationship between the libretto and the composer, and it's always in consideration of the intended audience....

Isn't that strange?

...What's that?

That classical music is made for such a specific audience. Is it still that way? It seems like things have changed now that everyone listens to weird sounds and has access to all of these semi-automatic instruments for music making.

Of course it's still that way, even in our world. Even your post-punk band caters to an audience. How can there be music without an audience, or culture without those that participate in it? I would say that every art is made for someone, always reveals a relation, and wouldn't have any purpose if it was ejected into a void without being seen or heard. It's the sensing that gives it purpose. Even an artist that is convinced that they only make things for themself - like we were discussing earlier, that's simply the story they tell themselves which may be different than the stories which circulate around them, and all those stories together with all the tension and theatrics that ensue, that's culture. It's always for someone...

The beginning of culture... yes that's what gives it meaning, through the conveyance, the broadcasting of meaning to whoever hears it and appreciates it, gives content back to the music.

I think the music you make with NL has a lot of detail in it. I get the sense that you're crafting representations of anxiety, distilled from your individual experiences of the world. The band has a feeling and a space that you create collectively, but then individual songs seem to differentiate unique perspectives that riff upon the main theme, modulating the ingredients of the affect based on the push-pull of you all making it. I think that's a way of telling a story which is very powerful too, the power of punk music. This collaboration that we're discussing now, I don't think it should be limited to a single formula or theme - just long-form abstract spaces or something - but could be a lot of different things in both its inspiration and technique. We're not going to be too literal, but not totally improvised either, but very intentional and applied in defining the parameters of a space, concerned with the specifics of the mechanism and its articulation as we chart an emotional-psychological space through different physical spaces, the space of performance. We are going to start making these sound objects and putting them up on a shelf, accumulating them, and the project includes that shelf as well as all the objects that we put on it and all the different arrangements we can imagine ourselves and challenge ourselves to taste, everything that we can pull from our collaborative library to be put together as a process of composition. Maybe that process happens in the live performance, or by attempting to bring that energy into a recording studio, or having the components separated by playing and editing techniques, like generating a bunch of material that we can compose later. I remember an interview with John (Luther) Adams where he explained how he would record literally days worth of music by himself, or with small ensembles, and then bring them into the digital studio to weave an intricate tapestry. I can see us functioning in a similar fashion, not worrying about beginnings and ends so much as finding a space to roam around in, and when we find it figuring out how to stay in it, rubbing up against the boundaries without falling back out into the void of mundane existence, to keep it up as long as we can. Later, once we recognize it, we can go in to cut it out of the larger whole, to frame it and teach ourselves how to recognize it, and then save that as an artifact for the shelf... a little piece of sonic memory. Once we have the moment captured and can listen to it for a certain duration without having to focus on evoking it, in the car or while out for a walk, we can figure out how to start and stop from those precise points and begin to hone a technique without all the other distractions, to make it more elegant.

I think that's a good place to start.

Perhaps the playing can start with you. I thought that maybe you could attempt a sonic beginning, just yourself, and then I could listen to it, just myself, and respond to your proposed technique with an idea somehow. Then we could listen to that combined recording and evaluate what happened, and have a conversation...?

Yeah. Ok.

It could also go the other way and I could begin, but I think that beginning with you allows you to set a certain intuitive tone through your playing style that I can follow, and I enjoy thinking of you as the technical leader of the playing style. Take all the good and bad elements of your being and funnel it into an affect of action, to play through the melancholia we were discussing earlier in a direct and authentic way. I would also ask in addition to the recording that you provide me with the tuning, and any modifications to the instrument itself.

I love the idea of two guitars in non-standard tuning. That's something I haven't really explored. I've been playing with these copper picks also. They give the guitar a really interesting surreal tone.

Great. I think we could address the entire instrument, its construction as well as how we can manipulate it or redesign it as an impediment. I'm thinking about the pickups and amplifiers, objects or forms added onto the basic design, things that limit the range of motion or expand the possibilities of sound... thinking of these elements in balance opens up a strange world of imaginative directions in striving for sounds matching our inner being, or beyond our comprehension. When I was in Iceland I was trying to have a conversation with the glaciers through a highly amplified guitar, using a glass slide on my right hand to glissando notes into crackling watery sparkles... but maybe that's going too far towards the mimicry you said you wanted to avoid. I'm interested in the slide as a tool to expand the possibilities of expression, to expand the realms of the conversation.

Extended techniques for extended expressions.

There's also the realm of recording techniques... I've been thinking about boxes that fit over the amplifiers, so that different frequency ranges or volumes would vibrate the material of the box to add a kind of auto-percussive effect like shimmering cymbal sounds or sizzle to the bass response... even playing through drums or taut heads, really primitive cymatic techniques. I remember you telling me about how cool it is, at work, when there are two people in the studio sanding at the same time, how it begins to oscillate into interesting interference patterns. Something like that, but sanding through amplification! Maybe it's a part that we compose for, a section that we provide directions to put wood boxes over the amps to color the sound.

Is the main goal to record this music? To package it and release it to the world?

I'm not so interested in producing products for consumption, but I'm very motivated by the excitement of performance, and in utilizing recording as a learning tool in the crafting of the composition that will later be performed. Recording is a mode of writing, like text or any other kind of language, and it serves as a document that helps us remember our actions, to gain some distance to sort out the gems from the shit, and like any book the words should be intentionally chosen and the grammar should have a certain polish. Mostly it's for learning, to learn how to repeat what we do, understanding where it is we want to go, just as important in learning to manipulate the guitars. I want to form an ensemble that performs, live and local, wherever it is that we might be, touring it around and bringing it to some exposure to see who it attracts and where it could take us. Perhaps we both eventually stop playing to become conductors of an ensemble of 10 guitarists, leading with mixing boards to fine tune a deep sound that must be attended to with great attention.

Maybe that's too far!

Ok, well I just encourage you to get out of it what you want to get out of it, and I will try to do the same, and that tension will emerge through the music quite naturally and make it better than we can currently put words on, I'm sure. Through the compromise, it will emerge.

I want it to be intentional, not just a wash of noise.

Same. Well, I'm writing this opera, which as of right now may or may not be swirling around the perimeter of our conversation, and I just keep thinking that whatever we do I want it to be free and be an autonomous creation but will undoubtedly influence my other pursuits, heavily if it's done well. I don't know any violinists, or cellists, or contrabass players, but I know you - an incredible guitarist - and we have some history playing improvised music together, so I guess part of my motivation is to work out some ideas for string ensembles with you and other serious players. I'm looking for something orchestral and epic...

You're trying to meet other players too? To bring other's into this to form a larger group?

I want to talk about what we are doing and something serious, very formal, and certainly serious, in order to see who it attracts and how we can challenge ourselves through the various conversations. I don't have a concrete vision, just an active imagination. What do you want it to be?

I like your ideas... It doesn't need to be anything, any specific sound or genre of music. I just don't want it to be interpreted as haphazard, sloppy.

Right. Rigorous, serious, highly attuned and intentional. Very well considered and rehearsed I mean.

I would like each sonic object that we craft to be highly considered, scored, remembered over time so we can go back to those musical moments. I like the shelf idea as a collection, but one that is arranged very deliberately.

Yes, well consider that there are numerous ways of going about that. One way could be to preconceive of an idea before we play, to write it out as a score, and then learn how to play the music from that procession. A bit unnatural to me, but not impossible, in fact quite a conventional tactic I believe, although I'm sure composers are usually sitting with their instruments and taking notes while playing through a assorted bag of ideas. Another method could be to feel it out, to find it, seek it out with the instrument, and through the improvisation discover new spaces that we cannot imagine or articulate, and then once we're there to put a flag on it, to mark the territory and trace our steps through the recording document serving as a kind of map so we can get back to that peak. Both seem appropriate for our ends, and other ways also that we can strain to imagine.

If the sound is overly considered, or if the influences of other music are too present, the process can go down hill pretty quickly. It seems more important to consider how something sounds and feels in the moment that it's being made, rather than trying to pin it down to what is familiar, what has already been heard.

I also don't want to become obsessed with pure novelty, to be so interested in finding new sounds that we can't repeat what we have learned from our research. Perpetual novelty becomes subsumed my another flavor of boredom.