What’s your working life like now? How do you create the conditions for spontaneity and the creative moment to occur?
“I wish you were out on the patio here in California. I’m sitting in the sun, the roses are just cascading and the blossoms are out and the birds are in the bird bath and I feel like an old English lady [laughs]…”
“The way I divide my time, it’s with a certain inevitability that there’s a periodic onset of what you might call melancholy. I just start to feel weird. Or depressed, or at a loss. And I say to myself, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant, OK. Get thee to the hospital – get in the studio.’ [laughs]
“Showing up for work is the most important thing. And then allowing things to happen is another element. I have to get in there and listen, and inevitably something will grab me and I’ll be like, ‘OK, let’s see what happens with this…’ Each piece requires its own concentration and some pieces just pop out. It’s like having children. Some are just difficult births and take a very long time…like The Garden of Brokenness – that was a very difficult piece, even though it only really has two loops in it. That one took a lot of very concentrated work over a period of months, but I was generally happy with the way it came out in the end. El Camino Real was the opposite: it just showed up, you know, it was this beautiful loop that I didn’t even remember making.
“When I was working in the 80s, some sessions I’d just create loops – I’d listen to them, and sometimes, if they were just perfect by themselves, they scared me – because I didn’t know if I could call it my work. I want to mix things in the air, and create something – you know, I wanted to be involved! [laughs] So loops that I really remember from those days are ones that I worked with and got really deeply into; others, like the one which became El Camino Real and the ones that became The Disintegration Loops, were set aside because I knew that they were perfect as they were, and I wanted to play – they didn’t let me have any fun, so they got set aside for later! [laughs] Their time eventually came…
“So I’ve still got this huge trove that I’m going through. Right now I don’t have my studio with my synthesizers and things like that, so I can’t use those right now, but if things go well this year, there’s so much real estate going empty around here maybe I can find a small place that I can use as a studio and archive and set up the equipment in there. Right now, I’ve got plenty of stuff to work on.”
“I’ve got another new record coming out soon which is another stunner, I’m very happy with it.”
Is that Vivian and Ondine?
“Yeah, that’s right. I’ll tell you a little story about it…It’s another very amniotic, long piece; it’ll be the only piece on that record – the recorded version is about 45 minutes long. It’s something that I developed out of necessity about a year ago. I was in New York to do a project at the Issue Project Room, and they have this really cool, computerized 16-channel atmospherical-type speaker system hanging from the ceiling, so the guy who developed it can position sounds in three-dimensional space or whatever. My work’s genuinely very low-tech, it’s basically a stereo mix that comes out, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings – so I said, OK, what can we do here? And he said, ‘Ohh, we can make it float around the room like water!’ and I was like, OK, that sounds perfect…
“But to go back in time a little…I needed to create a new piece for the performance first, so I started digging around in all my boxes of loops and I found this one main loop which was just a stunner, and then I found this little lunchbox full of these other loops. In my studio I tested them out with the main one and selected about a dozen or so that worked really nicely with it, so when I’m performing I have the two tape-decks and have the main loop on one tapedeck and then select a loop from the lunchbox at random, mix them together, see what resonates. When I was in the studio working on this, at that time last year my sister-in-law was pregnant with my niece, Vivian; they’d already named her, she was late, she wasn’t coming out, and everyone was waiting and it was getting to be summer in Texas and it was hot, and Vivian was keeping everyone waiting – and I said, with a name like that I imagine she will have people waiting on her her entire life [laughs]. So I thought, well, I’ll make something really amniotic and really gorgeous to try to get Vivian to come on out.
“So that night at Issue Project Rooms I did this thing with those speakers, and this watery, beautiful, gold video that Jamie had done, and the next morning it turned out that Vivian had been born in the night. And as well, my cousin’s first granddaughter Ondine was born, so I think the album’s title will be On The Birth of Vivian And Ondine or something like that.”
So much of your work, thematically, has been about decay and disintegration, but this is an album about the very opposite…
“Yeah…but in a way, it’s all transformation, you know. And I’ve been sitting here for the last year watching Monarch butterflies hum and feed and lay their eggs on my butterfly weed that I planted a few years ago and I’ve been filming all last winter these caterpillars munching and munching, getting fatter and fatter, and then they pupate on the oleander, these gorgeous green chrysalises that have teeny peep-holes in them and it looks like the sun is inside them – it’s just extraordinary. And then they’re born and they fly away onto Mexico. Just moving onto another phase of transformation, I guess.”
Kiran Sande