What are you working on at present, performance-wise?
“The last thing I did was in Sheffield, at the Lovebytes festival, using 8-channel surround sound in the largest greenhouse in Europe, the Winter Garden. It was with the assistance of some software from the Music Research Centre at York that I was able to do this. I’ve been doing work with the Research Centre for some time now, and dealing with some of the students there.
“Not so long we worked on an event that I curated at Aldeburgh, called LISTEN, part of the Faster Than Sound festival. I think it’s the first time that anything like that has been executed on that scale of PA – it was a 360 degree overhead set-up, and all done ambisonically, so height information is a large part of it. When they say ‘3D cinema’ these days it’s a load of bollocks, because it’s not, it’s a horizontal slice, it’s just the little middle slice out of the orange, and the top and the bottom are missing…There have been some films that have actually used ambisonics and included height, but it’s rare.
“What we were doing was genuinely 360 degrees, and it involved my getting people like Chris Watson [revered field recordist, known for his work on BBC wildlife documentaries and his releases on the Touch label, as well as his role in the early line-up of Cabaret Voltaire] and Bernie Krause. Bernie Krause introduced the Moog synthesizer to Europe, he was the demo guy for Moog, and also the guy who did the electronic music for the Nic Roeg film Performance with Mick Jagger, and was the synthesist on Apocalypse Now. I brought all these people together because it was a residence, so we had a whole week to work with, setting up and then doing what we wanted to do, making recordings of roundabouts with 360 degree microphones and the like.”
“If I went on The X Factor, they’d go ‘No! It’s all wrong, mate. You’ve got it all wrong.’”
You’re playing support on Autechre’s imminent tour. How will you approach that?
“With Autechre I’m doing either of one of two things. There’s the ‘hard-disc-jockeying’ – as I call it [laughs] – because I’m basically DJing with a computer but I’m not using any software like Ableton, so I’m going to play some music that I like, music that hopefully gets the kind of reaction from an audience that’s appropriate before Autechre play, or after they play, or whatever it is. But then, depending on the situation, I might do a live set: computer-generated and also analogue-generated sound that will be processed through a variety of different guitar pedals, so it’s a bit more physical and noisy, and kind of synthetic too, quite dense sound.
“I’ve just made a record of this kind of stuff. It’s on No Fun Productions, the New York label, and it’s a double CD and it’s called Value + Bonus. It’s a combination between a stereo test CD – like one of those that tells you you’ve got your speakers the wrong way around – and a kind of free, live, acid noise improvisation, recorded in one take with no over-dubbing. Then there’s editing that’s done in a free style – inspired by the freestyle editing of Omar Santana and Latin Rascals, all these people from the 80s whose edits I used to be really into, whether it be pop music or something else. They were the ones who did it better than anyone. Also, New Order’s ‘586’, the Peel session, has got a backwards edit, a reverse edit, which was pretty hardcore for 1982…”
Your best-known records, Live Salvage and Second Live Salvage are recordings of live concerts. Is it fair to say that you prefer documenting live performances to creating studio works?
“No, no, no. But I can see why you might think that. I’d been badgered by Peter Rehberg, who runs the Mego [latterly Editions Mego] label – I’d known him for a while, I used to go to Vienna and go to gigs and festivals and meet him. I was working with software, real-time-generated material, and also sample editing, with Max patches and so on – all on a borrowed laptop, it wasn’t even mine. I had to do these things in that way, and that’s why they ended up as they did.
Anyway, Mego were badgering me to make a record, and they were like OK, there’s a cassette from so-and-so concert from 1992 when you played for five minutes to, like, six people. Peter and I realised that one friend must have a recording of this, and then didn’t Morag or whoever have a video camera recording of that [laughs] – so we’re pulling all these things together and pre-mastering them into what would become some kind of document. Because there’s no way these performances will ever happen again, and anyway they happened at a time when they probably shouldn’t have happened at all. Sometimes people were quite outraged – mainly because of the context that they were actually presented in. If it had been some rock pub somewhere no one would have batted an eyelid…
“Those [performances] that exist on the recordings aren’t the mad ones, because those ones were actually stopped, people would pull the cables out, or close the laptop – close the laptop on me, in some cases – I’ve had all of that happen over the years. So that live thing is a document. But it’s also at the same time absolutely a fetish of mine, because I love live albums: I really like albums where you hear a reaction, whether it’s somebody being obnoxious in the crowd or whatever. I think it’s good. A lot of people criticised Second Live Salvage, because you could hear people talking through it, and they said [adopts snivelling voice]: ‘Well, this is shit, if it was real noise you wouldn’t have been able to talk through it’ and similar bullshit on the forums. If they’d been in the fucking place and seen how big the PA was, then they might have realised how loud it really was. Sure, I’ll go and do it at Fabric tomorrow if they want me to, you know – we’ll rip the place.
The things I’m really working on now are quite different to those [live albums]. I’m working on other projects and I have other things that I have to do to make an income, because it’s not like I sell shitloads of records. I’m doing the exact opposite. If I went on The X Factor, they’d go ‘No! It’s all wrong, mate. You’ve got it all wrong.’”
“When I was young you really had to fucking search for something. It would’ve taken years to find out the discography of some bands when I was a teenager.”
It’s interesting what you said about people reacting unfavourably to your 1990s performances. Do you still encounter much hostility to what you do?
“A customs guy stopped me yesterday when I was coming back from Amsterdam. He must have just taken one look at me and thought, ‘Right. You. Come on.’ So I was stood there thinking fucking hell, I want to get my taxi and my train, I’ve got a long way yet to go. And he’s going right ‘Right. Where’ve you been?’ and I say ‘Er…Amsterdam’. ‘Have you been anywhere else on your trip?’ he asks. ‘No, only Amsterdam.’ I don’t know what he was implying; I said, ‘I’m not on a stag do or anything like that’. So he says, ‘Right, what do you do?’ And I said ‘Well, I’m an artist’.
“At this point he obviously just thought I was taking the piss. But then he looked at my totally mangled, almost-expired passport – a passport that’s been lost for four days in Japan before, and been soaked through, and is falling to bits – and suddenly he’s going ‘Fucking hell, how many times have you been to Japan?’ And all the Visas are there. So suddenly he’s saying ‘Yep, yep’, and waving me through, and I was free to go. These situations are happening to me all the time. Trying to travel around and do the stuff that I do: I’ve been refused entry onto planes before.
“When I graduated from university back in ‘91 or ‘92, whatever the hell it was, I was unemployed. And ‘artist’ wasn’t even on the fucking list of things. It wasn’t even recognised. And you could go ‘But I’ve got a fucking degree,’ and they’d say ‘But it’s not on the list mate’. Fuck, anyway…So in some ways it’s a hard life. But that’s why I’m quite passionate. Equally, there’s a lot of stuff that I just can’t abide. I always have to find out who else is playing, just because so much of what’s out there is brain-numbingly bad. I looked on Boomkat yesterday and just went ‘Oh no. How many fucking records are there?’And they can’t all be the best records. I mean, it’s great that they have all this variety available these days, but when I was young you really had to fucking search for something. Now everyone’s just got it, everyone’s PirateBay’d it or they can get it off iTunes or Boomkat or whatever. It would’ve taken years to find out the discography of some bands when I was a teenager. I’m not suggesting that there’s no passion now, but there was a lot more passion then, I think.
“Anybody can get a computer and bang out a few tunes, and then they get amazed at the simple reality of having created something…”
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rexmatic
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OP
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liiiii
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Peter
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