Modern software does tend to “professionalise” a modern musician’s sound, to mask its shortcomings and to suppress eccentricity…

“That’s why it’s easy to pick out what’s good. Because if you’re into hard listening – i.e. you’re really going into slow motion when you listen to sound – then you pick out fucking everything, every clip. On my new album I’ve catalogued every noise clip that’s there, like they used to on the first ZTT Records. ZTT releases at the time – they were some of the first CDs ever to come out – catalogued the sampling rate the music was recorded at, the time code data and so on. I guess it was because CDs were just out and designers had all this data to respond to and play with. This was way before Designers Republic, by the way. And I quite liked the honesty of it.

“The things that I’m doing [on Value + Bonus]  are in real-time with no sequencing, no MIDI – I refuse to use MIDI – and as a consequence I’ve catalogued all these clips. It’s about being honest, and exposing how things are done. As you said, modern software is masking what people have really done, whether it be good or bad, and that’s why I’ll always pick out records that have been made better. When they‘re not just some standard copy-and-paste looping thing, when there’s some arrangement going on. Like if you listen to, I don’t know, the new MMM record for example – not that you couldn’t construct in [Ableton] Live, but you can tell that it’s been done in a different way. That’s why the record’s a bit more mutant, and a bit wobbly, and weird. Every element in it is always changing, so therefore, even though it’s got repetitive elements, it’s not repetitive. It’s always changing, whether it’s the pitch, or they’re filtering it, or whatever.

“All these techniques and tools are available to people now, whereas not so many years ago you would have had to go to bloody ERCAM to use the digital reverb on the computers there. It’s so new, all this stuff. Everyone’s got everything, and they want more: they’re ‘Ooh, yeah, fucking hell, have you got this, have you got that? Have you got the new…?’ It’s endless. On the one hand I’m fucking tired to death of all this shit but at the same time, if it’s the stuff that you’ve always wanted to have, because it does what you want it to do, and it works, and it’s intuitive, then obviously you want it. You need it. And then you find out that it’s ÂŁ1600 – and you go, ‘Fuck.’ If you’re not a post-production house, or you’re not a kid who works down one of them, then…

“Actually, I think that’s great: this musical underground of people working in professional jobs that aid and abet their real passions. If you work in a post-production house, then on the down-time maybe you get to fuck about with the gear, and maybe make something…”

“It’s about being honest, and exposing how things are done.”

Do you think the government should play more of a role in facilitating electronic sound-art?

“I think it’s great when there are people who can help you out. I’ve found in some countries, when I’ve done international artist residences, that there’s some kind of electronic music studio, and they’re more than happy to have you come down and have a go on their gear. And they might even pay you. The idea of that happening in the UK is a fantasy. When you do hear about people who get help, they seem to be people who are already so established – to the point that they’re already being financially rewarded somehow – that they don’t need the fucking help. It’s all a bit the wrong way around. It’s like in Amsterdam people go and buy drugs and then they go into a club and get searched – it just seems incredibly hypocritical. And it’s the same in terms of how people get help in Britain. I think we’d make a lot more, as a nation, in the entertainment industries, if we helped people a lot more. Why isn’t there a fucking electronic music studio in East Anglia that I could go and use? [laughs]”

Subsidies, grants and the like – whether it be for music, or art, or nightclubs, or film – seem to be far more forthcoming in Europe, particularly Northern Europe…

“And I’ve ended up in those places, because that’s where it happens. That’s why my gigs tend to be abroad, I hardly ever play in England. If I didn’t get asked to do the odd Warp thing, or something with Aphex or Autechre, then I would really never be in Britain, or at least it would be very rare. It’s always been in Austria, Oslo, Stockholm, Japan -  because they seem to be into it, and there are audiences there for it – and they’re well-versed, they know what it’s all about, what its influences are.”

In England the standard reaction tends to be quite sniffy, suspicious – people don’t always approach art with a mind to engaging with it on its own terms.

“Exactly.”

But then in Europe sometimes people can be a little too accommodating or unthinkingly deferential to what they perceive as art…

“And that’s the worst. That’s why they produce a lot of bad work in certain countries, because they get so much funding assistance that no one actually has to do anything, there’s no hard grappling going on. That’s why the YBA art movement really happened here and succeeded, and why it didn’t happen in Sweden, or Berlin. I mean, Berlin has its galleries, but it didn’t have a scene that exploded like that – because [the artists] didn’t really come from the gutter and have to work their way up, and be pushed into such mad situations that they end up doing that fucking natty stuff [laughs].”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.