Speaking of a loss of tranquility, can you tell me a bit about your two most tranquil albums? Cathedral Oceans and the Harold Budd collaboration, Translucence + Drift Music.
JF: “Cathedral Oceans started when I was kid, when I sang in a choir briefly. During that time I became very interested in the way that sound worked in big spaces, churches particularly. I learnt a lot of things there but I didn’t understand a lot of what I’d actually learned until later. And when I started recording I’d almost forgotten about all that until I started using echoes and reverberations, and then I realised that I could use some of that to simulate things that happened when I was singing in churches back then – and use that old knowledge of how a single voice in a massive space behaves. So I started experimenting, down in the basement of the studio, and when I had some time I used to get Gareth to set up tape-loops and reverberations and I’d sing into them and see what happened, and gradually negotiate my way through it. Over the course of many years Cathedral Oceans began to take shape – it did take a long time. In the meantime I could hear happening, in the stream of things going by, other people who were beginning to work in the same way.
“I became very interested in the way that sound worked in big spaces, churches particularly…”
“I started taking photographs of buildings and statues, beginning when I was on tour with Ultravox. I didn’t know what to do with any of these things. And then one day I picked up two slides and overlaid them – one was of some foliage, and the other was a face from a fountain statue, and you suddenly got this other reality coming through, which was unusual then. Nowadays Photoshop can do it very easily, but back then that kind of montage really wasn’t easy to achieve. It really inspired the musical juxtaposition – of that old-style church music with modern technology and synthesizers and different ways of singing, creating notional space rather than real space. So I started working in parallel with these two things and gradually built up a library of images and pieces of music.
“I was trying to do a live version of Cathedral Oceans in Vauxhall, and Harold Budd and Eno came to listen to it. Harold liked Cathedral Oceans a lot and we started talking; I was really into his stuff because I loved The Pearl, I just think The Pearl is one of the greatest pieces of recorded music ever made, a real classic, a landmark. So we got talking and we decided to do some work together. He came over; I was staying up in Leeds then, and I had access to this big stone house there that belonged to a painter friend of mine, Judy, and she let us use her front room which had a beautiful view of the garden. I recorded Harold playing there, and then recorded some pieces of my own. I was trying to imitate his style – what you’d call a tribute [laughs].
“Harold has really affected what I think about pianos, and piano music, more than anyone else – apart from Erik Satie. And that’s an old art-school thing, because I came across Erik Satie when I was about 16 in Preston, when a girl, a friend of mine, Liz, played Gymnopedies on the piano in the lecture theatre – and that just knocked me for six. It was fantastic music, the first time I’d heard it – I still find it very moving now, and I’ve never forgotten it. And when I heard The Pearl that was like a modern equivalent – I thought nobody could ever do [what Satie had done] again, because that was 1900 in Paris and a whole different culture, and then suddenly there was somebody living in Los Angeles who picked up on that, met up with Eno, and made this great record. So it was a wonderful moment.”
In a way I think is Budd all the more impressive because his work is created in the context of a much noisier and distracted world than that which gave rise to Satie…
JF: “You have to be tough to hold onto something as fragile as that, and he’s done it. I really admire Harold. He supplied the musical end of that record. I think the ecology of that record is very interesting because you’ve got someone like Harold, who was working to maintain that kind of stillness in the midst of all this chaos and cultural movement, but then you had Brian who wanted to do that but didn’t have that kind of musical focus really. And then you had someone like Dan Lanois – who’s of the best realisers of notional space that you can ever get, there’s just no one better than him – all together in one room to make this record. So it was a great balance of talents – perfect. And they made as close to a perfect record as you can get. Whatever that means. At the very least it’s a perfect realisation of an emotional state, and it will endure for a long time, well, forever – it’s up there with Satie.”
Translucence and Drift Music feature quite prominent synthesizer work from you as well, don’t they?
JF: “They don’t, actually, though I can see why you might think that. What I wanted to do was disperse all the piano harmonics as much as possible, by using reverbs and echo, and just take it as far as I could. Right into abstraction.
BE: “So there’s no synths? It’s all reverbs?”
JF: “It’s all derived from piano. No synths. All that effect is from reverberation and echo – and it’s interesting what happens if you push them to that extent, because they begin to create their own sort of ecology.”
“All that effect is from reverberation and echo – and it’s interesting what you happens if you push them to that extent, because they begin to create their own sort of ecology.”
It’s particularly amazing to think that Drift Music has no synths on it.
JF: “Drift Music is more abstracted, yes. You sort of go in for this state which is texturally shifting without any dramatic harmonic shifts – so it’s a lack of drama, really. A music without drama.”
Does it require a special physical setting to make this kind of intensely serene, strung-out music?
John: “Yes, and mental, definitely. You do get into a trance state when you do it – time just dissolves. It’s very contemplative. Not meditative – that’s a very artifical-sounding word. But yes, it slows you down, and you go into a completely different mode. And you have to be in that mode [in order to make that kind of music]. But it’s a lovely mode if you’re ready for it – you usually have to walk three or four miles before you sit down to it, because otherwise you’re too restless; you have to do something physical first, go for a swim, or be up all night.
“Early in the morning is the best time to do it – I did a lot of recording at dawn, in summer. Because you’re sort of half asleep and some of your critical faculties aren’t working properly and you’re calm enough just to drift along for a couple of hours. It was really interesting to do, and it links up a bit with Cathedral Oceans - that was like that, when I’d sing into those loops and so on, I’d get into this completely different time-state, and I’d be working with rhythms where sometimes the beats are a minute long (if they were beats – there aren’t actually any beats, it’s just a repetition) and you start to work inside that, within that. So your whole metabolism just slows right down and you can be there for hours, and it seems like minutes, you lose your sense of time. It was very pleasurable to make, it never felt like work, it was almost like gardening really [laughs].”
Kiran Sande
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