Chuck van Zyl

August 2009

Mark Jenkins

June 2009

Mark Jenkins has been part of Britain’s electronic music scene for quite some time now, having been inspired since seeing Mike Oldfield perform “Tubular Bells” on TV way back in 1974. He has released a number of solo albums, as well as collaborations with others, including the electronic music band White Noise. In November he’ll be the first British musician to perform at the Greenwich Planetarium.

Let's start with your upcoming performance at the Peter Harrison Planetarium at The Royal Observatory in Greenwich.  How did this all come about?

I've always tried to play great venues which offer fantastic visuals, so have performed in the past at the old London Planetarium, as well as venues like the very modern Teatro Nacional in Brazilia. I played several planetarium shows in the USA recently, so I contacted London's new planetarium pretty much as soon as it opened, and they were very enthusiastic. The performance "Supernova" has a fully synchronized computer graphic show which should look great converted to the dome shape.

Will this be a solo performance, or will others be joining you?

This is the launch concert for my "Best Of..." CD and DVD "Supernova" which is compiled from all my early space music CD's like "Space Dreams" and "Mexico Rising". I've given the performance a couple of times notably in the big Bochum Planetarium in Germany, but this time the actual album will be launched, and on the DVD version there'll be a narrative voiceover by Arthur Brown as well as alternative soundtracks in German and French. The second half of the show is with White Noise playing some new material, and we'll be playing both sets twice.

You have done a mix of solo recordings and various collaborations.  What do you like best about working solo, and what do you like best about working with others?

Solo work gives you ultimate control over the music, though I find it's always best to take some time off when it's nearly finished, play it for other people, and get their input about the final form of the music and the mix. In the past, collaborating with others has given me textures I couldn't manage myself - singing voices, flutes, guitars and other instruments. These days I'm working more on my guitar playing alongside the synths so I'm stronger in that area now. I do like collaborating with singers (most recently with Arthur Brown in the studio and live on stage in Holland) and haven't imposed my singing voice on anyone yet, though that's coming too.

In the last couple of years I've been performing a lot with David Vorhaus as White Noise. That's a very unusual collaboration because we're literally sharing an instrument; we're both plugged into his M.A.N.I.A.C. software on a single laptop. Otherwise I haven't done as much band playing as I'd like; the last major one was with a full rock band lineup with the improvising singer Damo Suzuki from Can and members of Gong and Here & Now at the Royal Festival Hall. Playing alongside a real rock drummer is a buzz, not something a lot of solo synth musicians get to do. It’s a great chance to take some of my old classic keyboards like the huge Elka X705 also played by Jean-Michel Jarre out on the stage. I have a prog rock band lineup called Perfect Earth in development, but don't have a full lineup for it yet. It will sound like classic Pink Floyd.

Who did you most feel you really "clicked" with musically when you performed with them, either live or in the studio?

Most of my recent activity has been with David Vorhaus within the White Noise lineup, and we did some tremendous performances for a project of mine called "The Ceremony of Innocence"; twice with Arthur Brown and the singer Alquimia, once with a solo cellist and drummer also involved. That album's getting some remixing done but I think when people hear it they'll really like the mix of electronic and acoustic textures, which is one of the main things I've always aimed for. I really never liked bands which used all synthesizers and nothing else. Tangerine Dream used Mellotrons which were really sampled sounds, plus guitars and drums, and Kraftwerk used the Optigan (a kind of digital Mellotron) and voices, and I really liked Mike Oldfield and his layers of guitars, voices, winds and keyboards. I have trouble now listening to music which is just layers and layers of analog synths.   

Do you actively set out to work with others, have they sought you out, or is it a little of both?  Any particularly interesting stories of how some of these relationships were established?

I've always been interested in adding anybody who can do something I can't, and most recently with the "Ghosts of Mars" CD "Something Dancing In The Darkness" taught myself a bit more songwriting (at least in a techno ambient dance style, nothing complex) for Alquimia to create some more commercial style songs. A lot of the other collaborations came about naturally with musicians whose albums I was releasing. Steve Jolliffe plays winds on one CD, Richard Pinhas some feedback guitar on another. But I've always found it difficult to hold a whole band together. I'm envious of stories like "everyone in Roxy Music went to art school together" or "everyone in Genesis was at the same boarding school". Living in central London and mixing with musicians who are always moving around or who have families and day jobs makes it much more difficult to hold together anything like that.

In addition to making music, you've written extensively about it, having published a book on analog synthesizers, and of course numerous music reviews.  It seems like usually musicians and reviewers are two different breeds, how is it you came to do both and what do you feel you bring to the table as a reviewer?

I was pretty actively interested in electronic music when I was studying, then looking for jobs in TV and magazines, and was lucky enough to get onto one of the first of the electronic music magazines. After that I never really worked on anything else, and was able to tie in special events with the various magazines, and meetings and interviews with musicians, with the type of concerts and promotion I wanted to do, so I've been very lucky. Most of the people I collaborate with now I met through interviewing them, though of course more recently I can more or less call up anyone I'm interested in. Most music paper people aren't musicians. For instance, when I worked for Melody Maker they didn't like Kate Bush because they said she was a "real muso."  To be fair though, there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from listening to music and not really understanding it. Knowing how it works and exactly what you're listening to definitely spoils the enjoyment in a lot of cases. For example a British musician who shall be nameless put out an album with a big picture of a classic old ARP analog synth on the cover, which looked interesting enough for me to buy. The whole of the first half was just Preset No.1 on a recently released Roland synth played endlessly, so a complete travesty as far as I was concerned.  But anyone who didn't know that stood a much better chance of enjoying it, I suppose.

You haven't been shy about stating your honest opinion in your music reviews.  Have you ever regretted any of the more negative reviews you've made, or changed your mind later about the music or the artist in question?

Unfortunately solo electronic music admits of no objective quality control, so I think the standard over the years has been pretty low. The standard of musicianship for example in prog rock bands is infinitely higher, and I think that's the fact in any conventional band music area - so I'm sure there are really great surf music or jug band CD's being released too. As mentioned above, I can tell a lazy electronic music release very quickly, and I think some of the long established names in the field as well as their more unimaginative imitators have been guilty of these recently, though many reviewers insist that they're still going from strength to strength. Most of the "reviews" published these days are by sellers who have to shift the CD's; a culture of encouraging more constructive criticism over the last 25 years would have helped keep electronic music out of the tiny ghetto which it now inhabits.

Usually musicians want to read books about how to use and program their synthesizers, but your book, Analog Synthesizers, goes more in depth into the history of them.  Why did you decide to write from this perspective?

I wasn't covering a specific synth but a whole genre, so it wouldn't have been possible to go into detail about programming them all, though there are lots of general hints and tips in the book (as well as a CD full of sounds which really lets you hear what you should be aiming for). But I felt the history of the analog synth hadn't been fully put into context, at least not from a non-USA perspective, though there had been good coverage of the Moog, ARP and Oberheim stories. So my book really lets you know what was going on in the UK, Italy and Japan at the same time that the American synth manufacturers were flourishing, and gives an idea of how all that activity ground to a halt, started up again after Acid House, and started to co-exist with software sound synthesis.

I see the book has been adapted for Amazon's popular Kindle device.  How do you think readers' experience will compare in this format, and are you in favor of it?

I haven't seen the Kindle version but I think inevitably electronic books will become popular. I can already see that the print magazine is falling away in favor of the website. In London these days they hand out free newspapers at the underground stations; then 1.5 million papers per day get thrown away. I think very soon we will receive that sort of publication just by waving our Kindle or similar at the turnstile on the way into the station. Anyway, I've gone fully virtual myself; I have my own web magazine EMIX now (http://emixmagazine.wordpress.com) for electronic music, technology and media reviews, and will link that to other news services around the world. 

Do you consider yourself old school or new when it comes to physical CDs versus music files?  Do you lean strongly toward one camp or the other, or do both have their benefits as far as you are concerned?

I do like vinyl (I have about 3,000 LP's but they're currently in storage) and CD's (which I've had to crate up without their plastic cases, but again I have around 3,000-4,000 so they're difficult to access). I've started using MP3 files a lot but hardly ever buy anything by download, just a couple of singles I wanted to work out arrangements for. But the purchase of a download is never going to give the same sense of connection to an artist as owning their album or CD, so I think it's become part of the process of music no longer being a way of making a living, just a hobby which almost anyone can partake in. Two hundred years ago you could make a living as a poet; 30 years from now, I think it will be possible to be a really great musician, a popular musician, a creative musician, but maybe it just won't be something you can do for a living any more.

What would you say to encourage someone starting out today as an electronic musician?  What would you tell them to focus on?

I wouldn't advise anyone to start out as an electronic musician today. I went to see Jean Michel Jarre's "Greatest Hits" tour this week, and of course none of the tracks dated from the last 20 years. If Jean Michel Jarre presented himself to the majors today he'd be laughed at - not a criticism at all, but a simple fact. Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk all invented themselves over 30 years ago, and nobody is looking for anything similar now.

There's a festival in the UK which bizarrely describes itself as an "Electronic Music Festival", but the lineup is almost all DJ's. This is the only area in which anyone will find any action these days, other than an avant-garde academic field inhabited by the likes of Scanner. So if you want to do electronic music, do not wear a cape, do not surround yourself with the gear, but try to look accessible, get a fashionable haircut, do something populist, and try to sing, or find and get along with a singer, even if the singing is not the most important part of the music. Lady Gaga is electronic music - kinda. ♫

Thanks Mark for the interview, and good luck with your planetarium show this autumn!

Between Interval

May 2009

Stefan Strand is the young man behind Between Interval, an ambient collective of one. For a more thorough introduction to the man behind this excellent music, you have several options, as he has not one but two very good webpages. One is his band webpage, with, of course, information about the band. For a more in depth look at the man himself, check out his blog and his biography.  As I said in this month's review of his latest CD, he truly is one of my favorite artists of the moment.  I am very pleased to introduce Stefan to EAS readers.

What does Between Interval mean, and how did you come up with that name?

When I started out making electronic music, nearly everything I did was within club music genres. Production-wise, there are so many rules to follow when making club music. After a while I felt strongly that I had to break out of it somehow and try out something completely different. 'Between Interval' is a name sprung out of that feeling. It was the name I used whenever I took breaks from the regular intervals in music. These days I compose a lot more ambient music than club music though, but the name still hangs in there, nowadays symbolizing more of taking a break and shutting out the 'real world' for a moment, disappearing into the ambient void.

Speaking of names, you recently changed your last name from Jönsson to Strand.  Why the change, if I may ask?

That's correct, I changed my last name a while ago. There's no thrilling story behind the change though. Strand is a name from my family a few generations ago, and I've been thinking about taking it back for a good amount of years, but never gotten around to doing it until now.

You've had a lot of good press, from myself and others.  What do you think it is about your music that really reaches people in a special way?

Yeah I've had some really amazing and overwhelming reviews! Thank you Phil, and everyone else! Initially I dove right into the ambient/space music genre without any particular plans, expectations or guidelines, allowing myself to experiment with the sounds wholeheartedly no matter the outcome of it. Maybe that feeling of tentatively exploring freedom shines through in the music somehow, I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm the right person to answer this.

Your music has such a deep, rich sound.  However, you mention on your webpage that your studio is rather minimal, and almost entirely soft synths.  How do you create such rich soundworlds?  Or would that give away your trade secrets?

For me, it's probably a matter of knowing my studio setup very well. With a studio as small as mine, I can focus on creating music instead of learning how to use advanced equipment. Without doubt, I think that hardware synthesizers and other hardware gear is very cool, but the thought that I'd probably spend more time setting up and learning new equipment than actually creating music is honestly a bit frightening. Every now and then I expand my studio little by little, but I'm taking it slowly at my own pace. And about the trade secrets, well it's not really a secret, but reverb is always present in my music. Lots of it :)

Why do you think musicians, esp. electronic musicians, are so multitalented?  For example, in addition to creating music, you design websites and you have some very nice photography on display on your personal webpage.  Is it just that whole right brain creative thing, or do you think it's something else?  

First of all, thanks for the compliments! This is a tough one, but I see what you mean. Actually several of my fellow music making friends are also working with the web in one way or another. I can only speak for myself though, but for me it's probably a combination of the wish to create something, and my interest in technology. I don't think that electronic musicians are more talented than anyone else; however they are usually interested in not only the music, but also the electronic equipment. And with the electronics and computers, web design and programming are close at hand, just as with digital photography and photo editing. If I had the time and money, I'd probably be experimenting with short films as well. I did some of that back at senior high school and really loved it. It's very time consuming though, and doesn't fit into my life right at this point in time.

Let's talk about your latest album, The Edge of a Fairytale.  How is it different from your previous releases, and what did you like best about making it and how it turned out?

The most obvious difference compared to my previous albums is the fact that the tracks aren't mixed together to a continuous flow on this one. Instead the tracks are clearly divided into separate pieces. However there's still a story, or a theme, going as a red line through the album just like in my previous work. I have worked a bit more with sampled loops this time. There's no percussion, but I'm letting the sounds form rhythms probably to a larger extent than on previous albums.

When composing music, I usually start with a thought or a feeling. Then I try to make a "soundtrack" to that feeling. The ideal situation for producing music is when this soundtrack evokes more feelings, thoughts and ideas that inspire me once again. So, the creation process becomes like a loop, starting out small and growing bigger and bigger when my own creations feed me with new ideas.

The Edge of a Fairytale is my soundtrack to questions about the origin of life, old religious beliefs, stories, legends and myths that have survived thousands of years. The music is dark, but not dark as in evil, more like a darkness representing the unknown - and somehow knowing that there's light to be found somewhere ahead. I think that people familiar with my previous work will feel quite at home with this release.

The photography on your web page is not only from your homeland of Sweden, but also England and Japan.  Do you get the opportunity to travel a lot?

As a kid, my parents often brought me on bus trips through Europe during the summers. So I have seen quite a few of the countries around here. I don't travel that often nowadays, but Japan is definitely one of the countries I'd like to return to. My trip there back in 2004 was really amazing. 

What was it in particular that moved you about Japan, what was the special connection for you?

The contrast between the big cities and the countryside is quite something. Just being in a city like Tokyo, that has more inhabitants than my home country Sweden, was a cool experience for me. At the same time, the calmness at a Buddhist temple in the foggy mountains in a remote area really had an impact on me. I have also been a long time fan of Japanese movies, animation, video games, and interested in the culture in general. So I was quite excited to visit the home country of some of my favourite soundtrack composers like Kenji Kawai, Joe Hisaishi, Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu. There's something special about the music these Japanese composers create, I can't define it, but it really touches and inspires me in a special way.

Wow, can I pick only one? There's so much that influence me! I guess it has to be something from my childhood then. The obvious choice would be either Pink Floyd or Jean Michel Jarre. But that simplifies it somehow. What initially pointed me towards electronic music was the video & computer game soundtracks of the late 80's and early 90's, before I discovered Jarre and Pink Floyd. Maybe I can say games from the Amiga-, 8- and 16-bit era, as my answer to your question. Without them, I probably wouldn't be where I am today. ♫

Thanks so much for the interview Stefan!

Dan Pound

April 2009

Dan Pound was born and raised in California, now living in the wine country of Sonoma County with his wife, two dogs, a cat, and a fish named Fred. You can read more about Dan in the bio on his webpage here.

Dan sent me his CD Liquid Planet to review an embarrassingly long time ago, which I recently dusted off and listened to when he sent me his new album Esoterica. Both are excellent, as you’ll see on the Reviews page this month. I immediately asked Dan for an interview, and he thankfully agreed.

You are classically trained in a number of instruments. Why did you decide to focus on electronic music?

Like many people in the arts, my path has not been a straight and narrow one.

I was classically trained on guitar, piano and double bass. My musical influences and tastes have always been varied and eclectic. Growing up, I was exposed to a wide variety of genres and musical styles. I heard jazz, classical, rock, folk, blues, Broadway, standards, roots and old country, among other things. My first exposure to electronic music was through progressive bands like ELP, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and King Crimson and the like. Later, I finally discovered Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and Steve Roach among others in this genre. This was a whole new aural experience for me, with a unique power that resonated deeply with me.

Initially, I went the singer/songwriter route, writing songs at a very early age after learning the guitar. I honed this craft by reading everything I could about songwriting, listening to everything, copying song books and tablature, etc. I got pretty good at song writing and lyrics, and even had some forwards from Taxi to A & R people for corporate consideration. After many forwards but no real breaks, I decided I was better at the instrumental, soundtrack kind of thing, and started exploring this more. I realized right away that this music was more "real" to me.

After getting serious about electronic music composing, I started seeing more success and soon realized that this was indeed my path. To this day, I have never looked back from this area and genre of music making.

I still incorporate guitar in my work, and even use my voice, but with non-lyrical vocal chants and shamanic style vocalizations. I still write songs, just without words and with very minimalistic melodies. 

Do you still play acoustic instruments on your recordings?

Yes. Besides guitar, I play a variety of ethnic percussion, Lakota flutes, didgeridoos, singing bowls, ocarina, anything that makes an interesting sound.

What exactly is a Lakota flute?

A guy by the name of Odell Borg makes these for his line, High Spirit Flutes, in Patagonia, Arizona. They are Native American Cedar flutes. I have three of them so far in different keys. They are amazing. The first time I tried one at one of the local music shops, it was immediately familiar to me and I had to have one. It brought a definite organic and emotional flavor to my sound. I love anything that takes breath to make the sound. That feels so primal and human to me and makes a nice contrast to the synthetic sound worlds I make.

What do you think sets you apart from other ambient and new age artists?

I think because of the fact that I incorporate a variety of non-traditional acoustic instruments and unique vocalizations into my work. This gives my electronic music more of an organic sound. I often describe my music as the soundtrack for a Shaman who goes to outer space; not your everyday ambient electronic music, nor is it typical new age. Often my music is of a meditative quality, yet it's also very dark at times.

How much does improvisation play a part in your compositions?

This plays a big part as far as exploring new ideas goes. It can also take effect when a new part is added to existing sound beds as overdubs. Even though the part might be fairly planned out, the actual in-the-moment executing of the event happens in real time, in an exploring manner, where the part comes out as sort of a surprising creation for me. In other words, the unfolding of the part or even the whole piece never comes out as planned all the way. The feeling of being in the moment while creating music takes over and the whole process takes on a life of its own, giving you a very different outcome than was originally intended.

For sure though, when I am exploring new sounds on an instrument or processing sounds, improvisation plays a big role.

What is your favorite instrument or piece of gear at the moment and why?

I know this is cheating, but I would say that the whole studio is my favorite. It’s like one big instrument for me. You almost never play every single note in one track, and you would almost never use every patch or feature, or parameter on, say, a keyboard synth for a single track. The same goes for the studio. I have many parts, features, dials, knobs, keys, reeds, strings, strikers etc. available to me at any time for whatever sound I need for any given track or piece of music.

If I had to choose one instrument, again I would cheat and name two. My analog modular set-up is at once alien and yet like an extension of me with built-in instincts. This would be one, and then probably my Nord lead 2-x synth. Then I would still have to mention my Lexicon pcm91 Reverb. Without this I could not get that expansive sound my music demands. Then of course there are the didge and flutes.

Would it be fair to assume, since your music was used for a Greenpeace documentary, that you support their work? You must have been very proud to have them use your music.

I am always proud for uses like this, and yes, I do support the Greenpeace project and others like them. Most of my music is based on themes of the environment, the Earth, the cosmos, our oceans and so on. In fact the entire Heat Waves album is based on the theme of global warming. Greenpeace used the title track from Return in the project you're referring to. It was used at the very beginning of the documentary, very effectively.

I am finding more and more use for my music in projects in the healing arts world, and I am proud of that. I've had my music used in projects like yoga videos, guided meditations, relaxation CDs and the like. Although maybe not as significant as issues of the environment, I very much support these arenas as having a positive effect on our health and overall living quality. I understand the need for quietude, meditation, relaxing and letting go of everything. I am always honored when anything I have created is used to enhance such a project.

I've always thought of music as a way and a passage vessel to help transport one to another plane, and to help the entire thought process explore and transmit higher themes than the usual everyday internal dialogues. This type of music along with say, yoga, is a perfect combination to achieve such a state.

So what do you do when you aren’t making music?

I like to read, mostly philosophy and "how to" books. I like learning about and how to do new things. This week, I rebuilt a small pond in my back yard. I like to landscape, cook, build things, write, and listen to music. I love movies. I like photography.

Have you started on your next musical project? What's it going to sound like, any idea yet?

I have most of a CD recorded called Living Planet that is almost ready for the final mixing and mastering stages after a few more brush strokes. In this one, you'll hear a lot of modular analog drones, along with very spacey atmospheres, some techno flavored grooves, some great lead synth parts, a little guitar looping, and lots of shamanic infusion. I did more vocal stuff on this one than usual, as well as more rhythmic based tracks. It's very much Shamanic space music but with a slight techno edge. I believe that it's my best work to date.

What's the best advice or feedback you've been given about your music?

I was lucky enough to have a three day, one-on-one master class stint with Steve Roach at his Timeroom Studio in December 2007. Along with all the technical areas, he also gave me many words of advice that I have retained in my memory and refer to often. The main thing that stands out is that he questioned the integrity of my CD releases at the time. They were flying out of my studio at a rapid fire rate. These were CDs with strong ideas, lots of substance and emotion, but they were CDRs not replicated CDs, and the labels were the peel and stick on type, and many times these were not playable in basic players. Also, there are a lot of EQ obscurities in these recordings and mixes that I wasn't hearing at the time that I hear now. I've since learned many critical listening skills, as well as fine tuned my studio environment and monitor setup. Steve taught me about these things as well. The whole way I record, monitor, mix and even compose has completely changed since. Also the final product is now a professional replication of the original master with screen printed artwork, so there are no errors with these discs. I take more time with the music now; there is no hurry to release the next title until it's really ready. I owe Steve much, and realize now that he really pushed me to the other side where I finally found my own sound, and now I'm just perfecting that.

What advice would you give someone else starting out in this genre of music?

I would say it's okay to emulate others at first because you learn a lot by doing this, but that in the long run, if you're serious about music making, you have to find your true self in your music; it should be your own sound. When I first started out as a singer/songwriter, one of the problems I had with song writing in general was that my rebellious nature took over when it came to the rules of the trade. I wasn't a top notch writer because my intros were too long, or I took too long to get to the chorus, or I didn't include a bridge, or the melody wasn't memorable enough, or the verses sounded too much like the chorus, etc. The great thing that turned me on to this genre is that there really are no rules. This made it fun to create music and sound worlds. I could just compose what I thought was cool and moving and just hoped that others would get it. This helped me find what works for me and to just be real, and produce music that emulates only what my emotions and states of mind are. The best works of music, that people love for years on end are the works that are totally original and outside the box. My best advice is to take chances, break the rules and be real to yourself. Find your own sound.

New age music seemed to peak in popularity around the 80s or early 90s, and may have dropped off a little since then. What do you think of the current outlook for the future of new age, ambient and electronic music in general?

I think it's getting harder to define what New Age music is anymore. There are so many subgenres out there. That's the problem with people relying on definitions and title labels. Some of us artists are hard to find out there because our music is not even definable by any known genre or even subgenre. Take for instance my own music. Some of it is dark ambient, some space music, some soundtrack, some new age, some experimental, some meditation music. In general, I think the outlook is good as more people are hungering for what’s different, especially in other regions like Europe and Japan and elsewhere. I hope it becomes more experimental, rather than continue the pop-infused phase it seems to be in right now.

What do you like best about making music?

Music to me is God's gift to us. It's the perfect, safe drug. I'm not a very religious person, but I am of a spiritual nature, and that's what making music is to me - a spiritual experience. It's the one thing in my life that I can construct and manipulate exactly how I want to. When I am in the creating phase of music making, I am not in this world, I am somewhere else. I guess it's not entirely true that I control all of it either. I am somewhat of a conduit for the receiving of aural vibrations that eventually twist and turn to create this living sound space that one can literally live in and even return to at a different time. Making music is the one thing I do foremost, just for me. The nice by-product is that other people tune in and like it too. ♫

Thanks Dan for the interview, and for the music!

Mystical Sun

March 2009

Your identity seems somewhat elusive. We know Mystical Sun is Richard from California, but little else.  So what else can you tell us about yourself as a way of introduction? 

There isn't much to tell, my name is Richard and I live in California.  It happens that I produce music and release it and have been at this for as long as I remember.  Discovered a way of making music and have been evolving it ever since.  Music is only useful if other people hear it too.  With the notion that it might be helpful and enjoyed by others the music is released.  

My identity isn't elusive when put into context.  When someone makes popular music, the public expectation is that they need to promote themselves as an entertainer.  The Mystical Sun project is abstract music for listeners and seekers to enjoy in their own space.  Since there isn't a Mystical Sun performing act, there is no performer to promote and no reason to focus on anything other than the music itself.  On a practical note, it takes too much time and energy to write bios, take pictures and think about a public image.  I'd rather just make new music or a video as it is more productive use of the time.

What were your musical influences growing up?  What did you listen to?  And what do you like to listen to now?

All the sounds ever picked up by the ears and stored in the brain were my influences.  Everything input is filtered and then returned to the world in a new form.  It's impossible to isolate specific influences.

I enjoy the abundance of sound, take everything in, see something in it.  There are many talented musicians out there producing now and there's some very incredible music out there just over the horizon. 

Describe your musical training and background.

Self taught over time.  I play a few instruments and run a computer.  Music is a discipline and an art and I approach it in that manner.  I study many of the the world's musical forms and research sound synthesis on a constant basis.  Particularly I've focused in on micro-harmonics, the sounds that are more or less overtones as an area for further development.

You've mentioned that you view your current album, Energy Mind Consciousness, as something to be listened to as a whole.  What is the message or effect you are trying to convey?

The effect of a movie soundtrack sans the movie; the opposite notion of the shuffle play way; if an album is a movie then a song is a scene and the scenes go in sequence. The music is instrumental, because there's no specific message.  It is about creating a sense of place and a sonic landscape; more akin to an experience.  If you go to a national park like Yosemite, what's the message Yosemite is trying to convey?  The question doesn't make sense, Yosemite is an environment.

I like to leave open the interpretation of the music to the listener and keep things as abstract as possible. My job is to produce music that people can use in their lives to fill the spaces they are looking to fill.  The music covers the walls with sound and creates an environment. All the sounds are custom designed and no loops were used in the production.  It takes a lot longer to make an album when you don't take the readymade shortcuts.

The songs have a linear non-repeating structure which makes them less accessible to most people.  This has the disadvantage of rendering the tracks difficult to remember, which is why most popular music is hook laden.  But, it also has the advantage of giving the songs a longer shelf life because hooks are the first thing that date and wear a song out.  Still for most this album will slip past them unnoticed as it is very subtle; by design it’s for a niche audience.

Does your music start with an idea in your head, or notes on paper, or do you just start playing around in the studio, or what?

Every song and project comes about in a different and unpredictable way.  There's no process or repeatable steps.  When the inspiration comes, I try and capture it.  I try and start a project with no preconceived ideas about it and follow the clues and leads along the way.  The answer is all of the above.

What do your pets or other roommates/family members think of your music?

My family says they like it and are very supportive.

Once you've finished an album, do you listen to it for your own enjoyment?

Only after a long period of not hearing it and sometimes in gaps of years.  My job was to make the songs and listen to them very closely then.  I spend an extra long time on each track and a track might be in the works for many years, so I hear them so many times that distance is required to regain perspective after they are complete.

Have you started your next project yet?  Any idea what it's going to be like, anything you'd be willing to share about it?

Almost, still producing videos for Energy Mind Consciousness.  Before moving on to a new project there are some album support tasks at hand.  Nothing to report on the new project this moment as it hasn't formed.  I know from past experience that it will be different from the current album, but still have something Mystical Sun about it.  Very much looking forward to working on new songs and seeing where that leads.

You've really embraced the internet, mp3 files, that sort of thing, for making and marketing your music.  Do you think the CD is on its way out?  And what do you think the future will bring to music technology?

The first album was released in 1994 and at that time the normal way to release music was to get signed to a label and then hope their distribution channels could get the music out there.  However at this same time the internet was gaining initial acceptance and there were only a few sites compared to now.  The internet fans embraced the music made it possible to get it out to others around the world.  Mystical Sun was lucky to be in a window of time when there were fewer people making music and fewer artists on the internet.  This allowed for the project to become known and find a few fans.  Nowadays the opposite is true an artist becomes a drop in the world wide ocean.

The future of music technology is unlimited.  More people will be making music because the tools are going to be everywhere.  The line between listening and creating will blur more, putting the listener in control.  The role of the artist will be something like a content provider.  The cultural aspect of the music industry is in for a big change as people will lose interest in stars as they become capable of creating their own entertainment.  Technology is flattening the music industry hierarchy and democratizing access.  

So do you consider this a good thing or a bad thing, and why?

The answer is both and neither.  Look at what is happening with video sites, blogging and social networks.  It's neither good or bad, because times, events, cultures, art and everything else change anyway.  The 20th century culture and music business created a model and it ran for more than half a century.  Something has to replace it to keep up with technology.  Change creates new opportunities and destroys some older ones.  The best one can do is ride the changes like a wave.

Will you continue to work as a solo project, or are you considering any collaborations in the future?  Anyone in particular you'd like to work with?

Probably both.  The project is based around my time availably.  If events are favorable there will be collaborations, but unsure of with whom.  

What do you hope to be doing 10 years from now?

Unknown.  Predicting that far ahead is difficult.  Anything can happen between now and then, there are many possible futures.  I know for certain that I am not certain about anything.  If quantum particles are uncertain then how can people be?  Are we now where we expected to be 10 years ago?

The probability is there will be another Mystical Sun album around 2010 and compilation appearances along the way. ♫

Thanks Richard for the interview, and for introducing me to your music. Everybody check out his new album on iTunes or on his website. You’ll be glad you did!

Javi Canovas

January 2009

There is virtually no personal information about you that I can find on the web.  (Ed. note: this has now changed, Javi has a new webpage, check it out at www.javicanovas.com.) So who is Javi Canovas really? Where were you born, where do you live now, what is your musical background?

I was born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and actually I live in this town. It is in the Canary Islands. I live here still. I've travel very little and I never have visited another country.

I studied piano in the Conservatory of Music for 4 years and I learned to play duduk in a workshop with the Armenian master Vardan Hovanessian. I learned electric guitar by myself.

Was your first love electronic music or something else?

EM was the first that I remember, but at the same time I listened to progressive rock, including Yes, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Camel, and ELP. I also listened to jazz rock, such as Pat Metheny, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, and various artists on the ECM label.

Who is your greatest influence in terms of EM?

Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, Kraftwerk and the first works of Jean-Michel Jarre.

Music fills almost all my life but I also like literature, cinema, philosophy and photography.

How did you discover electronic music, since you have always lived on the Canary Islands?  Was it through the internet? I can’t imagine record shops there just happened to have Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze on the shelves, or did they?

I discovered it searching between LPs and cassettes of my brother. Surprisingly there were LPs of TD, Schulze, Vangelis, etc. in many records shops. Although these islands are culturally Caribbean the Anglo influence was still very strong in the eighties. So for example I could buy Tangerine Dream’s "Exit" punctually when it was released.

How old were you when you got your first synthesizer, and what was it? Do you still have it?

I think I was nineteen or twenty when I had my first synthesizer, a Roland JX8P. But I had to sell it due to economic difficulties.

Do you primarily use hardware or soft synths to create your music?  What is your studio set up like?

I started composing with soft synths and then I bought some hard ones. I have an Alesis Andromeda A6, Korg MS 20, Roland SH 201 and Clavia Nord lead 2x.

Do you have a particular favorite tool or sound when composing your music?

At first it was Reason software and now the Andromeda.

Where do you get the inspiration for your musical ideas?  For example, for some it is nature, for some it is science fiction, for some it is their spirituality, or something else.

There's no a clear relation between concrete motives or images and the music; it is born spontaneously. Then it generally transforms in an introspective way, where I watch all kinds of things in my mind; emotions, or visual scenes of the past or present. But I can't tell you about defined motives or inspiration – sometimes it could be many, or sometimes none. It is based predominantly on general sensations or very abstract, surrealistic ideas.

How do you go about composing a piece of music?  Do you improvise, or are you very intentional about what you set out to do?

Mostly times I compose while playing but other times, I find ideas in my mind before write or play them. I don't have a fixed way. It depends on circumstances.

Your first couple of albums had very long Berlin school tracks with lots of sequencing. Now you seem to do shorter tracks with a lot more structure in terms of the melody.  Is this the style of music you plan to continue making for the time being?  Will you possibly go back to making longer pieces of music?

Normally I don't plan an album before I start to do it. I'm not sure what form the next album will take; perhaps I’ll return to long pieces, I just don't know yet.

How many other musicians have you met, either via the internet or other means?  Have you created music with anyone else?

I collaborated with The Omega Syndicate on the track "Anamorphosis" from the album Riding the Revelations. Brendan Pollard and I are planning a collaboration for his next CD. I played the duduk for some tracks by Rudy Adrian, which I hope will be released sometime this year.

What is your next project going to be, and when can we expect to hear it?

I haven’t started the new album yet, so I can't say anything concrete. It will be along this year.

Anything else you’d like to say to EAS readers?

Simply send them very warm regards and encourage them to continue listening to the electronic music that you write about on Electroambient Space.

Two inteview this month! Keep reading...

Michel van Osenbruggen

January 2009

Michel van Osenbruggen is the man behind Synth.nl from the Netherlands, recording fun upbeat electronic music. For general background on Michel, check out his well-written detailed bio on his webpage, or check out his blog. 

You mention on your webpage that you have no significant formal music training, and still don’t read music.  How do you go about creating it?

Well I had one year of organ lessons when I was 10, but I didn't like reading notes at all. I did learn some basic playing techniques though and learned a bit about chords. When I create a song I usually start with some sounds I recorded with my mobile recorder. That sets an image in my mind that I try to convert into sounds. Then I start playing some chords over that on one of my synthesizers. From there I start working out an arrangement in my sequencer software, add some drums or percussion and then play some extra lead lines to go with it. At the end I add some more sound effects to create the right atmosphere and remix the whole thing again.

You have a great deal of background in electronics.  Describe how that helps you in making your music.

Well I see a lot of fellow musicians struggling a lot with their studio equipment, cabling and especially their PC. I think this takes me minimal time because of my background. So this way I have more time to make music I think. My electronics background also helps me to understand my synthesizers better I guess. I never read manuals or anything. Currently I'm even building my own modular synthesizers from electronics components. That is really gratifying I can tell you. I will be using these a lot in the future to create more complex sound effects and textures. I think regular synthesizers are quite limited in that area.

Do you spend time working with sound envelopes, creating your own sounds, or are you more into just jumping right in and composing music?

I try to create original sounds, but most of the time I adjust existing presets to my needs and layer them together with others. I rarely create a sound from scratch. I don't see the point in that either by the way. The end result is what counts. Sometimes I come across a preset that I like so much that I can't resist using it. I do spend quite some time on tweaking sounds with effects processors afterwards as well. But most time I spend on creating sound effects since I think these are the signature on your music. Luckily I also have some friends that make sounds for me. That saves me some time also.

Have you played live yet, and if not do you have any plans to?

Not really. I know a lot of musicians that love to be in the spotlight, but I'm more a background kind of guy. I think I would die of stress on a podium by the way. Not nice for the audience! ;) I really like to work alone in my studio at night when everyone is asleep. I usually work in the dark since that helps me focus better. I'm very easily distracted. Besides all this I wouldn't even know how to produce my music live.

I was impressed at the number of interviews you have already done that are posted on your site.  I take it reaction to your CDs has been very positive?  That must be very gratifying for you.

Yes I'm still quite amazed about all the positive reactions I get. Especially on my MySpace account it is overwhelming. It is very motivating and that is what keeps me going. I'm glad there is still an audience for this kind of music.

Electronic music tends to be a very male-dominated genre.  You have a wife and two daughters.  What do they think of your music?

My wife doesn't really like my music. She is more into singing artists and listens to lyrics. So instrumental music isn't really up her alley and she prefers guitars over synthesizers. My kids do like my music. My wife has my CDs on her iPod in the car and my kids recognize my music instantly. My oldest daughter is very musical and I hope to do some musical adventures with her in the future.

On your blog you have some cool pictures of your studio set up. How did you gather such an impressive collection of gear?

I didn't buy it all overnight. It was a long process. I have been collecting synthesizers since 1990 or so and I hardly ever sell anything. I must admit that I do spend most of my money on equipment. I work a lot of hours so I don't have time to spend money on other things anyway. The last 14 years I have been fortunate to run my own company and the hard work that I put in there is paying off so now I can spend more time and money on my music.

How many CDs do you have in your personal collection, and how many of those are electronic music and/or synth pop?

I have about 200 CDs in my collection. About 50 percent of that is pure electronic music and 40 percent is synth pop for the rest some classical and even some metal and Celtic. My taste is quite wide, but I do prefer synthesizers over acoustic instruments and instrumental music over anything else. I do like the human voice when used as an instrument like choirs, but I don't like lyrics. I think the nice thing with instrumental music is that you can have your own picture with a song.

If you could only pick 5 CDs – no iPod – to take with you on a desert island, what would they be?

I would take Oxygene and Equinox from Jean-Michel Jarre, and Soil Festivities and Antarctica from Vangelis. I really love those records. I think I played them like a hundred times already. I would also take my own AtmoSphere album with me. All these albums all make me forget the world around me. That is also the reason I produce my own music. It takes me into my own imaginary world.

Your next project is going to be classical music. How did you decide that, and how is it coming along?

When I started to produce my own music about 3 years ago I didn't know anything about composing or harmony. I started reconstructing some classical tracks that I like a lot to learn from. Then I found out that I loved these tracks even more with my own sounds than I did with the classical instruments they are normally played on. I let some people hear the tracks and they all asked me when it was going to be released. At first I said it was not the plan and I put some of these tracks on my website and then I was overwhelmed by the requests so much that I decided it would have to go on CD for people to enjoy. I'm not sure though yet when it will be released. I'm currently also working on two other projects at the same time.

Do you have any collaborations planned, or do you intend to just continue doing solo recordings?

On my AtmoSphere album I actually did my first collaboration. The track “Nimbostratus” was produced together with Hans Landman a good friend of me. I will certainly do more with him, but I also have some other friends that can play very well on the keys. It would be fun maybe in the future to do a 'Synth.nl and Friends' album. I have that on my wishlist anyway. There are also some Groove colleagues that I think would be nice to work with and of course my own favorite artists.

If you were to collaborate with anyone, who would you choose?

I don't have to think about that. My big inspiration has always been Jean-Michel Jarre. If he would call me or mail me for a collaboration project I would drop everything get in my car and drive over there right away.

So who do you want to be when you grow up?

Well actually I intend not to grow up at all ;) But in the future I would love to do music for films or documentaries. Or maybe I could do something with visuals myself. I love the concept of surround sound and also prefer the better quality audio you have on SACD, DVD and Bluray over the CD. So I'm definitely planning to do some work in surround sound preferably with moving images that fit the picture I have in my mind while producing it.

Michel, thanks so much for the interview!  ♫

Pete Kelly

November 2008

Pete Kelly aka Igneous Flame is a full-time musician who lives near the edge of the North York Moors in England with his partner and his dog. He notes that he has lived in cities all his life until moving out to the Moors and that there's a world of difference.

Pete has worked in the Electronics Industry and the Arts - which he much preferred - and has exhibited as a ‘sound-artist’ as well as creating soundtracks for short films and theatre productions. He has been releasing his Igneous Flame material since 2003 and hopes to carry on releasing work in the future. He says that he works slowly, aspiring to constant improvement and diversification. Let's see what else he has to say in this month's interview... 

Your MySpace page mentions that you have a Master's Degree in Music Technology. Where did you study, and what was involved in completing the program?

I got that degree at York University in 1998. It was quite an intensive course, some of the material covered turned out to be very useful, some of it not. From memory we covered such topics as: Studio Techniques, Programming, Basic Electronic theory, Acoustics and Electro-acoustic music. York was big on Ambisonics, a form of surround sound; my dissertation was concerned with the compositional use of surround sound. I was very interested in that for some time, but I feel it's something that just isn't going to catch on.

I must credit the course with starting my ambient 'career'. I was set an assignment to create an electroacoustic piece, made from transformed field recordings and synthesized sounds. I worked on some Silicon Graphics machines that were high-end at the time and I predominantly used a program called 'MIX' which was developed by NoTAM in Norway. It was visually not dissimilar to a lot of track based Digital Audio Workstations (DAW's) of today. The visual representation of sound - waveforms / spectrograms and being able to move 'blocks' of sound around a time-based grid was a revelation to me after having used traditional tape-based setups. I made some of my own pieces using the program using manipulated guitar samples and it really got me thinking that this was a great way to construct ambient music.

I wasn't new to using computers for music making. I had used the original Steinberg Pro24 / Atari combination as well as early incarnations of Cubase and GM sounds, but it didn't really work for me. I wasn't wild about the whole MIDI sequencing thing. However, the prospect of working with audio was a different matter. I was particularly intrigued by 'sound design' - really altering the original sounds in all manner of esoteric ways. At York, we had access to some very idiosyncratic processing tools such as the 'Composers Desktop Project' (CDP) which had lots of uber-weird spectral / granular / algorithmic modules, which were run from command lines on some madly cryptic operating system. Thankfully, similar results can be achieved much more easily these days!

I'm not a 'techie'; I view tools as a means to an end. I'm not that interested in how something works, I'm much more interested in what it can do, musically.

What was your musical upbringing - both your training, and your listening tastes growing up?

I've played guitar since I was 16 and am self taught. In my earlier learning years, I went to see lots of bands and watched the guitarist to see what he was doing. I was very much into heavy rock as a kid and was something of a 'speed-demon' guitar player, which is ironic considering the nature of the music I am creating now. I'm left-handed, but have learnt to play the guitar 'upside down' (it not me) to a point which can make for some interesting outcomes. I played in quite a few bands that didn't really go anywhere, but it was fun.

A pivotal point for me was when I was living in a house with some Buddhists and someone played 'The Pearl' by Brian Eno and Harold Budd which immediately impressed me as I hadn't heard anything like it before. It's still one of my favourite albums, as are the 'Gone to Earth' album by David Sylvian and the 'Apollo' and 'Thursday Afternoon' albums by Brian Eno. Eno really got me into ambient music. I listened to his work for a long time.

In general, I like to think I have fairly diverse musical taste; currently I'm much more into music as a whole than just guitar-based material.

What was the first instrument you played?

The guitar (I played the recorder in school, but that doesn't really count). My first guitar was a classical guitar and my first electric was a Kay that I bought in the 80s. I've had some lovely instruments that I've had to sell on including a left-handed Gibson Les Paul DeLuxe and a fantastically idiosyncratic Gibson RD Artist. I also played bass in quite a few bands - usually 'lead bass'!

What was your first synthesizer?

A Casio VL tone - I don't know if that can be termed a 'real' synthesizer' ! The only real synth I've owned was a Casio CZ 3000. It was great fun making sounds on it, but it weighed a ton.  I used it on a lot of 4-track work-in-progress recordings in the nineties. I can't really play a keyboard well at all, so it didn't see a great deal of use. I have a few soft-synths now, which I use in my 'Formbank' beat-based side project. For my Igneous Flame material, I'm more interested in creating sounds 'from scratch' - manipulating guitar parts / binaural recordings (recordings made using tiny in-the-ear mics). There are virtually no 'synth' sounds on my Igneous Flame albums.

What do you like best about playing guitar?

I like the physicality of the guitar - the vibration, bending the strings and the like. I don't do it now, but playing very loud and using feedback to sustain notes was a fantastic feeling. When I was younger, I used to go and see lots of bands and I was always more drawn to what the guitarist was playing. I was excited by the playing of Eddie Van Halen, Todd Rundgren, Uli Roth, Alex Lifeson and Michael Schenker to name but a few.

What is your favorite musical toy at the moment?

At the moment, I'm getting to grips with all manner of samplers, beat-slicers and drum pattern thingies. I'm currently working on producing the debut album by UK artist Achromus. This will entail working in a completely different way that I'm used to. I'm having to integrate audio and sequenced stuff and add guitar parts, so I'm having to learn some new tricks - which is good fun. I've done reworks in the past and have always found the process to be musically stimulating. So I suppose the computer is my favorite musical toy, in that I do pretty much everything on it. In fact, pretty much all of my music could only be created using a computer as virtual studio, due to some of the techniques I use. I've worked in the past with ADATs / mixers / external FX units and the like and I wouldn't go back to them.

Your music has a very free flowing quality, but also seems pretty well put together. How much is deliberate composition versus improvisation?

Referring primarily to the beatless side of ambient, I feel that the compositional element is much 'underlooked'. I spent years working on guitar and studio techniques prior to releasing my debut album 'Tolmon' in 2003. In the same way, I think that compositional skills are something that is developed over time, with discrimination being a particularly relevant factor.

If there's an improvisational element in my work, it’s in the initial stages of a track. I play a few chords and experiment with different processing techniques or start off with a field recording and do the same. The 'live' element in this case is the capturing of some real time manipulations / tweaking which I record with another program. However, on my primarily guitar based 'Astra' and 'Satu' albums, there are guitar lines that I improvised over tonal drones and textures.

I start to construct a piece, paying attention to dynamics so that the piece has a structural variety as well as a tonal variety. I tend to use a selection of sounds that fit together, sometimes adding sounds from another (unfinished) track. I like to 'theme' tracks and in some cases a track is built entirely from a single source sound - usually a guitar part of some kind - made into multiple variants. Sound-design is a big part of my work, as is recycling - recycling the recycled, to obscure the source. Quite a lot of my tracks have changing tonal centers, which I think is unusual in ambient music, certainly in drone-ambient.

I should say that while I have enjoyed improvisation greatly in the past (jamming in bands and the like) and I do miss it, it's not the approach I now adopt to create music. The way I do things now takes a long time; I leave out a lot and self-edit rigorously, but I wouldn't be comfortable with, for example, playing long solos over backing tracks and using that as a basis for an album. I've done enough of that! I prefer to work in more of a 'wide-angle' manner, in terms of viewing an album as a whole. Whilst being able to 'zoom in' to really concentrate on tiny parts which could be only a few seconds in duration, but need the necessary attention to detail that is required to be incorporated into the track as a whole.  

You said that there's a world of difference between living in the city and living where you do now. How so, both for life in general and in terms of your musical creativity and/or inspiration? And which do you prefer, or do they both have their plusses and minuses?

I used to live in Leeds which is one of the biggest cities in the UK and before that, Middlesbrough, which is considered to be one of the worst places to live in the country. So, I could be considered a 'city boy'. The 'town' and the 'country' naturally both have positives and negatives. It took me quite a while to adapt to living in the country. Initially, I found there was much less 'to do' relative to the city. But that became a positive over time. In a sense, the country is the more 'ambient'. There is less stimulation - which is good for my work. For me, it's the beauty and easy accessibility of the North York Moors, which is the primary positive element, as well as the general lack of city blight - violence, sprawl, paranoia and noise.

On the subject of noise, where I live can be very quiet, which I very much appreciate, but there is the unpleasant high-intensity noise of military aircraft activity, which I wasn't used to in the city. Thankfully, this isn't constant - unlike city noise. Regarding 'visual noise', the country is far more preferable. On a clear night, the starry sky is fantastic. I don't miss not seeing miles of urban sprawl, busy roads and pylons either!

To sum up, the beauty of nature and the general isolation out here suits me and inspires me. I don't think it's for everyone though. I'd lived something of a 'full' life previously in the cities, so I can appreciate the differences.

How do you like collaborating with Achromus versus doing your solo material? It is hard for you, since you are so meticulous and deliberate with your own material, bringing another person into it?

For the 'HALO' album, the collaborative process with Achromus was probably an unusual one, in that I was allowed to simply get on with it. Achromus gave me his source material and I worked on it and completed the project. I sent him work-in-progress mixes periodically and I incorporated his comments. We never sat down to work together as such - we worked separately on different stages in the project.

I'm currently working on producing Achromus' debut solo album and that's a different way of working again. I can't comment fully as I'm in the middle of this one, but as I have mentioned earlier it's very different to my Igneous Flame methodology. I'm keeping what I feel is the core of his tracks whilst reworking them extensively - in terms of instrumentation, arranging, reworking parts and the like. That is the collaborative element essentially and again, we are working in isolation on different elements of the project. The main difference being that this is Achromus' album, so he is writing all the original material.  

What can listeners expect next from Igneous Flame or other Pete Kelly projects?

I will be releasing my 7th Igneous Flame album 'Electra' in spring 2009. This album will be a selection of some old and new material - with a theme. It will be 'abstract' guitar ambience, unlike my previous overtly ambient guitar albums. 'Electra' will be more sonorous and colourful whilst still retaining an esoteric 'core'.

The Achromus debut solo album I refered to earlier will be a 2009 release. It won't be an ambient album as such - it could be described more as 'instrumental electronic music' really (but not EM). We have similar influences and this album will show us wearing our Japan / David Sylvian / Harold Budd influences on our collective sleeves! ♫

Sounds like more good stuff to look forward to. Thanks so much Pete for the interview!

Beta Two Agonist

September 2008

Beta Two Agonist is Ian Lizandra, who resides in The Netherlands and records on the Dutch label Databloem. I was very impressed with his debut album Zero Point Field, enough so that I named him best new ambient artist of 2007. His latest solo album is excellent as well, plus he has a new collaboration with Jason Corder - you can read reviews of both in this month’s CD reviews.

For a brief bio of Ian, check out his webpage here. Up until recently, I didn’t even know Ian’s name, so I figured I ought to get to know him better and enlighten EAS readers in the process.

How about an off-the-wall question to start with – do you have asthma?

As a matter of fact, yes. Since I can remember I've had respiratory problems associated with asthma, so I always carry an inhaler with me.

You probably guessed the true intent of my first question – what is the origin of your chosen band name?

A beta-2-agonist is a substance that can be found in asthma medication. It relaxes the airway muscles and allows for more air to reach the lungs. I adopted this moniker when I started making more ambient-based music. I found out later on that Aphex Twin has a track called 'Ventolin', which is also an asthma medicine that I used a lot as a kid. I have always had a special relationship with all things air-related, so air - or the lack of it - has always played an important role in my life. Just breathing in and out is a wonderful thing and the most fundamental aspect of life.

Your webpage says that you were born in Barcelona, the son of a Catalan musician and a Dutch mother. What nationality do you consider yourself?

I consider myself to be somewhat rootless, nationality-wise. I've never had the feeling of belonging to one nationality. When I'm in Barcelona I feel somewhat out-of-place or disconnected from that specific culture and when I'm in The Netherlands I have exactly the same feeling. Although I speak Dutch fluently and without accent, I don't feel Dutch. It's probably because of growing up between two worlds. I do love the Mediterranean way of life though and love spending time with my Catalan family. Barcelona is such a vibrant city and it definitely has a special place in my heart.

Does your multicultural background have any impact on the sound of your music?

I don't know if it's clearly recognizable in my own music, but one consequence of having a multi-cultural background is that in my case, one is more sensitive to both the differences and the similarities between cultures. There are a lot of similarities, especially in music. For example, in traditional flamenco music people speak of 'duende', which is difficult to translate but can be seen as a mysterious blend of passion, tragic sadness and expression. It's something that everyone feels when moved by music or other art forms but no philosopher can explain. By listening to lot of different musical styles from all around the world I realize that this is something universal, you can hear it in Indian raga, jazz, classical music, electronic music and so on. In every culture music expresses our deepest emotions and I can only hope that people hear and feel it in my music too. One thing I like about electronic music is that has no real form or footprint that ties it to a particular culture. It can take many shapes because it is not limited to instruments or a specific technique or sound.

The Databloem label, and your music in particular, can be difficult to categorize. What do you call it when people ask what style it is?

To be honest, I always have great difficulties to label my music and most other music for that matter. For sake of convenience it's ok to use terms like free-jazz, atmospheric ambient, avant-garde or whatever, but the music that moves me almost always defies boundaries, because it is something that is dynamic and elusive. I use the term atmospheric sometimes, because it implies that I try to establish an atmosphere with my music, but then again, isn't all music about mood and atmosphere? More often I just tell people to listen to my music if they're curious to know what it sounds like, but it's funny that most of the time people just want to categorize. I think it's difficult to label your own music, because you have no distance to it whatsoever. I find it very difficult to listen to my own compositions objectively, if that is possible at all. I rarely listen to my albums, besides the actual process of creating them.

What’s the coolest thing and the worst thing about making music on computers?

The coolest thing is that you have an infinite palette of sounds at your disposal, and even more ways to process and mangle sounds beyond recognition. But at the same time, that is the worst thing about computers or any machine that can be counter-intuitive and that needs your input. It is easy to become so absorbed by the endless creative and technical possibilities, that it starts working against you. That's why, for me, it is best to see the computer as a creative tool and instrument, not a means by itself. One can feel detached from music that way. When I see it as a vessel for expression, everything around me becomes an instrument. Computers, software and interfaces are the new musical instruments of our time and have expressive and technical capabilities that are inaccessible to traditional instrumentalists. One thing I am particularly wary about is the idea that you need more effects, instruments, software or any kind of expensive hardware to make better music. I love equipment too, and when it comes to certain types of equipment it really makes sense to buy the best quality you can afford, but I'm convinced that the latest gear won't necessarily inspire me to make music. The same goes for software. I used to have this huge list of VST plug-ins, now I use only those that prove to be essential. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that electronic music is so influenced by software/hardware tools that the medium eventually becomes the message.

Describe how you go about composing a piece.

It's a really intuitive process. Most of the time I start with experimentation and collecting source material, looking for sounds and not really thinking about whether I can use something for a composition. Those sounds can come from field recordings or objects lying around, recordings of instruments or can be computer-generated. I leave a lot of room for randomness, chance and happy accidents. 

There is something magical about stumbling upon a sound that really excites me and gets my juices flowing. A composition might start with a chord, motif or texture that evokes a particular mood. When a sound raises the hairs in the back of my neck, I build on that emotion, adding to it without compromising that initial gut feeling I had. I try to avoid using the same approach or compositional method over and over and just let it happen. When I have a rough sketch for a piece, I start refining it and often a track is combined from several versions or other compositions. When I feel that the composition is well-balanced musically, I start working on the mixing/mastering stage.

It's not uncommon that images or words are the seeds for a composition, for me there are so many similarities between poetry, music and visual art. I find it very interesting that these fields are blending more and more. I remember reading something about certain composers seeing colors and forms when hearing notes or chords. When you think about the fact that colors are vibrations too, that's actually not very difficult to imagine. 

Your music tends to be more about unusual sounds than musical compositions in the conventional sense. So how do you tell when a piece of music is done to your liking?

That is the most difficult part, realizing that nothing is ever really finished. When I feel that there's nothing I can do or add that will improve it, I just leave it and listen to it a week later with fresh ears. When the music still captivates me at that point, I consider it finished. It's actually quite ironic when I stop and think about it; I strive to make the music sound free-flowing and organic, when it is actually deliberately arranged. I read something about a novelist who said that writing is more like stripping away, rather than adding.  I like to think of composing the same way and focus on the bare essentials of what I'm trying to convey.

Have you done any live performances yet, and if not are there any plans in the works? Or does your method of composing and playing not really work for that?

Yes, I do perform live occasionally and I always enjoy it.  The challenge for me in playing live is keeping an experimental and improvisational attitude towards electronic music. Without sounding like someone merely experimenting with sound in an unorganized fashion or just triggering sequences. It's interesting to note that a lot of people who are not used to electronic musicians, tend to complain about the lack of 'gestural' performance, such as in the way a violinist's or pianist's movements are connected to the sound they produce. They just see someone staring at a screen, pushing knobs and twisting buttons. One of the things I find difficult is that I never consider live performance when I compose my music, so that I really have a hard time translating it to a live setting. I'd love to find a way to play my music live like a jazz musician, to have true improvisational freedom.

What is the most unusual sound source you've used for a piece of music?

I was copying from a floppy disk once on a very old computer. Because of the old drive, it made this chittery rhythm. I immediately got my recorder and started copying files to and from the floppy drive. I also got this amazing surprise when I accidentally opened a non-audio file in an audio editor. And I used body sounds several times in my compositions. There is a hidden world of sounds that you would normally not be able to hear, unless you use extreme amplification, like putting something under a microscope. You can record the strangest sounds using contact microphones or a pick-up coil, of which the latter picks up electro-magnetic fields. Circuit-bending cheap toys can yield very interesting results too.

But in the end the most important thing for me is that the sound excites me, regardless of its origins. I don't focus on where a sound comes from, as long as it stirs something in my imagination. One thing I noticed over the years is that my perception of sound versus noise, if there is any distinction at all, has changed dramatically. I love listening to the murmur and noise of city and nature alike, or the drones and hums of machines. I've had numerous occasions, when composing, where the sounds outside would blend with my music. Every time that happens I feel great joy, because I feel that my music at that moment is part of a whole, as if the world adapts itself to the music, as well as the other way around. One time I had this wonderful experience where my composition blended with a piece of music from a documentary on TV. I listened in amazement how, in some uncanny example of synchronicity, two musical fragments that would normally be completely separated in place and time, were fused into something new. It was wondrous and I darted for my minidisc recorder, but sadly I was never able to capture that moment. 

What is the appeal of adding buzzes, static or distortion - sonic elements that most musicians work carefully to avoid?

Kim Cascone, an artist who himself has made extensive use of glitches and digital sound artifacts, wrote an essay about what he called 'The Aesthetics of Failure'. He describes it way better than I ever could. For me personally, there is something beautiful about using errors and grittiness and turning it into harmonic or rhythmical material - especially in this world where everything is supposed to be perfect on a superficial level. Maybe the crackle, static, clicks and pops of vinyl records influenced me, as I used to listen to my father's record collection as a kid. It's a very familiar sound to me. Because of our changing environment, immersed in digital technology, we are confronted with beeps, glitches, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise and so on. These tendencies can be seen in other fields as well, such as visual arts. Errors are way more interesting, because they catch us off guard and challenge our notions of what we define as right or wrong. Interestingly enough, a lot of sounds that I use come from organic sources and, when taken out of context, can be surprisingly similar to sounds generated by digital means. I also noticed that these types of sounds are becoming more common in mainstream music too, so that is an indication that we're growing accustomed to them.

You recently did a collaboration with Jason Corder.  How did that come about, and how did you like it?

We got in touch through an art project I was setting up, for which I was inviting musicians and visual artists. Because Jason is a label mate on Databloem Records, I thought he might be interested in participating so I got in touch with him. We talked about how we enjoy making music and he suggested exchanging some material for a possible collaboration. From then on, it just happened naturally. The first sound you hear on the 'Further to find closer' album is from a prayer bowl, which was the first sound I sent to Jason. We started processing and mixing the musical fragments after we made a few conceptual decisions, such as using mostly acoustic instruments as our source. After that we just kept adding elements to each other's sounds or processed them into something new. Before we knew it, we had almost an hour's worth of material.

I definitely loved working together. There's a term in Dutch that describes the process very well; 'kruisbestuiving'. Literally it means cross-fertilization, but it is mostly used in the context of two people influencing each other creatively or otherwise. Working with another musician adds a whole new dimension to the music, because of different approaches and ideas being introduced. The whole project was a free-form challenge-response improvisation. When Jason introduced a rhythmical idea somewhere along the line, I responded by developing that idea further. The result is that you can really hear a progression and flow in the album.

Any other collaborative music projects on the horizon?

At the moment, no. But It's definitely something I want to do more often. One of my long-time wishes is to collaborate with jazz musicians, because I like the modern jazz approach of experimentation combined with traditional instrumentation. I love that blend of organic sounds and digital processing. But I'm open to whatever musical avenue presents itself. I want to try to reinvent myself and find new approaches to make music.

Thanks much Ian for the interview, and for the great music!  ♫

Jeffrey Koepper

July 2008

For more background on this month’s interview subject, solo American synth artist Jeffrey Koepper, please read his bio page on his website. Thanks Jeff for the interview, I really appreciate it!

In April you performed at The Gatherings concert series.  How did that go?

The Gatherings concert went great. Chuck Van Zyl and his crew are great guys to work with and everything went off without a hitch. I think that is the best venue to play live electronic music - being an old stone church the sound is incredible and it is visually very inspiring. I have become spoiled playing there. It doesn't get much better than that for atmosphere.

How does playing this sort of music live compare to being in the studio?

Playing live is like nothing else, it is an incredible feeling. For me it is very different from the studio. The studio is a more controlled intimate solo experience, where it is just you and the machines creating. Live has the energy of the room and the audience which can really build an intense feeling. This feeling in turn will take you into new directions for the compositions.

Your music has a very "composed" feel to it.  How much does improvisation play a part in your creative process, versus carefully planning things out?

Well, I would say my music is mostly improvised and done in the moment, inspired by the feeling of the moment. I rarely plan and compose music before I go into the studio. In the studio I work with the machines and the different interfaces they offer, these interfaces in turn influence the music and how I make music. I try to get as much of the composition going as possible and then capture it live to a two track mix. I feel that captures the life and energy of a piece. I may then add some textures and sounds during a final mix. That way the feeling of the composition is captured and there is still room at the end to fine tune and finalize a piece.

On your website, at the end of a long list of familiar musical influences in EM and synth-pop, you go on to mention "Arp, Oberheim, Moog, Sequential Circuits and many others."  So how important is the technology in making good electronic music?  And how is it an "influence"?

The technology I use to make music is very important. I feel the type of musical equipment you use directly influences the style and direction the music will take. I list companies such as Arp, Oberheim, Moog, Sequential Circuits and others as influences because the sound and interface they offer directly influences how I work on a composition. I also feel that most of the music I like and that I was influenced by was done in the past using that type of equipment; that is proof enough for me. I could be called a Luddite in the fact that I don't use a computer at all in the studio. Everything I use is hardware, down to an analog mixing board and recorder. I could never work in the "mouse controlled" world of computer recording and soft synths. I just can't connect to that world.

Your list of gear is impressive.  How were you able to amass such an impressive collection for your studio?

The gear and old technology has always been important for me from day one. When I first got into music and bought my first synthesizer in 1985, it was analog. The funny thing was analog was on its way out of fashion but I just knew from day one I loved analog synths. People would say to me back then "why do you want that old junk" but I didn't care, I knew what I wanted. During that period the prices of analog synths dropped very low because there was little or no interest in them from most musicians. So you were able to buy them reasonably priced. But little by little people started to realize that analog synths were incredible machines and not outdated, so now the prices are back up to where they should be in my opinion for such wonderful machines.

Do you have a personal favorite in your synth collection?

I really can't say I have one favorite synth, they are all so different and good at different things. I love the aspects of the synths that give them their unique personality. For example ARP instruments are very different in tone to the Oberheim synths but I like both just as well...they all have their applications. So I guess I love them all equally. But I do really love everything Arp has done. :) 

Your discs have a very professional look and sound, from the packaging to the music.  How do you manage to do it all yourself?

Wow thanks for that. I try really hard to bring the best product I can to my audience. I put alot of time and effort into creating and recording the music. I want it to sound beautiful and lush. Steve Roach has been great with mastering my records. He's a great guy and I appreciate what he does. Also the packaging and art is important to me, I grew up with records and incredible 12 X 12 album jackets. I miss that format alot. So with my releases, I try to make them like mini album covers with the digipak format.

Will you remain strictly a solo act, or have you considered collaborating with others?  If so, who would you like to work with and why?

I am always open to collaborations, given the members both have something unique to offer. I have collaborated with others in the past and there have been some great musical moments. I really enjoy the feeling of creating new pieces in a group situation. Working with others can lead you in directions you would have never ventured to on your own.  As far as people I'd like to work with in the future, I'd love to do a project with Steve Roach, I think that would be very cool.

What is your favorite part about making music?

Well, there are so many aspects I love about making music, it’s hard to pin it down to one. I guess one thing that I really love is the creative spark that happens when composing and a piece starts coming together and coming alive. It is a feeling like no other. This feeling can give me the chills and make you very high and that feeling is also addictive, once you experience it you want it more and more. Another aspect I love about making music is using the older technology to create and bring that to the world. I like to show what is possible using just vintage hardware synths and sequencers. I feel that there is still a lot of good work to be done with this technology and many new directions to explore.

With all the time spent creating music, do you get much of a chance to listen to others?  Who are some of your favorites, EM or otherwise?

I do listen to music all the time. I tend to listen to a lot of music that was recorded in the mid seventies to the early to mid eighties. I like the sound and production style of this period. I like the classic EM artists as well as the early eighties electropop artists.

In fact, in addition to the ambient music scene, I do early eighties influenced analog electropop music under the name Wire Service.

Do you listen to your own CDs after you are done with them, or do you tend to move on to the next thing?

I tend not to listen to my CDs for a while after I release them. During and production and mix down you can really over listen to a piece. I will usually go back after about a month and listen to the CD after it is fresh to my ears again and check it out.

Who is your "trusty assistant" in the photos section of your site?

My trusty assistant is my dog Kali, she is a chuiabull, which is a chuiahuia/pit bull mix. She is a great assistant and helps me with inspiration and with all my compositions.

When you aren't making music, what else do you like to do?

When I am not making music I like to restore, build and repair analog synths, this is good for me because I can keep up the studio in great working condition and is necessary. I like to hike and camp and get out into nature whenever possible. I also like to restore and play around with old Volkswagens so I keep pretty busy.♫

Thanks again Jeff for the great interview - we hope to hear from you again soon! Check out Jeff's latest CD Sequentaria, which was reviewed in the June 2008 issue of EAS.

Vir Unis

April 2008

As it says in his bio page on www.atmoworks.com, “Vir Unis is a synthesist, drummer/percussionist, electronic groove creator, and sound sculptor.” Vir Unis is John Strate-Hootman, and he has been one of my favorite electronic musicians for nearly a decade, since his solo debut The Drift Inside in 1999. Whether doing haunting dark ambient or frenetic fractal grooves, whether working alone or with others such as Steve Roach and James Johnson, Vir Unis has managed to keep his music fresh, exciting, and very much alive. His bio page concludes with the statement “Vir Unis' goal is nothing less than to create 100% original electro-psychedelic mind-body music.” A worthy goal, and one that I must say he accomplishes on a regular basis. I want to thank John for taking the time with me for this month’s Electroambient Space interview.

What does Vir Unis mean?

Vir Unis is Latin for "one man" or "united man".  I realized early on that this whole process I am going through is to become whole.

Your bio on the AtmoWorks page mentions you got your start in music as a drummer in synth pop and new wave bands. Any we might've heard of?

No, they were all pretty much local bands in Chicagoland area.  Nothing of them really amount to much, despite all the intentions.  I played a lot in bars and clubs though so it really did help me hone my skills as a player somewhat.

Did you do anything with synths at that time, or were you strictly a drummer?

I played both.  I started as a drummer, but then got quickly fascinated with synthesizers and would go back and forth between the two in various bands.

Your bio says after this period you spent "several years in solitude". Was this an intentional isolation after being in bands?

Yes.  I had enough with being in bands and needed to find what I had been searching for all along.  It was always myself left holding the bag as various musicians would always end up leaving because of a job or other commitments.  I was tired and needed a new energy.  Focusing on a more personal and ethereal sound seemed like the right thing to do for myself.  I hadn't really heard much ambient music outside of (Brian) Eno, (David) Sylvian, and a few others, so it was truly a pure exploration into this type of music that was born out of this isolation.

How would you describe these early experiments in sound? Do you still have these recordings, and what do you think of them?

I have several boxes full of hundreds or thousands of tapes and CDs.  I think very highly of them.  It's the path that has led me to this moment right now.  I've released three CDs in the past couple years that focus on the early recordings.  The first one was called "Dreamers at the Edge of Decaying Light".  The second was "Primary Space", and the third was called "The Endless Days of the Mono Gods".  I plan on releasing more of these.  Listeners tend to like them as they help tell a story of how a lot of my music came to be.  For me the joy is of rediscovery.

Describe what it was like working with Steve Roach, in particular the recording process for Body Electric and Blood Machine.

Working with Steve was a lot of fun and gave me the opportunity to have a platform for a new kind of music that I had been exploring for years.  Steve is a good producer and obviously has an excellent ear for shaping mixes.  I would develop submixes of fractalized grooves in Sony's Acid program and also would drop in another mix of atmospheres I was working on.  Steve would take the two of these and shape them while adding on extra layers of textural works.  Sometimes it was the other way around, but mostly it was like this.  Body Electric was really an opening into a new world for me musically and Steve really helped make that happen.  Blood Machine was a further refinement of the process we had set in place in Body Electric and in Light Fantastic.

It has been a few years since you two have collaborated.  Do you have any plans to record together in the future?

None at this time.

GreenHouse Music, the label for your first two solo releases, was excellent.  What happened?

I think the change in the music business, at all levels had labels redefine themselves in the past couple years.  Unfortunately, a lot of well intentioned and interesting people were caught in this change and disappeared from the scene.  However, Nathan Larson, from GreenHouse has gone on with a couple interesting net labels in the past year or so.

How did you and your cohorts come to start AtmoWorks?

James Johnson and I first started it as a way to release music anytime we wanted in any format and in any length.  Understandably there are a lot of commercial restraints put on music that is released on record labels, even the so-called "indie" labels.  Anytime you work with a third party you are now working with someone else's agenda.  For some artists that's ok, and sometimes it's ok with me if it's a right fit.  AtmoWorks has been pure freedom for myself and for James.  It's my artistic home and will serve as such for many years to come.  James has left and now I am working with two long time friends and fellow artists, John Koch-Northrup and Matt McDonough.  The vision with us three remains the same as it was when James and I started.  It's very exciting and the possibilities are wide open.  We are now starting to work with post ambient bands and venturing outside of the small genre of space music type ambient.

Some of my favorite recordings are your collaborations with James Johnson, Perimeter and Perimeter II in particular.  Now that he is pursuing interests outside of AtmoWorks, does that preclude you two working in together in the future, or is the door still open to that possibility?

James and I remain very close friends and have plans to work on future projects together.  We are still very much open to it and James will probably release some work on AtmoWorks and also Hypnos.

Describe your fascination with two seemingly opposite styles in electronica, pure floating music versus active groove-oriented music.  Do you have a natural inclination toward one or the other, or an equal propensity to both?  How does your approach to these two types of compositions differ?

To me, opposites always suggest unity, even though it may be difficult to extract that unity from the deeper recesses.  I don't see a difference between the two.  Rhythm free floats as atmospheres and atmospheres move in rhythms, and obviously vice versa.  The approach can differ in so many ways it would be hard to pinpoint it down in a somewhat short answer.  Not to be elusive at all, I just can't put the approach down very easily in words. 

Although you have some more ethereal themes, some of your music, particularly recently, has had a more personal touch.  Describe how having a family has changed you, both as a person and as a musician.

Being a father has changed me a lot, but when you really sit and contemplate change you realize it's more a process of becoming who you truly are.  So this whole process of being someone's father and watching this wonderful process of consciousness developing has given me the freedom to truly be me.  Naturally, that affects my music deeply, as ultimately the art I create and myself are one.

What's next for Vir Unis?

I want to do more live performances.  I have one at the Butterfly Social Club here in Chicago with James Johnson.  It's an eco-friendly club and is run on solar and kinetic energy which is really great.  I love being a part of that.   I have more collaborations set up and as a solo artist I am integrating more of a performance based recording, recording a lot of material live in the studio and completely improvised.  I'm also producing a couple "rock" bands that are post-ambient and kind of an 80’s feel to them.  I'm working more in the producer role with younger musicians here in the Chicago area and really loving that.  I have a background of playing in rock bands and it's interesting to see this come full circle and I can also offer an ambient perspective as well.  AtmoWorks will be releasing these bands' albums.  It's great to see us expand the definition of ambient and hopefully reach a whole new crowd and generation of listeners.  It's something that the older artists of the ambient scene have tried to do and utterly failed.  This is something we will do.  The ambient "scene", I believe, must expand.  It has become way too insulated and self absorbed and ultimately out of touch with the world.  You can see this in a lot of graphic and musical works that are being put out by these older ambient artists as something "new" when they are quite dated and look like screensavers from Windows 3.1!  They think they are on the cutting edge and it's slightly embarrassing when you present this to a generation that has seen much more sophisticated examples of sound and vision works in video games and higher forms of art.  So, what's next for Vir Unis is to expand and grow.

Thanks John for the interview!

February 2008

Robert Scott Thompson

Part 1 of ?

Robert Scott Thompson has long been one of my favorite ambient composers. If you’d like to know more about RST before diving into this month’s interview, check out this excellent brief biography from his site. 

My asking Robert for an interview coincided with his desire to start promoting his music more, which includes a major redesign and unveiling of his new website, which is coming soon at www.robertscottthompson.com. Consequently, he had lots he wanted to share with EAS readers. His answer to my first questions alone ran longer than most interviews I have given. Rather than wait to see how the rest of our conversation unfolds, I wanted to bring you his first thoughts now, and as he and I have time to connect I will share his further musical insights in the future. For now, enjoy Part 1 of my interview with Robert. First, Robert wanted to say a few words as a means of introduction.

Before I get into my responses to your questions, I want to thank you for the opportunity to touch base with electroambientspace.com, your readers and listeners.  It is always a really great opportunity to do an interview such as this.  It provides a chance to reflect on what has been accomplished, renew vision and look to future projects. More importantly, perhaps, it gives the artist a chance to place his or her work into perspective – mainly on a personal level but also within the larger context of the field of contemporary music.

Your welcome Robert. I love doing the interviews for EAS, because that’s what really brings the fans closer to the musicians, and helps them appreciate the person and their motivations, taking them a step beyond just enjoying the music itself, and hopefully bringing a deeper appreciation of it.

Let’s start by talking a little bit about your general approach to music. You are involved in a variety of different genres and subgenres. How does that affect the way you work?

It seems that the artistic life, at least for me, cycles through periods of intense concentration on “the work” and periods of publication, archiving and dissemination – wherein perhaps there are more reviews, broadcasts and occasional interviews.  Increasingly, the opportunity to create new work takes precedence over the corollary activities of releasing new records and sending out promo copies to radio and press and so on. I like to periodically ‘switch (creative) gears’ as well. What I mean by ‘switching gears’ is that due to the fact that I work in more than one basic genre of music – namely ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ – I find it useful to periodically change my mode of working in order to squarely attend to the requirements of the opposite genre.  In other words, if I have come from a cycle of working diligently on recordings of ambient music (a serious undertaking that I consider an aspect of ‘popular music’) – such as the period of 1995 to 1998 during which I recorded two complex projects for Oasis/Mirage within a relatively short period – I will often wish to take a completely different approach to musical creation and engage in composing for chamber ensemble or avant-garde electroacoustics.

In the past, I was interested in maintaining a kind of careful compartmentalization of my work into a handful of genres – pop music (what I refer to as “experimental pop music,” think: Before and After Science or Bill Nelson’s work), ambient music (both classical ambient music, think: Apollo, the Pearl, On Land and what others might – incorrectly - refer to as New Age music, especially when pop and ambient sensibilities are melded), contemporary, or avant-garde instrumental music (in the spirit of high modernism – Messiaen, Stockhausen, Cage, Xenakis, and so on) and electroacoustic music.

This final category I used to refer to as “computer music,” until I concluded, around 1989, that only a few of us thought of the term in the way I meant it (the mediation of musical processes and sound objects through the use of computers, rather than USING computers to make music ~ something nearly everyone does these days irrespective of genre or aesthetic intention).  Basically, I became tired of answering the question “Yes, but can a computer compose music?”  In any case, electroacoustics itself is so broad a term that many don’t agree on what it really means – as Leigh Landly points out in his recent book “TITLE”. My work in electroacoustic music is most closely connected to the ideas of acousmatic music as developed by Francious Bayle, Francis Dhomont, Pete Stolley, David Berezan and others, and is increasingly influenced by the well-established context that is in firmly place in the U.K. and Europe.

Is it my imagination, or have things been quiet on the RST front the past 5 years or so?  What have you been up to?

During the last five or so years there has actually been a great deal of creative activity.  I have traveled quite a bit for my music – Prague, Paris, Bourges, Italy and within the U.S.  There have been a number of key new releases and various kinds of activities that have kept me busy. 

Affairs are certainly moving a bit more briskly than they were during the past few years and there is a lot of energy going into creative projects now.  My music is in more coherent distribution this year, thanks to my collaboration with Lens Records as a primary partner (www.lensrecords.com). Recordings are starting to appear with more visibility in foreign markets and there is renewed interest. My intention is that current efforts will translate to more broadcasts around the world, as well as articles, interviews and review, which in turn will hopefully develop professional opportunities as well. 

I am currently discussing a collaboration with a northern European electronica label who informed me, rather bluntly I might add, that no one in Europe knows my music!  That seems a reasonable conjecture given the plethora of artists and recordings worthy of a listener’s attentions.

To familiarize listeners both here and abroad, tell us about some of the releases you’ve done in recent years.

Both The Silent Shore (1996) and Frontier were important recordings, and the assistance of Oasis and Grant McKay to make them known to the public worldwide was essential and extremely helpful to me.  They brought my music to a much larger audience than I ever had before. These recordings are now released by Aucourant Records (www.aucourantrecords.com) and are available in the original form, as are my recordings released prior to them.

After the 1998 release of Frontier on Oasis/Mirage, several recordings were released that I think are significant and that are less well known today. One, Cloud Cover, under my pseudonym Fountainhead, is a really interesting recording that did not get much exposure at that time.  David Opdyke of AmbienTrance wrote that he found it to be very ‘dark and foreboding.’ I am not so sure I agree with his perspective on it, but I do think it is one of the deeper records from the 1990s, much like Frontier.  Also in 1998 was Aether, a recoding that included new mixes of a few tracks from the 1995 release Air Friction along with new material.  Aether might be more radio friendly than some of my other works of this time period.  Most of the music on Aether has beats but all of the music is instrumental. In some ways Aether is the antithesis of Cloud Cover.

Around 1999 I was very busy with work that would eventually culminate in the double CD on EMF-Media entitled Acousma, released in 2001.  However, there are also some projects that were created during 1999 that are now coming out on CD in newly mastered and packaged versions. Among these is Siren (Ambient) from 1999.  This is a recording that I think might be interesting for those into deep listening. It is one long, elaborate, evolutionary tone poem, made entirely from the vocalizations of a jazz singer with no other sounds added.

During this time period I was also beginning to look backwards into my catalog and develop CD releases of some of the more interesting material.  I have been recording since 1976, and I have a lot of material that originally was mastered on analog tape. I am working through this material, cleaning it up, remixing and mastering what I am most interested in for CD publication.  In 2000, In Ruins, the 1982 project that is perhaps my first serious and successful solo foray into classical ambient music, came out as a double CD set.  Now in 2008 it is newly published this year on two separate CDs.

Also in 2000 two ambient recordings of particular personal significant were created – Blue Day and Alchemy.  Because they did not have a label behind them at the time of their release they have languished in near total obscurity.  The finances were not there at the time to promote these new recordings to the radio, or reviewers, as they needed to be – with mass mailings and the kind of promotional effort that is often necessary but also so expensive. This is a kind of general problem with the genre, as well as with others that are related. People simply do not purchase this kind of music in mass quantities and those who might are content with mass marketed musicians to a large extent.  This makes it very difficult for the individual and independent composer and recording artist.  It is possible that the Internet is beginning to level the playing field a bit, yet the jury is still out on that.

Of these two recordings, Blue Day, has been reviewed at Billboard.com by Jim Brenholts.  In fact there are a number of helpful reviews of my music by Jim at the Billboard website. For those of you who do not know Mr. Brenholts, he is a mainstay in the field – and he literally wrote the book on this type of music – Across the Universe.  There is no one with more knowledge or love of this type music than he and he has listened to and reviewed literally thousands of recordings.  In his review, Jim calls Blue Day my “most important” recording.  I am not sure I would agree or know what to base this on, but I know which of my works are important to me and this is one of them.  It is gratifying that this recording has found a modest number of fans since its release. Yet, it is so little known to the general ambient music fan base that there have been few sales of the disc. Blue Day was originally released in 2000 and has recently been re-mastered and repackaged.  Hopefully more people will listen to it and add it to their collections. One of the features of this recording is that there are number of shorter tracks but also some very long tracks – it makes for a very unique flow to the record which was part of my concept when I created it.  A 25-minute track rarely gets airplay however!  Interested people can listen to excerpts from Blue Day at the Aucourant Records site here.

Shortly following Blue Day, there was a flurry of new work, including a project that I think is particularly beautiful.  A friend of mine, who happens to be a famous poet, favors this disc most among those he has heard – it is Alchemy, also from 2000.  Alchemy is both episodic, in the sense that materials return over the course of the recording, and developmental due to the fact that familiar materials return in new guises and forms.  The two key works that carry forth this process are Windswept and Summer Twilight.  Interspersed are other compositions that develop a highly peaceful flow for the recording.  It is more of a conceptual recording than Blue Day yet still retains a balance of new and recurring musical materials.  It is one of my personal favorites.

Since about 1998, I had been in dialogue with Mike Griffin of Hypnos about a solo release on the label.  Several projects, including Blue Day were proposed, but none of them really clicked.  Finally in 2005, At the Still Point of the Turning World was completed and released on the label.  I spent a very long time composing and developing the tracks on this recording and I am very pleased with the way it turned out.  There has been some strong broadcast support for the recording and some very good reviews as well.  Yet, I think it may not be as well known yet as it might be.  Some projects take longer than others, obviously, this one occupied my time for at least a year!

While Hypnos was busy putting the final touches on Still Point, I was busy producing On the Keyboard ~ Piano Works of Joji Yuasa on Aucourant Records, which was also released in 2005.  This recording presents the collected piano music of my mentor, Japanese master composer Joji Yuasa as performed by Dr. Ronald Squibbs.  It was a demanding and complex project and, I think, an important contribution to the field of contemporary avant-garde music.

This last release you mentioned brings up a point - you released several non-ambient music albums during this time, did you not?

Yes, parallel to this work in ambient music I was also releasing new projects in other genres – namely avant-garde classical and electroacoustic – during this time. In 1998, the long-form ambient /computer music crossover project Music for a Summer Evening was released (re-mastered and repackaged in 2007).  This is one of a series of works that engages the notion of algorithmic composition within the ambient music context.  These are self-generative, long-form, works that develop a soundscape through a simple process of musical stochastics (or the application of chance and probability).  The selection of musical materials for Summer Evening was very carefully and deliberately achieved but they are presented according to a probabilistic scheme.  The resulting musical soundscape is one that is enveloping, diverting and inviting.  Two concepts are at work in my music of this type – one is what Eno would refer to as ‘thinking music’ – music which compels thought but importantly allows for a space in which thinking can actually occur and the other is ‘musique d’ameublement’ – a term coined by one of my heroes, French composer Erik Satie – meaning ‘furniture music,’ sounds that can combine with the ambient surrounds, blending-in with the knives and forks of the dinner table, filling the lull in conversation briefly to descend into background sound once again.  Summer Evening and other works of this type invite both close listening (what some refer to as deep listening – almost as in meditation) and also casual use as background ambience.

I consider projects like Summer Evening to have ‘crossed the line’ over into contemporary art-music, what I refer to as the avant-garde –  even though it is likely that this term is now out-of-date and no longer all that useful in contemporary parlance.  Nevertheless, I apply a different kind of aesthetic to this type of work and engage a different aspect of my compositional technique when making this kind of project.  The music is microtonal, does not contain melodies, is based more-so on texture and sonic ‘screens’ and layers than on chord structures, formal repetition and common musical forms.  Even more firmly in the territory of ‘contemporary music in the tradition of high modernism’ is the collection of chamber music Meridian originally published in 1999 and now in re-mastered re-release.  This recording contains works for soloists and duos for flute, piano, clarinet and tape, violin and viola.  People interested in my ambient music might well find music of interest in a recording such as this one; however, it is nothing like a project such as The Silent Shore or Frontier, for example.

Around the time of the release of The Silent Shore in 1996, I completed several electroacoustic music projects that are now starting to be re-released in their original forms.  The first of these is Amorphia, from 1995, which includes a long-form work of over 30 minutes Wind in Trees, an homage to composer Joji Yuasa who as I mentioned earlier is my mentor.

One of my favorite recordings of yours is Sidereal. I understand you have done something interesting with the reissue. Tell us more about that.

Sidereal. – yes, the period goes with the word in the title – is my long-form ambient project originally released on the Space for Music label in 2002.  It is difficult for me to know how the recording fared originally.  I am not sure if it was made available to broadcasters and I do know that there were very few reviews.  This recording has just now been remixed and re-mastered into two new versions – ‘Continuous…’ and ‘Discrete…’ and has been published on Aucourant Records.  The ‘Continuous…’  version presents the music as it was originally on the Space for Music release – as one long, continuous sonic odyssey.  For the re-release on Aucourant Records, track indices were added, together with track titles to make the recording more approachable for radio presenters.  Originally, there was only one track ID and no titles.  A second version has also been made which is even more appropriate for broadcast, ‘Discrete…’.  This one has silences between the tracks and also adds three bonus tracks to the play list.  I am hopeful that there will be renewed interest in this recording in the new versions.  It has some really interesting music on it.

What do you think about the state of the ambient and space music scene?

It may be MY imagination, but it seems that after 2001, there was a general marked decline in broadcast opportunities, a growing paucity of reviewers and reviews, and in general a kind of cooling-off of interest in the whole field of ambient or spacemusic. People moved out of active participation in the field, due to overload and burnout in some cases, and others have not taken their places, leaving only the stalwart, long-time broadcasters and reviewers in place.  A case in point is the close of AmbienTrance  around 2000 – a wonderful review site that promoted a great many fine artists and recordings. I may be wrong about this, or at least I hope that the field is enjoying a renaissance now.  It seems that now in 2008 things are picking up again – new releases of importance are once again stirring the ears and minds of reviewers and broadcasters!  In my opinion, this kind of music is more important now in people’s lives than ever before.  With the world in such upheaval, uncertainty and transition, it is the music that allows the inner voices to be heard, the soul to wander and imagine and the heart to be opened, this seems to me to be the most essential aspect of music of this type – as a bridge to a new way of listening, seeing and believeing.  It is interesting and often disheartening to watch the reflection of our time in popular music and realize that it is a matter of exposure, education and access that makes the music that we create seem less essential, distant and unimportant.  There must be steps take to address this and Electroambientspace.com is one such place to do this.

Artists need also to be cognizant of what they are attempting to do. So many are concerned with making money, selling records and gaining fame.  This is not really possible within this genre and I dare say, that attempting to gain fame in music will make you “mad as a hatter” to quote Todd Rundgren.

This is the end of part one. Be sure to stay tuned for more from Robert in the months to come! And watch for the unveiling of his new website soon, which as I mentioned will be at www.robertscottthompson.com. 

Thanks so much Robert for giving this interview, and putting so much time and thought into it! ♫

January 2008

Telomere

Telomere is Chris McDonald. For a bit more about him and his Telomere CDs, please check here and here.  Great music, nice guy, fun interview. Enjoy.

Hi Chris.  First of all, I can find virtually nothing about you on the web, just your site with brief info on your releases - no bios, interviews, etc.  Can you just tell EAS readers a little more about yourself?  Where were you born and raised, where do you live now?  Do you have a family?  What's your day job?  Then we can get into the music stuff.

Sure, well I am a Californian really, having lived here all but a few years of my life. I am married and have a wonderful young daughter. I am a software engineer by trade. I have been interested in music for many years though. I first began playing guitar when I was twelve and have played guitar and bass in a lot of rock bands over the years. I discovered synthesizers as a teen when a friend bought one and let me try it out for a while. My first (semi) modular synthesizer was an ARP 2600 which I bought about 20 years ago, and wish I still had! I actually did quite a bit of ambient/space music experimentation on this synth at that time, also using heavily effected electric guitars. By then I had heard some Vangelis, Jarre, Eno, Stearns, Schulze, etc. and was interested in exploring those styles of music. But I was still primarily playing rock and blues in those days and didn't get serious about recording what I was doing until quite a bit later.

What was the inspiration for the name Telomere?

I first heard the word when reading about telomeres and their functions in a cell – casual reading though, I'm not a biologist. I liked the sound of the word mainly, and thought of it again when trying to come up with a name for the project. I know it's more of an inner-space name for what is perhaps a more outer-space musical style, but I suppose it's all related in the end.

Your CDs are created almost exclusively on the Serge Modular synthesizer.  How did your love affair with this synthesizer begin?  When did you first get yours and how did that come about?

The Serge synthesizer has been around for over 30 years, and I first heard of them when I was a teenager. I ordered a catalog from the company, but was disappointed to discover that I couldn't really afford a single module, let alone a whole system. But I kept the idea in the back of my mind and finally had the opportunity to buy my first panel around 1995. After that I slowly built up my system as I figured out what additional modules would be a good fit for what I was trying to do.

The Serge has a wonderful sound and a great interface. Perhaps the Serge is best known to space music fans for its soothing ambient sound, but like most modular synthesizers it is capable of a wide variety of sounds, only a fraction of which I would classify as soothing or space-like. Conversely, most any modular synth could be used to make a similar kind of space music, but I think the Serge has a unique quality that sets it apart.

This may be review for the musicians reading this, but for less mechanically minded listeners like me, can you describe in a nutshell how you make music on the Serge?  I mean, all the photos I see on the web are just big metal cases with a bunch of inputs and cables.  How do you actually create the music?  Do you just hook it up to a keyboard as the controller, or is there more to it than that?

Modular synthesizers like the Serge often don't use a traditional keyboard. Instead there are modules called sequencers that allow a series of notes (actually just voltages) to be set up that can be started, stopped, and repeated indefinitely. Using patch cables, the sequencer can be connected to oscillators that make audio tones and these in turn can be connected to filters and other kinds of modules that can change the volume or character of the tones. So the Serge with no patch cables plugged in is basically a blank slate, no sound comes out. I plug in patch cords and adjust the modules until it is making the sound I want, then add reverb, echo and other post-synthesizer effects to further process the sound.  Then I record the result of all that, often while changing knobs on the modules to alter the sound as the recording takes place. When I'm satisfied with the recording, I usually pull out the patch cords and start all over again creating a new sound, which then gets layered on top of the previous recording. I use keyboard-based analog synthesizers as well, like the Oberheim OB-8 and Roland Jupiter 8, both of which I used a fair bit on The Stellar Sea. They have a liquid, organic sound that I think melds well with the Serge, especially the Jupiter 8.

How much do you think the instrumentation dictates how you compose your music?

I'd say quite a bit. The composition very much centers around the character of the sound that the synthesizer is generating and how it evolves over time. For me, it's something that doesn't translate easily to other kinds of instruments while retaining any of its important qualities. Of course there are chords, melody, etc., but replicating those on a piano or guitar or other instrument wouldn't mean the same thing.

Have you done any live performances, and do you plan any in the near future?

I haven't, and don't currently have any plans to do so. It's difficult because the Serge is a bulky, expensive, and somewhat fragile instrument. Also, at best it can only be patched to produce a few sounds at a time, unless you own a very large system. Most of my music has many layers of sound, with lots of overdubbing to generate it all. I haven't figured out a satisfactory way to replicate that in a live situation.

There was a long break between Zoetosis and The Stellar Sea.  Any particular reason for that?

Yes, a lot of things happened after Zoetosis. My daughter was born, we moved and I changed jobs, both my parents became ill and passed away. Also, I have had a few other projects that I've worked on, including making some synthesizer modules and writing a software program that records loops of audio. All of this took time away from recording new songs for the new CD. Hopefully the next one will happen much faster, maybe only three years this time...

So often it seems that our spouses and kids merely tolerate our passion for space music, or actively avoid it.  At least, that's the way it is around my house.  What do your wife and daughter think about your music?

Well, they support me and listen occasionally but I wouldn't say they are fans of space music. I don't get offended though when people don't "get" this kind of music. I understand that it's not to everyone's taste, or particularly easy to catch on to.

The music industry seems to be more and more fragmented, with so many genres and subgenres - and space music and new age seemed more popular perhaps 10-20 years ago.  Do you think it will just remain a niche market, or do you think it has greater potential?

I certainly think space music has a great potential; a lot of people who have discovered it and love it simply didn't know that it existed before. So I think as technology allows more people access to more kinds of music the audience will grow. But space music isn't built to compete with pop music of course and it may always be considered a niche when compared to the most popular styles.

What do you think of the proliferation of MP3 players, and people picking and choosing their favorite tracks, at compressed bit rates, as opposed to buying an artist's full album with the original sound quality?  Do you own an iPod or similar device?

Personally I always buy a CD. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I enjoy having the physical connection to the music. The issue of picking tracks is a tough one I think. I'm sure most musicians hope that their work is enjoyed all the way through without skipping or interruption. I certainly put a lot of thought into the sequence and flow of the songs. In the case of space music, because of its flowing, evolving style, I think most fans would want the complete experience. I certainly do when I listen. But in the end I can't really control how someone listens to the album, only suggest it by arranging the tracks as I do. And if they get something different out of the music by skipping, shuffling, or even not buying a track, that's okay with me. Maybe the rise of the mp3 will be tougher on the hit-oriented pop music formats, where a whole CD could be sold on the strength of one popular song. Perhaps pop music in the future will revert back to some kind of single-oriented format like the old 45 RPM record era. But it seems like most good artists in any genre will want to release a good set of songs, and I think most fans of those kinds of artists would want all those songs.

I do own an mp3 player, it's convenient and okay for casual listening. If more people are listening to more music because of them, then I think that's a good thing. I'm not a fan of the sound qualities of mp3 compression though. Certainly a better format could improve the sound, and maybe a new standard will replace mp3, but unfortunately the current tradeoff seems worth it to most people.

What sort of music do you like to listen to? What are your current favorites?

Mostly rock and ambient. I also like blues, jazz, reggae, soul, funk, but I listen to those less. Rock-wise I've been listening to Foo Fighters and for ambient lately it's been Steve Roach, vidnaObmana, Robert Rich, and Deepspace. I haven't listened to as much music lately, I think my ears needed a break after I finished mixing The Stellar Sea.

What do you find most rewarding about making space music - the process of making it, the end result, positive feedback from fans, or something else?

Of course there's no question that it's very rewarding when fans write to say they like the music, that's fantastic. But I think that the most rewarding moments probably occur in the process of creation. It can be time-consuming and difficult to finish a song because I tend to do a lot of self-editing along the way, reworking parts and remixing things as I go along. So it's a great feeling to be searching for the right sound, texture, transition, whatever it may be, and then finally find it. It's not always a clear-cut thing, sometimes it takes a while to be certain that a part is working, but overall without those moments I probably couldn't make it to the end, so they are important.

When it comes to the end result, for some reason it's difficult for me to enjoy a CD objectively for quite a while after finishing. I think it's because I'm so inside the music by then that it takes a while for that perspective to fade so I can hear it from the outside. It's nice when I can gain some space from the music so I can listen that way.

Well, we certainly enjoy listening to the results of your musical efforts, Chris. Thanks very much for this interview!  ♫

Hashtronaut interview

August 2007

Hashtronaut is Michael “Mick” Daniel, an electronic musician from Liverpool UK. When not making very good Berlin school and ambient music, he spends time on his Hashtronaut online diaries, with entries ranging from the everyday to the mysterious. It is hard to tell where the line between fiction and reality begins and ends.  So to try to unravel the mystery a bit, Electroambient Space took some time recently to get to know the man behind the music.

So who is Hashtronaut really?

Hashtronaut is an everyday person, who really is just beginning to 'get it'. And this getting it has very little to do with music, but also has an awful lot to do with life. Its only now at 34 that I am starting to get the faintest glimmer of what it's all about. Also, I am starting to see the patterns and parameters that I operate within on a daily basis, which is something I could not do before 2006, which will forever be 'The dark Year' for me and my immediate family.

Hashtronaut is also a continuation of my musical side, which began a long time ago. I am primarily a guitarist, and most of my dad's side of the family are musical. For a long time I just played for myself, and then formed a succession of bands: Umbra, Couch, Acuphaze. Acuphaze was a band that I put an awful lot of time into, it was a space rock type of band – a friend who I heard the demo's a short while back christened it 'Hashwind', because it was very Hawkwind-ish, which is just fine by me. However, the vocalist in that band just couldn't accept the fact that there were periods where he would not be required on stage, because the 'space' element in a band is usually characterized by instrumental music, as well as electronic effects. All this caused arguments which eventually made everything implode. Immediately after this I went into my little studio place and recorded the most horrendously noisy piece, 'Report From An Unknown Planet' which featured detuned radios, recordings of scratched CDs, feedback, just anything you could think of, to vent my frustration at the break-up of the band. It owes more to Japanoise-avant-garde / psychedelic underground styles than Berlin or EM in general. During this preparation time for Acuphaze, I had also invested quite heavily in a projection light show for the band, and that never got an outing either, so at the time I was not a happy bunny at all.

Looking back, 'Report...' was just a good way to get rid of all this bile and vitriol that had built up. I then pressed 50 copies under the Hashtronaut name, the covers were printed out at work when no one was looking, and in the meantime I had stepped in playing guitar in Nanmess, which while I was there featured three of the four members of Umbra/Couch, so it was kind of a full circle, although we were playing much more straightforward rock music. I was never really happy there; it was a pretty boring time learning someone else's parts, even if it was a good discipline. I would give 'Report' away for free to people at Nanmess gigs. The same with the next discs up to the Lambda Variant, which was the first of my online sales, although these follow up discs were more in the Berlin School style. I didn't get my first PC until about 2003, and that was cannibalized from other people’s...and then I established a website the following year. I'm a slow starter.

As a result of  'The dark Year' in which I nearly lost Lindz when she had a really near-the-line bout of near fatal bad health, I now no longer smoke dope, or take any type of drug, so ironically, am I still really Hashtronaut? Perhaps time will tell.

Your Hashtronaut diaries are quite detailed.  How do you find the time for family, music, and the diaries, not to mention anything beyond that?

The diaries are usually written during the day when I should be working harder at my day job. I am lucky insomuch as the job I am currently in allows me to compile thoughts as I have them, put them on an e-mail and send them home to be entered onto the site, which I usually do on a Sunday evening. Not every Sunday, but at least once a week. I can now get a week’s worth done in about an hour and a half, less depending on the amount of photographs that are posted, as they are all sized individually, and other little tasks that need to be done. One purpose of the diaries is to show that a musician has no special qualities that set him aside from anyone else. He is not different to a street cleaner, or some other occupation that many would see themselves above – and I am not belittling street sweepers here, we would be in poor shape without them – who also has the potential to make music every bit as good or bad as anyone else. The diaries also maybe give clues as to how I work, that music happens in my life despite who I am and what I do, not because of it. Another purpose of the diaries is to show that I have no ‘side'. It’s just me on display to the general public, no barrier between musician and listener, or reader. I would hope that people enjoy reading them in the same way that they maybe watch Big Brother. The project is currently to complete a year's worth of entries, but it may go beyond that. The diary is also a result of 'The Dark Year'. It was a discipline that kept me sane.

On my days off, we try to get a bike ride or some other family activity done, even just a bit of shopping together, but as a rule we spend them together, which is always a pleasure. There is always something to do. The park is another favorite in the summer. Simple things – they are the easiest things to take delight in. I love my family, but I can, like most men, be a bit poor at showing it sometimes, something I try to remedy and refine every day, not always successfully. I try to be a good dad and partner though. Evenings that are not spent at the vault – my studio – are usually spent at home. I'm not one for being out at the pub.

When it comes to the music, I try to get to my recording space at least twice a week, three times in an ideal one. Those are long days, as I am up at 6:30am for work, finish at 4:00pm, over to the studio by 5:00pm and then record until midnight, or later, the early hours if I cycle home. I don't usually get into my stride till about 8:00 or 9:00pm, and many times in there nothing has been happening till very late when I suddenly hit upon something, and I have to follow it through. That can be as tiring as it is rewarding. But ultimately, it is rewarding. I really would like to have a larger house than the one we actually live in at the moment, though. I have never had the luxury of my recording place being part of my living space, which so many other people probably take as a given. Also the name of my space is '220 Vault' as it really is a vault, underground. I had a couple of emails the first time I mentioned it's name, saying 'That's not how you spell volt!'. Just while we are talking about the Vault, It can be extremely spooky down there at 2:00am in the morning. All you can hear when it’s quiet is the shutters in the wind upstairs at street level, and the dark down there is absolute. I always have a torch handy, I would not want to be in there totally blind. I was in there at about 2:00am one morning, and a friend of mine who I've known since school and been in a few bands with, came to the vault after a gig to crash there, and I have my gear set up with my back to the door. I just felt a hand on my shoulder, and f-ck me, I was clinging to the ceiling. I have returned the favor since then, and it looks like it’s going to be a running gag between us. I can feel a little guilty sometimes over going to the vault, as on a work day I am up before everyone, back after everyone in the house has gone to bed, and back up again the following morning for work, again before anyone else. I don't see them until 5:00pm the next day. Sometimes it feels like two days without seeing Lindz or 'The Keester' as my 9 year old sometimes refers to herself. This is a big downside of not having a recording space at home.

We've talked about your latest (now second latest, with "Soundcheck 1970" now available) piece of music, "Event One."  You refer to it as a new beginning for Hashtronaut.  What do you mean by that?

Many different things! 2007 has been a new start in so many different and important ways. Most importantly, my partner was critically ill in 2006, as I said earlier. It was far too close for comfort. Doctors were baffled until the 11th hour, and we really thought that we were going to lose her. I can’t even get my head around it now, it actually hurts to think about it, and I know that it all still overwhelms Lindz; it’s bound to. So we were lucky, we get to be back together all over again after our being separated while this illness dragged on and on. I am very grateful that the three of us are still together. I, she, we - we are all extremely lucky.

Secondly, earlier on I mentioned I was a guitarist who had more or less stumbled into EM by accident through the style the rock bands I had formed were taking – although I am au fait with EM in general). All the albums before 'Event One' were recorded with the most basic equipment – a CS1X synth, a QY70 sequencer, and an old Juno. Guitar FX pedals were used to try to increase the palette, but by 'Bottle Universe' I had pretty much pushed that little bit of kit that I had as far as it could go. The same week ‘Bottle Universe’ was released, it became clear that Lindz would need a major heart operation, and all the promotion for that album was just knocked in the head, a few token posts I think, and that was about it. The rest of the year, well I don't want to go into it...just awful times. Even though life was set to return back to normal at the end of January, it’s taken far longer