Equinoxe

Have you already been creative today and if yes, in what field (music or painting)?

I have already been making some new music today. I work every day on something, mostly it is music. This morning was a fairly typical example of the way I work. I am currently finishing some new material for release on Klanggallerie and there is a stockpile of sounds and alternative mixes that have accrued during the making of this album so I was looking at putting together some alternative tracks and mixes for an accompanying 7 single .I already have two tracks (for the single) that I am happy with but wanted to see what else I could come up with before I sent off the master discs. I took some basic elements from one of the finished tracks and added live parts played on soft synths and this altered the whole feel of the piece. The entire process probably took about twenty minutes and afterwards I had a new track that I felt was much more intuitive and immediate than some of the others that I had considered sending. The track could not have been made without the groundwork that had been put in working on previous versions and it highlights the very slight margins that exist in the creative process. It also reaffirmed to me that I work best when I completely allow intuition to take over and don't question the choices I make until after a piece is created. This new track was a complete surprise to me. That is the way I like things to be. It has taken a while to be able to get a point where it is now possible to ignore the present digital recording and mixing interfaces I use as successfully as in previous times when I used analogue only equipment .I had built up decades of rapport and understanding of the mechanics and the possibilities of this equipment as a creative tool. It didn't take this long to learn new software, that is not what I mean, what I am saying is that it has taken some time to be able to work completely intuitively with computers; In other word to ignore them. There have been many different viewpoints expressed about computer based recording and arranging but it all really comes down to how you want to use it. There are no rights and wrongs. There has been a revolution in the possibilities that are afforded for creative practice with the advent of computer based applications that can be utilised by the artist and I find it really interesting that the advent of new and different genres has, to some extent, been driven by technological progress and the ready availability of the equipment. There is an ongoing revolution in the way that music is recorded and distributed that can be traced back to the Punk era and the proliferation of homemade records and home based distribution .It has never before been so easy for anyone to record and distribute their own music as it is now. Of course piracy is a big issue here too. It is all too easy to copy music and download whatever you want from the Internet. I work everyday but I don't always get paid for it.

Rapoon has already existed for some years. What was the initial motivation to found the project and was it planned as a solo project from the start on?

The initial motivation to begin the project was a certain feeling of constraint whilst working within Zoviet France. It had been twelve years and I felt that there were other sounds that I wanted to explore. I just started releasing material under a new name and I had the idea that I would let the project develop whatever way I felt interested me at the time. Rapoon has been essentially a solo project but I have enjoyed working with other people and I intend to expand this aspect of Rapoon in the future. The most fruitful working partnership was probably with Viki Bain. There was a great inspiration for me in using Vikis’ voice within the framework of my recorded sounds and I miss having that possibility available. I am currently looking at the possibility of working with a cellist and singer and this would be good for me as it gives me new possibilities of playing live and changing directions in the sounds and structures within the recordings. There have also been a number of successful collaborations with other artists and there are a lot more collaborative ventures for the future. I suppose having my own project became important to me towards the end of my involvement with Zf because I wanted to be in control of my own music and output and to shape the way I wanted things to evolve.

Can you try to describe your feelings after having published your first release under the name Rapoon?

I was very happy. I felt that I could point to something and call it my own achievement , for better or worse, and no-one could contradict this.

In the meantime you can look back on a rather high amount of releases. The earlier releases seem to be more spherical than the newer records, in which the rhythm structures seem to play a more important role. Would you agree with that and if yes, how did this development happen?

Yes I would agree with that estimation on the whole. There are a number of contributing factors towards this change in the music. Probably the most obvious is the changing emphasis and character of the rhythmic structures. There has always been rhythm in rapoon music, it is just that the ways that the rhythms are constructed and used that has evolved and changed. I got more interested in trying to create pieces around more forceful and abrasive rhythmic structures than I had used in the past. There was a change in the sonic importance of the beat . I still make music that has an underplayed rhythmic element and I can only liken the process to painting where I also paint both figurative and abstract work .By exploring the possibilities of one type of expression you can learn about the other. In order to make better non- rhythmic music I make a lot of music that has a strong rhythmic presence, and vice versa. It is almost like catharsis, where you satisfy one desire in order to concentrate more fully on another.

There was a CD on Klanggalerie last year by the name of Rhiz, a club which is well-known far beyond the city limits of Vienna. Can this release be regarded as kind of a homage to this club?

The CD Rhiz came about because Walter at Klanggallerie asked me if I wanted to play another gig at this Vienna club and at the time I didn't feel motivated to play so he asked me if I wanted to DJ instead. I hadn't really considered this option before so I said yes straight away and then afterwards thought about how I would approach doing it .I decided to try and put together a set of new material that was my own and that was the kind of material that I would like to listen to in a club situation .I discovered that I liked hard beatz and used this opportunity to experiment with placing my own (usually identifiable) sounds set against a wall of heavy beatz. When I played the set Walter was unaware that I made all the tracks myself and was keen to know what it was I was playing. When he discovered it was my material he immediately asked if he could release it, of course I was very glad to do this .The album was made back in the UK and then it was launched at the Rhiz. I have many happy memories of gigs there and I was happy to give the album the title of this excellent club.

What criteria do you have to decide if a track is worth releasing? Is it important to you, to release everything that you have recorded or are there recordings which were somewhen put into a drawer and will remain there?

I don't release everything I do...there is probably less than fifty percent of the material I produce that gets released. Releasing anything at all is always a risk. There is something both lost and gained when a piece of work becomes available to the public domain. One of the reasons I work so much is that I still consider myself to be |learning  how to make music and the work that is released documents the progress I have made. I hope that one day I will become more proficient in some aspects of composing and yet retain an attitude of experimentation and discovery. There are many unexplored areas that I have yet to try my hand at and develop new works within these new or different parameters.

This isn't always an easy thing to do as there are always critics ready to try and take you down when you do something different or even if you produce something with similar elements within it. I don't really care that much what the critics say ...I don't have a lot of respect for people who do not produce their own work and yet try and tell others how they should work. I don't produce work for critics, I just explore whatever interests me at the time and I try and do it as honestly as possible.

The material that stays in the drawer is material that I consider to be not worth releasing. Although as soon as I have released a piece of work I have already lost interest in it in a way as I have moved on to the next piece I am working on. Most often I have several projects in various stages of completion at any one time and ideas are cross fertilized from one the other until each one is released, or not, and then a line is drawn under it. It becomes history.

In how far did other artists have an influence on your own creativity?

I think the main influences happened early on in my life, but I can still hear things now which make me think I would like to try and utilize that sound or achieve that

contrast in textures and emotions. The main influences which carry through to this day are, strangely, almost all German. I am thinking of Can, Neu, Faust, Kraftwerk and of course Stockhausen. Without any conscious reference to these early influences there is always in the back of my mind an attempt to achieve a similar listening experience with my own work to the experiences I remember as a youth while listening to these German pioneers, whether it was the unforgiving grind of repetition embodied in Faust's It's a rainy day  or the intricate sonic subtleties of Can's Future Days  (incidentally this is still my favourite work from Can.) There is a great diversity of artists who have an influence on the work I produce today. This is generally in an indirect fashion. I mean I don't just want to copy someone, what would be the point of that? There are many times however that you hear something and are struck by the simplicity or beauty or even the beautiful simplicity of a piece and want to try and capture the essence of what makes that work and put it in your own creations. The sound could be anything at all, a choral phrase, a synth sound, a drum sound, a fragment of a piano piece, anything, and from any source. I am not someone who only listens to one genre of music and refuses to listen to anything outside these self-determined parameters. I don't care what genre something is, I just care about how it sounds and if it has an emotional or intellectual impact upon you. There is beauty everywhere and ugliness everywhere also.

I have recently been re-listening to a lot of Philip Glass compositions and there has been an inevitable trickle of influence exerted there, which may well surface in future work. In particular I have become very enamoured of the use of soft brass timbres in my recent work and I think this can be traced back to Phillip Glass, Don Cherry and Jon Hassel.

Do you try to stay informed about what is going in the industrial and ambient scene and are there any projects that you prefer and/or could even recommend?

I am afraid I don't really make a conscious effort to keep up with current trends in the scene as I don't really see myself as belonging to any particular group of artists or genre. I get lots of records sent in the post and I have lots of friends who are musicians, though they are mostly working outside the areas that I tend to work in. I get to hear about new artists also through labels and fellow collaborators. I can recommend the work of Mark Davies as Omenya and Andrew Diey as Black Faction. Both of these artists have progressed from the general starting points of ambient and industrial ' music and travelled their own roads, which is surely what it is all about?

Your long career as an artist has certainly had an impact on quite a few newer artists. What does it mean to you if someone names you as a source of inspiration?

I am endlessly flattered and amazed when I am cited as an influence or a source of inspiration. I still tend to work in the dark, so to speak, and my work is left to its own devices once it leaves the creative stage. The fact that anyone likes or finds inspiration in what they hear is definitely a bonus and is often quite humbling.

I have recently been teaching part time at the local university (I am doing an MA in Creative Music Technology) and this has given me the opportunity to pass on some practical skills but perhaps more importantly it has made me think more objectively about my own work and in turn this has made me encourage new musicians /composers to generate their own self belief and follow their instincts when creating music. I have been very flattered to have PhD students asking me for information about myself that they can include in their thesis and the possibility of a book has been mentioned a few times. I still find all of this rather hard to believe and don't take it too seriously.

You are also active in the field of painting. How do you decide if your ideas should be expressed musically or with a painting?

As you know I began as a painter and studied Fine Art in the early seventies. There was a time when I could not conceive of getting through a day without doing some painting or drawing. It was as essential to my existence as breathing. Then, quite suddenly, music replaced painting and took on the same role and function and importance. The plastic arts have taken a back seat since that time but I desperately miss making marks on paper, especially if too long a time passes between each session of making paintings or drawings. So to answer your question I do not really make a conscious decision to express an idea in one medium or another it generally breaks down to whether I can prise myself away from the computer and make the time and effort to get out paints and paper and put myself in a different frame of mind and produce some visual images. The effort is usually rewarded ten-fold, but I have to say that I find painting mentally and physically exhausting .So it is a bit like deciding to take very vigorous exercise. You know that the results will be well worth it but there is an inherent laziness in making the initial effort.

In some ways the need to make visual images has been supplanted by the possibilities that are afforded with digital art and video. I have been very busy over the past year trying to teach myself how to make interesting video art. That in itself is a huge problem. It is easy enough to make video work but to try and push the boundaries in the same way, as music has been a constant challenge. I have some work that I am very pleased with but still think I can push it even further. There are whole new disciplines involved in manipulating images over time. There are many aspects of the psychology of perception involved. Also there are the considerations of where the images will be seen. A piece in an art gallery is going to be different to a piece used as a backdrop to a gig for instance.

How important is painting to you?

I think I partially answered that in the last question. Painting is hugely important to me. I have a very good friend who is a renowned Russian painter. He is now in early seventies and has only one lung left after cancer claimed his other, yet he works prolifically and paints for five hours each day. (He used to do more but has had to cut down since his illness) His work is of great quality as well as quantity, yet he estimates that for every ten pieces he produces only two will be really good .His lifelong aim has been to redress this balance until he can achieve a higher percentage of, in his opinion, really good ones. (I have to say that I think almost all of his work is fantastic) I wish I could devote the time that he does to painting and drawing but it seems there are always other things more pressingly urgent to do.

I have no trouble working every day on sound but there is some kind of mental block at the moment concerning painting. I must get a brain plumber to look at it.

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How do you approach the cover design? Do you finish the music first and then develop the cover or is that sometimes the other way around?

Almost without exception the covers have come after the music has been finished. (The one exception I can think of is Navigating by Colour). There are times however when I have thought of a material or design that I would like to use as an end result for a cover concept and have kept this in mind when making the music. Sometimes this can change as you work through a project and it becomes apparent that the music or the artwork might be better suited to another piece of work. Some art designs and cover /packaging concepts are still waiting for the right piece of work to come along. There are a few that I would really love to see realised but for one reason or another they are still at the first stages of becoming releases. (To go back a little to the piracy issue, I have been thinking now for some time that one way around this, for me, would be to go back to the days of Zf and hand make all the sleeves or packaging involved myself and release in Limited editions. I have grown increasingly frustrated with the compromise of a jewel case /booklet.etc type of cover anyway. They are so boring and uninspiring as objects.)

The covers that I am most proud of as art objects are the ones that were all hand-made during the early days of Zf

The covers designs in all instances have been an extension of the composed works, a clue as to the meanings of the pieces on the Cd, another frame of reference if you will.

Much to our regret, we have not had the opportunity to see you live yet. What - in your own opinion - makes a good live performance? What kind of places do you prefer when playing live?

I think that all depends on the atmosphere rather than the physical venue. One of the most rewarding gigs that I can remember happened last year in Prague. The venue was illegal and was in some underground cellars that had been cleared out and tidied up by the ars morta crew only that day. The walls and floors had been swept clean and washed down. It was very basic and bare with hardly any lighting and a very crude stage with only a couple of broken down tables as furniture .I had asked for various pieces of equipment to be provided and began to get a little worried as the time drew nearer to the start of the gig and there was still nothing there. Not even the PA. I couldn't do a sound check or anything because I had no means of testing the sound and no mixing desk to patch things into. Eventually, however people arrived with pieces of equipment and I began to set up my own things. Bit by bit the PA arrived and my equipment grew. A simple mixer was replaced with a much better one, a keyboard arrived, fx units ...etc, etc, The PA arrived and a very rudimentary and quick soundcheck followed .The gig started and the first act played (Scloss Tiegal ) followed by Walter from klanggalerie dj'ing. The pa sounded far better than it had any right to and there was a good atmosphere in the place. Eventually it was my turn to play and I started in the usual unrehearsed, improvisational way. The direction of the performance depends very much on the feedback that you can feel from an audience. There was a very intimate and receptive atmosphere here and the music reflected that feeling of being aware of the present. When the video projector broke down and the stage lighting gave up leaving only a single red bulb, it simply added to the sharing of the moment. Candles were lit and placed on the stage around the equipment so that I could see a bit better what was happening. The darkness and the packed proximity of the audience all contributed to a sense of communion and loss of self. I came away from that gig feeling that I had experienced something rare and special. If I have any goal at all when playing live it is to try and get somewhere close to that feeling when I play. This has happened a few times in the past. The very first live performance of Zoviet France was just such an occasion. It happened in an upstairs room of a pub in Newcastle and was attended by many who were simply curious. The atmosphere and the music were both perfect. It was a short gig and served to convince us that we could achieve the sound we wanted playing live. This gig served as warm up to the '91 tour of the States. Another occasion was on the island Pampas near Amsterdam. We lived rough on the island for a week and then played for about five hours into the early dawn. Again the atmosphere was right and played a huge part in the way that the music was performed and received.

Let's go back into history. How would you rate the influence of Zoviet France on today's industrial and ambient scene and why do you think are there still a lot of people in Zoviet France?

I think Zoviet France were unique and the early work is still seen as a source of inspiration to people because the genuineness comes through. The art and the packaging all added a sense of completeness and mystery about the origins of the music and much of it retains a timeless quality. The project retains a reputation of otherworldliness and attracts those who want something that is outside the norm.

How do you rate your role as a member of Zoviet France from today's perspective?

I am very happy to have been involved in the pioneering and productive days of Zf. I had always considered ZF to be a lifelong project and I was devastated when I realised that things were not going to work out as planned. Life moves on though and these days I am proud of my contribution to the band and prefer to remember the positive things about the experience and forget about the bad.

Dreams, hopes and plans for the future?

Well I am still learning how to make and compose music and more recently I have been learning how to use video and sound together so there is much yet to explore and many new directions to follow. I can see that painting will take on a more important role in the near future and there will be a shift towards the visual side of things and audio cd work will become less important .I also plan to do more writing. I want to write fiction. I hope that one day I can get some funding that will enable me to realise some bigger multi-media projects and that one day I will be able to afford a mac' with pro-tools and avid express.

Apart from those wants ... I am happy. I hope you are too.