1) There’s a mighty telluric force in your graphical and acoustic work. You seem to be strongly bound to the earth, to nature, to your birthplace. Could you explain this relationship?

1.

Perhaps I am just lucky in that I was born and grew up in a place that I loved and

which was very beautiful and dramatic and where there was a genuine element of danger. I learned to respect nature and to be in constant awe of natural beauty. Each day brought new subtleties to well known vistas and I never grew tired of seeing familiar places in a different and changing light. I lived in a remote and isolated area where there were few distractions and walking and musing were the main occupations .It was impossible to ignore your surroundings as they shaped your life. At night there was no light pollution so the stars were clear and easy to see. I don’t think too many people get the chance to look at a starlit sky and see the sheer enormity of the universe we inhabit. I think it affects the way we perceive ourselves and the lives we lead. In a city you can’t see horizons and you can’t see stars at night so they have no importance. In a city people tend to imagine they are important.

Where we are born affects our lives. If you are born in a city and live in a ghetto you get street smart and you learn to read the signs. It is instinctive. Sometimes a matter of survival. There is no difference if you are born in the countryside. You learn to read the signs of the place you inhabit. To know when it will rain, when it will be hot, how to recognise quicksand and how to judge the turn of the tide. I returned to the Solway Firth quite recently and walked on the marshes and breathed in the clean salt air. I was struck by how much sensory information was being gathered instinctively. I had been away so long that it was almost a sensory overload. There was a special familiarity in the smells and sounds that surrounded me. I closed my eyes and drank deeply of the wonderful sensuality of the place. I don’t feel that way in a city. I am not a city person .All the time I am here in this city I wait to return to my home. That is where I belong. On that particular place on the earth. I think everyone can have this connection but it isn’t always realised. I think the importance of respect for nature and our surroundings has been a constant part of the human condition .It exists in many cultures and plays a significant role in their development and spirituality. I just want to hastily add that I am not in any way in favour of the New Ageism trend that tends to steals bits and pieces of other cultures and make some kind of amalgamated statement of an idealistic Utopian dream world. The beliefs and traditions of, for example, the Australian Aboriginal people are theirs alone and while we can learn something about the human condition from them we should not try and adopt them. They exist for particular circumstances and for a particular people. The diversity of human beliefs should be celebrated not assimilated.

2 & 3.

2) Is there a discipline you would consider more essential than others in your existence? Could your paintings, your videos and your music be placed on a same level? Do you consider them in the same way?

3) How would you define your day-to-day experience of the lonely way in which you develop your art?

When I was younger, I could not imagine a day going by when I did not do some artwork of some sort. Mainly it was painting that I did then. There is something very sensual and gratifying about applying paint .The physical act is almost as important as the image being produced. Later in life this was also true about printmaking, a medium I grew to love and relish. These days it is creating music, or sounds which occupies most of my time. I am also busy creating images in a different way using computers, but I do miss the physicality of painting and printmaking.

When it comes to the physical act of producing a new piece of music or whatever, I work on ideas as they come to me and I am constantly refining projects that are due for release. I work everyday .I usually have a least a half a dozen projects on the go at any one time and I work on whatever is most pressing for completion or whatever I feel I can approach with new ideas. Some things sit around for a year or more waiting until I feel I have the right way of approaching them. Thankfully some people are patient enough to wait. Sometimes I feel that I just can’t go back to an idea because I have moved too far away from the initial interest in it and I am involved at the present time with a different set of sounds and ways in which to produce them. I try and learn new things. I make a conscious effort to change my working practices and discover new ways of manipulating sounds. As a practicing artist it is important for me to retain an interest in the way I produce my work. Sometimes, however this can be a double-edged sword as far as critics and fans go. There are those who want you to keep producing material that sounds similar to the material you have produced before and those that accuse you of making everything sound the same. There is no winning with critics so I mostly ignore them and do what I believe in at the time. When I am stuck with an idea or just feel uninspired or depressed I make loops of sounds. I create them from scratch and just play with them .I don’t make them with any particular project or purpose in mind but just give myself a free rein to make sounds that express emotions, conjure up pictures of places, states of mind, whatever. I create dozens of loops in a session and then return to them at another time and see if any inspire me .to create a piece based on the sounds. I don’t just use loops however. I often take out a mixture of instruments and a microphone or two and just record long improvised sessions of live playing. These often prove to be the most rewarding because there is an organic development of the sounds and the compositional structures are natural because they have to be played. I like both aspects; the natural development of sounds and structures and the deliberate artificiality of a sequenced structure. I like exposing the working method and often use loops that emphasise their loopiness. I mean that I use loops which are deliberately cut short or which repeat at points that are not the natural loop point. This has the effect of producing a slightly disorientated feeling and a sense of dislocation from the other sounds in the piece. The ear is never allowed to rest comfortably with the repeated patterns. There is a sense of disquiet. I see this exposure of the working method as having a direct comparison with visual work where the brush strokes and relief patterns and means of construction are an essential part of understanding and experiencing the work.

4) Could you detail the concept of the video performances you realise? I heard that your paintings were filmed and mixed with your music. Is it true? Could you give me the names of the people you work with in the field of video?

4.

The videos I make are a direct extension of the music and art making processes. In the same way that computers have made available to people the means of realising audio projects that ten years ago could only have been done in a Music studio, it is now possible to create video and art in a completely different way and attain results which could only have been done in commercial television or AV (Audio visual) studios.

The notion of working with moving images goes way back to early, artistically formative, years. The means were, however, not available until many years later and then, only with some difficulty. It first became possible to work with video and AV productions in about 1982 when I was working for an Audio Visual company in Newcastle Upon Tyne. The first efforts centred around slide animations and took an inordinately long time to reach fruition. This was partly due to the fact that all the work carried out on them was done outside of Working hours and the nature of the business meant that precious little time existed outside of working hours. I did however learn a lot of useful practical things and have since been able to put them into my own work. The end result of this time was an AV piece set to some music (which was later a piece in Shadow Thief of the Sun). This short (six minute) piece was abstract in nature and was made from hundreds of hand painted slides and altered transparencies. The work was done on banks of slide projectors that are controlled via a computer so that all the transitions and positions of the slides can be programmed. The programming is a skilled job and the person who did this was also a friend and colleague, his name is Nick Ketteringham. Nick has won many International awards for his programming and so I was extremely lucky to have someone with such skill to work with and to learn from. The work was then sent to a commercial studio where it was shot down to broadcast video. The video was shown on Canadian MTV where it won an award in a viewers poll as one of the top ten videos that year, which I think was 1991 or 1992. During this period I also assembled some video work for the Zoviet France US and Canadian tour of 1991 using a borrowed video-mixing suite that consisted of several large flightcases of hardware that took over my flat. These videos mainly consisted of heavily reprocessed material that came from largely televisual sources and a fair amount of video feedback that was also reprocessed and remixed. The video fx and processes available then appear crude by today’s standards but there were some interesting images within the work and it was a helpful learning process. The learning process never ends as the material I am doing now is still very experimental in nature and I am continually discovering how to do new things and achieve more refined results.

As I have already said the cost and availability of the hardware and software to make video work has been a determining factor in the increase in my interest and output of video work. I am currently without a DVD writer but I hope to get one very soon and make the video work I have been doing commercially available. I did get a USB video interface so I have been able to record earlier attempts from videotape and rework them. I also bought a cheap digital video camera that I use to shoot stills of my paintings and graphic work and also to shoot live footage to incorporate in video pieces.

I see the video work as moving paintings made of light.

5) You left the group :zoviet*france (of which you were founding member) because you considered that this group had fallen into the trap of ego. Do you consider that humility is essential in the field of creation?

5. I don’t think humility is essential to the act of creation. I admire Andy Wharhols attitude towards art. He unashamedly, and with a certain deadpan irony, talked about his art as business art  and said that this was the only kind of Art with any value. (Again, this phraseology is deliberate on his part.) The difference was that Zf started out with certain objectives and attitudes and credentials and somewhere along the line the people involved developed their own objectives and criteria as to what was and what wasn’t Zf. I left because the project was no longer the one that had interested me initially.

6) Are the other members of :zoviet*france still active? Do you keep contact with some of them?

6. I am still in touch with former members of Zf ……I don’t keep in touch with the present members.

7) Your music is linked to the underground scenes. Do you consider it an opposite to commercial music?

7 . This question has some relevance to the previous one and my own reasons for starting to work with the medium of sound. I saw sound as a legitimate area of exploration even though I had no traditional  skills as a musician or composer. This was some thirty years ago that I began to seriously work with sound and in those days there was not the areas of multi-media, multi disciplinary work that exists now. This was partly because the technology either didn’t exist, or was not affordable, and partly because the arts were more rigidly defined and separate. The idea of making music and releasing it as a commercially available commodity was made possible due to the breakdown of the stranglehold that the large record labels had on the industry. The catalyst for this breakdown was the advent of Punk rock and the sudden proliferation of small independent labels and distribution companies. It suddenly became possible to make records and release them yourself and bypass the traditional commercial criteria for a saleable object. The availability of the music through, an almost, word of mouth network was the main link to underground scenes and their continued evolution. At the time it seemed like we just put out our music and art object covers and they disappeared into a void .We had little feedback from anywhere and we were resolutely detached from any scene  at the time. Living in the far north of England also helped keep our anonymity intact and our profile very low. There is a certain cachet to be gained from being obscure; it makes it possible to gain a kind of cult status through the very fact of obscurity. This is not to say that this was wholly intentional but there was certainly an element of anti-commercialism inherent in the philosophy of the band. It was seen as an antidote to the watered down sameness  that pervades commercial music. This is even more true today than thirty years ago and the lack of any revolt against this by today’s youngsters continues to surprise me.

8) Do you establish parallels between the processes of creation? For example, it has been said, that you use the repetition of motives. Are there other analogies which could be distinguished in your work?

9) Is it important for you to seek a certain coherence between the different disciplines you practice?

8 and 9.

There is something that has puzzled me for a long time. When I am painting I have to have a different mind-set to when I am composing music. I would say that the principles involved in the two disciplines are very similar, even some of the practical approaches can be paralleled, but there is a fundamental difference in the way that my mind needs to operate that makes it impossible to just switch from one to the other. I would have thought that the two areas of creation were so similarly realised that there would not be any appreciable difference in the way that you need to think about or execute them and yet, if I want to create a series of new paintings, I have to stop working on any music for a while. I don’t even listen to any as I find it distracting.

There are plenty of other similarities though in the creative process and I have no problem working on video or manipulating images digitally whilst working on music at the same time. It is just the physical act of putting paint to paper that I find has to be done with a mental preparation that precludes any other activity.

As to the work itself I would say that the strongest parallels lie between the act of painting and the act of improvising music. Both draw on a flow of creative thought that taps into the subconscious and suspends the normal critical processes. The motifs and symbols that emerge during these painting spells often have primitive and cultural equivalents in various ethnic societies that seem to point to the universality of the subconscious. In similar way music, which is performed in the same trance like or suspended state of consciousness often, sounds like it transcends the cultural boundaries from which it springs. This kind of free flowing, associative, music is the most rewarding for me and the paintings that emerge from sessions of improvisation are similarly illuminating. It is however exhausting and draining work both physically and emotionally. This is another reason that I tend to work in intense bursts on new paintings and then work on less demanding stuff in between.

It is important that there is an overall coherence between the various aspects of my work but I try not to force, or make artificial, that coherence. I hope that through my work I will discover new ways of looking at the same things. This is one reason why repetition is important to my work. There is not one solution to the way a loop could be used or a painted symbol incorporated into a work. There are countless possibilities of juxtaposition inherent in every component of a work and it is only through experimenting that surprising juxtapositions can be discovered. The most important aspect of my work, for me as the practitioner, is that I am kept interested through continual discovery and re-discovery.

10) You realise the covers of your CDs yourself, is it a way to create an interaction between the graphical and the musical part of your work?

10. The graphic art that accompanies my music is important as it contains clues and ciphers as to the meaning of the whole work. In the past I have been accused of being too obscure and esoteric but quite frankly I don’t care about the critics that level these trite judgements at me or anyone else. The work is not a defining statement because I don’t think it is possible to make a defining statement about the human condition. The best we can hope to achieve is a moderate understanding of the mechanics and an enlightened view of the metaphysics of being alive.

The cover art offers an insight through different senses as to the nature of the whole.

As to what the nature of the whole is I don’t have any answers, just more questions and more ways of looking at the same problems and interpreting these into sound and art.

12) The samples you use in your music are often played by yourself on ethnical music instruments. Do you feel concerned by the traditional use of these instruments?

13) In your soundscapes, one can feel something industrial, but also something natural. Is it a way of melting opposites, of representing our time? How do you feel about the evolution of our world?

14) Could you tell me about your present work? About your projects?

12 –14 .

The sounds that I end up making and utilising are a direct result of what is happening around me. I live in a city but my preferred place of residence would be back in the countryside. I think the environment in which we find ourselves has a great impact upon our psyche and the industrialisation of the world at the expense of nature is an issue that influences my work and affects my outlook as to the future of this planet. I don’t want to make out that this is a driving issue in my work but it does have an impact upon it and as you rightly surmised it is indicative of our time. (Koyaanisqatsi is one of my favourite films)

I also tend to use and utilise whatever it is I hear around me. In the past I have lived in areas of high concentration of Indian and Asian cultural groups and the sounds of these ethnic groups has migrated into my work. In a current project I am using more contemporary European beats as an element within the compositions. I find it strange that some people are so narrow minded about different types of music. They tend to stick to one or two genres and rarely stray outside their preferred fields of interest. I like, and listen to, music from a wide variety of sources and genres .If it sounds good and has an emotional and /or intellectual impact I will listen to it again and somewhere down the line it will re-emerge as an element within my own music. It may not be n it’s original form and it may be set in a different context but that is what I like about making compositions in music and art; I never know where they will end up and I can learn things on the way.

At present I have many different projects on the go. I like to work sometimes on one another time on another. They are cross-fertilized with each other.

I have a particular project that contains a lot of beat-based tracks but is not entirely a beatz album. (This will be my submission for the major project in my MA in Creative Music Technology) Another Cd is based around recordings that were made in 1985/6 during a period of civil unrest in the larger cities in the UK as a result of government policies. Another project is a personal retrospective look at the past 50 years and in particular the early childhood memories of music and sound.