Madalyn Merkey
Interview (2021)
First, we would like to ask about the background of your music and emotions: during your childhood, what sort of musical environments were you raised in?I grew up in Oklahoma City, which is located in the middle of the USA. Both of my parents work in medicine and are not musical, so any early music application came from listening to the radio or watching videos on MTV in the mid 1990s. However, I have a vivid non-musical memory of going into the office with my dad after school and being left alone in a room that was meant for reviewing electrocardiograms
What kind of music and culture were you into before you started to create music?I went to a small grade school with eight people in my graduating class. Upon leaving, I conducted research online about musical subcultures. I had seen too many teen movies and thought I needed to find a clique, which ended up not being the case. That early experience of trying to find out where I fit in and being let down by the lack of culture in my Midwest town was a fruitful moment, since I discovered how hungry I was for musical expression. I would say listening to Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle as a teenager shaped my personal taste before ever being involved in making music or a music scene. I think the emotions I was drawn to were subversion and textural definition -- a sensation which felt unapologetically abrasive, but also seductive in a visceral way.
Not limited to only music or musicians, please tell us about the artists or works which have influenced your creations?I’m answering these questions as I walk around the Tate Modern in London, so my attention is overloaded by art. Hans Haacke is an artist I constantly come back to. His work pushes the purpose of art for me through an expression of activities and systems. At times, there is an investigative journalist nature to the work, but instead of a report some kind of consequential art is released that enacts the findings. Nothing feels crafty or cute, but it ultimately brings about a feeling of calm in the exactitude of the procedure. His work, Germania, 1993, where he demolished the floor of the German Pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale, often crosses my mind regarding his aptitude for taking risks.
Could you speak to us in detail about the production process?Ideally, I will have a lot of time to map out an idea beforehand, step by step, with the kinds of sounds I want to create and determine the best synthesis techniques. More often, the process is just about continuing to create sounds without too many preconceived notions. The creative steps are facilitated by habit.
Your music, especially during live performances, feels somewhat similar to real-time generative art. Please share your opinion about this interpretation with us.Yes, the goal in performance is to have sounds that constantly change and give way to surprises. In a solo performance it is key to have the computer acting independently in some tasks. I want the machine to make the art, given my directions in the composition, but I’m not strict and hope for many different outcomes.
I heard that you previously studied the visual arts, but was the reason you switched to creating music due to feeling that there were regions of expression that were unattainable by visuals?Yes, I felt like visual art could be digested instantly but required a painful amount of time to create. Perhaps in a way, I became fixated on capturing time and working with sound as a medium seemed less defined in its restrictions. The aspect of revealing information over time and navigating an experience seemed to fascinate me when I first started recording.
What do you think can only be expressed through music?Through music in particular, I try to cultivate a shared experience between many people and be with them in any number of locations or moments in their lives. I don’t know if I have the exact words to categorize what can be expressed with sound; but I do agree it exists on an emotional level of communication.
What is it that you continue to pursue and explore through creating music?I really like analyzing recorded acoustic sounds and trying to recreate them through synthetic models. My hope is to expand these sounds into longer instances or models for subtractive layering like overtones on an organ. I’m very interested in harmonic material taken from unusual sound sources, like packing peanuts falling on the ground or refrigerators releasing coolant.
It seems that sounds generated by programing are almost a mix of the accidental and the intentional. What sort of preferences do you have towards this balance?I swing between wanting chaos and control. I think it is good to start with a lot of material and then make decisions on something more precise. However, one of my ongoing areas of research is dynamics. I desperately want the ability to program a solo voice to emerge over the background and bring contrast to the mix. But this intention unequivocally leads to sounds that are all of a sudden too loud and can seem awkward, but I think it is a joy to then figure out how to respond to them.
I think that beyond creativity and inspiration, academic imagination and mathematical techniques are needed for creation of music in this genre. Have you ever felt difficulties in either bringing these concepts into harmony or fusing them together?Absolutely. I used to be much more interested in the math involved in geometric patterns and translating them to musical functions, like using Lissajous and bell curves to deviate the paths of melodies. But in a way, I think mathematics is inescapable. Even by identifying patterns that I like, there are inherently choices being made based on rationalizing ratios.