Listening to your work often makes me realize how narrow my own assumptions about what music can be have been. How do you personally define the framework or boundaries of music?I guess I don’t really define it. I just like to make different kinds of work and I think about things more often through a musical lens than through other mediums. Making work in other mediums and towards modes of performance that are not overtly musical really helps inform how the more directly musical work grows.
When beginning a new work, is it sound that emerges first, or perhaps a concept or words? And at this point in time, what would you say is at the core of your creative approach?It’s specific to the project. Sometimes the sounds come first, sometimes the concepts, sometimes the language, sometimes the system. And really, sometimes it is an opportunity that comes from an invitation that gets a new piece started. You can start to imagine the piece within the context of the invitation.
I want to always have an element of real experimentation in what I am doing and this means that sometimes pieces really don’t work out—that there is a certain amount of failure at play. Obviously I prefer when things come together and are a success, but I wouldn’t want to trade safe successes for what can be discovered through experimentation. Where this idea of experimenting has really found its purpose lately is in how I have been working with other musicians. Perhaps more than any specific methodology or medium, this interest in discovering new ways of relating to and communicating with collaborators is really the core of how I am approaching new work.
Please share your recent projects, current interests, and any new sonic or conceptual directions you’re exploring.I am in research and development mode having just finished a few records. It is a nice moment where I can get kind of dreamy and weird in the studio.
This past spring I finished the follow up to The Beat My Head Hit for Shelter Press, it is called Oblivion Seekers. It has been nice to return to working with so much language, to reengage as a vocalist and to get the chance to work with singers Nina Dante, Felicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou—there is something really mesmerizing about performing the vocal style we are using; everything highly synced and rhythmically intricate.
I have also finished a record with Play Time and that group is really at a stage where we are evolving what we do and making lots of new recordings. We are sort of overdue to get that out into the world but for now, it is just really fun to play in front of people and let the music grow up in public. Since we all live close to one another and have space and time to play, we have been able to let things develop in such an easy going and natural manner.
A few years ago when my wife, Katy, and I left New York to move to Shady, NY I wondered about accessing a community to hang with and make music and just relate. It has been really heartening to find such great collaborators up here and it feels to be expanding year by year.