Bad Jacket had a chance to sit down with local musician and visual artist Alex Cunningham to unravel the mysteries of art and music. Alex performs music in no less than three guises (solo violin, guitar in Hardbody, and violin in Vernacular String Trio) with releases on the Personal Archive label. You can catch Hardbody at the Schlafly Tap room on October 21st.
Ben: You’ve recently released an album entitled Ache on the Personal Archives label based out of Dubuque, Iowa. I was listening to it early today and it’s really great. There’s a whole lot of different types of sounds in it. I don’t know what I was expecting because I had heard some of your music that you had put out before on Soundcloud, some solo violin pieces, but Ache has some really loud and distorted violin, some quiet stuff, some weird chirping sounds. How was the recording process for that? Did you do it all in one take? Alex: Yeah, it was all done in one take. It’s kind of different than other stuff I’ve done recordingwise. All of my other solo stuff is acoustic violin improvisations and this was partially composed and I fed my electric violin through a bunch of effects. It was recorded out at Bird Cloud Recording in Edwardsville where I did my first release two years ago, a tape called Kinesthetics that was all acoustic. It was recorded with Ryan Wasoba who recorded the first one as well. I work-shopped the piece live for about two months before I recorded it. It’s split into different, partially-composed sections and within each section I can play as long as I want, keeping within what structures I had in mind sound-wise. So it allows me to create subsections on the fly within pre-planned sections. I played it live two times the week before the recording date. It’s a lot louder than anything I’ve ever done. B: It’s definitely something that you can live inside. It feels big and there’s a lot of things going on. It feels like a headspace. Alex: I’ve always thought my solo violin noise sets had, I wouldn’t call it a limited range, but I’ve always wanted more low-end. It’s something you don’t associate with the instrument, which is why I wanted it. On this recording I did some stuff where I have ridiculous low-end. I pitch shift two octaves down in some sections so there’s really crazy bass going on. B: That’s awesome. Were you going for like the sphincter-loosening stuff? Alex. Precisely. B: Now improvisation is a big aspect of the music you make and the territory that comes with that is like one-take, playing in the moment, playing off your gut. What do you think the benefits are for doing something in one take? What appeal to you see in improvisation? A: Well, 1) if you’re playing improvised music you do things in one take anyways because that’s the nature of the music (plus trying to recreate something you arrived at through improvisation is going to be weird every time) and 2) it can be a great (and for the same reasons terrifying) medium if you’re broke. It’s just a lot better for recording. I interviewed this guitarist Toshi Dorji, from North Carolina, and I had a similar question, “How do you pick what improvisations you put on an album?” and he said essentially “I have this amount of time and I have this amount of money and I pick what I like from what I was able to record in the window I had.” It’s basically that. There’s not like some thought-out universal recording prep for people that like improvising. They feel like they get their optimum creative performance out of improvising. That’s their medium. B. I don’t know if you know the rapper Milo. There’s a great quote where he says “matters of process become matters of place” You don’t sit there and go like “Oh, Ideally I would do this to get the most out of my recording” but it’s more particular to the place and how many resources you have. A: Yeah, totally. It’s not like a really great watercolor painter is doing that as some calculated cost/ benefit strategy over another medium. That’s just the method that feels right and gives them their favorite results. B: I also think it’s interesting you said often the process relates to how money you have. Technology influences music as lot as well. The pop song is 3 min because that’s how much they could fit on wax at the time. And from your perspective as an experimental musician, you’re creating your own context for you music. Do you think with experimental or improvisational music you need some sort of prior knowledge to get into it or do you think that it’s just as accessible as a pop song? A: I don’t think you really need any prior knowledge to get into experimental music, though of course understanding context and history adds to your enjoyment. A lot of the people I know that are really into experimental music or play noise or something were punks as teenagers and I think they came to this music from listening to those things: heavier music, punk outlooks. I don’t think there’s a point of entry that you need. But obviously you’ll be into more things over time and I think that the more and more sounds you expose yourself too, your ears adapt in terms of what they can take in and even what you think qualify as music. The more types of music you listen to the more connections you can see and the more appreciation you have for different types of sounds. You start to discover people who like to combine genres and produce new stuff that falls in between those genres. We have a catch all phrase for stuff that doesn’t fall in any category. “Experimental” is a term that refers to a billion different micro-genres B: IT’s something that exists for easy classification.
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