years later, under entirely different circumstances in my life, and thinking of Kevin, I thought it would be interesting to see what sort of thing I could come up with, following the same sort of process as before, but within such a different framework.
I generally only sample such tiny snippets of sound and combine those to make whole riffs or phrases, it’s not like I have a riff or something I really love and think, hmmmm, I’d like to do something with that. In collage generally I have always been very wary of contained aesthetic.
MS: How did the rapid technological changes of the past 20 years influence the way you now create your musical collages? Similarly, how do you feel your work reflects the changing process of making music?
MS: In the process of creation, things don’t always go the way one might have in mind. Do you embrace the mistakes that inevitably happen as you create a work of art? Do you embrace coincidence and chance?
TS: I used to have an eight-track analogue studio set-up in my home in London, so now the technological changes mean that I could have a living room in my flat rather than a music studio, sample from records straight onto a laptop, and record multi track onto a palm-sized hard drive. Simple and as wonderful as that! But that is about as far as the technological advances have been incorporated into the process. I still hand trigger the samples, allow myself only the most rudimentary pitch control, do not have a battery of effects and processors, and if I make a mistake (which is not a happy one) I rewind and start again from the top. So with all the work I do, although I do take advantage of new technology, I am very mindful that it does not infringe on the overall process. I think on the whole with modern recording that there are far too many choices. There is a tendency for technology to play the artist. It’s killing the raw craft and individualism of music, and that’s plain to hear in much of what’s being produced today. It all sounds processed and not very human, which of course is what music is really all about. It’s losing that visceral power. I don’t really like the way a lot of music being done today sounds so very clean and precise—it’s digital data really. And I have seen people endlessly tweak and tune something to bits in front of a computer screen simply because they can, and they feel they ought. I reckon if it sounds good when you first hear it, it’s good.
TS: Yes absolutely. For the longest time I would never sign any work. That is to say, take entire credit for its creation, as so much of what happens is accidental or at least something I find surprising. However, I’ve always liked the quote attributed to Louis Pasteur. “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I am, though, always quite amazed how such heterogeneous parts in my work come together as a whole, and how, in a music collage for instance, I can be dropping a needle through a stack of records and find just the right sort of sound to go with something else. The “Bluewaltzforyou” piece has over 60 samples taken from pretty much the same number of albums recorded at all sorts of different times and of all sorts of different styles of music in its two minutes and 22 seconds—that’s a lot of coincidence and chance.
MS: How do you start a musical collage? Do you have a particular sound in mind? TS: I usually start with a constructed sound, a handful of sampled musical snippets I play together to form a phrase which somehow captures a feeling that I want to develop and explore, and then from there like any collage, one thing suggests another. I only sample sounds from records I find in junk stores—all long forgotten or at least not at all known to me, and very rarely do I find something which makes it from my collection of sampling records to ones I have in a box by my turntable to listen to. Besides,
144
MS: What do you think of the idea that your musical collages work almost like conversations or interactions between songs and between instruments? TS: I like that idea very much. Music at its very roots is a conversation and if you have ever played in a group you find out pretty quickly that the same rules of verbal discourse between people apply equally to a band playing together. So to that extent I like my music collages to sound as if they were being played by an utterly curious and bizarre assembly of musicians. Actually, I think all art composition is a sort of conversation. MS: Do you find that the sound of an instrument can sometimes say more than words could? Does instrumental work represent more possibilities for interpretation? TS: It’s easy for me to think that way as I have a sort of synesthesia.That I see music as very structural as one might a painting or image, or indeed a sequence of moving images. But I also know the very profound feeling one can get from a chord (and again here I’d say that the feelings in a lot of modern processed music are somewhat contrived, more neurological than spiritual/emotional).