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Questions
fr
Sean_Casey@Brown.edu
-- First off, an update: what's been keeping you busy of recent?
1. AMARILLO RAMP (for Robert Smithson). solo guitar, etc. Released by
Starlight Furniture, USA. Jan 1998.
2. CLOUDS–VICTORIAVILLE CONCERT, MAY 1997. CD. Victo, Dec 1997.
Live Victoriaville festival concert also featuring William Hooker, Jim
O’Rourke and Gianni Gebbia.
3. SYR3. Sonic Youth Recordings. March 1998.
4. A THOUSAND LEAVES--new Sonic Youth LP, due May 1998.
other stuff:
Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt. Ring Tarigh Press, 1997.--chapbook
of musical experiences in Morocco, prelude to a larger Moroccan Journal
book.
…Just What Do You Think You’re Doing, Dave? Group show, Williamsburg
Art & Historical Society. June 1997.--art exhibition, i had a sculptural
sound installation.
also gigs--solo, w Hooker, and w SY.
-- On combining poetry and music: a lot of your
side projects combine poetry and sound. I was wondering how you approach
this combination. In a lot of word/sound projects, the combination sounds
arbitrary, as if the sound were just background ambiance for the poet
to tapdance over. For instance, Burrough's work over hip hop beats. Another
example is Kerouac, who cried in the studio b/c he felt that Zoot Sims
and Al Cohn weren't listening to his haiku. What are your thoughts on
these issues, and who do you feel has combined word and sound well?
Well, I think Kerouac did a pretty good job, for one. Mainly because his
voice and words/emotions carry the day. It is a hard combo, but in general
listening to spoken word requires a different attention space than listening
to music. in a sense any musical accompanimnet IS background to the texts.
the Burroughs stuff expecially falls intot his category. he continually
had his voice slapped over all sorts of backing track (including SY...)
I have a spoken word LP--Dirty Windows--set to come out in the next few
months, a sort of recreation of my spoken word gigs with Leah Singer's
films--ony w/o the visuals. so it has lots of talking, but also lots of
music. it's just a sensibility thing, as far as how well the two gel,
and also different listeners hear, and enjoy, very different things in
the spoken word realm... I think both Jim Carroll and Maggie Estep have
done some interesting stuff w music. Patti, certainly. John Hall, and
especially I like Todd Colby, with or w/o music. He's especially good.
-- Given the mutal interest in soundscapes and sound
texture, have you or
SY ever considered collaborating with Brian Eno? Or even having him produce
an album? I bring this up because your East Jesus release has been compared
to Eno's ambient work.
It has?? Cool! I love Eno's whole catalog, and would love the chance to
work w him at some point, I bet we'd get on well in the studio. But no,
we've never been in touch and I fear SY generally shys sway from getting
involved with 'name' producers, or whatever you call them, in the studio.
-- You recently took a trip to visit and play with
the master musicians of
Jojouka. How was your experience playing with them? I know Ornette Coleman
collaborated with them for his Dancing in my Head album. How did your
gtr work mesh with their reeds? Do you have any future plans to record
with them?
The visit to Jajouka was amazing, and I jammed well intot he night with
them. there are plans afoot to release some of this stuff (a small excerpt
is on the CD w the current Cool Beans! zine). Ornette, Brian Jones of
course, Elliot Sharp, many others have played with them. I hope to do
some recordings in the future with Bachir Attar, the leader, and maybe
some of the others.
-- On your role in SY: I'm interested how you view
the gtr interaction
between you and Thurston. In interviews, Thurston mentions how he mostly
plows ahead, sticking basically to the main riff while you play the listen,
think, and respond role. Also, he apologizes for his amateurish gtr playing
and jokes that you're the 'real musican' of the group. Your response to
these 'allegations'?
Well, sometimes his description is accurate. he does sometimes stick to
the 'plow' role, which is fun for me, because my part gets to add all
the shimmer and layered effects over top. but often the gtr playing between
us becomes sort of interchangable, to the extent that within a particular
song we will both be playing a combination of rhythm and lead (although
these trad titles don't really fit), just snaking intuitively in and out
of each others parts. often we'll listen back to a live tape or old record
and find we cannot tell if a part was him or me playing... And now, with
Kim playing mostly gtr, it's all three of us snaking and intertwining.
sometimes kim will be 'lead' and i'll feel i'm playing the 'bass' figure,
then in a flash all three of us will switch places... It's great fun,
as you might imagine...
As to thurston and the 'amateurish gtr playing', i might almost say thie
opposite. i think he is a much more naturally 'good' gtr player than I
am, I work out parts in a much more theoretical, or labored way, whereas
he seems to invent them right off top of his head and they're usually
great.
-- On your releases like East Jesus, you use carefully
arranged loops of sound, while your records with Hooker, like Envisioning,
are more spontaneous and bent on improv. I’ve read in interviews
that you plan on releasing an album of ‘songs’ -- sort of a
Ranaldo version of Kim’s Free Kitten or Thurston’s Psychic Hearts.
Is this record still in the works?
this 'song' record has been something i've been threatening to do for
some time now, but just never found the time to do. i still hope to do
something along this line in the '98 year...
-- Ever since I’ve listened to Thurston’s
Jetsun Dolma piece I’ve been really curious to hear you in that context:
freely improvised guitar without (many) effects or additional tinkering.
In Envisioning, you make good use of effects, but I'm dying to hear you
let loose and channel everything you got into the guitar and out the amp
-- without the effects. Something like those late Coletrane records with
Rashied Ali, you know? Do you have any plans to do any of this type of
free playing?
Well, I do quite a bit of this type of thing live (i'm not sure what yumean
by effects, in regards to either mine or T's records...) and maybe the
CLOUDS record would come close for you. beyond that, Wm Hooker and I are
planning to do studio recordings of the likes similar to our current gig
set in the near future which may be best at satisfying yr demands for
an "INterstellar space"-type drums and gtr action record. We
sure have gone out there pretty far together in recent perfrmances...
--When I listened to Envisioning, I always thought there was some sort
of loop or guitar effects being used in the performance. I'm not really
acquainted with the technology, though, so I may be wrong. Are your performances
recently with Hooker still incorporating poetry, or is it all improvisation
now?
We are still doing a fair amount of spoken word stuff in our performances.
The language stuff interacting with the 'spontaneously composed' performances
(actually we have scematic' structural scores we work from)--it works
really well quite often but some nights it is a struggle to inject the
words into the mix.
I do use a couple different looping devices live when I play, have for
years, so that may be what yr hearing. The looping effects on that record
(as opposed to clouds, which has post-performance (computer) loops as
well) were all done live. There are other gtr 'coloring' devices as well…
--With Washing Machine and SYR 1 and 2, Sonic Youth
seems to be heading in adifferent musical and aesthetic direction than
the three preceeding albums (EJTNS, Dirty, Goo) -- the music is more explorative,
getting into musical spaces, really examining them, and finding a sort
of resolution. This is as opposed to the previous 3 albums, where you
guys would noodle around, but tie things back quicker -- more concise
stuff. Although the recent material sounds much different than Daydream
Nation, the gameplan seems similar: play the theme, go off on it, go off
some more, and resolve it in the ensuing jam. Any thoughts on this? Also,
what has inspired this change, any bands or books particularly influential?
The Dead?
SY is in constant evolution, and pendulum swings of mood or desire lead
both towards and way from song format on the one hand, or extended extrapolations
on the other. we follow our whims, our muses, etc. There are def similarities
to DAYDREAM, sure, especially in the longer formats many of the songs
take. We've gotten very comfortable with what we do of late, and having
our own sonic studio has contributed to this--no more recording against
the clock. This, music, is what we do, and we are relaxed into the process
at this point. So the luck of being able to explore sound-forms at a leisurely
pace works to our mood right now.
Inspiration? A whole host of things, old and new. It's cool to see many
younger artists turning their back on indie-song-form at the moment, diging
into 20th cen works such as Xenakis, P. Schaeffer, P. Henri, Stockhausen,
Cage, Bayle etc, rather than just looking back to rock music fr 20 yrs
ago and recycling that.
--From what I've gathered from articles, the songs
for A Thousand Leaves are songs you've worked on for a while as instrumentals,
and recently put
words to. Since the band has its own studio now, what do you notice as
changes in how the band operates and makes an album? It seems that these
songs, more than any previous album, will have had the opportunity to
evolve and mature.
see above
--LR 3/98 hope this suits yr needs...
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