Pascal Gabriel

On May 6, 2021May 6, 2021 By 429harrowroadLeave a comment

When Mute first suggested I start a written project based on the STUMM433 boxset, their suggestion was that I aim to interview everyone who contributed a piece, everyone who worked on the box, everyone who designed an image, current Mute employees, former Mute employees, and those Mute artists that didn’t contribute a version of John Cage’s 4’33”.

I hadn’t perhaps appreciated the audaciousness of the suggestion, which, as I now I reflect on its scale and almost certain impossibility, has a certain Cage-iness about it.

Pascal Gabriel first worked with Mute on some of the early Rhythm King releases and went on to produce albums like Inspiral Carpets‘ Revenge of The Goldfish for the label. Gabriel set up the trio Peach with Lisa Lamb and Paul Statham in the 1990s, releasing their solitary album Audiopeach for Mute in 1997. In 2019, Gabriel adopted the alias Stubbleman and released the celebrated album Mountains And Plains for Crammed Discs, followed by The Blackbird Tapes in 2020.

Gabriel did not perform a version of 4’33” for STUMM433, so he recorded a performance to accompany this interview.

Recorded: June 15 2020, 05:00
Place: Islington, London
Interview: May 28 2020 (4’33” performance notes June 15 2020)

My wife Pippa and I went to the launch event for STUMM433 at Café Oto. The whole audience performed 4’33”. It was a really magical experience.

It created this very special sense of communion with all the people who were there. We were all looking at each other. People were walking outside and cars were driving by and stuff, but the whole of Oto was performing 4’33”. It was just wonderful. I’m so pleased I went, for that reason alone. There was an interesting talk by Simon Fisher Turner, and then Alexander Tucker conducted a performance of 4’33”. We just all stood there. Nobody laughed. It was really amazing to all be together in that moment.

_{Simon Fisher Turner & Robert Barry, Cafe Oto STUMM433 launch, October 27 2019 – photo (c) Zoe Miller}

I’m a big fan of John Cage. I read his book, Silence, and when Pippa and I made the road trip across America that inspired my Stubbleman album Mountains And Plains, we had Cage’s Four2 in our playlist. The thing that people often miss about John Cage is that he was really funny. He was absolutely hilarious. He had a certain way of performing. It wasn’t just 4’33”. It was also things like his performance of Water Walk (Water Music No. 2) on the American game show I’ve Got A Secret in 1960. That was fucking brilliant. He had great theories, but he was also really funny. He was a Buddhist, and I think that partly explains a lot of what he did in his music.

With 4’33”, it’s about really listening to your environment and nothing else. It’s about really paying attention, and it’s lovely because of that. The withdrawal of sound and distraction suddenly makes you aware of every detail in the environment around you.

Where do you go when you want silence?

I don’t think silence really exists, but the closest thing I can think of would be when I’m on my bike.

I’m really passionate about cycling in France or when I go outside of London. You hear the birds and the wind. It’s very meditative, but it’s not silence.

Notes on 4’33” performance

DocumentaryEvidence · 4’33” (15 June 2020, 05:00)

My performance of 4’33” was recorded at our home in London, in the same upstairs room where I recorded the sounds of birds for The Blackbird Tapes. I was originally going to perform the piece with a theremin, but in the end I used the very rare and super cute Electro Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer, which was made in New York in the mid-70s as it looked and sounded better. The synth is the only on EH have ever made. It’s basic but quite unique sounding. Its most famous sound imprint is the bassline on ‘Sexy Boy’ by Air!

The recording was done on Monday 15th June 2020, around 5 am.

Interview: Mat Smith

41. Gareth Jones

On September 17, 2020September 17, 2020 By 429harrowroadLeave a comment

_{Gareth Jones on a mountain above Lech by Daniel Miller, February 2009}

Recorded: September 10 2018, 12:08
Place: The Eskal, Ouessant
Interview: February 5 2020, The Strongroom, Shoreditch, London

I’ve been to quite a few performances of 4’33” over the years. It’s profound. It’s a very adventurous, and clever, and thoughtful piece because you hear the rest of the world when the musicians aren’t playing.

I was working with Yann Tiersen in the studio, and Yann got asked by Mute to do a version. This was at his studio in Ouessant, in Brittany, and Yann invited with me to collaborate on it, and I agreed. It was mostly a bit of helpful encouragement to carve some time out of our schedule to do it, because it’s always difficult: everyone’s busy. It was as simple as that really. Yann invited me to collaborate with him and I was delighted to accept.

I’d never performed it before, but I’ve attended performances for piano, and I’ve also attended a performance for a full orchestra. I remember the experience being somehow magnified because of it being a full orchestra.

4’33” is a step into deep listening and also meditation. There’s no sound coming out of the instrument, so it’s a very Zen experience. And, of course there’s lots of sound in the room, even in the average concert hall. A very professional recording studio might have almost no noise in it, but if you perform it in the living room with the window open, it’s absolutely not silent. And that’s obviously part of Mr. Cage’s message. It’s part of the door of perception that Mr. Cage opened with this piece. It’s saying, ‘Listen.’

Yann and I did 4’33” top to bottom without the three movements in the score. The three movements thing is quite good because it gives you the opportunity to page turn. I always imagine the classic version being at the piano: you’re sitting there, you open the lid, and you turn the pages for the movements. It’s Dada, in a way. It’s semi-ludicrous, but it’s not. It’s trivial but deeply profound at the same time.

Where do you go when you want silence?

My wife and I moved out of our Central London flat many years ago. My wife was talking to her meditation teacher and she said, ‘I’m finding it really difficult to meditate in the flat – it’s so noisy.’ Her meditation teacher said, ‘Move’ – very simply, just like that. So we moved to Hampstead, which is a lot quieter.

One of the most important things for us in our day-to-day living was having a quiet bedroom. We chose our house in Hampstead precisely because the bedroom was at the back, off the street, and very quiet. We’re very lucky. There are a few trees and what was a communal garden at the back, and the street is quite quiet. That’s really important to me.

I also like walking in the country on my own. Of course, it’s no more silent than 4’33” is, but I’m not talking, the phones aren’t on, and if it’s reasonably remote, there’s no one else around. The silence that nature offers up to us is really great. I often call it a walking meditation if I’m in the hills or mountains on my own.

There’s a wonderful book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In that book a truth is highlighted about meditation, which is that it’s simply the practice that counts. There’s no result, in so far as it’s not something you achieve – it’s just something you practice. Everything else just emerges from that. All it’s saying is, ‘Just do it!’ Don’t worry about it. Don’t overthink it. It doesn’t matter – even if you only have a moment of stillness, that’s awesome. And if it doesn’t, it still doesn’t matter: it’s still practice. And I think that’s what I’ve got from that book. It’s one of those books that won’t go to Oxfam. I can’t keep all of my books, but Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind will stay in my life.

Gareth Jones will release his debut solo album, ElectroGenetic, through Calm + Collect on September 18 2020. https://ffm.to/electrogenetic

Interview: Mat Smith

51: Lee Ranaldo

On June 15, 2020June 15, 2020 By 429harrowroadLeave a comment

LEE RANALDO by A.F. CORTES — Lee Ranaldo photograph (c) A F Cortes

Recorded: November 2 2018
Place: Midtown, New York – Walking Performance
Interview: January 29 2020, Lucky Strike, New York City

Everybody calls 4’33” the ‘silent piece’, but obviously that’s not what it’s about. Cage famously said that music to him was like opening the window and just listening to the sounds coming in. 4’33” was radical when it happened. Nobody understood it. But he was trying to say that whatever sounds you hear can be music. And in a way his music went further and further toward that aspect. You’d go to these concerts where somebody would be scratching a feather on a rock or something like that.

In 1999, Sonic Youth made a record called Goodbye 20th Century and we recorded two Cage pieces for that – Six from 1991 and Four6 from 1992. We got deeper and deeper into Cage’s music at that point, but even by then I knew that 4’33” piece was about environmental listening, so I wanted to use the environment of New York City in my performance. I went back and did so much research on the composition and the score before I went out and did it. I wanted to make sure that I was faithful to the score, with its three specific movements lasting certain amounts of time, because the score is all there is in a piece like that. If you’re not following the score, you’re making it up, in a way.

Sonic Youth – Goodbye 20th Century (SYR, 1999)

I recorded my performance in the rain, in Midtown Manhattan on a good little handheld tape recorder. I knew I wanted to use Midtown Manhattan traffic sounds. It just so happened that we were in Midtown one evening, and there was a lot of interesting sound around me.

—

I met Cage a couple of times. It was a big thrill. He was always around in New York in the early period of Sonic Youth. We’d see him at concerts all the time – dance concerts, or Merce Cunningham events or things like that. He lived in the East Village with Merce, and so he was readily accessible at that time, even though he was this towering figure. I remember when I first moved to New York, I’d occasionally be at a concert, and Cage would be in the audience, and that would be so amazing that this guy with this big grey beard was sat right behind me. To me that was unbelievable.

He was a very jovial, playful person. I love people like that where life is a big laugh to them, and yet they’re super significant and doing all this heavy work. That’s kind of amazing to me.

In my early days in New York, I played with Glenn Branca. There was a famous incident at this festival called New Music America. In ’82, it was in Chicago, and Cage was the festival’s emeritus that year – he performed and presented his work, and he was like a figurehead for the whole thing. Glenn’s ensemble played, which at this point was an orchestra, and Thurston Moore and I were part of it.

Chicago 82 – A Dip In The Lake (Les Disques Du Crepuscule, 1983). The cassette features an extract from Branca’s ‘Symphony No. 2’ with Ranaldo, and ‘So That Each Person Is In Charge Of Himself’, the interview with John Cage where he refers to Branca’s style as akin to fascism.

Cage hated Glenn’s performance. He called it narcissistic, because Glenn was at the front of an ensemble directing. This was everything Cage did not want out of music – the idea of the composer as Godhead. The next day, Cage gave this interview where he called Glenn’s music fascistic and it created this whole crazy contretemps about the festival, with Glenn having to answer all these questions and getting into this fight with Cage which lasted years. It was really crazy. At the time, and at that point in his life, John could not countenance music that was that specifically composed, where the composer was asking players to play under their will. Glenn was a wilful composer, like Toscanini or someone like that. So that was a really interesting moment.

LEE RANALDO by alex rademakers 001 — Lee Ranaldo photograph (c) Alex Rademakers

Where do you go when you want silence?

I think we all need silence once in a while. For someone like me who plays a lot of very loud, raucous music, the idea of silence is very important.

The times when I experience silence the most are right before falling asleep and right after waking up. My most silent experiences happen in my bed, at the end of the day and at the beginning of the day.

I’ve had a couple of experiences in anechoic chambers. I was at the one at IRCAM in France a couple of different times, and you realise that even in the most silent environment possible, it’s not really silent. You’re either hearing your blood rushing through your ears, or your stomach gurgling. Maybe when you’re a young person, up to the age of 20 perhaps, you can really experience absolute silence, but I don’t think with older ears that it’s really possible.

In an anechoic chamber, you can literally hear the blood rushing through your ears. You hear all these different pitches. I remember hearing quite a low rumble and some quite high-pitched sounds, but I distinctly remember feeling like I could hear the blood rushing through the little capillaries in my ears for some reason. That’s how it appeared to me. It was almost like the whooshing sound when you put a seashell up to your ears.

I went into the anechoic chamber at IRCAM in Paris with a French artist. He wanted to record me in there while I was thinking about playing the guitar. It was a high concept. I remember we were recording and I could hear my stomach gurgling. It sounded so crazy loud. I was the only one in the room, but there were microphones everywhere and I guess it wasn’t just me hearing it. It was really loud! It was completely silent and then, every once in a while, we’d hear something going on in my stomach.

So the most silent moments for me, like I said, are when I’m in bed at night. We live in New York. It’s a noisy city so there’s always fucking noise outside the windows coming in, but every once in a while it is silent, and at the end of the day when your neighbour upstairs isn’t dancing on your ceiling or whatever the fuck it is, there are moments of silence. They’re rare and they’re very important.

I have meditated. If you’re doing zen meditation like John did, you’re not supposed to follow your thoughts. You’re just supposed to go, “Oh that girl looks pretty and I wonder what she’s doing tonight?” and then you’re supposed to bring it back to your breath. It’s super hard to do.

When I was in college, I studied with a guy that was a Buddhist and a philosopher. He was a philosophy teacher at the school but he’d give these extra classes at his house in the woods, and he taught us how to meditate. You’d start with a minute or two and then you’d build up to half an hour or forty-five minutes, and I learned how to do it, but it’s really hard to clear your mind. My mind is always racing from one thing to another. I return to it every once in a while, and I think it’s an amazing thing to try and do, but it’s very, very hard.

I’m a cyclist, so I’m out on my bike a lot. I cycle along the Hudson River where there’s a path completely clear of cars. You can go ten miles in each direction and it’s relatively calm. I always talk about my cycling as meditation because if I’m not riding with someone else, it’s just me. I mean, sometimes I’m thinking about stuff – song lyrics I’m working on or whatever – but sometimes your mind shuts off and you’re just making sure you stay on the road. In way that’s my meditation these days.

Interview: Mat Smith

Alessandro Cortini

On April 8, 2020June 15, 2020 By 429harrowroadLeave a comment

When Mute first suggested I start a written project based on the STUMM433 boxset, their suggestion was that I aim to interview everyone who contributed a piece, everyone who worked on the box, everyone who designed an image, current Mute employees, former Mute employees, and those Mute artists that didn’t contribute a version of John Cage’s 4’33”.

I hadn’t perhaps appreciated the audaciousness of the suggestion, which, as I now I reflect on its scale and almost certain impossibility, has a certain Cage-iness about it.

Alessandro Cortini released his first album for Mute, Volume Massimo, in 2019, long after STUMM433 had been completed, but, as the next artist to join the label after K Á R Y Y N, if he’d recorded a version, it could have been track number 59 on the album.

Recorded: n/a
Place: n/a
Interview: September 18 2019

I’m familiar with 4’33”, but I never really thought of it as a piece in itself. I always saw it as more of an exercise.

I love the philosophy behind it because it’s so open-ended. And while I think it’s very interesting to see everyone’s take on something like that, I haven’t spent too much time thinking what I would do if I performed it. It would probably require some research and some thinking about how the set of instructions would influence me, in a way where I feel like I’m following them, but at the same time where I’m not enslaved to them.

What I like is that it definitely puts the player in a situation of over-sensitive listening, almost an amplified listening to what you do. It’s somewhat unnatural when it comes to performing, and so I think, once you’ve encountered the piece, it brings out an approach to playing that’s unlike any other. It makes musicians realise the importance of silence and also how their instruments, when not played in a conventional way, could be part of that silence in one way or another.

Where do you go when you want silence?

I think that the silence that I look for, and that I struggle to find at times, is more of an internal silence.

It’s a silence that, to a certain extent, is independent from audio silence. It’s almost a mindstate that is actually sometimes aided by having a certain amount of sound to accompany you on that journey.

Sonic silence is interesting but it’s almost a by-product, in a way. What I’m looking for is my own internal silence where I can listen to myself and what I actually have to say – it’s a place where I can feel at ease with who I am, and feel excited about being on this planet and having a life to live, and finding a way to live it in a productive way.

Meditation is very helpful to me. It’s funny because the more I know it’s good for me, the less I do it. There’s almost a part of me that is fighting it. It’s kinda crazy when you think about it, because you almost have part of the solution in front of you, but you ignore it because you know that it’s going to change you. This is all subconscious – I don’t think about it, and that’s why I force myself to meditate twice a day, but it’s good. I love meditating. I’ve started it. It came from an audiobook by David Lynch called Catching The Big Fish, and that’s how I got into it.

The way that Lynch relates meditation to creativity really sparked an interest in me, and then I took a course in transcendental meditation. I think any kind of meditation that works for someone is the right kind of meditation, but for me, that’s what pulled me in, and that’s what I practice. And that, along with suggestions from Steve Vai, reading Eckhart Tolle books – those were very revelatory about the now, and and how past and future are just fabrications of our mind: they don’t exist. They’re just a way to worry about things that are not important, not in an irresponsible way, but everything is about what you’re doing right now and how you’re feeling right now. The past you can’t do anything about, and it shouldn’t be influencing your present in a negative way, and the future you’ll never know. The best way to manufacture your future is by living in the now. And to me silence is that. Silence is the ability of just living in the now, in a way, not having everyday life or your own emotional baggage to get in the way of every single step of your day.

Going to a specific place to get silence is beautiful. I love that, but what is silence doing to you if you, in the end reach a place of sonic silence but inside of you there’s a constant set of voices telling you to to fuck off? Silence, and what it might do to me, is a very personal thing. All that going to a particular place to find sonic silence might do to me is make it even more obvious to me that it’s an issue.

Interview: Mat Smith

55: Josh Hager (ShadowParty)

On February 6, 2020February 8, 2020 By 429harrowroad1 Comment

Recorded: September 8 2018, 1230
Place: Portmeirion Town Hall, Festival No. 6
Interview: November 8 2019

I think 4’33” is really interesting. It’s a great concept. It’s very Dada, very Duchamp. It could be interpreted as really deep or really pretentious. It depends on how you look at it. And that’s the beauty of it – the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or the listener.

Mute approached ShadowParty to perform a version of it and we did it very quickly. We were playing the No. Six Festival in Portmeirion, North Wales. And they said, ‘Oh by the way we’re doing this 4’33” thing,’ so we recorded it there. We were onboard, but at first it was like, ‘Ah jeez, this is pretentious.’ We were like, ‘Well, we’d rather have you release our next single…’ But Daniel Miller and those guys, they’re having fun with it, I think. I think it’s maybe not to be taken too seriously.

Nick McCabe wasn’t there when we recorded it, Jeff Friedl also wasn’t there and Denise Johnson was out with ACR at that time. We were very fidgety while we were performing it. We did it during soundcheck so we were like, ‘Oh we’ve got to get this over with. We’re short on time for soundcheck.’ It was one of those where we had the whole string section and Joe Duddell up on stage, and everybody was just kind of standing there trying not to fidget, you know. We couldn’t keep ourselves from giggling. That was the hardest part.

There’s someone coughing on our version. That was somebody who came in early and was sat in the audience. It might have been a friend of the manager or somebody. I can’t remember if they let him know what we were doing or not.

Doing nothing for four and a half minutes isn’t a long time if you’re used to meditating, or anything like that. I did a lot of teaching martial arts and stuff like that in the past, so for me patience is a virtue.

I work on ambient music with a guy in New Hampshire called Scott Dakota. We do a lot of brainwave entrainment ambient music, which involves a lot of mathematics. It’s a program that’s a model of the golden ratio, where you can pipe in mathematics to calculate, say, rhythm, melody, combinations that make certain timbres, length, and silence. They’re also binaural, that is they’re offset left ear to right ear so they trick your cerebral cortex a little, vibrating at, say, theta. So it induces trance states, just from putting the headphones on or listening to it. The pieces are usually forty, sometime one hundred and twenty minutes long, so for me four and a half minutes – I’m like, that’s the single edit.

I love experiments. I mean, Devo’s very much into the Dadaist movement. We just did a show out in California a couple of weeks ago where we needed the sun to go down so that our screens would work. So while the sun was setting they decided to show a half-hour mockumentary on the music business, and everybody was just freaking out, pissed off, like ‘What are they doing?’ And Jerry’s just sitting there laughing, ‘It’s so Dada.’ He’s like, ‘The beards are the new squares, man, and they’re getting all pissed off – that’s so weird.’

Where do you go when you want silence?

I would say in my car. Driving, you know. I mean, it’s not complete silence, but it’s close. I listen to a lot of ambient music while I’m driving, but not the stuff I make with Scott. You probably shouldn’t listen to that in that car. I listen to Brian Eno instead.

Music and silence can really change your whole perception of where you are, and your mood. I mean, you put on King Tubby and it’s a totally different vibe to listening to Joy Division. That changes the whole atmosphere.

It’s a funny story. I used to have this loft in Downtown LA, and I had just moved there and it was completely empty, with a bright blue floor, white ceiling, white walls and everything. I set up this little patch of fake grass, a tent and a fake log fire, and I had this one record called The Magic Of Psychoacoustic Sound, and on one side it was a field, an English meadow, and on the flip side were crickets. So during the day I would have it on the English meadow side – you know, with birds and things like that – and then at night I’d flip it over. I did that until I could afford furniture. I still put it on all the time. I always thought of those sorts of records as the music of the future, where the ego, the big rock star egos and guitar solos are kind of gone, and it’s more about the communal sound or mood.

One of the entrainment experiments Scott and I do is concerned with repetition as a form of change. We’ll do something that has, say, a drone that’s tuned to a pitch that probably isn’t a Western pitch. We’ll have that drone just roll over and over, and what happens over time is that it’s so boring that your brain finds ways to make it interesting. And it’ll start changing, and that’s why these pieces are so long – your brain is part of the thing that’s making the music, the way it’s interpreting the redundancy of it.

There’s a book I have called The Hidden Messages In Water by a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto. He would project what are called cymatics, which is where you take a steel plate and you put salt on it, and you pump frequency through it – just pure frequency – and it’ll make these mandalas, these different shapes for different frequencies. Sound does that with water and of course you’re made up of 90% water, so the way that sound affects you on a molecular level can be healing, but it can also be used for sonic weapons like Americans do with crowd control.

The Hidden Messages In Water ties into ShadowParty, actually. There’s a song on the record called ‘The Valley’, that was the first song that Tom Chapman and I ever did, and in the middle you hear Tom talking. He went, ‘What do I say?’ and I go, ‘Here,’ and he just picked up that book, and he reads the title of it on the track. I only just remembered that.

Interview: Mat Smith

Thanks to Tyson.

23: Moby

On December 20, 2019December 20, 2019 By 429harrowroadLeave a comment

Recorded: September 2018
Place: Los Angeles
Interview: November 14 2019

How did you approach your performance of 4’33”?

In a way I wanted to go in the opposite direction from the original 4’33”. Rather than create silence I created as many notes as possible. And I made it in my studio in LA. It was just me and a bunch of instruments.

Had you ever thought about performing 4’33” before?

No, this was ‘written’ for the Mute project.

Did you know much about Cage?

I mainly knew of him as a mycologist, which I thought was interesting, as I’d never heard of a public figure mycologist before…

I know that you’re into meditation, as was Cage through his interest in Zen. How important is meditation to you in your life?

Meditation can be almost anything, from calm repose to focus. I guess, broadly speaking, meditation is putting your attention somewhere it might not otherwise go.

Eating a nice orange and really paying attention to it is a powerful form of meditation, for example.

Where do you go when you want silence?

Either my house or the mountains. My house has really good sound insulation, and the mountains are the mountains.

Interview: Mat Smith
Thanks to SC.

39 & 48: James Chapman (Maps & onDeadWaves)

On November 12, 2019 By 429harrowroad1 Comment

Maps (Milton Keynes Gallery, June 1 2019)

Maps version recorded: August 18 2018
Place: Maps HQ, Finedon, Northamptonshire
onDeadWaves version recorded: August 16 2018
Place: ODW car, Beacon Hill lay-by, Herne Bay
Interview: Maps HQ, April 8 2019

I was really honoured to be a part of it. I just thought it was such a cool idea. I recorded one version as Maps and then Polly Scattergood and I did one as onDeadWaves as well.

I recorded mine upstairs in my studio. I set up all my mics and then just sat there. It sounds weird but you do hear sounds that you just wouldn’t normally notice. And I guess, in a way, it made me think I should probably just sit and listen like that a bit more. I always feel like I should be doing something.

It was an interesting experience to just sit there for that amount of time. When you say, “four minutes and thirty-three seconds”, it doesn’t sound like a long time, but you don’t normally just sit for that long in silence. It’s a kind of meditation in a way. It’s a bit like if you do visualisations. It’s like the last thing I would want to do, but when I have done it, it’s really powerful. I love that.

On my version there’s a sort of clicking sound, which is the breeze coming through the blinds in the studio. At times it sounds like water, but it wasn’t raining that day. I mean, there’s all sorts of noises in my house. I heard things that I’ve never heard here before. I think the longer you sit in silence, the louder and louder those sounds become. It’s like the ticking of a clock that you might never notice but which seems to become really loud when you focus on it.

It’s interesting to listen to what people think they hear in these pieces. You’re creating a visual picture of where you think they were when they recorded it, and that could just be complete nonsense.

For the onDeadWaves version, I drove down to Herne Bay where Polly lives. We attempted to do it on the first day, but all of a sudden there was a massive thunderstorm. The idea was to go to the beach and record it there. We thought it would be lovely and that the sun would be shining, but the day we did it we literally couldn’t get out of the car because the wind and the rain was so bad.

So we waited and waited. Eventually we found a kind of lay-by and just sat in the car there. You can hear the odd car going by and seagulls and things like that because we were by the coast.

I tried to follow the instructions for the piece as best I could. For the Maps version, I held my guitar, which was was plugged in. Occasionally you can hear a little pinging sound from me holding that. Basically, I set everything up as if I was going to play something, and then just sat there. I guess it’s counterintuitive to what you’re used to doing but I think that’s part of it: you’re just sitting, maybe in a place you’re not comfortable with, and getting a different perspective on things. I could hear the hard-drive on my desk really clearly, which I don’t normally notice – it seemed so loud that day. I thought that was the only thing people were going to hear.

For onDeadWaves, Polly brought her Stylophone and I had a little dulcimer. I played the dulcimer on the new Maps album, Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss. There’s quite a bit of dulcimer on the track ‘You Exist In Everything’.

Where do you go when you want silence?

Sometimes, even though my house itself is usually silent, my head can not be, so I go out for a walk. There’s lots of nice places quite close to me, and you can even get to fields if you try. I love going out for country walks. That’s the kind of silence I like.

I always used to be attached to my iPod – like properly attached. I literally couldn’t leave my house without headphones on, but nowadays I like leaving my music at home when I go out for a walk. I’m listening to music all day. I think sometimes you’ve got to tune out for a bit.

Interview & bad concert photography: Mat Smith

Related:

Clash interview: Maps (2019)

STUMM433 Blog

Tag: 4’33”

Pascal Gabriel

41. Gareth Jones

51: Lee Ranaldo

Alessandro Cortini

55: Josh Hager (ShadowParty)

23: Moby

39 & 48: James Chapman (Maps & onDeadWaves)

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