Interview
Q&A: Nick Mulvey
1. What is sound?
Some days I feel like this whole experience is sound. All of existence is sound in different states. I always love the point in the conversation when the physicist and the Sufi mystic start sounding the same- 'sound alone is free from form'. I'm also pretty much in agreement with those who say this whole frickin Universe was born from the orgasmic moans of Shakti and Shiva's cosmic nooky.
2. Tell me about a type of music that you don’t make, but really love and inspires you.
don’t make, but really love and inspires you. The first time I heard a live performance of Gnawa music I was amazed. Insistent, deep and so hypnotic it's got many of the hallmarks that drew me into electronic music but it's an indigenous trance music from North Africa. The players use a metal ancestor of the castanet called the qaraqash, usually about five of these, creating a constantly chattering and repeated pattern so loud and so repetitive it should come with an epilepsy warning. This is anchored by one player on the bass-like gimbri who plays these deep basslines while singing out the melodies in a 'call' that the qaraqash players sing a group response too. It's so good. Such powerful music.
3. When you listen to your own music, what’s the first thing you hear and why?
I'm naturally drawn first to my guitar patterns. Normally the right hand picking parts and usually the thumb plucks within that. They ground everything else. All other elements, my words, melodies, drum parts and synth lines and other instruments, take their position from these picking patterns.
4. What sound haven’t you used in your music that you would love to use /bring to life?
I like the daff frame drum from Iran. In the right hands that thing is amazing.
5. What noise most reminds you of your childhood?
My mums singing around the house I think. She is always humming away and used to sing a lot to my siblings and I when we were kids. She would always sing the word 'cucurucu' as a lullaby to us and I put this in a sing of mine later on.
6. What does your music look like?
Well, to be quite literal here's a graphic score of my righthand picking pattern in my song Nitrous:Every segment of the circle is a pulse in musical time. The outside layer is my thumb and the pulses that I pluck are marked in black whilst the pulses I rest are left unmarked. The middle layer is my index finer and the centre layer is my middle finger. And the same for Cucurucu. In fact, all the artwork for my album (and the singles we released) is very literally the music itself visually expressed.
7. How does your music reflect your personality?
I think this may be one of those questions I'm less able to answer myself but better answered by those who know me well. My feeling is that my music reflects my personality very strongly- in ways I'm aware of and that I choose but also in others ways I'd like to avoid but can't! Fuck knows really...
8. What member of the animal kingdom would make the best music? Why?
Have you heard the noises that seals make underwater to each other? It's unreal. All LFOs and 808 kicks. Naturally and anatomically occurring low frequency oscillators. There is a Werner Herzog film called Encounters At The End Of The World and it has a montage sequence of all these seals making their 'music' underwater and it's actually like the second track from Dark Side of the Moon but just less menacing and more Sea World.