#moving through time

[gifcomcheirinho]

lord, what's become of us?...

[sinceileftyoublog]

Julia Kent Interview: Moving Through Time

BY JORDAN MAINZER

You wouldn’t know it from listening to it, but cellist Julia Kent’s latest album Temporal was originally written for a dance and theater production that never came to pass. “Their concept was a little it like life moving through time,” Kent told me over the phone earlier this month. Perhaps the concept was so broad that the production would have been too abstract, but it was a benefit for Kent, as she was able to make the music fully her own. Adding in sampled and processed-to-hell vocals from a different theater performance as further texture allowed Kent to create something unique within her discography. “I never have voice in my music, and it’s such a thing that people relate to,” she said. “I thought it would be an interesting way of incorporating voice into music that’s instrumental.”

The multi-talented Kent makes music for a variety of mediums: film (both documentary and feature), dance, and theater. But it’s the core of her work that makes her albums so good: cello and software. Using Pro Tools to record and Ableton Live for live looping, Kent is able to conjure textural and subsequent emotional depth. Temporal is her best work yet, and she’ll be playing some tracks from it as part of a record release show next Thursday, March 7th, at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. (Violinist Christopher Tignor opens; Kent is playing in France a couple days before, Hudson, NY the following day, and Prague next month.) Read our interview, edited for length and clarity, below.

Since I Left You: How was Temporal recorded? Was it your usual recording process?

Julia Kent: It wasn’t, because a lot of these pieces I did write to accompany dance and theater. Not all of them, but certainly the majority of the record. I made them with that in mind and with those concepts in mind. So I had them pretty much written, and I went through the recording process to turn them into a record.

SILY: To what extent did the songs change over time?

JK: They changed a lot. Live, I do live looping. I don’t love how that sounds when it’s recorded, so I record everything into Pro Tools and try to replicate the process of looping. Inevitably, things change a lot in the process of recording.

SILY: Is there a prevailing mood of Temporal?

JK: I think not. I always feel like I’m a little bit sad--as one is. But I feel like it was a little more abstract and a little less personal than my previous records because the genesis was this external thing.

SILY: I love “Imbalance” and the extent to which it’s almost like a dance track. Is that what you were going for with that? Is it the most propulsive music you’ve ever made?

JK: I think it pretty much is in terms of the rhythm of it. Obviously, I never go too far in terms of the beats and stuff. I use it again as a texture. But yeah, for sure, that one feels like it’s most propulsive and...what’s another adjective for it? I can’t think of anything.

SILY: That’s my job.

JK: Ok! Excellent! Thank you.

SILY: You open the record with “Last Hour Story”, a 12-minute track that goes in a lot of different directions. Was there a desire to lay out your sonic palate for the rest of the record with that first song?

JK: That piece does go in a lot of different directions. I think of it as a tripartite piece. It’s three separate sections all of which are anchored by this metronome that goes all the way through but varies. I was interested in seeing how much variation I could create while still having this unchanging thing underneath.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?

JK: It’s because of the concept of time. I was thinking about a bunch of different titles, and nothing else worked. I think the simplicity of this works.

SILY: It carries a couple different meanings. There’s the time one, but also the concrete, almost non-spiritual aspect of the word.

JK: For sure. That definitely inflects the concept of it.

SILY: What about the album art?

JK: I really had this idea that I wanted artwork that conveyed the energy of dance in a really abstract way. I wanted to go through photos of dancers. I went on an internet search for those. I found [Tan Ngiap] Heng’s work, which is so beautiful. We were really lucky he was happy for us to use his photo.

SILY: Are you playing all of the album live?

JK: Not all of it. The first track is really long. I played it live about a year ago, and to be honest, I’m kind of moving on into new directions. Live, I do a mixture of pieces of this record, the penultimate one, and maybe even some newer things. I feel like a 12-minute track is a lot to ask people to sit through.

SILY: It depends. Maybe if they’re expecting a track-by-track performance, but people will sit through continuous hour-long pieces.

JK: That’s true. The work I’m doing now, I’m definitely diving into something much longer and more unbroken. I’m still kind of figuring it out.

SILY: Have you been writing a lot of new material?

JK: Writing, not so much. I’ve been playing a lot with textures and different kinds of sounds. Just trying to figure out a sound world.

SILY: Are you doing any more film scoring?

JK: I am! I’m actually working on a film right as we speak, which is a really beautiful Swedish documentary. I’ve been doing a lot of little bits and pieces in that realm.

SILY: What are some similarities and differences in your approach when it comes to scoring films, writing for theater, and making music on your own?

JK: In the case of film, you’re writing to music to accompany an image or the emotional world of the film. It’s a totally different thing than making my own music. That being said, a lot of the time when people come to me for film music they come to me because they’ve heard the music that I do and they want something along those lines. Also, making music for a documentary is really different than making music for a feature. It doesn’t serve a different purpose, but music for a feature is so intertwined with whatever’s happening emotionally on screen.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, reading, or watching lately that’s caught your attention?

JK: You know, I have not been listening to a ton of music recently. I did just listen to my friend Barbara Morgenstern’s new record, which is gorgeous. I listen to a lot of music, but not a lot of it stays with me. Everything’s so friction-less now with streaming. I don’t want to get into that whole thing--that’s pretty much how I listen to music now--but it’s a different way of listening. It just all streams by you. Like a river.

SILY: I’m not a huge streamer. I prefer some sort of ownership, even if it’s just MP3′s.

JK: Thank God people still own music. Without that, I don’t know what would happen. For me, it’s more like because I travel so much, I just feel like I have so many physical objects, I’m trying to eliminate that a little bit from my life, and that’s an easy way to do it. But I super miss owning the physical object that is a CD, or vinyl, or cassette.

Live dates:

Mar 05 Les Bains Douches Montbeliard, France

Mar 07 National Sawdust Brooklyn, NY

Mar 08 Hudson Hall Hudson, NY

Apr 11 Palac Akropolis Prague, Czech Republic

[friedrichhabetlermusic]

Moving Through Time by Friedrich Habetler

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[dollydharma]

[chasing-the-sterek]

It's funny how if you're going to the future you're going forwards in time but if an event is moved forwards it's moved backwards in time to an earlier date

[portamiunasediaevattene]

[entrancetotrainsband]

Closed our set at The Monkey House last week by playing one of our older songs (Moving Through Time) with the one and only Joseph Keris, thanks Joe. Check it out right here! Big thanks to all the folks who made it out, and thanks to Jared Kenyon Music and Evening Edition for coming out to open the show! It was a super kewl time.

[humanculi]

"Moving Through Time" by Angelo Badalamenti.