FRAGMENTS OF A CONVERSATION
Below are some excerpts from an interview I had with Trevor Brubaker for the first issue of Eyestrain zine, featuring interviews with Mazurka Editions, Pleasure Island and Hheva, along with nearly 30 reviews and collages throughout by Luke Tandy. You can get a copy from http://m-i-n-d-w-o-u-n-d.tumblr.com/ You keep a highly engaging and detailed blog. Film, writing and music is regularly listed. Are these artistic works that bear a relevance to your music, or more so to yourself? Electroacoustic composers, such a Marchetti and Lucier amongst many others, are mentioned there. Do you consider your soundwork to be of a similar framework? I don't wish to know pigeonholing or genre details of course, but rather, do you find yourself queuing into the footwork of other performers? Or is your work of its own independent mold? Some works credited on my blog have had an influence on me, others are things I simply enjoyed in the flow of what I watch or listen to. Wether influential or not, I think they all tell something about what I'm after. It reveals or at least suggests the context in which creation happens. Besides that, I have the feeling that the wider my exploration of other practices is, the more precise and accurate my own way of doing it will be. It may not be a rule of thumb, of course, but I find it interesting to recognize that whatever I do, my concerns are never only my concerns. They're part of a collective experience. Many individuals have probably been searching in the same direction, or the same thing in another direction, in the past or in the present. I like the idea that embracing the specificity of your practice implies the exploration of it as a collective endeavour. You also seem to read from a large framework of topics; zen, psychedelics, Butoh, self-help, actionism. Again, do these sort of things bear a striking influence on your music or collaborative works? These topics affect my life both as an artist and as a human being. I don't make much distinction between both, by the way. In my mind creation is beyond the realm of artistic expression. You can sit in an artful way and make art in a dull way. I once met a guy in a bar, who claimed he had spent a long time in mental institutions, who said to me: "Did you ever realized that when you stare at a painting, the beauty of the light is nothing but a projection of your inner light?" The example of inner light may seem clichéd or romantic, as it obviously works exactly the same way when you look at a puddle of puke in the street on a rainy day. But the idea struck me at the time. I'm not interested in art as pure aesthetic enjoyment, I see it more as a practice, whose purpose is to acheive the purest possible expression of whatever we want to do or to be. What is the meaning of the title "Subjective Slave"? From reading some of your online chatter, I would imagine it dealing with conformity and its ugly relation to art and life. Subjective slavery is about lying to oneself and believing in the lie. It refers to the strategies we use to obstruct self-expression. What if we were totally free (to express anything we are) but were constantly using excuses as the evidence that we are not? We make slaves of ourselves, and we blame others, our circumstances or the world for it. Of course it happens unconsciously for the most part. It's a kind of conspiracy played on ourselves by our own minds, if you like. We are wired that way. "Art is not fully self-expressive until the artist has vanished. We relate to the world in exactly the same way." Is that to say that we do not truly live until "we" ("I") have vanished; allowing the world to exist? I was addressing the question of the contradiction between the realms of experience and belief, or more accurately how beliefs interfere with our ability to experience living in an ever-regenerated way: beliefs about ourselves, but also definitions and interpretations of our experience, representations and ideas about the world and reality, our hopes and ideals, and the language itself. The point I wanted to make is that our reprobation of what we see as conformism, social conventions, etc, makes no sense as long as it's not connected to the exploration of the conflict that lives inside each one of us. The idea of the vanishing "I" is about the recognition of the identity as being nothing more than an artefact of memory - a fiction or a superstition, however you want to call it. It must be understood in the sense of a unification of intentional action and unvoluntary occurence. A reconciliation between Will and Perception, something like that. We generally tend to create an impermeable distinction between self and other. We think of ourselves as living in a spot labelled "in here" by opposition with anything else - labelled "out there". But what if we, as conscious beings, were existing only as a transaction between "in here" and "out there", between self and other? A Zen master would ask: "Where is the sound?" "Where does sound happen?" On one side you have vibrations in the air. On the other side you have the eardrum and a fascinating transduction mechanism. None of them separately can be called "sound". So where's the sound? One last reflection on your blog; in a reaction to year-end lists, you had this to say (amongst many other things), " May I give you an advice? Stop your self-indulgent wankery and practice art like chimps do. No kidding. I promise it will be a great improvement." The whole blurb was highly agreeable, in lieu of all the artists, musicians, publishers, bloggers, and money-makers making sure that their buddies' albums sell. But what I would really like to know is, how do chimps practice art? The suggestion is beyond me. Is this your method? I don't want to be misunderstood here, it sounds totally natural to me that artists want to sell their stuff and make money. It doesn't raise any question for me as long as the work of art is more than just a commercial product. What struck me in these year-end messages was the number of occurences of the word 'intergrity'. What I heard in these statements was not an acknowledgement of the fortitude and achievements of fellow artists, like it pretended to be, but a hypocritical way for these composers to identify with supposedly positive values, to prove to themselves and to others that they were amongst the good guys, that the world is a terrible place to create demanding art, etc… I saw an opportunity to address the question of why most humans make art. I guess we all share this eagerness for recognition at different levels, and if we take an honest look I think there is not much in what we do that is not motivated by the affirmation of our identity. Since humans are conscious that they are conscious, there is always a train of thoughts that interferes with creation, that demands purpose, the consolidation of identity etc…But to really create something you need a clear space. Humans have to disable the normal everyday functioning of their mind, and they have explored plenty of strategies to achieve that: fasting, exhaustion, drugs, isolation, intense pain or pleasure etc… Animals live in that state naturally. Some are talented artists, especially amongst primates, like Congo, a chimpanzee who was pretty popular in the late 50's. I don't say 'talented chimpanzee' in a kind of snobbery or provocation, you can search the web for some of his paintings and see for yourself (http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/11928/lot/29/); it's really magnetic stuff. Creation without mediation. And then you have these elephants trained to draw flower pots. This reminds me much more of the way we humans practice art.