All images property of Jon DeRosa

Jon DeRosa has been releasing music under various names for almost fifteen years, starting in his teenage years. He is best known for his project Aarktica, but is releasing a new EP under his own name this [...]]]> Interview by O.S., August 2011

All images property of Jon DeRosa

Jon DeRosa has been releasing music under various names for almost fifteen years, starting in his teenage years. He is best known for his project Aarktica, but is releasing a new EP under his own name this month. We ask him about the background of his career, the inspiration for his music, and the future.

To listen to a selection of Jon’s music while reading the interview, we’ve prepared a special retrospective Cloudscape that you can run in the background. Enjoy!

OS: Can you tell me how your musical career got started? Dead Leaves Rising was your first project to be more widely released into the world, and put out two albums. How do you look back on those works and what other early projects were important to you?

JDR: I was in my early teens when I started recording under the name Fade. I released two cassettes, Pale, Broken Truths in 1993 and Windows in 1995. I look back on those releases…nostalgically. I was really quite naïve. Full of angst, cathartic, conflicted. I was thirteen years old.

I remember the actual writing and recording vividly and fondly. A lot of late nights, returning home from my summer job as a cook while the world slept, learning how to translate thoughts into music. I was just getting into bands on 4AD and Projekt Records, and the Fade releases were my early interpretations of those kinds of sounds. I had been studying classical and flamenco guitar from age 10, so there is a lot of that influence as well.

This was in the pre-internet days, so everything was via physical mail and word of mouth (and zines). I think that, in itself, is the most striking thing when I think about the early days: the absence of the Internet for connecting with others. In a lot of ways, it made the connections that you did make all the more special. I have boxes of physical correspondence surrounding the early releases.

I sent the tapes around to labels, namely Projekt Records, where Pat Ogle was booking a lot of the label’s first tours. He gave me opening spots on Projekt shows in the East. I don’t think he had the slightest clue that I was only about 14 or 15 at the time. In the end, I opened for Love Spirals Downwards, lovesliescrushing, Sean Bowley/Eden, Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Attrition, (et al) all before I was 18 years old.

Brian John Mitchell at Silber Records has been talking about reissuing those Fade albums. I haven’t heard either of them in about 10 years.

Fade evolved into Dead Leaves Rising in 1996, and was followed by the release of the Shadow Complex CD in 1997, which definitely presented a more aggressive and dark folk/goth sound. The second Dead Leaves Rising album Waking Up On The Wrong Side Of No One wasn’t released for another four years, and leaned away from the gothic influences and toward a more indie rock/folk sound. Shadow Complex is what I would consider my first “official” release.

Both Dead Leaves Rising albums were just released digitally through Silber Records this year, since they had been unavailable for quite some time. I think the early material is interesting in that it shows the most primitive origins of a sound that I would develop and change over the course of the next 15-20 years.

What was it like growing up in the NY/NJ area, and how has it and its scene influenced you?

I don’t think I ever followed any local “scenes,” really. Growing up in NJ, while most of my friends were listening to local hardcore, I was following Los Angeles goth or Bristol indiepop and Sarah Records, along with other stuff I considered truly “exotic.”

I gravitated to New York as a teenager because it seemed exciting, and I was really hungry to find other people who were into the same things I was into, musically. And it really has never disappointed in that sense. But, it’s a young person’s town. You need stamina. You need that youthful curiosity and optimism. I don’t know if it was like that in Lou Reed’s New York. But it feels that way to me now.

Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve gotten more music written if I lived in a smaller, quieter place and had fewer distractions in my life. But I don’t think it could’ve been any other way for me. And besides, I have met a lot of inspiring people, and had a lot of very unique experiences because of the city. I found that wasn’t the case for the stretches of time I lived in other places around the country and world.

Nowadays you work in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, famous for being a multi-ethnic and constantly evolving artistic neighbourhood. What are your personal feelings about the place, and what role does it play in your music, apart from featuring in two Aarktica titles?

I have some family roots here. My great-grandmother made bathtub gin in her apartment during Prohibition just a few minutes away from where I live now. My grandmother worked in a factory during the War, just one block away from where I sit. So, sometimes I look at it through those eyes…

Other times, I am always amazed by the “phenomenon” of Williamsburg and how it has become almost mythic on a world-scale. It’s Neverland for the masses! It’s a play within a play. There’s even a far-fetched sitcom I saw based here now.

There are some real, solid individuals I’ve met here, no doubt. But the place does make it awfully attractive to assholes these days. Is it a place for true men? Where young men can learn to be true men? I don’t think it is. And we need more true men. Just ask true women. But it’s also my home, you know?

But, I’ll step off the soapbox because my generation was the beginning of the problem. And while I have moral issues about the gradual disappearance of the middle class in New York City, I admittedly feel grateful as an observer to have lived in a dynamic neighborhood during its transformation. Socially it is really interesting how rapidly this place has changed since I moved here about 15 years ago.

How did the idea to form Aarktica come to you when it first started?

I don’t think it was a conscious decision, it was more of a coping mechanism to try and recreate sounds the way I heard them after experiencing sudden and permanent hearing loss in my right ear. I became somewhat of an insomniac due to the aural hallucinations and the electric shock sensations that occur when nerve damage occurs in the inner ear. So there were many nights spent in front of a 4-track tape recorder trying to make sense of what was happening to me.

It was really Brian at Silber Records that encouraged me to release the material. If not for him, I’m not sure I would’ve ended up pursuing it as a musical project.

How would you describe the evolution of Aarktica from the beginning to now?

There was a certain naïve curiosity, a sense of exploration and discovery in the beginning. And also, you know, an intimate turmoil within myself that marked the early recordings. But I have always been restless and tried to make each album different and varied, with the addition of instruments, players, song structures.

I consider the most recent release In Sea a sequel to the first album No Solace In Sleep, and plan to continue in that realm of sound with Aarktica. I hope to have a new release ready in 2012.

Is there a conscious stylistic division between the works you released for Darla Records and those on Silber Records?

I don’t think I ever made conscious stylistic decisions based on what label was releasing the album. I think toward the end of my relationship with Darla, I attempted to make more pop-oriented music, because I felt that it would be interesting to update the sounds I’d established as “ambient,” and Darla encouraged that. Silber Records obviously champions more experimental sounds. But in the end, I always made the record I wanted to make.

How important has your collaboration with these labels been for your music?

Working with Darla Records was really not my best decision, at least beyond the Bliss Out album. I just don’t feel like we see eye to eye on a lot of important things, and that’s important for an artist/label relationship.

On the other hand, Silber Records has consistently impressed me. Truly inspiring, original and ethical. It is a label with a vision that has truly always done its own thing and has always enabled the artist with the freedom to do what they want with his/her music.

What is the most important thing you have learned in over 15 years of making music?

La Monte Young said something to me during our studies together. I’m paraphrasing, but he said basically it is an artist’s responsibility to contribute to society. However, the way in which the artist contributes may not be the way in which he thinks he’s supposed to contribute. While I’m sure different people will interpret that in different ways, those words always stuck with me.

Another thing that I guess I have come to realize on my own is that success is relative. Everyone needs to find his/her own personal reason for making the music/art he/she makes. If you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, something will not feel “right” to you ever. If you are doing it for the right reasons and believe in what you are doing, you will always feel at peace with yourself. I would consider that the biggest success of all.

Where did you find all the people to do those wonderful remixes of the ‘In Sea’ album?

Believe it or not, most were artists who I had been in touch with for years and years. Artists to whom I listen, and whom have followed Aarktica over the years. I was truly humbled that so many talented friends were willing to devote their time and energy into reworking my songs. It’s a really great release. And great to finally work with folks like Jon from Yellow6, Mason Jones, Richard from Hood/Declining Winter…People who I’ve been in touch with for years but never met.

The new EP released under your own name sees you returning to a more open sound, song-based, and perhaps back in the direction of what used to be Pale Horse and Rider. Do you plan on recording more in this style again under your own name or otherwise?

Anchored EP

I think the new album is actually really quite different than work I did with Pale Horse and Rider. But, in the sense that these are “songs” rather than “soundscapes,” I see what you mean.

Anchored is just the first of what will hopefully be many solo releases. After many years of making music under a guise, I really wanted to make an album that was musically representative of who I am today, which is something really difficult to do with a project like Aarktica that I have a 10 year history with.

And who are you today?

A working class singer/bartender still trying to best all my previous musical efforts.

Photo by Sjugge

This interview was mainly conducted in February 2009, on the night of the Tonefloat festival in Paradiso, Amsterdam. It was corrected and supplemented with some additional material in March 2011, to roughly coincide with the release of the Chasing the Odyssey retrospective box set on Tonefloat. [...]]]>  

Photo by Sjugge

This interview was mainly conducted in February 2009, on the night of the Tonefloat festival in Paradiso, Amsterdam. It was corrected and supplemented with some additional material in March 2011, to roughly coincide with the release of the Chasing the Odyssey retrospective box set on Tonefloat. Thanks to Dirk for the pleasure of speaking to him, and for his patience. Also, thanks to the various photographers for the permission to use their work.

Interview conducted by O.S.

Flemish composer and musician Dirk Serries is one of the more prolific names active in ambient and drone music, having released many albums under the vidnaObmana name, as well as material as Fear Falls Burning, 3 Seconds of Air, and under his own name. Over the years, he has pioneered many styles of electronica and ambient, as well as guitar-based drone music.

The roots of his musicianship lie in the underground Industrial music and tapetrading scene of the 1980s.

Dirk Serries: I started making music as a young guy, in 1984. My parents started noticing that I tried to make music with turntables, making a kind of locked grooves, particularly in movie soundtracks. That was a fascination of mine. I got an old synthesizer from my father, a Korg analog synth, and then I started experimenting with very aggressive industrial music. It was very amateurish, of course. But you start building up skills, experiment with different elements – what can I do, what can’t I do – do I need musical education for that?

For the industrial music, feeling was primary as compared to classical education. I never felt the need to educate myself classically in music. Everything to do with electronic music in that time, the effects, recording equipment, synths, and so forth, I taught myself all of that, tried things, experimented, until I got a satisfying result.

But over the years, as my music grew more refined, particularly with vidnaObmana at the time, you start realising that you need a bit more than feeling for experimentation, more than just a good pair of ears. But I never took the step to get a classical education. Now that I play electric guitar instead of electronics, I sometimes feel that lack. On the other hand, and this is confirmed by many fellow artists, also musicians who do have classical training, it can sometimes limit you in your artistic freedom, in the sense that a classical education can impose limits on your vision. You are confined by a certain sheet music, certain schemas to follow. I am autodidactic, I hear certain things that they sometimes do not; you’re not always on the same wavelength. Part of me wishes I had such a training, but on the other hand it hasn’t caused me any real problems so far.

Over the years, Dirk has collaborated with more classically trained people. He relates some of his thoughts on such collaborations between classical trained musicians and musicians working with improvisation and informal playing styles. Do differences in training cause conflict or not?

A little bit of both. I’ve worked with a jazz double bass player, who was openminded enough to completely step away from his classical base, and that went perfectly. Of course, improvisation is a big part of jazz. However, with vidnaObmana I also had a project with a symphonic orchestra, and when you start talking with these people, you notice there can be a serious barrier. These people are perfectly schooled, but what they do – without wanting to disparage it – they do performances of existing works, in the form that is on their sheet. And these people have a big problem actually taking that step over the limit. It’s very curious, it’s something they can’t picture mentally. If you talk about combining an orchestra and experimental music, they don’t understand it; it is a totally different atmosphere, a different musical world. And these are real limitations you may experience, but also something you learn to deal with. There was no clash of egos or anything because one has classical training and the other hasn’t, nothing like that. Just technical limitations. Luckily, though, I haven’t met any people that really couldn’t work with me, or vice versa.

Dirk started his musical journey in Antwerp, which is still his home base. He tells us how the beginning years went, and whether there were a lot of people to work with at the time.

In the beginning, it was just me, I didn’t have any musical friends. In the early 80s there was a huge tape culture. All independent music, very uncommercial music, was released on tapes, and you started trading these tapes with other people who had tape labels. That was a worldwide thing – there was no Internet, obviously – so you had to wait a long time before your packages were returned. It evolved really slowly. But one day, I was invited to do a radio show on Radio Centraal – the most important independent radio station in Belgium, I think. Certainly the most idiosyncratic, and it still exists, and has reason to exist. Anyway, in that time I did a show about tape culture with predominantly experimental music, and there were a couple of other DJs who worked with similar music. And in this way I met, among others, the people behind Hybryds, another experimental group who afterwards grew towards CDs and further. With people like that I was able to exchange ideas. Like I said, it’s very interesting to do your own thing, to secure your own vision, to not have to compromise. But to create a broader base to work from, you have to be able to share your experiences with others, and to work with others, and that is really important to me, because you really learn a lot from interesting collaborations.

Eventually, Dirk made the step from working only for himself, at home, to sending his music out into the world.

It started through those tape networks. I was already working as vidnaObmana at the time, also the really aggressive industrial music from the beginning. I started self-releasing some tapes, and sent those around. There was also a small number of zines worldwide writing about it. In this way, you come into contact with other musicians, with tape labels. And as the years went by, CDs started getting cheaper as well, and some of the tape labels became CD labels. And you evolve alongside of that, start releasing a CD yourself, come into contact with labels who never were a tape label, but had started with CDs in the first place and have a big scope in mind. In this way, you take a new step every time in growing, and if you have a bit of healthy ambition, you are able to grow, and for me this was a very interesting period, because I laid the base there for meeting many American people, who later helped me to get signed with labels like Projekt, for example.

Dirk released a number of key albums on Projekt, like The River of Appearance and Crossing the Trail so we asked him more about his relationship with the label.

Photo by Sjugge

I had an exclusivity contract with them. At least until they got into a lesser period financially, and had to shrink a little, and they decided to terminate all exclusivity contracts. I still work with Projekt, for example vidnaObmana albums that had gone out of stock have to be rereleased, so that has become a relationship for life. And that is a beautiful thing. Actually, this all started with that one little tape network that Sam Rosenthal [Projekt's owner] had; he too started with tapes, and also evolved out of that. Luckily some people who had the right attitude back then are still in business. A lot of them disappeared, of course, which is a pity, because it is still an uncommercial genre. Many of them must have experienced a kind of disillusion when business started improving with CDs. Anyway, it’s a continually evolving world, and luckily there are still a number of key figures who keep setting the stage in the market, and that is a good thing.

It didn’t stop there, however, and Dirk has since released a large number of albums on various labels.

Well, I was pretty much done with vidnaObmana. I’d said what I wanted to say. After the Projekt period I released a few CDs on the Hypnos label, and then, through meeting a few people from the metal scene, I ended up on Relapse Records. There I released the final three vidnaObmana albums, the Dante Trilogy. Those were actually a fusion of all elements I had experimented with over the history of the project, from industrial to pure ambient to more rhythmic work. I was able to collect that in that trilogy, and for me that was the end of the story. My fascination with electric guitar was growing at the time, and I started thinking. I wanted to set up a totally different project, and that became Fear Falls Burning.

The most prominent home base for Dirk’s music at the moment is the dutch label Tonefloat. Naturally we wanted to know how this intimate relation came into existence. He also tells us a bit more about Conspiracy records, who also release some of his material.

After I released the trilogy through Relapse, I came into contact with Steven Wilson. He had gotten the albums through the label, and he liked them so much we got in touch with each other. He wrote to me saying, look, I’m currently in touch with a label that might be up your alley. And that is how I came into contact with Charles [Beterams, owner of Tonefloat -OS]. Since then, it’s gotten better and better. I think Steven and I are two of the most prominent figures on Tonefloat. Around it, different artists with different styles also work on the label, but we are the two pillars that the experimental part of Tonefloat is built on. And the relationship with Charles is so good that we can keep working towards the next step, and the next, and so forth. For that reason, there are only two labels that matter to me for Fear Falls Burning: Tonefloat because he really has a fascination and preference for the minimal aspect of experimental music, and Conspiracy Records from Belgium because they prefer the heavier, the more intimidating aspect.

For me, those are the two sides of Fear Falls Burning. It’s the same person; I love the minimal, but I also love the impulsive, the very harsh things. And I really didn’t think, and Charles agreed, that the latter part would fit in with Tonefloat’s vision. For that reason I am glad I can work together nicely with two labels. Another advantage is both are close to me. I am in Antwerp, Charles is in Rotterdam, and Conspiracy is an Antwerp label, so it’s all close together. This is really different from working with American labels, that is so distant. Now you can just sit around the table, relax, and talk about things, discuss things, look at the artwork together. If you’re working from a distance this is different, and you run the risk of having misunderstandings. Especially with Charles this works great. He’s such an outgoing and inspiring guy, who knows so much about artwork, about the qualitative side of things, that it is very educational working with him. In the end, I am a musician, and I know little about such things, and that way you form a great team. You can really feel and complement each other.

So Tonefloat and Conspiracy are really the labels I want to work with at the moment. There were a lot of labels who made offers to me after Fear Falls Burning sort of boomed in 2007, and I took up some of them in the beginning because I wanted to get a feel for the genre itself, the style, the world of it and how far I could come with it. In the beginning you have to play broadly to find out where you music is received best. That is very important, because you can be on a nice label, without anything really happening with the music. That happens a lot, that you get a label with a great image and feeling, bit without any commercial power. I mean, I’m not a businessman, but when you decide you want your music out there, you want it to reach the people. It’s no use having 500 copies of your LP in your room, so you hope it’ll go around the world a bit. So you really have to experience a number of different labels to eventually decide with which ones you want to keep working. Conspiracy is one of them, and Tonefloat is another.

Naturally, there were various projects in the works when this interview was first conducted in 2009. Most important was the 8LP retrospective box set from vidnaObmana, Chasing the Odyssee, which finally saw the light of day recently in 2011. Dirk told us about the planning that went into the box, and some other release plans for his projects.

Chasing the Odyssee

We are still working on the box set. It was originally going to be released this winter, but it’ll be pushed back to 2010 now.  Just because we both feel we’re not completely done with it yet. The music is selected, everything is mastered, but we still have to decide on a packaging that will be affordable, because I think that’s very important. And it’s a whole challenge, though luckily Charles knows a lot of printers he works with, so he can get samples. That’s how we keep working, and before you know it, months pass without any decision making. So yes, Charles has a lot of trust in me, and I’m very grateful for that, but he is also someone that as a matter of principle doesn’t invest in someone without there being a window of opportunity for having the investment pay itself pack. It’s sort of like a five year plan, he wants to work with someone he can get along with, where you understand each other and build a future together, and if the investment eventually pays for itself. And that is Charles’ strength, I think; he looks at is commercially, but at the same time in a unique artistic way. He would never compromise the music itself and the way you want to present it. He wants to keep his label alive at the same time, and that is important, too. It’s nice to release a CD, but it has to do something commercially as well, and I think Charles has such things perfectly under control. And for that reason we like to plan into the future. Not just to prevent conflicts between the two labels I work with, but also to just see how we can shape the future, how to get a flow into it, a sort of continuity that sounds logical and is acceptable to everyone. There has only ever been one vidnaObmana release on vinyl, so we thought it would be great to do a retrospective, a closing chapter on vinyl. Because this will definitely mark the end of vidnaObmana.

With Fear Falls Burning, it’s the other way around. We started with limited vinyl releases, and now that we see there is demand for it, we are switching to rereleases on CD. A big step for Charles. Soon there will be two of those, the first in a series of 10 CDs. He really believes in the quality of vinyl, but he managed to make the CDs appealing in a way as well. The sleeves are on beautiful thick cardstock, like the latest Sand Snowman album. Mine will be single sleeve, but when the series is complete, we want to have a box where you can put all 10 CDs, so you have a nice collection. Basically the whole back catalogue will be collected. There were a couple of vinyl releases on other labels, but these will return on Tonefloat, because I think it is important that one label is a sort of flagship for me. The Internet is a maze anyway, and there are so many labels that it is nearly impossible for any individual to keep up. So I want you as a fan or listener to be able to go to one label and know that there the future is being built for a particular artist. That if you want to follow artist X, that you really only have to look at one or maximally two labels to really keep track. It can be confusing otherwise, and I fell into that trap with vidnaObmana a couple of times. With Fear Falls Burning I really want to avoid that. So to me it is really important to have made a multiple year planning with Tonefloat.

Charles works in a unique way with Tonefloat. There are only of few artists signed to the label, but with relatively many albums. In this way, the label builds up series, and creates a unique experience for listeners.

Photo by Flughun

Yes, this is very special. I know a few musician friends myself, for example a musician from Germany that I think is really good, and I thought I might recommended it to Tonefloat. Maybe he could release a nice LP. It is really great drone music, and Charles said, I love it, but I’m not gonna do it. Why? Because I already have a drone artist on the label, and I want to focus all my attention on that one. I think that’s a beautiful gesture, a great principle to work from, and I believe that is the strength of the label. Suppose you have a label with dozens of drone artists, dozens of experimental artists, they have to compete with each other on that one label. And then you get a kind of division within that label. Sometimes it works that way, curiously enough. Not because of the artists, but because listeners also make choices.

Now with Steven Wilson, Charles has the Bass Communion project, he has Porcupine Tree, and a couple of other things. With Sand Snowman he’s got very unique experimental folk. With me, a unique drone artist who does his own thing. With Theo Travis he released a very remarkable and atmospheric record, very different. So these are all musicians with some common ground, but who will never be in each other’s way. That is very interesting about the label. It might make things difficult to sell commercially to distributors, but at the same time it is interesting for them also.

In the end, it is still niche music.

I don’t mind it being so. If I play for three people tonight, or ten, or for 500, I will enjoy it in every case. But I have found that the best gigs for me are in front of a smaller audience. Very strange, but that works best. As long as they are on the same wavelength. If you tour as a support act, for example, and you play for 1.000 people, and you know only 10 or perhaps 100 people are really interested in your music, it’ll be a rough night. Artists often talk about a black hole in the audience. You don’t see it, but you feel it. The murmurs, the behaviour. And it’s a pity for the 100 people who do enjoy seeing your show, that want to listen, but are hindered by the other 900. I would prefer playing an a smaller scale than in big halls. But sometimes it makes sense to join those larger groups, that’s logical. You do reach out to new people. Charles does that too, but in a different way. He tries through the label to make it appealing to find out about new artists. Say you like Porcupine Tree, and you buy a record at Tonefloat. Well, Charles will do an offer where you get a discount if you also buy Fear Falls Burning. In that way people do get acquainted with different music. That’s a nice system.

In 2009, Tonefloat released a collaboration LP between Fear Falls Burning and Theo Travis. Dirk explains how this came about.

Well, I know Theo’s music through the Slow Life LP he put out on Tonefloat, a beautiful record. Charles knew I admired it, and I had been in contact with Theo a couple of times through MySpace, so Charles came with the idea of us doing a collaborative record for a Tonefloat release. He orchestrated it, really. He linked us up, proposed it, and in that way we started working together. Because it would be a Tonefloat release, I thought it best to take a rather minimal approach to it, and Theo agreed. We decided upon a musical key to work in, and here we return to the point of classical training, him being a classically trained musician. But after that, things came very spontaneously, and we worked towards a minimal piece. Someone asked me recently how I would describe the music on The Tonefloat Sessions, and personally I think it is the most extreme record I have made with Fear Falls Burning to date. Not in the sense of being loud or noisy, not at all, but extreme in its minimalism. In a certain sense, the nihilism that’s in it. The LP has such a desolate atmosphere, even by my standards, I really starting realising this when listening back to it. I though, damn, this really turned out to be a very desolte, icily calm album. It has a certain layering, which gives it some body, but it still feels icy to me. Someone also made a parallel to vidnaObmana, which I don’t agree with. To me, vidnaObmana was more easygoing, warmer, gently flowing music. With some edgier elements at times, surely, but overwhelmingly warm, flowing music. This is something entirely different. Compared to something like Frenzy of the Absolute, this is very extreme to me. There is a strong contrast, but at the same time, both have the same level of intensity. You work with different elements, but the intensity is just as strong, just as dynamic, even though you are working without drums. And that’s why I think it is an extreme record, because it’s at the opposite end of the spectrum.

On the prolific Frenzy of the Absolute album, Dirk worked with different percussionists. He related how these collaborations came about and possibilities for future works.

This is again a matter of meeting a lot of people and labels in the beginning of Fear Falls Burning. Among the people I got into contact with via MySpace were the musicians of Cult of Luna and Switchblade. Cult of Luna invited me to support them on tour, and we did that twice. The first time on tour I started talking with Johannes, the guitarist, and we thought it would be interesting to do something together, and this grew into doing something on stage together. Before we knew it, the drummer Magnus Lindberg was there, and that was a symbiosis that clicked. We started thinking it would be nice to do something for Conspiracy records. I met Tim Bertilsson, the Switchblade drummer, in a similar way, and the followup to Frenzy of the Absolute will tread similar paths, also with drums, in that style.

The only downside is that you can’t always work with the live drums. Sometimes I just have to use loops. Last November we managed to do it all live in Antwerp. That was in a cultural centre that is subsidised, so we were able to fly over all musicians. That was a wonderful gig with a perfect symbiosis, and that cave me an indication that this was a good to direction in which to continue. The only problem is the logistical one, flying everyone over from Sweden, so I hope to find someone who lives more close by, who speaks the same musical language as well, because that is also a factor. We spoke about classically trained musicians, and those who are not. Well, there is the same with drummers who have a rock attitude and those who are more open, because it is very hard to drum to drones. That was a long search for me, before I found Tim and Magnus, who are able to detach from a certain rhythmic pattern and keep drumming without a guideline, and supplement the rest iof the music, because that’s very important. That works excellently now, and I hope to continue working with them in the future, maybe a little tour, we’ll see, but definitely in the studio.

'Chasing the Odyssee', Photo by Igor Romanov

A few things have changed since we spoke with Dirk in 2009. He has initiated several new projects since then, and the Chasing the Odyssee box set, spanning over two decades of work as vidnaObmana, was finally released earlier this year. We ask him how he feels about having the box out there, and what adjustments needed to be made before it could be put out.

It feels great! I’m so glad Tonefloat and I were able to complete this huge project. No real big adjustments were made, the box-set still holds 8 LPs on 180gram black vinyl and a 25-page booklet of Martina Verhoeven’s photography we used on most of the vidnaObmana back catalogue.

'Chasing the Odyssee', Photo by Igor Romanov

But the actual reason for the delay was that Tonefloat and I really wanted to find the best productional solution so that we could offer the box set at a very reasonable price to the listener, and I think we really succeeded. I am very grateful to Tonefloat that he gave me the chance to conclude the vidnaObmana story in style with this 8LP box. This project gave me the ideal platform to reflect back on my work as vidnaObmana from the past 25 years, select the music I consider to be essential and return to an audio format that I personally neglected during the rise of the compact disc. Couldn’t dream for a better ending, really.

Since 2009, three new projects have arisen for Dirk, one under his own name, and 3 Seconds of Air and The Sleep of Reason, which are collaborations with others. He tells us briefly what’s behind each of them.

Some major decisions have been made. While I slowly but surely re-discovered my ongoing fascination and respect for the minimal, introspective, and beautiful in guitar harmonics I started to realize that, due to the fast growth in style and composition, Fear Falls Burning was a project that clearly needed an ending nearby.

Fear Falls Burning surfed on a wave of appreciation and modest success and therefore I was able to not only record/release numerous albums in a short period but also work with several interesting musicians together in order to realize the vision. From extra guitarists to drummers, Fear Falls Burning became more than just myself in solo mode. While Fear Falls Burning became that uncontrollable entity, I simultaneously returned to restriction, discipline and minimalism. With Fear Falls Burning I’ll release one more album that will end the project, and I’m currently working on mixing all songs, and if all goes well this last album should be released late 2011.

Photo by Sjugge

In 2008 I took a chance to, after some many years of working under pseudonyms, release my first album ever under my real name. Microphonics I-V was the debut and start of setting a goal for presenting my passion for the harmonic, beautiful and minimal from there on.

The Microphonics series under my own name is a strict series that will slowly but surely take over all of my major projects, the concept is fairly simple. The music is released in three versions : the studio albums are on regular CD and LP with specific artwork, the live records are LP-only, limited to 300 copies in three different colors and without artwork and eventually all other possible and infrequent releases like tour editions, etc. are on 10”.

With Microphonics I finally reached, after some many years of discovering and experimenting, that momentum of self-awareness, a level of satisfaction. Microphonics is the result of working so hard over these past 27 years. Reducing the pallet of instruments to the most basic and returning to a genre I love the most. Microphonics is pure, minimal, harmonic, dissonant and just me.

3 Seconds Of Air is a band, a getting together of 3 musicians. I truly consider 3 Seconds Of Air not as one of my projects, but a full band. I’m just a member that participates equally as the 2 other musicians.

Naturally there’re musical parallels but in my humble opinion 3 Seconds Of Air is much more about making a sort of modern chamber music from a jazz or avant-garde point of view, music that is challenging in terms of tonality, the relationship between 3 instruments and the musical dialogue. Along with blues guitarist Paul Van Den Berg and my wife Martina Verhoeven on electric bass we’ve released our debut The Flight Of Song in 2009 and this March 25th our 2nd one We Are Dust Under The Dying Sun will be released. Both are on Tonefloat.

The Sleep Of Reason spontaneously grew out of correspondence between Jon Attwood (Yellow6) and myself. The Sleep Of Reason will exist in the form of a 3LP trilogy, reflecting our mutual passion for the most introspective, lo-fi and desolate in guitar music. We’re currently working on the third album and if everything goes well this vinyl trilogy will be released on Tonefloat at the end of this year.

Finally, we wanted to know what else is planned for Dirk in the near future.

Apart from a few pending collaborative projects, main projects are the releases of the second 3 Seconds Of Air album on March 25th, The Sleep Of Reason trilogy and the last Fear Falls Burning album towards the end of the year. Steven Wilson and I will start working on a new Continuum record in the 2nd half of 2011 while I’ll compose and record the long-awaited second Microphonics studio album throughout the rest of this year and 2012. A studio album I look so forward to as it will expand the tonal scope on Microphonics, a large tour will hopefully follow.

Links:

Dirk Serries Website

Tonefloat Records
Projekt Records
Conspiracy Records

Interview by O.S. & D.M.K.; All images property of Sand Snowman.

London-based musician and composer Sand Snowman has been releasing his unique material since 2006, also the year in which our website started. We’ve followed Sand from humble MP3 beginnings to where he is today: [...]]]>

'I'm Not Here', by Sand

Interview by O.S. & D.M.K.; All images property of Sand Snowman.

London-based musician and composer Sand Snowman has been releasing his unique material since 2006, also the year in which our website started. We’ve followed Sand from humble MP3 beginnings to where he is today: beautiful releases on CD and vinyl. Together with other artists from the Dutch tonefloat label, he paid a visit to our country in early february for a concert and some interviews, and he will return at the end of March.
We encountered Sand in the KinkFM radio studio, where he performed on the experimental and avantgarde show X-Rated. Just after that, we had a pleasant chat in the station’s lounge with some tea and wine, and the chance to ask Sand about his music, Irish background, art, and much more.
Our thanks go out to Charles of tonefloat and Arjen & Bob of X-Rated for hosting this interview.

O.S. & D.M.K.: What can you tell us about the development of the whole project, because Moth Dream was the first album, back when Woven Wheat Whispers still existed, but it’s only been 3 years or less. It’s a big step from an MP3 release to these beautiful vinyl things on Tonefloat, so… what happened in between?
Sand: I really don’t know [laughs]. I think when you put something out into the world, onto the ether, you’ve a vague hope- I mean, like for example when I did Moth Dream or Obsessive Creatures in America, I had no guarantee whatsoever that anyone was going to listen to it, let alone that it would actually be picked up by any… you know, find a home anywhere. So, I don’t know, I mean, I put it out there and just see what would happen. As it has transpired, I think it’s been perfect for me, because it’s allowed me some time to develop what I was doing, but without taking too long for this to happen and lose interest. 

'Moth Dream'

So then you put out some limited CDr’s on Reverb Worship and Time Lag. How’d you make the step to that?
I think I would’ve had Moth Dream available on Woven Wheat Whispers, and I like Six Organs of Admittance, I remember looking something up on them through Time Lag. I just sent the label an email and said, you know, “I’m doing stuff. You’re not obliged to listen to it.” He sent me an email back and said “Yeah, I’d love to hear some.” So I sent him a CD and he said “Yeah, that’d be great, I’d love to do a little run of ‘em.” I did “I’m not here” and that’s one that came again on Woven Wheat Whispers, I guess the end of 2006 for “I’m not here”, the end of 2007 for The Twilight Game, and Roger from Reverb Worship just contacted me through MySpace and said, “I noticed you have some things available through download, would you like a CDr-run?” -”OK, great,” you know? So, it happens kind of in step with what I was doing.

The first release you did was all instrumental, and then suddenly on “I’m not here” there’s two ladies singing, so how did that happen?
I know it’s strange, I’m not quite sure myself, but I think with “I’m not here”, cause it was the first concentrated album I did and like writers say that the first novel is autobiographical, or that you’re working through a lot of your influences, and a lot of the sonic ideas that I had, the purely instrumental ideas I had, on the first album I had a lot of room to explore with that. When I started writing the material for “I’m not here” or when the ideas started coming to me, a lot of them were in song form and I thought it’d be nice to still have a kind of continual music, still a continual instrumental tone experience, but to have some structure just popping up there, every now and then. Moonswift is my long-term partner, so uhm… “honey, do some singing”. I just put the microphone in front of her. I met this girl Nix and with her basically, you know, met up, got some ideas. I just gave her some backing tracks I had and “you can do what you want over it,” you know. It could open up what I was doing so it wasn’t all dependent on me, because I was still I think a bit tentative about writing lyrics and song structures myself.

You do write all of that yourself?
Yes.

Now on the new album, there’s some male vocals added and also a bit on The Twilight Game, so who’s responsible for all of that?
Right, on The Twilight Game I got a friend of mine, Jerome, to do some vocals. One night he said “Actually I do some singing, so if you want some male vocals…” I thought yeah, just for balance, because I like the underpinning of the voices. Also on The Twilight Game Jo Lepine who sings with The Owl Service did some singing for me as well, so I thought, great, because I like the idea of polyphonic vocal lines. I’m not really a singer myself, and I’ve been told that by singers that a lot of my lines aren’t that easy to sing, because I think of them as melodic lines or just instrumental melodic lines. I think polyphonically, and I like the idea of having lots of harmonies and as many textured layers vocally as are there instrumentally. And you know, it’s just been a continuation of that, really. I mean, at the moment, in the songs I’m working on at the moment, I’ve already used three vocals, and I’ve got another three or four in mind to work with.

So, and what about the new album? There’s Jason Ninnis and Steven Wilson, so…

'Two Way Mirror', CD version, artwork by Carl Glover

Jason’s a friend of mine, a singer/songwriter from London, and again it was one of these things, one evening he said you know “If you want some vocals sometimes.” – “Yeah, great, here we go, that’d be ideal.” And Steven – cause I did some playing on his album, he said “If you want some singing done…” – “Excellent, that’s great.” It was a question as well of thinking of what songs in terms of lyrics and melody suit what voices, and the two that Steven sang, well they’re really ideal in my head for his voice, and I’m very very happy with the way they turned out.

So how did you get in touch with Steven?
Steven got in touch with me, because the chap at Reverb Worship must have sent Steven a CD. There were a limited edition of 50 copies each, and Steven sent me an email, “I’m really really impressed with your work and I think that maybe more than 50 people should hear it.” So, it just went on from there, really. Steven passed “I’m not here” and The Twilight Game on to Charles [from Tonefloat] and… good fortune, really. [laughs]

Will you rerelease Moth Dream someday?
Possibly Obsessive Creatures, the American version, the reason being because that, as I said earlier, I just can’t find two of the masters for the tracks on Moth Dream. But, I’m not too bothered, because there’s the three tracks “Serpentine”, “Moth Dream” and “Light, Space, Shadow” I’m very happy with, and I wrote this other one around the time, which was on the American issue, “Obsessive Creatures and Caricatures”. It may be issued in that format, and that would be again be four fairly long instrumental pieces. So, that may be…

But the entire album is lost, because you lost some of the master tracks?
Yeah, I don’t have three of the tracks. Also, unlike “I’m not here” and The Twilight Game and Two Way Mirror, this album didn’t present itself as an entity to me, as an entire album. Because to me the structure of an album is as important as the individual tracks on it, the moods and the contrast to each other and stuff. Probably because Moth Dream, my first one, is more a question of ‘I like these, got them done now, put them together.’ When I finished that album, I started work pretty much immediately on “I’m not here”, so I was just pretty much taken up with that. So, the masters of a couple of songs just got mislaid. They’re somewhere in my flat, but that’s The Twilight Zone essentially, so they may at some stage turn up. [laughs]
One day… when you move into a new place or something. [all laugh]

'Flicker Fading Spark' EP

And what about this Flicker Fading Spark EP, because that’s also disappeared along with Woven Wheat Whispers.
Well, I do have the masters for those, cause that’s when I started working on The Twilight Game. It’s weird because it was actually another project, and that took over. And one of the tracks on the Flicker Fading Spark EP, “Magpie Eye”, is from a longer piece that became “I Spy”, the second track on Two Way Mirror. I had basically done the backing track of this 8-minute piece and I thought ‘the first part, I’m gonna get singing on the first part. The rest of it, I’m not sure if singing will work with it, so… no, the first part will be a separate song and this will just be an entity unto itself.’ And also because I thought that if I was going to do an EP to predate the album, it would be good to have a couple of tracks that don’t appear anywhere else. But I do actually have them… [laughs] I was a bit more sensible. [laughs]

OK, so then we’ve made it to the new album, basically. It’s going to be released this month, so what’s a bit of the background behind Two Way Mirror in terms of concepts and writing? How’d you compose it?
Uhm… ooh sorry, there might be a pause… [laughs] I’ll think about that one in silence…
You know, the first 500 CDs have an extra album, The Magpie House. It’s basically a kind of continuum: The Twilight Game, The Magpie House and Two Way Mirror. What I started with for The Twilight Game had some of the material that ended up on The Magpie House. Then I thought you know, ‘I’ll use that in the next one.’ But then other ideas presented themselves. I wanted a different colour and feel to previous albums. I mean, “I’m not here” to me sounds kind of like summer evening or something like that. It sounds like woodland at nighttime or something. The Twilight Game reminds me of a nighttime sky, a wintry sky, and Two Way Mirror puts me in mind of clouds and sky and kites and things like that.

Where does The Magpie House fit in in terms of ideas and concepts?
Well, The Magpie House, I had this dream- cause I have a thing about magpies, I paint them and draw them, I really love them and I love the idea of them as well, going around and gathering these things that are shiny and glittery. And, I had this dream of this house with all these magpies in it and all these wooden beams and stuff like that, and I thought ‘house, magpies, magpie house!’ That’s something else, you know. Or you know, me just gathering these fragments of myself from wherever. The album itself, where it would fit in would be that it’s the underpinning of say, mainly The Twilight Game and Two Way Mirror, it’s material that was acutally happening concurrent to that. Not so much outtakes, it just didn’t fit in with the idea, the structure and the concept of those ones. But it was in its own way kind of essential, because it’s what was going on as well.

Do you think that dreams have special meanings?
Yeah, I do, yeah…
Are they also an important inspiration for you? For your songs?
Certainly the unconscious or the subconscious…
Which speaks to you through dreams, yeah…
Or just impressions, I mean, it can be- when we left from the city airport, this industrial area, and it was cold, but there was this intense sunlight coming through. I find that these feelings- I see something like that and automatically a piece of music stars presenting itself to me then. So it can be dreams, but just impressions, subconscious impressions, impressions that are outside of time or a kind of material concept of reality.
And then the music comes to you, yeah, and you have to give it shape?
Yeah, and that’s what music is, giving shape to a very vague feeling, an impression, it’s giving the form, structure…
[all laugh]

Speaking of this kind of thing, if one looks at your MySpace, they’ll quickly realise that you’re also a painter, so how did that start for you, and in what way is it intertwined with your musical expression?
Yeah, well, my mum’s an artist, I was drawing before I could write or any of that. I love it and also it’s a great respite from having to think in terms of sound. It really really does cross over for me in terms of music, again it’s very hard to explain because it’s a feeling, a sensation, you know. But I think they are- I find that there might be an idea or a concept that’s presented in an album, and there’s kind of an overspill into the paintings I do, you know. Again, I mean the thing with music, I might do a painting or a song that I myself don’t really like that much but it feels absolutely right. In a way it’s kind of outside my own judgement. And I like to be as much outside of my own judgement as possible. So in a way it’s not something that I have that much control over. I quite like that. [laughs]

And apart from MySpace – you’ve used it for some of the earlier album covers, but do you also do exhibitions or something like that?

'Flicker, Falter, Fading Spark', by Sand

Uhm, the last exhibition I did was… nearly two years ago. [laughs] I very very rarely do, to be honest, I rarely put exhibitions on because of just the logistics, sorting it out and having to get people there and stuff. I know it might sound strange, but I don’t actually feel a great pressure to sell my stuff, or even have it seen. It happens, it exists. I think it’s the world we live in, where we feel that things have to be qualified by being seen and heard. In a way, that’s like me being an artistic meanie, keeping it to myself, you know. [lauhgs] But it’s not deliberate like that, you know. I very very rarely exhibit, and probably the main reason for why I very very rarely exhibit is that the priority is music. That’s my main purpose essentially. The painting is more *for* me, it’s more of an indulgence for myself.

Is there for you a difference between musical and visual expression?
Yes, yeah. Definitely, because music to me is entirely abstract from material reality, from what we see and hear and experience. Music, apart from birdsong and natural sound, music is a totally abstract concept. Most of the other art forms, I think, come some way out of our experience, like visual art. I think visual art has always been, through all cultures, representational. European art is in some way kind of an abstraction from real life, but it is based pretty much on the world that you see, you know. And I think it’s the same with literature, poetry, because it uses language, by which we communicate. Music then of course is just something else entirely.
Perhaps more direct, sometimes at least. Speaking to your feelings, or at least that’s a way to experience it.
Well, that’s it, cause it has a main line into your feelings, your subsconscious.

And what about literature or poetry? Does that influence you in your music in any way? Or your painting…

Very little, but… James Joyce is a big influence on me, more in his approach than anything. The approach of like Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, where you have parallel worlds, parallel takes on things happening at once. Because music was the primary influence for him, with literature, where he was, instead of telling a story, instead of a sentence like saying “he went out of” he’d have these compound words actually, cause he was trying to get polyphony in writing. But it’s just the way that makes you look at reality that’s had a huge influence on me, really, you know. When I read about Finnegan’s Wake, which I haven’t read – I love Ulysses, but I haven’t been able to get through Finnegan’s Wake.
[laughs] OK.
But the idea is absolutely mindblowing for me.
Why is it so difficult to get through for you?
Finnegan’s Wake? I think it’s having a primer first, it’s recognising the code, because I mean with Joyce you have a lot of references to Greek mythology, you know. I mean like say for example using kind of musical forms of fugues in literature, so the first time you read it it’s… you know. I mean I read about Ulysses quite a lot before I actually read it, so I had a primer in it and I was going to prepare for it. I think because Finnegan’s Wake is a dream, it’s kind of underwater, and it’s so very very- I find it very very hard to penetrate its meaning, you know. I understand it is about a dream reality, and also the thing of a wake[1]- “Finnegan’s Wake” is an Irish song. There’s also Fionn again, the coming of Fionn mac Cumhaill [wiki], this Irish mythological hero. It’s the return of the hero, which is going through all of Joyce’s literature. The main character, it’s all the hero’s voyage. Except in the last, in Finnegan’s Wake, the voyage is in a dream. It’s dream logic, he has strange juxtapositions and you don’t know where you are [laughs]. His language is beautiful, but I don’t know what he’s saying [laughs]. You know, but I’ll go back to it in time.
Maybe then it’s a bit more like music.
Yeah, it is.
If you read the words, but you don’t know exactly what it means, you have to rely on the feelings he expresses.
Yeah. 

Uhm, apart from your refereces, you also have an accent, so…
I’m Irish.
You’re Irish, yeah, cause you were living in London, that’s what we garnered, but we never heard you were Irish, so how did you end up in London?
That’s a very good question! [laughs] A series of strange events… when I was 17 I moved to London, and uhm, never went back. Oh, I’ve been back, but it’s just become home, you know, but it’s like I said, I’ve been there like since I was 17-18 years or so.
It has a special feeling for you, the city?
London, uhm, I think so, but then I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve been there a long time and I have history there. I think when you have a history somewhere, you have all these references there, so it becomes something to you. I mean, in many ways I don’t have to actually be living in London for what I do, but it’s right for now.

And what about Ireland? You ever feel like going back?
For a holiday, yes, but to live, no.
And why not, if we may ask?
Exile. I take after James Joyce. It’s when you’re in exile from your homeland. The danger is you romanticise it or you can become cynical about it, that is, you see it out of balance. But, you internalise the experiences. I mean, when I go back, I go back for a week every now and then, and I’m really- I’m not saying the people who live there don’t appreciate these- but it’s the ordinary things, the smell of coal fires, that’s just amazing, and it’s an instant effect on me that takes me back to when I was a little boy. Because I’m not living there, because I’ve been away from there, these associations are powerful, and I don’t really want to risk losing them. [laughs] You know, and I like that being somewhere else.
So you only realised these little things when you’ve been away for a while?
Yeah, definitely.
Or you take them too much for granted.
Yeah, well, you no longer see it. It’s if you’re taking the same route every day you don’t notice the odd nuances of an area or of the people’s accents and things like that. It’s when you’re away, then you really notice it.

'The Tower', by Sand

In your interview just now on the radio, you talked briefly about your musical influences. Your music itself is already pretty eclectic, but does that have a background in your own musical taste?
Yes, very much so, yeah. I mean, I get excited by things, I don’t know if it’s apparent in Two Way Mirror, but there’s a couple of tracks on it… I was really really excited by Bartók‘s string quartets and Shostakovich‘s string quartets. With the string quartet you have a dialogue going on, and it’s very economical. And, I often get excited about something that I *can’t* do, but it presents me with this other world to kind of play with and get involved in, so I thought ‘well, OK, how d’you get that kinda quality, that dialogue with acoustic guitars?’ You know, so rather than staying in the pattern of like, say, what an instrument does, I kinda listen to what it doesn’t. What I do often is that I write a piece on the piano and translate it to maybe two or three acoustic guitar parts. Or write a piece on the guitar and then play it on the piano. So I’m thinking of it, or I’m seeing it in a different perspective, in a sense. So, I mean, yeah, but the influences, we’re influenced by everything, even the things we don’t like, you know, but they are very very eclectic in what I relate and what I love and what I’m excited by, you know. What I’d like to integrate in what I do.

And what about playing live, is this the first time for you tomorrow?
I did a couple of very very brief sets in London last year. I did one actually as part of an improv thing with these two other chaps, who were playing like electronics and noises, and I was playing, doing what I do on the acoustic guitar, whatever it is I do on the acoustic guitar. But I did two sets, one in summer and one in October. Just to get myself prepared basically for playing in front of people, because everything I do is very much in my head, an extension of that is to actually do it in a room. I mean, I’m excited about it, because I think rather than recreate or trying to recreate a record – because the record is there and people can listen to that – what I’m interested in doing is taking the live experience, making that something into itself, an event into itself or a piece of music into itself. So there are themes and bits and pieces from the albums that are interwoven with each other.

OK, and then finally, you’re doing a couple of shows now, and you’ve just got a new album out, double CD, vinyl, and… Is there anything you have planned already for the future?
Uhm, one album, definitely, that I’ve pretty much all the backing tracks done for, and I just need to get the vocals done on that. I’m also working on this other thing at the moment, that I’m not sure what it is. It’s quite different, it’s more uh- I don’t know if I’ll actually do it as a- I don’t know if I’ll acutally finish it. Or, I don’t know if I’ll do it as a Sand Snowman project. It’s quite rhythmic, there’s a lot of drums and things like that in it, and it’s very sort of disjointed, but it’s very much in its early stages. I hope to have the new Sand Snowman one finished by the end of summer.

By the way, those drums, do you also play those on the album?
I play some, and I program some. I mix them up, basically, yeah.
But most of the instruments is just you?
I play, yeah. On the new one I’ve just got a friend of mine, she’s done some flute, and I’ve written some cello parts for another friend of mine. But still pretty much instrumentally, it’s me.
You mean the next album, the one that’s coming?
Yes, yeah.
And are there any more surprises you can unveil? Is it going to be very different from Two Way Mirror? What’s your feeling about it?
I think it’s going to be as different from Two Way Mirror as Two Way Mirror is from “I’m not here”. That is, there are similarities. In fact I think actually you can hear traces of all of them, even the first one. There are parts on that, that are the feelings and ideas that occur on the later albums as well. Basically, there’s kind of a cross-pollination thing going on with them.

[1] The “wake” in the traditional “Finnegan’s Wake” is a reference both to the wake at his funeral, and his awakening during the funeral, when it becomes apparent that he isn’t dead, but suffering from a severe whiskey delirium. An alternative interpretation would be that he was dead, but resurrected by the water of life (whiskey). See: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Finnegan%27s_Wake.

Links:

• Sand Snowman (MySpace)
• tonefloat records (Official Website)

All images property of Dave Colohan, except where noted.

Irishman Dave Colohan, the man behind Agitated Radio Pilot and prominent member of the Deserted Village Collective, was one of the first people we wanted to interview [...]]]> Interview with David Colohan

January 2nd 2009 – by O.S. & D.M.K.

All images property of Dave Colohan, except where noted.

Irishman Dave Colohan, the man behind Agitated Radio Pilot and prominent member of the Deserted Village Collective, was one of the first people we wanted to interview for Evening of Light. Parts of this interview have been lying around since early 2007, but now we’ve finally been able to mold it into a new whole. Dave was kind enough to answer all our questions before he left on an extensive backpacking trip through South East Asia late 2008.

O.S. & D.M.K.: How are things in Ireland just before the Winter? 

In a few days I leave for South East Asia, where I will be travelling with my friend Bean. We plan to record as we go so that should be exciting. The Summer has been a good one. I spent a month touring in America with United Bible Studies & Sharron Kraus & we met the most wonderful people, saw some incredible places & made some great music along the way. After that I toured Ireland with my friends in Resurrection Fern & The Driftwood Manor & I got to play on both of their albums. My own new album The Rural Arcane has come out on Deep Water Sonic Productions, which I am delighted about as those guys are true gentlemen & good people to hang out & play with. I have a lot of new projects started which I hope to finish around Christmas. The coffee is brewing & Wim Mertens is on the speakers. It’s all good…

It is clear from your music, and from interviews, that nature plays a big role in your life and music. How do you relate yourself to nature? Does nature have a spiritual or religious dimension for you?

When I stopped thinking of Nature as something ‘other’ and accepted it as something I am part of on a daily basis, I found that it became an important part of my life… from what I eat to what I play… and all points in between I suppose! Away from daily living, there is something about a vast landscape, forests, mountains, seas …. that brings you to an emptiness within yourself… brings an end to philosophy & petty concerns. It brings you to a point where you can begin again. This is its spiritual dimension for me… that you can find redemption out in the wild places.

Do you have different relationships with different landscapes? We can imagine that Ireland must be very different from your experiences in Australia, for example.

Ireland is a small country by any standard but has a wealth of variety in its landscape. Where I am from in the Irish midlands is mainly flat plains & bogs interspersed with forests & lakes. It can be a very haunting landscape & has influenced my music in ways that appear again & again – In Goldsmith Country & Like Flightless Birds are attempts to come to grips with it. The edges are blurred. Maybe it is the ever-present rain! When I lived in Australia I travelled quite a lot, living in a tent mostly. This way I could come & go as I pleased, working on farms & going camping in some truly magnificent places. From the rainforests & crocodile infested rivers of Cape York to the unforgiving expanses of the central deserts… The rolling farmland of New South Wales & the ancient Blue Mountains… The haunting emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain to the heartbreaking vistas of the Ocean Road… It is an astonishingly beautiful country. With the band Holt I tried to put some of it into words & when I listen to that album it brings back so many memories. Likewise, A Drifting Population takes me back to days on farms avoiding Brown Snakes & not having a care in the world. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss it over there & I know it will influence my music as long as I am alive. Travelling across America has had a similar affect. When you drive from West to East, the country transforms so often that it is impossible not to be moved in some profound way. In musical terms, sometimes I can hear the vast distances unfold… Landscapes & memories are echoed, looped & delayed… That emptiness where you can begin again is somewhere in the swirl & haze of sound.

How have your different travels (Australia, USA, Iceland, &c) affected you as a person?

I suppose there are some places where you take things in & some where you let things go…. I have learned something of both everywhere I’ve passed through or lived in. Travel chips away at the walls you build around yourself & helps you to let go of those things you’re afraid to lose.

Your music is often very personal. Do you ever feel uncomfortable opening up your soul in music that much?

Since I was 18 or so I have been writing & recording under the Agitated Radio Pilot name. I recorded many, many tapes – very primitive home recordings – on My Agitated Radio, the tape label I had at the time. Nobody listened to them & so I had a great freedom to develop my approach to music without interference. The Shrimper label – run by the wonderful Dennis Callaci – put out countless cassettes, CDs & vinyl by the likes of Sentridoh & The Mountain Goats. I would write to him a lot & get incredible albums from distant, exotic America along with letters & drawings. At the same time I was writing to Daniel Johnston‘s manager & getting all of his cassettes & 7″s. The music was sometimes overwhelmingly honest…& so this leaked into my own songwriting. Riot Grrrl [wiki] was happening at the time & something of punk’s spirit of “Anyone can form a band!” was in the air. So, without a musical bone in my body, I began to record all these cassette albums with their Shrimper-influenced artwork (& songs!)… It was only when I saw Townes Van Zandt play in Galway that I truly became aware of the power of opening up your soul in music. A man alone on stage with a guitar. That gig haunted me & still does. Years later, seeing Devendra Banhart play alone in a small bar, just before he rightly became well known… That was a major epiphany too. For different reasons maybe. But the essence was there in a man with a guitar, vulnerable & laughing & making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up… drawing ghosts up out of yer past & making ye sup on yer pint with a little more urgency. When you’re writing a song, I suppose you’re not thinking about the fact that (hopefully!) somebody will eventually be listening to it, maybe even the person it might be about. What comes out, comes out. It becomes uncomfortable playing them live. Not all of them of course but some cut a little close to the bone. Maybe sometimes I’ve thought that I can change a situation through a song. That’s a lonely road to go down… Short answer: Someone once asked what I write about when I’m not being so personal. I told them that’s when I write instrumentals!

How did the Deserted Village collective form?

AMM were doing a weekend of workshops & performances in Dublin in 2001. My friend Scott McLaughlin & I went along to take part in an improvisation workshop run by Eddie Prevost. Funnily enough, the ones who would eventually become the Deserted Village collective’s founding members were the ones who turned up with guitars! I’m not sure I impressed anyone with my contribution! After the workshop we did get to play in an ensemble with Eddie, supporting a solo set by Keith Rowe. I mean, these were guys who influenced Syd Barrett! It was an incredible experience & turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life. I asked Shane [Cullinane] & Gavin [Prior], the other guitar culprits, if they would like to play together again sometime. I know now that they were a little suspicious! But we started to meet once a week, playing in a room above the gate to Trinity College. Usually we’d go for a pint afterwards & so became friends as well as bandmates. After some time we decided to set up a cdr label in order to release recordings by Murmansk, our new free improvisation band. A neighbour came up with the name ‘Deserted Village’, it referring to the area I am from & the poem by Oliver Goldsmith. United Bible Studies existed already with just myself & James Rider being members. We invited the lads to join & soon there was a thriving community of us playing, recording & sometimes living together. Many people have passed through the Deserted Village over the years. Some stay & some move on.

What are the main projects of the Collective and of which are you part?

United Bible Studies playing live

United Bible Studies is the main project. Murmansk, the original inspiration for it all, is on hiatus at the moment. The Magickal Folk Of The Faraway Tree has reissues & an unheard album to be released…but the members all live in different parts of the world now. Children Of The Stones was a once off project which I am very proud of. Gavin has several projects on the go – Toymonger being his main one. The Cosmic Nanou is on the far side of the world, hopefully still recording on the sly! There are plenty of other projects people are involved in but these are the main Deserted Village-related ones that come to mind. Of other bands… I used to be in Holt & currently play in The Driftwood Manor & Resurrection Fern.

For you personally, what are the different concepts behind these projects?

Murmansk is only concerned with free improvisation. At our last gig I was told off for playing “too New Age!” Heh! The Magickal Folk Of The Faraway Tree is concerned with acoustic folk & unaccompanied singing. Children Of The Stones was a much more electronic approach to songs & drones. United Bible Studies can be virtually anything. On the recent American tour we went from feral noise to quiet folk, free jazz to completely acapella in the space of a few days. It all depends on who is there & where we are. I can’t really speak for the other bands. In case I get it all wrong!

Do you have a special aim or goal with the Collective?

If you asked me this when we started off, I would probably have said our aims were to release lots of music, meet like-minded people & travel. All of those things came to pass & hopefully will continue to for many a long year yet. I’ve been fortunate enough to play & tour with some of my favourite musicians- Charalambides & Fursaxa, to name but two…& to travel around America, experiencing such great hospitality along the way, not to mention all of the other incredible bands & places! Wonderful!

Were you immersed in folk music at a young age, or is this a later love of yours?

I remember when I was in school there was a programme on Channel 4 called ‘Party With The Rovers’. This was an Irish folk group [The Irish Rovers, O.S.] based in Canada, milking their accents for all they were worth & wearing woolier jumpers than The Clancy Brothers. They frequently performed while walking across misty moors or mountainsides. When they weren’t at that they were in the pub. This, whether I realised it or not at the time, had a profound influence on me! Some years later I spent time with a friend called Laura Tennant in England… I was 18 or 19 at the time… We were going to the Phoenix festival, specifically to see Levitation play. Of course as soon as I had bought a ticket Terry Bickers left the band but I went to England anyway. A plan we had was to visit some ancient sites, inspired in part by a mutual fondness for Julian Cope – whose Jehovahkill album was a massive influence on me – but alas we had no wheels in the end so that fell through. Laura’s parents had wonderful taste in music, not that I knew it at the time. I was far too cool to be enjoying Fairport Convention & Ashley Hutchings solo albums! If Melody Maker didn’t mention it then I didn’t care! But I suppose being in a rustic part of Britain, listening to music that seemed so out of time, well I guess this also had a huge influence on me. When I listen to this music now I am transported back to those quaint English pubs & country roads.

You mentioned that at first you were mainly interested in British folk music, and only later (re)discovered Irish folk. How did this come about?

In school, just before we went home, we would gather around the Master’s desk & learn the tin whistle. Something of its mournfulness struck a chord in me even when I was 11 or 12. We also had to learn Irish Dancing in those pre-Riverdance days though I have no fond memories of that! Irish music to me was all hundred-mile-an-hour jigs & reels & I felt nothing for it. When I was in secondary school my aunt got me a Nick Drake compilation -Heaven In A Wild Flower- & through listening to him I got into John Martyn & others from that scene. Then years later a friend of my girlfriend at the time handed me a battered video of a film I might like – The Wicker Man… Then I joined the ranks of musicians who were completely rewired upon hearing the music & absorbing the imagery within. From here I gained an appreciation of a much older tradition in folk music, both British & Irish. On our side of the water, singers like Margaret Barry & Paddy Tunney… His singing of “When A Man’s In Love He Feels No Cold” is one of my very favourite songs. I feel very fortunate to have met Johnny Moynihan, also known as ‘The Bard Of Dalymount’ & a walking library of song. A founder member of Sweeney’s Men, he travelled with Anne Briggs, spent some time in Planxty & has spent almost every waking moment with an instrument in hand… or so I imagine! He played a few gigs with me on a short Irish tour we did some time back & just being around him, hearing the songs & stories… I’ve been very lucky. He’s also the sharpest wit I’ve ever met! So it was only after getting into British folk-rock that I discovered where they were coming from… & Irish music did seem to play a strong part in that, with some of them at least.

What about your other musical interests? A quick glance on your MySpace throws up links with metal bands like Primordial and Wolves in the Throne Room, both projects that are far away from ARP musically, but perhaps share a sort of profoundness with your own music? How do these tastes influence you?

I loved metal before anything else. I should say I loved the imagery of metal but the music would rarely live up to it…That is until I discovered Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride & Anathema. I loved Slayer & Entombed & a few others too but the epic melancholia of these bands in particular appealed to me. At the time I was also listening to a lot of Fields Of The Nephilim & The Sisters Of Mercy, who also seemed to draw on a vast sadness. Travelling in northern Italy with a friend when I was 16 – along with A-Ha, these bands were the staple fixture of my walkman. We were hiking in the Alps & I have vivid memories of the music & the scenery melting into one… The natural world dissolving into chiming chords & drones & vice versa… Making snowballs on a mountainside in the middle of July with this music ringing in yer ears & the sound of waterfalls & birds bleeding through that again… It leaves an impression. Along came the explosion of underground American rock, grunge, university & girlfriends & somewhere along the line I stopped listening to metal. A few years back, sitting in my friend Paul Condon’s house, he tells me he has something I need to hear. It turns out to be Burzum‘s Filosofem & so a new raging love of Black Metal is born in me… Just like I had never left it. If my own music shares anything with Black Metal then I think it is philosophically rather than sonically. (Although I seem to share crappy keyboards with a few on that scene!) Nature is not always a benign force, as so much psychedelic folk seems to dwell on. It is haunting & cruel too. Where this seems to be what some Black Metal addresses, I feel my own music falls somewhere between the two. In some newer material I’ve been working on the Black Metal influence comes across more strongly. I feel that if I continue in this vein then it will be under a different name – Enclosed & Silent Order. Seeing Primordial live was an incredible experience. They have a seriously dedicated following over here. Again it is this idea of self & landscape dissolving into one that I feel in their music. Same with Wolves In The Throne Room, Striborg & Xasthur (though I’m sure he would hate to pinned down in such a way!)… I am reminded of those feelings I had on the mountain in Italy. Where sound seems to pour through the cracks between where you are & what you are feeling.

A bit about World Winding Down. How did you manage to gather such an impressive array of guest musicians? Was it difficult to incorporate all their input into your own musical vision?

Dave with violinist Vicky Langan

Most of the contributors were friends of mine already & as the majority of the album was recorded in Galway, all of my musical friends from there appear on it… Keith Wallace of Loner Deluxe, James Rider, Annemarie & Aaron of Mirakil Whip, Aaron from Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon… They knew where I was coming from & helped me to get where I wanted. Maja Elliott was living there at the time too & it was wonderful having her on board. Richard Moult sent some piano improvisations & I edited these into songs. Alison O’Donnell, formerly of Mellow Candle surprised me when she contacted me & it was an honour to have her on board. She got in touch through Myspace & I got in touch with others the same way; Richard Skelton, Larissa Pychlau [Cele, O.S.]… Antony Milton & Anders Gjerde supplied some field recordings. We released cdrs on their labels in the past & have much in common. John Cavanagh is a gent & did some beautiful work. Brian Conniffe & Vicky Langan of Female Orphan Asylum contributed haunting parts. Autumn Grieve & Sharron Kraus sang beautifully. Shane & Gavin of Deserted Village were invaluable… as was Caroline… who appears on Your Turn… & World… Indeed she inspired everything. An album is not finished until the artwork captures the sounds within & I have Maeve O’Sullivan & Aaron Coyne to thank for the imagery. I’ve met Richard Moult since & we have toured in America together but I have yet to meet some of those who appear on the album. We’ll share a bottle of wine someday, no doubt! It wasn’t difficult to incorporate everyone’s input into the overall vision, as it was one of sparseness. To me, it flows as it was intended to.

'World Winding Down' album cover

You’ve mentioned that World Winding Down and The Rural Arcane are sort of sister albums. Could you elaborate on that?

Well I will go one further & say that along with Your Turn To Go It Alone, they make up a trilogy. Weirdly enough they’re all doubles too…although Your Turn… is a double 3″ & roughly single album length…in the vinyl sense! They all contain a mix of shorter songs & more expansive instrumentals, which is true of nearly every recording I’ve made. Blame years spent listening to Pink Floyd!

'The Rural Arcane' album cover

With The Rural Arcane there is a more concerted effort to place the song at the heart of these soundscapes. All three work through a particular period in my life but Your Turn… has a few songs that refer to earlier times…relationships/friendships in America & Australia. I guess the themes are similar though… landscapes without & within – trying to capture moments long since passed. Can we capture them in the haze of reverb, echo & delay? I hope so… The first two parts were recorded while I was living on couches & floors & relying on friends. Wandering between Dublin, Cork, Galway & Ballymahon without any real direction. I guess there’s a lot of pain & longing in those albums. The Rural Arcane trades in heartbreak for a sort of redemption in country living I guess. Tellingly, this one was recorded entirely alone at home in Longford on four-track. On the previous recordings I was happy to mainly play guitar & sing. On this one I played every instrument I own & headed further out. Maybe there’s an emotional & musical progression from one album to the next. I like to think there is, but maybe I’m not best qualified to say.

'Your Turn To Go it Alone' album cover

What are you planning for the near future?Well for the next few months I will be travelling in South East Asia with my good friend & fellow musician Bean Dolan of Resurrection Fern. We plan to do a lot of wandering – writing & recording as we go. A lot of new material has been recorded already, which I hope to get back to when I return.

Any live plans? Perhaps outside of Ireland?

United Bible Studies & Murmansk have been my main touring experiences abroad. The Pilot has mainly wandered around Ireland. This past Summer however, I got to play some songs on a boat in Bar Harbor, Maine. I joined my friend Audrey Ryan on Independence Day before the fireworks began & it was a wonderful experience. She played fiddle on songs I’d written that morning under a great tree at her mother’s place. Got to do a few songs in Portsmouth, New Hampshire too, which was beautiful. I love that town! Rambling off the point again but as regards playing outside of Ireland in the future – definetely. I’ll play anywhere!

Finally, name one thing that you’d hope to accomplish with your music.

As I mentioned earlier, I hoped that I would make new friends & get to travel. That worked out & will hopefully continue to. I always hoped that maybe someday my music would affect people in much the same way musicians like Mark Kozelek & Neil Young have affected me. I get the odd mail from people who seem to find something of what they need in the songs. If that continues well then I’ll be happy. On a more frivolous note, I long for the day ARP gets a double gatefold vinyl! Heh!

All photographs property of Sedayne.

Where lie the roots of your storytelling and your musicianship – and were they intertwined from the beginning?

The first time music took on any sort of personal importance for me was with the little [...]]]> April 2008 – Interview by O.S.

All photographs property of Sedayne.

Where lie the roots of your storytelling and your musicianship – and were they intertwined from the beginning?

The first time music took on any sort of personal importance for me was with the little wooden whistle flute my Grandparents brought home for me from their holiday in Yugoslavia around 1968 or so – so I would have been six or seven at the time. I took it along to the school recorder class and the teacher told me it wasn’t a proper musical instrument. Ever since I was drawn to little instruments – artefacts, treen, ethnography and other bits and pieces of exotic junk, cargo & gew-gaws which tied in with the immediate corporeal empiricism of various aspects of folklore and traditional narrative that were very much the landscapes of my native Northumbria and beyond, especially Norway – so the one thing has aways existed in relationship to the other to the extent that I regard them as indistinguishable.

You have many different musical projects (Sedayne, Eleanor’s Visceral Tomb, Shibboleth, Venereum Arvum, DH7) Can you tell us the idea behind each one of them, and whether they focus on specific musical and cultural themes?

The music is more important than I am – I see my role as purely mediumistic, so I use the various other names to record and perform under to get away from the personal. Sedayne comes from an anagram of Sean Breadin, likewise Sabrina Eden, which is the name I use for my YouTube films. Eleanor’s Visceral Tomb is my idea of the ideal band – I’ve been in lots of bands in my time, but none of them were ever too happy, so EVT is my happy band; just me with my eight track! DH7 came from my old postcode in Durham – since we’ve moved to Lancashire I’ve changed the name to The Ha-Ha (I tried FY8 but it didn’t have quite the same ring to it!). The Ha-Ha is another ideal band, albeit with the focus on electronica, loops and sampling rather than the natural sound of the various acoustic instruments. Venereum Arvum is Rachel and I as a duo, which is a very happy band indeed, and Shibboleth is my occasional duo with Clive Powell which goes back to 1980, hence the name. There are other names I use too, such as Sundog, my Shamanic Alter-Ego – which is to say, the sort of ‘Me’ I would have undoubtedly been had not sense intervened.

Why did you release ‘Horse-Head in Winterland‘ under your own name?

Horse-Head in Winterland

Horse-Head was about settling old scores – going back to when I made that hurdy-gurdy in 1981; I wanted to revisit something of my old self in that music, to get back to an ideal of a purely improvised acoustic folk / noise aesthetic which I was dealing with back then before getting sidetracked into trying to play early music. The original idea of Horse-Head was to have it as a fake ‘newly discovered’ archive recording from 1981, which is why I used my own name, but for whatever reason I decided against this, but the name stuck. I did As I Live and Breathe (2003) as Sean Breadin too, which is one of my personal favourites though not many people have picked up on it. As I Live and Breathe should really have been a DH7 project, but I field-recorded all the parts on location in Northumbria and Rachel took lots of pictures of me doing so – so it was very personal from the off, dealing with very particular rural & post-industrial landscapes of my childhood, in particular the demolition of the old coal-fired power station at Blyth which I found particularly upsetting.

When and why did you start releasing your own music as Plough Myth International?

Ploughmyth came from a dream I had around 1990 in which I couldn’t remember the tune of “Mutton Pie” – you know those dreams where you’re about to do something you really ought to know but you haven’t got a clue – so in this dream I came up with this tune, which didn’t fit the words at all but it was still in my brain when I woke up, so the tune became Plough Myth, after the first line of “Mutton Pie”: ‘Now my jolly lads if you want to learn to plough, come to Ironheads and he’ll show you how…’ – thus somehow relating the very mundane notion of “Mutton Pie” to the heavenly notion of The Plough (Ursa Major). Over the years it sort of stuck, along with Harvest Myth, so it seemed somehow right to use the name Ploughmyth as a general heading for the music, but as to exactly when that was I’m not entirely sure – possibly in the mid 1990s.

How did your cooperation with Mark Coyle and Woven Wheat Whispers come about? Since all new Plough Myth releases also appear on WWW, I take it you are satisfied with the service? What role do you think the internet and digital labels such as WWW play in today’s folk movement?

Mark got in touch after reading of my work on Gerald’s site [Psyche van het Folk, O.S.], which was a year or so before he set up WWW. Dealing in hard-copy handcrafted CD-Rs isn’t something I’m very good at, or even maintaining my website – in fact it’s a complete pain in the arse, so WWW is convenient on various levels, though I’m never sure what to charge which is why I’ve done a lot of free stuff recently. I’m dealing in documents, rather than products – I think the idea of ‘the latest album’ is a complete anachronism, especially when you’re dealing with music as a day-to-day phenomenon. Sun Ra had this notion with this Saturn label, with each disk being an edition of a cosmic newspaper! I think the internet opens out this possibility, but I’m never too happy with paying for mp3s, so I try to do stuff for nominal amounts or completely gratis. I think everything of ours on WWW is either free or £3.75 – which is the price sticker on my old vinyl copy of Back into the Future by The Manband, quite possibly my favourite album of all time. I think it should be less – the important thing to me is that people hear the music, but business is business. My own website is in the process of demolition – just to free up some space for more free mp3s, likewise the Myspace site. I’ll be setting up others soon – both for The Ha-Ha, Sundog & Venereum Arvum.

You’ve mentioned that you admire the similarity of story morphology, even across national and linguistic boundaries. What is your view on the evolution of (Indo-European) folktales? How do you imagine they were told in different eras and places, yet still maintained a certain correspondence of form with their ‘cousins’?

All narrative morphology is determined by the hardware of the human brain, everything from basic syntax through to the classical sonata. This is the nature of language itself on a purely psycho-biological level, something humanity has been dealing with for the past 35000 years, or however long it is since we first looked upon the world as ‘other’ and started giving things names, concepts, and narratives. I once heard that the reason human beings suffer problems with their teeth that other higher primates don’t is because the human jaw has evolved to favour language rather than dental health – thus does Nurture triumph over Nature. Personally, as a Neo-Gnostic Jesuist* Marxist, I find that very exciting – and as a storyteller too, where one is aware of the functional nature of traditional narrative morphology in relationship to both subjective cognition and objective culture, and how the one might interface with the other through language. The fact that narrative morphology knows no linguistic borders is telling in this context, in terms of both function and structure. For example the story variously known as “Jack and the Good Helpers”, in which Jack assembles a group of uniquely (and improbably) skilled individuals to assist him along the way, is found in Wales, Ireland, England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia, elements of which found their way into the stories of Baron von Münchhausen. In all of these variations we find a flying boat, either as the main point of the story, as in Norway, or as an aside, as in Wales, so one might ponder the process but ultimately there are no answers. It’s like looking at a peacock’s tail and almost being seduced by the notion of a creator because we can’t get our heads around the mechanism of how such things came to be.

*Jesuism is a secular humanist philosophy founded directly on the teaching & example of Jesus Christ with none of the religious trappings so essential to Christianity.

Can you briefly sketch for us one of your favourite tales, or whatever comes to mind? What fascinates you about this tale?

This is a transcription of me telling my favourite ever story, which I call “Hare’s Guts”, together with my favourite ever traditional folk song, “The Innocent Hare”, or “Sportsmen Arouse”, which people will be familiar with from both The Copper Family and The Young Tradition [see below this reply for transcription]. The story fascinates me because it operates on just about every level imaginable. One level it’s about viscera & excrement in a very mundane yet highly ceremonial setting, and on another, it’s darkly Shamanic, and as psychological as Moby Dick, dealing with some very primal & fundamental resonances – I shy from using the word ‘Archetype’ because of the Jungian overtones! Maybe we’re not so very in touch with these aspects today, which is why I weave in the song, and the riddle about the wee brown cow, both of which deal with something pretty fundamental to our relationship with the darker aspects of a nature all but lost to us. On another level of course, it’s a political critique of feudalism – a ceremonial humiliation of authority, and yet a conformation of it at the same time. It’s also a very funny story.

Hare’s Guts / Innocent Hare / Wee Brown Cow
(Transcription of Sedayne storytelling, Hallowe’en 1998. Sung lines in italics; spoken word in plain text; descriptive details in parenthesis)

Sportsmen arouse, the morning is clear, the larks are singing all in the air – repeat that – sportsmen arouse, the morning is clear, the larks are singing all in the air – not bad – try harder next time. Go tell your sweet lover the hounds are out – repeat that – go tell your sweet lover the hounds are out – saddle your horses, your saddles prepare, we’ll away to some cover to seek for a hare.

Verse two. We’ve search the woods and the groves all round, the trial it is over the game it is found. Repeat that. We’ve search the woods and the groves all round, the trial it is over the game it is found. Then up she springs, through brake she flies – repeat that – then up she springs, through brake she flies – follow, follow the musical horn, sing follow, hark forward the Innocent Hare.

That’s the chorus. Sing it again to get it right. Follow, follow the musical horn, sing follow, hark forward the Innocent Hare. Getting better. Our huntsman blows his joyful sound, tally-ho my boys all over the downs – our huntsman blows his joyful sound, tally-ho my boys all over the downs – From the woods to the valleys see how she creeps – from the woods to the valleys see how she creeps – follow, follow the musical horn, sing follow, hark forward the Innocent Hare.

Now sing this – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns. It’s a riddle, about the hare – from Country Antrim – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns.

Because, here’s Jack, the poacher, the shaman, venturing forth in his dreaming, his waking, his sleeping, telling the story in the ritual darkness of his very soul – the story that tells of how he comes to catch the Brown Hair of the Valley, because for sure he’s been after that hare now for more years than he cares to remember – watching it getting ever fatter, ever wilier, ever more elusive, as he comes ever more under its thrall.

Sing – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns. This echoes the sentiments of an ancient English poem – the stag with the leathery horns, the animal that lives in the corn – the animal that all men scorn – but the animal that no one dare name – aye, the animal that no one dare name. All along the green turf she pants for breath – our huntsman he shouts out for death. Repeat that. All along the green turf she pants for breath – our huntsman he shouts out for death. Relope, relope, retiring hare – relope, relope, retiring hare. Follow, follow the musical horn, sing follow, hark forward the innocent hare.

And this one night, when the wind and the moon is high, upon the very night of Hallowe’en, when the hare is standing gazing up at the moon transfixed – on this night does Jack’s dream come true, and so he catches that hare – and he kills that hare – and he knocks that hare down with a rock and having killed that hare he takes the knife out of his pocket and opens the belly of that hare and takes out its guts – and stands there – bloodied in the moonlight, this great fat puss of a dead hare in one hand, and in the other – hares guts.

A hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns – sing – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns – sing – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn a wee brown cow – a wee brown cow – a wee brown cow -

And who should be watching him but the gamekeeper – the shaman, venturing forth in his dreaming, his waking, his sleeping, telling the story in the ritual darkness of his very soul – the story that tells of how he comes to catch the Jack the Poacher of the Valley, because for sure he’s been after Jack now for more years than he cares to remember – watching him getting ever fatter, ever wilier, ever more elusive, as he comes ever more under his thrall – and – things have got so bad the man can’t even get a decent shite for the thoughts of Jack – retentiveness being the only pleasure of the man’s life of course – holding it in, week in, week out, so that he might indulge in one almighty monthly evacuation by way of a purge to the rancidness of his very soul – but this night – seeing Jack there – with the hare, so the contractions come early – a premature delivery indeed, as the gamekeeper must put his moment of triumph on hold, and dash behind a hedge to – unload, and not without some degree of difficulty, being without the luxury of laxatives and tobacco, and a porcelain goesunder – indeed, the very comforts of his monthly purge, as he squats down on the cold ground and labours long and hard to liberate the near-solid incumbent of his bowel, and oh dear me – what a racket he’s making.

Jack meanwhile, he’s wondering what all the noise is about – so away over the hedge where here he finds the gamekeeper, labouring and grunting and sweating and cursing and groaning until at last there emerges into the world, into the moonlight, at least treacle-black yards of the thing steaming with a mist that flows thick and mysterious over the earth, a shroud to the thing he bore, as the gamekeeper looks down, waiting for stinking mist to clear, wiping the leavings from his arse with a small flat stone as his heart thrills to see what manner of thing he brought forth into the world. But that mist also hides the hand of the poacher – the poacher’s hand indeed, which seizing so wondrous on opportunity, deposits the guts of the Brown Hare of the Valley onto the gamekeepers leviathan of a jobby, so that when the mist clears, and gamekeepers gets a better look at his glory – oh dear me, doesn’t the blood drain from his face at what he sees there? Mother, Mary and Joseph! I must have strained a bit too hard there, because I appear to have passed rather more than what I ought – rather more indeed than is either healthy or sensible for a man – and, meanwhile, there’s Jack the Poacher, away down the road with the hare to the boozer, where he butchers it a with a clear and gives a portion each to the three unfortunate widows of his brothers who were horribly killed another story.

A hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn, a wee brown cow with a pair of leather horns – a hopper of ditches, a cropper of corn a wee brown cow – a wee brown cow – a wee brown cow -

And then, after an hour or so – in comes the gamekeeper himself, walking a wee bit stiff, as you might expect. Tell us your troubles, quoth Jack the Poacher to the gamekeeper – after all, isn’t it the truth that all men are equal in the tavern?

And so it is, the gamekeeper tells his tale, recounting the legend of that great steaming incumbent laying out in the moonlight that was the prize of such strenuous labours on his part, but how, when mist cleared – oh dear me – there I saw in the moonlight that I must have laboured rather too hard because hadn’t I passed rather more than was strictly necessary or indeed health?

Of course at this point the whole tavern’s in absolute uproar.

Don’t laugh at me! roars the gamekeeper – do not laugh at me – because -

(significant pause as Sedayne looks over his audience with a leer worthy of Johnny Rotten in the glory days; various members of the audience biting their nails in dread anticipation of the punch-line).

- By the grace of God, and a good stout stick – it’s all back up there where it should be!

(audience erupts with gales of nervous laughter, over which Sedayne sings the concluding verse of The Innocent Hare):

- This hare has led us a noble run – success to sportsmen every one. This hare has led us a noble run – success to sportsmen every one. Such a chase she has led us, four hours or more. Such a chase she has led us, four hours or more. Wine and beer we’ll drink without fear, we’ll drink a success to the innocent hare!

To what degree to you see an interconnection between folktake and folksong?

Ballad narrative seems to operate in similar way to that of folktale, which is how we get innumerable variations on the same basic song form, right through Child and beyond. My favourite internet folk site, by the way, is the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection, which contains 1600 field recorded folksongs from the Ozark mountains. It’s a seriously wonderful place to be, and seriously significant too – just look up Mrs Pearl Brewer and listen to her singing of “All Down by the Greenwoodside (The Cruel Mother)” and see what I mean. I’m not altogether sure if the two are connected in any actual sense – very rarely do we find the narratives of songs turning up as stories, or vice versa. Of course there are exceptions – “King Orfeo (Child #19)” for example is the Greek Myth of Orpheus, albeit in a bi-lingual ballad setting from the Shetland Islands – but this is very rare.

How do you view the delicate balance between tradition and innovation? On the one hand, you utilise a great deal of traditional material, both in your music and your storytelling. At the same time, anyone who knows your music will concede that is often far from traditional, compared to how traditional folk music is usually played. What do you consider your role within this tradition?

I have this trinity in which the three aspects of cultural process entwine: 1) The primal & the ancestral – 2) The historical & the traditional – and 3) The creative and the experimental. Without being too deliberate about it, I’m dealing with all three – separately, or together – most of the time. I don’t see myself as a musician in any conventional sense of the word – I’m a free improvising instrumental pluralist primarily interested in anomalous sound, as I have been since my grandparents bought me the little whistle flute forty years ago – at least since my teacher said it wasn’t a proper musical instrument! I’m not hung up on conventional systems simply because I don’t understand them – it’s not how my brain works; I never hear anything as being ‘out of tune’ in terms of tonality – be it bird song or whatever – so what emerges is by way of a more corporeal virtue, and this relates directly to my understanding of the instruments themselves, but rarely, if ever, in any sort of traditional context. For example, when I’m singing purely traditional English folk songs (by English I mean in English – so anything from England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia & America basically) I’ll use either a Hungarian zither or a Turkish fiddle to accompany myself. Neither of these are traditional in any musical or cultural sense, but both these instruments empower my entire understanding of the songs on a purely subjective level, which ultimately is the only level that matters.
I love traditional music in a traditional context, but I’m not really part of that, only as a singer and storyteller, where I can be a bit of a traddy / purist, but that’s just an aspect of what I am, because to accompany the stories I’ll invariably be improvising on the crwth or citera, riding the wind of a very vivid sort of spontaneous immediacy. Otherwise I’m dealing with music on a very intuitive, spontaneous and improvised level the whole time – themes emerge, likewise structures, but as to the morphology of those structures I couldn’t say precisely what they are in and of themseves, or what they might be analogous to. Analogues do fascinate me – real or imagined – but there’s seldom anything conscious about it. I might have a conscious idea, but I’ve no notion as to what the outcome might be. For example, the whole character of Sundog is determined by his collection of Jew’s Harps (on the download bit of John Barleycorn Reborn you can hear me improvising in the church of Kilpeck in Herefordshire, famous for its Romanesque carvings, using the Jew’s Harp to interact with the resonant / sacred space of the church itself) and for a while I’ve been dreaming about doing a music using just Jew’s Harps and pocket trumpet, with only a vague sense of how this music would actually work, but what actually emerged was something else altogether. I’m still working on this, but there’s bits of it on a recent WWW freebie and another on my Myspace site.
I suppose it’s rather like baking bread – a very intuitive process – but people have been baking bread for countless thousands of years but we continue to do so out of a different sort of necessity which isn’t so bound up with being self-consciously traditional or historical, or in any way authentic, it’s just about baking bread; likewise the very act of procreation – where would we be without it?

Links:

• Plough Myth International
• Sabrina Eden (YouTube)
• Sedayne (MySpace)
• Sundog (MySpace)
• The Ha-Ha (MySpace)
• Rachel McCarron (MySpace)

February 2008 – guest interview by Peter Webb. [Comments in Brackets by O.S.]

Photograph by Renée Rosen.

Tursa (http://www.myspace.com/tursa and http://www.tursa.com) as a record label and production house has gone through a number of significant changes and developments in the last two years. [...]]]> Interview with Tony Wakeford and Reeve Malka

February 2008 – guest interview by Peter Webb.
[Comments in Brackets by O.S.]

Photograph by Renée Rosen.

Tursa (http://www.myspace.com/tursa and http://www.tursa.com) as a record label and production house has gone through a number of significant changes and developments in the last two years. Tony Wakeford‘s band of merry troubadours Sol Invictus (http://www.myspace.com/solinvictushq) have been at the centre of the majority of releases by the Tursa label but it is now branching out much further than it ever has before. Sol, reflective of Tony’s personal musical vision and an expression of a remarkable personal journey that has dealt with some of the political contradictions, interests, preoccupations and ideas of a period of British culture stretching from the 1970s to today, have fostered an extremely independent music and cultural scene that developed from punk and post-punk through Industrial to the folk noir or neo-folk scene today. There is little literature on this very underground of scenes, David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse and Diesel and Gerten’s Looking for Europe being notable exceptions, but a cursory glance at the WWW shows a massive number of websites, myspace pages, forums, record labels and distributors who are involved in this area (see Soleilmoon, Tesco, Dark Vinyl, Athanor, Cynfeird, Strange Fortune, Trisol, Woven Wheat Whispers, Cold Spring, Eis Und Licht, Hau Ruck amongst others). Although the scene is not recognised in much mainstream music press (Zero Tolerance being an important exception) across Europe the artists and fans of the scene have created a vibrant and thoughtful music and cultural underground that has explored and fore-grounded ideas about paganism, ecology, individualism, anarchism and local cultural tradition. There are also elements within this scene that foreground philosophical areas attached to the New Right but these groups are thankfully small and marginal to the majority of the scene.

Tony, as an English artist, has honed his craft with Sol through many different phases. The early recordings of raw edgy guitar, bass and drums have given way to an evolving complexity of strings, oboes, violin, bodhrán, found sound samples, acoustic guitar and bass all set off with Tony’s affecting and brooding vocal style that is particularly emotive. The subject matter on the early releases discussed themes related to Paganism and Magick, now those themes have given way to examinations of Religion, Nationalism, Individualism, Love and the strange and rare beast that is English culture. Tony had solely run Tursa as a label inspired in part by David Tibet and his early releases of Current 93 and Nurse With Wound on the Maldoror, United Dairies and eventually Durtro labels (http://www.durtro.com). Death In June also had run their own New European Recordings label, this though had mainly been Douglas P’s baby (http://www.deathinjune.net), so Tony, once he had started Sol Invictus, decided he needed to take control of his own destiny and developed his own label on the Enterprise Allowance scheme (a 1980s government attempt to get people off of welfare and on the road to capitalist enterprise). Although he didn’t become the Richard Branson of the Post-industrial scene he made a concerted attempt at presenting his work and selling it to a wider public. Over the years the label has released 23 Sol Invictus albums and also albums by Skald, Sieben and Algiz. After being through a turbulent relationship with World Serpent (a distributor and finance vehicle for Tursa which ended in a collapse and bankruptcy of the company and left Tony with a large number of debts and non-payment of royalties) he decided to develop Tursa partly as a label in its own right and partly to license recordings to other labels. As the 2000s progressed and the Internet started to instigate massive changes in the wider world of music it also had a huge effect on underground scenes like the Neofolk/post-industrial scene. The net encouraged a decline in sales of recorded music through peer to peer file sharing but also brought people and music scenes together in closer ties through networking sites like MySpace, forums, websites and web communities. With all this in mind Tony has revamped and re-energised Tursa in a number of ways.

Firstly he met the Israeli and Jewish artist M or Reeve Malka. Reeve and Tony first linked up through ‘the evil’ that is MySpace. Reeve had been doing some work with Jarboe (on a yet to be released project) and Tony having worked with Jarboe in the past took a look at Reeve’s work. The two of them corresponded and hit it off. They started to look to ways in which they could collaborate. Reeve is a musician (M, Init, Hatch, The Miller Test – see http://www.idv33.com.) but also a talented producer and they decided that a fruitful relationship could be developed firstly with Reeve as a producer of Tony’s work and secondly as a joint label owner for Tursa as his business acumen was much more refined than the humble Wakeford’s, something he all too readily admits. Their first released work has been Tony’s solo album Into the Woods, a layered, textured and beautifully crafted album that highlights Tony’s structured song-writing on tracks like “Down the Road Slowly” and “The Devil went a travelling” and also his ability to produce dense atmospheric slabs of brooding ambience that evoke, in this albums case, an England of old, steeped in enchantment, magic, fear and mysticism on “Into the Woods” but also so readily brought back to earth lyrically in tracks like “The Hangman’s Son” and “The London Hanged”. The album has shown how the new relationship between Tony and Reeve is beginning to blossom into something quite special. They have also been working on the Orchestra Noir project and a check of the MySpace page of the band also shows the way in which Tony and Reeve’s collaboration is beginning to shape the project into a stimulating mix of classicism, ambient textures and vocal combinations of Tony, Autumn Grieve and Jessica Constable.

As a new business partnership and production house Tony and Reeve have gone about constructing a small empire of acts and bands that initially have come mainly from Tony’s own creative vision. He continues the project Orchestra Noir (http://www.myspace.com/orchestranoir) with a host of musicians some of which are `names’ on the classical scene: Guy Harries (flute, oboe – http://www.myspace.com/guyharries), Mark Baigent (http://www.myspace.com/markbaigentoboe), Richard Moult, Alexandria Lawrence, etc. He also has developed a number of new projects – The Triple Tree with Andrew King (http://www.myspace.com/thetripletree), Grey Force Wakeford with Nick Grey and Kris Force (http://www.myspace.com/greyforcewakeford), Wardrobe with Andrew Liles (http://www.myspace.com/andrewowenliles) and his own solo project. Tony and Reeve have also gone about adding a new set of interesting artists to the Tursa stable: The Zunroyz: a Ukrainian folk band and the melancholic and atmospheric pop of London based Hong Kong in the 60s.

The rest of this decade looks like being an exciting one for the ever-expanding group of musicians associated with Tursa. With these new developments in mind and also wanting to get Tony’s take on his life and the various paths that he has taken up till now, I sat down for a cup of tea and a slice of Zucchini cake at Tony’s London residence with himself and Reeve Malka. We started by exploring Tony’s first interest in politics and discussed his membership of the International Socialist organization (who later morphed into the Socialist Workers Party):

PW – Tell me about your relationship with the International Socialists and your time as a member with them:

TW – Basically they (The IS) came to the door one day to sell my sister a copy of their paper, her being a member of the hoi polloi and all and she got involved. I was about 13 at the time she was 6 years older than me, she was a skinhead girl and I was a little mini skinhead. For me it started as an easy way to get into pubs, as most of the meetings were in pubs, then of course eventually you get involved, she started going out with one of the blokes in the party. So I got involved and became quite active and for a socialist or far left group I think they were one of the best around at the time or the best of a bad lot. They were quite easy going and had a sense of humour and it wasn’t dogmatic but it eventually morphed into the horror that is the SWP [Socialist Workers Party, Wikipedia].

PW – So in terms of the politics did you get disillusioned with them?

TW – Well I was a real mixture of things, my dad was a shop steward and an ex-military policeman and he was a supporter of Enoch Powell so I was a real mixture from my upbringing. I was very socialist, I was in a council estate that was right next to St Georges Hill which was one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the country at that time. The houses there were full of rock stars, my dad had become a taxi driver and used to drive the stars and rich Arabs about, so there was a weird mixture of different competing prejudices within me. I considered myself to be pretty socialist and left wing but also I was pretty racist as a lot of people were. So there was a real mixture of different views. I also got involved in a lot of the anti-fascist campaigns of the time which is quite ironic as I get a lot of criticism now but I have probably punched more fascists than a lot of the people who criticise me have. There was for me no real disillusionment with the International Socialists but when the SWP came along and dominated the Rock Against Racism campaign and threw people like us into any warzone they could then I got fed up with it. The problems of the far left i.e. being very middle class dominated and the level of self hatred that is expressed where nothing English can ever be any good. All cultures are a mixture of good and bad.
It is a shame that today there still seems to be a self hatred that I think Orwell (George) talked about that is destructive and negative and alienating to a lot of people.

PW – Was that one of the reasons that you got disillusioned then?

TW – Yes it was just how we were treated as members. It is the same with all of these extremist groups they live in their own bubble. You can say exactly the same about parts of the far right; they’ve no connection to reality. Both extremes seem to meet up as `culty’ conspiracy loons. Certainly the far left and the working class could be living on different planets.

PW – So in terms of the music, which was very political at that point, Crisis were very political in a leftist sense, but then you move out of the far left, Crisis splits up and later Death In June forms. Then there is a use of symbolism that is associated with the far right and a whole image that seems to come from a far right aesthetic. Was part of the appeal of that politics and aesthetic finding; as Douglas P is quoted as saying, the ‘left wing’ of National Socialism or even of finding the socialist element of those politics and being attracted by that?

TW – Yes, I think that one of the dangers of being heavily involved in anti-fascism is the danger of attraction. You define yourself in opposition to something so much that you become obsessive. You find out more about it and it gets weird. I had always been a socialist but I didn’t see what was wrong with liking your country and being patriotic and I thought that the views of the British working people were being ignored. So, of course, in the name of a socialism that is patriotic and is interested in what is happening here and not a thousand miles away I looked around. So as I got disillusioned with the left then that became an interest. So when you find out about the Strasser Brothers [Wikipedia] and their ideas, it seemed to click with me, on a certain level and unfortunately, for me, it coincided with the NF [National Front, Wikipedia] having that strain within them. I remember picking up a magazine and being quite surprised because it was quite left wing. So when the members of left organisations are telling you that the NF are the boot boys of capitalism and a bosses front and then you read their material and it seems to be the total opposite of that so rather naively you think okay maybe there is something here. Maybe this is an alternative. I have to add that I was the only one to be stupid enough to fall for it. Neither Doug or Pat [Patrick Leagas] shared my death wish. But the reason that I do deeply regret it is the fact that, regardless of that the underlying strain of that politics is, or at least was then, anti-Semitism. That was also the bizarre thing that apart from having the left wing affectation of being very anti-Israel, I had had Jewish girlfriends before then, the Crisis song “Holocaust” was about the Nazi’s and the extermination program and I was very anti-Nazi and that is one of the real shameful things of it is that you get involved in the bubble that is far right politics and things you don’t believe in get ignored. When I joined I said that I was very socialist and patriotic and I don’t want to know about this holocaust denial and anti–Jewish stuff, I think that is bonkers. Then you get into it, you get in this bubble, you’re drinking and meeting with people and you just let things slide and in the end, I’m ashamed to say, you go out on the piss or to a party and you realise it’s for some dead genocidal maniacs birthday or something. At one point you would have been shocked at that, but because you are in this political bubble you just go along with it. Now, looking back on it, you realize you were aligning yourself to something that had they won power somewhere, would mean that many of your friends, and your wife would not have even been born.

PW – The NF were very good at recruiting amongst football casuals, young guys that were into music, culture and fighting and who were patriotic, socialist in some senses but had the feeling that the left was full of middle class intellectuals. But these people often got fed up with the leaderships of these organisations, wondered about their motivations and often when the more extreme elements of the racism came to the fore it contradicted their relationships with young black kids in their cities, workplaces or schools. How did you see the leadership of these organisations?

TW – I think that with all parties and extremist politics the further you go up the greasy pole the more corrupt and un-idealistic it becomes. You get all these Muppets on the ground, whether it is the NF or the SWP, who get their hands dirty and do all the groundwork but the further you go up the organisation the more cynical and corrupt it becomes. It’s all a bit of a cult.

PW – So when did you decide that you had had enough of that and when did you decide to move away from those politics?

TW – This period, for me, coincided with low level criminality, drugs (the taking and pushing of), drinking far too much, a general downward spiral. I woke up one day and realised that if the police had knocked on the door and come in and searched then I would have `gone away’ for a long period of time. I felt that despite all the changes in the NF and all the different ideas that the underlying ethos was still that the Jews are to blame. Even though there were some of us in the NF who would say that `if it rains they’ll blame the Jews’. Also, even though I was racist the idea of attacking someone because of their ethnic identity felt horrific, I was always polite to people in general whatever their background, because I’m very old school English like that. If people are polite to me then I am polite back. In fact I hate people’s bad manners far more than anything else, so it just wasn’t me. So although the people in the NF weren’t all the Devil incarnate there were some utter scumbags who should have been put down, so I thought what the hell am I doing, this just isn’t me. So I tried to just untangle myself from it all and it wasn’t immediate , it was a gradual process of getting out of it.

PW – So like leaving any organisation that you have spent time in you still have friendships with some of these people. Would it be fair to say that you maintained relationships with some people who had been in the organisation after you left?

TW – Most of the friendships that I had with people were with people that also became disillusioned with the politics. So very soon after leaving I didn’t have friendships with anyone who was still in the NF. Friendships in those organisations, just like the SWP, are often about being in the organisation and after you leave the friendship is dead, you become an outcast. It’s like a crap version of the Mafia. But yeh I don’t know anyone now who is a member of, or active in any of those organisations on the Far Right. But the people who left, we used to get together occasionally over a pint and have a moan and complain and it would always end up with us saying “what the fuck were we doing?”. Of course you still have residual views that carry on for a period of time but the further away you get from it the less you have those ideas. I mean now I’m the least that way inclined than ever, I don’t have any interest in it whatsoever. I find it quite alien. For me the past really is another country.

PW – So in terms of your trajectory since leaving the NF and DIJ what are the themes of Sol that are key concerns of yours. There seems to be a concentration on Englishness, Paganism, the Occult, the Runes, Religion are these new influences for you, or are they themes that are carried on from your earlier path?

TW – Yes, I think to be self critical, that I always needed a crutch of a big idea or a utopian dream. I think that the interest in Magic, the runes and Paganism was trying to fill a gap in a way and of course the Occult is just like all these political organisations in that it’s `cranksville’, people in bed sit thinking that they are great, either they are the new Lenin, Mosley or Aleister Crowley but the fact is they are wankers. In the end you come to the conclusion to mis-quote the Marx Brothers “that any organisation that wants you as a member is probably one that you don’t want to join”. I still find it very hard to look back on a lot of this stuff; I have just pushed it down not because I want to keep it a secret but because I’m embarrassed about it. I just want to forget about it but of course life is not like that. The English love belonging to things whether it is the Women’s Institute or Trainspotters and I guess that I have been a more extreme and sociopathic version of that.

PW – In terms of Sol’s development as that progressed and you got disillusioned with the magical and pagan elements of it what were the themes that remained strong for you in that work?

TW – I think that running all the way through it for good or ill is that I am an English artist and a lot of the music I like reflects a sense of place or culture because otherwise you are just playing lift music for corporate crap. Maybe I’m just being hopelessly reactionary but I think that music should be an expression of the artist. Part of what an artist is, not the only thing, but one thing is where you come from and the culture that you were brought up with and that should be reflected in the art you produce. So I am a very English artist and whether that is good or bad, I don’t know, but that is what I am. So all the hang ups and obsession of living on a little island, all the class, sexual and religious hang ups that England or Britain resonates with all come out in the music. Also, more generally, I write on a more personal perspective now. I’ve tub-thumped for long enough. So in the end how individuals think and feel and act is far more interesting than sprouting some ideology. Politics and art are very uncomfortable bed fellows. Especially when with music, they’re ending up singing alibis for murderers.

PW – So, when you take a good look at your lyrics over the last ten years then I would say that a lot of what you are expressing is the contradiction, the madness, the chaos of English life.

TW – Absolutely!

PW – Rather than saying isn’t this great, let’s fly the flag, it seems to be saying look at what is going on in this culture and look at the strangeness of it. Would you say that is a fair comment on your work?

TW – I am a bit embarrassed by flag waving, I like the kitsch value of it but I do know that it should be kitsch. So the whole contradictions of the English whether… I think that there is a quote that says “brave soldiers, cowardly civilians” if you stick a uniform and a medal on them they’ll die for you but in everyday life if you say jump they’ll say how high. There is also the whole class thing that I think a lot of Europeans don’t understand you know you can open your mouth in a pub and half the people in there will hate you – maybe it is not as much now but it is still there. The whole sexual hang up thing, I came from a very repressive working class family, my parents didn’t even undress in front of each other. I know that sounds ridiculous but it happens and those things have an effect on you. My dad was… another reason that I can speak about these things now, and my wife pointed this out to me, is that with a lot of the politics stuff etc. while my parents were still alive I didn’t want that to come out. My dad was one of those that liberated Neuengamme concentration camp, he had a walking stick… while I was in the NF I pushed all this aside, but I suddenly remembered that it was a walking stick that had been carved by one of the inmates as a thank-you to the soldiers who liberated them. It was very nice piece with the name of the concentration camp on it. Now that my parents are dead I feel more comfortable talking about these issues.

PW – How do you see yourself now? Sometimes you may be described as a Libertarian; do you think that is fair?

TW – In some ways I am a libertarian but there are certain issues that I have strong views on; People who are cruel to animals. Rapists and paedophiles, bullies in general I guess. I’m still a fascist when it comes to stuff like that. But apart from that if people aren’t hurting other people then they should be able to do what they like. That is another thing with the far right is that they had an irrational hatred of homosexuals; people have different views on things but nobody should be killed or discriminated against for who they sleep with.

RM – I think that it is easier for me because I have followed Tony’s music from the early years; a friend of mine introduced me to Sol Invictus and Death In June. I was attracted to Tony’s music because I think he maybe unconsciously developed this winning musical formula of one’s ideas, ideals and opinions through lyrics rendered by folk style music with an experimental nature (needless to mention that folk symbolizes the togetherness) topped with aggression, anger, beauty, mystery, the occult, and many other moods and emotions.

PW – So on the musical front there was definitely a strong feeling from you for what Sol was doing?

RM – Certainly, I loved what Sol Invictus is about, the lyrics and the way to hint and hide behind the words has a definite effect, his good old English sense of humour, the witty language, the insinuations, all of it is Tony’s artistic persona!

PW – What about your background as an Orthodox Israeli Jew? When you hear about Tony’s past how did you feel about that?

RM – I see things in a healthy way, you never judge a person for his opinions only for his actions.
If the good man had murdered someone or something like that then I definitely wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Everybody goes through changes and we always grow. I have to admit and it may seem strange but I knew nothing about Tony’s personal life till I met him, personally I have no intentions to know any details about a musician besides his music. I knew vaguely that there was something about DIJ and colleagues but never bothered to know more or stick my nose in someone else’s business, I’m not the type of person, I don’t like it and I don’t like when someone does it to me. It was after our first meeting when Tony emailed me a true and sincere email about his past, I then figured and said ah, so he was the trouble maker. I simply admired his openness and the good that he is after and took no time to reply yes, we’re going to work together! I have worked with big names in the industry and I will mention no names but there are some who did more harm and were anti-Semitic, people you least expect, but they often put on an efficient disguise.

PW – So now that the two of you are working together in Tursa, have you become a creative part of it as well as a financial part of it?

RM – Yes I am a creative and financial partner.

PW – Sol has this Neo-folk tag attached to it which sometimes makes sense and sometimes not at all and you come from a background where you have been into a wide variety of music and music scenes, do you see these tags as being useful in terms of an audience or categorisation?

RM – Basically I don’t like tags nor categories, I don’t like or want to have the need to explain my art or my intentions, it is strictly up to the individual to absorb and to experience it. It is up to the stores to categorize for efficiency and effectiveness of sales. The Neo-folk tag seems to work as long as the artist has no intention to limit his creativity and vision to one style of working. Artists should not use the Neo-folk flag as a style that can get stagnant and not be explored developed or progressed. I think it is quite unfortunate that the Neo-folk has a reputation that identifies with certain movements and ideals, as far as I am concerned most of the artists I listened to recently in this genre are simple copycats and some of them have got it very wrong or they simply don’t understand!

PW – The other development at the moment seems to be Orchestra Noir. There have been two previous projects that were quite classical in approach, what is the approach being taken with the new ON project?

TW – It’s got, not so much of the martial elements, I’m really tired of all these martial sounding acts, casio panzer divisions, plastic kettle drums etc. Richard and I when we first got together on this wanted to do something more emotional, much more personal but with classical elements and other ideas coming into it.

PW – Has that become much more of a band or unit as a whole?

TW – Well it used to be French based and now it is UK based. A lot of the people are now in London or the South East so it can come together much more easily now. Hopefully we will actually be able to play live. That won’t be easy especially with the nature of things as they are now (the expense of live performance) and with the fact that there are up to ten people involved. But the core of the project is me, Richard (Moult), Reeve and Mark (Baigent), the horrendously talented oboe player that we all hate. There is a lot of potential there, before I was knocking it out and someone else was arranging it where as now it is far more. Well not a democratic band because the ideas originate with me but Reeve gets involved. So for example the track “The Last Train”, Richard sent me a piano piece, there was a passage I liked so I looped it, wrote some bass and some lyrics and then everyone else got involved. Reeve created a really good percussion part that changed the direction of the piece, so it is a very interesting project.

RM – The track “Unto Eden” is an example of the new direction that we might take ON in, not for this coming album, but certainly for the next.

PW – So I’m not sure how many projects that you are now involved in, is it 7, why do think that you are involved in so many projects?

TW – I think that partly it is… I’m not sure really. I really enjoy that side of things and I hate the business side of things and Reeve as well as being an artist can do the business side. I think that some projects, like for example The Triple Tree – the M.R. James project, originally that was an Orchestra Noir project but it seemed to be too rigid for that so Andrew King and I developed that work. So these projects arise because we have such a big pool of fantastic musicians and within the Tursa family there seems to be no big egos. I’ve been in the music industry for a long time and I don’t know who is worst for ego versus talent; drama students or musicians. But within Tursa we have a great bunch of musicians who have no need for huge egos; they know they’re good and I know they’re good. We all respect each other and so far there has been no problem. I’m never sure whether those with the big egos are those who are lacking in talent?

With The Triple Tree, this started out as a one off project for Woven Wheat Whispers, a great on-line site that Mark Coyle started. He is a real unsung hero of the folk scene and I am very proud to have the Tursa catalogue as part of it.

PW – When people look at Tursa from the outside and don’t know about the development of it and Tony’s development they may look at someone like Richard Moult and ask questions about him e.g. where has he come from, he had links to an organisation that were on the extreme edges of Satanism and National Socialism, does he still have those ideas? He is not here himself so he can’t talk about it but how would you describe that relationship?

TW – The bizarre thing about it is that I didn’t know about Richards past at all until fairly recently and as soon as it came out I thought “oh no this is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream”. I found out about him through Current 93 and his artwork and I thought that his work would be good for an album. When I was thinking about the solo album I contacted him and said that I really love your artwork and would you consider doing an album cover for me. He said that he would love to and we got talking and he said that he really loved the Orchestra Noir stuff and if you ever need someone to tinkle the keyboards then I’d love to do that. So we started collaborating and like a lot of these things nowadays you don’t meet, you send stuff to each other and work on it. But on one occasion he was coming up to London to do some stuff with us and I thought it was a good opportunity to have a conversation with him. Because of my past I like to tell people about it, I did it with Reeve because he is Jewish, Lesley and Caroline because they are gay.

RM – Yes he sent me an e-mail and we had a chat and I thought: great, this person is very genuine.

TW – There is always a cloud hanging over you, especially if they have a good reason to be offended by my past. But with Richard he was just a painter from Wales, so he came up and we were working and I thought I’ll make him a cup of tea and tell him. So I said `Richard I’ve got something to tell you’ and he said `well I’ve got something to tell you too’. I said `do you know about my past’ and he said `oh yes I know all about your past, don’t worry about it’. He then said `do you know the group the Order of the Nine Angles’ and I thought `oh my god, of course I know, David bloody Myatt!’. For me all of that is way beyond the pale, whatever he has been involved in whether it has been far right politics, magic or Islamic stuff, the underlying core of it has been a virulent anti-Semitism. For me that is just too much and I would never have any sympathy with any of that shit, I never will have and Richard knows that. If I thought that Richard was still involved in any of that then it would be `goodbye’. But for me I had to tell people who I wanted to work with about my past, like Reeve, Caroline, Lesley and they have been very gracious and understanding, so what am I meant to do when someone comes to me and says something that is of a similar situation. I couldn’t tell him to fuck off. I did think when he first said it that I might go for a piss and come back and find the cat with its throat cut splayed inside a pentagram, but he said to me that this was ten years ago and he totally rejects it now. So I thought okay, fair enough, if this is genuinely in the past then let’s keep working but I know that this will cause a load of shit and people will use it to stir things up. He is however ultra sensitive about it and he does think that he was stupid, but we know that if this wasn’t in the past then we couldn’t work together anymore. For me all the David Copeland stuff and everything about them is beyond the pale. I have been through some really shameful, horrible things in my life so it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to not treat him with respect when he says he has turned his back on those ideas. But of course, if I was looking at it from the outside then I would think look at these connections, but I genuinely didn’t know at the time and now we have resolved all of that. If I was part of some underground occult movement trying to pervert our pop kids then I think I would go about it in a slightly more undercover way.

PW – Another side to this, away from the politics is the classical and operatic side that Richard has brought to the Orchestra Noir project. He has a background in interpretations of Britten’s work and pastoral music and it seems to have brought another element into the project.

TW – Yes it really does and he has brought something else to it. There are some disparate strands involved but they work really well together and everyone who is working on it has said that they feel it is a very special project.

RM – Yes classical, experimental, ambient even some pop elements there is not much like it out there at the moment. The way this music is performed we achieve an emotional response, strong and soft at the same time, intelligent and elegant songs and we all seem to love the outcome- it is an extremely strong band!

PW – Before it has just been your voice, but now you are bringing in some female vocals to it. What was the thinking behind that?

TW – I’m not the biggest fan of my voice and with this project I thought that there was a definite need for contrast, because the female voice takes it into different areas and gives it a different feel. The contrast between the two is good, the melodies get more interesting. With the project you have Mark Baigent, who is one of the best oboe players in Europe and he is classically trained, but he can improvise and that adds to the sound and suits a variety of voices.

RM – He’s great, he can produce anything with his oboe!

TW – Then there is me, I don’t know that many chords, I just play what I play, but within that and with Reeve and Guy (Harries) who are great musicians, we gel really well and there is a great feeling about the group.

PW – So you have an album that is being completed and that is going to be released next year and that is coming out with which label?

TW – We don’t know yet. We are leaving our options open because we are not sure who to go with. It is a very important release and I don’t want it to trickle out and do a thousand. So we want it to come out on the right label that will really push it and promote it.

PW – For the Orchestra Noir stuff you, Reeve, have brought a lot of different feels to the music especially in the percussion end of things.

RM – Yes, I look at each song and lay down what is needed, lacking or what will make it work. I am a percussionist by nature and I always push towards rhythm but in the end it is up to us to decide on the production and the image of the project.

PW – So in terms of Sol Invictus? What is the plan there?

TW – We have an album planned for 2008 which at the moment is called The Cruellest Month. The last album was 2005 and this one has gone through many stages. It has been percolating for many months. It started off as basic guitar and voice and since then we have added a lot to that which may get stripped off again the nearer we get to the final mixes. Reeve has got some ideas for cello and trumpet parts so we again are going to spend time on it because it is also an important release. It will be the first studio album with this line up. So we are going to take our time and get it right. But I am very happy with the way it is going I think it will be a very good release.

PW – Apart from Orchestra Noir and Sol Invictus, what about The Triple Tree and Grey Force Wakeford?

TW – Grey Force Wakeford (a collaboration between Tony Wakeford, Kris Force and Nick Grey) is all done and dusted as an album, Athanor are going to be putting that out next year. The Triple Tree will be put out by Cold Spring in January. Also Renee and I did a concert in Norway, with a communist promoter no less, and friends of his have a band that are mainly accapella with bits of percussion but amazingly beautiful. So we may do some work with them on Tursa or with Orchestra Noir and bring something out.

PW – So you are using Tursa for some projects and other labels for others like Cold Spring for example. They put out a CD from the concert you did last year, how is the relationship with them working?

TW – Yes that relationship is good. Justin has been really supportive and has stuck by us after the World Serpent fiasco. I like the fact that he is generally a good bloke and he has been very good with us. He organised a good concert and put out the compilation so he’s been fantastic. I don’t like everything on the label but you could say that about most labels and it is his project. So he has always treated me very fairly and likes The Triple Tree. God that sounds so sycophantic. He is a northern git and Cold Spring is just a front for dwarf smuggling into the UK. Something should be done!

PW – So in a way this is an example of the diversification in the music industry using different labels and looking at how those labels may connect you to audiences etc?

TW – Exactly, we will have the Tursa logo on the albums but we are using lots of different labels and we see ourselves as almost a production label. But that is the way the industry is going it is all about diversification and the whole industry at the moment is in flux.

PW – And what about your other projects Reeve?

RM – I am doing a project called iNiT as well as Hatch with my dear friend and a colleague of 12 years Guy Harries and I’m quite proud of them. iNiT is electronic pop rock infused with middle eastern influences and people seem to really love it and dance to it. With iNiT we are looking for a major label as it is pop and dance orientated music. I also work and perform under the name of M and have a few unreleased albums of which one is double album masterpiece with Jarboe of Swans and I’ll release them when the time is right!

I also play in and produce The Miller Test also on Tursa, as well as Zunroyz which is a band I was commissioned to put on together for a few highly successful shows and then had a pressure to record an album and when I gave Tony a copy we decided to bring it to the Tursa repertoire.

PW – Are there any other projects that you are involved with at present Tony?

TW- I’m working on a solo album for the Israeli label The Eastern Front. I met Tanya and Igor who run the label when I was staying in Tel Aviv. The album will be called Not All Of Me Will Die and is based on the poems of the Polish poetess Zuzanna Ginczanka. I’m exploiting the talents of people from Zunroyz, Sol and Orchestra Noir on it. I’m very pleased with how it’s going. I find the couple of poems by her translated into English very moving and powerful. She was shot by the Nazis in Krakow just before the end of the war. She was denounced to them by a neighbour. Her work was ignored by the Communists. I guess being Jewish and having friends in the Polish resistance did not put her in Uncle Joe’s top ten.

With that I finished my Zucchini cake and cup of tea with soya milk said my goodbyes and headed for the exit. Tursa and the individuals that make it up, as a production label and a group of musicians are producing music of real quality that stretches way beyond the confines of a narrowly defined Neo-folk whilst also maintaining its relationship with that audience. Tony Wakeford has forged an interesting and productive relationship with Reeve Malka and a listen to the various MySpace pages of Sol Invictus, Orchestra Noir, The Triple Tree, Grey Force Wakeford and Tursa show the breadth of music that Wakeford is instrumental in producing. The story of Tursa is also one of change. Tony Wakeford’s own personal journey reflects this change and shows how a simplistic view of someone’s political history can never capture the place that they have come to. Wakeford seems at one with himself and very open to a discussion of a period of his life which now is well and truly behind him. The future looks increasingly good for the various projects that Tursa has instigated in the last few years and the label is striving to provide an alternative beacon for independent music and production in the 21st century.

[Interview with Tony Wakeford and Reeve Malka, London, September 2007. Written and undertaken by Peter Webb, February 2008]

Links:

• Tursa (Official Website)
• Tursa (MySpace)
• Sol Invictus (MySpace)
• Reeve Malka (Official Website)
• Orchestra Noir (MySpace)
• The Triple Tree (MySpace)
• Grey Force Wakeford (MySpace)
• Andrew Liles (MySpace)
• Guy Harries (MySpace)
• Mark Baigent (MySpace)