Tag: electronic

[Interview] Carl Stone

Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music.  He studied composition at CalArts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. He was among the vanguard of artists incorporating turntables, early digital samplers, and personal computers into live electronic music composition. An adopter of the Max programming language while it was still in its earliest development at the IRCAM research center, Stone continues to use it as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with other improvisers. In addition to his work as a composer, Stone served as Music Director of KPFK-FM in Los Angeles from 1978-1981, director of Meet the Composer California from 1981-1997, and President of the American Music Center from 1992-1995. He is currently a faculty member of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan. His most recent retrospective compilation, Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, is out now on Unseen Worlds and can be purchased here.

Interview by Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett, who recently collaborated as CV & JAB on Thoughts of a Dot as it Travels a Surface.

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CV: How long have you been living in Japan?

CS: It’s coming up on seventeen years. I’ve been coming to Japan since the 80’s to work on projects, and in the spring of 2001 I got a six month residency at IAMAS, a media art institution in the middle of the country. While I was there I was offered a job as a professor at a university, so I kind of never went back to the US.

JAB: So you live in Tokyo–what are you teaching there?

CS: Well, the job that I was offered in 2001 actually wasn’t at a music school or even an art school. I’m was in the media department of the School of Information Science, which is now a straight ahead School of Engineering. I’m teaching things like music technology, programming for music, sound design, and acoustic aesthetics. I’ve recently started guest lecturing at Tokyo University, where I teach a course on music technology, and it’s also geared towards programmers and people in the sciences than towards artists.

JAB: You’re mainly working in Max/MSP now, right?

CS: Yes. I don’t know a lot of other programming languages. Max/MSP is one that I specialize in. (laughing) I’m a monoglot.

photo by Tomohiro Ueshiba

JAB: Have you always worked with emerging technologies in your music, or was there a period before you started using computers where you were like, playing a saxophone?

CS: I studied piano from the age of five, but I wasn’t very good and didn’t like practicing, so it didn’t go that far. But then in junior high and high school I played in some bands. I played with the musician Z’EV who you may have heard of—he sadly passed away recently. He played drums, I played keyboards, and we had a bass player by the name of James Stewart. The three of us were a power trio: organ, bass, and drums. No vocals. I played washboard and drums in a jug band, so I have an instrumental background, but I switched to using synthesizers when I first started college in 1969. After that I started performing with turntables, which wasn’t necessarily cutting edge technology, since turntables had been around for quite awhile, but people weren’t really using them in live performance in those days. When the personal computer came along and became smaller and practical, I started using that in the 80’s.

CV: And you studied at CalArts?

CS: Yes, that’s right. My teacher was Morton Subotnick.

CV: I read that while you were there, you started working with samples when you had a job transferring LPs to cassette.

CS: Yes! (laughing) Using found music was a starting point. I wasn’t sampling while I was doing that, I was just fulfilling a job backing up LP records. But it gave me the spirit of the idea, because I was noticing these sound collisions and combinations. I would have two or three different turntables playing all at once while I was doing these backups, so I noticed that it was interesting and I got the idea to try different combinations in my own music, to make new contexts for familiar music or unfamiliar music. That’s what got me off the launching pad, even though I wasn’t really composing at the time–I was just doing my job.

CV: Did you ever use any of the material from the job in your music?

CS: Well, there were a few of those records which I had never heard before that stuck with me and they do end up showing up in later works. For example, there was a great release of music from Burundi and I really fell in love with that album. The sample that I used from that album actually shows up as a starting point for my piece called “Banteay Srey,” which I wrote 15 years later and is part of the release that’s coming out on Unseen Worlds pretty soon.

JAB: That’s amazing. That’s the first piece on the record, I think? It’s a vocal sample?

CS: Yes.

CV: We both do a lot of sampling as well, so listening to the upcoming release I was really struck by how contemporary and relevant it sounds. The technology hasn’t changed all that much.

CS: I think that the technology has changed and evolved in ways that makes a lot of things easier to do, but in those days with much more limited technology I needed to try to find creative solutions for what I was interested in doing. I’m glad that it still sounds fresh and new. The technology has evolved, but what I’m trying to do and say with my music has remained more or less the same.

CV: Have you ever had a chance to reach out to any of the artists who made the recordings that you’ve been using over the years?

CS: Yes. Not in every case, but in some cases I have. I wish I knew where I could find the little girl from Burundi, but that recording goes back to the 60s and she’s probably not a little girl anymore.

JAB: How recognizable is that sample? I’ve never heard the original, so I don’t know if it’s distorted beyond recognition.

CS: I don’t know. I like the ambiguity: it sounds vocal, but you can’t be 100% sure that it’s a vocal sample. It’s been through a lot, it’s been slowed down, looped, it’s been subjected to a certain amount of computer treatment. I’m not sure that if you heard the original you’d say “Oh, that’s it!”

CV: I feel like the beauty of sampling is that you get to put it through your own apparatus, with your own choices and particular aesthetics, and you become a filter of sorts. I love what we’ve heard from the catalogue. I’m wondering if you generate a lot of material and are really picky about what gets released, or if you work more minimally and deliberately.

CS: I have a lot of unreleased material that I’d like to get out there. I seem to have a certain psychological resistance to releasing my current work. When I release something, I know it gets fixed in people’s minds and memories, and I’m more comfortable doing that with music that’s 10 or 20 years old, which I’ve already moved beyond. For some reason—and I’m not sure it’s a really good reason—I’m less inclined to release the music that I’m working on right now, because I don’t want to fix it in people’s minds. I’d rather perform it live. On the other hand, I do sort of regret that people are maybe becoming more familiar with my older work and not really with my contemporary work, so I should probably put more effort towards releasing all of it.

JAB: “Mae Yao” & “Sonali” (featured on the new collection) are some of the first pieces of music you released, right? How does it feel to look back on those old compositions from where you are now?

CS: Chronologically, “Woo Lae Oak” is the first, from 1981. “Mae Yao” is from 1984, “Sonali” is from 1987, and “Banteay Srey” is from the beginning of the nineties. It’s been a nice experience for me to revisit these older recordings, contemplate how they fit in with what I am doing these days, and to be able to share them with an audience. I’m really grateful to Unseen Worlds for their continued support in releasing these tracks, along with their earlier release of my pieces from the seventies and eighties.

CV: Do you keep things archived and stored in categories or folders, so you remember what’s what?

CS: Well, first a piece will get a working title, which describes the process I was using or the sample I was using, or something like that. Eventually it will get titled using my silly system.

CV: We heard you use restaurants you like as titles.

CS: Yeah, I don’t really like coming up with titles that mean something or describe the piece or are any kind of poetic reference to the music, so I have a random system in which I pull titles from a list, and that serves as a way of identifying it. The list happens to be a list of restaurants that I enjoy. A lot of the restaurant names are in a language that’s foreign to me, so it moves the titles further away from meaning and description, and they become more abstract. “Banteay Srey” is the name of a Cambodian restaurant. I don’t even know what it means in Khmer.

JAB: (laughing) Do you go to a lot of restaurants? Are you an exploratory eater?

CS: I am an exploratory eater. I think that’s a better description than a “foodie.” I don’t really like the term “foodie” that much.

JAB: (laughing) Neither do I.

CS: I do eat out a lot, and I do like to eat new cuisines. I’m relatively fearless in terms of what I’ll eat. I recently went to an eel restaurant here in Tokyo and once of the things they serve was the actual bones, the spine of the eels deep fried and eaten like bar snacks.

CV: Was that restaurant added to your list?

CS: It hasn’t been yet, but it probably will be. The problem is that with my early pieces is that a lot of those restaurants have gone out of business or aren’t that good anymore. People will sometimes go to a restaurant that I named a piece after and say, “Hey, Carl, I went there and it was lousy.” But if the song is from ten years ago and the chef is gone…

JAB: All the same, I look forward to a Carl Stone song titles culinary tour. We played a few shows in Japan awhile back–one at a gallery in Kyoto and a few in Tokyo, including one in a temple. A good friend of ours helped us set it up–Chihei Hatakeyama.

CS: Oh, yeah. We’ve played a couple shows together. Where did you play in Tokyo?

JAB: We played at a Buddhist temple called Ennoji, and then we played at a small jazz club called Velvet Sun.

CS: Yeah, I’ve played there. With Chihei, actually!

JAB: We also did a show on Dommune Radio, which you’re probably familiar with. It was streaming live, and we met Ukawa.

CS: (laughing) Yeah, a character.

JAB: I read that you did a performance with Wolfgang Georgsdorf, and that he was playing a smeller organ.

CS: That’s right. He invented this keyboard that triggers aromas instead of notes. That kind of thing has been done before, and usually what happens is that you pump in a smell, and then another smell, and then another smell, and they all mix together until you end up with a big mess, but what’s interesting about his is that he worked with an aroma technologist and an engineer to work it out so that he could not only mix smells as he wanted but also replace smells with other smells. He has a great palate of aromas, and they’re not all nice smells like roses or honey. He had things like wet dogs, rotting leaves, sweat, horses, and mushrooms. He would mix them the way a painter would mix paints on a canvas, or the way a composer writing a symphony might orchestrate. It was really interesting to work together, first in his atelier out in the countryside and then in Berlin, where we presented in a church. The performance was about an hour long and the audience listened almost in the dark. I was using a lot of environmental sounds mixed in with electronic sounds. I think it was a really nice experience for the audience.

JAB: Did you prepare specific smell and sound combinations beforehand?

CS: Yes. We had a scenario worked out in advance, so there was a certain amount of improvisation, but he worked pretty specifically, at least with the flow of the smells. He asked me to keep that in mind for my musical accompaniment.

JAB: I love the idea of improvising with someone playing a smell organ, as if you’re a jazz trio but one of the band members is pumping in the smell of manure, and you react to that with sound.

CS: Yeah. Some of the smells he had were like wet earth.

CV & JAB: Aaaaaah.

CS: Because that has a smell, right? And the smell of cut wood. A lot of outdoor smells that we kind of take for granted as we pass them by.

JAB: Smell is such a strong trigger for memory…

CS: Very strong. I think it’s the strongest trigger, actually, more than sight or sound.

CV: It’s nice when it’s connected to a performance, so that particular memory comes shooting back if you happen across the smell. I was curious how often you find yourself recording. I’m sure it depends, but is it on a very regular basis? Do you have to be in a certain mood?

CS: A lot of times I’ll be working in my studio and then something interesting happens, so I’ll just fire the engines and start the recorder. Then sometimes I’ve allocated specific hours for recording, usually when I’m working with another artist. I’ve got various artists that I work with and we’ll block out times for recording sessions in the hopes of making a record. In terms of my own work, I usually don’t plan to record, unless I’m working on a very specific predetermined project, like a soundtrack. I’ll usually just be working, and then if it gets interesting I’ll record it. It’s kind of my process, to do it that way.

JAB: A lot of your earlier works are kind of very much process oriented—for example it’ll start with an idea that’s a sample, and then it’s the sample twice, and then multiplied by four, and then by eight. I’m curious how often you find that you’ll start with an idea like that and then follow through with it completely, versus having some flexibility for the process to shape the idea. Are you strict with sticking to the concept of a piece, or do you leave time to play with it while you’re developing it?

CS: That’s a very good question. Actually, it’s sort of both. Usually I start with what you could describe as a kind of play process, where I’m just playing around, maybe with a sample or with an idea for a process itself, and I don’t have any particular goal in mind. I’m just exploring what’s possible and having fun, and then at some point an idea will suggest itself—how to take this and shape it and make it into a finished composition, and where does it fit in with other material? Is this one sample or one process enough for an entire piece, or is it just one element of a larger piece? Who knows? The answers will emerge through the course of this play. I’ll try plugging in different samples and seeing what the results are. The only problem with this working method is when I’m on a deadline, maybe working on a film soundtrack where they give you a request for a certain emotional feeling and a certain duration. But because I don’t always know where I’m going to end up at the end of my process it’s hard to fulfill those kinds of requests–which is maybe why I don’t do many soundtracks.

Tower Records, Shinjuku, Tokyo, ca. 1991

JAB: Do you find the technology shapes the idea as you’re working with it? Or, another way of asking this might be, do you think your music is inherently tied to the technology that you’re using?

CS: That’s also a good question. I think the answer is that my work depends on technology to a great extent because I’m trying to work with things that aren’t in the realm of human performance, and aren’t necessarily possible for humans—I’m interested in things that are slower or faster or higher or lower or broader than is humanly possible to perform. In that sense I rely on technology to achieve those things. It’s not technology driven in the sense that when the technology changes or becomes obsolete, I go out of business—it just means that I adapt my process to whatever is available. So I don’t think the technology is driving me, so much as enabling me.

CV: Is there anything else you’d like to add, Carl?

CS: Hmm, you’ve asked some good questions. I hear that one of you is going to Belgium soon?

CV: Yeah, I live in Brussels. I go back and forth, but I’ve been there for about fourteen years. Are you going to be in Belgium?

CS: Yeah, I’m playing at a festival–not in Brussels, but in a small town. You know Meakusma Festival?

CV: Yeah–we’re playing! We’re playing two sets, one with our collaborative project (CV & JAB) and one as my solo project, where we’ll play synthesizers together with a string ensemble.

CS: That’s great! I have a unit called Realistic Monk with a Japanese sound artist who lives in Germany, Miki Yui–we’re playing September 9th. I’ll see you there! We have an album that’s coming out on Meakusma.

CV: Oh cool, they’re doing such great work. John played there last year so we can tell you it’s a wonderful festival. It’s in the countryside, but a lot of people come out from all over Europe. There’s a lot of good music. Well, it was really nice to speak with you, Carl–I really relate to a lot of your processes.

CS: I’m glad to hear that, and I’ll have to look into your music and hear what you guys are up to. Sounds like we have some mutual concerns!

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Tour dates:

June 30 | Tokyo, Japan | Bar Isshee

July 7 | Rotterdam, NL | Gardena Fest

July 8 | London, UK | LSO St Lukes
The Barbican Presents Yasuaki Shimizu & Carl Stone

July 9 | Colchester, Essex | Colchester Arts Centre

July 11 | London, UK | Cafe OTO

July 14 | Kirkcaldy, Scotland | Adam Smith Theatre

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Thanks to Carl Stone, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett,
Tommy McCutchon, and Unseen Worlds for facilitating this interview.
Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The Art of Noise – The Ambient Collection, 1990

One final send-off to a perfectly nightmarish year. This technically isn’t an album but rather a compilation, mostly of tracks from The Art Of Noise’s 1986 In Visible Silence and 1987 In No Sense? Nonsense (both of which, if you’re unfamiliar with the group, are incredibly generous places to start). This collection was compiled by regular AON collaborator Martin Glover (aka Youth, a member of The Orb) with some tasteful mixing and transitions by regular Alex Paterson, also of The Orb.

This isn’t exactly what we think of as ambient these days, but boy oh boy is it a prime early 90s time capsule. If you’re an Art of Noise fan, you’ll love hearing favorites like “Crusoe” and “Ode to Don Jose” in slightly more vivid hi-fi. Try not to be put off by the language excerpted below–these are brilliant songs, and they make a lot of sense tweaked into an explicitly balearic context, given that a lot of AON signature synth textures and environments feel like very direct precursors to what is described below as ambient house. Includes “A Nation Rejects” and its successor “Roundabout 727,” the riff from which has famously been sampled in too many rap tracks to count. Choral samples, ocean waves, hypnagogic percussion, and cotton candy synthesizers. It’s almost embarrassing how up my alley this is, so I hope it’s the same for you.

Enjoy, thanks for reading, happy new year, and may we all be on the up and up.

With the advent of the nineties a new decade of clubs and DJs have floated into our consciousness. Their trip is a journey into peace. An ambient ecstasy. The creation of a new musical travelogue. A minimalistic embrace of everything good about the hard and uncompromising trance-dance of house and the surrealism of ambient instrumentalism.
Ambient or ‘chill out’ rooms have been set up in clubs all around the country as an alternative to the dance floor. Pure ecstasy escapism. Rooms for day-dreaming, fantasising or hallucinating.
This ambient collection is a sound step into the future. A collection of tracks alternatively known as ‘New Age House’ or ‘Ambient House.’ Everyday sounds, noises and atmospheres we’ve imagined and heard all our lives but never consciously listened to. An unfocused daydream with no background or foreground. A sense of not being yourself, or being apart from what you’re listening to. A draft into tranquility, in and out of reality.
Oft played and more than often sampled, The Art Of Noise have long been torchbearers for this form of ambient instrumentalism. So…chill out.

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Yoshio Ojima – Club, 1983

Another early 80’s anomaly, this one released on only 50 numbered cassettes in wooden boxes with silkscreen and Russian constructivist paper inserts. Ojima is probably best known for his catalog of significant environmental works, most notably the gorgeous 1988 two-album collection for the Spiral in Tokyo’s Wacoal Art Center (volume one of which has been lovingly catalogued here), but also for the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and the Living Design Center OZONE. He also produced Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Pier & Loft and Motohiko Hamase’s #Notes Of Forestry. (For more Japanese environmental music, see here, here, here, and here.)

Club takes somewhat of a departure from his more ambient works, but you can still hear his propensity for small motifs that build and layer into complex, embroidery-like compositions, particularly on tracks like “Boy In Vision.” Closer “Graduation” is similarly stunning and somber: between its whale-like, slow-motion horns rearing and arcing in the distance, and its deliberately distracting tinny mechanical whirring in the forefront, it reminds me of Hosono’s “Air-Condition,” released the year prior.

Still, if the cover art wasn’t sufficiently indicative, there’s a sense of humor here that isn’t necessarily evidenced elsewhere in his catalog: a spronky suggestion of mechanical toys on “Entrance,” a childlike wonder and marching-feel on “Orientation,” and perhaps most noticeably on the confoundingly good “Club-A.” People who know more than I do about the history of electronic dance music might be able to label this more accurately, but to me this sounds a whole lot like raucous, gnashing proto-techno, or even proto-acid. And then, just like that, we’re returned to the gleefully spaced out synth whirring of “Club-B,” as if nothing unusual had happened. (Though there are a few small nods to futurity on “Days Man” and “Schooling,” whose drum-machine-going-for-a-walk sensibility sounds like a nod to Testpattern–which is a good thing.) As much as I feel like a broken record, this is largely uncategorizable stuff, and a really special window into a genius stretching his legs and taking some worthwhile risks along the way.

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Mix for The Le Sigh

I was lucky to have a very sweet conversation with Hayley at The Le Sigh, a website dedicated to the work of female-identifying and non-binary artists. We talked about early electronic music, the rise and fall of the album download blog, and the politics of music writing, among other things. I also made a 90 minute minute mix of music made by women (though to be clear, men contributed to many of these songs in different capacities). As you can imagine, this was way too much to fit into one mix, so I focused mostly on synth pioneers, experimental, and new age, with a few wildcards thrown in. The mix opens with Wendy Carlos giving a verbal walkthrough of some technical aspects of her synth process, and ends with Nina Simone ripping our hearts out. You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Wendy Carlos – Electronic Pointillism & Hocketing (from Secrets of Synthesis) / Sonata in G Major, L. 209/K. 455 (Scarlatti)
2. Phew – Expression
3. Delia Derbyshire – The Wizard’s Labratory
4. Pauline Oliveros – Wolf
5. Michele Musser – In The Air
6. Pauline Anna Strom – The Unveiling
7. Laurie Spiegel – Drums (Excerpt)
8. Deutsche Wertarbeit – Auf Engelsflügeln
9. Virginia Astley – I’m Sorry
10. Laurie Anderson – Kokoku
11. Miyako Koda – A Story Teller Is The Sun
12. Björk – Come To Me
13. Kate Bush – Delius
14. Bridget St. John – Many Happy Returns
15. Joanna Brouk – Winter Chimes
16. Alice Coltrane – Er Ra
17. Claire Hamill – Winter: Sleep
18. Suzanne Ciani – The Third Wave: Love In The Waves
19. Gal Costa – Volta (Live)
20. Nina Simone – Don’t Smoke In Bed (Live)

Nuno Canavarro – Plux Quba: Música Para 70 Serpentes, 1988

One of the hardest and best parts about writing this blog has been running up against records that feel impossible to write about, avoiding them for months or even years, and then eventually writing about them anyway. This is exactly that kind of record, and fittingly I’ve been putting it off since day one: its influence is too far reaching to properly recount, it’s too elegant and precise to accurately describe, and I feel too gooey about it, too pierced to possibly set my feelings aside and attempt objectivity. I think that’s alright, though, because Plux Quba is too perfect not to share.

The story starts with a familiar format that, coupled with incredibly prescient music, feels like the foregrounding for a hoax. In 1991, Christoph Heemann brought a copy of Plux Quba to (from what I gather was) an informal listening session with Jim O’Rourke, Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert, and George Odjik in Köln, Germany. It was music without context, laboriously made with just an Ensoniq Mirage, a Fostex 8-track tape recorder, and an early 8-bit sampler loaded with pre-recorded, highly modified samples of things like television, radio voices, and a melodica. The story goes that everyone present was floored by it; O’Rourke so much so that when he launched Moikai, his label dedicated to minimal and electronic music, Plux Quba was his first (re)release, remixed and remastered by Portuguese guitarist and composer Rafael Toral. Since then it’s been reissued a few times, most recently by Japanese label Inpartmaint Inc, and while it has had incredible bearing on two decades of experimental electronic music, it seems that Plux Quba hasn’t yet received the widespread acclaim it’s due.

Several reviewers have said that Plux Quba takes inspiration from Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing. I don’t know if that’s directly true, but I like to think of this record as hermetic, like the music of Charanjit Singh or Woo, bearing the kind of brilliance that often does write its own spontaneous language. It’s much too deliberate to be called an accident–Canavarro was already a well-seasoned musician by this time. And yet despite being recorded at home on very dated, simple equipment, it seems to exist outside of time. Having witnessed the subsequent deluge of glitch music and its offspring, this still sounds truly alien and exploratory, a kind of sonic alchemy. It’s more abstract than what I typically post, so if you typically gravitate towards things that are lyrical or poppy, I would absolutely encourage you to start here, preferably in headphones–though, for what it’s worth, Canavarro himself instructs on the back sleeve that this record must be heard “1. through speakers that are as far apart from one another as possible, and 2. starting from A-5, at a low volume (‘Wask’ and side 2).”

It explores similarly incandescent territory as Canavarro’s remarkable split with Carlos Maria Trindade, often employing the same textural palette and manipulations of vocal samples–slicing them up, stacking them precariously, drawing them out into ghost whispers, and running them backwards. But with a longer playtime and no collaborators, Canavarro is able to fully world-build, perhaps to even create something that feels more circular and complete. Comprised of 15 vignettes, mostly between one and two minutes long, not all of this record is unabashedly beautiful. Parts are deliberately jagged (“Alsee”), faltering (“Untitled 1”), or shrill (“O Fundo Escuro De Alsee”), but it’s precisely their inclusion that allow the record to reach sublime, sparkling heights. The stumbling, out-of-tune baroque of “Crimine” comes to mind–even here, after two and a half minutes of uncertainty, the song abruptly shifts to a perfect, crystalline music box lullaby. The record most perfectly exemplifies its own restrained breed of heartbreaking on the final track, Untitled 8. Slowly building, gently pulsing synthetic marimba, a veil of processed, indistinct whispers, a faraway oboe, and a ship’s bell that, when fully faded out, leave you perfectly positioned to restart the record.

If you’re interested in learning more about the recording process, in my Googling I found out that Fond/Sound has lovingly translated a rare interview that Canavarro gave to Fernando Magalhães into English. You can read it here.

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[Interview] Phew

Phew has had a decade-spanning, genre-hopping career and has cemented herself as an experimental music icon. She was a member of Aunt Sally, a punk band at the heart of the Kansai No Wave scene, and has collaborated with an incredible list of musical luminaries. Her debut self-titled record from 1981 has been canonized by Japanese record collectors and post punk devotees alike. Still, it’s perhaps now, working with only her collection of analog hardware, that she’s at her most powerful. She has just released Light Sleep, a collection of six tracks culled from three CD-Rs that had previously only been available at her live performances. If you’re not yet familiar with her work, it’s an ideal place to jump in, and you can buy it here. In conjunction with Blank Forms, Phew will be making her US debut on April 6th at First Unitarian Congregational Church in Brooklyn. Tickets are available here.

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You said in a recent interview that you wished you could “sing like dance, and use electronics like singing.” There’s some really beautiful footage online of you playing in Tokyo in 2014, and the whole thing sort of feels like a dance.

Thank you. For me, when I play live I’m definitely concentrating on the physicality of the performance. But I do have to be in control, although there is an element of merging—you treat the machines like an extension of your own body.

You’re committed to using analog gear instead of digital, but it’s of course harder to use and less predictable. Do you feel that the unpredictability has turned into a central part of your live performance?

Yes. I performed in Paris last night, for example, and it took about five minutes into my set to be able to match the sound I had been producing in sound check—but you just run with it. It’s definitely harder, but it’s also fun and satisfying to perform that way. To finally get the sound right is like catching a wild horse and making it your own.

How much room do you leave for improvisation and live composition during performances?

I go into it with a big sketch of what I want from a song, and from there it’s like filling in a coloring book. It’s never going to be the same twice, and that’s the fun part. If something’s not working, I’ll do something else.

You’ve also said that you don’t think you’re a singer in the conventional sense, because you don’t aim to communicate a story or incite feeling within the listener. It seems as if you’ve resisted ideas about what the voice “should” do as a “human instrument.” Still, your voice is really powerful and evocative. Do you feel you use voice as a texture, or even as a machine?

Yes—it’s definitely still an instrument, but the way I treat voice is hugely influenced by how I listened to music when I was a little girl. When I was ten or eleven years old, the Beatles’ Abbey Road came out, so I was listening to a lot of the Beatles without understanding any of the English. I was tasting voice in the same way as I would guitar, with no understanding of lyrical meaning. I’ve used voice that way ever since, texturally.



You’ve said that you hated the 80s in Japan—that everyone was drunk on money, and you didn’t even want to leave the house. It’s interesting because I imagine most people think of the 80s as a musical explosion for Japan, especially given what people were suddenly able to do with synthesizers.

I don’t know. I wasn’t even listening to contemporary music at the time. I was mostly listening to music from the ‘50s. A lot of Elvis Presley.

Right, you even did an Elvis cover. Did your parents listen to Elvis around the house while you were growing up?

No, they were listening to more jazz. Especially my dad. But I hated it—I was totally allergic to jazz.

Interesting! I would have guessed there’s a lot of avant-garde jazz influence in your music.

Maybe subconsciously. I feel better about jazz now, but if there are jazz influences in my music they’re unintentional.

You’ve also mentioned the Sex Pistols being a big influence on you as a teenager.

When the Pistols came out I was roughly the same age as their members. Seeing them live was influential, but it was less about their music specifically than about punk as a movement. UK punk was a huge influence in my desire to have a band, but Aunt Sally was less about making a political statement than embracing the possibilities of punk, musically. The main takeaway from punk, for me, was a lack of leadership, a lack of any “pop star” identity.

Has music ever been a form of protest for you?

In the 80s, it absolutely wasn’t. We were just making music. We never even thought about the fact that having three women in a punk band could be radical. Now, in 2017, it does feel more like a protest. But it’s less about having a specific message, and more about the live performance and considering the experience of the audience. There’s something very small and fragile about that relationship, and that’s the most important and radical aspect of making music for me.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that you’ve always gotten the best out of all the collaborators you’ve worked with over the years, playing to their strengths while still keeping the music balanced. It always sounds like you, even when you’re playing different genres. What do you look for in a collaboration?

I look for someone that changes me, someone that allows me change into something I didn’t expect. That’s the most exciting part. Surprise, flexibility.


A lot of people are referring to Light Sleep as a return to the sounds of your first record. To me the sound feels more intimate and specific—the gestures feel smaller and more detailed, a lot of the beats feel like microbeats. It’s more delicate. Is this kind of intimacy a product of working without collaborators?

Yes. The recordings on Light Sleep were made before my record A New World. The songs are rough sketches, like drawing an object in pencil, which is probably the intimacy and scale that you’re hearing. I also recorded them in my bedroom, so they’re meant to be small.

Do you have plans or projects for when you’re done touring?

I want to do a performance in collaboration with a video artist. I’d like it to be somewhere in between a vocal performance piece and an installation, so it would probably be in a gallery or museum setting.

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Thank you to Phew, Juri Onuki, Cora Walters, Lawrence Kumpf, Keiko Yoshida, and Mesh-Key for facilitating this interview. Text has been translated, condensed, and edited for clarity.