Sound and Music

Why canal music?
The idea was brought to me and Lisa by Sound UK, and the brief was a fairly open-ended one. They wanted to create a tour going up the Grand Union Canal, but the musical content was really left
up to us.

And what ideas did you come up with?
Well I have a pretty similar approach to work, regardless of what I’m doing. And that is to try to find all the sounds that exist in the particular environment I’m working in, whether that’s a band, a building or an outside location. The interesting thing about canals is that they run quietly through different areas, each of which has its own sound world. The canal also offers the prospect of two different worlds – the world above the surface and the world below the surface – and this interests me a lot.

How will that above/below division be heard by the audience?
People will probably hear some live sound from underwater during the performance. We’re not sure how it’s going to work, but we’ll be dipping the hydrophone into the canal and you’ll probably hear the engine of the boat amplified.

What is a hydrophone?
It’s like a microphone, but whereas a microphone records sounds vibrating in the air, a hydrophone records sound in liquid. It allows you to hear any sound and vibration in the water.

What can you hear with it?
I’ve been using hydrophones for years. If you go to the Thames, say somewhere near the London Eye, where it’s really busy, you get an amazing cacophony of engines and propellers, and even when trains are going over the bridges overhead, you can hear that in the water as well. And you can go somewhere really quiet as well, like a pond where the main sound you hear is frogs mating.

I have to ask you what that sounds like...
It’s pretty intense because they use their throats as a signalling device. They vibrate their throats and as their throats are in the water, it travels through the water to the hydrophone and creates a really strong recording, with a lot of croaking.

There’s been quite an underwater theme to your recent work – this summer you’ve been playing sounds under water to an audience of swimmers.
That’s right. Wet Sounds – we did a gig in a swimming pool. It was amazing. The audience were mostly in the pool, and it was really interest­ing to work out how to connect with people when we were on dry land and they were in the pool. The great thing about buoyancy in water is that you don’t have all the stresses and strains of sitting on a seat. And to go for a swim straight after your concert and then listen to some more music was a really nice experience as well.

As well as water, forests seem important to you – you’ve created an album called The Forest and the Sea, and in another area of your work as the creator of software using Max/MSP, you’ve created a programme called Forester. Tell me about these and your interest in forests...
Forests have fascinated people for as long as people have been able to write things down and draw on cave walls, so there’s not much new I can say about forests except that the way I got into creating music about forests was that I was once in Epping Forest in East London. It started getting dark and I got lost and I began to realise that I was actually quite scared, so in the music I tried to investigate where this fear was coming from. Forests are beautiful and they also have this darker side to them, which fascinated me. The programme Forester is a piece of software I’ve created and which you can download free from my website. It allows you to drop sounds into it, and then it will pick parts of those sounds and combine them in various random ways to create this kind of forest of sound. And by using a pointer on the screen, you can move through this forest and affect the balances and how one sound modulates to another. The idea is that it’s quite mysterious and you don’t really know how it works. It tends to produce interesting sonic results, and I hear that people have used the results in films, to create background ambience, as a re-mix tool, and as an effect on tracks. When I first released it, I started getting emails from record labels saying that it was turning up on a lot of demos that they were receiving. It’s got a fairly specific sound, so it’s pretty recognisable!

Your music has been described as ‘post-electronica’ and ‘folktronica’. What do you think of these labels, and how would you describe what you do?
I think the key thing is that I hear things as sound rather than as music. I hear the sound that my band Polar Bear plays in the same way that I hear the engine of a canal boat, for example. I understand sound in terms of what frequencies are happening and what the amplitudes are – I guess it’s quite a technical perspective. But the other side of my music is the emotional side and that’s really important to me – the sounds should definitely trigger an emotional response. And it’s important to me that I get the right balance of technical and emotional. Essentially I love making things, and seeing how things interact. So being in a band like Polar Bear is interesting from that point of view. Polar Bear is a kind of jazz band, with two tenor saxophones, a double bass, drums played by Seb Roch­ford, the band leader and main composer. One thing I do is to treat some of the live sounds, manipulating them electronically, and I also inject some of my own sounds into the mix. I also like interacting with the players as an instrumentalist myself, so I’ve designed some instruments that that can be played in real time so that I can improvise with them properly. And on our most recent album (which we’ve recently recorded and which isn’t out yet) I’m playing electric guitar, so I’ve added the first chordal instrument to the band.I first started creating music – I didn’t call it music at the time; I was making sounds – using an old computer. I’d never really heard much electronic music, neither by the originators of the genre, nor by modern electronica artists. I first got into it because I just liked these computer sounds. And I discovered you could record sounds into the computer and then change them, which really got me excited. And then later on I found out about musique concrète and elec­troacoustic music, and that seemed to be exactly what I had been doing, so I got interested in that. I think my favourite piece of electroacoustic music is Bernard Parmegiani’s De Natura Sonorum, which is a wonderful, beauti­ful, human album, even though it’s using wine glasses and sine wave generators as its raw materials. The treatment of these simple sources just completely blew me away. Then I got into reading Stockhausen and Cage, the standard things. But at the same time I was really interested in singer songwriters like Will Oldham and Bill Callahan, and I could hear some of the emotions and the lyricism of their music in Bernard Parmegiani. And I was interested in seeing if you could have both these elements – the electroacoustic and the lyrical, folk-like music, in an album and what would happen if you did. That leads us onto the ‘folktronica’ label, and I think a lot of the things I’ve seen that are called ‘folktronica’ seem to me quite watered down. They’re cute and sound nice and pretty and they have some little electronic sounds bubbling away in the background, with some guitar or mandolin accompa­nying someone singing nicely. Whereas when I use electronic music and folk-like music, they’ve both got their own space and they don’t often happen at the same time, which probably makes things a bit more challenging for the listener. So it’s not a fusion of the two styles – it leaves the fusion to the mind of the listener.
http://leafcutterjohn.com