Jözzdo Interview  2002.

Well, first of all, would you mind to tell when and where you've been born and raised, your social and familial background, and what pushed you on the artistic way.

I was born and raised in the north west of England ,As far north as you can get before Scotland. The place was the Solway estuary and it was possible to walk across the mud flats to Scotland when the tide was out. It is a place steeped in history and also in conflict, with constant wars across the borders for centuries. It is also a very beautiful and serene place that has a special place in my heart and consciousness. There is a majestic beauty about nature that is inspiring and this is what first made me want to try and capture some feeling of my environment and to express my love for it.

I began by drawing and painting and the visual arts were my first means of expression. I showed some talent and received encouragement from school teachers and some grown ups . As an occupation it was always frowned upon , although from a very early age it was all I really wanted to do and the thought of it being a mere hobby was never my intention. I hated school and spent most of my time in the art room with a sympathetic teacher... my headmaster, to give him credit, did try and understand. He asked my art teacher if I was any good. Alas my art teacher had a very dry sense of humour and she told him that she expected that one day I would make a fair painter and decorator.

Your musical and plastic works seem to me as parts of a same process, they inspire me similar feels. I know you never learned how to play an instrument, but did you study plastic arts? How and when did you come to express yourself through both disciplines? What were your very first works, and what equipment did you use then?

As I said before Art was always what I wanted to do and so I went to Art College as soon as possible.

I really enjoyed the first couple of years but then I went to do a post graduate course at an art college near Newcastle which at the time had a reputation as being quite open-minded about the arts and did not necessarily favour one against another but allowed students to explore and experiment with various conceptual arts as well as more traditional classic arts.

It was because I was getting more interested in music as a means of expression that I chose this college and I was not at all interested in learning how to play music in a music college.

For a while everything was OK and as long as I continued to produce some related works in a visual media the college were happy about my main preoccupation with music.

There were two other students doing the same thing and we had to have a special part-time lecturer come into the college to assess our work as it was beyond the field of the rest of the art tutors.

His name was Dave Pinder.... a composer mostly in electronics but also using traditional orchestral arrangements . he was best known as a notator of other musicians works, most notably John Cage. He was a really nice person and gave us lots of encouragement and advice.

In order for there to be some structure to the course we were required to do exams on 20th century composers and to prove some musicianship we had to play pieces by other composers eg. Stockhausen.

We proved pretty apt at this and gave public performances of Stockhausen piano pieces and various John Cage pieces as well as our own compositions, so I think these were the first pieces of music that I ever performed live and they were in front of the traditional bow tie and tails brigade... with polite applause ruminated upon at the end of the piece.

It was pretty funny really, especially as we usually had had a surfeit of marijuana before the performances. Aside from these performed pieces I had been working with tape recorders for a few years. Recording instruments, sounds, ambient noises (they weren't called ambient then...) and manipulating and re-recording them to create new sounds and textures.

The first tape recorder I ever got was when I was 14 years old and I swapped some toys or records or something and got this huge piece of equipment which was built into a sort of suitcase and had a built in amplifier and speaker. It had the possibility to record on four mono tracks but you could only play back one at a time. However it was not long before I had taken it to pieces and joined wires and put in a switch so that it became a four track tape machine... It lasted about 10 years with good results.... There was a built in microphone which never worked... When the machine finally died I hack sawed the microphone out of its metal housing and joined some wires up to it and was amazed that it was one of the best sounding microphones I had heard. It is an almost flat disc with a large 1.5 diaphragm that is incredibly clear and transparent.

It became the main sound of :zoviet*france:'s recorded work and is still my favourite microphone.

I guess it is as old as me and still works like a dream with an instantly recognisable character.

Regarding your formation: what years did you study?

As far as I can remember the years were;

Foundation Year at Carlisle School of Art ...........1972/ 73.

three year BA at Sunderland School of Art ............1973/ 77.

Regarding your fist tape recorder: what kind of work came out of it?

Mostly manipulated recordings of ambient noises which were layered and treated to physical alterations in time and pitch. It was mostly just a time of discovery and experimentation. It wasn't until I got two recorders that the possibilities broadened considerably. Now it was possible to transfer treated sounds from one machine to another and I pretty soon discovered tape loops and the rhythmic possibilities of that process.

Regarding :zoviet*france: How, why and when did you create the project? Who was involved then?

:zoviet*france: was formed when a mutual friend put the people who were originally involved in the project in touch with each other, or to be more accurate I was introduced to the two remaining members of a former punk band who had a record contract but no band and no direction. I had been working with the mutual friend (Lisa Hale) on some pieces of guitar music and voice, but Lisa knew that I also worked on electronic music and sound manipulation so she introduced us all and it took off from there.

Originally we worked with guitars and drums and rehearsed in a rundown old building on the Quayside at Newcastle. (This area is now re-generated and the property is very up-market and trendy. When we were there it had holes in the roof and pigeons would occasionally shit on your head.)

I was really taken by the ability of Peter Jensen to play rhythms either on a bass guitar or on the assortment of percussion we had there... a mixture of real drums, oil drums, practice cello cases, bits of metal etc...

I loaned Peter some Can albums and astonishingly he came back a few days later able to play Jackie Liebziet riffs!!

Can were definitely the biggest influence on me and subsequently on the early days of :z*f:...

Eventually the music moved on and took on its own momentum and development... Personally I think the first two albums don't have much to recommend them but by the time of Norsch a distinctive style was emerging and Mohnomishe is the best example of that early period... Peter Jensen left the band shortly after this...

There then followed a short period of :z*f: being two members but we were soon joined by Paolo Di Paolo... A fellow artist friend of mine who worked together with me at a print workshop in Newcastle called Charlotte Press.

This was a place of particular importance at the time and was a hive of activity and exchanging of ideas... sadly it is now gone... closed by bureaucrats

The next era of :z*f: was in my opinion the most productive and rewarding. Paolo was, like me, essentially a visual artist and so we had a great connection. The albums produced at this time... (around 1985 to 1987) are the ones I think endure the most. Especially Popular Soviet Songs and Eostre...

Paolo left... then came Mark Spybey... Still it was another good productive period and I am sorry it ended abruptly. After Mark came Andy Eardley and another productive phase of the bands history. However things were not good between myself and another member of the band and the tour of the States in 1991 proved a catalyst in making up my mind to remove myself from a band which I had initially had such high hopes for and which I had put in 12 years of my life.

So what did you do then? Was there a break between your former work with :z*f: and Rapoon?

No there was no break... I already had loads of recordings I was working on.

The first Rapoon album was different because I wanted to establish a new direction and to explore new territory.

The second album would, if I had not left :z*f:, just been another album attributed to that wonderful anonymous collective.

What's your global point of view on music market? Do you deal well with the way it happens? How did you choose your labels after the :z*f: experience?

Well I don't think the :z*f: experience was that typical... There are very few bands who set out at the beginning as anonymous .

If anyone is thinking of doing this I would say don't be daft ...

As to the way I choose labels... Well, I am a very small fish and I don't really have a lot of say... I work with both Staalplaat and Soleilmoon and enjoy a very good relationship with both these labels. The Klanggalerie label is run by a long time friend of mine, Walter Robotka. Again, I have an excellent relationship with Walter. I am about to do another record with Relapse/Release which should be ready quite soon...

I am lucky enough in that all of these labels contacted me and I am happy to work with all of them. All in all I am happy and grateful to be busy doing what I love the most... making music and art.

Could you describe me your creation process(es)? What kind of tools and instruments do you use now?

For the past four years or so I have moved from recording on analogue tape machines onto computer based recording.

It has changed the way I work and my interest in different kinds of sounds has grown. Computers have become fantastically powerful tools and it is possible to do things that in the analogue/real-time world would have cost a fortune and taken ages to accomplish.

There are still many people who think that work done a computer is somehow done by the computer. That it is somehow cheating. I don't know how this attitude began, I suppose because it is possible to enter notes into a sequencer programme without playing them on a keyboard and without learning how to play a particular instrument, but simply entering notes and having them played back (albeit quantized) doesn't equal good music.

There doesn't seem to be the same misunderstanding about computers when you consider that authors used to use typewriters and now use word processors, yet the situation is exactly comparable. If you were not a good author before then simply doing your writing on a computer is not going to suddenly change anything.

So, having said that I now use a lot more electronically generated sound than I used to use in the past and my studio has changed to reflect this. There are now many more keyboards and sound modules than before although I still use lots of real instruments and real playing as well as using soft synths and samplers in my favourite sequencer programme (Logic Audio).

How do you choose the visual and sound territories you explore? The few Rapoon albums I know make me see both

wide and lonely places, maybe because they all play on duality between darkness and light, both seen through the eyes of beauty (of course this is a very subjective viewpoint - I'm not afraid of being wrong about it...)

Anyway, there's some kind of (sweet) mystery to me within your work, and I'd just like to know more about it. So if you have an answer to that... I may have some keys, but I'm not really sure: your love for nature first of all. You play to me a contemplative and impressionist music that drives me (back?) to primal, or better said essential instincts. First I felt like primitive, but it's definitely timeless, actually and I don't know if it's just the way you feel, the way you like, the way you'd like, or if you have a specific objective with your work.

Are you attempting to create such ambivalent atmospheres? They seem to come from a very peculiar place. Do you have mental techniques to go out there, or in there?

The way I have always worked is to find the music or the art from within.

As I have had no formal training in playing any instruments my approach when starting to explore playing was to not think consciously about it and just play. A bit like the zen archer imagining the arrow hitting the target and not consciously aiming for it.

This is still the way I approach playing.

Only when I have material to work on do I begin to exercise any conscious interpretation of what I have. Rapoon is, almost by definition, intensely personal music. Each album reflects some personal interpretation of history and experience. It is a kind of autobiography, though it includes what I believe to be universal feelings, emotions and states of awareness. It is filtered through my own ideas of time, space, reality, existence, consciousness, all the things about being alive that matter to me.

I recently returned to that part of England where I grew up and spent the first years of my life. While I was walking across the huge empty spaces that exist there I realised how in tune I was with that environment.

I mean at a very primitive, instinctive level where survival may depend on knowing what is happening around you and being able to interpret the signs. (Many people have been killed walking on this estuary... the tide comes in extremely fast and the currents are treacherous. There is also quicksand to look out for.) I was amazed that I could smell subtle variations in the wind and seemed to notice the smallest of details. I knew exactly at which point in time the tide would turn and begin to fill the estuary. It makes me think that we are all born with an innate awareness and affinity with the earth and especially the place where we have grown up.

This place is certainly within my music and art because it is within my soul and being.

I long to return and I miss the place. I don't feel at home in a city.

Let's speak further about your plastic... sorry, I mean visuals artworks if you're okay. As I already said, there's to me an obvious connection between music and artworks. Not only on the concept of each piece of work, but in the essence, or maybe the way you put things together. Just like collages, but not only.

My visual art reflects many of the same concerns as the music I make i.e. time, space etc.

Repeated images are used in both disciplines because I believe there are subtle variations occurring in our lives at every moment. I strongly believe that there are countless possibilities for each moment in time and that time itself is not linear.

A lot of the visual work, especially the monoprints, develop the idea of images evolving with subtle variations and all co-existing within a matrix.

I am aware that it is paradoxical that something so static as a painting should be about something that is essentially dynamic and these works are ultimately intended to be photographed and used as key frames in a long-term video project that I have been undertaking for the past few years. This will tie the imagery and the music even closer together as there will be a soundtrack.

Other areas of visual art that I practice are more traditional and academic but still done for love and to improve ability. One such area is that of life drawing which is probably the hardest discipline there is; certainly it leaves no room for disguising any lack of ability.

You say you're a small fish for labels because each of your records seems to issue in a very limited edition, right? But these are often beautiful objects (both :z*f: and Rapoon); any problems ever with the artworks? Do you formulate specific requests to the labels on that?

The reason I say I am a small fish is because the kind of work I do does not pander to fashion or trends and so will always be of a fairly small minority interest. I am grateful that labels exist where the people who run them do so because they love music and not only because they want to make a profit.

The editions are about the same they have always been, going all the way back to :z*f: days. Somewhere between 500 and 1500 copies.

This has made it possible to do special artwork that wouldn't be feasible with larger editions. I have been lucky also that there have been people at the labels who are also very good designers. I am thinking in particular of Geert-Jan Hobijn at Staalplaat who over the many years I have worked with him has come up with some beautiful ideas and concepts of packaging and has had the ability to see the ideas through. For the most part I have simply provided the imagery to be used.

Can you live off your art? Do you have any other activities than painting and music?

I don't make enough money to live off my art, at least I couldn't support my family on what I make.

I am fortunate that I have a partner who makes the money to support our family and for the past 10 years I have stayed at home and brought up the children and been the househusband while doing my music and art whenever I get a moment. (Anyone who thinks that is an easy option has never done it.)

What are your next projects?

My daughter starts school in September and I will have more time available to do things so I have applied, and been accepted, to do an MA in Creative Music Technology at the local University. I have also been offered the possibility of doing a PhD and some teaching work. I will begin in September also.

I look forward to all of this because I really love learning new things and being involved in new projects.

As for new albums... there are three on the way. A new live album on Klanggalerie. A new album on Soleilmoon called I Am A Foreigner (which will be released firstly as a vinyl LP then a full length CD). Finally a new mini-album in special packaging which will be released on Staalplaat.

I am always working on new material and have several new albums on the go at present reflecting new interests and influences.

Interview by WJ, 2001-2002

Jözzdo