1. Visual arts have always been a part of your life, but it seems lately as though they're becoming your primary focus. Are you finding a new balance between painting, film and music, and if so, where do you see your greatest interest as you go forward in your life?

I find painting the greatest challenge at the moment. I make such a bad job of it sometimes. It is unforgiving in its’ clarity. I put off painting, I prevaricate and turn on the computer and make a cup of tea. Anything except going and getting the paint tubes and brushes and some paper and making some marks on it. The thing is when I feel I have failed the disappointment is such that I feel desolate, as if whatever talent I had has flown and gone and will never return. So I put off getting out the paintbrushes and the paint and the paper and making the marks on it. No one likes to feel a failure.

Yesterday though, I did force myself to get out my brushes again and I tried hard to turn off my thoughts and just play with the paint. To do the first things that sprang to mind and not to think or analyse what was happening. To be childlike in my enjoyment of the act of painting. The result was that I managed to do two of the best paintings I have done for a long while. One in particular I like very much. My wife wonders how I can say that I like my own work. I tell her the truth. It is like someone else painted it. I was just the meat and flesh holding the brush.

The same is often true with the music…particularly playing live instruments. I don’t know what is going to come out. It is a surprise to me. Sometimes the results are nice, sometimes, like the paintings, the results are rubbish. It’s a risk but I don’t know any other way of keeping my interest. If I knew what the end result was going to be before I got there I would lose interest on the way. The journey is more important than the arrival at the destination.

Making moving visual art has always interested me. It is only in the last few years that it has become possible to use film and video work as part of my creative output. The costs were just too prohibitive before and there wasn’t enough hands on immediacy in the process. It is still a long process, but I love learning new skills and so I have spent the last couple of years teaching myself how to get the results I am after using film. I am still learning, I always will be. It is the same with music. I feel I have only really scratched the surface of what is possible in all three mediums. Video work, film work, successfully combines all of the elements I enjoy working with. I think this is where my main output will be over the next few years, though I will always force myself to get out the paints and make those marks that sometimes can arrange themselves very beautifully and reach directly to the soul.

2.

Alien Glyph Morphology collected a suite of six short films, along with an older piece you did when you were part of Zoviet France, and a new one that you might once have referred to as a work in progress (forgive me if my memory has failed me...). What have you done to make the music for this vinyl release unique and special. Is it different from the audio on the DVD? Will the CD version be different from the vinyl?

I think vinyl has a different sound and a different quality to CD. I know people who will argue with me and start quoting the math and the physics of the sound reproduction qualities of a needle scratching around on the surface of some plastic and say that all these things make it an inferior medium of sound reproduction but I am not measuring quality in the same way as they are. I am not interested in better I am interested in different, and vinyl sounds different. I like the way vinyl sounds. I recently got given a turntable (a good old Technics PL 514, for those who care about such things) A friend gave it to me because he said he never used it anymore and it was just gathering dust in the corner of some box room and he figured I was the person who would like it. My own record deck was the sole casualty of a house move several years ago and I have been without one ever since. I looked at some modern decks and didn’t fancy them, or the price, so I just did without until my friend came round and dropped this off. I rooted around in the garage looking for my old vinyl. (I have a garage but no car. I don’t drive, I never have. I think cars are fucking the planet. Personally I would rather walk somewhere.) Anyway I found them eventually and plugged everything together and put on something I haven’t heard for nearly a decade. It sounded lovely.

I like the size of vinyl records.

I like the weight of vinyl records (to hold in your hand, not to take to the Post Office and put on the scale and hear the charge for posting)

I like the covers of vinyl records. They are big enough to put in a frame and stick on your wall.

I like everything about vinyl records, except perhaps the space it can take to store them but even then they have a sort of invitation to browse amongst them that somehow CD’s don’t have for me.

It is possible to get software emulations of the qualities of vinyl records so that you can add them to recordings and simulate the effects that are added to the original sound by the imperfections of this method of sound reproduction. You can add various degrees of warp, dust, crackle, pops, mains hum, bass rumble etc. and supposedly get the feel of an original vinyl recording. It works to some degree but when you do a direct comparison there just isn’t anything quite like playing a vinyl record. This is not to say that I don’t like CD’s or that I don’t like pristine digital recording. I do. I love that fact that it is now affordable to have a home studio where it is possible to record sounds with a quality undreamed of even a decade or so ago.

Maybe I am weird but I like noise as well. I like gritty, grainy sounds that have somehow taken on an organic nature even though they are the result of mechanical imperfections and electronic artefacts. Put crystal clear sounds next to the dirty grainy sounds in a piece of music and the dynamics and interactions of the sounds become interesting and absorbing.

The Vinyl version of Alien Glyph morphology has been edited with the time frame of a vinyl record in mind. These days nearly all compositions are subconsciously referenced to the length of the average CD.

Play it on a record deck and it will sound different because of the nature of the medium.

When I heard again the sounds coming from the old record deck and the vinyl out of the garage, I immediately started making samples to manipulate and incorporate in future compositions. The sound of vinyl is inspiring.

The CD version of AGM id different in as much as this will include more of the first drafts of compositions, the first ideas and explorations. Sometimes as things go along they take different turns and directions. These are the initial recordings and compositions without the process of intellectual editing. Some are still the same; others are longer and less concerned with reaching any conclusion. They are more ambient and ephemeral.

2. You work in several media simultaneously. How does your creative process differ between, say, composing music, and making a film? I know some of it is intentional, but there also seem to be many elements of spontaneity. Do you approach film making differently from painting? From writing music?

Making music almost always begins with playing an instrument or taking a sound that is already recorded and manipulating it until it suggests a space or a place or a landscape. Once there is the space created to work in it is a matter of populating that space with other sounds and elements. If they sound foreign and conflicting then there sometimes evolves a natural resolution and a balance between the different facets. A lot of the creative process is intuitive and spontaneous. The same can be said of painting. Filmmaking is a bit more deliberated but still has leaps of spontaneity involved. Usually these make the whole thing suddenly come to life. It is possible to work for days, even weeks on a piece of film and assemble a dozen or so different elements and ways of compositing and mixing them all and still there is something missing, something unexplainable but essential. As an example I have been working on new pieces of film recently and considered one piece to be almost finished. It looked good and there was a satisfying overall feel to it but I just wasn’t happy with it. Suddenly I just removed about half of the video tracks and replaced them with different animated footage. The pieces I had replaced were much longer than the new bits so I stretched them fit and at the same time I just deleted all the little niggly things that had been there at the back of my mind. This radical butchery of weeks of work was suddenly an unknown to me. I pressed play and watched as chance synchronicities occurred and the combination of textures and colours worked intriguing and beguiling, and I knew I had made the right decision.

4. Is there anything specific you can say about the music you wrote for Alien Glyph

Morphology? Anything specific that inspired you?

The music for this project began when I went into my studio one morning (same as always) and turned on a keyboard and found a trumpet sound which I put through my trusty quadraverb fx and played some Jon Hassel type phrases. There was an expansiveness and detached quality about the phrases that I liked. I suddenly wanted to contrast that with the kind of busy and organized kind of sounds that Philip Glass uses. So I quickly pulled up a program on the pc that has a very good step sequencer in it which allows you to program and change things on the fly, as if it were a hardware sequencer. It is possible to create and alter rhythms and textures in real time and it becomes an instrument which you can record in real-time also.

I guess the basis for the total compositions were done in one morning. I mean there were a number of different but related sounds and constructions that went on to become the finished pieces. I have dozens of such starts recorded on my computers but not all of them get to be realized. Some take a few years to germinate, others are lost forever. AGM held my attention long enough to be one of the things that got realized.

The visuals for AGM went through a long metamorphosis before I was happy with them. Using the overlays of the very quickly drawn glyph scribbles came late in the proceedings and turned out to be the glue that made the pieces, I think.

I don’t know if I have said before that quite a lot of the things happening in the background, through the layers of overlay, are from documentaries about UFO’s and a lot of the footage is that shot by Joe Public, supposedly of UFO’s. I find peoples preoccupation with extraterrestrials and all other paranormal phenomena fascinating. It all seems to me to be on a par with religion and every other hopeless search for a meaning  to life. In fact I think it is the hopeless Don Quixote aspect of belief systems that I find interesting. More interesting than the belief systems themselves that is for sure.

The North of England has one of the highest concentrations of prehistoric petroglyphs in the world. They are everywhere. They cover the stones found out on the heathlands and barren places in the borders between England and Scotland. The least densely populated areas there are on this little island are covered with marks made into stone. Hardly idle graffiti perpetrated by ancient man; they must have some meaning or significance?

From the What you need to know about encyclopedia on the web.

A Petroglyph is an image recorded on stone, usually by prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek words petros meaning stone and glyphein meaning to carve (it was originally coined in French as pétroglyphe). This term is often used to refer to images painted on stone. However, the terms Pictograph or Cave painting are used to describe images painted on stone rather than Petroglyph which, in the strictest sense, refers to carved or engraved images.

These images had deep cultural and religious significance for the societies that created them; in many cases, this significance remains for their descendants

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Aliens, Ancient Glyphs, UFO’s, man’s search for a meaning in a world where there is none, just one aspect of the human condition. I hope my work is about being human with all it’s faults, frailties, hopes, dreams, disasters, loves, hates and complexities. There are no answers, just more questions.