7/4

What do you think of this one? Works for me. I like playing both at the same time.

Thanks for sharing. Here's what I have: Anthony Braxton - 8 Standards (Wesleyan) 2001 Bailey, Derek and Anthony Braxton - Moment Precieux Braxton, Anthony - 11 Compositions (Duo) 1995 w/ Brett Larner Braxton, Anthony - 2 Compositions (ensemble) 1989/1991 Braxton, Anthony - 20 Standards (Quartet) 2003 Braxton, Anthony - 23 Standards (Quartet) 2003 Braxton, Anthony - 3 Compositions Of New Jazz Braxton, Anthony - 5 Pieces 1975 Braxton, Anthony - 6 Compositions:Quartet Braxton, Anthony - 8 Duets With Peter N Wilson, Hamburg 1991 Braxton, Anthony - Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979 Braxton, Anthony - Composition N.165 Braxton, Anthony - Composition N.174 Braxton, Anthony - Composition N.247 Braxton, Anthony - Composition N.6g Braxton, Anthony - Composition N.94 for Three Instrumentalists Braxton, Anthony - Composition N.96 Braxton, Anthony - Compositions No. 10 & No. 16 (+101) Braxton, Anthony & Corea, Chick - Circle/Paris Concert 1971 Braxton, Anthony - Creative Music Orchestra (Koln) 1978 Braxton, Anthony - Creative Orchestra Music 1976 Braxton, Anthony - Donna Lee Braxton, Anthony - Duets 1976 Braxton, Anthony - Duets 1987 w/ Gino Robair Braxton, Anthony - Duets (1993) w/ Mario Pavone Braxton, Anthony - Duets, Vancouver 1989 w/ Marilyn Crispell Braxton, Anthony - Duo (London) 1993 w/ Evan Parker Braxton, Anthony - Eugene (1989) Braxton, Anthony - Five Compositions (Quartet) 1986 Braxton, Anthony - For Four Orchestras Braxton, Anthony - For Trio Braxton, Anthony - For Two Pianos Braxton, Anthony - Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983 Braxton, Anthony - Four Compositions (Quartet) 1984 Braxton, Anthony - Four Compositions (Quartet) 1995 Braxton, Anthony - Four Compositions (Washington, D.C.) 1998 Braxton, Anthony - In The Tradition Braxton, Anthony - Live Braxton, Anthony - New York, Fall 1974 Braxton, Anthony - News From The 70s Braxton, Anthony - Performance (Quartet) 1979 Braxton, Anthony - Piano Music (Notated) 1968-1988 Braxton, Anthony - Quartet (Dortmond) 1976 Braxton, Anthony - Quartet (Santa Cruz) 1993 Braxton, Anthony - Quintet (Basel) 1977 Braxton, Anthony - Robert Shuman String Quartet Braxton, Anthony - Saxophone Improvisations Series F Braxton, Anthony - Seven Standards, 1985 - Vol.1 Braxton, Anthony - Seven Standards, 1985 - Vol.2 Braxton, Anthony - Six Monk's Compositions (1987) Braxton, Anthony - Tentet (New York) 1996, Composition No. 193 Braxton, Anthony - The Aggregate w/ Rova Braxton, Anthony - The Complete Braxton 1971 Braxton, Anthony - The Coventry Concert Braxton, Anthony - The Montreux/Berlin Concerts Braxton, Anthony - Together Alone w/ Joseph Jarman Braxton, Anthony - Town Hall (Trio & Quintet) 1972 Braxton, Anthony - Trillium R Braxton, Anthony - Trio and Duet Braxton, Anthony - Trio And Duet Braxton, Anthony - Trio (London) 1993 w/ Evan Parker Braxton, Anthony - Twelve Compositions Braxton, Anthony - (Victoriaville) 1992 Braxton, Anthony - Willisau (Quartet) 1991 Braxton, Anthony and Andrew Cyrille - Volume 1 Braxton, Anthony and Andrew Cyrille - Volume 2 Braxton, Anthony and Leo Smith - Organic Resonance Braxton, Anthony and Leo Smith - Saturn, Conjunct the Grand Canyon in a Sweet Embrace Braxton, Anthony and Max Roach - One in Two, Two In One Brown, Marion - Afternoon Of A Georga Faun Shepp, Archie And Philly Joe Jones - Archie Shepp And Philly Joe Jones

I always dug it. Imagine where it could have gone if they had more time together.

Good to see you back Chris.

Back then, SNL had interesting musical guests.

nah.

Don't forget this pre-Codona solo album on ECM by Collin Walcott. Grazing Dreams.

I've heard them on radio for years and I finally picked them up recently. Ground breaking for their time and there's some interesting boots out there too.

That's nothing, I get told to "eat shit and die".

:

Not in NY. What I remember is pop instrumental music like Classical Gas and that synth hit, Popcorn. It was the only time they would play instrumentals!

Hopefully not this edition of Phil: He looks like SideShow Bob. Interesting...

Can I visit? I own a DV Cam with zoom...

Uh oh...I look like Phil Spector.

April 29, 2007 At Home Again in the Unknown By JON PARELES, NY Times I READ on the Internet that I was doing a hip-hop album with Timbaland,” Bjork said, and giggled. Timbaland, the producer whose splintered beats have propelled some of the best current hip-hop, collaborated with Bjork for three songs on “Volta” (Elektra), her first album of more-or-less pop songs since “Medulla” in 2004. But Bjork being Bjork, “Volta” is no hip-hop album. Bjork, 41, describes “Volta” as “techno voodoo,” “pagan,” “tribal” and “extroverted.” Those words barely sum up an album that mingles programmed beats, free-jazz drumming, somber brass ensembles, African music, a Chinese lute and Bjork’s ever-volatile voice. It’s a 21st-century assemblage of the computerized and the handmade, the personal and the global. “This relentless restlessness liberates me,” Bjork sings in “Wanderlust,” which she calls the album’s manifesto. “I feel at home whenever the unknown surrounds me.” She was on more familiar ground a few weeks ago, giving an interview in the recording studio at her house in Rockland County, N.Y. It’s an odd-angled room with fuzzy pink walls and a view of trees leading to a glimpse of the Hudson River far below. Dressed all in red, with her hair up in puffs on each side of her head, she looked like an Icelandic cartoon elf. She was adding some final mixing touches and sound-effects transitions to the album, and there was a song left to finish. The next day she would visit a New York City studio to record some French horns, seeking a sound for “Pneumonia” that would be “creamy with a blue emotion.” The music on “Volta” is earthier than “Medulla,” her almost entirely vocal album, and “Vespertine,” her 2001 album full of ethereal harps and string sections. It’s bound together by the brass instruments she deployed in her 2005 score for “Drawing Restraint 9,” a film by her husband, the multimedia artist Matthew Barney; she said she heard more possibilities than she could use in the film. “Volta” also rejoins her, in some songs, with a big beat. “It’s like I’ve got my body back, all the muscles and all the blood and all the bones,” she said. “It is definitely in your face, but I feel it overall as being quite happy.” “Volta” doesn’t aim for any known format. While some songs touch down with drumbeats and synthesizer hooks, others are rhapsodic and strange. Bjork sings about travel, passion, nature, self-reliance, motherhood, religion and a suicide bomber. For this album, she said, she was determined to be “impulsive.” “I didn’t start off with a musical rule,” she said. “It was more emotion.” She said she asked herself: “Are you playing it safe here? Are you actually being impulsive or are you totally subconsciously planning every moment? Are you really allowing enough space for accidents to happen?” In her native Iceland, Bjork sang everything from children’s songs to punk before reaching an international audience as a member of the Sugarcubes in the late 1980s. She knew early on what she wanted to do with her voice. “I was quite conscious that I wanted permission to be able to be sad and funny, and human and crazy and silly, and childish and wise,” she said, “because I think everybody is like that.” Like much of Bjork’s music since she started her solo career with “Debut” in 1993, “Volta” harnesses technology to sheer willfulness. No other songwriter can sound so naïve and so instinctual while building such elaborate structures. And few musicians have managed to sustain her unlikely combination of avant-gardism and pop visibility. Even those who ignore her music can’t forget her fashion statements, like the swan-shaped dress she wore to the 2001 Academy Awards. She also set down ostrich eggs along the red carpet. “People didn’t find it very funny,” she said. “They wrote about it like I was trying to wear a black Armani and got it wrong, like I was trying to fit in. Of course I wasn’t trying to fit in!” Bjork has three New York City shows scheduled: Wednesday at Radio City Music Hall, Saturday at the United Palace Theater and next Tuesday at the Apollo Theater. She will probably be the only headliner ever to perform at those places backed by a 10-woman Icelandic brass band along with laptop, keyboards and a rhythm section. Bjork is suspicious of the word pop, and doesn’t sell her songs to advertisers or accept sponsors for her tours. “I don’t want to be the conqueror of the world or be the most famous person on earth,” she said. “I’ve got no ambitions in that direction. Otherwise I would have done things very differently, I think.” But she appreciates reaching a large audience. “It would be too easy to walk away and say, ‘Oh, I’m just going to do these ornate objects that only a few people, blah blah blah,’ ” she said. “That’s just pretentious and snobbish. “I believe in that place where you plug into the zeitgeist, the collective consciousness or whatever,” she continued. “It’s very folk. Soulful. Not materialistic. I believe in being a fighter for that soulful place.” Bjork made “Medulla” and “Vespertine” largely at home while nurturing her daughter, Isadora, now 4. “I had a baby, and I was breast-feeding and organizing my work around that,” she said. “Even though I had a lot of collaborators, they would come for one afternoon for a cup of tea and leave. They would be visiting my universe, my world. When I started doing this album, I had a bit of a cabin fever of being too much in the protection of my own world, so it was time to be brave and get out.” Bjork recorded “Volta” at studios in the three places she lives — New York, London and Reykjavik — and traveled to San Francisco, Jamaica, Malta, Mali and Tunisia. Now she was willing to show a visitor some of the inner workings of her songs. A computer sat open on her recording console. It showed a screen for the recording and editing program Pro Tools — a familiar sight to musicians — with the multitrack mix of “Earth Intruders,” the first song on “Volta.” “Is music getting too visual?” she asked. “We could open a bottle of wine and talk about that for five hours.” Stripes of color, each one a sound or an instrument, crossed the screen, starting and stopping. “It’s like doing embroidery, like when I used to knit a lot as a teenager,” she said. “You just sit and noodle all day and have a cup of tea and make pretty patterns.” She hit the play button, and the tramp of marching feet began, soon topped by percussion, swooping synthesizers and Bjork’s voice, wailing, “Turmoil! Carnage!” New blocks of color announced new instruments: in this song, the sound of Konono No. 1, a Congolese group that plays electrified thumb pianos amplified (and distorted) through car-horn speakers. (She recorded with the members of the band in Belgium, and they will be joining her on some tour dates.) The beat came from Timbaland, a longtime fan who had sampled Bjork’s song “Joga” and finally got around to collaborating with her last year. “I walked into the studio with Timbaland with no preparations,” she said. “Usually I would have already written the song and there would just be a small little space for the visitor. But now I just wanted some challenge. We improvised for one day, and I just sang on top of whatever he did. “You just walk in the room and it’s just” — she made an explosive sound — “pfff!, and I just went pfff!, and we did seven tracks, just p-p-p-p-p-p. You get really smitten by his energy. It’s like, why doubt? Who needs the luxury of doubt?” Timbaland’s beats made their way into “Earth Intruders,” “Hope” and the song that sounds closest to other Timbaland tracks, “Innocence,” which has sucker-punch syncopations from, among other things, a sample of a grunting man. After their recording session, Timbaland got wrapped up in producing albums and touring with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, leaving Bjork to edit and augment the tracks. “I was a bit confused first, because I got a lot of stuff of his and was maybe expecting him to arrange his noises,” Bjork said. “It ended up being quite a good thing for me, because apparently he never gives other people stuff and lets them complete it for him. So he actually trusted me to do that.” For “Hope,” a song that ponders the story of a pregnant suicide bomber, Bjork went to Mali to meet Toumani Diabate, a djeli (or griot) who plays the harplike kora. They could have exchanged musical ideas electronically. But “I wanted to sing it with him at the same moment, because it’s always different when you do that,” Bjork said. “She wanted everything to work naturally,” Mr. Diabate said backstage after a recent concert with his Symmetric Orchestra at Zankel Hall. In Mali, he played and she sang, trying lyrics she had brought until the syllables fit and they had a few songs. She chose “Hope” and handed another one to him. “She said, ‘Take this and use it any way you like,’ ” Mr. Diabate said. “I couldn’t imagine a superstar doing that.” “Hope” ended up using a Timbaland beat and multiple, overlapping, tangled tracks of kora, traditionally a solo instrument. Mr. Diabate tweaked the results until he was satisfied. “She opened a new door for the kora,” he said. Other new songs have their own convoluted stories. Bjork visited Jamaica with Antony Hegarty, the brooding-voiced lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons, to record a lovers’ duet with lyrics from a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, “The Dull Flame of Desire.” They sang together, improvising back and forth, for a full day; then Bjork edited their duet into a smoldering seven-minute drama, worked up a brass arrangement and decided to set the whole thing to an electronic beat. It didn’t work. Eventually she brought in Brian Chippendale, the drummer from the rock duo Lightning Bolt. She told him: “I’ve tried so many beats on this song, but I think it should start with silence, and I think it should build up and then you should sort of take over. And it should be a beat that’s not a normal drumbeat but more like a heartbeat or something that you feel.” He improvised it in one take. Some of the lyrics on “Volta” obliquely address topics like politics, feminism and religion. “Declare Independence” uses a stomping, distorted, ravelike ’80s beat from her longtime collaborator Mark Bell while she exhorts: “Start your own currency! Make your own stamp! Protect your language!” She was thinking, she said, about Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, which are still part of Denmark, as Iceland was until 1944. “But also I just thought it was kind of hilarious to say it to a person,” she said. “It’s just so extreme!” Other songs, she acknowledged, are messages to herself. The elegiac “Pneumonia” uses only French horns, building up slow-motion chords behind Bjork’s voice, as she reflects on a bout of pneumonia she had in January and on whether she had made herself too isolated: “All the moments you should have embraced/All the moments you should have not locked up.” She also sings to her two children: her daughter and her son, Sindri, who is 20. In “My Juvenile,” a ballad accompanied by sparse clusters on a clavichord, she chides herself for the way she treated Sindri — “Perhaps I set you too free too fast too young” — while Antony sings “The intentions were pure” by way of reassurance. “You sort of let go too much when they’re 14,” Bjork said. “And then suddenly when they’re 16, you behave again like they’re 8. And then when they’re 18, you think they can fly across the world on their own. And then when they’re 20, you tell them off because they’re wearing a dirty jacket. It’s clumsy.” “I See Who You Are” speaks gently to her daughter, imagining her entire life span and beyond, “when you and I have become corpses.” It’s set to lightly plinking electronic tones, the Icelandic brass ensemble and the fluttering, surging notes of a Chinese lute called a pipa. The song is simultaneously a lullaby and an international concoction, an improbable mix and a cozy sonic fabric. While making the album, Bjork said, she read Leonard Shlain’s book “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” which propounds a theory of history shifting between dominant brain hemispheres: right and left, image and word, intuition and logic, natural and manmade. “It doesn’t have to be right; it’s just an interesting speculation,” she said. As the embroidery of her songs moved across the computer screen, and as her voice sang the lyrics of “Wanderlust” — “Peel off the layers until you get to the core” — it sounded as if the alphabet and the goddess were, for the moment, in harmony.

May 4, 2007 Music Review | Bjork Bjork, in Fighting Spirit, Links Church and State By KELEFA SANNEH, NYTimes The last time Bjork played Radio City Music Hall, five and a half years ago, she was in heaven: dressed in white, accompanied by the harpist Zeena Parkins. But when she returned to the space on Wednesday night, she was somewhere else entirely. The night began with a reddish dress, scorching red flames and pummeling beats: it was clear she had descended into a post-disco inferno. And there she stayed for the rest of her short but intense set, which lasted less than 90 minutes. Even when the pummeling stopped, the ominous atmosphere remained. Few singers express exuberance better than Bjork, but this show was severe and sometimes taxing: love songs were reborn as laments; dance tracks were reinvented as military marches. The concert was tied to the release of “Volta” (Elektra), her knotty but impressive new album. The album includes collaborations with the Congolese percussion group Konono No. 1 and the hip-hop producer Timbaland, and Bjork uses their clattering contributions to emphasize the inherent violence of rhythm. In between these outbursts are muted, moody songs that could almost be religious meditations. In that sense her performance brought church and state together; sacred rituals and military ones. The stage was decorated with about four dozen flags of different sizes, and certainly Bjork looked serious enough to lead a small army or a big congregation. Some songs were dominated by the churchy sound of a harpsichord or a pipe organ, while others marched forward alongside brass from her native Iceland. And eventually, inevitably, these two tendencies came to seem like one: a restless fighting spirit. There were some disappointing moments, including that opening: a discombobulated version of “Earth Intruders,” the new album’s fierce opening track. (She was joined by Konono No. 1, which was also the opening act, and she said it was the first time she had performed live with the group.) And sometimes that brass section was a drag, turning her more meditative compositions into funereal dirges. Even so, it’s hard to dampen the drama and power of Bjork’s voice; her every high or loud note inspired a roar from the obsessed fans in the audience. (And that subsection included just about all of them, it seemed.) She sang a sublime version of “I See Who You Are,” from the new album, accompanied by the warp-speed plucking and scrabbling of Min Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa, a Chinese lute. She was joined by Antony Hegarty, from Antony and the Johnsons, for a duet, “The Dull Flame of Desire.” At first the song, with its stylized lyrics (“I love your eyes, my dear/ Their splendid, sparkling fire”), seemed oddly cool, as if the two were merely going through the motions, not celebrating “passion’s kiss.” But as the song slowly and methodically built to its crashing climax, the idea became clearer. This was yet another tribute to the power of ritual — the power of intoning simple, familiar words until they sound strange. No doubt this crowd wouldn’t have minded a few more old favorites (though she did sing a somber version of “All Is Full of Love”), or maybe a costume change. But there is also something intriguing about Bjork’s insistence on now, her determination to link each tour to her current obsessions. Six years ago, on “Vespertine,” she sang, “It’s not meant to be a strife/ It’s not meant to be a struggle uphill.” These days, she doesn’t seem quite so eager to give herself over to bliss. The concert ended with “Declare Independence,” a furious (though fanciful) protest song from the new album. “Make your own flag,” she chanted, and then: “Raise your flag!” Sometimes, the pleasure of giving in is no match for the pleasure of not.

The Zeitgeist Reloaded An ecstatic, tear-bursting evening in Björk's pagan gospel church by Greg Tate, VV May 8th, 2007 3:36 PM Beloved by all—even pole dancers James Baldwin liked to say "Artists are here to disturb the peace." True that, Jimmy, true that. But when those rowdies are really on their game, they also rip folks out of mortal time and the fear of extinction. Lunge them away from their circadian lockstep and into the white-water roller-coaster rush of mythicized ritual frenzy, becoming mad, redemptive angel-banshees on the loose, casting wide nets, screaming love on that ass. A lifetime of loving Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman prepares you to love Björk and the way she worries the notes, stresses tonality until it cracks not because she can't help it but because she lives to crucify a pretty melody with her own brand of wounded, buck-wild, Middle Earth dissonance. She has become this century's zeitgeist artist for that reason, that alarming sonic tongue she uses to zap her diversity-conference audience's sense of emergency, fragility, and pure animal panic. She also operatically exalts and exudes that most elusive and fanciful of human desires: untrammeled, untamable freedom, laid out to the pomo techno-tribalist beat all you earthbound E.T.'s now call home. What the funk were the Wachowski Brothers going for in that Matrix Reloaded rave scene? Nothing less than the pagan gospel church of Björk in full-spectacle throw-down mode. At her Cinco de Mayo gig at the United Palace Theatre in Harlem—where you can still go Sunday afternoons to catch Reverend Ike preach the gospel of "plenteousness"—Björk showed a Negro how far we've come from 1964: lots of grown-ass white women skuh-reem-ing her name like bobby-soxers and teenyboppers once shrieked for Frank, Elvis, and the Beatles. Even everybody's favorite gangstress, our girl dream Hampton, broke down in tears the moment Björk opened her mouth. Lots of grown-ass Others doing the same: Blackfolk, queerfolk, Latinfolk, Asianfolk, hippiefolk, gothfolk, hipsterfolk, graypantherfolk . . . Björk's is a hunter-gatherer ministry calling all barbarous bohemian nations. Plenty of nappyheads for sure (you know we represented), but was trill hiphop in the house? No, nobody vaguely resembling a single ATL stripper in sight, though human nature tells us, just like East Village Nuyorican she-males once transformed the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" into a personal problem, down in the Dirty, Björk's probably inside hella pole dancers' iPods. "Pagan Poetry"? You know them girls are living there: "Swirling black lilies totally ripe/A secret code carved." But forgive me for being so gauche. Like us old heads used to do with Miles, I'm not even supposed to tell you what she sounded like before telling you what she was wearing, but a brother's thousand-yard stare ain't what it used to be and, strained for details (Was that bell of Halloween-flavored plumage made of feathers or taffeta? Were those thigh-high witch's boots?), all we know for true is a black storm of barely shorn hair got shook like a Polaroid picture, and nobody does the centaur dance better. Her band of gypsies included an all-homegirl brass ensemble, a vocal choir decked out in gaily colored church robes, a drummer, a synthesist, and a laptop jockey who doubled on a 'Pod-rigged wheel of steel. Special guests per her new album, Volta, included Antony (minus the Johnsons), two members of the Congo's own opening act Konono No. 1, and Ming Xiao-Fen bluesing her pipa like the spirit of Blind Willie McTell had gotten all up in her area. Gargantuan eco-friendly banners were strung across the back of the stage as if UN Plaza had been taken over by tree huggas with attitude. Nobody since Larry Levan has bewitched or deafened a crowd like her, and he's for damn sure up there in snap heaven raining "fiercefaeriewarriorqueenbeatchyoubettawork!" catcalls down upon her. No brag just fact: Like she already told you, when it comes to being post-everything, every-freaking-body short of Stockhausen, Sylvester, and Joni Mitchell needs to go get a late pass. The set list spun gold and new, crescendoing through nothing borrowed and plenty newfangled Icelandic-tinged country blues. If you're deep off in the cult, you won't be mad at Volta—she'll likely already have you at hello and whatnot. And at this point, like Prince, she's a legacy artist. Her best work's not necessarily behind her, but what is behind her is kinda genius, and whatever happens now is postscript. Still, we'll review: Volta's brass ensemble thing sounds a wee bit too Stravinsky-on- Demerol. In concert, it was more haunting, droning, and Doppler Effect–ish, poking up through the martial drum din and then receding. And maybe it's just moi, but her and Antony on the same track . . . don't you think that might be too much drama, m'dear? Like Freddie Mercury had done a mating dance with Nina Simone. We're supposed to humanly process all that surgical emoting at once? Your call, G, I'm just saying. Thankfully, Björk and kora master Toumani Diabaté both seem more comfortable in their own skins, more like when handshakes collide rather than worlds. Her pairing with thumb-piano–flaunting Konono No. 1, on the other hand, makes for more friction despite their mutual affinities. And the very prospect of her and Timbaland chirping and hiccuping on the same track is hands-down the best idea for a collab anyone's had since Sun Ra and John Cage made nice on Coney Island in 1986. Missy so owns Tim's thang that when you hear these Björk/Tim joints, you may feel compelled to drop the hee-haws in her absence. But the first one to mash up Volta's "Declare Independence" and Missy's "She's a Bitch" is a ripened lily. The freak-flag–waving "Independence," by the way, served as Björk's electropunk encore at Reverend Ike's Palace. One can only imagine what pandemonium might have ensued had her battle cry been a genuinely risky non-sequitur like "Fuck the Police." Even so, Tolkien never told us the Elf had militant-house anthems for days. Or that whatever scares this hi-fi priestess ain't got nothing to do with man, god, machine, mother nature, or the way of the drum.

David Torn Muses on Record Production, Film Scoring, and More By Barry Cleveland, Guitar Player, May 2007 Guitarist David Torn is widely recognized for his innovative approach to his instrument, and his many genre-expanding recordings. But Torn is also a sought-after record producer (David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Dave Douglas, Tori Amos, Sting) and film composer (Believe In Me, Friday Night Lights, The Order, Traffic). In these interview outtakes from GP’s June, 2007 artist feature, he reflects on both aspects of his diverse career. How do you decide which record production offers to accept? Because I put so much effort into the work, I have to have a connection with the music, not just be brought onboard because I was some guy who somebody thought was famous and could do a good job mixing. My best work is when I understand and feel the music. Another issue is time. I’ve gotten so busy that the first projects to get accepted are from friends who have been a part of some scene that I’m connected to. Many are super low-budget, which doesn’t concern me except for the priority of my family’s needs, so these days what’s sneaking through are people who I know, and who I know are committed to doing something with the records. The edges of the boxes from within which I work are not extremely well defined, so every project brings a new attitude, which means I have to spend two or three weeks mixing every project. It can’t just be one of these independent things where they expect you to mix a whole record in a few days, because that’s not going to happen with me. And I also like to know that the person who’s coming to me is willing to allow me to do some creative editing. I don’t mean make every record sound like a Squarepusher record, or one of my records, but there has to be some willingness to involve me as a producer. Finally, I have to feel that our personalities are compatible. For example, although I had a great time doing the Kaki King record, it wasn’t a good match. And, in fact, I ended up standing over [recording engineer] Hector Castillo’s shoulder and allowing him to do the mix, because Kaki really didn’t let me in. It’s no disrespect to her. She’s an incredibly talented, smart individual, but it just was not a good match at that time. I prefer to be proud of what I do. I’m still hoping to produce Jeff Beck’s next record, and I’m pretty sure that someday that will happen. If you could produce any artist you choose, who would it be? I’m not really sure in a desert island kind of way, but I would love more than anything to work with Estrella Morente, the flamenco singer, on a project that was meant to be a creative collaboration. And secretly, I’d love to a “pop record gone wrong” with someone like Chris Cornell, if he really took a hard left turn, or Tom Morello, or Kevin Shields, or Gnarls Barkley. And there’s still this desire to produce with David Bowie for David Bowie, but that’ll probably go to the grave with me. I could make a very long list, and that’s not even going into the jazz zones. Which of your skills, psychological and technical, do you find most useful in helping an artist achieve something of lasting value? I’m not really sure, other than musicality. It’s not so much bringing to bear the creatively collaborative elements—it’s bringing to bear the artist’s commitment to what it is they are doing, because my commitment is so insanely present at all times. My social skills are not that great. My technical skills are very interesting and different, but they are kind of idiosyncratically expert. So I always think that it has to do with being able to hear the music well, and to hear what the artist is hearing, or might be trying to hear, and to communicate commitment, that it’s not a joke. This is your last record. That’s my attitude. This is your last note. If that’s the case, then what are you bringing to the table, and if that’s not the case, then why are you doing this? That’s how I’d like to think of myself, even if it’s not really true [laughs]. It’s not just about the commerce or about that very specific form of ego gratification that can occur with fame and/or money. How much of the soundtrack for The Order was just you? It’s split about 40/60 between the orchestra and myself. That was an unusual one, because it was my first score for a real Hollywood feature film, and the license to be creative was unusually broad. I’m really proud of that score, especially because it was my first solo feature. The director, Brian Helgeland, is also a writer, so we had very writer-ly things to discover about the music as we were going along, and that was an incredible ride, really a great score to have done. In what ways does the creative process differ when you are composing music for a film, as opposed to your own records? What I’ve discovered over the many years that I’ve worked under other composers on hundreds of films as a creative contributor, is that when it’s working best, it’s because the composer is literate and understands the nature of storytelling. And then applying that, and hopefully coming to an agreement with the director’s vision of what he wants, and of what he actually has on film. And then you’ve got to please the studio and the producers. It’s a really different process than making your own record, and very stressful, which I enjoy. I like the drama. I hate it and like it at the same time. Why did you choose to partially relocate to Southern California? Film scores are changing right now, or they are about to change, and I wanted to be around for that. Except for the classic, epic-style movies, there’s a tendency now to use less and less music in a film. It’s been going on for a couple of years, and has been marked, although maybe not visibly or vocally by the industry, and validated by the success of a few very idiosyncratic composers in the last few years. Who are those composers? Gustavo Santaolalla, who won the Oscar two years in a row. He’s a musician, a guitar player, and he’s only been in L.A. for five years. He’s done six films, and two years in a row he won Oscars for movies that had, maybe, 15 or 20 minutes of music in them altogether. Then there’s Antonio Pinto, who did City of God. Jon Brion. Michael Edwards, who did Donnie Darko. David Julian, who did Memento. Clint Mansell. Javier Navarrete, who did Pan’s Labyrinth, which doesn’t have that much music in it, but where it does exist, it’s really critical to the story. And it’s a specific type of film, not all films. Because John Williams doing a Steven Spielberg film is always brilliant, what are you going to say? And Thomas Newman doing anything is always brilliant. There are always going to be films that require something very Hollywood-esque. Are there any particularly interesting guitar-oriented techniques that you use when scoring that are different than what you’d use on your own record? There are. One of the things that I like to do if I’m stuck for an orchestral idea or something thematic is to play the picture and make loops of harmonics. You can hear this very much on Friday Night Lights, where I’m using these tiny harmonic loops done with flageolets in different tunings, to set a tone and pace for something. Starting with pure textural devices, such as long, ambient-style loops, can often be the trigger for beginning to write something, and it’s become a way to move forward for me. It is, in fact, all the textural devices that got me into this business in the first place—the fact that other people were hiring me to create these moving harmonic textures for their scores.

Amazon is showing May 22, 2007.

...it gotta be interesting.

Dear Abby... I think my wife is cheating on me. I am a working musician and, as you would expect, travel a lot. I have been noticing strange things happening when I get home. Her mobile phone rings and she steps outside to answer it or she says, "I'll call you back later". When I ask her who called she gets evasive. Sometimes she goes out with friends but comes home late, getting dropped off around the corner and walking the rest of the way. I once picked up the extension while she was on the phone and she got very angry. A buddy of mine plays guitar in a band. He told me that my wife and some guy have been to his gigs. He wanted to borrow my guitar amp. That's when I got the idea to find out for myself what was really happening. I said "sure, you can use my amp but I want to hide behind it and the gig and see if she comes into the venue and who she comes in with". He agreed. Saturday night came and I slipped behind my Marshall JCM800 half stack to get a good view. I could feel the heat coming off the back of the amp. It was at that moment, crouching down behind the amp, that I noticed that one of the tubes was not glowing as bright as the other 3. Is this something I can fix myself or do need to take it to a technician? Thanks Very Concerned.

I got all excited, I thought it was something new and it had more Ralph Towner.

previous discussion.