Steven Wilson Headquarters
Most Steven Wilson fans are aware, or should I say, inevitably become aware of the fact that he realistically began his career path as a professional musician rather inauspiciously nearly 22 years ago when he and his teenage friend Simon Vockings began creating rudimentary recordings of electronic “noise” direct to cassette under the moniker Altomont. These recordings were influenced by some of Steven and Simon’s favorite artists at the time; German electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream were the most predominant influence. However, Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler, and experimental krautrock bands such as Neu!, Can, and Faust were also quite influential on the duos early recordings.
I would wager that if you are reading this article you are indeed a serious fan of Steven Wilson’s plethora of musical projects, the most prominent of which would currently be Porcupine Tree. I would also be willing to bet that many of you are most likely fans of his constantly evolving recording partnership with Tim Bowness in the esoteric No Man project, and have possibly even checked out Steven’s homage to his early krautrock and psychedelic influences explored in the somewhat self indulgent IEM project. Oddly enough, if you were to ask Steven which of his musical alter egos is his personal favorite, he is likely to tell you none of the above! In fact it is the textural and ambient electronic music that he creates as Bass Communion that is most near and dear to his heart.
As a certified card carrying Steven Wilson devotee, I became fascinated by the stark beauty that I heard in the music Steven was creating in Bass Communion when I picked up the self-titled eponymous release back in the summer of 2001. I was immediately touched to the core by this music, yet I couldn’t precisely say why. All I knew was that Bass Communion spoke to me, and the more I listened, the more it became a necessary part of my daily musical regimen to listen to Bass Communion.
Welcome to the sonic terrain that is Bass Communion, where ominous monolithic drones, and dark swirling rhythm-less waves of sound slowly evolve, envelope, and then dissipate into vacuous chasms of space. Where whispery traces of icy melodies are sonically layered and processed infinitely across alien soundscapes, filling every crevice and crack in a room, and in your head.
Listening to Bass Communion is very often an intensely spiritual, physical, and emotionally healing experience for me, and so I decided that I had to find out just what it was about BC that made it so special to me and many other Steven Wilson fans. Little did I know that when I approached Steven with my idea to do an interview based exclusively on the Bass Communion project, this would be the very first time he had ever spoken to anyone solely about BC in an “official” interview format! Imagine how thrilled I was to find this out, but enough of my ramblings and on with the interview then…
GK: Hello Steven thanks so much for doing this exclusive interview for Carbon Nation!
SW: My pleasure Geoff.
GK: I wanted to do something a bit special here with this piece and talk to you about Bass Communion, as you are normally used to doing interviews and press for Porcupine Tree, and yet you are actually set, or rather you were set, to release the new Bass Communion CD Ghosts on Magnetic tape last week. So let’s start at the beginning and go way back into history and tell me if you can about the first truly specific Bass Communion track that you recorded, and basically give us a little history on how and when the Bass Communion project started for you?
SW: OK it’s a little bit more complex than that. It’s kind of an intangible thing because in some respects I’ve been making Bass Communion music longer than any kind of other music. I don’t know if you picked up a copy of a vinyl release I put out a couple of years ago of something called Altamont…
GK: Well that was a follow up question I had and I was hoping you would lead into that… Does BC owe any of its conception as a project to the old Altamont instrumental experimentations? Was BC the natural mature extension of the experimental side of Steven Wilson?
SW: Yeah very much so, my interest in electronic, ambient, textural music really goes back a long, long way, long before I was even putting out records. I mean I can kind of date it from when I was a teenager, originally getting into krautrock and German experimental music of the 70’s. I’m thinking of things like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler, who made very strange electronic music, and that music was always there for me and part of my inspiration and musical world because I listened to so much of that music, and still do. So it was only going to be a matter of time before I started a new project to explore that influence again. I think one of the catalysts for starting the project Bass Communion was that there was a whole new wave of music in the mid 90’s that was really inspired by that 70’s music as well. It was seeing other people do it that gave me the license and confidence to start putting out that music myself. They’re pretty obscure artists that I discovered somehow, I don’t know if you’ve come across people like Paul Schutze, but I know you know Biosphere?
GK: I love Biosphere
SW: Yeah people like that were starting to do very dark, experimental, ambient orientated electronic music, and I got into that and it kinda revitalized my interest in working in those areas, which of course is what I had done as a kid in my teens making the Altamont music.
GK: When you were making the Altamont recordings was that predominantly done using just a four track and bouncing tracks etc?
SW: No it was all live believe it or not; we didn’t have any multi-track recording capability at all! I mean myself and this guy Simon who lived down the road from me had an old analogue synth, and we just used to set the stuff up and record direct to cassettes. That’s all we could do at that time, you know we were very young and still in school, and it was really just living out our influences at the time, which was a lot of that weird krautrock experimental electronica
GK: Stuff like Neu!, Can and Faust ?
SW: Yeah, but as I said, although we were listening to those things, it was more the Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, or the purely electronic artists that directly influenced us, and so coming back to that in the 90’s having, if you like, learned my trade a little better in terms of how to record music and obviously having the capability of multi-tracking and all that stuff now, to try to make a new take on what originally inspired me, that is really what Bass Communion is all about. It’s really of all my projects, well all my projects are labors of love, but this one is the greatest labor of love for me.
GK: I kinda look at BC as textural soundscape music that’s very evocative of mental imagery, and that’s the one thing about listening to BC (here I digress and ramble on about the various mental images certain BC tracks form for me, and I think Steven fell asleep briefly) that has always struck me is the evocative nature of the music. Do you have a specific vision in mind when you start to develop a Bass Communion track? Is there something you set out to reward the listener with, or is it more interesting to create the music and then sit back and listen to what people say they hear or feel from a particular piece?
SW: To be honest with you it’s more a gut reaction to a sound source. Every Bass Communion track is based on a single sound source. Increasingly I find that I’m really interested in taking a particular sound and it’s almost like solving a problem. If I have a sound, the problem is how can I create a piece of music from this one sound source? For example on the new record I collected some source material from recordings of old 78 rpm records that I found in my parent's attic. So I was playing these records and I couldn’t even play them at 78, I was having to play them at 45, so I couldn’t even play them at the right speed, so what I was getting off the record was hardly any of the music at all, it was almost all the surface noise and the crackles from the record because they were so old and so scratched, and those crackles and this kinda ghostly sound of the music coming through from underneath the crackle created something in my mind. It almost felt like the dead trying to communicate through the noise, which led me on to that whole concept of ghosts trying to communicate with the living world through the medium of recorded music or recordings. So those recordings that I collected became, well I’d say 80% of the music material on the new album comes from there. You won’t believe it when you hear it because hardly any of the sounds are things you can really relate back to that, but almost all the sounds on the record are various processed versions of those crackles and…
GK: So it’s essentially field source recordings that you manipulated through filtering and processing?
SW: Absolutely, and so for me the beauty of a sound, or the power of a sound, or some kind of spiritual or soulful quality in a sound will be the genesis of a piece of Bass Communion music. So it’s not quite as poetic as you were sort of making it sound, like I have some kind of vision or something. But there’s always something about a sound that’s at the core of a Bass Communion track that has inspired me and made me want to create something from it. Going back to one of the very earliest Bass Communion pieces, the Drugged track; this is almost entirely made from layering, processing, and multi-tracking the same sample of Robert Fripp over and over again, and I created from that the twenty-five minute Drugged piece, because the sound itself, the original piece of source material, was so inspiring… I think the thing with Bass Communion is finding a piece of acoustic or electric material that is so inspiring that it can form the music material in itself for a piece, something that can just fill a room with an atmosphere or texture that exists in time and space for the duration …
GK: Is it kind of like, in weird sort of way, a religious experience to pick up on a sound source that moves you in a particular direction and it just drives you?
SW: Yes. I find people sometimes look at my record collection and they’re a bit freaked out because I have things in my collection which are on the borders of what you could even call "music". I have field recording of anything from rainstorms to electric fences, which is one of the more bizarre things I have in my collection, some guy actually had collected recordings of electric fences, and people think I’m crazy when they see these things in my collection but I’ve always been completely inspired just by the beauty and the music that’s all around us, the music in sound. Of course the whole question of what is music comes into play then you know can a recording of a rainstorm be music?
GK: Well sure it could yeah…
SW: Well to me it is and I guess Bass Communion is one step on from that, it’s taking a single sound source that has an inherent beauty and that sound source can be something from the natural world, or a performer like Robert Fripp, or Theo Travis, and taking a fragment of what they do and finding a way to fill a whole space with that for, I don’t know, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and creating something that has got musicality to it but still retains the beauty and the power and the soulfulness of that original sound source, and doesn’t spoil it or destroy it.
GK: I think that’s what is so interesting about BC because you use a lot of natural sound sources which allow the music to remain organic. It seems to me that you have consciously stayed away from a lot of the software technologies that simply allow critics or fans to lump BC in with standard ambient, electronic, electronica, techno, house, or any of those other sub genres. BC remains a pure form of experimental music for you, correct?
SW: Yeah, I’m very conscious of the fact that Bass Communion is not....although you could call it electronic music, in actual fact precious few of the sounds in the music are sourced from electronics, they’re almost entirely sourced from acoustic or analogue instruments, or real performers, so in that respect this whole question of whether it is electronic or not is a bit of a moot point really. But I suppose the point is that the electronic aspect comes in the way that the music is processed and the way it is layered and is texturalized. I do rely very much on hard disc and digital technology, but the most important thing for me is that there is something about the original sound, that the acoustic properties of the original sound be maintained, and that’s really where the heart and soul of the piece is.
GK: Along that line of questioning then, could you ever see yourself in the guise of BC doing a recording that would lend itself to a more traditional IDM or glitch inspired style like say Aphex Twin, or Autechre, or will BC always remain an organic, ambient, experimental project for you?
SW: Well it’s difficult to say, I would never say never because BC even in the few years I’ve been doing it has certainly evolved and changed a lot, and I know you haven’t heard the record yet but when you do you’ll hear there’s a definite development into a different area. This album is much darker than the previous two or three…
GK: How can it get a whole lot darker than the collaboration you just released with Coleclough and Potter?
SW: Well it’s definitely in that vein but it’s even more ghostly and even more spectral than that. You have to hear it, I mean it’s really all based on a concept that is really specific to this record and BC may not continue in this direction on the next record for example. As you know I’m a big fan of the whole Warp Records family of artists Autechre, Aphex Twin, Plaid, I think they are all amazing, and I have to say I have tried occasionally to work in that area because I love it so much. But I think it comes to one thing and one thing only, and that is that I really wouldn’t want to do something unless I felt I could do something different with it, or unless I felt I could carve out my own area within a particular genre. Although I have tried to do the more traditional rhythmic IDM pieces, those guys like Autechre and Aphex Twin have covered so many different bases so well that mine sound like pastiches and really pale in comparison. However, I do feel since I’ve been working in the more ambient vein for so long on and off, that I have actually developed my own sound and style, and my own niche in that area. I think Bass Communion records do have a sound like no other artist. I have got some electronic music recorded, and I have to say that I don’t think it transcends it’s influences, and that’s always been a major concern for me not just with Bass Communion, but with Porcupine Tree, No Man, IEM, all of them really. I wouldn’t have been happy to release any of them unless I felt…I mean all musicians have influences and of course you can hear the influences from time to time, but I never want to release any record if I feel that it was merely a …
GK: Rehash?
SW: Yeah, the result of its influences, or just something that really didn’t transcend its influences. And I have to say my electronic music probably doesn’t transcend its influences at the moment. Then again it’s something where if I spent a lot of time working on it, eventually I would develop my own sound and my own style I’m sure, but I figure I’ve already got enough on my plate…(Chuckling)
GK: Yeah, just a little bit right? (Laughing)
* (some of SW's experiments in rhyhmic electonic music were subsequenlty issued on the limited edition "Unreleased Electronic Music" CD)
SW: Yeah I just don’t have the time to dedicate to developing, and I love listening to it, but I don’t feel a burning desire to make music in that particular style. Just one more thing I wanted to add. Very often I find that if I’m working on a rhythmic piece somewhere along the line I take the rhythm out and I prefer it. I have this process where I subtract the rhythmic element very often with tracks. Many of the Bass Communion tracks did actually start as more rhythmic than they ended up, but there is a natural inclination I have to remove rhythms and pulses and just be left with kind of this “sound”. I guess it’s coming back to that thing again about the purity of sound letting the sounds breath and just fill the room.
GK: Right, so it’s essentially an addition by subtraction process?
SW: Yeah, It’s a natural inclination I have to strip things down and keep them minimal...
GK: OK, since I haven’t heard Ghosts on Magnetic Tape yet, even though you’ve just described it to me in pretty great detail, tell me; You made the statement recently that this has essentially been the most accomplished and fulfilling recording that you may have ever done…
SW: I didn’t say it was “The”, I said it was certainly one of them yeah…
GK: OK my fault there…
SW: If I had to pick five of my favorite recordings that I’ve been involved in this would be one of them for sure.
GK: Why is that? What about this recording gives you such a deep sense of satisfaction?
SW: There’s something about it, there’s a purity about this recording that I guess I have been working toward with Bass Communion and I feel I have finally achieved it. That’s not to say that people will think it’s any better or worse than any of the others, but for me personally there is something about this record that has a purity and a soul to it, and it’s a very creepy record and one of the things that I like about this record that I didn’t achieve on previous records is that I cut out much of what I might call, hmm, the prettiness. I think on previous Bass Communion records there was a kind of slightly pretty element which wasn’t necessarily… How can I put this? In some sense I felt like I didn’t have the bravery at the time with the first two Bass Communion albums to make exactly the record that I wanted to. I can give you an example. There’s a track on the Burning Shed CDR called Amphead
GK: Yes, my personal favorite BC track by the way…
SW: Right, well me too, and I love that track but I wasn’t brave enough to put it on the second Bass Communion release because I thought - I can’t put a fourteen minute drone on this album. Because it is basically simply a piece of filtered noise, fourteen minutes worth of filtering white noise…
GK: Well you just killed my final question of the interview because I was going to beg you to tell us the secrets behind creating that track...(Laughter)
SW: Well it’s a bit more complicated than that because the filtering was extremely complex. The sound source itself was actually only the hiss from an open pickup on an electric guitar. I recorded this noise and then set up an extremely complex string of filters to create this piece, and when I finished that piece I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever done. But something stopped me from putting it on the record because I didn’t feel that perhaps Porcupine Tree fans, or No Man fans, would understand why Steven Wilson would release a fourteen minute track of filtered white noise! So in a sense it’s taken me three or four albums to get to the point now where I feel confident enough to be completely pure about my own intentions for Bass Communion, and there are some very minimal moments on this record that I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to put out in the past before… I mean people sometimes ask me, do you think about your fans when you make records? And I always say “ No I make records for myself ”, or Porcupine Tree always makes records to please themselves, but in some respects that’s not entirely true because you are always conscious of your fan base. So with Bass Communion, because it’s so special to me, I’m really reluctant to put things out there to be shot down if you know what I mean…
GK: Yeah exactly, it’s kind of like your baby…
SW: It really is and I was really worried when I first launched Bass Communion about putting anything out at all because I thought the Porcupine Tree fans are going to hate this, they’re just not going to understand this at all, and I have to say I was largely proved wrong about that. Of course there were some who weren’t into it, but pretty soon made up their mind that it wasn’t for them and didn’t buy the next one or whatever, but there were also people who really appreciated it and I guess now third, fourth album in, I’m feeling more confident about Bass Communion as an established style. I don’t feel I am putting it out there to be shot down now because I feel there is support for that side of my musical personality.
GK: Absolutely!
SW: People like yourself have given me more confidence to make this record (Ghosts), which for me is the purist statement of Bass Communion so far, and I think if you like Amphead your going to love this record!
GK: Amphead is one of those tracks that I listen to over and over again Steven and I swear I can hear 30 million things differently in the track every single time I listen to it and it’s a very eerie overwhelming track. If I were to play Amphead for most of my friends they would likely say what the fuck is that noise? And I would likely respond, “Precisely” that’s the point, but that’s what is so beautiful about the piece you know…
SW: Yeah that’s the whole thing its like, for a lot of people music is not music unless it has everything, unless it has the rhythm, the melody, and the harmony, but very often the music I love the most has one or more of those things missing and has a purity to it as a result. It could be just a sound or a texture, it could just be something rhythmic without a melody, and of course it’s a very Western way of thinking that unless music has a traditional pop structure, or it has a top line melody that it can’t be proper music. 90% of the music made the world over doesn’t have melody, a lot of music made in the Middle East, and particularly in Africa, is purely rhythmic and doesn’t have melody at all, and something like Bass Communion is a completely different approach to music. It's music without rhythm, it's music without melody, it's music that exists purely as texture or a sound, and it’s no less musical for that. But it’s difficult to explain that to someone who thinks they’re being radical if they go out and buy the new Coldplay album. That’s about as experimental as they get. Without wishing to patronize those people, they really would need to learn to listen to music in a different way to even begin to appreciate something like BC…
GK Yes you do, and having known you now for several years, and I have to say that I, like a lot of your fans, watch your play list pretty consistently, and I hate to say it but you have cost me a tremendous amount of money (Laughter) …
SW: Apologize for that, all the crap I’ve made you buy (Laughter)
GK: Bass Communion is essentially a self indulgent project...
SW: Absolutely!
GK: Prior to the release of the Remix project that came out in April, and the collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough and Colin Potter, the only real collaborator or contributor if you will was Theo (Travis). Is it a fair statement to say that BC is essentially a conduit or cathartic project for you where you can really immerse yourself in this style and where you can kind of forget about PT and No Man? I would guess that PT and No Man are the real money makers in your pantheon of projects, but is Bass Communion the project you focus on and spend a lot of time perfecting?
SW: Well actually I have to say that I don’t spend a lot of time on it. I mean the time I do spend on it is incredibly pleasurable for me, but most of the Bass Communion music is made during the time when I don’t have other commitments. When I am making this music I’m relaxing, it’s something that’s very natural, there’s no pressure, there’s no feelings like “God I have to come up with 10 songs now because we’re going into the studio to make a new album next month”, there is none of that aspect to it. I don’t have to answer to anyone about the content, commercial or otherwise because it is by far the least commercially viable thing I do. All those elements free me from any of the things that could affect the purity of the music and the purity of the intention behind the music …
GK: So the lack of pressure is inspiring?
SW: Absolutely, just simple things like how long do I want this track to be for instance; do I want it to be an entire CD, or if I want it to be ten minutes long, or a minute long, or anything like that, it’s not even an issue. It’s a purely creative thing in that respect, and every decision is made for no other reason than to please myself. In fact very often Bass Communion records are not conceived as records at all they’re conceived as things for me to listen to, to enjoy myself. Ghosts on Magnetic Tape… I actually at one point said to my friend that I’m not gonna release this even though I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, but I don’t think I want to put it out there… actually it’s my friend Dirk from…Do you know Vidna Obmana? Belgian ambient artist?
GK: Oh yeah of course, you turned me on to him so now I am of course trying to hunt everything he has released down…
SW: He’s amazing too and I actually played it for him and told him that I really didn’t know if I wanted to release it you know, because it was just made in such a pure way and for no other reason than to please myself, and he said look, you’ve gotta release it because it’s a great record so… It didn’t take much encouragement for me to change my point of view, and I guess a part of me was secretly hoping he was going to say that anyway, so yeah it really is something that exists for no other reason than the love of making these tracks and it’s not as if I spend an enormous amount of time sweating over it, quite the opposite because some of the pieces come together very quickly. Very often these pieces are very subtle in the sense that they can either work or not work on the basis of very small subtle changes, so they’re very fragile in that respect, and very often I’ll create a piece very quickly and spend two or three months very, very, subtly honing it by changing one balance here, or filtering something very slightly different there, until I’m absolutely happy with it. That whole process is very organic, very natural, no pressure.
GK: Are we OK on time? I apologize if I am jumping around a bit and out of sequence just trying to hit all the basses…
SW: No we’re fine. I have to say because I never talk about Bass Communion normally this is the first time I’ve ever had to articulate certain things in words and it’s actually kinda hard in a way, but it’s good…
GK: No I think this is great, and I think you’ll be surprised how many people really, really, want to know about this project in more detail! I think the fan base is really bigger than you might realize. I was doing a spot check of a lot of dark ambient websites this afternoon just to see if I could pull some info for the interview, and I was surprised to find several BC reviews on some really obscure websites, and the new collaboration got really high marks on a major ambient site that I found while surfing, and really there are only a handful of artists that do this type of music really well and BC is one of the few. Back to the questions! Is there an extensive amount of editing that takes place before you feel a Bass Communion track is worthy of release? You mentioned earlier that you might spend months tweaking a piece. Is that the norm or what?
SW: Pretty much ,as I mentioned in the last question. I think each track is a question of finding the exact right elements. It’s almost like solving a puzzle or a problem as I said. It’s finding exactly the right combinations of sounds and that can be something that hangs in a very fine balance, a very subtle thing, so very often I can bring the sound sources together very quickly and have some kind of rough shape to the piece, but then it’s a process of adding a note here, or removing a note there, changing the way two textures relate to one another, fine tuning and tweaking, yeah that can take a long time. As far as editing, I don’t really go for specific durations, I guess that’s just instinctive to know how long something is worth listening to. Again those are very self-indulgent decisions. If I decide I like a sound and want to hear it for ten minutes then that’s what I’ll do. Somebody else might get bored after thirty seconds I don’t know…
GK: So is it a fair statement to say that you don’t actually sit down and write tracks exclusively for Bass Communion, they just kind of evolve?
SW: I mean I’m aware when I’m working on a Bass Communion track…
GK: Let me rephrase that question. They (Bass Communion tracks) don’t really evolve out of odds and ends from PT, No Man, or even IEM, because those are more traditional type writing arrangements correct?
SW: No they don’t, in fact the only time anything like that has happened it’s happened in the opposite direction. Sometimes textures that I’ve used for Bass Communion have ended up being recycled into, well not recycled but reused or re-contexturalized if you like, into my other projects.
GK: Like portions of Drugged for Together We’re Stranger?
SW: Exactly
GK: The dulcimer in Lips of Ashes
SW: Yeah exactly, and there are other examples as well. There was a texture in 16 Second Swarm that was used in Russia on Ice.
GK: It’s funny but the hard-core SW fans always play a game of spot the sample. For example, where did Steven take that sample from (laughter) and it’s not often that obvious unless you are really a die-hard fan of all your projects. You have to be a bit nuts and have been into your projects for a long time to hear the connections …
SW: Yeah you know none of my projects are completely islands on their own. There are ideas and sounds that obviously crop up in different projects. There are chord sequences that have cropped up in both No Man and Porcupine Tree, drum parts on IEM records that have also been on PT records, so there is cross pollination between all the projects. Some of the Blackfield songs were songs that were originally written for Porcupine Tree as well, so for me that’s just part of my musical repertoire if you like. Frank Zappa was a bit like this, he’d write a certain melody for a classical piece and then that would show up on one of his rock albums so they act as clues to the bigger picture…
GK: I am not being critical here Steven, just as a guitar player myself I find that I’ll often write a song and turn around a couple of months later and realize that it’s not all that different than something I’d already written months earlier, so I had rehashed some ideas somewhere along the line and I think that’s just a human characteristic to go for what you know…
SW: Yeah every artist has a musical personality and part of your musical personality is that you do have a tendency to go for certain harmonic patterns, certain melodies, certain …
GK: Comfort zones?
SW: Yeah. I mean if you didn’t have that tendency to repeat yourself slightly then you would not have a musical personality. If you didn’t repeat yourself somewhat then how would people recognize your style and your sound? Yeah of course I am drawn to using the same kind of sounds and techniques, same chords and harmonic shifts. We try not to completely repeat ourselves, but in a sense we’re always developing and evolving the same core musical personality and always trying to augment it and expand upon it. But it’s always still there…
GK: Well there are only so many chords, and sequences of notes you can use too…
SW: Absolutely, and in a sense Bass Communion frees me from the same old chords, and same old melody stuff, because there are no chords and distinct melodies. It’s purely working in sound. However, even in Bass Communion there obviously is a certain kind of sound or texture combination that appeals to me and makes Bass Communion’s personality unique. It’s not something I’m conscious of when I am doing it, but I am aware at the same time that “that” is my particular preference in taste and takes the music and makes it sound the way it does.
GK: The great thing is there are allot of people out there that crave this particular kind of material and like I said I think the audience for Bass Communion is growing considerably, and for myself I have actually found it to be more inspiring at times than a lot of Porcupine Tree works…
SW: I think for a lot of people this kind of music is becoming more important because as the pace of life accelerates evermore, and stress becomes more and more a part of everyone’s life, and the MTV thing where you see a pop video, or commercial, or movie trailer, and you see a hundred cuts in every minute of film and everything has to be moving constantly to keep your attention....well the opposite side of that is this craving for something that is incredibly minimal, soulful, and that will just kind of fill the room if you like with this… well it’s almost the next step up from silence. I remember there was a very famous publicity campaign done by a Jazz label called ECM, not sure if you know them?
GK: Oh yeah, Keith Jarrett and all those artists…
SW: Yeah, Jarrett, and Garbarek, and those artists, and the whole label’s catch phrase during the 70’s was “The most beautiful sound next to silence”, and there is that sort of perception that ultimately silence is the most beautiful thing in the world in it’s pure form. Of course we can never really experience pure silence, and the whole thing about John Cage writing that piece for silence was not that he expected people to listen to silence, but what he was trying to say was … This is a piece of music that is four minutes and thirty-three seconds long, what I want you to do is actually listen to what’s happening around you, the music that is happening around you. The roar of the traffic outside, the birds singing or whatever it was, because we never really experience true silence but there is something about that kind of space, that texture hanging in the air, you know the roar of the traffic, or the trains on the tracks three miles away while it’s rumbling in the distance or whatever it is… For me Bass Communion is almost like the next step up from that it’s just filling the space.
GK: It’s like a heightened level of awareness?
SW: Yeah, almost, it’s just something, without wishing to get pretentious about this; it’s just something that heals the soul. It slows your whole metabolism down and focuses your mind into a different space completely.
GK: That’s kind of bizarre that you described the experience in those terms Steven, because that’s why I listen to BC so often. I have tinnitus really bad from playing my amps too loud in bands (laughter) years ago, and I even have use a fan to help mask the ringing in my ears to sleep at night, but I find that when I listen to BC, Biosphere, and other similar ambient soundscape material, it really gets into my inner being and kind of sooths my internal system…
SW: It’s interesting that you have to sleep with a fan on, with that kind of constant white noise on …
GK: Well I have it very badly…
SW: Wow that’s interesting though… So for me a beautiful sound or a beautiful texture just really makes time stand still and I just don’t want it to end. I buy many CD’s where you basically get just one piece for the duration of the CD, one sound or one texture and that’s how I came across people like Colin Potter and Jonathan Coleclough, so called dronologists who really do just create one sound, one drone, and then lay seventy-five minutes down on a CD and it literally becomes something that you fill the room with for over an hour…
GK: It’s like a mantra …
SW: Yeah absolutely, a kind of mantra drone, and I find something about that music so much more appealing than putting on, I don’t know, much as I admire a lot of contemporary rock artists I find that my lifestyle is such that I don’t have the opportunity to concentrate and listen to that kind of music in the way that it probably deserves to be listened to and concentrated on …
GK: My next question is a “what if” question. If you could arrange a collaboration with one of the following artists who would you choose and why? Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), Richard James (Aphex Twin), Asmus Tietchens, Sean Booth and Rob Brown (of Autechre), Boards of Canada, Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher), or none of the above?
SW: Wow, well they’re all kind of heroes of mine....I would really love to meet Richard James just because he was the original, the whole sort of start of the IDM thing really…
GK: Does he keep a really low profile, because he’s in London right?
SW: I think he is in London but he also seems like a really cool guy because what I love about him is the whole thing about playing with people’s idea about what celebrity is. You know, the videos with his face being morphed onto the kids bodies, and he does the most outrageous things and I kinda love that. In terms of someone to actually collaborate with I think I would have to go with the guys in Autechre because I think the way they create and program rhythms is astonishing. I’d love to take those rhythms and create Bass Communion-like textures over top of them.
GK: Here is a question that Serge threw at me that I found interesting. You recently worked with Aviv Geffen and you also collaborated with the late Bryn Jones of Muslimgauze, who in his life was a very outspoken supporter of Palestine and anti Israeli violence… Serge is getting political on me here (laughter). What was it like to work with two such people with differing viewpoints on the same subject? By the way, I have to plead ignorance here because I know that Aviv is a pop star so perhaps he’s not that political but I do not know much about him in general…
SW: He’s very political …
GK: So what was it like to work with these two different individuals, keeping in mind the fact that you didn’t have a lot of real contact with Bryn, but you certainly knew what his politics were about, and also tying into that you (BC) contributed a track to A Fire This Time which was a very politically motivated compilation that highlighted the horrors of American foreign policy. Can you kind of talk about those topics a little bit?
SW: Well although I do have a standpoint on these issues, that wasn’t why I got involved in any of them. I got involved with all three because of the music and that’s always the most important thing to me. Obviously I’m not suggesting that I would get involved in something if I totally disagreed with someone’s politics. If that were the case then I would hold back or stop at that point, but it was more important to me that Bryn’s music was extraordinary. That was the reason I wanted to collaborate with him, not because of any sympathies or otherwise I might have with his political viewpoint. Actually there’s a lot of things Bryn said that I don’t agree with. I mean he basically advocated the use of suicide bombings and all those things, and I don’t agree with that, although I do think the Palestinians do have a strong cause, but I don’t believe in their methods, and he did. In fact he actively supported them and believed that basically Israel should be wiped off the face of the planet. Now clearly the fact that I’m working with an Israeli musician right now means that I don’t agree with that, although actually Aviv would also have agreed with a lot of Bryn’s viewpoints as he believes that the occupied territories should be returned and has said as much in his own country, and got himself in a lot of trouble for that very reason. So in a way, although on one hand Bryn and Aviv could seem to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum they’re not in the sense that Aviv actually would agree with allot of Bryn’s, well… what for me were the most...um…
GK: Radical?
SW: No the least radical, I think the more radical side of Bryn’s politics were a little too much for me…
GK: His views were extreme?
SW: Very extreme - he basically advocated the use of violence, as he felt the Palestinians had been wronged so deeply. And I can’t agree with the use of violence…
GK: I would suppose that would give levity to the fact that you donated that track to the compilation where you worked with Naseer Shama?
SW: Yeah Naseer Shamma, “the” premier Oud player… The whole thing about with working with Bryn was I thought the music was extraordinary and I think one thing you have to accept sometimes with someone like Bryn Jones is that his politics and his music are so closely linked that you cannot separate them. So the fact that he did basically advocate violence, he did believe the Palestinian’s have just cause for killing Israelis and continuing to kill Israelis, that extremism, that anger, was directly channeled into his music and made his music what it was…
GK: Very intense…
SW: Yeah, you know there’s this whole cliché about how the real geniuses that come out of the art world, music, art, novels, whatever, are extremely troubled people. They’re either manic depressives, or schizophrenic, or have suicidal tendencies, and I think there’s truth in that. I think troubled people do in a sense very often become the people most able to express the human condition through art in the most genuine, powerful, and most touching way, and I think Bryn was a good example of that. He was a very angry, very troubled, very extreme and radical person, and that is why his music is so special and you cannot separate the two, and even though I didn’t necessarily agree with all his politics, I could recognize that they were what made his music so special and that was why I wanted to collaborate with him, because he was passionate and that passion came through in his music. And I’m passionate about my music as well.
GK: A couple of quickies then I’ll let you go… You’ve essentially answered this but Serge wanted me to ask, Ghosts on Magnetic Tape is the first BC release to actually feature a title. Why the change?
SW: I guess in the past with Bass Communion records I didn’t really have an overall concept; they were just a collection of pieces made over a period of time. So I collected my favorites over a certain period and that became the first BC release, and the same thing happened with the second release. This time I had a very specific concept, very specific source material, and I actually recorded the album in a relatively short period of time, like over five or six months whereas the previous two records were made over two year periods. This whole concept, the whole shape of this record, came together even before the music.
GK: A lot of BC tracks are very lush and they have a very cinematic feel and emotive qualities, like I explained earlier. Have you ever been approached to do, or would you like to do film work? I happen to know you’re a big fan of the film 28 Days Later, and you’re a David Lynch fan, and you are into people that are on the cutting edge of art like that. Is that something you’d really like to do?
SW: I’d love to. I would really love to score a movie because the way I would score a movie is the way David Lynch scores movies. The soundtracks to his movies were also very big influences on Bass Communion, particularly Eraserhead and the Elephant Man, and if you watch those movies, often there’s nothing you would call music on the soundtrack at all. There will be like a rumbling, or white noise, and that for me… You can run a piece of film and it has a certain effect, you can run the same piece of film with a white noise drone on it and suddenly something is magnified. Something is there that wasn’t there before and those movies alerted me to the power of texture in conjunction with images. I would love to do it, in fact I’ve actually written my own movie with a friend of mine Mike Bennion, which the next Porcupine Tree album is loosely based on, but yeah, it’s a shame that I haven’t been invited to score a movie because I’ve got some very strong idea’s about how to do it…
GK: Is your name out there though, have you thrown your name into the ring at all on any projects?
SW: Well I think there are only two ways that you can get to score a movie these days, either the director already loves your music and invites you to do it, as was the case with Sophia Coppola asking Air to do The Virgin Suicides, or these days movies or the soundtracks tend to be nothing more than glorified compilations, so you have all these major record labels desperately trying to get their act placed in the movie, and for me that’s just not the same…
GK: Well you know that in 28 Days Later, Godspeed You Black Emperor had a track used in the movie but they wouldn’t allow the track to be issued on the soundtrack when it was released on CD… They’re a very unique group of artists, have you seen them live?
SW: Never seen them live, would love to though. Seems like I’m always out of the country when they are here. They’re one of those bands I just keep missing…That was a very effective use of their music in that movie but it wasn’t as though they scored it for the film - the director had picked a song he liked and got the rights to use it. I’m kind of old fashioned in the sense that I still like the idea of the director actually commissioning a score from a group or an artist. I mean it still happens occasionally but more often than not it’s something orchestral, and no disrespect to people like John Williams or Hans Zimmer who knock out these orchestral scores which is fine. But I kinda miss the days when you would get Tangerine Dream, or Pink Floyd, or someone like that to actually score a movie…
GK: Ah Risky Business…
SW: Risky Business being a good example yeah, and the great example I can think of in recent years is the Air – Virgin Suicides soundtrack, which is a fantastic record …
GK Yeah that is an awesome score, it just fits the movie so well…
SW: Yeah it’s my favorite Air record, unfortunately it doesn’t happen enough, and so the opportunities for someone like me are so few and far between anyway…I mean there are probably only three or four movies a year that get made with that kind of soundtrack commission actually being part of the process. So I’m not really holding my breath (laughter)
GK: OK changing course again I wanted to ask you how the Coleclough/Potter collaboration developed. Obviously it came out of the BC remix sessions but was there anything special that led you to work with them exclusively versus say Vidna Obmana, Robert Henke (Monolake), Mick Harris (Napalm Death, Scorn, Lull), or any of the other artists on your remix release? What was it about those two artists that made you want to work with them on such a sprawling project?
SW: What prompted the collaboration was the sheer volume of material, and all of it good, that Colin and Jonathan produced when I asked them for a mix for the original remix CD. They came up with over an hour of music, and as I had space for about 14 minutes of music the logical conclusion was to issue a full collaboration CD. The first step in achieving this was for me to produce a track which reversed the roles of source material and mix, which became Yossaria. Then when we were compiling the CD I found out that Jonathan had done the 74 minute extended piece based on Drugged, which led to the project becoming a double CD. The whole nature of working with drone artists means that durations tend to be longer anyway. A drone can literally exist infinitely, so it made perfect sense to explore the collaboration over a multi disc set.
GK: Bass Communion material has been remixed by several artists over recent years, do you get a lot of offers to remix other artists? If so are you very choosey about what you will, or will not work on? Anything in the pipeline currently?
SW: I haven’t been offered a lot until quite recently, but now I am beginning to get requests as I guess Bass Communion has established itself. The problem as ever is time, but it’s something I really enjoy doing. There are a few remixes in the pipeline, but I’d rather not say who in case they don’t happen. One that is definitely coming out is a mix I did for Darkroom that should be out any day now on Burning Shed.
GK: Although you primarily work on BC material alone, Theo Travis has made several important contributions to many of your BC compositions. Can you tell us a little bit about what Theo brings to the table that you feel enhances or mixes so well with your BC compositions?
SW” Theo is a rare musician in that he is highly gifted and expressive on acoustic instruments, but is also totally at home in the world of electronics. Almost all BC music is based on processing live recordings of acoustic instruments and Theo’s flute and sax have been a wonderfully fertile seam of source material. Theo also explores similar ground to BC with some of his own work, fusing acoustic music with ambience and electronics in his project Cipher (I mixed both albums for them), and his solo album of flute experiments Slow Life. He is a pleasure to record, full of ideas, and one of the most gifted musicians I have ever worked with.
GK: Imagine there was to be a live BC performance. How would you translate BC material to a live experience? I gather it would be predominantly based on sequencing of computer/software technology…Would you include any other artists in a live performance, and what are the chances of something like this ever happening?
SW: Again it’s something I would love to do given the time to prepare for it. I think it would be a combination of real time computer processing of live acoustic sources, so I would need to have at least one other musician on stage.
GK: Finally, why did you pick the Klangalerie label to release the upcoming 7”? Any time-table set for release on this one yet?
SW: I’ve been a fan of the label for a while and love the concept. They operate like an art gallery producing small but exclusive editions for people that really care and collect, as the name implies. Almost everybody that is anyone in the experimental music scene has released a 7-inch on Klanggaleri, or Walter’s other label Syntactic. Artists like Merzbow, Muslimgauze, Hafler Trio, Main, Aube, Christian Fennesz, Rapoon, Scanner, Foetus, Asmus Tietchens, Rodelius, Zoviet France, Coil etc… So it’s almost like a badge of honor to make a 7-inch for the label…
GK: OK Steven, I think my phone card has just hit its limit so I would like to thank you so much for all your time, and the insight into Bass Communion and all the other things we discussed…
SW: My pleasure Geoff it’s been fun.
Interview conducted on 2/10/04, and originally published in Carbon Nation.