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What role does reflection or memory play in your music?

Marcus Eoin: I suppose it's a big part of what we're about, whether we like it or not. We need that element to give tracks some sort of emotional purpose, because it's always been a driving factor in what we love about our favorite music — the time period that you mentally associate with whatever you're listening to. Sometimes even new music that you've not heard before can still achieve that effect of throwing your mind back through time and triggering some sort of feeling. It's nice when you get a potent, sad vibe from a bit of music that ultimately has a positive, inspiring effect on you, like reminding you of an excellent summer or something.

"You can use rules or set theory to dictate timings and note intervals," expands Sandison about their composition strategies. "For instance, you can imagine your melody to run vertically instead of horizontally, so that you're thinking of it as a vertical spiral, running on the spot. There's a thing you can calculate for plants called divergence, which is a ratio of complete turns of spiral leaf positions relative to the number of leaves in that spiral. In plants, this usually gives a Fibonacci number, which is pretty uncanny, but it's basically a natural law that's trying to create optimum distribution of leaf positions, to stop leaves from obscuring each other in sunlight. You can apply a similar idea to a vertical spiral of music, to calculate optimal temporal event positions in a pattern or texture. It doesn't always make for easy listening though," he adds, laughing.

“We wanted the general sound to be simple melodies played on unrecognizable textures,” says Eoin about Geogaddi.

“We want to evoke the feel of old TV recordings,” adds Sandison. “We go to ridiculous lengths sometimes to make a piece of music sound dated and damaged.”

Sunshine Recorders

Michael Sandison: We love the sound of music that seems to be barely under control, music that’s out of tune in a beautiful way, or dissonant, or damaged. It’s okay to be imperfect – in fact the imperfections are where the magic is. To us, perfect music sounds sterile and dead. We actually put a lot of effort into making things rough and difficult and noisy. I think most bands get more polished and over-produced as they go along. But one of the ideas with Geogaddi was to go the opposite way, to get it to sound as though it was recorded before the last one. (NME)



Sandison: We don’t use laptops, but I do appreciate the sound of very complex rhythmic electronic music, though I fear that it’s a finite direction if it’s lacking the emotional effect of either a tune or some kind of reference point. To me, the ultimate composition is the one you can write in 15 minutes that has instant musical resonance, whereas complex rhythmic work is more like software engineering, it takes a long time and doesn’t always result in something of any significance in the end. We really prefer to approach a song as though it could work on just a single instrument, like an acoustic guitar, so that it has enough basic musicality to make it able to be played that way, or even sung. A lot of current electronic music seems to me to be 100 percent dependent on the specific sounds used for that specific arrangement. But we don’t get anything out of music like that. To us, music has to be more than just production and sound effects; it has to have melody and an ability to change people’s feelings. (Fader)



Sandison: We try to make the tunes work in more than one way, firstly in an ambiguous musical way, like most instrumental music, but also in an unsettling way. To us, music has to have some sort of purpose, usually to create some sort of an emotional change in the listener. In the past we’ve heard some people who have barely listened to our music making comments like “oh yes it’s nice music to put on in the background”, but if they came to see the visual show or actually listened more closely to elements such as the voices in the tunes, they’d realize there’s a much darker science going on. (Fader)



Marcus Eoin: If you’re in a position where you’re making recordings of music that thousands of people are going to listen to repeatedly, it gets you thinking, ‘What can we do with this? We could experiment with this…’ And so we do try to add elements that are more than just the music. Sometimes we just include voices to see if we can trigger ideas, and sometimes we even design tracks musically to follow rules that you just wouldn’t pick up on consciously, but unconsciously, who knows? (NME)



Children Have the Right of Music

Eoin: For some reason I have distinct memories of the rhythmic sound of a train traveling over the railway sleepers, the hypnotic nature of that. I may be trying to capture some of that when I am writing music without realizing it. Also, I think the memories you carry from childhood tend to be either from times of total happiness, or from some kind of traumatic disturbance such as moving home. That could explain why I also think of the comforting but threatening sound of a jetliner from the viewpoint of the passenger. (Fader)



Sandison: [The nostalgia for childhood] is something that has a peculiar effect in music, it ought not to be there, especially in atonal, synthetic music. It’s completely out of place, and yet in that context you can really feel the sadness of a child’s voice. Being a kid is such a transitory, fleeting part of your lifespan. If you have siblings, then if you think about it, you’ll have known them as adults for a lot longer than you ever knew them as children. It’s like a little kid lost, gone. (NME)



Sandison: When you’re young, so much of the detail in the world around you, like a brightly colored bumblebee, or a distinctive smell or flavor, can be totally mesmerizing. Then as you get older these mundane details start to become like background noise to your brain. I think this is why adults are always trying to push their increasingly desensitized bodies into more extreme experiences of food or sex or whatever. I’m always trying to get back to that childish wonder through music and visuals; it’s a form of voluntary simplification. (AP)



Eoin: I think that as people get older, they become conditioned by their workplace or society into ignoring the kinds of things they found exciting as kids, you know, like weird sounds, bright colors, smells etc. I read that very young kids can naturally experience sensations so vividly that synaesthesia occurs. (AP)



Music is Math – Vision of the Implicate

Eoin: I like the connection between science, psychedelia and art. The boundaries between music and mathematics, or color and sounds get broken down if you’re in the right frame of mind or under the influence of a psychedelic substance. (AP)



Eoin: The hexagon theme represents that whole idea of being able to see reality for what it is, the raw maths or patterns that make everything. We’ve always been interested in science and maths. Sometimes music or art or drugs can pull back the curtain for you and reveal the Wizard of Oz, so to speak, busy pushing the levers and pressing buttons. That’s what maths is, the wizard. It sounds like nonsense but I’m sure a lot of people know what I’m talking about. (NME)



Sandison: There are people who believe that the mathematical basis of music is something created or imposed by the mind of the composer and listener, but it’s important to recognize that rhythmic and harmonic patterns exist in nature and music is simply a collection of those patterns. Maths already exist; it isn’t a human invention, it’s a discovery. (Fader)



Eoin: [Geogaddi’s] “The Devil is in the Details” has a riff that was designed to imitate a specific well-known equation, but in musical terms. Maybe it won’t mean anything to anyone, but it’s interesting just to try it. We do things like this sometimes. (NME)



Sandison: We’re interested in symbols. We never just make a pleasant tune and leave it at that. So I suppose there is an intention to let the more adult, disturbed, atrocious sides of our imaginations slip into view through the pretty tunes. (NME)



Energy Warnings to City Dwellers

Sandison: [The fact that our music suggests something vaguely pagan] is probably just a reflection of the way we live our lives. We are a bit ritualistic, although not religious at all. We’re not really conscious of it in our music, but I can see that it is happening. (NME)



Eoin: We’ve always been inspired by nature, I think that our inclusion of nature-inspired influences is a reaction against everyone around us rushing to embrace everything that is technological, urban, and anti-nature. We try to keep our titles and themes close to experiences that are personal to us, but in a way that can be shared with the listener’s imagination. “Geogaddi” has several meanings – that’s what we wanted, to let people allow the album to mean what they want it to mean. (Fader)



Eoin: We don’t hate the city, just the homogenized culture you get in urban areas. (HMV.com)



Sandison: I don’t think it’s easy to be truly independent as an artist at the same time as being part of an urban community. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it just doesn’t suit us. Besides, when I’m faced with the choice of hanging out with my friends round a bonfire [in Scotland], or being squashed in a London tube with some suit’s elbow in my face, it’s an easy choice to make. (NME)



The Dawn’s Chorus

Eoin: I dreamed the sound of [“Gyroscope”], and although I’ve recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the end result was 99 percent like my dream. It spooks me to listen to it now. (HMV.com)



Somebody once said that the best electronic music is music that you could never quite imagine on your own. Are you aware as to how strangely your music seems to co-eist with the subconscious?



Sandison: I don’t know if we hear it quite the way the listener does. For us the whole point of writing music is to get something infectious into the back of the listener’s mind, something that feels so personal to you that you couldn’t even possibly convey it in words to a close friend. If you listen to a tune by some musician and it really gets you emotionally, it’s as though for a few minutes you’ve tuned into the feelings that were in the musician’s head. There’s a sort of knowing connection there between the listener and the musician that ordinary language would never be able to achieve. In a way it’s the closest you’ll ever get to being psychic. (HMV.com)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boards_of_CanadaKrzysztof Jagieło edytował(a) ten post dnia 09.11.08 o godzinie 00:17