Interview for Monday Magazine October 2008
Greg Pratt: Your ideas about music are interesting. You say music is a virus; tell me more. Is this a negative thing?
eldritch Priest:
Music is a virus in the way “it” uses other “things” to make sense.
That is, music, describes a way of using sound to hijack life's
expressive remainders, synthesize their effects and to breed what we
call “culture.” I was listening to Maurice Ravel's Daphnis and
Chloé the other day and was struck by the way this work, specifically
the third movement, commandeers my experiences of “a cool dampness,” a
“swirling mist,” “a blooming luminescence” and my habits of referral in
order to express a very culturally specific idea of “daybreak”-namely,
that French impressionist way of portraying a kind of lambent
light. Though the sense of the experience of this music is
supposed to be pleasurable, really, I felt contaminated, as though I
had been infected behind my back. Music is a virus in the way it
replicates a culture's way of “hearing,” in this case, in hearing
“sunrise.” So, is this a negative thing? In some ways I
think it is, particularly in the way that music's capacity to
articulate other elements of life is used to repeat a specific way of
hearing culture such that it shuts alternative expressive possibilities
down. Strange beliefs, like the idea of music's “timelessness,”
grow out of this mindless reiteration.
Why are you involved in making music if you feel it's a virus?
In
a sense, I suppose that I'm infected. We don't ask to be affected
by things; that's just the nature of an infectious agent. I can't
help that my metabolism has been co-opted for these expressive ends any
more than you or I could help being involved in using language.
However, think about poetry. If language is a virus (which
William Burroughs believed that it was) then you might ask: “why
speak”? Take the lyric poem. Here's a way of using language
that does not eradicate or deny its reiterative nature. The poet takes
the communicable force of language that she's contracted and bends it;
she makes language “say” differently. How many poems about love
are there?
Me, I'm not trying to sterilize music by negating its
capacities; instead, I'm trying to make a kind of “un-music.” I don't
mean “non-music,” I mean a music that pulls away from the
pre-conditions that give it its common sense as “MUSIC,” conditions
like “structure,” “cadence,” “tempo”…form…content… I'm trying to make
music a stranger to itself, which has a paradoxical effect of making it
more curious (“curiouser and curiouser” as Alice would say) but less
infectious.
Where did your interest in looking at music in such a different way begin?
That's
difficult to say. My interest in ideas and the character of
expression has led to studies in philosophy and art as well as to some
rather abstruse areas including 'pataphysics, Discordianism, and other
esoteric nonsense. My studies on Mannerism, by which I mean the
bizarre paintings and architecture of mid to late sixteenth century,
affected me greatly. The works of this period (primarily painting and
architecture) are really mind-bending; they harness a kind of
affectation that reflects a strange sensibility driven by delight in
enigmatic meanings, in distortion, in mordant artifice. In many
ways Mannerism expresses transition, by which I mean that Mannerist art
does not simply reflect change, but in fact brings it forth, makes it
effective, makes it strange.
Do you ever just sit back and enjoy some AC/DC or something like that?
Something
like that…I like The Mars Volta a lot and I occasionally find myself
blissed out on the music of Meshuggah, Primus, or Jim Black's
Alasnoaxis.
What can Victoria expect from your concert here?
The
short answer is “nonsense.” I'm amused by the idea of making
musical nonsense, not in the way that English readers understand the
nonsense of Carroll or Lear, but in the way that a music can have "no
sense," no direction, no purpose other than the desire of its own
variation. Of course this doesn't mean that the music I write
lacks the capacity to refer, to signify, or to meaning something. To
the contrary, the nonsense I write is a way to generate local interest
in the time of waiting where both the performer and listener can
experiment with their own habits of sense making.
Do you worry about alienating people with your works and ideas?
I
think it's a part of the process, quite literally, of making and
circulating a difference in the world. There're plenty of people
who write music that affirms a stable sense of being, tells us that the
human condition “makes sense.” I think that's preposterous and
tantamount to a lie. Not that this lie isn't useful-We all lie to
ourselves to get through the day. I'm an unabashed existentialist
and presume that existence expresses itself in the actions we choose so
that at a very basic level our very birth introduces a difference that
only intensifies as we try to make a world that we can
tolerate. To me your question then is an ethical one that
concerns me deeply: How do you express your “self” without impinging on
another's sense of self? My response to your question is that I
try not to impose a sense on my work that would, as it were, tell you
how to listen, how to “be.” Instead, I try to enact an
event of reciprocity that will sustain the strangeness between you and
myself. I can't say that this always happens, politics is always
being performed, but it's a way to act
responsibly.
What else do you feel Victoria should know about you?
Other
than declaring my existentialist sensibilities? I'm finishing a
doctorate on Cynical rhetoric in experimental aesthetics… I lived in
Victoria for a time…I'm a fan of Anne Carson's poetry, and I'm very sad
about the death of David Foster Wallace.
What are your future plans?
Finish
my dissertation. I've also been working on a long poem that translates
randomly generated Esperanto into English. I'm not certain which
of the two I'll complete first.
