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Introduction
Interviews with ...
Chris Mann
Annea Lockwood
Alvin Lucier
Stephen Vitiello
Jeph Jerman
NBA.
Your background is as a musician, how did you start using field recordings as a mode of expression?
JJ.
Actually, I think I started with tape recorders and sound-makers that I found around my parent's house. I don't think I ever separated these ways of working with sound. It was after I began playing "conventional" music that I found out that other people frowned on weird noises. I don't really hear field recordings as expressive. It's sound, and one listens to it.
NBA.
But don't you think that there is great emotive potential in natural sounds and that's why it's so alluring as material? Aren't they inherently full of expression?
JJ.
Perhaps some people hear them this way. Emotive potential lies in the context that sounds are placed in. Each listener will get something different from a sound depending on taste, upbringing, etc. How is it possible to know what the wind means with its sound? Another way to put it: the thing that the sound of wind expresses is the wind.
NBA.
Do you consider the pieces you produced as Hands To music?
JJ.
At first, I decided that Hands To wasn't music, simply because the pieces I was working on didn't seem to fit into any a priori idea of music. There was also at the time a lot of playing with ideas about what sound does to the listener physically. Friends argued the point with me, and these days I'd be more inclined to say that the Hands To works definitely are music. They are sounds, arranged according to my own likes and dislikes, and set into a context, albeit a sometimes rather obtuse one!
NBA.
So would that be a working definition of music for you? Sounds arranged and set into a context? Is there an audio art which isn't music?
JJ.
No, I don't think so. But again, it's up to each listener to decide. I suppose that we could separate sound into categories of "human-made" versus "natural", or "nature-made", and then art would be the human-made, sounds arranged and put into a context BY HUMANS. I don't think that any audio art made by people cannot be called music. It depends on what one has heard and what one is willing to entertain. If a person enters a room which contains a sound installation, and doesn't really listen to it, then perhaps this installation for them could be denoted "aural wallpaper". Music is a judgement made by each listener. I don't think that the idea of sound being expressive is "wrong", it's just not the way I think. I have come to this perception after many years of working with sound, trading things with others, listening constantly...this is what works for me.
NBA.
Could you elaborate on the ideas you were working with regarding what sound does to the listener physically?
JJ.
I was interested in the things William Burroughs wrote about, and tried a few of them out. Taking tape recorders into large crowds of people to see what happened. Using the record-playback-record method to interfere with street preachers. I made tapes using nothing but human body sounds and used them on occasion to try and alter my own and other's bodily responses by playing the tapes directly into someone's body and monitoring the result with a cheap biofeedback monitor. I was also, at the time, interested in the emotive potential of sound divorced from its origin. I was processing sounds in such a way as to make their origins unknowable, wanting to know if the emotion of these sounds carried through without one knowing their source. For example, a piece on the LP Vinhilation used sounds from the atom bomb tests made by the U.S. in the 1940s, coupled with Robert Oppenheimer's voice intoning: "Now I am become death." The voice was buried so far under the other sounds as to be undetectable. It seemed to work sometimes. I guess what I'm getting at is that it is the mind which gives, not perceives, meaning, not the sound.
NBA.
Would you mind talking a little about how you go about structuring compositions? I suspect in the performances you do now there is a lot of improvisation, but the arrangement of the pieces that use recorded material must be quite a different process. Any thoughts on the difference and how you approach that difference?
JJ.
Yes, my performances now are improvised, taking into account the room in which I am making sound, and whatever else is going on. The structure of the older compositions, the Hands To recordings, etc., was pretty intuitive. They unfolded through whatever process I was working with. In the earliest work, it was using loops and a small sampling keyboard to build washes of "emotional" sound. As I moved into using field recordings exclusively, the structures were still intuitive. Sometimes they deal with how sounds relate to each other inside the piece, but more often it is the result of assembling something on tape and then asking: "what's next?" There is no template or form I'm working to fill in. I start with sound, not idea.
NBA.
Do you consider yourself in the "acoustic ecology" group of recording artists? I'm thinking of Eric La Casa, Seth Nehil or Francisco Lopez, for example.
JJ.
Not a bad bunch of guys to be associated with. These labels cannot be avoided, and striving to discredit them is just spending energy needlessly. Where is the labeling? I have referred to myself as a musician most of my life. A sound artist? Okay. How about listener?
NBA.
The acoustic ecology association is generated, I suspect, from your choice of material, both in the field recordings and in the choice of your recent performance instruments which tend to be found (or collected) objects of natural origin. How did you start thinking of these particular objects as instruments? There are some native American references here, are there not?
JJ.
Yes, I see the correlation, and I don't deny the connection of my choices of soundmaking tools with an ecological point of view. I am careful however to point out that said POV was not my "starting point". I fell in love with these sounds. Quiet sound has always drawn my ear more than blasting volume. There are native American references because they clicked in my mind, and seemed to relate to whatever I was working on at the time. Yes, the ideas of a people living "closer to nature" were involved, but also the Indians less complicated world view and symbols. Their talk of "spirit" and the unknown that is everywhere evident. I would not attach these kinds of ideas to my work now.
NBA.
I'm curious about the printed insert in the nazha CD. You seem to be requesting the listener take a specific approach to the CD, or to your work in general. Is there a way of perceiving your work which you think may not be assumed by the listener? Do we listen today differently than we may have in the past?
JJ.
A very good question. I am concerned that we do not listen at all. The notes that accompanied nazha were largely at Manifold Record's request. They thought that the sound quality was not up to snuff and requested that I write a disclaimer. The notes are instructing one to listen, not to use the sound as wallpaper or an emotional mnemonic prod, which is what music has become. If one is thinking critically, annoyed by "poor" sound quality, or anything else at the time, one is not listening. I gave a copy of nazha to a friend who had trouble with it, wanting to know my intent and saying that she "had no frame of reference" to be able to listen. In other words, she didn't know how to listen without having some intellectual concept to hang on. If I said that my intention at the time was to make a piece of Sound Art, would that change how you perceive it?
NBA.
I think it might, for me.
JJ.
It's that I never think of these things when I'm working. It is all after the fact, and usually others who do that kind of thinking.
NBA.
Have you ever done work geared for publication other than CD and/or performance, like installation work or sound design? Might the context in which the piece is presented affect its sense of being music?
JJ.
Yes, I've done a few installations. I'm looking into doing more of them, as I like the idea of not being the focus of the thing. I also like the notion of setting something up which can run indefinitely. My dream is to have my own building with slowly changing sound installations, different for each room. Sure, context could change one's sense of what one was perceiving. perhaps we could eventually just drop the term music altogether, or, realize that what gets played on our radio and television broadcasts isn't music, but public self-promotion on a grand scale.
NBA.
You seem quite committed to separating out the work of art and the commodity in the entertainment marketplace. Can the artist (or art) find a comfortable place co-existing between the two in our current social environment?
JJ.
I very often doubt it. I think that creative work and commerce are opposites. The impulses for each originate in different parts of the brain. Art is the end result of a human creative process. Commerce is the attempt to better one's position in life through material gain.
NBA.
Earlier you said: "it's sound, and one listens to it,Ó which strikes me as a very Cagean notion of how to engage both sound and the world in general. I also noted you quote Cage in the liner material on The Second Attention CD. Was John Cage much of an influence on your work?
JJ.
I went round and round with Cage, reading and listening to his stuff from a very early age. I was unimpressed for a long time because I didn't understand anything about it. In recent years I have come to study Cage's point of view and am surprised at how close it is to things I've been feeling more and more, but haven't been able to voice. So, Cage has probably been an influence on me, at least in the sense of encouragement.
NBA.
Who would you list as influential in shaping you artistically?
JJ.
I'm always at a loss when it comes to this influence question. I always say that the thing that got me really seriously started working with sound was an old Ken Nordine record, Word Jazz. I know that everything influences us in some way, so probably everything I've ever heard or seen has influenced me.
NBA.
Other than music or sound influences, are their any other critical keys to you as an artist you consciously (or subconsciously) use: painters, poets, philosophies/phers, geographies/phers?
JJ.
I read a lot of biographies of artists, naturalist writing and books about natural science. IÕm very interested in "fringe" science, people like Tesla, Reich, Schauberger; archeology, geology, and many books about Zen Buddhism and related fields. I am very interested in consciousness and our understanding of it. Perhaps a lot of my work stems from these studies.
NBA.
But you don't feel your work specifically addresses these issues, they more form the environment from which the work emerges, would you say? You apply ideas of awareness and perception to the work as opposed to discussing them in the work?
JJ.
The ideas float around in my mind, so to speak, and so the work exists alongside them. I try hard not to apply any ideas to a collection of sound that I've recorded or performed (very difficult, I know) by not including any written information with a work when it enters the public domain. Anyone wanting to know what it's all about has to contact me. When I perform, I believe my task is to Òforget myself". Perhaps the work does specifically address issues of awareness and perception by its very nature, but maybe this just comes with the territory. If people ask about what I do, I usually say that I am offering a chance to listen. When placing this activity into a reproducible medium, it becomes the property, intellectual and otherwise, of the person listening. I guess what it comes down to is whether one believes in an objective viewpoint or not. I do not. I know that there is an objective reality, but human perception is most often closed to it. For me, the important thing is listening. What happens when we listen?
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