interview with qubism

at Quite a young age; maybe less than five years old. my dad was and is a huge fan of jazz. early musical memories include music on the radio. my mum had some fairly easy listening music on radio two (i think). one thing i remember is dancing around the room to the theme to van der valk. i think van der valk was a television program about a dutch detective (this would be early 1970s). the music was very easy listening with lots of strings, i wish i could hear this again and see the program. it's probably on one of the one hundred and fifty satellite channels i have on my TV.

an early record i remember my dad playing was some latin or brazilian record. the track i remember was very percussive. it was called the peanut vendor. anyway at various points, some guy shouts "PEANUTS" as lots of brass and percussion explode around him. i now only just remembered that my dad showed me how to play a piece of paper and a comb to this track. i also remember mum and dad helping to make a "SHAKER" to play along to this track -- a jam jar with pasta in it. i must say i'm only just remembering this after i've started writing this answer, and these are very happy memories, so thanks for the Questions!

david byrne or david sylvian or david lynch. (this could be a very long list, see influences later.)

i just look up "aphorism" and some free online dictionary said:

a tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; an adage.
a brief statement of a principle.

a brief statement of principle would be: as soon as you develop a formula, you're done for. what's the point of repeating yourself? unless you want to make loads of cash with a pop formula, there's no point. a not very tersely phrased statement of truth would be that for the Qubism album, almost every track started with samples first. i think 808 state said they often started with a sample, wrote music around it, and then freQuently ditched the sample they started with. this may be because they often deliberately sampled something they hated! i on the other hand did not ditch the samples. i guess i kind of worked out what key the track would be in by playing the notes in the sample on the keyboard. i have no idea what key the tracks are in because the only musical education i had was at comprehensive school from 11 to 14 years of age. (what i remember was a little movie we had in one lesson about acid rock. this was 1983. a movie about new order would have been a little more relevant.) i chose not to learn any instrument i think i thought that music 'o' level wasn't going to help me get a "decent job".

back to "the process"... i wrote all of my demo tracks at either my brother's house, or my house. wherever his eQuipment was basically (you might be able to see part of a photo montage of my 1991-92 bedroom studio if the em:t.cc guys can fit it in here somewhere!). for a while his gear was installed in a kind of mobile trailer kept in the basement of the sQuare centre in nottingham. it was there (with my brother with me) that i first began to write the chords for the track that became teotihuacan. my brother didn't contribute to this track though, he was reading the paper or something. i do remember asking him if he thought it was okay and he said "yeah..." i can't think of any higher approval than that.

the demos were then passed to john crossley who told me what he thought of them and then john and i went into the main studio at sQuaredance / sQuarecentre whatever it was called at that stage. we usually both had some ideas for what we wanted to do to the track. john didn't usually write any new notes or music, but he was always the most brilliant arranger, editor, producer and musician.

the finished tracks thus sounded Quite similar to the demos, but the production Quality was about a hundred t:mes better and the tracks were freQuently twice as long as the original demos. if you think of the difference between the demos and the finished tracks as the differences between me playing a piece of paper and a comb and john conducting an orchestra playing la traviata, we're getting close to the scale of john's contribution. but hey, i don't want to diminish my contribution!

the work of the following musicians has been an influence on me in some way even if it is not immediately obvious!

david sylvian, david byrne / talking heads, yello, larry heard (mr. fingers), derrick may, juan atkins, carl craig, aphex twin, moby, the orb, the future sound of london, prince, ryuichi sakamoto, david bowie, thomas dolby, new order, 808 state, a guy called gerald (early housey stuff), the black dog, orbital, pat metheny group, mantronix, public enemy and too may hip hop artists to mention, angelo badalamenti collaborating with david lynch, frankie knuckles, david morales, clivillies and cole, blaze. i could go on for even longer but i'd better stop.

this has been a Question that i've thought about over a few weeks! to be honest, consciously, i never thought in advance of interpretation versus representation. one example is 'ghosts of catalonia'. i did go to northern spain and did some location recording with my sony wm-d6c recording walkman and a mike that was of a decent enough Quality for my brother's studio vocal recording. i just walked around recording whatever went on in the streets. does this make the track representative of the place? maybe...

as for interpretation, i'll get back to you on that one.

there is a fairly long history here. i intend to cover this period in the first of a couple of articles i promised em:t.cc ages ago to be titled a brief pre-history of t:me. very briefly, i had known tim andrews and john crossley from their previous studio and label in derby. the studio was called the bakery and the label was called submission. i'll leave the details for the upcoming article to be published on em:t.cc soon. (soon? "t:me is relative, luncht:me, doubly so" - douglas adams.)

well, i first realised what cubism was after seeing david hockney's photo montages in the eighties. basically, picasso and braQue had an idea that you could incorporate more than one view of an object/person on the same canvas. (this is a much simplified version, sorry to the big art fans!) after picasso and braQue, no one else really did much with cubism apart from david hockney. not only did he incorporate more than one view of something in the photo montages, he included different views over t:me. one montage he did for a demonstration for a television program was a view of a back garden. he got his friend to move through the garden as he took lots of little pictures to cover the entire garden. when he put all the pictures together like a jigsaw puzzle, his friend appeared in five different places as she made her way down some steps with a tray of drinks.

i thought i could do something similar with sound! how arrogant that sounds now! i was not trying to say i'm the picasso of sound, but i really thought i could use a musical motif and over t:me, change the sound used for that little seQuence. also, john (crossley) freQuently used the same notes at either half speed or an octave up or down and the RSS (Roland Sound Space system) was supposed to "place" a sound in space and possibly move it around. this is very easy with left and right in stereo. the RSS was supposed to be able to fool your ears into thinking a sound was coming from above or below your head/ears. i think in practice the machine was fiddling with the treble and bass, although i'm sure it was much more complicated than that. head phones probably help with this effect and it is used all over the Qubism album. the best place i found for hearing the RSS effects was in the sQuaredance studio, mainly because it had two gigantic speakers in the control room.

finally, some of the sample loops actually go forwards and backwards before looping. yes! there are backwards frogs at the start of repercussions!

so, back to the name. more than one "view" of a set of sounds, varying over t:me in several ways. a previous band name used by my brother and i included the letter Q and i thought i could have the name Qubism, pronounced cubism. today, this seems a bizarre choice of name and i said so to paul hartnoll of orbital when i chatted to him after an orbital gig in leicester. he said, "well look at μ-zik, loads of people don't know it's pronounced 'music' and it doesn't hold that guy back!"

yes under the name 'cut the Q'. this was usually my brother, me and two other guys. we had a couple of singles out on the derby/nottingham submission label, which started in 1987.

the first was stereo show and raw thang sub x 09. next was crackdown. followed by who needs a love like that. then submission did a label compilation called submit to the beat. this was a double LP of the best of all their previous twelve's. i did one new track (exclusive to the compilation) called repercussion (note the singular version of the word) this was just me with john crossley producing. this was the start of Qubism really, but the track still used the 'cut the Q' name. this must be super-rare now! if i ever get a special edition out of the Qubism album, this will be on it.

initially, it didn't mean anything. i discussed covers with dave and chris and i did say "what about my ugly mug face on the cover?" i was genuinely fed up with the "faceless techno bollocks" phrase that was bandied about at the t:me. however, chris and dave said they were trying to build a brand for the label. (they didn't use those exact words, that makes them sound like advertising execs! sorry!)

i was Quite pissed off when one day john said "have you seen the cover?" chris and dave had picked that image and i had no choice in the matter. (i certainly didn't think chris and dave were angels who could do no wrong!) i was Quite disappointed that i didn't get to pick the cover image for my own album. i would happily have picked some sort of animal, but i guess at a certain point they got to a deadline and chose for me. i'm not one hundred percent sure of the seQuence of events, but there you go…..

as t:me went by, the cover seemed to become Quite appropriate. just on the one album i felt like i changed styles a bit like a chameleon changes his colours. i could not do a one hundred percent ambient album and i don't think that was the intention of the label. it certainly leaned that way, but basically, john, tim, chris and dave just said there are no rules, no formula.

possibly under the gun. this does have a lot of alterations to the various source sounds. there is a helicopter in there somewhere. andy shortland played some odd guitar after our request for odd guitar playing. whilst recording the guitar, john actually speeded up and slowed down the twenty four track and it was recording backwards at the same t:me, honest! so, when played forwards, we got some very interesting effects. i guess this applies to the "seeing the same thing from different views and at different t:mes" bit from above (why Qubism?)

musically, i do love ghosts of catalonia though. i can't really choose a favorite! that's like asking to choose which one of your children you like best!

i guess my immediate thoughts are of the soundtracks for installations that david sylvian has done, since they were part of the art. one of these was 'ember glance', 'the permanence of memory' which david did with artist russell mills. this explains the appearance of david sylvian's vocals on the how safe is deep? track by undark. sylvian's vocals are the same as for one of his own extra tracks on the 'godman' CD single. the original track (presuming it came first) was called 'shadowland' and came with an alternative version, called 'shadowland' (northfield).

i'm getting off the point a bit here, but i have to say that i was very pleased to hear david sylvian on the same label as me! he is god, basically. he has his own new official website www.davidsylvian.com and one of his fans, gerrit created an incredible reference site called www.trophies.org. gerrit actually suspended trophies in january 2003 and i was mortified since it had everything you could ever want to know about sylvian and his many collaborators on there. the good news is that gerrit is coming back with a new site, hopefully with all the content, but in a form that is easier for him to maintain. gerrit's new site is www.davidsylvian.net and is starting up in july i think. sorry to bang on about this, but this kind of leads into the next Question. before that though, "sound art, where has it yet to arrive?" hmmmmm... there are lots of places where it hasn't arrived...

i think the site is an awesome reference site for the old em:t label. i do think it compares well with the sylvian site i mentioned above. i am very glad that you guys have put so much t:me and effort into this. if i ever record another note, at least my album won't be totally forgotten! i think i am very lucky in this respect as there are so many people who release good stuff that does not sell millions of copies but may be forgotten after a year or two. i think the site serves as a very interesting forum for discussion. maybe the guestbook should be turned into a discussion board or let's have a separate discussion board. i think there may be visitors who see the "sign the guestbook" invitation and don't bother doing so, not realising we use it as a discussion board.

i presume in the next year you will expand by covering the new em:t label.

i wonder if many of the old artists would like to sell one off CDRs of their original works? maybe you could have a page for that if artists wanted it. i think if this were to happen, the artists should sign their CDs to distinguish between a legal artist's CD and any old bootlegged CDRs.

if you are thinking about revenue to keep the site going what about pay per download sharing the money with participating artists?