This interview is long overdue~ life has gotten in the way of my ability to keep up with my own projects, which I suppose is a good problem to have. That being said, I wanted to release this interview in the fall and I feel bad that you are only now getting to read it.
Willow Tea is lovely. They describe their work as “Melodies for imaginary silent films and sad children.” on their Bandcamp page, and it is an apt description. They conjure up music that touches deep longings. I am excited to share their words and some of their music with you. If they are new to you, listen as you read. The interview proper starts below this video, with Willow Tea giving an introduction to their work.
WT:
I've been making music since 1994 when, inspired by Nirvana and the "anyone can do it" approach of early 90s indie, I wrote some bad four-chord songs for my high school band. I first made music as an artform around 1998, messing around with a microphone and a very basic audio editor that was standard on Windows 95. Recordings still exist.
Over the years, I have recorded under:
Smudgeon (unrefined, noise/ambient/exploration)
Guelph Basin (dark ambient and noise)
Andromache (noise and ambience inspired by space and insects)
Idacarabus (noise and ambience inspired by ecological collapse)
Fjaeldmark (dungeon synth)
Willow Tea (sad mellotron sounds)
The Orb Weaver (dungeon ambience)
Gnornian (fantasy synth)
Reväwbro (fantasy sea-inspired synth)
Wyrdrat (dungeon noise)
Chernozem (collaboration; blackened econoise)
My main projects now are Willow Tea, and Gnornian. There are some anonymous things floating around out there too.
As you can see, I mostly tread that well-worn path between dark ambient, noise, and dungeon/fantasy synth.
How did you initially find your way into dungeon synth?
CR:
I got into dungeon synth without intending to. I was looking around reddit and bandcamp and I found the High Mages. I listened to their stuff and liked what I was hearing~ I've been a fantasy and sci-fi fan for my whole life, and the music resonated with me, so I reached out and told them I liked what they were doing. They listened to my stuff and we talked about doing a split release. I have worked in sci-fi inspired groups before and it seemed like a fun idea. I've been renovating a new house and the family is living in the garage, so I haven't quite gotten to sending them my stuff yet, but I plan to. They ended up being my first interview and I've been pulling at strings exploring the genre and it's subs as I get opportunities. I really like a lot of the stuff I am hearing~ even stuff I might not be particularly drawn to listen to repeatedly has been great to explore. For me it takes me to imaginative realms, ones I have spent a good deal of my time in anyhow, and helped me to discover new places as well. I really like the positivity I see in the community and I don't think it is too much of a stretch to start taking some of my own music into that realm as well. I really like the lack of pretension that I have encountered~ people making music primarily for the sake of making music which pleases them is a joyful thing for me.
WT:
I like what you mention about dungeon synth being a community-driven thing. People making music for the sake of making music, and then having a space to say "I made this thing about this thing I'm into" and having someone connect with that, is a wonderful thing.
CR:
Could you talk about shifting towards noise and ambient sounds? What compelled you to move in that direction?
WT:
I think it's more or less where I started. I always liked music that was a little dissonant or noisy or mood-driven. I like the sounds of places, the sounds of things; giving sound a space to inhabit, making spaces with sound, felt logical. The first noise composition I ever made was the sound of me hitting a desk with my first, underneath the sound of me blowing into a mountain dew bottle. And slowed down.
A lot of the music I was listening to in the late 90s was dark ambient and noise, mostly via Cold Meat Industry. Incidentally, this was my first exposure to dungeon synth via Mortiis and Arcana, but I was more interested in Raison d'Etre, Brighter Death Now, Ildfrost. I was also really into Nine Inch Nails, Joy Division/early New Order, artists that were using a different palette to guitar-bass-drums, or using that palette differently.
Making music with a home-made palette on a computer felt much more accessible than playing in a band - which requires a lot more coordination and gear and logistics and social aspects than I can deal with - and I never really had the gear to do that for myself at home. A computer and a microphone were always around, and it felt intimate and safe for me to explore with those tools.
CR:
What kind of environment did you grow up in?
WT:
I grew up in Tasmania, kind of at the end of the world. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, but Tasmania was always home. You get used to a slow pace of life in Tasmania, adjust to different horizons. In my early 20s I spent some time living and working in some wonderful, isolated parts of Tasmania. 50% of the island is reserved lands, national parks, wilderness zones - I had the chance to spend time in some of those places, and the near-silence you can find is good for the soul. The scent of an eucalypt forest when it's raining is something that feels like home. I became very interested in birds, animals, forests, wetlands, geomorphology, plate tectonics - that time, that profession, gives you the ability to dig into some very interesting topics, and you gain a broader understanding that the world is bigger and more interesting than what we see through our tiny windows.
CR:
What kind of influence do you think that played on the development of your aesthetics and your self?
WT:
Moving around a lot left me kind of unsettled and isolated. And if you're a bit of a loner or weird as well and don't really enjoy the things most of the other kids do, you find comfort and belonging where you can. Music, fantasy novels, movies, video games were my place.
The landscape of Tasmania is grand and epic, but also small and close and tangible. It lends itself to daydreaming and inventing stories. When I was 5-6 years old, I lived in a small mining village that only 100 years before had been briefly one of the world's best known silver fields. The boom didn't last long, and the town has this feeling of living on the bones of the recent past. It wasn't till later that I learnt that the landscape has a much, much deeper and complex story with the indigenous people. I didn't get all this as a kid, but there was a sense of shabby dignity and it felt like a safe, interesting place to explore and draw stories from. That particular place still inspires a lot of my music and art.
CR:
Could you talk about which fantasy novels, movies, and video games caught your imaginative attention when you were growing up? Did you play role-playing games?
WT:
For sure. I read a lot when I was a kid, I also had a lot of read-along story book-cassettes, my dad was a Star Trek fan so I remember the cassette of Star Trek 3 (the search for spock?) both terrifying and fascinating me around the same age. One thing that came to me recently was how much I loved the Lone Wolf books when I was 8 or 9 years old. I didn't understand the game book concept, so I just read them like choose-your-own-adventure novels (I never lost a battle!) and enjoyed the narrative. I think I have maybe 6 books in total, and I forgot about this for many years until Heimat der Katastrophe released Gnoll's Lone Wolf album this year, which brought a lot of happy memories flooding back. I think it was around 10, maybe 11 years old when there was a big reissue of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and I was fascinated by these posters of Smaug tumbling into Long Lake that was in our school library. So I read The Hobbit, before moving on to LOTR and they have lived in my heart since. These books gave me a great sense of escape, reading them really opened up a world of wonder, magic, tragedy, and little people doing amazing things. I was also really into the Duncton Wood books when I was about that age, which is a series that weaves together UK megaliths with a society of moles.
I wish I had known some people who were into RPGs, particularly tabletop, when I was growing up, but I think it never really took off in Tasmania and it was also a more social thing than I would have liked. The closest I got aside from misplaying the Lone Wolf books was hack n slash PC games like Diablo and reading White Dwarf magazine without really understanding what it was all for. I was more into the solo experience.
Probably the three computer games that have most caught my attention (aside from Diablo) were Age Of Empires II (I still play the occasional game - easy mode, of course), No Man's Sky, and Defender Of The Crown on C64. I got way into WoW for about a year but that was when I was in my 30s and while I loved exploring those maps, the extremely amateur environment nerd in me is always frustrated at how unrealistic game landscapes are. I realize how difficult it must be to build a large scale, realistic 3D world that is true to nature and also a good arena for questing about, so it's more like a general impatience that technology can't (yet) do what I want. But then, that's what real landscapes are for, right?
CR:
Could you talk more about your experiences working in remote Tasmania? What were you doing? Were there any experiences that were particularly notable? I'd love to know more, I am deeply captivated by the natural world and I don't know much about Tasmania.
WT:
Working in the national parks service was one of the best experiences of my life. For 6 months, I lived and worked inside one of Australia's most iconic wild places, Cradle Mountain. In those long summer evenings I would sometimes wander off into the park after the visitors had all left, and just breath in the quiet and the stillness. It was a great privilege to feel like I had this all to myself, and if there is one thing I really crave sometimes it is that sense of stillness: the world being so quiet that all you hear is the wind in the grass, or the occasional wombat shuffling about. That was truly good for the soul.
During that time I also helped setting up an international caving conference at a place called Mole Creek, which is one of the most developed karst landscapes in Australia. The thing about caves is they're not really the dusty, jagged, bat-filled holes you see in popular media: they're living landscapes, they're unique, evolving and damp and cramped and expansive and alive. Many of those caves have an ecosystem that is completely unique, even compared to the next cave over. And cave fauna is weird. I had the pleasure of running in and out of those caves for a month and I will never forget the stillness and darkness you find in a cave. You turn off the lights, take a deep breath, and hear...nothing. Sometimes you hear a river or dripping or your own heart beat, but otherwise blessed silence.
I now live in Berlin, which is a city that is rarely silent, there is the constant hum of cars from the autobahn and planes overhead and the sound of people and trains and humans living. It's quite a different environment to where I grew in terms of sound and life-iness. I love the city, but I miss being able to pack a snack and my camera and drive off to somewhere quiet and hear nothing, Sometimes the void of silence is pure indulgence - you're lucky when can find it.
CR:
First off, I am pleased whenever anyone brings up the Lone Wolf books. It has happened twice so far in my adult life and it brings back fond memories. I have been an avid roleplayer for most of my life, but due to time constraints I have had to put that on hold for a bit. Exploring fantasy and dungeon synth has eased that longing somewhat. I have always struggled with the socialization aspect of the activity. My imagination tends to tell better stories when it isn't intruded on. I am not sure you missed too much. Some of my best rpg experiences involved reading games and supplements no one would play with me.
Changing gears somewhat... Though I might come back to this.
I am interested to know what your philosophical/spiritual beliefs or understandings are. What did your view of reality start as and how has that evolved over time?
Mine are complicated but pretty simple at the same time, and I am far more open than I think most people might be to just about anything. If you want to skip this question, just let me know. I realize it is sensitive.
WT:
On the topic of Lone Wolf: when I was doing some world building for my Gnornian project, I lifted the word "Academician" from one of the World Of Lone Wolf books. I like to borrow words and apply them in different contexts, especially if they sound nice.
Spirituality is not really part of my makeup. My family are not religious or spiritual, so I grew up in a house where that just wasn't a topic or influence. I went to Sunday School and after-school church groups on and off as a kid but I think it was mostly to keep me occupied outside of school. I identify with atheism, but I'm not anti-religion. If someone is religious or spiritually minded, it doesn't influence my relationship with them. Having an open mind is important.
One of my main philosophies in life is actually from when I worked in the parks service, around minimal impact bushwalking: wherever you go, whatever you do, you will leave marks and traces, and you should look to minimize this. In bushwalking practice, this means things like not lighting campfires, leaving rocks and sticks and leaves where they are, not feeding wildlife, taking you rubbish without, etc. Humans are part of the wider ecosystem, but our potential for impact far exceeds any other animal within the natural world and we often do things without noticing we're doing it. So building awareness and recognizing my own impacts is something I try to work on constantly. Not sure I apply it consistently though.
CR:
A simple search revealed that all the Lone Wolf books are online here: https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home
I don't know that I'll ever have time to peruse those old books, but I am glad they are there for all.
Atheism is as legit as any other interpretation of the world. I am a spiritual person, captivated by mythology in all forms; I pretty much think that everything is divine (and maybe by extension that includes the idea that nothing is, it simply is). I have an extremely open mind in that regard, taking delight in not knowing the meaning of things while feeling a despair and freedom in thinking we might be responsible for making our own meanings. In general, I distrust anyone insistent that their interpretation of things is the only way.
WT:
Oh, I definitely agree. There are many ways to view and interpret the world as there are humans. One of the things I dislike so much about discourse on social media is that it rarely comes from a place of understanding or curiousity.
CR:
I really like the bushwalking practice you are talking about. I am not surprised that you have a viewpoint anchored in nature and our place in it. What are your thoughts on the anthropocene? When the nuclear age emerged, I think it irrevocably affected our collective psychologies. The developing understanding of what we are doing, of what damages our short sighted approaches have wrought, it is so difficult to wrap our heads around. It is hard to keep optimistic, hard to shift our perspectives to the long term, especially when capitalism has focused our attention on the immediate gains, the immediate distractions. Do these ideas resonate with you? How do they relate to your drive to create?
WT:
Certainly, many of my projects have had environmental themes. For Fjaeldmark, "The Slow Choking Death Of The King and the Queen" is about a town I lived in when I was very young called Queenstown. The river that runs through the town is polluted by 150 years of acid mine drainage. I remember when I was maybe 11 years old I saw a documentary about the river and they called it "dead water" and that phrase has always stuck with me. I have a dark ambient project called Idacarabus (named for a genus of cave beetle endemic to Tasmania) that explicity explored themes of ecological collapse, extinction, and human impacts on the Tasmanian environment. I made the song "Benjamin" one day after viewing footage the last known Thylacine, which died of exposure in a Hobart zoo in 1936. The footage of Benjamin is less than a minute long, and breaks my heart every time I see it. The Thylacine was totally unique, but no match for hostile farmers and a government bounty. So it's my requiem, something I made while processing my feelings about a world diminished by the loss of the Thylacine.
Much of what I compose/build comes while I am processing emotions, and the environment is a major source for this. Grief, anger, loss, they're compelling and deep wells of inspiration and drive. The book "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem explores this quite well through the story of an alien intelligence trying to make sense of human intelligence, and mistaking grief, regret, and a desire for penance as a way to communicate. the astronauts live daily with physical manifestations of those emotions and memories, eventually by choice. It's a deeply affecting book, and deeply human.
The future is a deeply troubling place right now, which I think is why people have a tendency to look backwards for escapism. Fantasy literature, music, and movies offer a way to do that.
CR:
I think that we also look to fantasy and science fiction media of all types for inspiration and guidance as much as we do to escape the world. I have always found that to be true in my own life anyhow, that I am able to find something of my own center in the narratives that I turn to in order to sustain myself.
You talk about environmental concerns being a source of emotions that you need to process through your music. What other emotive sources fuel your music? There is so much in what you do: beauty, melancholy, anger, reservation, joy, and a host of other feelings all woven together in fragments which come together as the whole of your many projects. Are you able to speak to where some of that comes from? Is it stuff you can articulate?
WT:
I'm not always conscious of where creativity and inspiration are coming from, and I don't often chase the source. While some of my projects have had very specific emotional or cultural sources, or are developed as a reaction or attempt to make sense of themes, for the most part I am just exploring and letting things take me where they will. With Willow Tea, I set out to try and make comfy synth, but at the time I hadn't actually listened to any comfy synth so I just decided I would try and write something "positive sounding, but with a touch of sadness". The first track I wrote was called "Three Quolls" and featured a heavily distorted field recording of my family laughing by a river. The next time I opened up my workspace to work on Willow Tea, I decided I would just explore sounds and texture, and I became obsessed with mellotron sounds and it went in a different direction entirely. I created maybe 50-60 pieces in a couple of months, many of which live in my dusty backlog, waiting to be taken down off the shelf. The inspiration was just the joy of creating, exploring sounds and melody and harmony and seeing what came out. And a lot of the time, it's as simple as that. Sometimes I fixate on a particular sound (like the mellotron), or scales that aren't so common. For a recent project I wanted to give myself a box to explore in and try to make something work, and the boundary I set was to only use the black keys of a standard keyboard - I built a framework of standard sounds to maintain some consistency, and now have about a dozen tunes that are recognizably related. Some sad, some playful, some probably don't work at all to other ears but they all helped me push myself, as well as satisfying that need to make things.
There are of course other things I've created with very specific intentions or inspirations, but the element of exploration and spontaneous, not-entirely-conscious-of-what-I'm-doing creation is always there. Sometimes it feels a little like I have my hands on the wheel of the car, but someone else is moving them around and I'm just there for the ride. I used to have some good techniques to encourage that, but much of the time I'm just letting a less conscious part of my mind make the decisions. I guess whatever lurking down there is where those emotional aspects come from.
I hope that all makes sense? When I went to art school many years ago, there was a heavy emphasis on concept and I never felt like there was much room for just creating for creation's sake. I never quite fit into that crowd because I was more interested in pushing paint around on paper to see what came out of it, rather than to do something conceptual. Conceptual art, stuff that is a representation of themes or stories, is a beautiful thing and I enjoy making and participating in it. A lot of the time though, I'm still just pushing things around on a surface.
CR:
Oh yes, I am a surface pusher myself. I think you described it very well. You sound like a conduit. For myself, when it really works, I just play what I am supposed to play. I mostly focus on emotions or images in a meditative way before playing, often in layers and relation to one another, but that does not dictate the response.
How do you make your music these days? What does the physicality of your process look like? How has this evolved from your early days?
WT:
Surface Pusher is a good way of putting it. I think of it as similar to doodling on a notepad while on the phone or in a meeting. I like the method you mention of focusing on something before playing, and in some cases I am coming from a similar play - like in the song "Benjamin".
A combination of Audacity and a DAW with a piano roll editor. I've been using Audacity since around 2002, but a few years ago I started exploring the built-in generators and it opened a new pathway for me. I rarely use samples or field recordings, although there are some exceptions where entire compositions are built from field recordings (q.v. Hive, by Andromache). Most of my projects from 2018-2020 were purely based on generated sound. I have always liked mixing together sine waves and various kinds of noise, and particularly applying some kind of randomising effects - the surprise and "a ha!" moments are wonderful, it feels like I get to discover things in what I created.
One of my earliest compositions is "Hums", which was inspired by a university lecture I had: I attended a guest lecture from Karlin Love, a Tasmanian musician who primarily plays saxophone as well as these amazing custom leather wind instruments. She asked the attendees in the auditorium to hum a certain note, and she improvised over the sound of 70 mostly tone-deaf students trying to hold a note for a minute or two. It was a revelatory experience: feeling that note in my chest, on my skin, in my mind, probably the first time I ever got to appreciate beats and chorus. I tried to emulate that by recording myself humming and adding several channels of that one hum sample, then layered and mixed up to create my own chorus. It didn't quite hit the result I wanted, but it's a concept and approach I keep coming back to in the hope that some day, I'll nail that same experience in stereo that I had sitting in that auditorium 20 years ago.
These days, my main tool for composition is a plain old DAW on my Macbook. I've always liked playing with piano roll editors, I am terrible as playing instruments physically. It allows me to compose things I would be incapable of playing. Using a piano roll editor gives me the ability to visualise things better too - my first instrument was guitar so I still think about notes in relation to a fretboard, though I am starting to get better at looking at a keyboard and knowing what things are. Often the song originates there in Garageband, but sometimes it'll be a little melody or line that I've discovered on guitar. As far as specific instruments or sounds, I just like to explore a little and find something that I like. That can be an important catalyst. With Willow Tea I sort of painted myself into a mellotron-shaped corner, which is okay because it gives it a consistent sound.
I tend to work in short bursts - I try not to spend more than an hour working on a song, and I rarely work on something over more than one session - once the moment and the focus is gone, it's hard to find it again, so the songs tend to be self-contained and done quickly.
Because there is no performance aspect to what I do, I can tightly control what I am making, which is probably why I like those random/a-ha moments so much - surprising myself and hopefully others? Maybe it makes what I do feel a bit stiff or mechanical, it's hard to be objective. Sometimes I create videos to give a visual aspect to the music and maybe open up new interpretations to the songs, I don't know if they're successful though.
CR:
Audacity for the win, it is my daw as well.
What kind of leather instruments did she play- saxophones and the like?
What have you learned from your creative pursuits? What impact have they had on the rest of your life?
WT:
Aside from saxophone, I believe all the instruments Karlin was playing at the time were custom made by Garry Greenwood. She has played in a trio called The Chordwainers, with each member playing one of these custom instruments:
The thing I like about this album is that everything is a reference to, and draws inspiration from, Tasmania/lutruwita. the instruments, the location, the titles, the artists, all echo a strong sense of place. I once did a workshop with another member of this group inside a cave, using the atmosphere and natural ambience of the cave to create an improvised piece of music. It was a lot of fun.
I don't know if it's a lesson per se, but the last couple of years of relatively intense creative work has shown me a lot about myself and how I interact with tasks and activities. Hyper focus is a necessary part of what I am doing and if I can't find that space of "me and the destination", it's just not possible to work. And that extends to my professional life too, so I guess in a sense I see no line between what I do to feed my soul and what I do to buy actual food. In terms of music itself, working on Willow Tea and subsequent projects, I've explored melody and harmony a lot more deeply and have a much better appreciation for how music all fits together. Harmony has always been something I enjoy - and dissonance too - and the more time I spent with Willow Tea the more I wanted to push myself a bit. When I was about 15 years old, I had a copy of Guitar World magazine where one of the columns was about major/minor dyads, at the same time I was taking guitar lessons and my tutor was teaching me a basic harmonization technique for the A Minor scale, and so much of my "music theory" goes back to this - but I never progressed beyond it so I decided to push out of that and learn more about colour, shape, interaction, other emotions beyond "happy/sad". I always had a very thin understanding of scales and intervals and chords, basically just enough to get by, and I feel like recent projects have opened the door a little wider. Still only scratched the surface though.
One of the biggest things making music has taught me - or maybe reinforced - is that you always need to put boundaries in place. In my case, without it I simply don't know what to do and the choices are too big or numerous. I have a gestating project right now where I purposely told myself "only use the black keys", limiting myself to a pentatonic scale I am unfamiliar with and trying to find melody and harmony and relationships between notes and I am pretty happy with the results and looking forward to sharing it later this year. Putting a fence around what you want to make - on a song, album, or project basis - is a good thing and helps with focus. I do occasionally stumble into a nice new yard with tools that inspire, and exploring things helps there. Other times, I need to consciously think about the limits or toolkit for a project so I have somewhere to explore.
Each project has taught me something different. Gnornian started from two different places: trying to do something that felt like Fogweaver without copying directly, and trying to work with percussion. Guelph Basin taught me about how to layer noises and how each layer colours the others, and that making long songs is fun but hard to pull of successfully - learning from mistakes or failures is a big feature here! So learning things about my own mode of working, the space I need to have, patience, and failure.
BTW, congratulations on your release on High Mage. Can you tell me a little about your approach, and what tools you used?
CR:
That is a lovely album, thank you for sharing it with me. My main focus over the years has been playing wind instruments and this is right up my alley.
I appreciate the need for focus and boundaries. I recently went through a creative period and it was fantastic, but I had to stop due to work starting up again and having to find my flow. It will be easy to go back, I think, but I am getting better at being able to step back without angst and regret. I used to get angry when I wasn't able to give the focus I wanted to making art, but now I am more at peace with it. I get frustrated when I don't have the proper time to give it. Likewise, I am trying to get better at looking at boundaries as a blessing. I have a young daughter and we have a small house. It gets cold where I live, so I won't be making much music in the garage until spring comes back around. So I am confined to my headphones, because I mostly get a chance to play music when she is sleeping. For a moment, this was really frustrating, but I realized I was having so much fun taking a deep dive into my synth that it was providing me with a great learning opportunity.
I don't have any formal training with any of my instruments. What education I did receive in music came during a couple of years that I spent playing in a free jazz ensemble. Most of what I learned had to do with improvising, with learning how to communicate musically with others in a democratic environment. I learned how to listen to other players and how, mostly, to focus on that. Those were stressful times and the band collapsed in on itself; I didn't like the experience. I continued to play, striking up a musical relationship with a guy who plays experimental music and we played off and on for over ten years together. We collaborated with others, even forming our own trio for a while and creating creepy and disconcerting compositions which had a science fiction bent. I learned a lot working with him as well and I am very grateful for all of those experiences. When I moved to a different region of the country, I lost all my contacts and making music wasn't so easy. I started exploring recording music and I created some bumbling recordings, a kind of documentation of my learning process. I started by recording with my phone, then I fumbled about with Audacity for a while. There is a certain quality I appreciate in my early recordings, but they are not of the highest quality. Anyhow, eventually I got a loop pedal and used that to start layering music and as a recording device. This was the point I started to get into playing with effects and the like (though for years my friend had been modifying my signal in real time as we played). Before that, I eschewed pedals and had focused on getting the sounds I wanted from my acoustic instruments and played my guitar with no effects, just an amp and a deliberately primitive approach. I started playing music well after the point I felt I could learn how to be truly great with my instruments, so I figured I would create and work within my own understanding of how music worked, trying to create my own sort of language if you will. It was a frustrating route to take, but at this point I can comfortably make the sounds I want to make when I play my instruments, I just don't get there in a conventional way. In approaching music this way, I have limited myself in my ability to work with other musicians, but that is okay by me, especially at this point. I do miss playing with people sometimes, but at this point playing music my my lonesome is forcing me to grow in so many ways that I am very comfortable walking a solo path for the foreseeable future. I also work a lot these days and my family is my number one priority; creative pursuits are necessary for me on a multitude of levels, but they need to be woven into the time I have in my life. I couldn't sustain a working relationship with a band or another musician right now and I don't have the space in my schedule to think about going back to playing live shows (and those stressed me, as did my reactions to the stress).
I had discussed recording a piece for a split with High Mage Productions before I started interviewing people. When I finally found myself in a situation where I could make that happen, I was still focusing on making music I could create in a live situation. I have a Novation Bass Station 2. I played my Telecaster through the synth and into an array of guitar pedals and recorded straight into Audacity in one take. Production after recording was minimal, maybe five minutes or so of tweaking the track and giving it a couple of listens through one morning while I got ready for work. The entire thing was improvised and it was a response to their ‘Mage... or Astromage’ album. After that split, Elminster put out a post asking for people to make splits with him, which I was interested in. I recorded a straightforward synth track for that, again all improvised and in part in response to Elminster and his compositional style, which is very different from my own.
So now I am trying to play quietly up in our loft when I get the chance while my family takes naps or is in bed. This has restricted me, for the time being, to my synth, which has turned out to be a catalyst for growth. I have a submission put together to send to High Mage Productions for a release that is all synth, which is completely new for me. It has a narrative structure and there were lots of surprises for me in the creation.
(note: this will be released sometime in the next year, and another recording was accepted by Hermetic Transmissions for release in 2022 as well)
WT:
Thank you for sharing, I am always fascinated by the way other people approach music, especially when it isn't a conventional path (e.g. playing in bands, developing technique, etc.). I am curious to hear the Elminster split and the High Mage album when it happens too. I find it interesting that the two split compositions are in response to others' music. Do you see it as a dialogue, or a "one question, one answer" kind of thing? And what was the response from your split partners?
I also like what you say here about learning to play "after the point I felt I could learn how to be truly great with my instruments", which is something that resonates with me. I played a lot of guitar in high school but never really gained traction on technique, which was frustrating when seeing my peers shredding away with amazing dexterity and fluidity. At a certain point, I stopped trying and just started to view guitar as a texture-maker rather than a challenge. I read an interview in the 90s where Trent Reznor said he had to "unlearn" how to play music to get what he wanted. I started paying attention to musicians who used their instruments in different ways - the fractured chords of someone like John Frusciante, those minimal partial piano melodies from "The Fragile" by NIN, the way PJ Harvey plays her instruments below the voice and melody - because that feels like it was much more achievable for me. I still struggle to pick up a guitar and play anything with fluidity no matter how much I have been playing. My fingers don't cooperate and I have a screwy sense of rhythm. Piano is similar. I ended up putting guitar aside when I was 19-20, and not picking it up again with any intention until a few years ago.
I definitely feel you on balancing work, life, and creative pursuits. My family really appreciate quiet (Berlin is a noisy place, and we're sensitive folk), so I confine myself to headphones, or try to squeeze in audible recording sessions into those rare moments when I have the house to myself. Doing a quick bit of mastering and a final listen-through in a few minutes before work sounds...very familiar.
Also, I love the name Mage...or Astromage? One of the first concerts I ever saw was Man...or Astroman? in Hobart, maybe 1995. I have no idea how they ended up touring a place like Tasmania - few international bands did, and only the most popular Australian bands; this was before cheap flights were a thing - but their performance left a deep impact on me.
CR:
High Mage recorded a response to my response. I'm not sure how Elminster approached the split, whether they had something which went nicely with my submission or if they recorded something in response. I love the idea of a working relationship where there is an ongoing intentional dialogue with other musicians.
WT:
Not sure where it belongs in terms of releases, but "Lonely Tumble Through" is quite... unsettling. Made for an interesting accompaniment while making dinner.
How do you plan an improvised performance? Do you have a rough structure, plan, particular scales, ideas in mind? Some of the electronic sounds here are kind of radiophonic. Neil Young's Dead Man by way of Daphne Oram.
CR:
I have a knack for generating unsettling music, it seems. It isn't always what I am intending and sometimes I veer in different directions, but it seems to flow from me. It doesn't seem dependent on my relative happiness either. I did go through a period where I was working through a lot of grief, my earlier releases on Bandcamp reflect this, but the unsettled nature of my playing existed well before that.
I am usually drawn to art which wrestles with the entire range of experience head on and there are depths of emotion there which are not pleasant or comfortable. Music has been a means for me to grapple with things which are difficult to talk about or to restrict and define with language.
As far as improvising goes, I cone up with a loose plan beforehand. It can be as simple as a theme or some tones I want to start with. From there, I try to listen and play what should be played. The listening and trusting in the process is pretty important. If I am looping or recording additional tracks, I often experiment with finding the right tones and/or combinations of instruments between takes. It is pretty intuitive based. I try to leave room for surprises and for the music to flow and construct its own narrative, primarily through textures.
Oh, and “Dead Man by the way of Daphne Oram”? Couldn't be more pleased with that description.
What are your thoughts on the right wing elements in the dungeon synth scene? I know they exist, but I don't know much about them. I assume they are related to parts of black metal, but I don't know the history.
WT:
I think a lot of that has come via the black metal scene, but it's not the only source - black metal is a genre of music pushed to extremes, so it's kind of natural that people with extreme views will gravitate towards it and related scenes like dungeon synth, noise, dark ambient, neofolk. Of course, a big component is just the general rise of right wing sentiment in many places, and also the extra visibility and exposure the internet affords people. I feel the internet and the ease with which one can be anonymous or adopt a mask embolden people to express views that 10, 20, 30 years ago they would have been reluctant to.
I try to support good people and do what I can to help raise marginalized voices. It's easy not to support people whose beliefs are based on hate or oppression or exclusion. I'd rather spend my time and resources on good people making good art.
CR:
That makes sense. I haven't directly encountered anything myself, I just hear rumors and see people post about being anti-Nazi and the like. I've seen much more in the way of acceptance than anything else, so it felt a little confusing to me~ I know only a little bit about the black metal scene, but even so I am aware that it sometimes contains or promotes sentiments which I abhor. I am distrustful of extremism in any form it takes. Assuming that any group is represented by its most extreme members is a mistake.
Who are some people you feel are making good art? What are some voices you think people should seek out if they like what you are doing? I'm not sure if I've made this clear, but your music is some of my favorite stuff that I've heard in the past couple of years, it is nuanced and contains depths while also having a balance to it which leaves room for the imagination. This is true in all of the work I've had the chance to experience from your various projects; I find it very inspiring and delightful.
WT:
Some of the artists who are also good people that I am currently enjoying and think people should support (note: a few of them are friends, but that doesn't make them any less talented):
Mondernte (https://mondernte.bandcamp.com/)
TULIIPS (https://tuliips.bandcamp.com/)
Toul en Ihuern (https://toulenihuern.bandcamp.com/)
Cate Brooks/Cafe Kaput (https://cafekaput.bandcamp.com/)
Sarah Allen Reed (http://sarahallenreed.com/)
Blood and Dust (https://blood-and-dust.bandcamp.com/)
For people doing similar things to any of my projects, I really couldn't say - I draw from a big, disparate pool of sounds for inspiration, and I'm not sure where I fit in the grand genre game. Some of the artists where I feel there is thematic, stylistic, or musical overlap - or at least a general atmosphere - and whose music wedges such beautiful images in my mind:
Aindulmedir (https://aindulmedir.bandcamp.com/)
Fogweaver (https://thefogweaver.bandcamp.com/)
Landsraad (https://landsraad.bandcamp.com/)
Little Spells (https://littlespells1.bandcamp.com/)
I think people who are looking for further mellotron sounds by someone who is many levels beyond my tinkering, they should check out Antiphonals by Sarah Davachi (https://sarahdavachi.bandcamp.com/album/antiphonals). If I could only bottle the feeling this album gives, but it's difficult to grasp.
And thank you immensely for your kind words, it means a lot to hear these little sketches and doodle resonate with people. I really appreciate it.
You can find and contact Willow Tea via these links:
https://willowtea.bandcamp.com
I feel like I made a friend with this one and I am so thankful for all the creative work Willow Tea puts into the world. I wasn’t overblowing anything when I said they inspire me.
And speaking of inspiring work: in the next couple of days I’ll post my interview with Erang. I’ve been sitting on that for too long as well and I am excited to send it your way.