Where do ideas for compositions come from? Garry Cobain: With sound itself! We try and refrain from getting too intellectual as a starting point, but prefer instead to push sound around, record, process, whatever it is until something resonates and transports us somewhere where speech and thought become unnecessary.
All our music, whatever the style, revolves around this principle.
We believe it corresponds to something far deeper than brain or thought, but instead to something more fundamental and resonant.
What were your working methods back in the Lifeforms days and do you still employ similar methods to today? As above.
Brian [Dougans] and me are 'slaves' to sounds.
Processing, sampling, recording, splicing, combining until we get that resonant 'inner' feeling that neither of us can explain.
Brian and myself are together in sound simply because we respond to sound pretty much identically.
Sometimes this affinity is quite spooky and time after time we are amazed by it.
Sometimes we can be arguing about our differences in 'outlook' when suddenly something will illustrate this exact thing so clearly we simply snap out of the argument realising there is something so much deeper going on in our attunement that neither of us can explain...
Lifeforms really evolved round the collection of hundreds of hours of organic and synthetic snippets recollaged to the above effect...
I guess things changed a bit around 1997 when we started developing our psychedelic potential and we started to apply our experience to sonifying the song and the lyric.
This ultimately led to the formation of Amorphous Androgynous in parallel to FSOL.
At their centre they employ the same techniques but to very different end points.
What do you consider the purpose of your music and music in general? To activate these centres and senses that are beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond 'the brain', which can in turn connect to hidden but accessible dimensions.
I think our unspoken and non-intellectualised process of working as above has always been the same over the last 20 years, but I've never been able to verbalise it this way before.
What has probably changed is the actual frequencies which I respond to and the way they combine.
A psychedelic dimension has opened up for me which now instructs a lot of my work - this has to do with a certain liberation of approach, a looseness with our use of the computer! What do you think are some of the potential pitfalls of making music with technology? It's fairly easy to get led by the inherent in-built strengths of a particular computer program rather than imposing one's own particular vision for communication.
I do believe that making music is an opportunity to discover one's inner voice, ones individuality, so using technology as a tool is more important to me nowadays than merely being in a technology race to use new techniques first and thus temporarily stimulate.
Computers are great though when pitted into a battle or equilibrium with one's own voice.
Without this discourse between the two polarities I think it always lacks.
How do you see the role of music changing as our relationship with technology changes? Technology is used to filter everything nowadays - all experience - and while computer music is all too often associated with being fairly obvious machine music, this is changing rapidly now and computers will increasingly colourise in very subtle ways everything from production to editing and the sonifying of all conventional instrumentation and recording.
This is in fact the biggest revolution happening at the moment - the interaction between performance and computer, capturing performances and editing, sonifying and collaging.
I think music is at a critical juncture.
It can be an activation code for both spiritual and revolutionary freedom, or it can become homogenised adrenalin feed, stimulating all the outer 'apparent' senses but failing to connect to anything deeper and more fundamentally linked to the great questions of our existence.
3 tips for producers 1.
Music is as much a discovery of self as it is a discovery of sound Ignore rules, don't get intellectual, immerse in a different centre, the heart centre, and explore and manipulate sound until the sound resonates and creates feeling there.
If you keep this equilibrium between the outward sound and the inward response then you will be led at every stage through the creative process to something that is deeply personal and original.
The authenticity of which others will recognise and therefore enjoy or feel the merits of immersing in.
It is this immersion that is the ultimate goal of great ambient music.
2.
Don't let the technology lead you It is a tool, be the master NOT the servant.
Yes delight in surprises, mistakes and the unexpected.
Go down technological rabbit holes to see what can be discovered.
But, periodically, bring the experiment back to your vision and try and impose that attitude onto the technology.
That way the innovation is perfectly poised between innovation of technology and innovation of the soul.
Without the other BOTH of these are equally meaningless! 3.
Music can be unsettling - can be contradictory Don't be scared to express the full range of human emotion.
It's a common mistake to simply use pleasant, relaxing sounds.
Great revolutionary music can include any texture you like as long as the sound transports you to a place that is deeply immersive and emotionally charged.
Don't be afraid to balance light with dark, harsh with pleasant.
Harmonic with dissonant, rhythmic with arrhythmic.
Great music always has the opposite polarities to varying degrees.
Play with them!