Reviews for fans of contemporary instrumental music
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Kerry Leimer is a name you don't see mentioned much in relation to electronic music of the ambient kind. My first introduction to his music was the album The Listening Room, a work which marked Kerry's return to making music after a several year hiatus. His latest release Statistical Truth was reviewed by me recently and can be found in the archive. A discography and more information can be found at his website Palace of Lights. I'd like to thank Kerry for taking the time to provide in-depth and forthright answers. Q: You told me that your break from making music between "Imposed Order" and "The Listening Room" was due to time demands for your business. During that time did you miss the creative processing of writing music? And what is your artistic drive behind making music? Creative work of one kind or another has always been part of my professional and personal life. Though pressures of commerce continually blur the lines, there is a sharp difference between work produced for commercial ends and personal work and finally, what begins as personal work and becomes commercial work. What becomes obvious is that any creative work produced for any market is changed by the stresses of that market. So my drive is shaped by a number of things. First and foremost, instead of defining a market there is the work of defining a particular aesthetic. A way for me to understand music and why it matters as it does. This is easy for some, hard for me because my method relies on generating a lot of sound and then organizing and refining it and redoing it. I cannot sit down and simply execute an a-prior idea with any degree of success. A recent example is Statistical Truth. More than 40 pieces were recorded for that CD and only 11 were finally included. My failure rate will always remain very high, and I accept that as a condition of work. Second, there is a need to do this free of a market. This is not to say that what I produce is so unique that no category can hold it. It is to say that any kind of commerce colors everything it touches. In addition, I don't want or have to layer the distorting pressure of making a living onto the work. The interval between Imposed Order and The Listening Room was a period of nearly complete submersion in commerce which left my interest and ideas about music largely unaffected. I would never wish to make a living at music because no matter what, commerce seeps in. Even during the altruistic days when PoL released the music of other artists as well as my own, the market took up much of the day in selling, in billing, in collecting and even in working. Statistical Truth was meant to be the follow-up to Closed System Potentials and then later to Imposed Order. But Closed System had attracted the interest of a filmmaker and I was suddenly on deadline to score Land of Look Behind, a record I did not want to make, and a record which delayed and derailed other more significant ideas for music. This doesn't imply that a commercial venture cannot be artistically successful as well. But I no longer seek that. Actually, I never sought that. My interest in music, and my effort to create it demanded at least that rather than stay locked in a studio it find its own place in the world. That my music has attracted a small audience, and that the audience seems like the right audience -- since these are listeners who do not need to be sold on the idea -- is enough to provide some external validation and feedback. Because these are people who clearly accept music as music rather than music as product. Finally, like any business the music business itself is an ideal example of the way in which the creative impulse is subsumed by the commercial impulse. So the drive behind making music can be questionable. At the commercial level, music is all about product and entertainment and rarely about art and comment. Even music that claims to be free of commerce is, for good or ill, typically niched into a market. The result tempers and finally hardens tastes and expectations into increasingly narrow definitions. This is true of any even marginally mainstream music, and it does immeasurable harm to artist and audience alike. And in addition to the commercial abuse of music, a case could easily be made against the widespread cultural abuse of music. From muzak in its many and more progressive forms to advertising, radio, clubs and even most soundtracks, music is reduced to a sensory accessory. Now, enslaved to the dollar in one hand and the short attention span of idiot consumers in the other. Music is marketed based on perpetuating cults of personality and, more importantly, it seems to strive to perpetuate fairly vacuous states of mind among "fans" who seem uniformly incapable of separating the work from the personality.
Q: From listening to your albums, and reading the liner notes on them, it's apparent that you have an abstract and intellectual approach to the music. Was that a conscious decision? My background is fine art, and my initial approach to music was shaped by that orientation. Mostly focused on rudimentary processes that apply equally well to visual or auditory work: pattern, inversion, reflection, contrast, direction, scale, superimposition, transposition and so on. These and other techniques can be used as tools to remove the artist by some degree from what is created or it can become the guiding discipline. Panufnik, for example, originated a compositional form based solely on reflected triads which, greatly simplified, says: start with a triad and play only the literal visual reflection, and reflections of the reflection until you find out where it leads. He then created exceptions to that rule for specific effect. A completely different example would be Terry Riley's origination of the tape-loop feedback system that Eno popularized. This highly fatalistic technique emphatically ushered in machine participation in the process of creating music. In both cases, by setting conditions instead of expectations, the outcomes -- the art or the music -- is able to tell us as much about the effects of process as the individual talent or skill of an artist, epitomized by Faust with the horrifically distorted cry "The microphone is perfect". This shift in perspective was a sea change that occurred in the twentieth century -- an emphatic turn away from Romanticism, Classicism and traditional views of what constitutes a work of art, or an artist. The issue is compounded because today so many are capable of doing something live or in studio with tools that in and of themselves provide a complete context for generating "music" of almost any sort, little to no prior knowledge required. That many of the results we hear are less about music and more about an exercise in personal preference -- not expression, but mere preference -- is the emergent problem. This is music that is not so much the product of conscious or even unconscious process, but the result of derivatives: systems that in many ways pre-determine outcomes regardless of the nudging and grunting of an artist. Which forces artist and audience down the slippery slope of little more than personal taste or depending on the extremely rare condition known as Talent. Relying on taste alone is fine, if your taste is thoroughly informed. More often than not, taste is the result of an unexamined and unorganized collection of impressions that are incapable, of and by themselves, of anything much more than picking out socks. And, of course, even talent needs examination. So, simply said, it's imperative to be able to think about music as well as to experience it.
Q: The market for ambient music is pretty small compared to the mainstream (pop, rock etc), and most artists in this niche don't sell enough albums to make a living from it. Is this the case for you, if so what's your career and does it have any relation to music? People seem to give more polarized, more violent and reflexive reactions to music than they do to any other form of expression. Which means that most people are comfortably unaware and uneducated about music and seek it principally as entertainment. What's worse is that on a popular level, all knowledge of music is strictly colloquial. Which contributes to a typically narrow scope of interest. The curiosity of the pop fan seems like some fragile, diseased little animal that needs to be kept away from direct sunlight, at the same temperature, swaddled in benign isolation, hooked to an IV that drips itself back into itself for fear of being exposed to anything it hasn't already been exposed to. This iron-clad orthodoxy is the opiate of the industry, bestowing vast measures of predicability, repeatability and efficiency to the carefully tuned production schedules of the Major Labels. I'd argue further that pop, rock, folk, country western, reggae, rap, hip-hop and the rest are dealing in essentially a single form: the song. Acceptance or dismissal of music among the Big Audience typically requires only two questions: first, is there singing? and second, deeper and more difficult to answer, do I like the singing?As the industry demonstrates again and again, the Big Audience for music is inherently, vehemently uninterested in music. The real interest is in merchandising, of which the CD is but a part, along with the hats, pants, shirts, shows, movies, programs and intangibles that contribute to letting people feel, however wrongly, that they are part of something larger than themselves. Which tells those of us who actually care about music in its many forms that broad acceptance is really not a serious goal. Music, if that's what you do, is the goal. Making a living at it can be good and , as I mention earlier, can be corrupting as well. I never sought to make a living at music, but it does comprise a large portion of my life. This is the balance I was able to strike, never on a daily basis, but over the course of many years. Often, the long scale is the only scale capable of offering balance of any kind.
Q: Your music sounds pretty unique to me. What artists, if any, have been an influence on your work? Most of what I listen to isn't at all similar to what I do. Other work influences my thinking but I'm uncertain if it's evident in the music. Reviewers have always compared my work to that of Eno. But comparisons aren't really the optimal way to approach listening unless what you're listening to is so derivative that it doesn't deserve any more consideration. A good exercise is to write reviews without using the word "like". As in "X is like Y, with a little Z". In 20th Century music I am principally interested by the work of Arvo Part, Gavin Bryars, Alan Hovhaness, John Tavener and a few others. Part and Tavener, in particular, write "sacred" music, so it's important for me to say that I am an atheist and am not drawn to their work by some sort of faith. In more popular forms there would be Rachel's; Robert Wyatt; God Speed You, Black Emperor; Do Make Say Think; Robert Henke; Deathprod; The Incredible String Band; Leo Kottke; Peter Hammill; Wire; Chris Whitley; Syd Barrett; most Early Music; Clogs; re: ; Richard Sinclair; Robert Fripp. A real hash... so instead of people, in no particular order, a few pieces of music that I tend to always come back to:
Grantchester Meadows (Roger Waters)
Q: As a reviewer I often wonder if what I get out of music is the same as the what the musician intended. When creating your music do you have a strong vision of what thoughts or feelings should be conveyed by the sounds? I am principally interested in articulating a melancholic sense without the requisite overblown anguish. A recent review by Max Oz got Statistical Truth exactly right when he said this is "music that positively aches". The source of the pain, of course, is left open. My biggest problem, from a purely sonic perspective, is staying away from the too pretty and the too consonant without resorting to extremes of dissonance and dynamics. I also work very hard at the scale of each piece, stripping elements down to that point where the least proves to be enough. And I tend to use the same elements, restated and/or processed at several points throughout the music. The result should give a listener a sense of deliberate structure, a form to each piece rather than mere formlessness, enhanced by the recurrence, though in disguise, of reusable elements. Given the sometimes oblique interactions, there should be the opportunity for the listener to hear the same thing in a different way by moving attention from one area to another. Finally, if we expect innovation in sound and harmonic content, we should expect it in rhythmic content as well, so as far as recent work is concerned, the number 4 is dutifully avoided as often as possible.
Q: Your latest release "Statistical Truth"fits in sonically and stylistically with your previous work. Will future offerings be roughly in the same vein? Probably, although I am unconvinced that I have ever done a truly ambient project and plan to do so in the near future, possibly as a gallery installation. I've also begun some small scale pieces in a more orchestral vein, let's say chamber orchestra, as a good example of being influenced specifically by the music of Gavin Bryars and Arvo Part. These will probably show up on my website in the form of free downloads. This month I also made available a series of pieces called Flaws. They are in three categories (Beat; Drift; Melodic) and are examples of ideas that went far but not far enough. These are also available as free downloads from my site. We'll soon add a new section to the PoL website that makes pieces some of the original PoL artists available as free MP3 downloads. To begin with, Marc Barreca and Anode (Robert Carlberg) will contribute pieces, along with others who do the work of music without any avenue for release. There's so much interesting work that will probably never see the light of day that we felt it was time to make more work available. In fact, once you begin to step away from labels and start listening to the personal work of people who simply love music, it gets harder and harder to go back to the store. Work on the next CD is just underway and planned for late spring early summer 06. Working title is "The Useless Lesson" and it will include some interesting -- I hope -- takes on field recording and other acoustic elements -- something I have scrupulously avoided for years. But CDs aside, the best thing is the continuing practice of music. |