I just think it's weird that you can have it in art, and visual art, you can have a Jackson Pollack thing where it's a total web of different forms and colors, and you can look at it and your focus can go in and see certain things here and here and here. And that happened in the 40s and 50s. And that hasn't happened in music, but it's happened in culture and culture and with technology and everything. You have people that do noise and beat you over the head with a wall of sound, but when you have a wall there's no focus and there's no moving around in a piece. I think there should be pop songs where it's like changing the channels on a radio. There's space for things to kind of unexpectedly change into something else or shift. We have the ability to hear multiple things. Maybe it's schizophrenic, the things that's happening with me. [Laughs]
I don't know, but it's interesting because when I first starting doing the Raglani stuff, I was influenced by these Reductionists, where one microtonal thing developed very slowly, and now it's the complete other end of the spectrum: highly compressed information, where it's like throwing a bunch of melodic note structures at a thing and pulling them out and allowing space to move in those pockets of data. And that concept with how do you make that listenable and appealing to people so they won't be like "that's just noise" or shut off. I think that's a challenge for musicians who are trying to do something a little bit different more so because there's not a lot of people who respect that kind of thing. They want more of the same, I think. What will you be doing this Friday with Kevin Harris for the New Music Circle showcase?
Kevin has upped the game. Apparently Kevin's been around St. Louis longer than I knew - Floating Labs has been around longer than I knew, and I remember going to a show there and him playing and just being, "Shit." Cause here's another guy doing modular stuff and it's better than my stuff. It would just give you a shot in the arm not to rest on your laurels or anything. There are people who are upping the game all the time. It's not destructive, it's creative to compete a little bit with these guys. Jeremy (Kannapell of Ghost Ice) and Kevin are two guys who pushed me without saying anything, just by their example of being creative people. I could see Kevin and I doing more stuff in the future. We've been both kind of lazy, that's why we don't have a proper project - due to scheduling. But messing around with stuff last night during practice, it was pretty clear that we had a shared language without actually discussing any of this stuff. There's just something going on with what we do that's either from listening to the same records or being so involved with learning synthesis and everything. Kevin is a great guy to have in town. Besides basically single-handedly creating a micro-community in St. Louis, he's also an awesome musician who does excellent stuff.
