Boomers were “radio natives” just as there are now social media natives. I listened to top-40 radio in the 70s as did everyone because it was almost a binary choice. I (we) used to buy all the Elton John records and sat around singing along with them. I got my first guitar in 1976 and the first bass in 1977, then attended music school in 1981. Once music became more theoretical a shift happened where I was playing in a different way and looking at music in a different way. It’s like walking around a big public sculpture with different vantage points; it’s casting different shadows and we’re finding interesting things in different parts of it that other people don’t see. Similarly, theory knowledge lets you see music from at least two angles instead of just one. But after a while, I realized I couldn’t remember how I played music before. It’s as if the way you saw the sculpture originally had changed. Untrained musicians tend to look at music in terms of memorized patterns. It’s actually an effective way to do it. A lot of the music that I learned was from untrained musicians until the theoretical phase. I had moved on and it replaced what was there. I think that partially, the alternate tunings thing was a way to revive intuitive playing and writing. In ambient music I’m also playing intuitively. Ambient music is my way of painting with sound, as cliche as it is.
It’s interesting to alternate between music and art: you start to see how they influence one another. When I’m in my music theory mode it’s the most rigorous way of working for me. It’s my craft — that’s where I can really get in and do technical things just like a painter would, but in visual art I’m not a skilled painter. When I’m doing art I’m doing it more intuitively and then I take that intuition back to music. In ambient music I have nothing preconceived — I’m just playing around with sounds and I start to build it up in layers and then subtract away elements.
There’s an axis in ways of working and the longer you’ve been doing creative work you can move along that axis. If I’ve been doing technical things for a long time I like to do things that are intuitive and vice versa. It gets me into a different headspace and I can get into flow experiences. But I can also get into a flow experience working in a score. I like the challenge of working in standard notation just as much as I like working with sound, where there are things that happen in the flow that can turn out to be really good pieces of music. The challenge is to be able to capture those moments when they arise. For example, if I’m working with a rhythm or stacking rhythms and I make a mistake where I start on beat two or on the “and” of one, it’ll create a polyrhythm. Stopping to take advantage of happy accidents is like stopping to take a picture of it. Sometimes that picture is more interesting than what you were working on. So if I didn’t notice those things happening, art can go missing sometimes. To be able to do things rigorously and just have fun doing them and not be concerned about skill gives you a good mix of ways of working.
