Interviewed as part of article in The Australian, 27 April 2006

Making experimental waves
From punk to classical, musicians in all genres are pushing the outer limits of the art form, writes Iain Shedden

NO matter how you perceive it, you can't take the mental out of experimental music. To some, it's about hitting things with other things just to hear what sounds they make. To others, it's a liberation, an exploration of new territory uncharted even by the greatest composers and songwriters.

It's also a form that has no boundaries. If rattling chains and blowing a conch is how you want to pursue your art, then so be it. How about creating an ensemble that's blindfolded and whose instruments are made of ice and melt during the performance? Now why didn't anyone think of that before?

These two examples are among many experimental exercises that have taken place in Australia in recent years, the first by Melbourne artist Anthony Pateras, the latter a collaboration between composer John Rodgers and Australian improvisers the Elision Ensemble.

Add to those the hundreds of unheralded Australians doodling with guitars and computers and mixing desks and bits of scrap all across the country, some whose work doesn't have a public, and you have an idea of the burgeoning local experimental music scene.

Some of its leading exponents, such as Pateras, Sydney band the Necks and guitarist-percussionist Oren Ambarchi, one of the founders of the Australian What is Music? festival, are getting rare television exposure in the coming weeks, thanks to an ABC initiative called Set, which will broadcast nine performances of experimental music. For the casual observer, the show should provide some confronting and some rewarding moments.

If the sight of odd instruments and the sound of instruments being odd strikes the viewer as innovative, they may be surprised to learn that experimental music in Australia is nothing new; indeed, it has been around for almost a century.

"There's lots of argument about what experimental music actually means," says Clinton Green, an experimental muso in Melbourne who is also researching an Australian history of the form and compiling a CD of early local examples.

Green is a late convert to the experimental camp. He began his music career in the early 1990s playing in hardcore punk bands. Today his output, under the name Undecisive God, is more ambient, more home-grown and decidedly solo. He produces albums of experimental guitar music - long strands of layered, atmospheric noise - that represent just one tiny channel of a largely uncommercial art form.

His research has taken him back to one of Australia's most famous composers, Percy Grainger, whose explorations of what he called free music included the building of the Free Music Machine, an elaborate device involving rollers and wrapping paper that controlled pitch in the playing of his compositions. Grainger could be considered the founder or at least a pioneer of the genre in Australia, since back in the 1920s such experiments were rare.

More recently, the music of Americans John Cage and Steve Reich, among others, has become the benchmark on which musical experimentation is judged.

"Some of Reich's pieces are still very contemporary in their concepts," the Necks' pianist Chris Abrahams says. "A lot of experimental music that is happening in Europe still owes a great debt to what was happening in America in the '50s, people like Cage, Morton Feldman. There's still a great deal of interest and influence from these people. There's a definite through-line from them to today."

With today's artists, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to describe what falls into the experimental basket. Digital technology and the internet have opened up musical possibilities. "You couldn't even call it a genre," Green says. "It's not like it's jazz or rock or anything. What unites us, if you take a positive view, is the sense of adventure and creation.

"If you wanted to be a bit more cynical about it, you could say there's an electronica scene and an ambient scene and a drone scene and so on. It's pretty disparate. Some of them do survive in their own little scenes. Some people like it to be called experimental, some don't."

Daryl Buckley doesn't mind the term, although it's only one of many that have been used to describe his work through the years. As director of the Brisbane-based Elision Ensemble, he has been involved in opera, improvisation, electronic music and art installations, all of which had a degree of experimentation about them. It was the ensemble that found itself with instruments made of ice, performing for 14 hours as their instruments slowly melted away, as part of installation artist Domenico de Clario's piece Haft Peikar in 2000.

Buckley uses terms such as squeaky and spluttering to describe the aquatic resonance in the oboes that disappeared before his eyes on that occasion, adding that there was an Indian or Middle Eastern quality to their diminishing tone.

Buckley shares the experimental tag with Green, but they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. While Undecisive God is a homegrown, almost hobby-level endeavour, Buckley creates large-scale productions that travel across the world and are funded largely by federal and state arts bodies. He is working on projects for the 2008 City of Culture Festival in Liverpool, England, and for a tour of Europe next year.

He is also a classically trained musician, although he doesn't see this alone as a prerequisite in creating stimulating and original experimental work.

"In Australia there have been perceived polar opposites, in that there are people who work with notepad and music and are trained at the conservatorium and work at the experimental end of that, and there are others who work with various technologies," Buckley says.

"I think that is becoming increasingly blurred now. It already has in Europe. Why should one pre-empt the other? They're all in the end talking about the same thing. Being able to read music is one tool, being able to use certain software is another tool."

Buckley has worked several times with composer Rodgers who, he says, "experiments quite radically up to the point of destruction of instruments and with new ways of creating sounds and timbre".

Their collaborations have included Tulp, the Body Public (2004) and Inferno, the latter a modern adaptation of the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy using traditional and created instruments, including more of the melting ice variety.

"We've done performances that push your physical capacity as a player and your ability to absorb information and the whole notion of what's possible to an olympic extreme," he says. "That's another way of renegotiating the boundaries of what's known and what's not."

Of all the recent practitioners of so-called experimental music, perhaps the most recognised internationally as a band is the Necks, the three-piece Sydney outfit whose 12 albums to date have twisted the notion of jazz, improvisation and ambient into something entirely their own. Their music has a hypnotic, almost trance-like quality that draws you in, all the while building on gentle, subtle shifts of dynamic or emotion.

Abrahams says that you have to adhere to "a certain experimental ideology to do what the Necks do. "It comes down to outcomes and whether you are satisfied with the approach," he says. "It tends not to be particularly commercial and it tends not to be something for everyone. Probably people who are interested in music and how it is made ... those people are into it. Everything has a nature of experiment, but some of it tends to be less easily digested. That's not say it is any more or less intellectual."

Not more intellectual, perhaps, but certainly more challenging than anything in this week's Top 40.

"I guess by being called experimental it implies that the outcome is not known," says Abrahams. "Maybe it has something more to do with the process of making it. Whatever outcome occurs from that process is viable, so you have a very broad aesthetic as to what can come out."

Interviewed by Andrew McIntosh for Taped Crusaders 'zine in August 2003

I know you where in Punchbag, where you doing anything before that?

Yeah, a bit. Punchbag was the first...I'm hesitant to call it a "serious" band, it wasn't musical genius or anything, but we did take it seriously and worked hard at it. Before that, how I got into playing music was a friend of mine, Kevin Ryan who was the original bass player in Punchbag, he and I were friends from the start of high school. He lived with his brother, his parents moved away, which is a funny thing 'cause usually the kids move away. They had this house with no parents. We were all really into music, we got into punk together.

Did you have a perchance for experimental stuff before that?

I think always. I probably didnıt know what to call it at that stage. But at the stage with Kevin, he bought all these instruments 'cause he worked, I was still at school. He bought a drumkit, a guitar which is now my guitar, that's the guitar I play to this day, and a bass guitar. And we used to just make a racket and we used to record it.

Any of that survive?

Have you heard of Kaos? That's Kaos. That was the first thing we did, and that was just a lot of fun, just mucking around. But in that, a lot of that's noise and just experimental stuff. So from the moment I just picked up a guitar or bass or whatever, Iıve been more interested in the feedback, droney kind of stuff. From the beginning.

How did the Sonic Youth influence happen? A I think I got interested in Sonic Youth from what I read about them. 'Cause at that stage when we first started mucking around, we where doing stuff with screwdrivers and drumsticks and feedback and stuff like that. And that was before I even heard Sonic Youth. I remember reading an interview with them and they where talking about all that stuff and I thought "Sh*t that sounds interesting".

A lot of people, when they do experimental stuff, they start doing a lot of stuff initially because they can, then find out later that it's been done before. Do you feel a connection with that or a bit discouraged?

No, I didnıt feel discouraged at all, and I have that experience to this day. I actually feel itıs a bit of an epiphany; somone else on the other side of the world is thinking the same as you. And in some ways I find it's a justification for what your doing. As you probably know yourself it's easy to feel isolated and are you doing stuff that no-one cares about? And to have that epiphany with someone else...I sort of had a similar thing with The Dead C. as well, 'cause I thought "Sh*t, Iıve been trying to do something like this for years!" And also another local guy, Chris Smith. Heıs a guitarist. I've heard some of his stuff and weıve met and spoke a bit about guitar, and we sort of think along the same lines. So I enjoy that, actually.

How did Undecisive God start?

Originally I just recorded stuff on the walkman, mucking around with my guitar. It was just a personal experimentation thing.

Wasnıt the first track by accident?

Um...(pause)...oh yeah! I know what you mean. The one on the "Archive" cd. (Laughs) What that track was, I had an old walkman that you could record with, and I used to take it everywhere and listen to these endless Sonic Youth tapes. I had it in my backpack and the record button got pushed and taped over the start of "Goo"! (Laughs) Which really pissed me off! But it was just the walkman in the bag feeding back and I didnıt think anything of it at the time. But everytime I listen to that tape I think "Oh, that sounds quite good!". And I had it as part of the "Archives" series that Iıve done, which is releasing old tape stuff on cd. I thought "Well, I'll call this the first track". It wasnıt intentional at the time but you know, maybe it's like the John Cage "chance composition" thing which I'm sort of interested in at the moment.

Is the "Archives" stuff the tip of the iceberg of Undecisive God recordings?

The "Archives" stuff is going chronologically; the latest is for year 2000. So what that means is that everything I've recorded from '91 to 2000 is now on those six cds. After 2000 there is a lot of stuff which Iıve recorded which hasn't been released. So I don't know if itıs like the tip of the iceberg, maybe more like half of the iceberg. I don't like to just put everything out. I like to sit back and look back at it and just make sure I'm happy with it.

Talk a bit about how you record.

It's sort of changed a lot, lately. Because now, about the last six months I've been recording exclusively on the PC, whereas prior to that I've recorded onto tape. When I was recording onto tape I was using the Tascam 4-track, and usually Iıd come in and have an idea, lay down a couple of tracks...originally Iıd mix down onto tape but then I started mixing down onto the PC. But now Iıve got some software called CoolEdit which enables me to record straight onto the PC and use the 4-track as a mixer. And that's actually changed quite a lot the way I record. 'Cause in some ways it really opens up a lot of possibilities. It's easy to sample tracks and loop tracks, whereas when your working with the 4-track itıs actually quite difficult to do unless you want to get into splicing tape or you've got a sampler or something like that. But it's very easy to do on the PC. Also you can get a lot cleaner sound when you want to get that clean sound. And this software's got a lot of great effects, too. But in some ways it's got restrictions as well. The biggest restriction I'm finding, with this particular software, is you can't do a live overdub exactly in sync.

Is that a problem with the actual software?

I don't really know enough about the software available but I think it's also a restriction on the PC as well. I think you have to get a special soundcard to be able to do that, which is quite expensive. But what the restriction basically is, is you can't record a track and play a track on this bit of software at the same time. So what I have to end up doing is record on the software and play back track 1 or track 2 on another bit of software or on a cd or something like that. The thing is you can't press "play" and "record" on the two bits of software at the same time. I mean, itıs not such a restriction with more ambient stuff but when you're doing something when you want some kind of rhythm it makes it quite difficult.

More people who record at home are switching to digital. Do you think youıll record exclusively to PC from now on?

That's a tough one. The way Iım going at the moment I couldn't be f*cked setting up the tape, to tell you the truth. But if I want to do something that I want to have in reasonable sync with overdubs and that I will have to go back to tape. But at the moment Iım discovering all these other possibilities with the PC and the software which is leading me in different areas, as far as recording; different ideas about composing and stuff like that. So the only real restriction is occasionally something rhythm orientated, and occasionally I like to have something with a beat. So I wouldn't rule it out (tape) all together. It sort of suits me a bit more too, because at the moment I'm not recording as much source material. I'm finding if I've recorded one track of sound that's generating all these different ideas, just because of the freedom to sample and loop and f*ck with sounds and make different things out of them.

What about originality? I know that when people get into this stuff they like to go over things and end up sounding the same. Are you conscious of that? Are you trying to sound like yourself, or even still just playing with that?

Itıs probably a little bit too early at this stage to say. Sometimes I discover a sound and think "Sh*t, I know that sound!", and I think "I'll try to do something like that guy". And Iıve never thought "I want to be original, I want to be original". Really it's about me; it's about what I want to do, itıs about me playing and about my self expression.

Isn't that the same thing, though?

What do you mean?

If you want to do what you want to do that is a kind of originality. I think some of the Undecisive God stuff you've put out does sound pretty distinct, that I haven't heard much elsewhere.

Yeah. (Pause) Yeah, that's true. But, I mean if I want to sound like someone else, just because I want to, I mean, that'd be the same thing. I know what you mean. I think these days there's not much around doing that kind of thing, because guitars are just so uncool now. (Laughs)

Your main instrument is the guitar, but now that you're on the computer more are you starting to use other sound sources?

Not at the moment, not really. Iım getting interested in field recording which I'm starting to do a bit of now. But that's still very "in the beginning", you know. But what I'm exploring a lot at the moment in the last couple of months is taking a few recent ideas which I've tried to do with analogue which just haven't quite worked, or they've worked but Iıve thought "I think I can get that cleaner sound and it'll work a lot better". And the ability to loop things and things like that. I'm talking about some of the things I did on the first self-titled cd, like "Angels" and the last track from that cd. What I've really been doing is working with that idea in a digital framework. And the new cd ("Offering"), a lot is exploring that kind of idea and the digital background gives it a lot more freedom to do that. So I think that's what my main concern has been lately, itıs a different avenue of exporing some of these ideas which Iıve originally had anyway. With "Angels", that's three or four tracks, Iıve been able to take that idea and do it with twelve or thirteen guitars now, playing different notes with different modulations, and itıs like having your own little orchestra.

You've also talked about using some of the sounds of train shunting near your house.

Itıs something I still want to do and Iıve spoken to a few people about it. I really need a shotgun microphone. Iıve tried to source a couple of those for free (Laughs). And I've also spoken to Andrew Lonsdale from Browning Mummery in Sydney, heıs been doing stuff for decades, and he sent me a lot of good information about how to make your own shotgun microphone. And he's actually done a lot of train recordings and he's going to send me some stuff, hopefully. Iıve tried to make my own but I need the right cardboard postal tube. I live by Tottenham rail yards and a hell of a lot of shunting goes on there overnight. And it's a sound I really like; all the neighbours hate and and protest it but I actually really like it (Laughs). I don't know what that says about me, but anyway...But I think a lot of people who do this kind of music can identify. If your just sitting in a room or something you find yourself tuning into the air-conditioning, thumpings of the fridge and things like that, and hearing music in it. And I really hear this in these train sounds and I hope they never close it down 'cause I really like it!

How did you start playing live and how is that developing?

The first time I did this sort of thing was at the "Behind Closed Doors" launch. That was really easy to do because it was behind a curtain so no one could see us and there was about ten other performers. And out of that we did a few more things with you and me and Alex and Frank. And then sort of in the middle of that I just did this solo thing at some bar in the city...it was because they wanted us to play and no one else could make it, so I just thought "Well I'll give it a go". I'd kind of been thinking about it for a while. And it was neither here nor there and people didn't sort of get it. So I've played, I don't know how many times, mavey about half a dozen over the last couple of years. It's really hit and miss. Mainly because your by yourself so there's nowhere to hide. Also my equipment is not the best quality. But I've had a couple of things that have been really good. One was in Brisbane at "Small Black Box", that was really good, that worked really well and I don't really know why.

The atmosphere?

Yeah, that was good. Maybe because too it's an experimental club; you know the people there are interested in this kind of thing. Iıve played in pubs and things like that, just ordinary pubs with ordinary bands, and I've actually stopped doing that now. I don't know why but I find it stressfull. I'm thinking, "If Iım going to play live I don't want to play in some pub where no-one's going to care". I want to do it where people might have an interest. So I really don't know where the live thing's going at the moment. If I do play live it'll probably at an experimental music event, and I know that sounds kind of inward-looking and closeted.

Why do you say that?

Iıve always had this idea in the past that you should try and break out of your own little scene and play with different kinds of bands and things like that. Otherwise everything gets really insular and people are more concerned with who's there rather than what's being played. That's all back in the punk scene as we know, but all the same stuff happens with the ambient/experimental-music, they just have bigger vocabularies (laughs). I mean, it's the same issues. I played with Scott Sinclair in May (2003); there where some good things about it, there where some bad things about it too, I had an equipment problem. But I'd be interested in playing with other people more, playing solo is a lot of pressure, it really is. (Undecisive God) has always been mainly a recording concern, but Iıve sort of tested the waters a bit with live playing.

You've got Shame File mailorder and label; how did that start and how has the emphasis changed with it?

It started off as mainly punk/hardcore stuff and tapes, in the very beginning. It's alwasy just been an avenue to do small release runs of things Iıve been involved with. And compilations as well, Iıve done about three or four compilations, and I've got another one coming up at the beginning of next year. So it's followed my musical involvement with punk stuff and then into experimental stuff; that's the label releases. I also have a mail-order side to it, which is other peoples' music, which is usually through trading with them. I have had releases on other labels.

How much is pragmatic in the sense that your releasing a lot of obscure stuff and a lot of home-recordings; do you think that it will always be small and you don't see it getting any bigger?

No, I don't see it getting that much bigger. It has grown bigger than what it was; I think it could get a big bigger. But two reasons, the nature of the music is that it's never going to be huge, I mean, that's it. And also for it to be big, I have to invest some capital in it and take some risks and things like that, which I'm just not going to do. I'm not that kind of person really. But things did take a leap forward after the "Behind Closed Doors" compilation, and Iım hoping this new compilaiton which I'm compiling at the moment will take things forward a bit more. When I say forward I mean reach a few more people. But there's no plans for world domination or anything like that. Yet.

A lot of people have found getting on the internet has opened up contacts, has that happened for you?

Yeah, yeah, definately. Iıve made a whole range of new contacts via internet for sure. A lot of the stuff that used to happen through the mail, I guess it still happens, I donıt know, just seems to happen a lot easier on the internet now because of the speed of communication, and the possiblities with MP3s are very exiting as well. There was a few years in the late '90s when I didn't do much at all, and then around '99-2000 I started getting involved with the internet, and that rejuvinated the whole buisiness and allowed me to make a lot more contacts. I can't say that people who are involved with experimental music are usually internet-active anyway, because if they weren't we just wouldn't hear about them these days, unless you read lots of zines or something.

Iıve noticed in Undecisive God you have certain, what I would call spiritual references, "Angels" being the most obvious. Do you have any beliefs that influence the music you do, or even just the titles?

The thing about doing this type of music is that you have no hope of getting any fame or material return or anything like that, itıs got to come from the heart. It does with me, thereıs no other reason to do it. I mean, why else would you do it, really? No one cares (laughs)! It's real self expression for me, so in that way I would say there is a real spiritual element to it. But I'm not trying to push a barrow or anything like that.

No, but Iıve noticed that a lot of the stuff you do is very positive sounding, which for me is a bit unique. The bulk of stuff I hear in the experimental vein is usually very dark and sombre. Is that something your consciously aware of?

I'm aware of it but it's not something...I don't know, it's tough. One thing I've always had in mind, I don't want to do anything political; which I'm actually revising that idea now.

Why didn't you want to do anything political? Was it burn out from the punk thing?

Maybe. But I was never allowed to be that political in the bands I was in anyway, because the other members never had the same politics. In Punchbag I used to write all these political songs and Duncan used to go "I'm not f*cking singing that!" (Laughs) I think to make something political it dates really quickly. Iım not against anyone else doing it, but for me...I don't know if youıve ever written a diary or a journal, you write something and your ideas about life, especially when your a teenager, and you come back, five years later you pick it up, and you read it and you go, "What the f*ck was I thinking? What a fucking idiot!". And to me, that would be like that, if I said something like, you know, "John Howard sucks" or something, I might come back in five years and think...I just feel like it would cheapen it a bit. And also, because it's kind of abstract music, I think any kind of message is really out of place. For me, anyway. Some people do it and they do it well, but just for me it's really out of place. But having said all that...(laughs)...Iım now sort of thinking I really want to do something that's at least a bit political, and it's that self expression as well, because now I feel an extreme amount of anger at what's happening in this country at the moment. And I really want to do something, I need to express that. So Iım thinking about doing something along those lines but that's a little ways off yet.

But if the music has a very uplifting sort of feel about it, this to me sort of goes back to what I suppose the "message" of music used to be, before a lot of lyrics where thrown onto it. Like, for example, Bach!

It really pleases me to hear you say that it sounds positive. And I guess the effort has been not to be cynical, cause cynicism doesn't date well, either. It's a really easy thing to do, to be cynical. But that's really pleasing because to most people it just sounds like noise, you know. And I think, too, that because it's my self-expression, itıs something that's from me and it's unadulterated, I donıt want it's purity to be muddied by any message. Itıs certainly uplifting for me; it's uplifting for me to play and it's uplifting for me to listen to, I get a lot out of it. But it's uplifting for me to play something really nasty as well (laughts).

I was going to say, you have done a lot of pretty gruesome stuff to. We've both done The Unnameable, which reminds me; Lovecraft! You're a fan of Lovecraft. Have you done any stuff based on that outside of The Unnameable?

Well, with The Unnameable we sit down and think, "Right, now we're going to do a Lovecraft sound", when I have done stuff in the past where I've really wanted to achieve this sound of eldritch dread. So I have done that as well, but I don't think thatıs my best stuff. At the moment I probably think the self-titled cd is the best stuff, and the new stuff is all too new to really rate it. But The Unnameable for me is a lot of fun, too.

There's the humour factor I suppose.

The humour factor, and just writing press about it is a lot of fun. And the song titles, I've just got a new lot of song titles 'cause Iıve just finished re-reading "The Dreams In The Witch-House", and the good thing about doing it like that is because I can hear, "Alright, I want to make this kind of sound now".

On the self-titled cd, you had a cover of a Dead C song, are you going to do more stuff like that?

Well, this is the restriction of digital, you know, 'cause you can't play along with the drums exactly in time. If you doing abstract, say if abstract needs a loop and your not exactly in time with the loop, big f*cking deal, but when youıve got the drums youıve got to really be on the ball. But I've probably got about half a dozen Sonic Youth covers recorded, the new cd is going to have a cover of Sonic Youth's "Mote", which I actually recorded probably about two years ago now. I recorded it at the time the self-titled cd came out but I just didnıt want to have two covers on it. It's a very extended version. Also on the split cd Iıve got coming out with Agit8 there's just an accoustic version of that. Mainly because I just fluked singing well, I'm really amazed by it, I don't know how I did it! (Laughs)

Are you proud of your voice?

No, well, I can't sing. But somehow I fluked singing this take well, so I just kept it . I have got the ability to sing well, I just haven't got the control to do it consistantly. And I like the idea of all these abstract and noise pieces and then surprising people with something more traditional like that. Hopefully this accoustic bit will work well among all the Agit8 stuff too.

What about some of the other bands you where in?

Nete started out as a two-piece with me and a guy called Wayne Duncan. And it was basicly his band, he wrote the songs and everything and I just did what I was told. Which was fine because I was still in Punchbag at the time and I was sort of driving a lot of that, and I really enjoyed being in a band where I didnıt have to do that. I thought Wayne was a really talented guy and I'm really proud of a lot of the stuff we did there. It went through a whole heap of changes, he'd write like twenty songs and say "Right, I'm finished with that style"....so that went through a whole lot of things. It started out I played bass in that, and he sang and played guitar, and we had a drum machine all the way through from Industrial rock similar to Godflesh, really really heavy stuff, through to more Gothy sort of stuff and a whole lot of stuff in between.

Kill was me playing guitar, Mark Hodges, who was in Punchbag, on bass, and Jason Dutton aka Eugene Snorkelbender on drums. I think we did some really good stuff but we just didn't take off, I don't really know why. 'Cause I actually think we did some really good stuff.

How would you describe Kill as a sound?

Well, I don't know. It was rock because we had the bass, drums and guitar. But we where trying to something a bit more with it. I was playing really noisy guitar at the time, and we had a really heavy bass sound and Snorkelbender's a really hard hitter on the drums, too. It was sort of like real noise rock. I was really into the whole King Snake Roost sort of sound; I really can't replicate that guy's guitar sound at all (laughts), but I was trying to do something like that, and trying to take some of the Black Flag aesthetic, as far as guitar's concerned. And The Mark Of Cain was also a big influence, before they went kind of Heavy Metal as they are now. We also tried to do stuff with different timings, and that probably killed us in the end, I think, 'cause that was just too hard; the songs we where writing were just ridiculously hard. And also, too, because Mark was studying jazz music, so he was getting quite accomplished in being a player and I just couldn't keep up with it, really. So that was a source of tension.

It must have been interesting, too.

Yeah, yeah, it was! But for me to be able to play some of the stuff we wanted to play, we would have had to rehearse a hell of a lot more, and I just didnıt have the time or the energy. I was working full time, got married and starting a family...it's a young manıs game, really. The rock band is a young man's game.

Unless your one of these shameless old farts who don't mind dragging themselves on stage and go through the motions they went through years ago.

But their not doing this stuff. But they're getting money out of it, so they can do it full time. And they're professional musicians and all that.

I just want to say, about the positive sound of Undecisive God, and the spiritual connection, and there is...because it's abstract and beyond words, it's beyond words anyway, and it's the perfect area for that kind of thing. It's a perfect means of self-expression. I love the thing Sun Ra says, about when a musician plays something he's talking to the centre of the universe. That that's what God hears, that's a language of the gods. That really appeals to me. That's why you shouldnıt be doing anything really dodgy (laughs), trying to make some recycled pop song or something. It might not do well for you in the afterlife! That really inspires me; be honest, be true to yourself, because it might be the most important thing you ever do.

I love the idea of pop stars going to hell! And as we know, music originally was very spiritually based, not just in the west but all over the world.

And itıs still that way, like in a lot of Asian cultures. Like in India, classical music is all spiritually based. That's very natural for me, it's a very natural association. Even when I first started recording that early solo stuff, I probably didn't think that in my mind, but it's still the same kind of feeling and the same kind of aims for the things you want to do. And it appeals to you when you think "What's the point of doing this? Blah blah...". But I never feel that way when I'm making music; the point of it is self evident. I also just wanted to say, about what you said about heaven, "Everything that is not music is silence"; as John Cage says, "There's no such thing as silence". (Laughs).