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[MB] Talking about love in that way takes us neatly onto the title for this event, ‘Care’. The germ for this came from speaking to a composer I’m sure you know called Michael Pisaro...

 

[JW] He was my teacher!

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[MB] He spoke to me about the intersection of caring for sound and for people. The stereotypical composer model is to tell another body to do something, and I wondered how much you’ve struggled with that or wanted to uproot it? Where is care situated in what you do?

 

[JW] This idea of a composer who tells other people what to do is a relatively recent Western concept. Bach and Mozart were involved in performing their own music but it’s notable now that a composer performs - no-one ever says "what’s the deal with Prince? He performed his own songs!". I’m more likely to describe myself as a musician rather than a composer-performer which a lot of other people have described me as. I’m very interested in working with people and allowing people to be people rather than saying simply ‘this is a flute’. I do a huge amount of free improvisation and the way people relate to each other in that community is very different to how it happens in the conservatoire composers-and-their-performers model. To play devil’s advocate, you can’t get an orchestra to play a piece of music without a hierarchy especially when there’s only a three-hour rehearsal schedule, so it is necessary in some situations.

 

[MB] How did that care manifest in the creative process with Andreas Borregaard for 'SELF-CARE', the piece we are programming? 

 

[JW] Our paths crossed so many times and I was thinking about Andreas a lot while writing. I’m 5’3 and he’s this hugely tall Danish guy who, when he jumps, really jumps. He’s an accordionist, but he also has red hair and a beard and is very tall and slim and is slightly shy and a wonderfully warm person; all of this was important to me when writing. The other backdrop to it are the Trump elections and the time immediately after that. We were discussing politics and that feeling that everyone had back then when you felt like everything was being overturned, especially as musicians who cross borders and what that might mean for us. At that time, I was living in London filling in forms which asked for all the places I’d ever lived, and as a musician who travels 26 weeks of the year I couldn't even bear to think about where all of those details would be. Side-by-side, I was downloading and reading the US reports on possible collusion with Russia to try and understand it all. There are direct quotations in the piece from those forms I had, and there’s this big explanation in the piece where Andreas tries to explain what cryptocurrency and bitcoin is. I really see 'SELF-CARE' as a late 2016/early 2017 piece - trying to make sense of the world by assimilating all this information in so much detail because you can’t trust the news anymore.

 

[MB] It's funny... trying to process all these channels of information like a prism taking in light and splitting it into digestible colour, dealing with it all side-by-side in this superimposed, collage-y way - the way you describe that really reminds me of my mentality towards DJ sets. Elements in DJ sets come and go, there are moments when you are reminded of extra-musical things outside of the club, and then the DJ plays an acapella which everyone sings along to and bonds you all as a crowd. It’s all geared towards this idea of making us ‘feel something NOW!’. Can you relate to that idea of euphoria in your own way?

 

[JW] I have a friend which works for a company which does so much of the track analysis and music information retrieval for Spotify. He’s also an ex-Michael Pisaro student! Spotify are trying to figure out where the drop is in songs - that moment of euphoria - and the fastest way to figure it out is to look at where people fast-forward to. 

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[MB] It’s funny you say that as when I was at school, the bro-y dubstep was in its heyday and the amount of YouTube comments on those tracks that would read “LIKE A B0:55” to timestamp the drop always being at 55 seconds was unreal.

 

[JW] Exactly! People are like “get to the euphoric bit!”. There’s something beautiful and life-giving about that way we listen to music, even if it’s the crappiest dance banger ever. I do like having these moments of completely lush euphoria in my music. I always quote Bruce Sterling who says the texture of the time we live in is ‘dark euphoria’ because it’s extremely exciting and terrifying at the same time. At the end of ‘The Site of an Investigation’ there’s a crappy house track about going to Mars and when I’m performing it, I’m so, so happy! It’s really important to remember the importance of euphoria in all music. I felt that euphoria when I went to see a Bernard Parmegiani piece where this huge electronic sound is surrounding you from everywhere and you feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. There’s something very old - 200,000-years-of-human-evolution old - about what it means to hear vibrations at the same time and move at the same time, or how our mirror neutrons fire out in the same way. Euphoria is never not going to be important.