[MB] In both of your music, there’s always this tactility to the live performance which is so engaging on a visual level. It’s always so makeshift and DIY, and all those qualities seem to condense, to nebulise, really strongly into a clear and cohesive aesthetic vision. How do you think you arrived at that? I guess the better question to ask is what were you like when you were studying as students, as how did you musically or personally develop into what you are now?

 

[VG] For me, I just got fed up… You know in concerts where you sit in a room, people turn off the lights and you have an electroacoustic piece. You get the sounds of wet rocks being rubbed together in someone’s hands, or the sound of water… these sorts of clichés. I just got fed up with how un-engaging that is. It tied in later on with this idea of in performance, and the live-ness of performance. We both gradually became interested in process as part of the performance.

 

[MC] We were running ACM long before we started thinking about physicality in performance. I guess then, as curators thinking about how to put a concert on as an engaging night, we were thinking about how can we visually make it interesting; how we can make something of performers getting onto the stage rather than the audience clapping as the performers bow and sit down, and what we can do with the full spectacle of an event. That gradually seeped into our music-making, as well. We were performing the music of Steen-Andersen and [Alexander] Schubert and that definitely influenced us. This ties into how I’ve steered clear of electronics in my music, partly because of the things that Vitalija has mentioned. I’ve found digital electronics problematic in a live setting, even if things are done live. When you have someone behind a laptop, I know that laptop can do anything; it could be making sound live or it could be totally prerecorded.

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[VG] For all we know, they could be playing Solitaire!

 

[MC] Even if a true physical sound is coming out the speakers, he’s controlling it with digital programming. Of course there’s a knob, and he’s turning it and sound is coming out, it’s just not quite the same as having an actual, analogue valve that is literally opening out the sound. It’s so much more direct. When I bought my first tape machine, everything suddenly fitted together so well with my PhD research which has been focused on cyclical and highly repetitive things; it’s an object about looping but it’s as real-world as a violin or a normal instrument. My first piece to really explore this was ’Tape Talk, Flutter and Warp’ which was a collaboration with the visual artist Sarah Hill. I wanted to try and write a piece where the sound and visuals are so intertwined that you can’t tell which is generating or affecting which…

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[VG] …or when both elements are dependent on each other.

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[MC] All of the sound was derived from the sound of the tape machine and the sound of the slide projector, and all that’s on the film is the workings of these machines in the moment.

 

[MB] I remember when I saw you both perform your collaborative piece ‘Mario Goes Frippertronics’ for reel-to-reel tape decks in Salford's MediaCity as part of New Music North West Festival 2016. In that piece, we’re watching you assemble, dis-assemble and re-assemble pieces of magnetic tape, so do you think process as a compositional device and as a physical entity are totally interlinked in both of your outputs?

 

[VG] Yes. For sure.

 

[MC] It’s definitely a focus for both of our music, but clearly, when it becomes such a thing, it will be interesting to do the opposite; something which has no physicality to it at all. These acousmatic gigs, those pieces that are totally disembodied experiences can be really interesting if they’re set in relief to something that is not. 

 

[MB] Why do you think that music as performance is so crucial to the current experimental music climate. Collectives like London’s Bastard Assignments are definitely pushing performance into new and exciting territories.

 

[MC] When CDs came out, people were saying that they were going to be the death of live music, so since then I think people have been asking ‘why go to a show when you can sit at home and listen to it?’. By emphasising that live presence, you’re celebrating how different it is from the recording, embracing it’s real-ness. Also, working with visual elements like lighting and slide projectors focuses on that live-ness even more.

 

[MB] To throw a curveball, how do you feel about the orchestra? I think that fits in nicely with this issue of live-ness and performance, as it has this monumental visual spectacle with the amount of musicians on-stage, but it’s never really addressed; it’s always about the sound. Following both of your experiences as part of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik Scheme, how do you feel about the orchestra? Did you find it hard?

 

[VG] I see where you’re coming from. I find it very traditional; people tell you what you can’t do with an orchestra more than they tell you what you can do. It’s riddled with limitations.

 

[MC] The conventions that orchestral members stick to are so hard to remove. It’s so hard to get orchestral members to help you with your piece if something in their part doesn’t work. There’s little sense of wanting to explore issues or wanting to help.

 

[VG] I mean, they did play crumpled paper…

 

[MC] They were definitely convinced by Vitalija’s piece. They didn’t do anything conventional at all; they were hissing, rubbing things together…

 

[VG] …putting blu tac on strings…

 

[MC] … and they heard it as they were playing and were responding to it. The problem with the orchestra is that it is the most historically valued thing in classical music, and the masses don’t want it to change. Additionally, an instrumentalist must have a particular attitude and mentality to play in an orchestra, one that is not often concerned with experimentation or pushing the boundaries because that is not essential to the survival of the orchestra. It’s got its place, but it’s hard to do anything properly different.

 

[VG] Someone should establish an orchestra with eBay instruments! I totally appreciate that the orchestral players’ instruments cost millions of pounds, but what inspires me about an orchestra is the amount of people, and the textures you can create, not the individual instruments themselves.

 

[MB] What do you think the fate of the orchestra is? What is your prediction for the future of the orchestra?

 

[VG] I think it’s going to stay. There are interesting noise orchestras, and the London Contemporary Orchestra that are doing interesting things, but it’s all still in the same conventional framework. I can’t see it changing in thirty years, but it will definitely evolve.

 

[MC] I don’t even know if it will. Where it is right now, it’s quite happy. The orchestra does a lot of educational work, it collaborates with pop and rock musicians, and that’s enough for it to survive financially.

 

[VG] I think alternatives will arise, alternative groups to orchestras. You have circuit-bending orchestras that focus on the amount of people. When it comes to the classical orchestra, I think it’s found its place. But, at the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with a Mahler Symphony. It’s still grand and powerful. It just doesn’t interest me at the moment.

 

[MC] It also has its own context. What’s brought us to the technologies and the instruments we’re using right now is our generation and how we’ve been brought up. We’ve had GameBoys and mobile phones and to write solely for instruments that were invented 200 years ago doesn’t wholly interest me.

 

[MB] Do you think our generation is influencing the way you work in any other ways?

 

[MC] I think one thing that hasn’t been mentioned is how we influence each other and collaborate. That’s the other weird thing about being composers, who have this decided path by peers and institutions alike that you are a person who writes things alone on paper or on your computer. No-one really collaborates. Two composers writing a piece - that doesn’t really happen. When I got the tape deck for my solo work, we made ‘Mario Goes Frippertronics’. When one of us is writing, the other one has always quietly been in the background.

 

[MB] Because obviously in the electronic music sphere, collaboration is a thing that happens so frequently. I guess that’s because the interface that you use to write is maybe more user-friendly to a non-musician than standard notation is. It’s also a totally cultural thing within the classical music world, as you say.

 

[MC] Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing. We just embraced it. We’re actually really different in how we work, our personalities are different as well. I think we compliment each other well.

 

[MB] So as Kinder Meccano, what do you both bring to the duo as separate artists?

 

[MC] The way Vitalija works is that she puts in so many hours and starts from the detail, whereas I’m much more about the big brush strokes. So when we start a new piece, we kind of work simultaneously from opposite ends and work inwards, trying to knit it all together into something coherent. It’s great to collaborate with Vitalija, to push me to create bigger and better things, and she introduces me to different ways of thinking about things.

 

[MB] I know Kinder Meccano hasn’t been going for long, but are there any plans for a release in the future?

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[VG] Probably by the end of 2017, we’ll have something ready to release, but I’m turning down solo gigs in order to push Kinder Meccano. After New York and Canada, we’re gonna give a year solely to Kinder Meccano to make some progress. We have plans of moving for a couple of months to Lithuania to this country house with all our equipment and to concentrate solely on the music.

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[MB] This is something I really wanted to ask, about the recording or documenting of your music. Because it is so visually engaging, just an audio recording doesn’t capture the whole thing. I imagine ‘We are for a while’ is a good project to talk about for this as you have the EP finished. Did you have to adjust the piece in any way when you flattened it from a 3D experience to just the audio?

 

[VG] Yeah, I had to re-tweak it a bit, making certain bits shorter which would otherwise be more focused on the visuals. We are getting it filmed in New York as part of our residency as well, so I will have some visual documentation as well. I had dreamed to release this like a DVD, but I didn’t.

 

[MC] The way I see it is it’s a teaser of something you need to go and see.

 

[VG] It’s gonna be an interesting thing to document Kinder Meccano.

 

[MC] I keep saying that we want to make hit pop songs, music for people to enjoy in the car.

 

[MB] That’s obviously a totally different mindset. Have you worked in that mindset already?

 

[MC] I think we’re gonna start this week! We’ve yet to write a full pop song, but I think it’s coming. We’re going to do the same set on the 15th, so if there’s some pop song we come up with, you’ll see it there.

 

[MB] To follow on from that, what can we expect from your Kinder Meccano set on the 15th March?

 

[MC] It’s hard to say at the moment, we don’t want to spoil anything! There are some pieces we want to write, or want to take to New York, but haven’t been able to. We were going to take a slide projector and write a set that was a duet for slide projector and hairdryer. It hasn’t turned out like that, but that may give you an idea as to what kind of thing we’re after. We’re still grappling with how fragile and unpredictable it is. We’re both quite awkward on stage because we’re not used to it, and when you know that any moment it could just fall apart, it has you thinking ‘why are we doing this?!’, but we just get such a buzz out of it.

 

[VG] It feels like we’re having a group of naughty kids on stage running about, and you can’t do anything about it!

 

[MC] It’s that tension that really makes the performance come alive. 

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