15 December 1993

DB: Well... one thing that I wanted to ask about is structured music, does it have a place... What I mean is, I really like a lot of tightly structured music, This Kind of Punishment would be an obvious example. Are they just sort of left-over wishes for some sort of order, or do they have a purpose? Can the structures be fucked with and reappropriated in use against the dominant conception...?

BR: Well, yes, there obviously is a tension there... I do listen to and appreciate some music that is structured by and does conform to these traditionally accepted rules... these conventions... I listen to quite a bit of it... By conventions I mean harmony, tonality, consonance, rhythm and all the rest of it... In a way it's like, not all metrical verse is bad, but for me all the greatest poetry is free, it's blank verse, it's not constrained... But at the same time you can work with those traditions and if you have a true spark of genius you can rise above them, you can make them more than just forms, you can invest them with some real emotion, with some real human content, and TKP is an obvious example of that being done, I can think of others but that's one that you've mentioned, and it's a good one.. but at the same time I see that there's a real tension between expressing something individual and real, and a form that has often become dead and constraining. So yeah... I don't think it's impossible to work within those constraints and achieve something valid, but the number of people who do so is tiny, and in a way that's an indication of music of lasting worth... that it can use those 'ideologically unsound' tools and structures and still, y'know, speak to me. Take for example the best of, say, folk music. There you're operating within a really tightly constrained form, where the amount of choice available to the performer is strictly limited in terms of the available notes, what will go with what, and the accepted modes and all the rest of it... but when it really works it's, you know, the best thing you've ever heard, because it's the epitome of a certain form of music, and it makes it sound fresh again. So yes... it's possible, and I think it's important not to be too utterly judgemental... but at the same time I know what I like, and that obviously affects the way that I judge other people's efforts and leads me to set some pretty high standards for what I will give the time of day to in terms of music, and I think that a lot of people would do themselves a service if they set their standards a little higher in terms of what they do, rather than just trying to repeat... which is what so much 'popular' music does... just repeat a very limited repertoire of musical 'moves' purely in the hope that through the machinations of international capitalism they'll dupe enough people to part with the readies to be, y'know, laughing all the way to the bank, drinking champagne for the rest of your life... that to my way of thinking is really setting your sights pretty low.

DB: You talk in your Free Noise manifesto [What is Free?]about the possibility of using amplified rock instrumentation and structure as a jumping-off point to 'harness noise more purely random and less limited by subjective considerations than that of any but the most determined of acoustic musicians'. Where does that leave the role of the musician? The musician is always going to be a subjective consideration in a lot of ways. So, what distinguishes music that we make from the sound of anything... the wind in the trees... the cars on the road... why do we spend so much time listening to it?

BR: I think the thing that distinguishes music per se is the intervention of the human subject, even if it is at the level of collecting sounds like cars on the road or wind in the trees, and bringing them together, juxtaposing them, as, say, in musique concrete. That is music because someone has taken the sounds and put them together, I'm thinkingabout Pierre Henri's... the thing he did with the door [Music for a Door and a Sigh]... it's entirely composed of recordings of a squeaking door and human breath. It's incredibly mind-expanding, it's from such limited sources, and they're not 'musical sounds', but by the technological intervention of the human subject they are made into music, into essentially 'an argument in noise'... an exposition of human feelings, human ideas, passions, and they therefore totally transcend the quotidean origins of the sound sources, and in the same way I think a 'musician' (for want of a better term) can use the random interaction of electrical appliances to make noise. And in what I do it's the interaction between myself and a musical instrument (though I don't always use one) and some primitive technological appliances that make noises, and that is music because I say it is. Because I'm presenting it in a context in which people will listen to it as if it were music, that's enough to make it music. If it's accepted on any level by the person who's making it and the person who's listening to it as music, then it is music. That's a definition of music that I would stand by. Most people would insist that to be music it has to follow these traditional patterns of harmony, scales, chords, harmonic consonances, you name it... and if it doesn't do that then it's not music. Now obviously I have a different definition, and I'm not alone in that, luckily, but it's a whole different way of looking at music. To me it's sound in which a human subject is choosing or arranging, or presenting, the noise in order to convey meaning of a human sort to another human subject.

DB: Isn't that in itself, in your words...aaah... 'the vain attempt to impose human subjectivity on the blind flood of facticity'? I mean, where do these thoughts and feelings of a human nature come from? Why do these sounds which have been arranged by another human being work for me in a way that...say noises on the street, while sometimes they might work for me in that way, more often do not. I get very suspicious of myself a lot of the time about what it is in me that is attracted to this organisation of sound, and whether it is something which might go against any ontological theories I might sometimes entertain with regard to the essential randomness of things.

BR: Oh... right... you think you shouldn't appreciate music?

DB: Not necessarily...

BR: It's somehow a waste of time...

DB: Well... perhaps it is...

BR: ... or ideologically suspect?

DB: Yeah... I'm suspicious of where the need for that communication or structure comes from... and how it could be socially created by people I don't like...

BR: Human beings are innately social, our consciousness is constructed in interaction not just with the world but with other human beings, communication is vital to the construction of the human subject. Music is one of the most prevalent forms of non-verbal communication, if you except dance and body-language in general, and sexual intercourse, then music is the pre-eminent form of non-verbal communication where we do attempt to say something to one another about being human, and to me that is why it is so interesting. It's more interesting to listen to the sounds that have been organised by another human being to be heard by me, probably because it's oblique, because it's not obvious, because I don't think that the results are pre-programmed in the way that they often are with traditional music.

DB: It can be such an incredible vehicle for communication, I'm not saying necessarily that it can be a complete waste of time, I mean I myself spend so much time involved in creating and listening to it... but I am just a little bit suspicious of it in terms of the tension between what you are saying about free music shedding light on perhaps the random nature of the universe, and yet by your own admission the best music is that which takes these structures and tries to do new things with them...

BR: The best structured music, not necessarily the best music.

DB: OK... what does concern me is how the needs we have for means of communication through things like music are created, and why we have them? Also the way that the ability and/or need for some people to find expression through any form of 'art', often understood as transcending some sort of decorative thing, does seem to be related in a lot of ways to some alienating forms of production, both social and economic. The artist often seems construed as being seclusive and finding it difficult to communicate generally, the whole sublimation/suffering artist thing. I was wondering how the need for some sort of communication and organisation sits with a seeming push within say your Free Noise Manifesto towards free music being a political necessity?

BR: Yeah... I think you have to admit that even free music is going to be conditioned by subjective considerations, by decisions made on the spur of the moment... I decide to put my finger here, rather than here, why, I don't know, but yes, it's a decision. You can minimise those choices by not actually touching the instrument, but you are still going to be twiddling knobs or moving the body of the guitar in relation to the amplifier speaker or doing something, sure. What I'm suggesting is not that all music ought to be completely and utterly devoid of intentionality, simply that it ought to eschew established formulae, that it ought to divest itself of these deadening forms, it ought to be the free play of human subjectivity, that it ought not to constrain itself by arbitrary rules.

DB: Is the kind of music you make determined by any philosophical considerations?

BR: I didn't start off from a philosophical premise that one should make this kind of music, nor did I start off from a certain sort of music and think 'What kind of philosophical premises will support this kind of din?' . But strangely enough, as my musical praxis progressed, it became apparent that the philosophical truths with which I was concerned actually have sort of intersected with the music, you know, like two straight lines converging on a point... they've come from a long way apart and eventually met...
...it seems to me that harmonically organised music tends to support a view of the cosmos as being rationally ordered, and views of the cosmos as rationally ordered tend to support the musical theory of harmony and regular intervals between the notes and all the rest of it... but at the same time harmonically ordered music tends to support 'Control' (to borrow a Burroughsian term), even to the innocuoous extent that simple pop muisc makes people feel good about 'things as they are', rather than making people criticise 'things as they are'. When I began to realise that, I began to think that maybe the conspiracy theorists are right...

DB: So, what is the connection between your interest in free music and seventeenth century alchemy and occult philosophies?

BR: Well, it's a small aspect of my interest in the history of science, it struck me as curious as I began to read about a lot of these thinkers, how this musical metaphor for the organisation of the cosmos was really quite widespread. It really goes back to the fact that what really interests me in the thought of that period is the real explosion of neo-Platonism, coming out from under the long dominance of the Church-backed Aristotelian philosophy in the Middle Ages, suddenly with the coming of the Renaissance Plato is back in favour, but not Plato as we know him today, it's a sort of 'neo-Platonically filtered Plato', because it took them a long time to sort out the real Plato from the imitation Plato. And along with the neo-Platonism comes this whole sort of Pythagorean concern with Harmony, Symmetry, Numbers, Music, Magic Numbers, Kaballah, you name it. And that was really a sort of serendipitous discovery on my part, that what seemed to me a really accidental path of research, that I came into accidentally, because I'd been interested in theorisations of the Copernican Revolution, and in the history of Gnosticism, because I was working in a theological library, and that was one of the interesting classes of books that they had, and then I had a book token in my pocket and was standing in the University Book Shop, and lo & behold I found the Selected Works of Robert Fludd, who was a name and nothing more to me, but I knew that he was connected with Renaissance alchemy, which was another area in which I was interested but knew very little about, having done some reading from Michael Morley's books. Then I discovered that alchemy, Platonism, Gnosticism, and heliocentric cosmology were all embroiled together in this really intense cultural melting pot in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods that gave birth to this totalitarian monster called Modern Science. Then it was like 'Son of Chronos', the young ate the parent, and the whole glittering baroque edifice of Renaissance Natural Philosophy just vanished. And within a generation of 1620 no one wanted to remember a thing about it because the Cartesian philosophy of mechanistic materialism took over, and led through Newton and on... but now, through this whole parade of modern science, we've got to the point where the physicists have become philosophers again, and have realised that in fact the universe, in ways that I can only barely comprehend, is structured according to random laws, and that chance is the big determining factor, even infinity is in doubt, we see all certainties go out the window, we're thrown into paradox, not that many people have tried to come to grips with that. They've finally come to their senses... and it's really interesting the kind of circular paths that knowledge follows. And so in a bizarre way I really feel an affinity for the nutcases of the renaissance, because I feel that they had a lot of things right... their holistic conception of the relationship between humanity and the world as a whole, the theory of the microcosm and the macrocosm, that we were a part of creation, as they conceived it, which is in a sense true, I think... I don't go along with Creation as a whole, but certainly their holism is something that's been totally lost by 'modern science', and only now are we beginning to get back a perspective that can see the reality of that. And now that science has given birth to the post-Heisenberg fractal philosophy we've finally kicked out the last vestiges of the 'theological' perspective on science. We've gone through the fake certainties of Positivism and we've emerged into , I think, a new game-plan... and in this new situation we can look at Paracelsus, we can look at Robert Fludd, we can look at Pico della Mirandola, and think 'My God, they're right about some things'... they're mad, but in an inverted way... if we stand them on their heads, maybe they've got something to say, and I'm interested in developing some sort of a dialogue between then and now. Because I'm interested in music as a practitioner, I can see a chink where I can get in and maybe bring together some disparate interests that I have, and that I've pursued so serendipitously for such a long time, thinking that eventually these paths are going to coincide,I don't know where, don't know when, but let's find out... and once again we are in Heidelberg, 1618, the Rosicrucian Manifestoes have just been published, and the world is our oyster. We could be seeing the establishment of Heaven on Earth by means of true science... maybe 1618 is now? Who knows? Heaven on Earth is always a beguiling prospect...