Interview by Matthew Backhouse - in Craccum Issue 05, 2007

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M-It seems that you are very concerned about your status as a woman in the musical field, which is a male-dominated -even sexist- cultural space (as is the whole political and social system, for ex. the power structures of liberalism, which are bound to those of the patriarch ate). How do you view the situation of women in today's musical economy?

With respect to the staggering amount of music that Antony Milton has released since the mid-90’s, I feel a little ill-equipped to review this recent CD on Ben Spiers Transient label. The only other disc of Antony’s that I’ve heard is the petite, insidious, but quite enjoyable motorised noise outing Small Engine Funk Tantra.

http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3432/artsbooks/5515/crude_effective.html...

Outside the moveable but reassuring guidelines of genre and tradition – perhaps especially in the white-guy tradition that likes to think it’s always about boldly going beyond them – choice paralysis and worse confront the musician who takes seriously the possibility that anything goes. Self-conscious experimentation collapses easily into convention: clownish genre hybrids, or genre fare in thin disguise (self-important club music, conspicuously).

The idea of a sextet, y’know … a musical group with six members, isn’t anything too unusual, That is, until you venture into the world of new improvised, electro-acoustic, noisy, post-electronic (whatever) music. Here, the small unit is the dominant format – soloists, duos, maybe three-piece. Six is something special. Anyone familiar with the extensive discographies of these gents: Tim Coster, Richard Francis, Rosy Parlane, Mark Sadgrove, Clinton Watkins and Paul Winstanley will find anticipation of this mega-ensemble (convened by Richard last year) well-rewarded.

1. That there is a tradition in Western thought, stretching back at least to Pythagoras1, that the cosmos is structured according to the principles of musical harmony.

2. That as a corollary of the above, harmony in music is seen as both 'natural' 2 and (ethically) 'good'.3

3. This concept of celestial harmony has been commonly expressed by the metaphor of the 'music of the spheres'4, wherein the planets are associated with specific musical notes or melodic modes.5

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...?

duende / n. 1 an evil spirit. 2 inspiration. [Sp.]

'All that has dark sounds has duende.'

F.G. Lorca: 'Theory and Function of the Duende', in Selected Poems: Penguin Books; 1960,

p. 127

As the Spanish Instrument par excellence, the guitar comes pre-loaded with a burden of extra-musical cultural significance. When we play the guitar, we are always playing with a caravan of images which trail us like ghosts across a television screen. Jimi Hendrix; Robert Johnson; and a crowd of anonymous Spanish gypsies, swarming like penitents on the road to Santiago.