An Interview with James Young, March 2004

We spoke about the formative years. Early influences were exclusively classical.

“I had conventional weekly piano lessons, my teacher was quite strict but the discipline was probably a good thing as I was, and still am, prone to gloominess and procrastination. I started at the age of 7 and carried on until I was 14. It was a solid grounding. It meant that when a real love of the piano kicked in during my adolescence I was able to find my way round the keyboard, though I was only, in fact, concentrating on a small group of notes. 

It suddenly became all consuming, but having realised that I wasn’t going to be a concert virtuoso I was unsure in which musical direction to channel my energies. I’d done a few small compositions and written a piano suite. I remember sending something to the Royal College of Music in Manchester, a professor wrote back and complained that I'd written it in a mixture of pencil and biro. It should have been in ink. He didn't seem to connect with the music at all.

Initially my understanding and appreciation were mainly centred around classical music, stretching from Bach, Haydn and Mozart to Debussy then Stravinsky, Bartok and Shostakovitch. I listened to music of the Romantic period in my childhood but as I grew older I didn’t care for it so much. I wasn’t really so interested in what the composer was feeling and their obsession with virtuosity. Of course, there are exceptions to this, like Schubert, as I was to learn.”

Then something else began to take a hold, a rather different, edgier sound.

“One day, at the age of 12, I found myself on the edge of a wasteland in Oldham. The ground was a kind of stone lava, purplish black, bruised...this was clinker, a by-product of coal... the wind was blowing fresh off the moors and it was carrying the sound of a fairground. I got closer. The men were setting up the rides, an empty waltzer was snaking to the music of The Animals’ House Of The Rising Sun. As I walked further across this black shingle the big wheel was turning to Catch the Wind by Donovan. It was intoxicating. This was the first time I had heard music amplified, apart from a Dansette record player in my bedroom. Interestingly, because they were testing their sound system, there was the same solipsistic pleasure as if the music was being played just for me. 

I describe this scene because I think that is how we perceive pop music, as something associated with a specific place and emotion. It doesn’t matter so much where you first heard Bach’s Art of the Fugue, although on a carousel ride would be good. When we listen again to a pop song it’s often with a desire to recapture the emotion we felt on first hearing. We never do, of course. It’s at that point that we become addicted and it can be a delicious addiction with its mixture of sexual arousal and disappointment, the urge to dance and the urge to cry.” 

A significant musical moment?

“Certainly. Pop music is definitely a ‘hit’, like a narcotic, it coincided with the hormonal rush of adolescence. I began to develop a more personal way of playing the piano that is still evident to me today, mainly based around very simple repetitive patterns. This is not in any way related to the so-called ‘minimalism’ of art music but more the result of an adolescent psycho-sexual obsessiveness. 

My total energy became focused into my playing. I would seek pianos out. Manchester was and is a great musical city. If I visited someone’s house I'd want to know, to the point of rudeness, if there was a piano there and if there was, then the one thought would consume me ... how to get to it, even if it had become a decrepit unloved thing in a back room. In Oldham and Manchester people had pianos. It wasn’t so unusual... working class, petit bourgeois, posh...it was universal. It helped establish a certain cultural democracy amongst a community that is almost entirely absent today.”

Were these early compositions influenced by anybody in particular, or were they completely original?

“Absolutely out of my own head although, inevitably, I was soaking up the culture around me...the so-called ‘Pop revolution’. Although when ‘Rock’ music emerged from ‘Pop’ I began to lose interest in the genre and I don’t think it affected my playing so much. Someone like Jimi Hendrix, of course, was a very powerful figure, both musically and symbolically... he played great guitar, made great music and he also bridged the black /white gap in such a charming and imaginative way. Yet I always preferred his shorter pieces, when all the ideas were compressed into an intense space. The first two Hendrix albums were like that, but the more he got into the extended psychedelic stuff, the more ‘rock’ he became, the less I was with him. 

When I was a kid, maybe 14, Hendrix came to the Palace Theatre in Manchester. It was some strange variety bill, you know, with Engelbert Humperdinck.. I thought about going but at that time I would get anxiety attacks if I was in large crowds of people, and those Engelbert Humperdinck fans scared me!”

What of other musical genres?

“I liked Black American music from Howlin’ Wolf to James Brown, to Thelonious Monk. Coltrane’s quartet was phenomenal, it was McCoy Tyner I would listen out for. Coltrane, I felt, often went on too long whereas Tyner’s playing seemed to have a more hymn like quality that I was attracted to...it was very spiritual and very rooted at the same time. 

Music was my dominant creative resource at this time, but I was mostly a listener. Apart from Bach etc I listened mainly to Black music, everything from Marvin Gaye to Archie Shepp, Ska to Sun Ra. The one advantage to my school was that it was in Hulme, Manchester. Hulme and Moss Side at that time were bursting with fabulous music from the West Indies. I was extremely socially disconnected. I would wander the streets alone, listening to whatever came from open windows, garages etc. There was never any fear or intimidation. They were nice people.

I’d have to say it was still mainly classical music, though, that absorbed me in a more total way and the Rite of Spring was next to my record player throughout adolescence and the early adult years. It was the pre eminent record of my youth, it seemed to have everything, a unique sound-world, ideas, structure, excitement, cultural context, universality, everything that rock and roll pretends to have and almost always fails so miserably at. And despite the economic and cultural domination of rock music and the way it somehow flattens everything out, I would say that the Rite of Spring is still a great musical resource...along with Bach, Byrd, Blind Willie Johnson, Moondog and King Tubby...” 

Outside of music the rites of passage into adulthood were not always smooth.

“I was a very disturbed and disruptive child. I think some of it was down to the single parent structure...I badly needed a father. My mother was widowed when I was 4. Energy was not being channelled constructively, I was very demanding. I felt stifled by the traditional grammar school regime. They seemed obsessed with discipline to an almost fascistic level. Even the terrifying Jesuits have a powerful rationale behind their strictness and so if you choose to rebel, you have some of idea of what you are rebelling against. But the intense spasms and contractions in British society that were giving birth to a new Pop culture in the Sixties and Seventies made the Empire based authority of my grammar school in suburban Manchester look obsolete and ridiculous. I dropped out, or rather was dropped out, and took a job at a cotton mill back in Oldham. I spent a few years odd jobbing, often going through periods of paralysing melancholia.” 

Interest in making music had begun to wane.

“After school, for a long time, I rarely went near a piano. I was mainly listening and reading and living a very solitary life. At one period, at the age of 17, I found myself staying in a gypsy camp outside Nice in France. I think I was trying to find another sort of home, a new identity. I had manuscript paper in my bag but I never used it. 

At another period in my early twenties I moved back to Manchester. I was living in Prestwich, North Manchester, and I was probably in danger of falling off the radar when a friend suggested I took a look at what was going on at the Polytechnic in Oxford. At that time freedom reigned. You could do anything, photography, music, art, literature...the doors were open. If there were some people who were trading on the ‘Oxford’ bullshit, I never encountered it. Instead I found a teaching staff who were really interested in being the facilitators of other people’s ideas, insights and dreams. People from all backgrounds...single mothers, acid raddled public-school boys, political refugees, neurotic loners etc. 

The cliché is that the late Seventies were a time of great inertia to be redeemed only by Margaret Thatcher and Punk rock but the reality for me was a greater access to almost everything, personally and culturally. Thatcher and Punk merely became a way for capitalism and the state to entrench themselves deeper into the cultural and personal psyche.” 

Higher education was a rewarding experience in many ways.

“Later I was offered the opportunity to study towards a Master of Philosophy degree at Jesus College, Oxford. However this coincided with meeting Nico and I never got round to it. I kept postponing it for a couple of years, like a true dilettante, but after a while I had a blinding vision of truth...I was finally going to leave the library behind and make a more serious commitment to procrastination by climbing aboard the Good Ship Nico. Dusty leather bound volumes were to take on a whole new meaning in Berlin in 1984.”

"He’d arranged a small tour for Nico and she was appearing in Oxford. They both just turned up, out of the blue, on my doorstep. I was half aware of who Nico was but didn't know much about her. People say to me, 'But weren’t you blown away by suddenly having Nico on your doorstep?' You know, I think my reclusive periods equipped me, in some strange way, to accept with complete equanimity the appearance of such unusual phenomena as Nico. 

What I found more unnerving, and still do, was the bourgeois dinner party, where the British capacity for cruelty and snobbery in small talk manifests itself. This is not at all the same or as liberating as the outrageous gossip and obscene innuendo which can vivify a social milieu and were typical of the Nico tour bus, to me these are signs of people at ease with themselves, capable of self deprecation. When I met Nico, I knew instantly that she would not know or care about someone’s family background. She had a self-containment. She was the nun of bohemia.” 

The Velvet Underground were the world’s first ‘branded’ pop group. And there seems to me something insecure about that. I know they recorded some hugely influential and original stuff but they hitched their wagon to that ‘art’ thing, so they’ve also engendered some terrible shit out there both musically and critically. I realise this is not necessarily intentional but the Warhol ethos was and remains such a powerful tag... I know, I traded on it myself.” 

The powerful influence of the whole Factory scene went well beyond just music.

“They also must have known, at least partially, what they were doing. It’s Faustian. So, they must bear some responsibility for the fact that Prague, a historically resonant and dignified European capital, a place of wit and seriousness, has become a ghastly pond of Pilsner, a theme park Bohemia, full of Velvet Underground fans and snivelling gap-year students performing their interminable beat poetry. Those clever Factory boys must have known the cultural impact that such a public embrace, as occurred with Vaclav Havel, would have upon a vulnerable people emerging from political repression. [Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and became a key figure of the ‘Velvet Revolution’]. Havel himself was vulnerable after enduring so much. I don’t think public love affairs with presidents and rock stars are healthy for either party and certainly not for poor Franz Kafka in his consumptive garret. 

I mistrust the idea of ‘art rock’. It commodifies the honest and the instinctive by turning it into the ironic and the knowing. It aggrandises and makes ‘tasteful’ what should remain stupid and mindless. By doing so it makes the culture stupid.”

“Suddenly I was playing rock music. I remember walking onto a stage in Milan and feeling this rush of energy, towards Nico of course but also to that magic circle of the stage. Very powerful, very addictive. I can’t pretend to any sense of authenticity. I enjoyed the 20 minutes Nico sang alone. I didn't feel secure in what I was doing and I didn't really like the idea of a rock group pumping away behind her. 

[Photo: Thomas Anschuetz]

I was playing pre written parts, I had no instrumental or compositional contribution worth making at the time. I thought of myself more as a drifter who got a lucky ride somewhere and who helped out a bit with the daily chores, but instead of chopping wood I was playing somebody else's music for them. By consenting to perform in these rock clubs Nico was presenting herself as a form of cabaret. Why not? Anything better than working or becoming Mrs Nico...not that any of those choices were possible. Nico inhabited herself. Where did she really come from?”

Three years later after sporadic bursts of touring in all sorts of place on either side of the Atlantic John Cale was given the budget to record a new Nico album.

“When John Cale came onto the scene things became more musically interesting. He formed a bridge of some kind, musically Nico trusted him completely. The agenda was to make an album in little more than two weeks, maybe a few days of rehearsing, and then a further week or so for the recording. 

Getting Nico to write and rehearse was impossible. I recall rehearsals where she wasn't even present, we’d just be sitting around...which is when all the temptations to decadence present themselves. Other than Nico on Camera Obscura there were mainly just two musicians playing... me and Graham Dids the percussionist [previously in Ludus, a Manchester group], Cale played some keyboards and Ian Carr, the trumpeter, plays on a couple of things.” 

She disappeared to write more material, and came back with another song, which actually turned out to be the best thing on the whole album. König, really was one of the best things she ever did. It was in German and the words are beautiful and haunting without that predictability of rhyming patterns that, for me, sometimes sabotaged her English lyrics. However, with the lack of material we were stretching out the other songs, there's some great ideas there but to me it's like a demo, we needed at least another month to do it justice. 

Sometimes I think I'd love to get my hands on those tapes, they must be in the vaults at Beggars' Banquet, other times I think it’d be creepy going back to all that and hearing Nico’s voice in the room from twenty years ago. There is a great record somewhere inside Camera Obscura.”

Unfortunately Nico’s talent tended to be obscured by constant substance abuse.

“The drugs were a problem... for everyone...it meant a lot of wasted time. But also I think that too often Nico wanted to do things that seemed to me to be misguided, like playing too many concerts with unprepared musicians. I also tried to encourage her to write more material in German because I believed it to be a central focus of her sensibility, which, for various reasons, she stubbornly ignored. Hearing her sing in German made total sense musically, vocally, conceptually. But whenever I’d suggest an exclusively German record she'd say ‘nooo-bawdy wants to hear that’.”

Not really the language of rock 'n roll?

“Well, not dollar-friendly rock and roll. But Nico could have made it work, if she could have overcome what I think was a certain self consciousness about the German language. She was of that generation born before the war that carried with them a permanent sense of all the bad stuff that subsequently happened. I feel she had difficulty coming to terms with the negative historical past that, as a girl immediately post war, must have saturated her native language and roots.” 

The album came out to mixed reaction and much European touring to all sorts of unusual places followed. 

“Actually, I’ve been reminded there were some very positive noises in the music press at the time. I think I was the one with the mixed reactions. There was certainly enough attention on Nico to generate more touring. After John Cale’s production work some focus had been achieved, a template if you like, for the way it could go. As soon as we got on the road though it turned into this tourist thing again. Only this time I wasn’t interested in the touring. I wanted to find the music.”

Occasional touring with Nico certainly wasn’t going to pay the bills, so what else was happening?

March 1988 saw the first appearance of young Henry Olsen (guitar).

“Henry came into the Nico sphere at a late stage. I wish he'd been there from the start. He was really good on every level, intuitively, intellectually, as well as musically, he had a real feel for what was required on every occasion, though, interestingly, he says he had no idea what was happening or what he was doing. Maybe that should be a pre-condition for a lot of musical activity. 

We toured Japan and a few other places. Nico was off heroin and on a methadone prescription. I'm not convinced it did her much good. I think having to change to another drug, when her metabolism was so used to the years of heroin, caused problems. Physically she seemed much frailer on methadone. Prior to being dosed on the state approved juice she'd been as strong as an ox. My experience of Nico, certainly initially, was not the fragile creature you see weeping in Chelsea Girls. She was tough. But by the time we were doing the Berlin Planetarium concerts she was complaining of terrible headaches, she was wrapping her head in a turban as if tightening it would ease the pain. I told her she ought to see a doctor. Nothing doing. She had a fear of hospitals, which I guess came from being a junkie...they can figure out your chemical past.”

The final act (as it turned out) was memorable and spectacular. Lutz Ulbrich had been Nico’s companion from 1974-78 and had accompanied her on guitar at concerts during this period. In June 1988 he organised a music festival at the Berlin Planetarium.

“Lutz in tandem with the Berlin City Council had put together a festival, Fata Morgana. Different days other people were playing, like Terje Rypdal, and Lutz's own band, Ashra. There was a specially commissioned event for Nico and she was supposed to write some new material, but again rehearsal was problematic. Somewhere there's a TV video of rehearsals and maybe an interview with Nico. The concert was really important for Nico, for me too. 

She had wanted a much more intrinsic compositional contribution from me than was usual. So this was not a ‘backing group’ type of thing, but a real collaboration. We were both incredibly nervous and paralysed with stage fright. The music was a bit rough and ready, it was meant to be a concert premiere, not an album, but there were some pieces that sounded great. A lot of it was work in progress, melodies without words that demanded a bit of vocalese here and there. And I remember that Graham Dids was struggling with the drum sound...the Planetarium walls kept spinning the beat back to him.”

After the Berlin gigs Nico went off on holiday to Ibiza. 

“She was really back on track. We both agreed the material was good enough to be a springboard to a new record, something that we could work on and get to know before going into a studio. This was to be the direction when she returned. She was really fired up. It didn’t happen. I’m told she most likely had the brain haemorrhage and then fell off her bike, not the other way round. She was in this intense heat in Ibiza. It’s too painful to think about it, I feel sure it could have been prevented in some way. I know that if she had been in Manchester then Alan Wise would have insisted she saw a doctor...a real one. 

So what happened next?

“I'd had my own brief odyssey with hard drugs, cocaine. There’d been so much of it around since the early Eighties. That stuff is very corrosive to the soul. It was an unhappy period. I look back and think of it as a period of paranoia, inflated ego and wasted time. Though actually there were some piano things that later resurfaced on Joanna. I was still playing, mainly with Faction and also with Eric Random, Henry [Olsen], Toby Tomanov and a beautiful monster from America. Then Henry and Toby joined Primal Scream, sans monstre. Odd to think that Nico's rhythm gang eventually became Primal Scream's.” 

Times were hard and they got worse when the Berlin Planetarium tapes were unexpectedly released on an album entitled The Hanging Gardens. 

“It was an edited version of some of the Planetarium material unofficially handed to a 'producer', Joe Julian, by Ari [Nico’s son]. I had compositional credits and the tapes were sold without my permission. I felt it was the best thing I'd done with Nico and I didn't just want it thrown away. 

I remember when I first found out. I was at home with Graham Dids, the percussionist, he’d bought a copy of one of the music papers and there was a review in there. We couldn't believe it. We went straight to the record store and looked at what was on the album and half of it was the Planetarium concert and the rest some unrelated studio stuff from a few years before. The sleevenotes suggested the whole thing was Nico's last studio work. There was no mention of the musicians involved who had been such an intrinsic part of the music. We didn’t exist. 

I called up Alan Wise who, at the same time, had been in negotiation with another, serious, record company to release the last concert recording legitimately. I asked him if he knew anything about this ‘Hanging Gardens’ thing and he told me what Ari had done. This was a terrible blow, everything seemed to be caving in around me. I even ended up having to sell my instruments. A bad time.” 

‘Nico's Last Concert: Fata Morgana’ on a German label came out a few years later and is the only official release of the last concert in its entirety. It excludes the studio outtakes that appeared on Hanging Gardens.

“The way it turned out seemed to make sense. There were huge gaps in my memory and also there was the problem of chronology. Just relating events like a diary would have been tedious, not interesting to write or to read. The only way forward was to create a narrative, a kind of novelistic journey with ‘characters’. 

Looking back I’m uneasy about some things, there is thoughtlessness concerning some people, especially with Nico's son. I think I allowed my emotions to take over because I was so mad with him. He knew how much that music from the Last Concert meant to me, apart from it being his own mother's memory. I resented being treated with such contempt...you know, when somebody disses you publicly like that. In retrospect I should have left all that out and moved on instead of throwing mud. This was a flaw in the book and in me.”

An unlikely offshoot from 'Songs they never play..' occurred a couple of years later through Alan McGee, main man at Creation Records.

"He was a fan of the Nico book and suggested to Toby Tomanov that I do a soundtrack to the book. It was a bit of an odd thing...it was a solo album but I didn't have autonomy as the agenda was set by someone else. It consisted of songs and pieces stimulated by situations and characters. 

Like the book it was called Songs They Never Play On The Radio. McGee really liked the title track...I liked a version of Schubert's Der Liermann (The Organ Grinder) for counter-tenor and sampled Nico, neo nazis, race riots, harmonium... well, you had to be there. It was a hard album to make as originally I was going to do it with Toby but he disappeared and Henry was going to help out but he went to America to do stuff for Primal Scream. So I was left on my own in studio." 

Royalties from the book kept the wolf from the door for a while. After this relative success other publishers came calling.

“A commissioning editor at Random House, Oliver Johnson, was crazy about the Nico book. He wanted me to write another. He liked bad behaviour made articulate. I think he hoped another book would describe the same territory... but we move on. 

I'd always wanted to go to Russia, although I toured the Eastern Bloc with Nico I’d never actually made it to the Land of Rus. I was a child of the Cold War, my mother was a serious socialist. We would always go to see Russian artists and performers when they came to Manchester. She never forgot to remind me that without the great sacrifice of the Russian people I would have been wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. And how us Northern Europeans like a Hugo Boss jacket! 

What was the Moscow scene like?

“It was extraordinary. There was no ‘scene’, no one predominant scene. Everything was shattered, in splinters, like a broken mirror. The British Empire dissolved over a relatively protracted period, though we perceived it, at the time, as swift. In the era of Information Technology the Soviet Empire seemed to vanish overnight, actually at midnight December 31st 1991. I found myself both on the margins and at the epicentre of a social and political earthquake. I ended up staying longer than I’d anticipated. I hoped to write a quick book and vamoose. Instead I began working with a group called Species of Fishes. They made strange atmospheric pieces with old synthesisers. They used very modern beats and also, with these hot-wired old synths, they created some very beautiful melodies for a very unmelodic time.”

The nascent Moscow project needed a sponsor.

“I approached the BBC to do a piece about Moscow looking to integrate Species of Fishes with the sound of the city itself in some way, inside its intestines. The BBC project was for Radio 3’s Between the Ears, one of the few areas of radio where you can still get away with it. It was to be a 45 minute piece looking at the city at this very pivotal time. 

As a starting point I took the Metro and the idea of 6 people in a carriage. You know how it is when you're on the Tube, you're in a contained environment, underground physically and psychologically, there's this incredible delineation of space, no eye contact, no physical contact. These rhythms and patterns of thought seemed good sampling territory, so I interviewed people about what comes into their heads when they're in the Metro and then sampled the result.”

As the composition evolved the amount of sampled material became considerable.

“I spent weeks underground, recording everything, the place opening and closing, the cleaners, the ticket booth cashiers, the trains, the announcers. It was extraordinary, there was a whole world down there. The Metro is Stalin’s Versailles, a kitsch aesthetic of marble halls and chandeliers. As I began to put it all together my model became the Circle Line. In London the Circle Line is an oval shape, in Moscow the Metro looks like a spider with the Circle Line its body, the physiognomy and psychology of it was interesting. For instance, I made the discovery, unknown to most Muscovites, that for trains going clockwise the announcer is male, but anti clockwise it's a female voice. Curious. Who decided that was significant and why?”

The musical content unsurprisingly came from the margins.

“I got together in the studio with Species of Fishes who produced sounds and patterns. I took these away to incorporate with the samples from the Metro and create a collage I called Last Train to Taganskaya. The title came from Kopeikin, another Moscow musician and innovator. He’d built his own synthesiser, his first album was amazing, real bedroom electronica. I involved Graham [Dids] again, he did a lot of editing and mixing. I felt it was a good piece, it turned out well, a real joy to do.” 

The Russian connection had not gone un-noticed and a call came to put together a Russian special for BBC Radio 3’s experimental music weekly ‘Mixing It.’ This is music radio on the edge. Featuring mainly new material the wide range of styles includes left-field areas of modern classical, dance, rock and world music. A programme of genuinely interesting music cutting across all styles.

“The link was the producer Philip Tagney, he was responsible for Last Train to Taganskaya reaching the airwaves and was the regular producer of Mixing It. Mark Russell [Mixing It presenter] got in touch and asked if I could put something together on one of my Russian trips. I seemed to be bouncing between Moscow and the UK from about 1993 onwards writing, making music and broadcasting. I haven't been over too much recently although I'll be there shortly to produce a vocal ensemble, very powerful songs from the villages." 

Other sounds, not necessarily generated by electricity, had a profound effect.

“The most penetrating musical sound, though, in Moscow was the bell-ringing. Very concentrated rhythmically, an inward energy that also generates outward to a call to prayer. God’s techno. I would say this was a powerful influence on my playing and it put me back in touch with a lot of the feelings I had towards the piano when I was a teenager. 

“I loved the Psychic Alliance thing but I do sometimes have reservations about drums and I decided not to use them on Joanna. It occurred to me that leaving out the rhythm track might free up a lot more. I accept you're denying yourself a certain cultural access. We have become programmed to expect drums and when they're not there it can make you feel uneasy.”

Listen to your favourite rock/pop intros and experience the relief when the drums come crashing in. Nirvana’s ‘Feels Like Teen Spirit’ is a great example!

“Even without drums I still often work with a pulse, implied rather than played. For Joanna I worked sometimes with a click in my headphones because I still wanted that subliminal presence of a strict tempo. But also I worked without a beat to allow more chance possibilities. Some tracks, like ‘Joanna 1’ are constructed entirely without metronome, yet you might imagine this track to be very metronomic. But, no, half the pleasure in creating that piece was in becoming a kind of euphoric machine.” 

When an experimental rhythm track was applied the results were very interesting. 

“I was in Paris visiting with the group Grand Tourism and they put some rhythm things on Joanna and beautiful analogue sounds and suddenly there was a whole different aspect to it. Everything sat so perfectly, and I have to say it was very, very, groovy. It sounded great, and I suppose one would have to say, ‘commercial.’ They offered to remix the whole album for me...a nice idea ...but then I would have to go out into the world to find financial backing for such a project and I am a nervous recluse.”

Once the concept was established the ritual of assembling the constituent parts could begin. Henry Olsen's contribution is way beyond the technical comprehension of the average person.

I recorded lots of material at home onto minidisk, I probably used about 10% of it in the end. Assembling all the tiny samples was like making a musical quilt. I’d listen back and make notes, for example I might identify that at 2'13" there was an interesting motif which continued for two bars and so on. I wasn't recording finished compositions as such, and I didn’t and don’t perceive myself as a composer. These were little phrases, scraps of fabric, that I felt would sit well with each other. Later they would begin to evolve into compositions but, in a sense, that was something they conferred upon themselves.”

The music began to take on a life of its own. “Sometimes the pattern of notes that I'd originally intended would almost disappear because Henry would have to continually slice the sample to make it fit within the pulses. Strangely, despite this snipping away at the fabric the musical ideas would still retain their innate quality, their essence, that made them stand out in the first place. Having to submit to the strict metronomic rhythm was, paradoxically, very liberating,, you'd think it was the last place where chance would be a factor but that was not so.”

With recording and editing finally complete a distribution deal was required. Sometimes it’s a case of being in the right place at the right time. Rob Ayling runs Voiceprint, an enterprising label with a highly eclectic catalogue prepared to give artists outside the usual boundaries of commerciality a chance. 

Joanna can be ordered through James-Young.com

© Stephen Yarwood, 2004

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