interviews

Finally, here is the Evan Parker interview from the Ashgate book. I was really pleased he agreed to be involved as seeing him play for the first time was one of those moments where things change. He was doing a workshop in Huddersfield and it’s fair to say I was not expecting the torrent of circular…

It’s perhaps good timing that I saw Bryn yesterday in London at the Music and/as Process conference at Goldsmiths where he was the keynote speaker. He gave a great talk on wayfaring and music, followed by some wonderful playing by Mark Knoop of his extended piano piece Vessels. So it seems apt to upload the interview…

The interview with Manfred followed our first meeting in London during one of my regular trips down from Huddersfield while my wife was doing a postgrad at the RCM. Manfred was there for six months on a residency, and Tim and I met up with him in a bar in Whitechapel to discuss his work.…

There are a few more interviews still to add, and here’s the email discussion with electroacoustic composer Bernhard Günter. At the time of the interview Bernhard’s work was moving more toward improivisation, so the interview covered both this aspect of his work and the quiet electronic music for which he was perhaps better known at…

It was perhaps quite odd to interview Christopher, as he was both a colleague and my PhD supervisor. We’d talked informally about each other’s work, so I wanted to create a record of these exchanges as part of the interview project. Some ten years later Chrsitopher still manages to display an extraordinary range in his…

This is the interview I did with Phill in 2007. I rang him from Huddersfield using the biggest piece of conference call technology I’ve seen – completely preposterous corporate boardroom style. As with all the interviews, I wanted to know more about how Phill worked, and in his case in particular I was curious about…

I’ve uploaded the interview with Rhodri Davies as the next one in the series – over half of them are available now. Rhodri and I met in Huddersfield in the 1990s when he was doing his MA, and I was lucky enough to witness the Gibbon Trio with Hervie Syan and Dave Summers which I…

Here is the interview I did with Alvin Lucier in 2007 at Dartington. He was over for a short residency, with the students playing and installing some of his pieces. We managed to find a very quiet corner of the cafe to chat, before heading over to hear his I Remember, a wonderful piece for voices…

A couple of days ago I was watching Tim’s Time with People again. It’s an astonishing combination of mess (literally, given the detritus strewn across the stage) and organisation, revealing the character of the performers in a range of different tableaux. We performed Opus 1 last year at Kings Place, and the sense of personal openness that…

This week I’ve uploaded the interview with Jenny Walshe. It’s one of the earlier interviews in the series, dating from 2004, just after she completed her Barbie opera. We discussed the provenance of sounds in her work, especially the way contexts are stripped away by reframing them. Although this continuous search for sonic materials is…

This week I’ve added the interview I did with Antoine Beuger in early 2004. I’d met him a couple of years earlier for the first time in Witten and was beginning to familiarise myself with the Wandelweiser group’s work at that point. We’ve corresponded and met occasionally since, and Antoine remains a significant influence for…

The second interview from the Ashgate series is now available to read online. This one is with Philip Jeck and was one of the few telephone interviews I did. I tried to capture Philip’s manner of speaking in the transcription as it seemed to reveal something of his thought processes. For me, that’s an important…

There’s a short interview with me at the City University Music Department blog made in advance of the concert there this Tuesday. It gives a bit of background to some of the pieces we’ll be playing. The concert will include five pieces by me, with three first performances. Alongside the excellent Plus Minus Ensemble, I’ll…

I’ve just started an interview with Claudia Molitor. I’m particularly interested in her tactile scores as they relate to my interest in surfaces and scores as instruments, so I’m hoping to learn more about how she approaches this. There’s only a single question there so far, but it will fill out over the next few…

I’ve uploaded some old email interviews that were originally completed in 1999 to my new interview page. So far I’ve added the interviews with Liza Lim and Tom Johnson, and there may be a couple more in the next few weeks. I’m going to add some new interviews to these gradually over the next few months,…