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How did the commission for your performance at St Giles Cathedral come about?
Well, it was conceived in an office and then the seed gestated in a bar. A common enough development process, no? One of the event organisers was passing through the Edinburgh offices of Regular Music when the production manager there, a good, dear friend, happened to be playing one of the Fovea Hex records - you will recall that both Colin and I have a history of working together on Clodagh Simond’s Fovea Hex, yes? The organiser thought Fovea Hex would be perfect for an event idea he was hatching as part of Edinburgh’s New Year celebrations, so phone numbers were passed around and I went to meet him for a beer to talk things through.
His initial vision evolved towards the notion that a body of people should be able to flow through a space with the music forming not so much a focal point but a participating element in some kind of yet-to-be-defined experience. That set up, ultimately, was not really going to work for Fovea Hex, but for Colin and I – who are quite used to people walking out on our shows – it was easily something we could work with!
Of course, it didn’t work out that way in the end. The cathedral was packed so tight that it took us 10 minutes just to get to the performance space.
Did any sketches of the work exist prior to the commission?
I don’t know that there were any prior concepts that were ratified in any way by the performance at St Giles. But I did feel curiously satisfied that such a marginal piece of work could be thrust with such success, such impact, right into the heart of a popular civic festival in a notable national landmark. It does make one really chew on those old questions of what constitutes marginal and who or what is responsible for keeping it on the margins.
But Fragile Pitches was always intended as an open concept which could be taken to a host of venues, right?
It was always the hope that we would be able to perform Fragile Pitches, in some form, in other spaces, for other occasions. Some civic. Some more familiar concert spaces. Some completely unexpected, off the wall locations. We were, and continue to be, open to the possibilities. Sadly, despite several notes of interest, we’ve never yet managed to see how this work would evolve through subsequent performances. Budgets keep falling apart, and so it goes.
You’ve already spoken out in favour of “trusting the nameless thing” in music. Was part of the allure of Fragile Pitches that it presented a great opportunity to take music back to its roots in pure sound and to a tactile, physical sensation?
I suppose you could say there is a connection there in as much as we provided no advance written information, no programme, no guide as to what to expect. We put the thing forward to let people make of it what they would. This was not strictly a strategy, as such. We certainly never spoke about it in such terms. Initially, I have to confess that it was the thrill of being a kid let loose in a sweetie shop. Someone was handing us the opportunity to play our music, generously amplified, in a cathedral space that had been an imposing physical presence throughout much of my life. I was, after all, born in Edinburgh.
I think that in the past I would enter these lofty vaulted cathedral spaces and wonder what it would be like to fill, I mean really fill the space with sound. Well, now I know what it is like, so can you imagine how it tears me up now to go into these spaces? The potential is realised and I want more of it.
What were considerations for you and Colin during the preparational stages of the piece?
I think we always appreciated that there were so many unknowns with the project that we had no choice but to allow ourselves to be as open as possible to adaptation. We had no idea what the cathedral would feel like at night, in December. Nor did we know how many people would be there. We had limited experience of the acoustics of this kind of interior. We had both performed in churches before, but something on this scale was quite different. And we had very little say in choosing the PA so had no idea of what we would be faced with on the night.
There was the slight advantage of my having played some of the material in a solo set at a church a couple of months previously. But that was a much smaller space – a collegiate church. It did, however, give an early indication of how such spaces really soak up the attack of sounds, which, if anything, prove more of a challenge than dealing with the immense reverb tails.
Colin and I both have libraries of hard drives stuffed with various sounds and sketches and so the preparation, if you could call it that, was comprised of my visiting him in London where we sat with lots of cups of coffee and went through our archives playing out these sketches and looking for elements that worked together. Then much of the rest was done in isolation. We knew – though seldom vocalised - the themes we wanted to approach, and we knew each others work processes and tools well enough to do much of this on trust. We only came together to rehearse the piece formally, in a hotel conference room, the day before the show. So we really ended up with a mixed palette of tools at our disposal to afford a good degree of flexibility.
In how far were you tailoring your sound materials and arrangements to the occasion?
There was nothing specific to the occasion, I suppose, at least not in terms of acknowledging it was heralding in a new year, or anything like that. But certainly there was an acknowledgment of the space. It could hardly fail to make an impact. The individual sounds and overall shape of the piece was gauged around the anticipation of the mood imposed by the physicality of the building, and the likely sound quality arising from a vaulted stone walled space. We knew what would soar, what would ascend, what would swell, and what it would take to cut through those clouds and waves of soft full sounds with maximum impact.
I had been attracted previously by the idea that the interior form of a church was designed to give all sound a sense of ascension, and that the projection and reverberation of the human voice, and more recently, the organ, could be optimised in this particular space. The space was formed around the voice. Western musical scales evolved partly on account of the strength of harmonics afforded in church settings. The accepted form of music, the architecture, if you like, was informed by the space. So that iterative history between space, musical theory and expression was at the back of my mind. We never spoke about it, however, and I couldn’t tell you if this was something Colin thought about.
There are not just “fragile pitches” on the album, but also very “subtle changes”. What’s your general perspective on the relation between time, change, development and composition?
I am not sure that I can answer that effectively. To have a perspective on something would suggest that I had come to some level of mastery with the concept, elements and effects. I have come to no such degree of mastery. My approach is informed by an instinctive narrative strategy that basically allows for a temporal line. The line must always be taut and the method for maintaining tension differs according to where you are on that temporal line. There are also devices for allowing the narrative to sink deeper into the reader, moving the material from the immediate short term memory to something more deeply ingrained. This is not something that arose too explicitly in Fragile Pitches but can be found frequently in my Human Greed work. Elements will be introduced early in the work and then may surface in various guises as the recording progresses. The effect, if successful, is to raise a curious sense of nostalgia and loss in a listener who may only be listening to the recording for the first time. But this is not mastery. This is not perspective. It is instinctive progress, and often has to be reworked over and over again whilst waiting for the magic to hit.
On Fragile Pitches, you seem to be searching for an extremely nuanced combination of subtle harmonies inside a vast space, of unpitched atmospherics and more concretely “musical” material. From your experience, is creating a balance between these poles that creates the strongest impact?
Well, yes, the combination of what we might call formal music with more abstract material is of ever increasing importance to me. Not really sure I can speak for Colin too much on this one and its difficult to ask him as he’s currently doing a piece of work in the middle of the Australian outback. But I think in general that it is safe to say that over many years of engagement with this sort of sound making your ears do become trained much more to the details, or to the full breadth of individual elements of a sound, and it is the details, the transients, the harmonic oddities that often provide the hook – even in the most seemingly brutal of signals. And one does, over time, treat the changes and progressions with an increased attention to detail and nuance. Again, personally speaking, my involvement with Clodagh Simonds (Fovea Hex) has triggered a great deal of new considerations for me in the alignment of ambient beds, abstract events and formal musical or acoustic instrumentation.
How much did noises by the audience, amplified through the cathedral’s resonance, come to enhance or disturb the actual performance?
I remember the concert very fondly indeed. I remember the performance in the context of the role it played in a beautiful evening – which sets it forever apart, as is right – from the recording of the performance. There were a lot of fire sculptures in the street, and it was very cold. In the end a lot of our review space was stolen by a minor incident with the wind whipping up too many flames from one of the sculptures.
I was never consciously aware of the sound of the audience, which is remarkable given the space and the number of people. But I was aware of their presence and I do recall gazing out into the darkness and seeing flashes and pinpoint red and green lights as people took pictures and video clips and so forth. It is a curious thing but I find myself much more relaxed and focused when performing to large crowds than when performing in small or half empty venues. Sadly, of course, for the likes of me the latter is most often the norm.
St Giles is an imposing building, resonating with a history of 800 years. In how far, did you feel, were you both playing with and against the cathedral?
We line checked in the afternoon and that gave us an insight as to what to expect with regards to reverb trails and bass response, and so forth. But of course all the rules were changed again when the crowd appeared in such numbers. It became akin to surfing I suppose, feeling the shape and form of the wave and adjusting our balance accordingly. We knew the sounds we were launching up into those gloomy heights, and we knew they would be bouncing back down to us at some point, and whatever came back to us from the PA, from the monitors and from the huge reverberations within the space commanded what new sounds we pushed out
There was certainly no impression of being oppressed in any sense by the surroundings. The overriding sense as I remember it was one of excitement. There was also the fact that the space was populated by these most curious light installations by Carabosse. These were the vests lit from within that feature on the CD cover art, and there were hundreds of them suspended in the air like softly glowing ghosts. I think that was really helpful in diminishing the potential for the cathedral itself to dominate and undermine our own contribution. You know, on reflection, it is more clear to see that these beautiful, intricate, grand scale places, these old, old cathedrals command feelings of awe, and reduce you to a fearful whisper, and so forth, but in secular contexts they are somewhat inert. Events like Fragile Pitches can, I think, be really beneficial in stimulating imaginative response and lending new vigour to one’s appreciation of these places.
What did it feel like, for example, of hearing pre-prepared materials like “Lymphoy” in the cathedral rather than your stereo at home?
That was just lovely. I have made up pre tapes before for shows in order to create a mood in the space and, hopefully, prepare the listener in an appropriate manner – but never, that I can recall, had that comprised of specifically recorded material. When Colin and I arrived at the cathedral to begin the performance, there was not only the shock of seeing the size of the audience, but the air was already alive with the slow waves of Lymphoy pouring over us all. In a way, it was like the performance was already in motion and all we were doing was stepping up to the plate to take over the controls.
There was, I suppose, a feeling of steering something on a scale much larger than either of us were used to but there was neither the time nor space to develop that power in any way within the context of a single performance. It is likely that, should there be further events, we would seek to build on that sense and give it some formal direction. I suppose we set out with the St Giles performance to give people a fresh perspective on how to appreciate and wonder afresh at these incredible interior spaces. Future shows may seek to offer something, I don’t know, a little more transformative. Dare I say, transcendent? Ah, possibly not.
I thought it interesting that you placed such importance on the right volume for the performance, as I was just discussing the very same topic with composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. He said: “Watching the smoke traverse into objects and the atmosphere is like poetic importance of volume to me. It is such a powerful thing and used unwisely in a lot of our daily listening and appreciation”. What’s your own take on the issue?
For a long time volume was, for me, simply another tool in the box. It is also perhaps true to say that for me sustained and gratuitous volume was also a mark of insecurity, a certain signal towards a lacking in confidence. I have enough experience now to stand by moments of near silence and still feel pretty confident and clear that the narrative line I spoke of earlier is still taut – perhaps even more so. Volume had its place when the intention was to cause pain, or bludgeon, or otherwise rattle and upset an audience. And if that’s what I feel I need to try and accomplish then so be it, I will push the faders up to 11 again. But it really has run its course. I still find it bewildering when one turns up at a noise gig and the band are handing out earbuds. It’s like giving out pants at a nudist colony, or combs at a bald man convention.
When you’re listening to the CD today, how do you feel the performance has translated to the album?
We are both very, very proud of the recording though it doesn’t principally exist, for me at least, as a document of the live event. The live event, as I already mentioned, is tied up entirely into a broader experience situated entirely in that evening, that slice of time. The recording exists – and exists very well - in its own right. I think it is particularly successful at capturing the scale of the space, actually – almost like the thing is some grand scale impulse response. It really is remarkable how well it acquaints the listener with the location.
But the recording is not the event and is not, to me at least, overly suggestive of the event that took place on that cold night in Edinburgh last December. That is the way it should be, of course. It is a good quality recording of a piece of good work that stands up very well in its own right. Curiously, given my response to the last question, the recording benefits from being played at generous volume. Of course the difference between a comfortable volume at home and a comfortable volume in a performance context is very different, but it does seem to benefit from being allowed to comprehensively fill the home, as it were.
There’s been a movement of original practise in classical music, placing great value on the fact that music is performed at the kind of spaces for which it was written. Regarding the undeniable success of Fragile Pitches, do we perhaps need an original practise movement in the realms of drone music as well?
Not sure that I want to be seen to be aligned to any kind of movement, to be honest – and I don’t see what we do as being strictly drone music. I think there is too much development, the evolution of themes is quicker. I’ll be opaque and just say its more west than east!
I still find it disappointing that despite the success of Fragile Pitches and the ripples it continues to cast almost a year down the line – not one of the invitations suggested to us in the past nine months has been able to secure the reasonably humble resource or the relevant signatures it would take to make it happen. Some church elders take exception to the idea for reasons of their own. Festivals run out of money well before they’ve even begun, civic leaders and council agents get cold feet somewhere up the chain of command, so on and so forth. We were very close to doing the show in a small chapel in Italy, and in what appeared to be a 19th century dance hall in Montreal and, believe it or not, in an abandoned nuclear bunker. Well, so far they’ve all fallen over or fallen through. But who knows what’s waiting round the corner. Let’s see. Let’s just see.
By Tobias Fischer
Michael Begg/ Human Greed Discography:
Consolation (Omnempathy) 2001
Pilgrim: New World Homestead (Omnempathy) 2006
Black Hill: Midnight At The Blighted Star (Lumberton Trading Company) 2008
Fragile Pitches/ w. Colin Potter (Omnempathy) 2010
Homepage:
Michael Begg
ICR Recordings
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