Mareotis Interview
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: I started playing guitar when I was about twelve and it has been my main instrument ever since. After high school I studied music for two years with a focus on jazz, which gave me a grounding in music theory, composition and improvisation. Improvisation has always held my deepest interest in music. A friend recently described improvisational music as hearing a group of people think together in sound through time, and this not only resonates with me but continues to fascinate me.
I played in bands throughout high school and into my twenties, and then moved to Montréal to study philosophy and history and stopped playing music for a while. While in Montréal I started focusing on writing novels and poetry, and was under the impression that you either had to be a writer or a musician and not both. For several years I put all of my energy into writing and music took a back seat. Then, years later, after moving to Toronto for grad school, I became inspired by what some friends on the west coast of Canada were doing, and picked up the guitar again. It started with a song that I wrote in response to a friend, almost like a letter to him in song form, and I enjoyed the process so much that I started to make music in my bedroom and began to focus more on the recording side of things. I made a bunch of music using only an acoustic guitar and a Zoom H2 handheld recorder, and then I started collecting microphones, software and instruments. It was a gradual process which mainly involved me realizing that being a writer and a musician were not mutually exclusive, and that one can actually help the other. Years of trying to write poetry has (hopefully) improved my ability to write lyrics, and the crafting process of recording--especially the mixing stage--is akin to the editing process of a novel, so I've been doing both for years now. I also study popular music and culture as a grad student, so I am consistently writing about music, which is a combination of two things that I love doing.
Q: You release albums that have completely different foundations from ambient to psychedelic rock. How do you approach such different genres? And do you have any preferences?
A: I don't have any preferences because I find myself interested and inspired by all kinds of music. I do tend to categorize music into functional and non-functional, which is to say that functional music is music that serves a particular purpose, such as acid house (because obviously this is for dancing). Non-functional music would include ambient music, because it does not necessarily serve a particular function, but can be used as a form of what Erik Satie called furniture music; sounds meant to blend into the natural sonic environment.
The psychedelic rock songs started out as song sketches, mostly a few chord sequences and a vague melody. These sketches were gradually stitched together and shifted and changed as sounds and arrangements came and went. Many of the lyrics come out of a process of recording improvised nonsense syllables, and then sifting through those sounds and fitting words to them. Most of my songs go through three or four layers of scratch vocals before I end up recording the final one (which I am rarely if ever totally happy with, but such is the nature of one's own singing voice I think). As for the other sounds, I usually take quite a bit of time to layer on oodles of guitar ideas, synth lines, bass parts, drum loops, percussion ideas, hand claps, egg shakers and other found sounds, and then begin a process of paring them down. Sometimes when I am sifting through these I will find a single snake-y guitar line, or a little electric piano chord-y bit, and like it on its own so much that I will copy it into a new project and it will become the basis for a whole new song. Some of the songs I am proudest of came about in this kind of accidental way, and it tends to be a good sign if things come together at the early stage rather quickly. Ideas will come rapid fire and what began as a thin little slide guitar part hard panned to fit into one song becomes the introduction to another song that is built around that one tiny idea.
The ambient pieces are made in a similar way, although they begin less as song sketches and more as particular moods I am trying to capture with particular keyboard sounds or chord sequences. I also use a systems approach that I talk about in reference to the next question, which is a way of creating music that improvises with itself. Overall, though, my approach to anything I make is to come at it with a sense of curiosity, playfulness and exploration. Most of the stuff I make that excites me comes from a sense of discovery, whether it is a strange guitar sound, a boomy fuzzy drum kit sound, or a strange warbly synth tone. I am always more interested in the process than the finished product, and a process-based approach is a common thread for all of the music I make. Music is a unique art form in that it can provide a sounding-out or unfolding in time of an idea or a series of ideas, as if it were a bulletin board that you stick notes, drawings and other scraps to.
Q: When it comes to soundscapes and ambient music can you talk about some of the tools as well as methods you are using?
A: One of the methods I use comes from Brian Eno's generative approach. Eno was inspired by cybernetic systems theory, and complexity theory--particularly evoked for him by British mathematician John Conway's 'Game of Life'--to develop a series of simple musical systems that would generate music for him. Drawing on this approach, many of the ambient pieces in Soundscapes were made by creating a series of loops of incommensurate length and then letting them interact freely. “Manufactured Voices” for example is five loops that blend together at random, with a warm synth pad that I added to glue it all together. Others began as generative music and then I added overarching melodic guitar or keyboard lines to make the textures take on more of a song-like shape. I made little music videos for two of the pieces on Soundscapes using footage I shot while on a road trip across America, and another one using some online footage, and some of the songs changed shape in relation of the images I used. They are rather amateur videos, but if you check out my YouTube channel they are up there (the two Places songs and Manufactured Voices). Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCifO3rGSekEGpqy1ZA4dVKg
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: I started playing guitar when I was about twelve and it has been my main instrument ever since. After high school I studied music for two years with a focus on jazz, which gave me a grounding in music theory, composition and improvisation. Improvisation has always held my deepest interest in music. A friend recently described improvisational music as hearing a group of people think together in sound through time, and this not only resonates with me but continues to fascinate me.
I played in bands throughout high school and into my twenties, and then moved to Montréal to study philosophy and history and stopped playing music for a while. While in Montréal I started focusing on writing novels and poetry, and was under the impression that you either had to be a writer or a musician and not both. For several years I put all of my energy into writing and music took a back seat. Then, years later, after moving to Toronto for grad school, I became inspired by what some friends on the west coast of Canada were doing, and picked up the guitar again. It started with a song that I wrote in response to a friend, almost like a letter to him in song form, and I enjoyed the process so much that I started to make music in my bedroom and began to focus more on the recording side of things. I made a bunch of music using only an acoustic guitar and a Zoom H2 handheld recorder, and then I started collecting microphones, software and instruments. It was a gradual process which mainly involved me realizing that being a writer and a musician were not mutually exclusive, and that one can actually help the other. Years of trying to write poetry has (hopefully) improved my ability to write lyrics, and the crafting process of recording--especially the mixing stage--is akin to the editing process of a novel, so I've been doing both for years now. I also study popular music and culture as a grad student, so I am consistently writing about music, which is a combination of two things that I love doing.
Q: You release albums that have completely different foundations from ambient to psychedelic rock. How do you approach such different genres? And do you have any preferences?
A: I don't have any preferences because I find myself interested and inspired by all kinds of music. I do tend to categorize music into functional and non-functional, which is to say that functional music is music that serves a particular purpose, such as acid house (because obviously this is for dancing). Non-functional music would include ambient music, because it does not necessarily serve a particular function, but can be used as a form of what Erik Satie called furniture music; sounds meant to blend into the natural sonic environment.
The psychedelic rock songs started out as song sketches, mostly a few chord sequences and a vague melody. These sketches were gradually stitched together and shifted and changed as sounds and arrangements came and went. Many of the lyrics come out of a process of recording improvised nonsense syllables, and then sifting through those sounds and fitting words to them. Most of my songs go through three or four layers of scratch vocals before I end up recording the final one (which I am rarely if ever totally happy with, but such is the nature of one's own singing voice I think). As for the other sounds, I usually take quite a bit of time to layer on oodles of guitar ideas, synth lines, bass parts, drum loops, percussion ideas, hand claps, egg shakers and other found sounds, and then begin a process of paring them down. Sometimes when I am sifting through these I will find a single snake-y guitar line, or a little electric piano chord-y bit, and like it on its own so much that I will copy it into a new project and it will become the basis for a whole new song. Some of the songs I am proudest of came about in this kind of accidental way, and it tends to be a good sign if things come together at the early stage rather quickly. Ideas will come rapid fire and what began as a thin little slide guitar part hard panned to fit into one song becomes the introduction to another song that is built around that one tiny idea.
The ambient pieces are made in a similar way, although they begin less as song sketches and more as particular moods I am trying to capture with particular keyboard sounds or chord sequences. I also use a systems approach that I talk about in reference to the next question, which is a way of creating music that improvises with itself. Overall, though, my approach to anything I make is to come at it with a sense of curiosity, playfulness and exploration. Most of the stuff I make that excites me comes from a sense of discovery, whether it is a strange guitar sound, a boomy fuzzy drum kit sound, or a strange warbly synth tone. I am always more interested in the process than the finished product, and a process-based approach is a common thread for all of the music I make. Music is a unique art form in that it can provide a sounding-out or unfolding in time of an idea or a series of ideas, as if it were a bulletin board that you stick notes, drawings and other scraps to.
Q: When it comes to soundscapes and ambient music can you talk about some of the tools as well as methods you are using?
A: One of the methods I use comes from Brian Eno's generative approach. Eno was inspired by cybernetic systems theory, and complexity theory--particularly evoked for him by British mathematician John Conway's 'Game of Life'--to develop a series of simple musical systems that would generate music for him. Drawing on this approach, many of the ambient pieces in Soundscapes were made by creating a series of loops of incommensurate length and then letting them interact freely. “Manufactured Voices” for example is five loops that blend together at random, with a warm synth pad that I added to glue it all together. Others began as generative music and then I added overarching melodic guitar or keyboard lines to make the textures take on more of a song-like shape. I made little music videos for two of the pieces on Soundscapes using footage I shot while on a road trip across America, and another one using some online footage, and some of the songs changed shape in relation of the images I used. They are rather amateur videos, but if you check out my YouTube channel they are up there (the two Places songs and Manufactured Voices). Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCifO3rGSekEGpqy1ZA4dVKg
Q: You also mention that creative process for more rock based music is based off of improvisation. Can you talk a little more about that?
A: As I mentioned above, improvisational music has always held my interest the most, and I find myself continually gravitating towards the more open-ended aspects of any musical situation. My favorite parts of making music are those 'a-ha!' moments where you get an idea, or you try something and it works right away. I am also inspired by Jeff Tweedy's comment in the documentary about the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot where he points out that the songs are the creation of the band, so they are the bands to destroy, to pull apart, and to reshape in any way they see fit. I am continually interested in pulling apart the idea of what a song is, while at the same time being a big fan of a well written song. I guess it's about finding a balance between what Eno calls surrender and control, or between chaos and structure, such that the situations for surprise are being carefully arranged, but the outcome can never be known. In some ways it can get close to the Daoist concept of wu-wei, or effortless action, which is not non-action or in-action but rather a kind of reaction to a set of environmental stimuli. In other words, you try to get to a place where you don't need to force creativity in any way, so that you can be open to pleasant surprises and happy accidents.
For me, improvisation is about trying to both recognize and move beyond musical habits. All musicians develop a series of habits, and this includes songwriting. If I don't try to keep putting myself in strange situations, or keep deconstructing my songs as I am creating them, then I would probably end up writing a bunch of songs that sound like bad versions of Neil Young or Bob Dylan. When playing guitar, I also tend to return again and again to the same licks and phrases, which are usually trite and add little to the musical situation. So improvisation and creative approaches to the process of recording help me to reflect on my own musical habits, and (hopefully) to sometimes break them, so that I can even surprise myself.
Q: Do you perform any of these styles live? And how do you achieve this?
A: I haven't tried to perform any of these styles as of yet, but I do plan on getting a band together to perform in the spring. I'm not sure what form it will take, but I am sure that the band that forms won't play the songs as recorded, but rather take the songs (or even parts of songs) as springboards for group improvisation. In my head it sounds less like a rock band playing well rehearsed songs, and more like Miles Davis' Live/Evil band (his electric band of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that you can see tearing it up at the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970). The songs could be like jumping off points, and then we will see where the sounds take us. Because of this dream, I would ideally like to have a large group of people playing in the band, including two drummers, which is something I have been wanting to try for years now.
I also currently play guitar and sing in an improvisationally based rock band called Zuffalo, so I do perform live on a regular basis. If you'll excuse a little extra plug here, readers can check that band out at zuffalo.bandcamp.com or at zuffalo.ca. We just released our debut album in June, which is available on Bandcamp, through our website or on Spotify and Apply Music.
Q: What else do we need to know about your music?
A: I am in the final stages of a new record that is turning out as different as Admiral Nelson Mandala is from Soundscapes. Each one of my records begins as a general concept or a way to approach making music. Soundscapes was made by using ideas from people like Eno, by trying to create a sustained mood through a mixture of sounds, and also by trying to create places that either exist in real life (and were imagined by me through sound as a kind of tone poem, if that makes any sense), or purely in my imagination. Admiral Nelson Mandala started as an experiment to see if I could pay homage to many of my main influences--particularly Brian Jonestown Massacre and German psychedelic rock bands like Neu!, Can and Faust--but still make something that sounded like me. Whether either of these succeeded is not for me to say, but such were my approaches.
The new record, which is called Further Inversions, was made by limiting myself in certain ways. For starters, there is very little guitar on the record, which was the main rule. Second, many of the songs are built on vocal loops, and lots of the finished songs are going to be little more than a drum loop, bass, a little keys and heaps of voices. I wanted to focus on my singing this time around, and on having my vocals less washed out with reverb and phaser and chorus and more up front and dry in the mix. I want to put myself in a more vulnerable position regarding my voice, as part of a process of learning to accept who I am as a singer. That, and I wanted to mess around with auto tune, pitch correction and a bunch of vocoders. So there is that element as well, which makes the record sound a little bit like R&B. It should be done in October or November.
Besides that, I'd just like to add that I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about my music, and that I am a supporter of Divide and Conquer and other similar websites dedicated to giving independent musicians a space and a place to be heard.
A: As I mentioned above, improvisational music has always held my interest the most, and I find myself continually gravitating towards the more open-ended aspects of any musical situation. My favorite parts of making music are those 'a-ha!' moments where you get an idea, or you try something and it works right away. I am also inspired by Jeff Tweedy's comment in the documentary about the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot where he points out that the songs are the creation of the band, so they are the bands to destroy, to pull apart, and to reshape in any way they see fit. I am continually interested in pulling apart the idea of what a song is, while at the same time being a big fan of a well written song. I guess it's about finding a balance between what Eno calls surrender and control, or between chaos and structure, such that the situations for surprise are being carefully arranged, but the outcome can never be known. In some ways it can get close to the Daoist concept of wu-wei, or effortless action, which is not non-action or in-action but rather a kind of reaction to a set of environmental stimuli. In other words, you try to get to a place where you don't need to force creativity in any way, so that you can be open to pleasant surprises and happy accidents.
For me, improvisation is about trying to both recognize and move beyond musical habits. All musicians develop a series of habits, and this includes songwriting. If I don't try to keep putting myself in strange situations, or keep deconstructing my songs as I am creating them, then I would probably end up writing a bunch of songs that sound like bad versions of Neil Young or Bob Dylan. When playing guitar, I also tend to return again and again to the same licks and phrases, which are usually trite and add little to the musical situation. So improvisation and creative approaches to the process of recording help me to reflect on my own musical habits, and (hopefully) to sometimes break them, so that I can even surprise myself.
Q: Do you perform any of these styles live? And how do you achieve this?
A: I haven't tried to perform any of these styles as of yet, but I do plan on getting a band together to perform in the spring. I'm not sure what form it will take, but I am sure that the band that forms won't play the songs as recorded, but rather take the songs (or even parts of songs) as springboards for group improvisation. In my head it sounds less like a rock band playing well rehearsed songs, and more like Miles Davis' Live/Evil band (his electric band of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that you can see tearing it up at the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970). The songs could be like jumping off points, and then we will see where the sounds take us. Because of this dream, I would ideally like to have a large group of people playing in the band, including two drummers, which is something I have been wanting to try for years now.
I also currently play guitar and sing in an improvisationally based rock band called Zuffalo, so I do perform live on a regular basis. If you'll excuse a little extra plug here, readers can check that band out at zuffalo.bandcamp.com or at zuffalo.ca. We just released our debut album in June, which is available on Bandcamp, through our website or on Spotify and Apply Music.
Q: What else do we need to know about your music?
A: I am in the final stages of a new record that is turning out as different as Admiral Nelson Mandala is from Soundscapes. Each one of my records begins as a general concept or a way to approach making music. Soundscapes was made by using ideas from people like Eno, by trying to create a sustained mood through a mixture of sounds, and also by trying to create places that either exist in real life (and were imagined by me through sound as a kind of tone poem, if that makes any sense), or purely in my imagination. Admiral Nelson Mandala started as an experiment to see if I could pay homage to many of my main influences--particularly Brian Jonestown Massacre and German psychedelic rock bands like Neu!, Can and Faust--but still make something that sounded like me. Whether either of these succeeded is not for me to say, but such were my approaches.
The new record, which is called Further Inversions, was made by limiting myself in certain ways. For starters, there is very little guitar on the record, which was the main rule. Second, many of the songs are built on vocal loops, and lots of the finished songs are going to be little more than a drum loop, bass, a little keys and heaps of voices. I wanted to focus on my singing this time around, and on having my vocals less washed out with reverb and phaser and chorus and more up front and dry in the mix. I want to put myself in a more vulnerable position regarding my voice, as part of a process of learning to accept who I am as a singer. That, and I wanted to mess around with auto tune, pitch correction and a bunch of vocoders. So there is that element as well, which makes the record sound a little bit like R&B. It should be done in October or November.
Besides that, I'd just like to add that I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about my music, and that I am a supporter of Divide and Conquer and other similar websites dedicated to giving independent musicians a space and a place to be heard.