Craque

Written by Liz McLean Knight Sunday, 07 September 2003 06:26

On October 2, 2001, A SYNESTHEIA Performance at the MindField space on Kingsbury was supposed to happen with Craque, Peccaui, and Dumb American. Liz Revision chats with Matt Davis from Craque about the events of MindField, live performance, and fractal improvisation.

Liz Revision: So Wednesday at MindField was pretty strange...

Matt Davis: Yeah, these cops bust in hoping to bust a big rave and it turns out there was this guy on stage with a pile of rocks making abstract noises and the average age was about 30...

LR: Yeah, pretty funny ... but then while we were all congregated around the door wondering what was going to happen next, so a bunch of us picked up ashtrays and bottles started a little improv drum circle...

MD: ...so then Toula [the Synesthia coordinator] announces that the dance performance is going to happen anyway..

LR: ...and there's these cops standing around looking totally confused while people are drumming away on beer bottles and dancing...it was great it could still be pulled off despite the cops trying to shut everything down... So anyway, let's talk about what you were doing at MindField before the whole operation got shut down. You were sampling noises from rocks and I thought it fit in nicely with the installation--there was video of grass up on the walls and certain areas of the floor could trigger nature sounds...

MD: I had wanted to start up while that was still happening so that people playing with the floor and listening wouldn't *quite* know what sound was what. The reason I did that was to let the audience realize that the sounds around them are music. Obviously that technique doesn't work in every performance space but it was suited perfectly for that installation.

LR: So tell me about your process when you perform live.

MD: The way I operate is a very exploratory and change-inviting process. I don't *want* to have control over what the sound may be; I want to be enlightened by what it becomes. I've got a huge arsenal of objects and toys I use as sound sources: rocks, cap guns, legit percussion, noisemakers, conch shells, etc. It doesn't really matter to me what the objects are--only that they make a sound. It's my job as Craque to discover what those sounds are. So I've got open-air mics and contact mics to help me explore the sonic properties of these objects and of their relationship to each other. Rocks are a nice way to start because it's engaging for the audience. I never forget that I'm there to perform, to entertain. The performer also has a responsibility - to themselves, to the audience, to the music itself - to be aware of what's going on around them. In my improvisations I always like to take in the environment to which I'm listening and being aware.

LR: But there must be some structure you're operating on, something that fuels how you will progress?

MD: Well...ok...the structure of the improvisation is related to the way Time - an integral part of the Music - is, itself, being structured as we live through it.

LR: ...meaning?

MD: Well, meaning that I embrace improvisation and instantaneous music, but at the same time embrace mathematical structure and form. I love John Cage's ideas of "structure as time and time as structure." I like to think that a piece of music or a work of art is reified by its structure more than its content, though i know that this is never necessarily obvious to the listener.

LR: It's not obvious to *me*...

MD: Ok, well, say you would structure something like this: you create a measure out of 6 beats 4 beats 2 beats. Then you'd have 6 measures, 4 measures, 2 measures of that little measure, and then would be a section that you could have 6 sections, etc...

LR: Ooh, like a fractal!

MD: Yeah, Cage called it Macro-Microcosmic Structure. I really like that idea because it means that the music is constantly building on itself and recreating the way it sounds. Cage was all about Time itself defining structure - you get up, you eat breakfast, you go get the paper, you walk to get coffee - these are all structural elements of time. Music, he saw, can be the same way - time can be the defining element - and that's where my live improvisation work comes in. So there are no structural points at which we need to be one place or another, only Time being structured as we live it.

So then this other part of the process is letting the sounds be themselves and relinquishing a certain amount of control... Cage's whole attitude was that the composer was removed from the sound, so you really shouldn't even notice that the composer is existing at all. But in dance music its a different kind of atmosphere, you're there to get people to respond, you're looking for an specific emotional response. But I think that the kind of emotional response from this kind of music, call it IDM or whatever, is where people get more excited when they see that you're grooving on what's going on...even if its weird.

LR: So what do you think IDM is?

MD: I don't actually think it's a genre. I think that IDM is the same type of post-classification as something like Minimalism... like back in the 60s people like Phillip Glass were doing really experimental stuff and all of a sudden they're being grouped into this huge, widely diverse group called Minimalism. I think what is being called IDM is really just a catch-all label for people who are genuinely experimenting, or making music the way *they* want to, but whose work tends to have danceable beats as their structure.

LR: Well, it's also been called "headphone music"...

MD: ...right, or "couch music" or whatever, but I think that's because it's interesting on many levels. It's like creating a character when you're acting. The thing that makes a character more interesting when you're watching an actor is how dimensionally-rich a character is. Good music is the same way, its many different levels makes it interesting, whether or not one can be perceptive of those levels is one thing, but that's what makes it a work of art.

Craque has some new wax out called "Trolling For Olives" (Really don't know the reference. I asked, but I think the coffee was hitting Matt a little too hard at the time).

You can get it at www.craque.net/wax.html

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