For our second series of interviews with musicians for Rollaroll, I spoke with New Zealand's Antony Milton, who recently performed a series of shows in Australia, including a show at Newcastle's This Is Not Art festival. Read the interview below:
For readers of Rollaroll who aren't aware of what you do, would you like to give a brief overview/description of your work?
I started out as a kid who was obsessed with tape recorders- recording weird noises. I particularly liked radio static (because it sounded like rivers and I was equally obsessed with wilderness and nature). Later on I got into writing (stories/poems), and when I was about 15 or 16 my Dad taught me to play the guitar. Inevitably enough this lead to me writing songs. But right from day one of learning my first guitar chord I was recording everything I did. It wasn't long before I was mixing weird noises with my songs and I spent much of my 20s (the 1990s) making hybrid song/noise albums that I released on my cassette label Wire Bridge (The 'Sirens' CD on Last Visible Dog is a collection of some of the best of this stuff). It was also during this period that I discovered that I wasn't the only person in the world who was doing this stuff. NZ labels like Metonymic and Xpressway became big influences. Around 2000 I had something of a 'post structuralist' crisis. I lost faith in 'the word'. Haha. This lead to me focussing far more on instrumental and drone and noise based works than previously. Basically I no longer felt comfortable employing words in my art.. It was also around this time that I started playing live on a regular basis. I had been very shy and insecure about putting myself 'out there' previous to this. It was strange really, one day I simply woke up and that insecurity was gone and it never came back. (Recently I've started writing the odd song again (albeit with as spare a use of words as possible..)). Anyway since 2000 I have been doing music semi-professionally. Touring, doing sound installations, making records and running my new label (PseudoArcana). I have several different on-going solo projects, as well as many collaborative ones. The common threads linking these projects- for me-are an interest in ecstatic states and musics; a reverence for 'place' (trying to draw out or represent the feeling of being in a specific environment); a fascination with textures (I like the rough rumble of tape); and the aspiration to play hands-on instruments in a sort of calligraphic gestural manner..
I saw you twice recently; once with Campbell Kneale for Birchville Cat Motel at This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle, and once at Serial Space in Sydney performing a live set of your solo material. Both were exceptional performances. How different do you find it to collaborate with another musician than it is to perform your own music?
Thanks! I think in Campbells interview for you he might have pointed out that the Newcastle show was actually meant to be billed as With Throats As Fine As Needles? That's our ongoing duo where in we basically set up a single one note drone and sing over the top. For records we traipse out to bunkers and caves etc with battery operated gear and make use of the natural reverberant acoustics of those spaces. When playing live we make our own caves and bunkers from electronics! In answer to your question I find playing with other people a lot more 'fun'. Playing layered electric music solo can sometimes be a bit like juggling - trying to keep all the balls in the air without the dynamic crashing to the floor.. In a duo it is at least twice as easy to keep the dynamic up where you want it. Playing solo is a lot more intense. That's not necessarily a bad thing of course. I get a great deal of satisfaction from the intimacy of solo performance. When playing with others the energy interchange is primarily with the person/people you are playing with. When playing solo it is necessarily between yourself and the audience.
On both occasions, but particularly at Serial Space, you seem to have quite an intricate set-up. Would you like to talk about what equipment and instruments you use during your performances?
My set up for doing sets like that live has evolved so gradually over the years that it still seems fairly rudimentary to me... But yes, there are a lot of gadgets employed. My father-in-law actually came along to one of the shows on the tour. Hes 79 and I'm not sure that he actually listens to ANY music for pleasure. Ha. I had something of an insight into how bewildering my set up must look to others when I was trying to explain to him what all the different bits did. The Serial Space show was mainly guitar and effects. Wah, reverbs etc. Having a hands on expressive instrument is really important for me when I play. I used vary-speed cassette walkmans to play tapes of field recordings. I layered rubbed and e-bowed guitar strings using a loop pedal. (This looping pedal also has 'beats' on it. Over the years I have had some disasters in shows when I would accidentally turn the beats on. Recently though I have decided to embrace them.) I had an sk1 sampling keyboard that I was using to drop in synth like pulses of sound, and for further drones. I had a contact mic'd caster wheel that I was running through a distortion pedal. This caster wheel is the new addition to the set up. I'm not sure that I've got it working right yet.. The idea is that I will spin it and it will make this huge grrrrggghhhrrrrrrrr sound- kind of like as a noise interjection. But despite it working really well at home it didn't really do its thing at any of the shows. So instead of using it for that I discovered that I can fit it in my mouth and sing through it. Haha. (I find that singing- or howling perhaps..- is actually one of the best ways of getting 'into the zone' when one plays.) Everything runs through a small cheap 12 channel mixer that also has cheesy built in effects that I can play about with.
And what about what equipment and instruments you use to record with? Is it different from what you use to perform live with or is it pretty similar?
Different projects have radically different set ups... Mostly when recording I play only one instrument at a time and build up layers through careful crafting. My live shows are far more chaotic than my records. They are truly improvised and tend to range across different feelings and modes of playing. As a result I actually release a lot of live things because that is like a recording project in its own right. In my recordings I'm kind of on two diverging paths at the current moment. On the one side I've been trying to make the loudest heaviest and most intense psychedelic guitar noise records that I can. Layers and layers of feedback and guitar riffs with pseudo-techno beats.. So its almost like 'pop' noise or something. That's really fun. On the other hand I've also been doing a series of records where I go camping somewhere for a week or so and try to make a record about the place where I am. For example I recently spent a week in a small village at Arthurs Pass in the mountains of the South Island where I made a banjo record. (Admittedly it only sounds like banjo some of the time..) Anyway these records tend to be a lot more nuanced and subtle and more aligned with say haiku than spectacular bombast.
How did you find the shows in Australia, were they enjoyable?
I think this last tour in Australia was maybe the best tour yet. It was really very fun. I found myself laughing a lot and I was happy with the shows and got to see some killer performances from other folk as well.
What do you have planned for the future?
Well.... Theres some big changes happening actually. My girlfriend and I are flying off to Sth America in March where we are planning on travelling together for one year. I'm taking some basic recording gear and have been talking about a few possible shows in Argentina but ostensibly 2009 is a year off music. Certainly off the label at any rate. So before then I am busy trying to finish off the various records I'm working on and packing up my NZ life. I'm already excited though about getting back into playing and touring in 2010. I also have ideas for some big installation projects that I would like to work on.
The following short clip is from a solo show of Antony's at Sydney's Serial Space. The night also featured Inappropriate Tough Guy Behaviour, Seaworthy, Brassskulls and Birchville Cat Motel:
I started out as a kid who was obsessed with tape recorders- recording weird noises. I particularly liked radio static (because it sounded like rivers and I was equally obsessed with wilderness and nature). Later on I got into writing (stories/poems), and when I was about 15 or 16 my Dad taught me to play the guitar. Inevitably enough this lead to me writing songs. But right from day one of learning my first guitar chord I was recording everything I did. It wasn't long before I was mixing weird noises with my songs and I spent much of my 20s (the 1990s) making hybrid song/noise albums that I released on my cassette label Wire Bridge (The 'Sirens' CD on Last Visible Dog is a collection of some of the best of this stuff). It was also during this period that I discovered that I wasn't the only person in the world who was doing this stuff. NZ labels like Metonymic and Xpressway became big influences. Around 2000 I had something of a 'post structuralist' crisis. I lost faith in 'the word'. Haha. This lead to me focussing far more on instrumental and drone and noise based works than previously. Basically I no longer felt comfortable employing words in my art.. It was also around this time that I started playing live on a regular basis. I had been very shy and insecure about putting myself 'out there' previous to this. It was strange really, one day I simply woke up and that insecurity was gone and it never came back. (Recently I've started writing the odd song again (albeit with as spare a use of words as possible..)). Anyway since 2000 I have been doing music semi-professionally. Touring, doing sound installations, making records and running my new label (PseudoArcana). I have several different on-going solo projects, as well as many collaborative ones. The common threads linking these projects- for me-are an interest in ecstatic states and musics; a reverence for 'place' (trying to draw out or represent the feeling of being in a specific environment); a fascination with textures (I like the rough rumble of tape); and the aspiration to play hands-on instruments in a sort of calligraphic gestural manner..
I saw you twice recently; once with Campbell Kneale for Birchville Cat Motel at This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle, and once at Serial Space in Sydney performing a live set of your solo material. Both were exceptional performances. How different do you find it to collaborate with another musician than it is to perform your own music?
Thanks! I think in Campbells interview for you he might have pointed out that the Newcastle show was actually meant to be billed as With Throats As Fine As Needles? That's our ongoing duo where in we basically set up a single one note drone and sing over the top. For records we traipse out to bunkers and caves etc with battery operated gear and make use of the natural reverberant acoustics of those spaces. When playing live we make our own caves and bunkers from electronics! In answer to your question I find playing with other people a lot more 'fun'. Playing layered electric music solo can sometimes be a bit like juggling - trying to keep all the balls in the air without the dynamic crashing to the floor.. In a duo it is at least twice as easy to keep the dynamic up where you want it. Playing solo is a lot more intense. That's not necessarily a bad thing of course. I get a great deal of satisfaction from the intimacy of solo performance. When playing with others the energy interchange is primarily with the person/people you are playing with. When playing solo it is necessarily between yourself and the audience.
On both occasions, but particularly at Serial Space, you seem to have quite an intricate set-up. Would you like to talk about what equipment and instruments you use during your performances?
My set up for doing sets like that live has evolved so gradually over the years that it still seems fairly rudimentary to me... But yes, there are a lot of gadgets employed. My father-in-law actually came along to one of the shows on the tour. Hes 79 and I'm not sure that he actually listens to ANY music for pleasure. Ha. I had something of an insight into how bewildering my set up must look to others when I was trying to explain to him what all the different bits did. The Serial Space show was mainly guitar and effects. Wah, reverbs etc. Having a hands on expressive instrument is really important for me when I play. I used vary-speed cassette walkmans to play tapes of field recordings. I layered rubbed and e-bowed guitar strings using a loop pedal. (This looping pedal also has 'beats' on it. Over the years I have had some disasters in shows when I would accidentally turn the beats on. Recently though I have decided to embrace them.) I had an sk1 sampling keyboard that I was using to drop in synth like pulses of sound, and for further drones. I had a contact mic'd caster wheel that I was running through a distortion pedal. This caster wheel is the new addition to the set up. I'm not sure that I've got it working right yet.. The idea is that I will spin it and it will make this huge grrrrggghhhrrrrrrrr sound- kind of like as a noise interjection. But despite it working really well at home it didn't really do its thing at any of the shows. So instead of using it for that I discovered that I can fit it in my mouth and sing through it. Haha. (I find that singing- or howling perhaps..- is actually one of the best ways of getting 'into the zone' when one plays.) Everything runs through a small cheap 12 channel mixer that also has cheesy built in effects that I can play about with.
And what about what equipment and instruments you use to record with? Is it different from what you use to perform live with or is it pretty similar?
Different projects have radically different set ups... Mostly when recording I play only one instrument at a time and build up layers through careful crafting. My live shows are far more chaotic than my records. They are truly improvised and tend to range across different feelings and modes of playing. As a result I actually release a lot of live things because that is like a recording project in its own right. In my recordings I'm kind of on two diverging paths at the current moment. On the one side I've been trying to make the loudest heaviest and most intense psychedelic guitar noise records that I can. Layers and layers of feedback and guitar riffs with pseudo-techno beats.. So its almost like 'pop' noise or something. That's really fun. On the other hand I've also been doing a series of records where I go camping somewhere for a week or so and try to make a record about the place where I am. For example I recently spent a week in a small village at Arthurs Pass in the mountains of the South Island where I made a banjo record. (Admittedly it only sounds like banjo some of the time..) Anyway these records tend to be a lot more nuanced and subtle and more aligned with say haiku than spectacular bombast.
How did you find the shows in Australia, were they enjoyable?
I think this last tour in Australia was maybe the best tour yet. It was really very fun. I found myself laughing a lot and I was happy with the shows and got to see some killer performances from other folk as well.
What do you have planned for the future?
Well.... Theres some big changes happening actually. My girlfriend and I are flying off to Sth America in March where we are planning on travelling together for one year. I'm taking some basic recording gear and have been talking about a few possible shows in Argentina but ostensibly 2009 is a year off music. Certainly off the label at any rate. So before then I am busy trying to finish off the various records I'm working on and packing up my NZ life. I'm already excited though about getting back into playing and touring in 2010. I also have ideas for some big installation projects that I would like to work on.
The following short clip is from a solo show of Antony's at Sydney's Serial Space. The night also featured Inappropriate Tough Guy Behaviour, Seaworthy, Brassskulls and Birchville Cat Motel:
Links: Antony Milton, PseudoArcana, Our Love Will Destroy the World, Sound&Fury, CPSIP
Related articles: Interview with Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel
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