Voices #28
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
cinchel
answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / drone / atmospheric work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Marble Sentiment” that we prefer is “this cloud won’t rain on me (thankful)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► cinchel: I had to go back to the ableton session to figure out what parts made up this track. It looks like I had this nice slow, almost organ like chord progression on the guitar that I looped. I do remember thinking that I really wanted to make more pieces that are not mostly guitar. So I listened to this chord progression and tried to find some chirpy and rhythmic settings on the Moog matriarch. From there I still felt it was a bit to dark so I moved over to the Rhodes piano and banged out some ghostly higher register intervals. I took some of the Moog improvisations that I liked and slowed them down by dumping them out to reel-to-reel and playing it back at half speed. I love the kinda warm bass tones that come from slowed down tape. The organ like sound from the guitar really guided me through the mixing of this piece, I like the cathedral like reverb and the resolution in the chord progression that had a feeling of a church choir.
[2. CREATION]
■ The A. O.: How do you usually approach composition? Do you start with a concept, a sound, a state of mind or what else? How do you generally proceed from the initial seed to the complete work?
► cinchel: I view music composition like sculpting or painting. I start with either some sound I have in my head, or a random instrument choice or a concept like “feels like a comfortable walk on the lake”. I then start recording some instrument, adding effects in the computer, looping parts. I’ll listen and if I’m really energized I’ll record another instrument, and repeat. Sometimes the time between recording 1 instrument and another can be days or weeks. At some point I’ll decide that I have enough “clay” so to speak to start to carve out something. At this stage I try not to record any new instruments, but I may dump some loops out to a tape machine and then record them back in. Slowly I find the threads and seams through all the layers that I can mix a story from. It really feels like navigating some wild garden, and the song I pull out from it is the map to get from one end to the other.
[3. FEEDBACK]
■ The A. O.: What do you hope listeners feel or experience when engaging with your music?
► cinchel: I have stories to tell but I don’t have the skill to tell them with words. So I hope listeners can hear the stories I bury in theses pieces. I hope it makes them think of nice memories or comfortable times. I hope it brings peace to someone at a chaotic time and movement to someone wanting to be more active.
[4. IDENTITY]
■ The A. O.: In a world saturated with digital music content, how do you try to keep your sound distinct and personally meaningful?
► cinchel: I constantly think about how I listen and how I conceptualize sound. Last year I began to realize that I no longer hear paintings, which at first made me worried/sad, but I realized that much like other aspects of my body that have changed with age, so had my brain. I’ve starting listening more and thinking about how I hear. I noticed that I had a relationship in my mind between tones and language. Not so much that sounds made words but that some sounds, chord progressions, intervals, give me the emotional feeling of phrase. This may be way I put certain sounds together and if I can learn how to decouple that, maybe I can start putting different sounds together. It’s not that I am bored with what I like to make, but I think it’s good to understand your biases and figure out how to undo some of them to find new ideas. I try not to concern myself with how to be distinct in the wider landscape of “experimental music”. I spent many years being overly concerned about that and I realized that it was both not a healthy place to make art from and was mostly informed by capitalism. Making art should not be a competition but it’s hard to move away from that thought when so many of the tools we have available to connect with other artists and listeners are hampered by captialism. I aim to make art that resonates with my ideas for getting these stories out into the world, and I hope they connect with people in some way, but even if they don’t at the end of the day I have to be happy with with I make.
[5. INFLUENCES]
■ The A. O.: Mention 3 albums that you consider relevant to your musical path and why.
► cinchel: ○ Sonic Youth – Goo and Dirty
When Kurt Cobain passed in April of 1994 I was a sophomore in high school. A few days later my brother brings home these 2 CD’s, he was in 8th grade and friend of his said “well with nirvana gone this is my new favorite band”. We both had never heard any sonic youth before and so we rushed to put it on. It didn’t click with me at first but I made myself spend the next few weeks listening deeply and trying to learn this new music language. I encouraged myself because I knew so many other people that I liked that really dug this band, they were frequently name checked in the various articles we read in Spin, so I figured there was something I needed to learn. This might be the first time I really experienced deep listening and teaching myself how to break my comfort zones.
○ (1b) Sonic Youth – SYR 1 Anagrama
The summer after my sophomore year of college I took a bus trip to NYC to visit my friend that just moved there. He got us tickets to see Sonic Youth at Irving Plaza. It was the first time I ever saw Sonic Youth live. The opening act was Milford Graves who came out in a suit adored with all kinds of bells and cymbals. He proceeded to play the most mind bending free jazz (with a person on sax who I don’t know the name of) non stop for 45 min. I was floored. Again nothing like anything I had heard at the time and I loved it. Then Sonic Youth takes the stage and opens with Anagrama off this SYR record. The SYR series, especially the first 3, are mostly jams that feel very improvised, and until this show I thought were a one time only thing captured to tape. But when they opened with the sounds exactly like the album I began to understand the way planning was involved in improvisation.
○ Stars of the Lid – The Tired Sounds of
I remember pulling this CD off the shelf at the record shop and taking it to the counter to give it a listen. I believe this would have been about 2003 or so. In like 2 seconds in I was hooked. This was everything I wanted from a band. I have basically been trying to recreate this record every time I sit down to record.
○ Palace Music – Lost Blues and other songs
It’s a compilation but it was my first exposure to this wild and creative song writer Will Oldham aka. Bonnie Prince Billy. It was also a pivotal moment in my own understanding of the world and myself. It was 1997 and I had just met the person that is now my wife. We had a lot of music in common and we were going through each other’s CD collections, playing music the other didn’t have. I don’t remember anything else she played for me that day besides this CD because it totally broke my brain. We had previously discussed our favorite Sonic Youth albums, which was already next level, I didn’t know many other folks who even listened to Sonic Youth let alone had a favorite album (hers is Sister which was even more, boom!, like she didn’t even have the DGC stuff, solidly indie through and through).
The first track, “Ohio River Boat Song” is a wobbly loose swinging song. Will’s voice barely releasing the words, the whole song feels encased in molasses but the emotions and the waves of harmony that ebb and flow between the drums, guitars and strings is so comforting. The next song “Riding” starts almost in the middle of a chord, like someone forgot to start the 4-track first before the band started playing. Then about 1/3 of the way it switches from this noisy mess into a seemingly sweet sounding poem then folk song. I being a very dumb and not well read teenager took the rest of the song to be about friends talking about riding horses, totally ignoring the last section which is clearly about incest. The whole collection goes on like this, songs that shouldn’t even work being the most beautiful and cathartic things to ever exist. And I was being shown this by someone who I thought was my equal but was clearly light years ahead of me. I never was the typical “cocky” teenage boy, but having up until that time not meet anyone as obsessed with new and out-there music, I believed that I wouldn’t ever learn about new music from a girl. I knew at that point that 1) this girl was truly special and I needed to be better and 2) I needed to beginning to approach everything with more openness and curiosity.
[6. REGARDS]
■ The A. O.: Leave us with a quote you love.
► cinchel: I’m a big fan of the writing of Kurt Vonnegut and this section from a letter he wrote to a high school class is one of my favorites:
“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”