voices #30
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Jashiin
answering some questions. We have already observed his electronic / soundscapes / Glitch work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Walk Through Dark Places: A Photographic Record” that we prefer is “Hipparcos Catalog”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Jashiin: There were several “catalog” tracks, all named after astronomical catalogs of stars, nebulae, and such. They were all made using a free pipe organ sample set I found online. I created an algorithm to process the samples: applying several effects with parameters randomized, then changing the loop points, also randomly. I had no idea how it sounded until I connected it to a midi keyboard and started playing, discovering the sounds as I went along. It took a while to learn which keys do what, which loops I like, if and how the pitch changed. I recorded many takes and kept the ones I liked best. “Sharpless Catalog”, from the parent album “A Walk Through Dark Places”, was the one I fell in love with the most and kept tinkering with. Two more catalogs, including Hipparcos, ended up on “A Photographic Record”, and there’s a couple more, either unreleased or hidden in the tracks of “A Walk”.
[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?
► Jashiin: It’s hard to say where the ideas come from, but when they do, they seem to attract everything they need to exist in the real world. I just try to find the most organic way to make it happen. For “Ten Poems by Birhan Keskin”, the original idea was a memory of a poem that came to my mind when improvising. The album ended up being this hermetic sonic reflection of the entire collection of poems, both their emotional content and the technical things like word choices and line breaks. For “State of Play”, the impulse was to play the piano using a lot of percussive tremolo, but it made me think of the Iranian santur, and the fates of my Iranian friends here – like me, musicians fleeing from an oppressive regime – so I recorded the music in such a way as to emphasize both the santur-like resonance, a symbol of exile, and amplify the sounds of my Turkish friend’s home where I recorded it, to give thanks for the hospitality they’ve shown me; everything else about the album, including the cover, followed suit until it was something of a political statement.
[3. FEEDBACK]
■ The A. O.: What do you hope listeners feel or experience when engaging with your music?
► Jashiin: “The desire of the moth for the star / Of the night for the morrow / The devotion to something afar / from the sphere of our sorrow.” (incidentally, the Shelley poem was the epigraph to a non-fiction book about the Hale Telescope, which was one of the first things I ever read on space, and certainly part of the inspiration behind “A Walk” and “A Photographic Record”)
[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?
► Jashiin: I don’t.
[5. INFLUENCES]
■ The A. O.: Mention 3 albums that you consider relevant to your musical path and why.
► Jashiin: ○ Alejandra & Aeron – Scotch Monsters
From the early glory days of glitch- and field recordings-based electronic music. In 2003, Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman created an installation which brought creatures from Scottish folklore alive, through sound and clever speaker placement. Hardly a day goes by without me thinking of this record at least once, both for the astounding wealth of its intricate sound design and for how deep its conceptual roots go: “In Scotch myth, people are sometimes warned of the presence of monsters by the particular sounds they make. Monsters and their sounds always fill a spiritual need of the community.”
○ Laurie Spiegel – Unseen Worlds
So far ahead of its time, it went completely unnoticed in 1991. I’m sure it was too simple and too emotionally direct for the likes of Wishart and Dhomont. And it was also probably too complicated and convoluted for the kids who were just starting out on Warp around that time. To me the music sounds like a parallel world version of Autechre’s Oversteps. I remember how I fell in love with Laurie’s music: it was when I read about this album’s “Viroid”, which she composed while sick. She wrote, “fantasizing that I could tame my own virus by doing so, I decided to map the complete genetic base sequence of a viroid into the musical pitch domain…” At the time I didn’t know of anyone who thought of their music that way, except myself.
○ Sun Ra – My Brother the Wind Vol. 2
Side A of this record is free jazz, which I like, but Side B is Sun Ra improvising on the newly invented Minimoog, and I absolutely adore those tracks. They’re tiny, tiny pieces, each different and distinct, entirely idiomatic to the instrument, and to my ears more creative than most keyboard players ever get in their careers. It’s never about finger technique or chord progressions for me, it’s the organic nature of the approach to the instrument. I wish electronics in jazz would develop from these seeds, but it went into imitations of acoustic instruments instead, complex chord progressions, impeccable precision while playing really fast, and all that. Maybe in another universe.
[6. REGARDS]
■ The A. O.: Leave us with a quote you love.
(not answered, Editor’s note)