The value of any kind of art form is powered you transform process your environment in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight in france i went to the Music Research center in a kind of rebellion from the existing system it was headed by a man called p. S. If there was actually the inventor of musical cut and i met somebody thinking that music is not only made of notes and harmonies but but made of sounds. Weird to me because i live it does not want to miss it on a. The difference between the noise and music is actually the hand of the musician you can make music with the sound of the rain and with the sound of the train with any kind of sounds around you. Ive been immediately convinced that it was far beyond a czar of music like i dont know rocky bank or whatever but a new way of considering the set. I dont. Want to. Work. Through. Her. Teeth but it. Was. Yes. I have trouble often defining my music in terms of. My text a melody. Ive always thought in terms of notes. But never in terms of written notes so to me an artist is very much sound but definitely in terms of texas im really into texas. But theres texas about. Her and. The rice is a kind of called irish process of. Bits of bits and bits of that is very much i feel and i just assimilated and. Its stuck together. Yeah it sounds like its kind of pitched sound. These being emitted by my computer you can record them and put them into a sampler. Often ill just take a sound that great things that Something Else and then record it then chop them up almost at random and the natural rhythms of how they fall or something that will look off and then inspire a beat or kind of rhythmic idea. That weve been interested in sounds but i guess making music out of sounds maybe i was about fifteen sixteen and started in a more serious way and i was lying on a top of a hill listening to a skylark and is making really rhythmic. Sounds and this cow is and this is going to. It sounded like john bass in a way. I also had this little portable recorder and i became interested in just capturing sounds i went and then assimilating the making piece of music as a form of journaling essentially side have particular travels or periods in my Life Captured in piece of music is a web just documenting memories and. When i was in vogue area. I was going out that play a festival and we had a few days and we ended up just capturing sounds. To me i really like the interactive nature of foraging for sounds they have a personality already and then working with i feel as if theres like more of a collaboration and just a solo project. And never know whats going to find or you are always unexpected its always surprised that happens or theres more of a conversation i find. I like to think that somewhere in the sound itself there is this kind of texture and fabric and character of that place. The place is hidden in the sound in some way the thing. I like to capture process is i tell stories to sound the one i didnt know about for example its quite nice to capture a traditional very old School Christian practice. With using the film side of it it kind of expands that arise and so you able to tell more stories at once. Where is the meaning lie in sound. How does sound communicate a quality of a place or of an experience. I. How does the sound itself contain that experience and that meaning then when you explore to it and play it so many of us out of the well its still carry that if that makes him. Look ok in. The moment im. Not here. Just. Just. Trying to tell you. Everything you need. To tell because of this piece now that theyre trying to. I. Think. The problem we have is that we live in a very image driven society and so were kind of under the tyranny of the image already so everybody just wants to see everything your making this film the first question you asked is what images of you go you know walk we showed go along with that for me id be happy just to see a blank screen and listen. If you listen to my music at the beginning its quite naive so it starts with awful crunches and then you hear peple. I think that it was important where you recorded so recorded sounds inside the British Museum and then in the sewers underneath london and in hot air balloons. And so i started to think about not only the sounds themselves but where they were recorded. I think every sound is music i think its just about i understanding where our perception or description of what music is. Thats what i think is to fill. The seat and see the shape. Thousand and nine and i went to record it to pick being born and then followed it through its life one last record is death but the record its been butchered and then cooked and ate and. The whole point about sound for me is that it starts to become a metaphor about how we interact with the world. I dont think were listening properly and i dont think were listening to stories other than listening to scientists to experts telling us that actually were killing ourselves were running out of oil running out of food. I want recorded twenty five thousand chickens hatching at the same time i thought youd hate liked in the cracking of eggs and i thought id be an amazing noise. The chicks are the same breed to the same age and even if you. Multiply me by twenty five thousand you just get. One of the most disappointing sounds of a herd of. Sound told me something which was in an ugly industrial process and theres nothing romantic a charming or inspiring all pleasant about my music as the process has got more and more extreme in the last record i made was made of a bomb exploding and so its almost like a heart to do them in that order because you couldnt just go straight in with a bomb. That was made with one five second recording and so we just took that sound and chopped off and manipulated and did forty five minutes of material from that one so. The issue for me really becomes starts to be a moral or political or social one like is it ok to make a piece of music out of the sound of. A car accident if you dont know the person in it you know you havent asked their permission. John cage says playing music writing music and listening to music is three completely Different Things and we should never confuse them and i think its a useful guide. One of the reasons. People traditionally go to see live concerts its because they see somebody sit at a piano or guitar and they play the notes in front of them and the sound comes out of them in real time and its a real event that had a real moment. Where as if im playing the sound of a pig. A pig being born all that happened six years ago. And why im playing history in every concert i do it just gets older and older. Theres like a historical reenactment telling a story from the past one minute youre playing the pig alive and thats me a pen pig dead. Its a very different relationship both with you as a performer in the material and you with the audience you. Biggest challenge is always how much information to give the audience you know do they need to know all the stories of where the sounds come from or is it enough just to listen. You dont need to hunt for a heart for sound sounds everywhere and all the time its something that you cant turn off. So for me the difficulty is hearing things that you dont normally hear. That becomes about the stories and it becomes about things that happen in other countries or behind closed doors. Well the queen having sex. Thank. You. What if you look at sounds from the outside theyre all equal its not seeing any kind of value that you give them it gives them by putting them in a context if you start valuing sounds just by theirselves then judge you dont you just get into that territory of taste and taste just a quick aside. When i went to school we did make these physical difference relation between no music being an organized form of an ordered ball sensation and why the noise is the norm organized from. For the course that nothing is said easy anymore theres no piece of pop music nowadays that does not integrate something that would have been considered noise about forty years ago. I rather belief in john cage definition for music when there was a taste no difference. Fees once you dont start controlling the material that you work with anymore you you open up new perspectives and this is a concept for society. I was born in berlin. But that was a different building most School Dropout i did had no particular profession i had no money and i had nothing to do. Whatever we were doing in the early eightys i dont think you can pin any artistic or decisions on that so i didnt start with the aim to do anything except two were to do something with my time. In the years that followed it was computers becoming the dust and out of recording it sort of i suddenly youll find yourself in a situation was a band which is a chemical unit of several people. Not playing anymore. A lot of times we are not really able to transport the sings on to stage. Mortified to jet turbine as we used to sometimes just waste too much. Thanks. Thanks. To sometimes and scenes that we did im not so repeatable. Thank you. I want you off to be in the same situation as i was in nine hundred eighty one that i dont know when you said i would love to make a lot of these mistakes again but i car. Did it. Sound heartless thats precisely what we do we help ourselves. Because thats where the fun lies for us. Six drummers are actually eight persons five drummers one actor and to move a director. We have never made a track on its own. Always connected to their performance. Or footage. I dont think that we think so much we just go in everyone just bangs on everything and. Here it was meant to look like the people played on these things in the room so we just collected a lot of sound. In the beginning was like this is how this will work well do something with that and that and then you take it back home and its no it doesnt work at all this works this sound that no one was aware of and someone just hit once thats a great song. And we just recorded all the living room sounds in the living room and we recorded all the kitchen sounds in the kitchen and all the bathroom sounds and. It was like a music video yeah it was playback. The whole film started with us doing the music and while the music was in place we could start to do the shooting. The most common calment is of course is this for real and its always great to be able to say yes ninety five percent or ninety percent are actually that in especially in in one apartment there was i think there was one sound that wasnt that wasnt the real one. The challenge is always you have the image and you have the sound they have to connect when you say thats really the whole thing forced. It was an experiment we didnt know what kind of music it would be and it was the first time we tried it. It worked and we did the film and we had it so that was a big surprise oh it works its actually a little and then we just try to push that limit how far can we go for the feature film sound noise. Knew we wanted to make it more spectacular magical. So. We ended up with like twenty thousand files. And then it was like ok. Now we have to listen to this is what. You dont sit down and think. This music should be like this and then we tried to do it with the sound you start with the sounds and see what what kind of music is in the sound maybe you start with a beat. And oxygen hose. That was. Used as well. Then we needed to know this it was one. And there was another question oh maybe we could find these two and. Other missions sounded like. Like this. One youre combining. The new we need an extra mile or so there was just troops for the option. Is the case and. Everything starts with. Old people today i think work with fallen selves would we have done with the movie this is very special because this sounds are so natural when you listen to modern music today behind what you hear that can be anything. That. Long at the law of. Im going to be. Much bigger than i was. At the age of. Nine. When were traveling we load our gear into a taxicab and people are like oh are you a band and were like yeah what kind of music do you play. And then theres this chasm of silence when were trying to figure out whats the honest thing to say that doesnt misrepresent what you do. But which doesnt go into way too much information and sound pretentious because then you sound like some who thinks what they do is so amazing in the complex that it really requires a lot of. That system find unusual sounds manipulate it chop it up layer it with it solve it was based on hearing techno unkept pop but also hearing academic music on pratt i had heard a record by pierre already i dont know it wasnt really tell i met drew that i really realized like oh. This is a kind of formal preexistent sort of music and. I guess the third stream would be industrial music and noise like the lines doesnt annoy botton. Noise music was really just a way to make music while being ignorant child. Were in this sort of refugees zone between genre and thats where we belong and so i dont have a problem with it except when its time to explain what it is because i dont know. Security. When i was in college i used to listen obsessive lee to the College Radio station calle x. And berkeley and i listen to it because i wanted to hear punk rock and one night i was walking down the street listening with a portable radio and i started to hear the weirdest music. And it was this piece micro fanie by stockhausen. I want to record and explain that the record was created by exciting a tam tam and then playing microphones movement as it got closer and further away from that object and then playing the signal chain by filtering and adjusting the volume i just could not believe that people in tuxedoes on going to gramophone were making these insane noises. So in a weird way like stockhausens piece gives you the whole digestive track of how electronic music can interface with the world and i didnt know any of that when i heard it when i just heard it as sound it was already amazing. When we play live we replicate for the audience the kind of process by which the music was made so martin will pick up a balloon and just start improvising all sample it live so ill start a song with literally an empty screen in which i have all of these options but theres no content yet. Electronic music interfaces have evolved in an exciting way over the last ten years where before you know like when youre making decisions about what sound to make it would literally just take time to like load up a sound before an improvisation but longs to think. Now change. Sometimes decide like lets work with an object because were interested in the object and its meaning other times youre just figuring out whats around and just like looking for objects and just sort of you know martins pretty good at playing objects and just working with them until you get something thats a form that works. And then were doing this here has to sort through twenty five minutes of my fiddling with the glasses case this is an engine of unhappiness for martin and. The deeper and to me like more frightening question about these techniques now is just that the very impressive wow factor of making music out of an object lends itself beautifully to advertising and capitalism. Exposes that this technique can be used in a radical uncritical way but it can also be totally appropriate. To always think carefully about where is the appeal is the object is it in the form were making a new record and its entirely about our washing machine are we going to take our washing machine on to or not no. One cares. But think of the clean clothes that you have on to our laundry on tour is like something youre totally obsessed with getting done and now we could do it ourselves. Its not really important to me that the audience knows are listening to the bridge i want them to enjoy the music is music or at least to hear the music first and then say what is that instrument. So the ethical framework was just to use the sounds unprocessed no posting of trouble or bass. Just use the raw already oh from the surface that i strike. And i write fixed musical compositions something that could be played by living is issued. I chose that bridge because i wanted to have a live concert and i thought that we would use the mountains as the theater the original plan was to have live musicians with the sheet music in front of them in your monitor so they could hear everybody else playing. This is going to cost maybe about two million dollars. And hopefully someday in the future after i kick the bucket somebody would decide if they want to make it happen. So the installation is what came first. One is you walk out onto the net hudson bridge you press the button hear the music on the bridge. But i realize that not everybody liked hides so for those people we created a Site Specific radio transmission art installation. When the bridge music cd came out it went to number eighteen on the billboard classical crossover charts which i was very happy with and a lot of the people in the industry were going to surprised about because the record came from nowhere after i had finished bridge music and it took five years to happen i said well now i have a proof of concept that i could show something so i came in here i went online and i looked up the eiffel tower and then i got this idea as they go there we go again. Mayor of paris is nominally in charge of all the monuments and i called the Mayors Office and i emailed the Mayors Office. And i sent a packet with a letter and a brochure about bridge music and my plan to do the eiffel tower and i did this six times they finally got it and they said ok what do you want to do what i would like to capture on the first level you know particular orders. I want to get the spiral staircase all right we have are doing something that you recorded every surface. With the idea that i would have six samples and i want to have two hard strikes two medium strikes and two soft strikes every surface hit with a wooden mallet six hit with a latex mallet twelve hit with a plastic ball and it just kept going when i came back i had ten thousand samples to go through this shows and on may thirtieth at eleven twelve am the first scene is us playing at the east corner the black stair railing the bottom square he said you suffer for your art and that was it i found that this handrail plays a soprano a and a middle c. This top round plays an alto ga or an f. Sharp you know the i phone tower was in calibrated as an instrument so its not going to give you pure tone and many composers would take that sound and then we could make a whole scale out of it. But if im going to play this live this sound is only available in one location on the tower now if you look at the screen here you see that its missing notes if i wanted to write a melody with these notes. Im good but if i wanted to write it with these two notes. No good. Writing the music this is why i wanted to do it so this part is so. So enriching. Manner. I said i really like to conceive a project with sample technique and ive been lucky to be able to have one of the first if not the real first sampling machine fairlight which is