Back from 'enforced limbo' brought on by the beginning of the teaching semester, here's the second part of the Australian EAI interviews - this one with Anthony Guerra.
Please detail your history/involvement with music - from teenage fumblings onward…My earliest fumblings were maybe at the age of 6 or 8 with my cousin, Peter Guerra. I had a big red plastic baseball bat and I played it as a guitar by scratching it with my fingernails; he hit a bunch of pots with pens and played a very tiny primitive toy keyboard. We recorded it on cassette too. I wish I had it now.. . It would be a perfect Black Petal release.
From about the age of 12 or 13 I started playing indie rock in my house with my cousins Peter Guerra, Nick Repole and Robert Garofano.. I played the home keyboard, sang, etc. It was very cheap and dodgy. I got a guitar at age 15. This indie rock band with my cousins slowly got better and better.. I ended up playing guitar or drums. We actually still play together when we can.. We are called The Bastard Kids. We barely ever played gigs, just made heaps of four track cassette recordings. We were too shy. The recordings were done quickly and spontaneously. I also had another rock band with high school friends (with me usually on drums). We actually played some gigs in pubs and rehearsed, but didn't record so much. The influences in these bands was just classic US and UK indie and punk rock (Dinosaur Jr etc)
At the same time as this, I was experimenting alone with the home keyboard. I would tape down the keys, create a drone and play crap on top... I wasn't aware of any precedents for this, it just sounded good (and it was not particularly difficult to do)
The Bastard Kids continued to sporadically record, but the other band things stopped. I continued to just play at home with the guitar and also experiment with drums and some random eletronics.
At the same time my taste was developing.. I still liked most of the punk, post-punk, electronic music, hiphop and indie rock stuff I always liked, but I was also becoming interested in improvisation, free jazz, and more abstract electronic stuff.
Around 95 to 98 I was basically just recording heaps of different stuff at home, trying things out, working towards different things that didn't go anywhere. I felt pretty isolated, and I was too shy to try to get gigs. Some of the stuff I did back then is similar to the later 'empty kingdoms' stuff, and the droney stuff i did with people like Joel Stern.
In mid-99, I left Australia and moved to London. I quickly came across the improv workshops that Eddie Prevost organised. At the second or third workshop I attended, I met Matthew Nidek. He is one of my best friends and still a collaborator, whenever we are in the same country.
Soon after, Mattin and Michael Rodgers appeared at the workshop. These guys become good friends of mine. Mattin met Joel Stern around that time. With these guys and others around, there was a lot of motivation to do things, and so a lot of gigs, recordings, talking, and drinking started to happen. We became really active. Me and Michael Rodgers started TwoThousandAnd. Mattin started his label. Joel and Mattin organised a lot of shows. It was not just us, there were heaps of other people involved: Nishide Takehiro, Romuald Wadych, Denis Dubovstev, Sandy Kindness, Matthew Highland, Ross Lambert, Rohan Thomas (the guy who did that cd with Dion Workman on Sigma Editions). Most of "the gang" were mainly 'outsiders' / foreigners - from Australia, Basque Country, US, Japan, Poland, Nothern Ireland, etc.
Things really developed while we were in London, and there were so many improv gigs happening, it was hard not to be inspired by all the activity. We were all really active.. Also, some of the London improv people were very welcoming and friendly. (People like the Bohman Brothers, Eddie Prevost) .
TwoThousandAnd released a bunch of things, and I did a bunch of other releases, a few with Joel Stern.
Slowly, some of my good music friends disappeared. Matthew Nidek went back and forth between London and the US a couple of times, Joel moved home to Australia, then Mattin left. Eventually I decided to move back to Sydney in 2003. I was sick of certain aspects of my London life - shit housing, the high cost of living, working in jobs with absolute fuckwits, etc..
I was happy to be back in Sydney. I was already friends with Matt, Adam and Peter.. and after I got back, we got really close. Playing with these guys was awesome, it felt really natural and comfortable. More on that later.
After that, I moved to Tokyo, about 2 and a half years ago. .. Black Petal become a serious concern once I got here. I have kept working on my solo guitar stuff and the Green Blossoms. I have been involved in some collaborations here too but the solo stuff is my main focus.
This article is loosely based around the idea of a kind of 'Australian electroacoustic improv', perhaps connected in some way with the Erstwhile 'canon', reductionism, the New London Silence etc. - all those convenient journalistic tags. How do you feel about this as a framing device - it's fairly evident there was a kind of 'historical turn' several years ago, where you all began to work in loosely similar fields…There is no reason why we shouldn't be linked with that stuff. Certainly we all have connections to those kind of people, to some degree. Exactly how I, or we, all fit exactly, I am not sure...
I have played with a bunch of people that are lumped into those "convenient journalistic tags" (Dafeldecker, Michael Moser, Toshimaru, etc), all of us have. Erstwhile distributed TwoThousandAnd and Jon Abbey was quite supportive. I did know the "London Silence" guys and play on the same bills as them, although I was definitely not part of the "New London Silence" crew. Joel and Mattin played with those guys, I didn't.
I didn't feel completely part of the Erstwhile or London Silence scenes though.. there was common ground and major differences at the same time. And a bit of an age gap, and experience gap... a lot of those guys had been around for a long time and came from a background of jazz, classical or improv music. I came to the same scene from a background of liking adventurous punk, post-punk and "indie" music. At the same time, there was enough in common for us to play together with some of these people..
I guess the common ground was that many of us were interested in a certain path of development - to get to some kind of essence or core, strip away useless gestures and bullshit, think about structure and texture.
And I do think I ended up in a different place.. I love the idea of reductionism but for me it never had anything to do with being quiet. My music was starting simultaneously accept absolute silence and extremely harsh material. A lot of the music I was playing in 2004 to 2006 was extremely harsh and noisy, lots of treble, no bass. (Jon, I guess you saw the quartet i did at WIM Melbourne with Arek, Takefumi Naoshima, Toshihiro Koike - this was the quietest gig I did in years).
At the same time as all this, I was working on my melodic guitar playing.. the stuff that you can hear on my first releases (Neutral Density Trio, Broken Hands, etc). When playing this melodic style and my "lovesongs", the intent is 100% absolutely the same - to present my ideas as simply and directly as possible without excess filler, frills or waste; accepting silence and noise; thinking about the texture and structure of what i am playing; etc. The musical elements are different parts of my musical taste.. but both approaches feel comfortable and honest for me.
The main thing about this "reductionism" for me, was simply to reduce myself down to the essence. It didnt have to necessarily be about playing at low volume, or not playing. More of an internal thing, a mental thing.
A lot of people involved in reductionism seemed to want to erase their personalities from their music, or even "express nothing". My feeling is the opposite.. I want my personality to be in the music, I want to express something.
What would you define as the essentially 'Australian' qualities of this music? What separates i.e. Stasis Duo, Breakdance The Dawn, Arek, Will, etc. from those overseas - do you feel there is any peculiarly Australian 'aesthetic'?This is something definitely Australian going on, but to be honest I have never tried to analyse it until now.. mmmm.... I think of a certain rawness or honesty; and a less studied, more direct approach to things. I think Australian people generally speak quite directly and honestly, "tell it like it is" and all that.. and that translates into the music. And definitely there is a lack of pretension, at least in the people I know and I love. There is also a certain amount of naivety and isolation ...
I remember I put on a gig one day and at the end of it, over a beer on the street, Adam happily proclaimed "Fucken Sydney music, man". I guess that sums it up best for me..
Who would you consider important Australian forebears for this music?The Birthday Party, and Feedtime are the first ones that come to mind, especially Feedtime. The music is minimal and raw and delivered without pretension. Despite Nick Cave's theatrics, I get the same feeling from the Birthday Party. (but note - i dont mean forebears just for Breakdance the Dawn, I mean for all Australian minimal music, whether the practitioners have heard it or not).
I also think about many other great Australian punk/post-punk bands over the years - Slugfuckers, Primitive Calculators, early Severed Heads, etc. That music is so amazing and inspiring.. I wish more people around the world knew of this stuff.
To be honest, I am not too knowledge about the history of "improvised music" in Australia.. I came to improv from a background of liking punk and post-punk rock and amateurish early post-punk electronic music. (eg I was into the Birthday Party, early Severed Heads since I was 13 or so)..
What's most interesting, maybe, is that I sense the moment has 'passed' in some way - for example, Adam and Matt are now primarily known for BDTD/No BBQ/X Wave; Anthony has moved through his 'love songs' projects, etc. Everyone's moved on from that moment where reductionism/etc seemed paramount (w/ the exception of Will, who I always thought was maybe more of the 'concrete'/electroacoustics/noise end.) Why is this the case? I'm not sure it was a 'conscious' turning point, but was there anything that may have predicated this? (I'm inclined to think through this as related to i.e. What Is Music - the shift from an interest in programming improv, to the final year of WIM going for Sunn, Growing, etc. - the more doom/drone/etc end of things…Fundamental shifts in the 'underground''s interests…That kind of thing - social/cultural aspects…)I have a bunch of different incoherent thoughts on all this...
Yeah, it is interesting how so many people have shifted away from that improv stuff - not just us, but people everywhere.. Look at Erstwhile, doing "Erst Pop", Dafeldecker playing in Dean Roberts' band, etc... lots of stuff like that is happening, but...
Is it really a shift away from something? I think most of us have been doing various different things simultaneously for a long time, and at certain points in time, different things come into the public eye.. . For me, I was playing rock since i was a little kid.. improv for about 10 years now, melodic guitar for as long as i can remember, etc.. These things have usually run alongside each other..
Many people in the improv scene are the same.. for example, in Tokyo, Taku Unami and Toshiya Tsunoda have played together in a kind of prog-rock band called something like "Cosmic Urination"!! and Taku has had a kind of brass band for years (called Hose, Ezaki and Koike are also in it) ; in London, Rhodri Davies played classical harp for a pop musician as well as classic improv and the silence stuff, etc.. Oren is the same, he has many interests and different ones are in focus at different times.
At the same time though, I did start to feel tired being part of the "improv scene", or more specifically, the "EAI scene" ... there is a lot of pretension and competitiveness.. people seem to place a lot of emphasis on being 'groundbreaking', or doing something new. Nothing is really new and I get tired when people try to act like their thing is. One classic example of this in the electro-acoustic improv scene is the interesting naming of instruments - "acoustic turntable" "amplified textures" etc. Maybe a lot of people, me included, decided it was time to "lighten up" a little. Being a pretentious musician is pretty ridiculous in light of all the stupid shit that happens in the real world.
One thing I really like about the scenes of so-called "free-folk" and "free noise", was that the music was often just as radical and exciting too, but the scene was a lot more enthusiastic and friendly.. with not so much pretension and the "seen it before, heard it before" mentality.
And one final thought - for me, "reductionism" is no less paramount than it was before, actually. Whatever instrument I play, in whatever context, my natural tendency is towards reductionism in some sense.
Can you detail your current projects - Green Blossoms, Vodka Sparrows, your solo 'love songs', the upcoming 10" for A Binary Datum… What threads them together, do you think? What is the bind/glue for your music?As usual, I have a lot of projects happening. I currrently have 2 main projects.
My solo "empty kingdoms" stuff has been my main thing for the last few years and will continue to be so. My solo gigs are always in this vein. I play written songs and looser noisy improvisations using my electric guitar, violin bow and a few basic effects. I sing. My voice is still weak and falters constantly. I still feel extremely fragile and nervous when I play live. As I have mentioned before, that is the point of it all, to be as honest as possible. It is not just all downer love songs though, the gigs can get quite intense and noisy.. This project is extremely serious to me.. As I told you in the last interview, I started playing this way due to emotional necessity.. and it is still fucken necessary..
The Green Blossoms is a project featuring me and Aiko Koga. I do most of the music; Aiko plays ukelele and sings. It is more melodic than me solo; and definitely a bedroom band. Most of the instrumentation is acoustic, acoustic guitar, ukelele, etc. I guess you could say my happy songs go to the Green Blossoms; my sad ones go to my solo work. The Green Blossoms involve a bit more layering, arranging, editing, multi-tracking, etc. Still the aim is to keep things simple. This band is very much about enjoying making music, like my old indie rock band, The Bastard Kids. It is an outgrowth being 4-track fumblings from younger days..
Since I have been in Japan, I have been doing a bunch of collaborations as well..
Shining Rice is a new band I have here with two people from Yokohama, called Junichiro Tanaka and Sei ....Jun and I play electric guitars, and Sei sings.
The sound is still forming but it is pretty melodic. Sei has a beautiful, kind of yearning voice.
I also recently started to collaborate with Mark Sadgrove. We have done a bunch recordings for a cd. Slow moving droney/melodic guitar and some whispered/moaned vocals. Kind of in the vein of Vodka Sparrows.. similar feel.
I have also done some playing with Hisato Higuchi, Our guitar playing styles are similar.. we both like slow simple playing, hushed vocals, silence, odd guitar notes and sweet chords. This project is happening very slowly. Too slowly!!
My bands from Australia are not defunct, just on hold...
Vodka Sparrows are me and Mark Leacy from Castings. I play electric guitar in the same way as my solo stuff; except we tend towards really long, drawn out downer stuff. Songs for drinkers to pass out to.
Your Intestines and Antipan are 2 of the rock projects I was doing in Sydney. I want to get back to Sydney and do more with both bands this year.
Your Intestines is me, Adam Sussmann, Peter Blamey and Matt Earle. I really love this band. We talked about doing "rock music" for a while. We we eventually got round to doing it, it worked straight away.. everything felt right. 2 cdrs out soon.
Antipan is me, Matt Earle, Sumu Sivanesan and Nick Dan. I play drums here. It is a lot looser and messier than Your Intestines. Partly because I am crap on drums and Nick didnt really play bass before. My idea for drumming in this band was commit myself to a rhythm I can't possibly sustain for long,, and then try to play it forever.
Sorry man, but the list of projects is endless. Me and Joel recently had a chance to start to record again. The recordings will take a while to get together and edited, etc.. I also mentioned the 10" and the Needles thing before.
This is obviously an exhaustive list of everything that is going on right now, or due to be released soon.
But in reality it is a lot more simple.. Most of my time is spent on 'empty kingdoms' solo work. The Green Blossoms is the second project. I don't do too many collaborations at any one time. At the moment I do the Shining Rice and Mark Sadgrove collaborations occassionally. Me and Hisato will get back together a bit later on. (He is busy now). Collaborations are really important to me so I will always have a few things going on. If I was in Sydney I would have a lot more going on.
The glue/the bind.. well, I guess my basic style is pretty musical and kinda dramatic. My guitar playing is usually very similar across most projects.. I have my tone, my chords, my notes, my slide playing, my bow.. I tend to stick to the same basic tools and notes for each group. I am very fussy about the notes I play... My ideas about how the music should develop and be structured are pretty honed. And as I mentioned a few times, I am pretty strict about when I should play and how I should do it.. And I am really into the sound and tone of things.. my ears like certain things, particularly beautiful, melodic and simple sounds.
It is actually hard to analyse it all too much because this stuff is just instinct.
When my music works, it just gushes out of me.
Tell me about your time in London - going to Prevost's workshops, getting to know Mattin etc. What did you get from this period? (How) Did the prevailing mood in London's underground at the time - reductionism, London silence etc - affect your playing?I already discussed the London stuff above but just a bit more..
It is worth saying - reductionism and 'London Silence' were not the prevailing mood in London back then, and probably not now either. Those people just got a bit of press at the time. The London scene is/was huge. The prevailing mood was always classic 'London improv'. There were a lot of venues, a lot of gigs and a lot of other little groups within the entire scene.. the more free jazz people, the Prevost/Tilbury-aligned people who appear on Matchless, the more electronics-y people, etc
I thought the tag of New London Silence was a weird niche marketing scheme or joke (probably/hopefully intentional) and kinda pretentious, silly or funny, depending on my mood. Those people involved in that scene are nice people. I didnt ever collaborate with any of them. Mattin and Joel did. I saw a bunch of gigs - some were definitely amazing, others were really bad. Like all kinds of improv.
I didnt hear many of the cds though. When I did, I couldn't understand why such quiet, detailed, precise music was so badly recorded, so distant. Seemed to do a disservice to the music and contradict the attitude (as opposed to Stasis Duo, where the recording quality feels like a key, intrinsic component of the music). Also, and there was a distinct lack of rock in what they were doing, something ultra-tasteful, which I didn't like. As I mentioned, my approach to playing is pretty "emotional", even dramatic.. whereas these guys (in London, in Berlin and Tokyo too) seems to want to erase their personalities, express nothing. I was the opposite.
But the good gigs I saw were great.. and definitely opened me up to some new possibilities.. I really liked when musicians try to use extended periods of silence in the music. I think I enjoyed this feeling of space and silence mostly in the playing of someone like Eddie Prevost, though. I played with him so many times, and his calmness and focus when playing is pretty amazing, even when totalling beating the shit out of a drumkit.
So, I could see the good points and the bad points in that kind of approach. I incorporated silence because I wanted to understand the individual components of my sound more.. using silence made things more fragile, made me focus more, and especially, made the dynamic (and therefore, dramatic) range extremely wide. (Noise after silence is far more bracing than just 100% non-stop noise). And the focus it gave me was awesome, sometimes I play gigs and can barely breathe by the time I get to the end, I am concentrating so hard..
I guess the main thing I got from my time in London were a lot of friends in the music world, and also a hunger to do things, do as much as possible, play as much as possible..
What is your approach to the guitar - firstly, in your improvised works - and secondly, when you are working on more song/folk/psych forms…My approach to the guitar doesn't vary much across projects these days.
Technically speaking - In most projects over the last few years, I play the electric guitar with 2 pedals - a sampler and a reverb pedal. I use a bow and an e-bow, and a slide. Whether playing improv or songs, I usually use this setup.
I do vary it sometimes - I use also play the acoustic guitar these days; in particular for the Green Blossoms I also play acoustic guitar, mandolin and ukelele a lot. I got into the acoustic guitar because I was living in a tiny Tokyo apartment and playing electric at home often wasn't possible.
If I playing rock i usually cut out the pedals and just crank the volume.
Aside from technical details. When I play improv I am trying hard to avoid noodling, fucking around; and especially I try to avoid audibly searching around for something to fit. I think it is better to shut the fuck up until the right moment. Or just play the same thing over and over until it works. I want things to be precise, simple and uncluttered.
When I am playing the songs or rock band stuff, I feel exactly the same way. I dont want to fuck around - everything I do needs to serve the structure and mood and I dont like unnecessary details or frills. So the same thing applies - shut the fuck up until the right moment, or hammer one thing to death until it works.
My approach to singing basically mirrors this.
You became quite closely involved with Matt, Adam, Peter etc while in Sydney - can you tell me about this period of Sydney's underground - it seemed incredibly fertile. How did these engagements change your relationship to music? There was quite a turn to noise/rock in that period - i.e. Breakdance The Dawn, Yr Intestines, Antipan etc.The friendship of me, Stasis Duo and Peter is due to Caleb Kelly. He was organising gigs in Sydney and through them he met Stasis Duo and Peter. He released cds by all of us on his label Impermanent.
When I was living in London, Caleb and I had some contact via email and eventually Caleb invited me to play the What Is Music? festival, on the same night as Stasis and Peter. When I visited Australia I was really happy to meet them, hear them, hang out, drink with them. Me and Stasis played some music together too and it went okay.
When I got back to Sydney to live in 2003, I became really close to these guys.
We never spent time discussing what we would do too much, we basically just played together and it seemed to work well. So we started to play together a lot. Me and Matt especially have fuckloads of unreleased recordings. It seemed like the 4 of us felt exactly the same way about how to play together..
A guy from Norway appeared on the scene, Inge Olmheim. We played with him a lot. Matt and Adam introduced some others guys - James Heighway; Chris Nylstock; we also met Nick Dan through the gigging scene.
Me, Matt, Peter, Adam, Inge, we all loved rock music, and always talked about doing some more rock music together. It wasn't linked to any particular outside influences happening at that time, it was just our basic musical tastes. We all had rock histories..
Antipan started up.. firstly as me on guitar and Nick Dan on drums. It was a mess, so we changed the line up, I got on the drums, Nick on bass, specifically because he hadnt played one before, Matt Earle and Sumu Sivanesan on guitars. Then we were cooking! At the same time, MosEissly got going (Matt, Adam, Inge), xNoBBQx (Matt, Nick). and Your Intestines, (me/Blamey/Matt/Adam).. At the same time, Matt Nidek was living in Sydney and our duo (a bit more droney and melodic) started back up. He is a very dynamic drummer and that brought a certain element of "rock" back into my playing. Me and Blamey had a guitar duo too, playing one or two guitars using 2 ebows, doing these kinda of simple loud sinetones. And Antony Milton came across that time and we played together..
Suddenly, there were all these groupings of us that were using more rock elements...
Your Intestines was the main one for me. We thought it would be good before we played a note.. and we were fucken right! We didnt have to talk or think. It was exactly as I dreamed, straight away..
We were doing these gigs, alongside our 'harder-listening' improv stuff.. to me, the concept and ideas behind each were exactly the same.. just the tools were different.. I remember when i said "we are playing rock music" a few people said back after the shows - "well, it's not rock music, it sounds just like your other stuff". They were right.
There wasnt much planning behind any "return to rock", just friendship, taste, beer, etc It was very natural.. and I think we approach it in the same way as our other stuff.
But yeah, it was a fucken busy time.. Matt got the Breakdance The Dawn started, Nick started talking about releasing Antipan on vinyl; I started to think about getting a new label going. We made a lot of recordings.. still there are heaps in the pipeline. TwoThousandAnd was still kinda going then too.
It was basically an inspiring time.. I was unemployed for some long stretches and had a lot of time to play.. the constant playing meant that things developed really quickly. The space of Sydney was good too.. there were enough places where we could make a lot of noise.
Also worth mentioning is the 2 great venues of the time - the Frequency Lab and Yvonne Ruve. The Frequency Lab was dirt cheap to put a gig on in, the Yvonne Ruve was free. The Casting guys were doing a lot of gigs and they invited me to play a LOT. That was a good situation to be in and I was really inspired by what they were doing too.
Fucken great time!! I miss it.. Black Petal is one way that I make sure these connections don't end.
What would you define as the overarching 'aesthetic' of your music - your approach to sound - etc.I already mentioned a few of the main things, and I dont want to analyse too much. But I think a lot about the structure of what I am playing. In terms of sound, I think carefully about the tone and texture of my notes; and I love beautiful melodic guitar playing. . I am extremely fussy about the notes I play.. most things sound wrong to my ears. I often want to play the most beautiful sounds possible. Maybe the main thing is that my playing is usually emotional, musical, and maybe even dramatic..
What has happened for you since your relocation to Tokyo? Do you feel your relationship to music has changed? You are working with different people - notably Hisato… Can you tell me what you make of the scene where you are?I don't want to be thought of as some kind of knowledgeable commentor on the Tokyo scene - I am pretty isolated and I cant speak Japanese as well as I should. But anyway....
Since I moved to Japan -I have been working as an English teacher to pay the bills and I work in the night, 5 days a week. Gigs in Tokyo either finish ridiculously early or go all night (partly due to the early finishing trains I guess) . The improv people to start the gigs early, finish the gigs early then go for the post-gig dinner until the last train.
For me, playing gigs on weekdays is impossible. Seeing gigs is also often impossible. I feel really isolated from nearly everyone that could be called a "peer" or "colleague".
The live scene is huge here. There are so many clubs, cafes, galleries, etc that have live music. Rock clubs are generally clean, well-run, way too expensive and don't interest me very much. A lot of clubs and other places make the bands pay rental charges, or pay-to-play, or expect a certain amount of ticket sales. A lot of younger bands are happy to do that, and the clubs neatly avoid a lot of the risk.
To be honest, I find a lot of the scene a bit too sterile and uninteresting. Not all, but a lot of it. I miss the energy and rawness that I felt in London and then Sydney..
That said, there are some great venues, some great organisers and some amazing musicians.
The scene of people like Sugimoto, Unami, Nakamura, Koike, etc put on a lot of gigs. Sugimoto and Unami seem to be the important presences, and it seems like many of the younger players are still in awe of Sugimoto, kind of like a mentor. I go to those gigs occassionally, but not too often. I do like the people involved very much, as musicians and people, but my ideas feel extremely different and incompatible.. can't really play with most of them.
My relationship to music has changed because I feel more isolated and I am not as active as I used to be. I have gone from playing a gig a week to play once every 1-2 months. I play solo more and more. The collaborations are very sporadic. Everyone is too busy.
But I guess for me, the things outside of music here is the exciting stuff.. regular life here is awesome and weird and inspiring. That keeps me going here. Definitely not the music scene. I only wanted to be around the music I truly love, I would camp outside Matt, Adam or Peter's house. In Tokyo I get more inspiration by looking at the streets, the old buildings and houses, the clutter, etc.. I like walking around lot.
