Carpe Noctem
Interview by CarnellVolume 5 Issue 1 1997
Borodubdor is located about 40km from Jogjakarta in the central most part of Java. It is the ruined site of a major Buddhist monument. Built over 1,100 years ago by a wealthy king of the Sailendra dynasty, the great shrine stands, constructed of dark-gray volcanic stone that possesses no interior spaces. The shrine rests on a square base measuring 121m on each side and consist of eight diminishing tiers of terraces connected by stairways. A huge Stupa, or bell shaped dome, rises over 30m from the uppermost terrace. Drifting over this placid setting is the music of the gamelan, an ensemble ranging from a few players to several dozen. The gamelan, with the exception of a few string and woodwind instruments, is a percussion group featuring xylophones, metallophones (tuned metal bars) and gongs. The various instruments are not interchangeable. for each orchestra has its own tuning. the gamelan can be coupled with the human voice and used to accompany dance and theater. Few people in the West are purveyors of this rare style of music which is said to have influenced the work of Claude Debussy. One of the few is Side Effects recording artist Loren Nerell whose latest release, Lilin Dewa, is an amazing listening experience.
Your bio states that Tangerine Dream's album Rubycon was a big influence on you.
Yeah, my initial interest in electronic music came from that.
What was it about that album that grabbed your attention and refocused you as to what you wanted to do in music?
I was actually really young when I heard that, I was fourteen or so. I heard it when it first came out. I'd never heard anything like that at the time. It was just so different than what I was normally used to hearing which at the time, was mostly pop music and some classical stuff. It took me a while to digest it, but once I got into it, I realized that this was something interesting that I wanted to pursue more.
Growing up, were you always doing music? Was that a thing your parents wanted you to do? I mean was it music lessons and that whole thing?
I took music lessons. It was more my idea. My parents never forced me into it. I started off on trumpet, then switched to tuba of all things, took piano lessons and studied some other instruments.
Throughout your history, you seem to have consistently backed up your natural ability in music with a lot of academic education. Do you think that it is an important thing to get a solid educational background in music as opposed to just getting out there and learning some "chops?"
I think an education is an important thing but it doesn't have to be scholastic and it doesn't have to be musical, either. I think it depends on what one wants to do. If someone is interested in western classical music, then a scholastic education is probably the best, because that's what most institutions are geared towards. But if someone wants to do something like what I am doing, then where does one go? To me it just seemed that scholarship was a natural course for me to follow and it was more of a personal goal than anything. In the end I think someone just has to follow what they feel is best for themselves.
I notice that you have a BS in Anthropology and Geography. How does that dove-tail into the music?
Well, that came about through a couple of things. The first, when I was really young, my folks and I spent two whole summers in Mexico traveling around visiting all the pyramids and the ancient sites built by the Mayans and Aztecs. That piqued my interest in anthropology a bit at a very young age. I got into it musically, later on when I was in college I got introduced to gamelan music, so that got me interested in going back and pursuing that end. For me, I felt the best place for me to learn about other cultures music was by studying anthropology and ethnomusicology, both of which helped me not just by showing me musically what is possible, but by showing me how other cultures view music.
You are heading in a distinct direction where there are a lot of gamelan influences. Why particularly that style of music?
Actually, it's something that I've been pursuing for a number of years. Even on my first album there's a bit of gamelan influence on it. I don't know if you've recognized that or not. So, that's something I've really been interested in pursuing. my introduction to gamelan music had a very similar reaction on me as the Rubycon album did years earlier. They both just seemed to resonate something similar inside of me. Because of this, I wanted to try and incorporate the two together. I found the gamelan stuff to be a natural counter-point to go along with the electronics stuff.
Do you feel that since a lot of the electronics is just that-electronic and therefore somewhat cold-does the ethnomusicality ground it and bring it back into the human?
I think so. See, electronics don't have to be cold, I feel. I mean, they can definitely have a life of their own and they can be very organic and acoustic if treated properly. Having a little of the acoustic element helps, in the long run.
You've written for film, theater, dance and interactive media. What can you tell me about these projects?
Actually, I haven't done that much. I've done a bit of each of those. The most recent thing I did was the background music for a CD-ROM magazine called Launch, They've been using my music for about the last six months now. The one film I did was a student film called In The Aquarium that was a graduate student's master thesis film. It was a short animated project, kind of an experimental thing.
Is that something you'd want to do more of?
Yeah, I wouldn't mind doing more of that. It was an interesting experience, I enjoyed it, I don't think I would want it to be my main focus.
You don't want to be Jerry Goldsmith...
Yeah, exactly. [laughs] I know people who do that for a living and it just seems that the film business takes them over, creatively, and once they get into it they lose their edge.
It becomes "not music for music's sake, but music to fit when the shark swims by."
It's such a competitive business and because of that you don't have the final say. I don't think it can really be a very creative outlet because the director ultimately has the final say and that's just a small aspect of the whole picture.
I see a lot of situations where someone will pour his heart out into an hour or so of music and, if the film isn't working right, the first thing that gets cut is the score. So, the theater and dance stuff, was that mostly in college as well?
Yeah, the last thing I did was about two years ago at UCLA. It was an experimental thing called kijang Raja. The woman who directed the play took an old Italian Comedie D'Arte, a comedy play called The Stag King. She took the elements of it looked at it, and thought, "Well, this would be interesting to throw it into an Indonesian or South East Asian theater using their techniques of dance, movement and music." She took all of her students and dressed them up and taught them to move certain ways such as they do in the theater there and we used the gamelan as the music to accompany it. I was the music director for that.
Walking away from those projects, what lessons did you learn from them that have helped you subsequently in the music that you are making now?
At the time, I was working on my album, so it had a direct influence. Actually, the third piece on the album came out of that. It was a distilled version of what I was doing. Aside from that it was a growth experience. I learned a lot about how to deal with a lot of people. if I ever do something like that again, one thing I felt that I needed more of was rehearsal time with the group. We got really short shifted on that because the whole emphasis was on the theater production part.
You performed all of this stuff live or was it all on tape?
It was all live, we did four performances.
So that's even more plates spinning.
Yeah, we had about a dozen people who were preforming the music. It was all just acoustics. I didn't use any electronics on this. I mainly used the gamelan. I wrote some music for the gamelan and then I took some other bits that I had learned of different compositions from Bali and Java and threw them in. It was an interesting experience. There was some talk about taking it to some theater festival in Scotland, but that hasn't happened yet.
You performed with the Kronos Quartet. How was that?
That was another interesting experience. Again, that was at UCLA. They spent a week in residence in the Ethnomusicology Department. Basically, their residency culminated with a concert at the end of the week with them using various ensembles that perform at UCLA. They performed with the Near East Ensemble, African Ensemble, some Chinese musicians and we did a piece with them on the gamelan.
What can you tell be about your thesis on lelambatan?
That's not a very well known term outside of Bali, but it's the most well known music in Bali. Every village uses this music to some extent. It's the ceremonial music for their temple ceremonies. Every village has at least one major temple, and every temple has to have at least one gamelan to accompany their ceremonies, many have more, and lelambatan is the music they perform. It's basically your traditional gamelan ensemble, but they have an instrument called a "trompong" which is like a solo, virtuosic instrument. Each piece last about twenty to thirty minutes long with this one person playing the whole solo with the gamelan accompanying him. They'll play maybe six, eight, ten pieces during a ceremony of this style. The music is not meant for the people who attend these ceremonies, but for the god's enjoyment.
I'm noticing a lot of interest in ambient music in general and ethno-ambient in particular. Do you think this is an interest of the day and a passing phase or do you think that it means that the future is looking bright for that sub-genre?
I think it's probably both, actually. There are certain people who just see it as a new flavor to try, but I also think there is also a lot of people who are seriously interested in it and are willing to pursue this more and want to hear more of this stuff.
At times, there is a dark-ish tone to some of your music, yet it still gives off this great feeling of peace, warmth and contentment. Which do you feel is closer to the initial vision that you have when you are writing it?
Maybe the question is just a balance, you know? Usually when I start a piece it comes from an idea and may just be a fragment which I expand upon from there. I think the darker tones are just something I normally tend to gravitate towards. They tend to be the tricks I know. [laughs] The musical tricks I know. The ones you use a lot of. So, they are probably are just things that are always there, kind of the baggage I drag along with me, but in the end I'm just trying to find a balance between these two sides.
Do you go into writing a piece with a distinct idea you want to get across or a mood you want to create or is it just noodling?
Not so much noodling any more. It depends upon the piece. The first piece on the album, Irama, that was a purely musical idea. There is this style of gamelan in Java called Sekatan. It's this old style that dates back about five hundred years. They only play it once a year, the week of Mohammed's birthday, and they play it all day every day during that week. When I was there last, I had the opportunity to spend two whole days recording one of the two groups that was playing this stuff. Because of that, I became really interested in this style. I wanted to do something like that, but do it in my own style. So, that's how that came about.The opposite of that would probably be the last piece on the album, Borobudor 4 AM, that came from some field recordings. Again, I did it in Java, at the Borobudor, which is the largest Buddhist Stupa in the world. I recorded that, actually at four AM, which is about the time that all of the Muslim mosques start their call to prayer. The Borobudor is situated in this valley which is completely surrounded by mosques, which is why there are all of these different voices bouncing off all over the place. Those recordings really intrigued me.
Were your first couple of albums done strictly through direct sales or did you have a distributor for them?
I had some distributors, but mostly in Europe. Because they were cassette only releases, a lot of people weren't interested in them. I had a lot of comments like, "God, if this was on LP or CD, I could sell a hundred of these, but since it's only on cassette, I could only sell ten." But at the time I just couldn't afford to put them out on anything other than cassette.
How is the interest in your music from shore to shore, in America as opposed to Europe?
The people who hear it seem to like it. It's hard to say because most of my distribution was in Europe, so that's where I heard the most comments.
Will the music always be a documentation process for you or, of course you'd like to make some money at this and make a big splash there, but is that a concern for you? Do you ever think, "Well I should do this because that will help to sell more CDs."
It that was a concern, I would probably be doing more pop music. Let's face it, Michael Jackson and Madonna aren't going to be afraid of my album when it hits the shelves. it's not going to affect their sales. No, I'm more interested in the music than the monetary aspects. It would be nice to be able to make a living at it, and hopefully, some day that may happen, but I want it to occur because of the music, not because of the masses.
Once you get your Masters, what's next?
Oh, that's a good question. [laughs] I'm still trying to figure that out, I mean, I'm own this road. I could keep going on to the Ph.D and then go on and teach somewhere. That would take care of the monetary aspect. I could survive that way. At this point, I may end up doing that. I'm not sure yet.
Not a bad way to go...
There are worse things to do. [laughs]
Now that your new album, Lilin Dewa, is out, is there another album in the offing? Is it just more school and then more research?
I have a couple of things that I'm working on right now. There's going to be a track on the next Twilight Earth compilation. They are doing a volume three and they asked me to do a track for that. I may do one of those mini-CDs for Amplexus. That's going to be called The Venerable Dark Cloud.
I think it's interesting from what I've heard of your music that there seems to be a really great dove-tailing of a lot of different style and a lot of different influences and you seem to pull it off without it seeming, not contrived, but it was a conscious effort. It all flows together naturally and I think that's really great.
Thanks, that's really the point. If it all seems natural together then I know it's worked.
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