Various Interviews
SAND SNOWMAN: THE WORLD'S NOT WORTH IT INTERVIEW(2011)
i seem to recall there being a james bond film from the mid 90’s called “the world is not enough” which - having not seen it - i imagine to concern the power-crazed antics of some arch villain, and the “world” referred to would be that of tyranny, dominance and mass recognition, as opposed to making a decent living, doing what you love and treasuring your brief tenure on this charming little blue planet. the former world, that of a sort of darwinian division of “winners” and “losers”, with its demand that one validates one’s existence by attaining influence and power over others - that world is certainly not worth it, to me and perhaps any artist who is more concerned with quietly honing their craft than with demanding recognition for its own sake. whilst art alone doesn’t pay the bills (well, not mine anyway), one should perhaps be satisfied with the opportunity of devoting as much of one’s life to one’s work as possible, with a modicum of peer recognition for encouragement, and not be overly concerned if “the world won’t listen” (the smiths/morrissey). after all, why should the world listen? nobody’s entitled to an audience and there is probably always someone more talented, worthy and overlooked than oneself.
tf: you’ve managed to make arrangements even more complex and unpredictable, while actually working with a slimmer palette than on some of your previous albums. what were some of the considerations for these two new works in terms of composition, mood, colour and orchestration?
i think i was aiming for a bit more clarity. when one is working with material that moves slightly beyond the more instantly accessible or recognizable, it’s easy for it all to sound a bit of a muddle, with lines, harmonies and counterpoint getting lost under a mass of pure sound. whilst i love psychedelic swathes of sound, i’m ultimately following the dictate of what the music requires, rather than just letting rip or adding layers for the hell of it.
tf: influences from the world of classical music seem to have become more explicit than ever.
as an untrained, illiterate musician, the world of classical/art music excites me with its formal/harmonic extension - and there is so much one can still do with melody, harmony and timbre - as well as being unsullied by fads and fashions. it’s generally unfashionable/uncool which is a plus for me. also, the late 19th century orchestra is still one of the richest sound palettes available to any music maker; if, like me, you have neither the resources or training to marshall such forces, you can re-imagine what you do have and aspire to a broader sense of dynamics and timbre. my musical holy trinity is probably ravel, debussy and scriabin and i, rather hopelessly if romantically uninhibited, am moved to approximate some of the otherworldy beauty and sensual richness i hear in their work.
tf: how did these ideals manifest themselves in a track like „under the stares“?
i was indulging in a thought experiment of incongruous pairings, in this instance, what might happen if js bach bumped into messiaen - the track “system failure” on “vanished chapters” is another of these, with mwandishi- era herbie hancock jamming with the slits. for some time, i’ve been intoxicated with the insistent ostinatos and eastern-european folk inspired melodies of bartók and, to a lesser extent, prokofiev and shostakovitch. in “elemental temple” i’ve sought to wed these, as a concluding and somewhat manic ritual dance, to a passage of ethereal scriabin/messiaen-esque stillness. out of the temple, into the fields.
tf: tell me a bit about the collaborations with steven wilson and amandine ferrari.
being, as i am, a non-singer, i always have to give some thought to both „singability“ and vocal suitability of my material. i’ve been very fortunate with the vocalists who have done me the honour of singing my songs. steven has a superb clear tone and an excellent range, but is capable of embuing so much feeling and suggestion, sometimes with an almost conversational quality, as if discoursing an inner dialogue. this is very much what i was after for the track „a life rehearsed“ where steven sounds distant, reserved and yet teetering on the brink of the abyss. amandine is an incredibly talented singer, musician and writer, as well as a cherished friend and, like steven, has an excellent range and can inhabit so many different vocal characters. she can sound like a chorister, with haunting purity that seems to summon the angels, but then shift to an almost sinister elemental quality, leaving the listener in a strange and frightening landscape. this is precisely the kind of jump/stop juxtaposition that i’d be delighted to hear in my own instrumental domain.
tf: what, from your perspective, makes the world’s not worth it the „official“ album and vanished chapters the „bonus“ record?
to return to the world of classical/art music; it was, i think, commonly accepted that a composer’s oeuvre would comprise of “outer” and “inner” works, with the former being inhabited by the large- scale “public” pieces (symphonies, ballets, opera) and the latter by more esoteric and specialized works, such as études and chamber pieces, for example. the world’s not worth it, with its occasionally defined song structures, vocals and guest players, is more outer than vanished chapters, which is, initially, for initiates but, one hopes, might someday make it’s quiet way along the little path forged by it’s marginally more extroverted sibling. if you actually play them back to back, they seem to merge quite well, with „the rebel’s rulebook“ leading into „transfigured forest“ - well, both are in the same key. they are related insofar as one looks out at aspects of the world before, with the other, withdrawing once again.
tf: you hardly do any promotion for your albums, only release something when you feel the time is right rather than working towards official deadlines and collaborate with a small, but dedicated circle of musicians. is this your way of counterpointing the pervasive tendency of „easy accessibility“ and the cult of beauty?
well, i’d love to think i’m providing the listener with something that’s not readily available elsewhere, otherwise i wouldn’t bother releasing anything; there’s already a super-abundance of recorded music available, most of it for free and much of it quite wonderful. one could, concievably, spend the rest of one’s life hunting down great music and never running out. for the contemporary artist/musician there is the great liberation of cheaply available recording technology (no more dodgy demos recorded in dead studio time... oh happy day). and, with so many people making and distributing music there is, aesthetic considerations aside, little point in creatively confining oneself in the desperate hope of „making it“. regarding promotion, i wouldn’t know where to begin, really. all i know is that one can expend all of one’s energy trying to draw attention to oneself - for which i’m too impractical, reticent and, most importantly, immersed in my work to do. moonswift and i plan to do more gigs (and plan to add percussion and electric guitar) as, in this day and age, it seems one has to play live in order to be heard, and if you are making music for anyone other than yourself, you have to get behind it. your albums are your babies and you must do as best to safely establish for them an existence independent from you. saying this, however, i’m not entirely comfortable with gigging, but remind myself of how much i enjoyed the tonefloat gigs - especially the last one with moonswift - and this acts as a spur.
tf: there are bigger social topics running underneath this, aren’t there?
we seem to be living in an age of coarse desperation, whereby the „shock of the new“ is now as depressingly predictable as it is instantly forgettable, the law of diminishing returns meaning that the dosage (of volume, vulgarity, violence etc) must, has and will be upped to the point that real horror (genocide, famine etc..) have a sense of the numbly familiar, as if one is simply re-watching an old film. what this does to our humanity, let alone aesthetic or creative faculties, is disturbing and potentially debilitating- with one wondering why, and for whom, one bothers. however, one has a choice (turn off the tv, throw down the „newspaper“) and one can make a difference (any scale is valid). there have always been bad times and we, as a species, have always required, or aspired to, beauty. if, in any capacity, one can offer beauty or some kind of fightback against the tide of dullness, ugliness and cliche, one is perhaps duty-bound to act. if you ever feel like „not bothering“ or giving up, it’s worth calling to mind any artist you love and considering what your life, or the world, would be like had they not bothered.
Evening Of Light interview Feb 2009
'I'm Not Here', by Sand
Interview by O.S. & D.M.K.; All images property of Sand Snowman.
London-based musician and composer Sand Snowman
has been releasing his unique material since 2006, also the year in
which our website started. We’ve followed Sand from humble MP3
beginnings to where he is today: beautiful releases on CD and vinyl.
Together with other artists from the Dutch tonefloat label, he paid a
visit to our country in early february for a concert and some
interviews, and he will return at the end of March.
We encountered Sand in the KinkFM radio studio, where he performed on the experimental and avantgarde show X-Rated. Just after that, we had a pleasant chat in the station’s lounge with some tea and wine, and the chance to ask Sand about his music, Irish background, art, and much more.
Our thanks go out to Charles of tonefloat and Arjen & Bob of X-Rated for hosting this interview.
We encountered Sand in the KinkFM radio studio, where he performed on the experimental and avantgarde show X-Rated. Just after that, we had a pleasant chat in the station’s lounge with some tea and wine, and the chance to ask Sand about his music, Irish background, art, and much more.
Our thanks go out to Charles of tonefloat and Arjen & Bob of X-Rated for hosting this interview.
O.S. & D.M.K.: What can
you tell us about the development of the whole project, because Moth
Dream was the first album, back when Woven Wheat Whispers still existed,
but it’s only been 3 years or less. It’s a big step from an MP3 release
to these beautiful vinyl things on Tonefloat, so… what happened in
between?
Sand: I really don’t know [laughs]. I think when you put something out into the world, into the ether, you’ve a vague hope- for example when I did Moth Dream/ Obsessive Creatures in America, I had no guarantee whatsoever that anyone was going to listen to it, let alone that it would actually find a home anywhere. So, I don’t know...I'd put it out there and just see what would happen. As it has transpired, I think it’s been perfect for me, because it’s allowed me some time to develop what I was doing, but without taking too long for this to happen and lose interest.
So then you put out some limited CDr’s on Reverb Worship and Time Lag. How’d you make the step to that?
I think I would’ve had Moth Dream available on Woven Wheat Whispers. I like Six Organs of Admittance,
I remember looking something up on them through Time Lag. I just sent
the label an email and said, you know, “I’m doing stuff. You’re not
obliged to listen to it.” He sent me an email back and said “Yeah, I’d
love to hear some.” So I sent him a CD and he said “Yeah, that’d be
great, I’d love to do a little run of ‘em.” I did “I’m not here” and that’s one that came again on Woven Wheat Whispers, I guess the end of 2006 for “I’m not here”, the end of 2007 for The Twilight Game,
and Roger from Reverb Worship just contacted me through MySpace and
said, “I noticed you have some things available through download, would
you like a CDr-run?” -”OK, great,” you know? So, it happens kind of in
step with what I was doing.
The first release you did was all instrumental, and then suddenly on “I’m not here” there’s two ladies singing, so how did that happen?
I know it’s strange, I’m not quite sure myself, but I think with “I’m not here”, because it was the first concentrated album I did and, like writers say; the first novel is autobiographical, or that you’re working through a lot of your influences, and a lot of the sonic, purely instrumental ideas I had, on the first album I had a lot of room to explore with that. When I started writing the material for “I’m not here” or when the ideas started coming to me, a lot of them were in song form and I thought it’d be nice to still have a kind of continual music, still a continual instrumental tone experience, but to have some song structures just popping up every now and then. Moonswift is my long-term partner, so uhm… “honey, can you do some singing”. I just put the microphone in front of her. I met this girl Nyx and just gave her some backing tracks I had and said “you can do what you want over it,”. It could open up what I was doing so it wasn’t all dependent on me, because I was still, I think, a bit tentative about writing lyrics and song structures myself.
You do write all of that yourself?
Yes.
Now on the new album, there’s some male vocals added and also a bit on The Twilight Game, so who’s responsible for all of that?
Right, on The Twilight Game I got a friend of mine, Jerome, to do some vocals. One night he said “Actually I do some singing, so if you want some male vocals…” I thought yeah, just for balance, because I like the underpinning of the voices. Also on The Twilight Game Jo Lepine who sings with The Owl Service did some singing for me as well, so I thought, great, because I like polyphonic vocal lines. I’m not really a singer myself, and I’ve been told that by singers that a lot of my lines aren’t that easy to sing, because I think of them as melodic lines or just instrumental melodic lines. I think polyphonically, and I like the idea of having lots of harmonies and as many textured layers vocally as are there instrumentally. It’s just been a continuation of that. In the songs I’m working on at the moment I’ve already used three vocals, and I’ve got another three or four in mind to work with.
So, and what about the new album? There’s Jason Ninnis and Steven Wilson, so…
Jason’s a friend of mine, a singer/songwriter from London, and again
it was one of these things, one evening he said you know “If you want
some vocals sometimes.” – “Yeah, great, here we go, that’d be ideal.”
And Steven – because I did some playing on his album, he said “If you want
some singing done…” – “Excellent, that’s great.” It was a question as
well of thinking of what songs in terms of lyrics and melody suit what
voices, and the two that Steven sang, well they’re really ideal in my
head for his voice, and I’m very very happy with the way they turned
out.
So how did you get in touch with Steven?
Steven got in touch with me, because the chap at Reverb Worship must have sent Steven a CD. There were a limited edition of 50 copies each, and Steven sent me an email along the lines of “I’m really impressed with your work and I think that maybe more than 50 people should hear it.” So, it just went on from there. Steven passed “I’m not here” and The Twilight Game on to Charles [from Tonefloat] and… good fortune, really. [laughs]
Will you rerelease Moth Dream someday?
Possibly Obsessive Creatures, the American version, the reason being because that, as I said earlier, I just can’t find two of the masters for the tracks on Moth Dream. But, I’m not too bothered, because there’s the three tracks “Serpentine”, “Moth Dream” and “Light, Space, Shadow” I’m very happy with, and I wrote this other one around the time, which was on the American issue, “Obsessive Creatures and Caricatures”. It may be issued in that format...four fairly long instrumental pieces. Maybe…
But the entire album is lost, because you lost some of the master tracks?
Yeah, I don’t have three of the tracks. Also, unlike “I’m not here”, The Twilight Game and Two Way Mirror, this album didn’t present itself as an entire entity to me. Because, to me, the structure of an album is as important as the individual tracks on it, the moods and the contrast to each other. Probably because Moth Dream, my first one, is more a question of ‘I like these, got them done now, put them together.’ When I finished, I started work pretty much immediately on “I’m not here”, so I was just taken up with that. So, the masters of a couple of songs just got mislaid. They’re somewhere in my flat, but that’s The Twilight Zone essentially, so they may at some stage turn up. [laughs]
One day… when you move into a new place or something. [all laugh]
And what about this Flicker Fading Spark EP, because that’s also disappeared along with Woven Wheat Whispers.
Well, I do have the masters for those, because I'd started working on The Twilight Game. It’s weird because it was actually another project, and The Twilight Game took over. One of the tracks on the Flicker Fading Spark EP, “Magpie Eye”, is from a longer piece that became “I Spy”, the second track on Two Way Mirror. I had basically done the backing track of this 8-minute piece and I thought ‘I’m going to get singing on the first part. The rest of it, I’m not sure if singing will work with it… .’ Also, because I thought that if I was going to do an EP to predate the album, it would be good to have a couple of tracks that don’t appear anywhere else. But I do actually have them… [laughs] I was a bit more sensible. [laughs]
OK, so then we’ve made it to the new album, basically. It’s going to be released this month, so what’s a bit of the background behind Two Way Mirror in terms of concepts and writing? How’d you compose it?
Uhm… ooh sorry, there might be a pause… [laughs] I’ll think about that one in silence…
You know, the first 500 CDs have an extra album, The Magpie House. It’s basically a kind of continuum: The Twilight Game, The Magpie House and Two Way Mirror. What I started with for The Twilight Game had some of the material that ended up on The Magpie House. Then I thought you know, ‘I’ll use that in the next one.’ But then other ideas presented themselves. I wanted a different colour and feel to previous albums. I mean, “I’m not here” to me sounds kind of like summer evening or woodland at sundown. The Twilight Game reminds me of a nighttime sky, a wintry sky, and Two Way Mirror puts me in mind of skies of clouds and kites and things like that.
Where does The Magpie House fit in in terms of ideas and concepts?
I have a thing about magpies, I paint and draw them, I really love them and the idea of them going around and gathering these things that are shiny and glittery. I had this dream of this house with all these magpies in it, with wooden beams and thought ‘house, magpies, magpie house!’ That’s something else, me just gathering these fragments of myself from wherever. The album itself, where it would fit in, would be that it’s the underpinning of say, mainly The Twilight Game and Two Way Mirror, it’s material that was actually happening concurrent to that. Not so much outtakes, they just didn’t fit in with the structure and concept of those ones. But it was in its own way kind of essential, because it’s what was going on as well.
Do you think that dreams have special meanings?
I do, yeah…
Are they also an important inspiration for you? For your songs?
Certainly the unconscious or the subconscious…
Which speaks to you through dreams, yeah…
Or just impressions, I mean, it can be- when we left from the city airport, this industrial area, and it was cold, but there was this intense sunlight coming through. I find that these feelings- I see something like that and automatically a piece of music stars presenting itself to me then. So it can be dreams, but just impressions, subconscious impressions, impressions that are outside of time or a kind of material concept of reality.
And then the music comes to you, yeah, and you have to give it shape?
Yeah, and that’s what music is, giving shape to a very vague feeling, an impression, it’s giving form, structure…
[all laugh]
Speaking of this kind of thing, if one looks at your MySpace, they’ll quickly realise that you’re also a painter, so how did that start for you, and in what way is it intertwined with your musical expression?
Yeah, well, my mum’s an artist, I was drawing before I could write or any of that. I love it and also it’s a great respite from having to think in terms of sound. It really does cross over for me in terms of music though it’s hard to explain because it’s a feeling, a sensation, you know. But I think they are- I find that there might be an idea or a concept that’s presented in an album, and there’s kind of an overspill into the paintings. I might do a painting or a song that I myself don’t really like that much but it feels absolutely right. In a way it’s kind of outside my own judgement. And I like to be as much outside of my own judgement as possible. So in a way it’s not something that I have that much control over. I quite like that. [laughs]
And apart from MySpace – you’ve used it for some of the earlier album covers, but do you also do exhibitions or something like that?
Uhm, the last exhibition I did was… nearly two years ago. [laughs] I
very very rarely do, to be honest, because
of just the logistics, sorting it out and having to get people there and
stuff. I know it might sound strange, but I don’t actually feel a great
pressure to sell my stuff, or even have it seen. It happens, it exists.
I think it’s the world we live in, where we feel that things have to be
qualified by being seen and heard. In a way, its me being an
artistic meanie, keeping it to myself, you know. [laughs] But it’s not
deliberate like that, you know. I very, very rarely exhibit, and probably
the main reason for why is that the priority
is music. That’s my main purpose essentially. The painting is more
*for* me, it’s more of an indulgence for myself.
Is there for you a difference between musical and visual expression?
Yes, because music, to me, is entirely abstract from material reality, from what we see and hear and experience. Music, apart from birdsong and natural sound, is a totally abstract concept. Most of the other art forms, I think, come some way out of our experience. I think visual art has always been, through all cultures, representational. European art is in some way kind of an abstraction from real life, but it is based pretty much on the world that you see, you know. And I think it’s the same with literature, poetry, because it uses language, by which we communicate. Music is just something else entirely.
Perhaps more direct, sometimes at least. Speaking to your feelings, or at least that’s a way to experience it.
Well, that’s it, because it has a main line into your feelings, your subsconscious.
And what about literature or poetry? Does that influence you in your music in any way? Or your painting…
Sand: I really don’t know [laughs]. I think when you put something out into the world, into the ether, you’ve a vague hope- for example when I did Moth Dream/ Obsessive Creatures in America, I had no guarantee whatsoever that anyone was going to listen to it, let alone that it would actually find a home anywhere. So, I don’t know...I'd put it out there and just see what would happen. As it has transpired, I think it’s been perfect for me, because it’s allowed me some time to develop what I was doing, but without taking too long for this to happen and lose interest.
'Moth Dream'
I think I would’ve had Moth Dream available on Woven Wheat Whispers. I like Six Organs of Admittance,
I remember looking something up on them through Time Lag. I just sent
the label an email and said, you know, “I’m doing stuff. You’re not
obliged to listen to it.” He sent me an email back and said “Yeah, I’d
love to hear some.” So I sent him a CD and he said “Yeah, that’d be
great, I’d love to do a little run of ‘em.” I did “I’m not here” and that’s one that came again on Woven Wheat Whispers, I guess the end of 2006 for “I’m not here”, the end of 2007 for The Twilight Game,
and Roger from Reverb Worship just contacted me through MySpace and
said, “I noticed you have some things available through download, would
you like a CDr-run?” -”OK, great,” you know? So, it happens kind of in
step with what I was doing.The first release you did was all instrumental, and then suddenly on “I’m not here” there’s two ladies singing, so how did that happen?
I know it’s strange, I’m not quite sure myself, but I think with “I’m not here”, because it was the first concentrated album I did and, like writers say; the first novel is autobiographical, or that you’re working through a lot of your influences, and a lot of the sonic, purely instrumental ideas I had, on the first album I had a lot of room to explore with that. When I started writing the material for “I’m not here” or when the ideas started coming to me, a lot of them were in song form and I thought it’d be nice to still have a kind of continual music, still a continual instrumental tone experience, but to have some song structures just popping up every now and then. Moonswift is my long-term partner, so uhm… “honey, can you do some singing”. I just put the microphone in front of her. I met this girl Nyx and just gave her some backing tracks I had and said “you can do what you want over it,”. It could open up what I was doing so it wasn’t all dependent on me, because I was still, I think, a bit tentative about writing lyrics and song structures myself.
You do write all of that yourself?
Yes.
Now on the new album, there’s some male vocals added and also a bit on The Twilight Game, so who’s responsible for all of that?
Right, on The Twilight Game I got a friend of mine, Jerome, to do some vocals. One night he said “Actually I do some singing, so if you want some male vocals…” I thought yeah, just for balance, because I like the underpinning of the voices. Also on The Twilight Game Jo Lepine who sings with The Owl Service did some singing for me as well, so I thought, great, because I like polyphonic vocal lines. I’m not really a singer myself, and I’ve been told that by singers that a lot of my lines aren’t that easy to sing, because I think of them as melodic lines or just instrumental melodic lines. I think polyphonically, and I like the idea of having lots of harmonies and as many textured layers vocally as are there instrumentally. It’s just been a continuation of that. In the songs I’m working on at the moment I’ve already used three vocals, and I’ve got another three or four in mind to work with.
So, and what about the new album? There’s Jason Ninnis and Steven Wilson, so…
'Two Way Mirror', CD version, artwork by Carl Glover
So how did you get in touch with Steven?
Steven got in touch with me, because the chap at Reverb Worship must have sent Steven a CD. There were a limited edition of 50 copies each, and Steven sent me an email along the lines of “I’m really impressed with your work and I think that maybe more than 50 people should hear it.” So, it just went on from there. Steven passed “I’m not here” and The Twilight Game on to Charles [from Tonefloat] and… good fortune, really. [laughs]
Will you rerelease Moth Dream someday?
Possibly Obsessive Creatures, the American version, the reason being because that, as I said earlier, I just can’t find two of the masters for the tracks on Moth Dream. But, I’m not too bothered, because there’s the three tracks “Serpentine”, “Moth Dream” and “Light, Space, Shadow” I’m very happy with, and I wrote this other one around the time, which was on the American issue, “Obsessive Creatures and Caricatures”. It may be issued in that format...four fairly long instrumental pieces. Maybe…
But the entire album is lost, because you lost some of the master tracks?
Yeah, I don’t have three of the tracks. Also, unlike “I’m not here”, The Twilight Game and Two Way Mirror, this album didn’t present itself as an entire entity to me. Because, to me, the structure of an album is as important as the individual tracks on it, the moods and the contrast to each other. Probably because Moth Dream, my first one, is more a question of ‘I like these, got them done now, put them together.’ When I finished, I started work pretty much immediately on “I’m not here”, so I was just taken up with that. So, the masters of a couple of songs just got mislaid. They’re somewhere in my flat, but that’s The Twilight Zone essentially, so they may at some stage turn up. [laughs]
One day… when you move into a new place or something. [all laugh]
'Flicker Fading Spark' EP
Well, I do have the masters for those, because I'd started working on The Twilight Game. It’s weird because it was actually another project, and The Twilight Game took over. One of the tracks on the Flicker Fading Spark EP, “Magpie Eye”, is from a longer piece that became “I Spy”, the second track on Two Way Mirror. I had basically done the backing track of this 8-minute piece and I thought ‘I’m going to get singing on the first part. The rest of it, I’m not sure if singing will work with it… .’ Also, because I thought that if I was going to do an EP to predate the album, it would be good to have a couple of tracks that don’t appear anywhere else. But I do actually have them… [laughs] I was a bit more sensible. [laughs]
OK, so then we’ve made it to the new album, basically. It’s going to be released this month, so what’s a bit of the background behind Two Way Mirror in terms of concepts and writing? How’d you compose it?
Uhm… ooh sorry, there might be a pause… [laughs] I’ll think about that one in silence…
You know, the first 500 CDs have an extra album, The Magpie House. It’s basically a kind of continuum: The Twilight Game, The Magpie House and Two Way Mirror. What I started with for The Twilight Game had some of the material that ended up on The Magpie House. Then I thought you know, ‘I’ll use that in the next one.’ But then other ideas presented themselves. I wanted a different colour and feel to previous albums. I mean, “I’m not here” to me sounds kind of like summer evening or woodland at sundown. The Twilight Game reminds me of a nighttime sky, a wintry sky, and Two Way Mirror puts me in mind of skies of clouds and kites and things like that.
Where does The Magpie House fit in in terms of ideas and concepts?
I have a thing about magpies, I paint and draw them, I really love them and the idea of them going around and gathering these things that are shiny and glittery. I had this dream of this house with all these magpies in it, with wooden beams and thought ‘house, magpies, magpie house!’ That’s something else, me just gathering these fragments of myself from wherever. The album itself, where it would fit in, would be that it’s the underpinning of say, mainly The Twilight Game and Two Way Mirror, it’s material that was actually happening concurrent to that. Not so much outtakes, they just didn’t fit in with the structure and concept of those ones. But it was in its own way kind of essential, because it’s what was going on as well.
Do you think that dreams have special meanings?
I do, yeah…
Are they also an important inspiration for you? For your songs?
Certainly the unconscious or the subconscious…
Which speaks to you through dreams, yeah…
Or just impressions, I mean, it can be- when we left from the city airport, this industrial area, and it was cold, but there was this intense sunlight coming through. I find that these feelings- I see something like that and automatically a piece of music stars presenting itself to me then. So it can be dreams, but just impressions, subconscious impressions, impressions that are outside of time or a kind of material concept of reality.
And then the music comes to you, yeah, and you have to give it shape?
Yeah, and that’s what music is, giving shape to a very vague feeling, an impression, it’s giving form, structure…
[all laugh]
Speaking of this kind of thing, if one looks at your MySpace, they’ll quickly realise that you’re also a painter, so how did that start for you, and in what way is it intertwined with your musical expression?
Yeah, well, my mum’s an artist, I was drawing before I could write or any of that. I love it and also it’s a great respite from having to think in terms of sound. It really does cross over for me in terms of music though it’s hard to explain because it’s a feeling, a sensation, you know. But I think they are- I find that there might be an idea or a concept that’s presented in an album, and there’s kind of an overspill into the paintings. I might do a painting or a song that I myself don’t really like that much but it feels absolutely right. In a way it’s kind of outside my own judgement. And I like to be as much outside of my own judgement as possible. So in a way it’s not something that I have that much control over. I quite like that. [laughs]
And apart from MySpace – you’ve used it for some of the earlier album covers, but do you also do exhibitions or something like that?
'Flicker, Falter, Fading Spark', by Sand
Is there for you a difference between musical and visual expression?
Yes, because music, to me, is entirely abstract from material reality, from what we see and hear and experience. Music, apart from birdsong and natural sound, is a totally abstract concept. Most of the other art forms, I think, come some way out of our experience. I think visual art has always been, through all cultures, representational. European art is in some way kind of an abstraction from real life, but it is based pretty much on the world that you see, you know. And I think it’s the same with literature, poetry, because it uses language, by which we communicate. Music is just something else entirely.
Perhaps more direct, sometimes at least. Speaking to your feelings, or at least that’s a way to experience it.
Well, that’s it, because it has a main line into your feelings, your subsconscious.
And what about literature or poetry? Does that influence you in your music in any way? Or your painting…
Very little, but… James Joyce is a big influence on me. Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake,
where you have parallel worlds, parallel takes on things happening at
once. Because music was an influence for him, instead of telling a story...a sentence like “he went out of” he’d have these compound words, because
he was trying to get polyphony in writing. But it’s a way to
look at reality that’s had a huge influence on me, you
know. When I read about Finnegan’s Wake, which I haven’t read – I love Ulysses, but I haven’t been able to get through Finnegan’s Wake.
[laughs] OK.
But the idea is absolutely mindblowing for me.
Why is it so difficult to get through for you?
Finnegan’s Wake? I think it’s having a primer first, it’s recognising the code, because with Joyce you have references to Greek mythology or the using of musical forms like fugues, so the first time you read it it’s… you know. I'd read about Ulysses quite a lot before I actually read it, so I had a primer and was prepared for it. Because Finnegan’s Wake is a dream, kind of underwater, and very hard to penetrate. I understand it is about a dream reality, and also the thing of a wake[1]- “Finnegan’s Wake” is an Irish song. There’s also Fionn again, the coming of Fionn mac Cumhaill [wiki], this Irish mythological hero. It’s the return of the hero, which is going through all of Joyce’s literature. The main character, it’s all the hero’s voyage. Except in the last, in Finnegan’s Wake, the voyage is in a dream. It’s dream logic, he has strange juxtapositions and you don’t know where you are [laughs]. His language is beautiful, but I don’t know what he’s saying [laughs]. You know, but I’ll go back to it in time.
Maybe then it’s a bit more like music.
Yeah, it is.
If you read the words, but you don’t know exactly what it means, you have to rely on the feelings he expresses.
Yeah. Uhm, apart from your refereces, you also have an accent, so…
I’m Irish.
You’re Irish, yeah, cause you were living in London, that’s what we garnered, but we never heard you were Irish, so how did you end up in London?
That’s a very good question! [laughs] A series of strange events… when I was 17 I moved to London, and uhm, never went back. Oh, I’ve been back, but it’s just become home, you know, but it’s like I said, I’ve been there since I was 17-18 or so.
It has a special feeling for you, the city?
London, uhm, I think so, but then I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve been there a long time and have history there. When you have a history somewhere, you have all these references , so it becomes something to you. I mean, in many ways I don’t have to actually be living in London for what I do, but it’s right for now.
And what about Ireland? You ever feel like going back?
For a holiday, yes, but to live, no.
And why not, if we may ask?
Exile. I take after James Joyce. It’s when you’re in exile from your homeland. The danger is you romanticise it or you can become cynical about it, that is, you see it out of balance. But, you internalise the experiences. I mean, when I go back, I go back for a week every now and then, and I’m really- I’m not saying the people who live there don’t appreciate these- but it’s the ordinary things, the smell of coal fires, that’s just amazing, and it’s an instant effect on me that takes me back to when I was a little boy. Because I’m not living there, because I’ve been away, these associations are powerful, and I don’t really want to risk losing them. [laughs] You know, and I like that being somewhere else.
So you only realised these little things when you’ve been away for a while?
Yeah, definitely.
Or you take them too much for granted.
Yeah, well, you no longer see it. It’s if you’re taking the same route every day you don’t notice the odd nuances of an area or of the people’s accents and things like that. It’s when you’re away, then you really notice it.
In your interview just now on the radio, you talked briefly about
your musical influences. Your music itself is already pretty eclectic,
but does that have a background in your own musical taste?
Yes, very much so. I get excited by things, I don’t know if it’s apparent in Two Way Mirror, but there’s a couple of tracks on it… I was really really excited by Bartók‘s string quartets and Shostakovich‘s string quartets. With the string quartet you have a dialogue going on thats very economical. I often get excited about something that I *can’t* do, but it presents me with this other world to play with and get involved in, so I thought ‘well, OK, how d’you get that kind of quality, that dialogue with acoustic guitars?’ So, rather than staying in the pattern of what an instrument *does*, I try for what it *doesn’t*. What I often do is, say, write a piece on the piano and translate it to maybe two or three acoustic guitar parts. Or write a piece on the guitar and then play it on the piano. So I’m thinking of it, or I’m seeing it in a different perspective, in a sense. But the influences, we’re influenced by everything, even the things we don’t like, but they are very eclectic in what I relate to, love, am excited by and what I’d like to integrate into what I do.
And what about playing live, is this the first time for you tomorrow?
I did a couple of very very brief sets in London last year. I did one actually as part of an improv thing with these two other chaps, who were playing electronics and noises, and I was doing what I do on the acoustic guitar, whatever it is I do on the acoustic guitar. But I did two sets, one in summer and one in October. Just to get myself prepared basically for playing in front of people, because everything I do is very much in my head, an extension of that is to actually do it in a room. I mean, I’m excited about it, because I think rather than to recreate or trying to recreate a record – because the record is there and people can listen to that – what I’m interested in doing is taking the live experience, making that something into itself, an event into itself or a piece of music into itself. So there are themes and bits and pieces from the albums that are interwoven with each other.
OK, and then finally, you’re doing a couple of shows now, and you’ve just got a new album out, double CD, vinyl, and… Is there anything you have planned already for the future?
Uhm, one album, definitely, that I’ve pretty much all the backing tracks done for, and I just need to get the vocals done. I’m also working on this other thing at the moment, but I’m not sure what it is. It’s quite different, it’s more uh- I don’t know if I’ll actually do it as a- I don’t know if I’ll acutally finish it. Or, I don’t know if I’ll do it as a Sand Snowman project. It’s quite rhythmic, there’s a lot of drums on it, and it’s very sort of disjointed, but it’s very much in its early stages. I hope to have the new Sand Snowman one finished by the end of summer.
By the way, those drums, do you also play those on the album?
I play some, and I program some. I mix them up, basically, yeah.
But most of the instruments is just you?
Yeah. On the new one I’ve just got a friend of mineto do some flute, and I’ve written some cello parts for another friend. But still pretty much instrumentally, it’s me.
You mean the next album, the one that’s coming?
Yeah.
And are there any more surprises you can unveil? Is it going to be very different from Two Way Mirror? What’s your feeling about it?
I think it’s going to be as different from Two Way Mirror as Two Way Mirror is from “I’m not here”. That is, there are similarities. In fact I think actually you can hear traces of all of them, even the first one. There are parts on that, that are the feelings and ideas that occur on the later albums as well. Basically, there’s kind of a cross-pollination thing going on with them.
[laughs] OK.
But the idea is absolutely mindblowing for me.
Why is it so difficult to get through for you?
Finnegan’s Wake? I think it’s having a primer first, it’s recognising the code, because with Joyce you have references to Greek mythology or the using of musical forms like fugues, so the first time you read it it’s… you know. I'd read about Ulysses quite a lot before I actually read it, so I had a primer and was prepared for it. Because Finnegan’s Wake is a dream, kind of underwater, and very hard to penetrate. I understand it is about a dream reality, and also the thing of a wake[1]- “Finnegan’s Wake” is an Irish song. There’s also Fionn again, the coming of Fionn mac Cumhaill [wiki], this Irish mythological hero. It’s the return of the hero, which is going through all of Joyce’s literature. The main character, it’s all the hero’s voyage. Except in the last, in Finnegan’s Wake, the voyage is in a dream. It’s dream logic, he has strange juxtapositions and you don’t know where you are [laughs]. His language is beautiful, but I don’t know what he’s saying [laughs]. You know, but I’ll go back to it in time.
Maybe then it’s a bit more like music.
Yeah, it is.
If you read the words, but you don’t know exactly what it means, you have to rely on the feelings he expresses.
Yeah. Uhm, apart from your refereces, you also have an accent, so…
I’m Irish.
You’re Irish, yeah, cause you were living in London, that’s what we garnered, but we never heard you were Irish, so how did you end up in London?
That’s a very good question! [laughs] A series of strange events… when I was 17 I moved to London, and uhm, never went back. Oh, I’ve been back, but it’s just become home, you know, but it’s like I said, I’ve been there since I was 17-18 or so.
It has a special feeling for you, the city?
London, uhm, I think so, but then I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve been there a long time and have history there. When you have a history somewhere, you have all these references , so it becomes something to you. I mean, in many ways I don’t have to actually be living in London for what I do, but it’s right for now.
And what about Ireland? You ever feel like going back?
For a holiday, yes, but to live, no.
And why not, if we may ask?
Exile. I take after James Joyce. It’s when you’re in exile from your homeland. The danger is you romanticise it or you can become cynical about it, that is, you see it out of balance. But, you internalise the experiences. I mean, when I go back, I go back for a week every now and then, and I’m really- I’m not saying the people who live there don’t appreciate these- but it’s the ordinary things, the smell of coal fires, that’s just amazing, and it’s an instant effect on me that takes me back to when I was a little boy. Because I’m not living there, because I’ve been away, these associations are powerful, and I don’t really want to risk losing them. [laughs] You know, and I like that being somewhere else.
So you only realised these little things when you’ve been away for a while?
Yeah, definitely.
Or you take them too much for granted.
Yeah, well, you no longer see it. It’s if you’re taking the same route every day you don’t notice the odd nuances of an area or of the people’s accents and things like that. It’s when you’re away, then you really notice it.
'The Tower', by Sand
Yes, very much so. I get excited by things, I don’t know if it’s apparent in Two Way Mirror, but there’s a couple of tracks on it… I was really really excited by Bartók‘s string quartets and Shostakovich‘s string quartets. With the string quartet you have a dialogue going on thats very economical. I often get excited about something that I *can’t* do, but it presents me with this other world to play with and get involved in, so I thought ‘well, OK, how d’you get that kind of quality, that dialogue with acoustic guitars?’ So, rather than staying in the pattern of what an instrument *does*, I try for what it *doesn’t*. What I often do is, say, write a piece on the piano and translate it to maybe two or three acoustic guitar parts. Or write a piece on the guitar and then play it on the piano. So I’m thinking of it, or I’m seeing it in a different perspective, in a sense. But the influences, we’re influenced by everything, even the things we don’t like, but they are very eclectic in what I relate to, love, am excited by and what I’d like to integrate into what I do.
And what about playing live, is this the first time for you tomorrow?
I did a couple of very very brief sets in London last year. I did one actually as part of an improv thing with these two other chaps, who were playing electronics and noises, and I was doing what I do on the acoustic guitar, whatever it is I do on the acoustic guitar. But I did two sets, one in summer and one in October. Just to get myself prepared basically for playing in front of people, because everything I do is very much in my head, an extension of that is to actually do it in a room. I mean, I’m excited about it, because I think rather than to recreate or trying to recreate a record – because the record is there and people can listen to that – what I’m interested in doing is taking the live experience, making that something into itself, an event into itself or a piece of music into itself. So there are themes and bits and pieces from the albums that are interwoven with each other.
OK, and then finally, you’re doing a couple of shows now, and you’ve just got a new album out, double CD, vinyl, and… Is there anything you have planned already for the future?
Uhm, one album, definitely, that I’ve pretty much all the backing tracks done for, and I just need to get the vocals done. I’m also working on this other thing at the moment, but I’m not sure what it is. It’s quite different, it’s more uh- I don’t know if I’ll actually do it as a- I don’t know if I’ll acutally finish it. Or, I don’t know if I’ll do it as a Sand Snowman project. It’s quite rhythmic, there’s a lot of drums on it, and it’s very sort of disjointed, but it’s very much in its early stages. I hope to have the new Sand Snowman one finished by the end of summer.
By the way, those drums, do you also play those on the album?
I play some, and I program some. I mix them up, basically, yeah.
But most of the instruments is just you?
Yeah. On the new one I’ve just got a friend of mineto do some flute, and I’ve written some cello parts for another friend. But still pretty much instrumentally, it’s me.
You mean the next album, the one that’s coming?
Yeah.
And are there any more surprises you can unveil? Is it going to be very different from Two Way Mirror? What’s your feeling about it?
I think it’s going to be as different from Two Way Mirror as Two Way Mirror is from “I’m not here”. That is, there are similarities. In fact I think actually you can hear traces of all of them, even the first one. There are parts on that, that are the feelings and ideas that occur on the later albums as well. Basically, there’s kind of a cross-pollination thing going on with them.
[1] The “wake” in
the traditional “Finnegan’s Wake” is a reference both to the wake at his
funeral, and his awakening during the funeral, when it becomes apparent
that he isn’t dead, but suffering from a severe whiskey delirium. An
alternative interpretation would be that he was dead, but resurrected by
the water of life (whiskey). See: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Finnegan%27s_Wake.
Sand Well, for the past five years or so the music, sounds, paintings and ideas I have been producing seem to have formed into an identity of sorts, one that is somehow autonomous and independent from my everyday reality. The name arrived rather in the manner of most of my musical ideas; unbidden, origins unknown!
m[m]: Is this your first musically project?
Sand This is my first serious project (that is, with material released). Over the years I've been (usually casually) involved with a few bands, none of which lasted more than a gig or two.
m[m]: The project seems mainly yourself- I take it you does everything i.e. write, play and record everything your self?. (expect of course the female vocals)
Sand Yes, that's me plucking, blowing, bashing, scraping and strumming away
m[m]: What made you decide to use female vocals heavily in the project and not your own voice? And tell us a bit about the female singers you�ve used?
Sand Firstly, I have an extremely limited voice (to put it mildly), and it's highly important to me that the vocals, as with the instrumentation, convey the true feeling of the music. I tend to prefer female vocals, especially those with seductive siren, or ethereal elfin qualities. I tend to avoid the dry, "intimate" vocal sound employed by lots of singer/songwriter artists (which has a human, almost confessional quality, and which lots of people can immediately identify with, as it appears that the singer is directly addressing them). I aim instead for a diffused, "distant" sound (which is to some extent depersonalized but hopefully gives the impression of eavesdropping on angels, or half remembering a dream)
Sand Moonswift is my Girlfriend and sometime musical collaborator (I'm working with her at the moment on some seriously abstract guitar/bass excursions). Her vocals are ideal for my music (her own music is gorgeous and should be presentable soon). When I started work on "I'm Not Here" (Autumn 2006) I advertised for female vocalists, as I wanted to use several voices to give the tracks the sense of being different "chapters". Thus I met Jo Lepine and Nyx. Jo is a fine folk singer who is currently working with the Owl Service. Nyx is a multi talented New Yorker who provided her own vocal melodies and lyrics for "The Lamb", "Blue Eyed deVille" and "The Lantern". An actor friend called Jerome also contributed some splendid brooding vocals to "Twilight of the Dogs" and "Harvest and the Stars"
m[m]: All of you albums are adorned with creepy, tripped-out and sinister surreal artwork- do you do this your self?
Sand Yes, they are based on paintings of mine. I'm keen that the inner and outer atmospherics suit each other!
m[m]: The painting of the eerier stone building/ house on the front cover of your last release The Twilight Game is very fitting indeed- is this out of imagination or a real place? And do you think you put more artwork in upcoming releasers?
Sand The stone building is based on an old church near where I live (in East London), a building of haunting, desolate beauty. For me it has an evocative power, or sense of suggestion, that I desire to translate into music. I'm forever finding parallels between the aural and visual worlds (the "inner resonance" caused by visual or aural sensations are probably interchangeable).
Sand The painting is an elaboration on this (the sylph- like figure maybe personifying the ethereal quality of the scene and music). I would like to include more artwork but, for the moment, there are practical concerns (especially those of limited funds for the printing of complex sleeves)
m[m]: The Twilight game, like I'm not here(your first release?) starts off fairly balanced and normal in it�s feeling(through very eerier) but slowly & surely becomes more twisted, sinister and nightmarishly psychedelic. Almost if your telling an audio story that becomes more unnerving and terrorifying- do you script albums? And is there a story behind The Twilight Game?
Sand Actually, "I'm Not Here" is my second album, but I agree; they do stray into somewhat more beguiling territory!
It is definitely my intention that each album is in the form of a journey, and in the case of "The Twilight Game" & "I'm Not Here" there is a sense of an inward spiral, taking the listener closer to the heart of the work (or, more ambitiously, closer to the centre of themselves/their "shadow" selves, bringing to light hidden or just hitherto unknown aspects of their psyches).
Sand I get a very definite sense of the structure of an album, and the manner in which it should unfold. The sequencing of tracks (where they are placed) is in many ways as important as the tracks themselves. I pay as much attention to the whole as the parts. There isn't a story as such behind "The Twilight Game", but I think there's an implied "program", or journey. For me it has its own significance, but I leave it open to the listener's interpretation.
m[m]: You clearly have a real love of the gothic imagery, horror ect- what would you say has been the some of the biggest influence on this large side of your sound?
Sand Well, I admit to being a Romantic, and being drawn to the brooding, shadowy and perhaps unsettling. I'm not sure about horror; to me it's very much an acknowledgment and expression of the uncomfortable aspects of our psyches, so that the musical journey is a sort of catharsis. One of my central concerns is the expression of the mysterious, peripheral, half-imagined aspects of being, thus largely eschewing the more tangible, material "realities" of life. Suffice to say mine isn't music you listen to in preparation for a night out, unless that night out is in the heart of a forest or on the edge of jagged, storm- tossed cliffs!
Sand Also I should say that I'm heavily influenced by a lot of early 20th century music, such as Debussy, Scriabin, Schoenberg and Bartok, where conventional tonality and structures are eroded and new forms, sounds and sensations are made manifest (to me, at least). What I mean to say is that I don't find "advanced" harmony disconcerting, but I concur that there's very little light heartedness in my work!
m[m]: Have you ever been approached to do any soundtrack work? And are there any films/ books you�d like to have sound tracked?
Sand No, at least not yet. I'd have love to have scored Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"
m[m]: why would you like to score Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" & what appeals to you about the film?
Sand Firstly, I think it's a stunningly beautiful film. the imagery, characters and motifs (chess, minstrels, and a knight who has lost faith) are, to me, inspiring and poignant. I love how Bergman employs light (a soft light for the minstrel's family, suggesting the eternally innocent and hopeful. A rather harsh light for the devil and the troubled knight, signifying despair and doubt).
The film seems to inhabit the same twilit dimension as so much of my music (if I can be so bold!) and is for me a visual example to what I often try to achieve aurally
m[m]: Obsessive Creatures(your second release?) is quite different from your other two releasers been vocal less and featuring longer shifting tracks that have an almost soundtrack feel in places- is this something you�d like to investigate in the future?
Sand "Obsessive Creatures" is the first album and, I think for this reason, is more sprawling and (for me) slightly less focused than the other two. This was me stretching out, playing with sound, time and structures, in many ways finding my voice (by keeping my mouth shut). It contains the seeds of many ideas that manifested on the other two (and will be continued on the next one). I see all my work as siblings, and "Obsessive Creatures" is the sort of elder brother, building foundations, aurally expansive, and experimentally braking ground (and bearing the brunt) for it's more delicate, refined siblings
m[m]: Have every played live or every wanted to perform live?
Sand Actually I played an improvised set last month with Andrew Rowe (The Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers) and Alex Monk (Archslider) which I really enjoyed. Moonswift and I are putting together a set of sorts for early summer. I have, at the moment, no plans to play "my" material live as I just don't think I could do it justice, but in the future....
m[m]: You mentioned an improvised set live from last month- was this recorded
and if so any plans to release it? And what did it sound like?
Sand I'm afraid it wasn't (to my knowledge, at least) recorded. The line up was; me on acoustic guitar (doing my usual repetitive eerie thing), Alex on electric guitar and laptop, and Andy on very strange vocals (I don't know how to describe them!), laptop and miscellaneous odd toy instruments. The set could perhaps best be described as "psychedelic space folk electro- neurotic compulsive disorder".
Last autumn we three recorded a series of rambling improvisations, which at some stage will be edited and hopefully released on Andy's Mandolin records here
m[m]: You seemly fairly prolific � have you got anything else you�re working on at present & if so how much is it like to The Twilight Game material?
Sand I think it was Noel Coward who said that work is more fun than fun. I am utterly, if happily, obsessed with my work, so am probably comparatively prolific. I'm working on an album at the moment (tentatively entitled "Neurotic Zoo"), which I hope to have completed by summer. By the way, if any female vocalists are out there, get in touch. I have an insatiable appetite for voices (the curse of the non singer...)
The first and last tracks from "The Twilight Game" might give you an indication of its current sound, but its early days yet. I'd imagine it will bear some of the hallmarks of its three siblings but have its own distinct, and distinctly odd, personality. Watch this space
Thanks to sand for his time and efforts with the interview and supplying the pictures. The Twilight Game is out on Woven Wheat Whispers check it here and Sand Snowman�s my space is just here
Roger Batty
Musique Machine Jan 2008
Walking it's darkened corridors [2008-03-06]
Sand Snowman's
original, creepy psychedelic tinged folk rock is one of my key
discoveries of this year so far, having fallen head over heels with
their most recent release The Twilight Game (reviewed here). I felt it only fitting to hunt down the projects mysterious key player Sand- whom kindly agreed to give me an email interview.
m[m]: Tell us a bit about the origins of Sand Snowman? Where did the name come from?Sand Well, for the past five years or so the music, sounds, paintings and ideas I have been producing seem to have formed into an identity of sorts, one that is somehow autonomous and independent from my everyday reality. The name arrived rather in the manner of most of my musical ideas; unbidden, origins unknown!
m[m]: Is this your first musically project?
Sand This is my first serious project (that is, with material released). Over the years I've been (usually casually) involved with a few bands, none of which lasted more than a gig or two.
m[m]: The project seems mainly yourself- I take it you does everything i.e. write, play and record everything your self?. (expect of course the female vocals)
Sand Yes, that's me plucking, blowing, bashing, scraping and strumming away
m[m]: What made you decide to use female vocals heavily in the project and not your own voice? And tell us a bit about the female singers you�ve used?
Sand Firstly, I have an extremely limited voice (to put it mildly), and it's highly important to me that the vocals, as with the instrumentation, convey the true feeling of the music. I tend to prefer female vocals, especially those with seductive siren, or ethereal elfin qualities. I tend to avoid the dry, "intimate" vocal sound employed by lots of singer/songwriter artists (which has a human, almost confessional quality, and which lots of people can immediately identify with, as it appears that the singer is directly addressing them). I aim instead for a diffused, "distant" sound (which is to some extent depersonalized but hopefully gives the impression of eavesdropping on angels, or half remembering a dream)
Sand Moonswift is my Girlfriend and sometime musical collaborator (I'm working with her at the moment on some seriously abstract guitar/bass excursions). Her vocals are ideal for my music (her own music is gorgeous and should be presentable soon). When I started work on "I'm Not Here" (Autumn 2006) I advertised for female vocalists, as I wanted to use several voices to give the tracks the sense of being different "chapters". Thus I met Jo Lepine and Nyx. Jo is a fine folk singer who is currently working with the Owl Service. Nyx is a multi talented New Yorker who provided her own vocal melodies and lyrics for "The Lamb", "Blue Eyed deVille" and "The Lantern". An actor friend called Jerome also contributed some splendid brooding vocals to "Twilight of the Dogs" and "Harvest and the Stars"
m[m]: All of you albums are adorned with creepy, tripped-out and sinister surreal artwork- do you do this your self?
Sand Yes, they are based on paintings of mine. I'm keen that the inner and outer atmospherics suit each other!
m[m]: The painting of the eerier stone building/ house on the front cover of your last release The Twilight Game is very fitting indeed- is this out of imagination or a real place? And do you think you put more artwork in upcoming releasers?
Sand The stone building is based on an old church near where I live (in East London), a building of haunting, desolate beauty. For me it has an evocative power, or sense of suggestion, that I desire to translate into music. I'm forever finding parallels between the aural and visual worlds (the "inner resonance" caused by visual or aural sensations are probably interchangeable).
Sand The painting is an elaboration on this (the sylph- like figure maybe personifying the ethereal quality of the scene and music). I would like to include more artwork but, for the moment, there are practical concerns (especially those of limited funds for the printing of complex sleeves)
m[m]: The Twilight game, like I'm not here(your first release?) starts off fairly balanced and normal in it�s feeling(through very eerier) but slowly & surely becomes more twisted, sinister and nightmarishly psychedelic. Almost if your telling an audio story that becomes more unnerving and terrorifying- do you script albums? And is there a story behind The Twilight Game?
Sand Actually, "I'm Not Here" is my second album, but I agree; they do stray into somewhat more beguiling territory!
It is definitely my intention that each album is in the form of a journey, and in the case of "The Twilight Game" & "I'm Not Here" there is a sense of an inward spiral, taking the listener closer to the heart of the work (or, more ambitiously, closer to the centre of themselves/their "shadow" selves, bringing to light hidden or just hitherto unknown aspects of their psyches).
Sand I get a very definite sense of the structure of an album, and the manner in which it should unfold. The sequencing of tracks (where they are placed) is in many ways as important as the tracks themselves. I pay as much attention to the whole as the parts. There isn't a story as such behind "The Twilight Game", but I think there's an implied "program", or journey. For me it has its own significance, but I leave it open to the listener's interpretation.
m[m]: You clearly have a real love of the gothic imagery, horror ect- what would you say has been the some of the biggest influence on this large side of your sound?
Sand Well, I admit to being a Romantic, and being drawn to the brooding, shadowy and perhaps unsettling. I'm not sure about horror; to me it's very much an acknowledgment and expression of the uncomfortable aspects of our psyches, so that the musical journey is a sort of catharsis. One of my central concerns is the expression of the mysterious, peripheral, half-imagined aspects of being, thus largely eschewing the more tangible, material "realities" of life. Suffice to say mine isn't music you listen to in preparation for a night out, unless that night out is in the heart of a forest or on the edge of jagged, storm- tossed cliffs!
Sand Also I should say that I'm heavily influenced by a lot of early 20th century music, such as Debussy, Scriabin, Schoenberg and Bartok, where conventional tonality and structures are eroded and new forms, sounds and sensations are made manifest (to me, at least). What I mean to say is that I don't find "advanced" harmony disconcerting, but I concur that there's very little light heartedness in my work!
m[m]: Have you ever been approached to do any soundtrack work? And are there any films/ books you�d like to have sound tracked?
Sand No, at least not yet. I'd have love to have scored Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"
m[m]: why would you like to score Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" & what appeals to you about the film?
Sand Firstly, I think it's a stunningly beautiful film. the imagery, characters and motifs (chess, minstrels, and a knight who has lost faith) are, to me, inspiring and poignant. I love how Bergman employs light (a soft light for the minstrel's family, suggesting the eternally innocent and hopeful. A rather harsh light for the devil and the troubled knight, signifying despair and doubt).
The film seems to inhabit the same twilit dimension as so much of my music (if I can be so bold!) and is for me a visual example to what I often try to achieve aurally
m[m]: Obsessive Creatures(your second release?) is quite different from your other two releasers been vocal less and featuring longer shifting tracks that have an almost soundtrack feel in places- is this something you�d like to investigate in the future?
Sand "Obsessive Creatures" is the first album and, I think for this reason, is more sprawling and (for me) slightly less focused than the other two. This was me stretching out, playing with sound, time and structures, in many ways finding my voice (by keeping my mouth shut). It contains the seeds of many ideas that manifested on the other two (and will be continued on the next one). I see all my work as siblings, and "Obsessive Creatures" is the sort of elder brother, building foundations, aurally expansive, and experimentally braking ground (and bearing the brunt) for it's more delicate, refined siblings
m[m]: Have every played live or every wanted to perform live?
Sand Actually I played an improvised set last month with Andrew Rowe (The Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers) and Alex Monk (Archslider) which I really enjoyed. Moonswift and I are putting together a set of sorts for early summer. I have, at the moment, no plans to play "my" material live as I just don't think I could do it justice, but in the future....
m[m]: You mentioned an improvised set live from last month- was this recorded
and if so any plans to release it? And what did it sound like?
Sand I'm afraid it wasn't (to my knowledge, at least) recorded. The line up was; me on acoustic guitar (doing my usual repetitive eerie thing), Alex on electric guitar and laptop, and Andy on very strange vocals (I don't know how to describe them!), laptop and miscellaneous odd toy instruments. The set could perhaps best be described as "psychedelic space folk electro- neurotic compulsive disorder".
Last autumn we three recorded a series of rambling improvisations, which at some stage will be edited and hopefully released on Andy's Mandolin records here
m[m]: You seemly fairly prolific � have you got anything else you�re working on at present & if so how much is it like to The Twilight Game material?
Sand I think it was Noel Coward who said that work is more fun than fun. I am utterly, if happily, obsessed with my work, so am probably comparatively prolific. I'm working on an album at the moment (tentatively entitled "Neurotic Zoo"), which I hope to have completed by summer. By the way, if any female vocalists are out there, get in touch. I have an insatiable appetite for voices (the curse of the non singer...)
The first and last tracks from "The Twilight Game" might give you an indication of its current sound, but its early days yet. I'd imagine it will bear some of the hallmarks of its three siblings but have its own distinct, and distinctly odd, personality. Watch this space
Thanks to sand for his time and efforts with the interview and supplying the pictures. The Twilight Game is out on Woven Wheat Whispers check it here and Sand Snowman�s my space is just here
Roger Batty
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