First of all, I don’t see those two concepts as being contradictory — now if the question implies that. There’s no opposition between trying to be individualistic in music, and the thing of incorporating anything in music that you like, derived from any possible genre, into your own music. I would say it’s the other way around – to pour from any source you know of and appreciate is a good thing for your individuality, it must be.
To divide music into styles or genres has always been quite an artificial thing to me, maybe it has to do with my background. I’ve never really felt any particular need to be loyal to anything else other than my own taste.
On a personal level, the most considerable distinction in music is the one between what you like and what you don’t, I would say. You have to be open to what you hear and not restrict yourself by thinking of and listening to music in terms of genre categorys. Music is really just one big thing, and it has become even more so in recent years concurrently with the fact that everything has sort of become available to everyone.
A musician in our days is at first an artist but more and more he also has to be his own businessman in terms of advertising, marketing etcetera. What is your personal adjustment about this?
I try to separate those activities. If I dedicate some time to be in the businessman role, I sure need to be put in quarantine for awhile before I can come back to creativity again. For me, they are contradicting areas, so I need to distinguish them from each other.
These days I’m busy working on my website which for a long time has been a wish for me — to be able to create a site of my own. Now I’ve finally set aside time to do it. It’s really one of those sidesteps for me, but I really enjoy it. When I think about it, website creation, at it’s best, can be a combination of both being creative and being a businessman.
Your current album is an example of conceptional work. Do you want to go further in this direction?
As I consider an album being conceptional to be a good thing, yes, I want to go on doing conceptional work. It’s really an after-the-fact word (not to diminish it). As I’m working on something, I consciously try not to quantify or limit my view of what it could be, what the possibilities are.
For me, and for many others as well I guess, it’s been a process of maturity if you look at it in a longer perspective. When you’re young you often have a tendency of wanting to show everything you can do with your instrument/in music all the time — to fill every spot with all your licks and abilities. As I get older I, in a way, try to do the opposite – to narrow down the musical ”subject” into, what I would describe as ”specifics” and from there try to create variety.
There’s a quality that can be found there I think. For instance, one of my big heroes, Jan Garbarek, whom I’ve been very influenced by, has this quality that I try to describe here. To me, there’s an incredibly satisfying tension in his playing, which partly comes from the fact that he’s not playing everything he so easily could do. He’s just showing us the tip of the ice-berg. What he’s NOT playing is almost equally important to what he actually IS playing. The rest of the ice-berg is, so to speak, not visible (audible) to us, but it really has a valuable function.
I guess I’m saying that even if you’re not playing out everything you know, it still comes through as a quality to the listener — at least in the long run. The paradox is that something can be even stronger when it’s not exposed. That’s what I feel listening to and absorbing the exceptional qualities of Jan Garbarek. I would like to think that my CD has a tiny bit of this in it’s capacity as a conceptional album.
I try to ignore that certain people hearing the album might think that they have me all figured out because of the strong direction of the album. For me it’s like: Next album equals a new subject.
Tell us something about the recordings of this second solo album. How important is the after-treatment of the masters in the studio for you?
If you take a look at the proportions between, on one hand the time spent doing the main recording, where the six-man band played together live in the studio, which is the normal band playing situation, and on the other hand the time spent doing the post-production/after-treatment, it’s pretty bizarr I have to admit. Not that I wouldn’t do it the same way again, but it’s just that it’s obvious that one stage in the whole album-making process takes a rather short time period in demand, a stage where you get lots of obvious results. And then you have the next stage, where in my case, many many days, weeks, and even months are spent, if you look at it from one angle, with less obvious results. Although I have to say that the reason I’m willing to spend so much time and energy doing this after-treatment is, of course, because I value the qualities I think you can get from it. One of the big aims for this recording project was to combine the real-time-band-playing-together-interaction with a big dose of after-treatment.
I try to be both a performer/real-time musician as well as being a non-real-time musician/a programmer, arranger, editor etc. These days this division of different musical activities and musicians types is a rather relevant one. More and more there’re people who’s becoming musicians without actually playing an acoustic instrument. Instead, they could be a computer-based musician, a programmer, or someone with a disc jockey background, and often in the non-real-time realm.
To answear your question, I think the after-treament is indeed very important for my album and the way it sounds. BUT, it really gets it’s justification by the fact that the main characteristic of the album is that it’s first and foremost a band-playing-together-album.
