Over/Under Magazine Interview

(Interview originally on overundermag.com)

First off, are you ready to get back on a plane?

Oh God! It’s so funny because I feel this Jet Blue flight is going to haunt me for the rest of my life- not because I am scared to fly, but because I know people are going to continually ask about it! I got on a plane the day after the incident and honestly felt fine. I’ll always remember feeling scared, but thousands of planes land safely every day, so I realize it was just bizarre luck that I happened to be on the one plane that became the media’s fiery darling for a few days.

How would you describe your music?

I think that even from the beginning, I thought of my music as multi-dimensional collage, in that sampling immediately implies the merging and thus subtle changing of divergent worlds. The first album I made, ‘Initial Experiments In 3D” was composed using samples only from my own musical collection, and since the sounds each held significance in my upbringing, combining and recontextualizing them made the album really rich with memories and influence for me; as I’ve said before, it was an album I made for myself.

Is there any particular effect you would like your music to have on the listener?

Listening to music is a different experience for everyone, so I couldn’t even hope for my art to affect an audience in any single, particular way. I think what’s important in experiencing anything is using your senses creatively and asking questions of yourself: how does that sound make me feel- what does it remind me of? And, for sampled music specifically, that sort of inquiry can take you in all kinds of new directions.

You say you were musically born in the basement at age 6, how does one become musically born?

You know, I think Frosty came up with that in an article he wrote about me in XLR8R, and it just stuck. In truth, I really had recorded music with my cousin Andy before I was six- using piano & toys- but it was with my neighbor and best friend Stuart Bogie (who now plays saxophone with Brooklyn’s Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra) that I was really “born” as a musician. We’d set up my Fisher-Price cassette recorder on the stairwell of my basement, and go to town on a Casio PT-80, my sparkly blue drum set, and a guitar, while Stuart usually came up with the song concepts and improvised lyrics. We went from singing about Roald Dahl’s The Twits and how “Smoke Detectors Save Lives” to making jazz-fusion-punk-prog in high school with a band we called Transmission, sharing influences ranging from Miles Davis and King Crimson through My Bloody Valentine and Fugazi.

The obligatory…. How was your name born?

I was on a train with my family traveling through Madrid when I decided to start focusing my efforts on sample-based music, and I wanted a moniker that would positively reflect that process and aesthetic. I tried to think of something in nature that feeds off of other things but simultaneously gives them life- which sampling, in and of itself, does- and my mom came up with a coral reef. I included “aural” in the spelling to make an obvious reference to sound and also to infer two other ideas: I really love music’s connection to visual imagery, and so if you look at my name that way (“C” “Aural”), you can construe it as “See” “Sound”; and finally, imagining the “C” as a copyright logo, I liked to make the joke about copyrighting sound, and how complicated and sometimes frustratingly stupid the whole intellectual property issue has become.

Which do you prefer, sampling or creating your own cuts?

To be honest, it’s all the same process. I use the sampler as a musical instrument and not as a tool to just loop other people’s shit, so if I am sampling a piano chord that Chick Corea played or a chord that I played myself, it’s all the same in the end: I am still going to compose melodic and rhythmic phrases by triggering sounds. As far as not incorporating a sampler in my process whatsoever- as in the music I’ve been making lately with Stuart- well, that is a completely different experience; ironically, I’ll draw from that material to sample as well…

You travel fairly frequently. Do you feel this has influenced your music?

As a rule, everything I experience influences my music because my music is quite literally a synthesis of everything I hear, restructured in whatever form I find appropriate to my mood. Granted, my use of samples extends beyond having visited the country from which they originate, but of course it enriches at least my experience with the music.

Which do you prefer, spending time as a hermit creating music, or socializing and performing?

I need a balance. Life and art are inextricable so, if you are just drinking coffee and sitting in a dark room - staring at a computer screen, making music and not much of anything else - after a while both you and your audience are going to be bored to tears. It’s like hip-hop producers who only listen to hip-hop- why do you think it’s become such a dead art? So, I generally let life fuel the alternating gears of experience and reflection, listening and making.

What is your creative process? What inspires you and kicks a song into gear?

It’s really sounds that inspire me the most in terms of trying to create an experience for the listener. While I’ll have a melody or chord progression in mind at first, the sounds I choose typically dictate their place in a piece or, more often, take my initial idea in a new direction- sounds have a life of their own. So, I’ll start by doing sound design on my computer to either accentuate a certain detail or just completely change the character of the sound, and then start experimenting with form.

You currently reside in NY, is there anywhere else you’d like to live? What is the vibe you feel from there? Are there other places where you feel have amazing energy?

I moved to NY for school in 1997 and felt it was unlike any other city in the world; I still do, and that’s why I returned here after briefly moving back to Chicago in 2000. At a dinner party the other night, a friend of mine said it most succinctly: America is an experiment. Regardless of how successful that experiment was, there is nowhere else in the world where everyone by nature is a foreigner, and nowhere else in America is that felt as much as it is here. Living in NYC is like being everywhere at once while staying still- traveling without moving- and if it weren’t for NY, I don’t think I would remain an American citizen.

Many other places have amazing energy- some of my favorite places are India, Japan and Thailand. If I were to relocate, I’d be hard-pressed to choose a single place abroad. I’ll cross that road if and when I come to it.

You’ve worked with many other artists, are there any that you would love to work with again?

Of course! Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, my workings with other artists have been remixes, so it’s kind of like someone handing you some oils and medium and then, when you are done brushing it on the canvas, you just throw the painting back over the wall and call it a collaboration. The project completed with my friend Jason Hunt called Boy King Islands and my work with Stuart under the name the Original Ultraviolets are the truest collaborations I’ve done since playing in bands back in high school, and I hope to do more like those in the future.

Your music is very complex, layering very natural sounds with industrial noise, mixed together with smooth jazz riffs. Do you have any guilty musical pleasures? Songs that…well lack the complex nature of your music.

I don’t really have any pleasures I consider “guilty”- at least musically speaking. To answer your question, I listen to almost no music that sounds like mine, and am not too interested in doing so. I generally listen to ambient music, rock, and then a ton of records I have loved forever. I’ll put on the Smiths, or Minor Threat, or Joni Mitchell, or Metalheadz, or Dinosaur Jr, and still go back to making the same kind of music I do.

What’s something in music right now that you can’t get enough of? Technique, sound, etc.

That’s hard to answer, because I listen to different music for different reasons. From a production standpoint, as surprising as it may sound for people who are familiar with my music and how much time it takes me to create it, I love listening to pretty lo-fi and simple recordings, hiss and all. And maybe it is because I devote so much time to making every sound I use as perfect as it can be for me, but there’s something so wonderful about a guitar and a voice, or a piano and a violin, or anything that is just is what it is. On a musical level, it’s expression- it’s soul. I guess that’s what I can’t get enough of: people truly feeling what they are doing, and then imparting that ability to their listener. Stuart produced a record for a friend of ours named Jeremiah Lockwood in his bedroom with a janky Tascam 8-track, and I’d rather listen to that than some complex, 64-channel Pro-Tools bullshit any day.

(Interview by Glenn Robinson)