On the subject of Bedroom Community, and where it evolved, Reykjavik seems like a special place for you, a place that continues to inspire you?
Absolutely, yes. I look forward to going there in the same way one looks forward to going home. It has been so tied up with how I have made music in the past six or seven years, and feels like a key part of the genetics of what I do. I love a northern city, an impossible city, which Reykjavik is, it seems so improbable that there are people living there, it’s so crazy – this barren rock that they figured out over a couple of thousand years how to exist on, it is an amazing, impossible thing.
A lot of work that has come out of there in the past few decades seems like that, for example, Björk’s latest record.
Oh my God, completely, it is so amazing! Björk is the aunt of that whole scene, but is also so wide-eyed and open to new experiences.
Laughter seems like a trigger to so much of your creativity, that through laughter you find a way through to somewhere unexpected, perhaps.
You know, that is really all it is, a bunch of people having fun, and the music is the fire that comes out of the friction of the laughing, really. I don’t have it in me to take anything that seriously, so I try to make serious things out of lighter moments. I think that’s the way to stay on top of things, actually, it is also to weirdly let go of all serious conceits. Going back to Björk’s project- what is so amazing about those apps, is that they are for everyone, it is so playful, babies could use them, people with autism,everyone can end up with something very beautiful, there is a sense of undoing all that mess around what composing really is, and what making music really is.
It goes back to that thing you have said you love Michael Nyman for- his “ecstatic melancholy” and that you always want music and the producing of it to be an “ecstatic process”.
Yes exactly, that is what is important, and that can take its cue from book learning and take all its language from the floridity of that, but essentially it is a childlike process.
Since your life has become increasingly busy, have you refined your work processes a little over the last couple of years, and tried to constrain your projects to keeping something akin to “office hours” in order to stay sane?
In the last couple of years, I have been trying to be a little bit better. I live with my boyfriend in New York, and he has an actual job with actual hours [laughs], so it makes the most sense if I pretend to as well. I try to be good with that, but then I will sometimes have a moment after dinner when more writing can occur, but I like to plan that as a sort of bonus thing. Sometimes he goes away for work, or if I do, then I can go back into older patterns. This was very clear a couple of months ago. I went to Minneapolis for a few days to a premiere, and we had a couple of hours of rehearsal a day, and basically I filled the rest of the day with these alternating periods of sleep and work, three hours of each, which felt very good actually, it felt like I was a rotary of a musical cult.
Drinking absinthe in the afternoon, creating at night?
Ooh how lovely, but I was in a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, so it wasn’t like the banks of the Seine [laughs]. It is best to avoid me becoming the kind of person who says “the work comes first….before food” [laughs] I think that for me is drawing the line, I will basically put the work before anything else, but mealtime is a sacred moment.
Grizzly Bear said that so much of Veckatimest was concocted over cosy dinners, hidden away all together, you must love those moments, where ideas are marinating along with the stew, great ideas can naturally be drawn from such moments.
Oh absolutely, one of the things that is great about them is that they value that as a “thing”. In the making of non-classical music, the hours are so skewed that the time most people are eating is the time you are working, so you then fit in meals as an afterthought, which Grizzly Bear don’t do at all, which I love. In the collaborative process, there is nothing more beneficial to the process than cooking with the person you are working with. There is a choreographer that I work with a lot [Stephen Petronio], and if he is making dinner, I try to help out, because you get into a rhythm of work, which is a microcosm of how the bigger thing should work, and even if it’s not working like that at the time, it is always a good moment to do.
Do you find that you produce a lot of work that you throw away?
It’s probably not as much as all that, but I do throw away a lot. I very happily threw out six minutes of music for the Crash piece. You learn how to do that with great pleasure when you collaborate, because sometimes the music is great, but it’s not working, and the point is to have it work.
How do you know when it is not “working”?
There are a couple of tests I have to do it. If you can look at the score and go through it in your head in real time, play it in your head, and your attention wavers for a second, something is off. That is usually how I can tell, whereas if it is working I am in it fully. It is harder to tell when the whole thing is off, but it is like that moment in cooking when you realise you have way oversalted something, and you just think “no amount of potatoes in the broth is going to fix this, I am going to have to start again” [laughs].
