copyright Camera Obscura Records and the Ptolemaic Terrascope. Thanks to Tony Dale for permission to reproduce this interview
The EP was followed up in 1992 by the 'Morse' LP, also on Siltbreeze. This strikes me, like 'Gaudy Light' does, as a very confident record. The songs seem to have contracted, become shorter, some really jagged, compressed and spat out like 'Hawks', and some beautiful acoustic pieces like 'Portrait'. Why the move to a lot of short songs, and was a lot of anger being worked out in 'Morse'?
I think for me there has been a lot of anger worked out through music full-stop, right from the beginning. And yet I thought at the time that I had left all that behind in my punk days and that all the anger had gone and become a lot more reflective. I can see now that it is very much an on-going process and I don't know whether I will ever actually get to that calm remote point, although it is very much the direction I am headed in.
The songs got shorter because traditional song structure suddenly stopped appealing to me. The verse-chorus-verse format seems to misrepresent the way the songs arrive in my imagination. They rarely arrive structured like that for me, they come in short bursts as one rapid insight or metaphor strikes me. From 'Gaudy Light' on I wanted just to leave the things in the order and 'parcel', for want of a better word, that they came to me in and not really chop and change them to fit a particular idea of structure, or try and make any sense of them or explain them any way. I'm still not sure what the song 'Gaudy Light' is actually about.
Which reminds me to ask about 'Screaming E', a personal favourite from 'Morse', although I've never been sure of what it is about...
That's one I can explain. It's basically a song about horror. It goes:
'I'll scream an E
Until I raise the hackles on you
Give you that skin wall drum feeling
Staggers reeling
Hammering yammering cry
Half the time the train of thought derails
Wait until your unseemly anger pales
It will pale
And leave you stranded
Grandma said to me
This will boil your blood
And then the pipes began to stray
They were skirling skirling skirling.
When I was five, my maternal grandmother took me to the Dunedin Botanical Gardens on a day when she knew there was going to be a massed bagpipe band playing. She got me to stand right at the front of the path before they played. They came marching past and stopped almost directly in front of us, maybe thirty or forty bagpipers and the drums and everything, and as they warmed up and blew all the air into those horrible big leather bags, she said to me 'this will boil your blood', which was just a terrifying thing for her to say to me at that age, because I really believed that sound that happened just a few seconds later was going to actually, physically cause my blood to boil in my veins. She obviously meant that if you had Scottish blood in you, this will cause you to feel strong emotion, but that wasn't obvious to a five year old!
Do you see drones as important in your songs?
Yeah, I do, because perhaps in a kind of abstract way there is a drone aspect to life itself, there is something that always remains constant. Musically it gives that same sort of feel, like there is something constant throughout.
You toured the US with Peter Jefferies in 1993, during, I believe, a period of great personal upheaval. What are your recollections of that tour?
I remember it as much for the time just before the tour. I found that I had to leave the warehouse place I had been living in for five years, and had to get rid of all the auction stuff I had been collecting and wheeling home on a skateboard and piling into the almost 15 000 square feet I had available. The old bits of furniture and knick-knacks wouldn't have fitted into an ordinary house. I came back from a day dumping all that to get the depressing message that my birth mother was dying of cancer. I had been adopted and had only know her since I was twenty. I was worried the whole time I was in the States that she would die while I was there, as well as worrying because my girlfriend had nowhere to live. It made it so much more stressful that it otherwise would have been. I had never played more than two or three days in a row and found the stress of playing everyday and travelling so much very difficult. I didn't like the way you have to become like a factory worker and repeat what you do. You can change the set, but you still have to appear in front of an audience playing guitar and singing day-after-day and it began to feel like a job. That worried me terribly at points, I felt I was showing only one facet of what I do, because what I mainly do is sit at home in the middle of the country, solitary and relatively calm, and record. Although I felt overawed by the whole thing, and occasionally wondered what I was doing and if I was doing it well enough, there were absolute high points to the tour. The people side of it was fantastic. I felt really sad to leave the people that I met after only a few hours of knowing each of them. There were many towns I wanted to stop in and actually a couple of places I thought 'I could live here, these people are great' and made really firm, fast, deep friendships that are still going, and it was great to see some of those people again on the tour I just got back from. The support from the audiences there was unlike anything I had felt in my whole life. It was kind of like a dream that there were enough people to fill the pubs and liked the music and had been following it for a while. Very hard to believe from your remote outpost at the far corner of the world that those people are actually out there.
Even so, I've got this problem where when I'm away from my own home or country for any length of time I begin to feel utterly as though I had died. It is a very intense kind of homesickness that is really valuable to ride through, come back home afterwards and feel differently about life because of that.
Did your relationship with Peter Jefferies survive that tour?
That tour it did. By the time we had done the European tour the following year we had been through a lot together. It was tense because Peter was totally happy to be there, just overjoyed. His enthusiasm was great and bolstered me a lot of the time, but I don't think that he understood that I had other things on my mind. To me, my musical career is not as important as my life itself, and that was something I have found very difficult about touring, I am always 'Alastair Galbraith -The Musician' and it is hard to feel like you are still a painter, or a person who likes walking around picking up driftwood or whatever else you may be. When you are working, people are constantly showing you their record collections or in some way talking about music. That sort of thing suits Peter very well, being pretty much how he has structured his life at the level of the dedication he has to music and his musical career, but I found it pretty off-putting.
1993 brought the first Handful of Dust LP, 'Concord'. How did that involvement happen, and what attracted you to the free noise ethic?
Bruce Russell has always had this laid back way of approaching things, as he did with the 'Hurry On Down' cassette, and he didn't really make a big thing of it. He asked me if I wanted to make a record with stringed instruments where we don't touch the strings, and use one type of amplifier and have one channel each and we'll see what happens. Later he told me that Twisted Village were going to release it, and we were happy enough with the music that we were pleased it was going to come out.
How important is the performance side of Handful of Dust to you?
Yeah, it's really important because it is a chance to totally throw away all idea of structure, and I love improvising with no idea what is going to happen at all. There is only one kind of thread that I believe that Bruce and I follow, and that is a certain empathy for each other's mood, but that doesn't mean exclusively musical mood or emotional mood, more a synthesis of the two. We are aware of what each other is doing and feels, but we never look at each other when we perform. The only thing I will know before we play is that Bruce will say 'I've got some titles for what we are about to do', and he will say 'A Single Eye All Light' or 'The Kaballah of the Horse Pegasus' or some other great and ridiculous stringing together of esoteric findings of his. The title somehow forms images of what kind of mood we are going to follow for the piece, but it also evolves as it goes along. Generally I just find that I am staring at one spot on the floor the whole time, and I think it is visually terribly boring for the audiences.
How do audiences react to A Handful of Dust performances?
In the very beginning, they hated it (laughs), and they stood as far back in the pub as they could. We had people like Peter Jefferies come up to us and say 'that was horrible, not only was it musically awful but it hurt my ears'. I guess it was fairly loud. Later, when the CDs came out, people who hadn't enjoyed the performance at all would say 'what a great record!', and Bruce would take great delight in saying 'well you were there and you hated it'. I think a lot of that has to do with A Handful of Dust being so boring to watch and it seems like we are just playing around with the instruments and have no idea what we are doing at all. But I think that if you close your eyes it instantly gains a whole new dimension.
Which is different to how I imagined the live performances, listening to them on CD. I always though it would be interesting to see how those sounds were being made.
Just recently in the States I had a jam with Seymour Glass from Bananafish. I just used my violin for this long piece of music, and he said at the end he was flabbergasted because he always assumed I made those noises with all these really interesting gadgets and effects, and was surprised that I did it all on a violin with no effects and not even plugged in. The expectation is that Bruce and I are running around twiddling knobs on things and using all sorts of bizarre tools on our instruments, but really we are playing them relatively conventionally, with a very limited repertoire of 'toys'. It expanded a little more recently, though. At the last gig we did, drummer Peter Stapleton surfed some short-wave radio for a while, and I used this broken tape echo thing, that has some awful fault in its electronics that meant you played a violin note and it turned into fifty out-of-tune violins. But a lot of what we have done is just electric guitar and violin through amps.
In 1994, you contributed to the Mountain Goats' 'Orange Raja, Blood Royal' EP. What led to you working with them?
On the 1993 tour of the States, Peter and I played a gig at Pomona just outside of Los Angeles at a venue called The Haven, and our support act for the evening was The Mountain Goats. John Darnielle at that point, as he does now, played acoustic guitar and sang, and that time he had the 'Bright Mountain Choir' backing him up, two women that sat on either side of him in chairs and swayed from side-to-side and sang a bit of back-up harmony. His intensity was awe-inspiring, and he lived the songs as he sang them. His lyrics were so beautiful, and the fact that he was really feeling what he was communicating struck me very powerfully and by the time he had finished I'd written him a kind of fan letter at the table I was sitting at, saying that I had never seen anything like this, and that he was a great songwriter and a brilliant performer and that it was hard to go on after him. Later that evening he and I and Dennis Callacci and Alan Callacci sat around at Dennis's house and passed around an acoustic guitar and played each other lots of songs. John wrote to me after I got back to New Zealand and asked if I would be interested in putting violin onto some songs. I ended up thinking I wanted to put more than just violin on, so I ended up using old, fake, third-world-shop tabla and a little bit of mouth organ which I had never played before, and a few violin tracks and sang, or repeated, some of his lines, although he'd asked me not to (laughs). But he ended up liking that.
1994 brought the European tour, as well as the 'Cluster' and 'Intro Version' singles. What else was was happening around that time?
After the draining European tour with Peter, I was feeling reclusive and living in the country at a place called (Taieri Mouth) about 30 kilometres south of Dunedin, and just wanted a very quiet life. I was more into paddling a canoe up the river than making music.
What a life!
Yeah, it was beautiful. It is where a fairly large river enters the Pacific Ocean and there is a small Island right in the isthmus of sand outside the bar of the river, and it is a totally idyllic place. The house I lived in was nestled on a small hill in the bush, and it was hard to even go into town, or even want to do anything in town, let alone to want to work! It took a very long time to get this feeling that perhaps I had retired, and I wasn't even thirty, and perhaps that wasn't really right. It was the enjoying of a very simple life that didn't involve having much ambition, not even creative ambition. Also that was the year when my mother was actually dying, and that made me quieter as well.
1995 saw the release of the 'Talisman' album on your own Next Best Way label. 'Talisman' seemed a pretty dark album to me, a theme of death running through it, but also densely poetic, with some awe-inspiring lyrics on songs like 'Carlos' and Black Flame'. What was 'Carlos' about?
The part about 'Henry's June' refers to Henry Miller's partner and how she was on his back to write a lot, and she seemed to have this really fated kind of life, that not only attracted but inspired a lot of people to create after they met her. The force of her character and the sense of destiny that she seemed to embody is shared by a couple of people that I have met that seemed to have that same quality, and 'Carlos' is about that. There are some people who seem to be on a different path to most others as though they are listening to another voice.
It has a certain spectral quality that crops up occasionally in your work.
Thank you. There were a couple of times when I have been recording things like that, and the actual song 'Talisman' that the word 'spectral' has become not really an afterthought but something that is going on at the time. With the recording of that song 'Talisman' there was a point during recording the vocals when I was convinced that there was someone standing just behind my shoulder, even though I knew that there couldn't be because the door was closed. I was half tempted to turn around and look, but on the other hand I knew that the only reason I had the feeling that there was someone there was that this was the version, and I told myself 'don't turn around, finish it'.
Some of the free noise ethic seems to have rubbed off in places too, with tracks like 'Mrs Meggary'.
'Mrs Meggary' was the primary school teacher of a friend of mine, who was very, very cruel to my friend when she was a young girl. She refused to let her go to the toilet until she wet her pants in class, and so I thought I'd get Mrs Meggary back for her. I wrote a piece of music imagining Mrs Meggary lying in the bath as a nasty, shrivelled old woman listening to horrible approaching footsteps down the hall, and eventually getting stabbed to death in the bath.
That puts the track in context now. Cruel but fair!
Yeah, it's pretty grim.
How does one get up in the morning and decide to record something as absolutely fried as 'Policemen on Ether'?
Once I was 'absolutely fried' on cactus and at the pub there was The Sombretones that Graeme Jefferies was in for a while. I thought that the band was singing over and over 'policemen on ether', and I'm sitting there thinking, 'what a great song', but of course that wasn't what they were singing at all. For years I wanted to write a song that did say that!
You just toured North America with the Mountain Goats. How did that go?
That was great fun, the most fun tour I have done. John is a really easy person to get on with. He's also a very kind man, and it helped that he was missing his girlfriend and we were able to bond over that because again I was missing my country and all the things familiar to me. We had a good time, and we would joke about every town we entered, and make fun of everything that happened to us.
One of the reasons the tour happened was the reissue of 'Morse' and 'Gaudy Light' on the Trance Syndicate/Emperor Jones label, and at the Austin, Texas gig I got to meet the Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey, who runs the Trance operation, and I asked if I could borrow the Butthole Surfer's megaphone and got to do 'Yuhahi' through this powerful metal horn, it was great fun. It meant I was free and I could get right down to the edge of the stage and point it at the eveyone's heads. I've got into using backing tapes for the backwards stuff live, because I used to get so annoyed at feeling limited by being a solo guitarist/singer. I took a lot of the original four-track stuff and put it onto cassette without the vocals. I would then play a little battery-powered walkman into my amp, so I could sing and play another instrument.
Tell me about your label 'Next Best Way' and what your hopes for it are.
Just to continue the way it is, I don't really want it to grow. It is at a nice cottage industry level. It is not enough for me to live off, and I guess it financially amounts to a small part time job of a couple of afternoons a week. For some reason I love the simple work of putting a thousand CDs into covers, doing the photocopying, folding a thousand inserts, posting away boxes of them, and hassling to get your money back several months later. I can really get into that because there is something about personally touching and therefore, in a kind of weird way, blessing each one that you do that is really satisfying.
What is next up for the label?
Next up was going to be a Pip Proud single, an Australian who I've been a big fan of for many years. I was so delighted when David Nichols of the Cannanes found out where he was living, and persuaded Pip to phone me one day. Pip then sent me three recent songs he had written and recorded, and I grew to love these three songs so much that I knew it was not worth me doing a Geraldine pressing [individually lathe-cut polycarbonate discs from King Records, Geraldine] which wouldn't sound that hot and I could only afford to do a very small number since 'Runner' had not brought back any money at all at that point. While I was on tour I had taken a tape of the three songs and advised Pip that I was going to try and farm it out to a bigger and better label. Now it looks like Siltbreeze are going to do it as early as January 1997 in a decent-sized pressing on quality vinyl. So there goes NBW #3 into more capable hands! Although I may do the 50 to 70 copies I can afford through Geraldine for NZ distribution only. Which means the third Next Best Way release will be my next solo album called 'Way Back Out', realistically March 1997, not because of limitations of writing ,recording and mixing, but because I need to wait for money to come back from earlier releases.
What are you listening to over there these days?
The Cannanes and Crabstick from Australia. Charalambides and Neutral Milk Hotel from the US. I got to stay with the Charalambides in Houston, and Tom and Christine Carter were the first people in the US I had said 'you are honorary Dunedin people' to. They seem so relaxed to me, very un-American! They didn't have this big career thing and they were really just nice people. I have a compilation tape of Charalambides that contains things I think are so beautiful...put it on out the windows at night and sit on the beach and listen to it...fantastic.
<< go back to part 1 of the Alastair Galbraith interview