Antony Milton

For our second series of interviews with musicians for Rollaroll, I spoke with New Zealand’s Antony Milton, who recently performed a series of shows in Australia, including a show at Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival. Read the interview below:

For readers of Rollaroll who aren’t aware of what you do, would you like to give a brief overview/description of your work?

I started out as a kid who was obsessed with tape recorders- recording weird noises. I particularly liked radio static (because it sounded like rivers and I was equally obsessed with wilderness and nature). Later on I got into writing (stories/poems), and when I was about 15 or 16 my Dad taught me to play the guitar. Inevitably enough this lead to me writing songs. But right from day one of learning my first guitar chord I was recording everything I did. It wasn’t long before I was mixing weird noises with my songs and I spent much of my 20s (the 1990s) making hybrid song/noise albums that I released on my cassette label Wire Bridge (The ‘Sirens’ CD on Last Visible Dog is a collection of some of the best of this stuff). It was also during this period that I discovered that I wasn’t the only person in the world who was doing this stuff. NZ labels like Metonymic and Xpressway became big influences. Around 2000 I had something of a ‘post structuralist’ crisis. I lost faith in ‘the word’. Haha. This lead to me focussing far more on instrumental and drone and noise based works than previously. Basically I no longer felt comfortable employing words in my art.. It was also around this time that I started playing live on a regular basis. I had been very shy and insecure about putting myself ‘out there’ previous to this. It was strange really, one day I simply woke up and that insecurity was gone and it never came back. (Recently I’ve started writing the odd song again (albeit with as spare a use of words as possible..)). Anyway since 2000 I have been doing music semi-professionally. Touring, doing sound installations, making records and running my new label (PseudoArcana). I have several different on-going solo projects, as well as many collaborative ones. The common threads linking these projects- for me-are an interest in ecstatic states and musics; a reverence for ‘place’ (trying to draw out or represent the feeling of being in a specific environment); a fascination with textures (I like the rough rumble of tape); and the aspiration to play hands-on instruments in a sort of calligraphic gestural manner..

I saw you twice recently; once with Campbell Kneale for Birchville Cat Motel at This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle, and once at Serial Space in Sydney performing a live set of your solo material. Both were exceptional performances. How different do you find it to collaborate with another musician than it is to perform your own music?

Thanks! I think in Campbells interview for you he might have pointed out that the Newcastle show was actually meant to be billed as With Throats As Fine As Needles? That’s our ongoing duo where in we basically set up a single one note drone and sing over the top. For records we traipse out to bunkers and caves etc with battery operated gear and make use of the natural reverberant acoustics of those spaces. When playing live we make our own caves and bunkers from electronics! In answer to your question I find playing with other people a lot more ‘fun’. Playing layered electric music solo can sometimes be a bit like juggling – trying to keep all the balls in the air without the dynamic crashing to the floor.. In a duo it is at least twice as easy to keep the dynamic up where you want it. Playing solo is a lot more intense. That’s not necessarily a bad thing of course. I get a great deal of satisfaction from the intimacy of solo performance. When playing with others the energy interchange is primarily with the person/people you are playing with. When playing solo it is necessarily between yourself and the audience.

On both occasions, but particularly at Serial Space, you seem to have quite an intricate set-up. Would you like to talk about what equipment and instruments you use during your performances?

My set up for doing sets like that live has evolved so gradually over the years that it still seems fairly rudimentary to me… But yes, there are a lot of gadgets employed. My father-in-law actually came along to one of the shows on the tour. Hes 79 and I’m not sure that he actually listens to ANY music for pleasure. Ha. I had something of an insight into how bewildering my set up must look to others when I was trying to explain to him what all the different bits did. The Serial Space show was mainly guitar and effects. Wah, reverbs etc. Having a hands on expressive instrument is really important for me when I play. I used vary-speed cassette walkmans to play tapes of field recordings. I layered rubbed and e-bowed guitar strings using a loop pedal. (This looping pedal also has ‘beats’ on it. Over the years I have had some disasters in shows when I would accidentally turn the beats on. Recently though I have decided to embrace them.) I had an sk1 sampling keyboard that I was using to drop in synth like pulses of sound, and for further drones. I had a contact mic’d caster wheel that I was running through a distortion pedal. This caster wheel is the new addition to the set up. I’m not sure that I’ve got it working right yet.. The idea is that I will spin it and it will make this huge grrrrggghhhrrrrrrrr sound- kind of like as a noise interjection. But despite it working really well at home it didn’t really do its thing at any of the shows. So instead of using it for that I discovered that I can fit it in my mouth and sing through it. Haha. (I find that singing- or howling perhaps..- is actually one of the best ways of getting ‘into the zone’ when one plays.) Everything runs through a small cheap 12 channel mixer that also has cheesy built in effects that I can play about with.

And what about what equipment and instruments you use to record with? Is it different from what you use to perform live with or is it pretty similar?

Different projects have radically different set ups… Mostly when recording I play only one instrument at a time and build up layers through careful crafting. My live shows are far more chaotic than my records. They are truly improvised and tend to range across different feelings and modes of playing. As a result I actually release a lot of live things because that is like a recording project in its own right. In my recordings I’m kind of on two diverging paths at the current moment. On the one side I’ve been trying to make the loudest heaviest and most intense psychedelic guitar noise records that I can. Layers and layers of feedback and guitar riffs with pseudo-techno beats.. So its almost like ‘pop’ noise or something. That’s really fun. On the other hand I’ve also been doing a series of records where I go camping somewhere for a week or so and try to make a record about the place where I am. For example I recently spent a week in a small village at Arthurs Pass in the mountains of the South Island where I made a banjo record. (Admittedly it only sounds like banjo some of the time..) Anyway these records tend to be a lot more nuanced and subtle and more aligned with say haiku than spectacular bombast.

How did you find the shows in Australia, were they enjoyable?

I think this last tour in Australia was maybe the best tour yet. It was really very fun. I found myself laughing a lot and I was happy with the shows and got to see some killer performances from other folk as well.

What do you have planned for the future?

Well…. Theres some big changes happening actually. My girlfriend and I are flying off to Sth America in March where we are planning on travelling together for one year. I’m taking some basic recording gear and have been talking about a few possible shows in Argentina but ostensibly 2009 is a year off music. Certainly off the label at any rate. So before then I am busy trying to finish off the various records I’m working on and packing up my NZ life. I’m already excited though about getting back into playing and touring in 2010. I also have ideas for some big installation projects that I would like to work on.

The following short clip is from a solo show of Antony’s at Sydney’s Serial Space. The night also featured Inappropriate Tough Guy Behaviour, Seaworthy, Brassskulls and Birchville Cat Motel:

Links: Antony Milton, PseudoArcana, Our Love Will Destroy the World, Sound&Fury, CPSIP

Related articles: Interview with Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as “fair use”, for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Filed under: Antony Milton, Birchville Cat Motel, Campbell Kneale, PseudoArcana, Serial Space, Special Features, This is Not Art, With Throats As Fine As Needles

Rollaroll Interview With Campbell Kneale

Campbell Kneale has been performing under the name Birchville Cat Motel for over a decade. Earlier this month, Kneale performed his last shows throughout Australia and New Zealand as Birchville Cat Motel before he moves on to his next project called Our Love Will Destroy the Earth (incidentally, the title of one of his Birchville Cat Motel Records). In the first of a series of interviews with musicians for ROLLAROLL, I spoke with Kneale about things like his last shows, performing live, influences and the recording industry. Read the interview below:

You recently just performed your last shows under the moniker Birchville Cat Motel, how did that feel?

FanFUCKINGtastic. Im so glad that its over and that I can start afresh. I really feel like its going to be so much more productive for me. I seemed to bump into so many people on tour who were so comiseratory about the whole ‘end of Birchville’ thing… like they expected me to be really bummed about the whole deal or something. I’m not. Im delighted. Fuck Birchville.

I saw two of your last Birchville Cat Motel performances; one with Antony Milton at This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle, and your solo stint at Serial Space in Sydney. Both were amazing performances, but there were quite notable differences between them. I saw Domenico Sciajno give a talk after his show for This Is Not Art, and he stated that he had to adjust his sound to the noisy environment in which he performed. Are you subject to changing or adapting your sound to the environment in which you perform in?

Not really. My solo performances are loud. If the room is noisy… i play louder. Easy. I tried my best to specify a large PA for BCM shows and tried my best to get promoters to put me on in places that were going to be appropriate for maximum volume shows. However, every now and then you turn up in a venue and the PA is about the size of a couple of laptop speakers and rather than smoke the poor sad little thing I’ll would try and bend to accommodate its meagre output.

However, when me and Antony play together its a totally different thing with a very defined agenda. Strangely, we were supposed to be performing together under our duo name, With Throats As Fine As Needles. When we turned up to Electrofringe we found we were billed as Birchville so I guess a whole bunch of people went away with a rather twisted impression of what constitutues Birchville Cat Motel. Its wasnt a very ‘Birchville’ performance at all. The Serial Space show WAS Birchville… sand-blasted dronerawk and shamanic lung-shread. With Throats As Fine As Needles gives no thought to ideas like ‘continuity’ or ‘style’ other than instrumentation (which in our case is primarily our voices) so each space holds the criteria for an entirely new performance. Yes, we respond… but only because we give no real thought to performing, we simply play with the resources we have available.

What equipment do you use to perform live with?

Oh dear oh dear… You are merely a novice in the ways of this dark magic and as such are not yet privvy to such powerful, galaxy-ripping secrets. Even Antony Milton only knows a secret handshake or two. Yet verily I say unto thee, gear maketh not the rockstar.

On your MySpace account, you list Black Metal as one of the genres your music participates in. The influence of Black Metal seems to me most apparent on a record of yours like Bird Sister Blasphemy, but how do you account for the influence on records like Gunpowder Temple of Heaven?

I dont account for the influence. I like all sorts of music and count them all as influences. The Wedding Present, Cheap Trick, Striborg, Angus MacLise, Brian Eno, Neu!, Ethiopian psyche, The Carter Family, The Stone Roses, Albert Ayler, Van Halen, Henri Gorecki… i can hear it all in the music. I find it curious how easily people latch on to labels… even ‘underground music types’ who you think would not be so eager to do such a thing. Metal is the new Wolf Eyes. Everybodys doing it. Everybodys waffling on about doom and death and black… people are so boring. I find black metal attractive as it is probably the most ‘experimental’ kind of metal… its raw and utterly unforgiving yet more about atmosphere than technique. It manages to transcend its own metal-ness and become something else entirely.

Gunpowder Temple of Heaven has nothing to do with black metal… its more like ‘Loveless’ meets ‘Rime of The Ancient Mariner’.

Our Love Will Destroy the World is the name of one of your Birchville Cat Motel records. What was it that drew you to this title, and why have you chosen it as your new moniker?

Titles float in and out of my head in a constant and random fashion… sometimes I manage to retain them for long enough to write them down. That was one that didnt get away. As per usual it holds all the ingredients of my own definition a good title… resonance, mystery, power, fuckedupness.

I felt like it was a good idea to reference my past work, after all, Our Love Will Destroy The World while being something different for me is not THAT different on a surface level to BCM. In fact you’d have to be some kinda autistic mathematical genius to be able to hear the difference at all. The new project is a transformation of ATTITUDE rather than anything to do with music… a new work ethic, a new ‘point’ and a new chapter for me rather than a whole new book. Our Love Will Destroy The World was the title that seemed most appropriate. Like so much of what I do ‘I just like it’. Its not that deep really. Sorry. Ha.

In a recent post of yours, you’ve told us that you intend to release the majority of your work in the future on analogue mediums (vinyl and cassette) only. What are your views on the recording industry at the moment?

Well, I have very little to do with the recording industry personally. Like many of the ‘cdr brigade’ I really only work via ‘gentlemens agreements’ with small labels, run by individuals who, almost without exception, are very kind, honest people. Friends in fact.

For what its worth though by means of observation, the ‘recording industry’ has never really been less relevant. Certainly to me, but i sense perhaps also for the entire ‘record buying public’… which less face it is dwindling to almost nothing… who BUYS records released by labels who could be considered ‘industry’ anymore? I feel like we are reaching another 1977… a bloated, geriatric record industry that has been feeding off the whole compact disc farce for 20-plus years (sorry, when did you say CDs were going to become cheaper?) and now they are getting the big ‘fuck you’ that they deserve. The global monoculturalism and predominance of hip-hop says it all… there has never been a form of music MORE popular that has had LESS to say. The industry deserves everything they get.

Lastly, when will we hear the first Our Love Will Destroy the World release?

Soon.

Links: Antony Milton, CPSIP, Electrofringe, Our Love Will Destroy the Earth, This is Not Art

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as “fair use”, for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Filed under: Birchville Cat Motel, Black Metal, Interviews, Special Features