Japan-based Terre Thaemiltz is an
award-winning electroacoustic laptop musician
and a queer activist, with roots as a house
DJ in New York's notorious transgender clubs
and as an ambient music producer. He has
a firm stance on reconfiguring notions of
performativity and trangenderism, and you
can learn more in Part 2 of our interview.
Terre Thaemiltz brings the Lovebomb tour
to Sydney @ Disorientation Lanfranchis Memorial
Discoteque Thurs June 10, Fabrique, Brisbane
Powerhouse Sat June 12, and Kaleide Theatre
Melbourne, RMIT University, Fri June 18.
Have you
found many gadgets and sound sampling devices
since your move to Japan?
I am not a real gadget whore. I have no
interest in competing with all of the software
and hardware geeks who always have the latest
and greatest of everything. I don't
think it's so important – which
is lucky, since I don't have the money
anyway! For me, it's more important
to find equipment you like, and explore
it. Don't worry about being technologically
behind, because everyone is always behind
in some way. I have found some nice things
in the garbage in Japan: old effect units,
drum machines, turntables. It's a
bit of a hobby of mine to clean them up
and do minor repairs. Some of them have
come in handy. In particular, people are
always throwing away old microphone spring-reverbs
for singing karaoke. Clean 'em up
and you can run all kinds of sounds through
them – much nicer than digital reverbs.
Are the Espanic
vocoder speech sounds on your Lovebomb tracks
an allegory of your preoccupation with issues
of transgenderism and identity politics?
Actually, “Lovebomb” does not
use vocoding, but a new process developed
by Christopher Penrose called “Co-depend.”
The difference is that vocoding has a “control
sound source” which the second sound
is pushed through. “Co-depend”
runs an analysis of both sound sources,
and like the name implies, has both files
contribute equally to the output sound.
This does not mean the output is always
a “middling” of the two sounds
– the results can be quite surprising.
As you said, I think the act of processing
sound sources is a form of recontextualisation
that has parallels with transgenderism as
a form of recontextualising gender signifiers.
In specific relation to the Lovebomb theme,
I thought the “Co-depend” process
contained some nice metaphors related to
love and co-dependency.
Given that
there are a plethora of female vocalists
in mainstream and alternate music worlds,
do your digitised 'sound texts' change the
'authorial status' of the feminine in the
field of contemporary song and electro-acoustic
composition?
I think that distortion and audible processing
helps “de-soul” the voice. Perhaps
it makes the voice function a bit more as
a representational device, rather than the
typical way of hearing vocals as a direct
expression of emotion. In the case of spoken
narrative, it's even harder to get
people to listen beyond the surface storytelling.
While I try to select vocals and spoken
word passages that relate to the project's
content, their real contribution is not
so much in what they say as how we hear
them. For example, the track “Between
Empathy and Sympathy is Time (Apartheid)”
features an early ANC/People's Army
radio broadcast in which the announcer is
encouraging terrorism – quite different
from the agenda of today's ANC.
The real point of this piece is not so much
a commentary on changes in the ANC or apartheid.
Rather, it's about placing extreme
alienation within a moment of loving affiliation
– that moment in a relationship where
you look at your lover and say, “I
don't even know who you are anymore”.
Ha, ha! When listening to this track, most
people have a clear anti-apartheid stance,
and in the beginning of this piece they
presume a level of agreement with the ANC
announcer. However, as the speech goes on
and takes violent turns, most people end
up calling their initial agreement into
question. Love and political alliance is
the theme.
In the early
'90s you had a reputation as a house
DJ in New York. Could you tell us about
your transition from house to electro-acoustic
audio collage?
My taste in music was quite eclectic since
childhood, but of course this was difficult
to reflect as a house DJ in the late '80s
and early '90s. I was frustrated with
the limitations of the house scene, and
kept losing DJ jobs because I refused to
play major-label shit, or couldn't
find clubs that played the tracks I liked.
But there were nice records being produced...occasionally!
After losing my regular gig at Sally's
II, I gave up on DJing. I decided to try
making music instead of DJing it, but I
guess I was a bit jaded and pissed at the
house scene, so I had no energy to make
music that conformed to the house formula.
That's how the first Comatonse release
came about, which was really a crossover
of ambient, deep house, jazz improv, breaks.
I never honestly expected any sort of response.
Producing in a lot of genres from house
to electroacoustique to neo-expressionist
piano solos is my way of not getting caught
up in the hype of any one particular music
movement. In part, this is modelled after
my idol Haruomi Hosono, whose catalogue
spans the gamut from rock to technopop to
ambient to electroacoustique to acid house
to trance. There's a lot he does that
falls into genres I don't like, and
his approach is totally spiritually loaded,
but despite these turn-offs I find this
diversity of musical identities interesting.
What were
your major influences while you were growing
up?
I guess the things that pushed me away from
formalist music were over exposure to Catholic
church music and being forced to take violin
lessons as a child, which I fervently resisted
year after year by never practicing or learning
to read music. The things that pushed me
toward electronic music were roller-disco
in my pre-teen years (I was pretty damn
good!) and an appeal for music without guitars,
since I associated rock'n'roll
with the people who harassed me. The irony
was that there were a lot of classic synth
solos working their way into rock, like
“Come Sail Away” by Styx and
the intro and outro to “Fly Like An
Eagle” by the Steve Miller Band. I
used to make myself mix tapes off the radio
with just these short little solos. So there
was a lot of
crossover in influences.
Where did
the name of your label, Comatonse, come
from, and what is the future for Comatonse?
The name “Comatonse Recordings”
(pronounced “coma-tones”) is
a bit of a bad joke gotten out of hand.
I issued my first record, Comatonse.000
(featuring “Raw Through a Straw”
and “Tranquilizer”), in 1993,
when there was a rather strong crossover
between certain types of house music and
ambient. Of course, both of these musics
are drenched in flaky spiritualism and “tripping
out,” which is of no interest to me
as a very non-spiritual socio-materialist.
I found (and still find) it oppressive.
You'd be surprised how hard it is
for people to accept that you can relax,
be at peace etc without engaging in anything
“spiritual”! To express my dislike
for the spiritual rhetoric being forced
upon my audio, as a kind of dark joke I
latched on to the image of a person in a
coma as someone who had an incredibly aggressive
and disempowering state of relaxation forced
upon them.
Comatonse releases tend to be vinyl, semi-DJ
oriented records. This is because it is
the only type of distribution I have been
able to secure – and it's not
even formal distribution at that. I don't
have a release schedule, just one-off projects
which I like. It keeps things small and
the quality up (at least I'd like
to think so). In July, there will be a 10th-anniversary
reissue of the first release, called Comatonse.000.R2.
The A-side combines the original A- and
B-side tracks. The B-side combines recordings
of the only live performances I have ever
done of these tracks, which happened in
Japan in 2003, ten years after their release.
And when I say “live,” I mean
that in the conventional sense of real keyboard
playing and improvisation. It was the first
time I had ever “played live”
in that way, so they are really rare recordings
in that sense. This record will be distributed
through Cisco Music in Japan, and eventually
made available through the Comatonse website.
Meanwhile, I will continue using Comatonse
Recordings as the umbrella production organization
through which I will license and release
other projects, such as Lovebomb...
