Vague Terrain

Ezekiel Honig's imprint Microcosm Music was recently described by Bernardo Rondeau in Dusted Magazine as "..having more color and shape than Kompakt's singular dot, but it is nearly iconic in its elegant shorthand: crisp and linear, it features a small metropolis crammed inside of a cardboard box ready for freight shipping or living room assembly." We asked our peer Evan Saskin to engage Ezekiel in a discussion about sound design, sampling, and the fine art of simplicity.

Vague Terrain: I like your myspace description that your music sounds like "Bumping into a chair while humming". Where does that come from?

Ezekiel Honig: I thought it was a funny, if abstracted way of getting the idea of the sound across without using generic terms like minimal or found sound (which means different things to different people). I think if read by the right set of eyeballs the bumping into a chair suggests the accidental aspect of things, as if actually hurting oneself or falling into something, and the humming implies a more personal kind of music - melodic, but soft and kept to oneself.

Sampling and Synthesis

VT: There's the suggestion of both sampled sounds (the chair bump) and synthesized sounds (the hum). How do those two approaches to sound become integrated in your music? Are they two completely different things?

EH: To me, these two things are completely integrated. I try to use a recorded note from an acoustic instrument if possible - rather than a synthesized sound - but then that initial note is often effected and transposed and mapped on a virtual keyboard to reach a melody. So, the initial "hum" starts out as more of a whole thing and I try to personalize it to come closer to this notion of the sound that is melodic and kept soft and close to oneself; becoming more of an internal experience. When I start working on something it usually begins with the "bump" and the "hum" coming together almost immediately, so they're intertwined throughout the process and have an influence on each other.

VT: Songs (can we call them that?) like "Green Tea" or "Love Session" have a strong sense of composed melody, whereas Scattered Practices LP seems to use synthesis as a kind of texture to place found sounds in front of or inside of. As a composer, how does that shift occur?

EH: Yes, we can certainly call them songs, though sometimes I worry that not everyone would. I think that shift has happened slowly over time, or maybe quicker if it's thought of in terms of one album to the next. In earlier tracks/albums I was working with a sense of what types of melodies I wanted to hear and make, and I think over time those melodies didn't change so much as stretch out and get pulled apart and re-organized. I think this is a function of wanting to evolve while trying to do a similar thing in a different way - to make the process move in a direction without leaving its origins completely. At the same time, it's happened naturally, without necessarily a moment where I stop and say "this album will be more like this," but rather a movement further and further away from clear lines defining a song or a melody. There is less delineation of where one note ends and the next begins, with less introductions and outro-ductions and things like that. I'm still interested in using techno as a form from which to work, but I'm moving away from that original form incrementally.

VT: Because you came to this sound initially as a drum and bass DJ. That music has a very particular and peculiar relationship with the sample, both as the edited breaks culled from old records and, within jungle especially, as the overriding identity of each tune. Do you carry those sensibilities with you still? Is there a persistent connection between sampling and field recording?

EH: The way d'n'b treats breaks has had a lasting impression on me. I love that sense of not following a set trajectory, and letting the song go where it wants to go - working with loops, but not following a loop. That sense of heavy editing has permeated my sound for sure - that sense of working with looping structures without being confined by them. Sampling ideas have influenced me in terms of how I approach sound. I don't sample the work of others, but I record sounds or instruments and use that as sample material the same way that someone would use a break or a vocal sampled from a record. I view it as creating my own samples, which is fun, and more engaging for me, and nice to know that that exact sound doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, because it was recorded at that one moment and can't be exactly duplicated... unless someone sampled it.

In general, I'm more interested in sampling that either works with very short samples or does a lot to the original source - obscures it and makes it so different that it isn't recognizable anymore. I can admit that I have a love/hate relationship with sampling. I love the technique and it's ingrained in my musical background and how I work with music today, but I have issues with how it's used sometimes. It's a gray line. I've just always gravitated towards sampling that doesn't announce itself as such, by disguising the sample, rather than using a whole melody that was written by someone 40 years ago. I'm not saying that I find no artistic value in that. I'm speaking more from what I personally am interested in listening to, or the way I'm interested in working. For example, Jan Jelinek's Loop Finding Jazz Records was hinged on the sample, but he used tiny snippets of samples and rearranged them into something entirely different. That to me is more interesting than some d'n'b records I used to encounter years ago - where I would get disappointed if I found out that my favorite part of the track was lifted off an old soul record and was very easy to spot if you knew the original, sampled material.

Experiments and Accidents

VT: Another aspect of your description is the idea of the bump into the chair and the implication of accidents and unexpected results. What is the process like to construct a track? How do you figure things out and how do you know when you have figured something out?

EH: In terms of the bump into the chair idea specifically, there is the implication of the accident, but it also refers to the types of sounds I gravitate towards - often the sounds of accidents themselves. In a way, there are multiple levels of accidents - from the event that happens down to the sound of the event happening. I try to be aware of the unexpected, but fortunate, happening, and make sure I can recognize it when it does. This applies just as much, or maybe more so, to the process by which I record sounds. I never record something by trying to find a specific sound. I always try something out and do a bunch of takes and make variations of that, and just let sounds happen. So, I don't know exactly what sound I'm looking for, or exactly what will happen when I do this or that. I go into the recording and look for the bits that feel right to me and try to work them into a song. I try to keep all the sounds used from one recording session in the same song, so it can have a sound theme of sorts - though it may have several of these themes, because it may be pulling in sounds from several sources.

VT: Do you still consider that work to be experimental? What is controlled? How do you figure things out and how do you know when you have figured something out?

EH: In a way, I guess this approach is experimental, but I don't like that word and I don't think of it in those terms too often. It depends on how you define it. If experimental is anything that eschews the musical conventions of verse - chorus - verse or classical technique, then yes, it's experimental. Using that definition, almost all electronic music is experimental, and yet I don't think that, for example, all techno producers would characterize their music as such. When I think of experimental music it makes me think of someone attempting something and then seeing what the results are and leaving it like that, or somehow having distance from the results of the experiment. I don't think of my music in those terms. For me, it needs to feel personal; needs to be part of my musical personality. There's a lot of trial and error and observation, but the end result is always something that's been pored over and arranged and edited and structured very carefully. That's where the control part comes in. There are a lot of accidents employed, but more so on the micro level. The small accidents are arranged into a larger, purposeful whole. Arriving at the completed song is a matter of approximating what I'm trying to do with it, which is a concept that could have been in my mind from the very beginning, or it could be what the idea turned into across the course of working on it. It's difficult to put it into words, but the song is done when it feels done to me. This takes into account what I've done in the past, what I'm feeling like doing that day, where I want the record to be heading, the weather outside my window and really anything that could be affecting me at that moment, combined with past experiences.

People, Places and Things

VT: Another aspect of your description is the sense of space. Do you set out with specific intentions to map out a space or to evoke a particular place or thing? Songs like "Cape Cod Getaway" or "Interstices" do this in a fairly concrete way, as do the above mentioned "Green Tea" and "Love Session" (perhaps I'm being overly determined by your titles). To shift focus to more recent work: What is the relation between the oceans of world and the living rooms of the world in a track like "Oceans & Living Rooms".

EH: I don't really set out to evoke specific spaces or things, but this can happen naturally anyway, since there are literally the sounds of specific spaces and things. I like that idea, that a song can capture that moment or that person or object, but I don't rely on that concept. I always feel that the end result is most important, with no knowledge of the sounds used or the concept behind it. Then again, I think any space or idea evoked is as much the responsibility of the listener as the producer. I hope that the listener will add something to the experience in order to complete the recorded work.

My track titles are often an abstraction of the sound sources used - just like the music - and they usually come after a track has been sonically determined. For instance, "Cape Cod Getaway" is so titled because of what the finished song evoked in me, and I tied it to vacation, and Cape Cod is somewhere I often went on family vacation when I was a kid. "Oceans and Living Rooms" got its title because contributions were made to it by Robin Saville (of ISAN, in the form of field recordings) and Morgan Packard (in the form of saxophone). Robin lives in England, across an ocean and Morgan lives right here in New York, and what everyone put into it was assembled here in my home. The title is just trying to tie together the geographical distance and the people who were part of it.

Collaboration and Complexity

VT: Another aspect of your description is the simultaneity of different things. Just surfing around the internet for reviews of your music, the term 'minimalist' crops up frequently, but there's always a lot of stuff going on. Is simplicity something that you strive for in music, how do you construct complexity?

EH: The listener's perspective says just as much about the listener as it says about the music. Minimal to one person is boring to another. Loud to one person is quiet to another. There's no way to control someone's reaction to art. I think the word minimal is used in different ways when describing music these days, and it rarely has much to do with the amount of sounds used or the complexity of the music. I think it has more to do with how the sounds are expressed - the space in it and the mood of the music. In that sense, I would agree that my music is minimal.

I'm not setting out to make something that is simple or complex. I think what I want to hear, and therefore what comes out of me, is something which usually gets categorized as simple. I see it over and over in reviews and it's (usually) used as a virtuous word, which is nice. I like music that feels spacious and space often involves less overt complexity. What's important to me is that there is something to be discovered after repeated listens.

I really love any kind of art where you can find the complexity in the simplicity. By complexity I mean where the space of the material allows the viewer/listener/reader to be inspired and begin to add their own meaning and inject their view - when not being inundated allows real appreciation for what's there, and dwelling on the nuances of something can bring out so much more of what's inherent in it. I gravitate towards art that has space in it, whether it's music or film or painting or drawing or anything else. It tends to resonate more with me and communicate more to me. It is a language of sorts, so the less that's said, the more room for interpretation and personalization.

How close one is to a piece of music has a tremendous effect on their perception of it. Of course the person who made the music is at the most intimate level with it and hears it differently than anyone else, but the amount of time one spends listening, or how close they listen, changes everything. I forget who it was - it might have been Karlheinz Stockhausen - who said something in an interview to the effect of - if one wants to really understand what the person making music was doing, than they would have to listen to it for the same amount of time that it took to make it. Of course, this is wishful thinking and not usually possible, but it does happen occasionally - where someone listens to an album hundreds and hundreds of times, and they "get it," in a different way because they've spent as much time with it, or close to as much time, as the person or people who made it.

VT: On the topic of multiple people making music, I want to bring up the Early Morning Migration LP [collaboration with Morgan Packard]. How did that arise? How does working with someone else affect your process? To what extent did that LP inflect your subsequent work?

EH: Well, that album was less of a collaboration than one might think. The tracks were made separately by me and Morgan Packard. We collaborated on a conceptual direction for the album and we shared notes and gave each other advice and to a certain extent acted as editors for each other, but we never sat in a room together making a track, or passed a track back and forth, or anything like that. We definitely made an effort to make it a cohesive album that made sense and worked well as a whole. As we got further into the process we were making songs to fit in with what was already there, just like I might if I was producing an album by myself. If I know that song A is probably going to make the cut, then I might work on something like song B because it would be a good complement or a good foil to song A.

We did collaborate on live performances for a while, as part of promoting the album, which was fun. We worked improvisationally, with occasional practices. We joked that it was our jam band. I handled almost all the percussion and some of the melodic elements and Morgan handled a lot of the melodic material and sound effects, textures, and the like. It was nice to have this sense of having four hands, that one of us could either let something play a little too long or be looking around for the right file or something, and the other would be holding down the fort. I'm sure working together that way has had an effect on me, though I don't know exactly how to phrase it.

Please visit Microcosm-Music.com and Anticipate Recordings for more information on Ezekiel Honig's work