Swimmer out of water
General | Georgina Lock | 14.04.08
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Origami Biro Interview
INTERVIEW with Tom Hill aka Origami Biro who has a newly released debut album Cracked Mirrors and Stopped Clocks. Previously, Tom was part of the acclaimed electronica partnership, Wauvenfold and during this time worked with The Super Furry Animals, Bjork, and featured on sessions with John Peel and Radio 3.
Widely considered a rare talent, Tom is interviewed by artist Jonathan Gillie, a painter who has a long association with the musician. They talk about music, film, the creative process and emotional influences.
To illustrate the interview, audio clips are positioned throughout the article. Click on the play button icon to listen to the clips. Internet Explorer users will need to click twice.
Noshi - Origami Biro (34 secs, 150kb)
Shall we start with composition process?
When I'm composing music, I have no idea where it will lead me or what the end result will be, but I always have faith that more will follow if I just get the ball rolling - I don't have to be able to see the whole thing to know that there will be more. Fundamentally, that's all I need to do; lay a few things down and they start dictating what happens next.
Once one part is recorded, depending on it's texture, pitch or tempo, I'm already being given suggestions about where to go next. Just a single note can have the power of dictating a whole piece of music. So really I'm only doing half the work, the music is actually helping me out, giving me suggestions. For example, after laying something that's say, quite bassy, that'll require something not bassy juxtaposed to it - then those two things are there but, maybe they're a bit flat, so they'll say to me, 'we need to spruce things up here'.
And it's always the same process?
Pretty much - that's the only thing I can find that's the continuing rule I stick by, and all I need to do is make sure that the first foot I put forward is a good one, because everything I build around it will carry the essence of that first thing
It's like, if a guitar part's got potential, I don't try to make it a better guitar part, I just lay it down and then try and work around it and perhaps build it up. Even if the original guitar part gets deleted, the fact is, it caused other things to come into being around it.
So it retains something of the essence?
Yeah, it's the essence of that initial idea or thing that I've laid down will always carry through, which is why I make sure that whatever it is that I lay down first isn't shit. It's got to be something that's got something about it - you don't know what it is but you feel kind of compelled to go with that idea, and that's the only thing that I need to do really - that, and have faith that the rest of it will unfold. It's like a bit of a jigsaw puzzle - so the closer it gets to the end, the easier it is and tells you immediately why that's gone on for too long, or that's boring so there's a change right there. It gets easier the more you start looking at it like that, allowing the tune to tell you where to go next.
Dissect - Origami Biro (14 secs, 228kb)
It's almost like a splash of paint on a page?
Yeah, I see it as a very simplistic idea of what painters do; you apply a bit of colour and if one side is too light then you're searching for a way to balance the light and dark. Or you splash a bit of paint on the page and even if you're trying to do something quite abstract, I guess that bit of paint on that page is kind of saying, 'I'm here, so what's going to be relative to me? What's going to go next to me to help the painting work'. It's the same with music I think, if the piece is too dull it tells you to apply something. I see it as music suggesting where I should go next, 'now that you've got this part, you can have this, this and this'. Sometimes it doesn't work but that means you've already got some options.
You've built in some kind of framework. I know you'll quite lock yourself away for periods of time, when you're working on your music. Do you find that being in a solitary space helps?
I think about people's opinions around my music, and people's opinions about music in general. I'm often quite dangerously swayed by those opinions and it's only when I lock myself away for quite a while, for a few days and not talk to people about music or about anything I'm doing, that I gradually find this kind of comfortable space where I'm not worried about what people think of it. It's not that I constantly worry about what people think, but their ideas and their words and opinions have an influence. I need to get away from that influence for a while and that's often when the best stuff happens, when it's just you and your own brain, you know?
Yes, when it's just you being involved in the editing process and you're not being influenced by other people's point of view.
And it might not even be just in the negative. Sometimes, when people say they like a piece of music, that does my head in as well, because I'm thinking, 'I wasn't even sure about that.' And it kind of makes me wonder about putting it in. it confuses me a bit.
Well it's a confusing process anyway, especially when you're working on your own as you say. If you're working in a partnership you've always got someone else to bounce ideas off and they will often bring something to the table that you'd never have thought of. So how do you find the creative process on your own, compared to working with somebody else?
It's a totally different process. But I think that locking yourself away can also be a bad thing. You do need to have some kind of grounding, and you need people to pull you back into the real world every now and again. I think when you spend time with something for too long you can become contrived and not even realise it. You come out again and people may say, 'I'm really not sure about that' and I may think 'shit, you're right'. It's really a balance between locking yourself away and taking on some criticism every now and then.
Vitreous - Origami Biro (12 secs, 200kb)
So working on my own was a bit strange but I kind of got used to it after seeing the response was quite good and that gave me the confidence to keep going and make my own decisions. But you still come back to a thing the next day and think 'god that sounds so bad.' So I gave things more time and instead of trying to finish, I'd go back after a couple of days and that was almost like my way of bouncing ideas off myself. Having a great bunch of friends helps, which I'm lucky enough to have.
We've spoken before about a difference between working digitally to working with paint, is that with paint your mistakes are always there. You can cover them over but they're always there. But as a digital artist, what's your relationship with making mistakes? Is that an important part of the process or is it good that you can get rid of the thing that didn't work?
I think you pick up a style of working eventually, but it is a tough one. I think there is something to be said for laying things down and letting the mistakes just be whatever they are. I think that it's an interesting thing to decide whether or not you should polish things or just leave them. I think that's always going to be a constant battle, I think it probably is for a lot of musicians. But that's the difference between painting and making music: you can record music and have it sound great, but then fuck it up with how you produce it afterwards, whereas, I think as a painter you develop a more holistic process from start to finish.
The whole album has a very distinctive feel, and I know that you've written a short story which was a big influence, was that something you set out to achieve?
Well I'd written a lot of music before that story, but I was inspired to write something then to see what I could produce. The writing was quite visual and I thought it would be interesting to see what type of music would go to those intricate, interlacing stories and lines. While I was thinking about that, I stumbled across soundtracks like The Motorcycle Diaries which is really expansive and visual.
Unknown - Origami Biro (12 secs, 200kb)
Does film music inspire you?
Yeah, there was one tune that inspired an idea to help me put music to that story, and that was Krystof Penderecki's Threnedy for the Victims of Hiroshima, which is the most horrific piece of music I've ever heard. It's really frightening and each time I hear it, I get this chill up my spine and I can't quite believe someone could make a piece of music that instils that sort of fear. I didn't necessarily want to do that, obviously, but on the album there is one track that is quite frightening and I like that juxtaposition … the whole album is quite nice and atmospheric and suddenly there's this really creepy and quite disturbing piece of music – but it works quite well in that it's also put there to emphasise the track that comes after it. If you listen to individual tracks you might think ‘oh yeah, they're kind of nice’, but the whole album was built by things being relative to each other. I can remember somebody saying it's like 'lethargy of the ears', when you have an album that doesn't change pace and do much – I was conscious of not making it so you get bored. Where two tunes sound a little too similar, I tried to balance it with a different pace or tone. In a way, I suppose it's a concept album, of sorts.
Talking about films, I know you've worked with video artists in the past and you've also been working with Jon Burgerman on some short animations – how do you find that process of working with someone who uses a different medium?
I really enjoy it. It's like being presented with a brief and given a couple of parameters but essentially being told to do what you enjoy doing most and put it to this film. In a way it's like being a kid in a play park really.
You’ve said that it was quite important for you to find new sounds when you were working with Wauvenfold, but I know that you've been listening to a lot of Spanish guitar music. In that respect were you looking for a new reference point to work from, something fresh or a sound that hadn't been used in electronic music?
Not really, I think it was just one of those growing up things. I stopped worrying about being original and started enjoying music for the sake of it being good or interesting – or how it made me feel emotionally.
This album seems to have an overall difference of sound compared to the Wauvenfold and the Penfold Plum work. It's certainly more contemplative – but retains a lot of the elements that Wauvenfold had. For example, it's very busy and there's lots of things going on, but it is slower paced. Did you think about that before you started or did it evolve?
I think it did evolve. You're absolutely right in terms of Wauvenfold – we were cramming lots of things in, trying to make it quite spectacular in lots of ways – from my point of view I can see that's what we were doing. I think with this stuff I wanted it to be on a small scale, so I wasn't expecting it to go very far in terms of drawing in a wider audience. I started off just doing it for myself, trying stuff out. But listening to people like Gustavo Santaolalla and getting involved in classical stuff again, I realised that you can have so much more feeling in just one note than cramming in shed loads of stuff. The more space there is the more you can get out of it and I think that Steve Reich was a massive influence on me in that. Stumbling across him caused me to try out new things.
Unravelled - Origami Biro (15 secs, 240kb)
At the same time you were listening to lots of new influences?
Yeah, like Francisco Tarrega. I enjoyed playing his stuff on classical guitar but when I started recording classical music, I thought it sounded boring and only when I was actually playing it myself did I find it interesting. But I found that looping bits that meant a lot to me had a huge impact – and I think I've said this before – if you've got a painting that has a lot of texture you don't want to whip it away after a couple of seconds. If it's a really good texture you want to stare at it, and that's what good looping is – a great texture that keeps coming back – you want to get absorbed into it because there's so much there you can get from it.
You've mentioned before that when you first heard the band Coco Rosie it was a bit of a wake-up call for you in terms of the production of the album. Can you say more about that?
Listening to Coco Rosie, what's was more surprising than anything, is the amazing nostalgic emotion that comes through with it not being polished. People try and polish things to make more atmosphere when actually you can get more atmosphere from not doing that. They (Coco Rosie) sometimes use Dictaphones, you know the most rudimentary, rubbish equipment they can find and record beautiful music on it – you can picture so many different things in this un-polished thing.
Wauvenfold and Penfold Plum were very electronic and pristinely polished. We were really fastidious about the sounds - making tweaks here and there with blips and clicks and stuff. So it was a real relief for me to use some of the inspiration I got from Coco Rosie and inject a little bit of that into some of the album. And some bits are a bit hissy and I think I could have taken some of that out, but realised after a while that it adds to it - makes it nice, gives it warmth.
Gathers - Origami Biro (12 secs, 192kb)
But that's very different from the classical guitar recordings because they're very clean and precise aren't they?
Like I said before, the one thing that did bug me about all the classical guitar music I heard was how perfect it was. And fair enough, because some of those tunes would sound awful otherwise, but I think this intimacy is totally lost. You can almost imagine it being like an electronic version of the instrument, like a computer narrated guitar sound, because it's just too perfect. I really want to hear those knocks and those slurs of human-ness.
You've always been interested in finding odd sound sources – what were some of the sound sources you used for the new album?
Initially Origami Biro was about wanting to convey this intimacy with the guitar. It was going to be about how good it felt to be playing this instrument, why it was good and why it felt good. Some things you'll never be able to do, like the smell of the instrument as it warms up and the feel of it, you know the dirt in the strings – but I think you can almost convey that with the creaks and the scrapes and the bumps and knots. I think I was trying to allow all those pieces, those little mistakes if you like, a place in the final pieces of music, because they're always there. I'd sometimes just fumble with the guitar and pick all the bits that sounded interesting, and use them as the rhythm.
I know on the album there are a couple of sections which sound like the cracks and the scrapes of the guitar, is that something you work on?
I've got to admit that I do spend time on that, they're not just mistakes that have been left – they're mistakes that I've focussed on and made a bit better. Those little things that happen – you know the creak of the chair when you play and stuff, I don't see why you need to take that out. So I've brought it forward, not just 'left it in'. I've exhumed it from the audio, if you like, and made it even more stand-out. A lot of that's in the album, it's a running theme.
Cracked Mirrors - Origami Biro (8 secs, 140kb)
What’s your relationship with record companies and making money from the music you produce – I get the sense that you make music anyway, whether you have a record deal or not.
Yeah, completely. I don't think I'd stop making music even if there was no chance of me ever making it as a musician. It literally is a form of expression, as often I'm not very good with words and couldn't necessarily articulate to someone in five minutes who I am as a person. It's much easier for me to spend a year on an album, hand that over and say, 'that's me'. The conversation of words causes you to make ridiculous mistakes and think 'oh shit, I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean that at all', but without words and without that kind of environment I can hand over music that I've spent time on, poured my soul into if you like, and then say, 'this is who I am'. You don't need words to put that across.
A lot of the visual work that you do is for live sets and I know you work in a very particular way. You're very interested in working as a live electronic musician instead of sitting with a laptop, which led you to come up with some very interesting tools to use live when you were working as Penfold Plum. Can you tell me a bit about the set up of live performances?
It won't be the same as the Plum stuff when I do the Origami thing. With Plum it was a matter of trying to have something visual for the audience because computers are involved. So I gave myself more stuff to make visual sounds with – like sampling noises, picking up guitars, ripping sellotape and hitting things. It was something for the audience to watch as there's always this incredible limitation of having to use a computer and stare at it and how dull that is to watch, but unfortunately that was a necessity. When I do this Origami Biro thing, there's going to be a lot less of that – almost hardly any computer work at all. I'm going to try and use different methods of recording and looping things so I won't have any kind of barrier to the audience.
So will the live set for Origami Biro be more about improvising around the new album?
I'm not really going to play anything off the album if possible and I'll try to create a completely new live thing for people to watch. It will have perhaps the odd riff that people will recognise here and there, and it might fall into a song now and then, but I think essentially it's going to have all the essence of the album but have nothing from the album. It'll be something for people to say is a unique experience, not just a CD rendition, and hopefully a good reflection of what they can get on the album.
How did you find the difference between working in your studio to produce the album and taking it out live? Do you see them as completely different things?
Definitely. Like we were saying earlier, I can always go back on a mistake I've made and say, 'I don't know about that' and have a look at it in a couple of days, but when it's live – it's not necessarily got to be perfect – its such a different process. However on stage that's it, you've got to make it work – you've got to somehow make it interesting for the audience. But to be honest I'm not worried about making mistakes, I think I mostly want it to be an enjoyable experience for the audience to the point where they'll think they can take something away that is interesting.
And is it an enjoyable experience for you, playing live?
I think I will enjoy the Origami Biro stuff a hell of a lot more than anything I've done before because it's going to be using an instrument that I really love playing – it's probably going to be much more live than anything I've ever done.
Is there a certain kind of response you hope the new album and the live sets will achieve?
Actually, if someone was to say to me that listening to my music evoked in them an emotion that they couldn’t describe in words, then I’d know I was on the right track.
Music | Jonathan Gillie | 02.05.07
Noshi - Origami Biro (34 secs, 150kb)
Shall we start with composition process?
When I'm composing music, I have no idea where it will lead me or what the end result will be, but I always have faith that more will follow if I just get the ball rolling - I don't have to be able to see the whole thing to know that there will be more. Fundamentally, that's all I need to do; lay a few things down and they start dictating what happens next.
Once one part is recorded, depending on it's texture, pitch or tempo, I'm already being given suggestions about where to go next. Just a single note can have the power of dictating a whole piece of music. So really I'm only doing half the work, the music is actually helping me out, giving me suggestions. For example, after laying something that's say, quite bassy, that'll require something not bassy juxtaposed to it - then those two things are there but, maybe they're a bit flat, so they'll say to me, 'we need to spruce things up here'.
And it's always the same process?
Pretty much - that's the only thing I can find that's the continuing rule I stick by, and all I need to do is make sure that the first foot I put forward is a good one, because everything I build around it will carry the essence of that first thing
It's like, if a guitar part's got potential, I don't try to make it a better guitar part, I just lay it down and then try and work around it and perhaps build it up. Even if the original guitar part gets deleted, the fact is, it caused other things to come into being around it.
So it retains something of the essence?
Yeah, it's the essence of that initial idea or thing that I've laid down will always carry through, which is why I make sure that whatever it is that I lay down first isn't shit. It's got to be something that's got something about it - you don't know what it is but you feel kind of compelled to go with that idea, and that's the only thing that I need to do really - that, and have faith that the rest of it will unfold. It's like a bit of a jigsaw puzzle - so the closer it gets to the end, the easier it is and tells you immediately why that's gone on for too long, or that's boring so there's a change right there. It gets easier the more you start looking at it like that, allowing the tune to tell you where to go next.
Dissect - Origami Biro (14 secs, 228kb)
It's almost like a splash of paint on a page?
Yeah, I see it as a very simplistic idea of what painters do; you apply a bit of colour and if one side is too light then you're searching for a way to balance the light and dark. Or you splash a bit of paint on the page and even if you're trying to do something quite abstract, I guess that bit of paint on that page is kind of saying, 'I'm here, so what's going to be relative to me? What's going to go next to me to help the painting work'. It's the same with music I think, if the piece is too dull it tells you to apply something. I see it as music suggesting where I should go next, 'now that you've got this part, you can have this, this and this'. Sometimes it doesn't work but that means you've already got some options.
You've built in some kind of framework. I know you'll quite lock yourself away for periods of time, when you're working on your music. Do you find that being in a solitary space helps?
I think about people's opinions around my music, and people's opinions about music in general. I'm often quite dangerously swayed by those opinions and it's only when I lock myself away for quite a while, for a few days and not talk to people about music or about anything I'm doing, that I gradually find this kind of comfortable space where I'm not worried about what people think of it. It's not that I constantly worry about what people think, but their ideas and their words and opinions have an influence. I need to get away from that influence for a while and that's often when the best stuff happens, when it's just you and your own brain, you know?
Yes, when it's just you being involved in the editing process and you're not being influenced by other people's point of view.
And it might not even be just in the negative. Sometimes, when people say they like a piece of music, that does my head in as well, because I'm thinking, 'I wasn't even sure about that.' And it kind of makes me wonder about putting it in. it confuses me a bit.
Well it's a confusing process anyway, especially when you're working on your own as you say. If you're working in a partnership you've always got someone else to bounce ideas off and they will often bring something to the table that you'd never have thought of. So how do you find the creative process on your own, compared to working with somebody else?
It's a totally different process. But I think that locking yourself away can also be a bad thing. You do need to have some kind of grounding, and you need people to pull you back into the real world every now and again. I think when you spend time with something for too long you can become contrived and not even realise it. You come out again and people may say, 'I'm really not sure about that' and I may think 'shit, you're right'. It's really a balance between locking yourself away and taking on some criticism every now and then.
Vitreous - Origami Biro (12 secs, 200kb)
So working on my own was a bit strange but I kind of got used to it after seeing the response was quite good and that gave me the confidence to keep going and make my own decisions. But you still come back to a thing the next day and think 'god that sounds so bad.' So I gave things more time and instead of trying to finish, I'd go back after a couple of days and that was almost like my way of bouncing ideas off myself. Having a great bunch of friends helps, which I'm lucky enough to have.
We've spoken before about a difference between working digitally to working with paint, is that with paint your mistakes are always there. You can cover them over but they're always there. But as a digital artist, what's your relationship with making mistakes? Is that an important part of the process or is it good that you can get rid of the thing that didn't work?
I think you pick up a style of working eventually, but it is a tough one. I think there is something to be said for laying things down and letting the mistakes just be whatever they are. I think that it's an interesting thing to decide whether or not you should polish things or just leave them. I think that's always going to be a constant battle, I think it probably is for a lot of musicians. But that's the difference between painting and making music: you can record music and have it sound great, but then fuck it up with how you produce it afterwards, whereas, I think as a painter you develop a more holistic process from start to finish.
The whole album has a very distinctive feel, and I know that you've written a short story which was a big influence, was that something you set out to achieve?
Well I'd written a lot of music before that story, but I was inspired to write something then to see what I could produce. The writing was quite visual and I thought it would be interesting to see what type of music would go to those intricate, interlacing stories and lines. While I was thinking about that, I stumbled across soundtracks like The Motorcycle Diaries which is really expansive and visual.
Unknown - Origami Biro (12 secs, 200kb)
Does film music inspire you?
Yeah, there was one tune that inspired an idea to help me put music to that story, and that was Krystof Penderecki's Threnedy for the Victims of Hiroshima, which is the most horrific piece of music I've ever heard. It's really frightening and each time I hear it, I get this chill up my spine and I can't quite believe someone could make a piece of music that instils that sort of fear. I didn't necessarily want to do that, obviously, but on the album there is one track that is quite frightening and I like that juxtaposition … the whole album is quite nice and atmospheric and suddenly there's this really creepy and quite disturbing piece of music – but it works quite well in that it's also put there to emphasise the track that comes after it. If you listen to individual tracks you might think ‘oh yeah, they're kind of nice’, but the whole album was built by things being relative to each other. I can remember somebody saying it's like 'lethargy of the ears', when you have an album that doesn't change pace and do much – I was conscious of not making it so you get bored. Where two tunes sound a little too similar, I tried to balance it with a different pace or tone. In a way, I suppose it's a concept album, of sorts.
Talking about films, I know you've worked with video artists in the past and you've also been working with Jon Burgerman on some short animations – how do you find that process of working with someone who uses a different medium?
I really enjoy it. It's like being presented with a brief and given a couple of parameters but essentially being told to do what you enjoy doing most and put it to this film. In a way it's like being a kid in a play park really.
You’ve said that it was quite important for you to find new sounds when you were working with Wauvenfold, but I know that you've been listening to a lot of Spanish guitar music. In that respect were you looking for a new reference point to work from, something fresh or a sound that hadn't been used in electronic music?
Not really, I think it was just one of those growing up things. I stopped worrying about being original and started enjoying music for the sake of it being good or interesting – or how it made me feel emotionally.
This album seems to have an overall difference of sound compared to the Wauvenfold and the Penfold Plum work. It's certainly more contemplative – but retains a lot of the elements that Wauvenfold had. For example, it's very busy and there's lots of things going on, but it is slower paced. Did you think about that before you started or did it evolve?
I think it did evolve. You're absolutely right in terms of Wauvenfold – we were cramming lots of things in, trying to make it quite spectacular in lots of ways – from my point of view I can see that's what we were doing. I think with this stuff I wanted it to be on a small scale, so I wasn't expecting it to go very far in terms of drawing in a wider audience. I started off just doing it for myself, trying stuff out. But listening to people like Gustavo Santaolalla and getting involved in classical stuff again, I realised that you can have so much more feeling in just one note than cramming in shed loads of stuff. The more space there is the more you can get out of it and I think that Steve Reich was a massive influence on me in that. Stumbling across him caused me to try out new things.
Unravelled - Origami Biro (15 secs, 240kb)
At the same time you were listening to lots of new influences?
Yeah, like Francisco Tarrega. I enjoyed playing his stuff on classical guitar but when I started recording classical music, I thought it sounded boring and only when I was actually playing it myself did I find it interesting. But I found that looping bits that meant a lot to me had a huge impact – and I think I've said this before – if you've got a painting that has a lot of texture you don't want to whip it away after a couple of seconds. If it's a really good texture you want to stare at it, and that's what good looping is – a great texture that keeps coming back – you want to get absorbed into it because there's so much there you can get from it.
You've mentioned before that when you first heard the band Coco Rosie it was a bit of a wake-up call for you in terms of the production of the album. Can you say more about that?
Listening to Coco Rosie, what's was more surprising than anything, is the amazing nostalgic emotion that comes through with it not being polished. People try and polish things to make more atmosphere when actually you can get more atmosphere from not doing that. They (Coco Rosie) sometimes use Dictaphones, you know the most rudimentary, rubbish equipment they can find and record beautiful music on it – you can picture so many different things in this un-polished thing.
Wauvenfold and Penfold Plum were very electronic and pristinely polished. We were really fastidious about the sounds - making tweaks here and there with blips and clicks and stuff. So it was a real relief for me to use some of the inspiration I got from Coco Rosie and inject a little bit of that into some of the album. And some bits are a bit hissy and I think I could have taken some of that out, but realised after a while that it adds to it - makes it nice, gives it warmth.
Gathers - Origami Biro (12 secs, 192kb)
But that's very different from the classical guitar recordings because they're very clean and precise aren't they?
Like I said before, the one thing that did bug me about all the classical guitar music I heard was how perfect it was. And fair enough, because some of those tunes would sound awful otherwise, but I think this intimacy is totally lost. You can almost imagine it being like an electronic version of the instrument, like a computer narrated guitar sound, because it's just too perfect. I really want to hear those knocks and those slurs of human-ness.
You've always been interested in finding odd sound sources – what were some of the sound sources you used for the new album?
Initially Origami Biro was about wanting to convey this intimacy with the guitar. It was going to be about how good it felt to be playing this instrument, why it was good and why it felt good. Some things you'll never be able to do, like the smell of the instrument as it warms up and the feel of it, you know the dirt in the strings – but I think you can almost convey that with the creaks and the scrapes and the bumps and knots. I think I was trying to allow all those pieces, those little mistakes if you like, a place in the final pieces of music, because they're always there. I'd sometimes just fumble with the guitar and pick all the bits that sounded interesting, and use them as the rhythm.
I know on the album there are a couple of sections which sound like the cracks and the scrapes of the guitar, is that something you work on?
I've got to admit that I do spend time on that, they're not just mistakes that have been left – they're mistakes that I've focussed on and made a bit better. Those little things that happen – you know the creak of the chair when you play and stuff, I don't see why you need to take that out. So I've brought it forward, not just 'left it in'. I've exhumed it from the audio, if you like, and made it even more stand-out. A lot of that's in the album, it's a running theme.
Cracked Mirrors - Origami Biro (8 secs, 140kb)
What’s your relationship with record companies and making money from the music you produce – I get the sense that you make music anyway, whether you have a record deal or not.
Yeah, completely. I don't think I'd stop making music even if there was no chance of me ever making it as a musician. It literally is a form of expression, as often I'm not very good with words and couldn't necessarily articulate to someone in five minutes who I am as a person. It's much easier for me to spend a year on an album, hand that over and say, 'that's me'. The conversation of words causes you to make ridiculous mistakes and think 'oh shit, I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean that at all', but without words and without that kind of environment I can hand over music that I've spent time on, poured my soul into if you like, and then say, 'this is who I am'. You don't need words to put that across.
A lot of the visual work that you do is for live sets and I know you work in a very particular way. You're very interested in working as a live electronic musician instead of sitting with a laptop, which led you to come up with some very interesting tools to use live when you were working as Penfold Plum. Can you tell me a bit about the set up of live performances?
It won't be the same as the Plum stuff when I do the Origami thing. With Plum it was a matter of trying to have something visual for the audience because computers are involved. So I gave myself more stuff to make visual sounds with – like sampling noises, picking up guitars, ripping sellotape and hitting things. It was something for the audience to watch as there's always this incredible limitation of having to use a computer and stare at it and how dull that is to watch, but unfortunately that was a necessity. When I do this Origami Biro thing, there's going to be a lot less of that – almost hardly any computer work at all. I'm going to try and use different methods of recording and looping things so I won't have any kind of barrier to the audience.
So will the live set for Origami Biro be more about improvising around the new album?
I'm not really going to play anything off the album if possible and I'll try to create a completely new live thing for people to watch. It will have perhaps the odd riff that people will recognise here and there, and it might fall into a song now and then, but I think essentially it's going to have all the essence of the album but have nothing from the album. It'll be something for people to say is a unique experience, not just a CD rendition, and hopefully a good reflection of what they can get on the album.
How did you find the difference between working in your studio to produce the album and taking it out live? Do you see them as completely different things?
Definitely. Like we were saying earlier, I can always go back on a mistake I've made and say, 'I don't know about that' and have a look at it in a couple of days, but when it's live – it's not necessarily got to be perfect – its such a different process. However on stage that's it, you've got to make it work – you've got to somehow make it interesting for the audience. But to be honest I'm not worried about making mistakes, I think I mostly want it to be an enjoyable experience for the audience to the point where they'll think they can take something away that is interesting.
And is it an enjoyable experience for you, playing live?
I think I will enjoy the Origami Biro stuff a hell of a lot more than anything I've done before because it's going to be using an instrument that I really love playing – it's probably going to be much more live than anything I've ever done.
Is there a certain kind of response you hope the new album and the live sets will achieve?
Actually, if someone was to say to me that listening to my music evoked in them an emotion that they couldn’t describe in words, then I’d know I was on the right track.
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