Stephen O’Malley

Todd L. Burns

Welcome to today’s first lecture. I have the distinct pleasure of sitting next to Mr. Stephen O’Malley.

[applause]

Stephen O’Malley

Thanks.

Todd L. Burns

As some of you may know, his music tends to be very long, and that’s something we’ll talk about. So we decided we’ll play one very long song at the beginning so you can get a little bit of a taste of what he does and then go from there. So do you want to introduce what this track is?

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah. Thanks for having me here, it’s nice to be here and see all you folks, and welcome to New York. I recently finished an album I’ve been working on for a couple of years, together with the Finnish musician Mika Vainio. You might know him from Pan Sonic and lots of solo work, he’s done tons of records over the years, he’s an amazing musician. We started this record two years ago. Anyway, we finally finished the mix last month. This record comes out in November but I haven’t really played this track for anyone yet, so it’s kind of a debut for y’all. But yeah it’s long, it’s almost a 20-minute long track. A lot of music I do is quite long and I think we can talk about arrangements and composition and patience and deep listening, through the use of time and distance, and stuff like that later. But first of all, let’s listen to this track. The group is called ÄÄNIPÄÄ, that’s the name. It’s a Finnish word that means ‘sound head’, either literally a magnetic tape head, but I guess in the vernacular in Finland it also means someone who’s totally obsessed with sound, like a sound- maniac in a way. OK, here it goes.

(music: Äänipää - unreleased / untitled)

[applause]

Todd L. Burns

So Stephen, why are your songs so long?

[laughter]

Stephen O’Malley

Thanks for sitting through that, by the way.

Todd L. Burns

Broadly speaking it’s a stupid question, but actually, I think it gets at a lot of different things that matter to you. Length of time, patience and listening, why is it important to you?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, I think we’re trained to increasingly get less and less focused; shorter and shorter material with music, with reading, with films, TV or whatever. Whatever sort of stimulus you have. In fact, 20 minutes isn’t long, it’s just a fraction of time, really. I was thinking actually, when playing this, there’s several movements, it could be divided up into several tracks or whatever, if we wanted to do it that way, but I kind of like the idea of thinking about an LP side. You sit down, you listen to an album, and this type of length is increasingly going away, I suppose, for a lot of types of music, or never was there in the first place. This sort of album-side length, it’s a good period to stretch out and explore different ideas in the composition and different tonalities and interactions. And errors, mistakes, all these things are allowed to be in the more living... Living form of an arrangement.

Todd L. Burns

Were there some mistakes in there?

Stephen O’Malley

[laughs] Well, maybe the whole thing is a mistake, I don’t know. [laughter] No, but it doesn’t have to be critically cleaned up and lined up and stuff like that. I mean, for me, it’s flavour, when you hear the humanity of playing music, because I play an instrument, you know? I also work with electronics and computers and everything, too, for music, but first of all, I’m a guitar player so nothing is ever perfectly played. But also, it’s always changing every time you play the instrumental at all, whether it’s the same composition or same idea or a different idea. So with recording you always have a snapshot of the idea, how it existed at that time. For me, with a longer arrangement, it gives more of a sense of the mindset behind a composition or the collaboration, the other musicians, the chemistry between those musicians and stuff, just prodding and poking at little different ideas within the context of the structure or the sound, tonality and stuff like that.

Todd L. Burns

You said first you are a guitarist. Where and when were you when you first picked one up?

Stephen O’Malley

It wasn’t the first instrument I played, actually, but I was a bit old to start playing guitar, I think I was 18 when I started playing. A lot of people get into playing metal when they’re younger than that. I was a huge fan, I just never wanted to play anything. I never had the right people to play with as well, so by the time I started I had met some like-minded individuals who wanted to work on some slow, heavy music and decided to play guitar.

Todd L. Burns

And where were you?

Stephen O’Malley

In Seattle, I grew up in Seattle and I met this guy named Greg Anderson. He was playing in a lot of hardcore bands that I would see when I was a teenager. I was really involved in the punk scene and in hardcore music in Seattle when I was growing up, simply because there was no metal scene, even though I was a metal head at the punk show. I was that guy. And Greg, actually he was in a lot of different bands. He’s a bit older than me so I would see all these bands, but finally he kind of came around and came up to me and was like, “Oh I’ve discovered this band and people tell me you’re really into death metal, this band Entombed. I love it, I heard this Wolverine Blues album,” or something like that. I was like, “That’s not even their best album, man, you’ve got to check out Left Hand Path and get some real sounds, you know? That’s like their pop record, Wolverine Blues.” Then we decided to start playing music.

Todd L. Burns

Now, you said you’re a metal head and you were the only one and there were some hardcore punk kids. So basically, you kind of had to make your own scene in Seattle in a way and you created a ‘zine, right?

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, I did a fanzine first, actually, before I played music. It was called Descent magazine and it was in the early ‘90s when you still made fanzines. I was really into tape trading as well, which was an amazing thing when I was growing up, made a huge difference in my life. It kind of ruined my life, actually, just meeting people through trading demo tapes through the mail. It was the first time I really learned about geography firsthand, trading with people in Brazil or Finland or Russia and stuff like that. You used to print out these lists of your entire collection and send them to these other people who did the same thing, and then make a selection of however much music you wanted to tape for the other person and trade like six tapes or two tapes or 12 or whatever, and then you’d exchange music that way. That’s underground, right there. No internet, nothing like that, of course. Then that got me into making this fanzine, which was just kind of an extension of that. A lot of people doing this were also musicians or had bands and they would trade their demos, too, or albums. Then I decided to put another piece of commerce into the equation with this fanzine and also had discussions with musicians and artists and stuff. And that lasted quite a while, almost ten years, and I met a lot of people at that time who I’m still friends with or play music with today, like Attila Csihar who’s the vocalist in Sunn O))). I met him through that and various other people as well.

Todd L. Burns

You were interviewing all of these bands, and it was a very “fan” scenario in the beginning.

Stephen O’Malley

Totally. “Fan magazine,” that’s what fanzine means, and I was and am obsessed with music. At that time I was much younger so it was a bit more idolatry as well, and also, it’s a form of escapism, music, of course. Though, when you’re actually in contact with the musicians, sometimes it’s sort of fantasy-land and there’s many times when I’ve met some of these people and, of course, your image, your mental image of what their personality is, is never anything close to how people actually are, especially when you’re younger.

Todd L. Burns

Who surprised you the most out of all of these people that you sort of had idolised, in the metal world?

Stephen O’Malley

Emperor. They’re farmers. They’re like weird old guys living on a farm but they’re making this incredible music. Meeting Samoth, the guitar player, it was like, “Wow, this guy’s really mellow and humble.” You know, he burned down a church and went to jail and stuff like that. He’s got a daughter and has good hygiene. [laughs] Certainly not disappointing, just very interesting. Of course, people are very complex and different, each person... Also, a lot of the Norwegian black metal people I met, because I interviewed a lot of black metal bands at that time in the early ‘90s...

Todd L. Burns

So, briefly: Death metal, black metal, doom metal...

Stephen O’Malley

More black metal, for that fanzine, and then it opened up into kind of more electronic music, World Serpent-style stuff, which in a way was a little bit of an extension of the discovery process of music based around occult topics.

Todd L. Burns

What sort of electronic-inclined bands are we talking about here?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, there’s a label called Cold Meat Industry from Sweden, which I got really into at the time. Their aesthetic was really powerful, actually, in the ‘90s, the packaging aesthetic more than the music actually. It didn’t age very well, a lot of that stuff, for my ear anyway. This was kind of before I discovered minimalist music, too, so it was kind of a pathway eventually leading to New York minimalist composers like Terry Riley and LaMonte Young through this sort of post-industrial music, basically through music using synthesizers and drone. And then discovering real composers, not just people like me, just underground, whatever, coming out of these types of scenes. Well, I stopped the magazine because I wanted to focus on being a musician.

Todd L. Burns

You mentioned the aesthetic of Cold Meat Industry, and you designed the ‘zine yourself, and you’re a designer...

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, I became a designer after that ‘zine started, eventually moving to New York, working in advertising as a creative director and stuff. It all started from doing a stupid fanzine at my mom’s house. [laughter] But Cold Meat Industry, the boss of that label was named Roger Karmanik. The label’s still around. I haven’t really followed in the past few years, but he had a big phase where he used tons of Gaussian blur [an image processing technique] on photos and a lot of colour saturation or desaturation and stuff and it just set a tone that was really compelling.

Todd L. Burns

And you did a lot of covers in the ‘90s when you were also starting your music career. Were you doing the blur thing, was that your aesthetic?

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, I would say I ripped off Roger Karmanik a lot or was inspired by his style. I still am doing album cover design actually, it’s a big part of my creative output. Recent stuff I’ve worked on are some pretty cool series, LP series, from the label Editions Mego. Peter Rehberg, who runs the label, he does some sublabels, too, or sort of sponsors sublabels which are curated by other people. One of those being curated by the GRM [Groupe de Recherches Musicales], the mythical studio in Radio France where Pierre Schaeffer started in the late ‘50s. But I was invited to art-direct this series of LPs. Totally amazing, Pierre Henry records and stuff. Well, there is a Pierre Henry record coming but I designed a Xenakis LP recently, it’s of electronic music he made at the GRM. I really enjoyed that.

Todd L. Burns

What’s your approach when you are dealing with music like that? I mean, where it’s kind of different than metal, or it has a pretty distinct iconography.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, it’s very different. You mean as far as visual approach? I think a big lesson for every designer is to detach themselves from the subject, emotionally and conceptually a bit, and bring something fresh to it. It’s a bit like mastering music. A mastering engineer’s supposed to bring their ears to it and their sort of taste, without destroying it, [laughs] I suppose. But with design it can be complicated if you really get too far into it and don’t... I think it’s really positive to have sort of a zen attitude about it and just allow a flow to present something to you and to this subject visually and naturally. If you get too into it, then you’re interpreting someone’s quite abstract idea, which is music. It’s one of the most abstract forms of creation and you don’t want to be in that role. It’s a bit like it becomes a judgemental role, if you go too far with it.

Todd L. Burns

It must be interesting, then, to design your own album covers.

Stephen O’Malley

That’s hard, because it’s directly linked with the concept.

Todd L. Burns

Especially when you have other band members who may have thoughts on what that should be.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, and usually they’re people who a lot of the time have never done design or even visual art. Of course, you want to keep a cohesive direction with everything with an album when you’re collaborating, but there’s a big negotiation process that happens a lot of the time; in the creation of the music too, though. It’s an extension of that, another phase of that. It’s always been really connected to me, so I don’t know if I would ever really make a piece of music that didn’t have a visual result as well. I’ve always thought music is intensely visual anyway, so somehow that can be a hindrance when you’re trying to package something, as well as being another form of the expression of the music itself.

Todd L. Burns

So you mentioned the name earlier, Greg.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Who is he? You said that you heard him playing slow... Slower music?

Stephen O’Malley

No, no. Greg Anderson, I play in a band called Sunn O))), he’s the other guitar player. We formed that band and we formed several other bands, too, including Thorr’s Hammer, which was the first thing we did, which was a primitive death metal band. And another band called Burning Witch, which was a bit more artistic, I suppose. But Sunn O))), yeah, Greg and I have collaborated on a lot together with that band and other projects as well.

Todd L. Burns

What was it about him when you first met him, that you knew, this is a guy I want to work with?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, like I was saying, we were just talking about music, and we’re just music fans with something in common. I think that happens a lot with musicians, like, you admire a third party’s music... That’s even more important than admiring their music, sometimes! You have something in common and something to start with. And yeah, we were talking about Hellhammer, Entombed, Nihilist, these kind of death metal bands that were slow and quite brutal and different, strange stuff. That was the starting point, that kind of common interest.

Todd L. Burns

You said the early bands, there was a primitive black-metal one and the second one...

Stephen O’Malley

Burning Witch, that was a doom band, I guess, that was more obviously a doom band. At the time that band was in existence we played small shows in Seattle and just recorded a couple of records, but over time those records have kind of been recognised by a whole scene that grew later. It’s pretty amazing, actually, the longevity of that stuff, because when the band was going we were literally playing in a Chinese restaurant, [laughter] playing a show with like ten people, which was fine, great time, but it’s strange how the trends change and how the history of music actually gets rewritten a lot of the time, the importance of things.

Todd L. Burns

You were in these other bands with other people and then you decided you go off and do Sunn O))), largely with Greg.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, Sunn O))) was the project Greg and I decided we wanted to do as just a guitar band initially, and it was just two guitars. It was kind of like a reunion, actually, because we had moved to different cities, for a few years we didn’t play music together, and then we both ended up in LA. We were like, “Let’s play music again.” I mean, it’s totally simple, a simple way of a band getting together, you just get in a room with someone else and play music and then there it is, then there’s something, if you’re lucky. And that’s what it was. That band’s done so many different things over the years but that’s the core of it, and that’s still what it is. I mean, it’s just two guitar players trying to play parts as cool as stuff we like, you know? The same ambition, sort of... Just with more resources you can also expand on those ambitions much more.

Todd L. Burns

There’s a couple of things I want to just touch on with the band. It seems like the live show is very much a visceral experience and you’d been together before you’d come to that decision of making that a big piece of it.

Stephen O’Malley

A part of the picture, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

How did you come to that decision and how did that become such a big part of what you do?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, it really changed a few years after the band began. We had made some albums and recordings and stuff and did a couple of small concerts but never really pursued a live thing at all. We were kind of given an opportunity to do something on a bigger scale: In 2003 we were invited to play in a festival curated by the band Autechre in the UK, this festival All Tomorrow’s Parties. Maybe you’ve heard about it, they invite musicians or groups to curate the whole lineup, it’s pretty cool. That was a big deal for Sunn O))). We had never come to Europe or even played a big show and we got there and we were supposed to be opening the festival on the first day at like 4 PM or something. This other band that we’re friends with, and are really influenced by, called Earth, was also playing the festival, and they were direct support for Aphex Twin on Saturday night. But Earth didn’t make it to the plane for some reason, didn’t make it to England, and we got to the festival and this guy Barry, it’s his festival basically, I mean he was the founder, he’s like, “Earth’s not coming, do you guys want to take their spot?” [laughter] We were like, what? You know, this our first tour. Like, “Wow, OK, sure, why not?” And it was the first time we had played live with Attila as well and so we’re...

Todd L. Burns

Sorry, Attila is...?

Stephen O’Malley

Attila Csihar, this Hungarian singer. He’s also singer in this band called Mayhem.

Todd L. Burns

Who we were listening to as you may have come in.

Stephen O’Malley

But he didn’t sing on this track, this was before him. Anyway, this guy’s pretty far out, and an incredible singer, incredible artist. So, we played at like 11 PM on Saturday night to an audience of 2000 maybe? Maybe more, but a lot of the audience were Aphex fans and they had dosed, or they were dosing preparing for the Aphex concert. [laughter] So people were pretty floored because Sunn O))) was really abstract, heavy, a lot of bass, no rhythm really. It was amazing, and Attila’s vocals sound like Tibetan pre-Buddhist ceremonial music, he’s got a very low voice and he does polyphonic singing and stuff. And he was wearing makeup and there was a whole spectacle too. That was great. So when that happened, that show literally opened the door for us to a whole different world of listeners, including a lot of people who were into electronic music who wouldn’t necessarily listen to a metal band before that show. It was a huge moment for us, and that tour went great, besides that show, it was very good, and we just decided to do more and we got more support and offers and stuff and then it turned into kind of a big thing with touring, especially between 2007 and 2010, we did a lot of tours. It was great and the whole stage thing turned into a much bigger production, too; a lot more equipment and an amazing sound man and we were able to play in better venues with amazing PAs and stuff. I always think about the band or any band as a multi-faceted creature, right? You have the live version, and you have the recorded version, and you also have the visual version. Maybe you have a film version. These are all parts of the whole and I would say Sunn O))) has been fortunate to have very distinct facets.

Todd L. Burns

Obviously, the visual version is something people have talked about. For those who don’t know, you guys were dressing up in robes during live shows. But as I understand it, the reasoning behind that was not to... Well, at the beginning it wasn’t necessarily to do anything except distract people from paying attention to you. It was to just distance them from, you know...

Stephen O’Malley

It’s sort of, when you have a uniform involved in any context it’s to remove the individual identity, that’s the purpose, and to create a cohesive identity. That’s what it led to very quickly when we started doing that. At the very first moment it was simply like, we don’t want to be... I mean, it’s pretty boring to watch two guys making guitar feedback for an hour. [laughter]

Todd L. Burns

You used to do shows behind the speakers too.

Stephen O’Malley

That’s right, we used to put the backline in the front of the stage and play behind, because of the same reason, but then we wanted to try something different. And it was immediately perceived as either camp, or ceremonial, or spectacle, or many other things. It made people react in a diffferent way to the music, and enlarged the context for people. You can get into it, you can think it’s stupid, or you can really dive into it that way. It changes time for that performance and you can have a pretty extraordinary experience if you want, or you can be entertained a little bit more, or a number of other things too.

Todd L. Burns

I think as long as you don’t end up getting defined by it, like Kiss trotting out with masks for the next 30 years, it’s actually a wonderful way of having all these sorts of different reactions to this thing.

Stephen O’Malley

It’s also a good way to involve a lot of other collaborators without making it a big deal, or a guest-star type of thing. “Sunn O))) with Masami Akita,” or with this person or that person, Justin Broadrick... We’ve had a lot of people play with us live without it being a guest-star-type situation, which I think is great because those musicians can then dive into it even more, too, maybe play in a different way that they wouldn’t normally do in their main thing. But yeah, the robes, I’m glad we have the album facet to sort of show a different side as well, but the live thing... “Derobed”, maybe we should do a tour with no robes. Wow! But it could be another group of people doing the same music. Then it becomes more about the music itself than us or the group, it becomes more about the sound itself. The sound is actually what you’re going for, you’re not going to see Greg or me playing slow riffs. You’re going for this physical encounter with sound, because some concerts are quite high volume and we use a lot of techniques with bass and sound pressure and standing waves and these sorts of things, so it’s a very physical encounter.

Todd L. Burns

You once said that the speakers are the stars of the show rather than you guys.

Stephen O’Malley

[nodding] Kind of the output transformer of the amps, I think, and the preamp tubes, those are the real... 12AX7s, they come from Holland. [laughs] Those are the ones, that’s the tone, at least for the guitars.

Todd L. Burns

How long did it take you to find the perfect one?

Stephen O’Malley

I didn’t find it yet. [laughs] There’s a guy that plays with Sunn O))) named Tos. He plays Moog with us sometimes, but he’s also an amplifier repair man, guru, mod guy, and he collects vintage tubes and he has a lot of really amazing old stock and he’s been very generous with those tubes and modded out, well, not modded but tuned our amps.

Todd L. Burns

I wanted to play a song, I guess it’s influenced you quite a bit.

(music: Earth - “Tethered To The Polestar”)

Todd L. Burns

That was Earth, “Tethered to the Polestar.” You mentioned Earth earlier. They were supposed to become big stars and instead Sunn O))) did because played in front of...

Stephen O’Malley

Oh, Earth is very successful.

Todd L. Burns

But you’ve mentioned in tons and tons of interviews Earth, Melvins...

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, that’s the foundation of most of the music. Dylan Carlson, he’s the guitar player of Earth, he’s kind of the grandfather of the whole style of music that I’m involved with and have been involved with for years. He’s an incredible player and an amazing artist.

Todd L. Burns

This record was made in ‘93?

Stephen O’Malley

No, this record came out in 2005, it was kind of their comeback record.

Todd L. Burns

Oh, OK. Oops. [laughter]

Stephen O’Malley

I actually designed the cover of this record, too, and that was pretty incredible to be involved with, in some way. Dylan kind of disappeared for a few years and then Greg met him. Greg also runs a record label, called Southern Lord, and he kept in contact with Dylan, and then this other guy we work with named Randall Dunn, this producer in Seattle, coaxed Dylan into making a new record, or helped support him and encourage him in doing that. It was this album, which is called Hex. Early Earth stuff sounds much different. There’s one album that Sunn O)))’s blueprint is basically taken from called Earth 2, the second album, and it’s very heavy guitars with no rhythm section. But this album, he came back with this album and kind of blew people away because it’s a country album in a way, or Americana.

Todd L. Burns

You can hear that at the end there.

Stephen O’Malley

There’s tastes of it but it’s really a minimalist album, all of the different instrumentation. It’s kind of in a rock setting, but Dylan’s way of arranging music is always, it’s minimalist music using space as one of the prime components of the sound itself. So this album was a great way for him to come back.

Todd L. Burns

Arrangements, arranging music like this, I’m sure most people think, “Huh, how hard can arranging minimalist music be?”

Stephen O’Malley

Trying playing slow, it’s difficult. You have to be very patient and it’s a different kind of skill with listening and stuff. You have to find nuance. I always thought Earth was amazing with the arrangements because, although it’s super repetitive, it always feels cyclic and continual. Well, not just repeating something but a continuation of an idea, an evolution, sort of a spiral type of feeling. I had met the drummer of Earth, whose name is Adrienne Davies, shortly after this record was released. One of the things we realised was that she didn’t know how to count Dylan’s music, and she didn’t realise that he was using a phrase and evolving the phrase over repetition. She thought it was one long piece and playing drums like that, in that way, pretty fascinating and incredible that she was able to do that, and do several records like that before she realised, “Oh, I can count six of this style, six of this or eight or whatever.” Doing a ten-minute memorisation of each nuance, that’s a different way of playing drums, for sure.

Todd L. Burns

I was thinking, I was listening to that song, the drummer, it must be so tough to just hold back in the same way as a guitarist.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Early on, are there lessons that you can impart as to holding back, being able to play slow?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, it must be very difficult for a drummer, more than a guitarist or other instrument, because when a drummer doesn’t play there’s nothing happening, they’re sitting there. Of course, the point of playing drums is beating something, so it requires some other sort of listening from the musician. That’s always been the most difficult role to fill in the bands I’ve been in. It takes a long time, you have to kind of relearn the instrument.

Todd L. Burns

I guess that’s why you and Greg were like, “Yeah, we’ll just do guitars.”

Stephen O’Malley

One reason, yeah, but I played in some other bands since that have had drums and then the first track I played, I mean, it’s a drum machine or there’s drum programming, which is a totally different mentality than playing drums as an instrument, I think. I was in this group called Khanate for many years, which was a New York-based group, sort of 2000 to 2006, and the drummer of that band, his name’s Tim Wyskida, it took about a year to form the music, to find the role. Not only for his drumming style, but also for myself, and the singer, and the bass player, but you kind of have to arrive at that destination together, or at least in parallel, and it must be very difficult for a drummer to do stuff in that sort of tempo, and... Restraint.

Todd L. Burns

Your guitar playing, tell me about the people you were listening to aside from Dylan that influenced you in what you do.

Stephen O’Malley

I love a lot of guitar players’ styles. There’s one Japanese player that I’m really fascinated by named Keiji Haino. He’s a pretty abstract player, psychedelic style, but he also focuses a lot on space. He was the first guitar player I read an interview with that talked about the space being more or as important than the tone itself. He’s an amazing player.

Todd L. Burns

Was that something that you had already kind of thought of but hadn’t seen it verbalized?

Stephen O’Malley

Not in those words. It’s quite poetic to put it that way, at least the way he put it. I mean, he said it in a much more beautiful way than I’ve just explained, I think, but it really stuck with me as, like, “Yeah, that’s true.” Not only are you restraining yourself as a player, you’re also involving a lot more of the universe in your sound, because those areas are still filled with perception, but it’s perception of the room, or it’s perception of the resonance, or it’s perception of the people around you reacting. It opens things in a different way.

Todd L. Burns

I wanted to ask you about KTL, which is a duo, I guess, that you do with Peter Rehberg who you also mentioned who runs Editions Mego.

Stephen O’Malley

Yup.

Todd L. Burns

How did that begin?

Stephen O’Malley

Peter had played with Sunn O))) a few times, actually. He’s a computer music guy and he also works or has worked a lot with this French theatre director named Gisèle Vienne, doing scores for her plays and choreography pieces and stuff. They were preparing a piece in 2005 and they invited me to join on the production, so Peter and I made the score for that piece, that was called Kindertotenlieder. We really enjoyed working together, and eventually we were invited to play some concerts and stuff. It started as a fake band in a way, playing live in this theatre piece, but then it turned into another band, KTL. And then we’ve done a lot of projects with Gisèle Vienne and also album projects and stuff since. And we’re playing tomorrow, in New York!

Todd L. Burns

What is it like working with a computer musician? A lot of your guitar is fed through him and he’s affecting it, right?

Stephen O’Malley

Originally it was. Now, the past few years, it’s more separate identities as instruments.

Todd L. Burns

Did it take a little bit to buy into the fact that someone else was going to control what was coming out of what you were doing?

Stephen O’Malley

Not really, because the purpose of the music at the beginning wasn’t our own. It was to support this much more complex arrangement of this theatre production, actually, as just one component in a much bigger choreography really, with lights and actor and dancer and stage design, all of this stuff. The music isn’t the central point. With that in mind it kind of opened things up a bit to experiment a bit more, but I think our music has actually become much more interesting since we divided things.

Todd L. Burns

Why do you say that?

Stephen O’Malley

Because Peter’s an amazing musician and what he does with synthesis and computer, it’s really unique and interesting.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we play a track and maybe you can queue up the YouTube of the thing while we’re doing that? This is KTL from the album IV.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, this was recorded in Japan. This was the first record we did actually out of context of this theatre stuff, and it was recorded by Jim O’Rourke.

(music: KTL - “Paraug”)

I’ve got to say it’s great listening on those Genelec’s [speakers], that’s cool.

[applause]

Yeah, that band, a lot of our stuff earlier on, it was kind of like a fusion of black metal, psychedelic guitar and computer, very simply. We’ve done a lot of others things too, though, since that. I haven’t listened to this album in a while now but, it’s quite melodic, actually. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

If you have your ears tuned to that sort of style, sure. You said you’ve kind of grown with it because you said that was kind of a synthesis of all of your things, or rather you can hear all of those elements. I suppose, it’s just a function of working at length with him, getting to know him better and then figuring out where you can go.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, the chemistry evolves when you collaborate with someone over a long period of time, it’s really interesting. It can be very rewarding, not only to the music but to the sense of creativity and expression and stuff for yourself. All of your ideas are reflected through this other filter. Or absorbed, or denied, or, you know... Over years you can come to trust that and learn how to listen differently to your own music.

Todd L. Burns

Do you do much solo stuff?

Stephen O’Malley

Sometimes. I’m playing solo tomorrow. I’ve been doing some concerts in the last couple of years and... It’s quite difficult because there is no communication with another musician, you’re on an ego trip in a way. [laughs] But I’ve come to realise how much I value the communication of collaborating, playing with other musicians, through doing the solo stuff. With solo, it’s much more like an investigation, I guess, of certain details of your playing style that you want to go further with, but when you’re in front of an audience, being put on the spot is quite good, I think, for being truthful in the investigation and not getting waylaid.

Todd L. Burns

What are some of the details that you’ve pursued?

Stephen O’Malley

The geometry of sound form, that’s the sort of large scale time exploration. Harmonic dissonance. Patience.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t we take a look at this clip.

Stephen O’Malley

OK.

Todd L. Burns

Why don’t you go ahead and set it up.

Stephen O’Malley

Back to the theatre director Gisèle Vienne, who Peter and I have done some scores for, this is a trailer of a play we worked on in 2010 and 2011. It premiered in 2011. It’s called This Is How You Will Disappear. There was a big team of people working on this including the author, Dennis Cooper, American author, a couple of Japanese artists, one guy named Shiro Takatani, he’s an incredible video artist, and another sculptor named Fujiko Nakaya, she makes sculptures with fog. Actually, it’s quite beautiful and amazing, and several other artists too. This is just sort of a trailer for the piece... But there’s some of the music in the trailer of course.

(video: This is How You Will Disappear trailer)

Todd L. Burns

How did you get involved in this?

Stephen O’Malley

I ask myself that question a lot, actually. [laughs] Like I said, Peter Rehberg is a long time collaborator of Gisèle Vienne, the director of this play. They’ve worked on six or seven other ones before I was involved and while they were coming up with ideas for a piece from 2005, called Kindertotenlieder, they invited me to participate. They actually invited Sunn O))) to participate, but Sunn O))) is several people with different ideas artistically, and it didn’t work out with the entire group, but I was interested enough to pursue it in a different context. It was quite challenging to understand why, in fact, it took quite a long time. I had to almost trick myself into going through with the process and to be very patient until these forms of value started becoming clear to me. That took about six months after the first play was premiered and we had been touring and stuff. I didn’t really get it, but the structure of these plays deals intensely with layers of time, flashback, future premonition, repetition. There’s a lot of, sort of... Well, not sort of, there is dance in all of these theatre pieces, and the style is quite fragmented and unique, but once I clicked into that... Being able to underst... Well, I can’t claim I understand the structure, but I can relate to the structure of really super detail with time.

Todd L. Burns

You said, six months after it premiered it finally clicked.

Stephen O’Malley

Something like that. I’m kind of slow, but it’s such a large artistic endeavour that it takes a long time to have some comprehension.

Todd L. Burns

I guess, I say that in the sense that that’s an enormous amount of trust on your part to continue along with it. I wondered, at the beginning, you were still, “I want to be involved in this. I don’t know what it’s about exactly, I can’t figure it out, but I want to be a part of it.” What was that impulse? And generally, is that your impulse with these sorts of things?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, yeah, maybe. It comes out of respect. Even if you don’t understand an artist’s work you can still respect them as an artist or respect the work itself, even if you don’t understand it. Maybe you don’t even like it, but you respect the form itself. I think that’s important to keep in mind all the time when you’re encountering art and music, because it’s a way of openmindedness that doesn’t require you to be committed with judgement. And I knew immediately that I really respected this work. I saw one play before in France and I was really confused. [laughs] But what was happening was fascinating, and it was such a strong encounter that I thought, “This is a great opportunity to try something different.” Also, something that’s not based on the music scene, but involves a lot of other types of artists. We’re working with similar ideas, actually. The light artist we work with on these plays, his name is Patrick Riou, he’s French, older guy, he’s been working with theatre and film for years. He is incredible and he is a minimalist. He’ll use only a few cans to create quite dramatic stuff. I mean, you saw just in that clip, that’s all his light design in that clip. So it’s an opportunity to learn about form through other fields directly.

Todd L. Burns

It must be quite eye-opening to be like, “Oh, you’re doing what I’m doing except in a completely different format.”

Stephen O’Malley

Or to try and figure out a way to be cohesive and collaborate with that person. This play also, This Is How You Will Disappear, one thing we did with the diffusion was to use spatialisation, which meant there’s a 14-channel speaker system around the audience with four subwoofer stacks, which was pretty fun. We used this software, it’s built for Max, it’s built by this organization called IRCAM in Paris who we collaborate with, and it basically creates a number of simulated acoustic spaces. So we could be in this room and we could have an acoustic space, like a forest or a canyon or a very small room or various other things, and you can move sound sources through this field and stuff like that. It’s more theoretical than practical, actually, but it is a pretty interesting way to collaborate with light, a lighting director, because what Patrick would do was bring the depth of field very close, so you could tell it was a stage, like ten metres deep or whatever. But then he’d make a move and it would seem like you could have a sensation of depth opening up and stuff like that. I got really inspired by that and brought spatialisation into the tools we were using for the composition of the music and tried to complement that with sound as well. But working with these tools is a little bit deceptive because you’re micro- managing every aspect, but the audience is there having the experience for the first time or even once. So I’ve learned through that that it’s much more effective just to suggest something than to make a very precise movement of a sound through space, for example, rather just having something moving accomplishes the same sort of sensation for the audience.

Todd L. Burns

You have the chance to do this, you need to employ all of your patience skills to be like, “OK, hold off, there’s no need to whizz-bang every moment.”

Stephen O’Malley

Exactly. We’re working on a new piece, actually, called The Pyre, which will premiere next month in France and we’re using spatialisation again, but we’re using it a bit differently and in a much more simple way. We actually have a programmer who’s building the spaces, and we just have faders. Like, OK, now we want a large outdoor space or whatever, and you just bring it in with that. But all that spatialisation stuff is now possible with Ableton, with Max for Live stuff, it’s the same algorithms. Not the same algorithm for the reverb, but you can do a lot with multi-channel stuff with Ableton, and do spatialisation. It’s the same people, the same engineer I work with from IRCAM is the guy who made the multi-channel stuff for the new Ableton. Manuel Poletti is his name.

Todd L. Burns

So are you using Ableton quite a bit?

Stephen O’Malley

For the theatre stuff, yeah, it’s great, it’s very useful for diffusion, as we like to call playback. Yeah, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

I kind of know the answer to this in a way but I’m curious. You came from this metal background and it’s kind of a scene. Was there a crucial record or something that really opened you up to more abstract and experimental music?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, it’s hard to pin it down on one album. Earth was a big part of it though, Earth 2. Hearing that as a metal-head teenager, “Well, this is heavier than all my death metal records but there’s no drumming and no singing, and he’s talking about this guy called LaMonte Young, this other guy called Pandit Pran Nath. Who are these people?” The universe continually opens up when you’re exploring music, it’s really great.

Todd L. Burns

I suppose, when you were doing the interviews for the ‘zine also it was just like connecting the dots: “He mentioned that name, what is that name?” I’m going to go further and further down the rabbit hole.

Stephen O’Malley

In some ways it’s quite selfish to be a journalist, to be able to connect those dots of personal interest when you have the chance.

Todd L. Burns

I agree.

Stephen O’Malley

But you’re not killing anyone, you’re just feeding your deep, deep addiction to music. There’s worse things in the world.

Todd L. Burns

I wanted to play one more song and this from Sunn O))). This is called “It Took The Night To Believe.”

(music: Sunn O))) - “It Took The Night To Believe”)

That was “It Took The Night To Believe,” it’s off Black One, which I feel is kind of an interesting record in the Sunn O))) discography. It feels like from there, that’s your kind of final statement, in a way, on metal.

Stephen O’Malley

I agree, in a way. Actually, the background of that record is like 15 years old. It goes back to what I was talking about earlier, about Greg and I sharing interests in this sort of extreme metal music when we started playing together. So in some ways, black metal wasn’t new in 2005 when we did this record, for us at least, this is like 20 years of fandom, and interest. I think that one of the most interesting things about that album is the people who didn’t play on it who we work with, like Attila, who’s the singer of Mayhem, arguably the most important black metal band, at least from the ‘90s. And we worked with a lot of American musicians who were more current. The singer of that track, his name is Wrest, Jef Whitehead. He has a solo project called Leviathan, and really interesting music, and we worked with another guy named Malefic, who has another solo project called Xasthur, and we did a couple of tours with him as well. So at that point it was a bit of a purging, I suppose, looking in retrospect, of this deep influence, because the thing we did right after that was a collaboration with a sculptor named Banks Violette, it was a totally different area.

Todd L. Burns

Obviously, you had those interests before Black One, but it does seem like some sort of looking back again, a demarcation line.

Stephen O’Malley

Well, another thing, to be perfectly honest, that record was the most successful thing we did up until that point.

Todd L. Burns

It must have been hard to not want to sort of repeat it, or maybe it wasn’t.

Stephen O’Malley

There’s a lot of clues there: we did two records called White, one was White1 and one was White2. So we did Black One but it’s “black one” as a figure, but there were endless comments about, “When is Black Two going to come out?” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s going to be our hip-hop record [laughter] or a gospel record or something.” We did repeat it in a way because we did a lot of touring with that music and there are some recordings that came out of those tours. But it mutated, Sunn O)))’s music is constantly mutating because it’s abstract on a level that allows the current influences of the musicians to transform it, in real time.

Todd L. Burns

The way you’ve described Sunn O))), it must be a really rewarding process to constantly be shuttling in people like, “Come in and be a member of the band for a minute,” you getting all of these inputs. Is there a particular person you’re working with now that’s inspiring you?

Stephen O’Malley

All of them! [laughs] I feel extremely fortunate to be able to collaborate with the people I’ve met and to be given opportunities to do all of these weird, interesting, stimulating projects, and that people pay attention to a point that sustains it. One guy I’ve worked with a lot over the years, and he’s played in Sunn O))) as well, is Oren Ambarchi. He’s a really fascinating musician, human being, artist, scholar, many other things, food expert, so he’s very fun to tour with because he always knows where to go to find the best food.

Todd L. Burns

That’s a good tip for the musicians in the audience, go on tour with someone who is a foodie.

Stephen O’Malley

Totally. You spend all your money but it’s worth it. That’s part of the reason for touring, to check out new cuisine around the world, I think. It’s one of the most important parts, actually. But he’s coming to music from a very different point than I am and it’s very stimulating. Also Rehberg, this guy...

Todd L. Burns

I don’t even think he would call himself a musician.

Stephen O’Malley

No, he would say musicians are like the lowest form of artist, even lower than pantomime. [laughter] I’m like, “Wow, OK.” That’s an example of his point of view being very different than a lot of other musicians, and it’s fresh. He has a very different way of thinking about structure, in non-linear ways basically, which is really important, I think, to always have in mind when you’re making music.

Todd L. Burns

Aside from the food, Oren, what has he taught you in a way? Or what have you taken from him?

Stephen O’Malley

That you’re equipment is important but you can really do fascinating things with anything, any type of equipment. He’s got a really strange set-up. A lot of his music sounds like it could be computer generated or synthesis, but it’s guitar processing, everything is guitar processing. He’s playing tomorrow night, too, you’ll get a chance to listen to it. As a gear maniac you look at his set-up and you’re like, “What? Wow, that’s really interesting, how you use all of this stuff in ways I never considered.”

Todd L. Burns

What does your set-up look like? I assume it’s quite different depending on what group or what context you’re in.

Stephen O’Malley

It used to be more so, but kind of on the point I just made, it’s kind of like you can change your tone with the same tools. It’s like a carpenter makes a lot of different things with his tools too. I use reverb, delay, I love tape delays, and I have modded RAT pedals, and the most important thing in my effects set-up is a switch that allows me to have four channels simultaneously or individually, which has phase control on each channel so I can play several amplifiers. The amplifiers don’t have to be in phase with each other, or I can tune the phase so they are all in phase and that makes an incredible difference with tone, of course. That was a real game-changer, that piece of gear.

Todd L. Burns

When did that come into play?

Stephen O’Malley

2009.

Todd L. Burns

You said you had some modded pedals. Are you modding them yourself?

Stephen O’Malley

No, I work with a couple of guys who build stuff for me but I don’t do it myself. I mean, I make cables and stuff like that, just basic soldering stuff, but when it comes to the guts I don’t have the skills. There’s people who do it a lot better than I could even begin to do.

Todd L. Burns

When you talked to them and said, I want this, how would go about describing that? What was your like, “I want it to do X”?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, recently I worked with this guy from Russia on this unit, which is a two preamp and a solid state preamp in the same unit, and you can feed one into the other in either direction, or you can run each one individually on two channels, two output channels, but the tube preamp section is based on this amplifier that I love to use called a Model T, a Sunn O))) brand amp.

Todd L. Burns

By the way, that’s where the band name comes from.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, it comes from the amps. There’s an amplifier brand that we named ourselves after, because we use a lot of those amps. And we love them. And we’re devoted. [laughter] And we haven’t been sued. But with that in mind, it’s a big problem to go places like China or Russia or South America because these amps don’t exist in those places, so it’s become a hindrance actually, or it’s become very expensive to do tours in other places where we don’t have the backline. So I asked this Russian guy to make me the preamp stage to try and open up some other doors for touring. I’d love to be able tour in Southeast Asia and countries with people that are super enthusiastic but their resources are much more limited than touring in Europe, for example. So hopefully that’ll be my 2014 sort of access key.

Todd L. Burns

I want to open it up to questions from the audience if that’s all right.

Audience Member

So I have, is it two questions? I don’t know.

Stephen O’Malley

Easy ones?

Audience Member

Relatively. You were talking earlier about the universe opening up when you’re looking for new music and all that and how you kind of just get exposed to everything. Do you remember how it was when you first started listening to metal, the feeling you got? Do you have any artists, off the top of your head?

Stephen O’Malley

Slayer. When you’re 11, 12 years old, and you hear some music like that, you’ve never heard anything like that before, music or otherwise. That’s when I started realising that music existed beyond a radio or background entertainment-type thing, narrowed in, focused on it.

Audience Member

It’s crazy, I didn’t start getting really exposed to music until I decided that I wanted to really pursue it and that was only a couple of years ago. My friends listen to everything, and they got me really eclectic. It’s really cool. My other question was about the Japanese psychedelic guitarist, what was his name?

Stephen O’Malley

Keiji Haino. He’s been playing music since the ‘60s, he’s in his 50s now. I’ve been lucky to play with him in a group, actually with Oren Ambarchi, a trio where I play bass, Oren plays drums and Keiji is the master, of course. He’s our master, we’re just the rhythm section. His most well-known, cult project was called Fushitsusha, which has existed and not existed throughout time. It’s currently active again.

Audience Member

Can you spell it?

[laughter]

Stephen O’Malley

Hey, let’s watch a video of Fushitsusha.

Audience Member

Alright, let’s do that. I’m going to write it down. That’s my question, I’m done.

Stephen O’Malley

That’s it? Let’s see here. Oh, here’s something from last year. We’ll just watch a few minutes because this guy can play for a long time.

(video: excerpt from Fushitsusha live)

He’s an incredible singer, too, but it’s a live video, I don’t know what the structure is, really.

Todd L. Burns

There’s something about him with that white hair too.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, he’s a wizard.

Todd L. Burns

Are there any other questions?

Audience Member

Hi. I understand you being influenced by ‘90s black metal, because I listened to that stuff myself for a long time, and I personally love the music of Sunn O))) because it’s stripped of the whole ideologic background of the ‘90s black metal thing. Actually, I stopped listening to that stuff because most of the people, or some of the people, not most, are racists and National Socialists. You were running a fanzine about this stuff in the ‘90s, so can you speak on that issue, how you dealt with that sort of background?

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, it’s a little touchy. You’re right though, there’s a lot of really far right people involved with that music, and nationalist and racist. But there’s also a lot of incredible artists, and sometimes they’re the same person like Burzum, for example, probably the best example I can think of. But when I was younger I didn’t really care. I didn’t take these people very seriously. I’ve gotten a lot of flak for that actually. I interviewed Burzum a few times, I had an article come out in a magazine that was quite questionable, like an overview of black metal. I was 20 years old, I was like, “This is extreme music.” That seemed to me at the time, maybe naively, to be the less important part of the picture. But after all, the more people you meet, the more experience you have when you’re travelling and stuff. I mean, it’s ridiculous, I don’t really have tolerance for that type of mentality any more. But when I was younger, I don’t know, I thought it was more interesting that they were satanic. That was more dangerous actually, than some guy being a bonehead redneck.

Audience Member

Hi, thanks for speaking to us today. You talked a bit about vinyl and having a song fit onto a side of vinyl and tapes. I was wondering, to what extent do you think the medium in which your music’s distributed affects the length of music you make? And then following up that, with the advent of stuff like SoundCloud and YouTube, do you think that’s helped to liberate the idea of tracks that have to fit a certain time or fit on an album in a certain way? Or has it made it easier to just make little soundbites because you can flip through it so easily?

Stephen O’Malley

Big topic, I’ve been talking about it a lot in the last year.

Todd L. Burns

Well, you just put your entire catalogue up on Bandcamp.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, you can listen to every Sunn O))) track that’s ever been published on Bandcamp now, and you can download hi-res WAVs and stuff. I have Google analytics watching the page just because I’m curious about, do people actually listen to a 20-mintue track? The answer is no. The average attention period on Bandcamp is two and half minutes on the Sunn O))) page. That’s just the first note on some songs, you know?

[laughter]

Which is fine. On the other hand, there’s been something like 10,000 have listened to the page in one week. I just put this up last Monday, pretty interesting. I used to be a bit more anti-MP3 and all this stuff, mainly because of fidelity, and also trying to be, “Vinyl is the best format for music.” Whatever way you listen to music, the important thing is that you’re engaged with what you’re listening to. I mean, that’s my approach to music. It doesn’t matter if it’s an eight-hour piece, you know? LaMonte Young has his Well-Tuned Piano piece, it varies from eight to 12 hours, but John Cage has like a 600-year organ piece that’s being played right now. If you’re listening to music with intent, then it’s informing you of something, so it doesn’t matter if it’s ten seconds or ten minutes. I think, that’s all.

Audience Member

Hi, thank you. I would like to ask you about duration especially, because how I met your music, I was listening to Györgi Ligeti Requiem in a hotel and a friend, I mean the desk man, comes to me and says, “Look, what are you listening to?” “This is from college, I’m analysing.” And he says, “Listen to this,” and it was a Sunn O))) album and I went “Woah!”

Stephen O’Malley

That’s a strange story.

[laughter]

Audience Member

Yes, it’s a really good story. So after that, of course, we were analysing that John Cage thing and so on. I’m researching in dance music, that’s what I do, but duration for me is important in order to find a state of mind. But I have problems with the industry, they say, “No, three minutes of this and we put it on vinyl.” It happened to me two times, and I want to know how you develop your ideas... I mean, what is your use of duration? And also, how you deal with the music industry in terms to adapt your music to the platform, because it’s also a business, we’ve got to live from it. I would like to you to talk about that. Thank you.

Stephen O’Malley

The first part of your question, it has to do with what the function is of the music. What are you writing for? What is the state of mind? With a lot of my music it’s quite simply about meditation, whether through listening or actually performance of this music as a sort of yoga, almost. That requires time. Other music, dance music, a three-minute dance track, that’s got a different function. It’s supposed to provide a different type of energy, encourage a different state of mind or metabolism, even metabolically, right? The second part of your question, well, a lot of our music with Sunn O))) and the other groups I’ve done with Greg have been self-published. At least for a long time in the beginning, Greg’s record label Southern Lord put out a lot of stuff, our own music, so when you’re operating DIY you can do what you want, but then you have all of the responsibility and risk on your shoulders. But I would recommend to everyone to consider doing stuff yourself before knocking down a label’s door for money, because that money, you can just go to the bank and get a loan, it’s the same thing, probably less interest rate too. [laughter] When you start chopping up all the deductions on your accounting statement you can see it’s quite expensive to borrow money from a record label as an [air quotes] advance. But that’s been really crucial in my entire career, this DIY attitude, also with booking tours, working with friends, from the equipment, like I was talking about my friend Tos, all the way to the tour manager, the booking agents, the promoters, like [gestures side-stage] Adam. There’s a level of respect that’s really like a friendship, so... You’re dealing with relationships there, too, but DIY, man.

Audience Member

Hi. I was just wondering in terms of approaching composition, in terms of the philosophies that are feeding into your work, how much John Cage has influenced you? In particular, in terms of that idea of expansion, two minutes might not be so interesting, but four minutes becomes more, and six and eight and 36 and so on. How much of that idea of expansion as a mechanic to make repetition become something else, and his thoughts on that?

Stephen O’Malley

John Cage is a composer I came to late. Actually, maybe in the past six years through Merce Cunningham, coming through dance. He was always referenced but it’s kind of like Elvis being referenced, like, yeah, yeah, he made rock & roll or whatever, or he made rock & roll, pop, he made pop. But once you get into John Cage’s methodology, of course, it’s fascinating and he basically did almost everything with experimental music before the ‘80s... Ideas that people have been very inspired by, and become seeds to working in very different ways. I also came to John Cage more as a visual artist with his scores and stuff. There was a great exhibition of his scores in Norway a few years ago that I got to see. There’s a great catalogue of those scores and stuff, but also the kits for preparing the piano and other instruments and all these instructions and stuff. I think rather than focusing on numbers, I think the methodology of being experimental is the greatest thing John Cage brought to the music and art universe, the postmodern one at least.

Audience Member

At what moment did you start experimenting with electronic beats and electronic music, and what was the main motor to do it?

Stephen O’Malley

With Sunn O))), even on our first recording we were using synths, we were using a Virus on the first demo we made. Since then I’ve been very interested in using synths, I’m by no means very proficient in it, but I haven’t really worked with beats though. The stuff in the first piece, that’s Mika Vainio, he’s great with that sort of heavy beat-making. I notice there’s some great synths in the studio here, man, it’s awesome. Again, it could be a very non-linear way of making music.

Todd L. Burns

Is your way of making music very linear, in your mind?

Stephen O’Malley

Making an album ususally is, unfortunately. You have to finish at some point. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

But the way you’re describing working, what you’re imagining upstairs is non-linear, and you’re saying that the way that you work is not that way.

Stephen O’Malley

Well, with synths, especially modular synths, I’ve always been confused, to a point where it’s like another language I don’t understand, but I can still try to speak it and try to find something so it’s an exploration. I mean, there’s people who know how to find specific things very well with synths, but it’s not necessary.

Todd L. Burns

So who brought the Virus into the studio on that first demo?

Stephen O’Malley

Mathias Schneeberger, the guy who recorded it, he had it in the studio. Then we got into Moog a little bit. Actually, we got into computer synths first before Moog, I’m ashamed to say, soft synths. But one guy, Rex Ritter, who played in Sunn O))) for a few years, he brough the Moog into the picture, a Minimoog.

Audience Member

Hi. When working with very long, drawn-out, slow-burning pieces of music, do you ever find yourself struggling to maintain sight of the wood in spite of all the trees and keep a general overview on the structure, even when you’re dealing with really extreme lengths, where you listen to a piece of music a couple of times and then it’s time to break for lunch? How do you keep tabs on what’s going on in a more structural sense?

Stephen O’Malley

It’s endless, [laughs] it’s difficult. It’s stimulating, though, to try and keep in mind not points on the point of reference, but an entire piece, because a lot of the time with length or duration-based music that’s the most important part anyway, it’s the full experience.

Audience Member

Hi there. I just worked with art in, I guess they’re called Ambisonics installations with eight speakers, so if you’d like to talk about it more, I’m becoming very interested in it.

Stephen O’Malley

Well, IRCAM, I guess it’s a foundation. No, it’s a public institution in France, so it’s sponsored by the French government. It’s an institute for acoustic research and we’ve worked with them a bit in the last few years. Basically, what it is now, is a bunch of engineers who are experts with programming and a bunch of engineers who are experts with PA installation coming together and creating virtual spaces with their collaboration, and then proposing that to composers and other types of artists for use in their own pieces. So this institution is actually quite open, and because it’s a public institution it’s their job, well, their duty, actually, to propose this to other artists to use, to collaborate and it’s been interesting working with them. But their type of ambisonics is called SPAT, “spatialisation.” Ambisonics is another institution’s word for it, for something similar. As you probably know, there’s different institutions in Germany and stuff that are working with these principles as well. But um, what can I say? It’s fun to have so much sound at your fingertips, right? To place things in space, in a non-stereo way.

It’s also fun to see a demonstration at IRCAM. They have this one thing called WFS, Wave Field Synthesis, and it’s 140 Genelec monitors in a line hanging from the ceiling, probably at head level, in the centre of the room and it really creates a sensation of objects. I saw a demonstration where it was a jazz band or something like that and the singer was [mimes speaker placement] here, the drummer was over there, the bass player was there. It’s like this sort of immaterial ghost feeling, pretty cool. It’s a nice way to simulate the actual musicians being there, in a very expensive way, but a lot of the time you need to do that. It’s pretty interesting. The engineer I mentioned before, Manuel Poletti who I work with, he works Cycling ‘74 as well and Ableton. He told me recently he was flown to LA to talk with Technicolor, the company. They’re trying to incorporate SPAT into film production now, but it’s kind of an uphill battle because Dolby dominates that surround-sound market with cinema, but that could be really amazing with film too, I think.

Audience Member

There’s a lot of object suites in Max especially for this, but in Max for Live maybe it’s a bit limited still. I’m not a programmer so I’m looking forward to learning more about it.

Stephen O’Malley

Ableton, it’s funny, they have these spatialisation things, but you have to do this bussing in order to get the multi-channel output, because Ableton just does stereo, right? But you can achieve the same thing with external bussing, or you can have 12 busses in Ableton, so you can have up to 12 sound sources. And the way the multi-channel Max for Live plugins are created, it’s set to go into this bussing system even off a single channel, you know? But it is limited, yeah. What I did, when it was still Ableton 7 and there wasn’t anything built in is, I ran external multi-channel busses into a Max patch, which was the SPAT, and then, of course, with Max you can have as many in’s and out’s as you want. But that had to be specially made for my project and stuff and it crashed a lot. Pretty awesome to have that crash during a performance. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

Are there any other questions?

Audience Member

Hi. I was just wondering, because you mentioned LaMonte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano and then dance music, and I think dance music can be very durational also. Like, you can go to Berghain and dance for ten hours. And I think you can look at this as a different kind of focus, which is more bodily oriented rather than mind-oriented, or awareness-oriented. I’m just wondering if you think there can be any similarity between the two or are they totally...?

Stephen O’Malley

Oh, absolutely. That’s why I like working with the theatre. Gisèle Vienne is a choreographer as well and there’s these incredible dancers that we work with sometimes, and it’s really interesting. I didn’t really know how close music and dance were before doing this, because my music isn’t really dance music, I guess. [laughs] Although Gisèle has told me, “Yeah, a lot of people are dancing, what do you think headbanging is?”

Audience Member

It’s just like a different extenuation of energy.

Stephen O’Malley

I guess, it’s a physical connection.

Todd L. Burns

And I think with the loudness it’s definitely body music, you can feel the bass.

Stephen O’Malley

That’s true, that’s true.

Audience Member

Thank you for coming. I want to ask you about a series you mentioned earlier on Editions Mego. Is that the one called Ideologic Organ?

Stephen O’Malley

That’s a label I curate through Editions Mego, it’s similar. The one I mentioned is called REGRM but it’s also a sort-of sublabel of Editions Mego.

Audience Member

It’s hard to keep track of, but I guess my question deals with... Because I heard that you curated this series, Ideologic Organ.

Stephen O’Malley

That’s right.

Audience Member

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that curation, putting together this series. I heard that Jessika Kenney record, I love that... I would love to hear some more about that series, if you please.

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah. Peter started working with John from the band Emeralds on a sublabel called Spectrum Spools, I guess that was 2010 or 2009 when that started. That was really successful right off the bat and Peter decided to try that with some other people, like inviting people to do that, and he invited me to do it. It’s kind of a great opportunity, because I’ve been involved with other labels over the years in various contexts but I’ve never been a good businessman on the label side of things. Because, I don’t know, it’s not my way. But with this situation, Editions Mego is producing the records, really. I mean, handling all the manufacturing, distribution, network set-up, press, accounting and I’m, I guess, the artistic director. I make the suggestions of who to invite to do albums, I work with artists directly, I do all the design, I facilitate the flow of the mastering and all this stuff too. It’s nice. I do so much touring that having a brick-and-mortar business is not possible really, so it’s an opportunity to make some connections, hopefully. I mean, you like Jessika Kenney, it was a pleasure to work with her in order to bring out some of her music on vinyl as well, and maybe expose it to people who wouldn’t run into her normally. Because she’s like a Persian classical musician, singer, so this is blurring the genre thing a little bit more maybe.

Audience Member

Thank you for that.

Audience Member

Hi, I’ve got a little question for you in terms of coming up with a new live show. What do you keep in mind in terms of arrangement and that kind of stuff to keep people entertained throughout the whole set?

Stephen O’Malley

Entertainment is not something I’m concerned with.

[laughter]

Audience Member

I got the same the problem over here too.

Stephen O’Malley

It’s not a problem. I think the problem is that people want to be entertained.

Audience Member

Yeah, that’s true.

Stephen O’Malley

It’s like, use your brain and engage. I mean, I love being entertained as well, but that’s just not what I do musically, anyway.

Audience Member

Hi. Actually, two questions. You were talking about the releases. I was interested in how you found out about Phurpa.

Stephen O’Malley

Phurpha?

Audience Member

That’s really cool. I mean, I think the whole lesson here is actually like, looking at other music styles and seeing that, like you said, it’s a valid point of view and you can learn a lot, especially surreal things, like you find in metal, like in black metal. Lately, I’ve been going through the world-music thing and one of the musics that I’ve found was that Tibetan monks, and it just was nuts.

(music starts: Phurpa - unknown)

I was interested to know how you found out about them, how you actually picked them up, because you must find a lot of this world music, occult thing. How do you think, that one would work and the other one wouldn’t? It’s really weird but it’s really out there.

Stephen O’Malley

It’s beautiful music.

Audience Member

You can learn a lot from it, even if you don’t like it.

Stephen O’Malley

It’s interesting because they’re actually Russians, and they’re the boss...

Todd L. Burns

This is them playing, by the way, just so you know.

Stephen O’Malley

They’re doing vocal music.

Audience Member

Can I just add something? For instance, this thing people usually don’t listen to this but if you go to Fever Ray, she’s got this intro track she kind of listened to this, she incorporated this into the music. So you can listen to it and get inspired even if it’s not something you like.

Stephen O’Malley

Well, the first thing is, on the entertainment tip, this is not music, it’s prayer. It’s religious prayer, actually. It’s an incantation, in fact. We perceive it as music because that’s how we listen, but the purpose of this form of music is prayer. It’s like a hymn or something like that.

Audience Member

That polyphonic thing you said with the vocals, it’s learned from this?

Stephen O’Malley

Well, let me tell you about Phurpa. It’s kind of a sect and the leader is this man named Alexei Tegin and he actually comes from the industrial music scene in the ‘70s in Moscow. Can you imagine how brutal that must have been? [laughter] But then he became a fine artist. He became a super-realist painter and was very successful in the contemporary art world for a long time. Then he walked away from that and started studying various forms of music and he came to Tibetan Bon music, actually, is what it is, pre-Buddhist religious music. He also studies a lot of other types of music, as you said, “world music,” but all “world music” means is non-pop music kind of, folk music maybe. First, he made two solo albums using this type of instrumentation and singing, and then he formed Phurpa, with some students, basically, or even acolytes you could call them. Pretty interesting, we played with them a few times, I brought them to England and they supported Sunn O))) on a few concerts. They’ve been doing more live stuff in Europe in the past couple of years, but I mean, they’re militant too. They’re in uniform, they all follow this guy.

Audience Member

But the first time you listened to his work, was it because you knew him already?

Stephen O’Malley

A good friend of mine turned me onto it.

Audience Member

OK, so you’re not doing like this digging through...

Stephen O’Malley

Oh, sure, but this group in particular I got turned onto by this producer I work with named Randall Dunn, just as friends share their music interests and stuff. And then I just tracked them down on the Internet, of course, they have a web page, wrote them an email and got in touch. But the whole process...

Audience Member

It was released actually on the label?

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah, it was the first album released on the Ideologic Organ label.

Audience Member

How did they guy from Mego react to it, by the way?

Stephen O’Malley

He liked it. I mean, we wanted to do something different with my imprint than Mego or Spectrum Spools or these other labels anyway. One of those things has actually been involving more acoustic-based music.

Audience Member

OK. And the second, can I just ask one more really fast? We’re trying not use tagging but I’ve seen a lot of tags used on you like “avantgarde.” Do you think those help in bringing metal to other audiences? I mean, I’m not sure if that’s...

Stephen O’Malley

I know what you mean. I would never call myself avantgarde. I would call myself “retrogarde.” [laughter] But these kinds of tags are used by journalists and writers to try and contextualise things and it can be annoying or incorrect, but ultimately, the purpose is just to give a frame of reference to help people.

Audience Member

OK, but since you had a fanzine you sort of went through the whole journalist thing a bit. Do you think this is a possible way to get metal or more extreme music to other listeners?

Stephen O’Malley

I don’t know. I mean, I could just say that the audience of Sunn O))) seems really diverse, a lot of different kinds of people coming to our concerts. It’s really cool.

Audience Member

Hi. Are you familiar with the work, you mentioned John Cage before, are you familiar with the work of Iannis Xenakis in the ‘70s?

Stephen O’Malley

Yes.

Audience Member

And have you worked with 3D and 4D representations of a sonic event or of the music you are composing, in order to try to contain it and see the evolution through the 20-minute or 25-minute...?

Stephen O’Malley

Oh, you mean visual analysis.

Audience Member

Yes, like 3D or even 4D.

Stephen O’Malley

Not really, I haven’t done that. In a way that’s what spatialisation is a result of, though, but I didn’t have to model stuff. All the music I’ve made using the spatialisation stuff has been instrumental music or singing, so we didn’t have to simulate anything. I’ve never really used virtual instruments... Or maybe a little bit, but I think it’s more interesting to have the humanity of the playing, in those compositions at least. I mean, I just mixed that ÄÄNIPÄÄ album on an API desk. There’s a beautiful API desk downstairs by the way, you should totally use it if you can. It has an incredible tone and the headroom’s amazing. Or maybe it’s upstairs? Upstairs there’s an API. It has a spectrum meter on it, that’s as close as I’ve gotten.

Audience Member

It’s in the secret room.

Todd L. Burns

Well, if you have any other questions, you’ll be around for a little bit today?

Stephen O’Malley

Yeah. Thanks for listening.

Todd L. Burns

Thank you very much, Stephen O’Malley.

[applause]