TUE., APRIL 29, 2008
eMusic Q&A: Henry Kaiser, Pt. 2
by Richard Gehr
I find myself both shocked and soothed by your most recent cross-cultural collaboration, Zen Kaiju.
That's with Kiku Day, a great Japanese shakahachi player. She's a well-schooled traditional player who also plays contemporary music. Zen Kaiju blends the rustic wabi-sabi esthetic of the Japanese tea ceremony with the "strange beast" tradition of the kaiju, which are big sea monsters like Godzilla, or Gamera, the turtle from outer space. We wanted to blend these two strong Japanese traditions by combining screaming electric guitar with shakahachi, which nobody had done before. It turns out that the two timbres are similar, and that the sounds of Japanese monsters screaming at spaceships seems to actually belong with that shakahachi feeling of deer in the forest at night. I'm very proud of that record, both as improvisation and as intercultural collaboration.
Do you often approach improvisations with a certain concept, mood or emotion in mind?
I'm completely a blank slate when I improvise. What I just said about Zen Kaiju was bullshit I discovered by listening to it afterward. There's absolutely no question that that's what those sounds are talking about, but it was completely unconscious and unintended.
Who's your favorite guitar player?
Derek Bailey created more new language for the guitar -- in the same sense that someone like Jimi Hendrix or John Fahey created new language for the guitar -- than any other guitarist before him. He also improvised more than any other guitarist. By which I mean that what he played each time he played was more unlike what he'd played every other time than anybody before him. Those are the things I'm most interested in, so I was a closer student of his. Bailey was a fantastic musical model and a great person. His indie label, Incus, got a lot of other musicians' work out there. He released Improvised, my duet album with John Oswald, and Wireforks, my duet album with him.
How would you characterize your guitar language?
I'm more interested in timbre than I am in melody, harmony or rhythm. I'm very interested in articulation and note bending. I'm more interested in what each note means rather than what note it is. I'm interested in superimposing different kinds of rhythm, such as Korean models, on top of pulses. I like elastic time, where the pulse constantly changes and the downbeats aren't always in the same place. I like to take Ideas from contemporary classical music that require complicated notation, but are either natural gestures in music from some other cultures or the kind of natural gestures that are most natural to me.
What's your relationship to electronic effects?
I use a bunch of electronic effects to get interesting timbres. As I've been surprised to discover lately, however, I use them a lot less than I used to, mainly because I don't want to drag a big rack around. And with the sad state of live music in America, you're not paid as much to play in increasingly fewer places, so you're less motivated to drag along a car full of gear. I've also been playing a lot more acoustically during the past couple of decades, so I don't need effects as much as I once did to get the sounds I want.
You really like guitars as fetish objects a lot, too, don't you?
I like guitars both as art and inspiration. If a guitar's a really cool psychedelic color, it's going to make you play something different than if it just looks like a piece of wood. And a piece of wood will make you play something different than a psychedelic thing. I caught the too-many-guitars disease from my pal David Lindley, but not as seriously as he got it, fortunately. Now he has the too-many-ouds disease, too.
Any eMusic albums you'd care to recommend?
I love Hindustani classical music, and I listen to it a lot at home. I was happy to see that India's terrific Saregama catalog is on eMusic, but I was dismayed to discover that so many of the albums are cut up in weird ways. Nevertheless, here are some sitar and sarod recordings I'd recommend checking out: My Inspirations and Classical Instrumental – Sarod by Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Twilight Melodies by Tejendra Narayan Majumdar, Etched in Time by Ustad Vilayat Khan, When Time Stood Still... by Ustad Vilayat Khan & Pandit Kishan Maharaj and Ustad Aashish Khan.
To go back to Part One of Richard Gehr's interview with Henry Kaiser, click here.
That's with Kiku Day, a great Japanese shakahachi player. She's a well-schooled traditional player who also plays contemporary music. Zen Kaiju blends the rustic wabi-sabi esthetic of the Japanese tea ceremony with the "strange beast" tradition of the kaiju, which are big sea monsters like Godzilla, or Gamera, the turtle from outer space. We wanted to blend these two strong Japanese traditions by combining screaming electric guitar with shakahachi, which nobody had done before. It turns out that the two timbres are similar, and that the sounds of Japanese monsters screaming at spaceships seems to actually belong with that shakahachi feeling of deer in the forest at night. I'm very proud of that record, both as improvisation and as intercultural collaboration.
Do you often approach improvisations with a certain concept, mood or emotion in mind?
I'm completely a blank slate when I improvise. What I just said about Zen Kaiju was bullshit I discovered by listening to it afterward. There's absolutely no question that that's what those sounds are talking about, but it was completely unconscious and unintended.
Who's your favorite guitar player?
Derek Bailey created more new language for the guitar -- in the same sense that someone like Jimi Hendrix or John Fahey created new language for the guitar -- than any other guitarist before him. He also improvised more than any other guitarist. By which I mean that what he played each time he played was more unlike what he'd played every other time than anybody before him. Those are the things I'm most interested in, so I was a closer student of his. Bailey was a fantastic musical model and a great person. His indie label, Incus, got a lot of other musicians' work out there. He released Improvised, my duet album with John Oswald, and Wireforks, my duet album with him.
How would you characterize your guitar language?
I'm more interested in timbre than I am in melody, harmony or rhythm. I'm very interested in articulation and note bending. I'm more interested in what each note means rather than what note it is. I'm interested in superimposing different kinds of rhythm, such as Korean models, on top of pulses. I like elastic time, where the pulse constantly changes and the downbeats aren't always in the same place. I like to take Ideas from contemporary classical music that require complicated notation, but are either natural gestures in music from some other cultures or the kind of natural gestures that are most natural to me.
What's your relationship to electronic effects?
I use a bunch of electronic effects to get interesting timbres. As I've been surprised to discover lately, however, I use them a lot less than I used to, mainly because I don't want to drag a big rack around. And with the sad state of live music in America, you're not paid as much to play in increasingly fewer places, so you're less motivated to drag along a car full of gear. I've also been playing a lot more acoustically during the past couple of decades, so I don't need effects as much as I once did to get the sounds I want.
You really like guitars as fetish objects a lot, too, don't you?
I like guitars both as art and inspiration. If a guitar's a really cool psychedelic color, it's going to make you play something different than if it just looks like a piece of wood. And a piece of wood will make you play something different than a psychedelic thing. I caught the too-many-guitars disease from my pal David Lindley, but not as seriously as he got it, fortunately. Now he has the too-many-ouds disease, too.
Any eMusic albums you'd care to recommend?
I love Hindustani classical music, and I listen to it a lot at home. I was happy to see that India's terrific Saregama catalog is on eMusic, but I was dismayed to discover that so many of the albums are cut up in weird ways. Nevertheless, here are some sitar and sarod recordings I'd recommend checking out: My Inspirations and Classical Instrumental – Sarod by Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Twilight Melodies by Tejendra Narayan Majumdar, Etched in Time by Ustad Vilayat Khan, When Time Stood Still... by Ustad Vilayat Khan & Pandit Kishan Maharaj and Ustad Aashish Khan.
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