I was recently asked to interview Chris Madak/Bee Mask for Time Off
Magazine for his debut Australian tour. As is often the case with a
certain strain of artist, I was asked to do so via email - an inherently
unpredictable format. As you will see below, I often compensate for the
limitations of an email interview by conflating anywhere up to five
queries into a single question; in hope that artists will have more to
say and not leave me stranded at deadline.
As is (very) occasionally the case, Madak came through and then some -
delivering two thousand words of response for an article that was never
going to be more than 650. I found his answers too compelling to
permanently leave them on the cutting room floor. Regardless of one's
actual enjoyment of his music (it is fantastically beautiful stuff),
Madak has a very interesting practice. He is, at once, utterly
scientific and seemingly quite spiritual about his work.
It reminds me of Olivier Messiaen, in a way. Messiaen was an indisputable compositional genius. As a youth at the Paris Conservatoire, he won awards for Harmony, Fugue, Counterpoint, Composition and Organ Playing. As an adult, he taught Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis - three of the most groundbreaking composers of their age. His own music was both technically demanding and compositionally innovative. He is partly responsible for the rise of serialism.
The foundation of Messiaen's work, though, was faith. He was a devout Roman Catholic. His work barely even existed within the realms of Western compositional convention - drawing on bird song and exotic rhythms from across the world - but it was almost exclusively sculpted around his faith. Madak's work has a similar dichotomy. As you will learn, he is a brilliant, almost visionary technician - yet his output is characterised by an implicit obsession with truth and the indefinable.
Have a read, anyway. It's worth it purely for a new perspective on tapes/vinyl/CDs.
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Firstly; how’s life in the world of Bee Mask? How are you feeling about the upcoming Australia dates?
In a word, busy! Taking care of all my last minute pre-tour stuff, working on bookings for the fall, and continuing to chip away at a record that I've been obsessively reworking behind the scenes for about two years now, which I hope to have finished by the end of the summer. I'm thrilled to be heading to Australia and very grateful to have the opportunity. Feeling good about the shows as well, provided that I can hold up under the forthcoming jet lag!
What can audiences expect of your live show, at this point? Given your reputation for building your own devices, I’m curious as to the exact specifications of your set-up?
The exact specifications change with mood and circumstance. For now I work live with a sequencer/sampler, a synthesizer, and some effects. I may or may not travel with anything handmade depending on what I end up feeling that I need to do. Lately the performances have been a way for me to develop and test ideas about works in progress, so audiences can expect to hear some ideas about where the project may be heading rather than a reflection of where it's already been.
How did you initially get into building your own devices (and why, I suppose)?
My grandfather was sort of a classic tinkerer who used to get me mixed up in his projects and as a teenager I had a friend and bandmate who essentially got himself struck by lightning indoors while trying to build a tesla coil and went on to make a drum machine that immediately burst into flames. Much later on I took a few classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at the technical foundations of the David Tudor/Sonic Arts Union approach, which is what got me making things that actually made sense in my own work. Since then it's been my good fortune to have made a few close friends in the world of old synth heads and the bulk of what I know now has come from my success in prying bits of information loose from them. That and reading “Electronotes.”
As for the “why,” I was motivated in the first place by a belief that artists have a responsibility to continually develop their understanding of their tools and materials. The bottom line is the production of the work itself rather than DIY for its own sake. I try to make sure that when I use any tool I do so because it's the right one for the job.
In fact, I largely stopped using anything handmade in live performances for a few years because I had the uncomfortable sense of people fixating on it and not evaluating the work on its own merits. Now, I've started to build a few things that are intended for live use again, but simply as an outlet for control freakishness. In general I think that we're eager to judge sound based on what we can see or read about it rather than what we hear directly. That's a deeply ingrained cultural bias that effects all of us and one of the core problems for artists who work with sound.
I once read that you consider your studio work to be the ‘locus of your practice’ - what do you mean by this? Was performing live always going to be a part of Bee Mask?
One of the many things that interests me about making records is that it's a means of working with time in some very subtle and intricate ways, and that aspect of the experience of making records (and of listening to them, for that matter) can easily collapse under the pressure of “the moment”. The basic challenge of performance is to keep it interesting and useful for everyone involved, and because my records are very postproduction-oriented and mostly not intended as documents of things happening in real time, it's not at all a matter of “doing the same thing you did in the studio in front of a bunch of people.” Instead, I try to present the sounds and ideas I'm currently working with as flexibly as possible, perhaps alongside a few older bits for a sense of context. Ideally the audience gets an up to the minute sense of what's engaging to me and where my head's at and I get the benefits of hearing how things do or don't work on a variety of sound systems and how they do or don't click with a variety of people.
Expanding that; I read in that same interview a reference to you doing work ‘outside the rubric of Bee Mask’ - perhaps a broad question but; what is the rubric of Bee Mask? Is there a specific ideology or investigation at work within your music as Bee Mask?
I've had a handful of different ideas about this over time, but for now I'm mostly motivated by the sense that I'm following the thread of the work I've already done rather than seeking an external rationale for what I'm up to. To be sure, it's important to think deeply about why one does what one does and to have a “research and development” aspect to one's practice, but it's just as crucial that the work be able to stand on its own two feet, so to speak.
Why release to vinyl and cassette? Or, to be more specific, why prioritise vinyl and cassette over other media?
Well, at this point I haven't released a cassette as Bee Mask in a couple years and I've generally avoided going on record as part of any trend toward tape revivalism. For the most part, I feel like I've done what I set out to do in the medium and that the current trajectory of “cassette culture” is away from my own interests and priorities.
Having said that, cassettes were interesting to me in the first place because they were practical. I'm old enough to have been recording and playing in bands well before CD-rs were reasonably cheap or reliable and I got my start with recording on a cassette four-track, so when this whole wave of contemporary tape stuff came along, I basically had an ornery desire to say “get off my lawn” and tweak everyone who was getting misty-eyed about nostalgia and decay and all that.
On the other hand, tape is also interesting as a medium precisely because it's relatively easy to bring out its unique properties. There's also something valuable about working with media conducive to an understanding of the history of what one is doing, and cassettes have a very important place in the history of small-press electronic and experimental music.
Vinyl is a completely different matter. While I wouldn't necessarily say “it's the best playback medium people have ever come up with bar none”, I would say that it is a uniquely compelling one and that its strengths complement those of digital media almost perfectly. The caveat is that the vinyl must be competently cut and pressed. Quality control and scalability are enormous problems in vinyl production at present, but I don't think that they're fundamentally unsolvable problems in the long run.
A lot of writing about you tends to emphasise your flair for high-fidelity sound. Is this a fair comment on your work? I’m just curious how those priorities gel with releasing to cassette or, as I’ve heard you now do, recording predominantly with a hardware sampler?
The idea of fidelity is deeply fascinating and deeply problematic for studio music. Sure, we can talk about the linearity of a playback system within certain parameters but if there is no primary acoustic event, what is even there to which the information on a record might be more or less faithful? Even if there is an original event I think it's always useful to ask ourselves what we're actually hearing when we think we're hearing “fidelity,” because the things that we listen for are culturally specific and can change to hilarious effect with time and circumstances.
Where cassettes are concerned, if the work was produced specifically for cassette, then how is the sound of the cassette not part of the sound of the work? Is an abstract painting that makes heavy use of impasto or in which one can see the fibers of the canvas a low fidelity painting? For its part, the sampler is what it is; I'm back to editing and mixing on a computer and further improvements to the live setup (where I still use the sampler) would likely lead me down the path of having to specify sound systems in greater detail than I do now. Not that that would be such a terrible thing if I could get away with it.
Reading your interviews, you seem to have a very academic or intellectual perspective on music-making. Would you attribute this perspective to anything in particular? Have you always viewed music in such terms?
Yes, I think my engagement with sound has always been basically intellectual and generally about decoding things. If I had to chalk that up to something, it might be that I come from a family of classically trained musicians who listened to virtually nothing else around the house, so my initial habituation was to the sort of music in which the real action lies in puzzling out how all the moving parts fit together, so to speak. I suppose it wouldn't be a stretch to say that I've tended to look at most music through that lens ever since.
What (or who) initially drew you into music as a child or teenager? Am I right in guessing that you didn’t start at the avant-garde end of the spectrum?
Well, in light of the above, being drawn into music was a given. As for getting into more experimental stuff, I don't think that there was a single watershed moment or anything, though there were definitely individual discoveries that had a huge impact on me. In general it was more the traditional pre-internet path of digging through books and zines, hanging around (and later working in) record shops, doing freeform radio for a while, and eventually studying art history and getting a broader context for all that information.
Spinning that question around a bit - would your younger self be surprised by the music you are now making?
Less so than you might think. While I have made more conventional music at various points in the past, I've also had a parallel practice of home recording for as long as I can remember; I was always carrying around a tape recorder, trying to modify my parents' stereo, and the like as a kid, and even when I was a teenager and playing polite jazz and relatively standard-issue punk rock as a social thing, I was still coming home every night and making farther out stuff on my four-track simply for my own amusement. I suppose that what's changed in the past seven or eight years is that that parallel thing has become my primary focus, which has made things both more simple and more complicated.
Do you think about the future much? Are there limits to the aforementioned Bee Mask rubric?
Yes, I think about the future to a fault. There is definitely some sort of horizon to Bee Mask, but I'm hesitant to commit myself by saying exactly what I think it is at this point. As I've said in the past, I think the important thing is for me to retain a sense that the project is mine to do or not do anything with at any given time. Right now I have some plans for the future that do involve Bee Mask. Once I've taken care of them I'll know whether or not I have some more.
What can you tell us about your upcoming 12”, for example? How did the relationship with Room40 start?
I started corresponding and trading records with Lawrence about a year ago, based on a mutual appreciation of each others' work and the idea of doing the record and coming over in connection with it followed from there. The 12” features two new pieces which were assembled for the occasion and bring together a handful of ideas I'd been playing with in the studio for some time, including some permutational tricks derived from 16th-century English bell-ringing, some routine sounds from around my house that I especially enjoy (that's my pressure cooker making a cameo on side A), and the voices of two close friends, Autre Ne Veut and Katherine Brady. It's at Dubplates and Mastering being cut right now and should be available this summer.
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And that's all she wrote. Email interviews are rarely used as transcribed works - so it's simply ten-twelve questions and a prayer. No formalities like farewells. Or maybe there are and I'm just rude. Either way, I hope you enjoyed it.
You can read the abridged feature here.
