Junto Profile: Ray Cobley
What’s your name? Ray Cobley (Raymond C.A. Cobley)
Where are you located? Stromness, Orkney Islands, Scotland. I have lived in Orkney for most of my adult life, including around 20 years on the small island of Sanday. Before that I moved around a lot, living in various places in the UK from childhood on, also spending some years in Germany, Austria, and Spain. In my youth I studied languages, gaining a master’s degree in German literature and a diploma in Spanish. I have had various occupations in teaching, agriculture, and retail, mainly on a self-employed basis. These days I am retired from paid work.
What is your musical activity? I kept the previous section brief because it has little direct bearing on my current activities. Throughout all the various stages in my life, music has been a constant and continuous thread. I had a solid basic grounding in music theory and have played (or played around with) various instruments. I never had the time nor the obsessive dedication required to be a high-grade performer and I was perhaps more interested in improvising than in reading or performing scores.
During my lifetime I have listened to many thousands of hours of music, mainly classical. In my youth I voraciously absorbed works of mainstream composers but later gravitated toward the modern era, including jazz. In addition, I also enjoy early music, including Renaissance polyphony and Bach.
My own first efforts at sound art and composition began some time after my introduction to digital technology and online resources, which enabled me to intensify my listening and studies of modernist music. I began with various attempts at musique concrète. I acquired a digital sound recorder and wandered around capturing various sounds, anything from birdsong to building sites, together with recordings of domestic activities or apparatus, of small and found instruments, etc. At the same time I was investigating techniques and software with which to play around with the recordings I had made and published my first tracks online around 12 years ago. Since that time I have expanded my capabilities and resources. These days, although I still often use the techniques of musique concrète and recorded sounds, much of my work is purely electronic.
I have no room in my dwelling for banks of electronic apparatus or large musical instruments so that, together with small instruments, my equipment consists of laptops with Linux or Mac OS, with which I always use open-source software, for example: Pure Data (or “Purr Data” in its latest incarnation), Audacity, with hundreds of VSTs and plug-ins, PaulXStretch, and Samplebrain. I have an infinite array of sounds at my fingertips, both recorded and electronic. The challenge is to organize a few of them into interesting combinations and sequences.
It is not my intention to limit myself to one specific style or genre and I am ready to try anything that falls within the bounds of my competence. For this reason the Disquiet Junto perfectly chimes in with my activities. I also take part in the Naviar Haiku projects and, in addition to the music, have contributed the odd poem.
Some years ago it occurred to me that I could produce videos to post my music on sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, and I began to make fairly basic abstract animation to accompany the sounds. Gradually there came to be more of an equal balance between music and video. Now I often create the visual element before adding an appropriate soundtrack. I occasionally use music from Disquiet or Naviar projects in these videos, but more often than not the soundtracks are completely different and created specifically for use therein.
What is one good musical habit? Never discard or delete unpublished material, however unsatisfactory it seems. You never know if it might come in useful in a future project. There are no mistakes in composition: it is what you make it.
What are your online locations? I am not a huge fan of social media, although I do use Facebook from time to time. My music is available at soundcloud.com/ray_cobley and hearthis.at, videos at YouTube and Vimeo, music and videos at the Internet Archive (archive.org). All my work is published under a Creative Commons license and is free to download or remix.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? Rather than trawl through all my tracks and ponder over this for hours, I’ve chosen something fairly recent:
I have selected this because it presented a new challenge to me. I have no interest in dance music and, until I did some research, was not even sure about the exact characteristics of techno. In the end I was reasonably satisfied that I had created something slightly unusual or different in what I imagine can be a formulaic genre.
If I’m not mistaken, where you live is fairly isolated. Has the internet increasingly diminished any sense of isolation and provided a sense of community, in contrast with during your youth? With regard to quality of life, the Orkney Islands regularly feature among the best in the UK as a place to live. On the other hand, being distant from major conurbations and with a total population of around 22,000, the audience for my work is virtually non-existent here. A few years ago I arranged a presentation in a local gallery but hardly anyone turned up. Since this seemed to be a waste of my time and resources, I have not tried again. In other words, I depend on the internet to make connections. Fortunately, through the various online platforms and projects such as the Disquiet Junto, both as creator and listener, I certainly feel part of a vibrant international community.
As for my youth, life was so different in those days that I find it
impossible to make comparisons.
Did you learn the lesson about not discarding anything the hard way? That is, do you have a memory of having thrown out something and later regretted the decision? Yes, that did occur a few times and occasionally I still delete tracks in error. By the same token, once something is published I try to make sure that I remove it from other files. I once found that I had uploaded the exact same track twice on SoundCloud under different titles!
The sounds in your beautiful recent YouTube piece, “Palette (Pure Data),” sound like field recordings to a degree — like fog horns, but transformed. When you are making sound from scratch in Pure/Purr Data, does your work with field recordings inform it? Upon consideration, I make little distinction between recorded and electronic sounds in the processes of composition. The origin of the material is less important than its destination. In other words, the main value is in the intrinsic characteristics of each sound or sequence and its potential for development or inclusion in a given work and, like many other artists, I often combine sounds from various sources in a single track. Looked at in another way, electronic sounds can be made to resemble recordings (as you suggest above) or vice versa.
Pure Data is a multi-faceted and highly adaptable tool and it is certainly possible to create sounds which simulate some that are heard in nature or field recordings. I have made use of this from time to time and, of course, on occasion such sounds can arise quite unintentionally. Any sound file can also be imported into Pure Data for use in conjunction with electronics but this facility is probably more useful in live performance.
In general terms, since I started with field recordings and musique concrète, there is no doubt that my experience with them has informed my later work in the sense that I have continued to use many of the structural and manipulative techniques and processes I learned at that time with all other sounds.
