Refresher Course Set 2: Oliveros, Dub, Aphex Twin
Whew, some of these early posts are heavy hitters. This “Refresher Course” series, of which this entry is set 2 (the first set went live yesterday), is the result of me starting to methodically work my way back through the more than 7,500 posts on Disquiet.com since the site launched at the end of 1996. Today’s set includes some of my favorite conversations I’ve had with musicians, among them a 1997 chat with Aphex Twin and a 1996 one with the late Pauline Oliveros. Here are the 10 old posts I tidied up today:
▰ A 1996 chat with Pauline Oliveros. I was DMing with Oliveros on Facebook before she died about doing a Disquiet Junto music community project with her, but then she passed away.
▰ A 1997 overview of electronic labels. I’d just revisited this piece a week or so ago when Achim Szepanski, who was among the people I interviewed for it, died. I’m wondering if that experience may have been part of the impetus to begin this clean-up process, this revisiting.
▰ My list of my favorite albums of 1996, including μ-Ziq’s In Pine Effect, Arvo Pärt’s Litany, and the Heat soundtrack. It was a very good year.
▰ An interview with Gavin Bryars from 1997.
▰ An interview with Darrin Verhagen, aka Shinjuku Thief, from 1997.
▰ A very short review of a 1996 Black Dog release.
▰ My 1997 Aphex Twin interview, one of the most read pages on this website. Funny story about this: I was warned in advance by the label, to an unprecedented degree, how “difficult” Richard D. James could be. At the appointed time he called me, I said hello, and then the phone went dead, and I was like, “Wow, they weren’t kidding.” And then he called back immediately. He’d dropped the phone by accident. This is why he starts off the Q&A by saying “Sorry about that.” In retrospect, it’s too bad I didn’t ask him much about Selected Ambient Works Volume II, because about 25 years later I’d publish a book on that album, but I didn’t have a lot of time, and we had a lot to cover.
▰ A starter kit for people new to ambient music. It’s actually broader than that.
▰ A fun interview from 1997 with both members of Spring Heel Jack. They faxed me their answers so they wouldn’t be misquoted.
▰ An essay, with interviews, on contemporary dub-influenced music in America, “Dub, American Style.” This was later collected in a book.
A few additional notes: As I’ve been working through these old posts, I’m amazed by how much of the music isn’t online, at least not officially. One of the DJ Spooky albums I mentioned, the one with Freight Elevator Quartet, isn’t, nor is Drain’s Offspeed and in There, mentioned in one of the pieces included today. This is also the case with many of the compilation albums in the “starter kit” listed above. Many of the URLs from the mid-1990s have gone dead. As I work through this material, if a link works, I leave the link live; if the link is dead, I make it not-clickable but leave th original URL in the text. Also, I was apparently much less of a serial comma absolutist back then; fortunately I eventually saw the light. And: I need to give some serious thought to tags. I never, for example, had an “ambient” tag on this site, but maybe it’s about time. I’m experimenting. I’d like the tags to be more useful, which means having a few more of them, and having them be more consistent.
