Writings

In January 2007, Eamon Sprod travelled to San Francisco to perform at 23five's Tenth Annual Activating The Medium festival. At that time, he sat down with 23five's Jim Haynes to discuss his work, the album that 23five had just published entitled Wind Keeps Even Dust Away, and his philosophies about art in general.

Jim Haynes: When you do installations, are they as Eamon Sprod or are they as Tarab?

Eamon Sprod: I do them under my own name. To my thinking, everything I do is part of the some projects, so I have wondered about that one. I think I have just gone with the "done thing," and I suppose a fear of seeming a little pretentious, as working under an assumed name is not quiet as "usual" for "artists" as it is for "musicians." Well in Melbourne anyway. On the whole, it might be a little silly on my part.

What does the moniker mean to you?

I may not be exactly correct in this, but it's an Arabic word for the ecstatic experience of listening to music. There was a documentary I saw about Oum Kulthoum and in it they were talking about the idea of tarab; and they were having trouble translating it from Arabic. I think the documentary was in both French and English, and they were having difficulty because it's something that is felt and not an intellectual process, which really appealed to me. It's an emotive or intuitive response to sound rather than an intellectual one.

Can you tell me about Oum Kulthoum?

To be honest I don't know a whole lot, but she is THE Egyptian singer, the grand-diva of Egyptian music (although some I'm sure would disagree). In the Doco I saw, there was some footage of her singing sort of variations or improvisations based upon Koranic recital; and the crowd would just erupt into ecstatic applause after every line of verse she sang. In the documentary, they were trying to explain this ecstatic response through the use of the word tarab, which is where I pinched it from. She's an amazing singer.

Are you attempting to achieve a similar emotive response through your work?

Well no, obviously I don't expect that sort of extreme ecstatic response; but in a much more low key way hopefully, yes. I would like people to feeling something when they hear what I do, and hopefully beyond that to when they hear all the things around them. I supposed as much as anything, it's a starting point. It's about what I am doing and how I respond to things. I still think of it as a process, of something you do as opposed to something that you listen to and passively absorb as entertainment.

You mean the act of listening?

Yes but more widely, I mean the act of making, being creative, of doing stuff; and that's not to say that listening to music, watching films, or looking at paintings etc. are not interesting or worthwhile. I'm thinking of the creative experiences in themselves are the things I do all the time. It's just that I get more from the process of doing things, what engages me most is the activity. I think that it would be better if more people were creative in their lives rather than just watching other people doing things. And that doesn't mean they should produce art (which many would argue is just another bi-product of bourgeois and consumer culture anyway); but live and think a little more creatively. Art is great as a way of learning, exploring, and inhabiting the world around you. That's part of it: my response to my surroundings and my environment; but also, rather than trying to make work that people have to intellectually decode or analyze. I like to try to set up situations where people can find their own meanings or responses, hopefully in a more emotive or intuitive way.

There are very obvious source materials to your music, such as on Wind Keeps Even Dust Away, there's shattered glass and a lot of wind; but there are also moments that are more tactile. While I could postulate on what I think that they are, it might be more important for me to respond to the sounds as being imagined beyond their original context. Is there a point of entrance from which people can enter this work?

I think the answer is that I don't really think about it. I don't build specific points of entry into the work so it's sort of not up for me to say. I am trying to play a little bit between the more obvious sounds and the altered ones or purely textural ones, but not in a hide and seek sort of way. Maybe, the work is trying to represent things coming in and out of focus, things being revealed and then re-hidden. Basically most sounds are left unaltered because they sound fine how there are without my (further) intervention.

So what is the intention of using common objects in a sound composition?

I suppose there's a number of things. You mentioned before that there are some quite obvious field recordings; and in a strange sort of way, I can almost forget what they are. I stop thinking about them as being linked to specific places, and they simply become sound. As we all know, a recording of a sound is not the same as the actual sound itself and is even further removed from the objects that made the sound. I don't use sounds as documents of objects or spaces; but at the same time, that's a load of rubbish because obviously I know what things are. But, it's not at the forefront of my mind when I'm working with them. Nothing is chosen for it's symbolic value, although it may inadvertently have some. It's about the sounds things generated. I've always collected junk off the street. First just because the things I found were interesting or useful, then I started making pictures or assemblages with them, so it wasn't too much of a leap to make sound with what I found. It's partially for the aesthetics of decay, and the sounds that come from living in wasteful and decaying cities. There is this dual thing; in that it is just about the sound and I can't deny that there is something about using broken, relatively useless discarded objects. There is some Situationist statement about using the tools of consumer culture to produce things that are useless to the consumerist system. I'm not quite doing that, but hopefully something vaguely in the same territory.

I have my own strong affinities for decay and rust; and I have my own allusions and allegories which I put into that medium. so when ever i hear any artist say that they are interested in decay, I have to ask why. Not so much that I can validate my own opinions, but because it is such a peculiar medium and one that is so loaded, but it can be used so badly.

I have something of a romantic attachment to the fact that the world is decaying, politically, socially, environmentally. As much as those are "bad" things, there's a nihilistic streak that I have which enjoys this. "Man is a bad animal" and all that. I was reading some of Robert Smithson's writings and he was talking about buildings being monuments to the decayed future. The things our society strives for are also the things that will destroy us. Their and our own demise is built into them. This is interestingly paralleled by the built-in obsolescence of most manufactured goods. So there's the notion of wiping the slate clean. I recall there being revolutionary movements in the ‘60s, which actually promoted nuclear war to get rid of the human race, thinking that might fix things up a bit. While I'm fully aware of the silliness of these sorts of notions, I still have romantic attachments to them. I quite like using the waste product of a consumerist society for creative ends. i don't know if its entirely a reaction against; but the notion that everything has to be new, clean, white, and sterile to be of worth is just not true, and in fact quite often the opposite. I like the idea of things not being permanent. The cycle of things coming and going is far more interesting. And then there's the pure aesthetics as well. So much contemporary art has been based upon this and led us, or me anyway to appreciate the small, broken, and insignificant; Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Tarkovsky, the Boyle Family to name a few of my favourites. So basically I find decay quite interesting on a purely aesthetic level. That's a bit of convoluted answer.

What was the process that came to develop surfacedrift, and how did Hamish Sinclair end up hearing this album and releasing it on Naturestrip?

Eamon: I put together a bunch of pieces without any particular idea to do anything with them, and friend of mine met Hamish, and he mentioned he wanted to set up a label with a particular focus on field recording. He suggested that I send him some of my stuff, which I did, and which he liked. I had "surface" the track down and pretty much finished. Two of the other tracks, I ended up reworking fairly extensively, and the last one was created during that process. Hamish was great. He basically said "I like this, I don't like this, I think this bit needs work, when can you get it finished and I'll release it," which he did.

I tend to start new tracks with whatever I have been recording recently and then start to combine things and shuffle things around, adding new things as they come along, so surfacedrift is basically a combination of bits of stuff I'd collected over a two-year period. I don't often consciously set out to do specific things, although I am doing so a little more now. But, this is a good way to start a piece for me; in a way, I try to let the sounds dictate where I go next and how I deal with them. I have started to play around a bit more, pushing composition more, although still trying to let the sounds point me in which direction to go. I didn't really think about composition at all during surface drift. It all fades in, gets fairly thick in the middle, and fades out. Which works fine but I've been trying to explore that aspect a little more.

Did that process begin to change on Wind Keeps Even Dust Away?

Yeah, I tried to change things in some ways at least. As I've said, after doing surfacedrift, I started to think more about the composition; and I tried to create more of a whole piece, as opposed to the four separate tracks on surfacedrift. I think that tied into a more compositional approach to the album. I brought in quicker shifts and abrupt sound -- you mentioned the breaking glass -- to vary and shift attention, rather than just beds of sound. Still trying to go with the sounds but hopefully being more in tune with them. I think the work is essentially part of the same process, as it evolves. While the records are specific points in that process, they seem to blur and overlap in my mind a little. By the time I finish one, I can see what I want to do with the next one, sort of as an extension or reaction to what i had done previously. Sometimes, the things that I'm unhappy about on what i have just finished, I want to address in the new one, or little things that I did like on this one, I may keep or take in a different direction. It's all sort of a continuation of the same process, rather than totally separate projects. A friend described the first track on Wind as a nice goodbye to surfacedrift, which was not intentional but I quite liked that he read it that was.

So, the title – Wind Keeps Even Dust Away – is that Pynchon?

Yes it's from Pynchon. It's pinched from the middle of a sentence in Gravity's Rainbow. It's more of the wording rather than anything else. It was one of those things that just jumped out at me. I was reading the book when I started working on the album. There were a few images that cropped up throughout the book, unrelated to the central themes of the book itself, as much as I love that book. They helped me to solidify and shape some of what I was thinking. They were quite useful. I still have that and another quote from the book stuck on my wall above on my monitor.

How would you qualify Pynchon's influence upon you?

I don't know. It's sort of tricky to tell. Of course anything and everything you experience will influence you in some way. I think gravity's rainbow is a great book but I wouldn't cite him as a big influence; not like reading Burroughs. That was a huge leap. Reading Naked Lunch and the Cities of the Red Night trilogy in particular had a huge impact on the way that I think.

Do you see your work as paralleling literature?

I don't know about paralleling literature. Reading, as much as listening to all sorts of funny music when I was younger was a huge influence on me. I come from a very bookish family; both my father and grandfather work "in the trade" so to speak, so we were always given books as kids. If I had finished a book and didn't have anything else, I would just go to my father and ask for something interesting. He'd hand me a new book and I'd go away and read it and then come back and get another one. Whether it was Kurt Vonnegut or whatever the other things were he'd give me, like Beckett, although not when I was a kid, a bit later. I could list a whole stream of amazing books my father has given me over the years. So that set me off I suppose and it's been a huge influence on me; Burroughs in particular was a big influence on me when I was younger for so many reasons in terms of how to view and exist in the world.

I take it that you don't view your work as cutting up the landscape and re-organizing it?

No, although you could argue that we do this already through experience and memory. And the act of recording and playing sounds into another place is doing that also. I wouldn't say that there's anything in my work that's particularly Burroughsian, but the layering of sounds that come from different environments and different spaces could be similar to Burroughs' idea that reality and time aren't linear, and are malleable. Everywhere you go, you are hearing and listening and remembering and thinking three different things all at the same time and that past, present, future, reality, and imagination all coalesces into what's going on in your head at any given minute. This is sort of what I am trying to get across: an interior responses to our surroundings. And I think those ideas are basically collage as much as anything else. I used to make a lot of visual collages, and to certain extent I still think of what I'm doing now is collage. I'm certainly not doing environmental plunderphonic works, but that idea of layering things up and displacement is a big part of what I do and what I like to do.

I always associate your work with psychogeographical concerns, as sort of these placements within wanderings and imagined spaces.

That's definitely there. I'm a huge fan of Iain Sinclair and I've read a bunch of the more obvious Situationist stuff, etc. And it's probably becoming stronger in the work, or perhaps I'm becoming more conscious of it. In some ways, on Wind and in my installation work I've been trying to address that more consciously rather than it just being the methodology, which it was more for surfacedrift. a friend of mine described one of the tracks on Wind as reminding him of when he first moved to Melbourne and wandering around late at night not knowing where he was. That was exactly the sort of thing that I would hope that someone would feel. not that everyone should feel that exact thing when they hear that track. But that's the sort of thing I'm trying to explore.

In your installations, what type of visual objects and how do those installations operate?

I've just started dabbling with this type of work again. For one I did mid last year, I painted a map on the floor of the gallery, sort of a topographical map. The floor of the gallery had its tiles removed leaving a grid on the concrete and all of these marks from the glue that in turn had been sealed and polished. So I used those marks as a guide for the map I painted, and then I covered sections of the floor with dirt, leaves and small bits of metal strewn across the top of it. I was trying to address the geography of the floor in a way, draw people's attention to look at the things around them. More recently, I made a series of nine boxes, that are sort of like sections of ground. I poured bits of cement, broke them up, and covered them with dirt; so it sort of looked like cracked pavement. I scratched into them and made landscapes out of them. I also used dirt, plaster, hair, bits of metal, leaves, those sorts of materials; and I constructed nine imagined landscapes, as if viewed from both very close up and from far above. In a way, these were trying to bring a physicality to the sound, which was a 4-channel sound piece. They were paralleling the sorts of places where I recorded in; but they were abstracted and were in no way meant to be realistic or literal representations of specific places.

Do you see yourself working more with installation? Where do you see your work progressing?

I like working with installation a lot. Although it has it's own impracticalities, like money and dealing with galleries, or not dealing with galleries of course. I hope that my work creates sonic environments or imagined spaces, and to a certain extent, it seems logical to work in a physically along side the sound. There are various ways of doing this obviously, like filling a room with rocks and coating the walls with dirt or building sound sculptures that actually make the sound. I'm not so keen on just speakers in a gallery, but that can set up spaces where people can listen to sound in a specific and peculiar manner or space rather than sitting in their lounge room. I am hoping to work more in found spaces, hopefully some outside things if I can figure out a cheap and practical way to do it. I'm beginning to become a lot more interested in taking recordings from one place and rerecording them played into another and so on, for my recorded work, and installations obviously can be part of that process also, in sounding out spaces and using the space as a way to shape the sound as well as being an interesting space to be and listen in. But I don't really know, I'll have to wait and see where I end up.