"Pollinator" - Review of Steve Tibbetts' new album: "Life Of" (ECM Records) plus Interview! By Mythologist, Willi Paul & Planetshifter.com

Introduction

As a mythologist, my internal antennae twitch and dive with alchemic software, searching for sound archetypes, story fragments and the sweat from universal memes. Prior Steve Tibbetts albums have been described as "music to get lost in;" a "contemplative shimmer like a reflecting pool." "Life Of" is described as: "loved ones or even a person Tibbetts might have observed closely over time while at work in a local coffee shop." But the quiet craftwork of mythic strings and his wonderous gamelan - chameleon piano travel with you much deeper than a glance. "Life Of" is a soulful interface and you want to sculpt with it.

Stimulating the listeners imagination, Steve plays his sonic palette; then we paint. The songs become a subtle contract - a union between artist and listener.

Tibbetts music can sponsor both delicate whispers and bombastic shudders, a deeper calling; piquing our memories from remote villages and vacations with gurgling faces. Let "Life Of" become your story. It's not about heroes and villains, but family & friends, - and a few strangers.

A catch & release.

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I came up with a number of ideas for the title of this work, including:

The Initiator
Cocooning
feeling human again
Before there was silk, there was Steve Tibbetts
Do you think we both feel the same things?

The very first experience from my rainy-day Manila listen to "Life Of":

Soul streaming
Cello portaging
Very slow Ferris wheel with 10 people looking up
Searching in cupboards for paper plates
A long heartfelt hand shake
Glowing in

When the album ended
I was startled by the silence
I realized that I had travelled somewhere else for a while
And that I was just
Alone (again)

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3 Pollinations from "Life Of"

"Life Of Mir" (track 4)

Tibbetts breathes thru his guitar, an ancient lung
And lays down a fresh rug
He says hello in the strangest ways

"Life Of Alice" (track 7)

Rain drops
Scurrying feet
Pulling aside the curtains for dawn
Yawning

Start Again (track 13)

Waving from the golden land
Turning soil
Heart Beating
Sowing the temple seeds

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INTERVIEW with ST

Hi Willi! These are interesting questions, and outside the realm of what I usually get. One guy you should talk to is David Torn. He would have great and lucid and funny answers to your questions. He's smarter than I am, and a better guitar player besides!

I will try to answer as honestly as possible, but the basis for all my replies is this:

music seems to me to be a twilight language, and therefore difficult to ascribe meaning to, to reduce to parts, or to reason with. Its power seems to be in its easy ability to flexibly straddle the realm in mind between everyday consciousness and other, more subterranean aspects of mind. It brings hidden aspects of mind to the surface, and it does so easily and tangibly. This is not to say that other aspects of consciousness are better, deeper, or wiser, they are just hidden, and it's nice to see them from time-to-time.

Music, and its partners in consciousness, can "wash the dust of the everyday off," as they say.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/17/soul/

Some have tried to describe how music (or art, in general) does what it does, and that description rarely seems to go well.

As listener / fan, it is our task to find enjoyment and meaning from your music. What is your charge in return? Has this changed?

I don't feel like I have a "charge." I do have a vague idea, from album to album, of what I need to do, and that understanding seems to arrive as a package. It just takes a long time to unwrap it. I still think in terms of albums, and it's only recently I stopped thinking in terms of album sides.

I would take issue with the idea of finding "meaning" in music. What would that meaning be? If it were something quantifiable or able to be described, it would, by nature, have to be a dilution of art's essential nature. It would be like describing Italy to the curious by taking them to dinner at Olive Garden.

Think about what Coltrane's or Hendrix's playing brings up in your mind and body. It's palpable, but hard to ascribe meaning or specificity to. It's a strange no-man's land, but one you can return to again and again. When I hear Hendrix's solo in "Machine Gun" I'm there, right there, with my 14-year old self. But we can't say much more to each other than to say "Wow, whoa, man."

When is a creating a song a journey for you? When is playing a song like treading water?

Creating a piece of music is always a journey, I suppose, but I would remove any romantic notions of "mission" or "heroism" or "deed" out of the concept of "journey." It is always a swampy, inelegant slog, and because I work alone, I find myself stuck in box canyons, again and again. (I need a map.)

Are you like a "soundronaut" traveling to sonic spaces and uncharted trails, combing and recording for others to discover and explore?

Sure, that's fine, but you can say that of any musician. Every expression is going to be unique. I don't think it's any different for me; the tones have to combine well, or dissonance well, and create something above and beyond (or below and before) the sound data. It's hard to know the moment when the composition is "done," but it seems that the right tones combining well at the right stage of in-completion is the right time to stop.

Are you connecting listeners to you or to themselves? Both? Neither!

When I feel a composition seems to acquire its own life I know it will connect with the listeners who have patiently followed me over the years. I've met a lot of them, and I know who they are. I suppose the music will connect the listener with some aspect of their own mind that wouldn't come up without it, but any music will do that.

It's good to listen to one piece of music over and over sometimes; just leave one CD or sound file around to marinate in and see how it affects your life from day to day. "Rothko Chapel" was stuck in my car's CD system for 4 months once, so I had no choice. It was always on. We spent many bleak winter mornings driving my kids to school in the dark with that music on. My kids complained.

You have a gift for art and culture; do you have to hide it away sometimes; put the gift on hold? Examples?

In fact, I don't have a gift for art and culture. I'm telling you: it's a muddy, stumbling slog. I subscribe to Harper's Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and I read them cover to cover, and I understand about 20% of it. I could read a lucid, well-argued article on the merits of Michael Haneke, know the meaning of every single English word in the article, then put down the magazine and think, "What did I just read?" Part of this is due to aging and brain shrinkage.

No, I don't have to hide anything away, any "gift." I'm desperate; give me more of the gift. Send the muse.

If we can feel the power of myth from storytellers, then why not from song? Are lyrics a bad thing there?

Not qualified to answer this. However, I can tell you my kids would have had no interest in listening to music before drifting off to sleep. They wanted the twilight world of Mordor, Arrakis, and Voldemort to accompany them into the dark. There's something about words and listening and bed that dimly calls up some pre-lapsarian campfire world.

I'm trying to think of an example of music that would qualify as "mythic" and not coming up with much. Maybe "Fratres." That's a piece of music where two musical giants sublimated themselves to the score and made something completely new. Mythic? I don't know. Lyrics: not a bad thing. "Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?" A great line, and always timely.

How do you translate visual cues and memories into sounds and messages in your songs?

It's the other way around. It's just endless hard work, broken compasses, ditches, failure, disappointment and abandonment. Then finally, thankfully, something seems to gain purchase, get traction, something starts to culture on the agar block. That's when some sort of imagery or landscape or "meaning" starts to manifest in the visual and conceptual fields. While that used to be terribly fascinating, now it's sort of annoying. There really is no meaning, and any imagery, visual cues, or reference to memory is just neurons creating patterns out of chaos.

On the other hand, it's just sound, but when it all comes together well, it does sort of slip down into the hippocampus and have a little party.

Is it far-fetched to tell you that your music helps to create a new language, code, or artistic space for me?

Not far-fetched: carving out artistic space is the everyday blue-collar work of music. The music I return to again and again occupies a body-mind artistic space, but I never thought of it as a code or language. "Language" is ok. That works. "Code," no, I don't get that. Codex? You can get musicians and artists to go way out on that limb, and they do, and it can be painful to listen to.

We did many interviews for the Choying albums, and writers were eager for me to talk about plumbing Jungian archetypes or pulling up buckets of inspiration from the primal substrate and bringing already-formed music into corporeal existence. giving it back to the world and so, on ad nauseam. If all could gaze online at my recording studio Steve-web-cam they'd see vacant stares, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, confusion, and naps.

Can silence be a sound?

Manfred could probably tackle that one. "The most beautiful sound next to silence" used to be the frightening motto of the ECM label.

How do you choose the source for your sound samples? Do you make samples from samples?

I make my samples myself. Like the genetic engineer in Blade Runner: Pris: "Don't you get lonely?" JF Sebastian: "No, I have lots of friends. I make my friends." My pet sounds. A gong maker in Candidasa (Bali) let me spend an afternoon recording samples in his gong shop while he was out back, slaughtering chickens. I've mined those samples for years. (I left some of the chicken shrieks in.) I recorded Tibetan longhorns in Sikkim in 1989 on a Sony Pro Walkman cassette recorder and found that they mesh nicely with electric guitars. I have nothing against purchasing and using pre-made samples but I just don't do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLPpXNhL9z8

Samples from samples, yes, many times I'll make some piece of music that's going nowhere fast, and after many months I'll realize the only good thing about it is 8 seconds of a peculiar confluence of echoed guitar, piano decay, and some voice sample from somewhere. I'll combine all that, pitch it down a fifth, make a stereo sample, name it "boring combined thing" and then find it 5 years later and wonder where it came from.

How do you interpret and deploy sound symbols and archetypes vs. graphic symbols?

My mind can't handle that sort of complex thinking. (See "brain shrinkage," above). Ellington: "If it sounds good, it is good." Armstrong: "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song."

Do your sounds (and songs) incorporate analogy and metaphor?

The sneaky, weird force of music causes that analogy and metaphor business to arise on the listener's side. If a musician told me they were consciously incorporating analogy and metaphor in their music I'd ask them how their ayahuasca sessions were going.

One more question: you made reference recently to the new work now underway there: big loud guitar! What's up ;)?

Just working with loops from an offhand remark from D Torn: "Don't you catalog your loops?" Well, no. So I played around with a few, and found some good electric guitar bits. This will take some time, like years, so don't hold your breath, and it might not fit on good ol' ECM, but I always try.

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Bios -

Steve Tibbetts

One-of-a-kind guitarist and record-maker Steve Tibbetts has an association with ECM dating back to 1981, with his body of work reflecting that of an artist who follows his own winding, questing path. The BBC has described his music as "an atmospheric brew... brilliant, individual." "Life Of", his ninth album for the label, serves as something of a sequel to his 2010 ECM release, Natural Causes, which JazzTimes called "music to get lost in." Like the earlier album, "Life Of" showcases the richness of his Martin 12-string acoustic guitar, along with his gamelan-like piano and artfully deployed field samples of Balinese gongs; the sonic picture also incorporates the sensitive percussion of long-time musical partner Marc Anderson and the almost subliminal cello drones of Michelle Kinney. Tibbetts, though rooted in the American Midwest, has made multiple expeditions to Southeast Asia, including Bali and Nepal; not only the sounds but the spirits of those places are woven into his musical DNA as much as the expressive inspiration of artists from guitarist Bill Connors to sarangi master Sultan Khan. "Life Of" has a contemplative shimmer like a reflecting pool, with most of the album's pieces titled after friends and family, living and past. (ECM version)

Steve Tibbetts (home)

ECM Records site

Willi Paul, Mythologist

Willi draws deeply on the emerging values in the permaculture and transition towne movements. He is creating sound myths based now after an eight year exploration of myth, alchemy, compost soil and sound archetypes for Planetshifter.com and his experimental sound project, the chaos era.

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The Historical Record -

"Pedal Flower Steve Tibbetts: Interview & CD Review of "Natural Causes."

My first interview with Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson (click yes)