Interview from Experimental Musician's Weekly
(an excerpt)


March 18, 1999

...
Experimental Musician's Weekly: After listening to your most recent album, "a curved geometry", I had trouble placing your style or pigeonholing you in a specific genre. Would you say that your music is strictly experimental?

Monolith: How do you expect me to answer that?

EMW: Well, not to be offensive, but I am beginning to doubt that you are truly experimental. In fact some of your pieces are not experiments at all.

ML: I try to make all of my work as experimental as humanly possible. I'm only one man, don't forget. I guess you could say that some of my works aren't as experimental as others, but each piece is monkeying around in one arena or another. Lots of my fans write to me and ask if more mainstream pieces like "auctal drop" are supposed to be experimental. People who ask questions like these are probably just missing the experiment. Some of the experiments may involve manipulating subtle features of the music or sound structure to produce an even more subtle effect. An untrained ear is likely to miss this sort of manipulation entirely. In fact, sometimes I can't even hear it myself!

EMW: How long have you been involved in experimental music, and how did you first start to experiment?

ML: Well, believe it or not, I've been interested in musical experimentation almost my entire life. In fact, experiments are all I've been doing musically for the past 40 years. I think I first started to dabble in musical experimentation when I was 9. My father brought home a vacuum cleaner from Halpern's and I went to town. At that point in my life, my experimentation was interspersed with more formal musical studies and interests. I started intensive piano training at 4, and I stuck with that regime until I was 13, at which point I moved on to an even more rigorous study of the falkhorn. Looking back, I think that all of the formalism blinded me to the other musical possibilities. For much of my youth, I believed that if you couldn't hear it, it wasn't worth listening to. My first serious departure from the realm of formal music came when I was 17, and the rest is history.

EMW: So at what point did you proclaim yourself to be the Godfather of Experimental Music?

ML: I'd really like to set the record straight on this issue: I never "proclaimed" anything. That title was invented by the Times a few years ago in their review of my work. It seems I can never live it down.

EMW: I would still say you are one of the foremost experimental music makers around today.

ML: I can understand why so many people feel that way. There aren't very many true experimenters left in this day and age, so I tend to stand out.

EMW: What is one of your most memorable moments musically?

ML: I was down in the Philippines with an associate of mine, Dr. Hank Livingston. We had spent a month or so there doing sound experiments, and I believe it was on my first day-long excursion to Canary Island that I really hit the jackpot. At that point, I came up with what some still claim is my most ingenious invention--a wearable sound lab in the form of a motorcycle helmet equipped with a stereo microphone array. It's unbelievable, really, just remembering how well this thing worked. In a mere 3 hours, I was able to hammer out about 152 different sound experiments. I don't think I've ever caught that sort of raw musical energy again since that day at Canary Island.

EMW: That is an impressive anecdote. Do you find that you use most of the material made during these sound experiments in finished pieces?

ML: Well, yes and no. For some of my finished work, I'm very choosy, and many of these experiments get left on the cutting room floor, so to speak. But then, after mastering a complete body of work for a CD, I often look back sadly at the 200-plus hours of material that I've had to cut. I often find some use for this sort of extra sound.

EMW: What do you end up doing with such a bulk of extra, unusable material?

ML: The material is hardly unusable. In fact, I've found hundreds of uses for it.

EMW: Like what?

ML: Hundreds and thousands of uses. In fact, I'd say that these bulks of raw material are even more useful than the finished works themselves.

EMW: What sort of uses are we talking?

ML: Countless uses, really. More uses than you can ever imagine.

EMW: ....

EMW: Where do you see yourself in 60 years?

ML: I'm assuming I'll be dead in 60 years. What are you getting at?

EMW: Err... How about in 20 years? You will make it that long, I hope.

ML: Yes, I think I'll still be alive in 20 years. Every few years, I feel a pressing need to reinvent myself. I think I need to do this to avoid becoming a walking parody of my own ways and interests. Over my lifetime so far, I've reinvented myself some 20-odd times, but now I feel the big one coming up--a reinvention to top all past reinventions. I think I'm heading towards a major turning point, and I can sense that there's no turning back. Right now I'm working on some stuff that will make your head spin, and I'm working in a completely new direction. I can tell you this: it's the best shit I've done ever, ever.