I sent some questions over to the United States, to David Keifer aka Cagey House, a webaudio legend whose year of 2010 was dedicated to constructing lots of crafty issues apparently looked upon very purpose to be improved on his cut and paste/sound collage/plunderphonics/sampledelic/hauntology approach.
The year 2010 is coming soon to its very closure having been very profilic for you. More concretely, are you satisfied with your goals and those realizations in principle?
In general, I was pretty happy with what I came up with this year. There was a kind of density on the tracks I made in 2010 that hadn't been there previously. That's especially true of Flapper with Tuba and some of the tracks on Ratty Boo. The only thing I was kind of disappointed with was the spoken word parts on Stupid Grin. I had thought that coming up with texts would be really easy, but it's not. So if I'm going to continue in that direction, I'll have to work a lot harder than I thought I would. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed, regarding your dense, alchemist-alike, even obviously tiresome way to explore the tracks, could you step backwards and analyze what were the basic differences and features of the issues?
Looking back, this year was about achieving a higher level of density - a kind of multi-voice critical mass. Up until around November of 2009, my main technique had been a kind of sequential collage. I'd make different tracks, then cut them up and string certain parts of them together, one after another. The Major Monk tracks and the B for Breakfast tracks are good examples of that. But then when I was finishing up Camping with Jimmie, which was one of the last things I made for Do the Magnet, I got to the point where I actually had two different tracks running at the same time - one in the left channel and one in the right. And it was a really cool effect. Then, without really thinking about it much, I just kind of threw myself into that kind of "everything at once" style of writing. Flapper with Tuba is really just an extended experiment in that. Each of those numbers started out as a little scrap of melody which I would keep dubbing back over itself - after some tinkering with voicings, and pitch and tempo. The cool thing is that, to me at least, they had a lot of emotional impact - they really took on a life of their own, and didn't sound just like experiments in technique. Through the rest of the year, I kept trying to expand that technique. And I started dubbing larger structures over themselves and over each other. For instance, instead of staring out with just a little bit of melody, I'd start out with more elaborated things, things that already had multiple parts to see how they would sound when played simultaneously with themselves, or some other multi-part thing. Most of the time the results were horrible, and I had to abandon them, but every now and then things got really interesting, and wild.
What could the melomans expect for the next year by you? What are your further doings to be planned out?
I have an album called June through the Window coming out on Weird and Wired in January. That one has lots of the really dense stuff on it. There's also lots more of that on an as-yet un-named album that I hope will be out on Just Not Normal later in the spring. That one also has some much simpler music on it as well. After that, I really don't know. My wife bought an ipod touch, and there's tons of music app for that. It would be fun to explore that - to be able to write away from a PC - to be able to write on the sofa, or even outdoors, that would be great! In any event, I'd like to really hone the emotional impact of what I do. A lot of the time I get hung up on method - I'd like to really start focusing on the buzz the music gives off.
Thanks a lot, David!