Vol. 2, No. 4
AN INTERVIEW WITH
NICK NEUBURG
Vol. 2, No. 4
JL
The first time I heard your work was around the time you released your first record, Cryptic Exaltations. I was having a conversation with Webb Crawford, our mutual friend, during a period where I was seeking unique approaches to solo practice in improvised music. They recommended I look into your record, which had just been released on 1039, and I was immediatley very taken by your material, your focus, and your strategic use of restraint in order to build these musical worlds. I definitely feel that this same spirit continues into this new release with us.
I’m curious: what were some differences in approach and practice between your first release and the second one?
NN
Thank you for saying so, and I’m honored and glad Webb pointed you in my direction! I should first acknowledge that there are definitely similarities in how the second record was fleshed out compared to the first record. They are both different than how I play live—I typically perform a continuous set where I make my way through different vocabularies in what I intend to be a seamless and unified way as a long form unfolding.
For both records, I focused on shorter tracks, using them to explore one specific area of my playing as a practice exercise. That way, the goal can be to flesh out each environment to its fullest potential. This has been my approach for both of my solo records so far, but maybe next time it could change. This felt like a way to bring people as close as possible into the experience of what it is like for me to practice.
The process of solitary practice is something that I really cherish and is one of my favorite things to do. When I play live, you obviously see the results of that kind of solitary practice, but I felt that there is a unqiue opportunity to share when you approach creating records as a way to bring listeners “into the workshop.”
JL
I can definitely hear that.
NN
Some musicians will only do a solo record once or twice in their life, and that is perfectly fine, but in my case, I think that I’d like to work on a new solo record regularly every few years as an opportunity to keep inspiring growth in my solo practice. It’s very important to me that I challenge myself to not become cynically complacent with my playing or allow myself to settle into the same vocabulary in the same ways over and over again. I’m always trying to develop something that feels extremely new to me at all times.
JL
Yes, I totally get that.
NN
Sometimes this will manifest in ways that are obvious—maybe exploring something physical like a new instrument or “object”/preparation. However, I think what I’m really interested in is the “inner work” of the practice—so working on how I approach phrasing, timbre, gesture, formal development, and figuring out whatever work I need to do to become more materially/technically proficient in expressing those aforementioned qualities. Whenever it may seem on the surface that I’m being inspired by something physical or material like an instrument or an object or an implement or a preparation, this inspriation is still in serving that “inner” work.
JL
That’s all very evident ot me. Your mention of that list of musical categories like phrasing, timbre, etc. reminds me of a conversation I have been having with a friend of mine in Chicago where we were discussing the worn cliche of what “working in the liminal space between improvisation and composition” means. So many people dangle this cliche as a cheap marketing tactic for their work.
NN
Very true.
JL
But in your work, these “material studies” you’re achieving by using specifically-employed reduction and focus ends up demonstrating how the practice can allow this inner life of the music to emerge in ways that end up being a very clear and strong structuring element that produces a kind of compositional form—a shape to the spectrum of musical variability. In solo practice—particularly when you commit to something like “this is the material, and we’re going to try to push higher and lower in intensity, and that will provide the morphology,” you end up with something that starts to break down the composition-improvisation dualism. I like how in your work, musical form is a kind of emergent property of the physical interactions that come through the specific techniques you utilize.
Something I am struck by is that the shapes and “behaviors” of your performance are very much not cliche and there is a sense of closeness that we have as listeners to the music. I’m fairly familiar with all varieties of unique techniques in percussion, but it is that “inner stuff” you were mentioning before that keeps every phrase and gesture very dynamic and surprising to me.
NN
I’m glad it comes across that way to you. Even though it’s obviously impossible to control whatever the listener percieves of your music, I would hope that they just listen to the sound itself and not get too focused on thinking about whatever techniques I’m using. That’s what is really important to me, because the process for me isn’t at all about achieveing a product. Even though when you make a record, you’re doumenting a specific performance and intentionally presenting that liminal snapshot of your work as a product—which is fine—but it is much more important for me that the work that went into the product is the result of my personal spiritual practice.
When I refer to “spiritual practice,” I mean that I view my practice process as a sort of active meditation where I’m putting myself in as close proximity with the acoustic sounds as possible on a physical level—and dealing with how that affects my state of consciousness. So even with these various musical elements, I view the consequence of how I develop them to be just a part of “polishing the container” so to speak—myself being the container for this process to manifest through. When I play, in any context, I just want to express myself as articulately and succinctly as possible. After that initial visceral experience, often whatever work I would like to do to develop whatever I’ve discovered further may or may not become apparent next.
Beyond that, I’m not really intrested in owning whatever the result is and framing it as “my music” even though it is an inevitability that my name and identity need to be attached to the music and there would be no way to avoid that completely, at least not that I can think of at the moment.
JL
I totally understand. That’s an ethic that goes far back—definitely in the experimental tradition with Cage and Tudor. There’s also that thing in certain free jazz traditions too where you hear things like “the playing isn’t about you, it’s about the music.” Of course, this can mean a million things in different contexts. I see what you’re saying as an emphasis on attention rather than intention—where in your performance, you’ve got various physical capacities that exist in the domain of your body, but then you have the ability to hear and witness what is unfolding in your practice. It is the act of attuning yourself to the physical interactions with the instruments you play on that allows the musical forms to emerge.
NN
Absolutely, absolutely. Of course, when anyone refers to their music or art in relation to spiritual practice, there is a danger of being unhelpfully vauge, because obviously everyone’s concept of what they may mean by spirituality is uniquely individual, and the word itself means nothing objective in particular. However, what I mean when I describe my musical practice as a “spiritual practice” or an “active meditation” is that, for me, it is the most effective practice I have in my life to help me exist as authentically as I can in the present moment and I have to imagine that’s the case for a majority of people who play music, whether they choose to see it that way or not. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in my life trying various meditation practices before, but for me, nothing beats this.
JL
That makes complete sense. In this same realm of discussion, something I find interesting about you as a musician is that there is clearly a lot of conceptual engagement on question around what the practice of improvisation is and how do these forms of self-understanding, understanding of spiritual practice, etc. come into form in the work itself. I admire your willingness to share some of this dimension in your work despite it often being a slipperly slope: when one starts talking about “what is spirituality” in musical practice, “what is meditative practice” in music, et cetera—to discuss these things can be something which flattens the actual experience of the music in some cases.
NN
Right. Speaking in terms of there being a spiritual practice in art really points to the practice being an act of surrender: most essentialy that of the egoically-constructed identity “performing” the music. Paradoxically, when one lets this happen, to the outsider the musician might seem more uniquely “themselves” than ever before, because by surrendering, they are affirming their true self. So at least in my opinion, this does the opposite of flattening the experience of the music.
JL
Right.
NN
To surrender all intellectual or conceptual framing of what is happening in the practice would, of course, mainly just prioritize the performer/practitioner having a visceral experience of the sound they are in the process of creating above all else.
JL
The tradition and practice of improvised music can be a good space for that. Many other kinds of music demand the player to abide by and fit within existing heuristics and semantic structures in ways that put a lot of attention on technique and physical capaicities in much less open ways which foreclose some of these kinds of playing relationships.
NN
True. But, you know, I love those semantic structures as well. Some people in the improvised music community rightfully talk a lot about the importance of synthesizing history and understanding what has been done before. I think, for me, it is a very personal thing to navigate, and I’m of the opinion that there is no one right way to synthesize both the vocabulary of the instrument you are playing/medium you are creating with and its social context. As someone who was trained first as a drummer in the so-called jazz tradition, synthesizing the vocabulary of the masters and then finding your own personal relationship to it is a highly prioritized method. It is still very much a part of my life and I think it would behoove most if not all practitioners of any art form to employ some version of this study or process in their practices.
However, I am skeptical of the attitude that there is an objectively true and chronologically linear canon in music and that our “job” as creative musicians is that when one has digested something that comes closest to the cutting edge within this socially-constructed canon, then the next objective is to “innovate” and evolve the music to the next logical step beyond that point. I think that all of the people who are seen as innovators were labeled so by others and were mainly not aspiring to be innovators. These people really were individuals who had the dedication and integrity within their practices to the point where they found their way to expressing work that only they could uniquely do, resulting in music that’s never been heard before from anyone else.
JL
There’s a way in which, when we look at how history is told in these musics, there is this illusion that emerges from the way we tell stories about our past. Like, we learn things like “jazz and classical music become more harmonically saturated and sophisticated as time goes on”, or “in the 20th-century, we see more inclusion of noise as legitimate musical material” and these give the illusions of developmental linearity. But, we forget that “new” musical things are “discovered” in ways that do not function linearly—oftentimes something “new” emerges in a hiden place where you wouldn’t think something worth discovering would exist. This is of course for musicians a really personal thing because these discoverise come from the relationship between what a body can do to an instrument and how the ear can recognize some matieral to be expounded on and how that relates to other musics.
This puts you in a position where, if you’re going to become attuned enough to notice something worth discovering out there, you often can’t use extant “linear” models of musical development to find it because they are too proscriptive to leave room for real discovery. If music were a linear progression, then anyone could rationally deduce what the next “new thing” would be beause it should already be explained by the current “linear” trajectory of musical development. But there’s something deeply non-rational and mysterious about how we come upon the musical material which ends up making up our practice. It’s a very personal thing, of course.
NN
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s very well put.
JL
Could you talk a little more about the specific mechanics of For 1 and 2 Surfaces?
NN
Sure. To tell a little more about the development from my first record to my second—a lot of vocabulary that I was developing for Cryptic Exaltations kept evolving as I kept practicing and working on stuff and enough time had elapsed that I felt compelled to document where I was at again.
Pragmatically, one main difference is that, with the setup of the first record, each track had different instrumentaiton. There are some tracks that are just resonant metal, some tracks that are some kind of single surface—I was playing an 18-inch jazz bass drum I converted to play as a flat surface—and some stuff that resembled a kind of drum kit or multi-percussion setup. It was kind of all over the place where every track was a completely different thing.
On this new record, with the title For 1 and 2 Surfaces, I’m using two drums as the primary sound sources. Each track still has a very specific sonic fold and environment it’s working with, but with those two drums as a constant. There is a 28-inch diameter concert bass drum and then a 16-inch what you might call a “timpani floor tom” or a “variable-pitch floor tom.” It is a tom that has a pedal that changes the tension on the drum head. Obvoiusly there is a lot of gestural and timbral potential in that, and a lot of what I’ve been developing in my solo practice as of late has dealt with exploring the possibilitiies of that drum. At the time of the recording of this new record, the variable pitch floor tom was pretty new to me, so the tracks that have it on the record show a pretty early state of me finding my way with that particular instrument, but many of the tracks use both drums together, and some use just one of them alone.
The variable-pitch floor tom came to me through a happenstance, situational thing. This particular drum is a very rare drum that Yamaha made for a brief period in the 1980s. Somebody was selling one that they hadn’t used much in many years and it needed some TLC, you know. It needed me to rework it a bit and get it back into playing shape. So I cleaned it up and started exploring it. When that happened, I had already planned on recording a new solo record and had already booked some studio time, so it felt natural to include the exploration of that instrument as part of the preparation process for this record. Lately, when it is musically appropriate, I’ve been using just this one drum because, a lot of the time on gigs, there’s enough that I can do on just that one surface that I’m perfectly satisfied with, and it is so much easier to manage logistically.
JL
That’s awesome to hear.
NN
Now that I have become bonded to this drum in a way that has opened up a lot of possibilities, I’m particularly interested in exploring it further. I reached out to this guy, Ken Lovelett, who builds and invents original percussion instruments in Woodstock, New York. I’ve noticed his work just peripherally by checking out the stuff he’s been working on—he’s somewhere between an instrument builder or a drum maker and a kind of sculpture or conceptual artist.
JL
Oh, great.
NN
And he’s been building these drums that are also pitch-changing drums that use a foot pedal similar to the tom I’ve been playing for the past year, but they use the foot pedal to blow air using bellows through the drum, like how people have been doing the floor tom technique where they blow into a plastic tube that goes through the air hole of a drum. So Ken built me a drum that will be ready very soon. It is very portable, so if I have to fly somewhere, I could actually maybe take it with me.
JL
That sounds awesome.
NN
So I am thinking once I have this new drum, that I will start experimenting with two surface setups again, but with these two pitch-changing drums. Depending on what this inspires in the practice room, it’s possible that this might lead to a new era of my solo playing that has yet to even take shape—you heard it here first if so. (laughs)
But we’ll see how that goes. Things change so rapidly about my solo playing—not even considering something pragmatically physical like acquiring/learning a new instrument/object/technique. When I first started playing the large bass drum, it also changed some things about my playing as there is obviously a lot of fascinating potential in working with the low and long resonance that is characteristic of a drum of those dimensions. Since recording For 1 and 2 Surfaces, I haven’t been using the bass drum nearly as much, though. I’m honestly in a completely different place in my solo practice than where I was when I recorded this second record. Such is the nature of these things: even though this whole interview is about this solo record that is just coming out, that material already feels a bit distant from me now.
But that’s how it goes: part of the ineveitable and conditional reality of having an improvisation practice is learning to let go of identifying with and holding onto whatever you played previously. Even though a recording/album frames itself like an “official” statement about who one might be as an artist, I find it much healtheir to view it as just a situational document of one specific moment that just happened to be recorded. Best not to get married to anything, so to speak. I feel like this record is a good and very well recorded document of my process that I can, in some way, say that I feel proud of, though.
JL
I definitely know that feeling.
I think part of what makes solo practice valuable is the journey that one takes in finding different kinds of practice to do as a musician. Certainly, over the course of one year, you might have multiple paths of musical materials that could be followed and developed, but if you’re attuned to your own sensing-self, you’ll find the right path forward for yourself and sometimes this leads to great change.
The idea of having two variable-pitch drums is very exciting to hear about. Conceivably, your practice could have more elements of counterpoint in it—something that isn’t always an operant element in different kinds of percussion vocabulary. What a fucking goldmine of possibility that could be.
Everyone navigates the path of their work in their own way and it is just a question of how can one bring themself to a deeper relationship with their instrument and their practice.
NN
Yes. That fact would be true no matter what materials I’m using as a musician. If I chose to just play the drum kit in a traditional way without any of the extra “stuff” I’ve been developing, you know, it would still be the same.
JL
Exactly. For some people, it’s playing scales or running solos over standards. You’re still training yourself to execute some musical activity, but you’re also training yourself to notice and to listen to whatever the practice is for you. You have to have both of these to find something “new” in your work—even if you’re trying to find a new way to play something like a diminished scale.
I think it is that isolation and focus in solo practice that, at least for a listener, you can have this opportunityto see the overlaps between execution and attention really impact one’s playing. How this unfolds in your own work is one of the things that really drew me into your record—you can see the dynamism in the gestures and timbres that come from your focused approach to developing the techniques in your playing. Your attention to the playing itself provides very surprising, unexpected shapes and forms to emerge and we all get to just sit and delight in it. I never know what to expect.
NN
Thanks for saying that. To be truthful, I don’t really evaluate whether I’m being “focused” about what I am exploring or not during my process. When I practice, I’m often working on a very specific area of my playing and developing that, as I mentioned before, because, in the end, that level of focus just in the sense that I’m committting to developing something allows me to become freer. I get to intellectually evaluate it as it is happening less because any concern about formal development or any other compositional unfolding is not being dealt with in that stage of the process and I can simply play with no particular aim in mind besides organic and experiential discovery. That’s kind of the goal, really. The main objective at this point is primarily to explore how what I am developing affects my state of consciousness. With enough dedication and patience, I can get to that place where—for that brief amount of time that I’m playing—I can completely merge with the literal experience of the music, at least from my point of view. It’s a little paradoxical in that I kind of feel that the most focused kind of practice is happening when the least amount of cognitive attention, at least in a linear and “schematic” thinking kind of way, is being intentionally applied.
JL
It is a mysterious thing. But I suspect that on some level, that is where the fun is: where the knowing of what is happening is no longer a necessary part of the process.
NN
Absolutely.
JL
I have one more general question to end this conversation. In our discussions, you have shown an eclectic engagement with different kinds of musics and different strands of esoteric thought—we had a great conversation about this over lunch last summer. If your listeners out there are interested in some of the strands that have been important to you—in music or in writing—where might people go to find some of these influences in your life?
NN
Well, there’s almost too much to say about that. These days, I try to actually avoid looking “outward” too much for musical inspiration, because I find it immensely helpful to approach my own practice with the attitude that if I have a desire to hear something in particular, than it is my objective and challenge to try and realize that which I would like to hear from others from and for myself. That being said, over the years, certain musical influences have been really important to me. Thelonious Monk has been consistently very important to me, for too many reasons to fully explain here, but the piano playing and composing alike is an infinite source of inspiration. Among people who are considered to be composers, Morton Feldman, Ligeti, and Xenakis are people who have consistently been really inspiring and influenctial to me over many years, and recently I’ve been really liking Jurg Frey’s work as well. In general, both Captain Beefheart and Hermeto Pascoal’s music are things that generally never leave my regular listening rotation.
Also, I really value and enjoy listening to various “folkloric” musics, generally, from around the world but I’ve been very excited particularly by a lot of folkloric African musics over the years. There are countless examples from all over the continent that demonstrate some of the most “advanced” music the world has ever seen—in my opinion—especially in terms of rhythmic nuance. During the few months that I was practicing in preparation for my solo record, I was buying and listening to a lot of music on the Prophet label’s Bandcamp, which is music from Charles Duvelle’s collection of field recordings, many of which were pretty famous/classic recordings that were originally released on the Ocora label. Many of those documents are absolutely fantastic.
I’ve also been very inspired by the work of the Japanese Rinzai Zen master and bamboo flute player Watazumi Doso Roshi. His recordings are hard to find, but trombonist Ben Gerstein has found a lot of very rare LPs and uploaded them to Youtube. He clearly has a very deep improvisational and spiritual practice and the playing is both fascinating and very moving. There is both vibrancy and life, as well as a fleeing of stillness and stasis in his music that is quite striking.
As well, the “sonambient” sound sculptures and music of Harry Bertoia have been inspirational to me as of late: the part of me that is very deeply committed to working with complex resonance within acoustic sound sources really connects to those elements of his work.
It would be remiss to not mention the fact that I find the work of a lot of other living improvising percussionists deeply inspiring, though I often intentionally don’t try to draw direct inspiration from them. That being said, it seems like many of these percussionists found their way into exploring some similar territory as myself for mostly similar reasons, so it would make sense for a musician to also have a lot of appreciation for musicians occupying a similar aesthetic and conceptual space as they are. A few living percussionists who I like a lot and feel are pushing the envelope in a fresh and exciting way to me are Roger Turner, Le Quan Ninh, Vasco Trilla, Ben Bennett, Carlo Costa, Seijiro Murayama, and Pedro Melo Alves just to name a few (I could name many more as well). Both Milford Graves and Tony Oxley are extremely important influences on me as well, for very different reasons.
Here in New York, one of my favorite people to see play live is Tom Rainey, and in fact, I’ve probably seen more of his gigs than any other drummer while I’ve lived in the city. I’m sure many reading this will be familiar with Tom’s work, but as opposed to most of the other people I just mentioned, Tom plays what one would consider the “traditional” jazz drum set, but what really is notable about his playing is the depth of his listening, and the confidence and professionalism that he presents in all the musical settings he plays in. I get an undeniable sense with him that there’s extremely nuanced and attentive listening happening, and that he is also taking risks and really going for things in the moment. There’s a strong primacy of the moment felt that really elevates a set of music to a very high level whenever he’s involved, and the energy he brings to the music really reminds me of a similar but hard to articulate feeling I got the few times I was lucky enough to see Paul Motian play towards the end of his life, although those two people play extremely differently, of course. Something about the deliberateness and confidence of the improvisational decisions made and the iconic and instantly recongnizable attributes about their sound mutually on the instrument strikes me in a somewhat similar way.
I do not read too much literature about the process of improvisation, but there are things I would be remiss not to mention on that front: things taht should be essential reading if you’re into the practice of improvisation or if you’re looking to hear very deep perspectives on the topic. Derek Bailey’s book about improvisation is great. Le Quan Ninh, who I mentioned earlier, has a great book that I just recently acquired and read called “Improvising Freely: the ABC’s of an Experience” that is excellent and extremely insightful.
As well, investigating so-called “spiritual literature” has been important to me, as music to me is a very direct way to address exploring one’s relationship with consciousness, and reading what people have to say about that has certainly influenced my relationship to music.
There would also be too many readings to name there as well, but “I Am That” by Nisargadatta Maharaj, which is a book of interviews between him and some of his students, really was a formative life-changer for me. He was an Indian Advaita Vedanta teacher and it is a classic book that is very famous. I would highly recommend it to anyone, for any reason, but especially for those who became drawn to expressing themselves in art as a means of greater understanding of the nature of their being.
Beyond this, the ethos and—I don’t want to say spirituality, per se—but the spirit behind the jazz tradition is something I hold dear. Outwardly, it seems, I don’t really present as a jazz musician, but I feel that what I am trying to do is something that is aligned with what the tradition is, which is to self-invent structures that address a personal relationship to the process of improvisation.
JL
Yes—that is a terrific way to put it.
NN
In that way, I feel like anybody who is doing that is a jazz musician by that metric.
JL
The expanded spirit of jazz to come, perhaps.
Thank you so much, Nick—for sharing your music with the label and for offering up some of your thoughts on the work here.
NN
Absolutely man.
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Empty Stage Journal & Records
Empty Stage Journal & Records
Chicago, Illinois