I'll take any job. I don't have any heroes or heroines. Just pick anyone out of a hat and I'd do it. Perhaps with a disclaimer if it's someone I don't like.
- Nigel Ayers: of Nocturnal Emissions
Many possibilities. Maybe Johannes Kepler would be an interesting story. He
was trying to develop a new way of asking questions (along with people like
Roger Bacon and some of the medeival alchemists) which exposed him to the
scrutiny of the church, which led to heretical observations; but yet he
backed away from his scientific work and spent the last part of his life
investigating platonic forms as models of the Universe. His frame of
reference was still medeival in essence, in a way that we may never be able
to understand. It's the sort of puzzle that interests me, trying to imagine
how another mind-set views the world.
- Robert Rich:Soundscape Productions / Amoeba Music
Well, a bunch of us kind of already did this with the "Dali: The
Endless Enigma" compilation CD. We were all to different degrees
influenced by his unique life and art, after his passing we decided
to pay homage to him with this compilation.
- Loren Nerell: Ethno-musicologist
This is an incredibly good question, in that you can find out a lot about a
person by taking a look at those they admire! My immediate answer would
probably be French composer Erik Satie- an unconventional fellow in ANY
time period. However, my ultimate choice would be Hildegard von Bingen.
She's probably the person I admire most in history, even though her
accomplishments would not be considered much by today's standards. She was
a musician, a healer, an author, an abbess, but through it all, she was
"haunted" by visions for the entirety of her life- visions of heaven,
earth, and things only she will know. She dealt with these visions through
her music- she one wrote that her wish was that her music move like "a
feather on the breath of God". I find her inspiring.
- Jeff Pearce: ambient guitarist
It would have to be about BS Johnson, a lost english writer. Born
in London, an evacuee in the war,wrote Travelling People, House Mother
Normal, was the poetry editor of Transatlantic Review, a film and
television director, praised by Samuel Beckett and committed suicide in
1973." He was a writer who focused on a key issue : how to represent the
random workings of the mind within the enforced consecutiveness of a book.
Johnson was attempting to break the form of a model but still
within an identical framework, the bound structure of the physical novel;
to take his work one stage further, creating a form of modern elegy, about
the experience of writing (and the experience of death) and expressing this
within a new form.
Johnson's work enhances our participation in the truth of
experience and the fragility of the 'real' and for myself acted as a key
inspiration within sound to leave the formal structures of rhythm, melody
and composition behind and seek solutions in new methods of explication and
exploration, wherever they may lie. I would dearly love the opportunity to
make a work about him one day.
- Robin Rimbaud: s c a n n e r
Sorry, can't answer this one! I wouldn't know how to illustrate any person
other than myself.
- M. Griffin: Hypnos Recordings
I tend to believe that creative work allows its creators to transcend their
mundanity, and in the past I was often surprised maintaining a nearly
worshipful respect for certain records only to discover that their makers
were quite unexceptional if not positively uninspiring as people. What is
interesting about artists is generally their art, and certainly it is the
latter that gives rise to an often misplaced interest in the other aspects
of their lives. In college I endured the lectures of one professor the
authors of whose quite excellent reading list entries were subjected to his
serial biographical analyses, and rather than illuminating the books these
glosses often lowered the apparently profound to the cheap level of tawdry
soap opera. In this sense I fear my theoretical biography of some music
hero or other (and I must admit the last heroic player of mine was Paul
Stanley from Kiss, and his poster came down a very long time ago!) would
leave me with the sense that his or her amazing work had been reduced to
some basis in a soured relationship or an overused chemical. Knowing that
Morton Feldman composed "For Samuel Beckett" while wearing lederhosen or
bingeing on steamed buns would not serve to enrich the listening experience
- at least for me. That said, I might be interested in a figure whose very
activity of living was central to his musical work, but here my choice
would be John Cage, who has done a better job than anyone else could of
entextualizing himself. I have read this question as proposing a biography
of a musical figure; if, however, it is to be taken instead to refer to a
musical piece based on the life of any figure (for example Klaus Schulze's
"Audentity"), I would probably have to choose Flann O'Brien's Doctor de
Selby or Samuel Beckett's jar-dweller in "The Unnameable."
- Thermal: Boxman (hako otoko) label
Well, of course my work so far has a bit of musical autobiography to it,
does that count? Maybe Poe (lots of nice thick atmosphere, tension and
the occasional rich, melodramatic but utterly gorgeous melody), or
Odysseus (dig into that bag of weird instruments), or Max Ernst (crazy
collaging and shifting sounds), or maybe someone considerably less
obvious...
- M. Bentley: the foundry
At this point in time, I cannot really name anyone.
- Dino Pacifici: Music-Language of the Spirit
Balto & Smokey the Bear
Great heroic quality.
- lk: (audiochrom)
Joan Miro because it is his fantastic, surreal paintings that I see in my mind's eye when I am composing.
- Richard Bone: ambient/ electronic artist
I think a musical biography of Henry Miller would be my first
choice. Mainly because it would be filled with all sorts of bizarre
creatures, dark alleys, passion, vivid hallucinations, and surrealistic
encounters, ending with a grand vision of the earth in a sunny paradise....
- Vir Unis: ambient/electronic artist
PATTI SMITH....COS SHE'S
A BEAUTIFUL PERSON WITH A RICH HISTORY IN MUSIC AND LIFE...SHE HAS
GRACE, BEAUTY, WISDOM, INCREDIBLE SONGS AND IS NO-ONE'S FOOL. TO RECORD
WITH HER WOULD BE A DREAM.
- Simon Raymonde: Bella Union Label and Ex-Cocteau Twin
Actually, this ties into the February question, because, in /Immanence/, I've sort of already done
that for the main character of A. A. Attanasio's Radix, who is
essentially a representation of the solar hero. I reckon ATOI wouldn't
mind doing one for Nikola Tesla, as we dedicated our anthology to him,
feeling he will eventually be seen as the most influential person of the
second millennium.
- Seofon: member/producer with Ambient Temple
of Imagination and The
Archipelago
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