Greg Godwin (Dsic/Aut) Interview Plus Exclusive Tracks

New Zealand born, Bristol based musician Greg Godwin has been spitting out a steady stream of digital abstraction and analog scuzz for several years now. Since his 1999 cd Fluor, Greg has been busily releasing his noise on various formats and labels. I first heard his music on the excellent 3″CDr release “miniDsic” an unusually poised ep of cold abstract sound with a keen sense of restraint in the service of abjection. That release veered between stark distant hum, warm fuzz and frantic servo-twitch. In subsequent releases Greg has explored similar and more derranged territory.

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As well as agreeing to this interview, Greg has kindly recorded three new tracks for Geometer magazine:

Balance Switch for Adris Hoyos

Nasal Windshield for John Stezaker

New Zion Psalms For Prince Far I

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INTERVIEW

Geometer: I think you’ve said before that you’ve never played a conventional musical instrument – how did you start making music?

Greg: Mainly through the inspiration of music I was listening to when I living in my home town of Wellington back in the late 1990’s. I was a pretty rabid listener and record buyer at the time and was inspired by the d.i.y./home recording philosophy of a bunch of New Zealand musicians I’d been turned onto at the time (see below). The realisation that making lo-fi, home taped sound was a completely valid expression for someone with no musical training was great. I bought a Fostex 4-track, analogue synth and a $50 guitar and just started recording for my own pleasure, not even with the intention of releasing it originally.

Geometer: Despite all the noise and chaotic textures, your work as dsic in particular often seems very carefully put together; there’ a kind of narrative to it. Is it a painstaking process, or does it progress pretty clearly and instinctively?

Greg: Well it depends on the tools and my mood really. some of the pure computer music is pretty structured, or at least put together with some thought of composition and dynamics and can take a while to put together, albeit intuitively because I have no real training. On the other hand, I’ve been employing more physical effects units, microphones and even vocals in recent work – that approach is more improvised and real-time. Bringing together both aspects into something coherent can be a struggle to achieve, and I ultimately end up pretty critical of the end result anyhow.

Geometer: I know you’ve talked about Kevin Drumm and John Weise as big influences on what you do – Who else would you say influences the sounds you’re making?

Greg: I’ve only really been listening to those artists relatively recently, so I wouldn’t say they are a big direct influences – probably more unconsciously as I really enjoy that kind of harsh noise anyhow and have been listening to a lot of the Japanese and American noise for a while. My biggest influences were really the NZ d.i.y underground, if not in sound then definately in spirit. I was listening to a bit of experimental music in the 90’s but always figured that it was produced overseas. I came across some articles in a local rock magazine talking about NZ bands like The Dead C and Xpressway records and the description seemed right up my street. It was odd because it seemed that there was an entire chunk of locally produced weird rock and experimental music right under our noses that was never discussed much in mainstream national music press – so I was drawn towards it. Picked up quite a few things on Bruce Russell’s (from The Dead C) amazing Corpus Hermeticum label and some early Birchville Cat Motel records and didn’t look back. Russell’s mail-order was great for getting hold of international musical weirdness through a local source.

At the same time I was digging some of the electronica coming out of Europe – Mego Records, people like Pita, early Fennesz, Florian Hecker, Oval, Farmers Manual. All this strange computer music that wasn’t quite dance and wasn’t quite noise and just seemed to be produced by guys messing around in offices with flaky music software or hacked up code. Glitch! I’d moved into a smallish flat after finishing university so didn’t have loads of space for guitars, amps so making music in the confines of a PC hard drive made sense. That stuff was a big influence for sure.

Geometer: Aut and dsic – Obviously there’s a fair bit of overlap in terms of sound between the two projects, but they do seem separate projects. To my ears at least AUT seems more about archives, memories and recordings – that foggy quality and the fact that the original tracks can often be glimpsed through the fog whereas DSIC – the first couple of releases at least seem more about the post-industrial and mechanisms. It reminds me of the precisely ordered inhuman noise of servos, dot matrix printers – stuff at the border between mechanical and electronic. That’s just my impression of course – how do you distinguish between the two projects?

Greg: dsic is freer and less conceptual and has a basis around computer music although draws in other elements too – its consciously got a harsher and colder edge. Aut was a bit more minimal and ‘warmer’ I suppose. That said, I have lots of 4-track tapes of early Aut music that is pretty dirty and closer in spirit to my more recent dsic music… guess i’ll release it at some point and that may  blur the distinction. Another reason I moved away from the Aut name is that an Italian post-rock group of the same name popped up a few years ago, so a good reason to start anew!

I hope to ‘return’ and do an Aut recording one day – a sequel to Home – back to electronica.

Geometer: One of the major trends of the past couple of years has been the resurgance of interest in memories and archives as material for artworks, a particularly music – what some writers have called “Hauntology”. But in common with a small but significant group of people as various as William Basinski, Oval, Plone, and Philip Jeck you were working with degraded archive material and the surface texture of recording in AUT back in 2000, well before the current trend formed – although arguably, this has been going on to a greater or lesser degree as long as people have been recording music. On the Fallt homepage you talk about the “elusive” nature of memory, and your “Home” album, which got a belated release last year, was accompanied by a quote from Genet

“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh.”

Is the discussion of Hauntology by people like Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher interesting to you, and does it strike a chord with you regarding what you were doing in AUT?

Greg: Ha, that quote is a bit pretentious and I don’t want to put too much weight on theory when it comes to the stuff I do. I was reading a lot of Genet at the time I recorded ‘Home’ so it seemed to strike a chord. The memory thing was more about a certain feeling that those old records that fed into the album gave me when I listened to them. A lot of sentimental feeling, especially with the adult-orientated/M.O.R rock source material kind of reminded me of listening to the radio when I was younger. Is that hauntology? I think emotion (and especially those emotions related to memory) can be felt in all music, and I don’t believe in a pure academic abstraction of sound. Even the the most severe and abstracted noise elicits a resonance that can be quite comforting if you give it enough time.

Of those artists above, I had only heard Oval at the time and I liked the cracked cd music he did… the glitch is the haunted digital machine – the proof that cheap and the broken consumer goods make the best sounds.

Geometer: Are you a fan of much of the stuff that gets termed Hauntological – Ghost Box, The Caretaker, Burial etc?

Greg: I’m bit ignorant I’m afraid – I’ve not heard the Ghost Box artists, so couldn’t say – aren’t they into analogue synths and library music? Not sure if its really where I’m coming from.

The Caretaker was one of the V/VM guys I think, and they had an amazing label going a few years ago. I must check it out then.

I love Burial though, “Untrue” is amazing… been listening to a load of dubstep recently and its really dark, skittery and moody stuff. Shackleton and the Skull Disco label too – they are haunted for sure. These are the sounds of Bristol nowdays and it seems very exciting but not talked about much in the big music press like The NME. The underground seems pretty healthy.

Geometer: What music is getting you excited at the moment? And anybody we might not have heard of?

I love most of the stuff from Prurient – flying the flag for badass power electronics, anything on the Chocolate Monk record label out of Brighton, creepy U.S.A. gunk from Andrew Coltrane and Sick Llama, local lads like Ian Watson, Garnett James, Joinedbywire, DTV/Anton Maiof (with whom I have a noise project, Menschenfleisch), recently got into Richard Pinhas/Heldon, Auckland based musician and old friend Duncan Bruce (i’ve recently released a cdr from him, so I’m totally biased here!). So much great music right now being released directly by artists on cdr, vinyl and cassette editions.

Geometer: Outside of music, what’s caught your attention of late?

C++, John Stezaker’s photo montage, Eric Hobsbawm’s modern history books, a slow trawling through all of the films of Dario Argento, sensationalist TV on National Geographic channel – America’s Hardest Prisons, American Skinheads, Air Crash Investigation !, the prospect of summer.