Colin Stetson
STEVE ELKINS: Many of the themes of “Echoes of the Invisible” are reflected in the music I chose for the film, but also in the lives of the musicians that made it. In your case, there are lots of parallels to explore. One is the sheer physicality of your music and how you play your instrument, which has a connection to all the people in “Echoes” who are pushing their bodies — and technology — to extremes in pursuit of something that’s much larger than themselves. And I came across a quote of yours, in which you said: “In my life, everything that’s ever been satisfying has been difficult…pain has always been ultimately satisfying…I’ve made it a necessary part of how I make music.” I’m just curious to have you elaborate on what that means to you, and why you put yourself through that.
COLIN STETSON: I started wrestling when I was ten, which created a baseline for working through pain to develop a deeper relationship with myself. You quickly come face to face with who you are. And when pain is placed in the service of something, you realize that it’s not necessarily an obstacle, but a gateway. So as I became more entrenched in the creation of music, I gravitated towards the bigger, more physically imposing instruments like the bass saxophone. And I think that’s because through them I encounter the most obstacles, and ultimately the most reward.
ELKINS: Even just looking at the instrument, wrestling comes to mind. It’s quite a beast. I’ve heard you say that the extremes of how you play, combined with relentless touring, has been tearing your body apart. What do you end up putting your body through to make your music?
STETSON: I try to keep my relationship to all of it very healthy. I want to overcome obstacles and advance my physical relationship to my instruments, so it’s not like I’m trying to do things that will injure or hurt me. But by 2007, I had been on the road with a lot of bands and started to tour with Arcade Fire, so it just compounded. From 2007 through 2016, I lived almost entirely on the road.
ELKINS: That’s a long time.
(WATCH): Colin Stetson Performing "Among The Sef" and "In Mirrors"
STETSON: And I was making music that was hugely difficult on a 112 year old instrument that’s not completely ergonomic. Aside from pumping my lungs and diaphragm constantly like a bellows, I had to learn the hard way how fingers are interconnected to the rest of the body. Their full potential can’t be unlocked without first making sure your legs, ass, and lower back are quite limber and stretched out. Nearly all tightness in your fingers starts from far below. It dawned on me that if I was going to actually be able to do what I wanted to do — and do it consistently — I needed to cultivate my body into an apparatus that never shuddered. I got much more into physical fitness, weights, running, swimming, breathing exercises, everything that was going to expand my lung capacity and strengthen my diaphragm. I also meditate and do yoga daily, especially on the road.
ELKINS: It’s amazing to realize that your sound is dependent on this whole intensive background regiment that is invisible to the listener, even if it’s conveyed through the music. That must be exhausting.
STETSON: Let me put it this way: I have 50 acres of land and an old house in the mountains of Vermont. Physical preparation there is likewise so important because every year I learn the same lesson: what I haven’t dealt with in the winter, I’ll have to deal with in the spring and summer. If I don’t tend the grounds, I’ll find myself enduring a backbreaking pile of digging, hauling, chopping, and raking. So here again — as with music — we find the effort becoming a gateway, unlocking something.
I was thinking about all this while watching your film. I found so much of it really beautiful and reaffirming, reminding me of all the things I learn from my day-to-day life. Thinking about my relationship to time and natural cycles, for example. When I first sat down with that piece of land about 8 years ago, I remember being so loathe to touch anything. To have any effect on the land, like cutting down a tree, even a small one, or mowing, or dealing with a river erosion problem, so you can increase the health and beauty of it in the long term. I’ve gotten better at understanding that when you do something now, there will be an effect that you won’t see until maybe five years or ten years down the road. That changes your relationship to time. And I did not understand time on that natural scale the way that I do now.
(WATCH): Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire) Perform "The Rest Of Us"
ELKINS: In a way, your music itself is a reflection on larger cycles of time. Just as geologists might dig through layers of rock, you are digging through multiple layers of time embedded in the diverse techniques you bring into your unique music. Your use of circular breathing takes us back 40,000 years or more to Aboriginal practices, but through a physical instrument that was made 112 years ago to evoke the music of that era. You amplify the percussive aspects of your instrument in a way that evokes African drumming, add layers of polyphonics that take us back to pre-historical stages of human and musical development, and sing into your instrument while you play (evoking the innovations of people like King Curtis), and so on. By hearing this all at once, it strikes me as a way of looking back through strata of time — another thread that connects you with everyone in Echoes. Do you ever think of your work this way?
STETSON: Absolutely. Circular breathing has a deep ancestral attachment for me. It’s as old as we are, and older. I watched an interesting documentary when I was young called “People of the Forest,” some Donald Sutherland narrated documentary about a tribe of chimpanzees in Tanzania. In one scene they were caught in a thunderstorm. And what do they do? Instead of hiding from it, a bunch of the dominant males ran out in the middle of the thunderstorm and shook trees and threw rocks, screaming into the storm as loud as they could. And I’ve always been haunted by that, how we all live in spaces that create endless, perpetual sound, and we’re affected by it. I think when we seek ways to interact with the natural world on its terms, we figure out: ok, I can also find a way to create sound endlessly, I can be one with you.
I was in Mali for a bit of a pilgrimage some years ago. I played with Tuareg musicians in the desert outside of Timbuktu, my first foray into true Saharan desert music. They’re nomadic and they’ll travel from place to place, and they have a cycle of music they call takamba which goes for days and days without stopping, as people enter in and out of it. The experience of that sound, that music, is bigger than the individuals who are playing it, because they are only there for a fraction of the time that it is alive. It’s almost like an extension of our earliest manifestation of communion with nature: trying to actually be seamless with it, not Other to it.
Circular Breathing (Australia), King Curtis , Tuareg Musician (Mali), Javanese Gamelan, The Theatre Of Eternal Music, La Monte Young
ELKINS: There’s a similar understanding in Java, where they say there is a continuously playing but silent music in the world, made of spirit. So when a Javanese gamelan orchestra performs, it is merely making audible the present movement of the music of eternity. I imagine this is also what La Monte Young was trying to tap into with his Theatre Of Eternal Music, which was inspired by similar ideas in traditional Indian music.
STETSON: I used to play a lot of music from Nigeria with the band Antibalas, so I got indoctrinated into the music of Fela Kuti. But between that trip to Mali and listening to old Smithsonian compilations of Moroccan music, I began to get a sense of both the distinctions and similarities of North African music. What’s significant to me in certain musics that are older than us, is that loping eternal that’s in it, a kind of infinite rhythm. I’ve always been really attracted to revolving concepts of drone; not of stasis, but of non-replicating repetition. Like what we see in genetics and the evolution of organisms, which might look indistinct from one generation to the next, but if you look at them on a micro level, you see they are actually constantly changing over the course of time, at time scales we can’t often perceive.
ELKINS: Yes! That’s something I hear in Autechre’s music, which I understand has been an inspiration for you. Music that seems totally repetitive at one level of listening, but in fact is constantly changing, never really repeating at all.
Autechre, Fela Kuti, Antibalas
(LISTEN): Autechre's "Rpeg" And "Pir"
STETSON: Absolutely, and in takamba music, there’s all of this beautiful, amazing metric modulation that happens, these gorgeous strange maths that take quite a long time to turn themselves around and around. Just as the music is larger than any of the individuals participating in it, it’s inherently a kind of reflection of the pettiness and profundity of human time scales. We only get the baton passed to us for a few years, from birth to death, and each one of us is furthering a whole we can’t always fully perceive. Like the picture of the migration paths of early humans in your film. It’s not like a few men and women marched those routes together, that was countless births and deaths, like a swarm of ants building on a trail of dead that took thousands upon thousands of years to get through those miles. This massive loping thing, each of us being a link within it, leading to the gradual development of our species and time and space. Thinking about the individual’s role in all this — and our collective memory — is something I’ve been trying to inhabit in my music on some level, especially when I was doing the New History Warfare Trilogy.
Colin Stetson's "New History Warfare" & "All This I Do For Glory"
ELKINS: Is this what you had in mind with the music you contributed to “Echoes of the Invisible”? I’m curious if that piece (“Spindrift”) has any parallel to the story I used it to tell.
STETSON: "Spindrift” is meant to be a kind of reflection on how memory works, like remembering a love in a way that only you remember; as this buoyant, precious, gorgeous love, even if it does not resemble the reality. Because our minds are built to create story, artifice, around what usually can be boiled down to very basic biological, animal components. The intellect is always constructing meaning and connections.
ELKINS: That's true even in science. I spent a fair amount of time observing how science works in practice for “Echoes,” which really alerted me to that in a new way...that it's an exercise in using story as the glue to piece together what seems to be disconnected fragments of phenomena. Which is not a judgment about whether any particular science is right or wrong, but that it's a central part of how science connects the dots.
STETSON: Yeah, using our intellect to describe every aspect of the natural world as we are able. There may be a kernel of truth, but when it comes to people and the mechanics of making sense of one's life as a story, our memories are not just snapshots. It’s not like we go around with footage of our previous selves perfectly encapsulated.
ELKINS: Like how Milan Kundera said: “Memory is not the opposite of forgetting. It is a type of forgetting.”
STETSON: Oh, that’s so good. [Laughs]
ELKINS: I’ve yet to see that idea implemented into artificial intelligence yet. That would provide an interesting challenge for the people who are trying to make a reflection of how our brains work.
STETSON: Wow, I never really thought about that. That’s beautiful. And definitely relevant to what I was thinking when I made “Spindrift"; thinking about trying to break down the artifice around the stories we tell ourselves.
ELKINS: That’s a fantastic coincidence since I used "Spindrift" during a scene in Echoes showing the construction of a massive Tibetan sand mandala. Traditionally, those mandalas are meant to draw our attention to the impermanence of our experience and perceptions — our stories — and to recognize how hard it is to go back to another way of seeing things once we’ve connected the dots a certain way. And "Spindrift" continues into the next scene about a blind man running across Death Valley toward the highest mountain peak in the continental U.S., because there’s this question embedded in that journey: why does he want to do this? Well, being human, there’s a story he’s telling himself internally, which is driving him to go up to that mountain peak, no matter how many times he almost dies. And at a certain point his story is shattered in an unexpected way, from which he has to reconnect the dots and create a new story.
STETSON: It really is a beautiful context for the piece.
ELKINS: What led you to begin thinking about all this through music?
STETSON: When I was a freshman in college, I was in a unique music theory class, that refused to approach music theory as a western analytic concept that comes from European concert music. One of our approaches to music was through walking meditations, where we would all walk in a line extremely slowly and spend an hour exploring a very tiny part of a building that we’d normally pass through mindlessly in about 30 seconds, focusing our attention on a universe of details we had overlooked in a place we thought we knew intimately. I hadn’t thought about that until just now, but that probably informed my own music a great deal, including the way I’ve been playing with memory and time.
Through that class, I was introduced to the gypsy music of eastern Europe, the Balkans, Pakistani Sufi music (like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), classical Indian music, Celtic music, painting a pretty amazing picture of the migration of peoples through the sounds they created as they migrated and settled. You settle into a region where you can extract certain things better than other things, so the tools that you have at your disposal for making sounds reflect the place that you find yourself in. And the music evolves culturally and geographically just as regional culinary practices do.
(LISTEN): Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Master Of Qawwali, A Form Of Sufi Islamic Devotional Music (Pakistan)
ELKINS: That connection between music and food is fascinating to think about. You’re reminding me of a Palestinian woman that Paul Salopek met on his Out Of Eden Walk, who said: “When we talk about Palestinian cooking, we talk about the influences from the outside. Our history is mixed into our food. It is the food of a crossroads. It contains migrations. It is about colonialism, conquest. Our sumac is a Roman ingredient. Our sweets, called canafe, are Turkish, from the Ottomans. Our bulgur grain is Mediterranean, much older here than rice. Only the akub, a thorny wild artichoke, is native to our hills.”
STETSON: I think that idea is really beautifully encapsulated in early hip hop, which was itself an artform created out of literally taking snapshots of pieces of history that had been codified on records, and creating a new piece of music from it. There was real care taken as to why it was those two particular songs and those two artists were sampled and combined. Stories were being told in the creation of all that.
ELKINS: It’s often forgotten that European classical music was once like that: a patchwork of traditions and cultures which, when combined, is resonant with stories of migrations and foreign invasions. For example, you can hear Turkish culture embedded in both Viennese orchestral music and Tuvan throat singing, even though they’re worlds apart stylistically and geographically. It's like a bandwidth of history. This aspect of music exposes a lot about societies, what a fiction our notions of “purity” are at almost any level: cultural, ethnic, or political. We see how music continually creates something new, which is larger than the sum of its parts. Do you know the composer Scott Johnson?
STETSON: Yeah.
ELKINS: He's explored some interesting connections between biological evolution and musical evolution, that music allows us to see that process happen at a much faster pace. It's a microcosm of inheritance and variation. There are genes that are handed down (to musicians) over time, but then they mutate. Musicians take this gift they’ve been given and take it in different directions, and suddenly there’s this infinite variety.
Krallice, Ex Eye, Sorrow
STETSON: For that person who claims that everything has been done, I have two words: Charlie Parker. Oh sure, they say, but NOW everything’s already been done. Fuck you! How arrogant to think that you live in a time when everything has been figured out and tried.
ELKINS: I don’t believe the cliche that there’s nothing new under the sun. I think the history of music is a good demonstration of that.
STETSON: If there’s anything new or distinctive in what I’m doing, it’s probably because my inspirations don’t come primarily from people who play my instrument. Most of what I do today can be traced back to growing up with Jimmy Hendrix and trying to sound like him on a different instrument. I was a teenage metalhead, and I still listen to a lot of fucked-up sub-groupings of metal and bands that I guess straddle some line with the avant-garde, like Meshuggah, Sumac, Krallice and Liturgy.
(LISTEN): Liturgy's "High Gold" + "Sun Of Light"
ELKINS: I love Liturgy. The drummer of Liturgy’s in some of your projects, right?
STETSON: Yeah, Greg and I are now old friends and have done several records together. He was part of my project “Sorrow,” a re-envisioning of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony involving members of Arcade Fire, Liturgy and Saltland that draws from black metal, early electronic music, and my own solo work. Our band Ex-Eye just put out an album on Relapse Records.
ELKINS: I also sense an electronic influence on your music too. It’s funny, because when I first heard your music — I think it was "Judges" — before I knew what I was listening to, I thought it WAS electronic music. Which is a remarkable accomplishment for music made on bass saxophone with no effects or overdubs. Are there electronic artists that have inspired you?
(WATCH): Colin Stetson Breaks Down "Judges"
STETSON: The one that I would really credit with sowing seeds of what I started doing solo that built into what I do now is Nobukazu Takemura. He had a record called “Scopes” which came out in the early 90s, and there was a song on it called “Icefall.” You should check it out. It’s fucking gorgeous, and a good example of the non-repeated repetition we talked about earlier. When I heard that for the first time, that’s when everything clicked. It pulled me in a very definite direction. At the time, I was listening to more mainstream 90s EDM like Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, and Autechre.
(LISTEN): Nobukazu Takemura's "Icefall"
(WATCH): Aphex Twin Music Videos For "Flim," "Come To Daddy," And "Windowlicker"
(LISTEN): Squarepusher — "Boneville Ocident" + "Iambic 9 Poetry (Live)" And "Everyday I Love"
STETSON (cntd): Bach’s a huge influence on me too. I’ve listened to the ’81 Glenn Gould recording of “The Goldberg Variations” more than anything else in my life. That’s the one Gould did a year before he died, because he was obsessing about things he regretted in his earlier 1955 recording, so his very short life was bookended by these two recordings, starkly different from each other.
ELKINS: Did you ever read “The Gold Bug Variations” by Richard Powers?
STETSON: No. Gold…Bug?
ELKINS: Yeah, it’s a play on the Goldberg Variations of Bach and “The Gold Bug,” a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptology. With your interest in music and genetics, this book is for you. It’s about geneticists in the 1950s who discover that studying Bach’s music provides insights into the genetic code, because it’s a reflection of how genetics actually works.
STETSON: I’ve gotta write this down. And the other guy you mentioned who explores music and genetics, was it Scott Johnson?
ELKINS: Yes, theres a great essay he wrote about it in the first volume of John Zorn’s Arcana series.
STETSON: Oh, I've read that! I love that book. It's just been so long, I've forgotten.
(LISTEN): Scott Johnson's "John Somebody, Part III"
ELKINS: Something you and Scott Johnson have in common is you’ve both found innovative ways to incorporate the human voice into music. In his case, writing compositions for electric guitar and orchestra that mimic the melodies and rhythms embedded in human speech. He's written entire works based the voice inflections of Daniel Dennett and I. F. Stone. And in your case, discovering a unique way to sing into your saxophone while playing it.
STETSON: That’s true! Because my influences were mainly outside the tradition of my instrument, I had been doing a lot of things I’d never heard other people do, that I didn’t have an example for. I just knew that it felt good. Then I gradually came to hear other people do things on my instrument like it, and to understand the lineage of innovation on the instrument: a lot of New York musicians like Thomas Chapin, and through that then connecting the dots, mining backwards, listening to a lot of Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell, and especially Albert Ayler. Peter Brotzmann has been a big, bright light, as well.
Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, Peter Brötzmann
(LISTEN): Albert Ayler — "Angels" + "Change Has Come"
ELKINS: You recently made a playlist of musical inspirations for NTS Radio and I was amazed to discover it was almost entirely musicians from the Ethiopia - Eritrea border, one of the most important filming location for "Echoes"!
STETSON: I’ve been hugely drawn to a lot of that music, because it gives us these moments of glimpsing something far longer, far older, made by people who haven’t been quite as touched by the way we consume everything now, music included, impacting the way music is produced and related to across the world. I have mostly women on that playlist. It includes Eritrean musicians like Tsehaytu Beraki, Yemane Barya, Korchach Tesfalem Arefaine; Malian musicians like Khaira Arby and Na Hawa Doumbia, who is one of the leading singers of Wassoulou music. But there’s also an Indian musician Kodhanda Raman and a killer young Scottish bagpipe player Brìghde Chaimbeul. There’s so much more research to do.
[Colin's playlist can be heard here: https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/colin-stetson-16th-june-2020]
Tsehaytu Beraki (Eritrea), Khaira Arby (Mali), Na Hawa Doumbia (Mali), Tukul Band (Ethiopia), Brìghde Chaimbeul (Scotland)
STETSON (cntd): Thank you for reminding me about Arcana, I would love to re-read it. I remember really enjoying what Marc Ribot wrote for it.
ELKINS: Oh yeah, his reflections on the history of guitar distortion, that’s such a good one! Actually, that essay could be read as a pretty germane commentary on your own music. Ribot would probably appreciate the way you produce distortion organically through wrestling with your instrument; how your voice is distorted when you sing into it, struggling to surface. For example, there’s that part where he says: ”We seem to love broken voices in general: vocal chords eroded by whisky and screaming, the junked out weakness of certain horn players, distortion which signifies surpassing the capabilities of a tube or a speaker - voices that distort, damage, but (at least in performance) don't actually die… My chief complaint against many practitioners of heavy metal in the early seventies through the early eighties is that I can immediately tell that their distorted sounds are not really placing their amps at risk. To whatever extent I have a moral sensibility, this offends it… It is the sonic equivalent of fascist architecture. The effect (and probably the intent) is to eliminate the little clicks and imperfections that belie the god stature of the guitar hero and to give the impression that the guitar is a strong bellowing voice rather than a frame for frail pieces of metal whose vibrations soon die.”
STETSON: Ahhhh…so good! I was a metalhead in my early teens, which led me to Ribot’s music, as well as John Zorn and Fred Frith. Zorn did a duo record with Fred Frith in the late 80s / early 90s that completely blew my mind. I wore that record out. I just can’t think of the name of it.
ELKINS: Was it “The Art Of Memory”?
STETSON: Yeah, yeah yeah! You got it!
ELKINS: That’s one of my favorite albums of all time.
STETSON: Yeah man!
(LISTEN): John Zorn + Fred Frith — The Art Of Memory
ELKINS: There are so few people I can turn on to that record, it’s so abrasive.
STETSON: [Laughs knowingly] Zorn is the most prolific dude I’ve ever met in my life. He writes literally hundreds of pieces every year, according to people I’ve spoken with who know him well. It’s endlessly inspiring and sometimes just entirely intimidating.
ELKINS: That’s not even counting his projects like “The Book Of Angels,” in which he wrote over 300 compositions in a few months. And those 300 pieces are only a fragment of his Masada project: 613 tunes reflecting the 613 mitzvot (commandments) in The Torah, each of which is a way to connect with the spiritual realm. In some Jewish thought, based on Lurianic Kabbalah, these 613 fragments of Yahweh's wholeness are restored when the divine spark that resides in every splinter of the mitzvahs are reunified. The scale of that whole project is just staggering, and it's only one tiny part of Zorn's output.
It reminds me of this documentary I once saw on Woody Allen, where he claimed he had this condition that’s like the opposite of writer’s block: he can’t stop making stories compulsively. He has stacks of file cards in his drawers at home, each with a movie title on one side and the story on the other. The movies he’s actually made are just a tiny sliver of them. Sometimes he chooses his next film by just pulling them out at random. It’s not necessarily that it’s the next movie he wants to make, he just doesn’t know how to sort through the pile!
STETSON: That’s fucking crazy. [Laughs]
A Very Small Sample of John Zorn's Records
ELKINS: One thing I took away from "The Art Of Memory" and Zorn’s other duo records with Frith: it’s one of the clearest examples my ears have encountered of improvisation almost becoming like a form of telepathy. Here are two musicians who are so in tune with each other, and have played with each other for so long, that despite having radically different sounds and backgrounds, they effortlessly dance between total chaos and instant synchronization, without any forewarning, in ways that seems impossible without reading each others’ minds. To me that's a window into a larger aspect of music that I don’t know exactly how to articulate: a way in which two consciousnesses can align in a microsecond, beyond words.
STETSON: Yeah, I always thought of all that avant-garde improvisation as having far more to do with ancient ways of communing with nature and with sound than anything, because it’s about relationships, emptying oneself for the moment and building consciousness. The practice of mindfulness as a method of meditation, I find just to be the simplest and most ingenious thing that we have. I feel it should be like brushing teeth as basic hygiene. Knowing that the nature of one’s suffering is due to our capacity for abstract thought in the past and future, the relentless, knee-jerk and non-purposeful exercise of living in both the past and the future as a being that exists in the present.
One cure for that — as anyone knows whose done any amount of reading of Eastern philosophy, Buddhism in particular — is to strengthen that part of us which understands the present moment. We all know there are many ways to get there: extreme physical exertion, runner’s high, sex, food, stories, music, these things we cherish so much. We create so much artifice about why we appreciate them all, but I think what they all share in common is that it’s hugely satisfying to be forced into the here and now, even for a moment. For me, making music has been gradually more and more about helping myself be present in the moment. And I’m just in awe of what Frith and Zorn achieve together on that wavelength.
Fred Frith Blowing Rice Through His Amplified Guitar Strings
ELKINS: I interviewed Frith in 2002, which was one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had about music. I should send it to you.
STETSON: Oh, I’d love to read it. I haven’t seen Fred in ages.
[The interview can be read here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Music/Fred-Frith/]
ELKINS: You’ve worked with a ton of incredible musicians, it’s staggering. I imagine that each of them imparted something to you that may have changed the way you think about music. I’d like to play a game, if you’re willing. I’m going to start naming some of them, and have you respond with a memory. It could be a story, or a snapshot image frozen in your mind, or a color, or even a single word. I’m going to keep it really loose. Wanna try that? Is it ok?
STETSON: Sure!
ELKINS: David Byrne.
David Byrne
STETSON: For this one, I’ll go with a color: red.
ELKINS: Why?
STETSON: While we were doing a few songs together, I saw a big bloodstain on another musician’s jeans. I said, "Did you hurt yourself?”, and he said, “No, that’s just deer’s blood.” And I just thought ah! my fellow mid-western people are here. That musician was Justin Vernon. After that I became a touring member of his band Bon Iver.
Anthony Braxton
ELKINS: Anthony Braxton.
STETSON: This one’s a snapshot: we’re at a bar chain smoking cigarettes and tossing back whiskeys for hours, talking about Tom Waits. I had just been working with Waits, and he wanted to know everything about it. He loves Tom Waits.
ELKINS: So maybe let’s move to Tom Waits then.
Tom Waits
STETSON: I could go on forever. So many stories. But there’s one thing he did early on that informed me about not only how I should work with him, but also within myself. I had just begun to feel my way around a new idea for a part, and before I had a chance to really figure out what I could do with it, he says: “that’s it, let’s move on.” And I said, “what the fuck, I wasn’t taking!” And he said, “no, no, no that’s the one.” It was such a shock to me, because what I had just done was in no way finished. And yet when I go back and listen to it even to this day, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, because it was honest, without any show pony-ism about it. So that idea of making sure that you’re not showing up in everything you’re doing. Getting your ego out of it.
He would always guide me saying things like: “You’re an old woman with alzheimers in the last days of her life, remembering your first glimpses of love with your husband who’s now dead. Go!” Or: “You’re 78 years old and you’ve played this song at the end of every Saturday night at the pub right down the street from where you were born. Go!” He made me realize what it really is that we’re all doing: we’re storytellers. As a musician, you’re often trying to prove yourself. This was the first time I began to understand music completely differently, that “the musician” should be nowhere near it. If you’re scoring a scene, you don’t want the composer showing up in the back of the scene waving and smiling. And I think about all music that way now because of him.
Laurie Anderson
ELKINS: Laurie Anderson.
STETSON: Laurie has this way of picking up an object and never looking at it the same way twice. Even if she’d say the same words every night, they’d never tell exactly the same story. There’s a weight to inflection. Minute changes in pitch and rhythm can drastically change the meaning. And that lesson has really impacted my music.
(WATCH): Laurie Anderson's "Heart Of A Dog" Trailer
Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven" and "Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada"
ELKINS: Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
STETSON: Godspeed’s fans have a rabid religious fervor about them, like those of The National, Feist, TV On The Radio, Animal Collective and some other bands I’ve worked with. Touring as the opening act for Godspeed means I was effectively the one thing that was separating the fans from Godspeed. It was like being thrown into the deep end, where you either sink or swim. It focuses your intention so extremely, so whole heartedly, to show up to that night after night, stepping up to the plate and digging in deep.
Sinéad O’ Connor.
ELKINS: Sinéad O’ Connor.
STETSON: I learned from her there is no such thing as “going through the motions,” even when you’re practicing relentlessly. For her, you perform how you practice. Otherwise, you’re only practicing how to make music with no life.
Lou Reed
ELKINS: Lou Reed.
STETSON: We often hear of Lou Reed the rock icon, but we don’t hear enough about his incredible hugs.
Mats Gustafsson
ELKINS: Mats Gustafsson
STETSON: Mats is one of my idols, the way he wreaks havoc. To work with him is to realize that I’m living an absurdly fortunate life.
(WATCH): Arcade Fire — "Wake Up" Live at Glastonbury 2007
ELKINS: Arcade Fire
STETSON: This one’s a word: “communion.”
ELKINS: Tell me more.
STETSON: Being on stage with that group for something like a Glastonbury crowd of 100,000 plus people, playing their anthem “Wake Up”…there’s something about that song, the way it resonates, looking out into a crowd, and seeing the connection in the eyes of people who are crying and yelling all the words together. It’s like communion on a mass scale that is frightening in its grandeur and beauty, not to mention music’s capacity to generate a sense of indistinction between us all. And it was deeply moving.
Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire)
For more on the music of ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/The-Music/
