(LISTEN): Destroy All Nels Cline + Nels Cline Trio

ELKINS: Ok, we’re rolling, so I should start the interview. I first discovered your music in ’98 when Destroy All Nels Cline opened for Sonic Youth on the tour for “A Thousand Leaves.” Sonic Youth had long been one of my favorite bands — they were to me what The Beatles were to previous generations — but you completely blew them out of the water that night. It was the greatest concert I’d ever seen; an ecstatic explosion of uncategorizable electric guitar rapture that felt like it had descended from another planet, or at least a distant future. It throttled me, nearly all music sounded boring after that.

I started obsessively hunting down every concert I could find of yours with my friend Jeff Schroeder [guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins], and we were amazed at how unpredictably mercurial your musical universe was; you seemed to play imaginable genre under the sun, and all of them virtuosically. The next time we saw you was a pure noise freakout at a punk club, then a jazz gig in a bookstore with Art Davis, the legendary bassist for Monk, Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie. Shortly after, I caught you doing an entire concert of classical guitar music in the backroom of some shopping mall. Then your band Banyan with Stephen Perkins of Jane’s Addiction and Mike Watt of Minutemen; an ambient drone set with CRIB, and free improvisation with a painter, Norton Wisdom.

Universes collide in your music. It reminds me of this thing I always liked that Goethe said, that “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” But how do you channel so much musical information at once?

(LISTEN): The Nels Cline Singers + Nels Cline Trio

CLINE: Well I have to say, as somebody who's always been pretty much in the cracks, that this is a fairly good period for the uncategorizable. I think that world communication in general has been heightened because of technology. So certainly, as Western people, we'd almost be remiss if we were in some way unaware of what's going on somewhere else, culturally. As somebody who grew up in what is essentially an explosion of world communication, I'm influenced by lots of different things.

When I was ten years old, Indian music became very influential on me, and then later African pop and traditional Ghanaian drum music. I was drawn to the guitar through surf music. That led me to what can loosely be termed psychedelic rock, which for me is still probably the biggest single thing that formed my aesthetic and inspired me to create. I still have to go back periodically and recharge my batteries by listening to “Happenings 10 Years Time Ago” by The Yardbirds. That was still a time when creativity and mind expansion were the crucial ingredients in a great song, rather than familiarity or a strong beat. Then I became aware of John Coltrane’s “Africa” and was drawn into the world of so-called free jazz: Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. I mean, Anthony Braxton, the AACM, Leo Smith, Art Ensemble Of Chicago, all that type of music interested me greatly. From there, things were breaking wide open.

(LISTEN): Nels Cline Trio

CLINE (cntd): So between jazz, and then progressive rock, you start wondering…well, wait a sec. This particular person says they're influenced by this guy Igor Stravinsky. So pretty soon you're listening to Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók, and Maurice Ravel, and Eric Satie. I fell in love with Shostakovich, elements of electronic music, microtonality, and the so-called “serial composers.”

ELKINS: When I was looking at your record collection earlier, I spotted an album by Vietnamese composer Tôn-Thất Tiết sandwiched between The Locust and Willie Nelson. I’m not used to seeing him in anyone’s record collection, let alone alongside those two. I loved his soundtrack for “The Scent Of Green Papaya.”

CLINE: Yeah he's more of a modernist composer, but at some point I was listening to all this traditional Vietnamese music and Korean music and Kodō music. Well, what are you supposed to do with all this information? Here I was grappling with all these different impulses, all these different ideas. How does one take all that and then still play electric guitar like a rock kid? Well, that's what I started trying to figure out.

(LISTEN): Nels Cline + Thurston Moore - "In Store" (1996)

CLINE (cntd): In my case, I thought for a long time, I had to find one thing, because prior to the mid 1980s, I would say, you were basically suspect if you didn't have one thing that you did well. But rock was considered a sin in “creative” music at that time. I never was sure that what I did fit into anything. But one thing I did know is it had something to do with what was going on in downtown Manhattan. There was an influx of lots of different kinds of music coming into a small part of geography. All eyes of the world are on this little spot. Because why? I don't know, it's always been that way. New York is a hub.

Then all that purism had to break down, because we can't just pretend we're one thing. I can't. And that was when I started to realize how deftly music can be conceived. It can be changed in an incredibly visionary way. And I have to say on a very personal level, that until I broke away from the idea of being a jazz guy, or a rock guy, which tormented me for years to the point where I was going to give up music, I was miserable. I just had so many impulses raging in my head; how could I reconcile the spells cast on me in equal measure by the subtle nuances of Tin Pan Alley chordal improvisations and the bludgeon of big one-note, fuzz chords?

(LISTEN): Nels Cline (Guitar) + Devin Sarno (Bass) - "Only Peace"

CLINE (cntd): So I started my Trio in like ’89, and just started writing what I felt like I wanted to play. Now I just try to think in a kind of subconscious way and let things come to the surface without analyzing them too much. I think it's what the abstract expressionist painters called automatism, letting things from your psyche come floating to the surface and letting your hand sort of automatically move. The Surrealists were really interested in this as well. And I think that's why there are actually kind of dumb ass elements to my music, because I sometimes like basic dunderhead things. I call it bone head factor. I can't live in some sort of world where everything's theoretically fabulous and perfected in some sort of doctrinaire way. Should I worry about these things? I don't know. I try not to though, because I think my mind has been my own worst enemy half my life.

And I think that in a way, sampling and hip hop are the ultimate impurity that everyone likes now, because not only has any element of sound become equal, usable, and valuable to the DJ, but even microtonality is Top 10. And that is hot. That's revolutionary to me. I didn't think I'd live to see that.

So the rules be damned. Even if I follow them. You know that Neil Young song “Hippie Dream?” The first line is: “Take my advice: don’t listen to me.” That's a great paradox.

(WATCH): Nels Cline Solo In Big Sur

ELKINS: I've seen you play your guitar with an egg whisk and a toy ray gun. How did you discover that objects like this can be used to conjure a much broader sound spectrum from your instrument?

CLINE: Certainly a lot of musicians — including me — have been aware of the prepared instrument thing. Most people are aware of John Cage’s music for prepared piano: he placed objects on the strings, such as erasers and quarters, to change the timbre of the piano entirely. But not just to resonate or buzz…objects on the strings actually change the overtone to the string because the resonation of the harmonics on the string is interrupted. So manipulation of that became crucial in composing for John Cage.

My first awareness of preparing guitar came from Fred Frith. Fred came out with an album called "Guitar Solos" in the '70s that really had a huge impact on me. Fred had been performing on multiple guitars that were placed on different tables horizontally, and activating them by dropping things on them like grains of rice. It was not about sitting with the guitar in your lap, picking with one hand and fingering with the other.

(LISTEN): Nels Cline + Thurston Moore - "Burnt Klub Girl Lid Tone" (Pillow Wand, 1997)

ELKINS: I love the trio record you recorded with Zeena and Thurston.

CLINE: That came about because Thurston somehow got the idea of asking me to perform with him on his solo gig at Tonic on the Lower East Side, the same night Zeena was there performing with Jim O' Rourke, I believe. I was there playing with Carla Bozulich under the moniker Scarnella. So next thing we knew, Zeena and I were doing a trio with Thurston on a bill with Kim Gordon's trio featuring Ikue Mori and DJ Olive. And we enjoyed it…Zeena was so taken by it, we ended up performing a little mini tour last year.

[Note: My subsequent interview with Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori can be read here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Music/Phantom-Orchard/]

(LISTEN): Scarnella

ELKINS: Since Zeena will also be in this documentary, I’d love to hear about your experiences working with Zeena and how you would describe what she does.

CLINE: Describing Zeena’s music is difficult, because she's coming from many places at once, which of course is one of the reasons I relate to her as a musician. Her work is by nature unusual, because the harp is not an instrument that most people associate with free music. And not many harpists would cite Jimi Hendrix as a primary influence, like she does. Plus, she plays her harp with pitch benders and foot pedals, like an electric guitarist. She becomes even harder to pigeonhole when you hear her composed music, which incorporates elements not only of 20th century avant-garde composers, but also what I would loosely call progressive rock. Not the progressive rock that we associate with groups like Yes, or Genesis, but Fred Frith oriented groups like Henry Cow and Art Bears (some of which she’s been involved in) that don't have all the drama and frou frou elements. And I love that she tunes her harp unconventionally, because I’m really interested in microtonality.

(LISTEN): Nels Cline's Acoustic Guitar Trio

CLINE: Absolutely. He plays in just intonation, and he's just really conversant with all the different microtonal pitch considerations, whereas I’m just a tourist. Elliott Sharp too, who I just made some recordings with. He’s created his own system of alternate tunings and compositional forms that reflect the fractal geometries found in nature, and even the structure of DNA. He’s also devised a way to trigger samples from his guitar strings using a MIDI converter. Everything he’s doing is way beyond me. Zeena was a crucial collaborator in his band Carbon.

ELKINS: Then there’s the other member of your Acoustic Trio, Jim McAuley. His music is just incredible.

CLINE: He is truly one America’s hidden treasures, right under our noses. I mean, his roots are DEEP. At one point, he was Sinatra’s guitarist!

[Note: The brief excerpts of Jim's music below were recorded at my home in August 2011, for a solo album that was named one of the "Best Albums of 2012" by Acoustic Guitar Magazine.]

(LISTEN): Jim McAuley Solo

ELKINS: Considering how uncommercial and abstract your music is to the general public, how have you and others in your musical community found an audience?

CLINE: I often think that what I'm doing is basically a kind of slightly more abstract form of popular music, but periodically I have wake up calls where somebody looks at me like I'm insane, and says my music is weird. But taken on its own merits note for note, a lot of my own stuff is very traditional. And it is intentionally so because — although I didn't design it this way — I'm only happy when for every moment of exploration, or temporal abstraction, there is a moment of coherent traditional melody or harmony, where for every moment of improvisation, there's composition, there's this constant back and forth. I don't try to strain it out anymore. I like the combination of that. This is where I'm happiest.

I don't publicize what I do to any large extent, and I'm virtually incompetent in hyping myself. So I don't know if I’ve had any impact on anybody. All I can say is that I’ve not stopped in 20-some years. And a lot of people stop. They give up.

(WATCH): The Nels Cline Singers + Stained Radiance (Live)

CLINE (cntd): One thing I do know is my sympathy with so-called punk rock has inadvertently created a certain kind of accessibility for me that I couldn't have predicted. The fact that I toured with Mike Watt was a huge change for me because Mike made it kind of a priority to make people aware of me when we were on tour in 1995. And Sonic Youth pointing people's attention towards the avant garde world of music has changed everything for people like me and Zeena. Because I think that our country is lagging far behind in trumpeting its own culture. For example, jazz music is — by those who play it and by those who appreciate it — considered America's most sophisticated and sacrosanct indigenous art form. Yet how many people in this country have any awareness of what jazz is, or was, or could be? I think people are afraid, quite often, they're not encouraged to make a leap in this culture.

(WATCH): Nels Cline + Gregg Bendian Performing John Coltrane's "Interstellar Space" (September 2002)

ELKINS: I’m glad you brought up Gregg Bendian, because the two of you recently put out an album covering the entirety of John Coltrane's “Interstellar Space.” I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how on earth do you go about covering an entire album that's pure improvisation.

CLINE: The audacity of doing the record wasn't lost on me. But “Interstellar Space” is not an album of pure improvisation to me, because there are thematic elements. I went into a period of meticulous study of the recording, as did Gregg. I mapped out a timeline of events, tracking not only the melodic ideas that Coltrane was playing, but also what registers he was favoring in different pieces: where he investigated whole tone scales, where he investigates a half diminished scale, everything I could. And you can hear me play a lot of the same stuff that Coltrane plays. As we performed it more and more, it became more our own thing. And I think that's when it became even better.

But it was important for us to think about it in a literal sense first. And I think that's why the album’s original drummer Rashid Ali liked it so much — he talked about it in the press —because he could hear right away that we'd listened to it and absorbed it. It really meant so much to us. We figured we’d get killed by critics and the public, but to our amazement, it was really well received and was nominated, in fact, for an International Jazz Critics Award for best tribute record that year. We didn't win, but we were absolutely the outsiders in that category: everyone else was Verve and Blue Note. That said, I just didn't care what anyone thought of it anymore, if Rashid Ali likes it. But also because we did it as a political statement, to say that this music is important to us, that the late period of John Coltrane can't be written out of jazz history by certain individuals who might pretend — or love to give the impression — that he never went down that road. So that was really why we did it.

(WATCH): Nels Cline + Bill Frisell

ELKINS: Do you have a preference for improvisation or composition?

CLINE: What interests me is the potential to use all the information, not just part of it. There are no rules at all for me, other than that we all listen to one another.

There are some people who like to imply that improvisation is somehow a lesser creation, but I think it's a little late for that discussion. I mean, I think we're a little long in the tooth for that. Improvisation is still where music came from originally. And the idea of the composer as some sort of all-seeing God, or some kind of icon, or some kind of genius…I mean, all that stuff…that’s tired. People are perhaps more comfortable with the idea of some autodidact that directed every aspect of it. And we all buy into cult of personality like that, because we all want to either feel aspiration, or to just be kept in our place and feel small. But basically, I like the idea that somebody with a sensitivity to sound can contribute to music, whether they know what they're doing or not.

(WATCH): Nels Cline + Norton Wisdom (Kid In A Sandbox, 2003)

CLINE (cntd): I think some people study really hard in traditional sense and it locks them up forever. Since I basically have felt like a musical moron my whole life, I think it's easy to get in the sandbox, and just feel like I'm playing. That's how I feel when I'm improvising: I feel like like a kid. I know how to use a shovel. And I know how to throw sand in people's face, or on myself, or into a bucket or whatever, because I know my materials. But basically, I don't know if my mind is much different from a kid in the sandbox most of the time. I'm certainly not trying to be sophisticated. It's really, really just about sound.

The artist Robert Motherwell was important for me because he was a lucid philosophical person, and could try to put these things into words. And what I'm talking about, in his terms, is the felt experience. I get a lot of sensation from music. It's as much a sensual worldly thing as it is an otherworldly thing. It's an intuitive road to an experience that feels really powerful.

(WATCH): Nels Cline + William Winant (Wrong Path In A Garden Maze, 2005)

CLINE (cntd): The reason improvised music is important for somebody like me is because not only does it allow me to have in-depth connections with other musicians, and meet them on their own terms, and share something with them; it also enables me to undermine or subdue my own sort of didactic and obsessive musical world, or aesthetics. It also allows the other musicians that I'm playing with to have a voice and to transform the music for themselves. It's that beautiful balance between the composed mixed with potential for chaos. It's endlessly enthralling…the excitement of the accidentally arrived at experience.

[Note on the video above: When I first saw Nels and William perform together, it was with Thurston Moore and Mats Gustafsson at UCLA. It was one of the most firebreathing performances of improvisation I've ever witnessed. In the midst of working on "The Reach Of Resonance," I invited Nels to meet up with William and I, at William's studio in Oakland, California in 2005 to improvise together once again. What I discovered when Nels arrived was that he and William had never actually met! They had merely shaken hands prior to taking the stage for their previous collaboration.

This clip is a short segment I edited together of the music that they produced that day, which was radically different from the napalm they unleashed the last time they collided. This time around, they conjured something more akin to a child taking the wrong path in a garden maze...which perhaps in the long run, turns out to be the right one...who is to say?]

(LISTEN): Wilco (Featuring Nels Cline) - "Handshake Drugs" And "Ashes Of American Flags" (Live)

ELKINS: You've been on both major labels and on small independent labels. I’m curious what you see as the advantages and disadvantages to each.

CLINE: The label thing is something that actually is on my mind a lot these days. There was certainly a time a few years ago when the idea of the major label was so uncool. Indie Rock was king and meant something. Now, what does it mean? Does it mean you’re not Creed? Alternative has become top 40. So I don't know what it means anymore.

The obvious advantage of a major label is the fake money. The downside is, of course, that it's a really bloated machine that doesn't care about people who aren't big and making a lot of money for the labels. But I just don’t know what “independent label” even means anymore, because so many independent labels are now funded by majors. Fake indie labels are everywhere.

(LISTEN): Nels Cline - "The Bond"

CLINE (cntd): Right now everyone's in trouble as far as labels go. No one knows if music as a product that you hold in your hand even has a future. It may all be downloads from now on. My lack of worry stems from the fact that what I do is play live, really. To me recordings are only one aspect, and in a way an unsatisfying aspect, because to me the real stuff is happening in the moment with you the listener, and we have that moment together, we share that moment, we have that bond, and the music is totally different in that time than it was on a recording. And that to me is what I live for, and so nobody can package that.