Seán Clancy Interview

Seán Clancy is an Irish composer and musician, his recent release Peso is a beautiful practice in patient and deep minimalist electronic music, and is illustrative of the depth of Clancy’s work as a performer and composer. Decy from Sources of Uncertainty invited Seán to make a guest mix, which you can listen back to here, he also asked Seán some questions about his musical practice and his perspective on music in Ireland.

Check out Seán Clancy's bandcamp and website for more of his work.

ddr.: Your work very comfortably incorporates some very personal elements, like Name Pieces, which looks at your own influences and artistic evolution, And Then You... which beautifully meditates on the arrival and life of your son, and Inventions & Canons, which incorporates recordings of incidental sound during specific moments in your life. This feels reminiscent to the early electronic work of Pauline Oliveros, which would be loaded with personal and political intent, stated overtly, such as Bye Bye Butterfly, which Oliveros says

'bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex.'

Oliveros composed this piece primarily using Hewlett Packard oscillators. One thing that I love about Oliveros’ work is the abstract, and elemental, sound sources used, the rawness of an oscillator and the removal from acoustic sound sources, and how this allowed the music made on machines to connect to a more intuitive part of our listening, removing traditional notions of the player to something, as another SFTMC member, Morton Subotnick, called a music easel, a palette for creating and arranging sound. With your own music, do you think on terms like these? When working with field recordings or recordings of incidental sound, what’s your approach when it comes to playing?

Seán Clancy: Wow, lots to take in there! First of all thanks for taking the time to listen to those albums, and for the thoughtful observation and question, much appreciated. I think there’s perhaps two things at the forefront of my mind when creating work. The first is quite easy... That I’m approaching music as a listener or someone that has to experience it. That’s whether I’m working with purely acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, location recordings, incidental sounds, or any combination of the above. Even when I might be using a conceptual framework, systems or processes, I try to present something that might arresting or draw somebody in. I relate this very much to the practice of the artist Sol LeWitt, who is a big inspiration to me, the work is all for the most part derived from conceptual rules, but it’s incredibly striking to look at. Relatedly, I try to keep my ears open as much as possible, and I hunt for exciting (or to my mind, beautiful) sounds either in my home or out in the environment, or on instruments either acoustic or electronic, so I’m always listening. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been mostly drawn to sound where attack is less perceptible, and the focus is perhaps on the decay and sustain of sound, or indeed on isolated sounds or their converse, sound masses. An interest in all of these kinds of sounds might seem paradoxical, but I’m a Pisces, so I reserve the right to be indecisive! What is interesting in the relationship between location sounds and say instrumental sounds where attack is less of a feature, is that in nature, or even domestic sounds around our home, attack is not the fundamental feature of the sound, as it perhaps is in more traditional forms of music making (whatever genre). I talked to Annea Lockwood about this a couple of years ago, and she talked about the musicality of water for example, where (and I’m paraphrasing) the sound of a river has a gradual or slow attack, it rises and falls (like a melodic line) and it can decay depending on wind/current etc. This has really stuck with me and really highlights the connection between our lived environment and music. My own approach to these things has a couple of different stems or branches. I’ve been interested in minimal music since around sixteen years of age, and many of my early written pieces were drone type pieces; however I was dissuaded from this kind of approach by almost every teacher that I encountered before I met Joe Cutler and Howard Skempton. About ten years ago after I had finished my PhD I had the good fortune to work with Bozzini Quartet and mentors Michael Oesterle and Laurence Crane, who introduced me to a lot of repertoire that focused on sustained tone or isolated sounds, and this had a transformative impact on me. In many ways this experience gave me permission to do what I more or less always wanted to do, and I’ve been trying to dive deeper into this world since. A couple of years later (maybe 2015 or something) I got a smart phone with a voice memo function, and I started recording things that I heard that were striking to me. I now have 1000s of recordings, more than I know what to do with, and I keep recording, I’m always excited by it. Around the same time I had a residency at the Moog soundlab, and used the time to work with my friend Thomas Parkes on making very simple drone pieces. What was transformative about this experience is how beautiful the sounds of sustained tones were on these old analog instruments, and what was even more striking was that when we finished our recording sessions we went out on the street, and the sounds we heard in the studio were all resonating with the sounds we heard on the streets. The buzz of train powerlines, busses and trucks going by, the general hum of the city. So the relationship between instrumental sounds, electronic sounds, and environmental sounds are all deeply connected for me now through a defocusing of attack, and perhaps to an avoidance of drama. To me creating work is a way of sharing or exhibiting my lived experience, and when I use location recordings with acoustic or electronic sounds, these sounds ornament, or give a subjective commentary on the environmental sounds that I’ve captured.   

ddr.: When listening to your work and thinking about the relationship to the likes of the SFTMC in sound and approach, and bearing in mind your own teaching practice and background, I wondered if you have ever considered the development of idioms of playing electronic music, particularly the kind of electronic music you play? While dance and club oriented electronic music has a well documented lineage, and electronic elements in psychedelic music like Klaus Schulze etc can be well framed within a time of experimenting and expanding music structures, the place of electronics in influencing both sound and compositional process for new music and for what we would now call ‘experimental electronic music’ has felt a little hazier and less documentable. Interestingly, there’s correlations in sound and approach from the likes of Alireza Mashayekhi and contemporaries in the likes of the GRM (such as Bernard Parmegiani), and, along with responses to or against other musical traditions, a significant shared factor is the use of early electronic instruments.  These instruments were in some ways the precursor eurorack modular synthesisers as we know them now, and were an early example of instrument design to give control of the ‘building blocks’ of sound. I’m interested in how our relationship to sound can evolve through this breaking down into elemental factors, and in how, as in our current era where Oliveros, Eliane Radigue etc. are maybe having a renaissance across a wide variety of audiences, we might see these idioms of ‘experimental electronic music’ established clearer and evolved further. Do you think we can identify something that might look like idioms of experimental electronic music?

SC: If I understand what you mean about idioms correctly: motives, turns of phrase, kinds of sounds, textures, etc? Then yes, I consider this development at every moment. One of the things that I try to do as a musician is be aware of what other people are doing. I’m always very excited to hear what other people are making, as for me it gives me some insight into how an other experiences the world. It’s also one of the joys of teaching. There will be some shared experiences with my own of course, but also there will be a uniqueness, and I love listening to this uniqueness, and learning about the other. Relatedly, because I think we are essentially on this life-journey by ourselves, I try to avoid (as much as possible) using the idioms or as I prefer to say myself, the syntax, of other people. I’m not always successful, but I try, and one of the ways I can do this is to know as about as much music as possible. As a result I think it is possible to identify idioms of experimental electronic music. Some have been pioneered by people that you’ve mentioned such as Parmegiani, Oliveros, Radigue etc. but then there’s so many more, and I think for every kind of sub genre of experimental electronic music, there’s innovators and people that define what some of these idioms are, and people that radiate or orbit around them, making turns etc. I mean just off the top of my head I can think of Luc Ferrari, who in a way defined the use of (seemingly) unedited field recordings, Annea Lockwood did something similar in her own unique way. I think of David Tudor making homemade electronic instruments sound like ecosystems, George Lewis effectively creating artificial intelligence back in the 80s, which has it’s own kind of syntax. Alvin Curran, brining a lot of these things together as a kind of one-man-band, Miko Vainio and Jerry Hunt making constellations of sound interspersed by silence (which I think is very important). Where you enter this discourse will perhaps determine a kind of path, and many of us in our own way are following the syntax that some of these people have created. This narrative is obviously defined by my own experiences and listening habits etc, and it’s not a totality in any way shape or form. I haven’t even begun to talk about people like Cage, Stockhausen, Schaffer etc, or indeed hip hop which I see as probably being the area in which the most sonic innovation is currently happening. For what it’s worth I see my own path being led by people like Ferrari, Lockwood, Radigue, Oliveros, Tenney, Curran, Vainio, and I feel very close to the music of more acoustic composers like Morton Feldman, Michael Oesterle, Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane, Sarah Hennies, David Lang, Oren Ambarchi & Crys Cole, Howard Skempton, Joe Cutler, Donnacha Dennehy, Jennifer Walshe, Andy Ingamells, Roscoe Mitchell, and Gerald Barry. though my practice is probably as defined by things that happen in visual/performance art, as it is in music.   

ddr.: Process or a procedural basis for composing or playing feels like a strong factor in both your composed work and in your solo performance, like recent release, Peso, and works like the X Lines of Music Slow Down and Eventually Stop series or X Minutes of Music on the Subject of Y series. Could you speak a little on this approach and how you came to use this process focused method in both composition and playing? What draws you to music that points to it’s own process?

SC: Absolutely. The way my brain works is that things tend to have to be very logical, ordered, and systematic, and the work I make is just an extension of this lived experience. For as long as I can remember composing, I’ve always used process without really knowing what this was, and then when I started learning about music, I could see that other people used these things also. You know voice-leading principles, counterpoint, etc. all these building blocks of music to me seemed really easy, because there are rules/systems etc that give a certain set of results if you follow them (you of course don’t have to follow them). Then when we come to the 1960s etc we find composers that make a virtue out of systematic music such as Tom Johnson, Alvin Lucier, Phillip Glass etc. and I was instantly drawn to this music because it really resonated with how I experienced the world. For example I’m virtually always counting: when I’m walking down the street, when I’m on the bus, when I’m cooking, when my mind starts wandering etc etc. and here was a music that manifested this kind of weird thing that I’ve done for most of my life. So, it felt very natural in my own work to make a feature of these things. It’s great that you’ve identified these three kinds of works that I make, as I think they do similar things in slightly different ways. They’re all effectively dealing with my lived experience. The earliest of these pieces are the' X minutes of music...’ pieces which were the result of me being upfront with a listener and telling them how long they had to commit to a piece to (and in some way giving them a formal map), and also what the piece was perhaps about on a superficial level. Like the football piece in this series, is of course about football, it literally translates the structure of a football match, but it is also about many other things; attention spans, shared experiences, getting older, nostalgia etc etc. Football (and sound) become a springboard to discuss these things. 'The X lines of Music pieces…’ are related. Again they’re about lived experience, but perhaps a bit more abstract here, only really dealing with sound. However, they all do the same kind of thing in that they start with a kind of burst of energy, and then as they progress they slow down, sometimes quite a lot, and eventually stop. This to me was similar to life, relationships, experiences, materials etc etc. We often start these things with a burst of energy, and as we move along, things begin to stop working, and pull apart, disintegrate etc etc. these pieces were a kind of reflection of this. Peso is a little different in that the process is a lot slower, and less apparent. It’s a reflection of me thinking about there being multiplicities happening simultaneously, and how we experience these things depends on where we shine a light, or where we focus. The harmonies in Peso for example are always present (in my mind), but they would change depending on which oscillators I subtracted, or where I focused the listener’s ear. Another thing worth mentioning is that I’m much more interested in subtractive processes as there’s far less music that utilises them, so things will generally slow down for me and thin out, rather than speeding up and getting thicker. The final thing that’s worth adding is that I’m not strictly a systematic composer, I use chance in every piece I write to add a bit of unpredictability, and also to help make decisions when I am indecisive.     

ddr.: Following from this, one thing that strikes me about your music is a comfortable relationship with humour, not leaning into novelty, irony or comedy, and not a wry smirk for those in the know, there’s a levity to pieces such as Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards that draws you in rather than feels like making a joke to get past the issue of having to make some work. Has this been something very conscious? Do you feel there’s an importance or significance to including humour in your work as you do?

SC: If there is any humour in my work it comes from sincerity. I don’t purposely create work that tries to be funny or humorous, but it can arise from unexpected situations that might occur in the work. This might happen in 14 minutes of music for example, where it becomes obvious quite quickly that the text in the video is narrating the story of a person’s life (through greeting card phrases), and I think the unexpected twists & turns of the person’s life are a little funny, but then you realise the person loses people as they get older, and eventually die themselves.  As I’ve said before, my work relates to my lived experience, and a way of sharing (or exhibiting) how I experience the world with others. As a result, I try to be as sincere and straight talking as possible (hence the titles, I’m letting you know what you’re in for!). I’m really not that interested in irony, and detachment, even if I aim towards emotional neutrality, flatness, and an avoidance of drama with my musical material. In fact I think ironic detachment can be a little dangerous in art, and I think we’ve seen this played out in post-truth society, and edgelords on social media amongst other examples. I’m not saying I’m totally against it in the work of others, I am after all excited to see how other people experience the world. Obviously there are people who deal with such issues in exciting and important ways, but I think we need to handle it carefully and responsibly. I have no real idea what people find funny, so I have to just make work about how I experience things. If that comes across as humours to some people, great! If it comes across as serious and thought-provoking, then also great! It can of course be both of those things, but I’m not sure if a skilled enough musician to articulate all of these things simultaneously. 

ddr.: Your own work fits into the lineage of both Irish contemporary classical and Irish underground/DIY/experimental music well. Where do you see yourself in these areas and what is your perception of the different musical areas you're involved in, as a listener, performer or composer? It was a formative moment for me when I was young and trying to get to grips with everything going on in Irish music subcultures when I reaslised that the 'serious' musicians and messy punks or odd experimental musicians around Ireland all seemed to know each other, often worked together and, for the most part anyway, all respected one another. After spending most of my life at this stage still trying to get to grips, and now keep up to speed with music in Ireland, these connections and crossovers feel integral, and when I'm feeling particularly contemplative, I feel like you could sit and draw connections all over the musical and cultural map and see that the old generalisation of Ireland being small and everyone knowing everyone being exemplified when you look at our various musical worlds.

SC: Yes absolutely! It’s a small world really, and I think anyone interested in left-field ideas or alternative ways of experiencing the world are drawn to each other no matter what way those ideas manifest themselves, whether through art, music, activism etc. This happens globally of course, but it plays out in a very pronounced way in Ireland, because of the geographical size of the country and the small population we have. From my own life, I started musical activity playing in grunge/punk bands around 1997 or so. My community then were people from all around Dublin that hung around Temple Bar Music Centre, so I got to meet people who I wasn’t necessarily in school with but had a kinship through liking the same music, or playing in the same side bands etc etc. I got into classical/contemporary music through this life actually. It was by listening to Sonic Youth that I got into John Cage, and then through Cage, I got into all the other stuff, and when I started getting into this other stuff, I knew that I wanted to be a composer, so I started learning theory and piano etc around 16 or 17, to help me prepare for study at university. At university I met other musicians from various different traditions, and became part of different musical communities, composers, classical musicians, electronic musicians etc. but I’d say my closest friends were (and still are) the people playing in various different bands from the different scenes around Dublin, Ballina, Waterford, and Cork. I also played basketball from the age of about 10 to 22 or so, and as a result was also hanging out with people that were heavily involved with hip hop, so even quite early on I was listening to all kinds of different musics, which to me were all effectively doing the same thing, trying to rock the boat a little, and offer a different way of experiencing the world to the way in which we were told to experience it. I moved away for a good many years in my 20s and early 30s, and joined other communities along the way, so now I feel I belong to lots of different communities that explore all of the things you mention. To me it’s all quite normal moving between these different lineages of experimental music, electronic, DIY rock etc. and I’m very happy drawing on all of these different traditions in varying degrees in the work that I do. It’s part of my fabric, and how I experience the world. As I’ve said I think anyone that is creating left-field music is effectively doing the same thing, we’re all on this kind of dark spiritual journey, sometimes together but often alone, and the core of what we want to exhibit is often the same, but perhaps the outward manifestation differs from person to person, group to group.     

ddr.: On your own work; have you anything new coming out that you’d like to talk about?

SC: I'm currently working on two related projects in Tandem, one is for a British ensemble using acoustic instruments, synthesisers, and location recordings taken from London, Birmingham, and Edinburgh. This is for a tour around the UK, and the material will also feature as part of 3 different soundwalks on a soundwalk app for the three aforementioned cities. As a kind of prototype, I’m making a soundwalk for the same app around an area in Dublin that uses location recordings and synthesizers. It’s quite nice because my 4 year old son is out hunting for sounds with me, so often you get to hear the fieldwork trip through the ears of a 4 year old.  I’m pretty excited to have these out in the world. I’m also hoping to have a couple of archival recordings out by the end of the year. Stuff I recorded in 2017, but have been on the long finger for various different life reasons. Also exciting to share these things.  

ddr.: You've graciously made a mix for Sources of Uncertainty, can you tell us a bit about the mix, who is on it, how did you pick them?

SC: I’m always listening to music, I probably listen to about 6-8 hours of music a day, and it’s almost always new music which has just been released. I have a system for listening! Each release stays in a playlist for 5 listens and then I sub it out. As a result I get a good sense of an album when it comes out. When I was younger I listened the shit out of CDs and tapes that I bought, listening hundreds of times, so I really knew this music inside out. I don’t have as much time to listen anymore, but I try to replicate this experience as much as possible. This mix is effectively made up of new things that are currently in, or have been in my regular listening over the past couple of months. However, there’s also a couple of other conceptual things going on. I tried to focus on tracks that are collaborative in some way or play with the concept of community. So you’ll hear work by Michael Oesterle, which stems from his long friendship with Bozzini Quartet, 700 Bliss, Billy Woods X Messiah Musik, Eliane Radigue and Bozzini Quartet, WANDA GROUP, Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker, Katie Kim, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry & The Organic Music Society, and Sebastian Rochford & Kit Downes. There’s also some memorialisation going on, and I’ve selected some tracks by people that have died recently whose music has emotionally impacted me over the years. So there’s a Low track (for Mimi Parker), a De La Soul track (for Trugoy the Dove), and a Modest Mouse track (for Jeremiah Green). The Sebastian Rochford track is also a memorialisation for his father, who died roughly the same time as my own father, so I relate to it a lot. There’s a piece of mine in there, not because I egotistically wanted to include a piece of mine, but because one of the guitarists on the recording, Danjel Röhr, died back in November, not much older than me. Danjel was a good friend and a fabulous collaborator, and his death hit me hard when I learned about it. I still find it very hard to believe. He’s playing amazingly on this recording, and his wife told me after his death that this project was one of his proudest moments, so I’ve included it here. Piecing the whole thing together felt very much like working on a composition, and I’ve enjoyed figuring out what materials should go where. Hopefully it’s enjoyable for your listeners. 

ddr.: You recently played with Aonghus McEvoy and band in Dublin. What is your approach to playing live? Your music seems hard to recreate live, particularly as a solo performance. Have you plans for more live gigs?

SC: My approach to playing live is to do as many things live as possible without using a computer. I compose and rehearse everything I do, but sometimes there will be elements of improvisation or indeterminacy. Conversely to how it may seem, even the recordings I make are effectively live performances. To date, the only album I’ve released which is not a live recording to stereo is ‘Inventions and Canons’ which has 100s of location recordings layered on top of each other with synthesizer responses. However, even this piece I can perform live as I have a kind of tape part of the location recordings which I play out of my phone into a mixer, and then play the synth parts in tandem. When I began doing live performances with synthesizers around 2016/17 (the reason for deciding to make this an integral part of my practice would take a whole other interview!), I told myself that I would not use a computer, and that I wouldn’t really write material that I couldn’t execute in live performance. So my solo set up-utilises a number of synthesizers, 2 looper pedals, sequencers, some percussion instruments, location recordings (on a phone), a microphone, and a mixer. I’ll often have projected text in performance, and sometimes use performative actions. I follow scores, which whilst notated allow a degree of indeterminacy and flexibility. I also have a performance duo with Andy Ingamells, which is much freer than things I might do solely on my own, and we do all kinds of strange things. Its fantastic working with Andy, as aesthetically we trust each other implicitly, and also it’s nice brainstorming ideas, sharing admin responsibilities, and going on tour with another person… much less lonely! That’s about it! One of the reasons I started performing live was to surmount crippling anxiety, and I used to hate it. Now I very much enjoy it, and play frequently enough in the UK, a little less in Ireland but people are starting to ask me to play a little more now. I don’t always have the time, as I teach full-time in a UK Conservatoire, I have a lot of writing to do, and I also have to look after a 4 year old child, but I really enjoy the community aspect of sharing a bill, getting to meet other performers and hear their work. It’s a nice way of acknowledging existence. Myself and Andy should be doing a few things this year, and I’m generally happy to play live if people want me to! DM’s are open as they say…