I saw that you posted a photo online of some Elvis impersonators in Tokyo, which is funny because I actually went a couple of years ago and ran into the same thing.

It’s definitely the home of the Elvis personalities. I think there are three or four other groups, dance ensembles essentially, that have their own things. We saw what we thought was a motorcycle gang, but they all just do dance-offs together.

It’s such an interesting culture; you’ve got this demographic homogeneity, but then the people have such extreme and diverse passions.

It’s weird; I think for most Japanese it really is homogenous and then like you say there are these spikes that come out, like those guys dancing or the Fruits, which is this Harajuku extreme fashion thing that was really big. Then in the early 90’s there was this thing called Ganguro, which is basically brown-skinned; these people would get super tan. It was mostly women, and there was this really interesting study about they were so particular with their looks that they weren’t attractive to men and were only attracted to each other. A lot of them ended up forming relationships, which is totally curious. But yeah, Japan is one of the most amazing places around, as I’m sure you experienced.

Do you get a lot of Japanese tourism in Australia? I think I’ve heard that somewhere.

Oh, yeah. In the 80’s, the Yen was so strong and our dollar was not so much so there was heaps of Japanese investment. It was heavily Japonified, I guess you’d say, but it’s shifted and now most international investment is coming from China. The whole financial crisis in China is hurting a lot and our dollar is crazy low at the moment, so being here is a little bit costly.

I guess the American South isn’t really a destination, but I’ve met something like three Australians ever. Very odd to extrapolate from that sample.

Right, for someone studying here it would cost rather a lot – we’re somewhere between America and European countries in terms of tuition fees. I have to admit, I really like it here because I'm from the tropics. For me it’s very familiar in a way, and strangely I was feeling very nostalgic walking around earlier. It’s because of the cicadas – whenever I watch films or TV series, particularly The Walking Dead, the sound designers have a particular type of cicada that they’re using to indicate that it’s summertime and that same species is here, right now. It’s strangely foreboding and nostalgic at the same time, recognizing something but never having experienced it.

That goes right back to the phenomenon of Elvis impersonation in Japan. What took you to Tokyo?

The very first concert I ever played overseas was in Tokyo, at Bar Off Site, which is where the whole Japanese New Minimalism thing was happening. I got invited to play at this thing called Bonenkai, kind of like an end-of-year party, with a whole bunch of these Japanese improvisers that I really respected, people like Otomo Yoshihide and Ami Yoshida, Taku Sugimoto. It was amazing, seeing all these people I’d been reading about and listening to without ever experiencing it in space. When I did that, it just made so much more sense than what I’d heard previously on recordings. I have to say that Otomo in particular was very generous to me. It was quite overwhelming to be playing overseas, and Tokyo is so full-on culturally, visually, and sonically, and Otomo really took me under his wing. Since then, I’ve been back about 14 or 15 times either for touring or more recently doing art projects there looking at the idea of biological time, all of these Japanese traditions involving time, and presence, as a Zen idea. I’ve done a lot of field trips there as well – I love doing field recordings. I haven’t actually played a show there in four years now, which might be the longest that I’ve gone since I started touring.

Do you do much traditional touring, or find yourself mostly booked for one-offs and festivals?

I was just in Berlin for three days last month – got off the plane, rehearsed for two days, performed, and got back on a plane – for a performance with Alessandro Cortini, who makes beautiful electronic work but was also a member of Nine Inch Nails. I still do those but it’s rare, mostly because for me to get anywhere it’s a full day of transit, like coming to Raleigh was about a 23-hour trek from where I live. That’s not that bad; Europe can be anywhere up to 35 hours. If nothing else, environmentally the idea of flying somewhere for a single performance is kind of crazy; generally I try and do a couple weeks of performance and projects. It’s also nice just to get in a cycle. Earlier this year I did a tour of Europe and it was really nice just to be in a very rhythmic, hypnotic pattern that played out every day. You can either fight against that, which I’ve done previously, or give yourself over. I think you find devices to work with that as a lifestyle; I have a couple things that I do everywhere, like take photos of beds. That probably sounds peculiar, but basically I’ve taken a photo of every bed I’ve slept in for 15 years and am about to publish a book about this called Where I Lay My Head, about the idea that the bed is the one private space left, and whether that privacy extends beyond the door. You see some ebb and flow, particularly in touring; sometimes you’re sleeping on the floor of a gallery in Nagoya during a blizzard and sometimes you’re in this palatial, overpriced hotel in the middle of China or something like that.

Being at least geographically isolated in Australia, how do your intercontinental collaborations come about?

It’s funny – maybe 15 years ago it was a lot more isolated than it is now. I look at room40 as a great marker of how things have shifted over time. When the label first started there was no PayPal, no internet – if people wanted to order something they sent money in the mail. That’s what I remember doing to get records when I was a teenager. In the early 90’s, to get at a record you had to go to an import store and pay a lot of money, or do a lot of tape trading. That built up different sorts of networks; I ran a fan zine for a long time and developed these relationships all over the world. I think now it’s much easier to make things happen – this collaboration with Alessandro came out of the fact that last year we both heard each other’s records and really liked them. I was listening to Sonno while I was touring, it was a great sort of record for airports and hotels. We just started corresponding from that point on and then somehow got the invitation to do this festival in Berlin with about a month to prepare. We built up a palate of sounds that we could use and play with live to see what would come out of it. It worked really well – it was a pleasure to explore that sort of approach. It doesn’t always work like that; when I’m working with Grouper, for example, on the Slow Walkers record, it was a really slow process. We took our time, spent a few years talking about it before beginning work. We had some shared interests in what we wanted to explore on the record and it grew really organically out of that. There’s a real pleasure in working with people; in my work there’s a lot of time spent alone and less of a social element. With every collaboration I’ve done I think that there’s a kind of seed that gets fertilized, something that I wouldn’t have come to on my own.

It’d be unthinkable now to package up $20 and an order slip and have any expectation of receiving a physical good some amount of time later.

Totally! That was a real thing, diving into something that you didn’t know. It’s not like I dislike it; everyone’s accessible now and there’s so much amazing stuff that you can do. I look back and there was just something about the discovery and the waiting that was really important for how I came to desire listening to things. There was a hunt involved, and sometimes you had to work really hard to find that demo or live recording of some band. There were a couple of things that took me two or three years to find, and when I finally heard them sometimes my imagination of what they’d sound like was way better than the real thing. That was good, because you recognize that you can build things up to a point at which you’ve got something in your mind that’s much better than what was recorded.

I was checking out room40’s site and saw the tagline sound parcels from the Antipodes – do you consider it a mission to unearth the sounds of Australia and New Zealand?

I’ve actually always been about reaching outward, but the point about sound parcels was really about the erosion of territoriality, geography, and emergence of, for better or worse, global homogeneity. With the label I think I’m most concerned with a sort of curatorial aesthetic that ties together sometimes very disparate material. The reason that I started the label was that I came across material that wasn’t as well-recognized as I think it should be, and my desire was to share that. The main reason that I put out music is that I really believe in all of the artists that we work with, and I count myself very lucky to have the opportunity to work with them. Since the label started there’s been a huge change in the way that we participate in music, as listeners and consumers. What might have been a commercial exchange 15 years ago, where you’d go to record store and buy a piece of music and listen to it a number of times because you’d outlaid some money to do that has given way to an exchange that has more to do with time, where you’re asking people to give over their most precious asset. When I’m releasing something I’m very conscious of trying to make sure that that exchange is valid. I know that when I’ve come to a record I want to share that richness of going back to it and listening again and again, and presenting that opportunity is why we put the music out.

I’ve read some of your academic writing – do you view that and your music to be companion works or distinctly developed?

I think there are certain concerns expressed in the music and in the theoretical stuff that I’m interested in, and I think that maybe the theory is a way of unpacking the practice, since the latter can be a very personal thing. Certainly with the relational listening idea, I perceive that there are other people practicing field recording and exploring environmental town who are sort of seeking the same result or relationship with the material but lack a way to talk about it. That’s kind of where some of this research comes into it – it’s a way of developing a language. There’s a great quote from Foucault about how discourses systemically form the objects of which they speak, so if we speak about something then the way that conversation is conducted becomes that thing or comes to express that thing. So formalizing some of the ways in which we talk about it means that one, we can talk about it, and two, we can talk about it more broadly. There needs to be a few incursions into the black unknown, and if you do that then gradually the unknown still expands, but does so in ways that we potentially don’t think that it will. That’s kind of exciting, I think, and that’s what’s happening right now if you look at the idea of sound studies as an area. Ten years ago that didn’t really exist as an area, and we’re starting to see people developing a lot of theoretical positions and attacking some of the historical ways that we’ve come to understand sound. That’s super important, and it means that we’re beginning to make those incursions.

Do you view your musical as an input through which the listener will hopefully reach a given output or understanding, or would that defeat the idea of relational listening theory?

I don’t know. If we’re talking about something like field recording, partly what I’m interested in doing is exploring this idea of transmitting the listener’s listening. At the same time, I can’t possibly transmit all of my experience of that listening. What I can do is offer some sort of portal towards a focus on the material in that sonic environment that I was interested in or seeking – the space, within a space. In short, partly it’s an invitation to be drawn into the same preoccupations that I have in a time and place, but all of the sociocultural baggage that you have as a listener comes to bear on the material itself and of course you’re going to have another kind of relationship with it that I won’t have. That’s part of the joy – even in concert, there are two things happening. One is that we’re all having these incredibly individual experiences, whether that be the kind of intellectual listening to the music and having an emotional response or the kind of internal, physical manifestation of vibration on the body, that synesthetic point between listening and touch that happens with sound pressure. We’re all having that individually and at the same time we’re having a collective experience, and there is a psychological capacity to what’s happening in that room. There’s also an unavoidableness to the physical nature of sound that I think is one of the intimacies of the ideas of performance. So I think there’s always a tension there between the desire to transmit something and the way in which that transmission is received, and that’s part of the joy of what sound is about for me.

I’ve always thought of sampling, especially the traditional vein of it in hip-hop where you’re chopping things up and reshaping them, as a very forceful and effective way of transmitting a listening.

Yeah, it’s like this is the part of these five minutes that I’m interested in, and here’s why I’m interested in it – because it transforms into this thing. I think that’s a really valid way to think about it, it’s a very acute reading of this idea.

As far as relational listening goes, do you think that it enables abstraction in music? I was thinking that some of your music could be described as presenting the broadest possible palate of sounds and thus enabling the greatest number of potential readings.

I think there are a couple different ways to think about it – there’s my record Kiri No Oto, which translates to the sound of fog in English. I was basically trying to do an auditory transcription of the visual effect of fog, you know where if you’re in a fog and you try and take in a landscape you just see this grey mesh of water particles. Then if you focus through the fog and you try and pull something out like a tree, or a spire, or a house then you can generally get the sense and form of that object. But the moment you try and bring it into relief with everything else around it you go back to this grey wash. I thought that was a nice metaphor to think about with music, so I was trying to find a way that if you were in that record particularly, you could focus on one harmonic element, but the moment you try and bring it into relief with the surrounding elements it becomes lost. So yeah, there is a kind of inbuilt tensions that you have to navigate or whatever, and I like that. I like work that forces you to be present and try and navigate something that’s unusual. Just thinking of tonight, and records that totally have that sensibility, Jenny Hval’s new record is completely baffling in the best way possible. It’s this series of things that happen and I don’t really know what’s going on a lot of the time but I love that. It’s exciting to not be comfortable, and that’s more and more the case if I’m looking for music, to have the relationship where it’s not necessarily instantaneous. There’s a little bit of work involved, and I think that’s how that idea of the absolute – you offer a series of strings that people can choose to be in or out on.

I read a particular piece of yours in which you were talking about the phonograph being the watershed moment in music. I’ve always thought very much the same of visual art – as soon as you could photograph something, the objective of all art to that point had been met.

The photograph presents a bit of a representational question – at first, people assumed that somehow you were documenting the real, that it was a valid representation of reality. Then shortly afterwards everyone started to realize that it’s actually not reality, that it’s a photo of a space and time and a particular perspective. I think that was the kind of crisis of something like ethnography, the idea that we were going to the indigenous groups and saying we’ve record all your songs, spoken with you, taken pictures of you – now we have you. That’s now largely rejected, I think, in the same way that a phonograph as a sort of actual representation of the sound was rather quickly rejected. We recognize that the technology does not have any of our psychological interior preoccupations that make our listening such a great tool for us. It’s just a pure, non-cognitive listening device, while it’s the cognition, the kind of agentified listening, that makes listening really useful. Even if you think about motion-tracking, things like that – all of that excess noise in the image that reduces the capability of the program to read the body is like the empirical noise that the phonograph captures. What we were actually interested in was capturing the body but what we got was all of this extra stuff. I think we’re constantly revisiting that with technology as a species, always trying to replicate our ability to filter. That’s what the technology doesn’t do particularly well – it doesn’t filter like our attention filters.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to the music of people who emerged right with the phonograph – you can buy The Complete Robert Johnson on two cassettes and that’s it for his catalog. Talking about ethnography, that’s a really telling name for it.

I have a complete Messiaen box set that’s like 32 CDs, but the thing is you can hold it in your hand. There’s something both really powerful and completely disempowering about it, that somehow you can be summarized in a box set. I think that’s beautiful and depressing at the same time.

Then you go farther back and you’ve got classical music, where, as far as appreciation goes performance is nearly irrelevant – compositional worship is paramount. I think a lot of classic music is underlain by the idea that it’d be a superior product if we could see the composer themselves perform.

Yeah, and I think they’d probably be disappointed if they did. There was a whole lot of improvising in those pieces that eventually became notated along the lifespan of the piece. We tend to shun that now, I think; there’s a rigidness to the way we think about western art and music that I think wasn’t there 200 years ago. You see it a lot with music, that there are certain conditions that get applied and then they can’t be reverted from. I think that thing before, about uncomfortable situation in music, is very much about renegotiating those conditions. And when you do that, it’s confrontational, but it’s also incredibly enlightening as a listener to come across that sort of stuff.

Do you find more inspiration in music or sounds? Do you differentiate between the two?

To be completely frank, probably equally. I also find a lot of inspiration in stuff that has nothing to do with music – most of my records come out of investigations of something entirely separate. The Peregrine, for example, came out of trying to make some sort of response to that book, which for me is one of the great, transformative texts that’s come out of the 20th century. And Wilderness of Mirrors very much came out of a political frustration with a lot of the situations that were happening in Australia in the lead up to that record. You look at what’s happening in Southern Europe, with the whole refugee crisis that’s mounting and what’s happening with our government about to start bombing Syria, and you just see this cascade of problems constantly. That frustration very much was expressed in the texturality of the record – it was very much about those issues and maybe a very personal response from my end, but one that translates into how other people can perceive the work. That’s what we sometimes come to forget with music – it’s a very subjective thing, but at the root of it there are always things that we can call on to begin to describe where it came from. For me that’s one of the really important things – to have those discussions, because we’re not always in touch with those questions. Music is a great way to open discussions.

What’s your feeling about vocals in music? Would you make music with vocal or lyrical content?

I’ve had vocal material, but never a song or something like that. It’s not that I’m against it in any way, shape, or form, I just think that once there are lyrics, the relationship we have with music is totally transformed. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good or a bad thing, but there’s definitely a transformation that happens at the point at which a clear voice enters into a piece of music – you’re instantly, very naturally, drawn towards that and maybe you subject the rest of the music to something of a reduced attention, which I think can be a really powerful thing but also be really diminishing. I think it’s easier to introduce a voice as a focus and then not pay as much attention to the compositional arrangement of materials behind that, for lack of a better phrase. I think one of the challenges, certainly on the records that I’ve made with Tenniscoats or Tujiko Noriko, is to use the voice as an instrument, how it becomes embedded within the musical framework and how it navigates or how it helps the other parts to navigate can be a really interesting way to work. One of the main reasons that I’ve worked with those guys, other than that they are amazing musicians, is to create this sense of Wow, what does that actually mean? How is it that we can make those relationships, which we think of as premeditated and understood, problematic? How can we make them turn around a little bit and open out somehow?

How would you apply that idea about vocals at the fore to songs in which, say, there’s lyrical content in a language that you don’t speak?

It’s interesting – for example, I own this great record of post-war Okinawan music. Obviously after the war there was a lot of American presence in Okinawa, so you had this pop music that was basically 7 records with Okinawan vocals over it. It is incredible music – Shimauta Pops is the name of the genre. What’s really interesting about that is that even though you have these two familiar traditions – Okinawan harmonic singing and post-war rock and roll, basically, they come together and your attention goes towards the voice. That’s partly because it is so unusual, but it somehow commands that the other stuff is there as a backing. I think certainly in pop music, instrumental stuff is almost seen as a backing toward the vocalist. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder if it’s a little bit to do with the commercialization of music in the ‘50s. I think one of the big questions we face in music is around the repositioning of music as an art form vs. a kind of commoditized product, and I think that commodification comes out of the mass production of the ‘50s, particularly the record industries in Northern America, Northern Europe that eventually spread everywhere. There was a transitional point where what had been an excuse for social gathering, which has something to do with format too – enjoying a piece of music at a concert and suddenly you can listen to it at home, suddenly became very individuated. We sort of tracked down a path that is very valid about the value of music as a commodity over and above a piece of art. It became entertainment, and not necessarily a transcendent art form. I think it can be both – there’s room for it to be entertaining, but also to allow you to transcend.

If you could control how people listen to your music, what do you think is the ideal environment?

I think it’s different horses for different courses, basically. I think there’s something that happens with earbud listening that you don’t get when you’re in a concert setting, but then there’s something very radically different when you’re in a concert setting that you’re not going to get when you put headphones on. I think that question about the priority of each of those listenings – one might be about the internal listening that happens in the mind’s ear, one might be about the bodily listening of being in a performing situation. There’s a nice counterpoint there, and I think hopefully that’s why music persists both as a live, present, performative thing and as a recorded medium; that there’s meaning for both of those things.