Deviations: An interview with Andrew Kettle

Sound artist Andrew Kettle has been organising live events for local experimental musicians for over three years. Developer of Label:KETTLE, an experimental music recording project, his personal recorded material dates back to 1993, with several CD releases and numerious tracks on various compilations (Serbsky Institute, ABC music, Vibragun, Last Chance Gasp, Phat Lips, Overt). His work, heavily influenced by alchemy, is riddled with transmutive processes and experimentation in the natural world. In addition, Kettle was the presenter of 'Atmospheric Disturbances', the experimental musicians' and sound artists' show on 4ZZZ, from June 1998 to July 2000. Semper spoke to him about some of his recent projects, public space, sculpting sound and the madness of the web.

So, the next issue's on space? Guess you did a web-search, and found the 'Public Space' project? Isn't it freaky, the whole web-site thing? Last week I had this guy from America called Andrew Kettle email me, going, ÒHello, I'm Andrew Kettle.' He'd typed his name into a search engine to see what'd come up, and landed on my site. So, I responded to to him, ÒOh great, another one I have to kill, thanks for coming out of the woodwork!' Haven't heard back from him since! I remember one time when I typed in ÒAustralian Experimental Music,' and found out that I was listed higher, because search engines prioritise finds by hit-rate, than the Adelaide Experimental Arts Foundation. They're an organisation with a national profile, so, that was pretty weird!

So, can you tell us a little bit about the 'Public Space' project?

Sure. It was a performance. I was heavily involved in community arts at the time, and witnessed the whole changeover of the public advertising legislation, which a lot of people weren't aware of. The council tried to make it so we couldn't put posters up anywhere except designated community boards. So, it really put a lid on our ownership of public space, and also on any kind of alternative culture, underground culture or street culture, because that was our communication to a large extent: the street poles and bus shelters. Not only was it like an information exchange, it was like a circulation of local art, like a public gallery of sorts. So, to see that die, to try and ban all of that was pretty heavy. We had these poems. Each one had five sentences and each sentence was digitalised so that I could use it on a keyboard. The idea behind it was that you trapped a sentence into the keyboard in order to play them with this sort of staccato effect. It was really important for me at the time. The Queen Street Mall was still being redeveloped and I hated it. The space has grown on me since. I tend to like Brisbane's older spaces though. You look at Brisbane and you think, we've destroyed our heritage, or, our heritage has destroyed itself. I'm more interested in the hallways and small pokey rooms in government buildings. I've had favourite places, as far as acoustic stairwells go, that have been demolished... It's interesting to think about the sticker culture that's come about now, with really cheap, twenty-four hour photocopy places where you can go and copy the hell out of A3 and A4 adhesive sheets, stick 'em everywhere. Another thing with sticker culture is that it's all about symbols. Like graf. If you've got a symbol, you can stick it everywhere. Like that Motorola ad campaign, remember? Those blue, black and orange rectangles everywhere on poles? I'd really like to find out if they actually got done for it, if Motorola got fined fifty dollars a sticker. The council could've made an absolute fortune! Alot of people actually got mixed up about it, took them home and stuck them on their fridge. But seriously, stickering is a really great form of reclaiming space from the multinationals. I stuck some up for the Deviations project. The idea was to go back and photograph them each year and see how they'd slowly degraded. Photocopy ink is incredibly lasting. Deviations was in November 98 and you can still see some of the original stickers on poles and stuff like that.

What other space-related projects have you been involved in?

Over in Japan there's this sort of fetish club thing, these really small little clubs which fit about 100 people maximum and they're reclaimed. They're normally converted from garages of some of the high rise buildings, usually three or four. They knock the walls out between them, leaving one of the garages for audiences, one for a stage and one's left as a green area for artists. The space for the artists is as big a space as the audiences'. The other style which is really common is, you'll have a bar and then the audience and then the stage and there won't be anything behind the stage. There's only three garages but you'll have 150 people in one garage all crammed in, with your speakers suspended from the ceiling. So, I put something on based on that, where we had a space that measured roughly 2 x 9 meters, with 65 people in it. I'm really into that sort of stuff. To me, as a sound artist, space is as important as the music. Also, for one of the first ADAPT festivals I did the Drone 9 performance, where we utilised the alleyway at Metro Arts. That was a really space-centric thing too.

Do you make your music adhere to the space, or did you pick the space to adhere to your music?

Both. Drone 9 was on 9/9/99. I don't know, it sort of sculpts itself into an idea. There's an artist called Jamie, and when I was doing Atmospheric Disturbances we were the only radio show in the whole world to play all of his material. He produces these one hour drone pieces, using kids' organ toys with the keys gaffa-taped down. Over a certain amount of time the circuitry, because it's cheap and plastic, would bug out or warm up, making the key-notes change. So, over one hour you can hear this sort of slow-morphing key change. What you heard when it started up and what you heard at the end were completely different notes. Space is actually very important to music and sound art in general. Have you seen three-inch CDs? You can package them a lot differently. Whereas a normal CD costs you $2.80 to post, a three-inch'll only put you back 45 cents. You just pop it in a little envelope!

So how do they work, having only such a short amount of time to work with? Isn't experimental music a kind of open-ended artform?

KETTLE, the record label, just wanted to get away from producing regular objects. When we were putting out normal CDs, a lot of people went Òoh no, sixty minutes of experimental music! Don't you have anything smaller?" It's a good marketing or gimmicky thing to say, Òoh it's only twenty minutes." The latest CD I did was 'Fading.' The idea was to capture the essence of twenty-odd minute performances in only one to two minutes. With a three-inch I could fit in twelve tracks over twenty minutes. In this way, listeners get a cross section of a year's worth of performances in under twenty-five minutes.

Could you tell us about the Lotto project? Didn't you give it away with gold lotto tickets as a gimmick?

Lotto was a CD of random tracks, just little snippets one after another. The idea was that the listener could either play it as is, or play it on random: limitless music, potentially. A graveyard shift programmer from a radio station in Melbourne actually left it on random for hours. But that's the whole idea. You could even make it do your gold lotto: make it pick your numbers by playing it on random and marking down the track-numbers. So, it's a 20 minute CD, but it's really a limitless CD. The next thing I've been wanting to do is digitalise this 9 page poem a won an award for in 1988. I'd assign a different voice for each of the sentences over the 9 pages. The whole deal would sort of be this whole random idea of recording it, getting it down to 99 lines and putting it on to a CD. You could randomise the poem like you could the Lotto CD: you could even play the two simultaneously, endlessly. Music on one CD and poetry on the other. Just going back to the three-inches, recently I got into this whole idea that I wouldn't do a performance unless I could either wear it or fit it in my pocket. So, for the Odyssey performance, the idea was that I used only two Lotto CDs. I had them in my pocket, popped them into the CD player and just randomised them, moving between the players, looping one and randomising the other. Afterwards I just jumped back into the audience. Down in Melbourne someone asked if he could get a quote on my luggage and equipment freight! I mean, my aesthetic is, if you can't carry it in your hand luggage, you don't take it. The idea of spending as much on your luggage as your plane ticket has caused me to become an economic rationalist about the whole thing. You can actually do a performance really cheaply. I mean, I've never got an arts grant for anything I've ever done.

Have you always been interested in chaos composition?

I'm doing a day job for a market research firm at the moment. I go doorknocking, asking people to fill out surveys and stuff like that. It's insane! Every address you go to you've gotta write down what happens to you, if they were home, etc. So I've been translating the results into music: whole notes for an interview, half notes for a subtle refusal, and quarter notes for vehement refusals. In theory it should produce an organic rhythm system. Another composition thing I'm wanting to do is a performance, in which the music is based on the chemical breakdown of the planets. Seeing as though there's eighty-four different elements, there's eighty-four possible notes. It's quite interesting, you can give each element a key or a note and then with the planets you can say, well, the earth's made up of a lot of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever, each of which has a corresponding note. When you play the elements / notes together, you get a chord of sorts. The Earth might end up a G or something else, based on its elemental breakdown. I once did an interview with Tim Ritchie for a documentary that was supposed to be about electronic music, but ended up being about Napster. We were talking about composition and what influenced me and I said this now notorious quote, that if you're the average person, 85 percent of your life is spent listening to traffic or air-conditioning. As a sound artist, what hope do you have? I've done performances with televisions the microwaves, with music triggered by the fields that these things radiate. Participants were able to figure out when they're moving into the field of an appliance, and realise how far out these fields reach. People came up afterwards and asked, Òhave you done something to the television?" Why go out and buy a television when I can just use my own? It was about awareness of electromagnetic variation. At the time there was a documentary on the ABC about the noise pollution we're putting into the ocean from all the engine noise from all the boats. Whales used to be able to communicate for hundreds of kilometres, but because we've got all this engine noise we've created this fog of noise that stifles the whales' communication beyond three kilometres. It was about being aware of all this pollution we're putting into the environment that we don't even see. It's bad enough with carbon monoxide. One of the nicest things I've ever recorded was captured at the Treasury Casino taxi rank. It was a Friday night and busy as all hell. There was this whole row of taxis, each picking up passengers, one by one. Once a taxi picked-up, all the rest moved up two spaces. Sometimes when it was really slow, I recorded one car going, all the drivers getting back in their cars, starting up their engines, moving one space, then turning off their engine. When you actually listen to it completely unrelated to the actual event it's like WOW! It sounds composed in a strange sort of way. The hard thing about editing field recordings is you can never snip them correctly because of these random elements. You can always hear the edit marks.

What do you think are some of the best spaces to listen to music in?

When I was doing Atmospheric Disturbances, we asking listeners, Òhow do you listen to the show?" We got some strange feedback. One guy hid in his cupboard, put the speakers inside the cupboard, stepped inside and closed the door. Another guy put his speakers in a toilet-bowl, and sat on the toilet during the show! So, there's this crazy shit going on. You'd get these emails once a week: we had a few taxi drivers listening in, and they were going, Òit's great, we can wind down the windows and get all this traffic noise mixing with the stuff you're playing!" That's what I really like about radio. You can have a whole variety of locations. We did a performance at a music conference last year where there was whole speaker distribution, which is a term for a performance in which you have a mixing desk with an unlimited number of faders controlling your different speakers. In this particular instance, we had subwoofers, tweeters, broken ones, half destroyed ones, ones that had pin holes in the speaker, a whole variety. Each had its own littler fader so we could control the whole movement around the space. But we did it on radio, and because everyone had their own radio: alarm clocks next to the bed, ghetto blasters, little hand walkie-talkie things, we threw them all around the room and we broadcast a show which was, I guess, a curated performance. That was a really easy sound thing with big results. We managed to get this whole variety of sound and location..

KATE SCOTT AND MARK GOMES