Here is the second part of my interview with Jamie Thompson, musician extraordinaire. If you missed the first part, please just scroll down for the full story.
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JF: Let me admit it: I’m not that familiar with either of your work outside of this stuff so much…I remember actually, when I was sixteen, friends of mine were really into that Islands song “Rough Gem”. It was played at house parties and we’d dance to it all the time, which is really kind of funny actually. (laughs) But it seems to me that this particular project is more… I mean, the term I’m going to use is “World Music” but I think that’s sort of a stupid phrase, because it turns every culture in the world into a rack on a CD bin.
JT: It makes the entirety of the non-Western world’s musical output the equivalent of “Country”! (laughs)
JF: And that’s the problem I have with the term, but unfortunately it’s the one I’m going to use. It seems like there are a lot of non-Western influences in the project. Alden’s singing songs in French, in Spanish, and there are obviously a lot of different, more diverse musical influences coming into play here. Definitely in your percussion too, I’m hearing a lot of Brazilian textures and just tons of different sounds coming into the music.
JT: For me, if you take World Music to be just an open mind to music of all different traditions, then for me and I think for Alden, based on what we’ve always talked about, it’s a big motivator. When I sit down to listen to music, I may end up listening to a jazz record, or I might end up listening to an “indie-rock” record. But just as often I may end up listening to--- I like a lot of contemporary African music, a lot of traditional African music, music from Eastern Europe, from India, from South America, and Alden is the same. We actually traded back and forth different songs and albums that we were finding personally influential. And yeah, the structure of the songs works very much like that too because it’s less--- I mean if you listen to Clues, for example, you have a lot of changes, it’s very programmatic music, where it’s like “okay, here’s this part!” then, boom!, there’s a huge change to something else and a lot of modulation. Whereas The Hidden Words stuff is a lot more cyclical and harmonically simple which is a lot more similar to…whether you’re listening to music from the Southern Sahara, or Columbia, or the Outback of Australia, more traditional music tends to be less harmonically complex and more cyclical because it allows more group interaction. But when you get more complicated: Western music has tended towards this more harmonically complicated, for it’s own sake almost, approach to things, where you have to really know a lot more of what’s going on to follow it. So that’s a big musical influence, certainly, I think you can hear, for me, my whole drumming style is pretty much based on non-Western sources and has been for a long time and I think Alden’s in a very similar headspace too. What I want to do is to be able to craft a kind of music that has that same kind of quality to it, although it is inevitably Western music because we are products of that culture. I like to imagine people clapping along, and singing along, and repeated parts, and call-and-response. Things like that are elements that I love in any music, and I think it’s something I would like to see more of in Western music. And also, interesting rhythmic patterns can disappear once you get into that more abstracted harmonic language. It becomes more difficult to make things rhythmically interesting if you want to keep the pulse steady.
JF: And maybe even to get people into a spiritual state, it’s a little bit hard when you’re shifting from one musical idea to another with a sort of multiple personality disorder within your music. I feel like you can really develop the spiritual nature, the sacredness, and the sanctity of the words themselves within something’s that’s cyclical. You have time to develop the idea, to let it percolate, and to let it continue. It kind of reflects this Eastern idea of cyclical reality, in which everything is just moving around and around.
JT: And the idea that a concept is not more valid because it differs more than the thing that came before it, which is also a very modern Western philosophical idea. Through all the arts, you have, especially through the 20th century, this idea that what you’re doing is not really valid unless it’s a refutation of what came immediately before it. I think both of us have a feeling maybe that that’s not the only valid way to go about things, and, I mean this is getting a little abstracted here…
JF: No, this is perfect. This is what I like.
JT: But you know, it’s nice to have patterns that endure. It’s okay to write music that has only one chord progression going throughout the whole song, and maybe that’s something that we lost throughout the 20th century in Western culture, this idea that it’s okay: things don’t have to be absolutely new, things don’t have to be constantly refuting. I think John Cage said he’s trying to create a music where you don’t have to kill your father to be doing something legitimate. And I think if you listen to a lot of traditional Western music it’s a push toward that. It’s always trying to do something that negates or refutes, or is the opposite, or as far away from what came before it. It gets so that you think something’s more valid if it’s constantly changing and switching up. There’s also a sense of comfort that comes from the cyclical, and that’s okay too. A lot of more modern Western music has been about making people uncomfortable. I think the expression of angst, and the expression of awkwardness, and the expression of anger have become hallmarks of western music.
JF: That’s kind of a shame.
JT: Yeah it is! I got that idea from when I got into just intonation music, which uses a different scale system. A lot of the practitioners prefer it because there’s a calmness to just intonation intervals; they’re mathematically pure, so there’s no dissonance to them whatsoever; whereas with equal temperament everything’s a little bit off, so there’s always this underlying erratic tension to the chords. It comes from everything. If you listen to the popular music going back the last forty years, everything---it’s really harsh. It’s all very harsh thematically; it’s all very harsh sonically; it gets harsher and harsher. And you know, I think it’s okay to make things that are just pretty, and things that maybe are trying to portray calmness, to bring about a state of mind that’s not about agitation, that’s about the opposite: calm. I think that’s a pretty important thing to do which is not particularly addressed in western music, yet, in other parts of the world, it’s the norm.
JF: Do you think that this sort of cyclical style allows space for these words to breathe and really be expressed? With the name of the band being The Hidden Words, a lot of emphasis is on the texts. I think, from my experience of playing with you guys and being a part of this, the audience can really focus on what’s being presented, lyrically and musically; if you have an idea that develops slowly, and you know… these are not epic poems that we’re hearing. They are very short and very succinct little texts and nuggets of wisdom that Baha’u’llah revealed, and I find it’s very complementary. I don’t know if you have anything to add to that.
JT: I agree. I think, for me, whenever I’ve done music that’s based around a text, what you’re trying to do is to set the text in such a way that the meaning of the words comes through better as a result of the music, even if people aren’t aware of that. I think that the way that The Hidden Words texts are used here, certainly some of the other Writings Alden’s been adapting, is based on the idea that you can’t necessarily hit someone over the head with it’s meaning, that’s not the point. You’re not shouting this in someone’s ear; you’re not saying “wake up! This is happening!” It’s reflective and it’s trying to tell you something that requires a little more reflection and a calmer headspace to understand. So in that sense, I think definitely the cyclical nature of the music and the focus more on that rather than angularity and abstractness puts the listener in a headspace where he or she may be more receptive to the meditative quality of the text also. Like, “O ESSENCE OF NEGLIGENCE! Myriads of mystic tongues…” it’s not such an obvious message. You can’t just look at it, and pragmatically say that “this is what it means, and therefore I got it”. So, to be able to relax into the beauty of the musical side of it I think definitely brings out the texts.
JF: The deliberateness of the adaptation reminds me of Arvo Pärt’s method of composition for holy texts. Rather than set a time structure and then try to fit the music in there, he looks at the sound of each word and then adapts it to the notes accordingly. He really makes sure that the text and the music don’t have to be stitched together like a Frankenstein monster. It’s something that’s natural and organic, and grows together and intertwines its roots until it’s one tree.
JT: There’s a wonderful history--- there’s this guy Harry Partch, an American composer, and he had a book, Genesis of Music, which I read, and the first chapter is this essay that he wrote that’s all about, for him, how music is corporeal. It should come out of the human body that’s making it and so if you’re singing words, you should approximate speech. That’s not the only valid way to do things, but for him if you’re gonna sing “I have a chair”, you wouldn’t go “I h-h-ave a ch-ch chair” because you would never talk like that. So, for him, the beauty of the melody should come from it being a natural speaking sound. This essay draws a whole history back to 1000 BC of all these different composers for whom this was a really important thing, this sort of naturalism of speaking the text.
JF: The development of this band can analogously be traced in the music of two previous bands Alden were in, one of them you were also in. There are these two songs, one of them on The Unicorns’ record which is: “Let’s Get Known”, and then on the Clues record, what concludes it is“Let’s Get Strong”.
JT: Which was written at the same time. It was written as a response.
JF: And now, Alden doesn’t even seem to need to make the statement, “Let’s Get Strong”. This band is just strong. It’s here, it’s ready to go, and there’s no need to comment on it because this is just what it is. I find that a rewarding way to look at it because this is the fruition of what’s been happening for years between you two. So in a sense The Unicorns is related to this band because it led to this destination for you guys. Not necessarily a final one, obviously, this is a continuous development, but maybe a more comfortable place for you both to rest--- where you can feel personally, spiritually, and musically fulfilled at the same time.
JT: Yeah. Personally, if I look at my own values and priorities in music, The Unicorns was this band--- the first band where I got nationally then internationally recognized and we could basically tour as much as we wanted to and people went and bought the record in large numbers. We were just thrown into it. None of us expected that sort of thing. So there are these three people who all have different desires and values that were important. And I think The Unicorns ultimately broke up as a result of the difference between “Let’s Get Known” and “Let’s Get Strong”. I think that pair of songs actually is really, really telling in terms of what’s important. I ended up going and playing in Islands because at that time, Alden didn’t want to play, he went and got a job doing something else and didn’t want to continue to be a professional musician and play in band like that and I very much did, even though Alden and I, I think, had a more complementary set of values about a lot of things at that point. And then Islands ended up going more in the direction of getting known than getting strong and I realized that I don’t even really like being known that much, when it comes down to it (laughs). I love playing music, and I love people, I love meeting people and getting to know people, and music has been an avenue to do that which I’m very, very grateful for, but it’s not important to me to be famous and be looked upon as someone who’s above anybody. Really, I’m the luckiest person to get to have the life I have and do the things that I do. It’s not like everyone else is lucky to have me doing this. I’m blessed with a wonderful opportunity for a life through this, and I feel like there is a concurrent responsibility: the fact that I get to do this means that I owe the world to do it in a way that helps it somehow.
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