Friday, August 1, 2014

[Interview 181] Elizabeth Veldon


q.
I must have counted over 200 pieces of music you have up on your Bandcamp right now! Do you know the exact number?
a.
no but I can check…three hundred and fourteen and that’s only on my own bandcamp, there are also the works on other labels, the collaborations on black circle, the work under other people’s names and works lost for various reasons. I’d guess about three hundred and fifty or so solo releases and possibly fifty or sixty split releases.
I make allot of music.
Q
How would someone such as me or just finding out about you today- right at this very moment- go about listening to your music? Where to begin?
A
I’ve been asked this before and I’ve always said to people that if they tell me what they’ve heard and liked then I can suggest other releases. There are also thematic concerns in my work so if you want to concentrate on, say, sexuality and gender there are releases specifically about that or releases about the shoah, improvised piano pieces, landscape pieces and so on.
In the end I’d have to admit that my discography is so large that you would probably be best to simply dive in and sample anything you like the look of.
q.
And your music is constant in the sense that you’re still making it, so that means that even if someone was to listen to everything then there would always be new bits and pieces coming in.
a.
yes, my music is always in a state of being created, coming into being or…no I don’t think that’s the correct way of describing it.
I often feel like I am not creating but rediscovering things, unearthing music that has always existed, connections that where always there but had simply gone un noticed such as when I connected a passage from walter benjaman and Jacob bronowski in ‘three pieces for ghosts’
For me those connections where not mine, they where there for anyone to see but I just uncovered them in the same way that I uncover sounds through a process of improvisation.
The woman who runs caladonia books in Glasgow (a plug for my favorite antiquarian bookstore there) said that I make music in the same way that a poet may make a poem in that I take the sensory and emotional experience of life as it’s lived and create art from it in a direct and reactionary way.
Q
Has Bandcamp ever contacted you to inform you that you have more music posted than any other artist on there? Because I’ve seen some pretty extensive catalogues, but I think yours is the biggest.
a.
no but once, when I was having problems with the bandcamp for black circle, I contacted bandcamp to resolve it and when I got an email back it ended with them saying something along the lines of ‘there are allot of releases on here’
q.
So realistically though, no one who just started listening now would probably ever be able to catch up with your music, huh?
a.
I don’t think they could but I wouldn’t be interested in directing a listener, I’d rather they made their own way through my discography and found odd and interesting connections of their own or had their own emotional or intellectual response to the work.

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