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Interview with Ramin Keene - 10/11/2004

Rick: How did you get started making music?

Ramin: Well, I properly started doing my own stuff in my teens, playing the guitar in bands, the usual typical stuff. But I got pretty bored of the experience of being in bands pretty quick.

"Stillborn" was the most successful. It was angsty miserable teenage grungey metal, three guitarists all taking solos and stuff. Terrible! Then later, with a few of the same characters, things got a bit more serious. By the end it was all getting a bit like "Nickleback" or something horrifying like that. Time to jump ship. I think some of them are still floating around London doing stuff. God knows what they are called now.

My older brother was releasing drum and bass records in the early 90s under the name "Special K," so there was an Akai S3000 and Yamaha DX11 gathering dust since he got married and his wife exorcised all his equipment from the house. So I started messing with those and just kept going.

Did you go on to buy lots of additional hardware gear?

I picked up a few things. I got one of those Roland Variphrase samplers when they dropped in price, but shifted it as soon as I got Reaktor. I've got a Novation synth sitting here as well which I never use. The Akai sampler really was it for me for a while. Spending days editing keygroups. Slicing things up. It was silly how long things took really but incredibly satisfying when you got it all done and things were working. Same as building Reaktor ensembles now I suppose.

Did you study music?

No, I'm self taught. I took trumpet lessons when I was young, and played in youth orchestras, but that seems like many lifetimes ago; I'd actually forgotten I did all that. I had a few guitar lessons, but the people you could actually seek out to teach didn't really know much themselves. Once you start messing around with things there are so many directions to go off in. I was never really interested in learning songs.

What kind of music do you make?

Hahahaha ... The stuff on Reaktions.com is the results of a particular train of thought I was following for a while that I'm pretty much getting over now. Looking around at different things and trying to take bits from them aesthetically.

Why did you "get over" this?

I just haven't been getting the satisfaction from my own work as I was. I feel a bit unchallenged by working how I had been. It feels a bit easy, or like I am repeating myself. It's like anything: You have to keep moving forward.

I wasn't really trying to produce anything in a genre, or reference anything. Just making what I wanted to hear. It wasn't really intended for anyone else. I'd be surprised if anyone could enjoy listening to any of it, it's such a subjective train of thought I think, it's kind of unaccommodating and inaccessible. And aims to be I think.

Well, there are *some* people who definitely want to listen ... Like me. :-) What instruments (software, hardware) do you use?

Well, I still dig out the DX11 every now and then. But I'm happy a loose MIDI cable hasn't bothered me for a long time. Other than that, all software. Anything I can get my hands on. Though I'm really into MAX/MSP at the moment.

I use Logic to put everything together and mix. But since switching to OSX something just doesn't seem right about it. Well, many little things. Scrolling causes all graphics to disappear or freeze so it's easy to get lost in your arrangement and it makes it difficult to work really fast. Absynth is nice for getting big DX-style metallic sounds, though there is an effect on there that"s really easy to overuse so I try to steer clear. Absynth has its "sound." It seems quite distinctive.

The Mothership

Who are your main musical influences, heroes?

There's lots really. Electronic stuff, there's a guy called Errorsmith, his second record Errorsmith 2 was totally where it was at for me for a while. Elastic techno. I saw him do a live set in Berlin in about 2001; he was using Reaktor. I went and bought it as soon as I could.

I'm listening right now. Pretty cool ... Very low-tech and quite simple in an odd, interesting way.

Which one are you listening to? Errorsmith 2? That"s the one!

Twerk is another guy. His album 'Now I'm Rendered Useless' on Force, Inc. Algorithmic techno. Amazing sounds. Hearing that was like "What the ****** ?!"

Yes! I'm a Twerk fan too.

The White Noise - An Electric Storm. An old psychedelic album I know very little about. I think it's something to do with Delia Derbyshire, the BBC radiophonic orchestra though I'm not sure. Me and a friend of mine were handed an old cassette of it by a family friend when she realised we were starting to "experiment" if you know what I mean.

Squarepusher's "Go Plastic" was also a big one. Very big.

A bit too metronomic for my taste ... But he's a virtuoso.

Well, I've always been quite impressed by virtuosity. I have a good collection of neo-classical heavy metal guitar solos, quite like my "fusion" as well.

Then there's obvious stuff like Stockhausen, late 50s-60 experimental academic stuff. I have a few recordings by Daria Segemen and Bulent Arel which are probably some of my favorite stuff.

How do you feel about the current state of popular (as opposed to academic) electronic music? Does it excite you?

I think there's a lot of good stuff going on in popular electronic music. And some of the electronics happening in pop music is pretty interesting too. Brandy's "What About Us" from a couple of years ago. I'm sure Madonna had a time stretch/morph on one track on that American Life album, which she had her techs pulling off in real time on her tour too.

Bjork, of course. And some of Britney Spears' arrangements are top-notch.

I think there is a general idea in the experimental scene that things are somewhat more advanced or progressive, which isn't always true. People take this stance in dismissing club tracks, I guess because of their structure, maybe also because of the tools they are using. But you've gotta respect that they serve a function beyond being unconventional or progressive or technically complicated.

Could you talk about this a little more? The experimental vs. club issue and where you stand on it ...

Well, for people like me there isn't really much of a division. I came to experimental stuff through techno, and for a while really didn't realize how far away from it I was getting. I'd be just as unhappy in a club hearing a stupid loop go on forever, as I would be standing in a space watching someone rewinding cassettes through a delay pedal. I've done both.

Doing sound collage or electro-acoustic sounding stuff seems distinctly retro in 2004. At least to me.

What *doesn't* sound retro? What sounds cutting-edge?

Albums from the 50s-60"s ... :-) No, I don't think any one thing can be grouped as cutting edge. In any genre or style there will be events which happen for whatever reason that are cutting edge. Like there isn't one artist or style for me that is continually cutting edge. You might do something really forward thinking, then whatever was the cause of you pulling it off is pretty much long gone by the time you may have realized you've done something worthwhile.

I actually played someone those Daria Segemen recordings recently and they said "How old is this?" When I told them they said "That's so sad ... the sound hasn't advanced at all since Segemen, apart from the recording quality." There's something in that! Definitely.

That suggests that the "cosmetics" are improving (recording quality), but not the essence (music). What do you think?

This is someone who would classify things as sound effects and not really music. So, I dunno ... it's probably more a criticism of my work than experimental sound as a whole. I think it's easy to level criticism like that at experimental work and make it an issue because it is self conscious about being at the forefront. You wouldn't say "You're still using the same type of guitar you were using in 1959, how sad!” (Well, you might.) But because the paradigms of experimental music are (arguably) undefined, it's easy to criticize it where you might justify something else being questioned from that angle by saying "Yeah, but it's the standard I-IV-V blues progression" even though that hasn't really progressed.

Do you have any musical goals, a personal mission statement? Where are you headed?

I've been messing around with Flash and Actionscript, and some motion graphics recently. I'm quite interested in using Flash and, to an extent, the Internet as a vehicle for my stuff. I've realised that a lot of what i've been doing has been the result of a creative tangent that really only makes sense to me. I kind of want to have some kind of audience (haha). I've sort of felt that adding a visual element to what I'm making might make it more penetrable and maybe illustrate the way I'm seeing sound in my own mind and what I'm getting from putting things together as I do. Also, i've really gone off live performance, or having pieces playing on headphones on a wall in a gallery. I like the way a web application could engage on a one-to-one level, rather than bombarding a room of people trying to socialize with this stuff.

I've also been messing around with multispeaker diffusion. They have just built an 8- speaker system at college, which is really fun. I want play with that more, but I intend to go towards using dvds as the playback medium, with 5.1 sound rather than presenting things under the guise of being a "concert." I love those THX openings on Lucasarts dvds. I want to aim for that level of "quality" if you could consider it that.

And, finally, any special notes on your Reaktions.com pieces ... things to listen for, insider info? A guide to the aesthetic of Ramin Keene?

Well, there is a lot of use of the human voice in those pieces, maybe more so than might be apparent at first. A lot of work came out of a year or so of permutations of the same collection of sounds which began as a series of interviews for a vocal piece I did with a friend.

I feel quite aggressive when making pieces ... when things are going well you feel that confidence. Maybe aggressive isn't the right word. But I imagine it like sonic gymnastics or something. Fitness. Like the clusters of sounds are hovering, building, then suddenly coming together in an overpowering burst of precision, just for a moment, then falling apart again. Like if you listen to Bitches Brew —

One of my all-time favorite "jazz" albums!

— all the musicians are following something that isn't really audible, but you can definitely feel it's there, and there are short moments when they come together, just for a bar or so then fall back again. Precision. Execution.

You can find Ramin's pieces, web site URL, and email address on his Reaktions.com home page.