James McKeown: Hawksmoor’s kosmische hauntology

Spotlight on James McEwen and Hawksmore

LP: I can already tell we're going to have a nice conversation. Anybody that sits in front of that many books is all right. I like that.

James McKeown: Yeah, it's not just a wallpaper. They are real books.

LP: Oh, it's not just a Zoom background.

James McKeown: Yeah, exactly. Genuine books.

LP: Amazing. So I have spent a lot of the last few hours in particular, but the last few days immersed in your new album.

James McKeown: Oh, amazing. Great.

Influence of Minimalist Music

LP: It's interesting, James because your arrival in my Spotify feed coincided with me reading a recent book about the history of minimalism in music. The authors describe the book as a revisionist history because they are contextualizing the movement beyond just Terry Reilly, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. And I wonder, do you think of yourself within that lineage? How do you think of the minimalists in general?

James McKeown: Terry Reilly is a huge influence. I love Terry Reilly. Do I consider myself part of that canon? I'm not sure I would go that far. My ego will keep me in check there. But in terms of their influence, yeah, absolutely.

Terry Riley has been a huge influence. I've seen "In C" performed a number of times by different incarnations of symphony orchestras. Adrian Utley from Portishead did a guitar version of "In C." 

Then, about three years ago, I got to see Terry Riley. And that was fantastic. That was an amazing experience. And I really wanted to go because I thought, bless the guy, he's in his eighties now, but he may not tour again. And I saw a venue called St. George's in Bristol, which is a lovely kind of converted church concert hall. So, acoustically, it was fantastic. It was just the right ambiance. He was playing with his son, Gyan Riley. So immediately, there was this symbiotic relationship between them. And it was fantastic. It was a spiritual experience. I can go as far as to say that. He was predominantly playing piano. His son was on guitar, electric, but very minimal and melodic. Terry Riley's piano playing was an amazing thing, really, because it was probably less like the kind of minimalism that we'd associate with in terms of a performance like "In C" or something like that. How would I describe it? Bluesy ragtime, jazz, and then from that into a kind of Eastern spiritual. So it was this fantastic blend of sensibilities, and it was a really profound experience. It's one that I'll always remember in terms of a live performance. 

So yeah, absolutely. However, Terry Riley is a touch point specifically. Philip Glass, as well. I love the solo piano album. That's my favorite of his. It is, again, getting into that kind of meditative, repetitive, cyclical kind of music. But yeah, I'm interested in that whole genre. So yeah, it absolutely feeds into what I do.

Musical Evolution and Journey

LP: What was your path or musical evolution that brought you into the world of electronic music? And I specifically ask that because from what I've read and from what I can hear, there are definitely multiple strands or traditions that unite in your music. I've watched some of your social media, so it's clear that you also come from a rock canon. Yeah. I am very curious about what the 15-year-old James was and how that young man's musical interest led to the James of today.

James McKeown: Yeah. Okay. That's a potted history. Yeah. I started playing guitar, as many people do in their early teens. So, guitar was my way in. Even before that, my sort of generic touchstones were heavy metal, things I could grasp onto.

In fact, to go back even further than that, one of the first things I experienced was my parent's record collection, or what was left of that, finding that as a way in. Music like John Williams, There was an album called The Height Below, which was very much guitar-based. It was the theme from The Deer Hunter as well; that was on there.

And I was seeing things like the cover of, as a child really, seeing things like the cover of King Crimson's Court of the Crimson King, and being scared silly, just as a child seeing that image. But then later, yeah, so then move on, and then around the age of sort of 12, 13, something like that, I started to take out cassettes from my local library, and that became my kind of gateway into just exploring type of music.

Yeah, so as I say, then the first things I probably would have gotten into were heavy metal sort of thing, Motörhead, that kind of thing. Again, more as a kid just looking at the cover kind of thing. One of the things I got into around that age was seeing Pink Floyd's Delicate Sound of Thunder on TV, recording that on a Betamax cassette, and watching that back on my VCR. I describe Pink Floyd as like my football team if you like. They're the one band I've always loved, regardless of how corny they got as they evolved. There are elements in all of their trajectory that I enjoy. 

And then, yeah, getting into playing guitar, then we get into the time of kind of early 90s, kind of grunge, pixies, stuff like that were bands that I was into and started a couple of bands, garage bands kind of thing, I guess you would call it just guitar and bass things. 

But around that same time, I got interested in four-track recording. That became much more of an avenue for me. I was quite introverted, and that really appealed to me, the fact that I could just put on some headphones, track some guitar, and then noodle away over the top of it and get lost in that. And then I started writing songs and stuff, made my own cassettes and sounds out of little things. 

Nothing then really developed through my 20s. It's more because of my kind of circumstances that I had children when I was very young. So my 20s and early 30s were taken up with that kind of thing. And obviously just sustaining a career, that kind of stuff. Then, through a change of life circumstances, I went through a divorce and stuff. I won't go into my life too much, but it became a situation where I had some more free time, and I could look at starting a band again.

So, I started meeting up with people on the local scene and having some jams with them over the years that evolved into a band. Initially, that was an instrumental thing to begin with. It was quite heavy, an almost rocky psychedelia thing. And then we had a change of drummer and stuff, and they were much more into Kraftwerk and things like that. I've always been aware of that kind of music because I've always been interested in it. Kraftwerk was a band that I was really into from an early age, more because my brother was really into hip hop. And I was hearing "Planet Rock," Afrika Bambaataa, and stuff like that, sampling Kraftwerk. It's a weird synergy between this stuff because I was getting it from that direction, and this is pre-internet. 

I'm sorry, I'm jumping about the timeline a little bit, but if we go back to the mid-90s pre-internet, I was reading kind of things like Mojo Magazine, that sort of thing, because that was where you find out about that kind of music, right? Because there were few other places, and through that, I'd read, I'd find out about, oh, this is a great book you can get called Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler. So I got a copy of that, and that became like a, again, a kind of gateway drug into Krautrock, kosmische music, of which you've got Kraftwerk at one end, and then you've got Neu and Harmonia and Cluster at the other end, that kind of thing.

There's an electronic element to all of that stuff. Now, we go back, sorry, jump, as I say, jumping around the timeline. But if we go back to 2010, around that time, and forming this band, we then got a female singer, and we evolved into this band, which was called Hi Fiction Science. It's not a great name, but it is what it is, right?

LP: We cannot all be held to account for our old band names. (laughter)

James McKeown: Exactly. And then you look at all the band names, and you think, does it really matter? None of them are great, are they, when you analyze them? So we worked together, but all had full-time jobs. So this was like a side hustle thing. But one that I started to take more and more seriously. I really wanted to make it. I felt what we were doing was pretty good, but I wonder if anyone got it. Our rhythm section was very much post-punk influenced. I'm coming from my Floyd, psychedelia, Krautrock vibe. We then got a guy in to play some keys. We got a female singer that sounded like she was coming from the Fairport Convention. So we got this weird mishmash of ideas. And some of it coalesced and worked.

LP: It all sounds very English. (laughter)

James McKeown: But yeah, exactly. And it's maybe a bit of a hard sell. What do you sound like? We sound like blah, blah, blah. And it's okay. Yeah, so we did some stuff. We did a couple of albums, and by our second album, we managed to get signed to Cherry Red. We felt at that stage, we felt, or I certainly felt, like we'd won the lottery. I thought, this is it. We've made it. We're going to be rock stars. The reality then kicked in that, actually, it's not really like that. 

We got nominated for a prog magazine award, which was a funny thing because we didn't feel that we fit with that sort of genre as such, but the label was very much of that oeuvre. And so I went to this award ceremony and met loads of prog luminaries, and it was a great time. It makes for a great anecdote, sharing a table with Peter Gabriel and all these people. It was like, wow, rock royalty. And then we did one more album after that, but the label didn't want to know because we'd not really sold anything. That's the potted history of where I came from.

Now, towards the end of that, I'd invested some money in a Moog and then started to explore if we could bring that into our sound. I was really just feeling my way into it at that stage. I started to play with that more and more on my own, layering stuff up. At that time, I was and am really interested in psychogeography—authors like Iain Sinclair and people like that. I'd read some bits and pieces of Iain Sinclair's work, but I'd specifically read this book called Lud Heat, which is about his time as a gardener in London in the 70s. He's a kind of nascent author at that stage, an aspiring author, but is meanwhile working in these gardens in London, churchyards and things like that. It's a diary of his time doing that.

Exploring the Hawksmoor Churches

James McKeown: What he starts to explore is this kind of cartographic connection between the Hawksmoor churches in London. And purportedly, if you look at the six churches and draw lines between them, you end up with a pentagram.

Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches were seen as very esoteric and not very Christian because they used lots of interesting kinds of motifs from Egyptian architecture and things like that. I just became fascinated by that. From there, I'd read Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor novel, which was loosely based on that Iain Sinclair book.

And I just thought, yeah, wouldn't it be great to walk around those churches and go and experience that? So I went and spent a day in London doing that. And if you ever do that, it turns out they're quite far apart. So it's quite a long walk. So I did as many as I could and hopped on the tubes and stuff.

But yeah, I then wanted to take that experience and produce an imaginary soundtrack to that. So I came up with some ideas, and they were all based around the Moog generating all of the sounds of the rhythms, the kind of textural elements. I played some live bass on it, and that basically became the first Hawksmoor album. It was a one-off standalone thing, or so I thought at that time. And so that's how I started that journey into more electronica.

LP: What did you think you were going to get, and what did you actually get from walking the grounds themselves? What was that experience about for you?

James McKeown: As I say, I'm interested in psychogeography and this idea of kind of flaneurs that kind of draw lines on a map and then follow this to see where it will go, where it will take you, that kind of thing.

That was an idea that developed from Guy Debord and the Situationists. It was partly to do with that. It was partly just to have a day getting lost in London, finding my way around. But also to evoke what that feeling would be like to experience those buildings. Yeah, I don't know, really, to try and take that emotion, that feeling, and translate that into music in some way, not in some grandiose kind of composition way, more just sitting down, coming up with some sounds, but having that in the back of my mind as a catalyst, really. Nothing more than that, but just as a way in. And then, I suppose you could say I retrofitted it because I then put the names of those churches to the tracks, but imagined, okay, this one sounds like it could reflect St. Anne's Limehouse because it, I can picture that, and it gives me that kind of feeling of this landscape kind of thing. That was the connection, really.

Interests in Occult and Sacred Geometry

LP: Interesting, because I had in my notes to ask you about how and if you had interests or influence from the occult and sacred geometry. There was that element in what was happening here. You didn't use those exact words. But certainly, I'm familiar with Alan Moore and the From Hell work, so I wasn't sure which angle you came to Hawksmoor from, and then where in that sort of cultural stew did you bounce around? And how far into what I'll call the non-academic esoteric do your interests go?

James McKeown: Yeah, okay, Alan Moore specifically and From Hell, and that, I wasn't really aware of that at the time. I was aware of Alan Moore, but From Hell was one that I'd not come across. So it was purely through Iain Sinclair, that route into it.

And then subsequently, I found all this other stuff about that I was not the first to tap into this Hawksmoor stuff by any means. That became very apparent, but the occult side of things, yeah, I do have an interest in that for sure. I used to read a lot of stuff about Crowley and those kinds of things, but I'd probably look at it more from a sort of, I don't want to say, theological angle, but a more philosophical take on it now probably, rather than the ritual aspect of it and all that kind of stuff. That doesn't really appeal to me, but certainly isn't these esoteric avenues that you can go down with this stuff do fascinate me for sure.

LP: Yeah, there are two elements that I find particularly interesting. One is the actual manifestation of something, especially in a lot of the churches in England and throughout Scotland. There was some influence on many of the architects, who brought in all kinds of bizarre iconography and art. It's certainly the how and the why of that that might be controversial. Still, the fact of it is it's etched in stone in these buildings, literally. And that, to me, is so fascinating, whether it's a reflection of the local customs or whatever knowledge was being transmitted there is fascinating.

Tangentially related to that is, more broadly speaking, what is the knowledge transmission? What is the genesis point of that knowledge? Who in the distant past is speaking to us through churches through this iconography and other occult means? Certainly, Crowley, and he's not the only one, tried to make the connection back through the guilds and back to the Egyptians.

Regardless of how much weight or validity you want to ascribe to it, and certainly many of us have different beliefs and feelings about it, it's a fascinating thing to play with. It's fun.

James McKeown: Absolutely.

Intersection of Music and Academic Studies

LP: And I'll ask a two-part question. How do you think about these matters? Do you see them as part of a knowledge transmission? And secondly, how does all of this, especially your music, intersect with your academic studies? Are these sides of the same dice to you, or are they different parts of your life?

James McKeown: Okay, so back to the first part of the question. I think, in particular, when you talk about the churches, and obviously I'm very much focused on the British landscape, A lot of those churches and those sites are things that have been built on top of what were originally pagan sites or, they've been commandeered by Christianity effectively. So, that's interesting. 

And so going back further than that and looking behind that, things like I've always been fascinated again by sites like Stonehenge, obviously, but particularly close to where I live in Bristol, there's a number of places. So I'm not that far from Stonehenge, really. I'm about an hour away from Glastonbury Tor. We've got Avebury Stone Circle, and as you probably know, the UK is just riddled with things like this kind of landscape. And it's those more pagan, druid-type landscapes and artifacts that I find really fascinating. Why do those things exist? Why was that created? And then that does speak to me in terms of a connection back to just the land and the landscape.

And yeah, there is a need to preserve the land, really, rather than build all over it, despite what I've said about all the architecture and stuff. That's the way that stuff would speak to me. One of the other albums that I did was called Saturnalia, and that was based on, I called it kind of 'Pagantronica,' tongue in cheek, really. (laughter)

But those were, yeah, playing again, playing with those same kind of ideas by stone circles and Gnostic symbols and those kinds of things. So that's the way that that kind of stuff speaks to us. So, I'm currently doing an undergraduate degree in philosophy. So yeah, absolutely, those topics do feed into all of the music because they're part of a bigger, wider interest that I've developed. Philosophy is a broad subject, right? So, many different aspects affect our lives. In particular, the thing that I'm interested in is more about the philosophy of the mind and consciousness and the way that consciousness can be altered.

Those areas of philosophy really appeal to me. That said, I'm also tempering that with religious studies as well because I needed to choose a couple of different pathways to supplement the degree, and that was the closest that would not take me too far off on another tangent.

It is a related topic, and that's not from a theological angle. It's purely from a religious studies angle. So, it is important to look at different kinds of faiths, how they manifest themselves, and how they affect people's lives. And the sociological aspect of that, but absolutely all of those areas that I read about and delve into in some way, inform something that I try to do with the music.

It used to be that they would be more conceptual, maybe. And that became a kind of artistic safety net in some ways. Because it's a lot easier to not easier, but it's a neat way of putting everything together if you've got concepts. And you can hang stuff off of it, whether that's going back to the first Hawksmoor album. Conceptually, that's a nice thing to do.

Releasing Music without a Conceptual Umbrella

James McKeown: That said, with the latest album, Telepathic Heights, this was the first time that I'd got a collection of music together that I felt hung together well, worked as an album, as a listening experience, but didn't really have any connecting thread as such that unified it all and pulled it all together under a concept. And I was nervous about doing that. When I met with Soul Jazz that released it, when I spoke to them, they were like, don't worry about it. It doesn't need to have that.

LP: It means more to you than the listener. (laughter)

James McKeown: Yeah, exactly. If it's cool and it works. And that was the first time I was like, okay, wow, maybe that's true.

It was quite nervous for me to let go of that as I don't necessarily need a conceptual umbrella for this to all be under, but yeah, that was a leap artistically.

LP: I'm sorry to say I've never held a physical release of any of your projects in my hands. I've only heard the music streaming. And I wonder if it's in the physical packaging at all, certainly in the previous albums, but I wonder about the current one as well. Did you make artistic statements? Did you include anything about the concepts? Were you trying to set that expectation or that context for the listener? Or was it truly just in your head?

James McKeown: Okay, so going back to the very first self-titled album, yes, absolutely. I worked with a small label called Environmental Studies, and because it was going to be a very limited release, we really went to town on the way that it would be packaged.

It was only like 50 copies or something like that we released. It was a CD, but it was in a nice kind of cardboard case with a fold-out map, almost like a blueprint that showed those cartographic links between these whole small churches and stuff like that. So it was a really nicely packaged thing.

Expanding Audience Through Cassette Releases

James McKeown: I wanted to get a bigger kind of audience, really. I wanted to increase the reach of people hearing this music, and I started to realize, through social media, that there was this whole scene of people releasing stuff on cassettes.

LP: it's hard to believe cassettes have come back. (laughter)

James McKeown: Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's crazy, right? And I was like, "Is this really the format?" But I looked into a couple of labels that were doing this, and they'd grown with their fan base of people that collected this stuff specifically.

Artistic Collaboration with Eric Adrian Lee

James McKeown: There was this really good kind of American artist, a guy called Eric Adrian Lee, and a label called Spun Out of Control. Eric Lee did this amazing piece of artwork for Methods of Dreaming. Again, this was a conceptual piece based around a made-up story, but it was this idea about this academic that produced this document, a paper written about methods of dreaming. And this was the kind of music that would reflect the ways that you could invoke these kinds of dream states and that kind of stuff. So, that preamble and back story was given to the label. Eric Adrian Lee read that and used that as the inspiration for the artwork, and that came together really nicely.

Exploring Themes Through Album Concepts

James McKeown: I did another album with them. I did three, actually. Another one was called On Prescription. My wife had been through breast cancer, and this was an album that was really produced to raise money for a breast cancer charity, but also as a kind of artistic way of therapy for me, really, to creatively pour this out in some way. And I based the track titles around imaginary names for chemotherapy drugs. So again, the artwork reflected that. Then, the last album that I did with Spun Out Of Control was actually released on CD, which was the big step up that was called Head Coach. And again, that comes back to a psychogeographic concept.

Milton Keynes and the Influence of Town Planning on Music

James McKeown: So the town of Milton Keynes in the UK was actually created by the town planners, who were all basically a bunch of hippies in the early to mid-sixties. They were interested in the themes of the summer solstice, and all of those roads have got names like Midsomer Boulevard. They created it so the summer solstice would align with Midsomer Boulevard and stuff like that.

So you've got this very modern town but with these very kinds of arcane, pagan, druid themes that relate to it. So it was really interesting that it was in the mundane '60s, but if you look below the surface, there are these kinds of really esoteric things that pull it all together. And Head Coach was a nod to being your head coach—a poor play on words. And then, Saturnalia again was another album, that sort of Pagantronica theme.

Transition to Soul Jazz Records

James McKeown: But then this album, Telepathic Heights, I pretty much gave this all over wholesale to Soul Jazz Records to produced the sleeve to do everything really, because I was a big fan of them as a label because they'd released a number of Krautrock kosimiche compilations that I was really into.

Having talked to the label, they were like, let's try and do something that reflects the same kind of design that we used on those compilations. In a subtle way to make people think, okay, if you like this, you may like this. That Spotify mentality, really, But yeah, I was really surprised by it. It wasn't what I expected at all, but I was pleasantly surprised, yeah, and it's very striking. I love that album art. Yeah, really, bold colors pop out, and it does pop out, so yeah, it was, yeah, it was, as I say, not what I expected, but not something I would have come up with, so it was really interesting, actually.

Reflections on Album Art and Conceptual Integration

LP: That anecdote reflects the limits and the potential of some of the conceptual elements of what you're talking about because before speaking with you, my perception was that it was all part and parcel of one conceptual vision because reading about the importance of hauntology in your work, which I'd like to talk about with you, and how that aspect of music often draws on retrofuturism or retro design elements, it all feels very integrated conceptually. Soul Jazz is smart enough to be able to pull that together on their own, but it felt like a singular vision. It's very interesting for you to say you did not have this overriding concept for this album, yet it sounds integrated conceptually.

James McKeown: So there's a couple of things there. That's the fact that the music did hang together as not overtly conceptual, but as an album, as a listening experience, it worked together well. And then, based on those conversations that I had with Stuart from Soul Jazz, to actually explain where I was coming from in terms of my influences.

And the way those influences fed into what I wanted to produce, yet with my take on it, I am starting to develop, hopefully, a kind of signature sound. And yeah, so that conversation was enough, and straight away, Stuart said, "Yeah, I see us presenting this as a kind of pop art with a pop art vision." And that made me think of then, so then going back to the past, so thinking of some of these great sort of crack rock albums that present like that. So you've got things like the first couple of Neu albums, just with that really striking text, just Neu, that's it, almost written with a Sharpie kind of thing.

And then you've got bands like Cluster again, Harmonia, those very flat things, bright colors, almost jarring in a way, but that's the beauty of it. Yeah, that's become emblematic of that sort of sound and that sort of music. So yeah, it was a real skill of them to pull that together. As you say, they're clearly smart enough to be able to do that, but it was a combination of that, the music, and our conversations around what I wanted to represent. So yeah, it came together well.

LP: It's interesting you talk about the visual element in some of the early Krautrock because It is strikingly different from the English music of that time. I know it's not a perfect analogy, but the closest I think there was at that time in English music was probably early prog. The visual element of that music was muted, but I don't mean it like you've talked about Court of the Crimson King. That album cover isn't muted. It's a lot of bright colors, but it's almost like through a screen or a film; there was this thing. And certainly with the enigmatic work of Hipgnosis that influenced a lot of the early seventies album art. There was something always muted or subdued in the visual presentation of English music versus German and Western European. It's fascinating. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know if there's a thing there, but it strikes me.

James McKeown: I think you're right. It's muted as in, I think, going back to King Crimson, that's painterly, isn't it? In the way that it's presented, but the Hipgnosis stuff, they're reflecting surrealism, that sort of thing. But there's a kind of, there's a dour kind of Englishness to it, right? It is an English sort of melancholy, which you see in things like some of the Pink Floyd covers. They did that with Led Zeppelin, didn't they? Presence, that kind of thing. And then, like the Peter Gabriel album covers, they did as well. They're stylized, but there's a melancholy to it. And that style is instantly recognizable but different from some of the German music of that time. It's interesting.

I read this book. I forget the author now, but it's about Krautrock and the sort of evolution of Kraftwerk and the evolution of German music. And it's talking about the way that those German artists of that time needed to recreate a new, literally start again, right? Post-war, they needed to start again and create their own vision. A lot of that stuff was more about being able to do something positive. Positive, upbeat, this is new music, this is exciting, this is futuristic. Certainly the Kraftwerk stuff would tap into that as a way of asserting themselves with some distance from the atrocities of World War II, that kind of thing. That feeds into it.

But yeah, you're right. There's an absolute juxtaposition between those two types of artwork, for sure.

LP: I may know the book you're referring to. I forget the author's name as well. It was originally in German. It's a white book.

James McKeown: Yeah, here we go. Let's say it. Look, it's the book. Let's see. This one, right? (NOTE: he holds up Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte)

LP: Yeah, exactly. I read that last year. Yeah, it's a great book. I love actually where that book ends in terms of placing Kraftwerk and where they are now. It's essentially that I hadn't thought about how the albums are a completed body of work now, and what they do is they go around and present it, like that's what a Kraftwerk live show is or a Kraftwerk tour is a complete multimedia presentation of This museum piece, it's almost a retrospective. However, it's still alive because they update it and they upconvert the visuals, and it's a fixed body of work that they exist to present as authentically as possible. It's fascinating.

James McKeown: It is. Yeah. It's all you say. It's almost like an exhibition in some ways, isn't it? It's just this is the body of work, and this is what we present. I doubt there'll ever be any new music from Kraftwerk now that it's just Ralf Hütter left.

LP: Now, do you think they tour after he passes?

James McKeown: Do you know what? Sadly, they probably will, in this day and age. Not to denigrate that stuff, but Tangerine Dream is still going now, aren't they? And I don't think there are any original members left. I've yet to experience their new music. I mean, Soft Machine is like a million incarnations. There's an evolution there.

Gong too. Gong is still going now, right? It felt like they had Daevid Allen's blessing to do that. So that was slightly different, And that's the interesting thing then we've become, that's very much the music industry, right? The music business needs to continue to market this brand, this product, which I'm never really that comfortable with.

Obviously, I buy into it literally because I collect music and various things, but I don't know. It's always uncomfortable that there's that side of it that seems so juxtaposed with the artistic side. There's a game to play because you need to get your music out there, right? You want to get it on Spotify, but there's still this slightly uncomfortable crossover where the artistic and the commerce meet. It's always going to be that way.

LP: The challenge, I think of pop art in general, right? Some people confront that head-on and play with the line in a glib, upfront fashion. And other people have to live with a lot of ambivalence and uncertainty around pop and art. It's interesting though, James, because I struggle with a lot of those same issues, but I've arrived at a slightly different place, which is First of all, being a bit of a jazz fan, you and I could buy a ticket right now and see the Count Basie Orchestra. Or we could see the Charles Mingus Big Band. I don't know if that's wrong. I have no opinion. Is that right or wrong? I don't know enough about what Count Basie's intention was. I'm sure it's all learnable, but I don't know anything about the why of that.

But I'm fascinated with the notion of tribute bands. We mentioned Pink Floyd like I interviewed Nick Mason. He pays attention to what's going on to the point of being careful how they route their tours. It's how he chose to focus on that specific pre-Dark Side era. He was like, nobody's out peddling this music that I have to compete with, so I'm going to fill that market niche.

But I also, where I land is like, what happens five, ten years from now, whatever it is, the classic rock generation will be gone. Should nobody be able to see a Led Zeppelin concert ever again? I don't know. Or see those songs. And it would be interesting if a lot of those bands actually do what Broadway musicals do and license. 

Say I want to see the Houses of the Holy tour. There should be an official production with the stage set and the costumes. And I don't know the actual arrangements for that tour. I could see rock fans hating it. I could see rock fans loving it. But in a day and age where the Australian Pink Floyd plays arenas, more people might like it.

James McKeown: you're right. You might be onto something there.

The Future of Music in the Age of AI

James McKeown: And don't forget, we're just stepping into the realms of AI now.

LP: And the thing Abba's done?

James McKeown: Yeah, exactly. That could be the start of introducing this stuff to another generation. I don't know. Maybe it will because the industry will want a bit more bang for their buck, won't they?

LP: Well, and I don't want to see the music die. There are so many bands whose legacies are not tended well, who, in their day, were very important. I don't know. I guess I worry about those things too much, but

James McKeown: Hey, someone's got to do it, right?

LP: it also reminds me of your video for "Abstract Machines" and all that old virtual reality footage, which is another area. Virtual reality has a moment where it is retrofuturism. It almost never had its future.

James McKeown: Yeah, that's very true. So there's a crossover there. Actually, I've just recently read a book by an Australian philosopher called David Chalmers. He's now based in New York and is a professor there, and he's written an amazing book called Reality+. This deals with the concept that taps into virtual reality, but also one step further than that about simulations and this concept of, could we be living in a simulation? Now, this obviously is a bit hackneyed because it was done in the nineties with The Matrix. But they were basing that on this kind of science fiction thought experiment. And that's fascinating to me, these ideas of as AI progresses, we will be in a situation where potentially that stuff that seems actually quite corny at the moment when you put on some VR headset and see your hands in front of you, that's potentially going to become indistinguishable from reality. It's scary, but it's also fascinating. 

And so all of those things that you mentioned, maybe I can go and see Pink Floyd or whatever, or perhaps I can go to the Fillmore or something because It's going to be like that. It's going to be the same. That generation won't know any different kind of thing. It doesn't relate to music, but it's an interesting way that you could relive all of that stuff and relive many different lives. 

LP: Is that the end of culture? Do we stop creating at that point because we're so concerned with living in things we couldn't experience?

James McKeown: I don't think so. Again, it comes back to the way that the commercial aspect of that will market. There will always be a market for doing that kind of stuff. But equally, musicians and artists will want to embrace that stuff and create new things with it for sure. So no, I don't think that's the end of culture. It's the beginning of a new form of it. I think. I hope not, anyway.

LP: I've come around to the idea, and this is a fluid notion for me. So it's just today's take on it. But I think I'm coming around to the idea that especially as it relates to all these discussions with AI, putting aside the societal repercussions and the deep fakes and the very scary real things that it will do to manipulate people's understanding of the world around them and inability to distinguish between reality and falsehood.

As it relates to the arts, I'm coming around to the idea that it's only making the role of the artist more important. It may marginalize or trivialize the work of a certain type of creative function in the marketplace. Still, artists they become more valuable to our society because the human element becomes more vital. That noise, that imperfection that the human adds to it, will become more valuable.

James McKeown: I've played around with ideas of coming up with song titles, and you can put that into ChatGPT and say, I'm making an album about X subjects, and can you give me ten album track titles, and they're always very generic, and you can tell these are AI produced because they're so generic it's untrue. There's maybe one or two you think, oh, that's okay. But most of them are rubbish. At the moment, we're not there. But as that stuff gets better and better, yeah, it's going to be something that people can harness. But for sure, you're right. There's always going to be that need for that human imperfection.

But also, I think the role of any artist is to say, "This is the world I'm in right now. This is what I'm experiencing. And this is my take on it". It's going to be filtered through the human, right? And what comes out then is the art. And when it gets put through that kind of human filter, it's going to be full of imperfections or maybe more relatable, or I don't know.

I don't know. But there's definitely a role for the artist to be that filter for whatever is the new thing in culture, in technology, whatever.

LP: In these conversations I have with people, I keep saying that it's not chat GPT 3 that's interesting; it's GPT 6. That's what we need to be thinking about and talking about.

Compositional Process and Creative Inspiration

LP: I wanted to ask you about your compositional process. Do you make process music? Do you follow the rules, like when you sit down and say, "I'm feeling inspired right now? Today's a work day. I'm going to create." How does that start for you? Are you at a piano? Are you at a computer? Do you take out your Brian Eno cards?

James McKeown: I do crack out my Oblique Strategies, yeah, often. But I use those when I'm at an impasse, a creative impasse, because that's where they should be used, right? So yeah, I do that. And I credit, I often credit that on the albums that I use those. Because I think it's just a fascinating creative concept.

I work a full-time job as well. So, I don't have that luxury when I think today will be a composition day. It's usually about this time frame that I've got to do something. For many years, I was, I kicked against that and thought, this is really bad. My art's really marginalized, but I've come around to the idea that that short, sharp focus time that you get is a more valuable way of doing this because you've got to make it count, right?

So it depends, really. It can be anything. It can be a sound. That I've generated from, I don't know, just a noise. It could be something, a sound that I heard that I recorded on my phone. It could be anything. It might be more traditional that I sit down and start noodling on the guitar and, oh, okay, this sounds like quite a pleasant thing.

Maybe I could develop that in some way. Or if it's the more electronic side of things, then I'll often use the modular setup, using the Moogs, the Moog DFAM, and the Mother 32, and set up a patch with that. That will often suggest a rhythm or create a sequenced melody that then often grows into something, and sometimes that is the kind of framework and the starting point.

I then layer stuff on top of it, and occasionally, I'll live with that for a bit. Then, I may actually remove what I started with and continue with the layers that I've put on top. And so, actually, it may have started in one direction, but then it becomes something very different. Something very ambient or the other way around, something much more layered or stripped out. Or something that sounds almost very guitar-based and compositional, but it actually started with a very strict rhythmic modular track or bass line or something that I started with. So, in answer to that, yeah, it's varied. It depends.

LP: However you arrive there, I very much enjoy the output. Thank you so much for the wonderful work, and I appreciate you making time today.

James McKeown: No, not at all. My pleasure. I absolutely enjoyed it. Thank you.