Inside the leper colony: Biba Kopf interviews Diamanda Galás, The Wire 32, October 1986

Matters of life & death: Ian Penman interviews Diamanda Galás, The Wire 190/191, New Year 1999/2000

Some friends of mine in the early 1980s owned a copy of Diamanda Galás’s The Litanies Of Satan (originally Y Records, 1982, since reissued on the artist’s own label, Intravenal Sound Operations). We listened to it obsessively. With lyrics taken from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, it was a work that linked so much: poetry, experimental music, histories of radicalism. We identified it as a dangerous record, one that spoke of challenge and defiance. By the time I read Biba Kopf’s interview with Galás, some of the friends from those listening sessions were dead. Galás was one of the first musicians to respond to the HIV plague. What stood out for me in Kopf’s article was an insistence on the power of the word, of utterance, of witnessing, of howling at loss. The meaning of those early listenings to Litanies now fell into a galvanising sense and Galás now shone for me, with all the brightness of the black sun which Gerard de Nerval devised as an instantiation of melancholia. Years later, Ian Penman’s interview – he and Galás had water under the bridge – brought out the scope of Galás’s witnessing: not only the contemporary destructions wrought by HIV-Aids, but the continuing reverberations of the Armenian Genocide. By the time I got to speak to Galás myself (The Wire 435, May 2020), it was as Covid-19 girded the world. She was empathetic, funny, a person whose artistic vision continues to bear witness to so much that is bad in the world, and to value what is good. I wish I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 1986, though.

Inside the Dream Syndicate: Edwin Pouncey interviews John Cale, The Wire 206, April 2001

In 1993, I saw something I thought I’d never see – The Velvet Underground on stage on their reunion tour. It wasn’t so much the extreme weirdness of this event happening at all (I mean, an audience singing-a-long to “Heroin”), that made such an impact, as it was the layers of sound that John Cale’s viola made: his drones had thorns embedded in them. (Edwin Pouncey’s phrase, “the roar of the power drone”, has always stayed with me.) Pouncey’s interview with Cale added so much to what I knew – or thought I knew – about Cale, from VU days onwards. Talking about the pre-history of The VU, the tangles inside The Theatre Of Eternal Music and the creation of The Dream Syndicate, with Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise, not exactly as a resolution to a creative cul de sac, as much as an attempt to push the form of multimedia work, was a revelation. Likewise, the three CDs of New York In The 1960s (Table Of The Elements), using material drawn from Cale’s own archive, are testament to a continuous practice of restlessness.

Into the labyrinth: Dan Warburton interviews Éliane Radigue, The Wire 260, October 2005

Invisible Jukebox: Éliane Radigue tested by Dan Warburton, The Wire 312, February 2010

The Primer: Éliane Radigue, by Julian Cowley, The Wire 456, February 2022

Dan Warburton’s interview with Éliane Radigue is among the first English-language ones conducted, and he covers the ground necessary to understand her work. That he starts the piece describing a diffusion of Ψ 847 forms an immediate link to the work’s first review, in which the fascinated composer Tom Johnson described the sensation of the sounds oozing out of the walls of The Kitchen in New York in 1973. Warburton caught Radigue on a cusp: the movement from electronic to the pure acoustic composition of the OCCAM (2011 onwards) series. The circumstances of the interview had been the recent release of Radigue’s Elemental II created for bassist Kasper T Toeplitz (Recordings Of Sleaze Art). Elemental II was also the turning point in which Radigue began to work with other musicians. (Songs Of Milarepa, from 1983, which features Radigue’s ARP 2500 and the voices of Robert Ashley and Lama Kunga Rinpoche, is something of an outlier.) Julian Cowley’s meticulous Primer is essential reading for understanding the themes and threads of Radigue’s music. For anyone tempted to think of Radigue’s slowly revealing music as austere, they need only to read Warburton’s Invisible Jukebox session with the composer in which she remembers dancing to New Orleans jazz just after the Second World War and listening to the “inimitable” Juliette Greco.

Misshapen identities: Philip Clark interviews Jennifer Walshe, The Wire 321, November 2010

In 2009, I went to Dublin to review a group show, Grúpat, put together by nine artists who were all incarnations of the composer Jennifer Walshe, then very much in her prankster period. Its attention to detail included much dressing up, invented instruments and a fake Wire review, written by Johnathan Vanns who, yes, was also Walshe. Grúpat was such an overdetermined ecstasy of delight that I can only think that Philip Clark had an absolute riot interviewing Walshe. True, her scale of works was increasing by the time they met – operas with real people, rather than the Barbie dolls of XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! (2003) – but Walshe’s roving, explosive imagination was captured so well by Clark, who situated the work within new music, literature and popular culture. No mean feat.

Spirit of Eden revisited: David Keenan interviews Shirley Collins, The Wire 393, November 2016

This was a gut-wrenching piece. David Keenan went down to Sussex to meet the folk legend, Shirley Collins, who had released her first album, Lodestar (Domino), in 38 years. Why so long? Collins had lost her voice (she was later diagnosed with dysphonia) after the trauma of being abandoned by her then-husband, whose name I am still too angry to mention. In this piece, Collins traces her path back to music, while Keenan, in his evocations of the way landscapes are so often entwined with folk song, makes it clear that the music was always hers for the taking, that it never really left her. There’s deep history here.

New day rising: Emily Pothast interviews Phew, The Wire 460, June 2022

I suppose that it was the Covid-19 pandemic that finally shifted so many interviews from in person to mediated sessions via Zoom and Skype (etc), but sometimes the format fits the occasion so well. Emily Pothast’s encounter with Phew is one of these occasions. Phew’s album New Decade (Mute) had been released the year before and it was clear that the artist, speaking from her home in Japan, was thinking about temporalities, in her case a strange disjunction between the present and the future. In it, Phew speaks of the comfort of hearing broadcasters on national media delivering terrible news with utter calm. (She was referencing two calamities – the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdown – in 2011.) It was as if the box – the radio, the TV, the Zoom interface – became a space in which the even the awful stuff in the world could be contained and managed. Phew makes the important point that maybe this isn’t a good idea: any kind of sound delivery, music or spoken word, that pulls the listener into a trance state needed to be studied carefully. Those words, first read in 2022, are ones I still think about.

Anger is an energy: Joy Press interviews Le Tigre, The Wire 215, January 2002

Where Riot Grrl meets “feminist-flavoured electropunk”: Joy Press’s feature on one pathway opened up by the explosive power of the first Riot Grrls (Bikini Kill et al) still makes for important reading. To what extent would the medium by the message? Is fall-out inevitable? Can we – and should we – dance to the revolution? Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman (who replaced Sadie Benning) and JD Samson – the trio who made up Le Tigre were media savvy and good with slogans, in a way that recalled the Guerrilla Girls, fun and, most importantly, in touch with electronic beat-making that demonstrated that a DIY electro-music culture wasn’t only the preserve of the boys. It’s often forgotten that music-making and all its attendant activities do not exist in a vacuum: the importance of community comes out loud and clear in this interview. At the time, we were probably thinking feminist and queer communities. With a greater understanding of intersectional communities these days, alongside a desire for social justice, it’ll be interesting to see how Le Tigre now embrace the bigger picture. With a summer tour coming up this year – the band’s first gigs in 18 years – there’s a chance to hear how they’ve developed the pounding of those tiger feet.

Breaking through: David Keenan interviews Einstürzende Neubauten, The Wire 240, February 2004

This is the album that actor Cate Blanchett has recently been hymning, and, honestly, you can’t fault her. Silence Is Sexy (Mute), the release of which was David Keenan’s opportunity to visit Neubauten in a bone-cold Berlin, is a gloriously melancholic device. Blixa Bargeld talks about its opening work, “Ich Gehe Jetzt” (“I’m Leaving Now”) as offering a laconic view as to what was happening to their hometown, this time being torn apart not by Neubauten’s jack-jammers, but, rather, by the architects in the employ of global brands. Neubauten have always been a band steeped in history – think of the layers of ground they dig through like archaeological strata, full of meaning, of sound and voices – and they were appalled at how post-unification developers in the city were simultaneously motived by commerce even as they were terrified of what their building would unearth. The obvious example is Hitler’s bunker, close to Potsdamer Platz: it was located and concreted over in double-quick time. Neubauten’s gaze over this album seems long, weary and very ancient. Even the photos of the band members standing amid scenes of semi-dereliction make them seem like spirits of the place, very watchful.

Tongue twister: Keith Moliné interviews AGF, The Wire 267, May 2006

What comes across so well in this interview is that Antye Greie – known to the world as AGF – discovered her own ways of doing things. She speaks of herself as a “poemproducer” – a powerful phrase – that underlines her own discoveries of cut-up poetry, sound poets and the like. It was a chance encounter with The Plastic Ono Band that made Greie, living in what was then East Germany, realise that music could be subversive. Given that one of the usual outlets for East German youth of her age was political song (paeans to reinforcing the country’s political system), it took her a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall to reorientate herself into a different kind of politics. Reading back now, AGF’s project with the Ukrainian laptopper Kateryna Zavoloka (Nature Never Produces The Same Beat Twice) feels more poignant than in 2006. At the time, Greie was thinking about the natural world (she describes the album as “techno-like trees”), but also fear, and violence, but her fears about the reverberative power of fear itself feels prescient, especially with reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It feels apt that the article also details her delight and wonder at the figure and the work of Éliane Radigue, with whom she worked, as a member of The Lappetites, in 2005’s Before The Libretto (Quecksilber). Here were two composers coming to the art and craft of composition very much their own ways.

Chains of the heart: Daniel Spicer interviews Matana Roberts, The Wire 356, October 2013

“It’s rather a precarious time to be an American artist,” Matana Roberts says at the head of Daniel Spicer’s interview with the composer/saxophonist/vocalist. Hindsight allows us the knowledge that she was speaking when Obama was still president; things were about to get a lot, lot worse. Roberts introduces her multi-layered Coin Coin project (it started in 2011): planned in 12 parts, it rightly puts African-American history, music-making, presence, at the heart of what the US is. Coin Coin is the sobriquet of Marie Thérèse Metoyer (1742-1816), a Black woman born into slavery (her freedom was bought in 1778) and who later developed a business and founded a community in Louisiana. For Roberts, the figure of Coin Coin is a way of taking up a thread that she weaves through history to the present day. If you plucked this thread, it would thrum with so much – the historical declamations and poetry of griots, the Black carnival, jazz, and always the resonances of that terrible legacy of racist violence: in Roberts’s composition and performances, this becomes many things: a witnessing, as well as a great cry of survival.

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