Pablo Dali

'MORNING TONES' REVIEW
Bodyspace (May 2007)

by Miguel Arsenio

MA: Could you chronologically set the time that “Morning Tones” – both album and track - took you to arrange?

MR: I started writing the “Morning Tones” record in August 2005. At the beginning I didn’t have a label in mind to release it or a time frame to follow, it was more about experimentation and creating a record that would achieve what I set out to do. Prior to the recordings I had been working a lot with field recordings and my goal was to integrate the sounds around my home with acoustic instruments in an attempt to capture some of the feeling of time and space. I worked pretty quickly. I discovered early on that the best time for me to write these pieces was early in the morning. So I would get up at 5.30am each morning and record for an hour or so. By the end of mid October 2005 I had 4 demo mixes that I was happy with. One of these pieces was the “Morning Tones” track, but in a condensed version, without the improvised guitar intro. At that point I decided that it was time to look for a label interested in putting out this music. So I sent it to Apestaartje and a couple of other small labels in Japan and the UK. Around that time I was playing a number of local shows and had a small tour on the East Coast of Australia so the recording took a back step. The day after I got back from the tour I got an email from Apestaartje saying they wanted to release these pieces along with something new to complete the record. I set to work immediately using the same process in the hope of writing two more extended pieces to finish the record. At this time I added violin and accordion to the process. By mid January 2006 I had two new pieces finalised but the record was still a bit short. So I revisited the Morning Tones track by adding the guitar intro. I set a single microphone on the floor of a studio space on a hot summer’s morning, leaving the sound of the equipment, my breathing and outside noise in the background, to create a synthesis of all the ideas I had been working on across the record. Personally it felt like closure finishing the record like this.

MA: Which specific methods and software technics you tried not to repeat on this album after all you had explored with “Alluvial”?

MR: For me Alluvial was all about processing, using dsp to heavy manipulate acoustic sound sources. On Morning Tones I wanted the acoustic sounds to have space to breathe, and as the majority of the recordings were improvisations I was focused on retaining the feel of the originals without burying them under lots of effects. A lot of Alluvial was recorded in an acoustically designed space filled with a variety of instruments and different microphones. There was a long period of experimentation before the recording phase, working with different microphone placements and discovering the best methods of using the space. I had sat in the space, the basement of my old house, for nearly two years trying to create that record. At the time I didn’t recognise this, but that period was really important in my development as an electronic artist. But with Morning Tones I wanted to make a record that was less about the processing and technique and more about capturing a moment. It was just me in a small room, with all the instruments and one good microphone. I didn’t get bogged down, if things weren’t working I just left it and came back to it. That’s one positive from working first thing in the morning, if things weren’t working I left the house, went to work and didn’t think about music as my thoughts were absorbed by the days happenings.

MA:I like the feeling “Drift” gets with the co-production of Dave Miller. Did you involve any persons, through debate or taken tips, in the process of the “Morning Tones” track?

MR: The collaborations on Alluvial were fun. I learnt a lot from them. Dave and I have worked on about three or four collaborations over the past few years and I always learn something from him when we record. For me that’s what collaboration is all about, picking up different approaches from other artists and then applying it to you own sound. On Morning Tones it was purely solo, I didn’t involve any other artists. After Alluvial which had 4 collaborations on it, I was in a mind set where I wanted to focus on doing a release individually. Plus I don’t think any one would want to get up at 6am to do recording! Once the tracks were completed I would bounce them across to a few people whose views on music I appreciate. They gave me a lot of constructive feedback that I took on board.

MA: Just recently I though in perspective about how many Lawrence English albums can be observed from a temperature-related perspective. All became clearer with his recent record “For Varying Degrees of Winter”. In a similar way, both the “Morning Tones” track and album brought me to listen to your tracks as elements really affected and sensible to clarity and different shades of light. How exactly did the light aspect influence you in the process?

MR: This is a good question, as I have never really considered light as a direct influence, but now I think about it, the influence of light is probably sub-consciously always there. My pieces aren’t narrative, they don’t tell a story, but instead try to evoke a sense or feeling and when I was recording in the morning, the morning light had an influence. Living where I do makes me more receptive to the changes in natural light during the day and the shifts between the seasons. I live in a small coastal town, only about 200 people live there, its very close to the beach and isn’t build up like a city or suburb. You just become connected with the natural world when you live away from the urban environment.

MA: I know you provided Grain of Sound an exclusive track and some photos of your own to be included on their Sonic Scope Quaterly. Were those more close, in theme and time, to “Alluvial” or “Morning Tones”?

MR: The images I did for Grain of Sound where created around the time that I was completing Morning Tones. The goal of those images was to get a single colour and heavily process it using editing software, so in effect it was the same process that I used in recording Alluvial but on a visual level. In a way there is a naivety and impurity to those images. I don’t consider myself as a graphic designer, I am highly interested in the field, but consider myself as a novice. My industrial design work is very precise and concludes with a very functional object that must fulfil a particular need or want of the client. The Grain of Sound images contain errors made by the graphics editing program, but I didn’t want to correct them as I wanted evidence of the creative process to remain. It was a reaction to always working in a precise manner.

MA : This one gets a bit off the stream, but I can’t help ask you about how did the performance with Taylor Deupree go? I’m tremendously keen on his stuff. Is it utopical to expect a collaboration between you two?

MR: The show with Taylor went really well. My live sets are always changing, sometimes I use instruments, other times it just laptop processing. At the Deupree show I used a MIDI controller especially designed for Ableton Live for the first time. It was good to have hands-on control of the positioning of the sound within the quad speaker setup. I am a huge fan of Taylor’s work and it was an honour to play with him. It would be great to do a collaboration with him, but to be honest I don’t consider myself in the same league as him. He is an artist at the forefront of experimental electronic music, I don’t believe that I have arrived there yet, I still see room for improvement, particularly in my live sets.

MA: I’ve read about you adding sounds of your father playing violin. Did that bring more of an affectionate perspective to an otherwise more focused process?

MR:I find this amusing, Its funny how things get lost in communication on the internet and via emails. My father didn’t play violin on record, the truth is that I used my grandfathers violin from the 1930s to make the last track on the record Dissolve. I am not very good on the violin, it was the first time I had played it, so I just did single notes and tones which I edited using the laptop. On the other had my grandfather was a great player who studied composition and was invited to join the West Australian Orchestra, however war broke out and he didn’t ever return to playing in front of people. The story got mixed up when I told Apestaartje that I was using my grandfathers violin, next thing I see on their website that I was sampling my father playing. My father doesn’t play, but he has the most amazing collection of music, from jazz to rock to folk and new forms of electronic music. In fact he often discovers new electronic music before I do. Using the violin did lend a more affectionate feel to the recording process. I remember sitting in my room looking at the violin thinking, “What songs did he play on this thing”. I know that he used to play to the other airman at night times during the war, so it was a pretty powerful experience. I still have the violin at home, my wife and I want to get it restored.

MA: I find it quite logical that you mention early morning as the preferential time to work on “Morning Tones”, as it sometimes sounds if still getting its “muscles” (textures) warmed up and coordinated. Did you develop any methods in order to preserve ideas that came up during working hours or did you just trust the fact that the good ones would survive till next morning?

MR: I always have ideas during the daytime and during the Morning Tones recording process things were no different. I see my time out of the studio as time for self editing and contemplation. I would burn rough mixes of the tracks which would be then listened to at different points of the day. I was constantly listening to the pieces thinking “ I need another guitar part in there” or “ maybe I used remove some of the layers in that part”. Some of the field recording ideas came up during the daytime, just from the incidental sounds around my office and home.

MA: Can we expect any Pablo Dali activity soon?

MR: At this point I have no plans to release music under the Pablo Dali name. To me the Pablo Dali period was a transitional time for me and its associated with IDM and more structured beat orientated music. I have totally abandoned this approach. Now I am more interested in a more abstract and freeform approach. The last Pablo Dali release was the single California Grey on Perth’s Meupe label. I really love those tracks, they were the pinnacle of the Pablo Dali sound, I have tried to start writing more material like this but I always reach a dead end and get very frustrated.

MA: Have you been working on some new material?

MR: I have a new record, as yet untitled, being mastered at the moment. Its coming out on Meupe sometime this year. It sounds more like Alluvial than Morning Tones. The tracks are shorter, it definitely still deals with textures but maybe not as processed, it has a lot of live playing and features guest musicians. There is also another project that I have been working on with Shoeb Ahmad, a young musician from Canberra. It’s a completely acoustic record that was assembled using the computer. No effects other than EQ and compression were used. Each of us would record instrumental improvisations and then send them to one and other via FTP. We used a whole range of instruments from acoustic and electric guitars, a whole heap of percussion, piano, accordion and the trusty violin. We finished an albums worth of material in March and are now shopping around for labels to release it. The recording happened so quickly, it feels to me like the most natural record I have ever made, hard to believe when we were both sitting on opposite sides of the country when it was recorded.

MA : Favourite Taylor Deupree album and favourite Room 40 release?

MR : What are hard question!! All of Taylors records are great. Its hard to pick a favourite. I think I would have to pick Stil as it had a big influence on me when I first heard it. My favourite room40 releases are : Lawrence English – Ghost Towns, I love the fact it documents a space and how its is unprocessed, surely he was tempted to use DSP but he showed restraint. Frost – Steelwound and Rod Coopers – Friction have also had high rotation on my stereo over the years.

© www.pablodali.net 2005



'MORNING TONES' REVIEW Bodyspace (May 2007) by Miguel Arsenio MA: Could you chronologically set the time that “Morning Tones” – both album and track - took you to arrange? MR: I started writing the “Morning Tones” record in August 2005. At the beginning I didn’t have a label in mind to release it or a time frame to follow, it was more about experimentation and creating a record that would achieve what I set out to do. Prior to the recordings I had been working a lot with field recordings and my goal was to integrate the sounds around my home with acoustic instruments in an attempt to capture some of the feeling of time and space. I worked pretty quickly. I discovered early on that the best time for me to write these pieces was early in the morning. So I would get up at 5.30am each morning and record for an hour or so. By the end of mid October 2005 I had 4 demo mixes that I was happy with. One of these pieces was the “Morning Tones” track, but in a condensed version, without the improvised guitar intro. At that point I decided that it was time to look for a label interested in putting out this music. So I sent it to Apestaartje and a couple of other small labels in Japan and the UK. Around that time I was playing a number of local shows and had a small tour on the East Coast of Australia so the recording took a back step. The day after I got back from the tour I got an email from Apestaartje saying they wanted to release these pieces along with something new to complete the record. I set to work immediately using the same process in the hope of writing two more extended pieces to finish the record. At this time I added violin and accordion to the process. By mid January 2006 I had two new pieces finalised but the record was still a bit short. So I revisited the Morning Tones track by adding the guitar intro. I set a single microphone on the floor of a studio space on a hot summer’s morning, leaving the sound of the equipment, my breathing and outside noise in the background, to create a synthesis of all the ideas I had been working on across the record. Personally it felt like closure finishing the record like this. MA: Which specific methods and software technics you tried not to repeat on this album after all you had explored with “Alluvial”? MR: For me Alluvial was all about processing, using dsp to heavy manipulate acoustic sound sources. On Morning Tones I wanted the acoustic sounds to have space to breathe, and as the majority of the recordings were improvisations I was focused on retaining the feel of the originals without burying them under lots of effects. A lot of Alluvial was recorded in an acoustically designed space filled with a variety of instruments and different microphones. There was a long period of experimentation before the recording phase, working with different microphone placements and discovering the best methods of using the space. I had sat in the space, the basement of my old house, for nearly two years trying to create that record. At the time I didn’t recognise this, but that period was really important in my development as an electronic artist. But with Morning Tones I wanted to make a record that was less about the processing and technique and more about capturing a moment. It was just me in a small room, with all the instruments and one good microphone. I didn’t get bogged down, if things weren’t working I just left it and came back to it. That’s one positive from working first thing in the morning, if things weren’t working I left the house, went to work and didn’t think about music as my thoughts were absorbed by the days happenings. MA:I like the feeling “Drift” gets with the co-production of Dave Miller. Did you involve any persons, through debate or taken tips, in the process of the “Morning Tones” track? MR: The collaborations on Alluvial were fun. I learnt a lot from them. Dave and I have worked on about three or four collaborations over the past few years and I always learn something from him when we record. For me that’s what collaboration is all about, picking up different approaches from other artists and then applying it to you own sound. On Morning Tones it was purely solo, I didn’t involve any other artists. After Alluvial which had 4 collaborations on it, I was in a mind set where I wanted to focus on doing a release individually. Plus I don’t think any one would want to get up at 6am to do recording! Once the tracks were completed I would bounce them across to a few people whose views on music I appreciate. They gave me a lot of constructive feedback that I took on board. MA: Just recently I though in perspective about how many Lawrence English albums can be observed from a temperature-related perspective. All became clearer with his recent record “For Varying Degrees of Winter”. In a similar way, both the “Morning Tones” track and album brought me to listen to your tracks as elements really affected and sensible to clarity and different shades of light. How exactly did the light aspect influence you in the process? MR: This is a good question, as I have never really considered light as a direct influence, but now I think about it, the influence of light is probably sub-consciously always there. My pieces aren’t narrative, they don’t tell a story, but instead try to evoke a sense or feeling and when I was recording in the morning, the morning light had an influence. Living where I do makes me more receptive to the changes in natural light during the day and the shifts between the seasons. I live in a small coastal town, only about 200 people live there, its very close to the beach and isn’t build up like a city or suburb. You just become connected with the natural world when you live away from the urban environment. MA: I know you provided Grain of Sound an exclusive track and some photos of your own to be included on their Sonic Scope Quaterly. Were those more close, in theme and time, to “Alluvial” or “Morning Tones”? MR: The images I did for Grain of Sound where created around the time that I was completing Morning Tones. The goal of those images was to get a single colour and heavily process it using editing software, so in effect it was the same process that I used in recording Alluvial but on a visual level. In a way there is a naivety and impurity to those images. I don’t consider myself as a graphic designer, I am highly interested in the field, but consider myself as a novice. My industrial design work is very precise and concludes with a very functional object that must fulfil a particular need or want of the client. The Grain of Sound images contain errors made by the graphics editing program, but I didn’t want to correct them as I wanted evidence of the creative process to remain. It was a reaction to always working in a precise manner. MA : This one gets a bit off the stream, but I can’t help ask you about how did the performance with Taylor Deupree go? I’m tremendously keen on his stuff. Is it utopical to expect a collaboration between you two? MR: The show with Taylor went really well. My live sets are always changing, sometimes I use instruments, other times it just laptop processing. At the Deupree show I used a MIDI controller especially designed for Ableton Live for the first time. It was good to have hands-on control of the positioning of the sound within the quad speaker setup. I am a huge fan of Taylor’s work and it was an honour to play with him. It would be great to do a collaboration with him, but to be honest I don’t consider myself in the same league as him. He is an artist at the forefront of experimental electronic music, I don’t believe that I have arrived there yet, I still see room for improvement, particularly in my live sets. MA: I’ve read about you adding sounds of your father playing violin. Did that bring more of an affectionate perspective to an otherwise more focused process? MR:I find this amusing, Its funny how things get lost in communication on the internet and via emails. My father didn’t play violin on record, the truth is that I used my grandfathers violin from the 1930s to make the last track on the record Dissolve. I am not very good on the violin, it was the first time I had played it, so I just did single notes and tones which I edited using the laptop. On the other had my grandfather was a great player who studied composition and was invited to join the West Australian Orchestra, however war broke out and he didn’t ever return to playing in front of people. The story got mixed up when I told Apestaartje that I was using my grandfathers violin, next thing I see on their website that I was sampling my father playing. My father doesn’t play, but he has the most amazing collection of music, from jazz to rock to folk and new forms of electronic music. In fact he often discovers new electronic music before I do. Using the violin did lend a more affectionate feel to the recording process. I remember sitting in my room looking at the violin thinking, “What songs did he play on this thing”. I know that he used to play to the other airman at night times during the war, so it was a pretty powerful experience. I still have the violin at home, my wife and I want to get it restored. MA: I find it quite logical that you mention early morning as the preferential time to work on “Morning Tones”, as it sometimes sounds if still getting its “muscles” (textures) warmed up and coordinated. Did you develop any methods in order to preserve ideas that came up during working hours or did you just trust the fact that the good ones would survive till next morning? MR: I always have ideas during the daytime and during the Morning Tones recording process things were no different. I see my time out of the studio as time for self editing and contemplation. I would burn rough mixes of the tracks which would be then listened to at different points of the day. I was constantly listening to the pieces thinking “ I need another guitar part in there” or “ maybe I used remove some of the layers in that part”. Some of the field recording ideas came up during the daytime, just from the incidental sounds around my office and home. MA: Can we expect any Pablo Dali activity soon? MR: At this point I have no plans to release music under the Pablo Dali name. To me the Pablo Dali period was a transitional time for me and its associated with IDM and more structured beat orientated music. I have totally abandoned this approach. Now I am more interested in a more abstract and freeform approach. The last Pablo Dali release was the single California Grey on Perth’s Meupe label. I really love those tracks, they were the pinnacle of the Pablo Dali sound, I have tried to start writing more material like this but I always reach a dead end and get very frustrated. MA: Have you been working on some new material? MR: I have a new record, as yet untitled, being mastered at the moment. Its coming out on Meupe sometime this year. It sounds more like Alluvial than Morning Tones. The tracks are shorter, it definitely still deals with textures but maybe not as processed, it has a lot of live playing and features guest musicians. There is also another project that I have been working on with Shoeb Ahmad, a young musician from Canberra. It’s a completely acoustic record that was assembled using the computer. No effects other than EQ and compression were used. Each of us would record instrumental improvisations and then send them to one and other via FTP. We used a whole range of instruments from acoustic and electric guitars, a whole heap of percussion, piano, accordion and the trusty violin. We finished an albums worth of material in March and are now shopping around for labels to release it. The recording happened so quickly, it feels to me like the most natural record I have ever made, hard to believe when we were both sitting on opposite sides of the country when it was recorded. MA : Favourite Taylor Deupree album and favourite Room 40 release? MR : What are hard question!! All of Taylors records are great. Its hard to pick a favourite. I think I would have to pick Stil as it had a big influence on me when I first heard it. My favourite room40 releases are : Lawrence English – Ghost Towns, I love the fact it documents a space and how its is unprocessed, surely he was tempted to use DSP but he showed restraint. Frost – Steelwound and Rod Coopers – Friction have also had high rotation on my stereo over the years.

© www.pablodali.net 2005