I was surprisingly delighted and intrigued by Andy Cowling‘s recent output “Star of the West” (deployed on Mille Plateaux digital catalog), where his sonic ‘historiographical’ strategies and approach – that could vaguely resemble some attempts of transplanting the situationist idea of psychogeography and Foucault’s heterotopia into sounds that many artists were trying to do by the end of the nineties -, that could resemble some of his date-titled releases, embraces a series of events occurred from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to the storming of the Capitol in January 2021. Let’s know Andy and his works by his own words.
Chain D.L.K.: Hi Andy! How are you doing?
Andy Cowling: Hi, I am doing ok. I suppose within my chosen artistic path over the last few years I have become a bit of an optimistic pessimist, and, right now at least, I’m not seeing much that tilts my outlook to the more optimistic side of things.
Chain D.L.K.: Would you introduce yourself in your own words?
Andy Cowling: I am a musician working within the genres of experimental electronic music composition and classical music performance.
Chain D.L.K.: How would you explain to any listener approaching your recordings what you did and do?
Andy Cowling: My electronic music is based on the principle of being fundamentally anti-escapist music. My goal with my music is to do several things. First, I am trying to document events which have a social and/or political impact. More so than documenting these events, though, I am trying to preserve some of the raw feelings that were present at that precise moment in history. As time passes, society always tends to collectively forget, become numb, and normalize the event no matter how obscene, violent, or shocking the event that transpired actually was. Even if a discussion of those events becomes a recurring feature in media/culture/news/schools/etc, the ubiquity of their discussion and the way in which they are discussed diffuse them to a point of abstraction. My intention is to have the music bypass all of these defensive and normalizing mechanisms in order to bring the listener back to what it felt like to experience those particular events at that original moment in time.
Chain D.L.K.: Someone could have expected a release named after someday, but the title of your new release didn’t meet these expectations! 🙂 How come? What’s its meaning?
Andy Cowling: There is some commonality with the dated releases and “star of the west” in the sense that they are all directly related to some major event, be it a grotesquely exaggerated celebration of freedom and independence in the face of extreme injustice for people of color or be it the day before a presidential election where the candidates both essentially ignored addressing any meaningful issues in order to pander to their respective bases.
The “Star of the West” itself gets its name from a civilian steamship that was hired to re-supply Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter was a Union Fort that was located in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, a state that had just seceded from the Union. Cadets from the South Carolina Military Academy fired on the ship, and, although the ship itself did not sustain heavy damage, it was enough to force the ship to call off their resupply mission. Perhaps more notably, these shots were the first shots fired in the American Civil War.
Now I am not saying there is going to be a new violent civil war that is going to break out, but the division, tribalism, and violence that has already manifested itself at least forces one to consider that as a potential possibility. (I guess also, to be honest, it did already come much closer to happening than anyone would have guessed.)
Another deciding factor for using the name was just simply its bluntness. It clearly describes what the USA believes itself to be and how the USA believes itself to be seen by the rest of the world.
Additionally, it is related to the idea of spectacle, everything seems to be turned up to the max when it comes to politics in the USA. It is pure political theater. Regardless of how real the underlying scandals are, there never seem to be any repercussions because the outrage has inevitably already moved on to the next scandalous thing, and/or taking an actual position is too politically harmful. The show must go on.
Chain D.L.K.: The more “presidential” track is “An L-shaped W”. It could perfectly render the manipulative powers of US media when more or less clearly entangled with a political one, but what were you going to represent by the >than18minutes of this track?
Andy Cowling: This track aims to represent how failures can be portrayed as victories by the followers of one particular faction or another. It also tries to deal with how catastrophic events are consistently being weaponized and exploited rather than being dealt with productively.
To follow the flow of events, I just want to quickly mention how the previous track ends with the text, “get some fucking action, get some fucking action now”. Whereas the opening quote of the second track, “and poised to go catch it” is a practical application of that really raw and aggressive final quote from track 1. As things take an overtly political turn, the main concern is not with the reality of the actual events, but rather with how they can be used for political gain, or, in terms of the media, how this disaster can attract as many views as possible.
The whole track itself is framed within the launch (beginning) and landing (ending) of a SpaceX Starship SN8 test from December 9, 2020. It is the one that can land itself vertically. The launch itself was super hyped by the fans of this company. Everything went precisely to plan and, to be honest, watching it flip itself around and land is impressive. It looks like something straight out of a sci-fi film. Anyway, this dumb rocket did it, almost. The second it touched the ground, the whole thing blew up. Huge explosion. It is like the saying – there is no difference between flying and falling, until the landing. On a related note, the whole concept of believing that having a privatized space industry, getting government contracts, and is owned by billionaires in itself is a positive thing suggests a pretty significant amount of navet being present. A navet that is represented many times throughout this track (and the album as a whole).
In terms of the manipulative powers of the media, I tried to portray it from a relatively ambivalent perspective, meaning that I tried to not add too much secondary commentary from my own personal perspective. I just tried to contextualize and link these disparate events together into an overarching narrative. For example, I added in the sports references (again), but this came from how the celebrations in the streets right after the presidential election unfolded. You had people chanting anthems like “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”. This is something you would expect to hear at a football game when the opposing team is losing. I thought that just presenting the narratives themselves within their context was already clear enough to make a pretty strong point.
On a more serious note, dealing with the voter fraud conspiracy was definitely one of the major points here, and it is quickly and pretty easily countered by the leaked phone call between Trump and Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State. There is also this surreal Newsmax retraction that they were forced to issue because of legal repercussions levied on them by the manufacturers of the voting machines.
In general, the voter fraud conspiracy was/is just so incredibly insidious in how it tried to undermine the very underpinnings of democracy. Whereas with the more neoliberal left-leaning media, it is just this navet constantly resurfacing, basically pushing the idea that electing Biden as president is going suddenly to solve all these deeply entrenched problems and diffuse those now weaponized belief systems.
Towards the end of the track, it returns to the landing portion of the SpaceX rocket test, but now it is from a different perspective, much further away. It is audio from a SpaceX fan live-streaming the event, they have traveled to Florida to watch the launch, and their excitement is in no way diminished by the failed landing, but rather increased. Then we can hear them say, “get ready, we’re going to feel that”, referencing the explosion they saw but had not yet heard or felt. This is a segue into the repercussions of all the tensions that had been building. Tensions partially broke loose in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.
Chain D.L.K.: Besides the title and the mentioned track, I enjoyed the techniques by which you managed to handle sources. Any word about them?
Andy Cowling: For the manipulations of the source audio I generally used just a handful of techniques, mainly different techniques/methods of time stretching, cutting, pitch shifting, modulating, and distorting. To get to the end result, though, a lot of the material went through many iterations of these various processing methods via re-sampling and re-recording. There was also a significant amount of moving individual transients around to get the correct rhythmic relationships and to get the right granular/glitch/sound. Overall, it was a time-intensive process that felt much more manual/analog than digital.
Chain D.L.K.: What’s the more difficult source to recognize in “Star Of The West”?
Andy Cowling: I think that one of the more impactful, but harder to recognize sources is in “the entire world is watching” – there is a rendition of the US national anthem, which takes place before the start of a football game. The accompaniment to the national anthem is a stretched and warped church bell. This particular church bell is being rung at the Washington National Cathedral bell on December 15, 2020, to mark 300,000 coronavirus deaths in the USA.
Chain D.L.K.: Is that helicopter noise rapidly turning into thunderous chaos at the beginning of the opening “The Entire World Is Watching” a sort of preface to the sonic route you paved along the whole track?
Andy Cowling: It is definitely a foreshadowing of what is to come. What is happening here is that the military staged flyovers of various hospitals to show their appreciation and support of the healthcare workers during the coronavirus pandemic. It is an interesting way of showing solidarity in that it is something that would be much more commonly seen at the start of a (again with the sports reference) football game.
My other aim here is to get the listener prepared for what is coming. With the field recording/spoken word/nonmusical introduction I am hoping to get the listener to adjust the volume to an appropriately loud level, and, then, if they can endure the wash of noise that comes with the flyover, they should be set for the rest of the album.
Chain D.L.K.: Regarding the show of the American social and political situation you are maybe representing, what kind of show is the entire world currently watching? Who are the puppets and the puppeteers?
Andy Cowling: The world is watching the end of an empire/the waning of a superpower.
I think the general population is clearly the ones being played. As for who is doing the playing, I am not sure, I can say with a large degree of specificity. It seems like a conglomeration of people who are either true believers in their cause and/or people that stand to gain political/financial power. I just can’t really tell how the motivations would be broken down here. Personally, I would prefer if they were just trying for money and/or power grab. If they are actually true believers of what they are pushing, that would be truly frightening.
Chain D.L.K.: Those banging snare-like hits started the third track, “Let’s Unite The Country”… so to say that the way to unite the country is something necessarily banging? Like a war? Any word about this interesting track?
Andy Cowling: That banging here is literally the sound of the Trump supporters banging down the door and smashing through the windows of the Capitol building. The title of the track is stemming from the idea that after the January 6th insurrection the country was extremely divided (which it was and still is) and basically that this is not the time to be too harsh on anyone. It is the time to forgive and forget and let the country heal itself. This was all just an excuse. The people sowing the seeds for insurrection and casting doubt on the democratic process were the same ones suddenly saying we should conveniently forgive and forget?! I just hate that it seems like the aggressor, even if they end up losing, always wins. The moment they get caught red-handed, they turn around and play like they are the victim. How stupid are we?
In the end of the track, there is a sample of Yo-Yo Ma speaking an inspirational message and playing cello for the Biden/Harris Inauguration ceremony. I think this is a very good summation of the whole album, at least when it comes to my critique of the supposed left in the USA. Yo-Yo Ma plays a musical medley (the Star Trek theme, amazing grace, largo from the new world symphony, and simple gifts) that is very similar in concept to what I tried to do with ‘’star of the west’’. He of course plays a musically convincing and beautiful performance, but it is so naively hopeful that I can not comprehend how anyone could take it seriously.
Chain D.L.K.: Mr. Trump’s rapidly distorted into an alien-like entity started the awesome final track. Any comment on it?
Andy Cowling: The final track for me is essentially like a bonus track or a hidden track that you would find on the CDs and tapes of a bygone era. That descent of Trump’s voice is effectively acting as a bridge, but it is also representing how even the most normal things, like what love is, get twisted within this political/conspiratorial framework. Obviously, there was and is a huge amount of hatred that fueled his ardent supporters throughout all of this, but then again, just to so casually turn it around and throw “love” into the mix is just so obscene to me. There are just so many contradictions there. It was also added it to move towards a slightly more pathetic viewpoint of all these people. That statement from Trump telling them to go home was more akin to all the insurrectionists getting some sort of symbolic failed coup participation medal and the temporary love/approval of their daddy.
Chain D.L.K.: Are there any “sample-delic” projects that you can consider as a possible source of inspiration for your collages? Maybe Negativland?
Andy Cowling: I was not previously aware of Negativland, to be honest, but, after some investigation, I have to say I find their work very inspiring! Musically I was inspired by Terre Thaemlitz’s “Lovebomb”, Bernard Parmegiani’s “De Natura Sonorum” (specifically II. Accidents/ Harmoniques), and Merzbow.
Chain D.L.K.: Maybe no one will guess you’re a graduate after studying with well-respected musicians and actually teaching classical guitar after listening to this last release. Have you ever thought about a possible integration of these two musical faces of your own?
Andy Cowling: Haha, well yeah, I think my stylistic development is maybe a little unexpected and misunderstood by most of my classical music colleagues. Although my music is clearly not bound by any sort of dogmatic tradition, I would have to say that many of the basic compositional elements are not all so different from modern avantgarde classical music. The path from electric guitar to effects pedals to classical guitar then back to electric guitar to effect pedals to finally just leaving the guitar partially behind in and of itself isn’t so shocking, though. I have seen many instances of electronic musicians more or less following a similar trajectory.
As far as combing the two, I think that my perceptions and experiences with the two different genres of music make it very difficult. I got into electronic music because I had the need to address/support/document social issues facing us right now. I could not morally stand on the sidelines any longer, and sitting in a room playing Bach into the void for hours a day (although still great music) just was not acceptable.
In my opinion, what one would generally think of as classical music, provides an escape from the current reality by means of a supposedly “pure” art form. In order to try and maintain the “pureness” of classical music, delving into the realm of societal or political critique in any meaningful, radical, or more direct way is discouraged in my experience.
There is nothing wrong with that (I guess? From my output, I think it is clear I do actually have a problem with it.), but my real aim is to emphasize reality. I want to take an unflinching look at and document precisely what most people do not want to see or hear. Ideally, I would hope my music works on a purely musical level, but, when understood in its totality, I want the message conveyed to be so damning that when people put it all together they say something like – wow ok that was horrible, let’s never do that again.
Chain D.L.K.: Any work in progress?
Andy Cowling: At the moment I do not have any works directly in progress, but I would like to begin a project that documents with audio, visuals, and graphs the hopeless situation that we are all now collectively entering into. Almost as soon as coronavirus waned, the next major crisis began to form. Particularly we have a confluence of inflation, monetary policy that benefits the wealthiest among us, wealth inequality itself, job insecurity, and climate change reaching a critical tipping point while still being very much unaddressed. We also have the war of Russian aggression in Ukraine. With this particular topic though I would not address it directly in any way other than giving my unequivocal support for the Ukrainian people as they repel the invading Russian forces from their country. I think it is an important ethical position to not stand to benefit in any way from such a catastrophe.
Otherwise, there will be several exhibitions this year showing an audiovisual installation called “THE HUB”. This is a project dealing with artificial intelligence and esotericism that I did in collaboration with Daniel Vier (a visual artist from Hamburg) and John-Robin Bold (a musician based in Berlin).
Visit Andy Cowling on the web:
https://www.andycowling.com/
https://soundcloud.com/andycowling