Interview : K Leimer

1. Your first sonic experience?
Cold War Air Raid Siren tests

2. The best record you received as a present? / The worst one?
Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic / The Monkees - The Monkees

3. The first record that you lost?
The Stooges - Funhouse

4. The name of your imaginary band?
“Lick Response”

5. You once confided being lazy with technique. Did you choose ambient music for its refusal to engage with an accepted type of virtuosity?
Many forms of expression seem to begin and end with the notion of perfecting technique, often at the expense of what might be more rewarding approaches. Rather than mastering a technique, i tend to develop small scale techniques designed to generate the pieces, rather than simply articulate a piece already written for a specific instrument or performer; a sort of upside-down approach that fails at least as many times as it succeeds.

6. Who changed your life?
No-one more and in more ways than my wife Dorothy Cross

7. What will music sound like in 50 years / 5000 years?
At a guess (not a prediction), in 50 years more than a few novelty songs about sea level change; in 5,000 years perhaps continuous, unorganized insect calls?

8. The perfect record to listen to when having a drink?
Cocktails: Alternative TV - Vibing Up the Senile Man or Wine: Michael Nyman - Decay Music

9. In a previous interview* you say that “the loop provided an instant structure—a sort of fatalism". In which way rhythmic loops differ from other loops? Do you think they are more fatalistic?
That comment concerned an open loop, a condition which persistently demands that you deal with the immediate past in adapting to, reacting to, participating with or changing the initial input while it decays: that stikes me as fatalistic because prior actions make determinations and set limits on what will follow. Closed loops simply repeat without any intrinsic modification: all you have is either additive, subtractive or steady-state.

10. Your dream collaboration?
Working with Alain Resnais to rescore Last Year at Mareinbad: its recursive structure seems ideal for developing a distinctive timbral approach to theme and variation.

11. The record that freaks you out?
Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Without Sinking is incredibly, almost unbelievably, wonderful. If you want a bad example let me know…

12. Is ambient music is at the heart of an unstable state of equilibrium between structure and entropy?
Ambient varies from pieces exhibiting some very structural concerns to those that represent seemingly arbitrary events, so the genre is apparently considered broad enough to span that range. But in the end, entropy wins.

13. The little-known track that everyone should have heard of?
Of mine? I particularly like the series grouped as “Non-adaptive Layers” on Lesser Epitomes

14. Can you tell us more about your work with Greg Davis?
Greg and i have not really worked together: he’s been an editor on a few projects for his Autumn records and for this ReRVNG release, and he’s helped me with engineering and mastering, but we’ve not genuinely collaborated on a mutually developed work. And i do owe him a debt of gratitude for his attention to and interest in my music.

15. An album you wouldn’t want to be?
Anything by Happy the Man?

16. The cover version you would love to do?
“Map Ref. 41ºn 93ºw” by Wire

17. “Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and all music has disappeared. All musical instruments and all forms of recorded music, gone. A world without music.”. What will you do ?
Enjoy the silence

18. The text you would like to produce a soundtrack for?
Fata Morgana by André Breton

19. Have you ever had auditory hallucinations?
Technically, a stereo image is, at best, an illusion, so, yes, maybe.

20. How would you like to die?
Outside of suicide i’m pretty sure i have no choice in this matter, so i’ve never developed a preference. But because you ask, i’ll say “while listening to the annoucement of a simple, inexpensive genetic fix to halt all disease and aging”.


Go to Palace of lights, Kerry Leimer's label, parse his discogs and buy A Period of Review on IGetRvng.