Three: "Being the River" With Daisy Rickman, Sam Grassie, Cian Nugent.
Join Daisy, Sam, and Cian for a conversation on beginnings, folk, and making music speak, dance, and live.
As I was preparing for the conversation part of the latest Soundings in Camden, I got into a lovely spiral looking at Daisy Rickman’s affecting abstract paintings and listening to her latest album “Howl”; a meditative, sprawling album of music for guitar and voice that came out last year. There is a continuity between the forms in her visual art and in her music. This made me want to investigate that thread with our guests; the mysterious ways we can go beyond language with music. This is where the conversation started.
EM: For those who haven’t seen Daisy’s paintings she does these amazing abstract pieces with these beautiful, otherworldly spiritual elements. It reminds me a little of Hilma af Klint, who is a Scandinavian abstract painter I’m fond of.
I couldn’t help but think as I was looking at them, Daisy, about the relationship between your practice as a painter and as a composer. How they feed into each other and maybe which came first.
DR: They definitely feed into each other and help one another and inspire each other as practises. I suppose they are very similar in a way and very different. I guess I started doing the painting first and started doing music after that, or rather, writing songs after that. I think because I’m not a very, I’m not very good at using words, I guess similar to painting, when you’re composing music it feels… the music part is where I feel more at home.
EM: The music speaks, yeah.
DR: I guess it feels like musically, the visual part of your brain, and the music part, feels like they’re coming from, at least in my brain, a similar place. Whereas the words part come from a different place. I don’t feel it’s as easy to access that part. If that makes sense.
EM: That makes loads of sense.
CN: Isn’t that like, left brain, right brain almost.
DR: Yeah I guess it’s that kind of thing. Which one is which? Left is logic, right is creative?
CN: I know this because my mother had a stroke and it damaged her language and what was interesting was that after she had that she became more sensitive to artist things and she became more sensorily lead. So she had a left brain stroke, and the right brain is the more intuitive, feeling, artistic side, and language and maths and things are more left brain. But it is interesting how they come from different places.
EM: That’s so interesting. And that’s a lovely answer. Your music does sound painterly. You have a painterly way of using your guitar and your voice. And I think one of the lovely things about music and painting is that they are languages that exist in symbols instead of in direct language communication.
It reminds me of, I did a series of workshops earlier in the year with a Chicago based guitarist - she’s like an experimental -
DR: Hannah Frances? Oh yeah, she’s great.
EM: Yes, Hannah! She’s amazing. The series was called “Open Tunings as Emotional Landscapes”. And this was something that came up during those conversations; that language that isn’t language, and composing from that place of intuition and experience.
Over to you guys. I wanna talk to you about the guitar. Cian, how did you get started? I know you’ve had an interesting journey, did you start as like a solo songwriter guitarist then into solo guitar and then into bands and back to solo or something?
CN: I started as a keyboard player in a ska band.
(laughter from the audience)
I think I was the worst keyboard player in the band. There were three better keyboard players than me. And then, guitar, I was a bass player in a nü metal band.
SG: Are you serious?
CN: Yeah I’m serious. I mean we wanted to be nü metal but I’m not sure that’s what we actually were. Then I got into guitar because the White Stripes rocked at the time, still do, won’t hear a bad word said against them. And I wanted to play like Jack White. And that’s what I got into guitar for. Then I dove down Bob Dylan and folk music and John Fahey and apparently ended up being a guitar player. But my rightful home was behind the keyboard.
EM: Did you ever compose behind the piano, for your own music?
CN: I can’t really play piano to be honest
EM: So, no.
CN: No, no. Though I like being behind the piano, it gets me thinking about music in a different way.
EM: Some people find that quite freeing when they’re trying to write, not knowing how to play something. With piano I tend to find it quite frustrating.
CN: I think the archetypal role of the songwriter is to be behind a piano. In the cartoon picture of a songwriter you have to be behind a piano.
EM: Yeah in that emoji that doesn’t exist yet.
CN: Exactly. So to not be good at the piano is a deathly blow as a songwriter.
(laughter from the audience)
EM: I suppose we can’t call you a songwriter anymore. You’re a guitarist and an ex-keyboard-player.
(laughter from the audience)
EM: Sam, your compositions land somewhere between, well, all of the 70s British Folk of the revival, the Bert Jansches and the Nick Drakes, but also that transatlantic influence, the Robbie Bashos and John Faheys, but yeah, where did you start?
SG: I went and saw a guy called Pete. Every year I asked for a play station and every time I got given a musical instrument instead, which is of course a fantastic present. I think I got a balrong, played a bit of that, that was good. Then I got a guitar and then I went to a guitar teacher. It’s a lot less funny than Cian’s trajectory.
(laughter from the audience)
And he loved KT Tunstall. I realised I was getting rinsed for my money every week just learning KT Tunstall tunes and I changed guitar teachers. Got some folk in my ears, realised, oh this is good. I’ve been listening to traditional music all my life because my dad plays the flute, but I guess the transatlantic stuff hit the spot in the venin diagram that appealed to me and took my away from shite music. No offence to anyone.
EM: Tell us about your latest record, “Jarabi, Winter Has Gone” how that came together. Because it’s drawn together from lots of different places.
SG: Ah well, I wish it was a record, it’s more of a long, protracted process of recording, prolonged by lack of cash and having to do things again. But what’s the good answer? The good answer is that to me, I love Scottish traditional music, I love Irish traditional music, but when I first heard the music that comes from Mali in West Africa, I was like, that is… that’s the closest representation I think I’ve heard people make of life in music. The rest of the time we’re trying to distill some kind of emotion or memory into a coherent series of words that sound nice and have a little turn of phrase. There’s a beauty in that when it’s done right, it can be extremely moving in ways. But, yeah, if I could have gone and learned how to play like that that is what I would have done. There are sanctions and laws against playing music in various regions of that continent, but especially West Africa, so to sit here and say, “oh I’d love to play Malian guitar” is a very ignorant thing to say, or rare, to get a chance to do that, but yeah, those tunes are my first attempt to kind of combine Celtic aesthetic with some sort of Malian pattern. How well that was I don’t know, but I want to keep doing it and explore that. It was definitely one of those things I did and was like “ooooh, I don’t know if I did that well” and did it again and was like “oooh, I don’t know.” And it’s very not in with what’s currently in folk right now, which is to be dour and dark and drag the fucking blood out of everything you can.
(laughter from the audience)
But I’m not massively, that for me is not really what… folk music has always been about giving like a spectrum of emotions in a committed way. Not being like, “I’ve made a super dark folk record and there’s a moment where I play a major chord.” Be like, here’s a banging tune I feel fucking great, this is a really sad tune I don’t feel so good. Sorry that was a ramble I was trying really hard not to ramble.
(laughter from the audience)
EM: It was a great ramble. What is it about the music from Mali that makes you feel like it’s alive in that way?
SG: Probably fluidity you know. We all have, I mean, any other tune I can think of… well, Nathan [saxophone player] probably has a much wider knowledge of music than me, and so do you all on this stage actually fair play to you all.
NF: I don’t know if that’s true.
(laughter from the audience)
SG: compared to traditional music, compared to songwriting, where there’s a sort of - and I’m totally going to talk above what I’m aware of - but to me it feels like there’s a structure that represents basically what it is to be alive in that music, which is a heartbeat, and breathing, and being present, and there’s the fluidity of everything else. Which to me, it’s what the joy wants, you know.
(laughter from the audience)
But you know, it’s like a butterfly flying, and water, and air. The things that actually you know… I think to me it gets closer to that than singing about a river. But maybe I’ve just heard that a lot more. But there’s real structure, synthesis, and coherence, and then also a sort, yeah, a beautiful chaos in it that just kind of breathes out of it.
EM: I mean that’s very similar to what we were talking about at the beginning with Daisy’s practise. When you go beyond language; “being” the river instead of singing about it, and the difference between those things.
But yeah I think that’s a constant tension that I find as a songwriter who relies on words, is trying to find those pockets where you move away from mimetic approaches, moving away from representation and towards embodying the thing itself. It sounds like what you’re talking about is beyond the mimetic, and moving towards what the thing is, which is really cool.
Cian you have a lot more of the songwritery aspect threaded through the various projects you’ve done. What’s your relationship like with the tension between those things in making music and writing lyrics?
CN: Honestly I find it very hard to comment on these kind of things because if I think if I had a better understanding of it I would have written a lot more songs. So I feel like I don’t have an understanding of how you’re supposed to do it. Occasionally I’ve gotten lucky and ended up with something. I think it’s a matter of zooming in and zooming out in alternating fashions. Where you can kind of be intuitive and do something and then not be too critical of it, and then zoom out and be analytical and critical and go so, “that was good, that wasn’t good.” And then remove the critical part of your brain again and try and just do something. But I find it very difficult to not just, everything I do, think it’s awful. And think “that’s a waste of time, it’s terrible” and then you have to be able to turn that off and go “ok, just do something and maybe it’s not awful, and if it’s awful you don’t have to do it again.” So that’s what I find, I don’t know. I think the songwriters I’ve always seen to have been very good at being intuitive and then being critical in alternating fashions rather than trying to do them at the one time. So that’s the only understanding I really have of how to do it, is to try and keep them separate, those two aspects.
EM: That seems wise. Though hard to do.
CN: It is hard to do.
******
“Soundings” is an event I’ve started running in Camden, London, at a venue called The Green Note. It’s an opportunity for myself and other artists to share new (or old!) material, and engage in conversation about the creative process in front of an audience. This interview is from our fourth event, on March 26th, featuring Daisy Rickman, Sam Grassie, Cian Nugent, and myself, with the wonderful Nathan Pigott on saxophone.
Buy tickets for the next Soundings event on April 28th here: Soundings tickets.
