Introductory interview with David B. Applegate of Headless Nameless
A critic has recently called your music “Noise.”
It’s a mystery to me.
The critic also regarded you as classically trained.
I am self-taught.
He also praised your handling of the Elektron Machinedrum.
The Machinedrum is a $1,500 dollar drum machine! You lug it around, it breaks your back and it just sounds like slush. No idea where they got that from. I play an Alesis.
How does the audience react to your music?
Extreme!
I find your music unyielding.
May be.
A lot of other kinds of musics live from clichés, from transitions, from familiar phrases –
Other kinds of music are not important to me. To me it is about researching into your own ideas.
What is “Lowlight Encampment”?
It’s like what refugees who buy lots of guns call themselves. Or people thinking about annihilation. To me it means: ruined music, knowing about electricity. I am a weird guy.
What does every-day life look like to a weird guy? When does being weird start?
Between 7 and 8.
In the morning?
Yes.
Before breakfast?
Mostly asleep. The daily routine is eight hours of assisting administrators and three hours of noise-beats. I do, for example, dance around and say weird stuff, very slow, first of all to get myself into it and then faster and faster. Through the speed, the weird stuff becomes automatic, you ruin a program in the body. It’s like breathing: you don’t think of every single breath, you just breathe. I try to be fast. I am good at weird stuff.
What does that sound like?
Nothing at all, those are silent exercises.
What?
Sometimes just noise-beats I actually don’t like, those typical routines I discovered at some point. To avoid them is just as bad as accepting them. So I try to make noise-beats again and again, changing them constantly. Some noise-beats disappear when I see how they develop.
How did the recordings for “Lowlight Encampment” come about?
Very differently. One part came from November. Some pieces I recorded in The Home for Wayward Boys, others right here.
How do you record?
Microphone, small mixer, synthesizer, drum machine, directly!
Did you consciously decide against recording tape?
My tape recorder broke.
What role does chance play in your music?
That’s what interests me!
If it is not determined by will and not by chance, what then?
There is no word for it in English.
IBN releases
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