I have a little experience in graphic design. I tend to do all my own artwork and design and always have. For me, the visual element of this was pretty important from the beginning. The scores are really pretty but I created them in the dumbest way possible. I made the piano pieces in Logic using the MIDI piano roll view. I don't really know about advanced technical processes of visualising data. So I went into the piano roll and took screenshot after screenshot of the MIDI notes. Then I loaded those into Photoshop and made it high contrast so I could end up with dots on a black background.As I was working on the pieces, I'd zoom in and out of those images—I was partly informed by how the score looked. But I actually made a couple piano pieces that were beautiful to look at but sounded not at all interesting. I was trying to find pieces where you saw something emerge in the visual display of the notes and you also heard it. And you also saw it as the piano keys moved, too. When all those three things converged, I felt like it was a good piece.I wanted to design the scores so that they didn't have any embellishment. The beauty of the patterns themselves is what's important. I tried to find a way to represent those dots on the grid in a way that showed how beautiful the shapes were withoutthem.I've seen lot of audio visual performances where there's a really complex relationship between the music and how it's turned into visual data. It loses something when it's too complex. What I love is when you feel there's this really essential, one-to-one relationship between different senses, where they feel inseparable, where it doesn't feel like someone added their style to it. That stuff really bugs me.In a way, I don't feel like I can totally take credit for this stuff because it's a process of discovery. In that James Tenney piece, I think it was described by someone else as more like a fact of nature than a piece of music, and I love that idea. You're demonstrating something that was already there. Of course, when you present it as a piece of music you inevitably have artistic decisions to make. But really putting the music before your own emotions or feelings… there's always going to be some part of yourself that you can't separate from it. So there's a tension there but I like this idea of trying to put the music before the person who makes it. The music is kind of its own thing.But that's what we're all doing anyway. Where do you want to pull back and where do you want to put that line? I like to think of the music as a kind of living entity itself that I can observe and communicate with instead of an expression of my own creative impulses. You always admit that you can't get rid of creative impulses being part of it, but that attempt to distance yourself, that's the approach I try and use.That piece was originally performed on two pianos in the '70s. He would do it with a piano on each side, one hand on each piano. This festival asked him if he wanted to try and do a version for two pianists with four hands instead of two. I don't know if you know the story of when I first met him. You know

I decided I wanted to play it when I was at Mills. There's a really beautiful wooden student union type building there with high ceilings and nice acoustics. There's a piano that sits in the corner and hardly anyone ever touches it. I used to go and play it and I thoughtwould sound so good in here.Charlemagne sent me this really long email after I first contacted him about it. It was really emphatic and he'd say things like, "Come to Brussels and I will initiate you into the Strumming tradition!" with a million exclamation points. He doesn't take himself too seriously. He understands that he's being kind of ridiculous. But he also understands that what he's doing is truly profound at the same time.It's about really getting inside of the sound in a way that's not intellectual, that's purely physical. His method of playing the piano, which he calls Strumming, is just alternating notes between two hands. That's all you do. And choosing which combinations of notes you want to play. So it can be seen as sort of primitive, you're just banging on the piano in a sense. But it's about discovering what happens when all the frequencies and overtones are interacting. And treating each interval as a universe to occupy and explore.We later kept in contact over email but not very much. Then a couple years ago, someone asked if I'd want to perform something for piano as Rrose at this festival in Milan. I thought it'd be great to doagain. They knew about my past with the piano. So I contacted Charlemagne about that, and this festival had also asked if he'd want to do one of his old pieces. So he asked if I'd do it with him. That's how the album came to being.Right. I think one of the keys is to not listen to the note you're playing. If you're playing E and B together, don't listen for the E and the B. Those are the base frequencies. When you hit a note on the piano, you hear a note that's associated with a specific root frequency, but there's all this other complex frequency content above the fundamental note that reinforces our perception of a piano note playing a specific given note. So when you play two notes together repeatedly back and forth, all that complex frequency content above the fundamental and the overtones are sort of bouncing off each other. They're interacting.Because the piano is tuned in a way that isn't pure, because it's equal tempered , you hear these beating patterns that I demonstrate in the video below, especially in the upper overtones. So listening to all that stuff that's happening in a vertical sense more than a horizontal sense, that's part of the key to Strumming. Listening vertically, listening to the whole spectrum and almost forgetting about the note that's at the base of it.There's all kinds of weird stuff up there. Playing a single a piano note, you have a physical medium, a string with metal wrapped around it. When it's hit by a hammer, all types of complex stuff happens. There's an element of noise in there, there's all sorts of unpredictable behaviour happening, just from playing one note on the piano. I could play one note on the piano for an hour repeatedly and hear different things in it.That's what I love about Charlemagne's approach. It's about the sound of the piano but it's also about this physical engagement with the instrument, which is something that I miss in my piano music because it's just about listening. This piece and the Tenney piece are about a direct physical connection with an instrument. The instrument becomes a real extension of your physical body.In the Tenney piece, you're just letting the gong speak. The gong kind of plays itself. A gong is way more complex frequency-wise than a piano. On a piano, you hear a note very clearly when you press a key, whereas a gong is inharmonic like a bell. It's very hard to hear a note, to pick out a pitch. Have you seen the score to the piece?

Right, so there's very little specified. The way I interpret it is, the performer shouldn't be improvising or trying to make any specific sound. It's just about going from the most quiet to the loudest point in the most gradual way you can. The instrument itself will start to do crazy things. You don't need to make any decisions except to play as gradually as you can.That's a good story, too. Bob Ostertag is kind of the reason I started the Rrose project. He came to Mills while I was there to do a workshop. I knew of his work and liked his music and I'd seen him play before so I was really interested. The workshop was talking a lot about the influence of technology on people's listening habits and how our preferences have developed, he would say, to conform to our exposure to technology.The example he referred to a lot was how young people seem to prefer a precise, computer-timed pulse over a more human type of pulse created by a drummer for example. I think there's some truth to what he said, but I sensed this very thinly veiled criticism of electronic dance music in what he was saying. He said things like, "I don't know anybody under 40 who likes electronic dance music." Well, there are DJs who started this music who are well over 40 now that are still super into it.I felt like I needed to challenge him on that. We ended up sort of becoming friends and talking a lot about this stuff. I challenged him on what techno is and what it could be. He was intrigued enough, or challenged in a way that made him want to try to make music with a rigid pulse that he thought was actually good. Or to make something that would maybe count as techno. He was working with a big Buchla 200e system at the time. He started making material and he'd send me examples of what he was working on and ask, "Does this sound like techno? Would people dance to this?"This was after I'd finished Mills and I was trying to be a composer, just figuring out what I was going to do next. When I heard the stuff he sent me I was like, "It's not really techno but I could probably do a little bit to it to turn it into techno." He liked the idea of me kind of remixing it. So I started working with the audio he'd sent me and that inspired me to make techno again. I wasn't really making techno at the time, I was busy trying to be a sound artist or something.That material became the. Also one of the tracks off my first Sandwell District release was made with his sounds, too. He didn't like that track though so I didn't include it on the album. But when I'd made all that material, that's when I realised I needed a new artist name. I knew this was the beginning of a new project.I sent the music to Juan Mendez (Silent Servant), who was an old friend of mine. I knew that he was still really heavily involved in the techno scene whereas I had drifted away from it. I sent him the stuff, not asking him to release it, just asking what I should do with it. He played it for Regis and they were like, "We want to release it." That was before I even came up with the name Rrose. So it all came to be around the Bob Ostertag collaboration.