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by William S. Fields in ei6
“You know I don’t sound anything like what I do in the interview in real life,” says Philip Samartzis, emailing from a new music festival where he is delivering a paper on “surface noise.” “I can’t imagine what kind of picture you have of me.” During the day Samartzis is a “Lecturer in Sound” at the School of Art, RMIT University in Melbourne, but he is loathe to leave anyone with an impression of ivory tower elitism, the last man among his peers to contrast his work to a presumed “low culture.” If anything, it is passivity, formal and conceptual homogeneity within haute sound culture, that raises his hackles.
In the 80s, enthusiastically navigating a constellation of disparate records, Samartzis channeled conditional love for all things searching— Nurse With Wound, Chrome, Erik B & Rakim, Bernard Parmegiani (“regardless of genre,” he remembers, as long as it had an “abrasive and dissonant aspect”)—into the influential turntablist entity with friend Andrew Curtis, Gum. Much has been written of Gum (though perhaps not enough), who created a dense, emancipated music from the rubble of sorely abused vinyl and sex-changed turntables. Consistent with his intentions and attentions today, Samartzis describes an early fascination with the “wrong parts” of pop music, the incidental appendages of each unlikely influence. “I have always found lyrics and melody quite distasteful,” he notes, though admits to being “the proud owner of most of Madonna’s 12-inch releases up to and including Erotica.” He cites the influence of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, but for oblique reasons: “There is an atmosphere about both records that I am fascinated by and continue to refer to them for their sense of space and texture.”
In the years following Gum, Samartzis spliced tape, shot Super 8mm film and wrangled computers for five years before feeling satisfied that he had mastered the voodoo required to maintain the integrity of his ideas without having his dog wagged by a new set of tools. “The charming thing about the film format was that it had to be sent to Germany to be processed so I didn’t know what I had until a couple of months after I shot it. It created a great sense of anticipation as well as influencing the decisions…these experiences have firmly remained with me and needless to say, continue to inform my working practices.” Samartzis is known to work on a project for a year or two following a recording session. “I refuse to work to deadlines and will only lock off a project when I am satisfied.” Parrying accusations of obsessive rework, analytical fussiness, or overcommitment, he rationalizes the slowness as a strategic compositional convention. Time “tends to be spent listening and reflecting rather than endlessly creating sounds.” No fan of carelessly smattered sound, abjuring nature, Samartzis welcomes a vacuum.
In collaboration, he dismisses the authenticity of original performance (a deeply-held fundament among most improvisers): “I am not interested in ideas of authenticity when it comes to the recording process…live performance has a very specific set of spatial and temporal demands that function quite differently within a recording environment.” In spite of this, a rapidly growing discography of more than ten collaborative/group records released and forthcoming (alongside four recent solo albums, and a host of compilation appearances) shows that Samartzis has gained the trust of improvisers as diverse and pedigreed as Kaffe Matthews, Oren Ambarchi, Sachiko M, and Alan Lamb (among others), all of them giving themselves over to a process that extends the idea of performance to include gestures “counterintuitive to the musicians’ usual mode of performance in order to establish a new set of responses.” Prepared CDs, environmental sound, sinewave/noise generator, mixing board: stating the patently obvious, Samartzis creates music. The recently released Soft and Loud, a culturally voyeuristic but sensitive phonographic work based on manipulated Japanese field recordings, is as articulate a work as he has made and there is scarcely a weak outing in the catalog. As an electronic musician his understated “make-it-count” hand and a rare ear for the big picture have been displayed in new light on each new collaboration. Yet Samartzis remains reluctant to align what he does too closely with performance and musicianship. “I am not a musician in the true sense of the word,” he clarifies with questionable genuineness, perhaps for the benefit of those more protective of the distinction.
(continues)
