Lost And Found
What did you have to face constantly that you couldn't manage and that pushed you to look for a solution in drugs?
Before that time? There were things that I didn't understand. A sensation that floated in my head, that told me what to play my guitar. I felt like there were big waves in my brain. At the end I understood they were big waves of subconscious thinking. It took me a long time, but then I realized how much music influenced these things. I understood that every time a movie had something about death, or something that symbolized that, the same thing was happening in my mind. If I heard beautiful music and I played it repeatedly, my mind began to do the same thing in the same order.
Was it like a chord was being touched or a light was being lit? Did you feel you had to concentrate on that thing?
Yeah, so I played my guitar and wrote music. Those were the sensations, and I called them "colors and shapes in my head". They told me when to play guitar, how to write songs. I needed them to play. At the same time I thought a lot about things like sex, child abuse, sexual molestations endured by children. I realized that thoughts were an important process to me to comprehend those confusing questions that I asked myself about death, sex, about why music makes people feel a certain way, and why it always had a certain effect on me.
And this was good for you, right?
Yeah. They were sensations that I always had while growing up, but I didn't know where they came from. I had questions about the voices I heard in my mind and about each of those questions and were given an answer to them by myself, one by one.
By the voices?
You can call them my guardian angel, if you want. Every time I understood a thing, I felt like I'd completed something. At the same time my mind lost a bit of its power about those big waves I was talking about.
At the end did it reveal itself as a positive thing?
Yes, it did. At that time I thought that if I'd lost it I would've never been able to play guitar and write songs anymore. When I was 22, my head was emptied. Maybe it was left only some sensitivity. I felt really empty, do you get me? Now my head is still empty, but I'm way happier than before. I write much more music and I'm more concentrated.
You're much more coherent too, or at least your lyrics are. Even if your head is emptied, the lyrics make much more sense. By the way, what do the numbers that appear in three song titles of the record mean? For example Negative 00 Ghost 27, Failure 33 Object and 23 Go Into End?
I needed titles for instrumental tracks and I wrote them on my block-notes. I thought about the titles that Autechre and Aphex Twins use; people who write a lot of instrumentals with meaningless titles that often contain numbers and letters without any intercourse between them. I wrote on my block-notes those numbers that seemed right. The strange thing is that after I wrote Failure 33 Object I realized that I am 33 and Josh Klinghoffer (The Bicycle Thief), whom I made the record with, at that time was 23. But when I gave the titles to the songs I wasn't aware of it. So I believe that often when I do things like that it's my subconscious that commands me.
Our task is to characterize schemes, leave them and go from the usual roads and back again.
Yeah, at this point to me it's important to be sure I can do it, because I know that my task is an organizational one. If you let your subconscious run you find yourself with a ton of aimless notes.
It's your duty to group them, piece them together...
Of course, because the subconscious can't organize them, nor be concise.
In SCWP you did a good organizational job.
That's what we have to do with our "conscious I". The most important step I made in the past 5 years was to get to take the reins. I have a lot of block-notes going back to the time in which what I wrote made sense only to me and no body else could have understood a thing.
