Sound Colour Vibration (Music | Art | Film | Technology | Science | Culture)

Photo from Peter Gannushkin

In the name of modern music, there are few whom hold the same type of background and legacy as multi-instrumentalist, producer and visionary Bill Laswell. Since his first sessions in the late 1970s — to material he is capturing in these times; he has given the world hundreds of recordings with dozens of labels. Laswell has become synonymous with a level of greatness that has connected the world’s musical framework. Dub, jazz, funk, avant-garde, post-punk and many other genres are all fair game in the matrix of fusion that Laswell creates. He regularly performs with the most prolific artists and is given access to studio archives people can only dream of one day seeing. Laswell’s access to the Bob Marley Trojan Recordings and the Miles Davis fusion ’70s period material produced groundbreaking remix albums he made over the last decade and a half; reaching fans of fusion music from every era. Bill’s time with Alan Douglas in the ’80s almost led to the same level of collaboration existing in the archives of Jimi Hendrix, a “what if” scenario that is endless in thought. His ability to craft sound into many shapes has really separated him from the rest, allowing him to function in many, many situations.

Bill Laswell’s ability to stay active with different groups over the last 30+ years has become a strong point in his success; while building musical bonds with some of the best musicians alive whom allow the act of improvisation to coexist freely within the structured definitions of their musical vision. From Tabla Beat Science and Praxis to Last Exit and Method of Defiance, his sonic variety in all these mediums is an illumination of the human spirit in creative greatness with communicative equilibrium at the base. Every single one of the recordings he touches is a reflection of every player — guiding each other and allowing all of their signature sounds to rise to the surface. The sheer depth of Laswell’s tone is unmistakable and also a very large part of modern-day rhythm. To realize his body of work already is overwhelming and it feels like the tank is still full with his music output release flow.

When we caught up with Bill Laswell last year, he had just been featured on the Blixt record put out by Cuneiform Records. At the same time Bill was beginning to really launch materials out of his M.O.D. Technologies imprint with a regular pace. With a retrospective Celluloid Records in circulation featuring a wealth of Laswell numbers, the dots are now connecting on his career in ways that this generation will really appreciate and love. “Rockit” with Herbie Hancock to legendary sessions with PiL, his track record for going the extra mile into every pocket of sound is unparalleled. Connecting with Laswell through the Cuneiform label, we were given 30 minutes to speak with the master of fusion about Blixt, Celluloid, M.O.D. Technologies, early years in New York and many more areas of his career. Enjoy this exchange with Bill Laswell and Sound Colour Vibraton’s Pouya Asadi below while enjoying a few live clips from Laswell and his various collaborations.

+++

Bill Laswell Interview
Conducted by Pouya G. Asadi
Fall 2012

SCV: Blixt is one of your latest group outings with two mind blowing musicians, guitarist Raoul Björkenheim and drummer Morgan Ågren. What were the deciding factors to bringing this group together for a release under Cuneiform Records?

Bill Laswell: [laughter] It’s not my project, it’s their project and they approached me and I’ve known Raoul for a long time, and every time I do these things they’re not my band, they’re not my productions, they’re not my projects. I’m as involved as they are but it’s no ones particular vision, you know. Raoul had an idea, he knew Morgan the drummer, I was interested in him and that’s how it happened.

SCV: There’s a very raw and improvisational setting in place for Blixt, how was the feeling and energy inside of the studio for this recording?

Bill Laswell: Well, there were some sort of prepared ideas, there were some directions and then there was sort of improv based on the, in some cases, pretty loose structure or really minimal structure. There was some ideas that were brought by those two and a lot of it was improved around those kind of directions. It was pretty spontaneous and fairly energetic and precise, we didn’t waste any time. We used the time well.

SCV: For the logistic side of Blixt, what type of bass rig did you utilize in the recordings?

Bill Laswell: It’s a 1976 Fender Precision, kind of customized, there’s a lot of different pedals I used on that record probably, different things. There might have been an 8-string at one point and another 4-string. Mostly it’s the Fender with a AMPEG SVT Amplifier and a DI in the studio.

SCV: What can you say about Morgan and Raoul’s contributions to this record?

Bill Laswell: Well it already is a collaboration, but again, Raoul initiated the project and brought, I believe, the bulk of the riffs, phrases, written parts, whatever you call ‘em. And again, that was a contribution to getting the thing started then once you get up to speed and get a direction, then you improvise. So the collaboration is there from the beginning.

SCV: You had the pleasure of interacting with creative goliath Giorgio Gomelsky when you relocated to New York in the ’70s. What were some of the biggest ideas, views and perspectives Giorgio gave you?

Bill Laswell: Well, that was a long time ago, and I was just arriving in New York and just trying to get started. I sort of had ideas of what I would like to do and not like to do. Giorgio is one of the first older people that I met that had actually done something and I was not as familiar with his forays into classic-rock like Yardbirds or those kind of groups. I was more familiar with his work that he had done with progressive-rock in Europe, stuff like Magma which came from France, and that’s how I knew him. And I guess what I valued about him was his progressive-rock side, and he was aggressive and determined. I’m not sure we really collaborated, he certainly had no shortage of ideas in those days, he knew that there was a lot of things that he wanted to try to do. But at the end of the day there’s things that you want do, that you hope you get to realize them, and I’m not sure that’s the case with Giorgio.

SCV: Celluloid Records was one of your first major projects during your time in New York. What was the most challenging aspect of getting the label running and do you go back to any of the first releases for pleasure’s sake?

Bill Laswell: It’s not my label, the label was owned and financed and dictated up to a point by Jean Karakos who I met through Gomelsky.  Karakos is still active, I wouldn’t use the word successful but I would say he’s done a lot and he manages to be one of the classic-rock music period record pirates that still exists. He’s one of the last. In a fun criminal kind of way, it comes from that time, but anything goes, you just take somebody’s music and put it out or you do whatever you want and you move on. It’s the classic pirate, but anyways, Karakos started Celluloid. We talked about doing projects and he gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted, so the impression people get in the market place is it looks like I’ve made a label ’cause I was contributing probably 80 to 90 percent of the catalog. And we had a fairly good arrangement for a while, he kind of let me do what I wanted, and some other things benefited the label and I also let him distribute or administer publishing, which brought money to the label. Those were the days when you didn’t know much about business, you just wanted to create things. So there’s a lot of bad business, a lot of money stolen/lost but some money earned. The only label that I can say that I’ve had, where I decided what everything was, was in agreement with Chris Blackwell who at that time had ‘Island’. In ’89 I created a label called Axiom and that was a situation where the label was owned by the corporation but it was in fact my label creatively. And until recent times, now we have a label called M.O.D. Technologies and that’s another case where we actually own the label and make all the decisions. There’s only really two situations where I can say “that’s mine”, that it’s my label with no liaisons with corporate labels.

SCV: Do you go back to any of the first releases on Celluloid for pleasure?

Bill Laswell: No, I don’t see music that way, it’s no such thing to me. Going back, I’m not big on that either.

SCV: When working with bass players on your projects — such as Bootsy or Jah Wobble — how do you decide when to wear the bass player hat as well as the producer hat?

Bill Laswell: You’re not really conscious of it. If you’re just thinking about some kind of honest collaboration or interaction with people you just sort of have to go with the moment and you don’t always have things totally planned. Everything’s not like a pop production or like making a film in Hollywood, it’s sometimes fairly spontaneous. Sometimes you record one person and you might replace them with someone else and no one even knows. So you just do it step by step with focus hopefully and a certain amount of spontaneity and you just make those decisions. Sound gets generated in all kinds of ways. Some people really call themselves producers and they take care of every detail and other people go for more of a feeling or just an overall “what’s the end result and what was your experience when you listen to this creation that we’ve just manifested?”. I don’t have a rulebook or any particular philosophy and I don’t like to designate titles that people give like producer, exec. producer, asst. engineer, etc.. It all goes into creating art, you know, and you don’t need titles, it’s not the military.

SCV: The personnel on PiL’s Album are very interesting, how did you arrive at that particular combination of players?

SCV: Well, again, it wasn’t really planned, its sort of a step by step process. Somebody makes a joke in a bar and somebody else says the wrong name to the wrong person and all of a sudden you have a list. John Lydon had said once in a magazine that he wanted to get Ginger Baker to play in PiL and everyone thought it was a joke and I actually thought it was a great idea. So the first thing that I said to him was “We should find him, I’ll find him”.  It started with Ginger Baker and then I was always at that time trying to get into as much recording as possible with Tony Williams. Ginger and Tony knew each other from back in the day with Jack Bruce. Then I got Tony, then I had the foundation. And then I just started to pick people that I had worked with or heard good things about and it went step by step.  We heard about Steve Vai; we had some friends who knew him. I had kinda production based people that I was using on a lot of different projects which at that time would’ve been: Nicky Skopelitis, Bernard Fowler and Bernie Worrell. I was working a lot more in Japan so I reached Ryuichi Sakamoto. Than there were people on the fringe that you would not expect to be on a rock records, like Malachi Favors from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Jonas Hellborg, and Steve Tuure. But again it came together just piece by piece falling into place and it involved finding people that were lost and discovering new people and dealing with some legendary people, all at the same time.

Photo by Peter Gannushkin

SCV: With yourself having such a heavy hand in Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” can you describe the recording sessions that made this pivotal turning point in modern culture while accepting and loving ‘turntablism’ and the new sound Herbie was coming up with?

Bill Laswell: “Rockit” was something that was not really a plan. I had started to make connections with what was in the beginning with what would become improv so I think the initial idea was to use electronic drum programming that we were hearing coming out of the Bronx and in hip-hop records. To use the turntable as a signature sound, as an instrument and than to augment that with references that weren’t jazz related and in some cases not even accessible music, but that’s kinda how it happened. It was something that just came together, we didn’t really know what we had until everybody responded the way they did. To me it was just another experimental studio kinda thing.

Bill Laswell: Last Exit is one of the most unsettling and gripping tunes I have heard in my life. The muscular velocity of how the group communicates in the setting of improvisation goes beyond old possibilities of compositions. What comes to mind when you think about your time with Last Exit?

SCV: It was from ’86 to, I believe, ’89 and it was very physical. It was very destructive. It was loud. It generated a lot of energy which sort of had a purpose in a form of a hygiene that it was maybe stamping out some of the more complacent activity at jazz festivals in Europe during that time. Sort of what punk-rock did to rock music. But it felt like there was some power there and it’s pretty much %100 improvisation. From playing a lot together, we developed a kind of a routine, at least between the drums, bass and guitar, that sounded to people like we were sometimes playing compositions or pieces. For the most part it was developing over those years of playing a kind of a language that we could speak only amongst ourselves and not outside of that particular reading group. It had significance in that it had power and it did feature some important people that obviously come from a lot of different areas.  And the response was always divided, you either loved that and you’re devoted to it or you can’t completely figure out why someone would do something like that. But over that course of time we did quite a lot of work in a lot of different places and it obviously subsided because of the death of Sonny Sharrock. ‘Cause you could never have it like it was, it would be like trying to put the Jimi Hendrix Experience back together without Jimi Hendrix.

SCV: One of my favorite groups of yours has to be Tabla Beat Science. The DVD Talamanam Sound Clash: Further Adventures in Hypercussion is something all fans of fusion music should own. How are you feeling about the work you completed with the group these days?

Bill Laswell: Yeah, I thought it was a great fusion and for once it was leaving out a lot of the obvious cliches of jazz/rock fusion. You got to hear a lot of great Indian music and you got to hear some modern sounds and technology and things being generated by laptop, by turntable, and there’s a lot of vocals with a good rhythm back line. I thought it was very timely also. Sultan Kahn has passed away and Tabla Beat is a kind of chapter that opened and a chapter that closed but I think it was well documented and we never had a bad moment and we always played very high-end type concerts. We played in India, Lebanon, Japan and all over England and the States so it was well documented. There’s at least three recordings of it, one of them being a DVD. So it’s a good clean open and shut case, you know.

SCV: Do you see another release from Tabla Beat Science on your M.O.D. Technologies imprint or is this a closed chapter?

Bill Laswell: I think it’s a closed chapter in a positive way.

SCV: M.O.D. Technologies is your new baby, serving as the successor to Axiom and the strong foundation created with that label. You released an expanded version of Profanation from your group Praxis, another of my favorite groups of yours. With a Lee Scratch Perry album released among other stellar material out, what plans do you have for this new venture in the coming years?

Bill Laswell”  Well, they’re already in place, a lot of them. I’ve been working a lot in Ethiopia and there’s a young band there, somewhere between the ages of 21-25. Ethiopian musicians playing their version of a kind of rock music. It’s African music but it’s very futuristic and it even has overtones of metal so it’s gonna be very controversial for the African music fear, if there is such a thing. So that’s one. I’m also doing an Ethiopian compilation of modern new stuff and some of the legends and the older stuff which will come with a thirty minute film. Hawkman with Sly and Robbie is coming out now, like any minute, and that’s pretty much roots reggae based with overtones of electronic music and dancehall and dub and sort of accessible and commercial reggae and dance stuff. There’s a record of North African which we hope to feature Pharaoh Sanders and DJ Krush. Some kind of a project will come out of the collaborations with him that we’ve been doing in Japan with MOD. That’s about it for the most part. There’s some very interesting things that are being talked about, and there’s probably another Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry record which will feature some other artists that everyone’s heard of. Working on that at the moment. That’s about where it’s at, at the moment.

SCV: I caught wind of your Sony Creative Software series Loops and Samples. Released as a box set with stunning 24 bit sound, how has the world responded to this gift of yours and how do you feel this will shape modern music for years to come?

Bill Laswell: Oh, I had really nothing to do with that, these people showed up, they were interested in loops, and I have a storage room full of tapes. I was in Europe, a guy showed up who had some money, he paid it to an engineer who was not even one of our engineers and made his pick of things and I never even bothered to see what they had chosen. I’ve never heard it before but I’m assuming it could be useful in a kind of cheesy way like if you’re copying something to make a quick TV commercial or something. It probably has a function.

SCV: How have your decades of touring and performing in front of vastly different cultures summed up your present day music-making?

Bill Laswell: Well you know, when it really comes to recording and trying to get a good performance, or being critical or judging a performance, honestly it’s really no different. You take it all for the value of the experience of the performance and then in the studio you try and do your best work. It’s not once you’re in front of a mike, once you’re determining a result in whatever way it needs to be done, you don’t draw the line, its not that different. I’m sure for others that might be frustrating but for me it hasn’t been any different.

 SCV: Do you have a love for the process of recording… being in the studio… creating music and so forth?

Bill Laswell: Yeah, to me it’s all process. Like they say ‘You’re dying every day but it’s the riot that counts’, it’s the process. Like Hitchcock would make a film and when he was done filming he felt he was done, of course no one realized his wife was an editor, but yeah, process is everything to me because there is no infinite version for me. There is no absolute final way something is. There’s no such thing as a purist when it comes to judging a record because if it’s a record that’s mixed for multiple tracks it could be done in endless different ways and so there are no real results, there’s just experiences we altered. In the future you’ll probably hear, or be able to, create your own versions of things that you’re interested in. It’s already starting a little bit, and it should be that way. And the process is the creative process which no one can take away from you, whatever you or anyone does is indivisible, is original, unless they’re copying somebody.

+++

+++

+++