Bill Laswell: Well yeah, you have to be, right? Or else you wouldn’t continue. I think it’s not just recorded sound but sound in general. Everything you hear is part of a kind of a cacophony of different orchestrations, whether it’s noise or nature. All of this gets synthesized into music, and I think it’s all relevant. It’s how you put things together. I don’t have a particular philosophy and pretty much what I say will change daily, but I am of course motivated by sound and especially extremes of sound, whether it’s low-end or a symphony or space and silence, it’s all motivating, and if that’s what you choose to do with yourself you need to immerse yourself in it one hundred percent and when you do that you find it all comes to you naturally and it’s still a motivation.
PM: What is your philosophy on making a record and what is your goal?
BL: Well, the philosophy is not to have a philosophy, and the goal is to get a good result that at least you feel good about that you’re not second-guessing – which I’m not too good at – or with the hope maybe that other people also relate and get something positive out of it.
PM: I’ve read that you don’t like to spend too much time on something, that you like to get the sound that you’re going for then move forward.
BL: Pretty much. If I don’t get what I think is valuable I’ll probably wait or move on and come back to something else. I don’t beat away at something for long periods of time. It’s usually if it’s not sitting right, if it doesn’t feel right, I’ll move on to some other area and then come back. I don’t like that idea of getting stuck in one place.
PM: What in your life first attracted you to dub music?
BL: Well I guess it came from the idea of rhythm section coming first because I had experience dealing with repetition and bass and drums. Earlier on when I started it was not that different – it was sort of R&B and sort of country music and blues and minimal rock stuff. I didn’t really come out of rock and rock & roll, I came more from rhythm & blues earlier on and blues and country music. So I related to the minimalism, the simplicity of the rhythms – bass and drums – to start with. When I first heard reggae I didn’t really think about it here or there. It wasn’t that important to me, even though it was at that moment – I think around the time that Bob Marley was just starting and everyone was jumping on that – it wasn’t that interesting to me, but when I started to hear dub I became interested in all of the music coming out of Jamaica and I sort of went backwards. I started with dub records and I would buy anything that didn’t have vocals, or even didn’t have horns. I was kind of just turning on the rhythm. And then later on, through that, I went and worked backwards and discovered all the great artists there with vocals...
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Phil Moffa @'Glasschord'
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