This interview was conducted via email during November, 2001 & edited for purposes of integrity & continuity.

CS: Having followed your career for the last ten years or so (beginning with Bastro), I find it interesting that you still consider your music to be rock & roll (as described in the Act Five, Scene One notes).Do you consider all of your music to be rock & roll?

DG: Aha — I can see that you haven’t yet heard Act Five, Scene One! Oh well, maybe you have and you still don’t think it’s rock music. But don’t the first seven minutes sound like rock? It has distorted electric guitar and a thumping beat and sounds more like a conventional rock band than anything I’ve played on in some time. (I had to go out and buy a distortion box.) I will say, however, that I’m still not at the point of matching my voice to this sort of rock-thump stuff — I can’t really see my way to it. Do I consider all of my music to be rock & roll? Definitely not. I have been prone to making statements like calling it all punk or post-punk, and then every once in a while I hear some super-fragile Gastr recording and think how strange it was for me to have had a chip on my shoulder about describing it with reference to punk.

CS: What drives a given compositional mode; that is, what draws you to something
like Apertura (w/Mats Gustafsson) as opposed to your more conventional songs like those heard on The Spectrum Between?

DG: I was tempted to say something like "to thicken the plot," but lots of people make relatively heterogeneous batches of records. In part, for me it has to do with the opportunity to work with people from very different music-making contexts. It was really exciting to find a commonality or a way of working in duo with Mats Gustafsson. The particular way of working frequently comes down to finding an instrument (in this case for me an Indian harmonium), a distinct character or feel to the playing (on Apertura, frozen-over slow), and some compelling textural relation between instruments (for Apertura, such similarity that there was a productive confusion about who was making certain sounds).Apertura is a good example of the fact that when I make wordless music, I prefer the extremely wordless — long durations and slow, virtually unsingable tempos. I like to write lyrics. But I will say that I find songwriting or working on records of songs much more of a challenge.Those records tend towards an extreme of constructedness.

CS: Do you have a favorite among your compositions/recordings?

DG: I would have to include both the wordy and the very wordless. Favorites include most of the songs on The Spectrum Between (I usually come to prefer how I’m performing a song over its recorded version), Act Five, Scene One (very wordless), Apertura, most of the songs on Gastr del Sol’s Camoufleur (ditto), much of Gastr del Sol’s The Serpentine Similar, and Squirrel Bait’s first record. I’m also very fond of the Red Krayola’s Hazel and Palace’s Arise, Therefore.

CS: Name five books you believe essential to your development/thought & why.

DG: Notes on the Cinematographer, Robert Bresson.
Statement on Occasion of First Exhibition," Marcel Broodthaers.
Silence, John Cage.
Ada, Vladimir Nabakov.
"Melanctha," Gertrude Stein.

What an unsatisfying list — taken as a whole not representative of much of anything! And verging on canonical as hell (runners-up: Beckett, Flaubert). I guess what these have in common is that they made me feel like really getting down to the business of my own work. Impatiently so.

CS: Name five recordings you believe essential to your development/thought &

DG: My Friend Roger," Babylon Dance Band.
Presque Rien N» 1, Luc Ferrari.
Song Cycle, Van Dyke Parks.
The Magic City, Sun Ra.
Corky’s Debt to His Father, Mayo Thompson.

Ditto on the empowerment-gift of be-your-own freak/invent your bad self.

     Act Five, Scene One borrows its structure from an earlier piece, Thirty-Minute Raven. You could think of it as Thirty-Minute Raven times two. Or you could think of it as an hour-long television drama as compared to the sitcom-length Raven — except that Act Five, Scene One is the more broadly comic, less deadpan of the two.

     Perhaps it also makes sense to think of these pieces in terms of locked grooves. But that only works if you imagine a groove that contains thirty minutes or an hour of sound. Call it repeat-mode rock and roll. We’d made it all the way to the Fifth Act when Scene One got stuck and kept starting over again.

     The Thirty-Minute Raven structure was born of considerations about how to install a four-and-a-half minute piece of recorded music in an exhibition. I really didn’t want to torture the people who worked there. The solution was to have the four-and-a-half minute piece play at the at the beginning of and thirty minutes into an hour-long cycle — a sixty-minute recording set in repeat mode. The intervening time was filled by layering individual percussion elements, scaled to the volume at which you might hear John McEntire shaking a tambourine or playing a triangle in the center of the space. The goal of scaling the percussion elements to their unamplified volumes was to achieve an effect of transparency. When the original four-and-a-half minute piece kicked in on the hour and the half-hour, it functioned like an alarm clock.

     In working on these pieces, I enjoyed becoming attuned to fifteen- and thirty-minute intervals. Your attention is teased, then taxed; the drift begins, and then it’s interrupted by by that perfectly regular signpost. Something like snooze-bar rock and roll. I wanted to strike a balance, making it empty enough to work in repeat-mode listening but not rendering it barren of thrills, spills, chills, quills.

     Act Five, Scene One is freshly risen bread, and I’m reluctant to say more about it.