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Electronic music CD Carya Amara - Tales of the Unattractive "hellishly varied... a great starting point to test the waters" - Modern-Dance Details and MP3s

Amey:

Amey Mazurek, the interviewer.

Stephen:

Stephen Jones, who worked on the video side of Severed Heads for a number of years.

Tim:

Tim Gruchy, of the band Vision Four 5, also Stephen's housemate.

Stephen: ... We had always, was in the States.
Amey: Right. Well, it's interesting you say that, 'cause when I talked about this with Tom, the book idea, he said, "Well, my mum would buy it, your mum would buy it, nobody else here would buy it." And then he had a friend there in the background, "I'd buy it!" "Yeah, but you don't have any money."
Stephen: Yeah, well that's the thing. We have been largely ignored in this country. There is a following, and we can raise an audience, and so on, but it's never gotten more than sort of like, you know, 800 people kind of thing. I mean, yes, in Sydney we can sell out four nights in a cinema, which is a pretty magnificent thing in its own way, but when you think about it, that's only 1500 people at the most. Or maybe 1600 people at the most, that sort of thing. It feels like a lot more than that. But those nights were fantastic, because it would just pick you up and sweep you away. I mean, I say that in the sense of never having seen a Severed Heads show, of course, 'cause I've always been on stage, except until - you see, I resigned from Severed Heads in the beginning of '92. And so since then I've seen a couple of shows, and they really do, I mean, they pick you up and sweep you away. At the moment there really isn't anyone doing a sort of live mix of the video, but the video is really still a crucial part of it. And of course it's basically now entirely Tom's graphics, and all his Amiga graphics and things like that, the core of the whole vision for him. So Severed Heads is also very changed, it's drifted and shifted and moved and changed and developed and, you know, all of that over the whole period sort of, very much reflects the possibilities of the current state of technologies and things. And those things are quite crucial, I think, to understanding what Severed Heads is, is that it is very much a fluid reflection of the possibilities and potentials as they could be got out of existing technologies and things like that, when you don't have heaps of money around.
Amey: Yeah. That's amazing. What about the American audience, how was that?
Stephen: Oh,they were great, generally. Only occasionally it was a debacle, but the bigger cities or the bigger college cities, great! Fantastic! And the college radio network played a very important part in that. [Stephen's housemate Tim shows up, introductions exchanged.]
Amey: So the American audience - and you opened for MC900FT Jesus and Skinny Puppy, were they different parts of the tour or -
Stephen: Oh, no, no, it's two tours. On the MC900FT Jesus, they opened for us, and that was the second US tour. On the first US tour, we opened for Skinny Puppy. So, yeah, we were top of the bill on the second tour. That was our tour.
Amey: I gotcha. Oh, that's right, you know, I think I saw that, years ago, at this club in Houston called Numbers. I didn't know Severed Heads at the time, so it just went over my head.
Stephen: Yeah, we played at Numbers in Houston.
Amey: Was it mostly dance-oriented, with a beat, or -
Stephen: What, our show? Yeah. Well, semi. As near as anyone would want to take it... I mean, the real stuff wasn't, but the stuff that we ended up having to market, was. I mean, getting people to market what Tom really wanted to do was totally impossible, you know. So I think you need to have a bit of a hunt through all that documentation and think about that. See, if you've got Nettwerk-type backgrounding material, you'll only hear about the -'cause they could never understand the role of the vision in the show.
Amey: No, I don't think any record company actually ever does. They just see the bottom line as money -
Stephen: Well, no, it's not the money, it's just that all they see is the music. They don't know anything about - they're involved in records, and they're involved in sound. They don't understand that a video clip, for example, is anything other than an advertisement for the record. Whereas for us, it was never an advertisement particularly. It was implied in a way, but it was never particularly an advertisement for the record. It was very much a crucial part of the show, and it was primarily a part of the show. And only secondarily was it an advertisement for the record. So it really had a very different role, the video, for us, than it had for any other band that you might name.
Amey: I don't know - maybe Laibach comes to mind. The last time they came to the States, they had some video stuff.
Stephen: Well, I mean, Kraftwerk had video, but they were sort of prerecorded clips just played back. They weren't directly active with the music.
Amey: Same thing with Laibach, it was a film, they just let it go.
Stephen: Yeah. Well, that goes back to Tangerine Dream and people like that. Fantastic films that went with the music. But it was just a film, you know, it was not something done that was part of the show in a live sense.
Amey: Or it'd be pre-planned - Hawkwind is coming back!
Stephen: Yeah?
Amey: Yeah.
Stephen: Wow.
Amey: Yeah, it's this guy name Nik Turner... He's bringing back his version of Hawkwind and it's a very 70s, visual, lasers and all that kind of stuff. I don't know what to make of that, it's really retro, you know? Lasers! That's live, man.
Amey: Do you think Severed Heads has been an influence on people? Have you seen that?
Stephen: I don't know, it's hard to say. One would assume that in the underground, in the background of alit of people's stuff, they've had Severed Heads records. I mean, we were constantly barraged with people giving us demos, so that in a sense we were an influence at the level of, you know. Another band that was travelling around and people kind of felt that we were worth getting an opinion from. So in that sense, yes, there's probably a level of influence. As for picking up on ideas or copying songs or copying sounds or anything like that, I think there have been some situations in which people have sampled. And there have also been situations in which people have actually asked to be able to do remixes, and that sort of thing. And that's been fairly - so I mean, yeah, I think there must've been an influence, but it's very, very difficult to tell, because people don't acknowledge where they've stolen things from, if that's their procedure, and there's been very little critical notice - I mean, you'll get Nine Inch Nails in Wired, or something like that, or Mondo 2000 or something, and I suppose, in a sense that item in Ipso Facto was the sort of only thing that ever happened at that level for us, partly because we were too early, and I think in many ways probably I think the influence is that we broke the ground for other people to come along and actually fill the gaps and be there, and be noticed. Whereas we were just breaking the ground, so that we were kind of unnoticed but did the groundwork, the actual bottom end of it, to allow other people to come along and do things, have an audience, and have a general response accorded to the m sort of thing. Tim, have we had an influence on things?
Tim: Absolutely!
Stephen: Apart from yourself, I mean.
Tim: Well, if you look at all the Volition bands, almost all of them work with video, to varying degrees, and I think that's a very direct carry-on from the conceptual works of Severed Heads. It's not a direct thing at all.
Stephen: Yeah, yeah, no, on the conceptual stuff we set up.
Tim: No one's set up to copy Severed Heads, but conceptually there's that influence of pictures and sound. So I think that that's affected most of the bands that are currently playing on Volition, well, the dance bands on the Volition label. I play in Vision Four 5; we certainly acknowledge a direct conceptual, well, an acknowledgement, and we've made that public all along. We're also on Volition, and I'm the vision, just as Stephen was the vision half of Severed Heads, I'm the vision half of Vision Four 5...
Amey: ...And your name is -
Tim: Tim Gruchy... Well, I've been doing visual production for years. And I'm the one most responsible for large-scale visual production on the east coast of Australia, in dance clubs and nightclubs. So I got that sort of rolling, over the last 10 years. And then the last couple of years I've been playing with Vision Four 5. And I've known Stephen - you know, Stephen was a mentor to me -
Stephen: '75?
Tim: '75, yeah. And I used to be the sort of younger Stephen's half side for a couple of years then. And so that influenced everything that I've done subsequently, and then more recently with working with Vision Four 5. And I think the conceptual - I think there's a difference too. What we do onstage is using technology that was never available when Stephen worked with Severed Heads. That sort of level of digital stuff just didn't exist then really, did it?
Stephen: Nope.
Tim: So what we use onstage is much more generally interactive. So we use body movement to control sound and vision using digital interactive systems. So we have a portion of the stage as sets.
Amey: So how many bands in Australia kind of operate on this level of -
Tim: There's no other bands operating on the level that we operate on, in terms of the degree of interactivity, and all our sound and vision technology is interrelated as well. So that a movement can be visually represented, but it can also be controlling sound.
Amey: Is that using MIDI triggers?
Tim: It's using a video camera that's converted into real-time computer graphic that's then triggering MIDI. So it's a totally integrated system. There's no one else that I'm aware of doing that in this country.
Amey: But that's a different story. That could be a whole story in itself. Yeah.
Tim: I don't really know of any other band anywhere in the world that sort of works with it in the manner that we do. And the thing that we really set out to do is integrate the two technically and conceptually...
Amey: But you think Severed Heads has been an influence?
Tim: Oh! Absolutely. But conceptually, not musically, conceptually. And like I say, every other Volition band. And that's not to say that - well, it's hard to know when the influence came, before or after other bands got involved with Volition, at what point that influence manifests.
Stephen: Generally all through it, I suspect, before and after.
Tim: Yeah.
Stephen: A lot of people have been listening to Severed Heads records. They're always cutting costs. Well, except for the first one.
Tim: But I think the biggest influence Severed Heads has had - mind you, that's just my bias - is not so much musically, is that it's the whole concept of presenting sound and vision.
Stephen: Difficult question. I mean it's your bias, and it's my bias too. But whether or not that's a real thing, or, as I often feel, despondently, that in fact, there are only two of us that have actually even noticed.
Tim: Well, I think it's out there, you know.
Stephen: Yeah, it's out there.
Tim: It's out there in ways you don't -
Amey: Yeah not overtly...
Tim: I get people who'll come up and refer to what we do, use Severed Heads as the reference to what we do. And that implies - now we're talking about people from the (general) public - and the only other thing they can compare it to is Severed Heads. And that implies a real influence out there in the public, I think.
Amey: Any word back from the Americans on that?
Stephen: What?
Amey: Influence kind of things?
Stephen: It's difficult to say. I mean I'm sure there is, but it's not the sort of stuff is particularly publicly acknowledging. It's not that they want to, or don't want to, or are thieving it or anything like that. It's just that it's such a part of the background, such a part of your constant environment, that it's kind of, we ll, it's just happening, it's just there. It's like the right-hand driving sort of stuff. I mean, my sort of basis for getting involved in video in the first place was always, you know, making visual music. That was my whole kind of approach to it.
Amey: But you always had this concept, before you met Tom, that you were going to get with a band, or it just kind of happened?
Stephen: No, it just sort of grew. I mean I'd done a take with SPK about the same year, in '79, that I saw Tom play. And then I didn't really do anything - oh, I did a lot of -
Tim: Can I talk him up for a moment?
Stephen: What?
Tim: Can I talk you up for a moment?
Stephen: [Smiles] Go on.
Tim: He was doing stuff, when I met Stephen, in '75, the sorts of things that I became involved in, which Stephen was organising, which weren't within the structure of a band or anything like that, but would be very much to work - [to Stephen] remember, at QU T's, work with a band, to create a live - and it wasn't about making a video for a band, it was about -
Stephen: A live context.
Tim: - a live context, we were creating a live mixed complex images with a band as an event. And it wasn't that it was any one band, it was always working with a number of different bands. So you were doing that very much in about '75, with various bands and musicians. And like I say, about creating a live, contextualised event, just generating a product at the end. 'cause it was always about the live, the thing about systems you always created were very much integrated, live systems. So he was working with the ideas, at least, in '75.
Stephen: Then there was a big show that I did at a gallery here in Sydney called Waters Gallery, we put a studio into the gallery for two weeks. And just invited everybody who was doing performance of any sort, music, dance, theatre, any damned thing that was no t at the level of the official culture, but of the underground culture sort of culture and stuff. And that was this live studio running for two weeks straight, 24 hours a day, almost, I mean, in fact, it was open for 24 hours a day. And I know that that had an impact on people, because they've mentioned it. Anyway, alit of quite extraordinary pieces presented during that time, not necessarily from myself or anything, but just all kinds of people, and other things within that framework. And there was lots of recording and stuff.
Tim: Remember the Regent's show you did in -
Stephen: Yeah, that too!
Tim: - Queensland University Music Department? With classical musicians, artists?
Stephen: There was an improvisation academic department of music in University of Queensland, they had an improvisation group.
Amey: When was this?
Stephen: '75. And that was - or '76 by that stage.
Tim: I think it was late '75.
Stephen: Was it? Yeah. That was a kind of situation where they had a bunch of synthesisers, the early analogue audio synthesisers, and there was a group of acoustic musicians - and we mocked up all the instruments, fed them out to the synthesisers, and then fed that back in to the auditorium. So they would play with the synthesised versions of their own sounds, the treated sounds and the chopped up stuff and all of that. And then we layered in, on top of that, a full vision video system - that was, I'd sort of been working with them for a few months on that kind of thing. And then at a later point, we layered in a full video system and with a bunch of dancers. Tim was a camera operator in that one. Weren't you?
Tim: I mixed.
Stephen: Sorry, oh, you did all the mixing, oh right. Who were the camera operators? Terry and -
Tim: Terry Murphy and Roger - hmm.
Stephen: Anyway, I've got such a bad memory, it's terrible.
Amey: It happens. I think it happens, the older you get the more information's stuffed in your brain -
Stephen: You overlay it all the time, and you sort of lose track of things that are kind of already done and finished and left, you know. Constantly overlaying these things. So that kind of process was a real, live, free-form, totally improvised musical-dance-vision video event. It was quite interesting because they had this wonderful big auditorium, which was just this big open square, which was quite acoustically developed. So they just put some daises around the place, and people would just walk around, and wander around the edge particularly, and the dancers would just kind of work their way through it. And this was sort of strategically placed, and the musicians were strategically placed and it was quite funny, it was quite good. I've still got the music for that. I've probably still got the video tapes but I don't think they'll play anymore, I'm afraid. Really a pity that.
Tim: Pre-video projectors too.
Stephen: Oh, yeah.
Amey: So what kind of equipment did you use?
Stephen: It was all just big screens. Big monitors, 20-inch - it was all black and white, the whole thing was black and white.
Amey: What kind of images were they?
Stephen: Oh, people walking around, synthesised vision, feedback, stuff like that. All kind of torn up, sort of kiddied kinds of things...