Interview with Stewart Walker - 11th Hour Technology

Stewart grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Unlike many other Americans of his age, at that time, he adopted the new sounds of early 90's Britain - from the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, to 808 State and The Orb. An interest in analogue synthesis and electronic music followed soon after a curious trip to the UK. In 1997 he began to release records, and continues to do so today on his own label "Persona".

Some describe his music as "minimal Techno".

We are very proud to present – Stewart Walker

11th-hour It seems that your studio skills are largely self-taught, and that you carved out a creative identity in musical isolation, away from any peripheral and like-minded musical community - in what way was this an advantage or a disadvantage?

Stewart My studio skills are totally self-taught. I always try to break it down for people into separate eras. For instance, the first era was around 1994 when I was spending all my free time in the library poring over 15 years of Keyboard magazines dating back to 1978 or so and learning about synthesizers was an absolute obsession. I'd go to bed reading about John Chowning's discovery of FM synthesis, dream about Yamaha's TX-802 and then wake up drooling over Korg's Mono/Poly. I was also lurking on the Internet message board called "Analog Heaven" at this time so that was fueling the fires as well. Then, I bought my first synth and it was unbelievable even though half of the voice circuits were broken. I would play chords and arpeggiations every day on this for about six months until I wanted to add some drum sounds to the synthy stuff. At this time, everything was coming out of a guitar amp. Then started the next era of studio building when I bought my first mixer. At this time, I was making 2 or 3 tracks per day, just coming up with new ideas and recording them to cassette and then moving on. This continued every six months or so as I gained enough money to buy a DAT, another synth, a computer for sequencing, a sampler and so on. I do have to give credit to Jake Mandell for pushing me to upgrade from my Mac SE to the Quadra with an Audiomedia II card way back when. I think that was a major step for my sequencing and recording skills.

I don't think there're really any strong advantages or disadvantages to being self-taught. I think that all artists must form their own musical identity to begin with, or after learning their craft. And so, the fact that I grew up separately does not have any obvious advantages except for the fact that I feel pride that I taught myself.

11th-hour Considering that the first of a string of successful releases was in 1997 it could be said that you have quickly risen to fame, with figures in the scene such as Ritchie Hawtin being vocal in their appreciation. Did this come as much of a shock, and did it create unnecessary pressure on yourself that hindered your creativity?

Stewart I don't think that external expectations put me under pressure as much as my own internal expectations. When I did receive acclaim it caused me to put a lot of pressure on to make sure my music was good enough to justify people's positive comments in my mind. I was releasing minimal techno at that time but I never really felt "locked" into making minimal techno. A lot of times, I'm writing a track that has nothing to do with dance techno and I'll go with it because I think the direction of it might be more interesting than if I restrain my ideas.

11th-hour Your first album "Stabiles" was inspired by the sculptures of Alexander Calder, yet in another interview following this release I have read you that you have also been inspired by, "chronic MTV exposure." What did you draw from each of these sources, and how have they both fitted into you musical identity?

Stewart After making Stabiles, I felt a little bit pigeonholed in that area because I felt like the "conceptual artist" and I started to see a division between making music for art's sake and making music for the sake of pop. I really feel like there are a lot of people in electronic music making music for art's sake, but I have a problem with that because there is not yet a system in place to recognize what makes a piece good. And with pop music, there's a more direct understanding whether it's good or not because you can see how people respond to it, and how you personally respond to it. Yeah, I'm kind of embarrassed about that comment about "chronic MTV exposure," but I used to watch it every day for a while.

Stewart I still view my music as conceptual because if I am not thinking about non-musical things, than it's hard for me to get inspired by the nuts and bolts of music tools. I'm not just thinking of one track, but a body of tracks, because I need some kind of framework to work within. For the Stabiles album I was thinking about sculpture and stationary things, and when I make tracks now I'm always referring to the titles that I write down… When I'm inspired I'll have a couple of verbal themes in mind, and then I'll try to get those words out and have those words hint at the content of the music.

11th-hour So are you tiptoeing a fine line between making music for art's sake and making pop music?

Stewart I feel like I'm leaning towards making pop music, um, and I find when you are sitting on the fence, you alienate people on both sides. So, a lot of the conceptual behavior that I exhibited before, turns me off now because I think that it's kind of pretentious and maybe unnecessary for the music. Maybe before I was giving away too much information, and trying to set too much of the framework for the listener, when most listeners already have their framework determined for their listening environment.

11th-hour But critics really liked "Stabiles". They were pleased with your sculpture references.

Stewart That's accurate. Critics do like it because, in my opinion, music critics need something to write about besides just the music. It's difficult to write about music itself, so critics and writers have to write about the non-musical ideas or the background of the music itself, and try to hint from those references what the music is going to sound like. I appreciate the critical acclaim that I received, but I'd like to be able to write music without thinking of past or future critical acclaim. I'd like to think about just making music that gives me pleasure, and sounds "right" after the thousandth run-through.

11th-hour Where else do you look to for inspiration if anywhere, and what, if anything, has grabbed your attention lately?

Stewart The biggest thing that's grabbed my attention lately was the movie "Donnie Darko." Every time I see that movie, I'm really excited and mystified by what the hell that movie is about. (laughs) I get a lot of inspiration from watching movies. Not inspiration to score movies, but ways to achieve moods, except movies have a completely different set of tools. I also get a lot of inspiration from making tracks now and from playing shows and performing. Or maybe "drive" is a better word. You know, play a great show and then feel "Okay, I don't suck. Maybe I should go in the studio now."

11th-hour You seem to have moved around a lot, both within the USA and around Europe, never having recorded music solely in one location. Was there any reason for this, and has your music developed some kind of interstitial element as a consequence?

Stewart A lot of journalists make note that I've moved around a lot, but most of my moving around wasn't for me. Most of it was following Tracey (Stewart's beloved wife) as her career was growing. I never really felt attached to a place that I was living, so boredom and a love of the neo-nomadic lifestyle pushed me to seek out greener pastures. I miss a lot of the places I've been to though. I think Washington, DC is one of the most beautiful cities in the US.

11th-hour You are currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts USA, where you have created the Persona imprint. Do you have any long-term plans to stay here, and if so is there any musically related reason why?

Stewart There's no reason to stay in Massachusetts for the music. When people ask me why do I live in Boston, my first answer is that it's half way between London and Los Angeles, so I feel like it's a good place to be for traveling and going to play shows - maybe in Germany or maybe in New York or Seattle. I feel pretty centrally located in the western world to play in the cities that will have me. My second answer is that, even though I have some feelings of frustration from living in Boston, I have a nice house. It's the best place I've ever lived. And, it's become obvious that here I have no distractions, so if I'm not productive, I only have myself to blame. Sometimes I regret that I do not have a peer group here but I imagine that could end of becoming overly political and not actually that supportive.

11th-hour Persona was created as a single point of promotion for your music that would otherwise be difficult to achieve with many different releases on different labels. Why do you feel that it is important to attach your personality to your music in such a way, where as in the past Techno has existed as a faceless entity?

Stewart I think that the idea of faceless techno producers is an old and boring idea, and I think it's an idea that is over. I feel that I'm not so interested in music that doesn't have something to say, even though that directly contradicts my concept versus pop discussion of earlier. I feel like it's no longer just about the music for me. It's about the background of my music-making process. It's about the way people interact with my music, and so, I don't want to be faceless because I want to put more out there in terms of culture and cultural products other than just faceless techno 12"s. And it also gives me a way to see techno become more developed as an art form because most of the music I have been a fan of is more than just good music, it's also good presentation, strong emotional content, and maybe I have the desire to sleep with the singer.

11th-hour Other artists; Geoff White, DJ Slip, Fred Gianelli and Gregory Shiff have all made appearances alongside yourself on Persona. Is there any particular reason why you have chosen these artists to feature on a label that is predominantly geared towards your own musical output?

Stewart I've been thinking a lot about having other artists on my label, and whether I should really pursue it. Of course it would be a dream to put out tons of groundbreaking records by famous and unknown artists but I did start Persona for my own musical vision. Also, I was proselytizing when I began Persona about how I wanted not just a label but a family of artists, yadda, yadda, but I realized that the best way to have a family of artists was to tap all of the kick-ass producers in your town and drink beer with them on the weekends. That might work in Berlin, but in Boston it definitely won't. The reason I started working with Greg was that Greg was somebody who impressed me with his desire to work and to make good music, and I liked the music he was making - I felt like it added a beneficial second style to Persona.

11th-hour How did your collaborations with Greg Shiff on the "Pleasure Island" and "South Suburban" EPs come about?

Stewart My collaborations with Greg came primarily because we were hanging out a lot. A lot of times when he would come over, I would be in the studio, and he would listen to my tracks, or I would go to his studio and listen to his tracks. We would drink beer and order pizza, or have barbeques, and so our desire to work together probably had more to do with the fact that we had become friends and wanted to see what types of music we would create together, because that's always an interesting question. And I think you can hear the influence we had on one another on the South Suburban EP for instance.

11th-hour How does your recent work compare with your initial releases from five years ago? Has there been any change in the music, or the way in which you write music in parallel with any ways in which you may have changed as a person? Do you have different motivations now?

Stewart I like to think that my recent work is more reflecting my own sound. I don't deny that my earlier work had strong references to Dan Bell, Rob Hood, and Basic Channel. Those were my big influences back in 1997, those were the people that I would sit down and listen to their records over and over just to check for nuances and modulations, etc. I like to think that my music is more sophisticated now as well, with more changes. I have more tools at my disposal and I think that I've grown better techniques over that time. On the other hand, if I listen to the music I compiled for the Reclamation 1997-1999 CD, I hear some similarities and organizational style, so, there's definitely a thread that can be drawn through my music, from the early recordings to the current recordings. But a lot of people have told me that I am able to keep my own sound with working in a variety of different fields or styles.

11th-hour Is there anything that you have been aspiring to musically, and if so how close are you to achieving this?

Stewart There are two things that I am aspiring to musically. I've always divided my productions into listening music and dance music. I think that now I'm making a concerted effort to excel at both, but also to try to separate them. The dance music is primarily coming from my efforts that I write for my live show, and it's been rare for the work from those live shows to ever show up on record. People have sometimes been frustrated, they would come to my live show and ask "is this on vinyl?" I wanted to keep the pure techno sounds away from vinyl because the sounds of techno are easier for me to enjoy in a live context rather than in the studio because in the studio I'm much more critical of too much repetition and so I tend to micro-program tracks to the point that they are no longer techno. They're similar to techno, but they are a new style.

That leads me to my other pursuit, which is making music that is good for listening to. My listening music is still very rhythmic, but it seems to lack the driving nature of techno tracks, so it doesn't work for that. I think I set that template with Stabiles, because I never felt like they were techno tracks, even though a lot of deejays said that they would play them. I still like to work more with rhythm than with ambience.

As for how I want to improve these two areas, I find that I'm often very happy with my live shows, but I see that there's a lot of room to grow so that they can be more flexible, go in more directions, and also that my timing is not as tight as it could be for fader tricks and punching in effects and stuff like that. I would really like to get to the point where I can do that as second nature. With my listening tracks, I've been making an effort recently to add more non-electronic instrumentation, such as short recordings of guitars or drums, just because I can really hear a new sound when I'm taking acoustic percussion or acoustic tonalities, and then chopping them in a digital environment and resequencing them. Then you get a nice mix of both the acoustic sonority and the digital edits so that it doesn't really sound like 1990s era techno music, but it doesn't sound like 1960s era Bob Dylan. It offers a nice blend of the two different sounds.

11th-hour Does the musical statement made by repetitive Techno loops still have the same relevance today, or would you classify it as part of Techno's history?

Stewart I don't think we can call music "techno" if it doesn't have repetition, because so much of techno is about using repetition to achieve either a trance-state or a hypnotic state or just to keep the intensity going. But in terms of what I want to listen to at home, I don't like to listen to music that is a repetitive loop from start to finish. I don't mind the repetition, but I want it to be hidden from me because I think that a good composer can focus your attention on different areas of a composition or track, while it's still playing or repeating, having the drums or synths repeat, but changing the relative volumes to emphasize the different structures of the music. And so that's always the mark of a good piece of music for me, when I can listen to it and I know it's repetitive, but I don't care because it's changing in it's own way. It's not necessarily verse/chorus/verse but it still has its own internal logic.

11th-hour Why did you give your last release on Persona the self-depreciating title of "M.O.R. of the Same", and your next release the similarly optimistic title of "Degenerate"? Is this a reflection on your current feelings towards electronic music and its associated scene, and if so have you managed to channel any such anger for creative gain?

Stewart My anger, which I channelled with M.O.R. of the Same was probably more aimed at my frustration with Bush becoming president because I felt like as soon as he became president, it was at least a symbolic turning point from the happiness and optimism of the 90s to the frustration and perhaps strife of the 1970s with similar world problems such as energy crises and recession. I felt like Bush symbolized a return to power of the old economy, the old world, and so I viewed that as more of a "goddamn, this is more of the same old shit, I thought we'd gotten past this." And there was also a musical component to that statement because I don't only listen to electronic music and the reason why is that a lot of what I hear, either in the form of demos or other people's records are tracks that shouldn't have been made because they don't say anything that hasn't been said countless times before.

I don't want to hear more of the same, I want to hear more of the new stuff. I don't think I've channelled enough anger, because I still have a lot of it, and to discuss the Degenerate title, I guess I look at these two 12"s kind of similarly both musically and conceptually because Degenerate is kind of my personal recognition of the fact that artists are viewed by American society in general as degenerates because what they contribute is not as tangible as, say, data entry or auto repair, so I feel a little bit of a backlash against artists/artistry in the brave new world of the music industry. Oftentimes I feel like it's a conspiracy of people pushing mediocre art, kind of like the character Ellsworth Toohey in Ayn Rand's book "The Fountainhead." And so for one artist to kind of create his or her own ideas that don't appeal to the general audience, I think, makes him or her even more of a punk/bitch/fuck-up--what have you. I like to embrace that as my mantle, because it doesn't seem there are many others who will do this.

11th-hour Do you feel that a lot of apathy has crept into electronic music? If so, do you think that it could be associated with any similar feelings that have started to be felt in contemporary society?

Stewart That's a good question. I think that consumers probably feel apathetic towards electronic music because people have been saying for years, ever since I've been involved in making music commercially that there is a glut of labels and 100,000 records come out every week, and you're not going to find a place, and that's more from the music buyers at record stores and distributors, but I think that that viewpoint has probably been mirrored by consumers of electronic music and perhaps consumers of any type of music because there's not a lot new happening in any genre of music that I can think of. Most change doesn't happen fast enough, and so maybe it's possible for there to be apathy, but it's also possible that the prime electronic consumer generation has gone on and maybe they listened to hard techno back in 1993, 1997, but now they've grown up and listen to adult-contemporary electronica like Thievery Corporation.

11th-hour What do you think that such digital and software-based "plug-in" studios - capable of being housed on a humble laptop computer - have brought to electronic music? Do you make use of any such methods, or do you place a greater value on analogue hardware?

Stewart Well, I have to be straight about this. Despite my desire to perform live with hardware, my studio is totally centered around a computer. As I mentioned before, I began creating my studio with all analog gear because these pieces were inexpensive at the time. Computers were expensive and too slow to do any type of audio multitracking or synthesis (with the exception of C-Sound), but as computers got faster, I started trying to use them more frequently. At some point the price/performances advantages of individual pieces of hardware lost out to the amount of power and control offered by computers. Nowadays, I like to fantasize about getting some analog or high-end digital hardware, but my music style includes using effects on almost every audio channel and I don't believe I could afford 20 separate outboard delay and reverb boxes. So I am grateful for the amount of power I can afford with one $2000 computer, and I believe that as technology continues to progress, I will gain access to greater power every time I choose to upgrade my computer.

11th-hour Recently on the Persona web site you have made your opinions known about laptop live performances, criticising them for being unable to captivate a crowd. You obviously place a great importance on the live show, and in the importance of engaging an audience - why do you feel that this is so important, not just for yourself, but also for electronic music as a whole?

Stewart I just started playing with the concept of a laptop backlash in its visual form this spring, and I made a T-shirt which I felt expressed that sentiment and debuted it at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. But I've been out watching performances my whole life, and I rarely encountered artists who could entertain while they were playing their music. In my opinion, it's not enough to play your music on stage and be finished with it. That should be the bare minimum that the artist has to offer.

Consider that scene from the movie "Shine" where the young piano student is taught by his teacher to practice blindfolded. In that situation he had to make the mechanical finger movements immediate and natural so that in his performance he could focus on the emotion demanded by the music. I see a parallel with electronic music performances. Long ago, a DJ explained to me how DJing is not just mixing records, or knowing which records go well together, but being able to play the right records at the right moment to make the crowd explode and knowing that ahead of time, so that you can have planned this event and its aftermath. You can't do that after 6 months of DJing, you can't do it after one year. It's a talent you acquire only through many years of playing in front of people.

DJs are really limited in what they can do because records have a preset structure, a preset orchestration, and a preset duration. I began performing live instead of DJing because I wanted more control over the music I was playing. I wanted the hi-hat to come in when I brought it in, not when the record dictated it. I wanted the ability to make build-ups and breakdowns when I thought it was appropriate. Having this amount of control makes the thought of playing other people's records archaic. It makes loopy mono-track records archaic. I know that Final Scratch is supposed to give the DJ more control, but if they choose to edit or remix tracks to play in their set, it's still going to be offline editing over which they will have no control over in a club environment.

I don't deny that laptops offer equal or greater processing power than my hardware samplers and sequencers but they fail in a couple of ways. The worst problem is that the foldout screen obscures half of the performers body, and you can't see their hands at all. I see the screen behaving as a true barrier between the performer and the audience so even if he is going crazy on his fader box you can't see anything if you are standing in front of them. When I play, I try to situate my equipment on the same level as the people dancing. And, my hands and body movements are completely visible (if they're not moving too fast) to those who want to look. If I'm not getting into the music as much as or more than those dancing in front of me, then there is something wrong.

11th Hour would like to thank Stewart for taking the time out to speak to us..

For more information check out the Persona web site, www.personarecords.com and for all bookings please e-mail Isaac@personarecords.com.