An Interview with Damian Taylor

By Marsha Vdovin

October 6th, 2011

6 comments

She’s experimental, with a pop budget…

Yeah. The most amazing thing with Björk is that no matter how avant-garde or experimental you get, fundamentally she can just sing like nobody else. So it’s like you can do the craziest stuff, and once she sings on it and it’s going to have an emotional resonance you can’t find anywhere else.

I’ve worked on plenty of projects where we’ve been super fucking clever with electronics, but then you spend like two years trying to find a singer and it doesn’t really happen. [Laughs.]

But yeah, that’s part of the joy of working with her, it really is an adventure. I remember a number of years back when she wanted to record with Toumani Diabate and she’s saying “Oh yeah, we should go to Africa.” And I remember thinking “Yeah, sure… I’ll believe it when I see it!” And then three days later you get your ticket! At that point I had only really been working in the London studio circuit so it has been amazing to go beyond that with her.

When we were with Spike Stent to mix Volta, a friend sent her a YouTube link for the first Reactable demonstations. The Reactable is like something out of Buck Rogers. So we’re watching these videos, and at that point she hadn’t asked me to go on tour, but she says, “Oh, that would be fun to take on tour,” and I kind of again was like, “Yeah, right! It doesn’t even exist! It’s imaginary! That must be… like… a computer animation!!!” And then three months later I was playing it on the headlining set at Coachella. Bonkers, right? So she’s got an amazing ability to make things happen — and the vision to even dare to imagine it in the first place.

I think she’s also at a point where she just looks at every project like ‘let’s make an adventure, let’s do something different.’ Fundamentally I think she just wants to keep things really interesting for herself. So different projects for different phases of her career would have a completely, totally different feel.

But again, it always comes back to her amazing sense of… well, the artistic aspect, basically, and the emotional quality that she wants it to have. So she’s always really, really firmly rooted in her instinct – does it feel right? So as far as I’m concerned, I just listen to what she wants and try to help her however I can.

What a great gig. Congrats!

Thanks. Yeah, it is kind of nuts. But there’s the flip side: that the process takes forever. Insane amounts of time. We were on Biophilia for two and a half years. That’s very different to making an album in say, two weeks.

So, at what point did you get into Max programming?

We spent 18 months on the album Volta. Björk doesn’t really work long hours in the studio, so I wound up having more spare time than at any other point in my career. When we were finishing up the Volta tour she started talking about her ideas for the next project and said, “It’s going to be really big. It’ll probably take two or three years.”

So I was like “holy shit!!!”, but then I realized it might be the one opportunity in my career to jump on a learning curve where I might not get anywhere worthwhile for a couple of years. So that got me into the Max side of things, investing the time to investigate technology and programming languages at a much more fundamental level — instead of doing the, dare I say ‘normal’ studio engineer stuff, where all your tools are already made by someone else and you just use them. Actually, while all that was going on, I also started hand building analogue outboard gear for my studio in my spare time as well.

How was the Max learning curve for you? Did you lock yourself away?

It’s actually a credit to Mark Bell, who’s one of Björk’s longtime collaborators. She was talking about wanting to have the music and the visuals synched or something. So Mark — who is really quite an amazing boffin [back-room geek] — decided, “Oh, we should all just learn Max because they’ve got the Jitter side of it, which is the video stuff, and you could just use the same messages in this whole system and make it feed everything.”

So the day the tour finished, I flew up to Iceland to work on some other stuff with her, but the second I got to my hotel I downloaded the demo of Max and started a tutorial. To cut a long story short, I wound up being the only person who actually learned it!

Back to the learning curve though; if you’ve never done any code or computer language programming before, there are a lot of times where you just have to try to absorb things without really knowing what the hell they are for. And I mean that in the nicest possible way!

I just slowly worked my way through all the tutorials, largely without understanding what the hell I was doing, but just absorbing what was going on, trying to follow every step that was presented. And yeah, it really was a case of locking myself in a room. If there was another noise anywhere, I just couldn’t do it. It took really intense concentration; just trying to absorb what was going on and follow a tutorial from start to finish.

But then at some point I figured I needed to speed things up, so I got in touch with Harvestworks, in New York, who I actually was aware of through an interview on the Cycling ’74 web site. I got tutoring from Matthew Ostrowski — and it was amazing, a complete revelation.

It’s been the same with me for a number of different things that I’ve tried to learn in the studio. Watching someone do something. I’d speak to Matthew and ask how to implement some really basic piece of logic in a patch, and he’d start tapping away. Just watching him physically do it, making objects and linking them together, something not working, deleting objects, relinking them until it worked. There’s something about physically seeing someone do it in real time that’s amazing and is far different to opening something that’s already complete and trying to reverse engineer. I started seeing the alternatives and possibilities. Matthew was an absolutely invaluable resource and I remain profoundly grateful for everything he shared with me.

So, you found direct tutoring to be the best route for you?

I would hugely recommend trying to find a teacher at some point, or otherwise hanging out in an informal setting with a more experienced cat and asking them how they might approach a problem.

But as time went on and I found my feet, I found that I’d be trying to do something and would remember, “Oh, yeah, there was a tutorial I did last year that was similar to that.” So I’d dig back, and go through the tutorials, and then start ripping code out of examples and modifying them to serve my purpose.

So actually sitting down and going through all the tutorials was a really good way to just imprint your mind with some of the capabilities of the language, even if you don’t understand quite how to use them yet.

Actually the perfect metaphor came from a lovely lady who came to teach us Spanish while we were camped out in Puerto Rico during the production of Biophilia; she’d say we’d need to have a basic pool of vocabulary available and memorized before we could start putting sentences together.

Even though it was a challenge, the whole learning process was really exciting for me as well. My work in the studio is highly technical but I’m very fluent with it already, so it was really interesting to venture into another highly technical field where the landscape was unfamiliar. It was a fascinating process of expanding and rearranging my brain patterns, and I think that’s actually had a really positive effect back in the world I usually inhabit, if that makes sense?

It does. I can see where you would approach the studio with new eyes.

Exactly.