An Interview with Damian Taylor

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October 6th, 2011

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Did you use Max on the new album, or are you only using it for live work?

Well, when I started messing around with all this stuff I’d make notes, “Maybe you could do this with that, or that with that,” you know. For example you start messing around with the drunk object and go, “Oh, OK, cool, I could have a slider that will manipulate stuff in a certain way.” Even if you don’t know quite what that other stuff is yet!

Björk had been talking about a lot of the musicological concepts that she had, not specific musical ideas like an exact melody or chord, but she liked this type of phrasing, or that way a melody could unfold, or wanting to go beyond straightforward time signatures, for example. So as I’d tinker and explore I’d sometimes discover some objects or externals that would ring a bell with what she had been saying, and I’d realize I could modify some variables in a system to make them able to exist in that world.

To cut a long story short, I wound up designing three significantly different performance systems using a Jazzmutant Lemur and a video-game controller as physical interfaces. There’s a Max tutorial on getting a data stream out of a Logitech game controller. That became a huge jumping off point for everything I was doing, as Björk responded really strongly to being able to hold the game controller and press buttons while she sang. It’s very different to sitting down at a piano!

So, basically, there are six songs on the new album that were written using these systems. I just focused totally on the Max side of things for data processing which would generate beautiful music as MIDI messages from a disparate stream of button presses and OSC messages. I designed a system of musical rules, ways of creating melodies and linking them together, then spent a lot of time making interfaces that would be conducive to the creating process.

View the full-sized screen shot.

Were these systems that Björk used herself?

That was a key thing with the design, I wanted to make stuff that Björk could use super intuitively. Because we’ve spent a huge amount of time together, I kind of, not to say I know what she would like, but I’ve got a pretty good intuition about what she might find fun, and I’ve also seen her get very frustrated when something is above a threshold of complexity that she’s comfortable with.

So we created this environment whereby she could just hold a video-game controller and press buttons and things would happen. We were excited about that tension between something being a little bit unpredictable to the point where it might surprise you, while also being very controllable.

She ended up creating a huge amount of sketches and musical explorations while messing around with these things. I think she always has like a million and one melodic or lyrical ideas in her head — I have no idea what she’s sitting on! So I think often she’d experiment to see if anything she had would fit with what she was discovering on the systems, and other times she’d create something with the systems that would inspire a totally new vocal.

Basically, because the systems allowed her to control electronics in this very intuitive way she was able to have the electronics follow her as a singer and a live performer; it let her write in a completely different way to anything she’s done before.

So, Max played a pretty important role in the album.

Max was an absolutely critical part of the writing of the album — and for the live stuff as well, because the songs were a direct result of these systems.

Since we used Max to create the songs, we had wanted use the same systems live. Well, we had built in our own kind of, I wouldn’t say chaos, but they’re a bit more… well, let’s say chaotic. [Laughs.] They’re a bit more difficult to steer than a traditional instrument, if you know what I mean.

But a regulated chaos.

You can totally guide the systems, but, you know, she’s got a 25-piece choir. So they’re counting say 13 bars in 17/8 before their entry. If you’re performing something on your own you can just vibe out for a while and then feel OK, now we’re going to the next section… Whereas in a big ensemble you have to be very precise and predictable, so we went with more conventional approaches for the live situation.

So, the performers retain their independence.

Exactly. On the flipside though there’s one song called “Dark Matter” where I custom wrote a Max patch specifically for the live setting. This was to give Björk a way to play something that she had written in the studio using a different system. The song is completely in free time, no tempo or measures to it at all. Our MIDI tech for the live tour, Paul Eastman, has done a bunch of iPad app development. He made a big button that just sends single midi note messages from the iPad which I converted into bangs in Max. Then I mapped out a network of messages that send the appropriate chord changes to the instruments onstage. That way, Björk can just sing it in her own intuitive phrasing and tap the screen when she wants to jump to the next musical event; this ensure the music totally follows her phrasing and feeling and she can concentrate 100% on that flow.

Going back a step though, Mark Bell was such a huge influence in this whole thing for me, even going back a couple of years before I got into Max. He would show me some of the mad patches in Reaktor and how he’d use them, as well as a lot of the more esoteric capabilities of Ableton Live, especially all the MIDI processing in there. This was a totally different approach to music than that which I had come up through with notation, scores, tape, and linear sequencers.

The real gateway to my more heavy duty Max programming was during a bunch of the early Biophilia sessions when Mark was bringing a bunch of his midi systems over. He was using more traditional midi controllers to influence them, then I hacked the Logitech game controller tutorial to give him MIDI messages from the controller. On the song “Dark Matter,” Björk performed with the game controller going through one of his systems in Ableton Live.

So he introduced me to a lot of concepts, like how you can use a scale plug-in, or a chord plug-in, and my earlier Max patches ran through some of that stuff in Ableton. So he really set a lot of my mental processes in motion and woke me up to a lot of possibilities. Then as time went on I started discovering new things in Max and getting into Bidirectional OSC with the Jazzmutant Lemur. I wound up designing things that had a lot more rhythmic elements and a lot more subtlety and capability with arrangements, but also had very usable and streamlined interfaces.

Did you use any of your patches to actually compose with?

Yeah, including “Dark Matter” there are six songs on Biophilia that Björk wrote with them, the others were written conventionally.

It really was a lot of fun and very liberating having them as compositional tools. There’s one patch I designed which will let you make stuff that just seems so incredibly complex and clever, but it’s just from the most basic kind of inputs. That one was used to write Moon, Crystalline, and Hollow. In this case, it’s completely the tool itself that brought those particular songs to life; there’s no way you’d sit down at a piano and write music like that, or hum it into a dictaphone. So it was pretty significant.

That’s one of my favorite things about Max, sometimes stuff that seems like it would be so complex is achievable in this very elegant simple way. And there’s a profound satisfaction in that. Just that Frankenstein moment where you kind of zap it with lightning and it’s suddenly alive, and you’re like, “Holy shit, it makes music!”