Emily Keegin: - What is your process when designing for musical endeavours (record covers etc)? And what do you see are the goals of such design work?
Russell Mills: - The process varies depending on various factors - the nature of the music, the artist(s), the deadline, whether or not the artist(s) choses to get involved or has provided me with ideas and or images to use. Generally, and thankfully, I'm asked to do whatever I feel is best without interference. In this I aim to produce a work that reflects or suggests some of the essence of the music without recourse to the specific or to the obvious or to narrative. Occasionally I'm asked to and am obliged to work with supplied images and/or some minimal direction/ideas, which emerge out of conversations where ideas and opinions are batted back and forth until we reach an agreed direction. When working in the former mode I tend to produce process-based multimedia paintings/assemblages, which, whilst being abstract are full of symbols that relate directly to aspects of the music. The imagery serves as a metaphor or as a carrier of several interrelated metaphors for the music. The resulting work(s) are then photographed and usually taken into the computer for further manipulation and integration with the typography into the overall design. When working in the latter mode, as long as I agree with the general direction/ideas, then I either try to follow similar processes, as long as they are contextually appropriate, or I try to find new approaches, new processes. The few times I've used photographic images have involved me taking photographs, which I have attempted to get wrong or that will be new to me when I see them, making the real unfamiliar. These tend to be layered in the computer (Photoshop) and digitally pushed to the extreme, again so as to produce images that are new and exciting to me, and hopefully to the artist and the potential buyer. Primarily my main focus is on ideas that will anchor the work, inform the work and give it a conceptual and contextual grounding.
Secondly I try to find something, a way of working that hopefully conveys, if obliquely, the essence of those ideas, or in the case of music, the moods or places that the music evokes. I guess I'm more concerned with suggesting rather than describing or emulating. I can't work on pieces, paintings, art and design or music, without ideas to underpin the finished works. The research I do tends to be pretty rigourous, in depth and broad. The research throws up sometimes seemingly unrelated and disparate ideas and previously unsuspected connections that inspire and inform the work. The way I approach all my work, personal and commissioned, is pretty much the same; the way that my work for Nine Inch Nails unfolded is similar to the way that works for, say Brian Eno and Roger Eno, Harold Budd and David Sylvian have formed. Whatever direction or process(es) I follow. pursue - the finished work must be allusive to the music, contextually anchored and hopefully beautiful, seductive or arresting.
Emily Keegin: - Do you see your self as a story teller? If so, how?
Russell Mills: - Not really at least not in a linear, narrative way.
The works are about interrelated ideas, concepts and facts, which are conveyed through processes or by suggestive metaphoric allusions.
Stories can be interpreted in them I guess but everyones take on what I'm doing will, I guess, be different.
Emily Keegin: - How has music / and music culture/ influenced your personal work?
Russell Mills: - Music generally has been paramount in my life and my work for as long as I can remember and has been hugely influential in so many different ways.
From early childhood I remember my Father playing music around the house - jazz mainly, Artie Shaw, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman and other big bands. Then my brother, who is 6 years older than me would play early rock'n'roll - BIll Haley, Gene Vincent, Elvis and the like. To try to assert my own identity I got into American instrumental music, Surf guitar bands - The Chantays, The Surfaris and later the Beach Boys. My Dad was in the RAF and much of my childhood was spent living on RAF bases in Germany, Holland and France, many of them shared with the USAF. Consequently I got to hear American radio stations and music from America that was still unknown in the UK. At 14 - 15 years old - enter music from other worlds that knocked me sideways - Captain Beefheart and Hendrix. At 16 I ran away from boarding school to see Hendrix play one his first UK dates (with, I think, the Nice, the Move, Pink Floyd. Amen Corner and Eire Apparent) in Brighton. Also whilst at boarding school I studied percussion from the age of 10 with the lead percussionist of the London Symphony Orchestra and attended "drum clinics" at the Greyhound pub in Croyden held by the great Joe Morello of the Dave Brubeck Quartet (of 'Take Five' fame) and was also in the ubiquitous school band foolishly trying to play versions of Beefheart and Hendrix numbers, without much success.
Also I'd experienced some great bands at the art schools I attended, firstly at Canterbury College of Art where I had a room in a house owned by East of Eden's Dave Arbus' Mother. The house was full of music and long haired hippies paraded in and out at all hours. Coming straight from a boarding school, this kind of life was a short circuit to being an art student! In addition to East of Eden, Canterbury at that time was buzzing with a great roster of local bands - Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, Caravan, Gong, Egg, Henry Cow, Camel, and of course the wonderful Ian Drury, who taught part time in the art school and was in the process of forming Kilburn and the Highroads - one could hear them rehearsing in the studios.
At Canterbury, and then at Maidstone, I was lucky enough to see bands that regularly toured the university and art school circuit, such as John Martyn, Pink Floyd, Roy Harper, Atomic Rooster, Isotope, Jethro Tull, Edgar Broughton, Blodwyn Pig, etc. My ears were receiving a very wide and exciting education. Whilst I was at Maidstone College of Art Bruce Maclean nurtured the "world's first pose band' - "Nice Style", who would perform and rehearse in the grounds and Michael Nyman would visit to lecture. David Cunningham who was on the Foundation Course a year below me, was cutting his teeth on sound experiments.
Maidstone College of Art (1971 - 74) - at this time most contemporary music in the UK had become pretty boring, formulaic and syrupy. The pomp rock of Queen, Genesis, ELO and co., didn't turn my crank. And the likes of Boney M, Village People, Chicory Tip, Dawn, Mungo Jerry, Lieutenant Pigeon, Donny Osmond, The Sweet, Mud, ELO, the Bay City Rollers, Gary Glitter and the New Seekers, amongst hordes of others, obviously failed to excite or intrigue me one iota. (Although I had always loved all of the Walker Brothers' releases and followed Scott Walker's journey religiously, still do - he's a genius). Thankfully Roxy Music appeared (1972) and with them one Brian Eno. I was saved.
Their collage of sound and oblique references struck a chord. A rock band who knew about art, film, literature and humour and who weren't singing about boy meets girl and who were making some wonderfully unearthly sounds too! I had to know more, especially about those sounds. Thereafter wherever I found any information on the band or heard them on the radio, I was becoming more and more interested in that weird guy in the feathers and make-up twiddling levers and knobs making sounds from another planet. Eno. Here was my English Captain Beefheart.
I went to see Beefheart and Roxy as often as I could and Eno was becoming more central in my life. He was the one triggering the surprises and the undertow of uncertainty that appealed to me. Roxy were really good, different. Entertaining but not mainstream. Over the year or so since first discovering them I'd read loads of interviews and reviews about them. What came through for me was that Eno was the one with the really interesting ideas; he was the one who impressed me most. I felt that has was thinking about the potential of sound in the same way that I was trying think about images. There was a kind of intellectual empathy, which made me think, even then, that I'd really like to meet that guy, to talk, to throw ideas around. ...
I think it was in 1975 that I finally plucked up enough courage to try to contact Brian and on a long shot wrote a letter to him and sent it via his management company EG Records. I expressed my admiration for his work and his ideas and briefly outlined what I was trying to do with my visual work - collage/mixed media/found material, working in layers, physically and conceptually, putting seemingly disparate ideas and visuals together to produce works that I could not predict and which had no ego behind them or in them. I was trying to surprise myself all the time and thought I'd found a way of doing it. Two of of my guiding axioms had been and still are 1) by the poet Robert Frost - "No surprising the writer, no surprising the reader', and 2) from my hero `Samuel Beckett, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.
Fail again. Fail better." I proposed that we meet up to just exchange ideas; there was no other motive for my wanting to meet him. As I stated earlier, I genuinely felt that we had a lot in common and might both benefit from meeting and talking. I didn't hear anything for about 6 weeks and had almost given up when I received a reply saying he was flattered and intrigued and he'd like to meet. We arranged for him to come into the studios at the RCA (then down at Exhibition Road at the back of the V & A.) one lunchtime when most of the students would be out for lunch. All went well and continues to do so. I've with and for him ever since on numerous diverse projects from album covers to videos to stage design.
I think right from the start his music and his approach to making music, especially from his first solo album "Here Come The Warm Jets" clicked with me. I felt there was a parallel mind at work but in a different genre using different tools. I'd been steeped in Dadaist thinking and practice for some years and was particularly interested and inspired by Kurt Schwitters, in his life as well as his work - he saw the two as inseparable. Picking up on and acknowledging the legacy of Schwitters and Dada, I was trying to find parallel ways of working with disparate elements to create new, unknown, non-prescribed worlds. Generative works before the term was used? Eno was, I felt, trying to find a similar route, using similar thinking (oblique strategies, directed chance procedures, etc.) to find new ways of making music that went beyond the musical genres of the time.
In my final year at the RCA I was obliged to propose a major project, a sustained body of research and work, on which my MA degree would be assessed. Given that I was investigating these collisions of opposites, the marriages of disparates, I needed a subject that would offer me huge variety, massive leeway for very oblique thinking. I needed something to base my experiments on that genuinely allowed experiment with both materials and concepts. Eno's wonderfully rich and elliptical lyrics provided all I needed. I wasn't interested in "illustrating" them in the usual literal way, which I've always regarded as redundant and insulting to a viewer's intelligence and imaginative capacities. I was more interested in the possibilities of apparently disparate juxtapositions and the new worlds that might emerge. Eno's inventive lyrics were the perfect springboard for tangential explorations of ideas. This whole project (took me 3 years to complete and a further 3 to get a publisher) eventually saw the light of day in a publication called "More Dark Than Shark" published by Faber & Faber in 1983/84 I think.
Whilst at the RCA Punk exploded (1976-77) and I got totally hooked into the whole scene - out gigging about 3 nights a week. Most of my first commissions came at this time for fledgling punk bands. In the midst of this flux I got to know what I considered to the best of the punk bands, Wire, and began putting on multimedia installations and performances with 2 of them Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis. Out of these events my growing interest in multimedia installations grew.
Subsequently I've done numerous installations in the UK, USA, Japan, and Europe - all of which have sound as a central element (as opposed to a background tint so to speak).
A by the by ... Through all this I've been very lucky to meet and work for some fantastic musicians, many through my friendship with Brian, who have, as a great bonus, also become good friends. The Edge, Bill Laswell, David Sylvian, Harold Budd, Michael Brook, Nils Petter Molvaer, Michael Nyman, to name but a few. Strangely they all seem to be more democratic and pluralistic in their world views, more curious about the world and about ideas - than visual artists. Conversations with them range far and wide and are never dull.
Another fact which emphasises the centrality of music to my life and work - since 1995 I've recorded two CDs as Undark and a third is in production. The Undark project is essentially an aural extension of my visual work, in that it celebrates the primacy of process and the importance of collage, of that possibility of juxtapositions to produce moments of wonder.
This is really rambling on too much and I still haven't really answered your question. Apologies.
Essentially, music, as with every cultural event or activity - writing, drama, film, art, etc., affects me when it makes me nervous, uncertain.
As long as music continues to throw uncertainty into my life then I'll be moved by it and I'll be influenced by it.
Emily Keegin: - Do you see your art as soundscape?
Russell Mills: - Kind of. See above. Much of my current visual work and my installations and the sound made for them, is heavily inspired and informed by landscape (rural and urban), our impact on place and the environment's effect on our development. All of it is based on thorough if sometimes oblique research routes and all of it seeks to evoke a kind of imaginary landscape and complementary soundscape, a possible future.
Emily Keegin: - Is your work drawn from personal memory?
Russell Mills: - Only tangentially, not specifically.
Emily Keegin: - What do you think about when you listen to music?
Russell Mills: - Cor blimey, that's a hard one! It depends on whether I'm listening whilst I'm working or whether I'm just listening and also in any given situation what the music is. I guess, like most people, I use music for different ends. To simply gain pleasure or joy, to try to unlock some understanding in events in my life or my work, to complement what I'm working on or to amplify how I feel, whether it be up or down. With Gorecki's and Arvo Part's music I feel a paradoxically satisfying mix of melancholia and complete ecstasy, uplift. With, say, the Gang of Four or Joy Division/New Order I feel driven, ambitious and confident - music of conviction like theirs is inspiring even when the subject matter may be bleak. Listening to Eno's more pop leaning material makes me more playful whilst his ambient recordings relaxes and allows me space to think. Sometimes music can help me on a path to discover answers to problems I've been having with work; I can find correlations between how the music is constructed or the processes at work within it and what I'm trying to do visually.
Emily Keegin: - Do you listen to music when you work? If so, what?
Russell Mills: - Yes, pretty much all the time. Recent fave listens (in a car or not - see below) are Sidsel Endresen (extraordinary Norwegian vocalist), Morton Feldman, the Books and Ligeti. Eno, Beefheart, Part, Gorecki, Elgar and Scott Walker also never fail to inspire me.
Sometimes I also listen to recordings of plays especially by Samuel Beckett and readings of poetry i.e. by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and when I can get them, by contemporary writers who turn my crank considerably - Robin Robertson, Paul Farley, Anne Michaels, Alice Oswald, etc.
Emily Keegin: - Do you listen to music on headphones?
Russell Mills: - Sometimes purely for pleasure but not whilst working as I need to move around a lot whilst working. I work with surfaces that are on the floor or ground, onto which liquids and solutions are chemically reacting, so I need to move freely around. I listen on headphones mostly when working on recording installation pieces or when working on tracks for Undark
Emily Keegin: - What do you listen to when you're in the car?
Russell Mills: - I don't drive so when I'm in a car I listen to whatever the driver chooses to play. Thankfully most of my close friends who give me lifts now and again, have impeccable and wonderfully eclectic tastes in music, so it ranges through Gospel, Arvo Part, Bjork, Fela Kuti, Kraftwerk, Kylie, Blues, Radiohead, Wire, Sigor Ros, Eno, Stars of the Lid, Charles Ives, Imogen Heap, Burial, God Speed You Black Emperor, etc. ( All stuff that I've usually introduced them to; typical of my missionary zeal!)