Carola Magazine

(This interview with Need is from 2000 or 2001..)

Academy

I quit school when I was 15. A few years later I was accepted to college, but I was too busy making music and having a job to attend.

I doubt that music, art, or even politics can be developed in the academic system, which, in the end is only a part of the larger class system. This is especially true of the US where the price of education is disproportionate to a real working person's wage. Education now assumes the ability to cope with a third world-sized debt.

Equipment

Economic limitations on equipment are always a good thing. From the beginning, Presocratics have tried to use this limitation to our advantage. Not as a strategy, but rather an honest attempt to do the best we can with what we have--we find new ways of working with the same equipment.

That said, I should also say that there is no concept of purity involved; we use whatever we can, whenever we can, provided the results are satisfying.

Also, because Presocratics present "recorded-music" as a "recording", the older equipment serves to make that even more apparent.

Europe

I am "at home" in Europe. That is: a stranger; from "somewhere else".

Errors

yes

Roots

no

Utopia

Wasn't "Utopia" a totalitarian state?

Visual Arts:

1) Cave paintings have yet to be improved upon.

2) More people should make less art.

3) Art schools should focus on materials rather than "feelings", "ideologies", or "funding"

An Enlightening Piece of Music

For the last few months I've been fascinated by Harry Nilsson's "One". Deceptively simple, it's not a song, but rather the X-ray of a song.

Teenage Heroes

I wanted to play bass in Gang of Four, guitar in Wire, drums in This Heat. I wanted to be Dagmar Krause, and maybe I was the only 17 year old in 1979 who wanted to be Robert Wyatt, wheelchair and all.

Attention

I have carefully cultivated my faculty for distraction. This is a kind of Zen. Attention is a limitation.

Disappointment

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Compulsion

When I was painting people said, Oh, that must be very relaxing. I never spoke to those people again. We record constantly, but we have gotten over recording everything We will never release even a quarter of what we record, just as most songs written will never be performed.

Compulsion? Yes. Somehow this is what we do. This is where we go.

Structure

Always, but not forever.