The last time we spoke, you were telling me about your latest project, which involved composing music on a train ride from Philadelphia to L.A. Fill me in on the details.
I wanted to go to California because Cocteau Twins had pulled out of Coachella. A whole bunch of Cocteau Twins fans had spent a lot of money on plane tickets. I didn't feel any guilt about it whatsoever because it wasn't my decision to pull out of Coachella. But I did think that I might make some people happy. So I agreed to play a concert in L.A. the night before when Cocteau Twins would have been appearing. But I thought, "How am I going to do that?" I didn't want to do what I usually do — I wanted to make it special. Slowly but surely the idea came together [to] combine one of the things I like the most — which is traveling — with some new music. I had a look around on the web, had a look at the Amtrak system and found out they had powered outlets and thought, "There we go. It will get me away from family responsibilities, I'll be able to work a bit and come up with some new shit." I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before — [to] come up with things out of a constantly evolving, new landscape.
Did you have your own cabin?
It was little, a small room with a bed. But it was perfect when you've got a laptop and you are trying to make music. You just shut the world out for 18 hours.
What software were you using?
Cubase SX2 — a very, very minimal installation. I really limited myself on the number of plug-ins, instruments, and all that. It really trims the fat off of the songwriting process. I wanted to give myself restrictions. I put in an electric piano, two synths, an organ and some drum stuff. Nothing like what I've got at home. I knew I was going to write the guitar parts once I got [to] L.A. I was making karaoke tracks basically, something to play along with. That's pretty much how my writing process is most of the time anyway. The guitar is usually not the first instrument. But it's not always that way.
Are you going to record this stuff?
Well, my writing and recording process is so similar these days. Half of it was written already. I took my laptop home and dumped it into my main system. Then I've got the guitars to record and most of what I'd written for the show will remain. I'll tweak it and work it, but it's basically the same. Some of it will be used in some upcoming shows, some if it will remain instrumental stuff, some of it will become Violet Indiana songs and some of it will disappear.
Are you going to do something similar to Lumière — which I saw in Seattle last fall — and incorporate film and video with these recordings?
No, this is going to be kind of a follow up to Imperial [an instrumental album released in 2003]. I could have gone whole hog and done the travelogue movie thing, but this is not the time for that. I'm really happy doing my visual work without a concrete set of music with it. I always change the music I play with Lumière, or any other visual stuff that I do. I don't want to be doing a DVD — I keep it a special sort of thing. The only time people get to see it is at a concert — it's not something you can really become familiar with. I see this next record as being more of an aural sort of thing. That's not to say I won't do something different in the future. I just need to get some new music out there, that's the mother of everything I do. The rest are all tangents, really.
I think a lot of people feel that way.
I spent the last year really not doing a lot of new pieces of music. I've done a lot of concerts, I've done that Mysterious Skin soundtrack, which was just me reworking stuff from a year ago.
Interesting. Let's talk about your studio, September Sound.
Well, that closed a long time ago — seven or eight years now. I started the studio at home with a Revox B77 back in the day while I was still in Scotland. That's what we use for Cocteau Twins for our concerts. We used to record things straight on it and then moved on to different 4-track set-ups, and eventually to 16- track when the first half-inch 16-tracks first came out. I can cut the story short by saying it became four fucking studios. The key point is, we built a studio and did Blue Bell Knoll. It was a really punky, sort of grungy little place with carpet on the walls, but it had a vibe to it. At that point we had an opportunity to get a room at Pete Townsend's Eel Pie Studios, which was pretty much closed down at that point, I think. It was just one floor of a building, just one recording room. It was my private, personal domain. I was also producing other people and [it] seemed like a good idea to let other people use it. Slowly but surely it turned into a studio business. It really upset me. It was like, "If I leave something someplace I expect it be in that spot two weeks later," but all of a sudden, people were in there fucking up my patch bay, rewiring things. It [was] no longer personal. Then to make matters worse, I eventually tried to combat that and took the rest of the building over and built one, two and eventually three more studios in order to retain a space for myself. But the overhead was such that we had to rent all of the studios to pay for the building and the staff. It became so frustrating that I couldn't do any of my own work. That's why we recorded the last Cocteau Twins album, Milk and Kisses, in a house in France. We rented a house and took a bunch of equipment over since I couldn't get into my studio at the time.
What equipment did you take with you to France when you did Milk and Kisses?
I think it was one or two ADATs and a little Mackie desk. There was no software sequencing at that time, it was all hardware and I was using an MPC 60 MKII — that was all the drums and sequenced stuff like that.
No live drums?
They were all sequenced. I could play all the beats, but I was never, ever a good enough drummer in a million years to play on a record. I programmed them like that because I can visualize sitting behind the drum kit and playing them with my hands. That's how it developed, anyway. In the mid-eighties it was an infinite hi hat which could carry on like a three-handed drummer. I wanted to emulate the sound of a drummer — I didn't want to take the thing into electronica with eclectic sounds, and live we were using a real drummer. I wanted to retain a consistent feel.
You talked about how the studio evolved into a business. Can you tell me what it was like to be an artist running a business?
I am not an artist who is capable of running a business. I am totally useless. [laughs] There is nothing creative about running a recording studio. It's like running a fucking Starbucks — you are in the service industry. Where's the fucking sanctity there? Of course, I tried having a record label [Bella Union] and I see that as the same fucking thing. It's like selling cans of dog food and that's why you've seen me ditch those things in the last 18 months to 2 years. I said, "Fuck it. I am going to stay in the part of the business that doesn't really pay you, but it makes you feel good."
Why did you close September Sound?
