An e-Tête-à-Tête between Nick Storring and Doc Pickles
quickly became a wide-ranging roadmap of Nick’s delicately counterbalanced musical
mind and mindset, in and out and side to side from all sorts of dialectics, Nick’s
thoughts on music, like his music, move in rhythm in a dialectic sequence like
a pendulum swinging over scrolling parchment. Here are some of his thoughts on
the difference between tunes and songs, improv vs sheet music, straightforward
vs challenging, and his thoughts on this wonderful world of envelope pushing
sound artists:

Doc Pickles: Here
are some questions for you Nick about the creative process of an indie
experimental classical noise cellist. I'm glad you're playing this garrison pop
montreal no shamelength!

Nick Storring :
Me too! I'm very excited to get a Wavelength re-match. I wasn't as pleased as I
could be with the first show I did there! That was long before I had perfected
my live thing. I'm also excited to be sorta a part of both Pop Montreal and No
Shame! Yay life!

DP Did you learn
cello because your parents wanted you to learn a different instrument but your rebellious
streak made you insist on making music differently?

NS Not really.
They actually chose the cello for me. I would always imitate the musical guests
on the muppet show so they knew I had to play an instrument. Then they saw an
article about the Suzuki Method and got excited that it was based on the ears
and geared at little kids. Initially they were gonna get me playing violin. My
grandma even got one for me (which subsequently became the sound-source for
this one "tape" piece (it actually did use lotsa tape!... answering
machine tape tape-loops and dictaphone) "Artifacts", which, to my
delight and surprise, actually got some international concert play in a bunch
of B-cities: Belfast, Berlin, Beijing.)

Anyway, my parents decided cello would be less squeaky, so
the violin (which was too big for me) got hung on my wall. I started on a viola
with an end-pin at age four!

My rebellious streak came later... during my undergrad when
I was contending with learning repertoire vs. learning to be my own flavour of
cellist.

DP Do you
sometimes hear a song in your head before composing, does the tune happen while
composing, or do you discover a song while editing?

NS It depends on
what I'm making. I'm all over the map stylistically, right. I've been doing a
lot of poppy songs now, I've been making stuff for theatre, eclectic dance
tracks, musique-concrète type stuff, I've even been writing for ensembles (I
did the Arraymusic and Madawaska String Quartet workshops this and last year
respectively). It's all quite different. The theatre stuff is pretty tuneful as
are the pop songs and dance tracks.

If it's my super-abstract electroacoustic stuff it often
just emerges through improvisation, processing and editing. The processing is
often done in real time too so it has an improvisatory feel.... The layering
and editing though is done as though I'm improvising in slow-mo with room for
fuck-ups.

The pop stuff too even, is like me fiddling with ideas on
instruments and processing and just getting it right. The only thing I sequence
usually is drums, Otherwise it's me playing it on an instrument be it an
electronic or acoustic one. Sometimes I edit the time a bit... and there's
always at least reverb, if not some more drastic effect on it.

Sometimes what I hear in my head is more is more of
stylistic or sonic idea. I hear certain instrumentation, or a certain tempo,
types of rhythms, the mode, but not specific melodies. This often happens with
theatre stuff where I have to accompany a narrative.

It's weird though... it's a chicken-egg thing. The ideas for
me need to materialize for me to actually really get a grasp on them, so its
hard to know whether they're in my head or emanating from an instrument or my
larynx first!

When I write for ensembles although it's often done at an
instrument, the nature of writing stuff for other people requires you to
totally premeditate... It's more of an internal process.

Because the process is so different my stuff for ensembles
has been very different than my abstract electronic things, dancey tracks or
even my pop songs, which all tend to be quite textural and dense. The ensemble
stuff is textural too but is very transparently melodic, and often
leaner-sounding. I'm learning a lot from doing something that's more
economical. It's informing how I'm making other music.

DP If you find
you've come up with a pretty and straightforward melody do you twist the music
up to make it more challenging or do you just go with it and let the
challenging stuff emerge on its own? Do you have to coax the good bits out or
do you have to prop the good bits up?

NS I have always
been very intuitive about all the music I make. I can't do it any other way.
I'm also very omnivorous listener so I end up making music in the same manner.
There's never any sense of making something deliberately weird or
confrontational, or intellectual/ systematic. Hell it's seldom even conceptual.
Conceptual elements just trickle in, and then I notice them later!

I think it's interesting to discuss this idea of
straightforward vs. challenging. While we can look at that being a simple case
of dividing on standard lines: tonal vs. atonal, rhythmically stable vs.
rhythmically free etc etc. there other orthodoxies that appear within different
music communities. As I keep mentioning, I've making a lot of poppy tracks
lately, often which draw on elements of things like new jack swing, disco, UK
Garage, 80's soul. This is not for ironic reasons, although I'm well aware that
these styles carry a certain baggage. This presents a challenge to some. For
instance, I think people like John Farah and THOMAS (who's drawing on similar
materials plus prog and jazz fusion) are making very challenging music, not so
much because of their rhythmic complexities or whatever but because they're
using and/ or combining things that have stigma attached to them. Even I think
"wow breakbeats are so passé" but John is just right there using them
because it feels right to him... and because of that mere fact that HE'S
convinced of them, he manages to make them work really well! He's treading this
line between classical pianist/composer and electronica producer which presents
lots of challenges to those two communities. Plus who woulda thunk that someone
could actually pull off a mutant hybrid of Vangelis' Blade Runner-score,
Squarepusher, Scriabin and Arabic music!

Because I'm doing a lot of more abstract stuff too, the
assumption may be for some, that I'm doing certain it to serve some sort of
conceptual purpose. Really I just like doing it and I think it sounds great.
Maybe that expectation isn't there but I think it IS nevertheless hard to
reconcile your own omnivorous tendencies. The urge to try to make EVERYTHING, and
how to structure that and feel like you're doing something that's at least
marginally cohesive.

I guess what I'm saying is something like Deniece Williams
presents challenges to Peter Brotzmann fans even though it's not conspicuously
'challenging.' It's all good music. The challenge for me is to get inside of it
as musician and listener.

While my approach is super intuitive, do I have a general
stylistic idea of where it's going... It depends upon my mood. I do like to
cross things up a bit and play with mixing and matching styles too so maybe
that's where some more straightforward and more abstract material starts
intersecting.

As for my strategy for making my better ideas stand out,
because I fly by the seat of my pants, it's most of often more a question of
extracting them... rescuing them even!. Sometimes I tend to clutter things up
too much so I need to pull the good bits out of the rubble and give them some
breathing room. This is especially the case when I'm working in my dancier or
poppier stuff. It requires that I resist the urge to make everything this
gigantic textural blob and get some hookier things happening in the foreground!

DP How does
playing live differ from playing to a tape? do you think there is an audience
on the other end of the tape or do you feel alone with the music? or do you
feel most alone when performing?

NS My live thing
is REALLY different than what I do at home. My live thing, so far, is 100%
improvised I create it all on the fly with vocals, cello, and whatever else I decide
to bring (synth, flutes, percussion etc.). I use the computer to manipulate and
layer it but never to bring in pre-recorded materials (so far).

It's funny though because this relates to the previous
question of "challenging music". Although what I do is technically
"free improv" I think people would hesitate to relate it to that
because of how it sounds (rhythmic modal, almost dancey!). I tend to play
differently for free improv audiences actually (I actually tend to beatbox more
and go for more of a disco vibe!! )

Anyway, at home things are more composed and edited and
often includes a wider array of instruments. I have quite alot of musical junk
at t home: synths, guitars, bass, banjo, hand drums, mandolin, bowed
instruments (like the Turkish kemence, the Indonesian rebab and the Indian
Esraj), thumb pianos, harmonium, weird reed instruments. It's just too
cumbersome to bring that stuff when I play out. Plus it makes thing less
focused when I have to many things I can play. I used to bring more stuff, now
I sometimes just bring the cello, a mic and my computer.

DP Sheet music vs
memorizing music vs going off-book? this is a question.

NS This is a
complex question. I'm definitely more a fan of memorizing and going off-book. I
always find notating my own music for other people to play a difficult task
because I like the uniqueness of the player to come out. With my own cello
students I always teach them that the sheet music is just a recipe, but the
sound is the real delicious meal... I always try to teach them the pieces by
ear first before letting them see the page so it gets in their ears.

In music school you're taught to analyze scores in isolation
from the actual sound of the music sometimes... but to me that's a really
alienating concept. Treating notation as if it can stand-in for musical sounds,
in the same way that written text can be parallel to spoken text encourages a
weird mentality about music I think, especially given the notation system we
use... Notation really only shows pitch and rhythm and a few other minor
things. Yeah you can get into graphic scores etc. but that's a whole different
thing. For me sound is a big big deal... The timbre of you're getting, the
minute gradations of pitch etc. etc. If you look at non-Western classical traditions,
for instance Korean, Chinese and Indian musics, there is so much other
information that cannot be mapped out with our notation system... It's
frustrating to me.

Same goes for a lot of pop music, you could transcribe all
the Charles Stepney arrangements on Minnie Riperton's "Come To My
Garden" but you can't really get to the bottom of how beautiful and
mysterious it is. Not even remotely close. The magic is in the production and
how the instruments were played, and how Minnie herself does the backing vocals
at times, and countless other nuances and secret tricks we'll never know...
Having a score to that won't get you anywhere, so we should just give up on
that whole thing use notation for what it's good for... Sheet music is only an
aide to get to that but ultimately it's like that old family recipe that's
passed on through generations! It's just a sheet of paper with instructions on
it... You need to go way beyond instructions is required to make it delicious
though!

DP What is the
difference between a tune and a song?

NS For me songs
are like a melodic vocal form. I often think of there being text too. Not
necessarily accompanied but often it's voice plus accompaniment. Tunes are more
like just a melodic idea. Or it can be like saying "jams"... "I'm
gonna go listen to Bel Biv Devoe tunes with Brad and Bonnie, mmkay Steve?"
"Oh man, can I come too, Nick? BBD had some great jams."

Does this mean I have to play songs? Uh oh! Better get
writing!!!

(Do show up for 9pm so you can catch Nick Storring as part
of Wavelength 505, aka SHAMEWAVE! The Pop Montreal “Pop Off” Tour. Nick will
kick off the night opening for Colleen & Paul, Braids, Shapes & Sizes
at the Garrison Friday July 23)