LUKE TEMPLE OF ART FEYNMAN
Hi Luke and thanks for taking the time out to speak with us at Musicology. Firstly congratulations on your new record Half Price at 3:30. To begin with can you elaborate on the artwork for the record and the inspiration behind it?
Going for that classic Popeye look.
An album can be a lifetime worth of experiences concentrated and refined into a body of work that encompasses many years and phases in life. Other times it is a snap shot, a brief period in time crystallized into a record covering a specific epoch. Was it a case of either / or for Half Price at 3:30?
Well anything you do is an expression of the person you are at that time and the culmination of your life until that point. I’m more interested in putting things together from a feeling of instinct so I’m not conscious of the narrative in how it reflects my present self but of course it does.
In terms of the writing and lyrical content, was there an overarching narrative tying the album together or an assortment of topics and inspirations that zig zag throughout the record?
There seems to be a few that address relationships that I’ve had with people who are mentally unstable. But you know I’m just realizing that now as I say this.
Of the eleven tracks on the album, how considered was your approach with the track order in terms of the overall communicatory story you wanted to share?
I was more concerned with the musical flow than the literal narrative flow. I was just working with musical dynamics when sequencing.
Working in both capacities, can you detail the dualism between producer and musician when you are composing and creating your work and where the lines intersect and diverge?
In terms of my process they are one and the same. I don’t tend to write outside of recording so much anymore. It’s a holistic approach. Sometimes I’ll have a little sketch before hand but generally speaking the moment I start adding other elements it swerves off the road and becomes something totally different.
In conjuring some of those atmospheric pieces and the sonic imagery you create through the electronic languages you use, are the certain pairings that you employ whereby a distinct sensation can only be expressed with a certain instrument?
I don’t really have too many “go to’s” in terms of sounds but I do like to use vary speed on my tape machine. Whether you slow something down or speed it up, it brings such a different character out of it.
Having meet and performed with so any different musicians and artists over the years, during that time, has there been any defining moments or words of wisdom that were spoken to you which really resonated with you and in turn altered the way you approach your craft?
Only in that every bit of advice I’ve ever gotten seemed to best suit the person giving it, so in the end I realized that this is my life and no one else’s and it’s ok for me to make my own decisions even if it’s contrary to what’s held as the right way to do things. I found that I had the most discord in my life when I was really struggling to “make it”(in music) all through my 20’s and 30’s. When I let go of that idea and then took stock of what it was that I actually wanted, things got much easier. I actually prefer a simple life, I like being home and with my girlfriend and I don’t like touring so much but I wouldn’t give that advice to anyone because that’s just me.
Replicating such delicately and intricately woven sonic pieces in a live setting isn't without its challenges and a quote by Dan Deacon often comes to mind when he says that “the audience is the performance”. Personally how do you approach performing live and channeling your creations through the instrumentation and ultimately the punters reception to it?
In my best moments I’m relaxed and working from a care free looseness within myself. When I’m worried about what people are going to think then that’s when the problems start. When I start feeling like a charlatan ,which I do from time to time, I’m locked out of the garden. In the end we are just moving energy around and that’s what people are going to respond to.
When embarking on an extensive tour that can run over the course of months or years, is there a certain feeling of being frozen in time whereby the material you are performing has been created some time ago and whilst performing and touring on the back of this, your own life stands still and is only released when the last road case has been packed and the last flight home has been undertaken?
For the Art Feynman gigs so far I’ve tended to improvise more than stick to a scripted set, in that way it can stay fresh over a longish tour but as I said, tour is not my favorite place to be these days.
On a philosophical level, what does music give you that nothing else does? The thing about music is that it’s not philosophical.
It’s physical In that it’s vibrations mingling with your nervous system and then generating related feelings, emotions and thoughts and in that it’s like any sensory experience we have to accept that music has highly ordered tones stacked in very particular order that in turn conjure highly ordered emotional states. The sonic world we live in usually has a more chaotic nature however all the fundamentals of “music” are there being employed all the time but without conscious order. “Music” is just the act of deciding on a center and then using tones that only relate to that center but of course that’s a totally subjective thing. John Cage just let his environment be what it was to show that music is in everything. That’s true in a sense of course but it’s more interesting to me to have a conscious hand in the arranging of it.
