Martial Canterel Behind the Dusty Curtains

I approached Electric Voice with the idea as Matthew and I had already established a dialogue regarding the “Electric Voice II” (EVII) compilation. The idea emerged as I wanted to mark the ten year anniversary of the project. There are countless songs, both finished and unfinished that I wanted to present. Many of these tracks are very dear to me as they stand as the heart and soul of the project’s humble beginnings.

We met when he approached me about participating in the EVII compilation in August of 2012. For me it is important that he is young and enthusiastic. More importantly we share a spirited disenchantment with the culture of music, culture at large.

At the outset the feelings and motivations of this music for me were informed by a nearly wholesale foreclosure on normal modes of both production and dissemination, i.e. mainstream culture. There was a somewhat hermetic space that I created for myself, whereby I coined or better yet established personalized conceits that would be stand-ins or figures to express indirectly the complications of the time – an active and evolving metaphoricity, for instance, dust, curtains, falling, secret chambers, deserts, etc. These figures simultaneously became tinged with autobiography and so there evolved an interplay, conjoining of the personal with the critical. This blurring of the lines between the personal and the critical becomes even more integrated when considering the mechanics of the analogue synthesizer – as a tool (instrument) that is rooted in the pre-digital age, it has no parallels with popular digital media (or one could even go so far as to say military technology), it’s boundaries are fixed in time, often forgotten time, and its mechanics are completely elemental, almost biological. The perceived poetics of detachment, of darkly lit enchantment, in effect, are a running commentary on the world as we all experience and live it.

I think that in this day and age mainstream culture and “underground” culture do not really have a clear-cut boundary – as both are active and unchallenging players in the current digital-information age we live in. This age has led to artists becoming simply curators of taste, DJs, selectors, false memories of yesteryear. And with this there is a hyper-horizontalization of culture – there can be no mastery, no craft, no learning process, only the repeatable, playback-able, and easily framed configuration of pre-existing models – already stored, already formatted, already ready. These conditions seem practically insurmountable, pervading all aspects of culture, of our lives. However, I feel a backlash is mounting and it should have some valuable consequences.

Playing live is really, for me, no different from recording or even writing music, so to be able to do this in Rome or Budapest, for example, is a complete joy. Many friendships and even a romance or two have been made across Europe. I love the live show aspect of the project, so to be able to do this every night in a different city is extremely exciting, albeit, slightly backbreaking carrying 140 kg of gear through train stations and airports.

In the last ten years, there is an obvious re-popularization of hardware music, especially analogue. There are hundreds of small boutique or otherwise hobbyist manufacturers of these instruments across the world. I feel, that for the first time since maybe 1982 there have been breakthroughs with analogue instrument technology, and this is extremely exciting, especially as many items of interest have been made more lightweight, more portable, and more affordable.

A piece is done when I feel the performance of the piece was acted out well. My recorded music is littered with mistakes and bad decision making, but this is part of the human in my music – so I do not necessarily look upon these with regret, but as a minor (traceable) slip and fall in my development as a musician.

I cannot think of anything I would have done differently.

This question begs me to be self congratulatory – the press in general are bound up with the aforementioned conditions, so I am often just lumped in as an 80’s revivalist. In this sense everything is overlooked, and in another sense, the press itself being symptomatic of the very thing I am interested in challenging, is part of the dialogue.

Apart from a toy Yamaha keyboard, the Roland Alpha Juno 2 with programmer – I traded my bass guitar in high school for it ca. 1992. Then when I went to University, the electronic music lab had multiple Sequential Circuits Pro Ones, and Arp 2600 and a large 4 panel Serge modular. My desert island synth would be the Serge Modular. Hands down for me – the most complex and variable synth ever made.

Perhaps.

The sound elements, textures evolve as I also evolve as a musician. Like anything, there are sounds I return to, moments I want to continue to work within, and there are experiments I want to test; some fail, some succeed.

My work exists within a sort of personal continuum, a process of learning, experimenting, but most importantly, and this sounds trite, a means of expression. With this said, any objective perspective on the future of music is impossible – I prefer to work within a self-organized vacuum – my previous work being the influence of the subsequent. Perhaps I have always seen the present and the future as a bleak place – hence this self exile.

I do admire some of the early minimalism of the American composers, however I feel little relationship with it today, as it is perhaps too opiated, too inactive. Although, I must say, as a ground for electronic music it is critical – nearly pure waveforms, the interaction of different waveforms with one another, modulating each other, the temporality of harmonics, etc. In some ways, perhaps the ABCs or 123s of electronic music. I aim to take these principles and in effect make more complex musical structures with more harmonic and melodic variance to truly shape and furnish something that is musical from nothing in real time, with two hands.

I, like most people, have been listening to music since childhood. I was reared on English and American psychedelic rock, folk music, Tyrolean Zither music, Liszt, Verdi, etc… As a teen in the late 80s, early 90s I listened to the typical range of gothic rock, industrial, shoegaze, experimental electronics…

These days I listen largely to a lot of European schlagger, Harold Budd, occasional wave, certain soundtracks… However I am typically engaged in my own work – so I listen mostly to my own work…..

The last great thing I watched was Miss Marple’s “Nemesis“.

Bring me to Vilnius!