Mike Benedetti's Interview, August 1997:
Well, when I studied music theory, they told us about Wagner, and about how, with his harmonies, he destroyed Western harmony--he basically made it meaningless. For me, when I started listening to Stockhausen, I felt that his music destroyed music entirely. And a lot of people say about Stockhausen that “a child could do that,” or that “you could just hear that sound anywhere,” that it has no intelligence behind it. But for me, it did just the opposite. It meant that whenever you hear a sound, you hear music. The idea of “music made of sound” really caught my attention. It doesn’t always have to have human intelligence behind it, like with “Machine.”
But I think that Unsound’s “Machine” tapes do have an intelligence behind them. As the artist, you create combinations of electronics, feedback loops, and effects modules. Those patterns may be rather abstracted from the music produced, but the patterns are there.
That’s true. I did spend a lot of time setting it up and fussing with it. In the end, my goal has always been to let the machine go by itself. I create the machine so that it does something interesting, but when it actually gets started, I don’t want to interfere.
How is the “Machine” tape coming along? Are you going to explain the process in the liner notes?
We’re on number sixteen now. I’m probably going to have to write it down to make it all make sense. There might be diagrams. I’m going to explain how it works, and suggest that people request their own tapes.
Their own sample?
The sample that we feed into the machine to start the process. I was thinking that people could send us material to sample, and that we’d cut down the price a little bit for that. Or you could suggest a message that we record ourselves. Or an even more abstract concept. “I want a piece that sounds like swans with machine guns.”
In your live performances, you have a strong element of theatricality and performance art. Why do you do this?
We take a lot of inspiration from dreams. Jim [Speer] especially. Whenever he has a dream, he tells me about it, and then we work out a way of doing it in a performance. In fact, the whole “Cap’n Mikee” costume developed from one of Jim’s dreams. He dreamed that I was dressed like a captain. He also dreamt that he was dressed like a giraffe, but we haven’t finished that costume yet.
What kind of advice would you give a young person who wants to perform this kind of music?
I think that anybody that already knows they want to do this kind of music doesn’t need much advice. I guess my advice would be “Don’t expect to get paid. Don’t expect people to like it.” Personally, I’ve often been surprised by how much people do like it. But it’s always a surprise. But you’ll find someone, you’ll always find someone who sees something in it. What I really like is when people see things in it that I don’t.