NICK AND I MET IN THE COMMENTS SECTION of someone else’s blog, and before long we began chatting about travels, flamenco, music, and other things that had nothing to do with the topic of that post, so we ended up moving to WhatsApp and have been in conversation ever since.
I wasn’t thinking about adding music to my podcast when I first listened to Nick’s music on Bandcamp, but after hearing his sound, I saw a fantastic opportunity for collaboration. Luckily, he agreed.
Including original music has made a big difference in the way I feel about producing podcasts. After recording my novel’s audiobook, I had come to hate my own voice and the editing process, but I’m finding that’s no longer the case now that there’s something more to it than passing quality tests and listening to myself fumble through text. I get a kick out of finding just the right sound clip for breaks between paragraphs, and I feel the music elevates the overall message, so much so it doesn’t even feel like it’s mine anymore. As the soundtrack fades in and out, at times I can even forget that I’m the one talking; it’s more like I’m listening to the radio. What a relief!
Anyway, why should any of this be a slog? I encourage you, whatever it is you’re into, to open up to people outside your immediate circle. Life is strange, and strange is where things happen. Maybe you’ll find an opportunity to create something new with someone whose talents compliment your own. This is not about cross-promotion or gaining subscribers or appealing to audiences. It’s about getting outside yourself and having fun. Because without that, what’s the point?
“I had zero interest in picking up an instrument as a child. The only person I was really interested in…was Weird Al. I was like, “Okay, maybe the accordion.” ~Nick
INTERVIEW VIDEO
TRANSCRIPT OF MY INTERVIEW WITH NICK HERMAN
I wanted to talk to you about your background. You said in your last Substack post, "I went to university at a very strange and mind-destroying institution called Harvey Mudd college." Why do you say “mind destroying” and how did your experience there shape you?
NICK: Yeah, it was a group of very smart people who had an expectation of a very high workload, solving very difficult technical problems all the time. And that was the expectation, by the environment and the professors and the students, that everybody there was coming from the cream of the crop, and then they're going to make the cream of the crop from that. Their mission was to train elite scientists. So yeah, in retrospect, if you had other interests, then it's not good. It's a bit intense of a place.
It's quite similar to other such institutions, in the US particularly. It's quite similar to Caltech, MIT. I know people from those places. It's a pressure-cooker environment. If there were less suicides than happen at MIT, I think it's mostly just because it’s located in Southern California instead of in Boston. But yeah, it's an intense place. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
So what was your major there? What were you planning on doing?
Mathematical biology. My idea at first was to go into neuroscience and neurobiology because I was really interested in the problems of consciousness and these things which are part of our linkage, our interest [referring to Tina]. But then over time I gradually realized I was more interested on a lot of other dimensions besides what the science could say. And science didn't really have that much to say about it, actually.
I still remember these pivotal moments, like when I had a third or fourth year…not quite exit interview, but an interview with a professor who was checking on students. He was like, “Okay, I want to see what your plans are.”
And I'm like, “Well, I'd really like to study to see how I can apply systems thinking to understanding these big questions.”
He just looked at me like I was really stupid. “Well, there's not a lot of work in that kind of thing. But, you know, maybe if you want to biomechanically model the movement of people's elbows and cartilage and things like that…”
At that point, I was really burned out. I was like, “Oh. Maybe this is not my path.”
That was part of my issue. I was always really trying to understand the perspective of why I was doing what I was doing when maybe I should have been spending more time in order to be “successful” just doing what I needed to do to get the stamps and whatever. But maybe that's part of why it was difficult for me and some aspects of it weren't working. And then, of course, comparatively, when I was able to take humanities classes like philosophy or something, I was like, “Oh, this is great. It makes sense. I get to pursue questions I'm interested in. And the workload is, like, one-third. I could do some of these classes and it would be less work!”
In your last Substack post, you talked about an obscure 80-year-old silent film called Meshes of the Afternoon. What is it about that film that captured your interest and made you want to create the soundtrack for it?
I liked it immediately. I think it had a very coherent vision even though it was a short, silent film that was made on a very low budget by a husband and wife team. Film as an art form hasn't been around really that long. For something that's this old, it’s towards the beginning of its period of time as an art form. When something is really new, people tend to be a little bit more experimental with their approach before it becomes very codified in the big Hollywood system.
I read about the filmmaker, Maya Deren. She seemed like she was an interesting person and she appealed to me. And even then, 1940 or whatever when it was made, the Hollywood system was already very well established and she was kind of railing against that in her works. She was this very weird experimental person and did documentaries on her own on, like, Haitian voodoo. But yeah, the surreal elements of it—although I shouldn't say that because apparently she hated surrealism as a movement—whatever you want to call it, you can clearly see the influence on people like David Lynch. It felt like it lended itself to trying to make some music for it because there was no music for it. You can put your own stamp on it. It was very experimental, but coherent and with a strong vision and that left me with the feeling that if she was alive today she would be like some kind of weird Berlin techno person, so something on that aesthetic should map to this. So I started to do that as a project as something that would be interesting and to expand my portfolio because I like the weirdness, but also sharpness, of the film.
TINA: It has a sort of a time loop quality to it as well.
NICK: More like a spiral than a loop.
TINA: Yeah, that makes sense. So this movie, Meshes of the Afternoon, didn't have a soundtrack at all?
NICK: No. I guess there are different versions that were made later on, including by her second husband who is Japanese and has this folk Japanese soundtrack. That's one of the soundtracks to it, like shamisen and Japanese instruments and stuff like that. But yeah, originally it was made silent.
TINA: How far along are you in this project?
NICK: Not as far along as I would like! It's hard when you decide to do a project on your own just for the sake of it—you know, like writing a novel. There's no external expectation or impetus or whatever. I think my most successful stuff has been when I worked with another person. Like this game jam. The idea of a game jam is, people try to make a game or a prototype of a game in like a weekend. So at that time I was streaming on Twitch some and I got to know a few people and I was like, “I can make some music.” I just had a day to do that, basically.
And likewise for my partner. The last short film, it was a very tight turnaround because it was also part of a 48-hour film festival. You had to make the entire film and shoot it and edit it in a weekend.
TINA: Oh my God. That's crazy.
NICK: Yeah. I had only a day really to make the music. So it was some heated conversation back and forth with my partner. I was complaining a bit, I'm like, “I don't know if I can do it.” I literally hadn't seen any visuals at all before I made the main score for it. And I was like, “Can you give me anything?”
She's like, “Well, that's how it is. We need it fast. You can do it if you want to do it.
I was like, “Oh. Okay.”
I visited the set and I looked around and I knew the plot and I knew some of the actors and stuff. I just wanted to get a feeling for it and step into the space, see what it's about. And then I came back and I was like, “OK, I just have a few hours, a few hours…” I sat down in my room in the studio and I had an idea about what elements were going to be in there, and I just cranked it out in a few hours. So I think people actually don't need a lot of time to make good works. It's about having the tension or the external impetus. In a way it's harder to do when it's more internally motivated. So we'll see.
TINA: Deadlines, deadlines. Writers love deadlines. Still, I can't imagine 48 hours to make a movie because I know video editing is insanely time consuming. And working with actors? [Mimes head exploding].
NICK: It actually ended up coming together quite well. I went to the film festival and there were like 100 films or something and it got in the top 10. And then later she made a more edited version, it's more tight, and that process took a year so. The basic project was over a weekend and then it's a year after that. Then I made some more music for that and it’s been in festivals, so that's probably the most anybody has ever actually heard any of my music, through that film and the festivals it has played at. Although most people will never think about the music or anything.
TINA: Right, we talked about this once, you were like, “Oh, did you notice the guitar?”
“I was actually just watching the movie. Sorry.”
NICK: Yeah, it's true.
How do you think about structure and improvisation in your work?
Focusing on electronic music, to me what opened up a lot of avenues was the idea of being able to sequence multiple instruments at once through synthesizers, and then when I got into more sophisticated tools, the idea that you could have things like aleatoric, so to speak—probabilities, like small variations—that idea is very intoxicating to me.
You know, if I was more social or more around people who are interested in the things I care about, then maybe I would’ve just found a band instead. But I didn't, so then I ended up thinking, “How do I mimic this process to express my own vision as of multiple people having a structure but jamming together, but also have room for a lot of variation and input from some controlled sources, some random sources?”
Do you think of your compositions as stories? And if so, how do you tell a story through sound?
In a sense, stories are a way of connecting up ideas. And the way we connect them up to make them stick is with emotion. Because, you know, like classic parables and stuff, right? There has to be something that sticks to your heart, I think.
My friend Bill Porter who I interviewed dedicated his life to poetry and translating Chinese poetry. He really understands these things very well because he's dedicated his life to these things. He would say poetry is the essence of expressing a feeling through language. Because prose can describe everything for you but doesn't always let you…pass through the gate. There's often a barrier in philosophy, right? It [poetry] doesn't tell you exactly what's there, but it opens up your heart. So I think in that sense, music is more aligned with poetry than a story or prose.
It's more like there's some underlying emotions or feelings you're trying to express, but you need a structure to make it stick. Because if you just have, you know, the emotion itself—and I think some people don't understand this—it's not enough. It comes off as like melodramatic or juvenile. I think it's just like the equivalent of somebody like crying loud or being like, “I'm important!” You need structure.
So it's kind of an inversion. I think with stories from written language, we have structure and we stick in emotions. And then with music, it's more like there's emotion and then you have to stick in the structure. You're coming at it from opposite ends, but maybe the net effect is similar.
That actually leads into the next question. Do you think of your music as something to be felt or analyzed, or do you resist that distinction?
Hm. I don't resist it. There are so many people that have a much stronger technical or classical background that I don't have. So obviously everything that has existed can be analyzed. I did some music theory and it's just as dry as anything and you can analyze and break everything down, but still—within a certain conception of our mind we can talk about harmony and rhythm and melody and all these things and how they fit together, and we invent a lot of terms to break everything down and show all the great composers and stuff, and maybe some of them are thinking very, very much in these terms—but still at the end, I think, if it doesn't leave you with some feeling, then it's kind of like, what was the point?
Some listeners struggle with abstract soundscapes. How would you recommend a newcomer approach listening to your music?
It's hard for me to say because everybody's mind is different, their experience is different. So I'm not exactly sure. My music will probably come off as strange to a lot of people, particularly in like North America, because my influences don't really align that well with what's popular or common. I mean, I have a friend who's a bit of a mentor to me who has a massive, massive studio and got me started on this stuff back in the day when we were both living in Berkeley. He's probably my best supporter, he’s been giving me a lot of praise and encouragement over the years, and he said something to me once, like, “Most people are not going to understand what you're doing. They think you're just messing up or something, like, you don't know how to do it.”
I got some comment, someone was like, “This is awful. You should burn your equipment and take up knitting.”
TINA: Oh no!
NICK: Someone else was like, “This is like a bunch of clowns got in a clown car and went on a meth bender.”
TINA: I love it.
NICK: So I think that sums up myself as an individual and what I create in a nutshell. People tend to either really understand and dig what I'm doing or I just seem incomprehensible. That's been kind of a motif of my life. Not much in the middle.
So it's hard for me to say. I guess the best thing would be, just expose yourself to other artists in the medium, especially as it pertains to electronic music, have some knowledge or awareness first of some of the things that are considered important, or what would be my recommendations of what I think is great, and then hopefully what I'm trying to do will make more sense. Because otherwise it might not make much sense to some people if they don't have a more open mind.
If you were to put together a playlist that best describes what makes you you, what songs would be on that list?
Aphex twin - ambient works 85-92, Syro
Miles Davis - in a silent way, kind of blue
John McLaughlin/Al di Meola/ Paco de Lucia guitar trio work (various)
On the electronic side, the biggest two direct inspirations for me by far, and many other people as well, are Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. I have the shirt on right now [shows Boards of Canada shirt].
The album by Aphex Twin, Syro. That's an album that I think is the pinnacle of all electronic music that's ever been made, basically. In terms of the feeling, the variety of textures, the complexity, the sense of change, the sense that you can listen to a lot of the songs repeatedly. I have over a period of years, and you will hear new things each time.
To me, another album that has those qualities is the great jazz album—by many jazz guys under Miles Davis but a lot of other people worked on it—In a Silent Way. If I had to pick one album to ever listen to, that would be it. Because it's like kind of ambient and kind of like looping, because they were using physical tape and experimenting with that for the first time, like 1970, there's a lot of ideas going on. It's mellow in a way, but also has these great moments of intensity.
So that's one of the albums that I keep coming back to. But I mean, all those artists, so many jazz artists inspire me, especially Miles Davis more than anybody, even though he was like a terrible asshole, apparently.
The great flamenco guitarists are deeply inspirational to me and shaped so much in how I think about guitar and the music. And luckily I was able to see a lot of some of my main heroes there. I was able to see Paco de Lucia and his dancers back when he was alive still. I've seen Vicente Amigo, I've seen Tomatito a couple of times. So all those guys, their music is astounding. Their playing is astounding.
And I don't know, I try to take a lot of ideas from anything. I have a very eclectic palette, as I think you probably understand.
TINA: I do know that. You like ev-er-y-thing.
NICK: It's funny because the thing that I get told the most by people I feel who don't understand me well, including people who are more typical in disposition…like my friend who's a composer here, they say, “You don't like anything.” That's my criticism because I'm not into pop or normal stuff and things like this or typical—
TINA: But you do like some pop. It's gotta be the right kind, right? It’s not like you’re against any particular genre.
NICK: It's just a matter of…I get labeled as being too cynical. I get called a “hater”. “I don’t like anything” or whatever. People have said this before, about various things about me, about various things in life, but...
TINA: Wow.
NICK: Yeah. I've played in a few Balinese gamelans. I mean, this music is, like, so deep. It's so wonderful. I think it has recorded history of going back, like, a thousand years or so. Both in the Bay Area and Vancouver, playing in the different ensembles, I've had a chance to meet people from there in those cultures, and they're just the most lovely, genuinely joyful people I've ever met in my whole life. I think there's something really magical there. Their music is super deep and it's very complex. I know very little compared to the people who are expert in playing it, even from the few years I spent playing it, but there, too, you can learn so much. You can learn so much from classical Indian music, even though I don't claim to understand it. I've been to a lot of concerts of classical Indian music. It's such a deep art form. You can devote your whole life to those things. I just try to grab a lot of influences from different places and try to tap into a feeling.
Nick Herman is a tea enthusiast as well as a multi-instrumentalist musician-composer who weaves melodies and sound from disparate idioms, primarily through his classical guitar and a small army of modular synthesizers. Discover his music on Bandcamp. Subscribe to his Substack, Kaleidescopic Mind. Support indie artists!
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