Cunei presents Craque’s Meat Hacker
Craque’s latest record is out today. We were lucky enough to catch up with him to talk about improvisation, Creative Commons licenses, and his favorite homemade instrument, the Hunquejarp.
Download Meat Hacker .mp3s or lossless files for free and listen to Plink.
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Cunei: So, Matt can you explain what this record means to you?
Craque: These are tracks that were never meant to go together, but ended up working as one in quite a special way. They also contain some of my favorite bits of the magic which draws many of us to a sound or sequence or texture that basically makes our heads nod and our toes click in our shoes. As I’m listening to them I hear motifs and patterns that are uniquely mine but completely subconscious, the mirror of my loving Chicago house styles and minimal experimentalism.
Cunei: I can hear both of those styles on Meat Hacker, but of course, with the Craque spin. What were some of the techniques and instruments you used on the record?
Craque: When working in a particular style of music, I let my improvisational instincts guide where things lie and what sounds good, keeping my own perspective on the stylistic tradition. I may divide the bass unevenly against the regular beat, or use unexpected phrasing and sudden changes in instrumentation, juxtapose classical form with modern structures… but I think in things like this there is always a level of personal taste, and I try to temper it with indeterminacy and unexpected coincidences.
I play trumpet on one track, guitar on several, and use many samples gathered from our percussion collection and various found objects. There are phrases from live shows that feature experimental sound objects I’ve built, interspersed with synths, and of course the beats.
A favorite pastime of mine is searching for new sounds through endless manipulation and combination, so you’ll hear simple little microsecond bits that sometimes took me hours to accidentally find. It’s discovery, and I tend to be more interested in an interesting end result than a specific process of making sound… I don’t program my own patches or stick to one platform, I just want to make music and here’s this set of tools at my disposal for doing so, or here’s what I feel like making music with today.
Cunei: What is your background in music like?
Craque: Probably my earliest childhood memory is standing backstage at an orchestra
shell, watching my father conduct a symphonic wind band. The trumpet you hear
on the album is his Bach Stradivarius, handed down to me when I started taking
lessons in college. Played flute from an early age up to high school, switched
to percussion, but also ended up in both Choir and Drama. That led to serious
involvement in both performing and composition, continued on to study opera
and extended vocal techniques. But I kept myself very involved in avant stuff,
hosted experimental music radio shows for several years, and played free jazz
and improv as much as anything else.
Post-academia was definitely a different story. I had been into experimental
electronics for a while, but really had only scratched the surface of what
I thought of then as broadly “electronica”. Living and working in places like
NYC and Chicago broadened my horizons in terms of how far unique and creative minds reached across music, art or pop or neither. So I basically expanded my repertory, I guess… from dramatic baritone and avant improvisor to dance
DJ and abstract sound collagist.
Cunei: That’s an awesome evolution. What are you working on these days?
Craque: Continuing to evolve… discovery is a large part of what thrills me
about music and art, so as an artist I feel like I’m constantly
searching. Very recently I’ve begun to really explore the world of
analog synthesis at the circuit board level, building my own instruments,
exploring the notion of electrical current as a direct agent of sound.
It’s the same notion of capturing the ‘original sound’ of a thing
and using it musically, in a recontextualized way. Meat Hacker is full
of samples taken from my live improvisations or sessions where i employ
a wide range of toys, rocks, plants, pipes, pieces of metal, percussion,
aboriginal instruments, and sometimes my voice – which may be where
that all comes from. You know the first things used to make music were
voices and drums, so it’s sort of deep connection to my humanity.
Cunei: You’re an advocate of netlabels, licensing your work with Creative Commons and giving away your music for free. Can you explain why?
Craque: While I specialized in vocal performance I was doing a lot more playing out of avant music than classical opera. My passions are there, and they’re strong. Over the years I have also come to understand that the performer and improviser energies in me far outweigh the composerly ones. So when I have the inspiration and insatiable desire to create (music or sculpture or building music makers), my methods tend to be immersive and improvisatory, as if I am performing. The things I do are pure artistic outlets for me, I don’t know how to do them any other way. Thinking about what money I can make is the furthest from my mind when I create art.
The music industry – that is, this business of making money from music – frustrates me to no end for countless reasons. I have solace in netlabels: they are one place people can go and form actual relationships with the artists and other listeners. They not only serve to bring a particular style of music to those in search of sounds that speak to them, but also act as social pylons in the vast cold machine of global communication. I did a project on a very small netlabel in Russia, and the world feels a closer place for it. In fact almost every label I’ve released on is outside the US, so I in a way I feel like I’m reaching out to people who really want to listen.
Cunei: What’s your favorite instrument you’ve made?
Craque: I have this thing called a Hunquejarp: a small plank of 2×6, probably
about three feet long, impregnated by a variety of found objects,
the whole thing driving a piezo contact mic and amplified, all
together as one instrument. It’s got its own special timbre, and
is really fun to play on and perform with… plus it’s pretty low
tech so it morphs and changes as I find different and new things
to add. Primarily I play it with my hands and a variety of percussion
mallets and anything else that happens to get in its way.
Look for Craque’s updates on Sounding.
