Episode 200: Max Richter

Max Richter is a composer, pianist, and producer. His albums include Memoryhouse, The Blue Notebooks, and Sleep. His instrumental composition “On the Nature of Daylight” has been featured in films including Shutter Island and Arrival, which he also scored. By combining orchestral writing with electronic and ambient music, his work spans ballet, television, and film, including Mary, Queen of Scots and Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Max's upcoming album ’While The Flood Rages' is out on October 16th Pre-save: https://maxrichter.lnk.to/WTFR Pre-order: https://maxrichter.lnk.to/ShopWTFR ‘ Works mentioned: Memoryhouse The Blue Notebooks In A Landscape ------ JAY-Z in ∞
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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Ich fühle mich, als ob Komponisten immer neue Wege für Geschichten suchen, wie neue Farben für die Palette. Also überall in den 18. und 19. Jahrhunderten die Orchester wird größer, weil sie neue Instrumente entwerfen, die Brassenregion wird größer, die Wände werden größer, mehr Strähnen. Der Piano-Knopf wird länger, je länger Beethoven lebt. Sie wollen mehr. Bach war ein Pionier vieler Dinge. Wenn man seine Organszene betrachtet, ist seine Organszene über neue Farben und die emotionale Potenzial des Instruments. Es ist auch schweres Metall.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Jede Bachs Organszene, unabhängig davon, in welcher Key es ist, hat eine Bottom C in es, weil das der größte Sound im Organ ist. Und man kann es im Schreiben erkennen. Es geht viel um Sensation, tatsächlich, ein bisschen um physische Sensation. Natürlich ist es unglaublich zusammengefasst und die Counterpoint ist unglaublich und alles, aber es geht auch um physische Wirkung.

• 2:06Rick Rubin?

  Wie unterschiedlich war Organszene vor Bach?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Ein bisschen unterschiedlich. Ich meine, du hast Buxtehude und andere so. Ein bisschen früher. Aber ich denke, was unglaublich über Bach ist, ist, dass er es alles zusammenlegt. Er sortiert alle tuningen Systeme, damit wir alle 12 Keyen richtig spielen können. Er organisiert all diese unterschiedlichen Materialien, die herumliegen, vor ihm. Ja, er ist unglaublich.

• 2:35Rick Rubin?

  Haben Sie immer Musik mit einer offenen Palette angefangen?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Ja, ich meine, ich denke, wir werden Musiker, weil wir mit Musik verliebt sind. Das ist es. Und du verliebst dich nicht mit einer Sache, du verliebst dich mit dem gesamten, dem gesamten Ding. Also für mich habe ich immer gefühlt, dass die Unterschiede zwischen Popmusik und Klassikmusik oder Elektronismus und Klassikmusik, ich fand, dass diese Unterschiede nicht wahr sind. Das waren nur imaginäre Konstrukte. Weil die Menschen nicht so sind. Die Menschen sind nicht in Boxen. Wir sind ein Spektrum. Wir sind eine Art Kontinuität über unsere Affekte, unsere Enthusiasmus, Dinge, die wir lieben, Dinge, die wir nicht lieben. Ich habe immer gedacht, ja, das scheint mir komisch zu sein.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Diese Idee, dass du nicht benutzt, was das Instrument ist. Und so, wenn ich ein Kind war, interessierte mich Klassikmusik. Das war in einer Weise, wenn ich drei war, ich verliebte mich, ich hatte ein bisschen ein闪电爆点 Moment. Aber gleichzeitig hörte ich immer zu, was in Popmusik passierte.

• 3:48Rick Rubin?

  Hat Klassikmusik für Sie seit dem Anfang eine Rolle gehabt?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Ja, ich habe einige Erinnerungen von, als wir noch in Deutschland lebten. Das war bevor ich, vielleicht war ich in meinem dritten Jahr. Meine Eltern waren Musiker, aber sie hatten einige Geräte. Und das Geräte des Bachs Double Valingconcerto, das fügte sich mit dem Gefühl von Sonnenlicht ein, das durch die Fenster fallen. Und das unglaubliche Melodie und das Intuition, dass die Melodie unglaublich ist, aber es gab ein Regierungsprinzip, es gab eine Grammatik, die mich damit beeinflusst hat, wie sie es machten. Und ich wurde passionately interessiert, herauszufinden, was das war.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Was ist das Geheimcode, das diese Sätze zusammentun? Ja, das war es für mich wirklich.

• 4:42Rick Rubin?

  Wenn man zwei simple Phrasen spielen kann und eine, wenn man es nie wieder hören würde, würde man zweimal nicht denken. Und eine drückt in deinen Kopf und schafft ein Gefühl von Emotion im Körper.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Ja.

• 4:54Rick Rubin?

  Wie funktioniert das?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Well, es ist ein Mystery, oder? Ich meine, es ist lustig, weil an verschiedenen Stellen, besonders wenn du jung bist, denkst du, ich verstehe diese Musik. Ich habe es, ich weiß, was passiert ist. Aber tatsächlich, ich habe das seit Jahrhunderten gemacht und es wird immer mehr mysteriös. Ich weiß, wie die Counterpoint funktionieren, ich weiß, wie die Dinge funktionieren. Aber es gibt etwas wirklich magisches und spontanes in der Art, wie ein Stück Musik dich beeinflusst. Irgendetwas wird dir eines Tages in eine Art gesprochen, die es noch nie hatte.

• 5:29Rick Rubin?

  Sind es irgendwelche unbrechbaren Regeln in Musik?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Nein, ich glaube nicht so. Ich glaube nicht so.

• 5:35Rick Rubin?

  Du bist frei.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Ja, ich denke, Musik ist, ich meine, es ist ein unbegrenztes Raum, oder? Und es ist ein Raum, wo jede Art menschliche Dinge gesprochen und ausdrückt werden kann. Ich denke, Patty Smith sagt das, nicht? Es ist ein Musikraum, wo du mit Abhandlung weitergehen kannst. Du kannst es einfach folgen. Das ist oft die Sensation, die ich habe, wenn ich etwas arbeite. Dass es ein solches, es öffnet sein eigenes Raum, als es entwickelt wird. Und du entdeckst diesen anderen Dingen, diesen Territorium.

• 6:10Rick Rubin?

  Also du hättest vielleicht ein Anfang und dann wärst du überrascht, was nächstes passiert?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Total. Ich denke, es ist wie die Novelisten sagen, nicht? Seine Charaktere. Sie schreiben eine Geschichte mit einem bestimmten Band von Charakteren und sie denken, sie wissen, was diese Charaktere machen werden, aber sie starten tatsächlich etwas anderes und es ist so, okay.

• 6:28Rick Rubin?

  Schreibst du immer?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Ja.

• 6:31Rick Rubin?

  Ist es immer ein Zweck des Schreibens oder ist es nur, ich schreibe Musik?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Ich mache viele Dinge, wo es eine Kommission gibt, wie ein Ballett oder eine Orchesterszene oder ein Film. Diese Dinge, wo jemand dir etwas fragt und dann engagierst du dich in ein Prozess, in einen Dialog mit ihnen. Und ja, das ist ein bisschen in Richtung etwas. Das andere, was ich mache, ist mein eigenes Geräte, die ganz offen sind. Du entdeckst es, als du gehst, du entdeckst, was es ist. Und es gibt dieses andere Stück Schreibens, glaube ich, wo ich etwas angefangen habe, ich habe etwas vorgestellt und es hat sich in etwas anderes verwandelt. Und es ist so, okay, also das ist nicht für das. Aber dann geht es auf diese Art und Weise in eine Komposthebel von Ideen, die

• 7:18Rick Rubin?

  Du kollaborierst.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Ja, die sind so, oh, was ist das? Und das ist interessant, um zu erleben.

• 7:24Rick Rubin?

  Hatte du jemals mit einem alten Stück wieder eingegangen und gefunden, eine neue Weise, um in es zu gehen?

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Immer. Ja, immer. Ich denke, sie sind groß, weil du sie mit einem bisschen Objektivität anspricht. Weil oft kann ich, ich habe etwas von Jahren her herausgeholt und es ist so, ich weiß nicht, was das ist. Aber es ist so, oh, es ist etwas, ich könnte hier etwas inhaken.

• 7:45Rick Rubin?

  Ist es immer ein Zeitpunkt, wenn du etwas herausgeholt hast und nicht weißt, was es ist, aber das ist nicht schlecht? Es ist tatsächlich ein guter

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Oh, es ist ein guter Dinge, ja. Ich denke, das ist groß, weil es dir ein bisschen editorial, es gibt dir ein bisschen Objektivität. Weil wir lieben, was wir machen, oder? Also es ist so, ich liebe das, obwohl es nicht funktioniert, aber ich liebe es. Aber tatsächlich ist es gut, ein bisschen Distanz zu haben.

• 8:08Rick Rubin?

  Wie startet man typisch für dich etwas?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Ich meine, wenn es eine Kommission ist, dann ist es eine Kommission. Bitte schreib mir dieses Filmenspiel, was auch. Mit anderen Projekten, wenn es eine Suggestion ist, dass ich schreibe, sagen, eine Orchesterszene, dann muss ich mich selbst fragen, ob ich die Idee für das jetzt habe oder ist es ein Raum, an dem ich gespannt bin? Und dann gibt es oft Ideen aus Literatur. Ich lese viel. Lesen ist meine andere Sache, wirklich, Poesie, Literatur. Und zwei oder drei Worte können einfach aus etwas herausjagen. Und dann denkst du, okay, also das ist eine Idee, das ist ein Gefühl, das ich gerne untersuchen würde, mit dem ich Zeit verbringen würde.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Das Artig.

• 8:57Rick Rubin?

  Hast du jemals eine Idee für etwas schönes, das wirklich die Dinge verändert, die du gegeben hast?

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Ja, das passiert oft. An diesem Punkt musst du ein bisschen offenes Dialog mit jemanden haben, der es spielen oder leiten soll. Ist das Teil dieses Stück oder ist das eigentlich etwas anderes? Ich glaube wirklich, dass nichts je verloren ist. Alles hat seine kleine

• 9:22Rick Rubin?

  Wartet auf den richtigen Moment.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Genau, ja.

• 9:25Rick Rubin?

  Wenn du mit Elektronik arbeitest, startet es immer mit Elektronik? Oder würdest du dann ein Analoginstrument nehmen und es mit Elektronik subvertieren?

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Ja, es sind beide diese Dinge. Ich meine, als ich erstmal mein eigenes Werk gemacht habe, kam es aus In a sense, me viewing like traditional instrumentation and electronics in the studio as like one thing. I tried to to sort of make that argument to, you know, orchestras, record labels, blah, blah, blah. And basically, no one bought that idea. I made Memory House, which is 2002 or something. It was really a sort of, well, no one's going to play this or commission it or believe in it. So I have to just do this. It treats the orchestra and and the electronics in the orchestra

• 10:16Speaker 00

  and the studio as like one instrument. At the time, there were these, you know, it had to be either this or this or this.

• 10:23Rick Rubin?

  And it feels like it birthed a whole new type of music. You're not the only person who does this now.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Right, this is true. Even though Memory House was like on commercial terms, I mean, it was a disaster area, you know? I mean, we didn't even get to play it live for 10 years.

• 10:38Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Right? There was no context for that record to exist. And obviously, basically hardly anyone bought it except other musics, right? Because everyone's always listening to what I was doing. And I feel like it may be, you know, that one and perhaps even more, The Blue Notebooks. It kind of gave permission for people to go, oh, hang on. There is this other space, which is maybe more omnivorous and a bit more inclusive. And yeah, I mean, I guess it started something.

• 11:08Rick Rubin?

  How important is melody for you?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Melody is super important. I mean, that's not to say every piece has to be focused on melody, but I think we imprint on a piece of music. The melody feels like a protagonist. It feels like the us in the music. You know, like a duckling will imprint on any old thing and you just follow it around. And I think we do that with melody. It's really fundamental. And I think even with like pieces which are maybe like ambient, say. So you maybe think, oh, well, it's not really melodic. But if I think of, you know, say, discreet music, Brian Eno, that's full of amazing melody. And I sing those melodies. It's like, oh, this one, you know, here comes this one. And they're like characters, right? And I think there's something very basic about melody for us.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  It connects to song, it connects to the human voice, folk music, lullabies.

• 12:02Rick Rubin?

  How do you choose to use voices when you do as opposed to, say, strings?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  I choose voices for, I guess, a lot of reasons. I mean, the pure color of them is amazing. It's so flexible, so expressive. I mean, it's the most direct way to communicate a feeling, right? It's so clear. There's also something about putting people in a piece of music. You know, if you have voices, you have like, if you imagine how the piece looks when you're hearing it, there's suddenly there's people there, you know? Whereas with instrumental music, sometimes it can feel like it's just the sounds, it's just the instruments, especially with electronic music, obviously. And I mean, that's special in its own way.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  But there's something about having the human voice involved. It just tells stories in a very special, direct way. I mean, that's why like the vocal is so kind of central in pop music, right? I mean, it's like all about that character telling the story.

• 13:05Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about where rhythm fits into your work.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Well, I guess rhythm for me comes from ways of making time pass. One of my sort of like aha moments was discovering the music of the minimalist, the New York minimalist, early stuff, Philip Glass and Steve Reich and Terry Riley. And the way that they use pulsation as a way to make time pass at different speeds. And the use of repetition, like repetition is incredible because it allows you to re-experience the same moment. I discovered this via the milkman who delivered the milk to our house when I was a kid. He would hear me practicing my piano when I was, you know, 14, 13.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  And he started delivering records with the milk, including like really experimental stuff, like the early Philip Glass things, early Terry Riley stuff.

• 13:59Rick Rubin?

  So cool.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely amazing guy.

• 14:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, that sounds like a seminal event in your life.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  It was 100%.

• 14:05Rick Rubin?

  I don't know anyone else who's had that experience.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  That's right. I mean, I think everything sort of fits together, doesn't it? I mean, I think the first thing for me really was just falling in love with music. Like absolutely, just sort of 100%.

• 14:24Rick Rubin?

  Did your parents love music as well?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  My father was an engineer, mechanical engineer. My mother loved music, played the piano as an amateur. But she, I think, you know, for her, music was essentially divine. It was like a portal, right? She felt that completely. And so I think I got a sort of sense of reverence for music as a thing from her.

• 14:51Rick Rubin?

  Lucky.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. So it's always felt like it had this kind of special, kind of numinous kind of quality for me.

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• 16:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you hear music in your head and then bring it to life?

• 17:00Speaker 00

  I do have music playing in my head all the time. You know, writing on paper, which is what I do if I'm writing instrumental music. Because you're preimagining, it's a different process to sitting at the piano and going, oh, yeah, you know, or that. Or sitting at the computer and going, let's try that. And then let's change it, try that, you know? So it's kind of a different process. And I think sometimes you can get sort of deeper into an idea almost without, you know, hearing it, without playing it, without working. You can sort of get to the the core of the thing just on a piece of paper.

• 17:39Rick Rubin?

  And is that an ordinary practice for you to sit down with a pad and think music and write it without humming, without playing anything?

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you're you're hearing it, you know, in your head.

• 17:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What might it sound like?

• 17:53Speaker 00

  I that's, I've asked myself, it doesn't really sound like any, it just hear it.

• 18:00Rick Rubin?

  Would hearing it be the right word or would it be a different word?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  I don't know. You'd have to wire my brain up and see if I am actually hearing it. But I mean, I think this is, it's part of, in a way, the traditional training for a composer. You know, I I feel kind of lucky in that I studied at the time when composer's training was basically the same as it had been 200 years previously. There are real benefits to that, just being able to sort of handle structures and grammar and materials mentally. You know, you can try them on the piano and stuff, but you know, it's basically going on inside you. It allows you to kind of distill stuff down. I guess within that culture, there was also maybe,

• 18:46Speaker 00

  you know, there was a lot of rules, like stuff you're not allowed to do.

• 18:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  And I really had, did have a problem with that.

• 18:53Rick Rubin?

  How many of the pieces that I've heard, which is all of your recorded music,

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:58Rick Rubin?

  would have come without playing? And how much would come sitting at a piano or some other instrument?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I don't know, maybe a third or something. You know, there's no point me sitting down and going, oh, I know that, you know, that Moog is going to do this because then you're responding to the color and what the instrument's doing. One of the nice things is the journey the piece makes, you know, from your desk to the musicians and what they bring to it. And then it's like, oh, well, it could go like this. You know, and then it's discovery. And that's wonderful. It's so much about intentions and attitude. You know, we've had some amazing experiences with, I guess, mostly younger orchestras, who bring a kind of a freshness and enthusiasm and passion and energy. And it's just like, it's just so moving

• 19:49Speaker 00

  to see, you know, people bringing themselves to a piece. And that's magic. I've had experiences with like older, maybe more like established and senior orchestras, where you just think, why are we here? And it's so much about the people and it's so much about the kind of culture and why.

• 20:09Rick Rubin?

  In popular music, the things that we like best are made by the younger versions of themselves.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

• 20:17Rick Rubin?

  Is that true in classical music as well?

• 20:20Speaker 00

  I think what's interesting about young artists is you get the kind of, you know, like the first album is like all the things they've been thinking about for their entire life up to that moment, which is why the second album is so hard, right? Because it's like, oh, well, I've spent, you know, 18 years thinking about this music for the first album. And now, 18 months later, I'm supposed to deliver another one. It's tough. I think with classical music, because it's composer-performers are not so much the norm. You know, it's more about just making the piece. And then the piece, in a way, lives its own life, actually. It goes out and it just sort of finds its way. And it's not so connected to the person, I think. It's just more about what that piece is doing.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I don't know, I sort of feel like, I hope I'm getting better. I feel like I'm getting closer to music. I'm sort of deeper in it, but I don't know.

• 21:15Rick Rubin?

  How do you know when a piece is done?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Like, having a piece which is not done is like having an itch you can't scratch. You know, it just keeps coming back into your mind. It's just like, you might think, oh, you know, you've done a big pass on something and you've like, in a way, solved the problem of the piece. You've answered the question of the piece. But it doesn't, you can't sleep properly on it, you know? And it's just like, it's not, it hasn't arrived.

• 21:44Rick Rubin?

  Would you say it haunts you?

• 21:45Speaker 00

  It kind of does, yeah. Sometimes it's like, oh, we're done. But more often, it's about sort of incremental polishing the tile a little more, you know, all the time.

• 21:58Rick Rubin?

  Do you tend to write short things that get longer?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I usually start with some little tiny object which fascinates me and then just kind of organically follow it. But at a certain point, it'll be mostly about taking away. I'm trying to sort of do the maximum with a minimum. I don't want to kind of clutter the world up. There's a lot of music in the world, right?

• 22:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  So I want to try and tell the story with the minimum amount of materials.

• 22:29Rick Rubin?

  What percentage of the music you've written have you released?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Probably less than half. I mean, there'd be a lot, yeah. I mean, there's a lot.

• 22:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah. And does it become obvious when it's time for something to be finished and come out? Or not always?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Sometimes pieces, it just doesn't, for, you know, whatever reason, it might be an artistic thought or it might be to do with not being able to present it properly in the world at that moment or whatever it might be, you know? There are pieces now, which I was like, I wish, you know, we could just release that. But if I released everything I wrote, then I would be releasing an album every month. That doesn't really make any sense.

• 23:12Rick Rubin?

  How many iterations would you say each piece goes through?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Some pieces just kind of, you write them and it's done. Other things, it takes some time, you know? And I actually enjoy that process. I enjoy the process of searching, right? Of not knowing, that's what I like. That's what's so interesting about the creative process, you know, because you sort of discover stuff you weren't expecting and you discover things about your own mind and process.

• 23:41Rick Rubin?

  Earlier, you also spoke about having a tiny object and it turning into more.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe one example is the way the melody works in On the Nature of Daylight, actually, which is just

• 23:58Speaker 00

  two notes. And then this fifth, this rocking fifth.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  So it's like the simplest thing. And what I like to try and do is I like to try and dig material out or kind of find properties in it by just turning it around, like walking around a sculpture. So when the piece plays.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  So it's, in a way, it's like super simple and it's like a piece of geometry almost, you know? But I'm trying to discover properties in that, which maybe I hadn't seen at the beginning or maybe we as like, as listeners, you know, listening, we haven't maybe found or expected. So it's like a mining operation into the material.

• 25:10Rick Rubin?

  Will it typically be the right hand that's playing the tiny object and then the left hand is moving around it?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like context, isn't it? I think that's partly to do with how we perceive music. You know, in the physical world, large objects move slowly. And to me, that maps on to kind of register in music. You know, so the bass, of course, can move fast, but it's less likely to, you know? So a piece like Vladimir's Blues.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  So the bass is moving very slowly. And again, Vladimir's Blues, it's just one little.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  It's just, it's kind of one little idea, which, for me, it tells, it tells a story and it's like a tiny moment in The Blue Notebooks. And The Blue Notebooks has got some somber material in it, but that piece is quite bright, I think. So this figure comes from, it's Chopin, basically. He does that all the time. The reason I sort of used it is because I love butterflies. And there's a pianist called Giza King from the beginning of the 20th century, German pianist, who loved butterflies. And he was an expert on all kinds of mountain butterflies, including the blues, which is a family of butterflies. And he has one named after him, actually.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  But also Vladimir Nabokov was an expert on butterflies and he also was an expert on blues. So Vladimir's Blues. And I like this idea that this little figure is like wings beating, it's like flapping. You know, I really like when a piece of music can kind of, as well as telling a story, that it can actually sort of, in its structure, in its DNA, can actually reflect what the subject is.

• 27:09Rick Rubin?

  It implies movement.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:11Rick Rubin?

  Something flapping. I first felt rain.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Right, okay, yeah.

• 28:35Rick Rubin?

  When you have something you like on paper, do you always know how you want it to translate to instruments?

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll be usually, I'll be thinking of like, oh, this is going to be whatever strings or something, you know, because then you're writing also for the way the instruments like to, you know, what they like to do. I do want the experience of playing a piece to kind of make sense to the musician. I know this is incredibly hard, but it does have to go this way. In On the Nature of Daylight, there's a second violin part, which is ridiculously hard just because of, it does the thing which violinists hate doing, which is play fifths. It's just so hard and it's a difficult key and it's very slow. And, you know, it's all like, it's all the worst things. And yet it does have to go that way, so.

• 29:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because that's how it goes.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Because that's how it goes, so, you know. But I'm trying to, I'm trying to sort of make the piece feel like it's a, there's an element of sort of conversation and collaboration with the performers themselves. I was talking with a friend of mine about this the other day and, and he was saying, well, actually, this is like in a classical music context, audiences, in a way, they quite like seeing someone like, overcome a great, you know, climb a mountain, right? There's something special about that.

• 29:57Rick Rubin?

  Would you say there's a thread that runs through all of your work?

• 30:01Speaker 00

  It's probably to do with a kind of a perspective on how is it to be a person in the world? A lot of things I've done are very, they come out of a kind of a, quite a personal emotionality. Maybe The Blue Notebooks is like that in a way. They're also about the world we live in, you know, society. Again, that record is, you know, comes out of the Iraq war conflict or a piece like Voices, which is, you know, the Universal Declaration. So it's, it's, it's that sort of dialogue between like an interior, if you like, journey or asking questions about meaning, but also about how we, how we connect in the world and what culture, what creativity can do in society. Because I believe in music, I do, right?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  I do believe in it, in its ability to kind of just elevate us.

• 30:49Rick Rubin?

  Even sad music.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 30:51Rick Rubin?

  Brings us together, absolutely.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and even, you know, in a tiny way, you know, if I, I get up in the morning, I'm making my coffee or whatever. I turn on the radio, there's some piece of music I love. My gaze is a tiny bit better, it's like one percent.

• 31:04Rick Rubin?

  Some days more.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Some days more, but you know, even that little, that tiny thing, I just feel like it's a very valuable thing.

• 31:10Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the people who come to see you perform live.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  It's a real mix because I've done a lot of movies and I've made records and I, you know. So I think there are like different audiences when they sort of meet in the gigs. I guess what's nice is that it is mostly like younger people. So, you know, classical music audience average age is like in the sixties or seventies.

• 31:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  And the average age at, you know, my gigs is like 28.

• 31:39Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  So, you know, for me, that's amazing. It's a beautiful thing and I do feel sort of, you know, very lucky about that actually because

• 31:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  it's an audience which is very kind of open eared.

• 31:52Rick Rubin?

  I've not seen you live, how do you present your material live?

• 31:55Speaker 00

  We play the records as records. So we've just been touring a program, which is The Blue Notebooks and In a Landscape, which is the most recent thing, just the two records.

• 32:06Rick Rubin?

  And then is there a visual aspect as well?

• 32:08Speaker 00

  There is, it's a very minimal thing. We've been working with a friend of mine, Esther Lynn, who's a wonderful.

• 32:14Rick Rubin?

  I love her.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  She's great, right?

• 32:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  She designed a very beautiful kind of lighting installation that we play in. And we, basically, the gigs are mostly in surround.

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• 34:29Rick Rubin?

  Is there a difference between what it feels like playing in a symphony hall versus a black box?

• 34:35Speaker 00

  I mean, the big thing is the acoustics.

• 34:37Rick Rubin?

  Better in the symphony hall?

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Different, because we, it's amplified, right? So we're playing amplified. That can be problematic if the room itself is very live, you know, because orchestral rooms tend to be pretty live, you know. So sometimes you're in a dialogue with the acoustic. A black box, you complete control, so it's easier in a way.

• 34:56Rick Rubin?

  Over the course of your life, who've been the biggest musical inspirations?

• 35:01Speaker 00

  On the classical side, in a way, it's like the ones that everyone loves, you know, like Bach, obviously, that's the starting point for me. Purcell I love, Schubert, Mahler, Stravinsky. And then in pop music, in electronic music, a big moment for me was hearing Altoban when I was a kid. That was huge because I didn't.

• 35:24Rick Rubin?

  That was an aggressive record, wasn't it?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's so mad, you know, and starts with those car sounds and things. But that bassline, you know, when that bassline starts, I was just like, what is this? You know, because I was 13, I didn't know electronic music. And I went on this kind of, almost like a quest to discover it. So, because I'd heard this thing on a BBC documentary and I wrote a letter to the BBC and said, what is this music, please? You know, put a stamp on it, took it to a postbox, waited six weeks, got a letter back. It's cuffwrecked, Altoban, so I was like. So I saved up my pocket money, got on the bus, went to the record store, bought Altoban, came back, dropped the needle on the thing and I was just like transfixed.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  It's like, what are these sounds? So then the next thing is I pestered my parents and like synthesizer, synthesizer, and they're like, well, it costs as much as a house. So, so that's a no. But there are these kits. So you could literally build a synth from a kit. I got one of these things and just spent weeks and weeks with the soldering iron, build this thing in my bedroom. Started to just be able to listen to those sounds and work with those sounds.

• 36:36Rick Rubin?

  Do you think the fact that you built the synthesizer versus buying one had some effect on you?

• 36:42Speaker 00

  It exhausted me.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  This is really hard. And I didn't know what I was doing. Fortunately, my, you know, I had my dad around. He wasn't, you know, an engineer, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer. He was like, that's a live wire, you're going to die if you live. You know, that sort of thing.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Hilarious, but anyway, I got the thing working.

• 37:03Rick Rubin?

  Did it make a good sound?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's fun. It's a synth, actually. It's a thing called a Transcendent 2000, which is designed by a guy called Tim Orr, who designed the Oscar and some other quite eminent synths, you know. And there's a few people who built this kit, like Thomas Dolby.

• 37:22Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Built one. The guy from New Order, the producer of New Order, I've forgotten his name. He also built one. And there were actually a lot of, like, Blue Mondays, like, Transcendent 2000. Because no one had any money, right? So it was like, let's all build the kit. So weirdly, all around the place, there were people building this thing.

• 37:38Rick Rubin?

  Would you record yourself on a cassette recorder?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:41Rick Rubin?

  Was recording always important to you? Or did you just like playing the instrument?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  It was a question of money. You know, if I'd had any funds, I would have, like, bought everything. And, you know, I'd have got into recording way sooner. But it was really expensive. Well, everything was so expensive at that time, you know. There were major hurdles to entry.

• 38:01Rick Rubin?

  Is there any one composer that you've been most influenced by?

• 38:05Speaker 00

  There's been a few. I mean, I love Mahler so much, and I love Schubert so much.

• 38:10Rick Rubin?

  Do you see them in your work, or no?

• 38:13Speaker 00

  I see Schubert in my work, I think. There's a lot, you know. I mean, I like, in a way, Cage wasn't a... He's more like an inventor. But I love his whole

• 38:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  of openness and perspective on things. I mean, Brian had a big influence on me. You know, he had a big influence on me. You know, as a kid, you know, discreet music, music for airports, those were foundational. You know, I really was like, uh, okay. A different way of hearing, a different way of being.

• 38:41Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk.

• 38:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I love Meredith Monk.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Genius, you know, incredible.

• 38:48Rick Rubin?

  Earlier, you said that you have worked with Schubert's music.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:53Rick Rubin?

  Can you play me a sample of something from Schubert? And then show me how you reworked it into what it became.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  The most obvious one, I guess, is an infra. It was made around the attacks in London of 7/7 bombings of underground and buses. And this was a ballet. And when I started thinking about the ballet, I was thinking about travelers, because it was in the morning commute. So then I thought about traveling music. And one of the big pieces of traveling music is Schubert's Winterreise. So, and it has this lovely tune.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  You know, and it has this, this...

• 39:40Speaker 00

  You know, it's got this kind of movement, sort of walking. So I just sort of wove that into, like, the string writing. But then I wanted to make a piano piece in there. So then I was thinking about other Schubert materials. So there's the G-flat impromptu.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's a gorgeous bit of Schubert. And I thought, okay, so what I'm gonna do is, because this piece is... This piece has a kind of a darkness about it. So instead of it being G-flat major, so I made this piece infra III.

• 40:36Rick Rubin?

  Totally transformed.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  So it basically takes, like, Schubert's atoms and kind of just turns the lights down on it. This melody that he has in his piece.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  That's, um, he gets that from Beethoven. Gets that from Beethoven VII.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's... But that piece is about the dance, right? So I'm like, trying to sort of lift it past the darkness by, like, referring to the Beethoven as well.

• 41:17Rick Rubin?

  When you play them in a row, I could see how it becomes unrecognizable because

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:23Rick Rubin?

  the mood is so different.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, because the infra's got a kind of, it's like, it's sort of searching. It's like...

• 41:33Speaker 00

  You know, that sort of somber. Whereas, you know, it's Schubert, right? That's his.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  I mean, that's just pure gold for me. I mean, I just love that so much. But that's a kind of obvious example, clear one, yeah.

• 41:53Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing. Describe the place that you make music in.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  I work in my studio, which is a studio my partner, Yulia, and I built in the woods outside Oxford. It was a tractor shed, a big old barn. And we put a bunch of studios in there. And Yulia is a, she works in visual art. So she has her studio. We have a cafe, and we have, like, production rooms, and then a recording room, and my studio, and a mix room and stuff. So it's a kind of laboratory in the countryside. It's very much about the forest and us. You know, it's like, very light, open spaces, kind of soften that binary between the technology and the natural world,

• 42:40Speaker 00

  and just try and keep those a kind of interchange.

• 42:44Rick Rubin?

  It's interesting, so many recording studios are just sealed boxes.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 42:48Rick Rubin?

  And they're soul-stealing.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, our live room, one wall, is completely a window out onto the forest. And then there are skylights. And it's this kind of organic feeling, as it can be. You're right, you know, traditional recording studios are kind of... They're hostile to organic life, aren't they? They really are. You know, it's a black box. The acoustic is, like, oppressive. Yeah, it's just a downer.

• 43:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, the only thing that gives them life is knowing the things that have been recorded there before.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 43:18Rick Rubin?

  You go to Abbey Road.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:20Rick Rubin?

  And it's a box.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:22Rick Rubin?

  But a lot of things have to be that box.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true, yeah.

• 43:25Rick Rubin?

  Do you have any rituals around writing?

• 43:27Speaker 00

  I keep pretty regular hours. You know, I think that's important. You kind of get into a rhythm then. I'm in there around, like, nine in the morning, half nine. You know, we're up early. We're up at, like, six, and doing all that other stuff.

• 43:43Rick Rubin?

  What do you do between six and nine?

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Oh, you know, meditate, you know, exercise, and drink cups of tea quietly, that kind of thing.

• 43:53Rick Rubin?

  What's your meditation practice?

• 43:55Speaker 00

  So I have a zen practice. I studied with a wonderful teacher, Tengat Han, in the end of the eighties.

• 44:05Rick Rubin?

  So how old were you at the time?

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Mid-twenties. It's a sort of classic moment when you sort of, you're searching, you know, wondering how to make sense of things.

• 44:16Rick Rubin?

  How would you say that impacted your life?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  In every possible way. Yeah, I mean, I think it gives context and a framework and a way to, a way to approach the day-to-day, you know, in a way. I mean, it's, underlies kind of everything I do.

• 44:35Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know that about you, but I can hear the zen in your work now that you say it.

• 45:11Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about beauty.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Beauty is worth striving for and worth celebrating and worth exploring. And in a sense, I think, within Western culture, we do have a bit of a hang-up about beautiful artworks. For example, like, within classical music criticism, there's a kind of suspiciousness about things which are, like, overtly beautiful. They're considered maybe insubstantial or not serious, or...

• 45:47Speaker 00

  But I I just don't believe it. I don't believe it.

• 45:49Rick Rubin?

  It seems like most of the great music up until modern music was all beautiful.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 45:55Rick Rubin?

  So if you adopt that,

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:57Rick Rubin?

  you erase everything that came before.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:00Rick Rubin?

  And that seems ridiculous.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is ridiculous, but you know, that is literally what, you know, like Boullet said, you know, he wanted to erase music history, burn down the opera houses and start over, you know, with this kind of music which was post-Second World War, all about, you know, conflicts and all kinds of other things. To me, I I see like the role of creativity in the world as a way to understand one another, as a way to celebrate human experience and to tell stories. I don't think those are like ugly things. If I have like affection for a piece of music, that's great news, you know.

• 46:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes, and even if it's dealing with a serious or difficult subject matter.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. I hundred percent agree. And I think it's interesting because actually our hang-up, I would say it comes from sort of the Western canon. You know, this isn't universal in human cultures. I mean, you know, in many sort of non-Western cultures, you know, creativity is all about beauty. You know, it's all about celebrating those things. So it's an interesting one, I think.

• 47:10Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the role of devotion in music historically.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  The original art music comes from pretty much out of liturgical chant. So you had elaborations of like, you had original plain chants, and then you slowly you get started to get elaborations of the plain chant. And that leads to kind of art music in the Renaissance. In parallel with that, you have a kind of a tradition of like courtly love songs and other kinds of materials of that sort, which are almost like they're the sort of worldly music in a way. And lots of composers wrote both, you know, I mean, someone like Guillaume de Macho, incredible visionary composer of the 14th century.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  He writes, you know, he writes The Mess of Notre Dame, but he also writes incredible sort of almost folky songs, beautifully made, but you know, very direct. Love songs, all kinds of things like that, stories. The devotional sort of attitude persists in in Western classical music in a big way, all the way to Bach. And then slowly, I guess, as the sort of 17th, 18th centuries move on, the Enlightenment comes, other things start to replace it and you get Romanticism, which is a pantheistic thing, a sort of a nature, you know, Wordsworth's On the Lake, you know, all this kind of stuff. I guess you'd say Schubert, Schumann, all of these people. And then it, you know, in the 20th century, everything evaporates.

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• 50:22Rick Rubin?

  How does folk music work its way into classical over time?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Folk music is is always there. Just at certain points, art music, classical music composers start to kind of go, hey, hang on a minute, you know, and they sort of engage with it. So you get it quite a bit in like 19th century, mid, late 19th century music. For example, like in Russia. And later on, you get it in like the Baltics, in like Sibelius, you know, it's a becomes so like the music becomes like a project of like nation building in a way. And then in the 20th century, you have people like, you know, folk song collectors. So recording folk songs and then they get used like in England, you get Vaughan Williams and Delius and those kind of people.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  In Hungary, Bartók famously, you know, use uses folk song. So they become like a resource.

• 51:18Rick Rubin?

  If you hear a French composer versus a Hungarian composer, do they have a different language that they use?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  They do.

• 51:26Rick Rubin?

  Can you give me an example of the different regions as best you can?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Oh, it's really hard. I mean, the thing about French music, you know, it's got this, had this, I guess, probably through the 19th century. It has this emphasis on like beautiful colors.

• 51:44Rick Rubin?

  Like Debussy.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Like Debussy, like Fourre, like Ravel, all of these. And it has this kind of sensuous color, you know, it's about that. Like going back to like Bartók, Hungarian music. You know, Hungarian music is a lot of it is derived from like folk rhythms. So it's kind of got a spikier texture, you know, asymmetrical rhythms, fives and sevens and these kinds of things, you know. And English music is it just feels English, right? It's just got this kind of

• 52:16Rick Rubin?

  Can you describe what makes English music sound like that?

• 52:20Speaker 00

  There is some folk song influence. There is also influence from the Protestant hymn book, Renaissance music, you know, like choral polyphonic writing, part songs, those things are big in English music culture. I don't know what it is, you know, it's just got this thing.

• 52:41Rick Rubin?

  If you were to take a piece of Renaissance music from Italy and play it in an English style, would you know what to do?

• 52:50Speaker 00

  What's funny is that even at that time, even in the Renaissance, you know, it was it was fashionable to be like Italian. So Italian music had this kind of in a way, it was kind of hip. English music was maybe had a more formality about it, possibly.

• 53:10Rick Rubin?

  Remove some of the hipness.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, in a way, but what's funny is that English composers used to go to Italy, study in Italy and then pretend they were Italian and go back to England and get a gig. There was a guy called Joseph Cooper who came back to England after studying in Italy and he called himself Coprario. He's not Italian.

• 53:29Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  You know, so it was always, it always had this kind of draw, you know, the magical South, you know, all the

• 53:34Rick Rubin?

  And do you think it was the English love of Italy or was it more the exotic nature of someone who comes from somewhere else?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  You know, the Italian Renaissance held an incredible sort of magnetic pull over like English arts and letters, music. All through the sort of 18th, 19th centuries. I mean, it was just huge.

• 53:54Rick Rubin?

  What happens to organ music when you play it on the piano?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? I mean, there are some amazing arrangements of of organ music. This beautiful arrangement of a couple of Bach are preludes, which are just stunning. People have been playing them over the last few years. Vichinger plays plays a bunch of them. So, I mean, you have to make compromises because you haven't got the infinite sustain. And you've only got two hands, not, you can't use your feet. So you, it's a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of a process.

• 54:24Rick Rubin?

  What was the first time you ever played in front of people?

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I played at uni- university, you know, in little university gigs. I was crippling nervous, so nervous. The first orchestral piece that anyone ever played of mine, which was at university, I actually couldn't even go. I just kind of sat in the pub next door and just like waited for it all to be over because I was like so

• 54:50Rick Rubin?

  Did you go to rehearsal?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I went to rehearsal, yeah. But I, for the premiere, I was just

• 54:54Rick Rubin?

  Too much.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Too much. It was just a kind of a whole blind panic of is it any good? It's definitely not any good. Will people know? They will definitely know. Is the performance going to be okay? No, it's going to be a disaster. You know, all that stuff.

• 55:12Rick Rubin?

  Do you think it has to do with the intimacy of music? That it's so personal to you

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:19Rick Rubin?

  that it's like marching out on stage naked?

• 55:22Speaker 00

  It kind of is. It kind of is. I mean, it's it's a paradox, isn't it? Because, you know, we make these things and then we put them out in the world, but they are really private as well.

• 55:32Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  In a sense, you know, so yeah, I guess I was just, I was completely freaked out at that time. I mean, now I love playing live, you know, because it's there's so many nice things about it, you know, it's a real time experience with people in a room. We've all agreed to come here together. There's a kind of audience community, there's a community of the performers. There's going on the journey together. It's so special. It really is.

• 56:01Rick Rubin?

  And there was a point in time when that was the only way to experience music.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:05Rick Rubin?

  It has more value now than ever before because music is available in so many other ways.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:11Rick Rubin?

  That we miss that communal experience.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  It's the campfire, isn't it? It's that, it's that sort of very basic human connection, just being together, listening.

• 56:21Rick Rubin?

  Does a piece of music exist before you write it?

• 56:27Speaker 00

  Interesting. I mean, I think you sometimes have a feeling that, you know, sometimes it'll just land so fast. You're just literally just writing it out. It doesn't happen that often, but it sometimes you feel like, well, that was really quick, you know, and it's just there.

• 56:45Rick Rubin?

  In your meditation practice, does music ever come up?

• 56:48Speaker 00

  It does, but in a funny kind of way, it's probably my little holiday from music. Because I, I have got music playing in my head like all the time.

• 57:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  So it's actually a slightly different thing.

• 57:03Rick Rubin?

  Is the music that's playing all the time familiar or not?

• 57:07Speaker 00

  It's just little bits and pieces. It's like, you know, when a little dog gets a bone and they just can't stop. It's like that. You know, if I'm working on a piece and it's like, part of your brain is like always working on it, always. And from beginning, from the first idea to the end of the piece, months later, part of your brain is always working on it. It just is.

• 57:32Rick Rubin?

  And are all the little pieces of music in your head familiar to you? Or are there any that have maybe not things that you're working on or hadn't thought about before?

• 57:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, stuff just pops up. Totally. It's just some little fragment.

• 57:47Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about collaboration.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  You know, a lot of my work over the years has been just me sitting in a room, you know, just like a piece of paper, piano, just doing this, you know, for hours and days. And of course, you know, that goes then to the musicians in the studio and we, you know, figure it out, we work it and we find the thing in the room in the day. And that's cool, but, you know, I, I do kind of start thinking, you know, this is a bit, it's just me in a room. Therefore, I really like, you know, for example, doing movies or working on ballet or when you've got other people, there's a dialogue, there's kind of conversations going on. I really enjoy that. I like the puzzle solving aspect of movies as well. The kind of, you know, what if, how about this? I like that. It's very enjoyable.

• 58:33Rick Rubin?

  Do you like other types of puzzles outside of music?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  I'm, I wouldn't say I'm a good chess player, but I quite like a game of chess. Yeah.

• 58:42Rick Rubin?

  Do you actively research for a project?

• 58:47Speaker 00

  I try to understand the kind of, the world of the piece as much as I can. You know, like with Mad Adam and recent ballet, you know, that's, so it's three big novels. So Margaret, you know, wrote this amazing stuff. So the first thing is to just read the novels and live in the world of the novels and then try to pull materials out of the text. I mean, there are characters in the novels who are these kind of transhuman creatures which have been engineered not to be violent. And they have amazing voices. They have these glassy crystalline voices and Margaret writes a lot about their voices. And I was like, that's the spine of the music. So I've got these voices. So those kinds of things, you know, I'm.

• 59:27Rick Rubin?

  Can you play an example of that?

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Okay, so the kind of main spine of Mad Adam is based around this, this line.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Just carries on like that. So it's a falling thing. It also feels like code because it's a sort of, it's got a kind of a pattern. And it in a way expresses the idea that these characters are, are like they're engineered, you know, they're there. And there's a lot of other kind of code in the books, but, so they sing a lot, this material.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  So it's, um, and there's a lot of music of this sort in it. And that becomes a kind of a spine through the piece. And the Crakers, they're called Crakers, these little characters. And they sing, it's kind of pre-echoed in act one and act two of the ballet. And then in the third act, they get to sing this, this melody.

• 1:01:14Rick Rubin?

  So beautiful.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:01:16Rick Rubin?

  If you didn't make music, what do you think you would do with your time?

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  I love poetry. I love literature. I would be in some way, not to say I could write, because that's a whole other thing. But I might be something around writing. I remember when I was at, at school, I, there was like a careers thing, you know, you, what, what were you going to be? Fill out this questionnaire. So I filled out my questionnaire and, and it came up poet or gardener.

• 1:01:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  That's what was really funny.

• 1:01:47Rick Rubin?

  And you're both. Turned out you're both.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  That's right. I'm both of those things.

• 1:01:51Rick Rubin?

  You're a poet and a gardener at the piano.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Exactly. I garden, I garden at the piano every day. Yeah.

• 1:01:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your relationship to the Beatles music.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  Okay, so the Beatles were really influential on me as, as a kid. I was probably about 10 when I first heard Abbey Road because my parents had it. And it was considered like, in a way, like too strong a medicine for a young kid, you know? They wouldn't, they wouldn't play me Abbey Road. They, they would hear it, but it was like, oh no, that's far too, you know? But they did buy me the red and the blue compilations. So I just hoovered those up. I absolutely hoovered them up. I was sitting in that chair after school with the headphones on every day, all day. And almost by accident, you know, you learn about how harmony works and song structure and drama and, you know, architecture.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  It's absolutely amazing.

• 1:02:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me the different ways you've recorded.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  As far as the records are concerned, it's always on tape. It's always analog. Analog two inch and analog mix. You know, on good days, analog masters or then, you know, we mix and then it goes to Pro Tools. But I'm very interested and I, I really appreciate the kind of tactile qualities of analog recording. I think it's a little bit like the difference between being told a story or presented with some measurements about something. It's a little different, you know? I mean, the difference is now not so wide.

• 1:03:25Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  But certainly it was like night and day for a long time. So, you know, the studio we have, we have all a completely analog signal chain, which is, is wonderful. But then, you know, there are other things. It just depends, you know? I mean, there are things like, there are piano recordings I made on a portable cassette thing. There's a piece called Lullaby for the West Coast Sleepers, which I recorded in a beautiful place up on the west coast of Scotland, Creer, which is like this art centre and they've got a fantastic piano. We were there, staying there with the kids. I missed it a long time ago. And I was just like, I'd just love to just go and play that piano, you know? But the kids are sleeping, so I just put the tape recorder

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  like basically on the piano and just, just played this little piece, which I'm just basically made up on the spot. But because the kids were sleeping and I didn't want to wake them, it was like, I played it so quietly. But, you know, that's just little homebrew recording and it's, it's on the record.

• 1:04:26Rick Rubin?

  If you would have played the same piece at a medium volume or at a very, very quiet volume, what would be the different effect of those things?

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  The quieter you play, the more people lean in. They lean forward. It's like what happened with singers. Go back to the 19th century, everyone's making a huge noise. But they figured out that if you go really close to the microphone and you, you croon into it very quietly, it's like got this really special intimacy and people lean in, don't they? It's like whispering in your ear thing. You know, somebody whispers in your ear, then you sort of, yeah, you lean forward.

• 1:05:01Rick Rubin?

  Do you experiment with how loud to play things when you're recording?

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  I don't really, I probably, I just sort of try to play it as I imagine it. Sometimes you think, oh no, that's just a miscalculation. You have to do it again. I mean, one thing that's, we've got actually at the studios, which has been really interesting, is we have this spiro piano, which is, you know, this recording piano that can play itself. That's Steinway made. And that's actually pretty amazing because, so you can do a take and then go next door and have a listen how the microphone's heard it. You know, rather than how you were thinking. You know, when you're hearing, you're also busy, you know? So you, you don't hear in quite the same way. And that, that's been really interesting.

• 1:05:46Rick Rubin?

  So the piano can replay what you just played?

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Rick Rubin?

  And you could change the sound in the.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  Exactly. Or I could say, oh no, I need to play quieter or louder or different, you know?

• 1:05:54Rick Rubin?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing instrument.

• 1:05:57Rick Rubin?

  Do you tend to do a lot of takes?

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  Not really.

• 1:06:02Rick Rubin?

  And do you mainly listen to vinyl?

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. At home, I, I, um, it's interesting because the studio, obviously, it's an Atmos room with like big ATCs everywhere, you know? It sounds super accurate. At home, I've got like a quite dark sounding valve amp, big old tannoy, a vinyl. Because I, that's, it's a different thing. You know, I just want, at home, I want vibes. I don't want like accuracy.

• 1:06:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  I just want like good vibes, which that does.

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• 1:08:15Rick Rubin?

  What was the first music that was your music, not the music that you heard that your parents played?

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Well, probably some of the early electronic music, some of the early psychedelic music, some of the early Pink Floyd things. The Beatles, actually, in a way, some of it. You know, the White Album was definitely my mom, and they were not into that. You know, the White Album was too out there. And then, yeah, some of the cuff track stuff, those kinds of things. And then also punk, because punk came along when I was, you know, 11, 12, that kind of age. Perfect.

• 1:08:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Thank you. Yeah, so we all got into that. And that was fun.

• 1:08:53Rick Rubin?

  What was the first concert you ever went to?

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  I don't know which was first. I went to Kaffetrag at Hammersmith when they did the Computer World Tours. That was 1980, I guess. It would have been 81. I saw Queen at Wembley. And that was the day after John Lennon was shot, so that dates the gig, because they played Imagine.

• 1:09:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  And then there was The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers and those kinds of bands, probably a bit earlier, actually. Probably a bit before that. But they were like terrifying sweaty little gigs.

• 1:09:37Rick Rubin?

  What would you say you listen to mostly?

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  I listen to a lot of jazz, quite a lot of electronic and pop music, and I listen to a lot of songwriting of all different kinds, a lot of classical music, you know. It's funny, because, you know, we have kids, so at a certain point, your listening is taken away from you and it becomes, they're like, they're in charge, you know? So I listen to a lot of, you know, what my kids are listening to.

• 1:10:03Rick Rubin?

  How old are your kids?

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  I mean, they would be shocked that I call them kids. They're 27, 26, and 18.

• 1:10:08Rick Rubin?

  And where do their tastes lie?

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  They are all very eclectic and interested in the sort of nooks and crannies of kind of popular music.

• 1:10:20Rick Rubin?

  Maybe because they grew up in your house.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Could be, could be.

• 1:10:25Rick Rubin?

  If you're on a flight, would you be more likely to watch a movie, read a book, or listen to music with headphones?

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  I find listening to music on flights, it's just, even with noise-canceling headphones, it's just too annoying. I don't particularly like noise-canceling headphones, and they kind of make me feel weird.

• 1:10:43Rick Rubin?

  Me too.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  So I use them like in an emergency, but basically I try to avoid them. There's something about the pressure, I don't know what it is, it's weird, does something with your inner ear. In flights, I tend to, I basically try and sleep. Basically, I'm a really good sleeper, I love sleeping.

• 1:10:58Rick Rubin?

  Let's talk about sleep.

• 1:11:01Rick Rubin?

  How did your sleep project come to be?

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this comes out of a conversation Yulia and I were having at the time. This is about 2011, 2012. It's when people started live streaming gigs, you know? So, yeah, some venue or other had just streamed the show when it was going out, and it was in some crazy time zone. So Yuli was ruling in Berlin at the time, so it was like 4:00 AM or something, and she was hearing this gig and sort of floating in and out of sleep, and she was like, this is incredibly, I'm hearing this in a different way, it's very powerful, it's very impactful. This is something, you know, here's an idea. And then, yeah, I sort of decided to try and engage with this from a musical perspective, to write a piece which was specifically about that environment, that space, that borderland, territory.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  And to look at some of the neuroscience around sleep and incorporate those things into the, into the structure of the piece. You know, what is sleep in our culture now, in society? Being asleep is, as it were, unproductive. You're not a productive economic unit while you're sleeping, so sleep is an act of resistance, really. It's a pause, right? So can we make a piece which supports that pause? So these are the kind of ideas that were floating around.

• 1:12:18Rick Rubin?

  When was it clear to you to make it law?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  That happened pretty much straight away. That was like, okay, so the piece is overnight. The piece is a landscape that you inhabit while you're sleeping.

• 1:12:31Rick Rubin?

  Do you only ever perform it at night?

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, we start at, we time it so that the last 40 minutes happen with dawn.

• 1:12:38Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  So we start 11 or 12 or 10 or whenever it happens to be in that place at that time of year, you know? Um, yeah, and we play straight through. You know, the audience are in beds, so there's like a few hundred people. We did it in Berlin in the, um, the power station, you know, which is amazing. When you go on the concert stage, you, you're projecting this material, right? Normally, you're like, we've got to tell this story to these people. But when we started playing Sleep, we're like, oh, no, no, no, no, that's not it at all. What we're doing is we're accompanying something that's going on in that room. And what's going on in that room is a community is forming. So all those strangers have decided to trust one another and just kind of do this, right? And that's really special.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  So actually, even though we play Sleep at concert volume, I mean, it's very, it's strong, you know? And like the subs in Sleep, it's like a massage, right? But it allows people to just kind of connect. So like the last part of Sleep, people are mostly awake because it gets quite loud. And also, I, what I do is I, the spectrum of the piece for most of its duration sort of mimics the spectrum that the unborn child hears in the womb. So it's dark, right? And then, so I just open up the spectrum towards the end because that wakes you up, right? So people are awake and they sort of huddle together. It's the sweetest, the most beautiful thing, you know?

• 1:14:09Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Really lovely.

• 1:14:11Rick Rubin?

  How many times have you performed it?

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  We've done 28. Putting it on is a big deal.

• 1:14:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Is it difficult to set up with beds and?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  No, the whole thing. You basically always need somebody who's fine to lose tons of money.

• 1:14:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  You just need someone who's like, we're doing it.

• 1:14:28Rick Rubin?

  Because you can't have that many people there?

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  No, right. I mean, we did one at Alexander Palace, we did three, three nights or two nights there last year. And that venue is normally 10,000. And we did 1,000.

• 1:14:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  And then we're asking them to keep it open overnight for three days. So their costs are insane.

• 1:14:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  But it's really special.

• 1:14:51Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever done it outdoors?

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did one in Grand Park in L.A.

• 1:14:54Rick Rubin?

  How was that?

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  That was lovely, actually. We did two nights there in the summertime. It's lovely. We had, there's like two stages of that park, aren't there? There's like, there's a path and then it goes down. I think they sold like the first bid, I don't know, 2,000, 3,000 or something, but then people just came.

• 1:15:15Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  It was really lovely.

• 1:15:17Rick Rubin?

  That sounds great.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  It was great.

• 1:15:19Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of your music as spiritual?

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  I think it really depends what you mean by that word. I mean, I would say that music is, it clearly has kind of magical properties of some kind, right? Because otherwise, why would we all love it so much? And equally, why, you know, if you hear a piece of music which you really don't like, why would it affect you so powerfully? Some tune that just drives you crazy, why does it drive you crazy?

• 1:15:45Rick Rubin?

  Same notes.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  Right. It's just air bouncing around, right?

• 1:15:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, how could it be?

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  So it's special in some way, yeah, definitely.

• 1:15:54Rick Rubin?

  What's the most beautiful place you've ever performed?

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  I really love the Herodian Theater at the Acropolis in Athens. We've played a couple of times there. That's amazing. When is it, 2,000 years old?

• 1:16:09Rick Rubin?

  How much does your mathematical understanding of music impact what you write?

• 1:16:16Speaker 00

  I think the two go together, all of that academic stuff. It's not a conscious thing. You know, it becomes just kind of part of your toolkit. And it kind of sits behind the toolkit. And if I look at some of the things on, say, in the landscape, they break all the rules. Totally break the rules all the time. I was in a gig the other day and I was, we were playing it, one of the string pieces. And it's got, you know, like in Bach's time, you weren't allowed to write parallel fifths, right? You couldn't because that was just bad counterpoint. And I was just, I was playing it and I was like, there's a parallel fifth there. And I was like, yeah, but it's good, you know, it's kind of, it makes sense, right? And also it doesn't matter. It's like, it's a different thing. But it just kind of, I guess it just kind of sits behind things.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  For me, it's always more about trying to find the most direct, expressive way to kind of tell the story. That for me is like all I care about. And I'll use any tools to get there.

• 1:17:15Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the different musical keys.

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  There are keys that, that I will just go to, like on the piano, if I'm looking for a particular feeling. People have maybe personal responses, you know, like, you know, famously all the Mozart D minor is like his kind of super sad key. And there's composers have different ideas. Like for me, D minor is like, no, it's fine. You know, it's like medium sad. Whereas, you know, the more sort of black note keys for me are a kind of, they feel richer. String players have like a different feeling about this because, because the instrument resonates differently. Because they've got their open strings, which are whatever they might be, just tuned in fifths. And those are, you know, white note keys.

• 1:18:03Speaker 00

  So those keys just feel their instrument rings more. But like a piece like On the Edge of Daylight, which is pretty much all black notes. The instrument doesn't resonate in the same way. So it has a special color because of that, you know, because the open strings are not helping. So it's only the notes.

• 1:18:22Rick Rubin?

  And how is an acoustic piano different than a digital piano?

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  It's a hundred percent different.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  I think a piano is, because you hear it with your whole body. I mean, even just from a technical standpoint, you know, MIDI is 128 velocities. And even if you sample them all, it's still contextual, you know? Because like an E on the piano, played with a C, sounds different than if it's played with a B. Because they, they intermodulate, they talk to one another. So you can't mimic that digitally. Like that piano is a big sonorous object, kind of a sculpture as well. You know, you play it and your whole body feels what it's doing. So yeah, it's a totally different thing.

• 1:19:07Rick Rubin?

  When you work in the studio, do you work with speakers or headphones?

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  Speakers always. I don't, I don't really like headphones.

• 1:19:14Rick Rubin?

  How loud do you listen in the studio?

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Trying to keep it vaguely sane.

• 1:19:20Rick Rubin?

  But you prefer it loud?

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  I do like it loud, but I'm aware that it's unwise to play.

• 1:19:26Rick Rubin?

  Long term, yeah.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  Long term, too loud. You know, there are some things with dynamics which you make mistakes if you're not playing at the right level. You can misjudge architecture. You can go, oh no, that, why is that so small? It should be, you know, why is that so big? It should be small, you know, this kind of thing. And, and so, you know, for things that are going to be played loud, like say a big movie score, you know? You have to mix it kind of somewhere near where you're going to be, because otherwise you'll just miscalculate.

• 1:19:57Rick Rubin?

  If you wear the writer hat, the performer hat and the producer hat, are you thinking about all of them all the time?

• 1:20:06Speaker 00

  For me, it's a continuity, you know? I don't really see them as separate activities, you know? It's just making music.

• 1:20:15Rick Rubin?

  So the writer aspect of you cares about the reverb, for example?

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, completely, yeah. And, and I, I see this studio as an instrument, you know? It is, it's a sculptural tool. It's a way to, first of all, investigate what you made and then present it in the best way.

• 1:20:36Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the bass.

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  I love bass. I mean, subsonics and, you know, low, low end is huge for me. It's a big part of my work. I think there's something special about those frequencies. I mean, in sleep, you have a lot of repeated low bass pulses.

• 1:20:56Rick Rubin?

  Usually with a lot of space between them though.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Rick Rubin?

  Because when the bass comes in, you're usually shocked.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're like, yeah, exactly. That comes from the kind of neuroscience thing in that you can use those to correlate or bring into alignment the audience's brainwaves, basically. So slow wave sleep can be, which is where we do our memory consolidation and learning. It can be kind of extended, that slow wave period by having repeated low frequency tones. And when I, I discovered this, I was like, thank you. That, that is what I want to be doing because I'd been working with this material.

• 1:21:35Rick Rubin?

  You've been given permission.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  I really had, I was like, thank you, science, you know? So I was able to write the music I kind of wanted to write, which had this kind of this, this low frequency pulse. It's funny with that piece because like the BPM of that piece is 40. It's always like this, I go on the stage and I get a little click in, you know? And after the first click, I'm like, oh, is it broken? Like where is the second click? And then it's like, oh no, it's really slow.

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  But then what's weird is that by the end of the show, 40 is like, yeah, of course it is. It's like, it's just moving along, you know?

• 1:22:11Rick Rubin?

  How would you say the sleep project changed your life?

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  It changed in that a lot of people who, you know, were unfamiliar with my work came to it from another space, you know, the space that sleep opened up, which is to do with rest and a different kind of focus and different engagement with music. Because I see sleep as a kind of a tool. It's a piece with a function.

• 1:22:35Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel like your music pre and post-sleep are different or no?

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, they probably are a bit different. I think with sleep, I pushed further into a space which was kind of there before. Like Blue Note Books and Memory House and there were like pre-echoes of the language of sleep. But they aren't fully expressed and they're not foregrounded. But they're kind of always there hovering around in the wings. And I think with sleep, it allowed me to just really push into that territory. And I think since then, you know, voices has kind of a similar, it's got some of that materiality in it, I think. I recently did a piece at, in Paris for, which is a lovely, such a nice project, which is not released yet.

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  But, so this was commissioned by the Fondation Louis Vuitton for their Rothko, big Rothko show.

• 1:23:27Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  And we distributed the orchestra throughout the building and the semi-electronic music and vocal music. And, and I think that piece is the kind of, the kind of next step in the kind of sleep language for me. But yeah, it's not out yet.

• 1:23:42Rick Rubin?

  How does the music change when you're looking at Rothko's paintings?

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  Well, I, I mean, I love Rothko. I mean, in fact, our first date with you, Luke, my partner, was to the Rothko room in the Tate in London. But he's been part of our lives for a long time. It was amazing being able to walk around a gallery, you know, hear the material. And the paintings are very generous. They hold your attention, but they're also, they're kind of not lecturing you, you know?

• 1:24:09Rick Rubin?

  They're non-narrative.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  They are extraordinary. And we had some, you know, great days where, because they would close the gallery for a day or something when we were doing our, you know, sound check. So, you know, we'd play the piece and there'd be no one in the building. And you could just walk around, seeing it's absolutely incredible.

• 1:24:27Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was really sort of.

• 1:24:29Rick Rubin?

  So you explain, different floors would have different pieces playing?

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the piece is kind of a mobile. So you've got nine galleries from bottom to top in this building. Six of the galleries had, had musical ensembles who would sometimes be there and sometimes not.

• 1:24:46Rick Rubin?

  And if they weren't there, you'd have a recording or no?

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  There is, well, there's electronic music as well.

• 1:24:50Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  So there's a load of mini-mog material. And then there is one ensemble of six cellos, one ensemble of six vocalists, one of six violins.

• 1:25:01Rick Rubin?

  And those would be added to what's already played?

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's all locked together.

• 1:25:05Rick Rubin?

  That's a beautiful idea.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  It's a lovely, lovely experience and I had such fun making the piece.

• 1:25:11Rick Rubin?

  I like the idea also of modular pieces where they can live in one way. But if you want to add these extra pieces, you can.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like a web of materials.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

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• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  This tradition is known as lectio divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements. Reading, reflection, repetition and rest. A short passage is read, a single. Phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for modern life, it offers brief guided scriptural reflections throughout the day,

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  to begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments. A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there now and always.

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  Learn more at lectio365.com.

• 1:27:40Rick Rubin?

  If you're writing using an instrument, how much would the particular instrument impact what you do?

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot, a lot.

• 1:27:47Rick Rubin?

  If you had a different piano?

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. No, they all have different personalities, don't they, in different colors? I mean, the piano, we were living in Berlin in our apartment in the evenings, I would be like just playing bits and bobs of Sleep, and I think that piano has a lot to do with that piece.

• 1:28:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06Speaker 00

  And it was just a second hand upright we got from a music school in Korea. But it had a very nice dark sound because you're responding to the instrument, right? So you're making decisions according to the instrument. Yeah, it makes a big difference.

• 1:28:21Rick Rubin?

  Is it true of location as well? If you're in a different place, might you write something different?

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think landscape is really important. It's funny because before we built the studio, we were living in a rented place just because we'd moved back from Berlin and, you know, we were just kind of landed in the UK, so we just rented this place. And my studio was a seven foot by seven foot cube, you know.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  I was basically, I could touch the sides of the, you know, pretty much. And I was sort of worked away. Now I made like, did a load of movies, did like a load of albums, you know. I was in there for about five years. And I thought to myself, well, it doesn't really matter because I'm just, you know, it's about what's going on here. But then, actually, it does matter because we are organic creatures. And being in the new space, we've been in there for five years. It makes a huge difference because I have, you know, air and daylight. And it sounds good, you know, it's so special.

• 1:29:24Rick Rubin?

  Have you experimented with all these new synthesizers that are coming out all the time?

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  There are so many.

• 1:29:29Rick Rubin?

  It's like a wave.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  I know, it's like, it's got mad, hasn't it?

• 1:29:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  First came like the Euro Rack wave, which I decided I wasn't gonna do because I knew that if I started, I would just, my whole, you know, because it's just, just one more module, you know. And it's like, they call it Eurocrack, don't they? It's just, it's just one more, just one more. I need another filter. I need another filter.

• 1:29:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  So there's that. So I decided I was gonna not do that. But then all these kinds of people like building synths at their kitchen table started happening. And yeah, there's just a lot of interesting stuff out there.

• 1:30:04Rick Rubin?

  What have been the biggest changes to music over the course of your lifetime?

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  I guess the first thing is the kind of effects of technology on the creative process, like the undo button, which just means people just making stuff all the time, la, la, la, undo, undo, undo. And Pro Tools and the grid. The grid starts to kind of, you know, everything's on the grid. Click tracks, all of that stuff, huge difference. Autotune, huge difference. Then you get the rise of streaming, the economics of that, the impacts on, you know, artists' ability to do what they can do from an economic standpoint. And now we've got the wonderful world of AI looming over us. So it's a lot.

• 1:30:48Rick Rubin?

  Have you experimented with AI at all?

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I've had sort of dialogue with various people in that space. It's funny because they bring an industrial mindset to it. You know, it's about the output, it's about the product. While the product is important, it's not the most important. The most important thing is the, the kind of journey to that thing you're making and how it comes from your biography and how it comes from all the people you've met and all the music you've heard and the unis of it.

• 1:31:19Rick Rubin?

  How you see the world.

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  How you see the world. And that's, I think that's, that's what's so special about music is it allows you to have a little glimpse into how someone else feels to be a person. You know, that's what's so special about it. And obviously, an AI system can kind of simulate a version of that.

• 1:31:36Rick Rubin?

  It can make things, but no point of view. It's just following instructions.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  No intentionality, no point of view, no... It's funny, I had this conversation with one of these, these guys. And they were saying, well, Max, how about this? You know, you've got an idea. You've had this idea at the beginning of your piece. And, and then you kind of get stuck, right? And they're like, well, that's where we come in. We'll do that bit for you, just like plug it in and there'll be the... And I'm like, well, that's, that, the bit where I get stuck is that's, that's what I'm after. I want to experience the struggle of like trying to figure it out. That's the magic.

• 1:32:12Rick Rubin?

  And you know, there are so many different solutions to that question. And settling for the one that a machine picks is an odd choice.

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  Right. You might as well just like, why even bother it? Because it's nothing, yeah, anyway.

• 1:32:27Rick Rubin?

  It feels like streaming has been good to you.

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  It probably has in a way. I mean, like Sleep, for example, is a piece which is people listen to a lot, it's streamed a lot. You know, there are downsides to streaming from the economic standpoint, definitely. And I think especially for emerging artists, it's very difficult, you know, to kind of cut through. There is so much material up there. You know, people discover things, right? Because there's no risk. They just click through, they follow their enthusiasm and their things that they love and their affection. And they're like, oh, I love this, you know. It doesn't matter where it came from, or it could be 40 years old, but they still love it. And suddenly, there it is, you know.

• 1:33:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I don't know if in the days of vinyl or CDs that your music could be as ubiquitous as it is.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 1:33:12Rick Rubin?

  I feel like your music really has captured the culture.

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  In a way, yeah. It's, it's a funny thing. As a kid, you know, you go into a record shop and you've got your five pounds in your hands, you know, and you're gonna buy an album and you maybe have heard about an album or you look at the cover and you're like, I would love to buy that album, but I'm just not gonna risk it because it's five pounds.

• 1:33:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  You know, and it's like, so then you buy the one that you kind of know, you know, the band that you love already and you just wanna get another of their albums. There isn't that risk to discovery. And I hear, I see it in, you know, the listening of my kids. I mean, their playlists are like all over the place, you know. It's just really interesting, sort of eclectic, things you'd never even have heard of.

• 1:33:54Rick Rubin?

  I wonder also if there's a aspect of the music you make that lends itself to streaming. When I think of like a Rock and Roll 45,

• 1:34:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Rick Rubin?

  I don't think that's better streaming.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:07Rick Rubin?

  It's probably worse.

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  In a way, yeah.

• 1:34:09Rick Rubin?

  But for Sleep, maybe streaming's good.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, if people use it overnight, it works.

• 1:34:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Then I think with Sleep, a lot of people have found other spaces for it in their lives. Like, you know, people will use it as a workday. Basically, they, they sit down, press play, when the record's finished, they're done.

• 1:34:29Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the difference between an orchestra and electronic orchestration. Is there ever an argument for the electronic orchestration or do you ever use them together?

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  If I've written orchestral music, I will always record an orchestra. It's just so much better. They say that, you know, the demo sounds like an orchestra until you hear the orchestra. It's like not even close.

• 1:34:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you typically make a demo that is electronic?

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Well, I have to for movies.

• 1:34:55Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about making music for movies. What's the process like?

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  I prefer to read it and make material from the page. It's kind of an open space. But I think it also helps the filmmakers because it gives them what the atmosphere of music could bring to it. You know, and they'll, maybe they'll use it, they play it on the set or they use it in the early edits and, you know, this kind of thing. And it just starts to become part of the texture of the world. So I like that. That isn't always possible, especially on bigger movies, which have more of like an industrial workflow. It's, it's like, you know, here's the temp, take out the temp. Now you do this and you, you know, six weeks later, we'll see you at the mix. It's a bit less satisfying greatly, but it can work. I mean, it can work. People make amazing music under those conditions, but it's more challenging, I think.

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  I prefer something a bit more organic, a bit more one-to-one. You know, like with, with, I've just done, last year I did Hamlet with Chloe Zhao. And that was just a, you know, one-to-one conversations. And really just felt like a very truly collaborative thing.

• 1:36:01Rick Rubin?

  How early were you involved in that one?

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  Again, right at the beginning.

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  I read it. We had lunch and we just talked through a bunch of stuff. And, and then I, I just said, well, I'm gonna just write you some material off the page. And I made about, I don't know, about 40 minutes of things, you know.

• 1:36:21Rick Rubin?

  Would it be, these are things that suit the story or this is what goes in this scene?

• 1:36:27Speaker 00

  This is how I see this world, kind of how I see it sounding.

• 1:36:31Rick Rubin?

  The vibe of the overall piece?

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33Rick Rubin?

  Not this is the sound of the scene?

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, completely.

• 1:36:37Rick Rubin?

  Any shows coming up?

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  I'm actually playing in Mumbai.

• 1:36:40Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  I'm really looking forward to it.

• 1:36:43Rick Rubin?

  How different is the reception in different parts of the world when you play?

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  It's funny, like, we, we really see it very explicitly with the Sleep shows. You know, like in the UK, all the beds are like, it's very quite far apart, everything regimented.

• 1:36:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Speaker 00

  Like in Berlin, everyone climbed up on top of the subs and in the subs and they were sleeping in the subs.

• 1:37:03Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:37:04Speaker 00

  Madrid, you know, it's just a big yoga mat with everyone just on a big yoga mat. In China, we did one at the Great Wall and, I mean, it's a rural area, so there were music people, but they were like farmers.

• 1:37:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Speaker 00

  And they brought their kids and they pushed the beds together and they were all just sleeping. Amazing.

• 1:37:21Rick Rubin?

  That sounds great.

• 1:37:22Speaker 00

  That show was crazy, actually, because it happened to coincide with some kind of important state anniversary. So the security was insane around the venue, like armed guards, you know. So anyway, we start playing the show and after I get I get two breaks in sleep, one around about two and a half hours and one five or six hours, something like that. Anyway, so after my first break, I walk off stage and I see all the all the armed guards just sleeping and just lying on the ground with their guns.

• 1:37:54Rick Rubin?

  It worked.

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  So amazing.

• 1:37:57Rick Rubin?

  Really beautiful. Have you experimented with ancient instruments at all?

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  I'm quite interested in medieval music, but it's a big kind of love of mine. So obviously, there's all kinds of strange instruments which kind of hardly work at all, but are kind of incredible, full of character.

• 1:38:13Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever use them in pieces?

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  I have used them in movies. I haven't used them in other things so far.

• 1:38:20Rick Rubin?

  Would you say more as a sound effect or more as a actual musical element?

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, as music. I mean, I did a movie, Mary, Queen of Scots, so we used a lot of like Elizabethan materials and stuff in there. It was good fun.

• 1:38:33Rick Rubin?

  You've done things where you incorporate the ambient sounds of the spaces. It's intentional.

• 1:38:38Speaker 00

  No, I mean, it's it's there from the beginning of my work, really. It's I mean, Memory House is full of that kind of stuff. And for me, you know, the music is sound and it's part of the continuum of sound.

• 1:38:51Rick Rubin?

  And the Cage influence.

• 1:38:52Speaker 00

  Right. Cage actually gets a little walk on on Memory House. I quote a bit of him reading, one of his texts. But we were just commenting just now about the extraordinary acoustic of this bass. You know, so you've got the little bugs singing. But what's amazing is there's no rumble. Like, the low end is completely wide open.

• 1:39:14Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your experience with the Royal Academy.

• 1:39:16Speaker 00

  There was like an orthodoxy, right? There was a thing, a way that you were supposed to write music if you were a serious, serious composer. And that was post Boulez, kind of atonal, serial based kind of music, very complex, not approachable for the non-specialist. You know, it was like music as kind of a technical manifesto.

• 1:39:42Rick Rubin?

  That's odd. That seems more like the alternative, not the thing you would be taught in school.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  No, it was really was. It was like you have to, you know, if you write tonal music, then you're kind of an idiot, basically, right? That was the deal.

• 1:39:56Rick Rubin?

  Strange.

• 1:39:56Speaker 00

  It was it was harsh. So anyway, so I was kind of doing that because that's what I was supposed to do. But I, you know, I kind of increasingly just came to doubt the whole thing. And it was the time of, so we're talking about the end of the eighties, you know, all kinds of new tonal music was starting to happen. I mean, I'd had my like teenage experience with Philip Glass and Terry Riley, which is tonal music in a different way, but is. And then what was happening was that the music from the Baltics was starting to come over on ECM, so Arvo Pärt especially. And I remember going to like the first performance of the Paseo, which is this incredible, it's

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  ninety minutes of, it sort of feels almost medieval in its construction. I remember just sitting there and going, I've got this all wrong, you know, there's something going on here, you know, rather than digging more and more into like complexity, you know. I was looking for something else, something more direct, more plain speaking, you know, just as a way to tell stories like in a direct way. I just kind of decoupled, I guess, from the academy at that point. I went to Florence, actually, for a year after that. And I studied with Berio. He was part of that modernist thing, but his music was much more omnivorous. He did folk song music.

• 1:41:25Speaker 00

  He worked with like Schubert and Old Materials and, you know, The Beatles and all kinds of different stuff. And it had this kind of plurality and it was also about society, you know, it was about the world. And I thought he was very inspiring for me. He just kind of made fun of all my very complicated music that I was presenting to him. And he was just a very credible genius, I mean, really visionary artist. And he could sort of, it was like he was reading my mind. You know, I would, you know, turn up with my thick score of like black ink everywhere and he would just be looking through it and he could, and it's crazy things, like impossible things, like you'd be like, I know that that should be a C sharp, and I'd be like, you know, he was like walking around inside my head.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  It was incredible. But he basically just said, look, forget about this. What is it you actually want to do? Why are you even here? Why are you doing this? And going back down to the fundamentals, you know. So that was, I guess, the sort of ultimately the thing that made me go, yes, I'm going to take away all of this complexity and all of this stuff.

• 1:42:34Rick Rubin?

  It's a tragic story for all the kids in school who went to music school because they loved music and

• 1:42:39Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 1:42:40Rick Rubin?

  Kind of anti-music.

• 1:42:41Speaker 00

  It was, well, yeah. I mean, Boulez, you know, who was the kind of godhead of that way of being was

• 1:42:47Rick Rubin?

  If there's one who does that, it's interesting.

• 1:42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Rick Rubin?

  You don't copy that.

• 1:42:52Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. There were two or three things that sort of made me just kind of go in a different direction.

• 1:42:59Rick Rubin?

  How did you end up with Berio?

• 1:43:01Speaker 00

  He actually had taught at the academy. He'd come for a couple of weeks and just done some master classes and stuff. And I loved his music anyway, so I kind of pestered his agent and wrote him a letter. And he just wrote me a letter saying, come on out. It was incredible.

• 1:43:14Rick Rubin?

  And did he have a school?

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  He did. He had a he had an institute called Temporeale, which is in Florence in the city, above a fashion school. So it's all these guys doing fashion and then on the top floor, there'd be this institute.

• 1:43:28Rick Rubin?

  What would a day in that class be like?

• 1:43:30Speaker 00

  First of all, it was very, very few and far between because he was like a global superstar composer, so he was not around very much. But when I saw him, he basically would just look at whatever I'd been writing. He would poke fun at it.

• 1:43:49Rick Rubin?

  In a friendly way?

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  In a friendly way. You know, I like, I remember sending, bringing him one of this piano piece that I'd written. And there's a thing with student composers, especially pianists, that they write the incredibly hard piano piece. They do. It just is what happens. So I wrote my version of this incredibly hard piano piece. And he was looking at this piece and he was just like this. And after a while, he says, he just looks up and he goes, Max, your piano piece. And he did this, he made this gesture, this brilliant Italian gesture, which is just like, it's all just, just stop it now, stop it already, you know? So funny. I was just like.

• 1:44:33Rick Rubin?

  But did you on some level find it inspiring?

• 1:44:36Speaker 00

  I mean, it's Berio.

• 1:44:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  So I guess that's the big thing I got from him. Because, you know, I couldn't really argue with him because he he had such an extraordinary like insight and vision and obviously, you know, an amazing composer himself. So it wasn't like I was going to say, no, you're wrong, because he wasn't wrong.

• 1:44:57Rick Rubin?

  Would you say deadlines help you or undermine you?

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  If I'm making my own record, then there is no deadline. Then I'm just working. But if I'm, if somebody's commissioned me to write a ballet or something and they need it at a certain time, then it's probably the only way it's gonna get done. Because I am actually, I sort of quite like doing nothing.

• 1:45:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Speaker 00

  So so if it if it weren't for the deadline, I probably would not get around to it in a way.

• 1:45:32Rick Rubin?

  Has there ever been a deadline that was a problem?

• 1:45:36Speaker 00

  They always feel like problems.

• 1:45:38Rick Rubin?

  But by the time you're done, you feel good?

• 1:45:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's there's usually a kind of a, it's impossible. And then slowly you find a way to make it possible.

• 1:45:49Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the first time you heard the piece from Shutter Island where your instrumental had vocals added to it.

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  You know, it was a sync request, essentially, came in via my publisher. And my publisher was, at that time, was an amazing man called Andrew King, who ran Mute, Mute Song, which is the publishing arm of Mute Records. He's a wonderful guy. He's a sort of English music business legend, you know, he'd managed Pink Floyd at the beginning and all of these kinds of things. He's a real character. So he's, he's like, Max, I'm gonna send you something. He sends me this thing with Dinah Washington on Les Deux L'Heures.

• 1:46:30Rick Rubin?

  Did he tell you in advance what it was? You just listened to it?

• 1:46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I was just like, I don't really, what's happening? What's happening here? You know, it's because it's so, in a way, because I knew the Dinah Washington song. So I just couldn't quite believe that it fit together so well. Because this was a long time ago. They couldn't like just pitch shift everything. And I thought it was kind of amazing. And I called him up and said, I think it's kind of amazing. And he's like, I think it is, you know. I mean, also, it having come via Robbie Robertson, who, you know, I love the band, I love Dylan. So I mean, all of that was, that was like, for me, it's, this is great.

• 1:47:10Rick Rubin?

  That's the first time I heard that piece of music was that version. I had no idea how it was made. And I didn't know the Dinah Washington song. And I was thinking, this singer is picking notes that no singer I know would pick to sing over these chords.

• 1:47:29Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's kind of weird in a way.

• 1:47:31Rick Rubin?

  In a great way. It made it better, not worse.

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:47:34Rick Rubin?

  It sounded so original.

• 1:47:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Rick Rubin?

  But it didn't work in any ordinary way.

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:47:39Rick Rubin?

  It really took my breath away. And then I had to try to find it. And it wasn't easy to find because it wasn't clear what it even was.

• 1:47:46Speaker 00

  Right. We actually, we'd never done that live. We did it live once last year with Celeste doing their vocal, and that was lovely.

• 1:47:54Rick Rubin?

  Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

• 1:47:59Speaker 00

  I have a sort of a faith in creativity as a thing, as a force in the world, as a force in society. And that in a way when I was younger. But I was sort of doing music maybe in spite of the fact that I was doubtful about its potential. It's quite hard to explain it. I feel more settled in music and music as a thing in the world now than I did when I was younger, even though I was always passionately obsessed with it.

• 1:49:38Speaker 06

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• 1:49:52Speaker 02

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• 1:50:40Speaker 02

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