How is the tour going up to now? Was it a long time since the last time
you toured?

Although I tour often, this was my first solo tour in three years. I
absolutely loved it and found that I was much freer than I was three years
ago when i perhaps had more to lose. The music was surprising each night,
and I found myself lucidly enjoying it on every occasion. The audiences
were extremely receptive, which has actually been my experience on most
occasions while touring.

Which are the differences between the music that you do on your solo albums and the one you do on Nmperign?

The most apparent difference is the presence of more melodic material on the solo recordings. I can be more melodically precise in a solo context. This is important to me for a variety of reasons, one being that this melody is somehow distinct from both what is considered traditional and what is considered experimental, perhaps because a certain quality of melody can
give you the feeling of timelessness, and so it avoids being contingent on the particular fetishes of the time. I don't think that my melodies are melodious to the majority of ears, which is fine, because most melodies are like viruses that stick in your head and loop and mutate so that you need to exhaust them somehow by hearing a song over and over again until it becomes
a single, harmless crackle in your mind, which is not what I experience as
enjoyment. I personally like melodies that are transparent and forgettable,
that are hardly melodies at all but more like melodic experiences.

Nmperign differs from my solo music (and i'm leaving out the very complicated
differences in process, which should be expected when comparing solo
improvisation with group improvisation) in that the music that comes out of
nmperign is almost always at the edge of what I understand as being music.
it takes me a while to digest our recordings and select the
strongest/clearest pieces, to recognize our intention, which is not the same
in the finished recordings as it is during the performances (this difference
is a basic condition of the artistic process as far as I can tell and is not
unique to my experience with nmperign. the unique experience with nmperign
is that the question of "why does this work?" is much more difficult for me
to answer, even in vague, poetic terms, than it is with other projects I've
done).

Have you been playing as a session musician? Which are your main
recordings with other people?

The idea of a "session" musician or a "sideman" always conjures up the idea
of money, the idea of a "professional", in my mind. So, in that sense, I'd
have to say that I have not been playing as a session musician. I have,
however, recorded on other people's projects because I respect them in some way and have felt that I could learn something from the experience. For a
long time i've worked with Masashi Harada, who has too strong of a
personality to not in some way be the leader any ensemble he's in. I've
also done a few jazz-like recordings that are refreshing now and then, like
a peaceful family dinner. Mostly, the members of any ensemble that I work
with are on some kind of equal footing, which is actually a shifting of
dominance in practice but ends up being, unarguably, a group effort.

Do you have a lot of music theory background? How does it affect your
compositions?

I have a Masters in Composition from the New England Conservatory, so there
is a lot of musical information in my memory. I am lucky, however, to have always enjoyed learning and to have had an aversion to being "taught".

Theories are basically translations (of what happens in music and why it "works") and suffer from the same shortcomings as translations. However, they also help to excite certain latent possibilities in music (Xenakis is an excellent example of someone who consciously applied theory to produce previously unheard and arresting music),

I have never self-consciously applied theory to my actual compositions
(which are really selected improvisations), but it has on occasion boadened
my view of what is possible.

I saw that you were playing in theatres and a church in your tour... Do
you change the music that you play for the different environments?

The environment has an effect on the music, of course. especially when you
deal with silences. Some rooms need to have the silence raised to
awareness, and one way to deal with this is to begin with sound that has
heavy vibrations (sustained pitches, for instance) so that when those
vibrations are gone, there is a void. Some rooms already have deep silences
and ask to be approached carefully or sounds that are normally strong will
seem clumsy and oafish. usually the room communicates itself very clearly,
and I don't have to think about how to deal with it at all.

Is the soprano saxophone your main instrument or are there other kind of
saxophones that you prefer using according to the mood of the song?

For almost ten years I have played the soprano saxophone exclusively. If I
were to pick up another instrument, I doubt that it would be another
saxophone.

How was your collaboration with Jack Wright, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Bob
Marsh?

It was very easy to make music with that group. The combination of two
cellos and two saxes allowed each instrument to disguise itself as another
and thereby take more risks. Each player had the ability (and the desire)
to either push the music forward or to stew in more static, textural areas,
so the pieces tended to be rather mercurial and extremely contrapuntal. It
is a type of music that is not really in fashion right now in the
experimental music world, where either a stripped-down conceptual clarity
(leaning towards coldness) or a nostalgia for free jazz seems to gather the
most hype. My music and musical taste generally lean towards the former,
but there is so much more to experience...

How big is the percentage of improvisation in your music? Do you record your gigs to see new ideas surfacing?

There is never a preconceived plan for the music, but you have to take into
account the fact that I/we have "improvised" thousands of times, and that
what is actually improvised in the music is always changing. Sometimes it
is as if I'm playing every sound for the first time, and sometimes it is
more of an unexpected arrangement of habits in varying stages of solidity.
Dealing with these shifting states of awareness is actually the more
interesting improvisation for me - it is openness to both strength and
weakness in an arena that can be (perceived as) profound, regardless.

Recordings act in volatile ways towards the music-making process. I've
recorded an awful lot, and, listening back, I've been sent down both barren
and fruitful paths. at some point, it becomes important to allow yourself
to forget things, drop lifeless habits, and keep a distance from recordings
and their insipid ability to create a fixed image of your musical
personality. That being said, I still love to make recordings and love
having recordings and don't support the notion of music being necessarily
better live. You just have to recognize the pitfalls...

Are you planning to do more collaborations with other musicians or are
you concentrating on solo music?

Always both. My solo music is interesting me right now since it is
currently in a phase of renewal. However, I have been struggling to do work
with larger ensembles (5 or more improvisers), which is logistically quite
difficult as you can probably imagine. A few concerts last year with a
nine- and six-piece ensemble were very rich and exciting for me, and one of
my goals for the upcoming year is to work regularly with these groups. In
september I will be doing a month-long tour of the u.s. with Greg Kelley,
Axel Doerner, Andrea Neumann, and Annette Krebs, which should lead to some
unthought musical moments.

We're at a point right now where there exists a more global common language
in this "non-idiomatic" idiom so that larger groups can play together
without the assistance of particular strategies (Zorn's game pieces, Fred
Lonberg-Holm's light box orchestra, etc.), but this needs to be explored
further to get beyond the superficial niceties of the large ensemble
texture.

Interviewed by Federico Marongiu

6 Standing Desert - split LP w/Kevin Drumm

The Darkest Corner, the most conspicuous - CD

In which the silent partner… - CD (as Nmperigm)

This is Nmperign second CD - CD (as Nmperigm)

Crawlspace / Universal Noir - CD

The Withered Grasses - CD

"44´38´´/5" - CD (as Nmperign)

Ink. - CD

Enter the Continent - Masashi Harada - CD

There the eye goes not - Mike Bullock - CD

Witness of the sun - Ben Schwendener - CD

Beware the short hair girl - Titlayo Ngwenya - CD