Nicholas Thayer | Composer

Nicholas Thayer is a London-born, Netherlands-based composer, producer and inter-disciplinary artist.  His electronic and new classical work has been composed for dance pieces, gallery installations and site specific work.

He and Emma discuss Entropy, a lockdown collaboration for Ballet Zurich that has finally been performed live on stage and the album it lead to: Tetramer, out now. They also talk about  adolescent musical tastes, how Glenn Gould revolutionised the recording studio and that time Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee sent Nicholas an email...

 The 3 Questions...

Was there a piece of art that changed everything for you? 

'Appetite for Destruction', Guns‘n Roses, 

Was there a piece of art that you think has value but don’t necessarily like?

N/A! If he thinks a piece of art has value, he must therefore like it.

What/who should we check out that we may not know about?... 

The documentary film Sisters with Transistors

Thoughts and lectures of Brian Eno

The work of Ryoji Ikeda

Transcript

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Movers, shakers, makers, what makes creative people tick and how do they find and develop their inspiration? Welcome to the podcast that draws back the curtain on the inventive mind and its artistic process. I'm Emma Lister... 

MUSIC 

Nicholas Thayer is a London born, Netherlands based composer, producer and interdisciplinary artist. He completed a Masters degree in composition for new audiences and innovative practice at the Prins Claus Conservatorium, where he now teaches courses in electronics and interdisciplinary art making. His electronic and new classical work has been composed for ballet and contemporary dance pieces performed by Netherland’s Het National Ballet, New English Ballet Theatre and Australia’s Sydney Dance Company and Queensland Ballet. He doesn't only compose for dance, of course, he has released 3 albums, made sound installations for exhibitions at the Rijks Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Camden, and his work has also been featured in short films, virtual reality experiences, site specific AV performances, and he's even worked with rock band Mötley Crüe. His new album Tetramer is out now. 

EMMA LISTER 

At at the end of your bio, you mentioned working with Mötley Crüe and I’ve just got to ask what that was about. 

NICHOLAS THAYER 

So, I met, I met Tommy Lee through, I just got an e-mail out of the blue one day. It was I was in some random airport somewhere and I got this e-mail from Tommy Lee and it said: “Hey man, I heard some of your music, and I really dig it. Tommy” and I was like, that's cool. And I replied with an e-mail that said, “Hey man, I've heard some of your music, and I really dig it”. And this is, you know, I was quietly freaking out 'cause I, you know, I grew up on bands like Mötley Crüe and when I was, you know, a miscreant youth, my friend James and I, we used to go down to the local pool hall and we would hustle pool, like meaning that we would just pretend we didn't know how to play and then at some point in the evening we would start playing properly and win and walk off with, you know, enough, enough money to buy a couple of beers or something. Clean up. The way we used to signal to each other that it was time to start playing properly was we would put Doctor Feel Good on the jukebox and as soon as soon as he we heard those drums (sings drums) Dig dig dig dig. We started putting everything in then OK, let's go. And you know, I was like, holy shit this is....and so I, you know, this was a big thing and I told Tommy this story, obviously, and he loved it. And then we wort of just established this friendship. And I went to stay at his place for some time when I was in L.A., and we worked on some music together. We made a bunch of songs together as well. And then when they were preparing to go on this big tour he asked if I'd like to do the sound design for his drum solo and I said, well, let me check my schedule...Yes! and then, so I've got to be a part of this amazing thing that you know, what a way to connect with so many people as they have done over the course of their career.  

EMMA LISTER 

Uhm, let's go back in time, a little bit further back than your Doctor Feel Good poolhall days to... like dance, I think music is something a lot of people try or get thrown into when their children. Not everyone makes a profession of it, and you know, regardless of which way it goes, obviously it's very enriching to a young person. You don't have to, like, become a professional at it for it to be good to try. But I wondered if you could tell me, seeing as now we know that obviously you have ended up in the music world, what your first serious encounter with music was. And then what made you decide to pursue it further? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

Yeah, good question. I honestly couldn't tell you my first serious encounter with music, it's something that has just been there. I like, I come from a very musical family my grandfather was a conductor in the in the Westend in London, one of my Aunts plays oboe in the London Philharmonic my other aunt was working at the Royal Opera House, at the time that I was born, in the costume department. Both of my my cousins...one of them is a contemporary opera composer, the other one is a pop songwrite. So like there was just always music around in my family and extended family are very much the same. So there was never for me a sort of, ah, this is, you know, first encounter, but I started playing violin when I was four and then piano when I was five and the discovered Guns ‘n Roses sometime around when I was 12 and then just sort of it just, music was always there. But in terms of deciding to make a career out of it, just when I finished high school I went straight into to do a Bachelor of Music in Melbourne, where I was living at the time. I did a year of that and then the government cut the funding to the course and all of the teachers that I liked left. And so I thought, oh, I'll go and do something else. So I then went to do a degree in philosophy and theology and all the while in the background of that I was still doing music and still doing music, and then when I finished that degree, I realized that I couldn't not do music. Like it was just something that I couldn't get away from. And so I thought, well, I'm just going to put everything into it for a year and these are the goals that I want to achieve by the end of that year and if I've achieved those goals, then things are moving in the right direction and we'll keep going with this. And well, I achieved my goals in three months and so I thought, well this, this seems to be working out OK and just keep going from there and one of the things that was impressed upon me very early on by a mentor is this idea of lifelong learning that's you know. There's always so much that we don't know about, even the things that we are the most passionate about. And so for me, having a career in music is always about just finding those things that I'm interested in that connect with music and pursuing them and finding new ways of exploring them, new ways of bringing them into my own practice. 

EMMA LISTER 

I'm trying not to make direct lines from classical ballet training, which is something I often do when I talk to musicians, but obviously, OK, if you're doing like jazz guitar, jazz, uh, right, there's, you know, it's much less set. Obviously, you need a core technique, but there's an improvisational element to it that is fundamental to what makes it the art form that it is. Is the urge to study and perfect an instrument --like I think it was your aunt who plays oboe in London Symphony--is that different, does it feel different for you from the urge to study composition, which is what you did your masters in. 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

It's an interesting juxtaposition between being a musician and a, you know, an instrumentalist as opposed to being a maker, yeah. And I mean you, you hesitate to draw the line between classical ballet training, but I mean I think it's a valid one, you know, like the difference between a company member corps de ballet and a choreographer, you know and you know, I don't think it's one or the other, I think it's always a line and I think everybody sits somewhere along that line. And so, but yeah, for me working as a composer, and yes it's what I did my masters in, the real departure point was about the creation and what is creation and what is what is art. You know? What is it to make art? What is it to collaboratively make art and that to me was then very different from “how can I improve my technique” to be you know...and technique I always viewed technique as vocabulary. It's words that can help you express what you want to say, but you still need to know what you want to say in order for the technique to help that. And likewise, obviously there's lots of techniques involved in composition as well, and you learn the techniques and so it gives you more words to express what you want to say. But you still need to have something to say. And the, yeah, I think that the metaphor holds up even further than that, like the more words that you know in in the language the more eloquently you can express yourself, and you know you can find just the right word that has just the right weighting or gravitas or this or that and likewise with technique, you know, like you can know this, all of these approaches are equally valid, you know, like the Kurt Cobain smashing out three chords on his guitar touched me and connected with me just as much as Rachmaninov’s incredible, delicate use of harmony. You know, all of these things are just as valid as each other. It's, it's what is the intent? What is the purpose? And that, for me is where the role of the composer comes in is. Concept, refining concept and connecting concept with with the eventual output.  

EMMA LISTER 

Yeah, hmm, yeah, super interesting. You keep mentioning artists that I liked when I was younger, too. There's something about, like being a preteen and Guns ‘n Roses, which is confusing! What year were you born? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

1979. 

EMMA LISTER (10:47) 

Guess what year I was born?! 1979. So, I think the thing...this is a total sidetrack...It doesn't matter. The thing with Chemical Brothers and Nirvana which I didn't really find till Kurt had died, it was specifically the Unplugged album, and for me it and Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy, like, yeah, all those acts, they really came together the moment that I got...I think at that moment it was probably a Walkman, not a Discman...and this is relevant later in our conversation, but the act of like having your own music, ha ha, you know, sonically surround you and the autonomy that you feel as a teenager riding the bus with like your own music. I think it really imprinted that stuff on me, like really strongly. 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

It's amazing to think that it was only it was in the mid 80s that the Walkman was invented and so it's only been that long that we have been able to design our own sonic environment as we experience these things and. You know, we were the last generation to grow up with that, or without that, and you know  we often, we often talk about these things, you know and you see these memes come up like “I remember a time when I had to remember my 5 best friends phone numbers and you go and wait at the mall and you just wait for an hour because there was no way of contacting them: and these sorts of things. You know, and that's, we all look at our childhood through rose tinted glasses and obviously the internet is a wonderful thing, but you know, there was growing up with those so it's a different, it's a different way of experiencing life and how thankful I am that nobody had cell phone cameras when I was doing some of this stupid shit! 

EMMA LISTER  

Let's go on to talk about one of your pieces specifically. We're going to, we're going to center a little bit on a piece called Entropy, which was a commission, I believe, for Zurich Ballet’s junior company. It was a piece choreographed by.... or is a piece choreographed, by Craig Davidson. It's about 25 minutes, ballet in the vein of I'd say David Dawson or William Forsythe. So, it has like recognizable classical movement vocabulary and partnering. A minimalist set and like, super tasteful costumes...shout out to Alana Sergeant. Then very cool lighting by Martin Gebhart, so it's totally in my wheelhouse, and Oh my gosh, kids are so good. Like, I retrospectively retire whenever I watch kids dance and like there's, you were kind enough to share a video with me of this of the junior company, and wow, they're just really good now, aren't they? The end product was released online during the COVID-19 pandemic and has subsequently been performed live by Zurich and has also entered the rep at Slovakian National Ballet, where it was indeed on a program with a Forsythe piece....So there you go! 

MUSIC PLAYS 

Let's talk about the process before the piece. So it began life during COVID. What was the brief and had you seen any movement sketches or anything from the choreographer or other creatives’ work before you put proverbial pen to paper. 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

Before I started putting dots on a page. As, uh, yeah, it began right, right at the start of Covid so I, think I remember I was actually in Rovaniemi when, like just as COVID happened, I remember I was there for a week... 

EMMA LISTER (15:03) 

What were you doing your holiday? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

No, I was trying to set up a project up there, which then didn't happen! So I was there and then on the Friday I went to Helsinki, actually, to see our mutual friend Emmi... 

EMMA LISTER  

All right, cool! 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

And on the Saturday we went to some galleries and that was when everything started going like this.. and then I changed my flight and flew home on the Sunday, and it felt like the end of Get Smart with all the doors crossing behind me. And as I landed in, as I landed in Amsterdam, I remember over the loud speakers they were like: ‘ladies and gentlemen, all services are now shut by order of the government’ I was kind of like ‘what the?!’ And all of a sudden it just happened. So that was in March and then April is when this project started, and it was the third project that I did with Craig. We worked together on a piece for Western Austraila, no, for Queensland Ballet in Australia, and then another beach for ZHDK which is a contemporary company in Zurich also. And then so, so he then came to me with this commission, that at that point had no name and we convened as a team, and the team was Craig and lovely that you mentioned the costumes 'cause Alana was very much a part of this process as well, and myself and this was a wonderful process. Like we realized at that time, that this huge gift of time that we had as a result of COVID, and we all experienced this dreary monotony and wonderful gluttony of time that we'd never had before. And so everything seemed to slow down and speed up and everything all this time was happening. So we decided to take that time, Craig was in Zurich and Alana was in Brisbane in Australia, and I was obviously here in Groningen. None of us could travel, and we met I think once a week for about 3 months for an hour or two hours. We just talked, talked about what it was like during this time of COVID, what it was like and then we started touching on some concepts that maybe we wanted to explore with this piece. And so it would be, it was three months of, at least, of these meetings before we even started heading towards, OK, what are we actually going to create and make here? And what's the process and what are we heading towards? And it was this concept of, of time that we ended up landing on as a way of sort of diving into this piece. And this idea that that, yeah, during COVID it felt like time was almost stopped, but then was also speeding past that, all of these things happening on different levels that it felt a bit like a stream where you would have the under current and the over current and all of these things. And at that time I was watching a lot of Brian Cox lectures, I had a bit of a man crush on Brian, Brian.Cox at the time. And you know, he and he was talking about all these incredibly high-powered concepts, and I understood about 10% of them, but you know, the I I loved listening to them... 

EMMA LISTER  

When he explained things, I understand, like 95% when he's talking. As soon as he stops talking, I understand 10. It goes up and down... 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

I think I've experienced the same, I'm like, oh, I'm getting this! And then you try to explain it to somebody else you're like, well, there's these squiggly things...and then time and some magic...yeah and and so I was just thinking about this, this concept of entropy and entropy being what divides the future from the past and that you know it is an increased entropy is what we're heading towards and. And I was reading.... 

EMMA LISTER 

Entropy, I understand is like, Well, without looking at the definition, I thought of it as how everything is like eventually falling apart and going towards chaos. 

NICHOLAS THAYER 

That's a fairly good summation of it. It's a yeah, an increase in entropy is a dispersion of energy and what that means, yeah, is a falling apart of things. So you can think like... ice melting is a dispersion of the energy because you have a concentrated energy in the ice cubes as it disperses, the entropy increases, and so it is the the thing that separates the future from the past is an increase in entropy. We're always heading towards this chaos, this dispersion of energy, this this pulling apart of the things-- you can't unbreak an egg, you can't unscramble an egg, you can't, you know, these are considered entropic metaphors, or entropic actions. So, I was reading a lot about that and we were meeting and discussing about that and then this is how the piece began its life as a, as, as a concept, as a way of then how do we translate these feelings that we're talking about into a piece of art? How do we, you know? Now begin, begin to synthesize these things into...So then when I came to start making the music, we had such a strong shared understanding of what this piece was going to be about and so, yeah, the process was then, From then it was, I would make sketches and send them across to Craig whilst he was in the studio and each evening he would then send me back videos from the studio and so I could then say, yeah, this is working or this is not working, or I really like this, or, you know, OK, I'm going to change this part. And then once we sort of had something that felt like a skeleton or a form, I got in the studio with the cellist Gayla and we recorded the parts and then and then finalized it. So I as much as possible when creating, especially with choreographers, I like to be in the studio and immediacy and a connection and I really see that the two languages of music and dance is so connected and it's so complementary. That being able to be in that time, in that creation place, that, oh, I can see, oh, this movement, this this is a beautiful way to change the music and then there's this dialogue that happens in that moment that you can't, that you can't get any other way. 

EMMA LISTER  

It's in five sections, and I believe it's in the last section there's some very, this is where I'm going to show up my ignorance in terms of musical vocabulary, but there's like a very funky bit where I think they're strings, but it sounds like some other instrument, like it sounds like... panpipes or something. Do you know the bit? 

NICHOLAS THAYER (21:53) 

I think I know the bit that you mean. Yeah, yeah. 

MUSIC PLAYS 

EMMA LISTER  

What is it? How, like how did you invent, borrow, find that sound? 

NICHOLAS THAYER (TIME) 

OK. So, so this was a pre recorded score, obviously due to the restrictions of the pandemic. Add obviously other restrictions. So one of the things that that really afforded me was the opportunity to play with the perception of sounds, and this is, this is something that has really been. I come back to Glenn Gould! This is something that has been enabled by the whole possibilities of recording studio in that you can really play with people's perceptions of how loud sounds are supposed to be. Like you know, in a you know, an early recording of a band they had one microphone in a room and if you wanted the guitar to be louder, you had to move the guitar amp closer to the microphone, and that was that was how it was. But we can now have such minute control over all of these different things so that the smallest element of a sound can actually be really quite loud and compared to a drum, whereas, in an actual, I hesitate to use the word ‘real’ life, because I still consider this real life, but let's call it in a room...You're in a room with this sound and a drum. There is no possible way to get that balance. So what the sound is, it's actually me playing my violin and just really holding the bow really lightly and just bouncing it across the strings. And you know the sound that it makes is really quite quiet. So I obviously had it very close to the microphone when doing that, but then pushing, just that that simple thing of changing the perspective or changing the balance between that sound and these other sounds that you associate with being very loud, then changes this perspective, and again this comes back to the concept of entropy, which was about perspective and about, you know, things moving faster and slower and things being more important and less important, and I don't know if it was the same for you, but for me all of a sudden having hour long zoom drinks with friends in Australia was the most important thing in the world for about a month! And I haven't done it again since or, no a couple of times, but you know and that idea that all of a sudden something quite inconsequential becomes very important. So that that was something I tried to play with all the way through as well, was the balance of sounds that should be quite quiet and should be quite loud. 

EMMA LISTER  

Can you just briefly outline, briefly outline the Glenn Gould thing because in the pre interview you were saying something really interesting about how he revolutionized the way that we listened to recorded music. 

NICHOLAS THAYER (25:00) 

Well, so yeah, Glenn Gould--incredible pianist. Largely regarded as the best interpreter of Bach ever. So he is this renowned classical pianist and was one of the first people from the classical world to actually say: No, the recording studio is an incredibly valuable tool and instrument in authenticity. So a lot of the classical world was saying: you know, doing two takes and putting them together, that's not an authentic performance. An authentic performance is one person on a stage. With an audience in a, you know, proscenium arch type setting and Glenn Gould was saying, no, no, I can go into the studio and do three different takes and chop them all together. And that is the most authentic performance of a piece of Bach. And so, he he he revolutionized the way that certainly the classical world, but then, you know, the contemporary art and recording world thought about what was authentic, what is an authentic performance, you know? And though that kind of platform then gave people the place to explore other ways of exploring authenticity in recorded music or and...there's a wonderful essay by Brian Eno where he talks about the studio, the recording studio, as an instrument in and of itself, that it affords us these opportunities to recontextualize what being a composer is, what being a creator is, you know, whereas it used to be that a recording engineer is the guy just capturing the performance, but that now a recording engineer actually is somebody who is the creator, who is the performer as well so... 

EMMA LISTER  

It seems it seems like you're using classical instruments, particularly strings, in unconventional ways. So whether you're trying to get like a like physically trying to get a different noise out of them or or slightly tweaking, tweaking them with digital software, I think in some bits, or as you just explained how you were kind of doing an extreme close up on a certain sound, but it is still tethered to the conventions of Western classical music like. It's, I think that's why it's a good fit with neoclassical ballet or a contemporary company that might have classically trained dancers like... it is new, but it is still rooted in the old. Is that fair? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

It is, yeah. So it's interesting that you use the word Western classical music and this is a quite a, quite actually a buzz word in in scholarly circles, I guess at the moment you know, is how do we break free from the Western classical tradition or even just Western musical tradition, you know? Right, there's so many... 

EMMA LISTER  

Is it the pentatonic scale? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

It's the pentatonic scale. It's music notation itself, it's the idea that music is to be performed by a person to a passive audience. You know, it's all of these things. I mean it's only 5 generations that we've been making, you know, before that it was just let's explore music. Let's see what it does together and for the vast majority of the history of music since, you know ‘Jane Caveman’ took two rocks together and hit them and went this sounds cool! You know, the vast majority of the history of music is a collaborative thing and a storytelling thing and a way for people to create a cultural and social identity in and amongst themselves. So it's only relatively recently that music has become an audience type, uh, boundary. And I think you know it's really important to try and start exploring beyond that, but to get back to your question. Yeah, so I'm, I am I I recognize very much that I hit the privileged jackpot: White, straight, male, English first language, upper middle class, all of this, and you know that brings with it certain responsibilities in terms of, you know advocating for people when I can, and being aware of this and...you know...but it means that I also need to respect that when it comes to my music making if I was to suddenly start making music using Japanese instruments in Japanese scales, that's going to be incredibly inauthentic and a bit insulting, you know, I'm sure to people who studied that music and grew up with that music and...this wonderful word that I heard recently inculturation.  

EMMA LISTER 

Oh wow, Is that a new way of appropriating something? 

NICHOLAS THAYER (29:56) 

No, no, it's quite the opposite. The opposite, OK So, so an enculturation is that you learn something just simply by living it. So a good example of something that you have, or I have been encultured with is how a supermarket works like nobody told you, sat you down and said you walk in y ou get things and you go to the front and you give them your credit card, and then they give you the things and let you walk out. You just observed it. You went with your parents, and you learn it just by doing and so music and you know, my musical upbringing, it is intentional and enculturation, I guess, you know, like I, I grew up with this kind of music. I I lived this kind of music and I'm aware of that, and so I'm also aware of ways in which I can push, push the edges of that and push the boundaries of that. So yeah, I do use sounds like violins and cellos and pianos because these instruments that carry with them the history, and you know, you've just play one note on a cello, or you ask a wonderful cellist to play one note uh,  on a cello--the audience immediately connects with that in a certain way that they don't connect with any other instrument exactly the same. Again, I'm going to draw the comparison with ballet training, if somebody walks out in in tights and stands in first position on the stage with pointe shoes on you go, oh, this is what I'm in for, you know, it's a connection point in a touchstone and a way for the audience to then locate themselves before you try and say, actually, no, we're going to, you know, maybe push this boundary a bit. We're going to push this boundary a bit. So one thing that I'm really interested in in my music is non conventional tuning systems and, you touched on it when you say that the pentatonic scale, yeah, if you look at a piano we have these 12 very clearly defined notes that make up one octave. You know, you have these semi tones, but there's notes between those notes, and then there's notes between those notes, and nothing is finite and you know, so I'm very interested in exploring how those things interact with each other. How different tunings or different combinations of tones and sounds can bring, you know, a different way of feeling. The world of you know...There's this huge change in music that happened around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when all of a sudden the sound of the world, the sound of our environment, changed from horses and carts to machines and, you know, machinery, you know, musicians and artists were sort of saying, Oh well, the music we make should reflect the sound at the world around us. So people started bringing in all of these metallic objects into orchestras and, you know, big sounding things and this and that. And then music started, tape recording was invented, and then people started incorporating these sounds into their compositions as well. Nowadays, you know, we live in this sort of hybrid world of analog and digital and so I really try and explore that juxtaposition in my music as well that there is elements of, you know it's analog if you like, or acoustic or these kinds of sounds and that, but then these are put through a sort of yeah as you say digitally manipulated or hybridization or that then distended or recontextualize somehow, but then also I  love the world of sound that's using electronics opens up because you know this I see is the world that. We really live in and it is this digital hybrid world, you know, so this is how I conceive of my music as this sort of living between these two things. 

MUSIC PLAYS 

EMMA LISTER  

The process of creating Entropy bled into an album Tetramer which is such a different focus for the listener. And this is where I you know, an hour ago when we were talking about headphones, I found it a much more contemplative experience listening to it 'cause I did actually listen to it on headphones versus the act of, I I know it was it was a bit of a hybrid 'cause people were watching the piece originally online, but it has been done live. So what was the biggest change in your approach, moving towards something that is for stage and movement towards something that is an album? 

NICHOLAS THAYER (35:02) 

Yeah, so I did really rework this music for the album, and my concept behind this album is yeah, Tetramer: four things, so four suites, four solo instruments and electronics, again forcing, you know, exploring this hybridization, this digital analog world that we live. In and then the concept for the album beyond that was this listening experience that it is, you know, I think intended, I sort of imagined that most people would explore it in headphones as a private experience. It's not sort of something that you put on at a dinner party and go: everyone listen to this! Listening in headphones then affords you the opportunity to really spatialize things and to create tiny little worlds out of all of these little elements. The main differences between the piece Entropy as it was for the stage and for the album was just in terms of a narrative flow. Sometimes things that we can work on a stage then lose you a bit because the narrative at that point, or the interest is being carried by the dance, means that you need to maybe change the music around a little bit in order for it to make sense, just in and of itself. So something, like, yeah, yeah, good example is like, you can have, if somebody is standing on stage, even if they're doing nothing, they're doing something purely by the fact that they are standing on a stage and that is in itself something and therefore nothing happening, nothing changing musically and nothing changing in terms of the movement is something in that context, but you take that you take away that person standing on the stage doing nothing and just have this piece of static music that you're listening to in your headphones and it doesn't have the same, it doesn't communicate the same thing. But also I it was...the other main thing behind it was also a documentation for me. It was things that I've been working on in exploring for a couple of years and I felt with those four suites that I'd sort of said everything that I wanted to say within that little research period, those things to explore and so its way of saying, go take this and put this on the shell now and now, the next things that I'm researching and exploring in my music take that in a slightly different direction. 

MUSIC 

EMMA LISTER  

We kind of talked this spoke a little bit about your childhood experiences in music and how you kind of slid into music, or at least it was just kind of surrounding you, but was that something that changed everything for you? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

Yeah, this is, this this this was a question I was pondering all weekend. Trying to trying to understand that and what I landed on in the end was actually...and we've touched on it before today is actually Appetite for Destruction by Guns ‘n Roses. The reason I came to that, it was because that was the first album, the 1st thing that I discovered for myself, that wasn't something that parents had introduced me to, wasn't something that was just in the house and. Obviously, I certainly was not thinking of it in these terms, at the time, I just thought, yeah, this sounds dangerous and cool and you know, and I want to be a part of this. But yeah, looking back on it, certainly experiencing that and like, this was me, this was a way that I could interact with the piece of art, and I'm going to call it that 'cause it's a really good album. So that it really did change everything for me because, you know, then I was set on this path of exploring all of these artists, myself and music and what was it that I was really reacting to in that and you know, how? How was it that you know, a relatively I like to think polite and well mannered kid from England was suddenly connecting with music being made by, you know, miscreants from the streets of Los Angeles, that's not such a that's not such a break in in a in a boundary. But you know, what was it that I found of myself in that music? Yeah, I'm going to go with that. 

EMMA LISTER (40:08) 

Was there piece of art that you don't actually necessarily love and maybe don't even like it very much but that you respect? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

So again, this is a really interesting question and it kicked off quite some discussion this weekend with a number of people, 'cause, I was trying to, I was, you know, I was coming at it from a number of different angles, and my first thought is was the Duchamp urinal piece. But, but then I was like, no actually, yeah, I actually I, I do love that piece, right? And then I thought, OK, let's think about some other things and then I was thinking about this this guy Pierre Schaeffer, who was the founder of a style of music called Musique Concrète, which was the first experimentations into using tape recordings and then turning those the pieces of music and. So very rarely would I actually choose to listen to his music, just as something to listen to. But I still love it. And then I would think, do I'd love that to Duchamp piece, actually, yeah, I do love that and so where I ended up landing on this question was that if I think a piece of art has value then, that enables me to engage with it on a thought level, which then gives me a love for that piece of art. So then I was, you know, I sort of got very deep into what does it mean to love a pece of art, you know, like, what does it mean to love this and love....yeah, so so where I ended up landing was that exactly that: if I think a piece of art has value, then that means that I love that piece of art 'cause I can engage with it on a human level. 

EMMA LISTER  

So, Nick, what should we check out? Who do we not know about who we should know about? 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

I'm going to very quickly mention three: One of them is a film that I highly recommend to everybody, Sisters with Transistors. It is a wonderful film documenting names that should be household names, such as Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, the pioneers of early electronic music composition. And all females as the name of the film would suggest. Absolutely recommend that film recommended watching, you can watch it on Vimeo, I think you have to hire it for a small fee, it’s an independent film. Do it, do it, do it, do it! This the second one I wanted to mention is Brian Eno, and I'm sure many of your listeners have heard of Brian Eno, but I encourage a deep dive into him as commentator on arts and a commentator on thinking about art and what art is. And there's many wonderful lectures you can find of his online from like the Red Bull Music Academy or I think the Edinburgh Arts and Architecture Awards or something like that. And they're all these sort of 1-hour lectures that he gives just thinking about what is it to be an artist in society today? What is the purpose of art in society today? Another one of our best ones Brian Eno. And then the third is a very personal one is Ryoji Ikeda, Japanese audio visual artist who does these large scale installation audio visual works are combining all of the music and the visual is taken from data from all over the world. In fact, one of his pieces is called Dataplex and it's live interpretation of data into, it's basically binary form, ones and zeros, in the forms of sound and light and as it's such a visceral way of experiencing data, as opposed to looking at a screen, you can sort of see it changing before your eyes. And as another one of my favorites, Olafur Eliasson says, you know, if you want to change the world, you need to change the way that people experience the world and, so Ryoji Ikeda's work really changes the way that I experience the world. 

MUSIC PLAYS 

EMMA LISTER  

OK, that's our episode. Check out Nick's work, especially his new album Tetramer: It's available now on Bandcamp. Musicians all love Bandcamp, I think it's 'cause they actually pay them properly, so definitely check out that app/site. Anyway, we'll link to that and other Nick Thayer goodies in our show notes, where you'll also find links to the stuff we talked about and his other recommendations. 

OK, closing credits this has been a Makeshift company production. Follow us on Instagram at makeshift company or check out our website, makeshiftcompany.com. Please remember to rate and review us wherever you're listening to this episode especially if you say nice stuff. Thanks to Sakari Mannisto for his help with the theme music and other audio tinkering. And now from the cutting room floor I give you... 

NICHOLAS THAYER  

10 reasons why classical music isn't boring! And I thought, that's just, that's the wrong question to be asking like that's you know... the question how could we make classical music more exciting. It's the wrong question. You've already lost the battle.