Interview with Bryan Day
Bryan Day has been a man of many trades. I have probably known him and his work for at least 25 years. This time I invited him to have a chat about what he has been up to and what happened between now and then. Dig in!
1. There is a moment in life for every artist and musician to get inspired and move on towards a certain direction and commit to start doing what is closer to your interest? You also have been through different stages in your life related to different genres. Can you describe this (those) moment(s)?
I’ve been playing around with sound my whole life. The first time I remember experimenting with creating electronic sounds was while playing around with some speakers and a 9-volt battery when I was in elementary school. My uncle ran a television and radio repair shop in the Minneapolis suburbs and he gave me some old discarded radio electronics including a pair of ratty paper-cone loudspeakers and I was fascinated by the popping and clicking that I could get out of them by connecting and disconnecting a battery. Around that same time, my parents bought a cassette recorder unit with a dynamic mic for our home stereo system that I used to record little ad hoc songs. Just silly stuff, I'm sure a lot of kids did the same type of thing. We had a Casio SK-1 and a Rapman keyboard with an integrated pitch-shifter as well and a little later my dad picked up one of those cheap Radio Shack wireless lapel microphones for his camcorder, probably at a thrift store. I used to mess around with that all the time, I remember taping the microphone to my face, making spooky sounds for Halloween.
We moved to a tiny town in central Iowa while I was in high school and my introduction to experimental music came from digging through used CDs at a record and book store chain called Hastings in the nearby town of Marshalltown. There was a lot of weird stuff on the radio in the 90s, major labels were all looking for the next Nevermind, so I think I was already primed to look for unusual stuff. I would dig into the selection of cut-out CDs and tapes and buy whatever seemed interesting. I remember finding a bunch of the later grab-bag period SST tapes, a couple Halfler Trio CDs, pretty sure I found a copy of Brotzmann’s Machine Gun there and albums by New York bands like Live Skull and Carbon. I bought the Trouser Press record guide books from that store and tried to pick up anything that sounded remotely unusual. I was more directly introduced to noise music through a review column written by Byron Coley in a mid-90s Spin magazine, one of the bigger mainstream rock publications in the states, which I also bought at that store.
I wasn't much of a musician, I played clarinet for a year in middle school, but my dad was a guitarist and had the gear needed to make interesting sounds. I fiddled around with an electric guitar from time to time, but wasn't really that serious about learning. I was more into drawing, but didn't really know where to direct my aspirations. I thought the logical outcome for the kind of art I was making would be to draw tattoos or comics and that didn't really appeal to me. There was a memorial carnival for a kid that died in a lawnmower accident at the baseball diamond outside our house weeks after we arrived in Iowa. I didn't really want to mingle, so I put a guitar amp in the window, plugged in my dad’s guitar and started wailing atonally. Maybe that's when I started on this noise trip.
I started recording with Brian Noring in Des Moines a year or so after high school. I was going to college in nearby Ames and I was excited to find someone who ran a noise label (FDR Tapes) in the area. I learned quite a bit about the noise and free improvisation world and the cassette trading scene through those visits. I think that I just brought a few guitar pedals and maybe a couple circuit bent keyboards. A friend of mine from Ames, Ian Johnson, worked at a local guitar pedal company called Pefftronics, and I remember bringing their signature random flanger, the Super Randomatic with me to some of those sessions. Ian also built homemade stringed instruments out of PVC pipe, which was a big influence on me.
I moved to Nebraska in 2002 and found myself in a fairly active community of artists from various backgrounds, punk rock, indie folk, free jazz and few noise guys. I organized a lot of shows for touring artists and performed with several projects—first Naturaliste, then Shelf Life and Seeded Plain. Each of these projects shifted my perspective, evolving my approach from noise and free improvisation as an extension of experimental rock to electroacoustic experiments with whatever I could find and, eventually, to improvisation as a gateway to rhythmic world music and performance art.
After moving to California in 2013, I became a bit less involved with the local scene as a whole. Not that I didn't keep busy, I organized a series for 7 years and had 3 long term projects: Bad Jazz, Collision Stories and Euphotic. But it became pretty difficult to have the same kind of personal connection to local artists that I had in the midwest. I really began to reach out to folks outside the local community again, and fortunately, my day job helped by allowing me to connect with artist communities all over the world through travel. There are several local organizations related to instrument building in the Bay Area, Thingamajigs, Dogbotic and things organized by folks like Bart Hopkin and Sudhu Tewari, where I’ve been able to host instrument-building workshops and demos for people outside the sound art community and make connections to galleries and educational organizations in ways that never happened when I lived in the midwest.
(Derty Gertie)
2. In your work you use instruments that you build yourself. it is not only interesting and a great value but gives an important shape to your solo and collaborative work. How did it start? How do you feel about it?
I started building instruments around the time that I first started recording and when I started my label. Along with seeing my friend Ian's creations, I remember reading an article about Solmania which described Masahiko Ohno's mutant modified guitars, which really clicked with me. There was a lot of guitar gear floating around at home and I thought that I could do something similar myself. I used a lot of oak in those early instruments, because my parents did quite a bit of DIY cabinetry in the house, so we had a bunch of extra oak boards in the garage. I was circuit bending keyboards and Speak and Spells at the time as well, but don't recall how I was introduced to that. I distinctly remember having a circuit bent SK-1 a few months after high school. By that point, I religiously read the reviews on a number of online experimental music magazines, so I must have heard about Reed Ghazala somehow.
Through the noise and industrial music rabbit hole, I discovered projects like Einsturzende Neubauten and Survival Research Labs and then I was introduced to folks like Hans Reichel, Harry Partch and Harry Bertoia through friends in Japan. A friend of mine helped coordinate some Bertoia reissues on PSF Records and I got really into his Sonambient stuff. I was then introduced to the sounds of other folks in the noise and electroacoustic world building their own gear, such as Knurl, Voice Crack and Das Synthestische Mischgewebe through friends in the noise scene. After I started moving away from noise and into the world of more instrument-based free improvisation, I started meeting the instrument builders in that scene like Neil Feather, Hal Rammel, Chas Smith and later my Seeded Plain bandmate Jay Kreimer.
I go through phases of trying to develop and build new instruments and then phases of learning how to play them and work within their limitations. Both phases can be exciting. I'm not always looking for the best sounds when I am creating new machines. Oftentimes, I'm just playing with a concept like, how can I make sounds from dragging things across the floor, or wouldn’t it be funny to find a way to use exercise equipment to make music, or what if making music was more like cooking. Early on, a focus was making instruments from found or household objects, but I've found myself working a bit more on the engineering side in recent years, building things from machined metal and plastic. Probably the influence of the science museum I work at.
After finishing a new instrument and exhausting the different ways that I've figured out how to play it, I start to try to extend its capabilities by adding effects, sampling and composing using just recordings of the sounds. To tell you the truth, I have pretty bad hearing, so I need to listen fairly loud to hear the nuances of the things I build, so listening on headphones to recordings of instruments after performing on them is often the easiest way for me to decide how to arrange things.
In the last couple years, I've found myself much more in the phase of working with the instruments that I've built already rather than developing new ones. I think I've designed and built only two or three in the last year, most of those electromechanical devices that don't really work well for improvised music. I've tried to put them to good use, but I usually just use those instruments as sculptural art pieces.
(Ballchain Xylophone)
3. Using self-built instruments to create music is a great idea but can also be a message. What drives you to create sounds using them?
What drives me, good question. Sometimes I think I'm on a hopeless mission to try and invent my own musical language from the ground up, starting with the instruments and then with performance techniques and even maybe the 'why?' of making music in the first place. Of course, this is completely ridiculous, since I'm not living in a vacuum. I run a label and work with a lot of other people, so I tend to listen to a lot of music and see a lot of different perspectives. But this goal does keep me motivated, and hopefully keeps me outside of a multitude of overused trajectories, although it makes me more susceptible to a frequent post-project cringe that might be avoided if I followed a more well-worn path.
One reason I build my own instruments is that having control over the design lets me arrange things in a way that makes it easier to discover new techniques while playing. Finding new sounds is possible with any instrument, but the surprise that comes from discovering a new way of playing something that I build from scratch is particularly satisfying. I really like performing live and finding new sounds in that environment. For me, performances are dependent on some kind of discovery. I love the drama, the idea that I'm somehow learning a language in real-time on stage, although It probably doesn't come off that way. My favorite performances to watch are of artists who appear to be making an existential jailbreak.
When I first got into sound art, it felt like a lot of people were just making things up as they went and then retroactively adding meaning to their work. I still think that is a part of it, I can sure fit into that at times, but now I’m seeing the flip side—many folks seem to know exactly what they’re doing, and the art ends up feeling a bit too safe. Really, in all types of music and art. There’s value in that, but I think experimental music should still feel like an experiment. So much in the scene seems to be defined by educational institutions, famous mentors, or expensive gear rather than by any real sense of personal risk. I’m all for people getting lost, making something weird, even cringey—and seeing what comes out of it.
(Travel instruments)
4. How do you set up for your live gigs?
For overseas trips, I’ve put together a slowly evolving setup of invented instruments that fits neatly into a suitcase I bought nearly two decades ago in Scotland. This setup consists of two hybrid instruments, which contain the guts of several of my larger instruments mounted inside two frames that clamp together for travel. These include measuring tapes, an adjustable carbon fiber rod played with a screwdriver handle that I call the rotowhisker, and a number of springs and tines. I also bring a separate instrument: a monochord with an integrated Ebow with two long springs that are played by bowing, with their pitch adjusted by rolling a bocce ball along them. All of these instruments have integrated preamps to minimize noise. I also use a MIDI-controlled FM radio that I designed, along with a few other devices—such as an amplifier for creating localized feedback loops using an electromagnet. The instruments then run through a number of effects: low-pass filter, overdrive, tremolo, and a looper. For travel, I made neoprene sleeves out of scuba-diving material for all the instruments and effects, secured with Velcro to prevent damage.
For some local shows, I bring out some larger instruments that I don’t typically take on tour. I think these standalone instruments are sonically superior to the ones I’ve developed for travel. The increased size gives me more flexibility when mounting transducers and lets me use materials that don’t need to be particularly durable or compact. With the hybrid travel instruments, the piezos tend to pick up low-frequency sounds from adjacent components, which makes the overall sound muddier than the standalone versions. I’ve experimented with using high-pass filters to reduce this rumble—with some success—but they can also reduce the clarity of the sound in other ways.
There are a few different ways I prepare for live performances. I record almost every day, both as practice and as a way of collecting material for upcoming projects. I have a folder on my hard drive that I’ve been adding to since the start of covid. Most of these recordings are done using my travel performance setup, which is usually arranged on a table in my studio. I try to record at least 10 minutes a day, but before important shows, I may aim for 30 minutes or more.
Since returning from my recent trips to the Middle East and Midwest, I’ve been trying to record daily using only a single instrument. I hope to eventually feel comfortable playing on just one instrument live for an entire set without the performance becoming tedious. Additionally, along with these single-instrument recordings, I’d like to develop some software as a compositional tool—something in PD that selects complementary sounds from different categories and helps arrange and perform them via a MIDI controller. With this setup, I could create a live and evolving audio collage using the sounds of my instruments.
(Alex Boardman, Bryan Day, L. Eugene Methe / Expensive People at Grapefruit Records, Omaha)
5. How did you feel about collaborating with anyone before you met? What brought you together and how did you find the communication?
Collaborating with people before meeting them in person was how most of my duo projects came together before I moved out of Iowa in the late 1990s. That usually involved making a pair of long recordings—mostly pretty dense noise—that my collaborator would then add to and edit to form the two sides of a tape. Later on, I started breaking things into smaller chunks. I wish I still had the recording sessions from those days so I could see how I approached the mixing, but unfortunately, I deleted most of those early files after finishing the albums.
A lot of the people whom I first started working with in the 90s were folks I met through the label or online platforms like Noiseweb, Freenoise and MP3.com. I had friends who were already connected to a pretty large network of artists, and once I had a website and a few releases out on the label, people started reaching out about doing releases. In turn, I would ask some of them if they wanted to work on a project together. I also tried to connect people on the label with each other to collaborate—which was kind of fun, kind of weird, now that I think about it. :)
These days, I more often work with other artists in person, both for one-off sessions and more formalized projects or bands. Lately, I’ve been doing more ad-hoc duo collaborations in my home studio. I go through phases—sometimes organizing a bunch of in-person sessions, other times just focusing on my own recordings. I record all of those collaborative sessions, but I usually don’t put much effort into releasing them unless we feel it’s something particularly special. That being said, I think that many of the most interesting collaborations involve combining different processes other than just an improvised recording session—like trading files, or working with a bit more discussion and planning. So, I’ve been getting back into trading audio files again. I think I'm kind of going full circle to the way I used to do things 25 years ago.
(Amanda Irarrázabal + Marco Albert - ōg- Cassette)
6. In an ever changing distribution of music how do you see your place and how do you feel about physical releases?
As a business, my labels have never made any money from the music that I've released, so I'm continuing as usual, paycheck to paycheck. As for online distributors, I've never been too impacted by the shift to digital. I did get a pretty nice deal through one of the founders of a major online distribution network—someone originally from Omaha—which I use alongside physical releases for albums that seem like they might reach a new audience. I don't get much control using that network, so some folks opt out rather than have their stuff pop up on Spotify or YouTube. I think a lot of experimental music artists still prefer releasing physical albums although oftentimes they will include a card with a Bandcamp download code.
I still love having physical releases of my own music as well. I travel quite a bit for my day job, and having something nice to give, sell, or trade with folks I meet is a great way to make an impression on a local scene. I can hand them out like business cards, sell them at shows, or send them to local radio stations. Trading music has really been one of the big motivators behind starting a label and releasing my own work in the first place. I find it fascinating to hear what people are working on in different parts of the world—how people can be working on similar types of music while being so culturally distant. Physical releases don't just disappear into a collection of audio files like downloaded music; they feel more permanent.
That said, I do think the days of releasing music on physical media—at least on a large scale—are numbered. The process is polluting, and I'm sure there's a lot of waste I'm not even aware of. It's also becoming more expensive to mail physical releases, especially with a more strict VAT in Europe, and who knows if upcoming tariffs and duties in the US will make an even bigger impact over the next few years. I do know that, at the moment, it costs a lot of folks I send music to in Europe a couple of euros per package I mail for review. That really isn't sustainable.
It seems like every few years there's an article or report from one of the larger journalism outlets about the resurgence of tapes and vinyl sales in popular music. I wonder how many of those sales are for younger folks buying physical releases as collectibles to display but are listened to online. In the YouTube influencer sphere, there’s so much content focused on hyping collectibles that maybe there's a chance some of that could trickle down to micro-edition experimental music labels as well. But, a lot of folks are living in smaller homes and apartments now, and there just isn’t space for massive collections—the walls of tapes, CDs, and vinyl that I used to see. I've been told that CDs are still very popular in Japan, while friends in India say CDs are out and cassettes are the biggest thing, so the popularity could definitely be regional.
(Public Eyesore Stickers)
7. You run your own labels - how does it work these days?
I try to put out an album a month on one of my two labels. Sometimes artists get behind, or I get behind and I end up releasing two or three things a month. I'm in that spot at the moment. I have 8 albums coming out in the next 4 months. That really throws me off, so I'm not adding anything new to the schedule until I'm all caught up. But I am really excited about some of the things that are coming up. This month, I have a double CD by Eugene Chadbourne and Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and in June an LP by Andy Puls' project A Magic Whistle. It's definitely worth it. I got a bit behind because I was in Kuwait and the middle east for more than a month and then went on a short tour of the Midwest immediately after that. I try not to do anything when I'm out of town.
A large percentage of artists on the label are friends of mine, people I've met on tours or from trading albums. Seldom do I get a cold inquiry email that results in a release anymore, but it does happen every now and then. I've been meeting some very interesting artists on overseas trips, a personal connection is the most important to me. I was in India in March and met an improvising instrument builder named Rahul Jigyasu that worked with another sound artist in Indonesia and I'm releasing their cassette this autumn. I don't really like to release stuff by folks I don't know well because it can feel like the release is just a notch in someone's stick, just a stepping stone and that's it. It’s a bummer when you put a bunch of work and money on someone's art and then when you finally meet them in person they're like "Who the hell are you?"
I really like cultivating this little microcosm of sound - every now and then there are little flashes of interest, but it has never become anything too scrutinized. There really has never been a strong need or desire for artistic consistency. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be doing the label, I can see at least some kind of pause in the next year. I'm at about 300 releases, if I count both Public Eyesore and Eh? albums, and it might be just a bit too pricey to justify in these uncertain times. I might just cap things off for a while with a pair of 12 inch vinyl releases later in the year. But, I've been saying the same kind of thing for the last decade, so, we'll see.
Thank you, Bryan!
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