Sarah Lowndes

The best thing about yesterday is you’ll never have to live through it again.

I saw Cage in a line starting back with, let’s say, Bach and you go forward through Mozart, Haydn, and then you get to Beethoven and then you get to Brahms and eventually you get to Schoenberg and Berg and then after that you get to Darmstadt, Stockhausen, and Cage, conflicting schools: the European school musique concrete people versus the American tradition which parallels all the arguments with paint

I saw Art & Language and the way the words were and the conflict of ideas, just the challenge to the form and the process, you’re building but at the same time you’re cutting the legs from underneath it. That made sense to me. Particularly, you know, after Darmstadt. Where do you go after Cage? You know, what is there left to do? You know? For me writing a song like Mistakes of Trotsky is more fun than talking about ‘baby, baby, I love you’. I don’t mind that, but I don’t want to do that.

There was a different agenda in music. I trace it back to about 1940, when musicians like us started to think a bit like painters.

MT: I appreciate what Keith says about craftsmanship, because when I grew up, real records came out on real labels, and when I got into punk and do-it-yourself, that was like somehow the vanity press side of things degraded the activity, you know what I mean? The reason that you put it out yourself is because nobody else will. If art is only about self-expression, why bother? What isn’t about self-expression?

I got three sets of lyrics from Michael Baldwin. One of the songs that came out of that was Mistakes of Trotsky,

I remember talking to Beefheart one time and he said ‘how’s your band going?’ and I said ‘not democratic’ and he said ‘oh, that’s bad’.

There’s this great description in David Toop’s Ocean of Sound (1995) of an early AMM performance where he sort of describes you all being on stage, ‘men are aimlessly busy or busily aimless’, he says, ‘standing there looking around I can realise that no-one else in the audience realises this is a performance.

you can think a lot of things at the same time, you can live while playing music which I think is one of the most interesting things about performance so there is some part of one’s mind

Every room has a different history. Sounds are also likely to be read in a site-specific way, so if the people are in a room in New York and hear something going ‘du-du-du-du-du’, it could be a tractor, or in England it might be a sewing machine or whatever, but in Hebron, it could be a military helicopter.