Interview Conducted by Andrew Shaffer aka Go Outside

Andrew: What role does music play in your life?

Carolyn: I think music has been a source of comfort and company most of my life. I was a latchkey kid growing up in the 1980s and my mom had a very specific rule-- no watching MTV. So I let MTV run all day, back when it was mostly music programming. New Order really stands out in my mind from that time. Later, as a young adult, I started experiencing live music in the early 2000s around Chicago and ran around with a pack of friends. I remember shows like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, My Bloody Valentine, St. Vincent, Chin Up Chin Up. It was communal, I remember standing around the Empty Bottle and Schubas like we would be 25 forever. We were all broke and riding out a recession, but somehow we always scrounged ticket money. Now as a mid life adult, I make music in my house, I collect records. It is a source of joy.

A: Is there a moment you can remember that you realized music was important to you?

C: I had this close friend growing up named Evan who really influenced me musically. I remember he and his dad had electric guitars (Fender Telecasters), and tons of CDs and records. We played together in a youth group band, which sounds pretty cheesy now, but it was everything then in 1990s Texas. I bought my first guitar because of Evan-- my parents wouldn’t let me have an electric guitar, so I remember toting around this huge Fender classical guitar with nylon strings. I was so proud of it.  I learned to properly wrap cables because of Evan. He introduced me to The Talking Heads, and I just kind of knew this was going to be a huge part of my life. We recently reconnected after a decade and he sent me a picture of a modular synth meme while working out of an Austin studio with “real synths”. We are divided on the matter. (Laughing) We were part of this kind of moment in music history where Tooth and Nail was still pretty good, and the Cornerstone festival was still going in Southern Illinois, so I drove out once to see his band Ethan Durelle play. There was kind of this venn diagram of Danielson and early Sufjan Stevens that inhabited this space, and it was just a large thriving community of people traveling together with a bunch of dollar bills, selling merch, bartering mastering services for screen printing, pulling U-Hauls to get to the next show. I still navigate music with that same mindset I cultivated 20 years ago, bartering skills, crashing on couches, making the table bigger as new folks come in.

A: You have a beautiful description of how you made your recent single "Delicate Feedbacks" on your website, I wonder if you could speak a bit about how your sense of place plays a role in your creative process?

C: Thank you for reading that, Andrew. I think it is very much an ADHD kid thing (speaking for myself, but I have noticed many of my peers speak on this condition as a creative driver) to take in way too much of your surroundings and have it stick with you. I notice everything. I notice with all my senses. It can be overwhelming. Where I live now is quiet and adjacent to the Patapsco Valley in Maryland. That’s why a lot of sea life and water shows up in my work. It is a completely different affair from anything I would make living in Chicago the last decade. I have traded ambient streetscape noises like bus doors and passing trains, bicycle bells for wind and storms, waterfalls and bugs.

A: Do you often start with an idea/concept or do your tracks stem from sound experimentation?

C: I do start with an idea or concept. Sometimes it is a mission to recreate a person, or a feeling, a moment in my personal history. Sometimes I collect an interesting field recording and I want to recreate the setting I found that noise in. I am very interested in negotiating my nostalgia for people and experiences. I think that is where it comes from. Of course this all evolves into sound experimentation as you bring these pieces to the table. 

A: You have a very eclectic collection of instruments/sound makers/toys...what's your relationship to your gear?

C: I view gear as the tools necessary to express myself. Sometimes it is difficult being involved in modular synths where I feel like a lot of the culture is about collecting modules just to have them, versus really assessing what you need to create with. I am interested in small makers and DIY culture, which, I recently met Karl Ekdahl of KNAS at a couple of Baltimore shows and I was very interested in their thoughts on DIY as the term, and not boutique. I have been thinking through why I choose gear, and I do think a lot of the maker ethos behind gear resonates with me. I like SOMA (my partner and I built a DIY Lyra 8) because of their philosophy of design, or even how to navigate the world as a human. I like Noise Engineering because of the partnership that steers it. I see a lot of myself reflected in co-founder Kris Kaiser’s words, I see a lot of how I think through things even reflected in their module interfaces-- like using onomatopoeia to describe sounds. I recently came over to the Monome side of things, purchasing a Teletype and I enjoy the community driven approach of sharing scripts, and collective problem solving. My sound makers and small effects are pretty special too and each have a story. I have a very prized fish bell given to me for my birthday by my friend Barry Schmetter who was known as Resonant Space. He was brilliant and a lot of the reason why I continue working in sound. We lost Barry in August of this year. Bells have come to hold deep meaning for my relationship with Barry. At his memorial, we all rang bells outside the Rhizome in DC as a send off. A few months later, Kris, Patrick, and Markus at Noise Engineering sent me their Debel Iteritas Alia module, which is a bell voice. This had deep meaning for me, and really brought home being part of a large community. I know music is not always an easy space to negotiate and comes with a lot of critique and ego, but there are so many people here for the right reasons. 

A: With "Delicate Feedbacks" and your earlier track "Atlantic Drift" I love how the different elements fade in and out in a way that feels very organic. How important is arrangement with your pieces? How do you approach it?

C: Oh gosh Andrew, I don’t know what I am doing. At all. And I don’t think anyone would fight me on this. I read a lot of thoughts from ambient composers like Eno and Sakamoto, how the elements should interact in the aural space-- but I don’t know. I work with Markus Cancilla (who works for Noise Engineering) on mastering, and we sit together and listen until we agree. Markus is more of an industrial music, large Doepfer system in the wall of their apartment, has a mohawk and a muscle car, and I am the kind of person who will listen to a bug for 2 hours. When my pieces first come back from Markus they are always super loud (I mean what is mastering but the make it loud service) and the elements I captured begin to startle me, like “Markus, this bug sounds like it is sitting on my shoulder instead of nicely in the background.” Or Markus will be like “I removed the ambient dogs barking in the waterfall pond, they are distracting.” And I am like, “can you please put them back in, they are part of my composition because the dogs were in the swimming hole with me.” So yes, organic. I am a former journalist, I want to report the scene exactly as it is. Also Markus is lovely and one of my favorite people to work with. 

A: I love the playlist you made to go with our interview. It covers a lot of ground stylistically but I feel like I can hear the connective tissue between these songs and your own music. 

C: I like a reverb delay. I like texture. I like personal elements from the field. I think the first album that influenced me in high school was Urban Hymns by The Verve. I had never heard anything like that in that era, and I still turn to that album. Current fascinations are Fred Thomas and their synth compositions, Mount Kimbie and all their collaborative works. I like musicians who are always experimenting and changing genres. It is so clear to me their music output is like air and I can see them in my head holed up with a four track in some corner of their houses while everyone is sleeping. 

A: I also know you're very active in your local scene and I imagine having those personal connections with other artists influences your work. How do you feel those things affect your process? 

C: I do try to organize locally. I think I tend to skew a little more outgoing. I know it was helpful for me when I was beginning to be taken under someone’s wing and encouraged. I previously mentioned my friend Barry who really modeled that for me, so I try to keep that going. I have another friend named Jerry in Philadelphia. He is an extraordinary human who is a professor of ceramics, a gallery owner, organizes Philly MOTS, a licensed wrestling franchise (really, it is ridiculous and the TDLR is a bunch of art kids fighting each other with made up personas), and an experimental musician negotiating a classic ARP 2600 and lap steel. Each year Jerry invites me up to play an activated temporary space called Velocities-- where we basically lug our synthesizers into an abandoned building and play all day long with visual projections. I am glossing over how incredible this event is. Jerry is the kind of guy who will make a hydrophone and go stand around in an ice flow in the Atlantic all day. I am getting ready to leave for a show in Philadelphia called Passages, and we have had a lot of back and forths as I put my piece together for the one hour set. He is encouraging and the kind of person who doesn’t demand mastery or perfectionism out of a performance. He is very much about the process involved, the inherent experiment and I think that is how I am wired too. 

A: Are there any non-musical things that you draw inspiration from? Books? Movies? Visual Art?

C: Oh yeah, I have a whole slew of odd things that seep into my work. Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, the early 1980s Time Life series Mysteries of the Unknown, the films 3 Women and Donnie Darko (which my name comes from), the art of Howardena Pindell, thinkers and artists affiliated with Black Mountain College, the poems of Tony Hoagland and Hayan Charara. I read a lot of poetry. I love going to museums. I love going to the library. I remain a curious and strange kid. 

A: What are your thoughts on the end of things?

C: I understand you meant this to be initially playful when you sent this my way, but the world has changed since the beginning of October. It feels like an end when we watch severe atrocities unfold in real time. I work as a communications director for an annual festival in Washington DC called Sound Scene. It is focused around sound art, and last year’s theme was “The End”. The installations negotiated everything from climate collapse to relationships ending. I think we are always at a sort of end, and I think I have always found that community is the only way through, no matter the severity of the end.

A: What's a recent lovely thing that happened to you?

C: I am realizing I might be a little cynical since I cringed at this question. 2023 has been a very hard year. A lot of loss. I think the lovely thing, the star of recent months, is after we lost Barry / Resonant Space, seeing the way everyone collectively worked to preserve everything he built. The DC Modular Collective continues in its new iteration as the DC Modular Society, Sonic Frontiers, Barry’s experimental festival continued on with the help of so many. There were incredible songs and compositions about Barry. I met new people whom I treasure at Barry’s memorial. I got to know other people better in our community. This difficult thing turned into a bright light. 

A: If you could give one thing to every person in the world right now, what would it be?

C: Permission to be fully visible as yourself and deeply loved as yourself. I guess I am not so cynical after all.

ARTIST PLAYLIST

We asked Carolyn to send us what she’s listening to and inspired by in the form of a playlist which you can check out on Spotify below:

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