Shy Tone

In a recent correspondence with Rhizome head honcho Jon Dale we discussed why a lot of people seem to have directed their attention for marginal sounds from downunder to New Zealand music and basically ignored the huge continent which is Australia. One aspect that Jon brought up is that the New Zealanders seem to be better at promoting themselves. I am not sure such a statement is valid in general but when it comes to The lost domain I have a feeling that might very well be the case, because if people just would have been able to hear this Brisbane combo's music I am sure they already would have a fan base of the same size as No Neck Blues Band or Jackie-O Motherfucker. It seems like they've rarely sent their CD-Rs (and earlier tape releases) anywhere overseas, and as far as I can tell they barely sell them in their hometown. But does that stop me from loving every single move they make? Of course not, and this interview is besides my general curiosity about the band intended to make a few more people feel as privileged as I did the day I first was able to enjoy the intoxicating serenity of their amazing two-track CD-R something is... on the aforementioned Rhizome imprint.

The lost domain is basically two guys, Simon Ellaby and David Mac Kinnon together with an ever-shifting cluster of talented musicians/personalities. They've been at it since the late '80s, when they were called the invisible empire, and if any of their more recent work is any indicator in terms of sonic qualities I'll have a lot of exciting moments in front of me when diving deep into their back catalogue. In a recent review of something is... I described their epic folk/jazz improvisations as if "the muted wailing of the desolate wind over some abandoned cabin in the forest would turn into a haunted piece of music". That should give you an idea of what their low-key grooves and spiritual resonance is all about. As if to harmonize with the mystique and obscurity of the actual music, all involved (at the moment I am typing this the official line-up includes seven people but I have a feeling that's likely to have changed by the time this piece is published) have bogus identities (sometimes more than one) dating back to the mid '90s. We obviously felt an urge to figure out who is who and to get a guided tour through the lost domain so we got in touch with David MacKinnon AKA John Henry Calvinist and Simon Ellaby AKA Frank for the intriguing chat that follows.

What was your childhood like? Where were you born?

David: I was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962. Like most, I can't remember much about my early childhood except fragments. My parents were both primary school teachers (grandparents farmers and builders) so I grew up w/a lot of books around, and rapidly became a bookworm. The other major early influence on me was travelling around the Australian Outback - we went round Australia when I was seven - and a lot of my aesthetic sensibility comes out of those experiences. The last key influence was probably my secondary schooling which, after a happy childhood, was something of a social nightmare.

Simon: Simon was born peacefully in Brisbane in 1969. Frank, his soul brother, came into this world in the lower Mississippi valley at exactly the same time as his twin, Henry Thomas, was being born in Texas, that being 1874, the afternoon. My childhoods were all charming and music-filled. From a very tender age my grandparents and parents would play me Lightnin' Hopkins records and I would dream of Caddilacs. I played sport and surfed and the weather was fine.

What got you first involved with music?

David: My family wasn't at all musical - dad is tone deaf and has a hole in his left eardrum, and although mum likes music, it isn't a big priority w/her. My oldest remembered favorites were "Tijuana Taxi" & "The Harry Lime Theme" that Spike loved to use in Goon Shows - actually, everything I do is deeply influenced by the Goons. Anyway, I seem to have bumbled into music by natural inclination, as any pushing going on was probably in the other direction. Weirdly, I actually started playing music before I really got interested in it...This was in Manangatang, in 1974, where we lived for six months in the school principle's house when he was on leave, and his spare room was full of all sorts of musical instruments. The one I fiddled around with was a 60s electronic organ w/bass chord keys, & all I did was screw round with slowly moving bassy clusters of chords & notes.

After that, I started listening to music more intently, I'm not really certain why - just a Top 40 station - got irritated by the downward trend in the expressiveness of most new stuff, and - being a bookworm - then read up on rock history. A local community radio station 3CR had a weekly blues program run by serious collectors - the kind who think the rot set in either the '30s, or the mid-'50s - and I discovered the very best of the roots thing - first blues and rock'n'roll, later old-timey and jazz. No great virtue on my part - I was just lucky. So by the time punk came along, I saw it as one renaissance among many, rather than as an originating event - a much more useful perspective, as it turned out.

And when I started making music in my early teens, I tried to learn by playing, not practicing. That came from the old oral traditions, as well as my first experiments. Overall, too, my sense of music seems to combine what I got from landscape - a "soundscape" orientation, if you will - and the dialogic, call and response thing from language's social/contextual dimension. Say expression as pragmatics and prosody, rather than grammar, which never interested me. Neat thing about thinking of music in this way is that it fits perfectly w/the oralist approach - it doesn't have much to say to conventional "technicalities" of music, so it doesn't interfere.

Simon: Being in Australia is a lot like being in the hill country. You're tucked away, removed. You have a sense of the real action being elsewhere, somewhere in a metropolis. So you gather in around you all you find important, intrinsic, and hold it close, then from that holding, that pressure, you release yourself unto freedom and your own brand new bag.

Were there any particular things, growing up in Australia, that influenced you?

David: One thing about being Australian is that the upfront egalitarianism makes it easier to look harder at collective processes. Metin, an early French observer of the place, spoke of Australian politics as "socialism sans doctrines" - and, given the trouble doctrines have caused, we're luckier when we're spared them. This mindset makes it somewhat simpler to avoid falling back on overly individualistic notions of creativity - not invariably, but the possibility is there, nonetheless...It also fits well w/the bullshit detectors that are also key parts of the ethos. These parts of being Australian are not at all a bad heritage...

What's Brisbane like?

David: I only moved here for the bats...you'd better ask the local boy, he's the one that fully resonates. Ask him about old pubs, why doncha?

Simon: Pockets of humid joy. When I was brought into this world it was here, I was raised and schooled here in all the fine arts of cold cold beer, sweaty days, cricket and escaping to the beach, my cousins in New Orleans and I often compare notes. I know no other. I have traveled only astrally with my brother Frank, and we have seen many fine things, but return always when we wake to these pockets of humid joy. (For the bookish, read Johnno by David Malouf, it's not all the favourable but very descriptive, also for a more recent read Praise by Andrew Mcghan). And my grandmother was a personal friend of the man who went on to become the logo for the local brewery (XXXX Brewery, we can't spell around here), did I mention that my father was born in a pub, he had bowed legs due to my grandmother carrying too many kegs of beer when she was pregnant.

When and how did The Lost Domain first get together? Who was in the band then, and who's been in and out of it along the way?

David: Simon and I met at university in 1987, got drunk a lot, shared tastes in literature and music very strongly - also an aversion to postmodern theory - and later, after Simon got sick, a history of mental illness. My poison's manic depression, Simon's is schizophrenia, so we cover most the bases there...In 1990, we started messing around with overdubbing, using a lot of distortion, with guitar and mandolin. I'd already done some bedroom recordings in Melbourne from 1981 on, but nothing'd ever come out and I'd forgotten them until recently. Anyway, neither of us were musicians, although I'd cobbled together an open tuned style by this stage, but mostly, I think, we wanted to make a bloody horrible noise. Say "Sister Ray" without the pretty bits - or the rhythm section.

On the other hand, you could also see it as a very noisy string band - as we often did - or as the fife and drum band we wanted to form, except neither of us could play fife or drums. It's the formative influence of archaic styles in particular that's marked the band over the longest term. For example, in 1999, I put together a list, today it'd be extended with more jazz - Sun Ra in particular comes to mind - and third world brass music, but this represented my key sources as of then, and few of them are recent...

garfield akers and joe callicott + the beale st. sheiks + bechet/spanier big four + captain beefheart and his magic band + the birmingham jug band + dad blackard's moonshiners + james brown and the jbs + tim buckley + the bum steers + sonny burgess and the pacers + r.l. burnside + cabaret voltaire + blind james campbell and his nashville street band + can + cannon's jug stompers + rev. c.c. chapman and congregation + alex chilton + church of god in christ + austin coleman and group + coloured balls + the cramps + james "peck" curtis + james luther dickinson + the dirty three + + brother claude ely + sleepy john estes + will ezell, baby jay and the graves bros. + john fahey and his orchestra + the fall + charlie feathers + feedtime + harmonica frank floyd + frazier and patterson + fungus brains + the georgia crackers + the golden eagles + pat hare + sid hemphill and band + king solomon hill + wright holmes + son house and band + peg leg howell and his gang + charles ives + skip james + elder a. johnson + blind willie johnson + freddie keppard and his blues cardinals + junior kimbrough + king david's jug band + the kingsmen + the kings of rhythm + the laughing clowns + professor longhair and his shuffling hungarians + emmett lundy + fred mcdowell and his blues boys + the meters + hoyt ming and his pep steppers + the modern lovers + jess morris + narmour and smith + the necks + j.p. nestor + neu! + one string sam + panther burns + harry partch + charley patton + pere ubu + sam phillips + the premiers + "ragtime texas" + the red headed fiddlers + rev. d.c. rice and congregation + dink roberts + eck robertson + the roane county ramblers + erik satie + the seeds + b.f. shelton + deacon l. shinault and congregation + the sonics + pete steele + the stooges + daddy stovepipe + napoleon strickland and the como fife and drum band + strontium dog + suicide + wallace swann and his cherokee string band + tall dwarfs + television + the 13th floor elevators + james "blood" ulmer + the velvet underground + tom waits + muddy waters and the headhunters + el watson + booker white and george "bullet" williams + robert pete williams + howlin' wolf and the houserockers + da costa woltz and his southern broadcasters + link wray and his raymen...

As to lineups, Dina Bojic joined us w/in a few months on 44 gallon drum - later "real" floor tom and bass drum - John Carleton joined, made sludgy noises on bass and organ, then left, Vicki Musgrave joined on toms, and then Dean McInerney on kit drums, Vicki left, Andrew Leavold replaced Dean, then left after Bettina Graham replaced Vicki on toms - enter Ian Wadley on kit drums and Greg Hilleard on lead/rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards and whatever - a few years later Ian, Bettina, and Dina all left us, sans drummers, were it not for Jeff Wegener, soon joined by Eugene Carchesio on everything, but mainly keyboards and reeds. Jeff left in 2001 - to be replaced by Jason, and when he left, we brought in Leighton Craig's keyboards and fiddle, and Rick Neville's upright bass. So, from having three drummers throughout the mid-90s, we're now charting drummerless territory...

Throughout, although Simon and I tend to dominate due to long tenure, the band has been a messy collective operation - no "songwriting" credits, or anything like that. As a band - as opposed to earlier overdubbing approaches - it took us a few years to learn how to play together - not that we had a lot of opportunities. Practice spaces are a problem, and most years we've only played a scant handful of gigs. Playing together - we record everything we do and always have - is the way we've always done it, practicing things has never been a priority. I've stuck mostly to guitar over the years, Simon's now switched - via 9 string guitar - to pocket trumpet and keyboards, but the basic impetus hasn't changed much.

I assume that the band is named after the Alain-Fournier book, right? What made you choose such a name?

David: When I was a mere sprig, one time in the outback the only radio station at all you could pick up where we were had a book reading every morning - and that was the book. I was about nine and I'd never heard anything like it. The rest of the family hated it - just like pre-war blues later on, funnily enough - but I was spellbound. Never actually read it, I think subconsciously I was afraid it wouldn't be as magical in print back home, but I remembered allright...

Now for the ridiculous tale of abortive band names. First - before we'd worked out we had something to say - we were the waldheim st war criminals (when you hear an unnatural act... you'll know why). Then we were the invisible empire - after a line in the Panther Burns masterpiece "Jump Suit". Not having any local Klan chapters (luckily) and being militantly uninterested in racism - must be the most irrelevant and one-dimensional form of human evil, hands down - I didn't know (duh) that it was the secret name of the Klan. I thought it was from some avant-garde manifesto - or that Tav'd made it up...Trouble was, when we wanted to change it, no-one could agree. Real trouble was, we loved the name, it had all of these lovely resonances - space/obscurity and a weird kind of twisted megalomania. A bit like Valis...

Finally, Mr. E (sensibly) refused to join unless we had a respectable name. We wrangled about it for months till I put my foot down (funny, that's usually Simon's job) after I'd sat down w/a kind of mental thesaurus and tried word matching to come up w/some kind of parallel. Midway through, the lost domain turned up, and you don't argue with epiphanies. Especially when that's what the book was about...

Simon: This Alain guy's book is a pearl really, about mystery, seeking and yearning for something delicate and ethereal, a treasure, the domain in which we are all at our best, spiritually and aesthetically, where we are all walking with the king, in time and rhythm. And when you dream such fine dreams, and seek such fine goals, every step towards them is joy. And, you know - A Grand Mule - who can top that....

I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised when I heard for how long you've been around. Is it a conscious decision to keep things obscure and somewhat mysterious?

David: There's a bunch of reasons - none related to wanting to be mysterious, although we will admit to enjoying confusing people...

Simon: We've been working our end, just waiting for some big shot record producer to come along with the fancy clothes and fast cars - someone with fine taste in ethno-musicology and cigars. But so far, no cigar...

David: Too true. Aside from that, I'm something of a hermit, so promotion doesn't come naturally. Everyone else in the band has just been in it for the music, and very happy to leave that sort of shit to me until recently - so it basically didn't get done. Plus we have no money (annoying, but a great excuse). And I'm also too good a historian to avoid the lesson of what happens to definitely non-mainstream artists if they start thinking like careerists. With no labels even vaguely compatible in Brisbane, and none until recently in the rest of Australia, and no overseas connections, it was easier just to concentrate on enjoying making music - I figured eventually our track record would speak for itself...

Still, we did contact people...Bruce Milne first with blondes in the mid 80s (an old Melbourne friend, then head of Au-Go-Go), then several handpicked fanzines over the next year. No response. Tom of Standing 8 Counts took a bunch over to New Zealand w/him in 1986 - I got one review out of that - I also gave copies of the dead set personally to Chris Knox, Rick from Feedtime, Ed Kuepper and then mailed one to John Fahey after that - and I got my first response from someone I'd actually heard of! Jon Dale took my remaining copies of the cassette releases in 1988, and sent them to people like Byron Coley - no reviews, no offers, no nuthin'...After that, Jeff called on his old friend (Jim White of The Dirty Three) and asked him to shop around a handful of the empire never ended... (our first CDR) - no replies, again...Simon's been mailing out stuff in larger numbers over the last two years - and, funnily enough...The whole story's rather depressing, really.

The first time I heard the lost domain was actually not until 2003 and the excellent something is... CD-R on the brilliant Rhizome label. How did you get in touch with Jon Dale in the first place? Care to tell us a bit about the process behind the album?

Simon: Jon's into alchemy in a big way, he took two of our little gems and made this big arse engagement ring out of them, he's a genius really.

David: Met Jon in 1988, from memory, when he was traveling about checking out stuff all over the place. It's a good sign of the sheer bloody size/isolation of places in Australia that, despite loving the band, he's never managed to make it back here, or even see us live, as we didn't have any gigs when he was up. Typical, that. When you think of Australia, remember that the minimum distance between cities is a thousand km - kind of puts the kibosh on casual intercity travel.

The album was originally two long improvised "singles" - the first we had no game plan at all for except to play as quietly as possible and see what eventuated. The second started with a tuning I'd come up w/on a crappy old guitar I own that is a poor player, but has a lovely old pickup. I've always liked tunings that play themselves, and this time I decided to steer clear of fretting and provide a kind of variegated drone as a bed for the rest of them to wallow in. I showed it to Eugene during smoko, and he started playing that brilliant organ bit. When the rest came back in, we sprung it on them cold and the result is what you hear... By the way, there aren't any edits or overdubs - what you hear is what we did - no practicing either, if you don't count a minute's fiddling around w/Mr E. before the second track.

Along with the album comes some brilliant liner notes. Care to tell our less fortunate readers (who yet haven't heard the album) a bit about them? Who came up with the concept?

Simon: I was driving to work one day in my buggy 'cause the wagon broke an axle again, and I kept thinking about this book about a Grand Mule or something like that, so I went into the library and checked it out, and some fellow in France wrote this book called Le Grand Meaulnes, so when young Leighton Craig who recorded that great desert island disc, Organ Notes, rewrote some of that for the notes I thought to myself, "Yes, exactly."

The album strikes me as being as much inspired by the landscapes as it is dialogic. There is a strong sense of a "call and response" approach to the proceedings, which gives the whole thing a wonderful flow. What would you say characterize a good listener?

Simon: Between my right foot and David's guitar, there is an unspoken and unspeakable language of field hollers and work songs - if I know it's Tuesday, he knows tomorrow's Wednesday.

David: Now you can see why I'm the band intellectual - I sometimes know what day it is...I won't go into detail about aesthetics and such but you're right about the importance of both call and response and landscapes (real and imaginary) in our music. Another thing worth adding here is that people underestimate - in non-dance approaches - the sense in which dance precedes music in its developed forms, and that lack of attention to the movement aspect - as w/the emotional aspect - screw things up. The flow comes from the body just as much as it comes from sensitive interaction on an aural level and any evocation of place we can conjure. When we had three drummers, we used to joke that because we couldn't get audiences to dance, we had to internalize that function within the band. Same thing applies today, although it's much less obvious.

As to a good listener, what it means at base is simply accepting that the other person isn't you, and so you have to give them space (in whatever way) and make an imaginative leap of understanding before reminding yourself that they still aren't you, and that understanding's only a metaphor. And all this without thinking. Playing our kind of music's the best training in listening I can think of, because we demand coherence - unlike many improv styles - but it has to be emergent. And we know it when we find, too... If anyone's interested in the question on a scholarly level, I can strongly recommend the great theorist of the dialogic, Mikhail Bakhtin - my favorite cultural theorist/historian, by a long shot. Contrary to ignorant rumour, he is in NO way a postmodernist...

I am curious to learn more about the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Care to fill in the gaps?

Simon: A quick flick pass onto the band intellectual, and he's away folks, flying down the left flank of the field...

David: Jeeze Mats, that'd take a book. Well, get Morson & Emerson's Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics - so far it's the only one to do the job properly. Usually I'd go for the original, but in this case - unless you wanna read everything - secondary is best. Bakhtin was - appropriately - an improvisational kind of writer, chewing over the same cluster of very basic questions over fifty years (when he wasn't recycling his manuscripts for cigarette papers during WW2 - makes me cry with laughter that one) and the key insights are scattered all over. I can't spot a single great quote they missed - so the book is as much anthology as commentary and exposition.

I'd better warn you, though...this stuff is addictively insightful. His original concerns were with the ethical/spiritual demands of authorship. Sound familiar? And if Marx is Hegel turned on his head, as the cliche goes, then Bakhtin is the acrobat to Kant's straight man. He started off as a neo-Kantean classicist in his very earliest work (but, unusually, Hellenism, for its cultural pluralism) then entirely broke free through developing critiques of Freud and (particularly) Marx and Saussure - the founding father of the mainstream of semiotics - and hence, all that pomo shit... Freud pushed him to confront development, Marx to deal sensibly (unlike Marx - or Freud) w/economics/social and Saussure (sensible but a born formalist) to ask what the hell language actually is, and what this says about aesthetics. Funnily enough, entirely independently at the same time, the developmental psychologist Vygotsky was building explicitly scientifically based models which perfectly dovetail w/Bakhtin's - and have revolutionized thinking about early childhood after they were "rediscovered" (took 40 years or so). Oh, and by the way, everyone in the contemporary neurosciences from Oliver Sacks on down worships at the grave of Luria - Vygotsky's pupil - who switched to neurology, partly because it was safer. That's real conscilience for you...

To be blunt...the culture wars are over, folks - the key theories were developed in Russia in the 20s, but nobody noticed.

Finally, the meat of Mr. B - dialogue not dialectic (embodied, not abstract), the multiple voicings inherent in every expression (but living voices - not the zombie dance of "intertextuality"), utterances (conceived dialogically) not sentences or words as the basic units of language (think about it) cultural pluralism from below (the carnival bit we all love), genre as modes of action in space/time (sounds abstract, but its actually a very easy way to think of them, once you get the knack), and in parallel w/Vygotsky, human development as reciprocal interaction. If you think about it you can see why this guy - who virtually didn't write a word about music - is so key to my approach to aesthetics...

His was a profoundly ethical yet fully social conception of what we are that rings like a bell no matter what culture you're looking at. And no wonder, all three big cheeses he critiqued were profoundly Eurocentric. Hey, so was Bakhtin, in his own way - no saint, he - but an early childhood divided between the Black Sea and the Baltic, and over 20 years teaching in central Asia gave him at least some understanding of real cultural divides - as opposed to the petty internal squabbles Europeans called cultural difference back then. And he deals w/all the "concerns" of pomo - except self-serving academic careerism - but offers answers that are useful to the working "artist". To me, that's the acid test...

Simon: And he's back again folks, fresh from having scored in the top corner. Now he'll settle down, nestle into his chair, and join the rest of us as we free our minds of theory by doing it without even thinking, secure in the knowledge that the gatekeeper is among us, and with us in our easy, free-flowing thoughtlessness.

In a way I'd say that you have this approach in common with bands like Jackie-O Motherfucker, No Neck Blues Band and Avarus. Do you feel any kinship with any (or all) of these bands?

Simon: I hear these kids going round, and I like them you know, makes me feel kinda glad to see such love in this bitter little world. I hope they sell lots of records, and that we do too.

David: Jon sent me a tape of NNBB a few years ago, but it was too formalist to appeal to me - he did say the album was atypical, but it was all he had at the moment and I hear their other stuff is much closer to what we do (dunno which one it was - you might ask Jon). Jackie-O I only heard of late last year, and Avarus is new to me. Maybe if they came to visit it might change, but we've been too isolated in our own little furrow for too long to feel real kinship...Still, it's nice to know that convergent evolution is finally working for us.

There's a strong folk/old-time vibe throughout the disc's 75 minutes. The rumor tells me that you (David) are a real scholar of all of that Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music stuff and a huge John Fahey obsessive. Is that true? Would you consider yourself a record collector?

David: If I've been an obsessive, it was more w/pre-war blues in my teens, the Cramps (my only full-blown contemporary fandom - I did the liner notes for the first 2 volumes of the Born Bad series) in my late teens, and the Velvet Underground since I was sixteen. I'd admit to being a scholar of archaic American vernacular musics - and have been for over twenty years - but, like Fahey, I've never had much interest in contemporary volksmusiks, finding them generally too bloodless for my tastes. So, I'd known of Fahey for years - as one of the pre-war "blues mafia" - before I heard any of his music. I only picked up on Fahey - and discovered old-timey stuff around the same time courtesy of Nick Tosches and Harry Smith - belatedly in the mid '80s. It was this double shock that led me to first think of making music seriously myself, and getting more systematic about my scholarship and aesthetic ideas.

And no, I'm not a record collector - I find all that obsessing about rarity/packaging etc...gets in the way something chronic.

Simon: Am I a record collector, no. I do own a recording of "Gimme a pig's foot and a bottle of beer." But I'm a simple man really, I just want to be a mole in the ground, or maybe a lizard in the spring, that's all.

But to tell you the truth there is just as much jazz and something deeply your own as there is folk in your music. How do you avoid doing too much at once?

Simon: I try to never do anything my right foot cannot understand. Even when wearing a khaftan.

David: The jazz comes more from Simon and the others than from me - I can't play any of that fancy shit at all...When I first started making music, I made a conscious decision - my last! - not to practice anything, play what came naturally due to my tastes, and see how it developed. In consequence, I'm a poor guitarist technically, but mine own. It also makes it easy to keep things simple...

When I played something is... the other day it suddenly hit me that it's deeply spiritual, if not even religious. How do you feel about such a comment?

David: How do I feel about such a comment? Privileged. As the great developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson observed, the basis of spiritual experience is a value-sensing mode parallel to - but entirely separate from - the pattern-sensing intellectual modes of thought. And this is a genuinely deep insight that most scientists haven't caught up with yet. So, while I'm not religious, I profoundly believe in the importance - and internal truth - of spiritual experience, and we seek it out however we can. It's great that you can sense this in our stuff, cause it means we've been finding something...

Simon - It's true, if it works, and I mean really works for you, this stuff will get you on a deep level, the magic when we make this music is tangible, unspoken and laden with beauty, you put down your horn or guitar or whatever, and look around at each other and you know, you just know, you've touched something, something that is...

Are you intentionally aiming for this spiritual feel or is that just something that happens?

David: To my mind, you literally can't aim for it - there are shortcuts - which are fun and often useful, but basically you just gotta hope. But not thinking is the real key - read Donaldson, she's full of insights here...Remember, in the beginning was the act. Words come later...

Simon: What sad saints would intend transcendence? We sit in a small circle when we play, my foot on the right, David on my left, mr e., l tone, papa lord god, Rick, Jason, and all the folks we play with and have ever played with, and ever will over and over into the distant future and pass the energy around and between and across, and we share and soothe, and give and take, and when it all works, we transfigure, we just goddamn transfigure. And we are there, walking with the king...

Would you consider yourself part of any Aussie scene?

Simon: ?

David: Ditto, although we do have affinities w/the Necks and the Dirty Three (to a lesser extent), who we played with in the mid '90s, before they became famous. Other than that, not really - if there was a scene, there'd be a label and promoters and you'd've heard of us already, probably. As far as I can tell, there's just a bunch of semi-isolated people doing interesting work - very few of whom get any notice at all. Ask Jon, he's the networker - I'm only your humble local hermit.

So, are you working on any music now? When can we expect some new lost domain material to appear?

Simon: We're off this very afternoon to gather ourselves together for another session, Frank is just back from the canyons (of your mind? JHC), John Henry's been spotted about town in antiquarian bookstores, and the rest of the boys are all itching...It's the fleas, you know. We'll let you know how the tapes sound...

David (later): Damn good - might well be an album in it. As to the other, well, we've got lots - including some already produced up only needs a slight polishing for the drink coaster set - but we want (need) someone else to put it out. As a businessman, I've got all the abilities (and aggressive instincts) of a sea sponge, but the shy tone stuff seems worth keeping together, especially the older stuff - still, we've got plenty of fresh cuts if anyone wants to check them out for release. Consensus is it's the best - but then we would say that... What I need is someone like Dean at Revenant - who by the way was the only "name" to reply to samples I sent out when I felt up to it. And I'd have to say that Fahey's heartfelt appreciation of the dead set (both words and music, he said "got it right" - I was amazed) is undoubtedly my career highlight so far.

So, we're out there - actually way out there - and we want some help. And I think we've earned it...

At the moment, my life's mostly consumed by writing The New Humanities: an anti-textbook - and I really can't justify spending all my time working on releases that nobody ever buys more than thirty of...track record as of the last fifteen years - and that isn't an exaggeration. I mean, I just recorded a set of solo improv things (about 140 minutes worth), but when I've sold less than 10 of my first solo outing on CDR in 5 years, I really don't know why I should bother putting the new stuff out at all... As well, the next dead set's recordings are already selected - although I need some help w'archaic/third world brass/reeds as I've only got into that in the last few years & scholarhip seems v.scarce (any takers out there?), but since only Fahey understood the first one & he's dead - again, why bother? And I wasn't joking about "all my time", either. Production to me is more like microscopically detailed massage of the sound source than the kind of free-for all shitfest that's too common today (apologies to Greg, who loves that stuff). Recording takes very little of our time, but to get the best of sound sources takes patience.

First you EQ - and only when that's as good as it possibly can be do you go on. What's more, you have to develop an intimate feel for the recording as a whole - warts and all. Each version has to be checked on different systems (old/new stereos, walkman, ghetto blaster, say...) to balance out the best overall sound - it's a compromise, but it's all you can do. Then the detail work starts. My favorite technique these days is manual compression. Instead of getting a stupid algorithm to do it, badly, you go through and massage the peaks and troughs note by note yourself - particularly in the weaker spots. I don't do it linearly - I just keep taking trawls through the stuff at whatever level of detail feels right at the time. By mostly sticking to volume (or a subtle EQ) here and there, the result stays totally true to the original mood/feel/integrity - it just sounds richer, and as if we were more reliable in terms of playing dynamics than we actually are. Some need a lot of this - some need very little. But I've spent two weeks on one 10 minute track even when I was limited to EQ - on the other hand our room sound/recording technology is so much better now that it evens out - and yet the sea is not full... took most of about four months to pull together, which seems about the same as blondes, from memory...

Oh, by the way, Greg's come back to us (bearing a new international reputation for street art, to the amazement of all) from sunny Melbourne - and Jeff Wegener (our token famous member - he was in the great Laughing Clowns) just rejoined. But we're operating w/shifting lineups now, so don't expect a lot of 7piece action. And personally, I think this is by far the best cluster of talents/personalities we've ever had...

Do you have any goal or mission as the lost domain?

Simon: To keep the flame alive, as Frank would say, whenever his tobacco pipe emberred too low, keep the flame alive, and share it round.

Anything you'd like to add? Any words of wisdom?

David: Let's be prosaic - romanticism is overrated - musicians should stop thinking about notes, and basically feel what they do in terms of their role in the performance. Timbre is everything - notes and scales mean nothing except through timbre - it comes first - both logically and historically. Drones prove that even rhythm comes second - surprisingly perhaps - as there's no equivalent from the rhythm side, if you think about it. Vernacular (oral trad) musics are the oldest living artistic tradition (see Merlin Donald, amongst others), but we can't just imitate them, and electicism is merely an ugly intellectual disease - it produces nothing of worth. We have to adapt their fluid processes guaranteeing endless newness to our own lives and selves - learn their hybrid vigour, and return music making to where it belongs - all over the place...

Stop Press: I just picked up a William Benzon's Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind & Culture, having discovered his on-line debate about the book's ideas on the net - doesn't know Bakhtin, but he's got a lot of key evidence that's new to me - and it's definitely the best music theory (as such) to date. Typically, he's not a musicologist, he's a neuroscientist whose other vocation is playing jazz trumpet...

Simon: You gotta cut while it's hot, goddamnit, or it ain't worth a damn. Take it easy, Mats, but take it - it's been a pleasure for both of us.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen...

and welcome to the lost domain