Interviews with James Asher

Interview with Ambient Visions (part 1 / 2)

Ambient Visions is proud to continue our series of Artist interviews with our latest entry featuring James Asher.

James Asher has had a long and varied career in the music business--his first single was produced by Pete Townshend in 1979, and he went on to return the favor by playing drums on Pete's Empty Glass album. After writing and recording 23 albums of library music, as well as gaining a clutch of production credits, he has gone on to explore the wider horizons of world music, releasing a series of very well received albums pivotal to it.

Reaction to "Feet in the Soil" shows that it communicates to a wide audience, with positive feedback from India, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, as well as America and the UK. "People really enjoy drumming, because in an age when you've got far too much information coming at you, there is nothing more genuine to get back to than the beat - expressing something on a drum. In America there are drumming circles, and spontaneously at open-air events people will have a jam. It has a lovely quality--there are no rules, and it's characteristically more American, in being less formal. We could do with more of that in the UK. It's a lot more gratifying than wondering why this function won't work with that function in the Utilities page on the PC".

James and I had a chat about how he started off in the business and progressed to the point at which he finds himself today....an international act with fans around the world. I'm sure you will find it interesting and when you are done reading head on over to James' website and check out the music that he currently has available. You'll be glad that you did.

AV: You were taught quite young to play the violin, age 7 I believe and then proceeded to teach yourself keyboards and drums, was the violin something that you wanted to learn at the time and what kinds of changes did the entry of music into your life make?

JA: I was generally drawn to music, and the violin seemed a way to start. In fact once I started to play it, I realised what a very difficult instrument it is. The formal tuition with grade exams etc was useful in its own way, but contrasted dramatically with my own experimenting with drums and keyboards. This was quite different, and much more based on improvisation and expression.

Music was very much in my family - all my siblings played an instrument, and my father taught both the school choir and a small orchestra. So I was very much brought up to think of it as an intuitive and familiar area - as much as the French and German languages my father also taught.

AV: How difficult was it for you to teach yourself drums and keyboards? Was it simply a matter of building on what you had learned about music from the violin?

JA: This was strange in a way because there was in many senses no connection between the two areas. Of course knowing a bit about major and minor scales gives you a grasp of some fundamental concepts within music, but apart from my father showing me how to play the St Louis blues at about 12, all my keyboard playing was an uninterrupted flow of my own explorings, uncoloured by what the formal response might be to what I did. Drums were so exciting as an idea, and there was a phase where I played violin in the school orchestra, and a few days later drums in a rock trio. I loved the depth of sound of the orchestra, and it was fun to be a part of creating this huge all engulfing sound. Drums was much more about raw energy, but it was completely compelling.

I didn't own a drumkit in the early days, but loved jumping on a kit. In fact probably because of no training, though I'm right-handed I instinctively played bass drum with my left foot and snare and hi-hat on the right. This is normally how left-handed people play. I later found that the idea of a kit is really quite a distraction, you can get deeper into the groove playing one or perhaps two drums.

AV: Were you preparing yourself back then for a career in music or had that not yet occurred to you?

JA: No at that stage I had no idea it would turn into a professional affair, and was just having lots of fun experimenting. Recording was always a completely magnetic area of fascination. My elder brother had a mono reel-to-reel - the old 7.5 ips jobs. I would be transfixed listening to his recordings of him playing the piano. And of course all the silly things you try with daft voices, crazy interviews and sound effects. It wasn't until quite a bit later that I bought my first Revox tape recorder, and was able to multi-track by bouncing from one channel to the other. I used to make a lot of recordings on this. It always still ended up mono, so I developed a technique of dubbing off the end result to a good quality cassette deck, and then recording it back to the other channel of the Revox, thus creating a version of artificial stereo. It used to drift like crazy, so you'd have to manually slow or speed up the tape reels to keep it in sync. I was always told this would snap the arm of the vinyl cutting arm, but some of my early library tracks were put on record like this, so it obviously could be done.

AV: What was your first experience in working in a studio situation? What were your impressions of the whole process taking music from a performance level and making it permanent in the studio?

JA: I learned the studio craft first in a dubbing facility for language tapes. It was then about doing random quality checks on analogue recordings. That seems bizarre now in the light of digital recordings and its ruthless accuracy. Then I worked in a large studio as a tape op (operator). This was largely a disappointment because it was generally such an uncreative process. Producers would analyze successful records and try and copy the sounds or techniques, which was alien to me. I'd see an effect device and get very excited as to what it might produce, or spend ages reversing tapes and seeing what could be got.

There was never really a distinction about performance and recording for me. You needed a performance to create a recording, and the two were a joint process.

AV: At what point did you decide that creating and performing music was how you wanted to spend your life?

JA: I'd done various jobs as a musician like working in restaurants, holiday camps and cruise ships. It's all fairly thankless as a process that, as you're often being asked to turn down the volume. At the point where you aren't any longer the audience are usually too drunk to notice the difference.

It was the recording journey that then led me to producing lots of stuff where I was just seeing what you could do. People would say the music would suit films or television - so that's when I started to explore music libraries and got my first material published.

AV: When was it that you set up your own studio and what did you have in mind to do with it at that point in time? Was it more for your own use or did you work with other artists as well?

JA: After making my first library albums I sent a tape to Pete Townshend. He kindly encouraged me, and apart from producing a single for me in 1979(Peppermint Lump),lent me a Teac 4-track machine and an Alice mixer.

This was invaluable and I made 12 library albums first on the setup he lent me and then with one I bought myself. I went on to make 23 of these. I also went on to play drums on Pete's solo album "Empty Glass".

I didn't really have objectives as what I was doing musically then - it was seeing what happened. Selling to music libraries was a way of helping me eat, and if it helped communications about how fast cement could be packed in bags, that was fine by me. It didn't alter my creative process, and I'd had fun.

I've always enjoyed working with other artists on and off. It just seems to be the case that most of own work has been originated by myself. Collaborations are not only fun, but invariably teach you interesting new approaches and techniques, as well as just being at best inpirational.

AV: Tell me about some of the early work that you did in your studio and what it taught you about the music business in general.

JA: I would experiment with things like playing rhythmically along with the speed of tape delays. It was originally one of these tracks that Pete Townshend liked that we made into the single. I had one of the first Jupiter 8 synths in the UK and did all kinds of things with it. A double album of musical sound effects, for example. Again a way to gain a reward from endless hours tweaking and creating sounds. The Jupiter 8 was a glorious device, and it was huge source of inspiration. There was talk of Roland re-making this recently but it would retail, at a ridiculous price like £15,000, so it won't happen. Sad, it was wonderful.

The music business in general was quite a way off in my early days. Library music (or stock music as it's called in the States) was decidely the smaller brother of commercial music - a lot less glamorous, and much more about whether ideas had a use than about image or posing.

AV: Tell me about the creative process with your music and how it moves from being an internal idea to being a piece of music that you record in the studio.

JA: There isn't a great distinction between the two for me. I work in my own studio, and much of what happens couldn't exist without the technology, by which I'm surrounded. I love what's possible with hard disk recording and this has transformed the process for me. It's not only the ability to move things around, but the whole open ended architecture it offers in the creative process. I like to involve acoustic performances and these bring a soul and life to the compositions which is key to the process. Again the hard disk is a pivotal tool. Where would be without pitch shift and time stretch?

For those not technically minded, pitch shift enables being able to isolate a badly sung note in a performance and put it back in tune, and time stretch allows rhythms that started out in quite different tempos matching each other, so that they can stay in time.

I can have ideas for a piece out and about or driving whatever, but it's only when I'm hands on in the studio that it starts to make sense.

AV: For those who may be unfamiliar with the process explain to me the difference in the new studios using hard disc recording and the ones that used to use multi track tape recorders. What has it allowed you to do with your music that you were unable to do before?

JA: The main difference between multi-track and hard disk is that hard disk deals with virtual information as opposed to finitely placed data. I don't want to wax dreary with an overlengthy explanation here. The following operations pretty much like any computer aided creative tool easily enable the following:- Cutting and pasting, copying, moving, repeating, fading in, fading out, changing assignment to different tracks (swapping inputs and outputs.) And of course being able to see the waveform on screen greatly enhances the ability to know what's happening at any stage. You can see a phrase and know why it seems to go quiet at one point and normalise(raise to optimum level) the offending part to match the rest. Seeing a waveform provides a brilliant platform from which to begin editing, compiling etc. Being digital information too means it doesn't degenerate at all when copied. Most significantly you can perform arrangements of material which are non-destructive of the original takes. These arrangements are just versions interpreting the original recordings.

Getting used to the broadening concept of being to handle material in this format is pretty mind-blowing. It has allowed me to integrate in my creative process a staggering amount more flexibility. It's a lot more meaningful to demonstrate this than to talk about it. I'd advise anybody interested in this approach to get a demo from someone who knows a system. Keeping up with all the myriad versions is tiring. The possibilities and potential also increases as storage capabilities become larger and CPU speeds get faster. There's a lot of excitement now about M-LAN and FIREWIRE. The musician wants a format he can archive material on and go back to, but the equipment makers ensure whatever you have now needs to be updated regularly. Ah, the two-edged sword of technology, we know it well!

I've now expanded how I'm enjoying computers in the creative areas.

I bought a DV-CAM last year which takes both digital stills and broadcast quality video. I transfer the stills directly into photoshop, which is a program, at whose depths and power I marvel. And I've been learning to edit video inside the PC. This allows the ability to apply all kinds of filters to the video footage. You can rapidly burn up hours of time in this area.

Processing of video is slow compared to audio. However it's totally fascinating, and I hope down the line to produce a DVD.

AV: Will technology ever replace shear talent when it comes to creating and recording music?

JA: On hearing some of the current chart material one could certainly be led to believe so. There are aspects of computing which if overused become very soul-less. Quantising for example. The ability to drag a beat or note to its nearest mathematically precise position so as to create an even tempo can completely ring the guts out of what might have been a good idea.

One of the upsides of the technology being much more freely available and cheaper is that lots of folks get to play with it. This of course means also you'll get all kinds of levels of musicality and sensitivity playing with it, with a range of highly divergent results. We are also seeing the rise and rise of the DJ. There is more and more new musical equipment aimed specifically at DJ's.

AV: Would it be fair to say that percussion has become your primary form of musical expression and how was it that the drums became such an important vehicle for expressing your music?

JA: Yes percussion is definitely the driving force. It's the groove that creates the framework in which all my melodic ideas join to create the whole.

Groove has a relationship to the whole area of trance, repetition, meditation and hypnosis. One view is that by repeating things beyond a certain point, the listener's mind is forced to jump off to a new place. But rhythm goes very deep at instinctive level too, and has become increasingly an antidote for me to excess infomation. Losing myself in playing a hand drum gives me a route to shedding all the clutterings and clammerings of a world over-rich with media, and finding a more wholesome space.

AV: From those early beginnings how has your music evolved over the years to bring you to where you are now? Was there a point that you could look back upon and say that is where my music began to resemble what it is today?

JA: "The Great Wheel" was a departure point for me. This was my first commercially released album. I'd been influenced a lot by Aura-Soma, and especially its charismatic founder Vicky Wall. It was my introduction to many of the concepts of what can broadly be called New Age thinking. I was inspired to hear about the idea of increasing your sense of well-being by an increased awareness in the concept of balance. I was especially attracted to it as it was a school of thought that was delightfully free of dogma, and offered a lot of potential for personal growth in a very unrestrictive way. Having made a lot of recordings for media puposes etc, this was a fresh avenue for me in writing more with the idea of making a personal expression. So in this way it was a fore-runner of the other commercially available work. I also started a record label at the same time. This was a lot of work and a real eye opener, but in the end I didn't want to spend my whole time doing administrative stuff, which of course running a label involves, so I returned to the role of artist with some relief.

The title track of "The Great Wheel" runs for half an hour. It has a timeless quality and seems to reach a mood of depth and suspension that I know has touched a lot of people. When it was first played on Hearts of Space the distributor Backroads had 400 'phonecalls asking what it was. This was how I came to have my first release on an American label (Music West).