Robert Millis' first album with the Discrepant label explores his obsession with hidden sounds and its anomalies.
"The phrase interior music occurred to me a few years ago as a way to describe some recent work. It's about the resonances inside of hollow wooden chambers (and hollow heads) like gramophones and talking machines, music boxes, instruments, metal containers, and resonant rooms. It's about exploring tiny audio fragments—single notes, vinyl and shellac surface noise, recording mishaps and anomalies—and arranging them into something meaningful. It is about my own interior mishaps and anomalies and attempts to arrange THEM into something meaningful. It also references "interior design" with the placement of sounds in specific locations, layers or in juxtapositions.
Inspirations include
Steve Roden's lowercase work, Toshiya Tsunoda's field recordings,
Éliane Radigue's slowly shifting ambiances, and the musique concrete of
Pierre Schaeffer, as well as the dhrupad and kayal traditions of Indian classical music—especially Kesarbai Kerkar and the
Dagar family who have a sublime way of stretching out individual notes and exploring their endless permutations, combinations and connotations."
Robert Millis
A sound artist, Fulbright scholar, and Guggenheim fellow, Robert Millis (born 1966 in New York, lives and works in Seattle) has authored or co-authored books (
Indian Talking Machine and
Victrola Favorites), produced compilations and documentaries for the Sublime Frequencies record label (including
Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road and
This World is Unreal Like A Snake in a Rope), composed for radio ("The Gramophone Effect" for
Documenta14) and film (the cult horror film
Session 9), and released numerous recordings as a solo artist, as Climax Golden Twins, as Telescoping or as Idol Ko Si.
