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page 3 of 5 7.Mattparsons asks: Do you ever find yourself hard pushed to know when to leave a track and say “finished”. If so how do you decide when enough tweaking is enough? Squarepusher: There are many ways in which I determine when a piece of music is finished: 1) It becomes intuitively obvious. 2) I run out of time according to a rule that I set myself. 3) It becomes too difficult to extend it any further - a sort of "marginal diminishing returns" idea. 4) I get bored of it (related to 3). Answer 1) is difficult to discuss, being as it is that matters of intuition are not rationally formed and are not susceptible to logical dissection and explication. Answer 2) is simply a matter of following a rule. Answer 3) is more of a pragmatic issue; roughly speaking, the question I ask myself is, “Could I be spending my time in a more fruitful and enjoyable way?” I can rarely see any argument for trying to make something work when it is fundamentally rubbish, or "flogging a dead horse". Occasionally I have done it to prove to myself that anything can be made good, even with the most compromised material. This is really an academic point. I think music does bear traces of its inception which can be detected by the trained ear - as I detest this when I hear it, I see no reason whatsoever to pursue this as some sort of perverse compositional method. Answer 4) is self-evidently bad.  8. Gombrclient asks: What kind of role do you think music plays or should play on a societal or individual level? What do you think are music's ethical implications, whether in the way it can affect or change people or, from a more individualistic perspective, in the way it can allow an individual to evolve through creation?Squarepusher: By starting from the point of view that music gains its currency by being affecting (what would music be that left its audience untouched by the experience of hearing it? Maybe this is what Brian Eno tried to do in his discreet music - but then who cares about that?), we can then ask in what way are we affected by a certain piece. What does a piece do to our state of mind? Immediately, the problem of cultural relativism strikes, which is that a given piece's effect on a given listener is determined by their cultural frame of reference. Therefore the potential universality of any information about responses to music is undermined by its supposed determination, by external cultural factors - an implication of this seems to be that we could never get to any response that is deeper than cultural conditioning, with limiting prospects for the validity of any generalised idea of responses to certain types of harmony, sound etc. I would say then that it may be useful to look for the common ground in responses to certain types of harmony, sound etc, between people of differing backgrounds - try to see where agreement lies. This might point in the direction of a response deeper than conditioning, though the cultural relativist might argue that such comparisons are impossible due to the radical difference between cultures. In this regard, it is interesting to consider the use of both brutal heavy metal and children's TV themes such as Sesame Street to break the will of prisoners in the Iraq conflict. It is bizarre to consider something as benign (as we perceive it) as the Sesame Street theme being used to torture people. I should think that even the most conservative listeners in our country would find this music far less terrifying than the Iraqi prisoners apparently did. See the following link (news.bbc.co.uk) and check the quote from Sergeant Mark Hadsell. If we have to discard any notions of universality in the perception of music, and thus that our understanding of music's affective dimension reaches down only to the level of conditioning, the investigation is not worthless - the knowledge may still find practical expression within the cultural context in which it is uncovered. To me it seems valid to pursue the question, what affects us in music? Which then leads to the more explicitly ethical question, how do these feelings influence our behaviour and conduct? If we see the varying types of behaviour and conduct as having varying degrees of desirability, which surely we will if concerned with ethics, then what does that imply for the composer? Given a certain knowledge of how certain musical approaches affect people, the composer has to choose to ignore or employ this knowledge. Ignoring an assessment of the ethical component in music does not mean that one's compositions escape having that dimension, simply that a default choice is made rather than a rationally deliberated one. Admittedly, ethics are a diffuse matter in the world of instrumental music, but we can still ask, what mood will this piece provoke? Is it good to be in this mood?  9. imageriot asks: I read, or heard a while ago, yourself talking about your unique methods of composing, the gist of which was that you are almost on another plane of consciousness when you write. I also read recently that you have no memory of massive sessions of composing. I appreciate that you perhaps do not want to share all your methodology and I'm sure you get sick of “what did you use to make this sound?”. I'm really interested in the psychology you apply to your music, the interaction between yourself and the blank canvas. Squarepusher: A brief way to describe this is to say that in certain modes of composition I am thinking only in numbers and logical number relations. It is a rarefied state, but I am sure it will be familiar to many who have worked in the deeper recesses of computer architecture at the assembly language level. It is something of an all-or-nothing way of working where concentration needs to be built up to very high levels. Again, nothing that would be unfamiliar to a practitioner of a martial art. There is much more to be said about this. I aim to write a piece on this and related topics. Keep an eye on the Squarepusher site, as I'll post it up on there.  page fourback to page two
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