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Stephen Palmer
- February 2008 -
Stephen Palmer is an UK based musician and sci-fi writer who’s the main man behind the psychedelic space ambient band Mooch that has gone for a rockier direction on the couple of last albums. He’s also making music as Blue Lily Commission and under his own name. Mooch has an excellent new album out called 1967½, so it was a perfect time to ask a few questions to figure out what it’s all about.
How did you first get into music and who were your early influences?
My very earliest influences were from my dad, who, though he was an amateur classical musician into jazz, also liked unusual stuff such as Ravi Shankar and Steve Reich. So the very first influences were avant-garde or ethnic. When I was 18, finishing school and about to go to university, I discovered various bands through my school friends, such as ELP, Yes, and eventually Tangerine Dream. I loved the way-out sounds, especially the synthesizers, which to me had a science-fiction edge (I was into SF in my youth). At university I expanded my collection of vinyl by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Robert Schroeder, and even managed to convert a few of my friends to these artists. It was these three groups or artists who really inspired me at the time in the field of music. But I also liked some jazz, some classical, and I’ve retained my love of the minimalists (Steve Reich and Terry Riley especially) to this day.
My dad and I had regular discussions – in our family this is called The Music Argument – about music, and to this day we have diverging, though occasionally similar, views. He dislikes most modern music, though interestingly he’s a fan of The Beatles and even of Freddie Mercury! (the voice, not the man or his band). He’s a hard critic of my own music, which he usually describes as too quiet, slow or soft.
What was your first instrument and how did you learn to play it?
Guitar was my first instrument, and it will always be my main instrument. However, I began playing late – when I was nineteen. I’m not sure why I started. I was at university at the time, and I expect it was partly an internal drive, and partly that all my friends were getting into playing music. Once I began, I took to it very quickly. I remember that the most useful purchase I made was the Denny Laine ‘How To Play Guitar’ book. I was entirely self-taught. My early inspirations were people like John McLaughlin, but after a while I began to play with less speed and more feel (not that I ever got anywhere near McLaughlin’s speed!). Occasionally I hear myself playing from many years ago – as recently, when I transferred some 20-year-old recordings for a friend of mine – and I recognise my own playing. I think my style is distinctive, though it is hard to describe. It is a kind of gentle Hillage style... I rarely bend the notes. My style is more based on sliding the notes. Also, I very rarely play with a plectrum.
When I began to collect flutes I found them difficult to play, but after a while I gravitated towards a technique of playing that isn’t “technical”. Again, it’s quite hard to describe. I wouldn’t say I’m a flautist, but I can make a nice sound from a bamboo cross-blown flute. It’s a kind of intuitive playing!
The first time I ever heard about you was when Mooch released some of the early albums. Did you have any bands before Mooch and what kind of music were you into at that time?
I did play in various bands, but never seriously, and never for very long. I was briefly in Sleepwalker, that being Clive Nolan’s (of Pendragon, Arena, etc) first band. When I was a better player I made a few early tapes. I recently rediscovered these in an old box. They’re not very good, but there is one track that might one day appear. In my early days I was in love with all forms of electronic music, so rock didn’t get much attention, although I was a fan of such bands as Rush and Pink Floyd. My early tapes are free-form ambience with guitars and a lot of sound effects, and these I began in 1992. I can remember the exact day – April 4. That was the first day of Mooch. By 1992 I had a Fostex multitrack recorder, and there was no stopping me from recording!
Who were your biggest musical heroes when you formed Mooch? How about now?
Synth music was my passion in the early days – Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Robert Schroeder, Bernard Xolotl, and many more. In terms of “heroes” I suppose I would count Geddy Lee, the bassist of Rush, as a hero of mine; an exceptional musician. Also Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. And as I already mentioned, John McLaughlin was a big influence in my early days. There were other inspirations, but more often it was their attitude that was important to me, for example Frank Zappa. In the 1990’s I discovered Ed Wynne of Ozric Tentacles and Alex Patterson of The Orb, and these two figures have been very important in the musical life of Mooch. It was discovering The Orb especially that led me to arrive at the first recognizable Mooch sound, that of late 1992 to 1994, on the albums 3001, Planetfall, Postvorta and The Crypt Of Artificial Intelligences.
How important a factor have psychedelic drugs been in your music?
Well, that is a very interesting question. I have a particular viewpoint when it comes to this topic, but this viewpoint is informed not by my love of free-festival or alternative culture, rather by my interest in nature and the environment. In my opinion it is wrong – you might say immoral – to legislate against naturally occurring substances, such as psilocybin and magic mushrooms, or the coca leaf. What nature provides we must deal with. It angers me greatly that in Britain the psilocybin mushroom is considered a dangerous “drug”, whereas tobacco and alcohol – neither of which I indulge in, except for a very rare glass of cider – are socially accepted. Chemicals created by nature must be dealt with in a mature way. Making them illegal is an infantile response. As for the man-made drugs, such as LSD or crack cocaine, I consider them to be worthless junk and wholly reprehensible.
I dealt with this theme in the songs In Time (which is about the importance of sensory experience) and Early Mornings on the new album 1967½.
How does the music and ideology of Mooch differ from Blue Lily Commission or the stuff you make under your own name?
The music of Mooch tends to be Western-based rock or electronic music, with occasional Eastern influences. Blue Lily Commission is Eastern-based music with Western influences, especially dance and synth sounds. “Stephen Palmer” is for Berlin School electronic music.
Mooch seems to have always been mostly your solo project with different members coming and going. Is that the way you have wanted or has it just been hard to maintain a stable line-up?
I like to think of it this way: I’m the leading, founder member of Mooch, but everybody is welcome. There have been a few stable line-ups, and those I have really enjoyed, especially the “classic line-up” as we like to think of it, which existed between 1994 and 1996. During those wonderful years I worked solidly with Cal and Garry Lewin, and with Terry Bartlett, and together we made Starhenge and a couple of other albums. I have very happy memories of those times. Eventually, all the good music from that period will be released. In 1998 I moved with my wife to the south-west part of England, and there I worked with various musicians. In many ways I prefer a shifting band membership because it varies the sound so much. Mooch will never stand still and become the same on every album. However I do feel that the modern Mooch is going to be stable for a while, even though there are some geographical problems. Chris Gill wants to work more with Mooch, and he lives near me. Cyndee Lee Rule is keen to work more, but she lives in America. And I’ve worked for some time with my transatlantic friends Don Falcone and Karen Anderson. But there are always ways around the distance barrier.
How did you first get into collecting the ethnic instruments you’ve used on your albums? Where have you obtained all this exotic stuff?
Here’s a copy of an article I posted last year:
”My passion for collecting musical instruments started in 1992, the year I began recording under the name Mooch. In the summer of that year my wife and I visited a local mill, and in the shop I noticed a strange looking object made of dark wood – dusty, decorated, with metal tines sticking out. Curious, I played with it until I managed to get a sound. It occurred to me then that the instrument would add to the sound-spectrum of my band, which at that point consisted of me and some friends guesting on various traditional instruments. I had no synthesizer, only occasional access to music software at work, and a single electric guitar. The object turned out to be an mbira, or African thumb-piano. It was the first ethnic musical instrument I bought.
When I realized how useful this little instrument could be I began seeking out other instruments. Soon I was obsessed. A visit to the Strawberry Fayre in Cambridge (U.K.) provided two Moroccan hand drums and a strange buzzy instrument that turned out to be a Saharan reeded flute. From charity shops I bought end-blown flutes, ocarinas, cymbals, and many items of percussion. I had to have one of everything.
The instruments were incredibly useful. Though I could not play flute, it was easy to improvise notes, and, with a little practice, bend between sounds and notes. This naive style of playing suited my soundscapes evoking alien rituals and interstellar flight. My first proper recording, soon to be released on CD although I did not know it then, was 3001, which featured ocarinas from South America, flutes, hand drums, and more. I wove these sounds into the ambience to add a human factor to the predominantly electronic music. It made my palette different, and, with the use of short-wave radio found sounds, made my music instantly recognizable.
When I got my first record deal with Taste Records my collection of instruments had expanded to twenty or so. The more adventurous use of electric guitar, better recording technique, and a selection of new flutes and hand percussion made Postvorta (1993) a better album than 3001. Later recordings featured ever more complex percussion, and in 1995 Starhenge was released, an album that crystallised the mid-nineties Mooch sound: ethno-ambience, electronics, Hillage-style guitar and short-wave radio recordings.
By now I had taken to visiting the famous Ray Man's Ethnic Instrument shop in London – paradise for a man with my particular obsession – and as the years passed I never stopped collecting. I began buying acoustic ethnic guitars and converting them to left-handed use. One or two of these guitars were expensive, but they were worth it: a saz (Turkish long necked lute), an oud (Arabian fretless lute), bouzouki (Greek), charango (half sized South American ten stringed guitar), balalaika (Russia), and so on. I had my electric, Spanish and 12 string, but the ethnic guitars added spice to my recordings; they were particularly useful when the Blue Lily Commission solo project began in 2000. Meanwhile, I had bought a Native American flute from the Dartmoor-based New Age musician Nigel Shaw – my first professional quality flute. I had in the years since 1992 learned to “play” my many flutes, but it was a style based on my ignorance of the instrument. I learned to find and bend notes more by intuition than any skill. To this day I would never say I was a flute player. But I can make the instrument sound nice.
As for the percussion items, they seemed to be breeding inside their cardboard boxes. It is amazing what variety of shakers people can make: seed pods, metal shakers, metal bells, rattles, and much more. One of my best sources was ‘The Art of Africa’, a shop in Glastonbury (U.K.). I must have forty or more different percussion items now. The flutes too seemed to be multiplying. Flutes are amazing: you think you have seen them all, then something different turns up. Even similar looking flutes can have differing sounds, so I have about thirty of them.
Then there are the one-offs. A strange wailing instrument from Burma that looks like an alien head; the berimbau I bought a couple of months ago in Cambridge; various two-stringed instruments from Central Asia; the kubing mouth-harp; xylophones; the African harp, the Burmese harp... Most of these instruments are still inside cardboard boxes from my last house move. There is nowhere to put them.
Recording the instruments depends on what they are. Some flutes are best recorded with the microphone at the mouth end, others at the opposite end. Most percussion items record beautifully, and I usually make these recordings into samples; these days I never play them as I used to in the nineties, for up to 23 minutes at a time... Hand drums are best recorded with the microphone off the upper surface, but you can get some great sounds by placing a microphone inside the body of the drum. It is guitars that are most difficult to record. The saz I record with a DiMarzio pick-up, while the bouzouki is so brash and loud it can be recorded off a standard microphone. The most difficult instrument is the oud, which records poorly off a pick-up, but is difficult to mike up. Also I find it difficult and frustrating to play because it is fretless, and so I have not used it very much. Ironically, it was by far my most expensive purchase.
After fifteen years of collecting ethnic musical instruments, is there anything I still want? Oh, yes! A santoor, a left-handed sitar would be nice, I would love an Indian harmonium, and you can never have too many cymbals...”
Here is the thread URL, with some interesting responses:
http://www.emportal.info/viewtopic.php?t=1420
You are also a sci-fi author. Please tell us something about that side of yourself?
I’ve loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a child. In my twenties I took to seriously writing novels, and of course those early experiments were terrible. But I honed my craft, got better, and eventually, after 8 years of trying, got a publishing deal with Little Brown Publishers. After my first two novels with them – Memory Seed (1996) and Glass (1997) – I had no luck with writing, until 2001 when Wildside Press in America picked me up. They were very small, but keen. They published Flowercrash (2002), Muezzinland (2003) and the near-future free-festival novel Hallucinating (2005), which I think readers of Psychotropic Zone would enjoy! I also had a dark-gothic novel published under a pseudonym by a medium sized American publisher.
After a few more years of nothing in the publishing world, my next novel Urbis Morpheos is being published by the British publishing house PS Publishing, which I am thrilled about. The novel is set a million years in the future, and the theme is how humanity interacts with nature and the environment. I think it will be published at the end of 2008.
What do you do besides music and writing? How do you earn your living? What are your hobbies?
I have a day-job at a college of education in Shrewsbury, which is in the far west of England, at the border with Wales. I have a lot of Welsh in me, and enjoy nothing more than promoting the Welsh and Welsh values at the expense of the English... there has always been tension between the Welsh and the English. But I don’t take it very seriously; more often it is an excuse for a good joke! Having said that, Wales is a spectacularly beautiful country, and I love it. My job involves looking after staff and students at the college, regarding their computer and also their audio-visual needs. Before this, I worked for many years in a bookshop. Before that I had various jobs in education. I would never be a teacher, however – that job is far too stressful...
What kind of music do you listen to nowadays? Your favourite artist right now?
I tend to go through phases of listening to bands. Often, buying a new album will initiate listening to their back-catalogue. I don’t have a favourite-ever band, but there are some who mean a great deal to me: Ozric Tentacles, The Orb, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, plus the artists Klaus Schulze and Kate Bush. At the moment my favourite artist is Neil Young. He’s a great songwriter, and a good example of how a musician can grow old, develop, and yet retain his fire. I hope I’m as creative as he is when I’m his age! I’m also listening to all the Mercury Rev albums at the moment. And I listen to what might be perceived as more mainstream music, for example Simon & Garfunkel, Steely Dan, etc.
The last two Mooch albums differ quite a lot from the earlier output. Was that a clear decision on your part, or just the way things went, or how did it happen?
Yes, it was a definite decision. In fact, that decision came about in 2004 or 2005, when I recorded the Gaiaspace album, the last Mooch album to appear on Andy Garibaldi’s Dead Earnest Records. You can hear in that album all the precursors to Dr. Silbury's Liquid Brainstem Band. I decided that I had for the moment gone as far as I could with ambient music, and I wanted to do more rock music. Some of the tracks on Gaiaspace could have appeared on Dr. Silbury's Liquid Brainstem Band, the tracks Massive and Emerald especially, but also I think Flow Thing.
How did you get all those wonderful contributors for Dr. Silbury's Liquid Brainstem Band and the excellent new album 1967½?
Some of the contributors I had known for some time – for example Jez Creek, Damien Redmond, Karen Anderson and Don Falcone. Others I had not known for long. Chris Gill lives near me, and we met a couple of years ago after both posting on the same forum board. He also has a rock band, Band Of Rain. Cyndee Lee Rule I had known over the internet for a while, but a few years ago I met her in Exeter, when she was supporting Tim Blake. As for Bridget Wishart, I had loved her voice ever since hearing the Hawkwind album Space Bandits, and it had been a dream of mine to work with her. It was in fact Don Falcone who introduced me to her. She sang superbly, and I’m very pleased to have worked with her. Many of the contributors to 1967½ were from the previous album, most notably Chris Gill, who sings all the songs. The main newcomer is Pete Wyer, who in fact I have known the longest of all – nearly thirty years! – but who has not appeared on a Mooch album for some time. Pete is now a highly respected modern composer, but he is also a brilliant guitarist. A solo of his will feature on the 1968a album, on a track called Peat Rock.
Have bands like The Dukes of Stratosphere or Walter Ghoul’s Lavender Brigade who have previously tried to simulate the vibe of 1967 been an influence on 1967½? How did you get the idea to do a late 60’s styled psychedelic rock/pop album?
Neither of the bands you mention are familiar to me, though I know their names, but there were a few modern influences on the new album. I rate an album called Andorra by Caribou very highly, and also some of the work of Gorkys Zygotic Mynci. The inspiration to do a ‘sixties style album came from my own listening. I found myself listening to a lot of ‘sixties music that I had not heard before, for example The Beach Boys, The Zombies and so on. Also I reacquainted myself with the classics of The Beatles, The Byrds, and The Mamas And The Papas. I have for some time wondered about the amazing song-writing of the ‘sixties, and long wondered where it came from. It was after asking such questions and wondering if there was anything cultural about the ‘sixties that made it such a special time, that I began assembling the ideas for 1967½.
Are you happy with the new album? Was it hard to make it sound like the late 60’s? Did you use any different studio techniques this time around?
I am very pleased with the album. The initial feedback has been positive, which I am happy about, as it was a considerable leap to 1967½ from the earlier albums – even from Dr Silbury’s Liquid Brainstem Band. I did use some different studio techniques, but the basis of my studio – Logic Pro on an Apple Mac G5 – was unchanged. The main addition was the Native Instruments Hammond B4 virtual instrument, which is a fantastic piece of software. Also I used certain types of delay and reverberation, such as were used in 1967. You can hear them especially on the tracks Truth Fairy and Wouldn’t It Be Good. And I wanted the track Diamond Cutter to sound like it was recorded in some sort of garage...
Is Mooch going to be more like a psychedelic ROCK band for now on, or are you going to go back doing more ambient, instrumental music again?
Mooch will vary from year to year, though I think it is unlikely that I will return to strictly ambient music with the band. I have the three main projects now: Mooch, which will always be a band of some sort, Blue Lily Commission, which is my solo project for ethnic-based synth music, and my other solo project under my own name, which is for ‘Berlin School’ style music – the sort of music that attracted me into the scene in the first place!
Is there any chance that we will see Mooch performing live any day soon?
It is highly unlikely! Mooch have had phases of playing live, for example in the south-west of the UK during the late 1990’s, but generally speaking I have found the live experience to be expensive, demoralising and far too much effort for minimal rewards. I suppose the “form” of Mooch – the ever-changing line-up – has not helped. My ambition is to release a string of exciting albums rather than tour, or even play live. Having said that, if I received the right offer from the right people I would put together a live band, perhaps for a one-off concert.
Do you already have ideas for the next Mooch CD? Would you like to share some of your other future plans with us?
2008 is looking like a very full year. On March 22nd, AmbientLive Records will be releasing my two ‘Berlin School’ solo albums as a double-pack, Berlin Via Istanbul and Berlin Via Cairo, which were recorded between 2004 and 2006. The music is in the Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze mode, but with lots of space-rock guitar, and a lot of ethnic elements. Then on May 1 comes the next of the remastered Mooch double-header back catalogue releases, In Search Of The Acid Metal Grille (first released by Dead Earnest Records ten years ago) and its companion disk The Acid Metal Grille Sessions, which has never before been released. At the moment I’m recording a new ‘sixties inspired album, “1966”, and writing a third one, 1968a. The plan is to release “1966” on August 1, the pagan festival of Lughnasadh; so far the recording has gone well. After that there will doubtless be more studio music, both ‘sixties inspired and back catalogue...
As far as my writing is concerned, I have, for many reasons – some personal and some relating to the publishing environment – been inactive recently, but my first new novel in a few years, Urbis Morpheos, is being published at the end of the year by PS Publishing. I would like to have more novels published once this new book is out.
Many thanks for Steve to answering my questions! Please people, do yourself a favor and check out the new album as well as the previous one if you’re into excellent, psychedelic rock. If the more floaty, cosmic and ambient stuff is more like your thing, then listen to some of the earlier Mooch albums, they’re wonderful too. Or check out Steve’s other projects.
http://www.stephenpalmer.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/moochspacey
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