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CLINKER | PRESS & INTERVIEWS

EDMONTON JOURNAL ARTICLE | JULY 2008

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINK HERE
(Clinker Podcast can be played back by scrolling down the archives list - Soundcheck 07.22.08:Clinker)

Another side of Leonard Cohen
Written by Francois Marchand

EDMONTON - If you plan to attend one of Clinker's performances of his Leonard Cohen-based live soundscape/animation project this weekend, don't expect to be able to spot if Gary James Joynes sampled, looped or stretched a piece of your favourite Cohen song. "There's no way anyone could ever pull any of that stuff and reference it," Joynes says. "I don't believe it would be possible. The original sources were so minute and I've expanded those so much beyond what they originally were that any resemblance to their original form is completely gone now."

As Clinker, Joynes has appeared three times at Montreal's famed Mutek festival and is currently on the roster for Los Angeles-based experimental music label Dragon's Eye. When he was asked to prepare a piece for this year's Leonard Cohen International Festival, taking place in Edmonton from Wednesday to Monday, the concept came easily.

The Edmonton-based electronic/experimental musician started looking for clips of Leonard Cohen's booming voice, hoping to use them as the foundation for what he calls an atmospheric 40-minute "bass-scape." However, Joynes admits it wasn't easy to find clean voice clips without music that he would be able to use for his project. "Fortunately, a friend of mine had a recording of The Book of Longing," Joynes explains. "I was listening to it and I was just hoping that there would be a moment where it would just be his voice, and there happens to be two poems that he reads on there. That was the original source."

He pauses and chuckles. "Maybe I shouldn't have given that away." He needn't worry too much. The clips themselves are barely decipherable -- Cohen's voice, stretched, synthesized and tweaked to the extreme, takes on a whole new deep and electronic musical quality as it glitches and crackles.

But that's not the only component to the experience. Joynes is also a visual artist, and for On the Other Side ..., he created a textural, ultra-slow-motion, black-and-white video presentation that flows along with his live performance. The idea was to take Cohen's Buddhist philosophy and the meditative feel of Cohen's work and incorporate it into both the audio and video. "The whole theme of this piece is an exploration of the light and dark, and the white and black, a common theme that I saw running throughout his music and poetry."

Joynes is already slated to perform On The Other Side ... at the Banff Centre in August. Considering the kind of dedicated following Cohen continues to enjoy, could it be possible the project will eventually reach Cohen fans elsewhere? "That's really hard to say," Joynes admits. "It's definitely a little bit outside of anything I would ever have imagined Clinker doing. We'll see what happens, I guess."

Part 2

Clinker gives us a deeper look at some of the elements and references found in his new experimental piece to be presented at this weekend's Leonard Cohen festival, and which you can catch a glimpse of in this week's Soundcheck podcast.

"I don't want to give the impression that it's all bass-scapes because it's not," Joynes says. "There's an enormous amount of other synthesis - we're covering the whole spectrum, creating the whole ethereal state of what I read in a lot of his poetry.

"I'm actually referencing a really famous piece of his music - I don't know what album it originally came from - called The Great Event, where he took the Mac 'Victoria' computer voice and he had it reading one of his poems and he'd taken the Moonlight Sonata and reversed it. It's a really fascinating piece of experimental music - as far as I know, it's his most experimental release. I've taken that idea and, throughout my piece, I have 'Victoria' reading some more of his poetry, and I did some interesting things with her voice as well. So I am infusing this piece with four poems that are read by the computer. It was paying homage to that piece, basically. One of his most famous lines, 'There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in' - that was where the whole original idea came from; going into the dark and the light of his work.

"The title comes from a poem from The Book of Longing called 'I Was Doing Something.' Towards the end of the poem, he's talking about being dispersed and scattered on the other side. I just thought that's what this piece is. It really is an exploration of an altered space or an altered state. Hopefully, the audience will feel comfortable in this place that I plan on taking them to."