Descending / Reflecting / Ascending

Mute City

Interview with Mike Gintz by L. Valena

Let's start from the top. What did you respond to?

I responded to a series of three paintings. They were called 'Descending', 'Reflecting' and 'Ascending'. I'm not sure if that's actually the order they were created in, but that's the order they hit my inbox. So I responded to them in that order.

What was your first response?

I kind of liked the motion. I liked that there was a sense of transition from piece to piece. It suggested a three-part response, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to go really on the nose that much. To me, they felt kind of like walking through a dense forest. Then emerging into a clearing by a lake, but with these really otherworldly alien colors. So there is kind of a surreality to them. I saw them in full size after I had downloaded them, but I first saw them as thumbnails in my email. I actually really like what they look like as thumbnails. It's zoomed out, so the details are really precise and the brushstrokes aren't visible. It almost looks like photorealism, but of something unrealistic. So I looked at them full size, but I also was kind of reacting to what they looked like when they were really small. So I started with that. I was trying to capture the feeling of that weird forest.

How did you start translating that into music?

I was thinking that I would start with something really dense, textural- wide and lush. And dark. And have that fade and become more sparse. And then make it more sparkly-sounding towards the end. I wanted to make it sound nice. A lot of my music has kind of abrasive textures. I play off of abrasive textures with more gentle and soft textures. But with this one, I was trying to stay away from some of the abrasive stuff. I was trying to make it sound a little more nice and comforting. The last piece that I made was pretty anxious and dissonent, and I thought that this was a nice opportunity to explore something a little more confident and a little bit nicer.

What were you getting, emotionally, from the work?

It was natural enough that it felt like gentle, nature documentary stuff. What I liked about it was the colors were surrealistic. So it felt, like I said, like photorealism but of something that's not actually real. But it didn't feel threatening, just kind of serene. So I wanted to capture that a little bit. And obviously, in the middle of a quarantine and very anxious political times, I thought it would be nice to make a piece that was less focused on tension and more focused on calmness. That's not usually the way that my music is, it's not what I typically compose or what I'm typically trying to go for.

Can you talk about the title of the piece?

Well I kept it in the order of how it was delivered. Descending, Reflecting, Ascending. I just kept it because I liked that sense of movement. The order that it came in suggested to me that the narrator, or whoever is experiencing the piece, is traveling. I wanted to do something that followed that. I didn't really want to change the title of the piece, because it felt like a big part of what I was going for.

I love that your piece has three movements.

It's funny, I wasn't trying to do that. I wouldn't say I was trying not to do that, but I wasn't trying to do that explicitly. And then it just ended up happening anyway.

Is that something that often happens in your work?

I don't know. I usually end up being more effective with my electronic stuff when I don't know exactly what I'm doing from the beginning. If I start with too coherent of an idea in advance, I actually end up burning a lot of energy trying to create exactly that. So if I hear something in my head that's too developed, I'll spend a lot of really unproductive time trying to reproduce that. Chasing that thing that I have in my head, sometimes forcing it. When I'm most productive, I do a thing, and then I react to that thing. And then I react to what I just reacted to, and just kind of find my way through the piece. So I had to kind of intentionally take breaks and not work on this piece for awhile, and I had to try not thinking about it when I wasn't working on it, so as to not let my planning get too far ahead. I wanted to try to be loose about it. That's why I think it's funny that it still ended up being three parts. One of the first things I thought to myself is that it didn't need to be a three-part thing. But it found it's way there anyway. I think it's interesting that it did that. It did it because it worked. It didn't do that because I said that it should be three parts. I don't think I even realized that until you just brought it up. If I had tried to make it three parts, I probably would have been stressing about the right way to do it, and instead it just kind of found it's way there.

I think that whole way of making things one step at a time can be really effective.

It's very different from the way I've made other types of music. When I write rock music, it's in an established medium. One of the things I like about electronic stuff is it's a little easier to react to it. When I play guitar, I know exactly what it's going to sound like. I need to know where my fingers are going, but I'm not really surprising myself. When you can make electronic music on a computer or something, you can turn nobs and put some sample triggers down without hearing anything that's happening. You can just lay stuff out and then press play and see what happens. And then react to that. There are ways to inject unpredictability into it, which makes it feel like your collaborating with someone else. Even if there's nobody else there. It's good to keep fresh and not overthink things.

I've never made a piece that was directly prompted by another piece, without it being a remix. The idea of remixing other media is really interesting. Thinking about what elements translate when you cross from one form of media to another. Interpreting these paintings as music gave me the opportunity to think. I wasn't trying to translate them- like 'what is the musical version of this painting'? So much as when you put these paintings into a musician's brain, what comes out? It wasn't supposed to be a direct translation so much as an interpretation. That's not typically the creative path that most of my work takes. So it was an interesting experiment in starting things with a prompt.

When you hear this piece now, what does it say to you?

Well it's funny. One of the things that is a challenge when I make music, is sometimes it takes me a really long time, and sometimes I really hate it by the time I'm done. And then I'm like 'get out of here!', and sometimes that's how I know it's done. If I don't hate it yet, then I'm still going to mess around with it. I don't actually hate this piece, but I did get it to the point where it felt like it was working.

There were a couple of points in the creation of the composition when I hit what felt like creative walls. I had the choice to step away or force it, and I think the time frame available gave me an opportunity to decide when I was going to force it and when I was going to step away. I was getting to the point where the deadline was coming up, and I was thinking to myself that it was starting to feel complete. But I had been living with it, so I needed some other folks to weigh in, and let me know if it was done or not. So I sent it to my bandmate- he listens to everything I do, to get his take on it. My friend who is a mastering engineer (and who I had master it in the end) said it sounded done. So I said okay. But sometimes at the end of working on something, I'm looking at it so closely that I don't have perspective to truly know if it's working or not. Obviously, I know every bit of it. So I'm interested in hearing it in a couple of months and hearing what it feels like when I've got a little more space from it. Usually when I release stuff, I'm actually doing it based on other people's judgement. Other people saying it sounds done now. Because otherwise I could just work on it forever. But the deadline was helpful with regard to that.

Anything else you want to say about this?

I thought it was really fun. I enjoyed the experience.

Call Number: C32VA | C34MU.muDe

Mike Gintz writes, records, and releases music with his band Hex Map and his electronic project Mute City. His work is primarily inspired by climate change, social justice, and science fiction. For more music, visit http://mute-city.com