A Conversation with Steve Kimock (continued)

PM: I know in recent years you've been doing guitar workshops and the like about what some might consider lofty topics like tempered tuning and how it relates to guitar and playing in tune and other related deep topics. What's on your mind lately in this regard that you might share with the readership?

SK: Oh, ouch. Well, the idea that I'm working with, Frank, is that what you're really trying to learn when you're learning music, the part of it that's happening at the listener's end that you actually get to put your hands on on the guitar in terms of pitch is the resonance of each of those intervals by themselves, just learning the resonance of those intervals and trying to feel what they make you feel like. But--how do you say this? I've gotta say this right.

PM: Okay.

SK: The entire time I've been playing and trying to learn, I went through a period--and you were around for part of this period--where I was very much focused on trying to play the guitar, just to wiggle my fingers, getting around on the thing, you know?

PM: Right.

SK: It occurred to me not long after that that I wasn't actually doing anything--that there was no actual connection between any way that I wiggled and what anybody necessarily felt, and I was just wiggling. I think the stuff that actually was sticking was when you'd get to someplace and you would have some interval to the tonic that was right, that was interesting. Billy would do it on the slide and you would do it with your voice and I would do it for milliseconds on any note that I played. So I've gotten to this place where I just take each interval and try and internalize the resonance of it. Just really, really listen to and tune with perfectly and sing it and play it and try and hear it and try and hear all of its component harmonics together, and then add intervals to those, and try and find ways to play them on the guitar, fretted or not. I started going back and relearning the actual resonance of all the possible intervals--and to recognize each one of them as a discrete feeling state. Then every day, to sing and play a little bit to see where you're at with how you're feeling those intervals and then presenting them. I think it's putting me a little closer to playing--not playing but just finding my way in that music, the same way that the listener finds themselves in it. Trying to play from the listener's perspective.

PM: Right. Not worrying about wiggling your fingers.

SK: Yeah, 'cause it's not finger wiggling and it's not music chords. It's not notation. It's some tactile triggering of emotion. It's those emotional states. You feel something in music, and you wanna play from those states, but it's not enough simply to be drunk and lonely and play, you know what I mean? That's kind of an accent or a color.

PM: Yeah.

SK: I don't know if that's any way to present musically a succession of feeling states that makes some sense. That's what I'm trying to do.

PM: Metaphysically, those intervallic resonances have profound effects on people's psyches. If they didn't, they wouldn't use tri-tones for police sirens and so forth. [Imitates a German police siren.]

SK: It's all really fascinating stuff. At this point, I'm just in the concept and the thinking of it. If there's been any recent direction beyond the trying to maintain and refine that idea that you're working every day with sort of calibrating your own emotional center to the feeling state that you perceive in the music, so at least you know where you're at--what little theoretical accompaniment there is to that has been going back as far as I can, just trying to learn some more about how some of these archetypical polarities in our shared consciousness has been reflected in music. This stuff didn't just show up. All of these very human sounds and organization of sound and stuff have been with us since pre-history.

PM: Right.

SK: Obviously, that's just part of what we do just as a species--our little human birdsong thing--pentatonic scales [laughs]--that's what we do. We make those sounds. These days, the modern thing with knowledge is that it's super specialized. Everybody's got a specialty. People that specialize in just this organ at this stage of development with this specific disease, or we specialize in this specific musical period and we're just super specialized. As you go back in time, the knowledge becomes more general. At some point, all that general knowledge was just stories or myth or something as it emerges from pre-history into recognizable disciplines and sciences. Even back in the day, if you were doing music, you were necessarily doing astronomy.

PM: [laughs]

SK: Now, if you're doing music, you're doing all the counterpoint. [laughs] It's like, well, what's that gotta do with music? Well, it's part of this music, but how is that part of anything else? It's just this one specialized study. So I'm going back and looking at some kind of odd stuff. The Sumerians had an interesting take on it.

PM: I love that some people who are in the public eye and considered some niche of popular music are looking at these things so that popular music and guitar music continues to incorporate concepts that run a little bit deeper and run somewhat far afield of wiggling one's fingers.

SK: I think the stuff is all in there, and will continue to all be in there naturally. I think that there's an over-specialization in the study of music these days, with a tremendous understatement. The stuff that gets studied as being important to music is so super narrow and specific, and this is so much that I don't even know where to start. Here's where the good work's getting done, I think, right now. Right now there's good work going on in the whole general field of psychoacoustics--how the brain processes music. A couple of good books--This is Your Brain on Music, have you ever read that? That's good. Let's see, do I have a copy here? Daniel J. Levitan. Great book. Oliver Sachs' book called Musicophilia--

PM: He is an amazing fellow.

SK: Amazing stuff. I think that's important stuff. I think that there are potentially some advances coming in the field of intonation generally, partly by way of synthesized music, although that hasn't really worked its way into the pop thing yet, where it's actually gotten worse by using pitch correction on the vocals to twelve-tone and shit like that. [laughs]

PM: Exactly.

SK: Oh, no! It's backwards.

PM: De-tune, de-tune. [laughs]

SK: Good grief. On the way home from that gig where Johnny opened up, I got out Astral Weeks. [Van Morrison's Warner Bros. 1968 debut--although MOJO in 1995 listed it #2 in 100 Greatest Albums and Rolling Stone #19 in 2003's The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, it took over 30 years to go gold.] I'm riding in the car and I'm listening to Astral Weeks, and it's insane. This shit is like, everybody in that entire session is tuned to some totally different thing. It's got a string section on the entire record which is basically--I can't even imagine how this came about. It was like, I'm only playing two chords, and I've got four strings. It was like, oh, well. The cellos and the violas or something like that--you guys just play the third and the fifth or something, and then the violins, just jam. [laughs] Got a string section on there, and it's just--play whatever you want. It's in between a couple of acoustic guitars and the vocal and the upright bass and some horns.

PM: And after all these years, it still sounds so amazing.

SK: Holy good grief! This is some really experimental shit. [laughs] It's really a very avant-garde record. When you go back and listen to it, you go, oh, this is some cat who completely got the whole kind of beat poetry kind of thing, but he's just some drunken Irishman or whatever he is, and he only knows two chords. He's completely getting the jazz thing. I mean, completely getting it, just on a beautiful level, and presenting it harmonically with a one chord and a four chord--okay, we're done--and making up the difference by seeing the entire thing uses ten thousand pitches randomly. [laughs] It's so cool.

PM: It's really so much about the spirit of the enterprise, which is the ingredient that gets left behind on so many records today. It's like--what do you mean, the spirit of the enterprise? It's like--well, that's the thing, actually, my friend. [laughs]

SK: Exactly.      continue

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