Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Interview with Rroland

When I write, as part of the ritual necessary to putting me in the right frame of mind, as well as making myself a pot of tea, I tend to put on some music. This is usually instrumental (with one or two exceptions). For instance, favourites include the soundtrack the from film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters by Philip Glass and (currently) Mum's Finally We Are No one. Another disc that has graced my player during the ritual of writing, and at various other times, is Reflections on a Past Life as Played on the Roland Synthesiser, by Rroland. Rroland's music is, to offer a very general description, instrumental, electronic and ambient. However, I'm not sure I could really give and idea of genre here, and even the word 'ambient' seems misleading. Sometimes, when I'm writing, I find that the music refuses to be background music. Some of the pieces are too structured to really be 'ambient', seeming to build themselves in cyclopean blocks before the mind's eye, and even those that have a drifting quality are only really misty - if at all - at the edges. If this is drifting, then it is drifting as experienced by Walter Gilman in H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Dreams in the Witch House', who finds himself nocturnally travelling in dream through regions that "lie beyond the three dimensions we know" in "plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain."

In the case of Reflections on a Past Life, however, there is some explanation, and that explanation is in the title. The fifteen tracks on the disc are a musical representation of a past-life re-lived, and, I must say, they do rather feel that way, like a therapeutic session, perhaps, with the likes of R.D, Laing, whose aim is to re-experience and thus to exorcise buried trauma. The reviews I have read of the disc use phrases such as "Candyland-on-crack", but my own experience is not of 'electronic popsicles'. To give an example, The Road up to Hell sounds to me like a cryogenically frozen soul watching paralysed as bits of karmic space debris burn up in the atmosphere of its aura.



Just the other day, Momus invited the readers of his blog to interview each other in his comments section. I wrote down an impromptu list of questions, and a number of people were generous enough to answer these (and all of them interestingly). Among these people there was Rroland, who has kindly given me permission to reproduce the interview here:

Q: What was the last book (s) that you read?

R: Street of Crocodiles Bruno Schultz

Q: How was it?

R: Funny, sad, inspiring made me want to compose new stuff

Q: Do you have any pets?

R: no, a mouse once lived with me but my landlord killed it

Q: What's your favourite non-alcholic drink?

R: Trader Joe's Bedtime tea

Q: What would be the preferred manner of your death?

R: in the backcountry while hiking, or with my head on my keyboard playing an endless distorted note

Q: What is the oldest article of clothing that you still wear?

R: that's a long answer, i wear everything until it falls apart

Q: What is your favourite kind of weather?

R: thick fog

Q: What is the least touristy place you have ever been?

R: San Diego, CA

Q: What place names make you laugh?

R: San Diego

Q: Have you ever been personally involved with someone born on an island smaller than Taiwan?

R: No

Q: Do you prefer to use chopsticks, knife and fork, or hands?

R: Chopsticks when possible

Q: Have you ever walked out on a film in the cinema, and if so, what was it?

R: 'I'm not There', The Heath Ledger parts were pissing me off

Q: What's your least favourite cartoon and why?

R: He-Man, because i am a mis-anthropist

Q: Who is the world's funniest comedian?

R: Franz Kafka

Q: What do you want to do next week?

R: Yoga

Q: Have you ever admired someone for political reasons?

R: yes, Momus

Q: What is the most psychologically formative event of your life before the age of nine?

R: when I burned my dad's porn collection and started a field on fire and got in trouble with the fire department

Q: Where did you last go for a daytrip and why?

R: I walked about 10 miles across the GG Bridge from my house in SF and took the ferry back from Sausalito

Thanks for interview Quentin!

You may listen to some of Rroland's music at his Myspace page, here.

Labels: H.P. Lovecraft, Momus, music, Rroland