The following was edited together from a self-performed interview, August 15th, 2006.
Firstly, a bit more background information on Jackie, beyond what she has said in the interview about herself and how she got into sampling. I recently returned from the International Sound Symposium in St. John's (July 2006). Jackie was also at the Sound Symposium, performing. And she was performing in a style that is quite interesting in relationship to this project. She was playing samples "live" with a touch sensitive drum pad called an Octopad, which you can play with drumsticks and use to trigger samples stored in a sampler (or computer).
This was a practice I knew she had been working on two years ago when she was composing the piece for Selected Sounds, the latter being perhaps the first time she had used this technique of non-percussive samples through the Octopad. I guess she's perfected the technique since, because it worked terrifically in the Sound Symposium context. She was extremely well received. Her performance slot followed some more traditional performances, including some Gaelic singing and re-interpretations of traditional Gaelic tunes improvised on keyboards and voice. The Sound Symposium includes a lot of improvisational music, but also a lot of esoteric types of composed music and electronic music. Anything and everything is acceptable to a certain degree at the Sound Symposium, including symphonies written for ships horns present in the St. John's harbour on a particular day, light-sensitive synthesizers playing back music as shadows are cast onto their surfaces, etc. And then there was Jackie, with a very rhythmic performance--very rock, even though she was triggering samples from a sample-based playback system. Jackie is a great drummer, whether with regular drums or her Octopad, and she plays in different types of projects, not only the "Lesbians on Ecstasy,"(a band which also includes Bernadette Houde and Lynne Trepanier, two other members of the Selected Sounds group) but also in other earlier groups/projects, not to mention her work in sound production for documentary films and contemporary dance soundtracks.
Her skill as a drummer really came through in her Sound Symposium performance. She played two tracks, one that used samples stored in her hardware for a long time, as long as she's owned some of the technology. She also composed something quite fresh, based on samples that she had drawn exclusively from the Fleetwood Mac album "Tusk" (although you wouldn't really have know it from the sound of the performance). This is a little-known album when compared to some of the group's super hits, such as every track from "Rumours", but it's an album that she loves. The performance went down really well; my students loved it (I was in St. John's to teach a graduate music class at Memorial University in conjunction with the Symposium). She also gave a guest presentation in my class, explaining the technology she was using, and provided some insight into her choices as a sample-based musician. The students found Jackie to be extremely open about her practice. This is counter to the norm in hip hop, for instance, and many other music production domains, where technological know-how is carefully guarded as a form of cultural capital.
Participants are always invited to perform short improvised sessions with other artists whom they have met at the Symposium on the last evening of the festival. Even though I knew Jackie from another context, we had certainly never performed or played music together before. We rehearsed in the afternoon, and then performed a "battle" with Jackie playing the Octopad with samples from "Tusk", and me on the turntable scratching from "Rumours". Together we composed something quite hysterical...which ended up closing out the Symposium improv for that night, and was also really well received due to its rhythmic and up-beat nature. The Sound Symposium was particularly mind-expanding. Many of the artists who I met, such as Gayle Young (Editor of Music Works magazine, or Warren Burt and Catherine Scheive (Percy Granger scholars and light-controlled synthesizer re-constructionists) were positively inspirational.
But to return to the interview with Jackie. She describes herself as both a musician and a sound manipulator. As she says,
often when I work as a musician it is just that. Just being a musician. And when I work doing projects at home or projects that aren't associated with a band, it's sound manipulation, although I do also play instruments when I'm creating music. I'll play a guitar or bass, so I'll incorporate being a musician, but I put the slash there because there is definitely a large separation between the two elements. J. Gallant, Question 1
She has lately been working on bringing these two identities together (she mentions this later in the interview). And in the two years since this interview was conducted, I think her practice has followed this path, although even back then we were simply having very enthusiastic conversations about how to integrate more live playing into one's work as a sample-based musician.
One thing I did notice about my Selected Sounds interview with Jackie is that I talk an awful lot. I give my two cents everywhere, and I'm busy trying to talk about this and that piece of gear. Jackie's great to converse with about that kind of thing. She readily admitted to me during a conversation on the way home from the Sound Symposium, she's a real gear nut. She loves talking about gear, and I eat that up as well. So we were talking about all our different pieces of gear and how we acquired them and how we learned about them. And we have very similar stories in terms of having notions about what certain older samplers (such as the Ensoniq EPS) can do. We both acquired such early models and then had our minds blown open in terms of what they were capable of. We then both started to create/craft music using these new tools, with varying degrees of success and for different opportunities as they presented themselves. But of late we have both been noticing how much fun can be had integrating a live playability into sampling. In the two years since we spoke for Selected Sounds, I found this very much to be the case, especially in my work with dancers, notably George Stamos (as choreographer), Lucianne Pinto, Sarah Williams, other Montreal-based dancers. The work that I have done with these dancers has necessitated a live presence. I have been onstage with them, I've been playing music off my laptop, but I've also found a need to respond to the dance in a way which is interactive and dynamic, as it is not always the same. Perhaps this is especially the case in contemporary dance, as how an artist moves changes from performance to performance, even if only in very slight nuances of timing. Good dancers react very strongly to good music, but the best thing that a composer can provide to dance is an interactive presence, both during rehearsals and performances.
I like to lay down a foundation, one that often consists of beats, or various field recordings manipulated into loops so as to be suggestive of beats. In The Reservoir, the most recent project I have been working on with Stamos, a lot of the material comes from water-dripping sounds from around my home. I explored and made recordings of the water-dripping sounds in our basement, in our kitchen, and various other places. I then integrated loops of these drips into a broader soundscape. I then add scratches over top of this foundation. I use the turntable to create melodies, narratives, nuances of sounds--a different level of communication, one that is more linear, and less loop-based, less recursive. One could almost say "more melodic". I think as a listener, as an audience, we are really looking for both these kind of things. Especially if we have grown up on Rock and Pop music--and even in Classical there is a strong tradition of adhering to this practice of mixing recursion with surprise.