Kyle Eyre Clyd - The Sound Outside

“This is my first album in seven years and it has a sound that is very personal to me and it has echoes of my previous recordings stylistically. I wanted to remember what I was into twenty years ago when I first started experimenting with sound to get back into making and so I listened to a lot of Keiji Haino leading up to the creation of this album. I also listened to Maryanne Amacher. This album was produced with every piece of gear and technology that I own including synths, Max/MSP, crystal bowls, whistles, a guitar, tape, theremin, pedals, tone generators, records, radios, contact mics, and mixer feedback.”  -K


Interview for Newsletter No. 40 :

What originally set you on a path of making noise and performing?

I studied art in undergrad in New York and took a lot of video classes and classes on sculpture in the expanded field where we studied performance art from the 60s. When I graduated I had little to no budget for my art practice and so I started working in performance art. I was going to a lot of New York noise shows while I was in college and I experimented with music at art school a little bit. I had always wanted to front a noise band while doing art like Niagra even in high school, but I could never get a band together. I really became more of a musician than a performance artist experimenting with sound after I moved into the punk warehouse Silent Barn. Then it seemed like my only creative option was to do music in that space and at that time there were suddenly a lot of solo projects in noise subculture as opposed to full bands.


What was it like living at Silent Barn? Any favorite or memorable shows?

Silent Barn was really wild! It was really dilapidated with no heat, but there were a lot of cool murals on the walls. For a while there were shows every night and it was a New York audience so there could be between fifty to seven hundred people there on any given night. I used to book a band called TryCryTry a lot which is now know as Haribo. They’re a jammy glam rock band fronted by the (now) art star Raul DeNieves in drag. I saw Kurt Vile and James Ferraro and U.S. Girls there. I booked the noise band Pedestrian Deposit early on and I liked them. I also booked Noise Nomads and Russian Tsarlag. I also liked Tyvek which was Heath Moreland from Detroit (Sick Llama) playing punk instead of his usual solo noise set. I also saw a lot of indie bands there like Future Islands and the Vivian Girls that I would have never seen had I not lived there. Indie rock tickets can be so expensive and I would have never seen a lot of that music had I not lived at Silent Barn.


I've seen you perform solo, as well as with groups like Mother Earth, and Chrysanthemum. Are there certain elements from any previous projects that you feel are present in what you're doing now?

I don’t really think that I work with improvised movement or performance art in the way that I did with Mother Earth anymore. Now when I perform I’m working with movements that are improvised but that are incredibly slow or slight and those movements change the sound in a way that is incredibly slow or slight. That could be something that I saw happening in No Neck Blues band which is the band that Keith from Chrysanthemum was in. I feel like what I’m doing now is really influenced by some of the things I was doing in Second Sun with Patrick Cole in New York and with some of my early music. At that time I was really influenced by Keiji Haino’s use of improvised electronics but I really had only heard this work as the videos weren’t available yet. I’m also trying to incorporate sound as a pure sound instead of as a musical element in my work which is what I was doing when I first thought of myself as a performance artist. I think of a sound bath as a sound experience that may or may not have musical goals and so I’ve been investigating the sound bath.

How would you describe the variation in sounds between your 2019 release Eggshell and this new album The Sound Outside? How was your approach to composing or recording different?

In Eggshell I wanted to try to incorporate a sonic phenomenon known as “the third ear” invented by Maryanne Amacher. I was also inspired by Eliane Radigue’s drone work. For this album I really wanted to reference my own work in the noise scene that I created before I went to graduate school and really knew a lot about highbrow music. I like a lot of the solutions that self-taught artists come up with and so I listened to a lot of this old material to see if there were any bizarre outsider sound elements that I could include in this album. I also wanted to reference different social sites for sound in this album like the sound bath’s coffeehouse or the noise rock nightclub space. I also wanted to avoid references to galleries and concert halls for this album and I feel like those were the social sites conjured by Eggshell. I did, also, listen to one Maryanne Archer recording for a tunnel that influenced the arrangement of this piece somewhat. Eggshell was recorded in the studio at Bard and at highbrow venues I had played at and the new album is a home recording where I used a large collection of every piece of gear that I own to create a more varied sonic palette.

How do you see the music relating to the cultural figures mentioned in the track titles? Who is Forrest Bess for instance?

The cultural figures in the titles—Forrest Bess, Antonin Artaud, and Agnes Martin—inspired the scores for this music. I used artworks by Forrest Bess and Agnes Martin to come up with graphic scores for the music on the first and third tracks. For the piece named for Artaud I used my instruments to mimic his screaming during a radio play he did. Recent scholarship suggests that all of these artists were most likely queer and suffered from various mental health issues so I thought it would be interesting to contrast their styles sonically to suggest that they had a cultural life and aesthetic that went beyond the outsider aesthetic that one might expect from individuals living with these conditions. I don’t know that the listener really hears that influence unless it’s explained in that way, but these artists provided me with a map to guide my process.

These recordings and your recent live performances have a very meditative quality to me...is it meditative for you also? How do you go about thinking of creating an "atmosphere"?

I try to make the new work more meditative now. This past year I hosted a sound bath series with my friend at a local yoga studio and that experience really taught me a lot about having patience with sound. I was influenced by sound baths for this album, but I use some instruments and sounds that you may not always hear at a sound bath. I think that the track named for Artaud isn’t meditative at all, though. I really wanted to capture his suffering for that track and I didn’t want the album to seem like music therapy because none of the artists I reference were doing art therapy in their work. I try to create an atmosphere by observing how different sounds reverberate in certain spaces and then I condense those echoes or expand them to create a feeling of a body darting throughout a space.

It's interesting how you meld the sounds of crystal bowls with electronic tones. Could you talk about that combination of elements?

Initially I wanted to create overtones by playing the electronics over the crystal bowls and to compose with the overtones, but there wasn’t enough musical information there for me once I began doing that so I started to improvise with the electronics with a little more variation on track two. I usually use a sine tone generator to create pulsing effects kind of like David Tudor did on “Pulsers.” For this album I composed with the pulses of the overtones rather than by using the rhythms created by the sine tone generator’s rhythms. I wanted there to be a stark contrast between improvisation on electronics that was very subtle and slow with improvisation that is more expressive and dynamic. I read that Agnes Martin saw her approach with drawing lines as improvised and related to expressionism because there is subtle variation between the lines and I found that to be a very interesting way to see expression and improv—as something that can sometimes be nearly imperceptible.

You also make visual art....what mediums do you like to use and what kinds of themes do you like to explore with imagery?

Right now I’m painting in oils. I’m trying to think of the gestures that an artist makes in abstract expressionist paintings as a form of dance and so I like working on very large canvases to leave a trace of my body movements. I want the gestures to be a record of my specific body size and abilities. I also have made sound installations where the visual imagery of the piece draws you into a certain sound or ideal spots for listening.