Breakdown | Michael Brook

What sort of music are you listening to these days?

Actually it's... I don't know if it's Swedish or Finnish? A guy called Silvistroff? It's a record Roger Eno recommended to me. Yeah, it's beautiful stuff. Symphonic-type work. Really, really nice. And I like the Finlay Quay record. I don't know if you heard that.

No, I haven't.

It didn't get a big notice here. More in England. It's a really good record.

I've noticed that some of my most played records are some compilations that came out from Virgin Records, of ambient music. They somehow managed to stick a track from Hybrid on each one. I was wondering if you would categorize that record or your music as what they call "ambient," and whether or not that label still applies.

I would say it most applies to some of the Hybrid stuff. I find, in my opinion, my stuff is generally a little more mid-ground than background. But it's not necessarily kind of front and center type music. I think there's a lot more music that is oriented to essentially being background than mine. I certainly don't think I'm in the middle of that category.

I guess I ask because, seen a little bit out of context, your first two solo albums... there appears to be a gigantic step between them. Cobalt Blue actually being fairly poppish at times.

Yeah. You learn, but also you just find different things interesting. The spotlight of one's attention moves around as you go through life. I'd been listening to a lot of J.J. Cale and Ennio Morricone when I did Cobalt Blue and I think I still hear influences of them in it.

One of the people I met from having set up this web site was Steven Davey. I exchanged a few emails with him, and it was very interesting to hear about what Toronto was like at the time that you were touring around in the Everglades. Sounded very exciting. He was mentioning that in the Everglades, he was focusing mostly on R&B-based rock and punk. And he said he was surprised to hear your more experimental stuff later, that you had apparently been doing outside of the Everglades. I think he was curious when you first started beginning to experiment beyond the kind of music you were playing in an ensemble like The Everglades.

To a large extent it was when I started a solo career, or in the years preceding that. I suppose it started when I met up with Jon Hassell and started working with him. He was sort of the... I guess him and Brian Eno were the first, and only examples I knew of at the time, of people who were making music that I think was kind of intellectually aware and yet still listenable, you know? It was good music to listen to, and also how it was made and why it was made were interesting. And most other music at the time was either one or the other, and I think I found them both to be pretty inspirational people, as to what they were trying to do. And that's sort of when I wondered if this could be done. These people seem to be doing it, and so I'd like to do it too.

Was Hassell teaching at York University? How did you get to meet him?

He was there just for a short period of time, doing a workshop. They had offered a kind of composer in residence. Then he started recording his first album there, using musicians, and there was a small studio there. He just sort of ended up staying there for a lot longer than anybody thought he was going to. But it was good for me, you know, I hung around with him. He was certainly tuned into the whole New York avant garde music scene, but he was trying to make music that was something someone would enjoy listening to as well.

Another name that seems to be mentioned a lot, along with Jon Hassell, is Pandit Pran Nath. And that's someone I know very little about.

I believe he died recently. He was a singer who taught Jon, Terry Riley, and Lamont Young. They were his main students. I think some people feel his presence had quite an influence on pattern-based music, you know, sort of Terry Riley-type stuff. I think Lamont himself was... not very many people listen to his music but I think his music influenced a lot of musicians. And I think was part of incorporating some eastern concepts into western avant garde music. I had expressed to Jon that I kind of felt I had reached a musical impasse. I had been playing rock music, but I didn't know much about music. And he suggested I study with Pran Nath. Which I did not very much, because Pran Nath was in New York and I was in Toronto. So it wasn't that easy to get down there for lessons, but I did, and it was good.

Thanks very much for taking the time to call.

I really appreciate you running the web site, by the way. It's a good thing for me to say to people, just "go check out this web site." So I do appreciate it.