Inside the Dream: In Conversation with Roger Clark Miller

Perhaps better known for antics alongside Clint Conley, Peter Prescot and Martin Swope in Mission of Burma, Roger Clark Miller spearheaded something akin to boulders rumbling down the mountain. The exponents of perforating eardrums, Mission of Burman’s 1982 debut LP, Vs., forever a cultural landmark in the pantheon independent music.

Due to Miller suffering from tinnitus, in 1983 the band abruptly came to a halt, and it would be just under 20 years later before Mission of Burma would rise again and reaffirm their position as one of the finest proto-punk acts to ever walk the earth. Their resumption in 2002, which saw tape manipulator Swope replaced by Shellac’s Bob Weston, resulted in a further four LPs, including the excellent The Obliterati (2006) and Unsound (2012) before calling time in 2020.

Outside Mission of Burma, and Miller’s solo endeavours have been just as fascinating. The various soundtracks and music for silent films (the latter as The Anvil Orchestra alongside Terry Donahue). The Burma adjacent Maximum Electric Piano, consisting of an array of bespoke instruments and techniques. The obscure new-wave odyssey of No Man Is Hurting Me (1987) and mangled guitar binge of Roger Miller? Oh (1988). The collaboration alongside his brothers, Larry and Benjamin as the Beefheartian-tinged M3, which offers the kind of sonic befuddlement that could have inspired Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. (Miller also plays alongside Benjamin as the prepared piano duo, M2.)

These are just some of Miller’s creative pursuits, spanning over a career that has seen the artist constantly shining light into new corners. Like anything left of centre, however, the Roger Clark Miller experience should be celebrated far more than it is, but speaking to him earlier this month via Zoom, and it’s clear he is nonplussed about this. Happy to work at his own pace, his focus and concern is what comes next.

Miller’s latest release, Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble, is the focal point of our discussion. His second solo electric guitar ensemble LP (the first, 2022’s Eight Dream Interpretations for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble), is one that Miller is immediately proud of. “It’s quite different from the first one,” says Miller. “It’s really difficult to perform because I’m constantly changing the instruments. I’m constantly playing the foot pedals… I’m hitting, starting a loop, stopping a loop, changing a loop. But I just did a tour down the east coast of the US that went quite well, and then I’m going to do a Midwest tour in October.”

Inspired by his dream journal, in what Miller describes as “both other worldly and inner worldly”, Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble pulls the mind to far out places. Composed via four different guitars, live loops and stereo devices, while there are slight Burma echoes throughout, as he’s always done during his career, Miller completely dismantles past ideas, ultimately smashing the mirror with the ensuing the shards scattered across his ever-expanding sound world.

Now living in Vermont after moving from the Boston area in 2015, like most, Miller was priced out of metropolitan living. “My girlfriend had a house in Vermont that was rustic and tiny, but she was starting to fix it up, and we’ve been fixing it up, and it’s pretty amazing,” he says. “We live on the side of a mountain, and we have a pond in the backyard, and it’s a dirt road when a car goes by, you go, ‘Who is that?’” he laughs. “It’s a nice contrast to my main work, which is like New York, Boston, L.A… a good place to retreat.”

Creatively, Miller is someone who doesn’t stay in one place for long. His bourgeoning discography – worthy of more column inches than its afforded – is a testament to that. “I think my next thing that I’ll be doing with music will be my new writing of songs for a solo performance,” he says. “People have really liked it for some reason. I’m kind of shocked how much they like it, so I’m just going to keep doing it.”

Then there’s Miller’s band, Trinary System, who ready the October release of The Hard Machine, which follows 2019’s Lights in the Center of Your Head. “They’re like Burma songs, except for they’re not,” says Miller. “There are some longer instrumental sections where you’d call it research, I suppose, but mostly it’s songs, and you would recognise the hooks and all that kind of shit. We are excited about the release. Quite psychedelic actually.”

While Mission of Burma may have seen Miller rise to prominence throughout the underground, his artistic impulses began long before that in Sproton Layer – the first project alongside his brothers Larry and Benjamin, formed in their hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where our conversation begins.

Sun 13: Did you grow up in a music household?

Roger Clark Miller: “Yeah, my dad was a pretty good classical piano player. I still have this little trophy he got when he was going to college somewhere in California… he was the best piano player there. He was thinking of being a concert pianist, but almost nobody does that, so he turned to studying fish. He’s a natural scientist, but he played piano sometimes in the evening, and he would play records, mostly classical. Stuff that I liked would be the Firebird Suite, and he played César Franck and Mozart. When we were going to bed, we would listen to classical music, and sometimes musicals of the time.”

S13: Was classical music your first memory of music?

RCM: “Yeah. I didn’t know it was classical at the time. In our family, when you were six, you started piano lessons, so when I was five, I was very excited that the next year I was going to start studying piano. I wasn’t a genius or anything, but I was good. And then The Beatles hit when I was in sixth grade, and it was like, ‘Why am I playing classical music?’ All of a sudden, I hated anything to do with piano and classical music, and I just wanted to play guitar like The Beatles. (laughs) I was like, ‘I’ll just follow this trajectory a little bit’.

“When The Beatles hit, me and my brothers loved them. Millions and millions of people in the United States had their lives completely changed by The Beatles on Ed Sullivan… then between ninth and tenth grade, the Summer of Love happened… Pink Floyd and The Doors were using keyboards. It was that psychedelic use of keyboards in rock music that caused me to take piano seriously again.”

S13: In the linear notes of the Vs. repress, there’s a photo of your business card as a piano tuner. Is that something you still do?

RCM: (Laughs) “That’s what got me to Boston. I had been in Ann Arbor, Michigan… Iggy Pop went to my high school, he was four or five years older than me. I was in Ann Arbor during the Summer of Love, saw the MC5 10 or 15 times. I saw The Stooges on their first album record release show in Detroit… stuff like that. It was really interesting, and then when punk rock hit in ’77 my brothers joined Destroy All Monsters, and I started to develop tinnitus. I just couldn’t get anything going, so I said, ‘I’m going to move to Boston and become a piano tuner… learn something practical’.

“When I moved to Boston, it was so much better of a scene than Ann Arbor. It was monumental, and I knew I had to hurl myself back into it. I was a piano tuner for a bit, but I’m not very good at fixing things. If you tell me what kind of screwdriver to get and tell me what to do, I can do that, but if you’re a piano tech, you really need to have a sense of how the physical world works, and my forte is the imaginary world. So I didn’t tune pianos for very long, but that’s okay, because pretty soon I was in Mission of Burma.”

S13: Were The Stooges and the MC5 a gateway to your first band, Sproton Layer?

RCM: “Not really. Our primary influences were Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the first Soft Machine album and Captain Beefheart’s Strictly Personal, because Trout Mask Replica hadn’t come out yet. Those would be our touchstones for the music that we made, though seeing the MC5 when they did Starship, I remember seeing Rob Tyner running through the audience with his eyes wide open – he was probably tripping out of his brain – and getting feedback and doing this high energy free-form improv’, that meant a lot to us.

“But at the same time when we were doing that, my dad heard that we were listening to Saucer Full of Secrets when that came out – that’s got a lot of classical elements, kind of avant garde – and he suggested that we start going to the University of Michigan concerts. They have a pretty strong music school, and they had a series called Contemporary Directions, which is all new music. I saw Terry Riley’s In C before I knew what it was, Stockhausen and [Krzysztof] Penderecki. In the afternoon, we’d get stoned to the MC5, and at night we’d get stoned and listen to Penderecki and Stockhausen. (laughs) So those kinds of things didn’t seem that far apart to us.”

S13: At that time, was someone like Lester Bangs ingrained in that culture for you, too? 

RCM: “I was pretty young. When I saw The Stooges, I was going into twelfth grade. My family was upper middle-class, but I didn’t have a lot of money, and so I spent my money on three things: musical instruments, records, and weed. (laughs) I missed a lot of concerts because I had a choice between records and weed or going to see a concert, so I missed some of that, and I didn’t read a lot of the publications unless someone brought them over to the house. So I wasn’t really familiar with Lester Bangs until the mid ’70s, and then I realised that he was an important individual.”

S13: What were the ideas behind your latest release, Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble?

RCM: “I live in the small Vermont town of Brattleboro. Some years ago, I had one of my art installations in the art museum there, and the fellow who runs the Brattleboro Art Museum suggested that I do some multiple guitar stuff. As soon as he suggested that, I could feel my brain starting to… he just poked a hole, and I just started going into the hole, and stuff started showing up in my brain. I almost didn’t want it to, because I knew what that meant. If I started thinking in those terms, it was going to become an obsession vision, and that’s what happened.

“Backtracking a little bit, in the mid ’80s, I had a thing that was called Maximum Electric Piano. I released a couple albums of that. I had a piano that had strings but also pickups so I could prepare the piano with objects… bolts and alligator clips – the John Cage thing – and also run it through guitar effects like distortion and delay and also make loops, so I could make a one-person ensemble out of that.

“That guy at the museum, he’s a good friend now, put this idea in my head. So I bought these three lap steel guitars that were really cheap, like 80 bucks and they’re on legs… you can prepare them, because when you prepare a guitar that you’re holding in your arms, the preparations fall off or fall over. But here they’re just sitting there, flat, and so you can really get into preparations. Once I had that and a looping machine and my other ‘normal’ guitar, I already had this idea that I developed in music school in 1975 where I used dreams as the structure for the music. It’s kind of post-John Cage, but also surrealist, very much influenced by André Breton’s thinking.”

S13: Right.

RCM: “So these were the kind of sounds I was making, which were very trippy once you give them the context of a dream. If you remember your dreams at all, they’re way out there. You don’t get in the car, go to the grocery store, buy brussels sprouts, come back home and cook them. That is not a dream. You get in the car and then suddenly you’re in a different town, there’s something coming out of the woods… so I could use these sounds that I had and structure them with dreams. But it also gave the sounds a context, and for people listening, a way to assimilate what I was doing. That was the Eight Dream Interpretations, which was my last solo electric guitar ensemble.

“This recent one, Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble, I wanted to expand it a little bit so there’s four dream interpretations. But again, there’s also a post-John Cage thing where I took photographs by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. Five photographs taken on Mars, and I use those photographs to structure the music… a little bit impressionistically, but mostly when the line of rocks rose to the top of the picture, there’d be a big upwards glissando, and then when it was little pebbles, there’d be random sounds on the guitars.”

S13: So your ideas and concepts are mapped out before the music?

RCM: “Yeah. I have kept a dream journal since I was 19. I do it every year. I keep a journal and a dream journal, and they’re always almost the same length. When I’m writing a new dream interpretation, or I decide to make an album of dream interpretations, I look over the last two years of dreams and just select ones that have a nice impressionistic or emotive content, but it’s a real story, and I can imagine how it would translate into music. I just collect all these dreams, like seven or eight, and start thinking about how I could turn them into music… pretty soon the best ones rise to the top.”

S13: Back when you first started Mission of Burma, did you ever envisage making these kind of John Cage, or Rhys Chatham-inspired improvisations?

RCM: “I wasn’t at that point. I was not aware of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca had not yet made any records, so that side was not an influence. But Fred Frith was somewhat of an influence, though that becomes much more manifest in my solo electric guitar ensemble, because I didn’t use alligator clips or any of that stuff. But in Burma, I would use dreams. The second verse of Einstein’s Day is a real ecstatic kind of dream. I had already been through, like… I love playing Béla Bartók on the piano, so some of my harmonies have that more than Clint, who wrote more pop tunes and more correct harmony than I did. All that stuff was brought in, and I would do anti-solos. (laughs)

“On Vs, there are three kinds of what you might refer to as ‘epic’ guitar solos. One of them in Weatherbox where I have the tremolo on, and I’m just waving slowly back and forth in front of the amplifier, like I’m a weathervane, and that’s the fucking solo! (laughs). In Fun World, I’m just hitting harmonics, and it’s not really the pitches… it’s more like how the notes are beating against each other, and it’s kind of dissonant; that’s another pretty nice anti-solo. Einstein’s Day is actually a scale, but lots of times I’m just holding the note, and the feedback is changing the pitch without me changing my finger position – that’s also kind of good. I was pretty pleased with those solos after the fact. At the time, you’re just doing shit… you don’t know what you’re doing. When I looked at the album a few years later, I thought, ‘Wow, these are pretty interesting’.”

S13: Do you have a great sense of accomplishment or fondness with those records? I mean, when you wrote and recorded these songs, did you ever think they would hold the test of time and become so influential?

RCM: “Of course, we had no idea. Maybe the comments in the press had been a little more made up about us being so influential, but we’d play a lot and were really loud. I think that was part of the problem; I couldn’t tell onstage, but people would be baffled by us quite often, likely by the chaos of the sound.

“A few places got us. New York got us pretty quickly. In Boston, they got us, DC, sometimes in San Francisco… most places it was confusing, but we would keep touring and doing it and go, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be bad tonight’. But it didn’t stop us, because we believed in what we were doing. It wasn’t like we had monumental egos, we just knew we were doing what was right for us, and we knew that there was something there. But we didn’t sit around thinking we were famous. We never thought like that.

“I was just talking about this in Philadelphia, because I played one of my Dream Interpretation concerts there, and it went really, really well. Usually, in the early ’80s when Burma would play Philadelphia, every show was terrible, and so the last show we played there, we put our three slowest songs at the top of the set just to get it over with! We thought, ‘We’re not like you and you’re not going to like us, so fuck you’. (laughs) I’m really a nice guy and so is everybody else in the band, but it was the aesthetic and the ethos of post-punk perhaps, we knew that they wouldn’t get it, so fuck them.”

S13: There weren’t really that many bands in the States like Mission of Burma around at that time. People may have associated you with someone like Hüsker Dü. But even your image, you wore collared shirts! There were no tees in your band…

RCM: (Laughs) “Hüsker Dü opened up for us in Minneapolis. They didn’t have a record out, or Sonic Youth… these are the bands that we are often connected to, and I like those bands… I’ve played with Lee [Ranaldo].

“When we started, Peter was really into shirts; the shirt things were his ideas, and they were kind of cool. We were just bridging over from no-wave into the gutsier side of post-punk. People thought that we were a hardcore band, but we never were. We were before hardcore existed, though I like some of those bands.”

S13: How important is sense of humour in music to you? For example, listening to The Obliterati, there are some pretty amusing parts throughout…

RCM: “It helps keep you afloat when times are bad, that’s for sure. There’s a saying… I may have made it up and it’s probably a pretty common one, but any day you can make your friends laugh is a good day. Because laughter releases some kind of stuff in the human body, and there’s a little bit of levity that allows you to go through the bullshit. Most of the time we were pretty amused… we just got used to people being confused by us, and it just didn’t bother us.

“In retrospect, it’s kind of weird, and we would make no attempt to adapt. I remember when MTV came down to shoot the video for TremTwo. I know this is a very severe kind of move, but I was the lead singer of that song, and so I moved as little as possible, and was deliberately as uninteresting as possible. And they never used it! I was happy, because I hated MTV, you know? Why do you need to watch videos of people miming to the shit? Why don’t you just turn the TV off and listen to the record and see the shit in your head! We never made any attempt to adapt to the world.” (laughs)

S13: Going back to The Obliterati, and the second phase of the band turned into the kind of golden period few others of your generation experienced. Unsound was excellent, too…

RCM: “I like The Obliterati quite a bit. Those are the two that I think are good. The other two are both a little stiff.”

S13: ONoffON is great!

RCM: “The guitar is so obnoxious. (laughs) In every single song, the guitar was in your face. It’s not enough texture for me. I think in terms of symphonies… like there should be a slow part where things quiet out, so I’m applying some portion of that to rock music. That’s why on The Obliterati, there are two or three songs, Careening with Conviction is one, where I just take the guitar out from the second verse. There was another song where I just took the guitar out so that it would be more interesting, because I hated that sound of the guitar just always in your face. Which isn’t to say it’s not a good record, but the thing about Burma is that we folded in ’83 for a very weird reason that was my ears. When we reformed, I was 50, and I had always said, I want to be able to hear when I’m 50: that’s why I’m stopping. And I was 50 and I could hear just fine, so that’s why we played again! (laughs)

“But in ’83 we didn’t fold because of drug problems or interpersonal problems or running out of ideas, we folded for the bizarre reason that I said I can’t play anymore. When we reformed, the consensus amongst our fans – who were just completely astounded that we reformed – was that we just picked up where we left off! It wasn’t like we were the Doobie Brothers or the Sex Pistols coming back and writing new material that was going to be bad because you’re trying to reach out to the glory. We were never successful in the first place, so we had nothing to grab at! We had nothing to prove except for that we were going to keep doing it exactly as we like to. I think that gave us a leg up.

“That was why we all said we’re not just going to reform; we’re all going to bring in one new song, because otherwise we’ll just keep flogging a dead horse. So we all did, then we all brought in another, and pretty soon we had an album. And then we kept making albums until towards the end when I was the only one writing, and it just seemed like time where I [thought], ‘I think we’re done’.”

S13: Tracking back to your solo album, No Man is Hurting Me, it might be one of the great lost new wave records I can think of. Is that one that you’re particularly proud of?

RCM: “No, I don’t like it very much.”

(Both laugh)

RCM: “To me, it’s everything that… so a guy who makes a solo record, and every one of those mistakes is on there, [but] he thinks, ‘I can do whatever I want now, I’m free!’ When you’re around other people sharpening your edge, it gets more interesting. Bob Weston, who did tape loops with Burma and did a lot of mastering in Chicago, I’d sent him two unopened copies of the record, which [he re-mastered] and are now available on my Bandcamp in really high fidelity.

“Why do you like it?”

S13: I think you can draw a line to it from some of the Curiosity material. It just sounds like a beautifully peculiar record not just of that time, but also now. It stands up as an outlier of sorts…

RCM: “It was the beginning of my Maximum Electric Piano period, where I had loops and preparations, which is the model for my solo electric guitar ensemble, except for the instrumentation… it’s a little different with the guitar instead of the piano. But you are correct that that did predate and was the initial model for my work, and the album that just came out.”

S13: The other record that lands in a similar world is Roger Miller? Oh. There are some moments that sound like Sunn O)))!

RCM: (Laughs) “That was such a cool record to make. It’s literally one of my favorites. It’s completely out there in some respect, but you can tell that the guy knows about music, and the pieces are very structured, or if they’re not, they’re deliberately non-structured. The reason that record came to pass is Forced Exposure, which was a label at the time, I’m still friends with Byron Coley. They said, ‘We’ll pay you $2,000 if you record a guitar record on four-track cassette’. I had a Tascam portal studio with four tracks, and they said, ‘If you record, we will not allow you to use the piano or percussion, it has to be all guitars.’

“It was kind of irritating, but there’s an example of had I just done what I wanted without listening to anybody, it might not have been anywhere near as good. So the limitations they put on me forced me to go one step beyond, and I had to make up a whole record and record it in my basement. It was really fun, but difficult at times – I don’t like engineering my own work. It’s such an oblique record. There are, I think, five vocal songs, and four of them are in a made-up language! They’re not even English! I hand spraypainted every back cover, all 2,000 covers. I threw rocks, small pebbles on top of them, and then I spraypainted over that, so you saw the shadow of the rocks. It got an incredibly favourable review in The New York Times, so to me, it was just a wonderful fuck you to the world. If you really are doing something, people will see it.”

S13: That big drone is the penultimate track, The Forest…

RCM: “I didn’t have enough material for a full album, so I just said, ‘Well, I’m just going to record feedback for 10 minutes’! The Forest is kind of based on some of Max Ernst paintings; he painted a series of forests. That’s why I called it The Forest. It isn’t based on those paintings, but it has a Max Ernst reference for me. I had three amps, and I think I had three guitars and they were just feeding back. I had one mic in the room in my basement on my fourth-track cassette deck, and I was going through and just modifying the tones a little bit, then I did another batch of the same recording.

“After that, one of the amps died, and then I couldn’t take anymore, so I put those same things back in slowed down, so it’s just constantly changing feedback. It actually becomes like a forest, because there’s no theme! It’s constantly slightly changing, as if you’re looking at a woods and an animal came out and went back in, the wind went by and changed the way the leaves look temporarily. So in a way, the title is appropriate for it.”

S13: It seems like you’ve always been in your own space in history, doing your own thing outside the parameters irrespective of what has been going on around you. Is that something you’ve reflected on?

RCM: “It’s just the way my brain works. I’ve always felt isolated. I mean, I feel a part of the world, and I have loved, I have lots of friends, and I like people and like to go out and see music. I pay a lot of attention to the world – I like Glenn Branca’s Ascension album… someone gave me a copy and that was really cool. So I’m not uninfluenced by things, but I tend to just follow my own muse. When I was a kid, I would play by myself and just make up stories, and I would write stories, so I’ve always been very internal, creating stuff.”

S13: Do you work on music every day?

RCM: “Every day, without a doubt. I mean, that’s what I do. I teach guitar lessons. I do soundtracks. I compose piano music, orchestral music, the dream interpretations, rock songs. I started writing songs again, but I don’t think it’s really for a band; I think it’s more for a solo performance. It’s a whole new style of writing. I’m really excited about it.”

S13: Do you think your immediate surroundings are influencing what you’re doing now?

RCM: “Not particularly. The wife of Max Ernst, who was also really good writer and painter, Dorothea Tanning, was asked about whether moving to Paris affected her art. She [said], ‘You keep making art, it’s the people around you that might affect you’. The fact that I live in this idyllic environment doesn’t really affect me that much. I’ve used the creek to organise music, but it’s something that I was already doing in Somerville, you know? You just gradually change. In my world what influences me is the entire world at this point, because you can hear anything from the latest stuff from Bali to what’s going on in London or Perth or Chicago.”

S13: Do you ever think of life without making music?

RCM: “I would have probably been a writer. In high school, I had a bunch of stories in the yearbook, but people did think that I was a very good writer and that I could have gone on to study writing. I don’t know if it’s any easier to make a living as a writer as anything else.

I had an art installation show a couple times where I modified records. On my record POP Record/ Evolving, it was nothing but a record noise like before and after the music and records that I recorded, and then I had it cut to an acetate, which wears away a lacquer, and old pops disappear and new ones appear, so the record never changed! This is the one of the first records that starts in a condition and instead just changes rather than getting worse. Every time you listen to it, it’s a little bit different, so it isn’t rigid.

“Cage complained about records being like a snapshot, and it doesn’t change. Well, this one is all about the record noise, and every time you play it, the record noise changes slightly. So that kind of conceptual thing that I made in ’85 that was shown alongside Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover. I didn’t know he was doing that, and they were out at the same time. I’ve always had a very visual or conceptual visual art.”

Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble is out now via Cuneiform Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.