For much of this decade, Bandcamp has been the most vital catalyst for experimentalists from all across the world. Many of which don’t garner the plaudits they deserve, simply because there’s just too much choice to wrap your ears around. You could spend the next three lifetimes in the quest to be all-knowing, and it still wouldn’t be anywhere near enough time.
Which is why it’s important to give the music you do manage to encounter the time and respect it deserves. In Edward Clark Cornell’s case, there’s plenty of it. The experimentalist came into sharp focus earlier this year with his excellent full-length debut release in collaboration with Band Of Susans’ Robert Poss. Kepler’s Choice, one of the finest in the experimental space this year.
Following the pair’s debut solo EP, Definitive Spaces (2024), my curiosities on the back of Kepler’s Choice led me to Cornell’s ever-widening oeuvre. (Of which you’re about to find out a lot more about by the architect himself.) Through the lens of latome2 and variations via his own name, the American experimentalist is the framer of moments. A practitioner of the kind of eerie terrestrial minimalism seemingly not for these times (or is it?).
The curiosity in which inspires Cornell’s work is fascinating in itself. It’s led Cornell through many different portals, including collaboration beyond the one noted above with Poss. Cornell’s latest, alongside Atlanta, Georgia-based guitarist / lap steel player, Frank Schultz. Together on their debut LP, Breath, the pair exchange ideas that carry the listener to lonely orbits.
Breath is all about inflections. These compositions, landing differently depending on which angle you tackle them from. Family Dirge is almost like post-country designed for space, as Schultz guides Cornell into deep corners of his world. On the flipside, the subtle plinking of Blunte finds Cornell stamp his mark on something elusively inspired by kraut-rock. Then there’s Undramatic, where the pair’s two worlds combine for something best consumed at altitude.
Arguably, it all comes together on War Stillness Hope. A composition that is akin to a patchwork woven together of loose threads from the history of minimalism. Which is where the pair land on Breath. It’s composition for safe spaces. But it’s not safe in itself, allowing the listening to be free because the music itself is just that.
Last month, Cornell answered a series of questions about his career, including his methods and what art means to him. His takes are fascinating, and – very much like his compositions – are truly one of a kind.
E-Clark Cornell (photo: provided by the artist)Sun 13: Who were your earliest heroes and influences, and do you still consider them influential in your work today?
Edward Clark Cornell: “As an only child, I shuttled back-and-forth between my parents and my two Grandparents’ two grandmothers who both had pianos in their houses, and both were interested in music. The piano is kind of scared me. They were these big imposing objects with a bunch of buttons that made beautiful sounds. But I was far from even being able to comprehend what was going on with that. However, my maternal grandmother, Rosie, had just gotten a collection from my believe Columbia house of classical music, which she was very fond of.
“After a little while she started lending them to me so at around six years old or seven maybe I started listening to a lot of classical music on our little record player to this day. Something that really stood out was Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. I played this over and over and actually memorised the different sections in my head. Still not having any desire to try and play that music, but I just loved it. So for the rest of my life pretty much I’ve been very influenced originally by classical music.
“As I got older, I started to listen to Charles Ives and Aaron Copeland very much into that kind of Americana modernism. Of course, very soon I got to understand Stockhausen, and on this shore Terry Riley. When I was in high school, I heard A Rainbow in Curved Air, and it just completely knocked me out. (Of course, at the same time I had just discovered John Coltrane, and started to understand improvisation.)
“I had never heard anything like that or really knew of anybody who is doing anything like that. Of course, at the same time without me really knowing it Philip Glass and Steve Reich were doing their thing in New York. I was very soon to discover that, and that completely solidified my love of what now it’s called minimalism.”
S13: Interesting…
ECC: “Now on a completely different track, I did not go into making ‘music art’ in high school. I started to do painting which my father had been doing for years, and I admired greatly his very realistic water colors. But I was into something wilder and of course I started creating my own abstract originals. I immediately was captivated by the work of Marcel Duchamp, who to this day is probably my greatest mentor in terms of all things conceptual and all things art. So Duchamp was much of an influence on my creation of sound, art or music today than any composer… But I digress the most recent influences who stay with me are Harold Budd, and Burg Frey… and of course, a friend to Marcel Duchamp himself, the granddaddy I think of all modern music today, John Cage!”
S13: How did the collaboration with Frank Schultz come about?
ECC: “Frank Schultz is a very interesting and talented multi-instrumentalist from Atlanta, Georgia. When Robert Poss and I did Kepler’s Choice and it came out, actually the review that you did sparked a lot of interest from other people around the country. One was a fellow named Chad Radford also from Atlanta, who is a journalist of contemporary music. He suggested that I take a listen to Frank and his music, so I looked him up and listened to a bunch of his stuff and thought immediately that this would be the perfect segue from sort of a drone-heavy more monolithic type sound which I was doing on Kepler’s Choice to something more ephemeral.
“Frank plays electrified banjo with a bow, lap steel guitar and other electronics. I was always interested in his sound, so I suggested that we work together and in short order we put together an album which is called BREATH. We both resonated to the type of music that we were individually doing so it was a perfect collaboration.”
S13: Whether it be via collaboration or your solo endeavours, is the objective always the same? Or does it alter with each release?
ECC: (Pause) “A very interesting question, and one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The idea of collaborating with another experimental or neo-classical musician has always been an incredible dream of mine for years. I’ve collaborated with people from afar since 2022 starting with Hans Joachim Roedelius, and Hans Dieter Schmidt – both incredible German artists and it was a privilege and an honour to work with them. Hadi Schmidt, as he is known by his friends and I have collaborated for years and still work on things occasionally. We have about four albums out together now.
“The whole concept of collaboration is a delicate and powerful one. It is a profound gift that goes back-and-forth between artists. Sometimes I will send something, and my collaborator will work on it sometime. They will send something and I work on it. Interestingly enough, we’ve never been in the same room at the same time coming up with music together… in this world of instant attachments wherever you are, it makes all this possible but it creates an interesting dynamic that can be good and bad at the same time. For me, it’s only been good with everyone I’ve worked with. The artists I have worked with and I clicked instantly and I think we’ve put out some great work!
“Now to get to the point… I think my intentions with my music are a little bit more rich, shall we say. In my collaborations you get out of your own head a little bit and you’re really listening very carefully to what the other artist is presenting you or what you’re doing with their work and there is nothing like it. It’s indescribable and that is the end of that. At the same time, I hold true to the concepts that I have which are very rooted in as I said before: experimentation minimalism but incredibly linked with improvisation.
“I call myself a structural improvisationalist, meaning that all my work, my visual artwork and my sound artwork has always been about contrast and contradiction the mixing of the familiar with the unfamiliar. So when I sit down at the keyboard, I will have perhaps an idea – a bit of language phrase – a concept an image that backs up when I start to play in other words inside every piece I do – no matter how small there’s always the germ of narrative within them, there is a bedrock of concepts and language that is behind the Work.”
Frank Schultz (photo: provided by the artist)S13: Do you need concrete ideas before making an album, or is it more of a case of following your nose?
ECC: “I always have ideas as a post conceptual artist, and experimenter. When I was in art school, I used to carry around a little pocket notebook with me everywhere because I would be in any situation and all the sudden to stop everything and make some notes for an idea that I just had. So in a sense, I always have ideas for anything that I do. Like I said before, it could be just a piece of language, one word, a misspelling perhaps of something that means something else that generates some thought about what is the meaning here.
“Meaning, is very much more important to me than matter. So, in that sense, I can imagine that you would say I’m a true conceptualist so when I sit down, I just find my way around the keyboard with a complete open mind stream of conscious playing with a few ideas creeping in there every couple of minute. But – now remember contrast and contradiction – I’m also a very good editor. I used to do a lot of video production, and a lot of video editing, which of course involve sound as well. So even though I feel that I am the quintessential improviser, I also have a very structured approach to how a finished product actually turns out.”
S13: Some artists say when they enter the creative process, certain aspects of it are out of their hands. Would you agree?
ECC: “Now this is perhaps the most important question of all. What you’re actually asking here is what is the origin of the creative moment the creative spark and yes, I think it is in a way out of human hands. Not to be a spiritualist, but I believe that true art uses the human being as sort of a lightning rod. I mean, we are sort of ridden by the muse so to speak, and I think at least 50 percent of the art that comes out of a human being is beyond their control. The other 50 percent is upbringing what you’ve listened to your surroundings, etc. But, that other 50 percent is something beyond what we can really catalogue and categorise the process of creating art, I believe is probably the highest thing a human being can attain.
“It’s like Robert Charles Wilson, one of my favourite science fiction writers, has said. “We need to understand the questions that we are not able to ask’ I’ll leave it at that.”
Frank Schultz + E-Clark Cornell - BreathS13: How important is silence in your artistic practice?
ECC: “Silence, that’s right out of John Cage playbook. I think my interest most recently by this, I mean in the last year or a year-and-a-half, is in Jurg Frey. He really cemented in my mind, the importance and the structural and tactile importance of silence in music. There is a Frey piano compilation, lieues d’ombres, [which] is a master class in a type of minimalism that goes beyond what you would normally consider minimalism. Frey uses a lot of white keys, and the notes are very simple with lots of space between them.
“At first, I thought this idea of giving things a whole lot of space was irrelevant in certain ways conceptually that is. But this album just took me into another place entirely in my head there’s times when he’ll make a ‘wrong note’. There are no wrong notes as Miles Davis would say, so silence becomes a presence in itself. It slows your mind down to actually consider in the active listening process not only the music itself, but where you are psychically, and physically it’s very Zen like anything that Cage did, but in a modern way that is so beautiful and crystalline it. It just makes the little hairs on the back of my neck go up to thinking about it.
“So yes, of the concept of silence is very important in a lot of what I do but not everything obviously Kepler‘s Choice. There is a lot of silence in that record and I love that. I love noise, I love post punk craziness, but with Frey, I get into another alternate universe of sound and concept.”
S13: Are there any necessities you need close-by in order to create?
ECC: “Another interesting question. I think I need a good book nearby. I think that’s necessary and I can give you some specific examples: Ulysses by James Joyce, and also Finnegan‘s Wake by the same author. Pretty much all of the works of British novelist J. G. Ballard. I’ve written a few speculative fiction short stories myself and writing is a powerful force. Language is a powerful force. As William Burroughs said, ‘Language is a virus…’”
BCMC Interview: “The more detailed your plans, the better it often comes out”
S13: From the outside at least, minimalism feels like it requires great patience. Is patience an important quality to your work?
ECC: “Again I have to go back to the concept of contrast and contradiction. Am I patient: no. Am I my patient with my work: Yes, but, no – yes – no – yes. There’s your answer. Not to be tricky, but seriously, like Marcel Duchamp I take my work very seriously. But at the same time, I have my tongue firmly planted in my cheek as I proceed with any artistic endeavour. So, being ‘precious’, taking yourself too seriously defeats the whole concept of true art!”
S13: How much do you think your immediate surroundings influence your work?
ECC: “That’s a very interesting question and I think it’s misunderstood by a lot of people. I see electronic musicians (which by the way, I do not consider myself one) who talk about being in beautiful surroundings, taking their portable sampling device to the Galapagos or Iceland or the Arctic or wherever and composing in this unbelievably amazing and ethereal environment.
“I’ve had some physical disability complications in recent years, so I really don’t go far afield from my home and or studio. I can make art anywhere. When I had a cast on my leg, I brought my computer and my main keyboard down to the first floor, and in a wheelchair, composed an entire album plus started the collaboration with Robert. The fruit of which is that first EP that we did – all with my leg hang up in the air in a cramped space with headphones on and my 61 key keyboard.”
S13: Your catalogue of work is enormous. Do you tend to listen to your past works or are you always working towards the next thing?
ECC: “Again, I’m going to have to sort of come clean about my intentions, which probably do not run in the same parallel direction as a lot of experimental or electronic musicians… what have you. I have hundreds of pieces, [and] some full albums on my latome2 Bandcamp site. To me it’s an archive, it’s a library. It’s a huge sketchbook of ideas and concepts through the years and that’s basically what I intended to be.
“Do I want people to listen? Of course, and people sometimes actually buy a few things. But let me be clear about this. I listen back to my pieces late at night sometime with my phone microphone stuck up against my ear just to make sure that what I thought I was doing I was actually doing. The most profitable experiments like this end up with me saying, ‘No, I didn’t do what I was intending to do’. Which is the most valuable lesson that you can learn.
“So the next day, I go up to my studio and do it the right way, and there’s another piece to put on Bandcamp. In the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to have a wonderful relationship with what I consider my label, Sincronía del Viento. My most serious albums of the last few years are on that label. I’m very proud of them and I’m very proud and humbled to be working with such great people. The people who run that label are all artist themselves and they’re not interested in making a profit at all. They’re just wonderful folks and I can’t say enough good things about them.
“To put a period at the end of this concept… I try to make a piece of music every day, so when you look at the huge amount of music that’s on my Bandcamp site, it’s easy to see why since I’ve been doing it since 2015. My body of work is a learning experience supremely to me, and I use it a lot to make sure I’m on the right path.”
S13: Do you think you’ll always work on music?
ECC: “This question arouses lots of emotions when I think about it. As I’ve said, I have always been a visual artist and a video producer for a career but always making video art on the side and usually with the very expensive equipment that I had access to in my career. I think there’s sort of a hidden agenda there. But I don’t know I think just the making of ART, and I mean it in capital letters ART I will always make art. If I’m deaf, I’ll continue to make visual art. If I’m deaf and blind I’ll dictate words into a tape recorder. That’s it…. ART is my life.”
Breath is out Friday via Sincronía del Viento. Purchase from Bandcamp.
