YOUR QUESTIONS, ANSWERED

Many people write asking me a lot of questions. Why did I choose the cello? How did I start playing non-classical music? What are my compositions about? So, for those of you with questions, hopefully this will answer some of them.

WHAT EQUIPMENT DO YOU USE ONSTAGE?

The cello is amplified with an AKG C411 contact condenser mic. I run it through a few looping/sampling devices: two Electrix Repeaters, Ableton Live and a plugin called SooperLooper. I control the sampling and various other audio parameters with my feet, using a midi foot controller.

My current cello was custom made for me by Robert Brewer Young. I can't say enough good things about Robert and his work. I love my cello. He's a genius...check him out at: http://www.robertbreweryoung.com/

HOW DID YOU START TO PLAY THE CELLO? ARE YOU CANADIAN OR ENGLISH OR WHAT?

I was born in Canada but it was in England that I started playing the cello when I was eight. I remember a teacher asking me if I wanted to play the cello and I don't think I had any idea what it was, but I said yes, so shortly thereafter I began taking lessons in the storage closet of my little school. I loved the cello, my teacher and my little broom closet.

We moved to America and my new school did not have a string program, so my parents rented me a cello and I played it in the concert band until a teacher was located in the nearest city. This new teacher kindly furnished me with a cello that he had restored himself (I played this instrument until 2006). We moved again when I was in the 10th grade to the small farming town of LeRoy, New York. Here I took lessons at the Eastman School of Music, played in the regional youth orchestra, a string quartet, the county symphony, the pit orchestra for rotary club musicals and I think in every other possible musical opportunity that my parents were able to drive me to. I especially loved playing in orchestras, and the feeling of being swept up into a single musical organism that had one mind. Nothing was comparable to what it felt like to play Beethoven with 110 musicians. Whenever I was alone in the house, I would move the living room stereo speakers so I could lie between them on the floor and blast classical music and the Cocteau Twins.

WHY DIDN'T YOU PURSUE CLASSICAL MUSIC AS A CAREER?

Music teachers said I had "talent" and I think everyone assumed I would become a professional musician. I assumed that myself and fantasized about becoming the conductor of a large orchestra. However, somewhere in there, and I'm not sure when it happened, I developed a debilitating case of "stage fright". This manifested itself in a shaking bow and a general inability to play in front of others. The cello would turn into a foreign object that I had absolutely no control over. In desperation I mentioned it to my teacher but she said ominously, "stage fright means you haven't practiced enough". So I practiced and practiced...but no amount of practicing made it any better, to the point that practicing just became demoralizing. No matter how well I could play a piece of music in private, I would dissolve into quivering jelly at every audition and solo concert. Unknown to anyone, my life, which consisted almost entirely of concerts and auditions, had become a waking nightmare. I was constantly oppressed by a feeling of doom. I never got stage fright in an orchestra or ensemble, but I knew that to get anywhere I'd have to audition as a soloist. A shimmering classical career seemed laid out before me, but I couldn't find a way across my fear.

So, I bailed on the thing I loved most. I opted to attend a small liberal arts college outside New York City called Sarah Lawrence, well known for attracting and producing creative weirdos of all stripes. It was great. I studied physics and medieval art and Italian and New York clubbing. I spent a year abroad at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, and became enamored with Italian language, art and food. But music continued to extert a strong pull, my head was always full of music, no matter what I was doing. During my senior year, I discovered patch chord synthesizers, free improvisation and 20th century music.

After graduating, I moved to San Francisco. I waitressed, managed a cafe and worked in a cooking school. Cello always remained the thing I loved more than anything, but while I continued to play, I couldn't figure out how to make a living at it. I wanted to get back on the classical track and graduate school seemed to be the next logical step. I applied to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Six months before the audition date, I quit my job in order to practice during the day while my roommates were at work. By time of the audition I felt confident that I could play all the music really well.

On the day of the audition I took the bus to the conservatory, walked into the audition room and felt that all too familiar, sickening, turning to jello feeling. I fell to pieces. My f***ing stage fright was still f***ing there. My hands shook, my bow shook, I couldn't remember the music I had spent months memorizing. I could barely scrape the bow across the strings. I made it maybe a few of minutes into the Shostakovitch cello sonata, and had just started to feel like I might eventually be able to control my bow, when the faculty members asked me to stop and dismissed me awkwardly with a "try again when you're ready". Grief-stricken, and profoundly embarrassed, I didn't talk about what had happened, and decided to give up classical music forever.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO PLAYING IN ROCK BANDS?

After the audition fiasco, I signed up with a temping agency in an effort to find meaningful work. I was 24 at this point, and it seemed like I should stop messing around and find a job that would allow me to pay back my hefty student loans. I was pretty peeved with myself about the conservatory incident but I was also pretty fed-up with snotty classical people. I answered an ad in the local paper "Italian bass player seeks melancholy strings for dark wave band". I bought a pickup for my cello and a small amp, called the number in the paper, and the band Alfred was born. Playing the cello at "11" was cathartic, it didn't make me nervous, I even started singing and writing songs.

To make some extra money, I began lugging the cello and a folding chair into the BART stations. Playing for the rush hour crowds, people would speed by on their way to work, completely ignoring me as I worked through a combination of the Bach cello suites and the occasional improvisation. Absolutely no one was listening to me. Every now and then, someone would stop and listen, put a dollar into my cello case and say "thank you". I began to be grateful to have any audience at all and not only could I make it through a piece of Bach, but I could even control myself enough to make it somewhat musical. I was so happy about this little fact. I didn't need to practice more, I needed to perform.

Meanwhile, I started working with computers and become an information architect and engineer at a small software startup. Music was my "secret life". Three or four nights a week I rehearsed with Alfred, which was a totally collaborative project consisting of myself, Jane Woodman, Gianfranco Pescetti, Tony Cross, and Kat Zumbach, and I played in Jane's rock band Van Gogh's Daughter, signed at the time to Hollywood Records. I played with other groups, at one point I was simultaneously in 5 bands. I started doing a lot of session work for indie bands and was learning a lot about how to amplify and record the cello.

One day, I answered an ad on the Internet Cello Society about an all-cello rock group called Rasputina needing a new cellist. The founder and creative genius behind the band, Melora Creager, wrote back and said I would need to move to New York. I wanted the job, but I didn't want to move back to New York. I waffled, flip flopped, had a good cry and decided to stay in my adopted city. Two years later, I was offered a second chance, and this time around moving to New York wouldn't be necessary, so I said yes and the rest is history.

HOW DID ONE CELLO X 16 COME ABOUT?

I had started writing music in college but it didn't become fully realized until I moved in to this live/work warehouse at 964 Natoma street in San Francisco. Jeffrey Rusch started the space a few years before as an incubator for art and community. It had two floors, 6000 square feet, rooms downstairs for residents and an incredible open beamed ceiling in the common area/performance space upstairs. We all used the space to host concerts, all-night parties and art experiments that really couldn't occur anywhere else. The subtle electronic music of resident John Eichenseer, aka Jhno, was like nothing I had ever heard before. I started sitting in with him and other electronic musicians in the wee hours of afterparties, improvising cello to the beats and bleeps. A year after I moved in, we built another soundproof studio, just for me (all houses should be so flexible!). To have a private, permanent place to work, where I could make music at any hour of the day, was an amazing thing and things went pretty quickly from there. I started hosting my own concerts where I could test out new musical ideas.

It dawned on me recently that I might be trying to recreate that awesome feeling of being in an orchestra by actually 'being' the orchestra. The music is composed with an electronica sensibility, but there is nothing electronic about it, it's all unmanipulated cello. At first I started the conventional way, writing out parts for multiple cellos, thinking I'd find a group of cellists to play it. However, little black dots were too static, I had a hard time figuring out how to accurately write layers of scrapes and taps and harmonics, and it was too SLOW. I wanted to hear it NOW so I just got some microphones and recorded directly into my computer.

Eager to perform for the first time in my life, I tried foot pedals and looping machines in order play as many parts as possible. I'd come up with a rough musical idea, rehearse the technology and then flesh the whole thing out live in front of an audience in the warehouse. For nearly every performance I'd have some new piece of equipment, some new technique to try out, some new musicial idea. The music evolved from concert to concert and no two evenings are ever be the same. I called the project One Cello x 16 because that's actually how many tracks I had to work with. Now I should probably call it One Cello x 32.

When I finished putting "One Cello x 16: Natoma" together, it sounded good, but it didn't have the oomph I was looking for. I wanted it to be orchestral music but I also wanted it have the aesthetic of electronica, if that makes sense. It was Mikael Eldridge (aka Count) who put the final polish on my tracks and made it sound like I'd always wanted my music to sound. I met him when he had me in to the studio to record some cello loops for DJ Shadow, who he was working with at the time on his album "The Outsider".

OK, HERE'S THE QUESTION YOU'VE BEEN DREADING. WHAT ARE YOUR SONGS ABOUT?

I have no idea, everything and nothing, its abstract...you know that "dancing about architecture" thing... and I don't like to apply specific meaning. Recently when people ask, I've been saying the first random thing that pops into my head...sheep! cabbages! I keep meaning to use Madlibs to draft up a fake multipage artist's statement. I like it when my listeners find their own meaning, that's the ultimate compliment. There is an emotional nugget at the center of all my pieces that drives the whole thing, and if I could say it in words, I would. Creating the music is an intense process because I go through all the expressions in there as I'm crafting it. The more fluid I get with the technology, the more direct that experience is and I'd like to take it as far as I can. Someday I hope to be able to perform high-res 64-layered pieces, in real time with synchronized generative imagery. There's a lot to do!

DO YOU STILL SUFFER FROM STAGE FRIGHT?

No! I feel dumb that I let it hold me back for so long. I think now that stage fright is just fear of failure, and since I know I can just improvise my way out of any major screw up, what is there to be afraid of? Plus, I've already experienced, many times, the worst that can happen onstage. It is never that bad. Recently I had my equipment totally die in front of 1200 people and had to make something up to entertain them. It was fine, I made up a new piece that now I play at every show.

Anyway, yes I still get nervous beforehand, but its the kind of healthy nervousness that you'd have to be a stone not to experience. It keeps me on my toes and makes me excited to perform.