→http://www.music.ch/recrec/label/artist/marclay.html#marfoo

Sanematsu: You went to the university in Boston, what was that time like?

Marclay: Even before I went to school in Switzerland, I was interested in American Art, so I went to US, Boston, and then to NY. My mother is American and I was born in the US, so I had a double nationality, it was easy for me to go to NY.
In the late 70's, first I was interested in minimal arts, and then performance arts became very interesting to me at that time, and I was going back and forward between NY and Boston to see performances. I was more interested in the music scene than the art galleries and museums. I thought there was more energy in new music scenes and for me new music was punk rock, it what I knew, what I had discovered in NY. Like DNA, Mars, No waves(1), yeah. That was also a time a lot of performance were happening. You know, Vito Acconci(2), Dan Graham(3), Laurie Anderson(4), people I admired. It was interesting the way they performed in clubs rather than in museums. So it was a sort of mixture between these interests and music, very raw energy, unskilled, you didn't need to study years and years to become a punk rocker. You can just do it, so that was very liberating. It meant, I could also make music.

S: I heard you invited Dan Graham to Boston to do some performance. What was that like and why did you invite him？

M: His performances in the 70's used the relationship between performer and audiences a lot, in a way, similar to his works' use of mirrors. He used to do the performance where the audience was in front of the mirror looking at themselves.
The performance he did when I invited him to Boston to be a part of the festival that I organized in 1980 was a piece that dealt with rock music and where the audience identifies with the performance. So he put together a band, three women, one of them was Kim Gordon. They were playing very simple music and he was talking to the audience, talking about the relationship of the viewer with the performance. It was kind of where the viewer identified with the performer. I had organized this festival that was based on the influence of rock music on the visual arts, particularly in performance. It was a strange performance, it was between a conference and a rock band performing. He was talking over what the musicians were doing, and asking questions about how the audience related to the musicians, how they identified with female performer, and maybe some kind of sexual fantasy they might have. The first I saw him it was not in a museum, it was a night club, the Mudd Club. That was a very famous club at that time. And I thought it was very interesting, this kind of arts people not having a place to perform, so they had to go where musicians were. So Nam June Paik(5) opened for DNA at CBGBs. In that case it was Arto Lindsay(6) who invited Nam June Paik to be there for the performance. And what he did was he broke a violin. He took this very slow motion, like this, took like 15 minutes, very very slow, and Bang! and it was amplified.(laugh) So I thought that it was interesting that there was a kind of crossover, and a lot of younger artists were getting a lot of influence from this music. Also I invited DNA, invited ZEV(7), that was the first time ZEV came to the east coast. A lot of these musicians are people coming from art schools. They were art students. So that was also interesting.

S: My question is about John Zorn(6). I heard that the first performance with him was the "Game Piece". What was your first impression in joining the "Game Piece"?

M: It was great. It was new for me. What was great about being able to go through the process of playing with this piece was to meet so many musicians. John Zorn introduced to me a lot of musicians. I was able to put my technique, my way of making music in the context of real musicians. That experience was really interesting. I leant a lot. I leant to how to improvise more, because I used to do more structural sets, I used to practice, to number my records and compositions , I tried to do it. So I leaned improvisation and heard how to collaborate. It was a very good experience for me.

S: I heard he had a background in studying Cinema and he had an idea how to edit. Do you think those editing skill might have had some influence on how he organized the Game Piece ?

M: I didn't know he studied cinema, I knew he studied theater. But yeah, a lot of these ideas about music came actually from his interest in theater and film, cartoons. In film, the narrative structure comes first and the music underlines the narrative and emotion, but sometimes they cut, they jumpcut. In film editing, change is very radical from one scene to the next, rather than a kind of transition that more traditional music would require. So if you just listen to the film, you know....

S: Listen to the film?

M: Yeah, if you close your eyes and become more aware of a kind of quick change in the sound. Also there is a long tradition of cutting sound because tape makes that possible just like film, the cut pieces by Jon Cage, and a lot of people throughout the 60's did a lot of tape collage. ...But I don't know that was a question you were asking...

S: Do you remember the first time you met with John Zorn?

M: The first piece I did with him was the "Game Piece". I remember meeting him. He had heard of me, my music, through his friend there. He was looking for people who were working with band sounds. And he asked me to play with him. So he hadn't directly seen my perform but had heard it. He needed a musician for his piece and invited me. We did a few rehearsals, and yeah, it was exciting to meet these musicians, you know, who had really studied music, that was their life, I was always a visual artists who went to listen to music where it happened, I was always on the audience side.
I had a band called "Bachelors Even", so I'd already performed, but I was performing more to the art audience maybe.

S: So you were rather a performer. One more question about John Zorn. I heard he used to play without instruments but with light and small objects. Have you seen it?

M: Yeah, with miniature objects. I must say, when I met his he was still doing that, they were only very small performances in his apartment which was very small. You could only invite a few people and he performed with small lights. Unfortunately I never saw it. Every time he said, "Oh, I'm doing one" and one day he wasn't doing any more, and I'd never got to see it, which I regret! But I have seen pictures and heard about it. Ten people sitting around, and with very very small objects. But he talked about it as music. I don't think there was any music, maybe some tapes I'm not sure...
I brought something he was looking forward to, my palettes. I had all these sounds available. And his idea of these strange streams of sounds put together like film...

S: Sound palette?
　
M: Palettes, just a choice of colors like a painter has a palette, so I have all these sounds from the history of recorded music. And this was interesting to him because it allowed him to be able to put these samples of really different genres, different styles of music in his compositions which were often blocks of sounds. So I added a lot of eclecticism, and I mean, it was a real exchange of ideas at that time. His ideas came from jazz, film, theater, improvisation, and all he'd done, you know, that was his life, he really thought about music. I came into that almost very naively, in an uninformed way, but I brought in a vision which was unique, because it was different from someone who's trained. So it was a really interesting exchange of ideas.

(1)No Wave→http://www.eai.org/qry/eai/catalogue/category
(2)Vito Acconci→http://pages.ripco.net/~nailhead/nycnowave.html
(3)Dan Graham→http://pages.ripco.net/~nailhead/nycnowave.html
(4)Laurie Anderson→http://www.laurieanderson.com/
(5)Nam June Paik→http://www.geocities.com/namjunepaik/
(6)Art Lindsey→http://www.liquidskymusic.com/artists/ArtoLindsey.html
(7)Zev→http://www.epitonic.com/artists/zev.html
(8)John Zorn→http://members.tripod.com/~JFGraves/General/links.html