Joe Burke: resident New Yorker, photographer, button-maker, electronic musician, graphic designer, and gourmand to boot. This multitalented fellow has released music at the longstanding Boltfish Recordings in the UK, as well as here with us at EED. We’re lucky to say we’re quite good friends with the guy, and that we think his newest album, “Cities Of Cedar”, is one of the best electronic albums we’ve heard all year! Thankfully Joe gave us a few minutes of his spare time to share some information with the EED webtraffic, making this post the first of what will be several Q & A sessions with friends and fellow music-makers that we’re into.
Here’s what Joe had to say:
please explain how you arrived at a word like ‘obfusc’, and what made you decide to use it as a production moniker?
Initially, I think it was based purely off a truncation of the verb ‘obfuscate’ (to render obscure or unintelligible). I’d always liked the word and, in a list amongst ten or so candidiates, it was the one I picked at the outset of the project. ‘Obfusc’ seemed to lend a built-in capacity for the music to evolve and grow in whatever direction I saw fit.
please list, in any particular order, your 10 favorite albums of all time
Lest this could ever appear a “definitive list,” I should preface it by stating that any list of this nature penned by my hand should be considered tongue-in-cheek, a ruse, trifle, etc. That said, ten albums I’ve appreciated for a relatively considerable span of time — some much longer than others — in no particular order:
The Beach Boys / Pet Sounds
The Beatles / Revolver
Brian Eno / Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy
Drive Like Jehu / Self-Titled
Elvis Costello / Armed Forces
The Jesus & Mary Chain / Darklands
Boards of Canada / Music Has The Right To Children
Johnny Cash / At Folsom Prison
Stereolab / Dots and Loops
Fugazi / Repeater
what else, besides music, inspires you? and why?
Everything seems pretty inspiring these days — life with my fiancée, Katie, being surrounded by creative people and incessantly discussing projects and productivity, trips into nature, solitary walks and bike rides through Brooklyn at night, new places, old places, and the weather. Personally, with time, I’ve begun to think of life itself as just a massive, ongoing project without boundaries — and while it may not seem a revelation to some, it literally struck me as an epiphany that absolutely everything is amazing, inspiring, and worthy of focus.
what are the key elements or ingredients that make up an ideal obfusc song or album? is your setup a vital part of your music-making process or could you make an obfusc album without any electronics at all?
My last album, ‘Cities of Cedar,’ made me re-think a lot of how I make this music. I still wanted, ultimately, there to be a strong melodic component in everything — or atleast some sort of defining mood, otherwise achieved by field recordings I thought were particularly poignant, personally — but I approached the songs in a different fashion, production-wise, than how I would’ve in previous efforts. The setup I keep is pretty minimal; it’s laptop-based, obviously, and ultimately everything I create gets chopped-up and arranged in Logic (on a Mac). I keep a six-string acoustic guitar, an electric guitar (borrowed from my friend Neal in 2005), and a four-string electric bass. Sometimes I’ll record directly to digital, other times I’ll get more favorable results with a mic sitting in a room recording straight to a Tascam 424 four-track cassette recorder. For synths, I’m all MIDI, like most, but also have a considerable bank of hardware I’ve sampled on my own — same thing goes for the drums. All of that said, the setup is vital only in that I know what I have to make sound with and it’s comfortable to me. At this point, I feel much more confident in saying that the laptop isn’t the production end-all for the music, which seems liberating in a way — but even so, if I were to make a record completely without the use of electronics, I don’t know if I’d necessarily put it out as an Obfusc release. I definitely have an idea of what I want this music to sound like and feel it’s best fitted for computer-based production. Simultaneously, and perhaps more importantly, I don’t want to relegate this to being “computer music” — more and more, I want it to tread the line.
what is the best meal you’ve eaten in recent memory
For a New York-based vegetarian, any dinner at Candle 79 could constitute such a memorable meal — they have an amazing way with seitan and revolve their menu by season. Of course, I also feel a particular need to wax proletariat and state that both Mamoun’s falafel (at $2.50/sandwich) and Los Pollitos’ vegetarian tacos (at $2.50/each, four blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn) caress my palate lovingly, too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SryXlZL7ebc&hl=en&fs=1]
LINKS:
Obfusc Website
Joseph X. Burke (Blog)
Joseph X. Burke (Flickr)
Boltfish
