BRIEF ENCOUNTER: ROE ENNEY

 ROE ENNEY is a sentient being who uses the visual arts and sound as stepping stones to expression.  Other musical projects include CLINICAL PISS and SLEEPING BAGS. What follows is our recent chat via email:

  I know that you play electric bass,  but you seem to now favor modular synthesis over other forms of sound generation.  Is this true,  and why?

Yes.

In order to consider how modular synthesis may represent the blue prints for style in acoustic and amplified sound composition. I find I explore attack in more detail than i do in acoustic playing and have possibility for more control over amplitude and my "effects" than in amplified sound. For this reason I encourage anyone who is serious about sound to explore modulars in order to gain new insight. After experience with them, you may find other instruments insufficient in certain capacities. My bass is still essential to my melody writing, and there are certain rhythms I can make with it that I cannot on modular. Bass was my first instrument and I have slept with my bass on several occasions, so we are intimate in that way. My modular seems like a more difficult to manage bedfellow.

  What is your favorite piece of gear?

It is really hard to say. I am certain if I choose, one of them will make me pay for it. I really love my recording interface now, because it makes my recording sessions so headache free.

 Technology and art.  How are they balanced in your creative endeavors?

They have a symbiotic relationship, with art being the creature situated more towards the top of the food chain. Technology cleans the ears and eats the parasites of my art.

  Is recognition of gender issues inherent to your work?

I think my work rejects glamour, glamour being deceptive, and also a big part of female culture in New York City. I haven't travelled as much as I'd like to, but I imagine women in other cities to be more interested and active in non-representational music.

 What can we expect from you in the future?   

I am going to continue recording myself and releasing the stuff. I have about four albums that I need to finish, all of them snapshots of very fleeting attempts to define my musical position before I've off'd and changed directions again. Introducing modular synthesis to my practice has manifested a cyclical struggle. Referring back to the blue print notion, modular synthesis seems to create a duality with the language it uses, different from any other type of musical literacy that I know, yet like hieroglyphs, feels intensely like the precursor to all other types of sound notation.


STUFF:
                 "Damnatio Memoriae" cassette album released on Phaserprone (2011)

                 Cassette single for Discriminate Music (2012)

                  Interview on Root Blog,  by Root Strata