Naomi McCaroll-Butler Q&A

Feb 23

By Ado Nkemka

Photo by Kevin Jones. Trio with Pedram Khavarzamini and Scott Peterson.

Read this Q&A with Naomi McCaroll-Butler ahead of an exciting weekend of experimental music workshops and performances from March 14th-16th. Co-presented with Tadpole. Read more event details on Showpass. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Ado: Could you introduce yourself?

Naomi: I’m 30 years old. I'm here in Montreal. I'm from Hamilton, Ontario, originally, and spent a lot of time in Toronto and was really nurtured by the free improv scenes in Toronto for many years. I make a lot of different types of music with different people. I sit in with rock bands and folk bands and noise bands, and all sorts of stuff.

I play saxophone and clarinet and a lot of homemade instruments, including homemade flutes, which I think I'll be bringing to Calgary. In the last few years, I've been doing some more live manipulation and work with Ableton and sampling some of the instruments that I've made, because some of them are quite big and difficult to travel with, so sampling them makes it a lot more possible that way.

I'm really interested in different tuning systems. For the last five years, I've worked with a band in Ontario called Labyrinth Ontario, that focuses on different modal music, so music from around the Mediterranean that have different dialects of modal language. It's been very cool learning about those traditions. I'm also very interested in tuning history in Western music, and how we ended up where we are with 12 tone equal temperament, as well as folk traditions that use different tuning concepts. So a lot of my instruments that I build investigate different tuning systems.

What is your favourite instrument you’ve made?

The one that I find the most exciting to play is what I call the tubulum, which is just tubes of steel that are cut to cut to length, so that when you hit them, they make a certain pitch. It's really lovely. I got some old mallets from a friend of mine who plays vibraphone, and have been playing with that. It uses a particular tuning from the overtone series that has 15 notes in an octave. So some keys feel very familiar. And then if you try something in a different key, it has a lot of different flavors to it. But the one I'll be bringing to Calgary is a fipple mouthpiece like a recorder or whistle, that turns the bass clarinet into a big, low overtone flute. I attach a few drone pipes to it as well.

How did you get into making instruments? What made you discover that it’s something you wanted to do?

I actually started making instruments when I was in high school. I had a shop class and I just did silly things like attach a saxophone mouthpiece to telescopic tubing and figured out, chuckles, how to play that. I also made a ukulele actually – more like a cigar box guitar with no frets.

My dad is a musician and he's a high school art teacher, and so I feel like some of that stuff I got from him as well. I've been doing it for a little while, but it's only become a really big thing for me in the last four/five years. I started with overtone flutes, mainly because I was learning about the overtone series, and I wanted to hear how that sounded.

And I did see that you play a bunch of wind instruments. What draws you particularly to wind instruments?

That's what I started on in middle school – got given a saxophone. There's something very vocal about them. The experience of playing wind instruments has become more important to me, actually, as I've gotten older – how breathing in certain ways can cue you into your body and that kind of thing. If you play them in a healthy way, it can be a really integrating experience.

As a musician could you share how collaborating within the Montreal scene might be different than collaborating outside of Montreal, specifically in Western Canada, Alberta, Calgary, if that applies?

I've been in Montreal for two years (or a little over that now). There are certain things here that are different from elsewhere – with language divides – and there are a lot of musicians who live here who don't always work in the city, which is an interesting thing too.

Collaborating here is interesting. I keep discovering new people whose names I've never heard of, and there are a lot of reclusive, very interesting people around. So that's different from elsewhere that I've been.

I think a lot of what makes collaboration possible is just quality of life stuff and cost of living stuff. That's a big difference between Toronto and here, for example. Though, the cost of living here is getting crazy as well. I've gone on tours out to the prairies and out to BC and so on, but I haven't spent significant amounts of time out there to have a sense of what the feelings of collaborating with folks on the scene out there is like.

I really am looking forward to spending almost a week there soon and getting a better sense of that. When I did go last, actually, I played Bug Incision with Dan Pitt Quintet which was really, really awesome. And it was lovely to meet some of those people and see a certain side of something DIY happening there.

What's the importance of the DIY ethic to you?

So much is possible, if we work together. pinksnail, a band I play in, it's a punk band, and we end up working a lot with DIY venues on our tours. And there's a certain kind of skill sharing that happens in that scene that I don't see elsewhere, which is really lovely. For example, people who know how to screen print, or who have some of the gear will share that knowledge or do a run of t-shirts for a band before they go on tour or on any kind of touring situation, people have been so sweet about having us stay over and I try and pay it backward, chuckles, whenever I can, pay it forward and have people over here as well.

Canada is a huge and fake country, with really vibrant but often siloed music scenes, so it makes sense that these robust DIY practices have sprung up. I want to shout out a few spots doing amazing work:

Radstorm in Halifax, an all-ages DIY venue and community space that does screen printing, rehearsal space, zine library and a meal program for its community,

The Tranzac in Toronto, which allows so many interlocking communities of weirdos to have space to develop a scene,
venues like Turbo Haus in Montreal, who rent the apartment upstairs to provide touring bands with a place to stay, shower and have a hot meal,
crews like the one surrounding the Perkolator community space in small towns like Perth, ON who do really rad things on a local level and strengthen the web that makes DIY touring possible,
and so many individuals who donate their homes, food and time towards community building and local subcultures.

I just released an album with composer Jason Doell (the same guy Rebecca Bruton worked with recently) on the label Watch That Ends The Night Records, run by Michael Cloud Duguay (Peterborough, ON) and Andrew MacKelvie (Halifax, NS). Jason invited me onto this grant project where he a) recorded musicians improvising, b) broke those recordings down into samples, and c) fed them to an algorithm he put together, tweaking it to play the samples in different speeds, ways, etc.

Once the tracks were generated we did some other overdubs of things too. He's innovating his own interesting processes for music making, in a way that integrates this interesting chance element and kind of breaks down the Great Man of History composer thing.

And in terms of Watch That Ends The Night, Michael and Andrew are doing some amazing stuff. I'm really into what they're doing; Michael and Andrew have both been really involved in their local music scenes for a while now, and they're combining their webs of connections that span across Eastern Canada for the benefit of us all.

They have something like 10 records lined up to be released this year, including this harsh noise/free jazz/hip hop record from Quinton Barnes that I got to be a part of with Ari Swan, James Goddard, Ky Brooks, Lucas Huang, Markus Floats, and Matt LeGroulx.

Just cool connected people being egoless, generous and collaborative, bringing really interesting groups of artists together. Despite (because of?) the grim reality of the cost of living making art more difficult almost everywhere in Canada, I'm seeing such an interesting and exciting movement of art happening right now.

How much of your music education is from academia/formal versus being self-taught? And would you change that balance? How do you feel about your music education trajectory?

I was joking with a friend yesterday – I had this sort of musing – because I have an undergrad degree in music and I was thinking “Maybe some of what I do could be good for a master's degree.” Is there some stability in that? Is that even a path towards stability anymore? I don't know. Then he brought up the “This is fine” meme of the dog in the burning house being like, “Maybe I should do a postdoc.”

It's interesting, I went to a very music industry performance-oriented school, Humber College which, in a lot of ways, was really awesome, and it equipped me in many ways. They're all about teaching all the saxophone players all the different woodwinds, so that you can work in pit bands for musicals and that kind of thing. So in terms of a lot of practical skills, that was great.

But the institutions are a very funny thing. I've kind of steered clear of them since then, because the way that being in those very hierarchical spaces can twist your priorities in a lot of ways I feel strange about. That being said, a lot of the people whose work I really admire have practices that involve a lot of institutional stuff as well.

Can you share a bit about what your improv workshops will entail?

My workshop is going to be a guided group improvisation using conduction. From the outside, conduction looks a bit like a conductor in front of an orchestra, but the experience couldn’t be more different. There’s no sheet music, the band follows a set of hand signals from the conductor, there can be a lot of unexpected shifts from place to place. There's also room for people to step out and do their own thing as soloists if they want, and maybe bring some of their own tradition, training, or voice.

In the workshop, I’ll introduce the basic hand cues and then we’ll try them in an improvisation together. Depending on how we do, I’ll introduce more cues and we’ll try more things. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole; every conduction workshop I’ve done goes into different directions based on what musical personalities are in the room. It’s fun, it can get silly, it can get very visceral; I sometimes feel like a classical conductor and I sometimes feel like I’m a preschool teacher leading a drama exercise.

The nice thing about conduction and part of the reason that it was first formulated is it deals with basic musical building blocks in a way that break down some of the usual barriers around making music together; language around music, sharing repertoire, reading music and so on. So for example, you're dealing with long sounds, short sounds, loud sounds, soft sounds, copying someone else, or various rhythmic cues. Often we pick up on something that’s improvised by one of the players and build on it as a group.

The second workshop will build on the first, but it won't be hard to jump in if you can only make it to the second (even if we were to rehash the same set of cues on both dates, the experience and resulting sound would be totally different… This is the beauty of improvisation; even one different element creates a universe of possibilities.)

Conduction is a word from Butch Morris, who was an improviser and band leader in the States. The set of cues I use comes from a few places: I first ran into conduction from Christine Duncan, who runs the Element Choir in Toronto, which is a totally improvised choir with rotating membership. Christine is a crazy, maniacal genius, and her language is really geared towards the voice. I also picked up a lot from Tyshawn Sorey who is an amazing drummer, composer, who lives in Philadelphia. He has his own very in-depth conduction language called Autoschediasms.

The third place I’m drawing from is the improvised music scene at the Tranzac in Toronto. There’s a sort of conduction language that collectively evolved over the course of a few decades around the music of the late great Ken Aldcroft, which I then learned playing with Joe Sorbara. It’s a language of hand signals that allows any member of a band to throw a curveball at any time, mostly simple manipulations of written melodies in infinite possible directions; playing melodies backwards, upside-down, half time, double time, using a melody as a bassline or a bassline as a melody, all backing up an improviser who’s overlaying something else on top of it in real time. That kind of thing.

Who are you hoping to reach with Workshop Pt.1 and Workshop Pt.2?

Each session will be a practice together, and everyone's welcome to come. You can bring an instrument, you can bring your voice. You can come if you're very well versed in a particular tradition, or you can come if you're totally new to playing music. There’s room for people who might be new to improvising to have a guided tour through what it could be like to improvise with the group.

And for the concert, what are you looking forward to the most?

Jelly Ear are all old friends from Toronto and Cory now lives in the Netherlands. It'll be lovely to see them and to hear them, because what they do is pretty crazy interesting. And then, I don't know Friesen/Hume/Waters and I'm really excited to meet them and see what they're all about.

I'm really excited to meet people. I think that's the biggest thing. It'll be lovely to go and actually have the chance to have a bit of an extended stay and meet people through the workshops and hang out over the weekend.

Naomi McCaroll-Butler bio
Naomi McCarroll-Butler plays saxophone, clarinet, flute, jaw harp, and various whistles and homemade noise machines. An active collaborator, she works in the cracks between free jazz, drone, noise, minimalism, and experimental pop and folk. Her own work examines the elegance of the overtone series, the ecstasy and body horror of trans embodiment, and the creation of trance environments through drone, repetition and fluid tuning systems. She is a student of modal music and plays with Labyrinth Ensemble.