William Tilland Biography

Somewhere around 1985, I experienced a musical revelation. Prior to that date, I had been feeding my musical passions in an apparently random fashion, obsessing over street-corner vocal groups and R&B in the late 50’s, folk blues and old-time country in the early 60’s, psychedelic rock in the late 60’s, and avant garde jazz in the 70’s — until I wasn’t even sure WHAT I liked. All I knew is that when I liked something, I really liked it, and I seldom stopped liking it even after it was out of fashion, which got me more than a few querulous looks at parties when I would get drunk and decide to share my musical tastes with innocent bystanders, moving obsessively from early Ray Charles to the Moonglows to John Coltrane’s Ole to Soft Machine and then maybe to Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys or Dave Van Ronk, or something from Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Anyway, in the early 80’s I was living in extreme Northern Alberta, and had no direct access to alternative music of any sort. To make things worse, I had been burned so often in the previous few years by over-hyped product I was “supposed” to like but didn’t (hey kid, if you like jazz, you’ll dig this) — that I was afraid I had permanently lost my enthusiasm for music. Then I traveled down to Edmonton, Alberta over a long weekend, and when pawing through a cutout bin at a crummy chain record store in some shopping mall (old habits die hard), I came across a Canadian pressing of Moondawn, by the pioneer German synth musician Klaus Schultze. I’m not sure why I bought it. I’d never actually heard anything by him previously, or anything more “kosmische” than the Doors or Pink Floyd, but I think I’d seen some vaguely positive reference to Schultze in a mainstream music magazine, and it was only a couple of bucks anyway…. Well, Klaus changed my life, and not only because I discovered that I had a strong attraction to German spacemusic. Sure, I started picking up all the Schultze I could find (or order), and then Ash Ra Tempel, and Popul Vuh, and Tangerine Dream, and Peter Michael Hamel, and Can, and so on. More important, though, it finally clicked that what had always mattered most to me in music was some sort of transcendent experience which took me out of myself and moved me somewhere else. Certain kinds of doo-wop could do that; Soft Machine could (sometimes) do that; early Dr. John could do that; Van Morrison (at his best) could do that. So I gave myself permission to pursue musical transcendence — or at least transmogrification. (It was also OK if the place I went to was alien, scary and even vaguely unpleasant, e.g., the psychic landscape of Dr. John’s “Gris Gris” — it just had to be “someplace else.”) Once I got on track, there was no stopping me. I started buying and subscribing to various obscure alternative music magazines, and taking more chances on curious imports and cutouts. I continued listening and learning, gradually expanding my horizons to include 20th century classical (Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg), minimalist trance music (Reich, Riley, Glass) avant garde jazz (Sam Rivers, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton), fusion (electric Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Last Exit), ECM-style “Nordic soul” (Terje Rypdal, Jan Garbarek), ethnic music (especially Indonesian gamelan, East Indian vocal music and Scandinavian folk), and the genre-bending experiments of unique musician/composers such as Hector Zazou and Rodelius. In the late 80’s, after I moved to the Seattle area, I started reviewing music for Option and the now-defunct Sound Choice (and more recently, AP and AMG) which gave my musical education a further boost. Today, I try to be as fearless as possible when it comes to new (and old) sounds, although my musical orientation excludes certain categories of music almost completely. I’m left-wing politically. but I don’t mix my music and my politics, and I’m also not terribly interested in music that panders to various cultural scenes — counterculture, youth culture, punk culture, grunge culture, hiphop culture, blah, blah, blah. If it’s really good, it transcends its origins and intended consumer base; if it’s not, I don’t want to know about it anyway. I’m also very wary of anything with big production values, and/or anything that could conceivably be adapted for a truck, pop, beer or lingerie commercial. The music that I listen to these days is usually instrumental, or uses wordless vocals, or is in another, unintelligible (to me) language. More often than not, I find that vocal utterances in music are too specific, too mundane, and too distracting. However, I am still temperamentally disposed toward what I would call the “prophetic voice” — which would include such diverse vocalists as Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Al Green, Captain Beefheart, Dylan (sometimes), David Thomas, Fred McDowell, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bjork and other singers who offer some truly unique perspective, and are not just Vegas-style entertainers, frustrated poets or knee-jerk social critics. I still enjoy good spacemusic (including most of Peter Namlook’s neo-spacemusic on the Fax label). I have a positive prejudice in favor of older European rock music, and have recently been re-acquainting myself with the best of European prog rock (Can, Soft Machine, Univers Zero, Art Zoyd, Magma, Faust, etc.), much of which is still ahead of its time thirty years later. I listen to a lot of contemporary jazz and jazz fusion, from late-period electric Miles to Curlew, Dr. Nerve, Music Revelation Ensemble, Jon Hassell and Paul Schultze (one of contemporary music’s true ambient/fusion geniuses). I like anything strange and experimental that’s done well, including dark industrial and musique concrete, although I get impatient with experimental music that doesn’t have an emotional core -which is why I don’t have much use for John Cage and other conceptual musician/composers. I am somewhat suspicious of techno as a genre (it’s too easy to flip the right presets, and fool someone into thinking you have something to say, at least for a couple of tracks), but I’m deeply appreciative of individuals and groups like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Nonplace Urban Fields, Mouse on Mars, the Orb, and anyone else who’s breaking boundaries and trying out new ideas. I can also get an emotional and intellectual charge out of Bartok, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Shostokovich, Feldman and other “difficult” 20th century classical figures, but I’m amazed at how the best of earlier classical music, and in particular the music of Beethoven and Bach, cannot be comfortably reduced to innocuous thirty-second soundbites. It’s gratifying to think that even though Beethoven is an old dead guy, his late string quartets are probably never going to help sell any Subarus or spaghetti sauce. Admittedly, “transcendence” is a pretty vague criteria to use for the evaluation of music, but it’s probably as good as anything else — and it works for me. I’m occasionally susceptible to false transcendence, i.e., the lure of cheap thrills and mindless new age bliss, or the expectation that just because an artist has been able to “break on through” on one occasion, he/she is going to be able to do it again and again on cue, per “contractual requirements.” But if I give myself some time with a musical source, I find that the truth usually emerges. (The “real stuff” has staying power; the imitations don’t.) Likewise, there are times when I’m too earthbound, psychologically and emotionally, to recognize transcendence even if it clouted me over the head, but so far, I’ve always been able to fight my way through my spiritual doldrums when they occur. And, of course, one reason that I would be hardpressed to put together any list of “favorite” disks is that different music works on me at different times, and in different ways. I’m not a Christian, or otherwise even particularly religious. (Maybe music is my religion?) But I take my musical motto from the Bible. As Jesus said (I think), “let he who has ears, hear.”