The Artist who Made Many Instruments
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The Artist who Made Many Instruments // An interview with Ken Butler
By Ben Zoltowski, Photography by Drew Anthony Smith
Talking with Ken Butler is a completely exhausting experience. Hell, walking through his gigantic Brooklyn loft is tough enough to wrap your mind around. Towering walls adorned with lawnmower parts, toy guns, spinal cords, damaged laptop frames and mannequin busts. A grand piano sitting innocuously in the middle of the room, only to reveal with a closer look, the entire thing’s been gutted; the keyboard replaced with just an octave’s worth, the body chock-full of fully-functioning alarm clocks. A single key is pressed and the entire thing explodes like a pinball machine, alarms firing, light emanating all over the room. All that ephemera on the wall, those are instruments; exquisitely sculpted out of items we understand as utilitarian – and they’re 100% playable. Stepping back from them gives an overwhelming sense that the earthly and the divine can actually be made inextricable with a mad genius like Butler behind the wheel.
For the past twenty years, Ken Butler has evaded any kind of strict definition. He’s recorded a single album for downtown avant-garde legend John Zorn, he’s been championed by Laurie Anderson, he’s maintained a successful showcase of his hybrid instruments on display at The Met and, in the same big breath, he’s been a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Butler insists that this is the only way to live; a continuous shape-shifting of method, experience and subsequent critique. At 61, after a close call with a life-threatening illness, the man is transformation personified. With our conversation careening at breakneck speed through experimental music, philosophies behind bricolage and the vapidity of playing his zipper on The Tonight Show, his energy made the twenty-somethings on the walk home resemble mangy sloths. Which, when it comes down to it, is that unlikely reward you’re unconsciously striving for when interviewing someone like
Ken Butler -- total reconstruction.
BZ: So you’re talking to someone who once attempted to own every album on John Zorn’s label, Tzadik -- how’d you get hooked up with him?
KB: In the summer of ‘97, I was in Tower Records, kind of burnt out, just like, “Oh man, I can’t afford any of these CD’s...” and I’m walking down the steps as Zorn’s walking up. He says, “Hey, how ya doin’ man? I was just at The Met and I saw your exhibition.” He asks, “Hey do you have any recordings? I’d like to sign you to Tzadik. We’ll do a nice thing with a 16-page book, you’d be great for it. I dig what you’re doing and you can do whatever you want. It’s not much money though, only five grand.” (Butler gasps) This is my experience with the record biz: one conversation with this genius avant-garde guy. I never signed a piece of paper, I never did anything. He just had the most deadly-ass reputation out of anyone. Four days later in the mail, an envelope comes and there’s a letter saying, “Hey man, here’s the bread. I’m so happy about this, really looking forward to what you’re gonna come up with. Do anything you want. Have a blast. Love, Zorn.”
BZ: I love that man. Ok, so when you’re strolling along in Brooklyn and you see a pile of discarded junk -- brooms, trash cans, old furniture -- do you get all riled up and think “Those are perfectly good instruments!”
KB: Well, that’s not exactly how I would characterize my perspective now. Appearance and the fact that these objects can speak to me as a potentially interesting arrangement, like in the style of a Dada Constructivist in the 1920’s; an abstract assemblage of objects and images that sort of have an abstract feel to them; that’s the initial attraction, not thinking that the objects themselves are functional.
BZ: What do you mean?
KB: So you have a red broom, a yellow mop, a couple black broken DVD players and a white cord. Rather than thinking, “Oh, a DVD player makes a good instrument,” it’s more that original arrangement. That’s probably one of the more difficult things for people to understand. Literally 95% of the time it has nothing to do with sound -- it’s a purely visual, iconographic arrangement that I try and conjure.
BZ: When I walked in here, I saw more sculptures than I did instruments but now I’m seeing those sculptures as instruments, but then my eyes switch again...
KB: Well, what’s the difference? That’s my real curse right there...
BZ: It’s funny you say that actually. I was listening to (Butler’s record) Voices of Anxious Objects and it felt like I was listening to an artist on NPR talk about what their paintings looked like.
KB: Yes, indeed. In fact, my least favorite art form is to record -- any art that occurs with your eyes closed. In my case, without the 16-page color booklet to go along with the album, delineating photographically what the instrument looks like in a particular cut, it’s impossible to get what I do. If you’re watching me play an umbrella, it’s a completely different experience; to have the source of the sound be so A) obvious and B) weird.
BZ: And I’m listening in my swivel chair, thinking, “This is lost on me. I know the intent was not for me to experience it sitting here like this.”
KB: Because there’s not really any deep structure -- it’s almost an experiment in timbres, but more so an experiment in live improvisation with weird things that aren’t technologically advanced. Even if there’s any ingenuity to my instrument design, I’m still not trying to introduce new instruments into the canon.
BZ: There are those who call themselves “sound sculpturists,” when really they’re just incorporating non-Western instruments -- to us, that can be exoticism. Though you’re doing the exact opposite by taking something mundane and making it exotic.
KB: Absolutely. Exoticism is over.
BZ: Not to degrade the music you create, but I have to say that while the instruments you create are completely inventive, the sounds you’re creating aren’t necessarily mind-blowing.
KB: Exactly right. I’m certainly not a composer-musician type. To professional musicians, I’m like a person shooting random pictures with their cell phone compared to a photographer. I don’t read music, I know nothing about the theory of music, it’s completely improvised much in the same manner that the instruments themselves are improvised. There’s something about the actual object-ness of the instruments that’s critically important to me in a different way than as a producer of sound. I see them as post-Cubist, post- Rauschenberg assemblages that are not intended to make a cultural statement about the objects in terms of their meaning.
BZ: Hmmmm....
KB: So if I’m using a cane as a violin, I’m not thinking about crippled people or the metaphoric meaning of the cane. It’s a lot of trouble for the fine arts world because the meaning only has to do with the cultural iconography of the object in terms of its transformation, its metamorphosis into something
else. You take a wooden cane, put it under your chin. [Butler demonstrates] By simply drilling a hole in one end, you put a tuning peg here, put a single hole here, put one guitar string here, put a contact mike as the bridge and it becomes a frighteningly good sounding cello.
BZ: That makes perfect sense to me and yet, I never would have made that connection.
KB: One of my favorite things to do is something that’s impossible to do. In the New York art world, artists think I’m a musician and musicians think I’m an artist -- which is great.
BZ: That’s gotta be kind of liberating.
KB: Yeah, because then what are the rules to anything? In terms of the New York scene, there was a period of time in ‘99/’00 when I’d already had a fair amount of success, but I just kind of chose to no longer play the intellectual ivory-towerish chess game of “What’s the zeitgeist this week?” Oh, this week it’s surveillance. That world is an esoteric game of calculated philosophy. I remember thinking about the art world and that if I didn’t have a gallery, there was no “solution” to my “problem” which completely resonated with that Marcel Duchamp quote that I love: “There is no solution because there is no problem.”
BZ: Hey, so I want to know everything about you being on Leno.
KB: Well every three or four years, I get approached by those shows -- someone Googles “wacky” and “music.” In ‘99 I got approached by his show. I said, “You let me hold up my CD, you’ll announce my upcoming performances and you’ll let me play three minutes with the band -- and then I’ll play the zipper and my head as the punch line.” Ya know how much Jay Leno makes?
BZ: Per show?
KB: Per minute.
BZ: ....$1,000?
KB: He makes $8,000 a minute.
BZ: Jesus Christ.
KB: So I’m out there in the green room by myself. I’m looking around and there’s a Kandinsky print, screwed into the wall upside-down.
BZ: (chucklin’)
KB: A woman comes in and says, “Ken, let me just ask you a few questions that Jay might ask you. How did you get started with the instruments?” I say, “Well, I was in college and looking through art history books, studying art and Dada and ---” And she says, “Oh, stop, you can’t say that.” She claps her hands together and says, “Let me explain it to you; it’s the difference between a friend of yours who juggles...and a friend of yours who juggles for the circus. We want the former.” And I say, “You mean, that I’m just the kind of a guy who worked for the post office for 74 years with a limp and a scraggily little beard and I started making banjos out of tin cans?,” and she says, “Well, kind of.”
BZ: Of course.
KB: So I go on. Jay sits me down, he’s kind of making fun, asks what my music sounds like, I mention a Middle Eastern influence and he starts going, “Ohhhh hummus, hummus!” Finally, he says, “OK, Ken, now you’re gonna do a little piece with the band. You’re gonna play your head and your zipper.” So I do the piece and it ends up being a huge hit and Jay’s going, “Ken has all kinds of other things; here’s his CD and he’s playing at the Knitting Factory in New York!” Here’s the real kicker: when I get back home, there’s 27 messages on my machine, my friends all like “I can’t believe you were on The Tonight Show!” Now I’m booked for the main stage at the Knitting Factory a few days later, guess how many people showed up?
BZ: Ummm...
KB: Five.
BZ: Ouch. So much for Leno’s endorsement. So you were part of New York in the 80’s -- which, is this time I’ve always had this fantastical vision of. Do you feel like the art scene in the new New York has really transformed at all since then?
KB: When I first moved to New York, I was a promotion machine. I went into galleries and had the balls and the idiocy and the naiveté, because I saw in movies that you go to New York, walk into a gallery and say [begins acting out a scene]: “Hi, I’d like to see the director of the gallery!” “I’m sorry sir...” “Oh yeah!? I’m gonna talk to him!” Smash through the door. “Hi, Mr. Johnson!? I’m Ken Butler from Oregon!” “Young man I like your style!” ...But in fact it’s not really like that. In fact, you’ll never get in the door.
Ya know, I always thought I should really be in London.
BZ: Why’s that?
KB: Because the English actually have a sense of humor. New Yorkers don’t so much.
BZ: It’s a very self-serious world here...
KB: Oh, please. [Begins toying with a handful of in-construction instruments in front of him] But tell me, do you know what bricolage is?
BZ: Ehhhmm...the collision of objects that aren’t normally supposed to be put together?
KB: See that’s the problem, it’s not. Bricolage’s closest definition here is “tinker,” except the connotation of “tinkering” is completely unserious. In Europe, a bricoleur and bricolage is a deeper philosophy about a way to approach living. It’s creating and building a new world by reprioritizing, reordering, disassembling and reassembling, re-contextualizing the existing parts of the old world. The idea of multi-hyper-utility, multiple uses in one thing.
BZ: Like the things they sell in Sky Mall or those other in-flight magazines...
KB: Yes! It’s a chair, it’s a step stool, it’s an ironing board!
BZ: Ok, so can I go home, look into my closet, stare at some objects and see hyper-utility?
KB: It’s what is at hand. Nothing means more to me than, what is out of sight, is out of mind.
BZ: How’s that?
KB: Well if you’re not looking at it, it’s not there. So if you used to play the guitar and then you moved to New York and you got a job, you’re too fucking busy to do anything and your guitar’s in the closet, you forget you even have it. It’s literally gone.
BZ: You come to terms with the fact that there are other forces out of your control pulling you away.
KB: Right, it’s not even within your consciousness. It doesn’t even occur to you during a random, stoned-out, trying-to-sleep thing. It’s just gone.
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