Maggi Payne

For a biography, discography or other information please go to Maggi's home page

Excerpts from an interview with Kristin Erickson

KE: Tell me about your most recent video works, Airwaves and Apparent Horizons.

MP: I love the desert. I'm really drawn to the huge expanses, the lack of humanity, and I definitely have a strong ecological bend. I want these places to be preserved and treasured; they're so amazing. To just be one with yourself and to put yourself into perspective. . . I mean the insignificance and how petty we can be. How we really don't need to keep propagating at this rate . . . we are killing the Earth for some reason that I can't understand. I don't understand it. I think we owe it to this Earth and all of the creatures in it to back off. To have less and less, not more and more. It's out of control. I don't think we have the right to take it away. We need to just think ahead a little and gather our wants and needs and own raping of the planet in as many possible ways as we can for various levels of greed and power.

KE: Watching your videos made me want to go to these places I have never been to.

MP: The experience there, the desert, you're usually there alone, again, getting in touch with our insignificance, and appreciating our place there. It's a wonderful thing. Every little sound, there are so few. Sometimes a whistling wind, sometimes a scurrying lizard, sometimes a scurrying rattlesnake, and it's probably scary to people who have not had that. So, it's a combination of the environment, those places that need to be preserved and just to understand how precious these places are and that we really don't need an oil mine or a gold mine there, or people traipsing.

KE: How did you make the music that played during the video?

MP: In Airwaves there's parenthetical realities. I was working at a radio station then and thinking about how unreal all, well everything on radio. . .the songs, well some of it is real, but most of it is unreal, all of the spots and T.V., my god, what a source of unreality, all of the newscasts . . . so, the piece is about their realities, the people who live this. Their sense of reality has to be so different than mine. Everybody has such a different view, its so subjective. So the greatest source of unrealities I could think of was the media, television broadcast.

KE: You didn't use the obvious parts though.

MP: Well, I took so many that it became a timbre. So, track after track after track after track. I'd record sixteen tracks then mix it to two, then I'd record sixteen more tracks . . .

KE: How many?

MP: So many. By mixing, certain timbres would start emerging, or certain frequencies that I could find. So I sampled sections and then I worked with the sampled sounds as source materials. The whole thing was to take these sources of unrealities and transform them into sounds. It has an eerie quality to it. There's no way to hear any of the individual things because there are so many.

Pictures from Maggi�s Crystal project are here: http://150.252.8.92/www/iawm/pages/earth/comp/payne.html

Last Updated: 2/3/06