Interview with Joel Kennedy

Joel Kennedy is a young composer who lives in Harlem, NYC. He is 1/2 of Rocket Surgery, a space-rock duo which has played numerous shows and self-released an album. In addition to work with Rocket Surgery, he has composed avant-folk music for solo guitar (imagine Shostakovich meets Harry Nilsson) as well as pieces for synthesizer and 8-bit electronics. On Tuesday,  June 16th at  8:30 PM, Kennedy presents an evening of music composed for ensemble including piano, strings, brass, voice, drums and electronics. Expect minimalist webs, complex rhythms, cinematic layering, a dash of prog-rock as well as a live score/short film collaboration with animator Lori Samsel.

Roulette: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
Joel Kennedy: I’d consider myself both, since I’ve generally written music that I perform myself. This particular show at Roulette is a step toward composition proper: while I’ll participate as a performer, I’m providing both scored pieces & directed improvisations for an ensemble.

R: Chocolate or Vanilla?
JK: Vanilla ice cream, chocolate pudding, etc.

R: How did you get into music?

JK: My parents valued and encouraged music in our family as my siblings and I grew up, gifts I’m grateful for. I played violin for several years via the Suzuki method when I was little, began playing guitar when I was eleven or twelve and have since explored keyboards, percussion, sequencing and circuit-bending.

R: What is music?
JK: WELL, I think it’s something that exists on an intuitive level, and thus can’t be fully explained. An active element within us. For me, whether it’s complicated or excited by systematic things like theory, music is an expression of feeling. Regardless of what it is, it continues.
In terms of time, music reflects who we were, who we are and who we’re becoming. In high school I fantasized about hermitage and I wondered if I would create music of some kind in isolation, with myself as the only human around. I’m still not sure, and have no current plans to withdraw from society. But I believe communication with any kind of life (and/or in connection with the earth) can be or is. a way of being musical. Communication for us applies especially to playing music with other humans, I suppose, and not with a gerbil (although that sounds fun, and plausible). The collective communication of crickets and dragonflies are especially poignant examples of animal music. I’ve also come to understand music as organically linked with our own and other bodies (including our heart and blood especially) – something that can be natural and healthy in that way. Inward and out, a symbiotic phenomenon.
I think different human musical expressions, or genres, if you will, reflect our desires, who we will ourselves to be, and who we understand ourselves to be throughout our lives. For me, avant-garde music is a largely esoteric process (although significantly, its community holds a wonderful and caring wealth of collaborators and friends); at another extreme, pop music works by its nature on a much broader and often exoteric scale.
In an eastward direction, I’ve also thought about the essence of music through my participation and interest in p’ungmul (traditional Korean drumming). P’ungmul is very organic to play; it is taught and experienced as collective; it’s communally experienced and enjoyed (while there is also the important concept of inner spirit). It is linked with different rituals, especially ones of agricultural labor. With p’ungmul, at best, rhythmic experience is symbiotic with an experience of nature, labor, community and harmony. I am in the ongoing process of partaking in and experiencing those truths, and of integrating/relating them to the also beautiful, but very different, Western and personal paradigm of individualism and self-sufficiency.

R: What do you, as a composer/performer of music, listen for in other people’s work- what moves you? What tickles your brain?

JK: The absurd, heartfelt and emphatic.

R: What was the last music you listened to?

JK: A Leadbelly compilation, just now.

R: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.

JK: A lot of things are happening with the pieces in this show. I’m especially aiming to tap into and am drawing from the dreamlike state. I feel that experimental music is a natural channel to express the power, potency and intuitive significance of dream. I’m collaborating with an animator (Lori Samsel) on one piece in this show, reflecting a dream I had involving (in general summary here) a hunter, stegosaurus, field, river, cliffs and sound. Other pieces will reflect a/poly-rhythmic states, ceremonial precision and if all goes well, combinations of both.

R: Are there any people you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
JK: I’ve been influenced as an artist by a wide array of people, and couldn’t mention them all here. Three significant musical influences in the past half-decade have been Milford Graves, who’s teaching and playing influenced me in understanding music as organic, and in the pursuit of polyrhythm as intuitive and worth exploring. Shelley Hirsch has also been an amazing influence, in her depth of expression and feeling, awareness and responsiveness. My bandmate of several years, Mark Ludas, has been an extraordinary collaborator: in music, conversation, camaraderie, understanding and spirit.