Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down in Kobe, Japan with guitarist, improviser, and sound artist Tim Olive, whose latest album is 33 Bays with Alfredo Costa Monteiro. They discuss Japan's importance to global experimental music culture; his own swerve toward experimentation after a western Canadian childhood spent listening to Black Sabbath's Paranoid; his early exploration of Javanese music in a Saskatchewan record library; how a Québécois girlfriend took him from Montreal to Osaka, where he lost "the rage"; how struck he felt by the sea of black hair Japan first presented to him; Osaka's "glorious ugliness," Nara's deer, and Kobe's wild pigs (just one of the signs of its close proximity to nature); his lack of a computer until last year, his longstanding ambivalence toward digital technology, and the double-edged sword of the internet's power to open up everything all at once; his workshop full of guitars in various states of dismantlement, and the importance of instrument modification to the physicality and sense of t