What's it like to be Ukeoirn O'Connor?

A short, informal question and answer interview with Grúpat member Ukeoirn O'Connor.

1. How and when did you get interested in composing?

It's funny, I was actually trained as visual artist. I went to NCAD and did painting, and I'd always played a little guitar and sang, but then a friend turned me on to some deadly music, stuff like Zorn and Pauline Oliveros, you know, Harry Partch, and I realized that all along what I'd been trying to do with pictures was to make music. So I just got into it, started writing it, and was lucky enough that my friend Flor Hartigan showed me the ropes and introduced me to the New Music community.

2. Is composing your 'day job' or do you do something else as well?

It's difficult when you don't have the academic or educational background in New Music, because so much of it is from that sort of establishment and tradition, and when applying for grants or whatever, my paperwork always looks a bit thin. But I gig a lot, and I work with ensembles and write as much as I can, and I live affordably. I haven't yet made that break to full- time composition, but that's all right. My day job is with Coillte, and I love it and they're good with my schedule, and I'd almost not want to quit even if I could. So the short answer is I do other things as well.

3. Where do you mostly get your ideas?

Down at the Tesco, on the sales shelf. Ah, no, seriously, supermarkets are important to me. I'm terribly interested in the sparks that fly when you get the mix of cultures, peoples, sounds and everything, and one great place for that is a supermarket right after work. Everybody's gone in for a sliced pan or some eggs and there's old people and young people and immigrants and everything, and there's the muzak and voices and children. It's like the casbah, but with fluorescent lighting. I love supermarkets. But as you know, I'm Irish-Japanese, so this idea of multiculturalism isn't just abstract for me, it's very concrete. If I want to get ideas, I can just go home and visit my parents. I love to go for breakfast because my mam serves what we call "The Full Japanese." She makes sushi, black and white pudding, baked beans and rashers. Ironically, though, it's my dad, the Irish one, who's into Japanese music—he loves taiko drumming and mimyo, which is Japanese folk music, and mam always gives him a hard time and calls him an imperialist and tells him to put on some Beatles. My mother loves the Beatles.

My interest in this mixing, though, the ideas that come from it, it's about the sounds, and the way we hear things. I'm not trying to do this sort of crude appropriation, where George Harrison picks up a sitar and plunks it down into a rock song, or the kind of musical magpie work you get from the minimalists like Reich or whoever, where they take south Asian rhythms, dumb them down, then appropriate them into a Western musical context. That stuff makes me a little mental. What I'm interested in and where the ideas come from is in the real confluence, where people are brushing up against each other, where it's messy and alive and, most importantly, a two-way communication.

4. What are you working on at the moment?

Two different pieces, plus some improv/collaboration with some of the other members of Grúpat. The two pieces I'm working on are, first, a sequence of pieces for voice and ukulele, very stripped down yet at the same time highly ornamented, that will premiere at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. These were commissioned by Jennifer Walshe as part of South Dublin County Council's In Context 3 programme, and I'm very excited to be writing for her voice.

The second piece is a quartet for prepared violin, bouzouki, contrabass saxophone and electronics. The bouzouki is a good example of what I was talking about, because it's used in trad music, right, but it's a Greek instrument. We're actually using a Greek one, a trichord bouzouki with more traditional tunings, but I've got Irish uses for it in my brain, just from the buskers on Grafton Street or whatever.

5. Describe your typical working day.

I like to get up quite early and write. Then I either go to my Coillte job or do some other stuff. I have to take a nap in the afternoon—this is my one hard rule—because gigs are usually at night. So I work on kind of a siesta schedule, which is a bit mad for Ireland. I mean, in the winter, we get about two hours of daylight and that's my nap!

6. What is it like hearing a new piece played for the first time?

I'm always struck by how alien it sounds. Here I was, I had this thing living in me, it was in my brain and in my hands and I wrote it down, and then here it is played and wow. It's like hearing your voice on a recording, right, that's not the way it sounds in your head. I have learned to work with that, to accept performance as part of the writing process, but at first it really freaked me out.

7. What has been the highlight of your career so far?

I'm very proud of my opera NOW you for to go, which I was lucky enough to have performed at the Dublin Fringe. It was a tremendous experience writing so rigorously for voice, and it was an enormous undertaking for me, with five singers and then an ensemble as well, and I loved working with Gavin Quinn, who directed it for the stage and helped me with parts of the libretto. I loved the physicality of it, and the chance to bring my fine arts training back into music. I mean, it was John Cage who said what's next, what's next is theatre. And I agree. Music happens, it's not just noises out of a speaker but a performance and a context, and it was great to work specifically with that. It was also fun to work with and against narrative, which I don't normally do. NOW you for to go told the story of a sort of time traveler, and it was developed by taking the story of Oisín and Tír na nÓg and smashing it up against the Japanese story of Urashima Taro and Ryugu- jo. I mean, both stories are about a man who goes away to a mystical fairy- land, where time moves much slower, and who then returns to our world and finds centuries have passed. Then he does something he's not supposed to and ages rapidly, even dies. So I was working with these myths and also had in my mind all these other stories about time travelers, like Chris Marker's La Jetée and the H.G. Wells novel, and it was a fascinating process.

8. What has been the lowlight of your career so far?

The first foreign performance of one of my pieces was by a jazz ensemble in Amsterdam and I went over for it, ate some food from a street vendor, got food poisoning, and spent the night throwing up in the hostel.

9. What is your greatest ambition?

I want to become pure sound.

10. Which musician in history do you most admire and why?

I really admire Harry Partch, the American experimental composer, for his dedication, his strangeness, his willingness to try anything. I guess it would be him. I also have a soft spot for Vivaldi, though I suppose I shouldn't admit that!

11. Which present-day musician do you most admire and why?

There's so many. We live in such an exciting time, musically, with so much, so many voices, so much cultural interchange, and so much going on technologically, that if you're listening at all it's really amazing. I know it may not seem that way, sometimes, with the Virgin Records sort of megastore approach to music that beats everybody over the head with the same new teen craze, but there's really an immense and rich variety of great stuff going on. I'm a big fan of Otomo Yoshihide and Christian Marclay. I like Howard Skempton. I've been getting into Rachid Taha, this Algerian musician who combines raï, techno and rock. Also Beck, Björk and Genesis P-Orridge. And like I said earlier, Pauline Oliveros. She's brilliant.

12. Which period of history would you most like to have lived in and why?

Right now! I was sick a lot when I was a kid, and I wear glasses, so if I lived any time before the twentieth century I wouldn't have made it this far. Although, you know, I'd like to see the future. So maybe that's my answer: The Future!

13. What is the best thing about being a composer?

The possibility of creating a sonic object that never before existed. The possibility of the new. That's why I get up in the morning.

14. What is the worst thing about being a composer?

The meetings of the Secret Society of Worldwide Evil Experimental Composers United to Conquer the Universe, or SSWEECUCU. They're really boring. No, really, I can't think of anything. I love it.

15. If you weren't a composer, what other career might you have chosen?

I've already been a painter, and I'm a tree surgeon now. Maybe later I'll put in an application to be a sailor. I've always loved the sea.

16. What is your concept of heaven?

I don't... You know, I know this is a metaphorical question or whatever, but I really, really strongly believe that we live here on Earth, and what we want to be better or to be good needs to be made by us here on Earth. I think heaven is a ridiculous concept, like total happiness or perfection or utopia. I think we need to think about concrete benefits and concrete improvements, positive change and a real future. I think the idea of heaven causes more trouble than its worth.

17. What is your concept of hell?

Eternal sameness. Whatever's the same, the same, after a while it's awful. Though I suppose John Cage would say that's just when you start really listening.

18. What is your favourite food?

My mam's salmon, wasabi root, and turnip sushi. I know it sounds weird, but it's great.

19. If someone gave you three months off with unlimited travel and living expenses, what would you do?

I think I would get all my friends together, and this includes Grúpat, and we'd have a rolling three-month party/improv/composition fest, with all kinds of impromptu concerts in public spaces, and all of it videoed by somebody like Spike Jonze. We'd spend two weeks each in Berlin, Rio, New York, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Jamaica and Amsterdam. That sounds like fun.

20. If you could have one thing in the world that would really help you as a composer, what would it be?

If I could jam a speaker right into my brain—like those hearing—horns that old people used to use-so I wouldn't have to translate the sounds into notation, that would be great. I like notation as a physical, visual thing, just not as a sound thing. I want to have music shoot right out of my head.