The following is an interview, Bestia Centauri’s first, conducted with a short-lived Swedish Web ‘zine called Ortus Obscurum.
BESTIA CENTAURI INTERVIEW
Ectonaut: Please introduce Bestia Centauri to our readers. What is Bestia Centauri all about? For how long have you been doing this and for what reason?
Bestia Centauri (“BC”): The public face of Bestia Centauri is a solo electronic music project that I initiated in 1999. By “electronic music”, I simply mean electronically produced music that utilizes modern sound synthesis algorithms. My work has nothing to do with the contemporary rave or dance music to which the label “electronic music” is often misapplied. There are other elements of this project, as well, but they are too personal to speak of at present. The curious reader can get an inkling of these other aspects of Bestia Centauri from the brief and slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek description of the project posted at www.somnambulantcorpse.com. As for my motivation, I do what I do purely as a source of pleasure and inspiration, and, more specifically, to create music that I would enjoy hearing but have not found elsewhere.
Ectonaut: Tell us something about the tracks on Ubbo-Sathla. Did you work with specific methods when you composed them? Is there a concept behind this release or anything else interesting that you think we should know about Ubbo-Sathla?
BC: The name of the title track derives from a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. Ubbo-Sathla is an interstellar entity who spawns “the grisly prototypes of terrene life”, and to whom all such life must eventually return. The Night Land II is inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s novel of (almost) the same name. The Catacombs of Ptolemais is a phrase from Poe’s prose-poem “Shadow–A Parable”. I intend to wean myself of over-reliance on literary references in the future, but these themes well illustrate various aspects of the “cosmicist” element that Bestia Centauri both represents and embodies. The aim is to create a sense of the numinous, the horrific, and the extra-human.
As for my methods, I work intuitively and spontaneously—at least, as much as software-based synthesis allows—but I do make a conscious effort to use a variety of tools and to make certain that the music possesses a certain flow. As Chris Franke once said, speaking of the music of early Tangerine Dream (I paraphrase), “Sometimes it’s a trickle, sometimes it’s a waterfall, but the music always flows”. I also take care to use, as much and as best I can, the sophisticated software employed more often in “pure” computer music or electro-acoustic music. The use of such tools has been the exclusive province of tediously intellectual academic composers or Post-Modern ironists for far too long.
Ectonaut: How would you describe the music of Bestia Centauri to completely new listeners? Do you feel that Bestia Centauri belong to a certain genre? Are there any bands that you think you can relate to soundwise and conceptwise?
BC: Apart from the general rubric of electronic music, I do not think that the sounds of Bestia Centauri fit into any genre. If pressed, though, I would say that my music falls somewhere between non-rhythmic dark ambient “soundscapes” and electro-acoustic music, with a slight bias toward one or the other in a given piece. Offhand, I cannot think of too many projects like my own. Although what I am doing is rather different, the early music of Tangerine Dream (circa1972-1975) has been a tremendous source of inspiration to me, as are certain of the works of the composer Gyorgy Ligeti (Atmospheres; Lux Aeterna; Lontano). Among much older works of electro-acoustic or tape music, I’m very fond of the music of Tod Dockstader and of Myron Schaeffer’s soundtrack to the film The Mask. As for more recent projects, of course, there’s much that I haven’t heard, but I’ve been most impressed so far by the work of Chaos As Shelter. Robert Scott Thompson is a contemporary composer of ambient and electro-acoustic music whose work I admire.
Ectonaut: What is most important in music according to you? How do you define quality music? What are your musical influences?
BC: I’ve answered the question about sources of inspiration (I prefer this term to the word influences) above. What is most important to me in music, as well as in anything else, is that it convey a sense of something poetic, imaginative, cosmic, Lovecraftian, and utterly beyond the human. “Quality music” to me is most likely to arise when the musician creates it out of a sense of inner necessity relating to the music itself, and not out of the usual social or egotistical motivations: that sort of, “Hey, look at me” mentality that is so prevalent everywhere today, but especially in the United States. I would certainly continue to do what I am doing whether there were any prospects for my music’s release or not.
Ectonaut: What plans do you have for the future? Are there any new Bestia Centauri releases planned? Anything else you would like to add?
BC: I plan to work at my own pace for as long as it gives me pleasure to do so, and to pursue the impossible goal of eventually replicating in spirit “the music of Erich Zann”! A piece entitled The Night Land will appear, I hope, within the next couple of months on an Afe Records compilation entitled No Abiding Places. Another, as yet-untitled, work will appear on a forthcoming Somnambulant Corpse compilation tribute to H.P. Lovecraft entitled The Outsider. There may also be a full-length release later this year.
Thank you for initiating this interview, and for taking an interest in such a new and obscure musical project!
