by LORRAINE CARPENTER
EBOW,
ENO, ECO: Michael Brook
Touring with Canadian
new wave band Martha and the Muffins in the early ’80s is a laudable
start to a guitarist’s career, unless, as in the case of Michael Brook,
your next collaborators are Daniel Lanois,
Brian Eno, Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan and the Pogues. Then the Muffins gig is a little
quaint.
Over the last two and a
half decades, Brook played with and/or produced all these artists and
more, first in Toronto , then England , and lately, L.A. He’s
also recorded three solo albums, the latest being Rockpaperscissors, featuring Lisa Germano, and composed scores for films such as
Paul Schrader’s Affliction, the Al Gore eco-disaster
doc An Inconvenient Truth, as well as the
similarly-oriented Who Killed the Electric Car? Not least, he invented the
“infinite guitar” effect, as used by U2’s the Edge in “With or Without
You.” The Mirror called the infinite guitarist at his
Hollywood Hills home.
Mirror: You played with bands,
initially. What steered you towards solo work?
Michael Brook: Well, I wanted to
create music, I knew I wasn’t a singer, so
I just started experimenting in the electronic music studio at York University . I can remember
having no idea what to do—not how to carry something out, but how to
start. You just kind of fumble around and you meet people who teach you
things, so I just kept at it.
M: Could you describe the
infinite guitar effect?
MB: Essentially, it
simulates standing beside a very loud guitar amplifier. It creates
feedback and makes the strings vibrate at any loudness, and it also
allows you to play in a less percussive way ’cause you don’t have to
pluck the strings.
M: What were you working
on when you came up with this?
MB: I was starting my
first solo record and I wanted to incorporate some kind of Indian
musical ornamentation, which is harder to do with a standard guitar
’cause the note dies away. I ordered a device called an ebow, which has a similar effect, but they lost
my order. I’d already booked studio time, so I thought I’d make
something that would do a similar thing, so I did, and it did. Finally,
my ebow arrived, but the infinite guitar
suits my purposes more.
Weather
vein
M: In light of your
contribution to An Inconvenient Truth and Who
Killed the Electric Car?, is it safe to assume
that you’re sympathetic to the cause and the politics involved in these
films?
MB: It is safe to assume
that. Both of these films are examples of a subset of a concern I have,
which is the general lack of critical thinking in contemporary culture.
Healthy skepticism is, in my opinion, the only way for society to make
good decisions, and it seems there have been conscious and unconscious
efforts to discourage people from looking at situations objectively and
accurately, and the environment is one area where I think that’s true.
There are many others.
M: I guess you’re not too
out of place as a liberal Canadian in such a “blue” town.
MB: Yeah, I mean I’ve only
met, knowingly, two people who voted for Bush, so I could not believe
the results of the 2004 election. But America
, in many ways, is not one country—it’s the size of Europe , with a lot of different interests and
attitudes and cultures. The fascinating thing is that the founders of
the country purposely designed an unstable form of government so that
the balance of power is always swinging back and forth, and so nobody
could do too much damage for too long, which was remarkably prescient
of them, over 200 years ago.
Fan
art
M: Have you ever had to
turn down a job on ethical or political grounds?
MB: There was a film–what
was it? It was disgusting. It was a fictional film, some dumb, crappy
movie. Mostly, people actually come to me with pretty good projects.
M: I find it interesting
that you’re incorporating imagery created by fans into your live show.
How much material have you received?
MB: To tell you the truth,
I’m a little bit out of the loop on that ’cause I’ve been rehearsing.
I’ve seen some of the stuff, and there are some really great images and
some not-so-great images. But it’s part of a thing that I’m really
getting excited about, that the hunger for community is a huge part of
modern life, and people are attracted to anything that addresses that.
I have a fuzzy goal of trying to increase that somehow, through Web
activity and more touring—incorporating visuals from people, hopefully,
is just the beginning.
With
Lisa Germano at la Tulipe
on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 9 p.m., $22.50
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