ENGLISH VERSION--published article is in German
Interviewer: Herr Linnewebber, Westzeit Magazine, Germany
WZ: When you made Europe on 50pc a day... which was your favourite place to stay/play by the way?
NV: Cornwall, England, and Bretagne, France. I stayed with all different kinds of people I met. Some of them were people you might not want to meet in the dark, but most of them were damn good folks. My favorite place to play was Mccartan's Pub in Rennes. My other favorite place to play was a lake alongside the foret Broceliande. The lake was still and somehow, it amplified sound, so that a whisper could be heard from far back, and a song seemed to be bouncing around all over the water. I can't remember what the lake was called. "Microphone lake".
WZ: Your bio says your songs don't have an(y) earthly purpose, nor deal with neuroses or lovesicknesses.
NV: They do deal with both neuroses and with lovesickness, but they are not a simple diary. I do not limit myself to my own lovesicknesses and neuroses, but rather pilfer freely from other people, real and imagined.
WZ: What would you call your way of working and approaching your ideal?
NV: Hmmm. A good ideal don't let you get within spitting distance. I would call my way of working "depends on the weather"
Sometimes it's excavation. Dig for bones, then brush at them until the dust shows what has been hiding. Maybe then put flesh on the bones and bring some weird old unknown creature to life.
Sometimes it's searching for weak spots in a damn, hammering at them with an icepick and hammer until a spot gives, and then spurt, the room fills up with water and words.
Other times its like sorting through tiny grains of sand with tweezers, looking for pretty rocks to put in rows.
WZ: I hear you're a film-lover? Did you watch something lately?
NV: Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. That movie lets its mystery breathe. Maybe its partly because so much of the story remains unturned that I had that feeling of not being able to get enough when I saw it. Got to see the director's cut though. The other version has a few extra scenes that weaken the story. Cramp its mystery, if you know what I mean.
WZ: There are parallelities towards film in your work. how would you put it?
NV: People have told me before that they thought my tunes were filmic. Hmmm. Images. I guess I'm an image horder. The ones that most often lead to songs are the ones that are on the verge of kicking into action. But since they are usually in my head, I get to walk around them and look in the cupboards-- see into things and behind things. See into what people are hiding. I guess its more like being in a film, or being a camera that can also capture smells, tastes and sounds, in addition to pictures.
WZ: How would you sketch your way of working with language (does language still matter?)
NV: Language matters to me. There's a whole lot of deconstructing going on these days. Most things eventually benefit from being ripped up and put back together. People are included in that. I benefit. Words benefit. But language is for communicating. So words are important as long as people go around flapping their mouths. And long may they.
WZ: What about the music? Sounds like your access to music was pretty innocent.
NV: Yes, I used to just fumble around, putting my fingers all over the neck until something sounded good. Since becoming interested in some modern classical music however, and since I started doing some composing of the pen putting notes to paper sort, I have gained a bit more knowledge of what things are called, and now more often I actually hear something in my head, and then figure out a way to play it.
There are times when I wake up with a song in my head. Other times a rhyme taps out to me on the bus, and then I try to keep it there until I can write it down. It isn't until the words and music get together that I am capable of remembering them.
Sometimes songs come in on the backs of other songs. Once I was fumbling through the welltempered Clavier, and in the C Major prelude, I heard another song. It was really a pretty fuckin weird experience. It was just there, under the chords, words and all. It didn't even follow the same chordal structure, but it seemed to exist there in the other song. A little parasite. Or something. It has its own name now, other than "barnacle on the back of the Bach Whale." It's called The Touring MacLaughlin. Haven't recorded it yet.
WZ: I hear you make puppets. Do you do puppet shows?
NV: No I haven't done any puppet shows yet. It's marionettes I make, mostly. They are fully functional, but mostly I've made them to sell in galleries. I hope the people who buy them play with them.
WZ: What is Tom Meshishnek's role in your work?
NV: He plays music with me, mostly electric guitar but also other instruments sometimes, like mandolin, toy piano, archaic Casio, etc. He also engineered and co produced my first CD, "You Talkin' to Me." I released that on my own label "Big Room Records". We pressed five hundred, but they're all gone now.
WZ: Does your approach work without tradition?
NV: No. I feel aware of a tradition, and relate to that tradition. Sometimes honor it, sometimes defile it. But what that tradition is exactly is hard to pin down. I don't think it is so much a cultural tradition from how I was raised. It is more lumpy than that, made up of the various artists I dig or places I've been, real and imagined. When I feel kicked by an artist, I get that feeling I'd like to make something that could kick me too. It's probably sick as hell, mad dogging after that feeling of being warm or excited, or low. Whatever.
WZ: Which medium influences you the most?
NV: I don't know. I dig a lot of people. Brecht, Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Genet, Lutoslawski, Garcia Marquez, Vince Gallo, Frank Lima, Artaud, Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, August Wilson, many others.
WZ: Your bio says something like you're more influenced by story than feeling, but are you aware of the fact, that most of these adventures told in old stories and songs or at least might deal with "cheap" human feelings... (hum...)
NV: Aint nothin cheap about human feelings. Or if feelings are cheap, then so's just about anything else of real value. But feelings aren't inherently worthy of being songs. I mean every feeling has probably got a thousand million songs around it already. So there's songs to sing when I need them. I could probably take one feeling and sing every song about that feeling, and I would turn blue and die before I got through them all.
"Feeling it" is not the only thing that makes a piece of writing or music, or an actor's performance authentic, or good, or worthwhile or artistic or whatever. In fact, people can get so caught up in trying to feel it that they lose all objectivity towards their work. Everything that would maybe help them make something clear gets lost in their tide of feeling. Plenty of really lame actors "feel it" squeezing tears out of their eyes, or thrusting their hands downward and screaming to show how angry they are, and you don't believe it for a second.
Feelings are sneaky. What if you feel something when you write a song, but then when you sing it you feel something completely different? AHA! That is where it gets juicy...
I guess I'm looking for something less subjective and more replicable than feeling. Images. They don't always react the same way with their surroundings, but they themselves can be used again and again.
At the same time I rant about all this, I am as often dismayed by the lack of real emotion in people's performances. Some of my favorite evenings have been so crowned by one little moment of hearing somebody actually mean something, mean it with the weird unpredictable voice inside them. Sometimes simple words. Or an ugly voice. They let that weird thing out, and everybody in the vicinity knows it.
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