To Blacken The Pages, a one man avant garde project founded by Paul McAree – a man anyone interested in the slightly more out there aspecs of Irish art and music would do well to look up. His most recent album, North, was released in February of this year and is the prolific Paul’s fifth release. Previous work has been hailed by Julian Cope, who described it thusly, “Creeping around the walls, seeping deep into your cupboards and drawers, the music of To Blacken The Pages dissolves linear time and swallows all misery whole.” Sounds like something I wanna know more about.

Is TBTP Ireland’s answer to Sunn O)))? Is nebulous abstract sound collage really music? These are the things we try to find out...

Connected: Firstly, the tough questions: What do you think you're doing? Call that music? What's wrong with an acoustic guitar, three chords and a rhyming dictionary?!

To Blacken The Pages: Christ. I've never been interested in the “3 minute pop song”, or at least only sometimes. I'd buy a single and always give the a-side a quick listen before wanting to flick over to the other side and see what the band was really made of. Albums were the same - I could always barely hold back from wanting to skip ahead to the, like, second-last track where everyone's hopefully letting their hair down.

C: What were the major influences which led you down the ambient/abstract path? Was it the likes of Dylan Carson (Earth) and Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O))), KTL, Khanate, etc.), or was it the voices in your head?

Oddly, my influences came more from the likes of the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. JAMC's "Barbed Wire Kisses' has had more influence on me than any other record. I played 'Mushroom Head' so many times I wore the tape out. Other influences came later - its funny, as you start going down certain roads you notice other people making similar material. For example, I only belatedly picked up on Expo 70 because I was compared to them, but now, its like, yeah, that's so cool!

C: Can you lead me through the creation of one of your songs? F'rinstance, a 13-minute epic like 'I am screes on her escarpments' - what comes first and how does the idea develop?

TBTP: Someone said once that my music sounded like it was made alone in a dark room - I guess it is! How a track gets made depends from song to song – I usually just pick up a guitar, hit the record and just start arsing about. I hate rehearsing stuff, hate having to re-do takes, hate having to learn any structures. I usually just start and see where it goes. So then I'll have a central core around which I build other instruments. Sometimes other instruments will take the lead, 'The Urgency' for example, started life on the bass guitar first. Sometimes I'll have a general feel for something - I'm just in the mood to record something, but never quite sure how it'll work till I get the guitar out, other times, I'll have a real sense of wanting achieve something-  the song 'Alien' was called Alien because I had watched the film on my own really late one night  with a few beers, and afterwards knew exactly what I wanted to do, that is, in a pissed state, blow up my amp by pushing the damn thing way too hard!!!

C: How much actual song-writing/structure goes into your music and how much of it is improvisation?

TBTP: Mostly its improvised, but thats improvisng with some desire to to dress it on a structure. I've done a few completely structureless pieces, but I've never been entirely happy with them. At the back of my mind is something of a core which may or may not emerge as the song progresses. I guess I'm interested in music which teases with a sense of structure.

C: What do you hope to achieve through your music? Personally, professionally(?) and so on...

TBTP: Its the old fine line between noodling away in a dark room and being on an endless world tour! Right now I'm still happy to just have the opportunity to put out some music, as experimental as I want - and just knowing there are a small number of people around the world who like what I do blows me away. Having said that I'm going to mix things up a little bit soon - I'm working on a double album with Korperschwache, which is really great fun, and I'd like to do more of that. After 5 cds of just me, collaboration seems like a way of keeping off the cobwebs. I would like to play this music live too, but we'll see - there's a lot of pressure within the industry to perform live, and to my detriment I've been resisting it, as I've tried prove its not essential. But still, I'd like to unleash TBTP upon some unsuspecting gig-goers at some point. I'd also like to see what happens when other performers would step in and take on aspects of music and make it their own, creating a new dimension in a live setting.

C: Can we expect you to appear as a guest on a Sunn O))) album anytime soon?

TBTP: I doubt it! I don't know those guys. But what they do is cool. Sunn O))) are an interesting phenomenon - on the one hand they've helped to expand, bring attention and respect to what was a relatively small scene and expand it in many ways, and on the other they've been the focus of an incredible media expectation and benchmark against which all others are compared. The forthcoming media interest for their new album is astonishing, its been a rising  reverence for the last few months now. As far as most media are concerned, if you hold a note for longer than 5 seconds you are a Sunn O))) wannabe and, ipso facto, shite. I can easily get fucked off about that, but I'm trying not to let lazy reviews get to me so much...

C: How much drugs? Too much drugs?

TBTP: Ah, tamazepam, bethedrine, halcion, seroxat, cipramil, tianeptine, restoril, sarafem, venlafaxine, escalitopram, cogentin, prozac, effexor, fluvoxamine, trilafon, citalopram, alaproclate, bupropion... No seriously, a cheap addiction to Neurofen is as heavy as it gets at the moment.

C: Tell me about your other musical projects, Slaves of War Orphan Farm, curatorships, etc...?

TBTP: Slaves is just me again - I was going to try and pretend it was 5 of us and get friends to pose as band members but in the end just couldn't be bothered. Slaves is more of a band idea, and I guess plays more of a homage to certain influences - Les Rallizes Denudes, German Oak, etc. I wanted to create a no-strings-attached anything-goes just-enjoying-the-music
environment, in opposition to TBTP which at the time was having a 'somber moment'...

I'm curator for Flood, a contemporary art project which was launched in 2008. At the moment its a venue-less space - we are commissioning artists to create work in a poster format which is then disseminated for free, though various galleries and pickup points, and is also posted out for free to anyone who requests it. Its an ongoing series, we'll hopefully keep producing 3 or 4 a year, as well as other projects.

I'm also project manager/curator for Breaking Ground, the contemporary art scheme for Ballymun. We commission artists to create artworks in collaboration with or in response to interaction with the community in Ballymun. We commissioned the Hotel Ballymun project last year which saw the conversion of the top floor of a tower block into a hotel for one month by artist Seamus Nolan, and soon we have a huge bronze sculpture by John Byrne - a fantastic piece which will see the figure of tracksuited teenage girl from Ballymun on a majestic horse. Its going to look amazing, and completely turns on its head the idea of who these heroic statues are for. Well, here we are - local, everyday people can be heroes too.

C: It might just be that I only recently discovered the world of drone, etc, but it seems to me that there's more and more interest in extreme or avant-garde music in the mainstream all the time... What are your thoughts on this?

TBTP: Yeah, I guess there is - I can kind of stand back and watch the spectacle, and see it rise and fall. I can't help but feel the media attention is a fad of sorts, they'll find a new genre to lick soon. While boundaries seem on the one hand to have expanded, on the other hand things are pretty narrow - I keep getting referred to as being 'ambient black metal' or somesuch, which is as much to miss the point as it is amusing. I've been reading a couple of magazines, and its awful really, some really cool bands are getting thrashed by critics because they wake up one morning and decide they've had enough of all the sunn-wannabees (see above), write awful reviews and say what they now want is for some musicians to start indicating or leading the way out of the post-drone egg-basket. Pleeaaassseee.....

C: What's next for TBTP and Paul McAree?

TBTP: I'm working on about 40 - 50 new TBTP tracks at the moment - maybe a new release in the autumn. I'm hoping there might be a 12" record in May or June, just 2 tracks. And then theres the double album with Korperschwache, we're still recording so maybe October or November 09 for that.

I'm in an exhibition in Draiocht in Blanchardstown in April and May which is loosely based on sound art - this will be a large installation of images, photocopies, 3 videos and an audio piece - its called Crow's Nest. The audio from that may appear on the 12" to come out in May.

I'm curating a few more Flood projects this year - in March a poster of 38 drawings of tits called 'My Berlusconi' by Flavia Muller Medeiros and in May a project by Terry Atkinson - I'm particularly super-excited about this one as Terry is (at least in my opinion) one of the most important figures in contemporary art, so that will be a personal milestone. Hopefully from this autumn we'll also organise the first of several exhibitions in an actual venue - the plan is to find ad-hoc spaces for each exhibition, be they run down, derelict, unused spaces, etc. Should be fun... and a bit of work...

http://www.toblackenthepages.com
http://www.flooddublin.com/current.html
http://www.breakingground.ie

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