Photo by Samer Ghani
Barry Paul Clark
Barry Paul Clark
The last time I saw bassist/experimental artist Barry Paul Clark perform was in a converted basement room in a nondescript warehouse in Riverwest. There, he and a few friends improvised an hour of music with electronics, saxophone, guitar, and flute, backed by processed images from obscure films. I left feeling changed in a small way. The music and media that came to life were mind-blowing but hard to describe, could never be exactly replicated, and were only heard by the dozen or so attendees in that little room.
That concert was the latest installment of Unrehearsed MKE, an improvised performance series Clark has helped co-curate for, at time of writing, 129 consecutive months. For over a decade, he has been one of the most chameleonic musicians in Milwaukee, moving from these types of underground passion projects to performances and recordings as solo bass/electronic act adoptahighway, member of multi-hyphenated bands like Retroreflector, Field Report, or Argopelter, and supporting the full-band expressions of songwriters Caley Conway and Ellie Jackson. His newest project, Cathedral Becomes Tomb, is a personal form of creative therapy. With several exciting events on the October calendar, it seemed like a good time to catch up on his musical life and his perspective on creativity.
Let’s talk about some of your collaborations. You’ve worked with artists like Caley Conway, Tony Catania, and your colleagues in Tontine Ensemble. What are your thoughts about these relationships?
With folks I collaborate with, their energies and insights have brought me into different ways of thinking about how I approach my own creativity. I think that’s really what the value of collaboration is to me: so many different energies in service to one goal, and more often than not, the goal isn’t necessarily trying to dictate a result but more about trying to find a process and then seeing what happens.
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It’s worth mentioning that a lot of these collaborations are based around improvisation, too. Can you expand on that?
Yeah, improvisation is a broad term but I’ve put it into a pretty consistent creative practice over the past 10, 11 years or so. On that same point about different thought processes and energies during collaboration, improv is a way to remove a lot of mentally unhealthy filters or hurdles that you may have in your own creative process and gets you into just making. The connective thread I observe across all forms of art is that something is made, not just considered. There has to be a process, there has to be work. Utilizing improvisation, for me, in music and other art forms, is a healthy way to remove obstacles around your own creativity and just start the work.
Regarding mental obstacles, you’ve been very open about your experience with anxiety and depression, and how that forms the inspiration for Cathedral Becomes Tomb. Congratulations on your new release, STEP Three. How do you see the progression of that project over the three releases?
STEP Three by Cathedral Becomes Tomb
STEP Three by Cathedral Becomes Tomb
I’m really excited that it’s taking on some creative considerations and sprouting a lot of ideas I’m exploring for the first time. My intention is to start with 12 digital releases, exclusively on Bandcamp, and see what that all might look like upon completion. Cathedral Becomes Tomb is a multimedia expression that uses creative skills I’ve developed in a way that helps me process some of the issues I have with my anxiety and major depressive disorders. The “cathedral” is representative of some of the conditioning I’ve experienced and choices I’ve made in pursuit of (what is now understood for me as) an unhealthy ideal. The “tomb” is what was actually being built in my pursuit of that, which is representative of the negative cognitive behavior and hardships in mental health I’ve subjected myself to.
It’s also an exploration of trying to find ways to push back against some pretty damaged and toxic systems I have observed and experienced around performing arts and the music industry. And at the foundation of it all, I just want it to be a way for me to stay motivated as an artist. So that includes playing bass, applying electronics to it, improvisation, film projection/AV stuff, and focusing it into more of an experience. I do think at the end of the day, across all art, everyone’s just after an experience. We live in a society and under an economic system where we’ve put a lot of obstacles in the way of getting to that very necessary and desired human experience of art.
I want to talk about film stuff too. Two of your short films, Enough is revealed in the way you wait, and in the way you leap and Bid Hope Farewell, have been featured in multiple film festivals in 2022 and into 2023. What were some of your takeaways from those experiences?
While I’ve worked in film before, from the musical composition side of things, shooting and editing footage and then adding music to it was a way for me to access creativity during the lockdown stages of the pandemic, when there wasn’t a clear sense of what everything was going to look like as a performing artist in the world going forward.
The two films I did were for pieces from an adoptahighway album I released in the fall of 2020, and then I did an audio/video project for an online event in the fall of 2021 based on Dante’s Inferno, which was curated by the humanities department at DePaul University. After both of those came out, I did the thing that every artist in the 21st century does where you talk about in on your social media pages, get a couple dozen likes (in the internet economy, that’s a lot, right?) and then everyone goes on their algorithmic ways. But making those pieces helped me better understand that the relationship with the experience of art is outside of time.
Even though I made those films in 2020 or 2021, which is ancient considering the constant pressures of the modern world to make “content,” they were in film festivals the following years, which was a “brand new” experience for everybody. And the audience's experiences were new for me, which I found valuable. It was basically a creative practice in the concept “you’ll never get what you don’t ask for” so instead of waiting around for somebody to notice these things I created and care about, a dangerous pitfall in the minds of many artists, I started submitting this work to festivals and trying to continue the “life” of some creative work that I’d already done.
Your use of video in an experimental context is really striking and interesting. How do you view the possibilities of the medium for expression?
What I like to do with incorporating film work is to present opportunity for connection in the observations of the creative experience. That sort of chance operation for synchronous things. When I shoot footage, which at the time of its creation could have its own artistic intentions, and then run it through all this “outdated” hardware that’s affecting it, some of which is reactive to the sounds I’m making in my double bass/pedal world, mixing across a signal which is glitching on its own. If you’re watching and noticing that the color of video and sound in the space might be interacting with one another, that’s its own creative experience that only that one person could have possibly had. I find a very deep and healthy value in that type of thing. A fundamentally human experience, which takes place outside of some of the societal systems we’ve put in place like organization of time and money. When I experience those types of things, whether it’s performing in those contexts or being in the audience, it makes me feel so small, but in the best possible way.
Small because you suddenly have people experiencing it alongside you?
Small in the sense that only I am experiencing this thing, and it can only possibly be me, because everyone else in the room is having a different experience with this thing being created in that moment. I find so much pleasure in just talking about what art and creative experience feels like. The CBT multimedia project is definitely my own creative therapeutic practice. It’s also a way to get people engaged with talking about the experience of art and finding value in that, as opposed to only relating value to a physical product or transacted commodity. That ties into why I’m just releasing things digitally as they’re ready. I’m not trying to put new physical things out into the world at this time. There’s already too much stuff. I want to focus on the experience of what I’m doing as opposed to the “product” of what I’m doing. And trust me when I say it’s not lucrative. (laughs) That’s not to say there won’t be a physical documentation of what I’ll continue to develop as Cathedral Becomes Tomb, but at that time, it’s focusing on the creative flow state towards that experiential thing I’m desiring and finding a healthy mental balance in.
I totally got that feeling watching Bid Hope Farewell. The combination of images and sound and text creates a conversation in my brain that is probably different for everyone. And that seems relevant to some of your upcoming film-related events, right?
Yes! Bid Hope Farewell was the film that was selected to be shown in the 2022 Cactus Club Independent Film Festival, and it won an audience program award. Part of the accolade was an opportunity to curate an event through Cactus+ Moving Image Series at some point in the 2023 calendar year. I didn’t really have new film work I was developing, but still wanted to present something that could intersect my creativity in music and film, while also providing a new opportunity for the collaborative process to present new work. So on Friday the 13th we’re going to be live-scoring the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The score is very improvised but there are some parameter-based things. Some of the musical composition techniques I did for the audio in Bid Hope Farewell I applied to coming up with musically thematic material for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
And this is just the first of a few of these forays into improvisational, experimental music scoring to different media in the public domain. Another one that’s coming up is at Wes Tank’s new Washington Park Media Center at 4303 W Vliet St. There’s a neighborhood trick-or-treat event on Friday October 27th, and beginning at 7:00 PM, we’ll be projecting those old-timey spooky cartoons and I’ll be making some ambient improvisations over the top of them.
BF: Anything else you want to share about mental health and the creative process?
BPC: I think there’s been a lot of value in being able to openly talk about some of my mental health issues, and how a pursuit of a life in creativity can be a very positive thing, but like many other navigations of life, has countless angles to hurt us if we’re not careful. I’ve put myself in a lot of different contexts on the negative side, and I’ve found a way to get myself more into positive places through cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation and attempting to practice mindfulness, as well as being in a very privileged position to have access to a consistent therapist and psychiatric medication. I know it’s a buzzword but “mindfulness” and trying to find presence in the now has been of such value to me in my struggles. The more we can spend in the now, the easier it is to get into the next thing. The entirety of everything is right now. It’s difficult, and anxieties surrounding past and future will still be, but it is possible to find balance. I've fallen prey to the common misconception about mental health, like, “Oh, you just do this therapy for a bit, take this medicine for a while, and then you’re cured.” But the idea of curing your thoughts? Well, thinking is the function of the brain. It’s like telling your heart to stop pumping blood. So, you’re going to think about all these things. That’s part of the human experience. When we can balance those interior and exterior energies, that’s when we find what our truth is and how we can move forward through this energy of life positively.
Barry Paul Clark will perform on the following dates in October (full schedule and up-to-date happenings can be found at barrypaulclark.com):
- Jonah Parzen-Johnson, Cathedral Becomes Tomb, and Mere of Light, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4, Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co., 224 W. Bruce St. Tickets $12.
- Live Film Scoring: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 13, Cactus Club, 2496 S. Wentworth Ave. Tickets $5-15 sliding scale.
- Washington Park Trick or Treat spooky and ambient live scoring to vintage Halloween/horror cartoons, 7 p.m.
- Friday, Oct. 27, Washington Park Media Center, 4303 W. Vliet St. Free (donations encouraged)
- Wired Explorations: Cathedral Becomes Tomb, RS Masters, Mere of Light, 12 p.m. Saturday, October 28, X-Ray Arcade, 5036 S. Packard Ave., Cudahy. Free .
Stream or download Bass A La Carte by Barry Paul Clark on Amazon here.
