Interview: BBC Radio 6

Interviewed by Huw Stephens for the BBC Arts Introducing show on BBC 6 Music, discussing my piece Where Parallel Lines Meet. Aired on 30 September 2021.

Excerpt

Huw Stephens: Why did you decide to make a piece about uncertainty? Isn’t there enough uncertainty in the world, Ben?

Ben Nobuto: It’s funny because I actually had the idea to do this uncertainty thing a while back and then obviously Covid happened and it became a very, very uncertain time. When I told people I was doing a piece about uncertainty they were like, ‘Oh, that’s very timely,’ but it actually wasn’t intentionally about Covid or lockdown. All these things just coincided and I felt like it was just in the air, in my personal life but also in terms of how people around me were feeling. Maybe to do with recent political things or just the internet environment and the social uncertainty around that. So I feel like there was a lot of material available for me.

HS: And who are the voices that we’re going to hear in this piece?

BN: They’re a mix of my friends and my family, so there’s fifteen different people. I tried to get a nice mix of ages and different backgrounds and genders, so it’s not just all the same people who sound like me and talk like me.

HS: Sure, and how did the process work then? Did you record the interviews first and then work the music around what they said?

BN: I interviewed each of them individually for about an hour or sometimes an hour and a half and-

HS: Wow.

BN: I had tons of material and I just whittled it down into very short snippets that I’d intersperse really quickly. I wanted to have a very rapid style, kind of like a collage: you’re not listening to one person for a long time, you’re listening to lots of different people say a sentence or two and then it switches back and forth really quickly. And after that I added the music over it and tried to weave a sort of musical narrative into it as well.

HS: And you’re a musician and composer primarily; what was it like working with speech in addition to the music?

BN: It was really interesting. I haven’t really done anything like this before. I’ve done stuff where I’ve sampled people talking off the internet. That’s really fun but it’s different because with that kind of thing you can go out and search for a very specific thing . . . but with these interviews it was very ad hoc, I didn’t plan anything really. It was all very open and I kind of just went from there. Whatever people were saying was to become the piece, so I had to be very uncertain myself with the outcome.

Where Parallel Lines Meet was commissioned by ‘New Creatives’, a scheme supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts. Listen to the piece here.