Simon Murphy makes beautiful experimental music on the floor of our front room. He says: "I used to think that no one would want to listen to my stuff, that it was just for me, but I think I've reached a point now that other people could enjoy it too" but he's selling himself short. Simon's music can make you feel as though you are being stroked by feathers or shot full of electricity. I got him to talk about it.

What do you do?
I started off thinking about elements of chords, the notes that make up a chord, but not playing them as a chord, playing them in different rhythms, with different tempos. I liked the way that if I played the three different notes at different tempos over quite a long time they eventually coincide with different rhythms. What starts out as something that sounds very random starts to repeat after you've listened to it for a while. There's a pattern to it.

You use a guitar, Monatron and a keyboard?
That was the idea that I started with. I did some things on the guitar like that, just counting in my head. Then I started using the metronome with a little gizmo I have called the Sound-Go-Round, which is a hard tremelo, to divide up the sound. If I played a guitar chord that goes 'brriiiinnnnng' it divides it perfectly into 'brring-brring-brring-brring-brring'. I've been using the same device with a keyboard, and I've just experimented with different combinations of tempos and notes and instruments.

How do you make a piece?
When I think about something I make little notes to myself about the notes that are going to go together. It's like a science experiment where you have a kind of hypothesis about what might sound good, you follow the steps and find out. I try and do one experiment at a time to keep it simple, they are sketches for bigger ideas I might do further down the line. Sometimes they sound good straight off, and sometimes I'll modify it as I go along.

What does it sound like?
What I'm trying to get at is... because I'm using quite primitive technology, it's never perfect. When you get two notes that are nearly-but-not-quite in harmony with each other you get a sort of ripple sound. That's what I really like, this modulating wave. You might get two or three sounds together and they combine. If you were doing it on a synthesiser they would be in harmony, but because everything is not exactly in tune, or the equipment isn't delicate enough to produce those pure sounds, you get this ripple. If I succeed in getting that in any of my things then that's what I'm really happy about.

What influences this music that you're making?
When I started to think about this music, the thing that really blew me away was Steve Reich's phase-shifting things. My music is quite similar in effect to his phase-shifting pieces where he would play two things and one of them would speed up really slowly. I didn't have the capability of doing that but I thought you could achieve a similar thing by starting with two different tempos. I particularly like his tape manipulation piece Come Out where he started with just a small piece of an interview he had recorded, and one of the channels speeds up. It's like a kaleidoscope of sound, the recording doubles up repeatedly, it could theoretically go on forever. Glenn Branca and Charlemagne Palestine are also influences, I like the overall building up of waves of sound that you hear if you listen for long enough.

Other stuff you've done sounds like Sister Ray.
Yes, well I started out being influenced by Steve Reich, and I also loved Terry Riley, but I wasn't interested in doing all the noodling stuff that he does. I am completely obsessed with Sister Ray, the idea that you can create some of the elements of that song in your front room is what I'm interested in. I think that wobble/ripple sound thing is quite pertinent to Sister Ray because of all the instruments they're playing and the sounds that are in there, you can hear it coming through.

You've talked about your music being quite a meditative experience. What goes through your head when you play your music for hours on end?
I listen to it really loud in headphones and sometimes I just play something for as long as I physically can, until my fingers start to hurt, or my concentration breaks. It involves very heavy concentration and counting. Around 15 minutes is about as long as I can sustain it.


What's a Monatron?
It's a home-made five-string steel guitar kind of thing that I made in 1997. I originally planned to use it as an addition to the general noise-scape of the band that I was in at the time, who were a pretty standard punk rock type band. I'd seen something similar at a friend-of-a-friend's house and I realised that I had all the parts of this thing that I'd been keeping for ages - whenever I fart around with my guitar I keep all the bits. In a sort of Velvet Underground type way I decided that I would tune it all to the same note and I thought I could play it with a violin bow. But I never got around to getting a bow so I used an aluminium pipe instead. The same sort of tunes you could play on a Stylophone were playable on the Monatron. It made this really excruciatingly horrible noise that was like a jet engine going overhead with this metallic scraping sound from the pipe. I found that it was too physically demanding to play it, it hurt my ears too much. It was a real racket. It created these vibrations that went through my body and it gave me big headaches. The Monatron lay dormant for a while until I began combining it with these experiments I was doing. I started to pluck the strings individually whilst detuning it at the same time. It's a lot gentler and similar to the rhythm/pattern stuff I've been doing.

Don't you make your own effects too?
The first thing I did was to rehouse this Sound-Go-Round gizmo because it was in a not very effective package, so I moved it and now it's a lot more versatile. From that I got the idea that I could make my own effects pedals. I knew someone who said that it wasn't difficult. I got a book called Electronic Projects for Musicians and I've made a few of the things in it with mixed success.


Tell us about your musical career.
I got a guitar in 1980 but didn't play it for about two years. I did home recordings and stuff for quite a long time. In the mid-80s I played guitar for The Legend, I recorded with him and toured a bit. At the same time I was in a band called The Hobgoblins, but then it mutated into The Melonfarmers when half the band decided that they wanted to play different instruments. We got to the point where we were practising quite a lot but we never did any gigs because one of them left. A few years later I found myself in another band a few years later, called the Six Inch Killaz. It lasted about five years but it was clear that we were not going to get anywhere and it all disintegrated quite messily at the end. But I wanted to continue making my own music so I decided that I could probably satisfy myself doing stuff at home.

Why do you make music?
It's very satisfying to create something, even if it's only making a tape, you can do it and play it back to yourself. When I was writing terrible songs years ago, I still listened to my things and I would like them, even though I didn't expect anyone else to like them. I've always had outlets for my creative impulses, whether it's written things, comics, drawings or anything else.

Where can people hear your things?
If anyone cares to contact me I can send them a CD-R of some of my stuff. I'm going to try to submit some of my work to small companies who are putting out weird stuff, and I'm making some MP3s for people to download.

What else would you like to say?
I'd like to increase people's acceptance of what you might call avant garde music, because I don't think people understand it. There isn't much to understand about it anyway, you just listen to it in a different way, it's not like a song with a beginning, middle and an end. I think a lot of people would enjoy it if they were exposed to it.