Dan Pound is an independent musician with a sizeable discography of self-released albums. Due to the incorporation of shamanistic motifs Dan's albums are some of the most intriguing that listeners will encounter these days. Last year I reviewed Solar Nexus which was deservedly described as “one of the hottest releases of the year". His latest album Tantra Majik will be reviewed at Melliflua later this year. Details of this album and his discography can be found at Dan's website. Thankyou Dan for taking the time to answer my questions in-depth. Q: You were involved with music from an early age . Can you tell us what led you to making and releasing instrumental music? As far back as I can remember, I was exposed to all kinds of music; classical, jazz, Broadway, folk, soundtracks, rock, you name it. I remember my Mom putting me down for a nap and turning on the soundtrack for Romeo and Juliet to help me go to sleep. Even at 4 and 5 years old I was moved to tears by what I heard. Not so much for the story, (although I had seen the film and loved it, as I have always been a hopeless romantic), but it was the music itself that moved me. It had a powerful impact very early on. By my own choice, I took guitar lessons at nine years old, ( I took piano when I was about 5...but NOT by my choice). I learned theory and tablature notation and such and was at once enthralled with the whole idea of writing or creating my own music. I would walk to the guitar shop where I took lessons and would spend hours there copying down pages of songbooks onto my own manuscript paper to learn even more about the structure of song writing. (I was only nine years old and couldn't afford all of the songbooks I wanted, and besides, the guys that worked there were my friends). My first stint with writing was writing little love songs for whatever girl I had a crush on at the time. I would actually write down the chords, notes and lyrics in my manuscript books, only this time they were My songs. Then I learned how to play double bass in the school orchestra. (Actually, I taught myself how to play, as I was unexpectedly approached by the teacher who said he needed a bass player...fast. I guess he thought I was the right man for the job.) Soon I was writing and transcribing works for the whole orchestra. That is when the instrumental musician/composer part of me came out. Since then it's been a slow trail which started out as a part time hobby, and now has actually become a real business and trade that I work at every day. Q: Can you tell us more about this? Well for so long music was a part time hobby. Very important to me but a hobby none the less. Then about four years ago I decided I wanted to really give it a go, and it became a full time serious hobby. That's when I started releasing my CDs, got a website up, got some songs online, and began pitching my stuff to various places. Then this last year I got real serious and decided to make the music an actual business. The ultimate goal being that I wanted to eventually quit my day job and make a real living at music. I got a license, business cards, book keeping stuff, a separate bank account etc. I started buying books about business and music marketing and such. I got seriously addicted to this part of things, challenging myself to do at least something everyday to help forward the biz. Now the business part takes as much of my time as the music making part. Taking the plunge and actually believing in myself was the first step. Now things are finally taking off for me. I guess hard work really does pay off. Q: Since you started releasing music you've built up a discography of over 20 albums. How has your musical style developed during that time, and has your method of creating music changed? When I really got serious about making music and was working on my first CD, Other Worlds, I was relying a lot on the use of samples to jumpstart my ideas, and was often going for that “commercial” sound as well. Now I go into the studio and just start shaping and manipulating sound in various ways and come up with something that sounds good to me. Or I go in with a clear cut idea of something I want to try and then go from there. I'm also doing more work in “real time” rather than step by step, so there is much more authenticity and honesty in my work. Nowadays, I use music to transport me to another plane of existence, where half of the creating is me doing, but the other half is me receiving transmissions from somewhere beyond to help understand where the music needs to go. It's actually much more spontaneous nowadays. Also, I am more seasoned in the studio and understand engineering more now. I have much more at my disposal because of this. I think of the studio as the master instrument of all instruments. It's a billion components with even more original possibilities and capabilities. I love the idea of making a sound or voice no one has ever heard before. Another difference between now and when I started is that I incorporate more organic instruments. I use the didgeridoo, Native American flutes, singing bowls, and various hand percussion and such. I also use my own voice instead of samples. I even shape and tweak the recordings of my voice so that you can't tell that it's a voice, so that it sounds like a cello, or you can't tell the gender, things like that. In reality, you could say, I'm still finding my own voice. Q: Who and what have been your main influences, and to what extent have they influenced your music? The first albums that I bought were from the Beatles, Neil Diamond, and Elton John, because to me they were the masters of singer/songwriters, and that's what I thought I wanted to be then. I later got seriously into classical music and numerous composers, and to this day still have a huge library of vinyl classical records that I rotate through. Then I got heavily into the great progressive bands of the 70's like Yes, Genesis, Rush, King Crimson and especially, Pink Floyd. It was a Floyd concert in LA where I had my first real music with visuals experience. That had a major impact on me. Another set of similar experiences happened to me when I saw the movies, Risky Business, Legend and Thief, all made around the same time. These movies all had a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. Because of them, I got hooked on electronic music. Then I caught their live show and was double hooked. I had to have everything ever recorded by the Dream. It was this influence that prompted me to buy my first keyboard. Actually it was my first piece of what I thought of as “gear”, as I only had guitars, my voice and my manuscript pad all these years. I still remember getting out of the store, getting in my car, and putting the batteries in this baby, (it was a silly little Casio after all), and crankin her up. I was amazed at all I could do with a sweep of a knob or a push of a button. (I've always loved buttons and knobs and sliders and such). I rented a little Fostex 4 track cassette recorder and went to work, creating music that sounded a little like what I had been listening to. I put together a collage edit of movie scenes onto video, turned the sound down on the TV, and came up with this music soundtrack to play back with it. It went together with it perfectly. I knew at that time that I wanted to create visual music. Another Major influence I should mention is Steve Roach. What a pioneer in the genre, and without formal training or musical education. His soundworlds are at this point in my life, the focal point for the style that I try to emulate in my work. Not sure if I should say this or not, but we have spoken together and I will be attending a week long immersion workshop for sound creation at his studio/home soon. This will most likely give me a whopping kick in the pants to help me move on the next level. Should be cool. Q: Solar Nexus is one of the most fascinating albums I've heard for some time. What was the inspiration for combining themes around the sun with shamanistic motifs? Starting with my third release, In A Hummingbird's Dream, I decided that I wanted each CD to have it's own theme. Sort of it's own story to tell. Even though my music is mostly instrumental, I feel like it should say and mean something. To have a lyrical type theme. It's also a good guide for me to stay on track of the overall feel of the album I'm creating, so as to make it sound cohesive and like the pieces all go together. At times I may have two or maybe even three CDs being created at the same time simply because of the fact that there are two or three different moods going on in the pieces I'm creating and so they're too contrasting and different. I would say that most of my music incorporates a degree of shamanistic quality and at the same time would be considered space music. Solar Nexus for me is the ultimate album because it fuses these two elements together so that the sum of the fusion becomes greater than either one on it's own. I felt like an alchemist making this one. As far as the theme itself goes, I think of the sun as the most powerful living thing the earth harnesses. We need it to survive. Think of it, it must come before all else in terms of all things physical or material. It Is life. Therefore, the pieces on Solar Nexus all have that feeling of ancient man, at his most primordial, still being able to grasp (or at least beginning to grasp) the importance of this life giving God-like thing in the sky. So we have the past and early man and his first “god”, and then you have the current knowledge of space and solar existence, and yet the mystery still remains as it always did....will the sun shine again tomorrow? Q: What got you onto the shamanistic theme and sound? When I first heard Steve Roach's Dreamtime Return and heard the elements of didgeridoo and tribal rhythms mixed with all these drenching synthesizers, I knew this was something I wanted to explore. At this same time I was reading a lot of esoteric and existential stuff like Casteneda and Ouspensky and others, and many of the spiritual themes and philosophies I was pondering started becoming the core themes for my songs and projects. To this day, the bulk of my music is based on these spiritual discoveries that seem to be ongoing. In addition to these elements was the introducing and inclusion of ethnic, organic instruments into my work. I decided I wanted to learn the didgeridoo, So I researched a little and bought one. I bought a video that taught me how to play. Then I acquired a couple of Native American Flutes and various hand drums and percussion and singing bowl etc. I had once seen Steve Roach in a promotional video scraping this rock across this other long slate rock, and thinking how cool that sounded. Sure enough around the same time of starting the didg, and building my first real studio, I found a long, shiny slate rock in my yard and another one for the hand. I've used that sound in several pieces. There's the scraping sound which is very potent in the sound design area, and then there's the clanking beat you can make with it. It's very primal to play a rock as an instrument. In the past I used mostly vocal samples in my ethnic stuff, but lately I have learned the letting go of the vocal chant. Mostly it's just guttural vowel sounds, but it can also serve as a percussive sound or effect as well. When I am doing the chanting, there is a true primordial feeling that takes over that is truly shamanistic in quality. Q: You've released a lot of albums in a variety of styles. Do you have a vision of what direction your music will take in the future? Also, do you have any plans for live performances? Performing live is something I have recently been considering. It scares the shit out of me but at the same time excites me. To this point, reasons I haven't so far are because of lack of portability and not having certain equipment needed for the task. Also, venues that cater to this type of music are scarce around my town, (as far as I know, and if anyone knows a place near Santa Rosa Cal. that does this genre, please contact me). As far as the direction my music is taking, I would say that I used to emulate, now I innovate. I am steering farther from the mainstream. I want to make sounds that you've never heard before. I want to use music as a personal tool for self exploration and inner travel. Therefore, I must always be looking in other different directions for the inspirations that spark my creative hand. I am honing in on my own sound and voice, and what's coming out is I feel very original and interesting music. Music from or for other worlds so to speak. I'll always make it a point to learn, grow and change, as a person and an artist. Q: Some of your CD covers look like computer art. Is that the case, and is it your work? You could say that it's computer enhanced art. The original images are almost all my own photographs and some my wife took. I would then tweak an image in numerous ways in a computer program and then add the texts, bar code, etc.., make the layout, print the covers, put it all together and you have an original CD. A real grass roots production. I must again state the importance to me that the visuals and music must go together, therefore, the images have to correlate with the theme of the album. That's the challenge, tweaking the image just right so it looks like what you want it to. The cover for Trance Meditation was done using a picture my wife took of a peacock feather. You can't tell that's what it is by looking at it, but the colors are all there. It looks like ripples in a mythical pool of rainbow colored water. The album covers are a real fun, creative part of the whole CD making process. Plus I use the art work for visuals on my website and a few collage slide show videos that are on YouTube.com and my website as well. My next CD is called In-sense, so what am I going to do? I'll take a picture of burning incense. If that's too dark, maybe I'll try a sparkler or a lit match and shoot and tweak that. We shall see. Q: A lot of ambient musicians are making collaborative albums these days. Is that something you would be interested in doing? Definitely. Especially if the blend is mutual and complementary. I like the idea of someone else who can play more than one instrument like myself and spontaneously seeing what happens. I have been in a few bands, and miss that chemistry that happens when everyone “gets” the music that's happening. The only rule would be, that there would be no rules. Anyone out there interested?