Steve Bates is a musician but also an artist, living in Montréal. My work is either recorded in live music or in installation art, radio, video, sound, and some film. Steve’s residency took place in October 2016.
WORM: Why WORM?
Steve Bates: To take advantage of all of the wonderful equipment in here. The thing with being on a residency is that your daily life is removed and you can just focus on your work. That is kind of a magic combination. I’m specifically working on developing some material for a project that has to do with historical and contemporary experiences of auditory hallucination.
I came from a radio art festival in Germany called Radio Revolten. Since I was already in Europe I decided to extend my trip by doing a residency here. I know some people that did work here, and it looked like a really great studio and a great culture. So I was interested in learning more about it and the best way to do that is to be here for a little while.
WORM: Your impression of Rotterdam?
I’ve never been here before, but I’ve always been curious about it. Once I walked out of the train station I kind of felt like I loved it already.
WORM: Equipment?
SB: The world of synthesizers is fairly new to me. I’ve been a guitar player all my life. I still play guitar but it’s more of a wrestling match. So I’m just switching some of my wrestling from the guitar to the synthesizer right now.
To be honest a big part of what I’m doing here is learning more about synthesizers. I have this loose project that I’m working on. If some of the material that I make here can feed into it, then great, but this is really more of a learning residency for me, or a “professional development workshop” [LAUGHS].
So, I’m going to try to make my way through all the synthesizers and then of course, I’ll take advantage of some of these other things lying around.
The interesting thing for me in the world of synthesizers are the sounds that synthesizer people don’t like; that they think are really basic and boring. But I can just listen to the sound of static-y hiss through a synthesizer and that would be a perfect record for me.
To learn more, visit http://stevebates.info/