Mmiv by Tim P Scott

In the Old Days, a record was something to keep, remember and return to consciously.

Also, even though CDBaby lovingly encodes the samples with the best music codecs known to mankind, the full glory and depth of the pieces are best appreciated by playing them from the original CD itself. So order today! Your complete satisfaction is guaranteed.

Interview with the "tim p scott" entity

by Guillermo Rodriguez / The Seville Inquisitor / January 2005 (English translation by Ivan Rogoff)

Since 1996 the Crow Caw Music Works label has released 6 CDs under the artist name tim p scott. These have not seen wide distribution except among connoisseurs of the arcane and unusual. The exceptional compositions--all instrumental--range from floating tinkly ambient pieces to hammer and tongs industrial bludgeoning.

Scott's most recent effort, "MMIV", was (not surprisingly) released last month [December 2004]. This work moves away from a base of MIDI purity and is built primarily out of actual audio material -- samples and loops from a number of sources, along with electric guitars and drums.

We were happy to be contacted by Mr Scott who was traveling in Portugal and set up a meeting to talk about his work. I was somewhat confused when two sunglass wearing gentlemen showed up for the interview. Thinking that the Federal Police had finally caught up with some of my younger misdeeds I was relieved when they introduced themselves as Farouk Ali MacFahrquahr and Shmuel Yintz. Puzzled, I asked where Scott was.

MacFahrquahr: "There really isn't any "Tim P Scott" per se. I'm sure there are people with that name, but for this project it was just a generic name a couple of friends and me picked back in the 1990s to create a new project along the lines of the Alan Parsons Group--if you are old enough to remember them. The idea was that people would split up the composing, arranging, recording, mixing and computer wrangling. Four or five people were doing this off and on starting from 1994 to now. I'm the only person of the TPS Cabal still doing work under the tim p scott name."

"I was always amused with the musical monikers that a lot of people affected, you can particularly see this in the hip hop world where almost no one uses their own name, even if they are solo performers."

Yintz: "Presently there are five of us who work on this. It's a very loose organisation, verging on no organization at all. Some people fiddle with parts or chip in a lead or rhythm part. I just play electronic drums and do some fetching and carrying for the group."

Inquisitor: "Well, that's most remarkable. With respect to you both I'm sure you can understand I can't really say I'm completely convinced. But none the less, I will still ask my questions and you can answer as you please.

"Has there ever been any live performances, or will there be in support of MMIV."

Yintz: "The project was never intended as a live vehicle, since playing live involves a million considerations of which few have to do with the enjoyment of making and playing music."

MacFahrquahr: "Again, to take the Alan Parsons Project as a reference; it was never intended to be a live act; the LPs were 100% studio creations intended to be listened to...thus the tim p scott slogan "music for listening to."

Inquisitor: "What are you willing to reveal about your working methods?"

MacFahrquahr: "It really cheeses me off to read interviews with musicians who say 'the tools don't matter at all, it's all about art and inspiration, man!' -- what a bunch of crap. It's as if the musician burns a candle, utters some incantations and the music just sort of drifts down from heaven. Maybe because I'm a gear head this offends my pragmatic side.

"The tim p scott project and I have gone through a whole bunch of different MIDI and audio programs, but rather than bore you with all the details, I will say that without a doubt the one product that completely changed the way we work is Ableton Live. I will hasten to add, though, that Live would not be possible 5 years ago with the CPU power that was available then."

Yintz: "The current pieces usually start with some kind of groove or loop, either from a sample library, something that I play, or in some cases my attempt to duplicate a loop on my kit. We have to do this if we hear a loop that's not licensed."

MacFahrquahr: "Even though commercially the tim scott project is nothing but a huge money loser, we've always agreed that we're only going to use legal paid for software and samples. It's sort of hard to justify asking people to pay for our work if we're not paying other people for theirs."

Inquisitor: "Although maybe these questions are a bit cliche, what artists do you regard as influences, pioneers, or heroes?"

MacFahrquahr: "This changes slightly as the years progress. I will probably be giving my age away to say that I have a lot of affection for the 60s psych/experimental bands such as Spirit, H. P. Lovecraft, Clear Light and such. I did enjoy some mainstream bands such as Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. Coming somewhat more up to date I would say just at random (this may change tomorrow): Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie, and Tool. Also UFO, Wishbone Ash, Camel,High Tide and Budgie."

Yintz: "Although a drummer I do perversely enjoy modern electronic music with a beat. Even though 99.5% of the time no live drummer is used. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk seem sort of quaint now but they were radical in their time."

[This interview also discussed some of the earlier Tim P Scott works; see the other pages at CD Baby (timpscott1, timpscott2, timpscott3) for the continuation.]

(Incidentally, much to our regret, due to a printing error, the names of tracks 9 and 10 as printed on the tray card of the MMIV CD are exchanged. My apologies to Quiloc whose track "Wrong place, wrong time" (track 10) was thus misidentified.)

(Dang it, I just found out that John Digweed had a record out in 2002 called MMII, so as with Glossolalia my title idea was already scooped! Curses...)

Tim P Scott news / January 2007

The new release, "Canciones de mi hermano electrónico", is now available on CDbaby! (See http://www.cdbaby.com/timpscott5)

This is the hardest edged release yet, full of "strum" (or sturm) und drang and other good stuff, 13 tracks of pure potent power running about 60 minutes in toto.

Average Customer Review: 4