Jono Podmore interview

How do you describe what you do?

I work in the creative aspect of the music industry. I once described my role as “doing everything in the studio except singing”. There’s composition, arrangement and performance. Then there’s the technical stuff: recording, programming, mixing and mastering. There’s also live shows and DJing. On top of that I have a professorship at the conservatory of music in Cologne, Germany, where I run a post-graduate course in Production.

When I started in the music business as a teenager, just about all of the areas I work in were unique roles, professions in their own right; a piece of music would be made by a team. Today, software has replaced much of the hardware of music creation, and the roles have blurred and reduced down to just one, often lonely, person sitting at the computer: the producer. Consequently the course I teach in Cologne covers all these areas and more, even including what Hunter S Thompson described as“a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs” – the music business. So to answer the question, I’m a producer.

In recent years I’ve also started writing about this multi-faceted role. Knowing how music is made and the personalities that make it first hand gives me a very privileged insight. Things in my game are not always as they appear, or rather as they are presented to the consumer, and I enjoy lifting the veil by writing about it.

Can you us about your Resonance FM show?

Talk to the Chip is primarily a 30 min podcast that I run with the rather brilliant Prof. Elif Yalvaç who came up the with the idea in early 2023.

The focus is on pioneers of electronic music, especially those who may have been overlooked, often women or non-european composers. So we’ve discussed and analysed wonderful pieces by Pauline Oliveros, Halim El-Dabh, Yoshimura Hiroshi and Mariane Amacher for example. The podcast was picked up by Resonance FM, which gives us the enormous advantage that we can play as much music as we like without any copyright issues. As a radio station they pay a blanket license that we can’t do as a podcast. So each episode is expanded to an hour to contain at least 30 min of music and then broadcast on the 3rd Saturday of every month. We’re just about to record episodes 23 and 24 looking at works by Daphne Oram and Alvin Lucier – so stay tuned!

What are you currently writing?

I’ve just finished a book about the relationship of drugs and music that is currently with the publishers and may be in the shops by the end of the year, inshallah! I’m planning another book about blackness in music which involves a lot of reading and research, despite the fact that what is understood as black music has been such a powerful force in my life since I was a child. So much is taken for granted, or simply ignored, but it’s a cultural gold mine when you start digging in to the black heritage of so much music, not to mention confronting the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade; the death camps that were the economic foundation of European economies and the “enlightenment”.

What about music?

As you can imagine there are a few plates spinning… 

I’m mixing and co-producing albums with Jhelisa Anderson and Black Jesus Experience – one in Atlanta the other in Melbourne, which brings its own peculiar issues, time zones nothwithstanding. I’m preparing more gigs with fellow traveller Johny Brown from the Band of Holy Joy. Johny had his book Corpse Flower published recently, so he’s reading from that and I’m improvising live music with my eclectic palette of theremin, ring modulator, electronics, Okinawan sanshin and Yoruban shekere. We’ve done a couple of gigs already and we’re planning a tour at the beginning of March taking German psychedelic rock band Arcane Allies and performance artist Laura Edwards with us on the road. West Norwood and North Shields won’t know what’s hit them… Meanwhile for a the past few months I’ve been making techno. I worked on so much techno in the 90s it was almost aversion therapy but I developed the skill set. I was commissioned to put together an EP for Specimen Records and after a few failed attempts I hit on a rather austere style that I’m happy with. 5 tracks in, one in development and at least 2 more planned. Report to the dancefloor…

Lastly there is still interest in Metamono, my band which first drew breath 15 years ago. We’ve been asked to dust off the venerable instrumentarium for a festival in the summer and perhaps more. So plenty going on!

How does teaching fit with your artistic practice?

Other than the obvious drain on valuable time it’s a healthy relationship. The students I spend the most time with are post-grad so it’s not a one way street. They stretch me and bring new ideas and techniques to the table which keeps me on my toes. Another aspect of being a professor is to keep my eye out for other artists and educators that I can bring in to the conservatory to give workshops. This builds relationships that feed in to my creative practice. I also regularly take my students on excursions and exchanges with other universities which can also broaden my horizons artistically.

And what about Tai Chi?

Tai Chi is a big part of my life and has been for the best part of 30 years. My training and teaching provide a healthy substrate for the rest of my work to grow from. My grandmaster Wu Kwong Yu once told one of my colleagues that just 20 min a day is enough to maintain physical, mental and emotional health. I do much more than that usually, but when I’m working away from home I find that if I put that 20 min aside to practice my form or some Qigong I’m so much more effective that I gain that 20 min back, and more. Although there are cross overs with my work (if anyone has seen me playing the theremin they may noticed a lot of Tai Chi in the movements) having a space in my life devoted to something outside of the music is an enormous help and can put things that loom large in my work life back in to perspective.

What are you currently listening/watching?

I’m a big fan of Ugandan band Nihiloxica and looking forward to hearing more from them since their last album and UK tour in 2023. I’m still exploring Éliane Radigue’s work and I’ll be going along to Cafe Oto in March to see harpist Rhodri Davis perform her piece Occam I. I’m watching quite a bit of Japanese telly on Netflix initially in an attempt to improve my tentative grasp on the language. Recent hits have been Light of my Lion, Tokyo Swindlers, Jin and Asura, a new series by director Koreeda Hirokazu who does a surprising amount of telly for an internationally renowned cinema director. Japanese telly can be a bit of an acquired taste – there are moments of saccharine sentimentality, offset with nuanced and intelligent acting. Soul searching Shakespearean monologues appear from nowhere, production values can be sumptuous one moment and shockingly artificial the next. Addictive.