David: Good question - that's a rather nice link I think, the person who gave me the idea for the title 'Fractal Bridge' was, in fact, a music therapist! I was working with a music therapist and I often do find myself working with music therapists because I do a lot of training and he was someone who wanted to learn how to do Soundbeam very early on and I was explaining the fact that I left out of my earlier explanation of what a Soundbeam was - a Soundbeam works by echo location and it sends out blips - on-off on-off, listen-response, much like a bat or a dolphin - now, should a bat be flying near to its twin, they might get confused about whose blip they were getting a return from - and the same with twin dolphins who have an identical sense and receipt - and the same with Soundbeams - if a soundbeam is anywhere near another soundbeam it will hear it and I used to experiment a lot with Soundbeams in the early days by letting my Soundbeams interact with each other in the form of an invisible bridge. Now a Soundbeam operates in a cone of 14 degrees - now a cone is much favoured by brass instruments, particularly the sax, because it has amazing acoustic properties, and the fact that no two people who blow down a cone will get exactly the same sound because the cone makes the sound in the tube do strange things - that's why I love saxophones - apart from the volume and power, you've also got that amazing individual expression and sound - everybody has their own sound ...

David: Well, I like to think so - but the amazing thing with Soundbeams is that you could put the Soundbeams in identical positions in relation to each other and they don't play the same thing - what we think is a pattern isn't actually a pattern.- if you use a computer and you analyse the patterns you realize that the patterns are, in fact, Fractal, and they are patterns within patterns within patterns...

David: Exactly - now that was our friend Paul Ridout investigating a mathematical or artistic equivalent concept of Fractal - and he came across 'Hibbert's Curve' - and it's an amazingly nice fractal because it looks like a tuning fork, - it's just like tuning forks within tuning forks within tuning forks and it goes on forever - and he recreated them on his computer, which was great. I subsequently went home and tried to recreate it myself -and I did and managed to make it reproduce and things which was very exciting - it's a really lovely shape. So, that's a Fractal- it's patterns within patterns. It does occur in nature, and it does occur within mathematics.

Tim: What happens when you play a saxophone inside a Fractal Bridge?

David: Well, once a Fractal Bridge is playing, it's playing away and a lot of that album is about the beams playing away and me wandering into them and playing inside them, bouncing one beam into another, with my saxophone or my arm, or I'm adopting strange postures which will stop one beam and allow the other beam to played by the end of the saxophone, - it's just infinite nonsense...

Tim: I wouldn't call it nonsense...

David: Well, it was, there were moments of it which were chaos ...

Tim: It's very beautiful ...

David: Oh I'm glad you like it, I really am glad you like it - it was a real joy working with Peter Hammill on it ...

Tim: Yeah, Peter produced it - what did he contribute to it?

David: Oh, an infinite amount - that's what made it a great pleasure - because he didn't really understand Soundbeam at all when we arrived. Rather than asking me how it worked and what it did, he just said, 'David's been doing this now for five years, - I know David, he wouldn't have been doing it for five years if there wasn't something there' - and, likewise, if Peter had been doing something for five years, I would want to know what it was, and respect his judgement... So he said, 'Just show me what you can do, and sat at the other end of the room and recorded everything beautifully - and made very constructive comments about, whether it was worth another take, and, basically, we filled up every piece of tape, every piece of hard disk, - I played for two days and left, you know, aeons amount of stuff and said, 'See you again in a couple of weeks'... Now, knowing Peter, he'd recorded everything meticulously, he'd recorded everything onto hard disk, he'd recorded my performances on several microphones, he'd recorded the Soundbeams, live, i.e. what was coming off my modules, what I'd thought they were playing, and I played on headphones, and he listened on headphones, so it was just me, screaming away on the sax in an empty room, - I mean, 'Is he mad? Is he mad? said the neighbours and the passers-by in the street! And then he also recorded the digital performance, and then, when I came back next week, while I was setting it up to do the next thing, - and I consciously did five different things during that session; now I was saying to Peter, ' Well, there's this approach, and there's this approach, ' and each set of two days was based on a different concept, or approach, so that it would make the album a little bit academic, but also very interesting and challenging for both of us - you know, not just 'What's your best songs, mate?' but a theoretical approach to making an album in a Soundbeam. Anyway, this is where the process started getting really interesting because each time Peter had a chance to really experiment - but he did make some really colossal astonishing decisions - And the most moving one was early on, where I played my gamelan which is an instrument from Bali, and they're metal instruments and everyone has a gamelan - and they're tuned specially; I didn't know anything about them at this stage - but since then I've worked with a gamelan player and know a lot more about them. So I was working in blissful ignorance of what a gamelan was, other than this sort of notion that quite a lot of European composers were quite interested in them and particularly Britten and Ravel - I'd read about that - but I didn't discuss any of this with Peter, I just played the gamelan, and recorded a vast amount of it and he came up with this great title of 'Three Kinds of Rice' for the flutey bits and 'Three Kinds of Meat' for the saxophone bits.

So off I went to my gigs and when I came back, he'd done this astonishing thing of completely re-orchestrating all the stuff I'd played on saxophone - not for the gamelan sounds that I'd written - he quietly put all that to one side, and re-orchestrated the Midi assigning each note to a different orchestral instrument - a phenomenally painstaking task - a labour of love - But he's capable of doing that, is Peter, and the result was absolutely astonishing - it completely and utterly blew me away as being the most astonishing thing. Peter didn't know about Britten's work on the same sort of vein - so it was an astonishing coincidence - so we recreated a sort of Britten-esque saxophones and orchestral gamelan. Absolutely delightful to hear it and quite inspiring. And that was why it was such a good album to make. And there were other sessions where I was trying to do too much, and Peter said, 'I'll wha-wha into the beams what you're playing, because, you know, I was really difficult for me to wa-wa and do three other things at the same time, so he interacted with the beam and controlled me when and, in effect, processing when I was playing a really weird piece of music called 'Wildman' - so I was actually reacting to what he was doing to me - So it was very weird, really weird, but it was good fun - and he's an inspiring guy to work with because his imagination is just so vivid.