Electric Connection: A Conversation with gabby fluke-mogul on ‘GUT’

Since the first electric violins hit the market in 1930, the concept of electronically manipulating the violin has maintained an aura of mystery. While musicians including Joe Venuti and Stuff Smith readily adopted amplification to their instruments over the decades, there has remained a resistance among many to change one of the most virtuosic touchstones of acoustic excellence. Arguably, such reluctance comes, in part, due to the rigorous path a practitioner must undertake to perfect their tone and the relationship they form with their instrument throughout the process. The hesitancy has seemingly applied to even some of the most ardent experimentalists. gabby fluke-mogul, who regularly explores the spaces between free jazz, improvisation, and noise, has long avoided electrifying strings. Instead, fluke-mogul chose to produce similar effects through extended acoustic techniques. But the artist’s perspective seems to be changing of late. This is perhaps best seen in the upcoming  May 6, 2024 performance of ‘GUT’ at Roulette Intermedium. 

At its core, ‘GUT’ is a solo violin work. In the traditional sense, there is the lone instrument presented. But fluke-mogul’s marrying of electronic manipulations and extended techniques often renders the strings to appear as if their sound came from a larger ensemble. In part, this volumizing of performers is produced by ‘GUT’’s use of fourteen – each representing a day of the two-week span during which the piece was composed – speakers. The effect is further amplified through the distinctive approach to live processing provided by Danishta Rivero. But merely focusing on any perceived divide between electronics and acoustics gives ‘GUT’ short shrift. Instead, as with fluke-mogul’s output more generally, one must appreciate the spiritual, emotional, and philosophical depths of the work. These elements emerge throughout our conversation with the violinist, whether reflecting upon the relationship children have to the sound world or upon the horrors in Gaza. Since the first electric violins hit the market in 1930, the concept of electronically manipulating the violin has maintained an aura of mystery. While musicians like Joe Venuti and Stuff Smith readily adopted amplification to their instruments over the decades, there has remained a resistance among many to change one of the most virtuosic touchstones of acoustic excellence. Arguably, such reluctance comes, in part, due to the rigorous path a practitioner must undertake to perfect their tone and the relationship they form with their instrument throughout the process. The hesitancy has seemingly hit even some of the most ardent experimentalists. gabby fluke-mogul, who regularly explores the spaces between free jazz, improvisation, and noise, has long avoided electrifying strings. Instead, fluke-mogul chose to produce similar effects through extended acoustic techniques. But the artist’s perspective seems to be changing of late. This is perhaps best seen in the upcoming  May 6, 2024 performance of ‘GUT’ at Roulette Intermedium. 

At its core, ‘GUT’ is a solo violin work. In the traditional sense, there is only one instrument presented. But fluke-mogul’s marrying of electronic manipulations and extended techniques often renders it a work that sounds like it came from a larger ensemble. In part, this volumizing of performers is produced through ‘GUT’’s use of fourteen – each representing a day of the two-week span during which the piece was composed – speakers. The effect is further amplified through the distinctive approach to live processing provided by Danishta Rivero. 

But merely focusing on any perceived divide between electronics and acoustics gives ‘GUT’ short shrift. Instead, like fluke-mogul’s output more generally, one must appreciate the spiritual, emotional, and philosophical depths of the work. These elements emerge throughout our conversation with the violinist, whether reflecting upon the relationship children have to the sound world or upon the horrors in Gaza. 

PostGenre: You suggested in another interview that children are the best improvisers because they are closest to the spiritual world. Would you mind elaborating further?

gabby fluke-mogul: Children have and continue to teach me the most. The idea that children need to be taught how to listen as opposed to the idea that children are listening from when they’re inside the womb, when they come earthside, and that they continue to come into knowledge of their bodies, spirits, and power are pretty oppositional in my opinion. I think wombs can be spiritual places, and I think children are closest to perhaps the deepest tones, vibrations, and frequencies due to their proximity to wombs, to bardos, to spirit worlds, and to nature. That said, everyone gets socialized or enculturated differently depending on all the sociopolitical intersectional lines of identity. 

I often think about what if we honored that babies in the womb have their own wisdom, their own understanding of how they should be born, what sounds and music they like, and what sounds and music they want to make in the future. My secret, and sometimes not so secret, double musician life includes working with infants and toddlers for over fifteen years in schools, community centers, daycares, and homes. More recently, I became a birth doula after many years of postpartum work. I think birth is the deepest improvisation, and I think deep listening has a lot to do with listening like a baby, globally and focally, past present, and future, in and outside of wombs. 

That said, the history of Western Classical ideologies that pressure, police, and attempt to silence expansive ways of listening and sounding, are vast and deep. They distance or dismiss the body in relationship to the music, and they distance or dismiss creativity. I think it is the role of the artist to be in resistance and to intersect, intercept, and amplify marginalized voices in this world. Whether it’s sharing Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening text scores, Roscoe Mitchell’s long tone tuning process, or Butch Morris’ conduction signs with little ones, there is a specific sense of expansive curiosity, keen questioning, and generative openness. I think when it comes to who I like to collaborate with, those qualities of aliveness, that I often associate with little ones, are what I look for and resonate with. 

PG: You mentioned earlier about the pressures of society to conform to set ideas of how something should sound and how those pressures decrease creativity. Is there something particular about those who make creative/experimental/free music that allows them to feel less pressure from these forces?

gfm: I think the pressures are always present, but that’s where community comes into play. I don’t think we’re ever divorced from those pressures, but we hopefully have the resonance and solidarity to keep moving forward with one another. I came into things through DIY basements and grassroots collectives of people organizing shows. It isn’t without the efforts of community-orientated musicians and venues, despite the pressure, that spaces are being created like Luke Stewart and Lester St. Louis’s ‘Assembly’ series at Sisters in Brooklyn that has DJ sets, noise, free jazz, new music stuff, improvisational folk music, all together. 

[These are] people investing their time, energy, and spirit into moving forward while also respecting elders and the deep history of the music and continuum of voices. I think it’s all always in the music, whether your experimentalism has the through line of growing up playing classical music, punk rock, or straight-ahead jazz. Many of the folks who are dear to me and who I work with, myself included, came from a classical background and, at some point, diverged from it or felt extreme resistance towards Western music ideology and went in an entirely different direction. I don’t want to generalize anyone’s experience, as I can only speak for my own of course, but I think that perhaps at the heart of it is an expansiveness of listening and the unwavering desire, urge, need, and commitment for something different.

PG: So what brought you from Western classical to more experimental music?

gfm: I started learning to play the violin in a group class when I was seven with songs like “Twinkle Twinkle” out of the Suzuki books. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I played in orchestras.  But as I got older, around the time I was twelve or so, I started to want more or something very different for myself in terms of what I was playing. I loved the vibration of playing in a big band or orchestra with other people. I loved some classical music, but I gravitated towards playing music I felt in my gut. Music that moved me, music that helped me understand my rage or the hues of my moods. I found music that wasn’t traditionally part of the violin repertoire that the other kids were playing.

I also listened to a lot of radio while growing up in South Florida. I would scan the stations on my radio and try to improvise with every scan. I would try to figure out, both harmonically and rhythmically, how to interact with the music I was hearing. That led to getting together with friends after school and improvising together, though I don’t think I called it improvising, at the time.

I am infinitely grateful for the teachers and mentors whom I came across throughout my childhood and adolescence. They introduced me to different kinds of music and the diasporic histories of music. They let me practice in the band room after hours into the night. They wrote me hall passes so I could finish listening to records when I was supposed to be elsewhere. When I went to college, I dove deep into listening to Ornette [Coleman], the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Leroy Jenkins and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Pauline Oliveros, bluegrass, and old-time, different folk traditions. 

PG: As far as Ornette, at one point Miles [Davis] stated he had a problem with how Ornette was playing trumpet when he was primarily a saxophonist. Have you had any similar issues with his use of the violin?

gfm: No. I love Ornette’s violin playing. I could listen to Ornette’s violin all day. I think it’s brilliant. I love his phrasing. I love his gestures, his violin playing, and, of course, the harmolodics of it all. 

PG: Your openness to new sounds has resulted in some very interesting projects. One of those, ‘GUT’, you will be presenting at Roulette on May 6th. What can you share about this project?

gfm: I am working in an entirely new way and also continuing a type of compositional inquiry I’ve been working with for a few years now. When I was at Mills College in Oakland, I started developing a compositional practice that involved the idea of long-form, process duration for scores. Scores that start, say, twenty-three days before the performance. The idea is if I compose a certain ritual directive or process for a performer(s) to have and experience over an extended period, how does that impact the way people make contact with themselves, each other and the music? That’s still something I’m working with. I am interested in composing with very specific parameters that impact listening and someone’s process.  What sets GUT apart is that it is the first time I’m using this method while composing for myself, as a solo performer, which is a bit new for me. I play solo often and have recorded solo. But I’ve never worked in this capacity for composing for myself solo for a live performance. 

PG: Do you find it difficult to compose solely for yourself compared to writing for other people?

gfm: Yeah. It’s interesting. I composed solo for myself for Love Songs (Relative Pitch, 2022), and I think there’s a specific sense of, perhaps, loneliness and a super loud voice of my inner critic. The volume is dialed up high. Those things are also present in many other spaces of my life or types of collaborations to a certain degree. But composing for myself solo seemingly allows them to come in pretty strongly, which is interesting, and part of it all for me. A lot of learning.

PG: Although you are playing solo, there will also be an electronic element to the work. 

gfm: There will be fourteen speakers and live multichannel processing done by a dear friend and collaborator from the Bay Area, Danishta Rivero. I used to work with Danishta when I lived in California but never in a capacity like this. We know each other mostly as improvisers coming together most often in ad hoc settings. Over the past year, she has been working on multi-channel work in Max MSP for Audium in San Francisco. At Roulette, she will be processing my sound live.

I’m also using electronics with the violin, which is a new phase in my life. Up until January of this year, I had very strongly adopted the perspective that all the pedals are in the violin and trying to find ways to make the sounds I sought solely through the acoustic or amplified violin itself. For example,  how many distortions do I have in my bow? What is my relationship to reverb as an acoustic instrument? Or through an amp? Can tremolo be delay?  Issues with psychoacoustics and acoustic phenomena and technique and language development on my instrument. Some call this use of ‘’extended technique.”

PG: What made you change your perspective on electronics?

gfm: It was a very specific call from Fred Frith. I was about to work on a film score in Europe with him, and about a week before we left, Fred called me and told me that he needed me to bring electronics. I had never worked in that capacity before, and Fred knew that. But he said it was something he needed me to do for the sake of the score. It was an interesting call in many respects! Fred is a very close collaborator of mine, and he knows of my work and the intimacy I have with my instrument and my listening probably the most out of anyone! It really couldn’t have been a better ask.

PG: How so?

gfm: Well, now, I feel I am pretty deep into using pedals and experimenting with how electronics and electromagnetic fields affect my body and my instrument in a way I could’ve never imagined. I’ve also leaned into a more spiritual notion of electricity. I am always in communication with electricity, and electricity shapes a lot of the music that I, and the musicians I collaborate with love. Electricity feels like another thread and universe of expansive listening to me now. 

PG: And the score for GUT was written over fourteen days?

gfm: The score for GUT involves a process that takes place over the course of fourteen days, ending with the performance on May 6th. I started composing the piece in early January after an unexpected E.R. visit. 

PG: Why the title GUT?

gfm: I was curious if I could create a container for what it is I feel in my gut – whether through dreaming, memory, or my present state of rage or disgust of occupation and genocide – when I wake over a specific period and how my playing is impacted by this process using specific parameters and transmutations over fourteen days through fourteen speakers in collaboration with Danishta, a doula of electricity. 

I like listening for the gut in people’s tone when they play. It’s all very instantaneous and very visceral for me in the same way that I feel when I am working with little ones or in my work as a birth doula. I have always been drawn to the electric moments of intuition, somatic, erotic, and embodied praxis. I don’t think of it as a precious thing really, but more of a thing of spirit, blood, sweat, and dirt. Moments of connection, touch, and electricity – through our bodies, through the ether, through the instrument, and through breath.

PG: Your mention of breath recalls Pauline Oliveros’ Zena Circle, which focuses on teaching musicians about response time and the idea of being one breath together. You had also worked with her. How do you feel her ideas on deep listening have most influenced your work?

gfm: Man, I don’t know.  I found Pauline’s work when I was eighteen or so. She was such a revelation and such a breath. Who she was, what she stood for, how she worked, and how she lived her life are so inspiring. As an out, queer musician, composer, and innovator who grew up in the way she did and moved through the world in the way she did was incredible to me. I had never seen that before, and I didn’t know that was possible. Her sonic meditations gave me the breath to say, “OK, I can keep doing this thing called life. I can be a musician, and I can start to envision a future.” I think, in many ways, Pauline kept me alive and allowed me to keep reaching for that expansiveness of listening. I am endlessly grateful. 

You can experience ‘GUT’ at Roulette Intermedium on Monday, May 6, 2024 at 8:00 PM. More information on the event, including how to purchase tickets, can be found on Roulette’s website. The evening can also be livestreamed, for free, on Youtube and will be archived for future viewing. You can read more on fluke-mogul on the violinist’s website.