An Interview with Roger Clark Miller

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Keep an eye out for Part 2, including a short film from Miller’s installation at BMAC.

Roger Clark Miller is a co-founder of the art-punk band Mission of Burma and a member of Alloy Orchestra, a three-person ensemble that Roger Ebert called “the best in the world at accompanying silent films.” Roger Clark Miller: Transmuting the Prosaic is an installation featuring video, sound, and modified vinyl records mounted on the walls of BMAC’s Mary Sommer Room. While Miller’s drawings have been featured in several venues, Transmuting the Prosaic marks his first-ever solo museum installation of what he calls “the kind of conceptual art that really gets me going.”

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BMAC: How did the concept for Transmuting the Prosaic develop?

Miller: One of the pieces I’m showing is “Pop Record Evolving.” That’s the record that is nothing but record noise, and the more you play it, the noise wears away and new record noise appears, so it constantly evolves. But I never thought of it as being more than just a Dada idea I had.

Then later on, with a screwdriver, I carved four bars of a Bach fugue into a record. That was another Dada kind of thing. John Cage claimed that Bach was the beginning of the end of music. I don’t completely agree with this, but I understand where he’s coming from, and I’m amused by the concept. Music became very organized and formal—Bach went through all the chord progressions, everything got ordered. By inscribing on the back of a record with a screwdriver the treble and bass clef of four bars of a Bach fugue—when you play it on a record player, that pure perfection that is visible to your eye sounds like violent chaos.

I kept working with this idea of playing with records. About three years ago, one of the lyrics from one of my Mission of Burma songs was part of a big mural by Joe Wardwell at MASS MoCA. I’ve played at MASS MoCA with both Mission of Burma and Alloy Orchestra. At the time, Mission of Burma had just folded. I asked myself, “What am I doing now?”

I always find that when I get really bummed out, really good things happen. That caused me to really think about where I’m at. How am I going to survive as an artist? What does it mean to be an artist? So then I started thinking about records. I started thinking, I’ve got this “Pop Record Evolving.” I should bring the records back. That’s when I started thinking about how I could make more modified vinyls. There are five of them in this show. I had also already been completing my film “Davis Square Symphony.”

Then I went camping in northern Vermont. All the time, while we were relaxing, I was mulling over the fact that I could put this together as an installation. I’ve been living in Guilford, Vermont, for four years, almost five now, and with Mission of Burma and Alloy Orchestra I’ve toured all over the U.S. and the world. Without Burma, I thought, what’s really around here? Well, there’s the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, right there.

So then I went to Danny [Lichtenfeld, BMAC Director] and said, “Here’s what I’ve got. What do you think?” And he went for it—so that caused me to actually have to do all this stuff! It’s one thing to think about this stuff, and another one to do it!

So I did a Kickstarter a little over a year ago. Some of these modified vinyls are etched, they’re kind of inked, but in a really specific process. It’s not like someone paints with an acrylic on it. It was done at a record plant. And they cost quite a bit of money. And I got turntables and headphones. So the Kickstarter supplied me with the finances to create this work.

BMAC: You mentioned John Cage. Could you talk a bit more about him and some of your other influences?

Miller: It was right after Mission of Burma folded for the first time in 1983 that I started reading John Cage’s books and the Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. That’s when I came up with the idea of “Pop Record Evolving,” which is an extremely Dada art object. It made me feel comfortable to read about these guys. But I have many, many other influences, too. If you want to talk about my rock influences, I love Jimi Hendrix, and Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd—he used a lot of dream-like imagery in his words. I like a lot of post-punk, the more avant garde side of it. But I also really like Bela Bartok. I’m also a pianist. I enjoy playing Bach on the piano, despite the fact that I’ve reduced it to record noise.

In terms of composers that I consider influential, Oliver Messiaen is a tremendous composer. He based a lot of his motifs on bird calls that he collected.

Max Ernst, the surrealist, had a drawing technique called frottage, which is a rubbing on surfaces. I used to do these constantly when I was on tour. You just take a blank piece of paper and a graphite, and you just start rubbing on trees, rocks. And then you see where the structure really lies, and you say, well, I could use a right angle here, and you see a table, and get the right angle by doing a rubbing on the table. I would hardly draw at all by hand—I would use the environment entirely. And that’s very much like Messiaen’s use of bird calls.

Cage would put star charts on top of treble and bass clefs, and wherever the stars fell, that would be a note. That’s a little bit more abstract than I like, but that steered me toward what I like to do. That was a revelation. Eventually I figured out how that fit with me, mixing it with the surrealism and Messiaen’s use of bird calls and Ernst’s frottage.

BMAC: Could you talk some more about some of the other pieces in the show?

Miller: When I decided to revisit the modified vinyl series for this installation, the first piece I worked on was “Signals, Calls, and Marches Lyric Sheet.”

In 1981, Mission of Burma had a record, our first 12-inch record, and at the time, everybody had lyric sheets. I suggested that we put all the lyrics in alphabetical order. So it fell to me to go through every song and get all the words and put them in alphabetical order. So that was the lyric sheet that came with the record, with all the lyrics in alphabetical order. So it’s not very far off from “Pop Record Evolving,” really. It’s very Dada and playful and fun, but it’s also kind of disturbing and makes you look at everything in a different way.

For this new modified vinyl piece, I got Third Man Records in Tennessee to etch all the lyrics that were on the lyric sheet onto a record in white ink. So now all the lyrics on the record are actually etched onto the record.

In front of each of these records in the installation is a listening station. For the listening station for “Signals, Calls, and Marches,” there’s a 45, a seven-inch, and you put the needle down, and you can read the alphabetical lyric sheet while you hear all the words on the record in that same alphabetical order.

So here’s how I did that. On the last Alloy Orchestra tour, in 2018, I brought a digital copy of “Signals, Calls, and Marches” and went through and collected audio of all the words on the lyric sheet. The first word on the lyric sheet is “a,” so I collected all the places where we said “a,” and I found the one that was the clearest. Then I recorded the word “about.” The other guys in the band were in hysterics, because even with headphones, they could hear these little bursts of a word, and then silence, and then another word. On that tour, I recorded all of the words, from “a” to “your.”

In a way it’s funny, but there’s also something to it outside of that. It amuses me to no end. It was tedious and took a lot of work, but it was incredibly fun.

Read Part 2 of this interview here.

Items related to this exhibit are available in BMAC’s online gift shop.