“People have been brainwashed, since the birth of pop, to a false idea of what music is,” says Dylan Nyoukis, sounding not angry, but disappointed. “They see me and just hear a racket, or a man speaking in tongues.”
You can understand why. To the untrained ear, Nyoukis’s performances resemble violent spasms, wordless vocal improvisations made up of yowls, snarls, ululation and gibbering. He manipulates tapes, employs performance art. He uses restriction techniques, playing instruments blindfolded or with his hands tied together. It’s challenging, even to anyone who doesn’t own a Robin Thicke ringtone.
I’ve come to meet Nyoukis on the outskirts of Brighton and, by coincidence, on his 42nd birthday. Assorted artists arrive, gathering around a restored jukebox in the front room. “Our house is a meeting point for the socially awkward. People tend to come here, even though it’s… far out,” Nyoukis apologises. I’m not sure if he’s referring to the room’s psychedelic animal paintings or its distance from the town centre.
We move to his daughter’s bedroom to continue talking. The tall, shaven-headed Scot sits on the floor, which he prefers, ruminating behind thick glasses. He spends a while evading my attempts to categorise his output. “There’s elements of music and visual art, which I don’t separate,” he acknowledges. “It’s free vocalisation, or sound poetry if I’ve scored the piece. It’s abstract art… why split hairs?”
The absent element that can make his work so unsettling is any words. And that’s the point: an attempt to stir up mysterious parts of the human experience, beyond language. “It’s whatever way you can put across some feeling,” he says. So-called noise music last had a resurgence in the early 2000s, among artists such as Wolf Eyes, Solmania and Zbigniew Karkowski. But Nyoukis distances himself from its loud, aggressive aspects. “Some people get off on audiences finding stuff unbearable, love it when they run out of the room. That seems very teenage to me.”
As a teen himself, Nyoukis was inspired by Dada and Fluxus, the Los Angeles Free Music Society, and the magic mushrooms that grew on his school field, with which he would disappear into nearby woods. All provided escape, the means to make glorious Technicolor from monochrome reality. This was Blackburn, West Lothian, also home to Susan Boyle. First a mining village, it became a truck-manufacturing base for British Leyland “which went tits up under Thatcher. There’s a lot of food banks now, people with the boot at their throat.” For Nyoukis and his wife Karen, both self-employed artists, surviving without a factory job and saving their mental space for creativity is a source of pride: “We scrape by on benefits. It’s ‘Fuck you! We’re poor but we won’t follow your rules.’” Is his work political? “The act of living the way I do is a political act,” he says. “Bringing up a kid, instilling anti-establishment ideas in her, I see her as a political act.” Daughter Elkka wanders in and out, a supremely cool 10-year-old in Beetlejuice-style trousers, with a Texas Chainsaw Massacre lunchbox. A recent show saw her wearing a pig mask, taping her father to a chair while he attempted to play the violin. Nyoukis also performs with Karen as Blood Stereo. “More than the pieces, my life is my art,” he says.
Surprisingly, Nyoukis declares himself no fan of watching or performing live music: “I’m not charismatic, have no interest in being Jim Morrison. I just want to create and be left alone.” He does, however, have an interest in releasing music. In 1993 he set up his own label, Chocolate Monk, putting out other avant-garde artists including Harry Pussy, Dogliveroil and the Folk Implosion. He’s fully aware that “there’s no real audience for this. Some people think if it takes a few weeks to shift 25 CDRs, you should give up. But that’s not why you’re doing it.”
The talk of CDRs has energised him. He gets up to show me some of the machines he has on hand to record with: four-tracks, reel-to-reels, tape players for the blind, which let you change speed and pitch. He shows me a German dictation machine that presses tape into LP-like grooves. It has ASSMANN printed at its centre. “I bought it in Bremen. It had all these notes by a paediatrician, talking about kids who’d broken their legs. It sounds cruddy,” he observes, pleased.
For all his disinterest in the mainstream, it seeks him out. His early hero Thurston Moore is a frequent collaborator, though Nyoukis distrusts guitarists and drummers “because they struggle to listen”. To mark the centenary of John Cage’s birth, the 2012 Proms asked him to perform Cage’s Branches: hooking up a contact mic to a cactus, and playing the spines. Was it amazing to play the Royal Albert Hall? “I thought there’d be vegan snacks and a bunch of booze backstage. But the orchestra just buy their own sandwiches from M&S. So I was bummed about that.”
Uncompromising and experimental, he’s happy in his own head. So, does he see himself as an outsider? “Without a doubt.” Does he have any ambitions at all? “I don’t think so. I’m not interested in money or reaching a bigger audience… just releasing beautiful things into the ether. I’ll do this until I drop dead.”
Dylan Nyoukis plays Cafe Oto, E8, on 21 March
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