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Who can fail to be impressed by Esperanto? A language devised by an oculist untrained in linguistics, living in a backwater part of Poland-now-Belarus, made up out of whatever spare parts he could find lying around, and it's got hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of speakers to this day, original literature, translations of most of the great works of the ethnic languages, even children being raised with it as their first language. Zamenhof actually made his language workable and useful, which, for example, Tolkien never did.

I'm not an active member of the movement at the moment because I have other things to do, but I must say that international Esperantist gatherings are actually quite incredible. You've got a Serbian, an Argentine, an Australian and a couple of Chinese over in a corner, and they're talking the same language which doesn't belong to any of them. They're certainly talking with more fluency and mutual confidence than if they all started using what is actually the defacto international language, Bad English (aka Engrish).

Plus, let's be honest, it makes commercial sense - Esperantists will buy anything in Esperanto. Those two tracks on Undinal Songs have gotten orders from France and Slovakia, and those are only the ones that the record company tells me about. I actually got a front-page positive review in one of the major Esperanto newspapers, no lie. A medium term project is an EP made up of E-o translations of Small Group Psychosis songs.

- VL

There's one dude who tried raising his kid with Klingon as his first language. He got stuck because the Star Trek guys had forgotten to put useful words like "table" into the language. Plus, it's actually virtually impossible for humans to pronounce - all the sounds are possible but the combinations just hurt. So they don't actually get it right on Star Trek most of the time.

The adoption of a stage name that sounds like a band was due to the fact that it gets far more respect from venues et al. "Singer-songwriters" are expected to be rather fey young women (occasionally men), handling an acoustic guitar, and staring soulfully into the audience as they whinge about their love lives. And then I get up there with my array of electronics and screaming my head off as I whinge about my love life, and people don't know how to handle it. The other factor is that I have other things to do with my life under my real name and I don't particularly like the streams merging. This should give you sufficient background on the name.

Lawrence Miles has himself said that he thinks that the ideal format for Faction Paradox narratives would be opera, but he doesn't think he could write appropriate words. But I should say no more until certain ideas I have have firmed up.

I know what you mean. Robert Fripp of King Crimson has said: "Playing live is a hot date; recording is a love letter". I do think that live performance is really what music is all about, in the sense of communication on all frequencies at once - there are vocal notes I can hit in front of a generous audience that I can't anywhere else. It's also terrifying and expensive, and if I get it wrong it's very embarrassing and can't be wiped from the timestream. Come to think of it, the same thing can be said about hot dates.

I'm glad you like the performance vid - the comedy gigs were a lot of fun, but I suppose I got annoyed after a while at the idea that people were digging the keyboard gymnastics rather than my words. And, yes, certainly, everything I do is at least theoretically part of an interconnected "Great Work" of causing something real to change in our memetic environment. Whether it has a hope of hell of success is a different matter, but it keeps me off the streets. Have you read The Revolution of Weightless Music? It gives some clues as to how it might fit together.

To get why rock music is trapped in cultural stasis, you must realise that this is not the 1970s, where amateurish weirdos could put any crap on vinyl and non-plussed cigar-chomping corporates would put it out just on the offchance that someone might be crazy enough to buy it. Rock music is now an acceptable (and therefore very strait-laced) career path that school guidance counsellors will put you on to - and that's precisely why the young people keep playing it. There's a whole infrastructure set up to nurture "talent" who can sell zillions of records precisely because they sound just like everyone else, and keep them happy and keep any "rebellion" confined to stagecraft. It sells to kids, it sells to their parents and even grandparents who can remember when rock music was rebellion.

Modern rock music, much like fascism, is the form of rebellion with the content of conservatism. Kids these days are still listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin because they were pretty much the acme of development of rock 'n' roll - 35 years ago. Would kids in the 50's have been caught dead listening to music from 1920? To ask the question is to get an answer. The form is zombified because the social movement which developed it was effortlessly bought out during the last economic slump. The same has been true of hip-hop since about 1992 as well. I think perhaps the "new rock 'n' roll" is internet trolling.

You're right to put out that the forces of production of music are now totally democratic. Sadly, the forces of publicity are anything but. Precisely because any prole can put out whole albums with 500 euros worth of equipment in their bedroom, there is so much out there that the "gatekeepers" in the mass media (and increasingly the blogs) are more powerful than ever. Which is, sadly, why it is not uncommon at all for four paying customers to come to a Vostok Lake gig - and therefore why we don't play live more often, even though it's where our special magic really comes alive. (We actually had quite a few more than that actually through the doors, i.e. mates of the support acts who demanded to come in for free.)

Your points about visual reinforcement are spot on the money. The backing singers were provided specially for a previous gig by the promoter - it actually worked well, almost too well, in that the songs with the backing singers achieved rapturous support while stuff where it was just me had people walking out with their hands over their ears (I wish I was exaggerating). Getting projected visuals is something I'm very interested in - if only I could find a graphic artist compatible with my vision prepared to work for free. As to guitarlike, in my darkest moments I consider getting a Keytar, although I generally consider them highly undignified and a product of the musical equivalent of penis envy. But you do identify what's the course of action with the best chance of success - finding venues which aren't "rock bars". What those might be is a question open to further research.

Everyone keeps telling me I should listen to Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV. I saw a documentary about the Sheffield bands and I think I liked what I heard about Vice Versa on that. I also thought the original Human League were surprisingly interesting.

Hey, man, don't knock the Keytar. Or wearing mullets and singing in a phony Yank accent. (Link is Geoff Downes rocking out on Keytar with Asia, 1983. It is basically hideous yet you cannot look away. The complete stupidity starts at 4:39 if your tolerance for 80's arena rock is small.) That hot chick from Cobra Starship plays one so I thought maybe they were coming back in among the cool kids.

I am very very impressed that you have picked my essential marketing problem - that of categorization. Many people have exactly that "I have never heard anything like this" reaction, but sadly not all of them mean it as a compliment. One admirer described me as "melodramatic electroclash", which sounds cool, but it's meaningless if you don't remember what "electroclash" was (early Ladytron, Fischerspooner, Goldfrapp circa Black Cherry etc). And even given that definition I'm not sure it's appropriate to what I'm doing - your mileage may vary, of course. I try slightly more fanciful descriptions, such as those contained on my Myspace, but I'm still not sure whether I get the message across. I mean - if you were trying to pimp Vostok Lake to your acquaintances, what would you say?

If you are referring to the tracks from the Anastasia EP with the comment about reverb overload, then guilty as charged - it was just after I'd upgraded to software which was capable of that kind of thing and I went over the top. Also something to do with being kind of ashamed of my vocals and wanting to blur them. I don't think that it's that bad on the "Magical Internet" tracks, and I think I've done it better on Small Group Psychosis, although some preliminary listener reports are still saying "needs less bottom-of-a-canyon vibe", but I ain't going to re-record at this late stage. Notwithstanding that, anyone slightly less cloth-eared than me who wants to do a remix is more than welcome to. All the SGP tracks are in Ardour format which I could slap on a disk!

The words are, indeed, extremely "intimate and personal", and they are generally the "point" of the whole act -as you might have noticed, I sing in a very clear and precise manner so they can be understood. (Which is one reason I did like the comedy gigs - people were listening to the words. They don't do that at music gigs.) On my first couple of albums I feel they they tended towards sad adolescent whining, but on the recent work I hope that I've come closer to making them more impersonal yet still getting the point across. I only ever did the comedy gigs because a workmate (a former pro comedian) suggested that I try it - the reason "Magical Internet" is coming out under the "Auxiliary Choir" moniker precisely because the kind of witty, cabaret-type stuff is not really what I'm about.

Speaking of which, I hope you like the album version of "Girl Without a Past" - your positive comments no doubt relate to the live version, on which I sing badly out of tune in places because my brain is too busying trying to remember the tricky keyboard lines. The album version will be better (I've cut some of the more elliptical lyrics too).

The sad thing about my accent is that, to some degree, I think I actually sing in a phony British accent. One British listener actually expressed surprised at my "strawberries-and-cream Oxbridge vowels", which seems weird to me until you realise that I did spend a lot of my life in an English Literature faculty where that's pretty much a universal tongue. The strongest "Kiwi-isms" in my recorded vocals would be the swallowed short "i" (New Zealanders are popularly reputed to eat "fush and chups") and the disappearance of "l" at the end of words into a kind of "w" sound, which I think we share with the Scots.

I actually recently invested in a big grunty synth of 1996 vintage (great Hammond organ sounds), so I suppose I'm coming close to catching myself up in time. But yes, certainly, the downside of the DIY ethic and the rejection of "the music biz" is that I can only create a vague approximation of the sounds and arrangements in my head with the resources and skills I have. I so wish I lived in the good old Prog Rock era when major record companies would pay for overambitious young people to hire orchestras and choirs and crap - pity the knights-in-armour-on-ice wankers ruined it for the rest of us! If the opera gets off the ground, I will try to get some kind of state arts funding so I can hire a bunch of music school undergrads to do the vocals (I am at the moment planning to make the instrumentation entirely electronic just so I can keep as much of it as possible in my own hands).

As for the visuals, I am not 100% sure. I suppose my prog-rock roots are showing again that I do think that the kind of thing that Pink Floyd were doing 1973-77 was very good - getting the point of the music across, and avoiding the "look at me" star syndrome. I suppose what I really want to do is musical theatre - the point is not me, the point is telling a story or getting over a vibe.

Heh. "Prog cabaret"? It does kind of work - I would certainly go to a performance advertised as such, but we've established that I'm in a minority. (I've done drag, by the way. I actually won a prize for doing a semi-spontaneous routine to Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man".) Funny you should mention ironic covers - I have a tradition of doing covers of heavy metal songs just for the eye-popping factor (and for the deconstruction of the phallic mythology of RAWK MOOZIK, parenthetically). AC/DC, Motörhead, Dead Kennedys... I even had a go at Led Zep's "Black Dog" once and I'm told it was a success!

The foremost "neo-cabaret" artistes on the scene at the moment are of course the Dresden Dolls, and I find them musically and stylistically very interesting - "A Motorway Runs Through There Now" on Magical Internet is intended as a direct homage. However, Amanda Palmer's lyrics drive me up the wall. Mad Larry has accused Neil Gaiman of being cheap and manipulative and serving up just the kind of self-obsessed crap that teenage goths want to listen to - I think he's being unfair, but I actually have quite similar criticisms of Ms Palmer's lyrics. I do hear she's currently doing a project with Gaiman, so there you go. But you may be 100% correct that I should be going for "intimate venues" rather than traditional music pubs. The problem is that intimate venues don't tend to have a good PA and in-house sound engineer, and the point doesn't come across out of a buzzy amp.

You are absolutely right to note the prog influence on the structure in places. The intro to "Girl Without a Past" I actually sat down and worked out on paper, would you believe - it's in an additive rhythm and a whole-note scale, for those to whom those words mean anything. As I think I've said, my actual songwriting craft is close to the quasi-prog quasi-singer-songwriter artists such as Peter Hammill, Kate Bush... and, yes, to a lesser extent, Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull (see "Anderson's Jig" on Undinal Songs, so named after a listener said "sounds like Jethro Tull").

As to my "classical" cred, I was taught up to Grade VI piano by a little old lady, and later did stage 1 composition and harmony/counterpoint at University. I don't actually listen to Western concert tradition music for fun (unless you count Wendy Carlos's work), but if you do want to do anything that's more interesting than three chords and a cliché, you'll have to think outside the square sooner or later.

De gustibus non est disputandum about the lyrics, of course. All I can say is that I'm quite embarrassed that I can look at the lyric sheet of Undinal Songs and in most cases point out exactly which Evil Ex Who Done Me Wrong they were about. My personal standpoint is that Bauhaus wrote the perfect example of that genre in "Crowds" and any further elaboration is superfluous.

You link to the video of "One Step Ahead", actually one of my favourite latter-period Enz songs because of Eddie Rayner's gorgeous keyboard counterpoint. Eddie Rayner is of course one of my personal heroes and a model of exactly how synths should work in a pop song. Probably not a lot of non-Antipodeans know this, but before Neil Finn joined, Split Enz were actually a prog band with a highly theatrical stage act. Their first album, Mental Notes (the original 1975 Australasian version, not the re-recorded 1976 British version) is one of the big infuences on me. I've heard of Crawlspace Records but I've never heard of any of the artists mentioned on that blog (with the possible except of Children's Television Workshop, although of course there may be some confusion there).

Another piece of the puzzle is the Flying Nun label bands of the late 80's and early 90's, or at least a subset of them. Look Blue Go Purple's entire recorded output is available on a single CD which you can probably, er, acquire somewhere perfectly legally. Same goes for the Chills, especially the "Brave Words" and "Submarine Bells" albums, and the Able Tasmans are also worth a listen. My partner heard their "Hold Me 1" and commented "sounds like something you'd write".

I'm actually in Auckland now precisely because I found the Wellington scene impossible to deal with. But there are no like-minded supporters - with the exception of the management of Random Static Music. I'm going against every grain I can think of. Overwhelmingly, the reaction I get is baffled indifference (expressed in sentiments such as "sounds eighties" and "that's really... interesting"). One big problem is that the equation "electronics = dance music" is very firm in people's heads (they file Ladytron under "Dance" at my local record shop). The only artist anything like me in this town that I know of is Bachelorette, who's significantly more mainstream than I am. Sometimes I think that if there were any supportive audience community anywhere in the world, I would be there as quickly as I could learn to speak Tagalog or Latvian or whatever the bizarre local language was.

I'll use films if I find a keen filmmaker. I don't have any preconceptions.

Now, you see, I have a set of Gentle Giant albums complete up to 1976. Not my favourite band by any manner of means, but I have more respect for them than some of their pomp-rock contemporaries because they were actually trying to make things interesting, rather than just overwhelming. But you're right that it got into complicated for the sake of complicated, and it resulted (at best) in music which is interesting but not particularly pleasant to listen to. I am glad that I have been able to stretch myself a bit and yet not mave it sound forced or pretentious. The title track from Small Group Psychosis, for example, is an eight-and-a-half minute narrative about mind-control cults, but I'm assured by my absolutely non-prog-tolerant partner (she likes late-period Genesis, for heaven's sake!!!) that "it doesn't feel like it's eight minutes long", which I assume is a good sign.

I suppose I'm a bit embarrassed that some of the early songs were actually designed as vicious putdowns, because surely that's an unworthy motivation to make art. "The Reason Why", from Undinal Songs, is a 100% true story. I ran into the person involved only once after that song was written. She said "That was completely unfair". I replied "Yes, it was meant to be". Petty, but satisfying at the time.

I think that the new version of "Crowley" on Small Group Psychosis is mixed in a much superior manner, so you have that to look forward to. It's kind of hard to live in this country and not dig Split Enz. The Finn brothers are near to royalty, and the rest of the guys in the band are generally still highly placed in the local music industry.

I played in several groups when I was younger. As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I have an unpleasant personality to go with my very singular musical vision so it was absolutely impossible to find collaborators who were compatible on anything but a superficial level. I would happily work again in a heartbeat with anyone who was compatible - there's no reason why there couldn't be more people in Vostok Lake - but I can't even find people who're close enough to my musical vision to play on the same bill, let alone play on the same stage or on the same album. Girls In Space was just a women's open mike night, at which I discovered in spades how much people hate and fear the one synthesizer on a lineup of eight warbly acoustic guitar acts.

To be absolutely blunt, if I had "household name money", I would record in a proper studio with a talented engineer who knows how to operate state of the art equipment. Oh, and get some more vocal training. And also pay talented filmmakers and stagecraftspeople to design a properly theatrical live set. And then take some months off to write the opera, hire professional singers and dramaturges... so I suppose the answer to your question is "everything I'm doing now, only not amateurish".

Will react to the links you've posted when home from work. The only thing I've actually heard from Steve Harley to this point is him singing lead on a Rick Wakeman solo album (yes, I know, I have repented).