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CLINKER | PRESS & INTERVIEWS

SEE MAGAZINE ARTICLE | JULY 2008

Clinker stretches
Cohen On The Other Side...
Written by Prosper Prodaniuk

Many works at this week’s International Leonard Cohen Festival will focus on the lyrics—the poetry—of the Canadian literary icon. But a new performance piece zeroes in on what every Canadian, fan or not, identifies with Cohen: that voice.

“It just sounds like he’s smoked way too many cigarettes and drank way too much whiskey over his 60 years,” says Gary Joynes, who performs under the musical alias Clinker. For the past six years, Joynes has been taking his slow-moving sound-and-lightscapes to festivals around the world. Using visuals to accentuate the smallest harmonic shifts and sonic glitches, Joynes digs to the depths of Cohen’s voice. “I needed to find his voice alone,” Joynes says, “and wrap it with my style and synthesis. I looked for the lowest frequencies coming out. I then time-streteched his voice—more than anyone should time-stretch anything—and when you do that, you start to get digital artifacts, which I, of course, embrace.”

Joynes lifted the title of his piece On the Other Side... from a line of poetry in Cohen’s The Book of Longing. “I wanted to approach Cohen from the sacred and mystic side,” he says, “which is a big part of him. Buddhism is a big part of his life, and when I broke down his work you can see that he did a lot of describing light versus dark.... It’s a very slow-moving piece, a meditation. I see my piece as maybe being some of the mantras he’s using when he’s meditating.”

Joynes weaves excerpts from other Cohen works weave through his 40-minute opus as well. “I pay homage to a piece he did a long time ago called ‘The Great Event,’” Joynes says, “where he took the sound of Victoria [the Macintosh computer’s simulated female voice] reading one of his poems with a reversed recording of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ I’ve revisited that idea with the computer reciting some of his other poetry while staying with that idea of light and dark.”

And yet, Joynes wanted to make sure that the human impact of Cohen didn’t get lost. “I didn’t want there to be looping,” he says. “There’s repetition—that’s part of a mantra—but every time his voice enters the piece, I’ll tweak it slightly every time to make it sound human.”

On the Other Side... will be the centrepiece of Clinker’s performance, but he has some more faithful interpretations of Cohen’s work that will bookend the show. “I really felt that I owed it to the audience not to completely alienate them into a world of minimalism that they may not have experienced before,” he explains. “I’ll be performing three of my favorite Cohen songs [“Hallelujah,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Suzanne”] with my friend Les Robot. He is, in my opinion, one of the best guitarists in the world. He’s from here, I’ve known him for years. He asked me once to describe his music and I ended up calling it ‘post-future blues.’ So that’s what we’ll be playing.

I can guarantee that no one has ever heard Leonard Cohen’s music like this.”