New York-based guitarist Sally Gates' musical journey through New Zealand and the US has led her from death metal to jazz metal, experimental 'noise' and improvisation.
Gates' performance beginnings were in Auckland death metal bands like Relentless Attrition and Infernal Assault.
As a musician she has tried out piano, drums, saxophone and violin, before guitar was the one that really grabbed her and stuck, she told Saturday Morning.
In 2008 she moved to the US to be part of the broader and more fertile metal scene there, and she has lived, played and composed in Florida as well as New York City - and toured the US and Canada playing in different bands.
This month she's back home to play the Wellington Jazz Festival, performing a new solo commission at the Opera House, on Saturday 23 October, and at venue Moon the night before, backed by some legends of the Aotearoa experimental scene.
Her new work for the festival, Thought and Terraform is inspired by quantum physics, neuroscience, memories of home, and an exploration of how the limits imposed by different musical traditions add to the creation of music.
Gates especially enjoys the collision of ideas, genres and the fresh unexplored territory of improvisation - which are artistically exciting, she said.
Sally Gates Photo: Supplied/ Sally Gates
"There's a lot of harmonic language that's actually similar between metal chords and jazz chords, they use similar intervals or extended chords, there's also a certain pursuit of virtuosity or technique too. They're also opposites that work well together," Gates said.
"A lot of the metal that I played is strictly composed, it's always going to be the same... and what I like about improvising or about jazz is that it's always different, it's always fluid, and you have to be more present in the music, you really have to listen and be aware of what's going on.
"When you're improvising you're really listening to everyone else around you and what they're doing and where they are in the song. It's a completely different experience to playing with a metal band, but the two still work well together, I feel."
Her new piece for the show, Thought and Terraform will be part improvisation.
"I have sections of composed music, and then I elaborate on those, expand through improvising, and connect each section together. It's still a fairly visceral thing, you're interpreting... each motif or idea each time I play it.
"A lot of what this piece is about is controlled limits on improvising. This relates to the title, your thoughts create the world around us, and we have certain limits on what we perceive and how we generate our reality. Such as a limited colour spectrum or a frequency of audio noises.
"I started to notice the parallel there with improvised music, because if you don't have any of these controls, things do just get chaotic, and hallucinatory, and non-sensical, so in a similar way that we use controls to survive so does the music, otherwise it goes towards those outer reaches of just noise or becoming unlistenable or just losing the thread and rambling."
Back in NYC, Gates heads trio Titan to Tachyons, whose second album Vonals has just been released.
She explains a tachyon is a theoretical particle: "That travels faster than the speed of light and if these particles were to exist then hypothetically they would actually be travelling backward in time, if they could break the light barrier." And hypotheticals are the stuff art and music are made from.
"As an artist you need to entertain all kinds of ideas to create, it's essentially all about hypotheticals - like what if I do this, or let me try that - that's really how you discover your voice and you create new things."
A journey in metal and sound
"I grew up listening to a whole range of different music, I grew up listening to metal and what's considered classic rock now. And as my tastes evolved I started discovering other musicians that were more genre splicing, fusion if you will," Gates said.
"I guess you absorb all that and you start to retell it in your own voice."
She moved to the US for the wider musical opportunities and the chance to hear a wider range of other musicians.
"[Living in] Miami was really interesting, because it's such a melting pot, like you have the Latin American influence, you have the Caribbean culture coming in, and that sort of comes out in the music as well."
Guitarist Sally Gates' trio's new album cover Photo: Supplied/ Sally Gates
A genre of sound, described as 'noise' captured her interest there.
"There's a really large noise scene [in Florida] - which is I guess kind of the extreme side of improvising, - it's literally that - just pure noise. A lot of these shows they have crossovers, where you have metal bands playing with 'noise, punk bands - whatever it is - and everyone's really open minded about it, so I started getting involved, improvising within the noise scene.
In noise performance "people will do all kinds of things, typically you'll have people doing what we call circuit-bending, where you have like a bunch of pedals or effects or synthesizers, and they're just making whatever kinds of noise or sounds they can - it can be very harsh and abrasive, and it's sometimes not even listenable."
That led her to writing noise and exploring other types of improvisation, jazz or free improvisation.
"I think it's for the experience - both the people playing and watching, it's something you go to see live, and it's more this kind of a visceral thing, just to push the limits of what sound or music actually is.
"It's exploring any kind of possibility, and a lot of it turns into performance art as well."
