London, 2026​

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During this interview, I change seats, place myself in front of another artist and ask him the questions I wish people asked me. Today, I meet with English architect, musician and guitarist Paul Bavister, who has just released his first solo project, Interstices.  

 

Paul, tell us about yourself.

 

I am an architect and an academic, most of my work involves sound and space, either developing buildings for musical performance or looking at how we perceive sound. With two children and a dog, I am very busy, but it is a happy balance, mostly. 

 

Tell us about Interstices, your first solo project.

 

Interstices is a suite of improvised guitar pieces that were developed over a series of evenings in Autumn 2025. The only sound source is a Gibson Les Paul with P90 pick ups. This is put through a looper pedal and a few effects as I can. The works have all  been recorded live, and in a single take. I wanted it to feel as close to a live recording as possible. There are many ambient guitar albums out there, but the sometimes sound over processed, and the source material is lost, resulting in a sound that whilst polished and pleasant could really be anything. With Interstices I wanted a patina of “dirt” on the recordings, I wanted the listener to hear clearly that it is a guitar, an amp, and a human. There are no musical pyrotechnics, I have been as restrained as possible in a musical sense, leaving the album sounding like a soundscape of the interconnected equipment, with me being a conductor of the evolving sounds. I have been very influenced by Japanese cooking in this regard, in Europe food is presented in sauces and additional flavourings, where as in Japan, food is often reduced to its “essence” with nothing added, the preparation and cooking process generates a version of the food in its purest form. I was hoping to achieve a sonic version of this with Interstices. 

 

How did the project come about?

 

The project was born out of a sense of creative frustration, my co partner in Ultima Canticum once said that you can only be creative when you do not have the time to do so, and I found that being a busy person made it difficult to write music; if I allowed myself a fixed period of time to do something, I would probable squander it, fussing about something irrelevant, being distracted and not doing what I set out to do, but when the children are in the bath or my wife is out for an evening, I often find that the urge to create dominates the urge to procrastinate. This is why the album was called Interstices, as it was created in the gaps of life, and all of the song titles are different words for spaces. 

 

Tell us about how your research work influences your creative work.

 

My research is dominated by how we perceive sound in space, and how our senses work together to temper any inputs, and build a picture of a sensory environment. This is a largely analytical process, and there is little scope for “creativity” in an artistic sense at least. The outputs of the research do give us clues as to how we can be more artistically creative and use the senses to optimise any artistic presentation, be it music or architecture. 

 

How do you approach creating music?

 

My approach has been tempered by being in an improvised music band for ten years or so, and the organic nature of the creative process really chimed with me, a complete opposite of the structured creativity of architecture. It is good to have a place of no rules, and pure emotion. I mainly use a guitar these days, despite having a room full of synths, but I can play guitar, and I cannot play keys so the process is more fluid. 

 

Explain us how you perceive sound and space, music and architecture — and how this affects your work.

 

This is a vast question ... a question I am still answering through practice and research. For thousands of years sound and space have been critically interlinked; acoustic space informing the perception of sound ... the evolution of architectural technology informing the evolution of music, from cathedrals to plainsong, highly decorated salons of Europe and Chamber music, the large Viennese ball rooms and the birth of the symphony, the list goes on. But since the advent of headphones and car stereos, artists have been writing for architectural non-spaces, spaces that have not been designed, and with multi-tracked recordings and digital reverberation, artists are in control of their own space, the link between architecture and music is severed. I have sought to address this with work such as the Musicity Project with Nick Luscombe, where we commissioned artists to write for set spaces, and my own work in biometric evolutionary design. 

 

What are some of the artists and personalities that have influenced your creative work the most. 

 

Undoubtedly Japanese Ambient  musician Tetsu Inoue has been a huge influence on me, sadly no one has heard of him these days, but his organic evolving sound sculptures are a huge influence. As well as the heuristic approaches of Brian Eno whose generative work is constantly engaging. I have also been listening to American guitarist William Tyler a lot too. Influences are a odd thing, try as hard as you can, you can never fully realise a facsimile of anyone else's work, and the resultant disaster may actually have merit in being an original work, as Elvis Costello says, anything considered original is actually a bad copy of something else. 

 

So after Interstices what’s next?

 

The magic of the creative process is you never know! A new piece of equipment or book can send you on a new journey, that is the joy of the creative process.

 

Thanks very much Paul. A last one for the road — one book, one album, one film —, tell us about your latest cultural findings?

 

Book: Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto. A great read where sound is a key plot point! Film: Nosferatu by Robert Eggers... just saw it on a flight, was amazing! Album: Glass by Sakamoto and Caston Nicholai (Alva Noto). Music and architecture in pure harmony! 

 

Bouncing on Paul’s words, there are much similarities between cooking and composing, so stay tuned for more updates from yours truly on how these connect together in surprising ways! Read my review of Interstices.