Yoel Schwarcz of Continuum, May 2006

I feel as if I've always been surrounded by music. My mother was a concert pianist (a student of Bartok) and I don't remember a time without music in my life. I leaned to play the flute at an early age and played in the school orchestra but I've no formal musical qualifications. However I did learn classical guitar with Tim Walker in London.

I really don't know. I suppose Hungarian and Eastern European music were strong influences. That is, my early musical experiences, the music that I grew up with.

Flute, recorder, clarinet, tenor, alto and soprano saxophones, harmonica and classical guitar. My preferred is the tenor sax.

No, I was essentially a soloist but did perform in a duo for a season in Amsterdam prior to the formation of Continuum (see below)

This is going to be a long one.

1) Although I'm Hungarian I was a child refugee at the end of the 2nd. World War and by the early sixties was resident in England - London to be precise.

2) In fact, Continuum was actually formed in London although I had started to develop the musical ideas in Holland a couple of years before. I'd better start at the beginning. I was a resident performer in a club in Amsterdam in the summer, playing classical guitar. One night I got very stoned, didn't really know where I was and couldn't remember the music; to keep going I kept improvising (I suppose in a very free fashion but I don't have much recollection) until I remembered what I should have been playing and again picked up the thread of the original music - and so on, in waves. The audience loved it and the management asked me to continue to play in that way. It would have been churlish (not to mention economic suicide) to refuse and as I liked improvisation, which seemed to come fairly naturally to me, I started developing my musical performance along these lines. I returned to London at the end of the summer and met an excellent Czech guitarist called Jan. The next season we went back to Amsterdam as a duo but at the end of the summer he decided to remain while I returned to London. I met John Warren there not long after. We decided to form a group in order to create, develop and play our own type of music. We found a management followed by a drummer and a bass player and the management then approached RCA who offered me a contract.

EL - Yoel’s wife Brenda has further clarified that although Continuum was started after he'd met John, it was his baby. It wasn't a formal partnership, just something on which they both agreed at the time and on which they decided to work together. Previously with Jan he'd had the same working relationship - but no group name.

Yes. The kind of music that we chose to play was technically difficult: We rehearsed intensively every day.  We needed instrumental technique in order to be capable of playing it, and musical and technical understanding of styles, musical culture of the period, phrasing etc.  

Richard was a friend of our manager. He never considered joining the group but played piano for us on "Autumn Grass" because the possibility was offered to him by our manager and he accepted.

The interpretations weren't based on band improvisations. I'll have to go into a bit of detail here. I wrote all the arrangements for the "Continuum" pieces (with the exception of the piece by Richard Hartley) and was the only member of the line-up to improvise (including on the piece by Richard) because I was the only one of us comfortable with improvisation. The title track on the second album, written by Patric Stanford, was recorded by the first line-up before we split up (which answers your question below about "guests"). The other tracks on this album (with the exception of the 2nd. movement of the Vivaldi lute concerto on which Richard played piano and a session musician played the synthesiser) were all played by the second line-up which consisted of musicians who were all comfortable with improvisation. The arrangements for all the other tracks were a group effort and each musician added his own improvisation. A typical set-up. 

Continuum was my concept. It was my group. Before I played music professionally I had been a professional painter, contracted to the New Vision Centre Gallery in London. I exhibited for ten years and had had exhibitions, at least one of which was called Continuum. I saw my music as a continuum.

See above. 

Patric was a friend of my then father-in-law. Yes.

I don't know if there were any issues with the record company - the management dealt with anything like that. But In order to get the track on the record they had to use heavy compression which you can hear on the recorder improvisation. This is something that I'm not very happy about.

There is one flute section which is wholly improvised, the recorder solo theme was written by Patric and the rest is improvisation.

No, I'm afraid I lost touch with them after I moved to France thirty years ago.

Yes, around 50/60 live gigs, I think. I've looked out my press cuttings to answer this one but will only give you the ones I consider the most interesting: The Round House, Imperial College, The Marquee Club,  London Television "This Week", The Wigmore Hall, The Queen Elisabeth Hall several times including South Bank Summer, a few times with BBC television and radio, the Northern Polytechnic, Eairan (Irish television), Wexford Arts Festival, Edinburgh Arts Festival, ICA, Royal College of Art.

We played what you find on the records plus another few bits. With the second line-up we played non-stop, each piece running into the next.

We still played live for a few months but didn't make any other records. It's the usual story of everyone pulling his own way which leads to disagreements. I decided to leave. They tried to continue for a while after I left but ... the whole thing just fell to bits. It sounds pretty horrible talking like this.

I don't know if it was progressive or not - I'm not sure of your definition of "progressive". It's sure that we didn't play like the pop groups of the time, our music was different from theirs.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Soft Machine, King Crimson (their drummer drummed for us at a gig at Southampton University once), Frank Zappa - thought all their music was different and really worth listening to. 

No.

Yes, Tim and I shared exactly the same point of view on this; there were other combinations that we could have (and did) explore(d). Music is music. We didn't live in a museum. If we liked a piece we liked it. In the first line-up the choices were limited by the instruments played and, as I said above, one of the reasons for changing the line-up was to give us the possibility of a wider choice in the music we played.  

Me, personally, no. Some people might have considered that our music was pretentious but I've never been very bothered about what other people thought. We just played what interested us.

1) I went to play as a session musician, playing tenor sax and completed my Masters in electronic engineering at the University of Southampton. 

2) Did sound for Henry Cow and toured with them. On one of the tours I came to France and met a violinist whom I married; moved to France and did sound for Jeff Seffer* (I played with him a bit too). 
*Jeff Seffer is an avant-garde French/Hungarian saxophonist who was a member of Magma (among others).

3) Stayed in France, designing live sound installations, theatre, concerts, tours, etc.; (beggars can't be choosers so sometimes I loved the music that I designed for, sometimes I hated it) until 1987;

4) Went to England to take responsibility for the Midas Console that had just been bought by Klark-Teknik;

5) Came back to France in December 1990 to continue working in sound until February of this year. 

Since February we've moved from Paris (where I was based from 1993) to the Loire valley. We bought a small old farm and will move in, in a few weeks. I have started creating DVDs that, at the moment, use paintings (that now change and move) that I've done over the last thirty years and music that I recorded over thirty years ago! (At least, the one on which I'm working at the moment). Future ones will probably use music composed by some young musicians I know - we'll see, it's the beginning. This work will be included in a group exhibition at the beginning of September. It's probably not very commercial but I've come to the point where I don't give a sh*t - I was never really about commerce.

I'm using them for the DVD so I can't say that I don't like listening to them but I can hear all the production mistakes (and some of my own). A disc is never perfect. 

Yes, when I worked as a session musician (I played with the re-formed Foundations) but didn't want to play commercial music under my own name. I honestly don't know how do create commercial art in any form.

Like this question. Ultra modern jazz (John Zorn, for example), Rage against the Machine, Penderetzki, Bartok, Kodaly, (never got over the Hungarian connection) Ministry of Sound, Radiohead, Massive Attack etc. Am not as au fait as I'd like to be. Maybe I'll have a little more time to listen now. But I'm not into Hip-Hop or Rap. I really wish that in the days of Continuum we had had the electronics that are available to the musicians today. I really admire some of the music produced and those that produce it - they push out the boundaries. 

It seems that I have absolutely none for I had no idea that the album was re-mastered and released - either before or after the fact (until this week). I was the only member of Continuum to have a contract with RCA and this contract was never cancelled. After I found out I found a site where I could order a copy and did so (I prefer to have it than my original vinyyl which has suffered somewhat over the years) however I think it's a bit much when I have to pay for my own music! 

Met at the house of a friend in London when I was working for Midas.

Not really but she's learning to appreciate (non-commercial) music! 

My labrador wakes me up as soon as the bloody sun is up; I get up, take him out, give him food and water (normally around 6.30 am while Brenda snores); try to wake up Brenda; make her coffee around 8.00am; try to wake up Brenda; enjoy a huge breakfast of cheese, ham, british marmalade; try to wake up Brenda; start working on my DVD; finally wake up Brenda. (EL - Brenda tells me that Yoel does not in fact wake her, she eventually wakes up in her own time!)

At the moment our house is full of workmen so life is a bit unsettled. I work most of the day on the DVD, walk the dog, argue with Brenda (sometimes we talk though), she argues with Ikea on the phone, we share the cooking, visit friends in the area and sometimes we'll have friends or one of the kids to stay (my youngest has just left today to go to Morocco with his girlfriend in a camper van) and Brenda drags me to brocantes (the French week-end flea markets). Sometimes we eat in a small local restaurant in the evening. We like good food.

In the future I'll keep working on my DVDs and once we're properly installed in the main house want to start painting again. Brenda's going to set up two gites - not my thing.