"It was a way of controlling what was seen and what was not seen, and I liked the way people weren't sure if I was even doing anything. You couldn't see the sax and you couldn't relate it to anything, really. The art was in combining and recombining and turning things inside-out and nothing being clear. This was going on while there were visuals going on and movement going on. Mark was there, Mark Bromwich...He's gone back to his original Polish name, Bokowiec. You can Youtube him and find out what he's doing now, with his wife.

"And the library. It was there I found Stockhausen. And to find out Harry Parch existed—the hell with this establishment business, I'll do my own. And the minimalists, Terry Riley Terry Riley
b.1935 , Steve Reich Steve Reich
b.1936
composer/conductor , Philip Glass Philip Glass
b.1937
composer/conductor . I was getting more reductivist. What I was doing was too brash, too violent. I'm not violent by nature. [Lukas] Ligeti, too, [Krzysztof] Penderecki. Under the influence of all these people, I realized that I wanted to cull from a very deep source. Then Anthony Braxton Anthony Braxton
b.1945
reeds appears, and I knew the sax had to be front and center. And Art Ensemble Of Chicago Art Ensemble Of Chicago

band/orchestra —that was fusion, to me, in its best possible sense. It's language, isn't it, so I'm getting into different languages, speaking in tongues, really—without any sort of initial training from anybody. I haven't had any lessons to speak of, I'm completely self-taught. It became obsessive. I was filling up this reservoir, combining things. It takes years to find a voice, of course.

"The No-Wave scene from New York—James Chance, Lydia Lunch—it got me playing again, wanting to form a band, throwing the mask off and the lab coat—and still to be actually in your face; and to actually show the horn, take it out of its tube in the theatrical context. I was still in England, but it was a big prompt for me to go over there, which I did.

"I formed another band with my cousins, these great older cousins, that helped me at 12 and put me on the progressive path. The older cousin, Vic, picked up bass and played these great Bill Laswell Bill Laswell
b.1955
bass -type lines. And the younger cousin, Eli, was doing Pat Place (of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) type guitar, kind of jazzy but kind of not. No Wave had taught me to treat the sax like a grinding electric guitar, so I would throw in these hard-rock references, along with nods to various jazz styles, for example, the '60s Blue-Note style. And I've always thrown in ethnic references—that's the Art Ensemble of Chicago's influence. It might be sort of Balkan, Ukrainian, Gypsy music, even Japanese folk. Sometimes it's tongue in cheek. I've been known to throw in a few false endings, maybe a blues-inflected thing.

"I don't see the point in being just another good player. I would choose personality over mimicked technical prowess. It was weird in the beginning because I liked the mystery of not knowing what I was going to do. I didn't want things explained to me. There was a ritualistic aspect to what I was playing. It was a very personal thing. I knew the saxophone would be with me the rest of my life—though I knew it wouldn't be exactly how I make a living. It was already a part of my life. It was always going to be with me. Whether it was ritual, or therapy, or exorcizing demons, or a healing force, it wasn't going to be tainted by having to make a living at it. It was deeper than that. Consequently, I almost didn't want to learn how to play properly. I wanted to allow for this window, where the magic would happen."

Vasylenko finally escaped Thatcher's Europe, (after a traumatic incident where he lost his horn), setting up shop in New York City in the late 1980s. After two years of the club scene there, and people either loving or not understanding his accent, he traveled to California, which was the "real escape." The highlight of this, as he avers, was meeting Sun Ra Sun Ra
1914 - 1993
keyboard , and getting his blessing, at an outdoor festival in Sonoma in natural amphitheater—wherein Sun Ra assured him his sax would come back to him in one form or another. "You never know," he said. "Just be open, and it might come back. You never know, but you know..."

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