How are you managing in the current German lockdown?

I’m mostly at home. Since my studio is also at home, I spend even a little more time there.  Of course I miss the opportunity to move freely and to meet friends. But in general, the corona crisis does not restrict me too much personally, neither physically nor mentally. My travel and consumer behaviour is generally not particularly extensive, so the quarantine hits me less hard than maybe others. The difficult part for all of us will occur after the lockdown I guess.

How did you first get into creating experimental music?

It was a slow process. I come from a rock background and at a certain point, however, there was a longing to start something new, to refresh things. So I focused my interest on electronic music but soon I noticed that it was not only about changing the field. I was chasing away more instruments than I added and suddenly there were tracks without a beat, without a meter, no melodies, no recognisable structures. That’s it, complete freedom. Our release history also shows very nicely that this development is a process that continues to this day and I hope this kind of naivety will go on as long as I release something.

Can you tell us what inspired you to create Brief Conversations

During the preparations for a commissioned work (EDIT 1/0/0/0, Moritzkirche, Augsburg) in September 2019, I had the opportunity to do recordings all alone in this beautiful, pure church. Just listening to this room several nights was a very inspiring experience. This gave rise to the idea of ​​developing this approach, recording different rooms with different shapes, recording the quiet. To listen to what a room has to tell us – the sounds it creates, sounds which can be generated in it by different impulses – fascinated me. Brief Conversations describes these dialogues and summarises it in sonic narratives.

Can you give an overview of the kinds of processes involved in the recording and production of this album?

It starts with the recordings. My field recordings are always the basis. They often happen by chance. Some are also planned because I noticed a sound event the day before or because something attracts me, for example an empty parking garage, a stairwell, a tunnel or a synagogue. After capturing sounds I look into the recordings almost microscopically, searching for lively and emotional aspects. These can be rhythmic or harmonic elements. All sounds that have something to tell are considered. In order to create something new, I use tools like most “normal” musicians: pitch shifting, time manipulation, modulation effects, delays, equalisers, distortion. The resulting components, which add something to the dramaturgy and the dynamics of the story, remain in the track; the others get chipped away.

Can you outline how one of the tracks off Brief Conversations evolved, from the original sourcing of the sounds through to the refinement of the composition?

Ah yeah … I think of ‘Shelter’. I got permission to take pictures in a huge, disused gas tank. And when I was ready to record, the worst storm that can be imagined broke out. No hope of improvement for the rest of the day. Everything I recorded was covered with this kind of white noise, generated by the wind and the pounding rain. In response, I started stamping my feet and making loud noises to deal with the annoying noise. Fortunately, I also packed my contact microphone and recorded additionally the very deep resonance of the walls and railings. When I got home after hours I was sure that the recordings could not be used. But wrong: the contact microphones – with some support from the Mini Moog – form the foundation of the track. The percussive stamping and hits are almost unprocessed and with a pinch of digital sophistication I was able to elicit a few spherical and even harmonious elements from the room recordings. If one listens superficially, ‘Shelter’ may have a more synthetic appearance. In fact, it is a purely electro-acoustic piece. With field recordings you rarely get exactly what you expect.

How important is the conceptual aspect of your work?

Very important. In the past few years I have been working conceptually only. Before I start working on something new I think about things and do some research. Collecting and sculpting new music is preceded by a theoretical process… most of the time. And once a concept is conclusive, I try to stick to it as much as possible. I think it’s like writing a book. You have to have in mind the whole story and bit by bit you invent the narrative strands and the characters.

What are you listening to right now?

 BBC 6 Music.

Favourite releases of 2020 so far?

Acoustic Shadows by Lea Belucci, The Experience of Repetition as Death by Clarice Jensen and Motus by Thomas Köner are really inspiring records. Radio France broadcast a piece by Jim O’Rourke called Shutting Down Here (still available online). I was there when they performed this piece originally in Paris at the INA-GRM Multiphonies Series. It’s just brilliant. And my friend DOT made an album called Monsters … so good.

What’s your next creative project?

Basically I’m concentrating on a sound installation. But just because it feels right at the moment I started playing around with stuff for cello, viola and violin. This is quite the opposite of what I’m doing normally. And because I’m not that much interested in playing live any more, my long-time live visual partner Stefanie Sixt and I will turn towards short films a bit more. We recently released Separate Waves Of One Ocean, and the next one could come out quite soon. And here and there I help recording stuff for Slowvox, the project of my girlfriend. I’m really happy about all this things….

Some Links:

Markus Mehr – Brief Conversations

EDIT 1/0/0/0

Gastank Augsburg/Shelter

Jim O´Rouke – Shutting Down Here

Sixt/Mehr – Separate Waves Of One Ocean

DOT – Monsters

Slowvox

]]> https://www.hiddenshoal.com/three-questions-connected-view/ Tue, 22 Jan 2019 04:46:21 +0000 https://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=16998 Connected View produce trojan horses. On first listen their output is littered with seemingly innocent, naive late-night instrumental jams, but on each successive spin you begin to notice the patterns and the purposefulness. By this time the woozy, rolling melodies have begun to mesmerise and before you know it you’ve fallen through the wormhole. Kinetic synths, sinuous basslines, live drums and found sounds intertwine to create an atmosphere akin to eavesdropping on Boards of Canada improvising with Fridge. Playful, dirty, brooding, radiant and rhythmic. Magic stuff!

To learn a little more about what makes Connected View tick we asked the boys to pull three questions out of the bag…

What’s the best show you’ve ever been to?

The best show we’ve been to was Stereolab opening for Sonic Youth at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia in the year 2000. It was a crossroads in many respects. We were young and impressionable and it changed our view of music henceforth. At the time, we were huge Sonic Youth junkies, had been for years. We had heard of Stereolab, but never really investigated. Their set blew us away. It was a lot of stuff from the Microbe Hunters/ Cobra era. From there on we were Stereolab fanatics. It was just what we needed at that time. The next day I went to the record store and bought everything by Stereolab that they had in stock. Instead of noisy guitar-based music, we started seeking out more synthy and baroque stuff. We dug into the types of music that inspired the Stereolab sound and sought out decades worth of influences and then the influences of the influences. Kraut, psych, electronic, edm, tropicalia, different styles of jazz, synth pop, shoegaze, ect. We loved it all. Its been like peeling an onion. That show set us on the path to eventually making our own music.

Why make music?

We’ve been asking ourselves that question forever as well. Not sure its ever been adequately answered or ever will be. It doesn’t have to be. Whenever I ask myself this question I think of a few of my acquaintances who are not creative, or not involved in art in any way, and I just couldn’t imagine living that way, without a creative outlet. It seems like a pointless existence. Sometimes I wish I could go without music, it would save us a lot of time in editing. I’ve realized that whenever I feel down or I am having some difficulties in life, I turn to music more. It is the great escape. Other artists I’ve read in interviews have said things like “it’s the search for the unknown, a beautiful mystery that you get to unfold.” We can go with that too. There’s some kind of nervous energy within us that can only be released through music.

What’s one of your favourite albums that’s unlikely to be featured on anyone else’s list of favourite albums, and why do you love it?

One of our favorites that has seemed to be in the rotation for a long, long time & probably isn’t well known is Movietone’s ‘Blossom Filled Streets.’ We enjoyed all of Movietone’s output, but this one most. I was instantly drawn in by how it sounded as if it was recorded on the beach and the ocean imagery imbedded within. It enlightened me to the idea of concept albums beyond the proggy stuff I had previously been exposed to. It helped to form my concepts of what an album is supposed to be. A cohesive group of songs with a central theme tying them together. A theme, but also similar instruments and a style spread over a group of songs. When I hear ‘Blossom Filled Streets’ it connects me to moments and places over many years and now has that nostalgic importance that some albums obtain. To describe the sound to someone who hasn’t heard it would be difficult. The album is kind of a post-rock-ish array of horns, rhythm section, electric guitar, keyboards, bass, and sea sounds with great singing and lyrics.

To get a glimpse inside the master’s mind we asked Erik to pull three questions out of the bag…

What kind of activity is your music made for?

I imagine that the music I make likes to put its listener in a state of “inwardness”. Perhaps it is music for the activity of paying close attention, either to the music itself or to some other solitary activity: walking, sitting, reading, breathing, running. I particularly admire a piece of music that sometimes just lends a certain emotional quality to my surroundings or to whatever I am up to , the next day has me counting beats, and the day after that seems to be all about texture. That is the kind of music I aspire to make.

Why make music?

Because it presents an opportunity to apply oneself – mind, body, and soul – to the construction of something like a rudimentary, abstract, self-contained world. Such a world makes possible the experience and exploration of longing, elation, sadness, grief, or ecstasy as such, in the absence of any particular cause or object. One may for instance try being gentle (as such) or aggressive (as such), probe the relationship between the two, or push either or both as far a one possibly can. There is obviously a tremendous sense of freedom here, but also a sense of duty. Musical ideas always seem to have potentiality, to be en route somewhere – to demand something. One listens carefully and labours to bring potentiality into (imperfect) being. Somehow, it reminds me of what it is like to be alive.

What’s your most treasured item of musical gear?

A Martin HD-28 that friends and family had got me as a graduation gift. Not only do I love to play it, it reminds me of people I love, and also of the fact that I have it in me to carry something difficult to completion.

To get a peek inside the Bird machine we asked Jonathan Shaw from the band to pull three questions out of the bag…

What’s the best show you’ve ever been to?

In 2011, Milky and I went to the now-defunct Harvest Festival in Werribee and saw a whole stash of incredible acts, including Mogwai, The Flaming Lips and Kevin Devine. For me, the highlight was Portishead. Oh man. My heart. To hear Beth sing ‘Roads’ live transported me beyond the stars… so beautiful.

Which song of yours is most important to you and why?

I’ll nominate ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ from our new album because of its unrelenting ambition. I also feel that if you like that song, you’ll like Summon the Birds. Just to complete that track, all 9 minutes of it, and to actually evoke – sonically and lyrically – the falling of a man into the Centre of the Earth is – in my opinion – a huge artistic achievement for the band. It also completes the ultimate synthesis of STB – the music as narrative and the lyrics as sound.

What’s one of your favourite albums that’s unlikely to be featured on anyone else’s list of favourite albums, and why do you love it?

A big album for us in the making of Blood Love – and one that Milky and I bonded over particularly – is Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, released in 1991. It is phenomenally good and as soon as I heard it, all I wanted to do was make music that good. The pace of it is what captured my heart. It unfolds at its own steady pace and weaves the listener into an unrelenting tapestry of beauty, wisdom, sorrow and light. I think it’s a colossal suite of songs and I can’t believe I only heard about it 8 or so years ago. We also based the final number of tracks on our record – 6 – on the number of tracks on Laughing Stock.

Why are we telling you all this? Because we cornered Ambrose and asked him to pull three questions out of the bag!

What’s the best show you’ve ever been to?

While it’s hard to go past Sonic Youth playing Daydream Nation in full, it’d have to be Gersey at the Rosemount many years ago – they were an incredible live band, especially in a small venue.

Build your own dream supergroup.

Keys & Sounds – Stina
Bass Guitar – Simon Struthers
Drum Kit – Ben Gibbard (lead singer from Death Cab but he played drums on their second record & they are stunning)
Woodwind – Mayuka Juber
Guitars – Myself!
Singing – Waltz era Glenn Richards (Augie March)

What’s one of your favourite albums that’s unlikely to be featured on anyone else’s list of favourite albums, and why do you love it?

I’m going to go with They forgot it in people by Broken Social Scene. Theres so many layers and little parts of it where they’ve just pushed things to their limit – things that you don’t notice at first but the character of the record has a lot of thought behind it. Without setting out to be, it’s almost a summation of all the techniques and things that were good about mid 90’s experimental guitar music, but with a lot of energy and delicacy thrown in.

Many thanks to Wagner and Grant for their time and efforts in making this happen.

WH: You have been playing music for decades. Was the concept for Memorybell already in your mind before you started working on this music, or is it a more recent artistic project?

GHO: Memorybell is a very recent project. I wanted to focus on ambient music following the release of Genus Euphony, but the way this album came into being was decidedly unplanned.

I had been composing, shaping, and reshaping 20 or so songs but could never quite get them to feel the way I wanted them to. After I got out of the hospital, playing the songs was a uniquely unpleasant experience. They sounded awful to me and I had trouble remembering why I had written them in the first place. When a song felt wrong, I either threw it away completely, or focused exclusively on its essence (often just one or two chords) and explored that as granularly as I could.

My close creative collaborator from The Very Hush Hush, Peter Bo Rappmund, had heard most of the songs in various stages of their composition. When I was able to play these new, post-amnesia versions for him he strongly urged me to release the record under a new name. The songs were so different from anything I’d ever recorded that it made sense that they be the start of a new project.

WH: What are your main influences and sources of inspiration?

GHO: It sounds odd, but a lot of my musical ideas come from mundane objects. There is a particularly pleasant sound that the metal vent in the roof of my house makes when it lightly rains outside. In my old neighborhood, there was an old row house whose laundry exhaust whistled beautifully whenever it was in use. I could listen to the sounds of an oscillating fan all day long.

I enjoy sitting still and listening to the world, though it’s far too loud for me. This is one reason why I’m drawn to expansive silences. I draw an immense amount of inspiration and solace from the quiet that descends during a snowfall.

Less esoteric and more to the point, I find the following works very influential (in no particular order):

Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
Air – Moon Safari
Billy Holiday – Solitude
Gas – Pop
Yo La Tengo – And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Stars of the Lid – The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

WH: You seem interested in exploring extreme minimalism in your music, creating a slow, surreal experience for the listener. How did you come to develop such a style?

GHO: When I was studying classical music I was most attracted to dissonant passages. These “sour” notes and chords represented for me a warmer, more interesting way of approaching musical expression. I would sit for hours playing a single passage over and over, slow it down, and make subtle changes to it. As I grew older, I looked forward to this monastic repetition far more than completing whichever increasingly difficult piece of music I was learning.

Starting in the early 2000s, I played bass in The Very Hush Hush. Like the piano, my method of approaching the bass has changed over the years but, even back then, I was more concerned with playing the most interesting note than playing the root. One well-placed note can heighten anticipation in ways little else can.

My ears most want to hear what happens in the moments after a note is played before it dissolves into silence. That tension is powerful and shaping that tension is my primary concern.

WH: In terms of your creative processes, are you driven by your technique, or do you let your emotions drive your composing and arranging? Or is it a combination of both?

GHO: Emotion is the driving force behind my music.

To my ears, technique is only as useful as one’s ability to use it to express emotion. Technique for its own sake does little for me.  It’s not that I don’t admire accomplished musicians, I do; I fully understand the time and dedication it takes to become an accomplished musician. But when technique becomes the focal point music becomes hollow. There is a whole spectrum of emotional experiences to be had while listening to music and feeling awe at someone’s ability is only one.

When I compose a new song, I try to keep my mind blank. Turn off my brain. Focus on what I’m feeling and sensing. What do I hear? What do I smell? Taste? I often begin with my eyes closed and open them once something interesting has presented itself. From there, repetition and manipulation of time and silence. How best to amplify what I’m feeling in the moment? What is the simplest way to say what needs to be said?

WH: Is there is a special place or time that you write music?

GHO: There used to be, but now I’m restricted to when my toddler son is either asleep or out of the house. Otherwise, he’ll come bounding from wherever he is and start mashing the keys. Adorable and amazing, but not conducive to thoughtful creation. I’m lucky if I get an uninterrupted chunk of 20 minutes per day.

Place is an interesting problem with the piano. You’re stuck wherever the piano is. My work around for this used to be scribbling ideas in a notebook, studying them when I couldn’t be at a piano, etc. Now, unless I’m particularly inspired and one of my 20-minute mini-sessions produces something more-or-less fully formed, I’ll hold a strong phrase in my mind for as long as I have to until I have time to explore it at the piano.

This results in a kind of fermentation. The most emotive part of an idea tends to become stronger, while the less necessary, more ancillary bits float off. This won’t always be my song writing process but, considering my 2 year-old just had a baby brother, I don’t see it changing in the near future.

WH: How do you work on individual songs? Do they keep evolving as you experiment with them over time, or do you find it quick and easy to finish each piece?

GHO: It depends on the song. Many songs are vague and gauzy at the start and I have to sit with them for a while before they reveal themselves to me. I try not to force anything onto them, just wait for whatever emotion it was that drove me to sit down at the piano to come out. Sometimes this process is quick, other times it is glacial. It took 14 years for ‘Somnolent’ to become what it is.

That’s an aberrant example, though. Most songs take on average 2-3 years before I finally leave them be. So, at any given time, the batch of songs I’m working on tend to have been initially conceived several years previous.

Occasionally, a song will emerge and I can’t figure out how to improve it. Those are always happy moments, though infrequent. I quite enjoy the long, slow evolution of a song. When one is finished, it may sound quite unlike it did in its infancy.

WH: In regards to your artistic process, are you a perfectionist, or more of a relaxed creator?

GHO: A complete and utter perfectionist, though I’m trying to let that go. My compromise is to direct my perfectionist tendencies toward my process rather than toward my music, to stay dedicated to giving the songs room to breathe, to grow, to change. Rather than try to force the songs to be something I want them to be, I allow them to be what they are. Even if I don’t like the end result, being true to the process feels like being true to my nature.

The most important part of my process is letting go. Ego can be a useful tool, in crafting personae, in pushing yourself, but I find it a barrier to making meaningful music. My best songwriting comes after I’ve processed whatever drove me to write a song in the first place. What remains after the dust settles.

WH: Silence, and the ambiguity it evokes, plays an important role in your music. Is this aspect of your music planned, or do you improvise?

GHO: Very much planned, as much as one can plan silence.  I can never predict the affect any given length of silence will have, so I conduct tests. Do I add a single beat here? A measure of seven? Thirteen? It’s a little like introducing oneself to a strange animal.

As consumers of popular music our ears have been trained to expect predictability in regards to rhythm. 4/4 and 3/4 dominate the sonic landscape. The ghost of the Western classical music tradition is persistent. The purposeful shirking of predictable time signatures is a good thing but if not approached carefully it can estrange the casual listener.

When I shape the silence in my songs, I pay close attention to what my ears want. Then I give them something else. Unusual time signatures often do the trick, but I try not to employ them for their own sake. Sometimes a standard time signature alternated with an irregular or changing amount of silence has a magical effect. The ultimate test is if someone can’t tell that a song is in 17/8 or 13/4.

The ideal is to make the unexpected feel natural.

WH: Can you tell us about your experience of transient global amnesia and how it influenced the creation of this album.

GHO: In late February of 2014 my first son was two weeks old. He was curled up with my wife on the couch and I left to meet up with some friends. We had a couple of beers and I made my way home. It was lightly snowing.

I walked in the house and my wife and son were still curled up on the couch. I took my son upstairs, swaddled him and put him in his crib, and put on my headphones.

I woke up in a hospital roughly ten hours later on a gurney, obscenely bright fluorescent lights flashing over my face. I saw my wife and asked, “What am I doing here?” She patiently recounted the story of how I had come into our bedroom saying I couldn’t remember where I had been, what I had done, the people I had been with; how she had called the police, to whom I had apparently been quite charming and funny, who in turn summoned an ambulance that brought me to the hospital.

My poor wife told me this story over forty times before it stuck. Tests were run; EKGs, MRIs, CAT scans, toxicology screens. At one point, a group of medical students with clipboards surrounded my bed.

Throughout it all, my wife sat holding our absurdly small son wondering if I’d had some sort of stroke.

I was diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia, which is, maddeningly, a diagnosis by exclusion. Once everything else has been ruled out, that’s what you get, a rare condition about which little is known. Extreme stress, sleep deprivation, and excessive physical exertion are thought to be the triggers.

The effect was as if a bomb had gone off in my brain. All memories months into the past and future were turned to glass.

The tests showed an increased sensitivity to light and sound. This proved problematic with a small baby at the house. I was given to carrying earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones with me for diaper changes. Going outside without sunglasses triggered a migraine. A screaming police siren triggered a migraine. A teakettle triggered a migraine. A loud sneeze triggered a migraine.

I quit my job. The thought of trudging through that soulless routine coupled with my new condition caused me so much anxiety I couldn’t function.

I was home all the time. When my son was sleeping, I had to do something. When my son was at day care, I had to do something. When I couldn’t sleep, I had to do something. I turned to the piano.

The songs I had been working on for the previous few years sounded like boxes of broken glass. Some of them literally gave me headaches. To heal, I picked them apart, focused on the parts that were soothing, that felt right, and threw out what remained. I reshaped them, let them ring out into silence, and created something new.

WH: Did you know beforehand that you were writing songs specifically for this album, or did you choose from songs that had already been written?

GHO: I chose from songs I had previously written, but completely altered them, post-amnesia. I had a concept for an album I had been pursuing before I awoke in the hospital. That’s the raw material to which I returned

At the time, it was important to me to force the issue, to make the collection of songs work even if they felt wrong. That’s when I really started focusing on silence. I threw out the superfluous, ornamental bits and chiseled the songs to their core. Then I wrapped them in silence.

WH: The title of the album, Obsolete, is very evocative. How did you settle on this title, and what does it mean to you?

GHO: I really don’t like titling my own songs. When I do, they’re almost always non-sequiturs. I reached out to an old friend, gave him the raw, un-mastered tracks and asked him to title the songs. He suggested the title track be named “Requiem for Obsolete Technology.” A great song name, to be sure, but I felt single word song titles were more apropos, given my editing method and interest in silence.

In general, I often feel like I was born a couple hundred years too late. The world is the loudest it has ever been, and for someone who craves quiet it is a struggle to remain focused amongst the head-splitting sounds of squealing brakes, screaming people, crackling electric lines, and wailing sirens. I like to imagine what the world must have sounded like before the industrial revolution.

Actually finding a quiet place is becoming more difficult. I live in Denver, Colorado and the legalization of marijuana, along with our city’s policy of being as inviting as possible for new businesses, has created an immense influx of people. City streets are jammed beyond capacity, and what used to be an easy drive into the mountains has become an arduous chore. Hiking trails are as clogged as motorways. Landmarks are being vandalized.

Quiet places are vanishing. So I create them in music.

WH: Did you work on the songs for Obsolete individually or collectively? The titles of the songs suggest a link between them.

GHO: The songs I ended up including on Obsolete were originally written at completely different times. The only thing they had in common was the fact they were the ones I had been drawn to in the years and months leading up to my amnesia. When I slowed them down and picked them apart after my return from the hospital, I noticed new patterns and arranged their order on the album accordingly. I rarely worked on one song at a time. I typically shaped the whole set of songs at once. If I made a severe edit on one, it often let to a complementary edit on another.

I touched on this earlier, but I find naming my own songs difficult. My natural inclination is to be abstract and sarcastic with names, but I felt it would be a disservice to the honest and existential nature of these songs to name them so. The titles of the songs are representative of various themes that were woven through my life when I reworked them. Koan is inspired by the Richard Brautigan poem, “Karma Repair Kit, Parts 1-4.” Ambulator is in reference to the Max Frisch novel, Man in the Holocene.

Both of these speak to me on a level that is difficult to articulate. “Karma Repair Kit” is a reminder to be still and accepting. Not of anything in particular, but of everything in general. Man in the Holocene is a meditation on loneliness and struck a note within me during my recovery, despite the fact I read it a very long time ago; it just bubbled up out of my mind.

The other song titles are fairly literal and loosely based on my friend’s suggestions. 2014 was unequivocally the worst year of my life. The amnesia wasn’t even the most difficult struggle, but I’m not going to elaborate. The songs are my way of processing what happened.

WH: What’s the main intent behind your music? What are you trying to communicate to your listeners?

GHO: That sitting still, especially when it is uncomfortable, is important; that the act of listening, whether it’s active or passive, is important. It slows down your thoughts, so you can spend time with them. Depending on your type of mind or life situation, that may not be desirable, but then it is all the more impactful.

Modern city life is fast and loud. We run around from place to place, from work to home, from the gym to the grocery store, checking our watches or phones, making sure we don’t miss appointments; little of that matters to our internal lives. We focus so intently on what we have to do that we rarely stop to think what we would like to do. Or what we should do, not only for our own happiness but also for our own mental health.

Slow down and take a nap. Memorybell can help.

WH: Do you have a lot of unreleased songs?

GHO: I rarely make a proper recording until I’m satisfied that I have a cohesive collection of songs. I have a few songs that didn’t make the cut for Obsolete, but if I do anything with them, I’ll probably chop them up and use parts of them in another project. I’ve reworked one song that didn’t fit the way I wished it had for Obsolete and will most likely include it on the next record.

I don’t have a lot of unreleased material but I do, however, have a lot of unrecorded material. I don’t write any musical ideas down, I just run the songs through my head over and over. I have several albums worth of songs in various stages of completion floating in my brain. Sometimes I’ll carry a song around for years before I return to it. One song I’ve been working on for 19 years and it still hasn’t fully revealed its mysteries to me. My approach is that if something is worth recording, I’ll remember it. Thankfully, the part of my brain that stores my musical ideas seems largely unaffected by my amnesia.

WH: Are you currently working on something? What can we expect next from Memorybell?

GHO: I’ve had my fill of reworking old material for the moment. I’m moving forward with my new approach and writing an album from scratch. It’s very freeing, and my process has quickened; I’ve let go of thinking of any given idea as precious, as worthy of meticulous appreciation. If something doesn’t feel right, it’s gone. If some essence of it sticks around, then it has merit and will find a place in some different form. It’s a looser and faster method than I’ve ever used before. I’m halfway done with the follow-up to Obsolete. The songs still breathe slowly and are still melodic, but it’s somehow…different.

My main obstacle is lack of time. I have a 2 year-old and a newborn at home (both boys) and, unlike when I wrote Obsolete, I am now gainfully employed. My time to write is limited to naptime, or those rare occasions when I’m home alone. I’m finding it helps, actually. I carry around the songs in my head, tweak them, try different arrangements, and then when I finally have the time to play them and test my ideas out, the good ideas tend to present themselves more or less immediately.

Whatever comes next will be looser and more organic.

—

Memorybell’s debut album Obsolete is available now through Hidden Shoal. Head to the artist’s profile for all links and more info.

“Society these days is in such a rush. We bounce from one thing to the next, often, it seems, with little idea of where we’re going. As an artist I attempt to fold into my process a slowing down, preferably to a stasis where blurred notes and ideas become suspended, frozen in air where I can analyze and manipulate them. The songs included here for me represent stillness in many of its forms: sitting with discomfort, ennui, idleness, sadness, relief, and release. Once distraction is removed, we’re left with our bodies and thoughts which, in turn, can lead us to some unexpected realizations.” – Grant Hazard Outerbridge (Memorybell)

Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago

Chicago band Roommate, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album MAKE LIKE on review site Coke Machine Glow. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an extensive review on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.

TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, MAKE LIKE. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?

KL: I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:

“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, MAKE LIKE is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”

A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”

TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on Make Like evolved.

Roommate – MAKE LIKE

KL: From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become MAKE LIKE had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.

TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently?

Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster

KL: It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on Guilty Rainbow), but with MAKE LIKE, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.

TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?

KL: It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing MAKE LIKE involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?

TC: The production on MAKE LIKE is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?

Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago

KL: We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason & Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures… he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.

TC: MAKE LIKE was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an exhaustive understanding of audio. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?

KL: I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when MAKE LIKE’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with the robustness and density of the low-end in our mixes. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album Threace, and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s Tridecoder and Scary World Theory, Morr Music’s Blue Skied An’ Clear complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s Becs and Pantha Du Prince’s Black Noise), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates & Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.

TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether MAKE LIKE was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?

KL: I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being The Father Costume), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.

So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of MAKE LIKE, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.

TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, Jim O’Rourke and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s MAKE LIKE as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?

KL: It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album Congratulations semi-obsessively… But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called The Gravity of Our Commitment. It’s phenomenal.

TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in MAKE LIKE?!

KL: I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!

Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s MAKE LIKE is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via Strange Weather Records and Bandcamp.

Long Range Transmissions is also available as a free downloadable album via BandCamp.

“Long Range Transmissions” – A Hidden Shoal Compilation by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

“Music is color for life. Like a painting, it’s sometimes big, brutal brush strokes that leaves a thick black stain in the soul, at other times feather-light, embracing and soothing tiny pecks of color melting within the soul. In either case, magic. Let these sound canvasses paint your soul.” – Battlestations

“Music is Color for Life” A Mixtape by Battlestations by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from Binary Rooms. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.

MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?

MM: Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?

MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.

MM: We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.

MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?

MM: I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.

MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?

MM: It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.

MT: There’s no rhythm, right?

MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.

MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?

MM: I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.

Markus Mehr – Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra) from Hidden Shoal on Vimeo.

MT: Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?

MM: Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.

MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.

MM: A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.

MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?

MM: At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, Re-Directed, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.

MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?

MM: We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.

MT: And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?

MM: Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. Re-Directed is one, and a second one, called Dyschronia, is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! Re-Directed deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On Dyschronia I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.

“Running Man is drawn from the long-distance running tunes of ambient electronic producer Liminal Drifter. Delicately mixed by DJ maestro Warren S, these are songs that fuel the run and relax the body, moving through space, floating on the groove, effortlessly, in movement. Songs inhabiting the wandering psyche of the runner, paths of calm, shifting melody and gentle shuffling beats. Warren S resonates the mix in sympathy, a playful and harmonically uplifting curation.” – Liminal Drifter

“Running Man” A MixTape by Liminal Drifter by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

“Here is a collection of 13 melody-driven songs written in a wide time range (1947-1977). Melody is the one element I struggle with in my own music, so I have an appreciation for it as a listener. In many of these songs the writers and performers convey a melancholy mood without being cute, maudlin or sentimental – something I admire because I know it’s not easy to achieve.

Many of the artist names will be familiar, but in a few cases perhaps not the names of the songwriters or vice-versa. Where it applies, the name of the writer is included alongside the performer. Thanks to Cam at Hidden Shoal for asking me to share this mixtape.” – Todd Tobias

“Melody Makers” A MixTape by Todd Tobias by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

But that’s enough from us for now. Let’s hand it over to the good doctor as he pulls three questions out of the bag.

What kind of activity is your music made for?

Running, cycling, body action, movement in time, just breathing, washed in sonic waves, a back and forth, an up and down, a vibration, a passage of time. Time allows music. No time, no music, no movement. Resonance is all we have. I’m drawn to the resonance.

Why make music?

The human psyche; an almost unbearable number of excitable notions trying to break into the world, visceral and cerebral, stuff to be expressed and articulated. I think that’s where music comes in, tapping into that flow, reimagining, a crafting of emotions into sonic resonances that hopefully mean something to a listener. I’m drawn to that reimagining.

What’s your most treasured item of musical gear?

My bass guitar stands proudly in the corner reminding me there’s always a groove; the low, guttural, trouser-flapping power of music.

“Songs that sparkle and songs that evoke a powerful sense of place and often both things combined in the same song. I’m fascinated by melancholy and rapture in song and the way the two play with each other. A lot of this music is fairly new to me, music I fell in love with once I’d finished my own album, but there are some old friends here too, artists who have had and still have a profound effect on me, both as a listener and a writer. Hope you enjoy this sparkling sound-trip.”

“The Sparkling Ground” A MixTape by Chloe March by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

“This is the ‘sister’ to my previous mixtape, Kitsch Before Glitch – but they’re not identical twins. This mix is the complete opposite of the last. It’s music that has attracted me and moved me over the last six or seven months.

It starts with David Sylvian’s ‘Darkest Dreaming’, a beautiful miniature I rediscovered last summer when I was finishing the album Binary Rooms. I played it in the morning, before I started working, for an A/B mix comparison, during the breaks, and again at the end of the day. I am addicted to this song. It makes me remember my taxi driver days, when I would record one song onto tape over and over again (such as ‘Heartbeat’ by Sakamoto/Sylvian, ‘Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely’ by Hüsker Dü, or ‘Someone To Pull The Trigger’ by Matthew Sweet), then listen on repeat the whole night through.

After this intro you’ll hear a lot of outstanding music released in 2014, previously unreleased music, tracks from colleagues and with colleagues, and some hard-to-find electronic classics of the early ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. And it ends with The Beatles’… by accident. If you’ve been listening to the whole tape, you are definitely also a ‘Fool On The Hill’ – a very nice one.”
– Markus Mehr

“Glitch before Kitsch” by Markus Mehr by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

“Quality Instrumental Post-Rock with a fierce emotion that will blast your face off for its entirety… The songs blend together to form a tsunami of shredding guitars, loud violins, free horns, booming basses and hammering drums… One of the greatest of its genre.” – WRUV

Now listen and hear why every word of that quote is spot on.

Kryshe is the live and studio-based ambient project of German musician Christian Grothe. Grothe’s music often evolves from live improvisation sessions, incorporating sound-manipulation software such as max/msp to develop a richly layered yet spacious sound. Grothe is also a member of the improvisational trio Unland, featuring ambient artist Jonas Meyer and clarinetist Shabnam Pavaresh. His releases to date are the Dreamland and In Between EPs, and the full-length release Growing. Listen to Kryshe’s music and learn more about the artist here.

“Wealth” – A Mixtape by Kryshe by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

So let’s hand it over to Giuseppe as we ask him to pull three questions out of the bag…

Who is your dream collaborator?

Definitely Peter Hook from Joy Division-New Order!

Describe your musical career in 6 words or less.

Traveling, observe, breathe, absorb and release …

If you were writing a soundtrack/score, what director would you most want to work with?

David Lynch

“This mixtape is all instrumental, but for me it gives voice to the essence of Hidden Shoal’s sublime cinematic spirit. I press play and the pictures begin flickering to life. Why do particular pieces of music get inside while others merely bounce off? As a visual creator, the music that takes hold of me connects synaesthetically to the kinds of pictures that have always arrested me, and are somehow necessary. Albert Camus said “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened” (L’Envers Et L’Endroit, 1958). This mixtape brims with tunes that for me project those pictures in my mind and remind me that there is already an entire world within Hidden Shoal, wheeling through the cosmos. I hope the wheel can take other listeners back around to their important images. What pictures made you?” – Stuart Medley, Art Director and Hidden Shoal Partner

The Unspoken Wheel by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

Slow Dancing Society has become an institution in the ambient scene, with each successive album holding true to a core sound while gracefully evolving. Drew Sullivan’s releases are neither by-the-book ambient nor exercises in structuralism, rather music that is birthed from emotion and feeling, then given form. Each song is a soundtrack to a moment; sonic photography painstakingly developed until its emotional hues are brought into focus. His latest EP, The Dusk Recital, is a delicious little side-step for the Slow Dancing Society project, as Sullivan employ more beats and overt ’90s dream-pop references.

So without further rambling, we ask Drew to reach into the bag and pull out three questions…

Describe your musical career in 6 words or less

Hidden Shoal believed in my sound

What’s your most treasured item of musical gear?

Omnisphere by Spectrasonics. It is “THE” synth to have. I really don’t know what I’d do without that synth. A close second is my Fender Stratocaster. Oh and my Fender Bass VI…ok I can’t really name just one, but those 3 are the total foundation of the Slow Dancing Society sound.

What’s the best show you’ve ever been to?

There’s been a lot of great ones that are still with me today, but I’d have to say Marilyn Manson on the Mechanical Animals tour. This was at the height of his showmanship and I truly loved that album over all of this others as it had that 80’s sound before really anyone else was doing it.

“The concept for this mix has been stuck in my head for several years now. Each track in the mix is in the same position it would be in on the album it came from. For example, Questar is track one on Keith Jarrett’s My Song, Caravan! is track two on The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble’s Here Be Dragons. You get the picture.

Normally when I prepare for a mmix I start with a whole bunch of tracks and end up only using half. It usually comes together very quickly. With this mix I started with a single track and built it from there, not really knowing where it was going to end up.

It’s a mix filled with old favourites and newer discoveries. I hope you enjoy it.” – Ian Hazeldine

The Everlasting Thursday – A Mix for Winter Nights by Antonymes by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

John Harle: A History of Britain by Simon Schama

Chloë: I was blown away by this score when I first saw the series in 2000. John Harle is a brilliant saxophonist and his score features his playing and also includes evocative arrangements of British folksongs performed by singers including Emma Kirkby. This music made a deep impression on me and just seemed to work so well with the material and Schama’s dramatic storytelling style. There’s a lot of symbolism used in the imagery, rather than full-on historical re-enactments and the music works in the same way, with older instruments like pipes, flutes, harp and the fragments of folksong, conjuring these lost worlds and tapping into a kind of communal musical memory. Harle is great at drama, at one point his screeching sax underscoring shots of fires during the passages about the burning of heretics – it’s very eerie! The sheer variety of tone he can get from the sax too is phenomenal and he really plays with that across the series. Another thing I love about this soundtrack is the space in it – the programmes often have silence, both in the presentation and in the score itself – so there’s space to take in the narrative, the facts, the imagery, the emotion of the past.

Cam: Your mention of space here is key to any discussion on film scoring. It is an art and almost an alchemical process to be able to support and grow the narrative and vision with sound and music.

Chloë: Yes – it must be so tempting to do too much and try to impose your own style, when what’s needed is something completely different or even nothing at all. I guess the composer needs to be incredibly sensitive about supporting that vision.

Harle used to work in the National Theatre Music Department early on in his career and I think I can hear that theatre music vibe. A lot of the music that I heard growing up was theatre music being practised by my parents, who were both musicians at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, so I was hearing composers like Howard Blake, Ilona Sekacz and Stephen Warbeck a lot! I got used to hearing music and wondering what scene it was for, what atmosphere it was creating and how it was doing it. Musicians had to adapt to the demands of the productions, like my dad playing fanfares on animal horns instead of trumpets, and my mum, a classical pianist, having to learn the accordion, get her head around the Yamaha DX7 synth and, most entertainingly for the rest of us, the theremin. When I eventually studied drama at uni I wrote a lot of music for productions and really enjoyed that challenge of having to create a particular atmosphere in a very short time. Sometimes I find it’s great to be given instrumental constraints and very short time-frames to compose in, especially if the dramatic/visual material you have is powerful.

Cam: That’s a really interesting point as I think that challenge has drawn a number of artists into crossing over into scoring for film. I can’t help but think of Clint Mansell in this regard, who went from the chaotic pop maximalism of Pop Will Eat Itself to producing the gorgeous, restrained score to Moon (amongst others, of course).

Chloë: Yes, it seems like limitations often bring out amazing and surprising creative results. I wonder if some artists are so drawn to film because as well as the challenge of it and wanting to develop as writers, there’s also this common discipline in some pop music of creating intense imagery and atmosphere. Not that other composers don’t do that, just that in pop you learn to do it within a very short time-frame, so to a pop artist being given a 90-minute film to score would seem like a luxuriously long amount of time to work with, but each cue has to create immediate atmosphere, so it also has that familiar discipline. But maybe also it’s easier in pop to put artists into boxes and not expect them to change what they do too much, so film-scoring would be incredibly liberating in that way too for someone who felt frustrated by that. It’s great also to discover that you can actually compose to a deadline if you’re used to spending years on an album like I am! That sense of urgency can sometimes generate wonderful creativity too.

Harle has also described himself as ‘a romantic, both as a player and a composer’ and I think that’s a big part of why I’m so drawn to his music. There’s a strong modal component to this score, with the plainchant, the folksongs and the sax playing what sometimes sound like virtuosic jazz improvisations – and I’m very drawn to that modality too, it’s how I write my own songs. He uses a lot of pure tones, both with his sax playing and with the early music vocalists who use hardly any vibrato, and I’m really interested in the juxtaposition of these tones put together with lush, jazz-influenced harmony. I also have a strong classical foundation and love jazz harmony and folk melody, so it’s probably inevitable that I love Harle’s music! I didn’t think to try working with saxophone myself until my latest album, when Ted Watson, a superb musician, offered to play for me – so I was finally able to experiment with writing for and singing with soprano sax, which was just fantastic and a lovely new direction for me.

Gabriel Yared: The English Patient

Chloë: I was a fan of Gabriel Yared before seeing this film as I’d fallen in love with the soundtrack he wrote for Betty Blue, which I listened to for years before actually seeing the film. I think maybe the chemistry of Yared’s creative partnership with Anthony Minghella is a vital part of the magic of this score. When I discovered that Yared had been part of the filmmaking process right from the start it really made sense – there’s just a feeling that the music and the film developed together in a really organic way and that it’s all intensely driven by the emotion that’s at the heart of the film. Minghella said afterwards, ‘There was a sense of us being unusually connected’. He was a musician himself and also said that he approached his filmmaking ‘as much from musical form as conventional storytelling’ – which is really interesting. It was Minghella who suggested that Yared use the Aria from the Bach Goldberg Variations and also the incredibly beautiful, haunting Hungarian folksong sung by Márta Sebestyén.

Cam: That kind of partnership between the creative drivers of vision and sound in films seems to be so natural and right it’s almost disappointing that it isn’t de rigueur in the film-making process. That’s not to say most directors wouldn’t have a pure vision (!) for the sonic and musical elements needed for the film, but having that collaborative partnership up front could sometimes bring so much more.

Chloë: I totally agree. It’s been so interesting doing this feature finding that most of the soundtracks I really love have emerged from these partnerships. Joe Wright and Dario Marianelli is another wonderful one. His score for Pride and Prejudice had to begin even before shooting started and ended up being a phenomenally successful soundtrack. I just don’t understand why music is sometimes added during the last few weeks of editing. Maybe it works for some films and for some composers who thrive on that challenge, but it seems like a wasted opportunity to me.

I love the way that Yared uses the Bach, orchestrating it, and writing the most beautiful pastiche that adds a deeply romantic lushness, without sentimentalising it or sounding naff. A lot of my early learning of the piano involved playing Bach, so I feel like that music is an old friend. I’m really interested in pastiche and the difference between writing say a baroque-sounding piece or a piece that reminds you of baroque but also takes you somewhere else. When I was commissioned to compose a score for a re-working of a ballet by Kurt Jooss from the 1930s, the choreographer asked for a contemporary score that would still hark back to that era. I really wanted to evoke an atmosphere that hinted at the 1930s rather than write full-on pastiche, so I tried to get a sense of composers like Weill and Walton into the music by using certain rhythms and instrumentation and then actually used a few chords from Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka’ – I knew I could never compose like Stravinsky, but using his chords really pushed me to write music that I never thought I could and definitely took me right out of my comfort zone.

Cam: Have you found that this need to conceptualise when approaching score work is something that feeds back into your work as an artist, or is it something innate in the way you approach music as a whole?

Chloë: I’m not sure if it feeds back, or if that’s just how I am – it’s mostly ideas that make me feel creative, so yeah, it probably is the way I approach my music. Except for improvising, when I play the piano to express something immediately and for as long as I want! I’m much more aware of what I’m doing as a songwriter now, but sometimes I’ll write and finish a song in a few hours, and sometimes in months, so it’s a different process every time. I do usually like to have an idea to form the music around though. Usually it’s an idea that comes packed with powerful emotion or imagery and that resonates with what I’m feeling and wanting to express. What I love is to create these self-contained little worlds and atmospheres, so I’m drawn to vivid symbolism and imagery and stories.

It feels to me that Juliette Binoche is the heart of this film and it’s her character who has the Bach theme – I think it makes her character’s experience feel timeless, as well as redemptive because Bach has that spiritual link to church music, but it’s also timeless in its humanity and beauty too. There’s so much suffering and tragedy in the different narratives, but hers has this gorgeous lightness and hope to it. The scene in the church where her lover Kip transports her around the walls on a rope to look at the frescoes with a flaming torch is just so beautiful. At the moment when Kip lifts her off the ground Yared uses pizzicato strings and then brings in his beautiful Bach pastiche in the bowed strings with harp gliss as well, and it’s just perfect for the scene. There’s such joy in that music, but there is also melancholy there and this heartbreaking fragility and lightness, so you know her joy is probably temporary and that it’s come after so much devastating loss. All the strands of creativity going on – the music, Binoche’s utterly beautiful acting, the way we lift off with her and the timing of the scene within the whole film – it just really gets me every time!

Hans Zimmer: Interstellar (contains spoilers)

Chloë: I’m quite surprised to find myself talking about Hans Zimmer. I wouldn’t really have put him as one of my top favourite film composers before, but this soundtrack did really take me over during the film and I found it very powerful stuff. It’s a combination of electronic elements with orchestra/choir/organ and piano. He had no less than six orchestrators working with him on this score and it really does sound like a massive team effort. I felt like I was just taken captive by this film and manipulated and spun off into all sorts of different emotional states – and the music was a huge part of that. It’s fantastically epic but also has a lot of tension and meditative space in it too and underpins the emotional core of the father/daughter relationship with its long separation, sense of loss and also deep love and connectedness. This theme is beautiful I think, a combination of quite cold, slightly threatening soundscape with what becomes a melancholy piano/organ piece. Apparently Zimmer composed the score over a period of two years alongside the director Christopher Nolan shooting/scripting the movie, so it sounds like another case of a strong emotional, creative connectedness between director and composer.

Cam: Considering the scope of this film it seems fitting to have such an involved and long-range approach to the score. You can’t help but appreciate the kind of nuances that can be afforded with such a long-term involvement in the musical and sonic aspects of the film.

Chloë: Absolutely. I wonder if this kind of long-term involvement happens more in TV music where composers are on board for long series and really get to have that intense collaborative process – like Bear McCreary with Battlestar, or Jeff Beal with House of Cards. I really love both those soundtracks and also Frans Bak’s score for The Killing. Even though they’re having to write extremely quickly, these composers are developing music alongside the show with this long development arc – it must be great to do.

The moment in the cinema when I thought ‘this music is just brilliant’ was the scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character is driving his car through the fields on his way to fly the spaceship and the music just rachets up notch by notch until it actually sounds like rocket-launching music while he’s still driving the car – it’s such a clever moment and just got me totally emotionally involved with the film from that point on. I love repetitive patterns in music, used a lot in film scores, and this one is one of the best examples of that kind of rhythmic instrumentation in the style of Reich or Glass, being built on and lushed out, that I’ve heard in a while.

Anthony Gonzalez from M83/Joseph Trapanese: Oblivion

Another sci-fi, but I reckon this film is all about nostalgia and I think that’s probably why I really liked the soundtrack by M83 and Joseph Trapanese. There is beautifully futuristic imagery in this film, but the overall feel is one of almost unbearable melancholy and nostalgia I found. It’s partly the fact that it’s Tom Cruise in the lead, occasionally on a motorbike, giving this nostalgic tilt towards his movies of the ’80s, but it also made me think of Blade Runner. The soundtrack also triggers these references, as it’s so reminiscent of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis. There’s pastoralism too, as Cruise’s character goes back to his cabin by a lake on a pristine bit of Earth – it’s this gorgeous contrast with the post-apocalyptic bleakness of the destroyed land and the sharp shiny minimalist sky-pods they live in. Of course, when he goes back to his cabin it has his collection of vinyl records of Tangerine Dream and Blue Oyster Cult and he lies by the lake listening to Led Zeppelin and Procol Harum. It’s not just a yearning in the context of the film for a pre-war Earth-home, it feels like a heartfelt yearning of now for 20/30 years ago.

Cam: Perhaps the Tangerine Dream vinyl was a nod to the Risky Business soundtrack! The temporal mis-match of Cruise’s character’s nostalgic musical yearning is interesting – this would have been the music of his great great great grandparents, I assume. Yet the film-maker makes a choice to work with the audience’s collective musical notions of nostalgia. I guess it’s all part of the beautiful trickery that is cinema.

Chloë: Ah yes, I hadn’t thought of that! It definitely worked on me, anyway! Nostalgia and music is so intriguing – seems that sometimes it’s within the music itself and sometimes triggered by it and all the cultural memories around it. I often actually feel nostalgic for eras and places I never even knew or went to, just through music – which is very strange! It happens when I hear film soundtracks from the ’50s and ’60s, for instance, or even jazz from the ’40s. I don’t really know what’s going on there, maybe that’s a common thing – I’m not sure!

I’m really interested in the way that this synth-driven soundtrack is used as a kind of humanising element in the film – there is a lot of orchestration and piano motifs, but it’s when the synths have full rein that you feel really connected to Cruise’s character I think. Maybe it’s because we now have this long history of synth-centred music and it’s actually a warm familiar genre now and a communal memory for us, rather than the futuristic-seeming sound it was in the ’70s and ’80s. Now maybe it’s associated with a kind of technological innocence, which is a pretty strange thing. When I listened to Tangerine Dream as a teenager I just found it completely hypnotic, exciting and all-enveloping. The first time I actually played a synth was when I was 15 and my sister’s boyfriend left one in our house for a few weeks. I composed this soundtrack inspired by a sculpture that an artist in residence had made at school. It was a fantastic feeling to be able to access all the different pads and multi-track and get these really deep evocative sounds and I think that’s where my love-affair with making electronic music started.

So without further ado, we ask Christian to reach into the bag and pull out three questions…

What kind of activity is your music made for?

When I listen to music, I like to get lost in the world of sound. I try to make music that I can get lost in, so maybe that’s the activity it was made for. But you can also use the music to create a nice atmosphere, just like you might light a candle.

What song of yours is most important to you and why?

The Growing EP is very important to me and I see it as one song because it came out of one live session. Although my sound is now a bit different, the creation of that EP was part of the process of developing my live set, and therefore a very important step in exploring the way in which I make music.

Why make music?

I make music because I’ve never done anything else! Because I’m a quiet person, when I make music I feel like I can express my stillness. Ideally, the music I make in the moment feels like an extension of myself. And maybe that’s why we’re here: to experience ourself. I think music is a very good way to do that.

Down Low by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

It’s been over a decade since Half Film split. The San Francisco trio released two LPs during their short run – 1998’s East of Monument and its 2000 follow-up, The Road to the Crater, both of which were re-released by Hidden Shoal in 2012.

The three have since scattered across the world – Jason hovered around California and now resides in Berkeley where he’s working on a new record for his sort-of-solo project Mist and Mast. In 2002, Conor and Eimer joined with members of Swell to form [the] caseworker (whose last two albums Letters from the Coast and Voices Out There were put out through Hidden Shoal) before going on an extended in hiatus in 2006. Conor moved to South Africa and now lives in Switzerland; Eimer left for Ireland but is back in Northern California. Along with the rest of [the] caseworker, they’ve spent the last few years demoing a third record by e-mail which will see the light of day in 2015 under the moniker AWMA.  Here, the trio discuss the music they made at the turn of the century.

“We never felt [our records] got properly released for reasons I won’t go into,” Jason tells me over e-mail. I probe for a few days but it seems the frustrations are too deep to dig up. Eimer offers the same sentiment: “Just reading some of the references to old acquaintances gives me a stomach ulcer.” Conor opts not to name names, but chalks his discontent up to “a bottomless well of incompetence,” – label mismanagement, perennially intoxicated distributors and plain bad luck.

Half Film – ‘Coated’

Yet the resonance of the music over-powers any lingering angst over the machinations of a bloated industry. How could it not? Every track on East of Monument is catchy in the strangest possible way – almost anti-catchy. The songs embed themselves into that strange part of your brain that’s active when you’re halfway between sleep and wakefulness.

“I have very good memories of writing the songs, the rehearsals, hanging out,” Conor says. “But as others will tell you, I find having to listen to the records very traumatic. I feel they were never as good as what we (or maybe just I) heard in our heads, and there’s a gap between what you want to do and what you’re capable of. And when I hear the records, I’m hearing that gap and I assume everyone else hears it too. Having said that, when I had to hear the songs again recently to make sure the re-mastering went to plan, I could still hear very clearly what we were trying to express at the time, and I thought it was an honest expression of who and what we were at the time. We weren’t faking anything. ”

Eimer puts it another way: “I commute over the Golden Gate bridge a few times a week and since listening to the Half Film records again, as my bus approaches the bridge in the evening in my head I hear Con and Jay singing Hang and it gets me in the gut every time. I think that song means the most to me of any Half Film song.” Listening to Hang, it’s easy to get that same sense of despairing endless space; as the closing track on East of Monument, it carries the heart-breaking weight of an elegy to a something precious long since lost.

Half Film – ‘Machines, Hawks And The Perfect Equation’

“Listening to the old Half Film discs – especially East of Monument – gives me a sense of nostalgia I don’t get from recordings of any of my other bands throughout the years,” says Jason. “I listen to ‘Coated’ and I get visions of the patterns on the walls of a club we played, the smell of a bar we hung out in.

“Another thing about that time – there were a lot of little scenes, but we weren’t a part of any of them. I know that’s what everyone says, but it’s true. Other band’s members had played in each others bands for years. We were content along the sidelines, going to practice, then the bar (sometimes just the bar), then back to Conor and Eimer’s to listen to the day’s record store finds.”

Conor concurs. “We were definitely not a part of the scene; it felt natural to stay away. It still does,” he says. “San Francisco feels like a long way in the past now, but it’s great to look back and to have had such a unique experience while I was there. The memories are in the records.”

Check out East of Monument and The Road to the Crater at Half Film’s artist profile. The songs from both albums are also available for licensing through Hidden Shoal.

by Matthew Tomich.

“A few years back, together with a friend i ran a small and cosy club (Der Pavian) in my hometown. Once or twice a month we had nights called Las Vegas Ballroom or Farfisa Club were I was putting on records just like these. These nights were packed and it was so much fun to play this timeless music. The guys who wrote, recorded and sang these songs were gods to me. The sonic quality is so unique, they did incredible arrangements for fantastic songs. This music from the sixties and seventies might be a bit over the top here and there but it will always have a special place in my heart, so i hope you enjoy this mixtape just as much as i do.  P.S. and yes, the vinyl-noises are authentic…” – Markus Mehr

“Kitsch Before Glitch” by Markus Mehr by Hidden Shoal on Mixcloud

Under his solo moniker, Markus Mehr has made a career out of patterns. Before the release of his fifth record Binary Rooms last month, his last three albums – a triptych of interconnected ambient/drone records, beginning with IN in January 2012, ON 6 months later and concluding with OFF in January 2013 – were exercises in sonic ritual, building upon repetitions of harsh electronic noise, warm synths and ethereal sound manipulation. But on Binary Rooms, Mehr’s new preoccupation is with duality and the relationship between opposites: warm and cool, organic and synthetic, reality and fiction. Part of that latter juxtaposition comes because much of the material on Binary Rooms began as field recordings.

“I didn’t sit down and play a piano or play the guitar and see what’s coming out of me,” Mehr tells me over Skype from his home studio in Augsburg, Germany. “So it’s more a collecting kind of thing. Then you start out and play around with things. It’s more that a sound or a recording or a noise attracts me, and I want to find out what is it and what can I do with it. Can I extend it? Can I slice it? Can I trash it or can I refine it? Like everybody who does field recordings I always put my ear on things to find a spectacular sound. It could be a car that drives by my window. It could be my cat. He’s snoring and that’s a beautiful sound. And after that hunting, a lot of editing and processing follows up.”

“I’m basically a musician, but on Binary Rooms, most of the time I did non-musical things. I see myself nowadays as more of a phonographer. I look at what’s outside and what’s surrounding me. That’s maybe where the whole thing starts. ‘Gymnasium Swarms’ starts with a sound from my kitchen. So you can hear my heater here. It’s a very spooky sound.”

The result of Mehr’s new found interest in field recordings and found sounds is a record that’s diverse and brimming with aural contradictions. The eight tracks on Binary Rooms offer so much variation that it’s impossible to settle upon a mood for more than a single composition. Opener ‘Buoy’ is 2 minutes of claustrophobic and uneasy listening, littered with sparse and unsettling sounds that sound as though they could be metal scraping against metal, the plucking of an out-of-tune violin or something else entirely. It’s followed by ‘In The Palm Of Your Hand’ which marries pulsating synthetic percussion with a somber piano riff and street ambience, before the harsh glitches of ‘Pedestrians’ strike like an electric shock. What Mehr appears to be doing on Binary Rooms is inhabiting a creative space that situates him somewhere between composer, phonographer and assembler of the aural world around him.

“[On Binary Rooms] I’m doing collages and putting things together to try to arrange new levels and new worlds,” he explains. “I try to redesign realities. I try to redesign reality in itself – maybe from A to B, you make C. To try to bring things together that usually don’t belong together – that’s exciting.

“For example, ‘Basin of the Lost’ is based on underwater recordings where all these really sad fishes swam in a tank, ready to become a burger or wha ever just a few hours later. And during the editing of the track, I don’t know why, but I thought a helicopter sound would be great. So in the real world these two audio events don’t belong together, but in the track – I mean, it makes sense somehow, and it keeps the whole thing weird and narrative. That’s the kind of work that interests me most right now.”

At 86 seconds, the track ‘Blackbox’ feels like an interlude, but buried beneath its oscillating synths is a fascinating subtext. Mehr initially began working on the then-unnamed song in 2013, and found himself applying some finishing touches on July 17, when less than a day’s drive from Augsburg, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed in Ukraine, killing all passengers on board. Though the title was eventually changed to ‘Blackbox’, Mehr initially named the track ‘MH17’ as a means to force himself to remember the tragedy.

“I had no title for that track,” he says, “and I thought, we have so much news – so many things around our head every day – and if we are honest, that tragedy is almost out of our minds right now. And it was very personal, because I’ve tried to make a mark in my mind that it happened while I was working on that track. There are so many tragedies we have to see on the screen and after two or three days they’re gone. I wanted to make sure that this one doesn’t go out of my mind anymore.”