Tag Archives: Simon Fisher Turner

Sunroof / Simon Fisher Turner / MICROCORPS / Nik Colk Void – IKLECTIC Art Lab, London 20.05.2022

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MICROCORPS / Alexander Tucker

Mute and Mute Song artists took over the IKLECTIK Art Lab near London’s Waterloo on Friday 20 May 2022 for a night of electronic music adventures.

Alexander Tucker’s MICROCORPS project offered faltering, industrial beats that usually formed out of a noisy, joyous sprawl of rapidly switched patch cables, over which he was prone to howl processed, wordless missives. An element of surprise dominated Tucker’s set, with sounds and rhythms cutting out suddenly just as you’d figured out how to shuffle along. A final segment found Tucker accelerating a beat so harshly that it rapidly left gabba territory and more than likely broke Moby’s ‘Thousand’ record with its pacing before abruptly stopping.

Simon Fisher Turner

Simon Fisher Turner presented nowhereyet, his sounds – inchoate melodies, processed cello, clamorous beats – set to a slideshow of London photographs by Sebastian Sharples. There was something eerie about Sharples’ photos, appearing to show a mostly empty, lockdown-era vision of the capital. We cross-cross from Spitalfields to the bombed-out sanctuary of St. Dunstan in the-East; from monolithic skyscrapers to snow-covered residential streets; from Canary Wharf construction to a deserted Bond Street. Fisher Turner’s music seemed to carry the same sort of alien, mournful sparseness; it’s as if the sounds and images, to paraphrase the enquiry ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’, pondered the question as to whether a place devoid of its people can still be considered a place at all.

Sunroof / Daniel Miller & Gareth Jones

Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones resurrected their occasional Sunroof collaboration for a celebrated collection of modular synth improvisations, released last year as Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1. For their Iklectik set, they were seated opposite one another in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage’s 1968 chess game, the board and its pieces replaced by innumerable boxes of flashing lights and tangles of coloured cables. In contrast to the pieces on their album, the set was intensely rhythmic, with grids of spare, almost skeletal beats instead of carefully-wrought, sinewy sequences. Miller and Jones have been friends and sonic adventurers together since 1982 and the symbiosis between them as they teased rhythms and patterns from their kit without ever seeming to communicate with one another was a testament to that enduring partnership.

The evening was interspersed with DJ sets from Nik Colk Void, ranging from juddering techno through to a memorable after-hours moment where she dropped Mudhoney’s socially-undistanced anthem, ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’.

Nik Colk Void / Mat Smith – photo by Leanne Mison

See Sebastian Sharples’ photos of the night at Instagram.

Words and bad photos: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Documentary Evidence

Isabella, Jasper And Simon Fisher Turner – Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody

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Isabella, Jasper And Simon Fisher Turner - Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody

Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody is an album by Simon Fisher Turner and his two children, Isabella and Jasper. Its release was prompted by a conversation between SFT and Charles Powne from the Soleilmoon label about a specific album of children’s music, which in turn gave Fisher Turner pause to mention a project he’d been working on using the recorded voices of his children, which turned out to be this album.

It is a deliberately personal album, but one that is faithful to an aesthetic that Fisher Turner Sr. has been employing for the last few years under the banner of Guerrilla Audio; the concept also extends as far back as you care to look in his back catalogue, right back to when he first alighted upon a Revox tape machine. It involves making discrete, covert recordings that find their way into later sound works, adding a naturalistic, unpredictable quality alongside electronic structures; they sit somewhere between field recordings and the wiretapped conversations of vintage Scanner. 

In the case of Savage Songs…, the fifteen pieces included here represent the majority of the lifetimes of Fisher Turner’s two children, now deep into their teenage years. They are constructed from recordings that Fisher Turner made of them while they were growing up – little nonsense poems, overheard conversations, early attempts at French, the sounds of innocent young minds hard at work learning or playing or inventing fantastical worlds that they then inhabit, even if briefly. They are like tiny time capsules of Isabella and Jasper’s youth, otherwise lost to the mists of memory and age were it not for their father’s idea to recor them. The effect is both universally nostalgic for anyone who looks back with misty eyes on the all-too-rapid maturity of their children (and who wishes they’d preserved those memories better; more respectfully; more completely), yet also deeply personal for Fisher Turner who so attentively documented their growing up in this way. 

Nostalgia might abound in the mournfully-arranged pieces like ‘Cream and Latin Odor’, ‘The Sad Skipping Story’ and ‘The Mighty Dinosaurs’ (the latter with The Elysian Quartet), which have a sweetness and poignancy in the musical accompaniments, but a sense of inevitable playfulness can also be found here. ‘OH YEAH, forget about it, YEAH’ judders along on fragmented electronic patterns like sonic hopscotch, underpinned by a dismissive refrain from Isabella that, from a teenage mouth, would sound cutting and hurtful; ‘BlahXBlahXBlahX’ is noisy and rambunctious, nudged forward by retro computer game chip sounds and a processed “blah-blah-blah” refrain that suggests young Jasper was completely oblivious to his dad following him around with a microphone; ‘Squirrel Song’ is a stentorian waltz set to springy synths that commences with some gentle harmonising from the two young Turners; ‘JAZZ JAM corner’ sounds like a short offcut from The Residents’ Commercial Album. 

In his honest, truthful and tender press release Fisher Turner says that there will be no second volume, in spite of the hours of unused recordings that remain on his overflowing hard-drive. His children are now 17 and 15, and the idea of being trailed around by a doting father with sound intentions no longer seems as fun as it did when they were tiny. Savage Songs…, then, represents a loving gift; a one-off; a unique paean to unique childhoods and the unstoppable act of getting older. 

Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody by Isabella, Jasper and Simon Fisher Turner is released September 4 2020 by Soleilmoon.

An email to Simon Fisher Turner, 6 August 2020. 

Dear Simon, 

Thank you for sending this across. 

I have to say, for all sorts of reasons, the press release moved me profoundly, and I confess to having shed a tear while reading it. Anyone with children who have suddenly grown up almost without you noticing – because it wasn’t sudden; never could be; you just didn’t see, or perhaps refused to accept, the signs – would recognise some of the sentiment in that. And that’s before I have even listened to it. My two daughters are 14 and 12. I don’t recognise them. I’m just some old fart whose music tastes they do not want to understand and who is boring because he tries to work hard to provide for them. 

I remember once, probably in 2008 or 2009, sending you a text from St Albans. I was waiting outside a uniform shop where my now-14-year-old was being fitted out for her first school uniform. I have no idea why I said this to you, nor what conversation we were in the middle of at the time. You told me you could relate. It felt like her future and her sister’s future were starting in earnest. Now they try to customise their uniforms, skirt length, hair length etc to the limits of what might get them a detention and I’m still waiting outside shops while they try on clothes. 

Strangely, too, something in your press release text made me nostalgic for my own childhood. It was the reference to Soleilmoon asking about an album of children’s songs. I had such an album as a kid. It was called All Aboard, a beautiful LP that had all sorts of classic songs on it, like Bernard Cribbins singing ‘Right Said Fred’. It also had ‘The Laughing Policeman’ on it, which got scratched on one of the policeman’s laughs, creating a locked groove that was utterly disturbing for this toddler playing nearby and might explain why the cut-ups of Burroughs and loops that I read about (before hearing them) fired up my imagination so much. I kept meaning to buy a second-hand copy while the girls were small, and now they’re not. And neither am I. 

I look forward to listening to this and writing about it before release. You can probably guess the thoughts and nostalgia with which I will approach it. Think of this as a preview. 

Thank you, 

Mat 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence 

Stubbleman & Simon Fisher Turner – Purcell Room, 20.11.2019 + new SFT remix

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“Was that what you were expecting?” asked a confused lady sat next to me as Simon Fisher Turner and Laura Moody concluded their opening set of electronics and expressive cello playing.

Being well-versed in Fisher Turner’s varied musical output I replied that it was exactly what I was expecting, at least in terms of approach; that said, even I was a little scared out of my wits as loud splinters of noise unexpectedly peppered a suite of sounds encompassing overheard recordings of what could have been people milling about in the bar before the show, the sound of plates being spun around on a tabletop, wonky rhythms created from breathy stutters and all sorts of intriguing, richly textured sonic events.

Alongside this, Laura Moody took a whole-instrument approach to her cello playing, striking the strings with the flat of her bow to create springy, bassy reverberations, tapping the back to develop rhythms, furiously sawing away to develop dissonant, upper-register squeals, or playing the bridge instead of the strings. Occasionally Fisher Turner would play sections of strings, and with that as a cue, Moody would then settle into what one might describe as a more traditional sort of playing, her cello cresting above the recorded strings without ever sounding too mournful or melancholy.

The pieces were taken from Fisher Turner’s forthcoming album with the ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal, with whom he recorded his version of John Cage’s 4’33” for Mute’s STUMM433 boxset. ‘Is this jazz?’ asked the lady next to me, largely unmoved by my explanation of what she’d just observed and my enthusiastic summary of Fisher Turner’s career in everything from pop to soundtracks to sound art.

I could (half) see her point. Fisher Turner and Moody’s set was not jazz, and neither was the artist they were supporting – Pascal Gabriel, in his Stubbleman guise – but they could be forgiven for asking the question. Gabriel’s performance formed part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, and even if you took a most liberal definition of what jazz is, the music he performed – a 55-minute seamless journey through his entire Mountains And Plains album and an extract from a new work inspired by his fastest time cycling Mont Ventoux in Provence – wasn’t jazz. But hey, genres are just labels anyway.

Gabriel faced a challenge with realising the many-layered sounds presented on Mountains And Plains for a live show without resorting to an unadulterated laptop playback non-performance. Instead, he painstakingly crafted a series of electrically-controlled automata housed in old-fashioned travel trunks that could be triggered to perform melodies alongside his and his Rotem Haguel’s playing. Watching a drum kit play itself on a piece like ‘South 61 West 14’ was a strange delight to behold, the kind of stuff of dreams or episodes of Bagpuss. One imagines that Luigi Russolo and his merry band of Futurists would have approved.

Watching the machines, which occupied centre stage with Haguel and Gabriel flanking them, was nothing short of mesmerising, reminiscent of Victorian player-pianos and fairground organs yet positioned within an ultra-modern context. Hearing the machines play the haunting, filigree passages of ‘Piety Wharf’ or ‘Abiquiú’, accompanied by visuals of the environments that Gabriel and his wife Pippa observed on their road trip across America was moving in a plaintive, unexpected way.

Gabriel concluded his performance with a twenty-minute concluding extract from his second Stubbleman release, titled 1:46:43. The suite is named after his best time on Mont Ventoux, and its inputs were the various metrics his bike’s onboard computer recorded throughout the best part of two hours of hard peddling – heart rate, cadence and so on – which Gabriel then turned into electronic sequences.

The extract was given extra poignancy by Gabriel’s explanation that his composition was also informed by the abortive climb of Mont Ventoux by British cyclist Tom Simpson, who died a short distance from the peak during the 1967 Tour de France. The music taken from 1:46:43 could immediately be linked to the stylistic poise of Mountains And Plains while taking on a hypnotic, meditative edge and restless drama that nodded firmly in the direction of Philip Glass and Terry Riley.

Ahead of the show, SFT has remixed ‘Abiquiú’ from Mountains And Plains.

Pascal Gabriel: keys, modular synth, Artiphon, theremin, foot controller

Rotem Haguel: bass, Moog Sub Phatty

Watch the rehearsal video below.

Read my interview with Pascal Gabriel here. Read the review of Mountains And Plains here.

(c) 2019 Documentary Evidence

Electronic Sound 53 – including my Mute STUMM433 feature

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The latest issue of Electronic Sound is now available in the usual high street retailers and as a bundle with an exclusive 7″ from their website. This issue has a primary focus on Berlin, featuring conversations with Alexander Hacke from Einstürzende Neubaten, Mick Harvey, Simon Bonney and others who recall the vibrant creative melting pot that the divided city represented in the late 70s and early 80s. The accompany 7″ features Berlin legends Malaria! while Gudrun Gut from band offers her take on sometime Berlin resident David Bowie’s ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ on the B-side.

My major contribution to issue 53 was a feature on John Cage’s seminal composition 4’33” and the incoming Mute STUMM433 project. For this feature I interviewed K Á R Y Y N, Daniel Miller, Simon Fisher Turner, Irmin Schmidt, Laibach, Pink Grease and Maps, each of whom explained how they approached their performance of Cage’s distinctive piece – where they recorded it, and what instrument they didn’t play. Each of the 58 versions on STUMM433 is wildly different from the next, each one includes its own individual story and accompanying visual, and only one of the inclusions is actually silent – just as Cage would have wanted.

This feature involved me diving back into Cage’s Silence book – something I’d first tackled in my late teens when I found a copy in my local library and studying the score. One took much longer than the other. It also awoke in me an interest in Zen after reading about Cage’s following of these ascetic Buddhist principles.

Elsewhere in this issue I reviewed Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss. by Maps; the score to Marnie by Bernard Herrmann; David Tibbet and Andrew Lisle’s debut Nodding God album; the latest Blow collaboration on Front & Follow by Polypores and Field Lines Cartographer; and a fantastic new Buchla-based concept album by Simon James.

(c) Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Electronic Sound

Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner – Care (Editions Mego album, 2018)

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Pairing two esteemed sound artists together, Care found Klara Lewis working in collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner across four long, painstakingly-created atmospheric pieces for Editions Mego.

These are pieces built from discrete sonic movements, never quite following any sort of predictable path or settling into formulaic ambient / soundscape familiarity. Opening piece ‘8’ is a case in point – 15 minutes in length and consisting of noisy interruptions interlaced with quieter found sound – conversation, birds, whispering near-silence – each gyration from one passage to another catches you off guard, typically just as you think the track has settled into itself. Electronics are processed into grainy distortion and rhythmic gestures are compressed into harsher shapes, often for the briefest of moments before being harshly cut into silence at seemingly randomised points.

It’s a conceit that Lewis and Turner use across Care without ever once feeling like they’ve settled into some sort of cosy familiarity, either with one another as collaborators, or with the material they’re working with. Far from it – these four pieces are alive with a continual tension and drama, never quite betraying where they might evolve to next, or for how long, or which section might suddenly re-emerge.

Each piece here is subtly different – ‘Drone’, despite its name, isn’t some sort of elaborate, dense dronescape but a piece filled with haunting textures and minimalist piano passages, along with an interruption from what sounds like a mediaeval folk ritual; ‘Tank’ utilises glitchy electronics that seem like they’re writhing out of control, fleeting voices and a processed jazz epilogue that feels skewed toward the point of Lynchian nausea.

The final track, ‘Mend’ starts out with genteel synth chords before becoming elaborately distorted over its full length, though it’s imperceptible at what point the piece lurches from nice to nasty. I was listening to this while descending through the clouds on the way into New York’s JFK. Its evolution from serene drift to noisy texture seemed the perfect soundtrack to the change in vista from uncluttered blue sky to the chaotic sprawl of Queens and Manhattan beyond.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen – Soundescapes (Mute Artists album, 2011)

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‘I think we’re both rebels,’ is how Simon Fisher Turner summarised Soundescapes, his distance collaboration with documentary film-maker Espen J. Jörgensen which was released by Mute Artists in November 2011. The product of a chance encounter following Jörgensen browsing MySpace in response to having heard Turner’s soundtrack to the David Lynch movie Nadja, Soundescapescontains thirteen tracks of adventurous sonic exploration, marking this out as the freshly-independent Mute’s most experimental release so far, and reuniting Turner with the enduring faith of Daniel Miller, whose original Mute imprint was Turner’s primary output for a large chunk of his career.

On the gatefold cardboard sleeve (which hides a fold-out poster), Turner is credited with ‘structure, rearrangements, composing, editor, voice, life recordings’ while Jörgensen is responsible for ‘sampling, circuit bent & analogue instruments, beats, oscillators, rain app, voice, composing’. From how the pair have described their collaboration, this demarcation of roles and responsibilities was crucial to Soundescapes‘ genesis – Jörgensen would effectively ‘feed’ Turner a diverse array of almost random recorded sounds, the sources of which were often not evident or known to the recipient, while over the course of two to three years Turner would process those sounds into the tracks via harsh edits into the thirteen songs included on the album. Just as Turner would be blind to the sources of the sounds, Jörgensen would often find it yet harder to identify his own sounds in the resulting tracks. Jörgensen’s sound sources included circuit bent instruments, snatches of conversations and pounded wood among others, none of which are remotely identifiable on the album. It’s also worth bearing in mind that this collaboration occurred without either side ever meeting one another, nor even speaking over the phone.

One condition of the collaboration would be that each side was unable to challenge the other, meaning that Jörgensen would not comment extensively on the final tracks Turner was sending him, while Turner would be the one to ask for more sounds or indeed decide when Jörgensen should stop the pipeline of noises. Jörgensen only commented on two tracks, one of which, ‘Tristfull’, includes one of the more identifiable sound sources in the form of a French rain shower recorded by Turner, soaking the backdrop with organic sound while layers of what could be tinkly music box sounds (but easily could be from something entirely different) dominate the foreground. Similarly ‘Drippex’, which starts with a snatch of wobbly, Marc Bolan-esque vocals (one of Turner’s own contributions) wanders off on nice gentle synth arpeggios, while closer ‘Twomen’ features snatches of what Jörgensen calls ‘bedtalk in Japanese’ and simple, layered baby xylophone loops. These are three of the prettier tracks here, a direct contrast with the busy ‘Noise Activity’ which Jörgensen originally described to me as the duo’s ‘ADHD track’ when describing its short abrasive punch to the eardrums.

Jörgensen sent me a photo of one of his favourite sound sources, a circuit bent Speak & Learn children’s education tool that I vaguely remember from my own childhood. That trademark electronic voice tone is evident (I think) on ‘Worry’, but instead of the friendly computer I remember, that voice is manic, distorted and uncomfortable to listen to, while all the while a regimented grid of pulsing not-quite-beats and synth squalls keep time. Elsewhere tracks blend together calm and serene tones with mechanistic cyborg confrontationalism, a case in point being the (almost) title track ‘Soundescape’ (early versions of which Jörgensen sent me as a ‘legal bootleg’), wherein vast blankets of Eno-esque drift clash with the abrupt intrusion of broken electronic machinery whirring to life.

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‘Selfcentred’ starts with drones and noxious clouds of threatening noise, concluding with brief snatches of what could be tiny orchestral loops if you listen really closely punctuated by patches of strained silence. Most tracks on Soundescapes are perfunctory affairs, generally lasting no more than four minutes or so, until you reach the hypnotic ‘Start At The End’ which stretches out its template of loops and grinding Throbbing Gristle-style industrial sound closer to the nine minute mark. Some Aphex-style detuned and distorted beats emerge toward the end of this album highlight, closing out the track with thunderous and gorgeous noise.

When I tried to import this CD into iTunes, the genre that came up was ‘pop’. Surely this should be ‘subversive pop’, given the often punishing sonic assault that the listener is presented with, and it is amusing to imagine a parallel dimension in which this is what pop music might sound like. For me, this noisy and adventurous release is a welcome, uncompromising, addition to New Mute’s diverse 2011 release schedule, a direct relative of its more sonically challenging material from yesteryear and a not-so-gentle reminder that Mute’s genesis lies squarely in electronic music’s wilder hinterlands. Sometimes you just need something a bit more edgy to clear your head, and Soundescapes does that many times over the course of its 40-odd minutes.

Originally posted 2011; edited 2018.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Simon Fisher Turner – De Dentro Hacia Afuera (The Tapeworm album, 2009)

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Translated, literally, as From The Inside Out, Simon Fisher Turner‘s De Dentro Hacia Afuera was issued as a white cassette on the consistently interesting Tapeworm label in an edition of just 250 copies in 2009.

The pieces on the cassette date back to 2002 / 2003 and the pieces fill a side apiece of the cassette. Side A (‘Outside’) consists of a field recording made by Fisher Turner of the procession of the Virgen del Carmen at Carboneras in 2002. The B-side (‘Inside’) consists of piano improvisations for the soundtrack to I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, which Mute released as a download in 2003. Both pieces were edited, with Fisher Turner’s full blessing, from the original recordings by Tapeworm’s founder Philip Marshall.

The procession of the Virgen del Carmen takes place on 16 July each year in many Spanish towns, and also in other Spanish-speaking countries, marking the day of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to St. Simon Stock in Cambridge. Stock was the head of an order of the Catholic church which had fled from persecution where they were quartered in Monte Carmelo, now Israel, to Europe. The appearance of Mary to Stock in 1251 was not the first time the Virgin had appeared in the history if the order; in fact, the order was established because of Mary’s likeness in a cloud to some men investigating two prophets. Though some have subsequently cast doubt on Stock’s claims, the reassurance that Mary purportedly gave him, namely that those who wore the traditional scarpel – a cloth garment more or less in the shape of the Cross – would be freed from the fires of Hell has stuck and developed into the festival of divine celebration it has today.

Not that you’d necessarily deduce any of that in the recording Fisher Turner made on 16 July 2002. Here there are segments of chattering crowds milling and thronging around; a rousing brass marching band fades in and delivers a particularly uplifting song that feels like the soundtrack to some sort of Andalusian black and white movie (‘It would be great to play this tune to mum,’ someone is heard saying) before slowly moving out of focus; children chatter; babies cry; birds whistle, so does a man; a lone trumpet lets out a solitary blast before another rousing processional starts up, this one containing a funereal, maudlin middle section and a slightly wonky, out of tune tone; someone speaks above the crowd, prompting others to join in rapturously; what could be a piano pings out a brief high-pitched note; fireworks thunder in the sky; street sellers proffer their wares with repeated and insistent cries; a Latin pop song drifts in and out of focus with a singer sounding suspiciously like Andy Bell from Erasure; a cycle of strange industrial clanking rhythms and atmospheric drones and echoes is unfathomable as a source; someone’s shoes squeak playfully on a pavement.

Divorced from any obvious religious essence, the processions recorded here could have been captured anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world. The only real connection to divinity is the uplifting music, but none of those songs are exactly hymnal, and the church bells that toll at the very end of the piece. From the outside listening in, it feels like a public holiday that’s more or less forgotten why it was established, a bit like May Day, an excuse to kick back and unwind without knowing what you’re celebrating exactly. It all sounds pleasant, fun, the general buzz of people having a good time.

In 2003 Fisher Turner recorded the soundtrack to British director Mike Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, starring Clive Owen. When I interviewed Simon just after the release of that album he advised that his process of creating the soundtrack involved getting on set, hitting props, talking to the actors, recording stuff and generally making a nuisance of himself to try and capture the essence of a scene.

‘I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead was pretty much improvised from my end,’ Fisher Turner explained to me back in 2004. ‘As they shot the film I worked at home on material that the editor was able to put in as a rough guide for the scenes. I had a good budget so I could test things out in the studio, bring them home, and rework them on the laptop, and then send them to the editor. I think finally I’d made up 9 CDs’ worth of music for the film. A lot of it is very atmospheric and distant, more ‘sound design’.’

The final soundtrack would contain familiar Fisher Turner elements in the form of tapes and contributions from the likes of former Blockhead Gilad Atzmon, but at its core were segments of noirish piano playing, the improvisations for which are documented on the second side of De Dentro Hacia Afuera. In recent times we’ve become used to Simon Fisher Turner almost dispensing with melody completely, but gathered here are a variety of modes and themes that evidence a unique skill at creating filmic moods with a minimal, discreet set of notes. Styles here range from tentative jazz to experiments that appear to involve sliding objects along the strings, clusters of evocative notes and ominous chords.

‘Solo Piano Improvisation #54’ is remarkable in two senses – first, as a piece of music (as opposed to considering it an assembly of sketches), it works just as dramatically as the fully realised soundtrack even without its additions and processing; second, it gives a rare insight into the early workings of a Simon Fisher Turner piece. Fisher Turner has himself said that his pieces are never really ever finished, often continuing to evolve further beyond the point where they’ve been submitted to a director and used in the finished film. The distance between early ideas and finished piece is thus immeasurable, making this document all the more intriguing. Though edited sensitively into a sequence and narrative by Philip Marshall, the result is still a recording of a work at its earliest stages, yet still capable of standing up as a complete work in its own right.

Related:

Interview with Philip Marshall from The Tapeworm about the label’s formation, ethos and ongoing exploration of the cassette format over at my other blog, Further.

Thanks to Philip at The Tapeworm and Simon Fisher Turner.

Originally posted 2013; re-posted 2018.

(c) 2013 MJA Smith / Documentary Evidence

Soundescapes – An Interview With Espen J. Jörgensen (2011)

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Noise Activity

Five years ago, Mute returned to its independent roots after separating from EMI. One of the first releases on the newly indie imprint was Soundescapes by Mute stalwart Simon Fisher Turner and one-time collaborator Espen J. Jörgensen. It arguably should have set the tone for Mute Artists’ new beginning, returning the label to the noisy, DIY, uncompromising point where it all began.

On the occasion of the fifth aniversary of Soundescapes, I am republishing my 2011 interview with Jörgensen. This will be followed in the next few days by the re-posting of a further interview with both Fisher Turner and Jörgensen from around the time of the album’s actual release. 


Soundescapes is a collaboration between musical auteur Simon Fisher Turner and film-maker / soundsmith Espen J. Jörgensen. The first fruits of this collaboration, the track ‘Noise Activity’, was released on 16 April 2011 as part of Mute‘s Vorwärts compilation; with that title, it is not a terrible surprise that the rest of Soundescapes explores the outer reaches of sound design.

‘I record whatever I like and Simon does whatever he likes with it,’ Jörgensen tells me from his home in Norway. ‘It’s the ultimate democracy; or maybe democrazy is a better word for it.’ Built on a mutual respect for each others’ creative vision, Fisher Turner and Jörgensen have an agreement not to challenge one another. ‘I do whatever I like, and Simon treats the material the way he wants to,’ says Jörgensen. and ‘I don’t comment on the outcome. So you could say that I’m the composer and he’s the re-composer.’

‘Noise Activity’ also appears on the forthcoming Soundescapes album, scheduled for release on a freshly independent Mute in November 2011, replete with a personal endorsement from Daniel Miller. ‘We’ve been working on this album for two to three years,’ explains Jörgensen about the album, recorded over an extended period in between both the composer and re-composer’s other activities, namely Fisher Turner’s scores and solo albums and Jörgenson’s work as a film-maker. ‘Noise Activity’ is our ADHD song. There are a couple of others which are ‘upbeat’, but not as crazy as that; some are very ambient, both light and dark.’

Already familiar with Fisher Turner’s work, I ask Jörgensen about his individual style. ‘I don’t actively try to pursue a sound, and I’m not trying to not pursue a sound. I think a lot of it comes from how I work, which is is more like an exorcism. I try to lure sounds out of devices and instruments. It’s all from intuition. I never write anything. I can have a five minute session one day and then I won’t touch an instrument for a month or two. I don’t do anything if I don’t feel like it.’

‘When I record things it’s mostly to hear what sounds I get if I hook up an instrument, be it circuit bent, analogue or digital, to an effects box or whatever; or it’s from an urge to play or record a beat. I try to record the first time I test an instrument to capture that first meeting or “moment”. I also think that art-by-mistake can be exciting, but I don’t call myself an artist.’

Artist isn’t the only term that Jörgensen doesn’t feel applies to himself. ‘I’m not a schooled musician and I don’t consider myself a musician, and so I can’t really say that I’m influenced by anyone.’

I ask Jörgensen whether his day-job as a film-maker means that the process of film making informs how he makes music. ‘They’re two different worlds, though they’re also not. I think it has more to do with my approach and attitude when I head into the different worlds. I want to be more free with music, so that’s what I do. With film you can improvise and play with the camera, editing and acting, but in the end it’s a lot of work. Music’s a lot of work, too, but Simon gets the hardest job of all – he’s supposed to make my noise work in a context, or a song, if you like. Then again, I wouldn’t call all of the tracks on Soundescapes songs.’

‘I like to write scripts which are more like skeletons,’ he says, returning to film. ‘I think it’s more fun to be open-minded when you work. If you’re not too tied to the script you can make room for things. I think visually, but when I work I often feel, or hear, what kind of music would work well without killing a scene. When I was working with [Faith No More founder / bassist] Billy Gould on the soundtrack for The Sequential Art, my documentary film about comics, he never got to see any of the footage. I told him what I wanted in the form of atmosphere and rhythm, and we worked from there.’

This sense of blind faith and trust also informs the Soundescapes collaboration. Whereas Gould never got to see a single scene, in the case of Soundescapes, Jörgenson and Fisher Turner have never actually even met one another. ‘When I think of it, I’ve never spoken to him either!’ says Jörgensen about this distance collaboration. ‘Our relationship is very text-based. It might sound very odd, but it works very well. I don’t always have control of the outcome with the stuff I record, but I don’t want to control what Simon does either because he does such a great job with putting it all together.’

First published 2011; edited 2016.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Olivia Louvel – Bats (If You Cross The Line SFT Remix) (CatWerk single, 2014)

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Beauty Sleep is the new album from Olivia Louvel, representing a beguiling set of song-based tracks that showcase the distinctive soundworld she resides in.

One of the most fragile tracks on the album is ‘Bats’ which is here given a very different reading by Simon Fisher Turner. Listen to SFT’s remix at Soundcloud.

‘Beauty asleep’ is available from Olivia’s Bandcamp page and is released in a special DVD-sized case. The album also features ‘In My Shed’ which takes a sample from Recoil’s ‘Stone’ as its source. The album was mixed by Paul ‘PK’ Kendall.

My review of Beauty Sleep will appear in the next issue of Electronic Sound.

(c) 2014 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence