Erm & Nickname‘s Woodland Ritual fits into that oddly obscure-yet-pervasive niche of outsider music lodged in between free-jazz, early Faust-ian experimentalism, ambient electronics, primal therapy, and neo-pagan psychedelic rituals. It boasts a rich darkness as well as an ephemeral light, not unlike the campfire in the East Sussex woodlands it was recorded around. I chatted with the duo about their unusual, magical recording experience, which just happens to be the latest release in our Extra Limited Runs series (order it HERE).
Arachnidiscs Recordings: Tell me a bit about Erm & Nickname. Who are you and what’s up with this recording?
Nickname: Erm & Nickname are Andrew Newnham and Nicholas Langley. We met at the age of twelve and almost immediately chose the aliases Erm & Nickname for making radio-style tape recordings and comedy videos. We were both enthusiastic owners of recorder-Walkmans so we eventually accrued hundreds of hours of improvised radio, comedy, songs and general silliness, most of which will never see the light of day.
Fast forward about twenty eight years and the Erm & Nickname personas can become a useful psychological retreat for us. We escaped into the woods of East Sussex for four days armed with only battery-powered gear and the sole intention of making music. Not to record an album or work on a cohesive project, but to immerse ourselves in the therapeutic music process. We recorded rock songs, funk tracks, comedy numbers, but sooner or later the wood spirits always took over. They enveloped us, spoke through us. Our thin electronic sounds became one with the crackle of campfires and the wind through trees. The constant activity of arachnids, birds, insects and worms seemed to transmit both the life voice of creation and the deadly sirens’ call into the ground. The song cycle ends with Hope.
There’s this Buddhist proverb “Living without hope is like burying oneself,” which should be the album’s tagline really. It was truly an unintended deep, personal, musical and lyrical experience for both of us….
ADR: You say the cycle ends with “Hope” but it literally ends with a scream. Is “Hope” to you a primal scream in the wilderness?
Nickname: That’s not really a scream, just a thing we do at the end of recordings to make each other jump. We love to unsettle ourselves.
ADR: It definitely unsettled us every time it came around during the dubbing. EQ’d perfectly to sound exactly like someone standing on the walk outside our front door.
Nickname: A primal scream in the wilderness though? Sure that can symbolise hope. Screams for help, mating calls — making sound always involves some form of hope, I’d not really thought about it, but maybe that’s the main function of making music, to hold onto hope!
Erm: It’s almost that there is hope; getting through tough times and challenges… But around the corner something new rears its ugly head. Just when u think its all “gonna be alright” for a time it is… then the dark comes. It is like a cycle… with hands held; with support of others it is conquered for a time…
ADR: I’ve always wanted to record something in the woods but haven’t organized it. Tell me a bit about how you found it affected the recording experience as opposed to recording in a studio setting or at a jam space or something.
Erm: Didn’t feel influenced by life surroundings. We were shut off with no other human contact. Within the three days all life distractions faded. The only thing left was our subconscious. Working in solitude with limited equipment and resources allowed a more relaxed and spiritual result. Those limitations allowed us to let go of ourselves…within time our woodland surroundings, crackling fire, played it’s important part. We allowed the woods and our emotions to take over.
Nickname: Definately. It was good to be away from a computer. Limitations are really positive for songwriting. The play-to-work ratio improves.
ADR: I’m a big proponent of imposing limitations to spark creativity. So what is your usual musical modus then? When you say “good to be away from a computer” is it all Ableton Live and VSTs?
Nickname: Ha, God no, sometimes I think I should try that as I’ve only done three or four tracks that way. I used to just use internal ‘sequencers’ on synths and hardware, and quantised everything. No computers at all. Then I got bored with electronic music and stopped for five years. Since then I started using a computer to record mostly live stuff, as well as sound processing, mixing and mastering. But for this project we were using just a portable recorder, which is how Erm and I always used to record actually.
ADR: When you pitched the album to me, I noted what I sort of thought was a Coil“unplugged” vibe. When I was listening to it over and over and over doing the dubbing, I began to notice perhaps more of a Nurse With Wound feel, perhaps specifically the vocals from their collaboration with Stereolab, actually. You said the Coil comparison was interesting because Erm doesn’t know them, though you of course are a fan, as are most people you make music with. Over on your side of the pond is there a large groups of people who are into the whole Coil / Throbbing Gristle /NWW / Current 93 scene?
Nickname: I really don’t know. Whenever I’ve met someone that I wanted to do music with, it’s turned out they’ve been really into Coil. That’s happened with at least three of my longest-running and significant collaborations anyway. Now it’s happened in a different way, it’s the first time someone made the comparison I think. Other than my own particular kind of music-people though, nobody I meet seems to know who they are. I’m not that familiar with Nurse With Wound but I love what I’ve heard. They seem to be interested in some similar areas to The Vitamin B12. And I do music with somebody who’s friends with members of NWW too so I should pay more attention really. I know I don’t like Current 93. I guess there are thousands of very keen fanatics rather than millions of fans. Coil were just so inspirational. I think that anyone who hears them is compelled to create with sound. It’s the overwhelming freedom of possibility in their music. They were very generous and kind with their time — with their fans — too. I know this for a fact.
ADR: NWW have a pretty vast catalogue that can be hard to delve into. Results may vary. I definitely am not a fan of Current 93 either. They sound like Jack Black doing a goth parody to me, though clearly many would disagree. But I was asking about Coil precisely because of how you put it: “Other than my own particular kind of music-people though, nobody I meet seems to know who they are”. I’m fascinated by that odd mixture of their being a seemingly pervasive, universal influence for experimental musicians of, shall we say, a certain age, yet remaining almost entirely underground even with—or almost in spite of—all the Trent Reznor connections.
My question here is, with your own particular kind of music-people, do you think its hearing music like Coil’s that compels them to create sound or that a band like Coil appeals to a certain kind of music-person? Who’s the chicken, who’s the egg?
Nickname: I’m pretty sure they were all doing music before hearing Coil, but it’s very encouraging to hear music that is outside of genres that can also be very moving and intimate. Not sure if young people are interested in Coil at the moment, but they will be at some point I think, it’s quite prophetic, or futuristic, in some respects. Technological folk music, which is where the music-making process is headed I think. So, not so much chicken and egg as chickens watching one of their own fly over the fence.
ADR: I hope you’re right about their music enduring—it does have a timeless quality to it. Though I wonder without anyone in that camp still alive if anyone’s in charge of their catalogue. I’d almost expect there were clauses in their wills to burn all the master tapes [*during the course of conducting this interview we excitedly learned their lost mid-90’s album Backwardsis being released by former—and still living—member Danny Hyde].
Anyway, you mentioned The Vitamin B12, which is another of many projects you’re involved with. Are these all different “nicknames” for you or are these actual bands?
Nickname: Not me. The Vitamin B12 is an umbrella term for a wide range of artistic projects that nearly always include Alasdair Willis. Mostly, it’s a free-improv group. I’ve done 14 complete albums with them but that’s basically piss in the ocean of a really huge body of work. Hz is just me. Babylon was also Erm & Nickname.
ADR: You mentioned Buddhism earlier. Is Buddhism something that informs your creative process?
Nickname: I don’t think so.
ADR: In that case, what does inform your creative process?
Nickname: For this project it’s very loose. It’s playing in the sense of children playing rather than instrumental playing. You could say the process is informed by our long history, reverting back to being kids. We also do a lot of jokey stuff which is the other side of this.
Erm: Working with Nickname for over two decades makes improvising more possible. We seem to know how each other are going to play. I find that starting songs by improvising can allow my inner self to come out. I’m quite spiritual; so allowing my inner self to flow into music seems to work.
Nickname: Spiritual yes, but you might also say witchy or seer-like. I think you described the lyrics as almost channeling at one point. It certainly felt like we acknowledged some ‘demons’ out in the woods. I think your stream of consciousness took a life of its own?
Erm: You’re right there! It certainly was music therapy in the woods…. [laughs] Well, maybe just for me. Maybe I/we needed to face the demons in order to move on? Whatever it was… it was a great escape, a good time out; and its inspired me to do more!
Woodland Ritualreleased on September 25th. You can order it HERE.
Interred Viewsis an interview series with Arachnidiscs Recordings artists. This interview was conducted by Jakob Rehlinger.
While still seated on the patio of the Victory Café after chatting about their grunge-era regrets, it was suggested that Jakob Rehlinger (BABEL) and Heraclitus Akimbo (better known as sound archivist Joe Strutt of the esteemed Mechanical Forest Sound blog) should interview each other about their respective releases in Arachnidiscs’ new Extra Limited Runseries. BABEL’sMARTIALIS and Heraclitus Akimbo‘s A Part of my Inheritance are both forty minutes long and both involve loops and keyboard-based music, but they are coming from pretty different places. These are the questions that they had for each other…
Joe Strutt/Heraclitus Akimbo: Tell me about the Extra Limited Run series.
Jakob Rehlinger/BABEL: As the name suggests, it’s very limited runs of albums or split tapes — five to fifteen copies per release. I decided I just wanted to get some blank tapes made with the pad-print of the label logo on it so I could just do limited runs of things sorta cost effectively, but still look kinda official. Honestly, for some releases, ten copies is all that’s needed. When I do a run of fifty of something, I give the artist twenty copies and maybe I sell fifteen pretty quickly. But the remaining five or so sit in my basement forever, slowly dwindling down until it sells out years later. Sometimes I think, “well, maybe I should have only made ten copies.” And this way, if need be, make another ten copies. That’s kinda the philosophy behind it, less waste.
[As it happens, the first run of A Part of my Inheritance has alreadysold out in pre-orders before the July 27th release date. Naturally, second run is planned and Jakob is wondering if he should’ve done it as a regular release.]
I think it’s very important that an album has some form of physical release, but does it need to be fifty or a hundred copies? Or does it only need to be ten copies for the real die-hards and it can have a digital life after that, but still with the legitimacy of once existing as a physical copy? Which is something I cannot let go of. I have zero interest in turning the label into a digital label. That’ll never happen — I’ll quit before that happens.
Joe: [exaggerated table-thumping for emphasis]
Jakob:[laughs]
Joe: Turning to your tape, I guess I’d start by observing there’s a fair number of BABEL releases…
Jakob: There are! There’s probably too many. But they’re each unique, I think. They’re each a different facet. Some bands, on their bandcamp page there’s this huge grid of a hundred releases and you start going through them and they’re all exactly the same. And you go, “Why? Why do you keep making music?” Whereas I think for the BABEL releases — to pat myself on the back — each album is quite different. I go through phases: percussive prepared guitar, synth, the earlier postrock phase…
Joe: And the same sequential variation is happening in this recent burst? Why have there been so many?
Jakob: I’m always recording. But in October, for no good reason, on a whim, I started recording a thematic album a month. It goes OCTAL, NOVUS, DECIMA, JANIFORM, FEBRIS, MARTIALIS, APRAXIA, MAZE, and then JUNIPER.
Joe: The code! Unveiled! So if you line them all up, it’ll show this long-term musical story of your development? Or decline…
Jakob: Musically, it bounces all over the place. JUNIPER is an American Primitive guitar album. Mini-album or EP. As yet, nobody wants to release it. [laughs] So it might be an Arachnidiscs release.
Joe: You can send that anonymous submission off to Revenantand see what happens.
Jakob: That’s probably a good idea. Maybe I’m aiming too low.
Joe: How many months is it going to go?
Jakob: I haven’t recorded anything in July yet. Since Mandi’s away in Europe right now, I thought I would have a whole album recorded by the time she got back. Maybe two albums. Maybe a double July album, but no. So this might be the end.
Joe: Does MARTIALIS just happen to come along at the time you’re doing the extra limited series, or did you think, “this is one that ten people would want to listen to instead of fifty?”
Jakob: That’s kinda what happened. ‘Cause lately I’ve been going out and hassling other labels into releasing BABEL material to what I think is a shocking amount of success. That they’ve agreed to put these out. OCTAL, I got Kevin Haney to release on Inyrdisk. I did NOVUS myself. DECIMA‘s gonna be released by a sub-label of Jeunesse Cosmique. JANIFORM is on Assembly Fieldin the UK. FEBRIS just came out on Tymbal Tapes. I think I have a label lined up for APRAXIS. So for MARTIALIS I thought this is maybe one I should release myself, as opposed to trying to get an ambient new age cassette label to put it out. It just felt like one that would be good for this series as opposed to shopping it hard on another label.
Joe: There was no one else in that “heavy Vangelis” niche that you could find?
Jakob: Well, there’s a ton of labels in that niche but I think there’s so many other people doing that I felt like it would be a harder sell… I feel like it’s one of my least unique BABEL recordings. It has the least, “that is definitely BABEL, I can tell right off the top,” whereas some of the other ones have a bit more of a unique artistic slant to them. This one, it was a bit more… it’s a good one for me to do as ten copies and see how it goes.
Although as I was dubbing the copies of all these [Extra Limited Release] albums I really got to enjoy each of them more and more, which I didn’t expect — I thought I’d hate them all by the time I got to the tenth copy. By the end, I was thinking, “wow, I really should have shopped this album to another label to do something more substantial with.” I dunno, just Stockholm Syndrome probably.
Joe: I reacted favourably to it.
Jakob: [laughs] I do think it’s good, but it’s very much a retro-synth album, which is what I was going for. Using space echo effects in a looping style. It’s definitely an aesthetic I was playing with that is well-tread ground.
Joe: Yeah, I said it jokingly a minute ago, but it seems like you’ve torqued the [early period] Tangerine Dream sound of the OCTAL stuff into a more airy Vangelis thing. But then there’s a couple little abrasive moments to wake you up.
Jakob: Yeah. I think it really works well in that aspect. As opposed to just being straight mellow new age pabulum. I think I intentionally added enough stuff that would give it a little more grit. But I feel like it’s kind of an anomaly, at least when I recorded it in March I felt it was an anomaly for BABEL. But then in April I recorded another synth album that was very pointedly synth-oriented, so I guess it’s more of a phase.
But speaking of drone-y/synth-y music based on loops, your album is definitely in that genre. Was this your first stab at it, or is it something that you’ve been secretly doing all along and now you’ve suddenly made this stuff public?
Joe: No, I’ve had other bursts before. I spent a lot more time noodling around with music before I was going to so many shows. And that tailed off once I had the blog and was recording stuff.
Jakob: Which must take up a lot of your time.
Joe: Yeah, so noodling — or recording — has been something that just hasn’t been happening for quite a while. But if you dig back, if you go on my bandcamp, there’s an ambient album there that I recorded about seven years ago. And it’s kinda the same, since I don’t know too many tricks. But instead of the loop pedal, that one was made with this toy I bought from a guy I worked with, a Mixman DM2. It’s like a DJ controller that you could play tracks with and “scratch” on like a turntable. But I accidentally found a way to use it for ambient music, by playing around with the samples that you could load onto it. I generated all these synth tones from an Electribe — an old one, the first version — using it just as a monophonic synth instead of a sequencer. So I had all these synth tones on the Mixman and “played” those to create these drones. So I always liked doing that stuff. I own three Buddha Machines, and sometimes I’d just like to crank them all up at once and live-mix them together. I tinker. Playing with the cheap, low-end gear I have laying around, like the Realistic Concertmate-500, which is the Radio Shack knock-off version of the Casio SK-1.
Jakob: That’s one thing on your album — that keyboard sounds so good. ‘Cause I definitely made a lot of recordings with that. I used to have one of those and I could never make it sound as good. I don’t think I had the know-how at the time. I was probably too [sheltered] to really have witnessed how people do this kind of stuff. So, I’d put a reverb pedal on it and expect it to sound good.
But anything that produces a tone, you can you can make an amazing-sounding synth or ambient album if you just know how to tweak the signal properly. And have the taste to be able to do it. Right? Having an innate taste, as opposed to a talent… [laughs] Taste is the most important element, I think. My problem is ego. I always insert way too much of my own ego into my music. I always want to impress somebody; that’s, way too much of a motivation for me.
Joe: It’s probably not a bad motivation.
Jakob: It’s a good one to be able to push yourself, but I think good music isn’t made when there’s any kind of ego involved… whereas I wanna impress somebody.
Joe: I’d say mine isn’t that ego-driven, except in a backhanded kind of way. Obviously you want people to be impressed by it, but my assumption is, “why in the hell would they be?”
Jakob: It’s because it’s very nice to listen to.
[When Joe transcribed this interview, he apparently deleted a paragraph around here where Jakob tells him how, when Mandi overheard Jakob listening to it, she raved about how much she loved the music not even knowing it was Joe. And how that’s even more significant because she rarely has anything positive to say about music Jakob listens to. It appears Joe is uncomfortable with praise.]
Joe: I think because I’m pretty aware of my limitations I wasn’t doing stuff that would clash. Most of what I recorded, you can just mix all of it together because I was just playing, what’s the word, diatonically? Just on the white keys. And then when I had little melodic moments, it would just be two or three notes in that scale. it’s hard to come up with something that’s an audible clunker like that.
Jakob: I can achieve that. I can go on just the white keys and somehow manage to make the most horrible, discordant racket. So, a lot of people, when they’re getting into this kind of music, they don’t try for any kind of harmony or resonance, they seem to instantly go for the noise end of the genre, as a kind of safety net. “Okay, I’ll just make things discordant. I’ve got this analog synth and I’ll just go blee-oo-wee-oo and nang-nang-nang-nang and make horrible noises.” But you seemed to avoid that altogether and you’ve definitely gone for something that’s very serene and still interesting in that Philip Glass-y, minimalist composer kind of way. Is that a conscious thing you did?
Joe: Well, I have done the opposite. I have distortion pedals and so on. I certainly enjoyed doing that when I played guitar more. And when I had my four-track I’d do that, just layers of abrasiveness. But for this stuff? Not that I dislike noise, but I wanted to make something I could listen back to…
Jakob: You were consciously creating something you wanted to listen to, as opposed to, “I’m going to do something to get on the weird drone scene.”
Joe: I’d say maybe the most immediate thing that was in my head was a piece called “Watermusic II” by William Basinski. It’s an hour long, and pretty minimal and soothing, with textures gently rubbing against each other. it’s one of the things I keep handy to listen to when I’m trying to go to sleep. I think that probably would have been in my head as much as anything else. And I was successful, inasmuch as I find my recordings quite pleasant to fall asleep to.
And I love the infinite malleability of this kind of music. I’d record eight or ten minute “takes” and then mix and layer them together afterwards in Audacity. The funny part with this stuff is, you don’t have to line it up in any particular way for it to align in a way that works.
Jakob: In this kind of music, for sure.
Joe: So there was very little effort…
Jakob: …there’s that happy accident element. You have your take or whatever, and then you line it up with some other stuff, and you realize, “well, I never would have ever consciously thought of doing this, but wow, that works really great.” I think it’s kind of a thing musicians don’t talk about when they work in this field: how much of their music is a happy accident? Literally throwing it against a figurative wall and seeing what sticks.
Joe: For the two-and-a-half hour version of Variation and Variations, I had ten sections, so I made a chart: one through ten on the left channel, then ten through one on the right, and then randomly fill in the opposite channels. And then I just went and copied and pasted that all into Audacity. Move things around so the sections line up and that was the finished product.
Jakob: That’s basically what I do with a lot of BABEL recordings, but I don’t even bother to make a chart. I just organically start doing stuff. What works, works and what doesn’t, doesn’t. I tried doing a thing where I was just recording random synth notes, thinking that I could just put them into the stretch filter in Audacity and it would all work out beautifully. Didn’t work at all. I realized I have to put a little more thought into it at the beginning stage, you can’t just randomly make noise and expect to stretch it out and edit together and have it be this brilliant disaster of an accident that turns into art.
Jakob: When you shared the picture of the tapes I posted today, your caption said something like, “I’m a little uneasy about this, I don’t want people to think I’m passing myself off as a real musician.” So, how uneasy are you about putting your own foot into the pool?
Joe: Well, I spend a fair amount of time around people who are so good at music. So to me it just feels like sheer dilettantism to say, “hey, I’m a musician too!” And worse to say it to someone who’s put their heart and soul into it, and played every day for years and worked their chops out. Even for — or especially for — people who are good enough to play freely in a way that doesn’t sound like they have chops, but who have an amazing amount of musical knowledge to fall back on. So for me to put myself in any way on their level just seems too pretentious.
Jakob: But that would be like saying, oh I dunno, Einstürzende Neubauten should never have made a record or something like that. I mean, there’s a certain period in any musician’s life — and I will, against your wishes, call you a musician — there’s a naïve period, where you’re creating something that is really spectacular. ‘Cause I think your album is really good. I was actually a little upset about how good it is, cause I was like, fuck you, this is the kind of stuff I’m trying to do with BABEL all the time but it just sounds like weird noise or something when I do it. In the art world they call it “naïve art” and when you get a certain amount of chops you can’t create like that anymore. You can’t do it — you over-think things subconsciously. About knowing why what you’re going to do isn’t going to work — that kinda ruins everything. And then you have to get to another level to be able to pull it back.
Joe: When I was thinking about what name to put on this, before I posted the stuff online, I actually had on my list of names this German word, Laienmalerei, which basically translates to “lay painting”, which is basically the same concept as you’re talking about.
Jakob: In the early ’90’s, I was a Joe Satriani shredder kind of guitar player, and I consciously un-trained myself to not ruin everything I played with hair-metal lickage, horrible tapping solos, and whammy-bar divebombs and everything that would just come out subconsciously. Un-training my actual ability to play the guitar was a very conscious thing, but I can also fall back on that technical knowledge if I need to. But I kinda purposely don’t practice very much. Always trying to get back to that naïve period.
But speaking of band names, what is the story behind “Heraclitus Akimbo”?
Joe: Way back, in the time before I was even playing guitar, maybe 2002 or so, I worked at an office job and I’d shoot the shit with a friend of mine who was also really into music. One day, we were talking about what our punk names would be. And we spent the lunch hour or whatever just coming up with lists of punk names. And one of the ones that I came up with, and that stuck with me somehow, was Heraclitus Akimbo. Lingering shades of my big crush on the Presocratics as a youthful philosophy undergrad, probably. But it’s a great punk name: it sounds both awesome and a little goofy.
Jakob: It makes me think of that Kim Mitchell album, Akimbo Alogo.
Joe: I’m not burdened by knowing that specific album.
Jakob: It’s the one with “Go For a Soda” on it.
Joe: Ah. I was just a singles guy for Kim Mitchell. So anyway, once I bought my guitar and wrote all my bad songs, Heraclitus Akimbo was the name they were under. I’ve told this story before, but to recap:
In anticipation of the terror of turning thirty, I bought a guitar. My friend at work, who I had all those list-making rock conversations with, he had a guitar and played a little, so he went with me when I bought my Strat. And we jammed a few times and stuff. He was an English major who was always secretly writing a novel he would never tell anyone about and I thought, “this is great! We’ll start a band and he’ll write the songs, ’cause he was an English major!” So after a little while, once I’d learned four chords, I started asking where the songs were. But there were no songs. So I just started pulling things out from my notebooks — all those pithy bon mots that I was collecting — and cranked out a few songs. And when I made crappy recordings of them I needed something to put on it to make it look like a fake “real album”, so Heraclitus Akimbo it was.
So that was the origin, and it had really passed out of my mind. But then, earlier this year, my father passed away. I was out in Manitoba for the memorial service, and cleaning some of the stuff out his place. And in his office, where he had all of his music, he had this whole separate pile of all the CD’s I’d sent him, set aside in their own place. So it was nice to see he had some affection for my music. We weren’t always the closest, but we’d bonded over music, and I guess he liked the fact I was doing this stuff. And I also ended up with his guitar and his Boss RC-2 loop pedal. And it was in playing with the loop pedal that I ended up sorta accidentally creating all this music. So that’s why it seemed like the logical name to put on it.
Jakob: It’s not nearly as bad as a lot of names that bedroom recordists choose for their projects. But I wondered: where did that come from? It seemed so random. What is this alter ego? So you had a conscious decision not to put it under your own name. Because in the Toronto underground scene, most people know who you are, or know your blog at least. You’ve got a lot of good will, as evidenced by the response when you posted the photo of the tape… you could just use your name. Like, why not?
Joe: Bandonyms are just better than real names. Always. Even if my name sounds a bit like a fake, made-up stage name…
Jakob: True. if I was going to make a movie about a hair-metal guy who was trying to make it, like a Rock of Ages kind of musical, “Joe Strutt” would be an awesome name for that guy.
Joe: Or a Dickensian rock novel, where your name is your character: “Strutt”.
Jakob: In high school I used to jam with a guy named Clay Caesar, and my dad would say, “he’s got such an awesome rockstar name!” And he did, it was like there was no way that name was real… Clay Caesar! [laughs]
[What Jakob neglected to tell Joe about Clay was how, shortly after he graduated high school, he went into the wooded area behind the tennis courts near his house and shot himself in the heart with a rifle.]
Joe: But yeah, I guess it never occurred to me to put my own name. To use one’s own name just seems boring. If it was, like, singer-songwriter stuff, maybe you put your own name.
Jakob: I started using the name BABEL around the turn of the century, sort of a semi-gothic electronic noise thing, and then I sort of abandoned it for a while to do Moonwood. And [around 2010] when I started re-visiting the type of stuff that would again be called BABEL, I was putting it out under the name “Rehlinger”, as if I were a composer of some renown: “Mozart… Brahms… Rehlinger!” And that lasted for about two months and a few MP3’s I posted somewhere and I realized, “I’m going to start calling it BABEL.” I’m not comfortable using my name at all, and even though I knew for a while that there had to be a lot of other people out there using the name Babel — it’s too much of a common word to be unique — it just seemed like a better route to go.
Joe: Are you familiar with the “other” Babels? Do you keep tabs on their career arcs?
Jakob: I don’t really keep track of them, but I definitely discover a new one every time I sign up for some internet service as Babel: “that name is taken.” And then I have to find some weird spelling, like “Babelmusik” or something like that because there’s a “Babelmusic” already. They’re usually techno artists, though. Oddly, I have not found a single dub artist named Babel. I feel like the Babel/Babylon thing… too obvious? How is there not a dub artist named Babel?
Joe: That’d be like evil dub, right? Babylon Dub.
Jakob: It doesn’t have to be a good Rastafarian. It could be the Satanist version of Rastafarianism. He’s totally for the cops.
Joe: He gets a haircut regularly.
Jakob: He’s a skinhead! [laughs] Lotta techno artists named Babel. Lotta flamenco, and an Italian neo-classical sort of thing. There’s an Italian metal band. They posted a video where it’s just their singer screaming into the microphone. You can’t hear the band, just an isolated vocal track, fifteen seconds of him shrieking. I was like, “Wow, this is great!” When you go into youtube, the first hit under Babel is this guy screaming and probably somebody’s gonna think that’s me. And it’s awesome.
And then, also, the Brad Pitt movie, when you google “babel” it’s all Brad Pitt movie for two pages before there’s anything resembling me. I mean, for branding I should have gone with my last name and just stuck with it and persevered and not felt awkward about it but it felt like at the time it was too hard for people to remember or even pronounce correctly. It bothers me when people say “rell-in-jer”.
Joe: Oh shit, I always have. Until two seconds ago.
Heraclitus Akimbo’s A Part of My Inheritance and BABEL’s Martialis both release on 7/27/15 along with Hirudinea by Louis Law. You can order any or all of them HERE.
CALL IT: Indie rock, mid-fi, long-distance recordings, shoegazing riot grrrls and quiet boys SONIC COUSIN TO: Slumberland records bands in a literal blender, Superchunk, The Swirlies, Joanna Gruesome, Velocity Girl, Guided By Voices.
“…the EP is like an explosion…From then on, Holiday and Vosper make a hell of a lot of noise…positively pyrotechnic thanks to a slew of yelled phrases toward the end…if everything is geometry this year, it’s exciting to see what 2016 will bring.” ~ Gray Owl Point
Guelph guitarist M. Mucci works in the American Primitive style—sort of a blend of classical, jazz, country and folk traditions. Or, since people have been playing acoustic guitar this way for 60 years now, the genre is more popularly knows as “a person playing a guitar.” Though most known for his acoustic works, Mucci also knows his way around an electric guitar. Indeed, the two albums Arachnidiscs is reissuing on one cassette (The Secret Is Knowing When To Close Your Eyes and Midnights) are electric guitar albums veering towards ambient post-rock.
The Modern Folk Music of America blog says about the release, “…the notes are soft and round and drenched in reverb…the songs, melodies and musical ideas fade in and out of one another. This one is recommended for both active and passive listening.”
Arachnidiscs Recordings: You recorded Midnights literally in the middle of several nights. Were the sessions shaped by their nocturnal nature?
M. Mucci: Yes, the sessions were very much shaped by the time they were recorded. The time of night was one factor – I didn’t want to wake my sleeping family upstairs, so I deliberately played very quietly. I was working in a mode somewhere between improvisation and song writing that I had first tried out on the other recording reissued on this tape (The Secret is Knowing album), where I try to quickly come up with a fragment of… something, record it without really any thorough composition and then in most cases, quickly overdubbing one or more additional guitar lines, hoping for some happy accidents. If a piece didn’t work in two or three tries, it was tossed.
The time of year Midnights was recorded was also a factor in how it turned out — it was one of the coldest winters I can remember, with really long stretches of sustained deep freeze. I really like working on music at that time of year because there isn’t much reason to go outside, even though I do like the cold and snow, at least for the first little while. I also distinctly recall hearing quite a few strange noises during the recording; at the time, I didn’t know what it was, but it kind of freaked me out the first few times. A couple of days later, “frost quakes” were all over the weather reports and I put it all together. After that, there was a lot of listening between notes to see if I could hear any during the recording.
ADR: Your notes for the Secret Is Knowing say “Words inspired by the island of Malta.” What exactly about the island of Malta inspired you?
MM: The Secret is Knowing tape was recorded after my second visit there. My partner is half Maltese and still has lots of family there, which we got to meet and spend time with on both occassions. The stories they told us, the history of the tiny island and the scenery were all in my mind. It’s a lovely place and we love going there to visit.
ADR: I used to live in Little Malta on Dundas West and read up a little on the history. Like all of European history, it’s very storied but seems like it’s not very widely known. I feel like there needs to be a “Knights of Malta” movie or TV show.
MM: That’s a nice little pocket of the city. Vicki’s grandfather still lives there in the house he bought back in the 1950s when he first came to Canada. The history of Malta itself is quite amazing for such a tiny little island – to put this in perspective, I think Toronto is bigger in area than the whole island. It seems like every empire has wanted a piece of it at some point in history, but they’ve still managed to carve out a unique culture.
Interesting facts: there are ancient temples and stone structures there older than stone henge. It hosted the ‘Malta Summit’ which was a meeting between Bush the first and Gorbachev and helped broker the end of the Cold War. Malta also seems to be a place for vacationing world dictators. We heard stories about people meeting Ghaddafi and Kim Jong-un water skiing there. And Brad Pitt seems to visit a lot and film there. I’m not making this up!
ADR: When I saw you at a show in Toronto recently, you ended your set with some unexpected drone metal tones. Are you planning a recording of that material?
MM: Since that show I’ve been thinking about recording something like that a lot. There are ideas that I have that I can’t pull off live, at least not alone. So I hope I can start working on a recording like that. I’ve been playing more of these semi-improvised electric guitar shows recently, rather than the acoustic finger picking and Ive been really enjoying the process of putting the pieces together. I also do love the drone/doooooom… but i think that’s the first time I ever tried something like that myself.
ADR: You certainly pulled it off that night. Getting back to the frost quakes for a moment. That strikes me as a quintessentially Canadian musical experience. Do you feel like the Canadian landscape directly influences you music? Or the Canadian cultural experience in general?
MM: I’ve never thought of the landscape as a direct influence. Maybe that’s not entirely true, as I’m thinking back to my first album (Under the Tulip Tree) and a lot of the songs were named after landmarks in Guelph – I had moved to Guelph just a few years before that album was made. But, I guess in the case of the frost quakes that’s probably true, even though I didn’t know about this phenomenon before that experience. As for the Canadian cultural experience, yes absolutely.
Something I’ve thought a lot about the last 4 or 5 years is my family history and immigration to Canada and the way that has shaped my experience. My grandparents came in the early 1950s from Italy and I’ve become really interested in that story, both the actual story of their journey and the wider experience of Italian Canadians (the subject at times has dominated my reading lists, novels, academic studies, history etc…). It ties in nicely with my interest in Malta too because the Maltese Canadian experience is pretty similar from what I understand. So it may not be readily apparent in anything I’ve release thusfar, but its always there.
ADR: At the same time your music stems, ultimately, from the American Primitive scene. Do you consider yourself to be part of that tradition?
MM: I think so. Anyone who picks up an acoustic guitar and plays instrumental tunes at some point is going to get the Fahey comparison, and rightfully so as his influence is undeniable. But that simplistic description I just gave of ‘American Primitive’ overlooks a lot of what Fahey was doing while reimagining what the acoustic guitar could be — tape collage, noise, totally wild studio edits — just being wonderfully weird!
ADR: Sandy Bull as well. When I first heard E Pluribus Unum a few years ago I said, “Well, why are we even bothering? He did everything that needed to be done with improv guitar back in 1968.” I have similar feelings with The Fripp/Eno album No Pussyfooting in regards to all the loop pedal-core albums out now. No one’s significantly improved on what they did 40 years ago. Are there any albums whose brilliance makes you question picking up a guitar or committing something to tape?
MM: I get that feeling too sometimes! But then I also think there are so many more reasons to play music than solely trying to make the next groundbreaking guitar album. Its about the joy of creating something new. Its about community and I think about all of the amazing people I’ve met through playing music. Its about pushing boundaries of sound too and challenging yourself to create something new — but if we were only stuck on that, we might never leave the basement.
But back to your question, three acoustic guitar albums come immediately to mind: John Fahey — The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick (a live album with various tracks from his first few albums, his playing is top notch and so is the recording. It was a show with Sandy Bull and his set was also released by the same label). Jack Rose – Kensington Blues (every time I listen to this one it gives me that feeling you described….why bother??!!) Harris Newman – Accidents with Nature and Each Other. And further to those three albums, I always have to mention the work of Loren Connors — his music has had an immense impact on me. Two albums I’d highly recommend are Portrait of a Soul and Airs. Oh and Bill Orcutt A New way to Pay Old Debts is an absolute ripper. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone in any era sound like that.
ADR: I think Loren Connors had an immense impact on all of us who work in improvised guitar, at least indirectly, whether we realize it or not. Those are all good reasons to make music. And trying to make every recording “ground-breaking” would certainly be an unrealistic goal. But something I ask myself more and more frequently as someone who runs a label is if the world needs new music at all. At least in recorded format. Do you think music in recorded form still has value today?
MM: As someone who can’t get out to live shows as much these days, yes I need new recorded music. I do love seeing live shows and I also love listening to recorded music. It is harder to sift through the immense amount of music we have at our fingertips these days, so I see what you’re getting at with these questions. I’m not sure I can answer to the value of recorded music question in a general sense, but personally, when I find a recording I like, I value it very much and I’m very much willing to pay for it. I don’t want to get into the whole physical vs digital, but I do tend to prefer a physical copy of something if I can get my hands on it. The whole package is important, not only the music and I appreciate it when someone goes to great lengths to put a good looking package together. I have purchased quite a few digital albums though — usually from overseas artists that I’ll probably never see live and that don’t have North American distribution; postage these days just pushes certain things out of reach.
ADR: I think Canada Post has a mandate from Stephen Harper to destroy Canadian indie labels through postal rates. I really do. That’s not hyperbole. Myself, I don’t really do digital albums unless it’s not available at all in physical format. And if the postage seems too high, I take that as an indicator I don’t really need the album. But for me, it’s definitely physical over digital. Which is probably why, despite there being too many instrumental guitar tapes available already, I really felt like these two albums of yours deserved to be available in physical form again. Frankly, I wanted copies and I didn’t want to just buy the digital files off your Bandcamp. It just isn’t the same to me.
Also I realized at some point recently, I don’t really enjoy live music very much. Not a whole night of it at least. The venues are usually uncomfortable on some level even if they’re not bars or night clubs. Most performers outstay their welcome on stage by at least ten minutes and I begin to feel I’m being assaulted by their ego (present company excepted, of course). Then there’s always some jerk in the audience being inappropriate and making people squirm. The opening act talks loudly through the everyone else’s set. Bah, I’d rather sit at home with a record. Or your tapes. But they’re also in the past. What’s coming up for you in the future?
MM: Thanks so much for the kind words about these two albums and for putting them out again in physical form. I’ll have at least two more releases out this year — another tape on the Ambivalent Soap label of two live recordings and an acoustic album titled Don’t Be Afraid should be ready very shortly.
Mild-mannered librarian by day, by late-afternoon Vancouver Island’s Stephen Wolf turns into the mild-mannered basement recordist named Partli Cloudi. A weaver of detailed audio tapestries, adding his own acoustic flourishes and electronic embellishments to a secret world of woozy found-sound, Wolf exudes the mystique of the mystical artiste who lives on the fringes. It’s the sort with a facade of eccentricity that people feel compelled to chip away at in order to discover the real person hiding within. Well, let me tell you, I’ve known Stephen for a long time and there is no end to the onion-like layers you could peel away. And if you did peel him down to the core, you’d find you were right back where you started because it’s not a facade. Stephen is one of those rare genuinely deep dudes whose zen-like demeanor and quiet wisdom isn’t an affectation.
I caught up with him (or, like always, tried to catch up to where he’s at) to discuss Watermelon Cauliflower, his second release on Arachnidiscs Recordings. And, of course, I forgot to ask him exactly what a “watermelon cauliflower” is.
Arachnidiscs Recordings: It’s been a while since I left Vancouver Island. There wasn’t much of a weirdo music scene there at the time, but what did exist was pretty tight-knit. What’s it like now?
Partli Cloudi: I am probably the last person to ask about a scene of any kind, being somewhat socially inept and challenged geographically by living on the outskirts of a small town. But if by weirdo you mean music that is not based on peer acceptance and/or the pursuit of peanuts, then I don’t think there is any scene.
Not to say there aren’t interesting artists all over doing great things in isolation that zero to few people will ever hear. But when you typically have to wade through the dominant culture and dominant sub-culture just to hear music outside of the conventions of rock etc, then you quickly tire with the realization of how alone you are.
My brother and I went to hear David Behrman speak at the University of Victoria a few months ago and we were the only non-students, in other words the only non-mandated attendees. Gordon Mumma was sitting beside David and they reminisced while they presented a slide show of his old electronic contraptions and played some pre-recorded samples. That same night I went to an indie rock basement show and the place was packed full of free-range hipsters posing in front of each other, taking selfies, and talking over the music, was that a scene?
ADR: That would be the definition of a capital-S Scene. It’s interesting what you’re implying about “peer acceptance” being a factor even with people making weird music. I know when I write or record something, it’s often through the filter of “What would Stephen think of this?” which, although I trust your judgement, I know isn’t exactly a productive filter to have in place. I also usually completely ignore it. Anyway, are you saying, even if your peers are creative weirdos, that the moment peer acceptance enters the equation the art is corrupted?
PC: For a weirdo to have peers would negate the weirdo’s weirdness, so it may technically be impossible. But it is not like art has ever been sacred and free from the corruption of getting paid, or getting laid or even just fed. I would concede that audiences essentially want to be entertained, but it is the duty of the artist to decide how far to pander and how far to challenge.
ADR:Watermelon Cauliflower, at first blush, seems to have zero discernible pandering. It’s one WTF moment after another. But it also doesn’t break from the forms people enjoyed about the previous album (Two Moron Ever Nose). Was that conscious? Were you giving the few people who bought Two Moron Ever Nose what they wanted?
PC: I would get nervous at the idea that someone is listening, so I probably would block any idea of audience out. Having no audience (perceived or otherwise) is more freeing. No consciousness was used in the making of this recording. I try to convert imagination into sound and back again, once I get to a freed state it begins to create itself, I might only awaken to clean up and hope that this time the tape machine was recording.
ADR: Okay, let’s maybe talk about about “the making of this recording” as you put it. I like to think I’m pretty well versed in this kind of thing, but I have trouble picking out what’s a sample, a found-sound and what is you actually playing an instrument. What’s your modus operandi?
PC: I do a lot of field recordings and have a huge collection of cassettes, many made on top of pre-recorded sources: music, audiobooks or thrift store mixtapes, then overdubbed with basement jams, old demos, or rhythms taken from rehearsals of other bands, with bits leaking into different surfaces and/or finally overdubbed by myself in my basement. Afterwards I wire up all my recorders into an ancient PC with an old version of Sound Forge you gave me 15 years ago, and essentially I play the 4-track recorders into it to make the end products. I like delay pedals as a means of time travel, but sampler technology is black hole that is already filled up. Since I stay away from most things digital, degredation and tape hiss can be a problem and an opportunity. It is super time consuming and does not lend itself to any precision, I really have no idea where anything is going to end up, no two takes are ever the same.
ADR: One of those situations where technological limitations leads to inspiration?
PC: Yeah, but I feel like I have way more technology than I can handle.
ADR: Getting back to what you were saying about not recording for an audience. It reminded me of some things I’ve be thinking about lately. About why we do this at all. What’s the point of making our music available to an audience? Why do you make these recordings and why do you make them public?
PC: I guess it is same question as to why we are here? Why exist? I was born into a fragile body that has an intense need to eat, breathe, paint and create rickety rotten soundscapes. I cannot escape it, and feel like I am dying inside if I try to stop. The process is not all sunshine and kittens and in fact is probably detrimental to my health and prosperity — I pray somebody somewhere in the vast continuum of time and space needs a Partli Cloudi recording for a some mysterious divine purpose, otherwise it is all for nothing.
If you’re interested in more of Stephen’s views on music, his blog Shelf Dwindle is one of the best repositories of music writing alive today. Also, you can listen to the below podcast episode where we sat down to discuss (and slaughter) the “sacred cows” of rock’n’roll.
Interred Views is a series of interviews with Arachnidiscs Recordings artists. This interview was conducted by Jakob Rehlinger.
Uvesen is a Norwegian duo of percussionist Børre Myklebust and the highly prolific Andreas Brandal who has been releasing challenging and transcendental music since 1994, racking up hundreds of releases over several projects. With Uvesen the two embark upon free-improv psych experimentation of the highest order. Deep majick drones and wild aural landscapes. Abstract, percussive textures and bowed strings mingle with wild freak-folk dances and expansive electric guitar.
This music is such a beast we had to encase it in plaster for your safety.
CALL IT: Drone, improvisation, psychedelic, no-wave, avant-garde, noise-ambient, free-jazz, freak-folk SONIC COUSIN TO: Pelt, Coltranes Robbie and John, Don Cherry’s Pan-African and Cosmic eras, Ensemble Pearl [or other SunnO))) ambient side-projects], Fred Frith, Sir Richard Bishop, Flowers/Corsano, a general VHF records vibe. God literally whispering in your ear (but maybe not whispering nice things).
ROSS BAKER has been making music since he got a hold of a tape recorder at the age of 10. From early tape and radio abuse, his music has been linked by a love of contrast and collage.
A half-hour collage salvaged from at least three hours of recordings, soundtracking the countless distant landscapes and buildings glimpsed momentarily during 28 years of car, bus and train journeys. Sprawling farm and forest punctuated by sinister undentified buildings and distant motorways. Ambient washes and sci-fi movie memories with a synth-pop interlude.
SIDE 20 — TRANZMIT: Deep Video
TRANZMIT began as a radio wave sound-college side project of BABEL in the early 2000’s. In recent years it has moved with the times, “mashing-up” (in the contemporary parlance) audio material sourced from the internet.
Film dialogue and Star Trek sound FX. YouTube video collage and movie trailer audio. Retro television commercials. Public transit, elevator and busker field recordings re-mixed. Augmented vocoder demonstration video audio. Spam emails read by text-to-speech and modified Bach. Voice synthesized random phrase generator and Twitter and Facebook updates. Digitally synthesized zen monks.
You can now pruchase the limited edition cassette release of A SACRED CLOUD‘s album ENSOLEILLÉ, 1972 via our Bandcamp site. Officially released on September 7th at the Sonic Boom Cassette Store Day Fair.
A Sacred Cloud is the Montreal based experimental electronic/guitar/drone/ambient/noise duo of Maggie Cho and Johnathan Woo. The album was mastered by Sandro Perri. Vinyl LP edition will be released by Jeunesse Cosmique in November.
Order via Bandcamp or check out the sounds below and be prepared to drift into a the ecstatically bleak retro-futurist android sheep daydreams of Vangelis-in-hell on a cloud that’s only silver linings.
SEMEN PRIEST came to our attention when we received a demo package, mailed from somewhere in Canada, containing a blood-filled condom and a vaguely threatening letter (“You should do our tape. xoxo Semen Priest. PS- We know where you live.”). Easily the most unusual demo-package the label has ever received (full story HERE), the CD-R of SEMEN PRIEST’s album that accompanied it prompted us to sign the band instead of notifying the RCMP. Even if we still don’t know who they are. Worst case scenario: Doing a run of pretty awesome cassettes is relatively inexpensive way to ensure your house doesn’t get burned down.
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Mild-mannered librarian by day, by late-afternoon Vancouver Island’s Stephen Wolf turns into the mild-mannered basement recordist named Partli Cloudi. A weaver of detailed audio tapestries, adding his own acoustic flourishes and electronic embellishments to a secret world of woozy found-sound, Wolf exudes the mystique of the mystical artiste who lives on the fringes. It’s the sort with a facade of eccentricity that people feel compelled to chip away at in order to discover the real person hiding within. Well, let me tell you, I’ve known Stephen for a long time and there is no end to the onion-like layers you could peel away. And if you did peel him down to the core, you’d find you were right back where you started because it’s not a facade. Stephen is one of those rare genuinely deep dudes whose zen-like demeanor and quiet wisdom isn’t an affectation.
ARACHNIDISCS RECORDINGS 