Collaborative Rebellion
Anyone who sees fit to decry social media as banal
and ultimately pointless would do well to look at the way such platforms
have brought artists into closer proximity to one another, fusing
new collaborations that just a few years previously would have never
ever have taken place, cross-pollinating scenes that would have
only existed in specific communities in specific cities, and bringing
together people who may never have imagined working together before.
Soundescapes, the new collaboration between musician, composer
and one-time pop star Simon Fisher Turner and documentary
film-maker Espen J. Jörgensen is a case in
point. 'I really liked what he did with the Nadja soundtrack,
and told him so when I found him by accident on MySpace,' is how
Jörgensen, someone who describes himself as being generally
disinterested in music, explains the genesis of the Soundescapes
project. It may have been more logical to imagine Turner providing
a typically idiosyncratic score for a future Jörgensen film
project, but instead the result is CD album which will be released
by Mute on 21 November 2011.
'I knew nothing about this man,' confirms Turner
of this chance encounter. 'Not who he was nor what he did. I know
now of course, and those recordings he started to send me make sense
now.' The recordings that Turner mentions were the waves of sounds
that Jörgensen began sending Turner over the next two to three
years. 'He records stuff. I've no idea what really, or how. Sometimes
it would be instruments and then another set of files would arrive
and it would be stuff he'd recorded on a bus with a broken dictaphone.'
'There's a lot of circuit bent instruments in there,
various synths, drops of water, fireworks, oscillators, theremins
and bedtalk in Japanese,' says Jörgensen of the sources of
sounds he began sending to Turner, and which will no doubt appear
in deeply processed from within the Soundescapes tracks.
'His recordings seem very random,' continues Turner, 'and I like
the way he just gets stuff, because he doesn't have to think about
what's going to happen to the sounds he's collecting, because it's
not his problem. I think we're both rebels.'
Turner's role in the collaboration would be primarily
as editor, taking sounds which may have been individually interesting
but detached from context, and creating new structures from those
sources. 'In a way he's a fantastic collaborator because he's the
shopper and I'm the cook,' is the way he explains the set-up. 'He
has no idea really how I make it up at my end, so we're both in
the blue really as to what the other is doing.' Turner would process
the sounds, then send his manipulations back to Jörgensen.
'I'm basically doing my thing - sound - and Simon's treating the
sound - editing, recomposing and mixing it all together,' adds Jörgensen.
'I never do stuff and say “this is for that song”, so
Simon gets tons of bits, like a jigsaw puzzle, and he makes a collage
out of those bits - basically creating his own thing. I think one
of the unique things about Simon's work is that he has this unique
way of mixing it all together. Only fragments of the stuff I recorded
and sent to Simon was used. If he used it all, our first release
would be a box with 30 discs in it, maybe more. Instead it's all
crammed onto a 40-minute disc.' Turner's sound contribution was
itself minimal, contributing the sound of sheep grazing in a French
field and a snatch of two Japanese friends talking.
'I wouldn't send Espen anything until it was at
least somewhere,' says Turner. 'I tended to keep the work close
to my chest until I felt there was something worth sending. Long
periods of silence from me I'm afraid. Because he doesn't know how
I make stuff it's difficult for him to judge things, I think. He
asked me once to remove something and I couldn't. He didn't understand
why not. It's mainly because everything I make is always floating.
Nothing is a mix. Everything is a rough mix so I never actually
record a mix and work on it. Instead I record 'passes', and edit
those. I don't keep masters. It's impossible for me to make a final
mix. I'm not interested in this.' To reinforce this idea of Turner's
works being perpetually incomplete, and the notion of what's being
heard by the listener as a 'work in progress' of sorts, a couple
of weeks after this interview I asked Turner about his music for
the short Channel 4 film, Double Lesson, which aired in
the summer of 2011; he told me he was still working on it, in spite
of it having presumably been sent to the director and actually added
to the soundtrack.
'I only commented on two songs,' confirms Jörgensen
of his harmonious working relationship for what became Soundescapes.
'Our only agreement was that I was supposed to feed Simon with sounds,
and that he would treat them the way he wanted and I wouldn't comment.
I don't need or want to comment either, but I did comment on two
songs which were 'Soundescape' and 'Tristfull'. I had Simon remove
some vocals I did on 'Soundescape', and after I heard 'Tristfull'
I simply said “fade up rain” - Simon had a recording
of a great rainshower in France somewhere, which made the track
work better, I think.'
'The thing I like is that I didn't actually play
anything on this project,' explains Turner of the appeal of this
pairing. 'Espen played and recorded one hundred percent of what
you hear. I just (re)arranged it and treated it. It's very pure
in fact. Very innocently edited, but heavily edited. I resisted
the urge to sample and play. That wasn't in the game.'
'I tended to make long pieces then use fractions
of small sections,' says Turner of his working methods. 'I'm a busy
editor. I love doing this: snip, snip, stretch, lubricate.' The
results were frequently worlds away from their original sound sources.
'At times I listen to the stuff I get sent from Simon, and say “what
is that?” Sometimes I can't remember recording the things
at all,' is how Jörgensen sums it up.
Like the eternal game in Iain Banks' Walking
On Glass, the project evolved, slowly, over two to three years,
with some pieces taking most of that time to develop into the 'final'
versions available on Soundescapes. Early on Turner suggested
that the pieces be used as backing tracks for another project, but
Jörgensen resisted. Nevertheless, the idea of someone attempting
to sing over these complex tracks remains an interesting unrealised
possibility.
With this type of ongoing, extended interplay between
two very different artists, I commented that it must be difficult
to know when it's actually finished. 'On Soundescapes I
think I was the one to say stop, go or “more please”'
says Turner in response. 'Or usually “enough”. I had
to ask him to stop sending me files. It finished when I couldn't
think of anything else to make it do.'
What's continually surprising is that despite this
album coming together over an extended period, Jörgensen and
Turner have never met, nor have they even spoken to one another,
and neither do they intend or even want to. Everything was undertaken
at a distance, files passing back and forth via the likes of Dropbox.
Even agreeing the artwork for Soundescapes was undertaken by email
with Mute in-house designer Paul A. Taylor. 'Perhaps
we could tour and only meet on stage,' muses Turner. 'Separate lives,
only communicating by email. No conversations. No actual physical
contact.' That this project has any sort of internal coherence arises
primarily from a sense of trust between the two collaborators, and
a sense of knowing precisely what each others' role actually was.
All thanks to MySpace, fast becoming a burning platform among the
proliferation of social networks, wherein such 'relationships' between
people who feel no need to physically engage are frequently commonplace.
Soundescapes sees Simon Fisher Turner reunited
with Mute, for whom he hasn't released an album since 2005's Lana
Lara Lata. Turner's return to the label, even if just for this
release, feels like a restoration of the classic Mute roster that
seemed to slowly fall away in the EMI years, particularly given
that The Grey Area seems to have swung back to
life with releases from Can and Cabaret
Voltaire in November 2011. 'I'm very grateful and happy
Daniel [Miller] wanted to put out these recordings,
' says Turner. 'He was the first person I gave tapes of it to. I
did also send it around to a dozen companies as well, who I'm glad
to say firmly rejected it on the grounds mainly that it seems a
bit raw and untamed.' Soundescapes would certainly appear
to be just about the most out-and-out experimental release that
the newly-independent Mute have put out so far.
Rumours started to circulate on Twitter a few months
back that a Soundescapes 2 might be in the offing, despite,
at the time of writing, the current volume not yet having received
an official release. 'That's Simon's fault, partly mine, since I've
started feeding him sounds again,' explains Jörgensen. 'I've
started new folders which just get stuff dumped into from time to
time,' confirms Turner, making a sequel at least even more theoretically
possible. 'I asked Espen to stop again over the half term, because
I didn't have time to listen to them or even open my Dropbox, which
I've just noticed is full again.'
'Nothing's official,' continues Jörgensen.
'Follow ups and sequels are seldom any good. It would certainly
be a challenge if we did it. But, if we feel that it's right and
worthy then I think and hope we'll do it. Right now I think we need
to finish various projects at both ends. I'm in the middle of my
next documentary, as well as a project with Andrew Blick of Gyratory
System. Simon's got a thousand of them. Luckily he works faster
than me.'
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