Producing music for me, and noise music in particular, inhabited a grey hinterland between creative act, religious devotion, therapy, and cry for help. As I write I am in the midst of jury service, an important public service but one which I am spectacularly badly configured to endure. It’s effectively served as an object lesson about how recent improvements in my mental health have been conditional on me spending as little time around other human beings as I can manage. It isn’t so much the process of the trial itself, it is sometimes quite dull but often quite interesting. It’s the sheer horror that is involved in being shut in a room with around a 60 people for large chunks of the day. Imagine being trapped in a work canteen for an entire morning except that the people parroting Daily Mail talking points at each other are shortly going to be responsible for determining the future course of someone’s life. Headphones and a book have got me through a lot but you need to be aware enough of your surroundings to notice when it’s time to go back to court because the lawyers have finished bickering over whatever contentious point of law is currently a sticking point. It’s therefore impossible to completely blot out the rest of humanity to a level I would find comfortable. They just talk and talk and talk. It’s like having acid poured directly into my brain.
Lunchtimes have been a rare oasis of calm, and frequently an oasis of harsh noise. It’s a chance to get out of that wretched room for an hour and I have experimented with various different distractions to keep myself from collapsing into either rage or despair, the two emotions I tend to feel most strongly. Walking listlessly to and fro through the various little odd patches of the town centre or hiding in the library certainly had something to recommend them but the thing that helped the most was the time I spent sitting in All Saints Church in absolute silence attempting to imprint the architecture onto my mind as a form of meditation. It’s a beautiful building in its way, full of the same geometric self-confidence that Wren brought to his churches. The architect was a self-professed fan. It has a square shape and high vaulted ceilings with a tremendous sense of order. The windows have only the merest hint of stained glass, small inserts in yellow, that barely touch the light that makes it in through the town centre. It’s a restful place with the thick stone walls filtering out much of the noise from the bustling world outside and the modest cafe that operates out of the front of the building. While I was there I decided to take a field recording and it is this field recording that forms the basis of the track I eventually constructed.
Having an album to work on provides a sense of focus, a sense of purpose and I wanted the track to reflect the various, almost unheard sounds that emerged in the field recording. I listened to it again and again, pulling out parts that sparked my interest in order to turn them into the loops that constitute the entirety of the work. This then is my tectonic prayer, a slowly shifting vortex of inconsequential sounds amplified into harsh discordant movements in an effort to blot out the presence of a world I despise. I’ve said before that I consider noise to be a radical form of silence (to the extent of using that as a title for an album) and this piece continues that effort to explore noise as a bridge to creating inner calm. When quiet doesn’t work sometimes the best thing I can do is create something that seeks to bludgeon the inner monologue into submission, a form of brutal tranquility. This was quite an ambitious work, as noise music goes, with a wide variety of different pedals and FX units deployed to deconstruct the various sound loops. At some points the loops are utterly unrecognisable while at a few points the various sounds that intruded on the low hum that is the closest thing to actual quiet the modern world has to offer are still in there. I think of the loops as nirvana munitions, something ugly unleashed in service the goal of creating a chaotic lull in the chaotic order of modernity, at least as I experience it.
Tectonic Prayer continues my various attempts to grapple with sound as a vehicle for mental survival. Whereas the previous album Drone Therapy was mostly concerned with the use of boredom and repetition to alleviate thought and Noise is a Radical Form of Silence was a conscious effort to build a sense of descent, of things literally slowing down, this is both more and less structured. I have tried to create a sense of a piece with movements by organising the loops into discrete sections that are still part of a larger whole. It doesn’t have the scope for happy accidents that some noise has, it isn’t formed by simply going nuts with the controls to see what happens. When I work with loops the scope for improvisation seems to reduce, I find that I’m more likely to simply let the underlying structure of the sound do most of the work rather than feeling the constant need to tweak and develop the parameters in the search of some illusory sonic high. Paradoxically there is something surprisingly freeing about stepping back from the urge to play. The improvisation has already been done by the world and I’m able to actually listen more appreciatively to the sounds as the algorithms of the FX units do their work. There is less concern about doing something which will “spoil” the sound and necessitate another take of the part I’m creating.
One of the fascinating things about recording music as opposed to playing with a band is that the artefact you are left is the end of the road. With a band songs have a way of developing in ways that you don’t entirely control and often when you do record something it’s actually a kind of disappointment because that constricts the song into something that you will then have to regurgitate whenever you play it live. There is some scope for change, especially for the lead guitarist and the drummer, but for the rhythm guitarist, bass, and the vocalist you’re more or less stuck with what you’ve got. Obviously many bands have continued to fuck around with their material onstage but for for a standard rock four piece you’re usually trying to nail something you’ve got to at least a serviceable level of polish. I wouldn’t say I disliked playing live but for me the joy of being in a band was in the rehearsal room, writing and learning songs and experimenting with different ways of approaching that same piece of music. I’ve often thought it would be fun to create a band that existed solely as a rehearsal band with no intention of ever playing to an audience or recording the songs, except possibly as pseudo live performances as a kind of record purely for those involved.
You don’t have that feeling of music as a living, developing entity with studio projects, (particularly with many noise projects). You do the album and it’s done. Even if you do play live you’ll never have a hope of recreating all the specific knob twiddles that went into the recording. Your live gigs would have to be something else entirely. In this digital age with the absence of physical media recorded music has never felt more ephemeral which perhaps explains the perverse appeal of tape media in the noise scene. A lot of people want that physical copy that is, by some standards, less at the whim of platform holders and the ever changing landscape of digital files. Personally I quite like the ephemeral nature of creating music in this landscape. My work only exists at the behest of forces I have very little control over, it could all vanish tomorrow if bandcamp suddenly decided to take against me. I have long since deleted the original copies of some of those tracks because I don’t have access to the digital real estate to be able to archive the original files. There’s at least three collections I wrote before I settled on Malesperi as the name of my project that probably no longer exist anywhere in the world. It could also disappear tomorrow and I’m fine with that because unlike a traditional band I’m never going to be in a situation where I need to find the original masters of a punk song I wrote forty years ago to try and reconstruct the bass tone for a deeply depressing reunion gig. I write music, it goes out into the world for a little while and then, inevitably, it will disappear.
That’s the message, if there is one, of this album; embrace the death throes of your own personal universe and find a way to carve out a little bit of peace in the moment because everything decays, everything falls apart, and the old certainties are constantly giving way before the immutable tides of entropy.
