Here is one more long chat with Alex and George from music duo Able Noise. We discussed their album High Tide and music experimentation.
AR: On stage, your main instrumentation is baritone guitar and drums, and when I saw you perform live at Rewire Festival 2021, I think it's more or less the same performance that is also online. In those occasions, you also had a ghost member: a tape player, a Walkman, actually. I was wondering, is that an integral part of your live set? And is it also included in the composition in a way? Is it also an instrument that you use when you're recording or writing music?
George: Using tape started out of the necessity that we were just two people with just these instruments, and we needed, we wanted this extra sound to come in one of these extra tracks. So then tape was the way to just bring that in. And then that really became, yeah, like a ghost band member we could also use as an instrument, as a way of manipulating sound, working with sound. So we really always think in terms, like we have our instruments, but we also really have tape, and we use that to our advantage in different ways.
Alex: It was kind of the one way of using recorded material very evidently. My brother did composition, and I went to a lot of concerts and I really struggled always with there would be like an ensemble of five musicians, plus a backing track that someone played on the laptop, which sounded super crisp. So why were those players not on stage? Or why is anyone on the stage? So with tape, it's always been this thing of she's playing guitar, he's playing the drums, and the tape player is playing that extra sound really, really evidently, also with how it gets manipulated and stuff. It's a very physical representation of sound, of it being “this is prerecorded music,” but it's also just the physical element of it. It's like the most... maybe like LP's, like a record player as well, is like the only way I know that is so physically, you know, you can actually bend the sound of prerecorded music. So, so, kind of physically on stage.
AR: When recording the album and with the post-production, there are tracks that are not what you're going to physically perform live. Were you already imagining what you would put on the tape or were you thinking about the live translation at all in that moment?
George: I think it's a good thing that we didn’t think about that before, because then I think the result would have maybe been different, or it would have been more complicated to really only think in the form of recorded music. But it was a really funny thing that afterwards, the moment that we got out of our shells and started thinking about performing live again, that was just like, hit us or at least hit me like a truck. How are we going to do this?
Alex: The gig is the gig, and there's music that works in that context really specifically, also between the two of us sonically and you know, our interests. And the recorded music being a completely different medium to experience. So it just doesn't make sense to try and... to me, generally it doesn’t make sense to assume those two are the same thing and treat it the same way, and then write and perform music the same way. It’s like the difference between theater and cinema. It doesn’t make sense that a theater piece would be translated into film and vice versa. It’s two very different things. So with the record, with the album, we thought of that really to be consciously okay, so what does this piece need? How can we take it a bit further? How can we bend it to kind of really, really work in this context?
George: But I think we do have like the excitement to keep some ideas and some parts that were written for the album. I think that we did already know that we wanted to take that with us, or at least to figure out this is, you know, newly written music and how could we... we don’t have to, but how could we translate that to live?
Knowing we cannot just play it the same way, because it doesn’t work that way. In the same way that the stuff that we’ve played, performed live, if you record that and put that on an album, it doesn’t work at all.
Alex: Then it was going back to the case of the gig. How can we play live? And then it was a question like, okay, what could we use which has been written in that context? So in working on the album, we weren’t thinking the gig. When it came to writing gig stuff, which is now, it was okay, what bits would be interesting to keep? But there’s a lot which is just different, and I find it quite exciting because a lot of live stuff which we've been playing for some years, which has never been recorded or released, and vice versa on the first album and the second, there’s stuff which we’d never even thought of playing live because it’s just physically impossible and just not interesting.
AR: Why not interesting?
Alex: For example, there’s this one on the album now, on High Tide, the second track, which is this kind of really noisy guitar droney thing. It’s guitar and saxophone, and apart from the practicalities of it, we could both play the guitar parts and then have the saxophone on my tape, but it’s just not it. Because I find it a very kind of psychedelic, kind of druggy, really intense, like super hot, the sun in your head, like an intense thing. And just that mood, that experience, I think doesn’t make sense for us even trying to create in the context of live. It just works in that being stuck in traffic in the car, but live just, we’re building a different kind of mood.
AR: Sometimes your music can be quite deceiving because of this tape manipulation. If I listen to “To Appease,” there is a lot of time slowing down or going maybe a little bit backwards, and it feels like you’re playing with a sample, like you recorded it and then stretched it or edited the recording. But then when you play live, you also do these sort of things, like you slow down then get faster or strum while detuning the guitar, for instance, which is in the end a very similar effect if you’re just listening. I was wondering if there is an intention to also sound a bit mechanical in a way, also when you're performing live?
Alex: “To Appease” is also an interesting one because we’ve been playing it for years and it’s gone through... There’s a phase that we were playing it and we never finished. We never figured out how, we never finish the ending. And we were playing it for years, and every single time we played it, we were like “we want to play it because we like it,” but it’s not done, and it was just really painful. So “To Appease” is an interesting one. For example, how that works on the album is the fact that it is... it’s like referencing rock music in a sense. Although, you know, I like the riff, I like it as a track, it is also the single. So now we’re playing rock music and what does that mean? Why would we suddenly be playing rock music? And so this tape manipulation thing, other than like sonically we were both very excited by the result. It just kind of trying to contextualize us using a motif, which is like the rock thing, which makes a lot of sense recorded because it is this thing of so here’s a rock song messed with. And then live, although the live version existed way before, I think it was the same thing, kind of stemming from the thing of like, okay, it’s a rock song, but why would we play this like druggy rock song? What is our intention with it? Maybe if it is, if we kind of like enhance this physical feeling of it. Like we have another song which is... It’s on the first album “To Consume,” and that’s like a pop thing. That’s pop. That’s kind of like this kind of poppy rocky thing, and it got contextualized by making it sound horrible through tape as if you’re listening to it off the radio. For then, only at the end of the piece, us to actually sing on it with our clear voices for you to kind of, hopefully, give the impression of it having been on the radio and us messing with the radio. Then we are singing to the radio playing. So it's always this kind of thing of also how you contextualize it on album in that way, but also like how you play it to kind of suggest, not that we're afraid of playing pop music or rock music, but just contextualizing it within the context of experimentation and highlighting elements within it. That it's not just this cool riff, but it is the reference of it.
AR: I didn't want to get here, but you mentioned that you sort of reference rock riffs or pop music. Do you think you play post-rock music?
Alex:
It's not that we want to reference rock music, it's just that we are rock people. I am rock, I come from rock, so it's there. I mean, it's like, I do genuinely like these bits, but it is this kind of step further. Okay, but what? ... This is art school crap. This is stuff we learned from art school, like, but why this? Like why this piece of music? Why this rock thing right now in this year? How is this kind of relevant? So it's just kind of being aware of the reference. It's not wanting to reference, it's just writing music. It's writing a riff which, you know, we like, but then it is trying to contextualize, like, okay, so what is this riff? And that's where the kind of thoughts come.
Geroge: Then completely taking it apart and then zooming in on every little detail and seeing how that works and why is that there? And then why do we move it this way?
AR:
What is interesting for me about your music is that it’s very abstract in a way, but also really depending on the dynamic of you two playing together. And also what you just said, like the way you use your structures or patterns are like a bit fragmented sometimes, or most of the times maybe. And it feels like the tempo is just based on the interaction of the two of you. So I feel like you never play with the click probably. When recording, do you also record live together, like guitar and drums at the same time?
George:
I think on the album, most stuff we've done there has been really separate. I think it works in such a collage-y way that it’s not written for as one piece and this is how it goes and then we just need to record it. It's like this thing is first here, okay, let's record it. What can this instrument add? What can this instrument add? And then we build that sort of puzzle together.
AR:
Okay, so it’s not like a track that is played from beginning to end.
Alex:
No, no, no. It was really annoying actually because we were doing a lot of recording. We had two full-on recording sessions with Sotiris, the sound technician. Both of them were like - okay, we need a little bit of this sound, we need a bit of that sound, maybe a little bit of bass, maybe a little bit of drum feedback, maybe a little bit of voice - all these elements first and then process and add it into the music. End of the day, ten hours in the studio, you'd listen back to like (imitates noises) and just like, okay, I think we can work with this. So there’s nothing that you were like, "Oh, this fucking rocks, man, this is like so cool." It's like, okay, I think this 12 minutes of feedback we can work with kind of thing.
George:
I don't know, lately I just really compare it to cooking. Like okay, we had like a little bit of garlic, we threw like a little pile of cayenne pepper there and a bit of broken bread there, and you know, and okay, we have all these like weird ingredients. Some match, some don’t. Let’s see what we can cook with this.
The thing that I think I really like with the way that we have gone about it, of it being super fragmented, is that I can still really take pieces apart. Like it never becomes one full, like one solid track that only exists in that form. That there's still a drum riff that Alex does, or like a riff that I have, or a vocal melody that we can pick from that and then move it somewhere else, or put it in a different form in a live performance.
AR:
When you're going to the studio, when you have the album in mind, do you have like the entire composition of the track, even if you play it in different bits, do you have in mind what’s going to be there, or do you record some samples and then you use them as elements to compose a song?
Alex:
That one. Album-wise, what we did is we had ideas—“Oh, maybe this could be interesting”—so we had like a riff or we had a melody or we had a concept and then we went into the studio, recorded the riff or recorded ideas, sounds to feed this idea, and then went back, then went to the laptop with the material and tried to make sense of it. That’s how the album went. So maybe it was a bit of jamming, maybe it was a bit of improvising, maybe it was like some melodies we had. A lot of it was very conceptual, like "Oh, it would be interesting if we constructed a piece, like the third piece on the album, Providence, was really that like, oh, it’d be really cool if we maybe did this." And then we recorded it, were terrified of the material for months, left it on our hard drive for months, and then only that was the last thing we worked on. We have to face this now and then listen to it like, "Oh, actually, this is kind of cool." That one was actually meticulously—this bit, that bit, that bit, that bit—as well as we could so that it doesn't sound cut, but it's heavily cut.
AR:
And then live you have a structure in mind, but you also have some room for improvisation.
George:
Yeah, depending on where we're playing, how big the room is, what kind of context it is, who else is playing, that we make something much bigger or much smaller.
And like, yeah, for example, when it comes to feedback, I also really like it that we have certain limitations set that we know this is kind of how it’s set up, this is kind of the sound that we’re doing, but it just depends on what’s going to come to you live. We've played together for so long that I think we have really learned how to read each other, or that I can really tell when Alex wants to rev it up or take it down, or if he's into it or if he's not into it, and vice versa.
AR: Tonight you're going to perform at this event series called Default. It's an event series for contemporary experimental music and sound art performances. I was curious, what are your plans for the show tonight?
George: We're doing something totally different. We're doing a sort of one-off performance which is actually based off of a technique that we used for the album. We were micing up the drums, micing up the kick, the snare, high tom, floor tom, and creating feedback from them. Alex is controlling them, playing with it with drumsticks, and I’m just giving the signals and moving between them. For the album, we did it quite extensively. He could fade between six channels and really just blend and move over them and play the drums as a melodic instrument almost.
Alex: So it's just microphone feedback through the speaker, but resonating at the frequency of the drum. So you can actually tune the drum to the note that you want, and it resonates like that. Then it’s kind of really meticulous mic placement to get the specific frequency you want. It just sounds like a sine wave. It sounds like a synth or whatever. But it's really cool because physically, you can play it by pushing it, tuning it, or muting specific parts of the skin to get other frequencies out. Or if you drum on it, of course, that kind of resonates.
AR: All right, I've got the last question. Do you think experimental music can be political, or in general, do you think avant-garde experimental music is political per se?
Alex: I really relate to the Dadaist notion of, which is not experimental music, but Dada is this kind of, was this kind of original thing of needing to be rid of the logic which brought us to the First World War, like ridding ourselves of the mindset which we are in, which leads to kind of these political manifestations, atrocious political manifestations. I think the biggest tragedy with experimental music is the fact that a lot of spaces are closing, which it's always been the case because with alternative music and experimental music you have alternative spaces and experimental spaces. Due to having alternative spaces, you have alternative dialogues and contexts and safe havens for people to meet and discuss ideas. It's not like one tailored to one individual and one kind of political or social mindset. When you have alternative spaces and experimental spaces for art and music, you have social hubs where people can interact. Having an experimental music environment, you give space to other forms of thought and discussions, which is very, very important. Questioning the status quo constantly is really, really important. Which is also aesthetic, by default, it's very, very aesthetic. Questioning the mainstream aesthetic is by default political because it shows that there are alternatives. It isn’t this one-way approach.
I guess a big question is how political can, for example, instrumental music be? I think that's kind of a big debate. There are many examples of how, because of course you can do it lyrically, you can, of course, do it through other means. There's this one guy, Marshall Trammell, amazing free jazz drummer. He's got his own sound, his own technique, and he's extremely political. Whenever he does a concert, he combines it with a lecture or with a talk. He does a lot of social events, educational events, or workshops with people. And for him, music is a means to translate these ideas, and it's two different things. It's like, “Okay, now I'm going to play a 20-minute solo,” but before and afterwards it is him also contextualizing what this is. He's also got this kind of very, very... his drumming to him is interpreted very, very specifically in how it stems from a history of violence in his family, from the poverty that his family and his environment grew up in, and how that influences how it plays. So then you are told this, and then you watch him play. It freaks the hell out of you, and then you discuss it afterwards. So in that sense, yeah, I think it's very, very possible. It's not by default. I think also historically, academically, a lot of music is really for music’s sake, which is also fine, but I do think it has the potential to be very, very political. But you just need to be very conscious.
AR: After World War Two, there were a lot of composers of avant-garde, the first experimental music composers, who were intentionally also just saying, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (quote by Adorno). So they were making very noisy, very strange music, which was also just a reaction to a melody because they were saying like a melody now doesn’t make sense as art, in a way. It's not meaningful and so for them, escaping that form or that type of sound, was inherently already political.
The reason I ask this question is because sometimes it happens a lot with free jazz, like very experimental free jazz bands that are also a bit noisy. Sometimes there is like a saxophone solo or a trumpet solo that sounds very much like someone shouting, yelling, and it feels political to me. But why?
Alex: It’s witnessing anger also, just being angry at society, being angry at politics. Personally, I really believe I stand behind the logic that everything is political. How we shop, how we dress, how we speak to each other, how we treat our partners—everything is completely representative of political influence and also political consciousness. So how we set up and the equipment that we use and the volume play out, it's political, it's environmental. It's like it's all there. It might be, in many cases, unconscious, but a lot of that also is kind of very, very conscious of how do you speak to your public live? For the longest time, Alex and I just don’t speak to microphones when we’re addressing the public, which is not a political manifestation, but it does have political implications. This is a shared endeavor, trying to break the wall of us playing the music and not being the ones on stage. We are the ones playing the music, but this is like a group effort.
AR: Of course, it’s a different kind of gathering where you're playing, if in a basement or with the audience around you, completely different than being at a big arena show.