Make no mistake: Russell Haswell is one of the most bold and uncompromising multi-disciplinary artists to emerge from Britain in the last 20 years. If you haven’t had your hearing permanently damaged at his hands, then you haven’t lived.
Straight-talking and sharply intelligent, Haswell grew up and studied in Coventry, before embarking on a nomadic period that saw him set up camp in United States, Finland and Sweden among other places, forging a reputation that has led him to exhibit visual artwork in such prestigious venues as Sadie Coles HQ, Anthony D’Offay, The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), TN Probe (Toky0) and Vienna’s Kunsthalle.
Preoccupied with exploring the most extreme and transporting possibilities of electronic music, Haswell is that rare thing: an artist equally comfortable in the often mutually exclusive contexts of the fine art gallery, the academy, the rock venue and the night club. His considered, grievously wrought explorations of digital sound transcend genre boundaries, and his past collaborators – including Aphex Twin, Pan Sonic, Whitehouse and Carl Michael von Hausswolff – are an accordingly disparate bunch.
Since 2003 Haswell has been engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Austria’s Florian Hecker, making use of Iannis Xenakis’s graphic-input UPIC Music Composing System; the recordings have been presented in live “diffusion sessions” around the world, and on albums released by Warner Classical (Blackest Ever Black) and Warp (UPIC Warp Tracks). Haswell’s solo excursions into the live realm have been documented on the acclaimed Mego releases Live Salvage and Second Live Salvage. His most recent Mego release is 2009′s field recordings collection Wild Tracks.
Haswell has curated exhibitions and special projects at venues including MoMA’s P.S.1 and the Aldeburgh Snape Maltings Concert House, and in 2005 and 2006 he programmed two ATP club events, the artists featured – among them British Murder Boys, Earth, Mark Stewart + The Maffia, Robert Hood and Pita – reflecting his own unique sensibility. He is currently curating a project commissioned by Istanbul’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, working with Peter Zinovieff, Jana Winderen, Yasunao Tone and Carl Michael von Hausswolf. Over the next couple of months, you can catch him supporting his friends Autechre on their tour of Europe, including a performance at the 2010 Bloc Weekend, before releasing Value + Bonus, a double-album recorded for New York noise label No Fun Productions.
Long impressed by Haswell’s artistic adventurousness and distinction, not to mention his terrifyingly good taste, we decided it was about time we called on him at his Suffolk home to talk it all through. It was a hugely entertaining and edifying conversation, employing a bewilderingly diverse cast of characters – among them Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, Michaela Strachan, Swans, Mick Jagger, New Order, Stockhausen, Rashad Becker and Benny Hill.
When did you first become consciously interested in sound?
“I was interested in certain parts of records rather than the entire thing, be it the entire track or the entire album…I used to go to the library in Coventry a lot when I was fairly young, and they had records, so I would borrow those and experiment with them, take them out and say ‘What’s this?’. I guess that’s where I introduced myself to most music until a few years later when I was in my early teens, listening to John Peel and reading the NME for the first time. I read the NME when I was 11 or so, because I was a paperboy. And I would thumb through it and go, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ or ‘This is a bit shit’ or ‘I think this is more down my street’ – like anyone else. This was the early 80s. So I was going through punk and the aftermath, not as a participant – I was too young – but as an observer.”
At what point did computers enter your life?
“The use of computers came when I was a kid, when I used to watch Micro Live [BBC2 show produced by David Allen as part of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project, 1983-7] It’s all on YouTube now, I’m sure. That was on Sunday mornings at 9am or so, so I used to watch that shit; I was intrigued. At my primary school they wheeled in a computer once, but I didn’t really have access to computers – unless it was to play Sinclair Spectrum games and so on – until I went to university, really. I went to Coventry School of Art (which later became part of Coventry University). They had some computer courses, and I got access to some of their machines…they had a load of new Apples in there. I was on my fine art foundation course, and I got to know a few of the people in the computing department; I was probably three years younger than them, but I got way in there somehow. I used to experiment with things which they had at the time – like HyperCard, and then a few years later Macromedia appeared and everything that you get nowadays.”
When did you become alive to the possibility of using computers for artistic endeavours?
“I remember watching films like The Billion Dollar Brain [1967 espionage caper, directed by Ken Russell] or The Italian Job, when they’ve got Benny Hill [in the role of Professor Simon Peach] using brown paper-covered boxes with some kind of device in them that hooks up all the traffic lights in the city…And they write a computer program that’s on a tape, and you see them stop the traffic network, and at the same time you hear BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style bleepy sounds, and you connect the two things. ‘Oh, there’s a computer that does electronic sound.’
“And then of course we all lived through Tomorrow’s World [BBC technology magazine show, 1967-2003] and so on, there was a bombardment of electronic music at that time. I remember being aware that Tangerine Dream were playing at Coventry Cathedral in 1975, and was annoyed – as a child – that I wasn’t taken to the concert. There were all these things, a massive combination of factors. You began to see it [electronic music] everywhere: watching pop bands like The Human League on Top of The Pops with their Synclavier, or seeing New Order, which was very significant for me. The fact of a band of having electronic ‘assistance’ and of being aware of the drummer going off-stage when they do ’Blue Monday’.”
the guy is an inspiration
It's a great interview this. Really good.
great stuff,
great interview, it’d be awesome if you guys somehow convinced him to do a mix with actual audio