Gavin Russom
Earlier this week I asked Russom, himself an artist whose moorings are in more “experimental”, beatless electronics, if he felt his own rhythmic dance music “interventions” accorded with those of Giffoni. Though their backgrounds and approaches are clearly different, I felt that they both seemed to disinter, and draw attention to, the stranger rituals and energies lurking in familiar dance music forms and methodologies. He wasn’t so sure.
“It’s not as if I’m trying to dismantle dance music to be something more energetic or experimental, I’m more anchoring something which has an extremely chaotic and intense energy by using certain musical devices, and not anchoring it so much that it becomes completely defined by those devices, but rather that there is a tension between the raw energy and the structure. My sense from listening to Carlos’ work is that he is perhaps working from almost the opposite direction; inhabiting the structures and systems of dance music and dismantling them from inside to push them towards noise and chaos.”
“I think music is way more powerful than people realize” - Gavin Russom
So for Russom house/techno is the result rather than the root?
“For me things start with energy and move towards a focus that might be interpreted as a musical idiom or genre,” he said. “For example, when I’m working in a way that eventually results in a dancefloor-friendly track, it’s because that’s the path which that particular track has taken me on.
“With ‘The City Never Sleeps’ I started by doing a live take on a 606 through parallel sets of EQs. That was the original idea that the track grew out of. It wasn’t particularly dancefloor-friendly despite being made on a drum machine but that’s where the energy was coming from at that moment. Then I had the idea to add each layer one by one and it grew into the instrumental track, then Viva came on board and the vocal element was added, and the structure of the track changed again from there. But there isn’t really a moment where I say ‘I want to make a track like this’ or ‘I want this to be this kind of music’. It’s more like there’s a mass of energy that gets first channeled into certain machines or instruments, then into certain sounds.”
But surely ideas of “house” and “techno” must be there, even if at the periphery of your vision, from quite an early point?
“In my own work I’m really coming from the approach of sound and its energy,” Russom answers, “Its ability to channel energy. Dance music is an obvious choice, an obvious idiom to work in to, as I say above, anchor some of this energy into a ‘usable’ form. Because there’s already all these ideas floating around in the dance music scene about what music can do for you. I think music is way more powerful than people realize, that’s my experience of music, that it is incredibly powerful and can do a lot for a person. When I make music, that is primarily what I want to share. I use references, again, as a way of anchoring this energy and translating it into form where it becomes communication.
“Undoubtedly a lot of the newer technology that exists for making dance music is focussed more on imitation than it is on invention.”
There’s an undeniable sense that electronic dance music is no longer plausibly ‘futurist’ – the idea that every successive techno or house record is a giant leap forward for sound/music is no longer a credible one, if it ever was. Genuinely new sounds seem increasingly hard to come by. It seems that more and more, the most interesting records in the electronic music realm are those that enter into conceptual dialogue with dance music past. I think not just of Russom and Giffoni but, say, Atom TM’s Liedgut LP; the most adventurous artists around right now seem to be consciously and formally invoking the past. Er, right?
“Is this just a function of the fact that there is so much more dance music being produced and released then there was at the time when, as you say, each new record was a giant leap forward? Undoubtedly a lot of the newer technology that exists for making dance music is focussed more on imitation than it is on invention, but there are still lots of new tools that could be used. For example, I was speaking to Paul Schreiber (of Synthesis Technology/MOTM) the other day and he was describing two new synth modules he’s designed. Both are completely radical and unlike anything out there. There’s lots of stuff out there but I rarely hear it on records. [But] we have Omar S., Gemmy, Traxx, Levon Vincent… All those guys have put things out that I consider pretty radical recently, that come out of specific genres but then blow the defining characteristics of those genres to pieces.
“I can’t think of a moment where dance music was not in a conceptual dialogue with the past, as all music is.”
“I can’t think of a moment where dance music was not in a conceptual dialogue with the past, as all music is – because of the fact that it is continually evolving and changing and growing from where it is to where it is going to be. The first wave of Detroit techno is obviously in dialogue with the music of the late 70′s, Kraftwerk and OMD etc, also with Motown and late 70s funk and soul, just as those musics were in a conceptual dialogue with rock, blues and jazz before them. I consider continuing that dialogue to be part of my responsibility as a composer and producer, to participate in the evolution of music as a whole.”
“I think that part of the way the modernist impulse has been interpreted historically has to do with massive movements, inventions or individuals that have been so radical that they have changed everything, destroying what came before and creating an entirely new thing in its place. I think this is largely a historical fiction that is based around marketplace necessity rather than creative development. The Futurists themselves, perhaps the most modernist of the modernists, were guided by an impulse to destroy current ideas about art so that it could return to a more authentic place which they saw manifested in so-called primitive cultures. So were the Abstract Expressionists. I suspect that creativity that has engaged the past has always been more interesting.”
Kiran Sande
Special thanks to Gavin Russom and Benedict Bull
Recommended listening:
1. Actress – Splazsh [forthcoming Honest Jon's CD/LP]
2. Actress – Loomin [forthcoming Nonplus 12"]
3. Various Artists – Radio Scenic Glow Vol.1 [Upstairs CD-R]
4. No Fun Acid – This Is No Fun Acid [forthcoming No Fun Productions 2x12"]
5. Carlos Giffoni - Severance [Hospital Productions CD]
6. Geoff Mullen & Keith Fullerton Whitman – November 28, 2009 [Upstairs CD-R]
7. The Crystal Ark – The City Never Sleeps (Instrumental) [DFA 12"]
8. T++ – Wireless [forthcoming Honest Jon's 12"]
9. The Panamax Project – Maximum Height [Subsolo 12"]
10. Addison Groove – Footcrab [Swamp 81 12"]
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