Dirk Serries - Light and shadow between ambient and metropolis

The fourth and final Italian date of the Mono tour is about to begin. Mezzago, a town in the heart of Brianza, easy to reach by car but decidedly awkward if you prefer public transport. Il Bloom, one of the most interesting and active venues in the Milan area, has been chosen as the backdrop for the disruptive force of the quartet that, more than any other, has come to represent post-rock in the East. Half an hour before the show starts, a man in a black hood with a Gibson Les Paul takes the stage, raising a genuine wall of feedback, drones and noise that bewitches and carries away an audience initially reluctant and incredulous into an intensely immersive journey. Once his metropolitan constructions are complete, Dirk Serries, formerly vidnaObmana, sets down his Gibson and reveals to us the details of this latest sonic reinvention of his.

Let's start with a question about the show that has just ended: you took the stage with fairly limited equipment, with the guitar as the undisputed protagonist. Can you explain how you achieve and reproduce your feedback live?

Yes, first of all the setup is guitar, effects and laptop. On the laptop there's a bank of the deepest sounds, which I can't recreate with the guitar, or at least not with a single guitar. As for the rest, the sound starts from the guitar and goes straight to the amplifier. The main effect is a looper, which extends the single note coming from the guitar in a cycle. The process unfolds fairly slowly, like a sonic skein in constant but imperceptible motion, which nevertheless has a sort of life of its own made up of an enormous multitude of sounds. Unfortunately a lot of people don't notice any of this, because they see me playing but can't hear the correspondence between my movements and the sound. That's because the slowness with which the loops extend means you only become aware of their beginning after a few seconds. It really is quite a strange process for anyone used to seeing a guitar played in the traditional way, where every movement of the musician is immediately perceived as sound. Here the construction is more complex and moves from texture to texture, as if each note were a brick in a wall, which is the final result.

“Microphonics” represents your latest sonic frontier, after years spent experimenting with the most varied forms of ambient music. Can we still talk about ambient when referring to this latest aesthetic of yours? And what relationship is there between “Microphonics” and the rest of your previous output?

As you probably already know, for many years I was vidnaObmana, then Fear Falls Burning, and now I work under my real name. I've always found it very important to reassess myself, both in music and in life: you're born, you grow, you mature, you progress, you keep on learning. And that could also be a good summary of my career: I've always wanted to explore different worlds, and the more satisfied I was with what I achieved, the more confidence I gained in my means and in my sonic language. And so I reached the point of feeling ready to release records under my own name. As time went by, I also noticed that since I started identifying myself as Dirk Serries, my music has begun moving towards a kind of blend between what vidnaObmana was before and what Fear Falls Burning was afterwards: the power and depth of the sounds on “Microphonics” sound a lot like Fear Falls Burning, while the harmonics – you barely notice them, but I use a great many – are closer to vidnaObmana! Except now I reproduce them with the guitar, whereas as vidnaObmana I played exclusively keyboards, synthesizers and electronic effects. When you hide your music behind a pseudonym you definitely feel more “protected”, but at the same time you put up a kind of barrier between yourself and your music. Now that I've started using my own name I feel much more connected to my music. Listeners know that this is Dirk Serries's music, and they recognize me in what I do: it's a completely different philosophy.

In your very first works you were searching for a form of minimalism within the context of industrial music, and the liner notes accompanying “Microphonics” once again speak of an exploration of minimalism. Have you always been interested in this musical form?

Yes, of course! Not to be critical, but personally I believe that a lot of the music out there today is too “full”: there's a lack of attention to and interest in the single sound and its peculiarities. On “Microphonics” I limited myself to playing a combination of very few notes, five or six at most. And yet, by working on each one of them, the result is a decidedly expansive sound! And that's my conception of minimalism: focusing on a few particular sounds and exploring them from within. For the listener, this gives the impression that the music remains just as minimal, despite the flood of sound that envelops it.

What exactly does “Microphonics” mean?

The word refers to a particular experience with instruments. When you have a guitar and an amplifier and start playing with them, as you go on both of them “warm up”, and with them the sound you're able to produce. The downside of this process is that certain sonic disturbances often creep in, which many people find unwanted. I, on the other hand, love them - it's something that shouldn't be there but that you end up with anyway, and it helps to shape the aesthetic of your sound! The word comes from that: a “microphonic amplifier” is an amplifier that suffers from these “sonic disturbances”, which I love working with and which are very much present on these latest albums of mine.

A concept similar to glitch, then?

Yes, something like that!

Why did you decide, after years spent behind synths, to devote yourself to the guitar?

That's an excellent question, because when I started out with vidnaObmana I worked only with keyboards. Then, thanks to Steve Roach, I began to get closer to acoustic instruments too - especially those linked to "tribal" sounds - and finally I got to know a blues musician who lived in the town where I live and knew some of my work. He was a great guitar collector and enthusiast, while I - especially at the start of my career - hated guitars, associating them exclusively with rock'n'roll and heavy metal. But as I said before, you mature as you get older, and so I "allowed" myself the possibility of discovering this instrument. And what I found was that I could produce sounds I'd always dreamed of achieving with keyboards but had never managed to create. Actually, already in vidnaObmana's last works (the final three chapters of the "An Opera For Four Fusion Works" quadrilogy, ed.) I'd started incorporating guitar, but at a very minimal level. From Fear Falls Burning onwards, though, I began leaving keyboards in the background in favour of the guitar as the protagonist of my work.

Does vidnaObmana still exist? Do you intend to pick that project, or its sound, back up?

No, no and no. vidnaObmana will never come back (laughs). My work under that pseudonym lives on, though: Projekt Records has reissued almost all of it, even recovering material from the very first cassettes for some compilations. Sam Rosenthal is something of a guardian of my musical past, and he still has hundreds of minutes of unreleased music from that period, which he'll most likely start putting out soon. But there won't be any new tracks under the vidnaObmana name, because now I feel I am simply and solely Dirk Serries, and as far as I'm concerned, a lot of vidnaObmana's sounds can also be found in "Microphonics" itself. For that same reason, when I agreed last year with Steve Roach to collaborate again after ten years, I immediately refused to release the record (he's referring to "Low Volume Music", ed.) as vidnaObmana. And if you listen to it, you'll hear that it's quite different from what we did together in the past.

Staying on the subject, "Low Volume Music", as you've already said, is a rather different album, almost unexpected given the history of your collaboration. What changed in the two of you over the ten years that separated it from "Spirit Dome"?

Well, Steve and I always stayed in touch. Even when I started working on Fear Falls Burning, we spoke and he told me that wasn't really his style, and that his music was heading in a totally opposite direction to mine at that time. So we decided not to collaborate, but when we felt the time had come to work together again, we immediately decided to try to focus our energies on a record that was as "pure" as possible. No acoustic instruments, no didgeridoo, no flutes, no fujara, no percussion: just the basic elements of what ambient/atmospheric music, in our view, ought to be - so keyboards and synthesizers. It's not a record we made with any pretension of exploring or discovering something new, but simply the result of what we felt like doing and enjoyed doing at that moment. Nothing innovative, nothing that challenges already well-trodden ground. And that's what we'll keep doing, because "Low Volume Music" is going to be a series that continues with further chapters!

How did you get into ambient music? Was Steve also a source of inspiration for you in that sense?

Well, the first source of inspiration was definitely Brian Eno, because as you know I actually come from the industrial scene: my first cassette works are totally immersed in a noise atmosphere. Then I discovered Eno and started getting interested in ambient - actually, at first I didn't even know Steve: I met him and discovered his work when I joined Projekt (1992, ed.), and I immediately loved some of his records - "Structures From Silence" above all - and his way of combining atmospheric electronics with acoustic-tribal music - for instance on "Origins". From that moment on he definitely became an important source of inspiration for me, because he made me understand that there was a form of ambient music capable of going beyond keyboards alone!

And from that "discovery" the masterpiece "Well Of Souls" was born...

Thanks for the description! One important element for that record was the differences between him and me. Steve lives in the Arizona desert, so he's surrounded every day by vast spaces and nature, and both of those things play a crucial role in his music. It's not the same for me - I live in a town in Belgium where spaces are very small, everyone knows each other, and instead of nature there are cultivated fields. For this reason, Steve's perception of ambient music is definitely much broader than mine: if my idea can be compared to a television screen, his resembles a cinema's giant screen. "Well Of Souls" combines these two visions well: Steve's boundless, desert-like one and my more "introverted" one, closer to minimalism.

You also hit another masterpiece with Sam Rosenthal, by the way!

Yes, "Terrace Of Memories"! That record came out of a purely postal collaboration. With Steve I recorded many times sharing the studio and instruments, while with Sam it was a back-and-forth of tapes through the mail - a totally different experience.

Looking at today's scene, who are the musicians you prefer? Or more generally, what do you listen to?

I keep listening to a lot of different music! Many of my fixed points have stayed the same, especially in jazz: John Coltrane above all. As for more recent output, there are plenty of great names: Mogwai, This Will Destroy You, Sigur Rós, Jóhann Jóhannsson... If instead we're talking about things closer to pop, definitely Editors and a lesser-known band, the Twilight Sad, whose distinctive trait is singing in Scots. In general it depends a bit on my mood: sometimes I listen to jazz, other times classical music, and other times still more experimental stuff. What I'm always looking for, generally, is atmosphere.

One last question: you're here with Mono, in my opinion another great band not too far removed from the ones you've mentioned. What do you think of them?

I like them a lot, they definitely have a very distinctive sound and belong to a fairly well-defined scene, post-rock, which again has a little to do with ambient. Their tracks follow a kind of fixed pattern, the classic post-rock "build-and-release" structure, which in turn isn't so different from the flows of the purest ambient music. Within that field they're certainly among the most interesting bands, also because they bring elements of their own tradition into post-rock structures: if you pay attention, the melodies often follow Japanese notation. They're also really great people, and it's thanks to them that I'm here, since they were the ones who asked me to open these shows. I can only be happy about that, because anyone making music like mine always finds it pretty hard to play live - there are very few venues willing to host "experimental" musicians.

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