John Chantler - The Immanence of Sound

A first general question, just to break the ice: do you think there's "still light out there"?

Yes. I like to hold on to a certain kind of utopian ideas about future possibilities, while still acknowledging the often bleak realities of the present.

Obviously that was a joke referring to how I interpreted the title of your latest album... Looking also at the song titles, it really does seem like a kind of journey toward some "residual light" within a context of decay. What did you have in mind when you chose this concept? What is "the light", ultimately? What is "the outside", and where can we find it?

Of course. The title was meant to be fairly open-ended. I don't want to impose a specific meaning. On one level it's quite mundane. Being inside this big, cold, empty church while outside there was gorgeous autumn light and the last rays of summer sun. And then, whenever I wasn't playing the organ, I hated the sound of the church. That huge, cumbersome reverb starts to take over your thoughts after a while. It could also be a fixed (motionless) light... but interpret it however you like. As for "The Long Shadow of Decline" - that was the title of an article I'd read about the decline of Britain's geopolitical influence. I think the author was disheartened by the situation, whereas I'm quite happy that the British political establishment has even less power and influence, given that they're a bunch of crooks.

That's one of the connections I imagined while listening to the album. Looking at today's social and historical situation around the world, I really feel like we're living beyond "the shadow of decline", in every respect (facts, economics, politics, human attitudes and reactions in general). And a lot of people are trying to figure out whether there's still "light outside" that shadow. Many probably don't realise that, in a way, they're just feeding that shadow with the very attitudes I mentioned. There's a kind of natural, obvious belonging between people's behaviour and the context of their lives. What do you think

I think it's useful to play the long game. I've just finished reading a really interesting book, "Inventing The Future", which argues for the need to work toward developing a strategic, intellectual, documented position for possible post-capitalist futures. Having preliminary thinking and actions ready for when opportunities for mass change arise (as happened with the 2008 financial crisis). That's part of the utopian ideas about the future I mentioned earlier.

Going back a bit to the music and the sound, I really did perceive this sense of disorientation in the album's dense sonic landscape. It really does feel like an eternal (and futile) flight from a kind of spiritual decay, with light filtering through certain cracks but never managing to prevail over the overarching darkness. That's why, in my review, I described this album as remarkably “concrete” compared to your previous music, and more oriented toward “the inner being”. Was this “disorientation” one of the goals of the sonic landscape?

I'm not sure I thought of it in those terms; I was always aware that the organ is already so loaded with meaning – I didn't want to focus too much on that, except to subvert some of those associations, for instance by amplifying the extreme registers of the organ. Almost all the high-frequency acoustic content is the actual acoustic sound of the organ, but it's been mixed so that it's relatively louder than you'd hear it against the other registers.

Conceptually, “The Luminous Ground” focused on some rather spiritual ideas from Christopher Alexander about art and architecture, and about what processes create works in which you can recognize something of yourself (or what he calls “self-like being”) in a structure – “the practical question of forging a living center” – but then the record is made entirely of synthesizers, so there's less of that immediate pull from our collective memory that associates the timbre of an organ with something spiritual.

Another project I find particularly intriguing is the one with Stefano Tedesco. In the live shows I've seen recently, it seemed almost like a kind of “surgical exploration” of certain analog machines (I think they were oscillators, right?). Over the course of your career you've collaborated with a huge number of artists, some of them very different from you in background and sound. What do you take away from each collaborative project?

I just got back from a trio concert with Per Zanussi (double bass) and John Hegre (guitar) in Norway, where we were improvising, but responding to and working within certain structures and directions that Per had developed. That kind of experience pushes me to think more carefully about the sounds I'm using and what they mean, and it's fantastic to work directly with other people and try to reach a shared, or at least complementary, understanding of what we're all doing. In general, though, I like to stay open to the situation, maybe push a little if it makes sense, but also try to leave some space for the music.

I'd like to close with a personal curiosity: some of your projects remain somewhat mysterious. For example, there's a collaboration with Lawrence English under the name Holy Family, which produced only two cassettes, now sold out and very hard to find. Then I saw your name on another project on Room40, For Barry Ray. Finally, I know you were involved in a very particular experience in Scotland, Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Can you tell us more about these projects?

Holy Family is fairly brutal music that Lawrence and I made together a few years back. We put it together very quickly, in person, and had an absolute blast. It'd be nice, at some point in the future, to be able to spend a bit more time on something more considered. For Barry Ray is a duo I formed with my partner, Carina Thorén; I still love the album “New Days” a lot – it feels like a foundation for a lot of my current musical interests, and I have fond memories of the shows we played around that time. Maher is a Japanese band, led by Tori Kudo, with a strong connection to Scotland through Pastels, who have released a lot of their music over the last 15 years. I met Tori Kudo by chance, when my subscription copy of WIRE magazine ended up being delivered to his house by mistake. He lived in the same rural prefecture where I lived for two years (from 2001 to 2003). We wrote to each other, exchanged music, and when we finally met, he invited me to play with Maher in Tokyo. He's a truly unique person, and that chance encounter was one of the most important meetings of my life; indirectly, it led me to pretty much everything I do today, in one way or another.

To wrap up, I'll ask you the same joking question I already asked Lawrence last year: 2015 is coming to an end. What's your top 10 of the year so far?

Ten is hard, but here are five things off the top of my head – “Simple Songs” by Jim O’Rourke – I can never get enough of it… and I can't get it out of my head when I'm hiking in the mountains in summer (“All your love will never change me!”). Slowing down with Jürg Frey was a truly wonderful thing to do this year: “24 Wörter”, “The String Quartets”, “Grizzana”. All of it superb. The magnificent “Vertigo” by the Necks. “Isswat” by Fadimoutou Wallet Inamoud fills me with joy every single time – and finally “Aberration Of Light” by Olivia Block; the cassette version is great, but the live performance at Fylkingen was particularly stunning.

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