Marsen Jules - Perpetual shades

One of the most active and representative figures in contemporary ambient music, Martin Juhls comes across as a gentleman from another era. Elegant both in look and manner, composed but never shy. It's almost like standing in front of the typical stereotype of a mid-nineteenth-century painter. This entirely reflects his way of making music, that spontaneous, intimate and romantic approach that unites the organic miniatures of “Beautyfear“, the melancholy of “Nostalgia” and “Herbstlaub”, and the long generative evolution of the masterpiece “The Endless Change Of Colour“. A human touch that, on one hand, sets his highly distinctive soundscape apart from that of most of his contemporaries – largely tied to the formal purity of sound art or to experimental-type evolutions – and, on the other, anticipated by at least a decade the “return to substance” that culminated in the recent masterpieces of Tim Hecker and Lawrence English. On the occasion of the release of “At GRM“, a collection of two suites developed during a residency at Pierre Schaeffer and company's historic Parisian headquarters, we got Juhls to reveal to us directly a long series of details about his celebrated and pivotal sonic adventure.

First of all, I'm curious about your moniker: where does it come from?

Simply put, it's a misspelling of my name. One day I received a package of promo CDs on which someone had misspelled my name in this really cute way. From that point on I decided to use it as my artist name.

Your new album isn't actually that new, since it collects tracks you recorded back in 2009. Why did you wait so long to release them?

It's actually material I worked on during a period when I was hired as an artist-in-residence at GRM for two weeks. It's very complex material. Suffice it to say that at the time I had a fairly modern MacBook: the CPU (the laptop's allocated memory, ed.) was running at ninety percent even while I was working on just a single track. I had to wait a year before I could process them properly, and I could only do so once I bought a machine capable of running them acceptably. Besides, I don't know how other artists do it, but I usually release albums with a delay of two to four years after they were created.

How did you build these two suites? How much of it is “planned” and how much improvised?

For years I've worked only with software and sampled material, and eighty percent of my music is generative rather than arranged. As for sound design, I used (and still use) a lot of tools that were developed right there in the GRM studios. Making music is an intuitive process for me, I don't overthink it. Listen and do, listen and do, and so on… until I feel it's finished.

I imagine it was an interesting period for you, given that GRM is a sort of parallel planet, where the seeds of much of contemporary electronic music (and beyond) were developed… What did this residency mean to you?

It was definitely wonderful to find myself recording and playing in such a historic place, also because it was the first time I got to work in a studio fully equipped for quadraphonic sound. I tried out a lot of tools using Ableton Live for quadraphonic setups.

And do the historic figures of GRM represent a source of influence for you?

When I started working with electronics, or rather with electroacoustics, I listened to a huge number of recorded talks by Pierre Henry, in which he described his earliest musical impressions from childhood. He didn't talk about instruments, but about trains passing along the railway near his house. Then he said that “everything he heard was potentially material to make music with”. That interpretation of the concept of sound was, and still is, so close to my own that listening to that talk was perhaps the first spark that led me toward electronics and sampling. I also worked a lot with field recordings and audio-visual manipulation in my very earliest artistic experiments.

What other musicians or composers do you feel are close to your own way of understanding music?

Stockhausen, Ligeti, John Cage, Luigi Nono, Aphex Twin, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, Harold Budd, Christian Zanesi. When I started working with electronic music, I also read a ton of books about the “Studio For Elektronische Musik” in Cologne, or the Grm in Paris, or other places like that. So it wasn't really the music itself that inspired me, but the artistic and technological ideas that were described around it.

This year you also released one of the most cohesive records of your career, “Beautyfear”. I know that many of those compositions date back some time, so much so that some people have linked it closely to “Nostalgia”, even though to my ears the two records have little in common sonically. Is there any connection between the two projects?

No, none at all. “Nostalgia” was more like a fulfillment of the ideas developed on “Herbstlaub”, if anything. The tracks I released on “Beautyfear”, on the other hand, all came out of two weeks of work in a theatre in Lisbon. These sketches were meant to be part of the soundtrack for a theatre production, but they were rejected by the people who commissioned them. They're very simple, direct miniatures, born of a far more transparent approach than the one behind “Nostalgia”.

Can you explain a bit more about this concept of “fear of beauty”?

No. If I'd wanted to explain it in words, I would have written a book. Instead, I recorded an album.

Going back even further, we get to what for me is your masterpiece, “The Endless Change Of Colour”. A record on which you also returned, among other things, to the generative ambient of Brian Eno, would you say?

Thanks, it's nice to hear you say that. Yes, I agree. And yes, it's a record of generative music, built on different loops played “against one another” at various levels of sound manipulation. There's no moment on that record that actually repeats, even when it seems to. I like this idea of bringing something to life that can then sustain itself on its own. I've already got a follow-up to that record planned, and I'm considering the idea of an extra version lasting twenty-four hours.

Is the reference to colours in the title also tied to the idea of a sound that evolves by “shifting” without ever retracing its steps?

Exactly, it's a metaphor to describe what happens on a sonic level. The evolution of the music itself can be compared to that of a kaleidoscope in motion.

And last but not least, you achieved another important result with the trio project. A choral evolution I'd already been thinking about back at the time of “Nostalgia”… What did it represent for you?

Working as a trio was a wonderful experience. On stage, I felt it as a natural extension of my artistic expression. Due to a number of circumstances, though, the project won't be continuing. Instead, I'm working on a new project with Jan-Phillip Alarm on piano and Roger Doering of Dictaphone on saxophone and clarinet. This latest idea came about mainly because I'm a bit tired of all this neo-classical music that's going around, and I want to bring something new to that world. When we started working as a trio, we were the only ones in that scene performing live with instruments. Nowadays everyone does it, it's become a staple of cinematic music. In the new group, though, I'll be focusing more on electronics than orchestration, and I'll be playing a lot of percussion.

Since 2010 you've also started working in the record industry with your own label, Oktaf. At first you thought of it purely as a means of releasing your own work, but then came records by Lufth and Gaston Arévalo… How do you see the label today?

When you found a label, it's obvious that you also want to lend a hand to artists you admire. I'd come across Gaston's work, which had come out on Tinner, and I liked it a lot, especially the more ambient parts. With Lufth it was a whole different story: Joerg is a friend I've always admired, and when I heard the tracks he was working on, I decided I wanted to do my part to help him get noticed.

Even after founding Oktaf, you kept recording for other labels, above all 12k, which is the temple par excellence of contemporary ambient music. How did that relationship come about? Do you plan on continuing to work with them?

I met Taylor (Deupree, ed.) in Paris in 2009, and he asked me to produce an album for 12k. What came out of that was “The Endless Change Of Colour”. I've already asked Taylor if he's interested in releasing the follow-up I mentioned earlier, which will be called “Shadows In Time”, but so far there's been no answer. If he doesn't get back to me, I'll release it with Oktaf.

The most interesting aspect of your career, in my opinion, is the incredible range of perspectives from which you've approached the very concept of ambient music. I'm thinking of your various side projects, and Krill.Minima in particular…

…which is essentially an unfinished project. Marsen Jules has always been, for me, the place to create an entire sonic universe out of basic, minimal sound material. The idea behind Krill.Minima, on the other hand, was to grasp the whole universe of musical possibilities and build something out of it. Unfortunately, though, I wasn't able to give that idea continuity or practical shape. Partly because it was a project that couldn't exist without a live dimension: at the time I had a quadrophonic live set I'd worked on for months, and without false modesty I think it was really dense and substantial, but in the end no one was willing to produce it. That's basically why I decided to drop the project.

So is Marsen Jules no longer a project today, but an alter ego of Martin Juhls?

Yes, today it is.

There are also a number of other minor projects: Falter, Wildach Sonnerkraut and Massiv… What do these brief experiences represent for you?

Wow, you're well informed, but to be honest that's all minor stuff that belongs to the past. There's another moniker you haven't mentioned yet, which will come back to life next year after quite a long time…

How do you generally carry your music from the studio to the stage? And how do you build your live sets?

I love playing live and interacting directly with sounds, space and the audience. I always want to make sure I have as much control as possible over everything that defines the performance. I don't like to talk about improvisation, because that would be a lie, but performing my music live really matters to me. I like the idea of playing dynamically, of taking the audience somewhere else through the music.

What kind of venue do you think best suits your performances and your music?

I like playing in theatres, cinemas, or generally places where the audience can sit and listen. And I always want a good sound setting, especially on my monitor. If the monitor sound is good, I can directly control every tiny detail and work on it so the audience can perceive it too.

What other projects are you working on now?

I've just finished working on the cover of “The Empire Of Silence”, a new album that will come out early next year. I also have other works nearly ready for 2015 and 2016. Then there's a series of recordings I'm sharing with pianist Bruno Sanfilippo that I plan to finish in the coming months.

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