snd/foto by simon harris
Mark Fell and Mat Steel of Sheffield based SND have been constructing their unique brand of micro-beat since 1998. Their first self released 12"s, labelled with nothing but a telephone number, formed a blueprint for the clicks and cuts movement that was to follow. Their trademark reduction of precision beats, methodical progressions and rounded synth stabs soon found its way onto the unfortunately now defunct Mille Plateaux label who released 3 critically acclaimed albums. After a 6 year hiatus they returned last year after a lengthy tour alongside Autechre with another series of self released 12"s titled '4,5,6'.
SND's influence can be heard throughout Minimal Techno (Sähkö, Sleeparchive, Richie Hawtin) as well as in the output of their peers on Raster-Noton and Mille Plateaux, but they remain extremely difficult to pigeon hole. No-one really knows what labels to attach to them. Are they dance music? Is it contemporary minimalism? Should they play in a club, a warehouse or a theatre? They occupy a grey area which borders on so many genres, a remarkable feat given the simplicity of the sound sources and the starkness of their aesthetic. Their music has always avoided needless excess or over indulgence, instead maintaining a strictly 'less is more' ideology.
In the coming months a new album is due for release on the fitting home of the Raster-Noton label, who hosted the second room on the 28th of January for Club Transmediale at Maria Am Ostbahnhof, Berlin. This night saw the premiere of their 'rhythm_screen', a 'performance space in which sound, light and architecture are united into an overall concept'. On display were live AV performances from Frank Bretschneider, Alva Noto, Olaf Bender and SND with each artist using a customized visual.
The following day I met up with Mat Steel and Mark Fell in a cafe on Kastanienallee to chat about the 'rhythm_screen', their forthcoming album and aeroplane wings.
Words & Photos by Simon Harris.
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snd/foto by simon harris
SH: Last night was the premiere for the Raster-Noton rhythm screen. Could you tell me a bit about the system you developed?
MF: The system was designed by someone else, we just had to decide what we wanted to do with it. We wanted it to be really simple and to avoid this kind of one to one relationship between the sound and image. I mean what we wanted from the system we wrote in 2 lines it was really that simple. Basically, on stage we have a series of controllers, each with 16 columns and 3 rows of dials. So what we thought was to assign each knob to RGB values. Those values are then just plotted directly on the screen. The very first dial change was just a single colour on screen. The second dial turn divided it into 2 colours and then gradually all these actions stack up into maybe 10s of 1000s of RGB values. So the whole thing has a cumulative effect.
MS: We have a separate row of dials just for manipulating the patterns which doesnt have any consequence on the screen. So if were not changing patterns the screen just stops. It's not until we turn certain controls that it actually adds onto the screen. Like one knob may be to control a filter and its also sending RGB values to the screen. It's like a log of the parameters we're changing during the performance and you only see the changes happing very gradually.
MS: I guess it could have been quite dissapointing for the audience I guess in some way. The rhythm screen is a new thing and yesterday was really like a test run for us. It's the first time we've worked with it.
MF: I mean computationally it's very simple whats happening, but congnitively to kind of glue together what's happening is quite complicated. There isn't any kind of one to one connection. This use of visuals that are related to sound in a seamless kind of way is really something we dont like.
SH: For me it was a little unusual having the projection to the side of the performance space.
MS: I quite like that set up. I'm not really into that whole set up where there's a screen behind us.
MF: And this whole mentality that there's some kind of spectacle. That there's a really engaging dynamic visual.
snd/foto by simon harris
SH: I mean this is the whole problem with laptop performance. When people are in these concert scenarios there is still an expectation of some kind of performance spectacle. The problem is how to address that.
MF: The problem is with the laptop stuff is with the audience. I mean why should you expect something? I remember about 10 years ago or so I saw Peter Rehberg live for the first time and he just walked onstage and pressed a button and walked straight offstage. I mean why should you always expect someone to be doing something? Why should it always be about skill or all these gestural kind of things. I'm not really interested in that. I mean neither of us are from musical backgrounds so we dont have all this baggage of needing to have something on stage that indicates there is some kind of skill going on.
MS: I remember one of our gigs. We decided to really try not to move at all. We really tried to be removed from the whole situation.
MF: We deliberatly try to create a distance from the audience. It's not really about bringing together the audience and the performers and having this really insane kind of interaction between technology and performers and audience. We just don't get it. The way we treated the visuals last night was also kind of in line with that. It wasn't about making this dynamic engrossing spectacle. It was much more removed.
MS: That approach is something you can find throughout everything we do really. We don't really like to push things on people. We don't really like doing things that are obvious. One example of this was when we were preparing the set for the last tour. There was one track which we had at the end which really built up. It was really like a massive climax. We really didn't think it fitted because it was so obvious. So we just took it and stuck it at the start of the set.
SH: Whilst we're on the subject of AV projects, maybe you could tell me a bit about Mark's 'Attack on Silence' DVD that came out recently?
MF: It came about because when I started doing music I was friends with the Anti-group in Sheffield. They had these ideas to use frequencies to engender states of mind. I guess I'm completly suspicious and critical of anything like that but at the same time drawn to it in aesthetic terms. I just wanted to do something that was as challenging as possible for an audience. I did a performance of it in Poznan. Basically, I'm onstage and I just press a button and there's a really gradual colour change that happens over about 20 minutes. It can either be quite intense and engaging or really boring and difficult. I really like this opposition between something that you can really get sucked into but at the same time it's constantly throwing you out of it. I'm really into the philosopher Heidiger who wrote alot about boredom and the nature of conscoisness. So alot of it is this interest I've got in Heidiger and this interest in what it is to exist.
SH: So you have a new album coming out soon on Raster-Noton. Can you tell me a bit about it?
MS: It's really just a natural progression. We started working on it last year. We went into our studio in Sheffield for 7 weeks and were there Monday to Friday from 9-5. Well more like 12-10 actually (laughs). We have a sofa there so one of us would be taking a nap whilst the other was working.
SH: I'm interested in how you divide the work when your working on stuff. Do you take seperate elements or work on everything together?
MF: I think Mat did more of the final editing this time.
MS: When it gets to the editing stage you do sort of have to go away and relisten intently to it. Just to get it really tight.
MS: We knew that to get an album done we'd have to work to a deadline so we met with Raster-Noton, agreed that we'd do an album and they set us a deadline. Our schedules were really busy so we just gave ourselves somewhere to do it and then we sort of finished our time in the studio and then went off to work on other projects. So we did the final edits separately.
MF: Actually, the final edit happened on a train from Dresden to Berlin where we had an appointment at dubplates and mastering. We were playing in Dresden and the next day we got on the train and got the computer out. So the last 2 hours was us editing on the train!
MS: We were just running by things, changing this and that and just checking it. We got it finished in September and i dont think the record will be out till the end of Febuary.
SH: So how does the new album compare to your previous work?
MF: All the albums we've done I thought 'that's almost what we wanted to achieve', but there was just something just a bit imperfect about it. 'Tender Love' I was really happy with but it was still kind of like it was moving towards something and not really feeling I was totally there. With this one it really feels confident.
MS: I think we've been a bit freer with it. I think the environment we made it in helped as well. We'd be making albums for Mille Plateaux and they'd be ringing us up asking us what the title of it was and we hadn't even finished it yet. We just don't work like that. We don't really come up with a title and then come up with an album. Because we had jobs at that time we'd always take 4 or 5 days off and then go back to it. It takes you a day almost to get your head back into that space. Then you get tired and it becomes a drag. This time we had an amazing studio. Totally no distractions and could really just focussed on it.
snd/foto by simon harris
SH: Do you ever find it difficult to remain objective when your working on your tracks. I mean when your working on things your listening to it over and over maybe 100's of times. Even if I listened to my all time favorite track over and over in one day I think I'd be totally sick of it.
MF: I dont really know what that idea of objectivity kind of means in this context. You do really have to really go fully into what your doing and get immersed in it in that sense. It's not like we feel that we have to remove yourself from it in order to make better decisions about it. We just trust our judgement.
MS: You can't really do that anyway. It's not until 2 years later, when you haven't listened to your album for ages and you put it on, forgetting about all the edits you've done.
MF: When we did the first 3 albums on Mille Platueax, by the time we'd finished recording them i couldn't even bear listening to it. It was like... O god this is just horrible.
MS: The last album took us months whereas this new one we did in about 7 weeks.
MF: Not just because of the way it was made or the time spent on it, but this one is the first one we've done that I can actually listen to and think this one sounds really good. It's the first thing that we've done together that I'm properly pleased with. As a product it just seems really right. The cover and everything.
MS: I just want to have it released really. We finished working on it in September and it's still not out. This was the reason we wanted to go back to doing 12"s because we could do them and release them really fast. It's like a snapshop of what your doing in time.
MF: With the 4,5,6 release we wanted to go back to the way things started. Its how we began 10 years ago with unmarked vinyl being self released. We got 300 copies pressed and they sold out within one day on Boomkat. I was getting all these emails from friends and stuff asking where they could get copies from. We often get asked about releasing it as a cd or on mp3 but were reluctant to do that. I think it's nice for people to treasure these kind of products.
SH: I found a statement on Mark's website that reads "SND promote an approach to the organisation of sound, space and format that owes more to origami than any other time based medium." So i was wondering. How exactly do you go about folding time?
MS: Didn't you get that last night at the gig? (laughs)
MF: I don't know. I'm trying to think of a non-bullshit way of answering that.
SH: I mean for me what's really central to your stuff are the timing structures which lead you to anticipate certain events, but the patterns keeps shifting around enough to keep you guessing.
MF: Yeah it's not like we think in terms of song structures I guess. It's more to do with the geometry of it somehow.
MS: I think those words that you just used really do relate to the way we work. It's hard to be too consciouss about it though.
MF: The whole idea of patterns and folding patterns or transforming patterns is something we did do. We developed software systems to manipulate things in a geometrical way. I remember once I got this graphics program for a crappy PC. It had all these models of things like aeroplanes and stuff and I found out that all these aeroplanes are made out of parameters. Then there is like a number and you can change it and all the wings just went totally mental and all these wings started appearing (laughs). I was like wow thats a really interesting idea that you can not only have a picture of something but you can have a model of it thats kind of derived from some mathematical structures and change the parameters inside that structure to have different outcomes. Thats what we tried to do towards the end of our days on Mille Plateaux.
SH: So when you play live are you using these kind of systems or is it more pre-sequenced material?
MF: In the previous live set up until about 2005 it was all kind of algorithmic. It's like change a parameter and you get some wierd wings occurring (laughs).
SH: You have a button for wings!
MS: We got alot of buttons actually...
MF: We had a lot of complex controls, things to morph between different patterns and things to do mathematical operations on patterns in real time to create unusual things. In this system we really wanted to get away from that because what we found was, with all that control, we were going into this performance mode that was really engaged and were there nodding our heads and going for it. We had lots of activity. Then through other projects and other things we were doing we realised it's really nice to do a lot less. So we made a decision to work on a system that kind of forced us to do less. This system that we've got now is just very simple pattern manipulation. It's pre-sequenced patterns in a certain format or protocol for scoring patterns that we've developed.
MS: So we've got alot of pre-written patterns, and we step through and select those patterns. But we can also adjust those patterns in some way, plus we can also change the quality of sounds.
MF: It's basically like we've got 4 decks so we can put different patterns in different decks and then do simple manipulation on them. It's not like theres one system, there are lots of different systems slotting in.
MS: Also we wanted to take away the option of bashing buttons and going for it.
MF: We didn't want to go for it really.
SH: That's funny you say that because the London show last year with Autechre was probably the only show I ever went to where there was so much bass that dust and rubble was falling from the ceiling!
MF: It was a good sound system for that show!
MF: The other thing about this system is that we've developed this method for scoring patterns so all the music is developed in lists. We never write stuff in and say 'oh this is a nice pattern'. We have to write it in really long lists of numbers that you cant really understand until you actually listen back to it.
MS: You don't know what the result is going to be. We wanted to get rid of that 'here's a grid' we'll put a beat here and here and here.
MF: We've been working with these grid based sequencers for like 15 - 20 years or something and there are no surprises anymore, you know exactly what it is which is really unstimulating. So we thought we're not going to use any of that and just work on this number based system of complex lists of parameters that determine what it's gona sound like.
SH: Do you find it difficult on the flip side of that, considering the vast potential of computer software, to keep your totally reduced aesthetic?
MS: Not really, we just don't get that sort of immersed in software.
MF: Also with our sounds and stuff, there's a really limited set of things that we do. SND as a project has very clear boundaries. We have some rhythmic sounds of a certain type. A few soft chord sounds and that's it. Its just 2 sets of sounds.
MS: I think we're also quite aware if we're getting too complicated. It comes from the experience of working together and knowing what we want to do.
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SND's new album 'Atavism' is out soon on Raster-Noton.
