Tone Glow 007: Dean Roberts
An interview with electroacoustic musician and singer-songwriter Dean Roberts + album downloads and our writers panel on Jan St. Werner's 'Molocular Meditation'
Dean Roberts
Dean Roberts is a New Zealand-born, Berlin-based musician who has a long history of making experimental music. Thela, the band he was in as a teenager, found support from Thurston Moore and the trio eventually released two albums on his Ecstatic Peace! label. Roberts would go on to make solo projects under his own name and as White Winged Moth, as well as in the group Autistic Daugthers. His projects have been released on Kranky, Mille Plateaux, and Erstwhile. We chatted on the phone about his newest album, Not Fire, on Erstwhile sublabel ErstPop.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: When I first heard that you were going to release a new project, I was thinking about how long it had been since you made new music. What was the impetus behind making a new solo album after so many years?
Dean Roberts: I wasn’t inactive in that period of not making records. I was playing a lot, mainly solo gigs and also with my band Autistic Daughters after we released those records on Kranky. I was living in Europe and then I moved back to New Zealand, and I took on a different career there working in contemporary art galleries as a technician. Then I started teaching at the art school there, and once you get involved in teaching, it just becomes a thing where you vanish off the planet (laughs). I was still playing a lot but nothing was really recorded. In part, I was working for a contemporary dance company and the songs that came to be from Not Fire were songs that had been floating around for some time.
How long have they been around for?
Some of the songs come from between 2008 and 2010. I never really recorded them—well I made demos—but I practiced them and played them live a lot. It wasn’t really until I found the right circumstances, which was when I toured Canada and Mexico and Italy… Around last summer I thought it would be a great opportunity to record. I had access to The Pines Studio [in Berlin] and spent six weeks recording there but some of the actual audio recordings I used go back quite a long way; I assembled a lot of stuff from live recordings and improvisations I did with different people. Those were with Primitive Motion, Chris Abrahams from The Necks, Paul Taylor from Feist. We had done different sessions and I had a lot of material there and I constructed a lot of the songs around these improvisational recordings and then I also worked with Andrea Belfi directly in the studio, making specific compositions—songs, really—with him playing drums.
There’s quite a mixture of people and the hard thing was getting it to sound cohesive when everything was recorded in different places at different times. A lot of the cohesion came from doing the Pines sessions where it was just me by myself using the same setup. Some of the basic recordings were made on my iPhone, some were made in hi-fi studios, and the finishing touches at the Pines were a very hi-fi situation. It was a matter of melding lo-fi sketches and overdubbing… I don’t really want to give away some of the mystery of things but I’m always fascinated with the way records are made. And that’s kind of a big part of it: the aesthetics and styles of production—I’m a bit of a studio geek—and on this record I can say that what I did learn is that the process is very simple, a lot less complicated than you’d think.
Would you say it wasn’t as simple with your previous records? What made it simple this time around?
For me it was a matter of working with very simple principles that I always use, which are a good, clear stereo sound recording—it’ll capture elements of the room—and as little editing as possible. I mean there are a couple snips on the album but a lot of the stuff was live takes. There wasn’t much post-production, it was a matter of capturing and assembling these live room recordings and just balancing out the variations in those different live situations. That’s kind of what I’ve always done but in this case it was quite a different quality of sound and the focus was much more on the narrative—the lyrics—and the singing than the instrumentation. With Autistic Daughters, the music came first and the lyrics came after but this time the lyrics and the songs were there so I already had the songs formed and structured and the lyrics completed before starting to make music to it as such. The process was a little strange. I was largely working alone but I have a very good friend named Emanuele Porcinai who would help me with the studio side of things so I could focus on playing. He has a very good ear and is a very good engineer to work with, but otherwise it was a solitary experience. I can engineer this stuff myself usually.
I’m intrigued by the fact that the lyrics took primacy over everything else here and how you worked on the record at the Pines largely by yourself. When I listen to Not Fire, it feels like a solitary record. I get this sense of isolation from the world despite feeling the weight of it. I’m curious about the song “Kids.” A line that sticks out for me is one where you talk about listening to Lush and wishing you could live like you did in the ‘90s. Who in that song is being addressed, and what was the ‘90s like for you? Obviously you were in [the band] Thela but what does that time period represent for you and how do you look back on it now in 2020?
Well I have to say that the song was recorded in New Zealand back in 2010. I guess it’s that nostalgia of wanting to live in the ‘90s. It’s based on the idea of a couple who have become older and have regrets about things they could have done—that’s kind of the sentiment of that song. The thing of “listening to Lush, or listening to Laws,” the reference there was a popular talk radio host in New Zealand during the ‘90s called Marcus Lush, and another talk radio host called Michael Laws. They were politically opposed: Mr. Lush was a left-wing commentator while Laws was a right-wing commentator. It was a real religion in the ‘90s to listen to their talk shows on different radio stations. We didn’t have the internet back then of course so that was where information and discourse happened. There’s probably five people in the world who will get that reference—my mother and my father and my sister, and a couple other friends who’ll buy this record (laughs).
It was partly what I worked with in my writing during the early-to-mid 2000s: I wanted to slowly go into this colloquial direction, knowing that the things that seem colloquial can feel universal. In the song “Paul,” for example, I think everyone has a person in their life that’s like the character described—a menacing thorn-in-your-side character, but the truth of that song is I can’t play that song in New Zealand because everyone will know who it’s about (hearty laughter). It’s certainly not about the Paul who plays on the record. It’s kind of a fictional person actually, or an avatar, but at the time when I was back in New Zealand, I got interested in how I could identify with storytelling and narrative in my songs—to not be afraid to go into specific, colloquial details. But strangely, they’re universal in a way.
For sure. I think often times the best songwriters have to dig in very personally and from there, there’s always those kernels of universal truth or a sense of familiarity that makes their work more relatable. Talking about this is interesting because you have two covers on the album: “Say After Me” and “My Diviner.” Two questions: What drew you to those songs, and what is the goal you have when performing a cover?
Well, with Bic Runga [who originally made “Say After Me”]—a side note that her name is pronounced “Bec,” like an abbreviation of Rebecca, but this isn’t going audio so that doesn’t matter (laughs). In both cases, with Bic and Chris Eckman [of The Walkabout, who originally made “My Diviner”], I asked for permission to do both songs around the same time and they were both forthcoming and had the same attitude: that songs are songs and if you feel you can inhabit them, it’s kind of flattery that theirs is universal in that way.
I’m a huge fan of the folk tradition, like with the British folk revival, where you hear these different songs between Bert Jansch and Anne Briggs and Fairport Convention, like “Matty Groves” or “Blackwaterside” that were all kind of shared and that concept of covering—even in punk and alternative music of the ‘80s and ‘90s—this idea of homage you can offer to a song by interpreting it in a different way. I’m also fascinated by how these interpretations and references can happen. For an artist like PJ Harvey, who I really love, I can see elements of Beefheart, Led Zeppelin, and Slint in her music. We’re all just sponges. It’s not like Rolling Stones came out of nowhere, they were very studious. I don’t feel precious about this notion of originality. Maybe there are a few people who just fell out of the sky (laughs).
I played a gig with Tiny Vipers once and she was fantastic. For her there was no point of reference for anything. I could find aspects of her music from elsewhere but for her it was a very natural process—I’m not that kind of writer. It doesn’t really just pop out of me often; I always have points of reference and I’m aware of what they are. I think there’s a myth that someone can be talented and just write songs—it’s a studious thing. There may be some people who can write songs off the top of their head but in many ways it’s a post-modern process—it’s an assemblage of ideas, and I’m not afraid of confessing to that. I’ll walk into the studio and say “I want to do something that sounds like The Kinks, or Roy Harper, or Laura Nyro.” There’s always some kind of point of reference which becomes the seed of a song, and then I bring a personal narrative into it.
Who then were the points of reference for this record? And were those similar to the points of reference you had on previous records, be it with Autistic Daughters or solo records like And the Black Moths Play the Grand Cinema or Be Mine Tonight?
The points of reference don’t really change for me in terms of things that I really love. I don’t know, I love the ‘60s and ‘70s sound of folk revival, Robert Wyatt, the Flying Nun songwriters like Chris Knox and The Verlaines, British writers like Roy Harper and Joan Armatrading. I listen to a lot of experimental music as well, so a lot of the palette I draw from is from the avant-garde and improvised scene but my concept since Be Mine Tonight has been to use the sound palette and techniques from them but to incorporate them into songs.
I’m not the first person to do that—I’m not professing anything here. You have someone like Mike Cooper who came out of the folk, songwriter realm and then started to explore with a more experimental palette. The way that I feel is that song forms exist and people know what they are so you really only need to touch on them to create a song, you don’t really need to drive it home and be overly explicit with songs—they can just be atmospheres. A guy that used to organize concerts for me in New Zealand once said that my records sound like the overdubs if you had muted the main tracks (laughter). I kind of like that idea. In practice, it is really quite often like that.
I had done all of this tracking last summer and I invited Emanuele to come have a listen to the songs I made and he took to the console and just said “OK mute that, mute that, mute that” and stripped it down to two or three tracks when I had recorded up to 16 to 24 tracks on each song. He said, “you don’t need all that, strip it away.” It was really good advice because you can get carried away with the potential that you have in a studio, and in the case of this recording I was actually very limited. I had a software system that wasn’t compatible with the studio equipment, so I had to use a primitive version of Pro Tools and was limited to what I could do with that. But in a way, it harkened back to my very first recordings with Thela or as White Winged Moth. I had a Tascam 4-track—you only had four tracks so you had to make good decisions and make good performances. When you’ve got like 64 channels in Pro Tools you can spend months and months working on something, so in a way being limited was a great restriction. In all art, limitation is a really great thing.
I’m just sitting in my friend’s studio right now and she’s a painter. I’m just looking at some of the paintings and what she does is make a decision—she’s gonna work with black and red, or blue and green—and by limiting that palette, she creates a very specific kind of imagery. I think with music it’s kind of the same. I’ve been working at a university which has a program in music production and it’s kind of scary what young people are doing in terms of the way they make music. It’s incredibly inventive in terms of the possibilities of what they can do because of the software, but where does the decision making process become part of that? You’re just flooded with possibilities. You can pull a snare drum from a sample bank of 50,000 different snare drums (laughter) and I can’t work in that realm, really.
For me, the process is getting the palette and the different takes that I make. I’ll listen back and say, “Well it was a bit clunky, and the guitar was a bit out of tune and it was a bit scratchy on the mic input” or whatever, and I make a decision and live with it—that was the best I could do in that moment. I’m not going to perfect it, I’m not trying to make records like Radiohead, I’m trying to make records that capture something else—I don’t want to polish it to the point of perfection. Other people do that, and people go to that level of perfection—I admire that work method as well—but that’s not for me. I just want things to hang out a little bit. I’m much more interested in Jandek than I am interested in Radiohead (laughter).
Earlier you said you were working with a dance company. How did you determine the sort of music you’d make for them?
Lemi Ponifasio, the director and choreographer of this company called MAU, has been working since the ‘80s and he’s always worked with people who are kind of more about noise than about music, so there’s not very much music in it. It’s kind of like these sound bits which are very constant and aggressive. He really loved the work of Sunn O))), Ryoji Ikeda, Oval, Xenakis—artists who are about spatial transformation of sound. I had done that kind of music with All Cracked Medias and he liked that and he invited me to make music for him and it really had nothing to do with the music I make now, but another aspect of what I do—with the electroacoustic style and using spatial and spectral techniques. You’re using enormous sound systems with subwoofers and huge line array speakers, and that’s a different palette to work with, you’re really pushing air around and shaking the chairs. I was really proud of the work I did with him, yet the music from that dance show wasn’t necessarily something I’d want to release; it’s more about the moment and the atmosphere at the time and what was required for the show. The show was black-and-white and a lot of it was set in darkness. It was similar to shows by Romeo Castellucci or Robert Wilson, where it’s less about the dance than the scenography and lighting.
I like how on the last track on the album, the title track, you bring up this image of fire again. Fire had previously been mentioned in the two songs you covered, and you bring it back here. The final lines say, “Love is something else/It’s not fire.” What is love, then, instead of fire?
Oh this is a hard one, this is a hard question (laughter). Well I guess the imagery of fire and water are pretty basic things to work from. The idea of something being burned or destroyed, or of someone being lustful or excited—people will describe it with fire. I suppose in the lexicon of music, especially in rock music, that kind of imagery is often used. The idea for me is participating in that metaphorical language in how we describe things… of fire or water, of bathing in the river. There are these common themes throughout folk and rock music with these metaphors and your emotional experience to these elemental things. Lyrically, I’m kind of working from that lexicon.
So you’re disagreeing with the tradition of singer-songwriters viewing love as this image of fire?
I like to leave that up to poetic interpretation (laughter). Maybe I would say it’s that understanding of love as a practical mechanism that exists in human relationships. That love can be a much more complex and deeper thing than what our imaginations of what love can be. This is maybe stepping back to your previous question about my decision to appropriate those two songs… there’s “Love end[ing] in a fire” on “Say After Me” and then there’s “My Diviner,” of how this person—or a divining rod—will lead one to water. So it’s this idea that love is not something basic, it’s this latticework of communication—it’s an evolving, changing thing. That’s kind of the sentiment.
With that said, I’m writing from the heart but I’m also a calculated scientist when it comes to making music, so a lot of the work is very personal. If a close friend sat down with me line-by-line, we could go through who and what everything is about. But to me it’s more about creating a universality. These songwriters that I love—Roy Harper, Sandy Denny, even Neil Finn—you can hear that there’s a lot of personality in it, but it becomes much more universal. I think it’s done by working with this rubric, this lexicon of storytelling and songwriting.
A lot of my friends listen to hip-hop, and it’s not something I’ve ever really related to—I loved Eric B & Rakim and Public Enemy at the time… in the ‘90s (laughs)—but there’s this whole other form of communication, and it’s both universal and personal. These songs have very, very, very personal lyrics. It’s just a genre I’ve never really explored and I’m just sort of discovering the thinking behind it and really quite fascinated by that. Aesthetically it’s not something that I listen to, though.
You said that you could go through each line with a friend—obviously I’m not going to do that with you—but I am curious, who are some of the people that came to mind when you were writing these songs?
The characters I describe are more metaphorical. For example with the song “Caroline,” I have a friend called Caroline and she knows that the song is probably pretty much about her. So I just joke, “You’re so vain you probably think this song is about you.” (laughs). But the thing is that this goes back to the pop lexicon. I was thinking of “Caroline, No” by The Beach Boys, “Caroline Goodbye” by Colin Blunstone, “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond, “Caroline Says” by Lou Reed, “O Caroline” by Robert Wyatt—the song is really about this mythical person who’s been a muse to people, and maybe it just rolls off the tongue well. It’s a nice name, it’s not like Gustav.
My idea was that it was contributing to this lexicon of pop songs that had been written about this character. Lou Reed used the character of Caroline in many songs, so it’s kind of just this nice name that rings. The antithesis of that is “Paul”—it’s kind of like the B side to “Caroline”—it’s a mundane sounding name to use as a lyric. And then that becomes extremely personal in a sense—I’ve had comments from listeners who are like, “Oh you’re directing this song at a specific person, right”—and then there’s also the mention of the name Steve [on “Heron”], and I think sometimes when you throw a name into a song, it makes one wonder if it was directly about someone. In most cases for me, it’s more of a metaphor.
Dean Roberts’s Not Fire is available for purchase on the Erstwhile Records Bandcamp page. Roberts’s other records can be purchased from his personal Bandcamp page.
Download Corner
Every issue, Tone Glow provides download links to older, obscure albums that we believe deserve highlighting. Each download will be accompanied by a brief description of the album. Artists and labels can contact Tone Glow if you would like to see download links removed.
Thela - Argentina (Ecstatic Peace!, 1996)
Less Slint-indebted than the debut, Thela’s Argentina takes lurching post-rock murk and suffuses it with a fiery restlessness. While The Dead C are an easy point of comparison, the differences are readily apparent: that group made raucous and peculiar records apt for shut-ins, Thela conjure up the spirit of those who rove endlessly, traversing rocky terrain in search for some semblance of home. Argentina is world-weary but hopeful, apocalyptic but meditative. Dean Roberts, Dion Workman, and Rosy Parlane’s synergy is felt immediately: there’s a thoughtful sense of meandering in every guitar line, an adhesive quality to the feedback and fuzz, a pained hobbling in the drum’s patient playing. While every track stretches beyond the seven minute mark, they all could have carried on until eternity; Thela create vast, greyscale landscapes that invite you to explore every nook and cranny, their music is contemplative, but also just places to be. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Dean Roberts - All Cracked Medias (Mille Plateaux, 1998)
There’s a weightless quality to the beginning of “Kompakt Arcade,” its soft ambient pulses grounding the piece with a dreamy rhythm before bringing you back to reality. This abrupt change is primarily signaled by the sound of a clock alarm, its presence appropriately placed alongside an array of familiar, comforting sounds—electronic blips, field recordings, rustling percussion. If Argentina made you feel like you were free to wander aimlessly in an enormous space, then All Cracked Medias is like sleepwalking in some dingy, confined warehouse. The jagged mixing and glitchy effects (it’s Mille Plateaux baby!) add occasional surprise and tension, but they primarily service this hypnagogic state. It’s not exactly nightmarish, but it feels grim, barren, lonely. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Download links: FLAC | MP3
Dean Roberts’s Bandcamp page
Shun Nakaseko (中迫隼) - Rokumeityuka (鹿鳴虫歌) (Floor Limit, 2004)
It’s only after listening to something like Rokumeityuka that one wishes more electronic albums from the 2000s were as relentlessly playful. The conceit is simple on paper: Shun Nakaseko takes field recordings of insects and recontextualizes them in different settings. While their buzzing and chirping provides charming rhythmic and textural qualities, Rokumeityuka doesn’t strive to present the raw beauty of insect noises. The opening track features a resplendent melding of such sounds with soft-hued ambience but it’s quickly disrupted by “虫合 #1,” a track that features repeated panning across both channels to dizzying effect. It’s only by the cheerfully carnivalesque “虫舞い” that we see the childlike wonder and imagination that characterizes Nakaseko’s approach to music. There’s plenty to love: “ウムホイコオロギを探して” delves into ambient pop, “ツチノナカの記憶” is a diaphanous IDM track, and “月夜に潜む虫ケラ様” has an astral, even sci-fi quality to it (I was reminded of Gakuryū Ishii’s August in the Water, of all things). This is an album for those who heard Haco’s Stereo Bugscope 00 in 2004 and wished it had something for the entomophiles among us. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Writers Panel
Every issue, Tone Glow has a panel of writers share brief thoughts on an album and assign it a score between 0 and 10. This section of the website is inspired by The Singles Jukebox.
Jan St. Werner - Molocular Meditation (Editions Mego, 2020)
Press Release info: Molocular Meditation is a bespoke light and sound environment featuring the voice of The Fall's Mark E. Smith. Smith is heard making observations on mundane objects, events, and a range of meditation techniques basically associating his discontent with an apolitical British upper class. His voice forms the narrative component of an electroacoustic composition by Jan St. Werner placed in a hyper-real scenario evoking a state of transformation and deceleration. “Molocular Meditation” premiered at Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2014. This album presents a re-edited and remastered stereo version of the original multi-channel piece.
The B-side consists of unreleased new work partly written around the same time as “Molocular Meditation” in context of Werner’s Fiepblatter Catalogue on Thrill Jockey. “Back To Animals” is a non-metric rhythmic exercise frantically hybridizing percussive accents with synthesized pulse. “On The Infinite Of Universe And Worlds” is an electronic opera based on Giordano Bruno’s Renaissance writings which Werner was asked to conceptualize for new music festival Music Nova in Finland. “VS Cancelled” finds Mark E. Smith reading an email from Domino Records explaining their discontinuation of the Von Südenfed project, a band Mark E. Smith had founded with Mouse on Mars’s Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma in 2006.
You can purchase Molocular Meditation on Bandcamp or on the Editions Mego website.
Mariana Timony: What a joy it is to hear the unmistakable and unmistakably ornery voice of the late Mark E. Smith again, doubly so for being removed from the framework of rock music—or even just “music”—on Jan St. Werner’s Molocular Meditation. The delight here is in listening to the myriad ways Smith finds to bend and stretch the contours of the English language, whether he is reciting quotidian things such as planning an outing, or reading a letter from the head of his label informing him that, no, they won’t be releasing his next record. Smith’s vocalizations are respectfully assisted by Werner’s sonic manipulations, which accentuate certain syllabic quirks and bring turns of phrase to the forefront, as when Smith—always a champion of simplicity—sneers “The word awesome means…nothiiiiiiiiing” in the title track. The final word is drawn out to emphasize Smith’s contempt for those who abuse adjectives to the point of meaninglessness, and it’s underlined by a squealing blast of echoing feedback.
Though one could certainly approach this work with solemnity—and any record that bills itself as a “bespoke light and sound environment” is presenting itself rather self-consciously—to do so would be to overlook how humorous it is. Perhaps there are comparisons to be made to other pieces of spoken word poetry and ambient noise or whatever, but you needn’t be qualified in those fields to appreciate Molocular Meditation because the closest analogy is probably the 2005 video of Mark E. drolly reciting football scores, proving that the man could literally read anything and make it not only interesting on the ears, but hilarious as well. So go ahead and laugh at Molocular Meditation. I did.
[8]
Jesse Locke: Mark E. Smith once said, “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s The Fall.” But what if it’s him with a member of Mouse on Mars in an edgelord sound art installation? We get that answer with Molocular Meditation, the second collaboration between Jan St. Werner and the crotchety grandpa of UK post-punk. Their 2007 album as Von Südenfed found them teaming up as an abrasive electroclash band with at least one song good enough to justify their existence. Smith’s voice is a powerful weapon to be deployed in any scenario, and here it’s warped and distorted to the point of sound liking a Southern gentleman Foghorn Leghorn. His pissed-off lyrics mostly come across as gobbledygook, but there are memorable statements that jump out such as, “The word awesome means nothing/The word fantastic is obscene.” Decent advice for any aspiring music journalist.
In the span of 20 minutes, the opening title track shifts from ominously flickering synth arpeggios—recalling Daniel Lopatin’s recent scores for the Safdie brothers—to Gristleized burbles that sound like the sputtering of Stephen King’s possessed car motor. Near the track’s end, there are guttural globs that made me think my cat was barfing in the other room. “Back To Animals” and “On The Infinite Of Universe And Worlds” have some hallmarks of vaporwave with their chiming computer boot-up synth tones, but both end up feeling more like a poisonous gas seeping into the room to infect your brain. “VS Cancelled” features the album’s most hilarious moment, with Smith reciting an email from former Domino Records head John Dyer explaining why Von Südenfed would be dropped from the label’s roster. His gleeful laughs are set against a shower of Longmont Potion Castle-style sound-burps, highlighting how the Fall frontman remained a button-pusher throughout his career. Smith’s legacy is complicated, to say the least, but you have to admire his decades-long dedication to kicking against the pricks.
There’s a sense of provocation and purposeful annoyance that dares me to pan this album, but it’s enjoyably abrasive with the same aggressive mind massage as Garden of Delete-era Oneohtrix Point Never. To be a fan of Mark E. Smith is to be a glutton for punishment, and even if I might never listen to Molocular Meditation again, I’m glad it exists.
[7]
Matthew Blackwell: Mark E. Smith’s legacy is often called “complex” or “complicated” by fans of The Fall. These words are used to try to shield Smith’s considerable artistic vision from the realities of his life. The facts are that he was domineering and abusive—both verbally and physically—to those around him. His art itself pushed at the boundaries of taste in ways that, in 2020, are hard to stomach. All of this is to say that even Jan St. Werner’s impressive musical acumen cannot make Smith’s self-righteous slurring palatable given the latter’s history. Editions Mego describes Smith’s lyrics as detailing “his discontent with an apolitical British upper class,” and while he does sneer at the idea of vacationing in Cumbria and the Lake District, this pontificating comes across as mere posturing considering the source. An equally urgent political intervention needs to be made within the British left itself if Smith is still viable as a prominent voice there. Those brief moments in “Molocular Meditation” in which Werner takes center stage serve as a respite until Smith returns, as if he remembered something else to complain about. If you belong to the category of listener that feels the need to apologize for his character, there might be something here for you. If you lucked out and found better heroes, skip it.
[2]
Gil Sansón: There’s a warmth to Jan St. Werner and his idea of electronic music that can be heard in pretty much all of his work that’s combined with a sense of whimsy and controlled chaos. Whether alone, as part of Mouse on Mars, or in other collaborations (Microstoria, with Markus Popp, being one of the most successful ones), his work has a strong identity that makes it instantly recognisable. Depending on the angle he wants to highlight, we can expect his patented digital glitter employed in an almost childlike manner—or conversely, an abstraction of the sources that find him closer to sound poetry, as in his work with Mark E. Smith’s voice in the present case. Somehow, Werner manages to retain all of the unpleasantness of Smith’s rants, manic laughter, caustic wit and delivery alongside very sensitive accompaniment, both rhythmic and melodic; the effect is often very moving without ever sanitizing Smith’s input, coming as a warm homage to a notoriously difficult person who nonetheless had plenty of things to say.
Apart from this there’s little here that anyone following Werner’s career hasn’t heard before. Formal innovation doesn’t seem to be the goal here. Werner seems to be simply following an emotional need here, and maybe just saying that we’re not done yet with Mark E. Smith and his legacy, a notion I can easily endorse. My only objection—which it isn’t one, really—is that it’s too short, and I would have liked to hear more, but that’s also to say that the release makes for a very satisfying listening, and it resonates with the listener afterwards. It’s a bit like sound poetry without calling itself so, which would have probably elicited a scornful smirk from Smith, anyway.
[8]
Raphael Helfand: Molocular Meditation looks great on paper. Pairing the unpredictable stylings of Jan St. Werner with Mark E. Smith’s iconic voice feels like the easiest path to transcendence. But on the title track, which takes up the record’s entire first side, the two don’t mesh. They may feel natural together, but Werner’s minimalist score doesn’t do much to make Smith’s dreamy narrative more interesting. The best part of the album is its closer, “VS Canceled,” a two-and-a-half minute track on which Smith reads aloud from an email from Domino Records that they’re cutting ties with Von Südenfed, the brilliant 2007 Werner-Smith collab that lasted only a year. The track’s brevity and playful tone overcomes the dreariness that shrouds the rest of the project. Still, it’s always a pleasure to hear Smith rant.
[6]
Leah B. Levinson: After a patient prelude, the curtain is lifted and we, the audience, are finally formally welcomed (“Welcome to Jan Werner’s molocular meditation/Good afternoon”) by the now calmed, cosmic, and echoing voice of Mark E. Smith, which had previously been barking abstract happenings in our ears for most of the eight-and-a-half minutes prior. Smith’s voice serves as an oddly nice guide whether it’s fully curmudgeonly or mildly mystic. He lifts the detritus of thought to show not tell. The phrases are steady, unintelligible, and disjointed enough to simply give human presence. They guide thoughts atop the meditation’s musical base: steady electronics droning on patterns and textures changing infrequently and without drama. Stable, noisy, pulsating, and vibrant. It’s functional and somehow sweet.
“On The Infinite Of Universe And Worlds” doesn’t fully make good on its title’s promise (being mostly lyric-less save for some howled speech) but instead succeeds as a friendly synth and collage piece in four parts. It makes its home within benign abstraction, forming a sort of cosmically joyful ambivalence. Cities grow in tiny patterns, building layers, repeating, developing complexity and order. “VS Cancelled” cuts any high-minded facade and serves as a snotty punk send off rendered partially ineffectual by the music below it (making it all the more punk). After reading the letter received (“Also, on a personal level, it’s hard/Because I passionately love the [Von Südenfed] music…/Yours, Johnny/I’m in Switzerland at the moment”), Smith ad-libs some ire while himself being mocked by the sharp midi plucks in the left channel. All-in-all it’s a digestible, satiating listen.
[7]
Jordan Reyes: Molocular Meditation’s title track is a 20-minute aimless walk, guided by pulsating synths and Mark E. Smith’s sneers. At times, Werner brings blasts of noise and abrupt pans, but these aren’t enough to ward off the stagnation of unfocused, tepid electronics. There are glimpses of greatness—a couple piano sections and a gentle melody halfway through the track juxtapose Smith in a pensive, surprising way, the beauty of the playing a human counterpoint to this vocal disgust—but these moments are unable to bring the listener back from the edge of a yawning precipice. It’s a shame that this is the entirety of the record’s first half because the second alludes to what could have been a stronger effort. B-side starter “Back to Animals” shows just how well executed this collaboration could have been: Werner backgrounds Smith’s affected voice—which sounds like a cyborg ghost—with broken dance elements, dynamic swirls, and airy synth sequences, timing full-on sonic changes with the vocal entrances and exits. It’s the most thought-out portion of the whole album, but it’s a whole that can’t be justified by five minutes.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Really, it’s an album for the morning commute: immersive electronics for those not fully alert, some snarled commentary to keep the listener company, caustic squawks to jolt one awake (just in case the coffee’s not holding, y’know). There’s a grandiosity to the instrumentation, but it feels numbing—like huge gestures than mean nothing at all. It pairs well with Smith’s rambling, which is about... something or other; who knows, who cares—I’m just here for the textural element he provides and the occasional giggle-inducing non-sequitur. In listening to Molocular Meditation, one will feel their ears being scraped, maybe some flecks of wax spilling out: nice. I feel clean, I feel ready; leave me alone, I’ve gotta clock in soon.
[6]
Marshall Gu: I could not help but break into the goofiest of smiles when the unmistakable voice of Mark E. Smith began narrating the title track. The Fall distinguished themselves through Smith’s performance—a one-man Beckett play about the loss of language—and that’s no less true when post-punk is exchanged for Jan St. Werner’s electroacoustic soundscapes. The compositions within Molocular Meditation vary: the title track ebbs and flows until it feels like it’s peaked above the clouds, like it’s catching sunlight for the first time in days; “Back to Animals” recalls the work of Powell and Container with its pummeling rhythms and filthy distortion. The third track, “On The Infinite Of Universe And Worlds,” recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete in its synth-layering. And closer “VS Cancelled” is one of Smith’s funniest moments. This album doesn’t add much to either artist’s legacies, but it’s like hearing from an old friend, and for that, I enjoyed every moment of it.
[7]
Jonathan Williger: I’ve never really liked The Fall, but the sole album by Von Südenfed became an obsession when it came out. The production was hyper-aggressive and maximalist, which felt like the ideal setting for Mark E. Smith’s rambling proclamations, and felt more structured and song-like than much of the Mouse on Mars catalog I’d been introduced to at that point. I feel a similar kind of rush listening to Molocular Meditation, even though the music is so much more abstract and varied. Everything Jan St. Werner has released as a solo artist in the past decade has been defined by precision and detail, and Molocular Meditation takes that to even further extremes.
I love the way Werner switches between locking into the sound of Smith’s voice (such as the sudden rush of electronics as he articulates the word “inexplicable” around the five-minute mark of the title track) and providing a constantly shifting backdrop that drifts alongside the vocals. The range of timbres Werner works with, from hissing white noises and sharp high pitches to swells of bass that seem to enter in an instant, is exciting on its own. There are of course large swaths here where the mocking, sneering attitude that Smith is known for shines, but there are moments where he sounds like the older man he was when this was recorded: vulnerable and rough. It gives him depth that he wouldn’t be able to find with a rock band.
[8]
Editor’s Note: Williger handled PR for Thrill Jockey in the past, specifically with Jan St. Werner’s Blaze Colour Burn and Transcendental Animal Numbers.
Sunik Kim: Mark E. Smith’s presence on Molocular Meditation is just one step above a total marketing gimmick: this is actually a collaboration, not a one-sided cash-in on Smith’s legacy and death, but a cursory glance at the press behind the album shows an obvious emphasis on Smith. And for good reason—unlikely collaborations like this do have an immediate appeal bolstered by the collaborators’ respective back catalogs, playing on the timeless music nerd fantasy: “What if x collaborated with y?” Unfortunately, just as prior Smith and Werner collaboration Von Südenfed worked in mostly dated electroclash/dance-punk ideas (even leading some to compare the band to LCD Soundsystem, which Smith expressed displeasure with for obvious reasons), Molocular Meditation works in dated Mego tropes: hazy, cozy, meandering chord clouds; tricky delays and reverbs; and a penchant for a very particular, distorted, processed organ tone (you know the one) found on Mego classics like Jim O’Rourke’s I’m Happy. Smith’s voice is so distinctive and entertaining on its own that the processing and audio trickery do him a disservice—to the point that this actually does feel like one-sided cash-in rather than a collaboration. And Werner’s substitution of the clattering fury of the Fall for a more meditative “laptop” accompaniment makes Smith sound deeply out of place, a ghostly presence that has wandered into the wrong room—or, rather, the wrong art gallery.
“VS Cancelled” is the one strong point on the album where the concept actually works, and a truly authentic humor and warmth shines through. However, it only succeeds in spite of the clunky musical accompaniment—which, beyond the Mego nostalgia, leans heavily on uninventive and, at this point, irritating “modular” sounds—not because of it. Though “VS Cancelled” succeeds because it lays out the absurdity and hypocrisy of the beast we call “the music industry,” a perusal of Molocular Meditation’s press copy—wherein the relatively “accessible” artist steps into The Gallery, with its “hybridizing,” “hyper-real scenario[s]” and “conceptionaliz[ing]” (?)—makes me wonder what exactly makes “Jonny in Switzerland” so different from the Jans, Andis, and, yes, Marks, of the music world. For some, it may be entertaining, fulfilling and even radical to see white men poke fun at other white men through music; for others, like myself, the shtick gets old pretty quickly.
[2]
Jeff Brown: On the title track, Mark E. Smith sounds like a character on a shortwave broadcast who’s entertaining himself with random thoughts. The music very much sounds like sine wave/test equipment, with raw and overloaded sounds rising and falling in pitch. They create this mental picture of Jan St. Werner in a RadioShack filled with bleeping gear, creating fast rhythms and pulses as Smith hunkers in front of a microphone reading from scraps of paper. “Back to Animals” is a short burst of high tempo beats and synthesizer stabs, bringing to mind the frantic sounds of a stainless steel pinball ricocheting off bumpers and crashing into targets. This structure—of a long piece paired with a short one—continues on the flip side with “On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds”, a krautrockish mixture of sequencer lines and fast-crashing percussion. “VS Cancelled” features bubbling arpeggiation paired with clanging drums that create a background for Smith to read an email informing him of a terminated record contract. The album shows that the unpredictable pulse of Werner’s electronics can keep pace with Smith’s sardonic wit.
[7]
Evan Welsh: The title implies an introspective journey into the minute things that hold everything together. Jan St. Werner and Mark E. Smith’s collaboration does in fact concentrate on these themes, but it doesn’t do so in a way that makes me want to concentrate on them with enthusiasm. On the central, 20-minute title track, Werner’s rustling and jagged electronics add emphasis to Smith’s non-narrative, fragmentary impressions of the everyday, guiding focus onto the lyrics despite their opacity. While Smith’s freewheeling rambling is just as intriguing and enigmatic as it always was, I don’t find his words here piercing or thought-provoking—while some of the phrases address pointed topics like politics and society (“The first problem of most young American males/Public speaking/According to the talking ducks of the Russian television”), many come off as banal throwaways (“The word awesome means nothing/the word fantastic is obscene”). The second track, “Back To Animals” is immediately more lively and overwhelming. Smith’s vocals are suppressed under the density of the music, adding yet another layer of abstraction. The opening two-thirds of “On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds” features Werner’s most immediately accessible soundscape—erratically bubbling and pulsing, sounding like atoms bouncing off one another and emitting a bright, colorful burst. When Smith does enter the track, the surrounding ambiance becomes darker, framing the incoherent yelps in a nervous, grinding, and claustrophobic atmosphere.
Werner’s constant sonic shifting and Smith’s sporadic poetry are not focused enough on any particular message to really impart any weight onto the pieces of Molocular Meditation. As a reflection of the rejection letter Smith reads on the album’s epilogue track, the album unceremoniously closes on a light, winking note that does inspire a few chuckles, but it doesn’t shine a light on—or recontextualize—anything that came before it. Perhaps this untheatrical, mundane end to the seemingly important things that came before it is precisely the point Werner and Smith were attempting to make, and the inclination towards significance is fraught to begin with.
[6]
Mark Cutler: It’s easy, while listening, to imagine how “Molocular Meditation” would have sounded as a spatial installation; its rhythmic beeps and layers of noise fading in and out, interacting in unexpected ways as they mingle in the ear. That said, Jan St. Werner has also done an admirable job of reshaping it so that it rewards stationary listening, too. Unfortunately, Mark E. Smith’s lyrics—the ostensible backbone of the piece—don’t really add much for me. The shouted fragments remind me, at best, of a bad Shadow Ring LP. When the music recedes, leaving Smith’s treated or untreated vocals, the piece as a whole grinds to a halt.
The next two pieces are more interesting, if less fully realised. Both revolve around the rapid, irregular pulsations which also characterize his excellent Spectric Acid. Smith’s vocals spill onto these tracks as well, but play a smaller role than before. On “Back To Animals,” they boom as though from a great distance, narrating what sounds to me like a consciousness uploading itself to the cloud. Despite its cosmological premise, “On The Infinite of Universe and Worlds” actually sounds more insular, offering a pleasing array of crisp, digital sounds. The sonic palette of these tracks will be immediately recognisable to any Mouse on Mars fan, but the compositions are looser and more organic than MoM’s frequently strained pop-IDM. It is gratifying to hear Werner let his sounds unfurl as they may, hitting one another at odd and intriguing angles.
The album is clearly a loving gesture by Werner to his friend and collaborator, the deeply mourned Mark E. Smith. However, as an album, it does not hang together in the way his Fiepblatter releases do. While there is a great deal of interesting and pleasurable material here, one never forgets that this is more of a document than a considered collection. At its best, Molocular Meditation only show the promise which Werner realized in his other recent work.
[5]
Samuel Mclemore: Given the compositional strategy of pairing recitations of surreal, humorous poetry with abstract and varied electroacoustic soundscapes, Molocular Meditation most brings to mind the venerable ‘90s avant-band The Shadow Ring. While Smith collaborated with Werner on the original installation entitled “Molocular Meditation” in 2014, it’s left unclear how much input he had on this “re-edited, remastered” version of the project before his death in early 2018. Perhaps this is why, despite the PR focus and top billing, his presence on the album seems so disconnected and unfocused. Smith speaks in exclamations which rise into expressive shouts, with Werner electronically processing his vocals further, often making the words incomprehensible; it’s an understandable choice when the lyrics we can understand include such howlers as “The word awesome means nothing/The word fantastic is obscene.” Meanwhile, Werner dutifully uses his array of unspecified electronics to buzz and hum a suitably charmless and dull accompaniment. Maybe it was more interesting in multi-channel sound?
The Shadow Ring were deeply idiosyncratic and gloriously DIY, unique in both approach and content; their music was dry, surreal, eerie, unclassifiable, and always completely personal. Their work is only available to the wider world because of a network of friendly labels, distributors, record stores, and music fans all more interested in original art than in critical prestige or monetary gain. This album, on the other hand, is a celebrity collaboration, pulled from the archives posthumously and padded out to full length status with notably weaker bonus material. It showcases both artists doing variations of their same old shtick, just in case you wanted to buy that again. Maybe that’s a safe bet in a landscape uniquely harsh to experimental music.
[2]
Adesh Thapliyal: Molocular Meditation isn’t a hastily assembled cash-in—Mark E. Smith’s contributions here date back to a 2014 sound art installation. But without the catch of a posthumous release, Jan St. Werner’s new record struggles to find a reason to exist. The centerpiece of the album is its 20-minute title track, and it dominates the proceedings to the point where even the press release calls the album’s three other pieces “B-sides.” It hangs on one conceit: Smith free-associates various sneers at the British upper classes over warbling, distorted electronics. In Werner and Smith’s previous collaboration, Tromatic Reflexxions, the duo looped and echoed Smith’s surreal proclamations until meaning lapsed into mysticism. Here, however, Werner’s production is more cheerleader than duettist, content only to underscore Smith’s non-sequiturs than act upon them. Because Werner doesn’t jostle Smith’s spoken word into being more than what it is, we are left cold by lines like “the disclaimer is always the first martyr,” whose ambiguities feel unproductive, or at least not worth the trouble of parsing. What ends up mattering for “Molocular Madness” is less its specific lyrical content and more in how—by conjuring up the specter of class—the apparent political neutrality of sound is exposed as a veneer. When, almost eight minutes in, a piano is introduced, it rings with the full weight of its hoity-toity upper-class associations. That brief moment strikingly contrasts with the vague gamelan influence that permeates the track, a juxtaposition that illustrates the track’s greatest shortcoming: while the piano is allowed to ring with a fuller spectrum of its meaning, the metallophone is hollowed out until it merely evokes a queasy strangeness, reproducing a familiar aesthetic hierarchy.
Jan St. Werner’s debt towards non-Western sounds and imagery throughout his career—from literally releasing a track called “Osho” to citing dub, jungle, and bossa nova in his work as part of Mouse on Mars—garners surprisingly little critical attention for how central it is to his music. I’m not implying that Werner is a culture vulture. At its best, his work avoids the flaws of primitivism (which sees the non-Western as raw material for art) and fusion (which contrasts the West and the East as if they were fixed, stable identities) to create soundscapes that resist being understood in terms of culture(s) entirely. Mouse on Mars’s 1995 album Iaora Tahiti is a great example of this tendency in Werner’s work: because its sounds are not easily categorizable as either Western or foreign, the album allows its non-Western influences to occupy a fuller range of signification than they would if they were clearly marked as alien. In other words, it opens up a space to think about identities, a space that “Molocular Meditation” tries to form but falls short. The track’s “exotic” textures are subsumed as representative of Smith’s distance from the wealthy, already a familiar idea in the context of the British working class (see: jungle) and are therefore a little boring, too boring to even tip over into offensiveness. The rest of this slight album consists of two short stocking stuffers and the Giordano Bruno tone poem “On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds,” which aims to channel spiritual transcendence but ends up sounding like Anamanaguchi’s generative music side project. I love Anamanaguchi, for the record, but Werner’s twinkling bleep-bloops don’t hold a candle to the occult cosmology that Bruno paid for with his life in the Inquisition. Of the filler tracks, “Back to Animals” is five minutes of the tap-click sounds from the latest Matmos album without the fun, while “VS Cancelled” is the experimental music equivalent of leaking private texts on your Instagram story. Molocular Meditation is the most inessential LP in either Werner or Smith’s discographies, a postscript to their celebrated careers rather than a swan song.
[2]
Average: [5.44]
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