Tone Glow 193: Mark Fell
An interview with the English producer about taking inspiration from structuralist filmmaking, the limitations of the Western classical tradition, and his new album 'Psychic Resynthesis' (2025)
Mark Fell
Mark Fell (b. 1966) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotherham who has spent more than thirty years creating experimental electronic music. During the late ’90s, he started releasing multiple albums and 12-inches in different groups, including SND with Mat Steel and Shirt Trax with Jez Potter. The former proved especially foundational, serving as a crucial turning point in his creative practice. Inspired by structuralist filmmakers like Michael Snow and minimalist electronic acts like Pan Sonic, Basic Channel, and Ryoji Ikeda, Fell was able to create music that reduced styles to their barest elements, all while foregrounding process and technology. In the years since, he’s released numerous solo and collaborative albums that have built on these principles.
Fell’s newest LP is Psychic Resynthesis (2025), a contemporary classical record made with the Explore Ensemble. Using a variety of modular building blocks, each of which is defined by a different sonic gesture, he presents a series of musical combinations that further his studies into timbre, time, and perception. Fell has also started a new record label cheekily called the National Centre for Mark Fell Studies. It will see him releasing 12-inches of solo electronic music. Its inaugural release is Nite Closures (2025). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Fell on October 6th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss his childhood in Sheffield, respecting his audience, and the ideas behind his new releases.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I was revisiting your early solo album, Ten Types of Elsewhere (2004). I was really struck by how powerful the silences are on some tracks—you can really understand how silence can be used as compositional material when listening to them. Do you remember the first time you understood the potency of silence, be it in music or with listening to environments in the real world?
Mark Fell: That album was the first solo project I released under my name, so it felt quite important. As an album is taking shape and I’m editing the material, I’m always acutely aware of how it flows. My interest in music started as a record buyer—the album as a thing. With Ten Types of Elsewhere, it felt like a bold step to create something that had a lot of tension, that could let things be spaced out where you’re not filling every minute with stuff. My background is in electronic music and, at that time, I was still very unfamiliar with traditions outside of what I’d grown up with. That whole vocabulary of music with silence, or spaces… it felt like a big deal to be brave enough to do that.
What pushed you to the point where you felt brave enough? Was there something you heard that made you want to take the leap?
Bear in mind, this was for Richard Chartier’s [record label] LINE, which presented itself as high-brow, oblique, and conceptually challenging. I took that as a cue to make a piece of work that responded to this. When I make a work, I’m really aware of the label it’s going on and its history, I’m thinking of its aesthetic position. I wanted to do something that wouldn’t have this rollercoaster of energy; I wanted to pull back and do something that foregrounded the pauses.
Yeah, the silences are really visceral. When I was in college, I was really invested in all the post-John Cage composers on the Wandelweiser label. But so much of that music, even when it’s centered around silence, is part of a very specific context, so to hear the silences in your music is really unique.
At that point, I was definitely nowhere near the contemporary classical world or the new music world. My music was definitely situated in the weird end of electronic dance music.
When you were younger, you were listening to bands like Depeche Mode and The Human League. Do you think there are ideas in that early synth pop that appear in your own? What lessons did you take away from hearing those acts?
The foundations of my musical sensibility are definitely rooted in that period, both as a listener and with the first equipment I bought—that combination of things really sits at the heart of how I think about music. I didn’t learn to read and write music, I didn’t learn an instrument, so the core of my musical sensibility is what mono synths and drum machines could do. It really feels like I’m still exploring that, whether it’s with a Max patch or a classical musical ensemble.
The synth pop stuff really made a lot of sense to me. Firstly, I was a very alienated and weird teenager. I had friends, but I was always kind of disappointed with them—they never wanted to do the stuff I wanted to do. To put it bluntly, they were normal guys and I wasn’t. One of the non-musical things that really drew me to synth pop was the way it presented a very different view of what a young man could be. It wasn’t this boisterous, angry thing, it wasn’t the cliché that punk became.
I was a little too young to be a punk rocker, but by the time it had reached my world, the punk movement was just an excuse for lots of guys to be violent. Synth pop was about a rejection of violence. There’s lots of brilliant punk and it’s an essential part of British history, but I didn’t like it at the time. It was all about the clarity and geometry of the beats in synth pop, and how they all fitted together. I was more interested in specific production styles—producers like Martin Rushent, who worked on Dare (1981) with the Human League. It was about these combinations of sounds. I think that’s still with me today.
Human League are from Sheffield—did you feel a sort of hometown pride?
Towards the later end of the ’70s, and again I was a little too young for this, there were groups like Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, and others who were on the weirder end of electronic music. Being from that city felt part of me. More than any other city, and I might be wrong—and readers are free to tell me that (laughter)—Sheffield felt like a really important city for electronic music. And I was aware of that. The record shops seemed to sell a lot of it, too. When I was old enough to start going to clubs, there were some that were full of that kind of stuff. You could feel very much a part of what Sheffield was. I don’t know if I was aware of any sense of my pride in that—I was just a kid who wanted to make weird sounds—but in retrospect, I’m very proud of that tradition and heritage.
Talk to me about your first concert and club experiences. Did you feel a sense of community in these places?
Britain had the 2 Tone movement with groups like The Specials, so I remember going to see that. It was a moment between punk and synth pop, and that was around the first time I’d be going around to see concerts. I was a very outspoken and oppositional young person and I’d get into a lot of trouble.
Like with teachers?
Yes, but also with friends. But when I was 15 or 16, I got into synth pop and was gender nonconforming. I’d get a lot of looks in the streets because of how I looked. When I was 16 or 17 there were these clubs we’d go to. We didn’t identify as transvestites, but these were places where a young man could dress like that—we could wear weird things. I remember going to Sin Bin [at Turn Ups] in Sheffield, which I guess was the first grown-up club I went to. It was this crossdressing sort of club. So for a start, it meant we could go and not get beat up, which is always an advantage! It’s nice to know you’re not going to get beat up when you’re in the club. But getting home was always a problem. We’re in the middle of Sheffield, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning, and we have to get a night bus. Going out was always a risky enterprise, but I always felt a sense of safety in those clubs. And it was electronic music playing there.
What sort of stuff was playing at Sin Bin?
Do you remember that record by Pete Burns, “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”? That sort of thing. Further up the road there was this club called The Limit, which was this dark, underground, cavernous place. There would be goth music there, the sort of synth pop from Marc Almond [of Soft Cell]. He did a group called Marc and the Mambas. You’d have that kind of stylistic thing going on there, which is the stuff that would become known as electronic dance music later on.
Can you speak more about these clubs? I’m curious about their importance to you as a gender nonconforming person. What would’ve been missing if you hadn’t had them?
They gave me a sense of validation. I always felt the world was wrong and I was right (laughter). That’s the stupidity of being a teenage kid! But it really felt like I’d found my crowd. It felt like the adventure had begun. I was in the big city, I’m going out, I don’t know where I’m gonna end up that night, and that was good. If I’d not had that, phew, well… I remember before that moment, I felt incredibly isolated. I felt let down, you know? I felt alone and unhappy. I didn’t meet the kind of people I wanted to meet—people who weren’t so utterly conservative.
When was this stretch of time where you were going to these clubs and dressing in this particular way?
I wouldn’t say I was crossdressing, it’s just that some people would not have been able to tell if I was a boy or a girl. I was wearing weird stuff. That lasted maybe two years because… I guess I ran out of money, actually (laughter). I was unemployed. I was at [high school] studying, and I was just unemployed for a bit, claiming benefits. I got more and more into alternative politics—anarchism and things like this. And then I guess I just became a dropout and didn’t go out because I didn’t have money; I just hung around in friends’ houses. Going out to parties became less of a primary concern—I actually got bored of going out.
What filled that hole? Was it making music?
I always made music, but I was buying a lot of records, and I had bits of equipment I was making music with. I was reading a lot of philosophy and literature. By the age of 18 or 19, I was staying home, living in some spare room in someone else’s house with a bunch of fellow dropouts. Drugs were also a really big thing. I was never a drug user—I’ve never taken drugs—and this always surprises everyone. I’ve never even smoked a cigarette, actually, but all my friendship groups had heavy, heavy drug users. That was the kind of world I was floating around in.
Was there a specific reason for abstaining from drugs?
I’m not anti-drugs. But the thing I told myself and other people was that those I saw who got really into them always liked really bad music (laughter). I just thought, “How could they be happy listening to this really bad stuff? I don’t want that to happen to me!” Looking back, what was actually the case was that my grip on reality was very shaky. I think if I’d taken drugs, I would’ve gone into a really bad place. When you’re using drugs as some kind of psychic exploration, that’s whatever, but when you’re using drugs to live with abject poverty and lack of opportunity, that’s a different thing. And that’s what it was for many people.
Can you talk about the significance of engaging in alternative politics?
The North of England had been deindustrialized. I’m from a family of miners and steelworkers, and at the beginning of the 1980s, around 1981, my dad lost his job in the steel factory because of privatization. I would’ve been around 14 or 15 at that point, and I became aware of how bad the political situation was in Britain. I became politicized through that. I learned about communism, about Marxism, about anarchism. They fascinated me, and I just got sucked into that. I was a really bright kid. I wanted to understand the world, to have a nice theory of the world and then to enact and change things, but that’s being a naive teenager.
How did being radicalized shape the way you thought about art and music?
It was just a bunch of things, even learning how to cook vegetarian food, as being a vegetarian was a political statement. I had these components of my life that were important. But back then, if I was to consider how all those things fitted together, I wouldn’t have been able to come up with a decent explanation, and I still probably couldn’t. And the anarchist bands like Crass, I wasn’t into them. I liked super slick electronic music like Yello.
Earlier you said that you didn’t want to do drugs because people were listening to bad music. It’s funny to hear this comparison, as those who’d listen to an anarcho-punk band like Crass would probably say an act like Yello was bad. What was the “bad music” that you considered unacceptable?
I really don’t want to be saying that music is bad, but a lot of the people in my friendship group of dropouts and stoners… well, this is around 1985 and I’m already listening to things like On-U Sound, Tackhead, and Mark Stewart & The Mafia. These guys are listening to Led Zeppelin, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd—all music I would not say is bad now, but they really triggered me at the time. Like, this was the worst possible music you could think of. Again, I was a weird, angry, messed-up kid. The kids who hadn’t learned from punk were still around, you know what I mean? And a lot of people in my friendship group were 5 or 10 years older than me.
You mentioned Tackhead. Did you end up getting into American hip-hop? Obviously I’m thinking of something like Keith LeBlanc’s Major Malfunction (1986), their association with Sugar Hill Records, and what that led to.
Around ’84, I’d been listening to things like Psychic TV and Coil but also dance music. Even groups like Einstürzende Neubauten were all moving in this direction of being percussive and sampled. It was these dance music formats. I remember records by Test Dept. that were an almost pre-techno. Or Front 242, though I was never massively into them at the time. I came to Tackhead through all that.
There was a record shop called Shock Records. It was tiny—you had to go up some ladders to get up to it. I would go in there as a kid with my six pounds every week, and the guy knew me really well because I was… well, the weird little kid (laughter). I remember one week he said, “Mark, you should buy these two,” and it was the first two Tackhead singles. He said, “You’re the first person in Sheffield to get these.” I went home and had a listen and thought, this is it. It was exactly what I was after. It was like the later end of all that industrial stuff was meaningless now. I got into On-U Sound, and Keith LeBlanc’s Major Malfunction is one of my favorite albums of all time. If you listen to it, it’s a brilliant piece of work, but structurally it’s similar to Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock (1983). Listen to what the tracks and interludes do—it almost mirrors it.
I’d learn by going to the record shop, and it was only like two times a month that I learned about something. So while I was aware of hip-hop, I didn’t know who the Sugarhill Gang were back then. I got some records by Schoolly D though, and I wanted to learn about this music. Following that interest in On-U Sound, I didn’t continue pursuing an interest in hip-hop even though I respected a lot of it. It’s incredibly creative, but I didn’t connect with it. Soon after this, house music is breaking through in Britain and, shortly after that, techno.
Were you quick to embrace house and techno?
I was quick to embrace it, but I was only as quick as I could be—I didn’t have the money. There’s this really brilliant club night in Sheffield called Jive Turkey. It was around ’85. Manchester is very good at shouting about how good it is—you had The Haçienda—but with the culture in Sheffield, it really underplays what it’s good at. If you ask people about the history of house music in Britain, they’ll probably know The Haçienda but they won’t know Jive Turkey. It was easily as important.
I could never afford to go to that, but house music was in my world. With the advent of house music over to Britain, suddenly you’d go into a record shop and it was all black sleeves with names you wouldn’t know. It was difficult to navigate. It was less about people on covers or even names, so I struggled to build a map of what was happening, and it wasn’t really covered in the music press in the way On-U Sound was; I think the journalists didn’t really get it. Around ’86 or ’87, I was thoroughly a part of the house and techno scene. The people who were part of it were entrepreneurial types who wanted to make money by promoting parties. But equally, there were lots of weirdo, political dropouts like me.
In Nottingham, there was a sound system called DiY Sound System. They were incredibly important, free parties and stuff like that. They were politically aligned with anarchism too. I’d be going to those club nights, to free parties at old factories, and then in 1988 my son was born. Rian Treanor was born in the middle of all that. We’d go out to parties and he’d literally be in a cardboard box in the corner of the room (laughter). He grew up his whole life through house and techno parties.
In ’89, I started at art school, studying experimental film and video at Sheffield. Sheffield City Polytechnic had this campus called Psalter Lane where all the weirdo art stuff went on, and I was in the experimental film and video course. Coincidently, this was when Warp Records started, and there were a lot of weird connections between art school and that record label and the party scene. It was a great world to be in, and loads of incredible things happened.
Can you tell me about the experimental film and video program?
It was a fine art course, so I got a degree in fine art. Back in those days, you had polytechnics and universities. The polytechnics were the more radical, politically engaged institutions—the teachers refused to assess the students. I ended up on that strand through this course called Combined Media Arts. You could do mainstream narrative film production if you wanted, but it tended to be experimental. I was really influenced by structuralist and materialist film.
It’s 1989, I’m in this world listening to house and techno, and I’m asking myself, “If I’m in this community and movement, what is my contribution gonna be?” I’m not really that bothered about making dancefloor stormers, you know? (laughter). Encountering structuralist and materialist film gave me a strategy. It’s less about the construction of emotion or meaning or storytelling and more about foregrounding the characteristics of the process and technology.
Are we talking about American filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow?
Yes, Michael Snow, particularly with Wavelength (1967). But also Peter Gidal, and he was an American based in Britain. Paul Sharits, too. I was really drawn to that, and I wanted to do the house and techno version of it. The tutors I had were brilliant—it was a brilliant course, and I grew so much—but they didn’t understand this world at all. There’s this British composer named Trevor Wishart who is in the vein of French electroacoustic composition. They got him in to meet me, and he’s a really great guy—I met him recently, too—but back then it was like, this is the antithesis of what I’m interested in.
Like it felt too old hat?
In one way it was just a boring, outdated language. I remember he did a seminar. I studied Western philosophy before I went into study fine art, and I was taught by a brilliant philosophy teacher. It was all Wittgenstein, basically. I was thoroughly embedded in the philosophy of language from a Wittgensteinian, post-structuralist, early post-modernist standpoint. And then Trevor Wishart comes along saying that he’s using sound to investigate universal semiotic entities. I wouldn’t be triggered by that now but back then, it was like, this is so wrong (laughter). So it was in terms of the aesthetics, the ideologies, and in terms of where that tradition grew from and its institutionalized connections with contemporary classical and orchestral music.
I got in trouble once on a panel discussion 10 years ago because I said that electroacoustic music was a product of the Western classical tradition, of orchestral music. It’s because of this focus on gesture and narrative form. Someone on the panel was quite horrified and called me out—fair enough. Later, I was in a conversation with Georgina Born, who’s this really high-ranking anthropologist who studies music communities. She was saying the same thing, that the electroacoustic tradition in Britain was rooted in traditional academia—this sort of romantic tradition in Western classical music. So yeah, that’s why I didn’t get on with it.
So this is about the second year, and I realized that I had no chance of doing this in art school because I didn’t know what I was doing, and the tutors had no way of… not necessarily giving me guidance, but understanding the question I was trying to pose. As an undergraduate, you’re on the first rung of the academic ladder and I thought, right, I’m just gonna make it easy for myself and make weird films. And that’s what I did. I left the music component of my practice outside of the institution. That was unfortunate, but it’s not like I had a bad time at university. I struggled the way any student should struggle, with difficult concepts and challenges, and I really grew a lot through that process. I look back on those years as being priceless.
Can you talk to me about the films you were making? Were these on film or video?
I did a bit of video and a bit of film. It was a really well-resourced department, so we had a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument. You know Sans Soleil (1983) by Chris Marker? It might be the same machine. There was a lot of early digital work and analog video work that I did. But for my final piece, I worked on 16mm. I became really interested in this American philosopher named Richard Rorty. I mean, he’s really quite vanilla now, but back then I really liked what I was reading—it gave me the answers.
I ended up making this work that was an abstract film. I had a two-year-old son, and my dad was still coming to terms with the loss of his livelihood even seven or eight years later—there was this corridor of factories that just became this massive shopping center. The film was about the changes in the industrial landscape in Sheffield and my dad’s relationship with it, as well as my relationship to it, and then my relationship to my son. It was this analysis of history and identity and landscape. There was bits of dialogue with me and my dad and with my son, but it was in the style of a structuralist film. It wasn’t trying to push any particular point of view; it was about looking at the same thing in different ways. That’s what I got from Richard Rorty, this view of human understanding as being rooted in distinct descriptions of something.
This makes sense. I feel like Ten Types of Elsewhere is embodying that. The different numbered tracks throughout the album don’t feel like a matter of sequencing, but an indication that these are different studies of the same overarching idea.
I guess that sort of approach carried on to that. A piece I made much later, Multistability (2010), was an important release for me. I didn’t really understand the significance of multistability when I made that record, that concept. This idea of multistable relationships to technology or time or identity or understanding—it really makes sense to me.
I know you were always making music and that your first releases were merely a matter of eventually making things public, but how do we get from you making these films to putting out 12-inches? There’s a gap there I’m not fully understanding.
I have these synthesizers and I’m making music this whole time, but I’m struggling to do anything I’m happy with. I left university in 1992 and am back to a life of relative poverty. Rian is 4 or 5 years old now. I have about four years of complete frustration, and I’m not motivated by making money—I just want enough money to live. But what I want to do… and it’s not even something I want to do, it’s that I’m compelled to make music. I don’t even have a choice in the matter—it’s an obsession. And for those four or five years, I’m making music that I think is terrible; I’m not able to apply this structuralist filmmaking to music. And though I don’t see it as so simple an equation, it is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to get to something that I don’t know, and I’m listening to a lot of experimental computer music, I’m trying to learn about free jazz—and it’s because I know the answer lies in listening to these things and bringing them together in some way.
Meanwhile, in Sheffield, Warp Records starts Artificial Intelligence, so I know about these guys. Some of the Artificial Intelligence stuff seems like what I’m trying to get to, but it’s not. Around ’95, I started to become aware of music by Pan Sonic, Sähkö, Ryoji Ikeda, Mego. I’m encountering Basic Channel around ’94—they really reduced techno music. There was Thomas Brinkmann. There’s this emergence of music that understands house and techno but takes it somewhere quite different, and this music made a lot of sense to me. I’m working with Mat Steel and Jez [aka Jeremy] Potter. Sometimes there’s three or four of us together in this loose, well, I wouldn’t call it an artist collective, but around ’95 or ’96, all of these people fall out with everyone. However, I don’t fall out with anyone, and this guy Russell Haswell approaches Jez and says, “Do you want to make a record for our label?”
This is OR?
Yes, OR. Jez says, “Mark, let’s make this record together, but let’s keep Mat out of the equation because I don’t like what Mat does.” I say to Mat, “I’m really sorry, but there’s this opportunity. I feel like I’m betraying you, but I’m just gonna take this up.” So we made this record [1999’s Good News About Space] as Shirt Trax.
Yeah, I love that one.
That was made around ’95 or ’96, and at this point I’m just kind of getting to where I want to be. Jez said, “I don’t like all these mellow chords.” He was referring to the lush organ stabs found in North American deep house. I say to Mat, “Let’s start a new project that’s just mellow chords and reduced techno patterns and that’s all we do.” What got left out of the equation for the Shirt Trax stuff became the founding principles for SND. The music was made really quickly and easily.
Listening to Ryoji Ikeda and Thomas Brinkmann and things like this made me realize that you can just forget the habits of house and techno. You don’t need to have drum rolls or a break or a bassline. Me and Mat said, “Let’s work on three 12-inch singles.” We managed to release them independently and get distribution for them, and we fully expected that it’d be a complete disaster; the guy who funded them did so with the intention of losing money—it was some tax thing. But I was done with feeling so shit about everything. I said to Mat, “If I can just get these three records out, I can die and that’ll be it.” It really felt like that.
The first record came out and it sold out really quick. Mille Plateaux got in touch with us the weekend after and asked if we wanted to put an album out, and obviously I was a huge fan of Mille Plateaux. That was it. I was suddenly making records I was happy with, and this was around ’99. In ’97, I got a job at an art school on the east coast of Britain. I was working as a studio manager and studio technician in a university, commuting five hours a day to get there. Once the music started to gather momentum, I realized I could quit that life and that I could make money as a professional artist.
Do you mind talking about these early projects? Blir, Shirt Trax, and SND were all different avenues to engage with specific studies of electronic music. Shirt Trax is all about these detailed, granular collages. Blir always felt like you were guiding the listener through the building blocks of dance music before the final track on each release becomes a more fully-fledged dance track. And then SND is perhaps the most “traditional.”
We thought we were making dance music when we made the SND project. When we got the record back from the pressing plant we realized, “Oh, we’ve not made one.” (laughter). Shirt Trax was with Jez, SND was with Mat, and Blir had something with Jez and something with Mat. It felt nice to have those different vehicles, and each of those projects was a product of friendships. I don’t know if in Blir we were intentionally trying to say that these were the foundational building blocks of dance music, but I guess we were doing that—we were reducing things to the barest of elements. Equally, back then, I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.
Do you feel like you know what you’re doing now?
Not really (laughter). Last night, Ian [Fenton] of Frozen Reeds asked me if he could release some old stuff. I said, “Ian, I’ve got a box of DAT tapes that I’ve not heard for about 30 years.” These are from around ’95, before SND. I got these DAT tapes out and I got out my machine, and these sounded really awful, just really bad (laughter). With the SND stuff, I felt confident in what I was doing, but I was aware that there was a big world of other music that I didn’t know about. For example, people would always say, “Oh, you’re into minimalism,” but I didn’t know what North American minimalism was beyond the Steve Reich I’d heard.
At that time, I became very narrow-minded. I was always narrow-minded when it came to music, but I was getting sent records and the only thing I wanted to listen to was the stuff I was making. It was a period of incredible focus, but it was ultimately unhealthy.
You don’t think that this narrow-mindedness was necessary to find the style that worked for you?
Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is that I was very focused and made all this music. I think the music I’m making right now is way, way better than what I made back then. And I feel it’s because I’ve learned about a lot of different kinds of music and traditions, and I feel like I can draw from that now. In terms of things like Max/MSP, I have a set of concerns that I can keep diving into, and I think that I’m now more confident to take risks. I’m always aware of how things are gonna be received.
In another interview you did, you said that SND was a “fundamental breakthrough” because you had a revelation about this “rejection of trying to instill excitement or energy in music.” When did you grow to appreciate monotony and boredom? Those are loaded terms, but I’m saying them in a value-neutral sense.
It was probably in ’95 when I encountered records by Ryoji or Brinkmann or Basic Channel. They didn’t try to create any dramatic energy. There’s an energy to it, but it’s about this sustained tension as opposed to the flows of ups and downs. I probably wouldn’t have recognized it as such back then, but that was when I first became aware of that.
More recently, in 2016, I went to India and studied Indian Classical Music. One of the reasons I did that was because I saw an all-night concert of Indian Classical Music in Leeds—it started at sunset and ended at sunrise. In the Western classical context, you might have the violinist or pianist doing all this stuff (moves his body around dramatically as if swept up in the glory of music). This was just three or four people, completely disciplined, and they were just doing what they were doing. It was energetic, but there was no showing off, no “look at how virtuosic we are.” Of course it’s very beautiful and emotional, but there’s not this sense of theatrically conveying that you’re having an emotional journey. I think that’s what I was rejecting in the early days of SND—it was a rejection of the worst bits of DJ culture, you know what I mean? “Put your hands in the air!!” (laughter). With SND, it was quite provocative to say that the record is just this.
A repercussion of reducing this music to something non-emotional and non-dramatic is that it magnifies different facets of sound. When I listen to your work, it makes me really aware of what happening on an elemental level. I love that Multistability, for example, makes me think of footwork and juke. And you hear that in your album with Gábor Lázár, The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making (2015). It can just be the sound of a specific handclap and where we hear it in the grid—that’s all it takes to make the association. Your music feels like it’s always tracing these boundaries.
The music that I still return to is North American house music. When house and techno arrived in Britain, there were British artists trying to make it, there was the early Warp stuff which was very bleepy, and then slightly afterwards you have things like hardcore and jungle. But by 1990, I was hanging out with this guy in Sheffield who championed deep house. Deep house, for me, was the thing that made the most sense. It’s the style of house music that I was drawn to. When everyone was going through hardcore and jungle and Artificial Intelligence, I was like, no, I’m joined at the hip with deep house.
Are we talking about Mr. Fingers?
Yeah, and Strictly Rhythm. That actually became the kind of thing that me and Mat were exploring with SND. What I really loved about that music was how all the parts interlocked. It was so well crafted that it was way more interesting than the chaotic stuff. I mean, a lot of that music was good too, but deep house was and still is really important to me. Multistability has got a lot of the ingredients you’d find in deep house—the organ stabs, the claps, the kicks. The production style and the patterns aren’t like deep house, but it is a distant cousin of it.
The immediate thing I’m thinking about is the way house music figures into the way we’re both engaging with this record. You have your own foundation in deep house and it gets mutated into whatever Multistability is, and I’m here thinking about it as a sort of mutation of footwork, which can be traced back to ghetto house.
Yeah. And by coincidence, RP Boo is stopping in town this week.
You collaborate with a lot of people because it provides a way for you to explore things you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. I’m curious about your Will Guthrie collaborations because of the merging of digital and analogue sound. Of course you have other albums like this—you’ve worked with Oren Ambarchi—but I’m curious how you approach a scenario like that.
In terms of two people in a studio working on one computer, like the way me and Mat or me and Jez used to do it, I haven’t done that in a long time. But I have done a lot of collaborations in different formats with lots of different people. I’ve done things where I’m more of a musical director and then there are situations where It’s a 50/50 collaboration between me and Will or me and Okkyung Lee. The way it worked with Will is that I was working at a university as a visiting lecturer. I got Will over to meet the students and we spent two days in the studio producing electronic rhythms. I’d be making these weird rhythms and Will would play along to them. It wasn’t particularly planned. It just worked. I perform a lot with Okkyung Lee, and the first time we performed we never even spoke to each other. I knew that whatever I did would be alright, so we just went on stage and it worked.
I would never rehearse, and my approach to performance now is based on a lot of bad experiences (laughter). When me and Mat were first asked to perform, I’d learned Max/MSP already and the performance was us preparing in the studio and taking notes, like, “When I do this, Mat will do this.” We weren’t following a score, but there’d be a certain road map. When we went on stage, it never sounded as good as in the studio. And it’s because when we were in the studio, we wandered around until we found the bit that sounded good on those speakers. We needed to have the confidence to do this on stage. How I approach performance now is that I have the confidence to put myself in a scary situation, not knowing where I’m going until I find it.
What’s it like working with your son, and how has that evolved over time? I remember you had that tape for Boomkat’s label during Covid, Last Exit to Chickenley (2021). And you mentioned earlier that he went to these house and techno shows his whole life.
Rian grew up meeting weird musicians (laughter). The amount of friends we had in our house… he had been exposed to a lot of dance music history and avant-garde music. What’s interesting about Rian is that he’s really clear about where the references are from in his work. He can be quite specific. I know you’re of a similar age group to him and also know a lot about music, but it’s unusual for someone to have so much clarity about what came when.
As he got older, around 12 or 13, our relationship became quite difficult. He was into music, but he was also getting involved with things that he shouldn’t have. I had to be a strict parent, basically. I loved him, I respected him, I cared for him, I looked after him, but the relationship was difficult. He hated me, basically. When he was about 17, I got invited to Japan and Australia for about six weeks. I thought that I couldn’t leave him at home, so I took him with me. I think it blew his mind. From that point, I think his small-town anger and claustrophobia left him, and our relationship improved. He went through art school and I always got him to help out with projects I was doing. If I was organizing events, he’d help out with production. He started to make music, too, and I was able to give him a lot of help and introduce him to labels.
The first thing we did together was during lockdown. We were in this house, and my parents also lived with us during that time. My dad is still alive—he’s 94 now—and since we had elderly grandparents with us, we had to be really strict about quarantining. And while we’d go out to the Peak District near where we live, we were literally stuck in this house for about a year, not seeing anyone else, looking after my parents, doing the same thing every day, not traveling, and my mom—who passed away recently—had dementia. We were caring for someone and saw her regressing daily into different versions of herself. It was this weird science-fiction type of experience, like we’d been taken out of reality and placed into some loop.
Last Exit to Chickenley was just lots of recordings we made around the house, sketches for music we’d been working on, recordings off the phone. I bought a piano during lockdown so there’s bits of people just bashing the piano, there’s bits of recordings in the garden, bits of radio. It became an evocative document of this time and the relationship we had to time. It’s called Last Exit to Chickenley because it’s a reference to the movie Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989). Chickenley was the village where my mum’s uncle lived, and she’d say, “I’m just going to Chickenley to visit my uncle,” but obviously he died many years ago and she was nowhere near Chickenley.
We have very different approaches to work. I’m very fast and decisive: That’s it, it’s done, no effects, I’m not gonna bother doing any compression. Rian’s way is more like, “I’m gonna spend three months making sure this snare drum sounds right.” And that drives me crazy! (laughter). Both of us are really into cooking, too. We cook a lot of Indian food, for example, but our approach is also really different. I’m just like, “Here’s a nice bit of spinach, and then here’s a nice bit of this,” whereas Rian is like, “I need to put in another micro-teaspoon of this spice.” It can be really difficult working together.
You had that album together last year, Promo (2024), that also had Kakuhan. I liked hearing your respective tracks and feeling how different they were despite some similar aesthetic inclinations. How do you feel like your loose methodology squares with something like your new album, Psychic Resynthesis (2025)? You’re not involved in the performance, yet you have an actual score for this ensemble.
I started by meeting each of the players on a one-to-one basis and exploring with them how they were making sounds on their instruments. There are some techniques they do that are well known, though I didn’t know that back then, and there are some unusual techniques that might not be so familiar. The way I approached this music is by having modular building blocks, where each block is a repeated or permuted behavior. A really good example of this is the artist Bruce Nauman. He has this piece called Manipulating the T-Bar (1966), and all he’s doing is rotating his metal T in the studio. It’s not anything theatrical or about meaning, it’s just the bare act of this behavioral activity. And that’s how I think about music.
I would say to the cellist, “We found this thing. Just do that, and don’t feel like you have to go off on this trajectory—just hover around this repeated thing and modulate it a bit.” I developed a scheme where each player has seven behavioral modules, and there’s a procedure that means that every time the piece is performed, the combination switches a bit so they can never get used to performing it together. It was also forbidden to rehearse. They were able to practice their little bits, but they couldn’t collectively rehearse this work. And because the score is sacrosanct in Western classical music—it would say on the score that rehearsal is forbidden—if they did rehearse, they weren’t actually performing the piece since they didn’t abide by it.
The piece was first performed at Centro Pecci in Italy and the original title was Every non-empty ultra-connected compact space has a largest proper open subset. It’s only been performed two or three times. I said to Nick, the director of the ensemble, that we had to document this. I wanted to go into the studio and make a video and sound recording of each of the modular behaviors, as there’s no actual way of writing a written score that could adequately define what they are.
We went into the studio and did this, and then the Psychic Resynthesis album was me taking those things and letting them suggest their own form. I didn’t follow a strict algorithmic structure. For track one, I just moved some pieces together on the timeline and was like, alright, that’s done. It was this very simple process of aligning things. I told Ian that I wanted a record sleeve that opens up like this (holds up record)—Crass’s Bullshit Detector Three (1984). We were planning to do this but at the last minute Ian was like, “I can’t find the right paper, this is gonna cost shitloads of money.”
I had the title already, so I was thinking, what’s plan b? I remember in 1982, when I was massively into Psychic TV—I had the haircut and everything—I’d gone to a local museum in the small town where I grew up. I took a photo of Exhibit 23, which was a human skull. You know how there’s that whole mythology with the number 23 and Psychic TV? I thought, okay, the way I’m packaging the album is this overt reference to British musical history, to my musical history. The inner sleeves are copies of the Throbbing Gristle 7-inches, too. I like the weirdness of being like, this is where we are—we have this contemporary classical ensemble—and this is where it actually came from, this ’80s era of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle.
Do you see a throughline between Psychic TV and the music presented on this album?
Probably not, but the weird thing is that when I was in the sessions with these players, I remembered Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady.” There’s this noise that sounds like (makes quavering tone) and I think nearly every player got to do a “Hamburger Lady.” You can hear bits where the cello plays this (makes same quavering tone). It’s a wobbly, drone-y thing. Then when I made the decision to add references to this particular history, it was quite ironic that this intention was always there from the beginning. And I’m so pleased with the cover, too.
I love the fact that it’s orange.
It’s a duotone, so it’s two Pantones as opposed to CMYK. It’s the same color combination as Coil’s How to Destroy Angels (1984). I’ve got another release, too. I started a record label through Boomkat just to release more solo electronic stuff. For me, it’s clearly an ironic label name: National Centre For Mark Fell Studies. I’m not that narcissistic, obviously. The center label of this new series is basically a copy of the center label on How to Destroy Angels. And that’s how I’ve always done it. I’ve always distributed these fragmented references with the hope that people can reconstruct them. And often people never do. I did an album with SND called stdio (2000), which is standard input and output—it’s like a header in C programming. And at the same time, I released a solo record under the pseudonym .h, and put together that’s the name of the whole header [stdio.h], but nobody picked up on it. And the .h was a lot of the same sounds I used on the stdio album but in different combinations. It’s the playfulness of it—can you weave these things together?
You’ve talked about removing the drama and emotion in your music, but are you considering the audience in any way when performing?
In a live context, that sort of energy peak is nice to give to the audience. When it’s a collaborative performance with acoustic performers, and it’s not a composed thing where I’m the director—in other words, when it’s a jam—then I think it’s nice to let the audience have that. Performance isn’t about my fun. And it’s not about just entertaining the audience either. It’s about respecting them, and taking them somewhere with you.
Oh that’s interesting, because a part of me wonders if the way you approach music involves not considering the audience in any form.
It’s not that at all! It’s about respecting them, that you’re not going to talk down to them. I struggled for a long time with this contract I have with the audience. Am I there to piss them off, to be antagonistic to the audience? That’s a very elementary attitude to have, and I think some inexperienced performers have done that, including me. It would be naive of me to deny what music does: it creates energy. And so in a live context, I’m happy to go to that point. There’s a rapport between me and my fellow performer and an audience, and we’re going into this intense state.
Ah yeah, that makes sense. This goes back to the structuralist film thing—there’s still a lot of emotions you can feel even when you’re just seeing, for example, flickering lights in a Paul Sharits film. It’s this reduction as a way to understand the actual possibilities and capabilities of music.
And different formations of what it can do.
What do you mean by that?
The kind of vibe that you get from Paul Sharits is very different from watching Steven Spielberg. The energy you take part in while watching Jaws (1975) is very different from what’s good about Sharits. And Paul Sharits is definitely not boring. Michael Snow’s Wavelength is quite a challenging watch, but it’s also invigorating. The things that we’re talking about, the descriptions are never gonna be accurate. These days, I’m trying to be mystical about music. I’m not interested in giving a single description of what it means to be engaged in it. And that’s why I’m interested in multistability—there can be several contradictory descriptions of how music works or what it does or what it’s like to perform or listen to music, and they’re all useful.
I’m interested in undoing the platitudinous ways we think about music. I was just in music school in Basel teaching some students. These were all people who went through classical music training—they were amazingly good at what they did. And yet, they all spoke about music in a way that’s grounded in the Western classical tradition. It’s about skill and virtuosity and expression and imagination—this typically Western metaphysical worldview. It’s good, but it’s only one way to talk about music and the creative process. Among music students, I’ll encounter this belief that music is about some expression of a feeling and that music emerges as an idea that forms in one’s head. That kind of worldview is a product of a Greek, Judeo-Christian metaphysical framework. It’s this idea of mastery as complete control of an instrument.
A few years ago, I came across this text from a Japanese flute player named Fuyo [aka Hisamatsu Masagoro]. What he says is all mind-blowingly amazing, but at one point he goes, “It is disgraceful when someone loves to produce a splendid tone.” What does that mean? If you try to imprint your aesthetic prejudices on the material, that’s bad. He then says, “What the bamboo does not automatically produce, human skill cannot correct.” What’s he saying there? That you have to have this intuitive relationship with the thing you are making music with, and your role is to let that thing do its thing. That’s a different kind of mastery. It’s a mastery of reaching a state of symbiosis with the instrument and moment of performance, as opposed to mastery of complete control under the will of some mental intention. Even though I’m someone from a Western contemporary art-world background, I relate more to Fuyo’s description of creative practice than anything I’ve encountered in the Western aesthetic tradition, at least with regards to aesthetic analysis.
Is there anything you wanted to share about your new label?
That’s just gonna be me putting out three or four 12-inches a year. It’s gonna be solo electronic music, and I haven’t released a solo electronic album in 12 or 13 years even though I’ve been making stuff the whole time. The problem is that I’ve ended up with way too much music and it’s become impossible to sort out. Shlom [Sviri] at Boomkat said, “Mark, just start a 12-inch label and put stuff out.” It felt quite liberating as opposed to being like, here’s an album, or here’s a grand statement.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Can you share one thing you love about yourself?
Jesus. That’s a really tough one. It’d be easy to say what I hate about myself, and whatever I answer with is gonna sound really arrogant (laughter). My answer is that I am able to feel contentment in the mountains. I live close to the Peak District, which is almost mountains. And I’m really into climbing up hills. I’m not doing proper mountain climbing with ropes, but I’m climbing and hiking all the time. And Rian does as well. Wherever we go, we look for the nearest mountain. We’ve been up the Himalayas, the Pyrenees. When we’re both in America, it’d be nice to go up some peaks there as I’ve never actually done that.
Do you feel like hiking is important for the way you think about art?
I like to wander and dwell, and that’s how I make work. Even right now, I’m thinking about being on a woodland path and going up a peak and it’s making me feel happy (laughter). I just love being in the mountains, I don’t know why it is. And whatever chance I get, I go. The noise of city life is brutal. In America there’s this whole ultralight obsession where you get tents that weigh almost nothing and you get these incredibly expensive materials. We’re into all that. And I’m really into tea as well, so drinking it is a big deal. I’ll often take some good quality tea, go up a mountain, collect some water from a stream, and then make the tea. That’s a peak transcendental experience: tea in the mountains.
Mark Fell’s new album, Psychic Resynthesis, is out now via Frozen Reeds. The inaugural release on his new record label, National Centre For Mark Fell Studies, is available at Boomkat. More information about Mark Fell can be found at his website.
Thank you for reading the 193rd issue of Tone Glow. Wander and dwell.
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Incredible interview thank you.
Well, that was wonderful.