We’re sitting in the NH Collection hotel in Brussels, it’s May 4th —
Although technically we’re not, technically we’re in the restaurant next door, and it’s called Le Rossini.
Le Rossini, yes. Today also happens to be Oren Ambarchi’s 50th birthday —
It is, many happy returns to Oren. You made it! That’s my message to him.
Touch is coming up on 40 years —
Couple of years to go, we’ve done 37, got to that one so two and a half years to go…
Congratulations!
Well, let’s get there first, before we start hanging out the bunting.
The first question I wanted to ask you is more of a personal one, when did listening transition from being a passive to an active act?
That I can very easily answer, I can remember very clearly when I was about 13 or 14, my parents gave me a shortwave radio receiver as a birthday or Christmas gift, or both, and I really got into putting the headphones on and dialling between the stations. I was interested in hearing stations with a foreign language. I ran a single aerial cable up onto the roof, I lived in the middle of the countryside so I had reasonably good reception, not too much interference from anything, but I was more intrigued by what was going on between the stations. I think that’s when I really started listening. But having said that, one of the things I used to do with my kid brother, which used to give us hours of entertainment, was to record the audio from TV shows, particularly British comedies. I remember Monty Python, Stanley Baxter, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise. We would record the audio onto cassette through the 5 pin DIN outlet on the portable black and white TV that we had in our bedroom, when I shared a room with Paul. We used to have a lot of fun putting it on tape and playing it back because it separated it from the visuals. I was kind of getting little seeds of things in my early teenage years. I think they were the starting point for when listening became active rather than passive. I didn’t graduate to doing tape cut ups or tape loops but the active listening thing I think was starting then. It was the shortwave radio that really — it’s been great fun going back to that with the drøne project I do with Mark Van Hoen where I’m culling a lot of samples and sound sources from that same process, but obviously much more extensively with a much wider field. I really enjoyed going back to that phase.
One of the things I personally respect about Touch is that it’s been fiercely independent throughout its existence —
Yes, fiercely, stubbornly, stupidly, you could say.
You’ve managed to operate outside what I like to call the musical industrial complex.
Yes, I think it’s making as few compromises as possible. We’ve never really applied for any funding, and the one time I did, it really felt awkward and going against the grain and we got turned down and I went, well that was a waste of time. I try to get each project to have its own economic self sufficiency. It’s a tall order but when it works it’s extremely satisfying and mostly it does work. So that gives us a lot of freedom to do what we want when we want. Whereas if you do apply for funding, and I do accept that it’s inevitable and in many ways it’s the only option, but for us it isn’t and therefore we have — oh look it’s, hail!
[ hail storm begins]
A heavy hail storm in Brussels. We should be out there recording it.
… I do understand that’s how a lot of people function, and that’s fine but it doesn’t work for us, for whatever reason, for all sorts of different reasons. It also gives you a fixed time frame within which you have to operate. We’ve never been very responsive to that process, we like to have an open end for projects which have to be allowed to develop in their own time. You can’t force these things. You can’t hurry art, as Jon Wozencroft likes to say. And he’s right, he’s absolutely right.
It seems like You and Jon don’t steer your artists in any direction, instead you support them.
There’s certainly an intensive dialogue. I mean when you say we don’t steer, we certainly might encourage, suggest, we might say quite strongly, actually that’s not a great idea because… Then it comes down to your relationship with them and how much they’re going to listen to you. But that’s extremely rare when that’s happened. I can’t think of the last time that it got even close to that. But, you know, you never know.
I remember a conversation we had in the tube the other day, you mentioned finding the art in the music.
Yes, ‘cus it’s not about music, really.
Is there a specific process that you use to find that, can you quantify it, or is it more intuitive?
Neither Jon nor I are musicians, neither Jon nor I studied music, never played any instruments ourselves, we don’t come from that background. We’re not in the same house as the artists who are operating in the way that they operate. But also, we publish books, Jon’s a graphic designer, typographer, writer, you know he’s a polymath. This is partly why we’re not a record label, it’s this whole idea of records, this whole sort of almost like you’re on a fixed journey, releasing records, trying to sell as many as possible, trying to, you know, that whole music industry — as you say, the musical industrial complex, doesn’t really work for us. We see ourselves much more as a publisher and we’re publishing editions and the editions can be any format. There doesn’t have to be any sound involved at all. Of course, largely it does involve some kind of recording but it certainly doesn’t have to, we’re not restricted. Hence the name, Touch is totally open. It doesn’t reveal anything about its format. We’re not Touch Books or Touch records, we’re just, Touch.
In terms of the curation, even though we’re all sick of that word —
I’m not, I like it, it works for us, and I think it’s important to underline its necessity as I did yesterday with that kid, who was dumping everything he did up on Soundcloud
We could talk about Soundcloud actually —
I’d rather not (laughs), but the ability to upload all your work without thinking about the implications of that, is interesting. Because of course people can so they do.
Nowadays, it’s so easy to go from inception, to recording, to releasing. You could essentially do it in a day.
You’ve got something on your table that used to cost thousands of pounds, and it’s now a few hundred pounds, or less. The whole mechanism of making something is now so incredibly easy and takes relatively a short amount of time to get something reasonable up into the public eye line or ear line. But to be a good artist is a whole other thing. So you’re getting an awful lot of people who are becoming efficient, proficient, at recording up to a certain point but, so what. If you haven’t got anything to say, what’s the point of doing that?
It seems like the gestation process is being bypassed because it’s so easy to release quickly
We’re almost in a negative gestation period. The gap between actually getting to a point where you think, oh, I’ve got something here, and it becoming publicly available is now almost nought, it’s zero. There’s absolutely no time for the artist to think deeply after they’ve done something, and ask maybe bigger questions that aren’t to do so much with the practical side of the project, come out of that and think more conceptually about it, if they haven’t done that before. And maybe going back and having another look later. Well it’s too late if you’ve already released it into the world then it’s harder to claw it back. My advice to everyone is take longer than you think you need.
When Touch first started, what was the general timeline for artists from inception to release?
There’s no formula for it, but it was obviously a very different process because you couldn’t email someone or upload a file or anything like that. It was all done, let’s say mechanically, through the post, or arranging to meet up, or going to a concert or whatever it was. Or even recording in a studio, booking a studio, going in there, the whole process was on a very different timeline. One thing I would say is that it was quicker and you had a higher quality of vinyl. It was vinyl or cassette in those days. Cassettes were what they were but with vinyl you had a higher standard, a higher quality of vinyl, the compound itself was a better. The pressing plants were really expert at getting good quality out. There were some failures, there always are with a mechanical process, but the general standard of vinyl production was higher than it is now. Not surprisingly because everyone was geared towards it. It was heavily invested in, and that was the main format until the mid ‘80s when digital arrived and changed things.
How do you go about deciding what format to release music on now?
Sometimes it’s a given. If it’s a cassette for example, you might have to remind the artist that there are two sides and they’ve got to think about that tension between A and B, like with vinyl which doesn’t apply to CD for example or even necessarily a file which could be separate files or one long file. There are automatically things to think about. But if you say you’re doing a new album really, you do a new album and see how it unfolds and think about the format at some stage slightly later on. Get the concept and the work in shape and see what form it takes and something comes out of that, normally.
At what point is Jon brought into the process to start thinking about photography?
As soon as there’s something to listen to, as soon as there’s something to reckon with. Jon needs to also conceptualize that aspect of it. He may not have the right photos, he might have to go somewhere and do a new shoot for that project whatever it is, wherever it is. He’s got a big library now so he can draw back and pull stuff out that he thinks is relevant. But that’s a discussion between Jon and the artist and that can take as long as it takes. It can be extremely quick or it can — there’s one project we’re working on which has been years, it may never happen, I don’t know. You just can’t force these things.
It seems like the mid ‘90s was the golden era for Touch. You started working with Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda, Oren Ambarchi, Fennesz, Biosphere —
Philip Jeck, Chris Watson. It’s funny that, to see it as the golden era, is that unfair on the artists working now? Whom in their day might become as influential? That’s slightly, prescient to say that, I wonder, I don’t know.
But there was certainly an energy in the mid ‘90s.
I think there were certain liberating things that were happening by then. The laptop for example was coming and the software was coming. For the artists that was hugely liberating. Fennesz would be a good example. He would say himself that that was an important moment for him to pivot his career as a solo artist, definitely, more towards the late ‘90s. Chris Watson and Philip Jeck weren’t using computers. Ryoji Ikeda was using a sampler, I guess that’s a form of computer, but in a different way. The laptop and the software was maybe slightly later, was it ‘97, ‘98, ‘99? +/- Ryoji Ikeda was ‘95, Philip Jeck Loopholes was ‘97. Anyway, I think you’ve got to be a bit more — which artist are you talking about? What was their particular journey? Oren Ambarchi was later. Oren’s 50 today so that’s his timeline. The others you named are older, as indeed we are. I think what was happening also was the retail aspect of it, the wholesale and distribution side of it was becoming much more efficient and the impact of digital was starting to make itself felt and they were forced to become much more efficient. You could argue that the golden days of that was actually the ‘80s, or the ‘70s and ‘80s, and in the ‘90s it broke, or it started to break because of digital. And then by ‘93 really, ’94, ‘95, when everyone started getting email and suddenly you realized you could send files, it cut out everyone. Huge changes, yes. But for the artists, many of them felt very liberated by it.
I remember I was complimenting your garden the other day and you mentioned its different phases, the current one being your favourite. Similarly, has Touch gone through different iterations of itself, what are they and where is it now?
It definitely has. Both Jon and I have been around a long time, longer than most labels and yet in many ways we feel like we’re just getting started. One of the reasons for that is that we can refresh ourselves by working with new fresh artists such as yourself, Zachary Paul, Geneva Skeen, Yann Novak. That’s how we refresh ourselves and we’re kept on our toes, by you guys. It’s always a shifting point, there’s never a fixed point where you can say, right, I’m satisfied, I’ve achieved this. Never, that will never happen ‘cus we’ll always be changing and adapting. Some of the longer trends occur often driven by technology, economy, the geo-political situation that we find ourselves in, for example. When we grew up and when we started there was a record store or two in every town and now you’re lucky if you find one. That’s a massive social change ‘cus you would go there for your information. Now you say, oh, well you can get it on the internet, only if you know where to look and you don’t have anyone saying, except your peer groups, check this out, it’s amazing. It’s a completely different way of receiving information and disseminating it. That’s been a massive change. We’re subject to these historical forces and we’re very good, I think, at dealing with these. Some labels and some artists get really stuck, and I don’t think we’ve ever got stuck. If we have, it would worry me a lot if I felt that or someone said that.
What projects are you excited about moving forward?
All of them. If I wasn’t excited about it we wouldn’t be doing it. That comes from a very good dialogue between Jon and I, we talk about ideas all the time. Jon says, this has come up or I go, this has come up, and if it feeds into our grander, general let’s say, world view, a bit like the Borg (hahaha), it’ll be absorbed into the greater thing. And of course the great thing is that the artists can shift and collaborate. You might meet Carl Michael von Hausswolff and an idea might happen and you might start working together, which we won’t know until you actually put yourself in that milieu, to allow that to happen. Collaborations are key components of all of this and it’s wonderful when that happens and you just never know which direction it’s going to go in.
You have an interesting position because you have a bird’s-eye view of the artists that you’re working with and so you’re able to match them together.
You have to be on the ground level but also looking down on the whole thing and see who might work together. That curating process is also done for live events, where you’ve got to put people together and you’ve got to structure it. You can’t just say, let’s throw all this together and have a great night, there’s got to be a reason to it, a point to the lineup, it’s got to work on some level. And if you think of everything as though it’s a composition, we’re not composers I hasten to add, but if you think of it as it’s a composition so there’s some kind of waveform rather than all on the same level, you don’t get artists who are occupying the same territory following each other.
Like frequency ranges, you don’t want artists to occupy the same range.
Yes, you don’t want five acts who are all dealing with infrasound on the same bill, unless the festival is calling for that and that’s the preconceived plan, but that’s obviously not going to happen.
Playing live is still a very important part of all this.
It’s critical I think and it’s worrying that so many venues are having such a hard time. Look at last night, you did a show at AB Salon in Brussels, which was free, your name is not around the houses yet, and yet it was full. People were prepared to have a go based on the integrity of the location and the quality of the playback system and a certain amount of other forces suggesting that this is going to be a good night to go to. It all matched and worked and you did a great show and the audience were fantastic.
Spaces like that are hard to come by, spaces that are free and high quality, with good monitoring systems, quadraphonic sound… it’s a shame that places like that are closing.
I think there’s a lot of interest in high quality sound playback and this idea of the listening rooms where you would play an album and play it to an extremely high quality and then discuss it is really, nice. A really interesting parlour game almost, it’s a lot of fun.
Do you feel that music comes from a different source when an artist is not expecting to make money off their work?
Financial pressure is an interesting one because it can work in both ways. It can really up your game but it can also really block you in. You see this a lot in TV and film with the time and economic pressures, often which are very negative, people assume that you’re very well paid if you’re doing high profile, it is not always the case – often the budgets get severely reduced even as you’re going along because they’ve had to suddenly spend on something else to do with the film or the TV show or the production, whatever it is. You don’t know that people are being well rewarded for their work, so you have to be careful with your assumptions. Just like visual artists might have a very large production budget, but a huge proportion of that, if not all of it, goes on really high quality tools that they need for the production. You’ve got to be a good spreadsheet manager as well as an artist these days. You really see it when someone is on their fourth series of a TV show and there’s honestly nothing else to say because the TV show is tending to say the same thing and they don’t want anything very different on the soundtrack. Some of that work can get very boring and also you’re up against an ever increasing time restriction because the demand for new work is so great now with so many TV channels, many of which need a constant input of soundtrack. That’s not good for creative flexing of muscles and exploring ideas. You can get trapped in that world, and the other things that most humans go through with starting a family or wanting to live somewhere a bit nicer perhaps or having to move to a different city, general economic pressures. It’s very tough.
How do you think younger artists can find the art in their own music? There’s been an increasing obsession with gear rather than content, especially in electronic music.
You’d hope you have someone in your life to tell you, that you’re shit, (chuckles). That’s a mean thing to say, but you know what I mean. But if you don’t have someone in your life to whisper in your ear, remember you’re mortal, it can get very difficult and you can lose sight of that. Especially if you’re being given encouragement from people who may not know much about the world that you’re operating in that maybe want to help. Maybe they’ve heard about the name and think, that’s great, let’s do it! Maybe don’t spend as much time looking at the work as they should do.
When artists are able to self release and put things up online, on SoundCloud and other platforms, you get false feedback.
You do get false feedback, and you need someone around in your life to be really fair with you.
That’s what labels were back in the day, that was their function. Now people have become their own labels.
Exactly, there are pro and cons of all of this for sure. I think it’s very hard for an artist to self-edit. Often they’re far too close to it and the ability to stand back and have a look from a different perspective, turn the telescope round if you like, that comes with maturity. The absolute masters of it I would suggest are Chris Watson and Philip Jeck. It takes decades and decades to get to that level of sophistication of looking at your own work.
And you can’t rush it like you said earlier.
You can teach. They have a lot to pass on, the two other artists. Chris has all these workshops, all his, it’s not unfair to call them, tricks of the trade, they might even be temporal shortcuts to save yourself a lot of time if you do things this way instead of this way and you use the materials around you rather than necessarily, going and buying the most expensive — he uses a coat hanger for his DPAs. You don’t need really expensive sophisticated stands with mechanical arms, the coat hanger is an amazing thing, you can hang it anywhere, and you can bend it, and shape it, and if you get the plastic coated ones, it doesn’t interfere at all. Things like that are incredibly useful and labour-saving and time-saving. Philip Jeck for years and years edited on minidisc, a medium that never caught on commercially in terms of releases but has been incredibly useful for editing, things like that.