Interview with Fergus Kelly
Fergus Kelly is a sound artist and improvising musician based in Dublin. He has been in numerous shows around Ireland, and has shown in Canada, America, Germany, Finland, Holland and England. He has done soundtracks for film and theatre and received many Arts Council awards.
Sound has been a constant element in his work, and has been used in a variety of contexts: tape/slide, performance, installation, soundworks for tape, CD, radio, and public spaces. His work was performed by The Manhattan Marimba Quartet in The Kitchen, New York, in 1991. Radio broadcasts include A.A.R.T., Dublin, 1994 and 1998, Hearing Is Believing, Liverpool, 1995, Horizontal Radio, Alberta 1995, Radio Gagarin, Hamburg, 1996, Resonance, London 1998, and Drift:Resonant Cities, Edinburgh, 2004.
Other highlights include showing in the European Workshop Ruhrgebeit in Recklinghausen, Germany in 1990 and 1991, and the Audio Visual Experimental Festival, in Arnhem, Holland in 1993 and 1995, participating in The Tuning Of The World conference in Banff, Canada in 1993, and performing in Six Weeks Of Sound and In The Eye OF The Ear II, both in Chicago in 1996. In 1997 and 1999 he performed in Dublin and Cork with UK sound sculptor Max Eastley.
He also showed in The Digital Hub’s Captured in Dublin in 2006 and performed in a duo with David Lacey in the Tulca performance festival in Galway in 2006, and in Volume 4 in Dublin in 2007. In 2007 he was selected joint winner with Ian McDonnell for electro-acoustic composition in Crash Ensemble’s Free State concert in Dublin. In 2009 he performed in London with Max Eastley and Mark Wastell.
He showed in Futuresonic in Manchester, also in 2007. In 2011 a soundwork was featured at the Alchemy Film Festival, in Hawick, Scottish Borders. A soundwork featured in Nowhere Island Radio, UK, and A Quiet Position, curated by Jez Riley French, as part of a broadcast during the AV Festival in London, in 2012.
Breathing Room, a sound/light installation was presented in The Goethe Institute in Dublin in 2012. A soundwork was featured in The Hilltown New Music Festival, Westmeath, in 2012. New soundworks were featured in Mayfest in London, Free State 7, Kilkenny Arts Festival and (H)ear Festival 3, Heerlen, Holland in 2013. He performed solo in Berlin in 2013, as part of the Functional Sounds conference.
In 2014, his soundwork, Concrete Sonorities was featured in the Urban Soundscape And Critical Citizenship conference in Limerick. It also featured in Invisible Places/Sounding Cities in Portugal in 2014, and in Radio Cona broadcast project, Ljubljiana, Slovenia in 2015, and Radiophrenia, UK, in 2015. A new piece, Tethered, was selected by Darren Copeland from New Adventures In Sound Art via a residency in University of Limerick, to be developed for performance on UL's SpADE surround sound system, and also for performance in Toronto later in 2015. This piece was also featured in Listen | Compose | Perform, an event in Dublin in 2016, curated by composer Karen Power. His work has also featured in various Radiophrenia broadcast events in recent years. He took part in Erstwhile label manager Jon Abbey's AMPLIFY/QUARANTINE online festival in 2020, as well as creating online work for Come Hell Or High Water series of live events on the Thames foreshore at Poplar, organised by Anne Bean, Hayley Newman, Harriet Latham and others.
Repetitive Strain Industries (Fergus Kelly, David Lacey & Jurgen Simpson) performed in Perspective 2000 in Belfast, and in the Infusion and Fix festivals in Limerick and Belfast in 2000. They also performed at Scoip 2001 in Tralee, and in Summer, in Dublin, in 2001.
Soundworks on CD include: GBH (1993), which appears on Random Access Soundworks, Pressure (1994), appears on Audio Artists Radio Transmissions. He appears in collaboration with Garrett Phelan and Carol McKeon on Soundworks III (1998). A solo CD, Invisible City (1999) was published by Project Press, as part of Project's Off Site series.
Recording under the name Reptitive Strain Industries, his work has been featured on compilations released through Charnel Music in San Francisco, Meeuw Muzak in Maastricht, and Staalplaat in Amsterdam. The album Nets In The Trawl was released by ND in Texas.
In 2005 he established a CDR label and website, Room Temperature, as an outlet for his solo and collaborative work, producing the CDs Unmoor (2005), Material Evidence (2006), Bevel (2006) (with David Lacey), A Host Of Particulars (2007), Strange Weather (2007) and Leaching The Pith (2008), Swarf (2009), Fugitive Pitch (2009) Long Range (2010), Unnatural Actuality (2014) and Quiet Forage (with David Lacey) (2015), Trembling Embers (2018), Gleaming Seams (2019) and Plundered Lumber (2020).
The album, A Congregation Of Vapours, was released to critical acclaim in 2012 on Dublin label Farpoint Recordings.
Two new albums were released in 2016: Neural Atlas (Stolen Mirror CD) and Shot To Shreds (Farpoint tape release).
The album Local Knowledge (Unfathomless CD) was released to critical acclaim in 2017.
A trio album with Max Eastley & Mark Wastell, The Map Is Not The Territory (Confront) was released to critical acclaim in 2019.
1. To begin a musical path is often to go through stages of different changes to embellish, eliminate and formulate anew your own definition of it? How did it start for you? And what where the stops on the way?
I began using sound pretty much from the start in college in the early 80s, using found metals, initially to record with, and later use in live work, inspired by the work of Test Dept., Einsturzende Neubauten, z’ev & Bow Gamelan. I was also inspired by the work of Dome, :zoviet*france:, Hafler Trio, Strafe Für Rebellion, Nurse With Wound and others, and began constructing very simple tape collages which were used for tape/slide works and installations.
Apart from a brief flirtation with guitar in my teens, I am not musically trained. I got the hang of drums some years later and really enjoyed the physicality of that instrument, but never played in a band. Since college, I have continued in the vein of constructed and adapted instruments and tape collages.
I’ve been passionate about music from an early age, and my love of the post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation found a crossover with the further reaches of sonic exploration coming from the Fine Art approaches to sound as a sculptural medium. I then discovered improvised music and was smitten.
2. What is your influence when it comes to the variety of the music you create at the moment?
There’s a huge range of influences across the spectrum that would have had influence in general terms, and a continuing influence in terms of what I’ve produced. Here’s a handful, nothing exhaustive. This lot have certainly stood the test of time:
The side project of two members of Wire - Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, working under the name Dome, made a deep impression on me. Coming from artschool backgrounds, they were basically approaching composition in a very healthily open-ended, lateral and exploratory way. I first heard their albums in foundation year in art school and I was really inspired. There was a simplicity and inventiveness borne out of that friction between technical limitations and creative freedom. But with considerable imagination and intelligence they forged utterly unique soundscapes that were, by turns industrial, poetic, bleak, absurdist, surreal.
One LP they made for Cherry Red in 1982, Mzui, had a particular appeal for me. This was based on an exhibition they had been involved in the year before with visual artist/designer Russell Mills where they made an audio visual installation from discarded material found on site which they invited the public to interact with, as well as playing it themselves. Edited highlights were compiled for the album.
This record was an epiphany for me. It made connections on a few levels: the notion of sound as landscape, the narrative qualities of sound—the idea of sound articulating a sense of place. The simplicity of using the space itself as the source was really appealing. There was a certain DIY punk aesthetic to that, which is, of course, predated by the idea of the found object in various twentieth century art movements. Then there was the nature of the sound itself: cold, gritty, matter of fact.
It's very evocative—there's a sense of the inevitable somehow, the feeling of events overheard almost, rather than recorded specifically. It often has an icy, brutal, almost terrifying beauty, wrought from the simplest of base elements. The record is seemingly random at times, yet at others carefully composed and intelligently articulated. There's a wonderful sense of depth, like the deep shadows of a Caravaggio painting, with some sounds occurring very far away, whilst others literally brush past the microphone.
On a similar level, in terms of creating utterly unique, skewed soundscapes, the work of :zoviet*france: knocked my block off, especially the ‘mid period’ work of such albums as Misfits, Looney Tunes And Squalid Criminals, A Flock Of Rotations, Assault And Mirage, Gesture Signal Threat. Their means were really simple, and very DIY: some non-European traditional instrumentation, fed through various effects, looped and processed, some vocal sounds and a fair dose of quite odd media clips, one of the most memorable being from a preacher’s broadcast about the truth behind the Jonestown massacre.
Like Dome, this music was completely unlike anything I had previously heard. It had a very strong voice – it could only have been produced by :zoviet*france: I always get a very isolated, abandoned, cold war ambience from these albums, a paranoid, haunted/hunted quality which continues to inspire me.
Like a lot of improvisers, the music of Morton Feldman has had a lasting influence. I find it repays repeated listens, and grows each time. I never get tired of his music. The simplicity, the grace, the intelligence, the austere beauty, the space between the notes, the sense of scale, from micro to epic… endlessly inspiring.
The Bow Gamelan had a huge impact on me when I first came across their work via an Audio Arts cassette circa 1984. They appeared on some of the early years of more adventurous arts programming on Channel 4. One particularly memorable bit of film on Alter Image showed them playing in rapidly advancing tide waters, till they were quite literally up to their neck in it. I had also read about them in Performance magazine, and was very lucky to get to see them in the ICA in 1986, with Bob Cobbing. They also played on a pontoon by the Ha’penny bridge in Dublin in 1990, an appearance marred by a particularly persistent car alarm that would not stop, despite Paul Burwell and z’ev’s vigorous attempts to silence it.
Superficially, there was a continuity with the music of Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept., but Bow Gamelan had a more playful, restless spirit. I just found their music incredibly exciting, the clamour of metals and fireworks, the animated machinery, and the core trio running around, more like technicians than musicians, keeping the whole enterprise from total collapse. Someone once memorably described them as a cross between Turner and Apocalypse Now. Sums up their shows up pretty well.
Some of the metals, especially the beer barrel ‘caskophones’ (which sounded like a cross between temple gongs and church bells) had a particular sound colour that, to this day, still brings me out in goosebumps. It really connects deeply with me for some reason, right down to the marrow – I’m completely in my element, lost inside it. Another instrument they used that had a similar effect were pyrophones – metal pipes ‘played’ with blow torches to create incredibly haunting, mournful drones, somewhat like a cross between aircraft engines and organ pipes.
I used to work summer jobs in London during my years in college (no summer work in recession-hit 80s Dublin). I was going into my final year in Fine Art after Bow Gamelan’s ICA show, and it completely fired me up to make metal percussion contraptions, including making beer barrel gongs by slicing them in two with an angle-grinder, and cutting metal pipes for pyrophones. The sculpture department became my new playground. Over 35 years on, I still have the beer barrels, which have featured on various recordings right up to my most recent work released this year.
My introduction to the music of AMM came when I got a copy of The Inexhaustible Document, which really had a profound impact on me. Here was music as geological event. As subtle, capricious and occasionally violent as the weather. Glacial movements and tectonic shifts. Music as séance. The interplay of three very distinct personalities was a highly combustible mix, an equation so much more than the sum of its parts.
What really got the hook in, when listening on record, was not really knowing who was playing what, even though the instrumentation of guitar, piano and drums was what you might call fairly straight ahead. Never had these instruments sounded so unlike themselves. It was an intriguing and fascinating approach to music. Seeing them perform on a number of occasions further enhanced my enjoyment of the music as I could see how the music was constructed in real time.
The DIY aesthetic in art as much as music has always been important. I was really into the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists as a teenager, and art school broadened my frame of reference to other work in the areas of Arte Povera, assemblage, and photomontage. In particular the work of John Heartfield, Ed Keinholz, Christain Boltanski and Anselm Keifer. Performance was also important, as a direct means of engaging an audience, and the employment of very rudimentary materials and processes, unusual locations and extended timeframes. In particular the work of Joseph Beuys, Stuart Brisley, Alastair MacLennan, and Andre Stitt had considerable impact.
3. How do collaborations work for you?
The musical possibilities expand further when working with other players in an open dialogue with parity of presence, no grandstanding, all listening attentively as much as playing or not playing. Listening is key. I established a strong connection with drummer David Lacey early on, and went on to play and record on many occasions over the years in a very sympathetic and satisfying working relationship for which I'm really grateful – the natural chemistry is a source of great joy. We have produced two albums together: Bevel (2005), and Quiet Forage (2015).
I've also worked with other Irish players such as Judith Ring, Jurgen Simpson, Paul Vogel, & Dennis McNulty, as well as UK players Max Eastley & Mark Wastell. We put out a trio album to critical acclaim on Mark's Confront label in 2019, The Map Is Not The Territory. Again, it's a question of being open to a musical dialogue, and allowing things to develop in an open-ended, organic manner, see where it'll take you. Inevitably it takes you places other than where you would go on your own, and this feeds back into further solo and collaborative work, in a form of compositional compost, a rich and fertile bed to draw from. I really enjoy the process.
4. When in doubt or a road block what or who do you refer to? Is there a manifesto of some sorts that you could establish?
No manifesto or strategy. If I'm having difficulty with musical explorations (which, luckily, rarely happens), I might change tack to visual work; photography/photomontage/painting/drawing. Time away from one medium refreshes you to re-enter the other medium. Anyway, after an extended period working with sound, I usually switch gear to visual work and vice versa.
5. The medium is the message as it was said once – what is your relationship between the tools you are using and the composition?
The materials inspire a particular approach with all their tactile and evocative qualities. Whole worlds can be constructed with these sounds with the compositional possibilities of the computer (4 track in the early days forced a particular discipline that’s served me well since). That’s the other side of it for me: the idea of making your own unique sound world, evolving a voice that establishes a particular presence, one that hopefully moves beyond your influences and into something different, something engaging and satisfying.
When I begin I have absolutely no preconceived idea about how I might structure the material, apart, as always, from the idea of moving on from and either developing or switching gear from my last finished product. The starting point was establishing a sound palette, and then using the computer as my canvas. The process of making various combinations is where things really start to spark my imagination and ideas start flowing from that.
Rough structures start to emerge once I start to articulate the material. Sometimes I will deliberately decide not to use processing, to keep everything clean, as a kind of discipline. Sometimes I work with a deliberately more limited palette, which does force a particular kind of lateral approach.
Improvisation is essential in building the material from the ground up, mainly because I can’t conceive of structures in the abstract as someone traditionally trained would do. But then that is only one system. Mine is another, admittedly more labour-intensive and time consuming one. I’m approaching it from an artist’s perspective – painting and sculpting with sound. Sound as raw, malleable matter to be manipulated - prodded, poked, pushed, pulled, beaten, hammered, scalded, stretched, scarred, chopped, diced, dessicated, burnt, and glued, taped, nailed and bolted back together again.
The editing of the material is where the pieces find their form. The painterly/sculptural analogy is apt as the sounds get built up and hacked back quite brutally, cross-hatched with other material, further distilled and recombined, depending on what’s working or not. Pieces can start out relatively long and end up a fraction of their original length, and sometimes shorter pieces that weren’t strong enough to stand alone end up being stitched together into a larger piece.
Listening is a really important part of the editing process. I would usually put rough mixes on CD and audition them at home for a period of time, let them settle – hearing them in much the same conditions as the listener. If there’s areas where I find I’m losing interest, then it’s got to be pruned. I shouldn’t lose interest for a second. I’ve got to be totally involved all the way.
6. How does your cultural background or beliefs affect your work, especially at the moment when global socio-political situation forces us to make certain choices?
I suppose choosing to make music from discarded materials could be construed as taking an oppositional stance - opposed, that is, to the given orthodoxies of music making and instrumental training. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying it was a deliberate stance against traditional approaches, just a more attractive and exciting one for me. The post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation had very significant influence on me in that regard. The possibilities just seemed wide open. There was a directness and a simplicity that was really appealing. It was also a much quicker route to producing music by sidestepping years of training. Of course, it’s not just musical ability you bring to the table, it’s imagination and intelligence too.
Ethics wouldn’t be consciously brought to bear… but could the use of waste material be construed as an ethical decision ? Does the fact that I use other non-waste materials weaken that ? Does it matter ? Ethics would apply more to improvising with others – parity between players, an openness of approach, listening as much as playing, no hard and fast rules, no grandstanding etc.
7. Plans for the future
Keep working, keep exploring... it's a compulsive activity for me, as essential as eating or sleeping... a kind of food/nourishment.
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