Interview: Dead Space Chamber Music

Lazy national journalists often try to pigeon hole the scene here, putting us in to one or two media friendly boxes that fit the fashion police narrative for popular music. But we know better eh? Bristol has a wildly diverse scene and one of the most intriguing bands around are Dead Space Chamber Music. Tom Bush (guitar, FX and treatments / soundscapes), Ellen Southern (voice, vocal field-recordings and visual art) and Liz Muir (cellist). Their debut LP is being launched on the 23rd September at the crypt of St John on the Wall. They took time out from their preparations to tell us all about themselves and their music, if you want to step away from the mainstream and feed your head then read on – you’ll be enchanted and intrigued. If you can’t make the show then get the LP here).

Where did the name come from?
There are some classical influences buried somewhere in the sound, and the classical music forms that we have been most influenced by were for smaller chamber music ensembles. There’s a directness and focus of the musical ideas in chamber music – an intensity and intimacy. The essence of the material is closer to the listener. Tom: I worked for a number of years in a cemetery, which is a dead space so to speak.

Ellen: A dead space, or anechoic chamber, is an environment, usually in a sound research setting, which is acoustically dead, has no reflection or reverberation. They are used to conduct acoustic experiments in “free field” conditions, and physically being inside a sound-less space can apparently be disorienting. Even “silence” contains sound: you still hear the sounds of the body, a high sound that is the nervous system in operation, a low sound that is the blood circulation. Experience of loss effects peoples feelings and approaches towards life, “haunts” your life in a way, and the idea of being confronted with the uncanny experience of your own heart beating – finding the essence of alive-ness in a dead space, is inspiring. Creating music or art, for me, enables me to travel between layers of experience of life and of death, and create spaces where I can inhabit and convey these things.

Putting these things together, we liked the idea of a suggestive name with some mystery and potency to it, as we feel our music is difficult to define.

How did you all get together?
Dead Space Chamber Music began as a duo of Tom and Ellen. After some initial early experiments, the first performance proper came from being selected to perform as part of American artist Theaster Gates’ Sanctum event at the medieval ruins of Temple Church, Bristol, in November 2015. This was a non-stop performance experiment, where local artists and citizens made continuous sound for 24 hours a day for 24 days. The location seemed the perfect place to debut our sound, and we performed multiple times over the event. The next step forward came with taking part in the Bristol Hum Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music in 2016 at the Edwardian Cloakroom, Bristol. We asked the organisers, the improvisation band Saltings (at that time composer and electronic artist Andrew Cooke with cellist Liz Muir and double bassist Caitlin Alais Callahan), if any fellow artists would like to collaborate with us, and we were really excited when Liz came forward. We played a 45 minute set together, integrating vocal sound-works Ellen had created in that very space in a residency there as part of her solo Site Singing project, and the current line up was born.

Since then, we have crafted our sound by playing live in independent venues in Bristol, and this year we have had the opportunity to play in London too. We will be back there later this year to play at the brilliant Dronica Festival (30th Nov-2nd Dec), which we are really excited about. We are also going to play our first live radio session on the Hello Goodbye show on Resonance FM this October!

Describe your sound for the uninitiated?
We are not certain how to define ourselves to be honest but we employ tags such as dark ambient, ritual, gothic, ethereal and dark neoclassical. The basic components are cello, voice, electric guitar, soundscapes and live sound-making objects. Also, the spaces we are in, they have a voice and a physicality which is contributory too. We approach our live performances as a sensory ritual: one work leads into another, forming a multi-layered arc of sound and vision. Our performances move between semi-improvised material, integrating and reinterpreted songs reaching back to the 14th century. With an increasing array of symbolic sound-making performative “props”, we rework each performance in varying combinations, to create a different interconnected journey each time, aiming to present audiences with an immersive sense of engagement.

Your live sets often feature improvised pieces, how improvised are the studio cuts? Given the improvised nature of the material, do you rehearse specific parts or movements to use as building blocks?
The recordings are all live recordings, in that we played together in the live room of the studio. Each improvised piece has distinct musical characteristics and defined structures which differentiate them, and then within those parameters, the improvisation takes place, so they are identifiable but never the same. In the way that In C by Terry Riley is different every time, but is always recognisable. We try and combine different approaches: Liz is very at home with free improvisation, Tom is more structure orientated, and Ellen enjoys introducing sound making objects, vocal fields recordings and unusual vocal techniques.

Also the way we construct each set is different every time, and relates to the space or environment, so it’s a form of re-composition each time: arrangements of musical elements. We like to combine songs, specifically reworking of early music pieces for example by John Dowland (1563 – 1626) and Guillaume de Machaut (1300 – 1377), and experimental instrumental or sound-based works, with vocal parts approaching glossolalia – non verbal expression.

We re-approach and rework pieces too, for example, in our last performance, Ellen sang the words of one of our songs to the melody of another, which is an approach she has adopted from vocal hymnody, fitting songs into each other by meter. The piece was also performed spatially, part a-cappella from across a resonant church, with Tom and Liz playing with pedals, samples, and some electric guitar extended technique: using a screwdriver. So we are always evolving and innovating our sound and our performance experience.

If you’re improvising for a recording is it just one take and out? And if it’s more than one take of an improvised piece, what tells you it’s done?
Recording the OEIRA EP and the album, we basically did two takes of each piece, that’s what the budget and therefore time allowed. That’s why we only wanted to record when we felt we had played live together sufficiently, and established our sound together, so the short studio time would produce the best possible results.

We know it’s done when we all agree it sounds and feels right: Ellen describes it as the piece having “been in the room”. It’s been fairly instinctive so far, you can just tell. The fact that it’s always a unanimous feeling proves this. We are so happy to have worked with with Tom Berry and Callum Godfroy, recent graduates from DBS Music in Bristol, as they shared this instinct too. During the process of recording, mixing and mastering our album we worked as one unit.

What does critical success look like for DSCM?
It’s important for us to connect to other musicians in our city, and initiate working collaboratively in creating interesting events. We started the event series Dark Alchemy, which recently had its 3rd instalment in the Church of St Thomas the Martyr, Redcliffe. We were honoured to have the support of the Churches Conservation Trust, for whom the event raised funds. It was an incredible night – an innovative and varied bill with fellow local artists New Haunts (darkwave) and Tommy Creep (modular synth). Previous editions have featured Kolophōn (with Agathe Max of Kuro and Drew Morgan of Modulus III), in the crypt of St John on the Wall. The reception we got, and the potent atmosphere of the nights, have shown us that we had created something very special and we are motivated to do more of this.

We are not certain what critical success looks like for us, but one aim we set ourselves, which we have begun to achieve, is to support touring bands passing through Bristol. This way we have played with great bands like Cold in Berlin, the Bonnacons of Doom, and noise innovator Horacio Pollard. We are really excited to be supporting Rose McDowall, who has collaborated with Coil, Psychic TV and Current 93, on the 4th October at the Thunderbolt, together with fellow Bristol artist and collaborator, New Haunts.

And what does commercial success look like for DSCM – enough bread to give up the day jobs or world domination, space stations and Gothic mansions with Cthuhlu shaped swimming pools?
Given the kind of music that we play we have basically written off commercial success at this stage.

Have you considered approaching established labels?
We are considering approaching labels, we like the music on labels such as Sacred Bones, Cold Spring, Dais, Rocket Recordings…

How do the labels react to unsolicited submissions (don’t be afraid to name and shame mind)?
We don’t know, we are about to find out we suppose (tips welcome!)

What about crowd funding – is this the best model now for new bands or does it require an established fan base to work?
Bands who already have followings have had success this way. We guess you need a “crowd” to “fund” from…for example The Tear Garden successfully crowdfunded an album recently, but they have achieved a legendary status through traditional distribution methods over the years, and are in the best position to now benefit from the “new” system.

There’s a belief that the internet has made it easier for smaller bands to make a living: direct contact with fans, selling merch thro’ websites and building communities via social media; what’s your take?
There are bands who are fairly well known and have a kind of cult status, who maybe could give up the day job, but choose not to. We don’t anticipate being in a position to “give up the day job”, so our model for success is to achieve a balance, we suppose. The independence and routine of a day job, especially one you value, can offer a freedom to more fully realise your creative endeavour, without commercial pressure. Being paid for what we do, through performances and sales, helps this to be sustainable too, as there are many costs involved in making music!

And given the prevailing trend for streaming (and young ‘uns believing they have a right to free music) how easy is it to make any cash from recording music? And is it still worth releasing physical product?
Yes – that’s what you can sell, people still want it, and covet it even as an object, which we do ourselves when we buy band merch! We have hand-assembled elements to our releases, such as hand stamps and wax seals, and even ceremonially buried our merch t shirts in the grounds of the Temple Church ruins recently: each garment comes with some of the earth it was buried in. But again, a living is another thing! Web tools mean you can put things out there while holding down an income from another source. Many bands work this way.

Same for physical places – we vocally and actively support our local independent venues, it’s a symbiotic, mutual support. Grassroots, independent venues, and close to our hearts. We create exploratory, experiential performances which fall between genres, so are less commercial than conventional bands. Grassroots venues allow us to take creative risks and experiment with sound – we use some traditional forms but also want to push boundaries and produce original work; commercial appeal is not our main concern. We rely on Grassroots venues, and now also on sacred spaces such as our ongoing relationship with the Churches Conservation Trust, which enables us to craft our artistic identity. In Bristol venue closures are rife. We feel it personally, it grieves us deeply, and we are already part of the fight back; vocally campaigning on social media, and Ellen was even interviewed at a noise-demo outside the recently closed Surrey Vaults. If there are no small to medium size venues then artists like us are then put under huge commercial pressure. We would have to sell large numbers of tickets or we wouldn’t get gigs. As a consequence our music would be completely different and we would lose our artistic identity.

With people picking and choosing what they stream and maybe not even bothering to listen to a whole LP, is it worth taking time to sequence and prepare a coherent LP? Why not just release tracks?
Tom: If the likes of Roger Waters and Trent Reznor had thought that way then in my opinion we’d be much worse off – the kinds of things they wanted to express necessarily required a longer format, and maybe people aren’t consuming that so much these days but that doesn’t change the fact that those more complex ideas are still relevant and necessary.

Ellen: You need music to take many forms to fulfil many roles. Music is very important part of many people’s emotional lives, and this language and need is pluralistic. Music to hear by yourself, music to share with others; it’s like any art-form: you need an epic novel as much as you need a graphic novel, they both have to be present and diverse in the culture for people.

All: Certain ideas can only be articulated in the long form of an album, and certain atmospheres need to be built up over a sustained amount of time. Tom: “I was into listening to albums, I got drawn into them in a way that just wouldn’t be possible with a single. When bands I was into released an album this was always a big event, perhaps more so than it is today but that’s what I grew up with so it’s stuck. Quite often when working with something you don’t know exactly where it’s going, it’s an unfolding process and you need to go where the work is taking you – it’s partially unconscious and the work can reveal itself as you go along – you aren’t in complete charge of the ship. If what needs to be expressed requires a longer format then that’s how it’s got to be. I honestly couldn’t care less if there’s fewer people these days who want to listen to album length releases that would never inform any creative decisions. Likewise if a song or piece is complete in itself and doesn’t fit with other material then it can stand on its own.

The past years have seen an awful lot of telly programmes finally using decent music, both contemporary and from the past, and some bands credit their success to their material appearing on something popular box…is it easy to break in to that market?
Film music and a cinematic feel is something we are very interested in, and it’s something people often say about our music. This year we tested the waters, and performed our own live soundtrack to The Dripping Tap from the film Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, Italy, 1964) at a private event in the Kino at 20th Century Flicks. Ellen lived a dream and even got to integrate Foley Art into her set up! We are keen to further explore film and sound / music in our work, which we see more as an artistic endeavour than a commercial one.

A lot of older bands now seem to make their living through the live circuit and selling t-shirts, but is the live circuit able to support newer and younger bands too?
We are not “on the circuit” as such, we have always had a tendency to want our performances to be special events in themselves. We play at local independent venues and places, and would love the opportunity to play in other cities and countries, but for the live performances we are keen for it to never to become “just another gig”: that’s not our motivation. Our motivation is much more exploratory, and about relating to the spaces we are in and the people we are with. The way we constantly adapt our material, and approach each live experience as a form of ritual, reflects this.

How about selling yer soul to Satan and sound tracking an advert? If you get the chance, would you draw the line and not let the band be associated with particular products or services?
Not for this project.

What about the future, what long term plans do you have?
In the future, we would like to keep experimenting with recording, as well as live performance, like recording in interesting locations and natural environments, doing site-based performances that take in and utilise different acoustic possibilities.

DSCM seems to keep you busy, but do you have time for outside projects too?
Tom is currently working on his own compositions for digital release. Liz also plays with the improvisation ensemble Viridian (@ViridianEnsemble ) who recently played live on Resonance FM. Ellen has an ongoing practice around site-specific voice, sound and visual art (@EllenSouthernVoice ); recent collaborations include BURL (live tour and Compound E.P 2016) and The Seer (Supersonic Festival 2017, and The Woodland Gathering 2018).

Pix by  Katie Murt Photography

Dead Space Chamber Music release their LP on 23rd September, crypt of St John on the Wall, details here.