Matt Baber
With Suite For Piano And Electronics, Matt Baber has finally shared some of his solo work with the world. The Sanguine Hum man tells Prog about being lost in space, the importance of intricacy, and why he won’t be widdling.
The Sanguine Hum pianist branches out onto the solo trail.
“IWilliamssaw the first Star Wars film when I was four or five in 1981. My parents had the John
soundtrack album and I used to have the record playing over and over again while I played with my Star Wars toys. Certain bits of that score elicited a real response in me that I can’t quite explain,” says Matt Baber, recounting his earliest memory of music’s capacity to alter mood and heighten consciousness, exerting an unseen but tangible force that he would encounter throughout his life.
It’s an encounter that can come as either blinding and Damascene or a slow awareness, sitting at the edge of our perception. “It’s the ‘something elseness’ of it – you’re getting a glimpse of something else going on in the world that no one can adequately put their finger on,” he says.
The full range of similarly intense epiphanies has been part of Baber’s experience both as a co-founder and keyboardist with Oxfordshire-based Sanguine Hum and as a solo artist. “I think if you asked most musicians, the real motivation is the connection between yourself and whatever is the creative process that connects you to the universe, for want of a better description, in a unique way,” he muses.
Over the years it’s been an especially productive connection. By his own admission, Baber has amassed hundreds of hours of solo piano music. Yet apart from the occasional download release via the Sanguine Hum website or dropping individual tracks for streaming on his SoundCloud page, including a glistening cover of To Be Over by Yes, the vast bulk has been left unreleased. So what made the 10 pieces that comprise his new album Suite For Piano And Electronics different?
“I suppose what made me decide I was going to put this one out was maybe a bunch of life stuff like turning 40 and getting the sense that there’s literally no point keeping them on a hard drive,” he laughs. “There’s an element where you’re working on something and it’s just you and the keyboard – there’s no way that anything that happens after that can actually improve upon that experience. So the only other reason for doing it is to hope that other people can share in the feeling you get from writing it.”
The origins of this particular album came in part as a result of the seasonal downturn he experiences as a drum tutor, his principal method of putting bread and butter on the table. Being a self-employed teacher means he’s used to what he describes as “the lull”.
“It’s when loads of people go away during the summer and you don’t earn that much money so it’s always good to have a project across the summer,” he explains, “and so this album was my project.”
Dominating the record are the bright tones and cascading notes from Baber’s piano. Those rhapsodic flurries and uplifting themes sparkle against a backdrop of subtle and painterly electronica. Sometimes heavily daubed, sometimes gently layered, they form shimmering backdrops, radiating a harmonic luminosity around Baber’s melodies or gathering into knots of pulses that bring a rhythmic impetus to a piece.
The album is almost defiantly old school in that the tracks are carefully blended and segued into each other. It’s not just about the songs individually, says Baber, but how they relate and fold into each other.
“Frank Zappa was a master of the segue and Todd Rundgren was another great one on A Wizard, A True Star. The experiencing of the whole record becomes something rather than just the songs themselves.”
Co-opting electronica wasn’t a result of some accident or mere whim. “A few years back I’d had a bit of a writer’s drought and to keep me going I’d started setting up synthesiser apps on an iPad, just to make something and thinking that one day they may be useful.”
Revisiting these loops, Baber set them up and began improvising piano parts against them. “That’s when it started feeling like a thing. The first complete piece I finished was Part Ten, the longest track and a suite within a suite. The funny thing was I was
“The real motivation is the connection between yourself and whatever is the creative process that connects you to the universe in a unique way.”
really struggling to finish it and just adding that slight touch of ambient electronics to it was the texture it actually needed. For me it was a radical thing to do because I’d normally keep the electronics and the ambient stuff completely separate from the piano stuff.”
While the stereotypical prog rock keyboard player is found whizzing up and down the notes as fast as they can among the banks of keyboards stacked so high they need a stepladder to hit top C, Baber is as far removed from that cliche as it’s possible to get. He certainly isn’t interested in shows of technique, either on this record or within Sanguine Hum.
“The word we use in the band is ‘intricate’ rather than ‘complicated’,” he says. “Intricate can be problematic because it’s harder to learn, harder to remember, harder to orchestrate with the band and can end up causing massive headaches when we come to remind ourselves how these things go.”
As far as Suite For Piano And Electronics goes, the approach was about meshing texture with melody. “I was ultraconscious about not doing the widdly-widdly kind of solos. Unless you’re an absolutely amazing soloist then it’s probably best to not bother and do something else.”
The making of Baber’s solo record coincided with a sense that after the release of Sanguine Hum’s 2015 album Now We Have Light, he and the others in the band were left feeling burnt out.
“We knew that when we decided to record again, it was going to be slow and gradual and without a deadline,” he says, acknowledging that this space in the band’s schedule also opened up an opportunity for his own work, which he was keen to take.
With Sanguine Hum’s fifth album, Now We Have Power scheduled for release later this year, and plans for live work by the group in the offing, there’s a sense that it was now or never for this particular record.
Baber’s happy that this collection didn’t go the way of his other music, becoming lost on one of his numerous hard drives. “I just want people to be able to discover it,” he says. “I think all you can ask for in this day and age is that it gets out there and that it finds people.”
Sanguine Hum’s Now We Have Power is out on October 12, while Baber’s Suite For Piano And Electronics is out now, both via Bad Elephant. For more information, see www.sanguinehum.com and mattbaber.bandcamp.com.
“I was ultra-conscious about not doing the widdly-widdly kind of solos. Unless you’re an absolutely amazing
soloist, it’s best to not bother.”