The art of noise
Together at last, noise provocateur Russell haswell and Life without Buildings singer sue tompkins. Gnarly grooves ensue...
For a noise artist whose uncompromising output revels in such titles as “Testicular Fortitude”, “Stochastic Jazz Fuck” and “A Horde of Flies Feast on A rotting Pheasant Carcass”, it’s something of a surprise to learn of russell Haswell’s penchant for 1980s soft rock. Quizzed on the song he bonded over with his new musical collaborator, former Life Without Buildings singer Sue Tompkins, the Coventry-born producer says: “‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ by Foreigner. We both like power ballads. We like anything that’s got demise in it, things that go wrong. Everything in decline is good.”
“I don’t care what russell gets up to in his day job,” adds Tompkins, “but I love that song, and the fact he loved it didn’t surprise me, really.”
The pair are discussing their unlikely union in a quiet corner of Café oto, the east London mecca for experimental music, where later that night Tompkins will join Haswell to perform their mutant take on house and techno to a capacity crowd, many of whom are Life Without Buildings devotees keen to witness Tompkins’ return to music after more than a decade of spoken-word performances in art galleries. The occasion is the launch party for Haswell’s Respondent mini-LP for Diagonal records, a suite of belligerent electronics, of which the standout is a gnarly groove called “Special Long Version (Demo)” that features Tompkins singing, talking and shouting in her light-hearted cadence.
By coincidence, the pair met in this same venue two years ago, when Haswell invited Tompkins to perform at his three-day oto residency. This evening she hops around the stage clearly enjoying herself as she sing-talks phrases like
“Let it pick you up!” and “I’m losing control!”, discarding her A4 lyric sheets on the floor as she works through them. This is new territory for both artists. Haswell, a battlehardened associate of Aphex Twin and Autechre, is used to grinding out extreme computer music and collaborating with the likes of Japanese noise warlord Merzbow and Florian Hecker. He’s never worked with a vocalist before but wanted to make a track inspired by vintage Chicago house. “I just like a beat,” says Tompkins, who works quickly. “I like the energy and immediacy of techno.”
Tompkins found a kind of fame at the turn of the century as the idiosyncratic frontwoman of shortlived Glasgow indie outfit Life Without Buildings, whose one and only album, 2001’s striking Any
Other City, is much cherished today and was reissued in 2014. The band split in 2002 having run its natural course. “My understanding of it is that people either really liked the band or really didn’t. But that’s good, isn’t it?” she says. “I’d rather have a load of lovely people going, ‘You’re brilliant!’ and then a load of people going, ‘You’re crap!’”
“I’ve always polarised my audience,” says Haswell. “When we used laptops for gigs in the early days, people would come up and push the screen down and pull out cables.” He’s even had a gun pulled on him during a show in Chicago.
With further collaborative recordings and shows in the pipeline – including a pencilled-in set of new wave cover versions – it’s clear that these two bring out the best in each other: Tompkins is back making music that stimulates her, while Haswell’s racket has finally been humanised. “What I do has always been palatable,” he adds, “it’s just other people who aren’t prepared to explore it.” Piers Martin Respondent is out now on Diagonal Records
“We both like power ballads… Anything that’s got demise in it” RUSSeLL HASweLL