Interview + Album Feature | Marcus Whale
Interaction, human connection and the palpable feeling of endlessness in music
Before heading our way to launch his brand new album Nether on July 25 Marcus Whale joins Tempo to talk about the importance of the physical format, how music is relational and contextual, process, influence and his deep connection to Melb/Naarm. Bar Open’s Make It Up Club and Absorbed get special mentions for the spaces they have created for improvised and exploratory music as the chat goes in all sorts of directions.
Hi Marcus, firstly, congratulations on your new album Nether, a collection of songs that embody the culture of the underground with themes around madness, excess, emotional overwhelm and queer desire to name a few. It’s a bold statement and radical release; how does it feel to see it completed and out in world?
It’s a relief to finally show people what I’ve been working on for the past year or two. I understand the kind of dramaturgy of rolling out an album piecemeal with singles and all that, and I do enjoy making the videos and art that goes along with that process, but it’s nice to be able to present the full thing as a singular work that people can dive into.
I usually stick with Melb/Naarm based artists for this blog but knowing your history, body of work and connection to this city I was keen to have a chat especially with you heading our way to launch Nether at SPIT in Footscray. Apart from it being released digitally, you have created a limited-edition CD-R with 48-page book, bound, assembled and stamped by hand. I really appreciate the effort that goes with making something like this and the old school mentality of the tangible format. Can you tell us about the significance of the physical release to you?
I’m really honoured to be interviewed, I’m always excited to see a Tempo post roll into my inbox and it’s a precious resource in a time when nobody’s covering local music.
The physical form of the release is super important to me.
I’m trying to hold onto the tactility of how I grew up consuming recorded music: taking a CD home, popping it on the CD player and flicking through the booklet, which was an almost mystical experience for me.
But even before streaming, when digital downloads were the primary form, I felt like it was necessary to have something physical. Music on a streaming service is ultimately just fodder to prop up the service provided by a tech company, and it’s basically just subsumed into this dystopian stream of content that might as well be infinite.
I want the music to feel like it has specificity and significance in and of itself, rather than living entirely as a disposable unit of stimulation for our dopamine-addled brains.
To me, music is relational and contextual, it’s about human connection and is highly interactive and should in no way be a passive experience.
I also think the physicality of the playable format itself is also important. That you have to literally put on a CD or record or cassette, deal with the affordances and limitations of the machine that’s playing it, be situated in a specific space with it, all of those things contribute to an experience of the music that is more memorable and more focused.
Listening to your album, I really appreciate the energy and hypnotic qualities with elements of IDM, bass music, trance, and sub heavy sounds. Can you talk us through the making of it, I understand that you wrote, produced and mixed it and then had Bree Van Reyk, Chloe Kim and Jacques Emery on percussion and Matt McGuigan recording those sounds with Wayne Sunderland on the final mastering duties. Can you also tell us about working with these people and how much they completed what you do?
I made all the songs in my bedroom at home, except for the opening two tracks, which were made in this short period of time when my gear was kept in the garage. Making music is how I have fun in my private time and building up tracks for an album is an incredibly exciting experience for me. I’m making it largely on the computer, with Pro Tools, and a microphone for my vocals.
As I was making the album, I started hearing percussion on some of the tracks and was super interested in working with tubular bells. I’ve always found bells a really beguiling sound, probably partly because of spending a bit of time in choirs and tuned into the grand way they can evoke a sense of spiritual presence. Bree, Jacques and Chloe have all been collaborators of mine in the past in a big way, and are all extraordinary musicians who I’m very lucky to work with. I got them together with Matt McGuigan at The Red House in Earlwood, where he records, and you hear the result on most of the songs on the album. Wayne has mastered almost all of my music since 2018 and does a fantastic job of making everything sound a bit better.
I am super keen to hear about the influences you have for this album; I have seen references to zombie movies and other classic cinema, absorbed festival, the dichotomy of Tool and HTRK, I also understand that you used a lot of different time signatures simultaneously following the polymetre technique.
Movies are always a big influence for me in making an album, but primarily in terms of how they can build a mood that extends on underlying concepts and themes - this is often how I’m trying to approach making an album as well.
The João Pedro Rodrigues movie O Fantasma was a big one for me, it’s a very strange movie about the behaviour of this garbageman who gradually withdraws more and more from his recognisable human form, ending in this incredible series of scenes where he’s wandering around a rubbish tip in a full-body latex outfit. I was really drawn to this idea of retreating from the human, thinking of trash and refuse and filth in general as being emblematic of the human impulse to create an inside that’s safe and controlled, which necessitates an unbearable outside that’s excluded from view - and that’s an impulse that I think is really central to the massive violence that humanity has wrought on the world and on itself.
As for the polymetre stuff, there’s a lot of layers in the music that are loop-based, but with the lengths of the loop at uneven, so they kind of spiral around each other. That’s what’s going on in most of the percussion parts -
I like how it feels like they’re never going to align, it creates this palpable feeling of endlessness in the music that I find super seductive when I’m making it.
In relation to the shows you have played here over the years I can think of Sugar Mountain, Substation and Rising festival last year for your performance of Ecstasy and there are many more with the countless projects you have been involved in. I first heard you with Collarbones in the early days and was really taken by your vocal stylings and the album Iconography was a real gem. What does the Melb/Naarm music and arts scene mean to you?
Thanks for saying all these nice things, I have lots of cute memories of making Iconography all those years ago! I’ve played a lot in Naarm over the years and have a lot of dear friends down there so I do feel quite connected. It’s exciting to visit, there’s always something really fun on and often lots of quite cracked experimental work particularly in the performance and dance scenes.
I also deeply love Make It Up Club on Tuesdays at Bar Open. I’ve always loved improvised music probably most of all and there’s something so special about the culture you can create around an event that’s on a weekly basis. It’s been wonderful to see it evolve and shift so dramatically over the years I’ve been going. That’s the nature of improvised music after all. You mentioned Absorbed earlier and that event is my favourite thing I’ve ever gone to. It’s wonderful to see such exploratory music and performance get a generous, attentive audience, and it’s really cute how wacky and silly things can get when people aren’t boxed in as well.
You navigate multiple art forms in all that you do, and I wonder what first sparked your interest in creativity and which mode where you initially drawn to?
I first started by playing piano, which I learned from when I was 4, basically because my brother was doing it and I thought it was cool. A few years after that I started writing little pieces of music as well, another thing I was following my brother into doing, and I basically haven’t stopped writing music since then. I’m very invested in dance now as well, and have done a lot of writing over the years, but in some ways my engagement with other forms feels like an extension of what it is to perform and make music, an impulse that I think comes from quite deep inside me.
How do you balance and keep the energy and interest in all your ways of working? And survive in this very costly climate where the cost of living over in your city is even more expensive?
I’m really lucky to have lived in cheap rooms in sharehouses over my entire adult life, and have lived as frugally as possible so I can spend as much of my time as I can on making stuff.
You always need a scam or a loophole or something in Sydney to make things work without extracting from all of your time to make enough money to pay the rent.
I’ve seen a lot of friends fall out of creating in order to provide for themselves, or more recently to create families and a stable domestic life, and that’s completely understandable and honourable. However, I’m more than happy to forgo basically any comfort or luxury or stability I could have if it means I can continue sustaining a creative life.
You are launching the album at SPIT in Footscray (address TBA) with Weyòn & Aarti Jadu and Sachin de SilvaK8m055 (DJ). I appreciate the mystery with the location and wonder if you have a special connection to it?
I’ve never been to SPIT but many of my friends have played or put on events regularly there. Every time I see a flyer for a show at SPIT, the lineup almost without fail is incredible. I’m really drawn to DIY spaces, they’re the types of venues I grew up going to and are always my favourite vibe for a show. I think organisers like Nick at SPIT are the bedrock of any music scene and there’s always a huge hole when an organiser stops doing stuff, so I really deeply appreciate the effort and passion that goes into a venue like that.
Finally, who are your favourite local Melb/Naarm bands right now and who would you like to see interviewed for Tempo? Feel free to also mention any cool and upcoming bands from Syd/Eora if you like?
So many, I really don’t know where to start. I’d love for you to talk to Aarti Jadu, her music is completely divine to me. I also would love to hear from Jannah Quill, r. hunter, Third Space, R. Rebeiro, Sachin de Silva, Takeo.K, Silzedrek, YL Hooi, tilman Robinson, Matthias schack-arnott, Wet Kiss, bodies, tongue dissolver, all the members of Kilat together and separately, Whitehorse, Diploid, Blood of a Pomegranate…..the list goes on and on and on.
Marcus Whale “Nether” Album Launch - Melbourne
Sat, 25 Jul, 8pm
SPIT
Footscray