Richard Norris interview – “It was strange to be so fashionable.”

The Grid man on his Deep Listening 2019-2022 compilation,

Richard Norris will probably always be best known as one half of The Grid, his classic collaboration with Soft Cell member David Ball, as well as a one time member of Genesis P-Orridge’s Psychic TV outfit and a current half of Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve with Erol Alkan. But those paying closer attention will know that he has branched out in recent years.

The stress of the COVID-19 lockdowns in late 2019 spurred him to begin writing music under his given name, and to explore more ambient sounds than ever before. What began as a ritual musical stress reliever soon ballooned into a musical, quasi-research project, Music For Healing.

Norris’ daily practice snowballed into putting out weekly, then monthly releases on Bandcamp, which has now added up to over ten albums in three years. There’s a rabid fanbase for it, inherited at least partially from his involvement in other acts, although his fans’ open-mindedness has also played its part.

They’ll no doubt be pleased to learn of this comprehensive compilation of both new and already-released works for the project, ‘Deep Listening 2019-2022’. Although the impression we get from Richard is that, with his newfound focus on the calming qualities of ambient music, he’d not be too fussed if it doesn’t snowball into the massive successs he enjoyed with The Grid.

“I’m often down the post office every few weeks with hundreds of records,” he says, “In a way, I’m cosy with that world of the subscription and gang – to keep releasing for those few hundred people.”

When we meet Norris, he is ensconced in his home studio in Lewes, where he recently moved. Norris cites the hubbub of Portobello Road, his former area, as an inspiration for the project. “We were living in Ladbroke Grove and there was all this chaos outside my house – I’d open my door one day and three people would fall in and start shouting at me. Now I’ve got a soundproofed room… It’s weird, I was making more ambient music when I was in the middle of town.” So, it’s certain: Norris’ move towards ambient music was a reaction to the weird and raucous world around him. “Here in Lewes I can open my back door and it’s quiet already.”

As many of our nation’s best historians will know, the South of England where Norris now resides is a wellspring of mythology, fairy-tales and ghostlore. No wonder, then, that Norris sees his new music as part of a fresh surge in English folk consciousness – an effect that has only come about after COVID. They’re two branches of the same tree: “I know someone who is head of the druids somewhere, and he said this January was their biggest intake of people for years, there’s been a massive spike in interest. I just came back from Cornwall, we did a massive magic ritual to celebrate Spring in a 100-metre wide symbol that was designed by Jamie Reid, the Sex Pistols’ designer. It was to launch a new thing and we got front page of the Cornish press and 30 pages in Arena Homme. It was strange to be so fashionable.”

I ask Norris about his politics, and he affirms his belief that there’s no such thing as apolitical art. It’s this belief that makes up the core of the compilation: healing, inspiration, and ‘where you’re at’ politically are inseparable. The track ‘Borders’ piques our interest, not least for its title but also for its stark piano entrainment. It’s one of the most minimal pieces on the album, but also one of the most attention-grabbing (a term we don’t use lightly here). Norris says: “When you’re thinking and talking about ambient music, you start thinking about physical space. You think about the nearness and farness of each mix – so borders between things start to come to mind naturally.”

“History always looks at, usually as we know it, the history of power. There’s the history of creating borders, land division. But the lesser-known history is the history of the imagination, which goes undocumented by comparison.”

With this comes a new realisation. Built into Music For Healing is a reconsideration of where we draw the defining lines between things – between concepts we thought were easily definable, but perhaps aren’t after all. Norris is obsessed with the work of Pauline Oliveros, widely known as a radical thinker on top of her musical works. Oliveros’ theory of deep listening, after which Norris’ project is named, emphasises picking up on previously imperceptible overtones, nuances, and layers in deep beds of ambient music and sound. Such are sounds which would’ve otherwise been impossible to detect without a certain level of focus. 

It’s this same line of thinking that causes Norris to question the entire received history of electronic music. “A lot of people think of electronic music as Kraftwerk onwards, but there’s been more than a couple of hundred years of people using electricity and static and lightning. For me the piano is a machine, it does do those kind of things. There’s been techno around for a long time.” 

(Not so) incidentally, this revisionist questioning of the ‘sudden, enlightened progress’ lens of history has taken anthropologists and historians by storm over the past three years. Pressed about the origins of healing music, Norris recalls a book by Harry Sword, ‘Sonic Oblivion’, which looks into the history of drone. It was one of the many influences that led Norris to believe that there’s something special about the practice of getting together and humming single notes. He tells a story:

“I remember being on the beach in Kerala at 2AM and finding these tiny little huts, clay and straw, and inside I see some lights and candles. No one else around. But inside are about 40 people huddled together with these little candles, and they were doing this really slow beautiful humming drone sound. It was so beautiful that I just burst into tears. They invited us in and I couldn’t, it was just too much for me. It was the sound of being human.”

Norris’ work with the mental health charity MIND, plus various physical health initiatives and even an NHS practice, has lent him some insight as to the real healing properties of tracks like his very own ‘Eighty Eight’ or ‘Grains Of Light’. “There’s a lot of pseudoscience out there, and lots of internet rabbit holes to go down… but there’s definitely a case to say that 40Hz, near the lowest E on the piano, oscillates at the same optimum tone – the same cycles per second – of neurons firing in a healthy brain. There’s a lot of research about whether the E drone really is able to stimulate this neuron firing.” He proceeds to play the low E note on his grand piano. No numinous experiences happen on the spot, but it’s safe to say that we do get a feeling for the note’s particular resonance.

All this leads to a staunch statement: “There’s definitely something that happens when you have just one note and play it for a long time.” With Music For Healing, Norris has been urging us to lock in and focus, to consider our present place and time and question the parts of it that don’t work for us. A global pandemic is a discordant overtone in a chaotic world. If only we’d listen, then perhaps we could build one that’s a bit more harmonious…

Jude Iago James

Buy your copy of Deep Listening 2019-2022 on CD or vinyl here