Immersion interview: “We were really, really not sure what to expect.”

“I think we knew more about techno than most people of our generation,” recalls Immersion’s Colin Newman, “We knew people who worked for R&S, and I remember them turning up one day with a white label saying ‘you have got to hear this’ and that was the very first Aphex Twin release, ‘Digeridoo’.  So we kind of knew that stuff by the time we came to London.”

By then – the cusp of 1991 and 1992 – Newman already had a rich history behind him as singer and guitarist with Wire.  The band’s roots extended all the way back to January 1977, when they played their debut live show at the first punk club, the iconic Roxy in Covent Garden.  

But seeing punk less a fixed sound and more a springboard for numerous musical explorations, he was experimenting with synthesisers as early as 1980 and his first solo album A-Z.  Hooking up with Malka Spigel, who he met in 1985 when he produced her band Minimal Compact and who became his partner “in life and sound” soon after, he moved over to Belgium – which is where they encountered R&S – and the solo album adventures continued alongside Wire, combining guitars and electronics.

“When we started being a couple I thought ‘if I bring her to London to live in a  squat then the relationship might not last!” laughs Newman, “Whereas they (Minimal Concept) were living in quite a nice place.”

“Brussels was very cheap in the 80s,”  adds Malka.

When the band officially split in 1992, Newman and Spigel started their own Swim label, initially to release her solo album ‘Rosh Ballata’ the following year.  It’s gone on to become a hugely prolific and respected electronic stable, giving a home to everything from G-Man’s iconic techno anthem ‘Quo Vardis’ (Gez Varley of LFO’s post-split solo project) to releases from Akatombo, Silo, Pablo’s Eye and Rhodes.

In recent years, however, Swim has concentrated more closely than ever on Spigel and Newman’s output, whether that be the wonderfully named Githead project (which also includes Scanner’s Robin Rimbaud and former Minimal Compact member Max Franken) or the pair’s long running partnership Immersion.

It’s the latest installment in Immersion’s Nanocluster series that we’re here to discuss. Arriving almost three years after vol1 – which saw  Spigel and Newman collaborating with Tarwater, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, Ulrich Schnauss and Scanner – the second album is split between tracks created with Swans percussionist Thor Harris and those made with Cubzoa aka Jack Wolter from Penelope Isles, with drummer Matt Schulz of Holy Fuck also working in conjunction with the pair.

The project has its roots in a club night – also called Nanocluster – that they set up in Brighton having moving there, alongside Andy Rossiter from gig promoters and artist management company Love Thy Neighbour.  As well as featuring a selection of cutting edge sonic experiments, the night climaxed with a collaboration between Immersion and the headliners usually worked out, written and recorded a few days before the performance.

“When we first lived in Brighton we were told by a friend ‘what you have to do in Brighton is create a scene’,” Newman continues, “so in the end we decided we’d do kind of a club night. Our twist on it was, Immersion would perform but we’d also do a collaboration.  The first one we did was back on 2016 with Tarwater, who we’ve know forever.  They came over, we worked out some stuff in the studio with them, we did the gig… We had zero expectations really.  A band you don’t know, which might have some people in it you do know, playing music that you don’t know and you might never hear again.  But it seemed to hit an audience, so we phoned our friends and we did four before the pandemic hit.”

The fact that the invention and construction of these tracks happened in the pair’s Brighton studio, it was natural and easy enough to record them, and after a while a decent archive of material had accumulated.

“We realised,” Spigel says, “’these could be records’.”

Where a lot of collaborations, Newman reckons, especially in the case of remixes, can be a case of someone fishing something out of their archive, with minimal attention paid to the original.  They wanted the Nanocluster recordings to be different, more of a proper joining of forces.

“The ultimate object,” he says, “was to end up with something that reflected everything that went into it, so you can hear everybody who’s playing on it and their contributions.  Although we do mix it.”

“If we didn’t mix it, it would be too much of a mix,” Spigel adds.

The project was always intended to continue – the fact the first was called Vol1 suggested that there’d be subsequent albums, acknowledges Newman – and once the pandemic had passed, the pair looked to resuscitate it.  They knew James Minor, vice president of South By Southwest 2023 in Austin, Texas, so suggested doing a Nanocluster there. 

Newman comments: “We thought he’d say that was a stupid idea but he said it was a brilliant idea and gave us a massive spreadsheet of everyone performing there.”

“We had to choose, which was quite tricky,” admits Spigel, “but we ended up with Thor (Harris) because he’s a percussionist, which makes things simpler, and he lives in Austin as well, which made it practical.”

“He’s an amazing character, and an amazing person too,” says Newman.

“We turned up at his house on the first day, it turns out he’d built his own house, he’s a carpenter as well.  There were five or six dogs running around.  It was an amazing journey working with him.”

“Again, we were really, really not sure what to expect,” Newman says of the Austin audience. “We didn’t know if anyone would come, we didn’t expect anyone to know who Immersion were and people can see Thor any time in Austin, he plays with various bands.  But it went amazingly well.  It was quite a rock venue, too, but it was absolutely rammed.  We were totally amazed by the whole thing.”

Meanwhile, Cubzoa aka Jack Wolter’s involvement in the album came after the pair saw him play a support slot in Brighton soon after the lockdown was lifted in 2021.  “We didn’t know anything about him but it was really, really good, great music and he had these fantastic projections,” Spigel recalls.

With Wolter being based in Brighton, life was easier.  They exchanged ideas – he sent songs, they sent ideas – but something wasn’t quite clicking, so they simply invited him to come and visit their studio. “We thought we were struggling at first,” confesses Spigel, “but in the end we got a different kind of space to what we were expecting.”

Newman likens the experience of making music the Nanocluster way to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. “You’re dealing with other people’s sense of rhythm, other people’s harmonic worlds,” he says, “and working out whether you can work within that.”

He mentions a fellow musician they’re friends with who had ‘collaborated’ with a big dance act – both of whom shall remain nameless. “He told me he’d played guitar but when the track came out he couldn’t hear himself on it at all. That’s not a collaboration.”

“We might recontexulise what they do,” adds Spigel, “but it’s still them.”

And ultimately, as well as an undeniably beautiful album, the process has had another tangible benefit, namely further improving and sharpening up the decades old collaborative process between the two of them.

“It used to be a case of me mixing stuff and Malka telling me if it sucked or not,” laughs Newman, “but now we really do work on everything together.”

Ben Willmott

Immersion will play some live shows later this year – hear the band’s BBC 6Music session for Riley & Coe from this week…

Buy Nanocluster Vol2 by Immersion on double 10″ vinyl by clicking here