Russell Haswell interview – “Art has to be real”
The underground legend on Skam, Dieter Meier and his first opera
On paper, Russell Haswell has already had a very busy 2025. The Coventry-born, Glasgow-based noise artist has just put out two releases – live album Boro Salvage and his latest UPIC Diffusion Session with Austrian boffin Florian Hecker – and over the coming weeks will release another two records, one for Manchester’s fabled Skam label, the other for the always-exciting Diagonal.
This comes fresh after writing his first opera, The Truth Is as Elusive as Ever, which he performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival in December – a highbrow move that might surprise anyone who’s encountered Haswell’s abrupt and abrasive live shows but which makes more sense when you consider his place in the arts world as one of the UK’s great disruptors.
Over the years, Haswell has been involved with the likes of Jake and Dinos Chapman, Aphex Twin, Autechre and Merzbow, and released some pretty uncompromising recordings on Warp, Editions Mego and Warner Classics. More recently he’s found a home on Oscar Powell’s Diagonal label, who put out his excellent Reality Therapy album in 2023 as well as an Autechre remix of his ‘Heavy Handed Sunset’.
But when Juno gets in touch to discuss this latest run of form, Haswell is trying to keep warm in his flat and looking forward to spring when he’ll be back on the road – as many musicians know, having a lot of releases on the go doesn’t necessarily guarantee reliable income.
Having settled in Glasgow several years ago, the 54-year-old is a familiar face at the Rubadub record and gear store and pals with the Signal Sounds crew, where he put on a couple of modular-synth events last year. “Then I just hang out with the people in the pub who are all dying from old age or smoking or alcoholism,” he says. “I’ve got mates on mobility scooters now.”
These new releases explore different aspects of Haswell’s practice, and taken together as a whole, offer a portrait of a principled man who is amused and frustrated by the state of the world and who is striving in his idiosyncratic way to make things better. On Boro Salvage, a live recording of his show in Middlesbrough last August, full of circuit-bent sounds and galloping rhythms, he tells the crowd: “This one’s called ‘Even When It Rains Here It Doesn’t Clean the Streets’.” The second track, he says, is called ‘Fred Again.. Is Shit’. Released on cassette through the Industrial Coast imprint, Boro Salvage nods to one of Haswell’s earliest releases, Live Salvage 1997-2000, for the influential Mego label – ‘salvage’ is a fitting description of Haswell’s rough and ready live recordings.
“With this recording, I just did what I usually do to things – I mastered it and cut out all the bits that might be problematic for some people. But it’s still got an explicit content warning on the cover because it’s got some swearing,” he says.
For ‘UPIC Diffusion Session #23’, Haswell teamed up with his long-time collaborator Hecker for the 23rd performance of material that they produced in 2004 while exploring Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC system of generative computer music at a studio in Paris. The first results of this experiment surfaced in 2007 on their Blackest Ever Black album, versions of which they performed at special events around the world, often engulfed in dry ice while green lasers strafed the venue.
This particular recording was performed at Berlin’s Atonal festival in 2022 for the centenary of Xenakis’s birth, and is another spellbinding examination of the more serene end of extreme synthesis by two masters in their field. It’s also one of the last releases scheduled for Editions Mego by its founder Peter Rehberg, a close friend of Haswell who died in 2021, aged 53.
“The Diffusion Sessions material was always the material that we made in Xenakis’s studio,” Haswell explains. “Every single one was a different edit from that period – it’s just rearranged and re-edited. We used to take it in turns to edit it. So sometimes Hecker would do it, sometimes I would do it. And sometimes we’d not heard each other’s edit until it was time for the gig. The one that’s just come out on Mego was the first time that me and Hecker had done a UPIC Diffusion since 2010, when we did Amsterdam Paradiso.”
At the UPIC Diffusion event in Zurich, Dieter Meier from Yello came to the show. “We had champagne with him. I think he was surprised by how loud it was.”
On a completely different tack, Haswell’s EP for Skam, named after its catalogue number KASM 03, offers glossy Jackson Pollock techno that bursts and spurts with real gusto. “The Skam one was made in 2019, before the lockdowns. It was made at exactly the same time as another album, for the Glasgow label FANCYYYYY, which is hopefully coming out later in the year.
“I was going through a pretty hard time and I made them both really quickly. Skam don’t do that much stuff, and I think it kind of went to sleep for three years. I actually got the test pressings this time last year, but it’s only coming out now. It’s based on this synthesizer called a Blippoo Box and a circuit called a Rungler which a Dutch guy called Rob Hordijk invented. I also used a module that gives me random triggering but is still slightly more organised than random – some kind of probability thing.”
Also incoming is Deep Time, Haswell’s sixth album for Diagonal, which arrives in April and contains some of his more user-friendly productions, veering from arpeggiated Autechre-ish sci-fi to thrusting EBM. The concept of deep time refers to geological time or cosmic time – the huge amount of time that has passed since the earth formed.
“it’s about the age of the planet, and Siccar Point in Scotland where the geological plates meet,” says Haswell. “When geologists saw that, they realised the world is older than we thought. And so it’s also about false truth and the current state of lies in politics globally and in the United Kingdom and the liars of Covid and everything that we all know about – just this sort of general malaise.”
It’s a theme Haswell explored in his opera The Truth Is as Elusive as Ever, which he premiered in Nice last summer at a LCMF event and which involves a chorus dressed in black bin bags contemplating the fate of the planet.
“It’s basically about false truths and how you don’t know what’s real anymore because of AI,” he says – though he composed the opera with AI assistance. “I gave it really hardcore prompts, saying this is what it’s about and then it spat some text out that I could use. I generated shitloads of stuff and then went in and took out the bits that I wanted and rewrote bits into it to make it fit.”
The opera commission took Haswell out of his comfort zone, but it was worth it in the long run – probably. “It caused a lot of brain-ache for me, having to think about things I don’t think about and having to embrace opera and watch stupid contemporary operas that I’ve seen before but revisit them and go, ‘Oh god, right, this is what you do’, and ‘oh, those experimental people in the 70s did it a bit like this and broke the fourth wall.’ I don’t think I’ve ever procrastinated as much in my life.”
Haswell is now getting enquiries about performing the opera in Europe. And that’s fine, because, for him, this is what art is all about.
“Art is about making an object and making something that is separate to the individual and isn’t transitory and doesn’t just vaporise. It’s tangible. It’s real. And I guess probably because of my education, I’m stuck with that idea,” he says. “Art has to be real. The virtual is just bogus.”
Piers Martin
Check the following current Russell Haswell releases here – UPIC Diffusion Session 23 / KASM 03 / Deep Time