Improvisations are like seeds: basic and uncertain at first, but place them in optimal growing conditions and they're bound to bear fruit. London-based producer Luke Abbott sees the seeds of improvisation as the "most magical part of the process." That idea is central to his new project, Szun Waves—a spiritual jazz trio consisting of himself, saxophonist Jack Wyllie of jazz/electronica trio Portico, and drummer Laurence Pike from Aussie experimental rock band PVT.
With Pike in Sydney, Szun Waves didn't have the opportunity to meet until last March—though they'd long talked about playing together. The trio convened for the first time at Sacred Walls, the secretive London studio of Abbott's friend and fellow producer, James Holden, that's been kept under wraps until now. (Virtually nothing exists online about the studio, and this is the first time it's been talked about in the media.) As an informal space without the pretense or expectation of a professional studio, Sacred Walls provided the optimal conditions for Szun Waves' improvisations to take root and grow. In three days, the band recorded six hours of entirely improvised first takes that Abbott subsequently mixed down into a six-track LP.
At Sacred Walls—premiering today on THUMP—is a documentation of the band's genesis. Exploratory opening track, "Further," captures their first moments ever playing together, in a studio or otherwise. "What you're listening to is us trying to figure out how to play with each other," Abbott told me over Skype last Friday. "It's very rare you actually hear the first noises a group of people make."
Over the next five tracks, the band's "noises"—Pike's tribal drumming, Wyllie's languorous sax calls, and the blips and drones of Abbott's self-engineered, generative system of modular synths—become less an exploration and more a natural dialogue. Below, Abbott explained to me how Holden's studio helped At Sacred Walls' jazzy, experimental soundscapes take shape.
THUMP: In regard to At Sacred Walls, you've said: "I have this slightly romantic notion about music being something that is grown (instead of written)." Can you talk about that?
Luke Abbott: The whole thing was an experiment from the start. I thought, if we're going to get together, we should capture it—at the very least to be able to listen back and reflect upon it. Then, once we'd recorded it, it just felt like we'd made a record. That idea about music being grown instead of written is particularly relevant with this project. It really isn't about making decisions about the things that you think of about music, like deciding on a drum rhythm or notes or an arrangement. It was just creating an environment where we could experiment with those things and have them come out as naturally as possible.
Did the studio play a role in the environment you wanted to create? Is that why you chose to make this record at Sacred Walls?
Yeah, [James Holden] is a very good friend of mine. I think he was quite excited for us to have this project in his studio, because he's also really into the same kind of spiritual jazz that I think we're referencing with this music. And James loves the improvised, sprawling, psychedelic stuff as well. It's very much part of what he's about. So, being in his studio just felt like a very lovely place to do it. To feel completely uninhibited there, just very relaxed.
Szun Waves at Sacred Walls
Can you talk about what made it a relaxing environment?
It's James' private studio, it's not a commercially run studio space. He's only been setting up there for the last couple of years. It's kind of out of the way, in an industrial part of [London]. There is a live room / rehearsal space downstairs, but we recorded the record in the mixing / production room. I think it's nice to keep everything in one room, it makes communication really instant. James has accumulated a really nice selection of studio equipment and a few really nice mics.
Sometimes you just feel relaxed somewhere, and an environment can take the pressure off you. It can put you in an informal state of mind – a big professional studio might have killed the vibe a little bit. At somewhere like James's studio, you just feel like you're hanging out in a sitting room. James' dog Buster is usually around, it's a very free-flowing environment for making music in...there's no pretension toward it being serious. You're just playing.
So did you call it At Sacred Walls simply because that's where everything happened?
We called it At Sacred Walls because it was about capturing what we did at that particular place. All of the recordings that we've ended up with are little documents of what happened, almost like a diary of the recording process. We all kind of related to the Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders kind of spiritual jazz records. I think we all had that in our minds as the vague blueprint of what we were trying to do, but it's not necessarily to do with how they play, or musically how that's structured. It's about just getting into a groove, playing, recording, and seeing what you come out with. And that's a way of getting somewhere that you couldn't have planned, and that's the beauty of it, I think, keeping it relaxed. So it was more taking that philosophy of how you make a record: getting people together, play, and record. It's taking that and trying to do it for real.
Szun Waves' At Sacred Walls is out May 20 on Buffalo Temple
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Szun Waves at Sacred Walls