On Chance & Randomness: Synth Talk with Phil Ventre

In this series for Decoder, I talk with some of the musicians in The Spacesuits collective on the role of chance and randomness in their work. The Spacesuits is an international collective of musicians working in tandem to generate new creation myths, taking their cues from pioneer Afrofuturist, Sun Ra. -Anaïs

The transition from Swing-era jazz to bebop wasn’t easy. After all, you didn’t dance to bebop. Imagine a room full of people swaying uncomfortably in their chairs. That’s the birth of cool. Bebop to free jazz may have been easier if only because jazz-listeners, black and white, had gotten more comfortable with the idea of black music you couldn’t dance to. Improvisation takes the stage. In free jazz, the musicians arrive unencumbered by previously wrought song structures. Instead of paying to hear the songs you already know and love, you pay to hear what happens. As a listener, you have placed your trust not in the music-as-it-was but in the music-as-it-may-be.

Cut to: three Englishmen in a patch cable fantasy. London Modular Alliance is a sight to behold. Phil Ventre, Simon Galvin, and Gavin Pykerman are the kind of musicians who show up with nothing prepared and nothing in mind except to do it differently this time. Mod synths in tow, the three men dive into the analog in totally improvised formations. But unlike the early bebopper, London Modular Alliance isn’t contending with the issue of how to get former dancers to sit and listen. You don’t go to an LMA show to sit and listen. You go to get grimy on some analog shit. From free jazz, musicians gained the permission to improvise totally. Decades later, the idea of a completely improvised modular-synth trio is exciting rather than terrifying.

Anaïs Duplan: Give me a crash course, if such a thing is possible, on working with modular synths.
Phil Ventre: With modular there are no limitations. The sound can be tailored exactly as you need it. Regular synthesizers may be restricted to a couple of oscillators. With modular there is nothing stopping you adding three, four, five, six, seven oscillators to create something totally unachievable elsewhere. Sometimes the modular can be used purely to process sounds, using analog filters, effects and so forth, and other times intricate, sequenced melodies. I feel it really reflects your mood and adapts to any situation you throw at it.

[Prompt #4: Take a photograph that corresponds to the caption, “PHOTO OF HUMANOID, CIRCA 3024.”]

How did this all start? How did you, Simon, and Gavin meet?
I initially met Gavin though SoundCloud. I stumbled across his tracks — we were making similar styles of electro — and there was an instant, mutual respect for each other. Emails were fired back and forth and the topic wandered on to synthesizers and set ups and he mentioned he was making a lot of his music with a modular system.

Gavin has always been ahead of the game when it comes to his music equipment, his studio has some amazing gear in there. With hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised he was into modular, but at the time I’d never really heard much about it so I was intrigued. This was over 3 years ago now. I popped down to his place for a look and was hooked!

He put me on to a small modular demo showroom run by Scheniders in Rough Trade East which was around the corner from where I worked. At the time there was nowhere in the UK selling this stuff so it was a gold-mine of knowledge for me. I learnt the basics and from there I started my own little system.

What exactly what was it about Gavin’s set-up that got you hooked? And where did you go from there?
I was hooked by the versatility that could be achieved, the possibility of sounds that he made. Gavin’s system when I first saw it consisted of 4 full cases (Doepfer’s standard 9U Eurorack format). I was starting out with a much humbler system! I think my first purchases were a sequencer, oscillator, VCA and Envleope Generator. It wasn’t just the financial constraints for me, I also wanted to not be overwhelmed at the start as there’s a lot to take in initially and it’s certainly a different mindset to using a standard synthesizer.

Around that time Gavin met Simon through the web forum Muffwiggler. Simon was based in Hackney Wick and looking for fellow modular nerds to meet and jam. Gavin was an active member on the forum at the time. He was interested and local enough to pop down and hook up. He mentioned this to me and I was eager to learn more so I came along too. Several of these jams took place over the following months and while we compared our systems it was mentioned many times how great it would be have a decent modular store in London. We all were desperate for a place where guys could come in off the street, have a demo and walk away with their gear. It became even more necessary when Schneiders closed their showroom at Rough Trade.

We spent a good 6 months figuring out logistics and finding a space that suited what we were trying to achieve, which brings us to today. We have a booth inside Vinyl Pimp in Hackney Wick where we’ve been now for nearly 18 months.

[Note from Phil: “I hope you agree with us that that [the creation myths] portray images of creation in deep space, a big bang of sorts, developing to life thriving on a planet as the sound unfolds. We set the analog laser up to the modular system during these experiments. Some of the shapes they conjured were so wonderfully alien it drew vivid pictures in our heads of what a humanoid could be perceived as in the distant future, very much like the entities within Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey in that they have no physical form, they are simply matter and thoughts.”]

All 3 of you met through the Internet. There’s an element of chance there. How else do you think chance has played into your work together as a group?
Chance plays a major role in every live event or gig we play. We have a vague idea of which direction we take a performance, but the nature of modular and the fact that matches can’t be saved or easily recalled means everything sounds different each time we play. This is often terrifying when faced with large audiences as there’s the potential for things to go wrong and/or sound awful, but it’s also exhilarating at the same time though.

What types of sound are you aiming for?
The beauty of modular synths is the diversity of the sounds they can produce. There are so many parts and modules interacting, sometimes complimenting (melodies), sometimes not (inharmonic, frequency modulation).

Depending on the gig we have, we’re just as happy making beatless drones and weird electronica as we are Detroit-style techno and electro for nightclubs. As there are 3 of us performing, we each concentrate on a specific area or task and generally would achieve a sound in a very different way from each other.

The final sound we create is not usually pre-planned; it’s improvised on the fly. The first patch may be figured out during a sound check or something and will act as a building block to get things started. From there it can literally go in any direction and is often led by the reaction of the audience.

So, during your live sets, all 3 of you are improvising at the same time. You’re all having different but simultaneous responses to the audience. That level of trust and cohesion can be hard to achieve in a group. What makes you, Simon, and Gavin able to work so well together? What difficulties have you run into?
We are improving, but each of us still has a focus on a specific part. For example Gavin may be working with melodies and myself or Simon may be creating drum patterns or rhythms. We work well together purely because we have similar tastes in music — LMA wouldn’t exist if this was otherwise — and through many hours of practicing together. The only real difficulties we’ve faced is on PA sound systems. The full force of an analog modular sound is often so intense and fierce that many club sound system really struggle to get the clarity.

That reminds me of something you’ said before, that you consider yourself to be from the “analog realm.” Can you elaborate on that?
With all the modern ways to do things today, ‘analog’ is seen as a bit antiquated. Modular synths certainly adhere to an oldskool methodology in that the basic premise used to patch sounds is the same now as it was when they first came about in the 1960s. The equipment we use is mostly analog, so in that sense we are very much stuck in the analog realm.

For a large proportion of modular manufacturers, their oscillators, filters, VCAs and countless other modules are still constructed and soldered by hand. The analog components seem to have more character than their digital counterparts, to our ears anyway. It’s maybe not apparent on a small, personal sound system, but when you amplify to the levels found within nightclubs the difference is highly noticeable. I guess this is why we prefer analog.

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For more information on The Spacesuits, please visit: www.thespacesuits.com. The Spacesuits is sponsored in part by The AfroFuturist Affair, Pushdot Studio, and Philadelphia Printworks. The final Spacesuits show this summer will be at The Distillery Gallery in Boston on August 7th.

[Header image — Simon lynch at the VandA Exhibition in London — appears courtesy of Ben Burling.]