I Really Can’t Play: An Interview with K. Leimer of Savant

Last year, RVNG Intl.’s band of aural cultural archivists set its sights on the work of Kerry Leimer, the Canada-born musician and producer who developed his signature brand of isolated, serene minimalism in Seattle throughout the second half of the 70s and first half of the 80s. Now. RVNG continues Leimer’s narrative with Artificial Dance, a companion piece that shifts forward to focus on Savant, the avant-groove project custom tailored by Leimer to find the odd but glorious intersect of dance music and experimentalism. We recently caught up with Leimer to trace the his earliest musical experiences, the formation of Savant’s several-member lineup, and his own experimental imprint Palace of Lights — check out Artificial Dance at RVNG.

When did you first notice or become interested in music?
Little to nothing as a kid — pretty sure I was naturally tone-deaf. I had to learn, and still work to learn, to listen. I’d guess that as a lad I heard a song — an early one by the Beatles maybe; tinny, clanging stuff. It began with the single pick of an electric guitar making a fairly short, odd-harmonics, feedback-like drone which then stopped and made way for a pretty simple little rock tune in support of thinly disguised sexual needs dressed in a suit of unassailable love, coated with the promise of life-long commitment and the heady scent of imagined danger. I suppose as is often the case, the words mattered more than the music, relegated as it was to supporting the singing. And the feedback, sadly, never returned. Anyway, I immediately found the feedback interesting, but the song that followed struck me as tedious: just another song about just another impulse. The captivating element for me has always been the timbre. Or sound itself.

There is also great appeal in the physical effect of listening to recordings — the illusion of a specific place occurring in a three-dimensional space — the soundstage / sound field is an addictive illusion for me. Just overwhelmingly detailed in recent works by Sylvian and Henriksen, to name only two. Again, something I had to learn to recognize, and something that remains profoundly pleasurable.

And finally, the deeper I listened the greater the breadth of musical articulations became: early music, new music, electronic, concrete, experimental, folk, electro-acoustic, classical, rock, punk, prog. Too many to list for a genre-agnostic listener.

What was your first instrument? When did you start playing music?
I don’t really have an instrument. I can’t really play. I do tend to claim that the studio itself is an instrument.

When did you decide to form Savant?
My interest was to try out the techniques I was using in my solo work in something like a rock format. And since I don’t have an instrument, it became obvious I’d need some help. The whole basis of Savant was the pursuit of self-organizing outcomes that emerge not from real-time collaboration, but by reaching a critical mass of recorded events. The illusion created by that kind of density of sounds — proximity and juxtaposition — tends to seem like music. And what enriches that idea, what makes it possible and gives credibility, is a diverse set of sources exhibiting their own behaviors. The preferences, experience, taste and abilities of each of the musicians allowed the work to seem genuine: it’s not really something that can credibly be pulled off on your own. But, again, the goal was to allow the recorded sounds to collaborate more directly than the musicians themselves. In the end it was me and a splicing block, but the sessions for sources were completely heuristic, so very easy going, very open-ended. The expectation was to get anything interesting on tape, nothing more specific than that.

Can you talk a bit about how Savant’s members came into the fold?
I had met Marc Barreca and Steve Peters through this shared interest in experimental musics. They were both at Evergreen State College, as was my long-time friend Robert Carlberg. We three — Marc, Steve, and I — actually played out live a few times, Uni cafés mostly and a “listening is optional” aesthetic. Marc Barreca may have introduced me to Dennis Rea; Steve Peters introduced me to John Foster and Steve Fisk — Fisk helped me with some of Land of Look Behind, but wasn’t on any of the Savant recordings — and Robert Carlberg (Anode) had gotten to know the New Flamingos, a sort of post-punk band working to get a record deal and performing pretty regularly around Seattle clubs. From there it was friends of friends, and a little trade-out for studio time on others’ projects…

There’s an incredible variety of ideas, instruments and approaches to pop music in Savant’s material. What were you mainly listening to or interested in at the time?
From Brussels with Love; Eno’s Obscure series; This Heat; Wire; Talking Heads; John Foxx; Swell Maps; Material; Alternative TV, AMM. London Music Collective is referenced in “Heart of Stillness;” Bowie’s backwards chant from “Moving On” ( Lodger ) was referenced in the opening of “Shadow in Deceit.” King Sunny Ade’s Synchro System Movement is in there somewhere too. “Sensible Music” is a nod to Joy Division and “Stationary Dance” to Eno’s “Kurt’s Rejoinder” (Before and After Science) — the voice is from an explanatory record concerning a John Cage piece for a Merce Cunningham dance. I used it because I tend to prefer “arbitrary” as an operational term over the more Cageian “chance.” Systems as tightly constructed as his severely delimit chance in many ways. Being arbitrary is another matter entirely. I was being arbitrary during the Savant work.

There are several other referents, more obscured still.

What was the writing, recording, and mixing process like? And how collaborative was the environment?
It was an odd collaboration really: I deliberately kept the musicians apart, playing against click tracks or re-synced by a Lexicon PCM. The true collaboration occured on tape. The pieces were largely assembled by splicing and multi-tracking and submastering: small cuts, small and large loops marked off in decimal inches to keep within a marker’s width of accuracy. Then dragged slowly across tape heads to find the appropriate thump so the next event could be dropped in.

Material added to the top — some quasi-melodic lines, rhythm guitar, emphasizing sounds — those elements were played onto the beds once some sort of shape had been modeled, usually against a submaster to prevent the player from hearing the complete piece.

Sends were limited to some spring reverb, a delay line and a parametric EQ. I didn’t use any compression because then, as now, compressors confuse me. “Honor thy error as a hidden intention ” was sublimely framed and then hung on the wall over the console, and strictly obeyed.

Mixing wasn’t very flexible because the tracks relied on so many submasters that a lot of decisions were already locked in, and the thought of going back and reworking dozens of edits grew increasingly unappealing as the later stages were in sight. Thinking back, the physical effort was really and nearly completely overwhelming.

How do you view sampling, then and now? There is a live vocal element but it’s processed quite a bit.
The whole aim was artificiality — a post-modern nod at the fact that there is nothing all that “live” or genuine about the recording process. No matter what, intrusions of equipment, equalization, dynamics, level adjustments, acoustic or no acoustic environments are present in the process. Then, of course there’s the no-man’s land of playback. Somewhere, on some Faust recording, one of the players shouts — with obvious overload — that “The microphone is perfect.” That’s the summa — these are artificial constructs made possible by interlocutors that have nothing to do with any sort of live or living experience. Recording is the transformation of events, not the events themselves. A listener needs to be aware of this the same way a viewer or reader needs to be aware of this. You experience a construct, not an event, not an object or thing.

The process used for the music I generate doesn’t even occur in any linear or real time, then or now. And while sampling has a different definition today, and is often manipulated in fairly conventional ways, The Neo-Realist (at Risk) does prove to be an early example of building music from sound libraries, much like musique concréte, but in more familiar “songs” format.

Did Savant perform live?
As is obvious, a studio makes for a poor performance experience. We played “Stationery Dance” live once. Not the happiest 10-minutes I can recall…

You seem very close with RVNG and the reissue campaigns for your past work. How did you come into contact with the label and decide to revisit this work with them?
It seems that the Savant records managed to hang around for quite a while. We (Palace of Lights) remastered and reissued The Neo-Realist (at Risk) years ago on CD and it has sold steadily for a few decades now, but the vinyl persists. The original LPs come and go on sites like eBay, year in, year out. I know DJs have been using bits of it and “Stationary Dance” for years and it may have a modest underground reputation, which may have contributed to this reissue. It starts with Greg Davis remastering and reissuing my Music for Land and Water on Autumn Records a few years ago. Greg planned to then follow up with a similar release of my early tape work. That project became too big for Autumn, so Greg got in touch with RVNG about doing what eventually became A Period of Review. I think RVNG was initially more interested in Land of Look Behind and the Savant tracks, probably because the music is more reliant on percussion and probably more accessible to more people. But I said no, so RVNG went ahead with A Period of Review. And they did a great job, and they did what they said they would do, and built some trust. And so it seemed reasonable to go forward with Savant.

Why did you take a hiatus from your label, Palace of Lights, and why relaunch recently? What’s different about running the label initially and running it now?
I studied design and made my living as a designer. My wife and I opened a design studio in 1980 — I had been freelancing before that. By 1983 the office was commanding about 60 hours of my attention a week. A year later, and for the 20 years following, about 80 hours a week. What free time I had for music was restricted to listening. The design business steadily and eventually confirmed all my suspicions about the unsuitability of combining commerce with creative endeavor. Coming out of the business-induced coma, we remastered my back catalog for CD in 1999 and I set up a small home studio again and began making the material available online. The label relaunched in 2000 with my back catalog and The Listening Room. Not long after we were able to begin releasing works by Steve Peters, Marc Barreca, Ang Mo Faux, Gregory Taylor and myself — Marc and I even managed to perform last year and produced two collaboration projects, Premap and Field Characteristics. There are currently 30 releases available on PoL. The biggest differences today are cost — much less expensive to put out an album, once studio time is made a non-factor; distribution is also easier and now that we’re all grown up, no-one expects to make any money doing this.

Savant’s Artificial Dance is out now on RVNG Intl.