Rupert Lally: Backtracks
by Mat Smith and Rupert Lally
Swiss-based electronic musician Rupert Lally releases a new album for the Modern Aviation imprint today (12th June 2020). Called Lost To The Past, the release finds him eschewing the soundtrack concepts – both real and imagined – of his recent material and instead finds him taking a personal look over his own life.
To celebrate the release, we spoke to Rupert about his extensive back catalogue and set him the challenging task of picking a mere ten releases. A user’s guide playlist acting as an entry point to Rupert’s material can be found at the end.
This was my first release under my own name – The Noisy Image, which was released the year before was originally put out as a promo for a new collaborative project that included my wife and some others. Growing Up On Mars felt like a statement of intent in terms of the music I wanted to make as a solo artist. Ironically, listening back now it feels like the slower tracks like ‘Tape 1’ and ‘Purple America’ have been more indicative, in the long run, of the music I continue to make. Around the time of its release, I joined MySpace on the advice of my friend and guitarist Christian Miller and the feedback and encouragement these tracks received on there, not to mention some airplay on Resonance FM, meant that I felt it was worthwhile continuing to release my own music – if I hadn’t had that favourable response, who knows if I would have persevered or not.
Key tracks: ‘Four Suns’, ‘Tape 1’, ‘Fear Behind The Window’
After Growing Up On Mars and its follow up, Feral, I initially struggled to create more music that I was happy with. My wife and I had now bought a house and we’d had our first child, and as well as other commercial music work, that all kept me busy. I junked an entire EP midway through 2008, because I wasn’t happy with it, and the only thing I kept was the track ‘Disco Volanté’. In the end, I began cutting up tracks that I’d done and added samples from old IBM adverts or public information service records and suddenly the project had momentum. I’d said that I’d wanted Feral to be like a musical patchwork quilt, and this was that idea taken to its extreme. It’s like the music equivalent of Peter Blake’s Sgt Pepper cover to me.
I genuinely believed that listeners would make the connection between stuff like ‘Inspector ‘71’ and tracks on previous albums such as ‘Four Suns’ or ‘Lost In My Room’ – they didn’t, and the album’s failure was not only painful for me, but it also forced me to re-think how I approached my releases in future. In some ways it’s a very personal album – it’s about nostalgia but also about growing up and being a parent. It’s no coincidence that the album ends with HAL from 2001 singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’, because that’s what I used to sing to my son when he was very little.
Key tracks: ‘Ode To The Hippie’, ‘Vermont Dropout’, ‘Last Words’
I ended up releasing three albums in 2011 – something that now seems pretty normal in the context of my current output – and this one, filled with more experimental tracks than I would normally have released back then, was the least planned of the three. Theatre Of Noise was mostly created during a period of forced convalescence after a minor case of blood poisoning. It featured me experimenting with various plugins, often creating the tracks almost in real time. As such it anticipates my work with Espen and my subsequent albums created with the modular synthesiser. To my great surprise, it garnered a lot of attention after being featured on Synthtopia and was, for a while, my most downloaded release.
Key tracks: ‘A Quiet History’, ‘a Collection Of Masks’, ‘A Distant Episode’
Stillium Partita (with Espen J. Jörgensen) (2012)
My first release with Espen came about after I did a remix of an unreleased track from his and Simon Fisher Turner’s Soundescapes. Espen asked if I wanted to try collaborating on something with him. We had no idea how well it would work, so we set ourselves a fixed timeframe (two or three months, is my recollection) and then we’d see whether we had anything worth releasing at the end of that. To say it went better than expected is an understatement: before the time was up we had over thirty tracks, the best of which (or so we thought) ended up on this, our debut album. Others would appear later on Reworked, Greece @ Peace, Noisence and This Is Art. I remember this initial period of collaboration as being one of the most enjoyable of my entire career and it was lovely to have someone who would not only share the burden of promoting the finished product but who encouraged me to be more daring in my own work.
Key tracks: ‘Skallax’, ‘The Basement Upstairs’, ‘Hornjiel’
This Is Art (with Espen J Jörgensen) (2013)
After six releases within a year and a worry that other musical commitments would give me less time, I asked Espen if we could make our seventh release our last, at least for the time being. It was understood from the beginning that we could well do more stuff together but if that proved not to be the case I wanted the partnership to end on a high note. This album collected stuff from around the time of Stillium Partita, tracks that had begun as remixes of File Under ‘Guitar’ material, backing tracks from an abortive solo album of mine and newer work.
It wasn’t put together as easily as some of our previous work so I’m pleased that what emerged has such a coherent feel. I’m also really proud of my guitar work on this album, especially the solos on tracks such as Wiki Lies and Where Do You Go. I’d been very reticent about using guitar so prominently. In my previous work it was often heavily edited or buried under processing, but Espen had encouraged me to include it more and more in our work, and this album highlights how much my confidence in my own playing had grown in that time.
Key tracks: ‘This Is Art’, ‘Wiki Lies’, ‘Pistolero Rides Again’
Scenes From A High Rise (2015)
The end of 2013 had left me exhausted and in poor health, and 2014 proved to even worse as I was faced with my father’s rapidly-declining health and subsequent death. As such, it would take until early 2015 before I really felt creatively ‘myself’, once more. This album was created in one week and almost entirely done live with a Eurorack modular synthesiser. It pointed toward a different way of working, more or less in real time, that I enjoyed immensely. It opened my music up to new listeners as I rapidly became part of the ever growing group of modular synthesiser musicians, leading to further releases and my playing live at events such as the Brighton Modular Meet.
Within the modular synth scene, I found a lovely group of performers and manufacturers that genuinely cared about the work we were all doing and a wonderfully inclusive sense of community. The album would also introduce me to future friends and important collaborators such as Hannes Pasqualini and Marc Weidenbaum, whose online Disquiet community would shape my future work. I didn’t realise at the time that the idea of soundtracks to books would be a concept to which I’d return to a great deal, and it started with this soundtrack to J.G. Ballard’s High Rise. Ballard’s work, with its combination of the alien and familiar (as well as a willingness to subvert the idea of how a novel could be constructed or read), had been immensely important to me as both a reader and writer. I first discovered his books in about 1996, around the time Cronenberg released his adaptation of Crash.
Key tracks: ‘Critical Mass’, ‘The Blood Garden’, ‘Night Moves’
I’d loved my friend Hannes Pasqualini’s artwork for some time and I always promised myself that one day I’d hire him to create an album cover for me. In a lovely surprise, he said he’d gift me an album cover design for my 40th birthday, which was wonderful but I knew it would mean I’d have to do something really special in order to do justice to his beautiful art. I’d been gradually doing more writing again since my father’s death – a film blog, keeping a diary – in an attempt to fulfil some of the potential I’d felt I’d had as a teenager and in my twenties. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to put that to the test.
Knowing that I could at least create a short story, if not something even longer, I took an existing idea that I’d had a decade before and added some information that I’d learnt from watching a documentary about human memory. I combined that into a sci-fi story set in the near future which had more than a few nods to Ballard and Philip K. Dick. Once the novella was finished I approached the soundtrack in exactly the same way as I would create the soundtrack to someone else’s work – slowly working through the text looking for moments and motifs I could accompany sonically. This remains one of my proudest achievements, not only for the music but also because I felt I’d finally shown the world what I could do as a writer.
Key tracks: ‘ID & Travel Pass’, ‘At A Party (Years Ago)’, ‘Elevator Shaft’
The Day Of The Triffids (2019)
Fellow Disquiet contributor Ian K Joyce told me about the Bibliotapes label where the concept was to create soundtracks to classic books. This was the idea of Stuart McClean, who I’d known slightly from Espen and I sending tracks in for all the Dark Outside broadcasts. It was a project tailor-made for me and, after some discussion about which book I might do, I settled on the John Wyndham classic, The Day Of The Triffids. The recording was almost as quick as that of High Rise, and the whole soundtrack was completed in one and a half weeks. I would re-read a chapter and then score it straight afterwards. I felt like I was able to really immerse myself in the world of the book and its 1950s / 1960s setting, and it seemed only fitting that the music reflect that BBC Radiophonic Workshop / Tristram Cary / Peter Zinovieff style of early experimental British electronica.
Key tracks: ‘The Coming Of The Triffids’, ‘The Groping City’, ‘Strategic Withdrawal’
The success of the Triffids soundtrack created a lot of opportunities for me and I was suddenly part of the whole independent cassette label family of musicians and composers. A mixtape I’d created for the music blog Concrete Islands was praised on Twitter by Gavin, who runs Spun Out Of Control. I immediately got in touch, told him how much I loved his label and its beautiful covers designed by Eric Adrian Lee, and asked if he would be interested in letting me create an album for the label.
Remembering an old story idea about a robbery gone wrong, I pitched him the idea of something that mixed High Plains Drifter and The Wicker Man as if scored by John Carpenter and Haxan Cloak. Despite my apparent confidence I was actually extremely nervous making this record, worried that it sounded too different from the rest of Spun Out’s catalog and that I was blowing my one chance with a label I really liked. It was fine though and it was an incredibly exciting moment to see my album up there on the website with Eric’s beautiful artwork.
Key tracks: ‘Edge Of The Union’, ‘Mountains’, ‘No Prospect’
Will Salmon had mentioned on Twitter how much he’d loved my Dune soundtrack. Much like with Spun Out Of Control, I’d then gotten in touch to say how much I’d enjoyed Modern Aviation’s previous releases and whether he’d consider letting me create something for the label. He was immediately enthusiastic, especially after getting my track for the Par Avion compilation, and when he heard my idea of creating an album that was ‘fragments of sonic autobiography’ about places and people that no longer exist. Once I’d created a list for myself of the places and moments from my early life that I wanted to revisit sonically, I approached the recording in much the same way as I had with the book soundtracks: allowing the visual idea or memory fill my mind and then scoring that as if it was a film playing in my head.
Key tracks: ‘A Beautiful View Of The Concrete’, ‘What We Found In The Woods’, ‘Memories Of The Shipwreck’
Lost To The Past by Rupert Lally is released on June 12 2020 by Modern Aviation.
