Simon James

interview by Mat Smith

Brighton-based electronic musician Simon James releases the latest in his meditative Room Tones series on July 16 2020. Room Tones Purple is the fifth in a colour-coded series of longform tracks that Simon began in lockdown with Room Tones Blue in May. The proceeds from each release go to Chestnut Tree House, the children’s hospice for East Sussex, West Sussex, Brighton and Hove and South East Hampshire. The hospice cares for 300 children and young adults up to the age of 19. Find out more about Chestnut Tree House here. 

Creating music has sometimes been a challenge in lockdown. I’m knackered. Everyone’s tired. Everyone’s just trying to deal with whatever’s going on at the moment, and to do anything creative – and lots of other things – you need that extra little bit of spark and energy. If you haven’t got it, you find yourself really fighting it. Sometimes it’s best to admit defeat for that day and hope that tomorrow your energy will be a bit better. 

I work with audio every day, and part of that involves producing podcasts. Due to coronavirus, all of a sudden things have been a bit crazy in that world. One of my clients has taken all of their physical events online, so they’re coming to me and saying, ‘Right, we need all this content from you – can you make it for us?’ I’ve been busier than I’ve ever been before. I’ve always tended to fit in making music around the jobs that pay the bills, which is how it is for a lot of people. Sometimes the balance is better and sometimes it’s worse. In this particular period, I was finding that I had zero time to make any music that I could really focus on. I was spending a lot of time sat in my studio, surrounded by my gear, but doing this sort of quite straight work – planning and working out who we were going to interview, and setting stuff like that up. 

I could see loads of people doing what they would describe as ‘lockdown tracks’, and putting all this stuff out. On the one hand I was thinking, 'It’s not fair – I want to do something!’ On the other hand, I was feeling like surely we’d had enough lockdown tracks and no one would want me to add to that. 

Then I had a thought: what if some mornings I got up and set up a self-generating patch on the Buchla? It would mean that I could be very hands-off. Once I’d set them up, I could get on with my work and let them play, in my room, quietly in the background. That’s why I came up with the name Room Tones for the pieces, because they were just sat there, doing their own thing in the background. 

Room Tones patch sheet by Simon James.

I had some experience of doing that already. I worked on an installation at a gallery in Manchester, where I created these self-generating patches and made two forty-five minute pieces, which will be getting released next. It was basically for a pop-up space in a museum for Maggie’s Cancer Centres. It was an area where people could go and do some work, or they could relax and chill out, and there would be yoga sessions, and wellbeing things going on. The sounds I was making were meant to be played in there, and I remember thinking that it was really difficult: I knew that I could make it completely wallpapery and not really do anything, but that didn’t appeal to me; there wasn’t enough about it. And then I thought, okay, well, there can be that element to it, but I also wanted it to have what I later termed little ‘mind activators’, little moments or bursts of something, that would be like a bird tweeting, but electronically. Those moments wouldn’t be too distracting, but they’d be enough for you to notice them, and for them to activate something in you. I continued that approach on the Room Tones pieces, where as much as there are bits that would sound repetitious, nothing ever really repeats itself. 

It involves using two particular modules on the Buchla. One is a sequencer, the Quad Sequential Voltage Source Model 251e, and the other module I used for this particular patch is called the Source Of Uncertainty Model 266e. I set up a series of notes, on the sequencer, which takes me about half an hour. I can put 49 notes into that, and I can do that four times if I want to, so I can have four channels of those 49 notes. I would choose a scale, a key, and I would put a load of notes in, in that key, into the sequencer, in two channels, and then I use the Source Of Uncertainty module to randomly select those notes. It means that it’s partly random, but it’s also ordered. I have control over the randomness as well, so I can control whether they’re lower notes or higher notes in that scale, so there is some performance aspect to these pieces also. 

I often use the Buchla in my work. I was first inspired to buy one through Alessandro Cortini. I’d known about the Buchla for quite a while, mostly through being a bit of a synth nerd, but I watched a really good video he did ages ago where he was talking about the Buchla. He’s got such an open way of talking about things, a warm and generous sharing nature, and I was so inspired by.that. Unluckily, or luckily, I came into some money, and was able to buy a Buchla system about seven years ago. 

They’re quite expensive, and it’s often quite hard to work out how to use them at first. You approach it with a bit of naiveté, and you don’t know what you’re doing. But that’s when you come up with the best sounds, when you don’t know what you’re doing. Now I know how to use it, I have to really force myself not to fall into certain ways of working, because it’s much more interesting to go the direction where you don’t know whether it’s going to work, or where it’s going, or what’s going to happen. It’s like a toy, and that’s what’s appealing about the Buchla. It looks like a toy; it’s very colourful, with the banana sockets and the different coloured banana cables. They’re very playful instruments, and it’s great because it’s always doing something a little bit different, and I really like that about it too. You can just get lost in it.  

Simon James’s Buchla by Dominic Goodman.

There are two other elements on the Room Tones pieces. There’s some reverb, but there’s also a box I used on the Space No Space album that I released on Golden Ratio Frequencies last year, the Ciat-Lonbarde CocoQuantus. That’s also quite integral to the Room Tones process. It’s like a looping machine but it’s always listening and always repeating; it’s always recording sounds into itself, and it will then repeat them for as long as you want. You can push a button so it will repeat them endlessly, or you can have it so that it will repeat them for maybe ten seconds, or fifteen seconds.

I feed the two channels from the Buchla into the CocoQuantus, and I’m also using some random control voltages to switch the looping on and off. So sometimes it will capture them and repeat them for longer, and sometimes the notes will go in and not repeat. So that’s like another random element that’s adding to these pieces. Sometimes it will play the notes backwards. Sometimes it will skip through a certain part of the loop and do something different. All of that is quite integral to the sort of accidental harmonies that sometimes happen in the Room Tones pieces. It’s got a really nice character to it as well, a strange quite noisy character. It’s a bit of a strange, alien machine. Sometimes a little noise will get into it and it will live in there for a while, looping around, with nowhere to go. 

The Room Tones pieces almost happened in spite of me, if that makes sense. In a way I almost felt guilty releasing them. There was that element of, ‘Have I really made this?’ But then, saying that, the moments that I recorded were some of the moments where I happened to be more involved. Sometimes I might hear it doing something and I’d go, ‘Oh that’s interesting, I’m going to see what’s going on,’ and I would start getting involved. I was always really careful and really conscious about not wanting any changes to be too dramatic. I didn’t want big changes or big timbre changes. I was trying to make something that was slow and spacious and steady, in a way. Sometimes I got it wrong, and I left some of those bits in, even though in other projects I might have decided to edit those out. I just wanted it to exist and do its own thing, and for me not to be too obsessive about it. 

During that period when I was really intensely working and doing the Room Tones pieces, I would go for a walk along the Brighton seafront in the evening, and I would have them playing as I walked. I realised that they were really quite powerful, and I really enjoyed listening to them, partly because they didn’t feel like I’d made them. It wasn’t like I’d spent months tweaking this bit or that bit until I’d driven myself mad – they were like new things that someone else had made that I could enjoy, disconnected from my involvement in them. That was really nice for me.  

Room Tones Purple is released July 16 2020 through Bandcamp.
Simon James photo by Curtis James. Room Tones artwork by Emily Macaulay.