By Patrick Ogle

Projekt is poised to release the Alan Elettronico album Electric Mind (Deluxe Edition). This extended version has SCADS of new material. Featured are remixes by Ryan Lum (Love Spirals Downwards), new signee VEiiLA, and ambient icon Erik Wøllo. Alan Elettronico began creating music in 1998. These early efforts include records of the drone ambient variety. He continued to be periodically involved in creating new music while also working as a poet and teacher. Electric Mind (2021) was his first release for Projekt Records and is an eclectic, joyous, electronic throwback that becomes positively addictive the more often you listen.

Electric Mind (Deluxe) Name-Your-Price Download at Bandcamp

This recording sounds like many of the better electronic soundtrack music from the 70s and 80s and, frequently, you can dance to it; is this similarity coincidental?

“Not a coincidence, I spent almost two years trying to capture the original sound of that specific kind of music,” says Elettronico.

He describes the process as a philological effort to reproduce sound libraries of digital synths while keeping the production similar to the standards of that time period.

“Inspiration came from Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, which is based on the same premise. It’s a homage to the music that made me love music,” he says.

This is a joyful effort, it isn’t some dry attempt at reproduction. You will want to dance. It is entirely possible you won’t be able to stop yourself. Although the artist had stopped himself from making music for some time.

“My Projekt Records debut came after a long hiatus. I hadn’t made any music since 2009, while my first and only album released when I worked in the collective named Oem Quartet, was distributed in 2006, and it was a dubstep album for which I provided the melodies,” says Elettronico. “So my debut under Projekt is a lot different from what I used to make. I wanted to explore some kind of music I used to listen to when I was a kid.”

Likewise this is a different sort of release for the label — not generally known for music likely to make you dance. Not all of this record has that vibe but a significant amount of it does. Elettronico’s most listened to recent records give an idea where his mind is musically.

“I am totally in love with Tension, Kylie Minogue’s last album. Production is insane, and songwriting is brilliant: you can enjoy the levity of the pop side, but when you are a producer you can get amazed by how any sound is well crafted,” he says. “Same for Everything But The Girl’s new album, a worthy comeback.”

It might seem curious that an award-winning poet like Elettronico creates music with few words. He doesn’t think it is peculiar at all.

“I don’t think it’s strange, as a poet I have always worked on sounds, and this is the same when I make music,” he says.

He also notes that he hasn’t used his poems for lyrics but that he occasionally uses lyrics on the same topics like the question of identity. But mostly? It is about music.

“I guess that when I make music I want the sounds to speak for me,” says Elettronico.

What does Elettronico hope you, the listener, will get out of his music?

“When it’s about wordless music, the reaction may vary: anyone can see anything in those patterns, and I like that. I particularly enjoy when my music gets people to dance,” says Elettronico. “I don’t mean in shows, people are there to dance and would dance to anything; I mean when they hear it by chance and start bobbing to the rhythm without even realizing. That’s when music gets deep.”

This release has brought Elettronico back into the musical realm, and he doesn’t have plans for another hiatus.

“The Deluxe Edition of Electric Mind has given me the chance to collaborate with a lot of people, fantastic musicians. It was Sam’s idea, and I can’t be more grateful to him and all the Projekt artists who worked on the ambient remixes,” he says. “This experience has convinced me to work on some ambient material I have kept in my archive, not sure what I was going to do with it. I think I’ll give it a chance for the future. For live gigs, I am working with Ekranoplan, one of the artists featured in the remix album, and very active in live sessions around Italy.”

by Paul Brandon

deepspace is Mirko Ruckels, a genre-crossing musician with a musical history that resembles more a patchwork quilt than a resume. His March ’22 release Superradiance was his first with Projekt, and its follow up The Blue Dunes has just been released. There’s also two Projekt collaborations with fellow Australian artist, theAdelaidean, and eleven other studio albums.

And that’s just in the ambient genre.

To call him restless is something of an understatement. In his twenties, one of his (several) rock bands was discovered in the Australian ‘Unearthed’ competition run by national radio broadcaster Triple J. Mirko has studied and performed opera with the University of Queensland, worked as a professional songwriter with BMG, obtained five degrees in music, arts and psychology, including two Masters, has been in an award-nominated Americana band, self-produced, recorded and released three albums of solo psychedelic guitar pop music, written a score for a computer game, an album of Beatlesque-XTC-Jellyfish inspired with duo Norskiosk and co-written, produced and performed two albums with ARIA-nominated musician Sarah Calderwood (which are the Australian equivalent of the Grammys).

So yes, he can most definitely be called restless. But sewn through all of these vastly differing projects has been his output as ambient artist deepspace. We sat down in a coffee shop in his hometown of Brisbane, Australia to pick apart some of those threads starting, of course, at the beginning.

P: When did you start creating ambient music as deepspace? Was there a particular catalyst for it or did it come out of nowhere, driven simply by curiosity?

M: I look back now and can see that I started creating ambient music as a bit of a response to a frustration/burn-out with more conventional music performance. I had spent over a decade (starting in the nineties) playing guitar and singing professionally as a musician, working in various guitar bands, often performing up to six nights a week. I started work after 10pm, finished at 2am, got home an hour later and slept until midday like some kind of strange nocturnal creature. Such is the life of a working musician, and I’m sure some of the readers will identify. It got old after a while. I also worked as a songwriter for BMG, writing relentlessly and shopping songs; I worshipped at the altar of pop song writing and filled books with hundreds of songs. My musical inspirations were musicians like The Beatles, Elliot Smith, XTC, Jellyfish: Anything with intricate melodies, vocal harmonies, interesting harmonic changes, and usually a late 60s influence. The nineties were an interesting era, and you couldn’t escape grunge or Britpop music if you were a band, so there were some of those influences creeping in as well.

After the early 2000s I turned to, in what you might see as a surprise, opera. I had started singing in choirs at university, and then found that I had a strong tenor voice with operatic potential. I ended up performing lead roles such as Don Jose in Bizet’s Carmen, Tamino in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Ferrando in Cosi Fan Tutti and other works. However, I felt I was a little too neurotic for a career in the area as it was highly competitive and demanding, and due to some difficulties between warring stylistic factions within the music department and also my own neuroses, I eventually backed out. I felt a bit bruised by the music industry, and it was a year after that in 2007 that I started recording the first deepspace album. I felt like I could be my true self doing this music. I am a very introverted person, and the music not only sounded like the inside of my head, but I could do it without any of the pressure, politics and noise of more conventional musical projects. Just me, my keyboards, guitars and a computer.

Some people say that you are your most true and joyously ambitious self when you’re eight years old, and you spend a whole lot of time away from and then eventually returning to that state after a whole lot of intervening noise and chaos. Well. When I was eight, I was obsessed by inner worlds, science fiction, fantasy, bells, and faraway sounds. In 2007, I returned to that state. I figured if I can’t navigate the perilous seas of the existing music industry, I can make my own seas. The music flowed out in response at that point.

P: What seems apparent to me is a perceived conflict between being in a band and writing ambient music. Being in a band is social; there’s collaboration, writing, arranging, rehearsing, other egos, and of course the live performance aspect, whereas producing ambient music is by and large a very solo affair. For you, I’ve always thought that it was more than that. Ambient music seems like a solace. You enjoy working in bands, there’s been some incredible bursts of creativity within the different projects, but usually after each, you retreat back to gently lapping shores of the drones and the atmospheric environments. Do you find yourself compartmentalizing yourself somewhat between projects and genres, or do they all occupy the same creative headspace? There’s also the personal aspect to this as well — bands take up a tremendous amount of internal energy, and a lot of that can be spent just dealing with differing characters, directions, and also the shedding of a certain amount of control and not just sitting back in the delicious solitude of composing.

M: I feel like the performative side of creating more conventional music in a band has always been a little at odds with my personality. Even though I did enjoy performing, especially with good friends, I still always felt like I had to ‘mask’ a little and be more extroverted than I actually am. When you are in, or front a band, you need to carry the evening and engage the audience. I find myself getting exhausted by that and by all the noise and activity. Ambient music is my oasis. I love empty liminal spaces, abandoned places where there are no people. I love nature, space, and getting deep into those environments. I guess that’s where the idea of deep ‘space’ came from. It’s not necessarily about ‘outer space’ per se, it’s about spaces and entering them with your imagination. And it’s a space in which I exist happily. And I know that others enjoy those quiet imaginative spaces too.

P: So following on from that a little, the structure of a band — and for this I’m generally speaking of the kinds of bands you’ve been involved in — is somewhat conventional; lyrics, melodies etc. Your composition path, is it generally improvisational or do you map out each piece thematically, sonically, technically? And I guess that question lends itself to the entirety of an album too as to whether you have an overarching auralisation of an album as a series of pieces or a whole? Da Vinci said that ‘art is never finished, only abandoned’ — are you one of those people with a cupboard full of hard drives crammed with musical jottings, settings, phrases and tones?

M: My composition is generally quite structured with some exceptions. Because I studied (and teach) music, I developed a harmonic language that I am very conscious of. I will intentionally use certain chords and musical structures that I love and that have become part of my musical language or often per-album palette. For example, in deepspace I love using chords with bass notes that are not on the tonic but are a third, fourth or fifth below in the same way that someone like Brian Wilson (Beach Boys) did – you’re basically inverting the chord, and it creates beautiful nuances, not unlike highlighting an object with a light, but from different angle each time creating a new beautiful vision every time even though the object is the same. When these are paired with other chords that are unusual and borrowed from distant keys, I become a happy chappy: I start to see a gallery of strangely-lit objects. Then the music starts suggesting itself. The listener doesn’t necessarily notice all this (unless they are another ambient musician!) It doesn’t sound clever, it just sounds interesting, evocative and a bit fresh and hopefully recognizable as deepspace.

So yeah, the composition process tends to be structured and so do the albums. Blue Worlds I for example, focussed on the colour blue, and I consciously tried to find ‘blue’ sounds. The Dream Polaroids was an idea of creating pieces that were based on photos taken within a dream. That gave me a wonderful angle of creating dream-like dioramas of sounds. The new album, The Blue Dunes, is made of music that suggests the landscape. A rich blue landscape of dunes. It’s a concept album with an accompanying science fiction story (inspired by the music) about a figure that enters a vast blue desert and experiences…well, you’ll have to read it (laughs).



 Yet the pieces are not structured to the extent of a notated composition where all the parts are written out. So, the ambient compositional process isn’t that different from writing a song. Structured, yet within an aural context, occasionally with chord charts. With a song, I try to find a melody or a chord progression that captivates me and then structure that into verses and choruses. Same thing with ambient music, except it might be an A section and a B section, or sometimes through composed, which means it’s ever-changing and not sectional. A difference between a song and ambient however might be: getting microscopic with sound – I might find a progression or sequence that I love but play it in a way where I’m barely touching the keys, and then I might filter and mutate that as well, it depends.

P: What’s easier for you, crafting a lyric or crafting a tone?

M: 



They’re both a separate game. Yet I will spend inordinate amounts of time on either until I feel it’s perfect. I have a very high wastage rate of pieces (and songs) sitting in my vault of unused ideas. I don’t like the idea of overpopulating my discography with half-thought-out ideas, and I get very selective and neurotic about what goes on an album. I’m sure if there are any ambient composers reading this, or anyone else in an artistic or a craft-based profession, they are probably nodding their heads right now.

P: So Brisbane’s home, and you are one of only two Australian artists on the Projekt label, but you count, by most people’s standards, a fairly broad cultural background of a German father, a French mother. You were born in Germany and spent seven years there before moving to Australia. Music is an odd beast — our creations are like these little private bricks that are our personal contributions within a public brick wall that meanders though many different cultures, and ambient particularly seems less bound by tradition than a lot of other forms — but do you feel a certain amount of pressure on you from different ambient sub-genres or even new age music, and I’m wondering whether you think about where you fit, or if that is even a concern?

M: It’s interesting to develop your music over time and to hear other people describe it. The ‘space ambient’ tag has been used quite a bit with deepspace. And people start to compare you to others. Spotify for example groups you with other artists that listeners also like. I have mixed feelings about this. I think every artist is always a little suspicious of labels and being part of a group of artists as it can feel a little bit like a genre prison and is not so healthy for your creativity as creativity requires air and freedom. If you look at the deepspace discography there are as many non-space albums as there are space albums, in fact, probably more non-space albums, so genre labels are not always very accurate.

I think creativity and inspiration are the guiding factors for me in terms of what direction I go in. If I’m getting bored with a sound or genre, I’ll automatically adjust and create something that excites me. I become disinterested very quickly if I don’t feel a particular feeling from what I’m creating, which is a good safeguard I think. I feel that you really have to create your own path and as French composer (one of my all-time favorites) Claude Debussy said, you should follow your pleasure. I don’t really write for any other reason – it’s certainly not for money. Too many things in this world exist for either competitive or pragmatic reasons. Let’s have a few things that just exist because they are beautiful or unusual. I think art provides that. P: Your biography mentions the deep joy you found as a child with non-melodic, almost atonal sounds such as lawn mowers, distant trains, church bells. You’re not particularly known as composer that uses found sounds in his work, so I’m assuming that your tonal constructions are an attempt to return to that almost meditative state. Do you find that you’re successful or does the process and focus of creation become the meditation more so than the result?

M: Both. My body fills with strange calm pleasure when I create but also when I listen to the result of what I’ve created and to ambient music that I enjoy in general. When I first heard artists such as vidnaObmana, Alio Die, Steve Roach and Telomere, I realized that it must happen for others as well as for me. That was a very exciting moment for me. When I was little, I would feel a sense of magic in certain places. I would look into the corner of my room and feel there was something exciting there: a vista, a diorama, a hidden world, an unexplainable sense of adventure. It’s hard to explain, but that would cause me to sink into a dream state. I put some of this down to my autism. I would enter an altered state upon hearing certain sounds which is something that still happens to this day. I experience it intensely when I hear the sound of bells. When I hear church bells, for example, my head buzzes with pleasure, and I just drift off into that place. I can listen to bells all day. When I hear distant noises, the same. Imagination, and a non-defined sense of anticipation, adventure and richness pervade my senses. When I hear a propeller plane going overhead, for example, I enter a trance state. I love drones and unfocussed sounds. Lucky for me then, ambient music is precisely the place where I can then play with these sounds.

P: Two of the recurring non-musical themes I’ve seen through your music are the sonic interpretations of deserts and the use of the colour blue as a grounding for a lot of your work. Does that come from a particular sense of place within Australia, a country known for wide deserts and the deep blue of the sky and the sea? What do you think are your main sources of inspiration? Do you draw from specifics like landscape, cityscape, people or particular subjects, or is it a much more internal process: childhood triggers, memories, questions?

M: To the last question, I would say that I draw from specifics often. They’re often external states rather than internal representations of feelings which music also deals with wonderfully, but I would say deepspace is ‘outside’ both in vast spaces and microscopic spaces with maybe a few exceptions. I am obsessed by deserts and have been since I was little. There is something so beautiful in those empty spaces, shifting sands, distant plains, and I’m very fascinated by them in a way that I don’t even fully understand. Maybe it’s the autism again (laughs).

Australia is a beautiful and strange continent filled with these kinds of places and arid spaces that seem to go on forever. This feeds my imagination, and I’m quite proud that it’s a source of inspiration for me as it does feel very unique and something that I can show to people in other parts of the world via sound.



 Other aspects like the sense of something appearing then fading away into infinite silence. And creating a sense of vast spaces. And then finding an often quite specific title that describes that feeling. “Light in the Neptunian Desert” is one such specific title from The Empty Atoms. I felt like I was hearing a very lonely light glowing in the distance, but it wasn’t on earth, and the title appeared from that. That’s exciting for me and was one of the reasons I started deepspace. Both music and titles are prompts for the imagination of the listener, much like that corner of the room, or faraway sound, was a prompt for my imagination.

P: Let’s talk about gear for a moment. Artists tend to be creatures of habit with their favorite pens, brushes or guitars. Jon Hopkins springs to mind here with his use of an old ‘99 copy of SoundForge (and Win 98 needed to run it). Your career has been long enough that you would have passed through many generations of hard and software. Are you the kind of composer that sticks to what works for you, or do you regularly find yourself getting itchy to try the latest plugin? M: I’m not very technical minded – I don’t really care about gear or presets. I need things to work fast, and I need to be able to fine tune the sound until I’m happy, so I always like good filters. Synapse makes some good filters. Reverbs are all important. I love reverb; it’s the sound of the gunk in my head. Synapse again, makes a wonderful reverb called Deep Reverb that I use all the time. I use some pretty basic software. Maelstrom, which is a really old granular software synth in Reason. I love it and can make it sing. I have Omnisphere and Keyscape, which are a bit fancy but find that I don’t use Omnisphere that much as the presets are all a bit too authored and specific – I use it for some layering here and there. I like to make my own sounds rather than complex presets. I’m more likely to use something basic like Subtractor or Absynth or an interesting plug-in I’ve come across, like something from Arturia. I like some of the Universal Audio plugins, which are nice. I do use Vienna strings which is probably the most expensive bit of software that I use. I am largely software-based when I’m not adding guitar with my strat or adding other acoustic sounds like bells and odd instruments. I do use some found sounds quite a bit layered under parts – it can give a wonderful sense of space and a meta-sense to a piece. Suddenly the piece is an accompaniment to the found sound, whereas before it was the sole sound. I love that shift. It’s like a viewpoint shift from first person to third person.

Apart from using interesting found sounds that I’ve hunted down, I’ve used my kids quite a bit as sources of sound: “Whisper 1” from Slow Wave Cathedral has my son Luka whispering on it in a stream of consciousness manner. Both my daughters have had multiple spoken bits: one is a spoken section at the start of “The Great Thing in the Sky” where my daughter Astrid goes “Look there’s something up in the sky!” at the start. Another one is my daughter Pixie: she once said that she would like to ask Santa Claus if he is purple. That turned into a piece called “Are You Purple?” on Deep Blue Universe. There are more spoken parts in other pieces if you listen carefully. 
I have experienced the evolution of software and am seeing some stunning programs emerging now. But I don’t think it does that much for the creative process —you can’t buy the desire to express something. No plugin or instrument will do that. You are the thing that creates the music. You are the most important plugin or soft synth (laughs).

P: And finally, what can we expect from The Blue Dunes? It already sounds like you’re branching out somewhat with the inclusion of the digital booklet and story. Is it a more narrative work than your other albums?

M: The Blue Dunes is pretty much a concept album. Being the desert freak that I am, I was very excited about the footage of The Blue Dunes on Mars that came out a couple of years ago. I was initially very excited but then quite sad when I heard that the dunes weren’t actually blue, but only appeared blue due to the particular software being used in that the cooler areas appeared blue while warmer areas are orange and yellow. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story was my next thought, and I started to imagine walking into a blue desert. The idea was intoxicating to me. The music came incredibly quickly, and I had this very strong intuition: do not touch, do not add anything unnecessary to this. Don’t stuff this up. This resulted in the most sparse and minimal work I have done yet. I imagine the temptation Steve Roach may have felt when he wrote Structures from Silence to add a few extra parts here and there. But he didn’t. He must have instinctively known to leave it as it was, that it was perfect. Which it was and still is. Structures from Silence is one of the most perfect pieces of sound ever written. So, even though afraid, I decided to let the music speak as it is. The beauty of a desert is because of what it has, but also because it lacks so much else. I started listening to The Blue Dunes tracks obsessively — normally I listen to edit, check, critique, like most other writers, but I did actually get hooked on this one and listened to it every day for a few months. I don’t say that to influence the listeners. That would be really cheesy and probably ineffective, as I imagine ambient listeners as being intelligent and very selective about what they listen to. I say it to impress upon you that sometimes it’s good to really listen to your instincts and let something ‘be’ what it is, in spite of the pressure to craft something ‘professional’ that sounds like it fits within a genre.

Paul Brandon is a Brisbane-based writer, musician and photographer. His (sporadic) journal can be found at paulbrandon.com.

by Patrick Ogle

Erik Wøllo is a Norwegian electronic musician and composer with over 50 albums to his credit. Stretching back to the mid-80s, his releases are highly imaginary and engaging, building a bridge between grand realms and gentle, serene atmospheres. In addition to his own albums, he has composed pieces for ensembles, ballets, film, television and theater.

Wøllo’s dark, dreamy sensibility appeals to a wide audience. Chill, ambient, shoegaze, trip hop, classical, fans of all of these and more will find something to like in Wøllo’s work. It would be easy to imagine that a follower of Dead Can Dance or Elliot Carter could hear analogs to their favorites in this vast library of sound. There are songs I can see played in clubs (“Sojourn I” off of “Sojourns” leaps to mind. DJs: grab a copy to mix into your set). He uses the guitar heavily in his work which may surprise those who listen to it without knowing his history or his philosophy.

“My soundworld is built upon long suspended notes, drones and textures,” says Wøllo. “The main challenge for me has always been that the notes on a guitar string die out very quickly. It is just the nature of the instrument. Not like a violin, for example, where you can use the bow up and down to play long sustained notes. I often find there is a need to use a lot of additional studio treatments to create the sounds I want. I have several custom-made pedalboards and other tools that can transform what I play into something more textural than the original.”

He says that this lack of sustain was one of many reasons he started to use synthesizers in the late seventies. Needing control over the length of notes, he’s been experimenting with this ever since using ebow, slide, various sustainer pickup systems, programming delays, reverb and a variety of other effects.

But the guitar has never left his repertoire.

“Most of my albums do have string instruments in one form or another. Both electric and acoustic. Very often I use diverse guitar synthesizers or trigger other synthesizer modules with my MIDI equipped guitars. I am a melodic composer for the most part, and I feel this instrument adds more of what you can call human element or a human touch,” he says. “The direct touch with the fingers on a string or on a drum will often make the tone more alive, expressive and exciting for the listener’s ears. It can be very subtle and just the icing on the cake, but still it adds something. Something more interesting, it gives a certain depth to the total soundscape. The pieces might be more personal, direct and original.”

Wøllo doesn’t, of course, use only guitars.

“I have a big collection of synthesizers!” says Wøllo. “First of all I am a composer who makes electronic music. I have been attracted to this aesthetic since the late 70s. In 1984, as a professional touring performer in various fusion bands, I decided to work mainly as a composer using the studio as my instrument.”

“I started to play the guitar at 11. Through all stages in my career, from rock, to jazz, it has always been my main instrument. For several years I practiced more than 8 hours a day and studied diverse techniques. From playing classical pieces by Bach to diving into fusion John McLaughlin material. Today all this is in there somewhere as a part of my education and history but now mostly only as compositional fragments.”

“I can use any instrument, no boundaries. Well, a few exceptions… there are no saxophones in my recordings. They would not fit in my soundscapes. Certain instruments have a certain vibe connected to them. I have been working a lot with kanteles lately, a stringed Finnish folk instrument. Other than my guitars and synthesizers, I have a nice collection of percussion instruments from all over the world. I record these, making loops etc…”

With little reservation Wøllo says his favorite, and indeed indispensable, pieces of gear are his old Lexicon reverbs.

“I have a lot of them, still use them. They are essential in my work. On a mix, I typically use like 4 or 5 in the fx sends on the mixer channels, all with different settings and equalizing to cover the whole spectrum. Software reverbs can sound good sometimes and they have gotten better especially for small rooms and spaces. But hardware units do have more depth and complex sonic realism. Also I need to mention my e-bow, which has become an important part of my trademark expression.”

Wøllo also uses loopers in his work, especially his new release, Inversions.

“Using looping pedals is a way for me to quickly develop ideas, adding layers and trying out repeating ostinatos, etc. A great composition tool. Also, as a solo performer, these are great devices in a live setting,” he says.

His loopers include TC Electronics, Digitech and Boss.

“I used Ableton Live as a looper with MIDI pedals for a while, which is a complicated setup with a computer and soundcard etc. Hardware looping pedals are a better and a more intuitive solution for me, both in my house and in my studio. I have been using the latest Boss RC-600 a lot, which is a great leap forward,” he says. “Still, I miss a few options and possibilities in the looper pedals that are available today. More instant real-time control would be a great option to have. And also if the looper could be more sensitive to your playing, like a second player assisting you in real time. Giving instant feedback to you. But that is future…”

“In my 40-year career I have been exposed to and been listening to many different genres and working with so many different artists. When I sit down to compose, it becomes a symbiosis of all these influences and intuitively it turns into something new and personal as it is processed through my filters,” says Wøllo.

At some point in the process he says his compositions begin to have their own life and he follows that path. Inversions is a series of connected instrumental pieces with something of a dark sensibility. The release was recorded in Wøllo’s house in his kitchen and living room. He did not go into the studio at all.

“The best ideas often come to you when you are in the middle of doing something else. In my kitchen there is a nice spot for rehearsing, and I have a guitar and a looper always available there, ready to record. Over the years this has resulted in a lot of interesting, intuitive and exciting sketches,” says Wøllo. “For this EP I collected some of the best performances, formed as a suite in 7 short episodes that have a total length of 30 minutes. All performed on various electric guitars, looping pedals and effects. There are no synthesizers on this album.”

He says he is attracted to any musician that can play and deliver messages from their deep, inner self.

“Music is an abstract art,” Wøllo says. “It is so easy to get lost and distracted in the physical aspect of it — being too obsessed with technique, equipment and gear, etc. For me the challenge has always been less is more. To find the right note, in the right place in the right sequence of notes, and leave space around it so everything can breathe. Can I be in a state of mind beyond thinking when playing and performing, going deeper and getting the attention away from the self. Then the music can lift off. And in that moment finding ways into the subconscious, almost like research into the unknown mind. There is a consciousness and an awareness in this that can take a lifetime to achieve.”

With Inversions, Wøllo shows that there’s much more to uncover with this humble stringed instrument.

by Patrick Ogle

Sean Williams is an award-winning author and a professor of creative writing at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. His book The Force Unleashed (based on the Star Wars video game) is a #1 New York Times bestseller. As a youngster he won the Young Composer Award in South Australia, and in 2017 he received the Australian Antarctica Division’s annual Arts Fellowship to research a novel combining the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration with H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

He is also theAdelaidean, a musical moniker referring to the name of his home city. The musical project is so varied that you might think each release comes from an entirely different artist.

“My music suffers from the same problem as my writing, which is that I like to move between genres. I call this a problem, but for some audiences it’s the exact opposite, because it keeps things fresh. The common thread uniting my compositions for Projekt are that they’re all ambient, but while I started with lo-fi/lowercase textures, I’ve definitely been drifting towards cleaner sounds lately. Still slow, moody, patient, with a bit of a dark edge at times.”

There is continuity in the individual recordings, of course, but from record to record there are significant changes.

“Some, like Isolation and Inner Real Life, are conceptually defined early on: both of these albums grew out of exercises in music-creation based on source materials (tapes I recorded in the 1980s and jazz recordings from my father-in-law, respectively). In those cases, the final results grew organically out of the textures that were available. For other albums, like Solarpunk, the unifying theme came later: I think of these albums like collecting a book of short stories, in that individual works may not have been created with a larger purpose in mind, but just such a purpose forms subconsciously around them, and subsumes them, making them part of something much bigger.”

Solarpunk has a lo-fi indie vibe that might seem at odds with the ambient and almost orchestral stylings of other recordings. It is a record that would not be out of place on Canada’s Arts & Crafts label.

“Solarpunk started as an assembly of two-plus hours of fragments that over some months I arranged and edited into what the album is now, a whole thing in its own right. I think of this as a very powerful metaphor for how positive futures come into being, through the efforts of many disparate people towards an end they might not even be aware of, entirely, until it arrives.”

Over the years Williams says he has had a variety of processes which were dependent on the materials he had on hand.

“I’m not a natural performer of any instrument, but I can and do occasionally knock out progressions on a piano if I’m looking for inspiration,” he says. “I also love the timbre of instruments, and I have a background in sound engineering that taught me lots of old-fashioned techniques to manipulate recorded sound, many of which have been baked into DAWs and can still be useful.”

Sometimes Williams starts with a simple loop that he feels has possibilities. Then he works with the other materials and sounds that he has at hand.

“Occasionally I use randomness to get me started or to get something that’s stalled moving again. I’m fascinated by the many different means available of varying existing musical artefacts and using them to build something new,” he says. “There are a lot of common elements that wind through my music, although they’re so mutated that I’d be amazed if anyone has noticed. My process, like my music, is in a constant state of evolution.”

Williams employs a variety of instruments in his releases. On Isolation, he plays piano, autoharp, tuning fork, alto recorder, bicycle bell, windshield wipers and… slinkies. You may notice some of these items are not, strictly speaking, instruments.

“My most recent compositions are made in a mixture of Ableton and Audacity, and I’m still deciding if either of them counts as an instrument, although obviously they’re both crucial to lots of people’s processes, including mine,” says Williams. “Although I studied music composition and found success with formal styles of writing, I regard my explorations through software as being a very slow kind of improvisation, so in that sense I guess my computer is indeed my main instrument. My study just happens to be full of keyboards and guitars and other cool things that I use to get a particular sound evolving in my own fumbling way.”

Williams is something of a gear head but like many of us his eyes are bigger than his wallet.

“Man, I love gear so much, but I’m constantly forcing myself not to buy any. Space is an issue, and so is money, of course, otherwise I’d own one of everything (old and new: I’ve always wanted a sackbut, for instance),” he says. “ I also like to be portable. Next year, I’ll return to Antarctica to overwinter, making an album while I’m there, and there’s only so much gear I’ll be able to take. Laptop, headphones, a mic or two: anything more than that can’t be guaranteed. So keeping it lean is definitely my current philosophy. When I get back, though, and the home studio I’m planning is built, all bets will be off.”

Music, writing and mathematics are Williams’ three great loves.

“I’ve always said that just one part of my brain handles the labor involved in each of them, and although that’s probably an over-simplification, I’m sure it’s partly true. All three involve specialist language, and structures, and logics that frequently overlap,” says Williams. “I constantly find myself performing intuitive calculations that draw from each of these fields, to the benefit of the final result, I think. I’m sure I’m not unique in this; I’m equally sure that there are other methods of creation that are just as valid.”

Williams says that, unlike many people he knows, he doesn’t create visually.

“I don’t even ‘hear’ what I’m composing either while I’m composing, in the strict sense of the word. I’m playing at a more theoretical level, if that makes sense (and without wanting to claim any superiority in this approach; it’s just how I work),” he says. “This concept of music-without-sound is something I explore in my novel Impossible Music — and one can see audio-visual outcome of this speculation in a work called ‘vocem video’ (link: vimeo) that I created with Ian Gibbins, an acclaimed visual artist, poet and former neuroscientist. The idea is that you can turn off the sound and still gain a sense of the music from the images alone. That, in fact, was how it was premiered at the launch of the book.”

The name “theAdelaidean”, as noted, relates to Adelaide, where Williams has spent most of his life.

“I was actually born a four-and-a-half-hour drive to the northwest in a country town called Whyalla, but “theWhyallan” didn’t have the same ring to it,” he says.

“Adelaide a large-ish city by international standards (over a million people) but considered small in Australian and has always struggled with its role on the national and international stage. Embracing the arts and arts festivals is a big part of its cultural identity — boasting Australia’s first writers’ week, for instance — but the fact of its remoteness has often made it a difficult draw for visitors from far-off. Like Australians in general, we tend to look outside our local community for new and interesting stuff to celebrate, so we’ve perversely suffered a bit of a creative brain-drain here, despite being in theory an arts-friendly place to live and work. I’ve managed to stay here through an international writing and music career that now spans over thirty years, but I know plenty of creators (those who need physical audiences, for instance) who moved elsewhere and never came back.”

Williams says these facts have given the city an interesting, if frustrating, relationship with the arts. There is a tension that helps the creative process, even if this isn’t always appreciated in the moment.

“Adelaide recently became a UNESCO City of Music, which is exciting, although some of the shine has come off that with the cancellation of our Unsound music festival due to lack of government support,” says Williams. “Recent governments have been ambivalent when it came to supporting individual artists too, such as writers and composers, in favor of larger enterprises — TV and computer games, say, or operatic spectaculars by composers who have been dead for centuries. This is a shame, but maybe that makes us living artists work harder, and better, in order to succeed on our own terms.”

Regardless of the trials and tribulations of the arts in Adelaide, Williams says it has been a great place to grow and develop as an artist.

“The landscape influences me (several of my books in particular). Sometimes the isolation from busier cultural centers like Sydney helps me find my own creative vibe: it’s often easier to find a stillness here that’s missing in big cities,” he says. “The reason why I chose the name ‘theAdelaidean’ for my ambient persona is simply that it’s also the name of the tallest building in town. It was being built when I needed to choose a name, and I thought it would be cool for promo shots — taking an ugly apartment and owning it for artistic purposes. But alas, there’s no big neon sign projecting my brand across the plains. Curse them!”

theAdelaidean’s Solarpunk is available at Projekt’s Bandcamp page, Spotify, Pandora, and all other digital sites.