You were there when all of this kicked off, right?įell: Around 1985/’86 is when I first became aware of house music, then slightly after that, techno arrived. House music, as a theme, has run through your music since the start. I was like, “okay, this is amazing.” I was just really into synthetic sounds and synthesizers from then onwards. He was a technician at the university in the electronics department and he had a mono synth. That’s what I initially got into and obviously being from Sheffield, at that time there was a lot going on – Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League were from there and a lot of other stuff besides that was going on in the city.Īfter that I managed to borrow a synthesizer off my parents’ next door neighbor. So it was electronic music that was typically dance music. Mark Fell: The first sort of music that I really, really got into when I was a 13-year-old teenager was synth pop – the Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, things like that. What’s your earliest memory of electronic music? It’s an opportunity to make that statement as big as possible to counter the kind of hostility towards minority groups that’s going around the press at the moment.” “Some of the best music in the world comes from Britain – especially dance music – and I think that’s because we have huge amount of different cultures in the country. “In the age of Brexit and Trump, I think it’s really important that we champion how brilliant multicultural society is,” Fell says. Ultimately music making is just about getting together and having a good time for a lot of people.”įell’s inclusive attitude to music extends to his curation of FACT’s stage at this month’s No Bounds Festival in Sheffield, which features Ugandan artist Sounds of Sisso, Hyperdub’s Klein, Sarah Davachi, Theo Burt and WANDA GROUP. It should be something that everyone can do. I don’t think making music should be the domain of five hyper-nerds. “If you show me a musical score I have no clue what it would means. “I still don’t know anything about the theory of music,” he says. Written for Portugal’s Drumming Grupo De Percussão, who performed it on a metallophone system devised by Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis, it’s a multitimbral, ASMR-inducing delight that does strange things to your brain.ĭespite an impressive CV that includes academic writing on the compositional process, Fell has no formal training. Out of these occasionally obtuse concepts, he’s made some of the most inviting and accessible experimental music of the past 20 years and carved out a wildly varied multidisciplinary career he’s just as likely to be found making installations as he is playing club shows.Īlthough Fell has been busy with different projects over the past decade – most notably the deep house-oriented Sensate Focus alias and collaborations with Errorsmith and Gabor Lazar – this year he released Intra, his first proper solo album since 2010. And whether he’s using software like Max/MSP to create algorithmic composition processes, or exploring specific FM synth presets, his music is made on his own terms. If you go round someone’s house and cook a meal, you don’t say ‘and now I am unveiling this meal and it is called this.’ You just cook a meal and eat it.”įell’s wry, matter-of-fact approach to navigating the music industry is much the same now as it was in 1998, when SND’s Tplay redefined minimal club music with a stripped-back combination of lush house chords and crisp 2-step beats. “We were just making music and it never occurred to us that we needed a project name. “We were just naive and stupid,” Mark Fell tells me from his home in Rotherham, recalling how a catalog number for the SND project with Mat Steel inadvertently become their name. In this interview, Scott Wilson meets Rotherham-based producer Mark Fell, who talks about a lifetime of experimentation with FM synthesis and algorithmic composition using Max/MSP. Signal Path is a new series that delves into the creative process of our favorite producers and musicians.
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