“The English canon of weird music”: Shackleton in conversation with Al Wootton

Al, can you talk about how you discovered Shackleton and what you find inspiring about his music?

Al Wootton: It was the first Shackleton record for me – and since then Sam’s stuff has always been something I’ve listened to. With Holy Tongue, I was playing his records to the guys and we’d listen to it on the road. I think what I dig so much about it is that it’s hyper effective dance music, but also has elements of the English canon of weird music; you can see traces of Coil and Current 93. Shackleton has his own sonic environment and very few people do that consistently and well.

Shackleton: That’s very flattering, of course. I think there’s been this false division over what’s effective on a dancefloor and what’s going to mentally engage with you. I always saw my own thing as being ritual trance music of some kind. When you reference Coil, I do see that as being in the same vein, so thanks very much for that.

How did you come to work together?

S: We were playing on the same line-up at Intonal Festival. I really enjoyed that performance; I could see old African Head Charge elements, which I liked a lot in the past. Then, Al came up to me at Venue MOT, at an Expert Death night that we were playing together, and asked me if I wanted to do a remix. I wasn’t so keen on that, though – I never really enjoyed remixes. I always like to take on a bigger project. Maybe it’s because, like Al said, I have quite a particular sound, so I like to be given space to develop that.

A: We thought it would be nice to get a remix, then a few weeks later Sam was like: “What if we did more of a collaborative album project?” And we were like, “Great!” We had just gone into the studio to record a bunch of starting points for a record, so it was perfect timing.

What was the recording process like? This album sounds less sparse than a lot of your respective discographies.

A: We’ll go into a studio for a day, bring things that we like with us and try different things. I’ll play a song in the listening room and be like: “Let’s record something like this”. Then we’ll go into the other room and end up playing something that sounds nothing like what I originally played, but it’ll have a similar energy or character. We recorded a bunch of improvised pieces and sent it all to Sam. He used quite a lot of it and then added his own music on top. It is a maximal record, but I don’t think it’s overbearing. There’s space and sparseness in there.

I’m intrigued by the album title. Listening to the music, it feels made for close listening; there are a lot of switches in mood and atmosphere, a lot of detail that you need to listen closely to.

A: I came up with the name when I was at a festival I’d been playing at. I was wandering around and the name came to me about the experience I was having. I wrote it down; we all write down phrases or things that we come across, thinking about titles. I think it fits the record because it does have this maximal spilling out of elements. It just…fits the music.

S: I also keep lists of names that I like. But listening back, generally, mine tend to be quite macabre, or have these nihilistic elements that wouldn’t fit with this record.

Can you talk about your early influences and how you started to make your own music?

A: I was in bands when I was a teenager, mostly making post-punk with a couple of synthesisers, but I was also buying acid house records and DJing with my friends. I was going to FWD>> in London and got big into dubstep; the first records I had out as Deadboy were in the post-dubstep era, or whatever you want to call it. In recent years I’ve been focusing on Holy Tongue. With my own stuff, it’s refining why I got into making music in the first place and going back to my original impulses.

S: I moved to London in 2000, then my mates and I started going down to FWD>>. It’s interesting because there wasn’t a name for dubstep at first, it was just people from quite diverse backgrounds bringing interesting stuff to the equation. But it did crystallise something and forms the context of my early stuff.

Sam, how has your production approach changed since the Skull Disco days – if it has at all?

S: At the start, I was using this programme called Reason, which had this drum machine. I was quite primitive – I used to get samples from records, chop them up and load them into the drum machine – but what really influenced me with early dubstep and going to big soundsystems in London was really pure bass. I didn’t know how to programme synthesisers so I would use a sine wave and pitch it down as low as possible. 

When you’re using a kind of bass [in production] that’s reliant purely on weight and doesn’t have any other characteristics, you realise that you have to give it space, so I ended up getting this very minimal sound almost by default. A lot of [those early results] were down to the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing; perhaps that gave me a kind of distinctive sound.

I think it’s quite a common experience, like Alan Vega and Martin Rev’s band Suicide. It’s raw, but you could say they nailed a particular sound back then. Even in Burial’s early production techniques, too. I think he was doing a similar thing with chopping stuff samples in this programme and then building it in the software, which gave him a unique, shuffling beat programme. When you do things that make people say: “That’s not how you should do it,” I find that it’s those very things that give you a particular sound.

You’re both described as “world-builders” in your music. How does that make you feel?

A: I don’t know what kind of world I’m building, but it’s nice to hear that. If I’m going to overthink it, when I’m imagining the music that I’m trying to make, I’m imagining an environment that doesn’t exist. I think that’s what people who are doing more experimental stuff are trying to do, whether they realise it or not.

S: Yeah, even though I try to avoid social media I have read that written about me and I’m happy about that. I never wanted to fit into a genre – when I saw it happening with Skull Disco, that’s when I wanted to get out.

What does The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now mean to you?

A: I think it’s trying to find the incredible miracle of the present moment. It’s easy to get bogged down in the mundane, but if you actually notice the dazzling bizarreness of reality, it’s a real trip.

S: I also think we can become quite trivial people, and it’s good to realise that love and beauty are around you all the time; you just need to open your eyes and heart. In this particular record, it’s about that moment of transcendence when you stop thinking, even for a fleeting moment, and be transported. That’s what I’m hoping to achieve.