Herb Sundays 116: Mark Fell
The experimental giant with a grab bag of greatness. "But there’s no intentional thread to the playlist. It would be nice to hear from listeners who think they have found one"
Herb Sundays 116: Mark Fell (Apple, Spotify).
Art by Michael Cina
“The playlist includes some old music as well as some relatively new releases. I was familiar with some of the older records back then, but not all. The Mick Karn album “Titles” for example was on my list of things to buy at the time, but I couldn't afford it. So I heard it for the first time just a few years ago. The centre of the mix, not in terms of time but at its core, is the track “Bamboo Houses” by Sakamoto and David Sylvian. I had this at the time of its release on 12”. But soon after buying it my then “best friend” stole it. Along with a few other items including the BEF cassette “Music For Stowaways”. The cassette itself was in the player, so he just took the cover. So since then my copy has been naked in a box of old cassettes from back then. But its weird how I only had that record for a month or so. And after the theft, and loss of that friendship, I never replaced it even though I liked it. The track “These Walls We Build” by Dalek I Love You is relatively new to me, but I had their 12 “Holiday In Disneyland” back then and loved it. The same best friend recommended I buy it, perhaps he was after that too. I kind of like the interaction of the elements on this track. A few years ago I began listening to lots of Jon Hassell and regret overlooking his work for so long. “White Car In Germany” is insanely good. What a brilliant group the Associates were. I first became of The Dwarfs of East Agouza after working with Sam Shalabi on the Oglon Day project. And our paths crossed in Denmark and I went to say hi when they were performing there. I love their music. The 12” mix of Change by Tears For Fears was a big deal for me as a kid - the instrumentation, production, and layered sequences really captured my attention - especially the fast synth brass sequence around two thirds of the way in. As a collection of tracks, there’s a bunch of releases here that came out towards the mid 80s - kind of after the initial emergence of synth pop. But there’s no intentional thread to the playlist. It would be nice to hear from listeners who think they have found one.” - Mark Fell for Herb Sundays
Edited from the bio: Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotherham (UK). His practice draws upon electronic music subcultures, experimental film, contemporary philosophy, and radical politics. Over the past 30 years, Fell’s output has grown into a significant body of work - from early electronic sound works and recorded pieces to installation, critical texts, curatorial projects, educational systems, and choreographic performances. Fell's work has been seen or experienced in some of the most renowned galleries and museums in the world and has been recognized by ARS Electronica (Linz).
His collaborations form a murderer’s row of experimental legends, including Laurie Spiegel, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Will Guthrie, Terre Thaemlitz, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi, and Mat Steel (as SND).
In 2022, Fell published “Structure and Synthesis, The Anatomy of Practice”, with Urbanomic press, bringing together the various strands of his philosophical and political thinking into an analysis of creative practice. These days, you’ll find Fell pop up across the globe (next up: solo live, volksbühne, Berlin on the 24th of this month).
I was introduced to the Fellscape by Tadd Mullinix (Herb 105) in the early 2000’s when he either lent or burnt me a CD copy of makesnd cassette (2000), an irrefutable classic album by SND, who have been taking press photos in rainproof outerwear longer than your favorite moodboard account guy has been alive.
Describing the music of SND is great cause the music itself is strangely fun in its alien beauty. It is dance music stripped of most of its voluminous trappings, scale and drama. You can listen to it without waking the house as I am now. I have called Fell’s SND adjacent work as the sound of a spreadsheet on holiday, Fell has said in
,“Imagine a Zen Buddhist with unresolved emotional issues.”This love of the popular pops up here and there in his ouevre, including a covers comp from 2008 which has SND covering “Billie Jean” where the tune shares some rhythmic canniness before it unspools into an ambient hiccup, the celestial jukebox stuck in permanent gind. A YouTube commenter: “this is like heaven.”
SND arrived on the swelling of Achim Szepanski’s Mille Plateaux label and the Clicks + Cuts series, plus a global resurgence in excitement for minimalism in electronic music from artists like Jan Jelenik, Pole, Vladislav Delay, mining dub and techno textures to find a sort of muted bliss with microgestures, the artist’s hand all but erased in a sea of glitches, what with the end of the CD age just ahead of them.
I was thinking more about how to describe the music of SND and some of Fell’s work and happened upon the word “shadowless” in an interview with Simon Reynolds (Herb 32) with the great
podcast/newsletter and again in a conversation with the great . I’m misusing the word compared to how Reynolds is, but I think Fell predicted some of the more sterile but vibrant sounds we now hear from artists like the late Sophie or Jam City (Herb 100), or as Lisa Blanning said in Pitchfork’s best IDM albums list: Fell has gone on to mine this territory in gorgeous, forensic detail with his solo career. Their imprints are all over a new generation of artists—including Lorenzo Senni, Gábor Lázár, and Fell’s own son Rian Treanor—who have incorporated their reductionism and digital pointillism into their own work” or perhaps acting like a “distant, long-lost uncle” to a new generation of the sound design-obsessed.I asked a producer I rate, Kelbin (who records for Tabula Rasa Records and has a new EP out on Future Classic), why he sweats Fell so hard, he rambled lovingly:
“I don't think I have a quote but I really want to recommend his book structure and synthesis, it's an excellent read. there's a great insight about mark's idea of the ideal DAW which is surprisingly similar to Blockhead by Colugo. I have no idea if the two things are related or if it's just a coincidence but I think it's fascinating. also my favorite record is snd - tender love. it's the record I always listen to on my way back from the club” - Kelbin
I’ll admit I was a bit nervous to approach Mr. Fell what with his acclaim and record store clerk deadpan, but I saw a video of him breaking down Beyonce the other year and realized he was approachable.
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Depending on your taste, the 2011 SND Boiler Room might be the funniest and/or coolest thing imaginable. Boiler Room has become sort of the symbol of the modern clubber, a hedonic sendup that more mainstream artists are using as platform for album launches etc. In SND’s version, the guys are checking email as dancers happen to be around them, its great with the sound off even, not a gesture in sight.