Immersion, the duo of Malka Spigel and Colin Newman, have been making acclaimed music for a while, both as a duo and through their work in Minimal Compact and Wire, respectively. Their latest album, Nanocluster Vol. 3, is (as its title suggests) the third installment in a series of collaborations. This one teams them with New York’s stunning “ambient country” band SUSS; the result is an atmospheric, textured collection of music. I spoke with Spigel and Newman to learn more about this new album and their overall approach to the project.
Both you and the members of SUSS have been making music for a while. Was this the first time your paths had crossed as musicians, or is there more history there?
We have a weekly 2 hour radio show — swimming in sound on Slack City, often described as Brighton’s coolest radio station — running 5 years already. We have a very broad stylistic remit and play a lot of new music. We’ve become quite obsessive about it, with Malka very much in the lead in unearthing the treasures. SUSS was one of the many bands she found. We’ve probably been playing their music for 4 years already!
They eventually realised we’d been playing them and reciprocated by asking us to be guests on their Ambient Country podcast. After we’d finished recording the show we threw out that we’d been doing these Nanocluster collaborations and the rest is history.
When did you start thinking about the process of collaborating?
We weren’t sure if they’d actually be up for a collaboration but it turns out they were and things logically developed from there.
Was the process of working with SUSS different from the artists you’d worked with beforehand in the Nanocluster series?
Every artist is different! We always start with some file swapping but the form that takes is wildly different every time. A big part of the process is discovering how each artist sees a collaborative process. We start by trying to be in the world of the particular artist and then see what is relevant for us to bring to it.
We slowly build the music between us based on how the collaborators react to what we do. The only thing the collaborations have in common is that we finish & mix the final versions. However we’d never release anything our collaborators aren’t 100% happy with!
Your current tour involves a collaborative set between Immersion and SUSS — how have the logistics of that worked out?
All the six previous Nanocluster collaborations have featured one single gig followed by the album versions. Great concept but hard to promote! So we thought it might be interesting to make the album first then play it live as a tour. A Nanocluster performance is always 3 sets – Immersion / collaborating artist / both together- so this is what we have been touring. 3 sets each night. We’ve run them as more or less a continuous 2 hour show, no support, by setting up the entire ensemble at the beginning and people entering or leaving the stage at the given time.
Was there anything that surprised you about how this latest set of collaborations turned out?
The whole thing about Nanocluster is that you never know how it will turn out! SUSS and Immersion are very different artists and that becomes very obvious in the live context. Yet we have carved out a space between us that makes perfect sense even though “on paper” it would look unlikely to fly!
Photo: Ben Newman
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