Automatic Invention: Alexander Tucker Interview

Alexander Tucker talks to Stewart Gardiner about Alan Moore’s Providence, panspermia and multi-dimensional imagery in Guild of the Asbestos Weaver

Listening to Alexander Tucker’s Guild of the Asbestos Weaver means stepping over a threshold, entering the subconscious flow of other realms. Taking its title from a phrase Ray Bradbury employs in Fahrenheit 451, the album taps into a rich seam of science fiction and cosmic horror, whilst avoiding the restrictive nature of genre conventions. Soundscapes rise and fall as Tucker carves out streams of evocative imagery.

He briefly manifested in this reality to discuss what lies behind the veil of the album with Concrete Islands…

Please introduce yourself and define your role within the Guild.

Alexander Tucker, Third Stage Guild Navigator.

This feels like a prolific period for you. Your previous studio album Don’t Look Away appeared pretty much exactly a year before this release and 2019 has already seen the Astral Social Club and Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra record released. Are you on a particularly creative roll or is it just the case that more of your work is being put out into the world at the moment? Do you have a secret room filled with unreleased music?

I’m pretty much always working on new music. Much of Don’t Look Away was recorded over about 4 to 5 years and the last Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra in a similar amount of time. There’s always a good chunk of time from when an LP is handed over to the label to when it comes out so more time elapses there.

With Guild I deliberately worked in a different way: I wrote the material, recorded a good portion at home, took the tracks out on tour and then went straight into Holy Mountain Studios to finish the album there. I do have a lot of unreleased material from the last two years but nothing that’s really finished. The pieces I invest my time in are nearly always put on albums at some point.

You lean further into analogue electronics and the crafting of soundscapes on this record. Was that a conscious decision when you set out? Was the process of making this record significantly different from others?

I like to combine both digital and analogue electronics because that’s what the present day is made up of. I was working for Swiss National Theatre and living in Zurich two years ago and picked up a Roland SP-404 sampler to help me with composing pieces for the play I was working on. In my downtime from the theatre I started recording and resampling with the 404, which ended up being a lot of fun. When I returned from Zurich, Matthew Jones who runs the Disciples record label and the Walthamstow dub and reggae night General Echo Sound asked me to write a live dub set for the night. I completely failed to write anything even close to a dub set, I tried but whenever I try and make something genre specific it always goes off on its own path. The closest I got was some beats with a bit of delay and echo, sorry Matt! But what I ended up doing was sampling beats and cello rhythms played by strumming or hitting the strings with mallets, this became the basis for “Energy Alphas”, “Artificial Origin” and “Precog”. The rest of the tracks followed in a similar fashion. I wanted the pieces to be very long and repetitious, and keep the elements quite simple but with many layers on top of each other.

Did you ever consider fully embracing the instrumental at the expense of lyrics? I’m not suggesting that you should have, but was the temptation ever there? “Energy Alphas” could be where The Beach Boys meet TG in a cosmic narrative, so I certainly don’t want to wish that sort of thing out of existence…

The solo albums often have instrumental pieces on them, but the lure of vocals is always strong because its such a flexible way of adding different melodies and ideas. If the suggestion is there, then I have to go with it. I’ve been producing tracks with other entities on a new modular project called MICROCORPS which is mostly instrumental, any vocal is heavily processed to become tonal and more synth-like.

Do you view Guild of the Asbestos Weaver as a continuation of or a departure from your output as Alexander Tucker?

I always see my work as a continuation of a larger body. But we change so much as people over the years, new interests and new influences are constantly coming in. I like my work to reflect these shifting sands.

It has been suggested that this album brings you closer to the concerns of your work as a visual artist. Please discuss. 

My visual work and my music often have these crosscurrents of imagery going on and share dialogue and titles. In the next issue of my comic World in the Forcefield there’s this character called Micro-Corpse which we used for the name of the MICROCORPS project. There’s also a section in the comic that uses these Wilhelm Reich terms and that’s where “Energy Alphas” comes from.

SF and cosmic horror are ongoing interests for you, but they’re much more of a direct influence on this record in particular. Why this album? How did that come about?

For a while I’ve been placing imagery into the lyrics that have references to sci-fi, horror and fantasy. Alan Moore’s comics have been a guiding light since my early teens. Over the course of Guild I’d been reading Moore’s graphic novel Providence which is his radical reinvention of the HP Lovecraft ‘Mythos’, it’s one of his late great works. He’s really messing with time and space; past, present and future. I hadn’t read any Lovecraft until reading Providence so picked up everything I could get hold of.  The track “Artificial Origin” is influenced by the Alien franchise, in particular Prometheus which is kind of a bad movie but it promised so much in relation to the origins of the Alien world and got me thinking about panspermia and secrets of the earth’s history.

The title is taken from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Can you talk about how the world of Bradbury’s novel intersected with yours? Were you thinking of any of his other works when making the record?

I just loved that term in the novel, it got me thinking about some sort of secret guild. I really like the brooding atmosphere and the imagery of those American suburbs. Like all great sci-fi, the world it depicts is not so far from our present day. I don’t necessarily mean geo-politically but the way life looks, with these sprawling suburban bungalow buildings with their television screens the size of walls and people with these ear buds feeding them information and entertainment whilst blotting out the rest of the world.

Which other writers had an impact on the album? And how did you go about drawing inspiration from them – I mean, how deep do the influences go in terms of the lyrics and the music?

Philip K Dick is always at the back of my mind, I’ve read lot of Dick. Over the course of this album it was mostly Lovecraft and Moore that I drew upon, I injected a lot of multi-dimensional imagery inspired by both these writers. But when I’m writing lyrics I’m coming up with scenes that are vague and shifting, it’s more of a dream logic of passing ideas, nothing coherent whilst presenting what I hope is strong imagery. I’ve had a great love of Dadaism and Surrealism since I was kid, so collage, cut-ups and automatic processes have always been a big part of my work.

I’ve been listening to Cybotron’s Enter album recently and I was also thinking about Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation – both of which are fuelled by strands of SF. The former crafts dystopian SF in contemporary 1983 whilst the latter riffs on William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. How do you think your approach differs? Are there commonalities? What records, if any, did you consider as sideways reference points?

I’m never trying to put forth a concept as such, I feel close kinship to someone like Tim Smith of Cardiacs, the lyrics from On Land and in the Sea are a mixture of the everyday and complete cut-up Dadaist nonsense. I love Jimi Hendrix’s fantasy tales on “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” from Electric Ladyland and Royal Trux’s lyrics have elements of William Burroughs and outright weirdness. God so many. Syd Barret’s work in Pink Floyd and solo, also 13th Floor Elevators’ subconscious flow of words on Easter Everywhere are equally inspiring.

There’s a sense of heavy journeying across Guild of the Asbestos Weaver, where the listener is submerged in your world and permitted to explore. What do you hope someone takes away from listening to it?

I really like Angus MacLise’s Dreamweapon term, the idea of dreams and altered states of mind as a fight against the status quo, although I’m also aware that this is all just entertainment and an escape from having to face the often dark realities of life. That’s not to diminish the affect that music, film and literature can have over our lives. With Guild I wanted an immersive experience where the repetitious cycles pull you into the frequencies and layers and the words would present this dream logic. I hope it’s transportative. I was listening to Earth’s Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons and Phases 3: Thrones and Dominions whilst writing this record. Earth 2 had always been my jam so I felt like I was rediscovering these records anew. This minimal approach and maximalist sound influenced the direction of the record but with added pop.

If not a specifically political work, the album nevertheless has political charge through evoking the totalitarian world of Fahrenheit 451. Could you talk about SF’s ability to reflect the contemporary world while pointing to the future and whether you’ve utilised that here?

I’m more interested in creating my own worlds rather than specific genres. There’s are touch of sci-fi, horror and fantasy but I feel a closer connection to the work of Max Ernst, his collage novel Une Semaine De Bonté is a touchstone for me. I like automatic invention in the vein of Dadaism and I think a lot of writers like Lovecraft were pulling from this same current, not that I think Lovecraft was necessarily aware of these artists but there’s a feeling of unconscious unravelling running through his work. There’s a freedom there that really appeals to me. Even Bradbury has this turn of phrase that feels like he’s going with his unconscious instincts, I felt like “the guild of the asbestos weaver” was one of these.

As a David Lynch fan, I’ve enjoyed your retweets of ominous whooshes etc. from The Return. I’m assuming you have an affinity for Lynch. If so, has he influenced any of your creative endeavours? You would play the Roadhouse, right?

I would love to play the Roadhouse! Twin Peaks: The Return has been constantly on my mind since it aired two years ago. I just re-watched it, such an unbelievable piece of work. I produced a comic called Entity Reunion whilst watching it the first time around, influenced by the programme. It has this figure who is in this constant state of flux, its body never really coalesces. The dialogue is made from cuts-ups from a book of unknown phenomenon. Lynch’s non-linear story telling is such a great fuck you to standardised modes of creating narratives and on top of it, is this incredibly potent magic realism. I felt like The Return was combining the things I love about Alan Moore and Lovecraft but without trying to be any genre except its own.

What does the future hold for Alexander Tucker or any of your collaborative projects?

I’m producing this MICRCORPS project, which has a number of guests from the avant electronic world that I won’t divulge just yet. Grumbling Fur have an album in the pipeline. We have some Time Machine Orchestra shows with Charlemagne Palestine coming up. The next issue of my comic World in the Forcefield is finished, just waiting for Breakdown Press to give me the green light on a release date.

Unfair, I know, but Ray Bradbury or PKD?

PKD.

Alexander Tucker Live

26 September: The Social, London – The Quietus Social presents

27 September: Kazimier Stockroom, Liverpool

alexandertucker.bandcamp.com