Listening Center: Lost and Found Futures

Stewart Gardiner discusses secret histories, retro-futurism and the sharing of cultural markers with the electronic phenomenon known as the Listening Center

Stepping on to the pavement outside Concrete Islands HQ, I was struck by the peculiar flurries of fog about my feet. Thinking nothing more about it, I continued on my way to the post office. However, by the time I had taken my usual shortcut the fog was heavy about me, engulfing my senses. As a result, I must have taken a wrong turn because I found myself in the wooded area of a small park. It didn’t seem familiar, but I’m not in any way expert on the nooks and crannies of North London, so I accepted it as nothing out of the ordinary. I would just have to find my way back to surroundings that I recognised. Therefore I marched on, despite the fog.

After a couple of minutes, I could make out a building in front of me and headed toward its outline. Half expecting, as in a dream, to find a simulacrum of the old mausoleum from where I grew up in Scotland, I was initially taken aback by the more prosaic form of a low concrete building. There were windows, but they were opaque with dirt; or perhaps it was merely an effect of the fog. I edged along the wall, pressing my hands into it in the hope of discovering a door, since I could no longer see in front of me. After some time I found one. Relieved, I operated the handle and the door gave way. I stepped inside.

It might have been prudent to recognise the silence around me and consider that a warning not to go into the building. But there were sounds from deep within that contrasted with the silence and drew me inside. It was only later that I discovered this concrete outpost was actually the fabled Listening Center, or at least one manifestation of it tailored to my own memories and perceptions. I’ve since researched the phenomena and made contact with the Center itself. I would like to present a transcript of that dialogue for the purposes of clarity.

Am I addressing the Listening Center machine or the human representative David Mason?

I’ve been instructed to say the human representative, David Mason.

The name Listening Center has the gentleness of library music about it, but at the same time something more sinister and possibly Ballardian. Was that intentional and does it reflect the music you make?

Yes, very much so. It’s always been about that shadowy undercurrent as a counterpoint to otherwise upbeat, sometimes quite innocent sounding music. A reminder of the interplay of darkness and light.

Your bio states that the Listening Center “presents a patchwork of imagined pasts and futures.” Makes me think about that time in electronic music’s past when it felt as if the future was being created right there and then. Did that future ever arrive? Are you making it today? What’s your relationship with nostalgia?

It definitely does have its roots in retro-futurism, the throwing back to an antecedent point from which to view an infinite amount of possible futures. But the future to which that music belongs was lost, one of many that failed to arrive. I am trying to re-make that future today… The music contains forward-looking hopefulness, but also the seeds of its own demise. Nostalgia has different senses – it can be the common notion of nostalgia as a desire to have things again “the way they were”, which belongs, to a certain extent, to the human condition, but the virtue of it depends very much on what you are specifically nostalgic for. There is another way of looking at nostalgia, which is more reflective and tends to use it more as a device: If the future is a box with opaque glass sides, then the past is a box with glass sides which are dirty and dusty and in which you can sort of see the objects it contains. Nostalgia is in this sense the act of looking into these types of boxes, and being able to make out the contents, albeit in a limited way. It might be possible to learn something about the future from this activity.

What should someone expect to hear upon entering the Listening Center?

Heaps of (mostly) old synths and drum machines, sometimes recorded properly, sometimes quite badly. Library-type themes. Minimalist sequences. Recordings on tapes near the end of their lives. Melodies which are repeated one time too many to be normal. The first track on Example One is a dictaphone recording of me filling a bucket of water in a bathtub with backwards Juno 60. That’s the starting point.

How do you hope your music makes listeners feel?

Well it is supposed to be music, so hopefully they enjoy it as such. On a deeper level I hope that maybe it connects them to something which provides a feeling of belonging, of not being alone. There is solace to be found in listening to and making music. Yes, we live in an evermore bleak state and this particular music sometimes reflects the failure of optimisms from another certain period, but it’s about not running from our inevitable fate. As Sun Ra wrote “This planet is doomed”… but it is a really good book of poetry.

Describe each of your albums in a few words.

Example One

A paean to a fantastic urbanism, public information films, half-remembered TV themes and kosmische musik.

Cycles and Other Phenomena

A meditation on the intersection of environmental and manufactured landscapes; an awareness of electricity as a natural resource.

Aural Assignments

A collection of studies in recording collisions of library and synth aesthetics with a limited number of analog instruments directly to stereo cassette; recorded before Cycles and Other Phenomena.

Paths and Surfaces

This was originally intended as a psychogeographical album which would speak to the location of the original “Listening Center” (see below), but which became another lost future somewhere along the way.

Can you tell us the secret history of the Listening Center?

Several years ago, a friend who was teaching at a school on the Isle of Man discovered the overgrown ruins of an ancient tiny wooden hut just outside of Castletown. Inside she found the remnants of a couple of dilapidated cassette decks and a film projector, along with some crusty headphones and shortwave radio equipment. When she asked her neighbours about it, they said it was the last remaining structure from the property of an eccentric collector and radio enthusiast whose house had burned down decades ago in unusual circumstances, and which had never been sold, even though the owner had disappeared soon after the incident. Nobody seemed to care too much about it and she picked through some of the ruined tapes and films – there were a couple of each not too badly decomposed, and she was able to play them on a cassette deck at the school; one or two films were also in surprisingly good shape and there was a projector on which she was able to watch them. She took some rough videos of the films and wav files of the tapes and sent them to me thinking I might be interested, which I was – I hadn’t heard anything like it before. I founded this music project, called Listening Center (the American spelling because of living there) – which makes music similar to what was on these tapes. She put everything back just as she found it and soon after got another job in the west of Ireland. We’ve lost touch since then.

Are there any books, films or other media that have had an impact on your music?

Anything by Philip K. Dick, Mark Fisher, Nigel Kneale, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (particularly Welt am Draht). Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards. Also Daphne Oram’s delighful book, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics. I am currently reading Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (see below).

There are threads of British electronic music running throughout your work. You’re based in New York – did you grow up there? If so, I’d be interested to hear what influence certain British subcultures have had on you and your music. I grew up in the North East of Scotland and have always been fascinated by aspects of Americana. Is part of it the attraction of otherness, yet an otherness sharing certain cultural markers?

I actually grew up in Dublin, then went to music school in Cologne for a couple of years, and finished college in New York. I went there to be a jazz drummer. Being next door in Ireland, I experienced the whole canon of British children’s sci-fi TV and strangeness in the early eighties as a child; the popular modernism of the 1970s was still around. I was also getting the North American stuff, which was very different, but also, in a way, similar messages in a different wrapping. The soundtracks stayed with me in a very fuzzy way, and not actually liking electronic music or synths until after music school, it seemed to come rushing back after a while.

(It is a source of regret that I have not been to Scotland, and so close by!)

I think the attraction of otherness and the sharing of cultural markers has always been paramount for me personally and ought to be protected, especially now, when this type of finding of common ground is under attack from all sides.

Can you talk about working with Ghost Box records? Or is it a case of, ‘What happens in Belbury, stays in Belbury?’

I only listed the albums up above, but the Study Series 7” that I did with Ghost Box and Pye Corner Audio is still maybe my favourite release, and in a way the most important, because although it is officially the second Listening Center release it is the one which introduced a lot of people to the music, and is probably the reason we are having this conversation now. I’ve always corresponded directly with Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly – we’ve never met – and can say that he has always been exemplary, both as a musical inspiration, and label boss. Having the experience of doing two releases with Ghost Box with Jon Brooks’ mastering and Julian House’s artwork is something that I’m very grateful for – I still think they are one of the best record labels around.

How did you start working with the Polytechnic Youth label?

The Polytechnic Youth connection came about when a friend on social media – a certain Mr. R. – introduced Dom to the Listening Center stuff and we ended up putting out Cycles and Other Phenomena on Deep Distance, then Aural Assignments on Polytechnic Youth, and finally, Example One. It had always been a secret aim of mine to release that one on vinyl, and again was extraordinarily fortunate to be able to work with Dom on its re-release.

Will you be working with Ghost Box and/or Polytechnic Youth again in the future?

Yes, there will be a picture disc single and a new full length album coming out on Polytechnic Youth in one of many possible near futures…

You’ve just released a collaboration with Lake Ruth concerning writer Clarice Lispector’s parents (she’s on my to-read list) benefitting RAICES Texas. Can you talk about the project and how it came about?

I became a fan of Lake Ruth after I met Dom and Hewson Chen in New York, and Hewson and I had talked about collaborating from the beginning. We’ve done several tracks together including a Pale Lights collaboration 7” which is about to come out on Kleine Untergrund Schallplatten. Allison Brice had written a song concerning the traumatic biography of Clarice Lispector’s parents who suffered unspeakably in pogroms in the Ukraine, and whose long journey and exile mirrors the plight of refugees and migrants today. It’s a good cause to support to try and alleviate that level of suffering in the face of growing systemic xenophobia, racism and sexism.

What’s next for Listening Center?

The new album and picture disc for Polytechnic Youth. Also, Listening Center, in collaboration with the poet Paolo Javier, is taking part in the Queens Museum International Biennial in New York; we are doing an audio-visual installation in the Lefrak City branch of Queens Library, which will run from November to February. The highlights will include: private language, demonic possession, roomtone, frequency shifting, super 8 film and cathode ray tube monitors.

Doctor Who or The Twilight Zone?

I love The Twilight Zone – but Doctor Who, because of Delia Derbyshire.

listeningcenter.bandcamp.com