Out of all of the local artists I’ve seen perform in Canberra, I think Reuben Ingall has to be one of the few I’ve seen play at so many diverse venues and events. Indeed, over the past ten years or so I’ve seen him contribute to Inflatable Ingrid’s absurdist pop at the much missed venue Toast, perform at the Art School Ball and a slew of pop-up venues including Canberra’s annual You Are Here festival, and destroy the Polish Club under his mash-up focused alter ego Dead DJ Joke. As well as being a prolific live performer, Ingall has also released a substantial amount of recorded material, with his latest album ‘Microclimates’ arriving on Feral Media just months after his cassette-only ‘Microwave Drone Rituals’ EP. In many senses the vaporous portrait of Ingall by Robbie Karmel that graces ‘Microclimates’ sleeve art acts as the perfect metaphor for the tracks contained within, which feel as intimate as they do abstracted. With that in mind, I caught up with Reuben via email to find out more about his creative process when creating ‘Microclimates’.
CD: It feels like there’s more of a focus on intimacy and warmth on this latest album. Was that something you were deliberately aiming for when writing it, or did things just turn out that way?
Reuben: I saw Markus Popp (Oval) in conversation at Sound Summit in Sydney a while back and he made some great remarks about how he sees his work as pop music, in that the goal is the listener having a strong emotional connection. I acknowledge that plenty of people find instrumental or electronic music somewhat impersonal, but that connection is definitely a conscious goal for me.
I wanna make and hear sounds that are vulnerable, empathetic with experiences of fear and wonder at the strangeness of life and the world (hopefully without stepping into some tacky new-age zone!), and through that perhaps provide comfort (though this could just be my own music-making catharsis bleeding into my ideas about what other listeners might experience). Maybe that sounds a bit lofty, but it’s what I get from some of my favourite artists.
CD: It also feels like you’ve returned to writing songs with ‘Microclimates’; is that something that you were consciously trying to do when making it?
Reuben: Funny you say that, because in fact I was conscious of making a mostly instrumental album, which to me makes them less like ‘songs’ but that’s pretty debatable. It’s definitely songier than my ‘Microwave Drone Ritual’ and ‘Set’ cassettes, but my live set for the last few years has mostly been material from my very-songy ‘Dealt’ CD, so I’ve had some comments from friends that they expected to hear more of me singing on this album! Broadly though, I think I’m usually drawn to a songish format – a beginning, a climax and an end in under five minutes.
CD: Were there any particular things that inspired the creation of the tracks on this album? Is there any uniting theme to the record?
Reuben: There’s a certain aesthetic and set of techniques – perhaps it’s approaching a kind of digital musique concrete. The sound sources are quite varied in terms of origin and time, for example the piano parts would have been recorded in 2012, and the guitar notes that form the bed of ‘Teen Blog’ were from an improvisation in 2011. What started as an effort to finish or discard older recordings, ended with me using them in a found-sound kind of way. Having time and distance I was able to approach the material as a resource to be sampled.
CD: Was there any reason why you choose the title ‘Microclimates’; does it refer to anything in particular?
Reuben: I guess I had an idea about each track putting the listener into a certain audio environment. To me, each track feels like it exists or occurs in a real local place, there’s not a cosmic/otherworldly flavour. And I guess ‘micro’ because the tracks aren’t very long in the grand scheme of things.
CD: Do you have a favourite track on ‘Microclimates’? If so, why is it your favourite?
Reuben: Perhaps ‘Teen Blog’. It features a huge piano-accordion that my brother found by the roadside. I love to hold down several of the chord keys at once and make big rich tonal clusters. It’s bittersweet though as I always want that sound to continue indefinitely, but the bellows will only stretch out so far! So, stretching and looping and layering those sounds on this track is quite satisfying.
CD: I understand that you design most of your software patches yourself; what sorts of stuff did you use when writing these tracks?
Reuben: I make patches with some software called Pure Data, and for a while I’ve been constructing lots of variations of things that essentially perform tape-loop/sampler type functions in that they capture a sound and play it back in some way. I incorporate degrees of randomness, pitch and beat detection, tempo ramps etc, and then the modular nature of the environment means I can create feedback loops and ‘nest’ things. Often I have some grand vision about a way for sound to be organised and then make a patch to execute it, other times it’s pure experimentation and improvisation.
CD: I noticed a few field recordings and found sounds scattered in amongst the tracks on ‘Microclimates’; what sorts of sounds did you end up using?
Reuben: In 2014 I played a couple of improvisational shows where I had a tape deck and a turntable on stage, sampled bargain-bin cassettes and LPs, and processed them with my patches. The last two tracks on the album are essentially remixes of excerpts from one of those sets, and some of that approach has bled into other tracks. The field recordings are some that I’ve taken around Canberra and the south coast of NSW. I love the sound of frogs and insects, especially cicadas.
CD: Have you had much of a chance to play these tracks live yet? What sorts of reactions have you had?
Reuben: I did one set where I used loops made from album stems and a bit of live guitar to create one long piece. It was well-received but I don’t think I want to pursue that angle. On the one hand I want my performance to be far more ‘live’, but on the other, re-creating the sound of the album in the kind of detail that would satisfy me is a big, daunting task – and maybe not in the spirit of the album anyway.
CD: Do you have any plans to play any shows interstate for this new record?
Reuben: Not as yet, though I’m developing and collating various patches into a new ‘rig’ for future dates.
Reuben Ingall’s ‘Microclimates’ album is available on Feral Media as a limited CD release or name your price download from http://feralmedia.bandcamp.com/album/microclimates
Photo by Adam Thomas
