Robin The Fog

Hello, you're listening to the Audio.com podcast, a place for conversations about all things relating to sound and music. I'm Ilia Rogatchevski. My guest today is a British composer, sound designer, radio producer, audio archivist, and educator, Robin The Fog. As a musician, Robin has been active since the mid-2000s, releasing a handful of tracks as part of the left-field dance trio Liberation Jumpsuit, as well as his Smack Miranda alias, on the short-lived label Bubblewrap Industries. After landing a job at the BBC World Service in the early 2010s, Robin began experimenting with reel-to-reel tape machines. From this period onwards, Robin focused on radiophonics, a practice of creating new abstract sounds from non-music source material. Using only natural reverb and a basic tape delay for effects, he created haunting soundscapes from field recordings of creaking door handles and garden gates. His 2012 album, The Ghosts of Bush, which was released under the Howlround pseudonym, was Robin's first proper foray into this world. The music was composed entirely from field recordings made at the BBC Bush House building, and was described by author Simon Reynolds as "the ultimate hauntological artefact". As Howlround, Robin has released numerous albums and EPs on labels such as Touch, Psyché Tropes and Buried Treasure. In recent years, the project has become more insular, almost industrial, foregrounding malfunctioning beats created entirely from tape machine feedback. Robin has produced bespoke sound designs for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Science Museum in London, as well as countless broadcast packages for Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. He has also collaborated with the sound artist Chris Weaver, who was a member of Howlround for some time, and the turntablist Strictly Kev as The New Obsolecents. His latest project, The Howling, a hörspiel duo with the writer Ken Hollings, is releasing its second album, Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway, on the Wormhole label on the 29th of September 2023. Robin currently works at the British Library as an audio preservation engineer, digitising various analogue recordings for posterity, and this is where our interview took place. I began by asking Robin what his earliest sonic memories were. My dad used to have a cassette of Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre, and apparently they used to use that to put me to sleep when I was a baby, and it's always been around when I was a kid, and I sort of felt like I knew it instinctively, even though as a sort of small child I don't think I would ever have sort of gone, I'm going to listen to this now. And the other one that springs to mind was the sound of a car driving over gravel, and I must have been about three or four, and I remember trying to replicate the sound in my head. I was holding my granddad's hand, I remember that much, and we were in a, it was a gravelly car park. It's a very warm, very particular kind of grainy sound, isn't it? Yeah, it sort of pops and it crunches. I suppose there's a musicality to it as well. When I was a kid, TV programmes I watched, or cartoons or whatever, I remember the sounds more than the dialogue. I used to be into planes when I was a kid, and there was a programme about fighter planes, and I remembered the sort of, when I found the episode like two decades later on YouTube or something, I remembered all of the rhythm of the different sounds in it, and the texture and the timbre of different engines and different moments in the film. So I guess I was always very sensitive to it. When you're that age, you don't really think, you don't go, ah, I'm becoming this sort of person. Because I think when you're a kid, everything's like that, isn't it? The first time you hear something, it's like, wow. I've played my music to babies, with their parents' permission. The thing with babies is you can tell when they're listening. So that's a formative experience, or they probably won't remember it, but it's something that is happening for the first time. And at that age, you don't have the language to articulate it. All you know is something is happening. You are to these babies what Jean-Michel Jarre was for you. Yeah, I guess so. But possibly, possibly slightly in a slightly less profound way. What got you into using sound as a form of expression? Basically, I was at uni doing music, which is ironic, really. I'm the only person, I think, probably ever, who has a degree in music, but can't play or read a note of it. But one of my lecturers, a chap called Bennett Hogg, I was in his study group, and he played us a piece of musique concrète. It was by Åke Parmerud, and it was a piece made out of a door knob. A light went on. All the music I loved was sort of, you know, jungle and techno, but mostly jungle. And the thing I loved about jungle was that, like hip-hop, had that element of bricolage, you know, of throwing things together, of sampling different things, and then sort of sometimes sampling unusual sounds as well. Simon Reynolds talks about this in Energy Flash. He talks about uncanny adjacence, which I really like. I think that's a really great way of putting it. And he was talking about sort of sample, modern sample culture, or as it was then – not that it's changed that much. I realised that, you know, musique concrète had all that anyway, but 50 years before. And he actually set us a project. I mean, this is 20 years ago. And he goes, take the sound and do something with it. And he goes, don't just put it into a sort of quasi-trance rhythm, you know, try and explore the properties of the sound a bit. Unfortunately, I did end up using different sounds a lot to just sort of make quite bad dance music. And it was only sort of after a few years, I gradually got more interested in actually just working with sounds and doing as little with them as necessary. And concentrating on that when you wouldn't really need to do anything with the sounds because they were interesting already. It was just a question of sort of, you know, knocking them into shape a bit. When did you arrive at using tape machines and should we say obsolete analog equipment as your main instruments? Two things. One, I'm always very cautious about using words like obsolete. I realise in the eyes of many people, these are outmoded, outdated equipment. But what I always say is, when someone sits down at a Steinway Grand, you don't go, oh, you're making retro music. My friend Chris, who I have made a lot of music with over the years. Chris Weaver. Chris Weaver, yes. He was interviewed a while back. Well, we both were. And he simply said, "these machines haven't finished". And I think that's the right way to look at it. Because what I always say, the most important thing is, I'm not using tape because it's cool, or it looks good, or it's retro. I got into doing this because my day job was cutting up waveforms on a computer screen, making sound pieces for radio and mostly current affairs stuff. And I realised the last thing I wanted to do was to come home and stare at more waveforms on a computer screen. And also, I realised I was really bored of everything I was making. Somehow, everything always turned out the way I thought it would. When I started, I knew what I would get at the end. And eventually I was just like, why bother? But the reason I use tape is because you don't have that luxury. It's unpredictable. You never quite know what you're going to get. You don't have a screen that's telling you what the waveform looks like. You are literally using your ears and your hands to make music. And as a result, you end up going in unusual directions because you sort of go where the machine takes you. But sometimes you don't really have to do anything. You can just put a sound onto the spool, play it back, play it back at half speed, cut a loop of it, and already it's sort of lost its origins. And you can't remember, unless you've written it down, you can't remember exactly what it was when you started because it's become this other thing. So, for me, I use tape because it transforms sounds easily. And it opens you up to a lot of improvisation. There's a lot of things that can go wrong or right, but that's quite exciting, quite interesting. So, and it was basically, I did a little tape editing as an exercise at the BBC when I started there. They said, you'll never need this, but it's useful to know. And then I worked with a guy called Thibault, who was secretly recording his band in the basement studio on night shifts when no one was looking. And I was down there one night, and Alexander Tucker and Dan Beban were also recording an album down there as Imbogodom And I noticed these tape loops that they'd left strung up on hooks in the studio, because people didn't go down there very much. And Thibault said, oh, have you never made a tape loop? It's easy. I'll show you. And so we literally, using a razor blade and some slicing tape, made a tape loop. There were still two tape machines in the studio, just still wired up, ready to go. They'd only fully gone digital a few years previously, so the machines were just there, permanently switched on, permanently plugged in. And so we just mucked around with tape loops for an hour or so, just recording stuff onto them. And this is Bush House, the old BBC World Service building. There was a door handle that made this beautiful squeaky noise upstairs in the corridors. It was partly the door handle, but also partly this kind of beautiful reverb that this huge hallway with a big ceiling made of Portland stone, which is a very resonant stone. And it made this beautiful echo in the space. I hadn't been able to make any music for ages, because I was all burnt out, but I was always listening to sounds. It was my phone. I didn't even have my recorder with me. But I got this microphone, held the phone up, recorded it onto tape, and then played it back at half speed. And then I had a recording of me whistling in the same environment. And suddenly the whistling at half speed sounded like this kind of mournful choir. It just suddenly had this rich sort of texture to it. And I just made loops of these things. And then I had another machine that I plugged into itself to make tape delay. And suddenly I had a piece. I wasn't able to predict what it would sound like when I started. Another light bulb went on. But that's the thing. I would not have discovered that way of working on a computer. I find it really interesting that you found your preferred method of working in the same context of the BBC, where radiophonics was developed as a practice. I find similarities between what you do and the work of Delia Derbyshire. So there's that sort of legacy that you are nodding to. And I'd like to ask if that's a fair assessment? And if there's any other people, artists, musicians that you look towards when you're creating your work? I'm always very flattered to have any kind of comparison with the Radiophonic Workshop and with Delia's work. I think my work has a lot less discipline because Delia was a musician and a mathematician. John Baker, who was another person at the workshop, he was a jazz musician. And he could work out how to cut tape so that it would be slightly ahead of the beat and give the piece a jazzy shuffle. If you listen to some of his work with hundreds of tape edits in the space of a few seconds, it's no wonder they all had mental health issues. It would drive anybody mad, I think. The conditions of the workshop were horrendous from what I've read. Yeah, I think in a way that that's very British, because if you look at Germany and France had actual organisations that were set up to conduct investigations into acousmatic sounds and avant-garde music and all this kind of stuff, well-funded places too. And there were places in America, of course, things like Columbia-Princeton and Mills College – well, the San Francisco Tape Music Center as it was then. There's places in Poland and places in the Netherlands, Eindhoven and all this sort of thing. And we didn't have any of that. It was a functioning workshop. They weren't there to experiment just to see what they could do. They had a jingle that needed to be done in a day or two or a theme tune for a TV show that had to be finished by the end of the week. And it was a small studio with hot equipment and no air conditioning and everybody was smoking all the time. Yeah, I can't imagine it was fun at all. I've been lucky enough to meet a few of them over the years, including the lovely Dick Mills and the lovely Brian Hodgson. So I've been given a bit of insight into how it was. Originally, you were only supposed to work there for six months because they were worried about what exposure to all this experimental sound would do to your health, which sounds a bit ridiculous now, really, doesn't it? But again, it just shows you what a new world it all was back then. I mean, and this is another thing, people going about the Doctor Who theme. It's still one of the most astonishing pieces of electronic music ever made, even now. But what we don't remember now is how shocking that would have been. To ordinary people, it didn't exist until that moment it came out of their TV sets on Saturday tea time. Until that moment, most people would have never heard anything like that before. And suddenly you're getting these sort of strange eerie sounds and it sounds sort of like music, but it doesn't sound like it's played on any instrument. Of course, it wasn't. It was made by cutting up sounds on tape. And I was a big fan of all of that stuff, you know, early electronic music in general. But the Radiophonic Workshop and things like musique concrète, I think there's a lot of discipline involved, whereas a lot of what I do is just sort of a bit sloppier. I would describe it as more playful. Yeah, I don't set out to be playful. A lot of it is trying to do something and it going wrong, but in quite an entertaining way. Graham Dunning talks about this. There's a quote from him that was, "the history of electronic music is doing it wrong on purpose". And I really like that. I think that's a brilliant quote. I don't do it wrong on purpose. But what I do now is I start with a sort of vague idea of what I want. And then I start working with sounds and seeing what happens. But a lot of what I do is in one take. It's setting up a situation, working it through, seeing what happens. And then a few days later, you might go, right, when did it work? And then you go, oh, there's a nice little five minute section here, or there's a little two minute passage there or 30 seconds here. And you're quite strict about not using any outboard effects. Absolutely. Yeah, very strict. No disrespect to anyone who does. But what I try and do with the Howlround project is I use non-musical sounds, sounds that haven't been played by an instrument, field recordings generally, cut to tape. And I edit, I play back at different speeds, I play in reverse, and I use tape delay, which is where I have one machine, which is recording, but it's also being fed back into the mix, borrowing another. And that is using Doctor Who. It's like the opening credits where the camera shoots the TV screen. But what I always say is the tape recorder is designed to record and to play back. Theoretically, it's meant to be seamless. You record your voice, you play it back. That's what it's meant to do. I love the fact that you can trick it into becoming this kind of creative tool by plugging it back into itself. It's kind of like a dog chasing its tail. That gives you the tape delay. It can also give you an echo, it can give you a bit of reverb, and it can also give the sound a kind of nice saturated feel to it. And it's also about embracing what tape does, because after a while, the loops start to break down, they start to degrade, they start to get damaged, there are dropouts. Sometimes something hasn't been properly recorded. There's a lovely noise you get sometimes when the playhead moves off the tape. When you hit the stop button, it sort of goes whoop, and then you can sort of put that through the delay, and you get this nice little squeak. So when you half the speed of a tape, you take it down an octave. You can sort of, you know, record something at 15 inches a second and play it back at seven and a half and record that, and then keep going right the way down. There's a guy called Jim Fassett in the 50s, I think, in New York. He did a thing called Strange To Your Ears, where he took a canary, put it onto tape, and I think he took the canary down nine octaves in the end, and it sounds like a whale. When you talk about hacking the tape machine, when you sort of use the technology in a way that it wasn't intended, it reminds me of, I think, what Caleb Kelly referred to as cracked media. There's a book called Crack Media, wasn't there, which had people like Yasunao Tone on it, and there's a huge tradition of people deliberately screwing, I mean, you know, I'm thinking of, was it Disinformation did a thing called Circuit Blasting, where they would take cheap Casio keyboards and feed them with far too much electricity, basically give them far more than they could cope with, and in the short period before they exploded, they'd start making all these crazy sounds. Obviously, people like Philip Jeck, making audio spider's webs out of samples of old LPs, and of course, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops. Obviously, that's a hugely important work, and a hugely beautiful work as well. So I suppose it's an exploration of partly of sort of frailty and fragility of objects, of mediums. I think, yeah, basically, what interests me about all of these things is it's the sort of fallibility, the sort of fragility of the equipment, the sounds you're getting, the technology. The reason I think Basinski's work is so beautiful is because I think it says a lot, you know, and also people like The Caretaker, you know, I think there's no coincidence that, you know, that he's gone on to make sort of music very much inspired by things like Alzheimer's and all this kind of stuff. It speaks to us about our own fragility and our own sort of temporalness. There's a lovely Joanna Newsom lyric: "landlocked in bodies that don't keep, dumbstruck with the sweetness of being till we don't be", which is really quite affecting when you think about it. I think working with, and again, this is not something I went, aha, I'm going to start working in this way, because it says this about the human condition, or it says this about this equipment. You know, I think that's probably why it resonates with people because, you know, the sort of the frailty, the fragility, the fallibility of it all. I mean, these machines will stop working one day soon. All of my, all of the gear I have at home, everything I use on stage, it will stop working soon. Like, you know, hopefully not too soon, but at some point it will end, but then so will I. So, you know, and what makes The Disintegration Loops so beautiful is that you're watching that happen in real time. You're watching something dying, but it's beautiful. Because you started with four machines and now you're down to two? When I play live, it's supposed to be four machines, but the trouble is all of them have different things wrong with them. So, it's about trying to work out what the best way to get through the set is. One of them can only do loops. One of them, when you press play, the play head doesn't quite engage with the tape properly. They all need a good servicing, basically. I'm going to probably have to drop it down to two just because my spine is not getting any younger, and it is, you know, it's over 30 kilograms when you've got the full set up with the mixing desk and all the spools and four machines. I'd like to do a bit of time traveling, if that's okay with you. Absolutely. I'd like to begin by talking about The Ghosts of Bush, which was recorded at the old BBC World Service studios in central London before they closed their doors for good. You talked a little bit about it already, but I'd like to know how you moved from that musique concrète working practice to using machines themselves as a sort of closed input tool for making, essentially, techno music, which is more or less where you are now with the latest record, Trespass and Welfare. I didn't set out to be angry and abrasive and broken, but I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, well, it's music for broken times. I never set out to go, this is going to be my protest record, or this is going to be my sad record, or this is going to be my mournful depiction of a building that's about to close record. It just seems to work out that way. I always said that the project got bigger as it got smaller because the first album was a whole building, the second album was a smaller building, the third album was a garden gate, and then the fourth album was a hinge, but all the time I was using the machines more and sort of feeding them back into themselves more, and I didn't mean it to just start getting sort of more noisy and angry and abrasive. That was never my intention necessarily, but it is a weird coincidence that as things have got worse in the last sort of 10 years, or certainly in the last seven years, the music's got angrier and noisier. With the first album you were sort of looking to your exterior environment and then you were sort of narrowing down and maybe almost climbing into the machine itself and there's a sort of isolation that happens, I suppose, and maybe it's about the sounds of the inner workings of the mechanism, and your 2020 EP Volte Face is quite a good indication of that isolationism because that's where everybody was at that time. But I'd started making that very angsty, abrasive stuff before the pandemic. In some of that stuff there is a kind of catharsis in it as well, I think. There is a sort of slightly mad joy to it as well. I'm not deliberately trying to wring an emotion out of the machine, but it is true that that does seem to be what happens. But with Bush House, really, I just loved the sounds of the building. I wanted to capture all the sounds that I knew around me as I was doing my night shifts or, you know, doing early morning news programs. I just wanted to use the sounds to make music. I didn't intend to make it sort of almost a eulogy. I will say this, I think it's very hard to do tape music and make it jolly. I think the only person I know who can manage it is Beatriz Ferreyra, whose music, even when she's using tape, just has this sort of effervescence and this light and this sort of airiness to it, you know. It's full of life and I don't know how she does it. Everyone else I know who works with tape, the music sounds very stark and very heavy. I think working with tape just lends itself to that. I personally think that the best electronic music is a little bit melancholy, a little bit dark, and I wonder if that's because it is essentially night music, it is club music. I guess not all of it is, but even if we're talking about working in the context of radiophonics, you're still stuck in a studio and you're not seeing any daylight. Very true, that's a very good point. Any sort of jolly dance music, and again this isn't a criticism of it, but it's designed to be sort of consumed while you're having fun in a club or in a social situation. A really good example, I think, is always The Avalanches, who I think are absolutely brilliant. It's very sort of celebratory music on the surface, but it does have this sort of undertow of melancholy to it as well. It's sort of like the soundtrack to that perfect summer that nobody ever has. Actually, I should say this, I think there's a really interesting period around 1993, because, you know, hardcore and jungle were my first love, and I got into hardcore in 92. And in 92, all the music was very uplifting, and then if you fast forward a year, the sort of ecstasy high was coming down, and people were having to take more to get the same effects, because they weren't getting the same effects, they were starting to get bad come downs. And the music, it's only a year later, but it's still got on the surface that euphoria, but there's a darker undertow in there as well. If you compare Out of Space by the Prodigy with No Good Start the Dance by the Prodigy, which I think those tracks are 18 months apart, maybe. On the surface, if you purely objectively look at them, they're very similar. You know, they've got a sort of high-pitched vocal sample, big sort of cathedral-size riffs, banging beats. But one of them is like, wow, we're having so much fun, this is so crazy. And the other one is, I'm having a panic attack. But ostensibly, they're the same kind of music. Now, again, I'm not suggesting for a moment that was a deliberate intention on the part of Liam Howlett, although he had his own opinions about where the scene was going and where he wanted to take it. There's that point of experimentation when the people are creating music, and they're not quite sure where it's going. I think Mark Fisher talked about jungle being, you know, that promise of the future, like it's going to lead somewhere interesting. And then it becomes accepted, homogenised, the techniques in creating that music become standardised, and you arrive at something like what the Prodigy later became, where it's very sort of formulaic. And yeah, sure, you can dance to it, but it's not forward-thinking. Mark Fisher is the, I mean, it's almost become a cliché to say it now, but him and Simon Reynolds, they wrote so beautifully on this sort of thing. So when he talks about "jungle sounded like the future rushing in", you know, you can hear the excitement in his thinking. And so much of that early jungle, you can tell they just got this equipment, they didn't quite know how it worked. And they were just sort of throwing ideas around and just seeing what it would do. If you look at the rate of change in electronic music in those few years in the 90s, one of my pet theories is, and I've had arguments with people about this, and I'm not saying I'm right, but I think it's an interesting idea. I think that jungle was the last step forward in music. I think it was the last time there was a genuine leap into the unknown, because you had samplers that could cut a sound up, a breakbeat or whatever, into infinitely small little shards of sound and rearrange it in a way that no drummer ever could. Now we have the same music, but in high definition. There's been no great sweeping movements forward since that time in the sort of mid 90s, when suddenly you could make music in a new way. Everything since then has been distilling the same ideas, you know, the kind of you think of the music that's come afterwards, like, you know, dubstep and grime and garage. I'm not denigrating any of that. But the sort of future shock isn't there. I think technology seems to turn to how we consume the music, rather than how we make it. And I think it has ever since. And of course, you know, then I am say all of this, being aware that all of the techniques I used were pioneered in the 50s, and in the 40s, in some cases, so I'm well aware that there is a potential charge of hypocrisy there. So we talked a little bit about melancholy nostalgia you get when listening to tape music, and I want to focus in on another side project you've got going called The Howling, which is a duo with Ken Hollings, who is an author and presenter. And from what I gather, it runs parallel a little bit to your work as a radio producer as somebody who creates soundscapes for radio plays and programmes. So can you talk a little bit about what The Howling is, how it originated? What are you trying to do with that project? The vision for The Howling, I can't really talk about that without Ken being here, because it's very much our project. What unites us both is that we both love sort of trash culture. And we both love sort of mucking around with spoken word, with texts. The thing I always say about The Howling is I'm not, I always say I don't really know what it is and I don't really know who it's for. But that's exciting. We know we're working on ideas for pieces all the time. And I never until literally the piece is finished, I don't know what it's going to sound like. And it kind of stresses me to be honest, because this piece we were making called Skydivers, we had this idea, it was Ken's idea actually, to use the V8 engine from a 1940s street rod, you know, just sort of idling as the rhythm track. And then right up until the moment where we spliced it into a loop and hit play. And I was like, I don't think this is gonna, oh, it works. Oh my god, it's working. Quick hit record. You know, a lot of people will assume, oh, you know, Ken's the writer, you're the sound guy. So your roles will be divided. But it's actually not turned out like that at all. Because Ken often provides audio for the sound recordings. I help out by finding texts sometimes. So it's very much a shared role, which is why I can't really talk about it without him being here. Except to say our second album, Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway, is out now on pre-order. And I'm quite excited about it. It's kind of a, I suppose you could say some of it's like a sort of hörspiel kind of audio drama type thing. Some of it feels more like sort of techno. Somebody described this as the missing link between John Cage and Suicide. It's not that I'm antisocial. I just normally work on my own so much. So it's been really strange to find someone I really connect with like that. We both just, we both love really bad films. But I always say a really good bad film doesn't know it's a bad film. It's trying to be a good film. A bad film that knows it's a bad film is just shit. David Guest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor. Oil on velvet paintings, shagpile carpet, plastic furniture, fluorescent colours, black light mist floats, nitrous oxide, crystal meth, not giving a good screaming goddamn about modernism, entertainment comics, porno versions of fairy tales, the word wacky, lip gloss, novelty beer can holders, tanning salons, lube, instant cake mix, Rondo Hatton, amazing stories, Manic Panic, Farrah Fawcett, Sonny Cheeba, Conan the Barbarian, NRA belt buckles, superhero movies and TV shows, every comic book ever produced anywhere, Jack Chick, Jackie Chan. David Guest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor. Wallace Wood's Suicide, the ubu plays of Alfred Jarry, Battle of Wolverton, Coleman Francis, Head Striker, Broom Hilbert, Garbage Pail Kid, Gerald McBoing Boing, The Crimson Ghost, The Hooded Claw, Shirley Batty, Teenagers on Council Estates, Pole Fighting and Pole Dancing, anything with the word mondo in the title, Weird Science, Grand Ark Freemasonry, Conspiracy Theories, The Paranormal, Bordellos, Crips, Rockets, Sideshows, Palmistry, Telepathy, Past Lives, Psychic Powers, Sea Monkeys, Self-Help Books, David Guest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor. So we talked quite a bit about your work as a musician and maybe we could round off the interview by talking about where we're actually sitting right now and what you do for a living. So we are in a dark studio with no windows, thankfully there is air conditioning, but we are in the basement of the British Library and around me I can see some reel-to-reel machines, not engaged, not currently spinning around. There are also stacks of tape machines, a couple of computer screens, compressors. Where are we and what are we doing here? We are in a studio in the British Library Centre for Conservation and my day job is I'm part of a team of audio preservation engineers and as the title suggests our job is literally to preserve audio from decaying analog formats. What I'm doing at the moment is I'm digitising four cassettes, well actually three cassettes simultaneously because it looks like one of the cassette machines has decided to blow a gasket, so that's not good. But yes, what we're doing is I'm currently digitising a collection of recordings of different dialects and that will then be subsumed into the British Library's permanent collection and researchers, members of the public, will be able to come and hear these recordings. In this studio we alternate between cassette and reel-to-reel. At the moment I'm set up for cassette but the next collection I think is going to be going back to reel-to-reel. We also do shellac discs, we do lacquer discs, we do wax cylinders, we do what are called dictabelts, we do all kinds of strange formats but as one of the slightly more junior engineers here I tend to concentrate on cassette and reel-to-reel because I know those formats pretty well. At the moment we've got... [plays cassette] "Yeah, that thing is perishable. (laughter)" Got an old recording of someone telling a few jokes. It pays the bills and it is work I care about very much because, you know, these formats won't last forever. The bizarre thing is cassettes in particular, they're hardy little sods. Some of these collections are being re-digitised because 20 years ago they were digitised to CDR and so all of those are now presumably unplayable, so we're having to do them again and obviously hard drive capacity has gone up so hugely. But the crazy thing is even now this isn't a permanent solution. At some point the hard drive will have to be copied to another one at another one. I came to an archiving workshop here about 12 years ago, a conference, an archiving conference, and after a whole day of this, in fact that was where I saw Mark Fisher talk. He gave a talk that started with "What's the point of all this archiving when we've all forgotten how to listen." To my memory the entire auditorium leaned forward, because we've had a whole day of people talking about how they preserve master tapes and what's strongroom humidity and all this kind of stuff. But I left at the end of the day thinking, thank God I don't work in archiving, it's a nightmare. So here we are. But I do love it. Do you have a favourite or most unusual sound that you've preserved during your time at the British Library? Well, when I was working on the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project, which is a nationwide project helmed by the British Library that ended last year, I was working for London Met Archives and we found this collection, it's incredible really, from the Inner London Education Authority, which is a very left-wing progressive educational institution from I think the 50s to the early 90s. Very forward-thinking, very liberal. Also, you know, probably quite flawed as well. But they were doing things where they had like, we found this box of graphic scores for kids, literally teaching children about experimental music aimed at 10 to 13 year olds. And at the time when, you know, people like Stockhausen and, you know, all these other composers were exploring similar ideas. There's a couple of little spools of tape with recordings on there of some of the scores brought to life, just tantalisingly short, just sort of 90 seconds each. But really, they don't sound that different from what the sort of the grown-ups were doing. Also, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry archive, we had this recording of handbells, just literally a performance on handbells by a group of bell ringers. And it was a tape where, these are stereo machines, they're two-track. A lot of old machines would have worked in a similar way to cassettes. You would have recorded one side, flipped it over and recorded the other side. So this is a performance stretched across two sides of the tape. But when you play them back on a stereo machine, you get the performance forwards in the left-hand channel and backwards on the other side in the right-hand channel. So you get this instant sort of Brian Eno ambient soundscape. And we actually got hold of the guy who owned the rights to the collection. And we said, look, do you mind if we put this online? Because it's really beautiful. And he was great. He just said, do whatever you want with it. Is there anything else you'd like to say about your, either your work at the British Library, or your work at the BBC, or your work as Howlround? Anything that we haven't covered that you'd like people to know about? I should say I find, I find it quite hard making, making music because it's, and I always say I don't call myself a musician, but I do call what I make music because it's, it's sound arranged musically. Organised sound. Yeah, it's organised sound, therefore it's music. Whether you like it or not is, is another matter. It's not something that comes easy necessarily. I always say with creating music or creating sound or writing or painting or whatever, a lot of the time when you're creating, you're searching for something. You're searching for that elusive thing. And 90% of the time, if you're searching for something, you're not finding it. A lot of this work is searching for something. And a lot of that is not finding it. The search will continue basically. Somehow, I will always find a way to keep searching for this next exciting sound.