BigShinyThing

Under the aegis of Illustrious, a business he’s started with Erasure’s Vince Clarke, Ware is exploring new territories of sonic experience. The public face of Illustrious is large-scale public audiovisual installations with an emphasis on 3D sound, lighting effects and performances. Behind the scenes, Ware is busy lecturing, working with researchers and artistic collaborators, and drumming up sponsorship.

BigShinyThing caught up with Martyn in his studio to ask him a few questions about his unique vision for 3D sound and multisensory art.

BST: At a time when the iconic experience of music is on-the-move, via headphones, from a pocket full of instantly-available low-quality mp3 downloads: why Illustrious: big, site-specific and public?

MARTYN WARE: Because we’re stupid and anti-fashion! We believe very much in the experiential — in immersing people in happenings. What we’re doing reminds me of the excitement of forming The Human League: exploring in the undiscovered ‘country of sound’.

We’ve always attempted to do something interesting to us, creating a new oeuvre. It’s always in your soul to do something different — the thrill of the unexpected. We want people to feel ‘you had to be there’ to understand it. The Rock vernacular is a bit tired and clichéd — there are some fantastic shows around with good sound, but not so many that offer anything other than an experience for the feet.

With The Human League and Heaven 17, you really did start an oeuvre: you invented electronic pop music! Do you feel that what you’re doing now is blazing a trail that others will follow?

The same people who were enthused then are the people who are enthused now — albeit a different generation. With dance music, as soon as you go down the DJ route, anyone with intelligence sooner or later wants to create their own content. Big name DJs who have made lots of money go on to make their own music, try and make their own sounds — and then find that their own stuff is more interesting than the stuff they were reproducing.

Do you feel that you have ’seen the promised land’ with 3D sound? Do you see your role as evangelism?

That’s all I ever do — I am John the Evangelist! Merging immersive art with sound is what I’m about. If more people are exposed to it they will dig it as well — I’m not the only one. It just makes sense to me. People intuitively like immersive experience — I’m into designing and changing people’s perception of what they are doing.

I love generative art and I love art that takes into account the content. Personally I think the whole VJ thing is puerile, just cutting up content to match a beat. The sort of thing we’re looking at involves multiple levels of art and entertainment: a hybrid of theatre and happenings. We’re also working on a hybrid of theatre and cinema: combining recent technologies to create brand new forms of experience. One of the things we are working on at the moment — a piece to perform at Gateshead called Near Life Experience (hopefully in January 2007 if the funding comes through) — features immersive 3D sound, a 30-piece choir in normal clothing concealed in the audience, members of the royal ballet, state of the art lighting design…

What’s your next public project?

Our next big project is the world’s largest public 3D sound field at ‘Sound Oasis’, an installation in Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. It’s a 24-hour piece by 12 different sound artists rendered in 3D. The whole thing is predicated on using the sounds of Mexico City, modulating reality. Maryanne Amacher is performing the piece which won her won the Ars Electronica digital music prize at Linz last year. Chris Watson is involved, UltraRed…

And with Designers Republic (also from Sheffield!) we’re doing the British Pavilion at the Architectural Biennale in Venice later this year.

In previous interviews, you have been upfront about your desire for sponsors and collaborators from the commercial and artistic worlds. Who would be your ideal collaborator? The perfect sponsor?

[laughs] Sponsors? Anyone who has giant amounts of money (just being honest!) We have some very interesting research collaborators and ideas — and it would be really useful to have access to some sort of state funding but we don’t seem to have that in this country. It seems more open in the US — they have a more honest relationship with sponsors, easy tax deductions and so on. We’ve had massive support from — and I can’t thank them enough — Bowers and Wilkins, who provide all our speakers and amps.

Collaborators? We’re interested in collaborators who can see the relevance of immersive sound to their business or art. We want to work with talented people with an open mind with skills that interlock but don’t necessarily overlap. Frankly, we’re not so interested in musicians — we’re more interested in performance artists and immersive artists of all kinds, architects and so on.

We did a lecture at The Royal Institution recently where we had sound-based toys in the foyer, and then at Cybersonica we met some nice folk who we’ll be doing more ‘future of sound’ stuff with, and we’ll have their sonic art in the foyers for future lectures. It’s all about engagement. We don’t really want to hold onto all the intellectual property of what we’re doing. I’m a big admirer of the Open Source way of doing things — there’s something very British about the idea of making something that maybe doesn’t quite work all the time and being brave enough to get up on stage with it, a bit edge-of-your-seat. We’re like Victorian explorers coming back with rhinos and things from our adventures — I travel a lot and like to bring people and knowledge back to share.

The challenge is just not to take the easy route. We all get tempted to take the easy one — compared to when we started out in the 80s, time is more limited and there’s less money available for making things and less money to be made by selling them in the long term.

There was less time pressure ‘then’: we would spend three months designing a new synth and making sounds in interesting ways — now I could create an LP’s worth of material in a week. It wouldn’t be anywhere as good as the old stuff but it would be interesting and that’s the problem.

With modern technology people — particularly people from the laptop fraternity — can get to a high level very quickly but with little substance. The challenge is for people to go from a facile route into a more difficult territory. That’s not the fault of the manufacturers or plug-in makers — they are just trying to make your life easier but inevitably that makes the product worse.

Is anyone still doing it ‘hard and interesting’ way? Is there anyone particular you admire for the way they make music?

It depends on whether it is derived from artisanship — look at someone like Vince [Clarke] who writes his songs on guitar then transcribes them as kind of contrapuntal monophonic layers…

There’s no-one who instantly springs to mind. There’s the electro-acoustic scene which I find interesting: the degradation of traditional music is interesting in itself. I’m working on a new BEF album where I limit myself to three virtual synths and no singers but famous actresses/actors to sing the words of familiar songs — the kind of sound we had on the track Morale… You’ve lost that Loving Feeling [on The Human League’s Reproduction].

What about the MySpace generation?

Today I was down at Brixton at our surround studio and one of the engineers was on MySpace. Looking at his page, Herbie Hancock is one of his ‘friends’ and he said they met on MySpace and talk all the time online. I mean that’s amazing — you’ve never met him, and you’re talking with Herbie Hancock (who must be amazingly busy) because you’re both interested in the same things! What struck me was the egalitarianism of it. I love it — MySpace is just one example. I like last.fm and Pandora — all these generative, modulating systems.

Your work is technically demanding for installation, but growing numbers of people have access to surround sound at home — do you have any plans for a ‘home version’ of any of your immersive works?

We work closely with DTS. We can produce binaural recordings with our tech but I’m not convinced that it works so well. In terms of delivering the 3D sound experience it just depends on where the speakers are — a cube of speakers for example would work. For that end we’re about to get into business with [conceptualist and producer] Charlie Morrow. He’s designed a kind of stand with one speaker on the floor, one high up on thin tubing which folds over for traveling. If you have four around a room then there’s your domestic set up. We can create 3D sound from 2D existing material which works spectacularly well — great for DJs in a club environment.

The big problem is content. Most record companies don’t even want to provide surround sound. For some reason lots of LPs have been mixed in 5.1 but the master tapes are just sitting on shelves, never released. I was thinking about starting a company to license the rights to these unused surround recordings and create a new label. But I don’t really want to be a record label: that model doesn’t appeal to me at all. Actually, people at the labels are keen, but everyone’s waiting for someone else to break the format if you know what I mean.

Listening to a stereo — actually sitting down to listen to music — doesn’t seem to happen to me anymore: I’m either in my surround studio, or at a PC with really tiny, crap speakers — it’s more likely that you watch TV, the Internet… The notion of listening to music conventionally sounds tedious now — there are so many other things to do.

I’m mixing the new album in surround and it will be available in 5.1. I don’t particularly like stereo anymore to be honest — it’s boring. Actually surround sound bores me — I’ve been doing 3D for 5 years now!

(Big thanks to Martyn, and to Lisa at Cybersonica for facilitating the interview)