Stay Positive: In Conversation with Immersion’s Colin Newman & Malka Spigel

“Are we too weak to push the rock up / Or are we stronger than we think?” questions Malka Spigel on Push the Rock – one of the focal points on Immersion’s latest release, WTF??

It’s been quite the year for Spigel and partner in crime, Colin Newman, who already have one Immersion release under their belt – the latest volume in their Nanocluster series, this time alongside post-country titans, SUSS, adding to the catalogue which includes collaborations with Thor Harris, Ulrich Schnauss, Cubzoa, Laetitia Sadier, Tarwater and Scanner. (The latter, the project of Newman and Spigel’s Githead bandmate, Robin Rimbaud.)

The subsequent U.S. tour with SUSS saw Newman and Spigel continuing to build up a head of steam and there’s no let-up on WTF?? – an album that crystallises the uncertainty of these times. “Immersion started quite pure. It was very organic. Machine, drums and synthesizers,” says Spigel during our conversation earlier this month via Zoom alongside her Immersion bandmate and partner, Newman.

The pair are talking all things Immersion, recounting the band’s early years, including their album Oscillation, which – coincidently – celebrated its thirtieth anniversary just two days before our chat. The tide has shifted for Immersion since then; Newman and Spigel now joined by drummer, Matt Schulz (Holy Fuck, SAVAK, Lake Ruth et al), which sees the band in a whole new light. Their explorations during the Nanocluster series, taking the project to wonderful new places, and that energy feeds into WTF?? and its stern examination of the world’s ills.

WTF?? sees Newman and Spigel tackle the world’s dark austerities with straight talking. From the pulsating Use it Don’t Lose It and Push the Rock to the innovative trance-rock one-two of Timeline and How to Be, WTF?? is a clarion call that sees Spigel and Newman influencing positive change through art in a bid to ensure the future isn’t as bleak as many forecast it to be. That “world gone mad” as Spigel suggests on Push the Rock and how art can empower those participants to rise against it.

Sonically, WTF?? hits the mark, too. Spigel’s Minimal Compact, a notable influence on Newman and Wire’s later years, and together as Immersion, they continue to survey the current climate with nimble, forward-thinking electronica. WTF??’s interludes in particular, a bridge between old and new Immersion, led by Schulz’s work from behind the kit and Newman and Spigel’s agile approach, forming motorik collages that float (It’s A Ling Way to Brooklyn), glide (Defiance) and somehow do both (Change of Use, On the Longest Day).

Speaking to Newman and Spigel, and there’s no surprise their music sounds and feels so effortless. With decorated careers – Newman’s as leader of post-punk touchstones, Wire; Spigel’s in the equally revered Minimal Compact; together in Githead – their alliance both as artists and life partners is seamless. Their enthusiasm for new music, in particular, is infectious, highlighted by their weekly radio show, Swimming in Sound, which has gone on to influence their work in Immersion, as they are about to explain.

Sun 13: Your song Not About Me from Nanocluster Vol.2 featuring Cubzoa got me thinking about technology and how it’s shaped the way we communicate and behave these days. Did you ever envisage a society that would become so selfish?

Colin Newman: (Laughs) “No is the simple answer. Why is the album called WTF??, you know? It’s just a stream of consciousness thing. Not about me, but it seems to be a text that’s fed into where we’re coming from. It just feels right to be saying stuff like that – being direct and not beating around the bush. This is not a time for being discursive, you know? We’re not into, like, ‘Fuck you’, add a name to that. It’s more like reflecting.”

Malka Spigel: “You just can’t believe what’s happening. Every day feels worse than the day before. The absurdity of everything would be funny, but it’s not funny.”

S13: In terms of music, did you ever think that it would be reduced to the way most people listen to it these days?

CN: “I think one thing that you have to be as an artist is not snobbish about how people consume your art, and be adaptable. I don’t think anyone consuming our album on anything other than the high-end stereo, playing the vinyl, is having an inferior experience. Most people make their records on equipment which is lower quality than high-end stereo. People spend thousands of pounds on their stereo.”

MS: “I think we lose the value in general, like, what it means…”

CN: “Absolutely. People are getting every record that’s ever been released for five pounds a month. And they complain about that! It’s too much. The reality of that doesn’t suit the artist. In many ways, it suits the industry, because it’s all about scale. How many people are paying for a service like Spotify and probably listening to records they bought in their youth? They’re not even exploring new music.”

MS: “I don’t want to sound like it was better in the old days, but when you put out a record, it had power and longevity. Now it all kind of comes and goes. There’s something a bit sad when you put a lot into what you do.”

CN: “It’s probably even more nakedly so than it was years ago. The innovation is coming from the independent sector. The more independent, the more artistic innovation, which basically doesn’t suit the way the industry is set up. To them the best is historical releases from dead artists. Especially ones that were massively famous. And then second to that, you get some AI artists sounding like stuff that’s genuinely popular. The whole thing, the level of cynicism there, is really quite staggering. The industry exists to serve the shareholders. The consumers of the music and the makers of the music are the two least important people in the system.”

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S13: With your weekly radio show, Swimming in Sound, it underlines how much you both have finger on the pulse of new music, which is quite rare for a lot of artists who have been around for decades. Do you listen to new music more than past material?

MS: “Oh yeah. What the radio show did for us, it opened the world of what’s going on now and how good it is, and we get inspired by it for our own creativity.”

CN: “That and the Nanocluster collaborations that we’ve done… some of the artists were kind of mates already, but others are people who we actually came to through the show. They picked up that we were playing their music, we fell into a conversation, and that starts to become something entirely different.

“We’re in Brighton… it’s not that we don’t know anybody our own age, it’s just most of the people who are active are somewhat younger. It’s what’s really great about the fact that we have the radio show and added to what we’re doing with Immersion means that there are very few barriers between us and artists in their ’30s and ’40s. We’re all part of the same thing.”

MS: “We’ve always been curious and looking for new stuff.”

CN: “The radio show crystallised it.”  

S13: Was the SUSS collaboration via the radio show?

CN: “Absolutely. Malka finds most of the stuff, and she found SUSS. I mean, ambient country – that sounds like something you’re not going to want to listen to (laughs), but that’s Bob [Holmes’] definition of it.”

MS: “When I first heard the music, I thought it was younger artists doing something fresh and new. Then we discovered they were not young, and they called it ambient country! But the music speaks for itself. It’s amazing. Then to imagine that we can collaborate with them. We thought, ‘Really? How would that work?’ But it worked because we have respect for the people we collaborate with. We go into their world, and we can combine what we do, although every time it’s anxious because you don’t know if it’s going to work and what kind of people they are… whether they are easy going or precious.

“You find your way sometimes, the moments where it feels a bit hard, and then you move forward and suddenly you have a record! When I look back, I’m proud of the record. Going on tour with them, it’s another absurdity. Almost a month with people that you’ve never met before, and you end up friends! There’s a great power to it.”

CN: “There is a great power in collaborating with different artists. We don’t really talk about future Nanocluster collaborations before they’ve taken place, although I think it’s an open secret that we’re doing something with Katja [Rackin] and Sam [Stacpoole] from Holiday Ghosts, but there are other people that we’re talking to. Some of the collaborations we have in mind are completely mental, and the opposite of SUSS. I mean, if that was a model airplane, it wouldn’t fly. (laughs) It doesn’t work on paper, but the thing is when you start to talk to people, it’s about finding a way. It’s about innovation. You have to be nimble and thoughtful.”

MS: “It’s interesting to be taken out of your comfort zone. It’s challenging, but then it really takes you further as an artist and I feel like anything is possible, because we tried this and it worked.”

CN: “The energy that we got from the different collaborations that we did over the first three Nanoclusters definitely fed into the new album. The combination of that and the radio show, we have so much context to draw from.”

S13: How much did the collaborations influence WTF??

MS: “I don’t think it’s a direct influence. It’s not like, ‘Oh, a bit of SUSS went into it, or a bit of Cubzoa’. It’s that you become more confident and open, and that feeds into what you create.”

CN: “In finishing the record, the fact that we toured the majority of that material over this spring really gives you a point of contact of the energy. We also played a lot of those tracks around Britain on last year’s tour as well. So you’ve had audience reactions… people coming up and talking to you about it, so you have a sense of what it is that you’re doing. It’s not just into the ether. It feels rooted somehow.”

S13: It’s such a well-rounded record that sonically pulls from the project’s core elements over the years. Making something like Oscillating, did you ever think you would make an album like this one?

CN: “No way. I mean, we did Oscillating because, well… we did Immersion because we really got fascinated with techno. We loved the facelessness of it, the fact that you could be anybody. We come from worlds and projects where you have to deal with a lot of baggage. It’s not just within the politics of bands and stuff like that; it’s people’s expectations. People expect it to be something and expect you to be somebody. So wouldn’t it be great to do a project where we were just nobody?”

MS: “We were influenced by the artists we were listening to. You could be from anywhere. You could be any age. It wasn’t about the image. We never thought of what was next.”

CN: “It’s actually 10 years since we reactivated not long after we moved to Brighton. It was partly because we’d been doing stuff with Githead with one member living in the Netherlands, and then we ended up in Brighton, and Robin was somewhere north of London. And then Malka had a band where people were living in four different countries. It seemed so impractical. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do something that just the two of us are doing, without having to consult with anybody else?’ It’s completely flexible.”

MS: “And then in terms of ego, we don’t really have ego between us which gives us the freedom to be ourselves and to express whatever, and to be critical without thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t say that to that person’. That’s something that would be difficult to do in most bands.”

CN: “We’re a couple. I think it’s an important dynamic, because most humans are in couples of some kind, and working with your partner is not necessarily always the easiest thing to do. We always had a natural affinity for working together from day one. We’ve always done stuff together.”

S13: Speaking of day one, do you remember the specific moment when you decided to start making music as Immersion?

MS: “I would say when we got into electronic music, and I had this MS-10 analogue synthesizer. It’s a Korg, and it’s a kind of voice that’s used all the way through Immersion. I guess it became my instrument within the project… we build things, not around it, but it was part of it.”

CN: “It was ’94 when the first album came out, we had just we put out Malka’s first solo album [Rosh Ballata], which was the first thing that we put out on swim ~, and then we released an album by Oracle of this project we worked on with Samy [Birnbach] from Minimal Compact… that was basically a compilation of tracks we worked on for the previous five years.

“We wanted to do electronic music… the purity of it because there was something about both Rosh Ballata and the Oracle album, they’re quite impure. They’re a mixture of things that’s strangely become really current. That Oracle album – which is really difficult for us to listen to now because it sounds so dated – I hear that harmonic world a lot in different places, and that combination of vocals and hip-hop beats wasn’t really innovative at the time, because it was not something that anybody was that interested in. They were very different worlds.

“The world of songs and the world of dance music were very far apart in the ’90s. I think that’s really changed now, because everything is mixed with everything. Sometimes that’s kind of okay… we can talk about purity, but sometimes the music we make is really impure. It doesn’t belong in one tradition. It isn’t one thing, it’s several at once, and sometimes quite conflicting.”

S13: Thematically, you touched on the directness of WTF?? Were there any other vital aspects that you wanted to capture with the record?

CN: “Like any other thing, it’s basically the material that you have that you work on to finish…”

MS: “…So it reflects what we’re into, or what we do at this moment or in the last period.”

CN: “The core of the material was actually written last year because, by a strange series of coincidences, Immersion became a touring band in Britain. This is something we’d never done before. Nobody had ever asked us! We didn’t imagine that could happen, but suddenly we did our first tour last autumn, and then our agent said, ‘Do you want to do another one next year?’ We said, ‘Okay, we better do an album before we do it’.”

MS: “We’re always busy with various things, so you have to kind of go for what’s required.”

CN: “We thought that if we’re going to make our set an hour long for a headline set (it had previously been a half-hour Nanocluster / festival set), instead of doing what any sane person would do – like fish out some oldies – we said, ‘Let’s add some new material’. But the thing is that we had been diligently recording stuff, and Matt Schulz has been very responsible in this. He will just say, ‘I’m here doing some gigs, can we fix something?’

MS: “He turns up and then we go into a studio. We jam basically, and then keep the recording. We might just use the drums or use the whole jam as a build up for a new track.”

CN: “We had some stuff that we could pick out and say, ‘Okay, let’s get these tracks to work’. Also, Nanocluster Vol.2 is full of stuff recorded in our friend John Emmanuel’s studio in Brighton. We also recorded stuff in Brooklyn which we visited in 2022.”

MS: “It’s kind of interesting that we recorded in different locations wherever Matt is and we are. We don’t know what for, and then it becomes used for either a collaboration for what we do. We toured with him, too. He’s an amazing drummer, very adaptable.”

CN: “He obviously comes from that ability to play with machines really easily. Some drummers who play with machines play around the beat. He plays right on the beat.”

MS: “He’s a mate. We absolutely love hanging out with him.”

S13: Did you have the artwork in mind before the album itself?

MS: “I collect plastic toys. The more absurd they look, the more I like them. That particular figure I bought in New York, and I placed it on a window ledge in a hotel in Brooklyn and took a photo, because I like to photograph my toys in different locations.”

CN: “We had a few different ideas for a cover, and a few different ideas for the title. Malka was quite strong on the idea. She wanted that to be the cover, and she wanted the title to be, What the Fuck?? I mean, it’s literal as well, because just… what the fuck is that, you know?” (laughs)

MS: “It just came together. It made sense.”

CN: “There is a lot about Malka’s sense of humour in this. We kind of share it in a way, but it comes from Malka… she can be very direct in a really funny way.”

MS: (Laughs) “When we toured with SUSS, Bob started making fun of me, and I realised I say, ‘What the fuck?’ quite a lot. And he started saying it just as a way to make fun of me! But then it’s stayed with me, and when we came to do the title, I thought, yeah, What the Fuck??”

CN: “It crystallised a sense of meaning, because we’re like every other human being with a conscience in this world; struggling to make sense of what is actually going on, and amazed and shocked by it. Could human beings have contrived to behave more stupidly? Are we just really doomed for extinction?”

MS: “The herd mentality of people following things you can’t believe. There’s stuff online, and it’s like, ‘What is going on? What do people say?’ It’s shocking how we became okay to do and say things that were unacceptable before.”

S13: Songs like Timeline and Push the Rock have a real positive and defiant streak in the face of that kind of adversity…

MS: “We played those songs in America where people are kind of in despair. They would come to us after the gig, thanking us for saying those things and feeling supported somehow.”

CN: “It’s like you don’t have to say anything from the stage about what the song is about. People are picking up directly on the words, and that’s what they’re responding to, so that gave us an amazing clue. Someone did a review of the album way too early, where they called it, ‘protest music stripped of metaphor’. We’re just saying it how it is, or how we see it. I think it does chime with people. It’s not something that we thought about, but this is what we should be doing.”

MS: “We all look for communality, for other people that think like us.”

CN: “As humans, we need to be in contact. We need to be able to feel that there are other people out there that we can relate to.”

MS: “You have online, so you’re in your own bubble, and you have the bubble of the other people that you don’t want to hear about. But it’s different when it’s direct through music or through being in touch with real people.”

S13: On Push the Rock, Malka, you ask the question, “Are we too small to make a difference”. Do you still think that art has the power to change things these days?

MS: “I do. I know that I get strength from what people create from music, and it just makes me more determined to go on and believe in what I believe to be the right thing. You can feel empowered by it. I think it’s too much to think we can change the world, but if we can empower people to think in a positive way, or to feel like they’re supported in what they believe, it’s already something.”

S13: Do you consider yourselves to be positive people?

MS: “It comes and goes. Some days I think ‘Fuck!’ and I feel shit, and some days I feel great! Music does make me feel happy. To create something good makes me feel happy.”

CN: “Yeah, creating something good or hearing something good. When we’re putting the radio show together, just listening to music in the studio, it’s uplifting… getting excited about Chinless Wonder’s, album that came out today.”

S13: I don’t think that anyone in your creative sphere has replicated your enthusiasm for new music, to be honest…

CN: “That’s a good thing. We want to be atypical, because there are a lot of artists, when they get to a certain point, they become very lazy. This is just a small example of something about how we’re thinking, because we’re quite connected with both the Featured Artists Coalition and with Music Venues Trust. We think about how we can be in this thing that we’re doing, and we’ve got the tour coming up, but we’re playing pretty small venues with small guarantees. But there is a possibility if we get enough audience we can ‘break the percentage’. That means once you’ve sold a certain amount of tickets, then you get a share of the extra money that’s come in. It’s encouragement for more tickets to be sold.

“But also, think about the level at which support bands are getting paid. They are part of the night, and in a lot of cases they are only getting 50 quid… that’s barely going to cover their expenses. So we’ve taken a decision that if we break a percentage, because our guarantees are pretty small – we can’t afford to do it in every case – we will contribute some money to up the support band’s fee. It doesn’t matter if they get paid 50 quid or 75 quid or 100 quid, we’ll still add that extra money for them.”

MS: “We come from the grassroots level, but we are prepared do this. If you think of people playing in stadiums, they don’t give a toss or give anything towards support bands.”

CN: “People get paid 50 quid for playing support in 2,000 capacity venues, because they’re not the headline artists. The headline artist doesn’t understand, or nobody explained to them. We have to be conscious as artists and understand the world out there. If you go to a show, especially a grassroots show in a small venue, it’s about the whole night. If the support band thinks, ‘Oh, I can make a bit more money if we bring more people in’, they’re going to get their mates along. It’s just basic.

“They don’t have to be our favourite group. We try and select people who are going to work with the evening or whatever. But it’s just common decency. We all started somewhere, and we don’t see ourselves as any different to younger artists who are just of that level in the industry.”

MS: “We don’t play anywhere different, and we don’t get paid more.”

CN: “We’re well aware of the financial difficulties that artists face these days, and how the industry is not set up for artists. Everybody’s struggling.”

S13: You’ve got some live shows coming up. When you play to your audience, is there any other experience in life that equates to that feeling?

MS: “It’s the kind of mixture of excitement and enjoyment, but also it’s a bit… not scary, but every gig is different, and you don’t know what sound you’re going to get onstage, so you only have so much control. And also, how many people will come? Are they going to be into it? That’s part of the excitement.”

CN: “It’s part of it. I really enjoy touring with Malka. It’s like we’re on the road at home. Sometimes you just want a quiet life. Touring is not a quiet life.” (laughs)

MS: “Being on tour with a band, it can be bonding, but everybody gets a bit stressed, and it can be a problem.”

CN: “We have a small crew. We have a UK sound person; we have an American sound person. We’ve done some touring with Matt, who’s very easy. I mean, his side job is working as an accountant, and he’s literally sitting in the car chatting to the office on Zoom calls making stupid jokes.” (laughs)

MS: “It’s very positive. You need positive energy. I think also, after years of working with different people, you get to a point where you want to work with people you love being with. It’s really important.”

S13: Do either of you ever think of a life without music?

CN: “I mean, you do what you do because that’s what you do. That sounds almost moronic, but that’s kind of how it is. Music and art is our life. We’ve definitely become more political, and that’s also politics of art as well. The politics around the music industry, the politics around streaming and live gigs and all of those things have taken on a real importance in the last few years in our lives.”

MS: “I think it’s part of my personal well-being. If I didn’t make music, whether in the studio, it doesn’t have to be live, maybe I would feel unhappy. The creation itself is my favourite bit, even if we don’t release it.”

CN: “I’m the practical one, so I’m always looking for a way in which we can make something that can be released, or something that can be played live.”

MS: “Everybody wants feedback.”

CN: “Direct feedback from audiences really helps. We really like touring at that kind of level as well. It’s interesting this year, we’re probably going to do a bit better than last year, certainly in some of the shows. You wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing if you wanted to be super successful and famous. Basically, you’d be doing the obvious thing.”

MS: “Do we know how to do that?”

CN: “It’s become very difficult because the waters have become so muddy now. What’s the biggest event happening in live music in the last couple of months? Oasis on tour. That is just a huge money-making machine. They don’t give a stuff.”

MS: “They might be having fun doing it.”

CN: “They might be, but Oasis haven’t even thought about putting any pressure on the venues that they play in to contribute a bit towards the levy. They’re in another world. One of the problems within our industry, is the infantilisation of artists, because you have people who do everything for you, so you never actually get any contact with the real world and what the real world consequences of the things that you do, and those consequences aren’t always positive. But nobody’s going to tell you that.”

WTF??  is out now via swim ~. Purchase here.

Immersion U.K. tour dates (tickets here):

• Friday, October 3: The Actors, Brighton (listening party & Immersion in conversation with John Robb)
• Wednesday, October 29: The Attic, Leeds
• Thursday: October 30: Mono, Glasgow
• Friday, October 31: Kamera, Manchester
• Saturday, November 1: Just Dropped In, Coventry
• Monday, November 3: Cafe OTO, London
• Thursday, December 4: Alphabet, Brighton