World Building: In Conversation with Ex-Easter Island Head

Like the city itself, musically, Liverpool has always done its own thing. With so many spitfires of creativity across the city, Liverpool’s experimental scene has been one of the most vibrant and consistent, not just within the North West, but beyond. And Ex-Easter Island Head have been a vital part of it.

Having spent years functioning as three-piece, Benjamin D. Duvall, Jon Hering and Benjamin Fair have amalgamated ideas from different orbits, not limited to the deep-listening movement and guitar orchestras of New York avant-gardist, Glenn Branca. The results have always been dynamic and transcendental.

While a host of releases under their belt, including Mallet Guitars One (2010), Two (2012) and Three (2013), Large Electric Ensemble (2014) and the excellent one-off piece released in lockdown, Lodge, it’s Ex-Easter Island Head’s live show that has always been the biggest talking point.

That will change on the back of their excellent new album, Norther, which sees Ex-Easter Island Head firing on all cylinders with their finest work yet.

Having welcomed in fourth member, Andrew PM Hunt (Dialect), while it’s been seven years since Ex-Easter Island Head’s last full-length release, Twenty-Two Strings, that’s not to say the band have been creatively dormant. Hunt and Duvall formed Land Trance which saw the release of their excellent 2020 debut, First Séance, which then led to 2021’s Embassy Nocturnes – the noirish collaboration with Aging; the project of Manchester experimentalist David McLean. Hering and Fair have also kept busy, most notably releasing music as The Aleph, with their 2021 EP, Cheshire Cat.

On the Friday night before the release of Norther, the band invited me for a chat after their rehearsal. Led through to their studio located in the old Brazilian consulate, there’s a chalk board littered with notes likened to a science equation, while the room mirrors the band’s impressive live set-up, stationed with an array of bespoke gadgets that all contribute to the Ex-Easter Island Head experience.

The main source is the mallet guitar, as Duvall gives me a quick run-through into how their beautiful noise begins. “Once you start laying the guitar flat like this, people send you loads of videos they’ve seen with the guitar in this context,” says Duvall. “There was this art installation, where someone had a set of guitars and all these birds in the room with them building nests through the strings, or flying around landing on the strings that was making the instrument sound.”

He continues. “But then you’ll get really cheesy stuff where someone’s put the guitar flat, but they’ve taught themselves to play Moonlight Sonata. Why would you bother? That’s not really about that with this. By having been set up like this, it kills a lot of the rock gestures.”

Towards the end of our conversation, Hunt shows me another instrument that is set up near his station. “The connection between the Japanese koto and a typewriter… the guy who invented that was dispatched to the United States in the early 1920s – at that point, I guess one of the most technically advanced societies in the world,” says Duvall. “How can we bring that technology back and apply it to music? The guy’s solution was to combine a typewriter with a fairly old Japanese stringed instrument.”

“It’s that thing of trying to bring together opposing things. Finding the through line, how can these separate, disparate things exist together?” explains Hunt. It rings true of the inspirations behind the Ex-Easter Island remit: oscillating between worlds both old and new. Their approach, intricate and methodical, which sees them operating without the constraints of time. A self-contained world.

“The first bunch of records, they’ve got such utilitarian titles. This is less sciencey,” says Duvall of Norther, while Hering explains that Twenty-Two Strings was “A kind of halfway house. Describing exactly what the materials are. I think we wanted a bit of a break from that.”

Norther is that and more, starting with Weather. A thrumming piece with spidery arrangements and a booming mass of sound emitted by the suspended motors running up the fret boards. A ramshackle of sound that causes the kind sensory overload of Lodge, but in more of an expansion way.

The futuristic sprawl of the title track follows – a rhythmic, trance-like earworm that courses through the veins. Or as Fair explains, a track of “geometric shapes” and “interlocking patterns”. With more rhythms that pinball around in your head, Easter is a piece that swells and pulsates with equal vigor. “[It’s] about improvisation and performance,” says Fair.

As well as the title track, Magnetic Landing sees Hunt stamping his authority, with the distant echoes of the ideas which have been pivotal in his own story as Dialect. Now alongside Duvall, Hering and Fair, the ideas seem borderless, as Fair explains that the piece is about exploring new techniques with the use of mobile phones and pickups. “We’ve got a different approach to each one, as well as them having different textures and using different instruments,” he says.

And that continues with Golden Bridges, which stars off with a sharp, grinding noise likened to an abattoir, immediately evoking the similar, noise-wrangling antics of Einstürzende Neubauten.

“They were kind of a really big influence for me, but in way where I only needed to hear a little bit of a music. It was more the idea at the end of it,” says Duvall. “The first music video I saw on the internet was a Neubauten video,” adds Hering. “It took about two hours to load, four pixels by four. I still soldiered through.”

The thing with Norther is how each composition is so strikingly different, yet still assuredly cohesive. It goes back to what Hunt was saying about the through line and bringing opposing ideas together. Arcs and swells that take you to different corners of the Ex-Easter Island Head sound world.

“You’re letting the sounds guide you for the most part,” says Duvall. “It might be the idea of using the phone over the pickups to send the voice through the guitar, which is quite an interesting dialogue between technologies. You’ve got the almost 80-year-old configuration of the Telecaster that hasn’t really changed since the mid-50s. The human voice, of course, is eternal, but then you’re playing it back through the phone… It’s a sort of weird dialogue between technologies and that’s like a hook that keeps us going.”

Preceding our talk about Norther, Duvall tells me about a record he picked up from an obscure New Zealand act, Surface of the Earth. Eventually that leads to another New Zealand band, noise veterans, The Dead C. The conversation drifts across the Tasman to Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival where Dirty Three’s name crops up having played one of the recent editions. Naturally, we move onto Jim White who, unbeknownst to me, played drums for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at the Liverpool Philharmonic in 1999.

“Susan Stenger from Band of Susans was on bass”, recalls Hering.

And from here, the thread continues…

Sun 13: Band of Susans. Now there’s another band…

Benjamin D. Duvall: “I only know them through Rhys Chatham, who was pretty big for us. When Ex-Easter started, one of the main reference points was Guitar Trio. It’s quite relevant to what we do; the idea that everyone’s guitars are tuned to standard tuning. Normally, you play guitar on strumming pickups [showing me as whilst speaking]. The way that Rhys Chatham does it, is exploration of the overtones that come out with a string. With Guitar Trio, he instructs the players to play over the nodal points related to fractions of how you divide the guitar neck. So, the best way to demonstrate it is if you play over the fifth fret, if you listen really carefully, you’ll hear the loop notes coming out of the top. Even though it’s the same fundamental notes, there’s three pitches going on there.

“This Chatham piece, it’s ultra minimalist. The sound of one string playing the same, but if you’ve got a bunch of players all playing that same note at different points in the neck, you draw out the harmonic overtones. You’ve got to listen for them and work with it, and then the room tone after that… that’s the building blocks of his minimalist sound because he’s coming in from a La Monte Young influence. He was really inspired by, like ‘How can I do minimalist music using rock instruments?’

“You’ve worked with him haven’t you, Ben?”

Benjamin Fair: “When you were saying that I was thinking as well, he used to write for quite big space. We’re very fond of playing in big churches and cathedrals and things like that. Working with Rhys on A Crimson Grail at the Anglican Cathedral in about 2012? When he had 100 guitarists and eight bassists. It was really good to work with him and get under the bonnet of that piece. If you can experience its output, to see how he’s actually devised it, it’s really eye opening.”

BDD: “The music’s structured to take into account the huge reverb of spaces he’s playing in, isn’t it?”

BF: “For the sort of dress rehearsal, the place was empty, so all the guitarists were playing… ultra-high ceilings and everything. I was thinking that the basses needed to come up. I was walking away from where all the musicians were in a big square, towards the back of the cathedral and I walked into the bass sound. They just shut down because of these big, long wavelengths, whereas all the highs… they go shooting around, sort of celestial and ethereal. It’s great to play a place like that. It’s designed to be humbling and make you look to up to those high celestial sounds. It’s really clever to write for big spaces like that.”

BDD: “He first came to Liverpool while we’d been active in 2010; Ex-Easter started in November 2009. Guitar Trio and A Crimson Grail were really big in terms of thinking about how to use the guitar as a sound generator. This is before we started getting into the more extended techniques and things like that. It was okay to play something at high enough volume with the technique I just showed you. You can generate or reveal this secondary information that’s in the tone. I always thought that was interesting.

“It’s almost like tuning your ear to pick up on a subtle DNA in the music and, obviously, the idea of masked guitars, Guitar Trio, you think three guitars, even that’s a little bit unusual. It’s already one more than you’re expecting. His pieces work with 10 guitars, 300 guitars. It was interesting in, like, ‘How can you do that sound without having to marshal all those forces?’ That building block. The mallet guitar was like the first thing.”

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S13: With the tailored instruments and sounds that have been a part of Ex-Easter Island Head, it always makes me think of industry. Do you think your approach is a subconscious nod to your local roots?

BDD: “It’s interesting, I’ve never thought about it like that.”

Jon Hering: “We definitely think of it in an industrial way. With the motors, we’ve talked about the fact that these cranes [showing me the apparatus] in these flat plains, it’s very much a landscape and architecture. We did some library music; that was Mechanical Landscapes. It was marrying that industrial with the natural. Whether Liverpool has planted that seed is a good question.”

BDD: “I suppose the experimental music scene we’ve come up through in Liverpool made something like this permissible. But also seeing a bunch of people years before we arrived to this where it’s quite an improve-y, avant-garde trope to lay the guitar flat. Keith Rowe was probably the earliest exponents of that. He likened it to the way Jackson Pollock would lay canvasses flat on the floor and then approach the canvass from that way, so that inspired him to lay his guitar flat. Through the strange sort of gigs that would go on, I remember Sean Wárs and George Maund do a real noise thing called Avian Flu, where they had guitars flat and it was more like a feedback thing. I really liked that, just the visual aesthetic of that, and then thinking, ‘How can tonal music come out of that?’”

Andrew PM Hunt: “I think in terms of industry, there’s a duality between the way Jon described all the harmonics and stuff where it suggests a kind of natural landscape, but there’s also this other side to the music, which is strictly rhythmic and uses these big chunks of metal clamps, springs and motors. That feels quite at odds with that pastoral, bucolic kind of thing.”

JH: “A lot of the approach is that it needs that infrastructure to make it work, which is industrial in its nature. It’s not just about, ‘You have these instruments, and your creativity does the talking’. Physically, you actually need things to be clamped and things to be held in certain positions. That affects the sound of the music. When you have that crane that is going to determine how it’s used and how it sounds, and the fact that it’s clamped means it limits your options. But then obviously, that gives you a composition as well.”

BF: “Sometimes the processes you go through lends itself to that sort of factory feel. So, by different sized cogs moving against each other – especially rhythmically that we’ve used that in the past – I think it lends its ear to sounding like a process plant. You’ve got these things like internal logic moving.”

APMH: “Yeah, I don’t really think it’s a conscious thing about the city. Speaking for myself, but it’s maybe more of our desire to bring opposites together. I’ve never really thought about industry as relating to what we do, although I can see where you’re coming from. But I think that desire to bring together these very free elemental aspects to music, like harmonic stuff… trying to bring that in face to face with very ordered, rigid, rhythmic ideas and melodic tuning in limitations, feels like trying to bring opposites together. I think in all the music we’ve always been involved with, there’s been a little bit of that going on.”

S13: With your collection of gadgets and technology, you’re always bringing new ideas into this project. Like the aeolian harp for instance. Does this actually feed into the idea of not wanting to make the same record twice?

BDD: “It’s interesting, because I feel like our evolution… I always think about the different techniques we use. They’re a vocabulary, and there’s always bits of the vocabulary that carry on into the next thing, and then there’s bits that get left by the wayside. In using the wind harp – which we chose quite a small function on the new record – it makes sort of a cameo appearance, but as an analogue to the overtone I was just describing in the guitar, there’s quite a parallel there. They’re both working with the harmonic series arising from a string. In one case, it’s the wind play in the string, and in another case, it might be us malleting the body of the guitar or tickling it with an allen key or a suspended motor. They’re both working towards bringing out this information from the instrument.”

APMH: “I was thinking about that the other day, because I was doing some stuff in the studio, trying different techniques on this acoustic guitar and thinking about whether we could integrate them into Ex-Easter. The way I’ve come to think about it, and maybe it’s true for any band that’s been going for a long period of time, is it becomes a container. Anything you put in the container becomes Ex-Easter Island Head, but the ingredients can be different; you can swap things out. That’s the thing that makes the band. I feel like we’re at a point where it can be quite free. It’s not inconceivable now, I think at least, (laughs) to do an Ex-Easter Island Head thing that doesn’t have guitars in it, because it’s a language.”

S13: Talking about your approach, is it a lot different from, say, Dialect or The Aleph or even Ben’s solo work?

JH: “Totally different from The Aleph. That’s song-based, very much melodic-focused. The elements that feel like they’re at the heart of Ex-Easter Island Head: texture, rhythm… they’re the least prominent with other stuff that we’ve worked on in the past, potentially, where it’s been about melody, harmony, song structure, lyrics, even. These things feature in the opposites, but it’s refreshing to be able to work on different projects. It’s all making music, but you’re looking at such different facets in different things.”

APMH: “I think one of the things that really sets Ex-Easter apart from other stuff we all work on is the pace of it. I mean this in a positive way, but it’s a very slow-moving organisation. And I think that’s actually part of it. These ideas slowly evolve. Nothing’s ever forced. We’re not immediately taking the same ingredients and just making another record of that. Fundamentally that’s not how the band operates. For another record, basically it has to go back to a seed and then watch it grow again, because it has to unfold quite slowly. I think that’s quite a unique element of it. For me, at least, I’ve been quite used to doing things maybe sometimes too fast. But I think it’s really good that it has its own evolution.”

BDD: “Yeah, that thing you were saying about a seed. The way that might loom, the physical layout we’ve arrived at here is as much a part of it as melodic ideas. I don’t know, does that sound accurate?”

APMH: “I’ve noticed recently that the layout of the way we set up lends itself to a particular way of working together, and that’s what’s on the record. In a way, I feel like if we are going do something new, you’d want to literally change the way we set up.”

JH: “It makes things possible and certain things impossible. I’m not going to play shahi baaja live, because I can’t reach it, and actually, we take that for granted. But there’s not that many bands, when you think about it, where the layout onstage basically determines what the music sounds like.”

APMH: “Yeah, we could be on a different station, but we’re not. You have to be on one of them. The whole band is obviously built around limitation and working with a reduced palette.”

BF: “With that motion is reduced palette, [and] that changes each time. You can prepare your station in such a way that you’ve not prepared it before, and then you’ve got to make it musical; that immediately stops you from relying on anything that you have in your musical archive of being able to use. You’ve got to actually be creative there to make it sing.”

APMH: “I will often be working on something and realise, ‘God, this part I want to do is hard’. If only the guitar was on a strap (laughs). But then of course, you’d completely undo the thing that led you to play the guitar like that in the first place. It’s a constant negotiation between this self imposed limitations and then trying to sort of stretch that to a place where you can do something musical. It takes a while to get used to playing these instruments.”

JH: “If we only had guitar straps, we would sound like The Sweet.”

(All laugh)

S13: What were the main aspects that you wanted to achieve with Norther?

JH: “We really wanted it to sound great. Really pristine. A step up from what we’ve done previously.”

S13: It feels futuristic beyond AI. You’re not even out running AI, you’re already in the next century.

(All laugh)

APMH: “This is an ongoing idea. I mean, this band exists in a future world that has not, like, progressed, but they have a weird mix of technology, semi-medieval sort of future but maybe has some electricity here and there. So, you could just about pull this band together out of the ruins. (laughs) The foundational aspects of the band, these kind of overtone experiments, that’s primitive in a way. You could imagine at any point in history someone getting to that point.”

JH: “With this [record], we didn’t want to be feted too much by how we would play it live. We wanted it to just sound how it needed to sound, whatever that may be… and then we could work out later how it could be played live.”

BF: “The last record was a faithful recording of our live set we sculpted over 18 months, two years. We’d just set up to be able to record that set. This was the other way around. We went into the studio and played it, wrote it and made it. Then we figured out how we were going to turn it into a set.”

BDD: “Yeah, with previous records, we’ve basically taken a documentary approach to almost capture exactly what it is we do onstage with overdubs, absolute bare bones, minimal tinkering.

“Throughout making [Norther], we were consciously thinking about an album listening experience that works strict of the context of how it’s made. Whereas I think with some of the other recordings we’ve done in the past, the key is, we’ve got to capture this as faithfully as possible.”

JH: “With the very early records with the mallet guitar stuff, the fact that it was audible, like, ‘Ah, they’re hitting guitars and mallets’… that concept was tied so deeply with the sound, someone wouldn’t listen to it without thinking about the fact that someone was hitting it with a mallet. Whereas, hopefully with this new album, someone could listen to it and be swept away by it. How it’s made doesn’t need to feature in that experience.”

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S13: Seeing some of your solo live performances, Ben, and it got me thinking whether some of the ideas from that have cross-pollinated with the ideas on Norther?

BDD: “Not as much as you’d think. It’s interesting because we’re all pursuing quite esoteric threads outside of this. I think my interest in aeolian music and wind music and being out in the weather, that’s provided a frame to think within. Definitely the first track on the record, Weather, we’ve thought of it as a weather system. We’ve got the pitter patter of rain through the motors… or more in the way that the sounds are brought out, there’s something quite elemental in there that goes back to what Andy was saying.”

JH: “Then there’s elements of change at play throughout each layer as well, which has quite a natural feel to it.”

APMH: “Yeah, [there’s] something about those motors on the strings, which was quite a foundational part of the compositional process. It’s repetitive, but not repetitive (laughs). Like, that’s the foundational part of that track. Part of the way we were looking at the material on this album, I think at times there’s a pattern there, but it’s very complex. It’s suggesting a natural process in an unfathomable way. When you look at this thing bouncing off the strings, you can trace what it’s doing, but it’s beyond what you can really understand. And that’s definitely a big part of that track.”

S13: Talking about the weather and elemental aspects, it got me thinking about politics and whether that has a role in in the band?

APMH: “In a way. It does in terms of the way the band works. I think there’s quite a literal political element at work, which I think is inherited from a lot of 20th century avant-garde stuff that’s relatively flat and non-hierarchical. The way we operate – I’m talking now of the band as an institution – not the material, but how the people operant in the band. In that sense, it’s quite unique. I think, for me at least, to be in a group where everybody does have a say, and yet there’s a very strong direction. Ben provides a lot of that direction, and a lot of focus. He sets the tone without really having a very heavy hand; almost an unspoken set of parameters. And that’s also down to the way we set up the equipment.”

JH: “Ben’s the boss, but there could be coup at any moment.”

(All laugh)

APMH: “The band comes from us all being able to contribute in a democratic way. So, I think that’s a very political element to the group. It doesn’t really relate to any kind of party politics or anything like that. There’s something about Ex-Easter’s music that is like conjuring worlds in a way. There’s a world building thing to it, to some extent. I think anything like that, there’s a political dimension to it… you’re imagining how things could be. Imagining a different world on some level, and that involves some form of critique of where you are now. So, I think in that way, there’s an implied political element.”

BDD: “That’s quite John Cage in that sense. Not that I’m claiming we draw huge amounts from Cage, but there’s that organ piece, the one that’s set to last 800 years or whatever. The guy in charge of looking after that, the way he views that piece is as a model of what a different type of society could be. Because of the timescales involved in having to shepherd that piece and make it survive, it’s like a symbol of the types of thinking that you would need for a different world.”

APMH: “I think Jon [Hering’s] work that he does outside of Ex-Easter in music education with kids, often disabled kids, is built into what we do in the band. We’ve done a bunch of projects that are based around their educational projects… working with schools and kids, and I consider that to be quite a significant political part of the group. We might get paid to do a project like that, but that’s not the reason that we’re doing it. We’re doing it because we think it’s really important to give kids access to tools that take them out of their everyday life and into an imaginative space that is fulfilling.”

JH: “It’s almost the role of the community musician, which is a concept that barely exists, but was once such a vital part of society. The idea of a community musician is a very nice concept. Again, we take it for granted because we do stuff like this and we collaborate and we work in different settings. Lots of bands don’t work with the community at all.”

APMH: “It’s been very nourishing for us as a band. Those projects have been good for us to try out new ideas, and bits of material on Norther have come out of doing these different projects.”

BF: “The nature of how we work, when you’re working with school kids, and also when we’ve done large ensembles, it’s a really good leveller for everyone involved. Because you’re making them have a new instrument in a way. Yes, it’s a guitar, but they’re playing it in a way or the using instruments in a way that they weren’t using them before, which is great because everyone’s on the same level.”

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S13: Ex-Easter Island Head were a three-piece and now with Andrew’s involvement I can hear some Dialect influences throughout. While you’re always exploring new ideas, does that also include an openness for newcomers into the band?

JH: “Because of the way the instruments work, if somebody new comes into the band, it’s bringing in a new artistic voice. You wouldn’t bring someone into this band because they’re an incredible hotshot guitarist, because that’s not going to be used here. We’d bring someone in because they’re an incredible hotshot flat guitarist, but that doesn’t exist. (laughs) We’d only bring somebody in as an artistic voice as an artist, as a musician. We’ve all played with Andy in various contexts for 20 years. We knew his voice and how we would work together.”

APMH: “Yeah. There’s an implicit sensibility to the group. Not only do you bring in somebody who was somewhat on the same page about things, but there’s a lot of parameters that are set up for you as well. You work with what you’ve got, you know? Not impose too much will on the situation because it’s already a finely balanced system.”

BDD: “That sounds political.”

(All laugh)

S13: Do you see Ex-Easter Island Head’s live performance being more of the essence of the band as opposed to what you produce on record?

BDD: “I think consciously with this new record, we’ve finally bridged that gap. We’ve always set out to make something that you’d want to listen to without the context of the live show. But with this one, I think we’ve closed the gap between like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to see him live’. Hopefully people will still be saying that for the rest of the band’s lifespan, but it’s felt like we’ve really worked hard on this new record to make it its own thing and its own experience.”

APMH: “As someone who spent a lot of time listening and fiddling with the record, I do still think it’s all about the live show. (laughs) What we said before about this record being less of a documentation and more of an exploration is still very true. But I think this band does work very nicely as a live thing. I guess because people are very used to listening to electronic music and electroacoustic music, for want of a better word, where it’s not obviously clear how any sound has been made. And I guess that could be true of our record as you just heard it with no context.”

JH: “I’d be fascinated for someone who knows absolutely nothing about what we do what their reaction would be.”

APHM: “I’m very attached to the album listening experience. That whole arc, and so I guess that was also a big part of what we were trying to do with the record as well: trying to do Ex-Easter, but in a classical format. There’s definitely an element of that at play. It’s funny, because we weren’t thinking about how we we’re going to do it live, but to be honest, it’s transferred incredibly easily. We gave ourselves permission to do overdubs, but we really didn’t go crazy with it.”

BF: “We went into it with an open mind. We were saying, ‘Oh, should we get all these musicians in, other instrumentation’, all those sorts of things. We didn’t actually need it.”

APHM: “We didn’t go that far away from what we could play live, because that is the foundation to the band. Even when you try and step outside of that, you’re still in that mindset. So, it’s not strict documentation at all, but also it never became, like, ‘How am I going to do that?’, which I’ve experienced in other recording situations. There’s such a strong performance element to the band that it never goes that far away.”

BDD: “I think on a practical level, I always want to avoid having a computer involved in this stage setup. You could argue that the sampler we’re using is basically a computer. I feel quite ill-equipped to deal with technology, so there’s always this tactile element to what we do. So even when we’ve expanded the remit, the DNA of the band is so attached to the tactile, what can the human hands do? That keeps it in check.”

Norther is out now via Rocket Recordings. Purchase from Bandcamp.