North London-born Chris Carter has had an extraordinary 50-year career in music. While working as a visual artist and sound engineer for various television stations in England, he extended his fascination for audio technology and theory by building his own synthesisers. Acting as lead synthesist, Carter teamed-up with performance artists Cosey Fanni Tutti, Genesis P-Orridge, and Peter Christopherson in the mid-'70s to form the pioneering group Throbbing Gristle – a seminal band of the industrial music genre. TG had dissolved by 1981, enabling Carter to focus on crafting radical solo works and collaborations with partner Cosey Fanni Tutti as Chris & Cosey. More recently, Carter has re-indulged his fascination for the principles of circuit bending, creating The Dirty Carter Experimental Sound Generating Instrument and the TG ONE Eurorack module. Meanwhile, the release of Chemistry Lessons Volume 1 – an album of immersive ambient landscapes, is a timely reaffirmation of Carter's compelling talent for sound design.
Did working as a sound engineer spark your interest in music, or did your passion predate that?
My interest in music predated that by quite a lot – it probably goes back to when I was 10 or 11. My dad was a hi-fi buff and was always listening to music. He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and would make, what I suppose we'd now call, mix tapes. One birthday he bought me a small battery-powered tape recorder and a kit for making crystal radios and oscillators, so there was this mixture of listening to crooners on his hi-fi, as well as doing all these experimental circuits. When I was about to leave school, I was offered an apprenticeship as a sound engineer, then things started to overlap.
What were you actively doing during your apprenticeship?
I was working with a freelance film and television sound engineer named Ted Ball. I did some television shows and documentaries at Elstree and Pinewood film studios. I guess it's where I learned my craft. The first thing I had to do was learn how to use a Nagra tape recorder, so I was thrown in the deep end, but it was a step in the right direction and it picqued my interest working with professional sound. When Ted retired, I went off on a tangent and worked for a photographer in Soho. From doing sound for television and film to working in a darkroom was quite a career change.
What did you learn during that period with Ball that initiated your desire to experiment further with sound?
That period overlapped with me building my own circuits. I used to buy a magazine called Practical Electronics religiously and was always tinkering with the little circuits they had in there before getting more ambitious and building bigger ones. One month, they put a whole synthesiser design in the magazine, where you could build the filters and oscillators module-by-module. I started building my first synth around that period, but because I was also splicing tape for television and film as an assistant sound recorder, I was working with these two different disciplines simultaneously. Then I started incorporating what I'd learned into what I was doing at home with my own music. I'd record experiments with my synths and circuits onto cassette, because I couldn't afford to have a Nagra tape recorder at home.
How rudimentary was this synth you built? Was it akin to the Eurorack modules that we see today?
It was very similar. They would publish a different module each month, but the idea was that you'd put this thing into one big cabinet, most likely based on a bigger version of an EMS VCS3. Each month, they'd publish a part of that design, so you'd build a VCF [voltage controlled filter] one month, a VCO [voltage controlled oscillator] the next, and then a modulator. I was building all these circuits and putting them into quite a big case. This was in the mid-'70s, around the same time I met Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P. Orridge, so I took my creation down to their studio in Hackney, plugged it into the PA, and we started jamming.
Presumably there were synthesisers on the market at the time, but well out of your reach financially?
I wasn't earning much, but I used to collect all the Moog and EMS catalogues and I'd actually been down to EMS in Putney a few times. At one point, when I lived in North London, I got an EMS VCS3 on hire purchase, but couldn't afford to keep up the payments. The only alternative was to build my own, so it was born out of necessity. A lot of what we used when we were in Throbbing Gristle was built by me or friends of ours – even the PA was handmade.
At that early point, did you foresee electronic instruments initiating a musical revolution?
I don't know if we were that forward-thinking. It was obviously happening; synths were appearing all over the place, but it wasn't new to us. Disco really embraced the synthesiser and electronic sounds, so we went along with that. As we got more successful, we'd buy gear off-the-shelf and incorporate it into our own. Once the Japanese entered the market, the prices came down tremendously. Initially it was all very American-based – ARP and Moog were the main players – but once Roland and Korg came on board it changed the whole landscape. One of the first synths I bought was the MiniKorg-700, which was relatively affordable. Then I got a Roland SH3 and started buying modules and incorporating those with what I had built myself. It was a slow process though.
Throbbing Gristle was a precursor to the whole industrial movement, but was there a template for the music you were making at the time?
We invented the name and everything, but at the time the term "industrial" related to us being industrious rather than sounding industrial. Because we weren't musicians as such, I didn't have a clue. Cosey had learned piano, so she had a good ear; but then she took up guitar, which she'd never played before. Genesis hadn't played bass, and although I knew how to put a synth together and make noises, I wasn't a keyboard player. We were making it up as we went along, so we were creating the template as we were doing it. It was like the cart before the horse, or the chicken before the egg, and because it was so rudimentary that gave it a raw edge.
I'm amazed that the term "industrial" did not relate to the sound of the music, but rather to the process itself...
It was more conceptual. The term "industrial" is like Frankenstein's monster; we don't really recognise what it was from when we started. People took it far too literally and the genre now is all about making an industrial sound. Back then, we were a cottage industry and wanted to do as much of the process as we could, including the distribution and production. That wasn't entirely why it was called "industrial" – our friend Monte Cazazza coined the phrase partly because we were in a very industrial area of East London, with factories all around us. You couldn't say the music we were making was industrial-sounding all the time because we were also doing love songs, pop ditties, and all sorts.
What did you think of the bands that spawned from that genre, such as SPK, Portion Control and, later, the likes of Front 242 and Nine Inch Nails?
They did amazing stuff, and it's a great sound. Somehow the industrial tag got put on them, and I don't want to diss them in any way. I totally get how people would label them as industrial, but it developed into something completely different from what we started. It's as basic as record shops wanting to compartmentalise everything, so it become a very wide genre, incorporating lots of sub-genres, like industrial techno.
In 2000, you worked with Cosey Fanni Tutti on some ambient remixes of your former album, The Space Between, as well as some Throbbing Gristle tracks. Was that a reaction to industrial?
That's quite perceptive – not a lot of people got that. It was a reaction. We wanted to take our sound in a different direction and that was an idea we'd had for a long time. When we were in the studio, we'd be remastering or running old tapes and we'd start putting them through different processes to get these nice drones and pads. By transforming the original sounds, we thought it would be good to do a project based around that.
Chris Carter's Studio
Which brings me nicely to your 2018 release, Chemistry Lessons Volume 1. What precipitated this return to solo work?
TG regrouped around 2006, and we started doing Chris & Cosey gigs not long after. It was a very intense time and I needed something to do as a form of relaxation, so I set up a small workspace in the studio. I started building circuits again and recording what I was doing. I gave it the project name Chemistry Lessons and started putting tracks online, but over the years I'd accumulated all these different tracks and recordings, which bled into my modular system and other gear. It was Cosey who suggested I had enough for an album four or five years into the project.
Do you feel that, despite it being a wholly electronic-sounding album, it's informed by your early experiments in the '60s?
Back in the '60s I used to listen to BBC radio a hell of a lot through a small transistor radio, as well as shows like Doctor Who on the television. With a lot of this, the music, the idents, and the special effects were all done by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. At the time, I had no idea about where the sound design element came from, until I found out it was all done in that one department. Listening to all that definitely influenced my taste in music and sound. A lot of people still don't realise how much material they actually put out. The breadth of what they did was amazing, from sound design to doing pop songs and everything in between. They had an amazing repertoire, and I loved them because of that.
Were the album tracks compiled with the intention of being listened to as a journey rather than a fragmented listening experience?>
To be honest, I'm not bothered either way. We agonised over the track listing with Mute Records for months to make it sound more like a journey. My original track listing was completely different, but because the tracks are so short it works quite well when they're randomly selected. I've gotten used to listening to it in its present incarnation, especially on train journeys – it's almost conceptual the way the tracks merge into each other.
It's also very film soundtrack oriented, but this is not really an area you've operated in previously and I wonder why?
In the last three or four years, we've had a lot of television and movie placements for the Chris & Cosey catalogue. I guess people have been going back, because there's been this '80s revival going on. We wouldn't have thought all of that old material was suitable, but the people that place the music obviously feel otherwise. It was an area we could have developed, but because we were into playing the high-energy, rhythmic material that we specialised in, we just continued down that avenue. But you're not the first person to tell me this, so maybe it's an avenue I should develop more.
Putting music to image is also a very different way of approaching the recording process.
I tried that in the '80s when I did some television work, but it was quite demanding. People can be very fussy, and if you don't handle rejection well it's not a good place to be. You can spend days working on a track for a piece of visual, hand it in, and they don't like it or want it changed and you're back to square one. That's not the way I like to work. I know we have collaborated with an awful lot of people over the years, but not so much with visual artists – it's a different kettle of fish and I'm not sure it's something I'm entirely comfortable with, although I might consider it for the right project.
Your studio today comes across as an archive of everything you've collected over the years.
It's funny, because I'll use gear quite a lot on a project, then, when I think I've gotten the most out of it, I'll have these annual sales where I get rid of loads of it. Famously, in '99, I sold almost every bit of analogue gear that I had, including my modular system that I'd had for years. I had this mid-life crisis, but by the following year I was already building it all back up again.
What precipitated this crisis?
I thought we were going to go in-the-box and everything would go through digital audio workstations, but I couldn't have been more wrong and it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I couldn't even get some of the gear back. I do still have some original gear from the '80s, but not much.
Did you underestimate how much you would miss the tactile element of using hardware, or was it the timbre of sound that wasn't quite how you expected?
I guess it was both of those reasons. I love hardware because it's so hands-on, although I constantly return to a lot of software plug-in suites. It's quite nice to have that mix of using really nice hardware with a decent digital audio workstation, but there's something about recording hardware that I prefer to software instruments. I'm not really sure what it is, but you're right that it's to do with the timbre of the sound.
I've had this debate with so many artists. I've always believed it has something to do with the flow of the electric current, which cannot be emulated by digital.
Having all those electrons scurrying around is definitely one aspect. You can turn gear on one day and it sounds great, but it's slightly different the next. It has to do with the hardware's physical controls and resistance, but very hard to pinpoint sometimes. Although I'm not an analogue purist, out of everything we've got there are certain bits of gear I always go back to, like my old Elektron [Machinedrum SPS-1] synth drum, the Roland Jupiter-80, and the Roland V-Synth. I've got an Eventide H8000 effects unit that gets used on everything I do, because the things you can do with that are infinite. It's permanently patched into [Apple] Logic, so it comes up as sends and returns. Then I've got my modular system, which is constantly in flux, including sub systems of my modular system that I never touch, other than for re-patching.
What software DAW are you using, and which plug-ins do you most frequently turn to within that?
I've stuck with Logic Pro for years and I like a lot of the built-in plug-ins within that. Cosey uses Ableton Live, but we often transfer stuff from Ableton to Logic and work with that. I love the Soundtoys plug-ins – I have their entire suite – and I also use Eventide plug-ins all the time. Otherwise, some Native Instruments, the [Ina] GRM plug-ins for experimentation, and the TC FireworX is a favourite for effect signal processing.
Are your ideas generated by sound itself, or do you have more clearly defined ideas about the direction you want to take with the music?
I work primarily with Cosey, who reads a lot and often has an idea for a sound that we try to emulate somehow. But because I'm constantly tinkering in the studio, I'll tend to come up with sounds depending on how my modular system is patched. I'll often hear something in a sound I've created that can be used as the basis for a rhythm or melody.
Do you think that not being able to read music gives you an advantage because you treat sounds and chords in a non-traditional way?
I absolutely agree with that – I am musically dyslexic. I still have the notes written on my keyboard because I often don't see how the black notes are divided. They're all evenly spaced to me, so I have to have the letters written on with a chinagraph or I'll forget. Cosey says I've sometimes got the advantage of not being held back by scales. She bought me a chord calculator once, but I didn't get on with it – what I come up with comes out of nowhere. I know all the terminologies and exactly what I'm doing technically, whereas she has no idea half the time what everything is. She's very good at mixing, because it's just basically faders, but that can also be an advantage because she tries things that I wouldn't, in terms of patching modular cables into different channels, and it usually sounds fantastic.
You worked with Peter Christopherson on ways of developing artificial vocals using software and hardware, and continued that theme for some tracks on the new album?
Yes, this was before he died. He'd been working with some Japanese software called Vocaloid [by Yamaha]. I always found it sounded a bit too artificial. He got good results for what he wanted to do, and we were thinking of continuing that, but I went in a different direction with it by using hardware. I have used vocoders, but the process is slightly different here. I used a vocoder and the Roland V-Synth to play the samples, stretch them, change the pitch, and process the sounds through the Eventide. Some of the vocals are from field recordings that I've collected over the years, underpinned with a vocoded version of my voice pitched up or down and mixed together. Most of the time, the primary sound was an actual human voice, whereas with Peter the primary source was software-generated.
What can you tell me about The
Dirty Carter Experimental Sound Generating Instrument?
I made that a few years ago with John Richards [Dirty Electronics], who approached me asking if I wanted to work on a circuit design. He specialises in making these glitchy handheld sound generation circuits, driven by capacitance from your fingers depending on how hard you press them. He's worked with different artists designing a circuit board, assembled by a team of students. We also did workshops where we would supply the circuit boards and components, and people would build them. At the end, we'd have small performances with everyone running their circuits. He took it to Mute Records, who made a different version of it, and I'm glad I worked on that because it was something I hadn't done before.
What interests you: the fun of making a new technology, or trying to create something that doesn't exist within the electronic music realm?
I do like adapting things. For years we would buy gear and I would modify bits of it – in fact I still do that now with the modular gear. You get interesting results by making things do what they're not always designed to do, or combining things that you wouldn't normally combine.
Indeed. I heard you teamed up with Tiptop Audio to create the TG ONE Eurorack module. I'm guessing that's a crazy distortion-type module?
Not at all; it's a sample playback module. They had an existing module called The One, which was really high-fidelity and could play back samples at 24-bit 96 kHz. It has a small memory card that plugs in the front and you can adjust the pitch, volume control, and a trigger – and you also have some CV [control voltage] inputs. They approached me last year because it was the 40-year anniversary of the first Throbbing Gristle album, and asked how we'd feel about doing some sounds for their existing card. I made 128 TG sounds from our archive; they loved them and asked for more. Then they came back and said, "Why don't we do a module with these sounds?" Our module, the TG ONE, is a different colour to the original but also has some typical TG functions, like a random mode and a glitch mode, where the loop will glitch in TG fashion. That's been really successful; people seem to love it, and there are some really good videos online of people using it.
How excited are you by the current modular realm and what it offers musicians today?
It's good. The only problem is that it's very addictive. You see people bankrupting themselves because they want the latest module or the biggest system. That's the downside of it, but the plus side is that there are some incredible modules available now. I've had modular systems since the mid-'70s, so it's not new to me, but I wish I'd had some of these modules back then because people come up with some amazing concepts. My system is quite big, but I've developed sub-systems and find that I'm far more productive working with a smaller system. Sometimes I come into the studio, look at the modular system, and it's quite overwhelming – and I'm not the only person who suffers from this. To get around that, I started putting together these smaller cases, based on far fewer modules so I'm more focused on the sounds I want to get. I'll always keep the big system because I can do some incredible patches on it, but for anyone going into modular I'd say start small, because you can lose focus when you have too much choice. It's great that there are all these companies making these modules because it brings people into this experimental area.
Software also gives you infinite possibilities, but people tend to get lazy with it. You can't really be lazy with modular, and everything you create is unique by default.
Absolutely. Cosey and I used to have this spot-the-preset type of thing every time we'd listen to new electronic music. Everyone uses the same drum patterns or presets on a synth; they're not even programming. The best thing about modular is that when you put some energy into patching things up, you'll hear sounds that no one's ever heard before. I love it when I hear new music and have no idea how they've done it. Because I'm quite analytical in the way I listen to music, it's great when I have no clue how an artist got a particular sound.
Impressively, you master your own music. You don't feel the requirement for a second ear?
We used to get the Chris & Cosey stuff mastered by Porky's Prime Cuts [with George "Porky" Peckham], but it never quite turned out how we wanted so we invested in some decent speakers and I got quite good at it. Having said that, the new album was mastered at Abbey Road, and I must admit that wasn't an easy journey. It's that "letting go" thing – I wasn't quite ready and I didn't like what they'd done with it at first, so there was a lot of sending files back and forth, tweaking mixes, and getting the levels right. I find it quite traumatic, but it's come out sounding really good.
The title indicates there will be further volumes?
Yes, when I put this together I had about 30-odd tracks recorded. We decided to max out at 25 on the first volume, but we've got some more ready to go for Volume 2. I have a lot of other projects on the go, so it's unlikely to come out for another year. Meanwhile, Mute has a three-year plan for Throbbing Gristle. We're doing a box set with a DVD and some unreleased material on vinyl. It will come out this year, or maybe next.
