Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe: In-Between the Notes

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe is one the most innovative composers working today. With his experience in punk and metal bands, and as a vocalist, his compositions are grounded in a way that is usually sorely lacking from conservatory fare. Startlingly prolific, he has released over 20 albums in 17 years since 2004 – often performing solo under the pseudonym Lichens – and also with the likes of the bands Om and Singer. He has collaborated with such heavyweights as Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo [ Tape Op #17 ], Genesis P-Orridge, and the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Robert was also the lead singer and trumpet player on three albums and an EP for Chicago’s 90 Day Men, and he provided vocals on albums for Drag City groups U.S. Maple and Town & Country. Using field recording in his work, he has now provided the score for director Nia DaCosta’s remake of the cult film Candyman , the latest in Jordan Peele’s ( Get Out , Us ) Monkeypaw Productions’ run of smash-hit, socio-political, arthouse horror.

How did the Candyman collaboration come about?

Monkeypaw Productions cold called me. They sent an email asking if I might be interested in potentially doing a score for them for a horror movie that they were working on. I love what Monkeypaw has done. In very short order, they’ve done a lot of very thoughtful, interesting, well-crafted film and television works. I was all in. And also, I was pretty sure that it was Candyman they were referring to, because I’d remembered several months before that having read an article about how Monkeypaw had optioned the rights from MGM to make a sequel of Candyman . I was definitely excited that they reached out to me. And then, I came to find out that they had been following my work for some years.

I don’t know if there is a bigger compliment than to be asked to do the remake of a movie where Philip Glass wrote the original score. How did his score inform what you did?

There was a lot of consideration in making the score, because the film had achieved a cult status. At the time it came out, it was technically a flop. But over time it built up a status as a cult film. A lot of people talk about how strange they thought it seemed that Phillip Glass did a score for a horror film. But if you go back and look, there are a lot of avant-garde composers that had done work for films. Look at Krzysztof Penderecki’s music used in The Shining . Bernard Parmegiani did the score for Docteur Jekyll et les femmes , which was a Walerian Borowczyk film from 1981 starring Udo Kier. This had been going on for a while. I enjoy the Philip Glass score. I also enjoyed the fact that it was a very strange fit for the film; how the film ended up in its final cut. These are the things that I had to consider, because obviously there is a history. We’re dealing with a lineage. I don’t want to gloss over it but, at the same time, it’s completely uninteresting to me and reductive to do something that would be derivative. I feel that way for any remakes or sequels that happened many years after the original film. The new film should live within that universe, but it should also stand as its own work. Nia DaCosta, the director, and I were very much in the same place with that – where we wanted to be able to come together and see through a finished work that stood on its own, while also paying homage or reverence to the original.

I read that you wanted to be on set, so the music would be integral and organic. As part of that, I heard you did field recordings on location in Chicago where they were filming. What did you record?

Being physically there was something that I proposed. I said, “Look, this is something that would be very helpful to me.” There was the possibility that the sound recordist on set could take some field recordings and send them to me, but I felt that it was necessary for me to be there – not only to be able to select the sounds that I needed specifically, but also to understand what the energy of the set was. I wanted to be able to watch Nia work in real time and see how she directed the actors and see more clearly what her vision was. This concept of the field recordings, it’s not something that’s new. I thought that it would be an integral part of the structure of the score, due to the fact that I would be displacing the energy of these locations to become textural elements in the score itself. I walked around Cabrini-Green [Chicago Housing Authority’s public housing project that existed from 1942-1995, and where the first Candyman film was set] and took a lot of sound from the street. There were these old electrical boxes that were on the outside of some of the row houses that had been emptied out or gutted. It was nice to get the sound of them, with the recorder inside of the box with the wind hitting it, or the door creaking on the outside. Taking footsteps through these abandoned buildings or capturing the air or the insects that were out there. There are a few different scenes that happen inside of a laundromat. When they took a break while they were shooting in the laundromat, I went in and the fellow that owned the laundromat put some coins in a few of the machines. He let them run, and I took some sound of the washers and dryers running. So, you have this mechanical movement as well. I used very little of, but it’s in there and it was all about this concept of capturing energy or spirit of the location.

Beautiful. I read that you lived in Chicago in the ‘90s.

Yeah, I lived about six blocks away from Cabrini-Green in the mid-’90s. I moved there at the end of 1995, so it was only a couple of years after the film had come out. That was still in conversations you would have people, being that was the location that the film took place. I had this relationship to the landscape already, which was interesting and something that the folks at Monkeypaw didn’t know. They were very excited about it when they found out that I was a part of that landscape at the time when the buildings were still there.

It seems your collaboration was destined, in a sense. What did you use to record in the field?

I had a Zoom H6. I was a couple of weeks out from purchasing a Sound Devices MixPre-6, but I hadn’t gotten it yet. The Zoom was totally fine. I had a stereo pair of LOM mics from the Czech Republic – the Uši Pro omnidirectional electret. I was holding those and also using the built-in mics to capture sounds.

You’ve said that the score could act as a character in the film. Did you create leitmotifs for the different characters?

I meant that the sound of the film should be an active character cinematically. Certain characters did have themes. They weren’t overt, but they definitely would reoccur. It was less about the specificity of the character, and more about the particular circumstance the character was in; more event-based than character-based. But, when I say that the score should be a character, the score should have its own presence in that landscape with the dialogue, with the characters, and how the characters are moving. The score has its own narrative as it moves through the landscape and acts as this apparition – as a ghost that floats through the story. It has its own energy and imparts its energy into each of these scenes.

It’s refreshing and inspiring to hear about a director and producers making such bold and artistically strong decisions.

Yes. I don’t know if I had any expectations with Candyman . I was more excited about the fact that the film was coming alive for an audience after it had been sat on for over a year due to the pandemic. It’s something that I was very proud of, and I think the work that we did was really exciting. My co-producer, Randall Dunn [ Tape Op #114 ], was also the engineer and mixer. Hildur Guðnadóttir played cello, and Matthew Morandi played contrabass and additional synths. It was a very small group of people, and it was exciting for me to be able to put that work out there because of the work that they did. I wrote and arranged and performed most of the score, but I wanted to have these collaborators with me who could act at certain times as counterpoint to what I was doing and give it more dimensionality. I wanted to have it as dynamic and nuanced as possible. Having those three folks in the fold helped me to get to exactly where I wanted it to be. I do feel I was given the space to do the work that I do. I wasn’t leaned on too hard by the studio. I was able to truly collaborate with Nia, have an open dialogue about what each of us were doing in the context of the film, and what was necessary for those moments. I am excited that Nia DaCosta is now the first African American woman to debut a film at number one. It’s wild that it hasn’t happened before. It’s not a surprise, but it’s a fucking shame. I’m very happy that people have responded to it in the way that they have. But I ultimately wanted to make a work that compelled me.

You recorded in your own studio?

Well, I have my studio here in Brooklyn, but down the hall is Randall Dunn’s Circular Ruin Studio. I did a lot on my own on the front end, as well as a few months collecting sounds and arranging them. When it came time to put it together and make sure that everything was coalescing, I moved everything into Randall’s studio. When Hildur was playing the cello, I did a five-mic array so that I would have a variety of sounds from the cello. I used a Neumann TLM 103, two Coles 4038 ribbon mics, the Line Audio OM1, and a direct signal. With all of the vocal work that I did, and the contrabass we used, it was a Neumann U 47. A lot was processed through a modular synthesizer. We had a Lexicon MX200 that Randall loves to use, and an Eventide H3000 for spatializing sounds. We used Manley compressors, and I eventually ran all that through a Trident [Series] 65 console.

I’ve read about how you’re often focused on the physicality of sound.

Sound is a physical thing. Whenever I give artist talks or do lectures, I often talk about process. Most people, when they think of art, they don’t think of sound. They think of something that’s tangible, like a painting or sculpture. What artists do with sound is sculpt the air. Soundwaves are resonant, and you understand them through the cilia in your ears and how they pick them up. Creating a sound work, you are sculpting air. I wanted this to be a very electroacoustic score. I wanted to have physical objects, and I wanted to use voltage and electricity and the human body to make this electroacoustic score. But I also wanted to play with psychoacoustics in a stereo field, and I wanted to be able to create something that would excite the ear. When that excitement happens with the ear, it does something to the body physically as well. A lot of low end frequencies that are put out by a proper sound system, you physically feel the push. All of these ideas are important to me, because it allows for the sound to implant a memory. So, one has an experience – from whatever vantage point they’re at. It’s an approximation of something that happened, and you process that through your brain and then that becomes your memory.

I’ve heard that you sing to patches you’ve created with modular synthesizers. They echo the organic nature of vocal expression.

When you sing, you use the body. That was always important to me – to be able to investigate the voice as an instrument and also investigate the body: How the body moves when you create the sound, where you sing from, the position that you’re in, where the air comes from, and how it’s pushed out of your body. Modular synthesizers are all based around voltage, and the human body is made up of electricity itself. You have these two entities which are operating in a similar way. I consider the modular synthesizer to be at one moment an extension of my own body, and at another moment a collaborator. It’s about a dialogue, without words, with the instrument. Being that modular synthesizers have a myriad of variables attached to them and what they can produce, and the human voice being the most flexible instrument that we have – the modular synthesizer is right there along with it.

Which synths do you tend to favor?

I love the synthesizer modules that Make Noise [ Tape Op #104 ] makes. There are several companies that make modules that are very much up my alley: Instruo, from Glasgow, Scotland; ALM Busy Circuits, outside of London; and Worng Electronics, from Melbourne, Australia.

These are not vintage units.

No, they’re all newer. The reason I like these companies in particular is the fact that they are coming from a 21st century perspective, while being able to reference mid-century circuitry and electronics. With synthesis I tend to lean towards West Coast additive theory, more than East Coast subtractive theory. I like being able to play with multi-timbral elements. It’s less about taking away, and more about adding on and seeing what you can shape, move, and shift. Buchla and Serge, being mid-century companies, I really love those. I don’t own one, but EMS – which was a company from London in the late-’60s to early-’70s – made the EMS Synthi AKS, which is a lovely instrument. There’s something about the raw electricity that I’m drawn to; something that’s not so smooth or precise.

Are you putting them through amps and recording the room, or is a lot of it DI straight to Pro Tools?

I’ll do both. I have an old Nagra 4.2 tape machine, so sometimes I’m utilizing tape. Sometimes I’m feeding the synthesizer into speakers, and then recording that with microphones. I’ve done that a lot. Also going direct. It’s all about experimenting, playing around with and exploring these different techniques and possibilities.

Do you tend to mix largely on headphones? Or to what degree are you using reference speakers?

It’s a mixture. I used to mix pretty exclusively on headphones, but I felt that I was missing certain things. Now I go back and forth. I do a lot of mixing on monitors now. I have a pair of Genelec 8040s that I use.

Your first solo album [Lichens’ The Psychic Nature of Being ] was complete pieces done as continuous improvisations without overdubs. What did you take away from that process?

I learned that I wanted to do it more. It’s something that I lean into. I have a very aleatoric process, so any inclusion of chance is interesting to me because an event may happen that I may not have considered. Then, I’ll move along that path. It’s all about setting up the structure and then letting it roll. As events occur within that structure, I may have had a notion that it would go in one direction, but it goes in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to course correct that, I’ll continue on the path that it’s actually going. Course correction is less interesting than having a fluidity. Being able to be flexible in that moment can garner some interesting results. And sometimes not. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that I can trust my intuition.

You often have the voices and instruments play different roles sonically – the vocals serving as brass, the brass serving as strings. What do you think is gained in those transfigurations?

It’s interesting to play with this concept of illusion. I like the idea of tricking the ear. People have a very fixed idea of what something is supposed to be. I want to be able to live outside of that particular expectation, because why should you be boxed into that? Also, because at certain times I want to have a particular sound and I’m not able to play a viola or a euphonium. I can get to that particular sonic architecture without using those instruments. I have never been interested in using samples of instruments where they are utilized to continue to live in the role that they’ve already been assigned.

I’ve been thinking recently a lot about technology in music and the way the history has been told. There seems to be an erasure of the contributions of someone like Stevie Wonder, whose use of electronic instruments was revolutionary from 1972 to 1974. Meanwhile, the classic rock folks like Pete Townshend seem to get over-credited.

With Pete Townsend being photographed in front of a very large modular synthesizer – obviously the object takes precedence in that moment. It’s like, “Oh, he has a relationship to this thing that looks like a spaceship.” Obviously, he was doing this thing. Pink Floyd had an early [EMS] Synthi AKS that they used on The Dark Side of the Moon . In the footage of them playing around with that, they’re tinkering with it and figuring out how to use it in the context of what they were doing. But, yeah, Stevie Wonder; he was utilizing those in a very different way – there’s physicality and percussiveness to the way that he’s playing with these synths. But also, you have to think about Bernie Worrell from Funkadelic. How he used the sound of the Minimoog is iconic. He was able to make that instrument his own. And now that’s something that you hear in popular music, from the early 1970s all the way on up. We’re still hearing it, that exact sound.

He’s been culturally cloned.

Yeah. That energy, that energy has been carried through. Maybe less popular, but no less important, would be Sun Ra. The way he played the electric organ was the same thing – expansive, for a popular form of music. There’s a composer by the name of Olly Woodrow Wilson, Jr. that no one ever talks about. I’ve mentioned him a couple of times in interviews recently. He was an African American composer who initiated the first conservatory-based electronic music program in Oberlin [College] in 1967. There were no conservatory-based electronic programs in academia, in schools, anywhere in the world before that. He did the first, which became the TIMARA [Technology in Music and Related Arts] program. And no one, no one , talks about the fact that his electronic work back at that time was incredible. But also, his orchestral work was insane. What he was doing was super amazing and no one ever talks about this figure. He was in academia for quite a long time and passed away in 2018. He was a composer that made the work his own. He wasn’t leaning on what had come before. He was exploring different forms. He was exploring a lot of African forms in his orchestral works.

How did you come to play tambura?

I was playing with a group for a period of time called Dream Weapon in Chicago. That was all based around Indian classical instruments. It was tambura, harmonium, violin, string bass, and sometimes frame drum.

I’m curious about your relationship to pitch. It seems related to what you’ve been talking about with tones.

It is. I have less interest in living within any particular scale. I like to be able to play in-between the notes. There’s so much room in there. The voice has such an ability to move fluidly from one note to the next. To be able to expand the world with tone and pitch is something that’s interesting to me. A 12-note scale is fine, but it’s not something I want to be beholden to.

robertaikiaubreylowe.bandcamp.com

www.frontporchproductions.org