ONE TRACK MIND

THE LITTLE CORNERS WHERE IT ALL HAPPENS:

AN INTERVIEW WITH KEMPER NORTON

Welcome to One Track Mind, the feature where we talk to a musician about a particular song of theirs, to learn about how they approach their music through that single prism. Or, at least, that’s the idea. In reality, of course, conversations wander where they wander, and we end up talking about a whole load of other things from that starting point of the one song. The micro inevitably expands to the macro.

For this edition I spoke with Kemper Norton, the recording alias of a musician who spent much of his early life in Cornwall. Many of his records focus on aspects of Cornish folk history — country dances, UFO sightings, the chemical byproducts of tin mining. He avoids the autobiographical/confessional concerns of much songwriting, to instead tell the stories of others. His music is largely based on samples and synthesisers, an uncanny sound that is both ancient and modern, and recalling the dream magic that COIL used to create.

For his recent record Tall Trees, Kemper Norton has taken a side step into instrumental, loop-based dance music, with track titles named after Cornish nightclubs and rave venues. However, it sounds like no other dance music — while there are slithers of techno and jungle in there, it’s more like the re-enactment of the panic/confusion/bliss of being on a dancefloor when the drugs kick in, than an exercise in a particular genre. He describes the record as “recollections, recreations and fantasies of legendary, feared or familiar Cornish nightclubs and venues… none of these places still exist.” All rich pickings for One Track Mind.

Which track shall we talk about?

I suppose the track ‘Tall Trees’ itself. That’s what it all started from. That’s the first track I did for the record. It felt like the opposite of doing really personal, Cornish history. Tall Trees is a club in Newquay. And for people who grew up in Cornwall, Newquay is like the opposite of authentic Cornwall — Newquay is the one place people in Cornwall think of as not being Cornwall. It’s the place where the tourists go, and it’s a party town. Kinda fake. So it was fun doing something that was the opposite of that authentic Cornwall. I wanted to do something about dance music, and having fun, and hedonism. So that was the starting point, for the record. Like, let’s look at the least authentic thing. [Laughs.]

But actually, personally it was really authentic, because when I was a teenager Tall Trees was the place where people who were much cooler than me went.

Did you ever go to Tall Trees?

I went a couple of times, yeah, but I was shitting myself. I was like a nerdy little teenager who was listening to Genesis and stuff. And the idea of going off to Newquay, which is essentially like going off to Vegas… after 11pm… where people got into fights, you’d hear rumours of terrifying stuff. It was like any city, but not quite. So I went there, and it was mind-bendingly terrifying, and really weird. It was full of music I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand anything about techno, or house. [In recording the track], it was about really going back to that, thinking about how that was the first time I ever heard dance music — at Tall Trees.

So it was quite a commercial club?

Oh yeah. Looking back now there was nothing cool about it. The Cornish clubs that get mythologised now are the places that Aphex Twin used to DJ at, like the Bowgie, these really cool little niche venues that have now got a bit of a rep. But that wasn’t Tall Trees… Tall Trees was just the club where everyone went. And for me that was totally alien — I was quite happy with my Jean-Michel Jarre tapes!

So, it wasn’t a place you had an epiphany on the dancefloor, that typical first rave experience?

No, not all at all. It was more like, “Oh, this is mainstream clubbing, this is absolutely terrifying and violent.” But also, really exciting. It was pure hedonism. And hedonism doesn’t look very nice, when you’re not that sort of person. So, I was just looking back and thinking that I wanted to do some absolutely simple dance music. Where would I start with simple dance music? Oh, Tall Trees! That’s literally all it was for. So, it was a way into writing some fun, functional dance music. Which was really liberating, after doing lots of stuff that was loaded with folklore.

Did you find yourself getting drawn back into the aspects of Cornish history, though — the social history of night clubs, and raving?

I did, I couldn’t help it. That’s part of what I like — getting into things that are neglected, disappeared or vanished. Also, we’re living in an age where clubbing culture all round — in London, and cities in the UK — is vanishing. So, that felt like a natural thing to look at. I think I’d done about three tracks, and I thought, “Oh, none of these places really exist in the same form that they used to.” Like Tall Trees still exists, but it’s not a club anymore. Then I thought about places that I used to go to dance, and how many of them had gone — little places like The Swan, that was a pub in Truro, and there is a track on the album about that. And it’s all vanished.

And obviously I’m old now, so you can’t help but go a bit retro. And so the record became a bit different, it became more about looking at the stuff round the edges. Then you get sucked down a rabbit hole of different venues, like Peggotty’s, which was a folk club in Cornwall, which I never went to, but then I got drawn into old bits of local folklore through that. Which I wasn’t expecting — I was just trying to make some banging techno.

Back in the 90s, pretty much any medium-sized town in the UK had at least one decent club… which just doesn’t exist these days.

I genuinely don’t know though… I live near Brighton these days, and I presume 20-somethings still go out and dance around, but Brighton is a bit of an exception maybe. The small-town stuff, I don’t know… I’m not sure if people still do it? Or do people just go round people’s houses and do ketamine, and listen to music off a phone?

A valid choice…

Yeah, it is. But so much has been made about club culture not being what it was, economically and culturally. And the record accidentally became a little bit about that.

In terms of how you put the track together, was ‘Tall Trees’ recorded live?

Pretty much, either live or two or three takes stitched together. I was getting bored, or reaching a dead end with assembling things gradually, and it was just getting to be not much fun. So, I just built something in an old version of Reaktor — just trying to make something really functional, just for this dance music. Like just four loops with a few effects. Every track has been made through that one tiny thing. And it’s all at 140 bpm. It was fun seeing how much you can squeeze out from one toy. These days, you can kind of make anything. There’s too many options. I think most musicians feel this way. So it’s nice to narrow down your options. I’d definitely do that again. Anything that makes you have limits is, for me, really creative. It makes you focus in on why you’re doing it. So, Tall Trees was very much about: can I make a whole album out of this funny little thing I’ve accidentally made? And I’ll hopefully do another one, in a few months.

Will that be similar, techno stuff?

Yeah, it’s going in a couple of directions. After having sworn off Cornish folklore, I seem to be doing an album based around the folklore and history of St Austell now, the Cornish clay district, post industrial. So, that music has no beats whatsoever, and nothing remotely fun! And then I’ll do another fun dance record at the same time.

Do you think recording live affects the music you make? One thing that strikes me listening to ‘Tall Trees’ is how the track builds and grows quite organically — I guess as you’re playing around with it in real time.

I was trying to make very loop-based music, but I never seem to be able to do it. I always get a bit bored of it. I love it when things drift in and out of sync. But what was liberating about ‘Tall Trees’ was thinking that if I do it, and it sounds godawful, I can just do it again, in a slightly different way.

You read about people in music magazines, carefully constructing their EQ, and they have this process they’ve been using for 20 years and so on… I used to be jealous of that, so I gave it a go. And it was so boring, I couldn’t do it. So, eventually I just thought — blast it out, and if it doesn’t work, record it again, and don’t worry about a structure. After doing this for a few years you realise that a structure will just naturally happen. I wanted it to be honest to that intention, of being a bit messy. Like going out and doing drugs and dancing is messy. That sort of cold, Berlin, white polo neck stuff… isn’t really for me. [Laughs.]

What’s the relationship between the track titles on Tall Trees and the sounds of the tracks? Were you trying to evoke the sounds of the particular clubs that the tracks are named after?

Initially, I thought: am I going to have to reflect how a pub in Truro is different from an outdoor space in Helston? Am I going to have to do field recordings? And then I thought, no, fuck it… it was more in the flavour of the sounds, and that was the thing about limiting the sounds to the small bit of equipment I had. Like, if you want the feeling of a pub in Truro, you’ve got these 20 samples and a crappy synth to make it. That was a lot of fun, to think: how do I make it sound like Truro? Do I try to make it rougher? And it was little things, like a wafty synth perhaps suited the Helston outdoor track, whereas a loop better suited Truro. But I deliberately abandoned the idea of desperately trying to recreate the sound of particular places. It was more about the feel.

What sort of stuff were you listening to, when you were going out raving?

I guess it was stuff going from the early 90s, like The Orb, Orbital, the tail end of what I was listening to as a 12 year old, so Jean-Michel Jarre. I went to London for a year, so I listened to Metalheadz stuff in the mid 1990s, which was amazing. Then I left, because London was scary. So a mixture of early 90s balearic hippy early techno. There was a compilation that I remember listening to at university, called Shamanarchy in the UK. It’s on Youtube. Honestly, if you want the most early 90s thing in the history of the human race, check it out on Youtube. That was a big inspiration. That was the thing that got me into acid house and techno, as a grown up. Also bits of weird industrial stuff, like COIL. I was trying to capture bits of all of that, in a messy adolescent way.

The COIL thing made me think: they sometimes said, even of their music that sounded instrumental, that there were vocals in there, but they’d been so processed that they were unrecognisable. I wondered if something similar is going on with ‘Tall Trees’: it sounds instrumental, but is it really?

I don’t think there’s any of my voice on it at all. But I have no idea whether or not that was deliberate or not. The only vocals there might be are… there’s always little bits I forget about, because my stuff is always made from snippets of loops that were on previous albums. So even I don’t remember where some of this stuff comes from originally. I’ve often got friends and family to record little samples, and then I’ve re-sampled it, but then I can’t remember where they came from. That’s always really deliberate — there’s always stuff from previous records in the new stuff.

Have you been playing out the Tall Trees stuff live, for dancefloors — given the inspiration behind it?

I played at the Acid Horse festival in Wiltshire. That was really fun. I played one folky song, and then the rest was the techno stuff. I think people enjoyed it. A lot of people were on drugs, so that always helps… I like dance music, and I like dancing and having fun. So an obvious motivation was to try and make something that other people might think was fun. [Laughs.]

How did you find raving in Cornwall in the 90s? With the likes of Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert being Cornish DJs — did it feel like there was something important going on at the time? 

Well, I left at a similar time that Richard James (Aphex Twin) and Luke Vibert left. They’re roughly my age. I went to university in Wales, and when I got there suddenly Aphex Twin kicked off. But when I was growing up, not in the slightest, we had no idea. I think Aphex has said the same — we didn’t know anything, we just made up our own stuff. If there’s anything magical, it’s from any area where you’re a bit disconnected. Not knowing anything is good. You can create your own idea. We’d heard about acid house, but we never got to hear it. So, we made our own stuff. 

Looking back, it never felt like a scene. I knew Luke Vibert a little bit in sixth form, but not in a cool way. I only knew him because when I was 17 he was the guy in charge of the tape player at my sixth form. That was before anyone had done anything. Then before you know it, everyone had gone to London and made it. [Laughs.] I think if you thought you were doing something cool at the time, then… it wouldn’t be good. I don’t think scenes really work like that. I don’t think Cornwall was unique. There’s loads of little places around the UK where really special things have happened… like St Albans being so central to drum n bass with the Source Direct label. These little corners of the UK are where it all happens.