Last month electronic duo Immersion (comprised of Wire’s Colin Newman and Minimal Compact’s Malka Spigel, a “life and art” couple) released the third album of their collaborative Nanocluster series (2021’s Nanocluster, Vol.1 saw them collaborating with our phriend Laetitia Sadier, German post-rock duo Tarwater, and electronic musicians Ulrich Schnauss and Scanner, while 2024’s Nanocluster Vol.2 had them collaborating with Thor Harris and Cubzoa.), and for the past two weeks they’ve been on a North American tour with their most recent collaborators, NYC ambient country trio SUSS. Next Tuesday, April 1st, the bands will bring their Nanocluster Vol.3 collaborative album to our very own Johnny Brenda’s for a three-part performance showcasing the artists’ individual work, in addition to what they’ve done together. Early this February I got a chance to chat with Immersion’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel via Zoom about the Nanocluster series, their seemingly unlikely collaboration with SUSS, and what can be expected of the live experience.
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Izzy Cihak: You’re gearing up to release the third Nanocluster album, a collaboration with SUSS. How did you originally come about this particular collaboration?
Malka Spigel: It started with us hearing SUSS, and loving what they do, and playing it on our radio show. We kind of got to know each other online. Bob [Holmes] asked us to be part of his podcast, and we started communicating. And we thought, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to collaborate with SUSS?”
Colin Newman: When we started doing the Nanocluster series, the first people we collaborated with were people that we knew already. And, as it’s developed, what’s happened is the fact that we have a weekly radio show and we play a lot of different music, we are in touch with a lot of artists now, and it throws up all kinds of possibilities and ideas about who we can collaborate with, and in which way, not always as a formal Nanocluster thing, but other stuff as well.
Malka: It’s always a question, “Is it gonna work?” ‘Cause nothing is obvious when it comes to exchanging music and creating something together.
Izzy: How was the process with SUSS, in particular, if there was sort of a process between the two of you?
Malka: It was definitely a process!
Colin: Yeah, that’s for sure!
Malka: We would send each other small ideas that the other side will build on, and started communicating, and it kind of happened.
Colin: I think the core idea of the Nanocluster collaborations is to find a midway point between the aesthetic of the people we’re collaborating with and our aesthetic. There are lots of good collaborations out there, and very often what happens is there’s a dominant partner. We try to avoid that. We try to lean into the world of the people that we’re collaborating with.
Malka: And we’re also very open to feedback, if the artist chooses to say they want things differently or not. Every time it’s totally different, which is a challenge, but never boring.
Colin: Yeah, absolutely! There are moments where it gets very hard [laughs], but I think that’s the nature of collaborating with other artists. Whether it’s individual artists or bands, that applies to artists of all ages, because we’ve collaborated with artists of all ages. Everyone’s different. Everyone’s got a different idea. You think there’s a standard, there’s no standard.
Malka: Everybody hears music differently [laughs].
Colin: Absolutely. Everybody counts differently.
Malka: And some people are very easy, like, “Yeah, let’s do it,” and it kind of happens. And some people are more cautious, they take time to get to the final result.
Izzy: Do you remember what it was that you first heard from SUSS, or what it is about them that drew you to them?
Malka: We always look for music online. And when we first heard it, it was definitely magical, familiar but fresh at the same time. We had no idea who SUSS were. And when we started looking into to it, we thought, “Oh, wow, it’s really interesting,” the people that create it and the music. It’s beautiful music with open space, really atmospheric.
Izzy: The album’s latest single is “State of Motion,” so I’m curious how that track came about?
Colin: When we started with the collaboration, we tried to pretty much to sit quite strongly in SUSS’s world, but maybe introduce a few rhythmic elements. We knew that a bunch of tracks of full-on drums, or breaks, or some other kind of devices, which would be really unfamiliar to them, wouldn’t work. But then, as we worked on it, we got a bit more adventurous. And there is an element of Immersion where we do like that meteoric beat. It’s something we’ve used in other pieces of music, and it just seemed to develop. Actually, their feedback encouraged us to make it tougher and more driving. It’s not full-on noise or anything, but it’s definitely much more propulsive than anything else on the record. There’s a certain satisfaction with having that kind of thing, because that really is a meeting of worlds. There’s plenty of SUSS in there, but there’s also plenty of Immersion. There are other tracks on the album which are much, much more abstract.
Izzy: As you were saying, you really like to collaborate with artists, not even just for this Nanocluster series, but how did this idea behind Nanocluster come about, to make this actual series of collaborations? You mentioned that when you started, it was people you already knew.
Malka: Yeah, people we already knew, and it started with a gig. While rehearsing for the gig, we recorded it, and it ended up being an album. But it’s not totally practical to always start with a gig [laughs], so we opened it up and we’ve done quite a few now.
Colin: We’ve been living in Brighton, on the south coast of England, for just over ten years now, and we wanted to become part of the city. Somebody suggested we have an event, a regular kind of event or a club or something like that, that would sort of be our thing. I guess it evolved into this idea that what we would do is we’d do an event where we’d collaborate with another artist. It has a form: Immersion plays a set, the other artist plays a set, and then we play a collaborative set. And that collaborative set is material that we’ve worked on together. And we play as if we were a band that you’ve never heard of, but it’s got familiar people in it. That was kind of the idea of it, originally.
Malka: We kept that structure, where each artist plays their set, and then we combine the two.
Colin: That’s what will be the live show of the touring Nanocluster.
Izzy: What kinds of feedback have you gotten about the way that you’re approaching live performances?
Colin: That’s a good question [laughs]. Obviously, our experiences up until now are doing all of them before there’s a record. Now, we’ve built up an audience in Brighton for people who will come to a Nanocluster, because it’s a bespoke gig. You’re not gonna see this anywhere else.
Malka: When we played at SXSW with Thor Harris it seemed to interest a lot of people to come and check it out, and it was really successful.
Colin: I think we got the idea that, actually, people would really like it, but if we were being a little bit smarter, we would do the record first, and do the shows afterwards, because it’s very hard to sell as a tour, turning up in Philadelphia and saying, “Well, there’s gonna be some artists playing. Some of them you’ve heard of, but they’re gonna be playing material you’ve never heard before.”
Malka: It’s never a jam session. It’s always prepared material, but obviously when you make an album first, it’s much more there and something to kind of stick with.
Izzy: Do you have a favorite type of live setting for performing these Nanocluster sets?
Malka: It depends what the other artist brings [laughs], so we can’t be restrictive or anything. We are kind of minimalists in our music and gear, so we create quite a lot with less, but then it depends on the other artist.
Colin: Did you mean what kind of venue?
Izzy: Yeah, because, I mean SXSW can have you at different kinds of unconventional venues. Do you feel like there are certain spaces that work best for this kind of performance?
Malka: It’s hard to say, because it depends on the person we collaborate with as well, but we kind of imagine more artist spaces. But then at SXSW we played in quite a rock venue [laughs]. The whole vibe was kind of dark and messy, and we thought, “Oh no!” but it worked really well. So, I don’t think we’re very picky about it now.
Colin: We played Hotel Vegas with Thor, and that was absolutely rammed full of drunk people. It was mad [laughs], but they saw the show and they loved it!
Izzy: Are there any artists you’d really love to do a Nanocluster album with, whether people you already know and have maybe considered pestering, or maybe you already have, or just artists that you’d really like to work with because you love their music?
Malka: We’ve been talking to various people. We don’t want to get into detail, because nothing is confirmed.
Colin: We also started doing quite a few remixes for artists that we might, or perhaps might not, do collaborations with. Doing the distance collaboration thing with an American artist has pitfalls, I think…
Malka: You mean getting us there?
Colin: Yeah, it’s much more of a big deal. There are certainly British artists that we’re talking to who would do something on a bit of a smaller scale. But this tour, in a way, is a kind of proof of concept. If we can pull this off, and we can tour America with a Nanocluster, we can basically play anywhere.
Izzy: On that note, what do you have planned for after these dates wrap? You seem to always have a lot in the works, and you’ve been putting these out pretty quickly. I mean, the last Nanocluster album was less than a year ago.
Malka: Sometimes we talk to someone and things take time, and this time it was quicker. And then you have to plan the whole thing around the release. But yeah, we’re gonna play more gigs in the UK as Immersion.
Colin: That’s the thing that happened at the back end of last year that nobody was expecting, especially not us, Immersion becoming a touring band in the UK. It’s just a confluence of people and situations. And we’re gonna repeat it again in November/December. And we did a classic Immersion thing when we did the tour last year. The Immersion set was half an hour, because the only thing that we played over the last two years had been Nanoclusters and festivals, so we realized we’d have to make a headline set. So, classic Malka and I, instead of fishing up a bunch of old stuff, we just wrote a bunch of new stuff.
Malka: Well, it’s a great excuse!
Colin: And now we’ve got an album’s worth of material, basically, so we’re gonna put that out in September or October.
Malka: Colin is good at planning ahead!
*Get your tickets here.
