 |
| Photos by Charlie Watkins |
Lawrence Casserley has been a pioneer of electronics in improvised music,
particularly through his development of the Signal Processing Instrument. To
celebrate Lawrence’s 85th year, Charlie Watkins sat down with
him to discuss a few records which have been particularly important to him
and the events he has planned for 2026.
– – –
By Charlie Watkins
I meet Lawrence at his home studio in Oxford. The already small room is made
even smaller by the books, CDs and audio equipment lining each wall. There
are three computers, one of which is the Signal Processing Instrument (SPI),
another displaying a book manuscript Lawrence is working on, and the third
with various audio files open. It’s a fitting setting: even in his 85
th
year, Lawrence is still full of ideas and as hardworking as ever. Before
we’re even sitting down, he is already explaining to me how the SPI works,
and I rush to start recording before I miss anything.
The first album Lawrence and I discuss is
Solar Wind
(1997), which he recorded at STEIM whilst developing the SPI. He
explains to me how the record came about: ‘I had three weeks there [at
STEIM]. Evan [Parker] was there, not all the time, but most of the time. And
Barry Guy joined us for the last part.
‘After a couple of days of just getting going, Evan said “Whenever we play,
we switch the recorder on,” and so we had all this stuff, lots of stuff.
Sometimes I’d say to him, “Look, I’ve got to do some programming, I’ve got
an idea,” so he’d go off for a walk, or practice, or do the crossword, and
then I’d say “Come on, we’re ready.” That’s how the CD came about.’
Lawrence tells me how those early sessions at STEIM were a pivotal moment in
the development of the SPI. ‘A lot of that original structure of the
instrument is still here. I’ve tweaked various stuff and added bits, added
things and taken things away, but the basic structure and the way it works
was established at that time. The current version has been pretty much
stable for about 10 years, so I finally stopped developing it and started
learning to play it! Michel Waisvisz [STEIM’s artistic director] said to me
“There comes a stage when you’ve got to stop changing stuff and just learn
how to play it really well.”’
Solar Windwasn’t Lawrence’s first foray into live electronics. He
dropped out of Columbia University to study music instead, and his first
composition with live processing was in 1969, during his postgraduate
studies at the Royal College of Music. ‘My composition teacher at the time
was Herbert Howells, who was quite a conservative. But he was really
interested in what I was doing and he was very, very smart and very good. At
the end of the year, I came into the lesson and he said, “I’ve had a letter
about this electronic music course [with Tristram Cary]. I’ve put you down
for it, of course.” That kind of encouragement was really good.’
Even in those early years, as Lawrence started to utilise electronic
processing in his compositions, he had a clear vision for how he wanted to
be using electronics in live performance. ‘I got this idea: I wanted an
electronic instrument that was like playing the cello or something, “my
instrument” in that sense. It just took 20 years for the technology to catch
up! When I finally got there, I was working with people like Barry Guy, who
had such a physical way of playing, and I said, “I want to play electronics
like that.”’
Although there was already an improvisatory element in his early
compositions, Solar Wind was really Lawrence’s entrance onto the
improvised music scene. Thirty years on, I ask Lawrence how he feels about
the album now. ‘It was a remarkable thing in its way. I’m certainly not
ashamed of it. The whole thing gelled, and Evan was so supportive of the
whole thing; that was sort of the catalyst that made it happen. It’s a very
special CD. I rate it as one of the best things I’ve done.’
Lawrence consistently describes his duo work as what he is most proud of.
‘You can get much more involved in the integration between the player and
the processing. When I work with more people, it becomes a bit more
diffused; this sort of really tight, close integration comes best in duos,
and some of the trios.’ That certainly comes across on his album with
Philipp Wachsmann,
Garuda
(2016). ‘I think Garuda is quite possibly the best thing I’ve ever done.
First of all, Phil is so amazing. The range of his playing and the range of
his experience is very, very large. And his thinking is very deep, too. He
always produces such fantastic material for me to work with. Again, we
worked over several days, recording different kinds of things in different
ways. I play some percussion as well and sometimes the percussion is
processed with his sounds, and other times it’s just the violin. It was a
very rich sound palette that we had and we worked a long time on it and I
think we formed a very special sort of integration. He inspires great
things.’
Listening to Garuda, it’s clear that both musicians are having a
lot of fun. I ask Lawrence how he understands the role of ‘play’ in music
that can often be quite serious. ‘I don’t think serious and playful are very
far apart. Like a lot of things, they’re different sides of the same coin,
and all these things are part of life. If you can’t have fun, then part of
your life is missing. And it’s the same with the music, if you can’t have
fun, part of the music is missing.
‘Music is an expression of life. And I think for me it almost is life. It’s
a lot of other things as well, but music is kind of the core of everything.’
Finally, we discuss a more recent recording,
Corps et Biens: Hommage à Robert Desnos
(2025) with the vocalist Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg. Lawrence has worked
extensively with vocals over the years, including his own; I ask whether
there is a reason he keeps choosing to work with vocals. ‘The voice is very
interesting because there’s so much you can do with it. It’s so flexible.
The work I did with [performance poet] Bob Cobbing back in the 70s and 80s
was a very crucial part of my life because it was Bob who really taught me
to be a performer. I didn’t have a way to be a performer – I wanted to be,
but I didn’t have an instrument that served the purpose yet. Bob pointed me
towards using what there was to perform with.’
One of Lawrence’s early works was a piece called 15 Shakespeare kaku, which
was a setting of poems Bob had written for the Globe Playhouse Trust. ‘He
took the letters of Shakespeare’s name, cut them up in different ways and
stuck them all in different shapes, and he would use these as source
material for vocalization. I recorded several different versions and used
small amounts of pitch change and a bit of ring modulation and things like
that.’
That early example of using electronics to process the voice feels a million
miles away from what Lawrence and Jean-Michel are doing together now, a
relationship which has developed over many years. ‘When you work with
somebody for a long time there are things that seem almost permanent, but
then there are other things that are always renewing themselves. If you stop
renewing yourselves it becomes difficult to do any more, or you find that
people move in different directions. I think that’s more or less what
happened with me and Evan. We’ve gone in different directions: it was
fantastic what we were able to do while we were working together, it just
came to a stage where it sort of didn’t happen anymore, which is the way of
things.’
In some ways, Lawrence has had a very consistent approach since he started
playing improvised music, which he recognises as he looks back on his early
recordings. ‘Just after we got back from STEIM, Barry [Guy] booked Gateway
Studios at Kingston, and we recorded
Dividuality
, which is really excellent, and it kind of got lost. A little while ago,
somebody said to me, ‘This is a really great CD,’ and I’d more or less
forgotten about it. And actually, a lot of the things I was doing then, I
can see the seeds of what went into [Evan Parker’s] Electro-Acoustic
Ensemble. That’s really where it begins.’ But at the same time, the need to
‘renew himself’ is clear; Lawrence has never stopped learning. ‘At the
beginning I was a bit nervous about how it all worked, whether it was going
to work, and how I could do it. It’s very different to the way I function
now. I’m much freer in how I do stuff. It’s partly self-confidence, feeling
more in control, understanding the instrument so much better.’
At the end of our chat, Lawrence tells me about his plans for his 85
th
year. He’s starting with three concerts at St Alban’s church hall in east
Oxford. ‘It’s a very nice space: quite intimate but big enough. The first
one is on Tuesday 7 April with Emil Karlsen, the Norwegian percussionist. We
had a CD out on Bead last year,
Aspects of Memory
. The second one will be on Tuesday 21 April with Hannah Marshall. We’ve
long wanted to do some duo work; I worked with her previously in a trio with
Alison Blunt. The third one is a very nice quartet with Dominic Lash,
Massimo Magee and Phil Marks: we’ve just released an album called
Livingry
from a concert we did in early October at the Hundred Years Gallery. That
will be on Tuesday 28 April. And Hannah and I are working towards putting
something out, so they’re very current things.
‘For my actual birthday, tenth of August, I’m planning to have the wonderful
trio,
Valid Tractor
, with Pat Thomas and Dominic Lash, and Paul Lytton is coming over from
Belgium to do a duo. Hopefully there will also be a quartet at the end of
that.
‘Later that month, I’m hoping to get the Spanish composer and performer,
Llorenç Barber, with his bell tree. Martin Mayes is coming over from Italy,
a French horn and alphorn player. He will be a special guest with
HyperYak
, a quartet I have played with for 25 years. I want to have a concert with
Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg and Viv Corringham. We were planning to do a trio
in 2020, which got overtaken by COVID. Two wonderful vocalists but a really
interesting contrast. For that concert I’m hoping we’ll have Harri Sjöström
as well. He very rarely comes to England, he hasn’t been here for around 10
years, so it would be lovely to have him. The other one I want to do is some
of my early electronic work contrasted with improvised electronics, with
Martin Hackett.’
It’s an impressive number of concerts to organise, especially at 85. But
Lawrence seems excited to be sharing his music. ‘Most of these concerts will
be on a pay what you can basis. People should be encouraged to come and
enjoy the music and there’s no pressure to pay lots of money. I want people
to enjoy the music.’
– – –
For more information on Lawrence Casserley’s 85 th birthday
celebrations, keep an eye on Lawrence’s social media or on the Oxford
Improvisers website:
oxfordimprovisers.com