Steve Albini had died a week before our conversation, casting a shadow across the music world in the days since, and here I was, via a transatlantic Zoom link, sitting across from Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, the duo behind the musical project, Immersion. Though our conversation was prompted for other reasons, two themes that quickly emerged were the importance of personal relationships in the music scene and the essential need for collaboration in the creation of art.
“We were in Chicago once, and we stayed at his place,” Newman remarked, explaining the nature of his relationship with Albini. “When they [Shellac] played in Brighton [UK], they had a day off, so we went out. I’ve never seen anyone giving big bills of money to homeless people in the street like Steve did. He was incredible.”
“I feel sad because they were supposed to be playing in Brighton next month,” Newman continued, “and I was just about to send Bob [Weston] an email and say, ‘What’s with you guys?’ I also got a random text from Steve about three weeks ago. It was to settle some bet about a Wire lyric. You know, classic Steve, completely out of the blue, ‘I’ve got this wager with a friend about this.'”
Colin Newman is, of course, a founder and the principal singer-songwriter for Wire, the canonical British post-punk band that has influenced numerous musicians and acts in the decades since their heyday during the late 1970s. Though Wire are still active, their first three albums – Pink Flag (1977), Chairs Missing(1978), and 154 (1979) – are considered their most vital, providing a crucial roadmap between the noise and attitude of punk’s first iteration with the Sex Pistols and the Ramones to a more intellectually complex terrain of art rock minimalism. Early fans included the Cure and R.E.M., who covered Wire’s “Strange” on Document (1987) – a rare move for a band that prided itself on concealing its artistic influences.
Another fan was Albini, whose band Big Black recorded Wire’s “Heartbeat” from Chairs Missing as a single that was eventually included on the compilation album The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape (1987). “I didn’t know him well at all during the period when people thought he was difficult,” Newman comments, regarding that earlier time when Albini was notoriously abrasive. “He was always super nice to Malka and me.”
Collaboration in Motion – The Nanocluster Project
It should be mentioned at this point that Malka Spigel and Colin Newman are married – another way that music can bring people together. They met in 1985 when Newman produced the LP Deadly Weapons by the band Minimal Compact, in which Spigel is a member. They soon began collaborating shortly after that, artistically and romantically, marrying in 1986. Among their collaborations have been the label swim~, through which they have issued solo LPs and albums by mutual projects, including Githead and, more recently, Immersion.
Listeners new to Immersion expecting something akin to Wire may be surprised. Immersion more closely approximates Spigel’s synth-based electronica work with Minimal Compact. That said, there is a tangible intellectual approach to their music that can also be heard on Wire’s early albums. There is often an idea to each song based on a single guitar riff or melodic line whose tonal possibilities and received meanings are explored through repetition and the atmospheric layering of other sounds, resulting in an aural density that can be mesmerizing and beautiful.
Prompting this interview are their recent releases, including a reissue of Newman’s Bastard (2024) from 1997 and Immersion’sNanocluster, Vol. 1 (2021), a collective effort also involving Tarwater (a German instrumental duo), Ulrich Schnauss (a German electronic artist), Scanner (a British electronic artist), and Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab. Their latest release is Nanocluster, Vol. 2, involving Thor Harris, a Texas-based musician and artist who has performed with Swans, and Cubzoa, the nom du musique of Jack Wolter, a musician and producer local to Brighton, where Spigel and Newman live. Needless to say, it can be challenging to keep up with their prolific productivity.
As a start, I ask them about these multiple arrangements, including their own, as a source of artistic creation. “We make music because we enjoy making music. It’s artistically fulfilling, and we like to work together. We obviously live together, and we do quite a lot of things together,” Newman answers without hesitation. “The Nanocluster project is also informed by our radio show [Swimming in Sound], which we’ve been doing weekly for four years now. We get to hear a lot of new music and be in contact with a lot of different artists, which feeds the whole notion that we have of collaboration.
“Malka and I are a collaboration, if you like. We’re a collaboration of life. Bands can be very competitive, and you can’t really be that competitive with someone that you live with,” he laughs.
“The whole thing’s grown organically,” Newman elaborates when I ask them to explain the origins of the Nanocluster project. “When we first moved to Brighton – we will have been here ten years in September – somebody told us you need to create your own scene. We wondered what that might mean. So, we thought, maybe we’ll do an event. We came up with this idea where we would find somebody that we liked and do a collaboration with them and that would take the form of a gig. It would be like a band that you have never seen before, playing material that you’ve never heard before, even though the elements of the band are people you know.”
“But it’s very risky,” Spigel quickly chimes in. “Although you know those people, you don’t know what’s going to happen when you suddenly create something together.”
“It’s not the same as just jamming on stage,” Newman adds, “because that’s all and done in the half hour that it takes to play. In this instance, you’re preparing something, and then you’re going on stage with something that you prepared, and you’re performing as if you’re a band. It feels like a band as well. It feels like a momentary band. We’re perpetually amazed and surprised by how different the people we collaborate with are…”
“It’s a meeting of personalities as well,” Spigel interjects, completing Newman’s thought. “You create music together. You have to open up, and you feel closer somehow. We’ve met incredible people through it, but…”
“It’s an organic thing,” Newman interrupts, in turn, in a friendly manner, using a favored word of his at this point. “In the way that we initially conceived it, it was like, okay, we’ll do a gig, and we’ll have the material, and if we’re going to do a record of it later, we’ll do that. We did collaborations that were just gigs but had stuff on the hard drive, and then the pandemic hit. What were we going to do? We basically just made the album. That was how we did volume one. By then, we started to question the methodology in terms of how you promote an album or a project. You [typically] do the record first, and then you tour it. Here, you do the gig first. We had an audience come and see that, basically like 120 people in Brighton. But then we had no means really to promote the album because we can’t really play gigs: we haven’t devised it that way. By the time the album comes out, whatever artist we’re working with, they’re off doing something else.”
“I’m more interested in the human side,” Spigel adds, “how things come together, the way things come together. It’s a kind of magic almost.”
Our conversation progresses like this: Spigel and Newman trade ideas and views, completing each other’s thoughts in a warm manner that reflects their years together.
I asked if they could say more about how the pandemic affected their collaborations. “I think the pandemic opened a space of awareness in a way,” Spigel responds. “We became aware of how we live, what’s going on, because we suddenly had space, the space to do things we didn’t think about.”
Both Nanocluster volumes were affected by this unexpected opening. “We invited friends to come and play, recorded it, and did a gig,” Spigel continues. “It grew from there. We had different artists we collaborated with on volume one. It’s creating music together, playing it live, and releasing it on an album. It’s not like a jam or anything, but we create something between us. We are very much aware of who we work with.”
“It is magical the way these collaborations happen,” Newman agrees. “I must say we did, as part of the development towards volume two, our first Nanocluster outside of Brighton, in fact outside of the UK, which was at South by Southwest [in Austin, Texas] last year, 2023, with Thor Harris. That was a really interesting experience because we had prepared some material before, but we didn’t know where we were going to rehearse or anything like that. We ended up rehearsing at his house, which is the house that he built in Austin. Thor is an amazing person. That was the best fun.”
“You not only get to create music, but you got to go to his house and do things together, go for a meal,” Spigel concurs. “It’s really fun and interesting.”
“Being in that close creative proximity, you become friends pretty fast,” Newman finishes. “It’s quite close.”
Spigel and Newman did not know Harris very well beforehand, though they liked his music and approached him, sending him several pieces of music with him sending pieces in return. Their collaboration undertook this layer-by-layer approach. I ask Spigel if she sees this process as a form of curation, given her background and practice as a visual artist, in addition to being a musician.
“The way I make music is like taking photographs,” Spigel replies, agreeing with the connections at work between both disciplines. “It’s quite spontaneous and without a lot of thinking involved. I just like people. But an element of it is like an art project. There is a concept.”
“It is a concept,” Newman agrees. “These are conceptual bands that we’re making. It’s not like we’re putting together a lineup that’s going to be together for the next 20 years, right?”
Collaboration in Place – Working Together As a Couple
Going further with the question of collaboration and their songwriting process, I ask them what happens when they individually come up with an idea. Is this a Malka Spigel project or a Colin Newman project? Or a collaborative project? I was curious how authorship worked between them and how that informed the development of a song.
“First of all, we are a couple, so there’s no ego between us,” Spigel responds, reinforcing a point Newman made at the start of our conversation, “which is really important. That open space to be yourself, to come up with ideas without hesitating and let the other person have space and support.”
“I don’t make solo records anymore,” Newman quickly adds. “Bastard [2024] was a re-release of a record I made in 1997 originally. That’s simply because it had never come out on vinyl. A record company thought it’ll be good to put that out on vinyl.”
“You’re not answering the question,” Spigel cuts in jokingly.
“I’m not answering the question because I don’t think that we really work like that,” Newman counters warmly with a smile.
“You have an idea, you come with it, and you do it, and then I have an idea. It’s like we build it up together,” Spigel agrees.
“I don’t sit there and say, ‘Oh, I’m writing a song for my solo record.’ I don’t have a solo record to write for,” Newman further explains. After a pause, he continues: “Malka is quite spontaneous and is hard to contain when she has an instrument in her hands. She will often require recording. It’s up to me to figure out what to do with that. So, I’m very often reacting to what she’s doing, and I very often work like that with our collaborators. I react to what they do. I typically find myself doing chords. I’m quite good with harmony. So, I look to find interesting harmonies.”
“Well, chords are important,” Spigel kids him.
“Yeah, chords are important,” Newman accepts. “You can take one really nice melody and subvert the chords around it and make it really stand out. That’s something that I’ve always been into. I’m a fair-to-middling singer, but I’ve always been able to set chords that make my voice sound more interesting.”
They are both quietly laughing at one another at this point. “Malka is really instinctive,” Newman continues with a smile on his face. “It’s only recently that she started even to think that maybe knowing the names of the notes might be useful, but if you put her at a keyboard and say, find the notes in this, she’ll do it way faster than I could possibly do. She’s just really, really quick and instinctive. She’s got a really good ear. Sometimes, we disagree. She will think the harmony that I think is the most beautiful is the weird one, you know, but apart from that, we pretty much agree on everything.”
Approaching the question of songwriting from a different angle, I ask Newman about how he thinks of Wire versus Immersion, whether he sees continuity or a radical break between the two. As a project with Spigel and other musicians through the Nanocluster series, Immersion seems more anonymous and even authorless. On the other hand, the early compositions of Wire often focused on a particular idea embodied in a certain chord progression, which involved playing with that idea in a very contained way – an approach also seen with Immersion.
“I think it all tends to be much more nuanced and organic,” Newman replies, returning to a preferred word. “Basically, I think we live in a world of evolution. Everything is evolving. Sometimes, it evolves quite fast, but everything builds on everything else that has already been. So, Pink Flag is standing on all of the music that came before Pink Flag. Then, the development of me as an individual, as an individual of the band. It all kind of follows whatever course it follows. You’re subject to whatever influences are around you, and to look for coherency is difficult. It would be harder for me. As a critic, maybe you see a coherency I don’t see.”
Newman pauses and then continues. “I think the one issue that I personally have always had is that I’m easily bored with one style of music, and I don’t just come from one thing. I had a conversation with somebody this week talking about the Beatles, and before I ever made any music, I used to say to people, ‘You have to listen to and understand the Beatles. All of their music is really different. It’s very diverse.’ There’s so much in the history of popular music, which is about genre music. To be in this genre, you do music in this style. I’ve never really bought into that.”
“People mix more genres than they used to,” Spigel adds, offering a second point of view. “We tend to like things that are hard to define. If you ask us what kind of music we do, we would say it’s hard to define.”
I ask them if this approach against definition and conventional categories has always informed their work.
“I don’t know if you know the story, but I met Malka because I produced a Minimal Compact album,” Newman begins to answer. “They were probably the best-informed band I’ve ever met. They knew music really well. They would be talking about artists and releases I just hadn’t heard of; they really knew their stuff. I guess, coming from somewhere [Israel] where there wasn’t anything going on, they wanted to immerse themselves in the music that was going on at that point.”
I ask how soon they started collaborating after meeting in 1985. “Not publicly. Nothing was released immediately. But almost the first thing we did together is play,” Spigel quickly replies.
“Minimal Compact used to live in this house in Brussels, and upstairs was a room where they’d borrowed an 8-track from the record company,” Newman explains. “Eight-track recording was not something that your average musician had access to in their own apartment. This was a pretty amazing thing in the mid-1980s. So, they would just incessantly record.”
“It was a way of entertaining ourselves,” Malka concurs. “There was not much going on.”
“Almost the first thing we bought when Malka and I moved in together was the just released Fostex 8-track,” Newman further adds. “It was the first affordable 8-track, and we started recording. I mean, we had no idea. Malka was just used to recording all the time. We were recording because it was fun to do.” After a pause, Newman laughs, “We had a little studio a long time before we ever owned a washing machine.”
“I learned recording through Malka’s impatience,” he continues. “She had ideas. She wanted me to record them, and I had to learn how to use everything quickly. Otherwise, I was useless. What you have to understand is that the mid-1980s were the beginning of what they called the MIDI Revolution. That was when the idea of making music in your own space started to become a reality. It was about computers, sequencers, and sampling. Sampling time was still so short you couldn’t have anything of any length in it. It was all just one hit sounds or simple waveforms or whatever.
“It was still the early days, but I got really excited about that and that we were a couple. We could use our disposable income to buy studio equipment. So, we started in our apartment in Brussels, building what became a studio. Then we bought a house in Brussels, and we moved the studio and extended it a bit. That was the roots of us making music. Then, in the early 1990s, we moved to London, and for the first time, we decided we would have a dedicated room as a studio. We fitted out our garage so that it could be a recording studio and started to get serious about production. At the same time, we started the record label. So, it was step by step, each step fairly obvious from the preceding one. But if you go back to the beginning and look at where we are now, we’ve gone quite a long way.”
“It’s about being independent,” Spigel summarizes. “Completely independent. From labels. From paying a lot of money for a studio.”
“The other thing is the psychology of it,” Newman elaborates. “You have to invest a bit of money to make something happen. A lot of musicians, especially our generation, can be like, ‘The man has to pay me, I don’t do anything unless I get paid.’ They wind up never having invested in themselves.”
“They always complain about the record label,” Spigel agrees. “It doesn’t do enough or whatever.”
“That’s a separate discussion that one could get into, you know, over several hours about the nature of the music industry,” Newman continues. “The majority of the music industry is a bunch of bandits, really. The deal back in the 1960s and 1970s was they would spend an awful lot of money to put you in a studio so that you could record your opus, and, of course, then not giving you a very big percentage because it’s cost them a lot of money to make it, and probably it’s not going to sell enough to recoup. Record companies don’t invest anything. There are still these massively exploitative deals.”
Collaboration in Time – The Future of the Past and the Future
Continuing our conversation, I ask about the reissue of Bastard as well as the formal release of the legendary Wire bootleg, Not About to Die (Studio Demos 1977-1978) (2022), and what Newman and Spigel’s perspective might be on archival releases and remixing past material given the benefit of new production technology.
“Surely, there are recordings of Wire, or I can say about Minimal Compact when I hear it and think, ‘God, I could have done it so much better,'” Spiegl begins as a response.
“You can,” Newman says in agreement. “But I don’t know. Craig Leon recently remixed the first Ramones album into Dolby Surround. I was like, what’s the value for the listener? What is being added to the original record? I still haven’t really gotten to the bottom of that. I think the only thing you could possibly say is if you could build a headphone experience that was like standing in the room with the music all around you as if you’re standing in the middle and the band is playing, maybe that could be an interesting experience, but I don’t know. With classic records, it’s difficult, you know? Giles Martin’s remix of Sgt. Pepper‘s where they did go back, and it’s like someone cleaned the window; I can see the value in that.”
“You want to move forward,” Spigel intercedes. “Basically, doing what you’re doing right now.”
“I’m more interested in new things,” Newman agrees. “You respect the past and allow the past to be.”
When I asked what their plans are for the near future, Spigel and Newman answered that they are already working on the next Nanocluster volume.
“With the next Nanocluster, we’re finishing it in October with a February release next year,” Newman explains. “The plan is to tour in America during March and April. There are already dates booked. We’re already developing material, mainly remotely. All of it is about building the understanding that there is a project called Nanocluster, which is about collaboration between us and other people. I think if we do this right and build it right, then it does give us an opportunity to do some really interesting things in the future with lots of other artists.”
“We can work with people in their twenties and people in their forties,” Spigel further describes, highlighting the intergenerational nature of their project. “It’s all music, and it’s all human beings that we love.”
“The other thing that underpins pretty much everything that we do is our weekly radio show,” Newman says, emphasizing an earlier point. “It’s a kind of lifeblood. It’s quite a strong commitment. In July, it’ll be four years. We’ve produced a show every single week.”
“That means you discover new music, discover new sounds, and it feeds back into your creativity,” Spigel affirms. “There is so much out there. People from our generation say there’s nothing new or good anymore. But there’s amazing music being created from people who have very few listeners on Spotify.”
“I’ve always held the view that 90% of the people who consume music don’t really like it that much,” Newman asserts. “It’s just something they feel that they ought to consume, and 10% are active listeners. They seek out things they like, and they don’t want to hear things that they don’t like. They’ll open themselves to new things. But the majority will always dictate the landscape. There’s now this whole thing with the amount of AI music being produced, and it’s all going to sound a bit like …”
“Taylor Swift,” Spigel intervenes.
“You know, popular music,” Newman concedes. “Nobody’s going to be producing AI music that sounds like something that is completely bizarre and new. What do you do with that endless crowding of the marketplace with that stuff? We are lucky enough to have back catalogs that earn money. What do young musicians have to do to survive? It’s a very, very difficult time, even for gigs.”
“Young bands are struggling,” Spigel grimly remarks.
“Everybody is struggling,” Newman emphasizes. “So, is music only going to be made by people with rich parents? You have to ask this question. Everything becomes kind of homogenized. The people on the margins are squeezed out. But it’s where the action is. The margins are where people come up with something different, a different way of thinking, or a different approach. I don’t think anybody who’s making any kind of alternative music expects to be making a fortune out of it, but it’d be nice if they saw something sometimes.”
“You can’t let frustration let you down,” Spigel resolves after a pause. “You have to keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Dogged determination,” Newman agrees. “I’m getting increasingly involved in a lot of quite political stuff to do with art. We have in the UK Music Venue Trust, who are trying to keep grassroots venues alive and find ways of feeding music there. It doesn’t require a lot of money for that ecosystem to work. And people like the Featured Artists Coalition, who are looking seriously at the way that record company contracts are just always fucking artists. I mean, there is just much more that can be done. Unpopular music is never going to make a lot of money. But, if somebody is just creaming off the majority of everything and just paying out their shareholders who don’t give a flying fuck about culture, this is not healthy for anybody or anything.”
After a brief pause, Newman continues. “Tomorrow, we’re doing a panel with Featured Artists Coalition, and we’ll be talking not just about rights issues and all the rest of it but also the work that we do together. People are interested in the way that we are doing the things that we do. We represent an independent way of thinking. We’re established musicians, but we’re not behaving like established musicians. Brighton is a city that is very strong for arts but which has a completely screwed-up structure around it. We’re also involved in the politics of how we can make that better. We have this massively strong grassroots scene and low [municipal government] support.”
“It’s true of many places,” Spigel adds. “But it should be changed. You can’t do anything dramatic, but you can slowly try and talk about it and tell other people about the reality and maybe in the long run …”
They both agree there are bright spots. “A simple thing like Nanocluster right from the get-go always had an audience in Brighton,” Newman ponders, returning to the start of our conversation. “A completely made-up thing, a band you’ve never heard of, playing material you’ve never heard before.”
“It’s a one-off. If you don’t see it, you’ll never see it,” Spigel muses. “So, people are fascinated.”
“The fact that we can get people in the door for that concept means that there is an audience out there who are interested in challenging preconceptions,” Newman concludes, and then with a laugh, “People trust us enough by now to know that we’re not going to serve up any old shit, you know?”