How I fill the voids of the cosmos

Mystical and modern, transformative, hypnotic, expansive and transcendent. They are the alchemists of sound, James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas. Emptyset is a multidisciplinary production project that explores the sonic possibilities of electroacoustic and computerized music, materiality and performance. Their recorded material has used techniques of percussion and spatial feedback in Ash (2023), raw audio synthesis in Blossoms (2019) and custom instrument design for Borders (2016). In parallel, they have worked on several large-scale performative and installation projects incorporating architectural acoustics, broadcasting, large-scale instruments and vocal arrangements through commissions developed for the Architecture Foundation, Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum and Deutschlandradio.

The cover image is pure cinema. It fills the gaps by letting the ‘fragments’/frames/spaces’ of and between the images (clouds, branches, the dark spaces of the ray light, the blades of grass) define a ‘direction’. Which in reality does not exist, because the clouds go one way, the grass too and the light vibrates around a black hole. Tell us about this artwork, it seems you have represented the cosmos with few elements.

We knew with this record we wanted to bring in elements from the natural world and landscapes. We talked a lot about historical relationships between sound, nature both thematically and within ancestral and ritual settings. The British landscape has a particular folkloric magnetism for many musicians and artists across time and this connection felt like something we wanted to acknowledge. Likewise the final approach was very much anchored in a simple visual that could contain a genesis of ideas and symbols, something that felt in a dialogue with folk and cosmic traditions with an unreality or fictional sense of place. The artwork very much became a lens to consider the impulse and trajectory of the record, a haiku for what we wanted to assemble.

Your enormous amount of work and reasoned experimentation ‘moves’ you in the ether with the same transcendental capacity of a flash in the sky or an instantaneous transmission of current from one part of the planet to another. What really ‘moves’ you in composing? Is there something pioneering and avant-garde or is it just experimentation?

With this record there was a very honest set of ideas around electronic sound and the possibility of futurity, it felt like a moment to stop and more openly embrace an interest in sonic traditions of the past, thinking through avant-garde as well as more mainstream music cultures. For the production process we worked from a recording studio in Bristol with lots of classic musical equipment and hardware that had been used by generations of rock bands and electronic musicians, and we wanted to embrace this messy relationship between these two musical continuums. The approach bounced of these lineages, developing compositions that felt like they were in a dialogue with this space between. For the process itself it was about generating a series of different signal chains that could shape and affect our source material. Much of this was using old flangers and guitar amplifiers alongside vintage compressors, mixers and tape equipment, even manually swinging microphones. The record emerged very much as a love letter to the messiness of electronic sound and its birth across the 20th century, this idea of a collective spirit to embrace technology and shape the future that transcended genre and form.

Dissever, from dusk to dawn, is the night the true day?

The liminal has always been a state of interest in our compositions, an area of questioning and uncertainty, where themes and ideas can exist in a state of being unresolved.

A dream, a succession of dreams and revelations, a hypnotic mantra but also an organic magma between the mystical and science fiction. Where do you want to take us with Dissever?

This sense of transcendence, cyclical motifs and hypotonic forms create the core direction of the album. A wheel that moves forward through time whilst reflecting back on atavistic, ancestral and primordial essences. This principle of looking at the future through a rear view mirror, the future itself being built from fragments of the past.

There are authors who love to experiment by improvising. It seems to me that your ‘improvisation’ is well defined from the start and that it is the ‘artificial intelligences’ that expand it and perhaps ‘read your mind’. Is that so?

The arrangements feel at times in the spirit of an exploratory system based music, creating quite elaborate setups that allow the compositions to emerge and evolve through improvisation. This possibility of leaving space to find the material through a technological and performative dialogue. The intelligence most likely manifests as intuition and a degree of trust in a method, that allows the tracks to become organic sculptural forms that build and flow in cycles.

A concept album that is a goldmine for techno music, it seems that you know how to treat musical matter like an alchemist treats metal, where does this ‘need’ come from?

There is most likely a grounding within the project to push and pull the principles and meanings of electronic music as we move from album to album. Within Dissever there was a focus on not only shifting our own approach to composition, what equipment we used, testing what we felt we could do within our ethos, whilst also thinking about what does sound actually mean on cross cultural and interdisciplinary terms and what can it mean within this space of the techno-imaginary or even the cosmic-imaginary.

Talking about instrumental music would be reductive, perhaps it is better to say ‘transformative music’. Don’t you feel like two ‘agents’ charged with ‘digging deep’ to solve some apparently insurmountable enigmas of history and science?

This is definitely an interesting part of our collaboration and one that feels enmeshed in both research and practise. Trying to understand these ritual, spatial, psychoacoustic, physical, anthropological and semiotic meanings encoded within sound have absolutely become a core focus of what we do. There is definitely a sense of digging deep, for us this is perhaps where the most meaningful outcomes develop. Once we have sense of a pathway it is then the puzzle of how to bring the world of this new approach to life, what materials, methods, context and support structures can help pull it from a proposition or blueprint into something alive and three dimensional. This idea of making the intangible real is perhaps one of the most enigmatic and compelling aspects of both art and music for us and one that continues to bring us together to create.

The term “immersive” is used, a bit inappropriately, to define the direction that 360° art is taking in involving the individual in a journey of total sensorial identification. In your case I would use the term “spatial” because you do not limit yourself to the tangible but it is clear that you ‘speak’ to an audience many meters above the sky. Who do you address with your work? Who are the listeners?

This has always been a question for us from the very beginning of emptyset, who are we addressing. From our early days in the studio the emphasis was very much about using sound to create a convincing universe with its own cosmology that could adapt and evolve across records, installations, videos and performances. How could a set of principles unify all these differing outputs. So it simply became a pathway of creating a world that we felt we wanted to inhabit and develop, one that felt immersive in a more imaginary sense, and then presuming that if it could hold meaning for us then that could extend meaning to other people. So perhaps this more abstract sense of audience makes sense for us, it’s been about trying to make a language rather than a product.

Dissever was presented for the first time at the Tate Modern as a live performance to accompany the Electric Dreams exhibition. Tell us about this experience and what it meant to you?

The exhibition Electric Dreams was developed by Tate as a project to remap the history of art and technology across the 20th century, connecting together different strands of sound, visual art and experimental media. This approach particularly resonated for us, and mirrored many of the ideas of converging sonic lineages we were looking to achieve in Dissever, fusing together the arcs of minimalism, electronic music, cosmic rock and sound art. So it felt like a good curatorial dialogue to enter and the right platform to bring this new material to life within the central Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. It was definitely a very special opportunity to present the material in a vast architectural context to an audience that were exceptionally engaged in the compositions both from a sonic, spatial and physical sense but also seeking an encounter of deep and attentive listening.

Among others, the work for Multiverse Music, as well as for Subtext Books, MIT Press and in fact the ‘multiverse’ and ‘multi-space’ that you occupy in the arts exposes you not only as musicians but also as curators/trailblazers of the sonic universes to which you feel you belong. How do you manage to combine all these elements in your working life and beyond?

We have both as more time has passed found ways to bring our lives as close to art and music as we practically can, whether that be making work, developing and supporting emerging artistic voices, releasing other peoples’ music, teaching and mentoring, writing and researching, or simply engaging with culture actively by visiting performances and shows, even on the most basic level simply buying a ticket and turning up. All of this forms part of a vital ecosystem and its become more evident that this idea of a non-mainstream or an underground is quite fragile, and the possibility of contributing and supporting this model from different points on the wheel feels like an important part of ensuring a future for both alternative culture and thought. Samuel Chamey