ROGER GOULA PRESENTS HIS LATEST ALBUM " ECOSYSTEMS"
Roger Goula
British, award-winning composer. On Ecosystems, twelve strings can pass for electronics and the electronics can pass for strings. His most personal record opens on a real heartbeat.
Some records arrive as a collection of songs. Ecosystems arrives as a world, or rather a set of small worlds, each with its own weather. Roger Goula recorded it with a string ensemble and then bent it through his own production until the seams between acoustic and electronic quietly disappeared. What you are left with is a bold, delicate study of how we live alongside nature, and whether we might find some harmony in the end.
Worlds Within a World
The album is performed by a string ensemble, enhanced by Goula's production, and the result is a bold exploration of sound that comes out of delicate interactions between strings and other samples. Each track functions like a world of its own, with its own stories, tensions and outcomes, and yet every one of them sits inside a larger theme. According to Goula, that theme is our interdependent, often fraught, relationship to nature.
The whole album responds to this idea of how we interact with nature, and hopefully it can offer some harmony in the end.Roger Goula
He means the idea on several layers at once. The whole set of pieces is one sonic ecosystem, balanced so that it functions from beginning to end. Then each piece is its own ecosystem too. As Goula points out, some ecosystems thrive and others collapse, so some pieces are deliberately allowed to run rich and others to fall out of balance and sonically die. On top of that, he used his modular synth to build generative patches that develop over time, little electronic ecosystems left to grow on their own.
Gift
The album's poignant opener, Gift, was inspired by Goula's life-changing experience of becoming a father, and it holds the urgency and the wonder of newborn life in the same hand. Stirring strings weave themselves onto a pulsing heartbeat, the actual ultrasound recording of Goula's pregnant wife, to express the miraculous gift that is life. It is also where the whole record began. That sample, he says, triggered the entire concept, and sent him reading into modern philosophy, including Timothy Morton's Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People and its idea of an object-oriented ontology that, on reading it, he realised he had always carried.
In Gift something is born, and it's magical and exciting, full of energy and life, and it will take us on a sonic journey that will change us forever.Roger Goula
It is a track of genuine awe at a paradigm-expanding event, and that awe is built into the music. Gift gives us the beautiful simplicity and clarity of the strings alongside the remarkable production and composition that have become signatures of Goula's work. The sampling of the scan, as he puts it, is simply a poetic act that relates back to the idea of being deeply, inescapably connected to other life.
In Conversation
Roger Goula × Antakly Projects
The album is performed by a string ensemble. How do you see the intermingling of the classical and the electronic, and was that balance difficult to find?
The balance between electronics and acoustic instruments is always a thing that has fascinated me, and I'm always trying new ways to make them work together. For Ecosystems, it was clear to me that these two elements needed to work in a symbiotic way, also as a projection of the concept of the album. Sometimes in Ecosystems you think you're listening to some electronics but they are actually strings, in this case a twelve-string section, and the other way around. They flow between each other in a very organic way.
There are two levels to how I achieve this. One is that when I write these pieces, I have in mind a classical structure. I don't think in terms of songs, a verse and chorus structure, so I let the structure develop organically wherever it leads me. The other idea is that I create some music material that I like, generally first generating some electronics on the modular and letting the machine speak by itself. Then I orchestrate those ideas in a classical way. When you put them together you feel they belong to the same world because they come from the same material. The generative patches on the modular also gave me lots of ideas on how to orchestrate the strings for the electronics.
You do a lot of work connecting visuals and music. How has that shaped the way you work, and how did it find its way into this album?
When I write personal albums I always think of images and narrative. I think my albums are always concept albums. Those images are not necessarily very defined but they have a feel. I know how the album needs to feel to the listener before I start writing it. Sometimes that image can change or morph through the process of writing, but there's always a feeling attached to an image. It's not that I'm scoring an image, it's that the image gives me inspiration for how the album needs to feel. It's quite the opposite of writing a film score, where the structure is given and you need to convey the feeling of the narrative.
How does innovation affect your work, or your creativity?
I think innovation and technology are tools that help us develop as artists. They are instruments, like a piano or a guitar, in the more etymological sense of the word. They are tools to make things, in this case music. Each period had its tools and instruments to create art, and the art created wasn't less complex than the art we make now. It was just different, because they had different tools to make it.
The problem with such innovative speed is that it concentrates on the tools more than the music. I see lots of people who know how to use the tools, but they are not necessarily making art. The question is how to use these technological innovations in a human and poetic way. The art is in you, not in the tools. At the same time, you need to master those tools to be able to transcend them and make music with them. Innovation shouldn't be the finality of art, but the instrument to make it.
Your latest project is connected to environments and the earth. Does that relate to your thoughts on well-being?
Ecosystems doesn't necessarily talk about well-being directly. It talks about the idea of being interconnected to nature. Modern humans have this approach to nature as a separate entity. It's something that is out there, that sometimes you interact with. The philosopher of science Karen Barad inverted the term into intra-actions. She argues that humans and nature are deeply interconnected and cannot be understood as separate entities. She draws on insights from quantum physics to propose a new framework for the relationships between humans and ecosystems. According to Barad, everything in the universe is interconnected and entangled, meaning that any action we take as humans can have a ripple effect throughout the entire ecosystem.
In this view, humans are not separate from nature but an integral part of it. I believe we need to recognise our interconnectedness with the natural world and take responsibility for the impact we have on it. That includes recognising the ways our actions can harm the environment and taking steps to mitigate that harm. Well-being is important to humans, obviously, but I really believe that having a symbiotic relationship with nature is even more important. Understanding nature as an intelligent entity and listening to it would make us good.
What upcoming projects or collaborations do you have going on?
I've started to work on a new album based on guitars and tape loops. I've started to reconnect with my main instrument, the guitar, and I'm finding new ways to write for it that are inspiring me. I want to create lots of poetic soundscapes, processing guitars with tape machines. I have this idea that it should all be playable live, possibly I'll record this album live, and I might include a smaller string section, a quartet or trio. There's also a very interesting dance project collaboration based in China, and an animation art installation in Amsterdam. Both will be announced soon.
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