Immersion: Where the Seagull Meets the Autobahn

Prologue: Immersion’s Nanocluster, Vol. 2 EP 1 & EP 2. EP 1 is a collaboration with musician, percussionist and polymath Thor Harris, EP 2 created with Jack Wolter of Cuboza. Yes. Found it. Exhilarating buttermilk throb-itis, the teddy bear’s MRI machine and the sad sweet melodies said teddy bear sings/sighs within. The best album I’ve heard since Dylan’s Rough & Rowdy Ways. Yes. 

Part I: A Mission Statement.  

Any article we write may be our last. So we must say everything we need to say in every article. And every article must reflect something only we can say, or it ought to be about something we absolutely desire for you to care about. 

I am asking that you recognize how extreme your imagination is and transcribe it; how full of gorgeous fireflies your imagination is, how full of the strange and the transcendent your inner narrative is, how full your mind and heart is with the holy and unholy music and paintings cut from the very clouds themselves, music that seems to transcribe the extremes of hope and imagination. Imagined music is real, too, because it is within the only self you will ever truly know; and when you find it in the real world, then honor those magic/real fireflies and tell us about them! 

If you merely “like” a piece of music, an album, an artist, why should I care? Why do you pretend that I should care? I am interested only in your extremes, I am interested in the echoes and recreations and revitalizations of the music that gave you hope when you were a hopeless teen, when you sat in your bedroom punching tickets to fear and loneliness but you found treasures and lifelines in the radio tube warm and hi-fi buzz and hum; you believed THAT song could and would save your life, THAT chord change could give you a reason to make it through another hellday in the hallways of middle school, THAT his/her/their splash of rust/red/rooster hair shang-a-lang Ziggy and pretty 10th avenue vacancy and even the Runyon/Scorsese dreams of On The Shitty Town could save you; these hopes, these tuned dreams, kept you alive, yes? Remind me, find me, find you. If something matters to you as much as music does then, tell me about it. Otherwise, google something about a 1980s sitcom and keep it to yourself. 

Every now and again, you hear something that reminds you why you gave over so much of your life to the love of music. When you hear it, you feel it in your fingertips, you feel it in your thighs, you feel it in the foggy wetlands of memory, you feel it in the temporary diminution of the present fear. 

Find it, tell me about it, and if it’s not THAT important, if it’s not that “rush home to hear Revolver or Village Green or Pink Flag or Pink Moon” feeling, I don’t want to hear about it. 

Find heaven in what you hear and see, and then write like hell. 

Got it? 

Part II: My resting state is hyperbole, because why not? 

I listen hard, I listen easy. Why tell you about anything that isn’t extreme? Why waste my breath hissing at you about anything that isn’t life changing, that isn’t a necessity, that isn’t something that won’t scramble your brain and thumbjack your heart as much as it does mine? 

I shout, softly. I am the mind-framed memory of crushed glass underfoot in Mercer Street when it was still full of shadows and echoes, I am the never-written poem in my head about Schiele’s scream in the courtroom as the judge sets fire to his sketches and he begs for an orange, I am Feldman’s hot hum in a Rothko Chapel, I am Farina’s last thought on his motorcycle, I am the fantastic buzz of a highway, heard from the crib or heard from the side of the road somewhere outside of Barstow, I am the first time you heard “What Goes On” or “Hallogallo,” I am that thing of extreme beauty that defies pessimism or history and is the optimism that is the heights of experience; I am everything worth changing your life and telling the world about.

Immersion’s Nanocluster Vol. 2 – two connected but distinct EPs that comprise, really, one solid piece of work – is one of the best albums I’ve heard this century. Uh-huh. Listen, I am too tired to addle your pate, my friends, too old and busy to serve you warmed-up Cold Brew in an Amphora Cup and tell you it’s from Delion. But this, this Immersion, is real, it washes over my ears and heart. I had come to expect sensational chime-throb extremes from Immersion (whose Nancoluster Vol. I was one of 2021’s best albums), but the two new EPs take this long-time collaboration between Colin Newman, Malka Spigel and a small, carefully curated roster of guest musicians to a whole new level: They’ve created an extreme, something to be spoken of alongside the great albums of the century, and something that utterly holds its own with the sui generis work of Post Punk’s purest and most quality-minded act, Wire.  

Nanocluster, Vol. 2 EP 1 & EP 2 is full of grace and blue 4:08 AM Northern light, seamless electricity and the major/minor buzz of the far away and far beneath high tension and low-earth wires, the sound of happy mother-womb fudgy/cuddly/buttermilk tinnitus (if buttermilk could have tinnitus, it would sound like Immersion), gentle and tugging, hypnotic and stimulating, the planetarium in the palm of your hand and the masterpiece found in the edgeless lands of the rainbow; Immersion morphs the insistence of post punk (lathed and balmed) and the dot-dash persistence of avant garde and the ecstatic space of star-spray minimalism; Nanocluster, Vol. 2 is fur-wrapped / Benadryl-overdosed Tresor / Berghain wedded to Wire / Stereolab-ist chimey hypopop, or is it what you actually dreamed Radiohead could be if they gave up INSISTING on being Radiohead and actually worked on perfecting the art of matchbox Dark Side-ism?!?

Mostly, Nanocluster, Vol. 2 EP 1 & EP 2 is not vague; it’s complete, it gets under the skin and under the blanket, it nods, stately and warm and hair-raising, without nodding out. (Jesus, was that a period? You’re slipping in your old age, Timbaud.) I’ve seen it called “blissful future pop,” and why not? Oh, Especially Pt 2 – the Cuboza EP – is subtle yet adamant, grace, graceful, gracest, Sunday morning at both 4:30 and 11:30, wobbly drunken dawn and wet-aired blue breakfast, rhythmic but as melodic as all gorgeous hell, sweet and doubly sweet but a little cigarette smokey and be careful not to pick up that Makers Mark with the cigarette butts in it, ohwait you already did, but you lived, didn’t you?, I mean, it’s freaking gorgeous, wobbly but motoriky and full of gulls. I bloody challenge you to find anything more beautiful – yet still insistent and full of gravity – as Nanocluster Vol. 2 EP2, okay? 

EP I – the Thor Harris collabortation — has just a wee bit more sugar-spun barbed wire wrapped around it, which is to say, it’s a shade more noir. In Finland/Iceland in August at 11:45 there is a faux night, the white blue dims to aqua sprayed with ruby, and you wonder what mystery the next few hours hold, though deep down you know that it’s only beauty light and more beauty light, but still, you wonder, and that’s the sound of Part I. Part I almost sounds like the first threat of the hangover, and Part II like the beautiful sexy happy drunk that comes first. 

Part III: I want to wrap myself in charged grace. 

My heart is a tongue that tests the terminals on the north end of the 9 Volt battery, those tiny saucers of connectivity, these electric moles; and I am charged with spit and tiny fire, and this is life and music. 

Immersion = Charged Grace. 

Part IV: The Interview. 

It’s always remarkable to interview Colin Newman and Malka Spigel. This is not just because of the gifts they have displayed as members of Wire, Minimal Compact, Githead, and various solo projects; and not because of how open-hearted, honest and articulate they are; but also because of the way they talk, together: they don’t just finish each other’s sentences, they actually say sentences virtually together – not talking at the same time, but literally exchanging words to complete one sentence. It’s a little hard to transcribe that, but I’d like to honor how this constant sense of trust and romance seems to literally extend and define what these people do in the studio. 

The extraordinary achievement that is this new record sort of alludes my ability to describe it. I mean, to me, it’s this kind of arpeggiated dream noise that I’ve always sort of hoped would emerge every time I clicked on the radio.  Maybe you can do a better job describing it than I can? 

MALKA SPIGEL: Somebody asked me yesterday, what’s your favorite genre? And I was like, oh, that’s really hard. Actually, my favorite genre is a genre you can’t define. I think what we’ve got in common with every collaborator is our reaction to what we imagine or think they are about. So we go towards — and we kind of have sympathy for – what they bring and try and enhance it, I guess. 

To what degree do Immersion becomes the collaborators and the collaborators become immersion?  (In addition to Thor Harris and Jack Wolter, past Immersion collaborators have included Tarwater, Laetitia Sadier, Ulrich Schnauss and Scanner.) 

COLIN NEWMAN: There’s always a tension there.

MS: Not a negative tension.

CN: Not a negative tension, but there is a tension between, well, —

MS: — Wondering how much do we want to interfere?

CN:  Yes, how much do we want to interfere? Ultimately, we mix it. So it satisfies us. We make the choices of putting that thing together in a way that we find satisfactory. 

I think that’s one of the extraordinary defining factors of this record. Everything is mixed with this gorgeous horizon, this oceanic space, yet it’s certainly not an empty or minimal instrumental palette. It feels to me that a lot of what defines Immersion is the mixing – I mean literally the studio/board mixing.

CN: I think it’s the idea of transparency in the mixes. It’s not jazz. It’s not like you’ve got some backing and then you’ve suddenly got this lead instrument coming really loud. It should feel like ensemble music. So you have that sense of all of the elements in it. 

It feels to me like there’s this idea of Immersion separate from Colin and Malka; there’s this separate person – not a real person, obviously – who emerges when you create Immersion. I think all great bands have this spirit who emerges apart from the actual physical band members, makes the band more than the sum of the people in it, and completes the band. And after all these years of doing Immersion – about 30 years, now – on Nanocluster Vol. 2, it feels like this other spiritual being has finally entered the room with immersion. 

CN: Bruce from Wire always used to talk about the missing person. 

Well, that’s what I’m talking about.

MS: It comes quite naturally.

CN: It does come naturally. And I think both of us are risk takers and we’re both quite fearless and artistically forward looking. It’s invoking the spirit of the collaboration in a way that you can’t define, you just do it. It’s like the, you know, it’s like the cycle analogy: why did British cycling get so good? Because they looked at every detail of what they did. There was a period when British cycling overtook French cycling, and the French thought it was because the British were cheating somehow or had superior technology. It wasn’t; it was because they looked at every single aspect of everything. You don’t see necessarily the whole picture when you’re doing it. When you are putting those things together, and you get to a point where you have put something together and feel like you’ve perfected it from your point of view. But that is the point in which, perhaps, that spirit of the, of the missing person emerges. 

How would you describe where immersion is in 2024 and how, and how you’ve gotten there?

CN: There are two separate things within Nanocluster Vol. 2: you have the collaboration with Thor, which leads to a certain extent into where he’s coming from, which is America Minimalism. So there’s a lot of percussion. So it’s very much about wanting to be in that world. Some of it, of course, has very much the Immersion type of touches, you know, like the “House of Thor” or the vocal on the end of the opening track; and then the stuff with Jack is really, it’s all vocal pieces. That’s something that we’ve never done as immersion before, which is all vocals.

MN: We found a formula where, for me personally, finally I can satisfy all the things I want to do: I want to play the bass and sing and do electronic music, and I want all those worlds and here we are, we can do it.

CN: How cool is that? 

This a high compliment considering what both of you have done for 30, 40 years, but I think this album merits it being taken as Year Zero, if that makes any sense. For the first time, as a listener, as a fan, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not terribly interested in hearing a new Wire album.’  Immersion feels like the best work you both could be doing at this time, and one of the best bands out there. 

CN: John Robb [legendary journalist] said something very similar to us, actually. 

MS: He said, oh, it’s like music from the future. And he said, he said, I’m glad Wire doesn’t operate anymore.

CN:  And he’s a huge Wire fan. I mean, I’m not doing it a sort of any a riposte to Wire or instead of Wire — we’re just doing this, this is what we’re doing. I mean, it just doesn’t have a relationship with Wire. it has a relationship to what Malka and I have done in the past. It has a relationship to our relationship. It is ultimately it is the projection of our relationship into an artistic sphere. 

Part V: From The Sattadhatu Sutta

“Mendicant, the element of light appears due to the element of darkness. The element of beauty appears due to the element of ugliness. The element of the dimension of infinite space appears due to the element of form. The element of the dimension of infinite consciousness appears due to the element of the dimension of infinite space. The element of the dimension of nothingness appears due to the element of the dimension of infinite consciousness. The element of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception appears due to the element of the dimension of nothingness. The element of the cessation of perception and feeling appears due to the element of cessation.”

For me, that’s Immersion, Nanocluster Vol 2 Pts 1 & 2. It asks, what is space, what is the hum of 45 years of musical history in our consciousness, what is the ecstatic memory, what is engagement without effort, what is art that isn’t arty, what is cessation of expectation asking us, kindly, to surrender to mesmerific joy, yes.

(I dedicate this piece to Deb Sprague, Kara Tucker, and Ron Hart.) 

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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