Loren Nerell. Photo by Sander Roscoe Wolff.
Loren Nerell is a Long Beach native whose celebrated career in electronic music began in the mid-80s. Since then, he’s released 7 solo albums, collaboration albums with Steve Roach, A Produce and Mark Seelig, and has collaborated in various ways with Kronos Quartet, Paul Haslinger (Tangerine Dream), and the famed Indian violinist and composer, Dr. Lakshminarayana Subramaniam.
Two years ago Nerell’s first cassette-only release, Point of Arrival, was released on vinyl, and quickly sold out. More recently, it and his second album, Book of Alchemy, were made available for digital download.
Long Beach Post: Looking back on those albums, how has your process, and your aesthetic, evolved since then?
Loren Nerell: I started off mostly trying to emulate my musical heroes at the time. I was very much influenced by the Berlin School, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, etc. and I had just discovered gamelan music and Harry Partch. Most of my first two albums were me just trying to figure out what I could do and what I wanted to do. Now, my music has evolved away from just imitation, I think I have matured and have moved into something that is closer to my own voice.
Sampling was brand new, so I was playing with that, sampling voices and percussion instruments and mixing them with synths. At times I was using the sampler as a crude looper but, at other times, then also using it to simulate a gamelan or tuned percussion orchestra.
Your work has been, and continues to be, influenced by the traditional ensemble music of Indonesia, known as gamelan. How did this love affair begin?
I was a student at San Diego State, trying to fill out my class load to be full-time. A friend of mine said to me “you might like the gamelan” which I had never heard of. So he showed me, I took one look at those giant gongs in the Javanese gamelan and I said to myself “I have to try this.”
What is it about the music that so captivated you?
At the time I was just open to trying new things but it reached me on two levels, the sound the instruments make, and also the interaction while playing it. To me it is just so much fun, it can also be very challenging and complex. There is a lot of hocketing or what they call kotekan, that is dividing up the passages between two different people to make everything sound like it is faster then it is. Those patterns can be complex and challenging to learn and to perform well. It’s a pattern, and the patterns have to mesh together otherwise they can fall apart.
Nerell left CSUSD for CSU Dominguez Hills to study electronic music, and use the school’s brand new Synclavier, a very powerful and expensive digital synthesizer. Unfortunately, access to the equipment was very limited, and the system proved unreliable, so he left and began to construct his own studio.
Your timing was actually quite good, though, because all the old analog synths you loved were falling out of favor, right?
Yes. Digital was the new rage and the Yamaha DX7 was just released, so everyone was selling all their old analog gear for pennies, so I bought a bunch of stuff. Some is now considered classic and goes for way too much money, now. [laughs] I also bought a digital sampling keyboard when no one had one.
How did you get all these pieces of gear to work together?
I had an early digital sequencer from Oberheim Electronics, a company that I ended up working for later. This device could send out control voltages and gate signals info to eight different things. I would play my notes into the sequencer, then tell the device were to send the notes. Later, I would record all this stuff to tape, then overdub more stuff on top of that. All the rhythmic parts were recorded live onto two tracks, then I would overdub the rest by hand.
In fact on the song Matrix you can hear a mistake. The cable to one side of the drum machine came loose for a second, so it drops out, then comes back in. On Waves of Time-the last segment-the digital box that converted the cv gate to something the sampler could use would hiccup and give me extra notes. At least they were in time. [laughs]
Your next album, Book of Alchemy, was quite different. How come?
I was starting to hear other music, more world music, like music from Africa, a Mexican artist named Jorge Reyes, plus some of the more progressive rock artists of the time like Peter Gabriel and David Sylvian. So I experimented with some rock structures with my friends from the band Djam Karet. On some tracks I was playing more with world music styles, actually playing hand percussion or bamboo or wood flutes, then bringing in the synths and samplers.
In the last several years you’ve worked on a number of collaborations, including “Intangible” with the late A Produce. Can you tell me a bit about that?
A Produce and I had known each other for years, going back to the early 1990s. We would hang out, come to each others shows, and generally support each other and had become good friends. Finally, a few years ago, we both found ourselves each with a lot of free time so, just for fun, we decided to collaborate and see what would happen. We specifically decided not to say we were going to make an album together, we just were doing it for fun and wanted it to have no pressure to do anything. So we did a track, then a second, then a third. After a while it seemed like we could possibly have something that could be an album, and people who heard the music seemed to like it so, at that point, we said, “Ok. This is an album. Let’s put it out.”
One of us would start something, bring it to the studio and we would work on it together to see if it worked. Only a few tracks we started from scratch together.
The album was released, and it was pretty well received. We did some radio interviews and had some nice reviews but, within a few months of the album’s release, A Produced died. The day he died he was suppose to come over and show me this new keyboard he had just bought and start work on a follow-up to the first album. At least he got to see some of the fruits of our labor on that first album before he passed away.
How does collaboration change your creative working, and thinking?
A collaboration is the coming together of two minds. It can be a bit of a give and take with someone else, not necessarily in a bad way. Not everything you might want to do will be right when working with someone else, so you have to except that when it happens. But then again, its nice to have another set of ears to hear things and another head to bounce ideas off of. Hopefully the outcome is something greater then what each of you could do separately, so far I think that has been the case, and I think each collaboration has grown me as an artist as well.
How did that work with the collaboration you did with Mark Selig?
Mark and I worked very differently then what I did with A Produce. The A Produce album took a couple years to finish. With the album with Mark, we did almost all of it in one week. It was more of a whirlwind affair, as we knew we only had so much time to do the album. Mark lives in Germany and had to be back by a certain date. When he showed up we just dove headfirst into it and worked 12 to 14 hours a day ’til it was about 90% done. After that, I had to record sarangi master Pankaj Mishra, and finish the gamelan section. Mark came back for a weekend and we mixed it.
You’ve also collaborated with Steve Roach, who has become rather legendary in the world of electronic music. What was your process for working with him on what became the album, Teraform?
I had just gotten back from Indonesia. We were using some of the field recordings I made in the album. These sessions were late night affairs, and sometimes we would do crazy things, For example, we took a recording I made of night sounds in Bali which consisted mostly of cricket sounds. We then put a little speaker of that outside and played it to the crickets in his backyard in Tucson and recorded that and put it on the album. [laughs]
Your last solo album, Slow Dream, has received some very positive critical reviews. What was the inspiration?
There is a very short time during sleep called the hypnogogic state, between waking and sleeping, which is very creative, often filled with visual and/or auditory hallucinations. The music from this album was composed for this state, so the music is very hallucinatory. I took a 20 minute field recording I made in Bali of a rare ceremonial gamelan, then stretched it out to over 6 hours long. I then took the more interesting parts and layered them with my synths and came up with the music for the album.
It was very well received, maybe my best-reviewed album to date. It’s always nice to know that someone likes what you do, but I try not to dwell on it for too long and, after that, I’m on to the next project. I just try to do something interesting and hope that other people like it too. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of time, to do these projects. It is appreciated when I get some feedback and people like what I do.
To learn more about Nerell and his work, visit LorenNerell.com. Visit BandCamp to preview or download Point of Arrival and Book of Alchemy. Also, watch for an extended re-release of his 1999 work, The Venerable Dark Cloud, due out this summer on Projekt Records.