LABEL SPOTLIGHT: Old Technology

For the next edition of our Label Spotlight series we travel over to the UK, to hone in on a label that sits somewhere between the ambient, experimental & modular synthesis worlds known as Old Technology. Birthed from shared experiences in the London music scene, Old Technology is the collaboration between friends Dan Bean & Anthony Child (Surgeon). The label operates on the fuzzy fringes of electronic music, embracing experimental sounds & live performance. Their catalog is ever-inspiring, raw & full of life, rooted in music with a mystical allure that stops you in your tracks. The common thread throughout all of it, is that it sounds so undeniably human.

Dan is a part of Bleep43 - a collective that has been active in the UK scene since the early 2000s. They began putting events together in 2002 in a part of East London called Spitalfields, at a venue called Public Life. A few years later, the events morphed into a residency at the beloved Corsica Studios, where they took over the space every couple of months & hosted the London debuts of many of our favorite artists in the scene, including Dan’s now label partner Anthony Child. I must admit, I’m quite new to Bleep43 myself. As I read back about the makings of this collective & their impact on the music scene, I long for the ability to travel back in time to an early 2000s London to experience some of these events they were putting together.

I discovered the music of Ali Wade & his Frequency Domain platform this past winter while doing some deep digging for some mixes I was recording. Ali who is also a part of the Bleep43 crew, released an album on Old Technology in the fall of last year with a friend of his under the project name Spiral Wrack. The album grabbed my ear immediately & moments later I had a dozen or so tabs open as I dug through all of the Old Technology releases. The clearest way to describe the catalog would be: handmade electronic music. The releases take your mind on an auditory expedition, built for headphones-on, home listening, or a sensory-deprived seated venue experience, like those Bleep43 has focused on in more recent years. The music is all encompassing, tickling your nervous system & giving your mind the massage it so greatly deserves. We highly recommend giving the below track from Bea Brennan a listen as you begin to read along as well as a few other highlights embedded throughout, while Dan Bean takes us through the makings of the inimitable Old Technology.

Before we dive in, I wanted to get a bit of context & talk about the genesis of Old Technology. As far as I’m aware, as a purely internet-based observer, everything seems to have begun around 2016/2017. You debuted a new live performance with Anthony Child known as The Transcendence Orchestra at a Bleep43 event in London in the spring of 2016 & a few months later performed together at Freerotation in Wales as well as again at Freerotation in 2017. Then in December of 2017, the debut LP "Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals" was released.

It seemed like at first, Old Technology was intended as an outlet for the two of you to release the LP & your live recordings from the past few years as The Transcendence Orchestra but then it later evolved into a record label with a wonderful community of special artists that we’ve been very grateful to discover through the two of you.

Is that correct when I say that it began as a platform for your own project or were you always intending to release music from other artists as well?

That's definitely the origin. We'd been talking about the way Deadheads compiled and circulated the bewilderingly large number of Grateful Dead live bootlegs, apparently with support from the band. That seemed like a good thing, to capture and preserve a vast body of documents, to build an overwhelming and possibly totally unnecessary edifice, just because we could. The audio equivalent of the Georgian follies we stay in when we go on research trips together.

In the end, that rather grandiose idea didn't entirely survive contact with reality. The live shows we ended up releasing are a fraction of those we recorded. Either one of us wasn't happy with a particular part of their performance, or there was an issue with the overall flow, or a technical problem with the recording itself. In some cases our performances were interrupted by bizarre unexpected external events, so we only ended up putting a few out. We're pretty happy with those ones though. I should add that there's a difference of opinion among members of The Transcendence Orchestra about the merits or otherwise of The Grateful Dead.

Was Old Technology something the two of you had been discussing for a longer period of time, as you were recording & performing as The Transcendence Orchestra or was it more of a spontaneous creation?

We tend to avoid discussing musical ideas too much because it's quite easy to suck the life out of them. We're normally pretty aligned about how we approach things, so if one of us comes up with a something and it resonates we'll discuss it briefly and then just get on with it. It's so much better to execute an idea and move on than block yourself up with loads of unfinished stuff that you're endlessly perfecting. Art needs an audience in order for it to exist and you don't have to listen very hard to hear the echoes of fascism in perfectionism, it's a curse.

While we were using Old Technology as an archive for our live recordings we simultaneously had the experience of releasing the first three Transcendence Orchestra albums on Editions Mego. Peter's ethos was about enabling artists to present their music in the way they wanted. If he was in, then he was fully in and there was no fiddling about with track selection, imposing graphic design ideas or otherwise getting in the way. I was pretty new to the experience of releasing music, but Tony was really clear that the situation we had with Mego was highly unusual, so it seemed obvious that it would be a good idea to afford that sort of opportunity to other artists. Our first release that wasn't our own music, our toe in the water, was a five track digital only EP by Bea Brennan. We're still releasing her incredible music today, I'm convinced that she's some kind of savant!

What’s the story behind the musical relationship between the two of you, specifically in regards to The Transcendence Orchestra & those early performances together?

We met through Bleep43, which I help organise, as does Bea and a bunch of our friends. We've been putting on events for over 20 years now. Tony started DJing for us regularly at Corsica Studios in the 00s so we got to know each other slowly. Around 10 years ago Bleep43 started to focus on parties that were about immersive listening rather than dancing. We put on a mini AV tour around the UK featuring Tony improvising a live Buchla set alongside visuals from Ali Wade, with Jo Johnson also playing live accompanied by visuals from Plant43. We did a show at the Southbank Centre in London, one at the Cube Cinema in Bristol and one at the Art School in Glasgow.

Around that time Tony came to stay at my place for a few days and we quickly realised that we were both fascinated by esoteric music, stuff that's way beyond the bounds of a traditional definition of techno. We ended up messing around with some of the acoustic instruments I have around the house and it was obvious to both of us that this was something that would be fun to explore further. Everything else pretty much followed from there, starting with our first show in a tunnel under the Thames and taking us to Morocco, Japan, the US and all around Europe. It's something we both find incredibly rewarding and simultaneously utterly ludicrous. Just to come back to the music though, we're both voracious, we need music. It's essential for our wellbeing, so we're constantly feeding each other weirdo gear. In terms of Old Technology specifically, we've both been quite bored by the staggering amounts of insipid ambient music out there and the very narrow definitions people seem bound by when it comes to thinking about psychedelic music. The label is supposed to be an antidote to that, or at least our tiny little attempt to alter the narrative.

I LOVE the dichotomy involved in the name "Old Technology" which is also reflected in the debut LP title "Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals" & how it relates to the creation process of the LP. Can you expand a bit on this interplay between old & new? Is that something that influences or guides the decision-making behind what music you release on the label?

We see it more as a continuum than a dichotomy. Everything up to this point connects to what came before and a lot of the effects we're trying to achieve are things humans have probably been doing since music was first made, namely to transport people, to open their heads. The modern tools we have are different, but that's almost the least interesting part of it. People focus on the tools way too much in music, all that does is cut you off from interesting things and those conversations are so boring anyway. The fact that we care much more about the effect rather than the means is one of the reasons why the styles of music and approaches to composition on the label are so diverse. We test everything we release very carefully. As long as it gives us that feeling of psychedelic awe and confusion then we're up for it.

What is your decision-making process for the label? You mentioned that you test everything very carefully, what does that testing involve? 

We've spent quite a lot of time to figuring out what the term psychedelic music means to us. The counterpoint being that psychedelic experiences are fundamentally ineffable, so to some extent it's a fool's errand to try and pin it down with a definition. Despite that, we've valiantly pressed ahead and I think we've now got to a point where we know it pretty quickly when we hear it, even if we couldn't necessarily put it into words. As someone once said, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

I think the best thing about the process has been learning how wide that range of music can be. Whether it's country rock or musique concrete, almost any genre can contain psychedelic nuggets, with the exception of psy-trance, ironically. We've stumbled across tracks from The Eurythmics, Archie Shepp and Paul McCartney that all go unbelievably hard. They're not generally considered to be part of the traditional cannon of psychedelic music, which might be part of why they're so powerful. It's a crate digging mentality to some extent where we're trying to blow each others' minds with wonky unexpected masterpieces.

If we're considering music for the label then we need to make sure that it works for us in a psychedelic situation. Does it remind us in some way of the first time we heard Would You Believe by The Hollies? If that's the case then we're good to go. The label is a pretty pure reflection of our shared tastes in that sense.

What's in store for the future of Old Technology? 

There seems to be an audience for what we're putting out, so I think for now we're pretty happy to keep on releasing psychedelic music we love, as long as people keep sending us it! Helping people get their ideas out into the world is a privilege and also deeply fulfilling on a personal level. The day to day admin of running a label is pretty mundane, but working with artists is immensely motivating.