Name: Mesmer
Members: Emil Jensen (trumpet, modular-synth, sequencer, field recordings), Victor Dybbroe (drums, percussion), Anders Filipsen (piano)
Nationality: Danish
Current release: Mesmer's Terrain Vague, mixed by Mads Emil Nielsen, is out November 24th 2023 via arbitrary.
Recommendations: Sugai Ken - On the Quakefish. His approach to creating music has been a huge inspiration in the creation of this record. His way of working in the zone between field-recordings and artificially created sounds are unique and the sound quality allows the listener to go deep into his musical universe.
Nature. Go listen to nature and dive deeper into the sounds surrounding you. It’s an amazing experience every time and can be deeply inspirational.

[Read our Mads Emil Nielsen interview]

If you enjoyed this Mesmerinterview and would like to stay up to date with the band's music, visit their official homepage of Anders Filipsen or the Instagram account of Victor Dybbroe.
 


There are many potential models for collaboration, from live performances and jamming/producing in the same room together up to file sharing. Which of these do you prefer – and why?

This album had a lot of compositional stages leading from the process of recording and collecting the material from the outskirts of Copenhagen, leading into compositional sketches inspired by these environments and audible structures.

Then, on to a process where the three of us were improvising with these sketches and then turning these bits and pieces into compositions and arrangements of the collected sound into a more distilled output. Finally listening to these improvised concerts of the newly written material, clipping and cutting these into new pieces of music.

The interesting thing for us is that almost all of these stages in the process were more or less collectively driven, and it gave us a new collective modus for us in our creative work together by looking through the same artistic prism on the sounds and compositional bits we worked with.

It helped shape the scope of the sounds we were examining and touched by, and the direction we went with it.

What were some of your earliest collaborations? How do you look back on them with hindsight?

Early on we started an Indie group called Traveling Tribes where we created psychedelic indie rock music with influences from traditional music from Mali, Congo and Indonesia. It was a learning process of investigating music from other music traditions, and the craft of playing groves and harmonic structures that could shift in dynamic tempos and tunings.



Looking back at it, we see it as a bit naive but also a very honest piece of music and portrait of us at that specific time.

Now the focus has obviously shifted towards an approach where we feel inspired by our own social and spatial surroundings. The airtistic focus has also shifted from being focused on skill and music output to a more intuitive portrayal of what we hear and experience.   
 
How did this particular collaboration come about?

We’ve been creating and playing together for more than a decade. In 2020 we decided to put an end to our old band.

Just as we made that decision some people reached out to us to make some site-specific concerts and residencies - this time for collective contemplation on how to work with the sounds surrounding us. It sparked some new energy to our group and to the creative process.

On the record we also collaborated with painter and musician Jakob Steen. He works with a big love for a very open and freely improvised creative process. His warmth and intensity affected our own way of being attentive and collective open to what might occur.

What did you know about each other before working together? Describe your creative partner in a few words, please.

We see each other as possessing very different qualities. And we are very open to dive into the stuff each one is interested in.

For this particualary project the spark came from the fact that all of us were super interested in Japanese environmental music and working with / tweaking field recordings / musique concrete, trying to bend the reality we are looking at.

What do you generally look for in a collaborator in general and what made you want to collaborate with each other specifically?

Beside the collaboration within the band, we reached out to Mads Emil Nielsen, since we find him and Arbitrary to be very good at taking decssions that clarify, precise and distil our recordings.

Which is definitely something we still could work on.

Tell me a bit about your current instruments and tools, please. In which way do they support creative exchange and collaborations with others?

We’ve been very focused on tools, sound systems and so forth throughout our earlier albums and compositional processes. But for the Terrain Vague album it became clear to us that the process and our mindset is now the tool to find and define the sound we’re looking to excavate.

The meeting between acoustic and processed sound and the focus of what these two bring to the table makes us think about the qualities of these sounds, and our tool is now how to use this listening attentiveness and channeling that through our synths, percussion, modular and mics.

The tool is now a way of thinking, and an approach to facilitate a room where the listener hopefully becomes interested in listening to sounds occurring in their own surroundings.  

Before you started making music together, did you in any form exchange concrete ideas, goals, or strategies? Generally speaking, what are your preferences when it comes to planning vs spontaneity in a collaboration?

For this particular project we wanted to work with field recordings, and composing with the impressions from them. In that way it differs from earlier works in this field in the case that it's both impressionistic and expressionistic on a totally equal level.

Earlier on we created songs that came from a very individualistic, emotional and intuitive state. This project needed a very precise plan from the start, which actually set us free creatively as a group. It let us be more spontaneous together.

We needed to find the scope of the inquiry in order to work freely within it. Terrain Vague was found as a working aim.

Is there a piece which shows the different aspects you each contributed to the process particularly clearly?

“Ode to the lost symphony” clearly shows the different layers in our music and the creative process.

Both field-recordings, acoustic sound and electronical sounds are sounds. At the same time it is a piece that has a clear compositional starting point, which during the process has dissolved and primarily works as a framework for a feeling and state of sound that we wanted to examine.

What tend to be the best collaborations in your opinion – those with artists you have a lot in common with or those where you have more differences?

As described before we find that in order to work spontaneous and creatively free together a direction or frame must be set when you work as anti hierarchical and close together as we do.

That being set we now find ourselves to be able to work with all sorts of artists now having found a very clear focus and working tools thanks to the process from the Terrain Vague album.  

Decisions between creatives often work without words. How did this process work in this case?

There were a lot of stages in the process where we were creating in a totally intuitive way also collectively. Still this particular work has demanded more talks and definitions to be discussed in the very beginning of the project.

As mentioned earlier on this has also set us free and given us a more collective mindset in all the other stages of the process. Words weren’t that needed then. Making the mixing and editorial process was carried out with almost the same flow as the improvised sessions.  

What are your thoughts on the need for compromise vs standing by one's convictions? How did you resolve potential disagreements in this collaboration?

To be honest there were very few disagreements and the tracks that didn’t make it to the “final cut” were agreed upon by everyone. Having played for so many years we also know where we can help each other out, and what just stalls the creative process.

We had one single disagreement at the very start of the process where we felt not being able to play as freely as we all needed to. After talking that through we definitely found a very fluid way of playing more freely together as a collective.

Do you find that at the end of this collaboration, you changed certain parts of your process or your outlook on certain creative aspects?

The creative and artistic decisions seem to have been a bit more out of our hands in this particular process. Working very intuitively with the sounds and the fact that improvisation and spontaneity have played a more profound part in the whole process have made it more vivid and uncontrolled.

That experience is most definetely something we’ve learned from and will keep as tools in excavating new material in the future.