Name: Thomas Ankersmit
Nationality: Dutch
Occupation: Composer, improviser
Current release: Thomas Ankersmit's Perceptual Geography is out via Shelter Press.

If this Thomas Ankersmit interview piqued your interest, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.

This interview was conducted in person in November 2011 and by email 2013/2014.

Over the course of his career, Thomas Ankersmit has played and recorded with a wide range of artists, including Phill Niblock, Jim O'Rourke, and Valerio Tricoli.

[Read our Jim O'Rourke interview]
[Read our Valerio Tricoli interview]



Do your ideas develop in the studio?

In part, but also during shows and from reading and such. My studio setup is basically the same as my live setup. I just unpack it and then it's the way it is here. I do prepare raw material for live shows in the studio, both in terms of designing synthesizer patches and recording chunks of audio material.

I try to play the synthesizer every day even if it’s just to experiment and mess around. I'll often record sound fragments in the studio to then cut-up and process them in performance, combined with live synthesis. Or I'll record more specifically designed parts for compositions and use them for records ...

I mean, I've been playing in public since 1998, when I had my first gig in Amsterdam. But my first CD only came out in 2010. That's to say my first proper CD - I made a mini-CD-R around 2001, but that was just fifteen minutes of saxophone playing. Then there was a split LP with Jim O'Rourke and then there was nothing for five years.

So basically, for me the studio has been more of a rehearsal space. I’m really quite new to the idea of completing a piece of music in the studio.

So is performing live and producing an album one and the same process to you – or do you actually sit down specifically with the intention of releasing something?


Because I’ve always focused on live performance and not so much on recording, for me the studio has been more of a place for experimentation where the results are live shows, instead of records. But that’s been changing a little in recent years.

For example, most of the raw material for Forma II, the CD with Valerio Tricoli on PAN, originated from this set-up. And some of it was recorded specifically for the album, where one of us would say we need more of this or more of that and then I'd record for a day and then we'd have more building blocks.



In terms of experimentation, I generally create a new Pro Tools session each month and that becomes a kind of notepad. Sometimes, with the Serge, I'll stumble upon some very unstable sounds that I like, but that I wouldn’t be able to reproduce, so I'll just hit the record button to capture it and try to sustain it for a while ...

[Read our feature on the Serge Paperface]

Even if I try to patch up the synth the same way at a later stage, I know that particular sound might disappear. With the way I use the synth, a lot of it is quite unpredictable. I frequently don't really know what's going to happen. Often though, these very fine, complex textures appear and those are frequently the sounds I’m most interested in.

Has the release of your Live in Utrecht album – which was your first solo release - added anything specific to your approach of preparing materials?

I do think that my way of working has become a little more more effective, that I'm not just switching on the machines and playing around.

For example, this one instrument [points to the Serge Modular], I've only had it since 2006, so that's seven years ago. And I'm only just starting to feel that I know my way around the thing and that I can realize some of its potential. I've also switched instruments a few times.



I started playing the saxophone in 1998 and the computer and modular synthesis came in around 2000 and I've had three different synthesizer set-ups. So I switched analog synthesizers twice and each time, it took me a couple of years to become comfortable with it ... and then to become uncomfortable with it again (laughs) and to get rid of it.

What made you want to start playing the modular in the first place?

When I started messing around with sound / music as a teenager, my first instruments were primitive electronic devices; a discarded radio, pieces of an electric guitar and an amp - both built by my dad when he was younger - a contact mic, stuff like that. The saxophone came a few years later. So I’ve always been interested in electronic sound; in particular the “hidden noises” of analogue equipment, and the physicality of playing with these machines; putting my fingertips directly on the printed circuitry to make feedback sounds for example.

Around 2000 I got my first Mac that was capable of running audio programs, and I also discovered the Doepfer modular synth which was one of the first of a new generation of affordable modular systems. Maybe I thought of it as more tactile than the computer, but more sophisticated than the broken radio?

Then in 2003 I had the chance to buy an old EMS Synthi A, which I like very much but it never really suited what I wanted to do. In 2005 I discovered the Serge and that still seems ideal to me. I’ve also stopped playing the saxophone for the time being so I’m really focusing on electronic music now.

[Read our feature on the Synthi AKS]
[Read our feature on the Synthi 100]
 
What makes the sounds and sound creation possibilities of the modular so appealing to you?

Well, I hate most modular synth sounds, and I hate most synthesizer music (laughs). Same goes for the saxophone by the way. So it’s not that I find their sound inherently appealing.

The Serge modular in particular is like a construction toy; you can build almost anything with it. I’m interested in the analogue “glitches” and distortions in the signal; internal feedback, little bursts of sound impacting on other sounds, things like that.

I like the Serge in particular because it’s designed to be extremely open and flexible - anything can be patched to anything else - and it’s full of unusual sound-processing modules. But at the same time it’s really precise and high-end. So you can have really fine control over your sounds if you want to, or you can make all hell break loose, and you can really “dial in” the impurities.

The Serge was invented in the early 70s at CalArts, an art and music school north of LA. They have a really powerful and heavily customized early Serge there. That’s actually where I first discovered the instrument several years ago, when I was visiting their studios as a guest. In the winter of 2011/2012 they invited me back to record with the instrument, which had just been restored by Kevin Fortune, who used to work with Serge, so it was in really great condition again. The piece I made there, “Figueroa Terrace”, will be released by Touch in early 2014. It’s a quadraphonic piece originally, mixed to stereo for the release.



One of the most important things to me is that, unlike the Moog and Arp instruments for example, the Serge was really designed with sound-experimentation in mind. It’s also really dense and compact: I have something like forty modules that I can take as airplane carry-on.

There’s a really nerdy book by someone called Mark Vail that has interviews with Serge Tcherepnin, the inventor, and Rex Probe, who builds the Serge synthesizers these days. Serge was talking about how he started making music by messing around with broken radios, and how he really appreciated distortion and fuzz circuitry etc. He was also close to Maryanne Amacher, whom I spent a fair amount of time with and whose work has always really impressed me.

I’ve never met Serge but he always sounded like a very interesting guy.

Tell me a bit about the learning curve with regards to performing on the modular, please. How did you gradually go from your early approaches to your current mode of performing?

I still have a long way to go. I guess some common paradigms for playing a modular synth are to either rely on continuous drones and slowly tweak the controls, or to sequence things so that the instrument plays somewhat automatically, or to play it similar to a piano, triggering sounds from a keyboard, which usually leads to a kind of tonal “plink plonk” result.

None of these things are what I really want to do though. I’m more interested in a kind of sound-collage approach, and in how the sound behaves in the performance space and inside the ears of the listener.

I’d like to be able to really shape many different aspects of a sound in real time, and build these dense clusters of events, and make them come and go as I please. But that’s easier said than done. I mean, that’s stuff Varèse was already fantasizing about almost a hundred years ago. And there’s a tension between wanting to sculpt the sound very precisely and wanting to do it all in real-time.

Like I said earlier, the kind of sounds I’m most interested in are happening at the edge of control; the “dirt” in the signal. You can’t really control that dirt.
 An obvious limitation of hardware is that there’s limits on how many instances you have of an oscillator, for example. Also, the knob settings and the way the cables are patched for one sound might all have to be changed to make another sound. I use a matrix mixer to switch between patches and I built a little interface that basically lets me circuit-bend the machine without opening it up.

So those are ways to mess with the sound more dynamically.

You've said that you want to play the synthesizer like an instrument, does that mean you want a certain fluency in the way you interact with the equipment?

Sure.

Is that one of the reasons why you decided against the typical keyboard as an interface?

The black and white keyboard is pretty irrelevant for what I want to do, I think. I can’t play the piano anyway, so it’s also not like I’m used to that interface and want to hold on to it.

One of the things I like about the Serge and Buchla synths is that those guys always refused to produce a piano-style keyboard. They were against the idea of playing a new electronic instrument that could produce all kinds of new sounds and shapes with an interface built for the conventions of the piano.

[Read our feature on the Buchla 208 + 200e]

In my case, it’s more a matter of designing several sound-streams, several sub-patches, that I can combine and switch on and off in various ways. I use manual switches and faders, and different kinds of control voltages to shape the dynamics, to make things come and go. These CVs are triggered by switches, or envelope-following a contact mic, etc.

You certainly could play the Serge or any other modular with a piano-style keyboard and get a very predictable, organ / piano-like response, but it’s not what I’m interested in. In terms of documenting my patches, I’ve largely given up on that; I just work from memory.

Does it matter that you've known the saxophone longer than any other instrument?


Not so much. I know a lot more about synthesis and electronic music ideas than about the saxophone I think. I basically know nothing about the saxophone. I’d been playing it in my own way since the late 90s, but I never had any lessons or anything.

I guess it fits your description of you playing the synth more like an instrument in a traditional way than the saxophone.


Phill Niblock and I did a gig in Bern a few years ago, where I played electronics and sax. It turned out that the festival organiser was a virtuoso saxophonist and the sound person also, and a number of people in the audience as well. They had a saxophone quartet together.

We all had dinner together afterwards and they asked me: So what was this note that you were playing? But I didn't know what the note was. I know most of the keys on the saxophone by their frequency in Hertz, so I could tell you where to find 138 Hz or whatever, but not where the F# is. So I said it's the one where this valve closes and you open this one ... And they said: That one doesn't exist! (laughter) And I said: Well, it's 307 Hz (laughs).

So I probably know a handful of things that not many people are interested in and I don't know all the other stuff basically.