Super_Collider
A ten-foot man bestrides the Royal Festival Hall stage like a colossus, clad from head-to-toe in an enormous white outfit. He is thrashing about like an elongated Busta Rhymes, and spitting out lyrics like Prince and Stevie Wonder grappling over an effects unit. It’s the London Sonarsound event where Super_Collider are supporting techno demi-god Jeff Mills: tonight showcasing his new soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. What seems to be a strange mixture of techno boys waiting to see Jeff Mills – and middle-aged film bores waiting nervously to see how Mills might have butchered Lang’s masterpiece – snatch glances at their companions as if to say: “What is this?”
This is a collision: between the underground and the mainstream; between heavy soul and hectic algorhythmic music programming; between the high-brow of the Festival Hall and the “fuck you if you don’t like us” art-school abandon of Cristian Vogel and Jamie Lidell. This is Super_Collider.
“The only problem that people have with Super_Collider…” explains man-and-machine vocalist Lidell, “and it’s a shame: is that we’re too ‘pop’ for the real underground crew, and too weird for the pop crew. We’re just sat in the middle…”
It’s a week and a half before the gig, and Slant is sharing a pint with the boys in a Brixton beer-garden on a beautifully sunny Monday lunchtime: their first of many, many interviews. Many, many people want to speak to them as their second album, Raw Digits, gets set to reach a metallic hand into the collective soul of electronic music-lovers everywhere and give it a welcome rub. The duo are in fine fettle, even when contemplating their forthcoming appearance at the Festival Hall, although they admit that they haven’t even begun practicing with the band yet. Jamie, at least, appears not to be phased. “It’s one thing that comes from working for years as a singer with electronic shit: I can just sing it,” he says, in his animated jive: gushing enthusiasm. “When I do my live show now I just get to the point where I do acapella… I do the finger clicks to just hold the pulse and get a loop sampler which gets a tempo and just keeps on clicking, and I can just deliver the song. It’s so much fun… yeeeah…” His partner, the more restrained Cristian Vogel, is more worried. “It’s very frightening” he deadpans. “We’ve been feeling the fear a little bit, but it’s alright because, as Jamie says, there are five people involved and they’re all powerful personalities.”
In the end, their appearance at the RFH follows the McDonalds-destroying ‘cabaret of destruction’ that is Matthew Herbert’s Radioboy live show. Slant suggests that Herbert is one of the only other artists combining complex electronics with smooth vocal science, yet Lidell, a friend and admirer of Herbert, places him at some distance. “He’s doing like film soundtracks and a big band album. It’s a really, really hard thing to do, ‘cos it’s got such a fucking history behind it. He’s stepping into another set of shoes there… like the territory of Duke Ellington and the real fucking badboys.”
In the same way, then, are Super_Collider a pair of highbrow musicians trying to tear up the rulebook? “I don’t think I’m ever gonna be that” says Lidell. “I’m not a good musician. I’m just a fucking weird… I dunno, music means something to me – I feel it. I can’t play the keys or anything like that. I just try and concentrate on one spot really heavily, and have to compensate for my other weaknesses with that strength.”
Despite such modesty, their pedigree is immense. Although Lidell’s last album on Warp received mix reactions, the first Super_Collider LP, Head On, charmed the pants off of anyone who came close to it. The no-holds barred soul that shines from Lidell’s sheer talent and originality as a vocalist, married with Vogel’s meticulous leftfield studio wizardry is a refreshingly unique experience. It’s “freeform matchstick building”, according to Vogel. However, questions of its accessibility divide their opinion – Vogel seems happy to occupy their unique territory, but Lidell is not so sure. “It’s hard for us to make the fucking music, ‘cos we’re stuck there thinking ‘we can make fucking weird music’… and we do. We’re not afraid to have no barriers and no boundaries creatively, but we put really strong barriers on when we make Super_Collider to stop it going too far into the zone.”
In his own right, Vogel has enjoyed a long career as a revered DJ and producer in the electronic music world: a forward-pushing experimental techno artist now living in Barcelona, with a huge following in Berlin (where Lidell now lives), and former denizen of Brighton (as was Lidell). “To people who value techno, and feel the revolution it created in music – which was a massive global music revolution that can’t be ignored… if you were part of that in its early years, you can’t really deny it. I read that Russ Gabriel, for example, recently said ‘all my music before 1997 was shit.’
And while the good old UK catches on in its own way, snatching and discarding trends like toilet paper, it’s no surprise that two of its finest are making the music of their lives from different corners of mainland Europe. “In Europe it’s a lot more honest” concludes Vogel, “in the UK it always feels like everyone’s so influenced by the press, and advertising, and all the commercial stuff… trying to make people’s minds up for them. In a way Super_Collider is keeping that original energy up.”
Originally printed in Slant Magazine, May 2002
Photo credit: Maud Taylor
This is a collision: between the underground and the mainstream; between heavy soul and hectic algorhythmic music programming; between the high-brow of the Festival Hall and the “fuck you if you don’t like us” art-school abandon of Cristian Vogel and Jamie Lidell. This is Super_Collider.
“The only problem that people have with Super_Collider…” explains man-and-machine vocalist Lidell, “and it’s a shame: is that we’re too ‘pop’ for the real underground crew, and too weird for the pop crew. We’re just sat in the middle…”
It’s a week and a half before the gig, and Slant is sharing a pint with the boys in a Brixton beer-garden on a beautifully sunny Monday lunchtime: their first of many, many interviews. Many, many people want to speak to them as their second album, Raw Digits, gets set to reach a metallic hand into the collective soul of electronic music-lovers everywhere and give it a welcome rub. The duo are in fine fettle, even when contemplating their forthcoming appearance at the Festival Hall, although they admit that they haven’t even begun practicing with the band yet. Jamie, at least, appears not to be phased. “It’s one thing that comes from working for years as a singer with electronic shit: I can just sing it,” he says, in his animated jive: gushing enthusiasm. “When I do my live show now I just get to the point where I do acapella… I do the finger clicks to just hold the pulse and get a loop sampler which gets a tempo and just keeps on clicking, and I can just deliver the song. It’s so much fun… yeeeah…” His partner, the more restrained Cristian Vogel, is more worried. “It’s very frightening” he deadpans. “We’ve been feeling the fear a little bit, but it’s alright because, as Jamie says, there are five people involved and they’re all powerful personalities.”
In the end, their appearance at the RFH follows the McDonalds-destroying ‘cabaret of destruction’ that is Matthew Herbert’s Radioboy live show. Slant suggests that Herbert is one of the only other artists combining complex electronics with smooth vocal science, yet Lidell, a friend and admirer of Herbert, places him at some distance. “He’s doing like film soundtracks and a big band album. It’s a really, really hard thing to do, ‘cos it’s got such a fucking history behind it. He’s stepping into another set of shoes there… like the territory of Duke Ellington and the real fucking badboys.”
In the same way, then, are Super_Collider a pair of highbrow musicians trying to tear up the rulebook? “I don’t think I’m ever gonna be that” says Lidell. “I’m not a good musician. I’m just a fucking weird… I dunno, music means something to me – I feel it. I can’t play the keys or anything like that. I just try and concentrate on one spot really heavily, and have to compensate for my other weaknesses with that strength.”
Despite such modesty, their pedigree is immense. Although Lidell’s last album on Warp received mix reactions, the first Super_Collider LP, Head On, charmed the pants off of anyone who came close to it. The no-holds barred soul that shines from Lidell’s sheer talent and originality as a vocalist, married with Vogel’s meticulous leftfield studio wizardry is a refreshingly unique experience. It’s “freeform matchstick building”, according to Vogel. However, questions of its accessibility divide their opinion – Vogel seems happy to occupy their unique territory, but Lidell is not so sure. “It’s hard for us to make the fucking music, ‘cos we’re stuck there thinking ‘we can make fucking weird music’… and we do. We’re not afraid to have no barriers and no boundaries creatively, but we put really strong barriers on when we make Super_Collider to stop it going too far into the zone.”
In his own right, Vogel has enjoyed a long career as a revered DJ and producer in the electronic music world: a forward-pushing experimental techno artist now living in Barcelona, with a huge following in Berlin (where Lidell now lives), and former denizen of Brighton (as was Lidell). “To people who value techno, and feel the revolution it created in music – which was a massive global music revolution that can’t be ignored… if you were part of that in its early years, you can’t really deny it. I read that Russ Gabriel, for example, recently said ‘all my music before 1997 was shit.’
And while the good old UK catches on in its own way, snatching and discarding trends like toilet paper, it’s no surprise that two of its finest are making the music of their lives from different corners of mainland Europe. “In Europe it’s a lot more honest” concludes Vogel, “in the UK it always feels like everyone’s so influenced by the press, and advertising, and all the commercial stuff… trying to make people’s minds up for them. In a way Super_Collider is keeping that original energy up.”
Originally printed in Slant Magazine, May 2002
Photo credit: Maud Taylor