Interview: Loscil

In the 10 years that Scott Morgan has been recording as Loscil he’s built up the sort of following ordinarily denied ambient artists. His albums, most of them released on Kranky, have been preceded by enormous swells of anticipation and dissected at great length in online forums. Such discussions have often focused on Loscil’s tendency towards high concepts: 2002’s Submers featured nine tracks named after historical submarines; 2010’s Endless Falls ended on a collaborative track, ‘The Making Of Grief Point’, featuring friend and former bandmate Dan Bejar from Destroyer (with whom Scott once played drums) speaking in unsettling half-sentences about the tortured creation of an imaginary ambient track. But Loscil’s greatest asset is consistency: from intricate albums like 2004’s First Narrows to this year’s Coast/Range/Arc — a series of beatless soundscapes released on Italian drone label Glacial Movements — there’s an aquatic undercurrent to Loscil’s work that makes it instantly recognisable. This is a fact he attributes to the prominent role played by rain in his life as a resident of Vancouver, where he currently spends his working days making sound effects for kick-ass computer games.

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The Stool Pigeon: In the past you’ve described computer game music and sound effect work as a career and Loscil as a hobby. Is that still true?

Scott Morgan: There’s a huge divide between what I consider work and what I see as recreation. Work normally involves coming up with interesting new sounds for explosions. The last game we worked on was called Prototype, and we’re currently midway through a sequel to it. And that game is pretty much non-stop destruction: you blow things up, you kill things, you shoot guns and generally smash the place apart. That’s standard for my work in computer games these days. I wish I could pay the bills with Loscil stuff alone, but I have two kids now.

Does the pyrotechnic nature of your computer game stuff lead to your work as Loscil being all the more sedate by contrast?

I was making this kind of music long before I got into game audio, so I can’t say that one was a direct result of the other, but I certainly enjoy those times when I’m not making loud sounds and I get to rest my ears a bit and do something tranquil.

Your records are famously thematic — Submers with its reverence for submarines, Endless Falls with its reliance on rain. Does it mean a lot to you to make albums with continuity and consistency?

Sometimes those thematic ideas are placed over the top of the music, they don’t necessarily precede it. Other times I work with that cell of an idea in my head — it’s very much a soundtrack approach, and I feel ultimately as though I’m scoring an idea rather than just making music randomly and without an overall guiding form. I’ve always liked the idea of an album or an overall body of work, where all the components have a relationship to one another. A collection of disparate tracks doesn’t appeal to me anywhere near as much.

What albums and artists brought you to the music you make now?

Music For Airports and other ambient Eno records were incredibly influential. That’s also a pretty good example of a record that has a heavy concept behind it: not just the shape of the record or the sound itself, but the very purpose of the music existing.

There’s an aquatic edge to much of your work. Do you find yourself appropriating ambient sounds as they exist in nature?

Water in general, especially moving water, is kind of white noise, but there’s something inside it that is more amazing to me than any kind of white noise you can create. There’s something about the intricacy of it: rain and white noise sounds random, but there is a pattern to it, if only in its consistency. And in that it becomes a sort of structure: rain does have a beginning, a middle and an end. Unless you live in Vancouver.

Are there a lot of deep-rooted childhood memories of rain that you think influence your work to this day?

I don’t have any specific recollections, but it’s definitely part of my subconscious. I was born and raised in what is essentially a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest. It’s part of our daily conversation here: we’re either complaining about the rain, or we’re overjoyed that it’s stopped. Everything is framed by rain on some level, it’s a constant background noise, and it definitely influences my music in ways that even I don’t understand.

What’s the process of incorporating natural sounds into your music?

I think of it as the opposite of starting a song with silence: if white noise contains all the frequencies audible to man, then making music from it could be seen as pulling out certain frequencies until you end up with the finished product, like a block of stone that a person might carve a sculpture out of. The raw sound of rain appears on the track ‘Endless Falls’, but in all the other tracks on that album I used rain as a source sound that I then processed and integrated into the track in more abstract ways.

How do you feel about the prevailing stereotype of ambient music as the property of suburban hippies: twee and charming but ultimately unthreatening?

It feels like there are many different definitions of what ambient music is. There’s the kind of background ambient made famous by Eno, the techno ambient stuff that people associate with The Orb, the borderline new age ambient that people often see as ‘healing’ music. And there are obviously different ways to listen to ambient music; you can deep listen and really submerge yourself, or you can use it like wallpaper and just let it shift in the background. I think what you get out of it depends on what you put into it as a listener.

Some of the new age stuff is very soaring and self-searching, whereas the average listener would struggle to detect a human hand in much of what you do. Dan Bejar’s vocal in ‘The Making Of Grief Point’ raises the idea of a conflict between creating a crystalline ambient fortress and the temptation to humanise. Is that a conflict you’re subject to much of the time?

There’s definitely a battle. I get an awful feeling whenever I feel like I’m getting too close to what you might call ‘spiritual’ music making. I don’t mind riding the edge: I want there to be something otherworldly and unsettling about the music I make, but I also want there to be a degree of humanism in there, because ultimately the music I enjoy the most is the stuff that affects me emotionally. So yes, there is a conflict, and I get terrified when I feel like I’m crossing that boundary and losing myself to one extreme or the other.

Much of your music also seems to be quite dark, which completely goes against the conventional notion of new age spiritual music.

I’m aware of that, and I certainly enjoy going to dark places with my music once in a while. That said, I’ve been slightly self-conscious of it ever since a friend of mine who was working on a film called The Corporation used a bunch of my tracks in the movie, and when I went to see the film they’d used my music in all the darkest, bleakest sequences — the bit about 9/11, the section on the Holocaust. I left the film feeling pretty jaded. I appreciate that my music might veer into the shadows occasionally, but that seemed a bit over the top.

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