Malka Spigel and Colin Newman are no strangers to collaboration in life and or in music. Married since 1986, the Minimal Compact bassist/singer and Wire’s primary vocalist and songwriter worked together on the latter’s two electronic albums Commercial Suicide and It Seems from 1986 and 1988 respectively, released by Belgian label Crammed Discs. In 1993, they founded their own label, Swim, and have come together as members of groups like Githead, with Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, and more recently as Immersion.
It’s a large body of work, made together, recorded under various names, with other artists coming and going and interjecting some creative flair along the way. That’s the spirit in which Immersion’s Nanocluster albums emerge. The first volume from 2021 featured Laetitia Sadier, Ulrich Schauss, Tarwater and the aforementioned Scanner, an album with a similar complexion to Crammed’s Made To Measure series from the 1980s, bringing together abstract experimentation with boldly defined concepts and parameters to work with/against.
Vol.2 is slightly different in that it’s a game of two halves – or more precisely, two 10” vinyl discs, with Swans and Shearwater drummer Thor Harris providing the sonic stimuli for the first six songs, and Penelope Isles’ Cubzoa, aka Brighton’s Jack Wolter, contributing to the other five. Matt Schulz from Holy Fuck brings continuity to the release as the drummer throughout.
Broadly speaking, the first release feels more cosmic, specifically on songs like ‘As Long As’, which has a euphoric electronic energy that’s strangely redolent of William Orbit’s take on trip hop, with an outlook verging on the hippyish: “As long as the stars shine … we will be here always”, sings Spigel, who appears to steer this initial collaboration more than her husband (though there’s undoubtedly plenty of overlap). ‘Rotations’ is propelled by minimalist-style ostinatos, spinning in regular intervals like the earth circling the sun, and ‘The House Of Thor’ is surprisingly twee in contrast to the more emotive minor chord landscape of ‘In Snow’. Harris is a multi-instrumentalist and a carpenter, and that mixture of ability and an anything-goes attitude helps define part one.
Part two of Nanocluster Vol.2 with Cubzoa feels less starry and more concerned with the here and now, despairing of right wing libertarians destroying the planet on ‘Not About Me’, which features Newman reciting verse over a dubby canvas: “Married to selfishness / married to stupidity,” he spits contemptuously. “It’s like the lunatics not only took over the asylum but took over the world”. He’s more reflective on ‘Other Ways’, delivering truisms that occasionally feel prescriptive, if not offensively so (“The universe was here before us / and it’ll be here when we’re gone / There is a power in objective truth / Whatever lies we tell ourselves”, etc).
Above everything else, Immersion manages to achieve a strong sense of human connection between these inseparable post-punk legends and other creative beings. Experimentalism collides head on with some immense pop tunes on both volumes, making it feel like a project that has plenty of immersive potential going forward.
