How I Play: Christopher Coe on his improvised modular-only approach for his Worlds End series
Here at Awesome Soundwave playing electronic music live is an essential part of everything we embody. The nature of live music, whether it be electronic or otherwise, is that it is being performed by an artist who may interpret or, even, improvise the music in a way that, often, is not repeatable. It happens in that moment. Some artists are very intent on faithfully reproducing a piece of music and others are focussed on creating new music in an improvised manner and, thus, a new work is formed each time they perform.
One such artist who works in this way is Christopher Coe, his improvisational approach is to create his music on the fly. Often never to be repeated pieces, he does not record his live shows often as he believes strongly that the music is for that moment, that shared experience with the audience at that time.
His latest project ‘Worlds End’, is a series of improvised modular-only pieces recorded and filmed on remote islands off the west coast of Ireland. Here, Coe gives us some insight to how he played live for the first of the series: Achill Henge.
Christopher Coe: For the '‘Worlds End series’, my idea is to get to an island with my modular gear and improvise the music on the spot.
For this, I use exclusively my Amalgamod rack case which holds 4 lanes of modules. The modules I use comprise the Moog DFAM, Erica synths Kick Drum, Mutant B09 (for toms), Mutant Clap, PGH life forms complex oscillator, PGH VCAs, Filters and Envelope generators, 4MS ensemble oscillator (does lovely harmonic clusters and pads), OXI coral (a beast of a multi timbral module), Norand Morphos (another beast of a complex oscillator), Mutable Instruments Beads, Strymon Magneto, and for sequencers I have multiple units: the AntiKulture Disrupter, the Intelligel Metroplex and the standalone OXI 1 which is a powerful controller with 4 sequencer channels and multiple types of sequencing, midi control etc inside!
Here’s a photo of me setting up on Inis Turk before shooting one of the next Worlds End series films.
I use a small PGH mixer and then come out through a WMD MSCL compressor. The audio feeds into my Elektron Digitakt, which also provides clock back to the modular stuff. I use the Elektron as a drum machine also. And all the audio goes from this to a monitor speaker and via USB straight to recording a stereo file into my laptop.
Raw and simple, what I record is what I use, one take, no edits.
Thanks Chris for sharing this insight into your approach and process!