Beachers: There are no cicadas in this town
Navel-Gazers #61 is an interview with Daryl Worthington a.k.a. Beachers who is going to talk to us about There are no cicadas in this town. I’ve been lucky enough to obtain access to this music prior to its release - I have to say the effect is rather ominous, almost like glimpsing into some previously-thought-to-be-indeterminate future, maybe one pervaded by ketchupy red smog of the kind depicted on this album’s cover. The soundscape of its first track, where Daryl has recorded the mechanical malfunction of a bus careening around London’s Zone 2 (or who knows, maybe Zone 3), is familiar enough to me, but it’s not long before the plot thickens. With Daryl’s music what always intrigues me is a jarring sort of interplay between different ingredients in the mix, being imparted to the listener-observer in a particularly transparent fashion. In a live context, no matter how clueless I personally am about electronics I can always follow along as he collates all the various elements together. And on this album we can almost “think” along as Daryl responds to urban field recordings in his own abstract guitar-feedback language, pausing on various elements such as wind sounds in the microphone, which might ordinarily be edited out. And well now, we can actually talk to Daryl to see what’s on his mind…. better yet!
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! I suppose to start, I’ve referred to you above as both Daryl and “Beachers”. We don’t want to confuse our readers, so who are you and what/who is Beachers? How do you define the project?
In terms of the name itself, it's a word that sprung into my head once while walking along a beach (I can't remember where but hazarding a guess either Suffolk or Jurmala, Latvia) and spending some time looking at some of the debris that had washed up there.
In terms of defining the project, it's never had clear, consciously set parameters. Over the years, certain patterns have perhaps emerged. One is an embrace of amateurism, and using that as a basis for exploration or experimentation. Another which recurs is a fixation on single sounds and stretching out what they can say. But I think most central is an interest in overlaps and not being dogmatic. And perhaps even amplifying certain contradictions. So, boundaries between composed and improvised, found and played, high and low-fidelity sounds I try to keep as blurry as possible.
Daryl Worthington: At a basic level, there's a disconnection. If we're thinking in terms of a band/songwriter/composer writing and/or recording a piece of music, and then determining and rehearsing a way to perform that music live (or the reverse, having songs they perform live, and then recording them) - that's never really been something I do, as Beachers at least. When I was younger I was in bands which worked this way, and I do still have an interest and respect for that practice, it's just not how I work currently.
But, sounds and processes from one do feed into the other. I use a lot of samples and field recordings, and what is in an album might be used live, and vice versa. (And often samples which I've used years ago will emerge much later on a recording. Sometimes the same sound will appear on multiple recordings...) Similarly, there are musical ideas (chord progressions for instance) which will likely be used live and in a recording. But where possible I try to keep things open ended and borders weakly defined.
Albums tend to come about in one of two ways. The first is through fixations on one snippet of sound and seeing how far I can run with that sound. Say, a single 30 second sample or recording which will be the only audio material I use. But that sound can be treated as open, with no limitations on the effects, processing or editing that can go onto it.
AC: Is that like Off The Hook?
One thing which guides both is that, for the last few years I've not had the option to do multi-track recording. It's something I could easily fix but it's actually a limitation I've found quite fruitful. So, in practice, if I record something on a guitar or synth, I can't record it directly over a drum machine, a field recording or even a click track. They have to be done separately and smudged together. It leads to some awkward tessellations which I like.
I enjoy the process of having a bunch of sounds which I then have to fit together, with no clear sonic image in my head beforehand. I don't tend to label or name field recordings, samples, or instrumental recordings. Often I'll be dragging in something without really knowing what it's going to sound like. Disorganisation is a path to chance and surprise! I have a chaotic, poorly structured workflow, and my intervention is to try and stitch together something I like or find interesting from that. Strictly speaking it's perhaps not truly experimental (depending on how one defines that term), as I'm applying ongoing aesthetic judgments and editing rather than letting a process just play out and keeping whatever outcome is produced.
Playing live is maybe closer to the latter process. My tools vary, but generally I'll have some samples prepared, and one or two instruments (generally a synth or a guitar). I'll have a vague idea of what I'll start with and what I'll end on, but everything in between is open. I keep all sounds pliable. Instruments will be fed through effects which can be shifted in real time. Samples will all be open to manipulation, or to being triggered at different times.
Also (just because I seem to get asked about this often) nothing is synced through midi etc - so although I'm largely using digital samplers and loop pedals, the only communication between them is mediated through me.
AC: Let’s talk about the 'Cicadas…' album. Could you explain how everything developed in sequence here? What did you have first - the field recording material, the instrumental material, the underlying idea? (Not to mention the arrangements, the titles, the visuals)? When and how did all that stuff get rolled up together in this case?
Daryl Worthington: There's not really a straight line through it. I think the title probably came first, and then I kind of spiralled from that - why was this in my head? How did it connect to my surroundings and how I was experiencing them at that time? I spent a long time toying with that phrase.
There were some guitar ideas that I'd been working on for a while, specifically aimed at playing with attack, sustain etc on the instrument. Some of these experiments I'd started recording around then, with no end point in mind.
The recording that dominates the first track, which is of a rail replacement bus service somewhere between Essex and Suffolk, is probably what started to anchor some of it (and that was the first track completed), and then I worked backwards and forwards from there and the title.
That bus, I think, is quite central to everything. To me it carries a lot of weight. Both the sound in and of itself, but also in terms of how it seemed to reflect a little of how I was feeling and what I was thinking at that time. But there are sounds which I'd recorded earlier, and some later which also ended up in the album, that seemed to thread into it. From that bus wheezing bus, certain things started to make some kind of sense.
Something about being on a very slow moving bus as its busted hydraulics started to make it sound like an animal, connected some things together in my head. The feeling of moving slowly, of being surrounded by a sound which was simultaneously infuriating and strangely meditative. I started exploring things that dialogue with that, and pulling things from my archive which dialogued with it.
The artwork came really recently, several months after I finished the recording. It comes from a mistake with an iPhone camera, (you can probably workout quite quickly what the mistake was, if you're keen eyed you might even be able to work out where it was taken) but again, it seemed to fit with the album. Both the obfuscation from the mistake, but also when and where the picture was taken... On the bank of the Thames, in one of the dwindling bits of space with public access. With the city all around, some things moving fast, some moving slow. Some repeating, some not.
AC: I’m going to guess the photo was taken somewhere on the Greenwich Peninsula. We can leave our readers to speculate.
There are a few sounds I’d like to ask you about. What are: the voices on Electrosmog? The hammering on the title track? The water on The River Is A Waveform? And the thing from around 2:10 on Wasteland Theme which sounds like a cicada (but presumably isn’t)? …are there any other source sounds you’d like us to know about?
Daryl Worthington: As mentioned before, my filing can be a little rogue. But, based on memory: The first you asked about is probably from a walk in Victoria Park (East London). What actually attracted me wasn't voices specifically so much as the crowd of sound dancing around the park, the specific texture of that moment. There's a lot more things happening in that recording apart from voices, but it's the voices that stick out (perhaps I should say, there were a lot more things happening in that moment, but it's only the swarm of voices overlapping from all around the park, that got clearly recorded).
Hammering on the title track: also Victoria Park. I didn't intend to capture it and to this day don't know where it came from. I was trying to record something else and the hammering started. I was near the canal so I imagine it could be boat related. The echo on it makes me think it involved metal in proximity to water.
The water on 'The River Is A Waveform' is a lock on the Hertford Union canal between Victoria Park and Hackney Wick, at night, specifically a very cold night. After it'd been raining quite extensively last winter.
The sound you mention on 'Wasteland Theme': I don't know. I know it was in Porto. It was very clearly a sound connected to something electrical, but I never got close enough to work out what it was. At the time it sounded pretty gnarly. The recording doesn't capture it (as you mentioned, it sounds like cicadas). Perhaps the sound source for all these things is as much a bad microphone on a phone as an actual event?
In general, specific source sounds aren't that important to me, beyond mindfulness of the ethical considerations of how a sound was captured. I don't want to keep them deliberately obscure, and will happily tell someone what specifics are if they pinpoint them and I can remember. But I'm more interested in combinations, and perhaps finding ways to explore the affect and effect of certain interactions, between the listener, their surroundings and sounds within that space.
Approximating, evoking or imaging situations rather than individual and clearly delineated things. It's why I'm not attentive to high quality field recordings, or to capturing pure, isolated sounds - because its not really an individual thing I'm trying to document, even if there might be one thing which draws my attention and acts as a subject, so to speak, when I start recording.
Thinking through this now, it seems that as well as a screaming bus, one recurring theme with this is places in an urban environment which are also slightly alien to an urban environment - a park and a canal. Maybe these, and the situations and interactions they contain, are sources more than the specific sounds within them.
AC: Regarding the album title, at first I thought it said “There are no Ciccones in this town” which is ordinarily untrue but this week I’m in America where I remember the sound tsunami during the cicada cycles growing up. Your timing is interesting as this summer there was apparently an emergence of 13 and 17-year broods here for the first time in 221 years.
What records were you hearing the cicadas on? You’re a music journalist, how heavily do you think hearing and analysing a lot of music affects your own work in general?
Daryl Worthington: Can I ask about your preamble to this question first? What's a sound tsunami? And, also what are 13 and 17-year broods - I'm guessing this is something to do with cicadas, but I actually know very little about them, beyond the peculiarities of their sounds. I think some of the things you're describing here, get at the volatility of a soundscape, and that's very interesting and relevant to me.
AC: Yeah I’m no expert on cicadas either, far from it, I guess I’m using “sound tsunami” to try and convey what it sounds like when they appear. It’s wild… you get these massive crescendos of sound every ten minutes or so. It only occurs in certain years. I wasn’t in the USA this summer but there was said to be a rare convergence of two different species in 2024.
Daryl Worthington: To answer your question, two that immediately spring to mind are Szabadság, by Adela Mede, and Lucie Vítková's Cave Acoustics (to be clear, I wouldn't necessarily call them direct influences). Both are wonderful records, and neither of them is specifically a field recording album. In fact both are really quite far from that. I don't know a huge amount about where they're from (aside from the former currently lives in Slovakia, the latter lives in New York but recorded her album in the Czech Republic). Having never visited either place, I don't know how common cicadas are in their environments.
In answer to your second question... it's a tough thing to unpick for me. But at the heart of writing about and making sound for me is a gleeful fascination with how we express and navigate our surroundings.
It's probably useful at this point to outline the kind of writing about music I generally do (at least how I see it in my own head!). When I write about music ((I'm reluctant to use the term journalist actually, but that's a whole different conversation), I try to get at either what the impact of the music is on me, or I'm thinking about what the music might mean in relation to what else is going on in the world. Whether it's contextualising with other music, other art, or what it might say in relation to other ideas and thoughts that are around in the moment. That's predominantly down to a limitation on my part. I'm not, by any stretch, a musicologist - I've never even formerly studied music or had a lesson on any instrument. That restricts how far I can really analyse a piece of music at the musical level. My writing is perhaps more thematic than actually about musical form, composition and structure.
I do of course listen to other music, as a musician, with the intention of understanding how that music might have been made, if there's ideas I can use myself, and also how I'd situate my own music in relation to what I'm hearing (is it connected, or, how is what I'm making trying to be different?) I think most musicians/sound artists etc do this on some level, and I'd have a profound distrust of any one who claims they don't.
Quite a big part of my work has involved hearing something and then trying to replicate the sound without understanding how that sound was really made - coming at it with a gleeful, wide-eyed non-understanding. Another thread is reading descriptions of music and trying to make something which sounds like what that writing describes (without hearing it). What does this have to do with your question about analysing music? I think it's important to balance analysis with maintaining a certain level of not really knowing. Openness to what something could be, and how the sound affects you, outside a fixed, technical understanding of the material. I think that applies to both me as a writer and a music maker.
AC: I’ve definitely noticed that about your writing. You tend to talk about music in terms of themes, concepts and context rather than worrying too much about how it was made, which I agree is also a viable approach to making music. To some that might seem counterintuitive, but the results can be rewarding!
Wrapping up here, thanks for this thoughtful discussion. What have you got coming up next?
Daryl Worthington: I'm working on several new recording projects, all of them quite different to "There's are no cicadas in this town". But I don't really have much information I can share about them yet.
Thank you for the conversation!
