Hello Spiral: Where Were We

Navel-Gazers #69 is an interview with Hello Spiral a.k.a. Joe Baldwin who is going to talk to us about Where Were We. Not to be confused with Where We Were or We Were Where, it forms part of a loose trilogy on the Hello Spiral Bandcamp, where a decade’s worth of electronic-oriented music seems to be steadily giving way to… something else. I can discern this new direction in the “spiral” discography by the cover images, very incidental-seeming photos that seem to be cut from the same cloth as a rolling chronicle of sounds - emanating out of the artist’s day-to-day life in various ways - which we hear on the recordings. ‘Where Were We’ consists primarily of a single, half-hour long first track from the 2003-2005 period which - we’re informed in the liner notes - was never really meant to be music. Two Sanyo dictaphones have been deployed here on a sonic reconnaissance mission of some kind, within a decidedly small, claustrophobic-sounding domestic space. A certain musicality gradually does emerge from this piece which impresses me, but it’s the sharp, contrasting cut to the second track - a recording made exactly 20 years later - which makes it a listening experience I’ll I never forget. Now… where were we? Well, Islington to be precise, we’re doing this one in person!

AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! First could you tell us about your background? Who are you and who or what is “Hello Spiral”?

Joe Baldwin: Hi, well… me, I’m just a shit-muncher that decided I was an artist at a very young age. That was always my main focus, to be an artist in any shape or form. I did visual art for a lot longer - further back - than when I started to muck about with sound but I was always obsessed with music and sound, and when I look back on it now, more with sound than with music. I like music but I think I like sound more.

Hello Spiral’s a stupid name I started using in the early 2000s when I first got on the internet. It comes from the Gastr Del Sol track from ‘Upgrade And Afterlife’.

I had this conversation earlier today funnily enough. Someone in my server said “wow, that’s good spiral lore”. There’s a recent clip of this guy Adam Friedland, he had Anthony Fantano on and they were discussing Radiohead. It reminded me of how the Hello Spiral thing even happened because it was almost exactly how a convo went down when I was 19 or 20 and working in an off-license. A guy came in, he was this big walrus of a guy, he literally wore a bowler hat and he used to have a certain brand of cigars ordered into the off-license I worked in the evenings. He was a real music nerd, he wanted to talk music with me a lot and ‘Kid A’ was playing on my little boombox and he asked me what I thought of Radiohead’s new direction and I said: eh, I’ve listened to Aphex Twin as long as I’ve listened to them and there’s not anything mind-blowing.

I thought I’d already gone everywhere I could go listening to music but he’s the guy who gave me the Gastr CD and therefore how I started using the name Hello Spiral.

AC: It’s good that all this time, you stuck with something that was important to you.

Joe Baldwin: Yes if I stick on something, I stick on something.

AC: We’ve chosen today to talk about ‘Where Were We’. This is ostensibly the first of a trilogy on your Bandcamp, followed by albums called ‘We Were Where’ and ‘Where We Were’. On all three of these releases you are resurrecting recordings from the 2003 to 2005 era. What was going on in your life at that time?

Joe Baldwin: Joblessness, smoking way more weed than I should have been, general worthlessness, alcoholism… I was living with my parents in Ruislip, I think I’d tried to move out twice. I’d dropped out of college a couple of times, I’d got shitty jobs like the part time one at the off-license, got on job-seekers allowance… there just wasn’t much I was looking forward to at that time.

I moved out once to be with my first proper girlfriend, we tried to move into her parents’ house, that didn’t work so we split. Then I moved to Somerset to be with a friend of mine who had just impregnated my little sister’s best friend and they needed a lodger. Like an idiot I moved into this house where these two children had just had a baby and it was a relationship that was ending. I was there around six months until I literally just walked out the door and got a train ticket home.

AC: Is that the only time you’ve lived outside the London area?

Joe Baldwin: It was actually.

Then I was in this sort of limbo. I was living in a tiny tiny room. My mum bought me a bunk bed made out of metal, one of those ones with a desk underneath, and I’m a life-long insomniac. I used to sleep on the floor under the desk between two duvets, and I’d get up in the middle of the night and I’d just be on MySpace.

MySpace was so good. I was connecting with all these bedroom musicians. I used to chat to Rhys Chatham, then I thought he was stalking me because every time I’d add a new bedroom musician, he’d seem to add them just after. Hmm.

AC: The main recording on ‘Where Were We’ was made on a Sanyo dictaphone. So, were these micro-cassettes? What do you remember about the dictaphones? Do you still have them?

Joe Baldwin: No they’re not micro-cassette recordings, regular cassettes.

I don’t think I have those dictaphones anymore. They were large bulky silver-plastic, and they had a little hand-strap. My mum stole them from a stationery cabinet. She worked for British Airways for 20 years and she would just nick stuff from work for me, and that was something she thought would cheer me up a bit.

AC: She knew that you’d like that?

Joe Baldwin: Yeah, they knew that I was into weird audio shit.

AC: So do you know what ever happened to the dictaphones?

Joe Baldwin: I had two… ….I do wonder if I have one of them still but I don’t know where it would be. One of them I gave to Adam Bohman. It was when I was living in the prison squat and I used to go to Cafe Oto around five times a week because I wasn’t paying any rent, so I could afford it. It got put out there that his dictaphone had broken, and I turned up to Cafe Oto and I gave him a bag of dictaphones, an assortment. This was in 2017 or 2018 or, I’m not sure. You could ask him, probably.

AC: I’m sure he’d know!

The first half of this piece concedes little in terms of conventional musicality or instrumentation, it has the impression of someone puttering around indoors…. somewhere? Later there are some more music-adjacent moments, and also you seem to venture outside or to somewhere otherwise more open? “Where were you” over the course of the piece and also, what was your thought process during it?

Joe Baldwin: Well, absolutely no thought process!

The location was at my parents’ house, amusing myself with the dictaphones. It probably took place over quite a few weeks…

AC: Oh right I hear the parts where it cuts.

Joe Baldwin: Right so whenever I heard something that I thought might be interesting to record, the tape would be left in the dictaphone, not on Pause but on Stop. And when you hear a cut, it could be a minute later, it could be 30 days later.

I can remember some of the sound sources because I was listening to it today. Some of it was the toaster in our kitchen for example - actually a lot of it took place in the kitchen. We had this huge wooden dresser with these thick wooden drawers - I can remember pressing record, opening the drawer, putting the dictaphone in, shutting the drawer, opening again, taking it out, stopping recording.

We had a weird door under the stairs where my stepdad had his computer, and we had these concertina doors to close that space. And there were these little… fucking… stained glass windows in the doors, with a three-way fold up.

AC: Like an accordion.

Joe Baldwin: Exactly. And some of that I can definitely hear is me chucking the dictaphone in there, and opening and closing them.

But I’m always more pleased when I can’t tell what the sound source is. And considering I was just doing this to have sounds I could sample or whatever, this recording - particularly over the other two I released, which aren’t as good - it came together so well.

And so at the end, there’s the sort of “denouement” where you can hear what’s like a wind chime, and something hitting something else quite a lot, which I’m pretty sure is the door of our conservatory - that had a wind chime on it - hitting whatever had stopped it open. So I think I just left the recorder there while the wind blew the door. Because you can then hear me in the kitchen in the background, fucking around with shit. Eventually I went ham on a cardboard roll, unravelling it and stuff like that.

It does blow my mind a bit how well-composed it seems considering there was no intention whatsoever.

AC: There’s a moment I want to ask you about at 16:55, someone is plucking what sounds like some kind of piano wire. First I wanted to ask what that is, but also I notice there is a pitch-shifting phenomenon there. I wondered if that was somehow occurring in the world of the source recording, or was it a manipulation of the playback device, or what?

Joe Baldwin: Yeah I know what you’re talking about. …just before that by the way, there’s an interesting part, there was something I got as a stocking filler. It was this thin, grey rectangle of plastic with a speaker at one end. It was for memos. You could press a little button and record. You could only record one thing. I guess it had a chip in it or something. It was totally pointless!

Before I had any way of recording via these dictaphones and then eventually a laptop, anything I had that would record audio, I’d keep hold of that audio, for years. So I had this thing I had recorded of me hitting something metal. I’d have recorded that on Christmas, five years earlier.

And it gets slower, because the battery starts running out!

But back to that pitch-shifted sound, this was a decorative xylophone that hurt your ears. It wasn’t designed to be an actual instrument. In real life, the tape cuts off all the high frequencies. It was just metal tubes that someone had turned into an oriental-looking, decorative xylophone.

The pitch-shifting is me using the Pause button.

AC: So is that… in 2024 when you’re digitising it?

Joe Baldwin: No, no. It’s untouched.

AC: Ah, so while Record is pressed - in 2004 - you’re simultaneously manipulating the Pause button.

Joe Baldwin: That’s right.

That xylophone by the way, in real life it felt like someone drilling your teeth. I wish I still had it so I could show you. The frequencies were insane, but I don’t think they’re audible, because of the low-pass cutoff on the tape.

AC: Not to overstate this, but the point where track 1 cuts to track 2 exactly 20 years later is possibly one of the most striking juxtapositions I’ve ever encountered on any album. I’d encourage our readers to listen to ‘Where Were We’ if only for the quasi-cinematic sensation of that moment alone.

Joe Baldwin: Thanks for that. I like that too. The difference in audio is great.

AC: Yes. And so, the background of that second track?

Joe Baldwin: I was in my flat and my ex was there too, she suddenly got the call to come pick up the keys to her new flat, this was a big deal because her flat-purchasing shit had been going on for like 9 months. She was eager for me to come with her, I wasn't that ready to leave the house but I relented.

We got all the way out of my building and upon the corner where the recording was made and she realised she'd forgotten her ID so she left me minding her bike (you can hear me pinging the bell) while she ran back to my building for the ID. Once she came back she was being neurotic about us making time and I told her in the recording 'this is as fast as I go’. This is because I have joint issues and I was dealing with a flare up.

So she left me there, shortly after the recording stopped, and cycled off. It turned out she didn't need her ID and I just went for a little walk. The whole point of this is it felt like the whole situation's point ended up being making that recording, because I already had the tape rip ready to upload that day, but I was wondering what I was gonna add in to make it a 'proper' album.

AC: I see. So, track 1 is from 2004 and track two is from 2024, do you think of this as a 2004 album or a 2024 album?

Joe Baldwin: It’s a 2024 album. They’re 2004 sounds obviously for the majority but… I only started releasing things in 2014 and I’ve only really ramped up what I do artistically in the last year and a half.

The thing is I also did start making music in 2003 or 4, I bought a big old 4-track and I was quite pleased with myself, thinking it was quite original, pranging away on a guitar and a drum machine and stuff I would compulsively write out, me reading things very deadpan, with no inflection in my voice whatsoever. And then I heard Shadow Ring and I thought: someone got there before me. And I scrapped all that, I don’t have any of it anymore.

AC: Ooh! …that’s sad, that kind of thing.

Joe Baldwin: I know, I know. Because, well I was… quite intense.

AC: Oh you scrapped it deliberately?

Joe Baldwin: Yeah I was quite an intense, aspergic young little man. So that’s one of the few things I don’t have anymore.

AC: Right.

But so, here you have this other stuff from that same period as that, but it doesn’t originally have that kind of intention and it’s not until 2024 - or whenever it was that you returned to this material we’re talking about - that now you attribute any to it.

And you… perceive it, like a listener. To a previous version of yourself!

Joe Baldwin: Yeah no, you’re right! You are right. The thing is if you care about listening, then intention doesn’t matter that much. If you get to a point where you’re a veteran of listening, then things which may not have had much intention are just… good. If you know what you’re listening for.

AC: Yeah it’s something you didn’t have at the beginning. It’s sort of like a paradox or something.

Joe Baldwin: Absolutely. And a lot of the things I find are my best releases I find have… less intention behind. Like not exacting your ego on it.

Do you know the whole anecdote with Stockhausen talking to Morton Feldman?

AC: Fill me in, no!

Joe Baldwin: Stockhausen approached Morton Feldman after a performance and said: what’s your secret? And Feldman said: I don’t push the sounds around. And Stockhausen said: …not even a little bit?

AC: Ha!

Joe Baldwin: Haha. Yeah, I think the intention is there, but in a different form. Me as a default, I do stuff that resolves into patterns. I think it’s genetic or something. So it’s almost too overt if I try and be creative. It’s way more effective if I’m not even thinking about it.

This stuff is quite cathartic to me because creatively I do like to micromanage so this is the antithesis of something like my visual art. But because I’m this kind of guy, I think it’s almost like something in my DNA to make sure that things are ordered and patterned. So listening to this 20 years later, it does feel like it’s been ordered, composed.

AC: Right it’s like your personality coming out in the work.

Ok. I wonder, from which era does the cover image derive?

Joe Baldwin: I was going through photos, a big stack of them and these three photos came up exactly like this.

AC: So, the one person’s head is cut out.

Joe Baldwin: That’s my cousin.

AC: And the other person?

Joe Baldwin: My cousin.

…they’re brothers.

…and so my stepdad’s sister, she ran an animal park in Devon in the late 90s and early 2000s that had animatronic dinosaurs to cash in on Jurassic Park.

AC: That’s either just a blurry photo or they were very realistic. I wonder when they’re from?

Joe Baldwin: They’ll be 90’s. When my maternal grandmother was dying, we made her a huge collage of all the children, grandchildren and cousins so that’s why his face is cut out.

AC: Ah right.

…what’s next for you, any current or upcoming projects to mention?

Joe Baldwin: Yes, there is. A kind of anti-drone album which is out on a Scottish label called Moonside Tapes. And an Adam Bohman duo is also coming out.

AC: What’s anti-drone?

Joe Baldwin: Drone you can’t settle into comfortably. It’s called ‘Detached Objects’.

I got this guy, who’s like an IDM niche interest celebrity, he’s like the Hunter S. Thompson of IDM, to do the blurb.

This is what he wrote for this album.

AC: That last part, what’s that a quote from?

Joe Baldwin: A poem. I had to look it up to be honest.

…Wallace Stevens.

“At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird's cry at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow . . .

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .

The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.”

AC: I notice he’s already talking about those topics before he delivers the quote. Maybe that piece made him think about the poem, or something?

Joe Baldwin: Yeah. I fuckin love Fred.

Fred McGriff. He goes by the name Fred McGriff.

AC: …cool.

…we’re done by the way.

Joe Baldwin: Yeah.

…I have zero memory of anything I’ve said, so…

AC: No, yeah.

Joe Baldwin: … ok great.

Hello Spiral can be found at https://hellospiral.uk/ and on Bandcamp.

Images

0) 'Where Were We' cover image.

1) Image by Joe Baldwin.

2) Photo by Michael Cowell.

3) 'Where Were We' original cassette (photo by AC).

4) Photo by Michael Cowell.

5) Photo by AC.

6) Photo by Michael Cowell.

7) Photo by Michael Cowell.

8) Photo by Shuoxin Tan.

9) 'Where Were We' cover image fragments (photo by AC).

10) Photo by Shuoxin Tan.

11) Image by Joe Baldwin.