Recoil: As Open As They Wanna Be

By Steve Holtje

 
Alan Wilder started Recoil as a side project while he was in Depeche Mode. Since he left DM, Recoil -- with different guest artists on each album -- has become his primary musical focus. On the group's new album, Liquid, he combines New York spoken-word diva Nicole Blackman and gritty Brooklyn poet Samantha Coerbell, terrifying vocalist Diamanda Galas, a sample of the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, Spanish Recoil fan Rosa Torras reading prose in Catalan, and Wilder's own adventurous, electronic-oriented music into an edgy, unsettling mix. Other guest musicians include Curve's Dean Garcia (bass), Steven Monty (drums), Merlin Rhys-Jones from Ian Dury's Blockheads (guitar), and Wilder's partner, Hepzibah Sessa (violin, backing vocals).

Wilder says his approach to Recoil hasn't changed much since he left Depeche Mode. "Obviously I can spend more time on it, so it's more involved. But in terms of its concept, it hasn't really changed, because it was always designed to be a very open project and very experimental, and, in a way, an antidote to what I was doing in [Depeche Mode]. It's still very experimental and still open. That doesn't mean sometimes it can't go more structured and more toward pop, but generally speaking, it's just as open as it wants it to be, and it can mutate, and it can bring in many different people at any given time."

Liquid was partly built around thoughts stirred up by a plane crash Wilder witnessed. "Really, the album was never intended to be about that," he emphasizes, "but I had this one track I was working on, and this incident kept coming back into my mind when I was working on this music, so I thought I might as well use it to write this particular track. And in the end it was a good way to kinda make sense of all the stories that were contributed by the other writers. And the way I found to make sense of it was to put all the stories into the mind of the man going down in this crash and make them become kind of his life memory as he's about to die in this air crash. And that was the thought that stayed with me after I witnessed this particular incident, which was a military plane that literally crashed right in front of us as we were driving around, myself and my partner, in the middle of nowhere in Scotland."

Of the tracks with Blackman, Coerbell, and Galas, Wilder explains, "I sort of build a rough framework with the music, which has a kind of atmosphere that I like and some kind of loose structure but nothing more. At this stage, I didn't have any idea about using this black-box idea as a sort of overall theme or anything. Once I got these collaborators involved, which is really dictated by the music and what that's kind of indicating, I didn't tell them that I wanted them to write a story that could be a man's memory. All I did was pick someone I think is good at what they do and can write, and just let them have a free rein, give them the track, and say, just write a story to this, whatever you like. So it's just my way to make sense of everything afterwards."

"I suppose I was looking for actors, but actors don't write words, so spoken word's the next thing, really, where someone can write words, tell a story."

Speaking both of the group in general and of Liquid in particular, Wilder continues, "I wanted [Recoil] to be my project, rather than that kind of group or a democracy. But at the same time, I'm not a dictator, so when I bring other people in, I want them to bring their characters and for them to contribute, so I don't tell them what to write. It was really allowing the music to dictate the kind of vocalists. So, for example, with Diamanda Galas I had this very dark blues feel to this particular track, and that's what made me think about her, because I knew from her previous work that she goes into those gospel and blues areas. And likewise with the spoken-word people."

The direction Recoil has taken so far -- one which Wilder thinks will change next time out -- reflected the way he conceived of and constructed the music. "I kind of gravitated towards [the spoken-word artists]," Wilder states, "because I felt the music needed some kind of narration, dialog. I often start building the music by using a bit of sampled film dialog, something like that just to give me some kind of focus. Most of the time I'm thinking around in the dark; I don't really know what the direction is, so I need something to sort of be a focus. So this music came together, and it had this sort of filmic quality to it, so in a way I suppose I was looking for actors, but actors don't write words, so spoken word's the next thing, really, where someone can write words, tell a story. Obviously, I go towards these people that have this kind of strong character. I think the music kinda needs that. I try to find people appropriate to the atmosphere of the music."