SIMON FISHER TURNER

Simon Fisher Turner & Espen J Jörgensen release a unique collaboration on Mute, Soundescapes.

Soundescapes came into being through an unsolicited contact from Oslo-based electronic composer and film maker Espen J Jörgensen (The Sequential Art), who found himself haunted by Fisher Turner’s score to the David Lynch-produced vampire film, Nadja. Jörgensen sent tracks to Simon Fisher Turner, whose career in music can often be seen as a series of serendipitous meetings from an artist whose openness has found him doing everything from soundtracking the late Derek Jarman’s most important works, with no prior experience, to recording an album in the late 60s that was hyped to be Britain’s answer to David Cassidy.

Fisher Turner, on his 33^rd album and Espen on his debut album, have never met, instead the two corresponded via email, and agreed that Jörgensen would send tracks to Fisher Turner, who would do with the sounds whatever he wanted, including throwing them away. “I was the cook,” Fisher Turner explains, “Espen was the ingredients.” Says Jörgensen, “We agreed that Simon would get the ‘final word’ by me not commenting on what he does, to ‘remake it in his own image’.”

Soundescapes speak of long hours mixing on laptop screens and the instant rush of new tracks downloading. They blend rubberised pixelated mania with the odd human cough and squelch.Soundescapes is a kind of gestalt thing. It is field recordings from a collapsed field, instant travel while staying in place. It’s a leap of faith, trusting both the unknown souls at the other end of the wires and the technology connecting them. “Here is a man who I’ve never met, probably never will meet,” Fisher Turner says, “and in this instance he was kind and mad enough to just keep sending me masses of noises and sound. All I had to do was WANT to make something with his treasure.” Jörgensen, “I count myself very lucky to have worked with him, though it was never my intention to work with him when I approached him - it just ‘happened.”

When working on his comic book documentary, The Sequential Art, Espen researched sound design. That lead to exploring the circuit bent instrument, foley sound and recording all kinds of instruments. But Jörgensen chose to throw it all overboard, and worked instead with Billy Gould of Faith No More on the soundtrack. Espen later gave the sound design recordings to Simon, which was the origin of Soundescapes. “I felt that Simon would do these recordings justice” says Jörgensen and continues, “Simon’s got this remarkable way of composing and mixing music, and with that he gave my sounds a home”. 

You can trace Simon Fisher Turner’s career in music from the moment when, as a teenager, pop svengali Jonathan King gave him free reign to tinker with his Revox tape machine. King had plans to mould a new David Cassidy by way of Bowie, but Fisher Turner had too many ideas of his own. An album, Simon Turner, survives online as a what-if, but the real fruits of this apprenticeship with King were the hours spent obsessively taping, splicing, patchworking sound. And not just sound—still a working actor, Fisher Turner wove the worlds of film and television with the avant noise and proto-punk music scenes.  If Fisher Turner’s life from 1973 onward was a film, it would be one that no one would believe, but everyone with an interest in pop culture’s footnotes and punchlines would want to watch. It was a time spent oscillating between appearances with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the scratch orchestra famed for its appearances on Brian Eno records, and being punched in the balls by Sid Vicious, of taking Robert Mitchum (during the filming of Winner’s remake of The Big Sleep), handcuffed, to a Siouxsie and the Banshees gig.

Meanwhile, Fisher Turner was building an extensive collection of sound works, and accepted the post of artist in residence at London’s ICA in 1980. A parallel postpunk career as John Peel favourite The King of Luxembourg offered a second shot at pop-idol hood: this time around Fisher Turner was older, and free to play with camp, cabaret theatrics, while warping Monkees and Turtles hits into textured, sinister and overexcited plays on the anodyne transistor-hit originals.  Yet another chance meeting—while working as a driver for a management company in the early 80s led to one of Fisher Turner’s greatest creative partnerships, with filmmaker Derek Jarman, scoring Jarman’s films from 1981 until the director’s death in 1993, including Caravaggio, The Garden, and especially Blue. Fisher Turner has the actor’s ability to absorb the essence of his surroundings and build from there, a skill that has led to work composing soundtracks for over 40 films and television programmes, as well as for site-specific art installations around the globe.  

It’s this thing that makes his work more relevant now than ever. He’s equal parts curator and creator, working with a sensibility that’s the opposite of the kind of Amazon.com algorithm that scans your last purchases and suggests what to buy next. He chooses projects and collaborations instinctually, playfully, and if there’s a logic to the process, it’s impossible to define. Fisher Turner likes to travel, and record. Some of these field recordings made their way into his new soundtrack for The Great White Silence, a BFI film restoration of the 1924 film of Scott’s doomed Antarctic mission, out now on DVD, with a live soundtracking at this year’s Branchage festival in Jersey in September 2011.