When Colin Newman and Malka Spigel started their synthesizer duo Immersion back in the 1990s, part of electronica’s appeal was the chance to reinvent oneself. “We were very into the electronic music when it started; it felt like a fresh movement.,” says Spigel. “It freed us from our past, and we could start fresh ourselves, without people’s expectations of what we did before.”
“Yeah, there was an element in a lot of dance music at the time of it didn’t really matter where it came from,” adds Newman. “It didn’t matter who the people were, what gender they were, what color they were, or what language they spoke, because it was instrumental music. So I think for the first time in the history of what you might call popular music, you lost that kind of axis of basically Britain and America — and in Britain, Jamaica — really having the majority of the markets. Suddenly you could really come from anywhere. And that really opened up the whole scene. Although the roots of techno were in Detroit, and roots of house were in Chicago, they were not adopted at the same level in America as they were in Europe. So Berlin and other places, you know, became centers of techno, and that was kind of interesting.”
Newman, of course, had already sought out and created alternatives to the usual pop fare with Wire, whose debut, Pink Flag, with its stop-start breakdowns, semi-spoken/shouted vocals, and angular riffs created a stir in the music world of 1977. For the band at the time, though, punk was already a cliche: They were rejecting both classic rock posturing and punk posturing at the same time. They were, perhaps, the first example of “post punk.”
And yet, as Newman pointed out years ago on The Guestlist podcast with Sean Cannon, “There was no such thing as post-punk. We were just ‘not punk.’ But we were not punk in a way that was familiar with punk already.” Wire was thus premised on reinvention. “Punks hated us … Our songs were too short or they were too slow. We were too weird. We were too arty. We looked wrong.”
By the 1980s, with Wire and his own solo albums, Newman was still questing for new, unique sounds, and in 1985 he came to produce an album for the Israeli synth band Minimal Compact, which included Spigel. They became a couple and eventually married, as both explored the potential of synthesizers in their separate projects. Ultimately, they formed Immersion and released Oscillating in 1995.
And reinventing themselves was part of the appeal of electronica at the time. As Spigel says now, “We liked how mysterious the artists were. Even the famous ones were kind of hiding, not really showing who they were. And the music, of course, was inspiring.”
Embracing the sonic world of synthesizers has served them well, and since 2021 they’ve expanded Immersion’s sound to include collaboration with other artists, under the umbrella term of Nanocluster. The debut Nanocluster album saw Immersion collaborate with Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier, German post-rock duo Tarwater, and electronic musicians Ulrich Schnauss and Scanner. Released in June 2024, Nanocluster, Vol. 2 had guests Thor Harris — the charismatic percussion player from Swans and Cubzoa — and Jack Wolter from Penelope Isles. And this year has seen the release of Nanocluster, Vol. 3.
On the new album, the couple are collaborating with the American “ambient country” band SUSS, described by Uncut magazine as “Eno’s Apollo Atmospheres crash-landed in America’s Sonoran Desert,” and by Pitchfork as “Neither rawboned nor ramshackle … their elegantly composed brand of ambient country stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots.”
A trio of veteran musicians Pat Irwin (the B-52s, Raybeats, 8 Eyed Spy), Bob Holmes (numun, Rubber Rodeo), and Jonathan Gregg (the Combine, the Linemen), SUSS combine traditional instruments like pedal steel, National steel guitar, mandolin, harmonica, baritone guitar, and harmonium with synthesizers and loops to create their a spacious, cinematic sound.
This sense of adventure makes them perfect partners for the Nanocluster project. As SUSS’ Bob Holmes notes in a press release, “Collaboration is an important aspect of the type of music SUSS makes. Whether we are collaborating with each other, or with musicians and artists outside of the band, the exploration and discovery of the unknown is central to our creative process. When Colin & Malka approached us to collaborate with them on Nanocluster, it seemed like a perfect fit. Their use of rhythm, synthesizers, bass and atmospherics felt very complementary to our instrumentation. As expected, the results were unexpected and our music was taken to a place where we would not have gone otherwise.”
Unexpected results can be good or bad, as Spigel points out. “It’s risky. There’s always nervous moments where you think, ‘Is it gonna work? Do they get the concept? Do we find a common ground?’ But surprisingly, so far, we’ve found a really beautiful common ground with every artist we’ve worked with, and we end up being friends. So that’s good.”
A common thread runs through every Nanocluster project, in that every album is ultimately initiated and brought to a close by Immersion. As Newman notes, “The thing that all the collaborations have in common, certainly from the recording side, is that we always finish and mix it, just to give it some kind of sense of continuity, and we do that with absolute inclusion of everything that our collaborating artist has given us. And they can say anything they want about how it ought to be. I mean, SUSS’ way of mixing is very different to ours. We tend towards something which you can hear all the all the nuance on it. They tend to like mix a bit more like jazz.”
Spigel adds, “But they’re into space, which is one of the things that draw us to them.”
The modern miracle of file sharing has been critical to Nanocluster. “With SUSS, they would send us four or five tracks with sounds that we could play over, and we did the same for them, and we built what ended up being the album,” says Newman. “It was all done remotely — actually, before last week, we never met them. We met them for the first time in New York when we rehearsed.
“I think once they kind of realized and trusted us that we could actually finish this off and produce something that was really something that we could all be proud of, that was probably the hardest moment. Once we were past that moment, then we started going very much into their world, and then finding what we could do that was really out of SUSS’ aesthetic. One is vocals. ‘In the Far Away’ started off as almost a kind of neoclassical piece, with the cycling pianos and that kind of vibe. And then Malka was like, ‘I think I’ve got a vocal for this.’ And so we put the vocal on it, and sent it. And they were like, ‘We love it!’ Also, having drums, which are a thing that SUSS don’t have, but actually they were encouraging all of this to be harder, tougher.”
Finally, as Spigel points out, “I think we did what felt right, within the music. It’s about what’s right for the piece.”
The latest Nanocluster collaboration will appear at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts Tuesday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m., with each band performing their own set before joining together for a third set as Nanocluster.