Interview by Zhu Wenbo about Sean Colum’s album saeculorum

Would you like briefly introduce yourself? What’s your music background?

Like many others I started off playing in punk and indie bands, then got into electronic music production via minimal techno and house music, eventually becoming interested in experimental music. I am an autodidact and have had no formal musical training or education. Improvisation has always been central to my approach as first principle, though I don’t necessarily consider myself an improvising musician in the cultural sense.

Now you’re based in Tokyo. What have brought you here, and how long have you been in Japan? How has the city—and its music scene—shaped your own work?

I’ve been living in Japan for several years. I came with my partner who I met in the UK (she currently lives in Paris). The sonic profile of the area around my home in Tokyo has featured a lot in my recordings as a kind of non-musically bounded ambient backdrop, so that’s maybe one way in which the city has shaped my work, if at all. The Tokyo experimental music scene in its current configuration has had no impact on my music whatsoever. My music has been developed independently of any musical community. Despite being here for some time, as far as I can tell hardly anyone in Tokyo is even aware of my music, let alone interested in it.

How would you describe your music? I once saw you play guitar, and in the midway through the set, you played some recordings on your phone….

I would describe my music as being primarily concerned with the distortion or subversion of musical form, structure, timbre, pitch, and time-domain parameters in novel and surprising ways. These days I’m mostly doing this via the use of computer generated sound synthesis and off-the-shelf, non-specialised software tools (though I still occasionally make use of guitar and other instruments). I have no interest in systematised compositional processes and prefer to employ a purely experiential approach based mostly on intuition and real-time interaction with such tools. I also avoid the use of extramusical conceptualism in my work. As I remember, that particular performance was not very well received, haha. Live performance continues to interest me inasmuch as it affords the optimal conditions in which to do something unexpected. It’s a punk cliche maybe but I’d rather the audience in such situations respond with disgust or annoyance or bewilderment than like, hollow appreciation or whatever. To what extent is the risk of alienating the audience a necessary byproduct of creating a potentially novel experience? I don’t know. Basically experimental music has become too established and too normal and more musicians should be actively striving to make it weird and radical and irreverent.

Your music is hard to find online.However on the other day, I find a long list of self-released digital albums on Discogs that seems you’ve already removed from Bandcamp. What kind of music were they, and why did you remove them? Are you dissatisfy to them?

Those recordings all comprise various experimental music compositions and are aesthetically consistent with my current output, I just felt that they had served their purpose and since there is already enough landfill experimental music on the internet they became prime candidates for deletion.

Your newest album “saeculorum” is built from various recordings gathered over years. Are these sound materials overlap with the removed albums, or are they completely separate? (If there’s no overlap, could you talk about what the material on album actually is?)

Yes, there is some overlap. The earliest materials date from 2014, while some were recorded especially for this piece. Some of it originally functioned as standalone compositions, lots of it is discarded recordings, the ends of recordings, forgotten recordings, unnoticed recordings, hidden recordings, phantom recordings, zombie recordings, recordings that don’t exist, etc.

If I were to summarize the commonalities of the sound materials in this album, I would say they are all sounds that could be ignored or easily overlooked. However, their current arrangement brings a completely new tension. I don’t know if you agree. I’d like to know how you actually selected, organized, and mixed the sound materials? How did you approach the large number and variety of sound materials? Was there any chance or randomness in your approach?

Yes, I agree, that was in fact one of the initial prompts for this album: the desire to formally repurpose and recontextualize certain ‘archival’ materials. The compositional process was basically haphazard and intuitive with a hybrid top-down/bottom-up approach to the piece’s formal construction; high mesostructural discontinuity being the primary compositional determinant. While I somewhat agree that the sounds to varying extents ‘could be ignored or easily overlooked’, it should be noted that I’m not intending to highlight the quotidian nature of certain materials in an attempt to mark them as neutral; I generally find the obsession in contemporary experimental music with ‘everyday objects’ to be extremely hackneyed and boring. Also, any outside intrusions such as cars, bicycle brakes, construction work, etc are being picked up inside the room from an open window. Other outside environmental sounds were played back into the room via YouTube. There were no field recordings used; I have never used field recordings in my music. Each individual audio segment essentially represents the total sonic profile of my room at the time of recording.

I’m curious how you first came up with the idea to make this album? When was that? Does the final version of the album match your initial vision?

I came up with the idea to make this album in spring 2025. I’ve been working with mesostructural discontinuity and linear audio montage in some form or other since around 2011/12 and wanted to make a long piece to showcase my interest in these techniques while collating some of my other musical preoccupations of the past ten years or so. I’m currently working on a new piece of a similar length and with similar materials but with a much higher density of disjunction events which I hope will be ultimately more radical in its absolute rejection of long-form motivic development.

Do you think if there are any differences about curent experimental music scene between Japan (or Tokyo) and other places (such as the UK)? I believe that experimental music fans all over the world are very familiar with some classic Japanese names making super noise or super quiet music, but they may not know much about what is happening there.

I don’t know anything about the current experimental music scenes in the UK or elsewhere so can’t meaningfully comment on any differences. Sorry! 

Finally, would you like recommend some artists around you who still deserve wider attention?

They’re not as active now I don’t think but Takefumi Naoshima, Takahiro Hirama and the Encadre label are vastly underappreciated and deserve wider attention. Their output in the late-00s was to my mind the last time experimental music felt genuinely new, innovative, futuristic, disruptive, inscrutable (I know of at least one other composer who feels the same way) … I particularly recommend checking out Takahiro Hirama’s Thr Eat Rhy Thm, the two collaborative albums of Kanichiro Oda and Takefumi Naoshima, as well as the two Septet recordings from 2007, one of which is on Ftarri sub-label Meenna. Also, the best experimental music release of the 2020s so far comes from China and it is called Field n.n. by Xiang. It has a similar air of mystery, inscrutability and confusion that I find very intoxicating.

可以先自我介绍一下你自己吗？ 你的音乐背景是怎样的？

和许多人一样，我最开始在朋克和独立乐队中演奏，后来通过极简的techno和house音乐接触到电子音乐制作，最终对实验音乐产生了兴趣。我是自学的，没有接受过任何正规的音乐训练或教育。即兴一直是我主要的方式，尽管我并不认为自己是传统意义上的即兴乐手。

你现在生活在东京。你是由于怎样的机缘去了那里？你在日本生活了多久？你觉得东京以及这里的音乐场景对你自己的音乐带来了怎样的影响？

我在日本生活有些年头了。我和在英国认识的伴侣一起来的（她目前住在巴黎）。我在东京的家周围的声音特征经常出现在我的录音作品中，它就像一种不受音乐界限限制的环境背景，所以如果说东京对我的音乐有什么影响的话，这或许算是一种影响。东京目前的实验音乐场景对我的音乐没有任何影响。我的音乐发展完全独立于任何音乐社群。尽管我在这里生活了一段时间，但据我所知，在东京几乎没人知道我的音乐，更别提对它感兴趣了。

你会做怎样的音乐？我看过你弹吉他的演出，同时我也记得你在演出中间播放了手机里的录音…

我会这样描述我的音乐：主要关注以全新并出人意料的方式扭曲或颠覆音乐的形式、结构、音色、音高和时间领域的参数。最近我主要通过电脑生成的合成声音和现成的非专业软件来实现这一点（尽管我偶尔也会使用吉他和其他乐器）。我对系统化的作曲流程不感兴趣，更倾向于采用纯粹的体验式方式，主要基于直觉和与这些工具的实时互动。我也避免在我的作品中使用音乐之外的概念主义。我记得那场演出反响不太好，哈哈。现场演出仍然吸引着我，因为它提供了做一些意想不到的事的最佳条件。这或许有点朋克的俗套，但我宁愿在这种情况下观众的反应是厌恶、恼怒或困惑，而不是空洞的赞赏或其他什么的。创造一种潜在的新颖体验，必然会带来疏远观众的风险，这种风险在多大程度上是不可避免的？我不知道。基本上，实验音乐已经变得过于成熟和普通了，需要有更多的音乐人去努力让它变得怪异、激进、不敬。

我在网络上很难找到你的音乐。但前几天在discogs.com上发现其实有过很多你的自出版数字专辑，但现在它们又都被你从bandcamp 上下架了。它们是怎样的音乐？你为什么删除它们，是对它们不满意吗？

这些录音作品都包括各种实验音乐作曲，在美学上与我目前的作品一致，我只是觉得它们已经完成了自己的使命。因为在互联网上已经有太多的实验音乐垃圾，它们就成了首选的删除对象。

你的最新的这张专辑，你说它的包括了很多年的录音素材。我猜想这些素材和被你下架的专辑之间有一些重叠。是这样吗？（如果没有重叠的话，可以讲讲它们都是怎样的录音）

是的，两者之间存在一些重叠。最早的素材可以追溯到2014年，但也有一些声音是专门为这首作品录制的。有一些最初是独立的作品，但也有很多是被丢弃的录音、录音的结尾、被遗忘的录音、未被注意到的录音、隐藏的录音、幽灵般的录音、僵尸般的录音、根本不存在的录音等等。

在这张专辑里的声音素材，如果让我来总结它们的共性，我会觉得它们都是一些可以被忽视的，不被引起注意的声音。但是以现在的方式重组在一起，又带来了全新的张力。我不知道你是否认同。我想知道实际在选择组织与混音的过程里，你是怎样做的？面对大量又不同的声音素材，你是如何下手？在你的做法里是否也会有一些随机的成分？

是的，我同意，这确实是这张专辑的最初灵感之一：想要对某些“档案”素材进行形式上的重新利用和重新语境化。创作过程基本上是随意且凭直觉的，采用了自上而下和自下而上相结合的构建方法；高度的中观结构不连续性是主要的创作决定因素。虽然我某种程度上同意这些声音是“可以被忽视的，不被引起注意的”，但需要指出的是，我并没有去强调某些素材的日常性与中立性；我觉得当代实验音乐中对“日常物件”的痴迷极其老套乏味。此外，一些外部干扰，比如汽车、自行车刹车、建筑施工等，是通过打开的窗户在房间里拾取的；但另一些环境声音则通过YouTube在房间里回放的。没有使用任何田野录音；我从未在我的音乐中使用过田野录音。每个单独的音频片段基本上代表了我录音时房间的整体声音特征。

我很好奇你最初是怎样想到要做这样一张专辑的？那是什么时候的事？专辑最终的样貌和你最初的设想是否一致？

我是在2025年春天产生要做这张专辑的想法。从2011/12年前后开始，我一直在以各种形式探索中观结构断裂和线性音频蒙太奇，并希望创作一部长篇作品来阐释我对这些技巧的兴趣，同时也融合在过去十年左右的时间里我其他的一些音乐思考。目前，我正在创作一部长度相近、素材相似的新作品，但其中断裂事件的密度要高得多，我希望它最终能够在彻底地摒弃长篇动机发展这方面做得更加激进。

你觉得在当下，日本（或东京）与其它地方（比如英国）的实验音乐场景有什么不同？我相信全世界的实验乐迷都会对那些经典的噪音或者极简安静的日本名字如数家珍，但对那里正在发生的事情可能了解不多。

我对英国或其他地区的实验音乐场景一无所知，因此无法发表有意义的评论。抱歉！

最后，请给我们分享一些在你身边还没有被更多人知道的名字。

他们现在可能不那么活跃了，但直嶋岳史（Takefumi Naoshima）、平間貴大（Takahiro Hirama）和Encadre厂牌的作品被严重低估，值得更多关注。在我看来，他们在2000年代末期的作品是实验音乐最后一次真正给人以新颖、开拓、未来感、颠覆性和神秘感（我知道至少还有另一位作曲家也有同感）……我特别推荐平間貴大的《Thr Eat Rhy Thm》，小田宽一郎（Kanichiro Oda）和直嶋岳史的两张合作专辑，以及2007年Septet的两张录音，其中一张由Ftarri的子厂牌Meenna发行。此外，2020年代迄今为止最好的实验音乐作品来自中国，是响的《Field n.n.》。它同样散发着神秘、晦涩和迷离的气息，令我着迷。