Lodestone by Stereo Minus One

Stereo Minus One, aka Machine Records founder Dan Haines Cohen, releases a new album, Lodestone, on 20 June 2022.

Dan's eighth album brings together recent tracks like 'Switched' and 'Empties the Floor' with previously unreleased new tracks. It also includes a special new Cape Canaveral remix of 'Alarums', a stand-out track from Dan's 2001 debut, The Sound Inside Sound.

Talking to Kevin Sorsby aka Cape Canaveral, Dan describes Lodestone as "partly pure escapism, the completely unconstrained joy of exploring arcane sound-worlds. Partly it's expressing a great deal of sadness and sense of loss, I guess dystopian science fiction themes. And it partly reflects a sort of senseless but insistent compulsion to create, to be fully in the present moment through an almost meditative attention to sound."

The full discussion between Kevin aka Cape Canaveral and Dan follows below.

MR: You historically seem to produce and release your work intermittently. Is this deliberate?

SMO: It is very much related to how much time I have had. In the early days I was studying and could spend days just doing music, and I managed to produce my first three albums in as many years. Since then I have always been working full-time and so finding time to do music has been a bigger challenge. Parenthood added to that. The other side of it is that it usually takes a long time for me to finish with a track, sometimes it can take several years!

MR: There is a consistent quality, sonically and ideas-wise, across your albums and singles, even over such a long period of time. Is there a Stereo Minus One ‘idea’ or ‘theme’? As in, some bands or artists occasionally write music but it doesn’t fit ‘them’, so they disregard it. And some artists just write to suit their style.

SMO: I try to work as spontaneously as possible, guided by my ears not by an idea of something specific that I have decided in advance. I don't know what kind of track I'm going to make. I try to find and follow the textures of sound, and follow randomness. So my main idea is not to have a pre-conceived idea. That is what the name is referring to - sound without a unifying idea. But it's not a blank page. The technology I use, the sound sources, and what I would call sort of sonic reference-points are there.

MR: We’ve talked before about reference points and something I’ve never picked up with your work generally is an obvious set of them. So would you say that you work more to your own reference points rather than nods to other artists?

SMO: When I think of reference points, I'm primarily thinking about places and spaces - my experiences in clubs, at gigs and festivals. I guess between 1991 and 2000 in particular, but also in 2000-2006 when I did a lot of playing live, DJing, and promoting, and since.

I think of a sort of chill-out side room, but the DJ is freaking you out... Next door you can hear the muffled but relentless beats on the dance-floor...

MR: That’s probably more valid, in the sense that it's things you’ve done, rather than the things you’ve heard.

SMO: Things I've heard are also important to me. But I do try to avoid repeating others or sounding like the things I like.

The first time I heard Polygon Window - Surfing on Sine Waves in 1991 or 92 it completely blew me away. I didn't know what I was hearing. I couldn't decipher the different tracks. It was totally alien.

Proper acid techno at the House of God in Birmingham in 1994, with Surgeon DJing, absolutely brutal. And you know I am still obsessed with early hardcore, jungle and early Bristol drum n bass - Krust, DJ Die, Roni Size. Also Dillinja in London.

MR: Your new album Lodestone, I find is very much SMO in contemplative mood though, even ambient.

SMO: Yes, the beats seem to have disappeared. A lot of those tracks had beats at some point but I took them out.

MR: It’s also very stripped down and defined, which gives the sounds room and space.

SMO: The connecting dots between those different reference points to me is a different idea of music, that has nothing much to do with melody or harmony or "songs". It's a collage of noise. It's like a function or a mechanism.

I have been known to throw a bit too much in, so I was definitely trying to simplify. I often hear music where I feel like each sound is wonderfully showcased and sort of shown off to its best advantage, and I think that is not something I have naturally done - often its been more multilayered and chaotic.

I have a sort of punk rock DIY ethos about it, as a non-musician. I hate prog! So I often reject musicality. The music I like least is where it feels self-indulgent, where there's technical talent but it is just saying nothing.

A lot of my earlier music was created in live takes. There are no DAW files with different tracks/ layers etc. Just the output. Often I would then add these files together to create a new sound. That was quite work-intensive as there was no way to fix "mistakes”. I did it that way through necessity, I had no equipment, my setup was really primitive and always breaking!

Now I have a better set-up, and while I have retained a lot of the same approach, a big shift in the last 5 years has been to find a way to hone things more, to straighten out crooked corners a bit - but without it becoming stale.

MR: Which is another question I was going to ask, ideas or process? For you predominantly, do ideas lead to processes to enact those ideas, or do you find ideas develop from processes you are trying? It sounds like the latter mostly.

SMO: I very much start with free improvisation, rather than an idea. In all things I do, I always find it impossible to commit to a method. The world is always in flux and so are we.

MR: Possibly why you consistently sound so unique. I’m assuming then, going forward, you don’t have a plan as such. Lodestone isn’t necessarily a shape of things to come?

SMO: It's a statement covering the last few years, with tracks covering about 5 years. It's been a pretty shocking time for everyone, with Brexit, Trump, and COVID to name a few. I didn't make Lodestone with any specific intent, or to try an express any particular idea I had in advance, but now it's been finished for a little while, what I hear when I listen to it is partly pure escapism, the completely unconstrained joy of exploring arcane sound-worlds. Partly it's expressing a great deal of sadness and sense of loss, I guess dystopian science fiction themes. And it partly reflects a sort of senseless but insistent compulsion to create, to be fully in the present moment through an almost meditative attention to sound.

I'm interested the paradoxical way artists disappear by drawing attention to themselves. I hate being in the spotlight, public performance, yet I have spent the last 20 years trying to draw attention to myself through my music. I think of these tracks as a sort of way of overwhelming myself, or making something that pushes a sense of self into the background. Back to that chill out room I mentioned... That state of confusion, of getting so absorbed in the music you don't really know what else is going on around you!

MR: And on that note, final question. Pizza or curry?

SMO: Definitely curry! But have you tried a Curry pizza?

Dan Haines Cohen has been releasing music as Stereo Minus One since 2001 when he founded Machine Records in Cardiff, Wales.

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