Future Exotica: An Interview With Roberto Auser
On a constant explorative mission, from figurative soundscapes to practical studio methods, Rotterdam’s Roberto Auser releases his latest installment of sci-fi exotica for the launch of his Ausland label. We asked the 2006 Academy alumni to guide us through the uncharted territories of Ausland, and discovered a world within a world of musical amnesia, silk screens, and clave algorithms.
If you were going to leave your elderly amnesiac self a travel brochure to your inner world, what would it look like? Could you be sure you’d recognise it? Does that shadowy stranger who just walked into town look familiar? These are the kind of questions that Roberto Auser and his Ausland label pose, and the answers are fuzzy at best.
Roberto’s latest EP Future Exotica might sound like a careful exercise in re-contextualism, but in fact it’s the result of trial-and-error experiments more than anything. There’s an element of surprise and accident to his approach in the studio.
“When I’m working on my own stuff, it’s usually an experiment with the machines, and it’s an ongoing creative process… It’s a bit like alchemy: you try to find a way to make gold which doesn’t work, but then you find something new. The outcome isn’t always coherent, which makes your archive a bit like a library record or something – you could have anything on it, from happy uptempo children’s songs to a very short downtempo bit, with some plane or train sounds in the middle. In the end, the whole archive ends up being quite diverse.”
The fascination of the unknown can have many different shapes. Our fantasies can be made into something real, can’t they?
Despite the diversity, Roberto’s long-running fascination with the exotic side of electronic music has been a constant in his productions. His 2010 album Secret Carnaval weaves bird calls and jungle noises with strange synth burbles and percussive drum tracks, and Future Exotica sees him exploring this sound even further. Batucada rhythms get wrung through drum machines and synthesizers, and waves of white noise wash against robotic tribal toms. “Island Wind” could easily soundtrack an after-dinner stroll with your ex-wife and her new husband, around the genetically-engineered tropical bird house on a derelict space station. There’s a tension between sunny exotica and dark brooding synths that speaks of the multi-layered relationship between clones, colonies and the seats of power, probing the geography of identity and questioning a dance that will surely replay across the stars in millennia to come.
“All that dark, ambient soundtrack stuff comes from an interest in strangers and strange things,” ponders Roberto. “The fascination of the unknown can have many different shapes. That’s also part of Ausland, the adventure and the exploration. Our fantasies can be made into something real, can’t they?”
The outsider inspires fear and fascination, whether in far-removed settings like the dusty railway outposts of Once Upon A Time In The West, the tropical rain forests of Predator or the scientific research bunker deep in the Antarctic in The Thing. But it’s not just on the horizons of distant lands that we encounter the unfamiliar. We should remain just as vigilant in the armchairs of our minds, as explored in psyche-fi stories like Philip K Dick’s Beyond Lies The Wub, or JG Ballard’s The Illuminated Man:
“By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…”
Roberto’s records are a medium to explore the inner world. Not just sonically – they also act as a kind of exhibition space for Roberto’s design instincts. The first 50 copies come with a handmade screen-printed poster splashed with a pointillist bamboo background and tiki-fied fonts, and the DIY design-side of the sleeve reflects Roberto’s studio approach. Like some kind of garbled fax or glitchy hologram, Future Exotica is a signpost that asks, “Which way now?”
“The whole thing about Ausland,” admits Roberto, “is that it’s the country where the music comes from, or at least where my music alias comes from. By making this music, I’m discovering this country as we go. So, in the end, it’s a more diverse landscape, more figurative. Whereas in the beginning, it’s more abstract, perhaps more emotional.”
Roberto’s other projects, in various stages of development, give us more glimpses of the man behind the music. His randomised algorithm project, where he feeds Latin and freestyle percussion chops into a sampler, which then spits out an endlessly mutating free clave, all started as Roberto trying out some ideas for performing live – and ended up as some chaotic art installation. Another project is his Spookhuis soundtrack, which explores music for that creepy haunted house on the end of the street. “Also, I’d really like to work on an audio book, translating stories into some kind of audio concept. I’m currently looking out for any writers, poets or filmmakers to bounce ideas off. I think it would be a great collaborative process.”
For Roberto, the end product is also part of the process: the memory itself isn’t as important as the process of remembering. If records are memories made real, then they might free up the brain a few gigabytes of space, but learning to live without them would be the ultimate power move. Then maybe those shadowy strangers might even become friends.
Ausland 001 is distributed by Clone and is now available in your virtual record store. Auser’s collaboration with Ian Martin as Kaval can be found here.
