Claude Speeed: Spectral Trance
It’s not often that you hear Lightning Bolt, Slint and Trans Am on a LuckyMe mixtape. But, then again, Claude Speeed isn’t your average member of the Scottish collective that counts Hudson Mohawke, Jacques Greene and Rustie among its members. Claude is one of the founding members of American Men, LuckyMe’s resident rockers. Solo, Claude makes the sort of expansive ambient music that will have you tuning in, turning on and dropping out. Currently at work on albums for both Planet Mu and LuckyMe, Angus Finlayson caught up with the 2011 Madrid Academy participant to find out more.
“A flatmate of mine back in Edinburgh, a video games designer, used to talk about this concept of having an avatar in the game world, a representative of yourself in virtual space. In order to suspend disbelief, the player needs the character to not be too fleshed out; to be a blank canvas in some way. Being nameless and silent does just that.” Claude Speeed is explaining the origins of his alias; an apocryphal story about players of the game Grand Theft Auto dubbing its nameless protagonist Claude Speed. “For me, music without lyrics shares that quality to some extent: it's up to the listener to decide what a song means, which necessarily involves putting themselves into it in some way.”
Judging by his music, Speeed has taken this blank canvas philosophy to heart. He is best known for a pair of high-profile remixes: one of fellow Planet Mu producer Kuedo’s “Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space,” the other reworking a cut from Martyn’s Brainfeeder-released LP, Ghost People. In both cases the originals are transformed into vast, aqueous synthscapes, charged with emotion but freed from specifics, giving the listener a chance to connect the dots.
In these remixes and numerous unreleased productions scattered across podcasts and his Soundcloud, Speeed’s expansive textures and drones call to mind the synthetic vistas of Oneohtrix Point Never, Blanck Mass’ grandiose ambient and the Blade Runner-indebted melodics of Kuedo. Compared to those artists, though, Speeed’s aesthetic is surprisingly free-roaming, drawing equally on live drums and programmed percussive patterns, orchestral arrangements and brazenly synthetic sounds. It also eschews the lo-fi haze affected by many of his peers; Speeed is skeptical of gear fetishism, and unconcerned with asserting the “authenticity” of his process. “The collector mentality, and manufactured connoisseurship, surrounding hardware drives me nuts on various levels,” he says. “I’m happy with ambiguity. I like that some people will hear a computer and some will hear some dusty old boxes.”
Speeed’s musical roots lie in the late ’90s. He cites instrumental post-rock band Don Caballero as a formative influence, alongside Boards of Canada’s proto-hypnagogic hip hop. The former is given vent in American Men, Speeed’s four-piece band alongside members of Dananananaykroyd and other Scottish bands, which predates the Claude Speeed project. Speeed has long been affiliated with the Glasgow-based LuckyMe collective, and the quartet’s 2010 debut EP saw release through the imprint, its pristine melodics and bold synthetic sound palette making for an unexpected but welcome pairing with the likes of Hudson Mohawke and Machinedrum.
Claude Speeed emerged, he says, from an urge to make “atmospheric, textural music without drums” – as well as from frustration at the slow work-rate of a four-piece band. That dissatisfaction is understandable when you consider Speeed’s solo output – some 70 tracks in the last few months alone, by his estimate. Speeed attributes his high productivity to his compositional approach, one where he tries to “forget about melody or chord progressions and instead think about processes.” The result, in its focus on the ways in which patterns and loops overlap and interact, echoes the quasi-algorithmic compositions of synth pioneers like Laurie Spiegel. Speeed also avoids becoming too bogged down in the act of creation. “It’s a lesson I'm learning over and over again, that working on songs too much just kills them. So I'm trying very hard not to be precious – just because you put a lot of work into something, doesn't mean it's any good.”
Speeed’s discography is set to expand rapidly this year. He is currently working on no less than two albums – one for LuckyMe, the other for Planet Mu. Speeed describes the LuckyMe LP as focussing on an “orchestral drone” sound; the string- and woodwind-led demos he sends through make explicit a debt to the classical minimalism of Steve Reich and John Adams. Elsewhere, Speeed intends, cautiously, to shift the project back towards more percussive territory. “There can be an overemphasis on danceable rhythm in electronic music, at the expense of texture or melody, when in fact the usual locus of experiencing this music is not at a club. That said, for whatever reason, ambient artists seem to embrace drums – especially kick drums – eventually, and given the city I live in I can say I'm not immune to that impulse.”
The city Speeed is referring to is Berlin, his adopted home after having left Edinburgh late last year. He doesn’t seem overly concerned with being dislocated from the fertile scene surrounding LuckyMe. “I feel that the concept of a localised scene isn't all that relevant any more, or not to me anyway. Via the internet I'm in contact with people from all over the place, so if there's a scene I guess that's it.” Still, it seems that in Berlin – and as a result of his time at the Red Bull Music Academy in 2011 – Speeed has found a community of like minds.
A recent mixtape for Truants featured music from fellow graduates Phoebe Kiddo and Biblo, both of whom live in the city, as do RBMA pals Doc Daneeka, Jools Hunter, Fabian Bruhn and Sara Sayed. “It's funny, I don't make music with any of those guys, but the simple fact they're around makes me feel somehow more comfortable, more at home. Everyone makes great music, so that sets the bar high for me, in an encouraging and inspiring way. RBMA made me see music, my own and others', differently in a lot of ways. One important thing was to feel like, the music that I naturally want to produce, it's OK to make that. That there is a place for me in the musical landscape somehow. I mean, I hope that's true.”
