Unlimited sustain: Hilary Robinson & Jo Johnson on Antenna Echoes
“Maze Echoes” sets the course for a string of songs with distinctively spooky moods in episode 7 of _____ mood. The drone and ghostly twirling piano of “Maze Echoes” was created by Hilary Robinson and Jo Johnson and opens their three-song EP Antenna Echoes.
Combining classical piano with electronica, Hilary and Jo have created a serene and invitingly haunting EP with Antenna Echoes. Curious about the backstory of their collaboration, and enthralled with the calming spookiness of their songs, I enquired about their work together, thoughts on the challenges faced by women in music right now and reflections on the evolution of music discovery.
You’ve described the physical location/surrounds of these recordings - Crystal Palace Park in South London… for someone who has never been to the park, should the music communicate something unique about that locale to the listener? I’ve never been to the park - the EP sounds to me like a serene but slightly spooky place.
Purely musical ideas were our starting point and I wouldn’t say that trying to characterise the park in sound in a literal sense was our aim (though that could be a nice project in itself). Our approach was more impressionistic and the idea of the park became a way to frame the music we were making. There is more description of Crystal Palace Park in the accompanying text for the Antenna Echoes EP on Bandcamp if anyone wants specifics. But “serene and slightly spooky” describes so well what makes the park unique that maybe the music does communicate something of its essence.
Are your original improvisations recorded at the studio still available or were they used for other things too?
We still have the files of the improvised piano tracks and used only a little of what I recorded. The rest of the tracks are so imbued with associations with the EP that it wouldn't feel right to use them for anything else. They were recorded at Antenna Studios, Crystal Palace (not the park but the London district named after it) and I have a clear memory of that day. The early autumn light streaming through the big industrial windows was just beautiful, with sounds from the market below drifting upstairs to the studio. This atmosphere made me less annoyed that the piano had a fault! A broken damper mechanism made it sound like the sustain pedal was permanently “on” – think too much reverb that you can’t turn off. I treated it as a challenge and the improvisations stemmed from creative choices in the moment about what to play on a piano with unlimited sustain. The resulting music was spacious and made of riff-like repeating melodies over slow-moving harmonies. Anyone who knows Jo’s solo work will recognise why the improvisations appealed to her.
To round off this story, Jo and I played at Antenna Studios together last year at a Ukraine benefit concert organised by Glen Johnson (of Second Language Music – no relation to Jo). We did mostly new material except for “Fresh Air and the Usual Low-grade Hedonism” from the EP, the most straightforward of the tracks to play live. The pedal had been fixed, but the piano still had its magic. It was an emotional moment.
Hilary, when did you start to play piano?
I was seven and apparently I asked for one – I don’t remember this, or what inspired it. My parents weren’t musicians and there were no other pianists in the family. I had a classical music training and eventually focused on classical composing, so my piano skills aren’t those of a concert virtuoso. Nevertheless, the piano is “my instrument” – my body and brain are wired for interacting with it. Improvising and inventing my own music were always part of my relationship with it.
It sounds like your collaboration process was reversed for "Maze Echoes" vs the other two tracks - did either method feel or work better for you and/or Jo? Was one more difficult than the other or did something stand out about one process over the other?
Really, we were just feeling our way into how to approach collaborating and trying different things in a spirit of curiosity about what we could do together and how to make it work. Both processes start like a conversation as one person speaks, the other responds and a discussion develops. For both of us, collaborating gives access to a bigger palette of ideas and their potential transformations. For instance, for “Maze Echoes”, I created music in response to a drone Jo sent me, then she transformed and elevated my ideas into something I would not have come up with on my own. Let's say that when it comes to performing live, tracks made with different approaches to generating musical ideas pose different challenges. But Jo and I continue to develop what we do separately, especially live, and stay in frequent dialogue about how we could bring the new techniques and technology we are working with as individuals together into our collaboration. It still feels like early days!
Are you working on other recordings now?
We developed some new, as-yet-unrecorded material for the gigs we played last year. In 2023 so far, Jo has been busy with solo work, writing new material and playing fabulous live sets all over in places as far afield as New York. I’ve been playing with other musicians including David Rothon, pedal steel player extraordinaire, in his live band (you can hear us on a live EP on David’s Bandcamp from a sold-out Clay Pipe Music label showcase last year).
But here’s an exclusive for you. Jo and I did make another track between the EP and Session One – our album for the 9128.live label – as an Antenna Echoes companion piece. At present, the files are missing in action. If they show up, we may let that track out into the world.
Do you think (or experience yourself) that women face difficult challenges in some areas of music? Could be anything from PR to partnerships, education or technology. I realise this is a big, vague question but the background is that I try to make sure that 50% of the artists on the mixes I make are women. In doing this, I realised how much stuff made by men I listen to by pure default. Does it matter? Should people support women in music more? How can people become more aware of women’s musical work?
We could have a very long conversation about this. First, thank you for what you’re doing in terms of representation – it’s part of the effort that takes us a step closer to not needing to have these conversations at all. There’s been improvement since my young adulthood. Both Jo and I started out in fields of music that were dominated by men to an extraordinary degree at the time: punk in Jo’s case and contemporary classical music in mine. Our duo work is at the intersection of electronic music and experimental concert music, where we’re still in a minority if not such a small one now. There are many more women at the forefront in all fields of music-making, holding open the door for the younger women following them simply by doing what they do and having a presence. The generations before us fought hard for themselves and by extension for us. Visibility is important. When women musicians are able to do what they have to do to build a body of distinctive work, the gender question stops being mentioned. Just one of my composition teachers was a woman, Kaija Saariaho – who very sadly left us too soon only weeks ago, at the peak of her powers as a composer. Kaija became one of the world’s foremost contemporary classical composers, full stop.
Perhaps the barriers (in the Western world) now are less of the “you can’t do that because you’re a girl” pressures to something more subtle. Female artistic endeavour works in opposition to the way that women are socialised to prioritise others above themselves. The act of creating anything in an artistic or musical sense is selfish, really. Women aren’t supposed to put themselves first. I recently caught a BBC Radio serialisation of Claire Dederer’s book, Monsters, on the moral complexities of appreciating art made by artists who are known to have behaved badly. You could guess a few of the male names that came up and why they're included in the book. But there is little parity between male and female "monstrousness". To paraphrase Dederer: the very act of insisting on putting creative work before other things (read that as obligations to others) makes the female artist monstrous in the eyes of many. The choices we make every day might be the battlefront now. We are back in Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own". And managing how those around us feel about it.
You are a music teacher, Hilary - correct? Assuming that you might work with young people, what strikes you about how they interact with music now vs when you were younger?
All my current teaching is with adult students, in group piano classes – a specialism of mine for a long time. Most of my students are over 25, so I can’t comment specifically on how young people relate to music (except for those in my family, which is a small sample). From a teaching perspective, the availability of every sort of music ever recorded on a device that people carry in their pockets is an astounding resource. As a music student, I spent weeks in the record library for a tiny fraction of the listening experience possible now anywhere with an internet connection.
I'm repeating what many others in their middle years have said here, but as young music fans, developing our tastes required human activity: borrowing from friends, making and swapping mixtapes, recording off the radio and (for me) travelling to bigger towns to go record-shopping were all important. The physical object meant something – music was a treasure to be discovered, uncovered, gathered – and whether streaming has an equivalent of that sense isn't something I can say. 4AD records bowled me over with their exquisite album covers and a feeling the whole package must contain something mysterious and magical (which it did, so often). I first discovered the label through a copy of The Spangle Maker EP owned by a friend's big brother. I had never heard, or seen, anything like it. Cocteau Twins became one of the most important bands of my youth. The teenage me would have been knocked out to think that some decades later, Simon Raymonde would pick Antenna Echoes as one of his top 10 releases of 2020. The grown-up me was pretty thrilled too.
I come from the 'borrowing from friends, making and swapping mixtapes and recording off the radio' times too, so this exchange was an absolute pleasure. Thank you Hilary and Jo for your time, well composed thoughts and the music.
Hearing directly from artists the stories behind their songs and creative process is really something I enjoy doing alongside the _____ mood. mixtape. I hope listeners and readers find something they like in it too.
Fingers crossed those missing files re-surface someday, Hilary and Jo!