Discovering Michael Tanner: Sonic Cartographer of Invented Temporalities
The Long Emergence of an Audio Alchemist
In the interstices of contemporary music, where the virtual threatens to engulf all that is tangible, Michael Tanner emerges as a cartographer of sound, mapping territories that exist in the overlapping spaces between past and future, memory and imagination, serving as a poignant reminder of music's capacity to function as both a mirror and a window—reflecting our collective psyche while offering glimpses into alternate realities.
Tanner's musical genesis, occurring in relative obscurity and by his own admission as a "late bloomer," proved serendipitous. This delayed inception allowed him to approach composition as a tabula rasa, unburdened by the weight of conventional wisdom, resulting in a prolific output that spans multiple projects, collaborations and aliases (Plinth, The Cloisters, The A.Lords, Thalassing, United Bible Studies, Taskerlands and more)
As he notes, "I knew I wanted to make 'non-traditional music' but spent a good few years hunting for a vessel to get me there." This vessel, once discovered, proved to be a hybrid craft capable of navigating the currents of folk, ambient, and experimental music with equal dexterity. The catalyst for Tanner's artistic evolution came in 1998 when he "learned how to slow down and transform sounds I'd recorded with a laptop and sampler. That changed everything."
This technological epiphany coincided with a deepening fascination with the English countryside and its hidden histories.
Tanner's music, particularly under the Plinth moniker, began to function as a form of sonic psychogeography, mapping the emotional and historical contours of rural landscapes with its emphasis on place, memory, and the re-contextualization of historical artefacts, investigating the effects of geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.
Moreover, Tanner's use of archaic technologies and his blending of historical traditions and contemporary modalities function as a commentary on the compression of time and space in the technological age as it exists in a "planetary present," where distinctions between past, present, and future become blurred.
The collaborative nature of much of Tanner's work, and his emphasis on the praxis of creation and the artistic event itself as a locus of discovery (evidenced in the recording process of The A. Lords), constitute a rupture in established ways of doing and perceiving.
It's an emancipatory divorce from formalism constraints, a self-invented ontology achieved by a uniquely nuanced balancing of past, present and future on all levels of his music, from aesthetic predilections and genre styling to recording processes and a dedicated ear for the narrative charm of ephemeral sound happenings like the capricious affectations of eccentric instruments, the cinematic crackle of creaking doors and the natural world, eavesdropped footsteps or other field-recording marginalia.
Undeniably, there's a melancholy undercurrent flowing through all of Tanner's music, a sense of acute awareness about the transience of existence, a sentiment beautifully captured in the fleeting, ephemeral nature of many of his deliquescent compositions.
Let’s listen to a few of the releases from Michael Tanner’s enormous output, spanning the first quarter of the 21st century. All of his work deserves attention, is of unfailing quality and merits the most exalted place in the crepuscular half-light where ambient, musique concrete, contemporary classical and alternative folk music meet surreptitiously, beyond the policing gaze of purists and other undesirable authorities.
Music For Smalls Lighthouse: Sonic Archaeology of Maritime Memory
Released in 2010, "Music For Smalls Lighthouse" stands as a paragon of Tanner's conceptual depth and his ability to transmute historical narrative into sonic experience.
This work, much more than just an ambient record, is a multi-layered exploration of maritime history, memory, and the ebb and flow between the familiarity of land and the wanderlust of sea.
The album draws inspiration from the tragic history of Smalls Lighthouse, located off the coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales. In 1801, two lighthouse keepers were trapped on the lighthouse for months due to storms, one dying during their seclusion. This macabre tale serves as the conceptual foundation for Tanner's compositions, which seek to evoke the psychological state of isolation, the relentless assault of the elements, and the gradual erosion of sanity in the face of mortality.
Tanner's approach to this material is characteristically holistic. The music incorporates the sounds of the sea, nails, and coffins, creating a sonic palette that is at once concrete and deeply symbolic. These elements are not mere background textures but integral components of the composition, each sound carefully chosen for its narrative and emotional resonance.
Musically, the record represents a refinement of Tanner's compositional techniques. The pieces unfold with glacial patience, mirroring the slow passage of time experienced by the isolated lighthouse keepers. Tanner employs a minimalist approach, using repetition and subtle variation to create a sense of time dilated and stretched to its breaking point.
The result is a masterclass in tension and release. Concrete sounds give way to more abstract textures, suggesting the psychological deterioration of the keepers and managing to be simultaneously soothing and unsettling, much like the deceptive calm before a storm.
The album concludes with "Sirens," a piece that eschews the more experimental elements of the earlier tracks in favour of a simple, haunting incantation sung by a ghostly female vocal. The effect is profoundly moving, a reminder of the human cost behind the historical narrative.
"Music For Smalls Lighthouse" represents Tanner at his most conceptually rigorous and emotionally resonant. By focusing on a specific historical incident, he creates a work that speaks to universal themes of isolation, mortality, and the human relationship with the natural world. The album stands as a testament to Tanner's ability to create music that functions not just as sound, but as a form of sonic archaeology, unearthing forgotten histories and giving voice to the silenced past.
The A. Lords: Pastoral Nostalgia and the Critique of Nature
The collaborative venture of Michael Tanner and Nicholas Palmer, known as The A. Lords, emerges as a sophisticated exploration of the liminal space between folk traditions and avant-garde sonic manipulation.
Their eponymous release, unveiled in 2011 via the Rif Mountain imprint, stands as a testament to Tanner's evolution as a composer and his capacity to engender music that engages in a symbiotic discourse with its milieu.
Tanner, already renowned for his protracted, melancholic compositions as Plinth, and Palmer, celebrated for his concise, intricate instrumental pieces as Directorsound, converge in The A. Lords to forge an enigmatic middle ground—a sonic landscape that gazes upon us "with an expression of woe."
The album's gestation spanned nearly a decade, with certain compositions dating back almost eight years prior to its release. Each piece is characterized as "a measured and deliberate homage to the oft-maligned (justifiably so) fields of Dorset." This description encapsulates Tanner's holistic sonic philosophy, wherein the ambient environment is as integral to the final composition as the notes themselves.
The recording locales—gardens, ecclesiastical structures, a wooden aestival domicile, and a dilapidated barn during the Harvest Festival—speak to the album's profound connection to the English pastoral tradition. Microphones strategically placed in arboreal and subfloor locations invite the environment to actively participate in the creative process. The resulting compositions transcend mere representations of place, becoming embodiments of their points of origin—audible accumulations imbued with the essence of their natal surroundings.
The album's auditory landscape is characterized by a delicate equilibrium between structure and serendipity. Acoustic instruments—guitar, piano, and glockenspiel—meander through the ten tracks, accompanied by both human and avian vocalizations. Incidental sounds of precipitation and creaking barn doors permeate the recordings, yielding a rich tapestry of sound that rewards attentive audition.
These inquiries situate The A. Lords within a broader philosophical discourse on the nature of nature itself. The album's pastoral soundscapes can be interpreted as a construction, akin to the English countryside immortalized by Constable for the drawing rooms of the newly urbanized industrial class. It presents a "retrospective utopia," a nature imagined and imposed in hindsight, sanitized of the chaos and destruction inherent in the interaction of humanity with the natural world.
Yet, it is precisely this constructed nature that imbues The A. Lords with its potency. The album offers listeners a temporary respite from the harsh realities of environmental degradation, inviting them into a sonic realm where harmony between humans and nature still prevails. As the gentle lullaby of "Pyewacket's Nest" draws the album to a close with the delicate tones of a music box, listeners find themselves drifting into a manufactured hallucination of what could be, or perhaps what once was.
In this context, The A. Lords serves not merely as a musical work, but as a critique of our relationship with nature. It illuminates the chasm between our idealized vision of the natural world and the reality of our impact upon it. The album's beauty becomes a form of gentle provocation, compelling listeners to question their own perceptions and interactions with the environment.
The A. Lords album thus emerges as a crucial link in understanding Tanner's artistic evolution, bridging the gap between his earlier, more naive explorations and his later, more refined works. In doing so, it offers listeners a unique insight into Tanner's developing musical language—a language that increasingly seeks to dissolve the boundaries between artist, instrument, and environment, while simultaneously interrogating the very nature of these relationships.
“Wintersongs” - A Seminal Text in Tanner's Lexicon
The Plinth project's "Wintersongs," originally released in 1999 and again in 2014, serves as a seminal text in Tanner's expanding musical lexicon.
Inspired by Lucy Boston's classic "Children of Green Knowe," the album demonstrates Tanner's early facility for blending conventional instrumentation with found sounds and field recordings.
The result is a work that exists outside of linear time, simultaneously evoking nostalgia for a past that never was and anticipation for a future yet to be realized.
Tanner reflects on the creation of "Wintersongs" with a mixture of fondness and self-deprecation: "We had only a very rudimentary knowledge of instruments, the evidence of which can be heard on the first skeletal recordings. This inexperience forced us on a different path to add meat to the bones...the instruments were downed and we focused more on sound manipulation, particularly those that were metallic or sonorous...before long the callouses on our fingers had eased and we were at home among flashing lights."
The album's opening track, "For C.S," encapsulates the nascent Plinth sound: birdsong gives way to multi-dimensional glockenspiel, followed by an otherworldly chorus of "hallelujahs" comprised of androgynous voices and equipment rumble. It's a primitive sound compared to Tanner's later work, but one that brims with potential and charm.
"Bracken," perhaps the album's standout track, showcases Tanner's emerging gift for melody. Tinkling piano and dripping guitar sounds provide a backdrop for a haunting trumpet melody, creating an auditory experience that is at once familiar and alien. "Hearth" further demonstrates Tanner's evolving compositional skills, with its interplay of guitar and piano counterpoints over a substrate of barely heard bells and swelling drones.
As Tanner's artistic vision matured, so too did his approach to composition and collaboration. Projects like The Cloisters and Thalassing saw him working with an expanding roster of musicians, each bringing their unique timbre to this contemporary enunciation of a chamber orchestra.
The Cloisters - Collaborative Appreciation of Sonic Dusk
In the twilight of pastoral mystique, The Cloisters' eponymous debut, first released in 2013 and reworked in 2020, emerges as a testament to the collective unconscious of a landscape imbued with memory and myth.
Transcending the mere categorization of "album," the record instead presents itself as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of space, time, and memory by cultivating a distinctive vocabulary that eschews the homogeneity of the ambient/classical minimalist scene.
The Cloisters represents a deliberate attempt to break free from genre constraints while it unfolds in four movements, guiding the listener through a landscape pregnant with nostalgia and enigma.
Field recordings serve not as mere backdrop but as integral components of the composition, blurring the line between artifice and documentation. The cooing of wood pigeons and the distant echo of poachers' guns piercing the midnight rain, evoke the spirit of musique concrète while remaining firmly rooted in the English pastoral tradition.
Collaborators Áine O'Dwyer (harp), Daniel Merrill (viola), Aaron Martin (cello), and Hanna Tuulikki (church harmonium) lend their talents to achieve a solemn, reflective atmosphere, captured in England's smallest church at Lullington, Sussex, a practice that exemplifies Tanner's commitment to site-specific recording, transforming the idiosyncrasies of any given acoustic space into an active participant in the musical dialogue.
The album's inspirational fount lies in the intersection of personal history and literary influence. Tanner's childhood haunts—the idyllic Symonds Yat riverside village in Herefordshire and the Welsh borderlands—serve as both inspiration and recording locales. Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" series, with its pagan-infused narratives of mist-shrouded Welsh mountains, provides a literary counterpoint to the sonic landscape.
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Punctuating this ethereal journey is the presence of Mooch, Tanner's feline companion, whose voice bookends the album—a poignant detail given the cat's passing shortly after the album's completion. This element of loss adds a layer of memento mori to an already elegiac work
In its rejection of the formulaic and its embrace of the idiosyncratic, The Cloisters offers a critique of contemporary musical production. It stands as a bulwark against the tide of homogeneity, a reminder that artistic innovation lies not in technological prowess but in the ability to evoke the ineffable through sound.
An economic sonic palette is used to profound emotional effect, challenging the listener to reconsider the relationship between sound, recollection and landscape, a relationship in flux as our era blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the real are increasingly porous.
Collected Machine Music: Temporal Collage Recontextualizing the Past
In the realm of sonic archaeology, “Collected Machine Music," released in 2012 under Tanner's Plinth moniker, emerges as a haunting simulacrum of non-temporality itself.
This fragile accomplishment, assembled between 2005 and 2011, stands as a testament to the persistence of obsolescence in our digital age.
Tanner has crafted a gentle, lyrical work full of wonder that transcends mere nostalgia, instead offering a profound meditation on the nature of time and memory.
The album's genesis lies in the detritus of Victorian-era technology: parlour music machines, wax cylinders, a French carillon, and a seafront calliope.
These archaic sound sources are not merely sampled but reconstructed, their creaks, winds, pipes, chimes, and wood knocks forming the raw material of Tanner's evocative sound-collage, an approach that recalls the Situationist practice of détournement, whereby obsolete or common cultural artefacts are repurposed to create new, subversive meanings.
"14 Bathwick Hill," the album's centrepiece, exemplifies this temporal fusion. Fragments of familiar melodies—"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," "Away in a Manger"—filter through layers of static and disembodied speech, creating a sonic landscape that is simultaneously familiar and uncanny. The effect is less one of nostalgia than of hauntology, evoking spectres of the futures past.
Tanner's skill lies not merely in the manipulation of these forgotten technologies but in his ability to weave them into compositions that resonate on an emotional level. The album taps into a collective unconscious, evoking shared cultural memories while creating something entirely new. It is an enchanted work that collapses temporal boundaries, inviting listeners to inhabit a space where oblivion and reminiscence coexist in uneasy harmony.
Focused in its timbre and austere in its palette, the nostalgic aura of "Collected Machine Music" should not be dismissed as mere historicism. Its hybrid compositions, while rooted by their very origin in the past, are unmistakably contemporary. Tanner has created a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant, a reminder of the persistence of memory in an age of digital ephemera.
In its rejection of linear time and embrace of simultaneity, "Collected Machine Music" offers a critique of our relentless march towards the future. It stands as a bulwark against cultural amnesia, a reminder that the past is never truly past but continues to haunt our present. Tanner's work invites us to listen not just with our ears but with our memories, to inhabit a soundscape where time itself becomes fluid and malleable.
Thalassing: The Sea as Collaborator
In the nocturnal reverie of “Thalassing”, Michael Tanner and Kerrie Robinson sail across an imaginary seascape conjured between daydreaming and the infinite horizon.
This eponymous album, released in 2011, born from a single night's improvisation against projections of the sea, stands as a testament to the power of minimalist composition and environmental attunement, creating a musical topography that is at once expansive and intimate.
The album's whispering restraint challenges conventional notions of volume and presence, inviting listeners to lean in, to attune themselves to the subtlest variations in tone and texture.
The opening track, "The Fan Of The Lobsters Tail," belies its colourful title with a stark simplicity: three guitar notes that set the tone for the album's intimate hush. This economy of sound pervades the entire work, each track a carefully crafted exercise in musical understatement.
The immediacy of the recording process is palpable, particularly in "Emerald Palace," where the accidental chiming of Tanner's hand relocating across the guitar fretboard becomes an integral part of the composition.
The interplay between Tanner's clean, reverberant guitar and Robinson's hazy accordion creates a sonic palette that is both primary and nuanced. The occasional addition of sparse piano adds depth without disturbing the album's delicate equilibrium.
Tracks like "Portunes & Salacia" showcase the duo's ability to compose in the moment, their playful, out-of-tempo explorations serving as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of oceanic currents.
“Thalassing” is a love letter to the sea itself, a message in a bottle cast adrift on sonic waves. It exists in dialogue with the vast body of artistic work inspired by the ocean, yet carves out its own uniquely slow, inviting, and incubating space, offering a restorative experience that stands in stark contrast to the cacophony of our rapidly deteriorating world.
In its unedited genesis of ideas, “Thalassing” achieves a rare cohesion, a unification of musical talent inspired by the eternal movement of the ocean. The album invites us to immerse ourselves in its gentle dissonance, to let go of our expectations and float in its minimalist currents.
Ultimately, “Thalassing” serves as a powerful reminder of music's ability to transport us, to create spaces of contemplation and renewal. In an age of digital excess and environmental crisis, Tanner and Robinson offer us a moment of pause, a chance to reconnect with the elemental forces that shape our world and our consciousness.
Suite For Psaltery and Dulcimer: Refining the Folk Idiom
Released in 2016, 'Suite For Psaltery and Dulcimer', represents a continuation of his exploration of traditional instruments and forms. Inspired by '70s new-age cassettes and the beauty of the Sussex landscape, the album is a refined suite of surrealist folk instrumentals.
The compositions deconstruct the folk idiom, creating an exquisite collection of pieces that exist outside of any specific context, ripe for interpretation.
The beauty of 'Suite For Psaltery and Dulcimer' lies in its restraint. The seemingly gentlest of sounds do the greatest amount of work, creating a listening experience that develops and unfolds at a pace far removed from linear time, creating an atmosphere that is at once hypnotic and wistful.
Delicate strings intermingle with plucked instruments, half-formed melodies disappear in smoky curlicues of lackadaisical improvisation, somnambulist perambulations stroll through stochastic reveries: the accumulation of gentleness upon fragility weave an intentional spell which is cast upon any listener susceptible to the abstract charms of ineffable beauty.
Vespers / The Blackening: A Harmonious Duality
In the twilight of his musical career, Michael Tanner offers "Vespers" and "The Blackening" as a final diptych, a complementary pair of crepuscular meditations on isolation and communion.
Released in 2022 as a double set of tapes by Objects Forever, these gorgeously delicate and emotionally nuanced works represent the culmination of Tanner's protean output
"Vespers," born from the existential ennui of lockdown, emerges as an unexpected improvisational gift. Recorded in 2020 atop a family vault in a local graveyard, the album captures a gentle, esoteric frequency that is nothing less than transportive and spellbinding.
Tanner's autoharp, harmonium, hurdy-gurdy, church organ, zither, and gongs interweave with the natural soundscape—birdsong and snapping twigs provide an organic counterpoint to the ethereal instrumentation.
The use of ping-pong delay serves as a poignant metaphor for the isolation of lockdown, simulating the call-and-response of collaborative performance at a distance. This technical choice transforms solitude into a form of spectral duet, with Tanner's sounds echoing back, demanding a spontaneous reaction.
Tanner's decision to withhold "Vespers" for a year, avoiding the deluge of lockdown albums, speaks to his artistic integrity. This patience allows the work to breathe, to exist beyond the immediate context of its creation.
"The Blackening," a collaborative piece featuring Alison Cotton and Lino Capra Vaccina, stands in contrast to the solitary nature of "Vespers." Recorded between 2014 and 2016 in the UK and Italy, it represents a different form of musical communion, one stretched across time and space.
In these final works, Tanner invites us on an inward-voyaging cosmic folk trip, a hermetic meditation that transcends its circumstantial origins, serving as a bridge between the mundane and the sublime, the earthly and the ethereal, offering listeners a space for contemplation in an age of perpetual noise.
As a coda to Tanner's diverse musical journey, his last two records stand as a testament to the power of place, time, and collaboration in shaping sonic landscapes. They remind us that even in isolation, we are never truly alone—that music, at its core, is always a form of communion, whether with others, nature, or the self.
His sonic cartography maps territories that exist not just in physical space, but in the collective unconscious of a culture grappling with rapid deterritorialization.
In doing so, Tanner doesn't merely create music; he constructs alternate realities, inviting listeners to inhabit spaces where disbelief is suspended and sound is experienced as an otherworldly phenomenon worthy of childlike wonder.
His organic but not naturalistic sound and his polyglottal influences testify to the enduring power of experimental folk music in the digital age. By blending traditional instrumentation with cutting-edge technology, and field recordings with archaic sound sources, Tanner creates a musical language that is uniquely suited to exploring the complexities of contemporary existence.
Tanner's journey of sonic exploration, at least for the listener, is far from over. Each project, whether under his own name or one of his many aliases, represents another step towards a convincing version of authenticity in a world increasingly dominated by the virtual and the ephemeral, reminding us of the profound importance of local circumstances, the tangible vestiges of memory, and the tangible, tactile experience of sound.
It is a body of work that not only reflects our current moment but also points towards new possibilities for musical expression in the years to come.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, July 2024