“I think you swim with the times, but you try to hold onto your own principles,” is how Malka Spigel describes the philosophy that’s guided her path through music and life over the past several decades — initially with Israeli-born, Belgian-based post-punk and experimental pop band Minimal Compact.

“You’re such a poet,” jokes her partner through the greater part of that time, Colin Newman, who made his name as the lead vocalist and songwriter of UK post-punk legends Wire.

A sense of back-and-forth, of each filling the gaps left by the other, of one stepping in and adjusting the flow of the conversation — of collaboration, essentially — is a natural part of the way they talk, and perhaps offers a window into the nature of their long-lasting collaboration as musicians too.

The pair met in Belgium in the 1980s and a combination of endless shared curiosity, a finely honed antenna for new sounds, and a porous, open sensibility to both absorb and eagerly share other people’s work has seen them leave their in fluence on (and be influenced by) by a fascinating and fluid alternative history of popular music.

Working together as co-owners of the Swim~ label, in the band Githead, as the electronic duo Immersion and most recently with a series of collaborators in the Nanocluster live and recording project, Spigel and Newman are perhaps more active than they’ve ever been. Earlier this year, they released the third of their Nanocluster series in collaboration, Immersion merging with US ambient-country trio SUSS to create a hypnotic, techno-organic, shifting kosmische collage of desert and sea, concrete and sky. Meanwhile, Immersion’s new album, under the zeitgeist-grabbing title “WTF?”, is set for release in September.

The following interview is an edited version of a conversation with Spigel (MS) and Newman (CN) last summer in the period between the second and third Nanocluster releases.

__________

IM : What do you think was your starting point that got you on this train?

MS： I think just getting together with people and playing together without any knowledge and technical ability, but feeling already the power of what it’s like to be creative. But also the togetherness, for me is the power that always stays there. That’s why we always collaborate: there’s some kind of magic when you play with other people, not only on the music side but on the human side.

CN： I come from a very different world from Malka. I mean, within whatever you call this whole gamut of music that runs from hardcore to neoclassical or whatever, there seem to be two approaches among ensembles. One is somebody writes something and the ensemble plays it, or the ensemble stand in a room and figure it out together. I come from the first approach. Wire is famously rubbish at jamming! If you’d said, “Let’s stand in a room and figure out some music together,” that’s never happened. If you have a basic structure and some compositional elements that are going in there, then it can be very, very good. Whereas Malka is completely fearless: she will literally just start playing and you kind of find things that go around what she’s playing. We first met in 85, so that’s a long period of pretty much continual working together.

IM : You produced maybe the fifth Minimal Compact album, right?

CN： Yeah, “Raging Souls”.

IM : That looks like a very interesting period for music in Belgium in the early 80s, with the Crammed Discs label and Marc Hollander from Aksak Maboul and The Honeymoon Killers.

MS： Yeah, there was some kind of energy. There was Tuxedomoon and other kinds of music around the label, and I think Colin was pretty much charmed by the whole thing. He came from living in a squat in London into Brussels, and the nice food and people who are kind of softer than in the UK.

CN： Yeah, I loved it. It was a real scene. And that period around the mid-80s was a really fascinating time. It wasn’t just Crammed Discs, there was Crépuscule, and both labels had a lot of international artists who ended up living in Brussels because it was cheap and good for touring.

MS： And London was a pretty harsh place! I was a bit shocked when I started going to London! It felt pretty poor. I could see why you were charmed with Brussels. Apart from falling in love with… you know!

CN： It was love at first sight.

MS： It was a fun place, but when it died off, it just became boring Belgium.

CN： What happened was the scene in Belgium crossed the psychological border. Flanders and Wallonia are almost two separate countries, and the scene moved to Ghent because that’s where R&S Records were based, and that was the whole techno scene was. Suddenly there were all these international artists signed to R&S and they were leading the pack. I mean, they put out the first Aphex Twin albums. Until Warp came and stole their thunder, there was a strong scene in Ghent.

MS： That’s also when we started getting more interested in London again.

CN： That’s true, if you’re in Brussels and you’re thinking about moving to Ghent, you might as well be moving to Poland. You have the same banks and same shops, but you have a totally different language and an entirely different mentality. And London was just starting to expand.

MS： We always feel attracted to places where things kind of start.

CN： I moved to Brussels in 1986 and we finally left in ’92, and at that point, the electronic scene was just starting in London.

MS： And started a label, and started to get to know more electronic music artists.

CN： Before we left, Malka’s time with Minimal Compact had sort of fizzled out, and we lived around the corner from the singer, Samy Birnbach, and sort of worked on a project that didn’t go anywhere. Then Malka got the offer to do a solo album, but she didn’t want to go into the studio with a bunch of hired musicians. We wanted to make it ourselves in our own studio.

MS： And they just didn’t get the concept. It was the beginning of people owning their own studios, and now it’s so common.

CN： She said, “Well I’ve already started on it. I want to finish it. Let’s just do it.” We moved to London with the idea that we could convert our garage into a proper space for recording, then make that record and figure out if we could find someone to release it. We took the little money we had, soundproofed the garage, bought a new mixing board and set to work on finishing the record. Then totally failed to find a label for it, but I had a meeting with (Mute Records boss) Daniel Miller and he said, “You’ve done it all yourselves, so why don’t you just release it yourselves as well? This is what you do…” So I had like a two-hour instruction about how to run a label. And suddenly we were releasing an album.

MS： Typical answer! He asked a question and now we’re a million miles away!

IM : This is my ideal interview. The less work I have to do, the better!

CN： It took Malka a year to actually admit that we had a record company. She thought it was well pretentious! But we put out Malka’s first solo album, and we made some money out of it!

MS： It was easier in those days.

CN： And people bought more. And after that we put out a compilation of the material we’d worked on with Sami Birnbach from Minimal Compact, under the name Oracle. So we’d released two records and then Malka said, “We have to make a techno record!”

MS： I never said that!

CN： Yes you did! You were very much into the idea that we had to make something more instrumental. You always liked the word “mysterious”.

MS： I guess it’s more pure. I always felt attracted with techno to how it doesn’t have too much of a “front image”. The people making the music, we don’t know where they come from, it’s all about the purity of music.

CN： Yeah, summed up in the NME with the phrase “faceless techno bollocks”, which rather like all those other words, like “jungle”, which starts off as a put-down but you sort of embrace it: “faceless techno bollocks”, what a brilliant idea! With the first Immersion record, we just pretended to be from Germany and we had publicity photos with wigs and masks, we had made-up names. If you’re a record company, you just release records: they could be by anybody. That was the first Immersion album, “Oscillating”.

IM : You also put out a remix album at almost the same time, didn’t you?

MS： It was really easy at the time. There were lots of electronic musicians, people were open, you’d ask someone, “Yeah, I’ll do you a remix!”

CN： It was Robin (Rimbaud, a.k.a. Scanner) that started it. We were walking in Battersea Park and he said, “I’ll do you a remix!” Oh, alright! Then we thought that would be an excuse to put out twelve-inches. We did two volumes of remixes and by the second one, we were getting slightly bigger names in the techno world doing remixes for us, like Claude Young, and those records were selling! Fat Cat Records had a shop in Covent Garden, and basically you’d manufacture some extra white labels, give them to Fat Cat, and they would sell them to all the top DJs.

MS： So it kind of spread naturally. I like the way it was so organic. Now everything goes through the industry and it’s impossible to break out of that kind of trap.

CN： And we started to have a reputation within dance music that was nothing to do with our history, just as this label that puts out cool music. The next thing that happened was that Gez Varley from LFO got in contact with us and he said, “I’ve got these tracks and Warp don’t want to put it out because they want to be all ‘listening music’ and I want to to do dancefloor.” And I remember listening to his cassette while going to pick up our son Ben from school in the car, listening to the first track, “Quo Vadis”, and I just thought, “This is pop music!”

MS： He called himself G-Man. And we did really well with it. I mean, people still play “Quo Vadis”. I heard it in Japan, when Wire played a gig and there was someone playing earlier, I don’t think he connected you with the track, but he played “Quo Vadis” and I thought, “Wow! People are still playing it!”

CN： It’s just an absolutely classic bit of danceable minimal techno and DJs loved it. So by this point we had a fearsome reputation but didn’t want to stick in one style. And then drum’n’bass happened. We were biiiiig on drum’n’bass. Techno was sort of American, but drum’n’bass was just London music, and it was kind of exciting like the 70s punk thing: suddenly you have this unbelievable explosion of energy. There was a point in the mid-90s when, to be honest, drum’n’bass was the only music that you needed. We made a little bit of it ourselves, but then we started working with Ronnie & Clyde, who were sort of the more intellectual side of breakbeat or pushing into a different kind of area. We put out some other stuff that was kind of more downtempo, and then towards the end of the 90s, we started to get involved in the whole post-rock thing. We charted a course through the 90s, starting with ambient techno and ended up with post-rock. It was all about what was going on: if you’re a label, you’ve got to be contemporary.

IM : It reminds me of something you said earlier. You talked about this thread of music that runs from neoclassical through all these other things, and you didn’t have a name for it. But it’s something I often think about: that there’s a line you could draw through stuff like John Cage, through what Brian Eno was doing in the 1970s and what a lot of the most interesting bands of the punk era were doing. It’s like a parallel history outside that classic rock canon.

MS： Didn’t everything change because of streaming. It changed how far it can reach and how it works.

CN： I think the fundamental change is in where the power lies. For example, the rise of instrumental music in the 90s meant that artists didn’t have to be from America or the UK to be international artists, and that thing has really been completed now with streaming, where you have what they call “glocalism”, where artists can do really well in their territory and spread out. At the same time, the industry is absolutely petrified and they’re doing everything they can to hang on — I’m talking about the major labels and the large independents — to the way it was. There’s definitely been a devolution of power and that has to be accelerated.

IM : You said that collaboration is something that became important when you started working together, and it seems like that’s grown a lot over they years. It’s obviously a big part of what Nanocluster is.

MS： It’s a fascinating area, because after so many years of making music, you get pushed out of your comfort zone because you’re working with a person you might not even know very well. So to kind of find yourself somewhere else and to try to go towards what they do, it opens you up and gives you ways forward with more options. Every collaboration takes us somewhere else.

CN： Wire happened again through the 00s, we had a parallel project, Githead, which was also a band, and we moved to Brighton ten years ago. We made a decision when we got to Brighton that we would reactivate Immersion because the equipment was quite modest and we could just play gigs together. Immersion’s last album (“Low Impact”) had come out in 1999 and the next one came out in 2016. It’s a long time between records, but that offered us a space to just get on and do stuff, so we did an album, which we initially released as two 10-inches and then compiled onto a CD — like analogue creatures living on an island, which was actually the title (the EPs “Analogue Creatures” and “Living On An Island” which were compiled into the album “Analogue Creatures Living On An Island”). So we were already starting to feel the alienation of Brexit in that title.

IM : I was listening to that earlier today and that struck me. I saw “Living On An Island”, then the date 2016 and thought, “Oh yeah, I know that feeling!”

MS： There was a really strong feeling at the time of the Brexit vote that we’re on an island, kind of separate from everything.

CN： And we live next to the sea, too.

MS： Yeah, which gives you a kind of hope and optimism at the same time.

CN： We did a few gigs, maybe a couple of festivals, but there wasn’t a lot going on with it. But someone we knew in Brighton had told us, “If you’re in Brighton, you need to create your own scene.” It can be quite divided-up.

MS： There’s LOTS of musicians!

CN： Lots of musicians! So we thought, “Well what does that mean? How can we create a scene? Let’s create a night in a club, but how can we make that different to anybody else’s? Well let’s have a collaborative element in it.” We’d known Tarwater for absolutely years, right from the early days of the Berlin scene, and we thought, “We’ll find a venue, do Tarwater and Immersion collaborating together. They can stay with us for a couple of days, we can work out the pieces together.” And it worked.

MS： And we could record it in our studio while we were rehearsing, so we had a basic recording of it.

CN： We did it at The Rose Hill, which is a small community venue that holds about 110 people — easy to fill it up with the right thing.

IM : How does the collaboration come about? Is there improvisation, or more prior preparation?

MS： We approach the artist and say, “We’ll send you three very basic ideas, you send us three basic ideas: try and put something on it that you come up with.” And we kind of build it, but not too far. Then we get together and sort of complete it in a way. It’s different every time, but that’s the basic structure. It’s not improvisation at all, but it’s not so complete that there isn’t a kind of tension about “Is it going to work? Is it going to be good live?”

CN： The next person we thought of was Laetitia Sadier. There’s something called “Krautrock Karaoke”.

MS： It’s someone from Japan who’s been living in London for a long time, and he’s been organising nights where people from different bands get together and play a version of krautrock. It’s fun!

CN： We did one with Laetitia Sadier. She came with not only the competence of her guitar playing: she’d actually learned all the parts, which is more than we’d ever done! It was amazing. So we thought maybe if we ask her, she’ll do a Nanocluster set.

MS： And she came over, stayed here, worked on material, and yeah, it was good.

CN： We know a lot of people, some of them just because we’re fans. There was a point when Ulrich Schnauss was making some of the best music on the planet, and then Robin Rimbaud, Scanner, of course who was in Githead. We’ve known him for years.

MS： And since then, we’ve been collaborating further and further afield and come up with more weird ideas that maybe shouldn’t work on paper.

CN： And then suddenly the pandemic hit, it was May 2020, we had these four collaborations, absolutely nothing else to do, so we thought, “Let’s finish the record.” And that was a difficult decision because Malka and I had never worked on mixing an album before. It was a real eye-opener: it was at that point the best mixed record that had come out of our studio, in my opinion, and it was because we were doing everything as a collaboration.

MS： It was kind of influenced by the radio show as well. When we play a lot of songs from different genres, we hear sounds, how things are put together, and it does unconsciously influence how we work.

CN： Absolutely. So we put that out in 2021, to some critical acclaim but in the middle of a pandemic you can’t do anything about promoting it much. All the gigs had been done already, so a bit difficult to tour it. And anyway, if any musicians in 2021-2022 were thinking about touring, they were thinking about touring themselves.

IM : Given the pandemic situation, how were you able to work together with the artists on the album?

CN： Everything was recorded beforehand.

MS： So while we rehearse, we record, and that becomes the base to work on. Now we’re working on stuff that they send us, and I don’t think something physical, in a room, is going to happen for this next collaboration (2025’s “Nanocluster vol. 3” with SUSS). So it depends. There’s always a way to finish studio work, whether we send parts to each other or peeople are physically here.

IM : This is also part of the way the project has evolved, by the sound of it. When you started, it was musicians in Brighton or who could travel easily, but as you start looking further afield for artists to work with, maybe that changes the process.

CN： Absolutely. What happened was that we put the first one out and then we thought “How do we move that on to the next layer?” Because we’d spoken to a lot of people but none of them were in Brighton, and the post-pandemic period was one when people were very much looking at their own careers. Doing stuff with us could be seen as a luxury. So we thought, “How can we do this another way?” We know quite well one of the main organisers of South By Southwest, James Minor, and we thought, “OK, why don’t we do something there?”

MS： It was quite scary because we have to travel to Austin and somehow create music with someone already there, so how do you do it? Then we saw Thor Harris on the list: he’s local, he plays percussion and seemed like it might be easy to make something together.

CN： And he’s very much in the American minimalist world.

MS： And he’s a natural collaborator.

CN： Thor was really up for it, we exchanged some material so we had something to build on when we got there. We ended up rehearsing in his house — the house that he built himself because he’s not only a very competent musician: he’s also a very competent carpenter, plumber and odd-job man, who also has this amazing social conscience.

MS： He’s an amazing guy. It was a great experience to work in his house. Everybody knows him in Austin.

CN： It was a bit of a baptism of fire in terms of the actual performance. We ended up playing at Hotel Vegas. We had to set up a table with all our gear on, in semi-darkness with drunk people falling all over us.

MS： It’s the beauty of the collaboration: each experience is different and each experience takes you somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise be. That feeling is quite addictive because we love making music together but to be pulled into someone else’s world as well is special.

IM : That’s one of the things that I find interesting, hearing the Nanocluster albums as a listener: it’s the feeling of all the musical egos dissolving into each other. Even though there’s a lot of people involved and the collaborator is switching with each side of the record or each disc, quite a coherent atmosphere comes out of it. The opposite of how you described working with Wire where each person’s role is very clearly fixed and separated.

MS： We do hear from people that even though there’s different collaborators, there’s a fullness to the sound.

CN： I guess that’s also how we mix it in the end.

MS： But not only that: we bring something human-wise where we connect with the person. It’s always ended up being a friendship.

CN： I mean we try to create a space for the person but we set a context. That’s actually one of Bruce Gilbert from Wire’s big statements about life and art: “Context is all.” I always hate what I call “big boy production” where you hear a record and you know there’s been a “producer” involved because it’s got that ego about it. If you’re working on production, you should be taking away the barrier between the music and the person listening to it: you should make it easy for the person to hear what’s in the music. It’s not about making yourself sound good, or about making this other person sound good: it’s about the whole thing.

IM : Why did you choose the name Swim~ for the label?

MS： Why not? (Laughs) I mean we always look for good sounding names. I suppose we always float easily between the worlds of different people. I don’t know, though. That’s something that comes after the fact. What do you think when you hear the name?

IM : It reminds me of Brian Eno. Water is such a recurring theme in his music, and I felt he does something a little similar to what I hear in Immersion. You’re both musicians who are known as singers in your other bands, but here you’ve stripped away the vocals in a lot of it. So it’s like taking away the pop star or rock star ego and finding some more fluid space where other things could happen.

MS： We had a compilation called Water Communication, so water seems to be a theme that keeps coming back. And now we live by the sea.

CN： This kind of brings us back to Jack (Wolter, a.k.a. Cubzoa), the other collaboration on Nanocluster Volume 2. I think it was back in 2021, when people were starting to have gigs again, and we went to The Rose Hill and we were really impressed by Cubzoa.

MS： He ended up sending us songs, and we thought, “What are we going to do?” because songs are quite complete things. Normally we start from something more basic, but it was an interesting challenge and I think it turned out really well.

CN： And the other thing was we did something that we had so far not done with Nanocluster, which is bash out some material between us because we didn’t have enough material at first. It was a quite spectacular success. They were quite different to his songs.

MS： It helps that he’s such a nice guy to be with. The human side is so important.

IM : With the last one, there were four artists, with each getting one side of the 10-inch but with the second one it’s just two, with one artist per disc.

MS： It’s not something we decided in advance, but it became obvious as we worked that there’s enough material. In the future it might be just one collaboration (Note: this ended up being the case with “Nanocluster vol.3” with SUSS).

CN： There’s no rule. Though we like the double ten-inch. The idea for it came about through two entirely practical reasons. One was that when we manufactured the first album, pressing 12-inch vinyl was taking absolutely months when you could do 10-inches much quicker. And then also on the first album there were four really different projects. So we thought, “If each one gets their own side, it’ll make a natural division between them.”

MS： And it’s more interesting for the artists, too.

CN： Yeah, if they’ve got their own separate things. And of course with the digital release, they are separate EPs as well. With streaming, the trend seems to be towards shorter releases. You’ll notice that someone releases an album with like twenty tracks, but only one or two will get attention and the rest will be ignored because there’s a bit of a short attention span in streaming. So we thought separate EPs and then perhaps different people will tend more towards one or towards another one. But it’s just about the medium, really.

IM : And I guess with the second one, each artist having more space to play with takes it to a different place than with a smaller, EP-length canvas.

MS： Yeah, there’s more expression for each artist to contribute.

IM : One thing that seems to run through your work now is a respect for independent ownership. I think even with Wire now the band owns most of its catalogue, is that right?

CN： We don’t own the 80s stuff and we don’t own the publishing on the 70s or 80s stuff, but we own the masters on the 70s stuff and we own everything since 2000. Some of the artists that we’ve released on Swim have taken back their own rights and others don’t seem to be bothered so much, but we’re happy to give back the rights. We don’t need to be hanging onto other people’s music.

MS： With you, it’s really important to have ownership because you became much more aware about how big labels can really…

CN： It’s made a massive difference to us personally. Of course I talk from a very priveliged position because it just so happens that Wire’s 70s material caught generation after generation. It’s not a static thing where the only people who listen to Wire’s music from the 70s are contemporaries of when it came out. It seems to go down the generations and catch younger audiences as well, so it’s a dynamic thing. And that audience, from what I can see in the streaming figures, is growing, not diminishing. So owning the master rights and getting the majority of the money into the band gives you a living. I mean people of the age of the original members, if they’d gone into the civil service, could easily be making much more money, but a lot of musicians in their sixties, seventies and eighties are struggling. Having to go on tour in poor conditions because if they don’t go on tour, they can’t pay their rent.

MS： There is an avantage and a disadvantage in that we own everything that we make together. We don’t have the power of an external label that can maybe push it more.

CN： It does cost money. You have to spend money on promotion, you have to spend money on manufacturing and all the rest of it. But, for example one of the collaborations that we’ve already started is with a band who are based in Brighton called Holiday Ghosts — with Sam and Kat. We’re two couples and we get on really well. He’s in his early thirties, and they know how to book a tour: they don’t have any problem with that kind of stuff. Musicians of my generation would not have even the first idea how to book a tour.

MS： I mean it’s so hard for bands nowadays, they have to be.

CN： They have to be! And since the pandemic, the industry has squeezed the musicians.

IM : It feels similar in Japan, where there’s a before and after where something accelerated massively over those years. Young musicians seem like such good businesspeople, and I sort of admire them but I kind of feel sorry for them that this has had to happen to them.

MS： Yeah, the freedom of just being a musician is amazing.

文：イアン・Ｆ・マーティン written by Ian F. Martin（2025年8月12日）

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