Photo by Ben Newman
Musical and life partners since 1985, Colin Newman (Wire) and Malka Spigel (Minimal Compact) have collaborated extensively, including Newman’s solo albums, the establishment of their record label swim ~, the avant-rock band Githead (formed in 2004), and, since 1994, their sound and visual duo, Immersion. The concept of artist collaborations began in 2021 with the release of Nanocluster, Vol. 1, featuring Tarwater, Laetitia Sadier, Ulrich Schnauss, and Scanner. Nanocluster, Vol. 2, a 5-song EP with Cubzoa (Brighton-based musician and producer Jack Wolter), followed in 2024. As hosts of the Swimming in Sound radio show, Newman and Spigel are dedicated listeners of new music and discovered the ambient country sounds of SUSS a few years ago. This mutual appreciation led to their collaboration, resulting in the release of Nanocluster, Vol. 3 earlier this year.
Currently, Immersion and SUSS are touring the U.S., performing individual sets and concluding each evening with material from their collaborative project. Their first in-person meeting occurred just days before their SXSW debut of Nanocluster, Vol. 3. Prior to their transatlantic trip to meet SUSS in New York, Newman and Spigel connected via Zoom to talk about their latest project, discuss how writing for Immersion differs from writing for Wire, and promote new artists they’re playing on their radio show.
How does songwriting for Immersion compare to songwriting for Wire?
COLIN: Immersion is a collaboration between us. With Wire, I tend to write songs and then bring them to the band, and then they learn them. It’s a very different process. It’s not like I tell them exactly what to play; but I tell them this is the chord sequence, this is the tempo, this is how the tune goes with it. It is a basic scheme for the piece.
MALKA: With Immersion, we normally start with the music. The song gets inspired by the music we create. And then the song is born out of creating something together.
COLIN: When we started as Immersion, it was pretty much ambience with rhythm. By the end of the ’90s, it was completely ambient and abstract and instrumental.
MALKA: We came from backgrounds of being in bands, and we were fascinated by techno and drum and bass, all this music that didn’t rely on personalities and image. We were like, “Yeah, we like that.” And then we love the music, obviously. So we kind of got into it.
COLIN: Immersion, in a way, comes from DJ culture. That’s where our roots as a partnership lie, but also in our own interaction together. We’re a couple. We work together intensely. We’re partners on many different levels and it’s very organic.
MALKA: We love good songs. It’s something that we miss a bit when we do a lot of instrumentals. It’s great to bring songs into it as well.
COLIN: That’s something that’s come back into motion with Nanocluster. There’s more Immersion material coming later this year and that does include songs. In a way, we’re influenced by the people that we’ve collaborated with and taking the thing into their direction. It’s not all songs, some of it’s instrumental. I think everything is in this continuous state of evolving and that’s kind of how it should be.
I discovered SUSS a couple of years ago. I love Americana music and pedal steel and slide guitars. I also love shoegaze music. I was trying to find any artists who might mix Americana with shoegaze on Google and I came across SUSS. I thought, “This is what I’ve been looking for.” I had the chance to talk with them and I really enjoyed the conversation because they aren’t just some young kids. They’ve got decades of musical experience. How did you come across the band and their music and how did the collaboration happen?
MALKA: Both them and us are not young, been around, did a lot, but we have a fresh approach to what we do. When we first heard SUSS, we had a similar reaction to you. But we were not searching, we just heard it. And I thought, “Wow, that’s so cool.” I thought it was a younger band, somebody new that came up with this amazing sound. When we looked up and realized they were people been around for a while, but they have this beautiful, fresh, sounding music. Although it there’s a lot of obvious influences, it’s original, the combination of the the styles.
COLIN: The context is that we’ve been doing a radio show for the past five years, every week, two hours. Malka especially, is very, very good at finding new music. I think anyone who’s done a radio show would, I imagine, be good at finding music. If you say to someone who’s never done one, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I know loads of music.” Give them two weeks because you’re gonna need to start finding something new because your record collection will start to sound stale. We didn’t set out to play new music, but it became inevitable. So what we were about was discovering new music.
MALKA: And it feeds into our creative approach, because we hear a lot of new stuff and get excited. It’s inspiring for us.
COLIN: Malka found SUSS and we were like, “Wow! This is amazing.” It’s what they describe as ambient country. That’s what it says on the tin. It is exactly that.
So you discovered them when you played them on a radio show but when did you have the idea to work on something with them? Did you work on this stuff with them in mind, or did you already have stuff?
MALKA: It doesn’t work like that. When we work with other people, we have to create it together.
COLIN: We’ve been playing them for maybe 2 years on our show. We’ve had the show since 2020, and probably started playing them in 2021 or something like that. We post the show on social media every every week, we tag all the artists, and sometimes a lot of artists don’t notice. But then you suddenly people get in touch. “Awesome. You played my track,” and that sometimes results in a conversation. And the conversation that resulted was Bob Holmes also has a radio show that he describes a podcast, but it is really a radio show, called, as you might expect, Ambient Country. He asked us to be guests on it, having realized that we’re playing their material.
MALKA: He asked you to pick some music and play it on his show and we talk about it. We got on really well.
COLIN: At the end of the conversation, we were just chatting, the recording was finished. And we said, “We do this collaborative project, Nanocluster.” We’re always talking to different artists about it. There’s always somebody in the pipeline that we’re talking to. We weren’t sure if that conversation would go anywhere. And then they came back and said, “We’re interested in this. This sounds like fun.”
MALKA: It’s obviously a risk, because you have no idea if you’ll find a common language. The way we do it is we exchange a little bit of music. We send. They send it back and build on top of it. Music is a language, and to put it into words is hard. How do you communicate? How do you do it? But it seemed to work every time we’ve done it.
It was all exchanging files back and forth? You never got together?
COLIN: We’ve never met them. We’re probably gonna meet them for the first time on Thursday night.
MALKA: We saw them on Zoom. As you get to know people online, you feel like you know them. But it’s not the same.
COLIN: This will be another voyage of discovery. We are naturally both risk takers. It’s the idea of getting into some kind of working relationship with people that you’ve never met, to do something on another continent.
MALKA: Sometimes it’s a very young band or musician, sometimes it’s very experienced established artists like SUSS. It’s a challenge.
Like you said, It’s a risk, but it’s gotta be super exciting, too, when it when it works.
COLIN: I think it came out a lot better than what we thought it might at various stages (laughs). We just keep going with it. Every time, there is always a moment in the collaboration when the penny finally drops. The collaborating artists realizes that, actually, we’re going to mix and finish it because they can have as much input into it as they want, but in order to have an aesthetic, we kind of need to do that.
MALKA: We release it on our own label.
COLIN: The idea is that it’s not Immersion plus someone else doing a bit of tinkling in the back. These are deep collaborations. We go totally into the world of the people that we’re collaborating with.
MALKA: Some artists are happy to let us do whatever with it, and some artists will be much more like, “I want this different and that different.” We try to be as open as possible. It’s democratic.
COLIN: But try and bring an aesthetic to it which we think is going to make it fit with our sensibility. You could have taken that material in many different directions.
MALKA: We’re respectful of the other artists. And obviously we don’t want to do anything that they won’t be comfortable with. It’s great to go into someone else’s world.
Do you feel like you’re going into someone else’s world or do you feel like they are coming into your world? Or, is it a brand new world that the two of you are creating together?
MALKA: It’s a meeting in the middle.
COLIN: The process is that we go totally into their world and then we start to say, “We could do this, and we could do this,” and find out what is acceptable for us to do within their context. The two things that were probably out of SUSS’s world entirely are: there are vocals on two tracks. We weren’t really sure if they were going to take that. And they loved it. And then, one track has kind of a thumping drum track. Actually, they encouraged it to get thumpier. We were a bit like, “Let’s not make it too strong.” And they were like, “Oh, no, we want it.”
MALKA: They are three people. We are two people, but we are a couple so it’s constant communication between us. When you have to communicate with three people, sometimes you have to figure out what they think or do they think the same as each other?
Do you think there will be a point during your first show with them where you’ll get caught up in how well the collaboration is working and look at each other, smile, and think, “This is how we envisioned it was going to be”?
COLIN: We don’t plan stuff like that (laughs). Both Malka and I tend to be people who have got too many other things to worry about. I think maybe five shows in we might start to relax a little bit. The whole Nanocluster thing is three sets. There are three sets every night. There will be a set from Immersion. There will be a set from SUSS. There’ll be a Nanocluster set.
MALKA: The album is an unknown that we went into, and it’s very rewarding, it worked well. Now we have the next stage, the live thing which we’re going into. We’ll find out.
COLIN: We’re doing it very much the way we’ve done other Nanoclusters, which is pretty much how we do Immersion live. We know we have a certain amount of backstop. If you were to try to recreate this music, you would need a much bigger band. There’s only five people on stage so we’ve got to figure this out. It will be kind of interesting. We are coming from a very different place from them in terms of where where we are as a live entity, where they are. Even though they use a lot of that methodology of looping and stuff like that, they’re still very much in that Americana, pure playing kind of thing, whereas we are really much more like electronic musicians.
When I interviewed SUSS, I told them that I wasn’t trying to offend them but that when there are nights when I have trouble falling asleep, I can play their music and be out within minutes.
MALKA: Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I find music online that you go to sleep to, and it’s not a million miles away from SUSS, but SUSS has extra character. That music is beautiful and relaxing, but not on purpose. I mean, the pedal steel, the emotion in it.
COLIN: Jonathan (Gregg) is totally their secret weapon. He brings the the emotional content to it by playing the pedal steel. He’s like the lead singer of SUSS.
It’s funny because Pat Irwin told me that he toured in the B-52s. He’s got rock experience. He’s done that in the past.
COLIN: Oh, yeah. He still plays in rock bands as well. Pat has endless stuff going on. He’s scoring the soundtrack to Dexter as well. He tends not to talk about the B-52s thing. He’s in the video for “Love Shack.”
MALKA: I was like, “Is that Pat? That’s Pat,” because I recognized him.
COLIN: In the ’80s, that was one of the most played tracks on MTV.
In Columbus, you’re playing in a church. That seems ideal for what you’re doing. You don’t want to be playing in a rock club where everyone’s holding their drinks, arms crossed, and up front just staring at you. It feels like this show is going to be an experience. Are you trying to mostly play in non-traditional venues?
COLIN: It’s quite mixed, but we aimed for that. All of the other Nanoclusters that we’ve done, we’ve done the performance first and the record afterwards, which, in terms of marketing, is the absolute worst way to do it. By the time the record comes out, you’ve already done the performance, and the artist is already off on their own tour. So we did it this way because we wanted to do an actual tour. The idea of it is a proof of concept. If we can do a tour of America with a band. and we can make that work with an album coming out before the tour, we could literally do it with anyone, anywhere because that starts to become a thing in the world. The idea was, how are we gonna make this so that there’s no expectation of it being a rock gig. So, let’s look at the venues and try and choose places that are going to be more conducive to the idea that this is kind of an art experience. But they are quite mixed. We’re playing Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia. In the end, it’s where you can get booked. But that was the original idea.
Each of you will do your own set, and then you’ll do the collaboration thing. What does the setup look like for the two of you?
COLIN: Malka plays and MS10.
MALKA: Which is a a analog synth.
COLIN: I play keyboards and guitar. We sing and we use machines to run the show. We have visuals.
This kind of music lends itself to visuals. When people are watching, is the focus on the two of you, or is it on the visuals?
COLIN and MALKA: On the visuals.
COLIN: We don’t really tend to light us. We tend to just have the screen behind.
MALKA: Some people have patterns, and it can get boring. From us, it’s real footage. There’s a story somehow.
COLIN: It’s not synced. We didn’t get to that point yet. I think that’s the next stage of our evolution to actually sync the video. If you’ve ever seen any Immersion video or any Nanocluster video, you know what kind of thing is in those sequences. It’s not a million miles from that. We’re providing atmosphere with the visuals. There’s stuff going on in the videos for people to watch. We’re boring. Immersion is not a ‘look at me’ type of thing, anyway.
How do you come up with titles for songs that don’t have lyrics?
COLIN: It’s a good question. Malka is very good with titles. And sometimes the titles are obvious. We went through a loop with SUSS about the titles on Nanocluster, Vol. 3. They chose some of the titles, and we chose some of the titles. That was kind of the last thing that had to be decided.
MALKA: When you create music, you get a sense, or it’s some kind of sense that brings words.
It’s amazing how you can lead people on how to listen to something based on the title. Like, it all of the titles on Nanocluster, Vol. 3 were space related, as I listened to it, I’d think of it as a soundtrack to a sci-fi movie. But if all the titles were about the Wild West, I’d have a totally different picture in my head when listening to the music.
MALKA: It’s like making a video. You put music with video and it takes you in a mood. When we did an Immersion tour years ago, we drove in the summer and on open road and the atmosphere, when I hear SUSS, this is what I feel. So some of the titles came from that feeling of open space and longing.
COLIN: With Nanocluster being a series, every album is a different volume of Nanocluster. It’s not necessarily marketing, but it’s a way of indicating to people that this is one in a series. As soon as Nanocluster 3 came out on streaming services, you could see the numbers jumping on Nanocluster, Vol 1.
MALKA: We have our own label. We don’t have big marketing tools to reach to a lot of people. Every release sort of makes people more aware of everything we’ve done.
COLIN: We also found, interestingly, that artists that we have collaborated with, when they put out new albums, the numbers go up on the collaborations that we’ve done with them. It relates to the world of the radio show. It’s the same world. We plug into a community of like-minded artists who may do really, really different kind of music, but it’s all within a certain level within the industry and artists who are working in the contemporary sphere, not artists, who are going around playing their hits.
Are people who have been fans of Wire forever also getting into Immersion or are they two different audience bases?
MALKA: I think most Wire fans are not so open minded.
COLIN: I have no idea. I think there’s a percentage. We did a really interesting interview. maybe a month ago, with a podcast called Major Label Debut. The guy used to be in a band, he really, really gets the industry. I was talking about the situation with Wire. Because Wire now owns the master rights to its ’70s catalog, it is actually as a band earning more money than it’s ever earned. Nobody’s on swimming pool money here. But, in terms of income, it means that Wire does not have to go out and play Pink Flag which, in the end, what happens when a band goes out and plays their classic records, it kind of diminishes them every time. There’s a purity to that experience. Someone who’s in their 20s coming to that record fresh is going to hear a bunch of 20-year-olds. And then they see that in a concert and there’s a bunch of old men? There’s a disconnect there. Allow the music to speak to its own time and its own audience, because that is the audience that’s coming. Especially Pink Flag, it attracts quite a younger audience. Let that be. Why should we come along? It keeps the mystery of it. If those people are like, “What did they do after that? What are they doing now?” And they discover Immersion. “Oh, that’s really interesting. They’re still doing something contemporary.” Some people are going to be fascinated and love that idea. And some people are like, “Yeah, no, I like the old stuff.”
MALKA: Why should they compare it? It’s a different thing.
COLIN: Well, some people do. If you look at streaming services like Spotify, and there’s lots of bad things you can say about it, when it started, the idea that you had all of the music that had ever been released at your fingertips you could find and search was exciting to the kind of people who were crate diggers. When it got taken up by a major audience, to be like, “I’ve got this music. I don’t know what that is. I want the Rolling Stones.” And it’ll feed you that. This is this the reality that we live in. A part of my history lies within that classic, historic genre. But I don’t live there.
You’re getting ready to hop on a flight to fly to America. Because you’re always surrounded by music, from playing it to hosting a radio show, will you throw headphones on for the flight or is that your chance to unwind and disconnect?
MALKA: We listen to music and watch some movies. There’s so much stuff available now, you take it with you. We watch Netflix and all that, and we have a stick. You can take it to a hotel and continue to watch your favorite thing.
COLIN: Having a radio show really, really changes your perspective. Ten years ago, I kind of knew roughly what was going on with music, but not everything and not really in any detail, and you’ve still got your favorites.
MALKA: We have a huge library, and when we listen to, let’s say, a random mix of everything we bought in the last few years, it’s all fresh and new, and reminds us, “Oh, that track is awesome. We forgot completely. If you find new stuff all the time, you leave stuff behind, and some of it is too good to not play again.
Is there a particular band or artist right now that you’re just in love with that. that I might not know about.
MALKA: Ex-Easter Island Heads. FUTUREGIRL. Kessoncoda. But we also like fcukers, because it’s good dance music.
COLIN: We were pretty early on with fcukers. I don’t know how big they’re going to get, but they deserve to be big. John Glacier, we’ve been playing for quite a while. Our taste is pretty broad. So you have, like, Flawed Mangoes. He’s a young guy. He does stuff on guitar.
COLIN: The guy’s got millions of followers on Tiktok. Nobody over 25 has ever heard of him.
How do people access the radio show you do?
COLIN: The radio show is called Swimming in Sound. If you go to swimminginsound.com, you’ll find a link to everything. It’s actually a broadcast show, but you don’t live anywhere it’s broadcast. It live streams every week on the Internet, but we’re lucky enough to be part of an organization that has its own catch up. You can stream every single show we’ve ever made on TotallyRadio.com. It’s described by the _Face magazine as the coolest radio station in Brighton. I don’t know if you know what Brighton is, but Brighton is a pretty cool city.
We’ve done a bunch of special shows to cover us while we’re away on tour. We also have, every week, a guest who is the main grassroots promoter in Brighton. He always chooses something every week and we talk about the band that he’s putting on. We also talk a lot about the industry and about issues within the industry. Those discussions can be pretty free ranging. It’s not just the playlist. We talk. We about the music. We talk a lot. We don’t interview. Occasionally we have other guests, but we don’t interview anybody. It’s just talking.
I think it’s cool that your fans are going to discover SUSS and SUSS fans are going to discover Immersion through this collaboration.
COLIN: The industry would like to have us all competing with each other. Actually, we don’t need to be doing that. We need to be encouraging people to listen to other people’s music. That’s why we play a lot of other people’s music on our show because it’s not about us. It’s about the other people. It’s about empowering.
MALKA: It’s about sharing what we discover with other people.
