Rutger Hauser
Collaboration with Lisa Busby, John Harries, Ian Stonehouse, Jon Klaemint Hofgaard, Jamie Coe, Sean Woodlock & Ruth Renfrew
Rutger Hauser is seven friends, playing in any combination and making improvised music with voices, drums, bass, guitar, turntables, electronics, cello, viola.
Link: Rutger Hauser website
The Swim
Recording (2019)
During the summer of 2018 we travelled to the Faroe Islands to record an album, which became The Swim sometime later. We lived and worked for a week in a community hall called Sólarmagn, on the coast at Velbastaður looking out towards Hestur and Koltur, the horse and colt, and the Atlantic beyond. That and more (amps, cello and drum kit, studio gear, pillows and bedding) was made possible by the generosity of various individuals and organisations on the islands and by the dedicated organizational work of Klaemint, the band’s Faroese guitarist.
Velbastaður is a bleakly beautiful place, but it was uncharacteristically sunny for most of the week. On Friday night, the sessions complete, the fog came down and we drank and danced enveloped in grey nothing. The place is in the music - the sound of the big, wood-panelled room, the coast road empty in both directions and the sea outside the window.
The Swim sounds like a group of people working things out together. If we could do without pre-determined form and without conventions of improvised music; if we could not necessarily be drummer, bass player, guitarist, cellist, electronicist, but sometimes just people playing together in different combinations; unspecialised, unsure. It’s mostly first or second takes. When we did things more times, they usually ended up worse.
Sean Woodlock recorded the sessions, helped us to make sense of the music before and after. Back at home, the recordings were mixed in a second week by John Harries, and some overdubs added by Ian Stonehouse. Otherwise, they sound now not much different to how they sounded in the room at Sólarmagn. The vinyl cut was by Noel Summerville, and art and design by John Harries. The album is co-released by Adaadat (UK) and Tutl (Faroes).
Collaboration with Lisa Busby, John Harries, Ian Stonehouse, Jon Klaemint Hofgaard, Jamie Coe, Sean Woodlock & Ruth Renfrew
Rutger Hauser is seven friends, playing in any combination and making improvised music with voices, drums, bass, guitar, turntables, electronics, cello, viola.
Link: Rutger Hauser website
The Swim
Recording (2019)
During the summer of 2018 we travelled to the Faroe Islands to record an album, which became The Swim sometime later. We lived and worked for a week in a community hall called Sólarmagn, on the coast at Velbastaður looking out towards Hestur and Koltur, the horse and colt, and the Atlantic beyond. That and more (amps, cello and drum kit, studio gear, pillows and bedding) was made possible by the generosity of various individuals and organisations on the islands and by the dedicated organizational work of Klaemint, the band’s Faroese guitarist.
Velbastaður is a bleakly beautiful place, but it was uncharacteristically sunny for most of the week. On Friday night, the sessions complete, the fog came down and we drank and danced enveloped in grey nothing. The place is in the music - the sound of the big, wood-panelled room, the coast road empty in both directions and the sea outside the window.
The Swim sounds like a group of people working things out together. If we could do without pre-determined form and without conventions of improvised music; if we could not necessarily be drummer, bass player, guitarist, cellist, electronicist, but sometimes just people playing together in different combinations; unspecialised, unsure. It’s mostly first or second takes. When we did things more times, they usually ended up worse.
Sean Woodlock recorded the sessions, helped us to make sense of the music before and after. Back at home, the recordings were mixed in a second week by John Harries, and some overdubs added by Ian Stonehouse. Otherwise, they sound now not much different to how they sounded in the room at Sólarmagn. The vinyl cut was by Noel Summerville, and art and design by John Harries. The album is co-released by Adaadat (UK) and Tutl (Faroes).
Good Sleep
Recording (2023)
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Digital available at Scatter Archive Bandcamp (from 31/07/23).
CD available at Rutger Hauser Bandcamp (from 31/07/23).
A good sleep.
The big bedroom, Rhoscolyn, Anglesey, summer of 2019.
A long drive, work worries trailing along behind us most of the way (neck of the bass guitar out of the window of Jamie’s car in front helps, though). Then mostly sunlight, dust hanging in sunlight, birds swooping and singing and sheep ambling in sunlight, a small world of house and garden, high banked paths with wild flowers like around Carnowen, beach and sea in sunlight. Going for chilly swims, playing cards and cooking and eating together, and the music seeming to come relatively easily mostly, though we got stuck sometimes and not all of it made sense when listened back to afterwards. Sleeping pretty well in fact, reading, being on holiday. Shortly afterwards pandemic and lockdowns and lots of new uncertainties, but none of that remotely imagined then.
These recordings have been sitting waiting for a few years, and it’s hard not to hear them as something of a time capsule now. As was usual for us, all pieces were substantially improvised, all of us in the room together with Sean recording and feeding us ideas and helping us work things through; and we generally didn’t try to re-play the emergent ideas or structures more than once. No rules really though. Sometimes we’d pre-record a part and then work to that. Sometimes we went out to look for sounds outside. Some elements were overdubbed, either at the time or later, back at home - because Klaemint wasn’t able to be with us in Wales, or just because they needed a little more thinking about.
Released July 2023, with thanks to Liam Stefani.
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Live at Cave 12
Recording (2020)
PRESS for The Swim
Claire Biddles for The Wire: “… it is an esoteric, multifaceted record fusing improvisation, DIY electronics and cross-genre structures. Like the islands themselves, the record is initially intriguing in its details and individual parts, revealing its rich wholeness over time…The album’s sense of drive and experimentation is not just in the playing itself, but in the openness with which different genres and forms are tested out…There’s a palpable trust that feels integral to how well the songs fit together, a belief in something close to supernatural in the group dynamic that enables them to make sense as a whole. The songs as artefacts become more than the sum of their individual elements elevated by something like alchemy.”
Luke Cartledge for The Quietus: “The Swim is testament to the uniquely open, porous nature of improvised music; skilfully delivered yet invitingly playful and inquisitive, it never feels obtuse or inaccessible. There’s something about the indeterminacy of the record that gives it an amorphous quality, making it feel markedly different from listen to listen. What results is a work of gentle exhilaration, that feels as profound when listened to on the 21 bus as it does when consumed way beyond the clamour of the city.”
Tim Parkinson, BBC Radio 3 New Music Show 14/9/19: “I’d really recommend this album…It’s unafraid to create soundscapes, then go into things that are more riff-based, there’s vocals as well, there’s spoken word. There’s a lot going on here!”
Recording (2023)
Digital available at Scatter Archive Bandcamp (from 31/07/23).
CD available at Rutger Hauser Bandcamp (from 31/07/23).
A good sleep.
The big bedroom, Rhoscolyn, Anglesey, summer of 2019.
A long drive, work worries trailing along behind us most of the way (neck of the bass guitar out of the window of Jamie’s car in front helps, though). Then mostly sunlight, dust hanging in sunlight, birds swooping and singing and sheep ambling in sunlight, a small world of house and garden, high banked paths with wild flowers like around Carnowen, beach and sea in sunlight. Going for chilly swims, playing cards and cooking and eating together, and the music seeming to come relatively easily mostly, though we got stuck sometimes and not all of it made sense when listened back to afterwards. Sleeping pretty well in fact, reading, being on holiday. Shortly afterwards pandemic and lockdowns and lots of new uncertainties, but none of that remotely imagined then.
These recordings have been sitting waiting for a few years, and it’s hard not to hear them as something of a time capsule now. As was usual for us, all pieces were substantially improvised, all of us in the room together with Sean recording and feeding us ideas and helping us work things through; and we generally didn’t try to re-play the emergent ideas or structures more than once. No rules really though. Sometimes we’d pre-record a part and then work to that. Sometimes we went out to look for sounds outside. Some elements were overdubbed, either at the time or later, back at home - because Klaemint wasn’t able to be with us in Wales, or just because they needed a little more thinking about.
Released July 2023, with thanks to Liam Stefani.
Live at Cave 12
Recording (2020)
PRESS for The Swim
Claire Biddles for The Wire: “… it is an esoteric, multifaceted record fusing improvisation, DIY electronics and cross-genre structures. Like the islands themselves, the record is initially intriguing in its details and individual parts, revealing its rich wholeness over time…The album’s sense of drive and experimentation is not just in the playing itself, but in the openness with which different genres and forms are tested out…There’s a palpable trust that feels integral to how well the songs fit together, a belief in something close to supernatural in the group dynamic that enables them to make sense as a whole. The songs as artefacts become more than the sum of their individual elements elevated by something like alchemy.”
Luke Cartledge for The Quietus: “The Swim is testament to the uniquely open, porous nature of improvised music; skilfully delivered yet invitingly playful and inquisitive, it never feels obtuse or inaccessible. There’s something about the indeterminacy of the record that gives it an amorphous quality, making it feel markedly different from listen to listen. What results is a work of gentle exhilaration, that feels as profound when listened to on the 21 bus as it does when consumed way beyond the clamour of the city.”
Tim Parkinson, BBC Radio 3 New Music Show 14/9/19: “I’d really recommend this album…It’s unafraid to create soundscapes, then go into things that are more riff-based, there’s vocals as well, there’s spoken word. There’s a lot going on here!”