Instability of the Signal Simon Fisher Turner

• 1 Barefeet 04:25
• 2 Turning Slowly 02:40
• 3 She Lowers Her Arms 03:10
• 4 I Can't Hear Anything 04:57
• 5 Thrashing It Out 04:09
• 6 Fishscales 02:07
• 7 Boymanduet 00:44
• 8 Toast 03:40
• 9 Democracy 02:02
• 10 Tape Ends 03:12
• 11 The "Special Relationship" 03:53
• 12 Purr 01:32
• 13 Bless Your Hands (Part 1 and 2) 06:23
• Total Runtime 42:54

Info for Instability of the Signal

The composer, musician and Zelig-like artist who has worked and performed in groundbreaking and underground music, film and art scenes since the 1970s has created a lush, soothing and intimate album, a landmark in his ever-expanding catalogue of projects. The 13-track album features Fisher Turner singing for the first time in many years, accompanying compositions built from tiny snippets of sound along with piano, classical strings, a detuned Fender Telecaster, and his magpie-like collecting of field recording.

Recorded by Simon Fisher Turner and Music Producers Guild Awards winner Francine Perry, this 13-track album is an intricate exploration of sound, inspired by the creative minds of Breda Beban, Hrvoje Horvatic, and poet Harold Pinter, whose verses ‘Democracy’ and ‘The Special Relationship,’ feature on the record.

It pulls together four strands of Fisher Turner’s sonic experimentation, which he identifies as Slivers, Sounds, Strings, and Singing. The “slivers” are tiny snippets of audio he used as source material for the tracks, all originally created by Salford Electronics (aka David Padbury), and reworked by Fisher Turner into foundations for entire tracks. The record also includes beautiful string arrangements by the Elysian Collective, who have toured with Pulp and feature on the latest releases from The Last Dinner Party and Pet Shop Boys.

Like Fisher Turner’s long and varied career, Instability of The Signal is an accumulation of experience, effervescent memories, sounds and textures. It contains hidden learnings. It is about how restorative singing of ourselves and to ourselves can be but is also a document of times and places delivered in beautifully impressionistic palettes of sounds and voices. It is also another document of Fisher Turner’s remarkable life and unshakeable curiosity about sound.

Instability of The Signal pulls together four strands of Fisher Turner’s sonic experimentation: Slivers, Sounds, Strings, and Singing. The ‘slivers’ are tiny snippets of audio he used as source material for the tracks, all created by Salford Electronics (aka David Padbury), and reworked by Fisher Turner into foundations for entire tracks. The ‘sounds’ that pepper these tracks are sourced from Fisher Turner’s relentless field recording, and include a rhythm created from the sound of a spinning bicycle wheel recorded in Berlin; the percussive sounds of objects on hard floors inspired by his collaboration with artist potter and writer Edmund de Waal; a hand-made mechanical pencil sharpener made by Tilda Swinton’s father (recorded while working on a film with Swinton and the Derek Jarman Lab), along with an extended index of guerrilla field recordings and sonic textures. The album’s ‘strings’ are recordings made with The Elysian Collective (who have recently been performing live with Pulp). Fisher Turner’s voice is the centrepiece of this album – it is the ‘singing’ that draws all these sounds together into a complete and distinctive album of songs. “I was making these tracks with Padbury’s slivers one day, and then the penny just dropped,” he explains. “I just knew I wanted to sing over them: to use my voice again.”

His lyrics scramble Burroughs cut-ups sourced from two of Harold Pinter’s poems; words from a book on the video work of Czech filmmakers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, flashes of memories of riding buses in London, cycling topless in jeans around the city. The intimate, soft vocals feature his own memories, pulled extracts from diaries and other texts, some of which are political and subtly delivered the frustrations he felt at the beginning of the project. These lyrics, he says: “reflect how I feel without standing on a soapbox and screaming.”

The album is rooted in the intimate sound space of a small studio, where he recorded with producer Francine Perry. The intimacy is mirrored in the album’s artwork – a photo of his regular collaborator and long-time friend, the filmmaker Isao Yamada listening to the album for the first time. Film plays an important part in telling the visual story of the album, with several filmmakers, including the documentary filmmaker Sebastian Sharples (who previously collaborated with Simon Fisher Turner for Lana Lara Lata (Mute, 2005) invited to create short films to accompany tracks from the album.

Like Fisher Turner’s long and varied career, Instability of The Signal is an accumulation of experience, effervescent memories, sounds and textures. It contains hidden learnings. It is about how restorative singing of ourselves and to ourselves can be but is also a document of times and places delivered in beautifully impressionistic palettes of sounds and voices. It is also another document of Fisher Turner’s remarkable life and unshakeable curiosity about sound. “I’m now a 69-year-old man and by hook or by crook, and some good luck, this album has turned into something which really sounds like me,” he reflects. “I’m singing how I feel I truly sound; this time, I’m not hiding anything.”

Simon Fisher Turner

Simon Fisher Turner
An erstwhile child actor and teenage pop star, Simon’s life as a film composer stems from his association with Derek Jarman in the 1980s and ‘90s. His scoring credits for Jarman included Caravaggio, The Last of England, The Garden, Edward II and Jarman’s final, poignant film, Blue. Other credits include the Anna Campion-directed Inertia and Bi-polar, Don Boyd’s My Kingdom (on which he collaborated with Deirdre Gribbin), and Mike Hodges’ Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Simon has done a diverse range of television work, including the documentary Peter Ackroyd’s Romantics, Channel 4’s Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes and the BBC1 drama Sweeney Todd. Simon also arranged the music for BBC1’s well-known Helicopter ident.

From child actor to teenage pop idol, self-confessed 'extreme sound freak' to acclaimed solo recording artist, Simon Fisher Turner's career has been nothing if not varied. His early acting credits included film and TV roles from Black Beauty to The Big Sleep (re-made with Robert Mitchum). At the same time he was fronting various '70s pop acts, and at the age of 17 was signed to Jonathan King's UK Records, releasing his first solo album in 1969.

After that precocious start, Simon followed an often eccentric, sometimes outlandish musical path. He operated on the fringes of punk; performed briefly with The The; became 'Musician in Residence' at the ICA in 1980; and released two albums as one half of a fictional French female duo known as Deux Filles. But through all this, Simon was developing a deep and abiding interest in the stuff of sound, accumulating a vast library of collected sounds from daily life. It is this interest which now forms the basis of his improvisatory, eclectic approach to music making, and is manifest on his most recent solo albums on the Mute Label (his discography comprises some 30 solo albums to date). From trite pop to extreme sound-freakery, the mature SFT (as he now styles himself) has arrived at a mesmeric originality.

Simon's life as a film composer stems from his association with Derek Jarman in the 1980s and '90s. His scoring credits for Jarman included Caravaggio, The Last of England, The Garden and Edward II. His final film for Jarman was the powerful, poignant Blue, where a soundscape recorded by Simon at Brian Eno's country house, together with Jarman's AIDS-inspired spoken words, stood in for visuals - only a blue screen was projected. The film won a Michael Powell Award. Simon subsequently toured Blue around the world, performing his music at live screenings.

In May 2014 Simon won an Ivor Novello award for his score for the BFI National Archive’s restoration of the 1924 film The Epic of Everest (directed by Captain John Noel), the official film record of Mallory and Irvine’s ill-fated 1924 Everest expedition. The score is a collage of instrumental and ‘found’ sounds, “made possible” (according to SFT himself) “by the internet connections we have these days. It’s a soundtrack made from found and stolen life sounds, alongside new music and fake foleys.”

However Simon is nothing if not adaptable, and his range is broad. As well as film projects in which his vivid imagination can take wing, he has worked on many commercial advertising campaigns, Idents and documentaries.

This album contains no booklet.