Originally trained as a classical saxophonist, composer and sound designer Ben Carey finds himself in a very different world from the one he started in. Now a prolific composer and technologist, Carey spends his time working with synthesis and interactive music software, a progression he finds more natural than it may at first appear.
“As a performer, I learned the discipline of dealing with very fine details,” he explains. “I’m very interested in the small details and how they bubble up. Working on an instrument, having to refine technique and then interpret helps with building music from the ground up.”
Ben Carey and the Serge ‘Paperface’ synthesiser. Photo © credit Kristoffer Paulsen
Carey has worked with a host of acclaimed ensembles and musicians including Sydney Chamber Opera, Ensemble Offspring, and the New York-based JACK Quartet. He’s also a lecturer in Composition & Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and one half of Sumn Conduit, with vocalist Sonya Holowell.
His work has featured at VIVID Sydney, IRCAM and the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music. Most recently, his 2021 string quartet, … and contribute to each other’s support, was selected as a submission to the World New Music Days festival.
On 26 June, Carey will release his second album with Hospital Hill, METASTABILITY. All of its material was composed on an early version of the Serge ‘Paperface’, a remarkable vintage synth currently held in the collection of the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS).
“This one is from 1975 and it’s a really original system,” Carey explains. “The difference between this and more modern synths is that it doesn’t give you anything. You have to work for it. The panels are like hieroglyphs. The way you approach making sound and composing on it has to be technical.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Serge synthesizers. A modular unit, it requires musicians to use patch cables to send sounds or samples to different units across its body in order to alter them or add effects. Its designer is Serge Tcherpnin, a Russian-American composer whose machines prioritise a low-level entry into the world of the synth, taking decisions down to a rudimentary level for users to build their patches from the ground up.
Ben Carey // SURFACING a film by Matthew McGuigan
Resembling an “old analog computer”, the 1975 Serge Carey used has taken quite a journey to get to MESS. Originally housed by the La Trobe University music department, as commissioned by Warren Burt, it was used frequently by Australian composer and sound artist David Chesworth. The instrument went to MESS after being acquired by its founder, Robin Fox.
METASTABILITY was created over two four-day residencies, the first in 2019.
“[I spent time] getting into the detail and finding out sounds that interested me, just pressing record and seeing what happened without any real idea that I might create an album out of this material,” says Carey. “I was just getting to know the instrument, really.”
After pandemic restrictions ended, and the possibility of an album began to take shape, Carey visited MESS again in 2021 for another short stint of recording.
“The first time I spent some time with the Serge, I was scratching my head the whole time, trying to work out what I was doing and what I could do with it,” he laughs.
“What was different between those two sessions was that in my first time with the Serge, I recorded lots of little bits that I was hoping to piece together later. By the time I came back, I was more interested in building up these larger, self-playing patches that I could perform on the system.”
Two of the works on the album, Metastability, and the gorgeously-tactile Accretion, were both made during Carey’s first residency in 2019. He employed a much more traditional electroacoustic approach in his splicing, layering and blending of complementary and contrasting sonic material.
One of the more self-contained tracks is Towards the Origin. Haunting and hazy, it sprawls with a sense of urgency whose threat never quite materialises, yet never relents. There is a fascination with texture and gesture. Melody and rhythm appear incidentally, like debris from the composer’s delve into how sounds interact and move in space.
Ben Carey. Photo © credit Kristoffer Paulsen
In a different electronic vein, Carey has devised the live electronics for the world premiere performances of Jack Symonds’ Fire-Featuring Heaven, currently touring with The Song Company.
A piece of software written within Max/MSP captures vocal snippets from the live vocal sextet, cuts them up into fine grains, and spits them out into speakers set up around the room for immersive surround sound. In this setting, Carey is much more demanding of his technology; requiring no deviation in what he instructs his technology to do to work in service of the score.
In the creation of his own work, Carey revels in a less deterministic approach to the instrument, focusing on the creation of a sort of “ecosystem” with the machine. Describing his approach to the synth as heavily improvisational and interactive, Carey’s music takes shape through a mixture of surprise and curation with the balance between human and machine autonomy deliberately blurry.
“I love the grey area,” says Carey. “When working with technology, I search out spaces where I can be surprised; where I can spark a machine to give me ideas, or compel me to make a decision I might not have made in the first place. There are gaps between your own intentionality and what a machine comes back at you with. You’re responding and interactively building up a network of sounds and processes.”
The Serge has become a perfect system to duet with, says Carey. There are more chances to find strange serendipities between the composer and the technology, he explains. After hours of working with the syntheziser, it becomes impossible to untangle which decisions were intentional and which ones were accidental.
“And that’s part of the fun. It really does feel like you’re building up a network of relationships. Every patch cable in front of you actually represents a decision, and each one of those decisions has a history. When you step back, you can’t really say, ‘I made every single one of these choices and I had all the intention to create the sounds that I did’.”
“I think there’s a lot to be gained in just tinkering and seeing what a system can do, allowing it to give you ideas and cultivate a sense of surprise.”
Ben Carey’s METASTABILITY will be released on 26 June.
