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| Photos by Charlie Watkins |
Lawrence Casserley has been a pioneer of electronics in improvised music, particularly through his development of the Signal Processing Instrument. To celebrate Lawrence’s 85th year, Charlie Watkins sat down with him to discuss a few records which have been particularly important to him and the events he has planned for 2026.
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I meet Lawrence at his home studio in Oxford. The already small room is made even smaller by the books, CDs and audio equipment lining each wall. There are three computers, one of which is the Signal Processing Instrument (SPI), another displaying a book manuscript Lawrence is working on, and the third with various audio files open. It’s a fitting setting: even in his 85 th year, Lawrence is still full of ideas and as hardworking as ever. Before we’re even sitting down, he is already explaining to me how the SPI works, and I rush to start recording before I miss anything.
The first album Lawrence and I discuss is Solar Wind (1997), which he recorded at STEIM whilst developing the SPI. He explains to me how the record came about: ‘I had three weeks there [at STEIM]. Evan [Parker] was there, not all the time, but most of the time. And Barry Guy joined us for the last part.
‘After a couple of days of just getting going, Evan said “Whenever we play, we switch the recorder on,” and so we had all this stuff, lots of stuff. Sometimes I'd say to him, “Look, I've got to do some programming, I've got an idea,” so he'd go off for a walk, or practice, or do the crossword, and then I’d say “Come on, we're ready.” That's how the CD came about.’
Lawrence tells me how those early sessions at STEIM were a pivotal moment in the development of the SPI. ‘A lot of that original structure of the instrument is still here. I've tweaked various stuff and added bits, added things and taken things away, but the basic structure and the way it works was established at that time. The current version has been pretty much stable for about 10 years, so I finally stopped developing it and started learning to play it! Michel Waisvisz [STEIM’s artistic director] said to me “There comes a stage when you've got to stop changing stuff and just learn how to play it really well.”’
Solar Windwasn’t Lawrence’s first foray into live electronics. He dropped out of Columbia University to study music instead, and his first composition with live processing was in 1969, during his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Music. ‘My composition teacher at the time was Herbert Howells, who was quite a conservative. But he was really interested in what I was doing and he was very, very smart and very good. At the end of the year, I came into the lesson and he said, “I've had a letter about this electronic music course [with Tristram Cary]. I've put you down for it, of course.” That kind of encouragement was really good.’
Even in those early years, as Lawrence started to utilise electronic processing in his compositions, he had a clear vision for how he wanted to be using electronics in live performance. ‘I got this idea: I wanted an electronic instrument that was like playing the cello or something, “my instrument” in that sense. It just took 20 years for the technology to catch up! When I finally got there, I was working with people like Barry Guy, who had such a physical way of playing, and I said, “I want to play electronics like that.”’
Lawrence consistently describes his duo work as what he is most proud of. ‘You can get much more involved in the integration between the player and the processing. When I work with more people, it becomes a bit more diffused; this sort of really tight, close integration comes best in duos, and some of the trios.’ That certainly comes across on his album with Philipp Wachsmann, Garuda (2016). ‘I think Garuda is quite possibly the best thing I've ever done. First of all, Phil is so amazing. The range of his playing and the range of his experience is very, very large. And his thinking is very deep, too. He always produces such fantastic material for me to work with. Again, we worked over several days, recording different kinds of things in different ways. I play some percussion as well and sometimes the percussion is processed with his sounds, and other times it's just the violin. It was a very rich sound palette that we had and we worked a long time on it and I think we formed a very special sort of integration. He inspires great things.’
Listening to Garuda, it’s clear that both musicians are having a lot of fun. I ask Lawrence how he understands the role of ‘play’ in music that can often be quite serious. ‘I don't think serious and playful are very far apart. Like a lot of things, they’re different sides of the same coin, and all these things are part of life. If you can't have fun, then part of your life is missing. And it's the same with the music, if you can't have fun, part of the music is missing.
‘Music is an expression of life. And I think for me it almost is life. It's a lot of other things as well, but music is kind of the core of everything.’
Finally, we discuss a more recent recording, Corps et Biens: Hommage à Robert Desnos (2025) with the vocalist Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg. Lawrence has worked extensively with vocals over the years, including his own; I ask whether there is a reason he keeps choosing to work with vocals. ‘The voice is very interesting because there's so much you can do with it. It's so flexible. The work I did with [performance poet] Bob Cobbing back in the 70s and 80s was a very crucial part of my life because it was Bob who really taught me to be a performer. I didn't have a way to be a performer – I wanted to be, but I didn't have an instrument that served the purpose yet. Bob pointed me towards using what there was to perform with.’
One of Lawrence’s early works was a piece called 15 Shakespeare kaku, which was a setting of poems Bob had written for the Globe Playhouse Trust. ‘He took the letters of Shakespeare's name, cut them up in different ways and stuck them all in different shapes, and he would use these as source material for vocalization. I recorded several different versions and used small amounts of pitch change and a bit of ring modulation and things like that.’
That early example of using electronics to process the voice feels a million miles away from what Lawrence and Jean-Michel are doing together now, a relationship which has developed over many years. ‘When you work with somebody for a long time there are things that seem almost permanent, but then there are other things that are always renewing themselves. If you stop renewing yourselves it becomes difficult to do any more, or you find that people move in different directions. I think that's more or less what happened with me and Evan. We've gone in different directions: it was fantastic what we were able to do while we were working together, it just came to a stage where it sort of didn't happen anymore, which is the way of things.’
In some ways, Lawrence has had a very consistent approach since he started playing improvised music, which he recognises as he looks back on his early recordings. ‘Just after we got back from STEIM, Barry [Guy] booked Gateway Studios at Kingston, and we recorded Dividuality , which is really excellent, and it kind of got lost. A little while ago, somebody said to me, ‘This is a really great CD,’ and I'd more or less forgotten about it. And actually, a lot of the things I was doing then, I can see the seeds of what went into [Evan Parker’s] Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. That's really where it begins.’ But at the same time, the need to ‘renew himself’ is clear; Lawrence has never stopped learning. ‘At the beginning I was a bit nervous about how it all worked, whether it was going to work, and how I could do it. It's very different to the way I function now. I'm much freer in how I do stuff. It’s partly self-confidence, feeling more in control, understanding the instrument so much better.’
At the end of our chat, Lawrence tells me about his plans for his 85 th year. He’s starting with three concerts at St Alban's church hall in east Oxford. ‘It’s a very nice space: quite intimate but big enough. The first one is on Tuesday 7 April with Emil Karlsen, the Norwegian percussionist. We had a CD out on Bead last year, Aspects of Memory . The second one will be on Tuesday 21 April with Hannah Marshall. We've long wanted to do some duo work; I worked with her previously in a trio with Alison Blunt. The third one is a very nice quartet with Dominic Lash, Massimo Magee and Phil Marks: we’ve just released an album called Livingry from a concert we did in early October at the Hundred Years Gallery. That will be on Tuesday 28 April. And Hannah and I are working towards putting something out, so they're very current things.
‘For my actual birthday, tenth of August, I'm planning to have the wonderful trio, Valid Tractor , with Pat Thomas and Dominic Lash, and Paul Lytton is coming over from Belgium to do a duo. Hopefully there will also be a quartet at the end of that.
‘Later that month, I'm hoping to get the Spanish composer and performer, Llorenç Barber, with his bell tree. Martin Mayes is coming over from Italy, a French horn and alphorn player. He will be a special guest with HyperYak , a quartet I have played with for 25 years. I want to have a concert with Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg and Viv Corringham. We were planning to do a trio in 2020, which got overtaken by COVID. Two wonderful vocalists but a really interesting contrast. For that concert I'm hoping we'll have Harri Sjöström as well. He very rarely comes to England, he hasn't been here for around 10 years, so it would be lovely to have him. The other one I want to do is some of my early electronic work contrasted with improvised electronics, with Martin Hackett.’
It’s an impressive number of concerts to organise, especially at 85. But Lawrence seems excited to be sharing his music. ‘Most of these concerts will be on a pay what you can basis. People should be encouraged to come and enjoy the music and there's no pressure to pay lots of money. I want people to enjoy the music.’
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For more information on Lawrence Casserley’s 85 th birthday celebrations, keep an eye on Lawrence’s social media or on the Oxford Improvisers website: oxfordimprovisers.com
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