Invictus Hi-Fi: The Studio Is An Instrument
A brillant piece of UK outsider electronica – plus 5 more listening recommendations
Not to revive the boring music journo cliché of the ’soundtrack for a non-existing movie’, but if Tarkovsky was alive and making a film today, he'd be well-advised to enlist Invictus Hi-Fi for the score.
On their second album The Vanishing, the anonymous UK producer and modular synth wiz channels decades of weird outsider music to create his own, completely unique and stunning brand of experimental electronica.
Music to enchant you and draw you deep into a strange web of interwoven narratives: The Voyager spacecrafts, the 'cloudbuster' Wilhelm Reich, abandoned British seaside towns, the Russian art of propaganda… trust me, you’re in for a ride.
The person behind Invictus Hi-Fi wants to stay anonymous. You won’t see their face on press photos.
While this is not an uncommon thing in electronic music at all, it doesn’t seem to be about creating mystery.
“I’m not trying to be elusive”, they’re telling me on a Zoom call with their camera on, as if to prove the point.
“It’s just because this project is so conceptual, I wanted to take myself out of the picture as much as possible. I'd rather it just be a blank sheet.”
The press release for The Vanishing, the second IHF album after 2021’s The Market Deities, name-checks electronic producers Boards Of Canada and Burial, the 1990s indie rock group Neutral Milk Hotel, and composers Steve Reich and Brian Eno.
“I've been making music since I was a kid. Then I very much got into bands, and moved back and forth between electronic music, breakbeat, hip-hop and guitar music. These days, I’m working alone. A couple of years ago, I started to get my head around modular synthesis. There’s an element of unpredictability to it. It's exciting because you're tapping into this weird random energy.”
Discussing their music, the person behind Invictus Hi-Fi giddily jumps from one fascinating, nerdy topic to the next.
One minute they’re explaining the uniqueness of modular synth sounds, the next they’re talking about British documentary film-maker Adam Curtis and his astounding leaps of logic (“trying to link Jane Fonda to fascism”).
Still, there is an overarching idea about The Vanishing. The press release aptly calls it “a requiem for the ideas slowly fading from our cultural consciousness.”
“Everything in there is connected in some way to loss – be it loss of people, loss of personality, loss of ideas. It is addressing that sense of entropy, things coming apart.”
The journey starts in a town that doesn’t exist. You won’t find Vortsluvik on Google Maps. Yet it’s the name that was written down a century ago on their great-grandfather’s naturalization document, when he fled to England in 1919 from pogroms in Ukraine and Belarus.
Jews had been persecuted in the Russian Empire for decades. More than two million left the country between 1880 and 1920. The antisemitic pogroms escalated after World War I, and 150,000 Jews were killed. Their great-grandfather made it out alive.
“So it literally says ‘Vortsluvick, Poland? Russia?’ – including those question marks – on that acquisition certificate. The title is addressing that idea of heritage dissolving. Who are you? Where is your family? That famous book by Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, has a similar story and probably played a bit of an inspiration as well.”
Another track, “Serious Weathermaker”, is inspired by the equally fascinating story of Wilhelm Reich. An Austrian psychoanalyst, he claimed to be able to influence the weather with a self-built machine he called the ‘cloudbuster’.
The story was used as the main narrative in Kate Bush’s famous music video for “Cloudbusting”.
“The Winter Underground”, on the other hand, was inspired by the Tarkovsky movie Stalker, which is based on the science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers.
“It’s about the illusionary nature of Russian propaganda during the Soviet era – the idea of trying to convince people that they've got a full stomach when they haven't. The Russians invented that.”
And then there’s “Out of Season”, a track dedicated to those desolate, abandoned British seaside towns in the East and the South.
“They’re liminal spaces in between seasons, until the sun starts shining again. But even after Brexit, they're getting less and less repopulated as culture shifts away from them. They’re these gravestones saying ‘capitalism failed here.’”
While “A Flag of No Nation” deals with the loss of country and of national identity, “The Last Broadcast” depicts the loss of all losses – the end of humanity.
The title refers to the two Voyager spacecrafts that started their journey into outer space in 1977.
Almost 50 years later, they’re extremely far away from the earth.
“I think one of them's getting close to the Oort cloud. One's left the heliosphere, that one is officially outside of the solar system. It's not going to be turning up in another planetary system for millions of years.”
Each one of the Voyagers carries a ‘Golden Record’ containing a brief overview of the history, culture, and science of humankind, including recordings of voices extending greetings to the galaxy in hundreds of languages.
“Unless we get our act together and survive, those two satellites will be our last record. Some post-human race will probably see them as evidence of alien life or something.”
Invictus Hi-Fi’s home studio
“The music is not being made; it’s the studio sound system that creates it”, the person behind Invictus Hi-Fi says. On their Instagram page, they’re regularly sharing geeky reels on studio technology, with a focus on modular synthesis.
Here are some exclusive images of where (and how) The Vanishing was created.
all images courtesy of the artist
Media Diet
5 Other Things I’ve Been Listening To
01
Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II (2024)
I saw this trio live at Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche last year, improvising on the tunes from their debut. Now the Australian guitarist and the Swedish rhythm section have released a second full-length, full of improvised Krautrock-meets-Gnawa riddims, hypnotic ambient drones and serious jazz chops. I like this even more than the first one, but both are very strong.
02
Poppy H – Confidence Of Crisis (2024)
I discovered UK ambient/experimental producer Poppy H earlier this year through their superb album Grave Era, which was recorded on a smartphone. Since then they’ve released several projects with an almost Madlib-like output approach. My current favorite is this tape that focuses on dark, dubby and noisy textures, reminding me of the short-lived ‘illbient’ movement coming out of pre-gentrified Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in the late 1990s.
03
SSRI – SSRI (2024)
Found this via the excellent
newsletter by . (Philip apparently discovered Poppy H through zensounds, so there’s some serious cross-pollination going on.) These are some dark dubby electronic beats from a duo out of Łódź, Poland. Broken drum’n’bass breaks meet disorienting vocal samples, sluggish trip-hop beats are piercing through weird synth soundscapes. Aesthetically related to the West Mineral/Motion Ward/3XL cosmos, but even more so that really dope downstairs J album on Incienso.04
Samuel Reinhard – For Piano and Shō (2024)
I’ve followed Swiss composer Samuel Reinhard’s work quite closely over the past year and even interviewed him for this newsletter. His newest album just got released on the Elsewhere label and features Copenhagen-based Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum and Tokyo-based Gagaku performer Haruna Higashida (playing Shō, a Japanese reed instrument). Like most of Reinhard’s compositions, this piece explores slowness, stillness and space, and is designed for focused listening sessions.
05
Jasmine Myra – Rising (2024)
I loved Horizons, Jasmine’s first album on Gondwana, for its modern update on ECM-style ambient jazz, infused with elements of cinematic electronica. The horn player and bandleader from Manchester has just released her sophomore full-length, which builds and expands on the themes of her debut. Gorgeous music, well-recorded and crisply mixed – if you’re even remotely into UK jazz, this is just a delight.
Reading
Jez riley French, Sawako Kato (27 May 1978–31 March 2024)
As a subscriber to the newsletter of 12k mastermind
, I learned that Japanese sound artist, composer and educator Sawako passed away. Her untimely death moved me, not just because she was about my age, but I also loved her music.The obituary above was published on The Wire’s website. Here’s another heartfelt note from the 12k site; the label has also teamed up with composer Kenneth Kirschner to publish Sawako’s previously unreleased 2003 CD-R sounds. It’s available as a name-your-price download from Bandcamp, just like all of her earlier released work on 12k. It’s never too late to discover Sawako’s playful lowercase ambient.
rest in peace, sawako 🖤
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
Listening to IHF now. Those sounds are so evocative. Loving it. And the stories behind them. So rich.
Thank you, Stephan, for enriching my life with your posts. I love finding inspiration via your posts from artists I have never heard of. I don't make music myself, but reading your posts sparks my creativity and inspires me.