Words by Anton Spice

At the end of the day, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe would sit in the laundromat and record the sound of the washing machine. The cameras had stopped rolling, but he would stay on location, collecting sonic residue from the dilapidated row houses of Cabrini-Green, to be tweaked, processed and knitted into the fabric of the score of Nia DaCosta’s 2021 cult horror adaptation, Candyman.

For a film concerned with the psychic effects of trauma in a place over time, there is something particularly powerful about this use of geography. Candyman is set in the abandoned Chicago housing project and was also filmed there. Its main characters Anthony and Brianna move into the gentrifying neighbourhood only to be drawn into its folklore. “I would consider the importance of the blackness and the black experience in the story,” he wrote in the liner notes to the soundtrack release on Waxwork Records. “I would not only focus on the terror but the nuance of emotions and offer up that complex energy.” Lowe too once lived just a few blocks away.

Although the Oscar-nominated score for Candyman has been the defining work of his year, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe is a musician and composer who has embraced nuance and complexity. A member of 90 Day Men in the 1990s, he took inspiration from Diamanda Galás, Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara and Boredoms’ Yamantaka Eye among others to hone a sound around the resonant potential of his voice. Whether under the moniker Lichens, his own name, or projects with metal band OM and new age composer Ariel Kalma, there is an undertow of experimentation and collaboration that resonates across his many disciplines.

As a self-confessed cinephile with a particular love for independent British cinema from the 1970s and ‘80s, it seems inevitable that one of Lowe’s paths would lead back to film. Whether in Ben Russell and Ben Rivers’ A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, 2012’s Last Kind Words or the forthcoming Mariama Diallo debut Master, he has tended towards horror and the surreal. But rather than be confined by the convention for jump scares and scratchy violins, Lowe sees in the form a freedom to challenge compositional tropes. What may seem like strings or brass are, in Lowe’s hands, just as likely to be modular electronics or his own voice, processed into something far more elemental.

As Lowe tells me over a video call, he is excited by this prospect of “getting down to the core of the thing and investigating it to make it into something else.” He has been known to coax sound from plants with bio-data converted into MIDI signals. What emerges from this process is a kind of deep time, not just in his long-form arrangements, but in the sonic excavation that takes place, which treats sound as substance, hewn rough from the splintered earth.

We end up talking about infrasound and aural ghosts, about haunting as a compositional tool and the sonic characteristics of abandoned spaces, alighting ultimately on the influence of free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. To immerse yourself in Lowe’s work is to trace the edges of improvised ideas in the palimpsests and overwritten histories that he is adept at burying in layers of reverb.

The way sound relates to space is one such trace idea that connects his installation soundtracks - most recently for an exhibition by Rashaad Newsome - to the world of cinema. After our conversation, I am reminded of a quotation by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, which although perhaps too dualistic, speaks to a spatial sensitivity redolent of Lowe’s approach.

“Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omnidirectional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority … Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return sounds back to our ears.”

Whether on-screen or on record, Lowe operates in the three dimensions of that incorporated sound world, where sound exists in actual rooms, with the actors, the director and the story. To do so, he likes to spend as much time as possible on set with them. It should then come as no surprise to find him in the laundromat after hours.

I imagine you've spoken about Candyman a fair bit in the six months since it was released. Has your perspective on the work changed in that time?

I think I have remained in the same place as far as my feelings about the work that I did. I think it's due largely to the fact that whenever I take on a project in collaboration, I always like to come into a project like this as early as possible because I feel that the sound can influence the visual aspects of the story and vice versa. With that comes a lot of consideration about the story itself and having a very clear dialogue with the filmmaker about what their vision is. 

I think a lot of times when you’re dealing with film, the sound is truly the last thing that's considered, which I always thought was really peculiar. It’s important for me to be as fully integrated into the project as I possibly can be because I then have the ability to make a stronger and more complex work that is actually in dialogue with the story and with the picture.

You’ve also spoken in the past about wanting to reflect the narrative mirror play and sense of illusion in Candyman into the score itself. Is there a sense with film composition that you are called on to account for your process and how it relates to the story in a more explicit way than releasing a stand-alone album?

That's interesting, I don't know. I think honestly you can build that mystification into a work like this. I'm not one to lean into obvious modes. I think with film, as well as my other work, it's about building a world and building a narrative. I think that when film music works best, it’s able to first live as a character in the landscape of the film, and secondly create a narrative for that ephemeral character that lives in that space. At the same time, I want to always be able to produce a work that can stand on its own as an album. That's basically the major challenge for me.

That’s interesting. Something it also suggests to me is the notion of sound as a conduit between the invisible or internal and the visible or external. There is a material quality to sound that exists in the space between these two states.

It does, and honestly, whenever I talk about sound-specific art, performance-based art, or any sort of ephemeral work, I think about these things in the context of music as an art form. How I approach something that would be represented in a space, say, for exhibition or installation, or within the realm of performance, is no different than how I would approach a painting or a sculpture. Sound itself is a tool and you make informed decisions on how to sculpt it, to sculpt the air essentially. Because sound is vibration, it’s a resonant form that we understand through the cilia in the ear in a very specific way.

To put that in the context of an artwork, for me the takeaway is the memory of the individual. Say you’re a patron and you go to witness a performance. You will go away from that space with a memory of the event that is an approximation of the actual thing that happened because memories are not exacting. Everyone will have had their own perspective and their own vantage point. So two people in the same room witnessing the same thing will come away with slightly different variables of what they witnessed. The idea is that the memory is the object. That which you go away with is the artwork, and you have it with you always.

This also seems pertinent in the context of a horror score, where the power of suggestion. You want the audience to feel something that is alluded to but not actually there.

I think that's indicative of cinema across the board. It's not anything that's genre-based. I think that genre films like horror and science fiction have a little more room to move in a broader context, just due to how people perceive what they are supposed to be. But I think sound within cinema should be allowed to move in the ways that it needs to tell its own story.

I don’t like to do obvious things and I tend to lean away from tropes because it's not that exciting for me. Jump scares are not that interesting for me. Sometimes they are effective but it's more interesting to me to be able to create a space in which the sound has no particular emotional bias.

How important is it to you that the sound you’re working with is recorded in a physical environment with its own sonic spectrum or identity?

I think that stuff is really important. When Ben Russell and Ben Rivers and I were making A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, there are certain aspects of that film where the sound in real-time was more important to the scene. So it’s about the way you lean into diegetic sound, but then also the concept of processing that diegetic sound is something that can be wildly exciting.

The first time I worked with [composer] Nicolas Becker was actually on A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness. He had recorded air in different locations around the world, in different set-ups and configurations. There is one moment on this body of water in the middle of the film where Nicolas used 37 different types of air that he mixed together.

So with Candyman, it was really interesting for me to be able to record the natural spaces, which were the actual spaces within which the actual stories took place, to begin with. You're sort of capturing that psychic energy and repurposing it and integrating it as a textural form into the body of the score.

What kind of sonic characteristics did Cabrini-Green have?

There was a real stillness, due to the fact that the abandoned row houses were no longer lived in. That energy was very still and maybe a little sombre even. The natural sound of the city, cars going by in the distance or helicopters going by overhead, crickets in the grass, the wind blowing around. I was also recording essentially just silence in some of these spaces, or recording inside these creaky metal electrical boxes that were on the outside of some of the buildings that had been gutted.

There is a fair amount of time spent in a laundromat in the film, so after they would cut I would go in and record the washing machines and the dryers in the space. I’d then take all of that material, survey it, and then process certain things and implement them into the score.

I’ve been reading a book recently called The Sound of A Room, which looks at what gives a space a certain atmosphere or psychic quality. I guess in this case, there is trauma built into the neighbourhood and the narrative, which is sensed throughout. It’s almost like infra-sound, below human hearing but still resonant on some level.

Exactly. As I was working through the score and arranging the sounds, I realised it was less about individual themes for characters and more of an amalgamation of all of these characters’ stories. It was about creating a work that spoke to the history and the folklore, the dread of the demon or the summoning of the demon, and creating a theme for the actual locale of Cabrini-Green itself. It was thinking about having the theme for the actual space, more than for the individual characters.

Many years ago a friend of mine was talking about something they’d read about vinyl records. And the thing that had been conceptualised was that there had been energy captured into the grooves of these records. When you put the needle on the record and it's transformed again into sound, it's like ghosts escaping from the platter itself. Things that have been documented and are now in the past live on as ghosts in the air.

I wanted to ask you about the idea of a haunting as a compositional tool, as much as a narrative one. A lot of your longer form work seems to engage in this idea of traces that reemerge through the texture of the sound over time.

I think a lot of that has to do with the way in which I really came to focus on solo work as an artist many years ago. For me, it was always very interesting to make things in real-time and not have any sort of concrete roadmap. I think a lot of that has to do with my process being a very aleatoric one. I rely a lot on chance and I think the challenge there for me lies in being able to accept the chance, move fluidly through that moment and not try to course-correct things because something has gone in a direction that I may not have considered. I lean into that new consideration and try to find a way down that road. And I think in doing so, you do elementally have these sorts of ghosts or apparitions that live in that realm of possibility, and that's something that I like a lot.