"Bang – An Open Letter" was the first introduction to both the Hafler Trio, and, to most the name of Robert Spridgeon from whose work the trio (Edward Moolenbeck, Christopher Watson and Andrew McKenzie) drew much of their early inspiration.

     Of the Trio probably the best known is C. Watson who was a member of Cabaret Voltaire until the early '80s when he left to work in Television. The Trio represents his first return to musical work. A. McKenzie has been active musically being at varying times a member of a pop group called Flesh, an early associate of the well known tape company Touch, a member of Whitehouse for their early live performances and collaborator with Nurse With Wound.
     Dr. E. Moolenbeck is the scientific link between the other two and the academic work of Spridgeon being one of the latter's executers and thus having access to large amounts of raw material related to sound.
     Information on Spridgeon himself is hard to obtain (indeed as all the information I have has come from the Trio alone I must admit to not being fully convinced to his existence!) but it appears that he was a member of the Swedish pioneering sound investigation group ROBOL who carried out various experiments from the '30s onwards connected with sound frequencies and the like. Spridgeon published in one of his books details of certain military experiments using infrasound which though not actually noticed by the authorities for some years resulted in a court case in which Spridgeon was jailed for refusing, on the grounds that the public had a right to know, to amend and delete certain portions of the text relating to the matter. This resulted in a campaign against Spridgeons work, which caused the destruction and thus rarity, of all his works (already difficult to obtain due to limited printing runs).
     Recently however some works have begun to surface and word is that both the Hafler Trio and a U.S. company are both issue a book of archive material that will give the general public more chance to access Spridgeons work in this area. Spridgeon himself died in 1962 only a few months after he was released from prison.

The interview itself was recorded with A. McKenzie (his views being his own and not necessarily the groups) and was made just prior to the release of their latest work, the double album "A Thirsty Fish" (LAYLAH).

Q: How did you first become involved with Spridgeons work and Dr. Moolenbeck?
A: We had done some tapes that had been broadcast on a few pirate radio stations and we got a letter from Moolenbeck asking if we realized that what we were doing had been done a lot earlier by Spridgeon. Around this time Chris and I attended a lecture given by Arnold Harris at Newcastle Polytechnic who was a follower of Spridgeon and had published a work on Spridgeon so we had heard of him prior to our contact with Moolenbeck. However we got in touch with him and found him to be a total lunatic so it wasn't long before he became an integral part of our work, mainly in an advisorary capacity as he is living in Sweden and not is able to travel much due to ill health, but none the less we are in good contact via mail and he also sends us packets to utilize so he is an active member.
Q: So we would be right in thinking that all your works have a scientific basis?
A: We like to have some basis to work from and it can save a lot of time just to take information from the works of Spridgeon and the like who first discovered them 40 years ago rather than have to discover them all for yourself. Some of the works are 'closed systems' where the piece is an example of a result of a certain process, while others are 'ongoing' projects. The first LP. is about half and half.
Q: So the new release is an 'ongoing work' then.
A: We are moving towards that and less towards demonstration. We are also phasing out are involvement with ROBOL as they are starting to ask us to do certain experiments for them which we do not want to get involved with, though each release has different levels to it. Some of it may seem unscientific in approach, but I see no reason why, like certain novels, religious or occult books, a deeper meaning cannot exist under a veneer. Also our work restates ideas that have become dated or lost their relevance, for example recording techniques that were 'new' forty years ago can now be reproduced today very easily and with far greater accuracy so we can apply techniques with far greater and in a far more wide ranging way. A lot of ideas first mentioned by Spridgeon and the like have passed into the general scheme of things without people actually realizing it – a lot of the effects we achieve and utilize had been used by others for example Bowie and Throbbing Gristle realized that sound could be used to achieve physical effects but their use was often in an imprecise or accidental way so maybe sometimes they weren't too sure of how EXACTLY they were achieved while what we after is a far more precise way of achieving these effects.
Q: Could you give an example of this?
A: Well a lot of our work is like a jigsaw in that you need all the pieces to form a whole but a very small example of what we are doing is as follows: In 'Seven Hours Sleep' we apply the ideas of an interesting set of experiments carried out in the 1930's in which an audience had every second syllable of a prepared text written down phonectically in front of them while the speaker would stand and read every other syllable (the audience of course being told that this was going to happen) and so the speaker might say 'a' and the audience would read 'boy' and so backwards and forwards until the passage had been completed. In the novella with the package there is a certain paragraph, which is a manipulation of the recording of the words on the LP. Both are manipulated out of all recognition and you would not be able to notice the two relevant sections unless you by chance happened to read the section in the novella at the same time as the section on the lp was playing in which case the full 'import' of both would be recognized and made apparent in a far more direct way as a sort of overall picture. In an early experiment we did for ourselves a piece was done to describe a girl on a boat by a river and I received an image of that type even though I didn't understand what was going on in a linear sense as you would, say reading a book… so in a way it is like Japanese or Chinese calligraphy which expresses words as a symbol (I once asked a Japanese whether they 'talked to themselves in their heads' as we do and he said 'Oh no – I think in pictures') which is very similar to the techniques we use. I must stress that this is a very small example as I don't want to give the rest away.
Q: That sounds almost like the Burroughs cut-up technique.
A: Well no. Burroughs claims there is an intuition in what he claims he does but it is essentially random and so he rarely hits his target whereas we try and filter out all the randomness and so take a sharper aim at the target we want to hit.
Q: You have a cassette "Hotondo Kikitorenai" out on Japans AQM label. How has that been received?
A: It has gone done there very well in that we have had letters from people who recognize our attitude and see the type of things I've been talking about in it even though some of the stuff is in English. We deliberately released something in Japan that was all talking so that people would have to come to grips with the fact that it was a foreign language rather than music in the same type of way as if released a record in the U.S or Europe that was all in Japanese… but they are much more interested in putting the effort into and getting the information out of our releases than people in England especially , they are lazy and want everything explained to them 'here and now' on a plate. They are not prepared to look into things and peel back the layers… it's intensely frustrating.
Q: Who wrote "Three Ways of Saying Nothing"?
A: "Three Ways of Saying Two" as it is to be called on the record is partly quotes from Spridgeon, Lidgenstein, J.L. Austin and a few others but mainly written by the three of us.
Q: Could you comment on the section where you talk about sound and its relationship to colour? "…Another interesting facet of this research is the relationship between certain frequencies and certain colours. Most religions have been aware of this and used it to great effect, associating certain hues with certain tenets of the faith, characters from it's past, certain key words or even ideas… pressed home over repeated exposure to the song or incantation eventually the colour could call to mind the subject associated without recourse to the accompanying strategy…"
A: Colour is just sound speeded up – if you could take a sound and had a suitably sensitive system as well as some sort of wonderful tape machine you could speed up sound vibration (light is just a vibration at a certain frequency) like the note 'd' is actually the colour orange slowed down as it were. Each note has a certain colour and so if the sine waves are pure enough, you could play with that idea. For example ancient mosques have really incredible colours and colour combinations, which were specifically aimed at achieving certain effects heightened by the muezzins calls – it is just a rediscovery and reapplication of that.
Q: What criteria do you use to judge your results?
A: Well a lot of the stuff is tested out on ourselves and there is also a private lab we are in contact with when we really want to try and achieve a certain specific effect, we can pay to have it tested out for us. It's also indicated by people writing to us… though people do take things different ways there are certain parameters that you can predict in advance for example you know that people have two ears and will generally listen to the release in stereo: that they will probably play it in a room not much larger than 20 feet across; if it is played on a walkman then chances are it'll be outdoors and thus background noise is likely to be there and chances are it'll be the sound of motors (cars, vans etc.). There are also certain frequencies that will have an effect irrespective of the equipment you play it on or where you listen to it so you can be reasonably precise about a lot of it.
Q: Would you like to see your records reaching the scientific community more? LAYLAH is hardly an 'academic' label.
A: Certainly not! We all have a deep loathing for the scientific community because it is so pedantic. Spridgeon has a lovely phrase "all they are interested in doing is arguing with pigs over the quality of oranges" – they spend their whole lives dissecting rats and the wondering why it is that they don't get up and walk off the operating table! They are very destructive ad negative, they don't have much enthusiasm about things and are far too specialized. They don't take into account the wider ranging implications of what they are doing, they might take a process with no bearing on 'reality' – they are just shut away from ordinary experience, which is something I loathe. If you have something to say you should say it to everyone and not just to members of your clique.
Q: But isn't your music done in a strange way people can't get at?
A: We do disguise what we do to a certain extent as we want to engage the person to make some effort – to get off their backsides and think about things rather than sitting back and taking it all passively.
Q: But surely you may add too much confusion that will make the listener 'switch off' as it is too meaningless?
A: It depends on the timescale you use. WE use confusion in a controlled way and not just for the sake of it. There are false paths into our work but when it reaches a dead end then we make it obvious that it is a dead end so the listener is continually thrown back until he/she reaches the right way through it. Also you can confuse someone but also give a direct intuitive communication, which is another aspect of our work. After a certain effect a 'reward' is obtained which encourages the listener to continue further and further – it is participation in information rather than blind consumption… you have to employ discrimination.