The term ‘brutalist’ comes from the French words ‘béton brut’, which translate directly as ‘raw concrete’ – hence the title of the Raiden album. The concrete structures that were built by leading architects from the early 1950s to the mid-’70s were part of a movement that was celebrated at the time. But because these government-funded, cold-stone structures were poorly maintained they’re now often dismissed as architectural monstrosities. The idea that architecture influences music isn’t a new one. Classical composers Mozart and Beethoven were inspired by Prague’s gothic, renaissance, and baroque structures in the 18th Century. And reverberations of the futuristic ideas the likes of Goldfinger, Le Corbusier and Rodney Gordon distilled into urban architecture can be seen and heard in a lot of electronic music. In his 1955 Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, French Marxist author Guy Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”. Raiden would certainly endorse this: “When it comes to making music; I think it’s impossible not to produce sounds that are some kind of reaction to your environment. I’ve always lived in cities and been intrigued by the architecture around me so it had to come out in my music eventually. It’s also down to the way you make electronic music. You build a track up from a set of foundations. There’s a strong architectural element to making dance music.” Before he died in 2008; Rodney Gordon said: “If no-one notices it, it’s not architecture”. The same could be said for music. “The architects behind all of the buildings I’ve dedicated tracks on my album to had this idea of trying to build futurist cities within cities; most of which stretched up into the sky,” says Raiden. “And [Detroit techno visionary] Jeff Mills frequently references architecture when he talks about his musical inspirations.” You can hear the ghostly echoes of Detroit’s forgotten warehouses and industrial spaces left over from the fall-out of the city’s automotive industry running through Mills’ early productions. The time he later spent living in Manhattan was equally influential on his particular brand of techno. “Living in Manhattan, in the middle of all those tall buildings, it can really be overwhelming,” says Mills. “There’s too much congestion.
A hundred things can be happening around you but you can’t get to them and you just have to accept that the city is bigger than you. That feeling of inertia can really help the creative process. You have to escape your surroundings somehow and, for me, that’s always come out in my music.” Even if architecture isn’t the inspiration to make music, it can often be the catalyst for it. Historically, bands have chosen to record in a particular building because of the particular sound a certain structure or space can create. Radiohead rejected the option of a glitzy London studio to decamp to Tudor Manor House St. Catherine’s Court, near Bath, to lay down OK Computer. And Manchester band Delphic recorded some of the music for their 2009-released debut album Acolyte in Salford cathedral. “We knew we wanted this particular guitar sound and we’d always loved the cathedral in Salford so we called them up and asked if we could record there,” says the band’s Rick Boardman. If you listen really closely to the album’s Ephemera track, you can hear the ambience and reverb of the cathedral along with the traffic noises from outside the building and the sound of people talking and walking in the background. “It gives the track an ethereal quality that feels kind of like standing in the middle of the cathedral itself,” says Rick. “Creating that feeling, emotion and sound was really important to us.” There are no tracks dedicated to churches or manor houses on Raiden’s Béton Armé. The buildings that inspired his sonic soundscapes include the Genex Tower in Serbia, the Ryoyung in North Korea and Marina City in Montreal. Of course, he’s not the first electronic artist to reference modern architecture in his music. If you check out the album or single artwork from many urban music releases from the 1990s and early 2000s you’ll more than likely see an image of a concrete tower block. The Streets, anyone? “The whole urban music and tower block thing is a big cliché,” says Raiden. “That’s why I decided to make my album to get the root of the matter. The link between British urban electronic music and architecture goes a lot deeper than sticking a block of flats on an album cover.”
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Illustration: © matt reynolds
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