Not long ago, Adam Hollander sat down with Robin Fox in anticipation of the upcoming showcase of his award-winning audio-visual work, TRIPTYCH, at Melbourne Recital Centre, which first premiered at Unsound Festival in Krakow back in 2022. Fox has garnered unwavering praise for his fascination with lasers, in which he harnesses the raw voltage of electricity alongside pulsating electronic soundscapes. In the following interview, Fox discusses creative evangelism, digital softwares such as Pangolin and Max MSP, analog synthesisers, Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS), of which he is a co-founder, as well as the experimental music touring circuit in Europe. He mulls over the term cultural critical mass and debates the democratisation of music production tools, as well as the potential dangers of their convenience.

ADAM HOLLANDER Lasers have become a signature theme in your work.

ROBIN FOX  They have, but it's frustrating because I'm a composer. I write music. Music is my first love, and lasers have taken over. When I started working with lasers, it was interesting for me because the noise that I was making was always going to have a finite audience. I always knew the experimental music that I was working on was never going to be massively popular. But when I started mixing it with this visual element, first with oscilloscopes and then with lasers, I found that people were much more willing to engage with sound that they would not appreciate otherwise. People were more open to the music because of the visual correlation that was happening. I found that really interesting. What this has meant internationally is that mainly the audio-visual works have taken off. 

Another huge part of my life is writing music for contemporary dance, which is why I’m at the ballet today. Most of the work that I do is composing music—that’s what I love doing. Making sound, working in studios. Then I add lasers and go on tour and do all these shows. So the show that's at the Melbourne Recital Centre—TRIPTYCH—is the latest in a series of audiovisual works that I've made over the last 20 or so years. They keep evolving and developing, but I never really make another one until I feel like I've got a reason to. It’s difficult to explain, but the audio-visual part of my work, to me, is still music. It's all music as far as I'm concerned. Lasers are amazing because you can turn them on in a room and people will just gasp, even though it's old technology. That beautiful columnated light is breathtaking because light never behaves that way in nature. 

Since I have to work with lasers all the time, I've become quite proficient with Pangolin—the industry standard laser display software—which I only started using to make things safer, as the lasers that I was working with were getting more powerful. Before that, I was working with a software called Max MSP, which is sound generation software.

AH Is that similar to Max For Live?

RF The max part is the same. Max MSP is an object-oriented programming language that was developed in the 1980s. Now it's nested inside [Ableton] Live. There was a period before Max For Live where you could build plugins in Max MSP, and I used to build plugins for people because once you understand the language, you can build whatever you want. It’s infinite sound-building, like digital Lego. And you’ve got all the Lego in the world to make whatever you want. Think up the thing and then you make it. Ableton is great and you can drop plugins into it, but let’s say you had an idea for a ring modulator for example. What if I had a thousand ring modulators? Then you could jump into Max and build a patch with a thousand ring modulators to drop into Ableton. 

AH A lot of people are creating their own custom plugins online. Spring reverb emulations. Stuff like that. 

RF Exactly. It’s incredibly flexible and infinitely variable. It was the software that I decided to learn very early on, when I started getting interested in computer music back in the late 1990s. In the digital sphere, a lot of my friends described this thing that they called option fatigue, which is when you get into a DAW with all the drop-down menus, there’s the problem of too many options to choose from. Everything is too open-ended. So I decided to focus on one piece of software. I chose the one that would give me the most flexibility. I wanted to work with real-time processing of live signals as I was working a lot with musicians—I was processing their sounds. So I built these software systems that were about capturing live sound, which then allowed me to manipulate the signal and spit it back out really quickly, in real time. 

AH What did the first iterations of that look like?

RF We did lots of pieces feeding double bass, piano and vocals into the system. It was like playing an instrument that was already playing. I did a lot of work like that back in the late 1990s, back when the idea of the laptop as a musical instrument was really contentious. I don’t think it’s contentious anymore, but back then it was a big argument. Can you use computers as a musical instrument? Well, of course you can.

AH Analog synthesisers and modular setups are in vogue now.

RF Yeah, and that's super interesting to me. I run this place called MESS—the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio. When we started that place, I was working a lot digitally. I made computer music for a really long time. And then I inherited this incredible collection of analog synthesisers and learned synthesis properly on a [EMS] VCS 3. Even though I was doing all this stuff in Max, working with the VCS 3 brought everything back into the real world. When you get off screen, you get back into your ears more. When you’re working on screen a lot, you're working with the visual waveform representation and after a little while, you actually don't need to listen anymore. Because you can see what's in front of you. You can edit a whole waveform up and not really need to be listening to it, which is weird to me. It feels better to take away that visual paradigm and put yourself back into the position of sculpting with voltage directly. When you have an analog synth in front of you, it's just a bunch of circuits with voltage flowing through it, which you control via these dials and pots. You’re actually just sculpting the electrical signal. 

AH Even more so in modular synthesis. 

RF When you're building a system from scratch, it brings you into direct contact with the building blocks of electronic music. But more importantly than that, it means that when you're building a sound yourself, even if you're trying to emulate a sound, you will do it slightly differently because your ears are magnificently refined. Your ears are your sonic fingerprint, right? So when you're trying to make a sound work with an analog synth, particularly one that doesn't have MIDI and isn't very reliable, you're constantly tuning oscillators. As a result, you’re making a sound that is actually going to have some of your personality. The digital tools that have been created, as amazing as they are, consequently have a homogenising influence on sound creation because everybody's using the same tools. And because those tools are digital, precise and infinitely re-creatable, it's very easy to create a facsimile of something that somebody else has created. We’ve got seven billion people on the planet. The chances that you're having an original idea are diminishing with every generation.

AH Especially with greater access to education.

RF Well, exactly. I think it allows room for this renaissance where we don't worry as much about originality. But the thing is, when you make music with very homogenised tools—say you're making techno for example—there are a million sub-genres of technology, but it's a functional musical form, right? A lot of people are going to make very similar things. You know you're going to have your kick drum on the one beat and you know that you're going to have your hi-hats in a certain spot. What makes an interesting piece of techno is all the salt and pepper that goes into the colour of that sound, which ultimately comes from your refined hearing. So, if you're just making that from drop-down menus and pre-defined sample libraries, chances are you're making something that's exactly the same as somebody else, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. But in my view, the thing that's actually going to catch someone's ears is when they can hear part of you in the music. It’s nice to be yourself. It's just a matter of expression. Music is an extension of human consciousness. 

AH That’s the wall that people who use Ableton constantly come up against. You can get into this mode where you don’t feel like you’re playing music anymore. Digital processing can also have this tizzy quality compared to the warmth of analog. It’s similar to what you were saying about lasers—it’s old technology, but you turn it on and people still go ‘wow’ at the sounds that come out. 

RF Yeah, because those sounds don't exist naturally in nature. 

AH Something linked to making music in computers is the idea of the grid.

RF Like MIDI, and everything being really synced up?

AH Yeah, and it reminded me of something Tim Hecker said about music beginning off the grid. That’s where things become alive. 

RF Totally. I always lean towards the randomising patterns that humanise a sound by bringing in errors. If something's clocked too beautifully, it's often not very musical. And what's really interesting is how in digital systems, even in the way that the digital sound is sampled, there is dithering, where they have to introduce a tiny bit of noise. It happens at the sound card, at the very basis, the very fundamental point at which music is digitised. It makes the sound bearable. But as a drummer, I want things to have a groove, you know? They need to have life and velocity.

AH Swing and shuffle.

RF Yeah, exactly.

AH Talk to me about your experience as a drummer. Was that your first musical pursuit?

RF My first instrument was the saxophone, which I never really liked. I was always trying to make drum kits out of the kitchen pots and pans. Ever since I was a kid, I always enjoyed making a racket. I finally got a drum kit in my early teens, from which point I just wanted to play metal. So I was in bands and enjoyed the intensity and community of that music, of being connected to other kinds of misfits. I guess, at the time, music was a place where you could really feel at home with people. I think it saved my life on many occasions. It's just always been this constant presence for me.

AH Your mother (Cindy John) was an experimental musician.

RF That’s right. She was a composer, but originally an opera singer and just a phenomenally natural musician. Perfect pitch. She was synesthetic as well. Weird music was in my life from early on. In the ballet rehearsal room recently, one of the dancers brought their daughter, and she was sitting underneath the piano. I had a flashback to when I was a kid sitting underneath pianos at Astra rehearsals. Astra is this choir in Melbourne that does quite a bit of 20th century avant-garde music. My mother used to sing Schoenberg. One of the pieces I remember is this work called ‘Pierrot lunaire’, which is a very atonal but super dramatic Schoenberg piece. I remember sitting under the piano while it was being played and blissing out on the sound intensity. 

That sense of creative play was always central to our lives. We were never discouraged from doing anything creative and I feel quite blessed for that. I feel that a lot of people have creativity taken away from them over time. Even if there's this ubiquitous music lesson thing that happens—everyone sort of plays the piano or plays a violin or plays the recorder—but eventually they're just told that it’s a waste of time. I think people's creativity gets shelved simply because it's not an economically viable option. I don't like that cultural paradigm. I think that what I'm trying to do through the creation of MESS, for example, is open everybody up to the idea that they should be making music. As something that can just make you happy. Something that just keeps you fulfilled as a human being, you know? That's what I like about electronic music. Put someone in front of a drum machine and you can show them how to program it. Suddenly they're making a groove that sounds like a Prince track and they're like, Oh my god, I can't believe I made that. And I just say, "Well, what you did and what Prince did—it’s the same thing.” That’s all it is. That’s making music. 

AH It's kind of demystifying the process. 

RF Absolutely.
RF Really, this is what I was saying before about being frustrated with the music industry. When you think about it as an economic force, it's in the interest of the music industry that most people don't make music. The industry wants to manufacture scarcity; it wants to make you feel like only these people make music. Only these stars that you look up to and deify—they are the ones who make music. It's all a game to get you to buy this stuff. And that frustrated me. When I had that revelation that it's not in the interests of the music industry for everyone to make music, I thought, well, we have to get away from that. You know AI will potentially kill the music industry anyway. It's cheaper! Let capitalism eat itself. And then we can just get back to actually making art and enjoying each other's company. Keep turning up to places and having empathy exchanges with each other. MAKING music and sharing music. That's why live performance is so important. And it's also why I love working in contemporary dance.

AH A couple years ago you worked on Manifesto with Stephanie Lake Company, which you composed for nine drummers. 

RF That was a dream for me as a failed drummer. Stephanie is my partner in life as well as at work. She said she wanted to make this work for nine dancers and nine drummers. But then, thinking about the work was interesting because percussion is just like any sound. Percussionists are famous for taking anything and turning it into a musical instrument. So, I didn't want to really go down the percussion path. I wanted to go with drummers. So all the kits are identical. Except for the cymbals, but they're all just these standard four-piece, snare-rack-floor toms. Kick, ride hi-hat. One crash. That’s it.

AH Are there stylistic differences between the drummers?

RF Yeah, they're all really unique drummers. There are passages, of course, where everybody's playing the same, like a big-beat section, where everyone is unified. But there are also sections where everyone solos. There is such energy coming off the stage because the dancers are all phenomenal. The drummers are all phenomenal. There are people who go to that show and say they don't know where to look; they don't know whether they want to watch the drummers who are up on this huge riser or the dancers. 

AH Are you familiar with the work of Barker? He’s an electronic musician from Germany who’s been a Berghain resident for several decades. He’s put out numerous releases on Ostgut Ton. The focus is on beatless techno using modular synths. Really complex rhythms and glittery sound design. More recently, he's been collaborating with a mechanical engineer called Kay Sievers, crafting automated physical instruments. They’ve made an automated drum kit, which is sequenced via MIDI. I feel their work links into this idea of having something organic, alive and physical while still being sequenced or composed by an overseer. 

RF There's a really interesting artist in Australia called Robbie Avenaim. Has a system called SARPS: semi-automatic robotic percussion system. And he's an amazing drummer. He sets up and improvises as a drummer, but he has these other mechanical things that improvise around him as well. Some kind of organic weird robot system, which is bizarre because he's bizarre. It’s like cyborg percussion. 

AH So you said you were trying to be a metal drummer in high school. How early did your interest in experimental music germinate? Obviously that came from your mother? 

RF After a wayward teenage period, I got my life back on track and studied law for three years. Things were going well, but then certain things changed. I realised I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to go back to music. So I left law school and bought a drum kit and started playing music again. I said to my mother that I wanted to go and study jazz at the VCA. And she was really funny, because she just said, “You're not good enough. You don’t practice enough. Some people have practiced their whole lives to do that.” And she was right! My problem had always been that I had no discipline. I ended up going to Latrobe University, which was really interesting. You didn't have to have any experience or musical training to get in there. There was no sense that you had to do X, Y, and Z in order to become a composer. It was really practical and it gave people permission to live the kind of life that I live. 

People ask me how to become an artist. My answer is: You just call yourself one. It's just a name. If you want to be an artist, you just say you’re an artist. That's what I do. But I think a lot of people disagree with that philosophy. Additionally, you run into the discourse that says that you have to hang around other artists. You've got to be face-to-face with free-spirited creative people. No, you don’t. The whole point of the 20th century was that there's no rules, philosophically and aesthetically. There are no rules for what you can and can't do. There are just different ways of doing things. There's nothing special about what I do. Anyone can do it. I know that sounds like it's being dismissive of the art form, but it’s actually honouring it. Any kind of barrier to a creative life is a problem for me. There's no reason why everybody shouldn't compose music. There's no reason why everybody shouldn't paint or get their hands dirty with clay. Whatever that creative thing is, it doesn't have to be music; everyone should do it. It’s just part of being human. 

AH There’s kind of a functional problem if you have the attitude that we only need engineers, doctors and lawyers. Who's going to be artists? Functionally, we can't really exist without art.

RF The thing that makes people smarter and happier is a rich environment. It's why people suffer so much in solitary confinement, right? If you take somebody out of a rich environment, they will wither and die. This rich environment that we live in is essential. It’s culture, and I don't see any difference, for example, between sport and the arts. This dichotomy that we've come up with is really stupid. It's all culture. Sports culture is amazing. It's great for people to exercise, be happy and fit, and do all that stuff. We should encourage it at all times, but we should do the same with the arts. But we've set up this weird thing, particularly in Australia, that you're either into sports or you're into the arts. We have amazing artists, and so many of them leave Australia because it's very difficult to have a career here. We don't have a cultural critical mass here. We don't respect artists here. 

AH What do you mean by cultural critical mass exactly?

RF When I was a young artist, I was playing noise and experimental music. Like I said, it's never going to be popular, but there was an amazing international scene in Europe. You can go from town to town and live like a medieval troubadour. You play a gig, get paid a couple hundred euros, someone gives you a vegan meal, you stay at a squat, play the show, and then you go to the next town, doing the same thing over again. Then, after sixteen shows, you come home with cash. There's no way you could do that here. You play a show in Melbourne and the next town with a festival is Sydney. Back when I was young, people weren't flying around every 20 minutes. Communities were forming, but there was no critical mass. Whereas in Europe, the cultural appreciation for new things was baked into the mentality. Even in classical music, most concerts would feature a new work, and not everyone liked it. But they knew it had to be there, because it was important. Whereas in Australia, it was so rare to see a new work in an orchestral concert. You could even go to an entire subscription series of one of the city orchestras and not see a piece past 1900. And that is a problem, because we don't accept that [orchestral music] is a living and breathing artform. In other parts of the world, this isn’t the case. Young people are encouraged to write orchestral music and they’re given more opportunities. I really felt that when I was a young artist, moving to Europe was something I would have to do if I wanted to actually pursue experimental music.

AH But you never did that. 

RF I never did. I was doing it, and then I met Stephanie Lake, and she had two young daughters and I ended up staying in Melbourne. Which is partly why I started MESS. I realised if I'm going to be here, I want to do something more substantial.

AH So you co-founded MESS back in 2016?

RF  Yes, we’ll have our 10th anniversary in 2026. MESS came about for a variety of reasons. I inherited a really interesting collection of analog synths. I feel very lucky about that. Synths are very valuable and rare and people can't afford them. And so a part of my thinking was, how can I make synths available for people to use? Because I was going on tour a lot, they were just sitting in my studio, and I thought, well, someone should be using these. The composer that I inherited them from, Keith Humble, started the Latrobe music department in 1975. He was quite a radical thinker, particularly around music education. He had this philosophy about spontaneous creativity being linked to happiness. 

AH Democratisation of the tools as well.

RF Absolutely, he was an anti-elitist even though he was an exceptional pianist and proved himself in the world of classical music. He toured around heaps. But he was of the opinion that none of that mattered unless you were trying to do something different. His legacy is very much baked into MESS.

AH It’s interesting that you talk about creative evangelism and the democratisation of music production so that everyone can be creative, though you do seem fairly sceptical about a lot of mass-market digital tools. The digital audio workstation in particular. 

RF: I can see how that's sort of contradictory. I'm not sceptical about those tools. I think it's amazing that everyone can have access to these things and I think it's amazing that more and more people are making music. What I am slightly sceptical about is the mimetic quality that it brings to the active composition of creation. Which is that it becomes a little too easy to replicate genres. And so people spend a lot of time replicating something that they think may make money. It’s baked into a sellable paradigm, which I don't like. 

AH What do you listen to these days? 

RF Well, it's kind of interesting. When I'm writing music—I’m in the middle of a development now, so I'm writing a lot of music—I don't listen to a lot of music. Your head gets crowded. When you're working all day trying to build sonic worlds and do certain things, I don’t want to live in headphones, listening to more music. Otherwise, I listen to pop music a lot, which is kind of interesting and people don't expect that. For me, a new Kylie album comes out, and I want to listen to that. I put that on and I know that the big music industry machine is doing all this research on how to make me feel good. I put that on and it's like a dopamine injection, right into my limbic system, it's like bang! 

Recently, I've been listening to Nina Buchanan's live sets because she's supporting my work at the MRC. And I’ve been listening to this artist, who's also a life member of MESS, who's embarked on this project of releasing about 100 albums over the last ten years. His name's folmR. I'm remixing a couple of tracks for him at the moment.

AH You probably have to get back to work. 

RF Yeah shit, I gotta go back upstairs. Time got away from us. 

^[1] DAW, or ‘Digital Audio Workstation’. A term that refers to programs like Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, Pro Tools.

Robin Fox presents Triptych on 30 Jan 2025 at Melbourne Rectial Centre's Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. Tickets available.