Leo Abrahams: Rethinking Improvisation

Already a classically trained pianist before discovering guitar at the age of 12, composer and producer Leo Abrahams began his musical career as lead guitarist for Imogen Heap’s touring band alongside Jon Hopkins on keyboards. Since 2005, Abrahams has released six solo LPs while co-writing film soundtracks, producing for dozens of artists and session playing on over 100 records. He has famously collaborated with Brian Eno on several LPs after the latter spotted him practicing his technique in a guitar shop.

One of Abrahams’ most recent releases includes Scene Memory II, which expands on his fascination for guitar improvisation and generating sounds from a single guitar source. Meanwhile, he has reunited with highly regarded jazz drummer Martin France for a second LP, Krononaut II. Initially an ensemble, here the duo responds exclusively to each other’s spatial interactions, with Abrahams employing Ableton Live’s complex patching features to trigger intricate and evolving patterns of layered sound.

I’m assuming guitar was your instrument of choice as a teenager, but was practice enforced on you?

I rather think I forced it on my parents - I used to get under their feet pretending to play piano on carpet fringes. That was my first instrument of choice aged 7 and then I took up guitar at 12 or 13, but it was really useful to have that backing and my piano teacher used to inspire me by transcribing versions of pop songs that I wanted to play while teaching music theory. As I got into my teens, I became really obsessed with Frank Zappa, which led me to want to be a classical composer. I studied classical composition at the Royal Academy of Music, but didn’t take to it and left without completing my degree after I got offered a job in a band. By the end of the year I was making a living, so I consulted my teachers and they both said if you’re already playing you should probably keep doing it.

Are guitars like snooker cues – once you find the right one it never leaves your side?

I’ve found that they’re more like tennis rackets - different ones are good for different jobs [laughs]. The guitar that I allowed myself to save up for was a ‘60s Fender Jaguar and the band that I joined was actually Imogen Heap’s. There wasn’t much guitar in her music, so I had to adapt and use a lot of effects so as not to smear guitar textures over everything.

When did you start to think of the computer as a device that would enable you to go beyond simply recording yourself as a guitar player?

The first day I got a computer with Logic. A friend I’d been playing guitar for paid me back by giving me a quick lesson and by the end of the day I’d made a track unlike anything I’d made on hard disk or tape. That a computer could facilitate such infinite possibilities was an interesting realistation, while acknowledging that it could also end up using you if you’re not careful. Somehow that experience got me thinking about generative possibilities - my favorite situation is where the computer becomes almost like a collaborator and you end up in a dialogue with it. In that sense I’ve found that, as a producer, a computer has two great functions – solving problems much more quickly and easily than otherwise possible and inspiring things that I might not have thought of.

As you became increasingly involved with computer setups, did you become less reliant on guitar pedals to change tone, character and timbre?

The thing about pedals is that they usually end up coming through an amplifier, which has drastic consequences for the frequencies that emerge. My favorite situation is to have an amp and a computer running together with an A/B box sending signals to one or the other, or both, and what I value about playing guitars through software is that you have access to the entire frequency range without one or the other being accentuated. I’ve found that it’s absolutely essential for me to be able to properly control those frequencies and love using sub or really high frequencies that simply aren’t translatable through an amp. I’m a big fan of letting amps and pedals do what they’re great at, which is to be raw, exciting and blunt, while letting computers be surgical and extended, frequency-wise.

In terms of improvisation, in what way was Ableton’s signal processing architecture a creative breakthrough for you?

Around the time of my first Krononaut record with jazz drummer Martin France, I was trying to rethink my approach to improvisation in general – not necessarily sonically, but more thematically or philosophically. I started thinking about Morton Feldman – a classical composer from New York from the ‘60s onwards. He did a very interesting thing with structure that I don’t think has been replicated or brought into improvisation very much. It’s a sort of meditative state with the emphasis on focus and concentration. He’d take little units of harmony, rhythm and melody and examine them from different angles in the same way you might walk around a sculpture in an art museum. It seemed to me that this state of contemplation was linked to natural variation rather than an argument - and so much of music is, essentially, a narrative argument. It’s no secret that Ableton is designed to somewhat reflect a modular synth, so the fact that you could plug things into other things, have signals running in parallel and the routing was so flexible meant that it felt made for that.

In less theoretical terms, how did that change your approach?

Before that, I was using MainStage just to host plugins, but Ableton allowed me to host plugins, route things to different places and assign LFOs very quickly and easily, which you couldn’t do with other programs at the time. Using Ableton felt like a partner in the examination of whatever themes or motifs I came up with and that became really fruitful because I could construct effects chains that reacted in slightly unexpected ways to whatever I was putting in. Not like a looper where you hit repeat and it acts as an accompaniment, but more as an aid to exploration. Ableton’s implementation of MIDI is also very straightforward - I use a MIDI foot controller to control a lot of parameters in audio racks and that feels like a very friendly, open environment. So Ableton was a natural choice really, and out of that grew a record called Scene Memory II, which is a solo guitar album that doesn’t really sound like a solo guitar’s been used.

Can you tell us a bit about your experiments with parallel processing and what’s to be gained from blending signals together in various ways?

It’s the same question as what can be gained from blending any sounds together. Within the Ableton architecture, you can separate something that has the function of a bass, a pulse, a melody or a pad quite clinically. My setup is to have my guitar going into a Gamechanger Audio Plus Pedal with the dry signal going into one input and the plus pedal signal into another. Both of those get split through various further effects chains and, through that simple starting point, you can generate quite complex but interactive layers of sound while being in full control of that space. Anything more than two or three layers and you’re into quite complex territory, but by being able to control the frequencies really surgically you can end up with much more refined results than by trying to do the same thing with pedals or an amp.

Are these experiments a reaction to the limitations of the guitar as a creative tool or your own perceived limitations?

The one thing I’ve found is that, when making something, I don’t really trust the way that I feel in the moment. Some of my favorite pieces have come when I thought what I was doing was terrible or, even worse, boring. Conversely, I’ve done concerts that I thought were great, listened back and thought, ah, maybe not so great. For sure, I feel very limited by my skills, my ear, and even my taste, so the beauty of this system is that it helps me to forget what I’m doing. It feels like an opening to curiosity and discovery, so it’s not that I want the computer to help me to write music, it’s more to do with creating an environment where music can happen.

Is the guitar an instrument that you ever stop learning about?

There are some aspects that I feel in command of, but even those are so ephemeral. It’s really one of the most humbling, confusing and, actually, hilarious instruments in that one permanently feels like an amateur, but in a positive sense. Morton Feldman said he didn’t want to be a professional because those people just repeated what other professionals had done, whereas amateurs were always discovering something. I certainly don’t put myself in his company – I’m just a guitar player, but when I sit down to play, I’m really just trying to make a sound that seems to carry some truth to it.

Download Leo Abrahams’ Synth Loop and Drum Machine Sample Pack

You touched on using audio racks to prepare for a session of experimentation. Could you go a bit deeper into what that might consist of? 

A bit like a virtual pedal board, whether I’m on my own or with another musician, I have a long list of combinations of plugins that I’ve found to be inspiring and useful. I might drag in a bunch of those, assign the routing a little bit and, critically, which is another great feature of Ableton, create further audio tracks so that the output of each layer can be recorded. You can tap into any chain at any point and print it as audio and I really like that workflow because, apart from anything else, it stops me from over analyzing whether or not I want to tweak something in the plugin chain. It’s basically telling you that whatever happened during a session in response to the way that these plugins chains are set up is set in stone. 

If we examine your last solo album, Scene Memory II… having previously worked to picture, do you prefer to write to some sort of preconceived mental image? 

I haven’t found that useful if I’m not doing that kind of work, but there was a point about 10 years ago where I was bored with what I was coming up with and got introduced to the tradition of modern Chinese ink painting that has its roots in calligraphy and somehow found that way of thinking unlocked something that was really useful. But the single best thing about music and abstract art in general is that you don’t have to put it into words. There’s a quality to so much abstract music that we still don’t have a language for - it can be joyful but melancholy and reflect the mystery of consciousness, but it can also have a great melody and be very immediate. It’s precisely that absence of a definite idea that I like, and ultimately why I do it. 

Is the success of a project defined by you no longer having to return to certain methods you employed to create the music?

It’s a bit of a cliché, but I rarely feel great when I finish something – I feel like it finishes you. Later on, I’ll come back and try to understand whether it was a portrait of some aspect of me at the time, but I find that the whole audio racks and semi-control thing is a really fertile area that I’ll continue to explore. The Krononaut II record is an example of using that architecture but with another musician who doesn’t do that kind of thing at all, so it’s become part of my language in the same way that certain guitars, pedals or bits of outboard have become part of it.

I’m guessing that once you’ve worked with Brian Eno you’re less likely to be intimidated by anybody you subsequently work with. Is there anything specific that you learned from Brian that has freed you as a session player or producer?

Practically, it opened a lot of doors for me, but on the creative side his attitude really changed the way I thought about the music-making process. Brian’s got a real knack for making people feel relaxed, comfortable and happy while doing something that’s intrinsically worthwhile. It has the same quality as when children are playing and learning in that it’s innocent but really focused. He cultivates that atmosphere quite deliberately and I’ve tried to follow his example in my own production work, especially when dealing with individual artists or bands. It’s really like studying with a great teacher, but he’d never take on the air of a teacher and you don’t come away with lessons as such, you just hope that some of that greatness might rub off.

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Text and interview: Danny Turner

Photo courtesy of Steve Gullick