Name: Simon Goff
Nationality: British
Occupation: Composer, producer
Current release: Simon Goff's new album Interior Realms is out via Sonic Pieces.

If you enjoyed this Simon Goff interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and bandcamp. 



In the past, music was often written specifically for certain places or with certain types of rooms in mind. Why do you think has this way of thinking about music and sound gradually been lost — and what has been lost with it?

I think in the past the way that people experienced music primarily was live, so the composer would write with that in mind. Today listening to music is so devoid of space.

When writing Interior Realms I had this idea to play with the theme of chamber music. This led my writing to develop in a specific way but also got me thinking about the actual rooms where music is captured and this led me to the unique recordings that we made.

Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

I've experienced two anechoic chambers. First at Neumann, where they test all their mics and it was a very strange experience.

The second was for testing speaker systems. It was much bigger and not a perfect anechoic chamber as it had a concrete floor. The lack of reflections is very disorientating though. You really only hear what is put into the space. As John Cage observed, there is no such thing as silence. When no other sound exists, you can hear the blood running through your body.

The Wasserspeicher where we did some of the recording for Interior Realms was very much an extreme acoustic too. I’m also just about to travel to the Czech Republic to record in the tunnels connected to the metro in Prague. There is a long 200m circular tunnel that we will capture the sound of to use in the score, plus record some vocals there and see how the space reacts.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound, space and music?

It depends heavily on the quality of the equipment and the room. I have a very standard stereo set up at home but I love checking music here as it is a very good barometer for how something is sitting in relation to other music I listen to.

Listening is not an objective experience, often the way we feel, how comfortable we are, the people we are with, all of these things can affect how we hear.

Already before picking up work on Interior Realms, had there been everyday places and spaces which intrigued you by the way they sound?

I've worked in studios for years and the different rooms records get made in are fascinating. Some of the best studios in the world have very imperfect rooms but this often is what gives that studio a particular feel.

I've also been fascinated by concert halls and how they are designed. Modern concert halls where everything can be adjusted to change reverberation times or the Musikverein in Wien which is largely considered the best concert hall in the world for orchestral music.

There is also an art museum near Düsseldorf called Museum Insel Hombroich and I've always wanted to do a recording there as some of the pavilions there have fascinating acoustics.

The press release mentions that the record grew out of your love for chamber music. In which way?

I wanted to explore writing for individual voices and combine them. Beethoven is said to have thought writing for string quartet was far harder than writing for symphony orchestra because everything becomes so exposed.

I decided to give myself 8 voices, four strings and 4 mono synths. I used this restriction to write new music which I played for the first time in an in-store performance at the record store of the label Sonic Pieces and these pieces became the Dream Sequences.

What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music and how did you pick the four locations for Interior Realms?

Whenever I have an acoustic with a very long reverb it is fascinating to play in as a string player. I have used looping as a technique in my music for a long time and when you have a room with a very long reverb the room can act as a looper, allowing you to play with the sound captured and hanging in the reverb.

For Interior Realms all the music started life in my studio where I have everything set up to write a lot by improvisation. I had heard about these spaces for a long time but never got the chance to record there. With this music it felt like it made sense to try.

I was aware of the Wasserspeicher from living in Prenzlauer Berg when I first moved to Berlin. Some of my favourite artists I have met here have made beautiful records in Grunewald church and I first went there when I was working on a recording session for Jóhann Jóhannsson with Víkingur Ólafsson.

I became aware of the Sound Mirrors in the UK when I released my first solo album 'Vale'.



Tell me a little more about the spaces you recorded the album at, please.

The Wasserspeicher is a really incredible space.

Originally designed to hold water that fed an inner city reservoir, it is now an empty space that creates a 14 second reverb. It is made up of a series of concentric brick hallways and has in recent years served as a music venue and cultural space. The long reverb makes it an incredibly unique place to record music.



The Grunewald Church is a church located in the Berlin neighbourhood of Grunewald in the south west. It's a beautiful leafy green part of Berlin and the church has been home to many great records.

I first became aware of it after I took part in a recording session there and had always wanted to return to record my own music. The reverb there is much more controlled than the Wasserspeicher and it made for a perfect counterpart in the creation of this record.

The Sound Mirror was something I became aware of in the process of my first record and we originally took pictures there for press, as it was a fitting backdrop for Vale which harked back to my first years in Berlin and the process of leaving the UK.



These Sound Mirrors are situated at a few sites along the English coast and were originally used to hear far off planes approaching across the channel. I really wanted to return to record here and capture the sound of the mirror. We did many field recordings there and one of them made it on to the record as the track Jet.

You hear a jet plane which passed whilst we were recording. This is something we were completely unaware of but only heard it later when listening back to the audio.

In which way was the compositional process different this time compared to your earlier, (possibly) less site-inspired work?

It varies quite a lot on this record.

Some of the music was written before I stepped foot in these locations and on those tracks the location is more a production element, less of a compositional element but very integral to how the music is presented. Other tracks were written purely in the locations or parts that became their own in these spaces.

Recording in locations like this gives so much to a creative process.

How did the recording locations concretely influence the pieces?

The space that you perform music in absolutely affects how and what you play. At its most simple, phrase length can change in a space with a very wet sound.

For me what a space definitely influences is the experience of that music in that moment. A record is just that, a record of time. These recordings capture moments of me creating and playing this music in these locations.

Would you say that the same score performed in different spaces is still the same piece?

Playing these pieces in other locations may not change the composition per se, but it absolutely changes the experience. Every new location is the opportunity to craft a new experience for the listener.

On Interior Realms there is one piece which purely came out of the experience of recording in the Wasserspeicher. “First Night” is an improvisation done on the first night of recording. We stayed there late recording and this track is just a selection of the material that we captured that night.



Playing solo in that space was magical. The architecture itself became as much of an instrument as the viola I was playing.