Jason Campbell's Field Recordings Are An Elegy for Newcastle's Industrial History

Jason Campbell is a man who in the past has operated under a few different masks. We've spoken to him about his work as Collector, a punishing hardware techno project out of Newcastle, and before that he was Stitched Vision; a foggy, gurgling swamp of synth noise.

Now Jason is stepping out and releasing the first work under his own name. Titled A Death At The Steelworks, the work is less dogmatically electronic as snippets of field recordings flirt with synth rumbles and acoustic instrumentation. The result is something much closer to musique concrète than anything Jason has done in the past, and it's hauntingly beautiful.

To accompany the release, Jason has worked with visual artist Joshua Andrews on a video titled Religious Iconography Adorns The Hall. 

Watch the video below and read a recent conversation we had with Jason.

Noisey: Was there a reason you chose to align this project closer to you personally?
Jason Campbell: This seems to me like a meeting point between my past and current projects in a musical sense and also because this release is dedicated to something quite intimate. I developed the idea for this release about a year ago on a flight back from Melbourne. I wrote down a fairly rough sketch of what I wanted to do in my iPhone, but put it on the back-burner as I was focusing my time on various Collector releases. I had been sitting on a lot of pre-recorded material but I needed time to collate it into a cohesive whole to make sense of it all. The album has a lot of human sounds buried in the layers too, so perhaps it's fitting that it is credited by name and not alias.

What prompted you to move into this new musical direction, and how long have you been working on this project for?
I've been working toward this project for around a year, on and off. I have always pursued field recording techniques and I think some of this is hinted at in my Collector recordings, but definitely more overtly so in this recent work. In my spare time I try and explore different abandoned zones and in Newcastle we have heaps of them. There are a lot of industrial wastelands and I think that it is important to utilise recordings that are contextually aligned with the overall piece that is being created. Many of the compositions contain field recordings taken from the former BHP Steelworks site itself. It wasn't a conscious effort to draw on a wider palate of sound sources but more a textural investigation I guess. The juxtaposition between synthetic and acoustic sound can be so disconcerting and I think that's what appeals to me.

You've previously worked with Joshua Andrews on art for one of your Collector albums. Can you tell me a bit about your relationship with each other's work?
Josh is a close friend of mine and I think that is reflected in our collaborations. We share a lot of tastes both musically and visually which is essential. He is a graphic designer by trade so he has a keen eye but is also such a talented artist in his own right. I approached him to edit a video knowing that he had been shooting a lot of Super8 footage up on the mid north coast of NSW of his family and friends. I wanted something uniquely personal to compliment the music that I was creating at the time, a bare bones document of intimate relationships. I couldn't be more pleased with his work.

The recording is coming out through Toronto label Summer Isle. How did that come about?
I had talked to Max and Rita firstly about issuing some new recordings that I had been working on as Collector, but they instead encouraged me to pursue the material that I had worked on for the Mazurka compilation, The First Thing that you want is the Last Thing that you Need. I have been a long term admirer of the label – not just of the music, but the overall aesthetic and how carefully curated each batch of releases are. I'm excited to be involved in the continual evolution of the label, for sure.

'A Death at the Steelworks' is available now through Summer Isle.