When he talks about music, Alex Ives lights up. There’s a lot to get through: the records that he loves, the places he’s had the chance to play music in, and the people he’s been fortunate enough to release music by. There are so many stories to get through – from the best alternative venue in Bulgaria to the coolest musicians he’s got to meet in his time co-running First Terrace Records – before you’ll hear him talk about his own stuff. For the past five years, Ives has been making music under the name of Specimens, largely putting out drone music. It’s the heavy stuff: the records he’s released in that time have been beautiful but overdriven, drawing together soft textures with disquieting walls of noise. There are allusions to other things in there, from the lounge jazz of Cafe Songs to freer, more loose collaborations. But it’s in ambient music that Ives has found a home: enamored with the genre, and with the potential for experimental sound, this is the music that feels fully him.
Across Ives’ first two records as Specimens, you’ll hear a lot of the ambient composers he was inspired by, living in his music. The refocusing phrases of William Basinski and the soft, suppressed intensities of Lawrence English feature in what’s going on in Sculptures and In the Dust of Idols; the loops and layers of these musicians act like a framework for him, offering a template of drone on which he can place his own experiments. ‘I’m unashamedly trying to come from that school’, he says, inspired by the sideways emotionality of it: ‘Cinematic music is poison to my ears, and these artists can create movements that have the impact of that in a more subtle way’. Both artists eschew the more sentimental leanings of ambient music, which Ives is suspicious of: if the music gets too saccharine, too directly in its feelings, then it’s trying to ‘move you too much’.
It’s obvious that Ives likes to feel, but that he wants to take a scenic route getting there. Talking about his favourite records, he mentions Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up, a willfully fragmented hip-hop record, and Women’s Public Strain, one of the strangest, most elusive noise rock records ever made. He likes the disguises, the musical obfuscations, that live with our emotional experiences: ‘the bits that move me the most are often the bits I don’t know that are moving me’. It’s reflected in his own music, which is unsettling on an almost innate level; ‘I find that people have to ask me to take static out of my music, and I have to battle my natural instinct to create a small bit of discomfort in everything’. The prettiest of Specimens compositions are always holding in something: a perpetual wash of noise lives underneath kinder, more protective layers. ‘It’s not to be abrasive – it’s just a presence for me’.
Ives’ early work comes from this sort of place; it is deeply moving, but it’s hard to identify the reasons why. His debut record Sculptures has an intentional stiffness to it; with resonant sounds and short repetitions, the pieces are like dioramas being observed. But Ives is keen to interrupt that almost aloof sound with moments of action and confrontation. The clicking and breathing percussion of “A Marble Hallway” seems to germinate, appearing and then completely overwhelming the lilting sustained chords he’s set in motion. On the delicate, repetitive “Piano Loops”, texture suddenly peels apart; the piece shifts starkly from its immaculate, immersive production to something almost diegetic, the loops sounding like they’re plumbing away on a broken radio. Talking about his process, Ives says he’s attracted to these contrasts, call them ‘abrasive’, because he wants to key in the listener. He hopes they’ll notice what he has. ‘Where’s the fuck off? Everything needs a little bit of fuck off’. It’s both a challenge and an invitation.
On his second record as Specimens, Ives was challenging himself, creating a record as emotionally draining to create as it is to listen to. Inspired by religious architecture and imagery, and its imposing presence on even the most secular of us, In The Dust of Idols is Ives’ densest record. Rather than blanket noise beneath cleaner drone sound, Ives used the record to foreground his oppressive textures, creating a tome. Dusty and mythic, Idols conjures up reverence and fear, invoking the negative space that exists with faith. The layers Ives builds with on the record make for an impenetrable soundworld, one that fits his explorations of ‘existentialism, and the dread one can feel in the face of an apparently meaningless world’. Ives wanted Idols to be heavy with history, as if it had ‘time stitched into it’, leaving us in its wake. Listening, it’s hard not to feel small.
It’s maybe not the thing you say about an ambient musician, but Ives has a lot of energy. He’s thrilled by the process of making music and ideas seem to spark generously. At the time of writing, he’s in the process of making two new records, both of which sound very different in terms of the concepts applied and the attention required. Though he claims that the most important thing to do with music is to ‘have fun’, he gets animated talking about the music that took the longest to pull off, the stuff he put in big hours over. He describes the process “The Unread Library”, a phenomenal collaboration with cellist Charlotte de Burgh-Holder, in which he had to learn new recording techniques and confront the reality of scoring an instrument he hadn’t interacted with much before. At the same time, Ives loves working on a less particular level: his most recent record Cafe Songs exists on a whim, created as a challenge to see if he could escape his more structured writing process. It’s an ambient album with the energy of a school music room session: Ives picks up his instruments and plays around with them.
Cafe Songs is so far removed from what Ives has made before. It was made up on the sly, celebrating the music you play absent-mindedly when you’ve got an instrument in your hands. ‘Guitar is my first instrument, and when I pick it up, I’ll always play the same chords on it and mess about, without thinking. You can make that sound nice!’. For Cafe Songs, he dusted off his old guitar as well as an alto sax (‘I just wanted to be able to play it in tune!’, he says of his horn playing), making them not features of the record but the core of it. The result is a smoky, ‘noir jazz’ vibe, a messed up inversion of a chill lounge setting. It’s different from the other records: Ives situates it in a specific place, rather than between layers of interconnected sound. There are cadences and pauses; there are moments, little seconds of time where things stop, like a lull in conversation. The saxophone plays melodies; the guitar speaks in full stop sentences.
Cafe Songs belongs to a place, and as a result is maybe Ives most transporting work to date: ‘I like to feel like I’m in the room’, he says, pointing to some of the records he’s released as one half of First Terrace Records, where the ambient sounds of buildings and studios talk back to the performer. Created amongst the backdrop of activism against racist police brutality and the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the record uses its environment to strike a pointedly ironic tone, taking the balmy, vibes-y aesthetic of its ‘cafe’ setting and imposing on it a music of foreboding and lament. Ives likes to view his records as ‘snapshots’, and the record sounds as immediate as a first take. Picking up the instrument really did something: it gave him a different way of creating music, one that prioritises the things you play straight off the bat. He describes it as ‘getting out of the cocoon’, learning to lay it out bare.
Though his music can be heady and conceptual, Ives is low-key about the way he approaches it. He doesn’t have any grand ideas about experimental music, other than that it should be enjoyed, and by everyone. For him, it’s the connections that hit harder than the music – the record gets made so it can be toured, performed and shared, so that experiences can grow from the ideas that exist on it. Collaboration is a massive thing for him: along with featuring instrumentalists on his first two Specimens records, his upcoming work Intersections sees him creating new work alongside some of his favourite musicians. ‘It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I just wanted to think about musicians I like and ask myself, how cool would it be if we made some music together?’. Perhaps as a result, the record goes hard, the artists bigging each other up over six euphorically reverberating pieces. The music of Specimens doesn’t end in the bedroom studio: it’s meant for more. ‘You can make something that’s hella produced, and that’s cool’, says Ives, ‘but I really want to feel what you’ve put into it. I want it to feel human’.