Robbie Thomson on XFRMR

When The Skinny contact Robbie Thomson to talk about his electrifying XFRMR project, set to appear at this year’s Sonica festival in Glasgow, he’s at the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Art in Morelia. “We’re just here for a couple of weeks making some new work… [for] another show called Infinite Lives that’s going to be at Sonica,” he tells us.

At the core of all of his work for Sonica is his fascination with science. For Infinite Lives he’ll be working with robotics and microscopes on stage to challenge the limits of perception; and with XFRMR, he’s found a way to harness the power of the Tesla coil to make music. We’re fascinated too.

Early on in our chat, we confess that for weeks in the lead up to seeing XFRMR performed as part of the Edinburgh Fringe this year, we’d been pronouncing it ‘ex-farmer’, and that it wasn’t until we were told “the house is now open for ‘Transformer’” that we even realised our embarrassing faux pas. “I know, it’s a stupid name,” Thomson says with a laugh. “It’s totally unpronounceable so it’s fair enough… just whatever works.”

The Tesla coil, invented in 1891 by Nikola Tesla, is an electrical resonant transformer (there it is!) circuit. It’s used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity, and it makes electricity visible, which is pretty cool. “Tesla as a figure is pretty interesting in his own right,” Thomson says when we ask how he became involved with the coil. “He’s got all this mythology around him, and all this weird conspiracy theory type stuff that goes with that territory. So I think he’s just a really interesting character.

“I’d seen the Tesla coil used in classic science fiction horror type stuff,” he says before excitedly remembering, “Actually, I think it was in Coffee and Cigarettes, The White Stripes have got one… So anyway, I knew about it… I knew you were able to tune it, and I’d seen people online that had made them play Super Mario Bros and stuff like this. But it was always quite a monotonal, flat sound that they were getting out of it, so it was kind of interesting to see if it would be possible to make it a bit more musical and expressive as an instrument.”

Live, paired with impressive projected visuals, Thomson manipulates the Tesla coil to create otherworldly soundscapes. At The Leith Volcano in August he took us on an experimental and intricate industrial journey through sound which, at times, was cosmically ethereal or overwhelmingly punishing, but it was the perfect dancefloor beats and bleeps he was able to create that were most impressive.

“In terms of being able to control it, it’s pretty easy, you’ve just got an audio interface so you can send it any audio signal you want and it’ll convert it into a signal that it basically understands, so it starts interrupting the frequency of the bursts and the frequency of the sparks, and that’s where you get the different tones… You can hook your synths up to it, or laptop or whatever.”

While the coil itself is quite small, it’s the Faraday cage – a safety precaution “to prevent electromagnetic interference getting out” – surrounding it which takes up all the room. “Rehearsing with it, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass because it needs the cage,” and even though “it does run off a normal socket in the wall… like a kettle,” it’s not something he can rehearse in the house, so he uses The Glue Factory in Glasgow as a practice space.

“It doesn’t really have a volume control, so it has to be on full blast... so I have to end up rehearsing when everybody else has left. It [also] creates ozone and some other gases as a byproduct of the sparks, so you have to keep it pretty well ventilated or else you start getting a sore throat and stuff like this – so yeah, there are a few health risks with it,” he tells us. It’ll therefore come as no surprise that the show comes with a ‘may interfere with pacemakers’ warning. Thomson assures us, “it would be very unlikely that anybody would be affected to be honest, but you know you’ve got to play it on the safe side… if it’s not interfering with the speakers and the lights and the computers and stuff, then it’s probably going to be okay for a pacemaker, but you never know.”

As well as the UK, Thomson has so far performed XFRMR in Australia, France, Indonesia, Serbia and Mexico to name a few, and tells us the hardest thing about travelling with the Tesla coil: “If you had to draw a cartoon of what a bomb looks like, then that’s kind of what it looks like. I’ve had people at customs opening it up and getting really worried and panicking and running around and calling for back-up,” he laughs. “It’s covered in high voltage stickers so it just looks really dodgy, and you can’t exactly turn it on to prove it’s safe ‘cause it’s definitely not safe,” he laughs again, “so I have to show people videos. Usually that’s alright, and they’re like ‘aw, cool, right!’”

Thomson’s XFRMR performance at Sonica will be the coil’s first public outing in Glasgow since its appearance at Sub Club for Optimo in 2015, and promises to be an exhilarating and, quite literally, electrifying show. We ask Thomson if he’ll ever put out a physical release as XFRMR? “I’d really like to,” he starts. “The thing with the Tesla coil is that I don’t know how well it translates when it’s just recorded and it’s not a live thing and you’re not there and you can’t see the sparks...  I think when you hear the recordings and then you actually experience it physically, it’s really different.”

We joke that maybe he needs to put out a visual album like Beyonce’s Lemonade? Laughing, he responds “R’n’B bangers the whole record, nice.” You heard it here first!

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XFRMR will be performed at Tramway, Glasgow, 1 Nov
Infinite Lives will be performed at Tramway, Glasgow, 26-28 Oct
Sonica 2017 runs from 26 Oct - 5 Nov, more info at sonic-a.co.uk