In Conversation #2
We at ACL have been fans of Aho Ssan since 2020’s Simulacrum, and Rhizomes topped several of our 2023 lists. The Parisian producer has featured in two recent interviews with ACL, the first conducted by me, in advance of his performance at Montreal’s AKOUSMA festival last fall, and the second with David, published earlier this week. David’s complete interview is reproduced here, and the transcript of my discussion with Aho Ssan, is included after the break for paid subscribers.
The Feeling of Everything ~ An Interview With Aho Ssan
Aho Ssan is a key player of French experimental music, and has garnered wide international attention for his felt, yet richly philosophical approach to sound assemblage. His last album, Rhizomes, was among our favorite albums of 2023. We talked to the artist mostly over voice notes, so the interview you’re about to read is a transcript of the exchange (a part of it from December 2023, another from March 2024). It has been formatted for clarity, with editorial additions mostly marking interventions from the interviewer for the sake of text flow and coherence.
David Murrieta Flores (ACL): Hello Aho Ssan! Could you please talk a bit about yourself and your background as a musician for our readers?
Aho Ssan (AS): I live in Paris, born and raised. I didn’t learn music at school, I’m an autodidact. [However] I [studied] mathematics, [computing], design and cinema. I make electronic and electroacoustic music. I work with a computer through different software, like Max/MSP, Ableton, and by making my own patches with electronic synthesizers, digital synthesizers. And yeah, that’s it!
ACL: I would like to kick off the interview by talking a bit about Simulacrum. Could you please explain how you understand this concept or what it means to you, and how you applied it through/in your music?
AS: Actually, I read Simulacra and Simulation thanks to a friend, while I was studying mathematics and information science at Orsay university. It was really a struggle at the beginning, but two years afterwards, when I opened it again it just crystallized in front of me; all the elements and concepts of the book were really tied to my life, at that moment. So the whole thing with reality, point of view, and capitalism: everything was synchronized at that moment with my life.
My grandfather was a really good musician, and was doing high life, afrobeat kind of music like 60 years ago, and at the time my mother had spoken to me about his trumpet, which was lost, but appeared in different houses across my family. Just like – one day, someone just found the trumpet [laughs] and the next day the trumpet is not there anymore, [but then] another member of my family just found it [again], and, you know, so and so on. At this moment I was like “this is really crazy”, I needed to find a way to simulate the music of my grandfather that I had never listened to, and find the way to talk about my roots, my family, and what I was living through. The stresses, living in the suburbs, the feeling of everything, as well as some choices I was making at this moment in my life to give me more chances at doing music. The choices were about more time for me to do music, but [it meant] less stability, financially, so yeah, the concept of simulacra was in my life at this moment. It is hard for me to talk about it, because it was not that important to talk about Simulacra and Simulation, in the terms the book was talking about them, it was more about attitude, about making [the concept] my own.
It’s crazy because last week [about the second week of December 2023] I met Marie, the wife of Baudrillard, and it was totally unreal [laughs]. It is hard for me to believe that I was with her for like half a day, talking about how Baudrillard was amazing, how he changed a lot of things in my life – and hers as well, of course – and how his book makes other connections, [such as, perhaps,] even the start of a friendship.
ACL: In the liner notes and elsewhere you’ve mentioned that this work relates your own experience of growing up with racism in France. How did the concept of the simulacrum help you to approach this topic?
AS: I try as much as possible to talk about experiences I have had, living in the suburbs in France, doing mathematics, physics, computing, then cinema, and how it was really difficult for me to feel in the right place a lot of the time. Same thing when I was going back to Africa, coming from France, I had the feeling that I was not in the right places. So that’s why I try to put in music the fact that I was struggling to find my place, but at the same time, the best way to find was to learn about myself and about my family, where I come from, my roots. To talk with my friends, actually, about things like these. Even in terms of music, I was listening to a lot of electroacoustic and experimental music, and I didn’t feel [there were] a lot of people like me, Black people doing this kind of music. So I try, as much as possible, to put things about myself [in music] – for example, my brother was a big fan of hip hop, so I try to crystallize the music I was listening to throughout the years, [seeking to] incorporate moments of my life within electronic and electroacoustic musical arts. That was my main goal, just try to make the music I want to listen to, trying to crystallize the place I was at this time.
ACL: Simulacrum brings together distinct styles and electronic methods. Baudrillard at some point in “Simulacra and Simulations” talks about the arrested existence of the real as an indifference between the synthesis of various models of reality and reality itself – everything is connected, and yet those connections reveal nothing of substance that could help distinguish between the things themselves. Is there a relationship between the genre-crossovers and this problem in your work? What is the role of synthesis in this?
AS: [I was] going out in France, getting exposed to a lot of music, to a lot of European music, and I was going back home to be exposed to a bunch of African jazz, high life, afrobeat, Cuban music… my parents listened to jazz, my brother to hip hop, my sister to electropop, and so on. My family was a big part of my musical journey, so I try as much as possible to express myself, three or four years ago. How I was feeling, how I was connected to the music I was exposed to, why I like this kind of music, why I like this kind of motif, so I studied and actually tried to understand my context at this moment. I also use technology, patches like Max/MSP with midi; also, because there are no samples in Simulacrum, I tried to use midi information sometimes, from percussions, from rhythm [instruments], from other music. I was really into it in order to appropriate myself. So I don’t think it was synthesized in terms of [instrumental] synthesizer, but more in terms of taste and education in music. But of course, I was using Max/MSP to simulate, so it’s totally related – synthesized – but I think it was really important for me to connect all these genres, because the more I was connected to the music that made me, the more I was connected to myself. I just bought a book by Baudrillard where he’s talking about unique objects and how increasingly […] everyone is listening to the same things, [so the question is] how you can make unique objects. In my head, I was trying to talk about, as much as possible, for myself and for my family and friends, to try as hard as I could to make these unique kinds of objects. I can say it’s unique, but because it’s myself, like talking about myself and how it is – I don’t know how to say it – how it will be connected to myself. In terms of genre I was listening to a lot of stuff, so that’s why I think the relationship of genres is really important in my music. It seems more real for me when I’m talking about myself, that’s what I’m trying to say.
ACL: You imagined your grandfather’s band and layered this electronic invention within the last two tracks of the album. Following Baudrillard, what sort of relationship to the real did you envision with that “technified” version of a memory that exists only partially (since you have no access to his recordings)?
AS: Great question, I’ve never thought about it, but I will try to respond to it. Having told you the story of the trumpet, I always had the feeling that my grandpa was still with us, and was trying to connect in different ways. So trying to simulate his music was my way to connect with him. I never listened to any music by him, it’s just trying to imagine it and also give shape to the conversation I had with my mother about him. I was trying to imagine how his music would be if he was still there right now, and connect to the present, not the past. So I don’t know if it’s a hyperreal device, it was really just an emotional device, trying to make something for myself.
I think, [in terms of] personal memory, I was more focused [on] musical experiments related to my family and also my situation, my condition in France. [The work was] based more on experience than memory. […] I was trying to convey something about the different music from the world that my family put in my ears. Technology helped me a lot, as I told you I’m not a trained artist, so I used a different way for analyzing music I love and then work with. Trying to understand the technology gives me some answers about why I love [certain] music. For example, in some of that music there are things like the relationship between semitones [I could see thanks to technology], so technology was more like [a set of] tools to express my memory, or to take the music from my memory — all the information — to develop something new. I never sample in my music, there are no samples; I didn’t choose samples from music I love or whatever. I’m not classically trained, so I have a lot of work to do, and technology gives me these tools for knowing “oh, this is the chord that I want” […]. So it gives me the exact chord, the exact suite, so I can analyze and use it for my own music.
ACL: How did you become interested in philosophy?
AS: I’m not sure how it happened, but I have been really into films for a long time. The field was into it, and [in my studies] we had a lot of philosophy, called “point of view”, in reference to the nouvelle vague in French cinema. So while at university my friends gave me a Baudrillard book and I got really into philosophy, and we even tried to learn philosophy at the same time, but it was too much for us. So we attended specific courses, and we were talking about subjects I don’t remember any more because it was like 15 years ago, but it was really important for me, I spent a lot of time talking about philosophy. So I think it was a bit of cinema, and also school, where these specific courses were a really good way to dive into it.
ACL: How do you conceive of the relation between philosophy and music? How do you see it in your work? Is it something to do with translation, with praxis, perhaps something else?
AS: I think it’s not easy to talk about the relationship between them. I feel like music has its own language, and philosophy too. I feel like, for example, the difference between Simulacrum and Rhizomes is that I try as much as possible to use voices, to use poetry, something that did not fit the earlier because it was only instrumental, and I feel like philosophy for me is actually a creative space from which I can really enjoy making music. Because I feel like I always need something exciting to make music, I can’t just go on my computer and make it. I need a concept, I need something that drives my motivation and so, I feel like philosophy or even politics are good drivers for that. For Rhizomes it was amazing, because the whole concept changed the process. So the philosophy changed the process. It’s not easy to talk about the relationship, but it’s there and they’re [deeply] connected for me.
ACL: I think it’s a good time to talk about Rhizomes, your latest release. The concept relates to connections, and I think it’s possible to see it in opposition to that of the simulacrum; one builds a new positive real, the other a negative one. In a way, this is reflected in the trajectory of both albums – a solo album with an invented collaboration, and then an essentially collaborative album. Conceptually and philosophically speaking, what would you say are the main differences between both?
AS: There are a lot of differences, for sure. In Rhizomes I was mainly trying to put myself less and less in the center, in the middle, and trying to learn to lose myself a bit. It’s different to Simulacrum because I was in charge of all the decisions, almost everything I was working with. [In Rhizomes] there are so many decisions not made by me, but together, and that’s a big difference. There is something to the conversation [between artists] that changed the output and the process, and philosophically it was something I was really into, and that I needed, actually, for myself, but also because the pandemic was really hard for everyone. It was the best way to still be excited about stuff, to connect with other people, so it was drastically different from Simulacrum.
ACL: In an interview for The Quietus you talked about the concept of the rhizome in terms of collective flourishing and collaboration, so my question would be: in more concrete terms, what were your objectives, aesthetically and also politically, with each of these collaborations?
AS: There is a lot, actually. I think the big difference, something I was looking for was how to incorporate more vocals. Taking [the concept of] the rhizome and [the writings of] Edouard Glissant, everything becomes about poetry, so I could incorporate vocal elements in my own aesthetic. It was really important, politically-speaking it was about connecting with people and trying to find the best way to be one, at the end of the day. One, you know, at a distance, going in the same direction. So trying to lose myself, to learn. Since it’s my album, with my name on it, it was really exciting to learn to lose myself in the process, in order to take back control of it [afterward], as a different [kind of] text. It was really enriching for me and definitely each collaboration was really something different. I was trying to work with people I love, and to work really deeply with love as [another character in the album]. There are so many different languages! I was trying to integrate different languages in collage – singing in French, in English, in Vietnamese, so I was also trying to find a way to mix languages within the genre of poetry and by sharing the experience of another.
ACL: Given your career in cinema, I’d like to ask you about montage and music. Do you approach combination or synthesis in music like you do in film? What is potentially rhizomatic about one or the other that makes them similar or distinct?
AS: I would say the similitude begins with the fact that I learned about dramaturgy, and then about music and cinema in general. So for example, in Simulacrum I try to [give drama] to the album, so in the “Intro” and the “Outro” I’m showing an evolution of the character of the drumming. It is something that in film they use a lot; a character has its own theme, so it’s something I did in Simulacrum to show and exhibit the journey of this character, to show its evolution. I do the same in Rhizomes, for example, with the first and last rhizomes, in terms of the similitude of style and motif but now totally changed. A track like “Cold Summer” is a track in three acts: you have the beginning element, climax and resolution, it’s something I really love to do in music. Where and when you put a silence changes the whole dramaturgy. So I think my way to make music and my way to make cinema are very similar. I would say that montage is more abstract, more instant, just a montage of different frequencies. I’m not trained as a musician, so it’s really the dramatic – “oh, I can feel all the emotions” that the frequencies give me when they are all together, or when I leave a silence there, [that are key]. I would say it’s not just cinema, but also just emotion for me.
ACL: Do you conceive of a difference between hybrid and synthesis?
AS: Not really. Actually, I’m not thinking about it when I’m making music, thinking about differences between them. It’s more about the emotion in the music. How these sounds sound for me and how they give me a sensation or not, how they give me this way to just lose myself into it. It’s more connected to emotion and response [to it] than hybrid and synthesis, to me.
It is always really difficult for me to talk about emotion. I have the intention to [provoke] certain emotions in people, but I know everyone has their own way of thinking, it’s so personal. After Simulacrum I had so many conversations with people telling me what they were seeing or feeling during a concert, [and] it changed my way of seeing the relationship between music and experience a bit. But personally, yeah, [emotion] was definitely one of the most important things in the music. It was using some effects, some tools to [provoke] a specific emotion. It’s not random that I’m using a lot of saturation or a lot of harsh sounds, a lot of high frequencies. It’s because it was part of this concept and everything I was feeling about being black in France. So of course I can’t say like “oh I want it to be […] uncomfortable [for everyone]”, but it was my way to [develop] this relationship between something that can be felt as beautiful and also threatening. The balance between the silence and the loud part is something really important for emotion. After all, [when I made] Simulacrum it took time for me to express well what I was trying to say. Before that I felt a bit speechless, so it was important that there was no such thing as vocals in the album.
However, the difference between silence and loudness is part of my personal emotion. I’m quiet most of the time, but I’m inside an emotion. It also has something to do with a personal taste in music. I really love beautiful orchestral music, so while I was trying to [provoke] all these emotions in a package – montage, as you said – it was really important for me to bring this moment of beauty to listeners. Because, almost at the end, it has to be peaceful and beautiful as a way to say there is some hope. I hope! [laughs]
ACL: What sorts of emotions inhabit your work?
AS: It’s been a while since I did Simulacrum now, but there are things that are still around in many ways. It’s about music. Music has its own way to be expressed, and I have my taste in music, always trying to input the music I love into my work. So I think it’s a mixed thing, [on one side] about the really emotional music I want to do, using tools not usually reserved for making emotional music, and [on the other] about musical experience, just the musical experience. I feel like the music that touches me the most is the music where you have to be really active in a way. It’s not something you can put at the back of your conversation or whatever and just enjoy. It’s really hard to say, but it’s about how to be quite active – you have to listen, you have to fall into it, to really take the emotion, to have the experience as it’s supposed to be had.
Talking about emotion is difficult! Simulacrum was so specific in many ways, [and yet] it was also about unknown places. A lot of people were telling me “oh, I feel like I’m in a desert”, or “I feel like I’m in this place”, and a lot of the times they were kind of dystopian, lost places. I was really happy about that, because I was totally [looking for] it. Not really dystopia, though, which feels a bit old now. More like the connection between unknown places, totally lost. Where I grew up, there are beautiful things in the suburbs, but it can also feel like being in the middle of nowhere.
ACL: This is all so provocative – since emotion is key in your work, when you talk about both losing yourself and connecting with others, does it mean being overpowered by those emotions, or does it mean maybe something more controlled?
AS: I think it’s very different, because the emotions in Simulacrum and Rhizomes are different. Simulacrum is more like a lonely place, Rhizomes is totally a connective place, [of] friends, family. [Now] I’m not saying that because it’s family and friends it’s a happy place, but it’s two different emotions. I think I was more overpowered by the emotions in Simulacrum and more in control of them in Rhizomes, just because they were two different contexts, two different outputs. Using my personal experience and then using the collective experience makes things just different in so many ways. But usually while making music I’m trying to be lost in my emotions, and increasingly I’m lost into them and then the work. Then I feel [further] connected to the work. The fact that I was more in control with Rhizomes was because the process was longer, it was a long process. Simulacrum was just me in my room two months, almost going insane, putting the music so loud to be in the zone; there are so many different layers, so many different instruments in Rhizomes, and that gave me more control over it. Usually, though, I love just getting into the vibe and just… I feel it’s the safest place, the most effective way to express what I want to in music. Mixed emotions, different levels of interpretations. Music gives me these tools for developing different points of view.
ACL: Finally, I would like to ask: what role does technology, in this case perhaps the mechanical aspect of electroacoustic music, play in these conceptions of synthesis and montage?
AS: I would say that technology is really important to me, otherwise I would not be able to express myself in this way. I’m not trained to play an instrument, so my vision begins with technology. I would say I’m not too focused on it, but without it I couldn’t work. It’s more related to how I can lose myself, giving me an emotion, how I can think about something, and that it can lead me into a really specific mental place. That’s how I see sounds and how I try to layer them: to put the listener in a specific mental space or emotion. In terms of electroacoustic music – I love experimental music and noise, they give me goosebumps [laughs] – I always try to find the best balance between melody, noise, and silence. Because when you put a lot of dynamics or a high volume or intensity I feel like it’s always good to go back to silence. That’s what I love about the music I listen to in general, artists like Valerio Tricoli, who make music that’s sometimes close to silence. Every element is really important to give – to put you – in a specific mood, and yeah, I really love thinking about balance between different elements, whether noise or electroacoustic ones.
ACL: Thank you so much for your time, Aho Ssan. Is there something you’d like to say to our readers before we close up the interview?
AS: I don’t know what to say [laughs]. I guess “thank you” to the people who take the time to listen to my music, and who read about the process behind it. It’s amazing for me, I can’t thank all the artists [in Rhizomes] enough, people who gave me their time, who trusted the process and gave me the material. I can’t thank them enough for that. And of course, thank you David for putting this interview together.
A Closer Look: AKOUSMA 2023
Shortly after the release of his stunning new collaborative album, Rhizomes, Aho Ssan presented a live diffusion of The Falling Man at Montreal’s Akousma immersive digital music festival. He had previously presented the Rhizomes A/V show at Berlin Atonal, but Akousma emphasizes multichannel diffusions, encouraging experimentation with different modes of presenting live music. The Falling Man was produced at Paris’s GRM studios, and while elements of that track appear on the album, it is a distinct work from Rhizomes, exploring the sensation of falling as a means of processing grief. Akousma affords artists the rare opportunity of presenting immersive works such as this which simply don’t translate to stereo listening.
Aho Ssan closed out the festival with The Falling Man, a 24’ minute composition recorded at Paris’s GRM studio. Some elements from Rhizomes, released by Nico Jaar’s Other People label, appear in The Falling Man, but the works are otherwise completely distinct. Like his 2020 debut Simulacrum, Rhizomes is full of dynamic bass and abrasive textures. Both records are similarly grounded in philosophical concepts; while the former captured his experiences growing up Black in the Parisian banlieue and connecting with the music of the Ghanaian grandfather he’d never met, Rhizomes explores non-hierarchical means of collaboration, and features a number of high profile guests including Jaar, Clipping., and Moor Mother.
The opportunity to record at GRM did afford some new opportunities, including working with synthesizers for the first time, but simply being at the epicenter of French electroacoustic music was a dream come true. He tells me, “I’m really related to [that] music, I’m a huge fan of electroacoustic music, it’s one of the I think music I’m listening the most in general in my life.” He mentions the work of Bernard Parmegiani and especially Iannis Xenakis, as they share a background in science, as particularly influential. Working in the GRM studios presented an invaluable window into their working methods, allowing him to better understand how such music was made. “You know, when you listen to some pieces from Xenakis you understand more what they were using at this time and it’s yeah it’s so inspiring, the freedom of it.”
The Aho Ssan project began with the debut of Simulacrum at Atonal in 2019, a performance which was very well-received and added to the buzz for that record’s impending release. He had previously worked on soundtracks for films, as early as a 2015 score for a film by Ingha Mago. Film scoring is a kind of collaboration, of course, but the success of Simulacrum created more opportunities to collaborate with other musicians, and even with the artist Kim Grano, who produced the art / lyric book edition of Rhizomes. Working with Exald S on “Wondertomb” and then with KMRU on 2022’s Limen opened up possibilities for further collaborations, particularly with vocalists. Aho Ssan explains, “I grew up with music with vocals, I’m a huge fan of rap music, of pop and R&B.” Exposed to rap music through his older brother, he was drawn to beat makers such as Black Milk and J Dilla, but he recognized the importance of the interplay between the rapper and the producer. With Rhizomes he pushes these experiments between vocals and music in entirely new directions, with means as varied as his collaborators.
The Falling Man was inspired in part by the famous photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks, but the tragic fate of that unknown victim is used as a means to explore a more personal loss. “One of my best friends… died a few years ago, so I was trying to talk about grief, to experiment [with] this kind of falling sentiment in the music.” Elements of “Rhizome I,” both of Josefa Ntjam’s vocals and parts of the track, as well as of Lafawndah’s vocals from “Rhizome II,” are used in The Falling Man, but the result is wholly independent from Rhizomes. The Falling Man was produced as a multichannel composition, and putting the listeners in the center of the work in this way allowed Aho Ssan to push his work in new directions. “My music is kind of maximalist in different ways, with sound design and also harmony, so it’s really cool to have the possibility to stack some different textures in different spaces and give them their own spaces, and their own life, and it’s really different than when you do it with stereo,” which he compares to the difference between admiring a flat picture and three dimensional object.
Working with immersive sound made it possible to explore the sensation of falling in a way that isn’t quite as impactful in stereo, while the spatialization tempered somewhat those maximalist tendencies. Even so, The Falling Man was the most dynamic composition I heard at Akousma this year, a welcome exploration not only of bass frequencies but also driving rhythmic beats rarely encountered on multichannel systems. It was an intense experience as one would expect from a work exploring grief and mourning, but with clear narrative cohesion and a proper denouement.
The titles of Simulacrum and Rhizomes make explicit reference to concepts from 20th century French theory, and while he says that Limen is not intended as an explicit philosophical reference, its concept fits this pattern. Simulacrum comes from Jean Baudrillard, while the concept of rhizomes comes from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, having gained additional currency in recent years as so many have become interested in mycology. But there is always a subversive aspect in Aho Ssan’s use of philosophical concepts. Beyond the connection with D&G, he also evokes the French Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant, who theorized hybridity long before white Euro-American thinkers coined the term “postmodern.” Inspired by the creativity of Glissant’s poetry, Aho Ssan explains that, “as I did for Simulacrum, my idea was not just to talk about rhizomes from a direct point of view, but take my experience of it and try to do something new from it.”
In the same way then, despite the explicit reference to 9/11, the title of The Falling Man also evokes the falling (or floating) man thought experiment of Ibn Sina. An influential philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age known as Avicenna in the Western world, this thought experiment was a precursor to Descartes’ later Meditations, often considered the beginning of modern philosophy. So once again we find Aho Ssan exploring hybridity, evoking deeper roots through an examination of difference. And whether or not this reference was intentional or just myself adding a further mutation of the mix, the concept of “the falling man” comes across in the experience of listening to the piece.
Aho Ssan closed out the festival on a high note, announcing the possibility of many future hybrid musics. And while, sadly, the inclusion of a Black composer in the Akousma festival is itself noteworthy (I’m struggling to find another example, and could probably count the number of non-Asian composers of color on one hand), it also demonstrates the importance of drawing on traditions outside the orthodoxy. Diversity for its own sake isn’t enough if we’re simply selecting those whose idioms most overlap with that of the overwhelmingly white Euro-American tradition. Aho Ssan’s music is very much influenced by the French electroacoustic tradition, but his influences do not stop there, and straddling multiple genres allowed him the opportunity to push multichannel diffusion into exploring new forms. Under the tenure of Francois Bonnet, Ina-GRM has made concerted strides to celebrate lesser known figures from their history while opening up the studios to new artists, such as Aho Ssan, who may not have been given such opportunities in decades past. And for its part, Akousma too has continued to evolve, increasingly showcasing a broader range of techniques and styles in its programming.
Below is the transcript of our interview, available only for paid subscribers.
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