Graeme Revell (SPK) interview: ‘There is nothing I would change except that I was (and still am) a very isolated person stemming from my childhood’

Graeme Revell is inseparably linked to his musical alter ego, SPK, and stands as one of the true pioneers of Industrial music. Alongside other groundbreaking acts such as Test Department, Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Z’ev, Monte Cazazza, Bourbonese Qualk ao he helped shape a movement that redefined the boundaries of sound, performance, and provocation.

Emerging from the late 1970s underground and reaching its peak in the 1980s, this scene produced a legacy whose impact still resonates across Experimental and Industrial music today. While several of those early visionaries are no longer with us, others—Graeme Revell among them—continue to create, adapt, and inspire. Speaking with him was both an honor and a revelation. From the outset, I was told that Graeme Revell prefers not to dwell on the past but to focus instead on the present. My initial plan for a retrospective, SPK anthology-style interview quickly shifted toward the here and now—a conversation about SPK’s new plans and Graeme Revell’s book, “The Ineffable Geometry Of Light”.

What emerged was a portrait of an artist whose creative drive remains undiminished. Decades after SPK’s early eruptions of sonic chaos, Graeme Revell’s passion for exploration and transformation still burns with remarkable intensity. This interview with Graeme Revell (SPK) was a glimpse into the restless mind of a true innovator. (Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

Q: Graeme Revell, at the time of this interview, you’re not quite 70 yet. Apparently, you don’t like to dwell on the past but prefer to talk about the future. Most people—especially these days—experience the future as uncertain. How do you perceive that? And isn’t the past a source of experience and wisdom for moving forward?

Graeme: The future is probably more uncertain than almost any time in human history. But I always take a dialectical viewpoint. Yes, there are clear and present dangers but there are also utopian possibilities that I try to write about. My book, “The Ineffable Geometry Of Light”, is a braided novel that first looks at the human experience of a young man encountering the seismic epistemological shift that Darwin unleashed on the western world, how he processes the removal of intentionality from the universe and immediately conceives of the rise of machines as an evolutionary inevitability. So that’s the past and present. And I do juxtapose that with two people facing the epistemological rupture of the near future, the rise of embodied artificial intelligence and the demotion of man from the center of the universe.

So, yes, there are broad currents from the past to learn from here, but they are different qualitative orders of magnitude apart.

Q: In many cultures, aging symbolizes experience and, above all, wisdom. Using that wisdom, what would you say today to a young Graeme Revell taking his first artistic steps in the 1970s? And do you think that same young man would have listened to any advice?

Graeme: I have been very fortunate to make most of the right moves and have been quite good at turning failures into positives. There is nothing I would change except that I was (and still am) a very isolated person stemming from my childhood. If anything, I wish I had been able to be more outgoing and more trusting in certain situations. The young man may have listened but his personality would probably not have allowed him to change. My project: to be continually changing styles, hindered my audience somewhat, but I am pleased in retrospect that I stuck to it.

Q: Between past and future, we shouldn’t forget the present. And in this present, SPK seems to be very much ‘alive and kicking’. It also feels like a very special—and perhaps even emotional—thing, since your son Robert is now involved. Could you elaborate on that, and especially on how the father–son relationship might evolve into an artistic one?

Graeme: Yes, a big part of my re-emergence is the opportunity to perform with Robert who really enjoyed the recent European shows. He’s a very talented musician. And I hired him from the age of 16 to play on several movie scores. So we’ve always had the relationship. 

Q: I read that new live shows are planned and that new material is also in the works, incorporating ‘new’ or ‘different’ musical influences beyond what we know from the early SPK. Could you tell us more about SPK’s live plans and musical evolution, as well as Robert’s contribution?

Graeme: Without divulging much about the future sound, he will be bringing his different influences into my mix. Overall, the aim is to enjoy ourselves, as always. Live, he will probably be mostly playing guitar and maybe some ethnic string instruments. I will be handling the electronics and there will be a special guest vocalist.

Q: If live shows are coming, I can hardly imagine you not playing some old songs. Doesn’t that bother someone who doesn’t like to look back on the past—or is that different?

Graeme: I will probably make some call-backs by sampling and including earlier SPK just for fans who are in the know. It’s a kind of thank you to them for all the support they have shown for so long. But I am done with the old material on the whole. As I said, I think I adequately established right from the beginning that no-one should have any expectations of what I am going to do. In fact, it often comes as a surprise to me;))

Q: You’re already mentioned your book “The Ineffable Geometry Of Light” that has been just published. I haven’t managed to get my hands on it yet, but the themes—despite the story being set in the Victorian era—seem profound and relevant. Humanity is central, especially its relationship to evolution, the emotional world, and sexuality. How do you want to present this story, and what does its content mean to you personally?

Graeme: In addition to what I said above, the story takes place in 2 eras: the 1860s, and ‘the 4^th decade of the 21^st century’. I suppose that I am proposing a reevaluation of what humanity, emotion, sexuality, language, intelligence, the unconscious and consciousness really are in the context of contemporary discoveries in neuroscience and deep learning. It is a presentation of huge amounts of information that would take years of reading dry academic papers to cover. That’s what I did. I have also grown disgusted by the stupidity and hubris of humans to think we are the crowning peak of evolution as we go about destroying everything in our path. So it’s a love story at heart that’s much bigger than ourselves.

Q: Do you recognize autobiographical elements in the characters, and what does the book reveal about you—and by that I mean primarily the person, not the artist?

Graeme: It’s also deeply personal at the same time. There are 3 main characters and I have thought since I completed it over 5 years that if I combined those three, it would be an autobiography. Not necessarily of me, but of the contemporary human on the cusp of being superseded.

What it reveals about me? I am fundamentally a materialist – I just thought of a term. Perhaps a micro-materialist in Daniel Dennett’s sense of us as ‘a collection of individual neural responses too fine-grained to capture with language’. I am of the opinion that the ineffability we ascribe to certain human experience is predicated on either ignorance or this inability to see into the minutia of ourselves. This is personal, cultural and historical – it gradually changes over time. I’m not sure if this is what you meant but it is how I see this temporary mutable entity that I, only for convenience and linguistic conformity, call myself. I can find no evidence or need for either self-awareness or even consciousness to describe any personal or universal phenomena.

I think, along with Susan Blackmore, that we are merely reproducers of replicating memes with their source in replicant RNA and probably earlier. We have had the status of best reproducer for a couple of hundred thousand years but within 10 years that status will be no more. What then? That is the question but we are not helpless here.

Q: I imagine it’s no coincidence that half your story takes place during the Victorian era—a time that also witnessed the Industrial Revolution and the idea of evolution. This period provided fertile ground at the end of the 19th century for Symbolism, an artistic movement that emerged in countries like France, Belgium, and Austria. I imagine that connection with art must resonate with you in some way, but how do you see that potential link between Symbolism and your own work, both today and in the future?

Graeme: You are right. The Symbolist period was partly a reaction against Darwinism. The hero of the 19^th Century section – Samuel Butler – correctly senses the inadequacy of the theory of variations to describe how the variations actually arise. He is really the progenitor of the theory of the Unconscious which is of course the territory of Symbolism. I trace the genealogy of symbols back through proto-Indo-European etymology to corporeal gesture (prehuman). And I find myself quoting the poetry of Rilke and Proust, both heavily influenced by the Symbolists. So it is a ‘raprochement’ of emotion to materiality that interests me.

Q: Evolution is clearly a theme that fascinates you. When we think about evolution today, AI inevitably comes to mind—something you’ve also been focusing on for years. Should we see this evolution as a blessing or a curse? And what does it mean for humanity in the 21st century?

Graeme: AI contains both outcomes. Every new technology is a small-p Political struggle. In this case it is evolutionary and we can’t stop its emergence, but the behaviour of the prior species is always reflected in the successor species’ genotype. (Baldwinian evolution). So, it is incumbent upon us, artists and dreamers to fight this political struggle against the powers of destruction and ignorance. Humanity will inevitably take a different shape in embodied Ai but my thesis  is that AI is very, very human having been trained on language with all its metaphorical conceptual basis rather than code (as in the old days). We are not separate species but a hybrid. None of this is binary. It is dialectical.

Q: Your studies have given you considerable knowledge of psychiatry, and I find the relationship between artificial intelligence and human beings especially intriguing. Don’t these developments—along with social media and other technologies—risk alienating people from one another, even to the point of losing all real connection? How do you see this, and can it be managed effectively?

Graeme: Yes, the learning networks of both species are converging but the downside is exactly as you describe. The old social ties between people are fragmenting so quickly and being replaced by vastly distributed, rapid velocity, truncated communication that we are struggling to adjust. People are certainly becoming alienated which gives power every chance to insert itself into agentic AI and relace deepfakes with even more dangerous DeepFeels (my term).

Information can be delivered through an intimacy pipeline with embedded erotic content via the agent. In psychology we know that an emotional connection takes a mere 6-8 half-hour sessions, and behaviour modification through suggestion in this erotically charged environment, only a few hours longer (12 hours or so). In contrast human-human contact is messy, often conflictual and can be boring. The uptake of sites like Replika and Xiaoice is enormous and can’t be stopped. I am on the cusp of publishing about how an alternative to these could be structured with necessary boundaries relating more to real human interaction. Check out Medium soon.

Q: What are your thoughts on the use of AI in the arts—particularly in music, visual art, and poetry?

Graeme: They are all at an early stage but getting ‘better’ rapidly. Just this week I have encountered 2 really interesting uses of AI. Firstly KK-Null’s work and also Somnambulists reworkings. My most controversial opinion is the one that AI somehow plagiarises and spits it out. I have two responses. Speaking as someone who has been plagiarized more often than I could say, I think humans with their ‘inspired by’ and ‘paying homage to’ excuses – if they even bother to do that much – are much better plagiarists than AI.

AI samples a much bigger database, taking a minute number of bits from each source and we inevitably borrow because of our relatively limited databases. Secondly, I believe that almost all ‘creativity’ is the combination of existing ideas. If you’re ‘very creative’ it’s because you combine and reinterpret quite different sets of information. AI can do this. I ran an experiment in the last few days on my FB page and around 90% or respondents were positive to my ideas. About 10% were still of the opinion that AI has nothing to offer which opinion I respect but predict this will change as the transformers are fine-tuned to produce more interesting output. I have proposed calling these NLMs (niche learning models) rather than the LLMs.

Q: The connection between evolution and art seems seriously disrupted in the current zeitgeist. I’m thinking of algorithms censoring a great deal of artistic work, but also of world leaders and governments allocating less funding to the arts. Should we, as art lovers, be worried—and what have been your personal experiences with this?

Graeme: Speaking as someone who lives off copyright royalties, I am concerned for future generations. The recent controversy with Spotify being a case in point. Its possible that copyright in the arts may disappear. The only reason it is 75 years is because the big entertainment companies had enough power to secure that (where inventions generally have only a 20-year period). However, if your copyright is not shared with a major corporation, good luck. The solution is for a ‘United Artists’ equivalent platform to emerge with fair trade principles.

I am a representative for composers, sound recordists and mixers in my home country, New Zealand, and funding is almost impossible to come by.  I run an AI Creative film competition here which teaches how to make ethical AI films because they can be done on a fraction of the budget even of a conventional short film.

We just have to find work-arounds. In this sense independent music, since sampling, has been solving similar problems since the 80s.

Q: Last year, I visited a powerful exhibition in Vienna about “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”), a term coined during the rise of the Nazis to describe works that supposedly didn’t conform to the norms and values of that regime. It immediately made me think of today’s algorithms, which also censor quite a lot. How do you view this reality, and how do you think it will evolve?

Graeme: The Nazi campaign against so-called ‘degenerate art’ sought to purify cultural expression by erasing what it deemed morally, politically, or racially subversive—modernist forms that threatened a state-approved conservatism of beauty, order, and obedience. The censors disguised ideology as aesthetics, claiming to defend public virtue while in fact eliminating dissenting visions of the human.

Today’s algorithmic censorship by AI systems often operates under the banner of ‘community safety’ or ‘brand suitability’, yet it similarly enforces invisible norms that suppress ambiguity, eroticism, gender diversity and political dissent. In both cases, a machinery of exclusion—once bureaucratic, now computational—narrows the field of human expression to what can be categorized as acceptable. Where the Reich hung forbidden canvases in mockery, our digital platforms quietly bury them beneath opaque layers of algorithmic invisibility.

Whereas I have expressed optimism for non-American platforms to arise to break their monopoly, I certainly wouldn’t expect less censorship from the likes of DeepSeek. I can’t see things improving in the foreseeable future.

Q: I mentioned your psychiatric background, which brings me back to the link between people with psychological burdens and artistic expression—sometimes called ‘Art Brut’ or ‘Outsider Art’. How do you view this kind of expression? And do you think it’s given far too little space and recognition by a certain ‘artistic elite’?

Graeme: I used to talk about this a lot. Since the demise of the institution of the asylum, opportunities for people with severe psychological burdens to produce art have actually declined. It is very difficult to gather materials and allocate time when struggling on the street with food deficit and drug proliferation. At the same time, contemporary art has become more and more expensive to produce.

Q: Could your book be adapted into a film—and if so, would you write the soundtrack? What might it sound like?

Graeme: It could possibly be done but I think it would be best in an experimental style like Darren Aronofsky meets Tarkovsky. The book has very long dialog passages so the screenplay would have to be much different.  I would like to try it and would certainly write the Soundtrack. It would be quite Ambient and a mix of the entire sonic history of man as if heard in a slipstream. I have already composed it in my head.

Q: You were one of the pioneers of Industrial music. Back then, the scene felt interconnected and deeply engaged—there was a real spirit. Is that a feeling or sense of connection you still experience today? How does it manifest itself now?

Graeme: For me, because of my isolation, I was not really connected to anyone except one close friend was Nocturnal Emissions and we were quite friendly with many others at a distance. Over the years I have met many others like Clock DVA, The Legendary Pink Dots, Nurse With Wound, Skinny Puppy, Laibach but I relocated to Australia in ’85, then went straight to Hollywood in ’90. At that point our trajectories diverged. It was very nice to catch up with them all at VOD this summer where it was a lovefest. It was also nice to meet and chat with so many fans in a relaxed setting. The scene has exploded beyond recognition however, and I know only a tiny fraction of the acts.

Q: To what extent do you recognize yourself, especially artistically, in your son Robert? And finally, what’s still on your to-do list?

Graeme: He has a different trajectory but we may have arrived in a hybrid room together. He is an instrumentalist/composer where I am just a composer. What’s still on the to-do list? How long do we have? I will tell you that the to-do list far exceeds my available time on this earth.