The SPKtR interview: Noise, Machines and the Refusal to Stand Still

SPK have never made much sense as an argument for artistic consistency. If anything, their history suggests the opposite: that continuity can reside in refusing to preserve a fixed sound, method or even definition of what a musical project is supposed to be. Graeme Revell’s current work as The SPKtR extends that principle into a very different technological environment, one in which artificial intelligence, algorithmic gatekeeping and increasingly unstable distinctions between human and machine production have become part of the artistic material itself.

Our conversation began with the contrasting directions currently emerging around The SPKtR and the considerably more abrasive SPKtR XXX, but quickly expanded into something larger: post-humanism, seduction as a mechanism of control, the politics of technological systems, the usefulness of unpredictability, nostalgia, artistic failure and the boundary between music and noise. We also returned to the difficult Wave-Gotik-Treffen debut and looked ahead to November’s Wroclaw Industrial Festival, where Revell intends to present something very different: not a reconstruction of early SPK, but an attempt to recover its confrontational principle using contemporary means.

The SPKtR interview

Karo: The SPKtR now appears to be developing along two currents: The SPKtR, where melody, atmosphere and cinematic scale seem to have more room, and SPKtR XXX, where noise and rhythm become dominant again. I find that distinction fascinating because it suggests more than two versions of the same project. Are they two different ways of acting upon the listener – one through seduction and immersion, the other through physical impact and confrontation? What can one communicate that the other cannot?

Graeme: You are absolutely right. It’s still quite early in my new period of creativity and I’m not sure what the parameters and boundaries of each project are yet. As a seasoned artist who has produced music in many different styles both for SPK and for film, I feel a little bit constrained by expectations. While ultimately I will move forward and produce music that I enjoy, I am aware of the audience that has supported me for decades and I am grateful to them.

So I have recreated just a few songs, whose tracks were destroyed in a fire two years ago, to show my love, but I don’t think it comes as any surprise to say that the broader SPK project was ALWAYS about change and defying expectations. Most bands play it safe at later stages in their careers by rehashing their old material to nostalgic audiences, but I prefer to live dangerously and present new material that reflects contemporary means of production and issues.

So, as you observe, these are two possible new versions of the project that reflect my love for both intense rhythm and noise on the one hand and melancholic and exotic melody on the other. Because they are extremes, it is difficult to jam them together, especially in a live concert context. But there are also other manifestations as yet unrecorded, and I wouldn’t say the project has bifurcated.

Karo: “The Last of Men” deals with the erosion of human exceptionalism and our increasing entanglement with technological systems. That is an enormous philosophical proposition to place inside a piece of music. How do you prevent an idea of that scale from turning the music into an illustration of a thesis? Can rhythm, distortion, frequency or the treatment of the voice carry an argument about what a human being is more effectively than words can?

Graeme: Another probing question. A four-minute song is never going to be able to deliver a coherent thesis on such a subject but, as with all my music, can act as a catalyst for somewhat deeper discussion outside of the music. My use of the term Information Overload as both a warning and a prescription for dealing with the social current of the late ’70s and early ’80s is a case in point.

“The Last of Men” is similarly a warning and, as you say, simultaneously aims at a constructive argument against human hubris, which is central to our survival past the very near future. Quite a lot of my music I view as a post-industrial style of “protest song”.

Going even further, the involvement of AI technology takes the project into the area of “post-humanism”, which I see not as the total removal of the human from the process, a la some of Cage’s modernist work for example, but as a decentring and a redefinition of our relationship with technology. I think the song can be an effective signpost for larger issues.

Karo: “La Encantadora Furiosa” introduces a rather different temperature: something darker and more romantic. It made me wonder whether seduction might actually be as important to your current thinking as technological menace. We tend to imagine our relationship with machines through fear, but the systems that transform us most profoundly are often the ones we willingly desire. Is attraction, even intimacy, becoming part of the language of The SPKtR?

Graeme: “La Encantadora” is certainly a different kind of song for me but does build on my years of film scoring, where I introduced a number of indigenous musical styles into film genres. From 1985’s “Zamia Lehmanni” I discovered my love of world music and very much enjoy exploring perhaps a different take.

Sometimes a piece of music is just a piece of music, but I have always agreed that seduction, especially in late capitalism, is an infinitely more efficient system of “normalisation” and submission than naked control. This is something that I have spoken about since the very beginning as a disciple of Foucault. It manifests today in the continuous dopamine hit of scrolling and has become more or less a fait accompli.

Karo: There is an almost absurdly perfect SPK story in what happened to “The Last of Men”: a piece written and performed by a human musician was removed from Bandcamp after an automated system apparently identified its audio as AI-generated. Early SPK examined institutions, psychiatry, media and systems of control; today some of that authority resides in platforms, recommendation systems and largely invisible algorithms. Did that incident change the way you think about where technological power now sits, particularly when the machine is no longer simply an artistic tool but a gatekeeper?

Graeme: Yes, I did it as a test of the gatekeeping actually. There are, in fact, small elements of the track that are AI-generated and I wanted to find out how good AI was at recognising itself. Quite good, as it turns out. So the incident definitely didn’t change any of my expectations.

I do, however, think it is absurd that the policing of the AI content fails to take into account that the content it is flagging actually owes its existence – partially but defensibly – to the very author, myself, which it has scraped. In other words, it has forbidden the creator to re-use his own IP. Now THAT is absurd.

It is a very complex ecology of power but, as with any technology, provides new possibilities while foreclosing others. The role of the artist is to expose these relationships and hopefully to go some way towards subverting them. In this case, the task is twofold: to contribute to the database more extreme content that will exist towards the outside edges of the probability distribution, and to adopt a practice of multiple iteration that allows one to favour these extremes in creating new content.

Karo: I would really like to ask about Wave-Gotik-Treffen because, from the outside, that performance seemed to acquire a drama of its own. It had been conceived as The SPKtR’s live debut with Robert, and then Robert became ill and could not perform. I also understand that at one point the show came very close to being cancelled altogether. Could you take us inside what actually happened that day, and how close you were to deciding that the performance simply could not go ahead?

Graeme: Yes, it was a shock and I really wanted to cancel because I knew that I could only deliver half of a show. It was only when I was begged by many people who had promoted and paid for the concert that I agreed to do my best. Perhaps it was the wrong decision, but onwards and upwards. I was lucky to have the wonderful Evi Vine accompany me on two songs, but the robot technology I had been working on could not be deployed because I was nailed to the keyboard.

Karo: What interests me beyond the circumstances is what that disruption revealed about The SPKtR itself. Did having to improvise around Robert’s absence expose possibilities that a technically perfect debut might not have? Is contingency still creatively useful in a project so dependent on technology and carefully constructed relationships between sound and image?

Graeme: I have always been a solo writer. Even when Neil, the original co-founder of SPK, was alive, we worked entirely separately except on stage. So my shows are tightly controlled from my workstation. Robert is in fact the wildcard improviser, so that contingency was removed by his illness and the show was the lesser for it.

The unpredictability is the fun thing about live performance and the robotic element is firmly still in this territory. We will see how it goes on tour!

Karo: Wroclaw Industrial Festival appears to represent almost the opposite proposition: SPKtR XXX, harder and much more rhythmically and sonically aggressive. How different should somebody who witnessed WGT expect Wroclaw to be? Are we talking primarily about different material, or about a fundamentally different relationship between sound, technology, visuals and the audience?

Graeme: The two shows will be very different indeed! I think there are only about four or five songs in common and I have radically remixed them. I am looking forward to WIF because I would like to re-establish the full-frontal assault that I think I began in 1978.

There are one or two contemporary acts that have taken up the mantle but overall, I have been profoundly surprised how many of my contemporaries have not come up with anything new in the last three decades. In fact, there seems to be quite a lack of exploratory energy.

With respect to the WIF set, I will try to deliver a visceral experience akin to how early SPK audiences described their reaction. The ubiquity of dark imagery nowadays means it is improbable to deliver the kind of visual shock that we once did, but sonically I think the experience is light-years ahead. It is a wonderful challenge!

Karo: Wroclaw also comes with a very particular audience – people steeped in decades of industrial and experimental music. Does performing in that context create an expectation around the name SPK that you feel any responsibility to fulfil, or is frustrating that expectation still part of the point?

Graeme: As I said earlier, I do feel some of that responsibility, but I also look forward to confronting their inevitable reactions, some of them no doubt critical, because throwing out different ideas is always the point. I always said that this variety of approaches was the essence of what has become lumped together under the term “industrial”. The difference is that SPK invokes this variety within a single show. I hope it’s exciting and fresh rather than frustrating.

Karo: You and Robert have described yourselves, broadly speaking, as composer and instrumentalist, but by now the collaboration must have moved beyond such a clean division. What interests me more is where the two generations actually disagree. Does Robert ever hear something you have constructed and tell you that it sounds too recognisably like SPK, or that an instinct which once felt radical has become historical vocabulary? And when those disagreements happen, who tends to win?

Graeme: As I have already stated, I am the sole writer apart from what Rob contributes on stage. So we definitely maintain a clean division. My work process is a very long one of self-criticism, which is why releases are few and far between. As such, there can be no disagreements.

He is free to offer constructive criticism and I would listen for sure. But it’s unlikely that he would, because he understands that making mistakes is all part of the joy for me. And he has his own solo project.

Karo: SPK has changed so radically across its history that perhaps its real continuity was never a particular sound at all, but an unwillingness to become fixed. With The SPKtR and SPKtR XXX now taking shape, what would constitute failure for you creatively? Would it be making something that alienates people, or would the greater failure be making something audiences immediately recognise, understand and comfortably identify as “SPK”?

Graeme: Absolutely, it’s about discontinuity – finding and exploring different definitions of what constitutes the boundary between what is considered music and what is noise. I would like younger generations to enjoy the music I love to create. Failure to engage beyond the wonderful fans that I already have would constitute a kind of failure.

Further, though, the “post-human” project is about shifting the appreciation of art from the old ingrained tendency towards aesthetic judgement to intelligent observation of the means of production. The incredibly rapid shift in the man-machine intellectual relationship – the means of production – is the crux issue of the day and is what my art is all about at the moment. This is not an easy shift for the listener.

I revel in the danger that I might alienate people because if they allow that to happen then they do not really belong in this, our space. Yet there will always be nostalgia and conservatism, and I will tell you a funny anecdote to finish.

I think it was our third ever gig in Sydney in 1979. At the first gig I had hidden one hand in my sleeve and was playing the synth with a large butcher’s hook tucked into it instead. After this third gig, an earnest young punk came up to me and said, “You guys were OK, but the band hasn’t been the same since The Claw left.”

About SPK / The SPKtR

SPK emerged in Sydney in 1978 around Graeme Revell and Neil Hill and became one of the formative projects associated with industrial music, although reducing their history to that category obscures how radically the project repeatedly changed its own vocabulary. Noise, extreme rhythmic experimentation, electronics, performance, increasingly melodic structures and eventually the atmospheric language heard on works such as “Zamia Lehmanni: Songs Of Byzantine Flowers” all appeared under the same name. That instability is important to understanding the present project: the relevant continuity is not one particular SPK sound, but an insistence that the project should remain capable of mutation.

The contemporary The SPKtR brings Graeme Revell together onstage with his son Robert Revell. Graeme remains the principal composer, while Robert introduces the improvisational element that Revell describes as the “wildcard” within performances. The music is currently developing through several possible manifestations rather than one fixed successor to SPK. Broadly, The SPKtR allows more room for melody, atmosphere and the cinematic vocabulary Graeme developed during his long career as a film composer, while SPKtR XXX foregrounds rhythm, noise and considerably greater physical aggression. Revell is careful, however, not to define these as permanent boundaries; other forms remain possible and, in his words, the project has not simply “bifurcated”.

That distinction will become particularly tangible during the forthcoming European dates. The tour begins on 7 November at Wroclaw Industrial Festival, where SPKtR XXX will present the harder configuration. Revell says only four or five pieces will overlap with the material heard at Wave-Gotik-Treffen, and even those have been radically remixed. His stated intention is not to reconstruct the SPK of the late 1970s, but to recover something of its “full-frontal assault” through contemporary production possibilities.

SPK / SPKtR – Europe 2026 tour dates

• 07.11.2026 – Wroclaw, Poland – Wroclaw Industrial Festival @ Stary Klasztor
• 10.11.2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Loppen
• 12.11.2026 – Gothenburg, Sweden – Monument 031
• 13.11.2026 – Stockholm, Sweden – Klubb Dod @ Nalen
• 16.11.2026 – Vienna, Austria – Liccht @ Viper Room
• 17.11.2026 – Leipzig, Germany – Hellraiser
• 21.11.2026 – Budapest, Hungary – S1 Beer Factory
• 22.11.2026 – Zagreb, Croatia – Boogaloo
• 23.11.2026 – Kranj, Slovenia – TrainStation SubArt
• 28.11.2026 – Pordenone, Italy – XXII Congresso Post Industriale @ Capitol
• 01.12.2026 – Augsburg, Germany – Rockfabrik
• 02.12.2026 – Berlin, Germany – Urban Spree
• 03.12.2026 – Utrecht, Netherlands – De Helling
• 05.12.2026 – Sint-Niklaas, Belgium – BIMFEST @ De Casino
• 06.12.2026 – Athens, Greece – Black Temple