Soplerfo doesn’t really mean anything. Translations from other languages yield merely gobbledygook. You can hypothesize all you like, but there’s no revelation to be found in the moniker for Sam Brelsford’s musical musings.
“I was doodling with a friend of mine in letters that looked good together. These were letters that looked pretty neat together and I thought sounded all right. And you can pronounce it in different ways, it’s got a little bit of ambiguity.” As a result, record shelves are starting to find Soplerfo filed somewhere among the S’s in whatever subclassification seems to fit most.
“I was in bands in high school, and the progression was: I was in a band with 6 people, then 5, then 4, then 3, then 2 and it’s just me now and I think there is a reason or that – I don’t know that I work that well with other people.”
Brelsford’s music explores the less danceable frontiers of the IDM movement – he culls together samples and electronic tones to create some of the most harmonious and inviting electro-glitchery to be found around these parts. His recent EP for Dogs was released on the Zod label, and plans for the release of a full-length CD are set for sometime in the near future.
“I hadn’t been doing any electronic stuff until ’99 - before that it was all 4-track with guitars and noodling around with feedback,” Brelsford says. “I started playing around with a computer – a friend of mine had an old really crappy 8-bit sound card computer – back in ’98. I was getting into sampling and playing with really crappy freeware audio editors. I’ve never really played with hardware except loop pedals and delays. It was like what I’d been doing on the 4-track, but instead of hitting play record stop, play record stop, I was [clicking a mouse and] doing it visually.”
The step onto the electronic side of the spectrum gave Brelsford the sonic control that had escaped his grasp before, but jumping into a new field meant it took a while to develop his own musical voice. “The first year or so of experimentation was more break-beat driven stuff, especially because the Toneburst [Collective] guys, who were the only guys in the area I knew who were doing electronic music, were doing that kind of stuff.”
“Basically, I thought I was awful at it. My interest was more in sampling - making samples, gathering samples with a microphone and a miniDisc; building everything from scratch – which is really tedious and slow, but really what I want to do.”
As Brelsford came to terms with other technology, Soplerfo began to take form. “[I was] collaging pieces together and that was the slowest thing in the entire world. Luckily, computers and software got better and better and I learned to work with MIDI and that really freed everything up.”
“I like the idea of capturing sound and chopping it up and make it sound differently. Taking it out of context.” This is very much the direction that Soplerfo’s sound has ventured toward, as he has veered from the beat-driven pulsation toward more electro-acoustic vaguaries. The EP even contains a toy stringed instrument, but the real root is a greater reliance on found sound.
Brelsford claims to carry his miniDisc recorder with him wherever he goes. While often it’s to capture fragments of sounds that are manipulated and sampled as something entirely new, he’s been recording large blocks of quiet sound interrupted by the natural cycles of life. It’s these natural occurrences that many of the more recent Soplerfo tracks are created around. “If I’m feeling any sort of writers block, I’ll throw down a big slab of audio and work on top of that.” Currently that working is PC-based, as it has always been, and Brelsford uses Logic as a means of assembling the sounds on his computer. He prepares his samples using Soundforge, and has a Yamaha keyboard and another set of keys to operate MIDI triggers.
“My old 4-track past is coming back at me since I’ve been away so long. I don’t want to go back and use that tool, but I like that approach of slowly building on a track. It’s kind of what I’ve been doing but I like the idea of recording straight to tape.”
Live performances are different than recording and Brelsford uses different tools to achieve similar results. “I’ve done a few shows with a modular live program for PC and I was using it as a live sampler, I would use the piano that they had [at Zeitgeist Gallery] and use a microphone and grab the sounds and then tweak the samples, and making loops on the fly and piecing it all together and then hitting the microphone to make percussive sounds. That’s scary to hear because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.” He’s aware of the limitations of improvising as a form, but realizes those limitations open up possibilities to having an entirely different set of ears appreciate the music. “I love doing that improv stuff, that’s just great, it’s like you’re in your bedroom building layers upon layers upon layers of the stuff. That’s a lot of fun, but a lot of people don’t want to listen to that.”
Sometimes Soplerfo is in an improvisational mood and can do things like that and other times he knows when to temper his presentation to fit the crowd. “Then there’s the other side where I’ll have predetermined loops that I’ll cut up from things I’d done in the past. If I’m playing in front of a larger audience or a less experimental audience, I’ll just do that because people tend to get into that more. I’m doing less, but there’s more of a groove. The loop-based stuff is really fun, too, because you get to hear yourself loud, and because it’s loop-based, it’s more jam-based and you can get a groove going and kind of bop your head… you don’t really do that to much of my stuff.”
Playing in front of crowds came quickly as Soplerfo was on the stage not long after Brelsford gave out his first copies of his music. “I did a CD-R that I approached the Toneburst guys with and they started putting including me on some of their shows. It’s always just been an evolution from there.”
Brelsford has shifted his music with his immersion in technologies. For the forthcoming CD, due on Zod by the end of the year, he’s been recording more and more acoustic instruments and working with Logic, but the project was the biggest step that Soplerfo has made. “It was a lot of work putting that CD together, I’ve never really done anything that complete.” In truth, it’s not complete, there are other steps that Soplerfo will travel. Another Zod tour of the US is forming and hopes are that it’ll extend past Pennsylvania this time. Brelsford has been in contact with friends in Europe and has been checking out the possibility of playing France as well as England.
But for now, Brelsford stays grounded looking for anomalies in the most placid environments. “I like to sit in my room and play with my stuff.” He spends time working with lots of sound and as a result has created Soplerfo and turned it into a conglomeration of letters that actually means something.