Callshop residents Will and Stu, hosts of bi-monthly show Full Circle, aired a on 1st May featuring an interview with standout performers from the weekend Rian Treanor and Cara Tolmie.

Discovered by Stu at Köln’s Night of Surprise, Rian and Cara discuss their collaboration, the importance of festivals in forging new collaborations and the process of translating largely improvised live performances into their newly released album, Body Lapse.

Rewire festival, describes itself as a festival for adventurous music focusing on experimental and multidisciplinary performances across diverse locations in the city.

Across 4 days, the festival uses over 25 different locations, featuring 30+ stages, concentrated within the city centre, spanning from key cultural hubs like Amare and The Grey Space in the Middle to special locations like the Grotekerk and Subterra, a former nuclear bunker powered by a custom 3-D printed sound system.

Here, we provide an extract from the interview with Rian and Cara. Listen to the full interview on the Full Circle archive.

Your performance is so much about the body and the room and it really came alive seeing you perform. When you are in the studio, how easy is it to summon that same club energy that you channel when you are playing live?

Cara - I totally agree (that live performance and studio recordings are two totally different mediums). I’m predominantly a performer, I’ve been performing all my life. I have recorded stuff before but this was the first time I’d done a lot of studio time and recorded a proper album.

It was hard. You start out with this expectation that you will somehow be able to reproduce the thing that you do on stage, but the thing about the live performance is that there are all these materials that you can’t put on a record. Presence is so much a part of what is happening and tension. How you sculpt the tension in the room and bring people up and down. That’s such a live material.

Also it’s quite important to me that I’m seen. That sounds very diva-esque but the way I look is a big part of the medium. My body does stuff that is part of the music. Some tracks, like Incongruous Diva, I physically shake and that affects my voice. You can hear that is going on but you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that just by listening to the record.

Rian - There’s always been really different angles to those things for me. I grew up basically making music on my own on a computer and all of a sudden now you’ve got to go and do it on stage. That’s a totally different world to me. But, after doing that for years I got more and more obsessed. For instance you’ve got to pre-program a computer which feels at odds to live music as a dynamic live system. But then I got more and more obsessed with how you can make very dynamic stuff to play live, it’s like a never ending world.

I got focussed on that craft of playing live and improvised music and became fascinated with that. And now I'm at the other end where records seem very different to me. I’m interested in generative music that's about making possibilities, options and spaces where things can be multi- faceted. In a way, making records is about closing down options. So, making systems is about opening doors, but making and editing records is about closing them. But there’s a craft to all that that I also love as a listener.

I care a lot about exploring sound systems, rooms, people being together, having an interaction and conversation live in a moment and how rich that whole experience is. It feels really strange to then boil that down to a stereo audio file that people listen to on Youtube or something! But then it enables other things, like getting gigs to play it live. They both are symbiotic (the live performance and studio recording album).