Swim Ignorant Fire is the name Stephen Holliger uses for the music he creates that generally lives in the ambient realm.
But the Bloomington-Normal native and State Farm audio engineer said his latest project with collaborator Ian Sheridan is a left turn. Holliger said it blossomed during the pandemic with his SP202 sampler after picking up four specific records at Reverberation Vinyl in Bloomington.
He tells WGLT the album "Bufo Alvarius" was named after the psychedelic properties of the Sonoran Desert toad, and the name "Swim Ignorant Fire" is a nod to his grandfather who was a pastor.
“I got to see him kind of age in this modern world,” said Holliger. “And to a certain extent I started to think about him more often as I was creating this music. He was a pillar of salt for me … kind of like the last …really good guy the older he got. As his health degraded, Swim Ignorant Fire created the more of a metaphor for him as far as what men will do with their faith and what they're willing to do. It was somewhat admirable to see this man kind of lived true to something that he holds dear.”
Holliger’s previous albums as Swim Ignorant Fire and under his own name generally fall into atmospheric ambient music where percussion is an accent at most and absent often. “Bufo Alvarius,” however, is heavy on percussion, specifically African rhythms.
"I've been really obsessed with African music, West African music, the rhythms, the guitar playing,” explained Holliger. “It's been an obsession over the last five, six years.”
He said he’s been wanting to do something different since he was minus a full band due to the pandemic.
“The next thing that I could attempt was pulling out one of my very old samplers … the Roland SP202, It’s notorious for 12 bitting … kind of bit-crushing things, making things sound a lot older. I was adamant on somehow pulling these things together and seeing what happened. The core bones of this project are these songs that are excerpts from numerous improv sessions over the pandemic, with me pulling samples. Improv has always been the spirit with a lot of this. I always like to get started or generate new ideas with those kinds of approaches. So that's generally how I got the first 10 songs … from these improv sessions, and then finally editing it down to under, say, two minutes or so with each song,” said Holliger.
There are 12 songs on this album, and Holliger said the isolation of the pandemic allowed him to experiment more than he might have in the past, and he said there was a story arc that developed beginning with the opening song “Arrival.”
“I turned this into kind of a missionary trip gone wrong,” he said. “The first six songs were exactly what I was seeking to do with this extremely lifting positive, joyous chant-work. As I started to get more of a narrative in my head, I wanted things to go a little bit of a left turn towards the end. And so that's kind of got me thinking of the general sense of a missionary trip gone wrong.”
He said he wanted to bring attention to xenophobia and related issues.
“The history behind some of this music is originally very joyous from independence. There's an odd flow of influence of that … there's actually a story I read in 2018. His name is John Chau … he was a missionary who was unfortunately trying to contact a tribe who was not wanting to be contacted. He was unfortunately murdered in his efforts to convert this tribe. So that kind of got this narrative in my head of a left turn."
Holliger said the process of creating this “left turn” for him exercised different music muscles. Instead of beginning with an improv loop or guitar idea to create his ambient sounds, he started with a vinyl rip and crushed it into his SP202 sampler.
“So now those vinyl crackles are a little bit more enhanced with the quality kind of degrading, putting that now into a Pro Tools session. Mixing and layering was definitely a new process for me, and using that sampler was strictly my primary instrument. I wanted to keep my focus on that because I wanted to have the time to explore that point a little bit more. Originally this was meant to be strictly an SP202 album, but I couldn't help myself, including friends (like Ian Sheridan) and putting bass guitar on it. So, this did create more of a collaborative thing that I was looking for. The collaboration was new as well, including more people with my music which is extremely satisfying and encouraging for me to continue doing that more often,” said Holliger.
