The Accidental Avant-Garde

“Make it New,” Ezra Pound’s modernist call-to-arms, turns 90 this year. Producer and composer Danny L Harle still believes in the crux of the project.

Harle’s story is made up of the kind of groupings and vanguards beloved by modernist-inclined histories. He was a key part of PC Music, an influential thing (label/art collective/aesthetic sensibility/lightning rod for the “Wot, No Guitars?” wing of the UK music press) that can now be happily chewed over in the past tense, after the label announced their closure following last year’s 10th anniversary. As Rachel Aroesti noted at the time, in the New Boring era of balladic pop, PC Music was one of few grand narratives this century worthy of comparison with garage, two-tone or punk of before. But, despite the brash, in-your-face aesthetics beloved by the label, its impact on pop’s middleground has been more entryist in character, infiltrating the mainstream until the whole is materially different. That Dua Lipa’s next album will be “a psychedelic-pop-infused tribute to UK rave culture” could only happen in a post-PC world.

Perhaps PC Music’s most wide-reaching impact has been as a sensibility. As with many PC adjacents, Harle’s music is irony-lite, even when it’s being decidedly wacky. On “Harlecore,” a 2021 gesamtkunstalbum where Harle turned his Harlecore night into a fantastical nonstop hard-dance club populated by performers like MC Boing and DJ Ocean, listeners with even a cursory knowledge of happy hardcore would find it relatively easy to hear distance as tunes like “Car Song” (“We are driving in a car, car, car, car, car / Playing music in a car, car, car, car, car”) race past. But you hear that distance as a remove rather than anything pertaining to irony: a product of nerd and headphone cultures in tandem, in which creators can get closer to a musical essence from further away. Like using a telescope to look down a microscope, you lose the lateral view—of subgenres as hyper-local responses to shared material circumstances, for example—and gain an ultra-detailed, dedicated look at an underappreciated music form.

Despite being involved in some of today’s biggest pop acts—Harle has worked with Caroline Polachek on her past two albums, has co-produced the latest two Dua Lipa singles, and lists work with Carly Rae Jepsen, pinkpantheress and Rina Sawayama among his production credits—he remains a slightly mysterious figure, with tastes that are eclectic to the point of iconoclasm. Even by the standards of performers with musical parents, the music he was exposed to growing up was diverse; there’s more than a hint of his father, the preeminent British saxophonist John Harle, in Danny L’s 57-hour “HUGE PLAYLIST” which, in amongst the tranche of pop, also finds time for Sciarrino, Lachenmann, Birtwistle, Adès, Berio, and Abrahamsen. Later, he sends me some scores from his student days. (He was a music undergrad at Goldsmiths, and did a postgrad degree in composition at the Guildhall School of Music afterwards; you can find music from that time deep in his SoundCloud.) By his own admission, the scores are “nuts”: a noisy, technique-heavy string quartet, and a helter-skelter piece for electric guitar, drum kit and “SNES playing ‘Street Fighter II: Turbo Edition’”. 

We speak for 40 minutes on the day that the Harle-produced Olly Alexander track—and UK Eurovision entry—“Dizzy” drops. Later that day, I spot him at a string ensemble gig featuring music by Richard Strauss and Claude Vivier. Though he grew out of some of the attitudes surrounding classical music, intense feeling towards the form still makes up a crucial part of the Harle lore.

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Danny L Harle: I’m fascinated by the dilemmas of classical music in the year 2024. It’s something I’ve always been trying to work out.

VAN: What are those dilemmas, from your perspective?

Why certain forms and instrumentations, regardless of popularity, have been maintained throughout history. It’s kept alive some incredible music, but [people are] playing it to empty rooms quite a lot of the time. I’m lucky that I absolutely love a lot of this music, but I just find it … very noble in a lot of cases, and also fascinating in other cases when it’s tied to political identity as well.

There’s also [the question of] what one does when a tradition has gone through its own modernism, and then you’re out the other end of that, so any kind of iconoclastic behavior is out the window. I was talking to the leader of a classical ensemble recently and saying that, if you heard a chamber piece that sounds interesting to you, is there anything that would identify if it was made in 1996 or 2020? He was like, No, not really. There are techniques that are stylistic that people use more nowadays, but you can find pieces from the ‘90s, from the ‘80s, that sound like, Oh wow, it’s from now! [Classical music] is sort of treading water in a funny way, but I still, like, love it, and am obsessed with especially older styles of music, older forms, and older composers.

Once a type of music has been through its own modernism, every sound produced by that ensemble is kind of a trope… There’s a funny sort of nostalgic feeling for the sound of a classical ensemble, that frozen 19th century orchestra idea that’s still bandied around.

One of your first musical memories is of your dad, John Harle, playing Harrison Birtwistle’s “Panic” at the Proms, a performance that’s gone down in history as a British skandalkonzert. What did you make of it?

It was all really boring, all that stuff. I didn’t give a shit about it being avant-garde or anything. In all honesty, I was so used to hearing the sound of dad’s saxophone playing, it didn’t sound like music to me, and I didn’t really understand why anyone liked it or listened to it until much later in my life, when I was able to listen back to his recordings.

It was just stuff that I had to sit through really, and I was just aware of Harry [Harrison Birtwistle] as a person. It was all quite wasted on me at the time, although I don’t know how you can really make a child excited about some of that stuff. (I mean, a child would have to be particularly interested in things like the idea of Pan, or a Greek chorus.)

But the fact is, I definitely was exposed to an eclectic range of things from very early on in my life, and therefore I guess I would just come at things with a generally more open mind. I didn’t have a strong idea of what music should be necessarily, although definitely in my teenage years, I became a bit of an arsehole about music for a bit, and I sort of had to become enlightened from that.

Describe how that happened; how were you an arsehole about music?

I was quite a nerdy teenager, and I was obsessed with music, but I was not great socially. I had friends and stuff, but I really enjoyed the fact that I knew a little bit about music to use as leverage socially to make other people feel inadequate. Like, I was really into Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman, and I sort of regret how I used my love of music and slightly lorded over people with it, as if I was better than them because of that. I realized [music] was a way of dealing with me ultimately feeling inadequate in other ways socially, and having a thing that I could sort of dangle…

That sounds like the classic junior conservatoire situation though?

It was younger than that. At the point at which I was studying, I got over that. Honestly, I just think I really didn’t enjoy school very much. When I left school and went to university, my life began properly.

I was working in a record shop at the time called Harold Moores Records, and found the buyer for that to be one of the most inspirational figures I’ve ever experienced in my life. Tim Winter had a sense that he was just a buyer of CDs where there’s no baggage attached to anything; he would put on a Girls Aloud CD, then a Sciarrino CD, and he’d be open-minded to anything. Sometimes it would be a Donnacha Dennehy violin concerto, then I can remember him putting on a CD one day, which was just one guitar chord for half an hour, and he was crying at how beautiful it was; then he’d play a Nicki Minaj CD afterwards, and be like, This is so good. I’ve never really seen that level of openness to everything. I realized that I also felt like that about music, but to see somebody else so freely expressing it was very inspiring. It paved the way in what I do: for me to feel free about including elements from everything I like.

I wrote a piece of music that bounces off fragments of Gesualdo’s music, using software called Virtual Singer to sing the Gesualdo. I thought it would be nice to have an acoustic ensemble bouncing off these artificial voices. It was right at the end of my master’s, but that was a very satisfying moment where I realized that if I just abstract the things that I like about the music that I love, and then recombine it in different ways, that’s the recipe that works for me.

You’ve previously described a damascene conversion in which you abandoned a pursuit of complexity through technique in favor of a more streamlined pursuit of feelings. Was there a moment that triggered that?

The thing is, I still am into some stuff that is complex. But I honestly think the best complex stuff is streamlined from the people writing it. Like, someone like Brian Ferneyhough, I think his stuff often does have a thing to say, and does have a unique atmosphere to it.

[The conversion] was definitely towards the end of the master’s degree, around the time of the Gesualdo piece, I would say. It also coincided with this moment of going out and playing electronic music that I was enjoying out in nightclubs, and seeing people at Guildhall complaining about how nobody goes to see “new music” concerts anymore, then that very evening going to a club and hearing someone like SOPHIE perform some music to a packed club of people, made me realize that it’s very much happening.

If any of these composers that everybody reveres from the past were alive now… none of them were writing using the antiquated forms and instrumentations from like 110 years before. They often had to invent a new instrument to add to their ensemble because they had something new to say.

It made me realize that often institutions have to teach teachable things. Some musical practices are just more teachable than others, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re actually necessary to know. For example, there’s an obsession with bebop in the jazz education world. Bebop’s obviously a very important form of music, but not everybody needs to know it; it’s just the most complex form, and it can be a thing that people can become obsessed with, and lost in technique with, and also completely miss out on the original point of it, and how the original people playing it were pioneering it.

I guess I realized that there were certain things that institutions had to be to exist as institutions, and I had been drinking that Kool-Aid slightly. It’s actually really simple at the end of the day, the act of making music, and often an obsession with education can cloud the simplicity of it.

There’s a great sonic distance between the music at the start of your SoundCloud and the musical projects you’re involved with today, but carried through it seems to be a modernist organizing principle: the thing in common is gestural economy, making gestures the most direct, concise, precise thing possible. 

I don’t understand any other way of doing it, or what the point is in doing it in any other way. What’s the point of putting anything that isn’t like the thing in the thing? I remember SOPHIE was telling me she was in the pursuit of making monophonic music. I guess that’s the ultimate goal. 

I mean, how many pieces of monophonic music have stood the test of time? If you think about pieces for the solo flute repertoire, there are so few pieces, because it’s so hard. But the funny thing is, it’s usually the first thing you’re asked to write in composition school, because it’s easy to get one flautist to play ‘em all. But it actually should be the last that you’re asked to do. Like, “Syrinx” is obviously amazing, a work of absolute genius, but I imagine Debussy was putting his whole debussy into that.

I’ve listened to “Harlecore” an embarrassing amount this year. How did the UK’s hardcore communities react to the Harlecore phenomenon? Did you get any pushback from it?

I didn’t, weirdly. I really expected to, and I made it very clear in interviews, I’m not part of the culture of that music that I was harking back to and referencing… It was a love letter to my experience of hearing it on headphones, rather than an attempt at cultural authenticity. 

Now that a line in the sand has been drawn with it, is there an argument to say that PC Music won? (In that, it was a musical vanguard that kind of actually worked?)

I don’t know about that. I would say that PC was at its best when it was striving to do something. It’s in the striving where the music is; much like the music of Brian Ferneyhough and someone trying to play one of his scores, that’s where the music lies.

One of my biggest fascinations has been the accidental avant-garde in pop culture: How crazy things can be, how loud and extreme things can be, and how much more crazy and louder and extremer they are when they are in pop culture than when someone tries to do something crazy, loud or extreme in the avant-garde or experimental world.

I was much more involved with and concerned with the avant-garde world before, but then I realized [popular culture] was all the things that I liked but just much bigger and in your face. When you’re talking about clarity of expression and gesture, you can’t get clearer clarity of gesture than in popular culture, because it has to be: there’s a criteria, you can get it wrong, and you can lose. There’s something at stake.

You produced this year’s UK Eurovision entry; what’s it like to be an artist involved in such a heavily politicized situation? And, given you’re between quite a few different worlds, have you seen them react differently to that situation?

I don’t pay attention to the social media side of things most of the time, because it’s just a deeply personal musical gesture. I’ve always been an avid fan of Eurovision, and the very thing that I’ve always liked about it is the sense of optimism to Eurovision; the fact that, in principle, it’s meant to be about just music as a thing, and a celebration of that.

There’s always something politically horrible happening in the world, there’s always been a thing happening during Eurovision, and as much as it’s been rocky at times, Eurovision itself has always persisted throughout all of this, and I just love it as a symbol of unity, I guess, in times of struggle.

It’s a kernel of optimistic spirit in the world, and that’s why it’s always been my dream to take part in it. It’s a very un-British thing as well, and that’s why I think that’s why the UK has always had a bit of a problem with it. It’s always felt almost like a European sense of optimism, a slightly Mediterranean thing maybe.

I’ve always really liked a lot of the songs, we’ve had a party for it for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to find the right artist. I’ve never known an artist who loves it enough to take part in it, and Olly had never found the right song. The decision was made to put that song forward, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

Finally, does the “L” in Danny L Harle stand for Lachenmann?

I’m gonna have to double check that, I’m not really sure. ¶