Nick Luscombe [NL]: How did you start on your track?

Steve Goodman [Kode9]: I did some hunting around for proposed city plans, images, maps. What was particularly useful was the digitally animated model from the BBC documentary ‘Dreaming the Impossible’ of the city centre proposed by the Bruce Plan, so the track started, in a sense, to soundtrack the drone/camera flight through this old-fashioned looking modernist simulation.

NL: Had you heard about the Bruce Plan for Glasgow before this project?

Kode9: No I hadn’t.

I was certainly aware of some of the actual effects of the unrealised Bruce Plan from spending the first 17 years of my life there such as the M8, the relation of the city centre to motorways which seems quite unique and some of the grim, peripheral housing estates and modernist developments that were built to assist the clearance of slums.

NL: What do you find most striking about the Bruce Plan and how did that inspire your thoughts about your track?

Kode9: I think what struck me the most was the amount of destruction involved in initiating that project, how long it would have taken [50 years] and the amount of old architecture destroyed and communities displaced that would need to happen to implement it.

So what struck me was the disparity between the optimism of the model and the reality of what it might involve.

NL: How did the track develop since you started and did anything surprise you as you developed it?

Kode9: The track started from the digital animation and the movement of its camera.

Usually when I see housing estates, with their uniform blocks, grid arrays of windows and geometric layout I always hear arpeggios, and the soaring swooping movement of the camera works well set against synth pads that cut across the rhythm of the arpeggios.

The more I thought about the track, the more I tried to work in some of this disparity between the optimistic digital animation of the Bruce Plan model for the city centre and practical reality. In the model the sky was blue. So I at least had to compensate for this unrealistic depiction Glasgow weather. Also it was deserted, as modernist models tend to be, devoid of street life. That combination of the erasure of climate and people dictated the tone of how the track evolved. So after working on the main body of the track with its synth arpeggios,

I wanted to drive a motorway right through the middle of the track

[as in Glasgow]. Its also raining, there are cars and most importantly you can hear the destruction that would precede such a plan, and also towards the end, the demolition of the actual modernist housing schemes which were influenced by the Bruce Plan and actually got built, such as the Red Road development.

NL: Do you see this as the soundtrack for a place that never was?

Kode9: I suppose it’s a combination of a soundtrack to a place that never was, but also to the actual influence of this unrealised or only partially plan, so

it tries to embody some of the optimism of the plan with the grim realities.

That disparity is kind of summed up in the name of the piece, which I borrowed from the old Blue Nile track of the same name which was also a tribute to the city.

NL: Do you think the experience of working on the MSCTY track lead to any sort of new thinking about future Kode9 tracks or creative outputs in general?

Kode9:

I always enjoy rare opportunities to make rhythmic music without beats.

It also dovetails with another audio project I’ve been working on which is another angle on a utopian Scotland called Astro-Darien, which instead of a utopian modernist city, revolves around an orbital space habitat.

NL: Do you think you will look at Glasgow in a different way when you are next there with this soundtrack now part of a sort of alternative/false memory of what have created?

Kode9: Well knowing about the plan certainly makes you appreciate the architecture which it would have destroyed.