Kaffe Matthews has announced her first solo album since 2003's Eb + Flo. Released on 10 April via the Brighton based label Objects Limited, Foreigner was composed on an Italian accordion organ that Matthews found in a second-hand shop in Belgium.

She talks to Clive Bell about returning to solo recordings with the newfound ELKA 400, relaunching Annette Works and Berlin's community spirit.

Clive Bell: The new album is like a love letter to the ELKA 400 organ.

Kaffe Matthews: So it’s actually an Italian accordion organ. There seems to be no information about this model at all online. I found it by chance when I was in Ghent making a new Sonic Bike piece. It was pouring with rain and we dropped into this second-hand shop. There it was at the back – I asked the guy to switch it on and I found the ‘Drawbars’ sound, like a sine tone. There was something exciting about it, you could just press down a key and the note came out without having to do any labour. Being a string player, that’s why keyboard instruments never appealed to me, because I’d never found the struggle.

Keyboards are too easy.

But if you combine the notes then you’ve got this other way of creating, which is to really get involved in the listening as you’re playing.

Is the whole album purely that organ? There’s no feedback or distortion?

No. I have an idea for a composition, then I play notes and chords, and I combine them in the computer.

And did you have the title Foreigner before you started?

No, it kind of came later. I had been asked to do a performance one evening in Berlin, in a place called Labor Sonor, where you’re invited to do things you haven’t done before. I thought, Kaffe, this is your chance to get this organ out. I’d had it a few years but I’d never made the time to explore it. At the same time I had just moved to Berlin, and I realised in all my years of travelling I’ve never actually been the foreigner – the immigrant – trying to set up home in a country that’s not where I was born. Even though it’s Europe and I have all this privilege, it’s still a culture that’s very different to the UK. Simple sonification of words is something I’ve been using for a while, so I made a scale from the word ‘foreigner’.

It’s your first solo record for quite a long time.

I know! I was horrified to realise it’s my first solo since 2003 [Eb + Flo]. If you’re wondering why there’s been such a gap, essentially I stopped making CDs because my solo practice was so much about working with the space, that I was no longer interested in making stereo music. I was making Sonic Beds with twelve channels, and my performances were always four channels. The four channel thing was becoming more important, and I thought I would dispense with CDs and move onto DVDs. If you recall, around that time we all started to think, hey, DVDs will be the next medium. And it just never took off. Then I went off on a tangent with the Sonic Beds, and after that from 2008 the Sonic Bicycles. It’s only last year that it became clear to me – that’s why Berlin makes sense for me now. There are so many people here making all kinds of music. It feels that community is much more visible here [than in London], much larger and more present. And it exists as a community, we really see each other. It’s very open, very mixed in terms of approaches, and there are high levels of skill everywhere. And a lot of music is being made that’s new, challenging and ultimately stereo. That made me realise I want to get on stage and make stereo music again. So good old Annette Works [Matthews’s own label] is going to get relaunched.

Sometimes I hear a criticism that Berlin is stuck in a rut, with people doing the same things for a long time.

I understand what you’re saying – there are a lot of people still doing the same kind of thing but that’s their thing, that’s fine! And why should people always be doing new things? In fact there are always new things happening here. For me a criticism of this music community and this audience is that it’s pretty white. But there are a lot of women working and performing here, which is a very good thing, and they’re more visible somehow than in the UK. I live in Wedding, which is a largely Turkish community, and now there are lots of people from Syria. There’s also an African community, although it’s very small. A bar has opened up which has lots of crossovers between Turkish and experimental music. That’s been opened by a couple of young Italians. The language spoken there is pretty much English; they had a quiz the other night when I dropped in and it was all in English – quite odd. Yes, I feel positive about Berlin – somehow I find more space to experiment here. And I realised that I was quite lonely for like minds in London. My community there, my friends if you like, virtually none of them worked in music, sound art or performance. They were artists working in digital arts, photography or the visual arts. The community of musicians that I’ve walked into here I never really found in London – apart from a few years with the London Musicians Collective and Resonance FM, but somehow it all seemed to disperse.

So you have plans for relaunching Annette Works?

Yes, I have – it’s imminent. I have found a new practice, a new instrument if you like. I don’t know if you recall, for my solo performances I had a laptop and a box, which was actually a MIDI controller, with a lot of faders. I’m using that same box but inside it’s an Open Sound Controller, so it’s sending OSC [a protocol for communication among multimedia devices, originally developed at UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technology]. So rather than 127 different possibilities within that distance of a fader, you’ve got thousands. And I use this to play oscillators. They are digital so they’re in my laptop. And so I can go from extremely static combinations of tone based work to extraordinary noise. The way I’m working with the noise is such that it’s absolute texture, working with a kind of geological detail. It’s something that I started to make when I was working with my shark synthesiser [Love Shark is a 2014 piece developed after a residency in the Galapagos Islands, where Matthews dived to film and record hammerhead sharks]. Adam Parkinson, who I worked with on the shark synthesis, he is the one who got this going for me, and then I took it on myself. The thing is, I’ve found a playing focus again and that’s to do with the fact that I’ve found a studio. I’ve got a basement space, so I go and plug in, and I’m in there for hours. It has made me realise that actually I’ve been treading water for the last few years. All these other compositional trajectories I’ve been on – but my solo performance practice was discarded, or rather I just let it go. But it’s really coming back with a vengeance! Solo Kaffe getting on stage with her laptop, about to improvise, and I haven’t done that for years.

But you’re not planning to just get on stage with your ELKA 400 and become an organist?

Do you know what, I would actually love to! Because it would be such a great performance style. I’d have great outfits and good lights! I have done three or four performances here in Berlin, but it’s a heavy old thing to schlep about. Isn’t it stupid? But that is so much part of the reality of being a musician.The thing about performing with the ELKA is that it really responds completely differently in different rooms. And that’s why doing it live is amazing. I made a piece which I called Resident, it’s part of the same vocabulary that’s on Foreigner. I do that live – there’s still a laptop involved, but I’m much more able to work with the room. But on Foreigner there are no effect pedals or anything.

Really? On the B side I thought there were odd moments...

There is a noise switch on the organ; when you first put it on you get a “Whurghssh!” And there are sustain switches of different settings. So last year I was listening back to the masters of the album, and it took me several days to get back into that space, sitting back and letting the music just do itself. I feel I create one or two ingredients and combine them, and then you have to let them do their thing. Stop poking them! I said earlier, ‘Oh, keyboards are boring because you press a button and you don’t have to struggle’ – well, it’s the bane of my life, but I have to be pushing things, tweaking… Just sit back and let it happen. And that’s been really hard! As a child I used to play the organ in the village church where my dad was a warden and my mum did the flowers. On occasion I also got to pull the bell ropes in the box at the back. My sisters were keyboard players, but I wasn’t, so my mum didn’t really encourage me to play. But then I was playing that same village organ recently for the first time in years, when I was just getting started with the ELKA. I went into the church and held down notes, and pulled out the stops very slowly – believe it or not, it was the first time I’d done that. I didn’t know the minute control you can get with those stops, even though intellectually I know the organ is like an acoustic synthesiser. They’re extraordinary things!

Pre-order Foreigner on Bandcamp.