Martin Aston - Facing the Other Way - The Story of 4AD

By nightfall, a hush descends; it’s the kind of place where you come to get away, or hide away, from it all. To give an idea of its isolation, America’s first atomic bomb was tested just two hours away. It’s a landscape on to which you can put your own impression, and also disappear into. ‘I’ve moved to where I feel my most comfortable,’ Ivo confesses. ‘But people just think I’m eccentric.’

It’s here, on a ridge outside of Lamy, that Ivo built his house. On the roof, you can see 360 degrees to the surrounding mountains. To the left, the Manzanos; straight ahead towards Albuquerque, the Sandias; to the right above Los Alamos, the Jemez and the Sangre de Cristo ranges that host ski season. Trails lead through the rock and scrub, but generally only dog walkers follow them; the remoteness is both impressive and comforting. In his decidedly modernist house, which stands out among New Mexico’s predominantly pueblo architecture, Ivo lives with his three dogs, his art, his music and his privacy. It’s an idyll, a hideaway, a fortress, possibly even a prison. Sometimes the only sounds are the sighs, whines and occasional barks of his dogs. The sun bakes down for much of the year. The skies are huge, the silence deafening.

Among the albums is a box set of This Mortal Coil recordings that Ivo recorded back in the day with a revolving cast of musicians, some close friends and others mere acquaintances. Some remain friends; others he hasn’t seen, talked or corresponded with for many years. No expense was spared in the mastering of this music or the packaging of the collectors CD format known as ‘Japanese paper sleeve’, though the high-end quality is more like stiff card, like it’s a book or a piece of art. These miniature reproductions of the original vinyl album artwork, only reproduced by specialist manufacturers in Japan, is the antithesis of the intangible digital MP3 that now defines music consumption. ‘I’m fascinated by the quality of what the Japanese do, and the obscurity of some of the releases they archive and document,’ Ivo says. ‘Record companies say that no one buys finished product anymore. So why not give them something of beauty?’

Shelves and drawers in Ivo’s rooms contain thousands of these limited edition box sets, which he trades as a hobby, to turn a profit if he can, ordering early and then selling on once they have sold out. After a period of not even being able to listen to music, it has again become an obsession. The music industry, or rather 4AD’s place in it, used to be an obsession as well. Not anymore. Now it’s a foggy, jumbled-up memory of highs and lows, a black dog growling at the foot of his mind.

Much contemporary music has a similar effect. Edgy, glitchy electronic music, the currency of the present technological age, ‘is just wrong for my brain,’ Ivo shrugs. He also admits he very rarely sees any live music anymore; too many people, too much fuss. The concept of the latest sound, the latest trend, the hyped-up sensation, leaves him cold. It has to be music that exists for its own sake. Music that can provide what he describes as ‘solace and sense’. For the most part, Ivo explains, ‘it doesn’t involve the intellect, but evokes an emotional response. It draws one away from analysis, from the brain constantly questioning.’

This music often comes from his past, discovered in his youth or while he was building 4AD’s catalogue, when he experienced epiphanies, love affairs, drug trips, through a cassette demo or a live show, before there was even the awareness of a black dog or what it meant to run a business. Music from the worlds of American folk and country appear to provide the most solace and sense these days. But the uncanny world of progressive rock rooted in the Sixties and Seventies, fusing the techniques of classical and avant-garde music to play havoc with tempo, texture and access, has become a recent fascination. ‘Give me originality,’ he says. ‘Give me something challenging. I listen to music now and I’m always running an inventory in my head of what it reminds me of. I mean, if you’re going to copy, to mimic, without putting an ounce of yourself into it …’

Ivo hasn’t recorded any of his own music since 1997, when he assembled a series of cover versions under the name The Hope Blister. ‘There have been a couple of times where I’ve talked about it,’ he admits. ‘I sent tapes out for people to consider, but I couldn’t go through with it. In any case, I haven’t had an original idea for years. In fact, I have no idea how I was ever that imaginative.’

Yet despite his disappearance into the desert and retirement, Ivo’s opinion clearly still stands for something. Colleen Maloney, 4AD’s head of press through the Nineties and currently at fellow south London independent Domino, heard that Ivo had fallen for Diamond Mine , a collaborative album between Scottish vocalist King Creosote and British electronic specialist Jon Hopkins that Domino had released in 2011. Ivo’s name subsequently appeared on a press advertisement beside the quote: ‘the best vocal record of the last twenty years’.

‘It’s so full of atmosphere, so sharp and so sad,’ he says, nailing the very qualities that so often elevated the music released on 4AD to such sublime heights. But, as the cliché goes, the higher you climb, the harder you can fall. Beneath the beauty, lies a deeper ocean of emotion in which to drown.

(BAD5–BAD19)

Far from Lamy, the ancient market town of Oundle in the UK has a markedly different flora, fauna and geography – flatter, greener, though just as sedate. In a rural idyll 70 miles north of London in the county of Northamptonshire, Oundle is also isolated: 12 miles from the nearest main town of Peterborough, and almost surrounded on three sides by the River Nene.

The house where Ivo grew up was also isolated – the driveway to the main house was half a mile long. The Watts-Russells are inextricably linked to Oundle: records show that Ivo’s ancestor Jesse Watts-Russell Junior built the town hall and the church, though it’s the ancient church in the nearby village of Lower Benefield that can be seen through the avenue of trees from the estate’s manor house.

Ivo’s family came from aristocratic money, but while they still own much of the land in the area, the low-rent tithes set by his grandmother in the 1930s drastically reduced the income. The farmhouse property where Ivo was raised while his grandmother occupied the manor house had broken windows in every room. ‘Sixty years earlier, the family name was a presence – my grandparents’ marriage was society news,’ he recalls. ‘But the reality was five of us in one bedroom, and the farm itself was only a modest success.’

Ivo’s father served in the British army in Egypt before and during the Second World War, and in Germany afterwards, before returning to Oundle in 1950 to run the estate farm. Ivo was born four years later, named after Ivo Grenfell, a cousin on his grandmother’s side and brother of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, whose famous war poem ‘Into Battle’ was published the same month he was killed in 1915. Ivo was the youngest of eight, with two brothers and five sisters. By the time his grandmother had died in 1969 and Ivo’s family moved into the manor house, all his siblings had left home. His other brother Peregrine (known as Perry) remembers Ivo assisting with the move in a rare bonding exercise with an emotionally distant father.

‘My older sister would joke, though not necessarily so, that the first time our dad talked to us was when we’d each turned fifteen, and he’d say, “OK, get on the tractor and drive”. He was a very aloof man, who lost his own father when he was seven and was raised by a tyrannical Victorian English mother. We never related emotionally to either parent.’