Mark Fell

Photo: Rebecca Salvadori

Driven by curiosity, Mark Fell’s unique approach to technology has shaped a long and adventurous career in electronic music.

Emerging from Sheffield’s fertile experimental scene and first gaining recognition through the influential duo SND, Mark Fell has consistently explored the relationships between computational processes and human perception. His work resists easy categorisation, in that it can be deeply mathematical yet unexpectedly playful, conceptually demanding yet physically engaging, revealing how technology is never neutral but always carries its own aesthetics and politics.

In an era now increasingly defined by artificial intelligence and automated creativity, Fell’s perspective feels more relevant than ever. Rather than asking what technology can do for music, he asks rather more fundamental questions: how do technological systems influence our ways of listening? What assumptions are embedded within the software we use every day? And how might artists subvert those conventions to discover genuinely new forms of expression?

Every artist begins somewhere, long before ideas acquire names or methods become philosophies. In Fell’s case, that journey starts with a deceptively simple question: how does a young boy growing up in a working‑class family in an industrial town come to see technology not merely as machinery, but as a means of making sense of the world through sound? The answer lies not in a single moment of revelation, but in a lifelong curiosity — one that would lead him to continually question established musical conventions while searching for entirely new forms of expression.

“I grew up on the border between Rotherham and Sheffield, in the industrial bit. When I was a kid, Sheffield obviously was the centre of electronic music. There was Cabaret Voltaire, the Human League, all this stuff, and I was 13 years old and starting to get into it all, and I went to a family gathering at my uncle’s in the East end of Sheffield. It was totally boring and I was the weird kid and then someone said, ‘Have a go on your cousin’s synthesizer, it’s in the coal shed!’ So I went in there, turned it on, and, I’m not exaggerating, literally, when my finger touched that dial, it was like the universe turned from black and white to colour.

“It was just a monosynth from RadioShack or something like a Realistic, but I sat in there all night. They couldn’t get me out of the room! Then I picked up a Powertran Transcendent 2000 from our next‑door neighbour who was a technician in the science department at the university. So, that’s where the story starts.”

For many young people growing up in the North of England during the 1980s, creativity became both a refuge and a form of resistance. Against a backdrop of industrial decline, political upheaval and communities fractured by the miners’ strike, electronic music offered an escape from everyday realities while opening the door to entirely new ways of thinking. For Fell, those years of isolated experimentation and self‑discovery would ultimately lay the foundations for a lifelong exploration of sound, technology and artistic possibility.

“It’s worth remembering that at that time, in that particular part of Britain, in the North, you had the miners’ strike and it felt like social infrastructure was just falling apart. I was becoming more politically aware. I was a bright kid, you know, like the nerd, but I was getting more rebellious, more into philosophy and art. So, it was part of my journey into an alternative being.

“I still have this huge box of cassettes, with photocopied covers from around 1981, with me messing around on a drum machine and monosynth, and it sounds exactly like what I do now! These were recorded on an old cassette deck. I didn’t have a mixer so what I used to do was cut the cables off various things and just twist the wires together to mix things.

“This period lasted for about five or six years, with me being quite isolated. You know, when you’re in a small town, you have to make compromises about who you hang out with. I was the kid with a weird hairdo and a synthesizer, and electronic music was part of this, almost like a kind of cocoon. Towards the end of the ’80s, I got into art school at Sheffield City Polytechnic, which was a great place to study. And, you know, it was the birth of Sheffield, techno and stuff. My ambition was basically to make a piece of music that I liked, and I failed miserably for a long time. At the same time, I always had this kind of realisation that I was good at what I did, I just kind of knew.

“I never anticipated making a living out of this, and my ambition in terms of a career, not that I ever really had one, was to be a weird anarchist dropout that just wanted to live on the dole for the rest of his life. But then I became a parent [to Rian Treanor, now a highly respected electronic music producer based in Rotherham in the UK], and realised I didn’t want to live that kind of life anymore, and got a job at Hull School of Art & Design as a technician. This was a great job as I was a Learning Advisor on a new course called Phonic Art and supporting students, but academic environments can tend to be quite toxic and around 2002 decided I’d return to working independently, following my own agenda, and miraculously have been doing that ever since.”

SND

The first introduction to Fell’s work for many was SND, his collaboration with Mat Steel, pioneering a form of almost broken dance music at the forefront of new digital minimalism. Stripped of traditional melody and vocals, their sound relied more on algorithmic pattern‑making processes. I was curious as to what led to this defining sound?

“I was still in the metaphorical shed with the synthesizer, and reading literature and finding out about experimental film and politics. I didn’t just want to make techno or house music. I wanted to make this weird radical version of it dealing with that vocabulary, but I didn’t know what that was going to be until I found it. I didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to resolve that issue.

“Then around 1995 a bunch of things started to emerge: Ryoji Ikeda, Mika Vaino and Panasonic, the Mille Plateaux label, Mego, and so on, and it was a brilliant time. I think it gave me a way of seeing my own work and my own questions in a new light, and it enabled me to step outside a lot of habits that were holding me back. This set me on the path to where I am today. I began working with Mat Steel as SND and with Jez Potter as Shirt Trax.

“Throughout my development as an artist, I would have one synth, then save some money, sell it and buy another. So, I progressed in that way. My history of making music is through real‑time engagement with dials and knobs. I’ve never studied music, nor knew any music theory. Then around 1988 I sold everything, and got an Atari ST computer with Pro‑24, which later became Cubase. I had one MIDI sound module with a minuscule screen on it, just one line. And I was sold the myth that in this kind of environment I could do anything, but this move — from using knobs and analogue electronics to screen‑based computer music — proved to be problematic. Several years later I formed an understanding of these difficulties.

“Basically, there was a shift in my relationship to that technology where I’d stopped being a performer and became a composer. The timeline environment promoted a compositional paradigm: here you’re not making this stuff in real time, you’re planning events, you’re outside the time of the music. What I realise now is that that was the thing that I was struggling with. I couldn’t make music in that environment, and I still can’t make music through considered planned decisions of ‘this note should go here.’

“This non‑real‑time way of working was the problem at the heart of my aesthetic, my...