---
格式版本: 2
标题: "In Conversation: Immersion’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel"
原文链接: "https://thekevinalexander.substack.com/p/immersion-colin-newman-malka-spigel-what-is-lost-will-return-interview"
发布日期: "2026-09-03"
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发布时间校准时间: "2026-09-06T19:45:24+08:00"
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发现时间: "2026-09-06T19:44:58+08:00"
入库时间: "2026-09-06T11:46:48.271Z"
来源平台: "Substack 数据中心相关博客搜索"
搜索渠道: "source_template"
搜索词: "site:substack.com Immersion"
匹配关键词:
  - "Immersion"
  - "performance"
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  []
相关专家:
  []
内容类型: "网页"
抓取工具: "Free Fetch + Defuddle"
清洗工具: "Defuddle Markdown + Defuddle/Readability 正文提取"
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AI优质: "否"
AI打分: 0
AI分档: "非优质"
AI质检状态: "不通过"
AI打分理由: "内容为乐队Immersion的音乐访谈，涉及专辑、巡演和创作，与超节点/AI Rack/机柜级AI基础设施完全无关，不包含任何相关技术或商业信息。"
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AI摘要: "Immersion的Colin Newman与Malka Spigel推出新专辑《What Is Lost Will Return》，用八首歌曲表达面对危机时的克制乐观，并将在2026年9月开启英国/欧洲巡演。"
AI摘要模型: "ali-deepseek-v4-flash"
AI摘要时间: "2026-09-06T23:44:37.759Z"
采集批次: "2026年9月6日19点27分09秒"
采集批次ID: "20260906-192709-237"
去重键: "https://thekevinalexander.substack.com/p/immersion-colin-newman-malka-spigel-what-is-lost-will-return-interview"
---

Colin Newman and Malka Spigel of Immersion. Photo courtesy of the band.

### Good morning!

> *Today we’re talking to Colin Newman and Malka Spigel of Immersion.*

---

Immersion’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel have no interest in looking backward.

The duo’s 2025 album *[WTF??](https://thekevinalexander.substack.com/p/kathleen-edwards-billionaire-immersion-wtf-album-reviews?r=3cbf2&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web),* captured the feeling of living through a nonstop wave of crises. Its follow-up, *What Is Lost Will Return*, doesn’t pretend things have gotten better. Instead, it feels like the moment one takes to regroup/refuel before charging back into the arena.

“The emotion we feel the album invokes is a poignant mixture of joy and melancholy,” Newman and Malka Spigel have said. That (relatable) mixture recurs throughout the record. Together, we get eight tracks of tight grooves, angular guitars, gorgeous synths, and a twin-vocal approach.

“We can be critical, we can have opinions, we can say all kinds of stuff,” Newman says from the Brighton studio he and Spigel share. “But it is not useful to anybody to have ‘fuck-you’ conversations. What we need is: okay, let’s understand that we are in a crisis. Humanity is in a crisis. And if we’re going to get through this, we’re going to need to do it together.”

It is a necessarily qualified optimism—less a denial of catastrophe and more an argument for resisting paralysis. Spigel puts it simply: “How do we look at the world? Do we get depressed or angry, or do we try and bring positive energy?” For Immersion, the answer isn’t ignoring the conditions around them, but instead using music as a vehicle for change.

Newman and Spigel are likely best known for their roles in Wire and Minimal Compact respectively, but this has never been a retro side project. The pair began making music under the Immersion name in the early 1990s, initially concealing their identities and presenting themselves as a German electronic duo. The reasons were simple: electronic music from Germany carried its own associations, and it provided enough cover to build the project outside the shadow of their previous bands.

At the start, Immersion was a “classic electronic duo,” Newman says. But the project changed when the pair revived it after relocating to Brighton in 2014. Instrumental beginnings evolved into collaborations, then into singing, guitars, and a more expansive sense of what Immersion could be.

“We began to realize: why can’t we sing in it? And why can’t we play guitars?” Newman says. “We like singing, we like playing guitars, and it just means we can express all the sides of what we’re into.”

In the past few years, that expanded definition has taken on a new practical reality: Immersion have become a touring live band. They are about to [kick off a series of UK/Europe dates](https://immersionhq.uk/), playing their largest venues to date. The live configuration is usually Newman and Spigel alone. However, Ohio-based Matt Schulz (Holy Fuck) joins them when geography permits—adding drums and an extra dynamic.

For the duo, the modest scale is both a choice and an economic reality. They are building an audience one venue at a time rather than relying on legacy billing or costly full-band production. “We don’t make life easy for ourselves,” Newman says. “When we tour, we play in small clubs. We have to build our audience almost from the bottom. So it’s like a young band.”

That stance also informs *What Is Lost Will Return.* “We genuinely feel we’re onto something here,” he continues. “We’ve found a line of something which… is relevant and of now. That’s what we’re interested in. We’re not really interested in living in the past.”

The new album came together with lightning speed. After the band’s 2025 UK tour, their booking agent asked when they thought they’d return. Newman and Spigel settled on September 2026, then realized early this year that a new release would be useful—if not essential—to accompany it. “At the beginning, we had basically two tracks, and we thought, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll make an EP,’” Newman recalls. “That was the plan in March. We ended up delivering an album at the end of April.” Ultimately, the compressed timeline sharpened their instincts. “Give us space, and we’re going to create music,” Newman says. “Making music is fun, and if you do it towards an album, then it’s much more concentrated.”

Their shared life has made that concentration/efficiency possible. They have collaborated since they met, and Spigel says the years have helped them develop an unusually candid studio language. “We can be very direct with each other,” she says. “If we’re not sure about something, we say it, and if we have an idea, we do it.”

The work happens in a converted one-car garage behind their home, reached through a small garden. It’s full of analog synthesizers, guitars, basses, recording gear, and just enough space for the two of them. It also serves as their mixing room, interview room, radio-production suite, and the center of their musical lives. “It’s just a space that we kind of like to be in,” Newman says. “It’s separate from the house, which makes it different somehow.”

Schulz helped push the new record into its final form, recording live drums to replace or reinforce the existing programmed percussion. “That just took it to another level,” Newman says. “That’s the best-recorded drums that we’ve had on an Immersion record.”

“Megafauna,” represents another dimension of the album. One of its three instrumentals, it moves on a dark, dub-inflected wave, with guitar lines and recorder flourishes creating a strange, ceremonial atmosphere. In the band’s description, its title reflects “lumbering large creatures moving slowly to the beat” and following “the sound of a primordial piper.”

The piper, it turns out, is Spigel. The track began during a 2022 session where the collaborators spent several days jamming without trying to force the results into anything finished. When Newman and Spigel later returned to the material, they built out a bass-and-drums foundation and began looking for a way to get it over the finish line. “Malka suddenly picked up this recorder and started playing this bonkers stuff on it,” Newman says. “This is literally first take.”

The “Megafauna” [video](https://youtu.be/CNZt7MWOZzU) extends the song’s uncanny physicality. It combines footage of Ivan Morison’s Soft Machines sculptures on the seafront, installed for Brighton Festival 2026, with masked drummers from the 2018 Brighton Festival performance Sense of Unity with Dundu in Whitehawk. The result gives the music a fitting visual counterpart: handmade beings, ritual movement, earth and straw, and a track that (at least) feels machine-made. For this writer, the contrast between earthen elements and music composed with electronics is striking.

Outside the album, Newman and Spigel’s weekly radio program, [Swimming in Sound](https://totallyradio.com/shows/swimming-in-sound), has become another avenue to express their belief in musical exchange. Recorded in the same Brighton studio, the show pulls together music from a laundry list of places: streaming sites like Qobuz, artist pages, playlists, digital stores, and more. It’s the sort of unstructured but associative search where each record leads to the next.

Spigel, by Newman’s account, is the principal collector. “I go on a kind of little flight, and one thing leads to another,” she says. A quick look at each week’s playlist confirms this: The selections move freely, and any given setlist might include Brighton artists, Japanese bands, drone, drum and bass, experimental pop, and more established names (to list a few). They also include one track each from Minimal Compact and Wire. The goal is discovery rather than allegiance to any genre. “Most people who are in bands, the music that they like is varied,” Newman says. “Very few people in bands will tell you that their favorite bands are all the ones that sound a bit like they do.”

The show has also helped generate genuine creative relationships. Immersion’s continuing Nanocluster series has brought them together with artists including [Tarwater, Laetitia Sadier, Ulrich Schnauss, Scanner](https://open.qobuz.com/album/tkkn9ut3cfjtb), [Thor Harris, Cubzoa](https://open.qobuz.com/album/ts7va0lzfs7cb), and SUSS. Their collaboration with the latter began with radio play and the Newman and Spigel tagging the band in a social media post for one of their radio shows. From there, it [grew into an album](https://open.qobuz.com/album/v6y41el9b2ccb) and a series of US dates. For Newman and Spigel, collaboration has to be more than a surface level exchange of guest appearances. “When you listen to Immersion and SUSS, you’re hearing both parties,” Newman says. “SUSS make all that space, and we fill it all up. But it’s not stuck together—it’s kind of merging in a natural way.”

That desire for meaningful exchange runs through *What Is Lost Will Return*. The album isn’t an instruction manual for fixing a world gone sideways, nor does it substitute good intentions for musical force. Its political aim is embedded in its method: two artists working earnestly, and creating room for other voices and unexpected sounds as a way to meet the moment.

For listeners coming to Immersion for the first time, Spigel hopes the result is clear. “We just hope they connect with the music, with what we try to project, and enjoy it.”

Adds Newman: “Building that network worldwide of people who get what we do, and we can get what they do—it’s the kind of thing that makes life worth living.”

*What Is Lost Will Return* will be available everywhere starting tomorrow (04. September). Click the record to pre-save/listen on Qobuz. You can also pre-order your copy [here](https://swim.greedbag.com/buy/we-dont-need-your-validation/).

To connect with the band and see what they’re up to, check out:

**[Bandcamp](https://t.e2ma.net/click/b9nwmn/bd79wrte/v8w6yw) | [Instagram](https://t.e2ma.net/click/b9nwmn/bd79wrte/fgw6yw) | [Immersion website](https://t.e2ma.net/click/b9nwmn/bd79wrte/b1x6yw) | [swim~](https://t.e2ma.net/click/b9nwmn/bd79wrte/rty6yw)** | **[Swimming In Sound](https://swimminginsound.com/)  
  
**Thank you again to Colin and Malka for their time, and thank *you* for being here.

Kevin—

---