Blind Convergence

Ambitious ambient solo project from Thieves Kitchen guitarist Phil Mercy.

Phil Mercy’s band Thieves Kitchen, which also includes his wife Amy, released their last album ‘Genius Loci’ in 2019 and are now on a long-term hiatus. As a result, Mercy has now moved into electronica with his one-man project, Blind Convergence. Prog has seen two of his live performances so far, and it’s hugely impressive – a bold mixture of synthesised loops, with ambient synthesised sequences and spoken word samples with guitar textures.

Mercy explains how this new project came about and how the approach of Thieves Kitchen keyboard player Thomas Johnson helped inform his new direction.  

“I spent ages after the last album wondering what to do next, and I decided that the only answer was to try to grow as a musician somehow. But Thomas understands the texture of sound like no other human I ever met. He has this wise and advanced approach to creating atmosphere. So, I asked myself whether I could do that on my own. This became Blind Convergence.”

A Blind Convergence performance is a continuous 45 to 50-minute improvised piece, with Mercy layering guitar and occasionally keyboard melody lines and loops over a pre-prepared series of sequences and samples, which flow through perhaps half a dozen prepared sections. But Mercy has set himself some rules to follow: “The performance is in the moment. But I’m allowed to create a palette of sounds ahead of time to provide a broad structure that I must stay within. This is very similar to Minimalist composer Terry Riley’s //in C//. He wrote a whole series of figures in that key that all the instrumentalists would follow. The order was fixed, but when they chose to play them was up to the individual musician. The result was a different combination of instruments each time. So, in my case, as the guitarist playing over it, the rule is that there’s a scale in each section. This is because the equipment is such that it’s difficult to change keys instantly with so many different sound sources. As a result change can only be very gradual. Within that, I have a palette of notes, and I can play whatever I like. Two different performances of the same piece will sound very different depending on my choices on the night.”  

Prog queries how it feels to play such music live. “It’s a lot less stressful than a Thieves Kitchen gig,” he laughs.  
As to future performances, it’s clear that using video would be an obvious next step, but Mercy also sees the benefit of other ways of enhancing a performance’s visual aspects: “I’d like to hook a computer up to live audio, which can be interpreted in real-time to generate video. I’d also like to incorporate cameras so people can see what I’m doing, and another possibility is to perform outdoors and film it.“  

As for releases, ‘Blind Convergence 1’ is available on his Bandcamp site, while a recent live performance of a new piece called ‘Skyward’ will be released on March 20th. 

Prog File//  
LINE UP: Phil Mercy (guitar and synths)  
SOUNDS LIKE: A glorious mixture of ambient electronica, intriguing samples and lead guitar. Eno meets Tangerine Dream.  
CURRENT RELEASE: //Skyward// is released via Bandcamp on March 20^th  
WEBSITE: https://philmercy.bandcamp.com  

– Stephen Lambe