As a student of Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Dieter Roth in Dusseldorf in the late sixties, Emil Schult found himself early on in the epicenter of Germany’s post-war cultural resurgence, absorbing the transformative artistic ideals of the day and transferring them to his work with thenobscure band Kraftwerk. While Schult never considered himself a musical equal, he soon found his place designing the band’s album covers and writing some of the group’s most poetic lyrics. Schult’s futuristic visual representations of science, technology and transport would not only become inseparable from Kraftwerk’s sound, they would also help cement electronic music’s utopian trajectory—one followed proudly by Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender. The Chemnitz-born musicians and owners of post-techno imprint Raster-Noton have long taken their cue in part from Kraftwerk’s sonic and visual formalism. With their recent spate of EPs as Diamond Version, the duo has chosen to invert the utopian paradigm, meditating instead on the neoliberal mottos of multinational tech corporations. Dystopia hasn’t sounded this good in years. Right: Emil Schult in Berlin. All photos: Hans Martin Sewcz.
72 EB 3/2013
EMIL SCHULT TALKS TO CARSTEN NICOLAI AND OLAF BENDER of DIAMOND VERSION
“Could billions of stars be read like notes?” Carsten Nicolai: Preparing for this
discussion, Emil, I noticed that you were born in Dessau. Olaf and I come from nearby Chemnitz which was known as Karl-MarxStadt back in the day. We grew up in the GDR, you in West Germany. Still, Dessau stands in my mind for the Bauhaus, and I wonder how the Bauhaus tradition was discussed or taught at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where you studied under Joseph Beuys.
Emil Schult: The Bauhaus was
omnipresent in Beuys’s class, the reason being that one of the main protagonists in that class came from Dessau. Imi Knoebel was then collaborating with Imi Giese on various minimalist concepts. And since Beuys’s class was central to the social fabric of the Kunstakademie, it had an impact far beyond the class that continues up through today. My assistant is currently working on her bachelor’s degree in 3D textile design at the Dusseldorf University of Applied Sciences. She’s actually designing an audio headdress. I told her that she should see the headdress within a historical context, from ancient status symbol, to the crown to Oskar Schlemmer’s experiments in three-dimensional staging at the Bauhaus in Dessau.
Olaf Bender: I think it’s interest-
ing that the Bauhaus in Dessau is surrounded by the massive
English Grounds of Wörlitz, which is this classically ornate garden created in the late eighteenth century by Leopold III. It’s essentially the natural representation of romantic ideals—the opposite of the abstract functionalism they taught at the Bauhaus. Not that we were originally schooled— Carsten and I started out as autodidacts, both as musicians and as artists. But everything we learned in terms of craftsmanship somehow pointed to the Bauhaus and craftsmanship as art. ES: How do you see the relation-
ship between Bauhaus and music?
CN: Well, you mentioned Oskar
Schlemmer, whose Triadic Ballet became the most widely performed avant-garde dance piece of its time. During Schlemmer’s stint at the Bauhaus in the twenties, his touring ballet helped spread the ethos of the Bauhaus. Also, many professors at the Bauhaus—Kandinsky and others—were interested in music.
ES: I have the impression that,
more often than not, it’s artists who seek out musicians to collaborate, as opposed to the other way around. Nam June Paik’s love of John Lennon comes to mind.
CN: For us, the connection came
when we were confronted with the question of how to design our record covers. Only later did we
start more actively visualizing our music—that is, ignoring narrative or illustrative approaches and focusing instead on visually analyzing the sound instead, using tools such as waveform oscilloscopes to analyze and translate sound into graphic design. ES: How important is it for
you to hear what you see and see what you hear?
CN: In all honesty, we never
sought contact with visual artists as much as we communicated with machines.
ES: Carsten, you’ve called one of
your recent Alva Noto albums Univrs. When I think of the universe, I feel reminded of man’s inability to understand what’s beyond our reach. I don’t understand terms like “eternity” or “light year”. We could extend this to history as well: What are one hundred million years of evolution compared to the last two hundred years? CN: I am not a teacher—I don’t
evangelize about things, and I’ve never tried to convert or convince people of anything. My approach is rather private as opposed to, say, someone like Beuys.
ES: I actually don’t know if he
tried to “convert” people to his way of thinking. I’d rather say he was a man without fear. But let me tell you a little anecdote. The electronic music that you and other musicians compose goes back to the invention of transistors. If you ask me, the transistor is one of the crucial inventions of the modern age, created by John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs in the late forties. All three are now long dead. After them, a new generation helped further the field. Nick Holonyak, Jr. invented LED in 1962. He’s eighty years old now. I traveled to the States to meet him at a lecture. I remember he said: “If we turn off the transistor, the modern world will come to a standstill.” That’s a true statement. I had the honor to give a speech that evening in