Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 4/2013

­Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 36 · WINTER 2013/2014

“From A to B and back again”

H.P. Baxxter MEETS ALBERT OEHLEN

GARY NUMAN nicolas jaar Cosey Fanni Tutti Mark Fell

C T M 2 0 1 4 — F E S T I VA L F O R ADVENTUROUS MUSIC & ART 1 5 T H E D I T I O N 24 .1 . — 2 . 2 . 2 0 1 4 B E R L I N

JAMES HOLDEN

LIVE

/ CHARLES COHEN

R A B I H B E A I N I / C YC LO B E / P O RT E R R I C K S O PA L TA P E S F E A T

BASIC HOUSE, KAREN GWYER,

1991, LUMISOKEA / MARK ERNESTUS

PRES

J E R I - J E R I / B L A C K M A N U A L / M E TA S P L I C E LICHENS / RODION G.A. / ERKKI KURENNIEMI S H OWCAS E

WITH

M I K A VA I N I O , C A R L M I C H A E L

V O N H A U S S W O L F F, T O M M I K E R Ä N E N , M I K K O O J A N E N , M I K A TA A N I L A , L U C K Y D R A G O N S KO N TA K T D E R J Ü N G L I N G E EDITIONS MEGO

PRES

KTL, BEE MASK, COH +

TINA FRANK, KASSEL JAEGER, MAIN, GRM RECOLLECTED 50 YEARS ELEKTRONMUSIKSTUDION EMS S TO C K H O L M / Á KO S R Ó Z M A N N S O U N DXC H A N G E — E X P E R I M E N TA L M U S I C C U LT U R E S I N C E N T R A L A N D E A S T E R N E U R O P E G E N E R AT I O N Z : R E N O I S E — RUSSIAN PIONEERS OF SOUND ART IN THE E A R LY 2 0 T H C E N T U R Y W I T H M A N Y M O R E TO CO M E

HAU HEBBEL AM UFER / BERGHAIN S TAT T B A D / K U N S T R A U M K R E U Z B E R G / BETHANIEN / ASTRA & MORE

W W W. C T M - F E S T I VA L . D E

G R A F I K ~ S T U D I O G R AU. D E

DIS CONT INUI TY

EDITORIAL

“Try not to be creative”

Max Dax: Hans-Ulrich, with

every issue of Electronic Beats we attempt to paint a portrait of a city by letting a cast of cultural protagonists tell us about it. Or to use another metaphor, it’s a bit like a polyphonic choir. This time we traveled to Hamburg where we met artist, musician and professor Michaela Melián. She told us that the HFBK, Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts, has always been open to various artistic disciplines and approaches. She also mentioned that over the decades, Hamburg’s art and music scenes have been politically charged. Then, when we met producer and label owner Alfred Hilsberg, he told us about witnessing street riots in the seventies, as well as leftwing terrorism and how musicians and film directors filled their work with what they’d seen on the streets in confrontation. Francesco Sbano, who is a photographer and journalist, explained the visibility of the city’s crime. You look at the harbor and you understand that you are looking at a broad stage of illegal trade and contraband.

In St. Pauli, the city’s red-light district, you’re surrounded by it.

The bottom line always seemed to be that the art was always influenced by the environment.

Dear Readers, Holly Johnson, the legendary singer of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, once said: “I get buzzed off the fact that Andy Warhol’s heard of us, because he gets buzzed off the fact that Picasso had heard of him.” A few months ago I wondered if H.P. Baxxter gets buzzed off the fact that renowned painter Albert Oehlen had heard of him— which is why we’ve gathered these pillars of high and low art for our cover story. Of course, Baxxter is a recognizable face everywhere from Berlin and Novosibirsk to Ulaanbaatar and beyond.

Hopefully, our other interviews and conversations with Laurel Halo, Mark Fell, Darkside and Daniel Pinchbeck will be as edifying.

Kindest regards, Max Dax Editor-in-Chief

Hans Ulrich Obrist: That’s inte-

resting. I traveled to Hamburg on a regular basis when Hanne Darboven was still alive. A visit to her house in Rönneburg was obligatory for me. She actually had studied at the HFBK. Her house was like a gesamtkunstwerk, filled to the brim with her writings, books, catalogues, magazines et cetera. Entering it was like going to a museum. I particularly remember my first visit there. She took me into the garden and showed me the grave of “Mickey”. It turned out that Mickey wasn’t a deceased member of her family but her goat. As an early protagonist of conceptual and minimal art, she was strongly supported by Sol LeWitt and Kasper König, with whom I actually had curated my first Hamburg exhibition at Deichtorhallen, The Broken Mirror, in 1993.

MD: Do you still visit Hamburg

often?

HUO: With Hanne Darboven’s

untimely death in 2009, I stopped traveling to Hamburg frequently.

MD: Our cover story this issue

is a conversation between the painter Albert Oehlen and H.P. Baxxter from Scooter. Even

though they come from two completely different directions, they both seem to be working with the idea of a universally understandable language.

For them, using an extremely accessible visual and linguistic vocabulary is about preventing exclusion. I’m sure you know that Oehlen too studied at the HFBK. HUO: Of course. And he now lives near Appenzell in Switzerland, where I visited him in his studio recently. It’s an extraordinary coincidence that in my student days, I developed a museum in memory of the writer Robert Walser right there, a few houses away from that restaurant!

MD: That’s funny. Didn’t Oehlen also contribute instructions for how to arrange an exhibition for your new book Do It—The Compendium?

HUO: Yes, the beginning of his instructions went something like this: “Arrange all your paint tubes according to their size.

Arrange all your brushes in alphabetical order. Turn your prepared canvas 180°. Choose a color and brush and make a mark. Try not to be creative.

Paint.” ~

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PICTURES TO THE EDITOR Send your photos to pictures@electronicbeats.net

When it rains, it pours. And when it pours in Montenegro’s capital, people just don’t give a damn. With Mount Kimbie onstage, the plucky Podgoricans put on their ponchos, opened their umbrellas and danced unselfconsciously before catching a collective cold. Blame it on the rain. Read reviews and watch live footage of this fall’s Electronic Beats festivals at www.electronicbeats.net/festivals. Photo: Ivana Pozovic 4 EB 4/2013

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Festivalgoers in Zagreb making analogue selfies shortly before grooving to headliner Fritz Kalkbrenner’s “Get a Life”. Photo: Matej Grgic EB 4/2013 7

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Woodkid’s handsome trio of pure brass class blew hard and long at the recent Electronic Beats Festival in Dresden. According to numerous reports, the French singer-songwriter’s chamber pop left some audience members wishing they had continued with their childhood trombone lessons, while their friends encouraged them not to dwell on the past. Photo: Peyman Azhari EB 4/2013 9

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A lucky ticket holder calming her nerves in the lobby of Budapest’s Millenáris Teatrum in between sets by Washed Out and John Talabot. Photo: Bertalan Soos / NVC EB 4/2013 11

Imprint Imprint Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues Est. 2005 Issue N° 36 Winter 2013/2014

Publisher: BurdaCreative, P.O. Box 810249, 81902 München, Germany Managing Directors: Gregor Vogelsang, Dr.-Ing. Christian Fill, Karsten Krämer Creative Director Editorial: Christine Fehenberger Head of Telco & Commerce: Thomas Walter

Editorial Office: Electronic Beats Magazine, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 13, 10178 Berlin, Germany www.electronicbeats.net magazine@electronicbeats.net Editor-in-Chief: Max Dax Duty Editor: Michael Lutz, Editor: A.J. Samuels Editor-at-Large: Louise Brailey Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert Copy Editor: Karen Carolin

Cover: H.P. Baxxter, photographed by Luci Lux in Hamburg.

Contributing Authors: Just von Ahlefeld, Vasili Alexandridis, Richard Brody, Gunther Buskies, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Charles Damga, DJ Richard, Mark Fell, Charles Grob, H.P. Baxxter, Laurel Halo, Tino Hanekamp, Alfred Hilsberg, Nicolas Jaar, Martin Jaeggi, Lawrence, Arto Lindsay, Michaela Melián, Giorgio Moroder, Morphosis, Gary Numan, Glenn O’Brien, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Albert Oehlen, Daniel Pinchbeck, Trent Reznor, Francesco Sbano, Thomas Schoenberger, Julius Steinhoff, Ricardo Villalobos, Nik Void

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Georg Gatsas, Harry Langdon, Margret Links, Luci Lux, minus, Satoki Nagata, Albert Oehlen, Elena Panouli, Ben Roberts, Stefan Rohner, Krijn van Noordwijk, Jörg von Bruchhausen

Electronic Beats Magazine is a division of Telekom’s international music program “Electronic Beats” International Musicmarketing / Deutsche Telekom AG: Claudia Jonas, Kathleen Karrer and Ralf Lülsdorf Public Relations: Kruger Media GmbH—Public Relations & Brand Communication, Torstraße 171, 10115 Berlin, Germany Michael Frohoff, michael.frohoff@kruger-media.de Subscriptions: www.electronicbeats.net/subscriptions Advertising: advertising@electronicbeats.net Printing: Druckhaus Kaufmann, Raiffeisenstr. 29, 77933 Lahr, Germany Distribution: VERTRIEB MZV GmbH & Co KG, 85716 Unterschleißheim, Germany

Thanks to: Jutta Bächner, Anke Bauer, Sven Brux, Reto Bühler, Peter Cadera, Robert Defcon, Konstantin Drobil, Arno Frisch, Florian Hadler, Stephanie Heinemann, Jutta Küpper, Nora Lawrenz, Tobias Levin, Stefan Strüver, Jens Thele, Kiki van Torx, André Vida, Sasha Wachtel © 2013 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited ISSN 2196-0194 “How much is the fish?”

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Content Content Editorial .................................................................................... 3 Pictures to the Editor .......................................................... 4

Monologues

Recommendations................................................................... 16 Music and other media recommended by Ricardo Villalobos, Morphosis, Richard Brody, Arto Lindsay, Charles Damga, Nik Void et al.; featuring new releases by Claude Lanzmann, Heatsick, Cabaret Voltaire, NRSB-11, King Krule, and more ¥C$ Glenn O’Brien’s Hundred Bucks of Books .................................. 28 ABC The alphabet according to Cosey Fanni Tutti ............................ 30 Style Icon Trent Reznor on Johnny Cash ..................................... 34 Counting with . . . Giorgio Moroder.......................................... 36

“Buy me a car and I’ll sign anything” Max Dax interviews GARY NUMAN .................................................. 40

Interviews

“I could call myself a cultural Marxist, but I don’t” Louise Brailey talks to LAUREL HALO ............................................. 46

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“I actively try not to prompt the audience to share my enthusiasm” A.J. Samuels interviews MARK FELL ............................................... 50

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“Popularity is a currency of its own” H.P. BAXXTER meets Albert Oehlen ............................................................... 60

Conversations

“It’s as if the plants are speaking or even singing to you” Daniel Pinchbeck in conversation with Nicolas Jaar and DAVE harrington of DARKSIDE........................................ 72 EB 4/2013

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Wanderlust: 72 hours in HAMBURG................................................ 82 NEU: Psiloscience .......................................................................... 98

19.11.13 11:53

Three of our featured contributors: Trent Reznor

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Gunther Buskies

(* 1965) Trent Reznor is a singer-songwriter and composer best known for his work with Nine Inch Nails. In 2011 he won an Oscar for “Best Score” for David Fincher’s The Social Network. In this issue he talks about his style icon, Johnny Cash.

(* 1951) is a performance artist and a founding member of Throbbing Gristle and duo Chris and Cosey (today Carter Tutti). Here she’s seen smiling on the cover of TG’s classic 20 Jazz Funk Greats. from 1979.

In this issue she tells us about her life, from A to Z.

(* 1972) is the founder of the labels Tapete Records and Bureau B. While the former is focused largely on pop and rock, the latter centers around reissues of classic German kosmische and krautrock acts. In this issue he tells us about his hometown of Hamburg.

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Monologues

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recommEndations

“Quoting the visual conventions of Instagram selfies.”

Martin Jaeggi on Georg Gatsas and Tobias Spichtig’s exhibition cyan, yellow, and violette

Martin Jaeggi is a journalist, art critic and lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts and F+F School of Art and Media Design. He has written numerous articles and essays for newspapers and art publications, including ArtReview, Exit and Aperture.

Opposite page: Fatima Al Qadiri, 2013, Digital C-print, 24” x 35”. All Portraits

by Georg Gatsas.

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The metallic whirring sounds of a track by Factory Floor’s Nik Colk Void dominate the atmosphere of cyan, yellow, and violette—a double exhibition by the artists Georg Gatsas and Tobias Spichtig at Kunst Raum Riehen on the outskirts of Basel. Gatsas invited Void to contribute a track after photographing her on commission for a magazine, which is also included in the series of portraits in the exhibition. It’s a configuration that is highly typical for Gatsas’ approach to photography and music, which have been inextricably intertwined in his work since its beginnings.

Between 2003 and 2007, Gatsas presented a series of exhibitions and publications under the title The Process in which he presented his photographs of the denizens of New York’s underground scene, ranging from legends like Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Jim Thirlwell, and Kembra Pfahler to up-and-coming musicians like Gang Gang Dance’s Lizzi Bougatsos alongside works by the very people he portrayed. The open structure of these exhibitions is a salient expression of the insatiable curiosity and openness that propels Gatsas’ work, which is as much about community and friendship as it is about authorship.

In recent years, Gatsas has focused on a long-time study of London’s bass music scene and shot numerous portraits of musicians for magazines like The Wire, Dazed & Confused, and Electronic Beats, which reappear in his personal work.

Here, he presents portraits of

young men and women whose attire and attitude epitomize a certain urban now-ness. It’s the way 2013 looks. The backdrops of the portraits—colored walls, shrubs and greenery—offer no indication where the pictures were taken, and indeed they could have been taken in any major Western city, since styles and tastes today are defined to a high degree by the Internet.

The sportswear and patterned shirts they wear are ubiquitous monikers of hipness. The images themselves reference Internet culture by quoting the visual conventions of Instagram selfies that have abounded in recent years.

Upon closer inspection, however, electronic music aficionados might recognize some of the sitters. Experimental electronic producers Laurel Halo, Xeno & Oaklander’s Liz Wendelbo, Nik Colk Void, Fatima Al Qadiri, and Visionist are shown alongside portraits of young people that Gatsas encountered in Zurich and London. Yet for the series as a whole it’s not important who exactly the sitters are. What matters is the overall definition of a certain moment of time by means of portraiture. Although the sitters are highly styleconscious and adept at projecting an image of themselves, Gatsas manages to capture astonishingly relaxed and intimate views of them, a testimony to the sensitivity of his approach.

It’s this tension between the artifice of style and the immediacy of facial expression and body posture that makes Gatsas’ images so poignant.

Tobias Spichtig, with whom Georg Gatsas teamed up for this exhibition, works in a variety of media with a concept-based approach. Like Gatsas, his work is informed by a close observation of pop and Internet culture.

In one room, he presents sculptures made of destroyed computer monitors placed on oriental rugs, combined with a series of land- and cityscapes by Gatsas that seem highly artificial and mediated. The juxtaposition of the sculptures and the images creates a discreetly apocalyptic atmosphere heightened by Void’s haunting soundtrack. Also, like Gatsas’ landscapes, Spichtig’s video projection of a floating iceberg, shot with an iPhone, does not quite seem real. You look at the video and wonder whether it’s a rendering. The somewhat shaky camera seems to be just another ruse to trick you into believing the image is real. In another projection, Spichtig shows a man with long hair, in black attire and flashy sneakers, dancing around a fire in the Swiss mountains – a jarring juxtaposition of urban culture and nature. The image reflects a certain longing for primitivism underlying digital culture that Spichtig considers a vital trend.

The photographs, sculptures, videos, and the soundtrack of the exhibition merge together into an immersive environment that manages to capture the zeitgeist of the current age of uncertainty, oscillating between melancholy and exuberance and between the pleasures of mediated reality and the yearning for immediacy. ~

Above: Alphabetical disorder. Photo: Margret Links.

Ricardo Villalobos is a Chilean-born electronic musician based in Berlin. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

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Ricardo Villalobos recommends . . . music

“Music should have no Babylonian boundaries and should not be ruled by economic interests.”

As a general matter, it’s difficult for me to write my personal opinions about music, especially about entire genres of music I might not like in a given moment. And classifications or definitions about musical “types” is the opposite of what I see in music and understand it to be. Music is music and just music. Music should have no Babylonian boundaries or distinctions and should not be ruled by economic interests. I’m interested in what people have in common through music. Similarities over differences. Music shows its similarities by itself and music alone allows the people to recognize those similarities.

After the Industrial Revolution, the new bosses needed to promote and tell a new fairy tale—a fairy tale about a relationship humans have with products. Ultimately, the point

of this fairy tale is to sell more products to more atomized individuals (the opposite of music).

It’s a promotion of the completely artificial and unique phenomena called INDEPENDENCY—an economic model to produce and sell more specific and personal products to make people feel unique and products seem distinct from each other.

But nothing in the entire universe is independent. That’s just a businessman’s fantasy.

They want to help compensate for the disadvantages of reality with a legalized LIE, keeping the custumer uninformed about the real price of production costs and making more money than anybody really needs. They aggressively promote the differences and various classifications amongst people who are actually quite the same. It’s their way

of being happy and protecting their interests in tough economic times. They want you to belong to something. They see it as necessary to be part of whatever kind of group they’ve created and to share what YOU have instead of selling large amounts of individual products to individual, independent people. It’s a hidden and accepted thing you see once you find yourself alone. To be alone is the most expensive price to pay to finally be noticed in the crowd. To feel FREE AND INDEPENDENT is heaven on earth? What a lie.

Instead of writing my personal opinions about what makes one kind of music different from another kind of music, I find it’s always more useful to say something about what people have in common. MUSIC FOR EXAMPLE. This is my review. ~

“It’s as if he’s placing the rituals of Judaism back into the landscape of present-day Europe.”

Richard Brody recommends Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust The Last of the Unjust sets a historical record straight which has been distorted, in my opinion,

by Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. For years, I did not know that Claude Lanzmann disputed Arendt’s position regarding the role of Jews under the oppressive authority of Nazi officials, as well as the very concept of a banality of evil. I personally have always passionately disagreed with Arendt’s conclusions in that book, though not with her research. Certainly she collects lots of facts and presents a sheer litany of horrors in terms of the organization of the Holocaust, but her philosophical conclusions I find repugnant—namely, that Eichmann’s role in deporting Jews to death camps derives not from hatred of Jews but from principled respect for bureaucratic order.

In Lanzmann’s A Visitor from the Living, from 1997, he addresses the “model” Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The film is comprised essentially of an interview with Maurice Rossel, the Swiss doctor in charge of visiting the camp on behalf of the Red Cross, who gave it a clean bill of health for its treatment of prisoners of war. Rossel had actually accused the Jews at the camp of not making an effort to inform him of their situation. Supposedly, he only later became aware of the horrors that were taking place there but did not see them and therefore did not report them. At the end of the film, Lanzmann confronts Rossel with the Jewish New Year’s speech of Paul Eppstein, who was the second Judenältester—elder of the Jews—at the camp. The role of

the Judenältester is an extremely complicated one which, historically, has been seen as one filled by traitors and Nazi collaborators. On the surface, Eppstein’s speech seems unremarkable, bland or inexpressive. But through Lanzmann’s reading, it becomes clear that anybody with a sympathetic heart can hear Eppstein attempting to tell his audience something that needed to be heard, something that urgently needed to be disseminated to the world.

Thus, in a rather oblique way, Lanzmann challenges the historical understanding—or misunderstanding—of the elder of the Jews.

In The Last of the Unjust, Judenältester Benjamin Murmelstein is approached as an ostensible pariah living in exile in Rome because he was too afraid to go to Israel because he feared he would be tried. What Lanzmann seeks to make clear, however, is that Murmelstein actually took grave moral risks in his attempt to save as many Jews as possible in his official position. When Murmelstein himself could have escaped, he did not. Instead, he went back to the camp and sought to do his best to preserve, in a Scheherazade-like way (that’s his term), the lives of those imprisoned. The result is a portrait of Murmelstein as a highly complex hero who, despite being in the literal sense of the word a collaborator and putting into practice orders that were repugnant, also understood that the alternative would be not just his death but the death of many, even all, of the prisoners.

Importantly, the movie also sets the record straight regarding the

supposed “banality” of Eichmann.

Instead of merely following orders and acting in accordance with the law, Lanzmann shows Eichmann as an enthusiastic participant in Kristallnacht who spoke casually and freely of the death of Jews under his command; a man who accepted that immigration was a possibility, but that so, too, was their death. Eichmann was in no way dedicated to saving Jews, but rather to expelling or killing them. Extermination was part of his policy, his evil was not incidental—it was constant and conscious. Which is what makes The Last of the Unjust so important, not just as a historical document, but as a work of art. The fact is that Lanzmann’s interviews with Murmelstein had long been accessible at the Holocaust Museum.

But in their raw form, they are far less capable of communicating Murmelstein’s political and personal psychology, as well as that of the inmates of the camp and the historical significance in the intervening seventy years.

This extremely constructed film begins with Lanzmann himself at a train station where the Jews headed to Theresienstadt first learned of the grand deception. Those aboard the trains had been told they were going to a resort of sorts. They had actually paid for their rooms and villas and, when they arrive at the station, they were forced off the train with shouts and cries and whips.

There, at the station, Lanzmann reads from Murmelstein’s book about Theresienstadt, so before we see Murmelstein, we hear his nuanced, morally furious descrip-

Cohen Media Group

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recommEndations

Richard Brody is an author, staff writer and movie-listings editor for The New Yorker. In the Summer 2012 issue of Electronic Beats he recommended Claude Lanzmann’s The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir.

tion. Then we see Lanzmann himself at Theresienstadt, walking up towards a building and into some barracks. This recurs throughout the film in other places Murmelstein mentions during the interviews. It’s as if Lanzmann is imagining himself in the situation of both a deportee and as Murmelstein himself. The act of imaginative sympathy is essential to this film. What would it have been like to be Murmelstein? What would it have been like to be a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp? What becomes clear from Murmelstein’s testimony is that the Jews’ most minute human interactions with the Nazi officials were constantly skewed and polluted by the threat of death. And Lanzmann, at the site of camps, killing fields, and restored synagogues that the Germans destroyed, imagines himself into that state of fear.

I wouldn’t begin to speculate on why it took forty years for Claude

Lanzmann to make this film.

But what is clear is that the subject isn’t just compulsion, arrest, deportation and extermination: it’s also—unlike in many of his other films—Judaism itself. Here, Lanzmann connects Murmelstein’s remarks from 1975 on the absence of Judaism in Europe to its current existence there. He films a cantor in Vienna singing the high prayer of Yom Kippur, and when Lanzmann visits Theresienstadt and quotes Murmelstein descriptions of Jews singing the prayer for the dead after each execution, the soundtrack also includes today’s cantor singing the prayer and in a sense, rededicating the site. It’s as if he’s placing the rituals of Judaism, which the Nazis meant to destroy for all time, back into the landscape of present-day Europe.

For a few different reasons, only Claude Lanzmann could have made this film. If you gave the footage to another filmmaker who hadn’t filmed it himself—who

hadn’t been present with Benjamin Murmelstein in Rome in 1975, who wasn’t now in his eighties and didn’t have Lanzmann’s experiences of the war, the German occupation of France, the threat of deportation, the first-hand experience of murderous anti-Semitism; to someone who had not been living with the Holocaust for his entire life, whose consciousness and, for that matter, unconscious mind was not inhabited by it, and who also didn’t have the cinematic sensibility that was formed in essential measure in the making of Shoah— the resulting film could never have been so complex, so resonant, or so personal. Shoah’s emphasis on death is an attempt to find beauty in absolute catastrophe, in the unrepresentable. The Last of the Unjust, by contrast, seeks beauty in the survival and persistence of Jewish life, in the redeemed life of Murmelstein, whom the movie itself rescues posthumously from his exile and his death sentence. ~

“A model that’s been made by the Internet.”

Charles Damga on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People and serial label subscription models I first met Nicolas Jaar when I was working for DFA. He must have been seventeen or eighteen years old at the time. I came back from lunch one day and found him talking enthusiastically but eloquently and immediately assumed he was some band’s manager, because those are the only types who command that kind of attention in the laid back office. He was talking about Joy Division in relation to Wolf + Lamb, so the context was wild, but Nico’s monologue felt inspired and energetic. Of course, Nico’s personality is large. He’s a tenacious guy, 20 EB 4/2013

and it speaks through his music and performances. He’s never not doing something, which is rare for young guys finding their way.

In my opinion, he’s on a pioneering artist track that not many people I know lead. Musically, I call him a unicorn—a mix of artists like Ricardo Villalobos on the one hand and Madlib/J Dilla on the other. And he’s got the chops to back it up. I can say as a promoter of other artists with my label UNO, there certainly aren’t many people who would kill a great label when it’s working, like Nico did with Clown & Sunset

after such a successful beginning.

I think if you look back at his catalogue, you can see a desire to break artists. Not in terms of selling a million copies, but more like shining a light on those who are a challenge to market. In terms of Clown & Sunset, it’s not like you’ve heard every record. But Jesus, it’s like ten records that are pretty crucial. Of course, these are interspersed with ones that got little attention. There’s only so much new music someone wants to buy, and as a label owner you find yourself releasing music to no one sometimes—and releas-

ing for everybody on the next.

In contrast, with Other People’s subscription model releasing albums and compilations every week to paying customers, people elect themselves into knowing what’s happening in that world. Together with Nico and the roster, they become more of a movement, serially signed up to having awareness of what’s going on at all times. It’s almost like an RSS feed to a pay blog where you don’t know what’s going to get posted but you trust whoever runs it enough to invest money in them. It’s a model that’s been made by the Internet. In a traditional label you usually need months and months of promotion

to make sure the thing has any chance of success. For example, if I have a new single I want to get into the grime community or on Rinse FM and cater to that native audience first, I then drop it on Soundcloud later to show that it has legitimacy where it really matters. Only after that do you want the populace to decide.

But with a serial model, it’s a constant flow of, say, ten releases in progress. It doesn’t involve so much trepidation, and that offers incredible freedom. I guess you could have said the same of dub 7-inch singles clubs, but that kind of excitement hasn’t been around for quite some time.

To a certain extent, I do hear a

common denominator in the work of a lot of the artists on Other People, but it’s a difficult line to release people who sound like you vs. sound you like, as an artist label. You’re inevitably tied in to a conversation with artists that are related to what you do, much like with Oneohtrix and his Software label. With Other People, there are points of overlap in, say, Vtgnike from Moscow and Nico in New York, but vast space with others like Acid Pauli in Germany. All of which I have grown to appreciate, with each increasing the musicality of the others. It feels like Nico has looked in the mirror and seen Other People, both as his reflection and his vision. ~

Charles Damga is the founder of avant-garde dance music label UNO records, whose roster includes the likes of Gobby, Arca and Fatima Al Qadiri. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

“There are very few musicians that I know of who approach music in a similar way.”

DJ Richard recommends Heatsick’s Re-Engineering Steven Warwick was one of the first people I met when I moved to Berlin and over the last year or so, I’ve seen him perform a lot of the tracks on Re-Engineering as part of his “Extended Play” live sets. In that scenario, he’ll manually build tracks over thirty minutes, using a restricted palette made up of his Casio, effects and a loop station. The result is loose but hypnotic, locking you into its groove. One Heatsick performance that particularly sticks in my mind was the PAN showcase at Berghain during the CTM Festival. He closed out the night with a three hour performance in the main space and hearing his sounds on that scale was incredible.

On Re-Engineering, the listener is given a chance to hear Warwick’s ideas manifested in a different way. The versions

that appear on the LP are not necessarily condensed, but in a way, re-engineered into forms more befitting of the format of a full-length record. It can be difficult for electronic musicians who are used to releasing singles to translate their ideas into a full-length, but Re-Engineering is extremely cohesive. The A-side builds up a rhythm, with unexpected tones and textures sliding into each other while the B-side coalesces into three or four seemingly club-oriented tracks, some of the most direct “dance” material I’ve heard him produce.

The record is bookended with tracks that contain the same spoken word piece; the first time delivered by Berlin-based artist Hanne Lippard and repeated

by Steven on the closer. This monologue, or poem, acts as a way for Warwick to introduce

many of the concepts behind the record, while at the same time being somewhat obscured by the same sounds that it attempts to contextualize. It contains one particular line that caught my ear: “What we do is secret,” which is the name of the first track on the Germs record GI. Darby Crash, the vocalist of the band, had a strong interest in the notion of circles as a concept for trajectory in relation to artistic practice and the progression of human history, inspired by the writings of Oswald Spengler. The fact that this line is repeated at the beginning and the end of the record acts as a multi-layered reference towards Warwick’s own practices in using loops of sounds in creating this record and as a broader indication of Warwick’s interest in cybernetics.

PAN

EB 4/2013 21

recommEndations

Opposite page: Nik Colk Void, 2013, Digital C-print, 24” x 35”.

DJ Richard is a producer and DJ currently based Berlin. He is a founding member and co-label head of White Material together with musician and producer Young Male.

One thing Steven and I have in common is the alternate trajectory we took towards making dance music. I came up in the Providence, Rhode Island noise scene, while Steven has a similar history with the experimental, noise and drone scenes in London.

Moving from that world into more dance-oriented stuff affects how you approach structure. At first, tracks like “Emerge” and “Ápres Moi, Le Déluge!” seem like cool nods back to Chicago jacking house but soon they introduce these bizarro mixes and sounds cementing the notion that this music is anything but nostalgic, or—and I say this with distain towards the label—“outsider house”. Knowing Steven, there’s definitely nothing outsider about his connection with this music. Living in Berlin, it’s not like we’re sitting in our bedrooms trying to replicate some sound that we heard online.

Indeed, the very concept of how ideas transmit through networks of people is at the conceptual heart of Re-Engineering.

It’s a subject that makes a lot of sense when talking about Berlin,

“It’s this tension between the artifice of style and the immediacy of facial expression and body posture that makes Gatsas’ images so poignant.”

Martin Jaeggi

where there’s a close network of DJs and musicians exchanging thoughts. A group of artists could all go and see a DJ at Panorama Bar and all be inspired in a different way—you can almost feel it happening. Berlin’s also the kind of city where people come and go a lot, creating a constant

influx and outflux of information.

You can hear this reflected in the record in the way the saxophones on “Mimosa” drift in and out of the mix. Perhaps the most obvious example is on “U1”, which is a field recording taken on the titular train. It features the sounds of a busker singing “Wonderwall”—I heard it and was like, “Oh that guy.” It’s a fascinating move to end the A-side with a field recording taken on a train in motion because you turn the record over and enter a different zone of sound. This captures a sense of hypermodern flux. In his artist statement, Steven talks about the work as a cybernetic poem that explores systems and their parameters. But the way he manifests that big idea in the record is through this very direct snapshot of himself as the artist, traveling through the city on the train.

That he is able to communicate these kinds of ideas with such a refined sonic palette and continue to develop his sound within these very fixed parameters is incredible. There are very few musicians that I know of who approach music in a similar way. ~

“Where machines dictate what we’re doing as much as we’re trying to control the machines.”

Factory Floor’s Nik Void recommends the reissue box set #8385 (Collected Works 1983-1985) by Cabaret Voltaire Mute

22 EB 4/2013

I’ve always been a big fan of Cabaret Voltaire, having heard “Nag Nag Nag” so many times at indie discos in the U.K. as a teenager. But my real introduction came through a DVD released on Mute featuring their Doublevision VHS work. Being more into visuals at that point, and manipulating video and

film as part of my art degree, the politics of the news clips and subliminal messages provoked a strong reaction in me, even though it was probably twenty years after they were first created. But I first met Richard Kirk when we asked him to remix “Two Different Ways”, a Factory Floor single on DFA. Happily, he

loved our track and when he DJ’d for us at an event we curated at the Village Underground, the best part of that night was just sitting backstage and listening to his stories. He talked about how Cabs drove around in a van full of TVs which they used on stage, but after the tour he took them all home and played

recommEndations

Nik Void is a guitarist, producer and vocalist best known as a member of electro-industrial trio Factory Floor. She also collaborated last year with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti for the live LP Carter Tutti Void. This is her first contribution to Electronic Beats.

Opposite page: Visionist, 2013, Digital C-print, 24” x 35”.

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static at full blast just because he didn’t like silence. He really has that special way of looking at things. You know instantly that he isn’t conventional.

The material contained in this box set covers a period that perhaps a lot of experimental fans of Cabs overlook. However, The Crackdown has always been my favorite album. It was made just after Chris Watson left and, personally, I’ve always liked the transitional stages in any artist’s work. I see the album as a turning point, when they started using mixed soundscapes alongside more formulated, traditionally structured tracks.

This is, of course, an indication of the direction they would take on later. In terms of the box set’s internal progression, while you still have these menacing electronic purrs on “Over and Over”, “Diskono” from the Doublevision EP hints at a classic disco beat. These albums are still very post-punk dub but also feel more basic dance—as if they’re introducing more space, especially to the vocals.

Stephen Mallinder still used a lot of vocal effects at that point, but here and there he uncovers his natural voice, like on MicroPhonies and what came after.

That album still has a murky air coursing through it—that dark electronic experimentalism that everyone loves the Cabs for and that still feels ahead of its time.

The Cabs’ influence on Factory Floor is similar to Throbbing Gristle’s. We’re inspired by their creative, almost workaholic approach, and the idea that you have your own base where you’re not just working on the music but the whole concept.

You control where you go musically, what releases come out, where you play, and, importantly,

you shake up the formula of playing live. Indeed, both Cabaret Voltaire and Factory Floor have a semi-improvisational approach where machines dictate what we’re doing as much as we’re trying to control the machines.

It’s also a cut-and-paste men-

“A good person to relate King Krule’s music to is Lou Reed, because Lou Reed has a very simple structure and just sings or sometimes even speaks over it.

King Krule is more of a singer, but the structure is similarly straightforward.

He’s free in what he does because the harmonic structures are plain—just two chords in a song [. . .].”

Arto Lindsay

tality, and I know they were strongly influenced by Burroughs.

Likewise, my vocals are always more about sound than they are about speaking something directly. The first track on MicroPhonies, “Do Right”, is minimal, but it also uses these playful samples throughout. It reminds me of “Turn It Up” on our LP. I think signing to Virgin was part of a natural progression for the band. MTV looked to them to feed them some originality, and the band saw that as an opportunity to get some money behind them to allow their work to continue.

Also, chart music was such a big thing in the seventies and eighties, so this is their way of trying to make their own “translation” of a pop record. Of course, only a few Cabs songs seeped through to the charts like “I Want You” and “Sensoria”, but it was enough to get people to buy the singles, then the album, and perhaps expose them to new ways of thinking.

In that sense, what Cabaret Voltaire and Factory Floor have in common is that we both sought to make music that’s a little bit different but also accessible. We want the channels of communication to be open. I think that’s what all great artwork is about: communicating an idea successfully. Ultimately, I think that’s what they achieved in the albums included in the box set, even though there’s always going to be a difference of opinion because it’s not as provocative as their early work. That said, in a twisted way, it kind of is. “I Want You” from The Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord was actually done after Virgin said, “We want a hit, otherwise you’re out.”

I think Richard said it was actually about masturbation, so you could say they got the last laugh. ~

recommEndations

“If he can write like this he can obviously speak more clearly. But does he want to? And is he working class?”

Arto Lindsay on King Krule’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon

XL Recordings

Arto Lindsay is a musician, producer and regular contributor to Electronic Beats. In the Spring 2013 issue he recommended Matthew Herbert’s Herbert Complete box set.

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King Krule is only nineteen years old, and that’s remarkable when considering the craftsmanship of his record 6 Feet Beneath the Moon. People oddly tend to file his music under electronic genres, especially UK bass stuff or dubstep. That’s probably because he appears to be a scion of James Blake. But in all honesty, I don’t know why. They’re so different, instrumentally.

Atmospherically, however, there are certain similarities. One could say that both are young and melancholy. But so are many others. Maybe it’s because both are extremely precocious.

Though King Krule is not nearly as electronic as James Blake, he achieves a lot of the same mood through traditional instruments.

A good person to relate King Krule’s music to is Lou Reed, because Lou Reed has a very simple structure and just sings or sometimes even speaks over it. King Krule is more of a singer, but the structure is similarly straightforward. He’s free in what he does because the harmonic structures are plain—just two chords in a song for example, and then when he goes to change, it gets very telling. These moments make clear that he knows something about music. He does something that’s very musicianly and makes choices only somebody who knows how to write a song would make. He uses kind of an eighties bass sound and dub techniques—pretty basic. In almost every song it’s a voice, a guitar and either hand-played drums or an electronic beat. Out of this

he builds something subtle, but I don’t want to call it old-fashioned. It’s more like he’s studying the ways a song can or can’t be built, like on “Easy Easy” or “Has This Hit?” In that regard

“But nothing in the entire universe is independent. That’s just a businessman’s fantasy.

They want to help compensate for the disadvantages of reality with a legalized LIE, keeping the custumer uninformed about the real price of production costs and making more money than anybody really needs.”

Ricardo Villalobos

the music is definitely retro.

Traces of dubstep, its repetitive patterns and atmospheres, can be found here too. And when he breaks up these repetitive arrangements it gets very telling, emotionally speaking. He sounds thoughtful, but not depressed, and that’s a relief because there’s so many comparable young artists that massively exploit melancholy just to boost atmosphere.

All too often this ends up with pathetic results. King Krule is not pathetic at all. What he does is some weird kind of serious singer-songwriter R&B. The lyrics are very poetic, and they try hard to be abstract.

There are other songwriters of this generation who’re capable of telling a story much more plainly, but with King Krule it’s like he gets more from the sound of his voice than from the lyrics themselves. He’s content to offer fragments. They make sense a few words at a time, but they don’t really make sense all together, which is kind of nice.

He’s got that heavy UK accent, and it took me a while to get past that, because it’s almost that he’s defiantly singing that way. It’s obviously a choice and in the end I think a good one.

A friend of mine recently sent me link to a Rinse FM show guest moderated by King Krule. It starts with one of my own tracks, “Illuminated”, and right after that, King Krule says something like, “Arto Lindsay really influenced me.”

I had heard of him before and found his stuff is pretty cool, so fuck yeah I was flattered. ~

“A collaboration thousands of kilometers apart, based around a futurism that’s fundamentally historical.”

Morphosis recommends Commodified by NRSB-11 DJ Stingray, aka Sherard Ingram, has long been one of the principle figures in electronic music for me, particularly his releases with Urban Tribe and with Anthony Shakir. Some years ago I released a 12-inch by Anthony on my Morphine label, and one track was co-produced by Sherard, but until a few weeks ago, when I met him in Tokyo, we had yet to have a proper conversation.

Listening to his set in Unit, I realized how difficult it is to describe what he does in depth and that also goes for acts like Drexciya, Gerald Donald and Gerald’s various side projects.

In contrast to people like Jeff Mills, Anthony, or Derrick May, whose sound you could broadly define, Gerald and Sherard—who make up NRSB-11—are after something more mysterious. The music is based in science, science fiction and futuristic concepts, and NRSB-11 live the music in a way that’s ahead of our times.

It’s similar to how good science fiction always remains ahead, even when it’s old. Take Blade Runner for example: if you watch that today it still seems futuristic, and you’ll always think it’s made for a future that hasn’t come yet. It’s timeless, not unlike Metropolis. And that’s something I hear on Commodified.

Much of the album centers on hidden messages from parallel worlds—political, financial and extraterrestrial. American afro-futurism has a long history of discussing the cosmos and planetary events in relation to the political state of affairs of black communities in the U.S. and their

oppression by the White House and CIA. The Detroit techno and electro scenes added to this history by preaching black power and supremacy, including for other non-white minorities. I’ve been to Detroit, and you can still feel the necessity of their position, maybe even more so today than ever before. In terms of Commodified, which uses sci-fi as a vehicle for political allegory, a story is told in the tension of the rhythms and production, as well as the album’s song titles, like “Consumer Programming”, “Offshore Banking”, “Industrial Espionage”, or “Austerity”.

Sherard explained to me that the album took a year to make, and you can hear it in the extreme attention to detail. Importantly, the collaboration was remote, also with the two transferring files back and forth—which is very different than how I usually work. While I think it’s interesting to work in close quarters with someone else, I imagine working at a distance can bring better results for a few different reasons: First, the process itself is related to current technology and is classically futuristic in terms of electronic music production often taking place in private bedrooms or small studios. Second, collaborating in the same room can involve making concessions to avoid confrontation. Trading files has the potential to result in something more mature. The distance keeps you honest and critical and that’s another interesting paradox that I associate with NRSB-11: it’s an extremely detailed collaboration taking

place thousands of kilometers apart, based around a futurism that’s fundamentally historical.

The future doesn’t exist. We make it up because we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. But it’s unimportant whether predictions come true. Rather, it’s the idea that matters. People often confuse the idea of futurism with technology. Accordingly, the problem with music today is that it’s arrived at a point of saturation in terms of “new” sounds. We can’t discover more sounds, and this was already true in the late nineties.

While many musicians still continue to hit a wall in search of the “new”, others have gone back to search for more information, more coding, and more concepts to learn more about music. These people are the winners. We have to enrich the ideas upon which our music is based and that can only happen with careful examination of history. Today’s devices are different and how we use them are different, but the results are not markedly different. NRSB-11 is content to dig deeper into what’s already there—instead of trying to work with the newest technologies in order to discover something that’s never been heard or played before.

They stick to their own language and do it expertly. They’ll eternally develop the same ideas, and the results are so often mind-blowing.

This is today’s afro-futurism.

And we are lucky to experience it—especially those of us who weren’t alive in the sixties and seventies. We will remember these Detroit purists as one of those myths we revisit when trying to enrich our personal knowledge. ~

WEME Records

Rabih Beaini aka Morphosis is a Lebanese electronic and experimental musician based in Berlin.

He is also the founder of the label Morphine Records, which has released albums by such artists as Charles Cohen, Hieroglyphic Being, and Anthony “Shake” Shakir.

EB 4/2013 27

¥€ $

often reflect on when I look down at a city from an airplane or when I contemplate the increasing specialization of knowledge and tasks in our society.

When I am horrified by the behavior of nations, especially democracies and in particular the big assertive one in which I reside, I often resort to Walter Lippmann who began to explain in horrifying detail how democracy works and how it doesn’t with his 1922 book Public Opinion, and who began to fear for the behavior of democracies in his 1955 The Public Philosophy. He never brings up the beehive or ant colony model, but I assert that when considering how unwaveringly committed we are to the idea that the majority rules, opinion is somehow considered godlike in its infallibility.

A Hundred Bucks of Books I’m a reader and a book collector.

To maximize my c-note I have selected fairly cheap examples of these books from my favorite source, AbeBooks.com. Were these actual purchases, I might have looked for first editions, hardcovers and dust jackets. But I selected these books for the extraordinary knowledge they impart. Hofstadter and Jaynes will make you see consciousness in a more complex way.

Jaynes contends in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown 28 EB 4/2013

When Glenn O’Brien recommends stuff, people take note. And if they don’t, they’re ignorant curs. The former member of Andy Warhol’s factory, TV Party-host and ex-editor-in-chief of Interview Magazine reads lots of books when he’s not telling people how to dress well. What kind? Think big picture.

Photo: Margret Links

of the Bicameral Mind that in pre-literate Homeric times, humans perceived the voices of the gods directly in their brains and used idols to trigger the voice. Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid theorizes that consciousness, our sense of individuality, or the “I” result from a strange feedback loop in the brain, and he presents the interesting idea that an ant colony represents a single mind dispersed among the individual neurons of its members. It’s something I

The perfect companion to Lippmann is Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), a nephew of Sigmund Freud who actually invented the term “public relations” and was an expert in what we call, less gently, propaganda.

Bernays believed that democracy necessitated manipulation of the public because of its irrational and dangerous “herd instinct.”

Bernays called his practice “engineering consent,” and he applied it to politics and press relations as well as advertising. One of his triumphs was convincing American women that smoking, which was taboo, was a sign of their liberation and suffrage. He called cigarettes “torches of freedom.”

Many of the techniques employed today by political action groups were pioneered by Bernays.

With all this under one’s belt it would be easy to despair of mankind’s future, which is why I resort to a modern, no-nonsense look into contemporary shamanism and entheogens. There is no more masterful guide than Dale Pendell, whose scientific yet extraordinarily poetic trilogy on psycho-pharmacology is a source of wisdom. If we’re having an apocalypse we’re going to need all the help we can get. ~

DEN SORTE SKOLE III FREE ALBUM DOWNLOAD DENSORTESKOLE.NET A musical odyssey that blends everything from Moroccan traditional songs, Indian hymns and field recordings of Cameroonian pygmies to forgotten Yugoslav psych, French avant-garde noise and early German electro into a dark and giddy trip through musical history and beyond.

ABC

The alphabet according to

Cosey Fanni Tutti

as in All Tomorrow’s Parties: Nico’s voice echoes in my head whenever I see this written down. I’m immediately transported back to my youth. My seventeen-year-old self chilling out with my friends. Dope, acid, mescaline times. A mind expanding era for me with Nico, Velvet Underground, Beefheart, and many more as the soundtrack.

as in Bourgeois: I’ve never been a member of that club but oddly enough I’d class some of my friends as bourgeois.

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As a performance artist and founding member of Throbbing Gristle, Cosey Fanni Tutti helped permanently alter modern musical consciousness with sonic and visual transgressions rooted in electronic experimentation and sociopolitical confrontation.

Together with Genesis P-Orridge, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and future partner Chris Carter, TG created the blueprint for the industrial genre and then spread the good word through their label Industrial Records, releasing such acts as Cabaret Voltaire and spoken word pieces by William S. Burroughs.

Following the band’s initial break-up, Chris and Cosey (today Carter Tutti) would go on to become one of the most prolific and influential experimental electronic acts around. Thankfully, they have not chosen to rest on their laurels.

Opposite page: Cosey Fanni Tutti, photographed in Norfolk, UK by Ben Roberts.

tively we were more or less on the level of the burial grounds in a factory making music.

as in COUM Transmissions: It was then. It ended. This is now.

But that’s not to deny the importance of my work with COUM. as in Ethics: Imperative, yet sadly lacking in so many people.

as in Death Factory: The music from the death factory came specifically from Throbbing Gristle working in the basement studio at Martello Street which was a factory built on the mass grave pits for the victims of the plague. So effec-

as in Fetishes: Wonderful fetishes, what would we do without them? My deepest fetishes are mine alone, except for whom I choose to share them with.

EB 4/2013 31

as in Jokes, bad: How many roadies does it take to change a lightbulb? One, two! One, two! One, two! as in Guitar: My sound weapon of choice. After more than thirty years playing guitar I “feel” it as an extension of myself. I still get such a buzz from playing, discovering, and generating new sounds with it. I can’t even remember what made me choose to play the guitar but I remember well getting Chris to cut down the body of a cheap and ugly seventies “Raver” guitar into a slick stick guitar to make it easier for me to handle. Then I gradually gathered my arsenal of effects pedals.

as in Heartbeat: Little did I know that this word would come to have quite a different significance from when we used it as the title for the first Chris & Cosey album. The irony isn’t lost on me that my unpredictable heart condition, arrhythmia, is actually a rhythm problem!

as in Industrial Records: The beginning of the industrial music genre.

Founded by myself and the other three members of Throbbing Gristle in 1976. It was, and still is, an extension of TG and our related works.

Cosey Fanni Tutti makes more noise than you do.

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as in Nick, MY SON: The best Chris and Cosey production . . . ever!

as in Kitsch: I love some kitsch, and done well, or badly even, it is just so, well, kitschy.

as in Love/ Hate: I don’t buy into hate, neither do I agree with the saying that love is another form of hate. They are opposites, one positive and enriching, one negative and destructive.

as in Making music with your partner: We fit like a glove. We have a wonderful symbiotic relationship, so making music, video, or doing photography together is second nature to us.

There are very rarely any moments of conflict. Plus, we both have separate projects so we get some space to expand on our creativity individually. That in itself brings new life into the work we do together.

as in Occultism: Occultism is a private issue, but I will say that my interest in occultism lies in the broadest sense of the concept.

Certainly I’ve embraced spirituality and I feel that a deep sense of self is essential to fulfill one’s potential. This also goes for maintaining a connection to a seemingly hidden dimension that is possibly out of reach if one conforms to restricted notions and established modes of thought, expression and ways of living and communication.

Having experienced my own death and resuscitation after undergoing a heart procedure some years ago, as well as the loss of so many dear and very spiritual friends, my thoughts on the subject now have shifted somewhat. When your light goes out you cease to exist. When we are vital organic life forms, our potential for ‘being’ is in our hands and is determined by our ‘self’.

Whether one chooses to achieve that through occultism or other practices is a personal choice. But in my mind occultism—or, other channels such as organized religion, Scientology and so on—act as facilitators. Practices alone do not provide any given rite of access to our deep inner self. It’s understandable that some people seek the mysterious in this world of vast scientific discoveries and knowledge. But that’s a kind of “blind faith” when you think that at the same time as seeking mysteries and higher truths they so readily accept science and technology such as the Internet, or mobile phones to access information on the subject, or the science of aviation to fly to remote spiritual retreats and locations. That technology and science actually disproves some of what they base their “belief” on.

as in Performance Art: I prefer the term “art action” to differentiate between a performance, like theatre, and an action. It can be great, inspiring and profound and it can also be disappointing and devoid of meaning or power.

as in Quo vadis, Industrial?: As a genre “industrial” means something quite different to us, to TG. People take the meaning far to literally.

It’s not just about hard sounds and driving rhythms. You just have to listen to all the different styles of music TG have produced over the years to figure that out. Our Industrial Records label is nearly thirty years old and still alive and kicking and doing very well. We have a series of unreleased TG projects planned for next year.

as in Radical Politics: Although it can be incredibly divisive in either a good way or a bad way I guess it’s necessary even if just to emphasize that something is definitely very wrong.

I despair at the human race, its ignorance and capacity for destruction and malevolence.

as in Sex Pistols: I guess they were pivotal in their own way but they were essentially a manufactured boy band nevertheless. I’m just pleased John Lydon went on to do some good work in his own right. His Country Life butter ads on TV were so cutting edge and anti-establishment.

as in Transgression: Always good and even better when it’s genuine and not done to gain attention or notoriety.

My work’s often been described as transgressive but I never think to myself, “What can I do that’s transgressive?” I just am and I do what I feel best expresses my feelings and myself. I’m an innocent really—or as Chris always says “49% angel and 51% devil.”

as in Utopias: Somewhere we dream of when we seek escape.

as in Vicious ignorance: Far too prevalent I’m sad to say.

as in William S. Burroughs: I’ve never been as interested in his work as much as the other members of TG were. I was “discouraged” from being involved on a personal level when meetings with Burroughs were arranged. I was told he was a misogynist. Or maybe it just wasn’t “cool” to have a woman with you when you go to meet and want to impress your hero.

as in XXX Film: Oh yes, nothing like a good Triple-X! Although, as with music, my appreciation can be colored by over analysis.

Read more ABC’s at electronicbeats.net/abc

as in Yearnings: All my yearnings are towards peace and quiet. Ironic . . . or maybe understandable considering the amount of time I spend making noise.

as in Zyklon B Zombie: Lest we forget, one of the lowest, most horrendous periods in human history. ~ EB 4/2013 33

Trent Reznor on Johnny Cash

Mr. Style Icon

The late Johnny Cash only became the focus of my attention when Rick Rubin asked me if I thought it was cool for him to record my song “Hurt” for the album American IV: The Man Comes Around. That was in 2002, but I was certainly aware of Johnny Cash before that. Actually, I’ve known about him my whole life. But it wasn’t until Rick Rubin stripped away all the unnecessary trappings of whatever era he’d released music before and refocused Cash into a new direction that I really started paying attention. This was the beginning of a series of great albums—all of which featured that uniquely sparse sound consisting only of Johnny Cash’s voice and a guitar. I thought that the first album, American Recordings, was such a bold move because it suddenly became obvious that reducing the songs to their core was what really mattered. This was about 34 EB 4/2013

Before it became cool to like Johnny Cash in the nineties, it was decidedly uncool. At least according to Trent Reznor, who grew up in smalltown America trying to escape the country music establishment.

For the Nine Inch Nails frontman, Rick Rubin’s legacy-shaping production on Cash’s famed American series was the first time the country singer’s stripped down genius and rich baritone struck a chord in him—one that continues to echo in Reznor’s own productions today.

Photo: Johnny Cash, photographed by Harry Langdon.

his songwriting and voice and persona . . . and nothing else.

When I started to work on the—how shall I put it?— Nine Inch Nails “comeback” album Hesitation Marks, I remember telling The New Yorker in an interview that I wanted the album to sound open and Johnny Cash-like. I guess American Recordings really had left a strong impression on me. And even though Hesitation Marks eventually didn’t turn out to become that sparse and ascetic, it was still driven by the idea to use as few parts as possible—just my voice and a drum machine. I don’t remember any other Nine Inch Nails album that was so reduced to the core of what I wanted to say and I certainly don’t recall any other musician who has influenced me that much recently. A lot of this has to do with Cash’s natural authority and sense of style.

Having said that, I have to stress the fact that I was the opposite of a Johnny Cash fan before.

I always thought of him as a country and western has-been and the exact opposite of what I considered cool as a kid growing up in a little town called Mercer, Pennsylvania. This was true even when I started making music in Cleveland years later. But as a teenager, I was against whatever my little town was all about, and since it was a country and western town, I also hated Johnny Cash. In my adolescent ignorance I saw him as a representation of a lifestyle I wanted to escape, strange as it is to say. But after maturing I was of course flattered when Rick finally sent me Cash’s version of “Hurt”, even though this is an extremely personal song and it still sounds strange in my ears to hear another man singing these lyrics . . . even if it is the man in black. ~

EB 4/2013 35

Counting with

Giorgio Moroder’s considerable contributions to disco and electronic dance music have long elevated him to the eminent position of godfather of various resulting subgenres. With his recent appearance on Daft Punk’s disco roots paean Random Access Memories, he’s gone beyond being merely a big name amongst techno and house intelligentsia to being a household name. Photo: Krijn van Noordwijk

memorable line in a film or song:

hours ago . . . . . . I put together a new DJ set.

“I love you like a love song, baby.” Selena Gomez

decisions I regret: – Not writing the score for the movie Fame.

– Not having invested in Apple.

sets of people that should collaborate:

records everyone should own: 1. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon 2. George Harrison – All Things Must Pass 3. Donna Summer – Live and More 4. Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde 5. The Beatles – Abbey Road 6. Michael Jackson – Thriller 7. Elvis Presley – Elvis Presley

– Democrats and Republicans – Devil and Angels – Moroder and Rihanna

things I haven’t done yet: – – – –

Bungee jump Made a hole in one Cocaine LSD

things I used to believe: – That Disco would never end.

Oops! It’s called EDM now.

– Santa Claus – Tooth Fairy – Easter Bunny – Storks are where babies come from.

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After

p.m. . . .

. . . I finish my Italian crossword puzzle that I started in the morning.

My

lives . . .

. . . 8 too many.

I wouldn’t touch it with a -foot pole . . . . . . COCAINE. ~

38 EB 4/2013

Interviews

EB 4/2013 39

40 EB 4/2013

MAX DAX interviews Gary Numan

“Buy me a car and I’ll sign anything”

Berlin’s Ramones Museum provides an irritatingly authentic rock and roll atmosphere in which to interview Gary Numan, whose carefully constructed trademark man-machine image has appeared on every one of his album covers since starting his career in 1978 with Tubeway Army.

Accompanied by long-time wife Gemma, who he often describes as his guardian angel, Numan was eager to discuss his relief at coming out the other end of a long, dark tunnel of a once declining career.

Gary, you belong to a pioneering group of artists who were extremely influential for electronic music. Do you consider yourself a veteran of sorts?

how he and Soulsonic Force used a lot of my music—Kraftwerk as well—in the formative days when hip hop became a genre. That was amazing, but I had no idea what was going on.

I’m aware of how old I am, that’s for sure. But talk of influence has only reached my ears in the last fifteen years. For instance, I met Afrika Bambaataa a while ago, and he was explaining to me

You weren’t listening to hip hop back then?

No, no. Looking back, for a long time my interest in music

Left: Gary Numan, photographed in Berlin by Luci Lux.

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became very narrow. I became very self-obsessed about my career—which, I should add, was in trouble for such a long time.

So I listened to music less and less. I think I fell out of love with it. Then in the early nineties I discovered Nine Inch Nails and The Sisters of Mercy and a lot of heavier, more aggressive things that I hadn’t been aware of for some reason. And I loved it. So I started to write very different music from that point and that’s when I started to be interested in other people again. Soon after that the Internet came along. I think about ’95 I started to be actively involved with the Internet and that opened up so much more information. That’s when I really began to read the things that other people were saying about me—people like Trent Reznor or Marilyn Manson—and it kind of just carried on from there. I suddenly found out about other people doing cover versions of my songs, or that they used to sample bits of my songs. A lot of the strength of my gradual renaissance has largely been due to other people being positive about what I’ve done, the effect I’ve had on them. Their praise has introduced me to a new audience.

Their props gave me a credibility that’s very difficult to come by.

You can’t buy street cred.

That’s what I’m saying. You don’t even get it from being famous. I certainly didn’t have it when I was selling millions of albums.

But via people like Trent the high caliber recommendations from such quality musicians caused so many good things to happen. I mean, in 1979, the NME reviewed my Pleasure Principle album and hated it. But only a few years ago they reevaluated it and called it a classic album of its time.

They probably hated Klaus Nomi, too.

look, the way you sound, the album covers, and even the things you say in public are all parts of the same machinery, and they all need to work together for the whole thing to work properly.

I should add though that I don’t care that much about all this nowadays.

To stay with the metaphor, you’ve also changed gears: instead of running a synthesizer through guitar effects pedals to get your signature distorted synthesizer sound, you’ve switched to playing guitar directly.

I still play everything through everything.

It’s still very much about creating sounds and noises. One of the fun things about making albums is trying to come up with sounds you’ve never heard before. I have no time for this analogue vs. digital argument that seems to be going on forever. I simply don’t care.

What is it you care about then when it comes to sound?

The feeling it gives you. Is the sound powerful? Is it haunting? Does it make you feel something? Can you manipulate it, turn it into a groove, a beat? I spent a huge amount of time when we were putting albums together in the early stages just making noises and recording them with my West German Uher tape recorder— you know, banging things, getting bits of concrete and hitting them with a hammer or wood or whatever it is to get different sounds. I collected hundreds, possibly even thousands of such recordings—I never really counted them.

Can you hear them on The Pleasure Principle?

No. With The Pleasure Principle we were still using synthesizers. But in anticipation of the sampler, which came out in 1981, When I interviewed Neil Tennant a few we were doing our own sampling with tape Both The Pleasure Principle and Replicas (Begissues back, he told me that the beauty of recorders. At that time I had a studio in gars Banquet) were released in 1979, a testaShepperton where they would also make pop music is that it’s all about the surface. ment to Gary Numan’s youthful hustle. Part of films, and I’d walk around their various Maybe the critics you mention are from a the “machine music” trilogy, which also included metal staircases, full of interesting stuff, generation that still held the concept of 1980’s Telekon and focused on dystopian themes hitting things, banging things, scraping authenticity in such high regard? populated by contemplative cyborgs, The Pleathings—and recording everything. And sure Principle contained the Kraftwerk-inspired I honestly have always seen pop music, even then I’d take it back to the studio where hit “Cars” and was the first album Numan recordwithout make-up and image, as artificial. I I would transfer my field recordings onto ed that prominently replaced guitars with synthenever was convinced by the reality of any of quarter-inch tape and then I’d cut that, sizers and drum machines. Terre Thaemlitz also it. For me, image was essential, as I had so depending on what the sound was and put recorded an entire album of piano interpretations many problems with fear and stage fright. it through my effects pedal. I’d spend days of Numan’s songs titled Replicas Rubato.

I couldn’t even hold a conversation among just tweaking, doing things, exploring. friends. And if I was to do a gig in a tiny Sometimes I would make loops out of it, I club, I was terrified of it. Developing my neon cool image was a would cut the tape and I could work out exactly how long the tape way of hiding behind something. For me it was a necessary tool, needed to be depending on the tempo of the song. I had a little cala mechanism to protect myself. But one day, I realized that my culation that did it, if the song was ninety-six beats per minute then image had become me. So it’s a double edged sword: On the one I knew I needed to have forty-one inches or whatever, and I would hand it’s good to have a strong image and on the other you have put that around the tape recorder and hang it, put little weights or to be careful to stay true to yourself. It’s like having two gears empty reels on it to keep it taut so I’d have a groove from things that grate against each other. I realized then that the way you I’d recorded out there.

Yeah. There was a hostility to that, an ignorance to white faces and make-up.

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Were you aware at the time of the history of musique concrète and the first experiments with tape loops and field recordings by people like Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer and Eliane Radigue?

No, I wasn’t, but I wish I had known about it then. There would have been so many things I could’ve learned from.

Then again, tracks of yours like “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” have become pioneering without that kind of background knowledge.

I know some of your songs have been used in commercials. A couple of years ago that would have been considered selling out.

I know lots of musicians see it differently today. Have you seen a change?

The thing that I’ve noticed about it recently is that electronic music has been around long enough to have discovered its own nostalgia, which I find uncomfortable. I’ve always thought of electronic music as being very forward looking; you could almost say that its reason for being is to search out new sounds, develop new technologies, and find new ways of doing things. Now we have people—and this is not a criticism, it’s perfectly OK—who are now coming into electronic music and referencing the seventies or the eighties as the source of what they want to do. They’re talking about old equipment with almost a romantic glint in their eye. They’d probably put a Minimoog on an altar rather than play it. I don’t have any of those romantic, nostalgic feelings about it and I find the very idea of looking backwards musically to come up with something new a really strange concept anyway. I find it particularly strange with electronic music. It goes totally against what I thought it was for.

Yet we have this new generation of people who are not thinking like that, who are thinking, “I want to be doing that too! How can we emulate that?” No criticism at all, I’m perfectly happy if people want to do that. But for me . . .

You’ve once famously said about Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” that it’s the kind of music where you want to have a sports car and just drive it faster and faster and you don’t want that song to ever end. Your biggest hit was “Cars” and I wonder if there is any connection?

Ha! I have to give you a disappointing answer: I’ve got children and I’ve got an insanely huge dog that weighs over two hundred pounds so I have this big tank of a vehicle and it’s not what I wanted. My wife Gemma got a lime green Wrangler with tiger seat covers—now, that’s a great car! I on the contrary have this horrible boring thing called a Suburban, which is far too long but with enough seats for a football team. I bought it so the children don’t fight because they fight all the time. The size of the car helps to keep them separated.

We even have two TVs in it to keep them occupied. So I’m afraid my car isn’t fancy at all. It’s just to move around children and animals.

When I moved to America I thought I was going to get all kinds of lovely things; I was going to get a Camaro, a Corvette, and I had all these other ideas for cars and that I was going to live the life. But here I am driving a truck.

And what car did you drive when you wrote “Cars”?

I can’t remember. But let me tell you a funny story: During the video shoot for “Cars” I remember having a casual meeting with my A&R man at WEA. He asked me which cars I liked, and I thought it was just a conversation. So I said a Corvette because I’ve always loved Corvettes. He asked what color? And I said a white one with red seats if you must know. I thought nothing of it, and then the next thing I know they’d bought me a Corvette.

With red seats?

Everything that I’d inadvertently asked for. I didn’t know that my lawyer had been seen going into CBS by somebody from WEA. They thought that after “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” I was going to move and get a better deal from CBS. So the car was a bribe and it was given to me on the understanding that I sign a new contract with WEA for another three years.

They thought you’d do anything for a Corvette? Was it true?

Yeah. I can be bribed. Buy me a car and I’ll sign anything. This is because I have a fascination with machinery in a way that I think it’s the opposite side to my nervousness around people. I feel at ease with cars, the more powerful, the faster, the more demanding they are to operate, the better. The same goes for airplanes: the more dangerous they are, the more comfortable I feel. I don’t know if that’s my Asperger’s coming into play or not. I am so at ease in these machines, airplanes in particular, although I haven’t done that now in some time.

When was the last time you flew a plane?

A couple of years ago, but I stopped. I was an air display pilot. I would do aerobatic things at air shows all over Europe and loved it. But nearly every friend I had was killed at some time or another, which was why I stopped doing it. Since I have my own children it just seemed too dangerous a thing to do for fun. But I did love it and I miss it very much and I was so comfortable doing that in a way that I will never be around people. I think whatever that quirk personality problem I have is, it finds its yin and yang in machinery.

Joseph Beuys, who was famous for becoming a pacifist after being a Stuka dive bomber pilot in the Second World War, would always say that the planes he flew brought death but they also were beautiful. He was actually shot down but he survived and processed this experience in his art. How would you describe the impact of technology on you these days?

I’m very much at the cutting edge of technology with music. I’m Pro Tools, I’m plug-ins. The only hardware synth I’ve got is Virus, which is a phenomenal bit of a kit. I don’t have anything older than two years, I’m right up there. But if somebody said to me tomorrow the next album you’re going to make you can’t have a computer, you can’t have plug-ins, I wouldn’t really care that much because to me it’s about the sounds. So I would find another way of generating the sounds. I would go back out with my tape recorder and start kicking things again and building up sounds that way, making my loops the way I used to.

It’s interesting that you say it’s about the sound and not the song because, for instance, Martin Gore from Depeche Mode says that a song’s only a good song if you can play it on a guitar.

That’s absolutely true. From an initial production point of view, for me, we don’t even touch the computer at all, we don’t get into any plug-ins. The sound is a separate thing, it’s another day: you go out and record and build up your library that you will then work into the record, so you have a new battery of sounds for each one. In terms of actual songwriting itself, for me it’s not on a guitar—it’s a piano. Everything starts with the piano.

You’ve learned to play the piano?

I can write songs on it. I play it well enough to do that. But if you EB 4/2013 43

say to me play a G chord, I’ll have no idea.

Do you know Terre Thaemlitz? He has recorded a couple of piano versions of your songs.

I know one of them, yeah.

How did you like it?

I loved it. I think it’s beautiful. I wish I could play properly like that.

Trent is a great piano player. Trent did a cover of one of my songs called “Metal” and he added all these piano things to it which weren’t in the original and it really makes a difference. In situations like that I realize my limitations.

this is why you work, to have all this fun. One of the things you’ll notice in England if you walk around are signs that say “NO”.

We went to the beach at Eastbourne and the first thing you see is this big red sign with “NO” written at the top and a long list of things you’re not allowed to do on the beach. You can’t do anything. That kind of sums up Britain. It’s the country that says NO, and they pretend it’s to do with health and safety. America doesn’t have that.

We’re living in an era when copy and paste has become the most normal working method, which could also be described as a give and take thing between artists. Would you agree? What are the social politics of copy and paste in terms of, say, sample usage?

I’d disagree. The thing about copy and pasting where you take something and you put it somewhere else is that you’re repeating something that’s already there. In contrast, when people appear on your songs as guest musicians it’s like you’re working on a song and someone will say, “I’m in town next week, we can record together.” In England they wouldn’t even think it. Robin Finck, whom I admire as one of the finest guitar players of his generation, proposed to me during a barbeque to play on a couple of my new songs, and that’s exactly what he did the following week. I never experienced that in England, not once. You’d have to sort out what they were going to get paid first. It’s not interaction—it’s work, it’s a job. In England I would have had to pay 2,000 quid for having a famous guitar player such as Robin on my record. I embrace the American attitude, and step-by-step I’m finally getting rid of my British cynicism, my suspicion, which is a positive thing. We’re really enjoying it, the climate is fantastic, and I’m amazed at how much music is going on there.

You said Trent Reznor’s your neighbor. He could give you piano lessons.

I think he might be a bit busy.

Do you meet socially?

From time to time. My wife Gemma and I’ve moved to Los Angeles for just a week and Trent invited us over with the children, his baby was having a first birthday party. Robin Finck was there, Josh Homme, all kinds of people and all had their children. So you’re looking at all these rock stars being dads. which was quite surreal actually.

Somehow I find it calming to think that these people have a life outside of music.

They’re great. We’re very grateful to Trent because he introduced us to a number of people very early on that made us feel very welcome and gave us a social world.

We didn’t really know anybody when we got there and almost immediately we were welcomed into Trent’s group of friends. It’s been very lovely actually, and it’s really made a difference to us.

It’s fascinating because there are people who say that L.A. is difficult to dive into.

I’m not sure if they mean it socially or culturally, or both.

White Noise is one of numerous live albums Numan has released over the span of his more than thirtyyear career. This one has the artist in top form, even displaying decidedly un-cyborgian behavior such as laughter on “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”. Aside from Living Ornaments ’79 and ’80, it was also the only other live album that charted in the UK. In contrast, this year’s Splinter sees Numan happily bumping along a rockier road, inspired by friends and collaborators Trent Reznor and Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails.

We’ve had no trouble. We found it more than friendly. The amount of interaction is far greater than we ever knew in England. Musicians joining in with each other, famous musicians hanging out with beginners, everybody just playing together and appearing on other people’s albums. There seems to be a joy of life there that British people don’t seem to have.

Can you explain?

I don’t know it just seems that Americans have a very different attitude toward fun and recreational time. This is what it’s for, 44 EB 4/2013

Can you recommend any new music from L.A. that we should be paying more attention to?

Fresh new music I probably couldn’t because I’ve only been hanging with Nine Inch Nails and these sort of people—established bands.

It sounds like things have come full circle in going to Los Angeles, meeting these people that you respect and who you enjoy interacting and collaborating with on your new album. Would you consider this progress?

For me it’s really great. Meeting people who claim you as an influence and finding out that they’re cool and doing stuff which is really interesting and clever is something I’ve been learning a lot from. One thing feeds into the other so that it then feeds back to the beginning again. If you ask me, it’s very much a two-way street. I said to Trent a while back, for everything you ever got from me in terms of influence and ideas, you’ve paid me back equally, if not more so because I’ve in part also survived thanks to you. ~

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LOUISE Brailey talks to LAUREL HALO

“I could call myself a cultural Marxist, but I don’t” When an artist makes something as startling, divisive and downright strange as Laurel Halo’s 2012 debut Quarantine, people want to know what’s going on inside their head. Numerous album descriptions were couched in terms of “catharsis” and focused on the sense of claustrophobia sealed within the music’s beatless sonic architecture and untreated vocals. Halo, however, takes offense at such attempts to simplify sounds with words. Over the past few years, critical attention has become a kind of background noise that distracts from her lone route through experimental electronic music. In conversation, terms like ambient, rhythmic, hardware, and software are examined and reexamined with care and contention. Call Chance Of Rain—Halo’s most dancefloorattuned work yet—a techno record at your peril. As Louise Brailey found out when she caught up with her over Skype, Halo’s music, much like her father’s art which graces the album cover and the artist herself, is anything but straightforward.

Left: Laurel Halo photographed by Georg Gatsas. The portrait was part of Gatsas’ recent exhibition cyan, yellow, and violette, which inlcuded works by Tobias Spichtig and music by Nik Void. Read Martin Jaeggi’s review of the show in our Recommendations section on p. 16.

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I want to talk about the artwork for Chance Of Rain, I believe it’s a piece made by your father in the seventies. The cover is quite an unsettling drawing, featuring men digging graves while others sit, dejectedly, on open coffins. What’s the significance of this picture?

No, but I can hear elements. Like much of your music it’s filtered through a warped lens. It’s certainly not straightforward techno.

I don’t think it sounds like a techno record!

Duly noted. Where are you based now, Berlin?

If you look at the image you’ll see that the men aren’t digging graves, they’re digging the other men out of graves, and those sitting are waking up into this afterlife landscape. It has been on the wall between my monitors for years. I like when album art serves as a visual contrast to the music—I think the music is active and colorful on Chance Of Rain but there’s something stark about the album cover. Yet there are some parallels between the music and the cover too—there’s intricate texture present in both, and there’s something intense about the album cover that spiritually anchors the music. There’s also humor in this album cover and the last one. I think if you took both at face value you might think, wow, this chick is depressed, but that would be pretty stupid. I just have a dark sense of humor at the end of the day!

I’m leaving New York next year but I’m not sure exactly where I’m going.

Why are you leaving New York?

I love New York and I love my friends there, but there’s practical reasons. I barely play in the States, for one.

Why do you think that is?

Not sure!

What does your father think of your music?

The first time I spoke to you it was via Twitter and it was, weirdly, about RuPaul’s Drag Race. How much does popular culture interest you?

I think he likes it. We haven’t gone in depth about it really. It was cool growing up with an artistic presence in my family. My stepmom is also a visual artist—she makes these amazing drawings where power lines lead to nowhere, weird dream houses and barren fields.

I personally have a soft spot for certain aspects of pop culture and obviously I love RuPaul’s Drag Race, I think it’s the best reality TV show. But what serves more as inspiration in pop culture is the stuff that brings me down. Because it inspires me to rise above these shitty, socially reinforcing aspects.

But you’re the only musician?

What socially reenforcing aspects do you mean, exactly?

My grandmother was an opera singer and she would sing for the troops during World War II. I also have some cousins who are tremendously talented singers and guitar players, they can remember dozens of songs out of mid-air, and they star in their town’s theatre productions.

We could pick any number of problems. Pop culture like reality television reaffirms the police state, reaffirms shitty social relations that I don’t support and I don’t wish to participate in. I suppose I could call myself a cultural Marxist, but I don’t. But that’s a more personal view than actually takes form in my music, and I think that’s an important distinction to make.

There are moments on Chance Of Rain that seem spiritually aligned with Detroit techno, albeit in a way that’s refracted and strange. I wonder how much the influence of Detroit touched you growing up in Ann Arbor?

I was never really involved in the techno community, but Detroit wasn’t that far away. My first exposure to techno was going to the Detroit Electronic Music Festival as a teenager, then at college I started digging deeper into the music of Detroit, the music of Michigan. Do you think the new record sounds like a Detroit techno record?

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But if you’re contributing art to society is there a sense that you want to provide an alternative, to drown all that shit out or at least counter it?

This music is just what I know how to do. It doesn’t have a political agenda. Of course, I’d rather we live in a world where governments force people to love and respect each other equally no matter what, but how would anyone possibly make money off of something like that? I’m just making music I love and that makes me feel good, and I hope it does the same for others.

“Pop culture like reality television reaffirms the police state, reaffirms shitty social relations that I don’t support and I don’t wish to participate in.”

You’ve spoken before about Quarantine coming from quite a dark place, personally. Were you in a better headspace this time around with Chance Of Rain?

Let’s flip this around. Why do you think it’s coming from a more positive headspace?

There’s something about the sounds that you’re using, and I think this comes down to your using hardware; the sounds are more alive. It feels like a window has been cracked, Quarantine was such a remarkable record but I found it hard to listen to at first.

I think it’s probably a projection of your own headspace on the music here, though it is joyful working with rhythm. Even if you are coming from a dark place I think writing rhythmic music can help you process it in a much different way.

It’s more an act of purging, perhaps?

Let’s drop the word “purging”, and “catharsis” for that matter. They are both cheap, easy words to apply to music, that ultimately reduce music to this kind of emotional vomit.

Chance Of Rain has nothing to do with catharsis, even though it is a moody record. That I would hope it inspires heightened awareness, emotional clarity or a desire to move listeners is an entirely separate thing from my own personal headspace.

Even with an on-the-sleeve emotional record like Quarantine, that was not catharsis because the content of the music only reinforced this dark energy for me. My emotional state really is none of your business at the end of the day. There is something inherently uplifting about music that makes you want to move, even if the origin of the music is dark. And there’s the simple fact that I just like making this kind of music and I’m happy to put it out.

When you make your music is it for you alone, then?

I think that there’s a lot of amazing pop music out there and pop clearly has expectations—catchiness, production standards.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong to make music for an audience, but for me personally if I think about an audience first and the music second then it doesn’t work for me. I have to approach music by taking on new processes and approaches, and creating something that I love enough to release, basically.

One of the things that was so remarkable about your first EP as Laurel Halo, the King Felix EP was its barely suppressed pop quality. Were you ever tempted to write straight pop music?

I would love to write pop songs for other people and I have done that in the past.

Of course, for Lauren Devine. Is that something you’d like to do more of in the future?

Absolutely.

Recently there’s been a detectable shift back towards using outboard gear—John Heckle, Helena Hauff, any number of L.I.E.S.affiliated artists come to mind. Do you think this is partly due to the way computers have seeped into every part of life and that it’s become a conscious attempt to break away from the ubiquity of the screen?

Well I think there is this noble intention, but personally I’m still looking at a computer screen quite a lot while producing.

In general, I prefer to use hardware when I play live because it feels more performative. But of course there’s no real difference between playing with hardware and playing with software, I think it’s just what you like because artists can have incredibly intricate laptop sets, and artists can have really pre-packaged, bland hardware sets too.

With Chance Of Rain, I was especially drawn to “Serendip”, which, I’m guessing is a reference to Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence program. Is this something that interests you? It’s well documented that you’re into science fiction.

Don’t trust anything that’s well-documented! Case in point the Voyager Golden Records; the sort of divide between the desire to be futuristic and being limited by your current knowledge set, your limited perception that informs you of the difference between traditional, contemporary or futuristic. The fact that you basically send a record into space and assume that, in case anyone ever finds it, they will have the capacity to play it. Or what music will sound like in a thousand, ten thousand years if it hasn’t been fully transformed into a corporate tool, if humans still exist then even. I think they did include explanations for how to play it but what good are instructions if an alien civilization doesn’t use technology, or better yet, exists as a cloud of sentient gas. The record has a nice inscription though, it says: “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times”.

That’s quite lovely. Even if it is a bit obsolete and presumptuous to think aliens would be able to play a fucking record sent up to outer space. ~

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A.J. SAMUELS interviews Mark Fell

“I actively try not to prompt the audience to share my enthusiasm” Dance music deconstructions are a dime a dozen these days, alternately appearing as noisy four-to-the-floor embellished with unpredictable sonic artifacts or industrial, reverb soaked meditations on atmosphere.

Not so the music of Mark Fell. The Sheffield-based artist and electronic musician has long been doing things bone dry in an attempt to get as far away from “representational” music as possible. Fell sees spatial effects—in contrast to pure synthesis—as an attempt to evoke something beyond music itself, of which his own compositions function as modernist critique. This is the common thread in his repertoire, which spans the avant-house of Sensate Focus and SND to the borderline academic analysis of house music’s component parts—its peaks and troughs and the spaces in between. As Fell told A.J. Samuels, his highly sculpted dance music reference points are as shaped by philosophical considerations as by British alternative music culture’s anti-Thatcherite history.

Opposite page: Mark Fell, photographed in Chicago by Satoki Nagata.

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“My music is a response to the commodification of club music culture, which is something that I kind of object to.”

Mark, like a number of electronic musicians you have at least one foot in the art world. How do you see the relationship between your music and sound-related art installations?

I think the music industry has a sort of baggage—that music is about having a good time, being an emotional release, being “universal” or getting lost in the moment. But I’m not primarily interested in trying to achieve these things. On the other hand, in the art world there’s a reaction precisely against all that. The art world’s baggage emphasizes critique and meaning. When you visit a show, interpretive notes are intended to guide the visitor through the work by explaining the meaning of things. So when I make art installations, even though I read a lot of philosophy and I’m involved in the theoretical aspect of the work, I still don’t think the point of the art I make is to understand a theory of the artwork.

For me, art is something ideally one should be able to engage with in phenomenological terms. So my work in both music and art is usually a reaction against both those kinds of baggage. I just did a performance at Krakow’s Unsound Festival where I have a bottle of water next to the mixer and my bag, and about thirty seconds before the set ends I take the bottle and put it in my pocket and put my bag on. I do it in a way that’s s very contrary to the climax or the idea of a musical crescendo or some massively involved ending. I was showing the audience that I was thinking pragmatically about getting off the stage, doing it in a very matter of fact way. I’m not sure if everyone picked up on it, but I was actually quite proud of it.

You can see that especially in your Boiler Room performance with SND on YouTube. You’re wearing your backpack the whole time, too.

Exactly, I did that to look as untrendy as possible, which for me is not too difficult. Trying not to show enthusiasm is important for me. Even though I am enthusiastic about the music, I am actively trying not to prompt the audience to share my enthusiasm. They should decide for themselves.

What do you think that achieves?

It’s a really difficult question to answer. I guess for me house music has really meant a lot. I grew up in a part of Sheffield that was really falling to bits when house and techno music arrived. It was towards the end of Thatcher’s government and it was quite a

repressive time to live in. So club culture here felt like a reaction against that state of affairs in a very real sense. Now, some twentysomething years after it seems as if club culture has become overwhelmingly comodified. I’m not interested in displaying wealth, taking drugs, driving fancy cars or trying to have sex with lots of women, and it seems this kind of music now promotes those things.

So my music is a response to the commodification of club music culture, which is something that I kind of object to.

Terre Thaemlitz has similarly criticized the Madonna-ization of house music—i.e. the popular white washing of its roots in urban poverty and queer culture. I know you’ve said in previous interviews that your views on house music were the only thing you two really had in common.

Well, Terre and I actually have quite a lot in common in that we’re both pretty antagonistic about a lot of things. We’re very different kinds of characters, but we share concerns about wanting to question things. I can’t speak for Terre but I think he’d agree with me.

We don’t want to present just a really engaging, “fun” experience.

When I first met Terre I had invited him over to Sheffield to perform one of his electroacoustic pieces. Then he told me, “Oh, I can DJ at the party if you want too.” I was like, “Sure, DJ in the bar.”

Then I told Mat from SND, “This Terre guy wants to DJ, it’ll probably be awful, but whatever.” And then when we heard him that evening we were laughing like, “Wow, he’s actually a pretty good DJ!” I expected him to just play a whole bunch of really eclectic stuff and for it to be a big mess structurally or whatever—a fair description of my approach to DJing, by the way. With Terre you could tell it was all a very considered and consistent approach, and he played a bunch of records that were very important for me at the time—very specific house music from a very specific period.

You mention growing up under Thatcher. What was your reaction to Thatcher’s passing this year?

I don’t hate Thatcher as a person, I just disagreed with most of the policies she and her government stood for. In the village next to where I live they were dragging effigies of her through the street and performing quite degrading acts on those effigies. And although I sympathize with the motives of those people, that’s beyond what I would say is acceptable when someone dies. Having said that, when we found out she died, it sounds terrible, but for

Opposite page: Mark Fell blocks the light. “Seeing the medium as a way of representing something else is not something I really do, like the idea of using paint to represent a landscape. I would rather get a bunch of colors and put them on the canvas and see how that works.”

52 EB 4/2013

most of my family and friends there was a celebration. There were parties; not because a person died, but rather because of the memories of everything that had happened in those times. It was a horrible time and a very repressive government. We all lost friends as a result of those policies: people committed suicide, people got into drugs, lives got screwed up. So the celebration, if you could call it that, was in memory of those people, and in reflection upon those times. A woman on the local radio summed it up very well: “When the oppressor dies the oppressed celebrate.”

Which policies are you referring to specifically?

It’s hard to say specifically which but what I can say is that there was a general mood of uneasiness. I grew up next to the village of Orgreave where in 1984 the Battle of Orgreave took place between police and miners. Jeremy Deller actually made a reconstruction of the confrontation, which is quite interesting. Around the time, when I was sixteen and leaving school I was thinking, “What the hell is going on?” It seemed like society was falling to bits. My dad lost his job and couldn’t find work again. It was so oppressive. I was brought up with certain kinds of moral beliefs about how you should contribute to society and things should be getting better and people should treat each other with respect. You know: you get a job and it . . . works. But when I was finishing school I realized it was all bullshit. It’s not what I observed in the world and society around me. That’s when I encountered Throbbing Gristle. For me they weren’t “wreckers of society”, as they’d been portrayed in the press. Actually they highlighted the fact society was being wrecked.

I was just this uber-alienated school kid from a crumbling town in the North who saw things falling apart and got obsessed with electronic music and alternative culture.

It’s a common narrative that artistically exciting things come out of eras of crisis, but it still feels crass to think about it like that.

In my town, Rotherham, none of my friends worked for years and people just made their own culture. There was music every night and events all the time. There were maybe fifty or one hundred people that would just hang around and do stuff. Between leaving school and starting college in ’87 or ’88 it was culturally the most amazing few years because everyone was doing stuff. And maybe that was a consequence of the terrible socio-economic state the country was in, but I don’t know.

What did your dad do?

He was a steel worker and his whole family worked in the steel industry. Between central Sheffield and Rotherham is this corridor 54 EB 4/2013

of factories, and he worked there from the age of about fourteen for around thirty-five years. This was when you got a job and you just had it forever. He was fifty at the time and never worked again, and he suffered quite severe health problems as a consequence; he had a stroke because he was trying to work so hard doing other things to survive.

Were you expected to follow in your dad’s footsteps as a steel worker?

No, I was quite lucky in that both my parents, although they were from this very traditional Northern working-class background, had other interests. My mum was quite into literature and was more of an intellectual person. As a child from a very poor background she won a scholarship to grammar school, and this was a kind of step into a more intellectually engaged environment for her. Similarly my dad won a scholarship to study art at Ruskin College, but was unable to go because he had to earn money to support his siblings.

They always encouraged me to do art and music and never pressured me about anything else. It was a very liberal upbringing and I always felt very lucky to have had that support.

I know philosophy is important to your practice both in music and art, and you’ve written in the past about the importance of phenomenology for what you do—specifically in The Wire about Martin Heidegger’s positing the primacy of practical knowledge of tools and systems over theoretical knowledge of the same.

Well, I studied philosophy for two years and after a few twists and turns eventually became obsessed with Wittgenstein’s later work. After college I went on to study fine art at university, I found myself looking at things from a philosophical perspective.

But this was quite in contrast to the mood at the time, which was heavily influenced by the French post-structuralists—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and so on. In contrast what I liked about Wittgenstein was his matter-of-fact approach to language, that there’s nothing scary or problematic about it. If you think of people like Chomsky who say language is the way it is because of deep structures in the brain, or you think about any of the French post-structuralists where language is framed as something problematic and restrictive, Wittgenstein’s description of normal, everyday language seems free from this paranoia. Anyhow, I eventually got heavily into Richard Rorty and through him I got into Martin Heidegger. Actually, my ambition was to learn German in order to read Heidegger. Hubert Dreyfus, whose lecture series is downloadable as podcasts was quite helpful. I bought the same version of Heidegger’s Being and Time used in his class and sort of remotely attended the lecture series. This was really engag-

“I’m not into making ‘weird’ sounds; I am into using very recognizable sounds and production techniques, but creating unusual patterns. If the sounds were unfamiliar, I wouldn’t be so interested.” ing because you could actually listen to students in the audience going, “Hey! I know German—I think I have a better translation,” or whatever. The podcasts really helped with understanding the subtleties. Then at a certain point I met electronic musician and artist Yasunao Tone and soon realized that he was also heavy into philosophy and Heidegger. That also gave me a new way of understanding his work and performances using technology.

Do you see Yasunao Tone’s work with malfunctioning MP3s as an example of the kinds of disturbances in a system that modify a tools function—and for Heidegger also highlight its relationship to the tool’s surroundings?

You could give it that reading, but I think with Bruno Latour you can also get an interesting reading of Yasunao’s practice, especially his ideas about the connection between humans and non-humans and how action is constituted in networks, instead of human action always driving networks of things.

It seems ideas related to object oriented philosophy—investigating the psychic reality of objects and non-human systems as opposed to just human knowledge—has been especially relevant in the past few years for artists and musicians dealing with independently evolving electronic artifacts.

Having looked at this quite superficially I didn’t see what was so special about it. For me, philosophy isn’t about trying to understand the absolute truth of things. It’s about how we understand things under different, perhaps even contrary descriptions. Like when Copernicus pointed out that the sun was the center of the universe and not just some yellow thing that goes around the earth, it’s not like the planets started behaving differently—they didn’t suddenly adopt different positions. It was just a different description.

And actually we could still describe the solar system as moving around us. It would probably be a bit more complex and not mathematically as elegant. But it would still be meaningful. I’ve also been obsessively watching Richard Feynman’s lectures on YouTube and one struck me in particular about gravity and centrifugal force and why the moon revolves around the earth. He said that initially people thought it was angels that were pushing it. And after a long complex description of the forces involved he concluded that the angels are pushing it, but just in the opposite direction we thought.

In your solo work I often hear repetition as a tool to display all of the variations of a closed system of sounds. The approach seems pretty scientific and focused on multiple perspectives and sound-variables in all its possible combinations, especially on n-Dimensional Analysis.

Well, somebody said one of my records sounded like an n-dimensional analysis which I thought would be a good name for a record.

For the piece I made quite normal house tracks using a bass-line sound, a chord-like sound and percussion. It’s important to me that in the production, things sound authentic. I’m not into making “weird” sounds; I am into using very recognizable sounds and production techniques, but creating unusual patterns. If the sounds were unfamiliar, I wouldn’t be so interested. What’s happening on the record is all the different ways I undid or deconstructed the original track. Something that recurs in my work is that an object can be seen from many different angles, and that’s also what I tried to do with Multistability. It’s a way to prompt the listener to encounter the work from multiple points of view. But it’s also about a practical question of how you structure a record. In dance music you might consider how things are introduced and the peaks and troughs, and what happens in the eight minutes of a track. But this is something I find really difficult to do. I also find this structure problematic from a musical perspective, even if I could do it really well. I wanted to try to develop other ways of structuring that kind of music.

Was that always the case?

My kind of journey into electronic music started with Human League, hearing “Love Action” in August 1981. At that moment there were loads of breakthrough British new romantic acts: Soft Cell had “Tainted Love”, Duran Duran had “Girls on Film”, Ultravox had “Vienna”; but “Love Action” was what I really loved.

Then I realized they were from Sheffield as well, so every weekend I would come into the city to try and spot them but never really did. And that’s how I got into more esoteric electronic music, like Throbbing Gristle, Chris and Cosey, Clock DVA, The Anti-Group and Cabaret Voltaire. For me, if anything had a guitar on it, I was like, “No, that crosses the line.” If the kick drum wasn’t right, I wouldn’t listen to it. And for me the perfect formula was “Love Action”. You could judge how much I liked something based on how far away it was from that song.

I know that last year you did an installation in an anechoic chamber at University of Salford. That seems like a perfect atmosphere for what you do because the sounds you work with are so incredibly dry and pure and without any spatial effects.

I tend to not treat sounds. I’m more of a synthesis person and for me, clarity is a really important consideration—which, again, is because of “Love Action”. I don’t use artificial reverberation—the room adds spatial qualities; and I don’t process sound with effects.

I come from a contemporary art background instead of a music EB 4/2013 55

“In the end, it’s a kind of ideological stance [. . .] If I make something that exists in a computer environment, why make it sound like it’s in a cathedral or something?”

background, and I have an affinity with very untrendy ideas from modernism. Seeing the medium as a way of representing something else is not something I really do, like the idea of using paint to represent a landscape. I would rather get a bunch of colors and put them on the canvas and see how that works; just a presentation of shapes and colors. Representational aspects creep into music production in terms of how sound is processed to create the illusion of space. But music has a non-representational tradition. In the history of music there haven’t really been so many instruments built to sound like an elephant, say. Creating instruments to represent those sounds is a pretty recent development. In visual art it’s different, of course. But in the end, it’s a kind of ideological stance. Like if an architect is building a wall out of concrete, they wouldn’t go and paint bricks on it to make it look like bricks. If I make something that exists in a computer environment, why make it sound like it’s in a cathedral or something?

So reverb is kind of the trompe l’oeil to the abstract expressionism of pure synthesis?

Yeah. It’s like the “Truth to materials” slogan in architecture. But in academic electroacoustic music, the approach is very different.

If you read Denis Smalley, who’s a prominent electroacoustic composer, you’ll see he talks about sonic forms in terms derived from real world landscapes—for example a river with points of bird song along it, and things moving in and out of focus, et cetera. What I do isn’t entirely formal—rather, it’s a critique of that kind of approach. I also dislike the idea of intentionally trying to create a specific emotional response. This is a belief that a lot of people have about music: that the composer is inspired by something and that they want to convey that feeling and to elicit the same response in the listener. I’m not saying people don’t have emotional responses to what I do. That would be stupid. I’m just not trying to create a specific emotional response. In contrast, when you listen to classical music, these cues are at the forefront. It’s like, “Feel this! Now feel that!” But there is a lot of music that doesn’t do that, like Indian classical music, which I really enjoy. The emotional direction is not so clearly enforced.

But does the emotional content of the music have to be translated into something linguistic-conceptual? Can’t some complex emotions best be “described” as the music itself, as opposed to an emotion that is translated into music, and then converted back by the listener?

I think our backgrounds, personalities, and cultural beliefs are implied every moment of the musical experience. That isn’t to say that you might not experience a direct sense of that emotion, 56 EB 4/2013

or that music isn’t the medium through which the emotion can be articulated. Just that this doesn’t happen outside the cultural world. I listen to all kinds of music, a lot of which is emotional. But I’d much rather be taking people out of the direct experience of emotion and have people wonder what’s going on and get them to ask what they’re supposed to be feeling, and why and how they are feeling it. I’m much more interested in curiosity and people saying, “What was that?” than coming out with some resolved emotional or conceptual outcome.

In the past you’ve said that drugs had a negative effect on music in England in the late eighties and early nineties. What were you referring to?

I’ve never taken any drugs, I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.

And until I met my girlfriend I very rarely drank, and I still don’t drink much. I’m not interested in taking drugs at all, but I’m not anti-drugs. If someone wants to take a substance and change their head state or experiment, they should be able to do that in a legal and safe way. I’m for the legalization of drugs. Many of my friends take drugs recreationally and they should be able to do it without being turned into criminals. I suppose in relation to music it’s more of a personal thing really, because I would go out to parties in Sheffield and the music was simply going in a direction I didn’t like. It was getting harder and darker, and techno in the style of something like Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance was emerging as an identifiable form. I respect those people, and there are a few Underground Resistance records I like but I wouldn’t listen to it for pleasure. I had already been through Einstürzende Neubauten and stuff, and I’d had my dark, hard brutalist interests. But in 1990 with techno and hardcore, I realized I just wasn’t interested in listening to that specific kind of dark, tense experience anymore.

What turned you off? Did you think it was frightening?

No, I just didn’t like the music. It’s like with punk: although Throbbing Gristle were aggressive, but in a very articulate and carefully constructed manner. The Sex Pistols and their whole swastikas thing was something I didn’t get. I was a little bit too young mainly. And spitting . . . Well, I had a polite upbringing where if you spit on the street you’d get hit on the back of the head by your mum. So when Soft Cell and other similar things came out, it was a radical shift from that kind of aggression, and this was implied in the production of the sound and the character of the music. And later from techno to hardcore I just moved to other interests, which at the time was primarily New York house music, staying home, drinking tea and reading books. ~

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58 EB 4 /2013

Conversations

EB 4/2013 59

Albert Oehlen is one of Germany’s most prominent contemporary artists. Along with Martin Kippenberger, he is known for radically questioning the role of the painter in society today and formulating a fundamental scepticism toward the medium of painting within the medium itself. But rather than turn away from painting as a discipline and in an effort to communicate in a more “universal language”, Oehlen has opted to paint in and around cut outs from advertisements and copies of Scooter lyrics. In interviews the painter has pointed out the significant relevance of Scooter’s neo-dadaistic lyrics in his work. The band’s curious slogans (e.g. “How much is the fish?”, “Hyper, hyper!”) are theoretically so simple that everyone would be able to understand them—that is, if they were to have any content: “Scooter proudly represents the abolute absence of a deeper meaning behind their shiny and glossy surface.”

Somewhat surprisingly, H.P. Baxxter was flattered when he learned that his work was appreciated by a bonafide member of the high-art club. This marked the beginning of an unlikely friendship, of which both appear to have benefited.

Right: Albert Oehlen, photographed in Zurich by Luci Lux. 60 EB 4/2013

H.P. BAXXTER MEETS ALBERT OEHLEN

“Popularity is a currency of its own” Albert Oehlen: Hi H.P., I’m calling from Switzerland.

Where are you?

H.P. Baxxter: I’m sitting in the back of a limo driving to Moscow Airport.

been published in a German magazine a long time ago.

AO: That’s one out of seven col-

AO: What kind of limo?

lages that are currently on display at the Venice Biennale. In one of these I’ve incorporated a photo of yours—I hope that’s OK with you. I mean, I didn’t ask . . .

HPB: Mercedes S-Class. That’s our

HPB: That’s funny. Obviously

preferred carrier to be brought from A to B and back again.

I don’t mind. I’m more flattered, really.

AO: What was your mis-

AO: The pieces are hanging in the

sion in Russia?

HPB: Over the years I have

become quite a TV personality there, so they kindly asked me to become the spokesman for the new advertisement campaign for Media Markt. We had already done some TV spots and, it was actually quite amazing for me to sit in my hotel room one night, turn on the TV and see . . . myself! This time in Moscow I was attending a press conference and we had an autograph session. Before that, I did a radio interview and was a guest on the Ivan Urgant Show—the Russian equivalent to Jay Leno.

The interesting thing about Ivan Urgant in terms of exposure is the fact that it is aired throughout the whole of Russia. It’s on National TV, which is why you can see it in Vladivostok as well as in St. Petersburg. But, Albert, I have to ask you a question. Just recently, a friend of mine sent me an MMS. She had seen a collage of yours in Venice and one of the parts was a portrait of me in an artwork that had originally

Biennale that started on the 1st of June and ended in November.

You wouldn’t believe how many people visit the Venice Biennale over the course of a half-year.

It’s so many more people than I usually would attract with one of my solo exhibitions.

HPB: Would you say then that art has finally become as popular as pop music?

AO: I don’t know if you can

compare the two. The collages are huge—two meters high— and appeal to a lot of people because of their size. But back to Russia, tell me how it is.

HPB: I like it. I almost feel home here. But more importantly, Scooter have very loyal fans over here.

AO: Are the Russian fans dif-

ferent than other fans?

HPB: I’d say they are particularly thankful. They often bring us presents to the shows.

For instance, I regularly get

oil paintings of me as a gift from these fans. Others give us bottles of vodka, which is probably not surprising, as we’ve been coming there regularly for almost twenty years now.

They appreciate that. We just finished a tour that led us to remote cities in Siberia and the Urals. Touring includes four to five hour flights on a daily basis. That’s when you realize how big Russia actually is, and that’s also the moment when our regular tour routine suddenly becomes an adventure again.

AO: I stayed in Moscow only

once, for one day and one night.

I still remember hearing techno music on every radio station. It sounded a bit like techno was the only music that was allowed to be played on the national radio.

HPB: Last year, we released our single “4 AM” in Russia, and it’s in the official Russian charts for the fifty-third consecutive week now.

AO: Did you shoot the video to

it in Russia as well? I remember it had a Soviet-style look and feel, with run-down alleys, gray urban backdrops . . .

HPB: I think you’re wrong. “4

AM” was, if my memory serves me well, shot in a club situation with many people ecstatically dancing and beautiful women all around. The clip you’ve seen probably was “The Sound Above My Hair”. That one had an “eastern” look. But we actually shot it in the Harz Mountains in eastern Germany.

Everything looked kind of retro there. The single didn’t perform very well, though. Then again, “4 AM” bombed in Germany, too. It was only a smash hit in Russia. This is remarkable since we usually have a hit in Germany first and from there the singles spread virally into other markets. But tell me, what have you been up to since we last met some two years ago?

AO: Nothing special, really. I’ve

had a big solo show in a New

EB 3/2013 xx

York gallery and a couple of museum shows in Europe.

HPB: You consider this “nothing special”?

AO: Don’t get me wrong—of

course museum shows are always special. But if you happen to do a show each year, you still get excited but you also learn to stay cool.

HPB: I know what you mean.

That’s why I stress that our recent tour in Russia felt like an adventure. Things can be most exciting, but as soon as they become a routine, they lose some of their thrill.

AO: This leads directly to an

interesting question: how do you measure success?

HPB: I’d say I measure it in terms of how often people recognize me on the street in some foreign country. Popularity is a currency of its own, if you ask me—and not only since the advent of Facebook likes.

AO: It’s a bit different in the art

world. You never hear a word of criticism at an exhibition opening. Everybody is polite and friendly. But with a delay of, say, eight years, people casually will drop a line such as: “You certainly agree that your exhibition back then was shit.” This is a bit disappointing, as you are neither given the chance to digest and evaluate such criticism, nor the chance to react or correct.

HPB: That’s interesting. Our longterm fans actually insist that nothing should ever change. They expect us to repeat the same formula over and over again. I sometimes find this discouraging, especially if I happen to read posts in Scooter forums. I ask myself if these people are sitting twenty-four-seven in front of a computer screen writing weird comments. I think that change is important. To remain true to yourself, you have to adjust to the times you’re living in and the sounds that are

“Our long-term fans actually insist that nothing should ever change. They expect us to repeat the same formula over and over again.”

H.P. BAXXTER

happening. We are fully aware that Scooter has a recognizable style, mostly thanks to my voice and my way of singing. But at the same time we know that we have to adapt to today’s tempos and trends to still be accepted as contemporary musicians in the clubs. This means gradually but constantly adjusting the winning formula. We’re basically forced to keep it as Scooter as possible and to expand the music as much as necessary. I remember you told me once that from time to time you insist that your students have to question the tools they are using—the canvas, the pencils, the techniques.

It’s a bit like that, I suppose.

I was talking about materials such as gold and diamonds that are valuable in and of themselves. I don’t think artists should use such materials to impress people. I would never use a photo of, say, another artist’s artwork in an artwork in order to “enhance” it. But to use the picture of a pop star in a piece of art is something different because it refers to something outside the art that I am making.

HPB: That’s exactly how we did “How Much Is the Fish?”. There we used a traditional melody that had been quite popular in the seventies and eighties, when the Dutch group Bots used it as the chorus for their smash hit “Seven Days on End”. We were “allowed” to use it because it was so contrary to everything you’d expect from a techno group.

AO: A transformation has to

happen. I actually quite liked it when you collaborated with Status Quo for your single “Jump that Rock”. You addressed different generations with the track, although Status Quo actually represented the same kind of dull-witted, headbanger culture twenty years prior to Scooter. I’d call it mindlessness with a positive, sympathetic connotation.

HPB: Ha, ha, ha!

HPB: I know what you mean!

Status Quo, after four decades in the business, have called their 2007 album In Search of the Fourth Chord. That’s the kind of self-irony everyone can relate to. It’s as if we’re all looking for some kind of Esperanto—be it in music or art—that doesn’t exclude anyone anymore. In that sense, it is very important to take care to double-check if every part of the equation is understandable. In all honesty, it also means that you don’t have to be a genius to make music, since the result doesn’t have to be original. It can be a collage of sorts.

AO: Ha, ha, ha!

AO: I am constantly facing a

AO: I’d say that if I am working

on a collage, the most important thing for me is to work with materials and sources that are not powerful, valuable or loaded in and of themselves. It’s important for me to use material that I either have personally discovered or that is unimportant or atrocious.

HPB: And what about using

my portrait in the collage?

AO: Ha, ha, ha!

HPB: So? AO: Look, that’s a different story.

Having dealt with their difficult past, German guilt today revolves around admitting to dancing to Scooter’s 1993 smash hit “Hyper Hyper” while drunk.

Or stoned. Or both.

conflict. duce art gazed at previous

I actually want to prothat can be read or by anybody with no knowledge whatso-

The cover art of Scooter’s ninth studio album is an appropriation of the The KLF’s legendary 1991 LP The White Room.

The hit single “Maria, (I Like it Loud)” was written by Marc Acardipane of Mescalinum United fame.

On the occasion of the band’s twentiethanniversary, Robert Defcon and Max Dax conducted a series of interviews with the entire Scooter camp.

They then assembled the oral history in the book Scooter: Always Hardcore. The cover features Baxxter in a typically German pose.

EB 4/2013 63

Above: H.P. Baxxter and Albert Oehlen first met in Hamburg’s Hotel Atlantic in late 2010. This initial conversation appeared in Germany’s conservative newspaper Die Welt in 2011 to much public interest, fueling Scooter’s oddball reputation and leading to a critical reevaluation of their impressive chart history. Scooter have not only churned out two decades worth of stadium technotrance anthems, they’ve also been honing their lyrics for just as long. When you compare 1995’s “Raving in Mexico” (“We’re getting faster!

This is the real Hardcore! Alright!

Faster!”) with 2011’s “Sugary Dip” (“Here with the venom banging with the treble, comin’ and movin’ and rocking like a rebel.”) the progress is obvious. The band’s twentieth anniversary club show will take place in Hamburg’s infamous Uebel & Gefährlich club on December 5, 2013. Presented

by Electronic Beats, a livestream will be made available via electronicbeats.net.

ever. So, yes, in that sense I am also keen to find that kind of “Esperanto”. But it’s an illusion to think that you can “read” a work of art without having seen other works of art before. I’m not talking about interpreting a picture in a right or wrong way. In a collage for instance, each and every part is referencing something else. If you don’t have a clue, you’re probably going to miss something.

HPB: Then again, if you’re listening to “Jump that Rock” and don’t know who Status Quo are, I doubt that you’d miss that much. It’d still be the sound that has you bouncing about on the dance floor.

Did you know that Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” wasn’t written by Marc Almond but by Ed Cobb and was first performed

by Gloria Jones in the sixties? I found that out decades after I had fallen in love with that song. So I’d say you don’t always have to know the context to enjoy the surface. You just have to make sure that the surface is shiny and immediate.

But coming back to what you’ve just said, when you’re using parts and pieces from Spanish roadside billboards and include them in your paintings, then you employ a language that is supposed to reach everybody without exception: advertising!

AO: That’s right. I use the bill-

boards for exactly that reason. It’s my attempt to develop a new way of painting.

HPB: How self-critical are you with your own work? Does it sometimes happen that you look back and consider, for instance, the past year as twelve lost months? This has happened to me in the past, and if this happens it is a clear signal that I have to change something in our set-up.

AO: This happens to me all the

time. 1987 was a catastrophe, clearly a step backwards then.

HPB: What happened in 1987?

64 EB 4/2013

“When you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, you can usually tell quite quickly if you are following a wrong lead or not. Then it’s up to you to correct the direction you’re following.”

Albert Oehlen AO: I was just meandering. I did

some good stuff, but then also a series of paintings that were leading nowhere. They haunt me.

This has happened to me from time to time, but not so drastically. I would consider a painting pointless and simply move on.

But when you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, you can usually tell quickly if you are following a wrong lead or not. Then it’s up to you to correct the direction you’re following.

HPB: You said earlier that you

don’t want to use materials that are valuable, such as gold or diamonds, because it already leads to a specific direction, right?

AO: Yes, and in that sense Picasso

is a role model for many. Almost all good artists historically only needed a pencil and a sheet of paper to create something beautiful and valuable. Other artists—such as Damien Hirst—use forbidden fruits, like his diamond skull. With the shark in formaldehyde solution for example, he triggered a primal fear that is inherent in every human being. It’s an archaic thing. We humans fear and respect the shark. So, if Hirst exhibits an entire shark, I ask myself if I am impressed by the artwork or by

the shark. The impact the shark has on you doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with art.

HPB: I actually quite liked the shark.

AO: And I changed my mind

eventually. Today I have to admit that the shark is a strong work, even if Damien Hirst did something that should actually be forbidden. But this is a problem for me. The two things happen to be contradictory.

But since you asked, I want to reverse the question and ask you if Scooter would function without the intensity and volume you expect from techno music. Couldn’t it be that the volume is an archaic tool, equal to the shark, which basically impresses thanks to its sheer loudness? I mean, from a purist’s point of view, volume is not a trademark of quality, isn’t it?

HPB: But volume, unlike gold, is free. It’s nothing classist or dividing. On the contrary, volume is a standard parameter, comparable to the canvases you paint on. I listen to all kinds of music. For instance, I like The XX very much. It always depends on the mood and on the surroundings.

AO: Fine, but what about the

precise moment of going out on stage? Do you feel safe because you know that whatever you do, it’ll be loud?

HPB: I actually don’t think that

volume can disguise a bad performance. If my voice is croaky for instance, amplification doesn’t help at all. If the monitor sound on stage isn’t balanced out, then performing is like flying blind. I’ve experienced shows that we completely fucked up because we couldn’t hear ourselves on stage. The sound is extremely important, but it isn’t about investing lots of money. Thank God that bad shows only rarely happen. But if they do happen you can be sure that the audience will notice the difference immediately. You can’t fool an audience. That’s actually also the rea-

son why I’m still a bit of nervous before going on stage. I wouldn’t call it stage fright, but it’s close.

AO: I envy you a bit for that.

Nowadays, when I attend my own openings, everything is planned out perfectly. I remember openings in the past, when people would openly joke about the smell of the paintings—they still smelled like turpentine because they were still drying. Those were great times. We were really proud of our pictures, and only a week later you’d see people’s reactions in the live situation of the opening. But nowadays, if a museum decides to exhibit a body of my work, the paintings are rarely younger than a year.

You don’t smell the turpentine anymore. It sometimes feels like listening to playback instead of a real live show. I miss that a bit.

I think I will start painting two weeks before the opening, next time, even if it would confuse the whole system. Everybody would be stressed and worried about the catalogue and about the hanging. It’s a lot of pressure!

HPB: Did you hear about Berlin-based artist Jonathan Meese’s Hitler salute during his last opening?

AO: I thought pressing charges

against Meese was ridiculous.

I’d call him very authentic. He pushes his luck by constantly giving his status a reality check.

He could actually lose it all. But I tremendously respect his willingness to risk that. He’s basically flooding the market with his art. This could become dangerous for him. Most other artists follow a less manic agenda.

HPB: He’s producing too much?

AO: No, the paintings are

great and have to be painted of course. But I don’t know any career counselor who’d advise his client to act so anarchically. I really like Meese for exactly these reasons.

HPB: Do you follow a more planned professional agenda?

AO: That’s not easy to answer. I certainly think about my career in terms of aims and goals. But more than that, I mistrust the quick win. I’m not trying to land the next hit. I try to see my work in the context of the idea of the new painting that I mentioned before. I try to be successful within my own artistic agenda.

I constantly try to set the course for a substantial development that allows me to follow my ideas. This actually applies also to the socalled “wild years”. I mentioned the habit of painting until the last minute before the exhibition would open. Even then I always tried to paint against the success. I would have been irritated by too much accolade and praise then. I preferred the frowns and rejections. Because I knew about the quality of my work and I knew that time would tell. By avoiding the early smash hit, I could develop under the radar. It is actually kind of a kick for me to delay the success that would come. Martin Kippenberger, by the way, did likewise. If you consider this career planning, then the answer would be probably ‘yes’. But I’d answer the same question with a clear ‘no’ if career planning meant squeezing out everything to become a top-selling, super expensive star painter.

HPB: That’s totally different with us. After topping the charts with our first single “Hyper Hyper”, we developed a sportsmanlike ambition to repeat this instant success. Our formula was always the same. If we believed in a song, we’d try out everything to properly market it. We definitely try to reach the highest chart position with everything we release. Knowing that this is actually impossible, we realistically try to have one #1 hit per album. Sometimes, however, we’d also release a song knowing it wouldn’t storm the charts, simply because we want to make a statement. But we certainly wouldn’t follow an art-for-art’ssake policy with Scooter.

AO: I understand. That happens

to me as well, occasionally. If I

succeed in landing an immediate hit, and if I really identify with that painting, then I obviously see no reason not to follow that trail and work harder in that direction. I have the impression that you don’t have a professional advisor as well. To me it looks like since “Hyper Hyper” you’ve continued on a certain path.

It’s innocent. People apreciate that. Especially when they can rave to it.

HPB: That’s true. I actually

tried to force it with my first band, Celebrate the Nun. I did everything to be successful and nothing worked. With Scooter we just let it happen. I’d say that following your intuition was—and is—probably the best career advice in the world. ~

The detail views of paintings on the following three double pages are prime examples of Albert Oehlen’s incorporation of H.P. Baxxter’s powerful but meaningless slogans. All pictures courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin.

Page 62: H.P. Baxxter, photographed in Hamburg by Luci Lux.

Page 66 - 67: Schuhe (2008), oil and paper on canvas, 200 x 230 cm; photo: Albert Oehlen / Jörg von Bruchhausen

Page 68 - 69: Control (2007), oil and paper on canvas, 230 x 200 cm; photo: Albert Oehlen / Stefan Rohner

Page 70 - 71: Floor (2007), oil and paper on canvas, 230 x 200 cm; photo: Albert Oehlen / Stefan Rohner EB 4/2013 65

Daniel Pinchbeck talks to Darkside’s nicolas jaar and dave harrington

“It’s as if the plants are speaking or even singing to you” Since scrapping his Clown and Sunset label in favor of the newly founded serial imprint Other People, Nicolas Jaar has been branching out to bigger and weirder things— most notably the continuation of Darkside with guitarist Dave Harrington. The duo’s goal of attaining dubby musical transcendence without the use of mind altering substances Nicolas Jaar: Daniel, let me just start out by saying that everybody wants to talk to us about music, which we find boring.

And music about music is boring, at least to me. That’s why we’d much rather talk to you, Daniel, about the things we were talking and thinking about when we made our new album, Psychic.

Dave Harrington: The thing I

can’t wrap my mind around is why Daniel actually agreed to do this. I mean that sincerely.

Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, I really

enjoyed the first Darkside EP and I saw you at this festival Lightning in a Bottle, where I was also giving a lecture. I’m also super interested in electronic music and where it goes and how it’s meandering. I’m always interested in meeting people who are at the cutting edge of music. So I guess my first question would be how and why you contacted me.

is ambitious. It’s also a far more sober path to enlightenment than that of NYC-based psychedelic figurehead Daniel Pinchbeck, whose musings on entheogens and shamanism have gained popularity amongst a new generation of illumination hungry souls. Here, in a curious meeting of the myndes, the trio discuss breaking open the head.

who brought your name up. We used to sit around and jam and we spent a summer in a kind of warehouse, industrial sweat lodge playing music everyday. And your name came up quite a bit . . .

so few people do. And then they have to explain why. And that’s when people start talking about 9/11. But I love secrets that could potentially change everything.

NJ: Also I’ve long been obsessed

biggest secret?

with finding secrets on the Internet. So I’ve read a lot about conspiracies which led me to some of your books . . .

DH: I’m more of the Breaking

Open the Head guy and Nicolas is more the 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl guy.

NJ: I think everybody is an

alien, I love aliens. I ask everybody if they’re an alien.

DP: Ever met any?

NJ: No. I’ve asked lots of people

though. Dave’s seen me do it. I usually just sit down and look the person in the eye and ask them. I sometimes know they’re not going to say no. It’s the weirdest question to ask anyone. So the person says . . .

DH: Well, there’s actually only one other person who plays on this record other than Nicolas and myself and his name is Samir. We all went to school together and . . .

DP: That they might be part alien?

DP: Which school?

NJ: Basically, yeah. People just

DH: Brown. He was the first person

get so confused and distressed, and I’m like, “Just say no!” But

DP: So what’s the world’s NJ: The biggest? I don’t know.

I’m utopian in my secrets. I want the secrets to change everything for the better.

DP: William Blake talked

about how human imagination is not just a mental state, but rather it’s existence itself.

So maybe that’s the secret we’re just tickling the edges of.

NJ: I would love for people to find

out that aliens exist and that they live here on earth; that there are huge clans of intergalactic space wars. I would love for us to just get our ego killed, demolished by a larger power, a larger story.

DP: Why? NJ: Because the human ego is

so boring. It’s like you think this tiny earth is anything?

I would love there to be this larger scheme of things.

DP: I consider it highly prob-

EB 4/2013 73

“Being good at my job means going and cleaning my instruments everyday and making sure that razor is sharp. Getting my knobs right. It’s like something artisanal. Everything else will happen at the right time.”

Nicolas Jaar able that there’s a vast cosmological narrative. But it doesn’t mean we’re nothing or not as important as anything else.

NJ: Well, I like the idea of us not

In Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck’s first work of creative non-fiction, the author describes how hallucinogens were key to his personal spiritual awakening.

Unlike heroin and cocaine, which were widely used amongst his peers in downtown NYC’s artistic and literary circles, Pinchbeck experimented with psychedelic substances not because it felt good or enhanced his social life. Rather, LSD and, in particular, psilocybin mushrooms sparked him to seek new worlds both philosophical and geographical, eventually leading to his participation in various shamanistic rituals involving hallucinogenics worldwide.

And so began his shift from secular materialist to ardent believer in spirits worlds.

P. 72: Daniel Pinchbeck in Brooklyn, NY. All photos by Luci Lux. Opposite page: Dave Harrington 74 EB 4/2013

being as important as many other things that are happening. It’s not just about humans. There are plants also, by the way. There’s water out there. I’d like the conversation to revolve around what other people and things “think”.

DP: So psychedelics and shamanism play a role in how you work and how you think about music?

DH: It’s not part of our practice . . .

NJ: I’ve never done

drugs in my life.

DP: Oh, wow.

DH: But I started reading Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley when I was sixteen. I went to see the Allman Brothers a whole bunch when I was in high school. And those experiences left indelible marks. But I think Nicolas’ and my ideas are similar even if our experiences aren’t shared in that respect.

We’re not a shamanistic band in the sense that we have gone to the desert together. But I’ve been cheating, preparing for this conversation and going back and reading your book.

But getting back to why you’re here talking to us right now. I thought about you, us, greater narratives, music and one of the stories from Breaking Open the Head about your experience taking mushrooms in Mexico with a shaman.

DP: That was in Oaxaca where in the town of Huautla de Jiminéz, where in the fifties Gordon Wasson took part as the first known westerner in a psilocybin mushroom ceremony.

DH: That was kind of like the

point zero of psilocybin into the West, right? Maybe I’m drawing a tenuous connection here but I was thinking about the shaman’s role in guiding you through your experience and I believe that the space of intense, loud, live music, can potentially reflect that ritualistic, shamanistic moment.

DP: I think that’s true to a certain extent.

DH: We as performers and musicians sometimes feel the sound is in this soup mixing all together, you know? It’s kind of shooting the moon to say that we’re being shamans. But the idea reminds me a bit of The Grateful Dead.

DP: I’ve heard that quite a bit in

the Burning Man, West Coast scene—that the DJ is kind of an electronic shaman, shaping the container on the journey.

DH: It’s not a revolutionary idea, I know. I’d just never thought about it too much before our meeting.

NJ: Here’s the thing: Daniel, you’re

talking about a DJ being a shaman and then there’s this other thing with The Grateful Dead, Phish, and the Allman Brothers just jamming, right? But there’s a middle point.

Where? Between using the sounds that a DJ could use and that kind of storytelling, but doing it within the jam context with instrumental elements. I think David and I are excited about the idea of shamanism in general. But the idea is not that we’re the shamans, rather that maybe the music can guide us, you know? Maybe we’ve gotten to the point now where you can be guided by the best things about electronic music and DJ culture and then by the Grateful Dead and jamming culture and bands

of the sixties and seventies. Maybe that can lead you out of the black box of the show, right? Now where does that take you? Maybe for a second you get outside of your life.

But that’s pretty boring—I can get that from a pretty bad movie on an airplane. But maybe, just maybe, it can take you a little further than that. And we’ve gone quickly to one of the biggest questions: How much can we be guided?

DP: I’m struck by the idea that music can guide you. What do you mean by that?

NJ: I know for a fact that all I can be and do is get better at my job.

But not get better at making “good” music. Being good at my job means going and cleaning my instruments everyday and making sure that razor is sharp. Getting my knobs right. It’s like something artisanal.

Everything else will happen at the right time. I am absolutely nothing as a “container” for spiritual content. What I give to people is something that I will hopefully receive from some other place. When I see artists and musicians who say they completely “own” their work I think that maybe it’s true for them but not for me. We are channeling. We are mediums. There’s no ego, that’s not the point. Use your ego to get good at your instrument. Technically talented musicians are wielding a hammer, but that’s nothing.

DH: We often don’t talk about music. We just make it. And when we do talk about music, it’s more an investigation. People say that Miles Davis’s greatest strength was as a bandleader, not a musician. He decides he wants to play with certain people and then he just trusts them. It’s really like Miles is the DJ. His music is a great gesture of egolessness, especially because jazz was often so much about individual voices and the soloist and technique and how far you can excel in these parameters. He kind of undoes all of that. The result is that it makes a new branch in the musical tree.

NJ: Do you have experience

with channeling, Daniel?

DP: Oh definitely. I think all art

making is channeling if it has any integrity to it. I’ve written about it before but I have had drastic experiences of a voice speaking through me during an ayahuasca ceremony that continued for over a week. The book where I describe it was actually rejected by my original publisher, because they just couldn’t fathom it.

“I went to a master class once with a jazz drummer who was very serious when he said, ‘If you can’t make music with two sticks and a rock, then you can’t make music at all.’ And there’s some truth to that.”

Dave Harrington

NJ: How do you cope with that?

DP: Well, there are different ways

Is there a certain amount of selfdoubt when that happens? That is, that it’s actually happening?

DP: I think self-doubt is a good

thing. In the book I talk about gods and spirits and people like Aleister Crowley. And then it turned out to be kind of a hoax or a fraud or something. So I think you kind of need to check back in. I believe in spirits and one day we will have a scientific explanation for them, maybe through quantum phenomena. I think we will come into contact with other dimensional beings that can speak through us. Shamans are people who make alliances with different spirits, and I’ve seen a lot of ceremonies with ayahuasca for instance where you can see the shaman incorporating a specific spirit they’ve been working with.

NJ: When I hear about stuff like

this there is very little doubt that these kind of things should or would exist. I understand it. But why is it not being used more?

Why is it not more prominent?

Why does Western society reject it?

DP: Because Western society has

long been possessed with a materialist worldview. We’ve totally rejected the possibility of other psychic experiences or consciousness and narrowed ourselves down to only valuing what could be quantified materially. In a way you could even see philosopher and visionary Rudolf Steiner saying that materialism is a kind of spirit that enters into us, one we try to reverse. He gives the spirit the name “Ahriman”, which he sees as a necessary force that we have to deal with to develop technologies.

NJ: But where does that

spirit come from?

to language it—whether it’s Carl Jung talking about archetypes that are in the collective unconscious or Steiner describing different planes and dimensions to different worlds. It’s interesting because when people have these experiences and recognize the validity of them, they need to construct a language or understanding that’s not a rigid belief system because the experiences vary.

Why should we know everything?

We’re still developing our understanding of these other worlds.

NJ: It’s a very immature thing to

want, but I like the idea of there being an origin to the evil of our society. I like the idea of saying, “There is a demon! It is this specific spirit!” I like the idea because the truth is actually there are all these different problems. But if there were one root, we could say it all had to do with one clan. We can talk about that clan. Where do they come from? Why are they doing this? Do you know what I mean?

DP: You have people like David Icke

who talk about negative reptilian aliens that have tried to create a human slave race. Personally, I find that too literal. But whatever the case is with ecological problems or vast disparities in equality, we have to decondition ourselves as human beings from compulsive, destructive behavior.

NJ: So you had a voice talking to you for a week. I’m interested in the sound. What was the texture?

DP: I’ve had all sorts of sound

experiences with psychedelics, especially related to electronic music. But in this case, the voice was like a more emphatic version of my own voice. It was me but to a much higher degree of gravity

and seriousness and conviction.

NJ: Did you recognize the words? Was it in a language you understand?

In his third book, 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy, Pinchbeck explores the consequences of his “anti-materialist” world view, tracing his conversion from thinking about society as driven by industry and capital to accepting the larger role of intuitive and magical domains so often negated by the system. This is the point of departure for an analysis of Hopi and Mayan calendar prophecies and their apocalyptic predictions in regards to various phenomena, including aliens, crop circles, quantum theory and 9/11. To help him connect the dots, Pinchbeck draws on knowledge gained from extremely powerful psychoactive substances such as the African psychedelic ibogaine or the South American brew ayahuasca.

Left page: Nicholas Jaar in Brooklyn, NY. Read Charles Damgen’s review of Jaar’s Other People label on p. 20.

DP: It was in English. I had it also with ibogaine, this African psychedelic. It was almost like a journalistic interview with the voice. I asked this spirit questions and the answers were shouted back in my head.

NJ: And in the most simple

sense it was like a heightened version of you?

DP: It sort of introduced

himself as God.

NJ: Morgan Freeman in your head?

DP: Something like that. My friend

who took ibogaine in order to try and kick heroin once asked the spirit: “How can I serve humanity?” And it shouted back at him, “Clean up your room!”

And it was helpful, because his room was pretty dirty.

NJ: What’s the most surprising thing this other-you-God said? Or any of these channeled voices? I like talking about this because I think maybe we can get to something musical.

DP: Something I have written

about in the past is how near humanity is to some kind of metamorphosis or transmutation event.

Is it something we’ll experience in my lifetime or in your lifetime? Is it a one-hundred-fifty-year process? Is it a never-ending process?

Are technology and biology going to merge? Are we going to pursue technologies that accentuate and elevate our psychic abilities? If the latter was true, I think it would go along with some kind of awakenEB 4/2013 77

ing, and we would have accelerated progress on earth. That’s part of the message I’m trying to transmit.

I still feel it’s beyond most people’s ability to know what the heck I’m talking about but I remain optimistic that we’re on the cusp of a deeper level of metamorphosis.

The fact that we’ve got ourselves into this ecological mega-crisis has spurred us to go into an initiation, an awakening. We’re just seeing the beginning of it with events like Hurricane Sandy.

NJ: So this is the information that

got channeled through you?

DP: Yeah, the voice explained that now is the long foretold time of the apocalypse, a time of unveiling and uncovering. It explained that there would be a vast transformation and collapse of the global financial system. It also said that those people who are awakening to the deeper dimensions of the psyche would somehow be carried through this process—that it wouldn’t be as destructive to them. Part of what we would be learning is that the physical and the psychic are mirror reflections of each other. I still stand by that idea.

It seems to be happening in the lives of a lot of people that I know.

Too many people don’t see that there is a direct relation to our spiritual development and what manifests in the physical reality.

NJ: So what’s hap-

pened since 2012?

DP: The book or the date?

NJ: The date.

DP: Well, nothing so drastic, I

guess. But that’s also what I had written. I would say on a subtle level, people’s ability to manifest is accelerating and their thoughts are more capable of impacting the world around them, in both negative and positive ways. I guess it depends if you’re a sleeping person or somebody who’s awakening to our co-creative capacities. If you’re awakening then you have to take more responsibility because your negative thoughts can cause more

78 EB 4/2013

“We’re on the cusp of a deeper level of metamorphosis. The fact that we’ve put ourselves into this ecological mega-crisis has spurred us to go into an initiation, an awakening.

We’re just seeing the beginning of it with events like Hurricane Sandy.” Daniel Pinchbeck negative impact. I’ve hosted a lot of retreats in the mountains in Columbia together with the Cogi and Arawak tribes who claim that they are “older” civilizations. They walked twenty-five hours to the mountains to talk to us about it.

Above: Nicolas Jaar’s first LP Space Is Only Noise (Circus Company) immediately made waves when it was released back in 2011. The blogosphere was braced for an impressive entry due in no small part to a series of imoressive singles and EPs that preceded it. At the time, the Chileanborn, NYC-raised upstart was still pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in comparative literature at Brown University in Rhode Island. It’s there that he would meet Dave Harrington and begin the musical dialogue that developed into Darkside. While Jaar’s sound has evolved, he has also retained a love for slower grooves which drive below the dancefloor speed limit. Many consider that liminal rhythmic space difficult to inhabit. For Jaar, it’s a comfort zone.

DH: You mention the connection between technology and biology. Do you think that’s related to what you’re discussing? Is it the material manifestation of it?

DP: I don’t think it’s ultimately

“material”. I think technology is the manifestation and projection of consciousness. We have an idea and then we manifest it as a tool. The tool then reflects back on us, and then we make another tool because we keep iterating. Consciousness keeps creating versions of itself.

Mastering technology is something we need to do; that is, not letting it control us or let it get out of our control. We need to master the projections that we’re unleashing.

Then we can look at people like Buckminster Fuller and his whole design and science philosophy and marvel at his ability to use technology to create a fully sustainable or abundant planetary civilization.

DH: It’s interesting to me because what you’re saying truly is built into technology. I went to a master class once with a jazz drummer who was very serious when he said, “If you can’t make music with two sticks and a rock, then you can’t make music at all.” And there’s some truth to that. But we work in an era where we go to the complete oppo-

site of the spectrum where technology becomes part of the means of expression. When I heard you talk about the dichotomy between technology and biology I thought about the experiences I’ve had, specifically being electrocuted on a low level for an extended amount of time without my knowledge. Since then I’ve been extremely sensitive to electricity. But we couldn’t do what we do without risking being electrocuted, in some sense. I’ve never had that shamanistic desert or jungle experience, so when I think about the times when I was most exposed to something out of the ordinary in terms of perception, it was always in the context of a hyper-modernized environment reliant on structures and material and technology. Do you think that stuff is just illusory?

DP: Not at all. I use technological tools all the time, so does my daughter.

DH: The question for me is what happens in the jungle and desert that can’t happen right here in New York City.

DP: I’ve been involved in all sorts of local scenarios, but the thing about ayahuasca is that it’s different when you do it in the jungle and are surrounded by the plant itself, as well as all other plant life, you know?

It’s as if the plants are speaking or even singing to you. I feel almost spoiled to have had that experience, it’s so incredibly beautiful.

But you’ve mentioned storytelling on your records before. How do you include narrative in what you do?

DH: I would say that we’re less

interested in a linear narrative and more in a larger journey. The feeling should be that you go on a spectral trip from the first sound to the last sound. You enter a space, you explore it, you walk around, and then you enter a new space.

DP: How do you define

that new space?

DH: It’s hard to be specific about that.

NJ: We turn a song into a land-

scape. I still fight with the idea

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“I think ‘ascension’ is such a Christian concept. Even the dualism of spiritual and material is something that most indigenous Daniel Pinchbeck cultures would reject.”

Somewhat bluesier than Jaar’s solo work, Darkside’s self-titled EP, also released in 2011, drew comparisons to everything from Manuel Göttsching and Balearic house to “lobby-jazz”.

Following their curious remixes of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories earlier this year (as Daftside), Psychic sees Jaar and Harrington traversing mildly psychedelic terrain. The result of their artistic strategies of channeling each other’s voices and telepathic communication through improvisation is a halcyon vision of what dance music could be: calmer, equal parts electric and electronic, and never mistaking stasis for hypnosis. It is nothing if not bold.

80 EB 4/2013

of how to communicate in four or five minutes and make it entertaining. It’s much deeper than worrying about what’s “formulaic”—rather it’s about it sounding like music. How do you make something that’s entertaining and pleasurable and that you can play that also doesn’t somehow scream, “This is a song!” It’s easy when you think about people like Philip Glass and Brian Eno, or minimal music in general. It’s music, sure, but it’s more like math that you can hear. And that’s cool, you know?

But there’s a certain amount of not wanting to be the “younger brother”, musically speaking. The younger brother writes formulaic songs and knows what works and how to get paid for it. Good job, younger brother. But the older brother is interested in ascension.

He wants to tell this story of connection, communication, and love through time—not through any structure that has anything to do with previous forms. That’s the hardest thing today: not trying to deliberately go against formula because that’s formula too. I’m talking about ascensions here.

DP: Uh, what do you mean?

NJ: Look, you listen to a song on

the radio, and it has a formula.

You listen to a noise band that avoids that and does the opposite?

It’s the same thing. I don’t give more props to the noise people that say there’s no formula because it’s just working in contradiction to formula. Ascension for me has nothing to do with formula or no formula. It’s just . . . ascension.

DP: OK, but I don’t know what you mean by that.

NJ: It’s the idea of something that’s above formula and non-formula.

It’s a complicated question because it’s about what we need to get to.

DP: I think “ascension” is such a

Christian concept. Even the dualism of spiritual and material is something that most indigenous cultures would reject. For them it’s meshed together in a deeper way.

NJ: Forget the word ascension.

DP: OK. My father was also an artist, and I’m curious to know how your father has influenced your work.

NJ: He’s a visual artist, but beyond

that he’s a social and political artist. His work is based in the idea that art is inherently political. When I was young and before I made music I wanted to be an artist just like my father because that’s all I knew. Then I realized during certain moments listening to music that it’s hitting me before I think about it politically or socially or any single way. I move, dance, like it, hate it, and the frequencies either resonate inside me or they don’t. First it’s primitive and intuitive. My dad being an artist put me in a position to think about if I wanted my content—the content of my art—to deal with the real world or what happens a second before it. But the older I get, the more difficult I find it to leave the real world. Before in my life, music just hit me. Now I think about how good the snare sounds or how good the chord is.

DP: What about the social

or political concerns that your father addresses?

NJ: No, just music. But at it’s best

it’s one-hundred-percent spiritual.

It’s by far the most transcendental and incredible feeling I’ve ever had.

And it’s beyond any words I can find to describe it. I got it improvising early on with my friends.

And that’s when they started doing a lot of drugs and stuff. I thought as long as I’m jamming three days a week, I don’t need that. Playing the piano really does it for me.

And that’s related to the idea of the medium and why we called this new album Psychic. I felt like in order to make this music with Dave a collaboration, I had to become his medium. He had to talk through me, and I had to do the same thing. Also I feel like psychic shops in America symbolize so many things about today’s culture. The first is that your future is turned into a commodity. But deeper than that, all of these shops are the psychics actual homes. They live there.

This is their front room. When they close the drapes they have dinner there, amidst these crystal balls and stuff. The idea that even this sacred kind of spirituality has been co-opted and beaten down by capitalism in today’s world was something that added layers to the music we made. Because what we do is very American music.

DP: I see a distinction between the spiritual and the psychic. The spiritual has positive ideas of elevation whereas the psychic is more ambivalent. The most obvious manifestations of the psychic are these tragic storefronts that look so much like kitsch and bologna.

It’s the perfect signifier. I mean you can find people who do have psychic gifts and can get something out of them, but they don’t work in these shops usually.

DH: I think it all depends on how

in my own thinking. I don’t think I’m mature enough to talk about the things my father talks about in his art. I’m much more interested in spirituality.

cynical you are. I’ve never gone to a psychic and said, “Hey, here’s five dollars. Tell me my future.”

It’s still too real. The idea is that something will be said and there will be some dynamic action, even if it was complete bullshit.

DP: Do you have any kind of spiri-

DP: It’s like in quantum physics.

NJ: I don’t think I’m there yet

tual practice? I know you said no drugs, but maybe meditation?

NJ: Or improvisation. ~

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WANDERLUST

72 HOURS IN HAMBURG

INTERVIEWS: MAX DAX, MICHAEL LUTZ, A.J. SAMUELS, THOMAS SCHOENBERGER PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCI LUX, ELENA PANOULI

“Hamburg is the gate to the world— but unfortunately only the gate,” Karl Lagerfeld once famously quoted his mother. One of Europe’s biggest ports, the city is a hub for old money, refugees, artists, political extremists and troublemakers. Historically it was the last to resist the Nazi takeover in 1933, but it was also home to the most infamous Nazi Police Battalion 101. While the contrasts today are less extreme, decidedly left-wing politics course through the city’s subcultural veins, from the football club FC St. Pauli to the massive squat Rote Flora and the Golden Pudel club. Hamburg’s protagonists are often embarking off to other places, but we sought out the stalwarts.

Friday, 9:25 p.m.

Beer and schnaps with journalist and ethnomusicologist Francesco Sbano in St. Pauli’s Golden Pudel Club Hamburg is a city in which you can almost smell the organized crime on the street. Standing on the Elbe River you sense that somewhere out there, amidst the vast

harbor, various kinds of contraband are being loaded and unloaded off cargo ships, containers with weapons, drugs or illegal waste.

And it’s happening right now. The same goes for St. Pauli, the city’s infamous red-light district. You see both legal prostitution and utterly illegal activities with every step you take. My impression is that visibility of criminal activity has, over the course of decades, led to a laidback stance on it. You can actually see this when you take a closer look at the way the city’s renowned newspapers and magazines such as Der Spiegel or Die Zeit write about crime and its causes. There is a reason why Hamburg is called Germany’s “media city”. The people who write about and investigate

Right: Aren’t you glad they’re anti-fascists? FC St. Pauli fans celebrate after a 3–0 victory against FC Energie Cottbus in a recent 2nd Division Bundesliga match.

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illegal activities are as hardboiled as it gets. You cannot impress them with anything less than a real scoop, and everything they do is fact-checked to the last syllable. So, when twenty years ago I offered to research a story for Der Spiegel about a so-called latitante—the mafia-term for a fugitive hitman hiding in the Aspromonte mountains—they immediately knew this was a door to information that rarely opens. They commissioned me to meet the latitante, photograph him and to write a report that, in hindsight, became the starting point of a series of articles and photo reportages that I’ve organized or conducted myself still today. As a journalist you have to be reliable and you must never reveal your sources.

This led to me becoming the first person to film the receptive ritual of the 'Ndranghetà. Of course I didn’t film any faces and I took care to make the voices indecipherable. As a result of my constant research travels to Calabria, I began to learn about the music of the mafia, the so-called “canti di malavita” or “songs about the criminal life”. These comprise the only history of the rules and duties of the members, as no written evidence is allowed to surface. I was both fascinated and frightened by the openness of these messages; the songs explained every detail of the life of a mafia member.

This inspired me to research the background and to meet the musicians on the recordings who were still alive. Eventually, I helped publish the first album of these songs through a label based in Hamburg whose then boss, Peter Cadera, was an equally weathered soul. He didn’t want to sensationalize the release. Rather he suggested putting together a website that would gather all information about the music’s complex contradictions and ambivalence.

Digging deeper into the music and the lives of the musicians, I gradually began to understand that the ’Ndranghetà isn’t just a criminal organization like any other. To have a musical tradition and a heavily codified secret language indicates that the organization has a culture of its own, a criminal culture. To

research and to document this became my mission in life.

Journalistic ethics have been key to my research and Hamburg’s long tradition of quality reporting. Indeed it’s an attitude that I am surrounded by in this city when meeting colleagues and fellow reporters. I wouldn’t think of living anywhere else in Germany for exactly that reason.

Friday, 11:30 p.m.

Ouzo, tomato salad and Souvlaki with Vasili Alexandridis at the Taverna Hellas My family opened the Taverna Hellas some forty-one years ago.

As a Greek in Germany opening a restaurant then was the easy option to make some money. That’s why it’s still in the family. I am old now, so sometime soon the next generation will be taking over. One thing that hasn’t changed over the years is the concept of the Taverna, which is simplicity. Large parts of St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn have been modernized, torn down and then rebuilt but at the Taverna you’ll see the same fifteen dishes we offered forty years ago.

Actually, we painted the dishes on the wall years ago so that foreigners could understand what we offered. We still serve the same Greek resinated wine, retsina, as well as the same beer and the same ouzo. Drinks are actually the most important part of the equation, not just for me but also for the night owl. And to that I say cheers! Or in Greek, “Yammas!”

Around 8 p.m. I usually have my first ouzo. It would be deadly boring to do this job sober. I wouldn’t be able to connect with the guests. I’d probably explode.

We are always a team of three and we basically follow the same routine day-in, day-out. No matter

who is attending the grill, you’ll always be served the same food.

This is also because our guests don’t want change. It’s an attitude we appreciate and embrace. On our small charcoal grill, we offer souvlaki, garlic flavored sausages, lamb chops and gyros, amongst other classic meals. But no French fries and ketchup. Instead we serve roasted bread, homemade Tzatziki and our Greek coleslaw or tomato salad as sides. And just as with the recipes, the restaurant has pretty much always looked the same too.

But in 2002, we did of course changed the prices from d-marks to euro. And then sadly a couple of years ago, our jukebox broke, which was a big deal because we’re famous for constantly playing the Greek folk music known as rebetiko. It’s strange because we listen to the same music now from a CD player, but it sounds completely different. It’s not like we didn’t try to get someone to fix the machine here, but the German couldn’t find the problem. So we brought the jukebox to Pyrgos where a friend of mine fixed it with some wire—the Greek way! We left the jukebox there, with all of the vinyl inside. And it still works!

Our location in the Davidstraße is pretty much the epicenter of St. Pauli’s red-light district, with its prostitutes, strip bars and brothels. Accordingly, entering Taverna Hellas means also entering an oasis of timelessness. We have been a kind of temporary asylum for countless lost souls who knew that they would find some food, peace and tranquility in our four walls.

And from our window facing the street you can see the lined-up prostitutes, the johns and the pimps.

If you get one of the two tables by the window, you can watch the St. Pauli nightlife as if you were in the cinema, like the north German version of a Scorsese movie. And even if the stage is the same, the play is always different. I’ve seen the most brutal violent crime through this window as well as the largest police operations and the most heartbreaking moments in the lives of complete strangers. Davidstraße is probably one of the most lively streets in the world, and I have the front row reserved all for myself.

Calabrian-born Hamburg-based journalist Francesco Sbano has compiled three installments of the anthology Il Canto di Malavita— The Music of the Mafia.

He also ghost wrote the autobiography of Giuliano Belfiore, a high-ranking Calabrian mafia boss. His most recent compilation of mafia music, La Tarantella Calabrese—The Dance of the Shepards, Gypsies and Mafiosi, is out this year on the label Mazza Music.

Opposite page: HGich.T are Goa trance and experimental electronic music pranksters with their proverbial tongues deep within their cheeks—that is, when they’re not biting them in uncontrollable acts of ecstasy-induced facial ticking. Die schöne Maike [English: The Beautiful Maike], pictured here in the bathroom of the bar Yoko Mono, is a founding member of the art school collective, who are loath to come out of character. Her’s would be that of dreadlocked Goa reveler, while others include a spikyhaired rave victim permanently wearing a diaper and orange traffic safety vest, and an extremely unconvincing police officer.

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Saturday, 2 p.m.

Wading through vinyl and drinking tea with Lawrence, Julius Steinhoff and Just von Ahlefeld at the Smallville record store and label headquarters, off the Reeperbahn in St. Pauli Julius: I was born in Freiburg but moved to St. Pauli around twelve years ago. I opened Smallville together with Stella and Pete, aka Lawrence, in 2005 and our focus has generally been “deep” house and some techno.

But the term deep tends to be overused, in my opinion. A warm quality is something we look for, but other than that I think it’s a hard term to describe. I suppose certain synth pads tend to make something deep, or contemplative, creating something that tells a story instead of just having a track work on the dancefloor.

Maybe it’s about the melody? I don’t know. With the Smallville store it was all about establishing a place where we can meet people outside of the bar and club context who appreciate exactly that.

In the beginning we always saw the same people coming here, but over time things have changed.

For me, St. Pauli has always been a place where people can come and be themselves, battling drunk tourists and idiots here for all the things the red-light district has to offer and laughing at the locals. I used to live on a street parallel to the Reeperbahn and it was just strewn with wasted people all the time. But that also makes it pretty unselfconscious.

St. Pauli has been kind of the

Left: Smallville storefront in the Hein-Hoyer-Straße.

In the past, the Smallville record store used to carry a larger variety of electronic subgenres. More recently however, the focus has become the kind of deep house and techno that the increasingly popular Smallville label puts out—a kind of funky, contemplative, pad heavy dance music which, for many, is synonymous with Hamburg’s small dance music scene. Both the identity of the store and label is strongly influenced by the artwork and graphic design of Stefan Marx.

Left to right: Julius Steinhoff and Just von Ahlefeld, aka Smallpeople, with Lawrence, aka Peter Kersten, in front their second home.

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last holdout to gentrification in this city, but not really. It’s happened here too. But everything is so centralized here: there’s really only one place to go out, and it’s St. Pauli. People are lazy and have a hard time leaving here, even if it’s for the best sound system and a killer line-up.

Just: I’d like to add a thought to the definition of “deep”: I think there’s deep hip hop as well, like Souls of Mischief’s ’93 til Infinity or even deep jazz. Certainly we used to have a greater variety of music and a lot of tech-house DJs and whatnot, but most have given up vinyl for digital DJing.

We used to try to buy everything and make sure people shop here, but now we care a lot less about catering to other people’s tastes.

In terms of a sound specific to Hamburg, I’m not sure you could say there’s one thing typical to this city, except perhaps rock and roll and deep house and, for a short while, vocal house.

But the scene is not so related to techno. In that sense it’s very unlike Berlin. Underground electronic music never took off here in the same way, and I don’t think there are so many young producers around these days.

Lawrence: The other day I met a girl who told me about a night out in Hamburg which sounded to me like the best night ever. She started out at a show of Moritz von Oswald’s at the Laeiszhalle, which is a beautiful old concert hall. After she went to Golden Pudel and then finished up at Golem, where Jus-Ed was playing. Other times you hear people complain that they were here for an entire weekend and absolutely nothing was happening.

I guess you could say it’s a city with ups and downs and you can never count on some of these places. I mean, Golden Pudel is open seven days a week and you can have the absolute worst Saturday there and the best Monday.

I grew up in the suburbs of Hamburg in the eighties and got into house music pretty early and there was only one really important place for that, which was Front Club. For me, it was a dream the first time I actually

got into the club because I was so obsessed with house music but was too young to experience it in that atmosphere. When I turned eighteen I literally went to Front every weekend for maybe four or five years from around 1988 onwards. The club was a true pioneer in terms of spreading the word about American electronic dance music and queer roots were an important factor.

For me that became an integral part of house music’s identity and my connection to it, but not because I was exploring my sexuality; as a heterosexual man it just always felt very natural being part of a gay “scene”. I just understood how much emerges from it. Certainly a place like Berghain or Panorama is only possible because it’s a place where queerness is being celebrated.

When I was growing up, record shops were not based in the city, but were closer to the suburbs, like Container Records, which had all of the U.S. and U.K. imports. In the year 2000 David Lieske and myself founded Dial Records, which is perhaps what I am most known for in terms of releases. But in 2004 Julius and Stella Plasonia and myself also wanted to open a record store specifically because it was something that was missing here in this city. Just took my place a few years ago and he and Julius have, in my opinion, done an impressive job of continuing to store very personal, deep instrumental house music. Also, the personality of every single track released on the Smallville label is, I don’t know how else to put, full of joy. It’s not about coolness or sophisticated things, although the music is cool.

At the moment, the situation with political refugees in Hamburg has been exposing just how racist some of the city’s politics can be, with the police just rounding up African refugees at random, based only on skin color and many of who came over via Lampedusa.

But the people have been fighting back, and Hamburg as a city where riots erupt over that kind of injustice is starting to reemerge. Which is a good thing.

Saturday, 5:15 p.m.

Taking a tour of Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts in the district of Lerchenfeld.

Afterwards visiting the studio of artist, professor and musician Michaela Melián of NDW pioneers Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Hamburg has always had a huge gap between the rich and the rest, even more so than my hometown of Munich. Of course, it’s also the wealthiest city in Germany and filled with old money. When we started the band Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle or FSK in 1980 in Munich, we knew about journalist and label owner Alfred Hilsberg from his column called “Neue Deutsche Welle” in the popular music magazine Sounds. We also had heard about his label ZickZack. Back then we had the feeling that in Hamburg, especially, something new was happening. Coming from a classical music background, I only knew pop in terms of pop art.

I knew Andy Warhol and I was fascinated by Fluxus as an art student, but I knew almost nothing about pop music. Nevertheless the boys invited me into the group because I was able to play several instruments and they didn’t want Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle to be all boys. One day we recorded four songs in our room on a two-track recorder with two microphones taped to bottles. We sent the tape to Alfred who had by that time already put out a few singles on his label, and he signed us shortly thereafter. I tell this story because

Opposite page: Michaela Melián in her studio at the University of Fine Arts. Melián is convinced that the university’s open curriculum allows students to pursue a variety of theoretical and practical skills without having to make unnecessarily limiting committments to a single practice or school of thought.

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Above: With his label ZickZack, Alfred Hilsberg has released some of the most important music in the history of German pop and avant-garde, including the likes of Abwärts, Die Krupps, Einstürzende Neubauten, Palais Schaumburg, Die Tödliche Doris and FSK. He also coined the term “Neue Deutsche Welle”, (“New German Wave”).

Photo by Heiko Laschitzki.

Opposite page: The Eros Center on the Reeperbahn. Don’t worry buddy, we’ll keep it our little secret.

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it’s somehow typical for Hamburg.

The city has a remarkable flexibility which allows for creative mobility and that’s something Alfred very much embodied. Since then I had pursued a career as an artist, and thirty years later I was asked by the HFBK [University of Fine Arts in Hamburg] to become a professor. That was a real honor because of the long list of former teachers who, by the way, also stood for creative freedom and mobility, like Bernhard Johannes Blume, Sigmar Polke, Franz Erhard Walther and Anna Oppermann. I inherited my studio from Marina Abramovic and, importantly, there were always lots of female instructors.

Thanks to my predecessors, the HFBK also has a long tradition as a place where students are allowed to really think about and reconsider their future—for example, choosing to study art to only later become a journalist, curator or a fashion designer.

Which is to say that the academy provides the theory, but it also teaches a broader craft. I attribute this to the openness of our system, which, unlike at other fine arts universities, allows students to visit a variety of different classes. I think this has to do with the mentality of Hamburg because of its politically charged history. Many students here are politically engaged and actively support the plight of the many Lampedusa refugees here; or fighting against the gentrification and reorganization of urban development in Hamburg. The question of who owns this city is central to the discussions we have in our classes. The school also tends to attract students who want to become artists but they do not necessarily want to learn how to feed the art market with clever products. This includes lots of conceptual art that is often too unwieldy to be easily marketed and sold.

I remember when studying was still seen as a period in your life where you’re figuring out what you really want to do, unlike today where lots of students have hardly have any time to reflect. Hamburg is different.

Saturday, 8:30 p.m.

A visit to the home of ZickZack label founder, journalist and all around cultural figurehead Alfred Hilsberg, who was eager to take us on a trip down memory lane My first impressions of Hamburg were strongly informed by the news media. Growing up in the sixties in the Nazi-founded city of Wolfsburg, home to Volkswagen, I had heard about a group of young underground film makers who had founded the Hamburger Filmcooperative and whose goal was to promote non-commercial cinema in West Germany. I ended up meeting the members on a trip to Hamburg and decided to stay because the city seemed to offer so much more than Wolfsburg. At the time, Hamburg was rioting—a semi-permanent state of political and social chaos. Demonstrations by the APO—Germany’s extraparliamentary opposition—were heating up the political climate in 1968, with many students simultaneously engaged in a campaign against the right wing publishing house Axel Springer, who owns Germany’s largest daily newspapers. Every day, violent clashes between the students and the anti-riot police took place, fascinatingly documented by a group of underground filmmakers. The left-wing Hamburger Filmcooperative became essentially the only distribution channel for a new wave of political documentarianism. At the same time, communes and alternative living communities appeared as a new form of anti-bourgeois lifestyle. For a short time I actually shared a flat with the infamous Ulrich Wessel,

who would later go on to become one of the terrorists responsible for the siege of the West German embassy in Stockholm. Those were messy times, to say the least.

There was very little clarity and even less political transparency.

At the time I had lots of friends in various leftist organizations, all of whom were following different political agendas, which I never submitted to. However, I was engaged in political initiatives on a more local level, including the city’s extremely active squatting scene. Getting to know the scene’s various protagonists, I would become increasingly disappointed with the fact that none of them cared about the arts, especially not about music. They’d listen to atrocious American mainstream rock and traditional folk protest songs, while all sorts of interesting underground music started to emerge locally. These new artists were the antithesis of the commercial Hamburg music scene, which in the seventies included people like Udo Lindenberg, Okko, Lonzo and later comedian Otto Waalkes.

Naturally the music press had zero interest in new bands and chose instead to constantly feature the same old, boring faces. Then, in the wake of punk in 1976-77, I began traveling to England twice a month and seeing all sorts of acts that impressed me enormously and left a huge impression. Shortly thereafter the first formulaic punk bands appeared in Hamburg and some of them even sang in German—not that this made their music any less predictable.

Only three years later I started my own label ZickZack, when, in the aftermath of punk, the first truly innovative bands started to appear. I immediately saw the need to release their music, and that’s how I became both a booker and record producer.

In light of the lack of new clubs or bars, I was forced to book these bands in traditional rock and roll joints such as the Logo and the Markthalle, which both still exist today. Especially the Markthalle became a meeting point that attracted hundreds of people from other cities. The HFBK, Hamburg’s University of

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Above: Gunther Buskies runs not one but two of Germany’s most successful pop, krautrock and experimental labels—Bureau B and Tapete Records. He also doesn’t allow his kids to wave the German flag when the national football team is playing.

Opposite page: Vasili Alexandridis (left) hard at work. Hamburg might be a city of transit, but in Taverna Hellas nothing really changes. For the past forty years it’s been the same rebetika, the same menu, the same family, and the same four walls.

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Fine Arts, also had plenty of students who would go on to form their own bands. By the end of the seventies, Hamburg finally had a vivid and well-connected underground music culture and ZickZack was in the process of releasing dozens of records that would later be considered eradefining. These were the first New German Wave releases. Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle frequently gave concerts in Hamburg, even though they were living in Munich. At the same time in Hamburg’s Marktstube bar and club, Holger Hiller and Thomas Fehlmann founded Palais Schaumburg. The Marktstube played an essential role in fostering the underground music scene; it’s there that musicians and art students drank and smoked and made plans to collaborate. The result is that things were getting pushed further and further and the innovation continued. Palais Schaumburg in particular were constantly pushing boundaries.

At the time, I was sharing an apartment with Holger Hiller and I remember watching him write lyrics while sitting at our kitchen table. He had a primitive computer he was squeezing new sounds out of. The band’s music, texts and performances gradually became more and more extreme.

We knew that we were collectively witnessing a turning point in German music history. I was enormously proud to have released the band’s first singles and LPs because they were so adept at mirroring larger social concerns in their very own, uniquely articulated fashion. Sadly, the movement disappeared almost as soon as it surfaced when the German market became flooded with cheap commercial copies of underground releases in the beginning of the eighties. It took a couple of years until musicians like Tobias Levin, Kristof Schreuf and Jochen Distelmeyer would start to sing again in German and begin a new chapter of music originating from Hamburg in the late eighties. I was also encouraged to develop and support this then fresh, young, critical scene.

But, alas, that’s another story.

Sunday 12 p.m. coffee with Gunter Buskies, co-founder and owner of labels Bureau B and Tapete Records I moved to Hamburg in 1994 and got a job at Universal Music through an internship back when it was still PolyGram. I was responsible for back catalogues, which is where I first got to know the back catalogue of the legendary krautrock label Brain. I was the go-to guy for re-issues, best-of’s and rarities, and I absolutely loved it, because I could constantly be changing the artists I was focusing on, although Brain was something I was especially drawn to. The thing about Brain is that they really had two types of repertoires, similar to Sky Records: On the one hand there were a lot of boring rock bands that tried to sound like groups from the U.S. or the U.K., like Jane for example. Actually, I would only say a quarter of the Brain catalogue was interesting or good, and measured up to Harmonia and Cluster. I saw it as my duty to find the gems that completely got lost, like Lilienthal, which included the likes of Dieter Moebius, Conny Plank, and Asmus Tietchens. But when I told the general distribution of Universal that I thought something like Lillienthal was definitely worth rereleasing, they told me, “Just forget about it, it won’t sell.” Well, I didn’t agree.

Brain was based in Hamburg and the city was and, to a certain extent, still is a kind of capital of the German music industry. Back in the seventies and eighties, this was especially the case, although it had nothing to do with a Hamburg music “scene”. Conny Plank didn’t live here, and neither did Cluster and Harmonia. But with Tapete Records and Bureau B, I suppose you’d be able to make a certain kind of connection these days.

But in the ninenties, Harmonia and Neu! reissues had proven quite successful. Michael Rother was

happy to have an entire page in the Frankfurter Rundschau dedicated to his work for the very first time and there was an ever-growing interest in krautrock and kosmische musik, but I don’t like thinking about it as “German” or specifically part of our cultural heritage.

But after actually meeting with Cluster and Faust and former Brain and Sky Records owner Günter Körber—who just passed away recently—it was clear that there were important things to be brought out again. Since then our roster at Bureau B has grown to truly focus on this kind of music, both old and new, including Roedelius, Moebius, Asmus Tietchens, exKraftwerk member Karl Bartos, Kluster, Cluster, Qluster and newer, proto-krautrockers like Kreidler and Camera. But in terms of my connection to Hamburg specifically, the football Team FC St. Pauli is extremely important to mention. For their one-hundred-year anniversary we put out a compilation album of one hundred songs by one-hundred bands, mostly guitar oriented and many of them punk. I was actually on a personal mission to prove that St. Pauli was the football club with the most songs written about it ever, and the fact of the matter is that this team is not like other teams. It’s more like, well, a cult that’s evolved from the left-leaning, working class area of St. Pauli, which is essentially Hamburg’s red-light district. During the seventies and eighties many of the buildings in the neighborhood were squatted by punks and political activists who eventually adopted the football team as their own, forming its leftist, anti-racist core and including socialist, communist and anarchist ideas as a part of its identity. I actually used to hate football until I discovered St. Pauli.

I would like to go on record that what we release—krautrock and kosmische musik with Bureau B— has absolutely nothing to do with nationalism or patriotism. This just happens to be the good music that’s come of out of this country since the late sixties. My kids aren’t even allowed to wave a German flag when the German national team is playing. I’m not a self-hating German, but I wasn’t brought up to sing national anthems.

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Above: Tobias Levin and Tino Hanekamp B2B at Golem Bar in the Fischmarkt district.

Tino Hanekamp is a journalist, bestselling author and the former owner of two of the city’s most acclaimed live music venues, Weltbühne and Uebel & Gefährlich.

Sunday: 11:20 p.m.

Learning about the cities current state of social and political affairs from author Tino Hanekamp According to European law, political refugees seeking shelter in the European Union are only allowed to claim asylum in the country they first set foot upon.

African refugees crossing the Mediterranean and successfully reaching the island of Lampedusa are therefore required to stay in

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Italy until granted residency status.

Thanks to its geographical location, Germany and other northern European countries have therefore far fewer refugees, particularly from boats. If an “illegal” refugee is caught, he or she will immediately be deported back to the country of arrival. In Hamburg at the moment, a number of socalled “Lampedusa” refugees from Africa have sought protection from deportation in a church and the current municipal government has backed off from storming it for fear of causing serious injury in a house of God. Instead they’ve opted to take equally drastic measures to demonstrate their capacity to act in accordance with a zero tolerance illegal immigration policy: police simply search each and every darkskinned person they see, demanding to see ID and residency status.

It’s not difficult to see this as a PR strategy by mayor Olaf

Scholz, who probably has grand career plans on the national level.

But the strategy seems in some ways to have backfired. Ever since the police began indiscriminately chasing down refugees and darkskinned citizens, left wing protestors have taken to the streets.

Protests were coordinated by the squatters from the Rote Flora, a dilapidated former theater in the middle of the city. Indeed, there is a reason why Hamburg is also known as a “riot city”; it has long tradition of riots, union strikes and protest. And while the current situation has made it obvious that refugees are defenseless and unprotected, the police still hesitate from raiding the Rote Flora because they know this is playing with fire, and it most likely would result in a city in flames.

In the early nineties, after the fall of the Wall, there was a wave of attacks on political asylum seekers’ dormitories in the former East, which gave rise to various left-wing groups. These in turn had numerous functions, ranging from organizing anti-racism rallies to squatting houses. More often than not, they achieved their goals, especially in preventing buildings from being torn down and turned into luxury condos. Many bands and musicians who are active in Hamburg— from Blumfeld and Die Goldenen Zitronen to Carsten Jost—also have political voices, and they use them to inform their fans of the situation.

Today a group of people including the journalist Christoph Twickel, author Rocko Schamoni, Chicks on Speed’s Melissa Logan and myself began an initiative called “Not in Our Name”, attacking the city’s new PR campaign, which portrays Hamburg as a kind of subcultural paradise. It’s deceitful and hypocritical for the government to praise us for our “creativity” while hiking up our rents, closing our bars and forcing us to close our studios in order to make way for new office buildings and flats for rich yuppies. Of course, like so many cities, Hamburg is subjugated by economic growth and by capitalism. But there’s not another city in this country that can look back on such a long and serious tradition of protest and resistance. ~

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was inactive. But what my studies and the studies of my colleagues at NYU and Johns Hopkins have shown is that if a terminally ill patient experiences a mystical level psycho-spiritual epiphany, they are more likely to have a dramatic decrease in anxiety and improvement of mood. It may well be that psychedelics allow us to perceive a spiritual dimension which is otherwise concealed—facilitating an internal re-equilibration of sorts.

AJS: It doesn’t seem intuitive to me

that people confronted with the harsh reality of their deathbeds would want to undergo a potentially frightening psychedelic experience.

It’s almost the opposite of the narcotic experience many cancer patients have in dealing with pain meds, which deactivate the mind.

Psiloscience A.J. Samuels: Dr. Grob, how

did you come up with the idea of psilocybin therapy for terminally ill cancer patients?

Charles Grob: It’s not an original

idea. We drew upon the record of psychiatric research with psychedelics dating back to the fifties, when a variety of psychiatric conditions were being treated with similar drugs. Indeed, the most impressive aspect of the older studies was the degree to which the treatment was effective—even in patients who didn’t respond well to conventional treatments.

Also, “normal” treatment models have shown to have extremely limited efficacy dealing with the depression, demoralization and anxiety shown in the terminally ill.

Stanislav Grof and Walter Pahnke in particular were extremely important figures in this field and have long shown how psychedelic therapy can restore a sense of meaning, morale and purpose in a sufferer’s waning days. Finally our culture has evolved to accepting research with these compounds.

98 EB 4/2013

In January 2011, Dr. Charles Grob published a paper in JAMA Psychiatry detailing findings on the therapeutic effects of psilocybin administered to terminally ill cancer patients. It was a watershed moment in psychedelic research, which is currently experiencing something of a renaissance after having long been stymied by U.S. government regulations. With other scholars now following suit, Grob is cautiously optimistic that the psychedelic experience and its arcane parlance will eventually find acceptance within the scientific community. All it takes is open minds.

Illustration: minus

AJS: What destroyed psychiat-

ric research with psychedelics?

CG: At one time, psychedelics were the cutting edge of psychiatric research. They were also of great utility in brain research and many of the studies leading to the discovery of the seratonergic nerve transmitter system came about through analyses of the effects of LSD. But by the mid to late sixties, the cat was out of the bag. The drugs were flowing though the youth culture and consumed by people who might not have known how to use them properly. This was perceived as a “public mental health threat” and all research was pressured to close, which it did for more than twenty-five years. It led a very acrimonious debate. We had to wait for people like Tim Leary to exit the stage for the show to go on.

AJS: What is it about the psy-

CG: Psilocybin therapy is challenging and not for everybody. Actually, recruitment for our study was more difficult than we anticipated and we didn’t get as many referrals from oncologists as we would have hoped for. A lot of the doctors are less concerned with patients psychological or existential status. But being in pain and discomfort is a consciousness constricting experience and indeed the medical profession is more open to treat with opiate pain meds, which can be a good thing. But this is also constricting. Psychedelics on the other hand are consciousness expanding.

AJS: What counts as a psy-

cho-spiritual epiphany?

CG: A sudden parting of the veil to see that there’s more to life than what we had considered; a sense of perception of a greater spiritual power; a profound feeling of awe and reverence. Sometimes people go deep inside and have a “religious experience” that stems from their own belief system, but others, when outside for example, experience nature as being alive.

chedelic experience that you feel would offer people comfort in their time of dying?

AJS: Are such descriptions

CG: There’s a lot we don’t know because of how long the research

CG: Yes, you could say that. But it doesn’t mean they’re not true. ~

still considered esoteric in the scientific community?

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