Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 1/2014 by Telekom Electronic Beats

Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 37 · Spring 2014

“Full moon! Get in the car!” ALISON GOLDFRAPP

CaeTano Veloso SUN RA ARkestra Boy george den sorte skole

connectinG the DiGital StartuP ecoSYStem with DeutSche telekom. lY P P a / m o .c m u a r b u h : it become Part of hubraum.com

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EDITORIAL

“Following a period of relative calm” Max Dax: In a run up to this

year’s World Cup, we flew to Rio de Janeiro to speak with the city’s various cultural protagonists for this issue’s city report. We were also in Rio’s various favelas, which, following a period of relative calm, have now once again become the focal point of both political violence and cultural development. Things there are changing.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Klaus

Biesenbach, Simon Castets, Luiz Camillo Osorio and myself are organizing the 89plus panel for the Expo1 in Rio. The global project deals with concepts and ideas of the generation born after 1989—a generation that distinguishes itself by being the first to grow up with the Internet. Of course, this will include aspects of ecology and shortage of resources. We will also be discussing the ideas of economist Hans Christoph Binswanger, president of World Wildlife Fund For Nature International, who is an advocate for sustainability and reminds us that that various markets need to adapt to the needs of the people, not vice versa.

MD: The legendary Brazilian

singer Caetano Veloso expresses a similar sentiment in this issue when he says that Brazil

Dear Readers, While most of you probably know the feeling of getting lost in hypnotic music within a club setting, there’s a long and fascinating world history to entering trance-like states through the ritual of dance. In this issue we found out how the Calabrian Mafia establishes order through their codified form of extremely entrancing tarantella. We also traveled to Philadelphia, where Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra invited us to the group’s commune to discuss space, music and the future. In Rio de Janeiro we learned about what makes South America’s largest economy culturally tick and politically go boom. All this and more, in a hundred pages of straight dope. And I do mean dope. Sincerely, Max Dax

now has the incredible opportunity to redefine success in a way that doesn’t have to be strictly based on notions of growth and an economic boom. HUO: Which is also especially rel-

evant for today’s new generation.

MD: It’s interesting that in our

interview with Paulo Cézar, a prominent member of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup champion team, was the most critical of Brazil’s current state of affairs, while Felipe Altenfelder, a digital native, emphasized that he is not against the government and only seeks to point out obvious areas of social and political improvement. Altenfelder is one of the founders of Mídia Ninja, whose network of bloggers broadcasted the riots in Brazil via live stream and provided fascinating, unedited accounts of the events. They managed to become extremely powerful in Brazil through the simplest of means.

HUO: For me, Rio has always

been strongly connected to the Tropicália movement, of which Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, and Caetano Veloso were key figures. This was one of the rare moments in the history of modernism in which something entirely new was born out of many different disciplines. It was

a magical time and something comparable seems to be happening today within the dynamics of Rio’s youth. It’s simply an incredible place, and I always associated the city center with Oscar Niemeyer and his atelier on Avenida Atlântica. Whenever I went to Rio, I always drove directly to his place on the Copacabana. Those were always fantastic visits. He worked there until the end of his life. MD: It’s through such interactions

that you find yourself thrust into a new environment, learning to explore it through the eyes and ears of the people you meet. In a sense, we experience cities unpredictably and through chance.

HUO: For me, cities are always

connected with people. That is, I essentially travel to visit people, and they live in cities. With them I see the environment as if I’ve entered through a back door. Oskar Kokoschka once said that it’s impossible to paint a portrait of a city, because as soon as he was finished, the city had changed. And he painted many, many cities. That’s something that I always have to emphasize when discussing urban cartography: It’s always about the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of a synthetic image of a given city. ~ EB 1/2014 3

WELTANSCHAUUNG

In Brazil, there seems to be no price too high to pay for football. This attitude is at the heart of a new book by Argentine photographer Christopher Pillitz, who has documented the beautiful and more disturbing aspects surrounding the sport in South America’s fastest growing economy. Construction of the Maracanã Stadium (pictured here) cost Brazilian taxpayers some 500,000,000 dollars. It will host the opening match of the 2014 World Cup in which Brazil will face historical rivals England. All photos: Christopher Pillitz 4 EB 1/2014

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Rocinha is one of the largest favelas in Rio with some 70,000 inhabitants living in extremely cramped quarters. Here, football is not the only thing that gets played hard. Since the 2011 arrest of the neighborhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biggest gang leader, Rio police have continued to send in tanks, helicopters and S.W.A.T. teams to establish some semblance law and order in preparation for the World Cup. But where are the referees? 6â&#x20AC;&#x192;â&#x20AC;&#x192;EB 1/2014

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Pillitz’s photos were taken over a period of two decades, during which time many things changed in Brazil’s largest city. But some activities always remained the same, like the acrobatic beach football played up and down the Copacabana. This January, the Electronic Beats staff, with the help of regular contributor Arto Lindsay, traveled to Rio to speak with some of the city’s most interesting cultural protagonists. Check out their travel report on p. 82. EB 1/2014 9

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When they’re not busy playing football on the highway, Brazilians continue to debate about whether hosting the 2014 World Cup will be a blessing or a curse, or a little bit of both. Pillitz’s book Brazil: The Beautiful Game was recently published by Prestel. EB 1/2014 11

Imprint Imprint Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues Est. 2005 Issue N° 37 Spring 2014

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

Editorial Office: Electronic Beats Magazine, Waldemarstraße 33a, 10999 Berlin, Germany www.electronicbeats.net magazine@electronicbeats.net Managing Director: Stefan Fehm Editor-in-Chief: Max Dax Duty Editor: Michael Lutz, Editor: A.J. Samuels Editor-at-Large: Louise Brailey Intern: Joe Morgan Davies Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert Copy Editor: Karen Carolin

Cover: Alison Goldfrapp, photographed by Georg Gatsas in London.

Contributing Authors: Marshall Allen, Felipe Altenfelder, Beate Bartel, Boy George, Paulo Cézar, Ciccio, Dario, Simon Dokkedal, Alison Goldfrapp, Christoph Hahn, Helena Hauff, Martin Højland, Hans-Joachim Irmler, Daniel Jones, Wolfram Lange, Arto Lindsay, Lotic, Renata Lucas, Kevin Martin, MC Gringo, Giorgio Moroder, Wolfgang Müller, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gundo Rial y Costas, Cristina Ruiz-Kellersmann, Sergio, Mimmo Siclari, D. Strauss, Paula Temple, Caetano Veloso, Hermano Vianna, André Vida, Wyndham Wallace

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Georg Gatsas, Kerstin Groh, Fabian Hammerl, Luci Lux, minus, Kerim Okten, Elena Panouli, Christopher Pillitz, Kristoffer Juel Poulsen, Francesco Sbano, Jerry Schatzberg, Hans Martin Sewcz

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: Schröder+Schömbs PR GmbH, Torstraße 107, 10119 Berlin, Germany press@electronicbeats.net, +49 30 349964-0 Subscriptions: www.electronicbeats.net/subscriptions Advertising: advertising@electronicbeats.net Printing: Druckhaus Kaufmann, Raiffeisenstr. 29, 77933 Lahr, Germany

Thanks to: Ian Anderson, Annitta Boa Vida, Brigit Berger, Johannes Blersch, Karl Bette, Vinicius Cantuária, Capello, Anne Haffmans, Craig Holiday Haynes, Tomas Hemstad, Christian Kellersmann, Denise Milfont, Michael Ohst, Virginia & Floyd Pretz, Brandon Rosenbluth, Luca Santaniello, Thomas Schoenberger, Danny Ray Thompson, Jean Trouillet, Sasha Wachtel, Pia Werner, Hayley Woolfson © 2014 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited ISSN 2196-0194 “Call me tomorrow!”

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Content Content Editorial .................................................................................... 3 weltanschauung ...................................................................... 4 Recommendations................................................................... 16 Music and other media recommended by The Bug, Jochen Irmler, Lotic, Paula Temple, Christoph Hahn et al.; featuring new releases by Can, Beyoncé, Automat, HTRK, De La Soul, Ekoplekz, Christoph Schlingensief and more Monologues

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¥C$ How Beate Bartel spends 100 euros........................................... 28 ABC The alphabet according to Wolfgang Müller .............................. 30 Style Icon Boy George on Bob Dylan ......................................... 34 Counting with . . . Helena Hauff............................................... 36

“Full moon! Get in the car!” Wyndham Wallace talks to ALISON GOLDFRAPP ............................ 40 Interviews

“Make a Mistake!” André Vida and Max Dax talk to MARSHALL ALLEN ...................... 46 “Nothing is holy” Max Dax interviews GIORGIO MORODER ........................................ 60

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“Every sound tells a story, and every voice has an echo” DEN SORTE SKOLE in conversation with Max Dax ...................... 66 MUSIC AND CRIME Calabrian tarantella: trance, drone and the rituals of the Mafia by A.J. Samuels........................................... 74 Conversations

Wanderlust: 72 hours in RIO DE JANEIRO...................................... 82 Editor’s Note: Slices now part of Electronic Beats TV ............................................. 98

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Three of our featured contributors: Francesco Sbano

Paula Temple

J’Kerian Morgan

(* 1963) is a Hamburg-based journalist best known for producing compilations of Malavita music. In this issue he photographed various ’Ndrangheta members and musicians together with A.J. Samuels for a special report on the Mafia’s tarantella rituals.

(* 1977) is a British-born DJ and producer who makes extremely hard techno. Currently based in Berlin, her most recent EP, Colonized, was released in 2013 on R&S Records. In this issue she recommends Pursuit Grooves’ selfreleased Modern Day Minerals.

(* 1989) aka Lotic, was born and raised in Houston, Texas, but now calls Berlin home. A creator of R&B-inflected bass music, he is also a resident DJ at Berlin club night Janus. In this issue he discusses Beyoncé’s self-titled LP and how it relates to his hometown.

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Monologues

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recommEndations “Listening to records like this is how I get most inspired—that is, not listening to techno.” Paula Temple on Pursuit Grooves’ Modern Day Minerals

pursuitgrooves. bandcamp.com/releases

British-born DJ and producer Paula Temple makes extremely hard and noisy techno. Currently based in Berlin, Temple’s most recent EP, Colonized, was released in 2013 on R&S Records to much critical acclaim.

Opposite page: Museumgoers in mid-observation next to Christoph Schlingensief’s Bath in Lake Wolfgang (1998) during the late artist’s recent retrospective at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. All installation views shown here were photographed at the Berlin retrospective by Elena Panouli. The exhibit is now on at MoMA PS1 in New York City. 16 EB 1/2014

I’ve only recently discovered Pursuit Grooves, after being told constantly to check her music out by my studio friends rRoxymore, Olof Dreijer of The Knife and Planningtorock. I knew Pursuit Grooves had done a remix for The Knife and for P2R, but actually I didn’t pay enough attention until I was researching the back catalogue of Afrikan Sciences only a couple of weeks ago. That’s when I came across her 91 Fellows release on the Deepblak label from 2012. She immediately got my full attention with her mood driven music created without any regard to fit into a specific genre and free from conforming to traditional song structures. This was music content to exist as an instrumental and without any hint of a main vocal. It also surprised me to hear slow, stomping industrial techno percussion running throughout 91 Fellows, and as a techno producer and noise maker

myself, I was very, very happy to hear these kind of sounds floating free of identifiable categories. So I got in touch with Pursuit Grooves, aka Vanese Smith, and she kindly sent me her new fourteen-track album Modern Day Minerals. As a techno fan for the last twenty years my reference points quickly became Detroit artists like Carl Craig, especially his Urban Tribe The Collapse of Modern Culture album on Mo’ Wax. Modern Day Minerals is similarly downtempo, with layers of vintage synth stabs, a sampled drum loop that remains consistent for each song, and various melodies circulating without being overly dense. Easy to listen to, yes, but also refreshing. It’s a complete contrast to what I produce, which tends to be blatantly dramatic. But listening to records like this is how I get most inspired—that is, not listening to techno, because I am too close to the genre. I crave moods and percussive grooves in a

different context. Pursuit Grooves manages to combine unlikely ingredients into something that’s playful rather than challenging. That is something I am still learning to craft as a producer. I know Pursuit Grooves is big on sampling, and she has YouTube videos teaching people sampling techniques for a DJ school in Toronto. I don’t sample that much in my own productions, but I do when performing live. I’ll surely be layering this album’s “Carbon Elements” in my heavy DJ sets because it has the suspense and tension from the distinct synth horn sound familiar from darker Detroit techno. The same goes for “Liquid Crystals”. Several of the tracks like “Lustre” and “Mystical Properties” have jazz or funk experimentalist tinges, but really, these sounds aren’t so disparate when she approaches them. And that takes serious musical talent. Now I truly understand why people kept telling me about her. ~

“He tore down the walls between stage and audience.” Max Dax on Christoph Schlingensief’s retrospective at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin As if abandoned by some oversized child, a toy-like white wooden church blocks the entrance to the Christoph Schlingensief retrospective at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin. Walking by his Church of Fear, it dawned on me that here, in this prestigious institute of contemporary art, an artist is being celebrated that rarely sold any of his work. Indeed, Schlingensief preferred to keep his art performa-

tive and the market in the nineties and early 2000s didn’t seem ready for his specific kind of public rampaging. In this sense, seeing Schlingensief’s work in a museum context seems to underscore that his polyphonic, controversial and sometimes tasteless gestures are, if anything, hard to grasp. Schlingensief often confronted viewers and audiences with multiple stories at once, straining

attention spans programmed for linear storytelling, as well as merging and bending various media in a way that created headaches when viewing unprepared. While his fame, like that of Martin Kippenberger’s, developed posthumously, his work in contrast was rarely material, haptic and commercially viable. Schlingensief’s art seems to grow more fleeting, distant, and less definable after his

Above: Installation view of Schlingensief’s The Animatograph, (2005/2006).

Max Dax is editorin-chief of Electronic Beats Magazine and electronicbeats.net.

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death. It remains as uncollectable as Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks or Fassbinder’s plays—both of whom were two of his greatest influences. But that is also what’s most fascinating about this artist-activist: He tore down the walls between stage and audience wherever he could. The activist Schlingensief was a Fluxus-artist—a film-, theater- and opera director. But at the core of these activities, he was also a writer who famously claimed that, “Failure is a chance.” It’s a slogan advertising agencies would kill for, a sublime idiom that calls to mind Beuys’ maxim “Every human being is an artist,” and Kippenberger’s clever reversal, “Every artist is a human being.” The retrospective’s layout successfully echoed Schlingensief’s creative schizophrenia. The works occasionally scream, “Don’t understand me!” On every floor and around every corner, spaces are oversaturated with objects competing for attention and creating an atmosphere of anxiety. Entering

the museum’s top floor, visitors are confronted with the climax of this forceful irritation: Schlingensief’s “German Trilogy”, consisting of the three films 100 Years Adolf Hitler, Blackest Heart and Terror 2000 are playing in unison at full volume, blasting across the room. From one angle you can even watch all three films at once. This interplay of the pieces becomes so consuming that it took me sometime to realize that unfortunately some of Schlingensief’s most ambitious and far-reaching projects are underrepresented. Far too little space is granted to the artist’s piece at the annual Bayreuth Festival in 2004. The same unfortunately goes for the metamorphosis of the “opera village” in Burkina Faso, which evolved from an almost cynical ego trip in the vein of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo to a project that playfully integrated the townspeople and gave them new perspectives.

Days before his death, Schlingensief granted me an interview that I had been requesting for years. Amongst other things he told me how hard he had fought against the antiquated expectations of the Bayreuth Festival, and how dealing with the Wagner family in order to realize his vision drained him of all his energy. What was implied but left unsaid was that ultimately, the strength lost during this experience compromised his health after which he soon discovered that he was in a state of terminal illness. Also, for the first time, he openly discussed with me his methods and approach to text composition. That conversation has helped me understand that his work should and could only be conceived of as a kind of multivoiced, elaborately commented manuscript—one so difficult to publish that, ironically, and once again, failure will inevitably have to be embraced by whoever might be willing to undertake that mammoth project. ~

“There is a quality and intensity to these newly remastered vinyls that has never been there before.” Faust’s Hans-Joachim Irmler recommends the Can Vinyl Box For several weeks now I’ve been working in the studio on new recordings with Jaki Liebezeit, and then one day the mailman drags this incredibly heavy package of Can’s entire catalogue in vinyl up the stairs. Jaki grinned when he saw the box. For me, that coincidence in timing was eye opening. I’d been listening to Jaki laying down drum tracks every day, while every night I was rediscovering Can’s early records, remembering him drumming like a tribal god in the past. To be honest, Faust were always aware of Can as our contemporaries, but back when the records came out, I only really explored Monster Movie, Soundtracks and Tago Mago more intensely. So in a way I was listening to Can for the first time, and I say this without a trace of irony, because there is a quality and intensity to these newly remastered vinyls that has never been there before—except maybe experienced live by the band in the studio while recording the originals. Entranced by this amazing fidelity, I found it fascinating to hear how much Can’s music seemed to initially come straight from the gut, despite their backgrounds in jazz and modern classical music. Jaki, of course, was a free jazz drummer and Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt had studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the early years, Can, like Faust, summarily rejected musical references to trendy American or British beat music. Over the course of time however, their music grew more complex when Holger Czukay swapped his

bass for a tape machine, thus conceiving of the studio as an instrument in an entirely new sense. However, the group also opened themselves up to the blues, which would have been unthinkable before. Honestly, I like the early records better than the later ones, but of course the truly excellent remastering has also provided their later work with a definite upgrade. I distinctly remember listening to Monster Movie for the first time. Back then, The Monks were the only band I knew whose idea of drumming as a shamanic motor resembled Jaki Liebezeit’s. An excellent example is “Yoo Doo Right”. There is an intensity and aggression to the beat that was utterly unheard of in 1969. And at the same time I hear a complete reduction to the essential notes and patterns in Irmin Schmidt’s organ playing. Nothing is drowning in sound, and Michael Karoli’s guitar functions positively symbiotically with Schmidt, while propelled by Holger Czukay’s counterpointing bass line. Back then, we instantly knew that with Faust we were doing something completely different. We strongly emphasized improvisation and dilettantism. We were convinced that everybody can make music. Can however, with their academic background, constructed, if not actually wrote their music. If you’d compare our early albums, you could hear that marked difference. But what is much more important is that at heart, both bands trusted that four or five musicians’ strong personalities would stimulate

and drive each other—that is, instead of fighting and overthinking things. Thankfully, I dare say, we never really competed with Can. Rather, we were glad to see that there were other musicians in Germany who, within a similar band context, approached each other with the same sense of trust. Incredibly, in forty-five years Can and Faust have never met, except for Jaki and me. During all the decades playing music, our paths never crossed. Can were in England for a while and so were we. But they left the island as we arrived. Astonishing really. I have to repeat myself here because it is so important to emphasize: this remastering changes Can’s music. I can suddenly hear details I never noticed before. It’s particularly obvious with Malcolm Mooney, their first singer. Mooney was hysterical and groovy at the same time, a rare combination. This atmosphere becomes less frequent with the arrival of Damo Suzuki, their second vocalist. And with Tago Mago, as everybody knows, Mooney’s time with the band comes to an end. I have talked to Jaki a lot during the past few weeks as I was interested in the way the band configurations changed over the years. And in Jaki’s case, I am even more interested in the way he experienced his own transformation from jazz drummer to Can drummer. That was Mooney’s influence as well. Jaki told me Mooney made him understand for the first time how the use of polyrhythms could inject a continuous beat with an intensity previously

Spoon Records

Hans-Joachim Irmler is one of the founding members of the legendary German krautrock outfit Faust. Aside from his solo work, Irmler currently performs together with ex-Einstürzende Neubauten percussionist FM Einheit and Berliner post-rockers To Rococo Rot. He lives in southern Germany where he also runs Klangbad Studios. In the Fall 2011 issue of Electronic Beats he recommended Popol Vuh’s Revisited & Remixed 1970-1999.

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recommEndations

unknown in rock music. Jaki loves polyrhythms and all uneven time signatures, because they give you an immense freedom. There is a reason why people can dance and associate more easily to polyrhythms than to straight beats. And Can were the masters of polyrhythm. Indeed,

they are a band for eternity, and I’m sure the vinyl box will become the standard of reference for their work. Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit defined and played a certain freedom during a time in which musical and social structures were not usually questioned.

Can’s success in the UK encouraged a lot of people to seriously pursue music. Their impact can’t be forgotten, and not just because of something that they did in the past. Music like this will always remain contemporary and this box set truly underscores the breadth of their oevre. ~

“In the tabloids Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the perfect couple. But it’s good to know that they’re not.” Lotic recommends Beyoncé’s new self-titled LP

Columbia

Houston-born J’Kerian Morgan, aka Lotic, is a producer of eccentric, R&B-inflected bass music and resident DJ at Berlin club night Janus. He released his first EP, Fallout, in October 2013 on Sci-fi & Fantasy. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

Opposite page: Installation view of Church of Fear (2003), taken in the courtyard of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

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Being from Houston originally and also being a longtime Beyoncé fan, I was thrilled to hear a record by her for the first time that truly went back to her Texas roots. Beyoncé, as the title would suggest, is a lot more about her being her than about her being a pop diva. Obviously this record exists within the context of pop music and is something that’s bought and sold on a very large scale, so it’s hard to know how “genuine” Beyoncé is being at any time. But one of the record’s main focuses, both visually with accompanying videos for every track, as well as lyrically, is the city’s Third Ward, located in Southeast Houston and home to a large percent of the African American community. I remember that Beyoncé’s mother Tina still had her shop there, while Destiny’s Child rose to fame. And even if we didn’t grow up in the same neighborhood, it was cool growing up to have someone famous representing your hometown. It’s a rare thing for pop stars these days to do anything improvisational, much less freestyle, which Beyoncé does on tracks like “Drunk in Love” and “Partition”, both nods to Houston rap culture. But the odd thing about Houston is the way rap there has changed over time. The whole chopped

and screwed phenomenon, mainly characterized by slowed down beats and cut up vocals, became one of the city’s biggest exports and consequently played a role in the rise of trap and eventually EDM. At some point the style made its way to pop and was reimported into Houston. Accordingly, there’s a certain irony to a lot of the sounds and styles that originated in Houston rap being used on an album by someone who grew up with it but is now Beyoncé. But somehow it’s done in a way that feels not only new but also more genuine. As a producer, I love the work her production team has done on the record overall, which is due in large part to newcomer Boots’ contributions. It’s pop music because of its sheen and connection to current trends, but a lot of the record completely ignores typical pop structure and, in a sense, completely re-invents a lot of popular trends. Songs like “Haunted” and “Mine” even have several distinct movements. The childhood recordings really drive home the atmosphere of personalization, as does the album’s other main theme: marriage. Lyrically, the tracks sometimes sound like a series of diary entries, interspersed with feminist monologues, with more

than one track where her voice is presented in the most vulnerable possible way. On “No Angel”, she belts and whines and whispers about not just accepting your partner’s faults, but rather loving them even more because of these faults. Having been married for two years, I know what it’s like to constantly be going back and forth with your husband. There is always a struggle between yourself as a person and you caring for your partner. It can be exhausting. But at the same time you really just appreciate having this other person there and the moments like, “I just want to say you’re mine, you’re mine.” In the tabloids Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the perfect couple. But it’s good to know that they’re not. I remember when I first heard this Björk song “Prayer of the Heart”, which was written specifically for her voice by John Tavener. I fantasized for a long time about doing something like that for Beyoncé, and making club music now, it would be great to have her scream over some kind of cybernetic drum track. But somehow this album seems to have wiped the slate clean. Indeed, Beyoncé as the artist and Beyoncé as a product seem to have merged more with Beyoncé the person. ~

recommEndations

“The scars may still show, but the wounds always close eventually—provided one keeps from picking at them.” Daniel Jones recommends Psychic 9-5 Club by HTRK

Ghostly International

Daniel Jones is a music promoter and creator of the subculture reconceptualization tumblr formerly known as Gucci Goth, now BlackBlackGold. Since 2011 he’s also been a staff writer and editor for electronicbeats.net. In the Fall 2013 issue of Electronic Beats, he recommended Visionist’s I’m Fine EP.

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Back in 2011, it was impossible to listen to HTRK’s second LP Work (work, work) without getting a sense of just how hard a time the beginning of this decade was for the band. In the mid-2000s, the Australian trio had been picking up steam following the release of their debut LP Marry Me Tonight. After so many years of suffering boring Joy Division variations, I felt like I’d finally found something fresh, a good balance of dubby aloofness and art-pop sensibility. It was even produced by The Birthday Party’s Rowland S. Howard, for that extra touch of street cred. But after HTRK bassist Sean Stewart took his own life in 2010, there was a palpable sense of entropy hanging over the band—a sense of loss that draped the subsequent Work (work, work) like a shroud. Its sluggishness and icy beats and synths struggled to exist beneath suffocating bass and Jonnine Standish’s plaintive vocals, which sounded like Sade having an orgasm while drowning. In the right mood, the album was narcotic, the stuff of equally beautiful and disquieting dreams. Pitchfork hated it. Psychic 9-5 Club is the first album Standish and Nigel Yang have recorded entirely as a duo, and while the atmosphere is just as glacial, the feeling of pain is lightened, less raw. Gone also is that feeling of decayed substance, a sheen of emotional armor growing over it that speaks of healing, of learning to love the world around you once more. Love has been the lyrical theme that

has remained the most constant throughout HTRK’s eleven years of existence. In the past it was expressed through coerced and soured fucks, late-night phone sleaze and junkie arm-poetry. Psychic 9-5 Club on the other hand knocks back the nihilism somewhat and stitches up some of the blown-out holes, making room for hope in the once lost souls of HTRK’s aural worlds. The eight tracks here are filled with fresh air that provides each element with more room to breathe. The music spreads out across the mind leisurely, rather than in a long smear of psychological decompression. The framework behind the

„While HTRK are quick to get the ‘industrial’ tag, to my ears they’ve always been far closer to Marc Almond than Marc Heal. I suspect that’s what made me enjoy Psychic 9-5 Club as much as I did.“ Daniel Jones

productions of Psychic 9-5 Club is still fairly skeletal, but there are so many layers of gauzy synths that the tracks always manage to feel vast, which fits the openness to new genres. Psychedelic organs chime between ethereal oscillations and dreamlike tropicalia makes me nostalgic for chillwaves gone by. The mostly instrumental “Feels Like Love” is downright playful at moments, even featuring honest-to-god laughter—not the malicious scorn of a dominatrix, but more the exhalation you might give upon waking in bed with a new lover, slowly awakening in a tangle of blankets. Indeed, Standish’s vocals are one of the highlights of the album. Where Work (Work, Work) had them barely peaking above the rest of the instrumentation, here they’re allowed to shine. Standish has, paradoxically, one of the most expressive monotones I’ve ever heard, and is able to wring two vastly different emotions out of the slightest change in inflection. The whole time I was listening to the album the edges of my mind were flicking at my barely-used pop recognition switch, especially during “Blue Sunshine” and “Wet Dream”. The latter’s choir-of-one vocal refrain “I’m in love with myself” pretty much makes it the perfect modern goth song. There’s also a whole lot of Sade up in there, as well as Dido, Nico, and Chris Isaak—all masters of the slow-burning torch song. And while HTRK are quick to get the “industrial” tag, to my ears they’ve always been far closer to Marc Almond than Marc Heal.

I suspect that’s what made me enjoy Psychic 9-5 Club as much as I did. Some of the descriptors I used for Work (Work, Work) sound like criticism, but it’s the complete opposite. I love music that makes me feel as though I’ve been dropped into an abys-

sal k-hole, and I love music that focuses heavily on intense moments of despair, if not outright celebrating it. But I’ve also learned that extended wallowing leaves me feeling extremely empty. Standish and Yang have managed to find a bal-

ance between the two that still evokes the bittersweet pleasure of exploring emotional wreckage, while strengthening the healing that comes after. The scars may still show, but the wounds always close eventually—provided one keeps from picking at them. ~

“Actually pirating from the download pirates.” D. Strauss on De La Soul’s entire catalogue, temporarily made available for free download on Valentine’s Day, 2014 Just as the birth of rock and roll was facilitated by imposing myths of delinquency onto a gaggle of professional jobbers, so was the turn-of-the-nineties, “Golden Age” of hip hop rooted in a bohemian class. And it was De La Soul and producer Prince Paul of Stetsasonic, with 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising, who pioneered the Gen X movement in which the suburban suddenly could be considered aggressive. What De La Soul embodied was a conscious opposition that expanded beyond politics. That opposition would spread to hip hop tropes in general and, by their next record De La Soul Is Dead, their past. The group’s pro-peace, semi-political conception of the D.A.I.S.Y. Age, conceived of in opposition to the gangsterism of their hip hop peers, dovetailed into De La’s mid-twenties grumpiness— mid-seventies in hip hop years. And there it remains today. To the collegiate listener of 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul’s bohemian approach was a complete revelation in attitude. It also came at a perfect moment in history. Black bohemianism was finally going broad: new editions of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Chester Himes’ oeuvres were being reissued. Spike Lee was doing the

right thing and just having to have it. Very few rappers had attempted to engage in a complex suburban aesthetic and almost all of the artists that did afterward—from Jungle Brothers and Justin Warfield to Basehead and Divine Styler—were castigated for their avant-gardism. That De La Soul’s sampledelic pastiche was even more experimental than those acts didn’t prevent them from being hesitant spokespeople for the coming nineties. So what does this mean in the context of the group releasing downloads of their Tommy Boy catalogue for a single day as a Valentine’s D.A.I.S.Y. bouquet? For such a romantic and commercial day, it’s a cranky thing to do. Free mixtapes tend to be the option of once budding acts with anarcho-libertarian tendencies: 50 Cent, Odd Future and Das Racist. But De La Soul is Gen X, and that suggests a skepticism towards authority and an optimism melting into dissolution. For such an attitude, particularly among those who accept success grudgingly, D.I.Y. is the zine‑y way to go. This extended to breaking with Prince Paul after De La Soul Is Dead, an exceedingly long record that might have been a masterpiece if it hadn’t been overwhelmed by errata. Its anti-hit “Pass the Plugs”

transports the listener back to a time when major artists would actually complain that their labels were expecting another hit single from them. That ship sailed with American Idol’s first winner Kelly Clarkson. Their next album, 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, allowed remaining traces of light-heartedness and foregrounded their ambivalence about already having achieved elder statesman status with relatively minimal sales. By 1996’s Stakes is High, they seem frustrated by it; calling it solid is damning with faint praise. Still, the first four records radiate inspiration. After a while, ambition and frustration took over: 2000’s Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump and 2001’s AOI: Bionix were two parts of an unrealized trilogy in which the music was mostly handed over to the allstar producer methodology that was swallowing hip hop whole. By the time they ended up on a Gorillaz hit, it was as if they were sampled, not samplers. Ironic, as it was a sampling lawsuit again, brought on by The Turtles of all bands, that put the kibosh on an era of pre-bling pastiche. So this free download day might be seen as a guilty return of the repressed except that De La Soul’s albums aren’t

wearedelasoul.com

D. Strauss is Senior Editor at EXBERLINER Magazine. His essay, “Berlin Falling: From Rags to Riches to Regret — Berlin Nightlife 2002 to Last Night,” can be found in the recently published Nachtleben Berlin: 1974 bis Heute (Metrolit). EB 1/2014 23

recommEndations

Opposite page: Installation view of KW’s museum staff interacting with the First International Pole-Sitting Competition (2003).

on iTunes: you can’t legally download them, they don’t own their own masters and Warner Brothers, which claims the Tommy Boy catalogue, is in no rush to clear the myriad samples it needs to in order to release it. This has not prevented easy and cost-free access to their entire

catalogue 24/7; those who took advantage of the offer saw in the comments section of each track a link to RapPalata.net, an illegal download site based in Russia. So De La Soul is actually pirating from the download pirates, while navigating between them and the record label that won’t

release their records online. They’ve become the tap the beer flows through instead of the brewer. One can only hope that RapPalata teams up with Warner Brothers to sue the group, if only to reinforce their bohemian sense of isolation. For that might well inspire a late masterpiece. ~

“The best dub goes far beyond music, it’s a way of looking at the world.” The Bug recommends Unfidelity by Ekoplekz

Planet Mu

24 EB 1/2014

It was Tom “Peverelist” Ford, Bristol’s Punch Drunk label boss, who first put me onto Nick Edwards’ work as Ekoplekz. He sent me a press release for Stalag Zero in 2010 which was fascinating at the time, because it was a million miles from Bristol’s dubstep scene, which was already succumbing to a uniform sound in keeping with what was happening across the whole of dubstep in the UK. This was music that was deviant, sonically and aesthetically. A year after that, I went to see Nick play at former jazz club the Vortex in Stoke Newington and while it wasn’t a great PA and there were a lot of people attempting to chatter through his set, he drowned them out. We’ve stayed in contact since then—that is, I still send him the odd email bugging him for the new releases he has coming out. While I haven’t been able to keep track of all of Nick’s subsequent releases, what I have heard has left me with the impression that his output was becoming more experimental, atonal and arch. With Unfidelity, however, he’s let some light into his domain. I was particularly surprised by first track “Trace Elements” as it starts exactly as you’d expect an Ekoplekz record

to start: cold and mechanized. Then a melodic K.O. riff comes in, which reminds me of Aphex Twin at his most pastoral and drugged. Likewise, “Coalpit Heath” is the antithesis to what I thought Nick was about before: it’s ambient, less agitated and much less openly paranoid. It was the first track that I immediately rewound, which is funny as it’s probably the one people would least expect me to go for; it’s the most narcotic and levitational cut on his album—strictly zoned. The thing is, a record like this is virtually irresistible to me because it’s just another extension of dub in its most corroded manifestation. When I put a compilation together on Virgin called Macro Dub Infection, the whole aesthetic behind the compilation and the sleeve notes I wrote for it were to impress the idea that dub is like an infection: it’s viral. The best dub goes far beyond music, it’s a way of looking at the world, a counterpoint to William Burroughs’ cut-ups and Jean Luc Godard’s celluloid edits. Dub mirrors how fragmented and insane modern existence is, and how we all focus on messed up pieces of a puzzle. As much as there’s been a consistent attempt to ghettoize me in dubstep,

I’ve never felt comfortable with that. I really just feel that I’m a freak, a perpetual outsider; an army of one. Nick is the same. There’s a maxim that we use in King Midas Sound that we took from DJ Premier: we want “to shock, excite and amaze”. I’m turned on by music that has fire in its belly. I want music to be revolutionary in its approach and impact. Unfortunately, because I’m a nerdy bastard, I spotted a lot of the antecedents to this record: parts remind me of John Carpenter, parts of early Cabaret Voltaire, parts even remind me of Kraftwerk, albeit cracked and broken down. But what makes it seem fresh is the relative redundancy of so many ideas in dance music now where, thanks to the accessibility of software, anyone can make a shit house track with nothing philosophical to offer. In response, Nick’s reverted to mad scientist mode: agitated, obsessive-compulsive, tangential. Live he resembles this intense nerd hunched over bits of gear, effects pedals coming out of his arse. He wears his influences on his sleeve here, going so far as to call a track “Robert Rental”. Rental was one of the pioneers of industrial music in the UK, but before it went globally shit.

recommEndations

Kevin Martin is a British musician, producer and journalist, widely known under his recording alias The Bug. Now based in Berlin, his latest album Angels & Devils is due out on Ninja Tune later this year. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

He put out very few releases, seemingly happy to collaborate with more “visible” people like Daniel Miller and Thomas Leer. But what Nick’s taken from Rental’s music is this sense of melancholy in the machinery. The overall finish of this record is key too, in that it’s willfully lo-fi. The contemporary fear that we’re under surveillance, with all our movements controlled, has resulted in art that’s universally clinical, conformist and sterile. Thankfully, Unfidelity has dirt under its fingernails, and a nervous stare over its shoulder. Of course, one of the hardest challenges in electronic music is knowing how to give the machinery your personalized voice. As a producer you ask yourself, “How can I make electronic music that’s original? Will someone be

“One of the hardest challenges in electronic music is knowing how to give the machinery your personalized voice.” Kevin Martin

able to identify the sound from the very first bars they hear?” I had a long period of procrastination after London Zoo where I wondered whether I ought to just tear up my own rulebook and do something fresh. Then

I got deep into my new album and decided I wanted to stretch the parameters, while keeping my singular voice. Nick must have these internal dialogues too, particularly as he’s released such a large body of work in a short time. Compounding this pressure is the fact that there’s been an explosion of interest in synthesis in electronics with the down pricing of modular synthesizers. There are probably loads of bedroom producers who are now getting immersed in warped electronica and that’s great. The more warped the better! However, at this point in time there’s still nobody releasing music like Nick is releasing here. He’s truly established his turf, and that’s one of the most crucial qualities for any producer working today. ~

“Chopin is not exactly funny, and neither is Glenn Branca.” Christoph Hahn of Swans recommends Automat’s self-titled LP

Bureau B

Berlin-native Christoph Hahn is a singer, composer and longtime lap steel guitarist in iconic post-punk/noise band Swans. Their new album, To Be Kind, will be out May 2014 via Mute/Young Gods. This is Hahn’s first contribution to Electronic Beats. 26 EB 1/2014

Ever since Swans reunited I don’t listen to music as much as I used to, because after every leg of the tour I need to give my ears a break. There are certain frequencies that get lost through these sonic assaults that we play with the band, and it takes some time for my ears to recover. In contrast to these violent volume levels, it’s been refreshing for me to listen to Automat. I have known the band’s guitarist Jochen Arbeit since 1981. He played in a band called Die Ichs and also in another project called Leben und Arbeiten. A few years later he joined Die Haut, in which I also played for all of three practices. This was before his time in Neubauten. I always liked Die Haut but found the music somewhat lacking in humor. That’s not a bad

thing. Hell, Chopin is not exactly funny, and neither is Glenn Branca, but I love them both. Anyhow, Automat’s self-titled album is very Berlin, for a variety of reasons: first and foremost are the obvious references of the song-titles, three of which refer specifically to Berlin’s airports: “SXF, “TXL, “THF”. These songs are cinematic and serve as a projection of different airports at different times of day—a highly subjective interpretation, I know, but that’s music. They also recall for me some of the solo albums by Die Haut and Bad Seeds drummer Thomas Wydler, which I worked on together with Jochen. The drumming in particular, here by Achim Färber, illustrates a groove in which percussion and cymbals function almost like

voices in a chorus. This varied sound palette, including Jochen’s abstract and unique guitar work, works well with guest vocalists Lydia Lunch, Genesis P-Orridge and Blixa Bargeld, all of whom narrate more than sing over continuously shifting dubs. This to me also reflects another, perhaps less obvious influence, which is the Berlin school of krautrock and kosmische—bands like Tangerine Dream and artists like Klaus Schulze. This certainly fits in with the rest of Bureau B’s roster. I am not so plugged into whatever the Berlin “scenes” are right now, but Automat have created unusual, impressive and decidedly urban sonic sculptures. It’s about the pulse. I would have loved to have witnessed the recording process. ~

22nd may – 1st june 2014 www.jazzfest-bonn.de

Patron: Oberbürgermeister Jürgen Nimptsch

feat. Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade

| electronic beats act (to be announced)

Tickets are available at all local known advance booking offices and under www.bonnticket.de

¥€ $

How Beate Bartel spends 100

Mrs. Free, Bülowstrasse 5, 10783 Berlin

The latest releases from An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music contains, amongst numerous electronic gems, the oldest musical recordings on earth, “Au Clair de la lune”. They were made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who, eighteen years before Thomas Edison presented the phonograph, invented a machine called the “phonautograph” which recorded sound waves as drawings

on black paper. But unlike Edison, he never intended to listen to the recording—he simply wanted to visualize them for scientific investigation. One hundred and fifty years later in 2008, the first known audio “recordings” were then translated back into noisy, crackling sound waves. 28 EB 1/2014

When music history was being written in Berlin in the eighties, Beate Bartel was in the middle of it all. Together with Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster she founded one of the first all female punk/ new wave bands, Mania D and played bass in an early manifestation of the Einstürzende Neubauten. But it was a few months later in 1981 together with the late Chrislo Haas that she would make her most influential musical contribution with proto techno act Liaisons Dangereuses, whose song “Los niños del parque” went on to become one of the most commonly sampled in electronic dance contexts. The band’s self-titled LP was recently released by Soulsheriff Records. Photo: Kerstin Groh

Waldorf Nave 2.1 Synth App: € 17.99 & Arturia iSem: € 8.99, Purchased from iTunes

I recently bought two synth apps for use in the project Stefan Rusconi Carte Blanche. The first is the Arturia iSem, which emulates an Oberheim SEM from 1974. The second is the brash Waldorf Nave synth with a built-in four track recorder, which is ideal for creating delicate pads. You could pay up to 1500 euros for hardware versions of the Arturia just to get the pulsating arpeggios and thick, billowing bass lines everyone raves about. However, tickets for our concerts, featuring Stefan Rusconi on piano and keyboards, Tobias von Glenck on bass and guitar, Sara Lunden on piano and vocals, Thomas Wydler on drums and myself on apps and electronics are significantly cheaper.

MACK’s Dreamgirl Earplugs € 8.49, Purchased on Amazon

According to the package, MACK’s Dreamgirl Earplugs offer “ultimate comfort for women” on account of they’re being “soft, small, silky smooth and contoured”. Earplugs are indeed useful for home use and on the go. The rest: € 36.53

This I would donate to Pussy Riot. Yes, they’ve been released, but I imagine they can use every cent. ~

Supporters of Pussy Riot in London. EPA/Kerim Okten

An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music / Vol. #7: Sub Rosa SR300, € 28, Purchased at Mr. Dead &

ELECTRONIC BEATS ON AIR EVERY THURSDAY 10 PM (BERLIN, GMT +1)

The alternative in radio.

The electronic music selection, Clubsandwich Vol. I Compiled and mixed by MANTU & Mathi Weck

FluxFM is broadcasting from Berlin and can be received via FM in Berlin (100,6), Bremen and Stuttgart (97,2). If you don‘t live in any of these cities check out our livestream on fluxfm.de

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ABC

as in AVANT-GARDE: The avantgarde of the present frequently becomes a dust trap in the museum archive of the future.

as in BAD: After Michael Jackson sold millions of records with Bad in 1987, I released BAT—a vinyl LP with audible ultrasonic sound echolocation calls of eight different local species of bats. In contrast to Bad, BAT was a bad seller, but now, more than twenty-five years later, collectors on eBay bid much more for a copy of BAT than a copy of Bad. I take this as a hopeful sign.

The alphabet according to Wolfgang Müller As a performance artist, writer and founder of neo-Dadaist artpoppers Die Tödliche Doris, Wolfgang Müller has been a key figure in Berlin’s cultural avant-garde since the early eighties. A prodigious documenter of the city’s wave and post-punk scenes, Müller helped organize the now legendary (and appropriately misspelled) Geniale Dilletanten festival, borrowing the title also for his 1982 compendium of essays by and about the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria! and Frieder Butzmann. In 2013 he published one of the largest and most definitive works on the era, Subkultur Westberlin 1979–1989. The first printing sold out immediately. Opposite page: Wolfgang Müller, photographed by Hans Martin Sewcz

as in Elegance: When Karl Lagerfeld was asked in the nineties what he thought of Berlin fashion at the time, he quipped that the colors designers used looked as though a dog had a terrible case of diarrhea.

as in DADA: People think that Dadaism was chaotic and spontaneous, but in making that assumption, they forget the era in which it arose. Society at the time was strictly hierarchical and militarized. Everything that resisted discipline was punished and persecuted. Dadaists created a thoroughly structured artistic system of lunacy in opposition to the lunacy of the system in which they lived. Reality is often understood far better through art.

as in CAVE, NICK: His move to West Berlin in 1982 marked a renaissance of normality. While David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed all challenged the traditional male role, Nick Cave’s classic existential masculinity restored many of Berlin’s confused young men with a feeling of security and cohesion. The same goes for more than a few young women. These days the image of the lonesome cowboy works best when embodied by a sensitive, suffering gay man à la Brokeback Mountain. 30 EB 1/2014

as in Fassbinder, R.W.: For his unfinished Pitigrilli adaption Kokain, Fassbinder went to the Berlin record shop known as the Shit Store and asked the owner for music by Étant Donnés and Die Tödliche Doris. Shortly thereafter the director died at the age of thirty-seven. In 1982, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and director Wim Wenders emerged in a new German cultural turn for the worse. Since then, everything that has been dubbed “the miracle of new German film” can only be described as an eclectic pile of crap.

EB 1/2014 31

Wolfgang Müller knows more about elves than you.

K taken from the logo of Krueger Brewery, 1935, as featured in American Trademarks – A Compendium, Chronicle Books, 2010. R taken from Codex Bodmer, a Coptic religious manuscript ca. 200 a.d.

as in Geniale Dilletanten: In 1981, this West Berlin musical movement posed the question: “Can one make something that isn’t music?” Still today, the question remains unanswered.

32 EB 1/2014

as in Hearing: Someone who’s never heard anything in their entire life surely has an entirely different conception of music than those of us who can hear. Being one of the latter, I helped create—together with the hearing impaired artist Christine Sun Kim—a special concept for a recording on vinyl: Panning Fanning. The sounds that it plays either land in the world of elves, the world of art or the domain of unmusicality.

as in Iceland: You can tell how influential advertising can be by the names of the countries Greenland and Iceland. Iceland should be called Greenland and vice-versa. However, in 982 the Viking explorer Erik the Red used the seductive name Greenland to lure Icelandic settlers to a place covered in ice. It was all a marketing trick.

as in JAPAN: Like Icelanders, the Japanese also have a tradition of bathing in volcano-heated water. Icelanders call this kind of bath “hot pot”, the Japanese call it onsen. Whoever looks for both similarities and differences discovers more than someone looking mainly for similarities or mainly differences.

as in KISS: Representatives of the German gay and lesbian organizations had numerous debates regarding the kissing scene in a video placed in Berlin’s Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism. As a result, the scene was constantly being replaced. For the heteronormative mainstream and homo-nationalists, Andy Warhol’s 16mm film Kiss from 1963 still remains an enigma today.

as in Loveparade: First held in 1989, the Loveparade was initially a demonstration of depoliticized hedonism and musical and cultural commonalities. “Mass(age) is the message,” according to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. The masses are the medium: they engross the media and absorb it. While the Loveparade attracted increasingly larger crowds of people from all over the world, the number of racist assaults, attacks and murders in the then freshly reunited Germany swelled.

as in MÖBIUS STRIP: Fascinating! Named after the mathematician A. F. Möbius (1790–1868), the closed strip has a one-sided surface—that is, a single surface from which all points can be reached. Its model can be produced by halftwisting a strip of paper and sticking the two ends together.

as in Neo-Individualliberalism (N.I.L.): This beast of a word was coined by cultural archaeologist Matthias Mergl. He defines N.I.L. as an invisible and dangerous ideology that spreads the message that all utopias of Western culture have long been realized within the individual and that everyone can be the shaper of their own happiness.

as in Orient: Today, all things oriental are treated as a threat. White purveyors of Western culture constantly talk about the oppression of women with headscarves or burkas. And yet women in the Western world fought long and hard to be able to wear pants, ties and suits. White men in contrast are still unable to easily wear skirts or comfortable long robes or kaftans.

Read more ABCs at electronicbeats.net

as in Pause: Valeska Gert (1892 – 1978) performed the dance piece Pause in Berlin in 1919 in which she remained motionless. Everyone who likes John Cage’s 4’33’’ should acquaint themselves with the radical aesthetics of Pause by this brilliant historical artist and performer.

as in Queer: David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed pushed not only the boundaries of pop music and gender but also questioned the notion of a uniform identity. So it only makes sense that these pre-queer artists were the ones to rediscover and reinterpret a Berlin divided between the socialist East and capitalist West within a pop context.

as in SO36: Since its founding in 1978 the Berlin punk club—comparable with New York’s CBGB—has been able to establish strong local roots without becoming provincial. Its close connection to its surroundings has actually strengthened its sense for new global, social, political and artistic movements. In a word, SO36 is glocal.

as in aTomic energy: According to most serious scientific prognoses, worst case scenarios like Chernobyl should only be possible once every 500,000 years. Since it happened recently in Fukushima, I’ve noticed how fast time flies.

as in Ursonate: Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate is music, poetry, visual art and science in one. It can’t be defined by a single category. The piece’s long, continuous tension is what makes it immortal. Religion offers salvation. Art doesn’t necessarily offer that.

as in RAF: I don’t mean the Royal Air Force but rather the Red Army Faction. When writing their abbreviation RAF on the letters claiming responsibility for their various crimes they used a typeset known as “American Superstar”. Every political statement has an aesthetic.

as in VINO DA TAVOLA, DIE TÖDLICHE DORIS WHITE WINE: I founded the band Die Tödliche Doris in 1980 and dissolved it into an Italian white wine of the same name in 1987. I thought it would be much more pleasant to do that than dissolve it in some stupid fight with the other individuals involved.

as in WOLFSBURG: Because I was born in Wolfsburg, I see it as somewhat unimaginative of my parents to have named me Wolfgang. Between 1938 and 1945, the settlement, which was founded by the Nazis, was called “Strength Through Joy City”. That would have been an especially atrocious first name.

as in XX: In her SCUM Manifesto from 1967, Valerie Solanas wrote that men, as carriers of the XY chromosome, are actually just genetically crippled women. In contrast, women, as carriers of the XX chromosome, are the genetically perfect humans. Men are basically missing a piece. To me this is a convincing theoretical counterpart to Freud’s concept of penis envy.

as in Yvonne, BLAUMEISE: The letter “Y” is rarely used in the German language, so in order to be able to include it in my alphabetically arranged book Blue Tit from 1996, I wrote the lyrics to the song “Blaumeise Yvonne”. I also composed a poem about the letter for the German pop star Andreas Dorau: “Y—is it two lines converging or diverging? Or is it a single line split in two?”

as in Z. After debates in the Icelandic parliament in 1973, the letter “Z” was officially removed from the Icelandic language. ~ EB 1/2014 33

BOY GEORGE on BOB DYLAN

Mr. Style Icon

“With a voice like sand and glue / His words of truthful vengeance / They could pin us to the floor,” David Bowie sings in his 1971 “Song For Bob Dylan”. I didn’t buy the album Hunky Dory until years later, but the song’s lyrics were like hyperlinks: I had to find out who Dylan was, only we didn’t have Google back then. And then I was instantly obsessed with him. I bought all of his albums, of course including Blonde On Blonde and the other two of that era, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Legend has it Dylan invented the “thin, wild mercury sound” on those, a kind of sound with no bass and piercing treble. Plus he had this incredibly cool look! Dylan was miles ahead of his time. Through Dylan I realized that, as a songwriter, I could write about all sorts of things, as well as interpret everything however I liked. Dylan never stopped surprising me. When, also years later, I first heard his song “Hurricane” I thought: “Wow, 34 EB 1/2014

When former Rolling Stone editor-in-chief turned MTV VJ Kurt Loder interviewed Bob Dylan in 1984 in the musician’s New York studio, he found him absorbed in a distinctly folk version of Boy George and Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon”. Some thirty years later, Boy George himself retells the anecdote as a kind of artistic knighting and explains how Bob Dylan has remained a fixture in his list of musical influences, many of which are cleverly woven into the fabric of his latest album, This Is What I Do, out now on Very Me. Photo: Bob Dylan, photographed by Jerry Schatzberg in 1965.

this is like a proper story!” And the best thing was that Mick Ronson, who played guitar on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour and had also played previously on Bowie’s Hunky Dory, was a member of Bowie’s band, Spiders From Mars. I think that Dylan influenced Bowie a great deal. Dylan wrote songs about real life events, and Bowie invented stories and told them like Dylan as though they were real. Diamond Dogs is a good example of that and it’s also the most bizarre, most cinematic record ever. Bowie would never have written it the way he did without Dylan’s input. With this Dylan-like style of writing, Bowie was painting a very different landscape to everybody else in the seventies. He seemed so much more intellectual and mystical and otherworldly. The way I write today is still influenced by Dylan. I am now starting to write songs that are slightly less personal than they used to be, although people often think they are autobio-

graphical. I used to always spill my guts in my songs. Today I often start with the title or one distinctive line and go from there. It’s a kind of cut-up process, a mixture of third party and my own ideas. I just finished working on a very Dylanlike song that I wrote for my American label who wanted a couple more songs for the new album. I had this line from a Sly Stone interview in my head, which became the starting point for the song: “Yes, I have regrets. I just can’t think of one right now.” When I read that I thought this could be a line from a Dylan song. Also, Dylan always wrote his songs this way, too—really fast. So I constructed the whole song around this one line in less than ten minutes: “The crowd, it roared, it was a sea of love / Into every song she bled / She cut the heads from the roses / And kept the thorns instead.” I can totally relate. I have a lot of regrets, too. The only difference to Sly Stone is that I know what they are. ~

EB 1/2014 35

Counting wiTH

Hauff Helena

The producer and resident DJ at Hamburg’s legendary Golden Pudel Club has been getting lots of attention since last year’s noisy, Detroit-inflected Black Sites collaboration with F#X, released on PAN. Here, her interview by numbers. Photo: Fabian Hammerl

one line in a song:

memorable

“I’m cynical mate, yeah bitter / I post horrible messages to successful musicians / On my smartphone, fuckin’ Twitter!” From Sleaford Mods, “Shit Streets Runny”

two

decisions I regret:

1. – 2. –

three

people that should collaborate: Luis Buñuel, Guy Debord and Len Deighton. Buñuel and Deighton meet Debord in his Parisian apartment. After eating calf’s brains in black butter prepared by Deighton, they empty a bottle of gin. Then Debord insults Deighton for writing for Playboy. Deighton takes Buñuel’s pistol and shoots Debord. Buñuel makes a film about it!

four things I haven’t done yet: -

A nine-to-five job Released an LP Given birth Died

five

things I used to believe:

- That school and university would be the best time of my life. That’s

36 EB 1/2014

what our teachers used to tell us, and they were completely wrong. Freedom of choice Parallel universes. Actually still on the fence about this one. The possibility of a better world. The police are your friends and helpers. No, they are utter utter cunts.

six

hours ago I was ...

seven . . . sleeping.

albums everyone should own:

Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft – Alles ist Gut Rowland S. Howard – Teenage Snuff Film Léo Ferré – Avec Le Temps The Music Machine – (Turn On) The Music Machine The Stooges – The Stooges Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left Siouxsie and The Banshees – Juju

After

eight

p.m.

I start to wake up and feel fresh.

nine My

lives . . .

I’d like to be a man in one of them.

ten

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

ElEctronic BEats prEsEnts

make music even without knowing anything about music

download thE app on thE app storE or googlE play! all inForMation: yElloFiEr.coM ElEctronicBEats.nEt

38 EB 1/2014

Interviews

EB 1/2014 39

WYNDHAM WALLACE talkS to ALISON GOLDFRAPP

“Full

— Get in ” moon!

the

car!

In the suitably quiet surroundings of a private London member’s club, Alison Goldfrapp’s gentle demeanour suggests an artist at last at peace with herself. With Tales of Us, her sixth album alongside musical partner Will Gregory, she has concocted arguably the most sophisticated record of her career. It’s a work that reflects the contented life the charismatic singer has found in nature—that is, both her own, and that of the world’s at large. Opposite page: Alison Goldfrapp, photographed in London by Georg Gatsas. Nature shots by Luci Lux.

EB 1/2014 41

Alison, how have your fans reacted to your recent change in style? There’s a notable musical difference to the acoustic approach of your new album Tales of Us to your previous work.

I got this tweet from someone the other night who said, “I’m really sorry, but I just don’t like Tales of Us. I like Supernature, Black Cherry and Head First.” Do you respond to messages like that? I’d be inclined to say, “Just listen to those records, then. No one’s forcing you to listen to the others.”

I did respond to him. I said: “It’s amazing: I’ve done six albums, and you like three of them!” So I discovered you and I have something in common: we both grew up with a military officer father in the same county of England, Hampshire.

Well, my dad wasn’t an officer after the war. He was only in the army because generations and generations of his family were all officers. He was just shoved into it, and as soon as he was able to get out he did. I never knew him as that person at all. You spent most of your childhood growing up in an English market town called Alton. Did you find it a little stifling?

I hated it, absolutely hated it! As soon as I turned sixteen I left school and went to London. What was it about that environment that you found so unpleasant?

Just its small town mentality. Maybe it was something to do with the era as well. It was just horrible. It was quite violent, I found. A lot of people getting beaten up all the time. Bored teenagers, very aggressive. I know you often travel to Norway and I have to say I find small Norwegian towns significantly more refreshing than those in England. The Scandinavian bluntness is enormously refreshing—this lack of bullshit and self-consciousness. Did you come across that?

Bluntness, yeah. Don’t even get me started talking about it. But everyone I met was extremely friendly, quite open, even though they can be quite blunt. I remember I met this really old guy up there who used to be a vet, and he was talking about the Lyngen horses to us, which apparently nearly went extinct. He managed to breed a few and bring them back into the valley. It was lovely. He took us into his house, so we met his family. They’re certainly not as uptight as us city folk, now are they. 42 EB 1/2014

I’d move there if I could afford to.

I nearly had a heart attack when I came back from my trip there and looked at my bank balance. It’s insanely expensive. But those sorts of places have vast spaces I find really appealing. Why do you think you’re so drawn to the countryside?

I was brought up to love it. My Dad was very, very keen on that. He really instilled in us that it was bigger than us, and therefore we should look after it and respect it. For me, it’s a bit of a religion. It feeds the soul, and it’s a place to think, and a place to create, and to be in awe of, to find peace in. It’s kind of everything, really. I love being in the city as well, because it’s fun culturally, but it doesn’t give me the same sense of fulfilment. So when you say your Dad instilled this in you, how did he do that?

Basically we’d have to go out at five o’clock in the morning and watch the sunrise, so we used to sit in the woods and we weren’t allowed to talk. He was quite into Zen. We’d just sit in nature, and had to listen and watch. For how long at a time?

I don’t know. It seemed like fucking hours to me! But I was very young. And whenever there was a full moon we drove to the sea and swam. We lived about an hour and a half away, so it would be like “Full moon! Get in the car!” That was one of the last things I did with my father: swim in the sea under a full moon. And we used to swim in the sea at all times of the year. It didn’t matter what time of year it was: you had to get in the sea! That was probably his army officer bit coming out. I did a lot of walking and hiking with him, too. I read that you used to sit down as a family to listen to music and then discuss it?

Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate that, because he taught me how to listen to things, and not just music. The feeling of sitting in the countryside: just sitting there and listening to things, watching. This idea that you could learn a huge amount just by being with something and not doing anything. Just observing. I think people don’t really listen very much like that any more, do they?

It’s hard. I feel like you have to set time aside to do that. And then, quite often when you do, it’s a bit like meditation: it’s very hard

sometimes to just get in the zone and not be distracted by all the other crap that you fill your head with. One of the lovely things about preparing for this interview was that I got to listen very closely to Tales of Us. I realized I don’t do that with music enough anymore, or I get distracted when I even try.

Everyone’s running around like crazy. We’ve all got our gadgets, and I think that’s why I like being in nature so much.

phor for everything in my life. We’ve always loved playing with so many different sounds, and most of our albums have been quite intricate in terms of there’s always something filling the space. I wanted to see what happened if we took all that stuff out. There was something quite liberating about just selecting one or two or three instruments and working with that. I like the discipline. You’ve done similar things on records in the past, but was your spartan approach to Tales of Us a sign that you’re mellowing?

Are you good at leaving your phone behind?

I’m not bad, actually. Although now I take it because I like taking photos and putting them on Instagram. You’ve spoken in the past about how you have to go away to write.

Fortunately, or unfortunately—I swing either way—we have a studio out in the countryside, and it’s a really great place to work. I like isolating myself, but it’s also a bit of a struggle sometimes because it’s not brilliant for one’s personal social life.

[laughing] I don’t know if it’s that. I feel more confident, that’s how I see it. I’m simply more like that with everything in my life: food, partners, money. I suppose that’s what happens when you get older. You know what you need and what you don’t need, and you know what you want to hear and what you don’t want to hear. I think that’s also interesting when you’re working. It’s like looking at everything through a magnifying glass, because you’ve just got one piano sound. There ain’t anything to hide behind. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this record was a sign that you’re more comfortable in your personal life. You seem generally to be a pretty private individual, but one thing I’m aware of is that, in terms of your romantic life, you—how shall I put this?— “changed direction” recently after meeting film editor Lisa Gunning . . .

So do you struggle being alone?

No, I just mean I have to leave London, which is where all my friends and family are, and I’m a bit of a hermit for however long it takes to write an album. So it’s a bit antisocial, in a way. I love it, but I’ve been doing that for quite a while now. I’d like to try and write a bit of an album not in isolation, just so I can go and have a drink with some friends of an evening. That would be nice. I’m intrigued by this idea of taking yourself away with the goal of writing a record. It sounds like you get up in the morning and say, “OK, time to write another song.” Is it that disciplined?

Yeah, but I think being creative is that, really: you have to sit and wait for things to come, but at the same time you have to work at it as well. It’s a constant yo-yoing between the two, and, once you’re in that writing mode, then your brain is looking at everything and seeing everything as a potential sound or story. Why do you think this record ended up sounding so bucolic?

Haha! I’ve moved over to the dark side! Yeah, you’re “shopping on the other side of the road!’” So perhaps this album is a sign that you’re much more comfortable with yourself, and you can actually relax at last.

Well, nothing happens in isolation. I’m sure there are lots of contributors to that, but yeah, that’s one of them. I mean, my mother also died. That was quite a big thing. That was three years ago now, but I’ve realized that I had to keep a lot back from her. I loved my mother dearly, but maybe a sense of feeling that I don’t have to . . . . . . suppress things?

Yeah. So there’s a sense of release?

I think it’s a very strong part of who I am, and our influences musically. Will and I have always loved the romance and drama of strings and melody. I really wanted to do something that was much more stripped back. Life needed to be more spartan, and more bold, and more focused. It felt like that was a good meta-

Yeah. Probably. I don’t want to focus on that too much, but on the last album there was so much stuff going on, in terms of the business side of things as well that was really uncomfortable. We changed management about three or four times. We had a real string of bad EB 1/2014 43

luck. Creatively it wasn’t my best moment. And then with Lisa, yeah . . . There were some bad people around us, and it really makes you address what’s good and not good, and what you need and don’t need. And love, and nurturing, and creativity: it was a bit of an awakening, all that stuff, and I think that makes you go, “What do I want? What do I need, and how do I achieve that? I’ve got another chance to do something I really want to do, so don’t fucking waste it!” You and Lisa have collaborated on a series of short films for songs from the new album. I’m not really a fan of music videos, but “Annabel” and “Drew” are impressive. There are a few things that struck me about them, the first being that you don’t seem to be trying to make strictly promotional videos. They’re more short stories. They exist on their own.

Well, I didn’t really want to make a video again in the sense that we’ve made videos before. I was really dissatisfied with that, and this album, because of the kinds of books that I was reading, and the films, all this storytelling, it seemed to make sense to do a video that was more like a film, that actually told a story and didn’t have to adhere to all the things that traditionally pop videos are meant to do. Lisa is a film editor, and because we live together it meant that we were talking about ideas, and she was hearing the music a lot, because I’d go home and work more on songs. So it just seemed natural that she should get involved. I was particularly struck by the depiction of the human body. It’s very sensuous, and we’re more used to seeing such things sexualized. It’s like you were using its form in the same way you were employing images of nature.

I thought, if you just listen to the song, maybe you’d think it was just about a little girl, you know? So it felt really important to make that film. He’s a great kid as well, isn’t he? He is indeed. Taking part in that can’t have been an easy thing for him to do, though.

No. We actually auditioned a lot of boys. Half of them vanished as soon as we said, “We’d like you to wear a dress.” But he had something about his face—his expressions, his stillness. It’s quite interesting seeing boys of that age because they’re quite fidgety, quite hyperactive, and he was the only one who was really quite still in his movements, where he could just look and it felt like there was a real presence there. It’s quite funny, though, because he was at that age where we thought, “Oh my God, in two weeks time he might come back and have a beard! He might suddenly turn into a fully fledged guy!”

“I think I’m the only person I’ve ever spoken to who really loved being at school with nuns. Most people have terrible experiences. I loved it! They were all fabulous, and I thought they looked great as well! I’ve got this memory of looking up at Reverend Sister Marie, or whatever her name was, and thinking, “She looks awesome!”. She had this really stiff, a-line skirt and big cross, and this black polo neck sweater, and a veil thing, standing in a dark corridor . . .”

The videos have got a sensuality to them, and I think they’re about the idea of discovering who you are, and identity.

I wondered, however, whether you worried that making as many as five videos would restrict the manner in which the songs themselves could be interpreted, because your lyrics are quite enigmatic, and if you make a video it narrows possible interpretations . . .

That’s why I’ve always struggled with videos. I feel like the music and our songs,—and the way that we write songs—are such a visual experience, for me and for Will, which is maybe why we explore sounds and visual things differently. When I’m writing I’ve obviously got my own little cinema film going on, but this is the nearest I’ve got to expressing it in a way I’ve wanted to. There’s a great line in “Annabel”: “Why couldn’t they let me be 44 EB 1/2014

both?”, which refers to the protagonist’s confused gender identity, which obviously comes out in the video.

Do you remember the moment when you realized you could actually sing?

Yeah, I do. Very, very vividly. I was in a choir at convent school, which I loved. I think I’m the only person I’ve ever spoken to who really loved being at school with nuns. Most people have terrible experiences. I loved it! They were all fabulous, and I thought they looked great as well! I’ve got this memory of looking up at Reverend Sister Marie, or whatever her name was, and thinking, “She looks awesome!”. She had this really stiff, a-line skirt and big cross, and this black polo neck sweater, and a veil thing, standing in a dark corridor . . . Sorry, I’m kind of deviating. You got all dreamy there.

I did get all dreamy. I remember this glitter in the floor. You know that paving that used to sort of glint? I get all misty-eyed about that time in my life. I felt like I was in a film all the time. Anyway, they called it “singing lessons”, and because I was really crap at everything else, it was the only place where I felt free. I think we were doing some scales, and we got to the top note, and the top of my head just started buzzing! I just remember thinking, “This is great! This is better than netball!” And ever since then you’ve been trying to recreate it?

I’ve been trying to get to that top note. ~

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AndrÉ Vida and Max dax talk to marshall allen

“Make

mistake!

”

Meeting the Sun Ra Arkestra’s director Marshall Allen at the group commune in Philadelphia wasn’t quite space travel, but it was a kind of time travel. The eighty-nine year-old tenor sax and woodwinds maestro was eager to discuss the teachings and creative punishments of former bandleader Sun Ra, one the most singular figures in modern jazz. Indeed, Ra was amongst the first to experiment extensively with elements of electronic music, anticipating what would become the musical language of the 21st century. Left: Marshall Allen photographed in the Sun Ra Arkestra commune in Philadelphia. All photos by Luci Lux.

EB 1/2014 47

Mr. Allen, it’s a great pleasure to meet you here in this particular house, where you and Sun Ra used to rehearse with the Arkestra.

Yeah, this house has seen and heard a lot in the past decades. Actually, I just woke up from a nap, I heard melodies playing in my dream. It was a late night out yesterday. You went clubbing?

No, just some overdubs in the studio. But even today, recordings are best done during the late hours. Are you recording new music for the Sun Ra Arkestra?

No, last night I was with a friend of mine, a poet, who needed some background music for his poems. He asked me, so I did it for him. I came back early this morning and then I needed some sleep. So, that’s what you do at night in Philadelphia?

I’m in this house all the time—that is, when I’m in town. I am away so often, I never stay home here much. We just played at Lincoln Center in New York on Saturday. And the week before that we played in Switzerland. And prior to that I was in Italy and London. I travel a lot. I want to pick up a trail from a previous issue of Electronic Beats in which Bobby Gillespie mentioned that he invited you to record with his band Primal Scream in London to kill some time while you were forced to stay during the volcanic eruptions in Iceland in 2010.

I remember. We were supposed to leave Europe the day it started. But we couldn’t get out because our flights got cancelled. So we had to stay a few more days in London. I figure we’d add an extra night and play another concert. And yes, we jammed with . . . what was their name again?

the neighborhood—Germantown is pretty nice but sometimes at night it can get kind of scary. But we’ve been here since 1969 and we practice all night, all day. The neighbors like music?

The police once knocked on our door, and Sun Ra told them he was playing a joyful noise. But other than that, no complaints. You still use this house for rehearsals?

We lived here and we rehearsed all day. We’d take a break and then practice half the night, right in this room here. But we also record here. And the nucleus of the band still lives here: I got to have people around me to keep the music going. You know, all the original instruments are still here. Sun Ra used to play on them. So this is a very special house not only for the Arkestra but also for American history.

It’s a commune. All the musicians living here would have other skills as well. One could fix doors, another one could cook, others were good painters. In the commune, we were doing everything ourselves. We wouldn’t need outside help, we were truly independent from the outside world. In this house, Ra was telling us that we had to do our own everything. We even sewed our own costumes. We had our needles and thread and a sewing machine and designed and tailored our own show uniforms. We didn’t have no money, so what could we do? We then learned to manage ourselves; we learned to read contracts, because if you don’t learn that, it’s always the middle men who’d rip you off. So we made our albums, made our music, made our covers, made our own designs. We even had a vinyl press for some years and we glued the label on the LP’s ourselves. Over the decades we eventually manufactured some 500,000 records in this house. Do you still have copies of these handmade records for sale?

Primal Scream. How were the sessions?

Good, I guess. There have been so many sessions in my life. I start to mix up names and places. I might have received a complimentary copy of their finished album and have put it on one of the many stacks that you can see here in my house. I actually play with a lot of young folks. I see the whole thing as an adventure, as I like all kinds of music. I am not just doing one thing, I am doing anything if I find a good thing in it. Recording with Primal Scream seemed natural to me because it meant we didn’t have to hang around outside under the grey London skies. Would you say traveling is an integral aspect of your lifestyle?

Yes, and it’s been like that since 1942. You know, I was in the US army and I fought in France. After the war, I just kept on staying in Paris where I also went to music school until 1949, which is when I left France for Chicago. But after a while the musicians from Chicago were starting to move to New York. So we got in the migration run and stayed in New York for a decade. But the last forty years we all stayed in Philadelphia, which is where I inherited my father’s house. Sun Ra needed a place to rehearse—for his band, for us—so I convinced him to take the house for free and live in it. The neighbors never complained?

No, no, we got some good neighbors here. The Ra house is good for

48 EB 1/2014

I think they’re all sold by now. Have the routines of rehearsing changed since Sun Ra’s passing?

No, it’s the same routine we’ve always had: no women or drugs or anything like that are allowed in these walls. It’s important that the musicians have a place where they can practice twenty-four hours a day. It gets difficult if you don’t have a place like that. But contrary to Sun Ra, who basically practiced all the time and couldn’t even get out the house, I turned it down to three days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. In New York I talked to the Arkestra’s drummer Craig Haynes who explained to me how you were prepping for the Lincoln Center gig. He said you were rehearsing a lot, but when you actually went on stage you hardly played anything of what you’d rehearsed.

We never do. I learned this from Sun Ra: you rehearse here for a month for a gig but you wouldn’t play any of the tunes. This way everybody was sharp and on edge. It’s actually a perfect way to keep musicians mentally aware. Nowadays when you watch a band you can be quite sure that they’ve rehearsed everything. Nothing could go wrong. Your concept on the other hand allows for some great inspirational moments that might result from accidents or coincidences.

Well, that’s the idea behind it. Music is alive and it’s always about the musicians, the sound of the room and the audience. And this means that everything can change at any time because you are well prepared for change. You have to adapt to the idea that everything changes all the time simply because the vibrations of the day are different compared to yesterday. That obliges you to change something. If you are really strict and repeat the rehearsed music perfectly then it won’t work because it doesn’t take into account the vibrations. And you have the necessary antennas to feel these vibrations?

Sure. It’s not academic.

That’s right. It’s nothing you plan, but thanks to rehearsing so intensely we got the arrangements and all the melodies and all the difficult music and all of the intricacies in our hearts. We can still play loose, free from the academic spirit. Ra told us to have our memory tight to remember things he’d play to us because he’d not play them again after we’d memorized them, you see? He’d play something different instead. Sun Ra had three, four or even five arrangements on any tune. And according to where we were, one of them would probably fit.

did it purposely, he spread the music everywhere, and the idea is everything everywhere. It was like the big giveaway, Lord, the big giveaway. You see, that was his way of doing it and less expensive than a book. If you want to get your ideas out there, just put them out there. Spread the music around. But didn’t you make your own book of melodies?

Yeah, I’m always writing my melodies down. I bring them to the copyright office, and by now I got a whole book of melodies. I don’t know what I will do with them, but I got them well collected. Unlike me, Sun Ra has written thousands of tunes. You may wonder how he had all the time to do that, but he was just consistent. In his writing, his ideas and his music his great discipline surfaced. Put something in it and you get something out. So in live situations you’re directing the band. How do you do that?

I’d come down with a chord, open it up, and they don’t know anything, so they’re watching me. And that way I can guide them along. It’s a method to make them pay attention. That’s the way you do music when it’s not being read. We have to all come into one and then we take it from there—anywhere it goes. And honestly, there is no other way to do it. If you don’t play the music, it will disappear. As a matter of fact, you have to know the musicians you are working with. It’s like tailoring the arrangements for the musicians while performing. That’s the reason why you have to live together and bind and co-ordinate.

But how did or do you memorize all these various versions of different tunes?

The memory . . . You have to know your book! Sun Ra would surprise us at any time. He’d play four bars on you and if he realized that you ain’t got your music on you, he’d change the song right in the middle of the introduction. Just to get this straight: Did he notate or did he not? Do you rehearse and play on notation or not?

You are essentially describing a living organism, right? A living musical organism.

Above: Danny Ray Thompson has played flute and saxophone on and off in the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1967. Rejoining the band in 2002, he also runs a private airport shuttle service and has worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Everyone has a different way to memorize. We got scribblescrabbles all over the page. We all have our own code to remember something once we are one stage. But yes, Ra always did notate. Have you ever considered putting together Sun Ra’s notations in a book?

Well, a lot of people are doing that. But we don’t need that book. The sheets are everywhere—in this house, in other places. Ra

That’s true. Sun Ra knew he could count on us. He didn’t come in knowing anything. He’d come to find out what’s going on, what you have to do, if you’re listening to each other.

And how important are recordings in that regard? They could serve as a memory as well.

I’ve only done a few since Sun Ra passed, but he did 500, 600, maybe a thousand. He had so much music and he wrote music everyday. As a band, we haven’t played all this music yet. So why record? So you’re in a sense like a living archive?

EB 1/2014 49

He left a treasure house of music, and I got the original notations. I got most of all of the music he wrote, and I even remember the combinations of what goes with what. But then, as time goes by, you lose some combinations of different melodies he had mixed together, you just forget them. And if that happens, then I’ll just make a new recipe with the known melodies. And put my own things in there. It’s the same thing with Sun Ra’s music because if he wrote a tune: it’s music, it’s notes up and down, but he has a secret way of phrasing he had to show you—otherwise you wouldn’t get it. Like a good chef knows how to read a recipe and how to tweak it, he’d show us how to turn the music alive, in the same way a chef has a secret formula. Ra got a little something in there that made the food better. You also eat here?

If one of us can cook, that’s what we eat. If you can’t cook you go to the restaurant and eat there. At the end of the day everything is about discipline. You know that you’re doing a job and you know that you’re doing what you want to do and you do it in good spirit. Let’s talk about Sun Ra’s recipe for moon stew.

Yeah, he had a recipe. He put everything in it and all of it was healthy. But the way he mixed it and made it taste—that was the secret. In that sense, he thought like a chef. Miles Davis, they say, was a good cook as well.

Sun Ra had all these recipes that he’d cook for us. I tried making the moon stew myself. I used all the same ingredients like him, but it didn’t taste like his. These days I’m teaching guys how to phrase a passage the Sun Ra way, but I couldn’t tell them how to cook. When you first met Sun Ra, the story goes that you went to his place and played what he told you to, but he was somehow disappointed with everything you played correctly.

He was disappointed because I played it too accordingly. He obviously noted that I got a beautiful tone, but that’s not what he wanted in the first place. He wanted someone who was willing to go beyond what’s notated or what he asked for. For me, this was irritating. I remember it made me nervous that he always said: “That’s good, that’s right—but it’s just not what I want.” How did you come up with this crazy saxophone approach of yours. It’s so unique.

Well, that’s what I was telling you: I was playing nice a smooth and pretty saxophone with beautiful tone and sound and execution, but Sun Ra would always say: “It’s good—nothing wrong with it—but it’s not what I want!” So I started to do what they call “anything”, and that’s slang for: everything wrong. And he liked it! I learned from him that to do skillfully wrong is still doing something but it’s not doing it in the sense of calculated thinking. It’s just “doing”, and that was the key to all the spiritual things that Ra tried to address with his music. From then on we got along very well. By doing the wrong thing.

Ra used to always make observations about the question of doing

50 EB 1/2014

something right or doing it wrong. He’d always say: make a mistake! And then after that, another mistake?

Yes! If you make a mistake or do something wrong, then make another mistake and another one and eventually this will lead you to something right. And how would he communicate to you what he really wanted?

He’d always sing it to you: dah dah dah dah dee dah dah dee . . . His way of doing it was a way of phrasing just before the beat. Like syncopated, like swing. Just before, not on. He had some odd ways of teaching us! That’s what computers will never learn.

For sure they’ll never learn to swing. In the beginning I’d bend certain notes and play a passage, and it was always the same music. But when Ra would take the lead, it would sound completely different. He had a unique flow and like with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, this flow would infect how we’d play the music and thus distinguish our band from any other band. You could say the same thing about the Miles Davis band. Duke and Sun Ra and Miles, they were all bandleaders, as opposed to just good musicians playing. Not everybody is born a bandleader. Everybody can have a big band, but being a leader is about being a leader. It’s the same thing in life and in war. You get some good ones and you get some, well, not so good ones. Swing tunes have always played a significant role in the Arkestra, especially when you play live. You reference genres and ideas inherited in jazz from decades ago, but by playing them today and in your style, it’s not a retro thing at all. You basically remind people that there is something from the past that can be brought to life again.

Sun Ra told me once there’s a thousand ways to play one note. So, there’s always just another way to play the same note, and you have to remember them all. Because when you are out there on stage and performing, you’re going to need to remember. As I said before, we play the tunes without charts. That’s the old swing way to do it. Duke Ellington’s big band didn’t need charts, just their memory, to be tight and precise. I play a whole gig without charts, too. And that’s what defines swing, really. Do you think today’s generation of musicians would be able to do that? To function as a band like the organism you’ve described before and to memorize all these complicated arrangements?

If you want to play swing, you can’t just duplicate a paragon. You have to rely on your own personality and your own way of speaking. Louis Armstrong once said: “You play what you is!” And there are all these colors in the sound, and all these individual ideas flowing through Duke Ellington’s band. And you could tell the difference between Duke and Count Basie and Jimmy Lunceford because each of them had their own particular style that they developed, even the little bands. You see, Sun Ra had his own way of coloring sounds. Unlike Duke Ellington or Count Basie, he used some dark colors. Ra was masterful in terms of design, he was fully aware that the coloring made the band sound in a unique way.

Is this common, to think in colors as a musician?

Sure! He would write the notations in dark colors to stress that— all in his kind of thick, kind of heavy handwriting. And you don’t necessarily have to have a whole room full of musicians to get that heavy, thick sound, because the way he voices the music, his voicing of a chord, using under and overtones, gave the whole thing a very individual color. When is a band considered a big band? Is it ten, twenty people or thirty?

It doesn’t matter as you are always dealing with sound, a sound that can make you happy or that can make you cry or that can heal you. So, as a musician, you’re dealing with sound first to enlighten yourself. Then you give it to others. Because when you’re not playing music for money or show or fame, you’re playing it for what it is, and that’s to heal. So, first comes the music, the sound body, the sound mind. We all know that music can heal as well as music can kill. Music can do all these different things, according to the way you play it. They invented a sound gun that can destroy thirteen-inch reinforced concrete: pow! They got a sound gun, the war people. That’s what they call sonic warfare.

The masters of war got all that for killing. But I’m using sound for healing and your well-being and your enlightenment. What about the phrase that’s often printed on Sun Ra Arkestra’s record sleeves: “As all marines are rifle men, all members of the Arkestra are percussionists.” Why do you draw that analogy to war here?

we have the self-understanding of a show band. And for that reason we dress up in costumes and bright colors. It’s not just us musicians sitting up there and playing. Were there other soldier ethics in the Sun Ra Arkestra?

You put on your costume like you put on a uniform and suddenly the vibrations and thoughts change. Why didn’t he call it the Sun Ra Army then?

Well, they got guns and we only got saxophones and flutes and piccolos. Then again, musicians call their horns axes. It’s slang. But having said that, different musicians got different ideas of what they want to do. Every musician has his own style and his own type of music. So, if you’re open to that—that’s good. If you want to play straight jazz, you’ll play straight jazz. And if you want to be in a band, you’ll play in a band and become a part of that band. In that sense, I never wanted to be myself, an individual playing music. I always wanted to be with others, I always wanted to be a part of a band, a part of an organism. That’s what it is and that’s why my life is being a part of a big band. To be together on the same vibration and to build a thing—that’s the discipline and precision I’m talking about. A man cannot learn without discipline. It’s a soldier’s code. Discipline is the key to everything. It’s the essence of any army or any band or whatever you are part of. Didn’t Sun Ra have his own jail for musicians who were lacking that ethos?

He called it his “Ra jail”: If you messed up his music then you were going in the Ra jail. He wasn’t any different in this regard to all the other masters that I’ve Well, we always played for the met in my life, where if you people, not in competition with mess up their music they become other bands. Enlightening peo- Above: At fifty-six, Craig Holiday Haynes, son of the legendary jazz drummer Roy another person. Charlie Mingus ple, healing them—that always Haynes, is the youngest member of the Sun Ra Arkestra. You can find our interview would literally throw something was our purpose. But I’ve seen with him online at electronicbeats.net. at you, and Sun Ra would cuss music being played and audiyou out on stage. He actually had ences throwing bottles at the musicians. I’ve seen this happen in a lot of things he would end up doing to you. But the worst thing for France and Italy to Jerry Lee Lewis and his band. We were playing sure was the Ra jail, because the Ra jail was live on stage. You couldn’t right after him along with the Mexican Ballet, and, man, I was leave the stage, you couldn’t go nowhere, you couldn’t do nothing scared. But you have to go on stage because as a musician you are a about it. You had to sit right there in front of the audience and take soldier. And so we went out there and we played a different type of it. And he’d get up and announce you and point his finger at you: thing and the French all quieted down. The soldier’s ethic is a good “This is so and so, a nice sax player, but there’s one thing he hasn’t ethic as it means discipline. I bet you will find a lot of philosophy got: discipline. I don’t care how good you are. You have no discipline books that will prove this thesis right. But talking of the Arkestra and therefore you sit and watch the band and learn.” That was the Ra

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jail. The music continued, but without one of us contributing. He’d just give another musician in the Arkestra his part. He got it covered as the concert went on. So, for instance, if the trumpet was out all he needed was me in there with the alto sax to sound like a trumpet. In such moments of punishment, I was always the substitute. When you were playing with Sun Ra how did it work with other music? Were you checking out records of other big bands?

We listened to everybody. See, that’s the thing they didn’t know about Sun Ra. He listened to everybody. He wasn’t prejudiced towards one type of thing. Do you recall some examples of music he was listening to that surprised you?

Well, he was always surprising me. That’s why I stayed so long and why I continue this endeavor to this day. That was the mastery of all these things. He taught us how to balance thought with the spirit. As a musician, you can damage people if you’re not sincere and have no discipline. You played with Sun Ra for almost four decades. After he passed you then became the director of the Sun Ra Arkestra. How do you fill this role with legitimacy?

I’m carrying the name because I was there all the time and because it was Sun Ra who taught me how to play his music and what his music means. But more than anything else, all this is also about keepin’ on keepin’ on. If you want a better world, you have to create better music. It’s as simple as that. We’re in a lot of trouble. We need musicians that heal people. The Sun Ra Arkestra is often referred to as imagining the future. The phrase “space is the place” is telling. But also you freed jazz from many of its limitations.

At the end of the day it’s always about being open. When jazz freed itself and became free jazz, not everybody in the audiences would get it. Some might have thought that the band was still warming up. They probably thought that the music they were listening to was just noise. People had this preconception in their minds how jazz had to sound in their ears. Sun Ra always used to say that we were playing the music for the twenty-first century, and he said that way back in the fifties. At the same time he wanted to be successful, but he always stressed the fact that we’d have to wait until the twenty-first century! And I said: But that’s about another forty-seven years from here. And he’d be telling me I have to go through this scramble for fifty-seven years before I could be successful. Sun Ra was also experimental when it came to electronic music.

Sun Ra was the first to use electronic keyboards in jazz because he was mentally living far in the future. He began to mix all these things together that he was hearing in his head. And it’s all out there in the universe anyways. Even today you could listen to the music of the twenty-second century in your head. He started to use electronic sounds at the time when I joined the band. Ra said about electronic

music that it was to come in the future and that it would be like a universal language that anticipated the future and that could be understood by everybody on the planet. He would draw his own conclusions from having foreseen the future. He’d say: “Now you drummers should have some more discipline and do what I tell you to do because in the future they gonna have electronic drums and then they won’t need you anymore.” He wizened us up by telling us that the electronic age was coming. He already knew that. He and Miles Davis, probably. Do you listen to contemporary electronic music?

I listen to everything. You turn the music on and I’ll listen. That’s what Bobby Gillespie did with us. He played music to us. And remember, when the Moog synthesizer came along, one of them was built for Sun Ra especially. And before that we were going around to the universities and into the universities’ electronic sound departments developing different sounds for them. So we could duplicate sounds there, and they added their own sounds. Nowadays you got everything in the machines you can buy. You just have to push a button to get everything now. But we’ve been hearing these sounds all our life. I’ve been living in the twenty-first century for more than fifty years now. So after all these years, you are now living in the present instead of the future.

The present is in the present. I’m eighty-nine now. I am enjoying the present like a memory of the past. According to you, the sheet music that Sun Ra left behind can be understood as predictions of the future, which essentially means of current times, right?

Absolutely. Ra could foresee these things like other men in the world foresee some scientific things in the future—and win Nobel prizes for it. Ra too was like some scientist who understood the future. You just had to wait your turn and you see. And to this day he’s proven right most everything he had been saying. And how do you store or archive his sheet music and notation? I mean: Have you ever made copies? There could be a fire that destroys everything.

Actually, no! There are no copies, only original notations. You know, I play all night and I play something different each time, and that’s what I teach the other musicians. That’s the gift Sun Ra left for the musicians to carry on with the idea of bringing out the music from the notes: it’s about the spirit, not the sheets. So just like I could take the band and go play a gig without written arrangements, I’d still know how to phrase it. It’s like poetry. I know a lot of ways how to create something from nothing. It’s like none of us will forget the lyrics to “Nuclear War”—which is, by the way, still a scary song to sing. Why?

Because it’s still so true, you know? To sing, “It’s a motherfucker don’t you know / push that button your ass gotta go” in public is still a bold statement. But it’s true. It’s as true as dropping a bomb on real people. Yeah, it’s that true. ~

Opposite page: The practice space of the Sun Ra Arkestra, located on the house’s ground floor, has seen more than four decades of continuous musical exploration. P. 54-55: Every corner of the house contains pictures and memorabilia serving as a reminder of Sun Ra’s role as the group’s founder and patron saint. P. 56-57: An alien casually hangs out in the house’s first floor reminding us of the meaning of jazz. What’s that you ask? Space travel, of course. P. 58-59: On the house’s second floor, Marshall Allen improvises on a small harp.

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MAX DAX talks to GIORGIO MORODER

Giorgio Moroder defined disco’s legendary Munich Sound and is responsible for the lurid colors and slick contours of our musical memories of the eighties. These days he’s been experiencing something of a renaissance since assisting Daft Punk with their Grammy Award-winning Random Access Memories. But as the seventyfour-year-old composer behind the soundtracks for Flashdance, Scarface and Fritz Lang’s controvertial Metropolis redux tells Max Dax, don’t call it a come back—he’s been here for years. Opposite page: Giorgio Moroder, photographed backstage at the Electronic Beats Festival in Vienna by Luci Lux.

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Mr. Moroder, what was your reaction when you found out that the complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was discovered in 2008 in Buenos Aires?

Well, I was especially happy for Enno Patalas, the former director of Munich’s Film Museum. He was the one who spent half his life searching for the complete version of the film. He’s a silent movie specialist and an expert on that film in particular. The problem as I see it was that there was never a good copy of the film—not even the Murnau Foundation, who owns the rights, had a good copy. Enno searched the whole world and never gave up. He once followed a lead about an original copy somewhere in Czechoslovakia, but there was nothing there. In Canberra, Australia he discovered a version with fifteen to twenty seconds of never-before-seen material, which was a sensation. I also discovered a version with another fifteen seconds of new material in a movie theater owned by an older gentleman in Los Angeles, who exclusively screened original copies. He actually allowed me to take this utterly rare nitrate copy to the California Film Institute to test it. They were shocked that I actually drove through the city with nitrate because the material is so damn explosive. When I think back on it, it could have been my death. In 2010 the restored original version premiered at the Berlinale. The sixteen extra minutes discovered in Buenos Aires significantly helped fill some of the gaps in the plot.

It was a dream come true! I only wish I could have been there. I have to take the time to watch Metropolis once again in Blu-ray. I remember reading the original screenplay and even then not understanding why Rotwang built the robots simply because his wife ran off—it all seemed kind of illogical. I’ve also spoken to many experts and I eventually came to the conclusion: no one really understands it.

For me, yes. At the time I had already done music for a Stallone film, Over the Top. A year later he asked whether I would be interested doing the music for the closing credits of Rambo III, so I did. We were then wondering who could sing it and he told me I should ask Bob Dylan because he thought his voice would be a perfect fit. But instead of asking him himself, he sent me over. I drove out to Malibu and Dylan had this incredible wooden house. It wasn’t a chalet like we have in Europe, but rather a really big house made entirely out of wood. He listened to the song two or three times and then didn’t say yes or no. Then the next day he called and said he didn’t want to do it. After that I then had another conversation with his manager and I wasn’t really able to tell whether Dylan didn’t like the song or he just didn’t want to do something for a film like Rambo. The movie was pretty controversial and very anti-Russian, and, of course, Dylan is very political. That’s ultimately why I think he said no—because of what was happening back then in Afghanistan. How does one get Bob Dylan’s telephone number?

Twenty years ago everything was a lot easier. These days it’s next to impossible to reach an artist. First you have to find the manager and send an email before you call. And usually nobody replies to your email. And then if they do, the answer is usually no. These days people speak far less on the phone. Everything is communicated by email or text message. But back then I just called him and told him I want to play him something for Rambo and then he invited me over. He gave me his address, and I drove there! That’s how straightforward it was. And how did Daft Punk get your telephone number?

The controversy centered exclusively on my music, even though if you didn’t like it, you could just turn down the volume—at least on VHS. But even Carmine Coppola composed new music for the remake of Abel Gance’s Napoléon in 1980. It was a trend back then. But unlike Coppola I did something poppier, and that’s why so many people cried, “scandal!” At least, visually, our version was the best and longest one available.

My agent Paul Hahn knows their manager pretty well. I’ve already mentioned that I’m interested in science fiction and when I heard Daft Punk were working on the soundtrack for Tron II, I offered my services. Thomas Bangalter then invited me to his studio for lunch on La Cienega Boulevard. I took my son with me because he threatened to stop loving me if I didn’t. He’s a really big Daft Punk fan. Thomas then mentioned at lunch that we should collaborate some time in the future. A little while later in Paris he invited me to his studio to have me tell him about my life. I did and that’s how “Giorgio by Moroder” on Random Access Memories came about. I think now Daft Punk is working on a long film, which includes large parts of my life, but who knows? You never really get any concrete information from them.

What fascinated you about Metropolis?

How long did you speak with Bangalter in Paris?

The vision of Metropolis reaches deep into the twenty-first century—that’s how far ahead of its time it was. There aren’t many films from back then that possess that kind of look or that kind of plot. Nosferatu is also great, but it’s only forty minutes long. I’ve always liked science fiction.

Around three hours. I just sat down and started talking.

But how were you asked to rescore such a classic film?

My DJing has nothing to do with Daft Punk. The Red Bull Music Academy invited me last year to do an hour-long interview, and at first I didn’t want to do it because flying from Paris to New York to talk for an hour would have been unnecessarily exhausting. But they managed to convince me by suggesting that I also play a DJ set, which worked out great. From there I did the same thing in Japan and since then five or six other cities.

How did you end up recomposing the music for Metropolis in 1984? At the time it was an extremely controversial undertaking.

My biggest successes were film scores. It all started in 1979 with Midnight Express, for which I received an Oscar right off the bat. Then I did Scarface, American Gigolo, Flashdance and Top Gun and automatically I was moving around in certain circles. So when you mention to someone how much you’d enjoy scoring Metropolis, people’s ears perk up. It was normal, in a way. Was it also totally normal to go to dinner with Sylvester Stallone and have him tell you that he wants Bob Dylan to sing one of your songs for Rambo III? 62 EB 1/2014

Would you say that your renewed interest in music was brought about through working with Daft Punk? Since then you’ve also started DJing, right?

Before that you went through a period where you were temporarily uninterested in making music. What do you attribute that to?

I was just doing less and less and simply lost interest. But I became

interested in other things, like initiating the large-scale construction of a pyramid in Dubai, which unfortunately never got off the ground. Also, together with Marcello Gandini I was involved with the development of a sportscar— the Cizeta-Moroder V16T. I actually own a prototype that I can’t drive because it’s not street legal. I then started playing golf and for a minute I thought I had discovered paradise. Then they dragged me back. It’s like with Al Pacino in The Godfather, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

must be a reason why they’re used in so many car chases or to create a certain atmosphere in contemporary neo-noir.

The original prototype is Donna Summer’s I Feel Love—that driving feel, that rhythm. When Alan Parker made Midnight Express, he wanted that exact sound. He gave me free reign, but he also insisted that in the key scenes that I use music akin to I Feel Love. And since then, I’ve honed the sound. I’ve perfected it. How long did it take for you to feel at home in Los Angeles with all the stars?

Did you ever run into Al Pacino when you were doing the music for Scarface?

It went pretty quick actually. In 1976, Donna Summer went Number One. I was traveling back and forth between Europe and America and then in 1980 I officially moved to L.A. Since then I’ve felt completely comfortable. Only in the past few years, I haven’t spent so much time there because I’m so often in Italy, Switzerland and France. But now I’m back. Maybe it’s not a really beautiful city, but working and living in L.A. is fantastic. The entire industry is there, ninety percent of all films are produced there and all of the big series. If I need a special kind of camera in L.A., I can get it in half an hour. The film industry is professional: certain cameras cost 50,000 dollars an hour. Nobody can afford to arrive late or deliver equipment that doesn’t work properly.

Yes, I ran into him a few times. He’s a friendly guy, a real gentleman—totally different than what his character in Scarface would suggest. When you were working on Scarface, did you know that you were making music for a film that would come to define the eighties like no other?

Back then it was bizarre. You see at first, the film was a huge disappointment. It was first presented to a small audience of film professionals and in these situations there are certain rules of etiquette, like clapping at the end of the movie whether it was good or bad. But at the end of Scarface, they booed! It was a terrible night for me because I knew that I’d just seen the best film I’d ever worked on. People criticized it for being too vulgar and too brutal, so producer Martin Bregman wanted to reedit the film and take out some of the fuck-yous. But Brian de Palma wouldn’t bend and in the end the director got his way. After that the film unnecessarily did a poor job at the box office. It was the success of the VHS that changed everything. The video release was what really made Scarface a classic. Today there are people who can recite the whole thing in their sleep. The only other film like that I know of is The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jay-Z actually wanted to do a new Scarface version with rap music, and I would have definitely been on board—nothing is holy, you know. The studio wanted it, the rappers wanted it, I wanted it—but Brian wasn’t interested.

Your name is inextricably linked with the “Munich Sound”. Did you find it hard to leave Munich?

To be perfectly honest, no. I left home in Southern Tyrol when I was nineteen and since then I’ve worked in practically every city in Europe, including four years in both Berlin and Munich. For me it wasn’t a problem at all to go to America. In Munich you owned the famous Musicland Studio. Lots of the people who came and went there were pretty serious coke heads, no?

I would never touch drugs. But maybe you can tell me what the era and clientele were like?

Do you sense a renewed interest in your film music since working together with Daft Punk?

I notice that the music that I did thirty years ago for Midnight Express and especially American Gigolo is becoming increasingly popular again. I also noticed immediately when watching Cliff Martinez’s Drive that they used the same sounds that I’ve used hundreds of times. Whether that has anything to do with Daft Punk, I don’t know. What’s so special about these sounds? There

Three albums by Giorgio Moroder that remind us of the colors of the eighties, and one that reminds us that he’s still around: Donna Summer’s I Feel Love (produced by Moroder), the soundtracks to Scarface and Metropolis, and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, featuring the song “Giorgio by Moroder” in which the musician describes his dreams of making music as a kid and his approach to creating the now classic disco sounds.

I rarely had anything to do with the people who booked time in my studio. When The Rolling Stones were there, I had absolutely no idea if they had drugs with them or not, and it was none of my business. When Led Zeppelin came, they booked the studio and threw me out. And that was the problem: I built the studio for myself, so that I could record my own music, but people like Marc Bolan or Queen were constantly booking time and I always had to go somewhere else. Honestly, I experienced very little of what went on in my own studio. ~ EB 1/2014 63

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Conversations

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MAX DAX TALKS TO DEN Sorte skole

“Every sound tells a story, and every voice has an echo” On their latest album Lektion III, the Copenhagen-based DJ and production duo Den Sorte Skole has deconstructed and reassambled thousands of samples across the genre spectrum in order to create music that questions the notion of authorship and originality. The result is a sonic safari through a veritable jungle of styles and ideas that shot to the top of more than a few year’s end best-of lists for 2013. But it also made the ambitious Danes too illegal for labels and distribution alike. Max Dax: You’ve used literally thousands of samples from all possible genres to create Lektion III, an album that questions the notions of authorship and originality. Since we have to start somewhere, I’d like to know how you stumbled upon the work of Karen Dalton, whose violin on “Katie Cruel” you used on your own track “Did You Ever”. Simon Dokkedal: I think Martin

read about her and bought the LP a few years ago. But there’s an interesting reason why we were even able to sample the violin: When Karen Dalton recorded the song, it was in fashion to keep the instruments sonically separated

from each other—panned to the extreme, so to speak. So you’d find her singing on the left channel and the violin beautifully isolated on the right. We then simply sampled the right channel. MD: In a similar act of creative

appropriation, Nick Cave also based “When I First Came to Town” on “Katie Cruel”.

Martin Højland: It’s all about

appropriation, and “Katie Cruel” is a prime example of what you can do with sampling that modern production can’t. When you listen to her voice on that track in particular it has this completely unique and authentic feeling about it. Hopelessness and the feeling that the end of the world is near are present in her voice, as well as in the tuning and sound of the violin. It’s so raw and real. When you sample it, you’re importing this feeling of authenticity into the music. You could never recreate that feeling with any violinist from any orchestra. So samples for people like Simon and myself are like voices from a forgotten time. They represent something that has to be kept alive.

Left: Den Sorte Skole’s Simon Dokkedal und Martin Højland in their caravan while on tour last year supporting Trentemøller. Photo: Luci Lux. EB 1/2014 67

“As a band, we started out spinning hip hop in the nineties and understood early on that almost every hip hop track is based on a sample and thus references something older. We wanted to base our album on samples that no one had used before us, but found that this is really hard these days.” Simon Dokkedal MD: In other words, Lektion III is a

to stuff we didn’t know. As a band, we started out spinning hip hop in the nineties and understood early on that almost every hip hop track is based on a sample and thus references something older. We wanted to base our album on samples that no one had used before us, but found that this is really hard these days. Most of the North American and Western European stuff has been found and used already. Almost all of the soul and funk records have been mined for usable samples. So we tried to dig deeper and wider. We had to go further back in time and extend our hunting grounds to include the whole world, and especially more unusual genres like early modern classical music, field recordings and Indonesian jazz.

kind of “protest against forgetting”, as Hans Ulrich Obrist would say?

MH: Yes, you could say so. People tend to define history on the basis of its biggest milestones, the most iconic people and the most dramatic events. But history is richer than that and full of forgotten pearls. When Searching for Sugarman about Sixto Rodriguez came out everybody was so surprised that such a musician could exist without the world knowing about him. But there are lots of these forgotten people that played an important role in shaping the paradigms and times in which we live. On Lektion III, some of these people get another chance to shine: Exuma, Eden Ahbez and Brigitte Fontaine, people with very open minds, crazy thoughts and rough lives on the edge of society. They did things you couldn’t have and paved the way for all the normalizers that turned their weirdness into something more mainstream. SD: When we started doing the album, we talked a lot about how we’d like it to sound, and gradually the idea of reviving old voices became more and more central. It became clear to us that we would only sample old and obscure stuff from all around the world rather than newer and known music from the West. And that’s why you’ll find very few samples on the album that are from after 1979, when I was born. MH: I was born in 1980, so

we basically grew up with the music of the nineties.

SD: We wanted to open our ears

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MH: That’s also why we ended up

Above and opposite page: Simon Dokkedal and Martin Højland acquired the albums pictured here through months of research on eBay and Discogs following the disapearance of their favorite blogs and music archives in wake of the dismantling of file hosting site Megaupload.

listening to the entire catalogues of Asmus Tietchens, Conrad Schnitzler and S.P.K. At a certain point in the process, these early experimental electronic musicians came into the picture. That was a real turning point because they provided us with a really fresh electronic sound that balanced the otherwise dustier atmosphere on Lektion III. Actually, these “early” experimental electronic artists—including people like Igor Wakhévitch—were doing things in the seventies that people are still struggling to emulate today. MD: I recently spoke to occa-

sional Kraftwerk collaborator Emil Schult about the relevance of the connection between electronic music and Joseph Beuys. Did you know that both Schult and Conrad Schnitzler were students of Beuys

and were taught that every artwork has to serve a societal ideal? Schult stressed the fact that in the twentieth century, there were only two real innovations that foresaw the universal language of the twenty-first: the invention of the transistor and electronic music’s use of algorithms on the one hand, and Beuys’ social sculpture anticipating the Internet as a social network on the other. I think this is particularly interesting in the context of this magazine, which is financed by a multi-national telecommunications company and focuses on the rhizomatic aspects of electronic music and human interaction, online and off. I think that you guys operate precisely at this conceptual intersection. MH: That’s why for us listening to echoes of the past doesn’t necessarily mean doing something nostalgic. Today’s world is truly globalized and it’s possible to merge musicians, sounds and styles from everywhere. I think the real question is when this will happen in a non-sampled form! The danger is, of course, that our ethnocentric Western attitude will probably erase these wonderful regional cultures before it can happen. MD: Did you really travel around

the world? Or did you virtually travel on the Internet?

SD: Unfortunately we didn’t have the money to really travel the world on the scale we would have liked. MH: But it was very surprising for us to find that vast amount of information online. We found so much inspiration on the countless music blogs like Mutant Sounds, Holy Warbles, Ghostcapital and MFT3F. There was also a thrilling blog by a Norwegian guy living in Indonesia. He had uploaded hundreds and hundreds of Indonesian jazz and folk records and tapes from the sixties to the eighties and organized them into a massive archival. He scanned all the liner notes and pictures and every copyright credit. We were in Copenhagen, searching for samples from completely obscure

stuff—it was so overwhelming and it could never have happened fifteen years ago. We combed through all these blogs and transferred massive amounts of music onto our hard drives. Then we sat for a whole year in our studio listening to two hundred albums a week for seven hours a day and eventually creating our own archive with all the usable samples that we’d find during these listening sessions. Quite boring at times, but I guess we are very geeky by nature and aware that structure and discipline lie at the heart of most good things. SD: From the beginning we tagged each and every sample according to style, tonality, speed and its instrumentation. We had folders for easy listening, with psych, noise, jazz, field recordings, folk— you name it. We were shocked how much the music from, say, Ghana differs from Mali. But then you suddenly encounter a rhythmic pattern in Thailand that corresponds with another pattern in Colombia, and with our DJ backgrounds we tried to figure out if they somehow match. We also refused to use the advantages of modern software like Traktor or Ableton. We didn’t pitch any of the samples to make them fit. We insisted on finding matches instead. The whole process was like searching for needles in a haystack. It wasn’t intuitive or funky or anything. It was just plain discipline. No rocking, beer-drinking jam session up in our studio—maybe just a mindexpanding joint once in a while. Of course, every now and then we’d have a session with matching material. But the real magic would appear if, after hours of inconclusively trying to match a sample with something from our archive, something suddenly truly beautiful touched our ears—simply because two musicians from different times and different worlds started to play together. MH: We had a plan and a vision, but on January 19, 2012, the file sharing host Megaupload was closed down by the FBI, and within a few months, the FBI,

on the exact experience that you’re describing: you start with Internet research, say, on Alan Lomax and the Delta blues, and then you loose yourself in the labyrinth of information and cross-references and hyperlinks. It’s only a short way from there to, say, Greil Marcus. It was Marcus who coined the term “invisible republic” to describe the importance of weird, old, eerie folk music whose singers and songwriters wrote a kind of counter-history to the official narrative. These people had the task of mapping out another America, the invisible republic that only shows its face through the haunting imagery of the songs they’ve written.

Google and some of the other big players shut down the entire infrastructure that these blogs depended on. All the blogs we loved were suddenly cut off from their archival basis. All the links went dead and all the music disappeared. It was a catastrophe for them. The Norwegian guy in Jakarta had built probably the biggest online archive of Indonesian popular music ever— I think because the Indonesian government doesn’t see the need or doesn’t have the money to take care of running an archive of their own. It’s sad and upsetting to see all this work erased over night by the biggest players in the market in an attempt to protect their own shares.

SD: You’ve hit the nail on the head with the connection between Greil Marcus and the old folk tradition. That’s why it was so important for us to release Lektion III with an extensive booklet of liner notes describing not only our ethnological approach but also carefully listing each and every sample that we’ve used and crediting the artist, year, country, song and the album we found it on. Just putting out the music wasn’t what it was all about. We wanted to give life to the various voices from the past. Sharing information was a big, big part of the project. In that way we were able to honor our sources and hopefully inspire people to dig into these amazing discographies.

SD: But thanks to the extensive

copyright credits by all the bloggers we started to purchase the original vinyl records of all the samples we intended to use and replace the MP3’s with better quality recordings. Discogs and eBay were really helpful at this stage, and we spent a lot of money. MH: We succeeded in getting approximately seventy percent of the source material we had originally collected for Lektion III on vinyl. The missing thirty percent were mostly WAV files created from otherwise impossible to find vinyl sent to us upon request from the people who were running the original blogs or from record collectors all over the world. For us it was a really special feeling to witness how all this energy came together in this project. MD: Did you ever feel like the

cyber successors to Alan Lomax?

MH: You know what? We didn’t know about Alan Lomax and his work as an ethnomusicologist when we started working on Lektion III. We didn’t even have a clue who Harry Smith was, who compiled the world-famous Anthology of American Folk Music, until we were researching some unknown folk track. MD: For a while now I’ve been

dreaming of writing a novel based

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a library by its titles? The broad stylistic and geographical spectrum of the Danish duo’s sampling tastes recently helped them win Denmark’s prestigous “Composer of the Year” award for 2013.

MH: And you’re right that we ended up being a kind of successor to Alan Lomax. Technology today made a completely new project possible compared to the limitations Alan Lomax had to deal with. We were able to virtually travel to Honduras, India, Lebanon and Siberia through the blogs and were not limited to the Mississippi Delta. Thanks to the Internet and the effort of all the bloggers we could sample the sound of fifty-one different countries for the same project, and create a “counterhistory to the official narrative”, to put it in your words. MD: Speaking of technology: You

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mentioned the FBI shutdown of Megaupload, which was essentially carried out to protect copyright holders—i.e. international corporations who own catalogues of artists’ rights. I think that the whole copyright system should be radically reconsidered and reshuffled as we have such different systems and standards for different entities. Take cooking for example: I understand the current state of cooking as the product of thousands of years of experimenting and refining tradition. So if you want to cook, say, spaghetti Bolognese according to a recipe, you’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright. Of course, this is more comparable to playing a record than sampling it. The latter would be more like the physical reprinting of a copyrighted recipe, for example from star chef Ferran Adrià i Acosta. But you can’t digitalize cooking. It’s still a physical act. In light of current copyright law, you’ve produced a highly illegal album. What’s your take on the issue? MH: In music, copyright is the domain of lawyers and record companies. But like in cooking, as you say, music has always been about appropriating something, altering it and turning it into something new. Much of African music for instance has been about singing songs in a religious context that were written long ago. By singing them in a new century or in a new context, you alter them and you don’t have to ask anybody for permission. That’s how the blues developed, and nobody stopped early rock and roll bands from turning the blues into something “white”. Copyright truly became an issue with the rise of big business in music and entertainment in the seventies, when their lobbyists started buying up all the rights in order to regulate access. I mean, according to our laws today, Brahms could have been sued for mashing up Beethoven’s ninth in his own first symphony. And genre-defining

albums from the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and De La Soul could never have been released today. The old system has worked successfully for hundreds of years. We could even extend this back to Homer and, later on, the Bible. SD: Actually, the whole concept of oral history is based on the ability to use and write down the words of someone else and turn it into a book. Copyright in music today favors big corporations and successful musicians. You can’t sample Madonna without immediately facing a lawsuit from her lawyers or paying her off with a lot of money. But if you are an African, Belgian or Chinese producer and doing something interesting, you can be sure that it’s much more difficult to sue the American production company who took your idea and changed it into something new. You’ll starve before you get your day in court. This is, of course, an oversimplification. But the American producer who just sampled an old Turkish record won’t be sued by the family of the copyright owner because they won’t know about it. He didn’t credit the original source and will run off with both the fame and the money. MH: That’s cultural imperialism in disguise, and that’s exactly the reason why we made an extensive booklet that functions as a guide to Lektion III. Not a single artist is left out, everybody can trace his or her sample. As I said before, we didn’t try to disguise the samples by pitching them up or down or by playing them backwards or by processing them through an effects filter. Yes, we used the violin that can be heard on Karen Dalton’s “Katie Cruel”, but we put it in a completely different context and it now lives again in a new piece of music. And yes, we used Asmus Tietchens’ “Tina, ich liebe Sie!” that was originally released on a cassette compilation called Sex & Bestiality from 1984. In fact, that was one of the few

Right: Digital archive, analogue heart. In order to properly show Den Sorte Skole’s set-up, photographer Kristoffer Juel Poulsen shot them from a bird’s-eye view.

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“On the Internet, a new culture of sharing content has already spread. I think the kids of today don’t give a shit about copyright. They simply don’t understand the problem and they speak from a completely different place in history. They grew up with the iPhone and all kinds of copyrighted material just floating around and up for grabs in the social sphere. They can’t understand why the old laws should kill creativity.” Martin Højland samples we used that was released after 1980. And you can go check out all of Tietchens’ work, because it is brilliant. So now you know.

samples in the recording process, we could never get a hold of all the copyright holders and make a separate deal with every single one of them. It’s fifty-one countries and every one of them has different laws.

MD: It’s interesting that you men-

tion Asmus Tietchens. He’s an old friend of mine, and we frequently discuss his work at Electronic Beats. I fondly remember a seemingly endless boat trip with him through the most remote corners of the vast Hamburg harbor. He and his assistant had installed an underwater microphone next to the ship’s propeller and on the deck he’d manipulate the sound and fade other sources into the mix—that is, while everybody else got drunk. I don’t know if they recorded or ever released it, but it was an afternoon to remember. SD: Every sound tells a story, and every voice has an echo. By providing the booklet we made sure that anyone who wants to dig deeper can easily do so. If someone wants to know more about the foundational loop of “Staklenih”—the Tietchens track used on Lektion III—then they can go for it. I bet that in Denmark next to nobody has ever heard of him. MD: Coming back to the copyright

issue: Even though I think that the system is not fair, you still didn’t clear the rights to any of the samples you’ve used. How do you plan on dealing with that?

SD: Having used thousands of

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MD: To me, the album is like a big

question mark. You ask the question, but nobody has an answer.

MH: That’s true and a very good

For Den Sorte Skole, making music isn’t about making money. Indeed, at the moment it couldn’t possible be, as they failed to clear the rights for pretty much every sample they used for Lektion III (and as a result, have had to peddle the album almost entirely by themselves.) Appropriately, the record is also downloadable for free at their website, densorteskole.net.

description. And this is the political part of our project: to challenge the existing laws and the music business. We actually posed the question directly to the Danish branch of the IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. We asked them for a collective clearance of all the samples and suggested that we split the royalties with all the respective copyright holders. We waited for three months, and then they said they wouldn’t do it. They essentially pretend to be representing the interests of the authors but somehow always seem to reject solutions that would benefit them. And we got word the day we finished mastering the record—the day before we were supposed to send it to the pressing plant!

MD: Which reminds me of other

inconsistencies of the copyright system. German television directors for instance can use whatever music they want, because they pay a flat fee to the GEMA, the German royalties collecting and broadcast licensing society.

SD: By now the problem has mul-

tiplied for us: Because we were not allowed to clear any of the samples we used via the IFPI, we can’t sell our album on iTunes, Boomkat or any other download platform. So we did an illegal pressing of a thousand triple-vinyl copies and selfreleased it on our website. And we also sell it on tour. We ship it ourselves, we have no distribution, and if you want to get the digital version of Lektion III you can download it for free on our website—including a PDF of the booklet.

MH: I think that the IFPI was

afraid to set some kind of legal precedence. By the way, we were invited together to talk about this on Danish national television during the evening news with the IFPI, but they refused to join the discussion, and we were left alone with the news host to explain the issue. Despite this little triumph on prime time, it’s still very complicated for us. We don’t have a label, we are not part of the established music business, and we simply don’t have access to the market. We are living in a virtual parallel reality to the so-called real world that all of us are exposed to on a daily basis. But one thing is for sure: the FBI can take Megaupload offline, but this doesn’t mean that they’re doing the right thing. On the Internet, a new culture of sharing content has already spread. I think the kids of today don’t give a shit about copyright. They simply don’t understand the problem and they speak from a completely different place in history. They grew up with the iPhone and all kinds of copyrighted material just floating around and up for grabs in the social sphere. They can’t understand why the old laws should kill creativity. They can’t understand why they are being criminalized for doing what people have been doing throughout history: taking the things that surround them, altering them, developing them with the technological methods. And the whole copyright issue gets even nastier when you look at vaccines or AIDS medication for instance. Things have to change, and we are proud if Lektion III can play even a microscopic role in this process. ~

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“If it were not part of Italy, Calabria would be a failed state. The ’Ndrangheta organized crime syndicate controls vast portions of its territory and economy, and accounts for at least three percent of Italy’s GDP (probably much more) through drug trafficking, extortion and usury. Law enforcement is severely hampered by a lack of both sources and resources.” – Cable from J. Patrick Truhn, Consul General, recently exposed by Wikileaks

And when I was born / I was born crying / And the midwife ran away and screamed / A child of bad luck has been born. – Giuseppe Colosimo, “Quannu niscivi iu” (“When I was born”)

Songs of beauty and evil Speeding along the autostrada through the craggy Mediterranean landscape at the southern tip of Calabria, two things dominate the coastline: the volcano Mt. Etna, which has been emitting black smoke for the past two weeks, and the myriad construction ruins that dot the region’s steep hillside. The buildings are in various states of completion and range from medium-sized houses to fully blown architectural absurdities made of ludicrous amounts of concrete to form shapes that appear to have no function (obvious even to the untrained eye). Referred to simply as “disgraces”, they serve as a constant reminder of the political corruption and organized crime endemic to Calabria. I am sitting shotgun and holding on to the edge of my seat Left: Sparks fly during the dance of the horse in Mafia stronghold San Luca.

MUSIC AND CRIME

Calabrian tarantella: trance, drone and the rituals of the Mafia Essay: A.J. Samuels. Interviews: A.J. Samuels and Francesco Sbano. Photos: Francesco Sbano with Hamburg-based journalist and photographer Francesco Sbano at the wheel. A native of Paola, a small town some two hours north of the region’s most populated city Reggio di Calabria, the tall, silver-haired Sbano is a controversial figure in Italian cultural circles. Over the past fourteen years, he has become the go-to guy for countless international media interested in getting face time with members of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, currently Italy’s most powerful mafia organization. But he is even better known for promoting and distributing the lone cultural contribution of the ’Ndrangheta to Italian culture: its music. Since 2000 Sbano has released some three volumes of so-called malavita songs, a genre of mostly acoustic Calabrian folk that romanticizes the trials and tribulations of ’Ndrangheta members’ lives of crime. Lyrically, the texts are often written by or based on stories of imprisoned Mafiosi and usually take the form of a wistful lamentation, with the narrators singing their hearts out about not receiving enough visits or being forced to kill out of honor or about never talking to the police—all to the pace of

a slow waltz. Sbano, with the help of some of the genre’s most beloved songwriters, mined hundreds of malavita cassettes for the compilations, which together have since sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide. Almost overnight, music that had been exclusively available in small town markets or specialty record stores in Calabria was being distributed and discussed all over the globe, and just as quickly condemned by various European anti-mafia organizations. Critics accuse Sbano of spreading mafia propaganda and creating folklore out of brutal gang activity. Having become something of a thorn in his side, they regularly protest his work and public appearances, which currently includes the release of his fourth and perhaps most compelling compilation, La Tarantella Calabrese, documenting the relationship of the Calabrian tarantella to the rituals of the ’Ndrangheta. As Sbano explains over long lunches and many hours of driving, Calabrian tarantella, known locally as sonu a ballu (music for dancing), presents a kind of historical blueprint of malavita culture. Unlike classical tarantella from Apulia, which gained its name in the Middle Ages as

a kind of musical exorcism for the effects of spider bites (tarantella is Italian for tarantula), the classical Calabrian tarantella is said to derive from the ancient Greek Pyrrhic dance, a dance of war. ’Ndrangheta tarantella ceremonies don’t just celebrate the criminal class in song—they also play an integral role in their rituals. Unlike the dozens if not hundreds of different kinds of regional tarantella in southern Italy, an ’Ndrangheta tarantella is a codified ceremony reinforcing or establishing new clan hierarchies and held on special occasions, from successful acquisitions to the release of a clan member from prison. It’s almost always the local don, or someone delegated by the local don, who decides which two dancers will dance together within a circle of potential participants with the first five men chosen representing the elite garde of the clan. While most dances are purely celebratory, occasionally they can become a dangerous competition when the goal becomes to literally dance circles around your partner as a form of athletic dominance. Responding to a challenge with a knife or a stick is an uncommon but not unheard of way of defending your honor. Musically, the Calabrian tarantella is an endless melodic cyclone, frenetic and extremely hypnotic, as I experienced personally during a ceremony with Sbano and numerous ’Ndranghetisti in a clubhouse in a valley of the Aspromonte mountains. Following a memorable meal of pasta with pig lard and massive piles of grilled meats, one or more tambourine players began to set a pace in 6/8, while small box accordions move back and forth between two chords and simultaneously weave a dizzying melodic tapestry. Floating atop the sonic melee were guitars, lutes, lyres, shepherd’s flutes, and the music’s most trance-inducing element, a traditional Italian bagpipe made entirely of wood and goatskin. The instrument’s reedy drone was actually more EB 1/2014 75

Above: Malavita songwriter Mimmo Siclari, photographed on the roof of his apartment building in Reggio Calabria.

of a constant wail and synched stunningly with the occasional singer, who belted out stories of love, farming and honor in powerful bursts, with the ends of his phrasing held and wavering until they find their harmonic home, mostly unisono with the drone. The power and elegant inaccuracy of the singing in Calabrian tarantella—particularly that of Antonio Serra or the late Fred Scotti, both of whom feature prominently on Sbano’s most recent compilation—reminded me in my thoroughly non-ethnomusicologist 76 EB 1/2014

referential nexus, of the vocal stylings of Jeffrey Lee Pierce or Kevin Coyne. Indeed, the music’s most entrancing strains have retained the historical traces of a kind of musical exorcism. For Francesco Sbano, promoting music so intimately related to the ’Ndrangheta has become tricky business, but not because he struggles with the ethics. In the five days we spent together he often and candidly expressed a deep mistrust of Italian politics and the country’s judicial system. What at times appeared to border on cynicism

revealed itself as the crux of a struggle I associate with the work of artists like Josef Beuys or Viennese Actionists: that is, artists that encourage people to accept that, for better or worse, “evil” is sometimes an intrinsic part of things artistically sublime. Or rather: the art is not sublime because it’s evil, but it’s also not to be discounted for the same reason. Indeed, the longer I stayed in Calabria, the more paradoxical the situations appeared and the less the appearances revealed the true nature of the

things themselves. More than one Mafiosi’s crumbling apartment building from the outside revealed itself to be a spotless luxury abode from the inside; the smallest, most harmless-looking guy in the room turned out to be the ruthless bodyguard with the longest criminal record; a young but senior ’Ndranghetista responsible for cocaine and weapons trafficking insisted we name his hometown while the comparatively small town don would barely exchange a word with us. Sbano: “Growing up, I had acquaintances who, at a

certain point in their lives, were forced to distance themselves from the ‘normal’ world when they became members of the ’Ndrangheta. I had gone to the beach and played soccer with these people and suddenly they lived parallel lives. And this is the most surreal aspect of it all, because the parallel world is hard to tell from the normal one. That is, unless you know the codes, and both music and dance are important aspects of that.” Of course, this also applies to the ’Ndrangheta’s social by-laws, which are firmly established. For Francesco Sbano and myself during the interview process, this meant being identified as nonmafia members who nevertheless pose no obvious threat to the ’Ndrangheta and therefore are to be treated with respect—i.e. having our questions answered either honestly or not at all. In the following series of monologues, our interview partners candidly describe their relationship to the tarantella and, where applicable, their role in a clan hierarchy. With the exception of a legendary malavita songwriter, names have been changed. This is who we met, how we got there and what we ate in the process.

Sergio, local ’Ndrangheta boss of multiple villages an hour northeast of Reggio di Calabria. A dark and poorly lit collection of hillside roads led out of the regional capital Reggio di Calabria toward Sergio’s small farmhouse and preferred meeting space. We turned onto almost hidden unlit paths off the main streets of a local village where nothing was marked. These led deep into the rural mountainside and were oddly better paved than the crumbling streets built by the local municipality. Passing pitch-black fields we pulled

up to the base of a small hill on top of which stood Sergio and an acquaintance, their persons obscured entirely by a bright security light which shone directly into our car. I ask Sbano what Sergio’s main form of income is. “People tell me it’s not extortion. They all say, ‘No, he’s a good person. People just give him things’”. I was told to wait while Sbano went up to greet them and explain who I was and what I was there to do. I was certainly not the first journalist they had been introduced to, but wariness remained. After ten minutes, Sbano whistled me out. At the top of the hill I opened the door and entered a small, brightly lit room that doubled as a kitchen and a clubhouse. I shook hands with Sergio, a short, powerfully built but soft-spoken man with extremely calloused hands that betray his lifelong activities as a farmer. In his early fifties, Sergio has a high-pitched voice and speaks with a slight lisp. His companion, Aniello, is a white-haired older gentleman whom I am told is not a member of the ’Ndrangheta. I take a seat at the table, and Sergio summarily fetches a juice bottle filled with chilled red wine made from his own small vineyard. This is followed by a massive hunk of crumbling, aged, homemade pecorino, which he cuts off in chunks with a large kitchen knife. Then the fennel salami; that morning’s hard, crusty bread, which he softens with cold water; the homemade olives and, finally, the pickled mushrooms. Up in the mountains it was close to freezing and the door to Sergio’s hut was left open for the entirety of our lengthy nosh. About two hours in, Sergio started to feel comfortable enough to talk: Sergio: The first time I ever led

a tarantella was when I was sixteen. I was chosen by the elders of our organization, because, well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but I am pretty sure it was because I was a wild kid: people respected me, I solved problems both with and without my fists, and I had also grown up with the dance. It goes without say-

ing that being the master of the dance is an extremely important role. Depending on the reason for the tarantella and if the rhythm is good, it can go on for four to six hours. I’ve been in trances before, soaked from head to toe with sweat, but only if the specific rhythm is being played from the foothills of my birthplace. I remember that my very first tarantella wasn’t that long, but it was important in terms of figuring out who to choose to dance and why. I recall the first time understanding that it was important to invite dancers from the surrounding towns to dance before my friends. It was a sign of respect and hospitality, one with which you also gain more respect. And I get a lot of respect around here. I am the boss, which means that I am bound to my territory. I don’t go on trips or travel abroad. Generally, when we host a tarantella only within our clan, then it is full of ’Ndrangheta codes. If a young buck gets smart with an older member, he may raise his hand to tell the youth: “You will know your place, you will respect me. Or you will pay the consequences.” Of course, nobody challenges the dance leader because his decision is law. Even if this means that they aren’t chosen until later on in the ceremony. This also means that nobody would dare attempt to dance around me. In tarantella, dancing with sticks or knives is something that happens for tourists, but believe me, it’s not a joke. The tarantella establishes respect and order but it can also be the arena for brutal conflicts. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, people can be carried out on a stretcher. Independently of the danger involved, I always have the best musicians to commemorate the event at hand. I want people to respect our culture. You see, so many things you see around here—the roads, the buildings, the stadiums, the markets—were created by us, the ’Ndrangheta. But only the politicians get the credit. The bourgeois don’t respect what we do. Exporting the tarantella is

a way of gaining at least what we contribute to culture. The fact of the matter is that I represent a different, older ’Ndrangheta—one that is fundamentally different than the younger hotheads who operate the trafficking and do all the killing.”

Mimmo Siclari, producer and songwriter of malavita music Driving west along the beachfront of Reggio di Calabria we end up in a neighborhood on top of a hill not far from the city’s small downtown amidst a series of illegally built tenement-like apartment buildings that run to a dead end. It’s sunny outside but the brightest thing in this dark alley are the whites strung across the clotheslines connecting the buildings. We’re there to pick up Mimmo Siclari, one of the most famous malavita songwriters who records his equally romantic and violent songs right here in his home studio. Siclari in particular has been the object for much criticism by anti-mafia activists and has given dozens of interviews over the years with journalists looking to find out more about the small round man who has been dubbed the 50 Cent of Calabria. We walk together to a local restaurant and take a seat where Sbano takes care of the orders: a three course meal including an antipasto of pecorino and olives, a primo piatto of pasta and fennel sausage with broccoli and a main dish of grilled meat. Before the interview begins, Siclari immediately asks us to lower our voices regarding Mafia questions as the waitress’s husband is currently in jail. He didn’t elaborate why. When the wine arrives, Siclari begins in a hushed voice to tell us how he first started writing songs for and about the ’Ndrangheta: EB 1/2014 77

Above: Musicians in front of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi near San Luca.

Mimmo: The voices in tarantella

have a very special quality: they are natural, untrained. These musicians sing beautifully, but it’s not formally studied in any way. It’s an authenticity that’s impossible to teach, I would imagine. The funny thing is that back in the day, everybody loved the tarantella, but only the farmers and the mafia were the ones who openly bought the records. The bourgeoisie would actually send someone to pick up the record for them because it was somehow a crossing of an invisible divide. They were ashamed to buy it, but loved listening to it in private. Before physical recordings the music and the dance were always one. That’s obviously changed, but for me they remain inextricably linked. Also, it used to be you could always tell who was playing if you heard the musicians from a distance because each had their own distinct style. These days, lots of the musicians attempt to copy what they hear on the record which makes it all somewhat less individual. Certain musical habits

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have become more widespread and musicians are far more competitive. It’s almost a kind of fight between them, and I’ve seen tambourine players play so fast and intense that their hands are bleeding. And they still won’t quit until somebody picks up another tambourine and smoothly continues on, like with the DJs changing of the guard. The music never stops, it just mutates slightly. For some musicians, playing for an especially important group of ’Ndrangheta might add extra pressure to perform. After all, it’s an extremely intimate musical relationship that they enter. But this isn’t true for the true musicians. For them it doesn’t matter who’s dancing, who’s listening, who’s armed and who’s not. Of course, there is some overlap between the ’Ndranghetisti and the musicians themselves. Fred Scotti, one of the most famous tarantella singers and musicians was also in the ’Ndrangheta and was killed in a feud with another member. But there are rules to this stuff and for the most part it doesn’t matter if they’re play-

ing in front of the Madonna, a boss or a group of housewives. The music doesn’t change, only the atmosphere and the intensity when ’Ndrangheta dance. The air is thicker, especially in the Aspromonte, where musically, the tradition is the most pure. And the most intense. I started out my career by selling cassettes from a wagon, where I would design the covers of the tapes myself. The lyrics were about the malavita, or the criminal underworld, which I had been surrounded by since I was a kid. It’s a different kind of music than tarantella—more like individual songs as opposed to endless rhythms. But they’re closely related. I’ve traveled all over Calabria and I was always fascinated by the respect and behavior of the ’Ndranghetisti, especially speaking in a kind of code. When I eventually spoke to them myself, they were eager to teach me some of the songs and texts because I was so fascinated, which is how I came to compose malavita music myself. I was really hooked on the power and respect when an ’Ndranghetista solved a little problem I had: I was arrested in a small town on the Ionian coast by the police after it was found out I didn’t have the right license to sell my tapes. Because the local Mafiosi knew me and liked my music, a feared member of the local clan came down to the station to pick me up. When the officers saw him their jaws dropped. They immediately released me and apologized for having confiscated my tapes. They also promised to never confiscate my tapes ever again. From that point on I often had two friendly men stand next to my wagon while I was selling to keep the police away. And they always bought me lunch. At some point a local boss invited me over almost every day for dinner for two weeks. I met his whole family and at some point I became afraid that I would be expected to pay him back for all of his kindness and generosity. But the boss wouldn’t even accept a single cassette. He just appreciated the respect that I had shown them in

some of the texts I had written. Pretty much from that point on I have written almost exclusively about ’Ndrangheta heroes romanticizing this life, while ignoring the more disturbing details of their criminal reality. This was easier to do with the old school ’Ndrangheta, who are different than today’s cowboys who absolutely cannot be romanticized. If you read the newspaper and heard anything about all the cocaine trafficking and all the unnecessary murders, then you know what I mean. But ultimately I write songs about Calabria. This is my land. It’s who I am and it’s what I do. Historically, this part of Italy always got seriously fucked, but ultimately it’s a kind of paradise.

Dario,

’Ndranghetista and trafficker in the port of Gioia Tauro

Our first meeting with Dario from the port town of Gioia Tauro had been two days prior in the parking lot of a sporting goods store which, according to Sbano, his crew ran and operated out of. I had also heard lots of intimidating things about the wealth and fearsomeness of the ’Ndrangheta’s new garde both by Sbano and by older bosses from smaller villages, so it was with some surprise when Dario pulled up behind us in his decidedly unostentatious Fiat Panda with his wife in tow. We were greeted warmly by a handsome, soft-spoken, medium-sized Mafiosi, who compulsively played with the cross hanging around his neck. After exchanging pleasantries and working out the details with Sbano he agreed to meet us on our last day to show us around the port and tell us a bit about what he does for a living. Forty-eight hours later we find ourselves in another parking lot in the center of town,

this time, ironically, behind the city’s municipal government building. We spot Dario and follow him through Gioia Tauro, which, as Sbano explains, was built around an ancient Greek necropolis. But I have a hard time paying attention because things have gotten noisy. Every car we pass seems to honk at Dario and most of the pedestrians wave and shout a greeting. Everybody knows Dario and he doesn’t leave town much, if at all. As a higher-up in one of Gioia Tauro’s two major clans, he is literally bound to his turf by ’Ndrangheta code, like Sergio. Bosses never leave town unless they are on the run or in jail and accordingly become threatening fixtures that most people greet out of deference because they are bound to see them every day at the grocery store, the cafe, the pizzeria, the bar. We pull up next to a fish restaurant and Dario leads us inside and introduces the manager as a “friend of mine.” As we’re seated, Sbano tells me that this isn’t the right place to talk about Dario’s business, so I settle in for small talk and one more enormous meal, this time a plate of perfectly al dente, no frills spaghetti and tomato sauce to start and a delectable grilled whole calamari main. And lots and lots of red wine. As Sbano and Dario become increasingly immersed in conversation my mind wanders until I look up to see we have visitors. We shake hands with Al and Enrico who take their seats at the far end of our table and seem to want to talk business. Looking at Sbano, I can see their arrival comes as a surprise. Both men are extremely young, intimidating looking toughs. Al, a prematurely balding, welterweight Italian Mike Tyson leads the conversation, while Enrico, his small, wiry driver and, as I would later find out, muscle, looked around the restaurant nervously, absently running his hand through his long hair. The next twenty minutes were the only time during my stay in Calabria that I felt truly

Above: Dancers drenched with sweat during a tarantella in the Aspromonte.

frightened and I spent most of it alternately staring at Al and Enrico and trying to avoid making eye contact. I understood almost nothing of what Al was insisting to Sbano except the names Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. Eventually, the two got up to leave and shook our hands, which came as a relief. Dario then explained that the duo were also friends of his and were there to ensure our safety, as well as to let us know that they knew who we were and what we did. After lunch we left the restaurant and followed Dario along the beach and back into town, past derelict gas stations and the cracked concrete poverty typical of semi-urban areas in the Mezzogiorno, until we arrived at a small pizzeria owned by his cousin. There, to my initial fright, we were joined again by Al and Enrico for espresso. But this time instead of feeling threatened, the two were all smiles and did their best to make me feel at home, even giving me some fake body blows and pinching my cheek. Dario

explained that wirey Enrico was a picciotto or soldier, which is the lowest wrung in the ’Ndrangheta ladder. This is why he was constantly being asked to do menial tasks, like clean out the ashtray or fetch things from the car. Al and Dario both seemed to relish making Enrico do something and then break his balls about how he was doing it all wrong. Across the street in a grey, unassuming apartment building is where Dario lives with his wife. He invited us to take a look inside. The spotless fourbedroom apartment was lavishly decorated with a wise-guy baroque sensibility, boasting various copies of Dutch Masters and courtly looking things. In the kitchen, a hundred dollar bill with the face of Al Pacino as Tony Montana was framed next to a Montecristo cigar, all perched atop a wine rack. While Sbano set up his camera to take some portraits of Dario, Al whipped out his phone to show me some pictures of his three pit bull terriers. In the meantime, Dario reached into his cupboard

and pulled out some leather gloves and a ridiculously large handgun and placed it on the coffee table to use as a prop for the photo-shoot. As Sbano started snapping away Dario soon realized that the gun wouldn’t do because of its engravings on both sides. And because it looked too intimidating. “It’s a gun for war,” Dario explained. “As opposed to just the everyday shoot out?” I thought to myself. Concluding that it would be much better to use the unmarked guns located in a clan safe house down the street, we ended up driving to a nondescript, three-story apartment building. Inside there was only one door to a single apartment, with lots of space in the building that otherwise seemed to disappear. The small one-bedroom apartment was cold, austerely decorated and smelled of air freshener. On the walls hung a historical calendar of Calabrian saints and a generic picture of a palm tree paradise. Dario explained that this was where they stashed weapons, gangsters on the run and cocaine. He then told Enrico to fetch another pistol for the shoot. A few minutes later Enrico reappears with a gun shaped package wrapped in multiple layers of plastic and newspaper. The weapon inside was fully loaded. Enrico started to empty the clip onto the table with the gun pointed sideways uncomfortably close to my direction. Dario snatched the gun out of his hands and started berating him, then showing him how to do it properly in exaggerated motions with the barrel pointing towards the floor at all times. Enrico hands me a bullet and smiles. I nervously turn it around in my hands for a few seconds and give it back to him. For the next ten minutes Dario poses with the gun for the portraits, after which Enrico is instructed to thoroughly wipe all the prints off of everything we’ve touched. “Enrico’s got priors,” Dario tells me. “He can’t be too careful. Me on the other hand . . . ” he laughs. “What do you want to know?” EB 1/2014 79

La Tarantella Calabrese is out now on Mazza Music/Tonpool.

Dario: Gioa Tauro is the larg-

est commercial port in the Mediterranean and of the circa four million containers that come through here a year, companies pay us a fee of a few euros per container for processing at the port, which in the end is a lot of money. But collecting money is not my job. I am a trafficker, and my clan controls an extremely large amount of the drugs that comes through Gioa Tauro. There are also two other main cities where Europe’s favorite and most expensive powder enters into—Siderno and Vibo Valentia. My other main job in the family is securing weapons. I’m the arms guy. I became inducted into the ’Ndrangheta four years ago and now have a pretty high position as a contabile or treasurer, and this is something I’ve entered into for life. There is no getting out of it. But I don’t find my job stressful. Shipments come in from South America, and I just deal with it. As for the tarantella: yeah, it’s a part of ’Ndrangheta culture, but I think it’s become less important for the new guys than the old guys. But in Gioa Tauro we do things a little differently anyways, and often times have as many as five men dancing together in the circle. The tarantella for us still remains important and when you’re asked to attend or dance, you do as you’re told. The last time I danced was about a year ago when a friend of ours was let out of jail. The fact of the matter is that it’s not so uncommon to not go to jail these days if you’re lucky. 80 EB 1/2014

It’s not like I get up at dawn every morning and commit crimes all day. That’s not how it works. Some days I have very little to do indeed. I am usually working when something isn’t working. I solve problems—figuring out why a shipment is late or why something at the port isn’t functioning. You see, there is an extremely important distinction that I would like to make between the ’Ndrangheta and practicing ’Ndrangheta. The former has to do with being named an honorable man and being able to protect yourself and your family. The latter isn’t just about being in the ’Ndrangheta. It’s about proving yourself constantly. I didn’t get to be where I’m at because of my name, but rather because of what I am committed to doing. Part of that is being extremely generous without asking for anything in return. If someone needs money, you give it to them without thinking twice about it. It is a classic aspect of being a man of honor: helping those in need, helping the poor. These are the seeds you sow to have them one day grow into trees of honor. I don’t speak so much about what I do and that’s exactly what keeps me safe. I like to think I have a pretty good sense of who could and would rat on me. And I’d like to think I’m protected by God, because I pray all the time.

Ciccio,

former ’Ndrangheta member

Despite having left his criminal past long behind, Ciccio was not an easy person to get ahold of. Numerous emails and meetings with mutual acquaintances proved futile in our attempt to speak to the small, heavily tattooed seventy-seven year old native of Cosenza. When we finally reached him on the phone through a friend a week after leaving Calabria, Ciccio was quick to

reminisce about a time when the tarantella and the increasingly obscure and more brutal aspects of its rituals played a central role in his life as an ’Ndranghetista. This happened to be especially true for the now part time baker, whose former status as a camorrista, or clan muscle, placed him in the center of brutal conflicts, which were occasionally carried out in the form of dance. Ciccio: I was eighteen when I first went to jail for robbery and assault, and if I am honest, I had always admired ’Ndranghetisti, or “men of honor” as we often refer to them. I had sought their attention since I was a kid, but growing up poor, the only thing I could impress them with was my courage and ability to adhere to the principle of Omertà, or code of silence. That, I had a lot of, which is why almost immediately when I entered jail I was inducted into the ’Ndrangheta, which of course involved dancing a tarantella held in the prison yard. I got out a year later on good behavior and proudly reentered my small town as a man of honor. But that didn’t last too long and only a few years later I went away again for twelve years, again for assault, but this time it was a bit more serious. By the time I got out in the mid-seventies, things in the ’Ndrangheta had changed. They called it “reforms”, but really it was all about the new garde literally killing off the entire old garde and instituting new goals, which revolved around ruthless killings and drug trafficking. I won’t say there wasn’t murder back in my day, but at the time, people warned you before you got killed so you had time to escape. But that was then. Anyhow, my boss went along with the changes, but I didn’t see the honor in it so I did something pretty uncommon: I asked to be released from my duties in the organization. He granted this, which happens extremely seldomly, and since then I have been degraded to the status of “contrasto onorato” and no longer have contact with my old clan. But I still have my

’Ndrangheta tattoos, which I am proud of and which are symbols of humility and pain and badges of honor. All of mine were done in prison by other Mafiosi. The enormous butterfly on my back represents freedom and its size is directly related to the length of my time spent on the inside. The snake is a symbol of my former status as a camorrista, and represents the fact that I can bite without warning. Which brings me to the tarantella. For the ’Ndrangheta it’s much, much more than a dance: it’s our training ground and reflects so many aspects of our world. The circle of men represents the territory of our crew. The dance master is the boss, of course, and participants are there to show who can dance the longest and who has the fastest moves—just like in real life. For us, violence is as much a part of tarantella as it is part of the world of the mafia, and my skills in knife fighting, which I learned in jail, have come in handy on more than a few occasions. You see, in tarantella you employ the same tricks: in order to stay as far away from you opponent’s knife as possible you circle each other counterclockwise, but always face to face. This way you also protect your own liver. My most serious knife attack was actually planned beforehand by my boss. I cut a guy’s face and only afterwards found out that he was a boss from Sicily. My capo invited the annoying young don to the dance because he wanted to teach him a lesson. At the time I remember thinking, “I guess Sicilians don’t dance tarantella as well as us Calabrese.” But later on, and for the next twenty odd years, I worried he was going to seek revenge. Ultimately, the tarantella is about entering a trance, an animalistic state. This is when you move instinctively, automatically, with speed and precision; looking, judging and reacting all happen in a single movement. This is when you have no fear, come what may. It’s the same state of mind a Mafiosi achieves when he’s planning or carrying out something evil. ~

WANDERLUST

72 Hours in

Rio de Janeiro Interviews: Max Dax AND Michael Lutz / PHotos: luci lux

The night-time view from favela Vidigal onto Leblon, Ipanema and Arpoador beaches. Vidigal was one of the first favelas in Rio to be violently â&#x20AC;&#x153;pacifiedâ&#x20AC;? by military police.

Brazil today is a country divided. And nowhere is this division more palpable than in the cultural capital Rio de Janeiro. There, in the hilly tropic idyll, rich and poor live side by side. They share the same beaches, dance to the same rhythms, and are watched over by the same monolithic Christ the Redeemer. But they live drastically different lives. Since being awarded this year’s World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, the appalling differences between rich and poor and extremely wasteful spending on public projects have sparked violent mass protests all across the country. Here, Rio and Brazil’s preeminent cultural ambassadors explain the current state of affairs in their own words. Thursday, 8 p.m. A conversation in Leblon with Arto Lindsay and Caetano Veloso about poetry and infinity. Caetano Veloso: The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote in a poem: “An East, east of the East”, where he describes his longing for and the promises and riches of new and exotic lands. In that sense, to me, Brazil is a West, west of the West. Even though Fernando Pessoa is not from Brazil, his poetry—and poetry

in general—is a strong force in this country. It’s one of the things I like about Brazil because poetry can actually be a very strong tool to project visions of the future. With poetry you can be ambitious about discussing a new role of Brazil. Currently, Brazil is a wreck. Brazil doesn’t work. Actually it’s never worked. Everybody knows that. But it has promise and the possibilities that one can imagine are fantastic. Suffice to say, the same applies especially to Rio de Janeiro as it represents all the good and bad of Brazil to the rest of the world. Arto Lindsay: Even to itself. Rio represents Brazil to Brazilians. The city formulates a kind of ideal of how to live.

Right: This is the view from the living room in Caetano Veloso’s house on Leblon Beach. Veloso says he cannot live without feeling the movement of the ocean. 84 EB 1/2014

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CV: But because Brazil is a failure, it also provides obvious opportunities to create something new. AL: I think that Brazil is capable of catching and nurturing the imagination of the world, like the United States. Of course, the U.S. is brutal, imperialistic, destructive, as you know, oppressive, racist and exploitative. But at the same time it has represented all these incredible ideals of freedom to the world. And it spread these ideas. Brazil being a huge country also means it’s empty. It’s a kind of basin of possibilities. CV: I have the impression that you are a little more optimistic than I am about those dreams. Maybe it’s because you’re American and I’m Brazilian. Because all the bad things you say about the United States, they all could be said about Brazil. Only the success is missing. My dream is that we could catch the opportunity to create something new, free from being successful in those old ways. AL: That should be possible. Because Brazil is different. Rio is different. It’s tropical. CV: When I was young, we didn’t even believe in the world outside of Brazil. We lived mostly looking and thinking inside of Brazil, not outside. The world outside was not real. Now it’s more real as lots of Brazilians have immigrated, especially to Europe and the United States. So today we have the experience of the reality of the outside world that was missing in the past. AL: Unlike me, you were even forced to leave Brazil and to look at your country from exile. I wonder how that informed your thinking. CV: The military government was like a nightmare for us. When I was forced to leave I was young. I lived in London for two and a half years in exile, and it was something oddly Brazilian that happened to me abroad: I started to miss the language. I remember when I came back after my exile, I would always change the radio station if they would play an English song. I’d try to find a Brazilian song instead, for the sake of the Portuguese language. I was tired of Europe and its culture. AL: The decade when I was just beginning to know the world, you were already creating it. You

are ten years older than I am. It makes a huge difference what you are referencing when you grow up. CV: I totally agree. When I was a teenager in the fifties, rock and roll wasn’t respected the way it was in the second half of the sixties. That change only happened because of The Beatles and because of the young British people who believed that American rock and roll could and should be taken seriously. AL: Speaking of change: I would like to know if you consciously tried to change the shape of Brazilian music. CV: It was a very conscious thing for us to make popular music. We knew that it had lots of power. We were a group of people that deliberately wanted to change Brazilian music. AL: What you are saying is totally important—Bob Dylan for instance didn’t want to change American music. CV: Didn’t he? AL: No, not deliberately. He was trying to do a lot of things but not that. People forget how folk music was contemporary with bossa nova and how at first it was all about historical excavation. The American folk movement was about finding and unearthing old blues and folk songs. It wasn’t about deliberately changing music like the Tropicália movement in Brazil. In your book Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, you describe how poetry became part of the program within Tropicália. CV: Yes, we were discovering the program while we were doing things. And in the process we became more and more conscious of what we wanted. We discussed these things, and I thought a lot during that period. AL: Who were some of the people that you discussed these things the most with at that time? CV: First of all with Gilberto Gil, who became Brazil’s minister of culture in 2003. But I discussed things with a lot of poet friends of mine, especially the concrete poets from São Paulo who were true experimentalists. They were as interested in the Tropicália movement as I was stunned by their

poetry. I had many discussions with Augusto de Campos, one of the leading concrete poets from São Paulo, who sensed something in my music even before Tropicália started. He sensed that we would change something and that we were coming from the world of poetry as well. Intensely talking to them definitively influenced the whole movement. The other people we would discuss with were mostly from the “serious” classical avantgarde field of music. They started to write arrangements for our songs, and we’d discuss how we could use these and what was going on in the international and in the Brazilian music scene. All the things we did were results of these discussions. All these encounters made us more and more aware of what we were doing. Everything was born out of a need. But we also started to analyze our situation. Bossa nova jumpstarted Brazilian music onto a very high level, because it was very sophisticated and done by very musical and intelligent people who were all still very young when it happened in the fifties. I was seventeen then and I was amazed by what the bossa nova people were doing. So I realized immediately that the creation of popular music in Brazil was a very important thing that should be taken very seriously. AL: It was the heyday of European cinema as well. Films like À bout de souffle premiered in Brazil at that time. CV: Godard especially was very important for me because he was everything that pop art meant. I got to know Andy Warhol through Godard. His cinema was the beginning of the new way of understanding American mythology, mostly from Hollywood, but also other aspects, such as music. It was completely different to see a Hitchcock movie before and after Godard and Truffaut. They changed our perspective on these things. And as I said, I was very young. I was touched and I understood it quickly. And then I went to the São Paulo Biennial when I was already engaged with the Tropicália movement in 1967. The pop painters from the United States were presented in Brazil for the first time. I was amazed because everything

Above: In the 2000s, MC Gringo, aka Bernhard Hendrik Hermann Weber Ramos de Lacerda, became one of the most recognizable faces of baile funk—despite (or perhaps because of) being a “gringo” from Germany. On p. 92 he describes the role the various samba schools play in promoting the social cohesiveness of Rio de Janeiro.

Opposite page: At 71, Caetano Veloso is Brazil’s most influential contemporary songwriter and singer. One of the main figures in the Tropicália movement with Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé and Os Mutantes, Veloso was among the first to open Brazilian music towards American and British pop, psychedelia and rock à la The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. Having studied Sartre and Heidegger at the University of Bahia, Veloso also used his popularity to openly discuss philosophical and socialist ideas. As a result, he was forced in 1969 into exile by the then military government. His time spent in London with fellow artist Gilberto Gil would permanently alter both Brazilian and British music. EB 1/2014 87

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I had gotten from Godard movies and from Godard’s and Truffaut’s texts about American movies—I found the roots of these perspectives in these paintings. I didn’t know the pop artists before then. I learned about this special consciousness. Concerning myself with the diverse ideas that drove the pop artists as well as the poets surely shaped my own understanding of what pop music should be all about. AL: I have some ideas about why Brazilian popular songs are so filled with poetry or are so close to poetry. Brazil was an oral culture until the middle of the twentieth century. So, language was very alive, language was spoken, it changed constantly, was played with and examined in a different way than if it had been mainly a written language. Another thing is the particular heritage of the Provençal language, an ancestor of Portuguese. In a country where most people don’t read, the people who do read are in the position to spread their point of view. All these things contribute in some way to why the language in Brazilian music is so charged and powerful. I guess these ideas are a result of constantly thinking about the difference between Americans and Brazilians. In Brazilian songs— from bossa nova to the songs that were influenced by concrete poetry—there is a kind of closeness between the words and what they are referring to. You know, the sea, the sunset, the beach are not only common topics in the songs, they somehow seem to constitute the song. And concrete poetry takes this one step further by concentrating on the shape and sound of the words. In American music it is almost as if you want to escape from language. In soul music made by black Americans singing in English, the intervals sometimes don’t fit the words and there is so much singing beyond the words. A growl, a scream, a yell often follows an otherwise simple line such as “I love you baby—aaarrgh!” You always want to go beyond the literal word. Talking about the “thingness” of words—how important is it to live near the ocean? CV: I think it’s good to feel the motion of the ocean. When I

Left: Sprawling across numerous hills, Complexo de Alemão is one of the largest favelas in Rio. A cable car service connects the different valleys of the large semi-legal shantytown.

Above: Wolfram Lange has been living in Rio de Janeiro for ten years. Aside from working for various research and counseling projects, he is also currently writing his PhD on social inequality within Rio’s urban environment. In his spare time he runs the music blog soundgoods.net and drums in various samba schools and carnival bands (see p. 92).

Above: Gundo Rial y Costas is an anthropologist who wrote his dissertation on favelas in Rio de Janeiro. He is currently working on a human geography research project on the same topic (see p. 92). EB 1/2014 89

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came back from my forced exile in London, I went to Bahia and stayed there for three years. Only then I wanted to move to São Paulo, but my wife didn’t want to. She found Rio de Janeiro more pleasant. So we came to Rio even though I would have loved to experience the contrast at that time. If I had gone to São Paulo then, everything would have worked out differently, because the sea is powerful. Most of the Brazilian cities were founded and grew during the colonization of the country. The cities were built along the coast. All these various cities have their own tonality and their own spirit, but they have this one thing in common: the ocean. They sense the infinite. If you don’t have that you feel kind of trapped in the city. That’s what most people feel deep in their hearts in cities like Belo Horizonte, Brasília or São Paulo that are not on the coast. AL: In Rio the beaches are numbered. Certain sectors of the beach over the years were always connected to certain people. CV: In 1972 when I came back from exile, Posto 9 was the “in” area of the beach. The hippieish people or whatever you want to call them would gather there. But the real “in” place was called “Gal’s dune”, as in Gal Costa’s dune, right across the street from where she lived. It was the place where people would go to get high. That’s why it was also called the “high dunes.” Nowadays it’s the gay part of the beach. In fact, the bossa nova people didn’t go to the beach much. João Gilberto didn't, nor did Carlos Lyra. Tom Jobim told me that when he was young he would often go to Leblon. AL: Leblon was still in the countryside at that time. Today it’s a concrete jungle. CV: It was just dunes and forest and farms. And he liked it. But when he started working he was rarely seen on the beach. Unlike me, the bossa nova people were not beach people. I lived in Arpoador near Posto 8 for a while. I would go to the beach alone. The beach was filled with lots of different people, also people from the favelas. They would all come down to the beach. But there were also surfers—blond guys with their surfboards and with

nice white girls, and some musicians as well as people from the theater scene. Everything was mixed at Arpoador. I remember talking to a black girl from the favela. We were looking at the Pedra do Arpoador, and she said: “That’s my rock.” And I thought it was touching that this favela girl was naturally and full-heartedly calling this postcard view of Rio her rock, because she had spent her life there. This is so different from São Paulo where the favelas are far away from the city center and the postcard views. In Rio, the people just come down from the favela to spend the day—or their life—on the beach. In that sense, the most important spots in the city really belong to everybody. AL: And vice-versa. Samba and the samba schools originate from the favelas, and samba is the music that functions like an amalgam to Brazil. CV: And all the people are proud of it. It’s the other way round, but again, people share what they think is theirs. In São Paulo there is no way that people could mix on the beaches like they do in Rio. Take Mano Brown of the Racionais MC’s for instance. He’s the most prominent rapper from Brazil and he lives in São Paulo, but the favela he originates from is far from the center and there is nothing he could call his own when it comes to his city. It’s absurd, as he represents São Paulo to the Brazilians. In Rio, people feel that they walk on the streets of a city they own. It’s a completely different mindset. AL: Did you take notice of the other big musical style that originated from the favelas—baile funk? CV: I used to frequently visit the favela Mangueira during the period when baile funk was growing. I went there very often to be at the baile funk parties where I would also see many heavily armed young people with big handguns and even AK-47s. It’s strange, but after a certain time seeing all these very young guys with machine guns became totally normal. AL: Did you ever feel frightened or unsafe in the presence of these people? CV: I always felt totally safe because I would always enter

the favelas with friends of mine who lived there. I never went alone. My friends would introduce me to these armed people and their bosses and from that moment on I was under protection. You know, I met some of the drug traffickers in some of the favelas and talked to them. Some of them actually became very famous later on because of their violent style. In fact, I once even met Elias Pereira da Silva, who became notoriously famous as drug baron Elias Maluco. But my most memorable experience in the favelas was meeting some of the old samba people together with Gilberto Gil. We would go to favela Mangueira and talk to these masters of samba for entire nights. And once you are there you’d talk also to the traffickers too. The samba people and the drug traffickers are the flip sides of the same culture. It doesn’t make sense to only talk to representatives of only one part of society. AL: The traffickers were actually the unofficial mayors of the favelas. They decided what would happen and they would mediate disputes. CV: I once read the book Brazil: Land of the Future by Stefan Zweig that he’d written in the late thirties. The book is brilliant, but nobody reads it. It is ridiculed for its title. Brazilians can’t stand the idea that someone else could see their country’s future in an optimistic way. AL: Do you have an explanation for this? CV: I’d say: They don’t want to take responsibility. If you think that you are crap, that you are shit and that you are nothing, then life is easy. This allows you to hate the Americans because you can point your finger at them and say: They are successful. The lament is the prototypical Latin American approach to responsibility. But I don’t identify with it. I still think that very good and very important things could be done by us. I don’t like to see myself as a loser and to grow resentful of people who do things and change things. Even the failures must be taken as a sign of opportunity. We should not be victors according to the values of the past. That’s at least the way I think.

Opposite page: Cristina Ruiz-Kellersmann is a Rio-born journalist and a promoter of Brazilian music: “The Cariocas have developed a relaxed attitude toward mismanagement and government failings. Why make a fuss when you can go to the beach? You don’t even have to arrange to meet someone since you always meet the people you wanted to see anyway in “your” Posto. For generations, certain professions, social classes, or circles of friends have been meeting in the exact same spot. No social network, not even mobile phones, can be a substitute for the intensity of those beach encounters. It’s just like in New York, where for decades the art scene used to meet only in southern Manhattan. You can get by well in Rio if you keep to the South Zone where the big beaches are located. Rio’s beach life is the heart of the city, and it’s why I love it here to bits. I was born here, have practically been raised on the beach, and I’m happy every day that, even though everything is constantly changing, the beach has stayed the same. The beach is the most democratic place in Rio as millionaires and prostitutes, artists, musicians, students, football stars, soap opera actresses and homeless people lounge next to each other, towel to towel, without one knowing anything about the other. That’s why the beach is the epitome of glamour.” EB 1/2014 91

Thursday, 11 p.m. Visiting the favela Vidigal together with Wolfram Lange and Gundo Rial y Costas. Above: Hermano Vianna is an ethnomusicologist, Brazilian music television producer and author of the famous book The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. He wrote his PhD on baile funk and unwittingly altered the course of music history when he donated a drum machine to DJ Marlboro, one of the genre’s first and most well known artists. On one of Marlboro’s albums a dedication to Vianna reads “To Hermano—who gave the rifle to the Indian chief.”

Right: Deep beneath the lively routine of Ipanema Beach, a 390-foot drill produced by the German company Herrenknecht works its way through Rio’s complex geology. A new subway line is planned to begin service here in 2016, when the city will host the Summer Olympics. This would significantly ease the immense traffic problems that currently plague the sprawling, 6 millionperson metropolis. 92 EB 1/2014

Gundo Rial y Costas: Only a certain kind of adventurer and tourist actually dares to enter the favelas, and none of them is a Carioca—a Rio native. Depending on who you talk to, people emphasize either the romantic or the stigmatizing aspect of the favelas. They speak enthusiastically about magnificent micro-architectures and the friendly social interaction. Or they talk about violence and the drug trade, ugly people and stinking garbage in the favelas. Occasionally, they’ll also mention the violence of paramilitary elite troops whose arbitrary terrorism spreads fear throughout the settlements. Wolfram Lange: The favelas are places of extremes. Extreme beauty and extreme poverty lie very close together. GC: So it comes as no surprise that painters, architects, fashion designers and movie directors over the decades have frequently drawn their inspiration from the favelas. Most people know the 1959 film Orfeu Negro by Marcel Camus and City of God by Fernando Meirelles, but Rio Zona Norte by Nelson Peireira dos Santos and Cinco vezes Favela are also important. These films show the everyday life and the social networks in and outside of the favela. The reality though is ambivalent. Since the eighties the Brazilian government has been trying to reintegrate the favelas into the city by means of various pacification strategies. Sometimes new sewer systems are financed, but no schools or hospitals for the inhabitants are ever built. At the same time gentrification progressively forces the poor to move to even cheaper housing further away. The motivation for this is obvious: With the upcoming soccer World Cup and Olympic Games, Brazil has two mega events within the next two years on their hands, effectively incapacitating the nation financially. WL: To this day favela resi-

dents are constantly being relocated against their will, while other favelas are being “pacified”. The only thing the Cariocas can appreciate about the favelas is how they look by night . . . from a distance. That’s when the favelas, nestled against the mountains, twinkle like diamonds catching the moonlight. When you look onto the city from up there, the view is spectacular—the beaches, the bay and the asphalt city’s sea of lights. GC: Many trends start out in the favelas, a lot of things become hot there first. The newest music reliably originates there. The favelas act as seismographs of culture. The newspaper Globo recently claimed that there are more than one thousand foreigners living in Alto Vidigal alone, a favela above Ipanema. Should this be true, we will soon be facing turbo-gentrification. WL: The only times it’s dangerous in the favelas are when either a rival gang enters the territory, or during a police raid. Interestingly, the number of muggings and thefts in some favelas has increased significantly since the military police has disarmed and banished various gangs. Because without the gangs, there is an important balancing, peace-keeping social element missing—one which is an accepted authority within the settlements.

Friday, 10:30 a.m. Breakfast with Hermano Vianna at the heavily secured Leblon mall. The origin of funk carioca or baile funk, as Daniel Haaksman popularized it, goes back to the late eighties. Back then, there was no original dance music scene in the favelas of Rio. DJs would fly to New York or Miami to get the newest Miami Bass productions on vinyl and carefully scratch away the labels so that other DJs couldn’t trace the music. In the nineties, this started to change. In the beginning, baile funk was a middle class phenomenon. In Rio’s North Zone, DJs would organize huge parties in big clubs and many people from the favelas came

and joined the dance. It all changed when they moved from the clubs to the beaches and started to play the music there. It was at a time when gangs from the favelas, almost like flash mobs nowadays, might suddenly appear at Copacabana or Ipanema to frighten and rob dozens of tourists within only a couple of minutes. The police did not see the difference between this and the baile funk beach parties that also attracted a lot of favela youth and the criminal raids. Actually these criminal flash mobs were never as dangerous as the media paranoia made them out to be. But as a result, funk parties were forbidden on the beaches and forced to withdraw and eventually blossom in the favelas where the police didn’t care what happened. Baile funk got huge in the favelas where it became the soundtrack to the so-called “pacifications” that made it possible for foreigners to set foot for the first time in the favelas that previously had been too dangerous. It was a really strange situation: people would have to pass road blocks set up by the riot police to get to the parties, only to be welcomed there by heavily armed security guards from the drug dealers who were in command of the baile funks. Suffice to say that during that time a lot of so-called proibidões emerged—funk tunes that would praise the body counts and exploits of notorious drug lords. After all, funk carioca really is a creation of the state. It found its codes and its slang because all the now famous producers, MCs and DJs were forced to develop the beats and the style in the favelas. And why not? After samba, MPB and bossa nova, baile funk is the most successful music that ever emerged from Brazil. And it’s the only music in decades to originate from Rio.

Friday, 3 p.m. Lunch and Antarctica Pilsen with MC Gringo at home in the favela Morro dos Cabritos. Unlike baile funk, samba is not about being explicit—praising of the local drug lord or the female ass—but rather about flirt and suggestion. So in a way it’s about the

EB 1/2014 93

Above: Renata Lucas is one of the most influential contemporary Brazilian artists. Based in São Paulo she describes Rio as a perfect retreat to develop ideas, but not to get things done.

Above: As a founding member of activist group Mídia Ninja, Felipe Altenfelder became famous amongst Brazil’s bloggers for reporting live from last year’s numerous riots. We met him on Arpoador Beach during the Ninja’s annual gathering.

last little secrets inherent to everyone and everything. The samba schools all over Rio, especially the legendary Estação Primeira de Mangueira in Favela Mangueira, form a connecting and stabilizing element within the social fabric of the population. For more than a few people their Samba school is more important than their soccer club. And just like in soccer, in Samba there are seasonal cycles, leagues and competitions. The first league, the Grupo Especial, consists of eleven competing samba schools. Even though the samba season officially begins on day one after Carnival, given the general hangover, it usually takes a month until anything happens. In March, the schools start designing costumes, dance moves, musical themes, and decorations, according to the overall theme that has been determined. Preparations take all year, and in November they finally start tailoring their elaborate get-ups. The huge floats are decorated, and most importantly, the batteria—the percussion at the heart of every Samba parade—is meticulously worked out. Everything culminates in a ninetyminute show, which premieres at the competition and is judged in various categories by an impartial jury. The live voting is the multimedia event of the year, and the craziest scenes take place in the streets of the city. When after two intense and highly emotional days of competitions the winning school is finally determined, Rio de Janeiro finds itself in a state of mass ecstasy equal only to the soccer World Cup finals.

Friday, 7 p.m. Visiting Renata Lucas in her studio in Santa Teresa. Opposite page: Arto Lindsay lives in Rio and is a frequent contributor to Electronic Beats. Known amongst other things for his radical deconstructions of bossa nova and pop music, his latest album, Encyclopedia of Arto, is scheduled to be released this year. 94 EB 1/2014

Brazil is amazing in the sense that it is a tropical country, and Rio is a tropical city. Sometimes I travel abroad and come back and there are nests of insects in my apartment. You really can feel that the city belongs to nature. In fact, I love the idea that if you’d abandon Rio, in very little time it will just be a jungle again. You can literally sense that nothing is definite here. This corresponds to the architecture, too. In Europe

everything was constructed to last, everything is “completed”, and Berlin is just on its way. As an artist, I am very interested in this transition, and a lot of my works deal with architecture and what happens if you twist urban details. São Paulo is inspiring as it has a far stronger dynamic of demolition and reconstruction than Rio. There you’ll never have a fixed cityscape and you don’t even have places where you’ve been all your life. The bar you used to go to became a Laundromat before it eventually ended up as a parking lot. That’s why I always say: In São Paulo you get things done, in Rio you wait and contemplate. It’s very probable that you’ll have a brilliant idea in Rio, but you’ll better realize it in São Paulo. In part this is because all these clichés about Brazil—the beautiful women on the beach, the samba culture, the great sunsets—apply to Rio, whereas in São Paulo everything is grey and that basically pushes you to be productive. Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have a relaxing time, but when you really want to work you are dependent on people who do what they say. The prototypical Carioca saying would be: “Call me tomorrow!”—a tomorrow, I should add, that will never materialize. For all the people who, like me, prefer to live in São Paulo, Rio then naturally becomes your refuge during vacation. I am not surprised at all that everybody who comes to the annual art fair in São Paulo in April or to the Biennale in September flies to Rio afterwards to relax and to party. In that sense it’s a great thing that in this enormously big country, Rio and São Paulo are only forty-five flight minutes apart.

Saturday, 4 p.m. Felipe Altenfelder congregates with other Mídia Ninja at Arpoador Beach. In 2003, the then minister of culture Gilberto Gil formulated the great idea of a “Deep Brazil”: taking the focus off of Rio de Janeiro

and São Paulo as the sole cultural centers and involving each and every citizen of this vast country. It made us realize that everything that was already happening just lacked visibility, so we started the Mídia Ninja movement to use the web as a platform to promote independent cultural exchange. Round about 2011, we were becoming a social movement of sorts. By then we were already occupying spaces all over Brazil, discussing and suggesting new ways of using money and housing and had gathered a network of journalists and social activists whose causes we helped promote. While our generation has always been inspired by free media, a new energy rose in our group, drawn from the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and similiar movements happening at that time. The idea was that everyone can be a Ninja when they need to be: a philosophy of free journalism and crowdsourcing. We wanted to let people know that the mass media does not have a monopoly on truth—and by creating our network the credibility of state controlled TV stations and news outlets started showing cracks. The political consciousness of our country is growing. Last year, our efforts resulted in the streets becoming a democratic space for the first time. The people were fed up with being held for fools—and the government got nervous. The police lost their cool, and their violent reaction propelled the attention of the protests to an even higher, international level. This was also due to Ninjas reporting live from the epicenters of the riots, thus streaming live videos that showed police brutality without editing. Having said that, it’s important to stress that the initial idea was not an anti-government one. Our former president Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva took forty million people above the poverty line, which is amazing. We are not talking about a few hundred Brazlian real more a month: It’s about the self-esteem, education and critical reflection of the next generation of young Brazilians. Our state has to take better care

EB 1/2014 95

Above: Sixty-five yearold Paulo “Caju” Cézar is one of Brazil’s greatest heroes and a model for the “Brasilian Dream”. Growing up in one of Rio de Janeiro’s many favelas, the footballer was part of the seleçao that won the World Cup in Mexico 1970. We met Caju for dinner in the Gavea district at the home of Brazil’s leading bossa nova reformer, Vinicius Cantuária.

of its citizens’ human rights, cultural possibilities, the environment, the access to independent communication and of course drug policies. The demonstrations took place to pressure the government, to remind them that there is still a long way to go. To say: “We want more!”

Saturday, 8 p.m. Paulo Cézar gets angry with the Brazilian government over dinner at the house of singer Vinicius Cantuária. This year could and should have been a triumph for Brazil. But there is no reason to celebrate. The World Cup will direct the world’s attention to our country, of course. But if you want to know my honest opinion, I think that Brazil has missed a great opportu-

96 EB 1/2014

nity to present itself as a progressive country to the world. This is especially embarrassing as Brazil for many still is one of the world’s leading football nations. The way the government has spent insane amounts of money to build the most modern stadiums in the world while ignoring the country’s serious problems—corruption, failing healthcare and fucked up education. My position is crystal clear in this regard. I was born and raised in a favela. I know the bad sides of the system, I know how it is when you are refused entry to a school or to university just because you’re from a poor family. You know, keeping the prices for public transport low would have been a signal for the future, but instead they raise the prices, as well as for gas and food. The recent violent riots have shown the amount of anger that the poor have accumulated and

you don’t need a weatherman to know that everything will get way worse during the tournament, or on the road to the Olympics here in 2016. The government is afraid already. Not since the military government has the country seen such an outburst of violence against the state. And, I repeat myself, it will get so much worse. The absurd thing here is that football in the past has more than once successfully served as a catalyst to channel people’s aggressions into something positive. Instead, the stage that has been set up to celebrate football will for sure be used to televise an attempted revolution on the streets. And the worst thing is the people cannot even afford to attend the matches because the ticket prices are ridiculously high. They are more expensive than Wimbledon. FIFA has sacrificed the democratic idea behind the game: the idea that football is for everybody. Take for instance the refurbished Maracanã stadium in Rio that used to have a capacity of 200,000 for general admission. Now it seats barely 75,000 fans. They turned a people’s sport into something elite. Even normal league games are insanely overpriced. You pay fifty or more real for a normal ticket, which is a lot if you compare it to the minimum income of 724 real per month. If you attend a normal game nowadays you will be sitting in an almost empty stadium. And there’s another reason why Brazilian football is currently going down: the standard is watered-down. European clubs hires all the good Brazilian players. Almost the same can be said about the national team, the seleçao: under national coach Luiz Felipe Scolari, the team is playing a particularly unattractive, almost German style. There is no finesse in the Brazilian game anymore. It’s become athletic instead of playful, all forseeable long passes and tall attackers trying to hammer the ball in the net. Don’t get me wrong: the Germans nowadays, they play like Brazil used to play. They probably just need a bit more luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if Germany wins the World Cup in Brazil. ~

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Editor’s note

Slices now part of Electronic Beats TV Max Dax: To what extent is

Electronic Beats TV the result of the disappearance of physical media? Romi Agel: The Internet moves and reshapes our lives with increasing speed—first and foremost in regards to how we consume information. Every new technological standard rewrites our digital perception and behavior. In music, technical progress has always had a major influence on scenes and genres. In some cases, as in techno or punk, it has been one of the primary reasons for their creation. And while we used to be extremely dependent on the DVD like everyone else producing independent TV, we’re now discussing the perfect length for a feature to be streamed on an iPhone: LTE broadcast speed is making new formats and channels possible right now. MD: And you see this as one

of the many steps towards global interconnectedness?

98 EB 1/2014

In its ninth year, the Electronic Beats DVD magazine series Slices has finally read the postings on the wall. Longtime program heads Holger Wick and Romi Agel have taken the decreasing importance of physical media as an incentive to rewrite the concept of independent music television: the newly named Electronic Beats TV will air weekly on electronicbeats.net starting March 4, 2014. We talked to the duo about creating quality, archiveworthy music television in times of LTE, seven-second comedy and watching movies on your phone. Photo: minus

Holger Wick: Physical distribu-

tion has always been problematic in some ways. The list of record stores—the main source of our circulation—is thinning out month to month. To lazily shift to distributing our DVDs to outlets like boutiques or clubs would have never been a satisfactory option for any of those involved in Slices, be it as a producer or fan. Another factor for the change was that we’ve been filming our features in HD for five years now, even though the DVD, a medium that was always viewed as transitory anyhow, only shows PAL-Quality. So to do our show one hundred percent online was a logical consequence.

MD: We now have the possibil-

ity of online HDTV on-demand. Is television of the future all about finding innovative ideas specifically for this format?

Romi Agel: That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. An important

aspect of on-demand TV is that archived material is much easier to access. In a dynamic archive like YouTube, you can easily connect two content-related features, even if they were filmed years apart. What we’re talking about is a living, rapidly expanding chronicle: every interview or concert we record becomes an artifact of its time. If you look through our channel’s history, you’ll find plenty of footage of clubs that don’t exist anymore and conversations with artists speaking with remarkable candidness very shortly before they became superstars. MD: By making the transition from

Slices to Electronic Beats TV, it’s also much easier for viewers to stay directly connected to you. What’s in store for them next?

Holger Wick: One of the bigger

changes we’ve made is that we now have a host, Matt Digby, moderating the show. He walks you through the features and shares a little extra information on the topics. While we will make some modifications and are introducing a few new categories, we still pride ourselves on not jumping on every bandwagon. We choose our featured artists based on their stories, personalities and music—not because they’re releasing a record at the time. We will continue to cater to our viewers’ high standards. ~

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