Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 2/2014

­Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 38 · SUMMER 2014

“Society waits for nobody” MØ

Wayne Shorter François K Inga Copeland RZA

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EDITORIAL

“You stick to formulas without becoming formulaic”

Max Dax: Hans Ulrich, you have

just released an impressive new book called Ways of Curating. In it, you write about the importance of rituals in your life, dedicating a whole chapter to taking the night train through Europe to meet as many artists as possible. You also elaborate on the importance of always confronting these artists with other fields of interest such as architecture, music, and, most importantly, poetry. For me, making magazines is the equivalent, not just because it means doing something on a regular basis.

Rather, in Electronic Beats we exclusively publish interviews and monologues that are based on real conversations. The ritual for us is talking to people and transforming these exchanges into a larger discussion every three months.

By the way, I also try to take the night train as often as possible.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: My book is also based on conversations. I’ve always had them with artists and I have always been interested in the question of how to turn them into books. Studs Terkel is one of the great masters of conversation. He recorded more than 10,000 hours in his life and taught me how to bring the exchanges into book form.

Rituals are important because

Dear Readers, In this issue, risktaking—be it in the form of harmonic and rhythmic deconstructions of pop music or fighting for gay rights in less than hospitable surroundings—was a central topic of conversation amongst artists, musicians and curators whose work is more than just a way to make a living.

In sunny Malibu I was challenged by none other than Wu-Tang chief RZA to a game of chess—and lost bad.

Also in Los Angeles, legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter described to me his work in a single sentence of provocation: “Jazz means: I dare you.”

In New York, Fatima Al Qadiri and Kenneth Goldsmith discussed the risks and intellectual rewards of copyright infringement.

Read on, we dare you.

Sincerely, Max Dax

they give structure to life: I go jogging every morning at 6 a.m. in the park, and I used to have a coffee drinking ritual, but I had to quit that. Oh, and I have the ritual of buying a book every day.

MD: In your book you outline

that not only curating but also the way people visit exhibitions has evolved over the decades.

HUO: You can say that going to the museum is a twentieth and twenty-first century ritual. More and more people go and it’s a very different ritual than going to the theater or attending a music performance where basically you sit in a chair in front of the stage.

Millions of people go to museums, but it is always an individual experience. Check out the texts

by German scholar Dorothea von Hantelmann about it.

MD: Like an exhibition, I think you

can actually draw a comparison between a museum visit and buying a magazine. Unlike a book, a magazine is current for only a couple of weeks. After that, the next issue replaces the previous one, which, over night, becomes a thing of the past. The great thrill therefore is figuring out how to imbue it with some kind of sustainability so people won’t throw your magazine

in the trash after reading it. This means that you have to make the magazine a real document of its time, because only then willl it have a lasting relevance. One of the ritualistic parts of making a magazine is that you always have to think in the same structures, the same columns, the same layout. And yet still you try to find new formats that could function with every new issue. Essentially, you stick to formulas without becoming formulaic.

HUO: Did you know the Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, who do Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman are also doing the corporate magazine for COS? It’s a great magazine and I read every issue cover to cover.

MD: I love the COS Magazine because it seeks to redefine the concept of “branded journalism”. I think that Gert Jonkers, with whom we did an extensive interview together with Penny Martin from The Gentlewoman in our Fall 2011 issue, has understood that we should see corporate publishing as a chance to make exceptional magazines. People like Jonkers are changing the world of publishing for the better, because they understand the ritual of producing a magazine like curating an exhibition. ~

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WELTANSCHAUUNG

“Science for a Better Life”1, “Make.Believe”2, “Connecting People”3, “Turn on Tomorrow”4—the track titles on Diamond Version’s stellar new LP CI (Mute) certainly have a familiar ring to them. But are Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender’s compositions really a critique of corporate culture or more a piss take? Did it still count as subversive when the two co-founders of avant-garde electronic imprint Raster-Noton played the Electronic Beats Festival in Prague this past March? It’s hard to say. Check out Stroboscopic Artefacts chief Lucy’s review of CI in this issue’s Recommendations section for some answers. Photo: Tomáš Martinek Bayer 2Sony 3Nokia 4Samsung

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London-based newcomers Jungle powered through their show at the recent Electronic Beats Festival in Bratislava this past April. The group surrounding frontmen T (center, left) and J (center, right) have emerged from a cloud of mystery regarding their identity—one that wasn’t entirely uncontroversial. In their videos and early press shots, the group used black models and dancers to be the face of their sound, but the two bandleaders looked pretty white onstage . . . not that the music sounded any different. Photo: Eduard Meltzer EB 2/2014 7

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Bathed in a blue glow, Dan Snaith, took to the stage in Bratislava as Daphni following an impressive performance by friend Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. Snaith’s eclectic DJ set included lots of sudden changes and a steep developmental arc, with entries and transitions both oblique and calculated—in other words: classic Daphni. Photo: Geoff Fibula EB 2/2014 9

It’s not hard to see how much of Warsaw has been rebuilt over the past seventy years and today, amidst a blooming cultural environment, a virulent form of turbo capitalism has real estate developers eager to capitalize on the city’s vast amount of empty space—large chunks of which can be found not far from the street ul. Złota pictured here. In this issue’s city report (p. 84), we spoke with artists, curators and musicians about why so much art from the city has become expressly political and how this will change their future. Photo: Luci Lux

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Imprint Imprint Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues Est. 2005 Issue N° 38 Summer 2014

Publisher: BurdaCreative, P.O. Box 810249, 81902 München 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 Editor: A.J. Samuels, Duty Editor: Michael Lutz, Editor-at-Large: Louise Brailey Intern: Joe Morgan Davies Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert Copy Editor: Karen Carolin

Cover: Mø, photographed by Frank Bauer in Munich.

For our limited edition cover, Wayne Shorter was photographed in Los Angeles by Luci Lux.

Contributing Authors: Fatima Al Qadiri, Sander Amendt, Black Cracker, Lisa Blanning, Inga Copeland, Kenneth Goldsmith, Ben Goldwasser, Heatsick, Daniel Jones, François K, Katarzyna Kołodziej, Magdalena Komornicka, Nina Kraviz, Claude Lanzmann, Steven Levy, Lucy, Martyn, Mø, Hudson Mohawke, Joanna Mytkowska, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Karol Radziszewski, RZA, Wayne Shorter, Jacek Sienkiewicz, Rosemarie Trockel, Stanisław Welbel, Anna Zaradny

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Robert Abbott Sengstacke, Curtis Anderson, John Barclay, Frank Bauer, Barry King, Guy le Querrec, Luci Lux, Tomáš Martinek, Eduard Meltzer, minus, Tim Peukert, Hans Martin Sewcz, Tim Soter, Miguel Villalobos

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, Karl Bette, Reto Bühler, Adrienne Goehler, Jörg Hacker, Fallon MacWilliams, Andreas Reihse, Niko Solorio, Hayley Woolfson © 2014 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited ISSN 2196-0194 “To me jazz means: I dare you.”

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CONTENT Content M

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Editorial .................................................................................... 3 Weltanschauung ...................................................................... 4 Recommendations................................................................... 16 Music and other media recommended by Rosemarie Trockel, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Heatsick, Daniel Jones et al.; featuring new releases

by Kreidler, Thug Entrancer, Ramona Lisa, Diamond Version, Arto Lindsay, Joey Anderson and more BASS CULTURE François K on Deep Space .................................... 28 ABC The alphabet according to Nina Kraviz .................................... 30 Style Icon Hudson Mohawke on Quincy Jones ............................. 34 Counting with . . . Black Cracker.............................................. 36

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“Society waits for nobody” Sander Amendt meets MØ ................................................................ 40 “Yeah! The dictator! Yeah!”

Max Dax plays chess with RZA ......................................................... 46 “To me jazz means: I dare you” Max Dax talks to WAYNE SHORTER ............................................... 54 “Whatever was on TV” A.J. Samuels interviews INGA COPELAND ........................................ 68

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„You grew up in a place without Led Zeppelin?“ FATIMA AL QADIRI talks to KENNETH GOLDSMITH ............................................................... 76 Wanderlust: 72 Hours in WARSAW.................................................. 84 NEU: “It’s a red flag for snoops”..................................................... 98

Three of our featured contributors: Lisa Blanning

Rosemarie Trockel

Frank Bauer

(* 1975) is an American journalist and regular contributor to Electronic Beats. In this issue, she interviewed producer François K, as well as moderated a conversation between Kenneth Goldsmith and Fatima Al Qadiri.

Photo: Luci Lux

(* 1952) is a German artist known internationally for her work on sexuality, feminism and the human body. In her first contribution to Electronic Beats, she recommends Kreidler’s ABC. Photo: Curtis Anderson. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London

(* 1967) is a German photographer based in Munich. A regular contributor to Electronic Beats, in the past he has shot the likes of Bryan Ferry and Gerald Donald. In this issue he photographed our cover story, Danish singer MØ.

Photo: Tim Peukert

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recommEndations “In contrast to fine art or literature, music needs no translation, no mediation” Rosemarie Trockel recommends Kreidler’s ABC

Bureau B

Rosemarie Trockel is a German conceptual artist internationally known for her work in various media dealing with themes of sexuality, the disconnectedness between fine art and craftsmanship, and female identity.

She lives and works in Cologne, and teaches at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. This is her first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

More than ten years ago I was introduced to Kreidler’s Andreas Reihse by Thea Djordjadze, an artist friend from Georgia.

For several years we three were neighbors in Cologne’s Südstadt where we shared the same backyard and an old garage in which Andreas also produced music.

In 2003 Thea, Bettina Pousttchi—another artist—and I had asked Andreas to create the sound for one of our installations, which turned out to be incredibly well fitting. Lucky enough we extended this kind of loose collaboration several times, for example for the theatre play “I WILL”, a collaboration with students of the Dusseldorf Art Academy, curator Marjorie Jongbloed and others, including Alex Paulick who has become Kreidler’s bass player in the meantime. In that sense I had super luck in having been Andreas’ neighbor. Over the years Kreidler’s music too became one of the best companions in

my life. Their two albums Eve Future and Eve Future Recall helped me through a winter, Tank I listened to non-stop when it was released, as I did with DEN. And now it’s happened again: I listen to ABC for breakfast, then in the car, and, actually I’m listening to it the whole day.

I am jealous of musicians if they work the way Kreidler do.

Among all the artists I think musicians happen to enjoy the most freedom. I’m not talking about economics. To make a living from music is a completely different issue. But how happy you must feel when your work can make other people happy? Music is immediate, it touches the heart directly and at the right volume you experience it with the whole body. You dance to music, you fall in love with music, music gives you comfort, and of course it inspires you. In contrast to fine art or literature, music needs no translation, no mediation.

It is not easy for me to pin down the secret of their new album ABC, what it “does” to you, what kind of a spell it casts on you. Perhaps it’s the temper of longing with comfort; then, what may sound light and easy, even sketch-like is, if you listen to it again, full of new swerves and curves, new depths and layers every time you listen. You will encounter a complexity that is never mannered and never ambient. There is always a driving moment, a carry-on that takes you by the hand, to get you up, to keep on keeping on.

I like how each song on ABC responds to each other, all of them together become a big narration. And they even connect to songs on other Kreidler albums in a manner that earlier achievements are extended and become an entity in their very own everexpanding cosmos. In that sense, Kreidler’s music is equivalent to the most beautiful physics. ~

“Emerged from the eleven dimensions of string theory” Hans Ulrich Obrist recommends the David Bowie is exhibit and catalogue

V&A Publishing

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“I am another.” This phrase by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud is key to understanding David Bowie not just as a person, but as a persona. Alternately, as the great Lebanese poet Etel Adnan has emphasized: “Identity is shifty. Identity is a choice.”

Indeed, Bowie’s play with identity has been a bridge to his relationship with fashion, which is why the recent Bowie exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum

in London and accompanying catalogue has made an effort to include numerous outfits and costumes that underscore his permanently mutable façade, such as the artistically tattered Union Jack frock he designed together with Alexander McQueen. Of course, this also draws a connection to his various identities in films, such as the reptilianhumanoid alien with telepathic abilities and superhuman intel-

ligence in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. There, Bowie’s character founds a billion dollar tech company in order to build a spaceship to return to his planet, but can’t get it done because of the superficiality and brutality of human civilization. All in all, a complex commentary on human identity on a more abstract level.

Bowie famously studied music and design and accordingly can be considered a kind of

Above: Standing tall. Bowie’s beloved turquoise boots from 1973. © The David Bowie Archive Previous page: Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for 1997’s Earthling. © The David Bowie Archive 18 EB 2/2014

Renaissance man with his multiple talents, which is reflected also in his variety of interests and which he treats as kind of parallel realities. This enables him to cover high and low culture, from pop to avant-garde—a kind of approach of cultural innovation reminiscent of early Godard as well as the experimental literature of nouveau roman—or even the famous MAYA principle—“most

advanced, yet acceptable”—which promotes aesthetic innovation only to the point that it doesn’t interfere with solving the problem at hand. Because ultimately, he changed the rules of the game, starting in 1969 with his entrance into the charts “Space Oddity” and eventual glam transition with Ziggy Stardust. Things turned more experimental with his Berlin years and trilogy of albums Low,

Lodger and Heroes before becoming a new romantic disco icon in a shiny blue suit and bleached blonde hair singing “Let’s Dance”.

This chronology is also marked by long periods of alternating visibility and invisibility, unpredictability and erratic changes in appearance and presentation. Apparently he also didn’t visit his own exhibit, but he did come out with a new album last

year. As Cocteau und Djagilew said: étonne moi, surprise me.

There are museums for architecture, science, literature and art, but there are almost no museums for sound. And yet it’s interesting to apply the medium of the exhibit to phenomena that lie outside of the art world.

This especially applies to the life and work of David Bowie, who, despite being primarily a musician has a relevance that was nothing less than culturally transformative. The Bowie exhibit does an excellent job in showing the different dimensions of someone who was not just a

songwriter, but also a producer, fashion icon, actor, painter and inventor of rituals and cults.

I occasionally think of him as someone who emerged from the eleven dimensions of string theory and whose behavior cannot be predicted. No one knows what his next step will be. ~

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery and a regular contributor to Electronic Beats Magazine.

“Carl Craig and RP Boo through neon dimension filters” Daniel Jones recommends Thug Entrancer’s Death After Life Thug Entrancer makes me respect house music. Don’t send me any prayers or worried emails; it’s not a long-running interest. In fact, this record is closer in content to a sub-genre-style juke. There’s a ghostly processor void looming over Death After Life that gives the album an otherworldly URL sheen, as though it were transmissions from another plane of audio.

Indeed, I’ve been petitioning for years for post-life artist awareness beyond wishing Kurt Cobain happy birthday on Twitter. Did you know that in 2014, ninetyeight percent of teenagers continue to listen to living artists? If you are part of the two percent that believe the opinions of the living are void and worthless and that only the dead should be allowed to speak and grace our ears with wisdom, share this review with ten friends or Klaus Nomi’s ghost will come into your room when you’re at work and ruin your bed sheets.

But back to my point about house music: Thug Entrancer, aka Ryan McRyhew, clearly has a love for the sounds of funky, paireddown Chicago. “III” in particular amps up the Larry Heard-like dance vibes, but removing the soul in favor of a kind of audio coleslaw: beats and snares are flung full-force at the listener’s ears, a sonic salad for the mind to digest.

Thug Entrancer bears little aes-

thetic resemblance to McRyhew’s previous project Hideous Men, a collaboration with his partner Kristi Schaefer; the hip-hop tinged occultronic beats have been smoothed out into something more mechanical. I can’t say I’m particularly versed in Chicago’s musical flavors, having only been there

“Share this review with ten friends or Klaus Nomi’s ghost will come into your room when you’re at work and ruin your bed sheets.”

Daniel Jones

once, but I can say that playing Whitehouse in the trap was not as cool as I’d hoped, unfortunately.

The seasoned drug dealers were not having it, repeatedly referring to it as “demoralizing” and “this shit’. If they’d only had “IV” to layer them in John Carpenter synths, they might have been too creeped out to slap me and whack

my guts and make me stand on the corner with a sign that said “Fart Boss”. The Nancy Reagan advertisements were right: drug dealers are just bullies with cool tattoos and a lot of money.

Indeed, Death After Life maintains a driving, after-dark juke flavor across the first half of the record, reminiscent of footwork minimalism; the second starts to get a bit more upbeat, chasing Excitebike soundtracks down a neon-lit racetrack on such skittering tracks as “VIII” and making my legs do the awkward shuffle most frequently seen in “Old Man Dances To ——” sort of videos. McRyhew, however, does make you think. His disruption of the traditional patterns embedded in each of these genres by decades of musicians is a result of loving care. Even as he dismantles, he rebuilds sibling structures on top of the ruins which echo our modern thought processes toward our past: a constant renewal, a fresh perspective on our dance roots to re-inspire or re-awaken tired ears. In a similar way as That’s Harakiri, another recent musical reconceptualization from Sd Laika, McRyhew uses broken patterns and repetitious audio phrasing to hypnotize the listener with both familiarity and discombobulation: the hand clap

Software

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 last issue of Electronic Beats, he recommended HTRK’s Psychic 9-5 Club.

Listen to this issue’s recommendations on Spotify.com EB 2/2014 19

recommEndations

beat of “V” applauding itself, the Atari meltdown toward the end of “III”, the overall uncanny feeling of hearing acid-tinged footwork rhythms overlayed with eighties Dario Argento-wave cloaks. It’s messy and, at times, seemingly divergent: the aforementioned meltdown, for example, seems

more of an album closer than a three-deep ender. But that’s half the fun. Above all, Death After Life feels like the mutant art-kid split personality of modern house music’s more staid mannerisms.

You can picture McRyhew bouncing around his equipment with a wide grin, running the likes of

Carl Craig and RP Boo through neon dimension filters and sweating it out as diodes. A flick of the hair and that techsweat is pouring on to your face and lips, just flying everywhere as the synth pulses laser light on the wall reading: MUSIC IS COOL. Which is the best part about music. ~

“It conveys real human emotion, and what kind of music does that these days?”

MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser recommends Ramona Lisa’s Arcadia

Pannonica/Bella Union

Ben Goldwasser is a founding member of American psychpoppers MGMT along with singer and lyricist Andrew VanWyngarden. Based in New York City, the group’s most recent self-titled album was released in September 2013 and featured prominently in our cover story from the same time. This is his first review for Electronic Beats Magazine.

Right: Bowie’s bluegrey suit worn on his Diamond Dogs tour in 1974. Design by Fred Burretti. © The David Bowie Archive 20 EB 2/2014

I first met Caroline Polachek, aka Ramona Lisa, through Craigslist, of all places. In 2006, during the writing process for Oracular Spectacular, Andrew and I were searching for a practice space to flesh out ideas. Caroline and her band Chairlift posted an ad on Craigslist, looking for another band to share their room. We all became friends quickly and found that we had a lot of overlap in our musical tastes and a mutual desire to fuse pop music with more esoteric elements. On Arcadia, her first solo record, Caroline has accomplished this and more.

A little over a year ago, a friend invited me to a secret performance of Caroline’s new music. I had no idea that she had recorded an entire album of her own material, and while she may have been nervous to share her project with the world for the first time, I was struck by how the performance presented something fully formed, as though she had been hard at work creating her own universe. Accompanied by haunting videos and choreography, the music seemed unapologetically new but at the same time it was hard to imagine that it had only just been written. The fact that most of it had been produced on a laptop while on tour made

it all the more impressive to me, given that that process can be really tedious. Unlike most music produced “in the box”, which lacks depth or falls too heavily on repetitive loops, Arcadia sounds rich and meticulously arranged and is constantly taking unexpected directions.

There’s a great interview with Angelo Badalamenti where he describes how he composed the musical themes for Twin Peaks. While sitting at a Fender Rhodes trying out ideas, David Lynch guided him through the various images and moods of the show. I can imagine a similar visual approach to writing music when I listen to Arcadia. While

“Beyond just adopting whatever flavor-ofthe-month production tricks happen to be in vogue” Ben Goldwasser

most of the songs on the album stand well on their own, such as “Backwards and Upwards”, which is an outright jam, the entire album seems to guide you through a tangible fantasy world.

There’s a great blend of old and new on Arcadia. I’m constantly reminded of other music that I like (for instance, I was tricked into thinking that I was listening to OMD at one point when “Avenues” came on when my phone was playing music on shuffle), but there’s always a novel sonic element or juxtaposition of styles that keeps the music from venturing too far into pastiche.

It doesn’t hurt that her voice is a striking, singular instrument that she is in excellent command of.

This is the kind of album that takes you by surprise. It doesn’t seem to come from any scene in particular, but it could easily further the opportunity for music to be accepted as “pop” while retaining a feeling of experimentation that goes beyond just adopting whatever flavor-of-the-month production tricks happen to be in vogue.

Maybe most impressive is that through Arcadia’s strangeness and familiarity, it conveys real human emotion, and what kind of music does that these days? ~

recommEndations

“I became fascinated with the power of music in its relation to location and memory.”

Heatsick recaps the music he heard on his recent world tour

Ghostly International

Above, top to bottom: Patrick Cowley’s School Daze (Dark Entries); John Barry’s original soundtrack to the 1965 James Bond flick Thunderball (United Artists Records); Black James’ im A mirAcle (FarFetched).

Heatsick, aka Steven Warwick, is a British musician and visual artist based in Berlin.

His work encompasses technology, hybridization, performance, sculpture and film. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats.

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I have just returned from a fivemonth tour around the world. To say I have been feeling displaced is a massive understatement.

Being in so many non-places such as airports and without a home, I really started to drift. And I learned to love it. However, the longer I was without a fixed location, the more recordings and books I amassed. Perhaps this is a psychological need to root down to something. Either way, I became fascinated with the power of music in its relation to location and memory. This first happened when I was on a stopgap stay in London over winter at a party of a friend of my partner’s. “Do you like John Barry?” I was asked by another partygoer. “Well, yes, I like his Bond soundtracks, but I’ve never really sat down and listened to them.” Cue a Bond soundtrack! Maybe it was the prosecco and the serendipity of it all, but I was thrown back into watching a forgotten Bond film, with a flashback more intense than any I’ve ever encountered, each note triggering more cinematic details. I felt I realized the power of soundtracks—their subliminal effect on cinematic memory and how deeply embedded in one’s consciousness they can become. I couldn’t recall the soundtrack name, but I distinctly remembered one song, its woozy flutes and eerily hypnotic scale snake charming my mind.

I had to hunt it down. After several failed YouTube attempts, I decided to instead watch every bond film until I found said piece of music. After three movies, I found it on Thunderball, Bond’s fourth. The track in question

was “The Bomb”, which played over and over again my mind.

After that, I watched as many Bond films as I could before I got bored. I got to Live and Let Die. I was reminded of the sheer ideological overload of cold war paranoia, the transparent sexism and racism on view. I wanted to rewatch with adult eyes, my anchor to childhood in an otherwise strange drift, which was to last for many months of my tour.

After that, I was off to America for a month, basing myself in L.A. but traveling all over for six weeks. A city without a center, L.A. was the perfect environment to reside in.

Driving around the city with a friend, we listened to so much

“A lo-fi soundtrack made for a gay porn flick, but the music is quite different to the bombastic Hi-NRG productions he’s known for and what I would have expected.”

Heatsick

music and eventually realized just how much time we spent in a car. Indeed the car for me was a home itself, with its own ecology and lifestyle built around it. I found out that cassettes are still currency in the U.S., and in several cities they were placed in my hand. In St. Louis, I had the fortune to play with Black James, a bizarre all-girl project best described as GRM style tape collage of popular song, with homothug girls voguing and projecting webcams onto multi-video channels in the background. It was one of the most baffling things I saw and I wondered how it would translate onto recordings. Actually, the image proved impossible to shake, as I am stuck with this memory no matter what I hear on their cassette.

In Philadelphia I was given tapes by self-styled American rager M ax Noi Mach, most of which were somewhere between power electronics, ghetto tech and state of the world addresses.

In San Francisco I was given several records from the Dark Entries label, including the School Daze soundtrack by Patrick Cowley, San Francisco’s legendary Hi-NRG disco producer, who made classics with Sylvester and a notoriously psychedelic remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. The Cowley record was a lo-fi soundtrack made for a gay porn flick, but the music is quite different to the bombastic Hi-NRG productions he’s known for and what I would have expected.

These tracks are a lot more experimental and introspective, showcasing another side of

Cowley that I greatly endorse.

This record also started to soundtrack my own journey around America in the opposite way to the Bond, in that I was listening to the music having not seen the film and trying to imagine how it would work together. I was reminded of the Fred Halsted film LA Plays Itself, which is part porn, part social critique of the changing state of Los Angeles

and soundtracked with bizarre tape collage music. Which is to say that it is completely at odds with the desired effect to arouse.

But back to Cowley: A track that I became particularly fond of is “Mocking Bird Dream”, with its dissolving liquid synths and delicate circular melodies. I DJ’d it in the Tenderloin district in a record store which was very close to a series of apartments that

rehouse struggling addicts. They were milling around and when I played Cowley a bunch of them ran inside screaming in recognition and starting partying hard.

Afterwards my friends took me to legendary dive bar Aunt Charlie’s where they played wall-to-wall Hi-NRG. The crowd was mostly drag queens and cell phones were banned. Oh, and whiskey was four dollars. I was home. ~

“Makes me want to go straight back to the beginning” Martyn recommends Joey Anderson’s After Forever There are two things that fascinate me about the New Jersey house music producer Joey Anderson.

Recently I came across a few YouTube videos that featured Joey dancing. Yes, you read that right, a house producer actually DANCING to music. Through his years as a competitive dancer, Anderson was eventually introduced to DJing and making his own music. In the videos, Joey’s movements are fluid and beautiful; they look invented on the spot and in the moment, nothing seems planned or contrived. In total alignment with the rhythm, his moves feel random but in the best sense of the word—like how water always finds the easiest way down stream. Anderson approaches making music in much the same way.

My second moment of fascination with Anderson was when I heard his track “Auset”, which was released last year on his Above the Cherry Moon EP for Avenue 66. Many people, including myself, were introduced to Anderson’s music through Levon Vincent’s Fabric 63 mix CD but it was “Auset” that proved to me his virtuosity as a musician. The track starts with a menacing synth riff filtering in and out with several other elements added to it before it all breaks down midway, leaving

us with just a kick drum. The tension builds and fading in from the distance is an entirely new riff that catapults the music to a new level of darkness. Then, when a frantic piano theme accompanies it, you’re truly in another world. This is not a techno track, but a story; with an end that is different from its beginning; with a development that captures the listener, picks you up, and puts you down in a different place.

Anderson’s debut LP After Forever released on the Dutch Dekmantel label, captures the natural fluidity of his dancing in sound, as well as his exquisite skill of transforming a techno track into an almost meditative moment.

After the beatless opener “Space Between Curtains”, the album really kicks off with “It’s A Choice”, which is rhythmically the most adventurous of them all. A Mooglike lead guides you through the song almost hesitantly and without leading to any sort of climax, the song’s easy progression becomes infectious. “Maiden Response” and “Amp Me Up” do similar things, establishing a rhythmical foundation with interesting patterns of leads on top. They develop slowly without doing anything majorly different. It’s meditation, you get into the zone, and you

stay there. I’ve heard Anderson’s music described as psychedelic and “trippy”, but I think those are unfair categorizations. These songs are not just little themes that happen to sound better when on hallucinatory drugs. They’re much more than just that. These are entry points to a Zen-like state.

That said, Anderson does not always hit home runs. His music is a very fine balance between getting the movement and development of a track just right or sounding a bit noodle-y. The middle part of After Forever, with “Keep the Design” and “Brass Chest Plate” have good rhythmic ideas and interesting sounds, but it all gels together a little less than some of the rest. By no means are these bad songs; they just have less focus.

Anderson gets back into gear on “Archer’s Ceremony” and “Sky’s Blessings”, with the latter a sort of redux of the former but in a more energetic fashion as “Heaven’s Archer”. This triptych brings a very strong ending to the album, and makes me want to go straight back to the beginning of it all, which is an obvious sign of quality.

A debut album always defines an artist’s main direction and sound as a continuation of a range of singles. Perhaps it’s

Dekmantel

Dutch producer Martyn, aka Martijn Deijkers, is a pioneer in fusing dubstep, jungle and techno.

He’s released numerous 12-inches as well as two critically acclaimed LPs, 2009’s Great Lengths (3024) and 2011’s Ghost People (Brainfeeder).

His new album, The Air Between Words (Ninja Tune) is out in June 2014. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

EB 2/2014 23

recommEndations

possible to explore your sound a little more in the space of sixty minutes but the main focus of an LP should be to define who you are. In Anderson’s case, After Forever shows that he is

in no rush. He is at peace with the elements he has to construct the songs and nothing comes in too soon or stays in too long. It is all meticulously put together.

You can trust his craftsmanship

and that’s what makes listening so enjoyable. His combination of meditating on sound and the fluidity of progression make After Forever one of the key albums you need to listen to in 2014. ~

“As if attempting to reverse the brainwashing process of the barrage of proscriptive mottos” Lucy recommends Diamond Version’s CI

Mute

Lucy, aka Luca Mortellaro, is a Berlin-based DJ and producer. He is also the founder of dark, noisy techno label Stroboscopic Artefacts where he has released two LP’s, 2011’s Wordplay for Working Bees and 2014’s Churches, Schools and Guns.

This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

Right: Assymetrical knit onesy designed

by Kansai Yamamoto for the 1973 Aladdin Sane tour. © The David Bowie Archive 24 EB 2/2014

I’ve been listening to the output of Raster-Noton for the past nine years and aside from an appreciation of the kind of electronic music they put out, I have also felt a kinship for it in regards to the general approach of the label: the music and the accompanying atmosphere of many of their releases is rooted in subversion and in the opposition to any form of mainstream dogmas. The label has embraced a fundamental belief in the idea that electronic music and what can be considered art are part of the same ensemble.

Accordingly, Diamond Version, the collaboration between label founders Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender is an especially interesting project for me. Subversion is at the fore of what they do, both musically and conceptually. This is clear first and foremost in the song titles of their new album CI: “Science for a Better Life”, “Make.Believe”, “Feel the Freedom” are all examples of corporate slogans. Being aware of the power of words, I as a listener felt the titles provided a framework in which I could move within, specifically restraining the freedom of interpretation to a specific kind of thought process.

Equally as interesting, however, is the fact that this conceptual framework applies not only to the track list or album title but also to the sound aesthetics. I can feel throughout the whole LP

a clear intention to play around with what I like to call “archetypes” of mainstream music and corporate sound. Unlike their solo releases as individual artists, Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender use simpler rhythmic patterns and song structures.

They borrow the basic shapes from mainstream culture and reframe them, thereby turning them into something completely different. The result is remarkably disorienting with the sounds pushing the listener to focus more intently what’s being said and what this kind of deconstruction of corporate culture means.

“Nicolai and Bender seem to draw a connection between the mindlessness of some extremely popular EDM and the numbing repetition of advertising” Lucy

Accordingly, its with deceptively simple means that Diamond Version manage to reveal some of the dark sides of corporate identity, as if in an attempt to reverse the brainwashing process of the barrage of proscriptive mottos.

I’m talking about simplicity and sarcasm, audible for example on “Were You There”, which features Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant singing a childlike version of the classic Christian hymn. Here you can clearly hear Diamond Version’s attempt to not only recontextualize church music by placing it next to songs about branding, but also to appropriate the more common sounds you might hear on an EDM track and spit them back out as something darker and more threatening. In doing so, Nicolai and Bender seem to draw a connection between the mindlessness of some extremely popular EDM and the numbing repetition of advertising—of course, with a healthy dose of sarcasm. In contrast to mainstream EDM however, the music is treated in very subtle ways: Nothing is too in-your-face everything is very carefully layered and masterfully articulated in space. This paradoxical formula is the group’s bread and butter, and the collaboration with Japanese light artist and musician Atsuhiro Ito pushes the envelope of contrast even further, with Ito’s hazy, distorted light-blasts

recommEndations

and oscillations bellowing under the almost clinically precise electronic music production.

Which brings us to the reason why we find this coming out on Mute and not on Raster-Noton.

The history of Mute is filled with

bands who are immersed in pop culture but also seek to transgress pop values. This is, in a sense, the same thing, just the other way around: a band immersed in anti-pop culture playing with pop dogmas. But importantly,

it’s not only about making fun of pop: transgressing corporate values by using their own tools translates into an incredibly stimulating experience for the listener. To sum it up, this is a boiling kettle ready to explode. ~

“Like an encyclopedia we see not one but all forms of the work presented” Max Dax recommends Arto Lindsay’s Encyclopedia of Arto

Northern Spy Records

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

26 EB 2/2014

For the occasion of Michael Jackson’s fiftieth birthday in 2008 while I was editor-in-chief of the German pop cultural magazine Spex Magazine, I commissioned a laudation by Arto Lindsay on the King of Pop. What I got back from him a few days later was, in my opinion, one of the landmark texts that’s been written on Jackson. One of Arto’s observations that stuck with me was that every time he heard Jackson’s voice, he “smelled blood.” In developing his own bellowing rock voice, Lindsay wrote, Michael Jackson’s music became a metaphor for a lion that hunts down his prey, knowing that he would always get what he wants.

When Arto released his first solo album in 1997, it was the first time you heard him sing tenderly, and it’s about as close as music comes to poetry, with lyrics that were at once minimalistic, harmonically complex and beautiful. Until then, he was primarily known as a noise musician, and a very influential one, too. There is a whole legion of bands, from Sonic Youth to Einstürzende Neubauten, that claim him and his former band DNA as a major influence and inspiring force in their artistic work.

Encylopedia of Arto is a twoCD-set, with the first part comprised of a collection of Arto’s personal best-ofs spanning the years 1996 – 2004 off of his solo records,

from O Corpo Sutil to Salt. These string of albums are breathtakingly imaginative and heavily fueled by his particular brand of post-bossa nova deconstruction. The second CD on Encyclopedia is a photonegative of the first, consisting of live recordings from two Berlin shows held in 2011 at the Berghain and .HBC respectively. There, he recomposed his original songs on stage using only his guitar, a distortion pedal and voice, raising them into

“Listening to Encyclopedia makes me wish more musicians would leave their comfort zones and confront themselves and their audiences with new and unexpected situations” Max Dax

sonic behemoths and risking the chance of real failure in front of a live audience. In the vein of Miles Davis or Bob Dylan, Arto actively seeks on these recordings to reshape the concept of the concert as such, with the music a kind of elegant dance on thin ice. The only remnants of the originals are the very general frameworks, harmonies, and certain chord changes, which he proceeds to dissect in the very moment they’re being presented.

Hitting a “wrong” note, his reaction is to ask, musically speaking, “What is a wrong note?” When a performer is able to embrace mistakes, he or she can, like an aikido master, turn them into something inspiring. You don’t have to tame improvisation.

Knowing Arto for years now, he sometimes appears to me as a man from the future whose antennae are tuned to sounds that have yet to leak into the public consciousness. Listening to Encyclopedia makes me wish more musicians would leave their comfort zones and confront themselves and their audiences with new and unexpected situations, putting their craft at stake, be it on stage or in the studio. In that sense, the biggest achievement of this double LP is that it lives up to its name: like an encyclopedia we see not one but all forms of the work presented—that is, their place in pop culture and the avant-garde, the radio, and on the next level. ~

BAss Culture

“When I step in front of the crowd there, I am actually striving to give them my soul” François K on his clubnight Deep Space at Cielo, N.Y.C. François Kevorkian may have been born in France, but he’s inextricably linked with the sounds of New York disco and house. Coming up with the likes of Larry Levan and David Mancuso at such dance music institutions as the Paradise Garage and Studio 54, his nearly forty years in the city that never sleeps saw his star rise quickly as a producer and remixer, working with artists as diverse as Loleatta Holloway, Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, while also becoming a revered DJ at his Body & Soul party, held together with veteran selectors Joaquin “Joe” Claussell and Danny Krivit.

Having celebrated his sixtieth birthday this year, Kevorkian could easily rest on his laurels. Instead he has taken his now elevenyear-old dub-inflected clubnight Deep Space at Cielo in Manhattan to new heights.

Here, for the uninitiated, François K takes you to Deep Space in his own words.

Opposite page: Happy trails. Revelers at Deep Space, photographed by Tim Soter.

28 EB 2/2014

Throughout my career, especially when I started going in the studio somewhere around 1978, I found myself very attracted to a lot of production techniques that clearly came from people using a lot of effects processing and delays and things. Whether it was more like traditional dub records from Jamaica or experimental records that came from krautrock in Germany, or whether it was some of the avant-garde free jazz that incorporated elements of tape music, like the Teo Macero productions of Miles Davis. All of these things, they had a confluence: astute producers were making heavy use of electronic music production techniques to enhance the live playing, whether it would be jazz, reggae, rock or whatever else. It was immediately clear in my work in the studio, and I became quickly known for being one of the people within the “dance music” or “disco” world that could deliver the trippy elements and exaggerated processing.

Others were great at extended versions of songs or transforming them into something that had more muscle for the dancefloor.

For me, it was the dub element— be it more electronic like my work with Yazoo, Kraftwerk or Jean-Michel Jarre, or on a more traditional reggae tip like with Black Uhuru, Jimmy Cliff, or Bunny Wailer. But as far as the people who were hiring me to do these remixes, this idea of the dub was always the thing on the side, rather than the main A-side version they were usually after.

Then, in the early 2000s, I was approached by the owner of Cielo, Nicolas Matar, and he offered me

a night. We were close friends, and being a DJ himself, he dug what I was doing. It was pretty much with the understanding it was going to be something related to house music. I think they were really surprised when I came back and said, “First of all, I don’t want to do a big night, like the weekends. I want to do something as obscure and out of the way as possible. Monday sounds great.” Because when you do that, you’re guaranteed that the big weekend crowd and fistpumping advocates are going to be at home getting ready for their job the next day during the week.

In the context of what the club looks like and how incredible everything is there—the sound system, the intimate setting that allows for a lot of seating around the dancefloor area for people not to feel awkward if they don’t dance—I figured I wanted to focus on trying to do something that was going to be totally unique and in some respect related to dub. Even though dub had been an integral part of my career and what I was doing since the beginning, it was never an acknowledged thing.

It was just like a bonus. But I felt that was the time for things to change. Instead of just starting another night where I would play authentic Jamaican reggae from 1975 by Lee “Scratch” Perry, King Tubby, and Niney the Observer, it was more going to be about trying to showcase and connect the dots for people to incorporate that dub aesthetic into all sorts of different backgrounds. Or in conjunction with that, to take songs that would be

otherwise very ordinary and to actually do whatever processing and treatment to them—sort of an abbreviated version of what I’m doing in the studio, but live and in front of people. We courted dub poets, DJs, or other artists who we felt were compatible with that aesthetic and somehow would accept to do, say, “special” sets around this point of view. In that sense, another turning point, even though we were already established, was somewhere around 2006 when we started hearing all of these rumblings from London and all these strange new types of music that no one had ever heard before, like Digital Mystikz and dubstep; it took time, and I needed to get people’s ears used to that new sound.

Deep Space has made me realize how much I value improvisation, the instant of creation, that moment where you’re standing in front of a crowd and there’s thirty seconds left to play on the record. You haven’t yet decided what you’re going to play next, and you have to look through all of your records and find something and put it on, mix it in, and make it all sound effortless and entertaining. It’s an unbelievable amount of pressure. What comes out is the one thing that you know you should be playing because, really, if you’re a DJ, you know what that is. Sometimes things that came from that voice are crazy, completely strange, totally odd. But I needed to defer to that voice and not stay focused on logic. When I step in front of the crowd there, I am actually striving to give them my soul—not some pre-programmed, pre-packaged, pre-digested slice of predictable fodder that might make them feel good at that very moment, but that they’ll have forgotten about ten minutes later. ~

Three records selected

by François K on rotation at Deep Space (Top to bottom): Objekt – “Agnes Demise” off Objekt #3, white label self-release, 2013: “One of those songs I can fit into everything.”

Special Request – “Soundboy Killer” off Soul Music, Houndstooth, 2013: “The mood of the junglist music from the mid-nineties but completely updated.”

Jon Hopkins ‎– “Open Eye Signal”, Domino, 2012: “Dark and brooding, distorted melodies and bass.”

EB 2/2014 29

ABC

The alphabet according to Nina Kraviz In 2011, when “Ghetto Kraviz” pounded its way through Europe’s clubs with a barrage of kick drums, it forcefully showed—with some help from a resurgent interest in footwork— how a single word repeated endlessly could be as catchy as any melody. But Nina Kraviz’s path to techno stardom wasn’t entirely smooth: Following the release of her self titled debut LP, the Siberian-born DJ and producer ruffled more than a few feathers last year in her controversial bathtub video interview for Resident Advisor, though ironically (predictably?) most of the naysayers were men. Unfazed by accusations of playing up her looks, Kraviz has continued doing what she does best, namely drop one sold out record after the next on such esteemed imprints as Rekids, Underground Quality and Efdemin’s Naif.

Here’s what’s been on her mind lately, in alphabetical order.

Opposite page: Nina Kraviz, photographed

by Hans Martin Sewcz in Berlin.

30 EB 2/2014

A

as in Acid: When I first heard an acid house track by Armando on the radio I thought it was a message from outer space. It went straight into my veins. It’s been a while since that day but every time I hear a proper 303 bass line I feel like a spaceship is on its way.

B

as in Lake Baikal: The deepest lake in the world holds about twenty percent of the world’s fresh surface water and is located in Siberia between two tectonic plates, not far from my home city of Irkutsk. If you look at Russia, this is exactly that charming blue object that you find on the right side of the map next to Mongolia.

This place is truly special and I feel very connected to its magic.

C

as in Chicago House: Chicago house, along with Detroit techno, has been one of my biggest inspirations. From melodic song-structured hip-house and mental acid grooves to the badass ghetto house of Dance Mania.

D

as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: This science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick served as the basis to the 1982 film Blade Runner. Postapocalyptic, dystopian future L.A. Watching Harrison Ford testing androids for lack of empathy is oddly relaxing. I also really like the soundtrack by Vangelis, where even saxophone, the instrument in pop music that I appreciate the least, sounds elegant. One little part of the movie’s original conversation was so inspiring to me that it appears in my own “Pain in the Ass” monologue.

E

as in Exaggerated Emotional Coherence: Also known as the “halo effect”. This is a psychological phenomenon in which our brain makes it easier for us by generating a certain representation of the world that is simpler and more coherent than it really is. The tendency to like or dislike everything about a person or a subject—including things you have not necessarily observed—is a part of it. This common bias helps us to create myths. It also helps with building up marketing strategies, creating superficial generalizations and jumping to conclusions. What it really doesn’t help with is recognizing the truth.

F

as in FM Intergalactic: Online radio station founded and curated by I-F, to which I owe half of my musical education. It’s comprised of four channels with the most choice music, from ambient soundtracks and Italo and Chicago house to the most obscure forms of electro and techno. The greatest thing is that you can always see the title and the artwork of the original record. The only problem is that half of the records played are hard to find and cost a fortune.

G

as in Gear: I think vintage synthesizers retain the spirit of their previous owners, which is pretty psychedelic.

EB 2/2014 31

H

as in Hypnotic moments and a state of flow: One of the most exciting things that a DJ can experience. It happens occasionally and cannot be predicted. Feels like magic. The crowd, the DJ, the place and the music become one thing and somehow both the music and the technical aspects of its deilvery are no longer consciously controlled.

The DJ reaches a phenomenal closeness to the people and continues only as mediator, transmitting energy to the crowd and receiving it back.

I

as in Intellect: One of the most important aspects of humanity. It’s about the ability to create an idea. This is a gift from above. It never ceases to amaze me how infinite the possibilities are, how many incredible things we can learn and do and how there are not many things that we actually can’t do. In combination with a true spirit it is the essence of humanity. A lack of intellect on the other hand is the saddest thing. It restrains progress and development.

But let’s not talk about that.

32 EB 2/2014

J

as in Jesus Christ: Besides the fact that he is God, he also used to be human.

For me, he is a role model of a great human being.

K

as in Kosmos: “Space” in Russian. It also means: planets revolving around stars, asteroids and black holes. This was my favorite subject in school after biology. The Andromeda Galaxy is just 2.3 million light years away. There’s cosmic dust all over the place. It reminds me of my “Kosmos” dessert at a cafe in Irkutsk—vanilla icecream with crushed walnuts and frozen honey, sprinkled with a little bit of dark chocolate powder. Sputnik. Stunning pictures of Soviet spacecraft Mir with Earth in the background. Our earth is so beautiful in pictures from space, much more appealing than, say, Mars. Did Neil Armstrong actually walk on the moon?

Belka and Strelka were two lucky dogs that flew to cosmos and actually came back. Many of their predecessors didn’t.

L

N

M

O

as in Love: All my favorite songs are about love. The same goes for books and films. It’s also quite a popular word.

For centuries, people have been discussing same old thing and strangely never get tired of it. This is incredible.

It never ceases to amaze me that the same word can be applied to carrot cake, children, hotdogs, flags, parents, perfume or an evening dress.

Surprisingly, when it comes to loving somebody for real, most people fail. Let’s blame it on all our love for cookies.

as in Mens sana in corpore sano: Latin for “A sound mind in a healthy body.”

This was the first Latin phrase that I learned in medical school while studying to be a qualified dentist. A very true saying.

as in Neurotics: Mostly very creative people that don’t fully stand on their own two feet and are in search of balance. That is, in between breakdowns, delusions, biting their nails, writing the most amazing books, making records, designing clothes and making irrational decisions that strangely help them remain in history. Neurotics are extremely sensitive and are never sure about anything.

They run away from those who love them right after messing up their life. But other than that, they are lovely people. I’ve always been attracted to them.

as in Oxymoron: So far my entire life has been one big oxymoron. I’ve been a sad optimist, a naughty nerd, an impulsive introvert, an outgoing social phobic, an intellectual cover girl, a modern orthodox, a DJ-dentist, altruistically egocentric, enjoying superficial things while searching for a deep meaning, strongly fragile, narcissist and caring, focused in my own chaos. Some people don’t get how such opposites can exist in one person. I understand.

P

as in Polaroid: I like the concept of capturing the beauty of the moment and enjoying immediate emotional response.

Right here, right now. All that was in and around that moment is soaked by the paper, even your thoughts. It is what it is and there is no need to correct anything. That is probably the nearest analogy to what I feel when I record my music.

Q

as in Quantum physics: Extremely interesting branch of physics that I didn’t give enough attention to at university. But I am eager to correct this mistake.

R

as in the Russian language: I am very lucky that Russian is my native language and I can enjoy Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol without a dictionary.

Incredibly rich, complex, colorful and melodic when properly spoken. Russian allows you to express every little nuance in the most accurate, elegant way. Without knowing Russian it seems impossible to convey the essence of Russian culture.

It is truly a great language and if I wasn’t born Russian I would definitely have learnt it as a foreign language. Living outside of Russia, I really miss being surrounded by my language. Especially saying “я люблю тебя”, or: I love you.

S

as in Simulacra: An old term that has multiple interpretations and a core idea of Jean Baudrillard. It comes to my mind when I see something pretending to be something else. For example, what nowadays gets called “deep house” in popular electronic music.

T

as in Techno made in Detroit: Mysterious music from a mysterious city that gave me the proper direction in life.

U

as in UBS or Ultimate Bullshit: Abbreviation that I came up with to describe outrageous forms of nonsense, ignorance and stupidity in combination with an unstoppable will to share the result of this unnecessary evil in public.

V

as in Vinyl: When my friends go normal shopping, I go record shopping. Many years have passed since that first George Duke 12-inch but crate digging remains my biggest addiction. Record stores are where I feel most at home, where I lose sense of time and sometimes reality. Vinyl is everywhere in my house. I love putting them in order and sorting out the mess in my bag after a long set. I can spend a whole day going through dusty boxes with used vinyl in the hope of finding a hidden gem.

Then when the gem is found, I can’t wait until the next opportunity to share it with people.

W

as in the What is it that the artist delivers? Their personality? Or maybe a message? In any case there should be something behind the artist.

X

as in Χρόvoς: Greek word for time, certainly one of the most interesting things for me to explore. I have no clear picture about time. It has this mystical effect on me. But even though I don’t know much about it, I sense that time extends far beyond our ability to measure it.

Y

as in Y: Why compare?

Z

as in Zeppelin, Led: My world doesn’t exist without this band. One the most vivid memories from my childhood is my father and I listening to “Whole Lotta Love” instead of doing my homework. Robert Plant looks like my future man. I love the nerve, the drama, the theremin, the tape echo on Led Zeppelin, and the fact that they recorded my favorite album ever in just thirty hours. ~

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HUDSON MOHAWKe On Quincy Jones

Mr. Style Icon

I had the pleasure to work with Quincy Jones in his Los Angeles studio last year where he produced Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall.

During the process he explained to me that he and Michael had created the studio to spec, and for me the most impressive thing were the speakers installed in the roof. The idea was that Michael and Quincy could lie on the floor and listen to the sound come at them from the ceiling. This is exactly what Quincy and I did as well: create, lie down, listen. The whole experience was extremely inspirational—I mean Michael is obviously The King of Pop, but also in the process of collaborating, I realized that some of my favorite productions of Quincy’s were his solo work, which for some people is more obscure. For example, I am a huge fan of funk stuff like The Dude, which more people should know because it did win a bunch of Grammys and even features legendary jazz harmonica player Toots Thielemans.

Anyhow it’s from 1981 and has a kind of early rapping on it, which is funny and kind of ironic considering his strong opinions about hip-hop. I actually used samples from The Dude for the Pusha T record I helped produce last year.

Honestly, I can’t say I was ner34 EB 2/2014

Scottish-born producer Ross Birchard, aka Hudson Mohawke, has successfully made the difficult leap from boy wonder to man of the music world.

As the youngest ever finalist in the UK DMC DJ competition, his aggressive sampling pastiche impressed on 2009’s Butter and his most recent EP Satin Panthers (both Warp).

In 2012, Mohawke signed to Kanye West’s GOOD Music exclusively for production duties, providing the likes of Kanye, Pusha T and Drake with musclebound psych-trap.

Here, he discusses working with musical style icon, the man behind the man in the mirror, Quincy Jones.

Right: Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones at the American Music Awards, 1988. Photo: Barry King/Corbis.

vous meeting Quincy for the first time. I approach artists and producers I work with, no matter how big they are, as people. It’s a person-to-person thing. It was the same when I worked with Rick Rubin: you just can’t get caught up with the back story or heritage of it all, otherwise it will get in the way of being creative. That is, despite being surrounded by barefoot guys drinking kale smoothies, which was the case when I worked together with Rubin in Bob Dylan’s old studio in Malibu, Shangri-La, which he now owns. That said, when I think back to Quincy’s studio, it was a bit challenging at times to not be impressed. He actually has Michael Jackson’s framed lyric sheets on the wall. That’s the first thing you see. I was like, “Fucking hell, I’m walking into history.” And then I remind myself not to get caught up in it.

We didn’t talk a lot about Michael Jackson as a person, though I have in the past with Kanye. With Quincy, Michael was always discussed in revered musical terms: nobody has anything but the utmost respect for Michael, and Quincy Jones is obviously a huge part of that. I suppose that speaks for itself. ~

EB 2/2014 35

Counting wiTH . . .

Black

Cracker

Rapper, producer, trans-man and poet Ellison Renee Glenn, aka Black Cracker, recently dropped his impressive debut LP Poster Boy via Gully Havoc. How dope is the life of the globetrotting MC? Let him count the ways. Photo: John Barclay.

one

memorable line in a song:

“Damn homie, in high school you were the man homie / What the fuck happened to you?” 50 Cent – “Wanksta”

two

decisions I regret:

--5 a.m. Bushwick, Brooklyn. A bicycle. A curb. Too many whiskey rocks. Too much confidence and “youth.” Hit concrete head-on.

Knee buckled with full weight. I have been walking with a slight to often pronounced limp and shattered ligaments ever since. (No insurance for all of my twenties.)

--Not understanding what publishing was prior to hearing lyrics and production I contributed to an Android commercial. Full rotation, multiple channels.

three

sets of people that should collaborate:

--Military strategists and amusement park designers.

--Laser light controllers and Southern Baptist preachers.

--Soup kitchen fundraisers and porn stars.

four things I haven’t done yet:

--Met my father. (Though I doubt this will ever occur.)

--Had more than $100 in the bank for more than three months.

--Done yoga.

--Sold out a solo show.

five

things I used to believe:

--Getting over heartbreak was quick, painless and as easy as catching a glimpse of a rainbow in a misty rain.

--Hard work and originality would overcome hype and superficiality.

--A smile is the ultimate weapon,

36 EB 2/2014

both in defense and offense.

--Drinking coffee would make my skin darker, or so my great grandfather said.

--I would be dead by now.

six

hours ago . . .

. . . I realized my second flight to Paris within 72 hours was not a day later but rather in thirty minutes. I made it, though I packed no pants.

seven albums everyone should own:

Antony and the Johnsons – I am a Bird Now Lil B – Red Flame Mike Ladd – Welcome to the AfterFuture Diane Cluck – Countless Times Wu-Tang Clan – Wu-Tang Forever Badawi – Bedouin Sound Clash Eckhart Tolle – A New Earth (book on tape)

After

eight

p.m.

Haribo. A bath. Her risotto. AKG 240’s pressed tight. MPK49 triggering Komplete through a Pro Tools instrument track. A silly melody and infinite wit, in an ideal world.

Sky filled with holograms walking backwards through the sand.

nine My

lives . . .

. . . are hanging by a strand of lightning, pulled by a spider between a liter of expired milk and triumphant sun.

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

Any amount of greed and ego-centric fame with only self-serving ambition. ~

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Sander Amendt talks to MØ

“ Society

nobody

waits for

Karen Marie Ørstedt, better known as MØ, has moved beyond her initial, foul-mouthed Peaches-esque productions into the terrain of soulful, pop-trap accessibility. On her debut LP, No Mythologies to Follow, the former hobby-squatter turned to producers Ronni Vindahl and Diplo (the latter initially an Internet acquaintance) to help her pimp her metamorphosis. Indeed, shifting identities comes naturally to the native of Odense, Denmark, who was raised on point and click self-discovery.

Left: Karen Marie Ørstedt, aka MØ, photographed by Frank Bauer in Munich

EB 2/2014 41

K

aren, you were one half of the punk band MOR before you went electro with your new band MØ. How long have you been a punk and what does punk mean to you?

I grew up very isolated in the suburbs of the Danish city Odense on the Baltic Sea. I remember my upbringing in the best possible ways. My parents are great, I love my brother, our house was nice, we even had a piano. But when I became a teenager I suddenly became rebellious against everything my parents stood for. I just suddenly had this urge to be an outsider. I remember that my classmates thought I was mentally ill because I started to wear black one day, including mascara. They would wear colorful clothes and my style must have seemed so weird to them. In hindsight this seems so distant and so strange to me. You know, I was a tomboy before, a boyish girl, but they didn’t tease me. It all started when I began to wear black. And from there it was a small step to becoming a punk.

And then?

I actually would like to rewind a bit. It all started with the Spice Girls. I had fallen in love with Sporty Spice. I was seven years old and I had this epiphany watching the Spice Girls on TV. I have them and only them to thank—or to blame—for becoming a singer. Watching them on TV was the first time ever that something really appealed to me. Don’t get me wrong: Every little girl at that time went mental because of the Spice Girls. But I took it really, really serious. And that’s why I started to make music as a teenager. I started to write songs because of the Spice Girls.

By doing so, I learned to let off steam. Writing songs became my platform for expression. You are a man and you probably saw it differently, but for me as a teenage girl, the world hadn’t really opened up yet. And I didn’t know how to handle it.

How old were you when you started smoking and drinking?

I was fourteen. That was when the hormones came through. From one day to the next things really started to change inside my head.

What books did you read then?

In all honesty, I didn’t read that many books. I never did. I am a slow reader. But certain music would trigger me. I started to get hooked on Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Bikini Kill and other bands.

Sporty Spice basically got replaced by Kim Gordon. I began to print out the lyrics of all the Sonic Youth songs on my parent’s computer. Actually I printed out all the lyrics of all the songs that somehow have touched me. From the Sonic Youth lyrics alone I could have made a book. I mean, it didn’t even occur to me that they may have released a songbook of their own. I just needed to print everything out immediately because it was accessible on the Internet. My brother on the other hand was playing computer games all the time when he wasn’t roleplaying Tolkien scenarios in the forest. And my brother had this friend who was always wearing black trench coats and had black hair.

All I remember is that I wanted to look like him. I was listening to “Youth Against Fascism”, and my classmates thought I was mentally ill.

Tell me about the squats you frequented at the time.

It all started when I changed to a school in the city. And there were other people who also dressed like me. I started smoking with them and they took me to their punk places. Suddenly it was 42 EB 2/2014

all about left-wing politics, anti-fascist engagement and drinking in squats. All these different groups were gathering there.

There were feminist groups too, but first and foremost anti-fascist groups.

Why? Were there a lot of neo-Nazis around?

No, not that many. But I was against them anyways. I soon started to get into the squatter’s environment and finally I started this punk band called MOR—Danish for “mother”—together with my friend Josefine. We immediately had what we’d define as success: We played in squats all over Denmark, Europe and even in New York. We had recorded music and would shout and perform to our self-made playback show. You’re from Berlin, aren’t you?

Yes, why?

Well, we played at this squat Köpi in Berlin. We were drunk for five years, played every weekend in squats—basically we were being young, I guess. We just felt this huge energy. From the stage we’d preach about political things that were important to us. And be it a stupid slogan like, “Fuck the government!”, “Fuck Nazis!”, fuck everything. I mean, we were only seventeen. What counted for us was the fact that we were seeing the continent and that we had an audience. I think it’s important to always balance out the seriousness and the overreaction. Some of the political bands that I appreciated at that age were annoyingly serious.

So it was a pretty quick development from Sporty Spice to Kim Gordon.

Well, for me as a seven-year old, Sporty Spice for sure was the Kim Gordon among the Spice Girls. Growing up and remembering my childhood fascination for the Spice Girls, it surely helped to inject pop ideas into my music. I mean, I still love perfect pop music. And everything suddenly made perfect sense when I went to Fynske Kunstakademi—the Funen Art Academy. I realized that I could combine everything and form some kind of an artificial character who is part me, part Kim Gordon and part Sporty Spice. After all, Kim Gordon went to art school too before she founded Sonic Youth, didn’t she? I started MØ during my time in art school in 2009. Actually, my alter ego then was rapping.

Everybody thought I was crazy. But the fact that I could think and act conceptually liberated me. It has an ironic edge to it so that I called it MØ, which means “virgin” in Danish. I liked the idea that my alter ego had a bizarre name and was constantly agitating. It wasn’t about letting off emotional steam anymore.

Everything had changed.

And now you have a proper band.

I have to admit that I have since dumped the rapping alter ego. It was a progression. I started to sing more and more. And this led to another coincidence. Ever since then I have been working together with the producer Ronni Vindahl. He always liked me, but he never liked my sick raps. When he noticed that I had started singing he immediately asked me if I could record some vocals for him. He then produced some music around it, and we called the track “Maiden”. Eventually we’d constantly be exchanging files. I remember receiving his first email with music when I was doing an internship in New York. That moment changed everything. I liked the idea of becoming a pop musician, and that also meant that I had to form a band, play Roskilde, play the game. But that’s what it is: a game.

EB 2/2014 43

What kind of internship did you do in New York?

I heard you are a fan of Jonathan Meese.

I was helping JD Samson of Le Tigre. She’s the girl with the moustache. So, me and Josefine were JD Samson’s interns—interns in girl power and feminism.

Yes I am and I would love to meet him one day.

It’s one of the blessings of our times that you can effortlessly send music files back and forth to collaborate. Do you agree?

Absolutely. And that’s exactly the way Diplo works. I really like it that you don’t have to necessarily meet in person to do music nowadays. I grew up with this idea that I can do music in every hotel room, in every train or friend’s apartment. I don’t listen to the people who say that this way of making music is supposedly impersonal. I don’t think that way. To me it’s totally normal.

Hans Ulrich Obrist has a project called 89+. It features the thoughts and opinions of the generation that was born in 1989 or later—basically the generation that grew up with the Internet, that doesn’t know a world before the Internet age.

Damn! I was born in 1988.

You can always say you were born in 1989.

Not if you print this. Anyhow. As I said, I embrace these times.

And you could call Twitter impersonal too. But a Twitter post actually led to Diplo and me finally meeting in reality. Someone must have read an interview in which I mentioned Diplo and how much I adore his music and tweeted it to Diplo. But he had heard of MØ before. He contacted me, and we met. And for me it paid off that he is so open-minded. He’s really into new sounds and new people, constantly traveling and collaborating. We ended up writing the song “XXX 88” together in 2012. In that sense I’d say our times are sick in a good way, no matter what the people say.

Do you remember a time before the Internet?

You probably just have to get more famous. Or someone has to give him a copy of our conversation . . .

That would be so great! I really like the way he agitates. I discovered his performance work in art school. I admire him for the irony he shows in his performances. And I heard that he got sued for performing the Hitler salute.

That’s true, but they closed the case. The court rightfully judged that the freedom of expression in art is more important.

That’s good to hear. I love him because he is crazy. But besides Jonathan Meese, my biggest idols are from North America. I love Grimes, I love Karen O. and I love Kim Gordon. They all stand for a kind of posture that I admire. I generally adore people who stay true to themselves, who are building something up over the course of several years. I think the real person manifests themselves in such efforts. And I’m saying this also because I was always bad in school. I couldn’t concentrate. And that’s why I basically felt so attracted to music.

Have you ever met any of your idols?

I actually met Peaches once at a festival in Slovakia. You shoudn’t underestimate her influence on young women in Denmark. My rap alter ego was very much inspired by Peaches. She taught me how to swear and be vulgar in front of other people! By the way, did you notice that almost all of the huge solo artists in the world today are women? Madonna, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Lana del Rey . . . You could easily extend the list. I know that most of them are produced by male producers.

But still, it’s all girls! Girl power! At least in the Western world.

I first noticed this in art school. We were two-thirds girls. And didn’t Lady Gaga go to art school?

For sure I remember the times before I got my first mobile phone when I was thirteen. Until then I could have easily imagined a fulfilling life without one. Somehow our world was more peaceful and less self-centered then. I really love social media, but many people misunderstand it as an invitation to preach how great their life is supposed to be.

No, not visual art. She—her real name is Stefani Germanotta—created Lady Gaga at NYU’s school for performing arts.

But you use social media as well.

I think it’s great that women like Peaches, JD Samson or Kim Gordon have become role models for my generation. Girl power to me means that I’m allowed to show my flaws as well as my strengths.

That’s true, but I try to not overdo it. I mean, society waits for nobody. If you don’t use social media, you are probably going to be left behind. You have to communicate. I don’t question that.

But there’s a lot of people out there who use social media to boost their egos.

Andy Warhol would have loved social media, don’t you think?

I think he predicted it. I just object to people using social media to show their friends how good they look, how great their job is and what fancy things they can buy. I mistrust a perfect veneer. I can really get upset about the glorification of perfection. There is a thin line between proto-fascist advertisements that portray an idyllic world of consumerism and self-advertising on Facebook. I mistrust all the Miss Perfects. They are sick people. That’s just not how the world is.

44 EB 2/2014

Either way, it shouldn’t be about what sex you are.

But “girl power” is all about what sex you are, no?

What would happen if you ever met Sporty Spice?

I actually met her this past April. I won an award from a Danish radio station, and they flew her in to give me the award at the ceremony. OMG. At first I thought it was an impersonator. I almost said something like, “You almost look real.” I was totally flattered, I almost cried. After the ceremony I took the chance to talk to her. I explained to her that she basically was the reason why I became a musician in the first place. And she told me that she felt flattered that I had recorded a cover version of the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There.” She even had paid for her own flight, because she liked my song so much. This world is so fucking crazy that I sometimes don’t understand it. ~

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“ yeah!

MAX DAX plays chess with rZA

diyctator!

The

“

eah!

The chief musical mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan known as RZA recently challenged editor-inchief Max Dax to a game of chess. Needless to say, it wasn’t even close. During the match, the Staten Island native was keen on discussing his various other battles—including a directorial debut, creative control of the Wu and issues of copyright ownership.

While fighting on various fronts, the fate of the new, unreleased Wu-Tang album has remained a looming question mark. Here’s why.

Left: RZA, photographed in Malibu by Luci Lux. Wardrobe and styling by Niko Solorio.

EB 2/2014 47

T

he US is currently witnessing a real boom in terms of electronic music. You are best known for your work with the Wu-Tang Clan, but recently you’ve also ventured into the world of crossover and more experimental hip-hop with your collaboration, Achozen, together with Killarmy and Shavo Odadjian from System of a Down.

I think electronic music has revitalized itself as a world music again. And for America, electronic music is not just about the drum programming and the synths but also the sampler—so you think of hip-hop.

That’s an interesting take. In our last issue, Marshall Allen from the Sun Ra Arkestra mentioned that Sun Ra was actually one of the first in jazz to use a synthesizer. He actually helped create sounds for some of Bob Moog’s first productions.

Did he become a spokesperson for Moog?

No. I suppose it wasn’t quite pre-endorsement days, but I think they wanted him just to help push the gear to the limits of sonic outer space.

Sun Ra is incredible. Where did you meet Marshall Allen?

We actually went to the Sun Ra commune in Philadelphia and took a tour of the whole eccentrically decorated house.

That was very enlightening probably.

Indeed. Today we’re in Malibu, but you’re originally from New York City. What were your thoughts on California before you moved here?

I was actually really naive about California. In the early days of Wu-Tang we came to San Francisco and had a chance to stay there for about three weeks. Our label thought Northern California was an important market. And so they gave us a corporate apartment, already furnished. Me and ODB shared one apartment and Raekwon and Ghostface another. There we were: a bunch of guys from the hood now in a whole other state and living. I mean, we had to get our own groceries! We were early twenties, just getting this life—and San Francisco was that city. I was impressed because it had an almost N.Y. feeling, you know, with all the restaurants. It had a culture, it had chess players on the streets, and the best thing was the police wasn’t harassing us! We hung around in Oakland and the Bay Area with the tough gangster guys and the weed and the drugs and the chicks. That was my first taste of Northern California. It felt good. Actually it was a time that helped Wu-Tang become tight because of what we went through there. It felt like a new life together. But when I came to Southern California, to Hollywood, that was really mind blowing. I had a preconception that it might be too glamorous for me but it turned out to be very satisfying, not least temperature-wise. It is a blessing to wake up in November or December and the temperature is seventy-five degrees. So I just fell in love with Los Angeles. Call it a change of polarity. I felt freer, a different kind of vibe. Maybe it was the sun.

Basically the whole New York aggression was gone. For the first time in my life I wouldn’t wake up with it.

up in a place that’s more calm, smoother. Not ten meetings a day, two should be enough. You don’t walk out the house and there’s a million people; it’s walk down from the hotel and there’s only very few people on the street because everybody is driving a car.

I actually find these six-lane Los Angeles freeways oddly inspiring. They have a kind of cinematic feel. I can imagine musicians programming beats and matching harmonies to the motion of the highway.

I do that! I program beats in the car and I program beats on the plane. And since I always fly first class I can plug in my drum machine.

You’re not a fan of batteries, huh?

Not at all. I’m inspired by what you feel 20,000 feet above the ground, baby.

I read your book The Tao of Wu and I was fascinated by your description of growing up in Staten Island. You mention your home was robbed on Christmas when you were eight years old.

It’s a horrible idea to think that anybody would steal children’s Christmas toys. But you actually became friends with the guy who did it!

Yeah, Chili-Wop. You have to know that my mother got lucky with the lottery and hit the number. Betting on numbers is a really popular illegal lottery in the projects. The history goes back to prohibition. So my mother was happy and buys all these wonderful presents and moves us into a new apartment. And the next thing you know, our toys, my sister’s bike, the little pinball machine: all gone. We was heartbroken and there was nothing we could do about it. All we could do was cry. Anyhow, the next door neighbor was Chili-Wop and his brother was Tony Mac. They was real cool, real tough guys. They were like the gangstas, they had Richard Pryor albums. We would come over there to play the album, hear records like That Nigger’s Crazy, all that cursing shit. And if you messed with them, they would kick your ass. Even guys on the next block knew about them. When I was nine, their youngest brother Lazar was around twelve, and I got into a fight with him. He was a big dude! I was beating up on one of the other neighbors that was my age and Lazar came to help the guy. He tried to break it up and I immediately went at him. He was like twice my size and got me down and had me, but I kept fighting and fighting. We ended up becoming friends, which lead to me becoming friends with his older brother, Chili-Wop, who was about sixteen going on seventeen.

Which is a huge difference at that age.

Yeah, it’s a big difference. I admired him. And as our friendship increased he ends up telling me that he was the guy who robbed us. But we still stayed friends. I am telling you this because not everybody who comes into your life as an enemy remains an enemy.

And not everybody that comes as a friend remains a friend. ChiliWop became my friend, a protector. He was there to help me out, and I learned a lot from him. [A hummingbird flies by and stops, hovering about a foot from RZA] As a hummingbird flies by . . .

Are you referring to your upbringing in the projects?

I’ve never seen a hummingbird so close. I guess this kind of thing only happens in the center of the Wu-Niverse?

Yeah, the projects of New York—all the fast paced hustle and bustle. I lived that for so many years of my life. Suddenly I wake

Yeah, this is how we do in Malibu. [RZA moves his queen into position] Check-mate, brother!

48 EB 2/2014

EB 2/2014 49

At least I lost against a real player. I read you’re also the champion of the Hip-hop Chess Federation.

True. I started playing chess at the age of eleven, which, by the way, is not so good. But I got more serious later on. Bobby Fisher learned chess when he was six years old, and usually the people that learn the game at the age are the ones who become great. I started late but I’ve been playing long enough to have won more than just a few tournaments. I like chess because it’s a war game. It’s mathematical and it’s analytical. And unlike in life, if you lose in chess it doesn’t mean you’re dead. It’s a game that definitely teaches the strategies of life, where you can learn from loss. It’s also very meditative for me. A lot of people can’t learn from loss. They lose and they can’t come back, they can’t recuperate themselves, and I think that’s a curse for them.

Do you listen to jazz?

I love jazz. When I was making 36 Chambers I was listening to a lot of Thelonius Monk. I remember when we got signed to the label I had bought his and Bill Evans’ box sets from the advance—both being great pianists and both very different, yet similar. Plus, they’re both on the Riverside label. I remember asking the executives at RCA to get me a copy of Straight, No Chaser, Monk’s story.

I actively tried to learn from him, watching this guy playing the piano.

I ask because I think many older jazz musicians not only brought music forward but sought to redefine social consciousness in their own way. I think hip-hop was highly influenced by certain jazz ideas.

I agree. Actually for me personally it wasn’t jazz or people like Iceberg Slim or Gil Scott-Heron that pushed me as far as hip-hop goes. But as years went on and as time passed it was these forms of music that became more influential to me. And then as I became a hip-hop celebrity I started to study other music, so now especially I listen more intensely to jazz. When I listened to Monk in the nineties I would automatically scan it for samples that I could use for a beat. This has fortunately changed. Now I listen just for the music itself.

What about free jazz?

Free jazz, they say, is like a sentence without a repetition, and when I started composing I was going on for thirty-six, forty-eight, sixty-four bars before a repetition could be heard. We always had to re-edit it, because that’s not how popular music works! Quincy Jones actually told me that once—that in order for music to become popular, to become a phrase, it has to have repetition. I had to adapt to that, of course, but you see, if I just smoke a joint and go, it’s never gonna be a straight hip-hop beat.

Hip-hop is one of those genres that appeared pretty suddenly.

Let’s say it wasn’t around in a mainstream way because some hiphop historians say it started as early as 1970 with the release of Gil Scott-Heron’s Small Talk at 125th & Lenox. Some say it started as early as the sixties with James Brown and Isaac Hayes. And some others say that it goes back to DJs like Doug “Jocko” Henderson from Philadelphia, who would always rap a few words over instrumental music on his radio show. I even once heard someone call Muhammad Ali the first rapper. You know it’s hard to really trace the root of it. But let’s just say it flourished more throughout the 50 EB 2/2014

eighties to gain world recognition in the nineties and to become a global pop sensation since the Millennium that continues to this day. Many aspects come to mind when you try to find out about the origins of hip-hop because so much is geniunely based on manipulating existing music. The first guy who scratched they say is DJ Kool Herc. He brought with him a Jamaican soundsystem background. Or if you look at Rakim who some consider one of the best rap lyricists of all time—his father was a jazz musician and his flows were basically jazz-inspired. And if you look at the big sound of the West Coast—I am talking about Dr. Dre and Ice Cube here—you’ll notice its funk roots. Now, if you take a conclusive look at 36 Chambers, even though I did sample from various sources, the only thing I was trying to make was hip-hop. For me, hip-hop was the inspiration before anything.

At the core of much hip-hop, every track echoes someone else’s track by using samples that inherit all the dignity and power of the original artist.

I agree. Take a song like Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat”: It was sampled by Run-DMC on a track called “Here We Go.” Think about “Rapper’s Delight,” the first rap track to ever be big around the whole world: Sugarhill Gang just copied Nile Rodgers and Chic, and A Tribe Called Quest copied and pasted from jazz. Hip-hop has always been an infusion of all music imaginable. I would go so far and label it the other big American music that was invented in the twentieth century—after jazz. I disagree with the people who say that hip-hop goes way back to Africa. C’mon, let’s give it to America first. It was those streets in the projects and them kids without instruments.

What do you mean when you say these kids didn’t have instruments?

Until the late seventies public schools in the US always offered music lessons—that’s why in the Motown days, everybody was seeing music as a proper way out of poverty. When the government shut down the music programs, all the kids went through their school careers without instruments. The guitar and the bass were replaced by the drum machine and the sampler and the turntable and the microphone, because these kids did not get introduced to an instrument that has to be mastered. The equipment that could be self-taught became our creative tools. One of the big differences of hip-hop to any other music is that it was made by a generation of non-instrumentalists. Eventually those guys would go on to learn instruments like me, like Q-Tip, Dr. Dre or DJ Premier.

Would you agree that, on the other hand, all those great genredefining hip-hop records that made the whole thing explode—you couldn’t make them nowadays because clearing the samples would be impossible. How do you see that issue?

The sample issue is part of the destruction of hip-hop to me, and I never agreed with the sample laws. I think it should be totally legal to sample because according to copyright law you can take any form of music and make a new derivative. According to that, hiphop should be able to flourish. Nobody has set a precedence case yet. Somebody needs to go all the way through with it and set the case record cause there’s no case file on it.

Yeah, but this could ruin that person right?

Regardless, it’s worth the sacrifice, because what is a sampler? It’s an instrument. And what does it do? It samples. If sampling is

supposed to be illegal, doesn’t that mean that the sampler itself should be banned, or sued, or lawsuits against the people who make the samplers should be filed? And wouldn’t that also mean that Apple is the biggest lawbreaker in sampling history? An Apple computer comes with Apple loops. Now for a guy like me with a trained ear, I listen to some of the Apple Loops and I can tell which record it came from, I can tell what breakbeat it is. I can prove in court that that breakbeat is a sample but yet it’s on every modern Apple computer. All music is literally a derivative from music that is already in the world. Even the American anthem is a derivative of an old bar song. The lyrics were changed to make the anthem but the person who wrote the bar song didn’t get a nickel for that. I could look at The Rolling Stones and all of the blues, and look at all of the songs of The Beatles, even though The Beatles are my favorite songwriters, I could find songs predating them that use the same chord progressions. Why can you “borrow” a tune and not sample a bar? Why is hip-hop being taken apart when our genuine instrument is a sampler? Our instrument isn’t the guitar and a pair of drums, but we are creating, we are taking phrases and sounds to make something new out of them and it should be considered an original composition. The good thing is that it pushed guys like me to become a real musician.

Are we touching on Duke Ellington here? I mention this because Ellington also became famous for unexpected chord changes, right?

Exactly. With my music it has always been all about the unexpected chord changes and the different fucking rhythms that I put together that made them tracks go. The only difference is that now I’m playing all this shit with real musicians and converting everything to digital. And then I start manipulating it. But I’m not manipulating somebody else’s music, I’m manipulating my own. The flipside of the coin is that it took me fucking ten, twelve years of study.

But wouldn’t you agree that years of study are never lost years?

True that. Let me take a look at my career as a songwriter during these years of study.

What did I achieve? I did work with Kanye whose album became platinum; I did work on the Jay-Z album that went through the roof as well; I’ve been involved with million-selling soundtracks for Tarantino and stuff like that, but I didn’t find the time to carefully record an album of my own with me as the central artist.

But you finally did on the new Bobby Digital album, right?

Will we hear any of that progression on the announced new Wu-Tang album?

Yeah, and I’d also count in the new Wu-Tang album. There’s no outside producers so far. It’s just me, and I think I’ve figured out a way to make another classic hip-hop album that will inspire everybody.

Guess what? On the new Wu-Tang album there will be no samples. But here’s the thing: it still sounds like we’ve used samples. Why? Because we sampled our own recorded music. I’ve figured out what notes I like. That’s my sound.

On the new album you hear all these rhythms and all this new music that has been written by me. I asked myself: How can I make this music sound authentic just like the old records that I used to sample in the past. So I went down to Memphis and gathered all the musicians to play my favorite notes.

You repeatedly mentioned in interviews that you would produce a new Wu-Tang album only under one condition: if Raekwon, Ghostface and all the other members accept that, like with the 36 Chambers, you are the musical dictator.

Yeah! The dictator! Yeah!

And they were able to deal with your ego?

And yet to me it looked like you were basically dependent on them to agree to these terms and conditions. I mean, you’re known as a bunch of guys who are supposed to have big egos.

Yep, and they told me they haven’t felt this musically refreshed in a long time. They been playing music for thirty, forty years on autopilot and now they say: “Yo, you have refreshened us.”

I would have thought they’d be playing funk and blues and boogie every day.

Right, but now they’re playing it with my idea of progression. So now instead of how Al Green would go from A7 to E7, but I’m going into a diminished chord instead because of the notes and chords I hear in my head. I need the hip-hop just like that.

Remember we always pitched everything down and slowed it to fit the spirit of it really.

Four essential albums in a RZA-centric Wu-Niverse (top to bottom): 1. Year zero for the Wu: Enter the Wu-Tang / 36 Chambers from 1993; 2. Gravediggaz’ brilliant horrorcore debut 6 Feet Deep (originally Niggamortis) from 1994, featuring production and MCing by both RZA and Prince Paul; 3. RZA’s soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s modern samurai epic Ghostdog from 1999; 4. RZA returns as Bobby Digital in 2008 with Digi Snacks.

You’re totally right. I’ve been having difficulty, to be completely honest with you. There are some members of Wu-Tang who have not come and agreed yet, but some of the important guys have. You know, Method Man and Inspectah Deck have come and cooperated even when they may have disagreed. You know, the thing that bothers me about Wu-Tang and anybody not accepting the terms I’m offering is that I’m not proposing anything with the idea of hurting or diminishing us. I’m saying that clearly because EB 2/2014 51

my focus and my L.A. movie experience is that I am a couple of years ahead of them all. I was given the chance to direct a real movie with a twenty million dollar budget. Compared to that, even a high album budget of, say, five million dollars is small compared to a movie budget. And I tell you, being responsible for such a huge amount of money completely rearranges your ideas of producing an album! I’ve grown as an entrepreneur and I’ve grown as a business man.

Did you ever have a five million dollar budget for an album?

I had it for the first Bobby Digital album and I had a close to five million dollar budget for Wu-Tang Forever, which was a double album. Of course we were many guys needing to get paid and we had to pay everybody else involved in the production, so that album cost a lot of money. Thanks to the movie experience and to the fact that I had to direct some four hundred people on the set and behind the scenes, my brainpower has grown. I’ve traveled a lot and seen different parts of the world. I’ve even been to the Shaolin monastery in China. I’ve had a taste of what the electronic music is doing in the template of hip-hop and I have a taste of what classical music does from composing. I have a taste of what soul music is. I just want to bring all that knowledge to the table, like Captain Kirk.

Kirk is the captain of the ship, baby. He has Mr. Spock and Mr. Sulu around him and they all help, but he’s the fucking captain and if he says warp speed ahead, it’s warp speed ahead.

You’re basically saying that in art there’s no space for democratic decision making?

All I’m saying is that it has worked before like that, and it will work again. You just have to trust my vision. Actually, the Wu-Tang album will be more to their benefit than to mine because I have a much bigger success with my second career. The films are more lucrative than anything I could achieve in music. That’s why I’m saying now is the time to take heed to me again, because this time I’m not doing it for the money. I once went through a phase in my life where I wouldn’t do nothing without the money and that was bad. I think that happens to everybody who’s successful. You have to overcome this and once you reached that next level things start to really get interesting. 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Wu-Tang Clan and nobody has given me five dollars on it yet.

In fact, the production has already cost thousands of dollars out of my own pocket, and yet I can’t get the cooperation of the crew. The first album only cost 50,000 dollars to make, and I already have tripled that by now. And I ask them why don’t you come work with me? I’m just asking them to come in and to participate because we all will benefit more because now is the first time where we are not signed to a label meaning we don’t have to suffer from a point system. Instead of getting eighteen points we could actually get fifty points. Everybody will get a bit of the pie and we’ll all enjoy the success. And if it’s not successful only I lose my investment.

You once called Quentin Tarantino your godfather when it comes to film directing and the business. Would you say that he’s mainly responsible for your career path?

Yeah! You could call him my mentor. I met him years ago in New York at a press junket for a martial arts movie called Iron Monkey that had been bought by his company, and they hired me to help promote the movie. At that time Wu-Tang was the biggest band in the country. Plus we were affiliated with martial arts. So they wanted the RZA to help bring awareness to this film and they offered to pay me money to do it and I declined the money because I love the movie. I was a fan of the movie since I saw it ten years 52 EB 2/2014

earlier. By the way, this is a good example of how much time it sometimes takes until a great movie gets distributed in America.

I told them to donate the money to the charity of my martial arts school, so it was all a beneficial thing. Bottom line is that I met Mr. Tarantino and we became immediate friends.

Why did it click?

We both realized in a split second that we liked the same music and movies. It was basically a boy buddy thang, and we wound up calling each other to watch movies or listen to records together. That really became our thing. So if he was in town we’d watch a kung-fu movie at the Miramax screening room and that became the foundation of our friendship. By the time he had finished the script for Kill Bill he’d let me read it first—and I was completely blown away. I told him I wanted to be a film director someday, and I asked him if I could be his student. He said yes and one day he asked me to teach him about music production. So I bought him a guitar and I taught him a few things when I was working in the studio. A couple of times he’d even come and travel with the Wu-Tang on our tour bus. But I still have to really sit down with him and give him the proper workout that I feel I somehow owe him.

You only have to sync your itineraries.

Yeah, we’ll find time. So far he only mentored me, really. He let me come to his movie sets and allowed me to watch him work. I went all the way to China with him. I paid for the trip with my own money and just watched and took notes. That’s the best schooling.

Watch and learn—that’s not too far from the sort of school of the streets, in a way.

Yeah, I went to street college—again. It took me about five years going through Kill Bill 1 and 2 as well as Death Proof. Quentin’s place became my college campus of sorts and he’d let me come up to his house and spend the night there whenever I wanted, even if he wasn’t there. It is a very good friendship and I’d even say that I love him as a brother. Anyway, after five years under his tutelage I asked him whether he thought that I was ready.

And?

He said I wasn’t ready just yet. My final test was missing: I hadn’t written a script yet. You know, at the beginning there was the word. So I wrote The Man with the Iron Fists. Eventually Quentin thought I was ready and that’s how I was allowed to direct The Man with the Iron Fists.

Did Tarantino also leave an impression on you in terms of attitude?

I learned how to walk the tightropes of Hollywood by asking Quentin how to behave in the biz. Like: Should I accept that offer?

Should I go there? What do I do? He was very gracious with his knowledge like he actually is to many people. The thing I like about Quentin the most is actually a mutual characteristic: We never questioned who we are. One day we talked about that and he said he grew up with people always telling him he was too loud.

And you?

I grew up with people telling me that I am a know-it-all and that I’m too conceited. But this is the way I am. We have these personalities and people shouldn’t be trying to stop us. ~

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Saxophonist Wayne Shorter is one of the last living jazz giants that defined the genre in its formative decades. Having started his professional career in 1959 with legendary drummer Art Blakey, Shorter joined Miles Davis in 1964 and in the late sixties helped usher in Davis’s electric revolution—a foundation he later built upon with the Weather Report. A practicing Buddhist, Shorter currently leads his own revered quartet. In Los Angeles, he discussed with Max Dax the psychology of risk-taking and the malleability of time.

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Max dax talks to WAYNE SHORTER Left: Wayne Shorter photographed at home in West Hollywood by Luci Lux.

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O

nly recently, volume two of the Miles Davis The Bootleg Series was released by Columbia Legacy. It features stunning live material by the 1969 quintet, only moments before you guys went electric. Everything sounds unbelievably fresh even though it was recorded forty-five years ago.

With your own Wayne Shorter Quartet you recently released the live recording Without a Net. Once again you sound like you’re leaving a comfort zone, deconstructing scales and harmonies—like on the epic track “Pegasus” that you recorded in L.A. at the Walt Disney Concert Hall together with The Imani Winds.

Why would you say that was the case?

In February 2013 I went back to New York to perform together with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. It was another version of “Pegasus.” There was a piece called “Lotus” and another one called “Prometheus Unbound.” I’m working on them right now. I’m mixing the music and all that. It will be released with a graphic science fiction novel. Don Was, who is now the president of Blue Note Records, wants to do it as a coffee table book. I forgot the name of the artist, but I remember that he’s from Atlanta, Georgia. He’s working on it right now in Switzerland because his wife is Swiss. I met him once in a hotel in London, and Don showed me some of his work. I especially liked one picture of his.

I think it’s because the sound of the 1969 outfit was never copied simply because nobody knew about it. There existed no official recordings of that band until now. How does the release connect the pre- and post-electric eras for you?

Well, hearing it again, it triggered a lot of memories. The recordings are from the Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan-Les-Pins. Only Miles and me had survived the previous line-up: Jack DeJohnette had replaced Tony Williams on drums, Chick Corea and Dave Holland had substituted Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter on piano and bass. Man, this was some kind of a tight outfit. But I’ll tell you what I connect with this particular recording: I was home in New York, finished taking a shower and the phone rang. It was Jack Whittemore on the other end of the line who was calling for Miles—he was his agent. We had just finished playing some place that week in New York. So Jack said: “Tonight we’re going to France.” We’d go there for one night and then come back the next day.

I guess that’s what you’d call short notice.

Actually, it wasn’t all that unusual. But in this case the rush led to the recordings that you can hear on the Bootleg Series album.

Everything just happened so fast in those days. Everything changed at such a fast pace that if you didn’t release something immediately it’d be lost forever. I mean, one day later we came back from Antibes and played at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey and I don’t think that we sounded the same at all.

You went through a kind of time travel hearing these recordings again and that’s what I’m interested in. Having been one of the creators of this sound, were you aware of the fact that you were working on a new direction in jazz back then?

Yeah. And I think that it is a great thing to finally share that vision with the people of today, even if it took forty-five years to officially surface. I still believe in a future jazz music. I am not trading in nostalgia.

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Can you describe it?

As I said it was science fiction, which I love. It showed some sort of a galactic council making judgements about which solar system is naughty and which one’s nice. He also did another book of all the racial cultures, pictures of peoples faces with a clock over their heads showing the time zones they’re in.

How do you think about time? I know you converted to Nichiren Buddhism. Bhuddism says you have to live in the present tense, but as a musician you are actually obliged to be a man of the future.

How do you deal with that dichotomy?

That’s the challenge of being in the moment. It’s a challenge to be in the moment where you don’t present yourself with your Sunday suit on. Actually I think being in the moment transcends time, because one moment is equal to eternity. In that very sense I like it when Stephen Hawking says that “nothing is wasted.” For me, nothing is thrown away, and there is no such thing as nothing. So I’m in all those, you dig it? I’m trying to live out the ongoing evolution of the word itself, the words that we say as well as the things that we think, say and do. Everything, including music, becomes a frontier when you try to do and to infer in the form of film, sound, literature or architecture. Everything we face becomes a precipice. The challenge for the masses is to turn in their medicine, to take responsibility, to prepare as well as they can and to then leave the world of followers. When they then stand at the precipice of the unknown,

they negotiate this frontier as leaders. Individuals becoming leaders, individuals who experience singularity as an epiphany. Having said that we try to play music like this. Playing music should be a struggle, like going through resistance. It’s like how an airplane needs the resistance of the air to rise.

So would you say you accept everything as it results from your vision?

I surely don’t blame record companies or other people for anything. As I said, I accept barriers as the resistance that I need to fly. It’s my duty to find out what other uses there are for things that seem immovable. Every obstacle is a potential enabler. I don’t like the phrase, “Use the brains that the maker gave you.” I believe more in exploring the hidden potential of the brain. That’s why I’m trying to play music that actually recalls a conversation that I once had with Coltrane. One time he said that he’d like to make a record that he described like this: “You put it on, and it’s already there. It’s like you’re walking down the street and you see a door and you open it, and everything is already going on: no introduction, no nothing.”

People like you, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul and a couple of others represented a metropolitan or urban way of jazz as a lifestyle—as opposed to referring to Africa, like John Coltrane or Sun Ra did. I wonder how important it was in that sense to wear, say, a suit and not a colorful African garment onstage? I ask because your music was and still is also about style and body language. Everything, including the music, was and is glued together by coolness.

Oh yeah. Being a musician and wearing the suit was like making a social statement. Remember the times. Instead of getting up on a soapbox and protesting like some black poets were, we showed our pride with our body language and in the way we dressed. I certainly refer to a European tradition here in the sense that I say that Mozart was a jazz musician too.

How does he fit into that equation?

Just listen to his Symphony #40 in G Minor and you’ll understand. The melodic motif of this symphony is nothing else than a predecessor to the upbeat that you’ll find in a lot of jazz compositions. You see, I don’t stop at the word “jazz” as I don’t stop at words at all. It would have been most fascinating if Mozart had been born 150 years later!

That’s an interesting thought experiment.

To me the word jazz means: I dare you. I dare you for a meaning, for the moment I dare you. Expand on that meaning because human being means so much. It means so much that is not yet there. In progressing we become more and more human.

You know, some people say it’s already done. We’re done, like as if we were a cake that came out of the oven. But no, we’re not.

We’re everything we do. The conscious decision to wear a suit reflects the struggle within itself. Another conscious decision to keep the group I’m working with now sharp is to leave out rehearsals. It has a practical connotation as we all are living far apart from each other. But it has much more to it than just the practical.

To me this sounds like a continuation of Miles Davis’s working habits. He didn’t rehearse much either, right?

I remember Miles and me talking on the phone a little bit when I had just joined his quintet and he’d announced to me that we’d be going to the studio next week. At that time I had a book that I used to carry with me. I started writing music into this book during my stay in the army. So Miles said “We gonna record next week. Bring the book.”

Because he was curious?

Because he knew. I had shown it to him before, and he’d seen “E.S.P.” in it. That was in late 1964. We then recorded the album E.S.P. in New York in January 1965.

That was a landmark album consisting entirely of original compositions by what was to become Miles’s “second great quintet.”

Yeah, as I said, I’d just joined him. We actually played in West Berlin at the Philharmonic together in September 1964. But back then we didn’t have any original compositions yet. We were still elaborating on Miles’s repertoire, giving it a spin. I should mention Art Blakey at this point: Art always said that we had a message to deliver. That made us bullet proof. I mean, we were traveling all over in trains and planes and we had some close calls. Once a bus almost went over the cliff. But Art would always say that nothing is going to happen to us because we have this message to deliver. I mention this because Miles thought the same. But there were other important people in my life that have influenced me, too. For sure Art Blakey had left a strong impres-

I

still believe in a future jazz music. I don’t trade in nostalgia.

Wayne Shorter

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sion on everyone he ever met. I remember him spending two or three hours playing with kids in Japan during a tour. And only recently I heard that some of those kids who are adults today say they remember Art Blakey spending time with them and that they want to thank him for inspiring them. They basically said that he enabled them in part to become strong adults and contributing to society.

They were all mixed—Asian, Latina et cetera. And right before they left they said: “You know we are the new people.” The first book I read when I was twelve years old was The Water Babies

by Rev. Charles Kingsley. Today I have about four or five copies. The first one was an abridged version for twelve year olds and only later I found out there was an original version, a more complex one.

There is no such thing as wasted time.

Water Babies is also the title of an album by Miles Davis. Had he read the book as well?

Right. And of course we all know that Art Blakey was selfdestructive in his own way.

You mean because he was using?

[Pauses] That was not the whole man, the whole person. I was with Art for five years and with Miles for six. When I went to Japan with Art, I remember that we met some Japanese writers who urgently asked us the question: “What is originality?” That was in 1961 during my first stay in Japan.

And what was your answer?

Art said: “Originality is what jazz is.” You know, originality is not copying. So Art said: “Jazz means trying not to copy or trying not to repeat something from the past—bringing something from your own gut.” I like the phrase “the mystery of us.”

Not only as musicians, but also as human beings we’re on this adventure called life. I always say life is the ultimate adventure of the mystery of us. I know there’s people who think “ultimate” means “end.” But I think ultimate means “unending.” No walls, no boundaries. The question is: how do you play that?

You mentioned that with your acoustic quartet you don’t rehearse.

Obviously that takes trust. That’s where the real magic comes into play.

When we’re not on the road we spend quite a bit of time studying music; not listening to music but studying music, reading music. I read a lot of science fiction novels. At the moment I’m reading a book called The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. The story takes place in the Thailand of the future and the windup girls are females who freed themselves from slavery and have to live in hiding. They call themselves “the new people.” By the way, last week five girls came in here to do an interview for a documentary on Stanley Clarke, and one of them was his niece.

I don’t know if he read it but I know that I gave the book to him as a present one day. He recorded Water Babies after I had left the band.

So everything is connected, but how do you connect with your musicians if you’re not rehearsing?

We always start with something we call “zero gravity.” We’ve been together for years now. We have a kind of unspoken communication, almost like E.S.P.. So, when one of us plays something, just one note—it always reminds me of going on a date, you know, a guy and a girl. Usually most dates go like this: The guy is thinking of what to say while the girl is talking and then she’s thinking of what to respond while he’s talking.

But that’s not really listening.

That’s why I say “usually.” But if they’re not thinking and just talking and the other one’s listening, then something’s happening.

Even if they are disagreeing! That’s an adventurous date, and I would compare our quartet playing together to an adventurous date.

Or maybe a boxing match? I know that Miles Davis boxed—do you box as well?

No, I never did. But I like boxing. Nelson Mandela, who was a boxer too, hit it when they asked him how he put boxing together with his beliefs about compassion and non-violence. He said when he was boxing he and the opponent approached each other with the greatest respect. Plus he knew that his opponent had been medically examined. It wasn’t some gangster business, you know, when you throw somebody in the ring and he’s not ready for it.

That’s when brain damage and all that stuff happens. Mandela said that practicing told him what to do outside of the ring—you

Right: Wayne Shorter, photographed by Luci Lux. The Wayne Shorter Quartet, featuring Shorter on tenor and soprano sax, Danilo Pérez on piano, Brian Blade on drums and John Patitucci on bass, will play the upcoming Electronic Beats Night of the Jazzfest Bonn on June 1, 2014. The show will be made available soon after on www.electronicbeats.net

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know, take the boxing to the prison and fight the guards. Boxing to him was like a seed.

Joe Zawinul once told me that one really important thing about being in a band is that you have to get along traveling together and actually he extended this to the aspect of drinking together.

Being together in the Weather Report also meant that you could always relate to each other because you had this common sensibility when it came to exchanging ideas. Do you have as intense a relationship with your new quartet as well?

Oh yeah! We travel together in good ways and my wife travels with me all the time. Only recently Brian Blade married too. He married the young lady he went to high school with. He hadn’t seen her in twenty something years before it clicked. They travel with us too. And we’ll get to the point where Danilo Pérez will join us with his wife too. They have three children but Danilo’s wife is amazing. She plays alto sax and she has a degree in music therapy. I wonder how that will turn out. All of us traveling together . . .

Bringing the wives on the road is the complete opposite to what Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography about traveling and never, ever taking women on the road. Seeing as how he’s known as one of the greatest and most prolific bandleaders of all time, is this a reaction or comment on his way of leading a band?

No, I wouldn’t say that. You have to know before Miles passed away I had my own band and we would both play at Montreux or some other place. He would go on first and when we met again in the dressing room, he’d ask if we should go on tour together— you know, from bandleader to bandleader. Back then I had Terri Lyne Carrington, a woman, on drums. And he would ask me if I thought women keep better time than men on the drums.

And what was you answer?

how to play this rock and roll. And in all honesty, I anticipated something was going to happen too. The key came to me when we were recording “Nefertiti” without any solos in it, just playing the melody over and over again. Actually it was Ron Carter improvising underneath. I just felt that this was the beginning of a revolution.

The electric revolution? Nefertiti was also the last acoustic album before Miles Davis went electric.

Several writers said that the repetition of “Nefertiti”, this groundbreaking new format, was a nudge into a different thinking. One night I was at Miles’ house while James Brown was having a residency at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. So, Miles was cooking and his new wife Betty was there too. And Miles, he said in his whispering voice, he said: “You know jazz needs another motor, it needs a motor like James Brown has a motor.” And while he was cooking he asked Betty to do a dance step that exemplified the motor. We would often stay in apartments where we could cook and all that, and he’d call our room and he’d say: “Hey Herbie, hey Wayne, come on over and check Betty out!” And then we’d walk into his apartment and they’re cooking and Betty’s dancing to Jimi Hendrix and James Brown and Sly Stone and she’s dancing the new kind of steps we’ve never seen before. And Miles says: “That’s what I’m talking about!”

So I guess it’s true that many important decisions are made in the kitchen while cooking?

I would say yes. Miles would always come up with new ideas in the kitchen and at the same time tease you to taste the chicken or the steak he was just cooking. The same applied to the hotel rooms we were staying: He’d order a lot of food before we’d go to the night club to play—two tables full. Then he’d say: “There it is.”

You ate before you played?

Terri was sitting right there, so I said something like women are really good with interior decorating and that I’d think that jazz needed some interior decorating. You know, women are integral to jazz. They may not stay in the forefront, but Miles used to say if you played to an entirely male audience you better get another profession. And that’s one of the reasons why he went into Bitches Brew: He wanted to get into the then uncharted jazz territory where people who liked Janis Joplin and other girls screaming felt thrilled. He was convinced that we knew better

M

No, we didn’t. But he wanted to look at the food. He’d say: “Doesn’t this look nice?” He would call sometimes and invite me to the Cuban restaurant down the street from where he lived in New York, a place called Victor’s. And let me tell you about yet another favorite restaurant of ours on that corner of 52nd and Broadway right across from Birdland that served the best Wiener Schnitzel in town. Which reminds me, when Joe Zawinul and I met there he wasn’t speaking any English. We were talking with

iles would always come up with new ideas in the kitchen and at the same time tease you to taste the chicken or the steak he was just cooking.

Wayne Shorter

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our bodies but it translated as words. That corner was something.

What made it so special?

financiers are not reading poetry anymore. We therefore have to surprise the financiers how we get things done that touch the human spirit without their money.

It was like you worked in Birdland and during an intermission you’d go all the way down to the Village Vanguard. All the musicians would cross each other all the time. Actually it was the only time musicians would see each other because everyone was always working. Some of us would have our own cars. Lee Morgan had a Triumph and Donald Byrd had a Mercedes. Herbie drove a Cobra. If you didn’t meet the musicians on the street you’d see them passing by.

And this understanding influenced and informed your way of composing your late music? On Without a Net you let classical music theory and abstract ideas infiltrate into your music. What you are doing is not pure jazz anymore. I have to mention Miles Davis once again as he was listening to a lot of Shostakovich when he went electric and that basically informed the way he composed. How would you describe the directions you’re taking with your quartet at the moment?

What car did you drive?

If jazz sounds like jazz it becomes like a statue: immobile. But the intention of jazz is to move forward. I dare you to go forth.

Exactly that is often forgotten. Doing what we are doing is a risk.

But it’s first and foremost a chance. You have to come out of the closet during your life as a human being when the coast is clear.

That’s what we’re all doing. See, we’re not playing music—we’re dialoguing with life. There’s a difference! We’re having a dialogue with the unexpected. If we can take chances on stage, it all gets down to the definition of faith. Do you know that people have been trying to define the word faith for ages now? They’re still trying to define it! What is faith? Some say it’s something that adapts. Others say it’s something not seen. Faith is the evidence of something not seen. But to me that’s limited. If you ask me, faith is to fear nothing. When you play music, when you embark on a plane. You get on fearless.

No car. I was in the army where I got my driver’s license but I never owned a car until I moved to California twenty-six years ago. And somehow all that goes into the music. What happened between Birdland and the Village Vanguard was nothing else than celebrating a way of life. But regardless of cool you’re always celebrating the wonder of life and you want to celebrate it by giving something back to life, which means to the people. And what you give is what your profession is, so in my case it’s the music.

That’s actually the greatest thing you can give to life in celebration of the wonder of it. Music that reflects life is an original gift to people. To me that’s the meaning of life: You have to do what you do—whatever that is—with the maximum possible faith.

Does something exist without people? Take the word “existence”: Is it a valid term without people? A tree falling in the forest—is there a sound if there’s no one there to hear it?

Now that you’ve been exploring the meaning of life in other ways, has your method of composing changed? How would you compare writing “Nefertiti” with the Miles Davis Quintet and writing “Orbits” from your last album?

That leaves me almost speechless in light of the experience you went through losing your wife in the tragic TWA Long Island plane crash in 1996.

My wife.

I hope I’m not crossing a line here by mentioning this.

What shall I say? “Nefertiti” came just like that. Almost effortless. Whereas writing music now is like . . . you have to realize that today is a different time compared to a couple of decades or centuries ago.

What’s the difference?

It’s not only about me and how easy writing a piece of music is for me. We also have to realize that we do what we’re doing with uncompromising faith. We are living in a century where the

Don’t worry, you’re not. Because I believe that death is temporary, like so many things that are temporary. And that implies that you can detach yourself from that and fly and you’ll meet more than what you’ve lost. And that means with anyone who’s died you’ll more than meet them again. I say it again: Be fearless! I know, it’s easy to say. You got to work hard on it, no doubt. But never forget: We work hard on the other stuff all day long. Just take a look around you. We work hard gossipping on the phone or on the Internet for instance.

You can always use your time more profoundly. ~

P. 62-63: Wayne Shorter with Art Blakey (drums) and Lee Morgan (trumpet) in Chicago, 1961. Photo: Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images.

P. 64-65: Miles Davis (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano) and Wayne Shorter in Berlin, 1964. Photo: JazzSign/Lebrecht Music/Corbis.

P. 66-67: Keyboardist Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter in Palavas-les-Flots, 1976. Photo: Guy le Querrec/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus.

EB 2/2014 61

66 EB 1/2014

EB 1/2014 67

A.J. SAMUELS interviews INGA COPELAND

“Whatever

” TV

was on

On her debut solo LP, Because I’m Worth It, Alina Astrova, formerly one half of enigmatic duo Hype Williams, embraces her independence in a blissful and carefully constructed dark haze. Despite hints of her current musical trajectory in previous 12-inches, her LP as Copeland reaches new heights in a standalone sound, closer to the work of the album’s lone collaborator Actress (on only a single track) than former Hype Williams bandmate Dean Blunt. But in her first Q & A, Copeland remains wary of seeing her work as progress.

Opposite page: Alina Astrova, aka Inga Copeland, in Berlin. All photos by Luci Lux.

EB 2/2014 69

lina, I was surprised when you ordered your beer just now in perfect British English. I expected you to have an accent.

You mean a Russian accent?

Yeah. Before that, I was interested in music, like teenagers are, because of going out. I didn’t know that much about music apart from what I’d hear around.

What did you listen to when you were growing up?

Yeah.

Well, I’ve known English since I was about five from watching TV. My parent’s idea of parenting was to let us watch as much TV as we wanted. This was after the Soviet Union collapsed. Maybe TV was more exciting then because it wasn’t banned, because all these foreign programs were being shown in English for the first time.

I’m surprised the cartoons weren’t dubbed, because the way characters move their mouths usually seem pretty non-language specific.

Nothing is dubbed in Estonia. It’s too small I guess. There were subtitles.

In some countries the people who do voice overs of famous foreign actors are famous in their own right.

In Russia, too. I remember only one guy doing all the American movies. He did all of the characters in one monotonous voice. There was no trying to pretend to do a female voice or anything.

Do you have a special knack for languages?

I’ve never tried to learn a foreign language as an adult so I wouldn’t know.

You were born in Russia, but your family moved to Estonia when you were a kid. You studied art criticism at St. Martins in London. How did you end up there?

I moved there when I was seventeen without much of a plan. I applied to several schools without really knowing what they were.

It was just an extension of high school, another three years of something I had to do. I wasn’t one of those kids who knew what they wanted to do straight away or followed an interest from when I was young. I just wanted to leave Estonia.

Whatever was on TV. MTV came into that part of the world in the nineties, so we just watched that on repeat, looping, the same chart ten times a day.

This was I guess the tail end of MTV playing videos before it became more reality shows?

Last time I had a TV, they were still playing some videos.

I attempted to read a piece of art criticism of yours I found online for an Estonian art magazine. I had a hard time with it because the English translation was a bit wonky. But I did understand that it was a critique of the relationship between culture and economics, particularly with the influx of Western culture into Estonia since the end of the Soviet Union. I extrapolated a bit from the essay when thinking about the track “Diligence” off of your new album. At some point you quote Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” with, “Cash rules everything around me,” and then Snoop’s “Gin and Juice” with, “Got my mind on my money and my money on my mind.” But you couple that with a more cynical take on earning money: “Everything is measured in numbers, so what’s the significance?” Do you see your music as a vehicle for a critique of capitalism or the music industry?

I don’t see the lyrics as so literal. This isn’t a real narrative or hardly even any original content there. You can immediately tell the references because they are such a cliché, culturally but also in terms of what they express. It’s more interesting for me to pull together these widely known things and see if they can be an expression of a shared thought process, rather than constantly trying to come up with an original statement to show how insightful I am. In that sense, I guess, you could say that it’s against a kind of vision of artist as authority.

No, I started when the band started.

Listening back to Hype Williams and your previous solo 12-inches and EP, I was kind of surprised by the sound of your new album.

Production-wise everything is much more well defined, the song structures seem more focused, the vocals are more treated, which make it more engaging than previous releases. Do you at all see the album as a step forward or any kind of progress?

Hype Williams?

I’m not such a technical musician in terms of production, so I am

So you weren’t always making music?

70 EB 2/2014

“Working with people possibly forces you to lose the idea that creating something meaningful is a personal achievement.”

not particularly interested in developing a sound or a direction in that way. Everything I do happens as a bit of an experiment and I see the album just as much a part of this ongoing process as the 12-inches or anything I put online. The reason I’m not saying that it’s a step in one or another direction is that I have no idea what the direction is, there is no plan.

So what is inspirational for you in making music?

I can’t really describe there being a method. I’m not easily seduced by the technical side of things. It’s more about the environments in which music is experienced and addressing those situations.

Is Hype Williams only on hiatus or is it over for good?

Can you live off of your music?

Now I’ve been doing this for long enough to get through the phases of initial interests, then hype, and then whatever comes after. But initially I didn’t get into music thinking of it as a potential profession so it took me a while to accept that it is my job. I still make music in the same way I’ve done before, but no longer being in the band, I had to rearrange what I do on a practical level. Releasing the record by myself, not on any label, has been a big part of that.

It’s an enormous amount of work on one hand, but it felt necessary to go through the process independently. It had to do with avoiding being in a situation where you know less about it than the people who approach you with deals, which can be a very patronizing experience.

I suppose it’s better to be confronted with someone who’s patronizing than someone who’s trying to rip you off.

Patronizing is ripping off, in an emotional sense. But also, sometimes people don’t mean to be patronizing or to rip you off—they might think they understand what you want without it being the case. It’s no surprise that the music industry is full of these stories.

Getting into it quite young, as most people do, you don’t always know how to negotiate these things and avoid misunderstandings.

You don’t know or care about anything besides your art and you make all these decisions that you think are just incidental. Then they come back to you five years later and you’re like, “What the fuck is that?”

What got you excited about music when you moved to London in the mid-2000s? Grime? Dubstep?

I can’t say I knew much about grime back then. I found out about it later through friends who were really into it.

What about now?

There are plenty of things I listen to, but not so directly for inspiration. My experience with music—particularly dance music—is still more going to clubs and dancing, where I don’t necessarily think about what synth is playing on what particular track.

72 EB 2/2014

As far as I know, Hype Williams is still going, but I am no longer part of it.

And you guys were a couple . . .

Does this relate to other questions you have?

I find the idea of a couple making music together interesting, because I have a hard time imagining it being easy working creatively with your partner. Although there are plenty of counter examples.

When people get involved in a project, relationships inevitably end up being quite intimate, regardless of whether it’s a couple or a group. It’s always a power play and that’s what makes it complicated. It’s hard to detach the work from this other thing that’s going on and all the insecurities involved in being around other people.

But that’s also why working with other people is really important to me still. Representing this idea of a single musician with great ideas and great talent is something I don’t find that interesting. Beyond a certain point thinking about how special you are at something or how bad you are at other things is just limiting. Working with people possibly forces you to lose the idea that creating something meaningful is a personal achievement.

Musicians who work exclusively by themselves come across sometimes as narcissistic. But maybe you have to be obsessed with the world you’ve created for yourself to maintain a certain level of success on your own.

I don’t believe in that. It’s a very dominant narrative in music and elsewhere: the idea of a tortured genius providing revelatory advice through personal suffering. In a way, the lyrics on “Advice to Young Girls” are a joke about this concept of a role-model and giving patronizing advice. Engaging in this self-importance thing is obviously very seductive, but it has become infinitely boring to me because it’s a limited understanding of the situation. You live in a world with other people and they also think about things. I don’t feel like I have to prescribe what music should be. Of course, the system would support the idea of individuality, because it is easy to sell. The alternative is not so easily brandable. ~

ONE YEAR FOUR EDITIONS SIX Euro

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Fatima Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti artist and musician at the forefront of underground electronic music, a position solidified by her new, debut album Asiatisch for Hyperdub Records.

The adopted New Yorker is additionally celebrated for her role in the young Gulf Arab art collective GCC, whose retrospective exhibition is on now at New York’s MoMA PS1 until September of this year.

Another artist favored by the MoMA is native New Yorker Kenneth Goldsmith, the institution’s first Poet Laureate. Renowned as the founder of the Internet’s library of the avant-garde, UbuWeb, he is equally revered and reviled for his conceptual writings and actions, such as his call to “print out the Internet” in protest of the death of activist Aaron Swartz. A generation apart, their acquaintance began not in New York, but in Dubai, and while there may be little direct overlap in their work, when they sat down to talk in Goldsmith’s Manhattan apartment—which he shares with his wife and their two children—thoughts on the end of copyright, the battles won by modernism and loops in video game music had the two vowing to continue the discussion long after the tape turned off.

Right: Fatima Al Qadiri in Manhattan. All photos by Miguel Villalobos.

76 EB 2/2014

FATIMA AL QADIRI TALKS TO KENNETH GOLDSMITH

“You grew up in a place without Led Zeppelin? ” Moderated by: LISA BLANNING Kenneth Goldsmith: I remember

that we met at the art fair in Dubai about five years ago. I’d been working on UbuWeb with Bidoun, and they brought me to the fair to do these series of talks.

In a parking garage, they had set up this salon where the coolest things in the world were happening. We did the talks there, and then we just ended up staying up all night. After that you and I sporadically saw each other. I had a book launch at MoMA and you came to that. And I’ve been always trying to go to your things, openings. That’s the thing with having kids, I just don’t get out. It’s impossible. During the hours of an opening, what is it, six to eight? It’s hell time around here. Kids need to eat, they need baths, their homework is breaking down, they’re fighting. I can’t get out of my house six to eight. But what’s happening with you in the art world now?

Fatima Al Qadiri: Well, I’m part

of this collective called GCC. We’re nine artists, four girls, five guys. Seven from Kuwait, one from Qatar, one from Bahrain.

We formed at Art Dubai, in the VIP lounge in March of last year.

Then we had a bunch of shows.

The first one was at Kassel at the Fridericianum. Now we have a solo show at MoMA PS1, which is amazing. It’s called Achievements in Retrospective, and the four shows we had previously were on the theme of achievement, so Christopher

Lew, one of the curators, decided to house it under one roof.

KG: God, I hate working col-

laboratively. I always find that I hate what comes out of it. I think it’s the worst of me and the worst of them. Sometimes what I do, if somebody wants to collaborate, I just give them a book and I say, “You do it.” And it always comes out terrible. And I’m like, “No, I’m sorry. I would have done it differently.” I hate all my collaborations and I’ve just stopped doing them now.

I’m too much of a control freak.

I can’t cede an inch to anyone.

FAQ: I’m a huge control freak, but I feel like sometimes someone else knows better than I do. For instance, I’m extremely dimensionally challenged. One of the members is an architect, then another one is a furniture designer, and they work with dimensions all day. I can fight with them, but they know better.

I have a lot of ideas, but I can’t physically realize them, and that’s the beauty of working with a collective. It can be done. So we can build a house, we can make a movie, we can write a book—we have two writers and four filmmakers. If sound is needed, I’ll do it. But it’s definitely decided together. The thing about naming yourself after a government body is that it’s about cooperation. It’s about nations ceding to a higher power, or the greater good.

KG: God, I feel completely disconnected from nationhood. I live on a small island off the coast of America. That big thing, I want nothing to do with it.

FAQ: There is a tribe mentality

in our work in the way that in Gulf or Arab society the tribe is the most important thing, you know? You’ll protect them even if they commit murder. They are above the law. So, we operate like that, too. It is the most important thing, really. Any kind of hint of dissent has to be snuffed out almost immediately. [laughing]

KG: As a New Yorker, I’m com-

pletely paranoid and suspicious. I’m cocooned. . . .

FAQ: I’m extremely para-

noid and suspicious . . .

KG: . . . particularly with my family! Particularly with those people that of course would be my tribe, I can’t stand them.

I told you already that I can’t stand having kids. So, it’s really different. But I admire the collective. So, it’s based where?

FAQ: All over the place. Two live

in Kuwait, one lives in Beruit, one lives in Dubai, two live in London, three live in New York.

Thank God for technology.

KG: But you must spend a

lot of time on airplanes.

FAQ: I do because of touring. I feel

like, if you make music, there’s only two things you can do: You can sign a publishing deal and start songwriting for pop stars, or you have to start DJing. Or you’re rich. There’s really no other way of getting around that, unfortunately.

KG: Touring sounds like a drag. As

a writer I’m so glad I don’t have to tour. I just want to stay here and work. And that’s why I love the web so much: I can be social without ever having to be in the same room as anybody. I can just send things out, and it can be cold.

I love the distance. A lot of people don’t even know that I live in New York. When I’m here, I’m usu-

ally under cover. UbuWeb works for me perfectly great. I just love the idea of throwing up a giant distribution network without ever having to hold anybody’s hand or raise any money or do anything like that. The whole thing has been working for eighteen years in that way. My entire production is predicated on distance.

And so I do have to do readings, but I try never to do them in New York. I hate doing them here.

FAQ: Getting away from

the home audience?

KG: There isn’t much of an audience! There are ten people in New York that care about what I do. If you do a reading twice a year, you’ve already burnt those poor people out.

FAQ: You have to stage it carefully.

I definitely appreciate that. I hate getting on planes. But I have to DJ, so I really don’t have a choice. I mean, I don’t want to be anybody’s entertainment in the middle of the night. It’s really not my idea of fun. I’d rather be entertained!

KG: Are you DJing like art or is

it entertainment when you do those gigs? Are people dancing?

FAQ: Oh yes, they’re dancing. The

kind of music that I play is a lot of rap. I would summarize it as rap over unrelated beats. So you basically recognize the lyrics but the beat underneath is something completely different. Because I love rap, I love the hypeness of it and that’s what I want to listen to when I’m in a club. But I don’t want to listen to it dry. I want to listen to it mixed with something alien.

KG: I find that on UbuWeb, most people don’t care about the artists that are there. They don’t care about the historical qualities. They don’t care that Kurt Schwitters was representative of Dada and he did Ursonate in 1925. Hugo Ball? They don’t care. Cage? The same. DJs mostly go into the site and plunder it for really weird sounds and then mix it in to Bruce Nauman on the dancefloor of São Paulo going, “Get out of my life.” [pounds on the

table]. Because, you know, the art world is producing all of these kinds of insane sounds that you can’t find elsewhere. And I love the misuse of that. I’m actually really, really into it. I think that’s probably the legacy of twentieth century sound art: to become fodder for dance mixes.

FAQ: Definitely for intros and out-

ros. But if I see the crowd’s reaction, it’s always positive for me.

So I know what I’m doing is right.

But I’m very hard on myself. I’m not the kind of DJ that just goes up and presses play and is just happy to take the money and play any old shit. I’d rather die than do that! I have to make sure that what I’m playing is going to hit them really, really hard—as hard as I can.

KG: My radio show for fifteen

“Whatever is original is irrecuperable and doesn’t exist anymore. We can’t identify it, we can’t locate it. Honestly, it’s just this mass of free-floating signifiers that is temporarily put together into constellation . . . There’s no history. There really cannot be anymore.

I find that to be the motif of our age.”

Kenneth Goldsmith

years was three hours of trying to get people to turn the radio off.

stuff, that’s not difficult. And people do all the time. Or they’ll play some obnoxious shit. You know, they’ll play what I would classify as bedroom music in the club, and I’ll want to smash a bottle on top of their head.

FAQ: Oh my God!

That’s obnoxious!

KG: It was so obnoxious! But you

have a dial and you can click it off. It’s not a forced thing. I did it under various names, including “Unpopular Music.” So one day, I think it was for White Columns, they asked me to DJ for a benefit.

And really, I don’t know anything about dance music, and it was a complete disaster. People were coming up and literally screaming at me. And I was trying to kind of fake it, and they were like, “This is horrible, you are awful.” So I went onto the street, like in front of the IFC Theater in the Village, and those guys used to have tables set up with dance music cassettes.

I bought a bunch of those, um, you know, house music or something like that. I put them on and people began dancing and loving it, and then I left in the middle of it.

FAQ: It’s really difficult to make

people happy in the middle of the night, being their entertainment at that hour.

KG: It’s the hardest audi-

ence in the world.

FAQ: People diss DJs a lot. I feel

like, yeah, you can play Top Forty

KG: I remember around 1996 I was

Above (top to bottom): Goldsmith’s published works include Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), in which he describes his methods of literary appropriation and Day (2003), a transcribed and bound issue of the September 1, 2000 edition of The New York Times.

in France and somebody took me to the first rave I ever went to. I couldn’t get it. There was this one guy on stage, and I couldn’t really see what he was doing; he wasn’t playing an instrument, it looked like he was simply standing there.

And then there were thousands of people facing this guy. People were sort of dancing a little bit, but not really. It was like people were just sitting there watching a guy who might as well been checking his email. And this got worse with laptops. If you’re not really dancing, to sit there and watch electronic music has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.

FAQ: I DJ from my laptop, exclu-

sively. But I don’t even make eye contact with people. Because I don’t want them to look at me. Get on with your dancing business.

KG: I mean, I thought you were

most famous as an artist and then the DJing seemed to come later or was it the same time?

EB 2/2014 79

“People diss DJs a lot. I feel like, yeah, you can play Top Forty stuff, that’s not difficult. And people do all the time. Or they’ll play some obnoxious shit. You know, they’ll play what I would classify as bedroom music in the club, and I’ll want to smash a bottle on top of their head.”

FATIMA AL QADIRI FAQ: Well, the DJing came

later. I mean I made music, and I was doing visual art. I made both at the same time.

York.” So, randomly, thank God it was linguistics. I actually feel like it’s changed me as a person.

You can see vestiges of it in my work, but not directly. It’s made me more aware of language’s relationship to identity, language as identity. One of the most basic examples is not mocking the way someone speaks. Or how someone speaks can be a false persona if they change the way they speak when they speak to certain people. For instance, someone that I know, the way she speaks to her bank on the phone is completely different from the way she speaks to me or to the way she speaks to strangers. If you’ve studied linguistics, you immediately spot that. You can smell it a mile away.

It has to do with identity, how she wants to present herself to people.

It tells you a lot about a person.

see, I have no views on copyright.

I don’t believe in it. I don’t use it.

I distribute my work freely; everything on UbuWeb is pirated and distributed freely. But copyright is also a weird and nuanced thing.

I don’t blame people for wanting to hold copyrights for things that are worth money. If I did something that was worth money, I’d probably want to hold onto the copyright and try to make some money out of it, too. But the materials that I deal with on UbuWeb and also in my own work are not involved in that at all. I make my money from academia, university work. This also pays for all of my intellectual production, and I figure I don’t need to get anything back from that. I throw it out into the open. So, yeah, in certain ways, I’ve managed to prove that actually copyright doesn’t exist.

KG: So you ever go back and

FAQ: I feel like it’s a very—I don’t want to say touchy subject—but it is a reality as far as music. For visual art, it doesn’t really enter my mind. I feel like so much of contemporary art is pastiche, referencing the past, recreating the past. But with music, as you said, if it’s interfering with your income and livelihood, that’s where you go into a gray area.

Sales from records for many musicians are negligible. If you enter the title of my last record, the first thing that comes up is “.zip”.

I really can’t be a hypocrite and say that it pisses me off because I’m definitely downloading a whole shitload of music. But for me, if it’s an artist I care about, I look at legal sites first and see if their music is available for sale.

Sometimes we’re friends and we’re doing an exchange of music. But I would like to financially support artists that I care about, as far as music is concerned.

KG: Did you go to art school?

ever think about linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure or anything like that?

FAQ: No, I have a degree in lin-

FAQ: No.

guistics. It’s really random. I wanted to go to art school, but the Kuwaiti Ministry of Education did not have any scholarships for that, unfortunately.

KG: You’re not reading it for fun

anymore? No interest in Chomsky?

FAQ: No. I feel like for me,

KG: Do they have good art

schools in Kuwait?

I don’t know. The reading . . . I really enjoy reading biographies and sci-fi.

FAQ: There is no art pro-

KG: I’ve got a couple of new

biographies on my iPad. I’ve got the new Walter Benjamin biography. The problem is I know it all too well. And the other one is the new Burroughs biography. You like Burroughs?

gram in Kuwait.

KG: So you have to go abroad

if you want to study? Why are there no art schools in Kuwait?

FAQ: I feel like the Kuwaiti government doesn’t want to encourage art as a profession. They see it as a hobby. And that’s why I couldn’t study it as a major. I mean, I went on a scholarship.

They’re like, “Music and art, these are hobbies. These are not infrastructure-building majors.”

I don’t know how linguistics is an infrastructure-building major. But it was the only thing offered in New York, so I did it. I was like, “I don’t give a fuck if I have to do like biomedical engineering.

I don’t care, I have to be in New

80 EB 2/2014

FAQ: I mean, with Burroughs

Above: Images from Goldsmith’s recent performance in the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, where he printed out some 250,000 pages of documents originally procured illegally from JSTOR archives by the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

I feel like I liked him more as a teenager, but now I just feel like he’s this character that has been given so much exposure.

When someone is so overexposed, I feel like I don’t need to read it to know what happened.

KG: I kind of think so, too. But

I get those books all from filesharing for free. That’s the way I read these days: whatever I can find on file-sharing. It pretty much determines what I read. You

KG: Whatever is original is irrecu-

perable and doesn’t exist anymore.

We can’t identify it, we can’t locate it. Honestly, it’s just this mass of free-floating signifiers that is temporarily put together into constellations. And I want to go back to Walter Benjamin’s constellation, the dialectic constellation which forms temporarily for a

minute and then gets blown apart again. That’s really a cognate of the network and the way that networks are coming together, the way cultural artefacts are ephemeral, exploding back out.

There’s no history. There really cannot be anymore. I find that to be the motif of our age. And if that work doesn’t reflect that in some way, it’s not work I think is particularly relevant—which is clearly not the case with yours. I feel that the copyright battles of the twenty-first century are the equivalent of moral battles of the twentieth, the kind of censorship battles. We talk about Burroughs or we talk about Joyce. Those are the battles, and they were won.

With copyright, I keep trying to get arrested, and I can’t. I just did a big project in Germany where I pirated about 350,000 dollars worth of JSTOR documents—a giant online academic archive of knowledge that should be free—as

a tribute to Aaron Swartz. Swartz downloaded a lot of it. Of course, he felt it should be free, and it ended up very tragically for him.

So this was a tribute to him. We used JSTOR’s logo, and I set up a JSTOR pirate headquarters in Dusseldorf. I had five computers and five students that were helping me print out 18,000 documents that were pirated from JSTOR. We put it out all over online and got big press, Yahoo and all sorts of places, and JSTOR hasn’t reacted. And it’s kind of like, maybe we’ve just reached this point now where you can provoke copyright all you like. It’s very different than it would have been ten years ago. Everyone is just kind of with it now. And life does continue. Art continues to be made, somehow people make profits. I think from different things, maybe not the artefact itself, but all the things around artefacts.

I’ll never really make a good pay

Above: Goldsmith founded the website UbuWeb in 1996 as a hub for avant-garde media, including concrete and sound poetry, and later branching out to film and sound art. The website explicitly embraces low quality audio and video rips and describes itself as a filtered archive of artists’ works, not a replacement for purchasing or seeing them in situ: “UbuWeb is like seeing a photograph of a painting.

If you really want to see the way Van Gogh applied the paint, you need to see the damn thing in person. Until you can get there, you’re stuck with us.”

check from my books, so there’s a free cultural thing that I think is really in the air. I also wanted to ask you: Did you choose to be an artist or did it choose you?

FAQ: I mean, my mother was an

artist. She was a painter and a printmaker. So very twentieth century, very modernist paintings of women. She was very feminist, and even the music that she listened to was sung by women. She listened almost exclusively to female Arab and Iranian singers singing about heartache, which I think really influenced me. [laughing]

KG: I’ve got these funny records,

I wonder if some of these are your mother’s. Let me bring out some of these LPs I have. Maybe you’ll know some of these.

FAQ: [inspects record covers]

Maybe some of them would be in my dad’s record collection.

EB 2/2014 81

“I feel like the Kuwaiti government doesn’t want to encourage art as a profession . . .

And that’s why I couldn’t study it as a major.

They’re like, ‘Music and art, these are hobbies. These are not infrastructure-building majors.’ I don’t know how linguistics is an infrastructure-building major. But it was the only thing offered in New York, so I did it.

I was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck if I have to do like biomedical engineering. I don’t care, I have to be in New York.’”

FATIMA AL QADIRI KG: Really? Kind of square . . .

Arabic music was Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” I was in eighth grade, I heard that and I was like, “Wow, something else is going on here.”

FAQ: Not square, no. It’s like

Arabic pop from the sixties, seventies. Your records are in mint condition. Some of them are classic, and I’ve never heard of some of the others. [Picks up an LP] This is Tunisian, very, very rare. Put on this Sabah, she is the Cher of the Arab world. She kept going until her nineties, and always looked really young. This is basically the most impressive collection of Arabic vinyl that I’ve seen a nonArab own. I mean, I only know some of the records, but where did you get these? Because this looks like one sale, somebody’s really mint record collection.

FAQ: I’ve never heard that song.

KG: You know, it’s sort of a weird

rock, Arabic, Middle Eastern, mystical kind of thing that Led Zeppelin were doing. You know, how did American kids get into anything interesting? Through rock bands. How is it that you’ve never heard “Kashmir”? Did they not have Led Zeppelin in Kuwait when you were growing up?

FAQ: No, actually they didn’t.

KG: Come on! You grew up in a

KG: There was a place on Atlantic

Avenue called Rashid Sale’s. I’d always gone there and bought those records for a lot of money.

When everything was changing from vinyl to CD, they dumped their entire stock at Tower Outlet.

And I got each one of those for a quarter, brand new. There were records I had been always dreaming of having, but they were really expensive, like fifteen dollars each. I walked out with probably most of them.

FAQ: What got you into this era of

Arabic music in the first place?

KG: Well, look at those cov-

ers! But what really got me into

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place without Led Zeppelin?

FAQ: I grew up in Kuwait

Above: Three images from GCC’s current retrospective at MoMA PS1 (Top to bottom, courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Gallery, Berlin): Inaugural Summit, Morschach 2013 3, 2013; Berlin Congratulant, 2013; Inaugural Summit, Morschach 2013 5, 2013.

months, and he was like, “Here you go.” And I had suddenly quadrupled my record collection.

While I was flipping through it, I found Pink Floyd, which I just thought that was really unusual, because I don’t think he ever played it. He played Cerrone a lot, but he never played anything remotely rock. I personally listened to a lot of American pop growing up, like all kids did: Michael Jackson, Eurythmics and whatever was playing on MTV at the time. And then I graduated to gangsta rap by myself.

KG: How available is gang-

sta rap in Kuwait?

FAQ: It was available. There

was this place called The Video Club that sold bootlegged copies of rap records, and I bought it on CD. I was so happy that my parents didn’t speak English enough to know the lyrics I was listening to. So that was a relief. I just felt very edgy.

KG: So what do you do with that

in Kuwait? Feeling edgy and filled with American rap stuff?

Like what does a kid in Kuwait do with those feelings? Do you find other people that were into it or did you feel really alone?

FAQ: Not really, no. I didn’t want

to share my love of it. Listening to music has always been a solitary thing for me, because I didn’t grow up going to concerts. There was no such thing.

Concerts were largely illegal.

in the eighties!

KG: What about Arab pop?

KG: Oh well, nobody was play-

FAQ: I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to this as a kid, no way! They had concerts, but I didn’t even know about it. I wasn’t in the same world as this kind of stuff. The only Arabic music I heard was whatever my mom had blasting in her studio while she painted, which I largely disliked. But the stuff that I did like was the Iranian singers that she listened to— Googoosh, who maybe you’ve heard of. Googoosh is the biggest female singer of twentieth

ing Led Zeppelin in the eighties.

But if you had been in Kuwait in the seventies, you would have heard Led Zeppelin.

FAQ: I’m sure. My father gave me his record collection almost ten years ago when he switched to MP3s. Before he wouldn’t even let me borrow one record. I begged him, but he was like, “Get it out of your mind, it’s out of the question.” And then suddenly, I came back to Kuwait for six

century Iranian pop music. And Hayedeh is another one. My mom was very fixated and would only listen to like three or four singers at a given time, the same song over and over again. If I was sitting there drawing with her, I didn’t have a choice in the music selection. It was always a form of: You broke my heart.

I was younger, I thought about it more. But now I feel like ever since I made my first melody, my goal has always tried not to create things that could be mistaken for other people, which is a really high bar to set. But something that I do avoid, very strongly, is any kind of atonal work. It’s never been my interest, atonality.

KG: And are you listening to a lot

KG: Is it because it all sort of

of music these days? Or is it like cooking in a restaurant, where you don’t want to eat the food that you’ve been cooking all night? You like to have silence around you?

FAQ: Since DJing became part

of my career, I listen to music that I want to DJ. It’s become very work-oriented, which really annoys me because I never had that relationship before. When I listen to something, I’m like, “Oh, how can I blend this in with that other song?” It’s annoying.

KG: I told you before I did a radio

show for fifteen years, so I know.

And all my listening was focused on what I was going to be playing that week. It was a freeform radio show, and I had three hours to kill. Finally, when I was listening to MP3s, I would just have all of these playlists lined up, and I would be listening to something thinking, “Oh, that will go in that playlist.” Ultimately listening became a lot of work.

FAQ: Yeah, it’s become very

functional and perfunctory in a way. It just took the joy out of it. Mostly, I like silence. And I’ve enjoyed it for a long time. One thing that growing up hasn’t changed is listening to music for pure fantasy reasons. To listen to something and fantasize while you’re listening to it. That’s why for me, listening to music is always a very solitary thing.

KG: When you say “silence” do

you mean that in a Cagean sense?

Is there any kind of influence from that stuff on what you’re doing? Do you think about all of that kind of history and ideas?

FAQ: Well, I think for me, when

people that made music for a living for Konami—you know what I mean? To try to recreate it is to try to write a Miles Davis song.

KG: But there is Kind of Bloop, which is an eight-bit version of Miles’ Kind of Blue. And you know what? It’s actually really good!

It’s a beautiful thing because it’s kind of like the Miles tunes on that record are so incredible that you can’t destroy them even with any technology. It’s kind of like I’ve never heard a bad version of “Mack the Knife”. Because the song itself is so fucking good no matter if it’s Vegas, or, you know, the worst thing in the world.

sounds the same and it would be hard to be an original and unique atonal artist?

FAQ: It’s just been done to the max.

KG: But do you ever spend time

listening to Schoenberg or . . .

FAQ: I feel like with covers,

FAQ: No, I never did. I hate to

use the word “classical”, but the twentieth century composers that I listened to were always Russian or Eastern European.

My favorite has to be Prokofiev.

He’s definitely the highest on the list. And there’s one called Ippolitov-Ivanov, who’s lesserknown. Actually, I prefer the nineteenth century composers, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov.

And my father lived in Russia.

My parents went to grad school in Moscow in the seventies, so he amassed quite a large collection of Russian classical music, which was blasting in the house as well.

KG: Is that stuff that you got in the

collection when he gave it to you?

FAQ: Oh yeah, definitely. So the

influence from my mother were these heartbreak female singers.

From my father it was Russian classical music and Cerrone. My youth was hardcore rap, and video game music was very high up there too, because I was playing video games.

So these little eight-bit compositions were on loop. And I think the loop aspect of it really influenced making electronic music, because it does have that built in.

KG: But there’s whole

waves of eight-bit composers now, chip composers.

FAQ: That to me is weird. I don’t

know, I’m interested in the original

sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I have sort of a cover on my record.

KG: What’s the sort of

cover on your record?

FAQ: “Nothing Compares 2 U”.

KG: And who’s the original artist of that?

FAQ: Prince.

Fatima Al Qadiri’s musical chronology (top to bottom): Asiatisch (Hyperdub, 2014) explores Western stereotypes of Asian culture; Desert Strike EP (Fade to Mind, 2012) navigates video game war fantasies related to Qadiri’s experiences living in Kuwait during and after the first Gulf War; Genre-Specific Xperience (UNO, 2011) is a reinterpretation of “five sub-genres of dance music: juke, hip hop, dubstep, electrotropicália, and ’90s Gregorian trance.”; Warn-U (as Ayshay) layers, amongst other elements, holy chants of different Islamic sects on top of one another.

(Tri Angle, 2011).

KG: Oh, the Prince song. See,

my pop music is not so good.

FAQ: It’s okay. Prince wrote

it and then Sinead O’Connor sang it. You were definitely around when that song was huge. I mean, you couldn’t escape it. It was everywhere.

KG: I somehow managed to miss

things. I was told recently that in 2000—I think it was something like that—that the Mets played the Yankees in the World Series. I had no idea that such a thing happened. I happen to miss these major things that happen just because I’m so in my own weird world. I have a few Prince records, I was around then. But Sinead O’Connor I kind of missed.

I can’t tell you her biggest hit.

FAQ: That was her big-

gest hit, for sure.

KG: What’s it called again? ~

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WANDERLUST

72 Hours in

Warsaw

Interviews: Louise bRAILEY, Max Dax, A.J. Samuels / PHotos: luci lux

The view from the fortieth floor of the Marriott Hotel bar includes the nearby Palace of Culture and Science (the large clock tower on the left), originally a gift from Joseph Stalin. It proudly ranks as the 187th tallest building in the world. Finished in 1955, it also happens to be one of Warsaw’s oldest.

“What are you thinking here, where the wind / Blowing from the Vistula scatters / The red dust of the rubble?” wrote the father of modern Polish verse Czeslaw Milosz in “In Warsaw”, decrying what he saw as Poland’s tendency to endlessly recall past sufferings. But in a city packed with monuments, selective memorialization has also seen large swaths of the medieval center simply rebuilt to resemble a time before its destruction during World War II—or, in the case of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, turned into luxury condos. It’s one of many aspects of national identity the city’s flourishing art and music scenes have fixed in a critical gaze on the road to their cultural tomorrow.

Thursday, 3:30 p.m. sitting down with Joanna Mytkowska, Director Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw The building that houses Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art was built in 1970. We have been using it for seven years now, and it’s one of the few utterly beautiful yet functional buildings of the socialist modernism era that still exists here, as most of the others have been torn down to give way for the erection of Warsaw’s twenty-first-century turbo-capitalist skyline. This is a real pity because the buildings from the era of socialist modernism define a certain aspect of

our cultural identity. Obviously this loss will increase with every future demolition. In fact, our museum is next in line, and we will need a new space by 2016.

Talking about Warsaw means talking about identity—and about lost identity. Almost the entire city was destroyed during the Nazi occupation, and the socialist architects were some of the few to give it new character—that is, not including all of the nostalgic attempts to rebuild the old medieval city. Actually, the city’s “medieval” castle was rebuilt between 1970 to 1984, so technically it’s younger than the Museum of Modern Art. And this dichotomy highlights one of Warsaw’s main issues: What is the city and who owns it? In this

Right: A topographical relief of the Warsaw Ghetto. The bronze colored point marks the entryway to the old Jewish cemetery—one of the few locations that recalls the annihilation of the city’s once vibrant Jewish culture.

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Above: Jacek Sienkiewicz is a pioneer in the Polish electronic music scene and known internationally for his experimental, Detroit (via-Berlin) inspired techno, much of which he releases on his own Recognition imprint.

His most recent release was 2013’s split 12-inch with Atom ™, Wagner— Zwei Abhandlungen, which was funded by the Goethe Institut in Warsaw in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner.

Opposite page: Joanna Mytkowska has been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw since 2007. In the past, she worked as a curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and also curated the Polish Pavilion at the fifty-first Venice Biennale, which featured the video artist, filmmaker and photographer Artur Zmijewski. Although she sees the effect of the current wave of real estate development and turbo-capitalism in Warsaw critically, she also concedes that it has made the work of the city’s artists more political.

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context, one cannot underestimate the works of artists who confront these questions, particularly Elzbieta Janicka and Wojciech Wilczyk, who have created a photo series depicting the former wall of the Warsaw Ghetto and focused on four fundamental layers of the urban space: the destruction and emptiness left by the war, the nostalgic reconstruction, socialist modernism and the current turbo capitalism. Looking at their photos you realize that these layers don’t truly “meet”. The historical and architectural tension becomes obvious. Only opportunistic developers would call it “dynamic”, but at the moment I’d say it’s the developers who own Warsaw. This is precisely what makes our museum so important because we seek to discuss and document precisely these transformations. One must not forget the fact that Poland started to embrace turbo capitalism as a quasi-religion in the very moment that the rest of the world began questioning neoliberalism. Obviously, there is a direct connection between turbo-capitalism and the destruction of all those buildings that once represented Poland and Warsaw’s other identity.

Our institution is very small compared to other museums. We have a team of only twenty people and for us it’s been a fight to survive. When the government created the Museum of Modern Art, they actually had a completely different museum in mind, one that would represent the “new” neoliberal Poland. Seven years ago when we started, we were fully aware that even though we had the best connections, we were still isolated— both from the city and from the world. But step-by-step, year after year, we’ve built up a reputation.

We have become a gathering point, a place where ideas are being born, discussed and brought to life.

Hundreds of people come to our openings, and last year we had more than 120,000 visitors.

At the moment, the liberal powers are in charge in Warsaw and they continue to support us and specific art projects with money. It’s somewhat paradoxical to say, but some of the things that I’ve criticized here also seem to be the reason why Warsaw’s art scene is so inter-

esting and political; the lack of decency, thought and strategy in urban development inspires artists to fill in the gaps. Everything seems to inform and depend on one another, and at the end of the day I think we have been quite lucky in Warsaw. The financial crisis didn’t hit Poland too hard and budgets for the arts have not been cut to zero like in other Western countries. Many people say that Warsaw will become the new Berlin. I’m not so sure about that, but I admit that there are some indicators. Today’s Warsaw reminds me of Berlin in the very early nineties, and for sure it will stay like this for another couple of decades. I doubt that the city will be gentrified as quickly as Berlin. After all, Germany has a much stronger economy, and there is so much more money in circulation. I don’t see the danger of Warsaw becoming that rich anytime soon. In that sense, Warsaw remains the ultimate promise.

Thursday, 8:15 p.m.

A visit with artist Karol Radziszewski at DIK Fagazine HQ. Homosexuality in Poland is a heated issue. The country is very conservative, with more than ninety percent of Poles declaring they’re Catholic. Every Sunday, the priests in the churches teach that gay people are devils, which influences the political situation. In 2005 there was even a proposition preventing gay people from being school teachers. It was then that I decided that I had to do something, so I started DIK Fagazine, which is the only quarterly artistic magazine from Central and Eastern Europe concentrated on homosexuality and masculinity. When I founded the magazine, I was already interested in the idea of artists working in the public spaces, through interventions and so on, because I’d co-founded a guerrilla artist group called Szu Szu as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts. The idea was that we wanted to take art out of Warsaw’s galleries and into the city, and from 2005 we

started selling the zine from the car. DIK Fagazine started small and grew; in the last issue we traveled around Eastern Europe covering different themes relating to gay life before the fall of communism: you have cruising areas described from the Serbian perspective, gay beaches in Estonia, the first gay zine from Gdansk.

The same year that I started the magazine I staged the first openly gay exhibition in a private flat in Warsaw, a manifesto of sorts. I made prints, photographs, wallpapers, murals, videos, the magazine, just so it was done. I could move with more sophisticated issues, not just related to basic topics surrounding what it means to be gay. However, society has changed in the ten years since I started DIK Fagazine, but there’s still a lot of homophobia.

In the beginning, I couldn’t find any gay photographers, so I asked straight photographers to take the pictures. It was funny to watch the straight guys in Poland trying to work out how a gay photo session should look. Sometimes my projects were too provocative for the gay community, even. People thought I was portraying a bad image, so there were times when I was against both the conservatives and the gay community.

Last year, my studio burnt down and everything was destroyed: my paintings, my work and very sadly, my entire DIK Fagazine archive. I only have these copies because I went around and got them back from the bookstores. Nobody knows what happened but there are rumors that there was a real estate developer.

Some thought it was because of my work but the odd thing was that it didn’t even cross my mind.

However, that was when I realized how extremely people see what the magazine is. I get thousands of emails of course, and some of these I then turn around to incorporate into my work. For example, my last video piece is of me reading the letters from a guy praying for me. What’s more, Poland is very sex-phobic—we haven’t had the sexual revolution here. I still find it hard to get a model to be naked for the photographs. Adding queer

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issues on top of that? That’s really exotic. We just had a long discussion in the Polish parliament about the notion of “gender”. It’s crazy, they’re manipulating the words so “gender” issues pop up in relation to, say, pedophilia and the sexualization of children as well as for equal positions for men and women! Yes, these kinds of topics in 2014. As for the Fagazine, I always saw the word “queer” connected almost only with university studies, and that’s why I use the Polish words. Words like “Pedal”, which is very offensive, like “faggot”. We’re trying to provoke; to put queer politics into practice.

Some people ask me if there’s a common experience between those who grew up under communism.

I was born in 1980 and I actually think that the beginning of capitalism is a much more significant experience for my generation. The way that people started to believe in capitalism influenced everybody so much that we’ve lost the ability to think about it critically. It’s influenced everything: the fashion, the clubs, the cafes. Young people dress quite fancy in Warsaw but not because they want to express themselves. Rather, there’s a pressure that they have to show off.

Five years ago, we had Europride gay parade here, and that was a crucial moment for me, because it made me realize there was no queer underground. Europride is a kind of gay pride colonization that’s supposed to bring the rainbow flag from Western countries to Poland. Suddenly the parties were just for gay men, and the tickets were super expensive. The main conference was about pink money—the purchasing power of the exclusive gay community.

So we said, “Fuck off!” A group of us gathered in my flat, queer people from left to right, and we came up with the idea of creating an independent festival called Pomada. We put on one of the first parties which was totally fifty-fifty girls and boys and more than a thousand people came.

In June will be the fifth edition.

The central idea is that all of the organizers who work in art, music and culture would put our own money into it so that it would 90 EB 2/2014

Links: Die sich über mehrere Hügel erstreckende Complexo de Alemão ist eine der größten Armensiedlungen in Rio—eine Seilbahn verbindet die Täler miteinander.

be completely DIY. Ultimately, this is really what we are trying to do: to push young people in Warsaw to just do it themselves.

Friday, 10:15 a.m.

Jacek Sienkiewicz explains the history of techno in Warsaw I was born in Warsaw and have lived here almost all my life so I’ve watched this city change and evolve, from Communist times to the investment “boom” of recent years. Warsaw is a place that you love and hate at the same time; it’s not an easy place to be: it’s full of contradictions, shocking differences. It’s beautiful and ugly, tiny but too big, scary and funny.

All in all, a pretty curious place to live. Of course, we all know the tragic history of Warsaw—how it was almost completely destroyed

by Germans in 1944-45, and then again under a reign of terror by Polish and Russian Communists.

As a result, there are hardly any

true citizens of Warsaw, meaning someone who’s lived here for generations. The majority were either killed, deported, or they finally emigrated. Instead, the majority of Warsaw’s population today are second, maybe third generation. It’s a weird, weird city, with many painful experiences, much like Poland itself.

Musically, there’s no consistent scene as such, rather smaller communities of artists and promoters mostly operating independently.

But there’s a lot of them, and it’s still growing. However, it’s also a bit in our Polish nature that there’s no real sense of community. A lot of people work on their own and in their own closed circuit, not wanting to lose their individuality—or so they think— by being part of something bigger. Only recently have people started to realize that we’ll get nowhere without working together with others. Let’s hope it’ll be a start for a real music community here. That said, the avant-garde scene was always pretty vital in

Poland, with a small circuit of top quality experimental music of many colors. I got into the avant-garde scene through my older brother Maciek who’s been a DJ, musician and music critic since around 1990. He fed me with early industrial music like Throbbing Gristle and SPK, and other noise and improv. There was also a lot of avant-garde music and art at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and now we have the new Museum of Modern Art, which unfortunately somehow misses the point on this subject. We actually had the world’s top musicians playing small clubs here, some brilliant small festivals like Musica Genera or—back in the day—Unsound.

Right now I’m working on a few albums, and there are also some collaborations on the way, with some really exceptional Polish artists as well as some young musicians. I have a small label called Recognition, managed practically all by myself, and this year I am celebrating its

Above (left to right): Magdalena Komornicka, Stanisław Welbel and Katarzyna Kołodziej are curators at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art and founders of The Artists Festival, which places Poland’s premier artists in the performance context of a music festival.

The trio emphasize an interest in blurring the lines between music, sound art and pop culture.

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Above: Same as it ever was? Warsaw’s Castle Square sits in front of the former official residence of the Polish monarchs.

Largely destroyed by the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the buildings were painstakingly reconstructed and restored in 1984.

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fifteenth anniversary. The focus is Detroit-inspired techno and things more experimental. There’ll be two compilations and some more new 12-inches—from me, or my project with Jurek Przezdziecki called Tumult Hands. I feel there’s a massive potential in the experimental and avant-garde scene here. Unfortunately, I cannot talk about the dance circuit.

That said, the beginnings of techno in Warsaw started in the early nineties with underground parties in the city: stroboscopic lights, ultraviolet, smoke machines and a totally eclectic sound. All kinds of music were played: industrial, trance, electro, techno, jungle, even hardcore!

It was a crazy time, we were very young, spontaneous and—it has to be said—acid house was really big in Warsaw at that time.

People would bring music from London, and then we started traveling to Berlin to buy records as there were no proper record stores here in Poland. We’d take an early morning train to Berlin,

spend a few hours in Hard Wax and then hop on back. That is, unless there was a party. I went to Berlin regularly to hear my favorite DJs play in E-Werk or Tresor, especially at the time of the Love Parade. We were fascinated by this freedom of partying and the quality of music, hoping, if not being sure, that we’d have the same in Warsaw sooner rather than later. Sadly, here in Poland it takes much more time for things to change. By the midnineties we had started having regular parties with guests from abroad, eventually promoting by ourselves. Now there are few great clubs in the country, and a lot of summer festivals with really top quality artists. What’s lacking are more quality, smaller clubs with reasonable bookers and managers. If you ask me how it’s going, I’d say slowly, it’s not easy but we’re moving forward.

Maybe it would be easier for me in Berlin. I even used to live there at one point. But somehow I always end up in Warsaw.

Friday, 2:45 p.m.

Coffee with the curators behind The Artists Festival at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art Katarzyna Kołodziej: We decided to

organize The Artists Festival for the first time last June in Warsaw.

The aim was to collect and recapitulate the key sound and musical projects undertaken by Polish visual artists in the last couple of years. We invited not only artists who are involved in both sound and music, but also those who have bands and who do it for fun and not just as an artistic strategy—that is, for whom sound is not an inherent part of their artistic practice. And there are loads of Polish artists who work with sound: Konrad Smolenski did an audio installation in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year. The year before that it was Katarzyna Krakowiak with a sound work. Having so many examples of artists, sound proj-

ects and bands, we felt that it was the right time to bring the idea of such a festival to fruition.

Magdalena Komornicka: As curators at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, the oldest and the most established contemporary art institution in Warsaw, we had already worked with a number of “artists-musicians” and were curious what it would be like to truly divorce the work they were presenting from . . .

Stanisław Welbel: From the white cube!

MK: We wanted to separate the music from the exhibition and get away from the idea of music as adornment for, say, an opening. The idea was to recontextualize the music and sound into a framework of pop music and all of its underlying mechanisms. To be honest, it wasn’t always easy to convince the artists to perform outside the secure walls of a gallery.

SW: Obviously, the reference to the musical industry is built into the name: “The Artists” is a play

on the endless amounts of “The” bands. For us it was fun to place the bands in a public amphitheater in Warsaw’s Skaryszewski Park in the district of Praga.

The amphitheater hadn’t been in use for big events in a long time, because it’s organized by a city-run cultural group—a kind of “house of cultures”, who only put on small shows for the local community—like, old dodgy guys playing sailor songs. So the festival was also about infusing a part of Warsaw with a different meaning. Of course, it’s no secret that artists have done plenty of music projects and collaborated with musicians, like Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth, or Angela Bulloch and Big Bottom.

And artists have a pretty different approach to the idea of performing. Our goal of blurring the lines between music, sound art and performance art was previously unseen on the Polish scene. Many of the artists were previously involved in interesting musical projects that were never

a stand-alone thing. They never had the chance to perform outside of gallery context and turn their projects into something for an actual stage—in contrast to more established artists, like Anna Zaradny, Wojciech Bakowski or Adam Witkowski for instance . . .

KK: Because the question is: When do you treat a band made up of artists as a band and when do you treat them as an art project? Kraftwerk is an interesting example here, one that started onstage and ended up in a gallery, even though their connection to art has always been a strong one.

SW: Look, this is not a safe gallery space. It’s the opposite. And as a curator, it’s interesting to see what the attitude of the audience is when it isn’t an art audience, which is why it was so important to do this in a public space. There are no excuses. We saw it as kind of a test for the visual artists.

KK: But the audience mostly saw it as a regular music festival and not as a gallery event . . .

SW: That said, to attempt to fig-

Above: Born in Białystok in 1980, Karol Radziszewski studied painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and is a co-founder of the art collective Szu Szu together with Ivo Nikic and Piotr Kopik.

He is also the editor-inchief and publisher of the DIK Fagazine, billed as “the first and the only artistic magazine from Central and Eastern Europe concentrated on homosexuality and masculinity.”

Following the destruction of his studio in a fire last year, he is currently in the process of building back up his magazine archive.

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ure out what the audience felt is almost always an act of projection. A lot of the people were art world people. And the line-up was pretty demanding. In the middle of the concert was a performance

by Piotr Bosacki, who hired the pianist Krzysztof Dys to play a particularly challenging work, “Counterpoint Exercises”. When I say challenging I mean both musically and for the audience. At some point people got annoyed and were yelling at him and screaming “You stink!” But both Dys and Bosacki really seemed to enjoy the abuse, because it also translated into a kind of musical background. Or at least a noise background. In a similar sense, the artists Igor Krenz and Macio Moretti also put on an interesting and short performance with his “band” Napalm of Death. Igor is from a different generation than the rest of the performers, who were mostly born in the late seventies and early eighties. He was fascinated with the audience’s fascination with equipment and expectations: what amps and guitars you have, and the look you’re supposed to have to be taken seriously. Because ultimately, a music festival is all about ritual: changing bands, changing equipment, entering and exiting a stage.

Napalm of Death set up enormous Marshall stacks and Ampeg amplifiers and loads of other equipment and then played one extremely loud screaming guitar riff for three seconds. They even had roadies with Napalm of Death t-shirts. Most of all, it was equipment porn, executed by an artist cooperating with a group of professional musicians.

Saturday, 5:15 p.m.

A conversation with Anna Zaradny on straddling genres.

I come from the formerly German city of Szczecin in western Poland located on the German border.

This certainly had an impact on my musical development. The immediate vicinity to Berlin, the local scene and Western Europe in general have made my roots, contacts, and music multi-tracked, so to speak. Growing up, I went

through numerous stages of musical education: On the one hand, I had classical and jazz training, and learned a few different instruments, including violin, piano, saxophone, voice as well as conducting. On the other hand there was the immediate reality of a strong subculture, predominated by a punk. This is what initially led me to play punk and then grindcore. I think of my musical upbringing as a kind of parallel musical penetration, both with extreme worlds and communities.

Over the years, it’s all deepened.

In 2001, together with the Polish sound artist, composer and musician Robert Piotrowicz, I established a festival for improvised and experimental music called Musica Genera Festival, which also became a record label. Soon after, experimental electronics became a dominant feature in my work, It's been about ten years since I moved to Warsaw and in terms of an electronic or experimental “scene”, I always wonder if you can even call it that when it only concerns a few people that deal with music seriously. Certainly, over the years, the situation has changed.

There are more artists associated with experimental electronics and more events and record labels.

But I would say in general—not just in Warsaw—there is no such clear relationship between visual arts and experimental music or sound art. There are maybe single cases that result either from collaborations with visual and sound artists or from the comprehensive work of artists who create between various fields of art and coherently combine sound and a visual matter. However, I think that a consciousness of both sound art and experimental music is still rare.

Warsaw is not the best place on Earth. Certainly I appreciate that it is a relatively dynamic city— maybe not as much as other world capitals, but it has great potential and really all depends on the people who explore it. There is the possibility for it to be reduced to the level of a provincial capital. Or it could become a valuable, important European city. After traveling, coming back here can be a really heavy experience. I enjoy

the chaos and urban eclecticism, but this is exactly what makes this city not the most beautiful.

I climb up on the top floors of apartment buildings and on roofs in different parts of Warsaw for different perspectives. Other times I find myself in pockets of urban nature, at the riverbanks. In both cases it feels likes a study in urban alienation; being in the city and still completely outside of it. It’s an environment full of flaws, infrastructural and economic problems and constantly bad weather. But perhaps what I struggle with the most is the aggression, the boorishness, the rudeness, and constant feeling of frustration— people young and old, strangers, and friends. It makes me wonder about what kind of people we are, what kind of society we have formed. It makes me wonder why we are able to antagonize, hurt and destroy each other.

Above: Born in Szczecin in 1977, Anna Zaradny is a multi-instrumentalist working in the fields of experimental electronics, sound art and improvisation. A key figure of Warsaw’s musical avant-garde, she is also the co-founder of the Musica Genera Festival and label.

Saturday, 8:00 p.m.

Claude Lanzmann’s memories of Warsaw Even though I never really connected to Warsaw, the city did indeed play a significant role in my life. I shot sequences for both my films Sobibór and The Last of the Unjust in Warsaw, and I was here when Shoah was first shown on Polish TV in 1997 to discuss the film in public. As a matter of fact, I went to Poland for the first time in 1978 to do research on location for Shoah. I initially never intended to go to Poland.

I was actually convinced I could make my film without setting my feet on Polish ground. This was obviously a mistake and it showed an arrogant attitude on my part.

When it comes to researching and telling the story of the termination of the Jews then you cannot evade Poland—the geographical center of the annihilation. It took me more than four years to surrender myself to the fact that I had to necessarily film on site in Warsaw, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno, Sobibór and Treblinka.

And in Treblinka, ninety kilometers east of Warsaw, it finally happened: Driving through the night at slow speed near the death

Opposite page: Only a single street—ul.

Próz˙na—survived the mass demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

Many Varsovians are enraged that the city has allowed luxury condos, posh restaurants and hotels (on the right) to begin whitewashing and restoring the Ghetto’s last remaining architectual facades.

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Above: French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann is one of the most important European chroniclers of the twentieth century. His magnum opus Shoah is considered a key documentation of the Holocaust.

As the editor-in-chief of the journal Les Temps Modernes (founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) he remains a central figure in French political discourse.

In the Winter 2013 issue of Electronic Beats, New Yorker film critic Richard Brody reviewed Lanzmann’s latest film, The Last of The Unjust, which explores the life of Benjamin Murmelstein.

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camp, trying to connect myself with the site, trying to understand what it meant “to be in Treblinka” forty years after “it”, I passed the place-name sign of the village of Treblinka. I suddenly realized: There is not only a demolished death camp but also a village of the same name, where real people lived while only a few meters away hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed.

To interview the peasants who saw everything and to interview the train driver who had moved the death trains to the loading ramp became the key to my film.

And for the last chapter of Shoah I investigated the situation of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

But you must not forget that even before the occupation, the Polish were known for their strong anti-Semitism. You can still feel this today even if some Jews have become figures of the national history of Poland: Even though they have a Jewish museum now in the former ghetto and a big

street was named after Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Jewish Combat Organization that had organized the Ghetto Uprising in 1943. When I arrived at Warsaw Airport in 1978, I was presented to an interpreter.

She was a small, dark girl and her name was Marina Ochab.

She had an extraordinary Jewish face. Her father, Edward Ochab, was the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party under the Polish leader Gomułka. He resigned and left the country— like so many other intellectuals and Jews—after Gomułka had started a radically anti-Semitic agenda in 1968. Ochab had lived in the Soviet Union since October 1939 and when he returned, he believed that anti-semitism in Poland could be overcome. So I met his daughter and I remember that she had never heard of Treblinka. She knew of deportations and “victims of the fascist occupation” but had never heard of the death camps. The idea of taking her with me to translate

my interviews with the Polish peasants who hated the Jews like ever before was just ridiculous.

In 1978 there were barely any Jews living in Warsaw. You wouldn’t hear the Yiddish language anywhere. But they were giving lessons in Yiddish to Polish actors so that they could play Jewish theater pieces in Yiddish— with a terrible Polish accent. They thought they were able to recuperate everything. But it’s not only the fault of the Poles. It’s a general fault of the survivors, including the Jews themselves. I always say that destruction is always winning. Death is always winning.

You cannot rescue or save everything. Interesting enough, the only ancient city structure in Warsaw that has survived both the Nazi terror and the Second World War is the old Jewish cemetery. In fact, I’d call it the place in Warsaw where I felt the best. I spent a lot of time during my stays in Poland taking strolls in the cemeteries of Warsaw and Lodzź and Auschwitz—all three of them were half-Jewish cities before 1939. That’s why the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw literally marked the center of the city—it wasn’t on the periphery!

The silence at the cemetery is quite impressive. You’d hear the birds there and they wouldn’t sound like liars. In fact the same can be said about Auschwitz and Berlin-Weißensee. In both cities the Nazis didn’t dare to touch the Jewish cemeteries. One can envy the Jewish people who died of a natural death and were buried in the cemeteries instead of being deported like cattle to Treblinka from the “Umschlagplatz” in the Ghetto. As I said before, the last chapter of Shoah is about the Ghetto. The Judenrat Adam Czerniaków who commited suicide in 1942 plays a major role in the narration. We found his tombstone in the Warsaw cemetery. It was in winter and it was freezing.

We had to roll a snowball over the tombstone to see its inscriptions. With the snow you could suddenly read everything. I’ve spent hours thinking and walking in the vast Warsaw cemetery.

The reality of the Jewish world was and still is palpable there. ~

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mation about customers because it upsets the equilibrium between our security, on the one hand, and the advantages of using their services with the information we provide, on the other. It’s a tradeoff with Google knowing a lot about you, because they can do stuff to make your life easier. You could argue that the big tech companies should have known.

But nonetheless, I talked to securities experts and people I knew on the inside who were livid. Now the U.S. government and not dark side hackers or hostile countries like China are the number one adversary of the largest U.S. companies.

“It’s a red flag for snoops” Alex Samuels: Steven, you’ve writ-

ten extensively about cryptography.

Since when have you been interested specifically in the NSA? Steven Levy: I came to realize during the nineties when I wrote Crypto that there had been a revolution in the field of cryptography, which is more than a thousand years old.

That was when cryptography started to have a popular application—and when the U.S. government started trying to suppress it because there was stuff they couldn’t crack. The so-called “crypto wars” broke out: people in the tech world wanted to export products with encryption to protect the privacy of business transactions and email. When Snowden came out, I knew I would be writing about the NSA. In the nineties I never really got my foot in the door.

But now, Rick Ledgett, Raj De, Anne Neuberger, and General Keith Alexander all spoke to me in their headquarters. That’s an enormous change. I don’t think they’re evil

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While the NSA has bared the brunt of the fallout of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, tech company complicity remains a lively issue of debate amongst those concerned with having entrusted the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook with too much information.

Hacker-ethicist Steven Levy has been interested in the politics of encryption ever since the rise of the web in the nineties. As he explains, offering personal information in exchange for free use of web platforms oddly continues to be a model most people feel comfortable with—as do the NSA. Illustration: minus

people, they’re just very focused on their mission to protect Americans.

AS: In an article in Wired from January this year, you give the benefit of the doubt to various tech giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, who claimed that they were unaware of the scope of the NSA hacking into user and customer databases—even though they admitted to having provided the NSA with smaller amounts of information subpoenaed through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA]. Do you still believe that the big tech companies were more victims of the NSA than collaborators?

SL: I was covering this in real time, and it did seem like tech companies were blindsided in a lot of ways.

All the tech companies claimed to have never heard of PRISM, which is technically true. But yes, they had also been complying with FISA. Look, these companies do not want to release sensitive infor-

AS: Do you think there is a difference in expectation between the information of customers who pay for a service and users who get it for free? And do you think that really large companies are, in a sense, too big to fail? Smaller companies who work with encryption like Lavabit chose to fold instead of compromising the privacy of their customers.

Google and Facebook would and could obviously never do that.

SL: Let’s say the government wanted to do a program where they wanted to collect everyone’s email metadata: whom you write, whether they reply, et cetera. I think that would actually be too egregious a violation for people to go along with, and Barack Obama, whose record on these things isn’t the best, recently objected to the same proposal for telephone metadata. I think it would be very tough for the government to do something that sweeping now. We have Snowden to thank for more transparency.

The debate is taking place.

AS: But wouldn’t it just happen in secret?

SL: Perhaps. But when you use encrypted email and telephone lines, then it’s almost like self-selecting yourself to be watched. It’s a red flag for snoops. Citizens are in a catch-22, unless companies like Google install massive encryption, which they probably don’t want to because it will hurt their business model. If their algorithms can’t scan the mail and create ads from them, then they get very little out of it. ~

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