Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 3/2014

­Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 39 · Fall 2014

“For us, it was zero gravity.”

ALEC EMPIRE

JESSY LANZA MOBB DEEP RaYMOND PETTIBON ZOLA JESUS

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EDITORIAL

“The present appears as a void.”

Max Dax: Hans Ulrich, Detroit

and Berlin are not officially twin cities, but their music scenes are.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty-five years ago, producers, DJs and performers from Berlin and Detroit established a partnership through techno. This is how the greatest youth movement since punk was christened in both cities. We have decided to dedicate this issue to those two cities: Berlin after the fall of the Wall, and Detroit today. Both contain a multitude of unused spaces that can be occupied creatively.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: When the Wall fell, I was in Rome talking to the great artist and cartographer Alighiero Boetti in his studio about how the map of the world was about to change. Do you remember where you were?

MD: Funnily enough, I just missed experiencing it in person. I didn’t even consider the possibility of the Wall coming down. Only two days before it happened, I hitchhiked to West Berlin from Hamburg to see the Wall at Potsdamer Platz. Like animals in a zoo, I watched visitors chisel little chunks of graffiti out of the Wall in the West in front of the East German border police’s eyes.

I thought it was stupid. The next day I hitchhiked back on the designated transit route through the GDR. My last memory was of the

Dear Readers, This issue of Electronic Beats will be my last as editor-in-chief. Our long-time editor A.J. Samuels will take over the reins beginning next issue. I would like to take this opportunity to wish him all the best. Being able to direct the course of this magazine for almost four years has meant a lot to me—especially because Electronic Beats represents a print model that is utterly unique. In this issue, we’ve sought to prove once again that exciting music journalism is possible if you have the courage to take chances and are open to all avenues of conversation with artists and musicians.

By talking to each other and engaging in meaningful dialog, we can learn from one another, broaden our cultural horizons and trigger new ideas.

Kindest regards, Max Dax

grey reality of East Germany— the wait at the border, the random inspections, the speed limit on the potholed freeway. This was everyday life there just one day before the Wall came down.

is no small part of what makes the generation of those born after 1989 so interesting. All they know is a world without the Wall but with the Internet.

HUO: Unlike in Berlin, the pro-

lels between East Berlin back then and Detroit today?

tests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing were not peaceful, several people died and many artists left the country. Michelangelo Pistoletto had already declared 1989 the “White Year” in January, meaning that the year’s events would be reflected in white pictures, which turned out to be the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Beijing massacre.

Notably, he did this project before those events. I remember the invitation for the show’s opening. We all thought something fundamental was about to happen. Pistoletto predicted it.

MD: The present appears as a void.

HUO: Exactly. And, of course, none of us could have imagined how accurately he anticipated the upheavals of the year to come. However, we should bear in mind that in March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet by encouraging CERN, his employer at the time, to simplify communication by implementing hypertext, which was the World Wide Web. This

MD: Do you recognize paral-

HUO: Above all I see Detroit

today as a place where artists can afford spaces. But I also recognize that global networking makes actually living in the world capitals of art obsolete for artists. Cities producing art and cities showing art don’t have to necessarily be the same anymore. However, ruined cities have always been places of inspiration for artists. In his wonderful new book Ruin Lust, Brian Dillon describes how ruins conjure up the glory of past civilizations and address our own. As he puts it, “Ruins recall the glory of dead civilizations and the certain end of our own.

They stand as monuments to historic disasters, but also provoke dreams about futures born from destruction and decay.”

For centuries, ruins have been a source of inspiration for artists.

MD: Hans Ulrich, let me thank you for the inspiring dialog we’ve engaged in over the past few years. This will be our last editorial interview. ~

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WELTANSCHAUUNG

Jon Hopkins’ live set at Electronic Beats Festival in Cologne was rawer than you’d expect from an across-the-board critics’ favorite. Flanked by large-scale projections, Hopkins’ emotive melodies carried a cinematic heft, but it was the detours into abrasive techno physicality that saw even the most skeptical yield to consensus. Photo: Peyman Azhari 4 EB 3/2014

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Walking, no, strutting the line between wyrdo folk, psychedelia and sex disco, Alison Goldfrapp led her band through a killer set at Electronic Beats Festival Cologne. Newer, more interior numbers like “Drew” certainly held their own against flashier classics like “Strict Machine”. But if the British pop veterans have taught us anything it’s that reinvention remains a crucial skill in any band’s armory. That, and a well placed wind machine. Photo: Peyman Azhari EB 3/2014 7

“To me jazz means: I dare you,” Wayne Shorter told editor-in-chief Max Dax in the Summer 2014 issue of Electronic Beats. And at the recent Electronic Beats night of the Jazzfest Bonn, Shorter and his quartet, featuring Danilo Pérez on piano, Brian Blade on drums und John Patitucci on bass, made good on that promise. The legendary saxophone player masterfully explored the harmonic foundations laid down by one of modern jazz’s truly outstanding rhythm sections while a captivated audience accepted the challenge. Photo: Eduard Meltzer

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As co-sponsors of this year’s Berlin Atonal festival, we sent artist and photographer Armin Linke to capture the location’s panoramic industrial backdrop—as imposing as the line-up progressive.

Here, Ensemble Modern and Synergy Vocals rehearse Steve Reich’s entrancing Music for 18 Musicians, which proved to be a crowd favorite on the opening night. A few days later, editor Robert Defcon presented the podium discussion on the transatlantic musical connection between Berlin and Detroit, featuring Alec Empire, Gudrun Gut, Dimitri Hegemann and Walter Wasacz.

Check out this issue’s feature on nineties Berlin on page 68 and our Detroit city report on page 82. Photo: Armin Linke EB 3/2014 11

Imprint Imprint Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues Est. 2005 Issue N° 39 Fall 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 Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert Copy Editor: Karen Carolin

Cover: Alec Empire, photographed by Luci Lux in Berlin.

Contributing Authors: Mike Banks, Lisa Blanning, George Clinton, Samantha Corbit, Nika Roza Danilova, Ben de Biel, Robert Defcon, Danielle de Picciotto, Sebastian Drude, Ludwig Eben, Alec Empire, Mark Ernestus, Ben Frost, Stefan Goldmann, Gudrun Gut, Cornelius Harris, Annika Henderson, Mike Huckaby, Albert Johnson, Jessy Lanza, Tim Lawrence, Tin Man, Katrin Massmann, Gregor Marvel, Jackmaster, Steve Morell, Richard Mosse, Kejuan Muchita, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Raymond Pettibon, Stefan Schilling, Michael Schirner, Mark Smith, Reimund Spitzer, Michael Stone-Richards, Walter Wasacz, Ary Warnaar and Jutta Weitz

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators:

Laura Andalou, Peyman Azhari, Martina Bacigalupo, beckundbauer, Ben de Biel, Christian Heinrich, Armin Linke, Luci Lux, Adolphe Marx, Eduard Meltzer, minus, Richard Mosse, Elena Panouli, Hollie Pocsai, Stefan Schilling, Andreas Schlegel and Tim Soter

Electronic Beats Magazine is a division of Telekom’s international music program “Electronic Beats” International Musicmarketing / Deutsche Telekom AG: Wolfgang Kampbartold, 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: Arto Kyrill Bauer, Karl Bette, Dunja Christochowitz, Ricarda Sophie Fricke, Reinhold Friedl, Harry Glass, Carrie Hampel, Dimitri Hegemann, Katja Lucker, Ute Noll, Olivia Pässler, Elena Panouli, Paulo Reachi, Andreas Reihse, Max Shackelton, Niko Solorio, Funky Taurus, André Vida, Laurens von Oswald and Susanne Weber © 2014 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited ISSN 2196-0194 “The present appears as a void.”

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CONTENT Content L M O N O G U E S

Editorial .................................................................................... 3 Weltanschauung ...................................................................... 4 Recommendations................................................................... 16 Dylan Carlson, Max Dax, Annika Henderson, Daniel Jones, Tin Man, M.E.S.H., Michael Schirner, Mark Smith, Ary Warnaar; featuring new releases by Alec Empire, The Bug, FKA twigs, Gut und Irmler, Roman Flügel, TCF, Transllusion, Ultrademon and more clubland Tim Lawrence on the Lucky Cloud Loft Party ............... 30 ABC The alphabet according to Zola Jesus ...................................... 32 Style Icon Jessy Lanza on John Carpenter .................................. 36 Counting with . . . Jackmaster.................................................. 38

V I I N T E R W S

S A T i O C O N V E R S

“They were jealous of our wealth.”

Max Dax talks to Raymond pettibon ......................................... 42 “Hip-hop is our therapy.”

A.J. Samuels meets Mobb deep ...................................................... 50

“Like trying to teach a rabid dog to sit.”

BEN FROST in conversation with Richard Mosse .................... 58 BERLIN EXPERIMENT 1989 – 1992 An Alternative History of the Fall of the Wall: Squats, Techno and the Police ....................................................... 68 Wanderlust: 72 Hours in DETROIT ................................................ 82 NEU: “0% sound design. 100% presets.”......................................... 98

Three of our featured contributors: Michael Schirner

Mike Huckaby

Jessy Lanza

(* 1941) is a German artist and communications designer based in Berlin and Beijing. In this issue he explains how Martina Bacigalupo’s Gulu Real Art Studio photo book emphasizes the importance of the observer’s active gaze.

(* 1970) is a deep house and techno DJ and producer from Detroit. In this issue, he discusses the education and gentrification in his hometown, as well as the importance of teaching kids about electronic music history.

Photo: Max Dax

(* 1985) is a singer and producer based in Ontario, Canada who makes spacious, avant-garde R&B. In this issue she explains why John Carpenter’s films and soundtracks have been a major influence on her work.

Photo: Hollie Pocsai

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L M O N O G U E S

RECOMMENDATIONS where Artists recommend the work of other artists

“In space nobody hears you scream— and nobody’s in a hurry.”

Max Dax on Alec Empire’s Low on Ice (The Complete Iceland Sessions)

Geist Records/DHR

Max Dax is the editorin-chief of Electronic Beats Magazine.

P. 17, 18, 23, 27: For her exhibition Gulu Real Art Studio, photographer Martina Bacigalupo collected discarded images taken in a photo studio in the city of Gulu, Uganda, in which people’s faces have been cut out for use in official documents.

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Editor-in-chief Max Dax explains why Alec Empire’s Low on Ice is one of the more poetic albums in the history of electronic music and how its rerelease as a 3-CD box set is an important opportunity for critical reassessment.

In August 2013, Groove Magazine editor-in-chief Heiko Hoffmann asked me to compose a Top 20 list of the most relevant electronic music albums of the last twenty-five years. My three favorite records were: 3. Basic Channel’s BCD-2, 2. Jeff Mills’ Waveform Transmission Vol. 1 and 1. Alec Empire’s Low on Ice (The Iceland Sessions). Released in 1995, Alec Empire’s glacial ambient record, with its Deleuzian superstructure, marked a radical departure from the prevailing consensus that a techno producer has to churn out functional techno music. His break with convention impressed me less at the time than it does looking back today. What spoke to me in 1995 however was the new and yet familiar sound radiating from Low on Ice—one pleasantly divorced from techno’s evolution of Faster! Louder! More euphoric!

Low on Ice was captivating in its minimalism and hypnotic in its deceleration. The album, in short, is the antithesis of the “greatest global youth movement since the hippie revolution”, as the founder of Berlin’s Tresor Dimitri Hegemann recently described the techno movement. Or, to stay closer to my personal associations: Low on Ice is

reminiscent of Andrej Tarkowskij’s Solaris from 1972 in its role as a response to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968: In space nobody hears you scream—and nobody’s in a hurry.

The first eleven tracks on Low on Ice conjure up a feeling of isolation, similar to today’s not uncommon musical interpretations of a post-rave hangover. However, it should be noted that Alec Empire lives almost straight edge, which means no drugs, cigarettes, or alcohol. In light of that, the above hangover is of a more ethereal

“Released in 1995, Alec Empire’s glacial ambient record, with its Deleuzian superstructure, marked a radical departure from the prevailing consensus that a techno producer has to churn out functional techno music.”

Max Dax

nature. I find it not at all surprising that the whole album was programmed in only three days, in a tent at the edge of a music festival in Reykjavik with an impressive mountain view. Empire actually produced a lot more material than was published in 1995. Almost three hours in total—two hours more than the original album length—are now being released as Low on Ice (The Complete Iceland Sessions) in a 3-CD box set on Geist Records/DHR. These additional two hours are screaming, digital, suspense-packed continuations of the originally rather quiet tracks.

What becomes much more apparent in this context is Empire’s dub-like approach, using his studio as a central means of expression and expertly manipulating spatial effects, particularly reverb and delay. Accordingly, the mostly long, often meditative and sometimes beatless tracks sound both experimental and yet entirely purposeful. But even though his studio is the true instrument, Low on Ice is still based around the standard tools of techno productions at the time—the TB-303, SH-101, MC-202, TR-808, and an AKAI Sampler. In this sense, Empire’s break with techno consensus in 1995 becomes even more striking.

“It was very, very cold,” Empire recalls about recording in his tent in Iceland. “I was lying down, surrounded by machines and imagining what would happen if time stood still—if we all froze to death and only the machines kept running, until, slowly, they finally shut down, too. The only thing left was the red light of a 303, blinking in a snowdrift.” ~

Recommendations

Read more recommendations by artists about other artists on EB.net.

“We concentrate on the essential.”

Michael Schirner recommends Martina Bacigalupo’s Gulu Real Art Studio Michael Schirner is an admirer of the blank space—an element central to the photography of Martina Bacigalupo.

Here he explains how her art demands the observer’s active gaze.

Human beings reduce. We concentrate on the essential. We leave out as much as possible, preferably everything. This principle applies as much to advertising as it does to art. We remove things until a blank space emerges. There is a simple recipe in communication design: The more we leave out, the more observers will fill in the blank space and thereby become creative themselves—that is, become the artist. This requires an effort, which, in my opinion, perhaps

as a secondary rationalization of an unconditional basic income, should be monetarily rewarded.

In Martina Bacigalupo’s book Gulu Real Art Studio the blank spaces are actual white squares in an otherwise complete picture, which makes them even more obvious. The image screams “Fill me in!” The subjects in Gulu Real Art Studio demand to be completed.

We cannot deal with the horror vacui. Everything around the person portrayed is a clue to the missing element, the head. We see a floral print dress, so we assume it must be a woman. This woman must be black because her arms are. Does she have a kind face? We search our memories. And for every picture, we inevitably conjure up a different character. We can’t just perceive these images as they are like we can a beautiful sunset. We have to

become active observers. And the fact that we enjoy doing so is a testament to their quality. What we are seeing are leftovers, a photographer’s trash left behind in the studio.

In his wonderful conversations with Kenneth Goldsmith, Andy Warhol, whenever asked about the value of his work or what drives him, always replied: “Nothing.”

Warhol wasn’t interested in the fundamental or sublime but rather in the insignificant and expendable.

He was interested in leftovers, the unintended, things that just happen.

Leftovers or remnants—important terms in relation to Bacigalupo— are closely related to coincidence, something Warhol loved. That is, he loved surface and even doubted the existence of anything below the surface. Or at least he wasn’t interested in talking about it. Everything revolves around the blank space. ~

Steidl

Born in Chemnitz, Michael Schirner is a German artist, communications designer, and former head of the Düsseldorf-based GGK advertising agency. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Beijing.

This is Schirner’s first contribution to Electronic Beats.

“I find it challenging not to sit here while listening and pull it apart in my head.”

Anamanaguchi’s Ary Warnaar recommends Ultrademon’s Voidic Charms Anamanaguchi’s Ary Warnaar finds it easy to look past the hype surrouding Ultrademon’s status as the godfather of seapunk. Why? Because Voidic Charms is in every way the real deal.

I’ve been a huge fan of Albert Redwine, aka Ultrademon’s production and sound for a while now but something that he definitely took to the next level for me on Voidic Charms was

melody. Not so much “hooks” or anything, but a lot of very pretty and instantly captivating progressions. “Vine Hung Horizon” and “March 29 – Viral Host” are highlights on that front.

I’m sure this has already been said about this album, but it’s clearly a more mature Ultrademon release. When listening to Voidic Charms, you can definitely pick out specific elements of musical inspiration, but the tracks aren’t about the references.

People love to say genres are dead, and music is just “music,”

but still so much new music is just mixing and matching genre specific sounds or compositions.

A lot of new artists just create reference-collages to showcase their musical interests. And Ultrademon clearly has a wide variety of influences and a huge amount of knowledge he could be showing off, but he doesn’t flaunt that in Voidic Charms ; he just uses what he knows to create some very unique and new sounding tracks.

It’s especially refreshing for me to listen to music where the answers to questions like, “Where

Coral Records Internazionale

Ary Warnaar is the guitarist for NYCbased Anamanaguchi, which uses vintage video game hardware to make hyperactive electronic pop. The group released its most recent album, Endless Fantasy, in May 2013 via dream.hax.

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Recommendations

Read Ultrademon’s track by track commentary of Voidic Charms online at EB.net.

did you get that sample from?

What gear did you use? What genre is this pulled from? What are you referencing? What is it possible to compare this music with?” in no way outweigh the actual listening experience. As a musician, it’s hard to listen to

music and not really go into serious detail analyzing it. I find it challenging to not sit here while listening and pull it apart in my head. Voidic Charms is that rare release where my first instinct isn’t to do that. Rather, my first instinct is—and this is definitely

going to sound cheesy—to just sit back, listen and get transported into the album’s world.

Because it’s a fascinating and brave new one. Ultimately, this is music that reminds me that I love stuff that does not rely on preexisting context to be enjoyed. ~

“Like a spark of discharged neon gas.”

M.E.S.H. on TCF’s E4 15 C4 71 97 F7 8E 81 1F EE B7 86 22 88 30 6E C4 13 7F D4 EC 3D ED 8B

Liberation Technologies

M.E.S.H., aka James Whipple, is a Berlin based artist and electronic musician originally from Southern California. A member of the Janus colletive, Whipple’s second EP, Scythians (PAN), was released this summer and expertly reconceptualized Jersey house, hardstyle, and trap into a sound all its own.

This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

Check out Lisa Blanning’s interview with M.E.S.H on EB.net.

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Janus crew member M.E.S.H. takes a close listen to recent Liberation Technologies signee TCF and offers his own interpretation of the Norwegian artist’s approach to codes, cyphers, cybernetics and encryption.

I first met TCF, aka Lars Holdhus, through a friend from California who met him at the Städelschule, an art school in Frankfurt. I knew his previous project very well, which was an extremely consistent series of gabberized dancehall bootlegs and chipmunked bubbling tracks that managed to mock the spread of musical memes through sites like Soundcloud and Tumblr while inspiring dozens of imitators.

Lars and I share some interests in common, and I remember our first conversations centering on hardcore electronic music and the spread of club music trends over the Internet. As a contemporary artist, his research interests go deep into block-chain encryption and network hierarchy. Listening to his new record on Liberation Technologies, I was struck by the contrast between his ability to conceptually ground his work and the resulting deeply absorbing

and interpretive listening experience. What follows are thoughts on and reactions to the individual tracks that make up the record.

“D7 08 2A 8D 2A 37 FA FE 17 0E 62 39 06 81 C8 A1 49 30 6F ED 56 AD 5E 04”: Hardcore can describe a sonic palette as much as a reaction toward stylistic inertia. A tendency in which established parameters aren’t abandoned but are maximized to the edges of their own spaces of possibility. Hardcore treats emotional and sensorial intensity as an algorithm to be optimized. “D7 08 2A[...]” begins with an incantation— “slow, slow”—over what sounds like a wet balloon being tied or an injection hose writhing out of its casing. Beneath electrostatic noise sweeping cross-spatially comes

“TCF’s music reflects the weirdly emotional intensity of nonorganic entities, the inhuman agency of machine life.”

M.E.S.H.

a rapid plasticized pizzicato, then a low system tone stuck in an indeterminate arpeggiation, the ground for a detuned flute to cross over like a spark of discharged neon gas.

“46 4D 68 77 64 A0 43 B7 E9 A7 CB B4 BE 68 6B CB A0 5E 10 02 CC 96 EA 75”: A cipher is an algorithm, a series of steps that encrypts or decrypts plain text. A cipher requires a key to operate. Some ciphers work on fixedsize blocks, others work on a continuous stream of symbols. If TCF has left keys in his music, they are buried beneath opaque layers of textural strata. “46 4D 68[…]” opens with cinematic synth strings perforated by tremolo and undergirded by the sounds of small machines that seem to be counting or authenticating a signal passed down a chain.

“54 C6 05 1C 13 CC 72 E9 CC DC 84 F2 A3 FF CC 38 1E 94 0D C0 50 5C 3E E8”: This track sounds like a threshold in the system being reached, a vigorous new awareness achieved, at once shocking and sedative.

TCF’s music reflects the weirdly emotional intensity of nonorganic entities, the inhuman agency of machine life. This confluence of the epic, the sentimental and the austere comes to a head as trance synthesizers slot themselves into a Steve Reichian pulse.

“F8 5E BB 63 94 B5 17 BA

Recommendations

Opposite page: A resident of Gulu, northern Uganda, all in green.

The region has been embroiled in near constant civil war for more than twenty years. As a result, identity and identity cards are of utmost importance.

74 AC 11 EE 33 86 B2 7E 93 E0 E4 AA B4 CF 1F 64”: The system in deep ferment.

TCF is a dedicated tea enthusiast, and has spent the last year sampling eighty varieties of tea. Last spring he decided to select some of the most interesting, and, using a crowdfunding website, offered a tea subscription service. The project is called Tiny Encryption Algorithm or TEA. You receive your tea in a silver anti-static bag with a print on one side. The first tea offered was a Da Hong Pao. Along with the tea comes a download code with which one can receive music composed by TCF, in this case what sounds like a Lubomyr Melnyk piece generated algorithmically for MIDI piano. There is

a certain uncanny feeling when listening to TCF’s music, like you are hearing tropes from avant-garde music recapitulated and resynthesized by anonymous processes.

“DB 9F 72 A8 B4 1C 62 8A 3C 96 22 8B 5B 03 23 6F 81 16 64 76 3E 0A D8 16”: At the peak of the record, this song begins with submerged synth tones and what sounds like fluids splashing in concrete chambers, or underwater recordings of distant naval exercises. The oddly emotive rave synthesizer returns. TCF’s music displays a comfort with musical manipulation; the winding song structures, overwrought chords, and cinematic usage of sound effects and sub-bass reflect an artist comfortable with using all available tricks.

“E5 42 CC 3C 83 3D A0 76 DE 90 E4 CB 49 99 C9 9F C5 48 7A A8 2F 34 1F BC”: The record winds down with a euphoric distorted string piece.

The machine sounds, previously plastic, now sound like metal grinding on stone.

“97 EF 9C 12 87 06 57 D8 B3 2F 0B 11 21 C7 B2 97 77 91 26 48 27 0E 5D 74”: Slow.

For a record built on conceptual rigorousness, E4 15 C4 71 97 F7 8E 81 1F EE B7 86 22 88 30 6E C4 13 7F D4 EC 3D ED 8B is lush and dimensional. It reveals an artist consumed by processes and networks, and collaborating with systems to push the listener to extremes of emotion. ~

“I present to you a mostly speculative biography of Roman Flügel.”

Tin Man recommends Roman Flügel’s Happiness Is Happening Dial Records

Tin Man, aka Johannes Auvinen, is an American electronic musician based in Vienna.

His most recent album, Ode (Absurd Recordings), is an entrancing and noirish interpretation of acid. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

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Tin Man’s speculative musical biography of Roman Flügel attempts to look deeper into the artist’s current cross genre impulses. What role does Flügel’s pioneering status as a label chief, DJ and producer play in his aesthetic decisions?

First and foremost, the new Roman Flügel album is fun and sweet. It ties together many threads—that is genres, musical histories, emotions, and I am guessing personal stories.

The record is obviously contemporary, and you will be hearing it get played out by DJs soon enough, but it is also track-for-track something of a history lesson. Probably the first thing that will strike listeners is how the musical moments refer-

enced here announce themselves so distinctly. One track screams krautrock, the next kosmische, then Depeche Mode, slow-motion afterparty house, and ultimately a sweet IDM track that surely will be used in an advertisement. If you make a point of covering so much ground on an album, there is a reason. Here is where I start to speculate why.

I can imagine it is a confluence of his history as a producer and the history of music that he has been surrounded and inspired by. So, here I present to you a mostly speculative biography of Roman Flügel: Roman Flügel went to some parties in Frankfurt. The music and the scene was wild. It was battering frenetic techno he encountered there; at the time a mixture of pitched-up techno trance and acid.

He got the bug to produce some tracks. In contrast to the frenetic

energy he experienced at the parties he decided to explore a more ambient loved-up vibe and something more personal. He quickly realized that he also wanted some of that energy he experienced in the clubs. From that day onwards he has been trying to reconcile the two side of this spectrum by pulling from different genres, different histories, and different emotions.

He has corralled them into something novel. Coincidentally, along the way, he has had a major impact on the developments of various scenes through his output, DJing, and his label work—actually, I say that as an understatement. Roman Flügel is an essential artist to consider when reviewing the Frankfurt scene and its impact over the last twenty years. You could even say he helped develop a genre of house music that incorporates aspects of

Recommendations

Read an interview with Tin Man conducted

by Mark Smith on EB.net.

techno. I wonder what that could be called? A young audience will grab onto his current project easily and be left all the richer when they start looking into his catalog.

I suspect a busy touring schedule gives an artist a certain sense of what makes a functional track and also what makes a track fun for the floor. But listening to this record, it sounds even more like he’s reaching into all his personal music interests and connecting them back to his dance music repertoire. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suppose that he took the album as an opportunity to make something personal.

I remember once reading that LFO’s first album was originally constructed as a mix-tape to be given to a friend—a love letter, pure and simple. To a degree, DJs are prone

“He helped develop a genre of house music that incorporates aspects of techno.

I wonder what that could be called?”

Tin Man

to connect with such gestures also. I would venture to say that this album could be such a gesture: “Here is how I feel, which happens to be the music I like.” The historical references do not feel didactic, but rather celebratory. It’s also fun to see how so

many different reference points connect now. This personal approach makes all the more sense because of its release on the visionary label Dial, which was always a great proponent of touching dance music.

I am a fan of neorealist fiction.

In the genre authors will often use a title that will appear in a slyly offhand manner in the story. It can be a small detail that causes an irritation when read, sticking together or contrasting parallel narratives, or revealing a mundane fact swimming in the overwhelming sea of absurdity—subtitled everyday life.

When I say the new Roman Flügel album is fun and sweet, it is not that I want to glue together, tear apart, or pick out any factual thread of all the references the record ties in. Rather, it is fun and sweet. ~

“This is music beyond empathy.

It doesn’t care about you.”

Gardland’s Mark Smith on Transllusion’s The Opening of the Cerebral Gate.

Tresor

Mark Smith is one half of improvisational electronic duo Gardland, whose most recent LP, Syndrome Syndrome, was released in 2013 on RVNG Intl. Currently based in Berlin, he is a regular contributor to electronicbeats.net.

Check out Mark Smith’s regular studio/tech column Gearache on EB.net.

24 EB 3/2014

Lots of people attempt to find an emotional connection to the music they listen to. As Gardland’s Mark Smith argues, that’s almost impossible to do with the insularity of Drexciya and James Stinson’s side project Transllusion.

It’s a little sad to me that Drexciya feels like an unattainable artifact.

No matter how many reissues and reappraisals attempt to push them back into modern electronic discourse, I can never fit them into any cogent narrative. While contemporaneous acts like Underground Resistance cultivated a similar sense of distance, UR’s was much more an inclusive and empowering

brand of isolated autonomy that was directly applicable to one’s everyday life. Drexciya on the other hand seem hopelessly far away.

There is no takeaway message. Or if there is, it’s too deeply alienated and abstracted for terranean brains.

I find it hard to even consider them as people. Their musical character occludes their human character completely. This is music beyond empathy. It doesn’t care about you.

And that’s why I value The Opening of the Cerebral Gate so much. It exists within a vacuum, surviving purely on its own narrow but perfectly taut aesthetic.

Drexciya exist in a zone beyond the pretension of your ego, yet their world is self-made and totally powered by the collective id of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. So to Transllusion, a Stinson alias.

I wonder if this degree of artistic self-curation is possible in the music world today. These days there isn’t a lot of cognitive dissonance surrounding the necessity of dressing your boring self up in some sort of vaguely transcendent narrative. Drexciya kind of blew right past that. They came up with perhaps the most ridiculous framing concept in electronic music to date and then inhabited it so totally that their position was unassailable. It’s awesomely ironic that they used a spectacle to maintain their autonomy. I’ve yet to hear a cynic calling in to question the artifice that’s central to the Drexciyan identity.

There’s the usual glut of Detroit signifiers on The Opening: malignantly pitched harmonic progressions, laddering arpeggios,

big 808s, the occasional unclassifiable noise; but Stinson manages to remain distinct from the city’s history. I put Terrence Dixon on a similar pedestal but even he occasionally reclines back into the welcoming arms of the Detroit identity. However, as Transllusion, Stinson’s sound design gets a facelift. Bright transients and some modern reverb contribute to a more

searing palette than his warmer early nineties material. It’s a suitable coupling to the brain-pain themes that the record courts.

The Opening was the second part of a project called the Drexciyan Storms. Stinson and Donald were supposed to release seven records in a single year under a variety of aliases. This is the same series that gave us Lifestyles of the

Laptop Café and Harnessed the Storm; needless to say, they were on something of a roll. I’d hazard a guess and say we’ll continue to see these records reissued. Personally I’m glad for it. And this is basically how it goes talking about Drexciya.

You hit an end point pretty quickly where all that’s left to talk about is the music itself, and we all know that gets old pretty quick. ~

“Kraut is a rather unselfish genre.”

Anika on Gut und Irmler 500m It’s not everyday that two giants of German music—one of krautrock, the other of punk, electronic and NDW—successfully collaborate to make music seemingly free of ego and pretension. For Annika Henderson, Gudrun Gut and Hans-Joachim Irmler’s LP 500m is a testament to their ability to give each other the freedom for creative expression.

There are few women like Gudrun Gut in the music industry, and even fewer that have consistently carried on for so many decades as a beatmaker, video artist, producer and musician. She has always embraced new technology and new kinds of music, and that has kept her current. I have been listening to it ever since I was a kid and looking back at her early career, Malaria! was rather experimental, punkish and completely uncontrived. It was about having fun, trying ideas and seeing what they could create. If anything, Gut’s music has evolved in structure and become even more fascinating in the process.

That’s why her latest work with Hans-Joachim “Jochen” Irmler is so inspiring. Irmler is a distinguished musician and producer himself and as a member of the band Faust is one of the more important figures in krautrock and a key developer of a new approach to improvised, sequential music. 500m is the meeting of introvert Irmler with extrovert Gut, a fusion of punk and kraut, the conscious and the subconscious.

Kraut is a rather unselfish genre. It is about entering the instincts and reading the moves of the others around you. It is, in many ways, about finding the perfect balance. Accordingly, Gut is constantly trying to chart things and Irmler is delicately weav-

“With kraut the music can be too introverted. Here however, Irmler provides the psychedelic tapestry and Gut brings in the punch.”

Anika

ing through it all like a fish you can’t catch. But Gut’s confidence lets her leave Irmler’s playing intact. And that’s why I look up to Gut as a producer so much: She knows what she’s doing but she is completely open towards someone doing something different.

Maybe one of my favorite tracks on the album is “Chlor”, a slow, gradually developing piece of music with a hypnotic bassline.

It reminded me of King Kong, the original version from 1933. In the beginning, the beat is slightly out of time, reminiscent of King Kong’s movements as he drags himself up the Empire State Building. There are some crazy high-pitched noises as well. Those are the planes hovering like flies around his head when he’s up on top, towering over Manhattan. They are tiny in comparison to the monster’s huge torso, which keeps on powering through like the bass in “Chlor”.

Overall, Gudrun’s voice is used very sparingly throughout the record, but in a good way. Her whispers have something disturbing about them. The first track where she pops up is “Traum” which means “dream”—though the whole thing is more of a nightmare, really. She keeps saying: “Komm ich Dich holen”—“I’ll come get

Bureau B

Annika Henderson, aka Anika, is a former political journalist and singer-songwriter based in Berlin. Her self-titled debut, produced by Beak>, was praised for its humid and de/reconstructed take on pop—a sound further refined on 2013’s follow-up Anika EP for Stones Throw. This is her first guest review for Electronic Beats.

Read Max Dax’s interview with Anika on EB.net.

EB 3/2014 25

Recommendations

Opposite page: Martina Bacigalupo’s photography highlights the importance of the observer’s act of projection in completing a work of art.

you”—in this eerie voice. And then the track gets really twisted and arrives at a place neither of the artists would have been able to create on their own. It actually reminded me of another character from a film, namely the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who would come along with his

horse and carriage, offer kids lollipops and then push them inside, the sides of it go down with these jail bars, and off he takes them.

Often with kraut the music can be too introverted. Here however, Irmler provides the psychedelic tapestry and Gut brings in the punch. I think that bed-

room producers especially should take the risk in working with more live musicians—though it may be hard to find musicians as gifted and experienced as Jochen Irmler. For both of them, the collaboration is a very brave move, and it is one that today has become increasingly rare. ~

“Does that make me an angel?”

Dylan Carlson on The Bug’s Angels & Devils

Ninja Tune

Dylan Carlson is a guitarist, singer and the only constant member of the band Earth, whose ultra slow and muddy incantations massively shaped the genre of doom as we know it today— thanks also in no small part to drummer and partner Adrienne Davies. Earth’s latest album, Primitive and Deadly, is out now on Southern Lord.

Read The Bug’s review of Ekoplekz’s Unfidelity online at EB.net.

26 EB 3/2014

It’s no secret that Earth mastermind Dylan Carlson has a weak spot for hypnotic repetition. As he explains here, loops were the foundation of his interest in Kevin Martin, aka The Bug’s latest release. While the two collaborated last year on a few yet unreleased tracks, Carlson describes here his appreciation of fellow Bug collaborator Flowdan.

I had heard about Kevin Martin, or The Bug, through a mutual friend of ours, Simon Fowler, who did the artwork for Angels & Devils and was working with the label Small But Hard. Simon approached me about working with Kevin. Then, funnily enough, I actually met him because we were both playing at Unsound festival in Poland. I had just missed his show as King Midas Sound because he had played the night we got there and then we just happened to run into each other on the street in Krakow. But that was already after everything had been agreed on, I guess. And it wasn’t until later that I realized he was in GOD and Techno Animal with Justin Broadrick. Then I was like, “Oh, I realize now who he is.”

Earth has this weird history with electronic music. The first time we came to England in 1995, Bruce Gilbert from Wire was using our records to mix as background tracks as DJ Beekeeper, and just recently we played in Joshua Tree with this group called Simian Mobile Disco—who I wasn’t aware of, but apparently one member is a big fan of ours. For some reason, even though I’ve always thought of us as a fairly rock or metal band, we seem to have this weird crossover attraction. It’s funny, during my “missing years,” I guess you could say, I liked a lot of electronic dance music. I really liked Massive Attack, Goldie, a lot of the jungle stuff. I actually worked security at a few raves in Los Angeles. My dark dance past.

One thing I’ve always liked about some electronic music is that it’s really repetitive. It’s very cyclical.

I think there’s definitely a similarity in approach with what I do where it’s about looping and repetition. Obviously with that it’s more technological whereas with what I do, since I’m a Luddite, I do it on a guitar. But there’s that same emphasis on loops and layering and songs not revolving in a snappy way. I’m not super well-versed in it, though; the thing I like about Kevin’s stuff is that it’s got that darker feel like the Massive Attack stuff I’ve always really liked. I really dig the way his rhythms start out and then do

these weird turnarounds where it suddenly changes, rather than that constant, really straight beat that so much electronic music has.

And it made playing with him quite interesting. I’d be playing and then think, “Oh wait, I missed something there.” Basically we did three tracks together. He just sent them over and I played guitar on them at a studio. I’m sure he altered them once I was done with them.

It was kind of funny when I saw the title of the new Bug album, since our last record was called Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light. Thematically, I guess, we’re riding the same zeitgeist. His is what I’d call dualist: obviously the Angels side is the first six and the Devils side is the last six. Whereas mine sort of canceled each other out, or provided a synthesis, to get Hegelian about it. There are tracks on both sides I like, like “Fat Mac” with Flowdan because it’s immense and slow and it has the good loop thing he does. I like the other Flowdan ones, too; he’s someone I wasn’t familiar with previously, but I’ve always liked that Jamaican patois sound. The part I would listen to the most, I have to say, would be the first six songs, probably because it’s the slower and more instrumental side. It’s a little more unsettling, whereas the second side is a little straighter to me.

Does that make me an angel? ~

Recommendations

“Like Aaliyah before her, FKA twigs has changed the game.”

Daniel Jones recommends FKA twigs’ LP1 Young Turks

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 Thug Entrancer’s Death After Life.

Read Daniel Jones’ musings on all things dark in his Audioccult column on EB.net.

28 EB 3/2014

Daniel Jones sees in FKA twigs an innovator: The musician and former professional dancer sounds like no one else, her minimal, bass-heavy R&B experimentalism redefining the genre’s twin pillars of sorrow and sex.

FKA twigs is that rare artist who, with each new aural unveiling, never fails to surpass herself.

Last year’s stunning EP2 and the exquisite music videos that accompanied it released a veritable deluge of praise from the lips and fingertips of all who beheld it.

Perhaps because there’s so much of Tahliah Barnett in it. Aside from her breathy, entrancing vocals, the self-taught twenty-year old produces much of her work herself. The layers of emotion embedded in both bass and vocal is astounding, and it contains enough depth and power to leave echoes across the mind for days.

It’s the voice of the soul brushing the ears as light as a feather.

There is no one like FKA twigs.

LP1, FKA twigs’ debut, is likely to be considered a “difficult” record by pop standards; the woozy, occasionally off-kilter production and deadpan title give the album the same unapologetic posture that her work has always shown. Slow, bass-heavy thuds lurk and grind against each other in the background, sucking away your breath without warning before receding again. Yet as unconventional as it may be, this is undeniably a pop record, and it’s in the

long-player format that Barnett’s brilliance most comes to the fore.

As with her previous work, love, lust, melancholia, fear and hope are dominant themes, and the immediate impression is one of an emotional spectrum from “When I trust you we can do it with the lights on,” to “I could kiss you for hours.” On first listen, “Lights On” is a throbbing and coyly sexual slow-burner that builds to a climax of sultry after-dark guitar. But as Barnett admitted in a recent interview with Pitchfork, the sexuality is embedded in strength to expose your negative sides to someone else—but only after trust has been earned. Barnett approaches R&B’s thematic bedrock with an honesty and intimacy that makes each song feel like the memory of a lover’s conversation.

“Behind this loneliness is a vast strength, and as much as the concept of the body is made Other, it’s also celebrated.”

Daniel Jones

Accordingly, a strong sense of loneliness walks hand-in-hand with the sexual imagery in FKA twigs’ music. This coupling lends a sadness to evenp the most exu-

berant tracks on LP1, and an air of desperation to her seductions.

“Closer”, a song about (perhaps) finding true love, is built on humming, spectral production so ethereal it might have been plucked from a Cranes album, and closes with one repeated phrase: “isolation.” The skittering snares on “Video Girl” are hurled forward by bass thrusts, and while musically it’s one of the album’s most radio-friendly tracks, the lyrics paradoxically decry unwanted attention. Even the sweetness of “Hours”—soft lips trembling and rumpled bed linens dampened with sweat—ends with the dehumanization of her voice as it slows, winds down like a machine . . . and dies. We feel her ache, her exuberance and vulnerability, not through a filter but rather as though it were extending across waves of sound directly into our emotional cortex.

But these are not songs of defeat. Behind this loneliness is a vast strength, and as much as the concept of the body is made Other, it’s also celebrated. In Barnett’s declarations of hurt are also the glories of being alive, a manifestation of fucking in ecstasy and sorrow. Barnett isn’t saying, “Woe is me,” but rather “This is me.” LP1 is full of idiosyncrasies and discomfort, but it’s so well constructed that it also feels like the template for the future of R&B, one as powerfully intimate as it is distinctive; hypnotic, richly detailed and lush with honeyed fragments of sound. Like Aaliyah before her (hallowed be thy name), FKA twigs has changed the game. ~

30 EB 3/2014

Clubland

“Records are selected to match the arc of an acid trip” Tim Lawrence on the Lucky Cloud Loft Party in London The disco historian and co-founder of the London adaptation of The Loft— perhaps the longest running dance night in the world—discusses the party’s organizing principles and David Mancuso’s LSD-soaked original vision.

The Lucky Cloud Loft Party began with David Mancuso, who has been running private parties in downtown New York since 1970. I met David while I was researching my book on the rise of the city’s DJ culture. Since June 2003, Colleen Murphy, Jeremy Gilbert and I have been running the party according to the principles of David’s New York parties. For the first eleven years we held the party in a converted power station with springy wooden floors. We decorated the room with hundreds of balloons, just like we were putting on a kid’s birthday party, to evoke a time of joy and freedom. We put out a spread of food to give guests energy for the marathon dance. And we set up the room so that the first thing a dancer would see would be the party room and not the booth, because the dance floor is the focus of the party, not the person selecting records.

David has never called himself a DJ. Instead he prefers to call himself a “musical host” because he is a party host who also happens to select music that he thinks his friends will enjoy. The sound system is almost entirely analogue and is made up of high-end stereo equipment that is highly efficient

and sensitive, including Klipschorn speakers and Koetsu cartridges.

It only supports vinyl playback because vinyl is the warmest and most detailed medium. The overall aim is for the system to reproduce the original recording as accurately as possible because the energy of the party will rise in correlation to the musicality of the experience.

Whether the role is taken up by David or by someone else, the musical host will play the entire party, from 5 p.m. to midnight, drawing on a wide range of sources that stretch from acid rock to disco to house to minimal techno—because the world is diverse and magical so why restrict the music to a single genre? Records are also selected to match the arc of an acid trip, because LSD was the drug of choice when David held his first dance party on Valentine’s Day 1970. He wrote the words “Love Saves the Day” on his party invites for a reason. David learned from Timothy Leary that the acid trip is comprised of three stages, or three “bardos”, and he selected his records so they would match the intensity of these phases: the gentle, playful beginning or “entry”; the deeper, more introverted transcendental “circus” that follows; and the more open, more social, more uplifting experience of the “re-entry”. David was the very first person on the downtown party scene to take dancers on a kind of musical journey, and although that’s become something of a lost art in contemporary club culture, it remains important to us, whether we choose today to take LSD or not.

Whatever the stage of the party, the

musical host won’t take the sound system above 100dB because anything above that can start to tire or even damage the ear. Early on we found that quite a few people would come up to us and ask if we could encourage David to play the music louder—because we’d all become used to hearing loud bass music played at 120dB and above. What’s interesting is that we no longer get anyone asking us these questions. Our ears have adjusted to a new way of listening.

Another distinguishing feature of the parties is the absence of a mixer in the sound system. David decided to get rid of this piece of equipment after he concluded in the early eighties that a musical signal becomes more powerful if it passes through the least number of electronic stages possible from the vinyl to the ear. He decided that the musicality of the experience was more important than his ability to mix records; or, as he put it, interfere with the intentions of the recording artist. Getting rid of the mixer also enabled David to properly shift the attention of the party from the booth to the dancefloor. Of course, by now it’s become mandatory to have non-stop mixing in contemporary party culture and people assume that any gap between records would lead to a decrease in the energy of the party. But what we’ve found in London is that the pause has become a moment of heightened intensity, when people can clap, scream and whistle, showing their appreciation of the music. And that to us is really quite thrilling. ~

Three records selected

by Tim Lawrence that reflect the phases in an LSD experience invoked at a Lucky Cloud Sound System party, top to bottom: Chuck Mangione with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra: “The Land of Make Believe”: Entry Osunlade “Envision (Âme remix)”: Circus Stevie Wonder “As”: Re-entry Opposite page: David Mancuso in London, mid-selection. Photo

by Matt Cheetham.

EB 3/2014 31

ABC

The alphabet according to Zola Jesus

For Nika Roza Danilova, creating Zola Jesus was a way of coming to terms with quitting the opera training she’d undertaken between the ages of seven and seventeen.

While the project came to life as a lo-fi affair, Danilova’s gravitation towards pop became apparent on her second album, 2010’s Stridulum II (Souterrain Transmissions).

There, cavernous space and a fondness for gloomy power ballads saw some corners of the music press label her sound goth—a categorization underscored to a certain extent by last year’s Versions (Sacred Bones, 2013). With her fourth album Taiga (Mute) due out in October, the former philosophy student tells us what’s playing in her mind.

as in Arthur Schopenhauer: Favorite Schopenhauer quote: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”

as in Death: The greatest motivator.

as in Empires: Genghis Khan, all the way. as in BBC Radiophonic Workshop: When I was doing a Maida Vale session for Rob da Bank’s Radio 1 show, I made someone working at the studio show me the room the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used to work out of. It’s no longer used for the same purpose, but I could still smell old tape reels and Delia Derbyshire’s perfume.

as in French: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” as Voltaire writes at the end of Candide.

Opposite page: Zola Jesus photographed by Tim Soter in Brooklyn.

Read more ABCs on EB.net

32 EB 3/2014

as in Conrad Schnitzler: Conrad & Sohn is best father/ son record I’ve ever heard.

as in Haters: Haters love to hate my nose, yet accuse others of being vain and insecure for getting plastic surgery. Make up your mind, because I have: the nose is staying.

as in Independent: If you were the last person on Earth, could you get on?

as in Jesus: A figure that holds all the power for some, and nothing for others.

as in Kindness: Kindness is one of the few things that separate us from the savage. as in Goth: Lazy journalism.

EB 3/2014 33

Zola Jesus thinks deeper thoughts than most.

34 EB 3/2014

as in Libertarianism: Harm principle!

as in Quasar: The only thing cooler than a black hole is a quasar.

as in Void: Fear of the void keeps me awake at night.

as in Mute: A legacy I’m proud to be a part of.

as in the Russia: My ancestors, deeply familial.

Frustratingly troubled.

as in the Wisconsin: Snow.

Birch forest. Deer. Wolves.

Ginseng fields. Home.

as in No Future: No future for you / No future for me.

as in Sia: Sia is responsible for some of the best pop songs on the radio. For someone as uncompromising and unique as her to have a hit record in the States gives me hope that pop music is ready to loosen its straight jacket.

as in The xx: Extremely sweet & hard working bunch with a solid vision.

as in Opera: An art form on the edge of becoming obsolete. Microphones killed the opera star.

as in Trapped: It’s easier to feel trapped than to feel free.

Humans thrive in structure but that can quickly imprison us if we’re not careful.

as in Youth: I fed into the ego / I fought what brought me closer to my youth.

as in Philip Glass: I recently saw Einstein on the Beach, and it was one of the most transcendental live experiences I’ve ever had. His work puts the listener in a trance, pushing you further inward with each repetition.

as in Underwhelmed: Allergic to it. If you can’t poke and prod people and incite strong feelings, do nothing.

as in Zola: Harsh realist.

~

JESSy LANZA On John Carpenter

Mr. Style Icon

I first watched Halloween when I was about eight years old. I remember my dad asking if I wanted to watch a scary movie, and of course I said yes. In hindsight, I don’t think it was an appropriate movie for an eight-year-old, but I guess that’s part of the reason it left such a big impression on me. John Carpenter is really good at creating scenes that are simple but never fail to be terrifying, like the one of Michael Myers standing outside a window in the middle of the afternoon or a dog running though the snow in The Thing.

I also really love the way he transforms cities and uses them for the backdrop of his movies, like with his depiction of Downtown Los Angeles in They Live or Manhattan in Escape From New York. He’s really good at taking something familiar or safe, like a quiet suburban street or a huge city and completely transforming the environment into the exact opposite; a metropolis on the one hand appears empty and ominous, while the suburbs unsafe and quietly terrifying, to say the least.

36 EB 3/2014

Like many smalltown kids, Jessy Lanza learned to sing by emulating Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey.

However, unlike most, Lanza transcended the distinctly unfunky origins of Ontario, Canada to become one of R&B’s most interesting prospects. Her debut LP Pull My Hair Back— co-produced by Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan—features her high vocal register expertly (and at times eerily) offset against cold electronic soundscapes.

So it made sense that when asked about her style icon Lanza chose director and composer John Carpenter.

The soundtracks to these films have really stayed with me as well. As a composer, Carpenter has the ability to heighten the fear factor of a scene through the use of a single note or riff technique. In the same way that John Williams composed his famous Jaws theme, the Halloween theme is just a single octave pattern repeated over and over again on the piano.

While Halloween’s theme is really well known, he’s also written amazing soundtracks for his other films like Christine and Assault on Precinct 13, which is probably my favorite Carpenter movie, if I had to choose one. Actually, when I think back, Assault on Precinct 13 would have been one of the first movies I watched which used synth-generated music as the theme. Come to think of it, maybe the exposure to this music subconsciously attracted me to really warm synth sounds as I got older?

Right: John Carpenter on the set for The Thing in 1982.

Photo: © Sunset Boulevard Corbis

My parents were both musicians and when I was growing up in Ontario, my dad had a lot of synths around the house that I had no idea how to use.

One day, around six years ago, I came to a standstill while writing some music on the piano.

Composing on the piano is hard, and to be able to come up with lots of different ideas and carry a song through all the way was always a challenge. Then I remembered all these awesome instruments that were sitting around my mom’s house, all this gear that nobody was using anymore that had been stuffed into a crawl space.

I decided to try them out.

I pulled this Polymoog synthesizer out of our attic and dusted it down and, thankfully, it still worked. Looking back now, I see that my dad was really an important person in my musical development—perhaps my biggest influence because he was the one who introduced me to sci-fi and horror movies as well as encouraged me to learn piano from a young age. Watching John Carpenter’s films seriously triggers a sense of nostalgia for me. It might sound strange but when I think about being a kid, watching his movies is one of the first things that comes to mind. ~

EB 3/2014 37

Counting wiTH . . .

Jack

Master

Glaswegian Numbers label and clubnight founder Jackmaster has a rep for surprising and raucous selections in his DJ sets. But did you know about his past as an Oasis obsessive and repentant dubstep hater? Here’s Jack out the box.

one

memorable line in a song:

“Ass / Titties / Ass ‘n’ Titties / Ass, Ass, Titties Titties, Ass ‘n’ Titties” DJ Assault – “Ass-N-Titties

--That hard work alone could get you where you want to be.

--That being backstage or in the VIP section of a party is cool.

--That drugs were bad.

two six decisions I regret:

--Taking up smoking weed as a kid.

--Selling some of my record collection on Discogs.

three

sets of people that should collaborate: --Dizzee and Wiley need to be reunited and take us back to the Sidewinder era. With Slimzee on the decks obviously.

--Noel and Liam Gallagher. I was a huge Oasis fan as a kid. Not sorry if that’s uncool.

--Scotland vs. England. It wouldn’t exactly be a collaboration but rather the fiercest international footballing rivalry in the world.

four things I haven’t done yet:

--Played a whole set sober.

--Kept a plant alive for more than six months.

--Adopted a dog (probably best given the plant thing).

--Learned to play the piano.

five

things I used to believe:

--That dubstep was shit.

--That I was a sick goalkeeper. At school they nicknamed me “The Brick Wall” because I was a beast basically.

Reflexes of a cat. Now I’m just a plain liability.

38 EB 3/2014

hours ago . . .

I was playing football in the sweltering heat of Barcelona for Ben Pearce’s charity football event at Sonar.

seven albums everyone should own: Daft Punk – Homework Prince – Dirty Mind Drexciya – The Quest Beverly Hills Cop OST Ricardo Villalobos – Alcachofa Rustie – Glass Swords Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

After

eight

p.m.

. . . is when I wake up. I’ve always been a nighthawk and I work far better in hours of darkness. Getting up at or before noon is an achievement for me.

nine My

lives . . .

. . . were used up many years ago spray-painting rooftops in Glasgow.

I’m down to my last one for sure. Fuck it—we’re here for a good time, not a long time, right?

ten

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

Tight pennypinchers, thieves and liars. ~

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V I I N T E R W S

Max dax talks to RAYMOND PETTIBON

They were jealous of our wealth After years of missed opportunities, we finally got the chance on short notice to meet Raymond Pettibon, known to many for his inimitable punk drawing style and cover contributions for Black Flag and Sonic Youth. The discussion took place while Pettibon was in the process of hanging drawings for his recent self-titled exhibition at the CFA Berlin gallery. Despite the stressful backdrop, he was eager to go into detail about why combining text with image so successfully communicates political messages, and why art can also promote forgiveness.

Left: Raymond Pettibon, photographed by Luci Lux at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin.

EB 3/2014   43

Opposite page: Plate 82, No Title (End the war...), 2007 in Raymond Pettibon - Here’s Your Irony Back: Political Works 1975 - 2013 (David Zwirner/Regen Projects/Hatje Cantz, 2013)

r. Pettibon, we once briefly met in 1992 at the Esther Schipper Gallery in Cologne. I remember buying three of your xeroxed fanzines back then.

Why didn’t you buy more? They were cheap then. I really wanted these pieces to be accessible for everybody. I think a copy back then cost something around twenty deutschmarks or something.

But I eventually threw most of them away. I used to carry them around from flat to flat and got so annoyed that I just wanted to get rid of them. Your three copies might be worth something by now. You know, only recently I noticed that my nephew was counterfeiting these fanzines and selling them on eBay for hundreds of dollars to feed his drug habit. But they weren’t originals, they were fake. I hardly ever sold any of them. There should be only a few originals in circulation.

But even back in 1992 you were quite famous for the record covers you had designed for Black Flag and Sonic Youth.

Most of the people associate me with punk music. And yes, I contributed to punk by giving away motifs for some bands, but I did art before and after that. Of course, I was a fan of Black Flag. But art was the foundation. Believe me, all these bands, they didn’t give a fuck. Surely they appreciated my style, but they usually just picked from my stock. Which is OK. And of course there were also a few rare cases when I was actually commissioned to paint a cover. It’s really absurd because many of these punk bands came from an art school background, but they considered, out of their punk attitude, “art” to be a dirty word. Artists weren’t welcomed by the punk community. That only came years later. I still meet a lot of people who are only familiar with my work thanks to my album covers.

I was initially seduced by the film noir imagery that you process in your drawings.

I love film noirs. I think they are the best movies ever made.

My favorite one is Gun Crazy by Joseph Lewis. I think it’s from the fifties. It’s extremely well directed. Kiss Me, Deadly is another noir that I love. That’s a Robert Aldrich movie.

And Asphalt Jungle by John Huston is great as well, pretty hard-boiled. And apart from film noirs I like films by Howard Hawks and Roberto Rossellini. I really like the narration of these films. I don’t see any filmmakers who still do film like that. Consciously appropriating from these films to me is like 44 EB 3/2014

inserting perspectives of film noir realism into my narrations.

But I also like dogs.

Is it true that you have a soft spot for fighting dogs and that you host bloody dog fights?

[laughs] I planted that rumor myself. I once told an interviewer that I breed mastiffs and mastinos, because, you know, in interviews you sometimes can really make up things and almost everyone will believe it if you really take care. But in reality I don’t like dog fights. I much prefer long dogs with small legs such as cocker spaniels or Brussels griffons that actually look a bit like Yorkshire terriers. I have a small dog, her name is Boo. She’s a Brussels griffon. She actually looks like Chewbacca.

She looks like a wookiee?

Yeah, George Lucas used to breed Brussels griffons that looked exactly like Chewbacca. I am one hundred percent sure that he modeled the wookiee after one of his dogs. We should check it out later. Boo is pretty small. She’s not a lap dog. She likes to run in circles and be chased by other dogs with longer legs.

Why would you make up dog fight stories?

Well, I honestly don’t remember why I made that one up. I guess the thrill is to make it believable. Because then it becomes a narrative. And maybe that’s why most of my drawings have a inherent narrative. You know, I learned to draw early on. In this show at Contemporary Fine Arts I will exhibit a couple of drawings that I did as a small kid.

How old?

Maybe eight, nine years. But after a while you lose your natural style. You then have to relearn it again. The drawings that I did as a kid were influenced by comic books, they really depended on the clash between the image and the text, they’re collages. I sometimes even added the texts years later. I say this because I always felt drawn to literature and hybrids such as Goya’s Disasters of War [Los Desastres de la Guerra] cycle because he used words and images too. Pure visual art in comparison has always been less an inspiration. Rather for me it’s literature. Be it poetry or be it comics. And yet, in the end, it’s a combination

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46 EB 3/2014

Left: Plate 84, No title (It is particularly...), 2007 in Raymond Pettibon - Here’s Your Irony Back: Political Works 1975 - 2013 (David Zwirner/Regen Projects/Hatje Cantz, 2013)

of all these things. Poetry of course can exist without images, but why not add them?

Or vice-versa: You’ve drawn images and then quoted from James Joyce or Fernando Pessoa. You’ve even then added something from yourself, so the words become something new.

Oh yeah. That’s right. I borrow or steal quite a bit from other writers and as every writer will confess, nothing ever comes from a vacuum. You get inspired by other writers usually more than by your everyday life. I mean, of course you can be inspired by that, and there’s many approaches to it, and the same goes for me. Some of my texts were completely inspired on the spot, when I had to meet a deadline for a show where a number of pictures were still to be made. In situations like that I had to be creative and to produce texts for the drawings fast. Sometimes the whole show could be my writing as a result of that. And sometimes I’d have a good book with me that I could easily pull quotes from. But I rewrite while I read, you know? So some of my texts are outright wordfor-word quotes from others, but once the context changes, every quote becomes a work of thought. And of course the image changes everything. You can have an excerpt from anywhere, but once you add an image it will completely change the way you read the work.

Did you grow up in a house surrounded by books?

My father was a writer. He had written one book called Tyger!

Tyger!, named after the Blake poem, that was published by Macmillan in 1968. But it wasn’t such a big success. And if you don’t land an immediate sensation with your first novel it’s not that easy to get a second chance. He wrote in the espionage kind of genre like John Le Carré. His favorite writers were Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. But we never discussed literature in the sense that he was my mentor or influence. But since I was his son I remember the full bookshelves very well. I grew up reading.

What about TV?

Well, of course I like television. I did this show in 2007 for David Zwirner called Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) and it focused on political works that actually provided the information that was left out in television. The media after 9/11 was one hundred percent pro war. You wouldn’t hear a word about any probable reasons for the attacks. The New York Times especially, but also the Washington Post and even the New Yorker showed

a one hundred percent one-way point of view and you wouldn’t read about a single voice that’d ask why it had happened. That subject was simply taboo. Everywhere you read that they were jealous of our wealth. For the Zwirner exhibition I was going back into my past and into the political cartoons that I had made back then. I stripped away the caricatures and all the conventions of political cartoons and propaganda to arrive at political reportage and analysis. For me it was a way to see if political art can still be viable or not. And I think that someday—too late of course, when I’m dead—some people will realize that I was actually successful with this particular series of drawings. Because in 2007 there was really no other artist that I can think of that was covering that subject.

You mentioned Goya and his series of etchings The Disasters of War. What fascinates you so much about them?

Well, he is one of my main influences—his series of etchings especially, but I of course love his paintings and aquatints too.

Comparing him to Honoré Daumier for instance would bring out that Daumier was more the political cartoonist in the conventional sense. But both are my primary influences, in terms of style but also in terms of mixing text and painting. William Blake of course has to be mentioned too. A great poet, draughtsman and painter. Again, many of his best works are a combination of the two, of word and image. The influence of comic books on the other hand is marginal. To me, who never had an art education, comics were an introduction to composition and framing, and nothing more.

The Goya etchings are prime examples of economical uses of text and image. Goya would comment on a massacre of peasants by soldiers with a sentence like, “They shouldn’t have done it.”

His etchings are just so overwhelmingly great and their narration is still understandable to this day, after all the centuries that came and went. You know, I never felt compelled or constrained to go past that because I assume taking an image out of a film or a passage from a book doesn’t isolate it from reality.

Collage, multiple drawings, triptychs—you can create a narrative also by hanging pictures in a certain way, and I am exploring that field at the moment a lot. The core is always: I like to tell a story. I used to fill drawings with words, and the lettering got tinier and tinier because all the text had to fit in. So the whole drawing would be a picture and it would be surrounded EB 3/2014 47

by hundreds of words. There’s something to be said about the economy of saying something with the least means.

Poetry is also the art of saying things in the most condensed way.

Sure. Usually. I mean, poetry can also run on autopilot. Take Dante.

Lots of words. I used to read a lot of poetry in the past. I don’t read that much nowadays anymore because creating my own work consumes so much of my time. I’m not immortal, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day. I am aware of that. You know, some of my lines and my writing are becoming shaky because Parkinson’s syndrome runs in the family. On my father’s side all four kids had it.

You also have your own kind of Disasters of War—specifically your drawings of the collapse of the twin towers and a portrait of Osama Bin Laden.

As I said, the Zwirner exhibition mostly dealt with 9/11 and its aftermath. The pictures dealt with the consequences of U.S. imperialism. I mean there are nine-hundred-something U.S. military bases in the world, you can find them in almost every country. I would say that I took Goya as an inspiration and as a blueprint to comment on my country’s attempts to rule the world. I mean, the U.S. used to engage in every possible war and they would always label these wars as “peacekeeping missions” or as a war “for democracy” or “for human rights” or “against a bad totalitarian dictator,” such as General Noriega or Hussein.

As a matter of fact I don’t have the ambition of changing the world with art. But I see a pattern out there that is never going to stop. There have been generations of people already joining the fight, going off to foreign shores and getting their legs blown off. The only people who got anything out of it were veterans who survived physically intact and eventually become policemen. And that has led to the militarization and to the domestic police state of America that the U.S. is today. New York is worse than L.A. now in that sense. It used to be a fairly free country, you know. America would be off fighting anywhere, but at home it used to be pretty free. But the war has come home and to save our freedom, as they say, we have to accept a country that is far less free than it once used to be. The U.S. is a country that has never been invaded. But it has joined every war from World War I to World War II to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Every generation has had its own war.

Can a country be addicted to war?

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It is an addiction. The military industrial complex has become such a big part of the economy that it has turned into a juggernaut that can’t be brought back. It just grows and grows and grows. So many people’s lives are dependent on these jobs.

In a recent interview you said that you want to “express forgiveness” with your drawings.

First of all, there is no irony in my work. Take for instance the drawing End the war against the Iraqi people. It says exactly why 9/11 happened; it uses Bin Laden’s words that he tried to get over to the American public. And I am not defending him! I have great regret for the people who died in that attack. It was so unnecessary. But there were reasons for it. And I knew from the start that the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t be a success at all. I knew it from the history of America. I mean, Germany and Japan in a sense won World War II in the long run because they were forced to demilitarize and to build up other industries.

But how does that translate into your idea of forgiveness?

I did that one show explicitly on politics. The rest of my work is different. I also paint flowers. I do a lot of lyrical art. And forgiveness is a good quality that can be passed down from generation to generation. Like my mother’s Estonian and my uncle was in a Russian gulag for more than ten years. She was a refugee after the war and she preaches forgiveness rather than hate and revenge. It’s been the same thing with Nelson Mandela who spent so many years in solitary confinement. He could have come out and been a huge slaughterer like Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

But instead he wanted reconciliation. After all the things that people had done to him, he wanted forgiveness. That impressed me. Interestingly enough, Vietnam in the meantime has become a more robust capitalist nation than the U.S. Have you ever been to Detroit?

I have, just recently.

Detroit is a wasteland. A failed city. The U.S. used to be a productive country, but we have successfully outsourced all production and manufacturing to China. That’s why there is no business left to do in Detroit and that’s why America is having a serious problem. To me, the city is the epitome of all things that are going wrong in America. ~

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A.J. SAMUELS meets MOBB DEEP

Hip-hop is our therapy Mobb Deep are nothing if not survivors. As teenagers in the mid-nineties, Albert Johnson and Kejuan Muchita created an era-defining sound in hip-hop that was at once uniquely jazzy, deep and thuggedout. Since then, the duo have assumed the role of perennial hip-hop phoenix, emerging from ugly public Twitter feuds, gun violence, and incarceration to be seen as one of the greatest and most painfully honest hip-hop acts of all time.

Albert Johnson aka Prodigy (left) and Kejuan Muchita aka Havoc (page 53) were photographed in Berlin by Elena Panouli.

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H

avoc, people know about the life of Prodigy from his autobiography, which came out in 2011. Of course you feature prominently in that as well, but less so your musical background growing up. What was happening in your house musically as a kid?

HAVOC: Well, I didn’t have an older brother, so it didn’t come from

there. But my father was a DJ. He used to seriously blast soul and funk and R&B stuff from the seventies all the time in my house. It embedded music in me also because I heard it at night as a child, especially when I was trying to sleep. I’m surprised me and my brother didn’t go deaf, for real. But I’ve also always been into art. Me and P [Prodigy] went to the Manhattan High School of Art and Design, so we’re creative types, you know? And speaking of teenagers, it’s amazing to see kids at shows these days who are eighteen or twenty years old who know all the lyrics to everything, from The Infamous to the new album. And there are plenty of ladies, which is weird, because we make thugged out music. I mean, this ain’t romantic.

I wanted to ask about your brother, Killa Black. He pops up in lyrics all over your records, especially on The Infamous. On “Temperature’s Rising” for example you describe him being on the run and covering up evidence for his crimes. It’s not the most uncommon story for the crew you ran with in the projects in Queensbridge, but your brother ended up not getting killed by someone else but rather taking his own life.

[Prodigy arrives at table, picks up a rock of crystalized brown sugar on the table] Prodigy: Yo, this shit look like Molly here, yo. MDMA. Brown sugar.

What were you guys talking about?

HAVOC: Killa Black. Yeah, that shit came out of nowhere. Imagine

getting woken up at five o’clock in the morning and someone telling you your brother’s dead. But my brother was kinda wild and was into the streets, so somebody waking me up and telling me he’s dead, the first thing I’m thinking is, “Did he get into a shootout?”

The last thing I thought was suicide. And this was my brother. Not a stepbrother or a close friend. That shit hurt.

Prodigy, in your autobiography the way you describe Killa Black’s suicide is that he had been behaving differently after he got shot and had a bullet lodged in his head—that he suffered from depression after the trauma.

the platform to do what we do. It’s a fucked up platform, but we got to share our life with the world—either for people who could relate to it, or people in the suburbs who want to learn about what’s going on in the hood. And as a writer you write about your life experiences. You’re candid with the people that are listening to you because they’re listening. That makes the message that much more authentic.

Hardship might be something that some people are afraid to share, but with us, we share our pain and we wasn’t ashamed of it because it made us who we are. You know what I’m saying? It’s a powerful voice.

Had you guys ever thought about seeing psychologists or going to therapy?

Prodigy: Hip-hop is our therapy. I can’t see myself sitting here talking

to somebody like, “Hi, we’re going through this and this.” Like, what are you going to tell me? There’s nothing that you could tell me. My experience told me more than what you going to tell me. Going through the bullshit is going to tell me more. I would rather sit down with a beat and get it out, you know what I mean? It’s a stress reliever, man. Word.

Guns always seemed to play a big role in your music and lives. On “Quiet Storm” off 1999’s Murda Muzik, Prodigy, you describe how you’re dad taught you how to shoot when you were seven and that the loudness used to scare you. You go into greater detail about it in your autobiography. Havoc, do you have a first memory of holding a gun?

HAVOC: I can’t remember the first time I held one but I remember the

first time I got in trouble with a gun was when I shot somebody by accident. That’s how inexperienced I was with it back then. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t back then. Basically I shot a representative from Def Jam in the stomach playing around with a gun in their offices while we were trying to get them interested in our music. I was bugging, almost had a nervous breakdown after. That’s when me and P was first trying to get on, you know. That could have been a major setback. But that motherfucker had angels around him, you know what I’m saying? That shooting could have changed the course of everything. I don’t think even today somebody could have gotten away with it.

Prodigy: Shit, that would make anybody different.

Prodigy, you describe what happened in your book: Havoc asks for a bunch of posters from the Def Jam rep, and while he was going to give them to you guys, Havoc jokingly threatened to shoot him for them. And then when the gun accidentally went off, you guys ran out but got held up by a bunch of undercover cops. But in court the guy testified that it was all a big mistake, right?

HAVOC: The bullet that hit him in the head was actually a ricochet.

Prodigy: Pretty much. I actually still see him from time to time.

And after it was lodged there for a while he got real quiet. We actually had to put him in a psychiatric hospital for a little while. And then he would snap out of it. He was going through some mental issues.

So Mobb Deep blew up when you were extremely young and struggling with a lot of real life shit. Aside from all the violence of the streets, Prodigy, your father also died of AIDS. Do you at all associate the darkness of your music with a kind of haze of depression? Your early albums come across as dark and threatening, but also deeply sad.

Prodigy: I definitely had a lot to be depressed about in my life, a lot

of depression and anger and resentment and everything. Foul, word.

So yeah, that’s a big part of my life and became a big part of our music. Rap music is a good way to let out that energy.

HAVOC: You know, all the shit that we went through kind of gave us

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And is he friendly to you guys, like “Hey you shot me, but no big deal.”

Prodigy: He knows it was an accident. He can’t feel no type of way.

Prodigy, you also come from an impressive musical background, to say the least. Your grandfather was the bebop sax legend Budd Johnson, your mother was in the sixties female doo-wop group The Crystals, and your grandmother owned one of the most famous dance schools in New York City. It’s interesting how many rappers have this direct jazz connection, especially ones you were affiliated with, like Nas and his father, cornettist Olu Dara.

Prodigy: I definitely learned a lot of discipline from my grandfather, man. He used to sit up all night writing sheet music and writing lyrics

to songs. I could remember when I was, like, five years old, sitting on his lap while he was writing music, smoking his pipe. That’s all he used to do every day and all night: write music and watch the Mets play baseball.

Oh yeah, and play golf. He also had all these tour posters all over his wall from Russia and Germany and all over the world. Growing up seeing all that and going to his shows when I was young, going into the Blue Note in Manhattan and seeing his albums definitely inspired me musically, just seeing how he did it. But it wasn’t until later that I realized who he really was, how famous. I ain’t know, I was too young. When I got older, people were like, “Yo, your grandfather, he’s ill . . .” That’s when I really learned to appreciate it. And you know, he died on tour in his hotel room in his sleep, which was kind of crazy. But also New York is an ill place with ill music. My grandfather’s generation was when jazz was really happening all over the world, then my parents generation was doo-wop, and then the next generation was hip-hop. But yeah, my moms replaced a girl in The Crystals who had gotten pregnant, but my moms didn’t really get any royalties or anything. She used to tell me horror stories and say, “Don’t be spending all your money on tour eating steaks every night. And make sure you getting your royalties!” She actually managed Mobb Deep in the beginning but I had to fire her, yo. We got into an argument one night at a talent show early on in our career because we were cursing in our songs.

We actually cursed out the talent show director because he told us we couldn’t curse onstage. So we were like, “Yo, fuck you! We Mobb Deep!”

My mom was like, “You can’t talk to people like that!” and we’re like, “We can do and say whatever we want!” And then we fired her.

That’s cold.

Prodigy: It’s all good. Anyway, we on tour now and I’m eating right

and all that. Actually, eating healthy is something very important for me. On the road it’s hard but when I’m home, I’m on some strict diet shit. For my sickle cell I have to be. It stops me from being sick when I eat a lot of vegetables and drink a lot of water.

I know sickle cell anemia can be a debilitating disease, and when you used to get attacks you would have to go to the hospital and get pain meds. I know you got out of jail in 2011 after doing threeand-a-half years for gun possession. Was it hard to eat healthy with the food they have there?

Prodigy: Actually, in jail it was even easier to stay healthy, because

every month you get thirty-five pounds of food in a package. So every month I would get my wife to send me thirty-five pounds of green vegetables. Everybody else got snacks—Oreos, chips, all types of junk food. But not me. I would eat my package and the jail food, you know what I mean? And I drank mad water.

Did you have a cellmate?

Prodigy: Na, I had my own cell. I was in a special housing unit, you know what I mean? Because of my celebrity status or whatever. It was hard being away from my family, away from my career, away from the studio, away from all my friends. But dealing with the inmates and all that shit, that could be another headache. But I didn’t really have any problems as far as that shit. There were a couple of people I was cool with. But I was more focused on myself, on my health, focused on my writing, focused on working out. That kept my mind occupied.

Over the years there had been plenty of voices proclaiming Mobb Deep as the sort of unsung heroes of golden era NY hip hop. Of course you got your due, but you never quite achieved the superstardom of your peers like Nas, Wu-Tang, Diddy and later Jay-Z. Slowly but surely however, The Infamous is increasingly being seen as one of the most important hip-hop albums of all time. How 54 EB 3/2014

do you explain that kind of up and down development?

Prodigy: I think Mobb Deep music is way more aggressive. Yeah, aggressive—that’s the perfect description. That’s what made us different.

HAVOC: Plus, the dudes you mentioned was the type of artists that was chasing radio singles anyway. That was their purpose. I ain’t saying there’s anything wrong with it, but that’s what they was doing.

Prodigy: Yeah, Jay-Z was chasing the Top 40 radio single, you know

what I mean? He’ll tell you himself. I remember I had a meeting with Jay and Sam Scarfo and all he kept talking about were the charts on Billboard, from Number 10 to Number 1. He focuses on making a record that charts. We focus on making a record, period.

Pitchfork journalist Jayson Greene recently reviewed both the supposed “rerelease” of The Infamous, which never was, as well as the new double record The Infamous Mobb Deep. He gave the The Infamous a perfect 10 but the new stuff a 4.9, which seemed to have pissed you off, Prodigy. You responded on Twitter by calling him a “bitch boy” and saying that you were looking for him.

What was up with that?

HAVOC: Wait, what happened?

Prodigy: Yeah, you could tell that dude did not listen to the damn

record at all with his review. I don’t know what he was going off about but he clearly didn’t listen. All he kept talking about was the old songs, he barely said anything about the new ones. So I went in on that nigga. But I was just fucking around.

What was interesting though is that you went off about it in more than one tweet, and one point you wrote, “If u don‘t come from our blood stream how can u make a proper assessment of our music? U don’t understand it. U a outsider peeking in.” Was that a critique of white people trying to overanalyze hip-hop but not knowing about the hood?

Prodigy: No, it’s not about race. I meant my bloodline. I was talking

about experience. I was talking about how he don’t come from where we come from. He not a part of that world, so how could he make a proper assessment of that world? He know nothing about it. Nothing. I mean look at this guy! He don’t know what he’s talking about with Mobb Deep. Maybe he knows what he’s talking about with Jay-Z, but probably not with that either. I can tell when people know our music. Word.

Prodigy, one of the things you have rapped a lot about in the past is mysticism and the Illuminati, especially the writings of Dr. York, who founded the Nuwaubian movement and discussed various religious and extraterrestrial themes in his books, many Afrocentric. How did you get into that?

Prodigy: It’s not just Afro-centric at all. Dr. York is an ill researcher

originally from Brooklyn who wrote a lot about history and religion and cultures and stuff like that. I bumped into his books when I was on my way to high school in the city. They sold his books at these stands on Jamaica Ave. in Brooklyn and in Manhattan—just tables on the street with incense and oils and these books. It interested me, because it was a lot about language and a lot of stuff they don’t teach you in school.

He talks about the Torah, the Koran, the Bible, and he talks about all cultures and races. It’s the history of the world. And you’ll bump into the Illuminati in his work too. But that word is just a piece of the puzzle.

It’s just one dot out of a million dots you gotta connect. Everybody gets caught up in it. But when you’re researching and learning about the world you live in, you’re bound to bump into that word “Illuminati”.

you’re wondering why oil is spilling into the oceans destroying the earth.

In the past you’ve compared reading about the teachings of Dr. York to John Carpenter’s They Live , where the main character, played by the former pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, puts on special sunglasses and is able to see the world as it really is: who is an alien pretending to be human and who’s really human, as well as all the controlling subliminal messages we’re surrounded by everyday.

Prodigy: But voting does count for something

when you vote “None of the above.” But only when everybody votes that.

What about Obama?

Prodigy: I like Obama because he’s black. He

Prodigy: When I saw that movie, I realized

inspires young black kids. We been through a lot— slavery, all kinds of foul shit—so to have a black president inspires my son and my daughter and other little black kids. That’s the only thing I like about him. Other than that: Fuck him. I don’t like what he represents, I don’t like his policies. I don’t like the system, period. But it’s my right not to agree.

It’s my human right to say I don’t agree with you, I don’t like you, I don’t want nothing to do with your system. People should vote though and get involved with politics and the voting system so they can learn its power. But me? Nah man. I’m not gonna vote for some dummy they put in front of me. It’s all fucked up. It’s all corrupt. Although sometimes I like watching the debates between the candidates. They hilarious. I’ll sit there and it’s just like comedy, yo.

how ill John Carpenter’s metaphor was. People tend to take movies literally, like science fiction. But a lot of these movies have real information in them and writers have to hide it in the words “science fiction”. The messages are hidden in the metaphors. It’s hard to talk to people about that information who can’t see what I’m talking about. They don’t get it until they do their own research. They put their own glasses on and then they can see.

What about politics? Can you vote after being convicted of a felony?

Prodigy: Yeah, I can vote if I register. But I wouldn’t vote. I don’t believe in the system. But I believe people should vote, so don’t go by my opinion. Get involved. To me though, I know too much shit. It bothers me too much. I know that Democrats and Republicans are two wings of one bird. I know that congress gets paid off to not pass certain laws and to pass certain laws.

They get bags of money. Powerful people in congress get bags.

Prodigy, you always considered yourself kind of precocious. Like you said on “Shook Ones”: “I’m only nineteen but my mind is old”. Somehow, I feel like this is also reflected in your attitude towards gay people. You’ve said in interviews that you couldn’t care less if somebody is gay or not. That’s a tolerant take on homosexuality, as hardcore hip-hop goes.

Prodigy: It’s just a reality in the world and you

HAVOC: The illest part about that is that people

have to live with it. The gay is not going to go away, it’s here to stay. There are gay people in the world, you know what I’m saying? Deal with it.

accept it!

Prodigy: People are so sedated with entertain-

ment. That’s how the Romans used to do it. That was the purpose of the Coliseum: To keep people’s minds occupied with sports and entertainment while they were changing the laws and the monetary system. Remember when they used to fight with lions and gladiators and all that shit?

That was the purpose: To keep people not thinking. If you read history, they even admitted it.

HAVOC: And a lot of people have gay family mem-

So what’s the modern day Coliseum?

HAVOC: Oh man, there so many, for real. And this

bers but shy away from saying that. I got gay uncles, you know what I’m saying? I’m not ashamed to say that.

Who doesn’t have a gay uncle? Anyhow, do you guys have favorite rhymes or beats of each other?

Prodigy: Movies, Internet, cars, jewelry, fash-

ion, video games, music . . .

Capitalism?

HAVOC: You say capitalism? Yeah, one big distraction. People care about the things they really should care about the least. Because people are so turned off by politics they think that voting doesn’t count, doesn’t make a difference. And to a certain degree, they’re right. At the same time, when you see politicians taking bags of money from corporations and at the same time

Hip-hop history, top to bottom: 1995’s The Infamous is one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time; 1996’s Hell on Earth cemented the group’s rep as grimy, hardcore hip-hop philosophers; 1999’s Murda Muzik saw the duo move into baroque sample territory, though the single “Quiet Storm” remains a minimal masterpiece; 2014’s double album The Infamous Mobb Deep contains both previously unreleased takes of classic tracks from The Infamous, as well a few future classics.

is gonna sound clichéd, but I have to say that when I first heard Prodigy’s “Shook Ones” verse, that shit totally blew me away. And every time I hear it. I’m like, what the fuck was he thinking back then being so young?

Prodigy: My favorite Hav song is “Handcuffs”. It’s the type of beat you don’t even think Hav do.

HAVOC: But back to “Shook Ones”: How you gonna be like, “There’s a war going on outside no man is safe from”? You gonna set it off with that?

I mean years later, that’s an ill fucking line. And it’s always gonna be an ill line. Forever. ~

EB 3/2014 55

S A T i o C O N V E R S

58 EB 2/2014

In early 2012, the Australian-born, Iceland-based composer and expansively dynamic musician Ben Frost stumbled upon Infra, a book by Irish photographer Richard Mosse based on a series of photos Mosse had taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In creating the images, Mosse employed the discontinued military surveillance film Kodak Aerochrome, which sees infrared light and renders plant life a lurid shade of pink.

After a lively email exchange, Mosse invited Frost to the Congo to provide a soundtrack for the next evolution of his Congolese work, the film installation The Enclave, which premiered at the Irish Pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale to much critical acclaim, not least for Frost’s soundtrack of field recordings from the Congo. Recently, Frost took time off his hectic touring schedule promoting his new album A U R O R A to meet up with Mosse at the artist’s studio in Berlin to talk about their respective work and future collaborations. The conversation was moderated

by Lisa Blanning.

Left: Everything’s gone green (and pink). Ben Frost photographed by Richard Mosse in Iceland. P. 60: Richard Mosse, photographed by Laura Andalou in Amsterdam.

Ben frost in Conversation with Richard mosse

“Like trying to teach a rabid dog to sit. ” Moderated by: LISA BLANNING Richard Mosse: Ben, I’m about

to embark on trying to find or embrace the unknown again. I’m trying to dismantle my work, my big, long four-year project in Congo. And I find that taking that leap into the unknown is one of the emotionally hardest things to do, but it’s fucking cool when you get it right. When you really take a leap from the fiery building into the darkness. It’s hard to do correctly, to really challenge yourself to work against your instincts, your reflexes, and to rip up what’s come before. But I’m thinking that your most recent album A U R O R A came out of that same challenging space somehow. You’ve had a prolific year, creatively. Aside from your album, you’ve produced an opera, The Wasp Factory, you’ve gone to Congo twice and made a piece for the Venice Biennale with me. It’s all coming from a very loud place. Can I ask you why you titled the album A U R O R A?

Ben Frost: Well, as you’re well aware, that was not the original title. When you work in this realm of digital music, from day one you’re sitting on the airplane and you’re making some basis for a song or a piece of music. And then the battery’s got three percent left in it, and you’re like, “Fuck, I need to save it! Yeah, ‘Emergency Zero Five’!” And then that piece of music is called “Emergency Zero Five” for the rest of its life, right up until that point where you actually have to give meaningful titles

to things. And you have to consider, “Is that the title? Or am I going to completely change the meaning of it to direct the ear in a different way?” With A U R O R A, the original title was Bulletproofing.

This was far more connected to The Enclave; it stemmed from the bulletproofing ceremony in the film that takes place where you see this prophet do this water blessing over his soldiers. They then literally believe they’re bulletproof.

And what I took from that was this idea of armament, of shielding oneself from harm. Which fit into my practice, into my life at that particular time in a major way.

But then as time went on, that title became less and less relevant because I felt like the term “bulletproofing” had this negative twist to it. It’s a protective measure; it’s a defensive stance rather than offensive. Whereas with the idea of the aurora, I read this German alchemist called Jakob Böhme who did this big dissertation on the aurora as the concept of the dawn and as the pinnacle of the alchemic process, where it’s about the expulsion of darkness. This idea that the dawn is not so much about light coming in, it’s about light pushing the dark away. To me, it spoke of an offensive move, as opposed to protecting oneself. It became about pushing back. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like that’s what that record is about: using light as an offensive gesture.

RM: That’s one possible interpre-

tation of my Congolese works, the way the surveillance film technology turns the green foliage pink. We were sitting in a bar and you were saying, “The use of the infrared film in Congo almost evokes this potential for hope, for growth, for rebirth.”

BF: I’ve been really adamant about making that known to people. I feel like that’s a small misstep in the communication about Infra and about The Enclave—the way in which the technology is misunderstood. This idea of infrared, I think people understand it as this heat-seeking technology or something. In the context of that film, it’s not about heat, it’s about the permutation of life.

RM: It picks up on the health of the plant, potentially for Congolese wealth. There are four rainy seasons a year in eastern Congo, and the soil is really rich on account of the recent volcanic activity in the region. The landscape is incredibly fertile, yet many people are starving. It’s a rich country in spite of its poverty.

BF: The Kodak Aerochrome film will react differently to a living plant. If you paint something green, if it’s made of metal, the film reveals that in a completely different color to the surrounding vegetation, even though it’s the same shade of green in the visible spectrum. But if it’s a living plant, it glows pink. But if it’s a dead plant, it will just stay dead, it will stay brown.

RM: So, it’s like in Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. Was there anything in your personal life that was shit that you tried to turn to gold, to sublimate?

BF: I think with the perils of one’s personal life, you can either allow yourself to be a victim of those or you can push past them and make an offensive stance.

Also, that’s an idea that for me is totally connected to my experience of being in DRC, just the complete banality of my stupid, white people’s problems. This kind of glaring awareness of how

EB 3/2014 59

insanely coddled and stupid all of the things I worry about and spend time sweating emotionally about are in the face of what is an actual problem in a place like that; arguing with my ex-girlfriend on Skype while people are shooting at each other down the road . . . I often wonder about how you reconcile that? You’ve had to deal with that not only in the Congo but in Iraq, Gaza. But it’s not something that you just isolated to the outskirts of Goma.

BF: But my point is, when you

RM: I think that my own works

RM: Because I think it’s dishonest, in a way.

RM: It evolved into a public gesture, of course, but it started in a very private, intuitive place—a place of blindness, linguistic failure and transgression. I wanted to transgress not just photojournalism, but also myself. And over the years the project found momentum, and developed into a kind of advocacy. An advocacy of seeing. A problematic advocacy nonetheless, deliberately so, and still wracked with transgression. But you’re right, the conversation currently surrounding the work is far from the project’s beginnings. Ideas evolve over time. It’s a journey.

BF: I agree with you. But

BF: If I’m completely honest about

try to be true to the beauty of Congo, eastern Congo, particularly. And not to hide that away and say, “Oh, actually, it’s all just a hopeless disaster. Woe unto them. Pitiful squalor.” That’s a complicated gesture. It’s hard to own a really complicated and also problematic gesture when it comes to human suffering.

There’s an ethical code there, which I’m attempting to break.

BF: Why?

I’m curious as to why.

think about when you first went down there, that genuine curiosity about the situation down there, surely you didn’t go with this idea that you’re going to turn photojournalism on its head and reveal something new about the conflict in Central Africa and blah blah blah.

RM: No, definitely not.

BF: So then why?

RM: I think it’s out of date. I think it needs refreshing. There’s no red blood cells left when it comes to representing the Congo. I think where there’s tension, it’s always a good thing. When people are offended, there’s something genuinely at stake. And I’m not talking about shock factor here.

it, and I want to be, there were a lot of really fundamentally childish beginnings in A U R O R A—some really garish, undistinguished, stupid ideas. I wanted to see what it would be like to make dance music. Or what happens if I just work with drums? And my contention is that probably you had a similarly really base level set of ideas that you wanted to get at . . .

BF: I say that’s the interview

RM: Oh, definitely.

answer. And I mean that in a way that it’s your answer now that you’ve had time to think about it.

But I can’t believe that’s what you were thinking about when you started. I got pulled up on this a bunch of times in interviews, where people are asking me to define all the aspects of A U R O R A. And I’m like, “It’s just come out. Ask me in two years what it means to me.” And I feel like you’ve had more time now with The Enclave.

RM: Too much time.

BF: . . . that have since become

much more complicated and you found a way to talk about it and justify it and expound upon it. And also, in reflection, you realize what it is that you were actually interested in. But that thing only ever comes later.

RM: In the beginning, I was just sick of what I was already doing.

I felt I had exhausted the possibilities of my methodology and needed to throw away the crutches.

“I think that my own works try to be true to the beauty of Congo, eastern Congo, particularly, and not to hide that away . . . It’s hard to own a really complicated and also problematic gesture when it comes to human suffering. There’s an ethical code there, which I’m attempting to break.”

RICHARD MOSSE

BF: You could have become a very

successful photojournalist, if you had just done what you were told.

Two of Richard Mosse’s recent publications, top to bottom: Infra (Aperture, 2012) was the artist’s first attempt at tackling the complexity of war photography aesthetics in the DRC. The more recent The Enclave (Aperture, 2013) is the culmination of Mosse’s investigations in book form. The work was also presented at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2012.

RM: In some respects my work in Congo has been a parody of photojournalism, an attempt to question that belief system. But I was also sick of myself, of my monumental approach. My images were so hyper-focal, big and masculine. And I wanted to subvert myself, ultimately. That’s one of the reasons why I chose to use this pink, kitschy aesthetic. Because I realized that war photography is an essentially macho thing.

I wanted to do it in such a way that’s feminized. It was really an assault on my own comfort zone.

And through that, you start to bring yourself into the unknown.

It’s not just about yourself though.

And if it’s successful, it will allow you to start to think about other things, as well. It’s all about your response, your intuitions. And that’s exactly what you were doing with A U R O R A, right? Because you changed the rules. And this is something I’m thinking about a lot, all the time. After Venice, you told me I should change all the rules. That’s hard to do unless you’re really ready, like you’ve got to hit the bottom. It’s really hard to throw away your methodology, particularly when it’s been successful. Like with the album you did

EB 3/2014 61

“I feel like people are going to look back on the late nineties, they’re going to listen to all of these dogshit recordings where people were just coming to grips with digital recording techniques. And with digital photography, like the first Kodak 72 dpi photos. And they’re going to look at those and they’re going to aestheticize them in a way that’s, “Oh my god, it’s so digital! I love it!

There’ll be an app that’s “make it look like it’s a pixellated piece of shit.”

BEN FROST

a few years ago, By the Throat.

It’s a beautiful piece of music. But you threw away strings right?

What else did you throw away?

fucking genius, he can play anything. He can play any rhythm.

You give Shahzad any aspect of any niche culture music and he can find his way into it within two seconds. Like Greg, he’s one of those people, he makes me feel stupid every time I’m in a room with him, on a creative level.

BF: Guitar, piano, a new studio . . .

RM: Visually, on stage, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but—as far as I know, no one talks about it—Greg Fox who used to play in Liturgy and now is performing with you looks like this hippie, with free-flowing, long hair; his posture radiates open positivity.

Too much yoga, veganism. He’s on the left, and on the right is Shahzad Ismaily, who’s sort of a Satanic creature with a hoodie.

It’s total dualism, Manichaeism.

Now, was that scripted? Did you meet both of them and think, “Oh fuck, this will look great on stage.”

BF: I think it probably began even more banal than that, actually.

On one side you have the raised in Manhattan, whiter-than-white metal drummer who just radiates this perfect, Terminator intensity.

Then on the other side you have the Pakistani, all kinds of influences coming from every corner of the globe, a manifestation of all that is foreign in Western music, completely off the grid, swaying, polyrhythmic enigma.

It was probably something about smashing those opposing forces together, like a particle accelerator. And Shahzad—he’s just a

62 EB 3/2014

RM: That’s good to work with someone who’s smarter than you.

BF: It’s always good to work with

people who are smarter than you.

I think you do the same thing.

RM: As a rule. Trevor [Tweeten, cinematographer of The Enclave] had a great description. He came up with it immediately and—like all of his ideas—it was a glimpse of the sublime. How did he describe A U R O R A? It was like a freezeframe of a bullet being shot in an underground rave. It was beautiful.

A brief overview of Ben Frosts’s recent releases, top to bottom: 2014’s critically acclaimed A U R O R A (Mute); 2009’s By the Throat (Bedroom Community); Frost’s 2012 collaboration with Richard Mosse The Enclave (Aperture).

BF: There comes that point. I guess

it’s not dissimilar for you, when you get that first proof or contact sheet back from the lab and you see what you have. Of course you can change the color balance and you can edit the shitty shots out and you can make a collection out of that, you can make a narrative from what’s there, but you can’t fundamentally undo the DNA of it. You either accept it for what it is and work with it, or you just fucking throw it off the

table. Because there’s already this intensely powerful current that’s decided where it’s going. And you can divert the stream, you can channel it into a way that it powers a certain faction, but you can’t reverse the current. You can’t go back on what it is. And with A U R O R A, it’s the same thing. When I left it alone for six months—which I did—I came back to it hearing it for actually what it is. There was no reverse switch. That’s what it wants to be. And there was that point where I just went, “Is this the record I want to make? Is this my post-By the Throat statement?” And I recognized it exactly for what it is, in that it’s without all of the filigree adornment of By the Throat. The femininity in a weird way has been removed. It doesn’t have any of that placating, stroking the back of your head nature that allows a lot of the aspects of By the Throat to exist. I remember, there were a few moments where I tried to nice it up. I played around with it, for sure to try and dampen it a little bit, but it’s gone. Everything felt like a cheap shot at trying to reconcile something that just refused to be reconciled. It was like trying to teach a rabid dog to sit.

RM: Why did it take you five years to release A U R O R A after By the Throat?

BF: It didn’t take five years.

Realistically, it was probably a two-year process of making that record. But before that, fundamentally I just didn’t really have anything to add. Do you think about that at all—the necessity of your work?

RM: Yeah, I’ve just realized recently that for the last seven years I’ve been on this fast track of just hammering bodies of work out on a two-year cycle for the Chelsea gallery scene. And that came out of being at Yale where it’s all the same, except the frequency was more intense. It’s just like you’re running on adrenalin.

It’s not healthy. Sometimes you need to take a little time off.

BF: You know, I remember on my

first day in the Congo, we crossed the border, we bribed some officials and we got in. We started driving and literally two hours later, I was standing in a grave up to my waist, having dirt shoveled on to me and a coffin dropped in beside me. I think that was a “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment. Interestingly—and this is something I’ve thought about a number of times—from a technological point, I had one of these field recorders, but I had it hooked up to a pair of noise-canceling headphones, which completely block ambient noise so you’re only hearing what’s coming through that microphone. In a strange way, it removed me from the situation.

And it’s only in retrospect that it feels that it has the gravity that it was lacking at that moment. At the time, I was just like, “I need to get the sound of that dirt.” It’s an instinctual gesture, but it’s also a didactic gesture as well. It’s not “honest” in the way I think a lot of people would like to think pure cinema or pure documentaries or pure journalism works. You make those choices along the way. You decide what to show and what not to show, and those choices affect the way the work is perceived.

RM: It’s all a manipulation. It’s

a series of decisions. Sort of off topic, but talking about our first trip, you were talking about when you distort digital it sounds nasty, but if you distort, as you do, analog signals, it’s just gorgeous. I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot, because I’m basically distorting an analog signal by using a grainy, old military film technology that’s silver halide film—if you did the same with digital, it would look like vomit.

BF: But don’t you think there’s

a historical nostalgia for that as well? I feel like people are going to look back on the late nineties, they’re going to listen to all of these dogshit recordings where people were just coming to grips with digital recording techniques.

And with digital photography, like the first Kodak 72 dpi photos. And they’re going to look at those and they’re going to aestheticize them

you’re seeing someone and they start sleeping with somebody else.

Does that entice you further into their world, or does it repel you?

in a way that’s, “Oh my god, it’s so digital! I love it!” And there’ll be an app on your iPhone that’s “make it look like it’s a pixellated piece of shit.” Because that’s what will be in fashion at some point.

It will be the acid washed jeans of photography. How do you feel about the fact that your work will be at some point distilled into a plugin in Photoshop? The Infra?

Like a Richard Mosse plugin?

RM: Repels me.

BF: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s

RM: I think it already has. About

two years ago they made an infrared app for the iPhone, I believe. Unfortunately, they didn’t put my name on it, I didn’t make my millions. I don’t own the medium. The harder one to swallow was the first five minutes of Star Trek: Into Darkness. You sent me that first.

I didn’t believe it, but then I was on a plane and I watched it and was appalled. It’s not just that they turned the trees red and pink. The people on that planet are dressed like African tribesmen. But not only that, do you remember the planet was being destroyed by a volcano?

In the first five or ten pages of my Infra book, it’s basically step by step honing in on Mount Nyiragongo, an active volcano with an enormous lava lake boiling away, which last erupted in 2004, destroying the city of Goma. So you have specific characters here: Africanstyled tribesmen, a red jungle, and a volcano. Many people came to me, separately, and told me that they reckoned the people who made the new Star Trek film had obviously seen the Infra book and were like, “Hey this is cool! Why don’t we just copy this and call it this weird planet in Star Trek?”

Someone made a music video for A$AP Rocky’s “Wassup” in which the band members are made to look like gangsters in an infrared environment. They tweaked the color of the grass and bushes digitally so it’s pink.

BF: I can show you so many more

examples of people ripping you off, you don’t even know. But I have a different question. So,

Above: Stills from A$AP Rocky’s partially infrared “Wassup” video.

two kinds of people: the ones that would say go harder into that or just back off completely. As soon as it becomes the thing that you lose a stake in, as soon as it’s not yours anymore, it dissipates the energy that surrounds it and requires a certain level of willingness towards self-destruction to just tear that down and move away from it. After By the Throat, it was open season. It became every man and his wolves—so many leachers. And that doesn’t make me want to make By the Throat Part 2. It just makes me want to get as far the fuck away as possible. They can just have it.

RM: Yeah. But if I had said that in 2011 after Infra—by rights any sane photographer would have done: “OK, I made the book, I did the show. On to the next thing.”

Then I wouldn’t have made The Enclave, which is a total evolution.

BF: Do you think it’s impor-

tant to be first with an idea?

RM: I do, actually.

BF: Me, too. I think original-

ity is the only thing, it’s the last rung on the ladder.

Above and p. 64 – 65: Nowhere to Run, South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, 2010. © Richard Mosse, courtesy of the artist and Galerie carlier | gebauer; Bottom photo and p. 66 – 67: Come Out (1966) II, North Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, 2011. © Richard Mosse, courtesy of the artist and Galerie carlier | gebauer.

RM: The top rung or the bottom?

BF: The bottom. Everything

else is just aesthetics and social climbing. The bottom rung is having something that you’ve come up with on your own.

RM: That’s weird, it’s the bottom rung. I would have thought it was the top rung. What’s the top rung?

BF: I don’t know, having some

celebrity girlfriend who can elevate you to the upper echelons of importance or whatever. Having a sex tape. That’s the top rung.

RM: Well, that’s my next project. ~

EB 3/2014 63

THE BERLIN EXPERIMENT 1989 ­– 1992 25 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Oral History. Featuring Alec Empire, Danielle de Picciotto, Gudrun Gut, Dimitri Hegemann, Ben de Biel and more.

View from LinienstraĂ&#x;e 158, 1990 Photo: Ben de Biel

Driving past squat and club I.M. Eimer, Rosenthaler StraĂ&#x;e 68, Berlin-Mitte.

Photo: Ben de Biel

Il Gran Teatro Amaro at CafĂŠ Zapata in Tacheles.

Photo: Ben de Biel

View from a squatted building in the Kleine Hamburger StraĂ&#x;e 5, Berlin-Mitte 1991 Photo: Ben de Biel

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, dropouts, squatters and anarchists made Berlin’s decaying central district of Mitte world famous. Where today young professionals meet for power lunches amidst a constant din of Daft Punk and Berlin t-shirt tourists stumble from H&M to Diesel, rubble and smog from the infrastructural ruins of East Germany and the real ruins of the Wall once implied a different future. In the nineties, a parallel universe with its own music and squatter culture rapidly emerged in Berlin. This is the scene’s surprising oral history, featuring Gudrun Gut, Alec Empire, Danielle de Picciotto, Steve Morell and more.

A

LEC EMPIRE: Societ-

ies can come to an end. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, political circumstances changed radically from one day to another.

KATRIN MASSMANN: The implosion of the GDR had already begun by mid-1989, six months before the Wall came down.

The entire structure of the state crumbled in the hands of the apparatus. But no one expected such a spectacular end.

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO: Motte [Love Parade co-founder Matthias Roeingh aka Dr. Motte], called me on November 9, weeping: “The Wall is open”. We were all completely beside ourselves.

GUDRUN GUT: From one day to the next, Berlin was an uncontrolled city.

STEVE MORELL: We went out onto

the Oranienstraße in Kreuzberg. Nothing was functioning. There were all these cars from the East, massive crowds clogged the streets, and it stayed like that for the next few days.

Everyone was getting drunk and going wild. No one knew where it would all lead, after all, there were Russian tanks just outside West Berlin.

berlin experiment 1989 – 1992

An Alternative History of the Fall of the Wall: Squats, Techno and the Police Interviews and Text : Robert Defcon and Max Dax Berlin images: Ben de Biel and Stefan Schilling DIMITRI HEGEMANN: All the

people who sat around quarreling in West Berlin, who had always wanted to do something for the Cultural Revolution now had their chance. The time had come.

gray. There was a stationery store, a shop for fruit and vegetables, and a department store—meaning a supermarket and a post office. At the end of the road there was a Christian bookstore and a clock shop.

BEN DE BIEL: The people from the scene surrounding the Eastern bands Freygang, Die Firma, Ichfunktion and Feeling B acted very deliberately right after the fall of the Wall. They knew a building was empty, so they’d take it. The original “cell” was the Wydoks in the Alte Schönhauser Straße 5, which was occupied in January 1990. Next came the Eimer in the Rosenthaler Straße 68, a building that was supposed to be demolished and therefore no longer on the property register.

So they knew that they would have peace and quiet. And this all happened in Berlin-Mitte, right in the center of the city.

LUDWIG EBEN: The houses were

KATRIN MASSMANN: During GDR times, Mitte was not a popular residential area. On the one hand, it was the governmental district. At the same time, parts of Mitte near the Wall were rather shielded. The Oranienburger Straße consisted of ruins, wastelands and decaying buildings, all monochrome, all

bullet holes from the Second World War in the facades. The air was thick. Real clouds of fog floated through the streets from the Trabants [East German cars] and from the coal stoves and smokestacks of the decrepit industrial facilities.

run down, the plaster was crumbling, there were still

every other street light was lit.

The city was bathed in dim, orange light. It was dark. Some streets had no lighting at all.

There were hardly any cars. In the heart of the city there were hardly any people on the streets at night. It was totally spooky, like in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Berlin-Mitte was a dead city.

LUDWIG EBEN: There were a

huge amount of vacancies.

But the buildings were also in such a dilapidated condition. There were buildings where you didn’t know if they were going to collapse from one moment to the next.

JUTTA WEITZ: Some buildings

were supposed to be renovated, others demolished. This fate awaited the historic ruins of the department store on Oranienburger Straße, in which the Tacheles squat settled.

STEFAN SCHILLING: When the

police didn’t intervene in the squatting of the Eimer, the time was ripe for occupying another building. A date was set: February 13, at 1 p.m. The guys from Freygang had an old fire truck. They drove up to the ruins of this huge department store with the siren sounding and entered the building.

KATRIN MASSMANN: I went there,

and there were actually banners hanging on the building, declaring that it had been occupied.

Thus the Tacheles was established. The name was apt, as “Tacheles” is originally a Hebrew word meaning straight talk.

Alec Empire is the frontman of legendary electronic agitpoppers Atari Teenage Riot and founder of the label Digital Hardcore Recordings. Photo: Luci Lux

BEN DE BIEL: At night barely

BEN DE BIEL: The Tacheles building is an architectural monument, the first steelframed building in Berlin. The building was built with much more steel than was actually needed, because at the time there was still no knowledge of how amazingly strong steel really is. But it was clear to the squatters: Although half of the building had already been demolished before it was squatted, it would still last forever.

EB 3/2014 75

ever free elections were held in the GDR in March 1990, where the eastern Christian Democratic Union triumphed, there were three months in which the primary discussion was about how to raise as much capital as possible from the 1:1 exchange of 4,000 ostmarks per person, and for how many family and friends you could quickly open a bank account.

ALEC EMPIRE: The East German

Above: Street scene in the Kinzigstraße, Berlin-Friedrichshain, 1990. Photo: Ben De Biel

STEFAN SCHILLING: Some of the

squatters had already gained experience in the West Berlin scene.

They knew that you have to hold a squatted house; you can’t just go home at night. There were probably two couples who held it for the first week. It was a cold winter, and there was no heating.

LUDWIG EBEN: I remember we

went into a bar. You could go in from the side through the hallway, or climb through the window. There were a few sofas, and you bought your beer through a door that had been transformed into a kind of hatch. There was a big joint being passed around, and we heard about the Tacheles. So we went there.

It was March. At the Tacheles, there were just a few people who had formed an association and declared the building occupied. But these few people were nowhere near enough. So we simply joined the group.

ties were incapable of acting after the Wall came down.

LUDWIG EBEN: The Tacheles was

meant to be blown up in the near future. During the day, construction workers were busy drilling holes for explosives, bringing in beams and delivering sand so that the house would collapse into itself nicely and symmetrically. Then in the evenings we would continuously destroy what the builders had done during the day. In fact, they only worked for two hours in the morning, then they’d get drunk and go home.

Because of our different work-

76 EB 3/2014

BEN DE BIEL: In the first half of 1990 there were discussions about whether there could be an alternative path for the GDR. There was a spirit of optimism.

was a neo-Nazi attack on the Tacheles. About 120 people at-

people were convinced that there must be a middle ground, a point at which the two systems could meet.

ALEC EMPIRE: People hoped that

the collapse of the regime would not simply result in a takeover by the West. People wanted to create something better, because neither system was perfect.

member the hopes of that time. and the long discussions in the evenings about how to create a better system. But in actuality, the facts were already being decided elsewhere.

Reimund Spitzer runs the Berlin techno club Golden Gate. A philosopher by trade, he also publishes literary texts.

Photo: Adolphe Marx

LUDWIG EBEN: In May 1990 there

KATRIN MASSMANN: Many

JUTTA WEITZ: I can really re-

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: In West

Berlin, the building would have been cleared immediately.

But such amateurish actions were possible in the East because the relevant authori-

ing hours, we almost never met.

civil rights activists, which had triggered the events only weeks before, disappeared overnight.

Instead, a unified “Germany” patriotism was being propagated through the mass media, with the black, red and gold flag colors flying everywhere. To make matters worse, Germany won the 1990 World Cup in Italy and Franz Beckenbauer proclaimed Germans to be invincible. The right wing attacks on the refugee asylums in Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 were directly related to Helmut Kohl’s reunification policy.

BEN DE BIEL: It tipped quickly when Chancellor Helmut Kohl turned up saying “come to daddy,” setting the course for a monetary union and reunification. When the first and last

Gudrun Gut has been a key figure in Berlin’s art and music scenes since the late seventies. She runs the labels Monika and Moabit. Photo: Andreas Schlegel

tacked the building. One of us, Tombo, had a Molotov cocktail thrown in his face. A mob was at all entrances, ready to kill, just like that. We managed to hold the Tacheles. But Tombo had to spend half a year in the hospital.

KATRIN MASSMANN: The incident led to a wave of sympathy.

The blasting operations were temporarily halted and they didn’t continue after it was declared a historical monument.

BEN DE BIEL: On July 1, 1990, the East German mark was replaced by the West German mark. Half of the East Germans went on vacation and the other half bought a used car. So within two weeks, East Berlin was suddenly full with all these heaps of junk. As soon as they could no longer be driven, the cars were just left to sit there.

SEBASTIAN DRUDE: Around the

middle of the year, squatting by Westerners also began increasing. The West Berlin anarchist magazine Interim published weekly lists of vacant buildings.

GUDRUN GUT: Young people began pouring in from the West to the eastern part of Berlin. You could try your luck. Anyone could do what they wanted. That was the feeling. Every day something new and improvised was born.

BEN DE BIEL: At night we sat

out on the street in front of certain buildings. If no lights were on in an apartment for three nights in a row, then we’d break in, look around inside, and, depending on how nice it was, we’d install a new lock. In the apartment above what later became the Friseur club we found two working telephones that had access to international numbers. It must have been an office. You could make free calls to America.

So we installed a new lock for this apartment and always passed on the key, preferably to Italians, Spaniards or Americans. Anyone who needed to call abroad could go there.

GREGOR MARVEL: Until the midnineties there were practically no phones in East Berlin. I, like many others, had a notepad with a pen hanging on a string outside the door of my apartment. You’d come home and there’d be a message: “I was here, I’ll try again next week.” And then a

“At night you descended into a hole in a basement only to re-emerge filthy, exhausted and unimaginably happy the next morning.”

Danielle de Picciotto

week passed. Or you’d just meet at night in the usual places.

BEN DE BIEL: Initially, there was only the Tacheles, which is where everyone met if they went out.

For drinking and discussing, mind you, not for clubbing!

KATRIN MASSMANN: For people like me, who came from the East, it was amazing that you could suddenly meet in a public space and do something there. The entire area between the Eimer and Tacheles developed rapidly in 1990. There were squatted houses on Linienstraße and on Hackescher Markt. And at the very end of the Oranienburger there was another occupied house where the Aktionsgalerie opened.

JUTTA WEITZ: For a time there

were around thirty squatted houses in Berlin-Mitte.

Throughout East Berlin there were over 120. There were also buildings with individual apartments that were squatted.

A real microcosm developed.

looked a bit Neanderthal.

BEN DE BIEL: The Ständige Vertretung in the Tacheles was one of the first techno clubs in East Berlin. There was a door to the basement, in which there was only scrap and debris.

ALEC EMPIRE: When we first

LUDWIG EBEN: Tim Richter and

BEN DE BIEL: In Germany there were known DJs such as Clé, Dixon, Tanith, Kid Paul and Dr. Motte. That was techno here in the beginning. The music

Nick Kapica carried the debris out of that place for weeks and then started a disco, which was very cool. They stole the sign of the Ständige Vertretung [engl. permanent mission], which was the West German embassy in East Berlin. It hung there, well secured behind a bunch of wire, just to make sure that nobody else stole it again. The best DJs in the city were invited to play at the Ständige Vertretung, and suddenly there was a line sixty meters long outside the door.

markable that young people from East and West Berlin were so quickly able to agree on techno.

That was their common thing. heard Detroit techno, we knew: this is it. This sound describes exactly how we feel.

On that basis, we wanted to find our own language.

STEFAN SCHILLING: The Ständige

Vertretung was a revelation. You could spend hours dancing with everyone, with or without any reason. There was a kind of nonverbal agreement, and there was this new music, with people like Ed2000 or Dr. Motte. It wasn’t about running a disco for profit, but all about the rush and celebrating that very moment.

GUDRUN GUT: A huge fire always burned in the middle of the basement. A thin red laser beam cut through the smoke.

REIMUND SPITZER: There were

people who wore gas masks.

Some kids brought entire bottles of speed, which they openly consumed on the dance floor. Out of the bottle, onto the hand. Up and away.

Gregor Marvel is an artist and fashion designer. He runs the Friendly Society shop with partner Christian Heinrich.

Photo: Christian Heinrich

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: It was re-

BEN DE BIEL: There were people who were dressed up pretty wild and just walked around.

The furrier was closing and had a sale, so suddenly everyone was wearing furs. It definitely

Danielle de Picciotto is an artist, musician and author. She also co-founded the Love Parade with Dr. Motte in 1989.

Photo: Adolphe Marx

brought a new vibe. There were the nicer and more open people, and they took the more chilled drugs. Speed and ecstasy didn’t cost much, so both Easterners and Westerners could afford it.

On ecstasy no one was ever beaten up. Not even on speed. There was never any stress in the club.

Everyone wanted to be a family, to belong together, and to experience something great together.

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO: When an entire club full of people is on ecstasy, then the mood, the atmosphere and the behavior changes. There is much less fear of contact. Everyone wanted to cuddle, to sit around together and hug each other. There was a sense of community.

REIMUND SPITZER: East Berlin

was the hippie dream come

EB 3/2014 77

nineties. Instead, everything blended—DJ, audience and music. Everything was equal.

The moment is what mattered.

ALEC EMPIRE: Soon after the Wall

Stefan Schilling is an artist and former squatter in the Tacheles. He is currently putting together a photo book about the squat. Photo: Adolphe Marx

true. You occupied a space, put in a sound system, and people would turn up. In a little way, they had created the new world, as it should be. Everyone was allowed to be creative in a calm and friendly atmosphere, to have ideas, to dance. In the occupied spaces, only our rules applied: Everyone was equal and everyone deserved respect.

We all liked each other because we were all at the same party.

This also redefined politics as cooperation rather than conflict.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: Suddenly

it was back, the hippie movement. At least, that was how I had always imagined it. People embraced in the morning, you said goodbye differently.

REIMUND SPITZER: That was the

end of punk negativity. Anyone could come, no matter how they looked, could belong, and was greeted with a smile.

came down the first raves started, such as Technozid or Elektrokohle Lichtenberg in East Berlin.

There were countless locations, so people just did stuff everywhere.

Those kind of parties were common. They weren’t clubs, just improvised, like, “That place is empty, let’s bring in a PA!”

GREGOR MARVEL: You needed an electrical outlet, a fold-out table, two cases of beer, a bottle of vodka, some paper cups and maybe some bitter lemon. Then a mixer, two turntables, speakers and a strobe light. And a fog machine, of course. There wasn’t anything else. Anywhere you saw a red lightbulb shining or there were some candles set up, then you knew: that’s a bar. Rows of apartments were seized for temporary bars.

BEN DE BIEL: The furnishings could be found on the street.

People simply put everything that reminded them of the GDR outside the door as bulk waste. Some of it was really cool stuff. You could just take it away. Of course, that was a boon for every club.

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO: I remember a party on top of a roof where everybody was supposed to bring a rose. The whole floor was covered with roses at the

ALEC EMPIRE: That attitude

stems from the earliest days of techno. It was before the Wall came down, when a few dozen West Berliners met in the UFO or in the Turbine and became convinced that this music was the future. It was no longer based on what we knew from the twentieth century. It resisted all categorization.

GUDRUN GUT: The idea that there is no longer a star who stands on the stage and celebrates his or herself was an idea from the

78 EB 3/2014

Dimitri Hegemann is the founder and head of the Tresor club and label. He is also one of the co-founders of the Berlin Atonal festival. Photo: Adolphe Marx

end. Then we held a party in a basement, with the motto “black and white”. So everybody came in black and white. Everything happened via word of mouth.

GUDRUN GUT: You’d get a secret invitation from someone, and because it was in the East, you’d go.

REIMUND SPITZER: The authorities didn’t prevent it, but only because they didn’t even notice for a while. It isn’t the decisionmakers, politicians, and officials that made Mitte and ultimately all of Berlin into a big deal, but a bunch of freaks, dropouts, anarchists and squatters. It was the Anti-Berliners, as they were called by the politicians.

BEN DE BIEL: On July 24, 1990,

shortly after the introduction of the deutschmark in what was still the GDR, the East Berlin courts imposed the so-called “Berlin Line” from West Berlin in the eastern part of the city.

This meant that from that time on, no new squats were tolerated in the East and had to be cleared within twenty-four hours.

However, the buildings that had already been occupied were allowed to negotiate contracts.

LUDWIG EBEN: At the same time

the work of the “Treuhand” trust began, which was in charge of selling off the state-owned assets of the GDR, often to dodgy businessmen from the West. Nothing remained of the original thrust of the civil rights campaign to distribute the national wealth to the citizens. Within just five years, eighty-five percent of East German assets fell into West German hands. Another ten percent went to international investors.

The Tacheles was merely one of many puzzle pieces in this large-scale redistribution process.

JUTTA WEITZ: It became a true race against time. The principle of “restitution before compensation” had been set in the reunification treaty. This meant that property had to be returned to former owners after the unification. Had the own-

“The authorities were busy with makeshift attempts to regulate the traffic but otherwise retreated from the public sphere.”

Dimitri Hegemann

ers instead been compensated, there would have been a lot more time to develop things calmly.

SEBASTIAN DRUDE: On the night

of October 2, 1990, some of us went through the district with spray cans and sprayed over the street names with black paint.

It was because we feared that with the unification of the two German states on the October 3, the western police would come and start evicting. That was meant to confuse them.

BEN DE BIEL: On November 12, recent occupations in the Pfarrstraße and Cotheniusstraße in the neighboring district of Friedrichshain were cleared within a few hours by hundreds of police. Squatters in the nearby Mainzer Straße expressed solidarity and demonstrated. Although the Mainzer Straße had largely been occupied in April before the “Berliner Line” came into effect, the squatters came to the conclusion that Mainzer Straße would soon be under threat, so they prepared themselves. The first Molotov cocktails were thrown during a solidarity demonstration, and a barricade was built at Frankfurter Allee. Someone actually stole an excavator and dug trenches.

STEVE MORELL: Many people from West Berlin and West Germany lived in Mainzer

Straße, but also East Germans, Spaniards, French, English.

It was a lively mixture.

BEN DE BIEL: Half the street was

occupied, thirteen houses all together. There was a women’s and lesbian’s house and a queer house that was occupied only by gays. Most squatters came from the Kreuzberg political scene. This meant that the militant political attitudes from the West had come to the East. In the Mainzer Straße it was common knowledge: The police are the enemy. So they armed themselves heavily.

STEVE MORELL: The new forms of collective coexistence that had only recently emerged suddenly found themselves threatened. On top of that, property owners turned up that could not be argued with. That fueled aggression in the scene, and it became radicalized.

SEBASTIAN DRUDE: It became

increasingly clear to the squatters in the Mainzer Straße that an eviction was imminent. These occupations were a thorn in the side of the city. They wanted to decapitate the East Berlin

Ben de Biel is a photographer and former owner of the Maria Club. He currently serves as the press speaker for Berlin’s Pirate Party. Photo: Luci Lux

squatter movement. Two or three days before the eviction, the first convoys came down the highways with police from Hamburg, Hannover and Munich. It was provoked two days earlier, when the police smashed the squat’s windows with water cannons.

The squatters threw stones.

Above: The view of the back of the Kunsthaus Tacheles squat in Berlin-Mitte, 1991. Photo: Stefan Schilling

BEN DE BIEL: In advance of

the police’s arrival, people were hopping around on one of the roofs in the Mainzer Straße. They tore down the facade cladding and threw the stone slabs on the road.

STEVE MORELL: Razor wire was mounted on the roofs. Back then you could get it for free. You just had to go out to the old East barracks, and it was lying all around. In one of the abandoned military barracks, even tar machines and spark generators were found and taken. The police at the eviction on November 14 had to hold metal plates over their heads, because the squatters were pouring hot tar down from the roof. The infamous electrical traps were built from the spark generators. Of course, they provided signs that read “380 Volts”.

BEN DE BIEL: It was the most massive use of police force in Berlin in post-war history: Three thousand policemen against five hundred squatters.

STEVE MORELL: I watched it from

the outside. There were helicopters, from which the police roped

down onto the houses. When the police got into apartments, they made short work of it and threw everything out the windows.

The police were extremely violent in these operations. They’d just smash a baton in your face or over your head— they didn’t care. To the police, the squatters were scum. The scenes were reminiscent of a civil war.

BEN DE BIEL: In Berlin-Mitte, there was a different mood.

In summer we snuck into the Monbijou children’s pool at night, floated candles and splashed around a bit. Then a policeman came and said, “What are you doing there?” “Well, we’re swimming.” “That’s not allowed!” In the end he allowed us to stay, as long as we took away our trash. Political radicals would have turned a situation like that into an opportunity to insult the police. Of course, the situation would have escalated.

JUTTA WEITZ: Since the return of buildings to former owners didn’t happen very quickly, unexpected room to maneuver arose for WBM [public residential apartment management services], who still managed a majority of the properties in Mitte from the GDR days. First every single case had to be examined by the newly created Office of Unresolved Property Issues. There were houses with ten different applicants, all claiming that it was theirs. They had to go house by house and review the registries and inheritance records. So

REIMUND SPITZER: Scenes like

that only turned out so well because the authorities were overwhelmed and had to overlook many things if they weren’t really serious protests.

Jutta Weitz was involved in the property management association WBM in the nineties, which helped support squatters and artists. Photo: Adolphe Marx

EB 3/2014 79

were substantive approaches that were actually pursued. You also met colleagues from similar establishments. Things were discussed that would change Berlin a lot in the following years. For the first time there was a space not just to think about something different, but to let it take shape. We were brash enough and didn’t spend long questioning, but quickly established facts: the clubs and art venues, musical developments, the Love Parade.

Above: On the corner of Kleine Hamburger Straße, Berlin-Mitte, 1990. Photo: Ben De Biel

I went to all the occupied houses one by one to introduce myself as an employee of the WBM. On the other hand, I spoke with the former owners. I didn’t want to wait until a situation arose that would have led to an eviction. In all the houses where there was any legal possibility, we entered established rental contracts. If there were vacant WBM buildings with commercial spaces, then I searched for groups for them and systematically spread the word that a place was available for the price of heat and electricity or very low rent.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: The estab-

lishment of “temporary use” and the resulting temporary use agreements were very important for the development of Berlin. This created the possibility of legally using places to try out ideas, at least for a certain time, until they later fell back into the owners’ hands.

ALEC EMPIRE: Whether legal or

illegal, new locations were continually created beneath the city.

Berlin has a very specific kind of damp, musty cellar with rusted pipes and dilapidated electrical

80 EB 3/2014

wiring. The lighting was improvised. You’d hang a construction lamp so you wouldn’t fall down the stairs. In March 1991, the

GUDRUN GUT: It was dark and damp, it smelled like a cellar, but with hardly any light and brutal sound, and very minimal music. It wasn’t funny at all. Jeff Mills was also not a fun event. It was really hardcore.

STEVE MORELL: I don’t know how many liters of liquid for the fog machine were used per night in that vault. Sometimes you couldn’t even see your hand right in front of your eyes.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: I can remem-

Sebastian Drude is a linguist. Originally from Hanover, he lived in various squatted houses in East Berlin from May 1990. Photo: Adolphe Marx

Tresor opened a very typical club for that time, except as a former vault of the Wertheim department store in Leipziger Straße, it additionally had these old safe deposit boxes and heavy steel mesh doors as a bonus.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: The Ber-

liner Tagesspiegel newspaper once described the vault as a perfect shelter from a Feng Shui point of view.

ber one morning in the garden of the Tresor, which was a place of total calm right in the center of the city. We were the first to settle there. Then the Ministry of Finance set up across the road.

Some of the employees who came to work early even danced with us shortly before starting work.

Somehow in the morning we always had the feeling of having done something during the night. I hadn’t danced or taken any drugs, but I must have done something in those ten or twelve hours because I always had new insights from the conversations.

Sure, fifty percent was silly chatter, but the other fifty percent

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO: We wanted to take what we were having fun with and what we believed in out into the open and not always party in these basements. That was the original idea behind the Love Parade. It was also a movement away from the existentialist, heroin-heavy melancholy that was so typical of West Berlin in the eighties. It was about a kind of joie de vivre.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN: When house

and techno arrived, a community emerged really, really quickly.

Certainly the euphoria surrounding the fall of the Wall helped, but it was especially about the new music. It was fresh. Our first 12-inch on Tresor Records, “Sonic Destroyer” by Underground Resistance appeared in the summer of 1991. The second 12-inch was “Der Klang der Familie” by 3phase with Dr. Motte in 1992.

The title describes the spirit of the times: “The Sound of the Family”. We somehow all liked each other. We got along. The atmosphere was really good.

BEN DE BIEL: Soon property starting getting returned to its former owners. At a certain point it became clear who owned the property, and then it was often directly sold or put on the market immediately. That attracted investors who shopped for cheap real estate and bought it for peanuts. Entire streets.

JUTTA WEITZ: At some point it just became: buy low, renovate and resell immediately. That led to a very different kind of commercialization. You could

write off the purchases and renovations for tax purposes for up to one hundred percent over ten years. That was a special rule. That paved the way for entirely new economic models.

BEN DE BIEL: Strange things began to happen in Berlin-Mitte.

The houses were then drenched.

That way the fabric of the building was guaranteed to be ruined, and the oldest buildings in the Oranienburger Straße were taken from us. Eventually, they put a cardboard roof over it, which could hardly withstand the rain. In the end, everything was so destroyed that you could drill a hole into the wall with your finger. Then it had to be torn down—just so someone could put a hotel there.

BEN DE BIEL: Meanwhile, af-

Katrin Massmann managed the theater at Tacheles and is now overseeing the artistic design of the Humboldthain club. Photo: Adolphe Marx.

Whenever Dorothee Dubrau, the District Councilor for Construction, was on vacation, an excavator would accidentally crash into a house. Then the house would have to be demolished. For example, that’s how the Elektro squat was torn down even though it wasn’t supposed to be.

JUTTA WEITZ: An excavator “accidentally” crashed into a side wing of Neue Schönhauser 10. It was vacant, sure, but there was no demolition permit.

Then suddenly there was one.

BEN DE BIEL: In 1992 there

was a fire in the attic of the apartment buildings next to the Tacheles. Forty or fifty people lost their homes.

ter the people’s first spending spree, the lights really went out in the East. Just as the people left their old GDR junk out on the street, the East German economy was abandoned.

Soon, every other person was unemployed and broke.

LUDWIG EBEN: A typical scene:

I’m in a small supermarket, and in front of me is a guy with a bottle of schnapps and two cans of dog food. He doesn’t have enough money, so he gives back the dog food. There were so many total alcoholics, utterly wasted, with bodies that were already completely trashed.

They were the first people to disappear from Berlin-Mitte.

BEN DE BIEL: There were countless state-sponsored work creation schemes. Tons of money was pumped into the social system.

LUDWIG EBEN: These were mea-

sures to tranquilize the population of the former East. People in yellow suits tore down the

Alec Empire

same factories where they used to work, and this was a job creation scheme! At the time, practically everyone at the Tacheles who could raise an arm got a state job repairing and rebuilding the Tacheles. They received between 1,300 and 2,000 deutschmarks per month. However, most of the recipients were never there or were doing something else, so you couldn’t plan on them actually working. Only a third really tried to help establish an infrastructure in Tacheles. But we succeeded. By 1992 the place was firing on all cylinders: There was the Zapata, the Ständige Vertretung, theater productions, concerts, and workshops open on both floors. They were used by artists who worked there.

The building attracted hundreds of people daily. Suddenly everything started working!

That was even more valuable for us than oil and diamonds.

REIMUND SPITZER: You could

walk forever through Tacheles. It was like a trip.

STEFAN SCHILLING: There was

LUDWIG EBEN: The fire depart-

ment let both houses burn down.

We became extremely agitated, so the firefighters called the police. The police actually got out of the car wearing Nazi helmets.

A good shock, that was. They were just waiting for us to start a fight,so that they could haul away the whole Tacheles crew.

They saw squatters as enemies of the state. When the fire was out, the order came: “Water on!”

“These days it’s not so easy to tell people in uniform that they are not familiar with the laws.”

Steve Morell a musician and founder of the Berlin Insane festival and the record label Pale Music. Photo: Adolphe Marx

someone there with a big drum that shot out smoke with every hit. He’d take aim with a preference for people who didn’t yet know the effect. Or you’d walk into a room and hear all this loud laughter next door: People were filmed and the images were distorted into bizarre grimaces with a magnet on a TV screen in the next room. It was a way of laughing people’s egos down to size a bit. Joseph Beuys’ extended definition of art and social sculpture

became the agenda of a whole generation, not only for artists that recognized explicit references.

Suddenly, everyone was an artist and were focused on the creation of new social relationships.

REIMUND SPITZER: The German

Chainsaw Massacre by Christoph Schlingensief was showing at the cinema on the third floor, called Kino Angenehm (“Pleasant Cinema”). In the film, the fall of the Wall sets a West German butcher family into a murderous frenzy.

They kill visiting GDR citizens in a seedy hotel kitchen. The sound system was insanely loud. There was a lot of yelling. They were yelling the whole time, actually.

KATRIN MASSMANN: In a circus

arena in the auditorium of the Tacheles, people wearing shiny bondage costumes were led around in chains. It was Bestia Pigra by the RAM.M.

Ludwig Eben worked as an artist and ran the bar at Café Zapata in the Tacheles. Today, he runs the Humboldthain club in Berlin-Wedding. Photo: A. Marx

theater group. A woman with huge breasts was lowered down from above on a rope, accompanied by electronic sounds and aggressive texts.

STEFAN SCHILLING: Suddenly a

huge door opened, and in the room behind it a band was playing. Upside down. They were the Elektronauten, with Ben de Biel. It was like they were standing on the ceiling.

ALEC EMPIRE: For those who

wanted to restore order, it was already a state of emergency.

For us, it was zero gravity. ~ EB 3/2014 81

WANDERLUST

72 hours in De

Interviews: robert defcon and max dax PHOTOGRAPHY: max dax

troit

Like in large cities all over the U.S., freeways in Detroit function as dividers, separating the rich from the poor, and “the white city from the ghetto,� as Cornelius Harris puts it.

Forget for once Madonna, Eminem and Iggy Pop. Detroit, formerly known as Motor City, is a broken metropolis that nevertheless can still lay claim to being the epicenter of American black music. The Motown sound, funk and techno were all born in what was formerly the richest city in the US. Today, however, the city is bankrupt, and the majority of its largely black population is living in poverty. Diving into the city’s musical history is a lot like being transported to a parallel dimension of hopeful projections. For many, Detroit’s music and art scenes remain a unique opportunity for urban cultural renewal—albeit one not without the potential pitfall of a revitalization that excludes black communities.

Thursday, 2 p.m.

Michael StoneRichards on Detroit’s two historical narratives.

When you think of the wealth of the United States, which is—even in its decline—second to none, how is it possible that we have cities in the U.S. with problems like Detroit?

My friend Jerry Heron, author of AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History, has made the case of Detroit as the archetypal American city. America’s way of life was built here. America’s middle class was invented here. And

all the things that are wrong with America today, you can find them in Detroit in a form of hyper-logic.

Detroit is the failed city, a city that is a synonym for American crisis.

Apparently, Detroit is the perfect subject to discuss the nature of urbanization and the future of the American city in late modernity.

This, at any rate, is the image, or as I would prefer to put it, the representation of Detroit. In this context I strongly reject the question “Who owns the city?” because it is predicated on the idea of ownership. In my mind, the answer is, evidently: No one owns the city. Detroit has been going through a crisis for a long time—in part precisely because certain people thought that they owned the city. But there are all

Right: At Bert’s Music Club, a mural colorfully displays American pop cultural heritage—and that the King of Pop did the first moonwalk in a televised Motown tribute.

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kinds of signs that it may be pulling itself out of the depression of the past thirty years. There are economic signs, too, emblematically, with the gradual regeneration of Downtown, Midtown, Cork Town and Eastern Market as there are also cultural signs, like the opening of MoCAD—the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit— or Power House Productions, where two people, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope, started to buy houses, take them off the grid and produce electricity from solar and wind power. Power House also means asserting authorship within new forms of communityformation as this encompasses self-empowerment, participation, care and neighborhood stabilization through art and culture.

I am not at all surprised that the number of artists who are moving to Detroit has strongly increased, not only from New York, where rents have been raised insanely over the past few years, but from all over the world. You could probably even say that Detroit foresees a future akin to Berlin, a city that attracts more and more foreigners to live there because it has space and perspectives to offer. And as these signs of revival become more and more obvious, it is in this context that people begin to talk about displacement and gentrification.

As I said before I don’t accept it as legitimate to talk about the city in terms of possession. It is the very idea of possession that implies that you have the right to do what you want with what is yours—that is, without any notion of care for the other in a city which is in dire need of care and transformation. That is what we have to get rid of. The collapse of Detroit as an economic engine in the United States is the result of a failure of imagination in the political class of Detroit who led the city to a form of not only economic bankruptcy, but political and cultural bankruptcy as well.

All of this put together marks the end of a narrative, that is, a particular representation of Detroit as an industrial narrative. It’s over, and another narrative begins—a narrative of the

future that doesn’t revolve around obsolete industry, money and economics but around representation and the polyphony of caring.

Also, the Detroit of the future is neither going to be white nor black in terms of dominant narratives.

It is going to be a plural Detroit.

One of the great subjects of contemporary art and politics is the engagement with alterity and the other. Because what have we in the West been lacking? Empathy.

Instead, we have been dominating. The opposite of domination is care. Much in contemporary art is based on care, where art practice is cultivating the possibilities of radical empathy. You cannot show care without empathy. I see this as one of the central lessons of Joseph Beuys: He absolutely set an example for literally cultivating empathy by planting seven thousand new oak trees and calling it a “social sculpture”.

Detroit can become synonymous with critical notions of care, and the role of care not only in interpersonal relationships but in a larger cultural context—from the personal to the level of the city, to the level of the social, to the level of politics.

We have made imagination something that is supposed to result in things, things that we call artworks. What if we look at imagination as fundamentally a way of training empathy? What if we move empathy from the production of things to the creation of new kinds of relationships?

That’s what I have learned since coming to Detroit, and I have made friends with some of the really compelling artists who are living here and doing this type of art called Social Practice.

Social Practice does not create art that is meant to go on walls. These artists are building houses—or taking them off the grid. They are creating energy fields. They are creating projects where people and the environment are being shown care. You bring people together in such a way as to create collaboration, to create participation. These Detroit artists are creating new forms of playful participation and involvement marked by care. In this sense, empathy is

one of the great responsibilities of contemporary art—and a great option for Detroit.

Thursday, 5 p.m.

A conversation with Mike Huckaby about Detroit’s new power generation.

As an internationally successful DJ and longtime producer of Detroit techno, I found a new challenge in encouraging pupils to learn how to make electronic music. I mean, these kids are the last people who are responsible for the desolate situation the city is in, but they are the first to strongly suffer from the effects of failed politics. I have my class at the Detroit Public Library, a beautifully restored building in Midtown, and actually it is more of an electronic workshop than a class.

There, we discuss all aspects of electronic music. One day I might bring down a synthesizer, one day a sampler or even an iPad. Once we watched a film about Moog to discuss the history of the synthesizer.

I guess helping pupils is the least I can do if I want to contribute to the city in a positive way as the arts in school have just dwindled to the point of nonexistence. The school system is heavily dependent on the Detroit economy, and the first thing that always goes is the arts.

But education in music is highly needed because the pupils can become more well rounded individuals, and they can convey their own sense of creativity and artistic ambitions. Without that they are just sort of hindered and influenced by the Detroit economy and their surroundings in the neighborhood.

Music can be turned into a positive sociopolitical weapon.

Imagine a thousand kids working on music instead of lingering on the corners. Especially as a Detroit DJ I do not only have a responsibility, I also know how beneficial it can be for oneself to be able to really focus on something you are creating. In Detroit there is nothing to do here but work on music.

In Detroit, the fact that there is nothing to do here is why it works.

Mike Huckaby has released countless classic deep house and techno records on labels such as Third Ear, Tresor and his own Deep Transportation and S Y N T H imprints. As one of the more enthusiastic evangelists of Detroit´s music, Huckaby continues touring and teaching around the globe extensively.

Opposite page: Michael Stone-Richards is a professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at CCS in Detroit.

His work centers on his engagement with otherness, and he has published widely in French and English on the avant-garde in poetry, as well as on critical theory and art.

He is currently working on his book The Care of the City: Detroit and the Art of Re-Invention.

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That is the ironic nature of the situation. Because there is this uninterrupted focus that exists here, we’re able to create music that’s appreciated around the world.

I even think that a legion of young musicians could somehow alter the path of gentrification that Detroit has slowly started on at the moment. It is happening at a perceptibly non-threatening level, but it is picking up speed.

And we all know that gentrification doesn’t really work for anybody of need. It is always the displacement of somebody in favor of someone else, and I blame the forces that allow gentrification. I call it social murder.

And yet it is a double-edged sword. I can’t see any benefit for anyone to see the city turn to pieces. I mean, the nice house here we are talking to each other in was dilapidated only a couple of years ago, the roof fallen off, windows smashed in, homeless people occupying it. I remember thinking: Will they ever raise the money to restore these houses to their natural beauty and to bring to blossom again this once beautiful street?

For years, my answer was “no”.

Now I see how things are starting to change in Detroit, and I also see the high price the ordinary people have to pay for it. Suffice to say that nobody official wants to hear about my electronic music workshops because nobody is making any money with it. But for myself and my pupils, electronic music and art is the only voice we have.

Thursday, 8 p.m.

A conversation with Cornelius Harris about Detroit’s invisible dividers and walls.

I can’t imagine musicians such as Mike Banks or Jeff Mills doing the music they did in any other city than Detroit. If you imagined either of them growing up in Paris or Munich, we would not have Underground Resistance, it

would be a very different kind of experience altogether. Because I’ve witnessed what has been going on since the eighties when the inner city black and Latino youth jumped on the bandwagon after the more expensive gear finally became cheap second hand—and then started to take chances.

But at the same time this was when AIDS really started to emerge and devastate a lot of communities around the country. Crack was introduced to the inner city and destroyed a lot of people and families as well. It was a time when the mass media repeated like a mantra that the average inner city male would be dead by twenty-four.

You can’t imagine the negativity around us. Making music also was a way of rejecting these dystopian media rumors, and Underground Resistance was about defining our own future. There is a reason why the first Detroit techno hits by Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson had titles like “Big Fun”, “Goodlife” or “Strings of Life”. They rejected being confined by reality.

They created their own reality.

The Submerge building hosts the Submerge record store, the UR offices and the UR museum, and is a good example of how the music has not only put Detroit on the map but also has altered the microstructure of the city. The building on Grand Boulevard was falling apart when we saw it first, but Mike Banks didn’t see the ruins and the decay but instead he saw this really nice place that it eventually became after we all helped to rebuild it.

Detroit today is a city that especially needs visionary people who don’t see the current sad reality but a better tomorrow. Then again the city has had more than enough visionaries in the past. I am talking of the people who destroyed the city by putting up freeways cutting through intact communities. This way many of the former neighborhoods got divided forever. Freeways are nothing else than invisible walls dividing the white city from the ghetto or rich neighborhoods from poor. Gentrifying only Downtown and Midtown is a new way of sepa-

Left: Certain areas of Detroit are already embroiled in gentrification battles. As Mike Huckaby told us: “You can't find an apartment anymore in Eastern Market.”

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rating people. You just have to take a closer look at the Detroit grid, a city that is almost as widespread as Los Angeles. Downtown is a tiny, tiny, almost barely recognizable spot on the huge city map. Investing only there of course upsets a lot of people.

So, in a way, 8 Mile Road has become synonymous with the invisible borders that still separate black and white neighborhoods.

Basically you can say that north of 8 Mile Road the white suburbs begin. And south of it, it’s mostly black communities where work, public transportation and social structures are heavily missed.

We like to think that these borders are natural. But really, they are not. These borders are results of man-made decisions, and they have a huge impact on the people who live in Detroit.

Underground Resistance is a reflection of that and a reminder that these fights aren’t new. A hundred years from now there will still be something happening that people need to fight, because there will always be someone who wants to take advantage of people. I think it was Jeff Mills who once said that the self-understanding of Underground Resistance was comparable to that of Public Enemy. That’s also why a lot of Detroit techno wasn’t instrumental and used to have words of hope. You know, especially words of hope can be words of resistance too.

Friday, 1:15 p.m.

Walter Wasacz on Detroit’s crumbling infrastructure.

The freeway system was planned and lobbied by the Detroit auto industry, driven by the idea of maximizing the potential of the car, and established under the Eisenhower administration in the fifties. So not surprisingly, suburbs began to flourish and the city of Detroit began to lose population and density.

As a side effect Detroit has basically buried its public transportation system. It is not easy at all to get around in Detroit by bus or even by taxi. We don’t have a subway or a functioning railway

system. The abandoned Michigan Central Station has become a sad reminder that Detroit has been taken off the railroad net.

The eighteen-story-high terminal building once was the tallest train station of the world, built by the same architects who’d built Grand Central in Manhattan.

There is not the will to reconnect Detroit to public transportation anytime soon, and there’s the racial issue as a part of that problem, too. Urban Detroit is black, it has the largest percentage of African-Americans in a city in the U.S., and the white people in the suburbs consider Detroit unsafe.

They make the inner city synonymous with crime. And yes, crime is part of American society. The United States has always been violent. Unfortunately and sadly, we have built this country on blood.

Of course every city has its crime, but for some years now, Detroit has been the country’s murder capital.

And it will be hard to reverse that tendency as Detroit has declared bankruptcy in 2013—the city can’t pay back the billions of dollars that it owes to creditors although there have been breakthroughs in this regard recently, and the city is likely to emerge from bankruptcy earlier than originally anticipated.

But the negative results still are visible: Certain parts of the city were given up, and today about fifty percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty line.

At the same time we have all these opportunities in Detroit; a lot of young and smart people come to town and become innovators and entrepreneurs. Many of them say that they are fascinated by the very slow rhythm of the city, which they sometimes describe as “DPT”—“Detroit People’s Time”. I think there are historical reasons for this, as many of the African Americans came from the South in the early twentieth century when the automobile industry began to really kick out cars and became an international business.

Then during World War II the city became the country’s armory, the “Arsenal of Democracy”. In terms of mass production, the city needed many workers, so people flocked to the city from the South

as well as from Central Eastern Europe. So “southernness” is the foundation of Detroit’s slow-paced, relaxed rhythm, and I always say that the city is much more like Houston or New Orleans rather than northern cities like New York or Boston or Philadelphia.

And even though all industry has substantially collapsed here, in terms of mindset, people here are still more likely to make, build and produce things, as opposed to consuming things.

So to me it’s no surprise that kids like Derrick May or Kevin Saunderson in the eighties began to make music rather than just listen to it—and there was some very good radio in Detroit at that time, not so much now.

The only thing that was always lacking in Detroit was the audience. What Detroit lacked was the EasyJet experience—kids from other cities flying in for the weekend like they do in Europe when they fly from Zurich or Barcelona to Berlin for the weekend just to party. This way, the Detroit laboratory of music was very insulated and inside the bubble people experimented with music and listened to themselves. The techno guys proved that isolation can be a positive thing, a sort of musical incubation that allows you to try out all kinds of things. It was the Brits and the Berliners who first paid attention to Detroit techno.

They started noticing that the black kids in Detroit were creating this cool, new dance sound.

Only then these guys went over to Europe, hung out in Berlin and other European cities, became celebrities within a few months really, couldn’t walk around Berlin or Amsterdam without people saying “Oh my god, the guys from Detroit are here!” And back here no one knew who they were, it was really business as usual in Detroit. And with the money they had earned abroad, many of the Detroit producers bought themselves homes in better parts of the city, less dangerous and less violent, and took care that their children would go to better schools and wouldn’t have to go through the kind of violent life that they themselves had experienced.

Opposite page: Opposite page: Cornelius Harris, aka “The Unknown Writer”, is the label manager and occasional MC for Underground Resistance Records.

This picture was taken at Coney Island Lafayette on Lafayette Street in Downtown Detroit. “After a DJ set we would always end up here for a ‘Coney Island’. Only by traveling did I eventually learn that a ‘Coney Island’ is known as a hot dog in the rest of the world.”

Above: Walter Wasacz is a journalist and writer based in Hamtramck, an enclave in the center of Detroit. He has written extensively on Detroit music culture for the Wire, New Musical Express, De:Bug, Metro Times and XLR8R. He is one of the co-organizers and hosts of the Detroit-BerlinConnection, a conference for subcultural exchange and urban development that connects the two cities.

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Friday, 6:30 p.m.

Mark Ernestus talks about his first time in Detroit

Above: Berlin-based producer, DJ and co-owner of Hard Wax record store Mark Ernestus poses in a car in Senegal. Read our interview with Ernestus about his involvement in Senegalese Ndagga music project Jeri-Jeri in the Summer 2014 issue of Electronic Beats.

Photo: Mbene Diatta Seck

Right: Abandonment abounds on Charlotte Street and 2nd Avenue in Downtown Detroit.

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Detroit techno really struck a chord with the people hanging out at Hard Wax around 1990-91—basically the core of the Berlin techno scene. But a lot of Detroit records came from ghetto labels and generally only made it to Germany by accident, and you could forget about trying to order them, so we always made direct contact with interesting labels by fax or phone to import them ourselves.

We managed to get a couple of good connections to Chicago and New York fairly quickly, but Detroit was difficult. Usable Internet and affordable mobile phones were still in the realm of fantasy at that stage, so fax and phone bills easily racked up four-figure sums. There was a fax number etched into the lead-out groove on the Waveform EP by UR, so we had to try that out right away.

In the first few years, Underground Resistance was still operating out of the cellar at Mike Banks’ mother’s place.

They were pretty surprised to get a fax out of the blue from likeminded people in Germany—a lot of Americans only knew about Germany through WWII documentaries on The History Channel. UR had just released their first 12-inch and never sold anything overseas. Jeff Mills told me later that to send the first box of fifty records to us, he just called UPS to pick it up.

The bill he got later was way more than the actual value of the goods. We all learnt a lot of expensive lessons back then.

At some point in 1990, Derrick May played for about twenty people in the second UFO in Großgörschenstraße. I went with my Hard Wax friend Boris Dolinski, and we got up the guts to talk to him afterwards. Derrick gave me his phone number and invited me to visit him in Detroit some-

time. He never dreamt that someone would actually do it.

I drove to Detroit from Chicago in a rental car. As I got to there, it was already late, jarringly cold and foggy. That was in January 1991, three days after the Gulf War had started. The atmosphere was really muted, especially among AfricanAmericans. A lot of people were worried about friends or family stationed in Iraq. I hadn’t looked at a map beforehand, I thought I’d just drive into the city center and find a pay phone. If I couldn’t get hold of Derrick, I was just going to find a motel and take it from there. After being on the freeway for about half an hour, I caught on that there isn’t any city center, and each area was just as dark as the next one. I just took any old exit off the freeway and drove straight ahead towards the city outskirts.

For the first time in my life, I saw five-figure house numbers, while everything around me was getting darker and darker.

After driving for miles I came across a McDonalds with a pay phone in the entrance. I called Derrick from there. He was at home. At first he pretended to be his own assistant and asked me where exactly we’d met and what I looked like. Then he turned to Derrick—who he was supposedly speaking to in the background—and asked himself if he had time for me. In the end I was allowed to come by, and he gave me the address: back at the other end of Gratiot Avenue.

After that Derrick was really open and helpful. He showed me around and introduced me to a lot of people. For him, just like the others I met later, it was somehow impossible to imagine why anyone would voluntarily want to drive to Detroit—and then to do that just for their music! Generally there was a feeling that Detroit techno was being ignored by the rest of the world, or was even disadvantaged by the self-interests of other scenes, like in Chicago, New York or London. I felt much more of an open connection with people in Detroit than in New York

or Chicago. Maybe that happens when too few people live in a city instead of too many.

Another reason why I was welcomed into the scene as a German was because of Kraftwerk who, in their own way, seemed to compliment George Clinton’s Afrofuturism perfectly. Clinton lived, worked and recruited musicians in Detroit for a long time, and Mike Banks even played with Funkadelic at one stage. At any rate, in the city that was built up and destroyed by technology, Kraftwerk and its aesthetic had really struck a chord and were considered the perfection of funkiness.

It was a real surprise for me at first, to see that there were hardly any clubs in Detroit for the huge number of talented DJs and producers who lived there, especially for techno.

That is, but for two exceptions: the Music Institute, which had already ended by the time I first got there, and Heaven, a gay and lesbian venue that still is a point of reference for me, just like a good club should be. I still remember a BYOB party in some condemned building, where I’d say there were about 13 DJs and 2 audience members . . . I worked out pretty soon that an abandoned building in Detroit is completely different to an abandoned building in East Berlin in the early nineties. As a European I was completely not used to those kinds of social conditions. The bitter reality of crack had nothing to do with the weekend party drug culture that we knew. And before Bill Clinton, you could buy Uzis and AK47s at a market stall without ID, you only had to buy the ammunition later . . . according to law.

From this perspective, public space there is just not a relaxed place to be. An empty building in Berlin meant potential and space for creativity, whereas in Detroit it would be a potential crack house and at some point you were sure to find a corpse there. The easygoing way you could open clubs in Berlin and hold events, just didn’t exist back then in Detroit and it still doesn’t now.

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Michael Anthony Banks, better known as “Mad” Mike Banks, is an American techno producer. He is the co-founder, along with Jeff Mills, of record label and group Underground Resistance and a key player in second generation Detroit techno. Along with Mills and Robert Hood he produced most of UR’s early releases. His releases often deal with elements of political and social commentary, which have made him a controversial figure from within the Detroit electronic music scene.

Opposite page: George Clinton is the founder and leader of Parliament Funkadelic, one of the most influential musical collectives in African American pop and electronic music history. Clinton’s solo productions have also been extensively sampled by various West Coast hop-hop producers, most notably Dr. Dre, and make up the foundation of much G-funk era hip-hop.

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Saturday, 3:20 p.m.

Meeting up with Mike Banks at UR headquarters Nothing has really changed if you compare today’s capitalist America with the slavery times. The only difference is the so-called American Dream, but it remains a promise that can be watched on every billboard and on TV, but hardly anyone, at least hardly no African American, will ever benefit from it. The wages are as bad as they were in the slavery times, there is no social or medical care and the vacation you get is just enough to, say, meet your relatives in Chicago every now and then. And if you are unlucky, the bus won’t stop for you in Detroit in winter, leaving you freezing at the bus stop for another hour, if you don’t have a car.

So in Detroit you are forced to own a car, but to drive it you need insurance. As a matter of fact you have to pay a different price for the insurance, depending on which part of the city you live. It’s 5,900 dollars a year if you live within the 8 Mile radius, which is a lot of money. This basically forces the people to live in the greater Detroit Metropolitan area, far away from the city center, where car insurance is far cheaper—or to give the authorities a wrong address. For the authorities, on the other hand, this is the easiest way to manipulate elections as lower class people who are actually living in the city can’t vote here. And it’s a proof how the right wing politicians use every imaginary trick to cut down black people’s rights. That’s how evil it gets! They have privatized the legal system and the prisons, which is a scandal. And if you turn on the radio, gangsta rap is the only thing you’ll ever get to hear. The radio stations belong to the same multinational corporations that own the record companies, the prisons and the law. Gangsta rap in that sense functions like nursery rhymes: They promote quick money, shiny cars and big guns. But if you get caught living like that you can’t even leave the country. It’s a small step from imitating a gangsta life-

style as promoted by gangsta rap and to eventually being forced to go to prison where you become a profit unit for private prison corporations, earning even less than in the slavery times. I have lost quite a few kids to jails that I’ve formerly trained as a baseball coach. Others joined the marines because they get health insurance there. I believe in music and baseball because they offer kids other sources of income.

I will say that it really makes me proud that auto designers like Dave Pinter from GM publicly claim that they listen to the music of UR while designing new prototypes of cars. He even donated a drawing of a new futuristic car to the museum—with a UR logo painted on it. But more generally speaking the Detroit car industry has lost the plot. Trends of the future such as hybrid cars and car sharing were not invented in Motor City, but somewhere else. It may sound bizarre, but still building muscle cars is what they do and I somehow quite like it for nostalgic reasons. You should probably know that I am a former auto mechanic.

I can fix a car and I can repair a motor. Of course I love muscle cars and racing. I used to race myself a lot before I had kids. Think of “The Punisher”, which is the title of a UR track but also the name of a car. It embarrasses me that Detroit doesn’t even have a proper racing track within its city limits.

Naturally, then, illegal drag car races replace official ones. I always spot GM engineers at these events and I notice that they are as much fascinated by the cars as I am.

Which is where Kraftwerk come into play. By claiming they are robots Kraftwerk paid respect to the assembly line. Their minimalistic movements on stage resemble the movements you have to follow if you assemble a car. To me this formulates a deep connection between Germany and Detroit. As a matter of fact, attending the first Kraftwerk show in Detroit in 1981 was a turning point in my life. We were all blown away by the power of “Pocket Calculator” and actually tried to copy the little melody lines by using the same synthesizer as they did. But we always failed.

Only decades later when Thomas

Fehlmann of Palais Schaumburg introduced me to Ralf and Florian backstage after a Kraftwerk show in Leipzig, Germany, I took a chance and asked them how they programmed that melody. They looked at me and said: “We just put the sequencer on random.” So that’s why we couldn’t program the pattern. We didn’t figure German efficiency could go that far. The scales fell from my eyes.

Saturday, 7 p.m.

George Clinton tells us about listening to new music and why he still calls Detroit home Detroit feels like home to me even though I wasn’t born there. I also feel at home in Jersey though I wasn’t born there, either, but I was raised in Jersey and spent the first half of my life there.

I got to Detroit in 1962 where we recorded our first hit record and all the other hit records to come. And that’s reason enough to call a city one’s hometown.

Anytime we hear new music, we’re there—we’re into all of it.

So whenever anybody is doing anything just tell them to call me, and I will be down with them. I’ve basically worked with everybody who was part of The Golden World, which is what they call Northern Soul now, to Motown, through to the days when P-Funk was born in Detroit.

But especially electronic music has been there all along, and for Berlin in particular the connection with Detroit became a big thing in the nineties. The real bond was set up way back in 1981 when Kraftwerk were presenting their Computer World show at the MIT Nitro Rock Club in front of a speechless audience—of which many later would form a band, become producers or DJs. We had a DJ called The Electrifying Mojo who had a radio program called Midnight Funk Association and that’s how he brought Kraftwerk to the hood! And he played Falco, he used to play both of them. You can hear their influence in a lot of Detroit recordings from the early

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Samantha Corbit has over a decade of involvement with multiple Detroit record labels under her belt, including UR and Transmat. She currently manages the Losoul label’s newest project, Another Picture.

Above: Kraftwerk, Parliament Funkadelic, Star Wars and Dr. Spock behind glass at the Underground Resistance headquarters.

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nineties. Today, electronic music is world music. So, if you are visiting Detroit you have to see the Underground Resistance museum.

And they just opened United Sound as a museum now back up on 2nd and Antoinette. I donated a refurbished piano to them. And never forget the Motown Museum right on the other side of the UR headquarters. I have no worries, Detroit is going to be a big historical place for music in the future.

Because Detroit to me means one nation under the groove.

Saturday, 9 p.m.

Late dinner with Samantha Corbit, who talks about potential urban renewal There is something about summertime in Detroit. I don’t know if it’s

the way the sun is shining on the buildings or the smell of the trees.

When I was seventeen, I used to sneak out with a fake ID and tell my parents I would be staying at a friend’s house. Instead, I would go to raves. They would be in abandoned buildings. Sometimes they would just plug in a generator and would have the music playing, or a friend would take me to a party and you would just crawl through a hole to get in. I would close my eyes and immediately know who is playing: Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson or Derrick May. I would also go to UR parties. They were really militant and hardcore.

It could be quite intimidating.

Detroit was a mecca of music and dancing and it still has its own sound. Compared to Berlin techno, there is much more soul in the sound of Detroit. You feel it. There are a lot of soulful influences both from Motown as well

as gospel traditions. Berlin techno is much harder and darker.

Of course, these raves and parties were pretty illegal, very underground. They got raided by the police, and eventually everything was shut down. These days, the musical innovators rarely play in Detroit. There is not enough money. They can make more money in New York or anywhere in Europe, where a hundred people would be at the door, right when the venue opens. In Detroit, a hundred people for the whole night would be an amazing turnout.

Detroit today is desolate regardless of seasons. If you do end up in the wrong area, you could get robbed or even killed.

Pedestrians would just keep on walking. Another one bites the dust. We all have vehicles to drive in. There is almost no mass transportation, and the buses aren’t that safe either. But generally, people don’t want to drive downtown because in certain places your car would be broken into, while you’re in a bar, shopping or having dinner. There is one venue where you keep hearing of cars broken into. It makes you wonder: Is it planned? How come security isn’t doing anything? Or you would get jumped in the parking lot. These things make people think, “I don’t need to go.” At night, I would not walk around by myself, not even in my own neighborhood in Midtown. I wouldn’t be afraid, but I would know it’s not the smartest thing to do.

Now you thankfully have investors and people from other states and countries coming in and opening cafés, restaurants and shops in some areas.

Businesses that were in the suburbs are moving into the city.

Some of them are creating new jobs and a lot of them are making people come down to the city. Additionally, incentives are offered to live in Detroit.

If you work for the hospital or any of these companies you get a discount on your rent in certain areas and buildings in town. This brings people back.

But it will be quite a long time before the sun really starts shining on Detroit again. ~

NEU

using exclusively presets. Did you find that difficult?

“0% sound design.

100% presets.”

A.J. Samuels: Why a

book on presets?

Stefan Goldmann: In electronic music there is a kind of dogma that musicians are supposed to shape their own sound. And that’s what I’ve done too, until now. The opposite would be to use presets, but so many artists have a negative opinion of them. That struck me as weird, because so many sounds I hear these days are extremely similar. I wanted to see if presets are as awful as the ideology claims. Naturally, some people create every sound from scratch, but then they put it into a beat grid and end up with a typical house rhythm, which is a preset of the mind. So why is sound design supposed to be individual while structure can be generic? It’s all very unclear. I remember some time ago Aril Brikha had accused Shlomi

Imagine a world in which musicians boast about the lack of sound design in their productions.

Hard to fathom? That may change. In his upcoming book of interviews Presets – Digital Shortcuts to Sound (The Bookworm), Macro label founder Stefan Goldmann explores the taboos surrounding pre-programmed settings on sequencers, synthesizers, and interfaces to better understand how they’ve influenced much of the music we know and love.

Illustration: beckundbauer

Aber of copying his track “Groove La Chord”, but then Aber claimed he had just used the same preset!

AS: So how would you describe the function of a preset?

SG: Saving time. Also, when hundreds of people use one sound it can end up being the social glue of a track. If you individualize every possible element, no one can connect with your music because it will have no reference points.

Innovation is always defined by its relationship to a previous state.

Sound-wise certain things stay the same—otherwise it’s just white noise. Actually, the features of any tool shape the results of its use.

And the same goes for presets: they provide a social framework.

AS: You also recorded an album

SG: Difficult? It was the easiest thing I ever did! For this project I bought some cheap synthesizers on eBay. One of them was a Yamaha that uses FM synthesis, which is technology the company also put into their best-selling DX7 synth. FM produces quite complex timbres of an almost acoustic quality, but it still sounds totally artificial. I was going through the presets and found they sounded a lot like the back catalogue of Warp. I was like, “Oh that’s LFO! And that’s Autechre!” Autechre especially is a great example. Their sound palette is very limited, but they structure it really interestingly with their sequencing. Today, you have a huge wave of people using modular synthesizers. But where are the important records made with that? It reminds me of the “Ikea Effect”, which says if you put something together yourself, you like it more than if you bought it prebuilt from China. And with presets you don’t risk thinking your sound is more special than it actually is.

AS: I often hear presets referenced explicitly as such—that is, as a past vision of the future laden with a certain utopian value. How are presets connected to musical ideals?

SG: Manufacturers have to guess which sounds are needed when an instrument hits the market. But when the sounds spread fast, they can sound dated very quickly. There are also sounds nobody wanted— failed industrial assumptions of where culture is headed. This works against the common idea of cultural critique, in which an industry simply sets standards we follow.

Industries can fail and that frees failed presets to be used in unscripted ways. I think it’s especially related to artist Cory Arcangel’s work with with obsolete digital technology. But strangely, there is more anxiety in using the readymade in music than in visual arts. ~

ELECTRONIC BEATS # 04 out on 12.20.2014!

98 EB 2/2014

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