Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 4/2014 by Telekom Electronic Beats

Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 40 · WINTER 2014/2015

“I was not a tame performer” KAREN O

MICHAEL GIRA holly johnson Donato Dozzy cookie mueller

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EDITORIAL: preview with roman flügel

“It’s a different state of consciousness.” Dear Readers, A.J. Samuels: Karen O, who graces the cover of this issue, recently released an album dedicated to a series of fleeting crushes she had years ago titled Crush Songs. One of the intriguing aspects for me was how much these tracks were able to communicate in an extremely short format—some under a minute. Roman Flügel: You know, I was

never a huge fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I enjoyed Karen O’s Crush Songs enormously. Aside from the overall intimacy of the production and subject, I also fell in love with the lengths. It reminded me a bit of The Magnetic Field’s 69 Love Songs, which is one of my favorite albums of all time and also about unrequited love.

AS: That’s true, but with 69 Love Songs I have the impression that Stephin Merritt sings a lot about relationships that didn’t work out; the songs are humorous but dark. Karen O almost seems to celebrate the unrequitedness! RF: Yeah, maybe it’s more about the length. You know, these days people record long songs just because they can, but this is a beautiful rebellion against that. I tried something similar under my Eight Miles High moniker a few years ago, but most people were wondering what the hell was going on.

In this issue of Electronic Beats, we have decided to take a closer look at how the world outside music shapes so much of what we listen to—that is, beyond narratives of new technology guiding various electronic subgenres. In the first part of our new series “Sound in Motion”, we survey how African American roller skating communities have changed dance music’s groove. We also traveled to avant-garde breeding ground Antwerp to learn about the importance of good highways in the development of Belgian new beat. Everywhere we looked, art seemed to imitate, and then innovate, life—from Arca’s LP namesake Xen, a character created from secret online personas, to Michael Gira’s time spent in an Israeli jail. Here we present our thoughts on music made outside the vacuum, with guest previewer Roman Flügel. A.J. Samuels

AS: In this issue we have decided to focus on non-musical phenomena that have been key influences on music—for example the impact of African American roller skating communities on American dance music. How do you understand the influence of experiences you’ve had outside of music on the records you make? RF: First, reading about roller skating in this issue really made it clear to me how much the groove and feel of it effected certain kinds of disco, post-disco and hip-hop production, which is fascinating. As for my own “outside” influences: I was surrounded by music since I was a kid. The radio, MTV, my parents’ record collection—these were all pretty inescapable. Not too long ago I met up in Hamburg with Michael Rother, a former member of NEU!, Harmonia and early Kraftwerk, and he explained to me how independent his approach to music was in the seventies and still is today. He expressed the need to isolate himself from musical influences to look into his very musical core. I think it shows a real generation gap. Music today often sounds like a puzzle with a thousand different influences from a thousand different sources. You would need a kind of musical psychotherapy to figure out what is what. Other artists, like Michael Gira from Swans, are pretty aware of their

external influences and experiences—which he goes into detail about in your interview. On the one hand, he recounts his time reading Marquis de Sade and Oscar Wilde in an Israeli jail, which is pretty serious. On the other hand, he can also laugh at himself and his ability to piss people off. I appreciate that. But it did surprise me how little he respects electronic music. He doesn’t even think a lot of it is music! AS: Which is ironic considering how often Swans get namechecked by techno and electronic industrial acts. RF: I remember how important Swans were for one of the largest techno distributors in Germany in the nineties, which was Siggi Zahn from Neuton. And the first Underground Resistance records weren’t far away from them either. But also, Gira’s description of his creative process—the need to be engulfed in sound, the need to experience it at extremely high volumes—to me, that’s what walking into the Berghain is today. Also, my very first time entering a techno club was exactly that. Omen in Frankfurt was actually the first proper techno club in Germany, and I remember feeling what I was hearing with every single part of my body. It’s a different state of consciousness. ~

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Weltanschauung

Danish singer-songwriter MØ sang herself into a frenzy for a lively crowd of fans and art enthusiasts at the recent Electronic Beats Soiree, organized around Art Collection Telekom’s exhibit Fragile Sense of Hope at Berlin’s me Collectors Room. Before the show, attendees had the chance to take a guided tour of the exhibit, which featured the works of emerging Eastern and Southeastern European artists, including rising talent Agnieszka Polska. Read our interview with the Polish artist on P. 56 to find out about how she sees art interfacing with the “real” world. Photo: Matze Hielscher 4 EB 4/2014

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Erlend Øye, the former guitarist and vocalist of electronic dance-pop quartet The Whitest Boy Alive, does the whitest stadium rock dance alive at the climax of his performance at the Electronic Beats Festival in Zagreb. Lucky for him, he has an immaculately goateed Croatian security guard playing guardian angel. Photo: Tomislav Sporiš

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After garnering much critical acclaim last year with her debut LP Pull My Hair Back (Hyperdub), Jessy Lanza let her hair down during a recent performance at the Electronic Beats Festival in Vienna. In our last issue, the Canadian songwriter and producer opened up about the influence of director and composer John Carpenter. The eerie purple lighting and warm synth vibes would have made Carpenter proud. Foto: Thomas Unterberger Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App

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Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues

Est. 2005 Issue N° 40 Winter 2014/2015

Publisher: Burda Creative Group GmbH, Postfach 810249, 81902 München Managing Directors: Gregor Vogelsang, Dr.-Ing. Christian Fill, Karsten Krämer, Jeno Schadrack Director Berlin Office: Stefan Fehm Creative Director Editorial: Christine Fehenberger Head of Telco & Commerce: Thomas Walter Conceptual Advisor: Max Dax

Editorial Office: Electronic Beats Magazine, Waldemarstraße 33a, Aufgang D, 10999 Berlin www.electronicbeats.net magazine@electronicbeats.net Editor-in-Chief: A.J. Samuels Editor: Mark Smith Duty Editor: Michael Lutz Copy Editor: Karen Carolin Intern: Laurence Thompkins Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert

Cover:

Karen O, photographed by Luci Lux in Berlin.

Contributing Authors: Lisa Blanning, CJ Bolland, RP Boo, Bill Butler, Suzanne Ciani, Patrick Codenys, Max Dax, Geeta Dayal, Jozef Devillé, Donato Dozzy, John Elliott, Roman Flügel, Michael Gira, Adam Harper, Shaun Harris, Richard Hell, Peter van Hoesen, Daniel Hugo, Holly Johnson, Daniel Jones, Tasha Klusmann, Danny Krivit, Craig Leon, Karen O, Julian Oliver, Daphne Pascual, Frie Pascual, José Pascual, Nikolai Pascual, Agnieszka Polska, Jas Shaw, Laetitia Sadier, Afrikan Sciences, DJ Spinn, Warbear, Steven Warwick

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Marta Collica, Henry Diltz, Stefan Fähler, William Glasspiegel, Chloé Griffin, Matze Hielscher, Ilaria Magliocchetti Lombi, Luci Lux, minus, Satoki Nagata, Roland Owsnitzky, Elena Panouli, Alisa Resnik, Hans Martin Sewcz, Tomislav Sporiš, Amelia Troubridge, Thomas Unterberger

Electronic Beats Magazine is a division of Telekom’s international music program “Electronic Beats” International Musicmarketing / Deutsche Telekom AG: Wolfgang Kampbartold, Claudia Jonas, Kathleen Karrer und Ralf Lülsdorf Public Relations: Schröder+Schömbs PR GmbH, Torstraße 107, 10119 Berlin press@electronicbeats.net, +49 30 349964-0 Subscriptions: www.electronicbeats.net/subscriptions Advertising: advertising@electronicbeats.net Printing: Druckhaus Kaufmann, Raiffeisenstraße 29, 77933 Lahr, Germany

Thanks to: Tina Brown, Donte Doyle, Timur Gerbert, Markus Goeres, Rona Greenberg, Heiko Hoffmann, Martin Hossbach, Antonio Kimbrough, Tasha Klusmann, Matthias Kümpflein, Vaughan Mason, Lola Mitchell, Aaron Parker, The Pascual Family, Hili Perlson, Amy Reinink, Rita Schwartz, Sven von Thülen, Dyana Winkler, Susannah Whaites, Lezley Ziering. Special thanks to Lisa Blanning for roller skate tips. © 2014 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited

ISSN 2196-0194 “Art is my dog.”

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Since bolstering his profile with remixes of Björk’s Biophilia in 2011 and last year’s Four Tet-produced Wenu Wenu, Omar Souleyman—seen here at the Electronic Beats Festival in Vienna— has hypnotized increasingly larger audiences around the world, despite the fact that most can’t sing along in Kurdish and Arabic to his stripped down, electric dabke folk. Foto: Thomas Unterberger Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App

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Art galleries aren’t generally places to horse around but the opening soiree of Art Collection Telekom’s Fragile Sense of Hope exhibition brought out a touch of the equine in this Berliner—thanks in no small part to the generously stocked open bar. Photo: Matze Hielscher

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CONTENT

o n s

I N T E R V I

OG u e s

M O N O L

E W S Editorial ................................... 3 Weltanschauung ..................... 4 recommendations ..................16 Richard Hell, Adam Harper, Heatsick, Laetitia Sadier et al; on Cookie Mueller, Arca, #ACCELERATE, Ariel Pink and more. Strategy game soundtracks with Daniel Hugo; Music meta-talk with Mark Smith; Kablam’s peak time DJ picks Bass Kultur ............................. 30 Sex-positive techno party Gegen ABC .............................................. 33 The Alphabet According to Craig Leon

“It took quite a few margaritas to get me up there” Lisa Blanning meets Karen o ..................................... 44 “It was anarchy as a solution” A.J. Samuels meets Swans’ Michael gira ........................... 50 “A large community of artists, curators and galleries remain detached from society” Mark Smith meets Agnieszka Polska .................. 56

c o n v e r s a t

SOUND IN MOTION, PART 1...... 64 Roller Skating, Civil Rights and the Wheels Behind American Dance Music “My god, it’s not a machine. It’s human!” SUZANNE CIANI talks to DONATO DOZZY ...........................78 72 Hours in ANTWERP ................ 84 A Journey into Electronic Music’s Belgian Roots NEU: Julian Oliver talks to Geeta Dayal The Market Value of Ignorance......98

Style Icon ................................ 38 Holly Johnson talks to Max Dax about David Bowie Counting With . . . .................. 40 Afrikan Sciences

New in this issue: Augmented Reality! Get access to tons of extras with your smartphone in STEP

STEP

simple steps.

Get the latest version of our EB.TV app for iOS. In case you already installed the app, run the update by scanning the QR code on the right. ———————————————> Start the AR camera from the app’s main menu and watch for this sign: ————————————————————> Sweep over the pages indicated with the logo to unlock videos, exclusive mixes, related articles and more.

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I N T E R V I

T I O N S

Gu E s

M O N O L O

C O N V E R S

E W S

recommendations

“Bright lights, lurking forms, glistening surfaces and whirling, extended limbs.” Adam Harper recommends Arca’s Xen Mute

Adam Harper is one of the premier writers on emergent, underground electronic music and the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books, 2011). This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

Opposite page: Cookie Mueller, ca. 1982. Photographer unknown. In Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin. Courtesy Max Mueller. 16 EB 4/2014

Xen is Arca’s hotly anticipated new LP. It’s also the artist’s feminine alter-ego bubbling with cyborg sensuality. Adam Harper unpacks the complex digital biology that spawned this strange and inviting beast. For at least two years, Arca has been a name carrying extreme promise. All we really knew was that the producer was in his early twenties, is called Alejandro Ghersi, is from Venezuela and based in New York, and is affiliated with UNO NYC’s label network of avant-bizarre voices, including Mykki Blanco, Fatima Al Qadiri and Gobby. One run-ofthe-mill web interview didn’t quite manage to live up to the twisted alien hip-hop of his Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 EPs for UNO, and after that, Ghersi withdrew from press attention. But during that silence, Arca burrowed right into the burning edge, producing an expansively beguiling EP for FKA twigs that brought her her first flush of attention, and getting involved in the production of Kanye West’s Yeezus. Now, after these glimpses into other worlds, Arca offers a long, rich and yet still mercurial performance from an intriguing new creature, Xen. Xen, says Ghersi, is an alterego that has been part of him since childhood, an androgynous-cumfemale personification of his queerness that manifested in games, secret identities and online personas, and which blossomed again more recently when the producer came out. She appears on the cover of

the album “pleasuring herself” in bright headlights against an abyssal dark, her head tilted back decadently and the flesh of her arms rippling with sensuality. The image is the work of Jesse Kanda, Ghersi’s long-term collaborator in the visual domain. Since the covers of Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, Kanda has provided an uncanny analogue of Arca’s sound in disturbing yet alluringly flexible 3D-rendered bodies, transforming and cavorting in defiance of biology. Arca’s music is the same, full of curves and freedom, bright lights and lurking forms, glistening surfaces and whirling, extended limbs. Together, the pair have built—or better, grown— a new electronic organicism. Xen initially bears something of a resemblance to the late nineties and early 2000s electronica that Ghersi counts as an influence—Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher—and thus one can see why the producer has worked on Björk’s next album. It’s tempting to hear it the way so much music of Ghersi’s generation has been, as just a disordered echo of a greater past. But Xen has her own motives and comes from a different place. Aesthetically, the album is at a tangent to the stridently strange productions favored by other queer underground acts such as Mykki Blanco, Le1f, and Zebra Katz. Xen is the symphonic version. Or, more probably, it’s a ballet. Because Xen is a multiplicitious figure. Many tracks contain several life forms coiling around each other, each with its own sense of time and space, all crowded into the same fractious textures and

struggling for expression and independence. New limbs and organs burst through the skin, feelers fly in every direction and prehensile tongues curl. Disasters of pleasure, showers of sex. The title track is an electrical injection, with strobes of percussion whipping up a club nimbus as stallions rear their heads and the wreckers come whirling and squeaking over the polished floor; at the center of it all a daughter’s dancing class on a tightrope. But other tracks are solo portraits, often keyboard improvisations. “Sad Bitch” pliés forward tentative and lonely before exploding into pirouettes and dovetailing melodies. “Family Violence” is a forest of jabbing and pointed fingers, “Promise” shudders and teeters as if shaking off an ice age, and the piano sketch “Held Apart” waits at the windowsill with memories in its big eyes. The parameters of Ghersi’s self-exploration are readjusted with each track, causing constant surprise — dance beats, noise, song, cinematic strings and rave stabs all rotate the album in a space of unexpected dimensions. Like all LPs of similar weight, Xen can teach the open-minded listener to turn frustrations into pleasures and opportunities. Its ephemerality can slip too easily through the fingers. Of course, that can be blamed on the lamentable millennial attention span if it makes you feel better. But no, Xen is also a lesson in the life of sound and the fruits of instinctual desire. And it might signal a new weird electronica, one intimately acquainted with embodiment and freer than ever in its endless sonic playground. ~

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recommendations

Read more recommendations on electronicbeats.net

“Cookie’s life and world in epic detail.” Richard Hell on Chloé Griffin’s Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller Punk icon Richard Hell explains how writer, artist and John Waters’ muse Cookie Mueller stood for everything that was right about New York in the seventies and eighties. For years now there has been a lot of wistful, sometimes bitter nostalgia amongst artists and adventurous youth for the New York of the seventies and eighties—Cookie Mueller’s era. She has become legendary as an emblem of a period of bohemia perhaps only rivaled here in freedom and inspiration by the fifties, when Pollock and DeKooning were making New York the capital of the world for painting, Miles Davis and John Coltrane et al. were doing the same in music, and John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were holding up their end in poems and novels. In Cookie’s time, the painters were Basquiat and Clemente and Haring and Schnabel and Wool and Prince; the musicians the Ramones and Patti Smith and Television and Blondie and the Contortions and Sonic Youth; the writers Eileen Myles and Gary Indiana and Kathy Acker and Rene Ricard; the photographers Nan Goldin and Peter Hujar and Jimmy de Sana. To name a few. Cookie was a muse, housemother and salon hostess to the artists, as well as an irresistible writer and actress herself. She increased the happiness of everyone who knew her. She was not only classically supportive and encouraging, but she was hilarious and otherwise entertaining, and she usually had drugs, too. She also was sexually uninhibited. She was the archetypal gutter bohemian heroine at a time when it

was still possible to concoct a life in New York that more or less worked in that mode. She’s probably best known now to the uninitiated as the central subject of the photographs that made Nan Goldin famous. She also had memorable roles in John Waters’ early films, and her writings were published by such landmark small literary presses as Top Stories, Semiotext(e), and Hanuman. She wrote a column about art for Details magazine and one about eccentric health for the East Village Eye. But she made her living from welfare checks, dealing drugs and go-go dancing in strip clubs. I knew Cookie, and, like hundreds of others, I loved her. I don’t mean loved her “romantically” necessarily, but just for what she

“You know, it’s not too late yet. Fighting for the right to party is a profound objective in the right hands.” Richard Hell

was like and the kind of friend she was. I am also one of the eightyplus people interviewed for the book though my contribution is meager. I regret to say I was skeptical of the undertaking, not knowing Chloé Griffin, the woman behind it, who hadn’t known Cookie. But the book is a kind of masterpiece. Chloé nailed it; her commitment and devoted effort, not to mention her style, in creating this book, do Cookie justice, which is saying a lot. Cookie was unique and

so, similarly, is this great book. The book sumptuously relates Cookie’s entire life, from her trailer-camp style childhood in Baltimore, to her cheerful bad-girl teenage years there, interrupted by an escape to San Francisco at the height of crash pad drug-soaked hippiedom where, still a teenager, she narrowly escaped a run-in with Charles Manson. It then turns back to a more happily sex-and-drug crazed communal life among the denizens of John Waters’ circles in Baltimore and Provincetown, and onto the center of then wildly flourishing art precincts of New York, and regular impoverished but funfilled jaunts to Europe, most habitually Positano, on the Italian coast. Edgewise gives us Cookie’s life and world in epic 3-D detail by seamlessly weaving together the loving and astonishing testimony of most of the people who knew her. And she was nothing if not social. She and they exemplify the nobility and soul of this messed-up species. They exist for joy and art in active defiance of convention and authority. I mean, fuck the police. Even possibly, literally, fuck them. As I was saying, there’s a lot of nostalgia for those days now. New York has become like a theme park for the smug and arrogant and wealthy. I’m ambivalent about that nostalgia. On the one hand it’s good that people recognize the ways of life depicted in this book as desirable; on the other hand it’s depressing that the ideal is relegated to nostalgia, as if it’s now out of reach. Granted, there’s a lot of repression, and those resources appear to be dwindling, but you know it’s not too late yet. Fighting for the right to party is a profound objective in the right hands. ~

Bbooks Verlag

Richard Hell is a songwriter and author based in New York City. A former member of the legendary bands Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and The Heartbreakers, Hell is considered to have been the main inspiration behind the style of British punk acts like The Sex Pistols and The Clash. He recently co-authored PUNK: Chaos to Couture with Andrew Bolton, Jon Savage and John Lydon in tandem with last year’s eponymous exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

Opposite Page: Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller and Susan Lowe in film stills from John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs, 1970. © Dreamland Productions.

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Recommendations

“Invited to do something dangerous.” Laetitia Sadier recommends Ariel Pink’s Pom Pom

4AD

Laetitia Sadier is best known as the voice and lyricist behind the experimental pop group Stereolab. Her most recent solo album, Something Shines, was released this fall on Drag City. This is her first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

With Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier bent genres and eras into alien yet recognizable shapes. She’s found a kindred spirit in Ariel Pink’s Pom Pom. One thing’s for sure: Pom Pom has a strong transportive quality and is blessed by Ariel Pink’s unique understanding of classic songwriting aesthetics—that is, a multitude of different ones, aided in part by the legendary Kim Fowley who co-wrote a few of these songs in the hospital while recovering from cancer. Listening, I imagine The Kinks and The Who, angry working class lads getting clever and high on life and testosterone at some big party in San Francisco. I feel invited to do something dangerous and exciting, like run across la Place de l’Étoile or around l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris, with The Stranglers as background music. Both groups share a similar energy and a disheveled style of guitar picking, mixed with classi-

cally educated musicianship. Indeed, the quality of the performances on Pom Pom is what gives these images their life and effervescence. This isn’t to say the record doesn’t have darker shades and creepy angles. I found myself imagining Pom Pom as an alternate soundtrack to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, as it balances gory tunes with a tongue and cheek attitude. Admittedly, with “Lipstick”, I got lost in the sound of electronic pan flute for the first time. But despite numerous stylistic leaps, there’s nothing gratuitous happening on this album. All the parts are strategically placed and relevant as a whole. So when we take a left turn and land on a sweet ballad, it’s equal parts surprising and calculated. Take the preppy “Nude Beach A Go-Go” for instance. It has the retrograde tone of early fifties surf rock from the American West Coast, yet it sits seamlessly by the heavy stomper “Goth Bomb”,

which takes us to the other side of the world and a decade into the future, calling to mind Led Zeppelin-like revelry of 1969. The production style is versatile too, shape-shifting into the Caribbean with “Dinosaur Carebears”, which releases the pressure with a sparser, dubbedout reggae quality. Thank god, because I needed a breather. Which is to say that there’s nuance to the groove on offer here, as well as on the serious and down-to-it shuffle of “Sexual Athletics”. Tunes like “Black Ballerina” get me dancing to a gentle disco beat reminiscent of what the band Sparks would elegantly say to Les Rita Mitsuoko in the proverbial elevator. Ultimately, Pom Pom is a playful, luminous and extremely generous record. It took me on a trip and told me many stories that will keep unfolding as I carry on listening. It’s so rich and laden with detail that there will surely be more revelations each time I press play. ~

“Kind of upbeat, by Earth standards.” Simian Mobile Disco’s Jas Shaw on Earth’s Primitive and Deadly

Southern Lord

Jas Shaw is one half of British electronic shape-shifters Simian Mobile Disco. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine. 20 EB 4/2014

For Jas Shaw, Earth’s monolithic, slo-mo dirgescapes have been drastically altered by the addition of vocals on their new LP. The sound of Earth has always been both primitive and deadly. Simple, slow, relentlessly repeating textures that unfold over a period that’s closer to the side of an album than a side of a single is

what we have come to expect from them. The guitars move in fizzing, shifting tones, but the comatose pace in which they grow makes them hang in space. Accordingly, when we were looking for a band to play with us earlier this year out in Joshua Tree, under the stars and surrounded by desert, Earth were our first choice. Looking at the liner notes for Primitive and Deadly, I noticed that this album was recorded just a few miles from there too, at Rancho de la

Luna. Putting the record on, it immediately took me back to the desert. “Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon” is kind of upbeat by Earth standards but still, it’s syrupy and heavy. I settled in for a trip back into barren plains. Then, a minute or so into “There is a Serpent Coming” it came: vocals! At first these caught me by surprise. I’d not heard that there were supposed to be vocals on this record and I must admit that initially I was really thrown by

How People Talk About Music with Mark Smith

From Comets to Comments:

Talking about music has always been a chance to get outside your head and connect with others. The staggering diversity of music and opinions on the Internet seems like a golden opportunity for knowledge and communication. But for Mark Smith, things aren’t quite what they seem.

efore the invention of the wax cylinder in 1877, experiencing music was most often a collective experience. It was something that happened around a piano with the family, on stage in front of an audience, or in temples with the devout. And once the performance was over, the music was gone. Recordings made music into something static, and more significantly, allowed us to experience it alone. Today, the Internet has pushed this internalization into overdrive, with music arriving at our ears increasingly divorced from the human contact that was part of experiencing music from day one. What’s more, the Internet provides us with an eerily disembodied medium to voice what the music does inside our skulls. For me, trawling the comments section of a music website is a quasi-anthropological pastime, but there is something deeper lurking within that dizzying cluster of opinionated anonymity, namely the indelible traces of territorial pissings. The demarcation of boundaries and distinctions

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have become more sensational than the music itself. This year, within my Berlin electronic music industry bubble, PC Music especially was an inescapable topic of conversation. Every odd day it would come up in talks with producers, label owners, music writers, and academics. Yet for the life of me I couldn’t find someone who took a close listen to those decadent, glistening sounds for more than

point of view with the virulence of someone protecting their very digital essence. One of the features of exchanges about music has always been an arrogant certainty in the opinions expressed. That’s just the nature of the beast. However, the beast has become a Leviathan. There is nothing in the online medium to discourage the notion that you are the center of the universe,

thirty seconds. Was that PC Music’s point—an accelerationist pisstake on how we discuss trending sonics? The jury is still out. Meanwhile online, especially on Resident Advisor, comments sections provided an endless scroll and troll, covering topics from gender and sexuality, to race, geography and postmodernism. A barrage of polemics seemed to come straight from the hearts of avatar-shielded individuals defending their

and this has had a destructive effect on music discourse, especially when the music only gets a cursory listen. It’s all too easy to slip into a solipsistic mode of listening when our minds are filtering through our own particular organizing schema of values and opinions. Where are the reminders that music is beyond us? Take the recording recently captured by the Rosetta space probe of the comet 67P, dispersed around the world as

the “singing comet.” The “song” actually occurred at a frequency far below the human range of hearing. It was digitally altered to fit our perceptual capabilities. A ceaseless ancient hum was cropped to a digestible one and a half minutes. It was fun to listen to, as are many of the remarkably synthesizeresque sounds of planets, stars and comets on YouTube channels like SpaceRip. But for me, making click bait out of comets reinforces not the endless horizon of the universe beyond our ears, but the very opposite: its digital, human packaging. If anything, listening to music on the Internet and seeing how people talk about it has spawned a kind of anti-Copernican Revolution, where the world of music experience revolves around our screens and sound cards. I’m not advocating a Luddite retreat. The Internet has been amazing for music, spawning all sorts of new tangents which couldn’t have existed without the access to sounds, software and distribution that the digital world provides. But the sense of freedom and opportunity demands responsibility and self-awareness from listeners and producers alike. Without it, the Internet becomes a shattered mirror reflecting our narcissistic tendencies, our restless attention and ultimately our disconnection from the world of music that’s actually happening, every day and every second, outside our minds and off our screens. ~

Illustration: Marta Collica

Ego Talk in an Online World

Recommendations

the decision to include them. They suddenly brought this soaring music to, well, earth. The music wasn’t an abstract shape in the sky, and suddenly the band lived up to their terranean name—not unlike parts of 1996’s Pentastar, which also featured vocals. Suddenly, I found myself on the other end of the stick that I have come to hate so much in

music appreciation—namely, my brain telling me, “It’s not like the last record!” What a conservative concept, that a band is a brand, shoveling out varying clones of their successful formula. And upon further listening, the LP’s vocals became an interesting departure, particularly in the case of Rabia Shaheen Qazi of Sub Pop psychrock act Rose Windows. I’d never

have put these bands together but the combination really works. I suspect that many long-term Earth fans will moan about this change. I’m not going to let myself become one of them. Earth are a band with a long and influential back catalogue. They should be encouraged to try new things, to change. Just because this music is primitive doesn’t mean it’s bad. ~

“Blackest ever black clothes available.” Daniel Jones recommends the Darklands showroom in Berlin With music and art fuelling its pitch black aesthetic, Darklands stands at the helm of Berlin’s wearable avant-garde. Daniel Jones explains why the techno world and fashionistas alike flock to the showroom. Not long ago I walked into a wide, open warehouse near Berlin’s central station and I was greeted with the primordial sounds of Lustmord’s “Babel”. Five minutes later, I was hearing the new Objekt. No, I wasn’t at some mutant rave—I’d just entered Darklands, a high-end shop specializing in the blackest ever black clothes available. Much of it is in the four-digit price range, making it past my day-to-day means. But Darklands is as much a place to consume with your senses as with your wallet, and accordingly, it has nothing to do with high-end mainstream fashion. This is the frontier of the wearable avant-garde, though much of the clothes ride the border of wearability hard. I often have the impression of being surrounded by textile sculpture. Besides drooling at the rare beauty of the garments and jewelry

hanging around the store from the likes of Ann Demeulemeester, Raf Simons, Parts of Four, and, of course, the demigod Rick Owens, Darklands itself is a pleasure to look at and listen to. The music playing as you peruse the store is carefully curated by owner Campbell McDougall and his staff, and their mixes change frequencies frequently, traversing terrain from jazz to industrial and, importantly, ultra-current underground techno. The atmosphere is almost that of an art gallery, and indeed central to the shop’s identity is its use as

a space for art of various kinds. On my recent visit, a few weeks after a Ben Frost solo performance to celebrate a sculptural installation by designer Boris Bidjan Saberi, the shop’s cave-like basement was temporarily housing Anima-Sound, an exhibition by Evan Sugerman, who is the mind and hands behind the aforementioned Parts of Four. The space was filled with a patched modular synthesizer hooked to a massive black case of sub-woofers dubbed “The Beast”. The hand-built rig functions as a display for his latest

Daniel Jones is a music promoter and creator of the subculture reconceptualization tumblr formerly known as Gucci Goth, now BlackBlackGold. In the last issue of Electronic Beats, he recommended FKA twigs’ LP1.

Below: At the opening of an installation in Darklands by avantgarde designer Boris Bidjan Saberi, pants, boots and shirts coated in bronze and silver hung from the store’s rafters. After the lights dimmed, Ben Frost grabbed his guitar and tore through an hour long set of pounding rhythms, feedback and electronic noise. Photo: Elena Panouli

EB 4/2014 23

Recommendations

Opposite page: Chloé Griffin and Gwenaël Rattke, The Anomalous Nobility, in Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin.

PoF collection, triggered through several variations of sound by the proximity of the viewer. This marriage of art, couture and music makes the store one of the most unique shopping—okay, browsing—experiences I’ve ever had. These days, Darklands is often seen as a kind of Berghain for shopping and counts numerous musicians and famous DJs as regular clientele, amongst them Trent Reznor, Ben Klock, Function, Richie Hawtin, and Chris Liebing.

As McDougall puts it, “It wasn’t that long ago that big techno DJs would just wear a T-shirt and jeans, but a lot of these guys are realizing that you have to up your game a bit. It’s taken a while, but once a couple of those heavyweight DJs started to come in, word got out and eventually it took on an organic path.” Darklands has flourished due to selective purchasing, a keen sense of style, a deep love of art of all kinds, and that ever-so-important rule for a

business: unpretentious customer service. Visitors inevitably seeking techno tips will be readily supplied, but McDougall is pleased to offer more well-rounded inquiries. “I see it as an extension of the brand that visitors can get information about a variety of things, be it an art fair, a Swans show or the new Nick Cave movie—which was excellent. Increasingly in this world, everything is driven by a bottom line, by numbers. We’re about the craft.” ~

“Manifestos now come pre-hashtagged, forecasting their own viral uptake.” Heatsick recommends #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader

Urbanomic

As a musician, Heatsick pushes the humble Casio keyboard to its logical conclusion. The Accelerationist Reader from English publishing house Urbanomic pushes capitalism in a similar way. To offer a brief and very broad definition: accelerationism is the idea that radical change in a global capitalist system can only be generated by accelerating the system’s self-destructive tendencies. At the recent book launch held in the Pro QM bookstore in Berlin for the compendium #ACCELERATE, its British publisher and editor, Robin Mackay, explained his initial hesitance of turning recent strands of accelerationism into a mere buzzword. Having previously documented emerging perspectives on accelerationism and what became known as speculative realism in his Collapse journal, Mackay explained the potential pitfalls of philosophies being hijacked. This has been particularly evident in the cartoonish

24 EB 4/2014

path of speculative realism—a philosophy popularized by a former sports journalist that rejects the privileging of human thought over that of other entities. It was also the source of many an artwork depicting the secret sentient life of random objects and anonymous materials. However, being of the mindset that someone will inevitably publish a book on accelerationism, Mackay decided he would rather it be him. Accelerationist ideology in action! #ACCELERATE documents the philosophy’s genesis in Marx, charting its course through the disillusionment of various post-’68 French philosophers, though philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are, in a sense, accelerationism’s first real torch bearers. In their attempt to rethink the most effective forms of changing capitalism, they came to question the notion of revolution: “But what is the revolutionary path? Is there one? To withdraw from the world market . . . or might it be to go in the opposite direction? Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate’ the process.”

Moving forward to the nineties, #ACCELERATE goes on to highlight the key role of technology in the grand scheme of capitalism’s collapse as conceived by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University. CCRU was founded by Sadie Plant and Nick Land and attended by the likes of Hyperdub label founder and musician Steve Goodman aka Kode9, Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun from the Otolith Group, amongst others. As activists, they were key components in investigating the surprising ways in which music, culture, technology and capitalism intersect. Inspiring artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman and Russell Haswell, the group were also the first to discuss the then nascent drum and bass scene. But they included at least two opposing visions of accelerationism: While Nick Land is interested in speeding up capitalist flows, philosopher and music journalist Mark Fisher points out how technological development can paradoxically deliver inertia and stasis. As a consequence this has

played out

Swedish-born KABLAM, aka Kajsa Blom, is the opposite of a vinyl purist, choosing instead to manipulate digital tracks with all of the advanced possibilities CDJs offer. A member of the Berlin-based Janus crew, Blom maniacally mashes up

genres like Jersey club and kuduro with gabber, using stylistic left turns to get people onto the floor and stay there. Here she takes us through five tracks of a recent set—how they fit together (or don’t) and what kind of larger arc they provide.

Bubbling at the Seams PLACE: Slakthuset, Stockholm / TIME: 2:30 a.m. / peak time 1. Jhené Aiko - “Comfort Inn” (DJ Rell Remix) There have been a lot of Jhené Aiko remixes coming out since her amazing debut EP Sail Out was released in 2013. This is hands down the best one. It’s one of those really fast Jersey club tracks with a BPM around 140. The booming bass and cut-up vocals that came out of early Baltimore club tracks from the eighties are jacked and hyped up in these modern New Jersey counterparts. It has a high intensity that comes and goes, which is why I find it fits both peak time and warm-up sets. Not that I really adjust to what time it is. I think I adapt more to the space than to the time. At Chesters, where we used to have the Janus parties, I tried anything I liked at any time, and that is really a main element of DJing for me: trial and error. And not being afraid of error. Let the previous track play out because this intro needs to be heard from the beginning, undistracted. That insane booming bass creates a weird balance with Aiko’s silky voice.

2. Rotterdam Termination Source - “POING!” This is a gabber track. I love gabber because it’s so merciless. It’s a style that came out of the Netherlands, full of distorted kick drums and manic energy. It’s much faster than any other tracks I play, which means I have to pitch it down to around 140 BPM. I like mixing these two together; when contrasted with the DJ Rell track, “POING!” has a much higher intensity. The minimalism and super heavy bass sit oddly with the harmony of Jhené Aikos voice, but to me it makes perfect sense. So it’s not about smoothness when I mix, it’s more about finding something in one track that is absent in the other and making them work together. The bouncing ball sound also makes it kind of comical, and I like a bit of humor in my set. I’m never ironic, but I can definitely be humorous. Since the Marfox track starts with a hardcore-esque drum, it can get slammed in.

3. DJ Marfox - “Noise” This is my favorite kuduro track at the moment. It’s so raw. Kuduro has its roots in Angolan carnival music, and there’s been some great interpretations coming out of Lisbon in recent times. During the first ten seconds it almost sounds like a gabber or hardcore track. Mixing this out of the Rotterdam Termination Source track takes us from a rhythmically one-dimensional genre to a genre that is all about dynamic rhythms. Both make you want to move but in very different ways. I think mixing these together creates a flow. And by flow I mean that there can be flow in the anti-flow, continuity in discontinuity. There are ways of playing three tracks from three very different genres one after another and making it work. It’s easy to have flow if you play shit that all sounds the same. I’ve discovered that bubbling hearts kuduro no matter which way you combine them . . .

4. DJ NDN - “Jumpstyle Meets Bubbling” TCF aka Lars Holdhus, played this amazing bubbling set once at a Janus party at Chester’s. It was before I was a part of Janus, and I was blown away by it. I’d never heard of this genre before. It was created by Caribbean immigrants in the Netherlands who played dancehall at higher speeds. Lars shared a .zip of his bubbling set, and that’s where I found this track. I don’t know who DJ NDN is or if he even exists. Anyway, it’s insane. It has a hard-hitting jumpstyle energy but with a bubbling rhythm on top. It fits the DJ Marfox track because of the similar rhythms. Perhaps the peak of the head scratching during my set until they hear this . . .

5. Total Freedom / Rihanna - “HUNTER’S TALE OR RIHANNA STALKING RIHANNA WITH A JOEY JORDISON (TM) TORCH” All faces melt. ~ 26 EB 4/2014

Recommendations

led to efforts to define acceleration not in terms of speed, but rather, as rate of change. As Fisher argues, tech visionaries like Bill Gates promise business at the speed of thought, but what capitalism delivers is thought at the speed of business. Fisher’s essay “Terminator vs. Avatar” is a highlight of #ACCELERATE, describing how the tech-dystopia of Terminator—a popular accelerationist reference point—has been replaced by the primitivist yearnings of Avatar, which we could also find today in, say, slow food restaurants. Paradoxically, it is precisely the 3D technology in Avatar that allows

the viewer to connect with some fantasy of “back to the land” primitivism. A parallel can be drawn with the imagined history of the hippies retreating or “dropping out” from society, while in fact being all along fully integrated with military intelligence practices and streamlining neo-liberal labor structures, as Fred Turner later argues in his essay “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” Finally, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” point out, technocracy is not the path to utopia. Patricia Reed also sum-

marises the potential pitfalls of even using the #accelerate tag stating how in today’s climate of self branding, manifestos now come pre-hashtagged, forecasting their own viral uptake. Reed imagines the speed of capitalism metaphorically as a spinning amusement park ride, with bodies immovably glued to the edge, whirling nauseatingly fast, but not moving an inch. But when will they become unhinged? When reading through #ACCELERATE, a song constantly seems to be playing in my head. “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay” by Whitney Houston, the UK garage remix. ~

Steve Warwick, aka Heatsick, is a British visual artist and musician based in Berlin. His work encompasses technology, hybridization, performance, sculpture and film. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats Magazine.

“A matter of minute gestures.” Mark Smith recommends Steffi’s Power Of Anonymity True anonymity in the twenty-first century may be a thing of the past, but Panorama Bar resident Steffi still sees power in its shadow. Mark Smith looks at how the reanimated ghosts of house and electro stalk her new LP on Ostgut Ton. Dance music producers often defy genre in principle but submit to it in practice. That’s not to say that all contemporary dance music sucks, but it can be hard to tell the difference between the derivative and the fresh. Producers face the challenge of balancing their innovative impulses with the specific and conservative demands of genre and context. Historically however, artists were viewed as special figures distinct from mere mortals, and it’s hard to reconcile this model with the production practice of house, techno, or electro producers whose identi-

ties can be diffuse and abstract. Now that dancefloor-oriented styles have entered a middle age where the parameters are set and the expectations are known, how does a producer make something special? Steffi Doms is hardly an anonymous figure in modern house and techno circles. Yet the way she pulls the strings on her new album calls to mind an unseen puppeteer, manipulating inert objects into recognizable human forms. Doms draws from the bedrock of classic electro and house, yet the pieces are

“Dancefloororiented styles have entered a middle age where the parameters are set and the expectations are known.”

Mark Smith

put into motion in just a way that we end up with something seductive. In her music, production becomes a matter of minute gestures. Of course, injecting animate life into weary tropes is difficult, especially from behind a cloud of anonymity. Sensitivity to stylistic nuance and a real world appreciation of what works on the dancefloor are key to making dance music more than an exercise. Doms has that in spades. In that sense, Power Of Anonymity is potent in its simplicity. An arsenal of analogue machines trace out generic guidelines drawn decades ago in Detroit and Chicago, but the music in no way feels like fetishism. Doms follows the prescriptions of history but not merely for their own sake. On “Pip” she pulls off loud and resonant electro with grace and finesse, before diving headlong into strutting synth pop with regular collaborators Dexter and Virginia on “Treasure Seeking”. These stylistic poles eventually form a larger pattern, fitting seamlessly with

Ostgut Ton

Mark Smith is one half of improvisational techno duo Gardland, who will soon be releasing their second LP on RVNG Intl. He is also an editor at Electronic Beats Magazine.

Stream the title track off Steffi’s Power Of Anonymity at EB.net

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Recommendations

musical moods you’ll recognize but perhaps find hard to place. Part of the pleasure you get in watching a puppet show is forgetting the human hands pulling the strings; Power Of Anonymity

gets you to focus on what’s actually happening in front of you rather than the guiding sensibility behind it. It sucks in the listener with an infectious sense of wonder that doesn’t feel tied

to any particular time, genre or city. And still, the musical links are clear as day. As a whole, Power Of Anonymity is strangely subversive in its ability to make you hear it on its own terms. ~

“Truly worthy of a wider audience.” John Elliott recommends the timely Deutsche Wertarbeit rerelease Today’s producers are increasingly inspired by German synth music of Bureau B yesteryear. The recent reissue of Dorothea Raukes’ John Elliott runs the Deutsche Wertarbeit LP Editions Mego subhas John Elliott rediscoverlabel Spectrum Spools, ing why he first fell in love releasing music by with the kosmische classic. the likes of Donato Dozzy, Container and Bee Mask. Previously he played in American synth trio Emeralds. These days he’s releasing under the Imaginary Softwoods moniker on imprints such as Amethyst Sunset and Wagon. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.

Read Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ conversation with Asmus Tietchens on EB.net

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In 1981, Dorothea Raukes produced an enigmatic album under the alias Deutsche Wertarbeit for the Sky Records imprint. At the time, Sky Records had forged a solid identity with a healthy catalogue of essential, post-LSD damaged Berlin school kosmische albums and questionable progrock. Raukes was already releasing albums on the imprint with the obscure prog outfit Streetmark, who released their final LP the same year as her debut solo effort. The style of German kosmische music at the time was developing beyond the acid-bent experiments of Ash Ra Tempel, Günter Schickert, and A.R. and Machines, with artists like Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Michael Rother releasing more polished musical works. Deutsche Wertarbeit, however, glows with a singular outsider vision of post-kosmische electronic music that remains unparalleled. It is also one of the only kosmische records made by a woman, which is remarkable in and of itself.

Like many outsider masterpieces, the songs on the Deutsche Wertarbeit album seem so stylistically random at times that it’s hard to immediately wrap your head around it as a whole. The opening “Guten Abend, Leute” begins with the friendly ping-ponging of Korg MS and PS series synthesizers layered over a loose drum machine rhythm and bizarre vocoder passages. But the attempt at synth-pop ends when “Deutscher Wald” kicks

“The Deutsche Wertarbeit sound is hardly relative to the early minimal-wave or post-kosmische sounds neighboring it.” John Elliott

in, with it’s ecstatic synth-pad ambiance and driving sequencer progression. Tracks like “Unter Tage” and “Auf Engelsflügeln” soar high with chord movements and melody patterns that project a focused mission of striving for the ether. The overall fidelity and vibe of the album is of its own universe, with a particular emotional resonance, sophisticated song struc-

turing, and, to my ear, a singular energy that distinguishes it from its male counterparts. “Intercity Rheingold” has the same beautiful sound and style as the previous tracks, except with a distinctly bittersweet narrative. Album closer “Der Grosse Atem”, leaves things ambiguously unresolved. It’s a bit of a head scratcher because it drops the tightly knit song craft and drum machines all together and slowly unwinds over ten minutes with delicate modulations and gentle droning. It’s astounding when music can convey what can’t be described with words, and “Der Grosse Atem” is a transportive magic trick of an ending. It’s hard to imagine how a piece like this can be captured on tape, or even be conceived. Despite some of the erratic stylistic shifts throughout, the album is still somehow cohesive. The Deutsche Wertarbeit sound is hardly relative to the early minimal-wave or postkosmische sounds neighboring it. While expert in the execution of its own vision, the album seems naive and uninfluenced by the musical climate of the time, making it unlike anything else in the Sky Records catalogue. Though the current surge of reissuebased labels releasing electronic music from the past can at times be overwhelming, the Deutsche Wertarbeit album is truly worthy of a wider audience and another chance to be heard. ~

Developed with the professional DJ in mind, with respect to the wallet of the unpaid amateur, Zinken is chock-full of handy features like the dual-duty TurnCable and ZoundPlug. Designed for maximum comfort, Zinken features swivel ear caps, an adjustable headband and specially selected materials that are easy to keep fresh and clean. These headphones are designed to thrive in a DJ environment, but also excel at day-to-day use.

Find out more at urbanears.com/zinken

URBANEARS.COM

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Bass Kultur

“They’re excited to take their identity off, like their clothes.” Warbear on Berlin’s premier sex-positive dance party, Gegen. If Berlin is a city renowned for both techno and liberal attitudes towards sex, no party brings the two together like Gegen, a bi-monthly event that a whole cross-section of the city looks forward to. Resident DJ Warbear gives us access. When I was studying German at the Volkshochschule [school of German adult education], there was this word I encountered that was so full of meaning: gegen. Gegen has a history of philosophical politics because gegen means “against”— gegen Rassismus [against racism], gegen Nazismus [against Nazism]. It creates a boundary, like, “me gegen you.” It defines two identities in a dialectical way. But you can use gegen in a temporal way to say, “Wir treffen uns gegen neun,” which means, “We’re meeting each other around nine.” It was a contradiction for me because one part is a closed concept, the other part an open one. How can that be in the German language, which is so identitarian and so dogmatic and dialectical? For me, contradictions are the salt of life, as they produce change. And queer culture is about non-resolving contradiction. So, gegen in particular was perfect as a concept for a queer party, because it’s about identity crisis. But we—myself and co-founders Boxikus and Tom Ass—don’t want to sell you the possibility to be queer for one night and we don’t want to reproduce another

identity in being queer. For us, being queer is about being dialogical, not dialectical. We don’t want you to reproduce a stance against something, and that was related to the heterophobia that happens in a lot of queer scenes. It’s too easy. What’s difficult but much more liberating is to produce a dialogue within your fears. We wanted to produce that in a microclimate. This is what people that come to the party understand and feel. They’re excited to take their identity off, like their clothes. KitKatClub, where we host the party and which originally formed as a sex-friendly trance/techno club in 1990, has been an enormous influence for us. It was the only club in Berlin that for twenty years has had a very strong sexual politics applied to party and club culture. It was a space where a lot of different social and cultural groups converge to produce an exact state of crossing, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or age. This is the only party where you can find people seventy years old. Also, KitKat was always queer before the concept of queerness became a segment of the academic market. They were performing it in the nineties, and they always accepted differences of sexual orientation and gender by making their club a safe space to explore. Which, of course, fits to why the space is full of light and color. This is another thing we really loved, because this idea of techno and club culture in Berlin is black. There’s always this idea of the city as a disaffected place packed with industrial scenarios and the end of history. KitKat, in

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contrast, were coming from early nineties psychedelic trance imagery. Gegen is not just a queer techno party, it’s something way more complex, although it’s basically a techno-oriented, queer-positive dancefloor. This means we give space to queer-positive and feminist-positive techno producers and techno DJs, and that was the filter through which we do the bookings. Everyone from Mueran Humanos and Lotic to Gardland to Paula Temple have played here. And then there was another soul of the party, the concept of The Darkness. Inside The Darkness we were applying an idea that Tom Ass developed: a music and performance perspective on the obscurities in queer culture. So noise music, performance art, drones—whatever is outside a linear four-to-the-floor beat, techno-oriented idea of music would take place in The Darkness. Once we moved to KitKat we had incredible possibilities because it’s enormous. There’s a room in the basement that we used as a darkroom, but there’s actually no sense having a darkroom in a place like KitKat where you can do what you like, where you like. We also have other dance floors—one more bear-oriented and another more female or female positive with house and disco tunes. These were further explosions, like a new aspect of the KitKat opening to the eyes of people attending. Ultimately, every time you go to Gegen you get lost and discover a new party. It’s another kind of identity crisis, but in a good way. ~

Top to bottom: Three records that represent Gegen’s main dance floors:

GEGEN TANZ : Martin Landsky – “1000 Miles (Laurent Garnier Remix)” THE DARKNESS : Aphrodite’s Child – “The Four Horsemen” off 666 BRIGHT ROOM : Jimmy & Fred - “I See Lights (Karmon Remix)”

Opposite page: Gegen identity. Posters designed by Stefan Fähler.

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video game soundtracks with Daniel Hugo

How do you make music to accompany the destruction of entire civilizations? What about the rewriting of historical events in the span of a few hours? Critic Daniel Hugo explores the world of strategy game soundtracks to find out what it sounds like to play god.

he strategy game genre is staggering in its diversity, yet has remained a largely ignored cultural niche in the broader gaming market. Why? Well, first off, the genre’s narratives spread across time and space and take stylistic cues from fantasy and science fiction, making it fertile ground for mixing historical reality and subjective mythmaking. In other words: they’re complicated. But no matter how far out things can get, these games remain bound by the unique perspective of the player. Rather than being embedded within the world of the video game, the player floats above the action, positioned like a god. Here, “real time” goes out the window, and there are no more “turns”. Civilizations pass from the Bronze Age to the Information Age in hours; new worlds may be discovered and battles change the complexion of a game in minutes. Heady stuff indeed. But what does this mean for its music? What melodies and rhythms can capture the grandeur of this shift? As with most game soundtracks,

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music makes the fantasy convincing, and that’s a tall order for simulating seismological shifts in culture and history. I would argue that becoming “godly” is at the crux of the strategy game fantasy. But it’s also a romantic sentiment foreign to our own time, which perhaps helps explain why classic strategy games like Civilization, Age of Wonders and StarCraft, no matter their theme, rely upon the culturally ingrained pathos of the orchestra. From soaring choral passages to huge string movements, elegiac brass to woodwind solos, these soundtracks contain the widescreen emotions of the baroque and classical. Even synthesizerbased pieces (with the Yamaha DX7 featuring heavily), are peppered with violin and timpani flourishes. Homeworld, the exceptional 1999 sci-fi game,

borrows Samuel Barber’s famous choral arrangement of his 1936 work, Adagio for Strings, to evoke the divine importance of the gamer’s task to unify a tribe with its spiritual homeworld. It’s important to note that the strategy game in particular, as an arena for god-like decision-making, contains infinite scenarios which must be captured in music. And yet game music is necessarily fixed and determined. How can the infinite be harnessed to the predictable? By constantly walking the line between stasis and drama, tension, anxiety and passivity; sounds anticipate the game’s development while remaining sensitive to the present moment. Dramatic shifts in musical style and instrumentation provide the basic illusion that the music is responding to unique changes in the game. 1999’s Age of Empires II: Age of Kings is perhaps the most motley in how it negotiates these peaks and troughs of gameplay. With its incongruous fusion of bardlike song cycles, classical guitar, harpsichord solos, nineties breakbeats, pan flute, and slap bass floating constantly in and out of focus, it’s one of the most disorienting listens in terms of sheer bombast. It’s as if the com-

posers, Americans Stephen Rippy and Kevin McMullan, tried to record a stoned thought experiment about what modern music’s genealogy would sound like had every ancient empire been equally accorded the full privilege of cultural domination. Which is to say that Age of Empires indulges in the fantasy of alternative histories, while the strategy game sci-fi Homeworld, with its deep-space ambient soundtrack, wishes to abstract itself from human history altogether. The challenge and success of the strategy game soundtrack has been to retain the distinctive character of each game’s narrative, while threading together the impulse of godliness and drama essential to its gameplay. Whether it’s the stilted ambienttechno innocence of Populous, or the Vangelis-like cinematics of Dune 2000, the music tries to capture what the world sounds like when life changes in an instant, not around you, but below you. It’s a testament to the weird qualities of these soundtracks that when taken in isolation they are erratic and schizophrenic listens, yet within gameplay itself, you never consider them to be laid on too thick. You don’t forget about the lack of subtlety so much as thirst for it at a subconscious level. The ultimate success of strategy game music is its ability to flesh out the game’s speculative and transportive properties: to imagine oneself as supreme, omniscient and powerful, even for the most fleeting of moments. ~

Illustration: Marta Collica

Strategy Games: Music for Playing God

ABC

The Alphabet According to Craig Leon A

as in Art: “Art is my dog,” is a premise I can stand behind. It’s better than what an A&R man—a now defunct job at a record label where a producer/employee helped to guide the career of artists—once declared to me during lunch: “Sushi is my life.”

as in B, Sirius.

R U Sirius?

as in CBGB: A place from a time in our lives. A place to develop. I did not eat the hamburgers.

Music history is often shaped by people out of the limelight’s glare; those background figures who incubate the artists and sounds that define scenes, cities and generations. Craig Leon is one such figure. The sixty-two year-old Miami native played an integral part in establishing the key acts that dominated the Downtown New York music scene of the late seventies and early eighties, with the likes of Blondie, The Ramones, Talking Heads and Suicide all passing through his hands, both as a producer or an A&R rep. Leon’s own music has recently come to the fore thanks to the reissuing of Nommos on RVNG Intl, which first appeared on legendary guitarist John Fahey’s Takoma imprint in 1981. The album, a minimalist ode to a Malinese creation myth, is an enduring electronic classic that sounds as hypnotic and fresh today as it did more than thirty years ago.

as in Dub: A fluctuating sound that was a big influence on the reverbs of the first Suicide album. A technique I learned working on Martha Veléz’s Escape from Babylon in 1975 with Lee Perry and Bob Marley.

as in Everglades: Proof that hell can be filled with water.

as in Folk: What pop and rock music used to be before they got corporate. You can’t really have corporate folk music by the nature of the beast, though they’re trying.

He had a unique singing style. So much of his work and outlook is important to me but “Father Death Blues” is an amazing song as well as a beautiful poem.

as in Hell, Richard: The unfortunate victim of me breaking one of the cardinal rules of record collecting. On my way to a meeting at Richard’s house I passed by a secondhand record shop. There was a big old pile of Jamaican dub records and white labels which were rare as hen’s teeth in New York at the time. Since I was in a rush I made a mental note and said I’d pick them up on my way back from Richard’s. At the meeting I told him about the find. We both ran down to the shop and of course they were gone except for some miserable compilations. So when you see it, grab it.

as in I: I’m not used to writing so many sentences that begin with “I.” It’s a strange feeling and not easy for me to do.

as in Ginsberg, Allen: Equal parts poet and rock personality.

as in Jamaica: A place that is very close physically and musically to where I grew up. There’s the emphasis on heavy bass that’s just like Florida soul. EB 4/2014 33

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Opposite page: Craig Leon, photographed in London by Amelia Troubridge.

as in Kosmische: The people from the German experimental spacerock label Kosmische Kuriere had a hilarious fashion sense, particularly in their use of aluminum. They recorded one of my favorite groups to this day, Ash Ra Tempel, who also did an album together with Timothy Leary. Unfortunately, Kosmische sometimes misinterpreted what a record company can or can’t do. Issuing an artist’s recordings without their knowledge is a cardinal sin. Before that, I recommended signing their label to Sire when I worked there. It didn’t happen. I dislike it when a composer’s or artist’s work is released without their consent and against their will.

the words kept changing on the page every time she read it. Correct assumption.

as in Nommos: Recorded in the seventies before the advent of easy digital electronic sounds. It’s speculative fiction as a musical album.

as in Ostinato: A musical motif that continuously repeats in the same pitch. One of the delightful ways to induce a trance.

as in LinnDrum: A drum machine by Linn Electronics with fifteen sampled sounds, especially popular in the eighties. I played around with one of the first ones. I think that a lot of musicians misinterpreted that its best use was along with other percussion rather than on its own.

as in Que Viva Mexico: An incomplete film by Russian avant-garde director Sergei Eisenstein that I would love to have written a soundtrack for.

as in Ramone, Tommy: A truly demented genius. He rates up there with Michael O’Donoghue [see Z]. He started a band steeped in performance art and then created a song called “Beat on The Brat” in an attempt to give the Bay City Rollers a run for their money in the commercial sweepstakes. I guess that I’m a bit demented myself since I believed him.

as in Polyhymnia: The muse of poetry and dance in Greek mythology. You can count yourself as being very fortunate when she comes to visit you.

as in Machen, Arthur: A master of sci-fi and horror fiction. I once gave a copy of one of his nineteenth century novels to a lady who wanted something “out of the ordinary.” She claimed that EB 4/2014 35

Page 33: B: Sirius B is one of the largest white dwarfs known in our universe. The Dogon people, indigenous to West Africa, had knowledge of its existence without the use of telescopes, an apparently inexplicable footnote in the history of astronomy. Sirius B and the Dogons play a central part in the concept behind Craig Leon‘s seminal Nommos LP. E: The Everglades are the swampy wetlands at the southern tip of Florida, known for its floods, alligators and giant snakes. Page 35: P: Apollo, Mnemosyne, and the Nine Muses, by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728 - 1779). Page 36: X: An excerpt from Iannis Xenakis‘s twisted score from Pithoprakta (1955 - 56), measures 52 - 59. Z: A frame from Michael O‘Donoghue‘s absurdist comic The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist illustrated by Frank Springer.

as in Stein, Seymour: Founder of Sire Records, now vice president at Warner Brothers, responsible for signing lots of important acts, from Madonna to Talking Heads. You definitely want to go to a tacky Chinese restaurant with him for dim sum. You just may be lucky enough to hear him do an a cappella vocal presentation of the B-side of any given doo-wop 45 at the drop of the hat. It was once said that he has “shellac in his veins.” This is a true statement. For those who are scratching their heads, shellac was the primary ingredient used in making 78 rpm records.

as in Talking Heads: A unique group of artists. It’s amazing how they were able to become one of the earliest “crossover” groups. Their potential was evident even when they were in their rawest form when I first saw them play their earliest gigs. They’ve continued on today in different areas of music, David on his own, Chris and Tina on their own, and they’re still doing it really well.

U Read more ABCs on EB.net

36 EB 4/2014

as in Unsound Festival: We performed a forty piece orchestral version of Nommos. There was a great reaction from the audience, but I’m sure some people didn’t get it. It’s not easy listening.

as in Vega, Alan: One half of the legendary band Suicide. The most unusual vocalist I know of. I once taught Luciano Pavarotti “Blitzkrieg Bop” but I wish that I had taught him “Frankie Teardrop” instead.

as in Youth, aka producer Martin Glover: I always wondered if he was going to keep his nickname when he got older. He has.

as in Zeitgeist: I used to look forward to the issues of the literary journal Evergreen Review that had the comic strip “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist” by Michael O’Donoghue and drawn by Frank Springer. I remember one story contained the line “Your buttocks will be devoted to lyrical themes such as Fortitude Slaying Avarice with the Lance of Sagacity.” ~

as in Wine: Lubricates the soul when used in moderation. Has proven an excellent writing aid through the centuries. It also primes your mind for reading “M” or listening to “X”.

as in Xenakis, Iannis: Like Bach, his music starts with a mathematical premise and then creates its own unique universe. There’s no doubt that his job as an architect had quite a bit to do with this. Easy listening for the future generations who will be more evolved than ours.

CTM 2015 F E S T I VA L F O R A D V E N T U R O U S M U S I C & A R T 2 3 .1 . – 1 . 2 . 2 0 1 5 B E R L I N ELECTRIC WIZARD A L E C E M P I R E & Z A N LY O N S S O U N DWA L K C O L L E C T I V E W I T H N A N G O L D I N & T I N A F R A N K X J E N N Y H VA L & S U S A N N A Y U N G L E A N & SA D B OYS X 1 8 + X E M PT YS E T NISENNENMONDAI X GAZELLE TWIN RO S E K A L L A L & M A R K O. P I L K I N GTO N PROSTITUTES X SUICIDEYEAR THOMAS ANKERSMIT X CRAIG LEON E L E C T R I C I N D I G O & T H O M A S WAG E N S O M M E R E R E L I S A B E T H S C H I M A N A X S E N YA W A X S O T E KLARA LEWIS X LUCIO CAPECE P E D E R M A N N E R F E LT X E X T R E M E P R E C A U T I O N S P I E R C E WA R N E C K E & M AT T H E W B I E D E R M A N SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO X ALEKSI PERÄLÄ LY D I A A I N S W O R T H X L U C R E C I A D A L T MUCH MORE TO COME W W W. C T M - F E S T I VA L . D E

DESIGN ~ MARIUS REHMET

HOLLY JOHNSON talks to Max Dax about DAVID BOWIE

Mr. Style Icon There were a handful of musicians in the seventies who encouraged me as a teenager to live my homosexuality more or less openly—amongst them Marc Bolan, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. In 1973, when I was thirteen, I saw David Bailey’s famous TV documentary about Andy Warhol. Literally overnight I became his biggest fan. The film was extremely controversial at the time. There was talk of the “impending brutalization” of the British youth, whatever that was supposed to mean. That’s also the moment in my life that I realized I wasn’t the only one different from other boys. Soon after, I also started reading everything by Warhol I could lay my hands on. I devoured his diaries as well as anything else he did. That was also pretty much the reason that David Bowie eventually became my idol and my role model. Aladdin Sane, Bowie’s follow-up LP to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, came out on RCA the same year, and it hit just the right spot for me. See, Bowie spoke to me directly. When he publicly came out as being bisexual, I, too, could admit to myself and eventually to others that I am like Bowie, that I too love men. For Frankie Goes to Hollywood [=FGTH] I adopted the stage name Holly Johnson, in reverence of Holly Woodlawn—the 38 EB 4/2014

Before he became the brash and unabashedly gay singer of British eighties concept poppers Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Holly Johnson was growing up in Liverpool and struggling with his sexuality. That is, until a television documentary would lead him to the work of Andy Warhol and, in the same year, David Bowie’s glambiguity as Aladdin Sane. Johnson’s double epiphany was as musical as it was sexual and helped shape not just Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s explicit debut Welcome to The Pleasure Dome, and Johnson’s lifelong committment to LGBT rights, but also his first solo LP in fifteen years, 2014’s Europa (Pleasuredome). Max Dax got the skinny.

Opposte page: David Bowie on British television in a room at the Hotel Delmonico, NYC, 1974. © Henry Diltz/Corbis

Factory superstar who Lou Reed sang about in the famous opening line of his song “Walk on the Wild Side”: “Holly came from Miami F-L-A / Hitchhiked her way across U.S.A. / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / Shaved her legs and then he was a she.” Even though I was equipped with a role model and a new name, the success of Frankie Goes to Hollywood came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had been playing in a more or less unsuccessful band called Big in Japan with Bill Drummond, who later formed The KLF, for eight years. Then I started FGTH, after which Trevor Horn discovered me, and the rest is history. Suddenly I was a pop star, and I loved that role. But it was like playing a part in theater. Or to be more specific: Frankie Goes to Hollywood was my interpretation of Ziggy Stardust. Looking back, I think you could describe us as a truly conceptual eighties pop band. Frankie was a cartoon character I had shaped. Those super aggressive vocals are not my natural singing voice either, but I considered the piercing, sirenlike quality a necessity. And, of course, my fake hyper-confidence was totally exaggerated. I’m not that confident in real life. We’ve all read Freud: The best way to mask your internal insecurity and sensitivity is by being loud and dominant on the

outside. Everyone knows that. As Frankie, I was also England’s first openly gay pop star. Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who interviewed me for Smash Hits in 1984, could never forgive me for that. He couldn’t acknowledge that we were successful with Frankie before they were and so effectively paved the way for the Pet Shop Boys. Neil—I always call him Nelly, but for some reason I don’t think he likes it—only came out in 1994 during an interview with Attitude Magazine. As a music journalist, he knew about the advantages of gaining respect as a musician first and only then planning the how and when of your outing. Because from that point on you become someone else: you’re not a pop star anymore, but a “gay” pop star. It becomes a stigma. In that sense, Neil Tennant— unlike us—had a master plan. The only plan we had, if any, was this: I’d consider FGTH a success as soon as parents of the world would lock away their sons whenever we played a show. I wanted Frankie Goes to Hollywood to be just as much a threat to the perfect world as David Bowie once was by being openly bisexual. That was pretty much our whole objective. But by leaving behind the “bi” part of my sexuality, I aimed to take it one step further than Bowie. At least I set my sites pretty high. ~

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EB 4/2014 39

Counting wiTH . . .

Eric Porter Douglas, aka Afrikan Sciences, is responsible for some of the most exciting Afro-futurist productions in recent memory, blending the broken beats of West Coast funk with classic house, and a dash of Sun Ra sci-fi. His new LP, Circuitous, is out now on Berlin imprint PAN. It goes hard.

one

memorable line in a song:

“Even if it’s jazz or the quiet storm, I hook a beat up, convert it into hiphop form” – Rakim, “I Ain’t No Joke” off Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full.

counter-clockwise I could go back in time. --I could never throw away my childhood toys. --Children are the future.

two six decisions I regret:

First would be selling my comic book collection which I had amassed from childhood to make rent as a struggling college student. I never recovered from that, and it kind of killed the spark I had for collecting. Second, around that same time, Whodini were in town to do a show, and their DJ was calling around trying to find turntables for the gig. They contacted me, but I held out because they wouldn’t have compensated. My childhood heroes—and I ended up trying to extort them. Oh, the shame.

three

people that should collaborate: Doctor Who, Doctor Strange, Doctor Ice. The result? Time traveling rap with a twist of mysticism.

four things I haven’t done yet:

--Traveled to my namesake. --Performed in Japan. --Committed to daily practice on my upright. --Found inner peace.

five

things I used to believe:

--That my parents were robots. --New sneakers made me run faster. --If I spun around fast enough 40 EB 4/2014

hours ago . . .

seven I was preparing my child for school.

albums everyone should own: Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band – The Very Best of Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band Sun Ra & His Arkestra – Jazz in Silhouette Ultramagnetic MC’s – Critical Beat Down Frank Zappa – Apostrophe (‘) Two Banks of Four – Three Street Worlds John Lee Hooker – Get Back Home in the U.S.A. Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

eight After

p.m.

Daddy goes off duty, LEGOLAND is dismantled, avengers are disassembled and I clear out of my studio.

nine My

lives . . .

I keep resetting on the fifth.

ten

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

Man made drugs. Blessed is the herb. ~

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I N T E R V I

T I O N S

Gu E s

M O N O L O

C O N V E R S

E W S

LISA BLAnning Meets KAREN O

It took quite a few margaritas to get me up there” Karen Lee Orzolek, aka Karen O, first caught the public eye as the charismatic and often outlandishly dressed frontwoman for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a trio of artrocking post-punks from New York who emerged to much acclaim in the early noughties. While their success led to a number of opportunities for the singersongwriter, it was creative chances she took in soundtrack work with director Spike Jonze and an inspired foray into theater, Stop the Virgens, that revealed the scope of O’s talent. All of that has culminated in her first solo LP, Crush Songs, with compositions as fleeting and love-struck as the crushes they extol. Left: A studly Karen O, photographed by Luci Lux in Berlin Neukölln.

EB 4/2014 45

Karen, obviously your new album is about crushes, which I like. It’s a universal theme. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from a crush?

It’s just one of the most romantic things that can happen to you, outside of actually falling in love and having it work out [laughs]. A crush is one of the best parts of either not falling in love or falling in love. That’s actually a pretty important lesson to learn, I’d say. Anything more? Maybe something more from a specific person that you learned?

In a lot of ways, the nature of a crush is, like, ninety per cent of the time unrequited, you know? And every now and then it actually works out or you get to the next phase with the person that you’re crushing on. But the majority of crushes are fantasy and if you have an overactive imagination like I do, it’s really satisfying because there’s all sorts of things you come up with in your head. And it just seems like it’s really all or nothing on the romantic side of things. There’s not a lot of things in life you get to fantasize about so much. But now that you’re married [to director Barnaby Clay] it probably changes your relationship with crushes, no?

Yeah, it does, but you still continue it. One thing about life as it carries on, is that there’s always going to be temptation and there’s always going to be crushes down the line. And I think that’s probably a good thing—it spices up things in the bedroom, and other places, as well. You got to keep the fantasy alive. Your backstory is fascinating: you’re the mixed-race daughter of two immigrants who grew up to be a rock star. So this is like the American dream.

Well, my dad wasn’t an immigrant, my mom was. My dad was second generation. He was born in Massachusetts. Oh, I see. I find this so disappointing because everywhere in the press they say you have a Korean mother and a Polish father.

My mom is Korean and she came over with my father, but he is full-blooded Polish. That is, he was born and grew up in the States, so he’s American. Well, that changes things slightly, I guess. I think I read a quote somewhere where you said that you were an “embarrassingly wellbehaved child.”

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So what was it that enabled that well-behaved child to be so out front as a performer?

It’s probably a pretty common theme among the more wild and extroverted performers, you know. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were coming up, one of the first bands that we came to Europe with was The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Jon Spencer is a very charismatic, sexy performer, and he’s just about the shyest person that I have ever come across in my life. So I grew up very shy, I would say with a rich internal life, but having difficulty being 46 EB 4/2014

able to express that in my daily life or really be able to access what was going on in the inside. And I did have a sort of exhibitionist streak in me, even when I was really little. But when it came time to start performing, especially with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it was like a volcano. There was just all this pent-up energy and maybe frustrated creativity and desire that I hadn’t been able to express because of just being a more shy, awkward person and when I got to the platform of the stage, it came just erupting out. What about the decision to even go on stage in the first place, and not only that, but to be the face and the mouthpiece of the band? For a shy person, I imagine, to take that leap . . .

It took quite a few margaritas to get me up there, and that’s actually the honest truth. When I was in my teenage years and college years, I got into indie rock music and stuff like that. And that just felt a little bit more accessible to me than trying to be Michael Jackson, you know. I’d check out bands and, again, fantasize about giving that a shot myself. And I had a lot of teenage angst and twenties angst—actually tons of it. It just started to dissipate in my early thirties. But a lot of that angst just triggered me: if people were doing one thing, then I wanted to do the other thing. It’s pretty predictable, but it always worked in my favor. At the time in New York when we started the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it was a really dead music scene, and also you had audiences that just stood with their arms crossed, silently judging you as you played a show. That was kind of the vibe. So at that time, I think being in my twenties, having a lot of energy that was starting to erupt, having a lot of angst, I just wanted to shake things up. I don’t know, it was an overwhelming desire to do that. You said that you had an exhibitionist streak when you were younger. How would that manifest itself?

Well, you know, I had a penchant for wanting to perform, and making home films and choreographing dances with my friends and stuff like that. From really young. From even four years old, I think. There was one particular event that happened when I was in the fifth grade. There was a talent show. I lip-synced to “Twist and Shout” or something like that, but I wore these really dark sunglasses. I was around eleven at the time, and the sunglasses were so dark that I couldn’t see the audience—basically my young peers and teachers and stuff. They could see me, but I couldn’t see them, and I just went insane, I went crazy. I remember my teacher being totally shocked to see that side of me. So that performer was there. I just took it all the way, it was always kind of what I wanted to do. I was not a tame performer. That means your parents weren’t surprised with what you ended up doing with your life.

I think they were probably surprised that I was a success, although they weren’t so surprised. I showed signs of that when I was growing up. One of the songs on your album is called “Native Korean Rock”. How does that part of your identity inform what you do?

I don’t sit around and think enough about those sorts of things, as far as analyzing how this and that affected me. But that being said, I think it had a really big affect on me. For one thing, I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and a lot of American kids don’t travel a lot when they’re young. They don’t get out of the States or maybe even their town for most of their life. But I grew up going to Korea,

almost a dozen times over the course of my childhood, because my grandparents were there. They are actually pictured in the packaging of Crush Songs. If you open up the flaps, they’re in there. So, I grew up experiencing that culture, with that always being part of my life. And also being half-Korean in a largely undiverse school and community kind of made me an outsider. I didn’t have to be one, it just happened because I didn’t fit in—not only as the result of being half-Korean but also because of the kind of person that I was. I was a little bit offbeat and shy, but I feel like being mixedrace always saw me a little bit outside of what was the norm of the kids I was around. As a result of that I was a lot of the time on the outside looking in, building my identity off of how I wasn’t like everybody else instead of how I was like everybody else. And that’s the making of someone who ends up in punk rock, I think you could argue. I really like the soundtrack work that you’ve done for Where the Wild Things Are, as well as “The Moon Song” for Her. Both films were directed by your former boyfriend Spike Jonze. I feel like “The Moon Song” is something of a Breakfast at Tiffany’s ”Moon River” moment—it even has the word moon in it. Was that conscious at all?

Oh yeah, I think that since so many of my influences are film-based, “Moon River” was probably in the periphery of my creative process. I think the main influence was from the film The Jerk.

romance moment—because I’m obsessed with teenage adolescence, and that period of time in your life. Hughes’ films were also a big influence for “Modern Romance”, off of Fever to Tell and “Y Control”. And there are countless other examples without a doubt. I love how the films that you’re choosing are The Jerk and John Hughes as opposed to Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman or whatever. It also seemed like the work that you did for both previous mentioned soundtracks helped to create the context for this record.

Well, the backstory for these songs is that I was never writing them as a record or anything like that. It was really just like, maybe you’re a painter or something like that, and you’re overwhelmed with emotion about someone you love in your life, you get to a canvas and you have to go [scrawls in the air] like this. So writing these songs was me finding a way to channel all this emotion that I was feeling and find an answer to the questions I had in my heart, and having to get it out through song. But these weren’t intended to be released in record form, it’s just the result of what I do when just thinking about it isn’t enough—just write a song about it. I meant more sonically.

[laughs] Well, you could have interrupted me. Lo-fi is the way that I do things because I can’t really play anything that well, so I keep things really simple. On Wild Things, I had amazing musicians with me, but still they’re so good that I had to keep reeling them back in to keep it really, really simple. It’s probably that my sonic aesthetic is just simplicity.

The Steve Martin film?

Yeah, “Tonight You Belong To Me”, when he and Bernadette Peters have the duet on the beach with the ukulele. I love that scene so much, and it’s so romantic—so much so that I convinced Spike to have him Karen O on growing up different: “Being half-Korean in a largely undiverse school and commuplaying a ukulele instead nity kind of put me as an outsider. I didn’t have to be one, it just happened because I didn’t fit in.” of a guitar for the song. I don’t know how creativity works, but the moon came right to mind. And also the songwriting feels much more related. But really, the If you say that you take a lot of inspiration from film in general, are there other moments in film that stand out to you particularly that you know have affected your work in the past?

Oh yeah, countless amounts. John Hughes was a huge influence on early Yeah Yeah Yeahs love songs. There’s that one scene, I think it’s in Pretty in Pink at the end when Molly Ringwald storms out of the party and she’s crying and it’s nighttime, and she’s walking down the suburban street totally distraught. Then Andrew McCarthy, her love interest in the movie, comes running after her, and they run towards each other in the street. It’s just this teenage

project that I was most fascinated by—which of course I haven’t seen in person—is the Stop the Virgens project. It looked like it was an impressive production, I was very impressed. So is there a narrative arc that you can describe for that production?

Yeah, there’s definitely a narrative arc, but I’ll do a really shit job of explaining it. I wish I had one of my buddies who helped produce it with me, they’re so much more eloquent than I am. Give us the Twitter version.

OK. In a way it has more of a mythological vibe to it, about these virEB 4/2014 47

gins who are these creatures born into the world, innocent, but they’re sort of doomed by the central figure who, in a way, is their mother, or something like that. But it’s their rites of passage of discovering life, sexuality, self-expression—to be kind of punished for Dionysian excess and being punished for wanting too much experience. And then, finally, they end up sort of sacrificing themselves at the conclusion.

Christian Joy has been very important for you.

Is this a corollary for growing up? I ask because earlier, you said you felt very drawn to the adolescent period of life, and I wonder if this might be related to that somehow?

We found each other probably about thirteen years ago and have very much grown up together. So what I do, which is hard to explain with music and performance, she does with costume design in a really amazing way. She’s an artist more than a costume designer. And because we’ve basically been working together for thirteen years, we often have common references in mind for any given stage, record, or project. We start bouncing them back very excitedly. Sometimes I’ll have a very specific thing that I want to get done—like in 2009 I really wanted a studded, black leather jacket, a la The Ramones or Michael Jackson, et cetera. So that was a more specific thing, but generally it’s not quite as specific as that. We just talk about artists that are influencing us at that moment, and then I just give her complete freedom to do anything that she wants—outside of maybe wanting a leather jacket or this kind of thing. But traditionally, I don’t see the costume until the night that I’m going to put it on, which is really unusual for a working relationship.

Yeah, I think it probably is. But it’s funny, because the music for that just came flooding out when I was twenty-five, and it was so unconscious, maybe a little bit subconscious, that it took ten years to kind of piece together what the themes and story of it were. So it’s probably all related. What was the most satisfying part about that project for you?

Well, for one thing the production had, like, forty women in it, with a largely female cast and production team. That was a very different experience for me. I grew up in the rock world mostly working with men, almost ninety-nine percent of the time. So that was really satisfying about it. And it was such an insanely ambitious production for someone who’d never done anything like that before, that it just gave me so much more confidence and experience in jumping genres and being able to connect a bunch of different kinds of art, so that was awesome, too. I just wonder if that feeling was related at all to the earlier part of your career when you were actually receiving accolades as a pin-up and a sex symbol, and you were asked to pose for Playboy, which you refused. The spread of experience, or what you must have felt about those different kinds of feedback must have been an interesting contrast.

Yeah, it was a totally interesting contrast. I think in those early days with that kind of stuff it was so bizarre to me, I couldn’t believe I actually got an offer for that kind of thing. It felt like total absurdity, but I guess what I do is kind of absurd, too. I’m probably also not the only person to feel like that after getting made the offer.

How does this relationship operate and how do you guys feed off each other?

“It’s their rites of passage of discovering life, sexuality, self-expression— to be kind of punished for Dionysian excess and for wanting too much experience.”

But now you’re at the stage where you’re able to create an environment from scratch that is open and welcoming and encouraging. It might not have started out that way, but in the end you talk about it as being a sort of affirmation of femaleness.

Yes, absolutely. It is. And I’m trying to catch up with that, too. It’s relatively new for me, and I’m just being more conscious of it. That wasn’t always the case. I feel as though your collaboration with artist and costume designer

48 EB 4/2014

I’m wearing her right now. She’s always with me.

That’s a lot of trust.

Yes. It’s a ton of trust. And I’d say, maybe nineteen times out of twenty, she totally nails it. But there’s one time out of twenty where I’m like, “There’s no way I’m going to wear this.” But no, I do wear pretty much everything that she’s ever made for me. And I will continue to do so. And the other thing is I keep pushing her out of her comfort zone. Because I like to go out of my comfort zone, I just drag her out of hers with me. The costume that she made for me for Crush Songs, the two of them, they’re totally different from anything that she’s ever done before. One of the references was the singer and actress Marlene Dietrich, so she had to make a kind of thirties gown for me, and she’d never done that before. We call it, “the agony of ecstasy,” our collaborations, because there’s a lot of trust, but there’s also a lot of pain and torture. We have a little bit of a sado-masochist relationship in ways, where I drive her crazy with her having to do this, pushing her out of her comfort zone. And she drives me crazy by making things that are really uncomfortable or revealing. I’m pretty much a prude. I read an interview where you said you were like brothers and you beat each other up all the time and you destroyed a dressing room once, somehow.

[laughs] We used to be brothers, but now in our more mature years, we’re more like sisters. ~

A.j. SAMUELS meets MICHaEL GIRA

“ It was

anarchy as a solution

“

Since reforming in 2010, New York noise-rockers Swans have experienced something of a renaissance. But unlike the resurrected projects of so many rock contemporaries, the group surrounding songwriter Michael Gira has lost exactly none of its pathos and only increased in volume. While the band has churned out one critically acclaimed album after the next—most recently 2014’s To Be Kind—it’s their explosive, overtone-rich live performances that have cemented their reputation as arguably the most formidable and influential rock band around today. Left: Michael Gira, photographed in Berlin by Hans Martin Sewcz.

EB 4/2014 51

Michael, the last time I saw Swans was here in Berlin at the Volksbühne a few years ago, and . . .

No, I know. We’re one of the best rock bands ever. I know that. I just know it. Swans have congealed and are one of the most volcanic, eruptive, virile rock outfits ever. I think one of the things that makes what we do so powerful is that it’s generous. Generous how?

I mean we’re as fully embroiled and consumed by the sound as the audience. We give ourselves up to it. We’re not hammering our songs at you. We try to make it elevating for everyone. It’s funny, but talking to an American, I don’t censor myself from using a word like “elevated”. Otherwise I would say “uplifting”. When I interviewed [Swans lap steel guitarist] Christoph Hahn a few months ago, he mentioned that he had two Fender Twin Reverbs a meter and a half away from his head, and still your voice was “as loud as god.” Your band is known for extreme volume levels. Can you tell me a bit about Swans’ history with volume?

Ok, but we’re not louder than Motörhead. We’re not louder than AC/ DC. I think those bands are probably louder—if you call that a band. Rather, “brands” might be more fitting. Our loudness has to do with wanting to feel the sound and be inside of it; to be inside of something bigger than yourself. It’s like sculpting. It’s not about people or even ourselves. And the resonance of the guitars doesn’t happen until at a certain volume level. The same goes for the sustain. When it’s right, it’s like four church choirs singing at once. But historically, very early on, volume was an issue. I don’t know why. I was the bass player and started the songwriting process on bass. I just kept getting more and more gear. I had an SVT, A10s and two five-hundred watt JBL speakers in a reflex cabinet with a Gallien-Krueger head, and since I wasn’t really a bass player doing running lines, I would just play chords on the bass and really want to feel it hit me in the stomach. It was about the physical impact and these chunks of sound. And then we had another bass player on top. We also used a cassette player that played cassette loops because I didn’t have a sampler. For each song we had a different sound, a different tape. Then there were two drummers. So there were a lot of very intense push-pull sounds. None of them were very consonant. And then there was Norman’s guitar, and that was it. But we never used loops with rhythms in them that we would play to, because that seemed really artificial and stultifying to me. It’s like these bands that play with backing tracks or click tracks. That’s horrible to me. I recently saw Tony Allen play as part of a well known trio led by electronic musicians, and a chunk of the time it seemed like he was forced to adapt to their machine groove, which seemed somewhat restraining.

That’s disgusting. That’s not music. That’s, like, advertising. How could you take that rhythm, which is one of the most intense rhythms outside of James Brown—Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat—how could you fucking take that and technify it? That’s just horrible. Electronic music doesn’t reach down into the intestines enough. But I think James Brown, for instance, is a musical genius, with the kind of interlocking rhythm patterns that occur. I mean, it sounds very simple and you want to move, but it’s almost like Bach or something, these pointillist fugues. It’s all these points making this whole. It’s intense. First you respond to it physically and emotionally but then you think about how 52 EB 4/2014

its done, it’s almost inscrutable. Fela Kuti is very similar, he took a lot of influence from James Brown. He incorporated the Afrobeat ideas into it. It’s joyous and wonderful and in terms of the human experience, it’s the highest you can go. Swans isn’t like that at all. But you are ecstatic.

Yeah. You know, despite the fact that you have a magazine called Electronic Beats, I am really anti-electronic music. Well, not “anti”. It’s people’s business, they can do whatever they want. But I feel like post Kraftwerk, [electronic music] is like wearing ten condoms. Wearing more than one condom at the same time doesn’t even work—it creates friction and breaks them all! Although maybe with ten condoms . . .

Even watching someone with a laptop onstage is completely bogus to me. I’m not against found sounds or music as being, um, concrete. But nowadays it seems everything has to be so regimented in these grooves. But that’s just me. Kids like it, so what the fuck? With club music there is the idea that a DJ or producer’s lack of a “performance”, in the rock and roll sense, makes for a different, more egalitarian atmosphere.

“Egalitarian”? That’s anathema to me. It’s not art. To me the most interesting conceptual approach to that was a story Genesis P-Orridge told to me. He was asked to DJ at a rave and he forgot his fucking tapes or something. So you know how when you have a big PA, when you turn it on when it’s not muted it makes this massive popping and exploding sound? He did that for half an hour, just turning the PA on and off. That’s Gen. He’s a genius. That’s making music. Or banging two rocks together. Or two heads together. Have you worked with Genesis in the past?

No, I was friends with him for a while, and we were on the road together solo a couple times before the passing of his beautiful wife. And then, because of life circumstances, I haven’t seen him for a long time. When I saw you perform solo recently in Berlin, I was surprised at how there was still so much volume generated just by your voice and an acoustic guitar. It also seemed like you were often channeling different voices.

That’s phrasing. It’s finding a spot in yourself where the music comes from. If you listen to Nina Simone, it’s like, my god, what a singer. There are five different aspects of her in a single phrase. As I’ve done this tour I’ve also discovered these voices and tried to bring them out a little more. It sounded like you were channeling not only other voices but also other characters. Can you tell me about that?

Not really, because I don’t know. It sort of just happens. I’m guilty of having looked on YouTube to see if anybody posted from that show because I know it was one of the best solo shows I’ve done. I found a clip where I am going into this intense litany of revenge and in the middle I did this thing, where I’m kind of going [makes guttural squealing noise] and I was shocked. It was like another person. I don’t even remember doing it. It was like an evil demon that lived inside of me and just wanted to stick his head out. At the beginning of the show you were really aggressive, telling

people who were talking to “Shut the fuck up!” and threatening the sound guy if he turned you down even the slightest bit. But then you started warming up and by the end your attitude towards the crowd was almost friendly.

You have to train your slave. The orifice has to relax so everybody enjoys themselves. Hmmm.

I’m kidding, of course. But I do want people while I’m there to know that I’m not fucking around. It’s real, and they should shut the fuck up if they’re talking. Why are they there if they’re talking? And why are they looking at their phones? I had this dude in France where I played in this beautiful cathedral with great sound, fold out chairs, 350 people. Everything was great and then I look and see this fucking snit in the front row checking his fucking emails. So I just stopped the song and I was like “Hey, you! What are you doing? Go in the back! Get the fuck out of here! Fuck you! Fuck off!” Then he got up with his girlfriend and made a face and went, I don’t know, to text somewhere. But how dare a person do that? Everybody’s living in this virtual reality experience now, walking around with their phones and watching it through them, too. Nothing’s more infuriating to me. Hip-hop was getting big in New York at around the same time as Swans were developing. Did you follow that development at all in the beginning?

I’ve never related to hip-hop, I have to say. Black music I like—R&B, blues, funk, Fela Kuti, of course. But the whole hip-hop thing to me was too a-musical and too aggressive.

Gira on stage with Swans at the Berghain in Berlin, 2014. Photo by Roland Owsnitzky.

Yeah, I was like that as a kid too. A little bit of Tourette’s [laughing]. One thing that always interested me in performance art were these odd social conjunctions, like Vito Acconci being under this ramp, masturbating while you walk in. Or Chris Burden, Viennese actionists . . . We spoke to Hermann Nitsch a few issues ago for our story on Vienna.

Too aggressive?

Yeah, in a kind of dumb macho way. But that’s just my proclivity. There was some great music that came out of there. But watching some guys gesture and talk about gangs onstage with basically a cassette tape or sampler playing their shit is like karaoke. I don’t want to sound closed-minded because we used samplers and tape loops before. Gradually though I realized it was a bit of a crutch and got rid of it. In fact, when I stopped Swans for the first time, I threw away my samplers and got rid of entire trunks full of floppy disks. I would sample twenty or thirty different kinds of snares, kick drums, babies crying, whales being butt-fucked, whatever. Samples were a part of making Swans. But at some point I just said “Fuck it! I want this shit out of here!” So I took it to the dump and threw it all away. I started writing on acoustic guitar to go to a place where I make something happen right now, with no crutches. What do you mean by “crutch”?

For us, it was volume. I just wanted to play acoustic guitar and look at you and make an event happen. Not in a folky way. And gradually I learned how to do that. Swans is now loud again, but it comes from a deeper place, I think. At your solo performance in Berlin, you got a frog in your throat at one point and shouted, “I have a little negro in my throat.” I was kind of shocked. What was that about?

I don’t know, it just came to me. I always say the wrong thing at the right time. Was that always the case?

Ah, you were in Prinzendorf! Was it good? It was shocking and impressive at the same time. He had interesting things to say about art and morality. Of course Otto Muehl was strongly criticized for his amoral approach to art and for . . .

They did some fucked up shit, which made me think, “I don’t really like this anymore.” There was this video by Otto Muehl, filmed by Kurt Kren, with this woman and a swan. They’re touching each other and there are feathers everywhere. Eventually they cut the head off the thing and she takes the neck and . . . I was just like, you can’t hurt this animal. And then there was Muehl’s commune with the child molestation, and I was like, “Fuck that.” But those guys were pretty intensely good artists, trying to get to the core of reality and change reality. Do you draw a line at a certain point with art? Nitsch explained that he draws no boundaries—or rather, that he doesn’t have to explore them all himself. I found the idea disturbing.

He’s right. It’s almost like a Zen kind of reality at that point. Take the Battle of Stalingrad, for instance, where the Germans and the Russians faced this incredible hardship and cruelty and committed vicious acts of murder and cruelty towards each other. During these winters of intense human suffering and violence, it becomes like an opera. A million people died, you know? It’s a heroic moment in human history, leave the ideology out. It’s a heroic moment in human history. It’s utterly unbelievable. There’s a moment where I leave my ethical judgment aside. But as far as art, when it comes to cruelty towards the innocent, I’d probably be drawing the line. It’s one thing to attack the bourgeoisie—if that even exists anymore. It’s another thing to think you’re some demi-god and that you have no ethical responsibilities whatsoever. EB 4/2014 53

What’s replaced the bourgeoisie?

“Bring the Sun” with Cold Specks.

I think now we’re all just programmed consumers. The more urgent issue at this point is whether we have a self anymore with consumer advertising and media making up our DNA; whether there is free choice or whether we only exists as consumers.

Does she play guitar at all on the album? She’s a great guitar player.

How do you see the increasing corporate involvement in art and music?

That’s another thing I don’t like about rap: the bling. It’s all about consuming. But that’s in rock, too. It’s everywhere. But ever since I was a kid I was obsessed with the idea of advertising. Back then it was television advertising kind of overtaking your mind, and you trying to decide where “you” begin and where influence from all these images impinging on your psyche ends. And vice-versa. I just read a factoid today that the average person sees more images by breakfast than the average person saw in a whole lifetime in 1890. What kind of effect do you think that has on people?

I don’t know, I’m not a sociologist. But you can see it in people. The weirdest of all are these things [points to iPhone] and seeing how quickly they’ve overtaken the culture. Watching people in a city space, which was an interactive space, just walking around staring at screens is so strange. I recently read an interview where you contrast your ability to network with that of Sonic Youth, who were especially good at promoting themselves. You describe traveling across country and making enemies left and right. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Some of your albums are also funded with fan donations. In an article by Sasha Frere-Jones he mentions that for your solo work, you offer fans the opportunity to have a song written about them for 500 dollars. How did you come up with the idea?

I started doing it in 2000 with another band, Angels of Light, creating hand-made CDs with the specific purpose of raising money to do the next record. Because there is a certain group of people that care about the music on a personal level. And since record sales were shit—not because the record industry had collapsed yet back then but because our music was not popular—it was a way to get more people more involved. And I’ve been doing it ever since, much to my chagrin because it’s a huge amount of work. But I thought, “What can I give to people to make them feel like I am really singing to them and thanking them?” It was to write a song for them. I don’t know what the next step is—maybe to go have anal sex with them?

“We negatively networked! I mean, how many enemies can you make around the world?”

It was even worse than that. We negatively networked! I mean, how many enemies can you make around the world? It was just me then. I was a violent motherfucker. I don’t know why. I would just confront the promoter about not having the right PA and then force him to go get it and he would lose money. I was angry about everything and I don’t know why, to be honest. Tell me a bit about what inspired your new album, To Be Kind . The first thing I noticed were the song titles, especially the opener “Screenshot”. I know you’re very active on Facebook . . .

“Active on Facebook.” Does that mean that maybe I’m masturbating a lot? I notice that you can post any random video, and hundreds of people will automatically like it.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I would like to leave Facebook but it’s such an integral part of Swans right now so I have to do it. How was working with St. Vincent?

It was great. She sang on “Kirsten Supine”, “Nathalie Neal” and 54 EB 4/2014

No, she doesn’t. Yeah, she is good, in her own way. But she plays very different than how I would do it.

Always an option.

But these are the things you have to do these days to continue as a musician. So your income is mostly from live shows?

There are some sales. With the level of interest that we have recently, I’d be doing great if it was fifteen years ago when people were still buying records. But whatever. I’ve been learning how to survive since I was fourteen. I just figure out ways to keep going.

Can you tell me a bit about surviving as a kid? I know that as a teenager you spent time in an Israeli jail for getting caught dealing hash.

Yeah, it was scary. I was fifteen from Southern California and suddenly I was in an Israeli jail. The hippies who got caught dealing there would come and go and I stayed. I didn’t have any friends. I was alone. Eventually one of them came and was like, “What are you still doing here after a month and a half?”—because I hadn’t even been charged yet. He went and got me a lawyer and the lawyer got me charged. So I got out and was then sentenced to another month and a half by a judge to a juvenile facility. There I met some hippies who protected me. The one thing I learned how to do in the jail cell is read, because the hippies would read books. For instance, I don’t remember if this is apocryphal or not, but I recall I read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and The Miracle of the Rose. I also read some Frank Harris, some Oscar Wilde and maybe some Marquis de Sade. The important thing is that before that, I was just a kid fucked up on drugs and then after I read. The other thing I learned is how oppressive—like a physical weight—time can be. I was sitting in the cell often quite alone. And it’s like the weight of

the universe is just bearing down on you when you’re there by yourself. I learned the urgency of time. And not to take any sides in the conflict in Israel, which I guess is eternal, but I saw Arabs coming in who had been tortured. This is 1969. They would tie their hands to their ankles and put a stick between there and twirl them and beat them with another stick. And they would burn the bottom of their feet with cigarettes. The recovery room for them was my cell, so I would talk to some of these guys. One of them was a doctor, another one was just a family guy. And back then when bombings occurred, they would round up entire towns of men and interrogate them all.

No. I got in a fight once on acid at a punk gig. I mean more extreme behavior. I remember leaving a punk gig in downtown L.A. and everybody walking down the street and breaking every window of the cars along the way. It was anarchy as a solution. It’s nice. What’s your relationship to religion?

I was raised Catholic and I’ve always had spiritual aspirations, but I’m smart enough to never be interested in dogmatic religion, because I realize that any sort of template or structure you place on reality is instantly going to dissolve. Usually in religion, histories are apocryphal, at best. But the aspiration to be a part of something bigger than yourself and to touch something sacred in life is universal and wonderful. So my religion, in that sense, is Swans. It is the music. But I started going back to church recently. You know, I’m on the outside, but there’s something about it I really like. I’m sort of an observer, but I’m not cynical. I don’t believe the Bible is the literal book of god, but it is interesting to me. There’s certainly something in all religions which speaks of a greater potential in humans.

How did you end up in Israel?

It’s a complicated story. After my fucked up childhood, my family was told by the authorities in Los Angeles that I would be put in juvenile hall until I was eighteen unless my father came to get me. This is because my mother was basically an incurable alcoholic, and I was on my own since the time I was young. They were divorced. So my father came and got me and took me first to South Bend, Indiana, where he was an executive consultant for building a factory for Bendix Brakes. Before that he had his own aircraft company in Los Angeles in the fifties and sixties. They made brake systems for airplanes. When that failed he became a consultant and then eventually got hired by a big company in Europe. I went with him. Then I ran away, hitchhiked around Europe and got caught. I then stayed in Germany for a year in Solingen working in a tool factory. Then he told me, “You have to go to school now, son.” He was going to send me off to a school in the Swiss Alps, which was a fancy school the children of the company he worked for could go to. I said no and ran away with a couple of older hippies I met in Solingen. We hitchhiked down through Germany into Yugoslavia, then down into Greece and from there to Turkey. We stayed in Istanbul for a little while and then had just enough money to get to Israel because they had a contact there. At the time it wasn’t easy to enter. We arrived there penniless and stayed in a Kibbutz. They were selling drugs, trying to send hash through the mail back to the States. Pretty stupid. I got involved too, and when the hippies left the Kibbutz, they left the hash with me. When the rest of the Kibbutz found out I had the hash, they called the police and they came but I escaped with the hash to Jerusalem and was in a youth hostel trying to sell it. There the police found and arrested me. You mentioned before that you were a violent person.

Shit yeah. I don’t know why, but yes. Physically fighting with people?

In terms of your lyrics and how you deliver them, I sometimes had the impression that you’re singing from god’s perspective.

I just gravitate towards that. It’s not like I try and teach anybody anything or show anybody anything. It’s just who I am. But is the door open just a crack for believing in something greater?

Michael Gira’s noisy chronology, top to bottom: Swans’ first LP, 1983’s Filth, was conceived as a series of one-chord simplifications to punk’s three; 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind, is a breathtaking collection of live tracks and ambient experiments and their second to last album before going on hiatus; 2004’s I Am Singing to You from My Room is one of Gira’s most melodic solo LPs; 2014’s To Be Kind sees Swans return to ecstatic explosions of complex emotion.

I believe in cosmic unity, a god inside us. But you have to be careful when you start believing in god if you care about truth—that it’s not wishful thinking. So when I’m reading the Bible for instance, I know these are just ancient stories. It’s not like god was on the mountain and told these things. They’re myths and tales that were compiled over centuries. But they do form a kind of narrative that speaks to our beginnings. The book of Genesis talks about the beginnings of the Jewish people—where their place is in the world. But it all kind of involves, like . . . when did the Bible start, 1500 B.C.? Can you imagine being a nomad or herder and looking up at the sky? What did they see? They knew nothing about science, nothing about the cosmos. And so of course the world was probably vibrating with magic. Have you ever been to the MET in New York and gone to the Egyptian room? Or to the one at the National Museum in London? It’s astounding when you look at the sandals or mirrors or combs and you think about their view of the universe and the information they had. It was tiny. Basically, the world must have been this psychedelic experience. ~ EB 4/2014 55

Mark Smith talks to Agnieszka PolskA

A large community of artists, curators and galleries remain detached from society” Twenty-nine year old Polish artist Agnieszka Polska has set herself the artistically ambitious task of trying to change the past. By de- and reconstructing archival images, Polska bends official art historical narratives, both of Poland’s artistic avant-garde and the art world at large. Indeed, her films and animations project beyond their highly specific subject matter with an eerie aesthetic, bolstered by pop-musical references to Can and collaborations with Sun Araw. But does her art interface with the “real” world as much as her recent boycott of the Biennale of Sydney? Left: Agnieszka Polska, photographed in Berlin by Alisa Resnik.

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Agniezska, how does the history, context and identity of being Polish factor into your work?

I think that artists from Eastern Europe have a certain attitude towards the issue of memory. It’s strongly connected to the change of the system after 1989. The archived historical information was distorted; it’s this unusual thing of living in a part of Europe where your past is not very certain. I think that this is visible in my practice, for sure. It’s not really being Polish that plays a part, it’s more being from Eastern Europe. I analyze the topics of memory and reconstructing the past in many of my works. I try to reshape the past with present activities. It seems like you’re often staging a history related artistic intervention with your work.

I think about it in a similar way to a film from the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder called The Niklashausen Journey. The story takes place in the Middle Ages and follows a group of people who are proto-communist activists of sorts. Naturally, they are concerned about the situation of peasants so they stage a revolution in a theatrical way. They have an actress—Hanna Schygulla—who pretends to be the Virgin Mary to one peasant so that he thinks that he’s having a revelation. Then she suggests to him to start a revolution and so it follows. The difference, I suppose, is that nothing I’ve done has had a real impact on our future. It’s more analysis. But earlier this year you did boycott the Biennale of Sydney because their major sponsor, Transfield, an infrastructural maintenance company, had disturbing financial connections to the offshore detention camps of Australian asylum seekers.

Yes, I was one of the artists who withdrew, and eventually Transfield withdrew too. That was a very specific situation because the connection between the Biennale and the source of the money was just so obvious and striking. Withdrawing was the only thing we could really think of, but it was a very hard time and very complicated. What is sad is that this action probably had an effect only inside of the art community; it raised awareness about the ethical sources of sponsoring culture but it didn’t have any effect on the Australian government’s policy of mandatory detention centers. Of course, each case is different, and the cultural boycott is not a good solution to either. For example, I’m not a supporter of boycotting Israel or Russia in the field of culture, because it’s crucial not to deprive these societies of information. These situations are very sophisticated, and in each case you need to consider everything individually because they’re totally different. Do you feel that as an artist you’re often forced to confront difficult ethical situations and adopt a viewpoint?

I think that it’s a very positive thing that it happens often in the art world. On the one hand, artists, curators and the public are more aware of the issues; they have a broader political awareness. But on the other, the art world is increasingly supported by

unethical sources. The Berliner artist Hito Steyerl made a very interesting piece about this tension for the last Istanbul Biennial. She produced a work called Is the Museum a Battlefield? In a very lyrical way it analyzed how the Biennial was sponsored by corporations with ties to the war industry and how the battlefields which they supply are transferred into the institutions that they sponsor. I think it’s very important to realize that we are the participants of this battle in every aspect of our lives. When did art begin to be a fascination for you?

I was always quite interested in art, especially in animated film so I started to study art in Krakow and then Berlin. At first I was doing animated film but recently I’ve been more interested in narrative and cinematic forms. This is how I started working with actors. My mother is an art historian. She studied art history, so it was always present in my home. She’s not into contemporary art, so I was exposed to that only after I started to be interested in it myself. I think it was the outcome of the flows of education in socialist Poland. They were not taught contemporary art; if you were an artist or a student you were given no knowledge of this. A lot of your earlier animations use the archives of defunct Eastern European socialist states as a source for aesthetic materials.

It depends on the work. In many earlier works I was using older materials scanned from books and magazines, but it really depends on the intellectual content of the piece. For example, if I produce a work about how a piece of art changes through time, then I’ll use scans of photographs of the works from a certain period. But in my new works I use different sorts of materials. In my last two animations I used the same technique as my earlier work, but the photographs come from contemporary sources. The usage of the source must be strongly connected to the theory behind the piece. For example, in the recent film I made called Future Days, which is not an animation, I used figures from art history and elements of art history itself. I created a phantasmagoric image of heaven for artists where they would go after death. It would give them a possibility to meet, especially the artists from Eastern Europe who never met the artists from the Western world because of the problems with getting a passport. So it was actually the first possibility for them to have an encounter. It was a very ironic image. Speaking of humor, has anyone ever told you that your work is sometimes reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python?

Many people have told me this, and for sure there is an association. I once had a very funny situation at the airport when I was flying to Israel. You have these horribly strict security controls when you’re flying to the country. The guards told me that I need to prove that I am an artist. It was a ridiculous moment; I had to take out my computer and show them my films in the middle of the airport. But they really liked them and said, “This is like Monty Python! OK!” Tell me about the artists and art theorists you included in your imaginary heaven for Future Days.

Some of them are well known like Bas Jan Ader and Lee Lozano.

Right: A still from Agnieszka Polska’s 2013 film Future Days, in which a group of renowned deceased artists (Paul Thek, Andrzej Szewczyk, Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske, Bas Jan Ader, Włodzimierz Borowski) and one art theorist/curator (Jerzy Ludwinski) ´ meet in a heaven that looks a lot like hell. Like much of Polska’s work, Future Days questions its own relevance beyond the art world: “They dream about coming back to earth. I think that it refers to art in general, to how art is isolated from society and how artists are trying to get back to society and have a real world influence.”

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There’s Charlotte Posenenske, the Polish artist Włodzimierz Borowski and the curator Jerzy Ludwinski. ´ I’ve chosen them because they’re all very important for me and influenced me a lot. Also, I think what binds them together is that they all left the art scene at some point and in different ways. Charlotte Posenenske decided that artists have no effect on society so it would be better to study sociology. That’s what she did instead of practicing art. Lozano stopped communicating with artists or any art people because she didn’t feel comfortable in art society. She considered her withdrawal a work of art and called it a “drop out piece”. She had another work that ran for the last twenty years of her life known as the “boycott women” piece, where she literally stopped talking to women. This piece was meant to last for two months but it ended up going for twenty years. I’m interested in this very radical position taking in culture and also the idea of leaving art is interesting to me. I think of this as a very brave statement. Also some of these artists couldn’t make the deliberate decision to live through art; Paul Thek was excluded from the art world even though he was later acknowledged as a great influential artist. People didn’t understand this at the time. Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea, cruising through the ocean. Still some people say it was planned. So the “heaven” you’ve created is an ideal environment for artists to meet who perhaps wouldn’t want to?

But, in a sense, part of your work shows the ridiculousness of artists, illuminating their hopeless abstraction from day to day life.

I wouldn’t call it the “ridiculousness”. Rather, it’s more about showing the state of melancholy that you enter trying to overcome that distance. You often use pop music in your work. Is that also a way of attempting to overcome that distance?

Well, music is quite important. Apart from the works that are specifically about sound itself, I always try to have good music in my pieces, and I like working with musicians. For Future Days I used the pieces of the American musician Sun Araw and Polish musician Stara Rzeka. And Sun Araw wrote the music especially for Watery Rhymes, a video I recently showed in Nottingham. It’s quite short, around three and a half minutes, and it looks a bit like a music video. He made the song, and I made the animation at the same time so it was a real collaboration. Also, the title of Future Days was based on the Can record of the same name. I was listening to Can at the time and I thought this is the best option for a film about heaven. The film doesn’t refer to the album itself but it was such a good title for a piece about this imaginary happening, because death is our obvious future.

“I had to take out my computer and show them my films in the middle of the airport. But they really liked it and said, ‘This is like Monty Python! OK!’”

Yes, in fact this state of being in heaven is a very sorry state because the artists are forced to meet in eternity. And that’s another question of the film: Is art possible at all in a state of timelessness—that is, a state that excludes the possibility of change? My video presents this group of people who are aimlessly wandering through these meadows of heaven and are trapped in this situation. They dream about coming back to earth. I think that it refers to art in general, to how art is isolated from society and how artists are trying to get back to society and have a real world influence. There are many artists who are trying to influence their social surroundings in many ways; still we cannot deny that a large community of artists, curators and galleries remain detached from society.

Did you grow up relating art to activism?

Well, I’m from Lublin, which is a city where you need to have a good reason to go to. I think even in Poland not many people go there, and this creates an interesting scene for the arts because it’s very isolated. Lublin artists are very different from the artists that we know. They have their own style of clothing and their own style of producing art, which is very much like an urban activism. When you live there, especially as a teenager, you think this is the worldwide common thing for artists. I remember that they would only wear bell-bottoms. I just thought this is how artists look. Then you move to another city and you discover that you were wrong.

How can artists overcome this distance and make a real world impact?

You mentioned that Future Days poses the question of whether art is possible in an infinite state of being. Is mortality a necessary condition in creating art?

I think it would be a lie if I said that I try to overcome this distance. For example, Future Days isn’t so easy to understand for people who aren’t into art history. Yet reaching such people through art is crucial to me. On a certain level it’s not necessary to have this academic knowledge in order to get something from art. I believe there is still a possibility of an inner change in individuals, even if it’s not a change on a big scale.

Well, I was thinking about how the state of eternity excludes the possibility of any change because anything and everything will happen in eternity, so change is not important. And art is not possible in a state where change is not possible. These dead artists who go to heaven in Future Days won’t have a fear of death or oblivion anymore, and so they wouldn’t have an interest in producing art in the first place. But that’s kind of the joke. ~

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SOUND IN MOTION Part I

Roller Skating, Civil Rights and the Wheels Behind American Dance Music How African American roller skating communities changed the groove. Featuring interviews with: Tasha Klusmann, Bill Butler, Danny Krivit, ShaProStyle, RP Boo, DJ Spinn and more.

Revelers grooving with their skates on during this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Halloween party at The Rink on East 87th St. in Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s South Side. Photo: Satoki Nagata

A view of the floor over the shoulder of JBs specialist DJ DMC at The Rink. Photo: Satoki Nagata

A still from the upcoming documentary United Skates by Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown, which focuses on African American style skate communities across the United States. Pictured here is a regular parking lot pimpin’ session held at an Appleby’s in Richmond, Virginia. According to Winkler and Brown, “adult skate” is often seen as a euphemism to denote “black” skate sessions.

DJ Spinn getting back to his rink roots in front of the rental desk at the Markham Roller Rink, Markham, Illinois.

In our new four part series Sound in Motion, we take a look at wheel-based subcultures that have had an especially important relationship to the development of musical subgenres. It goes without saying that ideas surrounding the rolling and cruising experience—from roller skating grooves and the importance of punk, hardcore and hip-hop for skateboarding, to productions tailored specifically to car audio bass—have long permeated pop cultural consciousness. In short, wheels matter for music, and we’d like to find out how much. Here’s a look at how sound and motion have fed back into each other in the past and continue to do so today.

n the beginning there was the loop. The history of modern roller skating and its relationship to dance music is one of direction, flow and repetition: on the most micro level, wheels turn, allowing pivots and limbs to swerve and sway. Zooming out farther, skaters cruise at rinks counterclockwise in an oval, over and over again, lost in rhythm but always gliding in time to an allpowerful groove laid down by the DJ. However, skating isn’t just defined by a smoothness dictated by the DJs predominantly groove- and loop-based music. Rather, it has long fed back into the production of dance music that’s as popular outside of the rink as inside. And yet within the broader pop cultural narrative, roller skating, like disco, still receives short shrift as a fad that went out of style with pet rocks. That is, predominantly for white communities. Because roller skating in the United States—specifically “style” skating—has long been an African American past time. And unbeknownst to most of white America, where roller rinks have long closed down or are used predominantly for “artistic” breakdance and figure skating-like competi-

SOUND IN MOTION, Part I

Style Skating and the Evolution of Dance Music in Chicago and NYC Essay and Interviews: A.J. Samuels Photos: Satoki Nagata, William Glasspiegel

tions, skate culture in African American communities continues to be as popular today as it ever was. Yet its influence on the development of dance music, from disco, funk and R&B, to hip-hop, crunk, Miami bass, techno and, later on, footwork, has long gone criminally under-documented—a glaring omission also reflected in the larger context of academic roller skating histories. In short, skating has been vital to both the evolution of popular American dance and dance music for decades. And to understand why is to understand the remarkable space that it occupies at the very core of American civil rights struggles. First, a brief history. In the U.S. in the forties and fifties, roller rinks, like swimming pools, amusement parks, and other spaces of recreation in America, were strongholds of de facto segregation in the North, where the second phase of large scale African American migration from the South had recently come to a close. But unlike the then newly implemented integration of the labor force and the U.S. military, which were guided by the pragmatic color-blindness of American capitalism and militarism,

skating rinks were amongst the last bastions of social “leisure” spaces separating white from black. As historian Victoria Wolcott explains in her singular work connecting roller skating and civil rights history, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America, co-ed dance and music culture at roller rinks ultimately provoked widespread fear of interracial sexuality: “In sites where leisure was consumed actively and men and women mixed, segrega-

“In sites where leisure was consumed actively and men and women mixed, segregation invariably followed.” Victoria Wolcott

tion invariably followed.” This intensified when, at the same time, the introduction of vinyl and the accessibility of record players revolutionized the music that was played in rinks. In

cities like Chicago and Detroit, gaudy tones of the Wurlitzer organ—the familiar hurdygurdy-like sound of American amusement—were replaced by early R&B à la Jimmy Forrest, Count Basie, or Duke Ellington. Suddenly, quad skates—an innovation from the original nineteenth-century inline skate design—were being used to their full potential as tools of dance to early groove and swing-based music in African American skate communities. But “black” skate nights weren’t simply provided by white rink owners in the forties; they were hard won through civil disobedience. Many of the first sit-ins in America protesting racial inequality were actually “skate-ins”, which took place across the northern United States a good twenty years before the mass mobilization of marchers fighting legal segregation in the South. These included the violent White City Roller Rink protests in Chicago, as well as NAACP-led rallies at the Alhambra Roller Skating Rink in Syracuse, New York and at Harriet Island Park in St. Paul, Minnesota, amongst numerous others. And while rinks everywhere were transformed into battlegrounds in the fight for equal rights, the result, paradoxically, was often not the integration ideal, with black and white skaters gliding to a new rhythm together, but rather exclusively “black” nights and “white” nights; or alternately, exclusively “black” rinks, albeit often with white owners—a phenomenon that persists to this day, much to the chagrin of the African American skate community, and key figures like skate historian Tasha Klusmann. Klusmann, a Washington D.C. native, runs the National African American Roller Skating Archive, housed at the prestigious Howard University which boasts hundreds of interviews with style skaters and DJs. For her, African American culture is as integral a part of roller skating history as skate EB 4/2014 71

Left to right: Danny Krivit, the late DJ Julio and Robert “Big Bob“ Clayton at The Roxy in Manhattan, 2006.

history is to African American culture—a position largely ignored by historians of both. Today’s African American style skating communities across the U.S. still regularly experience difficulty in finding rinks to host larger late night “adult” parties—an obvious vestige of a historical struggle. This is also reflected in the usurpation of dance moves pioneered in black skate communities by “jam” skaters celebrated in predominantly white mainstream skate circles. For Klusmann, music and skate style are two sides of the same coin, developed in tandem with the introduction of soul, R&B, funk and early disco into the rinks. But the marked regional differences in music played in the rinks across the country, from the fifties up through the eighties, were partially a result of the fight for independent African American radio formats—that is, in contrast to today’s nationalized generic music conglomerates that control the airwaves. As she put it, “When I was a teenager we didn’t have national radio. There were local D.C. radio 72 EB 4/2014

stations only, so what music we liked might not have been what was going on in Detroit and New York and any place else. Every hub had the music it liked, and this was really the case with the black community. For D.C. in the seventies, it was Melvin Lindsey’s original Quiet Storm show on Howard University radio WHUR-FM.” With a few exceptions, notably Amy Reinink’s excellent writing on the D.C. skate scene, and a promising upcoming documentary United Skates by Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown, which focuses more on African American skate culture at large, little has been done on the significant influence of skate culture on dance music. Ultimately, countless rinks in African American neighborhoods have functioned as veritable petri dishes for the regional development of dance music cultures and were often equipped with separate dancefloors (occasionally “kiddy” discos), where young performers would get their first break and budding DJs could expand their repertoire on top of playing for the skaters.

This story and the following interviews should by no means be considered an exhaustive account of the music inspired by and played for skating’s smooth glide within the rinks’ larger loop. It also shouldn’t be considered a detailed account of the relationship between

race, segregation and style skating. Those each deserve separate books, and would have to include cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston and St. Louis (amongst others), all of which have big skate scenes and notable musicians born from them. Nor is the emphasis here on the act of skating or the vibrant scene itself. Instead, this is about the historical foundations of influential dance music sub-cultures. The interviews here are, barring a few notable exceptions, with DJs and producers whose reach in dance music has gone beyond that of the rink to be able to explain the music’s influence outside of it. Here in Part One, the focus will be New York’s original disco and boogie powered style skate explosion and a brief introduction to the birth of the hip-hop groove, as well as Chicago’s reworkings of James Brown and the fever-pitched footwork that developed alongside of it. Stay tuned for Part Two in our Spring issue, which will delve into Baltimore snap skating, Detroit’s basement techno parties on wheels, the birth of crunk in Memphis’s most infamous roller rink and more.

New York City – Disco, Boogie and Beyond:

Danny Krivit

It goes without saying that in dance music history, it doesn’t get much more fertile an environment than New York in the late seventies and early eighties, from which disco, house and hip-hop would emerge. Empire Roller Rink in Brooklyn is often credited as the nucleus of the funkier, bass-driven skate styles. DJs such as the legendary Robert “Big Bob” Clayton—still an active selector on the national roller skating scene—introduced a disco vibe that matched the utterly original moves previously introduced to the rink by the godfather of style skating, Detroit-native

Bill Butler. As Butler explained to me recently by telephone from Atlanta, the true revolution in skating at Empire came with his own insistence on introducing the slow groove of Count Basie’s “Night Train” to Empire’s then primitive sound system in the fifties: “In Detroit we had to picket to skate a single night because it was an especially segregated city at the time. Then I landed in Brooklyn in 1957 and changed the whole concept of roller skating by introducing Count Basie. Everything after that became skating to the downbeat, and the rest is history. See, space plus the beat

equals all strides. I could have been a mechanical engineer, but I chose to roller skate.” While Butler would go on to develop many of the strides and dance moves that became de rigueur for style skaters in the disco era (documented according to region in his famous how-to style skating book Jammin’), Manhattan’s Roxy roller rink would prove to be equally influential in terms of its selectors, amongst whom dance music pioneers DJ Julio and Danny Krivit stood out. Krivit, a DJ, producer and founder of the legendary 718 Sessions party in New York, sees an enormous and often undiscussed influence of New York’s groove-based skate music styles on much of the disco and post-disco tracks made in the seventies and eighties. As a native New Yorker and a bus boy in his father’s legendary West Village cafe, The Ninth Circle, Krivit grew up surrounded by music and musicians who defined various eras in popular music, from childhood friend Nile Rodgers of Chic and neighbor Ian Underwood of The Mothers of Invention to meetings with James Brown. Here, Krivit takes us through style skating’s most defining era in New York dance music: I roller skated when I was a kid with little metal skates. It was just an activity like any other. I certainly didn’t think of going to a roller skating rink, even though they did exist, because at the time rinks that I knew of only played muzak and melodies. It was not rhythm, and certainly nothing with a beat. The rinks back then didn’t encourage that. And ethnic or “non-white” rinks were pretty segregated. But this started to change in the seventies in New York, which is also when certain rinks started to play entirely different music than before. Ultimately, the real change in skating came from when people stopped skating to

melody and started skating to the groove. For me, at the center of this was Bill Butler and DJs like Big Bob at the Empire Roller Rink in Brooklyn in the mid-seventies. Around the same time I got my first more serious pair of three-hundred-dollar skates. Suddenly I could control how I moved, even dance on skates. By ’77 I started seeing that there was a whole skating scene. Then, in the Summer of ’79, I DJ’d an outdoor skating party, which is where I met DJ Julio, with whom I would come to DJ with at The Roxy. That was the first time I played just for skaters. Disco had gotten very strong towards the end of the seventies, but the music also seemed to get a bit whiter and more about the beat than the groove. Even though my style was more soulful and funky and perfect for roller skating, it had me kind of not in the disco trend. I wasn’t playing “Born To Be Alive” but rather B.T. Express. When I played the roller skating gig, it was suddenly much more groove oriented, much more what I was actually into. And for my mixing style, the skating was also teaching me something: It wasn’t about mixing things only beat on beat, it was more about mixing in the groove. And it was also more down tempo, not as frantic, and not choppy. When I got the opportunity to audition at The Roxy in December 1979, I didn’t think I had much chance of getting the job. I was competing against a lot of the city’s top DJs. But The Roxy was such a huge rink, with the DJ booth way at the far end, and they didn’t have any monitors for the audition, so when you were trying to mix, there was this huge delay and echo on the beat. A lot of the DJs weren’t prepared for that and ended up doing train wreck mixes and also played a lot of inappropriate stuff. So when I came on, you can see from the things that were in my chart from the same month, like Shalamar, Prince and Trussel, that I was play-

ing skaters jams. I also knew this element of record store style mixing, which was bringing something in at a very low volume and correcting it on the first or second beat before anyone else really hears anything wrong, and then bringing up the volume and completing the mix correctly. The owner of Roxy, Steven Greenberg, told me I was the main DJ. Julio, who was an established roller skating DJ already at the Metropolis, was also in. Steven was not an easy person to work for, but I made it through to the next owner, also named Steve, who owned another slightly larger rink in Long Island called Laces, where I also got a job and remained there as their main DJ for ten years. Some weeks I’d DJ seven nights a week, but I always played for skaters at least two nights a week. It was a very different scene than club music, but the roller skating groove seemed very natural to me and grounded me musically. The end of 1979 was the height of the “disco sucks” period. Around the same time I started to play at Roxy for skaters, most clubs were fleeing from disco, but they didn’t know what to replace it with. New wave was the first replacement choice, but it didn’t really stick. Then there was freestyle and eventually people thought, “Maybe we can get into rap,” but it was still too early for that. That’s about when house music slipped in, kind of a raw stripped down version of disco. While this was all happening, roller skating was still really strong, and there’s something about roller skating music that was a hybrid of the best things about disco and radio R&B, like a clubbier version of radio R&B. Roller skating music was also starting to refine itself. A good example of that is “Give Me The Night” by George Benson. If you listen to it closely when you’re skating, you’ll notice that instead of having an emphasis on every other beat, there’s a clap every eighth or sixteenth beat. It’s where you would push with one foot on

the emphasis and the next foot on the other emphasis, which was the ideal skating groove. Of course, there were more high energy or down tempo grooves, but this was in the pocket, and a lot of music made at the time was right there. A lot of producers and bands didn’t necessarily want to admit that some of the music they made was particularly for skating, while you had other songs that were explicitly about skating, which was kind of ironic, as they didn’t fit into the real skate groove at all. You had this movie Roller Boogie, and they pushed Earth Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” as this roller skating song, and when you saw people skating to that, there was no larger rhythm. It was as if everyone had headphones on skating to a different beat! On the other hand, something like Vaughan Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” worked really well. At the time, I was in a DJ record pool, and we would also go to record companies for records. My friend Bobby Shaw was at Warner Brothers and we were always going to his office to get new records on Fridays. He had a lot of key releases for roller skating, like “Are You For Real” by Deodato, “Love X Love” and “Give Me the Night” by George Benson, “More Bounce To The Ounce” by Zapp. The group of DJs that gathered in the office were a lot more R&B oriented like myself, and half of them would show up in the rink regularly. Also, in the beginning of the eighties, a lot of people were looking at the dance charts and thinking that something weird was happening, because the top dance songs charted seemed to have no relationship to sales. In contrast, the R&B charts were directly related to sales. You would see a lot of producers and promoters coming to the roller rinks, because if I was playing a new song and it was a hit in the rink, they knew it was going to stick. Roller skating had a certain strength to it in predicting hit material—that is, as opposed to club music: certain EB 4/2014 73

songs were huge hits only in specific clubs, but didn’t really sell if they weren’t also on the radio. I remember when I was working the intro of “Risin’ To The Top” by Keni Burke, Rick James was there and apparently picked up on the groove. It seemed like a very short time after that, he produced Mary Jane Girls’ “All Night Long” and followed up with a couple of songs which were exactly that groove! No doubt, a lot of people were going to the roller skating rink to pick things. Later on, when I was playing at Laces in Long Island at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties, hip-hop was really coming into its own. At Laces, there were a lot of hip-hop artists looking for the grooves for their records. Spinderella, who ended up being the DJ in Salt-N-Pepa, was a big roller skater and would bring me her very first productions to check out. Salt-N-Pepa actually all met at Laces. Slick Rick was also a regular, along with The Fat Boys, the group Guy, LL Cool J and De La Soul. To me it seemed like there was an entire hip-hop scene around picking the skate grooves. With The Roxy, the owners had too much to say about what should be played there, so I liked to take the “off” days. Julio didn’t care and liked having the bigger nights, which was still only a crowd of three to four hundred. I, on the other hand, didn’t like being told what to play, because sometimes the owner would come and demand “YMCA” or “Le Freak” and people would jump up, even if they didn’t like the song. The owner felt vindicated. So what I did was take Monday, the slowest night, with maybe only thirty people, but guaranteed owners day off, and as I started to play what I thought was the right music, in a very short time thirty jumped to a thousand people. The owner was looking at the books going, “What’s up with Mondays?” He showed up and asked me how this happened and I told him, “I’m just playing what I think is really roller 74 EB 4/2014

skating music.” He said, “What if I told you to play ‘YMCA’ or ‘Le Freak’?” I said, “You’re my boss and I would play it. But if you’re asking me, it’s a mistake.” And he said, “OK, I get it, those songs don’t work any more, but what would you suggest to replace them to get people jump started?” At the time it was “Heartbeat” by Taana Gardner, which even took Larry [Levan] at the Paradise Garage a month to get people into, because in the clubs people wanted uptempo, and “Heartbeat” was considered a “druggy” left field disco record. Eventually, Frankie Crocker of WBLS got on it, and it became this huge

“To me it seemed like there was an entire hip-hop scene around picking the skate grooves.” Danny Krivit

pop hit. And of course early rap records were sampling it a lot too. But before all that, it was a roller skating anthem. Anyhow, when I played “Heartbeat”, the crowd went nuts! And my boss looked at me and was like, “Wow, this is something I never would have guessed.” Then I get a call from another DJ who was doing a Hi-NRG night at Roxy, and he was like, “It was bad enough when the boss was forcing ‘YMCA’ and ‘Le Freak’ on me. Now he’s telling me in the middle of a Hi-NRG set to play ‘Heartbeat’!” With other DJs like Julio, we played a lot of the same music, but Julio also played a lot of pop, which I didn’t really identify with roller-skating, because it didn’t keep that groove. And when his skaters showed up, they were all really good skaters but not

as much bopping in time to one single groove. And not as many people could fit onto the floor or it would be too chaotic. But with my night, it was insanely crowded, and as a result, apart from doing “men only” or “women only” interludes, you also had to bring down the groove a lot slower—otherwise there were too many accidents. So that’s why things in the speed of “Heartbeat” became peak songs, and also why a record that I heard only a bit on the radio and not at all in the clubs—Keni Burke’s “Risin’ to the Top”— became the absolute peak. Especially when I would cut up the intro to make it extra long. I remember around the summer of 1979 I was skating around the streets with my girlfriend at the time, and I would call up Larry [Levan] who actually lived in the back of the Paradise Garage, where he had an apartment at the time. I’d call and say, “Hey, I’m just skating around, can I come by?” And he says, “Sure, I’m just getting up.” So when we get there he turns on the sound system and plays some of the new records he got that week, and we’re skating around the club to him DJing. As a club, the Garage seemed pretty big, but for skating it actually felt quite small, especially compared to Roxy. It felt like one big turn. But Larry also came to Roxy a lot, and he in particular was really impressive on skates. I told him, “Wow, you’re really good!” And he goes, “Yeah, I used to be a skate guard at Empire Roller Rink!” He was talking to me at the edge of the booth, when I put on “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” by Eddie Kendricks and he’s like, “No you didn’t!” So on skates he races to the floor. I’m not really paying that much attention, but then I don’t see him for a few weeks. And when I went to the Garage, I saw him with his arm in a sling and I’m like “What happened?” and he tells me, “You played that song and I ended up pulling my arm out on the rail because I wanted to get onto the floor

so fast!” Alex Rosner, who did the sound for David Mancuso at The Loft, was also a really hardcore skater. He actually always wanted me to play Latin music, which is a good example of how people can find the groove in whatever music they really like, even if it’s not what I would call ideal skating music. I’ve been a Billboard reporter for many years, and still am, but in the eighties the girl running the charts kicked me off reporting—until she was replaced—because she didn’t think DJing for skaters really counted, comparing it to playing in a bowling alley or pool hall. It seemed like a lot of people really had no idea how influential roller skating music was. But a lot of what was happening in the Garage for example, was stuff I also was playing in the rink. A lot of skaters also went to the Garage, and Larry’s taste in music could make my crowd bend a little. Like this record by the Funk Masters, “Love Money”, which is a great groove, but borderline too fast for skating. But because it worked in the Garage, it was accepted for skating. “Numbers” by Kraftwerk was another one. The other way around, I embraced Alicia Myers “I Want to Thank You”, which ended up becoming a huge hit. Once, Larry came by my house, and I played him the record but he didn’t pay much attention because he liked to discover his own stuff. But I got asked to play at the Garage for the first anniversary of Judy Weinstein’s record pool. There’s this famous picture on the Internet of two guys dancing— Larry Patterson and David Todd on the floor—and that picture was taken when I was playing that night. Anyhow, Larry asked me when I played Alicia Myers “What’s going on?”, as if I was holding out on him in terms of hot records. And I told him, “I played that for you already! I thought you’d like it because it worked so well at the rink!” The next week he’s playing the song, Frankie Crocker from WBLS hears it, it hits radio

and becomes a massive hit. Of course, Tee Scott’s remixes were also huge for skating, and there was another very strong overlap there between he club and the rink.

s skating’s star began to shine less bright in the media at the dawn of the eighties, The Roxy continued to play an important role in NYC dance music, this time as host of the earliest club-based hip-hop parties, organized by Kool Lady Blue and featuring the likes of hip-hop innovators Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, the Rocksteady Crew and others. And while Blue famously advertised the party as “no skating”, she readily admitted in a recent email interview to a disco influence in the beats that were being rapped on, audible perhaps in sets by attendees such as DJ Hollywood and Love Bug Starski. Rock Steady Crew member Mr. Wiggles also cites skate moves as having had a sizeable impact on the development of electro-boogie and breakdancing from the beginning: “The dances and routines had footwork that we emulated on the dance floor without skates on. The bounce feels that skaters did led the way to how we added more bounce to our moves. I can remember that you could see how a cat danced by the way he skated.” Indeed, as rinks like Roxy, Empire and Laces in Long Island became magnets for up and coming hip-hop producers seeking grooves for productions, New York hip-hop royalty such as Marley Marl, Russell Simmons and, later on, Irv Gotti all spent time promoting parties at various rinks, where seemingly every major hip-hop artist in the infancy of the genre’s development performed. Accordingly, New York style skate music (often referred to as “boogie”—the bridge between disco and house) occupies a unique place in hip-hop from the late eight-

ies and early nineties, appearing as a kind of halcyon era of groove and community in rap lyrics and productions. This can be heard in the endless sampling of Vaughan Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” and De La Soul’s nostalgic “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’” to Biggie Smalls’ “Hypnotize”, which was based on Herb Alpert’s 1979 roller rink hit “Rise”. The handful of NYC-based skate music compilations that have been released—e.g. Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez’s Roller Boogie 80’s or DJ Spinna mixtapes—are often a who’s who of tracks sampled by hip-hop. In fact, you’d probably be hard pressed to find a single big boogie track that hasn’t been sampled to death by hip-hop. Meanwhile further south, rinks in Miami in the early eighties were slowly but surely becoming hotbeds of emerging bass and freestyle productions. Genre innovators such as Maggotron, 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell and neighboring Orlando-based DJ Magic Mike all started out in South Florida rinks, while renowned freestyle producer “Pretty” Tony Butler owned one himself, DJing and promoting his star act Debbie Deb’s earliest singles to those striding to the skateable sounds of the genre’s melodic electro. For many, freestyle, and to a certain extent betterknown Miami bass tracks such as Maggotron’s “The Bass That Ate Miami” or Krush 2’s “Ghetto Jump”, were staples of Miami skate culture, as were Luther Campbell’s Ghetto Style DJs Pac Jam party, where skaters would roll to the latest bass music mixes at the legendary Sunshine rink. Historically, Atlanta, Memphis, St. Louis and Boston also all had active hip-hop scenes that developed in rinks during the eighties. More on skating’s connection to the development of regional hip-hop styles in the next issue in Part II.

Above: Shaun Harris, aka ShaProStyle, is a Chicago JB skate producer.

Style skating and James Brown remix culture in Chicago:

ShaProStyle

As most style skaters would agree, one of the most celebrated scenes in America developed in the house, blues and funk hotbed of Chicago. There, skaters have long rolled not just to the strict confines of a single genre, but rather to the weighty canon of a single artist: James Brown. Since the mid-seventies, Chicago’s JB skaters, as they’re known, have taken many of Brown’s original dance styles and adapted them to quad skates, including wheel-based simulations of footwork (notably the “mashed potato”) and a generally smooth, swaggering roll, forwards and backwards, not to mention the occasional split. JB skating has long spawned numerous nights in Chicago

rinks devoted exclusively to the music of the JBs. But instead of remaining static, JBs skating evolved in the mid-2000s when younger Chicago producers—most notably Keezo Kane and ShaProStyle—established a meatier, updated approach to the genre with electronic reinterpretations of James Brown, not unlike the recent thumping edits of rare R&B cuts by Bmore club legend and fellow skate DJ KW Griff. JBs remixes have breathed new life into the Windy City, especially in the famous South Side location The Rink, where veteran DJs, including resident DJ DMC, still hold down traditional JBs and hip-hop nights. Here, ShaProStyle explains the scope of JB skate music and how he EB 4/2014 75

approaches innovating classics by The Godfather of Soul: My production of new JBs remixes started together with my friend Keezo Kane, who was on Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label for a while, where his track “Ga Ga Ga” saw new school JBs music crossing over to bigger audiences. Of course, there is a long history of people skating to the JBs, but back in the day, beginning in the seventies, it was only the original James Brown tracks—that is before we took it to the next level. First what happened is that Keezo Kane came out with a JBs remix track, really cutting it up and piecing it back together and markedly changing the production. Then, going on that, I made a track. In the beginning we were kind of battling without really knowing each other, but without thinking about it, we formed what’s known as the “new school” JBs sound. We would always put our own style into JBs tracks, like putting some power under “Funky Drummer” or chopping up “The Big Payback” and putting it back together, guided by vocals. Now, of course, Chicago is also big on new school stepping, which is a kind of funky, two-step swing dancing. Back in the day it was all about tracks like Jeffree Perry’s “Love’s Gonna Last” that really came to define Chicago stepping. The interesting thing is that these days people in Chicago step to new JBs remixes, which is how a lot of the stuff Keezo and I put out ends up getting air play on the radio. We kind of started new school stepping, if you will. Though today, the biggest new dance style around the city for sure is bopping. I remember the first time I went skating, it was when a friend asked me to come along to The Rink in the South Side, which is not far from 76 EB 4/2014

where I live near Stony Island. At first I was wary, but when I got there it was completely packed. What I liked about it was that it was a very diverse crowd; everybody there had their separate lives, but when we came into the rink, we were all one. And, maybe even more importantly, this was a real club on wheels. There were people skating everywhere, and the old school JBs DJ that night, DJ DMC who also still DJs at The Rink, was tearing it up. He was playing all JBs, because it was a Saturday night, which at The Rink is the “JBs set” from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. The thing is, I used to like to skate fast, and a lot of James Brown is a bit slower, so when I started producing and remixing, I would often speed the JBs tracks up a bit. But regardless of old school or new school JBs, no other city skates like Chicago, even though now, the national parties are where it’s at. I do a lot of production specifically for skating, though I’m not a huge fan of mixing—maybe it’s a skate music thing. On my skate albums, you get all the intros. And each one of my albums has a theme to it. Say, something for older skaters called Plus 25, smoother stuff like Let’s Step Tonight Volume 1, or straight rolling music like Skate Group Theory, which is made of individual tracks which were commissioned for specific skate groups in Chicago. But always the vibe of all my skate music is based on JBs. People know me for that reason—especially because for all my tracks, I have my signature sentence, which is me speaking smoothly into the mic, “Let’s do this ShaProStyle.” But also, vocals almost always make my tracks funky. Sometimes it’s more on the old school R&B tip with Marvin Gaye, and other times more modern R&B with R. Kelly or even straight up preaching with Steve Munsey, who is a pastor on TV from

Indiana. Believe it or not, Munsey’s preaching with the clapping in the background sounds a bit like James Brown. To me, the rhythm and the bass control the skate style. When you watch people skate to my music, their heads are down and their eyes are looking straight. The music makes them want to skate hard JBs style. It’s all about getting in the zone. When we do roll calls at the national parties, where they

call out the crews from each city and they own the floor for ten minutes, when “Chicago!” gets shouted, people know what’s up. See, JBs skating is about movement—toe jam skating or bouncing or crazy legs can be done to old classics like “Monorail” or the updated versions that I do. But it has to be funky. It has to groove. And JBs music does that best. We’re carrying a torch, if you like.

From the rink to the dancefloor:

Dj Spinn & RP It’s also in Chicago’s various roller rinks where footwork, one of most celebrated electronic music and dance movements to appear in recent years, was born. Many of footwork’s first dance battles took place after participants took off their skates, and it’s no secret that late footwork pioneer DJ Rashad and longtime friend DJ Spinn met at the Markham Roller Rink in the city’s south suburbs. Here, DJ Spinn, himself a former rink DJ, and footwork/ghetto house legend RP Boo explain the strong link between the development of footwork and JBs skating: RP Boo: I first started producing music after I was already DJing. See, I was in House-O-Matic dance crew. I did so-called “performance tapes”, which were made specifically for their dance routines. One day I met DJ Slugo at a party and the president of House-O-Matic wanted to go make a track there with him at Slugo’s house, so we went over and when I saw what he had to make tracks with, I was surprised: a Roland R-70 drum machine and a Pioneer sampler. That’s it. And he made a track in minutes. I asked him, “Is it that easy?” And he was like “Yes!” I had just gotten a job at Chuck E. Cheese’s and had some money

Boo

so I went and picked up my first R-70. At the time I was making house, ghetto house. DJ Spinn: I was lucky because

I had the skating rink in my neighborhood where we grew up in the south suburbs, Markham Roller Rink, so every weekend that was the spot to go to. It all started off skating, and then when you got old enough to go to the disco you could go there on the Saturday night and dance. That’s actually what we were waiting for. In the beginning I’d go skating with my family, and all that was a family thing, really, but Markham then became a big part of my life.

RP BOO: When I moved to the

South Side in the eighties, I started hearing of The Rink on 87th street. People were already stepping there in 1987. I went into The Rink for the first time in ’92, and in the back behind the skating was a dance floor, where kids used to dance very early footwork. It was an actual party going on. But one day they wanted to have a dance group competition, and I was dancing with a group called Megamove and we won the five hundred dollar cash prize, of course. Naturally, the DJs at the rink were also aware of what was going on in the back, and this was the beginning of the con-

nection. See, Dance Mania was also sampling a lot of the music from the late seventies and early eighties that had a groove to it, which you could say was skating music. The dancers and the skaters were both having a nice time in the back. For me, it was the same kind of music but different formats. That is, the Dance Mania stuff didn’t get played for skaters, but it did get played in the disco and sampled what the skaters were skating to. I talked to my father about this recently: everything we did—skating, footwork, house—had to groove. This is the connection that Chicago really has: All the skating people knew all the Dance Mania people. And all the house people knew each other. DJ Spinn: I didn’t only just

start dancing or skating at the rink—I also started out DJing there. A lot of people started DJing there. You had to do it all, and I used to work the skate counter, like rent skates out to people, and I worked the concession selling pop and chips. There was a booth with a little window cut out where people would come up and make requests. There were people celebrating birthdays and parties going on so we had to take the mic and stuff like that. We just had to do everything really—MCing, DJing, DJ for the skaters, DJ at the disco. And music-wise we had a program. When I was working there when I was sixteen in ’97 to twenty in ’01, we had an extensive JB’s collection, basically just a playlist. Also, some slow cuts especially were for the backward skaters, and for the couples and what not. Eventually you’d go to the disco room next door, start off with some hip-hop probably for the first thirty minutes and then go right into the house music. For sure, DJing at the rink was an important first step for so many Chicago DJs: Me, Rashad, Rush, Gant-

Man, DJ Thadz from Dance Mania, who also put me on to a lot of old school house records. I really looked up to him especially. Stacy Kidd, DJ Malcolm, all those people. The rink was a big part of my DJing career. And growing up, when you came to the disco at the Markham Rink, that was where you’d hear ghetto house. It actually started out with house for me, because I never used to really hear hip-hop at Markham. They played dance-hop and stuff but mainly just house music. All the discos in the back of the rinks that I went to other than Markham, like The Rink or whatever, they’d also play ghetto house. The change from that to footwork happened when I was dancing, so ’94 or ’93. The music was born from dancing, specifically from battling each other. And then slowly but surely it started changing with the music getting faster. I just remember dancing to “Percolator” back in the day, that was like 125 BPM. And then later ghetto house—Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, Traxman. Cats was making like 135. And from 125 to 135, that’s a bit of a difference. RP Boo: I would say there were

a total of three skating rinks that played a major role in the development of footwork. The first was definitely The Rink, where I was more of a special guest DJing there in the back. The second rink was called Route 66, and the third rink was Markham where Rashad and Spinn were at. DJ Malcolm, who was a skate DJ at Markham, is the one who promoted the party where I first met Rashad and Spinn. And Malcolm also DJ’d at The Rink, which is why when he combined the two groups of dancers from each roller rink, that’s when footwork exploded and became what it was. Because the younger dance groups all started in the skating rinks, until they started becoming part of what House-

Above: Producer Kavain Space, aka RP Boo, is a Chicago footwork legend.

O-Matic was doing. And rinks provided a good space for the kids to develop. All the major footwork competitions in the beginning were held in rinks. Of course some people say the rinks were safe havens, and Markham was, but The Rink and Route 66 weren’t always safe. At Route 66 there were a lot of Gangster Disciples, and a lot of them were skaters and dancers. With The Rink it was similar. And the connection for me between skating and footwork is clear: James Brown. You see, skating still plays a tremendous part in groove sessions. And there’s plenty of legwork, all of the JBs stuff, in footwork. It was all birthed out of James Brown. You see James Brown is footwork. DJ Spinn: At Markham you

have the big skating floor when

you’d come in, and you had a long queue to the disco, and then pay to get in. You’d just skate with all the kids right up along side the disco. A lot of kids would skate but when dancing really got serious, they were just gathering, getting ready for the disco to open. But there was always the mix of the older generation of JBs skaters and the younger generation because they all danced too. Everybody did skating first for real, that was a traditional thing. The different neighborhoods came together and you’d skate. And it was always to JBs. Like RP Boo says, James Brown was the real connection between dancing and skating: A lot of us would take moves from skating and try them in the disco. That was an important part of ~ the development. EB 4/2014 77

Since releasing a career-spanning compilation on archive label du jour Finders Keepers in 2012, Suzanne Ciani’s impact on modern electronic music has never been more apparent. From her early days soldering circuit boards in Don Buchla’s synthesizer studio to making pinball machines speak and designing sounds for big brands like Coca-Cola, the sixty-eight year-old Ciani has long sensualized technology by emphasizing its continuities with nature. Italian DJ and producer Donato Dozzy is on a similar sonic journey. A veteran of Roman techno, Dozzy remains unparalleled in crafting tactile and immersive electronic atmospheres. Over the past decade, the Labyrinth Festival resident has been a driving force behind the highly influential techno projects Aquaplano and Voices from the Lake. More recently however, his music has broken through the confines of the dance floor and ascended into orbit with a slew of releases on Spectrum Spools and Prologue that both define and explode the concept of “hypnotic techno”. The two met at Dozzy’s house on the outskirts of Rome and found out, after shedding a few tears, that their connections run deeper than either would expect. Right: Suzanne Ciani, photographed in Rome by Ilaria Magliocchetti Lombi. 78 EB 4/2014

Suzanne Ciani TALKS TO Donato dozzy

playing and I never forgot about that.

for the advertisement and they had a blank space, a little opening of a couple seconds, and then the song started again. The Coke guy said, “Can you do something in there?” I said yes, not knowing what I was going to do. He says, “Well what do you need?”, and I said “My Buchla!”; I ran and got the Buchla synthesizer, I brought it in and it occurred to me that if I did something generic without a pitch center, then they would have much more latitude in using it again. They could use it in more places. So I thought of the bubbles and I used the Buchla to make the sound of fizzing and the lid popping off. Sure enough they used it in all their ads, every year or so they used it. They made a whole campaign around it, this pop and pour.

SC: [provocatively] “Try me again.”

DD: It sounds better than every

“My god, it’s not a machine. It’s human!” Conversation moderated by Mark Smith Donato Dozzy: Suzanne, this is

quite an uncanny experience for me, talking to you here right now. I heard your voice for the first time when I was ten years old. I’m not joking. I was with my mother on holiday and I came across this pinball game called Xenon. We were in a skiing village, and I was actually looking for the right place to go play video games, and I became fascinated by this pinball machine. I put a coin in and you showed up.

Suzanne Ciani: When you put

the coin in my voice goes [puts on sexy voice] “Ahhhh.”

DD: To a ten-year-old boy that was

quite a new and exciting experience. It left a lasting impression.

SC: I like sensual technology.

To me this was fun. I had never played pinball before when they hired me to do the sounds for this game, and when I watched guys play it it seemed like . . .

DD: . . . like they were hav-

ing sex with the machine?

SC: Well, in a sense. But there

were some vocal things I wanted to do that were too far out for the manufacturer. Like, when you hit the flippers, I used a harmonizer to lower my voice so it went “Ohhh, ahhh, oooh!” I also wanted to put a whip crack sound on the flipper but they wouldn’t let me do that.

DD: I remember going home after

DD: Yeah, I remember! I’d never had

a machine talking to me before, ever.

SC: “Try the tube shot.” DD: Oh my god. SC: I was actually inducted into

the Pinball Hall of Fame last year. I was the first female voice in a pinball machine. I didn’t think that was that worthy, I thought I should’ve been inducted because of all the hi-tech work we did. But I’m glad you experienced it.

DD: You and “Pinball Wizard”

from The Who—the combination really fucked up my childhood.

SC: I had a lot of guys come

up to me and tell me that. I wasn’t aware of it because I never went to a pinball parlor.

DD: I also have a vinyl of yours here

with the recording you made for Coca-Cola, the sound of the bottle opening and the bubbles fizzing.

SC: Yeah, in terms of recording,

you could never get those bubbles going up perfectly. So those are imaginary. You actually don’t hear bubbles when you open a Coke! Here was the job: I’d been trying to meet with the Coca-Cola people for a year, and I finally barged my way in. They had a song already made

Coca-Cola you’d ever open in reality.

SC: When you think of the real

sound, of an actual bottle opening, it doesn’t have all that finesse and detail. So you create a sound that is the platonic ideal, an imagined perfection that doesn’t really exist. Then it informs people’s perception of the reality. Working for these big companies was fun because it was different every time, and I had a lot of freedom because nobody understood what the Buchla could do. Everyone was like, “What is that?” Nobody had ever seen this machine before and then I got hot and so everybody wanted to hire me. But the Buchla, as a modular synth, had no keyboard and companies would hire me to play riffs, and I’d have to say no because it was physically impossible to play a simple tune.

DD: Of course, it doesn’t

work like that.

SC: When I went to American record companies they’d say, “OK, what do you sing?”, and I’d say “I don’t sing”; “Oh, so where’s your guitar?”; “Well, I don’t play the guitar”; “Oh, well, what do you do?”; and I said “I play the modular synthesizer and I need a week in the studio to make a demo.” “A week? We’ll give you three hours.” Their idea of a demo was you go in and sing a song, and for me a demo was a week around the clock in the studio. That didn’t work, so I

went to Europe because Tangerine Dream was happening here and I thought maybe there’s a more receptive environment for electronic music in Europe. I went all around, and it was horrible. Then I went back home and continued to work on my album, and I had about five pieces done. I heard that Japan was the second largest synth music market . . . DD: . . . and still is! SC: . . . so I went. I took somebody

with me and that’s how I got my first deal. They had some electronic consciousness there. It was completely different. The worst experience was the United States: they don’t listen at all, they talk on the phone, people are coming in and out. Europe is second worst. Then in Japan they’d take you in a quiet room with some tea and a good sound system and you sit and they listen to your whole record and they don’t say a word. Have you had this experience?

DD: Oh yeah. For the Japanese it’s

the deepest form of respect. It can be confusing at times because you don’t know where their real interest ends and where mere politeness begins. Generally the culture is really into respecting the act of listening. I can say at the moment that Japan is probably the place where I personally have the biggest satisfaction because the people have the biggest enthusiasm towards the music. Sometimes I wish I was born a bit earlier just to experience the vibe of the past. Every time I try to relate myself to musicians and artists that belong to a different generation I feel like we are the same age. I try to look at the old days like it is present right now. This is the way I feel because I think that things haven’t changed as much as people may think. The way to the music is still the same. You’ve found your Buchla attitude many years ago and it’s still in your heart. Basically I think you’re bolted to that.

SC: An Italian understands this. See,

some people think that machines are inanimate but for those of us who play them, we know they are alive.

DD: There is continuity between

nature and synthesizers. It’s not

only about using an internal oscillator to create a certain sound. It’s also the way the machine can interact and process sounds coming from nature. You can manipulate nature and establish a relationship with it through the machine. So you use a synthesizer to get closer to nature in some way. SC: Are you talking about pro-

cessing a sampled sound?

DD: Yes. Recording them, watching

their waveforms, comparing them to the waves within a synthesizer. The distinction between “real” and “artificial” doesn’t make any sense to me anymore. For me, a sound is a sound. I’m interested in what I can hear in my surroundings and putting them in relation to artificial ones and seeing what happens when they are combined.

“You create a sound that is the platonic ideal, an imagined perfection which doesn’t exist. It informs people’s perception of reality. I had a lot of freedom because nobody understood what the Buchla could do. Everyone was like, ‘What is that?’ Nobody had seen this machine before.” Suzanne Ciani

SC: You’re sonically orientated. I feel

exactly the way you want them, that’s available for people to hear. If a piece isn’t constructed right it gets so boring. Don’t you think there’s something Italian about that?

when I hear your music that you’re into the color of the sound. Because I grew up with the Buchla modular system, I have always focused on the way the sound moves. I’m talking about the old days. What happened was that people thought synthesizers were about making specific sounds like, “Can it sound like a flute or strings?” That was never a focus for me. I was all about sonic movement. No, my synth didn’t sound like an oboe, it sounded like thunder going up into the sky. It was moving in a very ephemeral way that didn’t stop long enough for you to say, “This sounds like that.”

DD: This has to be related to the

way we are influenced by the place that we live. California and Italy have many common points. Plus, if you add on top that you also have Italian origins, everything comes full circle. We are surrounded by environments that are full of colors and smells, and that is easily transposed into the music.

SC: When you’re working in elec-

DD: And without human control.

I’ve been reading the notes you’ve printed to accompany your compositions. It seems like you have a very specific, preconceived idea in your mind and you try to use the machine to recreate something that is related to reality, to daily living. But it’s the way you make it that’s totally free from any structure. It follows what’s in your mind, an idea.

SC: It’s a poetry. You live the

poetry. That’s what I heard in your music also, the conjuring up of atmospheres and environments. Every time you listen it’s different. When you make a piece to please yourself, one in which all the details are just

Above (top to bottom): Lixiviation is an excellent introduction to Ciani’s sound world, covering her commissioned ad work and live modular performances with the Buchla synthesizer; The Xenon pinball game features Ciani’s voice and soundtracking for which she was recently inducted into the Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame.

tronic music you do think about that because you’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, to fundamental elements of sound. You can deal with the frequencies that rub, and you can control so many raw elements when you’re electronic. You think about the pitch, amplitude, timbre; you think in all these little separate fields. You analyze sound as you’re making it.

DD: That’s totally true. The same principles can be applied to nature in general. It’s the way the universe is constructed. People get used to these principles and sounds because they’re surrounded by them from birth so they take them as given. If you have the right attitude or if you start

EB 4/2014 81

“It’s the way the universe is constructed . . . The principles of synthesis apply to everything that surrounds you. It’s how cause relates to effect. A certain action of the wind will make things sound a different way. It’s the sort of modulation you will find on a synthesizer.” thinking in another way you can see the principles of synthesis apply to everything that surrounds you. It’s about how cause relates to effect. Think of how a certain action of the wind will make things sound in a different way. It’s the sort of modulation you will find on a synthesizer. Now I’m in a stage of life where everywhere I go I hear sound. I hear something I like and wonder, “What is the pitch? What is the note? Will this fit to something else?” Electronic or not electronic, it doesn’t matter.

four. He had Greek origins and he came to Italy just at the right time. Not so many people know about this guy but he was one of the fundamental elements of the Italian prog band Area, which was one of the biggest in Italy in the seventies. Listen to Stratos’ record Cantare la voce; it’s breathtaking the way he does things with the voice which we would do with a synthesizer. So the point is not even the voice itself, it’s the way you use it. It’s about the brain and about the attitude. Many people do amazing things with the voice but this guy especially was doing it in a way that we would understand immediately. I’m glad Sony is repressing his works. I discovered that his vocal technique had been influenced by Eastern culture. You can watch videos of monks who can create multiple notes with the tone of their voice. Singing chords. The overtones are crazy. We all wake up in the morning with our own unique voice, but there are some people who are blessed and go in amazing directions. This is what I learned. After that experience I thought that it was the right time for me to try to work with the voice. I’m not able to sing myself, just a little bit. So I thought that if I found someone who had the right voice, then I could try to work with some of these effects. In my opinion it worked pretty well.

SC: As humans we apply our con-

SC: So your new album

DONATO DOZZY

sciousness to all sounds. We can’t help but listen in a human way that organizes what we hear. As for the ego, our judgement; why do we get wrapped up in liking and disliking and identifying with some things? It’s part of being human, yet there seems to be so much noise that goes around creation which doesn’t feel authentic. How do we get back to what is primal?

DD: The voice is the primary instru-

ment. After years of working without vocals, I’ve regained interest in this form. I’ve been going deeper into rediscovering the origins of where I’m from, especially the musical scene in Italy back in the late sixties and the beginning of the seventies. I’ve been going deeper and learning about the people who had been using the voice as an instrument, like Demetrio Stratos who died young at age thirty82 EB 4/2014

is only voice?

Above (top to bottom): Dozzy’s first album, K, was reissued this year by Further Records and introduced his serenely shifting atmospheres to new audiences; 2013’s Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask saw him reconfiguring American artist Chris Madak’s audio mosaics into vivid still-lifes. Released on Editions Mego sub-label Spectrum Spools, the LP initiated Dozzy’s shift away from the dancefloor.

DD: Only voice. I made it with a

singer named Anna Caragnano. The idea came from a guy who was my mentor since I was eighteen years old. He taught me how to relate myself to a crowd. His name is Paolo Micioni, and he’s a producer and DJ known for his involvement with disco. Anyhow, at the beginning of this year he was facing a very heavy illness, and he told me [welling up], “Donato, I’ve always been your bigger brother. I’m very proud of what you do. But there is one thing you haven’t done yet which is confront yourself with the primary element.” I knew what I had to do, and he put me in touch with this girl. Then I learned that she grew up in the same town where my mother was born, which is in Puglia in the southeast of Italy, a

very small village called Mottola. Then I thought, “OK, this really is a sign.” In two weeks we made an album. Two weeks! It’s going to be out next year around March. SC: For me the voice was an expressive tool but it was always related to technology in some way. When I started working with electronic music there was no expression, no velocity or pressure control. So I built a device I called the “Voice Box” which was an assembly of processing stuff; compressors, a vocoder, equalizers. It allowed me to use my voice to control dynamics and expression on a synthesizer. It’s charting that continuity between nature and machines again right? I actually knew Harald Bode. He was German, a lovely guy who worked at Bell Labs. He invented the vocoder. Sennheiser had an early vocoder but the Bode vocoder was the best and he did a custom mod so that the unpitched part of the voice at the high end would pass through the effects so it made a more breathy sound. I have vocoder on all my albums. It was subtle, but it was there and that was why I got into it. In order to spend all the hours that you do with that machine you really have to be in love with it. You want to have a rapport, you want to feel connected. Early on I went through a period where I said, “This machine isn’t behaving like a machine! It’s not calibrated, why doesn’t the tuning hold the way its supposed to?” It’s supposed to do something logical. And then I said to myself “Oh my god, it’s not a machine. It’s human! It makes mistakes.” DD: In Buchla terminology, this is

called the source of uncertainty.

SC: I said to Don Buchla, “This is

not tuning properly,” and he says, “Well do something else.” The attitude was that you shouldn’t come to the machine with a preset idea of what you want to do. You should feedback with the machine and evolve your language with it. But I came to the new version of the Buchla with a language developed on the old machine. So I’m suffering now because I’m not approaching the machine on its own terms. I want it to do what

230 mm x 155 mm

it used to do. And it’s not doing it. When my original Buchla was stolen, I . . . [with tears in her eyes] I basically had to have an intervention. Friends came over to try and get me back on track. I was suffering. The machine broke down, and I broke down. DD: I feel so bad. SC: People in New York said, “We

have to do something.” Somebody actually bought me another machine and said, “You just have to start playing something else.”

DD: Like after you have a car acci-

dent: You just keep moving and eventually start driving again.

SC: Then my studio became this

huge clearinghouse for all kinds of instruments: Yamahas, Rolands, whatever. After I lost the Buchla, I designed DX7 sounds and I worked for Roland. They would hire me

to go out and inspire people to play the synth. The other thing that happened was that I gradually weaned myself off electronics. My first two albums were all electronic and as I went on more and more acoustic instruments came in until finally it was all acoustic. Now I play the piano but I’m going back to the Buchla. You never know what’s going to happen. [Donato picks up an ornate box] SC: What’s in there?

[Donato pulls out a jaw harp, places it between his teeth and begins to play] DD: It’s a jaw harp. This is a Russian variation called a khomus, which has a way longer sound than the average jaw harp. Somehow this strange little instrument has become like an extension of what I do in the studio with my machines. This is

Above: During a break in her European tour, Ciani traveled by train to Rome to meet Dozzy for the first time in the bedlam of the city’s Termini Station. On the drive to Dozzy’s home in the hilly outskirts of the Italian capital, the conversation drifted from their shared Italian identity to local wine, music software and vintage synthesizer modules. Influential for both artists has been their respective discovery of the relationship between nature and machines—particularly to hearing all sound, accoustic and electronic, as a form of synthesis.

something that you can do without using a synthesizer, and the sound is so similar. It’s two months now that my studio hasn’t been switched on. I play the jaw harp because I feel this is its moment for me. At some point you need to switch from what you usually do and extend it to other types of instruments. There are one or two instruments in particular that are going to call you and this has been mine. It’s inspiring to recreate machine sounds with non-electronic instruments and see what is the difference, what is the effect that this brings to my brain, my body. When you play the jaw harp you feel all your bones vibrating because you put it between your teeth and then your whole head starts vibrating. It’s crazy. I want to be good at it. SC: You could tour with

the jaw harp.

DD: I would, but my mother is

worried that I’d break a tooth. ~ EB 4/2014 83

WANDERLUST

72 Hours in

Antwerp

A Journey into Electronic Musicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Belgian Roots Interviews: A.J. Samuels & MarK Smith / photos: Elena Panouli

Antwerp panorama, multi-tracked.

For many, Antwerp isn’t a city that springs to mind when charting the history of electronic music, though the Flemish—and Belgians at large—have been dancing to repetitive mechanized rhythms, playing records extra slow and partying for days on end decades before the concept of rave even existed. And while most countries’ selfperception is steeped in narratives of exceptionalism, Belgium’s complex weave of war and geography has provided the ideal conditions for musical open-mindedness. It’s this historical flexibility that has fostered electronic body music, Belgian new beat and rave techno—not to mention arguably the most vital avant-garde fashion in the world. Thursday, 3:30 p.m. Techno producer and DJ Peter van Hoesen gives us a history lesson on Belgian electronic music. Why Antwerp? Let’s take a few steps back. If you speak to Belgians, they tell you there’s a lack of identity, that it’s a defining element. I think it’s very important to know why that is, because it makes it easier to understand what is happening today, and I’m a bit of a history freak. Belgium as a country is a concept created by a number of larger nations. An important point came in the sixteenth century when what used

to be the Seventeen Provinces, which we can say was basically modern Holland and Belgium, was split in two during the revolt against the ruling Spanish, who were aggressively Catholic. A large part of what is now Holland and Belgium used to be one country, more or less, until the Eighty Years War. Then it was split. So you get this big nation, a mercantile nation, where suddenly the southern part is cut off because of the intervention from a very Catholic country. Yet this nation is mostly Protestant, so all the Protestants tried to get out of the southern part as soon as possible, so they go north. All the capital and all the intellect also went to the north. What stays is a weird collection of people. There’s a civil war going

Right: You could spend hours getting lost in the beauty and weird architecture of Antwerp’s central station, which is filled with larger-than-life bas-reliefs of dancing exiters.

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Above: As Filip van Moerkercke of music management company Playout! explained, new beat was essentially slowed-down, bass heavy industrial, new wave and acid house. It was crossgenre as a genre.

Above: John Power is a British expat who runs the music management and promo agency Best in Show. He takes an evangelical approach to educating the world about the importance of new beat and Belgian techno—rightfully so, in our opinion. Opposite page, clockwise from top: José, Frie, Nikolai, Lucian (orange pants) and Daphne Pascual of USA Imports. Aside from having run one of the most important record stores and recording studios for new beat and Belgian techno, the Pascual family are also repsonsible for the printed slipmat. If you owned a slipmat with graphics in the nineties, dollars to donuts they printed it.

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on, so the whole thing disintegrates. You can imagine what this does to the population. Things disintegrate, things fall apart. But you learn to adapt. Out of all the Western Europeans, Belgians are the most flexible people by far. We can adapt to anything because, historically, we had to. People like Patrick Codenys from Front 242, and myself included, are kind of like, “Hey, this vagueness is exactly what makes the place attractive, that you can choose from so many options, so many languages, like Dutch, French and German.” I think what bands like Front 242 did was to take and use that. They were able to draw from several influences and make something that was completely unique. So this lack of identity, it could be empowering if you choose to see it like that. But is the glass half empty or is the glass half full? Look at Antwerp; it’s a city with a lot of influences from the outside world, and they are quite open to those influences happening. There’s a huge richness there. I think this is artistically beneficial if you open yourself. What might be a problem, or what has always been a problem, is that Belgians are very bad at selling themselves because of their lack of identity. There are things that are specifically Belgian, but so far Belgians haven’t really moved beyond marketing the chocolate and the beer. There was electronic music on the radio from a very early stage of my life; only years after I realized that in other countries this was not the case. Growing up, I recall one moment when I’d been involved with music for a while but I was still young, and electronic music was still an underground thing; I heard Human Resource’s “Dominator” on the radio on a Saturday afternoon on the Hit Parade. I still remember thinking, “How is this crazy, totally fucked up song in the charts?” It was one of those moments where I thought something is happening. But I didn’t know then it was specific to Belgium. Musically, Antwerp is a good place to focus on for certain reasons. It’s a port city. I happened to be born there. I spent most of my

life in Brussels but I was brought up in Antwerp so I have a good feeling for both cities. Antwerp is definitely very important for the development of electronic music in Belgium, although a lot of the artists that made a name for themselves in EBM and later in new beat and rave were not directly connected to Antwerp. The biggest post-new beat phenomenon in Belgium was R&S as far as labels go, and that was from Ghent. The biggest new beat club at the end of all the hype was near Ghent. But Antwerp has the typical dynamic of a city where lots of foreigners come in every weekend. The main thing was there were quite a number of good clubs like Ancienne Belgique, Prestige and later on Cafe d’Anvers. Not only in Antwerp, but in the whole region surrounding it. In Antwerp there was this crossover between the fashion academy and the club scene, so when parties would happen during the week they would be full because students would attend. It wouldn’t be just a “student” party, because the fashion academy would do it their own way, mixing up with other people from other contexts, quite a surreal soup. Someone like Walter van Beirendonck, who is of course one of the Antwerp Six, was part of it for a while. He definitely rode that rave train. Another reason why Antwerp is so important is because new beat as a genre was by and large supported by a very important Antwerp radio show on SIS, as well as a very important record shop, USA Imports, where they built a studio and people could go in behind the shop and record, with the music then released on the shop’s label. And then you had Liaison Dangereuse, the very influential radio show. Sven van Hees was selecting the music and Paul Ward was doing the presentation. I was still at school but every Thursday everyone would tune into the radio, you would listen to it and nothing else could get done. They raised a whole generation of people with that. You can still find those shows online archived somewhere. There’s one three-hour show, I think it might have been

the last show on SIS, and that for me is still the best three hours of radio I’ve ever heard in my life. That for me defined new beat. Belgium hasn’t been marketed the way other scenes have. When new beat, techno and rave happened people experienced it, lived it intensely, but never thought, “Let’s hype this up!” It’s not a Belgian thing to do. Belgians aren’t very good salespeople. In that moment they forget to see a broader picture. I think a contrast with Detroit techno is a good one, because from the start Detroit was marketed. It’s very clear and easy to understand: some British guy arrives in Detroit, hears the music and with typical English entrepreneurial flair says, “I’m going to make these guys the biggest guys in dance music!” and does it. There was never anybody in Belgium who thought the same about what was happening here, and what is written about Belgian electronic music is in Flemish or French. So it’s accessible to Dutch and French readers, but that’s it. And I think basically we ended up paying the price for not believing in ourselves enough. Toward ’95, ’96, you could see the club landscape change. You’ve got this whole dynamic where, if given the opportunity, a Belgian is going to think something coming from outside is better than something that’s made inside of Belgium. That killed a big part of the scene, which made it difficult for people like me. What is a big recent success in Belgian music history? Tomorrowland. That’s it. The Belgian scene was thriving in terms of enthusiasm until ’96, but obviously enthusiasm only gets you so far. You need a certain degree of professionalism and collectivism in order to pull together and keep it going. We didn’t have that, but the German clubs did. Seventy percent of the artists playing in these clubs every weekend are German artists. They immediately understood how you make a scene not only thrive but also continue and give it a long-term perspective. This doesn’t happen in Belgium. I don’t see how this

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could change. Every time I go back to Belgium I have the same feeling; I’m happy to be there, but I see the same old reflexes, and I don’t really want to be in that kind of environment anymore.

Thursday, 7 p.m. We meet three generations of Pascuals, the family behind the legendary USA Imports. Frie: José and I met partying on the Belgian coast. Every weekend we would meet there—he came from the south of Belgium, and I came from Antwerp. I remember he was leaving one discotheque and going to another called Groove. He and his friends turned around and followed us. We were going to a lot of soul and jazzy soul parties in Ostend, where we danced the jive, which was fun to watch. The music was all about totally obscure jazz, R&B and funk records, and around 1969, Popcorn the club opened, where they played similarly hard to find soul records but which were slowed down to be a bit sludgier, so everybody could dance together. It was slower than rock, more like northern soul in the U.K. But popcorn was the first genre to properly slow records down. This goes from the late sixties to the early seventies. All of the records were hard to find and all the artists were American: Billy Butler, Motown, jazz instrumentals like Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father”. Then it branched into cha-cha-cha, which the DJs also always slowed down. Of course they also hid the labels, so nobody would know what the tracks were. It was incredible. That’s when the record stores sold vinyl by auction. When José and I became a couple, we would buy lots of rare records, and that’s when we decided to open our shop. But in the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium, they didn’t play American or British records, which is why José and his friends came to Antwerp—to listen to those records, James

Brown and all that stuff. Back then he didn’t know any of the record titles—I knew all the titles! But once we started the record shop, José would go into the clubs with all of his records and sell them to DJs as special “USA imports.” And the name stuck to our shop, which we opened in 1973 in Antwerp, so José and I could live together. This was also the beginning of the popularity of Barry White, whose records we had exclusively in Antwerp because we bought them from the U.S. At some point there was a strong overlap between popcorn and disco as club music, so that’s also what we sold. Every week all of the owners of the discotheques in the city came to the shop bringing gin, whisky and orange juice. We had really big speakers, I mean really big, and it was as loud as a disco in the store. It was a party everyday, and this made us very popular. But an important development for us was the first 12-inch. There was lots of publicity for the better sound quality and what it can do for your speakers. The Salsoul label always put on the label, “Warning! This song can blow your speakers.” José: At the time, all of our contact with foreign labels was done on the phone. They would literally play the record into the receiver: “Groove one? OK, I’ll take thirtyfive of those. The second track? No, I’ll pass.” Our phone bill was 100,000 Belgian francs! This was forty years ago, so we’re talking around 2000 euro. Because our specialty was dance music from the very beginning, we played a central role in new beat, both selling records and producing them ourselves. The music we started selling became electronic around the time of Kraftwerk, although before that I would also consider Pierre Henry to have played an important role. We sold all of his EMI records. When the DJs started to play it, we sold everything. Human League’s “Being Boiled” was an important one. The bass sound in the beginning worked perfect with the lasers in the club.

Left: It’s not uncommon in Antwerp for entire families to do back-to-school shopping at Raf Simons' pop-up shop for, say, the designer’s recent Ruby Sterling collab.

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Above: None other than Napoleon Bonaparte built the city’s first lock and dock in 1811, which has greatly contributed to the city’s cultural melting pot status. For generations the port has also helped supply Antwerp’s revelers with party favors galore.

Above: Director Jozef Devillé sees a curious confluence of historical and technological events as responsible for Belgian electronic music. 92 EB 4/2014

Daphne: But electronic dance

music was a bit after. I would say it started with Front 242. That was an important foundation. Frie: But with new beat, like with popcorn, it was all about looking for rare records that nobody could find. Max Berlin? You couldn’t find it! And here in Antwerp there was the discotheque AB—Ancienne Belgique— where Dikke Ronny was DJing on Sunday. And all the DJs from Ghent and Brussels came to see what he was playing. We knew what he was playing from other clients, so we were lucky. It all started in Antwerp, even though people from Ghent might tell you otherwise. Of course, one of the most important discotheques for new beat, Boccaccio, was in Ghent. But that was later. José: The big time was Saturday. It was impossible to come into the shop because it was completely full. People would line up waiting in the street with food and alcohol. Nikolai: There is the classic story

of how new beat started, how DJs played 45 rpm records at 33 rpm and pitched up +8 on the turntable. That was Dikke Ronny. What people don’t know is that it was an error. He was too fucked up, and that’s why it was too slow. True story! Frie: We preferred the beginning period of new beat because later, for me, it became too commercial. New beat in the beginning was mainly instrumental tracks, not like the productions they made later on Antler House. Those labels made thousands upon thousands of productions. We sold it because the people wanted it. It’s what was being played in the discotheques. It started in Antwerp, went commercial in Ghent and it then came back to Antwerp to die. So you see what was really going on. José: With new beat it was that classic combination; you have the music, the artist, the look and the dance. It was the same with rock and roll, the same formula as Elvis and punk.

Nikolai: The clothes were a big

part. People were wearing bomber jackets with these patches stitched on of cemeteries and tombs or old pictures of their grandmother, sepia tinted images of old people dancing. Ecstasy was the main drug. Huge tablets of ecstasy. They would steal the emblems off of BMWs and Mercedes and wear them as necklaces. Also they would bring suitcases to the club, like silver Samsonites. And they’d dance with a suitcase. José: Cocaine used to come in from Studio 54 in New York. Two or three people risked the journey every week to fly there. Also they would come back to the shop on a Monday with cassette recordings taken from New York radio. For me this was fantastic because these tapes would include promotional copies of brand new records that we couldn’t hear otherwise in Belgium. I’d catch these tracks one month before the release; so every day these cassettes arrived I’d be phoning New York to order them.

Frie: There was always a lot of sexuality in the music but some of the new beat labels really pushed it. All the young people followed it and over time the crowd got younger and younger. So there were all these DJs who helped start new beat but when it became too commercial they naturally moved on to something else. And they automatically came to techno, gabber, hardcore, and especially terrorcore. Nikolai: There again, the same thing: the Nike Air Max, the bombers, the certain styles of dance. The entire package of the looks, music and dancing was part of those genres too. There were certain class distinctions between them. Terror was like the intellectual alternative to gabber; it was for the really weird ones that needed this extreme music to get calm. The dress code of hardcore techno from our point of view as a seventeenyear-old child was like . . . Daphne: . . . white, working-class, suburban. These scenes were a

way of life for people. There were these huge parties for terror music. There would be ten thousand people wearing the same clothes doing the same dance. In a way it was beautiful to see. You had the DJ on the stage; he was like the god, and all the people were dancing the same dance toward the DJ. It was rave but more . . . uniform. See, at first the DJ was a small thing, unknown. Then he was on a stage with fire and lasers. The early nineties was a crazy time in Belgium. You had these extreme new styles and trance, but remember that this is also the same time as Nirvana. Growing up in a record store was pretty specific, but for us it was normal. I was a kid or an early teenager and you had all those colorful people around. Those beautiful guys also! All of the DJs, they looked beautiful. We came back from school to this. See, we listened to electronic music as kids, but I had a period as a teenager where I listened to grunge. There was a time when I was into rock music

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because I wanted to rebel against the techno music of my parents! Frie: We came home late when the shop closed at 7:00 p.m. and then we would eat together. Afterwards, we’d watch television or something. Daphne: Or we would listen to tracks Frie and José were going to release over and over again— CJ Bolland, Pink Poodle, Christ of Noise. Though in the beginning, it was new beat artists like Confetti’s, Max Berlin . . . Frie: Yes, because we ran a recording studio also, out the back of the shop. But years passed, things changed and the record store closed in 2009. Nikolai: The Internet didn’t kill it but the fun went out of running the store. Then there was the rise of CDs and later MP3s. So I said: “It’s normal that this is happening, I’m not going to fight it because it’s impossible.” I would be stupid to tell DJs, “Guys, you have to keep on buying vinyl!” They pay ten euro for a record and they only play one track off it. So why not pay 99 cents?

Above: Belgian producer and DJ Peter van Hoesen left his native country for the thumpier pastures of Berlin. From the sounds of it, he won’t be moving back any time soon.

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Friday, 3:45 p.m. Jozef Devillé explains the inspirations behind his documentary The Sound of Belgium. In Belgium, we’re not very proud of our own culture, so why would you make a movie about our electronic music? Because the only original music that came of Belgium was electronic music. If you didn’t live that scene, you don’t realize its importance. And in Belgium things are different, which is an important aspect of my documentary, The Sound of Belgium. You see, in most societies, if you want to go to the most famous clubs you go to the capital, and after that probably to the center of town. Most of our clubs were in the middle of nowhere. Also, years before electronic music even existed, people in Belgium were dancing to mechanical, automated sounds. For days on end. There is a small town at crossing highways where roads from Antwerp to Germany and Brussels to Holland all meet called Zandhoven. Along these roads there were six or seven huge spots for people to stop and have a snack and a drink. And all of them had a loud, powerful self-playing organ. Now, the organs produce an analog sound, but it’s digital music: There’s paper—music roll—being fed into the machine, and if you look at the early versions of Cubase, it looks exactly the same. So there was already this tradition of dancing to the straight synchronized beat of these organs, which I would argue is a very subconscious influence, this very measured organ beat. And it’s important to make this connection, whether you like organ music or not, because EBM, new beat and techno—all of this followed from this mechanized tradition, and it’s unique to Belgium. Most of the dance halls also stayed open the whole week and throughout the whole weekend. It was a prosperous time in the fifties, and people had money to spend. And it was the beginning of the notion of partying to mechanized music kind of endlessly. This was the fifties, mind you. And back then a record player was not

loud enough for a crowd of dancers. But these organs were loud. Most other documentaries about electronic music were from a very British perspective but they don’t have a clue about what happened next door in Belgium, and I don’t blame them. New beat happened twenty, twenty-five years ago and still no one had made a documentary about it. I haven’t even found a book. The first decent piece of writing that was written about it was done by an Englishman, Bill Brewster in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, and the new beat story is in the same chapter as Ibiza. Years ago Ibiza and Belgium were pretty similar. It was the same blend of music and the same desire for a mixture. Except the only difference is in the Ibiza music you hear the sunshine and in Belgian music you hear the rain. And even though no one seems to talk about new beat, it has influenced the world in ways you wouldn’t expect. I took a trip to Mexico and when I went record digging, three-quarters of the electronic music I found there was Belgian new beat! Also, I remember in the early stages of researching for the movie, I watched a documentary about British jungle music. There was one famous DJ, Fabio I believe, who was saying, “We started making this jungle because we were fed up with being conquered by the Belgian stuff.” And in the early nineties, UK music was all Belgian stabs with the big beats. The English just started copying these sounds. Take the label XL Recordings: their first records are reissues of Belgian tracks. If you listen to the first Prodigy tracks the Belgian influence is obvious. Like, “Charlie” for instance. The only thing is that there’s something different in their way of chopping up the breakbeats, and Belgian music is somewhat more militaristic, like EBM—which comes from music and national history. The point is that music doesn’t change by itself. Society and technology change music. Self-playing organs and new highways connecting roadside dancehalls; these were the main ingredients to our electronic music and dance culture.

Friday, 5:15 p.m. Front 242’s Patrick Codenys describes how he injected muscle into electronic music. Belgium is a sort of cross on a battlefield. Also, the capital of Europe is here. There are the highways, too, and apart from flows of traffic, these were also the media highways in the early eighties that were very interesting for sampling. We were among the first ones to have TV channels from all over Europe, and that shouldn’t be underestimated in terms of importance. See, I like Anglo-Saxon music, I like reggae music too, but I’m not a Rasta guy, I’m not American, I’m not English. So although I appreciate that stuff, I don’t really feel it. In my opinion, you look for what you have inside. We called our style “electronic body music” because the body is also the brain. It’s not only about groove, swinging and dancing. It’s enjoyable but it’s also mental. Our body is also a great instrument that uses the senses. I think when you work with a machine you create an interface between yourself and the machine. I could symbolize this by a big arrow from the machine to you and you to the machine. You try to understand and manipulate the machine and try to get something out of it. The machine is giving it back to you. In the early days the interface was very tough, very difficult, very mathematical, very hostile to the human body. The body needed to make an effort intellectually and emotionally to create. At the time, this notion of interface, to imaginatively manipulate the machine, was extremely complicated. Mainly because there was no aesthetic for it but also because the manuals for those machines were terrible. It was a fight all the time. The notion of the body was important for us, especially live because we were one of the rare electronic bands that had a very physical presence, like D.A.F., for example. It’s not like Kraftwerk with some guy standing still behind the machines. When I was eighteen I was going to a club called Cinderella in

Opposite page: Walter van Beirendonck is a fashion designer and a member of the Antwerp Six, a group of visionary Belgian designers including Ann Demeulemeester, Dries van Noten, Dirk van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee whose radical aesthetic has been transforming haute couture since the eighties. After graduating with the other members from the Royal Academy of Antwerp in 1980, van Beirendonck quickly established a phantasmagoric style that was as much influenced by visual art as by the hotbed of nighttime activity bubbling in the clubs of Antwerp. New beat’s daring and highly sexualized musical pastiche was a key influence in his breakthrough at the British Designer Show in 1987. Van Beirendonck now heads the Fashion Department at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Above: Patrick Codenys is a founding member of EBM trailblazers Front 242, one of Belgium’s most influential bands. Since 1981, Codenys and co. have been injecting a unique physicality into their industrial rhythms and have inspired artists from genres as disparate as postpunk and techno. EB 4/2014 95

Above: A balloon-toting mannequin taunted by the flippant whipping of an inflatable noodle. Everyday scenes in Antwerp often seem like they have emerged from some design-y avant-garde master plan.

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Antwerp. It was an amazing place with a David Lynch atmosphere. This was the club that would have all the transvestites from the red light district arrive at two, three o’clock in the morning. There was leopard print on the walls, velvet couches and they’d play only glam rock like Roxy Music and Bowie. Eventually it switched to post punk and new wave, and during that time Antwerp’s fashion designers haunted the club. You could tell that the spirit of these people was feeding from those musical genres. I was going out to Antwerp because it always was a city where there was a lot of fun, a lot of clubs, a lot of animation. It was a city that would live until six in the morning, no problem. So there has always been a sort of dance culture, a night culture in Antwerp. However, when we were starting out, electronic bands at the time were kind of meek—ABC, Spandau Ballet types. And other electronic bands that were successful like Depeche Mode were kind of quiet on stage. There was no muscle behind electronic music, although you could easily put distortion on synthesizers and have really tough sounds. When you listen to industrial music it’s very tough. So we wanted to force things with the military outfits for instance, and try to make a break through. People could identify with us more easily because that army gear was cheap and easy to buy. Regarding the press, you will not find a lot of positive reviews of Front 242 between ’81 and ’85. Most people hated us. But generally in the early eighties there were many Belgian bands and interesting things happening in Belgium, so Swedish, French and Spanish people would come to Antwerp and Brussels to look for records and buy stuff, the same way you would go to Kings Road in London to buy your punk items. But when new beat DJs started out, they would take a 242 track and play it very slow, so it was flattering in a way. It’s also a different way to listen to your music. Now it’s true that compared to what we were planning on doing in our lives, regarding electronic music and research and trying

to find sounds and directions or structures, new beat was a quick artistic approach because the productions were made in a day. We were taking two years to make an album. It was a different world, but I enjoyed it very much. Nights at the Boccaccio in Ghent were a blast. What I like is that it goes to the primal core of the electronic music genre. New beat is leisure. It’s fun. But we never collaborated with new beat artists. We never changed our style of music because of it; we wanted to keep our integrity since the first day. See, if you take the English language, it’s based on consonants like, t, k, p; that’s why it’s more rhythmic. French for instance is based on vowels. It’s more poetic and lyrical. That’s why you have those Italian and French songs that are more melodic and you have English songs that are more rhythmic. But it’s all mixed here. You take what you want.

Saturday, 10:20 p.m. A journey into the origins of rave with producer CJ Bolland. The link between industrial and Belgian techno were the sounds. Acid house was a great inbetween for those two things. It had more of a disco-y four-to-the-floor beat that was much straighter and better to dance to, but it still had those dirty sounds, which came from the Roland TB-303. Same thing when you listen to early Nitzer Ebb; it’s techno made before the genre existed, we just didn’t call it techno then. There are lots of cross over things going on rhythmically between industrial and techno, but the reason I started making a fairly hard style of techno was because I was inspired by those really dirty, crunchy noises you heard in industrial. That’s what tied it all together. It was us kids who were going out to see industrial music when we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen who really started the Belgian techno scene. I don’t think a lot of those old school boys like Patrick [Codenys] got really involved in techno. It was the next generation. In Belgium, we took techno and

made it harder. What was coming out of Detroit was funky, clever and intelligent. We grabbed all of it and added our dirtier touch. From day, one Belgian crowds were into techno. Actually, they went apeshit. I will never forget it, hearing my very first release on R&S records in Boccaccio. It was called “Do That Dance” and it had a big looped guitar sound from Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll”. Frank De Wulf sampled it on “Acid Rock” and I nicked it with my sampler and made it longer. It just had this sound going on the whole time, and the place went mental. It was pretty instant because it just smacked you right in the face. The sound was so big, people were excited and it soon went abroad. People picked up on it. Germany was pretty much the first. I wouldn’t like to say anybody was before anyone else, it just felt like it was happening in Belgium before anyone else got it. At the time, I had about twenty aliases, and we would be releasing at least one record a week. That’s two or three tracks on a 12-inch. But we were kids. We didn’t go to bed, we worked. The best part was on Sunday nights when we’d be working in the studio until four or five in the morning and then we’d bring our tapes to the club, stick it on the reel-to-reel, play it and see how high people jumped. If they didn’t jump high enough we’d head on back to the studio and tweak it a couple more times, take it back to the club to test it again and say, “Yup, this is good, you can press this one tomorrow.” The music didn’t require huge amounts of production and attention. It was basically find one good element, slap a beat around it, see how long you want to dance to that part and then stick it on a piece of vinyl. That’s how simple the music was back then, not that it’s that much different now. But we took it very seriously. I wouldn’t have released anything I wasn’t behind. Although when I listen to some of that older stuff now I doubt that a little. But at the time I thought, “This is tough, this is how I want it to sound.” There was definitely quality control; it was just the music in itself that was

basic. It didn’t require a high level of attention. We didn’t even use compressors. You couldn’t imagine that nowadays. You couldn’t imagine that ten years before and you can’t imagine it now, but for some reason it suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore. But as simple as the tunes were back then they were still distinct, and you could tell them all apart. That’s a problem with techno nowadays because let’s be honest: a lot of it sounds exactly the same. Back then a track had it’s own little gimmick, it’s own little sound, something that made it that track, even if it was a silly little vocal sample. You could tell them apart. People would recognize it after one listen. Of course, there was a lot of sampling. People were always pinching each other’s sounds. I remember an interview with 808 State where they talked about how influenced they were by what was coming out of Belgium. Every record that would come from here they’d buy without even listening, take it home

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and sample the hell out of it. R&S was my first record deal. For me it opened all the doors. Suddenly I had this studio I could work in with more gear then I could possibly dream to afford. Also, it brought me together with a lot of people. It was Renaat [Vandepapeliere, R&S label owner] who introduced me to Dave Angel, Richard D. James, all these artists whose music he was licensing from abroad and then flying here to hang out in the studio. It was like a whole big family. We’d fly in Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Dave Clarke, Mark Spoon, Laurent Garnier . . . I mean, I would have met these people in clubs at some stage but it all happened quite early on and you were meeting them outside of the club in the studio where you can have a proper chat about things. It brought a lot of people together. On the one hand you had Belgians dancing to new beat at 110 BPM in their clogs versus these guys from Detroit doing this crazy shit. I knew where I was going. ~

Above: Some eightyfour percent of the worlds rough diamonds pass through Antwerp’s central diamond district before ending up on the luxury goods market. While the district was historically run in large part by Antwerp’s Hasidic Jewish community, diamond traders from India have become a growing presence since the early 2000s.

Above: Godfather of Belgian rave, CJ Bolland, is not a fan of people dancing in clogs.

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can equip themselves with? Should everyone learn to code?

The Market Value of Ignorance Geeta Dayal: Julian, your work

often offers ways to fight against the invasiveness of technology and various kinds of digital services. What are you working on right now? What do you seek to expose? Julian Oliver: I’m now especially interested in what I call “stealth infrastructure”—essentially covert infrastructures with a hidden agenda. By building cell towers into familiar looking objects that transparently “hijack” a person’s connection with an existing carrier, I can reflect that inherent vulnerability back to them and engender a healthy paranoia, so people ask themselves, “Through whom and what do I speak? Can I trust my phone, my provider?” The other thing I’m spending a lot of time on is a line of anti-wireless surveillance hardware called Cyborg Unplug, which is the first product I’ve ever

Wireless technologies have long invaded every aspect of our digital communication—a development that has gone hand in hand with deep and often covert surveillance interests. New Zealand-born artist and “critical engineer” Julian Oliver wants us to know how extensive those interests are. Through manipulation of wireless networks, Oliver helps us understand that our devices aren’t the loyal butlers of communication we make them out to be. Interview: Geeta Dayal Illustration: minus design

taken to the market. Coming in the form of a little plug the size of a laptop charger, it detects and disconnects wireless spy and surveillance devices from hidden cameras in smoke detectors—popular in hotels—to camera-enabled drones and wearable spy technology. Cyborg Unplug actually started with a little script I wrote back in June called “glasshole.sh” that detects and disconnects Google Glass devices on local wireless networks. After the large amount of press that it received, people were calling for an easy-to-use wireless-defense system for this brave new world of tiny, networked spy devices. So I teamed up with my friend, dance music producer Samim Winiger to build up the site and brand. GD: What do you feel are the

most important tools or techniques that the average citizen

JO: It’s unrealistic to suggest that everyone ought to drop what they’re doing and to learn to code, let alone become an engineer. Nonetheless, I do think that until we can describe, even if only conceptually, the technical systems and infrastructures through which we communicate, remember and even think, we aren’t empowered to protect ourselves. We’re unaware when our basic rights are being compromised. Ask anyone how the postcard they received arrived in their mailbox, and they’d offer a reasonably coherent description of the process. Ask that same person how the email you sent them arrived in their inbox and most will be stuck with surrealist metaphors. This doesn’t mean that person is stupid, but it is telling that most have little or no idea how the technology they depend upon actually works. In the communications space, such ignorance has an extremely high market and political value; remaining “mere consumers” leaves us ripe for surveillance and corporate abuse, as countless leaks have shown. GD: What draws you to wireless networks as a medium? JO: There is an invisible domain of great power and influence: the electromagnetic domain. Anything wireless is just a small subset of that vast spectral space, part of the spectral family known as “radio”. This space alone—with antennas, signal generation and analysis software—is already enough for a lifetime of study, and reveals very quickly that our devices are not what we think they are, let alone that they’re remotely loyal to us. As A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto of 1993 put it: “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal yourself to the world.” It’s clear that many of the devices and networks we use are actively leveraged by certain corporations and governments to take away that power. ~

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