Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 42 · SUMMER 2015
“I don’t owe anyone a pop record” Róisín Murphy
M.E.S.H. Lydia Lunch Michael Rother Dj Bone
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EDITORIAL: preview with M.E.S.H.
“It’s important for people to feel like they have a stake in their culture.” A.J. Samuels: Knowing sufferers
of tinnitus and having struggled with it myself in the past, it recently occurred to me how strange it was that so few magazines and websites on electronic music address the issue. Which is why we’ve decided to bring together in conversation experimental musician Frank Rothkamm and therapeutic tinnitus app developer Jörg Land, both of who have developed two new, extremely different approaches for therapy. Have you dealt with tinnitus at all in the past?
M.E.S.H.: Yes, I started noticing I had mild tinnitus in my left ear after coming home from a six-hour DJ set in Switzerland. This club had the booth monitor right by my head and the monitor control dial on the mixer was broken. I didn’t realize I was developing it for a long time because whenever I would notice the tone in a quiet room, I assumed it was just some electronic device in the immediate environment creating high frequency sounds. I find it interesting reading the ways people try to quantify the volume and frequency of tinnitus symptoms that seem to be psychological. It made sense to me that certain treatments that seem very subjective or imprecise could have actual real results. Frank Rothkamm’s project makes intuitive sense to me—a mix of research and experimentation on his own symptoms, filtered through his artistic practice. I can imagine that listening to his Wiener Process box
Since this magazine’s shift in focus towards the voices of the artists themselves, we have attempted to broaden the scope of what’s important to thinking about electronic music. What’s relevant to the artists from their perspectives—in monologues, interviews and conversations—is relevant to us, which is why looking beyond the conventional framework of dance music towards literature, film, art and philosophy has become central to Electronic Beats. In our cover story on Róisín Murphy, our lengthy interview with novelist Richard Price, our tinnitus special and elsewhere, we ask: How does framing information change its value? What’s a frame? Is it the thing that tells you where art ends and walls begin? Is it the conceptual packaging that simplifies complex things? Avant-garde producer and guest previewer M.E.S.H. offers his perspective. A.J. Samuels Editor-in-Chief
set in full would attune the brain to perceive slight changes in tone at a finer granularity. Maybe the sound of the tinnitus just becomes a tone among many, and psychologically you become less irritated by it. The perceived volume decreases. AS: In our Recommendations sec-
tion, cybernetics theorist Oswald Wiener discusses his experiences making music together with Fluxus artist Dieter Roth, which often centered on tension-filled explorations and musical “failures”. An important goal was to break with conventional musical frameworks. How do you approach the possibility of failure in what you do?
M: I was interested to read about
how Oswald Wiener felt he had some kind of balancing effect on Roth, as well as Wiener’s description of the tension between pure abstraction and the listener’s desire for coherence. Roth’s extreme level of output seems intimidating without experiencing the context of the time he worked in. I think in the conditions we make music today, it’s more necessary to have a fear of adding extraneous signals into the environment. It’s often the case that working quickly and unselfconsciously leads to unconscious copying and falling into clichés. Perhaps because we’re sitting now on the archive of all recorded music. Even working improvisationally can lead to quotations and copied gestures. As listener
expectations become more normalized it becomes harder for artists to build a convincing language of their own. Personally, I like to create specific environments to work in, get things down quickly without editing, let it sit, listen, find connections between decisions I’ve made and build on those connections. It’s best if I can work instinctively and build up these tendencies into a sensibility. That way I can take the unexpected, the failure, and turn it into a semi-coherent system. AS: What about the club music framework? In our Bass Kultur feature, Venus X speculates about the future of her party GHE20G0TH1K, which has much stylistic overlap with the Berlin-based Janus collective, to which you belong. M: For Janus it’s been really impor-
tant to have resident DJs to set the tone and draw connections between the guest acts and develop something new. As Venus says, I think it’s important for people to feel like they have a stake in their culture and be the ones that get to introduce it to the rest of the world. GHE20G0TH1K was really influential because it was so unfiltered, had a diverse audience, and turned into a platform for new sounds that didn’t have a home. There are a lot of pretensions about the club being a liberatory space but most aren’t. GHE20G0TH1K is an exception. ~ EB 2/2015 3
The ayes have it with Adi Ulmansky, a fixture of our spring 2015 EB Festival season. In between working the photo booths, Adi delivered solo live sets of hook-filled R&B and electronics in Cologne, Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava. Read her recent backstage conversation with Róisín Murphy on electronicbeats.net. Photo: Martin Haburaj
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At the EB Festival Bratislava, the silhouettes of hip-hop fan Ryan Lott, aka Son Lux, and drummer Ian Chang cast a psychedelic shadow reminiscent of A Tribe Called Quest’s classic The Low End Theory. In the past Lott has earned his keep writing music for commercials, but now boasts collabs with indie-pop media darlings Lorde and Sufjan Stevens. He’s also applied his song craft to soundtracks, including The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby and this year’s Paper Towns. His sixth LP Bones is out now on Glassnote Records. Photo: Martin Haburaj EB 2/2015 7
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Lights, camera, HORNS. It’s 2015, and brass is the new black. Here at the EB Festival in Warsaw, Kristoffer Lo of Norwegian popsters Highasakite wields not a trumpet or a cornet, but a flugabone. Yes, it’s the shiny old-world tool used mostly for heralding indie angels. And undeniably, grace abounds as Highasakite’s latest LP Silent Treatment topped the charts in Norway, where rustic pop comes in all shapes, sizes and beard styles. Photo: Hubert Zieli´nski EB 2/2015 9
Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues Est. 2005 Issue N° 42 Summer 2015
Publisher: C3 Creative Code and Content GmbH Heiligegeistkirchplatz 1, 10178 Berlin Managing Directors: Rainer Burkhardt, Gregor Vogelsang, Lukas Kircher, Karsten Krämer, Jeno Schadrack, Burkhard Tewinkel, Dr.-Ing. Christian Fill 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 Managing Editor: Sven von Thülen Copy Editor: Karen Carolin Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert
Cover:
Róisín Murphy, photographed in Berlin by Luci Lux.
Contributing Authors: Kathy Alberici, Mykki Blanco, Lisa Blanning, DJ Bone, Cakes Da Killa, Max Dax, Simon Denny, John Duncan, Roman Flügel, Brendan M. Gillen, Terri Hooley, Daniel Hugo, Finn Johannsen, Daniel Jones, Jörg Land, Suzanne Lavery, Tim Lawrence, Claire Lobenfeld, Lydia Lunch, Anthony McIntyre, M.E.S.H., Róisín Murphy, Richard Price, Michael Rother, Frank Rothkamm, Scuba, Lorenzo Senni, Adrian Sherwood, Dan Shipsides, Elissa Stolman, Eugene Ward, WIFE, Frank Wiedemann, Oswald Wiener, Ry X, Venus X
Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Nick Ash, Erez Avissar, Günter Brus, Ron Galella, Martin Haburaj, Franz J. Hubmann, Fergus Jordan, Luci Lux, minus, Alex de Mora, Cornelius Onitsch, Björn Roth, Dieter Roth, Sarah Rubensdörffer, Katja Ruge, Andrew Savulich, Niko Solorio, Miguel Villalobos, Holger Wick, Isolde Woudstra, Hubert Zieli´nski
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 and 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: Christoph Adrian, Ian Anderson, Nicolina Claeson, Monika Condrea, Max Gassmann, Timur Gerbert, Peter Greenberg, Julia Hecht, Sarah Kaes, Seek Knive, Brad Samuels, Mary Jo Savulich, Logan Joseph Siff, Lorraine and Murray Smith, Nadine Söll, Paul A. Taylor, Dave Youssef
© 2015 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited
ISSN 2196-0194 “If you’re given an outsider lemon, try and make some outsider lemonade.”
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At the Leaf Audio DIY synth workshop held at the EB Festival in Bratislava, attendees repurposed defunct dial-up Telekom modems into 8-bit chiptune synthesizers. What in feudal times was known as “gleaning”—serfs collecting leftover crops from wealthy landowners—is today called upcycling, and it’s what the middle class do to the average man’s trash. Photo: Martin Haburaj EB 2/2015 11
Berliners had a chance to twiddle the knobs of history at the R is for Roland book release party at Echo Bücher this past May. R is for Roland features over three hundred pages on seminal Roland machines (like the System 100 seen here) and including interviews with the likes of Jeff Mills and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Read a review of the book in our Recommendations section by DJ, author and magazine editor Sven von Thülen. Photo: Holger Wick
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CONTENT MONOLOGUES
Editorial ...................................... 3 Weltanschauung ...................... 4 recommendations .................. 16 Tim Lawrence, Oswald Wiener, Brendan M. Gillen, Finn Johannsen et al; on Grace Jones, Dieter Roth, Visonia, Conrad Schnitzler and more. Pop Talk on Taylor Swift; Music Metatalk with Mark Smith; Video Game Soundtracks with Daniel Hugo; DJ Bone dissects a festival DJ set
Interviews
Conversations
“I just don’t give a fuck anymore.” Max Dax meets RÓISíN Murphy .......................... 50 “A real addiction.” A.J. Samuels meets richard price ........................... 56
“A few drops and the smell of death was gone.” LYDIA LUNCH talks to MYKKI BLANCO ............................ 70 “Listen with your body in the zero gravity position.” TINNITUS SPECIAL! FRANK ROTHKAMM vs. JÖRG LAND ................................... 76 “Like a healing shower for the ears.” MICHAEL ROTHER talks to ROMAN FLÜGEL .......................... 80
BASS KULTUR ............................... 38 Lisa Blanning talks to Venus X about New York’s GHE20G0TH1K
Wanderlust 72 Hours in BELFAST ................... 86
ABC .................................................. 40 The Alphabet According to Adrian Sherwood
NEU: Simon Denny on Deconstructing NSA Aesthetics .... 98
Style Icon ................................... 44 How Scuba learned to love Prince
Three of our featured contributors: Richard Price
Venus X
Simon Denny
(* 1949) is an American novelist, screenwriter and master of gritty street dialogue. His most recent novel, The Whites, is now being adapted to the big screen. In this issue he talks about the formative influence of James Brown. Photo: Miguel Villalobos
(* 1987) aka Jazmin Venus Soto, is an American DJ and co-founder of New York’s GHE20G0TH1K party. In this issue she explains the origins and future of the party, and why celebrities shouldn’t be co-opting the underground. Photo: Erez Avissar
(* 1982) is a New Zealand artist whose work investigates the visual aesthetics of business, surveillance and technology. In this issue he discusses commissioning a former NSA art director for his installation at the Venice Biennale. Photo: Nick Ash
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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 left. STEP Start the AR camera from the app’s main menu and watch for this sign: ------> Sweep over the pages indicated STEP with the logo to unlock videos, exclusive mixes, related articles and more. STEP
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Monologues
POP talk: TAYLOR SWIFT’S 1989
2014’s best-selling album, Taylor Swift’s 1989, is still dominating pop charts in 2015. The record has earned countless accolades, and a week after Swift bagged eight Billboard Music Awards in May it reclaimed the second spot on the Top 100. Still, the album’s relevance in the mainstream seems worlds away from the underground. Are there points of connection? We’ve attempted to bridge the gap by tapping four artists to tell us how they feel about the megahit. Here, American rapper Cakes Da Killa, experimental trance composer Lorenzo Senni, Drum Eyes member/improvisational violinist Kathy Alberici and Tri Angle Records associate WIFE weigh in.
Rapper and New Jersey native Cakes Da Killa on why Taylor Swift writes songs for That Hoe Over There: With writing accolades from NYC to Nashville and a few Grammys in tote, Taylor Swift is America’s favorite girl next door. 1989 was made for the drunken karaoke smackdowns we later regret getting tagged in on Instagram, but it’s cute. “Blank Space” is clearly a candy-coated THOT [That Hoe Over There] anthem. Swift’s pen game is polished, but some of the hooks sound like commercial mind control, especially on “Shake It Off” and “I Wish You Would”, which I like because Taylor clearly wants to say, “I wish a bitch would!” in a cute way. “Clean” is my favorite, maybe because I’m love starved. Or because I need to do my laundry. The moral of the story is that Taylor Swift is lusty as fuck.
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Dance music dissector Lorenzo Senni hears something in Coldplay that he doesn’t hear in Taylor Swift—something only an emoticon can describe: My brain has already digested singles like “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off”, and of course, I know a pop song doesn’t always need to be challenging. But we often underestimate how sensitive we are to sonic events. That sensitivity is what I’m interested in when considering things made by professionals in big studios. And because I listen to a lot of pop music, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed when I realized that 1989 does not provide that ubiquitous tranc-y feel—one that even Coldplay has in the form of an uplifting coda on “A Sky Full Of Stars”. A pop record needs just a couple of big hits to achieve really good results, but this won’t be enough to write history. ¯\_(``J )_/¯
Taylor Swift’s impressive, no-filler songwriting makes doom-psych maestro
Kathy Alberici
wish she were twelve again: It seems strange to write a review of a record that is already so omnipresent that I can hum the choruses of half the tracks on there. I played the album today in the car as I drove round the streets of Berlin anticipating the need to switch it off pretty quickly, but damn, it’s too catchy. There’s no fluff, no filler, just straight up joyful pop music making me wish I were twelve years old so I could dance on my bed miming with a hairbrush. Each song is a perfectly crafted piece of sing-a-long sunshine. And with that amount of music, we’re talking about a lot of sunshine. There’s nothing revolutionary about this music, just all the right ingredients for great pop: a girl who can actually sing, writes all her own songs, and pumps out enough hooks per track to make anybody believe they know all the words. Some people think it’s just pop music, but I know that it’s dangerous stuff.
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„Taylor Swift, I can‘t get used to this album.’ It is ist so genial konstruiert, dass es sich wie eine zeitlose Blaupause für die Zukunft des R&B anfühlt.“ Daniel Jones
He’s not twelve years old. He’s not a fan of the middle class. He is sick of heteronormativity. The man who calls himself WIFE doesn’t like a lot about 1989: I expected to like some of this record and thought it could at least hold a candle to some of Katy Perry’s best songs, but it falls very short. The tracks are catchy enough but none of them are outstanding . . . or even particularly good. What’s really difficult about listening to the whole thing is that it has the lyrical appeal of a prepubescent diary. Tay Tay’s anecdotes might seem reasonable when you are a twelve-year-old, but by the time you hit sixteen you know that it’s all garbage. It sounds like the pinnacle of the upper-middle class: too safe, too white. It’s drenched in nostalgia, but not that real nostalgia that comes from a human with a heart that feels real things. It’s the kind of nostalgia that is born of an eighty-minute romcom. Throughout the record I’m hearing a person without any emotional investment in what they’re doing. Anyone who has seen a man and woman on skates singing “A Whole New World” will understand that this record has a lot in common with Disney on Ice.
A Polaroid and a Sharpie is all you need to make your Number 1 record retro spiffy. EB 2/2015 17
recommendations
“DJs and dancers could start to freak out in a different way.” Tim Lawrence recommends Grace Jones’ The Disco Years box set Disco had its fair share of casualties, but for historian and writer Tim Tim Lawrence is an expert on New York City Lawrence, Grace Jones may be its ultimate dance music culture and has penned two survivor. Her first three authoritative music albums show disco in history tomes, Love its death throes and a suSaves the Day and the perstar in the making. Arthur Russell biogIsland
raphy Hold On to Your Dreams. He is also cofounder of the Lucky Cloud Sound System, a British offshoot of David Mancuso’s legendary long-running Loft party. His next book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83, about the city’s post-disco club culture, is due out in 2016.
Opposite page: Selten gehörte Musik, Munich, 1974. Offset print. © Günter Brus. The poster by Viennese Actionist Günter Brus advertises a night of “Seldom Heard Music” performed by Brus, Dieter Roth, Oswald Wiener et al. All images are featured in the accompanying catalogue to the exhibit Dieter Roth und die Musik: Und weg mit den Minuten on now at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. 18 EB 2/2015
Disco started to go mutant before the backlash of 1979 compelled its producers to quit their exploration of punk, new wave, funk and dub combinations. As disco outsold rock for the first time during 1978, for instance, figures such as Arthur Russell, Michael Zilkha and Walter Gibbons were carrying dance music into dissonant territory as they added their left field touch to releases like Dinosaur’s “Kiss Me Again”, Cristina’s “Disco Clone” and Love Committee’s “Just As Long As I Got You”. But the shake-up arguably started even earlier, when Grace Jones recorded “I Need a Man”, “Sorry” and “That’s the Trouble” for the French label Orpheus between 1975-77. Admittedly, Jones didn’t set out with any radical intent, her main concern being to switch from modeling to music. Yet these releases stand out as early studies in disco juxtaposition thanks to the way her stiff, gravelly voice combines so uneasily with the standardized disco-backing track. DJs and dancers could start to freak out in a different way. Jones went on to release three disco albums with Island, Portfolio (1977), Fame (1978) and Muse (1979), all of them now reissued as part of an elaborate box set. Given that pioneering disco remixer
Tom Moulton produced all three, and given that Jones is now widely regarded as one of disco’s definitive divas, it’s easy to assume they amount to a landmark trilogy, with Jones now deemed by Island to have been a “natural choice” for Moulton following his work with The Three Degrees, MFSB and The Trammps. But whereas the gospel-R&B tradition produced what seemed like a small army of African-American divas who were able to connect with New York’s predominantly gay dance crowds through a sense of shared emotional hardship as well as a relentless will to survive, Jones cultivated an inverted diva persona
“Affectlessness, dominance and drag.”
Tim Lawrence
that combined affectlessness, dominance and drag. And while dance crowds loved her stage persona and style, relations with Moulton soon turned strained. “Grace became very grand when it was time to do the album,’’ Moulton told me. ‘‘I guess the success went to her head. I finally got so mad I said, ‘Grace, it’s amazing that with so little talent you can please so many!’” Chris Blackwell of Island picked up Portfolio once it had been completed and went on to release Fame and Muse, having heard about Jones through writer Nik Cohn, author of the article that inspired the making of Saturday Night Fever. “He was a friend of mine,” recounts Blackwell. “He said, ‘There’s this unbelievable
looking Jamaican girl in New York, you should check her out, she wants to be a singer.’” Ready to enter the disco market after making his name in ska, reggae and rock, Blackwell was all set to sign Jones based on her image. So he was pleasantly surprised when he listened to “La Vie En Rose”, a new track from the first album, and deemed it “unbelievable.” But the triple dose of musical covers that took up the whole of the first side were sonically insipid as well as ill-suited for Jones, whose voice seemed stiff when faced with the melodic-emotional demands of the form. “Do or Die” turned out to be the standout track on Fame yet fell short of Moulton’s finest work; the sequence of French language covers seemed to be made for lounge listening rather than dance floor play. Muse sank because of the backlash and also because it was the weakest of the three albums. While Jones fans and disco collectors will rightly welcome this reissue, history suggests that the releases were somewhat out of time, delivering an instrumental backdrop that was already beginning to sound generic and presenting an artist whose sense of discord was a little ahead of its time. Jones would find her ultimate expression on her next three albums, the Compass Point trilogy, when Blackwell took control of the studio. Dub, rock, soul, funk and disco swerved and clashed to create a new form of cacophonous bliss. Where other disco artists struggled to survive the backlash, Jones would relax into her mutant self. ~
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“The presence of a non-musical tension.” Oswald Wiener on Dieter Roth und die Musik: Und weg mit den Minuten
Edizioni Periferia
Above: Splittersonate (Splitter Nr. 64 und 86), 1976-1994. 115 sheet, collage, Courtesy: © Dieter Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
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Dieter Roth’s remarkable relationship to music has never been explored in detail—until now. Close compatriot Oswald Wiener looks at how the current exhibit and catalogue on Roth’s musical endeavors reflect a life that knew no boundaries. I saw the first installment of the Dieter Roth und die Musik exhibition a couple of months ago at Kunsthaus Zug in Switzerland. As Roth’s longtime friend and companion I can
surely say that trying to stage an exhibition that focuses only on his music is an undertaking that is almost doomed to fail for two reasons. First of all, his musical output was close to boundless, especially during the last years of his life. He died in 1998 at age sixty-eight and followed an exhausting work ethic that prized quantity over quality. Second, Roth is still first and foremost known for being an extraordinarily gifted concrete poet, graphic designer and Fluxus artist. I remember that when I first met him in Vienna in 1966 I was surprised that he
also made music. I was quickly stunned by his extensive musical knowledge and creativity, and we started recording music together. In fall 1972 I organized the Erster Berliner Dichterworkshop [The First Berlin Poetry Workshop] in my then restaurant Exil in West Berlin. We did it again in late 1973, which is when Dieter and I composed and recorded Selten gehörte Musik/Novembersymphonie [Rarely Listened to Music/ November Symphony] together with Georg Rühm in his studio. But apart from our on and off collaborations, Dieter
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composed and recorded almost obsessively on his own. Walking through the Kunsthaus Zug, I was reminded how many hours of music Dieter Roth actually had composed in his life—not to mention his massive Langstreckensonate #1 [Long Distance Sonata #1] from the mid-nineties, which is comprised of some 264 compact cassettes full of piano music. You could easily spend months and months listening to his late musical works, and you probably could fill even more than one museum show with his vast output. That’s why I remember asking myself why the curators of the Roth exhibition put on display as much as possible and only made it accessible via headphones. I mean, does it really make sense to randomly listen to twenty minutes of Langstreckensonate #1 and then miss the remaining 250-plus hours? Of course, on the other hand you also have to ask yourself whether it would really be enlightening if you would take the time to listen to the whole piece. Personally, I would consider myself a typical music listener. I don’t like abstractions that lead nowhere. And as such I sometimes have my problems with the nihilism inherent in Dieter Roth’s music because it deliberately neglects aesthetic categories such as arcs of suspense or dramatic composition. I prefer the music that I recorded with Dieter together as we balanced it and kept the nihilism out. Having said that, a major part of the music that was on display at Kunsthaus Zug and now in Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof was the result of collaborative efforts where Dieter sometimes only played a minor role. But it’s in these collaborative works where you’ll find the presence of a non-musical tension that his pure solo works often lack. When Dieter and I made music
“I once witnessed how Dieter was crying while listening to a recording of a late Beethoven string quartet. He simply was overwhelmed by emotion. Has anybody ever considered that Dieter probably composed his complex of abstract and—as he would put it, “meaningless”— music in his later years to hide his emotional side?” Oswald Wiener
together with Günter Brus or Gerhard Rühm, you could physically feel our presence in the form of tension. In hindsight I would call it “music of emotions.” I would go so far to say that Dieter Roth only showed true emotion when he wasn’t trying to meet his own impossibly high musical standards, but rather when he would allow himself to be just one part of a larger group of musicians. I once witnessed how Dieter was crying while listening to a recording of a late Beethoven string quartet. He simply was overwhelmed by emotion. Has anybody ever considered that Dieter
probably composed his complex of abstract and—as he would put it, “meaningless”—music in his later years to hide his emotional side? I know that Dieter didn’t want to show his feelings. He felt embarrassed that I had seen him crying. In the early seventies I published a book of poems by Dieter Roth called Frühe Schriften und Typische Scheiße [Early Writings and Typical Crap] because I believe that he was a very good poet. Like with his music, he insisted that there was no meaning or significance in his writings. He believed in repetition. When he wrote poetry he often would repeat the same line by the dozen. I once asked him if he thought that this had to be taken as an invitation to emphasize each line in a different way. But he answered: “No. Each line has to be declaimed in the same way.” And I, on the other hand, couldn’t really tell if he really thought what he said or if he just wanted to contradict me. Clearly, the curators both in Zug and at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin have invested a lot in research. This becomes clear when studying the catalogue Und weg mit den Minuten [And Away with the Minutes], where the entire background to Dieter’s body of work becomes tangible. The complete edition even comprises seven books, a DVD and three vinyl records. The catalogue contextualizes the times, the places and the ideas of Dieter Roth and his various collaborators in much greater detail than we ever would have had the chance to experience, even having lived through those decades ourselves. Which brings me to what is probably the largest impact this exhibition has left upon me: We tried to understand the times we lived in as we went through them, but we were unable to reflect on the bigger picture. Today, it doesn’t matter that we don’t remember every detail—others have done the research instead. ~
Oswald Wiener is an Austrian artist, professor, cybernetician and former member of avant-garde literary circle the Wiener Gruppe. In 1968, he was sentenced to jail together with Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Peter Weibel for his participation in the Viennese Actionist happening Art and Revolution, which involved nudity, public masturbation, defecation and self-mutilation on a large Austrian flag while singing the country’s national anthem. As a result he fled to Berlin, where he ran the famous artist restaurant/hangout Exil, before becoming a professor of aesthetics at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the nineties. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.
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Recommendations
“Mesmerizing becomes propulsive.” Ectomorph’s Brendan M. Gillen recommends Visonia’s Nausicaa EP
Electronic Emergencies
Brendan M. Gillen, aka BMG, is one half of Detroit electro outfit Ectomorph, which he founded together with Drexciya enigma Gerald Donald before teaming up with producer Erika Sherman. Gillen has played a key role in defining the stark sci-fi sound of second wave Detroit electro, and continues to keep the spirit alive via his Interdimensional Transmissions label. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.
Electro has always had transportive qualities, but for Brendan M. Gillen, Visonia’s latest EP is an electronic journey of epic proportions. I first heard of Visonia, aka Chilean producer Nicolas Estany, via his inspired and somewhat haunting collaboration with Dopplereffekt on Last Known Trajectory a few years ago. What seemed like such an effortless balance between warmth and ice has only gotten better on his latest productions, with each new release bringing further developments in complexity and stylistic diversity. Which brings us to the current Nausicaa EP on Rotterdam’s Electronic Emergencies, a label distributed by Clone. The title is the name of the princess from the Odyssey who is angelically kind to Odysseus, the wandering hero enduring adventure after adventure on his way home to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War. Nausicaa is also the windriding princess in post-apocalyptic manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I suppose who Estany is referring to depends on who you think the world’s greatest
storyteller is: Homer or Hayao Miyazaki. Either way, it’s clear that this is the soundtrack to some form of epic exploration. What I find so compelling in Visonia is the fusion of genres old and new. Inspirations come from many sources: the synthetic strings of John Foxx, Ultravox and Gary Numan, the soundtracks of Jan Hammer and Giorgio Moroder, percussion tricks of IDM and the Skam catalogue, early rave, deep hypnotic modern techno power, Detroit electro and classic EBM, to name a few. Yet through all the distinct influences a stable and unique voice emerges, inspired by the past but never nostalgic. It’s not thick analogue, but rather more soft synth modern laptop production. The beats are powerful when the song calls for it and ever dominant strings truly sing out, sometimes simultaneously in ethereal layers but more often as classical, almost new wave melody. For me, the EP functions as an album, since there are so many thoughts within. Or perhaps it’s more of a soundtrack, because like a good DJ set, it takes you on a journey. Some of the songs feel schizophrenic, like the opener “The Moon Doesn’t
Want to Look at You”, which initially balances angular eighties wave with “Crockett’s Theme” strings. Eventually it starts jumping in and out of sections that are simultaneously young Juan Atkins electro and Kevin Saundersoninfluenced UK rave. Long story short: these aren’t combinations you really ever thought you were going to hear, or believe would work if seen only on paper. The drama reaches its apex in the hall of “Blue Mirrors”. A sense of urgency takes over, and what was mesmerizing becomes propulsive, dark and luscious. I envision a bareback flight in a dystopian Never Ending Story. Perhaps that’s a contradictory image, but so is the music of Visionia. The journey ends with title track “Nausicaa”, which is full of suspense and a sense of longing. We find ourselves finally reaching home, only to realize that we lost a part of ourselves on our voyage. It’s important that albums like this continue to be made. That is, music not just built for the dance floor, or purely for the mind. This is a fusion of so many of the best ideas across genres, combined thoughtfully to tell a story. Not pure DJ music, but pure electronic music. ~
“This is the sound of no deadline.” Mark Smith recommends Ben Zimmerman’s The Baltika Years Mark Smith finds serenity in an album composed over a decade on obscure PC software. Software
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When promotion materials for The Baltika Years began appearing online, there were two key selling
points: First, according to its creator Ben Zimmerman, the tracks were never intended for release, and second, the album is comprised of a decades worth of music laboriously built using an arcane PC called the Tandy 1000 RLX. It ran an operating system called Deskmate,
which is capable of sequencing three mono voices of user-generated or built-in samples. However, it could only record eighteen seconds of sample material at a measly 22 kHz, which is about half the industry standard for audio fidelity. To put this in perspective: modern
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music software running on a decent laptop can record hundreds of hours of audio at a sample rate over four times higher than the Tandy. According to Software label-head Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, The Baltika Years articulates a belief that idiosyncrasy is inevitable, and that human affect and technology are linked. One helps the other express something mysterious about the world.” Immediately my interest was piqued. The idea that Zimmerman made his pieces free from the pressure of concrete goals posed some titillating questions: What could this possibly sound like? Is music best made without prior intent for distribution? Do we automatically assume that art will flourish when freed from the slings and arrows of The Audience and The Market? How much stock do we place in the idea that genius is best incubated alone? And does the notion of the lone genius automatically also imply an ivory tower from which he or she creates? As a result of these thoughts, I heard and judged The Baltika Years according to different criteria than most music. For me, this collection of tracks is something more like a
Read Mark Smith’s review of Indonesian noise band Senyawa on electronicbeats.net
longitudinal study than a collection you simply sit down and enjoy. This isn’t to say it’s not immediately enjoyable—I was hooked on first listen. But it’ll turn a lot of people off within a few seconds. The lowbit processing of the Tandy gives Zimmerman’s samples sharp, jagged edges and a uniform depth of field akin to the aesthetic of early video game music. If you’ve ever played on a vintage Nintendo or Sega, you’ll know what I mean—there’s something charmingly naive in that era of bright and blocky audio. What at first glance seems crude is offset by the baroque intricacy of Zimmerman’s sequencing, which teases out remarkable textural details from the shifting, crumbling timbres of re-pitched samples. The Tandy’s feeble processing powers give Zimmerman’s sound sources a unique morphing quality that’s simultaneously lo-def and packed with potential. Guitars on “For Mimi Pt. 1-5”, yapping voices on “Phyllis”, and wacky FM bell tones on “The Scream” all become marked by the Tandy sound. His sources often decompose in order to evolve, a process in full effect on tracks like “Housed!” and “Crystal Lake”. Zimmerman
appears to have arrived at a place of sonic abundance by moving towards extreme limitation. As a result, there’s something charmingly autistic in Zimmerman’s pieces, which are put together precariously like a musical Jenga tower. It’s also in the act of stacking compositions that a discernible whole appears. Taken in isolation each track comprises a disconnected oddity, be it a ten second miniature or a twentyminute opus. But they only break into full bloom in a sequence. Making such complex music on the Tandy must have been an extremely arduous process. This is the sound of no deadline, no release schedule, no concrete goals. I can hear the emancipation and, to be honest, that trumps for me any of the actual musical qualities of the record. Releasing music like this sidesteps typical forms of judgment and listening. The quality of the music recedes behind the fact that The Baltika Years operates outside of temporal cycles decided by anyone who isn’t Ben Zimmerman. That’s rarer than you think. But if you heard this in a vacuum, without the press release explaining how to hear it, would it come across in quite the same way? ~
Mark Smith is one half of improvisational techno duo Gardland. He is also an editor at Electronic Beats.
Opposite page: Long before Jimi Hendrix burned his Strat, it was man vs. music for members of the Wiener Gruppe, pictured here laying waste to a grand piano for their performance 2 welten (2. literarisches cabaret), Vienna, 1959. Photo: Franz J. Hubmann, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna. © IMAGNO/Franz Hubmann.
“Projecting my Western perspective.” Eugene Ward recommends Nozinja’s Nozinja Lodge Eugene Ward is known for distilling diverse genres into a unified sound, but South African dance music don Nozinja proved something of a cultural curveball. I first heard about Shangaan, the South African genre in which Nozinja is arguably the central creative figure, not long after I had discovered footwork via
Massacooramaan’s blog. I was fast enraptured by footwork with its uncanny sampling, unprocessed drum samples and high speed. When Will Bankhead linked me to the Honest Jon’s compilation Shangaan Electro – New Wave Dance Music From South Africa, I was intrigued. But at the time, footwork held a kind of competing position in my mind and eventually “won out” as far as these two fast, tom-heavy genres go. I felt I knew how I wanted my tom
drums, and what’s more, footwork had recognizable samples such as Evanescence, Aaliyah or Lil Wayne distilled into new hooks and contorted around direct, aggressive drum work. As a teenager there wasn’t much that could compete with footwork for me, though my associating it with Shangaan was somewhat facile and dubious. Where the lyrics and cultural context of Shangaan escaped me, in footwork I felt I already had something ostensibly similar in the
Warp
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Eugene Ward is a Sydney-based producer best known for his Dro Carey and Tuff Sherm aliases. With a rapidly growing discography of releases for the likes of The Trilogy Tapes and Berceuse Heroique, Ward is one of Australia’s most prolific and respected dance music producers of recent years. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.
drum palette, which drew upon on that familiar musical touchstone for a white male: American pop. I wouldn’t say I dismissed Shangaan at that point, but I did judge it unfairly and somewhat superficially by conflating it with the Chicago dance genre, considering Shangaan’s tempo and arrangement is entirely indigenous. And still, I find it difficult to escape my cultural bias. Listening to Nozinja Lodge, I catch myself projecting my Western perspective onto the apparent styles on the record. But the tracks on the LP, like those on any reasonably interesting electronic album, are not restricted to a single definable style. Here, they’re neither “all Shangaan” nor entirely high tempo.
Growing up on Japanese video game music, it’s hard not to associate the use of rapid-fire, impossibly accented electronic percussion with the rolls and fills of so many 16-bit adventures, though I don’t think Nozinja would have the same interest in the Sega Genesis sound chip as myself. This presents an interesting point, namely how completely different contexts can see creators arrive at the same point with their machines, at least with respect to drum programming. My favorite example of this is the album’s second track, “Mitshetsho We Zindaba”. Its chord progression, groove and instrumentation bring to mind Icehouse, or the more current purveyors of Australiana, Client Liaison. The fourth track,
“Xihukwani”, gives me this vibe as well. There is also a chant in “Mitshetsho We Zindaba” that is immediately recognizable: a semi-obscure but highly popular Roland sample heavily used by Atlanta producer Zaytoven and first prominently used on “Dilemma” by Nelly and Kelly Rowland. The use of this sample feels so indebted to my reference point that I think maybe, in that one sound, Nozinja and I are actually looking at the same thing. Nozinja Lodge is a well-paced, catchy album that feels truly innovative, whether measured against the criteria of Western dance music criticism or the cultural context it’s rooted in. As such it comes highly recommended, whatever it may connote or tell you. ~
“Pioneering musical eras are exciting precisely because nothing is settled.” Finn Johannsen on Conrad Schnitzler & Pyrolator’s Con-Struct
Bureau B
Finn Johannsen is a DJ, music journalist and vinyl enthusiast based in Berlin. He coruns the Macro label with Stefan Goldmann and is one of the key figures in Berlin’s renowned Hard Wax record store. This is his second contribution to Electronic Beats.
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Conrad Schnitzler’s impact on electronic music is matched by the sheer depth of his discography. Finn Johannsen peers into an intimidating legacy to find a unique project of reconstructions planned by—and befitting of—the master himself. It’s been four years since the legendary German electronic music pioneer Conrad Schnitzler passed away, and I’m very sure that at this very moment a person, or more likely, several people are wondering just where to start with the gargantuan archive he left behind. From the late sixties until his death he pressed record more than most,
and his vast, officially released output is surpassed only by what has not yet graced the public’s ears. Every music consumer nowadays is forced to struggle with the sheer amount of music resurfacing from the past. Legions of thorough and not so thorough specialized labels are dealing with mostly manageable back catalogues. And then there is Conrad Schnitzler. In retrospect, you can take a whole lot of what we’re familiar with today in terms of electronic music, trace it straight back to what he was doing decades ago and slap a “proto” tag on it. From the very beginning until the very end, record for record. So how do you approach such a legacy? You need time, for sure. You need dedication, definitely. You need expertise, of
course. But you also need an idea of how to comprehensibly do justice to all the effort. Schnitzler himself is probably the only person to ever have heard everything there is, but thankfully he was also helpful in helping others wade through his oeuvre as much as he possibly could. When m=minimal label head Jens Strüver was granted access to Schnitzler’s audio library in the early 2000s, he invented the ConStruct series, in which Schnitzler’s archive would be constructed into new compositions by other musicians. And Schnitzler agreed to it. The first installment was handled by Strüver and Christian Borngräber, followed by Kreidler’s Andreas Reihse after Schnitzler’s death. Now, seminal krautrock/ kosmische label Bureau B are on
the case. And what a case it is. It’s important to note that the series is not meant to be a tribute to finished recordings by means of remixing. The history of electronic music is littered with unnecessary remix compilations. Don’t get me started. Of course, there are exceptions where the remix is as advanced as the landmark music it approaches. LFO’s version of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “La Femme Chinoise” comes to mind, which is a fine example for the ideal combination of source material and the remixer’s own artistic signature. Both YMO and LFO have their merits, and together they
multiply. More often than not however, reworks are disrespectful to the original by being too respectful, thus watering down the originality of what they’re reworking. Luckily this is not the case with the ConStruct series, and Schnitzler surely wouldn’t have been content with just being flattered by other artists, however weighty his artistic persona. Which leads me to the third Con-Struct album, curated and rearranged by none other than Kurt Dahlke, aka Pyrolator. Dahlke, a former member of German electronic post-punk miracle Der Plan, is another seminal pioneer of electronic music in his own right. He knew
his Buchla and his numerous other synths and devices and what to do with them. I’m totally convinced that Dahlke’s historical impact should never be underestimated, and may later be con-structed itself. An inspired choice for Schnitzler’s recordings indeed. In Dahlke’s own words: “I wanted to present a side of Conrad which I had always heard in his music but which often goes unnoticed: a darker, technoid side. In my opinion, Conrad has always been one of the great pioneers of classic Berlin techno music.” Upon hearing the album, the word “proto” once again comes to mind, this time applied to techno. But it’s
Above: Dieter Roth, Postkarte an Dorothy Iannone, 1972, repainted polaroid photograph, Ahlers Collection. © Dieter Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
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not today’s club formula of drone plus kick thunder, but rather more of a nineties variety, when disparate sounds, both imported and home grown, permeated the scene. Pioneering musical eras are exciting precisely because nothing is settled within them. These eras are
defined by their explorative nature, an openness that both Schnitzler and Dahlke embodied several times throughout their respective careers. With the latest Con-Struct album, you have Schnitzler’s love of musical adventure combined with Dahlke’s selection, which reflects his own
musical preferences and signatures. Or as he put it: “I must admit, I could not resist the temptation to add one or two of my own ideas. The original tracks were so inspiring, I just had to.” I’m more of a Dahlke than a Schnitzler scholar, but I sense understatement. ~
Opposite page: Dieter Roth and Björn Roth, Keller-Duo, 1980-1989, Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg. © Dieter Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
“Back in the nineties, every sound was a sonic mystery to unravel.” Sven von Thülen recommends R is for Roland Roland has created some of the twentieth century’s most influential instruments. Sven von Thülen remembers a time when their hallowed machines were a puzzle to the originators of Berlin techno. I’m not particularly prone to gear porn, nor am I the most technical producer. But luckily enough, I’ve been able to share a studio with friends who’d fallen hard for analogue machines of all kinds. So over the years I had the chance to test much of the classic equipment that defined house and techno, the genres that fascinated me the most. A whole lot of that gear was built by Roland, a company whose impact on dance music is difficult to overstate. For that reason, R is for Roland, a new illustrated book by Tabita Hub, Florian Anwander and Michal Matlak, is a timely and loving homage to the Japanese manufacturer. Aside from quality pictures for fans, it also includes interviews with pioneering artists such as Jeff Mills, Robert Hood and Mark Ernestus, who share their thoughts on their favorite Roland devices.
When I first got my hands on these machines they were already considered classics that had defined more than one sonic canon. Maybe that was one of the reasons that when Felix Denk and I began interviewing the historical protagonists of Berlin’s techno scene for our book Der Klang der Familie, the geek in me was curious to hear how those early producers found out about the machines responsible for the sounds they loved so much. Because back in the nineties, every sound was a sonic mystery to unravel, both in terms of its source and how you could reproduce it. So it came as no surprise when René Löwe, aka master dub techno producer Vainqueur, told us that, to his ears, Detroit techno sounded like it was made with lots of gear. It was only through
“They were already considered classics that had defined more than one sonic canon.” Sven von Thülen
his exchanges with Detroit producers like Eddie Fowlkes and Juan Atkins, who made their first trips to Berlin to play at Tresor, which helped Löwe realize that the secret of the sound wasn’t an expensive studio. Another early Berlin producer was Mijk van Dijk, who was working for the short-lived Hype Magazine back in the day. He too was searching for sonic clues: “When I interviewed Baby Ford or Kevin Saunderson, I always asked how they made their pieces. That’s how I learned about the 303. Before, it was always only the “Chicago” machine to me. And then there was the “Detroit” machine. That was the 909. The first time I played a 909, I came close to tears over how easily you could program the drums.” The irony is that all of these analogue synths and drum machines attained iconic status at a historical junction in electronic music, namely when they had to make room for digital equipment. As a result, they were discontinued or even considered to be commercial flops. Thirty years later, the love and fetishization of a TR-808 or a System 100 is more present than ever. R is for Roland is undoubtedly proof of that. ~
Electronic Beats
Sven von Thülen is an author, DJ and producer based in Berlin. His most recent book Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall is an oral history covering the rise of Berlin dance music during the build-up and in the aftermath of German reunification. He is also managing editor at Electronic Beats.
Read more about R is for Roland on electronicbeats.net.
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“We fetishize the incomprehensible end.” Daniel Jones recommends HEALTH’s Death Magic
Loma Vista
Daniel Jones is a music promoter and creator of the subculture reconceptualization tumblr formerly known as Gucci Goth, now BlackBlackGold. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats.
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Precarity, austerity, anxiety, fear. With civilization entering a new era of free fall, Los Angeles noise group HEALTH provides writer Daniel Jones with the perfect soundtrack for turning the end into a new beginning. This is how he peels away the layers and dives into the purifying blasts of Death Magic. “We have no words any longer to say to one another. Your mouth opens and: nihil, nihil, nihil.” – Current 93 We live in a time of great uncertainty. Systems fall around us. Mass economic disparity, social injustice and a dying planet are the legacies we leave for future generations. A deluge of information bombards us daily, there to be seen, liked and then forgotten. The boot stamping on our faces isn’t that of an oppressive government, but rather the concrete realization of our own neglect. We, the human race, love to terrify ourselves on a daily basis with the thought of our own annihilation. We fetishize the incomprehensible end because we fear it. Approached with a pair of tweezers and a microscope, it’s a strange fascination, one that fulfills mankind’s attempt to place itself outside the natural order of things. How do we maintain this obsession without devouring ourselves like an ouroboros? What we need now, perhaps more than ever before, is a post-nihilism that embraces entropy and fear and then enfolds it into the secondary routine of nightlife pleasures: death reshaped into dance magick. Heralding this musical memento mori, HEALTH
have returned with a collection of anthems for a crumbling world. Violence and noise have long been staples of the celebrated Los Angeles group, whose live shows rank among some of the loudest and most intense I’ve ever experienced. But it’s with Death Magic that they’ve crafted a definitive statement for Generation Fear. The cacophonous guitars have been shaped into concise industrial dance perfection, while Jake Duzsik’s vocals achieve something akin to pop emotion. On “New Coke”, the album’s bombastic lead single, Duzsik’s wail bombs and destructs with the aid of thudding kick drums and chainsaw synths. Standout cut “Stonefist” details love like an uncertain atheist invoking god: in a dismissive and derogatory way, but obsessively in their thoughts. It’s music tinged with a sadness of something half-remem-
“Some of us don’t know what we want, or where we’re going, or even if we’ll be alive next year. This is our reality. But it doesn’t have to be a mental dead end, a downward spiral or even a negative.” Daniel Jones
bered, yet perpetually just out of reach: “We’re never going backwards. We’re never growing young.” While these themes are prevalent throughout the album, it’s hard to necessarily call Death Magic a celebration of them. Like contemporaries Crystal Castles, HEALTH’s musical evolution finds them acting as bitter commentators on the state of the world for an audience more attuned to getting their news and views in the form of entertainment. It’s easy to imagine “Flesh World”, one of the most enthusiastically rave-friendly tracks on the album, burning up the same indie discos where Crystal Castles’ “Crimewave” once made hearts race. Yet underpinning the hammering beats are lyrics that speak of isolation in a crowd and a psychology that, beneath a veneer of apathy, is screaming at itself to regain control: “Follow your lust /There’s no one here to judge us /Do all the drugs / We die, so what?” As necessary as it sometimes feels to me to embrace the macabre, surrounding myself with images of death often functions like carving a large-scale jack-o’lantern display: creating totems to scare off the real bogeyman. In every musical explosion or reverbdrenched shriek I’m drawn to, I sense the extent to which the unknown terrifies me. Some of us don’t know what we want, or where we’re going, or even if we’ll be alive next year. This is our reality. But it doesn’t have to be a mental dead end, a downward spiral or even a negative. In this sense, the music on Death Magic suggests that, even as we revel in deathworship, one day we’ll maybe be able to shrug it off and resurrect. ~
Illustration: minus academy
music metatalk by Mark Smith
Becoming an RBMAde Man:
What do you see in this image? Over the past seventeen years, Red Bull Music Academy has become one of the most important incubators for up and coming dance music producers and artists. Magazine editor and Gardland member Mark Smith recounts his struggle with the application process for acceptance in electronic music’s ivy league.
W
hat’s the title of your autobiography?
What’s lying next to your bed? When was the last time you cried? You’re undergoing a psychological examination. Look inside yourself and answer 32 EB 2/2015
truthfully, lest you render the results void. Look further through these seventeen pages and you’ll see a Rorschach blot. Is that France? Or two flying warthogs? Coincidentally, this year’s Red Bull Music Academy is going down in Paris. Attending the Academy is a grand way to launch a music career, or sure up a flagging one, if you’re lucky enough to be chosen. In two two-week sessions you attend lectures with very famous and often interesting and sometimes inspiring musicians. You also go into the studio to collaborate with fellow academy participants. Myself being on the lower tier of everso-slightly successful electronic artists with no future prospects in sight, I considered myself a perfect candidate for this year’s academy, which is why I was following instructions like: This is where I am in
relation to the musical universe. Please draw us a map! Here I drew a stick figure being inexorably sucked into a swirling void labeled “music industry”, guarded by space junk and comets labelled “ego”, “money” and “time”. Hold up, I’m actually trying to get these people to bestow the coveted honor of Academy Participant upon me. I scribbled my drawing out and realized I had no space to draw another. So what exactly do they want? Is it me? My initial instinct was: hell no! I needed to come up with a character that fits my idea of what I think they want. Or rather, their idea of what I think they want . . . or something. And of course, the only way to ascertain what they may want is via the questions in the application. So I’d sit for way too long mulling over how best to answer questions like: What’s the one thing
you’d never put on Twitter? Well, it could be any number of things, but I was only interested in the answer they find most attractive. I got that old insectoid feeling of a cool kid sussing you out. You’re a nerd auditioning to be a cheerleader, and they humor you politely while scribbling cruel aphorisms on their notepad. I just want to be friends, be liked, and maybe even respected—just a little. I never thought that perhaps a completely uncynical response would be successful. Heck, I didn’t even get that far. I was maybe half way through before I started feeling deflated after thinking too long about this question: Who is your favorite Asterix character and why? What’s his or her name in your language, and what does it mean? I asked my girlfriend, “Should I even bother?” She said no, so I stopped. ~
Images from The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
Daniel Hugo on Video game Music
Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure:
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter First-person mystery games are increasingly taking on more complex forms of storytelling—and their scores are reflecting it. What do nonlinear narratives sound like?
F
or many years now, the worldwide revenue of the video game industry has towered over that of print. In many respects, the immense popularity and economic success of video games has left classic forms of storytelling sustaining themselves on the slim pickings offered by a stubborn old-world cultural landscape. It seems fitting then, that some games would then turn to meditate upon the writer that it has helped make disappear. Indeed, every disappearance is a mystery, and every mystery has its own detective
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inspecting the case. In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a first-person mystery game, players become the hard-boiled detective Paul Prospero, who traverses crime scenes that dot the noirish, bucolic topography of Red Creek Valley. The area appears as a kind of relic, with its abandoned mineshafts, houses, forests and train tracks. Prospero is investigating the disappearance of Ethan, whose strange and prophetic short stories alert his attention to a disturbing narrative intertwined with the town’s economic collapse. Littered throughout the world Prospero must explore, the stories become allegories that are clues moving us closer to Ethan’s disappearance, while also remaining abstract. The supernatural and mystical density of the game is amplified by its stunning graphics and sound design. The gameworld bristles with details
like pastel-colored skies, dust floating in cylinders of light, snatches of reflections caught in running water—all woven together into a wonderfully intricate and varied landscape that is near psychedelic in its hazy realism. The sheer magnitude of the valley, its aliveness, bears down and emphasises its own desertedness, generating the game’s creepy tone throughout. Only through Prospero’s paranormal ability to animate past events by correctly linearizing them in the present through a series of puzzles do we ever “see” other people in Red Creek’s vibratory surroundings. By largely avoiding dominant and clichéd evocations of fear, the sound design and score are perfectly measured in building the disturbed, tense atmosphere. Layered within its plaintive strings are a manifold of bizarre envelopes of sound, with chokes, gargles and rattles
emerging and disappearing as Prospero enters new areas of the map. The sceptical tone of the pieces prevents the story from being overloaded with any clear emotional content. Where other soundtracks demand and, in turn, direct attention, this one works through the detached coloring of a plot that always wants to avoid simple resolution. Ultimately, The Vanishing celebrates the power of the story. It champions what might be called a narrative surplus, where storytelling exceeds complete story understanding. Which is to say: What happens when, where and how can remain mysterious, as long as we’re intrigued by how we encounter the events and the way in which they slip into other stories. Because of this, every story is a mystery, and every mystery needs a detective. And detectives are in the business of creating as much as uncovering. ~
played out
Boned and Rethrowned PLACE: Bloc. Weekend, Minehead TIME: 7:28 p.m. Sunday - festival closing night If you’ve ever had doubts about the expressive potential of turntables and vinyl, look no further than Detroit native DJ Bone to teach you the truth. The painfully underrated selector, producer and label owner mixes with three or four decks at once, morphing classicist techno into something unfamiliar and genuinely exhilarating. Here, he unpacks the method and philosophy behind his charging whorl of sound, taken direct from a Sunday night set at Bloc. Weekend festival in England. 1. DJ Bone - “Detroit is . . . Hard” This is my current peak time favorite. It’s a banger, but the sentiment comes straight from the heart. I went into my studio, expressed myself and this was the result. I played this to give the crowd a glimpse into my vision of Detroit. It references what Detroit is—not only for me and many of my peeps, but also for the music fans around the world whose basis for techno stems from Detroit electronic music. It bangs hard but there’s a melodic key line and vocals of dedication to offset the heavy drums.
While the percussive elements of the remix battle it out with the beautiful strings and piano, I fade in the aptly titled “Distracted” by Ø [Phase]. This of Life” while the two previous tracks continue. Don’t forget I’m queazy, hypnotic track floats well on top of “Strings”. using three decks here! I cut faders in and out to introduce 4. Ø [Phase] - “Distracted” different elements while makThis came out on Token Records in ing sure I maintain the beat. I 2013 but I still find myself drawn to it. finally remove everything but Ø [Phase] has made sev“Strings” eral tracks that convey certain moods very well. when that “Distracted” has a wanpiano line dering, seasick synth line drops. but it never goes too far out. This sort of sound is a perfect way to disrupt a typical four-to-the-floor loving crowd. I use this track as a transition from one mood to another. It seems to hang in mid-air.
Heat, mood and intensity are my gauges in the mix. To take things even higher I needed a dark, charging follow up.
The next mix brings together two very bouncy tracks that really swing. A sort of giddy-up vibe is created.
Left: DJ Bone, photographed in Amsterdam by Isolde Woudstra.
2. Planetary Assault Systems - “Rip the Cut” Luke Slater, aka Planetary Assault Systems, is a master of his craft. This track is complete mayhem! It has that tribal feel that I love and fades into sinister territory while remaining funky. It’s very deliberate, almost like it’s in a hurry to reach its destination. Luke has this form of expression in some of his tracks that’s truly amazing. Honestly, my intention was to go from “Detroit is . . . Hard” to “Rip the Cut” in order to tear the roof off the place.
Fade in my remix of “Strings
new school, preserving an important piece of history for me and remaining true to the roots.
3. Rhythim is Rhythim - “Strings of Life” (DJ Bone Remix) This is an unreleased remix I made of Derrick May’s “Strings of Life”. There have been so many remixes but I wasn’t feeling any of them. I felt this classic needed an aggressive update. I introduced organic percussion and chants that get things popping, only to have it all drop out for the infamous piano line. It’s a yin and yang thing here. Old school becomes
5. Ben Sims featuring Paul Mac - “Can’t You See?” I received this gem from Mr. Sims quite a while back and have been running it non-stop ever since. I’m not sure if or when it had a proper release. Also, the title may have been changed. It’s a very hypnotic track with a disco essence to it. It’s the choppy sample edits that give it its soul. These relentless, unapologetic twists and turns fit my style of DJing perfectly. ~
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Bass Kultur by lisa blanning
“It’s about people having authorship over their youth experience.” Venus X on the future of New York’s most influential party, GHE20G0TH1K. What started as a fiercely local club night fusing R&B and rap with regional forms of dance music has become New York’s key incubator for autonomous youth culture. With the forces of capital baying at the gates, founder Venus X tells us how to protect what’s real. In 2009, my friend was working at a bar and gave me an off-day monthly. At first it was called Deathwish, but people were calling it Ghetto Goth because that was what we were using to describe it. By the fourth month, it was Ghetto Gothik. It went through a few different spellings—it’s a lot about disruption and being elusive, not wanting people to find us online. Why would we make it easy to spell? I was young, brown, growing up in New York and gay. When you grow up in any of the black or Latino neighborhoods and you’re gay, everybody knows each other. But there were local punks, steampunks and hardcore kids who DJ’d with me, too. So we kind of created a crossroads where everybody could meet up, which didn’t exist before. It was a really open format. Within six months we started doing parties at a bar in the Lower East Side, maybe one hundred sixty capacity in the basement. They were the best parties. It was me, [Hood By Air designer] Shayne [Oliver], Physical Therapy, a lot of people who are now on Fade To Mind, and a lot of New York all-star instrumental-
ists, like Dutch E Germ from Gang Gang Dance. Since then we’ve been on and off in both disgusting and great warehouses, and sometimes Santos and SOB’s. Musically, the party says two things specifically about our youth now: it’s very local and it’s also very Internet. So it’s from here but it’s also from nowhere. Everyone can co-exist here in New York because it’s so fast-paced and crazy. No one is going faster than us. So the music is local: vogue, which is happening in Midtown, and Jersey club. as well as a lot of producers from the Bronx and all over New York. But at the very beginning it was actually punk and industrial, really dark hip-hop and nineties Memphis murder music, like Three 6 Mafia. There was a time when we had a lot of great gothic rap that no one ever called goth, and it was reinterpreting what that was. We were trying to be obscene, we were trying to be fixers of history, we were trying to say, “Fuck you,” to a lot of people. This aggressive reinterpreting is now going into vogue culture, Jersey club, kuduro and juke. I don’t see the problem with understanding women’s history and sexual politics and also playing rap music. When you’re living it, it’s a much more dynamic thing. I was really militant when I was in my late teens. I was studying African studies, more specifically the political economy of race. I was squatting, hanging out with kids that were extremely radical. Then, by the time I was twentythree, I had gone back to school. I developed more into an adult that could sustain the pressures of capi-
talism and I wasn’t just angry. So how do I actually participate in the world that I like, which is a fashionable world, a world of complex social dynamics where sexuality is not just a thing of power play and abuse? Part of it is avoiding or working around male culture: a male-dominated nightlife, male-dominated fashion industry, a male everything. Now the party has been on and off for a few years. When there’s great venues, we’re not going to stop a party. But when there are no venues, and shit is hitting the fan, you realize some people are just using the party for the aesthetics. They don’t get that it’s about people having authorship over their youth experience. No celebrity can co-opt that. It’s not allowed, which is why GHE20G0TH1K was shut down for a few months when the whole Rihanna thing happened [Rihanna, who never attended the party, hashtagged #ghettogoth in a series of Instagram posts over a year ago]. This city is about money, it’s about greed. I’m not going to fight a celebrity, and I’m also not going to fight a system that’s organized in the service of rich people and corporate situations. Kids getting this organized to make an impact in so many different genres, from so many different backgrounds, doesn’t happen very often. And Rihanna is just an archetype for the whole system, which constantly says, “I’m going to take it from you even though you created it.” And it’s just like, “No, it’s 2015. We’re not doing this shit again.” ~ Photo: Erez Avissar
Three GHE20G0TH1K Classics: Joswa In Da House - “El Me Gusta (Fra Fra)”: “Explicitly gay Dominican dembow was crucial to the sound of GG.” B. Ames/Nicki Minaj - “Ra Ra Ha (Roman’s Revenge)”: “Unrealistically aggressive beat. Love the way B. Ames chopped the animal sound.” MC Bin Laden - “Bololo Haha”: “Baile Funk’s not dead.” Opposite page: Venus X (center) flanked by Nguzunguzu’s Asma Maroof (left) and guest MC Ian Isiah. EB 2/2015 39
ABC
The alphabet according to
Adrian Sherwood
as in African Head Charge African Head Charge was a psychedelic dub band I first produced back in 1981. Consider it an attempt to inject some “holy voodoo” into dub. The line-up changed a lot over the years but it’s centered on percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah. There was a lot of talk of African influences in Jamaican music during the seventies and eighties, but the heavy Afro percussion that Bonjo specialized in wasn’t so common. Most Jamaican roots tunes tended to use lighter percussion like repeater and bongo drums. With Head Charge we emphasized heavy beats, samples, chants, down-tuned vocals and backward-mixed tape. By Jamaican standards we made tracks that were pretty whack. Still, I stand by them to this day.
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In the early eighties Afro-Caribbean roots music was being dubbed into another dimension. Producers like Englishman Adrian Sherwood stretched the music’s rich cultural fabric into new frames of time and space. Dub, industrial, electro, hip-hop and synth-pop became part of the same musical conversation, especially under the auspices of Sherwood’s label On-U Sound. There, dub cornerstones of bass weight and uncluttered space came to define the producer’s style, whether he was remixing Bim Sherman or Nine Inch Nails. His wide-open sound was most recently featured on Late Night Endless, a hi-def collaboration with Bristolian dubstep producer Pinch. Here’s an ABC cataloguing Sherwood’s sprawling history, from drinking tea with Björk to movie nights with Johnny Rotten. Opposite page: Adrian Sherwood, photographed in Ramsgate, UK by Alex de Mora.
as in British foreign policy God alive! It’s clear that British foreign policy is anything but just British, especially in light of “our” peace envoy Tony Blair’s criminal foreign policy adventures.
as in Dynamics There’s a dearth of dynamics in modern music. What’s more important are dynamic people and relationships.
as in English dub production The originators are untouchable but time marches on. The Jamaicans have a saying: “Each one teach one,” and many producers in the UK—and the entire world over for that matter—have been attentive students who learned from the best. They understood the lineage and pushed dub into the future.
as in Cultural cross-pollination Pollination is essential. Stop poisoning the bees! Cultural cross-pollination is great in music if the ingredients are properly seasoned.
as in Fatherhood The best productions I’ve ever been involved in are my children.
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as in Gravity and groove Both are strong forces that pull you about and lift your feet off the ground.
as in High Wycombe What can I say? It’s a small satellite town west of London where I spent my formative years and forged lifelong friendships that have shaped me to this day. Glad I left when I did though.
as in Imported wax from the Caribbean and Africa Like receiving messages sent from another planet.
Illustrations by Cornelius Onitsch 42 EB 2/2015
as in Jah Shaka The pre-eminent sound system warrior and producer. I’ve been listening to him for over forty years. Most people don’t know that he’s a jazz aficionado as well as a dub master. I still marvel at his ability to work his sound system non-stop for twelve hours straight. When Mark Stewart and I first started working together, the first thing he did was play me a cassette of a Shaka dance. The cassette was heavily distorted, like most live Shaka recordings, but Mark’s tape was particularly hot. I thought he wanted to record tracks in the vein of Shaka’s steppers rhythms but I soon realized that he really wanted his record to sound like Shaka’s sound system blowing up.
as in Kukl We often crossed paths with the Icelandic post-punk band at John Loders’ Southern Studios in London. We would wait for whoever was in the studio to finish, be it Crass, Exploited, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Subhumans or Minor Threat. Only then could we get our own sessions started. In the meantime we’d have funny chats in the kitchen over cups of tea with Björk and the rest of that strange and lovely crew.
as in Lydon, John I first met the former Sex Pistol with Viv Goldman. I came across him later on through Ari Up while I was staying at her mum’s house. Ari was the daughter of John’s girlfriend, who later became his wife. I really liked John. He had a video player, something I’d never seen before. I spent a few nights with him watching films like A Clockwork Orange.
as in Meditate on bass weight I’ve always thought the bass line is as important as the melody. Most of my favorite tunes are all about the bass line.
as in Nostalgia Being nostalgic is all well and good, but when you’re making music and pine for a time gone by or for things to be or sound a certain way, you better be careful as it can spell the end for you.
as in Overdue payments An issue in all our lives.
as in Pinch aka Rob Ellis, dubstep pioneer and head of Tectonic records. He’s genuine, intelligent, funny and I’ve just made a great album with him!
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favorite producers are those whose style you can recognize instantly.
as in Quality control at a record label I’ll relate this to the old music business. When they were minted it seemed that large record labels didn’t have much of a policy regarding quality control. These labels were often run by tone deaf A&R people and business men who seemed to think that being financially successful meant they had quality acts. Anyway I guess quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
as in Where is political music today? Good question! Sadly, I don’t think artists are as political as they should be. With the exception of Sleaford Mods I can’t think of many articulate, angry new bands coming up.
as in Teenage years Not the best years of my life, probably because I was stoned and unable to speak for most of the time. Now I remember those years fondly because that’s when I discovered Jamaican music.
as in Xciter App A new app for your phone that’s supposed to enhance the sound of compressed MP3s. I’d like to have a go with it, certainly sounds interesting. It’s just another tool but possibly a great one considering that most people listen to low quality digital files these days.
as in Uncluttered space A very important musical tenet. Carving out a specific place for each instrument and sound effect is what I love to do best. I like being able to isolate each part so I can grasp how one element plays off the other. I think this comes from my early experiences recording multiple musicians in a single room at the same time. Even after overdubbing, I made sure that everything could be clearly heard in a dynamic, three-dimensional field. Uncluttered space is vital to many modern productions. Tracks these days have become super minimal, though they’ve never had so much sonic power.
as in Racial tension It’s stirred up over and over again to stop us fighting the real dogs.
as in Signature sound Something to strive for. Most of my
Adrian Sherwood dubs more versions than you. as in Violence in Jamaica The history of the island is cruel and violent, but let’s not forget how the CIA funnelled weapons into the country during the seventies. Political shenanigans are played out in the poorest areas with the drug business and gangs fueling ongoing problems. It fills me with sadness.
Read more ABCs at electronicbeats.net
as in Your influences I’m clearly influenced by things from the past that I’m admittedly a bit nostalgic about now. On the other hand, finding new influences is a must. See N! Generally these stem from working with and meeting new people, as well as seeing and hearing things that impress me and make me wish for something new.
as in Zero Zero One God. The beginning. Perfection. And also, funnily enough, the code for phoning America. ~ EB 2/2015 43
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SCUBA on PRINCE
Mr. Style Icon
Prince wasn’t one of the most important artists for me growing up, and his albums weren’t among the first I bought with my own money. He also wasn’t one of the artists I played guitar along to while standing in front of the mirror, convinced that it was only a matter of time before I’d become a rock star. My first brush with him was actually via the Batman soundtrack that came out at the tail end of the eighties. That movie was quite a key moment in my childhood. See, I had the album on tape, but I only really connected with one or two tracks at the time. I was a bit young for it back then, but now it’s one of my favorite albums. After that, I remember “Gett Off” coming out as a single in 1991 and all the girls at school being completely obsessed with it . . . which was possibly the reason it didn’t quite stick with me. It was when I was about twentyone or twenty-two that I read a long article about Prince and decided enough was enough and that I really needed to make an effort with this guy. There’s so much in his catalogue, ranging from the immediately accessible to stuff which is pretty impenetrable if you’re not familiar with how experimental he can be. I jumped straight in by buy-
Over the course of a decade, English producer Paul Rose, aka Scuba, has run the gamut from heads-down dubstep and Berlin-tinted techno to bombastic Ibiza-ready tech house. His propensity for changing it up has seen him fall out of step with the authenticity police patrolling the underground from whence he sprung. But his resilience and autonomy has returned to the fore with his new album Claustrophobia, inspired by a recent set at Japan’s Labyrinth festival. So it’s not so surprising that he puts Prince, the paradigm of chameleonic charisma, on a pedestal. Here, Rose explains how His Purpleness helped him embrace shapeshifting tendencies. Opposite page: Prince attending the premiere of Purple Rain on July 26, 1984 at Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California. © Ron Galella/Getty
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ing a bunch of albums at once, but the only one which immediately stuck was Purple Rain. After that I gradually got deeper into his seminal run of albums from the late eighties and early ninities like Parade, Sign ‘O’ the Times, Diamonds and Pearls, the Batman soundtrack and others. There’s so much about Prince to be inspired by, from his music all the way through to his attitude and public persona. His willingness to challenge his audience’s perceptions, even to the extent of intentionally alienating them at points, is something that I’ve been directly influenced by over the years. Even if you have the instinct to act like that, it’s quite a daunting thing to undertake in the public eye. But knowing that someone like Prince has had the balls to do it first gives you courage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to compare myself to Prince, as that would be ridiculous. But adopting that iron-clad, indestructible attitude is something I’ve aspired to for a long time now. Another really key thing for me was his approach to recording. A lot of the really seminal material was just done by him with Susan Rogers engineering, which was quite a distinctive way of doing
things in the eighties and would be pretty much unheard of in the making of pop records now, where a million different producers contribute to a single track. Susan Rogers is quite an inspiring character in her own right, actually. Studio engineering is still one of the most male-dominated professions I can think of and in the eighties it must have been even more so. There’s a great story about her leaving Prince in the studio to record the vocals to “If I Was Your Girlfriend” with the microphone preamp inadvertently 10 db louder than it should’ve been and them keeping the distorted recording that came out. That’s the kind of studio insight that is really invaluable—far more than learning how to work a compressor properly or whatever. Sometimes it’s the mistakes that lead to the best results. It’s the finished product that matters, not how you get there. All of my music has been recorded and mixed down on my own in the studio, and I’ve definitely used Prince as a conscious excuse to take that approach in my own mind. It’s probably held me back in certain respects, and certainly there have been times where I’ve thought that I’m missing out on something by only working alone. But then I have the Prince justification . . . even though he had an engineer. ~ EB 2/2015 45
Counting wiTH . . .
Howling Howling are Ry X and Âme’s Frank Wiedemann, two men extremely in touch with their feelings—and yours. The duo’s recent release Sacred Ground (Monkeytown) combines the sincerest forms of indie-pop and Innervisions-esque house to make tracks for the melody hungry dance music enthusiast. Maybe that’s you?
memorable line in a song: “She’s a tear that hangs inside my soul forever.” Jeff Buckley – “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” off Grace.
decisions we regret: Each thing we do, regretful or not, is a part of our learning. We could say we regret many things we’ve been a part of, but then we wouldn’t have learned and grown from those experiences. So it’s all part of our journey.
artists that should collaborate: Björk, Radiohead and Fela Kuti.
ways out of an argument: There are only three ways out of an argument: humility, love and trust.
years from now music will be . . . Magical, still.
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6
hours ago ... Ry was getting kicked in the middle of the night by a threeyear-old.
albums everyone should own: Every one of the Âme albums they have never put out. Other than that, there are too many to list, because music is deep and wide. Everyday requires a new experience in the vast ocean of music.
After a.m. (in the club): Frank is probably about to go on.
Our cloud Somewhere beautiful and peaceful on an ocean with waves to surf, a studio ready to create in, amazing food and our friends and families by our side.
I wouldn’t touch it with a -foot pole: We’re open. Let’s touch it. ~
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Move around freely, pick up calls and listen to music on the go without tangled cords. Hassle-free as it should be! The Plattan ADV Wireless headphone is the first Bluetooth headphone in the Urbanears line-up. It comes with a built in microphone, a swipe interface on the ear cup and it is ready for up to 14-hours solid playtime before recharging. Add lots of cool and innovative features like the machine washable headband, collapsible structure and a ZoundPlug and you have yourself a match made in headphone heaven.
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Interviews
MAx Dax talks to RÓISÍN MURPHY
I just don’t give a fuck anymore.” When Irish singer Róisín Murphy broke seven years of silence with an EP comprised exclusively of songs sung in Italian, no one could have guessed where she’d go next. Since her days as the voice of Moloko, Murphy has bore the mark of the perennial underdog—largely for never bowing to expectations. Her new album Hairless Toys is a decisive step forward and a definitively experimental pop record, delivered with a confidence that defies the brevity expected of chart fodder. Here, Murphy unpacks how giving up on the dream of superstardom helped her achieve something greater. Left: Róisín Murphy in Berlin. All photos by Luci Lux.
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R Róisín, last year you released an EP of Italian songs entitled Mi Senti, which roughly translates into “Do You Hear Me?” It was an interesting and, for many, a completely unexpected career move. I didn’t even know that you speak Italian . . .
Well, I don’t really—scusi, non parlo Italiano! But if you’d provide me with an original recording and a good English translation of the lyrics then I could easily sing in Italian with almost correct pronunciation . . . and also feel the lyrics while singing them. But apart from that, hardly anybody really noticed the album, so I wouldn’t call it a career move. The song selection was excellent. Picking classics by Mina and Lucio Battisti was a bold statement for a non-Italian.
Well, I also covered Patty Pravo’s “Pensiero stupendo”, and she must have totally been into David Bowie, too. As female stars, both of them were fully aware of how much further they could go than anyone else around them at the time. They were both role models, but their fame somehow was limited to Italy. If you don’t speak Italian how did you connect to the songs?
I don’t speak it very well, but I do understand quite a lot of Italian. I had yet another Italian boyfriend years ago so I already tried to learn the language. I have a sort of love affair with the language and the country. And Italians like me! Or, at least they like the blonde, blue-eyed Irish smile of mine. Have you ever been invited by Italian TV to sing there?
My fiancé Sebastiano is Italian, and our son is half-Italian, so we feel like an Italo-Irish family and singing in Italian just felt natural. Maybe it feels a bit strange for other people but for me it was just a family thing. Ask any Italian and they’d name these two artists as the most important Italian singers in pop music history. In that sense, covering four of their songs wasn’t that risky, was it? Sebastiano is steeped in the history of Italian cantautori singer-songwriter music, and funnily enough he turned his back on it as a teenager only to re-evaluate it when he was thirty. But I came across Mina long before I met Sebastiano. When I went to New York for a couple of months in my twenties I stayed with a half-Italian girl who taught me so much about Italian music. She was the one who introduced me to Mina. In fact, until today she was the only one who would play Mina’s music to me and let me just listen to it without simultaneously trying to translate and to comment on it. But since they always get excited when listening to Mina, I started to understand what her music must mean to the Italians. Italy’s love for Mina goes back to the sixties. You probably know her legendary live album Mina alla Bussola dal vivo?
Of course I do! In one particular concert, Mina played the song “Non credere” with an intensity that leaves me speechless. Sebastiano’s uncle actually wrote that song, so he once played the full concert to me on YouTube. It’s all black and white, and you basically see just her face singing at quite a distance to the microphone. Suddenly, while watching, I understood why she was such an incredible star and so far ahead of her time, especially her personality and the way she dressed. She was a total beauty queen but also had this great sense of humor. You notice that in the way she performed; in her eye movements and her funny little dance steps. She owned her appearance in a way artists like Dusty Springfield didn’t. She was so modern that I would call her the Italian Madonna. Interesting comparison! I always thought of Mina as the Italian David Bowie because she also had this air of androgyny. On some of her record covers she really plays with that. 52 EB 2/2015
I really wanted to do San Remo but it didn’t happen. On your new album Hairless Toys you switched back to English. Is this the end of records in Italian?
Probably, but you never know. I might do more because I loved the result. I could imagine doing a record in French sometime soon because there is so much great French music. But then again, I would die embarrassed if I didn’t pronounce the words I’m singing correctly. I don’t want to end up like Bowie singing “Heroes” in German. The lyrics you wrote for Hairless Toys are amazing. They’re like an endless stream of consciousness. That’s a very unusual way of writing lyrics.
I don’t know about that. I’d say on this album, my long-term musical director and collaborator Eddie Stevens and I worked in shifts. We’d work straight for about four hours in the morning. Then we’d go out for lunch, have a pint, come back and continue to do it the old fashioned way. Eddie sits down at the keyboard and makes it up as he goes along, and I make it up as I go along, too. I come from a background in electronic music where you produce music more in bits and pieces and then kind of bricolage it afterwards, you know? But this time we sat down like oldfashioned songwriters at the piano. There was some kind of very close “frisson” between him and me. And once we had had a drink we couldn’t give a fuck! I think the lyrics would work as written poetry. They’re so much more complex than what you’d expect from a singer who was once regarded as the possible next queen of pop.
You know what? I just don’t give a fuck anymore. I can’t hear it anymore when people say, “Why didn’t she make a decent pop record?” Nobody lets me be a pop star anyway! When I made “Overpowered”, Pitchfork called it “possibly the greatest pop record of the last decade.” But did it make me a pop star? No. My
guess is that I don’t owe anyone a pop record at the moment. With this record I did whatever the hell I liked to do. I’m an adult now, you know? And as a woman I am fully aware that I don’t want to do what other people want me to do. So maybe yes, you’re right. Maybe there is some kind of an adult orientation to the lyrics that says: This is who I am and you can take it or leave it, I don’t care. Really. I’ve sort of proved that I can do all of these things that you wanted me to do and still I’m stuck with being me. In a way all my new lyrics circle around this very topic. Did you consciously seek to create a different style of lyrics for this album?
They say that we humans change every seven years. I have two kids and I’m not forty-one anymore—that’s how old I was when I made Overpowered. So I’d say that just following my instincts was change enough. And of course the fact that Eddie and I are like spiritual brother and sister was important, too. I mean, you cannot emulate the original feeling that defined the early records of Moloko. That should be obvious because at that time I was in a relationship with the person I was creating with. I was becoming a singer together with him and a writer and a live performer and everything else. You recently said that you recorded some fifteen songs for the album, but Hairless Toys only features eight of them. Can you describe the process of what you kept and why?
Wasn’t it Willie Nelson who wrote the song “Why Do I Have to Choose”? In the past it has always been a drama for me to choose the songs and then put them in order for a record. It really used to hurt and it always took some record company guys to kick my ass to do it. But this time it was different. I was in Ireland for Christmas, and everybody had already gone to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. So I got up and started to think about which songs to toss and which to keep. It only took me an hour. Then I wrote a text message to Eddie with the track listing. And a couple of minutes later Eddie texted me back: “Yup, totally!” The album title, by the way, was a misunderstanding, as I don’t sing the words “hairless toys” anywhere on the record. But I liked the twist. I actually sing “careless talk,” but he heard “hairless toys.” I was just a bit annoyed when the record company told me that I should’ve put more songs on it. As if quantity mattered. It seemed like one of the music industry’s big misunderstandings in the nineties was to think that just because there is seventy minutes of audio space on a compact disc that you have to fill it to the last minute.
Yes, yes, that’s so true. I think one of the blessings of getting older is learning to edit. I have fewer clothes in my closet and less media and less everything now. I don’t want to become one of those people who can’t get in the door of their house because it’s full of stuff, you know?
Before I mentioned Mina, and you mentioned Madonna. Is it also an act of editing your ambitions to give up this urge to become a major pop star?
I always believed that I have the potential to be a pop star. I actually still think that Overpowered is the one overlooked record that I did. The music was great, the videos were incredible, I had the financial backing of a major record label and I had a powerful stage show at hand. But the Pitchfork review I quoted earlier ended with a conclusion like: “. . . but she will never be a pop star.” Maybe they’re right. Maybe there is something in me that doesn’t actually want to see me in the A-list? I’m a very happy human being right here, right now. I can live very well from making my music. I love to play live, I get invited again and again to play festivals, and I have plenty of time not only for my family, but also for my fans because I overcame all my concerns about social media a year ago. I started with discovering Instagram, which I loved immediately. Social media is such a strong invention of the new century. It allows me to break down all the barriers between my fans and myself. And apart from that: My life is just great. Why should I complain? And unlike Björk I’ve never had to face a bomb threat by a stalker in my life. I think that changed a lot in her life. She has built a wall around her to protect herself and her family since then.
I’m not sure if I could deal with something like that. I need to be able to do whatever I want. I have reached a point where I simply make the records that I want to make. It actually started when I did Ruby Blue together with Matthew Herbert and my record label said, “You’ve made the wrong record.” I remember asking myself if they’d behave the same if I was a man. Up to that moment I had been the single most successful artist on that label. So how was working with Matthew Herbert? He’s known for being especially detail-oriented in terms of sound design.
It’s not just that—he gave Ruby Blue a direction. I came from a place where I was making records with my boyfriend. I had started Moloko with him and I couldn’t even sing when we signed the record deal. I became famous for the line “Do you like my tight sweater? Do you see how if fits my body?” For me, Moloko was like a big step into the unknown. And it was fun. And I still like the records that we did. But it was also clear that I wouldn’t continue down that road when I released records under my own name. Basically, you had realized that you’d successfully survived your fifteen minutes of fame, right?
Absolutely. When I started Moloko I loved music and I loved art and I loved films and I loved books. I loved Mark and I had no job and no sense of what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And then Moloko went through the roof and changed everything. And every step that I went further with Moloko I realized: “Wow! I can really EB 2/2015 53
do this!” So, when I started working with Matthew Herbert I didn’t know how to do music without this genius Mark, who was pretty much an incredible producer. I didn’t know if I could go and work with other people, you know? It felt like leaving my own living room that I had shared with my boyfriend when I walked into Matthew’s studio. Matthew had this manifesto, this set of rules for how he went about things, and that was just what I needed at that time. It took a lot of bullshit out of the process. The fact that, according to the manifesto, we weren’t allowed to do a lot of things narrowed down our means. In a magical way it was beautiful to follow this narrow path and everything that came out of it just sounded gorgeous. I was attracted to working with Matthew because his music didn’t sound like anybody else’s and I had no idea why this was until the first few days of working with him. I remember that I had brought a magazine with an article about Brian Eno and The Long Now Foundation to the studio, in which Eno explained the importance of sustainability in everything you do. I thought it was a good idea to discuss the article with Matthew before starting to work and he just said: “Yeah! But can you just go and bang the magazine against the microphone please?” So that’s how it started: I was banging this magazine on my head and against the microphone and also on my ass! And five minutes later he had already edited a new sound, and we created an entire opus of music out of it. You describe Matthew Herbert as something of an alchemist . . .
Well, I’d say he is. He has inspired a lot of musicians like me. He really is a paternal figure. I really felt that from him. Step by step I became less self-conscious and then we really started recording. His ear is all about hearing the beauty in things. He hears beauty. Once, in the process of conducting an interview with Matthew Herbert, we were walking through the streets of Bloomsbury to have lunch at Ciao Bella’s in Lamb’s Conduit Street in London and I had this noisy aluminum trolley. He kept complaining that I was polluting the original street sounds with it.
Oh dear! I’m sure he was kind of half joking with you. But then again, I can understand him. For him, everything is about what you hear. And working with him I realized that when you’re a musician you first and foremost have to listen. And it’s just great to work with someone who permanently hears something in what I was just doing. When I sang he would listen and find something that he’d heard and that just made me feel very safe. And did you work like that on Hairless Toys as well? Did you have rules?
I didn’t listen to any other music during the writing and recording process, which is an interesting experience when you love music as much as I do. Actually, I felt relieved when we finished Hairless Toys because I could listen to other people’s music again. And let me tell you one thing: I don’t just continuously listen to the same music 54 EB 2/2015
again and again. Also, when a new listening format pops up, I sort of change my listening habits. It was the case when I got my first record player. And it was the case again when I bought my first CD player and my first computer. And now it happened again because I discovered Soundcloud and Mixcloud and Facebook. All these moments led to new music that I’d listen to for a certain time. On my personal Facebook page for instance—as opposed to my Facebook artist page—I am permanently swapping stuff with people. That way I get to hear loads of music that I’d never have listened to if I was only buying records every now and then. Via Facebook I got introduced to the wonderful music of Maurice Fulton and I remember starting to search the net for some DJ mixes or whatever. And I found some marvelous ones! Also, the most recent change in my listening habits has been in the gym over the last six months. I started to listen to different music again while working out. So you work out with headphones?
Yes, exactly. In the gym I started listening to a lot of hip-hop because I’d been to Miami a few months earlier, where I had experienced an epiphany of sorts. I listened to hip-hop that was booming out of convertibles while walking through the streets and I’d never heard it like that before, ever. I hadn’t felt excited about it for years, you know? Maybe because I just hadn’t been exposed to it and it hadn’t been very prevalent in the U.K. scene. But in Miami, hip-hop was in the air and it meant something, if you know what I mean? Listening to these sound-blasts from passing cars just showed me how present hip-hop is in the States. Was it a specific kind of hip-hop you remember hearing in Miami?
Having lived in Ibiza for many years, my partner Sebastiano has this Balearic influence inherent in everything he does. And Balearic is very tasteful. It’s not a style—it’s more a mood. Sebastiano plays a lot of Balearic music at home. And when I heard this hip-hop in Miami I had finally found a radical answer to the Balearic beats lingering through our home. What I heard was using elements of EDM plastic-ness and often had really disgusting lyrics. It’s basically the opposite of that tasteful Balearic sound, and I kind of enjoy playing it when Sebastiano is in the house because it makes him want to be ill. There’s a punk in me that likes the fact that part of this kind of hip-hop is disgusting. But apart from that, the music really works well for me in the gym. There is something very American about being in the gym, this whole idea of powering on—which is a bit equivalent to the idea of climbing your way up in life, right? Push forward into this modern world and forget about being so bloody tasteful and Balearic and let’s just fucking get on with it and be ambitious again. I guess I can’t carry that person around with me that I used to be a couple of years ago, you know? And I encounter this moment of truth every now and then. And for the time being, I stopped smoking and I don’t drink so much. I’ve been there and done that. Now I try to be as clear-headed as I possibly can. With Hairless Toys I knew that the only thing I can do is to change again. ~
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A.J. Samuels talks to RICHARD PRICE
A real addiction.
Richard Price recently came out with his ninth novel The Whites, a timely story that revolves around cop anti-heroes bound together by obsessions with criminals that have eluded justice. It’s a novel with roots in the modern police drama’s richest soil: the moral proximity between police and the policed. In light of America’s current law enforcement scandals, that has rarely seemed a more relevant point of departure. So it’s ironic that Price claims The Whites was an attempt to move away from the broader social commentary of previous works such as Lush Life or crime-drama game-changer The Wire. A.J. Samuels met the author at his home in Harlem to discuss how a keen sense of observation and an intuition for street dialogue can provide more than half the plot. Left: Richard Price, photographed at home in Harlem by Miguel Villalobos.
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R Richard, you recently wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal about going to the local movie theater in 1964 to see the T.A.M.I. Show, a concert film featuring James Brown, amongst other rock and soul acts. You describe how as a kid growing up in the Bronx projects, there seemed to be no escape from your small world and routine. That is until James Brown—who you call the epitome of the “other”—changed your life. What did you mean by “other”?
It’s not so much about James Brown, it’s more about me. Imagine you live in this small urban village of a housing project in the Bronx and you’re fourteen and a mope and you have these phantasies about not being you: You’re both bored and boring, and you’ve kind of had it with yourself. The T.A.M.I. Show was actually James Brown’s greatest filmed performance. The concert had a number of acts from The Supremes to an American knockoff version of The Beatles called The Barbarians. And, as the grand finale, a set by The Rolling Stones. But before The Stones came on, James Brown and The Famous Flames took the stage and totally blew the Brits away. Jagger spoke about how cowed they were, just watching J.B. from the wings. In the James Brown biopic, produced by Jagger by the way, they re-enact that performance, including Brown walking offstage afterwards and saying to the pop-eyed Stones, “Welcome to America.” In the Bronx, everyone I knew walked the same paths, thought the same thoughts and lived in identical apartments. So when James Brown came on the screen that Saturday afternoon in 1964, for me, he was like an alien—a funky high-speed rhythm master from another planet. This man wasn’t like any other singer or dancer, black or white, that I’d ever seen. At the time, I was actually more into doo-wop, Dion, the Four Seasons, or Motown with it’s polished syncopated soul. The Beatles left me cold. But on the T.A.M.I. Show, this tight-as-a-drum dude comes out with his marcelled high conk hair and his black silk shirt and skin tight sharkskin suit shrieking his heart out and dancing like a dervish. Just watching him was a near violent experience. I was in shock, it was an assault on my sense of the world. But in a way, James Brown opened up the world for me. He was the other, like no other. And I never recovered from that. See, one of the reasons why someone might yearn to be a writer is that your basic temperament is that of an outsider. Your nature is more that of an observer than a participant. And that holds true even while you’re in the middle of participating. Yes, I’m doing this with my friends, but I’m also simultaneously observing myself and my friends doing this. I’m here but I’m also in my head. I’m writing as I’m doing, I’m here but not here. This is why writers or any other kind of solo artists are rarely homecoming kings or queens. Writers are not class presidents. Writers are not the most popular kids in school. Writers are like caves. And James Brown that afternoon in 1964 just lit up my cave. Talk about an outsider. You’ve also said that James Brown’s influence has been with you throughout the writing of your novels and screenplays. In what way? What did he show you?
He showed me himself. He celebrated outsider-ness like a million art58 EB 2/2015
ists before him, but at the age of fourteen, he was my first. I wanted to become my own James Brown. For me, it was like: I’ll never be as handsome as you, I’m not even particularly known as the best writer around here—if there is such a thing—but I’m going to embrace my god-given nature, embrace my own singularity and make art. Which was your street-level prose?
Yeah, it turned out to express itself in that way. And the desire to pursue that street-y persona was accidentally enhanced by finally leaving the Bronx at eighteen to go upstate for four years to attend Cornell. I had never really left New York City except for summer trips. Suddenly I was living in a dorm at an elite Ivy League university where everyone seemed to come from upper middle class or wealthy international backgrounds. These are the sons of doctors and lawyers and hoteliers from Tennessee and Boca Raton and Barranquilla and Singapore. I was totally intimidated. And sometimes when you’re young and immature and find yourself ego-drowning in a sea of imposing others, you search for something in your own background in hopes of coming off as exotic, too. For me it was being from the Bronx, which I hoped would make me interesting in their eyes. So I came across very Bronx-y. All of a sudden I developed a Bronx accent I never had in the Bronx. I’ve been around other people who’ve done that in the university setting as well. I knew a professor from the South who came across like a moonshine-swilling, motorcycle-riding, swaggering redneck. It turned out his father was the head of an elite boarding school in Alabama or Mississippi, and he held a PhD from Yale. But he’s acting like a cracker! The guy’s a Faulkner scholar! That’s when I realized that I’d been doing something similar with New York. I didn’t know who I was, so I embraced the Bronx because I thought it was sexy. Because the more insecure you feel in a foreign environment, the more you self-consciously strive to be interesting even if its based on an exaggeration of your truth. If you’re given an outsider lemon, try and make some outsider lemonade. And you’re not judged by the same criteria. Your upbringing is often made out to be an important part of your authenticity as a writer documenting the streets.
Well, if you try too hard, there’s nothing authentic about it. But embracing outsider-ness meant also pursuing outsiders as the subject of my writing. My first novel, The Wanderers, was about white, working-class kids growing up in the projects of the Bronx in 1963. That felt like a natural world for me to embrace with intimacy and confidence. I went back to the same well for my second novel, Bloodbrothers, and then tried to do something more metropolitan in my third and fourth books. My third novel was Ladies’ Man, which was about a door-to-door salesman in Manhattan whose girlfriend dumps him and, as a result, he goes on a one-week sexual bender. My fourth was The Breaks about a recent college graduate who comes back home to live with his parents and totally cracks up. And then,
because I was feeling burned out and bored by all my self-referential writing, I went off to write screenplays because I had some offers. And when I started writing movies, I quickly realized that in scriptwriting, you are no longer the subject. A screenplay is nothing more than a blueprint for a building. You’re a hired pen, and they didn’t hire you for your thinly veiled bio. If you don’t know first hand anything about the people or world you were paid to imagine, then you better learn fast. You better get your ass out of the house and hit the road. So I hung out with pool hustlers for The Color of Money. I hung out with cops for Sea of Love. For eight years I went out there and mixed it up with the world beyond myself in order to write movies, and as a result I learned to leave myself behind, to embrace whatever I had to—new people, new occupations, new landscapes and convert it to art. And frankly, it was the best thing for me as a novelist. You’re open about having formerly been addicted to cocaine. Many writers have used drugs or alcohol to help them write. You’ve said in the past you were unable to write while high. When did you first become addicted to cocaine?
It was in the early eighties, and I was having a lot of trouble writing and it seemed like everyone around me was doing coke. I was very down at the time. My work felt lost and I soon discovered that coke made me feel like I had accomplished something, feel like I had plenty of irons in the fire when in reality, I hadn’t actually done anything. Then that became an addiction in and of itself. A real addiction. I was just a cokehead. How did you quit?
I quit because I had to. I went to Italy for a month with my wife at the time. And I didn’t know how to get coke in Italy. I could have never cleaned up here because it was too easy to score. Within two weeks I discovered how to be a person again. When we came back my biggest fear was that all I had to do was go like this [dials with hands] and I’m a cokehead again. But the second day we were back, my wife told me she was pregnant, and that was the end of coke for me. It’s been thirty years, and I never looked back. Not long after that, in order to write Sea of Love I was running with cops in neighborhoods that most people wouldn’t have gone in with tanks during the days of crack. And after seeing the world from the back seat of a cop car, I started to hang out with the people they were arresting. And the people were just trying to live and raise a family in a war zone. And, perhaps because I grew up in a racially mixed housing project, I found myself being naturally drawn to life in the urban trenches. It had been eight years since my last novel and by now I’d had two kids, was married, I’d lived a bit. And this world that I found myself re-entering was what pulled me back to novels. I wanted to write about the struggle of just making it through the day, every day in a world that I both knew and never imagined. I wanted to go out and learn again, but this time in the service of a
book that wouldn’t be subjected to higher powers driven by marketing concerns. Many of your novels and screenplays navigate the increasingly blurred lines between police and the policed—something that has also long been a trend in “gritty” cop shows and films, especially early on with television’s Hill Street Blues and then later NYPD Blue and The Wire. How do you explain the fascination with the shared moral code between cops and perps?
Well, back in the early eighties everyone thought Hill Street Blues was a ground-breaker when it came to realism. But I recently tried watching an episode and, man, it did not age well. It comes across now as so sentimental. But at the time there was nothing like that. I think the trend of this “new” breed of cop shows had to do with the audience’s increasing hunger for so-called warts-and-all realpolitik. They wanted anti-heroes who were fucked up, but in the end you rooted for them nonetheless. It’s hard to get a studio to invest money in a characterdriven drama where people get no relief from their distaste. At the end of the day you have to have a bit of sympathy for the guy no matter what or people will just switch channels. Pull for him, otherwise you’ll have no audience. I always saw McNulty in The Wire as that kind of referential anchor—the classic Irish cop anti-hero, something more conventional for people to find a way into a far more complex story.
Well, you could say on paper McNulty is the horse we ride through the complex landscape of Baltimore. But if you ask people who their favorite characters are, they never say McNulty. He was kind of a cipher. More people will go for Bunk, his partner. Or the bad guys. In your new novel The Whites, the protagonists are police and former police bound by their respective obsessions with criminals that have gotten away. A “white” is a reference to the great white whale in Moby Dick. At a certain point, their obsessions with justice and doing harm to their whites define their own code of ethics. The officers start on the right side of the law, but just barely. And then at a certain point, they cross a line.
Actually, I think they threw ethics out the window. They said, “Fuck it, there’s no god.” The leader of the crew lost his child to Leukemia, and they all agree that the heartless killers who have eluded justice all these years on their watch have just forfeited their right to live, simply because the courts screwed up. This father’s child dies, but all their “whites” are still out there making babies, getting high, getting laid et cetera. And that leads to a kind of group moral nervous breakdown for them. At first, they won’t go out and kill their “whites”. Of course, I don’t want to romanticize these cops, but their combination of grief and nihilism leads them to say, “Fuck it. Let’s scratch that itch.” EB 2/2015 59
“Writers are like caves. And James Brown that afternoon in 1964 just lit up my cave.”
It’s unethical, but in a sense, killing the bad guys doesn’t necessarily reflect poorly on them.
Photo by Miguel Villlalobos
Well, that’s in the eye of the reader. I let the characters build their own monuments and dig their own graves on the page through their words and actions. Characters who do heinous things in my novels aren’t like Iago [from Shakespeare’s Othello]. They don’t just pop out of some black hole as fully realized evil. A storyteller should avoid black and white constructions. People are all about the grey. Narrative fiction should respect the grey. Otherwise you’re stuck with cardboard people. In your experience embedded with the police, have you often come across detectives obsessed with criminals they were unable to put away? Are or were there whites in your life?
No, no whites in my life. But from 1986, when I started hanging out with a Manhattan detective squad to gather some cop-life experience for Sea of Love, up until last year, there was always at least one detective, male or female, in every squad, who was obsessed with a particular cold case—one that no other detective in the squad cared about anymore considering all the other cases that had since come in over the years. Maybe that detective became obsessed because of the helplessness of the victim. Or maybe it’s because the detective knows who did it but was unable to gather enough evidence to bring that person to justice. There are any number of rational or irrational reasons. Obsession with a criminal is the demonic version of falling in love: seemingly arbitrary yet bone deep. And this usually fruitless effort to bring someone to justice years after the crime is its own custom-made hell for the pursuer. And it makes them into Ahabs. The thing is that it’s never the bloodiest case or the one with the highest body count. Why a certain crime affects this detective so much and the other detective doesn’t give a shit is impossible to say. For example, in the homicide squad in northern Manhattan I know a detective who was obsessed with the sniper shooting of two Yeshiva students on the Upper West Side. The detective wasn’t Jewish, and he had no real suspect; it didn’t make sense. This was back in ’88 when crack had taken over and something like a billion dollars a year were being wired back to the Dominican Republic. The whole area of north Manhattan was up to its hips in blood. And I’ve seen this over and over again. I’m fascinated by the mysterious interconnection between a crime—invariably it’s a murder—and an individual detective. Is it something in their childhood? Something in their life? Is it empathy for the victim? For their family? Is it the gall of the killer? Here’s another one: I recently gave a talk hosted by [investigative journalism website] ProPublica, and one of the guys that came was an Irish cop named Tommy Hyland, who was the first guy to take me around with him on patrol. He’s retired now from the force but teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. So I’m talking to reporters and the head of ProPublica, who’s friends with Tommy, turns to him and asks, “Did you ever have a white?” And Tommy says “Yeah,” and then proceeds to explain how somebody cut the throat of a hooker in Riverside Park 60 EB 2/2015
on 96th Street in 1982. The perp and someone else sat her on a rock, dropped her pants and made her look like she was on the toilet. Then they just left her like that. And Tommy could never get over how they positioned her body, because it was such a big fuck you to everybody and everything. But this is a guy who’s seen so much worse. This is what I wanted to take to the brink in in The Whites: the idea that if the cop doesn’t kill their white, they’re going to kill themselves. Because The Whites in particular deals with police violence, a lot of interviewers have asked you recently about the current wave of reporting on police brutality and the resulting protests. What about police officers constantly confronting or perceiving a lethal threat? To what extent do you think a lack of gun control combined with police forces’ systemic racism contributes to the violence?
Well, with these inner-city guys who get shot, I don’t think it’s about gun control, because it’s not like they illegally bought a gun. It’s about their being black and that they’re guilty until proven innocent. If you see that South Carolina video with the guy getting shot in the back, or the guy in Baltimore with the severed spine, or Michael Brown or Eric Garner—none of them had guns. I think it’s fucking racism. Look, if a guy shoots at you and he gets killed, tough shit on him. But in these other cases, I think it’s knee-jerk racism. And I think black cops can be just as racist as white cops. There’s a book out by a former cop named Steve Osborne who says he’s not a racist: after two years as a police officer he hated everybody. But I guarantee when you’re facing off with someone, you’re much more likely to pull your gun on a black guy than an Irishman. The police’s attitude is that there are two types of people in the world: Us and the assholes. And the assholes outnumber us. We have to show force, overwhelming force. If we don’t, the animals are going to know, and we’re dead. That’s how they think. When it comes to physical confrontation, they’re going to overpower you to the point of strangling. There’s adrenaline, weapons and eighty of you and one of them.
One of Richard Price’s inspirations for documenting the streets was the work of pioneering photojournalist Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. In the photographs by Andrew Savulich on the following pages, we find a gritty, updated take on Weegee’s New York street scenes during the height of the crack epidemic—a time and place where Price cut his teeth as a story teller. Page 62-63: Taxi driver explaining how an argument with a passenger caused him to drive into restaurant, 1989. Page 64-65: Jealous boyfriend starts fire that leaves over one-hundred people homeless, 1993. Page 66-67: Cop becomes upset with demonstrators, 1990. In The City – New York Spot News and Street Photography 1980-1995 by Andrew Savulich. © 2015, Steidl-Verlag.
But there aren’t so many instances in your books where the cops come across as being extremely racist. Have you experienced that kind of racism interacting with cops?
Are you kidding? Oh yeah. Before Ferguson went down, there was a documented history of cops in that police department casually sending each other racist joke emails. But I’ve heard just as bad or worse in other police departments. Sometimes cops, black and white, find themselves dealing with a particular minority over and over and that “customer base” becomes a source of contempt and cop humor. Additionally, if the overwhelming majority of individuals they arrest are non-white, they tend to paint everyone of that race with the same brush. If they see a black kid running, the first thing they think is: Did he just kill somebody? Rob somebody? They’ll stop him and strip-search him. But the kid’s on his way home to eat dinner, to do his homework. And if that kid has any experience with cops he knows not to give them any attitude or it will be that much worse for him. He doesn’t want to be arrested, and so as innocent as he might be, he has no choice but to eat any shit that comes his way. You’ve described police officers as backstage passes to a show, and compared traveling with them to scuba diving into the dramatic waters of a given neighborhood. Do you ever feel like a voyeur to other people’s misery and drama? Is it strange to consider other people’s tragedy and misery as entertainment or the raw material for your books?
No. Whenever I feel like I’ve witnessed something significant, I get high on it. And when I attempt to turn that witnessing into literature it’s never only a reporter’s recreation of an event. That’s just the starter’s yeast. Books are five dimensional: the eye, the ear, the inner life, the narrative style and the context of a surface event. Spike Lee’s filming of your novel Clockers was an important step in making you a household name. How did you see Spike Lee’s musical interpretation of the scenes that you developed in Clockers? The strip search interrogation of Mekhi Phifer’s crew to the sounds of Philip Bailey’s “Children of the Ghetto” or the child about to murder a junkie to KRS-One’s “Outta Here” both come to mind. What was it like working with Spike Lee on Clockers?
Oh yeah, the scene with the kid and the gun riding towards the drug addict who almost looks like he’s dancing to the music when he’s just twitching because he’s high? I don’t know if it was a track shot but it’s incredible. And so was Rosie Perez’s dancing to “Fight the Power” from Do the Right Thing. But let me say first of all that I never worked with Spike Lee. I was working with [Robert] De Niro and [Martin] Scorsese on Clockers and then they went off to do Casino. That’s when Universal said, “What do you think of Spike Lee being the director?” At the time he was the only commercially viable black director, so I said sure. But he took the script that I wrote, which had taken me a
few years, and he oversimplified the characters. But what he lacks in storytelling he makes up for as a visual artist. He has an amazing palette and he uses whatever he can to enhance the visual and aural experience. You don’t hold a script up to a screen and everybody reads along from their theater seats. See, here’s the trade-off between a novel and a movie: A movie can never have the depth of a novel, because a script is a one-hundred-twenty-page singing telegram. But it can deliver you faces. I can write twenty pages describing someone, but you can see that person in a heartbeat. I can write twenty pages on the interior life of a character, but a good actor can give you the essence of the interior life in one expression, one gesture, in the rhythm of their delivery. Sure, you lose depth and the life of the interior, but you get faces and that interplay between music and a color palette and actual human beings who aren’t ink. Do you think that’s generally the case for film adaptations?
The English Patient was successful both as a book and as a movie, as was John Huston’s film interpretation of James Joyce’s The Dead, but when it comes to adapting great or even not so great literature to the screen it’s usually a failure. I wrote the screenplay for Child 44, which took seven years to make it to the screen and then instantly bombed. Even I couldn’t follow it! But the book I had adapted it from was a fourhundred-page political-historical thriller. I made mistakes. I should have been much more ruthless. When you’re making a movie, the only thing you owe to the book is the spirit and rough outline of the story. You just have to massacre the book but try and retain the spirit, tone and flavor. So great literature winds up as mediocre movies: War and Peace, Catch-22, Red Badge of Courage . . . you could get together with your film buff friends and make a list of failed “literary” films ten pages long. After a few beers, it’s a hell of a lot more fun than playing Charades or Scrabble. I think filmmakers often have too much respect for the narrative language of the book. If you’re too respectful of your source material or unable to get free of the literary halo, then you’re screwed. Events on a page, the language of the narrative on a page, the interior life of a character on a page, is intended for the page, not the screen. There’s no authorial presence in a script. A screenplay is basically a progression of scene settings, and dialogue, a blueprint laid out to serve a two-dimensional art form. The best books for movies are potboilers: The Godfather, Jaws, The Exorcist. And it’s because there’s nothing to respect in the writing as writing; there’s no literary style to throw you off track, just an engaging yarn that reads like half a screenplay already. Apocalypse Now is an exception.
Yeah, but that was so loosely Heart of Darkness. And all Apocalypse Now owed to Heart of Darkness was the spirit— Western forays into places where they don’t belong, the disaster that follows and how the internal toll on the interlopers after a while corrodes their souls. ~ EB 2/2015 61
Conversations
Since the late seventies, no wave icon Lydia Lunch has been known for her no-holds-barred approach to selfexpression, be it political, sexual or a combination of the two. The creative mind behind Teenage Jesus and the Jerks has collaborated with a veritable who’s who of the punk and postpunk worlds, and in the process has become an inspiration for many a fellow musician and young art-weirdo seeking to break out of their hometown for the big city. Despite being from two vastly different New Yorks, she and rapper/writer Mykki Blanco, whose recent mixtape Gay Dog Food was released via UNO in late 2014, are perfect foils. Blanco’s rise as an artist has seen him wear a number of hats, from occasionally cross-dressing rapper and poet to aspiring investigative journalist. And while Lunch has been creating art globally for over three decades—or “since before you were born, honey” as she put it to Blanco—both have the same experimental fire burning in their cores. The two bonded over wine at the Howl! Happening gallery in Manhattan before the opening of Lunch’s current exhibition, So Real It Hurts.
Opposite page: Mykki Blanco in the arms of Lydia Lunch. All photos by Miguel Villalobos. 70 EB 2/2015
MYKKI BLANCO talks to LYDIA LUNCH
“A few drops and the smell of death was gone.” Moderated by Claire Lobenfeld Lydia Lunch: One reason why I was
interested in speaking to you is that I’m in drag every day. I thought it was also interesting that we both ran away to New York when we were very young. We already have this connection. We’re both, as I like to call it, non-mono-gender.
Mykki Blanco: I think I most identify
with being a gay male. But what’s interesting is that before Mykki Blanco began in 2010 and 2011, I was living as a transgendered woman every day. What spurred it wasn’t anything that had to do with my sexuality; rather it was this creative Pandora’s box that seemed to open. One of the reasons I ran away as a kid and still do the impulsive things I do is because I’m an experience junkie. I’ll hop on the horse and ride into the dark cave, get bit by a scorpion and then be rushed to the hospital, but at least I did it.
LL: I’m an adrenaline junkie, which
is why I’ve never become addicted to any other drugs because I’m riding on the natural high and that’s from experience. It’s why I also collaborate with people. Art, to me, is the self or the universal wounds. When I collaborate with people I want it to be this sacred space where no bullshit gets inside because bullshit is everywhere outside of it. MB: What I’ve found now is that when I do choose to cross dress, I know how to do it so perfectly my body becomes something that gets catcalled on the street. Then I expe-
rience that feminine sex objectification. It’s so odd because I can have facial hair and go about my life this way, but if tomorrow I decide to wake up, shave everything, put on a wig, a full face of makeup, a padded bra and go out into the street, it would be a completely different experience. Knowing that everything is actually that transformable, it kind of messes with your mind. LL: That’s where you and I are kind of similar: [grabs breasts] These are balls, honey. But this is a grand trick and the devil is a woman. I love being tricked out in this body because basically I feel like a faggot truck driver. That’s how I describe myself, but I look like this. It’s a lot of work. MB: When I ran away from home, I wasn’t running away from a negative home environment. I was super independent. My mom actually still has the letter I wrote her, and I think I say something like, “I’m not running away from you. I’m running away to my future,” or something to that extent . . . See, Marcel Duchamp was such a huge influence for me. I actually wrote a narrative book of poetry before I started rapping called From the Silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Boys. That term actually comes from this European conceptual artist Vettor Pisani, who had a piece called All the Words from the Silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Beuys, as in Joseph Beuys. I switched it around to be B-O-Y-S. But Duchamp
was super important to me because through him I realized at a young age that I didn’t have to be pretentious. Art didn’t have to be this foreign, serious, over-intellectualized thing. It could be playful . . . LL: And absurd. It’s whatever you decide to elevate to art, which is both the best and the worst part of Duchamp. My favorite piece by him is Étant donnés. If you’ve never been to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see it, it’s stunning. It’s a huge barn door, so you walk into this room and there’s just a barn door with two peepholes. To me, this was such an amazing last statement that’s so multi-dimensional and so evocative and provocative. I’m a conceptualist—the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Situationists, that’s my heritage. And that has nothing to do with punk rock, which I never was. It’s no wave. When you speak of any other kind of music, like disco or punk or country or opera, to some degree, you know their parameters. But when you say “no wave”, it’s less clearly defined. It was different from punk because it was a social phenomenon based on protest. No wave was about personal insanity in an asylum the size of a city where everybody was a lunatic, quite frankly. It wasn’t user-friendly and it wasn’t “we’re all in this together”. It was very isolationist. It was very this is me against everything. MB: The ideology of going out of your way to move to somewhere inexpensive and dangerous isn’t so prevalent these days. LL: Otherwise, Detroit would be overloaded with artists. I was there recently for a no wave panel at the Detroit Institute of Art with Retrovirus. And there are great people there. But pre-technology and pre-Internet—Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Chicago with blues in the forties, Paris or Weimar Berlin in the twenties and thirties—people always went to places that were preor post-disaster for economic reasons because other artists gravitated toward that. I think with the rise of the Internet, that geographical place doesn’t exist so much anymore. MB: And everything is event-
based. I was having a conversation with a friend about how no city is cool anymore. Everything we do is based off of an event. LL: This seems like the right time
to drop a few facts about New York in 1977: Son of Sam; the Blackout with 5000 people arrested, all of Broadway looted. Hip-hop culture came out of the Blackout of ’77 because everybody stole electronic equipment. Many mafia dons were murdered. The first boy appeared on a milk carton, Etan Patz, and they just reopened that case recently. That’s just off the top of my head. My apartment was seventy-five dollars a month. It was between two burnt-out buildings, garbage piles six feet high. They didn’t want to give it to me because somebody had electrocuted themselves with their TV by accident and their dog ate their face off. It smelled like death. So, I went to the botanica around the corner. They gave me a 72 EB 2/2015
Mykki Blanco showed up with his shirt on, but over the course of the conversation felt the need to disrobe. Lunch did not protest. Celebrated both for his art and his brashness, Blanco recently had art world socialites gasping at a party during last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, where he accosted MoMA PS1 Director Klaus Biesenbach by throwing sandwiches at the German curator while yelling that he doesn’t care about black people—an accusation not unlike the one Kanye leveled at fellow whitehaired art enthusiast, George W. Bush.
little bottle with a skull and crossbones, I shit you not, a few drops and the smell of death was gone. MB: So, New York City, 2007. I moved into a storefront. There was this woman who had a store called the Art Fiend Foundation. Her name was Johanna Hofring, I met her as a runaway. But then six years later, when I got back to New York I was like twentytwo, and I rented a room deep in Bushwick. My neighbor was this Caribbean man, who I don’t believe practiced voodoo, but he definitely chanted at night. Then when I was in New Orleans, I heard similar chants, which made me think it was voodoo. But anyway, I had to get out of the situation because there were fucking roaches in the building, and it was pretty disgusting. As in, like, furry roaches. I left, and Johanna and I had this deal. She had opened up this whole new store
in Sweden, so she actually didn’t even live in New York. I was supposed to manage her store in New York, but I definitely didn’t manage it. I used it as an insane hangout. My friend Armand and all these boys would come and smoke angel dust there, which was all full of organic clothing . . . LL: That smelled like angel dust? Best of both worlds. MB: But they would steal stuff. I
ended up having an insane situation where I was locked out and drunk, but I had left my shoes inside. I accidentally broke the glass door, but I didn’t have any money. The closest best friend I had was in Greenpoint [Brooklyn], so I had to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, barefoot.
LL: Good thing you weren’t in
drag barefoot. That wouldn’t have been a pretty picture.
MB: One of the things about crossdressing is that I actually learned about a New York underbelly that still exists. Times Square is actually still fucking sleazy as shit. Have you ever seen that scene in Sweet Charity where they sing “Big Spender”? There’s a club in Tribeca, in the Financial District, it’s still there, called Club Remix. It’s a basement club, a red room with paneled mirrors around and literally it’s just transgendered women and [cisgendered] women standing in a room and guys come to the bar. This exists. I discovered this through how I was living. The city will really throw you for a fucking loop. LL: What about New Orleans?
How long were you there?
MB: I was in New Orleans just
for two months. I actually left because if I stayed there, I was going to become an alcoholic.
LL: They do drink hard there. I lived there for two years. I lived in New York from ’76 to about ’80, then went to L.A. for two years to work with Exene [Cervenka, singer for seminal punk band X] and I had a band when I made 13.13. Eventually I went to London to work with The Birthday Party and Rowland S. Howard. Then I came back to New York in 1984, and I moved to Spanish Harlem. I left New York in 1990 for good. I’ve been living in Barcelona for almost ten years. America is a fascist police state. I went to a country thirty years out of fascism, because [George W.] Bush stole the second election. I’m amazed nobody came with me. MB: I live in L.A. now, but I was on tour for two years, so I didn’t really have a home when everything started with Mykki Blanco. I was literally living out of hotels. And this is the thing: I moved to L.A. in January but I’ve only lived in my apartment consistently for two weeks. My lease is for a year, and I enjoy living there when I’m there, but I’m kind of bored. Ready for this? Next month I’m doing an assignment in Nepal, but guess what? I’m going to climb Mt. Everest in drag. I’m not going to do it dangerously. I already told my mother, I’m not actually climb-
ing Mt. Everest. I’m just going to do the trek to the base camp and I’m not doing any climbing. Whatever is two hours up, that’s where I’ll be. [This conversation took place before Nepal’s tragic earthquake.] LL: I hope you don’t cause an
avalanche with your spiked heels. Is anybody going to be sponsoring this?
MB: I’m going myself. One of the reasons I’m going is I got kind of mad. I grinded really hard the last three years. I think I have really tough skin, but the homophobia and the bullshit that I encountered in the music industry started to turn me off. I signed with this label based in the UK and Germany called !K7. Signing with them has been the best thing career-wise that’s happened to me. I have an advance and it’s good. But I told them, “You know what? You guys are signing me in a really fragile state. I need to recontextualize myself. I need new things to think about, I need new things to talk about. I’m going to accept this deal, but I need you guys to know I’m going to focus on some other things.” I want to start focusing on my writing again and that’s why I’m going to Nepal on a writing assignment. I’m going to be writing about what I observe in my forty-one days there through interviews with different people about what contemporary gay life is like in Nepal. From people who do sex work to middle class people. Through the Internet, I’ve already reached out to Nepalese hipsters. Actually, I feel like in the genesis of what you were doing, the world and society had much more respect for the time that it took to create a song. People didn’t want you to be on a hamster wheel pumping out content. LL: I mean, who are they? Because I never listened to them anyway. Only through stubbornness, resilience and an incredible amount of discipline have I been able to do everything I’ve done. “Oh, how come you didn’t sell out?” You can’t sell reality out. MB: But your music reached! LL: Because I’m relentless. Because so much music is shit that people
“One of the reasons I ran away as a kid is because I’m an experience junkie. I’ll hop on the horse and ride into the dark cave, get bit by a scorpion and then be rushed to the hospital, but at least I did it.” Mykki Blanco
are going to reach back and find something good. The same way people reach back to Coltrane or Duchamp or Henry Miller because so much is shit right now and there aren’t many voices of individuals who are staying relentlessly true to their vision. My mood swings, my multiple schizophrenia, which is reflected in my music, my innerfaggotry—it needs experience so that I can document it in lyrics or books or spoken word. Speaking about reality is not a popular commodity. MB: I’m starting to realize that. LL: I was so fucking aggressive and there was no precedent for that. We didn’t have many precedences for a screaming, tantrum-throwing bitch out there like she’s ready to box your fucking face in, which I was. I had many-a-fist thrown at my spoken word. My fists.
Top to bottom: Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ ss (UNO, 2012) was Blanco’s breakthrough mixtape; Betty Rubble: The Initiation EP (UNO, 2013) saw the artist upping his rap game while maintaining his experimental spirit; Gay Dog Food (UNO 2014) continued to fuck with rap conventions and featured a collab with O.G. riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna.
MB: There is a race to remain relevant because of the digital turnover. I was thinking about my projects sincerely, and they were coming from the heart, but how I felt they had to be executed left me no time to actually experience. As soon as it entered my body or my mind, I had to put it out. It’s like, “I need to release this song because I haven’t released a song in three months and people are going to forget about me.” LL: That’s part of the gen-
eration you’re from and the technological turnover.
MB: But I feel like maybe some people are starting to wise up and
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“As a black man in a woman’s body who’s a faggot truck driver and a Sicilian, which makes me half-black, I’m sexist and racist? Give me a break.” Lydia Lunch
that people want albums. People don’t just want this digital turnover because we’ve had so much of it. LL: I don’t do the digital turnover. I don’t Facebook. I don’t do Twitter. I don’t want any part of that crap. This is my statement for Facebook: I’ve never had one because I knew it was surveillance from the word fucking go. You’re not my friend unless you look me in my fucking eye. And I don’t want to read a comment, I want to read an essay. Your comments? Put them on the toilet wall. This is my statement for Facebook because I’m going to start an account just for my exhibit at Howl! but I’m not running the page: “For all you Peeping Toms looking into the keyhole of all eternity, just so you know what I’m doing and you’re not. And you can’t leave a comment and I’m not your fucking friend.” It’s a surveillance device, and I don’t give shit. MB: I was just reading an article in National Geographic about how people are less adventurous because they can look places up on their phones, so every city in the world has so much surveillance footage. Even with Nepal, I’ve looked up something, but looking at every Google image, it’s just like, “There’s that temple.” And then when I fucking get there . . . LL: That’s why people don’t have to do anything but sit at home and be their own armchair philosophers with their bad one-liners talking about everything you just did. I don’t think so. But I want to go back to the “no city is cool now” thing. I was talking to a friend of mine who has been nomadic for eight years, living as a traveling musician. And I’m like, “If we took $1500, we could
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get a triplex house anywhere but New York or L.A.” We don’t want to live in these cities because they’re the assholes of the universe. And she goes, “Yeah, but…” and she’s right, we don’t want to live anywhere else. MB: Personally, something that I’ve wanted so far in this little artistic journey that I’ve been taking is a partner in crime. I’ve toured with other musicians, but having that artistic other . . . See, one of the things that performing has done, and maybe it’s my life path or my birth chart, but it’s kind of kept me single. LL: I was celibate for two and a half years after a lifetime of promiscuity, which would top anyone you know. And that was shocking, the celibacy. A friend said to me, “You better get your legs above your head. No wonder you have a backache.” MB: There’s a poem by the author Bob Kaufman that goes, “My body is a torn mattress, disheveled throbbing place for the comings and goings of loveless transience.” LL: “My womb, a tomb, a sacrificial cunt. The more they kill, the more I fuck.” Lydia Lunch. To me, spoken word is still very important. The written word is still very important. MB: I think slam poetry kind of ruined poetry. Maybe that’s a bit harsh; I do think there are some good slam artists, and when slam originated it was such a cool thing. LL: When I first heard “slam poetry” I thought it was a physical thing and I was into it. Beat poetry? I want to beat somebody up.
Top to bottom: No wave classic Teenage Jesus and the Jerks self-titled LP (Migraine, 1979); the comparatively sanguine Queen of Siam (ZE Records, 1980); Sonic Youth collab Death Valley ’69 (Blast First, 1985); recently rereleased Conspiracy of Women. (Other People, 2015)
MB: It created this stereotypical archetype that everybody associates with [mimics slam poet] “A poet speaking like this. And when I do this, my words are like this.” LL: Well, I don’t do poetry. I do spoken word. That’s a real generic term but when I came to New York originally, I came to do spoken word. But a spoken word scene didn’t exist, so I just started curating shows with short acts of violence. One of my first solo shows was called The Gun
is Loaded. Now I would have been arrested for treason. The first line was—and this was under Ronald Reagan—“It’s all about getting fucked. It’s about getting fucked up, fucked over, fucked around with or just good old-fashioned getting fucked. And you guessed it if you said the biggest dick of all was some octogenarian asshole who gets off on fucking the entire fucking planet.” This didn’t go down so well with those p.c. Soho News reading people because I was racist and I was sexist. Now, as a black man in a woman’s body who’s a faggot truck driver and a Sicilian, which makes me half-black, I’m sexist and racist? Give me a break. MB: What was I accused of recently? Oh, I was accused of having an obsession with the “other”, because I don’t speak enough on police brutality or on issues that happen in the country. From all the traveling I’ve done, it’s hard for me to talk about injustices in America because we’re still a first world society. Something that happens in this country, as awful as it is, is not the same as something that happens where people don’t have fucking clean water. LL: The reason why people don’t have clean water is because we denied them that fucking right. And the reason why we have to talk about the negative bullshit in this country is because we export all the fucking misery to the rest of the world. I have to continue to talk about it, and that’s why it’s important to me that Conspiracy of Women is being rereleased by Nicolas Jaar twenty-five years after it first appeared; or thirty years after I started complaining about this bullshit after being a child of the Summer of Hate, which is Charles Manson and the hate-fuck of America and Vietnam and Nixon and Kent State and the disaster that America was and the failure of the sixties. It failed us and that’s why my generation was so negative. And out of that negativity, I chose to do something positive, which was to articulate, for those that have no fucking mouth, the rottenness that this country is. We don’t get the picture. So, I paint the picture with my fucking words. ~
Gartenstraße This is the spot where, in 1902, Blind Willy Weiss sat drinking schnapps and strumming guitar when he invented a playing style that would become known as the Delta Blues.
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Tinnitus special! Frank Rothkamm vs. Jörg Land
“Listen with your body in the zero gravity position.” Moderated by Sven von Thülen Frank Rothkamm: I had never heard of tinnitus before I got it in 2010. I have subjective tinnitus, which is different from objective tinnitus, where the doctor can actually hear the sound when he does an examination of your ears. Subjective tinnitus, on the other hand, only exists in the listener’s brain. The only thing I knew before that was a certain kind of ringing you have in your ears, like when you come home from a club. But that usually didn’t last very long. I remember being shocked when I got real tinnitus because suddenly there was this persistent tone in my environment. I first thought that sound was coming from my TV. I had a very old one back then. But when I turned it off the sound was still there. That’s when I really freaked out. I went to the doctor, and they did a whole bunch of tests, which I found completely fascinating, to be honest. You’re in this bizarre room, and they put little headphones on you and somebody says certain words to you and you have to react. It was extremely interesting but in the end the outcome of all this testing was them saying: “There’s nothing wrong with your ears—there’s something wrong with your brain. You’ve got tinnitus. We can’t help you. Good luck with it.” Jörg Land: For a very long time you didn’t have many treatment options as a patient, mainly psychotherapeutic approaches which have a high entry barrier and a high dropout rate. This wasn’t just frustrating for people who suffer from tinnitus but also for the physicians. FR: My doctor in Los Angeles gave
me a guide that included a bunch of crap, because there really is no cure
Tinnitus is a highpitched ringing in the ears that can range in severity from mildly distracting to totally crippling. If you’re reading this magazine, odds are you’ve experienced it yourself. In terms of a cure, however, no one can quite agree on exactly what tinnitus is, and things can get a little heated when two opposing perspectives go headto-head, as you’ll find in this conversation between sound artist Frank Rothkamm and Jörg Land, cofounder of Hamburgbased audiology company Sonormed. Recently, Land’s team developed the tinnitus treatment app Tinnitracks, which took home South by Southwest’s coveted Founders Award. That same month, Rothkamm released his own highly personalized tinnitus therapy as a twenty-fourhour-long algorithmic composition. Tinnitus has never been more present, and here are two radically different approaches for dealing with it. Left: Frank Rothkamm in L.A. photographed by Niko Solorio.
for tinnitus. I had to do something because the sound was unbearable, so I started to do research and experiments. In my research I found no hypothesis or working model or approach to actually heal tinnitus. I came to the conclusion that the only way of dealing with it would be to change how you perceive sound. JL: The key to understanding and
dealing with tinnitus is the brain. Brain science is a comparatively new field of study; any findings are only ten or twenty years old. Scientists still don’t really know how the brain functions as a whole, but they’re getting closer and closer while acquiring knowledge on how to modulate the brain. I heard about an approach in which physicians treated stroke patients to regain eyesight by stimulating the healthy eye. This approach is similar to what we do in terms of treating tinnitus. Obviously, because brain research is such a new field there are still many people out there who don’t believe in what the scientists are doing. The point is: There is no cure for tinnitus so far. I agree with you there, Frank. What we at Sonormed are doing with our app Tinnitracks is designed for tonal tinnitus, where you can treat the specific frequency of your tinnitus—that is, the tone itself. We know from medical statistics issued by healthcare insurance companies that the vast majority of people who are diagnosed with tinnitus suffer from tonal tinnitus. This is the group of people to whom Tinnitracks can provide relief. We took published independent research and clinical trials as a basis and translated the findings into a unique technology that can be used for treatment. Key to this
approach is to determine the exact frequency of the individual tinnitus tone. To that we tailor the treatment. FR: How does it work? JL: It’s basically a contrast effect
induced by filtering the frequency of your tinnitus from the music or sound you’re listening to. This contrast effect is extremely precise and causes nerve cells to reconnect and adapt. The neurological reaction is not only leveraged to treat tinnitus but also stroke patients. Not every single piece of music or sound is suitable for the treatment, though. Audio books for instance— and speech in general—has a very limited frequency range. Also, classical music can be difficult.
FR: I do have my frequency. At the beginning it was at 16,000 Hz and 30 db. But it started to modulate after a while. That’s why I don’t talk about hearing a tone, because what I am really hearing is a cluster of tones. They are not all of the same frequency. Looking at it as being only one single frequency is not right, I think. We don’t know enough about this disorder and where it’s located in the brain. We don’t have a medical cure or druginduced solution so far. The best we have at this point is based on Pawel J. Jastreboff’s model, which basically states that you have to get used to your tinnitus because you’ll hear this sound for the rest of your life. So you could call that a psychological approach . . . JL: Sorry for interrupting you Frank,
but we do have clinical evidence indicating that the cause of tinnitus is a hyperactivity within the audi-
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tory cortex. We know from working closely with doctors that in most cases it’s the volume of the tone that is changing and not the frequency. But I totally agree, if the frequency is changing in your tinnitus, it is a rare condition, and we currently could not treat that with our solution. FR: I disagree with you. I don’t think there is any scientific proof for a treatment of tinnitus and to those people who say that there is I would call their data flawed. I had my own approach and my own “treatment”—if you want to call it that. I realized after a while of experimenting with sound, all I was doing was actually creating a piece of music. I didn’t find the magic bullet or a universal treatment but I found new ways of listening to sound, which then had an effect on my tinnitus and eventually led to the discovery of what I call “psychostochastics” and my release of the Wiener Process. This is not offered as a therapeutic approach though, because the effects of psychostochastics are not known. What I made was music.
Above: Frank Rothkamm’s twenty-four CD box set Wiener Process is named after mathematician and philospher Norbert Wiener, the originator of the concept of cybernetics. For Rothkamm, tinnitus is rooted in perception, not the ear, which is why he sees it as untreatable and independent of individual listening habits.
JL: What did you do exactly? FR: I started out with the Jastreboff Model, the only one that is, in my eyes, based on somewhat decent science. It’s a form of “tinnitus retraining therapy” that first centers on ending the negative view of the sufferer towards the tinnitus and then reducing the actual perception of it. For me, this was achieved through trial and error of creating sounds, exposing myself to them and checking how it affects my tinnitus. What I’ve created is a form of sound treatment—either for low-volume headphone listening or listened to aloud with any other music or sound environment. It’s designed so that listeners will not remember what was heard a few minutes ago and what they hear will be different upon each encounter, which is the stochastic, or “chance” element of the music. After a while I realized that it worked, but not because it changed the tinnitus sound. It was because of how I listened to it. So you might not be able to change the physical cause of tinnitus but you can change how your brain operates when listening. That’s the premise
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Above: Tinnitracks. The Founders Award for start-ups that Jörg Land and his Sonormed team took home from South by Southwest was previously won by none other than Twitter in 2007. While Tinnitracks is still awaiting approval from the USFDA, Land is confident that the app can help millions of tinnitus sufferers around the world. Opposite page: Jörg Land, photographed in Hamburg by Katja Ruge.
of the Wiener Process. The Baskaru label released it as a collection of twenty-four CDs and as a twentyfour hour stream—the results of my four years of research. You can tune in any time from any device to the twenty-four hour stream. Obviously, my research is subjective, and the release is a piece of art. Its scientific effects are not known as this point. JL: Just to clarify things here,
Frank: our claim is to reduce the volume of the tinnitus-tone, not to cure it completely. What Tinnitracks is based on is clinical evidence that we can lower the volume of the tinnitus by up to fifty percent. And we are currently working to increase this percentage. It’s all based on independent academic research that has been published and verified by the academic community accordingly. To us it is extremely important to be transparent here. That is why we offer on our website a comprehensive list of the studies we based our solution on and thus enable anyone really interested to access the original data. I strongly disagree with your statement that there is no reliable scientific evidence of lowering the volume of tinnitus. We even have some cases where patients say that the sound seems to be gone after using our app. But we cannot reproduce this, so we don’t say we can cure it. All this brain research is quite new. And I believe scientists are on the right path. All of the partners we’re working closely together with, not only Sennheiser but also the European Commission, share that view. Moreover, all of these organizations closely monitor what we are doing, which has helped a lot in the process to achieve classification as a medical product.
FR: I think one real key word in
this conversation is neuroplasticity. I think the brain can, within reason, reroute neurological pathways. I also think that it’s probably the key to understanding tinnitus, and in general to understanding music on the level of brain functions—what sound actually does to the brain. That became my main point while dealing with my own tinnitus. What is music? What is sound? I haven’t tried Tinnitracks yet since it’s not available in the USA at the moment.
JL: We are currently in the pro-
cess of getting the Food and Drug Administration clearance in the US, which is a lot of work . . .
FR: . . . but I’ve looked at all the approaches out there so far. And I found them to be unscientific and some even seemed to me like scams. Scams to get people to undergo expensive therapies. But I’m not here to discuss your product. You obviously are and you can vouch for it. I’m not attacking your product. JL: I do not deny that there are wild theories and promises made out in the market when it comes to tinnitus. However, I cannot stress enough that our solution is based on acknowledged and published research. I think it’s a tremendous achievement that you have developed your own way to cope with your individual situation, but the tinnitus you describe is neither the most prevalent form nor the one we target nor the form scientific research available relates to. FR: That’s all fine. There’s just a difference in opinion. I am more of a skeptic. I just think we haven’t found a cure yet. JL: We aren’t saying that we’ve
found a cure; we have found a treatment to reduce the volume of the tinnitus tone. However, one day a cure might be found and to support that, it’s necessary to take different perspectives into account. I think it would be great if you could talk to one of our neurophysiologists, for maybe you have found something in your personal studies that could be of interest to us, too.
FR: Yeah, absolutely. And all my work is open source. I’d love to share all my findings and my research. I have to issue a warning though: The effect of psychostochastics and the Wiener Process on humans is not known at this time. As a result, I urge you to use it at your own risk. For some it is extremely powerful if you listen to it on high fidelity headphones in low light with your body in the zero gravity position. For others, I hypothesize, listening to Heino may be just as risky. ~
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“Today it’s always said that in a certain sense, Neu! is proto-techno. But I’ve never felt that,” Roman Flügel recently told krautrock legend Michael Rother over coffee in a Hamburg cafe. And still, employing trance-inducing elements of repetition as building blocks for long, spiraling musical exploration seems to be a tradition in which German musicians have helped innovate across time and genre. Which is why it’s surprising that Flügel, a German dance music icon and co-founder of the Ongaku imprint, insists that the conceptual bridges between krautrock and first-wave German techno were subconsciously constructed, at best. For Michael Rother on the other hand, the rise of dance music in the nineties was something that barely registered on his musical radar. At the time, the co-founder of Neu! and former member of Kraftwerk and Harmonia, was embroiled in legal battles surrounding the rights of his solo material and genredefining Neu! classics. The eventual resolution via Grönland Records’ massively influential Neu! rereleases in the year 2000 helped usher in an era of krautrock’s mass rediscovery and canonization. Here, Rother and Flügel discuss narratives connecting hypnotic German genres and whether patience, beyond being a mere virtue, is also a common musical strategy.
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ROMAN FLÜGEL in Conversation with MICHAEL ROTHER
“Like a healing shower for the ears.” Moderated by: A.J. Samuels Photos: Sarah Rubensdörffer Roman Flügel: Michael, I always hear a great sense of concentration and focus in your music, especially in your solo work. Do you have a particular approach to focusing or calming yourself, musically speaking? Michael Rother: You need to really
go inside yourself and hope that something happens through this internal analysis. Usually, it’s the finer aspects of emotional processes that can be found and then expressed through music. On the other hand, I love excitement. So there’s a good reason why I’ve lived in the small German town of Forst an der Weser since about 1837 [laughs]. I always end up coming to Hamburg in winter because it’s easier to endure cold weather in a city. But the rural tranquility, open space and fresh air in Forst are incredibly beautiful. When I look out the window I can see the Weser river, which runs right past my house. Behind it are miles of rolling meadows. It’s breathtaking. I passed through there by chance in 1971 with Kraftwerk, when I was playing in the band. I can still clearly remember how I looked out from our bus and being totally overwhelmed by this landscape. Two years later I found myself there once again while looking for musicians for the Neu! tour. Cluster—that is, Roedelius and Dieter Moebius—had been living in Forst for two years at the time. And then I decided to stay. That environment helps me
to concentrate and to be calm. You live in Frankfurt, right? RF: Yes, I live in a rather notorious district near the main railway station. A lot has changed in the last five years. Gentrification is happening with a vengeance. Joy and sorrow still live side by side in Frankfurt. There are still a lot of junkies, a lot of people who have no money just trying to survive day-to-day near the train station. On the other hand, expensive apartment buildings have sprouted up for all the Deutsche Bank and European Central Bank types, and that obviously alters the structure of the district. But I grew up in Darmstadt, on the edge of the Odenwald forest. My parents’ house was completely idyllic, with lots of birds and a lot of nature. I moved away when I started my studies. City life has the advantage of being able to travel easily. The airport is just around the corner, yet the city center in Frankfurt has luckily been spared all the aircraft noise. MR: There’s neither a highway
in my immediate vicinity, nor a good train connection. But as you just mentioned birds: hearing birdsong is an experience that I enjoy anew each spring when I leave Hamburg and go back to Forst. When you’re surrounded by birdsong, your hearing changes immediately. It gains more depth.
RF: We have pigeons cooing, but that’s not quite the same thing.
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MR: But do you know what I mean
also the classical compositions that I grew up with. And, of course, things that I had heard in Pakistan where I lived for three years when I was nine. My father worked for Lufthansa and was stationed there. To this day, Pakistani music touches me in a very special way, especially the brothers Nazakat and Salamat Ali Khan. Their music flows on a kind of wave, with these two singers who always take up the thread and build the music in incredible ways.
by depth regarding birdsong? You can hear precisely the distances of certain sounds. It’s like a healing shower of precision for the ears. By the way, how old are you?
RF: Forty-four. MR: So a generation
younger than me.
RF: Yes, I first became aware of your music when Grönland [label founded by German pop star Herbert Grönemeyer] reissued the Neu! albums. I already knew the later Kraftwerk, of course, but the rereleases were when I discovered much of what was happening around it, as well as the early Kraftwerk, of which you were a member. And the music captivated me immediately. This goes for Neu!, Harmonia and, of course, your solo records. I bought quite a lot of them—essentially after I bought a bunch of Brian Eno records and figured out his connection to your world. What I find so fantastic about listening to the music you made with Klaus Dinger [drummer and founding member of Neu!] as well as with Roedelius and Dieter Moebius in Harmonia is the completely different attitude towards what rock or pop is supposed to be. You radically broke with a lot of traditions and from that, entirely new approaches and paths suddenly appeared.
RF: I’ve been going to India at least
once a year over the past three years and the music touches me in a similar way. I eventually discovered Vedic chanting, the music that Brahmins, the elite priest caste in Hindu culture, created over decades with only their voices. It has meters that are completely foreign to us but which totally fascinate me. For me it’s primarily about the sound and the rhythms. In a sense it also reminds me of Harmonia, as you hear rhythms that overlap and time signatures that are unfamiliar to European ears. Were you consciously referencing such musical traditions, or was it the random results that came from your attempt to synchronize two drum machines? MR: We never theorized much. I
MR: It’s nice to hear because that is
exactly what we wanted to do back then. For me it was always about forgoing all those classic structures, and to somehow discover a new musical continent. That was the aim. Klaus [Dinger] always had an ear for the essence and effect of pop. You can also hear it in his later work with La Düsseldorf. That helped me, because I was never looking out for that. I’ve always been more surprised if something especially poplike comes out of what I’ve done. That was also the case with my solo albums, like Flammende Herzen or Sterntaler. The question for me was always: What can I draw from if I try to forget about Jimi Hendrix and American and British pop music? That’s why I turned to German folk music and children’s songs and
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A select Michael Rother discography, top to bottom: Neu!’s classic eponymous debut (Brain, 1972); Neu! 2 (Brain, 1973) divided critics; Harmonia’s Musik von Harmonia (Brain, 1974) was Rother’s first album with Roedelius and Dieter Moebius; Rother’s first and second solo LPs Flammende Herzen and Sterntaler (Sky, 1977-78) feature Can’s Jaki Liebezeit on drums.
think the odd time signatures came from Roedelius. He played those kinds of melodies on the piano for hours, and that fascinated me. That was the reason why I absolutely had to make music with Harmonia. Throw in the surprising interjections from Moebius, and you had a kind of music that could happen on the spot. Like on “Watussi”, for example. That’s Roedelius, who sometimes got carried away playing with delays and getting into an almost trance-like state with these loops running the whole way through. We never ran two drum machines simultaneously. What sounds so messed up was the result of our edit and approach. For example, we ran a drum machine through a wah-wah pedal and sent them through a tremolo, which, of course, weren’t synchronized. We couldn’t do it any better back then, but it has a very special energy.
RF: The studio setup that you
had with Harmonia in Forst is known from photos: two nearly identical blocks of keyboards and effects units, with two guitars in front of them. MR: Right, the heavy Gibson
and the light Fender.
RF: The leopard print Fender always fascinated me. MR: I bought that off Florian
Schneider from Kraftwerk. I still have it. Nice and light, a Fender Mustang with a tremolo bar. I eventually removed the leopard skin because it became unappealing to me at some point. Florian had also decorated the guitar with colorful stones.
RF: What I always wanted to ask you
is: What role does ego play in music for you? After Neu! and Harmonia did you choose to go solo in order to fulfill your own musical vision?
MR: For me, it’s a pretty straightforward development from Neu! to Harmonia to my first solo record. I couldn’t have omitted any of it. I never would have ended up with Flammende Herzen or Neu! ’75 without Harmonia. But the fact is that Harmonia failed at the time. It was simply a commercial flop. In 1976 we reached the point where we really just stared at each other and said, “It just can’t go on like this.” I suddenly found myself alone, and to get back to your first question, I had no other choice than to go solo. Flammende Herzen emerged out of that situation. Not because I wanted to finally gratify my ego, but simply because there was no one with whom I could collaborate. For me, it was an experiment: What comes out if I make music alone in the studio? The key to that happening was Conny Plank. As a producer, Conny had the incredible ability to understand and empathize with the ambitions of the musicians who recorded with him. He once said that he sees himself as a midwife who helps musicians to deliver their babies. Which is to say he works without pressuring you. He also sometimes subtly placed limits, without it being clearly noticeable, by saying at the right point: “It’s
good like that.” There is a lot happening spontaneously in the studio on Flammende Herzen. Conny and I never had any disagreements. Whatever he did, I always liked it. RF: How was your work with Conny Plank financed at that time? I’ve had the luck that I’ve been able to build my own home studio gradually, and the means of production have become cheaper. For you, considerably more money and effort was needed in order to get anything onto tape. MR: Indeed, it was stressful.
Commercial studios were expensive. We always worked at night, because it was cheaper. For the first Neu! album, Klaus and I had four nights for the recordings and then a week of mixing in another studio, for which the owner of the studio got the publishing rights. That’s how things worked at the time. We somehow scraped the money together. That was also what was so special about Conny Plank: He shared the
risk with us. Of course, it meant that he was involved in the licenses. But as an overall matter, it was hell. We suddenly could record on sixteen tracks for the second Neu! album, where the first was recorded a year earlier on eight. We failed spectacularly with these new opportunities: “Oh, I’ll play another guitar, and another reverse piano, and I can still throw in a violin there.” And then the week was nearly finished, and what did we have to show for it? One side of an album. Then the B-side emerged in a crazy night, where Klaus kicked against the turntable so that the needle jumped. [Side two of Neu! 2 consists of previous singles, “Neuschnee” and “Super”, played in various speeds from both tape and a record player.] RF: I have to admit, I was incredibly irritated by that the first time I heard it. MR: I hated Klaus for it, but it was
the result of sheer desperation. He would probably never have admit-
On last year’s Happiness is Happening, Roman Flügel offered up an homage to German synth music traditions, kosmische in particular. But as he points out, his approach to making music—unlike Michael Rother’s historical reinvention of rock and pop—was never about creating “new” sounds but rather rearranging prefabricated puzzle pieces into a unique but recognizable image of dance music. As he tells Rother: “I never had the intention to break with everything that came before. That’s one of the biggest differences between my approach to making music and yours.”
ted it, but it’s the truth. We had these two pieces, “Super” and “Neuschnee”, and it was clear that they would be on the B-side, but they had a total of maybe six and a half minutes, so it wasn’t enough. And then Klaus put our first single on the record player and let loose. Later, the B-side of Neu! 2 was considered the first remix experiment. RF: Indeed, today it’s always said
that in a certain sense, Neu! is proto-techno. But I’ve never felt that. The fact that something is repeating has absolutely nothing to do with techno. Your music grabbed me on a harmonic level that pop music or the music that otherwise surrounded me never did. It was a different sound. I never associated it with techno. I made my first record in 1990 and I had no idea of your music back then. I didn’t know that something like that had ever existed in Germany! During the nineties, house and techno led to the development of a new scene, which I was part of. People in Germany once EB 2/2015 83
again found their own language with electronic music, but for me at the time it had no connection to what you had established in the past. I still see it that way today because so many people who produced records in the nineties had absolutely no idea about music from the seventies. Techno and house is and has always been club music and a unique youth culture, which has little to do with what was done in the seventies. What happens harmonically on your records together sounds incomparable to me. One could draw the connection between your music and techno, but in the end it’s constructing something else.
you could connect with at the time. I left the bands in which I had played as a drummer until then, and in the late eighties, started to produce on the cheapest bits of equipment. My music has always been created as a form of sampling. I know you’ve said that you wanted to leave everything that was there before behind you. An important part of what you said was to withdraw as much as possible and not listen to much music in order to have your own sound. For me, it was always very important to hear a lot of music and to somehow process what fascinated me. I suppose it also had to do with different times. I’d be curious to know: How were the late eighties and early nineties for you as an artist? The positive mythologizing of the seventies hadn’t really taken place yet.
MR: I noticed the development of
techno only from a great, great distance. I wasn’t hanging out in Berlin or in the other cities where a lot of it happened. I can remember that I sometimes heard something on the radio and thought: “Ah yes, so that’s happening now.” But it didn’t really leave its mark. I maybe briefly considered it in order to see if it could serve as an inspiration. Repetition, of course, always does, like the magic of repetition I found in Pakistan, not just the strange sounds and melodies.
RF: For decades, repetition was something that people in Germany pretty much never got to learn. It was always more about pushing variations to the extreme, to have as many combinations and changes as possible before something repeated. On the other hand, techno was an almost archaic approach to music, which felt extremely liberating to me when I started to work with machines. There is also a very important difference between the way your music was created back then and how mine has always been created. Namely, I was influenced by pre-existing record collections, by sampling techniques and the availability of music. My music consists more of puzzle pieces, of various connections that I make between different things that I’ve heard in my life. I never had the intention to break with everything that came before. And that’s a very big difference in approach. For me, house and techno in the late eighties and early nineties was the most radical thing
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MR: The seventies were pretty
much “out” during the eighties.
RF: Exactly. How did that feel? MR: It was difficult. But I had the
A select Roman Flügel discography, top to bottom: His first release as Roman IV was the acid-tinged 12inch Altes Testament (Playhouse, 1995); Superstructure (Laboratory Instinct, 2005) was a jazzy down-tempo affair made together with vibes player Dell; La Forza Del Destino (Playhouse, 2006) is an excellent compilation of Flügel’s EPs as Soylent Green from the nineties until the early 2000s; Last year’s Happiness is Happening (Dial, 2014) saw Flügel approach dance music from a variety of different angles, but always with his signature musicality.
good fortune to regain the rights to my first three solo albums after five years. The manager at Polydor then offered me a rather lucrative contract. But you could see quite early on that Deutsche Grammophon, which Polydor belonged to, was reorienting. They released a compilation called Alles für Zuhause (Die Neue Deutsche Welle) and stuck on one of my tracks. They probably thought they could somehow still shove me into this market where I didn’t belong. That’s when the trouble began. Not financially, but artistically. At the time, the public moved away from what I was doing. By the end of the eighties, there was no interest at all. I prematurely terminated the contract with Polydor. I then continued to work for four years. It was pretty exhausting, because I realized that I could no longer relate to the reality out there. Then in 1993 it became clear that I could no longer wait for things to fall back into place. Consequently, I founded my own label and released everything myself.
RF: That was also exactly the time when self-releasing became possible for me. Those structures
emerged at the time. From then on, it was another way of working. MR: Well, the remained dif-
ficult for me. Also becauπse of the endless discussions with Klaus about the Neu! reissues. It wasn’t all fun and games.
RF: Of course. Then let me ask you some more about Harmonia. Harmonia and Kraftwerk both recorded two very important albums around the same time . . . MR: I believe Kraftwerk’s
Autobahn came out one year after Musik von Harmonia.
RF: Yes, which is interesting, because I think that on the title track “Autobahn”, something happens musically that for me sounds exactly like a part of the Harmonia album. MR: Really? I’ve never heard
that. Great, I’ll sue them! [laughing]. What do you hear there? I’m very interested to know.
RF: It comes in that middle section, where there’s a melody that, to my ears . . . Well, I’d have to have the tracks side by side. MR: I would not insinuate that
Kraftwerk had taken anything from Harmonia. But I can remember quite clearly how I proudly came to Düsseldorf with the first Harmonia album. I met up with Ralf and Florian in a billiard bar and then played the album to them in the car. I can even remember that they were especially impressed by one of the pieces, called “Veteranen”. And you know that I’ve jammed with Ralf Hütter. Back then it became apparent that we were on the same melodic path. It was a revelation for me, because at that time, to my mind, there was no one in sight who wanted to do anything similar to what I was doing. With others musicians, there was either still blues in what they were doing, or it was complicated and overly intellectual. With Ralf, I could immediately relate. That compatibility between us is perhaps a better explanation of where the similarity in the pieces could come from. ~
Translated by Alexander Paulick-Thiel
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WANDERLUST
72 Hours in Belfast Interviews: MARK SMITH
Fight or flight: Every dusk, thousands of starlings swoop around Belfast’s Albert Bridge.
Photos: Fergus jordan
In 1998, the city of Belfast disappeared from the headlines after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement—an accord effectively ending three decades of unrest. While the bombings became less frequent, religious and political division manifested itself in less obvious ways. The roots of antipathy between the city’s Catholic and Protestant communities are exceptionally complex to the uninitiated and stretch back centuries. Today, the ramifications still play out in people’s day-to-day lives, with attempts at truth and reconciliation floundering. A survey of those on the front lines of community, culture and history tell a story in which a violent past is always present. Monday, 10:30 a.m. Former Provisional IRA militant turned historian Anthony McIntyre on the function of history in Northern Ireland. I grew up on Lower Ormeau Road which is in a predominantly Nationalist area of South Belfast, meaning most people were of a communal Catholic background. We didn’t prioritize our religious faith, but we believed in the idea of a unified, Republican Ireland, rather than a separate North under the control of the British. Unlike other parts of the city, the South is a relatively mixed area where Catholics may live in close proximity to their Protestant
counterparts. Elsewhere, the city’s divisions can be more cut and dry. The East of Belfast is a strongly Loyalist area, meaning most people are Protestant and support Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. And the West is regarded as a Catholic stronghold. This isn’t to say there aren’t pockets of Protestants in the West or Catholics in the East. These crossover areas, where neighborhoods and allegiances can change depending on what side of the road you’re on, are often where polarized communities clashed, be it during the Troubles or now in the present day. The Troubles refers to the period of political and sectarian violence from the late sixties to the late nineties, which made Belfast a very dangerous place. I was once a
Right: The Short Strand neighborhood in East Belfast. It's common for Republican murals to express solidarity with other international causes, particularly that of Palestine.
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member of the Provisional IRA, the paramilitary organization fighting for a Republican Ireland. In 1976 I was imprisoned for eighteen years for shooting a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a stateless military force fighting for the British, outside a bar in the South of Belfast. In prison I began to look back, re-engage with the past and by the eighties I helped put together a book called Questions of History, which was a crude Marxist analysis of Irish history. Upon release I completed a degree in politics and a PhD specifically in Republican history. I became interested in how histories are constructed. I came to the Foucauldian conclusion that one history becomes the dominant history—to the extent that it’s able to suppress alternative histories. Sometimes a history can become dominant for no other reason than a pop group can: a marginal difference in quality. It may have just hit the taste of a certain time and become established conventional wisdom. I think history has to be a multiplicity of narratives and voices. But there are facts on the ground. Or rather, there is only ever one fact on the ground. There’s one hundred ways to tell a lie, but only one way to tell the truth. It’s the interpretation that causes serious problems for history. In Northern Ireland we still have disputes over the facts on the ground, such as the British state’s rule and torture and collusion and murder. In 2001 I began a project under the direction of Boston College. I began to interview people who had participated in Republican activities during the recent conflict. These are people who might have knowledge pertaining to the myriad violent activities committed during the Troubles, information which could implicate current political leaders in the political violence of the past. The contents of the interviews were to be kept secret until the deaths of the participants, otherwise their lives could be in danger. This was the sensitive nature of the knowledge they held in their memories. The implications of these interviews were of such political significance that it could effect not just individual lives but potentially relations between nation states and political parties.
I interviewed six former IRA members as part of the Republican project. There was also a corresponding Loyalist interview project that I didn’t participate in, and I didn’t know the people who were giving the interviews or the research participants. The research manager was Irish journalist Ed Moloney who was also an expert in Northern Irish politics and had been the northern editor of The Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune, so he was pretty experienced. The interviews were covered under a strict confidentiality clause and Boston College made it very clear to me in private conversations that these tapes were under the strictest confidentiality and that they were in no way to be made accessible to the police or anybody else without express permission from the interviewees; that all was safe and inviolable. However, in 2011, the British Police Services of Northern Ireland, under the auspices of the British Government, applied to have access to the interviews that I had carried out. They used a treaty called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. They issued subpoenas and managed to obtain some of the tapes. As a result of those conversations being exposed prosecutions began taking place in court. We fought a very long battle to protect the research we’d collected. We lost, but we managed to limit the extent of the damage. It led to a chill effect for the type of research we were carrying out now that people are facing imprisonment. Today I can’t travel north because of threats of arrest. That’s why you have to meet me in Drogheda, Ireland rather than Belfast, the North of Ireland. One thing is clear: it’s all about who controls the past. I would urge people to record their experiences, their own histories, and get as much down as possible. But don’t give it to the universities. Just hold on to it, and then give it to a lawyer to release upon your death and put it into the public discourse. Don’t do it for the purposes of score settling, and don’t do it so you can poke someone in the eye while you’re safely dead. There are times that people will forget. Periods and memories will disappear, and there’s things that we’ll never know.
Ultimately, truth is not necessarily about reconciliation. I don’t see how truth can reconcile. It can repel, but I still think as a society we need to know about it. The truth, I keep saying to people in the North, is a political weapon, and it’s used as such. They talk about truth and reconciliation but in actual fact they should be talking about truth and recrimination. Because what people in the North want, it seems, is truth about YOU and not truth about US. So we can talk about YOUR war crime on Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers killed fourteen unarmed civilians in Derry in 1972. But you cannot talk about OUR war crime on Kingsmill in 1976 when ten Protestants traveling on a bus were stopped and shot dead by members of the IRA. The North, and Belfast in particular, is confirmation that history is always written from the perspective of the present. It’s written to suit present needs and not written for the purposes of historical accuracy.
Monday, 7:30 p.m. At the Suffolk Lenadoon interface, Suzanne Lavery describes the struggle in uniting communities. I work at the Suffolk Lenadoon Interface Group, a community organization geared at bridging the divide between Suffolk, a tiny Protestant community situated in the midst of Catholic-dominated West Belfast, and Lenadoon, the Catholic community bordering Suffolk. This means working with both sides of the sectarian divide—with children, the elderly and community leaders—on projects aimed at building a peaceful and understanding environment for our families. Our building lies on the interface between the two communities. An interface refers to the dividing line separating Catholics and Protestants. Often an interface is identifiable by a Peace Wall, which is the name given to the giant walls which snake through much of Belfast, segregating polarized communities in the East, West, North and South. They were first
Above: For former Provisional IRA militant and historian Anthony McIntyre, uncovering crimes of the past is a dangerous but important process for Belfast. It’s also a deeply personal endeavor. McIntyre spent eighteen years inside Maze Prison for the murder of Kenneth Lenaghan, a member of the Loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force. He took part in a research project for Boston College documenting the oral history of participants in sectarian violence. It recently made headlines after leaks from the interviews alleged that Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams was involved in the infamous disappearance of Jean McConville. Left: Christoff Gillen is a performance artist and LGBT activist. He was recently charged with writing graffiti after using chalk to scrawl the word “love” on the pavement outside Belfast City Hall in protest of ongoing discrimination against the queer community. “Paramilitaries can paint a ginormous, aggressive image of a soldier in a balaclava holding an assault rifle without trouble from the authorities. But if a gay man writes ‘love’ in chalk it’s fair game.”
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Above: On the outskirts of West Belfast, Suzanne Lavery attempts to navigate the challenges facing community reconciliation groups. As officer in charge of the Peace Walls Program at the Suffolk Lenadoon Interface Group, she is expected to achieve concrete goals and improvements between extremely divided communities.
Above: John Duncan is a photographer best known for documenting Belfast through the great political and economic changes of the past two decades. He is also editor of Source, a Belfast-based photography magazine rated amongst the world’s finest.
Right: A look down Donegall Place toward Belfast City Hall. The center of Belfast was a no-go zone for decades due to countless bombings. However, since the late nineties, the city center has rapidly morphed into a commerical hub fit for tourism.
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built in 1969 at the beginning of the Troubles, yet their number and height has only increased since the conflict “ended” in 1998—a clear indication of how nothing has changed here in a fundamental way. In other cases, an interface is invisible to an outsider; it’s detectable by more subtle symbols of sectarianism, such as flags, graffiti, colored curbstones or even the color of people’s clothes. There are seven hundred and thirty people in Protestant Suffolk, and there’s ten thousand across the road in Catholic Lenadoon. It’s very, very difficult to bring people from both communities together because what you’re dealing with is history. And it’s a history of segregated behavior that doesn’t just go back a few decades. It goes back centuries. Sometimes I get the impression that our work might be pushing in a direction that may not be meeting the needs of the community. The big political divisions may not necessarily be the most important issue in people’s everyday lives. Sometimes I feel like if we disappear tomorrow it won’t make any difference. Part of that has to do with the fact that there are quite a lot of older paramilitaries who have become community leaders and influence our young teenage men. Paramilitaries are the soldiers who used to be, or still are, members of the Ulster Volunteer Force on the Protestant side, or the Provisional IRA on the Catholic side. Since the end of the Troubles in the late nineties, these paramilitaries have seeped back into day-to-day life, and their old affiliations infiltrate our lives in different ways. Paramilitaries have considerable influence in all Protestant communities across Northern Ireland, but because we have such a small group of young men in Suffolk they’re more open to that insidious influence because they’re constantly together. It causes a lot of disagreement because parents who are trying to get away from all that obviously want to keep their kids separate from these people. But the kids get under their thumb and they’re too scared to say to these older men, “No we’re not doing that, our mothers don’t want us to
do that.” They end up locked in a vicious circle. That’s something we find challenging as a crosscommunity organization, because when kids get into that circle they stop engaging with us, even when the opportunities are enticing. For example, we had organized a trip to Italy with room for five boys from Protestant Suffolk and five boys from Catholic Lenadoon. We had hundreds of responses from Lenadoon but after about two weeks of the recruiting process we’d not had one response from Suffolk. We went to talk to the kids and find out why. Mostly they said they want to be here to build the bonfire, because the trip doesn’t come back until the day before it’s set alight. Which brings me to the next point: Bonfires are a deeply ingrained part of Protestant culture in Northern Ireland. The history behind their significance goes back to English Protestant victories over Catholics in the seventeenth century. The bonfires are built in the weeks leading up to the twelfth of July and they’re burnt the night before, on the Eleventh Night, as it’s known. Some bonfires reach as high as a medium-sized apartment block. Often Republican symbols are burnt on the bonfire, be it Irish flags or effigies of the Pope. So on the one hand they’re part of Protestant history, yet they can propagate sectarian division and an aggressive atmosphere. Now there are a lot of paramilitaries involved in the building of the bonfire, especially since the protests in late 2012 when the City Council voted to limit the amount of days the Union Jack—the flag of the United Kingdom—would be flown at City Hall. Before that it was mothers getting the funding for the bonfire, organizing the party and arranging for the building materials. Then these protests kicked off and caused a lot of issues in Protestant communities. Within Suffolk the paramilitary element began to say, “We need our symbols, we need our emblems back.” The first thing that happened was they drove young men in every Protestant community into the streets with Union flags. It caused a lot of violence on the interface. We had our first petrol bomb come across the interface in twenty-five years because of the
flag issue. We’d see the curb stones painted red and blue again which had been washed off for years. Vandalism and graffiti started going up everywhere, especially KAT tags [“Kill all Taigs”—“Taig” being a derogatory term for Irish Catholics]. Now there are Republican community workers who’ll no longer take part in cross-community projects within Suffolk because they don’t want to be seen by their community leaders as selling out to the other side. So we’re the only ones doing cross-community work here. And the young people are being told not to take part in our projects. I find a lot of kids from Suffolk won’t come up to the shops after four or five o’clock, especially in the winter when it’s dark. I know my kids, and I know as a parent, I told them, “Don’t go up to the interface after nine or ten.” Because that’s the way we were brought up. We weren’t allowed near the interface after three or four o’clock because our parents felt so scared that there might be snipers. When I was a kid, gunmen used to sit on the roofs and shoot down into our community, so parents just had that fear. And yes, we’ve all passed it on to our kids.
Tuesday, 12:00 p.m. Photographer John Duncan on Loyalist bonfires reflecting change and stasis. I’d been taking photos of Belfast for years before I started shooting bonfires in 2002. Now a lot of those locations where they were built don’t exist anymore. The inner-city bonfires were often constructed in overlooked or underused bits of land: empty car parks, vacant lots and the like. When I was photographing the bonfires the city was being extensively rebuilt and these disused spaces began to be developed. Part of that has to do with the economic changes brought on by the paramilitary ceasefires, and the money that flowed into Belfast as things stabilized politically. During the bonfire project I was also shooting photographs of developers’ billboards in a project called Boom Town. That’s something I’ve been doing since about
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1999, presenting these gap sites and developer’s proposals for what’s going to fill the urban voids in Belfast. Collectively, the billboard photos point towards the city that Belfast is slowly becoming. The bonfires are predominantly built by young teenage boys. They’re a focal point of Belfast landscapes. Understandably, photographers at the bonfires are treated with a certain amount of suspicion. When I started, people’s first question to me was: “Are you from the newspaper?” And then I’d say, “Well I’m doing this for an exhibition in a gallery,” and they didn’t really have any conception of what that was or what it meant that their bonfires might be shown in such a context. And then I said, “Well, have you ever been to the museum in Belfast? It’s a bit like that.” They got that. So then I’d take around a little book that had contact prints to show the kids what I was doing, and they were always intrigued to see the techniques of the bonfire builders from other neighborhoods. It was clear that they’re very, very localized. Bonfire builders gather 94 EB 2/2015
Above: At Hopewell Square in the Loyalist Shankill area of West Belfast, kids stand by as a bonfire burns on the Eleventh Night. On that evening, hundreds of bonfires are lit throughout Protestant communities across Northern Ireland. The celebration is a prelude to The Twelfth, an important holiday on the Northern Irish Protestant calendar commemorating defeats of Catholic forces by Protestant king William of Orange in the late seventeenth century. Depending on who you talk to, the bonfires are an important piece of cultural heritage or a thinly veiled sectarian threat.
material weeks and months ahead, and guarding material is important before they can be constructed into a tower. In my experience, the kids’ interest in other bonfires was a bit of friendly rivalry on one level, but there’s another strain that’s more aggressive: in some of the photos you can see guard dogs and you’ll notice the building materials are spread all over the ground so if somebody from a rival area comes to try and burn them, it’s much more difficult. Some bonfires are built in more public places, and there’s an awareness that signage emblazoned on the bonfires will be quite publicly read. So there’s one that reads “As seen in The Irish News.” Call it bonfire humor. Then there are others with more sectarian messages like “Fuck the Pope”. It’s been a few years since I did those pictures, and I have mixed views about it. On the one hand, I’ve seen bonfires built with a lot of creativity. There’s a lot of emphasis in Belfast on “community art,” and in one way you can see the bonfires as a creative
community project. But there’s obviously a lot of sectarian politics embedded in these structures. In terms of how people from outside Northern Ireland understand my pictures, there’s always a danger of things being lost in translation. Say if a bonfire has a Union Jack on it, it’s very easy to misread that as “They’re going to burn the Union Jack,” whereas in fact the Union Jack is hung up there until the night before it’s set alight and then it’s replaced with an Irish flag, which is then burnt. It’s quite a nuanced language that’s difficult to decode from the outside. It can take a lot of explaining. The question for the photographer is: How do you draw on the specifics of this place but at the same time avoid making work that’s so nuanced that nobody else can understand it? In more recent times, the City Council has pushed to replace the bonfires with “beacons”. There are numerous angles to the debate surrounding the bonfires, but one of the things that have come to the fore is the environmental
impact of burning thousands of car tires, especially when you’re burning them in urban areas. So on the face of it, the beacons are a means of addressing environmental issues. They are wire mesh pyramids filled with woodchips, which are less toxic when burnt. From another perspective, the movement from bonfire to beacon symbolically reflects how Belfast’s culture is changing. It shows how when local government authorities get involved in community issues, people’s complex traditions, cultures and histories can become airbrushed. Health and safety culture was brought into play, effectively bypassing some of the sectarian arguments lodged in these structures. As an incentive to using beacons instead of building bonfires you get funding to have things like children’s bouncy castles. There’s a whole set of conditions you have to sign up to, including not burning the Irish flag. But there are less than twenty of the new beacons and there are still hundreds of “traditional” bonfires.
Tuesday, 5:00 p.m. Artist and climber Dan Shipsides on how Belfast politics manipulates art. I’ve been in Belfast for nearly twenty years. I was working as an artist in England beforehand and I was at the stage where I felt the need to do a masters course. The choices of art schools then were really London, Glasgow or, oddly, Belfast. I didn’t want to go to London, too much of a rat race. I already knew Scotland reasonably well and it wasn’t as strange a place as Belfast was . . . and still is. The context of Belfast, and Northern Ireland as a whole, is rich in terms of space, landscape and climbing as an activity. This place catalyzes concerns of territory, the unknown and fear, and for me climbing on some level is a way of escaping territory. A lot of my early work as an artist, whether I utilized performative approaches, video, photography or experimental sculpture, was based around the idea of climbing
Above: Carrie Twomey at home outside Drogheda, a small town south of the Northern Irish border. Twomey, her husband Anthony McIntyre and their children were forced to flee their home in Belfast following threats from senior IRA members: “In conflict, the loudest voices—the voices that are given most prominence in mainstream media and history—tend to be the ones least effected by the events that they’re talking about. Hopefully we’ve contributed to blazing a trail that allows ordinary people to speak up and get their history documented.”
routes as a kind of cultural form or artifact. If you look at a lot of the routes in Northern Ireland, many of them relate to the Troubles. You could probably write a PhD on it. The naming and style or aesthetics of each route can have a variety of implications, especially so here. You see, summits are frontiers of sorts. The passage to a summit or top of a climb will often encounter conceptual, psychological or philosophical frontiers, and obviously high points have always had strategic military value, aside from symbolic or political value. Climbing routes themselves could be considered as artworks: They are created, authored, named and dated, consumed and generate cultural currency. Moving to Belfast allowed me to see climbing and art as a far stranger and more politicized activity than I had previously imagined it. In fact, much art in Belfast is constantly encountering and dealing with politics, whether it’s embedded in mountain summits or in the streets, and not necessarily always in socalled positive or productive ways. There are a lot of granite EB 2/2015 95
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climbs in Northern Ireland which are pretty hardcore, and some of which have a very specific relevance. For example, John Dunne, who was an internationally significant climber, put up this route which he named “Divided Years”. It was known as the hardest climbing route in the world at the time—it was then the very first E10-rated route listed in the UK grading system. “Tolerance” was another climb he named. His routes tended to pick up on social or political resonances specifically tied to what was going on here. For a time in Belfast there was a genuineness and authenticity around trying to combine art and a social agenda. I was involved in that and still have a passion for art to not just exist for gallery audiences. But the tragic thing is that that scene has become extremely instrumentalized, particularly around identity and reconciliation. The government sees “socially engaged” art as a way of solving problems, so artists are commissioned under that premise. For example, to work in interface or deprived areas. I think that’s really problematic. I’m not interested in going to a prescribed, stereotyped community, or one that stereotypes itself for funding, and trying to do something with them because they’ve been selected by a government institution. A lot of art funding in Belfast is set up to support this sort of public art and outreach. It’s a part of the political social policy. Art then becomes an accountable kind of tick-box so they can say, “We’ve put culture to good use, we’re getting good value out of all this money we give to cultural activities because it’s addressing social problems.” To me that’s the death of art and shows a total misunderstanding of the more circuitous process and value of art. I wasn’t brought up in Belfast so I don’t have a particularly engrained tribalistic framework to my psyche that’s maybe natural for many locals. But now I’ve got kids with local accents, and I realize how my attachment to this place has become concrete. We live in predominantly Loyalist East Belfast, which has real problems for sure. It’s not so much about educating my kids differently; it’s about
understanding how they will be continually exposed to particular ways of being and seeing and the oppressive pressures of identity politics. So the challenge is to think about how to keep their perspectives, and mine, fresh and open and constantly rejuvenating. I truly believe art can help carry that.
Wednesday, 2:00 p.m. Good Vibrations record store and label owner, Terri Hooley on breaking sectarianism with punk. I was born in South Belfast but now I live in the East, and they don’t like me here. I was attacked here a couple of years ago because I’m a Protestant who likes Catholics. I asked my attackers: “Why don’t you attack me because I like Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Rastafarians?” And they’d say: “Oh, we don’t mind them, it’s just the Catholics we hate.” So I’ve always been attacked by Loyalists. But six years ago I was attacked by Catholic Republicans too. I get grief from both sides because I don’t fit in their categories. My family and I were always targeted in East Belfast because my father was English. He came over here after World War II and he was a Labour candidate. In the fifties people used to beat up all the Labour reps, including the women. I’ve not mentioned this in years, but the first time I was in the papers was at the age of six when I got an arrow shot in my eye. It was during my father’s election campaign, and he and his colleagues were all beaten up for being Labour, which was perceived to be a Catholic thing. And that was before the Troubles had even started. By the age of six I thought all these people were a bit nuts, people on all sides. So it’s something I’ve grown up with all my life. But later on I was being attacked because I brought Protestant and Catholic kids together through punk. In London punk was a fashionable thing that lasted nine months. Punk has never gone away in Belfast. There’s a line in a movie about my life that says, “New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers and Belfast has the reason.” The
punks are my heroes. I was the unlikeliest person in the world to be a punk—I’m an old hippie anarchist! Some German journalist labeled me the “Godfather of Punk” and for some reason the name stuck. I was never a punk, never will be. When The Clash first came to Belfast they were going to play the Ulster Hall in the town center but they were stopped because of insurance problems. And the kids started pogoing in the streets outside the venue. In those days the police weren’t used to kids having a dance and a good time, they just thought it was going to be a riot. So the police attacked them, and that was the night known as the Battle of Bedford Street. It was the night that kickstarted punk in Northern Ireland. There used to be a ring of steel around the Belfast city center where you were searched for incendiary devices. Belfast had the only city center in Europe that people didn’t use at night. All you saw inside the ring of steel was the police and the army. Then, later, it was the police, the army and the punks. It was funny because these British soldiers were very young and they were probably thinking, “God, I wish I could go to a punk gig.” So the army used to come into the bars and stand at the back with their rifles in their arms. And then you’d see them nodding their heads to the music. When we started Good Vibrations we hadn’t a clue about how to make a record. We hadn’t a clue about how to record a record. We hadn’t a freakin’ clue about anything! The only thing we knew was that we couldn’t be sure we’d be alive by the end of the week. One night I came out of work and three gunmen tried to grab me and take me away but two guys jumped in and saved my life. I knew these two guys because every day I’d say good morning to them and they’d go, “Don’t be talking to us, we hate you, you’re a filthy lefty.” I tried to buy them a drink after they saved my life but they’d never take it and just tell me to “fuck off.” But that’s Belfast people for you. In many ways people would be really rude to your face but they’d actually really like you. The funny thing about this city is you’re not allowed to move above your station. ~
Above: For Dan Shipsides, the relationship between art and community outreach in Belfast is often unfortunately co-opted by politics. Still, he sees art practice as a potential means to change ingrained modes of thinking and behavior in Belfast. Left: Good Vibrations’ perennial outsider, Terri Hooley. When Nirvana toured Belfast in 1992 and Kurt Cobain fell ill, he reportedly said, “I don’t mind dying here, because it’s the home of Good Vibrations Records.”
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or shorthand summaries to very abstract, complex programs that maybe only one or two technical specialists know the workings of. AS: So you think the images
from NSA slides aren’t just primitive visualizations?
Deconstructing NSA Aesthetics A.J. Samuels: What’s frighten-
ing or interesting to you about the images connected with the NSA slides Snowden leaked?
Simon Denny: When I saw the slides
for the first time I was maybe as surprised and confused about their content as many people were. But I was also very taken by the way the information was presented. The graphics, logos, layouts and logic of which phrases and images were used seemed as revealing about the culture behind agencies such as the NSA as the text information they contained. I saw particular languages and subcultures being drawn from—fantasy, pop-sci-fi, gaming, magic and wizardry— which I didn’t necessarily associate with the bureaucratic and technical languages of intelligence agencies of major nation states. For example, images were lifted from Magic: The
At this year’s Venice Biennale, artist Simon Denny used the New Zealand Pavilion as a platform to investigate the visual language of the NSA by contracting David Darchicourt, a former agency art director, to illustrate various security-based themes . . . without telling him of their intended use. The Guardian broke the story and informed Darchicourt, adding another layer of intrigue to an artwork about the culture of knowledge and secrecy. We asked Denny why NSA aesthetics matter and how his conversation with the NSA cartoonist went after the leak.
Gathering-style game Shadowfist for slides describing QUANTUM, which is an NSA attack program that duplicates Internet traffic; there were references to the Terminator series and Skynet in the TREASUREMAP Internet mapping program; popular meme lolcats were used to represent the QUANTUMSQUIRREL program and representations of wizards showed up as icons for the phone-tapping program MYSTIC. And there are many more. AS: You’ve said of the NSA’s images
that “the leak made them into 21stcentury masterpieces.” In what way?
SD: The images that Darchicourt
and his contemporaries have created read as icons for the activities that have become so debated, which makes them extremely important cultural producers. They have provided easy visual handles
SD: Actually, they’re highly sophisticated. I think the set of cultural referents—including military history and use of illusionists such as Teller of Penn & Teller in GCHQ’s [British intelligence’s] Art of Deception slides—shows a complex understanding of the cultural space around this material. I can only speculate, but building these kinds of references into imagery could suggest playfully boasting about their badass capabilities. Or perhaps they suggest a degree of criticality, using a symbol as potent as The Terminator to introduce a critical possibility into icon making. AS: Do you consider your instal-
lation a work of “reverse espionage” as The Guardian stated?
SD: Not exactly. I think it was a very
clever and effective headline. The fact that the paper “leaked” the details of my mildly covert project was very appropriate and made for a better artwork. Darchicourt eventually emailed my collaborator, designer David Bennewith, saying he had questions about the project and requested a phone conversation. Over the phone with Darchicourt, I explained what my intentions were with interpreting his material without permission. I also offered to host him in Venice. Actually, once the gesture was performed of making and releasing the exhibition without his knowledge, I felt like his close input would add even more value to what was presented. He indicated that he would have to consult the NSA before he could accept any further invitations from me. Unfortunately I haven’t heard from him since. ~
ELECTRONIC BEATS #43 out September 19, 2015!
nOISE LOVE sOnGS
Ritournelle — Festivalnacht der elektronischen Musik Mit : Barnt, Caribou live, Roman Flügel, HeCTA live, Simon Hildebrandt, Pantha du Prince live, Quartier Midi, Rødhåd, Ahmet Sisman, The Notwist live 15. 08. 2015 : Jahrhunderthalle Bochum
Festival der Künste