Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 3/2015

N° 43 | 44 · FALL & WINTER 2015

­ELECTRONIC BEATS

YEN TECH TONY CONRAD MISSY ELLIOTT OLAFUR ELLIASON

ELECTRONIC BEATS · JEFF MILLS · HELENA HAUFF · JULIA HOLTER · NEW ORDER · MANELE

CONVERSATIONS ON ESSENTIAL ISSUES N° 43 | 44 · FALL & WINTER 2015

“That’s how insanity happens.”

KEVIN PARKER (TAME IMPALA)

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ELECTRONIC BEATS FESTIVALS 2015

PODGORICA 4–5 SEPT BUCHAREST 2–3 OCT BUDAPEST 15 –18 OCT ZAGREB 6 –7 NOV

AURORA AV AV AV ELLIPHANT DJ FIL LAVIN FJAAK LIVE GEORGE FITZGERALD DJ GILERZ ROOSEVELT TEN FÉ DJ TIJANA T ZENKER BROTHERS ACTRESS ALEXANDRA BRANDT BRAUER FRICK WITH BEAVER, TANYA & JOSA DJ HELL MISSI MONTY CLUNK FRANCESCA LOMBARDO LIVE HUDSON MOHAWKE DJ SET MAX GRAEF & KICKFLIP MIKE NIPPLEʼS DELIGHT TEN FÉ TOTALLY ENORMOUS EXTINCT DINOSAURS DJ SET WEVAL ÂME BERGI CRIMSON THE EGLO FATIMA &LIVE BAND HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR HOWLING IAMYANK KIASMOS NINA KRAVIZ ТРИП NOZINJA OMAR SOULEYMAN S. OLBRICHT SERES SUBOTAGE TEN FÉ VOLKOVA SISTERS ILJA RUDMAN KINK LIVE KÖLSCH DJ SET DJ KOZE KOZMODRUM MYKKI BLANCO PYTZEK ROMARE SINKANE TALISCO TEN FÉ TOMISLAV YOUNG FATHERS

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EDITORIAL

I Love Big Cocks. It’s perhaps not the most obvious sentiment that comes to mind when thinking about how to frame the editorial for the final print issue of Electronic Beats Magazine, but it’s the one that makes the most sense. Let me explain: recently on my way to work, I encountered dozens of posters featuring the aforementioned slogan printed in appropriately thick, 7-inch font, advertising the mail order sex toy company Dildo King, who, in recent years, has become a ubiquitous presence in Berlin with their sexually explicit PR campaigns. And even though I always do a double take when I see street ads promoting twofers for newfangled rubber dongs, in Germany’s capital people don’t seem to blink.

Partly that’s because Germans— and Berliners in particular—aren’t prude. The city’s atmosphere of sexual freedom, catalyzed in the twenties by the early gay and trans rights initiatives of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and entering into public consciousness in the sixties via the anti-authoritarian new left and free love communes, has created an environment where bourgeois swinger clubs exist in every district and the annual Folsom Street fetish festival is practically a family affair.

But there’s also another reason why I Love Big Cocks offends nobody: norms of etiquette often don’t apply to English in Germany. Which brings me to Electronic Beats. Over the past five years, I’ve never had to argue with anyone about the appropriateness of magazine content. This is in part attributable to being an English-language corpo-

~

Electronic Beats Magazine has been around for eleven years. I’ve had the pleasure of working on it for the last five, while serving as editor-in-chief for the past twelve months. In 2011, art director Johannes Beck and myself helped former editor-in-chief Max Dax realize his vision of transforming Electronic Beats from a theme-based quarterly into a magazine focused on interviews and oral history.

Artists’ perspectives became the nucleus of the publication’s identity. The idea wasn’t only to create a magazine which stood as a model for the future of print, but also as a vehicle for a metadiscourse about the future of print—and the role of corporate publishing in that future. We won awards.

Corporate publishing awards. Lots of them.

It’s with great regret that I inform you that this will be the final issue of Electronic Beats Magazine.

A.J. Samuels Editor-in-Chief

rate publishing magazine operating out of Berlin. Which isn’t to say Deutsche Telekom doesn’t read this magazine. They do. Front to back.

The company has simply trusted us to produce engaging interviews, conversations and artist monologues without assuming the role of censor.

So what does that mean exactly? In the past it’s meant Richard Hell jokingly calling for the collective “fucking” of the NYPD while discussing the anti-establishment accomplishments of John Waters’ muse Cookie Mueller. (“Fuck the police. If possible, literally, fuck them.”) It’s meant Swans’ Michael Gira insisting that, if you leave out the ideology, the Battle of Stalingrad was one giant, heroic opera. It’s meant being able to have “cunt” in 70-point font as part of a headline of an interview with The Kills. But beyond all the wouldbe transgressiveness, it’s also meant having the freedom to feature artists that matter talking about things that matter, irrespective of their popularity or relative obscurity: being able to interview members of Italy’s most feared mafia organization, the ’Ndrangheta, about their unique music and dance rituals without worrying about whether influential European anti-Mafia lobbies cry foul. Or having Faust and Tony Conrad wax philosophical about the world’s renewed interest in drone music without wondering what that has to do with selling cell phone contracts. Or having Terre Thaemlitz explain the importance of Japanese trans activist Akihiro Miwa’s aging in public. Or National African American Roller Skating Archives founder Tasha

Klusmann discussing how roller rinks shaped modern dance music.

The point is that the editorial freedom at EB Magazine has been predicated not only on falling in between the cracks of cultural conventions, but, ironically, falling outside of corporate ones as well. The Telekom logo printed on the front of every issue has meant a curious kind of journalistic freedom: no advertorials and no advertisers complaining about content being offensive or too obscure. Does this make corporate publishing somehow superior to normal publishing? Could it even be the future of print, as some journalists have contended? Hardly.

Corporate publishing is viable as long as the belief in branding by association remains powerful. And that belief vanishes when the inability to measure the power of these associations becomes an issue. Clear metrics exist in the speedier world of online publishing with tweets, likes and clicks. Content is immediately shareable. Less so for a free print magazine. Which is why our indepth interviews, long format stories and artist conversations will now be featured exclusively online at electronicbeats.net under the guidance of Elissa Stolman and Sven von Thülen. I wish them all the best.

A number of factors have contributed to the last five years of EB Magazine becoming a perfect wave of editorial autonomy.

We were never under the illusion that the wave would never break. We just wanted to ride it for as long as we could. And then gloriously wipeout. ~ EB 3/4/2015 3

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The beginning of the end, with help from Richard Quine’s 1959 film classic Bell, Book and Candle. Photo: T. Djll EB 3/4/2015

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When the Electronic Beats Festival hit Podgorica, organizers constructed a “selfie wall” consisting mainly of a bunch of mirrors into which people could gaze at their own reflections—and those of their companions. It was strategically placed directly in front of a statue of former Montenegrin national writer and Prince-Bishop Petar II Petrovic´-Njegoš, who was said to be fond of poetic reflections. Photo: Miloš Vujovic´ 6

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ELECTRONIC BEATS MAGAZINE CONVERSATIONS ON ESSENTIAL ISSUES

Est. 2005 Issue N° 43 | 44 Fall & Winter 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, Heiligegeistkirchplatz 1, 10178, 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:

Kevin Parker photographed in Berlin by Luci Lux.

Contributing Authors: Lisa Blanning, Paul Breazu, Tom Chapman, Tony Conrad, Phil Cunningham, Lucrecia Dalt, Max Dax, Chris Dercon, Aïsha Devi, Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, Ion Dumitrescu, Olafur Eliasson, Gillian Gilbert, Helena Hauff, Julia Holter, Daniel Hugo, Jean Michel Jarre, Finn Johannsen, Daniel Jones, Rasia Khan, Justus Köhncke, Tim Lawrence, Mica Levi, Jeff Mills, Scott Monteith, Matt Morandi, Stephen Morris, Nick Newlin, Kevin Parker, Marc Pell, Jean-Hervé Péron, Matt Spendlove, Bernard Sumner, Elissa Stolman, Veronica Vasicka, Woody, Dario Zenker, Marco Zenker

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Frank Bauer, T. Djll, Camil Dumitrescu, Harald Engel, Luci Lux, minus, Alex de Mora, Cornelius Onitsch, Elena Panouli, Chris Polk, Hans Martin Sewcz, Adrian Stähli, Zsu Szabo, Wolfgang Tillmans, Miloš Vujovic´, Nick Wilson, Isolde Woudstra

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: Michael Aniser, Karl Bette, Nicolina Claeson, Marta Collica, Markus Göres, Adel Halilovic, Raphael Lane, Elyse Lightman-Samuels, Hili Perlson, Fallon MacWilliams, Arthur Rau, Lorraine and Murray Smith, Lucia Udvardyova, Walter Wacht, Uli Weber, Anja Weigl

© 2015 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited

ISSN 2196-0194

“They’re gonna take Earth problems to Mars.”

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After Bill Drummond shut down The KLF in 1992, his focus shifted to a musical project known as The17, a choir that “exists only for the experience of those performing it.” Under his direction, they performed site-specific scores from 2003 to April 2013 using just their voices. During the choir’s final months, Swiss director Stefan Schwietert made a film about them titled Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow and All Music Has Disappeared, in which Drummond can be seen accosting strangers and painting on fields in the name of art. Photo: Adrian Stähli EB 3/4/2015

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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

Olafur Eliasson’s Berlin studio, pictured here, is full of objects and projects in various states of completition. Turn to page 68 for an in-depth conversation between the celebrated installation artist and techno progenitor Jeff Mills. Photo: Elena Panouli 10

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CONTENT MONOLOGUES

EDITORIAL ...................................... 3 WELTANSCHAUUNG ...................... 4 RECOMMENDATIONS .................. 14 Tim Lawrence, Chris Dercon, Lisa Blanning, Deadbeat et al; on Arthur Russell, Berghain | Kunst im Klub, Planet Mu, Pole and more. Pop Talk on Miley Cyrus; Music Metatalk with Mark Smith; Video Game Theories with Daniel Hugo; the Zenker Brothers dissect a DJ set

INTERVIEWS

CONVERSATIONS

“That’s how insanity happens.”

Mark Smith meets KEVIN PARKER ............................. 44

“Walk up to your own horizon.”

OLAFUR ELIASSON talks to JEFF MILLS ................................... 62

“Deep house? Shallow house? Curry house?”

A.J. Samuels talks to NEW ORDER .................................. 50

“I know something you don’t know.”

HELENA HAUFF talks to VERONICA VASICKA .................. 74

“We’re talking about modernism here.”

Max Dax meets JEAN MICHEL JARRE ..................... 56

“No Can, no Kraftwerk, no Cluster, no nobody.”

TONY CONRAD talks to FAUST ............................................. 78

BASS KULTUR ............................... 34 Lisa Blanning talks to Woody about Berlin’s Heideglühen

“I don’t think of the music as a message.”

JULIA HOLTER talks to LUCRECIA DALT ........................... 86

ABC .................................................. 36 The Alphabet According to Micachu and The Shapes

Bucharest Special: THE ORIGINS OF MANELE .......... 90

STYLE ICON ................................... 40 Yen Tech on Missy Elliott

Three of our featured contributors: Daniel Jones

Julia Holter

Chris Dercon

(* 1981) is an American writer, promoter and DJ. For almost five years, Jones has provided EB with a disarmingly personal take on the darker side of music, identity and culture. In this issue he recommends the sins of the flesh.

Photo: minus

(* 1984) is an American composer and singer known for her allusive and complex take on pop music. In this issue she talks to Lucrecia Dalt about the expectations facing female songwriters and how subverting assumptions is central to her work. Photo: Luci Lux

(* 1958) is a Belgian curator, art historian and director of Tate Modern. In this issue he recommends Berghain | Kunst im Klub, and examines the club’s unification of sexuality and space through art and architecture.

Photo: Luci Lux

IN THIS ISSUE: AUGMENTED REALITY! Get access to tons of extras

with your smartphone in

simple steps. STEP 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.

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MONOLOGUES

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POP TALK: MILEY CYRUS & HER DEAD PETZ

On August 30 Miley Cyrus performed a new song, “Dooo It”, while hosting the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. Then she posted it online along with the twenty-two other tracks that comprise Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, her fifth album.

With production credits from The Flaming Lips and artist/digital marketing guru Ryder Ripps, it's another step in the transition from Disney child star to fully-fledged pop artiste. Spatial, Jahiliyya Fields, Aïsha Devi and Justus Köhncke debate whether her transformation convinces.

Oustider techno insider Jahiliyya Fields recently released his Chance Life LP on L.I.E.S. According to the press release, it references Alvin Lucier and Jacques Lacan— which qualifies him While Spatial is Aïsha Devi makes to talk about what is and isn’t serious a purveyor of varivery weird pop ous forms of UK bass music, so it’s no sur- music. Guess what music, he also enjoys prise to read that she he thinks Petz is? a good pop album. thinks Miley Cyrus Music criticism should be on But he doesn’t hear does not. that Discovery Channel TV show about disgusting jobs, Miley checking her Here I am, at the end of the so I will be brief and without pop privilege on Petz. album, a bit anxious because guile. This album sounds It’s not surprising that Miley Cyrus kicked her saccharine Disney legacy in an edgier direction. That punk attitude could have currency, as selfreleasing an album and thereby shunning the industry machine is a great stance. But it would be easier to buy into if the attempts were more sonically daring. Much of the lyrical content is juvenile, even for the most hormone-ridden adolescent. The posturing seems plastic. “Dooo It” has partystarting production swagger but feels out of place amidst the faux-psychedelic Flaming Lips karaoke songs. “Slab of Butter” and “The Floyd Song” are as palatable as they are forgettable. The record has little resonance with me, and it’s disappointing to see a pop star with such privilege fail to make the most of an interesting gesture.

I’d have hoped that pop in 2015 would be more exciting.

I feel no nucleus, no substance, no cohesion. I kind of get the intention but I’m lost in the artificial result.

Why does intimacy sound so fake? She has carefully chosen her subversive entourage; Wayne Coyne and his acolytes assaulted the LP with music anthology recipes and injected psychic intensity like a motto.

But on a creative level, it’s a bit of a fail, because each of Miley’s tracks is less powerful than its reference. It’s a boring demagogic parody. Miley wants to be an amalgam of past and present pop stars simultaneously: Grimes, Lady Gaga, Peaches, Madonna, Siouxsie, M.I.A., Cicciolina, Alice Glass, Lana Del Rey and FKA twigs. But she’s just Miley—an uncomfortable cartoon avatar compulsively impersonating existing icons and never generating her own content. She is the goddess of obsolescence.

like The Flaming Lips with Miley singing ADHD lyrics interspersed with bouts of weed-insight into the nature of narcissism. There are some “Bold as Love” licks spread over some softly grinding synths and beat machines. The “serious music” gravitas keeps this album firmly commercial.

Plus, one of the other producers actually added a spoken trademark to each of his overly-compressed cuts. As the album unfolds, some deeper cuts emerge as well-crafted psych synth pop. “Tangerine”, with its wide-panning spaceambiance, is the closest to an actual trip. The Lips and Miley sound like they had fun in the studio. I had to shut it off when it sounded like a talent show at the end.

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German house producer and Kompakt veteran Justus Köhncke isn’t afraid to celebrate Petz while others shun it. Maybe it’s because he gets the joke?

Out of nowhere, Miley Cyrus dropped an astonishingly captivating, private, heartfelt and hyperultramegamodern pop album. There doesn’t even seem to be CDs or vinyl. In Mileysphere terms, it was produced rather cheaply in her garage with a lot of help from her buddies, The Flaming Lips. I actually don’t enjoy her voice and prefer Grace Jones, Róisín Murphy, Karen Carpenter, Donna Summer et al. But as a nerdy producer, the production techniques applied to her vocals—drowning them in an ocean of psychedelic processing instead of the usual methods of Melodyne or Auto-Tune and dropping them in as razorsharp, reverbless microsamples—bring me to my knees.

Petz offers the humor missing in pop these days, hence “I'm So Drunk,” a miniature song that lives up to its title but could be extended to a sevenminute club banger. I would buy a dub/instrumental version of Petz immediately. It’s like nineties instrumental hip-hop, which I always preferred to message-heavy macho rap. And I want to remix “Tangerine” so badly.

Miley, can you hear me? ~ Is it all over my face?

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RECOMMENDATIONS

“One day it’ll happen, but for now Russell’s music refuses to age.”

Tim Lawrence recommends Arthur Russell’s Corn With Arthur Russellmania showing no signs of abating, writer Tim Tim Lawrence is an expert on New York City Lawrence looks into Corn, a new compilation dance music culture and has penned two that shows there’s an authoritative music abundance of compelling history tomes, Love and diverse material yet Saves the Day and to be released.

Arthur Russell Audika

biography Hold On to Your Dreams. He is also co-founder of the Lucky Cloud Sound System, a British offshoot of David Mancuso’s legendary longrunning Loft party. His next book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83, is about the city’s postdisco club culture and is due out in 2016. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats.

Opposite page: Wolfgang Tillmans, Mundhöhle, 2012. © Wolfgang Tillmans. The work, which translates into English as “oral cavity”, hangs at the Panorama Bar. All images appear in Berghain | Kunst im Klub / Art in the Club, published in 2015 by Hatje Cantz.

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Has there ever been a revival as strangely beautiful as Arthur Russell’s? Composer Philip Glass released Another Thought, the first posthumous collection of Russell’s music, on Point Music in 1994, a couple of years after his mentee and friend died in relative obscurity. Ten years then passed before Audika and Soul Jazz released Calling Out of Context and The World of Arthur Russell in close succession in early 2004. Instead of cancelling each other out in front of what was assumed to be a tiny market, the releases triggered an unprecedented level of interest in Russell’s music—music that in many respects had been too diffusely complicated to attract a significant audience during Russell’s lifetime.

Supported by Russell’s surviving lover Tom Lee and uniquely ready to embrace the full range of Russell’s music, Audika’s Steve Knutson went on to become the label head Russell never had the good fortune to work with during his curtailed life. With each album immaculately designed and notated, Knutson combined the re-release of albums such as World of Echo with compilations such as Love Is Overtaking Me, which was drawn from the mythological shelves of unreleased reel-to-reel tapes that

filled a wall of Russell’s and Lee’s walkup Manhattan apartment at 437 East Twelfth Street. Now, following a hectic period of Arthur Russell-themed tribute albums and memorial concerts, comes another Audika release, Corn.

The album showcases material Russell started to work on during 1982-83, when he had good reason to believe his efforts would be released on Sleeping Bag, the label he co-founded with Will Socolov.

But Socolov had become frustrated

by Russell’s indecisiveness and was more interested in releasing dance tracks that would directly appeal to the city’s burgeoning party scene,

“A precious addition to one of the most far-reaching catalogs of late twentieth century music.”

Tim Lawrence

and so the songs were left to drift until Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis handed Russell an album deal that enabled him to get busy with the unfinished tapes. With his home studio in place, if never wholly finished in his own mind, Russell laid down most of the tracks by himself, calling in trusted collaborators Mustafa Ahmed (percussion) and Peter Zummo (trombone) to add parts, with Rik Albani also contributing trumpet. “Arthur made me

wait for years,” recalls the Rough Trade boss. “It was frustrating, but I knew he needed my support to keep financing his music.”

Knutson issued four songs from these sessions on Calling Out of Context: “The Deer in the Forest Part One”, “The Platform on the Ocean”, “Calling Out of Context” and “I Like You!” Corn presents another nine, each one a precious addition to one of the most far-reaching catalogs of latetwentieth-century music—a catalog grounded in Russell’s openness to the panoply of sounds that were taking root in New York City during the seventies and eighties. The opening track, “Lucky Cloud”, provides a jam-driven corrective to the somewhat mournful acoustic version selected for Another Thought, an album framed by the sweeping tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. “See My Brother, He’s Jumping Out (Let’s Go Swimming #2)” executes more sonic acrobatics than the 12-inch version of “Let’s Go Swimming” remixed by the pioneering DJ-remixer Walter Gibbons, with Russell’s mesmerizing cello and floating voice offsetting the track’s complex rhythmic layers and fat synthetic bassline. “This Is How We Walk On the Moon” roughs up the version included on Another Thought, taking the song into surreal funk territory. Trippy and dreamy, playful and ambient, “Ocean Movie” might have been recorded while Russell thought of the fish tank he and Lee kept in their apartment. The rest of the tracks are equally compelling.

One day it’ll happen, but for now Russell’s music refuses to age. ~

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Read more recommendations on electronicbeats.net

“The urine shines like the gold in a Byzantine church.”

Chris Dercon recommends Berghain | Kunst im Klub Berghain | Kunst im Klub reveals the venue’s longstanding commitment to reflecting queer activity not only in music, but also in architecture, design and art. Curator Chris Dercon ponders the complex space of the techno institution.

Until fairly recently, the issue of sexuality and space, in which theories of sexuality are reread in architectural terms and architecture is reread in sexual terms, was a glaring absence in architectural theory. The symposium and publication Sexuality and Space organized by Beatriz Colomina at the Princeton University School of Architecture in the early nineties was one of the first initiatives to correct this omission. Soon after, Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders for the Princeton Architectural Press in 1996, focused on the role of architecture in the formation of queerness and the architectonics of gay male sexuality. In his introduction, Sanders writes: “Architecture and masculinity, two apparently unrelated discursive practices, are seen to operate reciprocally.”

Undeniably, the essays, images and graphic design of the recent book Berghain | Kunst im Klub call our attention to the structure of a homoerotic look transacted through space. The architecture of queer visibility, which this book covers in detail, troubles the

heterosexist perspective by overturning the social rules forbidding male spectacle within public space. Indeed, there are no better “introductions” than Sexuality and Space and especially Stud: Architectures of Masculinity to understand the sexual implications of the architecture and art of Berghain. Berghain | Kunst im Klub, designed by Yusuf Etiman and conceptualized by Kathrin Hain, tells us as much. The book’s cover is entirely devoid of text, with only the spine featuring the title—a smart and courageous gesture by the publisher Hatje Cantz. All we get is the club’s logo superimposed on an image of one of the club’s raw industrial walls.

It functions as a bio-political selfrepresentation of the clubbers, the heavy beats and yes, in contrast to what many say and think, the open atmosphere of Berghain. Or as Berghain regular and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans put it: “The atmosphere in a (good) club is like art is supposed to be: it’s totally open and doesn’t tell you what to think.” Had I therefore also seen on and in Etiman’s cover an abstract rendering of the male anus in Wolfgang Tillmans’ Phillip, close-up III from 1996, which once adorned the Panorama Bar, and which is reproduced in full glory twice in the book?

This and the other plates of Tillmans are a perfect introduction to the rest of the book.

The interview with Tillmans is intelligent and enlightening, as are most of the other carefully edited interviews. Tillmans ends his interview: “I find the most

interesting visual medium at Berghain to be the flyers.” These exquisite flyers are placed at the very end of the book, and I have to admit, they are often more memorable than most of the art, which the book generously and thoroughly documents. That said, there is a fascinating common theme in almost all the contributions featured in Berghain | Kunst im Klub, gleamed not only from reading between the lines.

All contributors appear to show and tell of fractals and fractality, fluids and fluidity, darkness and lightness. It makes sense when seeing photographs documenting the art, as for once all the lights are on! Suddenly we see the borders of borderless Berghain.

Even photographer and legendary doorman Sven Marquardt discusses the importance of daylight.

As far as fluids are concerned, Sarah Schönfeld’s Hero’s Journey (Lamp) from 2014, an illuminated glass case filled with a thousand liters of urine she collected and preserved in the club’s toilets, is one of the most poignant works on view. The urine shines like the gold in a Byzantine church.

It is an image of salvation.

Elsewhere he pigeon droppings and dust particles that appear as fractals in the photographs of Friederike von Rauch create the same kind of “otherness”. As argued in the scholarly publications mentioned above, it reminds us that there is no such thing as queer space; there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use. This book explains exactly that. And it does it so well. ~

Hatje Cantz

Chris Dercon is a Belgian art historian and curator. After serving as director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst from 2003 to 2011, Dercon was appointed director of London’s Tate Modern, where he diversified the museum’s offerings with interdisciplinary programming. In 2017, he will take over as the general director of Berlin’s Volksbühne theater. This is his second contribution to Electronic Beats Magazine.

Left: Marc Brandenburg, Kiosk, 2014. © Zsu Szabo, the artist.

Brandenburg, now a successful artist, used to work the Berghain bar. During last year’s 10 exhibit, he created sheets of Berghain themed temporary tattoos, which were sold out of a kiosk.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

“Actively fueling the life of a scene.”

Lisa Blanning recommends a triple-disc compilation celebrating Planet Mu’s remarkable twenty-year anniversary.

Planet Mu

Lisa Blanning is an American music journalist based in Berlin. She has written extensively for numerous publications including Wire, RBMA, Resident Advisor and The Fader. She is also a regular contributor to Electronic Beats.

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Tracing a line from IDM to breakcore and footwork, Planet Mu is a vital piece of electronic music history.

Lisa Blanning investigates how label owner Mike Paradinas continues to blaze a trail into the future.

If any record label is audibly a reflection of one person’s taste without regard for commercial interests, it’s Planet Mu. After twenty years, Mike Paradinas—aka electronic musician µ-Ziq—is the kind of label head still capable of delivering surprises. This is clear over the course of the fifty-track, three-disc compilation µ20, which commemorates their milestone anniversary.

Planet Mu has earned its reputation as a pioneering electronic label. In 1995, electronic music in Britain was already a thriving culture of revolutionary club flavors and intuitive avantgardism—two traits that often overlapped. As µ-Ziq, Paradinas planted a flag of rave-influenced experimentalism (call it IDM, even if he and his friends didn’t) contemporaneously with the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre. He famously released a collaborative album with the former, Mike & Rich’s Expert Knob Twiddlers, and has been friends with Richard D. James since their university days together. You’ll see this fact repeated over and over again, but it’s the kind of old-school credibility that deserves recognition.

It also reflects the kind of music that Planet Mu was built on, and most of that history is explicit on the compilation’s third disc. Late nineties tracks by µ-Ziq, Jega and Frost Jockey set up the historical

nod to Mu’s breakcore period, which includes Hrvatski, the deconstructed drum ‘n’ bass project from synth wizard Keith Fullerton Whitmann, as well as Datach’i, Shitmat and even Hellfish. This is also the disc with the most overtly experimental music, such as Leafcutter John’s electroacoustic eclecticism and Ed Lawes’ concrète synth probes. But perhaps the most affectionate pleasures come from the forgotten oneoffs, both in recognizing how far Mu’s influence spread at the time (I didn’t realize that there were any IDM producers from Kalamazoo; hello, Dykehouse) and in the personalized, often droll artist descriptions you’ll find on the Mu website, which date from a time when Paradinas himself still wrote them.

The first two discs consist primarily of unreleased material from 2010 until the present.

This is Mu as we know it now: the off-kilter techno homages of µ-Ziq, Ital, Ekoplekz and John T. Gast; a sprinkling of odd, detuned pop from Miracle and Heterotic (the duo of Mr. and Mrs. Paradinas); the prog-charged project of multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan and Zombi-synth lord Steve Moore; the next-generation weightless grime of Mr. Mitch and Dizzee Rascal vocal sample glossolalia from Milanese. And the remit of Mu gets more and more expansive. Throw in some lush ambience from Polysick, Ital Tek and Claude Speeed, the mesmeric pan-African melodicism of John Wizards and IDM heirs like Boxcutter and there’s a lot of electronic ground covered.

Naturally, Paradinas is a DJ too, and the tracks are sequenced with musical relationships in mind.

It’s fitting that breakcore’s finest, Venetian Snares, who has released chiefly on Planet Mu since 2001 and is the label’s bestselling artist, closes out disc one. The label’s engagement with breakcore presaged its championing of footwork—represented here through a salting of different styles from RP Boo, Traxman, Jlin & Fawkes, DJ Diamond and more. A dissected mutation of ghetto house, footwork gestated quietly in its native Chicago for almost two decades before Mu introduced it to the world at large, first via releases from footwork outlier DJ Nate, genre champion DJ Rashad, DJ Roc and the first Bangs & Works compilation, all released in 2010.

In the post-internet era of exhaustive access, footwork unleashed a shock of energy into underground dance music culture. Paradinas’ stature in electronic music was already cemented, but this kind of recurrent relevance is the mark of someone not just connected to, but actively fueling the life of a scene.

There are a few surprises in the compilation’s extensive liner notes/one-hundred page “book” by music writer Rory Gibb, even for someone familiar with Mu’s history.

Discovering that most of Venetian Snares’ music is written in a 7/4 time signature is as enlightening as the list of Paradinas’ aliases.

The anecdote of how Mu came to work with Hellfish is cause for sheepish smiles. In person and in this text, Paradinas comes across as reserved but intelligent with a sardonic sense of humor. µ20 reveals the weirdness, stubbornness and quiet exceptionalism of a label that continues to be a pioneer in electronic music. ~

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RECOMMENDATIONS

“Like wandering into a vast forest.”

Deadbeat recommends Pole’s Wald LP The long-awaited Wald LP is finally here. Deadbeat thinks it’s equal to Pole’s finest work. Here’s how its melodies relate to Lewis Carroll characters.

Pole

Scott Monteith aka Deadbeat is a Berlin-based producer working at the intersection of dub and techno. With a background in software instrument design, Monteith’s music is impeccably produced, as shown on releases for ~scape and Wagon Repair, as well as his recent Tikiman collab The Infinity Dub Sessions. This is his second contribution to Electronic Beats.

Stefan Betke has made incredible contributions to the electronic music landscape over the last two decades. His work under the name Pole, and particularly his much-lauded Blue, Red, and Yellow album series, (officially titled 1, 2 and 3 respectively) helped to define the aesthetic language of a new sonic era around the turn of the millennium. In its adherence to chance operations, boundless experimentation and embracing mistakes, the loosely defined “clicks and cuts” genre was indebted to the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman and the Fluxus movement. Pole and his contemporaries updated these ideas for the digital age by juxtaposing them with modern dance music tropes and the Jamaican dub conception of the studio as an instrument.

As the co-curator of the sadly defunct ~scape label alongside

Barbara Preisinger, Betke championed the music of like-minded artists who otherwise may not have found a global audience. Indeed, I very likely wouldn’t be writing this article or making music at all if not for their efforts. In recent years Betke’s artistic work has taken a back seat to the development of his Scape Mastering studio, which has been responsible for putting the finishing touches on a truly colossal number of records. While the odd Pole remix has surfaced from time to time, the best way to experience his music has always been through the total immersion of the album format. Accordingly, the news that his first new full-length in eight years was finally finished was certainly cause for excitement.

The autumnal forest gracing the cover of Wald—“forest” in German—is a smart visual cue for what listeners can expect from the album’s nine musical movements. Listening to Pole albums has always felt like wandering into a vast forest, where the thickening canopy obstructs sun, moon, and starlight. The leaves of this most recent woodland setting

have begun to brown with the changing of the seasons and the first gusts of cold northern winds.

Those familiar with Betke’s previous albums will find plenty of the deep blue basslines, head-nod grooves, and crackling percussion that have made his past work so warm and enjoyable. However, this latest collection sets itself apart in a few key ways. His melodies have previously tended toward the melancholic but these latest tunes are brimming with other-worldliness, as if this particular Wald was populated with characters out of a Lewis Carroll story. Add to this a new dimension of distortion and snarl in the sound design, and the appearance of rickety, handmade grooves which sound like they may collapse under their own bass weight, and you end up with an album which demands close listening. This is gorgeously weird stuff with very little reference to the past or present beyond the work of Pole himself. At a time when it seems so many musicians are lazily mining the past in lieu of charting new creative tracts, Wald is truly a breath of fresh air. ~

“Atmospheric and stunningly inventive.”

Finn Johannsen recommends Patrick Cowley’s Muscle Up

Dark Entries

Porn soundtracks don’t often come to mind when thinking of great music, but Muscle Up shows Patrick Cowley’s brilliance wasn’t dimmed by throbbing flesh.

For years it seemed as if Patrick Cowley appeared out of nowhere,

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establishing an impressive musical career in a brief period of time and vanishing just as quickly at thirtytwo years old when his life was cut tragically short by AIDS in 1982.

Since then, millions have danced to his music and productions, and within certain circles Cowley enjoys a reputation as one of the most important artists in the history of club music. Still, Patrick Cowley the

person has remained largely unexplored. There are countless entries in books and websites about disco that feature Cowley, mostly rehashing the same handful of photographs and scant biographical details. There have been no interviews, and no friends or collaborators telling their stories. Cowley the artist left us only his forward thinking musical vision with which to speculate where the

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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. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats.

music came from. When Cowley’s fame as a synth wizard skyrocketed in the early eighties during the aftermath of the classic disco era, he was in the process of producing the first album by Indoor Life, led by his friend Jorge Socarras. It wasn’t music destined to shine under the glistening mirror balls of the world’s hedonistic palaces. Instead, it was dark and edgy—more post-punk or new wave than disco. Either way, it should have been proof that there was more to Patrick Cowley than the music he became famous for.

The seeds of the world experiencing another side of Patrick Cowley were sown in 2007 when John Hedges, head of the Hi-NRG label Megatone, moved house in San Francisco, and invited the local DJs from the Honey Soundsystem to help him sort through his archives.

They discovered the original reels of the Catholic recordings in his basement, and later introduced them to producer Stefan Goldmann, who happened to be a guest at one of their events. It was an honor for Stefan and myself to

release the album on our Macro label two years later. All involved were certain that the world would be thrilled to discover another side of Cowley’s musical genius.

Our expectations couldn’t have been further from reality. Fans of Cowley’s Hi-NRG sound were not interested in a different, somewhat darker shade of the musician.

The record’s lack of sales was disappointing to say the least.

Thankfully Honey Soundsystem member Josh Cheon founded his label Dark Entries around the same time the original Catholic release came into being and has since been determined to find unreleased Patrick Cowley recordings. His hard work has paid off.

Before rereleasing Catholic with additional material last year, Cheon released Cowley’s School Daze in 2013. The album is a collection of compositions recorded between 1973 and 1981 for gay porn films produced by the Fox Studio company. The album is not only a welcome piece to the puzzle of Cowley’s enigmatic persona, but

also an invaluable testament to how outstanding his musical talent really was. The music is dense, atmospheric, stunningly inventive, and surely surpasses its functionality as the soundtrack for sex.

Enter 2015’s Muscle Up. The LP has a few more soundtrack excerpts where Cowley lures spaced-out atmospherics from his synths, which are both dark and enticing. But there are also heavy funk workouts that sound like they might stem from his college days jamming with Arthur Adcock and Maurice Tani. The album’s highlight is surely an alternate instrumental version of “I Need Somebody To Love Tonight”, one of the best tracks Cowley produced for disco legend Sylvester.

More pieces to the puzzle indeed.

I’m sure there’s more to reveal from the vaults, and hopefully these different musical facets of Patrick Cowley—particularly those produced before he became famous—will be taken as seriously as the rest of his oeuvre.

It really is about time. ~

“He looks like a child discovered at some perverse game.”

Daniel Jones recommends the Sins of the Flesh Daniel Jones’s id

Daniel Jones is a music promoter and creator of the subculture reconceptualization tumblr BlackBlackGold. He is a longtime contributor to Electronic Beats.

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As the lights dim, author Daniel Jones takes his place at the proscenium for a puppet show like no other. Sit back, relax and take a look at who’s pulling the strings of our lives—and little deaths.

An empty stage, its backdrop painted with the idiot faces of gods. Their heads incline upward, either in disdain for those below

or in baffled wonder at what hands might work above them.

And there, descending on silver wires, a puppet with arms thrown wide like a grotesque Christ. His wooden feet touch the stage with a soft tchk. No spotlight illuminates him—only the footlights cast awareness, flickering softly below a dance of dust particles.

He slowly advances under the command of a less than able puppeteer, looking burdened by some crippling illness. His

robes—perhaps “rags” is a better term for these flapping swatches of loose, red fabric—twitch as his head wobbles madly. It’s as if the puppeteer was seized by a fit of the giggles. His painted lips part with a clumsy cluck: “In the light of your persuasion, I saw a rare creation, and I cross this consummation for the solitude of another way of being.”

Following this proclamation, he steps back, away from the footlights. The rumble of sheet

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metal from behind the curtains rises slowly. It’s a simulated storm that brings a cold wind to blow and tease at the ends of our host’s sad tatters. Above stage center, two pale, beautiful feet emerge, glowing as they kick the air. The puppet echoes these kicks in exaggerated pantomime, legs thrusting higher into a gleeful dance. He tears his robes further to reveal an almost comic striped prison uniform.

This puppet is no invalid, but inmate! What a silly impression he makes amongst the stars and gods and swirling eddies of ancient dust. That is, until he suddenly stops dancing.

Through some trick of light his face appears streaked with wetness. Sweat? Tears? He stumbles

forward, mouth agape: “In this light I thought I heard a voice that said six perfect words.”

From above, on the edge of comprehension: “A child’s echo, hear him singing.” A church bell rings, and the voice speaks once more from curtained ceilings: “This is not the only dream.”

Two hands now appear from above. Neither hold wires or give direction to the slumped-over figure below. From between their thin fingers, snowflakes begin to fall, covering the puppet in white.

And as the hands pull upward, the puppet rises from the freezing pile, hands outstretched toward those now vanished: “Take my hand beneath the sky! Lend your voice, that I might fly! When you’ve looked beyond my eyes

into a different way of being!”

Cracks appear in his wooden lips as they’re forced to perform the acrobatics of intense laughter, delivered into a false sky of spinning gods who don’t get the joke.

The puppet’s knees hit the stage.

For a moment, he looks like a child discovered at some perverse game until his small body shapes a whirling dance that steadily becomes more luminous and violent until zzzzppp! he’s yanked upward to rest among the lights with that beautiful, unseen figure.

Two silhouettes—a shadow and a shadow’s memory—are sewn together by delirium. Two conjugal shapes straining as much against as toward each other. Neither voice nor limb nor light remain.

This is sex. ~

Above: Berghain attendees in 2014 may have noticed a set of blue barrels in the corners of the club’s bathrooms with signs on them asking people to pee inside. Artist Sarah Schönfeld used the urine for her 2014 light and glass installation, Hero’s Journey (Lamp), shown at the club’s 10 exhibition. © Zsu Szabo, the artist.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

“Sounds whirl around your head.

Your head whirls around the sound.”

Mark Smith on Pauline Oliveros and Ione’s Water Above Sky Below Now Morphine

Mark Smith is an editor at Electronic Beats Magazine.

Pauline Oliveros and Ione use music as a means to bring about change, and Water Above Sky Below Now is a continuation of the duo’s declaration of musical autonomy. Here’s how their “Deep Listening” techniques and Expanded Instrument System achieve that and more.

There’s a classic narrative about twentieth century minimal and experimental music that says it deconstructed traditional roles and hierarchies. The need to confront issues outside of music became an organizing principle with which to compose, and having a good idea could trump musical ability. The music of Pauline Oliveros and Ione moves beyond experimental music’s theoretical concerns towards a functionality that’s steeped in actual human relationships. So in a sense it’s difficult to recommend Water Above Sky Below Now, a continuous thirty-nine minute improvisation for accordion and voice, in isolation from Oliveros and Ione’s two trademark projects: the concept known as “Deep Listening” and a musical processor called the Expanded Instrument System (EIS).

Firstly, Deep Listening is an exploration of hearing—both active and passive—as a communitybuilding tool and a general approach to understanding creativity. As an organization, the Deep Listening Institute (DLI) runs retreats, workshops and residencies geared at using music as a path to inclusivity and awareness. For example, Oliveros

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and her team create software that allows children with severe disabilities to improvise together. Ione is the director of the DLI and a specialist in dream awareness, which includes a variety of techniques of dream analysis and group discussion. The connection between this background and music makes sense on Water Above, where Ione’s vocal contributions remain highly allusive. Her voice appears in keening fragments whose narrative gaps allude to salt, blood and the Middle Passage: “The sea is upside down . . . red sand . . . those beneath the ocean . . . our footsteps on the ocean floor . . . the man with scorpions in his pockets . . . those women in the tower . . . how could you leave them there? Where is the key?” Ione’s fevered exhalations seem powered by her own sense of wonderment and discovery, and are occasionally confronting in their nakedness. Her concept of dreaming as a vital means of communication between disparate cultural groups provides one way to read her questing vocal contributions. And still, Oliveros’ customized accordion, operating within her Expanded Instrument System, remains the main attraction.

Oliveros likes to call EIS a “time and space machine” that can break down the relationship between past, present and future.

Using a huge battery of delays, reverbs and spatial tools, the system takes fragments of accordion and voice and turns them into putty. Often it sounds as if the accordion is divided into two personae: sometimes spluttering and bickering, other times united in disquieting accordance. After

a while your perception of pitch goes out the window, leaving your mind to trace shifting hulks of sonic mass and blink-and-you’llmiss-it musical gestures. With the first volleys of the instrument’s reedy sound, just-intoned harmonies fill discrete points of space.

Sounds whirl around your head.

Your head whirls around the sound.

The focus here is on duration and timbre rather than pitch and rhythm, and the cumulative affect is surprisingly playful. Though it’s couched in a musical language that promises a small audience, and a conceptual background that requires some explanation, seeing Oliveros and Ione appear on a label like Morphine bodes well for reasserting marginalized voices in the history of electronic music.

Interestingly, this marginalization was in full swing at a time when the line between high and low culture was supposedly dissipating.

In the sixties, globalization opened up an inspirational world of nonWestern musical concepts. Video artists became composers, performance artists became musicians, and engineers became tape artists.

But decades on, it’s clear that any lasting radical changes were confined to a ghettoized experimental music audience, and the men who fit the old systems of male-oriented music history were elevated above the rest. Perhaps that’s why most people are less likely to have heard of Pauline Oliveros than her contemporaries. She certainly has her place in music history, but it’s situated within the biographies of illustrious males, some old, some dead, and many of lesser importance. ~

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MUSIC METATALK BY MARK SMITH

Grey-Scale Techno and New Music:

The Invisible Hand that Feeds

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hat are the connections between the grey-scale brand of modern day techno and the experimental minimalist tradition often referred to as “New Music”? Superficially, the former is for dancing, the latter for close listening, although this generalization doesn’t preclude paying close attention to a Regis track or someone bopping along to Music for 18 Musicians. These sweeping statements are intended to imply that both kinds of music have completely different functions and come from disparate contexts. At times they share a penchant for extended durations and repetition in pursuit of a hypnotic state outside of normative time scales. Beyond that, they’re increasingly marketed in the same contexts, most notably at adventurous European music festivals. Phill Niblock can share a bill with Actress, Charlemagne Palestine with Donato Dozzy, and Steve Reich gets chucked in just about anywhere without anyone batting an eye. Techno producers with pretenses to high art like to name check New Music composers who in turn vociferously deny any continuity between their work and techno

or are barely aware of its existence altogether. Though not strictly a New Music composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen—when confronted by music from Plastikman, Aphex Twin and others in 1995–famously quipped that, “music becomes a whore” when it has a functional element. Where New Music trades in Pythagoras, Fluxus and just intonation, modern grey-scale techno-think focuses on production technique and tends not to be concerned with difficult questions. Which isn’t

past three decades has cities, curators and cultural funding boards looking to dance music in their pursuit of financial support and investment. Yet techno in its natural environment doesn’t quite qualify as high culture for the moneyed, older audience that attend and partially fund classily curated art music festivals. For them, there’s a certain point where no amount of experimental sound design will counter-balance a thousand bars of kick drums.

So how do we bolster the

Illustration: Cornelius Onitsch

New Music and techno appear together at arty music festivals with increasing regularity. Although they may share some superficial similarities, Mark Smith sees the union more as a product of economics than musical proximity.

Spot the difference. to say it should be, but rather its concerns look inward, rather than outward. Modern composers might not be the best to judge such matters, but the fact remains that the differences between New Music and techno run far deeper than their incidental aesthetic similarities.

So why are they converging? The rise of club culture as a consistent economy over the

impression of occasion and solidify techno as something worthy of high culture?

Enter New Music, a canonized (but marginal) art form with a strong history and cultural currency. Experimental minimalism has influenced many aspects of the late-20th century music, particularly rock, noise and drone—at least as much as techno. Steve

Reich, Philip Glass and co. now function like Beethoven.

Which is to say they’re insoluble pillars of greatness, and reliable programming for leading European and American orchestras, who receive some forty-five percent of their funding from banks.

However, this ossified branch of New Music lacks edge and can’t rely on classical music contexts to expand its influence and profit margins. But a whole new audience of openeared techno fans lies waiting to be tapped. And backs are waiting to be scratched.

This is possible largely because listening has changed over the last two generations.

New Music helped catalyze a shift in the sixties, the implications of which bear fruit on a large scale in the present day. Now there is an ever-growing audience used to enjoying timbral and textural development in lieu of harmony and structure. So, in a sense, New Music fostered its own new audience by proxy, and one of those proxies is techno. For me, this is the key connection between New Music and techno, and its implications are most evident from an economic perspective. An important part of the exchange between New Music and techno is rationalization, and converging markets and audiences rather than musical kinship or reimagined music histories. This isn’t remarkable in and of itself, but it does a disservice to both kinds of music when we willfully disregard the invisible hand pulling the strings. ~

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DANIEL HUGO’S GAME THEORIES

Adventure Games and the Global Conspiracy Adventure games often have players exposing the connections between threats to world peace and planetary existence at large. Are the conspiracies in gaming a reflection of increasingly global threats and connectivity?

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A retro-style point-and-click adventure game, The Blackwell Legacy follows a young freelance writer in New York City charged with the task of helping ghosts find their way to the afterlife. Gamers assume the role of spirit-medium, mediating a world infected with restless souls and the occult.

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rom the beginning, the adventure game genre has nurtured a symbiosis with figures and images of the occult, mystery, horror, and, most of all, conspiracy. Perhaps even more than its distinctive stylistic attributes such as the point-and-click, puzzle solving and the piecemeal unfolding of the world through the framing of the screen, conspiracy appears as the gravitational center around which all other adventure game themes orbit.

This is especially the case in classics like The Last Express, which presents pre-World War I geopolitics and an underhanded arms deal between national enemies inside a ride on the Orient Express. Similarly, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars takes place within the opulence of early twentieth-century Paris and its intricate political schemings.

In a manner far different but just as powerful, the astounding Cosmology of Kyoto is a non-linear game set in a feudal Kyoto swarming with phantasms, politics and the tiny details of daily life. For more “modern” renditions of the conspiracy, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, anticipates the stylings of True Detective

by twenty-odd years. Set in mid-nineties New Orleans, the game connects a chain of voodoo-related crimes that ultimately turns into a EuropeanAfrican colonial narrative.

One could argue that the value of these games is in configuring how your character—the devious criminal, the American tourist, the beleaguered horror writer-cum-detective—affects the much wider domain of politics and world history. The constant emphasis on the individual within a larger conspiratorial context implicates the player in a history of greed, war or colonial abuse. So what is our vantage point and influence on this matrix of forces? In posing the question, adventure games seem to appropriate an opposite approach to the world than that of the social sciences, where individuals are seen as having a negligible influence on world events.

Indeed, in adventure games, the world isn’t just the setting for a crime scene or conspiracy—it is often the crime scene itself.

This says something about agency that goes beyond the obvious influence of classic savior narratives. From the post-apocalyptic present created by natural disaster in Dead Synchronicity to the galactic mafia syndicate running earth in Gemini Rue, the concern isn’t a particular murder, deception, or disappearance taking place in the world, but rather upon or against the world at large. Global existential threats and connectivity—from global warming to the Internet—appear to have adventure gamers thinking about the world as such. ~

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PLAYED OUT

Hook, Bassline and Zenkers PLACE: CONCRETE, PARIS TIME: 4:00 A.M. SUNDAY, PEAK TIME Munich-natives the Zenker Brothers have steadily infused German techno with a refreshing take on breakbeat tracks. While their label Ilian Tape has been one of the most consistent imprints in contemporary dance music, their own productions have reached new heights since their debut LP Immersion dropped earlier this year. In this run down of a recent set, the brothers dissect a selection of predominantly UK and German techno for a controlled exercise in tension and release.

1. Appleblim - “Auburn Blaze” Whether we’re starting our set in the middle of the night or at the very beginning, we mostly lead off with a beatless track. It helps the crowd recognize that there’s a new DJ taking control—one who’ll build a new vibe from a clean slate. In that sense, this recent Appleblim track is a perfect launchpad. Appleblim has been making dope tunes since 2005, and “Auburn Blaze” shows how versatile a producer he’s become over the last decade.

After a simmering build-up, “Flashback” finally releases the pressure valve with an expert drop, setting the scene for higher energy.

Rippling dub ambience makes way for a searching arpeggio that creates a tantalizing sense of anticipation.

Dario (left) and Marco Zenker, photographed in Munich by Frank Bauer.

2. Hodge - “Flashback” We like our beats break-y and syncopated.

It’s nice to maintain the tension with broken rhythms rather than launching straight into four-to-the-floor material after an ambient intro. This track has a very trippy vibe and a subtle rolling groove. Hodge is responsible for some wicked cuts in recent times, and this is one of our favorites. It’s quite simple but it sounds unique, and it’s a track you recognize immediately. It’s great when a tune makes you wait for something, but what you’re waiting for never seems to come. Which is to say “Flashback” maintains the tension without getting boring.

3. Stenny - “Hagale” This Stenny cut was released on our label Ilian Tape, and it was a highlight in many of our sets this year. It pumps straight from the get-go and captures the flow established by “Flashback”.

“Hagale” is a peak time track that avoids the standard formulas producers use to make those hands-in-the-air moments. On the other hand, it evolves in a way that’s hard not to dance to—weightless pads are counterbalanced with shuffling hats, and

a killer kick-stab combination keeps the momentum ticking over. Stenny is part of a new generation of Italian techno producers who are picking up the techno lineage laid in Napoli during the nineties. Vai Stenny, Vai!

Shorter, charging loops move the energy levels into the red as Stenny’s modern techno gives way to a nineties classic.

4. Surgeon - “Untitled” (from Dry) True to the EP’s title, this track is a dry, loopy monster from 1999 that’s still making booties shake over a decade since its release. We like our sets to unfold in waves of different styles, and this is a great tool with a personal sound that’s perfect for building bridges to other musical moods. A set with one straight vibe and sound feels rather boring to us, so we like to keep things diverse and vary the energy levels during the set.

Swinging 909 hats and subtle sub pulses creep into the mix, signaling a turn toward a funky direction.

5. Marcel Fengler - “Sphinx” “Sphinx” has an infectious, banging swing to it, which jumps on top of the Surgeon track quite nicely. It’s dark yet extremely catchy, with an ebbing synth line bubbling atop the funky groove. Like the preceding tracks, it has an open-ended vibe that opens up many options for what to play next. Marcel Fengler is a great guy, DJ and friend, and it’s particularly nice to slam cuts made by your buddies. ~ EB 3/4/2015

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BASSKULTUR BY LISA BLANNING

“We have a responsibility to provide something that Berliners were missing.”

Through the bushes and behind a gas station in an isolated pocket of Berlin, Heideglühen is one of the city’s best-kept clubbing secrets.

With the world’s attention focused on Berghain, a team of rave-seasoned Berliners have created a DIY party that escapes the purview of the EasyJet set. Resident DJ Woody explains the origins of a space open for veterans and newcomers alike.

I moved to Berlin in 1991. I came from Munich, where the government was more conservative and strict. I was reared on funk, soul and hip-hop, so I like a good groove and a sense of sexiness, but these vibes can be found in techno, dub and many other genres. I was really young, eighteen or something, when I moved north. Hilke Saul, one of the owners of Planet and E-Werk, saw something in me. I was really lucky to catch her eye because these venues played a big part in shaping Berlin club culture in the nineties.

I was made a resident at Planet before it closed in ’93, and then six months later we moved to the new location, E-Werk, where I was a resident until it shut its doors in ’97.

People were coming from everywhere to party at E-Werk. Maybe we could call them the first techno jet set. Of course, Berlin changed a lot in the next few years. Those old spaces that we could call our own became something else, or ceased to exist altogether.

Heideglühen didn’t start in a club venue, but rather in the

backyard of Julian Schulz’s workshop. He works with metal and furniture and builds structures for galleries, artists and clubs. In the back there was a little space that he renovated into a hangout for himself and his friends, and I had my fortieth birthday party there.

I invited Radio Slave and some other DJs and I took care of the sound system and flyers. We didn’t expect it to be so good. Julian said, “Let’s do it again.” That was three years ago, on Heidestraße, where we got the “Heide” name. Glühen means to glow. In Germany we say vorglühen for when you meet friends and have some drinks to get in the mood before going out.

Heideglühen is our instinctive reaction to spending so many years in Berlin. We needed a place like a living room, somewhere to feel free and at home. A place to turn the night into day. Some people have said that Heideglühen reminds them of the early days of Bar 25, which is a cool comparison, but currently there aren’t so many places in Berlin that do what we do. With Heideglühen, I think we found a place to bring people from different generations together again. This is the spot where a lot of friends from the nineties and the beginnings of Berlin techno come together. That was the point. Sure, there’s new people coming to every party, and especially younger people, but we like this mix. It’s not only the oldschool. Everybody’s welcome at Heideglühen, but they have to be friendly. That’s why the party is so real and people can feel it. Our

audience is really open. They know there’ll be quality music, even when we don’t post the line-up. We have a nice crew and make the parties fun for ourselves, and maybe that’s why people can sense the authenticity. It feels like an innocent place where everything is possible.

We’ve been in a new location since last summer. At first there was nothing there; it was just an empty space in Wedding. Julian and the Heide crew built everything from scratch: the building, the dancefloor, the backyard, the garden—everything. We weren’t sure whether the new location was going to have the same magic as the original, but we trusted Julian’s vision. And it grew from party to party. We made it better and better. Without Julian’s construction there wouldn’t even be a dance floor and I couldn’t have made so many nice bookings. So Heideglühen is very much a group effort. The team we have is really important.

We have a responsibility to provide something that Berliners were missing. The first Heideglühen was an amazing dream and a genuinely special place. It was difficult to make Heide 2.0, because people had a high standard. Sure, the current incarnation is different from the first but this change is also positive. You have to make the next step and not rest on your laurels or try to artificially recreate something that’s past. It’s always been magic, and that makes me really happy.

There’s been no party where I said, “Hmm, this time was boring.” ~

Three Heideglühen Classics: Suparaw - “Glowin’ Nights”: “A hypnotic analog adventure and a total Heide-jam.”

The Wise Caucasian - “Kutchie Dub”: “Deep, sexy, late-afternoon dub techno.”

Boe & Zak - “Loop For Love”: “Super special disco tech. Lights the dancers on fire.”

Opposite page: Woody (center) in his natural habitat.

Photo by Elena Panouli

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ABC

The alphabet

according to Micachu and The Shapes

as in ANIMAL COLLECTIVE We embarked on a trippy tour together. They were very foolish— before we even met them they let us travel on their tour bus. They’d start their live sets and this massive cloud of ganja would rise into the air. Their audiences were really peaceful, good-feeling crowds.

With their fourth album Good Sad Happy Bad, Micachu and The Shapes have rejuvenated their fresh, angular take on garage pop following their adventures with the London Sinfonietta and Micachu’s award-winning score for Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin. The LP emerged from drummer Marc Pell secretly recording the band’s improvised jams, which would eventually become the album’s creative foundation. As a result, Micachu and co. transcend the pseudorisk-taking prevalent in myriad rock and neo-psychedelic projects of late, choosing instead to embrace mistakes and mine musical imperfection for raw emotion.

Opposite page (Left to right): Marc Pell, Mica Levi and Raisa Khan, photographed by Alex de Mora in London.

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as in BEATS Making beats is a daily habit, part of laptop life. They’re like sketches in a notebook. You can get into your own zone and lose hours getting into little grooves.

as in DANCING Pulling shapes. At the same time as playing a gig you can get a sweat on. It moves the music forward.

as in ENGLISHNESS Sort of an old-fashioned term.

We have such a shared culture online and those distinctions feel more and more irrelevant.

as in CHOPPER A wooden instrument created by Dave Sylvester and Mica. It has eight strings with a wheel and picks, and you use a rod to play it. It sounds like the strumming of a guitar, but more constant, more mechanical, less human.

F as in FEEDER Raisa: The title of an EP I put out a couple of years ago. It wasn’t as fun without these two, which is probably why I haven’t put anything else out since.

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as in GOOD SAD HAPPY BAD The name of our new album, but it could be the name of the band. The songs are either real downers or peppy uppers. The title says everything and nothing, which is ideal for us.

as in MATTHEW HERBERT A mastermind. He made an album where he reared a pig. For his live shows he’d have a chef on stage. Smelling bacon during his set was off the hook.

as in IMPROVISATION Improvisation is equal parts math and cosmos. We always thought that improvisation was this thing that you had to train many years for and we’d never be able to do. It felt satisfying coming together for the jam that became Good Sad Happy Bad.

Micachu and The Shapes take more risks than you.

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as in JOYFUL/JARRING NOISE Is this a description of our music?

Otherwise, big up Sun Ra.

as in KWES An amazing soul and an absolutely natural musician. He’s got an unbelievable set of ears, a beautiful voice and beautiful lyrics. Plus, his productions are tactile and personal. He’s also a great facilitator of other people and he’s very patient and committed. He can play several instruments to a really high standard, as well as use a computer. More often than not, you don’t see those two skills together.

as in LONDON SINFONIETTA We did a live performance with them called Chopped & Screwed that involved the Chopper. We were worried about it. These musicians are absolute virtuosos, specialists in modern music, and able to read and perform incredibly complicated notation. We gave them some written material, but the order of how it was played had to be committed to memory, which put them in a vulnerable position. We were surprised at how much risk they felt that involved, but we were all totally out of our comfort zone.

Everyone had to risk something.

as in MCs Brother May came up with the name Micachu, and he’s the main MC that Mica works with.

He’s part of the much-treasured group around us who are interchanging roles and making music together. This community is the most important thing.

as in NOTATION It’s like drawing, but a detailed drawing instead of a big sweeping thing. To compose with notation is pretty Zen, but we don’t write out our stuff because we’re talking to each other and have it committed to memory.

as in OPTIMISM Yes, please. It’s not done on purpose, but if you hear optimism in our music, that’s really great.

as in POST-PUNK It felt like we were making punk music for this album. There’s the driven, sketchy energy of the music but also our own explosive compositional attitude—it’s full of sudden changes in direction and mindset.

as in QUANTIZATION We avoid it mainly, but every music technology has a place, even Auto-Tune. It depends on what the purpose is.

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29.09.15 09:10

Interview by Lisa Blanning.

Read more ABCs at electronicbeats.net

as in TUNINGS The moment in between songs.

Non-standard tunings expand the harmonic world of the humble barre chord. We don’t use many weird tunings anymore because half the set was spent getting in tune! Those tunings aren’t patently unusual, just to Western ears.

In Indian music, Western music scales would sound strange too. as in ROUGH TRADE We were choosing between labels, and [founder of Rough Trade] Geoff Travis listened to five seconds of Jewellery and said, “Well, I don’t think I’ll sell much of this, but I like it so I want to put it out,” and we were convinced. He was truthful and unfazed. The whole ride with the label has been a pleasure, and we’re very lucky.

as in UNDER THE SKIN A film directed by Jonathan Glazer, starring one Scarlett Johansson, with a soundtrack by me, Mica. Has it changed how I work? I’ve gone back to my old ways.

as in VACUUM CLEANER Mica used to use a vacuum cleaner to distort her voice. It sounded as in SHIPPING CONTAINER like hell on earth and it nearly We mixed our album Never in a converted shipping container. The killed her. A studio was in a neighborhood of Hoover is never a containers holding office spaces, safe thing to put homes and workshops. During the near your mouth process another container two doors while it’s on, kids. down became available and Mica Especially every went for it. Later, Kwes moved into night on stage! another. The whole area is around East India Docks. It’s right opposite the Millennium Dome and under the flight path of London City Airport.

There’s very little phone signal and no Internet, so it was a good place to write music and poetry.

as WITHASEE I, Marc, produce bands and artists as a facilitator under this name, and a few solo bits. The name was given to me by school friends who noticed I introduced myself as: “Marc with a ‘c.’” I was named after Marc Bolan and I’m proud of it!

as in XYLOPHONES OF LIGHT BULBS American composer/instrument builder Harry Partch created a tuned percussion instrument, called the Mazda Marimba, which used Mazda light bulbs as keys.

as in “YOU KNOW” (FROM NEVER) It’s the story of a quick rejection at a long house party. For the video, we dressed up our friends in colorful clothes and had them boogie to a drum ‘n’ bass track while drinking non-branded beer.

as in TIRZAH Doesn’t start with Z—this is cheating! However, Tirzah is a chic goddess babe. ~ EB 3/4/2015

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29.09.15 09:11

YEN TECH ON MISSY ELLIOTT

Ms. Style Icon

For me, and I think for many kids who grew up in the nineties, Missy Elliott was one of the most important video stars of our generation.

I remember my first time seeing “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”, Missy’s single debut in which she infamously dons a gigantic inflated trash-bag suit, and thinking it was the most insane thing ever.

Despite growing up around MTV, the cultural significance of this and the era-defining aesthetic of Hype Williams’ videos were, for the most part, just a sense impression to me. All I knew was that Missy was so effortlessly cool and so immediately futuristic that everything else seemed boring in comparison.

As I got older it became clear that Missy was in some ways the antirap star of her time, especially in regards to the norm for female artists. Her wardrobe choice in “The Rain” was not only a parallel to the era’s visual style but also could be seen as a critique on body image, standards of beauty and the industry that initially rejected her.

In an interview on VH1’s Behind the Music, Missy said, “I’m a stay big, and I mean literally.” The eccentric humor and flawed relatability of Missy’s personality is in part what made her so progressive and almost punk in attitude. She was a feminist icon and a style icon without overtly trying to be either.

Today we tend to be more hyperaware of gender issues in commercial media. The objectifica-

Back when post-internet producers were pre-Internet teens, Missy Elliott was ruling airwaves and MTV screens with a globally conscious club sound.

According to Nick Newlin, aka Yen Tech, Elliott’s cross-cultural reference points were hugely inspiring for his own trap, EDM and K-Pop pastiche. Having launched his Yen Tech persona at Art Basel in 2012 and dropped his Revengeance mixtape via DIS Magazine a year later, Newlin has long had one shiny sneaker planted in the world of art galleries and forward-thinking electronic music. While he remains ambiguous towards his own identity as maximalist K-Pop phenomenon vs. post-Internet Gesamtkunstwerk, he is eager to describe how Missy Elliott’s songwriting and feminism helped him understand what’s real.

Missy Elliott brings the heat at a performance in Burbank, CA in 2008. © Chris Polk/Getty

tion of women—especially in rap music—has been criticized openly, and the result has been varying degrees of progress. The pseudofeminist message of an artist like Beyoncé, who in my opinion reads as much more impersonal, owes a large debt to Missy. Rather than #flawless, Missy Elliott came across as real and down to earth, a star who was unafraid to be critical and outspoken, but remained selfdeprecating. She was just herself, and her music had the ability to carry these messages without being defined by them. Her influence today has obviously extended well beyond hip-hop, too: the trite, commercially gift-wrapped message of a song like Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” not only wouldn’t exist without Missy Elliott, but comes across as disingenuous and forced in comparison.

Beyond her social significance, Missy’s weirdo visual style and futuristic club-oriented sound was obviously important not only to hip-hop, but to newer aesthetics that have become relevant in the post-internet landscape. A track like “Get Ur Freak On”, with it’s minimal sound and global samples, predates M.I.A’s pop/ club-crossover tracks and other more contemporary underground club trends by years. I can recall being floored and mesmerized the first time I saw the video for “Work It”. I was old enough that there was a different context to

seeing this that I didn’t previously have with her earlier generation of videos. This was post Y2K, right before YouTube happened, and the video had an immediate effect on me. From the off-kilter beat and Pan-Asian visual themes to the bizarre wirework choreography and self-referential physical comedy: it may not be obvious but many of these elements I’ve tried to hint at in my own work.

Missy Elliott has had a major comeback in the public’s consciousness this year. Post Super Bowl, we saw an endless slew of bullet point articles written about her relevance and her legacy. I think it’s important to look at why though. Beyond the fact that she’s had countless hits and sold millions of records, and beyond the fact that you can view her work through a feminist lens, I think that moment recaptured our collective desire for an authenticity and a dexterity in our pop stars that has been severely lacking. Her songwriting, her severely overlooked production work, her oddball aesthetic, and her endearing realness places her into a canon of pop artists that exist uniquely as themselves. Since producing tracks with Aaliyah and Timbaland to collaborating with K-Pop artists, Missy Elliott’s work spans two generations—from late nineties MTV to the post-YouTube present. And it remains as vital as ever. ~

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INTERVIEWS

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30.09.15 13:33

MARK SMITH MEETS KEVIN PARKER

That’s how insanity happens.”

Hailing from Perth in Western Australia, one of the world’s most isolated cities, Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker might seem an unlikely candidate to top the charts alongside Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. But in only a few short years, Parker’s infectious brand of lysergic, riff-heavy pop has gone from bedroom project to global juggernaut, striking chords with young festivalgoers and aging psych-snobs alike. With his latest album Currents, Parker draws on new inspiration from the funky crucible of eighties electro-pop, and a beguiling set of new life circumstances.

Left: Kevin Parker, photographed in Berlin by Luci Lux.

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K Kevin, you’re from Perth, which is thousands of kilometers from the next major town or city. How has that affected the music you make? Or do you think people unnecessarily romanticize the idea that isolated places promote innovation?

I still don’t know. There’s definitely something to be said for Perth people doing what they do to please themselves rather than anyone else. I think we have that balance going on where we’re so far away from the other cities in Australia that we feel disconnected, but we’re connected enough to know what’s going on in the outside world. We have our interpretations of styles of music that are popular in other places, so we catch on to the rest of the world. Touring in Melbourne and Sydney isn’t really in the cards for young Perth bands because it takes ages to fly there and costs a lot of money. So we said, “Fuck it, let’s not bother. Let’s stay here and make music for the rest of Perth.” Maybe it’s that sort of decision which makes the city musically productive. Since everyone has already seen everyone else play, there’s an onus to do more fucked up shit. Besides, I never relied on a music scene to do what I do because I make music alone, and when I started out there wasn’t a scene around me anyway. My experience of the “Perth scene” was just my friends and the people I lived with. Perth is so spread out that everyone has a huge backyard by anyone else’s standard. That was one of the things that shocked me once we left Perth: I always assumed that everyone around the world had a backyard. Only when we started traveling did I realize how naive that perspective was. We were more about backyard parties and weird jam events amongst friends that would go on for way too long.

Would you say playing outside established venues with your friends fed a healthier musical instinct? Playing in bars always seems to foster a competitive tension between young bands.

For sure. The competitive thing never changes though. You can’t escape it because it’s human nature. I always found it constructive.

Like a sibling rivalry, it only makes you strive harder. I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as good at what I do if I didn’t strive to be better than a band I saw or played with. I wanted to make music on the level of my friends. So that was competitive in the best possible way.

Do you think bands tend to get too deep into the mechanics of how they’re going to make it too early in their careers? There’s a tendency to focus on getting plucked out of your home town by that cool, foreign label.

Before we got “plucked” as you say, which is exactly what it felt like, I didn’t want to be a part of that grind: raise some money, record a demo, get a manager, get some more money together, record an EP, shop that around to every single person you can think of—from rural radio stations to giant labels. Then you go and raise more money from extended touring, record an album and that’s your moment. I saw the painfully rigid structure of it.

I read that you got the call from the Australian label Modular, your pivotal “pluck” moment, on your way to a university exam. The

world is pressuring you to get a life, or a “real job”, and then the complete opposite happens.

We were waiting for Modular to let us know whether they would actually go through with signing us. They’d been in contact with us before but they were like, “We need to talk to the boss,” who I guess was [Australian promoter and Modular founder] Steve Pavlovic.

The call was to confirm that they would fly us to Sydney to play at a showcase for them. I was walking around uni, the exam was in twenty minutes and I was meant to be studying but I was thinking about this call. Then five minutes before the exam I thought, “Fuck, I better start walking to the exam,” and then the call came on the way there and I was like, “Fuck it, sweet! I’m out!” After that I drove home to our share house and told Jay [Watson, touring member of Tame Impala] and we were like, “Whoa, sweet.” We didn’t even have a manager and we needed a lawyer to decipher the contract. It all went pretty smoothly after that. Each step on the ladder of success was as weird as the last. Getting flown to Sydney and put up in a lush hotel was like, “What?” Modular was so cool at that point. They put on a gig with us as the sole act in the middle of the day just because they wanted to see us. No one had even heard of us. Literally no one. And they had all these cool people there. So that was kind of crazy.

It must be weird thinking back now to something that seemed like such a huge deal at the time. Are you losing touch with the person who was stoked and surprised at something like that happening?

It’s true, which is sad. I still consider that the most exciting time of my life. The initial feeling that something great could happen is immense. Not to say that amazing things haven’t happened since then, but I’m getting better at digesting them.

I assume your resources and creative possibilities have expanded with your success. Do you feel like there’s a trade off in that regard? Are there constraints that appear in other areas to offset the appearance of freedom?

I think the more people you have involved—like with these big American labels—the more you have to fight for what you believe in. In the early days, if I thought something should be a certain way, I could say, “I think this should happen,” and I’d deal with it myself. Now it’s on a different scale. For instance, if you’re asked to stream your live set at a festival and you don’t want to, it’s a big deal. Some phone company sponsored a festival we played, and it was stipulated in their contract that the top three headline bands must be streamed, and I’m like, “No, I don’t want to be fucking streamed. I want to have a good time on stage and know that it’s not being broadcast to the entire Internet and stored forever and picked apart.” So suddenly, if you don’t want something to happen, if you want to do it your way, all hell breaks loose between managers and festival promoters and whoever. Even though there are lots of people working for you who care about your work, you’ve got to fight for what you believe in even more when it becomes a bigger deal.

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The business interests of the infrastructure become tightly linked with your private decisions.

That’s what it is. When more people, companies and brands depend on you to make a living, suddenly you have to please a lot more people than you did in the early days.

Some people just ignore it and say, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want,” and others are quite considerate.

I guess I’m somewhere between the two.

With Currents, you drape your signature songwriting style in electronic, funk and R&B-inspired aesthetics. The press has tended to paint this slight shift as a big, risky move for Tame Impala.

What would happen if you released something that was really going to confound expectations? If slight changes in instrumentation are heralded as a fundamental change, what would happen if you released, say, a drone record?

Or the sound of a washing machine in reverse.

Kevin Parker on dealing with success: “When more people, companies and brands depend on you to make a living, suddenly you have to please a lot more people than you did in the early days.”

Not purely to be weird for the sake of it—but if your audience considers slight generic change as some huge step, perhaps that’s something to play with?

I hate the term “going electronic” or “going pop”. A lot of bands who have an established sound and a bit of success can become overly aware that people consider them to represent a particular brand of music. It’s a cool thing for them to throw those expectations out the window and make something totally obtuse. I find being inaccessible for the sake of it more of a cliché than going the other way.

Could the infrastructure veto such a move? Render it somehow impossible?

At the end of the day it’s still down to the artist. That’s probably the reason why a lot of bands make an experimental album: to pull a middle finger to the people who are expecting them to do something else. In a way that’s kind of how I felt when I was making Currents. I was making songs with a drum machine rather than a drum kit, or songs without a chugging riff. I knew that [Tame Impala’s 2012 hit single] “Elephant” did really well in America. The radio stations just kept playing and playing it months after its release. The record label was like, “Sweet, this ‘Elephant’ tune is sick.”

Ten more of those please.

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They never straight out said that. The people we work with would never expect me to regurgitate formulas for the sake of success.

But they’re probably thinking, “If he makes another ‘Elephant’ then we’re minted.” If I did, it’d get played on the radio, even if it was less inspired. As long as it was the same kind of thing, they’d be like, “Dope, there’s the next one, ship it out!”

Your production tends to get put on a pedestal, and people like to emphasize your selfquestioning isolation within this dreamy soundworld. Album titles like Lonerism and Innerspeaker make such a connection quite immediate. While Currents is aesthetically pleasing on the surface, there’s an insidious aggression in it that’s contrary to the production style.

“I dream about being a hotshot producer in the same way a kid dreams of being a rock star. See, for me, production is inherent in the songwriting process. I’m completely unable to write a song without considering how it would be produced at the same time.”

Some people focus purely on what the sounds say to them. The production style forms their opinion of how optimistic or pessimistic an album is. For me, Currents is meant to be about looking forward and a sudden adoption of confidence. Suddenly this interior voice is declaring what they are and what they want, as opposed to the other albums, which are more self-questioning. The overall consensus on Currents was that it’s heartbreaking and really sad, which kind of confuses me because Lonerism was really dreary in comparison.

The lyrics are quite defeated, and Lonerism in general has a depressed tone to it, yet people were saying it’s really upbeat and positive. It’s weird that I always seem to have the opposite interpretation of my music.

Production can be such a red herring in that it can say one thing with this hand and another with that.

Oh man, that’s one of my favorite things about music: putting two different kinds of sentiments together. I always thought a sad song with sad music and sad lyrics is one-dimensional. When you juxtapose positive lyrics with a melancholic sound, suddenly you have this weird friction that plays with your emotions. That’s one of my favorite things to do. I gravitate towards that musically.

Would you consider production to be surface or content? Some critics say your production keeps listeners away from a meaningful interaction with the actual content of a song. Do you consider production musical material in and of itself?

My instinct is to say it’s extremely inherent in the music.

Production is the music as much as the aesthetic dressing because so much of how a sound comes across dictates how the

brain responds to that sound. If you play a guitar nice and clean with some country rock strumming, it says one thing; if you overdrive it, suddenly it’s a really angry, aggressive chord with a completely different emotional value. And that’s what production is—it’s how the sound gets from the source to the ear. So from the ground up it has emotional weight. I dream about being a hotshot producer in the same way a kid dreams of being a rock star. See, for me, production is part of the songwriting process. I’m completely unable to write a song without considering how it would be produced at the same time.

Surely there are loads of people asking for your services.

You’d be surprised. I think there are a lot of production requests coming from fans sent to my manager. She filters through them, so not many requests actually come to me. Some big names have asked me to produce their stuff. I wouldn’t be able to say who, because then I’d be saying whom I denied. Sometimes I say no because I love their music and I’m too afraid to fuck it up and ruin it for them. It’s such a personal thing; people have to know each other to work together properly.

Now that you’re playing these huge festivals, is there any sort of musical monotony setting in or does the mega-festival keep surprising you musically?

I’ve slowly become that guy who doesn’t check out bands, which seems to be the ultimate sign of becoming a jaded festival veteran. You just rock up, play your gig and piss off. I still maintain that you can learn something from every artist you see, especially watching them on stage. That is, if they’re not exclusively using backing tracks. Having said that, I don’t go out looking for my new sound. I wait for it to come to me. Music has always come from such an internal place for me. I have a hard time thinking about it any other way.

When you’re a teenager, music can be a huge factor in shaping your identity, maybe because it comes from a highly personal internal place, as you say. I guess that especially goes for musicians. But for most, real success will remain a fantasy and their identity readjusts to everyday life. But when the opposite happens, I imagine music can have a volatile influence on your sense of self.

Absolutely. I guess that’s why artists go crazy. [Long pause] That’s how insanity happens. ~

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A.J. SAMUELS TALKS TO NEW ORDER

Deep house?

Shallow house? Curry house?

Music Complete, New Order’s first studio LP in over a decade, sees the band back to harnessing their paradoxical musical tendencies: Hi-NRG with guitars, utopian synth-pop with Mancunian gloom. It’s been a long road towards regaining their signature balance between dancefloor styles and post-punk. But given the absence of Peter Hook’s chorus-tinged bass and the return of veteran keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, is the music complete?

Behind the banter, they think so.

New Order, left to right: Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, Phil Cunningham, Tom Chapman and Gillian Gilbert.

Photo by Nick Wilson.

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B Bernard Sumner: You American?

Yes. Bernard Sumner: From where?

The Boston suburbs.

Bernard Sumner: The one thing I remember about Boston is going for

a haircut. I asked the concierge at the hotel where I could go to get my normal haircut, which is called a “fade” in America and a “short back and sides” in England. I didn’t want a modern hairdresser. I just wanted a guy who’s been cutting hair for years. The concierge said, “I know just the place!” So he sent me to a shop called Ye Olde Fashioned Barber and when I went in, it was just a normal hairdressers. I sat down and told the girl, “I don’t want you to cut this real high, like American Marine style. Just fade it in.” I gave her full instructions. But when I came out, it looked like Frank Sinatra’s wig.

It looked like a tongue on my head.

is a big college town. You get students coming to Manchester because of its bands and industrial past—it’s like they’re hoping a bit of working class will rub off on them. Credibility. England is a country that gets divided around Birmingham, innit. South of Birmingham it’s getting a bit arty, and if it’s north of Birmingham, it’s more working class. There’s Judas Priest working in a foundry.

[Laughing] Now they’re all London bankers. They’ll be starting their own bloody music service next, like—who’s that fella? [Breaks to answer phone call from daughter regarding groceries] Sorry, who was it that started that music service? Was it Jay Z? You mean Tidal?

Stephen Morris: Tidal! Yes! Let’s all start one of them fucking things.

Or credit cards. You see the Sex Pistols credit card? What’s that about?

Fucking hell. Johnny Rotten and God Save the Queen at low, low interest rates. We should do one! New Order credit card! I can see it now: “Give us your money, we won’t give you anything back.” Um, right, sorry!

Music, music.

The problem is that Brits understand everything Americans say, but Americans understand only a fraction of what you say.

What about the famous Sex Pistols show in 1976 in Manchester that supposedly started so many bands? Were you at that show?

Bernard Sumner: Why is that? It seems less true in the South.

Stephen Morris: Was I fucking at that show? Half the people who were there weren’t there! I’m not going to be one of them people who pretends. I wasn’t there, I was fucking washing my hair that night.

I was probably listening to prog rock. In the bath. I actually didn’t know it was on, to tell you the truth. And if I did know, I probably wouldn’t have gone. It was a bit late. A lot of punk came from New York anyway, from people like Richard Hell. The Pistols were just a really good rock ‘n’ roll band, but they had that attitude. And the thing is, all the bands adopted “that attitude” eventually. They don’t do interviews, but if you get them in a room and give them a fiver, they’ll slag off all the other bands. Punk elitism.

I’ve read that southern American accents are linguistically closest to British accents.

Bernard Sumner: That makes sense. In New Orleans everyone could understand what I was saying. But when I go north, I would order butter and get a glass of water.

I wanted to ask you all about something that I’ve noticed reading British music journalism, which is an obsession with the connection between the working class and pop music. Historically, lots of bands and producers, not just from Manchester and the North but all over the UK, have working class roots. In a sense, it’s almost become a condition of being taken seriously for some critics.

Gillian Gilbert: Well, we didn’t go to universities and things like that. We

Punk elitism?

Stephen Morris: Yes, I’ve just invented it.

Phil Cunningham: That’ll be five pounds, please.

didn’t study and stay in school a long time. We had to go out and get a job to earn money. So actually I think that was, or is, a very Northern thing. You had to support yourself, because you didn’t really live with your parents. They couldn’t afford to keep you.

Bernard Sumner: I think with working class bands and music journalism it’s changed a bit, because now you have your posh bands, like Florence and the Machine or Mumford & Sons.

Stephen Morris: Down south you had art school. Up here, you work in a

How do you know Florence is posh?

fucking mill.

Phil Cunningham: It’s down to a lack of opportunity. What else are you

going to do if you can’t focus on music?

Stephen Morris: But it actually isn’t quite like that because Manchester

Bernard Sumner: You can just tell. Florence is posh because she’s got

dosh. You can tell what class someone comes from by hearing them talk. I don’t know—I don’t care what class someone’s from. But yeah, there was a time when you had to be a working class hero. But you can’t help where you come from. It’s not your decision. It’s kind of

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inverted snobbery to see it the other way. I think portraying the working class positively comes from British film in the sixties. Like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Taste of Honey. There was a fascination with grim Northernness in those films, which suddenly made it cool to be Northern. It stood for being gritty and rebellious. I think it’s true that people up here don’t give a fuck about authority. John Lennon, Happy Mondays . . .

Tom Chapman: Morrissey—he’s always against something. He always has an opinion.

Phil Cunningham: [To Stephen Morris] You said there was a bit of

rivalry with The Smiths . . .

Stephen Morris: There’s always rivalry between bands. There was a

lot of rivalry between the Pistols and The Clash and all that—it was like, “They’re nicking our audience.”

Phil Cunningham: But everyone grows out of it, don’t they?

Stephen Morris: Oh yeah, you love ’em in the end. When you’re young

and full of beans, you think you’re the best thing since sliced bread, and the other guy thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread. So it’s testosterone-driven.

What about The Fall?

Stephen Morris: The Fall? Yeah, The Fall were great. The Fall were a continuous undercurrent through it all. They were completely outside of most things really. Outside of music. Mark E. Smith is just a thing in himself. He’s an institution. We went robbing once, briefly.

But I haven’t got a stitch to wear.” That’s really up! So is “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”, which is my favorite Smiths song.

I think some journalists are lazy and just want to peg a band to a category. Obviously with Joy Division, the music and the lyrics were heavy. We were products of our environment, as well as our record collection—Iggy, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Velvet Underground, Neu! . . . it was our upbringing. In the late sixties and early seventies Manchester was pretty poor because the factories had closed down. I lived in Salford, and it was like a wart on the edge of Manchester. It was the industrial powerhouse. From the thirties up through the seventies, everyone there worked in the factories. I remember as a child hearing all the factory sirens going off calling people to work. We had the docks there too. Another sound I remember happened every New Year’s Eve. We wouldn’t watch Big Ben on television, but rather we’d go into the garden at midnight and hear all the ships sounding their horns from miles away. So we grew up with this urban industrial decay. Joy Division rehearsed in a factory with smashed windows. You can see it in the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” video. The room was enormous, and we had no real furnace, just an electric heater, which we all took turns standing next to. Occasionally we would collect a bunch of rubbish and burn it for heat, which was incredibly stupid. We weren’t on drugs at the time either!

Your description of the ships, the factories and the sounds reminds me of the current album title, Music Complete, which sounds like a play on musique concréte.

Bernard Sumner: It is.

And what’s the relationship of the album to musique concréte? Or was it just a pun?

You went what?

Stephen Morris: Robbing. We robbed a beer truck in Athens—which

probably explains the Greek financial crisis. Mark’s a great Northern character. And he’s got a vision. Nobody else could be Mark E. Smith. And Mark E. Smith couldn’t come from anywhere but Manchester. I remember we bumped into The Fall in Germany and all of us were drinking at the hotel pool. Andy Robinson, who’s now our manager, pushed Udo Lindenberg into a swimming pool.

Udo told Andy that we’d never work in Germany again.

Guess that one didn’t go Udo’s way. To briefly get back to Northern bands: After post-punk, lots of the music seems less dark and more dance-music inflected or psychedelic, though the lyrics still stayed pretty dour.

Bernard Sumner: I don’t know about that. Take The Smiths.

Morrissey sang the word “miserable” once with “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”, and then they were pigeonholed as a “miserable” band. But that’s not miserable. I mean, “I would go out tonight/

Bernard Sumner: It’s just a pun. It means whatever people interpret.

So it could mean a complete collection of different styles, or that we completed the record and were relieved because it was very hard work. I was doing fifty hours a week after Christmas, and toward the end that turned into seventy hours—weekends as well. So when we were mixing it and getting toward the end, it was a real relief.

Iggy Pop is featured on the song “Stray Dog”, which your press release describes as an “American Gothic” poem. How did that come about?

Bernard Sumner: In March 2014 we got a letter from the composer Philip Glass who asked us if two members of New Order would be interested in going over to New York to play a benefit concert for the Tibet House organization. Patti Smith and Iggy were involved, as well as Philip and a bunch of other musicians. We only had forty minutes to rehearse with Iggy, but it worked out just fine. I’ve got to say, Ian [Curtis] would’ve had a big smile on his face, because he was a massive Iggy fan.

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T Tom Chapman: We were playing with Patti Smith’s drummer as well, and

we only had one shot at the performance.

Bernard Sumner: But it all worked out. And then afterwards I wrote “Stray Dog”. I was a bit worn out and was watching this TV program with subtitles. I saw one subtitle and thought, “That’s a great opening line to a song or a poem,” so I wrote it down, and watched a bit more. By the time the program got a bit boring, I’d thought of a second line to complement the first. So I guess my subconscious was filling in the gaps. I didn’t take other lines from the subtitles, just the first one. The TV is distracting your conscious mind, switching it off, and your subconscious is coming up with the goods. I’ve found this is the best way to write lyrics.

It’s interesting you mention watching TV and writing music while you’re being distracted. When I interviewed Karl Bartos, formerly of Kraftwerk, he claimed watching TV is one of the most fruitful sources of inspiration for songwriting, especially for distracting him so some other part of his brain can get something done.

Bernard Sumner: Exactly. Karl’s a good friend of mine, he’s a really

great guy, but he takes the piss out of me a little bit too much at times. And he’s a wimp when it comes to spicy food.

Can you tell me about the danciness of the first half of Music Complete? I definitely hear you revisiting the Hi-NRG and Italo sound of your early records.

Bernard Sumner: The funny thing is that it’s easier to write slow,

introspective songs. Actually, it’s dead simple. You just tinkle away at a piano or do something relaxing and introspective. And we’ve known it since the days of Joy Division, because we always used to sit down and start doing those really slow tracks and then go, “No, no, no—we need something fast and dancey.” And once we’ve got the fast and dancey tunes in the bag, we can work on the slower, introspective material. We wanted stuff that would get the audience going in a live situation. So we’d write that kind of track first, but this time around, we forgot to do the slow, introspective stuff! I only noticed when the tracks were put together for this album. The last few New Order albums were all guitar-based, because back in the late nineties I needed a break from electronics. At the time, music was very genre-based and pigeonholed: What kind of house is it? Is it deep house? Shallow house? Curry house? Is it drum ‘n’ bass? Is it jungle, or is it grime? And I got a bit fed up with that. I just wanted to write a dance track. Then people are like, “Oh, you can’t use that sound, that’s so last year.” I found it was like trying to write with a straightjacket on. So we just stopped writing dance tracks and started writing rock tracks. With a guitar, all you have to do is write a song. It doesn’t matter what bloody style it is. So we did that, and now it felt like it was time to pick up the synthesizers and computer again. On this album we split up into different writing groups: it was Steve and Gillian, Tom and Phil, and me on my own. And there’s

a hat on the table, which we’d all throw ideas into, and once they were in the hat we’d all get together and say, “I’ve got an idea for that song,” and we’d lay the idea down. There weren’t any big ego problems. If someone didn’t like an idea, it was gone. So the song was king, not the band member.

Stephen Morris: I’d say it was a metaphorical hat.

Sounds extremely democratic.

Phil Cunningham: If you give Bernard a piece of music where in your head you think, “That’s the verse, and that’s the chorus,” he’ll always do the opposite. I’ve worked with other singers, so I have an idea of what most vocalists tend to pick as the chorus or verse. So I think that’s pretty interesting.

Bernard Sumner: Well, in terms of the songwriting method and including everyone, we got a good album out of it, so it worked. It’s difficult because that sort of process can rub some people the wrong way. Tom Rowlands from Chemical Brothers produced some of the tracks, and he didn’t like any of the parts at first.

Tom Chapman: And he doesn’t really like guitars.

Bernard Sumner: Yeah, so if we came up with a guitar sound, it’d have

to be translated into a synthesizer.

There’s been lots of back and forth, some of it very public, between the band and former bass player Peter Hook. What I’ve read through all of the vitriol in his statements is that he’s sad not to be in the band. Musically, Music Complete doesn’t have the bass front and center.

Bernard Sumner: I think it’s time to be getting over that sound.

I think Peter’s angry more than sad. He’s hurled insults at us through the press and said he’s going to fuck us over in any way possible. He was angry in the band, and he chose to leave. He’s angry with us because we carried on. He said the band had split up without consulting the rest of us. He didn’t tell us—he just said that the band had split up, and we hadn’t. I think it was quite an arrogant thing to do on his part. He left, we didn’t sack him.

Sorry Peter, we didn’t sack ya.

Is there any future with Peter Hook?

Tom Chapman: No. I like my job, thank you very much.

Bernard Sumner: He left seven years ago and he’s spent those seven years

hurling insults and threats at us. Doesn’t really make you to want to work with him again.

I wanted to ask you guys about the recent criticism of this

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“Down south you had art school.

Up here, you work in a fucking mill.”

Canadian band Viet Cong. They were attacked because of their name, mostly by the American and Canadian Vietnamese communities and by people who take issue with cultural appropriation.

Now they want to change their name. Have you heard about this?

Bernard Sumner: No, but I can understand not liking the name Viet Cong

if you’re American.

It’s well known that Joy Division was named after the brothels for Nazi soldiers and New Order was a Pol Pot reference.

Bernard Sumner: The name New Order is about Prince Sihanouk, and

the demise of Pol Pot. It’s about good guys. But yeah, Joy Division was about the brothel section for the German army, which I suppose is rather tasteless. They were different times. It was punk, anarchy.

We were naive and in our twenties.

Joy Division was brought up a few times in the recent debate about Viet Cong. The general sentiment was: Joy Division—great name, but could that band exist today with that name? No way.

Bernard Sumner: But it’s a great name, isn’t it? We were like, OK, the connotation is really bad, but in the end it’s a great name. It was fuck you, we don’t care what you think. The youth attitude. But now I realize that it could be offensive to people. I probably wouldn’t choose it now, but we were rebellious kids back then. Our attitude was that we’ve been rejected by society, so fuck society.

I recently spoke to Mark Reeder about his film B-Movie, in which Joy Division plays an important role. The movie is a semi-fictional documentary of his involvement in the Berlin music scenes of the eighties and early nineties. He told me on the side that when Joy Division played Berlin in 1980, it was a disaster. Apparently the sound wasn’t loud enough for the vocals, and then someone in the crowd yelled at the sound guy to turn it up, but he spoke in German, and you guys didn’t know what they were saying. In response you yelled something like, “Can’t you fucking speak English?” and then it went downhill from there.

Bernard Sumner: Well, I don’t remember that gig, but I remember

we had a problem with the PA system we brought from England. It was really bad, and the handles on the sides would rattle from the volume. I also remember we took these art house film posters from the venue and stuck them up in our hotel room. A lot of Joy Division titles came from those posters.

“Komakino” must have been one of them.

Bernard Sumner: Yeah. We changed Kant Kino to “Komakino”. And

I remember Mark took some photographs of us in the little pension we stayed, but then he left the film there. After Ian died we went back to get the film, and the pension owner said, “We want

20,000 Deutschmarks.” So we came back later, broke into the pension, and grabbed ’em spy-style.

How do you guys feel about turning Ian Curtis’s house into a museum?

Bernard Sumner: First of all, it’s not the place where he lived; it’s the place where he died. So I don’t think it’s a good idea from that point of view.

Secondly, his wife and his daughter don’t want it. Thirdly, I’m sure the people who live next door don’t want it. But on the other hand, I can understand people who totally love the music of Joy Division and want to pay homage to a physical reality that they can touch—that is, other than his headstone. I can see where both parties are coming from. But at the end of the day, you have to respect the wishes of his family.

What about your families? Stephen and Gillian, your kids are old enough now to appreciate New Order, no?

Gillian Gilbert: Yes, but only since I came back to the band in 2011. The kids were born when I left New Order. It’s funny now because the kids had only known me as a mum. Like, “Oh, you don’t do anything, you just take us to school and make tea and stuff.” But since I’ve been back, they’re watching YouTube and are quite interested in researching what we did. I think they’re really proud of us now. It’s made them more into music. The eldest said to me, “Why didn’t you make me do music when I was at school?” Tilly, my eldest, is nineteen. She’s in a band already, called Hot Vestry, and Grace, my youngest, is fifteen and totally into music. At the moment she’s listening to Hole. She’s just borrowed my electric guitar, but she’s got little tiny arms. So she’s on YouTube, learning a few Hole songs and Nirvana too. She’s like, “Listen to this mum!”, and she’ll play a Nirvana song. I was never really into Nirvana, so she discovered them on her own.

And before that?

Gillian Gilbert: I took a sabbatical from the band because my youngest daughter fell seriously ill. She became paralyzed overnight. We found out that it was an infection of the spine, so we spent a couple of weeks in Manchester Children’s Hospital. We’d finished Get Ready and were about to go on tour. Our daughter fell ill in March, and we were due to go to Japan in June. Phil was already on board to come and help with the guitar, so I taught him all my keyboard parts. The band carried on without me while I stayed at home to look after my daughter but I didn’t really want to be on tour anyway. I suppose I was avoiding that. I can’t think of anything worse than bringing the children on tour with you . . . apart from the children you’ve got in the band.

What’s the stupidest question you guys have ever been asked by a journalist?

Stephen Morris: That’s easy. “Why don’t you do interviews?” We used to get asked that all the time. During interviews. ~

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MAX DAX TALKS TO JEAN MICHEL JARRE

We’re talking about modernism here.”

In 1977 when the Sex Pistols were spawning angry three chord reactions against the pomp of prog, a young Jean Michel Jarre was enjoying the success of his first LP Oxygéne­­ —the kind of spacey, analog synth exploration punk supposedly sought to destroy. Jarre, a former student of Pierre Henry, would go on to sell eighty million records over his fortyyear career and has experienced a critical reassessment of late. His recent collab-heavy LP Electronica 1: The Time Machine ambitiously seeks to tell the history of electronic music . . . with electronic music!

Left: Jean Michel Jarre, photographed in Berlin by Harald Engel.

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M Monsieur Jarre, your new album Electronica features a large cast of iconic collaborators.

That’s right. They are my heroes. I am proud that they were all willing to participate. I see it as a great honor that they all loved the project.

Strangely, the most iconic of all possible collaborators is missing.

Who do you think would that be?

I would have thought the first composer you’d reached out to would have been Pierre Henry, who is considered to be the last living godfather of electronic music.

OK. Let’s cut the preambles and really start talking then. You’re absolutely right. Pierre Henry is it. I actually will meet him again very soon. For various reasons that should not be part of this conversation, it wasn’t possible for him to work with me on Electronica.

But we met a couple of times over the last few months and discussed the possibility. When we met for the last time in June, he proposed to collaborate on the second volume of Electronica that will be released in April 2016. Pierre Henry is very old, you know? He needs a lot of time to rest, and I am more than willing to respect his slow schedule. Suffice to say that I am very, very busy all the time so that this particular collaboration turned out to be the most complex and the most difficult to set up, even though we both live in the greater Paris area. I can only hope that this collaboration will finally see the light of day as I consider him the last man standing.

As a young man you studied under Pierre Schaeffer. Can you tell me about it?

He laid the foundation for everything I have ever done. By inventing the concept of musique concrète, Schaeffer created the theory of electronic music, and we all should eternally praise him for that.

He was the one who defined music’s single most important evolutionary step in the twentieth century by saying that there can be music beyond notation and sheet music. He basically introduced the idea that concréte sounds should also be considered music. Music is sound. That was his message. And as we all know, this concept changed the shape of music fundamentally. Every electronic musician, every composer and DJ is a sound designer nowadays and thus a grandson of Pierre Schaeffer.

But Schaeffer wasn’t only dry theory.

You’re right. To prove his theory right he took a microphone and went out into the city and recorded whatever he heard: a barking dog, the sound of the heavy rain, a train passing by, the wind blowing. With these concréte field recordings he started to compose music.

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So, when Kraftwerk recorded the airflow from the inside of a moving car to generate the hissing sound in their song “Autobahn”, you’d call them Schaeffer’s “grandsons” too?

Yes. Between noise and music there’s just the hand of the musician.

As opposed to Schaeffer, Pierre Henry was more like a hands-on composer and less interested in concepts. When together they changed the definition of music in the late forties, they were like yin and yang. And don’t forget the music of Eliane Radigue who, since she is a woman, is often overlooked in this context. But more than anything else we should understand that electronic music came from all sides of the frontier and, in a way, also helped us to forget World War II: Germany, with Stockhausen’s Studio für elektronische Musik in Cologne, and France were the epicenters of electronic music. Italy’s Luigi Russolo formulated the manifesto L’arte dei Rumori [The Art of Noises] for the futurists and Russia’s Leon Theremin invented the first instrument that would generate entirely electronic sounds.

Where would you put electronic music in music history? And where would you put yourself in that context?

Electronic music evolved out of continental Europe’s classical music tradition whereas rock music and jazz are derivatives from an AfroAmerican origin. In that sense, electronic music looks back onto a massive heritage. And regarding my person, I had two choices: I could have either become a composer of contemporary experimental classical music or the electronic musician that I eventually evolved into. In the early seventies I started to experiment with ideas and concepts of pop and progressive rock and voilà—that’s when I wrote Oxygéne. From there my music has become part of the collective unconscious. Every musician seems to have an opinion on Oxygéne—be it the late Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream or younger artists like Boys Noize, Air, Gesaffelstein or musicians from the Berlin techno scene.

It’s interesting that you place the beginnings of electronic music at almost at the same time as abstract painting.

We’re talking about modernism here. And in this context I would call myself a modernist. I feel so privileged that I have been, just by coincidence, born into this century where I could basically witness the beginning of a phenomenon. When I started to make music, the first synthesizers had just been invented. When I started to compose electronic music it felt like walking in virgin territory. It was fully innocent, naked, with no references and no direct influences. That is the ultimate luxury you can have as an artist. Nowadays, when young musicians start to make electronic music, they face a long heritage. They’re influenced by everything that has been published before and by definition cannot be pioneers anymore. Having said that, there still is a lot of interesting music being released year after

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year. And to tell you the truth, If I had the choice, I would love to live one hundred years from now. Maybe I would make music with implants in my brain that directly translate what I am imagining into music? I like the idea of traveling without flight cases, saving air freight.

But wouldn’t you agree that the future has already begun? No one has to learn an instrument anymore to translate a musical idea into real sound.

When I did Oxygéne in 1976, I recorded it in my kitchen in Rue de la Trémoille. It was basically a home recording, as I actually didn’t have much money at all. I only owned seven or eight instruments, among them the ARP 2600, a Farfisa organ and Korg’s Minipops 7 drum machine. But with the success that came with Oxygène I was able to invest in more and better gear. Never forget that limitations are very important.

Limitations forced you to become creative?

Yes. The trap of technology these days is that it makes everybody believe that it is a luxury not to have any limits. In a Faustian sense this is true. To break that pact with the devil you have to force yourself into limitation. My advice to young musicians and producers is therefore to start by carefully choosing one plug-in and to then explore this one feature for six months. Take nothing else, don’t stop until you really master it. It’s like educating a child: You better give it a rigid framework. But within this frame make sure to give it total freedom.

That sounds like potentially sound advice. Do you have any more to offer?

Always keep in mind that the history of electronic pop music only started forty years ago. Every relevant work of music that has been released in these years was important because it surpassed the level of pure technology. In other words, every plug-in, instrument or computer is just a tool. If you want to create a piece of music that is going to last you have to find a way to define your very own unique musical language. It’s like discovering your musical fingerprint. Formats have been the result of such individual efforts. Because of the pianoforte we have the concerto. Because of Elvis Presley we have the format of the three-minute single and the jukebox. And because Native Instruments invented the plug-in Massive we have dubstep as a preset. But we should not be trapped by this insight. By the way, one of the tracks on my new album mirrors exactly that.

Together with Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel of Air, I recorded the track “Close Your Eyes”. We had the idea to utilize all the different technologies that were used over the course of the decades and to feature them all in one track. The track

starts with sounds from oscillators of the Pierre Schaeffer era and the first loop we made was magnetic tape that we’d cut with scissors. From there we went to the first drum machine and the first modular synthesizers to the first sampler, which was the Fairlight. Then came digital hardware and finally some Native Instruments plug-ins. And the last sound on the track was made with an iPad. How did you approach all of these world-famous musicians, gathering them like a tribe around you?

First of all, when you love someone’s music, you have a fantasy about the person behind it. You project a lot of ideas on this person. This is a prime example of how our imagination works.

You may have noticed that my album is the exact opposite of all these albums that have features of famous artists on them.

These commercial albums are all made according to the same generic formula: You send files around the world and get back vocal tracks or a guitar riff from people you’ll never meet that you then copy and paste into your music. In my eyes, this is a worn-out marketing concept.

So, what exactly makes Electronica so different then?

I wanted to physically meet each and every collaborator faceto-face. I traveled the world for this. And not only that: I approached everyone personally, avoiding agents and managers.

I wanted this to be a collaborative project between artists from A to Z. Paying respect to each artist involved was a huge issue.

And this included recording a demo —as opposed to a finished track—for every single artist I approached. These demos basically mirrored the musical phantasies I had towards each musician and left enough space to add their own ideas and to express themselves.

In 1975, Bob Dylan gathered a stellar cast of artists including Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Harry Dean Stanton, Allen Ginsberg, Kinky Friedman and others to embark on a tour that would carry the name “The Rolling Thunder Revue”. Were you perhaps doing something similar?

I know what you’re getting at. Of course I would never dare to compare myself to Dylan. But I am aware that the young generation considers me one of the godfathers of electronic music.

And apart from that I am the boss of my own project, yet at the same time I am fully aware that I can only learn from all the young musicians that I’ve actually met all over the world. There always has to be a director if you want the result to be cohesive.

Believe me, if you show a lack of leadership you can’t fit so many egos—Massive Attack, Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter—on one record. ~ EB 3/4/2015

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LAFUR ELIASSON: I remember when I first encountered your music. It must have been 1997 or 1998 and I had just moved to Berlin a little while before. I’ve always been very interested in the structure of sound but I wasn’t very articulate about it back then. I’m still not, really. But sometimes you hear things that seem to be expressing themselves on your behalf. Sometimes you go to a concert or to a club, and you hear something that is almost like it’s verbalizing something that you wanted to say, but you hadn’t quite found out what language to say it with. I had that experience with your music. And if that happens, the interesting thing is that you connect to the sound so that, in a sense, you become the producer of the music. You identify with it to such an extent that it becomes a part of you. I haven’t found out exactly how to coin that phenomenon, but I think you, Jeff, have successfully created sounds that speak on behalf of others over the years. Personally, back then it had a lot to do with having left Denmark, coming to Berlin and starting to make my works.

JEFF MILLS: I wish I had met you then. You can probably relate to the fact that when I create something, I’m kind of lucky if I can retain that type of relationship with it. In most cases, I become the spectator of my own work. The public’s opinion kind of takes over. It takes it away from the creator. Whether you want it to or not. I’ve produced things where I’m kind of in disagreement with other people’s interpretation. It can happen. There’s always that risk. So I’ve resorted to a way of just making music for myself and not letting anyone hear it, and I listen to it only to inspire myself to realize something else.

OE: Wow, that’s a great luxury.

JM: Do you ever do

things like that?

OE: I search for places that will

inspire me. To be inspired is actually hard work. I really respect the people who somehow seem to be inspired out of the blue. I always

UTOPIAS IN SOUND AND SPACE

Walk up to your own horizon.”

Conversation moderated by Sven von Thülen Photos by Luci Lux and Elena Panouli Detroit-native Jeff Mills is one of electronic music’s great conceptualists. Treating techno as an art form that transcends dance floor euphoria, his musical investigations of science fiction and utopian themes overlap with the work of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, whose large-scale installations explore the manipulation of space, light and reality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eliasson has long found inspiration in Mills’ work, and vice versa. Which is why when getting to know each other for the first time, talk of art education and collaboration had both artists buzzing with ideas.

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have to bloody listen or read or work on something to achieve that.

When I stop and pause, I literally stop getting inspired. I wonder what would happen if I really took a break from working. I haven’t tried that for thirty years now. But essentially, I don’t know if I make works for myself. But I like to experiment and those experiments very often don’t turn into anything. There is that moment where an experiment sort of turns around and takes on its own agenda. So instead of you pushing it, the experiment pulls you with it. This turning moment sort of indicates that what you work on might potentially be artistically valuable. But this doesn’t happen very often. You keep pushing and pushing, and it just gets more frustrating and, eventually, nothing comes out of it. Then again, ten projects that do not turn into something bring you to another point. But I’m curious about the consequences of working with sound. If you think of a sound-

scape, or an architecture of sounds, it’s very spatial. It’s not a linear thing that goes out of the speaker and comes into your ear. It’s the whole environment that is somehow vibrating or pulsing, and it’s very 3- or 4- or 5-dimensional. How does that feel, and what happens to you when you are in that space?

JM: I really believe that all humans,

no matter how many people they’re connected to, how many friends they have, really spend most of their lives by themselves. You experience things in ways that are very difficult to explain in words or in conversation.

I always think about that when I’m composing music. I’m never really composing for people, but for an individual listener. There’s a whole bunch of psychological aspects that go with that. One thing for instance is that for most of us, we graduate from college if we’re lucky, and then after that, structural and formal teaching is really over. The average person doesn’t really have many opportunities to realize new things because they have their life, a family, they have responsibility and so on. And so I always thought that if we can slip more things that are relevant, more teachable things inside of art, using music to whisper something to someone to kind of nudge them in a certain direction, this feeling of learning in a very structural way then takes over. I always keep that in mind when I’m sitting in my studio alone and I’m thinking about the way that I would like to learn about new things. Ideally, it would be through something that I enjoy, like electronic music, science fiction or classical music. And I wonder, why can’t I learn something about planets at the same time?

OE: That’s a very valid point. It

points towards what type of active role, if not music, then creativity and artistic agendas can bring to our society in the future. Because I do think there is a tendency to think that creativity is something that you consume. When you go to a museum or a concert, you do that in your spare time as a kind of recreational escape. I am not a fan of education in words, as it is a bit patronizing in this context.

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in people being able to evolve is, I think, one of the great strengths of cultural production. Because when you go to a concert, people are not being patronized; you don’t first walk out and explain this sound means that, and that sound means this. Essentially, you let it flow and people just have an experiential relationship with it, which is very much driven by trust.

There aren’t many places where people can exercise trust with such precision. If we look at society as a whole, one of the great challenges is the lack of a feeling of interdependence: to trust the politicians, to trust the finance sector, to trust the scientists who work to fully understand climate change and how to deal with it. So trust is a major issue. And cultural production, if it is not marginalized into some kind of experience economy, is fundamentally trustworthy. It’s the strongest parliament of our times; it’s creativity. I totally agree with you that there should be no limits to where one can take these things.

JM: I went to see The weather proj-

ect when it was first shown in Tate Modern. It was the first time I was exposed to your work. What was most interesting was the way that people behaved when they first saw the installation. It was literally like they were seeing Jesus in front of them. And they began to walk very slowly and their movements began to slow down, actually. Some lay down on the floor, some became more quiet and started whispering to one another. I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never seen an installation have this much power.

OE: I was struck by the experience

of the people as well. I often think about it. As you mentioned, a lot of people did a lot of different things.

And yet they were not seeing the diversity and activity in the space as a conflict or disturbance to the experience of the piece. I’m very curious about what types of environments actually see difference as a success.

In Europe we have a lot of exclusion going on right now based on difference. Different cultural background, different religion, different skin color, all kinds of things. And in that sense, I’m curious about what types

of spaces successfully acknowledge that people see things differently; they are different, they come from different places, and that this is actually a contribution to the quality of the space. When you say, “Oh, that sound. I didn’t really like that,” and someone else says, “Actually, I kind of liked it. It sort of touched me,” you can still be friends. And we don’t think that’s remarkable, right?

But the truth is, that’s actually quite a big deal. If you see a position in politics, everybody says something and then use the differences in their points of view as an excuse for acting politically. I’m very interested in the question of why we are so touched by sound. It’s so irrational.

And why are we not using sound and music to teach mathematics in school? It has unbelievable potential, yet it’s somehow just sitting to a great extent in a very passive or, let’s face it, stupid industry. Or it’s an art form that, just like the art I do, is a little bit elitist and marginalized for a certain group of people.

That’s why your thoughts on teaching resonate so much with me. And I don’t just mean bringing music into school. Maybe it’s also about bringing the school into music.

JM: I think that there will be a great

change in the way that we learn.

When I was in high school, we never finished the book. Meaning that whatever class it was, we never reached the end of the textbook.

And that was routine in Detroit public schools. So what does that tell us? I think that the old ways of teaching won’t be enough. I think that probably the best way to teach a human will be to simulate reality so they not only open up a book and read it, but they have the opportunity to feel like they are experiencing it firsthand. And I think that we may be entering into an era where virtual reality and the simulation of reality are better teaching tools.

Because you not only feel that you’re there, but you can experience it from different perspectives. You can be taught the Civil War in the U.S. from the Confederate side and the other side. You can be caught in between. So I think we’re just on the edge of using art and sound and all these things to teach. Technology will have its most profound use

P. 62-63: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003.

Installation view at Tate Modern, London, 2003.

Photo: Maeve Polkinhorn.

Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York © 2003 Olafur Eliasson P. 64-65: Olafur Eliasson Your rainbow panorama, 2006-2011.

Installation view at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, 2011.

Photo: Thilo Frank/ Studio Olafur Eliasson, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark © 2006 Olafur Eliasson P. 66-67: Olafur Eliasson, Colour spectrum kaleidoscope, 2003.

Installation view at Danish Pavilion, 50th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2003.

Photo: Giorgio Boato, Collection of David Teiger © 2003 Olafur Eliasson

Left: Jeff Mills aka The Wizard. Both Mills and Eliasson were photographed in Eliasson’s Berlin studio.

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there—I think it’s going to replace education. And I think when that happens, we’ll be looking at art and art forms very differently. Not only can you listen to Miles Davis, but you can also understand the context in which he made Bitches Brew, or the first time that he played at Carnegie Hall. I think that in the end, we will become, in a utopian kind of way, super-human, superintelligent. Not because of the books that we read, but the type of experiences that we’ll be able to live in our short lifespan. So I can be a fireman on Tuesday, I can be the president of Ghana on Thursday, I can be back home and watch my soap opera on Sunday. It may be like that. And then when you think about experiencing things outside of here, other planets, going to Mars, and having the feeling of walking across the surface of Mars and what that would be like, it’s going to be an enormous leap forward. And I think art, music, all these things will have incredible impact as teaching tools.

OE: Since you were at my studio

yesterday, maybe you saw that we have a number of digital spatial experiments with these Oculus Rift glasses. We 3-D printed a camera which has hexagonal filming capabilities of the space, with six GoPro cameras in it. What I’m interested in is the link between the virtual and muscle memory, because I do think people totally underestimate the experience that one has. Of course it’s not the same as being on Mars, clearly.

On the other hand, it allows for storing knowledge in a spatial and bodily way much more complex than pure theoretical or algebraic teaching. And this is how culture and sound and music and art and theater have been operating for a long time. It has always been physical. And I do think that we see more and more education and training and skill enhancement, involving culture as a guiding light. We are searching for ways to store knowledge in our bodies or brains in more sophisticated ways.

JM: But you also teach

as well, right?

OE: I did. When I taught at my for-

“I’m AfroAmerican, which means . . . that I don’t really know where I’m from. So we have to make up and construct a hypothetical past.”

Jeff Mills

mer school, The Institute for Spatial Experiments, I made a point to explain something very specific to the students or “participants” as I called them. They would come to me and say, “Listen, I have a great idea.” And they explain the idea and say, “Isn’t this a great work of art?” And I say, “No, it’s an idea about a great work of art, and you are about to go on a lovely journey to try to turn this idea into action.

And this is one of the most rewarding things one can do.” The journey is in fact first a sketch, then a model, then another sketch, then many models, then going back and forth reading a bit about it, asking a scientist for guidance or assistance, having people help you, testing it on a bigger scale, and so on and so forth. And gradually, the idea gains physical space. I’m very interested in this process, when an idea leaves the state of language or intuition and gains physicality. This is what I call reality production. Eventually it might even be shown in an exhibition, but that is just another creative step. And I think it’s important to see that the creativity in this isn’t in

Artistically, both Mills and Eliasson have been interested in the concept of a binary solar system. For Mills, the idea of two suns implies a complete shift in the identity of man, nature and the universe: “It’s interesting to see how we’ve shaped our lives around the one thing that we rotate around. There is one point around which we revolve, and that is the way reality is supposed to be. With two suns, would we walk through life imagining that we are so self-conscious, for instance? Would we attach ourselves to other people more easily because of the way that we’ve been taught by the sun and its relation to its twin?”

taking a sketch and turning it into a model. The creative part, I think, lies in understanding the consequences that creating art has on its surroundings on the other students, on the world. And how the world inspired you to take that step in the first place. So this means that what makes things creative or gives them potential is actually not what I do in the studio. Rather it is in the consequences of having a studio that creativity arises and inspiration is nurtured. I think this is very important to understand for teaching, because there seems to be the suggestion that you can teach in a closed environment, a school, whereas the criteria of a potential success of a school should be rooted in the frictional quality it has with our times. And I do think, in a very odd way, this is why at some point, Detroit realized that they were alone. And this is the moment when they started challenging that idea. And out of that challenge, people like you emerged.

JM: I think that we aren’t able to

detach ourselves from the problems in which we grew up in.

And I think that when they go to Mars, they’re gonna take Earth problems to Mars. If you have a man and a woman, a young and an old person, somehow they’re going to bring up these differences, and they will create the same world that we exist in now.

OE: Well, the reason why I’m opti-

mistic is that I think that sometimes, even without knowing, we take it for granted that reality is non-relative. Reality is relative. We live with things that we mistakingly think are pre-defined, given by god, made by nature, and we say this is beyond the reach of negotiation.

And if you take a different stance and say everything, including reality, are models—especially social conventions or cultural conventions—then the way we see things is cultural. We don’t see reality, we see things the way that we’ve learned to see things. That’s why I always insist that reality is relative, much more relative than you would normally think. One great area to rehearse your relationship with reality is, for instance, culture or art or sound. Because I do think that it’s a

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very healthy exercise to counter the essentialism that comes with saying, “This is something god decided.

Nature is predefined. That’s how cities look. This is how architecture has to look.” Things are the way they are because of the social regimes with which our society has chosen to organize itself. To criticize that can be very liberating. I do think that one can actually adapt to major changes, because we see that, well, reality is not real anyway.

So we might as well just change it.

And that’s why I’m generally quite optimistic with regard to the confidence in people’s ability to shift or adapt to new environments. A good example is the way I listen to your music. It’s almost like there is a huge area or infinitely large space of what we all know. These are the things that we learn, and this is the world that we understand. Then there is a threshold, and then on the other side of that border or threshold, there is everything that we do not know. And that’s my very simple version of the world: the known versus the unknown. And our life, to a great extent, consists of expanding the known into the unknown. The older you get, the more you know.

Or so we hope. But walking up to that line is reminiscent of how I think of your music, which is the meeting of the two. Right? That’s the sound of that line between everything we know and everything we do not know yet. But by listening to it, we kind of expand. Because then we’ve heard it, then we know it, and before we heard it we did not know it and it was unknown, right?

The idea that you could walk up to your own horizon I think is a lovely one. We kind of make the mistake and think the horizon is always moving with you as you walk, no?

I think you just walk up to your own horizon and say, “Look, actually the horizon is not a line, it is actually a space.” It is a space in which things are both familiar, known, and they are also abstract, unknown, at the same time. And there’s actually plenty of stuff in there. One can build a house in there, one can live in that horizon, where you adapt to the unknown and you have a lot of known stuff with it. So when I make a work of art or exhibition, I very often try

to think about, well, if this is now the end of everything known, let’s say the galaxies, the Milky Way, the horizon of the Milky Way, beyond that there is the other thing. Let’s say the exhibition is right there hovering in that infinite emptiness.

JM: OK, I have another ques-

tion. Could you ever imagine that your artwork could become a living, breathing thing?

OE: Oh yes, absolutely. I say it

also because I think as a rule, one should never suggest no-goes in art. The way I see it, art is more a language, and the language can be anything, everywhere at anytime. It can be anything at all. I have gradually learned that.

But what is much harder is to say something interesting with a language. I think that requires a lot of talent to stay connected somehow, so that you know that what one does is interesting. You have worked so long now, Jeff, also, clearly to stay on top of . . .

I don’t mean career or anything like that, I just mean creativity.

To be creative requires a lot of, for lack of a better word, connectivity with the world. You have to be able to feel what is going on, not just around you, but just in general.

On other planets, for that matter.

JM: I’m Afro-American, which

means that as with other AfroAmericans, I don’t really know where I’m from. So we have to make up and construct a hypothetical past. And then create a reason for living from that. So it’s different, because we’re not really tied to anything or anyone or any place. We have a notion that we’re from a certain continent, but we don’t really know, and we don’t really have those ties. So at a certain point in our lives, we really have to make it up.

And as a result, you don’t really have many boundaries. Nothing is outrageous. You have Sun Ra and people that literally just create their personal history, and no one can tell you that it’s not true. I wouldn’t say that Afro-Americans are prime candidates for creating surrealism, but our typical circumstances lean more to the

idea that we need to live, and we need to have some basis for living, so there we create our world and our purpose. Music is a device. It has always been something that we can use to manipulate, to create, to use as an extension. But it’s really a world that we live within.

And it’s a world where there are no rules, there are no laws, there’s no one telling you what it should and should not be. Of course we have critics, but the truth is that you have the ability to be able to move mountains if you can find the right code. We know this, and we treat it almost in a religious way.

And somehow it’s handed down in Afro-American culture in a special way that we hear it differently, and we can interpret it differently. I don’t know where it comes from—it’s not something we’re taught in school, it’s not something we can read and understand. It’s rhythm, it’s a very natural thing.

I’ve never had any conversations with really old black people about it, but it’s a very instinctive thing, and if you’ve done it as long as I have and you do as many things, it really becomes one of the few things you can really rely on.

OE: I think that as the world

grows more complex, the idea of identity also changes.

Traditionally, identity was very strongly defined by the past. I think there is an increasing tendency to say, “Well, my identity is the compilation of moments to which I belong.” And that belonging very often transcends national borders. I might have more in common with a guy in Japan than with the person living next door.

But even though we have cultural landscapes and identity patterns that are shifting so fast, it does not replace the need for having a sense of history and belonging in the trajectory of time. I do think it’s important to see that identity also needs to be seen as something extending into the future, the trajectory in front of you.

And clearly it does not mean that one should not address holes or traumas in the past. But I think that our identity lies in how we identify with the sounds we make in the moment we make them. ~

A selection from Jeff Mills’ vast discography, top to bottom: Waveform Transmissions Vol. 1 (Tresor, 1992) was Mills’ game-changing debut solo album; Exhibitionist (React, 2004), remains one of the most name-checked mix-CDs in techno history; Blue Potential (Satélite K, 2005) is a live album with the Montpellier Philharmonic—Mills’ first collaboration with an orchestra; Woman In The Moon (Axis, 2015) is a new soundtrack for the classic 1929 silent movie by legendary German director Fritz Lang.

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HELENA HAUFF IN CONVERSATION WITH VERONICA VASICKA

“ I know something you don’t know.”

Conversation moderated by Elissa Stolman Photos by Isolde Woudstra When techno stumbled out of its obsession with minimal in the mid-2000s, it turned to the leathered arms of EBM, industrial and synth-wave for fresh inspiration. In spite of those genres’ penchant for masculinity, two women—Helena Hauff and Veronica Vasicka—are currently representing the best aspects of dance music’s rediscovery of all things dark. Hauff, a resident DJ at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club has released on numerous labels, most recently her debut LP, Discreet Desires, on Actress’s Werkdiscs.

Hauff admits to having long been an admirer of New York-based Vasicka, who co-founded the famed East Village Radio and has run her influential Minimal Wave label since 2005.

Here they discuss their humble musical beginnings and the challenges of running a DIY label in 2015.

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elena Hauff: Veronica, how

did you first get involved with music?

Veronica Vasicka: I started recording when I was seventeen. I had a bass guitar and I would tape interesting sounds outside, sometimes industrial sounds. Then I would bring the tape recorder to the pickups on the bass guitar, and the sounds of the tapes would come through and I would record those onto a four-track.

It really was just about exploring sound and not thinking of an end product. When I was eleven and my brother was thirteen, I started listening to his tapes. Lots of Cure, The Smiths and New Order. From there, I ended up going much deeper very quickly into darker electronic stuff. In high school I definitely didn’t fit in, but I didn’t care at all. People commented and stared at me on the street because I was pretty extreme in the way I looked. In our yearbook, there were slogans that said, “Eighth grade wouldn’t be the same if . . . ” Mine said, “Eighth grade wouldn’t be the same if Veronica wore white.” But none of it phased me. I just felt like, “All these people are idiots.”

I had my own little music world, and that was all I cared about at the time. I felt like, “I know

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29.09.15 09:56

something you don’t know. This is my own secret world of music.”

HH: I had a time as a teenager when

I really tried to fit in, so I looked like everyone else, but I wasn’t like everyone else and it didn’t work.

I never got bullied at school, but I never had a lot of friends, either.

I wasn’t into crazy weird music at the time. I was also into The Cure and Joy Division—pretty mainstream-ish, but none of the kids at my school knew about it.

Looking back, I think I was cooler than all the other kids, but I didn’t feel that way when I was young. I didn’t know anything about music, and I didn’t differentiate between stoner rock and new wave. I loved music and I loved sitting at home and recording stuff onto cassette tape and listening back to it. But I didn’t have anyone to share that interest with. When I left school I realized there are actually other people that are into music, and my taste in music is actually not that weird. It’s pretty normal.

VV: Those formative years are inter-

esting to think about because you’re a sponge at that time. You’re taking everything in. Like you were saying, it wasn’t about genres. It was about learning about music in general. I got a little too into collecting synthesizers around the beginning of my label Minimal Wave. I started a radio show in 2003 and the label in 2005, and I was really curious about the instruments that they used in all these tapes. I was obsessed with certain drum machines. I would listen to a tape and say, “OK, they used a CR-78 in this tape.” I started recognizing what instrument was used.

HH: How? VV: I would write to the creators.

But I think it was that, as soon as I started recognizing the sounds of the machines, it became second nature. Over time, I would listen to songs I had known for such a long time, like “Just Fascination”

by Cabaret Voltaire, and I would say, “That’s a Juno 60, that weird synth line.” And then I thought, “OK, I need this machine. I want to make music.” The synths weren’t as expensive as they are today.

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HH: I was going to say that

you were pretty lucky to start around that time because drum machines weren’t as sought after as they are now.

VV: They weren’t in high demand.

Now I feel like there’s a changeover. A lot of the companies are recreating those old synths, or different versions of them. It’s very en vogue to have gear and not to use a computer, which I think is great.

HH: When you start making music,

it’s actually easier to have limitations the way you do with machines.

VV: Exactly. You have a limited

vocabulary and so you can make

something more easily. But I use a computer now to DJ, so I feel like I’ve come full circle. The computer is a great tool because you can take samples from old tracks, like some song from 1981 where thirty seconds is good and the rest is terrible. You bring that into a set and use parts of it to loop stuff and create something new by combining the past and present.

HH: I totally agree. But I’m not a

computer-type person. They just confuse me. To be fair, my computer is really old and it doesn’t really work. I don’t want a new computer; I’d rather spend money on a synthesizer. But maybe if I had a new, fully functional computer I’d get into it.

Hauff (left) and Vasicka continued their conversation after their sets at this year’s Dekmantel Festival near Amsterdam. Relying heavily on deep acid cuts and EBM, both women stand out from the pack of house and techno DJs that dominate Europe’s touring circuit. Their respectively dark, aggressive sounds have been in high demand since dance music rediscovered its appetite for sonic destruction.

VV: What’s happening with your

new label, Return to Disorder?

HH: Everything is fine now, but

starting out things went wrong— very wrong. My idea was to work with an independent pressing plant and do everything on my own.

The pressing plant actually sent me 100 copies of the record at the wrong speed, so you had to pitch it down to minus eight to make them play right. It wasn’t techno, it was a band with vocals, and the guy on it sounded like a fucking girl.

The pressing plant said, “We’re going to sort it out. We’re very sorry, it’s our mistake.” But I never heard back from them. They either went bust, or . . . I don’t know.

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VV: That’s crazy. I think that’s

just a stroke of bad luck.

HH: Yeah. When I first started, I

was like, how do you start a label?

What do you have to do? It was such a strange feeling. I kind of knew what you had to do, and I had a few friends who had labels, so I was like, “OK I need a pressing plant, a distributor. How do you do it?” It was so confusing. What was it like for you to start your label? Did it feel like a natural thing? Was it easy or were you confused at the beginning?

VV: I think it was pretty natural.

But it was more about the radio show, in a way. I was the program director at East Village Radio, and I was pretty much in the office above the radio station all the time. When I played [the first Minimal Wave release] Oppenheimer Analysis on the radio and when I was DJing in a bar, people got so excited about it.

For me it was more like, I need to get this music on vinyl immediately.

I didn’t think too much about the process—I just thought about the end result. The first release took a lot longer than I had expected.

At the time, in 2005, I don’t think there was such a huge demand for vinyl. I didn’t wait too long to get the test pressings. The best part was bringing the first twenty copies to Other Music, a local record store in New York, and putting them on consignment. They sold right away. It’s probably a lot harder now, to be honest, because I’ve had so many issues with pressing plants recently. This year has been the worst year for pressing plants, because they’re so crowded.

HH: It is. I never thought that

the whole process would take so long. It’s ridiculous.

VV: Even a few years ago, it wasn’t

like that. There was a guy pressing records in New York City who would give you test presses in like, ten days. That’s unheard of now. But tell me about your label, Helena. What are you going to release and what’s the plan?

HH: The plan is: there is no plan.

I just want to put out things that I like, basically. The first release

is a band called Children of Leir from England. They use a drum machine and a synthesizer, and the rest is guitar and bass. It’s quite psychedelic, a bit krautrock-y, a bit wave-y. The second release is going to be a guy from Greece called Morah. He produces really interesting techno. As I said about the way I got into music, I don’t really care about genres, and I want my label to be like that. Everything I like is going to end up on it—well, everything available that I like.

I don’t know if it’s going to work.

Maybe I’ll get frustrated and won’t like having a label and I’m going to stop doing it in a year’s time.

Maybe it’s going to be great and I’ll really enjoy it. Who knows?

VV: I think it’s better not to have a

plan, because it’s really more about what you’re interested in putting out there. That’s ultimately what’s going to drive the label forward. It’s just about your vision, right? Your taste.

HH: Yeah. It’s just about my taste.

The only thing is that I want to work with people I like. I don’t necessarily need to know them in person. It’s great if I do, but if I don’t and their email communication is nice and everything, that’s cool.

Obviously, no one wants to work with obnoxious people, so that’s the only rule: if someone’s obnoxious I’m not going to work with them.

they’re easygoing, everything flows smoothly and things get done a lot more quickly. And when an artist is really difficult, their records tend to sell slower than the artists that are easy. Not all across the board, but it seems like the ones that are the most demanding are slower to sell.

HH: I think it’s cool when some-

one really knows exactly what they want. But if they’re cunts, obviously, it’s a bit shit.

VV: Get to the bottom line of what

Top to bottom: Felix Kubin’s Teenage Tapes (2012, Minimal Wave) collects the electronic dadaist’s earliest work, recorded between ages eleven and fifteen.

Dust Under Brightness (2012, Minimal Wave) is a compilation of bleak and dusty dirges from In Aeternam Vale.

HH: You do all the label art-

work yourself, right?

VV: Yeah, I do the artwork. I went

to art school when I was eighteen, and I worked as a photographer after I graduated from school. I was assisting photographers and photographing musicians and bands and things like that. I taught myself graphic design programs to do the layouts for the records.

It makes the process more fun.

VV: Oh yeah. That’s happened too

many times. But I tend to be pretty patient, so I think I’m the ideal person to deal with the characters that have been on Minimal Wave.

I’ve also been really lucky with a lot of the artists who were very openminded and easygoing and not so specific about what they envisioned for the end product. Sometimes it’s really hard because you need the artist to trust you as a label so that you can do your own thing with their music. When it’s more about what they want, or what they imagine—when they’re too controlling about it—it becomes a problem.

Every step of the way they want to hear another version of the master, they want changes to the artwork, they want a certain image of themselves not to appear on the artwork, so it’s not always ideal. But when

they require sooner than later, because then you’ll spend a lot of time emailing back and forth with them, saying, “Well no, I don’t want this, and I don’t want this.” The thing is that, ultimately, I want the artist to be happy. But it’s frustrating to get to a point where all this work has been done and then they change their mind and say, “I want this bio edited,” and all the text has already been set. Having all the information upfront as to how much control they want is important. But I’m pretty flexible.

HH: I actually went to art school

as well when I was about nineteen. I never finished, though.

Top to bottom: Helena Hauff seemed to appear out of nowhere with the Prototype EP (Pan, 2013), a collaborative hardware jam on steroids with fellow Golden Pudel resident F#X. Discreet Desires (Werkdiscs/Ninja Tune, 2015) dials down the overdrive for a cleaner, more melodic mood.

VV: I don’t think it’s neces-

sary to finish art school.

HH: Yeah, no, it’s not. If you get

something out of it, you can have a great time at art school because you’ve got a lot of freedom and can do what the fuck you want. But I realized that I didn’t want to be an artist. I was into photography as well. But I didn’t really see myself as an artist in that respect. It was the fine arts, and it was like, “art” art, you know what I mean? Art art. ~ EB 3/4/2015 77

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Few have achieved as much in both the music and fine art worlds as Tony Conrad. In the sixties, Conrad helped pioneer minimalist drone techniques together with the likes of La Monte Young, John Cale and Terry Riley (amongst others) as The Dream Syndicate, before developing his trademark strobing “flicker” film method that became central to experimental cinema.

At the time, Conrad characterized the New York Downtown music scene as a search for “something just beyond music, a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery.” It was also a fitting description of the artistic kinship he would strike up with the German band Faust.

Known today as one of the most important krautrock bands of the seventies, Faust merged jazz and rock techniques with radically improvised Fluxus and avantgarde interventions, using tape, metal or whatever else was at hand to create authentically new music.

Conrad approached the group to collaborate, resulting in their 1973 minimalist masterpiece, Outside the Dream Syndicate, which they recently performed at this year’s Berlin Atonal Festival. We sat down with Conrad and Faust’s Jean-Hervé Péron and Werner “Zappi” Diermaier to moderate a conversation on their collaborative history.

TONY CONRAD TALKS TO FAUST

“No Can, no Kraftwerk, no Cluster, no nobody.”

Moderated by Daniel Hugo / Photos: Hans Martin Sewcz Tony Conrad: Today, the twenty-

second of August 2015, is the day that Faust and I come together for the ten-thousandth time. Well, really it’s the third time—somewhere between the third and ten-thousandth time.

Jean-Hervé Péron: For me, it’s

our second time together, and for Zappi it’s the third. In my mind we’ve played two shows together in the past. But Zappi mentions you played together as a duo in New York.

TC: You weren’t there in New York?

JHP: That’s right.

this is far out stuff . . . and this is from 1971?!” In New York, we knew about psychedelic music and bands like Amon Düül, but Faust were doing stuff that was weird, and I thought, “This sounds nice.

I should go and talk to them.”

Did you guys know Amon Düül?

JHP: When we were living in our

self-designed studio in Wümme, we voluntarily secluded ourselves from the outside world. This was a choice that we made. So, while we were aware that there was a scene outside Wümme, we didn’t know anybody. No Can, no Kraftwerk, no Cluster, no nobody.

TC: What were you doing?

Zappi Diermaier: We lived in Wümme like it was a cloister.

JHP: Gardening. It’s the thing to

TC: For a long time?

do. I take care of all the weeds and the dirty, nasty jobs, whereas my wife takes care of the real gardening. So I’m an unskilled gardener, and I love it. I’ve a passion for physical work. Mind you, JeanJacques Rousseau said that the problem with mankind is that it can’t deal properly with its garden.

TC: And Confucius said . . . what did Confucius say? I forget. So this’ll be the third time that we’re playing together? I first heard your music because [film critic and record producer] Uwe Nettelbeck sent me your records along with stuff by some other bands. I played the records and thought, “It’s like rock ‘n’ roll, but

JHP: There are two ways to

approach time: the way you feel it, and how it passes in reality.

For me, I felt like Faust’s days at Wümme lasted two years.

ZD: I think it was three

years all together.

TC: But you guys must’ve been, like, fifteen years old back then. You look like you’re only fifty these days.

JHP: That’s kind of you, Tony.

Actually, I was nineteen when we moved into Wümme.

ZD: And I was twenty.

TC: Twenty, now that’s an important age. I loved being twenty.

When I was twenty, I was beginning to make this drone music.

When I heard of you guys, which must’ve been about ten years later, I was thinking, “Oh boy, I better record Outside the Dream Syndicate before I forget how to play it.” So that’s why I wanted to go see you at Wümme. That place was like an ant colony. There were chambers in different parts of this big building. There was a guy in the attic writing operas, everyone’s smoking a lot of weed, and the dog outside is biting everybody. Nobody bothered to leave the house because you’d go outside, look in all directions and there wouldn’t be another house for as far as the eye could see. Once a week or so, Uwe would come in his car with some groceries. It was like living in an oasis.

JHP: We shared girlfriends, we

shared dogs and we smoked a lot of mind-expanding substances.

Luckily, we had the great opportunity to be introduced to your world and concept of music. But you’ve got a very important point here Tony in mentioning that the drone “scene” existed ten years before Faust were actually making music.

TC: In my mind, it wasn’t a scene.

In a way I was like you: isolated and out of contact with everybody.

There was nothing. I mean, I was listening to rock ‘n’ roll and Peggy March—stuff which had nothing to do with drone music. Also, the avant-garde music of the day was focused on very different things.

So for us, it was like, “Whoa, this drone music we’re making is the best shit in the world.” That’s what we thought at the time, but you can’t do the best stuff of anything, ever. After all, the idea of using a single note as a basis for composition has existed in music all over the world for thousands of years.

In that respect, La Monte Young’s idea of an eternal music—although completely false and wrong and misguided— has some kind of sense to it. Drone functioned in Western culture in a way that broke down the barrier between high and low music culture. The next thing to happen in our little

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circle was The Velvet Underground, and the old connection with Andy Warhol furthered this breakdown of high and low culture. With Faust, the feeling was similar. You were making rock music that was devoid of commercial sensibility.

Like you say Jean-Hervé, we didn’t care what anyone else was doing.

JHP: What happened to us? What

made us go in that direction?

TC: To you?

JHP: To us in general. Did our

parents mistreat us? Were we stepped on when we were born?

TC: We were reared on the avantgarde spirit of happenings and Fluxus and the breaking down of boundaries within high art forms.

It was obviously theatre but it was also music: La Monte Young was writing pieces where he would feed a piano some hay and things like that. But these avant-garde gestures can happen any time; they’re not just reserved for 1960!

It was happening in 1970 with Faust, and maybe it will happen in 2015. I don’t know who’s doing it now, though. Except for me!

JHP: I think it’s important to

reiterate, as you mentioned, that drone and all these ur-musics— these primal ways of expressing oneself—have existed since before we were born. It’s the stomping of the Britons, the overtone singing of the Aborigines and the Inuit.

TC: The Celtic music of Europe is a particularly interesting case.

It’s unknown because it was never recorded; yet throughout Europe you see evidence of bagpipeesque instruments in Hungary, Germany and France. The Celtic origins of the tradition must have been somehow stamped out. I wish we knew more about this.

JHP: We must not forget the

other person in our story, Uwe Nettelbeck. You were doing this beautiful thing in the States, and we were doing our thing on the other side of the pond, and Uwe had the merit of seeing that there was a connection

On Faust’s second album, So Far (Polydor, 1972) the band’s primal sounds and tongue-in-cheek pop sensibility went head to head. It also ignited a landmark shitstorm, as the label had hoped it would establish the band as the “German Beatles”.

It very much did not.

Instead it cemented their reputation for making powerful, hypnotic, and repetitive music that the press would label as krautrock. Aside from Péron on bass and Diermaier on drums, the band also featured Hans Joachim Irmler on organ, Rudolf Sosna on guitar and keyboards and Gunther Wüsthoff on synthesizer and sax.

On their most recent release j US t (Bureau B, 2014), Péron and Diermaier present a series of open-ended ideas for other musicians to build upon— an invitation for future collaborations, of sorts. According to Péron, an initial version of the album was scrapped for lacking “rawness”.

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between us—that these were two weeds that could grow together.

Uwe had a vision and a plan. He wanted to give the experimental music the same means of production and commercial chances as Schlager or pop music.

TC: I heard this too. I told him that if he releases Outside the Dream Syndicate it shouldn’t be classified as classical, it should be pop! Zappi, how did you get to know Uwe Nettlebeck?

ZD: It was an accident that I was

there. I knew him, but I had nothing to do with film. But Andy Hertel made a film about a monk who had the same nose as me, so I acted as this monk. It had nothing to do with Faust. A bit later I met Uwe in this film house, and he brought a little suitcase with contracts and money inside.

JHP: To buy our souls!

ZD: We were very hungry so we

took the money and went next door to a restaurant and ate.

TC: For me, by the end of the sixties, this drone music was at an end. I was no longer thinking that it was a statement. As for Faust, it was a beginning, an accident, a thing that came together.

JHP: I would like to stress something that is essential to keep in mind: We didn’t think much. There was no plan or concrete intentions.

We were young and enthusiastic.

This is the privilege and strength of youth. I certainly didn’t think. I didn’t care. The primal, ur-music is something that’s inside you. We didn’t want to invigorate, misuse, abuse, or make anything popular.

No. It just happened. And Tony, you triggered this. It was latent in us, and you triggered it.

TC: It’s fantastic hearing the origins of Faust, because I never knew all of this. It’s a long and complicated story. And now the band has split in two.

JHP: I still have the sheet of paper

you gave me in Atlanta where you explained your history, your

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Left to right: Diermaier, Conrad and Péron catch up before their recent perfomance of Outside the Dream Syndicate at this year’s Berlin Atonal Festival. Housed in a gargantuan former power station, the festival provided a suitably cavernous space for the trio’s drones. Audience members could use the venue’s seemingly endless nooks and crannies to explore different aspects of the sound, as waves of drone and shards of repetitive drumming refracted around concrete pillars. Conrad and Faust’s performance stood out from a program dominated by younger techno artists presenting audiovisual projects marked by bleak imagery and bassheavy reports. By reducing their palette to drums, bass and violin, the veterans made the architecture sing where others struggled to handle its unusually long reverberations. Earlier in the evening, Conrad also presented a selection of his diverse filmography, ranging from his groundbreaking work with flicker video to an extremely humorous take on a sexually frustrated Mrs. Santa Claus, starring himself in drag. Another short film featured a shirtless Conrad standing in front of a green screen filled with images of men kicking each other in the groin.

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“By the end of the sixties, this drone music was at an end. I was no longer thinking that it was a statement. As for Faust, it was a beginning, an accident, a thing that came together.”

Tony Conrad itinerary in music, but I guess you didn’t have a chance to hear our story. I feel privileged to be part of the Faust saga, and you’re right that Faust has split in two directions. We respect each other, we don’t interfere with each other, we ignore each other, we don’t like each other—but we do respect each other. The Faust story is getting complicated. Now I feel an urge to meet younger people.

TC: It was fun to begin performing music again when these younger, fantastic musicians started making their own interesting music and rediscovering what we’d done in previous decades. Getting asked to play again was partly due to the newfound access to lost music made possible by reissue CDs in the nineties. Suddenly there was a community who were discovering African Pygmy music and so forth, and they also discovered this minimal record by Tony Conrad and Faust.

Smart, young people like Table of the Elements founder Jeff Hunt, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke found me and asked whether they could re-release our music. They wondered, “Should we ask Faust?” and I was like, “Yeah, Faust is a band, they’re real people! You should contact them.” Then they realized that Faust was actually a big band, so they invited us to play this festival. I think they were surprised that I could still play.

JHP: There was a time when I

didn’t want to let anybody from the outside into our circle, but now I’m quite eager to meet all these younger people who have heard what was happening in the past and are now

84

pushing it further. So the circle is close to being closed. My mantra is: rund ist schön—round is beautiful.

What differences have you found performing with a new generation of experimental musicians?

addition of something extraneous, and I love that, to add something external. In that respect, there has been a lot of change and a lot of additions for me in what I do.

TC: Well first, let me say that I’ve

has always spilled outside the bounds of musical performance.

been working with the harmonic series for a long time. I considered the drone as a way to explore harmonic relationships. I have a lot of theories about the harmonic series that have evolved over the decades, and I’ve wanted to express them though music. So this means being highly selective about which harmonics I should play and what relationships I should establish. This approach and manner of thinking hasn’t really been developed by the younger artists working with drones. They’ve been thinking about drones, but not following this interest in a particular direction.

So this is a specialized aspect of my music that I don’t see echoed so much in other people’s work.

ZD: Has their approach to music affected your practice at all?

Top to bottom: Tony Conrad’s Four Violins (1964) (Table of the Elements, 1996) is simultaneously a defining document of minimalism and a perennial outsider piece. It also stands in stark contrast to the aesthetic familiarity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass’s rhythmic pulses. Similarly on the fringes is Outside the Dream Syndicate (Caroline, 1973), which saw Conrad and Faust working together for the first time. Conrad’s striking, insistent violin is offset by Zappi’s primal drumming. The music is akin to early Velvet Underground, but more lumbering and patient.

TC: I’d say the rise of so-called “noise” has allowed my music to be understood in a certain way. I like noise because it breaks things up. I don’t really believe in minimalism.

Okay, fine, the three of us play very steady drone music—it’s wonderful—but it’s not the only thing, you see? It’s not a matter of being impatient; it’s a matter of offering some color and some change. Yet it’s often the case that the color and change in my music is associated with the concept of noise, which connotes a sort of uniformity, so it’s a bad name for it. Because after all, there’s a lot of variation within drone music, and the types of variation that have come to be called “noise” are incredibly various. Alternative instrumental techniques, theatrical elements, different performance styles, and the use of pre-recorded material: Each of these things has been called “noise”. Noise is a reductivist concept. It’s such a garbage pail term. It really means nothing and it’s not an adequate way to understand what’s being added to the music. To me, noise stands for the

JHP: But your work with music

TC: Of course. I think I was candid enough early on to realize that my music didn’t have a platform for achieving anything significant in the way of social change. This meant that if I had social, political or historical ideas, I would need to write or use other media to express them. There were certain observations that I made that suggested that social change was a good area to be thinking about.

It seemed to me that rock ‘n’ roll was a really significant factor in the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Jeans, fashion and rock ‘n’ roll infected the East in a way that was very powerful. I think this helped to draw my attention to the way that music may function as an expression of social power and social twisting—the twisting of individuals in the construction of a social order. The clearest examples of this kind of thing are marching music, anthems and church singing. It’s very clear that music is one of the main things that forms identity and creates unified social structures, so the idea that you’re German or American is strongly expressed through music.

Also, music in relation to advertising—jingles for example—is very important to social constructs.

Everybody thinks that all of this isn’t such a big a deal. I think it’s way up at the top in terms of importance. It’s very clear that these are factors that have been inaccessible to a twentieth century understanding of music and society. In the twenty-first century, we’re going to need to understand some of these things as we face the pervasive monster that is neoliberalism. And we have so few tools that actually manipulate people in any way that could be construed as opposite or running in a different direction to neoliberal forces.

If we ignore music in this regard we’re making a big mistake. ~

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In pop and folk, the voice is often considered the most direct route to emotion, with lyrics as the articulation of the feelings expressed. While many singer-songwriters adhere to that orthodoxy, Los Angeles-based composer Julia Holter uses her voice to approach emotion from a more oblique angle.

Using allusive texts from various sources to render her “self” an abstraction within elaborately constructed baroque pop, Holter has based previous records on everything from Greek tragedy to musicals. But as her most recent LP, Have You in My Wilderness, shows, the music remains both intimate and direct without centering on her own identity. Similarly, Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt has turned to external sources such as New German Cinema and microbiology to inspire her electronic productions. Dalt’s struggle with her own vocals led her to drop not only singing but also “traditional” instrumentation—looped and treated bass and guitar—altogether. On her recent self-titled EP, she presents a decidedly more abstract approach to composing which, like Holter, has drawn comparison to one of the great manipulators of sound and voice, Laurie Anderson. Dalt and Holter have worked together in the past and when they met again in Berlin, they were eager to discuss making music that isn’t a pure expression of personality.

JULIA HOLTER TALKS TO LUCRECIA DALT

“I don’t think of the music as a message.”

Moderated by Mark Smith / Photos by Luci Lux Lucrecia Dalt: We first crossed paths via Gudrun Gut . . .

Julia Holter: . . . in 2008.

LD: She asked us to contribute

music to a compilation series called 4 Women No Cry. Each volume featured four female musicians from four different countries.

Then we went on tour together in Poland and Germany. I remember Gudrun wrote to me on Myspace.

JH: Myspace was amazing back

then. I found out about so much music that way, particularly new artists doing crazy work under the radar. Now Myspace is a dead zone.

LD: People could format their

Myspace page the way they wanted.

It was a very clumsy platform, but in a charming way. I liked that you could judge the artist by how they tried to organize all those chaotic boxes and images that Myspace let you customize. It all disappeared when they tried to streamline this mess that everybody was making.

JH: We also worked together on the

Terepa project for Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People. The two of us, along with five other artists, including Laurel Halo, Rashad Becker and NHK’Koyxen, recorded music simultaneously for twenty minutes with zero communication between the composers. Then these individual recordings were layered over each other to form a chance-based or “telepathic” composition. We didn’t have a

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discussion about what we were doing, just a time bracket within which we could play anything.

LD: I definitely left a lot of space.

JH: Yeah, I felt that too.

LD: Once the recordings were put together I was lost sometimes as to who contributed what.

JH: You can’t really tell at this

point. The final piece is a real wall of sound. It sounds like it took place in a murky sewer. I’m totally saying that in a good way.

LD: And there’s no space or silence.

That would’ve been nice—if there were empty points where everybody left space for each other.

JH: Terepa was a good exercise in balancing external criteria with personal, intuitive composition. On the one hand, there’s the romantic idea of channeling an internal state, and on the other, incorporating non-musical materials into the music making process.

LD: I’ve stopped channeling my internal drive into my recordings.

Now I need external objects and pieces of information around me in order to make music. I need stimuli because the idea of pulling something from “inside” and playing a song in a romantic way became alien to me. I worked in that traditional way in the past, but it doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Now I follow a methodology.

JH: So you’re letting different

things come at you and then you’re responding to them rather than just dealing with your own thoughts?

LD: Yeah, exactly. When I create only with my internal resources, without any exposure to anything outside my head, I tend to be very mathematical and structural. I end up repeating patterns, generating less new ideas. When I have input from outside I start to see more surprises in what I’m making. I feel this is good because, since I work alone all the time, I can get confused and tired of myself during the work. These external sources become creative partners, telling me, “Hey, this way!” For my upcoming album I worked with projections of New German Cinema. I’d play them silently while I was working on the tracks. I came to Berlin on a scholarship, and I decided that I wanted to investigate German film because I didn’t know much about it. So the album feeds from this cinema, from Ferdinand Khittl, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter and Helke Sander. I can take a little cluster of information from a film, and those scenes become a force that takes the music beyond the proscribed structures that internal “channeling” reproduces.

JH: That’s how I work with sto-

ries. Maybe they’re not as obvious an external material, but the key is that they existed beside myself.

They have their own life. Then I can work with that material to make a song. People are always like, “Why do you use other people’s stories?”

Whereas for me that’s precisely what’s interesting. They want to know, “Where’s you in this?” I don’t understand the question. Obviously I’m in the work—it seems like a given that you’re in a song you create. So isn’t it more interesting to find that structure or impetus via something else? You need something that pushes you. Maybe you won’t find that drive within yourself.

LD: I’m not using words anymore either, so locating a self in my work is problematic. I sing a very simple line at the beginning of my new record and then the rest is decidedly abstract. It’s a journey of

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some kind of object that’s dealing with time as it’s passing through different sound possibilities. The movement and acceleration of this “thing” is affecting the way the sound is perceived, and it becomes more elastic. One idea forms and when you’re trying to hold or reach it, it leaves. It’s always moving.

It became a record that’s more related to physics and relativity.

JH: I’m not going to form a story of

my life in my record. The idea that you’re not in a work because you’ve used other sources to push against rather than drawing on an autobiographical journal is so narrow.

Yet it’s a pervasive idea that we’re constantly confronted with. Some people like to think that using external sources means no emotion exists within the music. That’s the other weird question I get asked: “What about your emotions?” Well, they come through. It’s not like something isn’t interesting if it’s not about you, or entirely from within you. It’s a very strange idea that people have about art. Maybe it’s also an argument hinged on gender. I don’t mean to attack anyone but people tend to think of women as writing about their feelings. I can’t adopt a story without confusing people because they have these sorts of expectations.

How can I sing a man’s perspective?

There are plenty of weird assumptions people make regarding what a female artist can and cannot do.

LD: For me it was a fight. Every time I took the microphone it didn’t feel right, especially performing.

Paradoxically, I was generating a more interesting dialogue without my voice, when I was just playing the music. The voice is susceptible to everyday changes and it behaves differently according to the situation. I feel I have more control over a performance when I’m not singing.

JH: When music is physical or

absolute, it’s not working language anymore right? It seems like you find that liberating.

LD: It can be liberating on a personal and a creative level. With my album Syzygy, I was passing through a crisis and living in a weird state of mind generated by

sleep deprivation and over stimulation. I enjoyed being in this state, because I was able to let this thing out. I would say it was my most emotional record in this sense because I was desperate. I needed to make this album to have relief.

JH: I have this idea that’s hard

to logically explain in plain language: I don’t think of music as a form of communication. Or art in general. The only time that I come up against a contradiction to this idea is when I think about political music, or music that is somewhat political, but not obviously so. In any case, when it comes to my music, I don’t feel like I’m communicating. It’s a confusing thing for people because I work almost exclusively with language. I started making music in school. I was writing music for other people to play and I thought of myself as a behind-the-scenes person. Then I found that I was most happy when I was recording, and one of the main things that I found difficult is to make absolute music, to make music that is just there. Classical music is very much about developing themes, musical figures and motifs, and it was really hard for me to do that in music school. I couldn’t get interested in it and I think it’s because I’m not really much of a musician, in a weird way. I don’t find it fun to work with the development of musical themes. I’m much better when I work with words.

LD: But I have the sense that your album Tragedy was working with themes.

JH: Maybe. I don’t like to think

about it. In school it was always like: [in a curmudgeonly voice] “How does this theme develop?” Instead, I was working with language, and the language was guiding me through.

It doesn’t mean that I only work with words, but it means that when I don’t work with words I might be thinking about language. That said, I don’t think of the music as a message, so it’s confusing. I don’t have a thing to say, I just have things that come out of me so that people can feel something. I kind of spew things out and make people make sense of it. I feel no sense of respon-

sibility, which might make me a jerk. There’s a mystery in things and that’s what I like to bask in.

When I make these songs they’ll start by just coming out—then I develop them. There are songs that appear with imagery whose origin is beyond my logical understanding, and then I like to work with that as a basis. I think there’s a surreal quality to it because I don’t know where the imagery comes from.

It’s like looking at another person’s sketches and then developing that other persons’ work. That’s what the process of making this new record was like. It’s not like my last album, Loud City Song, where it was all inspired by one story. By the way, did you go to music school?

LD: I studied civil engineering.

JH: That’s so cool.

LD: I worked two years in a geotechnical company. Designing foundations, retaining walls, and other stuff. We’d do all the tests of the soil, analyze the samples and from there produce the results and offer recommendations like, “Okay, you have to dig down twenty meters and there you can lay your foundation, it has to be this diameter, et cetera.” It was mostly an office design job, mathematical design, but someone would have to eventually go down underground to make sure the strata reached was the expected one for the foundation. I was one of the few who didn’t mind going way below the surface of the earth. It’s not a very nice situation being god-knows how many meters down there in a hole that’s only around one meter in diameter.

You’re beneath the water table so it’s raining basically. It was a cool job and I really enjoyed it but it was a very, very difficult job for a female.

JH: Because you were treated weird?

LD: You come into the industry, your boss puts trust in you, but when you reach the construction projects, they’d expect someone older, most likely a man. And they would suggest to hear a confirmation from another engineer. There is this gendered history behind you that’s quite difficult to fight. ~

Top to bottom: On Tragedy (Leaving Records, 2011) Holter used Euripedes’s Hippolytus to frame a journey into baroque pop arrangements. Loud City Song (Domino, 2013) saw her voice coming to the fore, inspired by the Hollywood musical Gigi.

Top to bottom: Syzygy (Human Ear Music, 2013) consists mainly of Lucrecia Dalt’s barely-there guitar, disquieting synth messages and wisps of claustrophobic vocals.

Last year’s self-titled EP (Other People) employs harder to place electronics but is also her most infectious work to date.

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IN SEARCH OF THE OUTERNATIONAL

The Origins of Manele With its roots in Romania’s marginalized Romani community and nineteenth-century court musicians, the music known as manele has emerged from a unique confluence of continents, cultures, politics and technologies. What began as the soundtrack to daylong weddings has since moved into the Romanian mainstream, but you won’t find manele on the radio or in record stores. Due to institutional anti-Romani prejudice, it’s been subject to petitions banning it from public performance and has become part of a culture war pitting Romania’s Eastern identity against the desire for Westernization. Now, a new generation of Romanians are rediscovering the music’s endless rhythms and subversive street-life identity.

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Weddings, the Orient and DIY Distribution Future Nuggets label owner Ion Dumitrescu describes the origins and development of manele and the conflict it represents in Romanian society.

Manele is a musical genre that has engulfed the entire Balkans over the past thirty years. Its linguistic origin dates back to the Ottoman Empire, and the word manea is Turkish for “song”. At its core, it represents a kind of contemporary Romani wedding music that has spread across the region under different names, like tallava, chalga, kuchek and turbo-folk, with each style developing its own distinct flavors and modulations according to region.

Although manele began in the wedding industry, it has spilled over into mainstream music. For decades, a constant exchange has existed between the countries involved in manele. Tunes from Bulgaria were reproduced over the border with Romanian lyrics, Albanians covered Romanian manele hits in Albanian and Romanians often borrowed from the Serbian turbo-folk scene. As a result, these exchanges transgress copyright logic and instead tailor manele to local demands. In that sense, manele artists have created a sort of musical shortcut, taking synthesizer workstations, reprogramming them for manele grooves and mixing them with traditional Roma styles. These artists have no qualms about lifting tunes and melodies—from Serbian and Bulgarian hits to the “manelizing” of American R&B. It’s a tendency not unlike that of sampling or remix culture.

Emerging manele bands in the eighties and nineties replaced traditional instruments with electric guitars and synthesizers and were ready to absorb any and all influences, from pop and oriental to folk and electronic.

Nowadays we call this nascent music, for lack of a better term, “proto-manele”. It represents a

transitional period and marks a time before manele matured and became the regional norm in the Balkans and Southeastern Europe. This transitional stage was represented in nineties Romania by the Eurostar label, which was focused on “Cântece de Petrecere” or music for parties, as they titled a series of proto-manele releases.

From there, a significant, albeit marginalized scene exploded with hundreds of manele bands appearing all over the country. Anyone living in Romania back then

“Manele never gets aired on the radio in Romania—the result of characteristic discrimination.”

Ion Dumitrescu

was exposed to this trend, whether they liked it or not.

Before the crystallization of the genre at the turn of the millennium, manele germinated hybrids with hip-hop and dance music while at the same time producing mature artistic voices such as Adrian “Adi” Minune, Florin Salam and Dan Dra˘ghici.

Although this music originally appeared at restaurant parties and weddings, it since developed into an active club scene, which allowed a continuation of wedding logic and behavior outside the ceremony itself. This also went hand in hand with transcending linguistic norms in manele singing. For example,

Dan Armeanca, one of the first to revolutionize wedding music in Romania, used to sing in Arabic.

To this day, it’s debated whether he was speaking proper Arabic or just phonetically voicing the words. And there is a precedent for the latter: in Romania in the sixties and seventies, rock bands often played Beatles and Rolling Stones covers while singing in phonetic English—a language they couldn’t speak at all. This embodies the “outernational” spirit of manele, which is key to understanding its core.

Unlike international music scenes, the outernational is an uneven terrain, perforated by numerous holes and discontinuities and marked by lack of memory and archival consciousness. The outernational produces out-of-history artistic expressions that never consolidate; they linger in partial isolation and hard-to-trace genealogies. The specter of disappearance is always on the horizon.

Outernational music, like manele, is all over YouTube, but almost nonexistent on mainstream online music platforms and marketplaces like SoundCloud, Mixcloud and Beatport.

Thus even today, international and outernational standards for music production and diffusion are completely different.

For example, manele musicians release singles and YouTube videos specifically to ensure a flow of wedding gigs. Talent scouts with YouTube accounts scour videos for manele wunderkinds.

And while the music is sometimes hybridized with pop and dance textures in an attempt to breach the mainstream, local manele stars usually earn their money at family events. This is because manele never gets aired on the radio in Romania—the result of characteristic discrimination towards Romani people. TV stations on the other hand have embraced it, albeit in a tabloid fashion. Although there are hundreds of manele artists, they all operate through two or three agents, and recording and production is limited to few studios.

Which is to say that it possesses

Above: A typical promo shot of manele soloist Ionut¸ Print¸ u, taken at Bucharest’s famous Million Dollars club.

Above: Babi Minune is known for writing one of modern manele’s most progressive songs, “Made in Romania”, which challenges the perceived differences between ethnic Roma and ethnic Romanians.

Opposite page: Da˘nut¸ de Vitto leading the party at Hanul Drumet¸ului, the oldest manele club in Bucharest.

P. 90-91: The Hanul Drumet¸ului band with bodyguard. The musicians and the muscle provide the foundation for the vocalist and a rotating cast of soloists who circle the tables, interact with the audience and take requests.

Parties in manele clubs can last up to twelve hours, while weddings can stretch across an entire day and night.

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Above: Million Dollars club poppin’ off.

Right: A bride enjoying herself at Hanul Drumet¸ului. As Ion Dumitrescu explains, the wedding industry is the backbone of the manele world.

Right: Dan Bursuc, manele’s most prestigious agent, at home in Bucharest.

Bursuc is responsible for building the careers of many of the genre’s biggest stars, including former child prodigies Sorin Copilul de Aur and Babi Minune.

Photos: Camil Dumitrescu

an alternative infrastructure.

The overlapping of the mainstream and underground is also a common contemporary outernational paradox. The manele case is telling, being both under and overground and having millions of listeners but never showing up in local shops. Even as orthodox Western market

procedures begin to operate in border societies like Romania, many manele artists maintain an outernational dynamic through a network of kinship industries, mass piracy and unfettered copyright infringement.

Operating at the periphery means anything can happen, and in recent times, it did hap-

pen. Facing a gutted history of totalitarian regimes, revolutions and hardcore austerity measures, continuity is an inoperable notion in Romania. Apart from being on the border of East and West, growing up in Romania in the early nineties meant becoming an adult in a territory filled with tensions caused by the constant collision of modernity with pre-modern ways of life. Economic disasters, constant precarity and the crushed dreams of living in a utopian capitalist society—all these mark the general cultural ecology of Romania. Partially as a result, Romania and Bucharest didn’t develop music scenes, niches or any kind of clear structures that one would consider standard in the West. The manele world developed freely in another dimension around mafia bosses—so-called barosani—at the edge of Romanian culture.

And it survived because the wedding is still a fundamental event in the Orient, which is a cultural continent from which Romania will never fully remove itself.

Still, in Romania, the main national project of the past twenty-five years involved becoming a Western society.

This process meant ridding the country of Turkish influence, which has existed for centuries due to colonization by the Ottomans. Traces of the Oriental were to be excised, as well as lingering echoes of Russian influence. That’s why a significant part of the Romanian intelligentsia has so aggressively spoken against the proliferation of manele. In turn, manele artists also spoke bluntly about the new values and characters produced by turbo capitalism.

As ethno-musicologist Sperant¸ a Ra˘dulescu recently said in an interview: “If you don’t like manele, you have to change Romania.” This is music that functions as a mirror of a country still populated with mafia bosses, crooked politicians and big-shot money mongers paradoxically obsessed with traditional family values and Christian morality. ~

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“There is an active resistance and stigma applied to this music.”

Ion Dumitrescu and manele historian Paul Breazu tackle the finer points of the music’s history in conversation.

Ion Dumitrescu: Paul, I wanted to start out by talking about the transitional period between socalled proto-manele and today’s manele. I know you’ve extensively investigated the timeframe between the early-nineties and the late-nineties. After the 1989 Romanian revolution, literally hundreds of bands sprung out of the periphery of cultural lore, forging a hybrid genre that is still poorly known. Personally, I consider there to be two main musical traditions that fed into manele.

First, the legacy of Dan Armeanca radically changed the Romanian la˘utari folk music tradition by introducing guitars, drums and synths in the eighties. Armeanca also changed the lyrics, inventing a new folklore inspired by the experiences of a new proletariat—a “street life” if you will. The second influential change I would attribute to the Albatros legacy, which helped birth minimal manele, with its small bands, basic orchestration and harmonies. This minimal variety also took lyrical content one step further by including themes such as the military draft that had been taboo in the eighties under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaus¸ escu.

How do you see the development of modern manele and the role of these two traditions?

Paul Breazu: In my opinion, there are a few sonic roots that fed into the formation of modern manele.

This newer style reached its climax in the year 2000 with the

revolutionary manele-pop album Fa˘ra˘ concurent¸ a by Adi Minune and Costi. In my opinion, that record represents a before-andafter moment in manele music culture. Let’s talk a bit about the before. According to the famous Romanian ethnomusicologist Sperant¸ a Ra˘dulescu, manele-like music was played in Romania in the nineteenth century during the Ottoman occupation. In those times, a manea tune was defined as a “lamenting love song often sung by high society ladies and their servants, the la˘utari, who were a professional clan of Romani musicians.” The nineteensixties were another important time in the formation of manele.

Electrecord, the one and only Romanian record label of that era, released numerous la˘utari records by the likes of Taraful Frat¸ilor Gore, Romica Puceanu and Gabi Lunca˘. I believe the word manele first appeared on one of their records—a 7-inch

by Victor Gore with the song “Maneaua flora˘reselor”.

Interestingly, that song is paraphrased by Nicolae Ra˘ceanu on a famous “proto-manela” track titled “Magdalena”, which mysteriously appeared on a 7-inch in 1982 in the United States, where Ra˘ceanu had emigrated. Ra˘ceanu wrote the song as a reaction to the folk music propagated by the communist regime as represented in the inexhaustible state-run TV program Tezaur folcloric (“Folk Treasure”). He essentially created a “dirty” version by stealing EB 3/4/2015

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“Magdalena”: Azur, Odeon and Generic. They all made use of an almost identical musical toolbox—guitars, keyboards, drums, bass—and artistic inspiration.

Although they apparently shared similar politics with Ra˘ceanu, these bands operated in a functionalist paradigm and could be understood as existing to keep the system balanced. They were born simultaneously with the emerging pan-Balkan sonic trends of the era, a time of empowerment for the turbo folk, skiladiko and arabesque genres. But the function of these genres was to entertain working class people. It followed a formula and had no tradition.

They were playing Romanian music, as well as Serbian, Greek, Turkish or Hindi, because working-class parties imposed a playlist that was all-inclusive.

They weren’t bands of Romani la˘utari but self-taught musicians belonging to the majority, and in spite of some musical motifs in their songs, their connection to manele music is highly superficial.

Above: CD cover for Eu sunt mare gagicar (I’m Such a Ladies Man), recorded in 2000 by Adi Minune and Vali Vijelie. The duo are two of the main protagonists of the transitional period between nineties proto-manele and the pop-manele of the present day.

Right: Dan Armeanca was responsible for introducing synthesizer and electric guitars into the genre and opening it up to arabesque and modern Orientalpop influences.

P. 95, top to bottom: Ion Dumitrescu is co-founder and main instigator of the Future Nuggets label, which releases obscure Romanian psych and manele,as well as contemporary takes on both genres.

Paul Breazu is a music journalist and co-founder of the Paradaiz series of manele events in Bucharest.

ID: And what about Dan Armeanca?

bits of a classic manela track and singing about a sexual affair with a prostitute. On the album cover, he sports a thick gold bracelet on his right wrist—a piece of jewelry that could have sent him to jail in those times. Indeed, the beginning of the eighties was the most dystopic period of Ceaus¸ escu’s political regime. Ra˘ceanu’s song is real, urban and representative of the times. It has nothing in common with hard working farmers, the stubborn chastity of village girls or the green foxtails of official, state-sanctioned folklore. For these reasons I would say that the grandfather of modern manele music—the manele music of the nineties—could be Ra˘ceanu.

Meanwhile, three important bands were being established while Ra˘ceanu was recording

PB: He’s another important artist without a biography. The media’s disinterest in these musicians goes hand-in-hand with its sycophantic obsession with the West and passive-aggressive racism towards Romani people.

Armeanca is credited as the inventor of so-called “modern” manele music, which exploded in the nineties. Born most likely from a family of Romani la˘utari, he is a character surrounded by many myths. As a resident at the infamous Calypso Restaurant in Bucharest in the years after the Revolution, he launched the careers of important names such as Adi Minune and Brandy, and brought an enduring Levant feel to the new school of manele music.

In the nineties, Armeanca enacted a radical change within the genre by constructing a very particular sound with new instruments. At the time, an entire generation of Romani musicians neglected by the media emerged onto the Romanian scene, building their

own production and distribution systems with micro-recording studios. Cassette tape culture and the market stall at its core.

Albatros, with their dramatic lo-fi Casio minimalism, is part of this generation, as well as Real B or Novomatic, a project split between amateurish new wave pop and tropicalia. Back then, all these bands were thrown in the same huge bucket of “Oriental” music, although some of them had nothing to do with it. In my opinion, the “party music” bands from the beginning of the nineties are similar to current post-manele artists, which is a kind of Balkan, Western and Oriental blend.

ID: It’s difficult to draw a chronological path of the genre out of all these fragmented trajectories, blank biographies, legends and rumors. I remember you once told me that at some point there were two bands named Azur, with the clone playing the same songs as the original band in the late eighties and early nineties as a sort of undeclared tribute—but they were performing at the same time as the original Azur and enjoyed almost the same level of success! I know that with a lack of copyright procedures, bands were claiming different hits; because even though they had their own repertoire, they also had to play what was asked. I think hits like “Magdalena” or Azur’s “La o masa˘ mai retrasa˘” were played by everyone, yet the origins of the songs triggered tensions and rivalry among the protagonists.

On another note, what can you say about the influence of the synthesizer on the development of manele’s various strains?

PB: It’s true that the synthesizer,

with its bossa-nova, beguine and disco presets, was used to the maximum by eighties and nineties bands like Generic, Azur, Tomis Junior and Zorile. At that time, they weren’t programming their synths; rather they seemed to use “Oriental” presets taken from floppy discs. I see this as one of the legacies of that period that is still visible in today’s pop-manele, or “system” manele as they call it.

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Today, all the keyboards used in manele, like the Korg Triton, Korg PA-series, Roland G-800 and others, are instantly equipped with the established sounds, beats and breaks that everybody uses. Every respectable manele keyboard musician has the Bulgarian sound banks, the Albanian ones, the folklore package, and the Oriental digitized instruments taken from the Roland A-49 or uploaded via computer. There are keyboard sounds made famous by incredible virtuosos like Amza from Bulgaria, whose altered library of Casio CZ-101 presets was certainly influential. This Casio model itself became a reference to all the key players of manele, partially due to its adjustable pitch bender.

ID: How about the introduction of the drum machine?

PB: Well, another discrete con-

nection in this dis-continuum between eighties, nineties and noughties manele would be the removal of acoustic drums. A whole generation used acoustic drums, starting with Dan Armeanca, who had a full eightmember band in the nineties.

Groups like S¸obolanii din Ploiesti and Îngerii Negri had classic drummers for years. Generic and Azur also used acoustic drums and at some point shifted toward drum machines. This shift happened for practical reasons: when the endless flow of song requests are coming in at a wedding or party, the beat has to go on. The groove can never stop. This means that tracks can last up to ten minutes, or even longer. And the weddings themselves go from twelve to twenty-four hours. A human drummer couldn’t cope with that. This led to minimal trios, another echo of Albatros’ generation, with many bands today using only three or four musicians on keyboard, percussion, violin or clarinet and, of course, vocals. In Romanian manele, the voice is the most important instrument. Everything has been reduced around the vocalist, in stark contrast to Bulgarian manele where they have entire wedding orchestras. With this

proliferation of regional varieties and different approaches, as well as a lack of traditional documentation, many substrates of manele have slipped through the cracks of history.

ID: Right, many short-lived manele hybrids disappeared. In a way, the influence of mainstream pop leveled the whole genre in terms of production. But before that, one of my favorite kinds of manele was the disco-manele fusion of Dan Armeanca and Adi Minune, which took off somewhere between 1993 and 1998.

Few recorded examples survive today, and most are on trilulilu. ro and YouTube. But they tend to get removed or just disappear.

Also, around ‘94 or ‘95, petty thieves known as s¸ menari and provincial wise-guys known as smecheri were replaced by big tycoon barosani mafia bosses.

At the same time, with the appearance of a new Romanian middle class, people were eager to leave the socialist ghetto behind and infuse pop manele with straightforward lyrics.

PB: Actually, in the last fifteen years, we’ve witnessed a wave of racist anti-manele sentiment, and the appearance of the first antimanele militants such as writer and politician George Pruteanu.

There have actually been online petitions to ban manele in public spaces. It’s bizarre to think it was easier for Florin Salam, the new king of the genre, to appear on BBC Radio 1 than to be on any mainstream radio or TV station in Romania. There is an active resistance and stigma applied to this music that cannot be dissociated from racism in Romanian society against Romani people.

However, in the past few years, something else also changed.

Today, successful artists like Florin Salam are making songs quoting Michael Jackson and Rihanna. This emerging cultural relativism of the new generation is a step towards normalization. However, this also works the other way around. You can hear the influence of manele in DJ sets played in “reputable”

clubs, and in the work of a new generation of music producers. The label you co-founded, Future Nuggets, stands at the forefront of this trend, alongside young music producers like Huzur and Florin Dra˘gus¸in.

ID: After the anarchic nineties in Romania, I think most industries—and especially the club and party industry—became more Westernized. House and techno clubs emerged. Events and festivals focusing on different genres appeared, from drum ‘n’ bass to hip-hop and minimal techno. Pop music labels started to make lots of money. It was a sort of escape from outernational dynamics. My own take is that the manele world failed to step out of the wedding and family events landscape. The manele musicians’ position was always that of pseudo-stars. And these musicians are still at the bottom of the hierarchy. When Florin Salam steps on stage in a club, nobody cheers, nobody applauds. In clubs or at weddings, the musicians are subordinate to the crowd no matter how many millions of views they have on YouTube, and no matter how famous they are. The client is above the la˘utari. He gets excited only when he makes a request and the vocalist sings to him personally. When one gives money, one can enjoy. It’s all about the people to whom they sing. The lyrics don’t represent the manele singer’s own feelings. In a way, the manele stars are just vehicles, giving a voice to people’s “boss” fantasies—his status, his needs and his lamentations. Also, manele releases are usually distributed in gas stations or small, improvised shops around the country. The whole manele pseudo-industry is pre-modern in a way. I would say that the manele musicians missed the chance to address social, political and cultural problems. That said, I’ve always viewed Future Nuggets, aside from being a label of selfassumed Romanian obscurities, as a bridge builder. And not just locally between manele and other alternative cultures, but also toward the rest of the world. ~

Top to bottom: Dorel de la Popes¸ti is a powerful voice in the field of gangsta-manele. One of his major hits was “Sunt mare mafiot” (“I am a big mobster”); Ionut¸ Cercel is one of the genre’s many young artists. Hailing from a musician’s family, his father, Petric, and his brother, Florinel, are also well-known vocalists; Lele is one of Dan Bursuc’s signings, and has grown under his wing since the tender age of ten.

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~

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N° 43 | 44 · FALL & WINTER 2015 ELECTRONIC BEATS · JEFF MILLS · HELENA HAUFF · JULIA HOLTER · NEW ORDER · MANELE

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