Es muss Terre Thaemlitz schon sehr irritiert haben, welche übergreifende Zustimmung vor drei Jahren dem als DJ Sprinkles veröffentlichten Album „Midtown 120 Blues“ entgegenschlug. Es war bei weitem nicht das erste Mal, dass in seinem/ihrem Schaffen beeindruckende House-Tracks erschienen, die durch und durch mit Subtexten aus dem von ihr/ihm seit den frühen 90er Jahren entschlossen verfolgten Themenspektrum versetzt waren. In der Wahrnehmung seiner/ihrer Arbeit war es inhaltlich ein weiterer Aspekt, musikalisch eine weitere Bestätigung. Aber House hatte zu dieser Zeit vielleicht noch weniger über den Tanzflächenrand hinweg zu sagen als zuvor, und klang auch über weite Strecken ziemlich ausgelaugt, sodass hier für viele plötzlich auf mehreren Ebenen die Ausnahme erschien, die die Regeln in Frage stellt. Nur haben sich die Regeln durch diese Episode keineswegs geändert, und Thaemlitz lag wohl nichts ferner, als sich als der ulkige Querulant mit den feinen Tunes mit den Gegebenheiten zu arrangieren. Ganz im Gegenteil, als sich die Aufmerksamkeit auf ihre/seine Clubkultur-Interessen richtete, sowieso nur ein Ausschnitt ihrer/seiner Musik, war „Soulnessless“ schon längst in Arbeit. Und dieses nun endlich fertiggestellte Unterfangen geht weit über die Mühen hinaus, die er/sie sich ohnehin schon seit Jahren macht. Schon das „Dead Stock Archive“ von 2009, eine im Eigenvertrieb erhältliche Compilation sämtlicher ihrer/seiner musikalischen Aktivitäten auf 2 DVDs, war eine deutliche Absage an die digitalen Musikplattformen, mit deren Gesetzmäßigkeiten und Rechtsverletzungen sich Thaemlitz seit einiger Zeit herumplagen musste. „Soulnessless“ bündelt nun diese Kritik in einem gewaltigen künstlerischen Komplex. Das Album erscheint in Form einer MicroSD-Karte samt kleinem Booklet. Auf der musikalischen Ebene gibt es fünf elektroakustische, mit unzähligen Tondokumenten verwobene Cantos plus Bonusmaterial, in deren Zentrum ein knapp über dreißigstündiges Pianosolo steht. Ergänzend dazu aufwendig gestaltete Videoclips und Texte in 10 Sprachen. Die inhaltliche Ebene fasst Thaemlitz auf seiner/ihrer Webseite aufs Kürzeste als den Versuch einer Dekonstruktion von „Soul Music“ aus einer non-spirituellen und anti-religiösen Perspektive zusammen, der er sich über die prekären Zusammenstöße von „gender, electronic audio production and spirituality“ annähert. Und beide Ebenen greifen beim Hören, Lesen und Sehen derart intensiv ineinander, dass man angesichts dieser immensen Fülle von Eindrücken fast kapitulieren muss, aber nie will. Konzeptuelle Arbeiten anderer Künstler erscheinen im Vergleich unweigerlich fast lächerlich, was weniger mit der Superlativ-Quantität dieses Materials zu tun hat, sondern mit der Akribie und Konsequenz, mit der ein Superlativ-Erlebnis erreicht wird. Und der Dancefloor? Dem wird das Ungetüm in zwei begleitenden Vinyl-EPs samt House-Remixes untergejubelt. Und wie macht man nach so etwas weiter? Ich mache mir nicht die geringsten Sorgen.
> Bocca Grande – Overdose (Four Roses Recordings, 2009)
Ich kenne es nicht. Ist es aus Deutschland?
Nein, ist es nicht. Es ist ein deutsches Label, aber die Produzenten sind aus Japan.
Das wäre meine nächste Vermutung gewesen.
Warum hättest Du das vermutet?
Das Piano als Schlüsselelement. Ein helles Piano und auch die Art, wie sie es editiert haben. Es ist offen.
Interessant, dass Du aufgrund des Piano-Sounds auf Japan gekommen bist.
Ich denke, dass diese Art Melodie etwas hat von japanischem Soundtrack-Piano-Stil hat. Diese gewisse melodische Herangehensweise. Es gibt immer dieses romantische, dramatische Element. Und nun mit dem Keyboard weiß man genau, dass es definitiv aus Japan kommt. Es ist aber ein sehr schöner Sound. Sehr Yellow Magic Orchestra. Sehr oldschool.
Das ist, was ich dachte, als ich es ersten Mal gehört habe. Es klingt nach der Art wie Sakamoto Piano spielt.
Genau, das Piano ist irgendwie Sakamoto, aber das Keyboard im Hintergrund ist der Hosono-Touch. Es ist diese Tanzmusik, zu der Du nicht tanzen kannst, für mich jedenfalls. Vielleicht bin ich, was das Tanzen angeht, zu einfach gestrickt. Es hat diese Plastizität an sich. Ich frage mich oft, wenn ich diese Art Musik höre, ob die Musiker diese Plastizität kritisch angehen, oder ob es nur ihr künstlerischer Ausdruck ist, und eine unkritische Herangehensweise. Aber dieser Collagen-Stil zwischen Melodien, Elektronik und Texturen ist auch sehr japanisch.
Sie nennen sich Bocca Grande. Ein Paar, und sie ist Klavierlehrerin. Alle ihre Tracks haben diese Piano-Elemente.
> H.O.D. – Alive And Kicking (Mata-Syn, 2009)
Schnelles Tempo. Zu schnell für mich zum Auflegen. Das kenne ich auch wieder nicht, ich vermute mal, es ist europäisch.
Ja.
Aber kontinental, definitiv nicht englisch.
Es ist englisch.
Nein, ist es nicht! (lacht) Plugin-Keyboards, würde ich sagen. Software-Studio. Auf eine Art wie Snd auf Acid, weißt Du was ich meine? Es klingt wie eine Snd-Platte auf 45, über die man einen Beat gelegt hat.
Ja, dies ist ein englischer Dubstep-Produzent. Ein gutes Beispiel für einen etwas deeperen Stil, nicht so abhängig von den sonst üblichen darken, wobbeligen Basslines.
Ich wünschte, wir hätten einen DJ-CD-Player dafür, denn der Bass ist nett. Es wäre schön, das erheblich langsamer zu spielen.
Ich hab das ein paarmal gespielt und auf -6 heruntergepitcht, und es funktioniert.
Ja, man müsste es so auf zwischen 120 und 125 BPM herunterbekommen, und es könnte wirklich deep sein.
Ist das ein Sound, den Du magst?
Nun, es erinnert mich an einen Sound, den ich mag. Aber die Pads, ich müsste raten, wenn ich sagen wollte, ob es Plugins oder Synth-Software-Keyboards sind, zumindest ist es ein Mastering-Stil, wo es hochgeladen wird und dann mit digitalem EQ und Plugins gearbeitet wird. Der Sound erhält dadurch diese Knusprigkeit, die mich nicht wirklich interessiert. Auf seine Art ist es zu clean, und zu scharf. Es ist ein Klang, der nur mit Digitalaufnahmen funktioniert. Was in Ordnung ist, es ist auf diese Art eben zeitspezifisch, und zeigt, dass ich überholt bin. Es ist wie House Music mit etwas zu unbehandelten Patch-Sounds. Das führt zu so einem industriellen Flavour. Das schreckt mich auch bei modernem Techno ab, ich mag das nicht.
Weil es vorgefertigt klingt?
Ja, aber auf eine Art die nicht zynisch ist. Ich kann es nicht genau sagen. Ich finde nicht die richtigen Worte um zu beschreiben, was mit diesem Keyboard-Sound ist. Aber ich mag den Bass.
Es ist definitiv für große Soundanlagen gemacht.
I picked this because of the extraordinary lyrics, which reappeared eventually in the house scene. Kerri Chandler did a version of it. And there are some rhythm patterns that you use as well. It was also a hit in the gay house scene. There are many house tracks based on this tune.
Personally, I really like Nina Simone a lot. I think there have been a lot of really bad remixes done of this track. For example, the Masters of Work remake added a really cheesy synth pad over her, so it’s really been bastardized a lot. But I think that’s part of the whole schmaltz of the gay house scene as well. That it has this way of reducing things to a cheap standard.
I think there’s a way in which it’s complicated to play music that verges more on gospel than soul in the club environment. And I think that’s something that Nina herself would like in a weird way. She identified herself less as a jazz musician, and more as a folk musician. And felt that she was channeled in the jazz corner by the industry. In her biography, she talks about being—if anything—a folk musician. That kind of cross-categorization is really interesting to me. And there’s also this idea of “How could her music get worked into a DJ set?”
Especially with this contrast between the euphoria of her live performances that is associated with her work, and her audience’s reactions to her work. She’ll play something like “Mississippi Goddamn,” this sad, tragic song. And the audience is like, “I love this song!” They’re cheering like idiots.
I think the same goes for this song. The way that she sings this song is not cheerful at all. That contrast struck me in that gay house context as well. It’s not the same sort of material that you ordinarily associate with it.
For sure, that’s something that I identify with in my own music. I often produce it from a perspective that people don’t sympathize with particularly. Or they approach it from an angle that is different from where I produce it from. They want to turn it into something, despite the complaints, that is energizing for a party. For me, I’m totally not concerned with this type of energy.
I really have a respect for her. I can empathize with this idea of immigration, of leaving the United States. It was under different circumstances, of course, but as an American who emigrated to Japan I feel a kind of simpatico with her.
Would you basically say that this streak in your work, where you reference things like this, is that you try to remain faithful to the original vibe of the material?
No. I don’t believe there is an original, or that there is something to be faithful to. I don’t believe in faith at all, in any form. I think this is important to clarify. That doesn’t mean just being kind of aloof or naïve about the connotations either. It’s about thinking about them in a way that allows for complications or recontextualizations as opposed to simply doing an homage or a tribute. Nina Simone has had enough tributes, you know? It’s OK if we don’t tribute always.
Gary Numan – Cry, The Clock Said (Beggars Banquet) 1981
Your Rubato series where you do piano renditions of Kraftwerk, Devo and Gary Numan. It struck me that all three of these acts have this weird relationship between technology and humanity. Was that your purpose with it?
Yes, of course. The purpose of the series was to investigate the techno pop icons that were the seminal acts of my childhood. And to think about how it polluted or influenced or channeled my own productions, as well as my own politics. And, of course, techno pop is very phallo-centric, Mensch Machine, so I wanted to also complicate the homo eroticism of this musical world that almost exclusively prevents the entry of women. Which makes it either a misogynistic or gay space. Or both. Or neither.
So all of the piano was composed on the computer, which I felt kept the technological association with these original artists and what I feel their vision was for using technology, but also to have the result be this neo-romantic piano solo that wasn’t a Muzak version, but going towards an avant-garde piano that—unless you were a big fan—you might not be able to pick out the melodies.
Sexuality this genre seems really warped in a way. As you said, like with Kraftwerk. The only time that they explicitly dealt with sexuality was on Electric Café on “Sex Object,” which is a really weird track.
Yeah. They had it in Computer World , they also had “Computer Love,” though. But it’s always about either the machine or the woman is the object. Always objectified. “Sex Object” has a very weird elementary school approach to gender.
Everybody likes to think of Kraftwerk as being very much in control of their image, but if you look at their catalogue, it’s a total mess. You have this Krautrock stuff. The Ralf und Florian album, that was cut from the catalogue for a long time because it didn’t fit in. They are much more eclectic than they want people to think.
I think their concept is also much more open than many people think. They left some leeway.
I think a lot of it is due to the record company. I’m coming at Kraftwerk as an American, and which records were distributed to us there may have been different than what was sold in Europe. So things like the first ones with the pylons were never seen until I was in New York. And they were, like, a million dollars. It was Autobahn , Trans Europe Express , Radioactivity , Computer World , Mensch Machine and that was it. If you could track down the Tour de France EP, it was a miracle.
How would you place Gary Numan in this? He also played with these ideas, but it always had a bit of a tragic note to it.
I think that the Dance album… Remember when you interviewed me about the Dazzle Ships album, and I talked about it being a kind of crisis moment when an artist is trying to figure out their own artistic direction, and they’re faced with the pressures of the major labels that they’re signed in and locked into. Dance was right around the same time, and I think it was Gary Numan’s crisis with the industry. When you look at it in relation to the kind of progress of the sound of his work—and at that time he did have a very linear channeling of what he was doing—this was the album that was the peak of this weird electronic Latin percussion thing. He had people from Japan working with him. His next album, Bezerker, was this more industrial thing. It was samplers and all this sort of stuff. For me, though, Dance was the height of this certain kind of sound that he had control over, but also dealing at the same time with pressure from the label.
Image-wise, what he did up to Dance certainly served him better than what he did after. I remember this sleeve of Warriors … Maybe the image that he portrayed earlier wasn’t exactly original, but it served his voice quite well. And his persona.
For me, the conflict of something like the Warriors cover, where he’s standing in this S&M gear, all leathered up with a baseball bat as though he’s some kind of bad ass road warrior guy, is that he has this posture that is totally faggy and limp. And the bleached hair. And then he’s not queer-identified. He’s straight-identified. He plays with gender in his lyrics, but he makes it clear in his interviews that he’s not. For me, it’s this contradiction between the kind of costume play that you could find in a gay club, but for me it was also a mismatch…like the leather bottom.
It also has to do with being a nerd that is really into science fiction. He also has this nerd component. His lyrics are all about Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner . He was totally into that stuff. And I think that’s also what drew me to him. And it also made me repress the impact that he had on me. By the time you reach 18 or so, it’s too tragic to say that you’re a Gary Numan fan. People react in this horrible way. But he, more than Devo or Kraftwerk, was really influencing me.
I used to plagiarize his lyrics and enter them into the school district contest and get ribbons for it. And when my father was upset with me about music and things, it was my Gary Numan records that he would lock away in the closet so that I couldn’t get at them. There was a lot of battle around Gary Numan in my adolescent life.
I think that’s why the “Cry, The Clock Said” has such a special connection for Comatonse. Because the first EP was basically a dub remix of this song. Read the rest of this entry »
In discussion with Terre Thaemlitz about the album “Dazzle Ships” by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (1983).
A lot of interesting electronic music was produced in 1983, the year “Dazzle Ships” was released. What drew you to Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, and this album in particular?
To be honest, I don’t recall exactly how I came to own this record. I think it was probably the usual budgetary situation where I had heard about OMD, I wanted to buy a record to check them out, and “Dazzle Ships” was the cheapest album to buy. As a teen, my record collection was built on unpopular records from the $1.00 bin. This was economically unavoidable. It also meant my point of entry for a lot of bands was through their “commercial flops”. And as an “outsider” who did not fit in with others and was therefore a flop of sorts myself, I found resonance with these failures at assimilation. Gary Numan’s “Dance” is a brilliant example – thinking back, to be 13 years old in Springfield, Missouri, and really into that album, it really signifies a kind of social isolation. A “normal” or “healthy” 13 year old could not be into that album. Impossible. So I believe this entire process of arriving at an album like “Dazzle Ships” must never be reduced to a simple matter of taste. It’s tied to issues of economics, class, socialization… in the US it is also tied to race and the divide between “black music” and “white music,” etc.
With this album, OMD experimented with elements beyond their Pop abilities, like shortwave recordings, sound collages and cold war/eastern bloc imagery. How would you describe the concept of this album?
I think “Architecture & Morality” already introduced a lot of those elements. I don’t know for sure, but as a producer myself I imagine this is partly related to the emergence of better sampling technology. They could use samplers to play back all kinds of sound elements, rather than being limited to synths and multi-track recording. I also imagine, drawing from my own experiences, that “Dazzle Ships” (like Numan’s “Dance”) represents a crisis in their relationships to their record labels and Pop music generally. A crisis with capitalism, the demand for sales, demand for audio conformity… and in this way the socialist imagery of the album is perhaps a reflection of their struggling against these processes. I remember reading some article – which I have no idea if it was trustworthy or not, but – it talked about the tremendous pressure labels put on OMD to become more Pop. I believe they were asked to finally decide if they wanted to be the new “Abba” or not, and if so, to change their style accordingly. This was a brutal trend in UK new wave. It destroyed the Eurythmics, The Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, Depeche Mode, and on and on… These are all UK bands, all extremely influential, and all totally boring in the end. Very few groups came out of these struggles for the better – one exception being Talk Talk, who did abandon their synth sound but became something marvelously unmarketable in another way. All of these New Wave bands had to become Rock bands capable of penetrating the US market, blah, blah – dumb American Dreams. Techno-Pop was dismissed as a fad by industry, and the artists seem to have gotten swept up in the hype of possible “success”. Ironically, of course, even if they got a brief flash of super-Pop success they alienated their core fans who had been drawn to them as other than Pop. I know I felt extremely betrayed. I still do, at age 41. When I was young, it was a personal betrayal, now it strikes me as a cultural betrayal. I could be totally wrong, but I guess for me, all of this feeds into the concept of “Dazzle Ships”, the title being a reference to massive battle ships. The idea of sending this album afloat in the marketplace, poised to attack and conquer as the label wants – but stylistically it also clearly sabotages any prospect of popularity. I think it was OMD’s attack on the labels that released it – a final kick in resistance before transforming into the Pop band that produced “Junk Culture” (although it could have also been a tremendous extension of A&R pampering in which the label let their artists run amuck – but that is so much less inspiring to me). And you have to forgive me, coming from the US, I have no idea how these records operated in Europe. I can imagine they got radio play. But not in the US. So my view is slanted by this. In the US these were all anti-Pop albums with no airplay, except in a few major cities. They had to be hunted down. And this camouflaged cover, in a way, also carried this metaphor of a product hidden in the marketplace, hard to find, elusive. But present. I like this metaphor – it predates the queer motto “We are everywhere” by a good number of years. Read the rest of this entry »
Die letzte Vinyl-Auskopplung vom brillanten Album “Midtown 120 Blues“, dessen wegweisende Strahlkraft man inmitten des großen aktuellen House-Einerleis gar nicht genug unterstreichen kann. Alle die das nicht tun, haben entweder ein schlechtes Gewissen oder warten darauf, dass endlich wieder was anderes saisonal ausgerufen wird, und sie sich nicht mehr mit diesen elendigen Harmonien abmühen müssen, diesem Tiefediktat, und überhaupt mit der ganzen Kratzbürstigkeit derjenigen, die den Wagen unbeirrt schon seit Jahren fahren auf den man gerade mal so halb aufspringen konnte. Natürlich richtet Thaemlitz seinen gerechten Zorn genau an diese Adressen, und wohl hat er seine Diskursideen schon viel komplexeren Kontexten eingeimpft, aber von der konsequenten Umsetzung seiner Kritik mit seiner eigenen Idee von House hätte sich in einer gerechten Welt so schnell keiner erholen können. Es sei denn, man redet sich mit einem wackeligen Aktualitätsgebot heraus und macht wieder hohle Party. Den Remixer von „Grand Central Pt. 1“ betrifft das jedenfalls keineswegs, denn Danilo Plessow setzt hier seinen Motor City Drum Ensemble-Höhenflug fort, und ersetzt ohne große Intensitätseinbußen die Fragilität des Originals mit dem massiven Bass-Wumms und House-Orgelakkorden des New York Sounds, mit dem man schon vor Jahren den Ignoranten ordentlich vor den Karren fahren konnte, die House pauschal als Luschenmusik ächteten. Die Hoffnung stirbt immer zuletzt.
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