tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46447981303051833462024-03-05T20:56:53.922-08:00Écoute s’il te plaîtNew and archival writing about music, by Nancy L. Stockdale. futurowomanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04772755069537635296noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4644798130305183346.post-35946731247711399792016-01-11T12:50:00.001-08:002016-01-13T06:28:09.496-08:00David Bowie, 1947-2016I woke up this morning to a text from the person in the kitchen: "Fuck! David Bowie died. Unbelievable. I just cannot fucking believe it. That's the last thing I expected."<br />
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I read it and said, out loud, "No!" then burst into tears.<br />
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It was the last thing he expected, and the last thing I expected, because we had just been talking on the 8th (Bowie's birthday, just a couple of days ago!) about how Bowie's new record, <i>Blackstar</i>, was a masterpiece. Bowie has had musical ups and downs over the past decades, but <i>Blackstar</i> really stands out as one of his very best records, ever. Indeed, back in November, I was in Denver at a conference, and the person in the kitchen sent me the video for the title track, saying, "This is extraordinary. It's finally his Scott Walker moment." I played "Blackstar" the single over and over and over, gobsmacked. <i>This is the Bowie we've been waiting for</i>, I thought to myself. <i>He's done it. </i><br />
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<i>Something happened on the day he died...</i><br />
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I got out of bed, teary-eyed, and met the person in the kitchen and we talked about what Bowie -- make that <i>David </i>-- meant to us. "What about his kids? What about Iman?" I said, as if I know them personally. "I was born in 1970. He's been here my whole life. It's the end of an era! I've never lived without him!" I knew immediately that I needed to write something, and write it today, to try (desperately) to express this idea of: <i>what did he mean to me?</i><br />
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Why was I crying over a celebrity? This will, of course, only make sense if you are a person who has ever had the all-consuming feeling that some kind of art is the most important thing in the world to you. For me, growing up, it was certain kinds of music. Particularly in that delicate era of my life from around the age of ten until my early twenties, music guided me. It guided me through my father's death (he died the same day as Bowie, strangely, although decades earlier), it guided me through the crazy world of school, of love and longing and loss, of moving away from home, of making mistakes, of accomplishments, of the transition of youth to adulthood. Music meant more to me than anything else, and I voraciously consumed it in many forms, as well as its alluring trappings -- adoration of the musicians, wearing or wanting to wear the fashions associated with certain types of it, adopting the language of it, dreaming of and then experiencing imageries and imaginaries and even the consequences of it. As a child, as a teen, and as a younger adult, I was a reader, I was a talker, I was a thinker, but most of all, I was a music listener, and an obsessive one at that. Maybe another day I'll write about how that obsession really manifested itself, but this piece isn't about me, even as it is, I suppose, totally about me.<br />
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<i>I am a DJ, I am what I play.</i><br />
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And among all of the musicians I adored, there were four icons that stood in a pantheon of influence unlike all the others: Freddie Mercury, about whom I'm lately writing in a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138821767" target="_blank">scholarly way</a>, but I have yet to make public my private writings about his influence on me, because they are still too raw and personal; Nina Hagen, who, when I finally met her -- in the most unlikely and most likely of all <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncVFmgMk050" target="_blank">Southern California possibilities </a>back in '96-- was the only person who made me completely star struck in my whole life; Kate Bush, about whose influence I've written <a href="http://ecoutestp.blogspot.com/2015/01/archive-review-of-kate-bushs-kick.html" target="_blank">here</a>; and then Bowie, whose death I can not yet absorb. Thinking about it today, those four have some key elements in common: they are all simultaneously unique and totally blank, projecting personas rather than selves to their audiences, which then allows their fans to make them into whatever they choose to make them; they are all mythologically huge in their sheer audacity, yet rather small when being themselves; and they are all chameleons, refusing to be defined or contained.<br />
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That's what attracted me to Bowie, clearly. Much ink has been spilled regarding Bowie's propensity to change his image, his characters, his style. But what that really meant to me was that it symbolized the potential of becoming anything, of being anywhere, of rejecting what the world sees and emerging as you want to be. Bowie notoriously ripped off so many people, including those whom he idolized, adored, and envied, people with whom he worked, people he mentored. People like Anthony Newley and Marc Bolan, Scott Walker and Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. But the thing is, he did all of the things he took from them and made them better, and was better at the business and the looks and the images, and so even the rip off became homage. But that isn't what made me love David Bowie.<br />
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What made me love Bowie was the fact that his music spoke directly to me, opened up worlds far beyond my lived experience to me, and it always felt like he was singing straight to me. This is best summed up by two distinct moments in my life. One happened in 1990, when I finally got to see Bowie live, for the first and only time. It was at <a href="http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/david-bowie/1990/cal-expo-amphitheatre-sacramento-ca-73d58ead.html" target="_blank">Cal Expo in Sacramento on the Sound + Vision tour</a>, and when he came to the stage, I experienced something I'd never seen before and have never seen since. Bowie walked on stage and the entire audience stepped back. A sea of 10,000 people stepped back, because he was just that big.<br />
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The second moment happened in 1999. I was sitting in the Cinematheque in Jerusalem, watching (for the first time, of countless many) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRY9K78uDRs" target="_blank">Todd Haynes' <i>Velvet Goldmine</i></a>. There's a scene in that exquisite film, when Christian Bales' character, Arthur Stuart, is watching Brian Slade, the pseudo-Bowie character come to life by Johnathan Rhys-Myers, on TV for the first time. Arthur's sitting in his parents' grimly British sitting room, awkward and teenage in all the worst ways, and he is so transfixed by the glam persona on the screen that he jumps up and screams, "THAT'S ME!!! THAT'S ME!!!"<br />
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I sat in the theatre and my heart stopped. <i>THAT </i>WAS ME, I thought, that's me! In that one moment, there had never, ever been a piece of cinema that so directly spoke to me, because my whole world in the biggest part of my teenage life had been just that -- sitting and watching, sitting and listening, sitting and reading, sitting and dreaming, THAT'S ME. And just as Arthur's parents looked at him like he was a freak, so I know a lot of the world of Modesto, CA in the 80s looked at me like that, too. But I didn't care. It didn't matter to me, because I had those people, those icons, those musicians who brought me what Bowie so perfectly titled "Sound + Vision," and that was an escape for me, as well as a promise.<br />
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It was a promise that I did not have to be trapped in a world I wanted so desperately to escape. And when I saw David, I knew that I could do that. <i>We can be heroes, just for one day.</i><br />
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During the walk home that night from the theatre, my flatmate and I talked about the film. I was fighting back tears talking about it, because <i>Velvet Goldmine </i>seemed to be a total encapsulation of everything that mattered to me, including both the potential of music and the loss that came in its aftermath, when the record stopped. And when my friend relayed that she had no ability to relate to what I was talking about, I determined that it was because she grew up in Manhattan, and in such a satiated and even waterlogged cultural site, there was no need for yearning, no struggle, and no desire.<br />
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But it wasn't just that I grew up in a place where I had to fight for culture and glamour that I fell in love with Bowie while still a child. It was simply because he conveyed the gamut of deep emotion with a level of creativity and flair that was both universal and deeply specific. Bowie spoke to those of us who did not fit in and did not want to fit in. If you were different, if you wanted more than the prescription society tried to dose you with, and if you had the ability to open your heart and open your mind, he could fill you up with both emotion and its absence. He was both everything and nothing, a blank slate and a full plate.<br />
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There's this moment in the "Let's Dance" video that sums up so much of why I love Bowie.<br />
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Like the mystical jewel that transforms Jack Fairy et al in <i>Velvet Goldmine</i>, Bowie's "Let's Dance" delivers a pair of red shoes from the ether to an Aboriginal couple on the outskirts of Sydney, a magical charm and a conduit for another world. After sampling what they have to offer--essentially, white privilege--the protagonists take the red shoes and smash them, then leave them behind in the dirt. There's a whole cultural critique specific to Australia and racism and postcoloniality there, of course, but there's also this rejection of the tropes of society and what it means to be "successful" and "civilized" and "respectable." And I just remember seeing that video for the very first time -- probably on <i>Night Flight</i> -- at the age of twelve or something, and gasping in a moment of epiphany. "The serious moonlight" from that moment has never left me. I didn't have to be like anyone else, ever. There's a price to pay for that, but when you care about the things I care about, and your priorities are not in line with the world around you, validation from such an icon is priceless.<br />
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<i>I've never done good things, I've never done bad things, I never did anything out of the blue. </i><br />
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I have much more to say about Bowie, and I know I can say it better. But I wanted to write this today, stream of consciousness perhaps, so the shock of his death, mixed with my inexpressible gratitude, would register. All I can say today is, This is how a icon, an artist, a legend dies.<br />
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<i>Oh I’ll be free</i><br />
<i>Just like that bluebird</i><br />
<i>Oh I’ll be free</i><br />
<i>Ain’t that just like me</i><br />
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<b>Thank you, David. I love you. Rest in Power. </b>futurowomanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04772755069537635296noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4644798130305183346.post-5464364459273768272015-01-11T18:17:00.001-08:002015-01-11T18:51:30.252-08:00Archive: The Semantics of Sound: Listening to Andreas Ammer (published at Deep Mag, 2001)<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">[I was lucky enough to interview Andreas Ammer back in 2001, after being a fan of his extremely unique <i>hoerspielen </i>for some time before that. Since this interview, he's continued to make amazing works of audio art. And I must confess that I always listen to <i>Crashing Aeroplanes </i>on every transcontinental flight I take.]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;"><b>Andreas Ammer interviewed by Nancy L. Stockdale</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">Andreas Ammer is one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers of contemporary <i>hoerspielen </i>("radio plays") coming out of Germany today. But despite his credits as the author of "texts" and "konzepts" on the inner sleeves of CD soundtracks, it may be more appropriate to view Ammer as a collage-artist, more of a builder of texts than a writer of them. Indeed, his varied catalogue of works over the past decade reveals a man committed to integrating sound sources into his texts which transport the listener to a living world beyond words, all the while proclaiming a distance from those same texts that rejects commentary beyond the individual listener's interpretation. It appears to the outsider that within Andreas Ammer rests a fervent desire to paint a picture for his listener without manipulating the reception; what matters is as much the process as the comment at the end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">Key to Ammer's appeal is the way in which he blends his visions with the composers and musicians with whom he collaborates. Indeed, listening to the results of his complex and varied partnerships with people such as FM Einheit, Ulrike Haage, and Console, it is often difficult to find the spot where text ends and music begins. Such successful aural blurring speaks volumes about Ammer's commitment to making music out of words, an ability to reshape language past literal—or literary—meaning into something far more intimate and contradictory than concrete definitions. The shift from pop music to symphonic linguistics is subtle but powerful, and always provocative.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">I met with Andreas Ammer to find out more about how he sees his artistic contributions while he was working in Los Angeles in March 2001. What follows are glimpses of Ammer's self-reflections on his various projects, as well as the ways in which he brings his concepts to life and the partnerships he has developed with other musicians thus far.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;"><b>Geschichte Ist Ein Engel Being Blown Rückwärts</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">Ammer has used historical sound sources as textual fragments in a variety of his pieces, often confronting history head-on with a manipulation of original texts and recordings that rearranges traditional chronologies and interpretations into something other than expected. In this way he is taking part in a larger Western rejection of history as dictated from above; but whereas most of that frustration is masked in a belief in the authenticity of the History Channel and a trend toward the Hollywoodization of historical events, Andreas Ammer is far more subversive, and far more honest. In their epic three-act sound opera <i>Deutsche Krieger</i>, Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit illuminated the absurdity of historical commentaries by turning 20th century-Germany's darkest hours into pop music, letting the primary actors speak for themselves against a soundtrack of tension and fear wrought from the contemporary media of the eras in question. Funded by government-sponsored radio divisions for movements revolving around Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler, but denied government money for the final piece about the Red Army Faction, Ammer and Einheit nonetheless produced the final segment and brought all three together to blow the lid off of preconceived historical concepts.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: As an historian I just got blown away with the way in which you are using primary documents and the media to create new primary documents...but also art that is manipulating history. And so I thought I would start by asking you about the way in which you see yourself manipulating history and the contribution you are making to that larger act? I think the best example of that is <i>Deutsche Krieger</i>, in which you have completely manipulated the sounds and the message behind them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Well, in fact we stopped manipulating too much the nearer it gets to the present, when it has to do with our personal concerns, to our materials. You know there's three parts, and the first part is very far away, so nobody can remember; and even nobody did remember that there were actual traces—audio traces—left. Very few people know that existing sounds were there, that sound recordings existed from the time of the First World War. Even finding those little pieces—it's about 90 seconds, something like that—was so exciting!!! I said, "We have to do a radio play out of this." I made one first alone, and I was not satisfied. Only about the First World War. It was without a musician, and it was really not good. So then I asked Mufti—FM Einheit—"Do you want to mix that thing with me?" and he said, "Of course," and we did it, and we decided to make this trilogy. It was kind of weird because it was very natural to choose those three parts, you know? What was going on in the '70s in Germany—it was not a world war, it was a war of twenty people against the state—but it was a symbolic war. A kind of late hippie movement, but a very violent hippie movement. And we could connect those three episodes; one of the First World War where the media was the recording on phonographs...for the Second World War it was clear, it was radio coming up, the Nazis using radio in such a furious way that isn't done today, that might sound very dangerous, but they were so aware what this medium could do and how it could get very close to the people, how you can manipulate people with the media. And third were the German terrorists, they were the first who used television for their aims. They took this very famous hostage in Germany, and said, "OK, we've got this hostage, and we want this and this and this, and please answer us in the evening news." And they got a VHS sent to all the stations of the hostage speaking: "I'm a prisoner beginning on the Second of July and please free me!" And so this was broadcasted on the news, and so it was the first news—first not war, it was a civil war, not even a civil war, but it was—took place in the television. So we had three battles going on, and we had three medias connected to it, and that was kind of a weird idea because it has Ulrike Meinhof, who is in Germany a very dangerous woman, but who is, for the Leftists, kind of a heroine, too. Nobody agrees with what she was doing, but nearly everybody agrees with what she was saying and wanted. She was a journalist before and she said, "OK, this society is still so Fascist, all the same people being in the positions," and she was writing this in articles beforehand. She became kind of an icon for the Leftist movement. And you might not have heard that our Foreign Minister [Joschka Fischer] now was accused that he 30 years ago was in contact to someone who was in contact with her—it's still not solved in Germany, this thing. So you've got the three [histories] together. We were very free in arranging the materials in the First World War, so we even edited single words from a poetry reading we had, to put up a new story, and we had this one speech of the German Kaiser, and we edited every word and put new poems out of his Declaration of War. Because we thought dealing with history in the right way was a history of media, because the media are making fakes all the time. In fact, the first document we have, that was the Declaration the First World War in Germany, it was an original sound recording, but it was a fake. Because it was a speech that was not recorded when the speech was recorded, but two months later the Kaiser went to a recording studio and he said, "Oh, I've made this speech, let's record it for history!" That was the first fake, and since the first original thing was a fake, so we felt, we too could do fakes on our own, and to make kind of fun. But in the Second World War it was not fun anymore—it was in abstract no fun, and it was not fun for us listening to Hitler all the time; we sat in the studio and it was so awful, weeks listening to that...I think the second part is the worst part of it. So the third part, we got personally involved. We tried to put ourselves back, the music changed, the music is more—more music. The first two parts are more collage, the third part is more getting into our lives. It gets more 4/4 music and so on, getting also more sound that goes to the heart, and it was our personal reflection with the material. Hearing this woman speak who was an icon, nobody in Germany knew that these documents exist.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: And so you found them in an archive?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: No, not even in an archive. Broadcasting stations didn't support us for the third piece because of terrorism and so on, but you could set up an underground system. I told this man who was working as a publisher to do this, and knew that he will know other ones—"Oh yes, I have a tape here." So it went on, and after three months we had original sounds by Ulrike Meinhof. And we had some connections to broadcasting stations who had some other material, and so we managed to find all that. And it's not in the official archives, too, it's really a kind of sound archeology.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS. You have created a new archive then with your piece, in a way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: That would be the most beautiful thing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: How has "Ulrike Meinhof Paradise" been received in Germany, since you weren't able to get government funding for it like the other two?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: It was not broadcasted, so...! We didn't get any money for it!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: So only if people buy it do they hear it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yeah. The whole piece was received with, is one allowed to do that? Can we make music out of Hitler? And can we have such a non-reflective view about terrorism? Because there's no reflection on it, just the documents, and all the reflection is done through the music, and how the documents are treated, and that is what people said. They had fear about it, because everybody knows that music can create moods, and that was what we were trying to do with those pieces. Because two things that go mostly, I think, to the bodies and the minds: it is pop music that can be understood in all the planet, and the other thing, that is the Opera. Those two are different things; you know, a pop song concentrates all the moods one had in a life in three minutes, and it works. And the Opera does it the other way round, an opera takes very intense moments and stretches it. That's why all the people die for two hours in opera, you know? You have to stretch these moments, these intense moments. And both of those we are trying to do. So, put in the power of pop music, and put in the intensity of an opera, and put them intellectually together. So that's what we are trying to do in those works, just to get some intensity in it. And not to get too...we never want to do a rock opera, that's the worse we could do. What a great end later! To do a rock opera!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: My own personal opinion of that piece is that the music is very good at setting that mood of commentary without actually putting a commentary into the words. I think especially at the end of the Hitler piece, the silence that emerges from it at the end is very powerful commentary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Even after hearing it many people say, "You can't put a piece like that to write commentary on it," but the good thing about when you work with sounds like that is that everybody's bringing his own history [to it]...in Germany naturally everybody has an opinion about terrorism, and has an opinion about Nazis, and not so much about the First World War...but the hard thing about doing things only for the ear is how to create a world. You can easily create it in the cinema, you can easily create it in a book, but it's very hard to create a world only for audio things, because sounds are not semantic, you know? You can hear this [knocks on the table] but you don't know what it means. There are very few sounds that are semantic. There is the telephone ringing and there's the sea-side, there's birds singing...I think you won't come to about more than twenty semantic sounds. The rest is abstract, abstract art. From there, it's very hard with abstract art to create a semantic mood—that's what we want to do. You only have to say "Hitler" and everybody brings their moods with them. And then you can play with this. Even in the Hitler part we tried not to do it very drastic and military...We also tried not to do it in a very sentimental way...I think it was the hardest thing to do and it didn't quite work...I think, it's 60% of what's possible, I'm not so satisfied...I know what I didn't want to do, I'm not so satisfied with what we did instead.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: How did people react to that piece when it was broadcast?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: We don't know, you never know.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Do people talk to you about it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: I had some public performances, not doing it live, but sitting in a small theatre, and many people said, "You can't do it!" And they were asking, "What are you? You're not a fascist, you don't look like a fascist! But you're doing Hitler and you're doing this terrorist woman, so what are you?" And that's what I like about those three people, you don't get them in one, you know? One might be a heroine, but it's a heroine you don't have to deal with, and the other is the most worst that happened to earth, but put them all three together, it creates kind of a portrait of the last century, the good and the bad—mostly the bad, the history that was a bad history. What many people said is, You can't deal with the Second World War in twenty-two minutes. Like, that's a little bit American! You know, in twenty-five minutes I'm going to tell you everything about the holocaust! But we tried to get to the pop song way, with a very few simple impressions and to put it in a small story, but it doesn't mean that it can't be touching, or mean very much to you when you hear it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;"><b>Literary DJ</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">Ammer's earliest works with FM Einheit revolved around traditional classics from the Western literary canon: <i>Radio Inferno</i> sent up Dante's masterpiece meditation on Hell, <i>Apocalypse Live </i>was conceived as the televised <i>Weltuntergang </i>projected from the pages of Revelation, <i>Odysseus 7 </i>cast Homer's famous hero into space. Their most recently broadcast works, however, have left fiction behind, but the rendering of art inspired by primary texts remains. <i>Frost 79°40'</i>—an elegant collaboration between Ammer/Einheit and Finnish electronic maestros Pan Sonic—tells the story of British explorer Robert Scott's unsuccessful bid to be the first man to reach the South Pole through the letters and diaries of the protagonists, while <i>Marx Engels Werke </i>tackles the worldview of perhaps the most influential ideological partnership of modern history. However, their current work-in-progress for the European Broadcasting Union, <i>Crashing Aeroplanes</i>, was—like <i>Deutsche Krieger</i>—inspired solely from sound samples, as was Ammer's most recent release with electronic musician Console, <i>Official Olympic Bootleg</i>. Nevertheless, whether he is working with sound samples or canonical texts, Ammer maintains an ardently postmodern distance from his creations, commentating via the power of a cut-and-paste editor rather than a self-righteous pundit. For Ammer, the texts—oral, aural, or visual—stand apart and alone.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: So, looking at the things you've done with Mufti, you seem to always gravitate toward apocalyptic sorts of themes concerning the canon of literature, and radically shifting it, but still remaining within the sense of something epic. I just got <i>The Seven Dances of the Holy Ghost</i> [co-produced with Ulrike Haage] so I was just listening to that, and in that too you are working with religion which is the ultimate epic. So I am curious about how you envision yourself in writing those texts and the way in which you take on classics, like <i>Odysseus </i>for example, putting him in space.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: So we don't do literature anymore! That's just because we decided that's enough, we had done everything so what else could we do? From the Bible and Dante and Homer—what else can you do? My first work together with FM Einheit was the Dante piece, and it was no great idea, in fact I didn't know it when I suggested to do it, 'cause I wanted to read it once, and I tried it twice and I failed! So the only way to read it is to do work with it! What's funny about <i>Radio Inferno</i> is that...it might sound stupid if I tell it now, but it's re-defined this stupid thing called "Radio Play." No one did a radio play like that before, and very many people do radio plays like that now. So to do it with that extent of music, and with that role of the music...normally it was, one says, "blah blah blah." and then the other says, "blah blah blah," and then when it gets dramatic the music was coming in. It was clear we didn't want to do that. We wanted the music to be part of it like an opera. And literature? I hope I never will write a book. Not because I don't like books, I like books very much; because I think of so many beautiful books I couldn't write. One is better when those exist, but there are so many forgotten books, and even the greatest books are kind of forgotten. But I don't want to make a weird thing, "Oh, Dante's such a great writer!" It's just that you can look at those books and just take some sentences that go to your heart and your mind and make your own story out of it. A friend of mine often called it something—"literary DJ"—putting a beat from here and a melody from here and mixing it up together. In fact, that's the way I work very much, having lots of books around me, and reading here, "Oh that sounds good, I'll take that down," and then you have just one sentence that you like. There is a better example from <i>Apocalypse Live</i>. At the end there is a kind of blues song. The text there, it isn't changed from the Bible, it's exactly one sentence from the Bible, only one sentence, it makes up about 4 minutes, and in the sentence there is a list of what goods will be destroyed when the world goes down. And it's very surrealistic—I forgot what it is, elephants and camels and bread and very weird things coming together—and it's the perfect surrealistic poem, but it's written in the Bible and when you read it in the Bible it doesn't sound surrealistic. But if you take it out—and you must not change anything—just cut off the sentence in the beginning and the end and you don't mention God anymore. That's what I did in this way, anywhere I think God was mentioned in this sentence I put it out because I didn't want to make a metaphysical piece. So the sentence works now as a sentence in the Bible and as song lyric and as a kind of surrealistic poem. I could not...those weird assemblance of things could never come to my mind, even if I said, "OK, think about the twenty weirdest things to put together in a poem." It would never have come to my mind. I don't make jokes of those texts, you know? I take them very honest. I like them—not so much the Bible—but I think they're wonderful passages, wonderful texts, and you don't have to destroy them to use them, you can use them to take them out of their context or leave them in. Take it like you do a sample, and you make something new with it, and you put it in a context that's your own context. On Apocalypse you don't get it so much on the CD, it was a stage show, you know? And we had in between the texts the most famous anchorman of German television [Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs]. And we filmed him and he was sitting in his normal news studio where he sat all the time, and there he was doing the in-between texts. And he'd say, "OK, we've heard enough now from Babylon, let's see how things are down over there." So there's a slight change, we took all the things in quite different contexts, with commercial breaks...but everything stays its own. I don't make a joke about the anchorman, I leave the anchorman alone. And we had a real pater, from a cloister, reading those Greek texts, and we left him being a pater. Even the three singers, one free jazz guy Phil Minton, and the second was Alex Hacke from Einstuerzende Neubauten, and the third was a countertenor [David Greiner]—the three most different people you can imagine—this old free jazzer who all the time is going [does his best impression of free jazz improv singing!], and Alex is kind of a Hank Williams fan with a cowboy hat on and boots on, and the countertenor was very stiff with a white collar, and they didn't dress up for the show, they just came how they are. That can also make a collage, in this case out of the singers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is the multi-linguistic character of a lot of the work that you do, and how you see yourself as an artist working with several different languages in the pieces and the theory behind that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: It's not so much theory behind that, it's that I like language as sound, very much, and so, from the beginning I liked very much when I started being very concerned with sound poetry. And in fact my first radio play that I did some fifteen years ago was about sound poetry, but I recognized that when you use a language you don't speak it's for you like sound poetry. So, I don't speak Italian, and so when we had this Italian artist speaking the Dante voice [in Radio Inferno] that was perfectly for me like sound poetry. It had nothing to do that it's a semantic language for other people, so I can take this and put it up as a wall of sound that has meaning for others but not for me. And I like that very much, and sometimes it comes out of the actors. Phil Minton doesn't speak one single word of German, so if I want to work with him I have to write English texts, and he will make sound poetry out of them! That's the way it goes, and I like it! It's kind of weird because sometimes I spend so much time writing texts for him and then he speaks it and nobody can understand! And I like that very much!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: So, you don't have a sense of European identity being across the borders, or anything like that?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: No, nothing like that. It's just to get away from the content a little bit, and to speak again of the Opera, it's like, if you go to Opera it's more beautiful in Italian even if you don't understand Italian. And even for us listening to English or American pop music it's the same; for us you don't get every word, but you get very into this music, and maybe you get more into this music because you don't understand everything. And it's for me to create a natural way of not understanding everything, to use so many languages that you can't understand everything. I tried to escape from literature, because we've done so much and I thought I must try some new things, so I, with Mufti, did this one Frost about Robert Scott, this man on the [South] Pole, the second man on the pole, and now we did the Marx thing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: I think that <i>Frost </i>piece is amazing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: I like that very much. Pan Sonic, they're so wonderful. What I like about it is really the music. It was the first ever only writing for one actor [Günter Rüger]. And it's a 72 year old man, and it was a stage show, too, and what I liked about that was that it's about a great, heroic man that's writing all about this great, heroic fight to the pole, and what a great British man he was, and there's a small, 72 year old man, you even hear it in the voice a little bit, you hear it, he's very breakable! You don't dare to touch him—"Mir ist kalt! I'm freezing!" And then the Pan Sonic music in the background.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: It's great though, because that edge in his voice, it shows to me as a listener the regret of the whole experience.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: That's what we tried to do...And it's normal literature but you can't write texts like that, you can't write a thing like this, and I can't write it. I like very much literatures, written words that are authentic. It needn't be a good text if it's a true text. And I changed very little in those texts, I just left out to bring some rhythm in them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;"><b>Turning Away From the Linguistic Turn</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">Despite a conscious decision to abandon literature as a primary influence, <i>Marx Engels Werke</i>, the most recently broadcast Ammer/Einheit production, keeps the pair grounded in fictive literature of a kind, since humans have thus far failed to implement the ideology so eloquently espoused in the Communist Manifesto. But the turn Ammer and Einheit have taken away from canonical prose is made more dramatic with their current project, <i>Crashing Aeroplanes</i>, an endeavor which injects art into the final moments of mundane routines gone irrevocably wrong. In these two projects there is the potential for as much outrage and reflection as in <i>Deutsche Krieger</i>, both in the context of societies' reactions to human decision-making in the name of ideology as well as the limits of artistic expression. How far can these composers legitimately go in their quest for making every thing musical?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: So, you presented <i>Marx Engels Werke</i> in Dresden, right? Is that true?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: How was it received? What's the difference in the audience in Dresden as opposed to in Munich?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: They were not yet ready for it. It was very more distant—"What are they doing?" It comes out, I think, of the communist education. They are not free to think about it yet. They don't feel...I think...they feel a little bit distracted when we do it this way, not commentating it. All the time, every interview we did for it the question was, "So, are you fond of communism or are you against?" And we always said, "Yes!" But I don't write a piece like that to say, "Oh yes, I am against communism!" or "I am fond of communism." That's weird, but in the East everybody wanted to know that. And even in the piece there's no answer, because we did it like the other ways, we just took the text and we made something out of the text which hasn't been there before. And we have treated the texts in an honest way, and we didn't look down on it. We're not making fun of it, we're not making a hero out of it, we're just saying, "OK, this is a text, we sing it!" And in the East they were...there was applause in the end but it was much more silent than it was in other venues. The last show was really great applause, but the audience was so young, I think they heard of most of the texts for the first time. In the theatre in Dresden there were more people between 30 and 60 and they were sitting there thinking. But it was very good to do it there, and in fact, one of our actors, Günter Rüger, he is from the East. He's the only one who could sing the DDR anthem the right way. He taught us! But we didn't want to have this communistic kitsch, you know? We didn't want to have this. There's no communistic songs... no. We had a plan to do it in the beginning but we eliminated those parts. It just has to stand apart. There's another story in this, not to take going into it...basically, it's to listen to what was said there. And it's still a good text. Marx was a great, great writer!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Absolutely. And I think in fact the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> is so brilliant because of its simplicity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yes, and it's the same text how I said before. Everybody's going in with his own feelings. He's going with a feeling into it, and the only thing he gets back is a text. And the text, it doesn't put those feelings into you. <i>Marx Engels Werke</i>, I think it's the most extreme thing from the musical side we did, it's very loud, louder than anything we did, and it's even very strong beats, and Caspar Broetzmann on the stage making such noises—people really [grabbing their ears] saying, "Ok, that's it!" And when Phil Minton had his 60th birthday [during rehearsals] we found out he's the youngest of our singers! Such a thing is going far, far from punk rock and Phil Minton is 60, and we had an actress playing Marx [Jennifer Minetti] and I think she was 63, and we have a very old, very nice man playing Lenin [Günter Rüger], and he's 73! But we didn't get it till we had Phil's birthday because it was so natural. Our drummer [Saskia von Klitzing], I think she's about 23, so we have a range from 23, Mufti and me being about 40, and our frontmen being far from 60! We like that very much. It was not a concept, not a concept in mind, but I think it was a sub-conscious concept, not to have a youth thing, not to have a thing...for...well, for nobody! It's a whole range—from 25 to 73—the ages on stage all working together.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: How much do you guide your actors as far as the interpretation that they give your texts?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: As less as possible. Part of that has to do with, we only work with actors we know. If I choose Phil Minton as an actor, it makes no sense to say, "Phil, can you make that sentence very clear?" That would be a very stupid idea! So if you want to have Phil Minton on the show, then you want to have him on the show because he's dealing with texts and music this way. And I like to work with people who have their own way. I don't like to work with people who say, "OK, here's a text, what should I do?" I don't like it, because I don't want to say to anybody how he should do a text. I like to work with people who are such artists of their own that they want to do a text in their way. And that goes both with musicians and with actors, so...mostly I don't like to work too much with actors, because they often say, "OK, how do you want to make me do this?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: How does the process work when you are working with a composer, what you choose to put in the book versus what they're bringing into the music, who's influencing who and how that negotiates itself?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Normally we don't say one is the author and one is the composer, because our way of working together is not that way. Those works are not works of texts with a composer doing the music besides...With FM Einheit I've worked eight years, so we know each other, we've spent very many days in studios and on stages together, where we know each other very well and...if you have a stage show, it's clear that the text must be a text to go into rehearsals, and mostly the music is developed during rehearsals, but there has to be a text first. But it's not important because when you have...anybody speaking the text and the music developing to it you can throw the text away. Often Mufti says, "Oh, that's not a good text,"—he never said this but I can feel this from him—so I throw it away. And often I've said to him, "That's not the kind of music I imagined," and he said, "OK, I'll throw it away, OK, but I imagined it." We don't have very much roles, I think we choose each other because we can trust each other. Very often he does a music I don't like, but I choose him as a composer...and I'm not a composer, so I have to trust a musician, and I think it's the other way round. I think he often doesn't like the texts but he chooses me as a man who has to deal with the world and the content, and he has trust me for a very long time. I've trusted him for a very long time and the music, and sometimes he's destroying my texts at the same time as I'm destroying his music. But we never give anything away to the other, or say "OK." We put it together and see how it fits together, and if it doesn't fit, mostly we both change! And something's wrong!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: I'm sure that over time you've developed an unspoken language in a way between yourselves and the way you work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Not unspoken, but we don't talk so much about what we're going to do...we're talking about, OK, let's do a piece about this and this. We have just done a piece about <i>Crashing Aeroplanes</i>...</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: So what is that about? Airplanes crashing?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yes, really. You know, from the beginning I started making radio plays, I always looked for sound sources that had some expression. That's where I first came—I think it's about 12 years ago—to these sound sources of the First World War, and it's moved on for years to the <i>Deutsche Krieger</i>. I got this idea about this Black Box—all the things recorded when an airplane crashes, and I thought, "OK, we might..." You can on the net download some of those files. Some people say it's not a thing you should make music about, but I think art has to go too far. It's a little bit too far, but I trust us. We didn't harm anybody with it, we didn't make fun of anybody. So we hook up some original sounds of crashes. We have this one crash, it's a plane that fell down on Amsterdam about fifteen years ago, we had a whole entire eight minutes of the flight, from lift off to...</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: From the Black Box?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: No, this one was not from the Black Box, it was a dialogue with the Tower. And that was very impressive, because the first time you hear how people act facing death, it felt so impressive because they don't panic. They're doing routines, they know what's going on, and you know, you hear the people on the ground, "No, say that again, you have fire on engine three and four...?" "Correct, fire, engine three and four." And the people on the ground couldn't believe it. It was three minutes after take-off. It's very weird, and it was kind of hard to get the sound quality, it's not very good, in fact it's very bad! But you oddly don't care! Kind of hard to treat the material so that you get the situation, so you have to repeat some lines, and you have to work with speakers, but they don't make commentaries about it, they just make the situation clear. Mostly just time is running, and it's, "Amsterdam airport, 18:04," and then, "plane blah blah blah it's just taken off," and then, "18:07 plane blah blah blah engine three and four burning." And if you want to mention what was happening you can bring in the sound sample. In one piece it's very impressive I think, you hear they're going down, but it's not like Hollywood, they got very concentrated, and you hear those people concentrating, you hear this. Only in the last two seconds there's some crying, and it's, "going down, going down," and that's it. It's even impressive when you tell the story. We tried to capture that impression. So it has happened, so why don't we try to make art of it? We can't ask them anymore, but you can listen to it on the web, so why not try to honor those people, how their death was?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: So do you have anything in that piece that's reaction on the ground after the crash?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: No, we don't do any reactions. We didn't do it, because we're just concentrating on those planes, we've nothing outside, no commentaries, just imagery from some of the routines that go on in a normal flight, you know, the stewardesses, "put on your blah blah blah..."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: What's the music like in the piece?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: It's much analog synthesizers, and on two tracks we tried to develop rhythms out of signals, you have all that [Morse-like airplane static], to make rhythm of them, but mostly you don't hear the original anymore.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">For the past few years Ammer has collaborated with Munich electronics wizard Martin Gretschmann, a.k.a. Console, producing three <i>hoerspielen </i>which have also been released as CDs on the pair's own label, Code: <i>Loopspool</i>, a reflection on Walter Benjamin, <i>Bugs and Beats and Beasts</i>, award-winning music from the world of entomology, and The <i>Official Olympic Bootleg</i>, a sound history of the modern Olympic games. The Ammer/Console productions are quite different from those Ammer has done with Einheit, illustrating further his malleability and aptitude for shaping his concepts around the strengths of his musical partners. What remains similar, however, is Ammer's use of collected sound sources to direct the plot of his work; and whether the topic is philosophy or mass culture, the inspiration comes from something already in existence, begging to be morphed into another thing which is entirely different and original.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Console and I have our small CD, it's a 3-inch CD about Walter Benjamin [entitled <i>Loopspool</i>], it's kind of similar to <i>Deutsche Krieger</i>—it's not so much about history, it's much more about philosophy—and its also a work only working on sounds, dealing with the ideas of Walter Benjamin, who once said in his <i>Passagenwerk</i>, "We have all this rubbish of history, and you know what I will do with it? I will give them their purpose back, all this rubbish, I will use it!" He said it much more beautifully though! And that's what we did. I had some lectures from philosophers that were known to Walter Benjamin, and I had them talking about him, [Theodor] Adorno and [Ernst] Bloch [and others]...It's just about those philosophers remembering him...Adorno, he says he looked like a wet rodent! Here was one of the greatest philosophers and he looked like a rodent! And we had some passages from Bloch, and we cut it and edited it together as if they are having a struggle. And the music Console does, it's more electronic, more clubby, even a little bit easy-listening style. I like this very much because it's very un-upset, the piece. I always imagined those people sitting around a campfire, like remembering, "Oh, you remember, there was Walter there...!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Are you going to be doing more work with Console?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yes, definitely. Working together with him started out to be quite the opposite of Mufti but getting together with him started out to be just the same. Just because there we were, listening to each other and bringing the pieces together. Musicians are very good in hearing, and they're very grateful about content, because that's what they can't do. And I'm very grateful about emotions from the sound, 'cause that's what I can't do. And if you trust a musician, if you like him, it's very good! Console never had heard a radio play before until I think in fact ours!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Maybe that's good, maybe he's not corrupted.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yeah! I mean, I hadn't listened to a radio play before I did my first one. All the people who say, "Oh, what have you done to our radio play?!?!" I didn't know what I was doing to radio play! And the first time I met him, he's about 15 years younger than I am, and he was....And then he got into this production of the Walter Benjamin thing, and I think he was astonished by himself! He started working on a structure of six or eight minutes, and he put it all together, and he had done 80% of the music or 90% of the music, and when you're listening to it for—what is it, 25 minutes?—for the first time, I think he was really astonished at himself that he had done this piece that was 25 minutes and it's about a philosopher he'd never heard before! And he said, "Oh, it's interesting! I like it!" And all in the studio where he works is still very much independent bands around, and they said in the beginning, "What are these radio plays?" and now they play the Bugs and Beats things in front of their concerts! Just when the audience comes in the concerts! And then afterwards is coming an independent guitar band! And they were all suspicious about me in the beginning, but that has vanished totally.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Tell me about <i>Bugs and Beats and Beasts</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: My idea was, let's make a radio play just with the sound of insects, because it's a sound source, because—choose your instrument! Like a composer says, "OK today I will write a concerto for 2 violins," so I choose insects! But mostly the entire piece, there's no instrument playing on it, just one cello, but you don't hear it as insect sounds. So I like it very much when I have a conceptual idea and this idea manages to work. Console and I thought we'd make music, I did that because the sounds are so close to contemporary electronic sounds that you don't hear that it's a cicada. And you make one piece of this sound spectrum and you can develop very good bass drum from it. You don't hear it's not a bass drum! It's only important for us.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: That's so interesting though because it says a lot about where music comes from, the human desire to replicate sounds that are already there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yeah, that's what kind of the text is there about, taken from scientific books about insects—how they make sounds, and how their sexual life is—just descriptions; and they're so weird, because they live in such a weird world, those insects! We did one more thing called <i>Official Olympic Bootleg</i>. It's perfectly in German! It was also all the original sounds from broadcasts from Olympic Games. And what I liked about it was that you never have to say that this is a broadcast of 1936, this is one of 1984, because you hear it, just at that moment you hear—not even what they say, but howit's recorded—how the voices are, how fast they speak, you hear that it's from '36, '52 or '84. It's very weird!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: It's funny how the Olympics get this national imprint when the whole idea behind it is that it's an international thing meant to break down barriers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yeah, but that was not the thing for me. The thing I liked was, we have those artificial heroes that in fact don't mean anything. But [the commentators] have these very upset voices! You can lose any sense of content with the commentary, they just, say "And they're off!" and the commentator—"They're off?" and it goes so quick, they can't get with their voice right behind them what's happening, who's first, and who's second and all, because everything goes so quick. One thing I tell often is about the radio broadcasts of soccer games. They're very, very close to what radio can do, because you never get an idea who is running from the right side, from the left side, and you don't get...you even don't get this cinema thing, but you understand everything. And that's very close what radio can do and has to do. It has not to make up for the cinema, it has not to say, "OK, this guy is coming from behind, and this girl has such hair," It has to do it in another way. And sport broadcasts I think are where it's mostly working. And you—in the moment when you hear it—understand what is happening without having a picture. So, that's why for this thing there's not so much content in it, it's just about the voices and the history of the voices of the thing. Actually it's the same German history in it again. We have some broadcasts of '36, we have some broadcasts of '72 when there was the Arab thing in the Munich Olympic Games, and we have some broadcasts of the Ben Johnson thing, but only it's not important. It's much more about how the century unfolds in the way that the 100 meters is broadcasted. And when we worked together on this piece it also was a live piece, but it was a very simple live piece, just Console and me and one DJ, and Console and me were at our Apple notebooks, and we have everything stored in there. His holds the music and I totally hold commentaries. We met in our rehearsal room for about, I think, ten days or so. We met at 11:00 and we went on trying out what we can do until I think 7 or 8 o'clock, and everybody was bringing in what he has programmed the last night. What Console and I did was to edit those things and get a rhythm out of them, during daytime we rehearsed, and then went back to our places doing the programming till three or four in the morning, and meeting again at 11:00—"look what I've done this night!" And I brought my things, and Console brought his things, and we rehearsed together for eight or ten hours, and then went back to our places, and all the time working. Working together, it was as close as you can get to something with somebody responsible for content and somebody responsible for non-content sound things, because it was perfectly one-to-one working. So, sometimes I had some speech loops where I said, "OK, let's make a track out of this one." Sometimes he had a rhythm and said, "Don't you find some voices for that?" It was how it's supposed to be.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;"><b>The Logistics of the Thing</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">In an era when so much mindless McPop promoting fantasies of the unattainable gets dressed up in midriff-revealing sequined numbers and sold to billions throughout the world, the complex intellectual productions of Andreas Ammer can be downright boggling. But perhaps even more boggling—at least to someone living outside of Germany—is that the government often helps sponsor the <i>hoerspielen </i>he writes. This links his work to an artistic tradition beyond mainstream pop music, while at the same time, allows him to subvert time-honored cultural expectations and consumption by taking advantage of a well-entrenched media institution and tweaking it beyond the limits of convention. None of this can occur, however, without serious business decisions and planning; Ammer is clear that he works with his musical collaborators and actors in the spirit of equality and respect for genuine collaboration, and part of that is ensuring legitimate amounts of money to make his projects happen in the correct way, even in the midst of a downward turn for the music industry at large. And despite financial considerations, Ammer remains enthusiastic about widening his audience and making his work more accessible beyond initial broadcasts and stage presentations.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Just in general I'm curious, because in the United States we don't have anything like radio plays funded by the government on our national radio. Our national radio is funded by the public so it's not interested in such things. And so I'm curious about the audience that you get when these are broadcast in Germany, and the impact they have on the cultural scene there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: So the radio play has a history more than an audience, I would say. When we started it was a very, very old fashioned thing, and nobody who wanted to do serious art was doing a radio play. So what we really did is gave the radio play some audience back—not so much that more people listened to it, but having it on CDs, and especially having it shown live on stage—then younger people listened again to it. Not so much, it's not huge masses, but some hundred people coming to the theatre. You know, it's coming out of the fifty years thing, people listening on the radio to something that was not yet television. So it has the radio departments for radio plays, they have survived on these public broadcasting stations, but they're very big in Germany still. And it's only two departments that cost a lot of money—one is the symphony orchestra, the second one is the radio play department. There's still money in it. And it's a good thing, because there are still poets making radio plays out of their books, but it's just not what interested me, and that's where I said, "I will never write a book. I want to work to get the most out of the medium, to have two loud speakers, and what can I do to make the most out of it?" And that's not reading a play with different roles, you know, but still it's much about what FM Einheit and I are doing, and now several others are doing it. Many people think it's like a disease, all the radio plays we go over again!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Well, I used to live in Britain, and in Britain there's this tradition on BBC4, but it's very much this old-fashioned, yada yada...</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: The old fashioned is just a backlash, you know, with all those audio books, but the idea we had connecting it to pop culture—it worked so far, so we have our own kind of audiences, more markets, emails coming from around the world from time to time...and it's nice, because you get in contact with people, and other people sending me things, and it's like a community that's there. And it's interesting doing other things with radio and with records. It's the stupid thing about pop music: it's so beautiful, but it's not managed to get more out of it than the three minutes! That's what we're trying to do. And there's so many wonderful musicians working in it, all the time stuck to make one song, next song, next song, and so on...</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: Well, the whole industry machine is so foreign to what's actually happening with musicians a lot of the time, don't you think?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: Yeah, but the whole market is broke, so...! It's a great time for us. OK, we don't sell...we sell less records than we sold five years before, but it's in the whole market, so that now we're selling enough records to bring out the next record. It has gone a good way, I would think; just because the market broke down, all the other stuff grew more important. We sold very much of the <i>Deutsche Krieger</i> and <i>Radio Inferno</i>, but we didn't get in touch with people, and we're selling less now, but we're getting in touch with many people. And I think it doesn't have anything to do with the works, because we are working the same way, all the works are similar, and I think the audience also hasn't changed too much. I think that the market changed in a good way, that the people who are really interested in something, they get together in some way, they find a way, and I like that. We're not financing ourselves via record sales. All the productions we do, they are financed in advance—in former times only with radio play departments—but as things grew more and more expensive, we have much more to deal with theatres. The Marx thing, I think it took us two and a half years to get the money together, and half a year to produce! So, it's a greater art. Things get very expensive if you want to do it the right way. If you want to do it right on stage, if you want to work together with professional musicians—we always pay very close attention to all the musicians that they get paid very well—and so you have to get together real lots of money if you want to have it right. For Marx we were nine people on stage, nine people being together in a city for two or three weeks, and rehearsing, and I think for the whole show it was seventeen people, and we did a tour and the cost for the transport was so immense. So we got four producers and it worked out. But it's financed in advance, so if we manage to bring out the record it's just for keeping it alive and making it available. People still talk about Radio Inferno and its seven or eight years ago that we did it. It doesn't happen to a theatre piece.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">NS: How did you get involved with all these projects in general, in the beginning? How did you get interested in doing work with sound and radio plays and things like that?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">AA: It came as a coincidence. At the university I was very much into sound poetry. It was really a coincidence. I just wrote one script about sound poetry, and it was not planned to become a radio play. But it ended up at a radio play department. So it became a radio play! It could have been a feature, a weird feature, or something like that. And I did some other things, and then I said—I worked for a radio—I don't want to do words, I want to do music, but I am no musician, so I have to work together with musicians. And then in what way did I get to knowing to FM Einheit? I did a piece together—it didn't come out as a CD—with another musician, and I wasn't satisfied, so then at the same time FM Einheit was very much working for theatres, he had given a sign to the radio department, "maybe I would work for you on something," so we two were brought together. And so made a friendship until now...</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18.1818180084229px;">[Copyright Nancy L. Stockdale, 2001-2015, All Rights Reserved]</span></span></div>
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futurowomanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04772755069537635296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4644798130305183346.post-3837803360109550352015-01-11T12:58:00.001-08:002015-01-11T18:51:00.804-08:00Archive: Review of Kate Bush's "The Kick Inside" (published at Deep Mag, 2001)<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
[I wrote this review of Kate Bush's 1978 debut album, <i>The Kick Inside</i>, in 2001. I was 30 at the time, looking back upon my teenage self. Now, at 44, I can see that another person wrote that review, too. It's also interesting to me now, given Kate's return to the spotlight after her very long absence. The photo is of Kate Bush as a child, taken by her father, Robert Bush; we used it in our original publication.]</div>
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I know what you are thinking—isn't that album a bit old?
Precisely my point. This album is old enough to take me back to my adolescence,
and to Kate Bush's as well. Indeed, most of the songs on this record (and by<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>record</i>,
I mean<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>long
playing</i>) were written when Kate Bush was but a girl herself. That must be
why I loved it so much when<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>I</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>was a girl, and why, when I listen to it now,
I revel in its innocence and charm.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I grew up in Boring Town, USA
during the Reagan years. It was a place full of self-righteous hicks who
condemned me to Hell for my thrift-store overcoat and purple hair, a place
where kids could do nothing but sit around and dream of escape—or, for the less
adventurous, prepare to assimilate as fast and as unnoticeably as possible. I
chose to dream, and I escaped into music. The import section of my local record
store was my Mecca, and I injected as much foreign vinyl as possible into my
veins back then. I ran the gamut, and a lot of it was extreme, but I was also a<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>girl</i>.
One night I saw Kate Bush "Live at the Hammersmith Odeon" (what an
exotic venue!) on USA's <i>Night Flight</i>, and there was no looking back. It
was one girl to another when Girl Power actually meant something.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I immediately ran to the
record store to get whatever I could by the tights-clad angel with two wacky
back-up brothers. All they had was<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>on a
domestic EMI-America release. It was already almost six years old. I plunked
down my $7.99 + tax and carried it home in the flat plastic bag. I tore the
wrapper off the album and gazed at the girl on the cover, all red leg warmers
and chestnut hair and dark eyes. The liner notes were on the back, the sleeve
inside merely white paper (what a rip-off!) I sat the record down onto the
turntable and carefully dropped the needle upon it. The opening strains of
"Moving" hit my ears, dolphinesque samples in an era before samples,
and then the voice of a spirit from another world, the most magical world I
could then imagine—the universe of perfect union spoken with a British accent.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I was thirteen,<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>sounded
so sophisticated. It was an album filled with dramatic and dreamy songs about
love set in Berlin bars and casinos and candlelit dinners and the dark brooding
passion of that classic misanthrope Heathcliff, all mixed up with the
philosophies of Gurdjieff and a Gnostic Jesus and Sufi darwishes and Om Mani
Pad Me Hom and a hippie-dippy new age vibe that somehow didn't offend me at
all. "Feel It" sounded positively dirty to me then, and I couldn't
stop playing it. The way that Kate sang about her dream lovers seemed so much
like my own idealized fantasies, it was as if she was reading my mind. The men
of "Moving," "L'Amour Looks Something Like You," and the
one and only "Saxophone Song" were so perfect and so real, I
desperately wanted to find them for myself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I was so moved by that album
that I got inspired to do a little research about my new locally-unknown
musical discovery—harder back in the day, when all I had to work with was my local
county library stocked with back issues of<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>Creem</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>and<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>Rolling Stone</i>, and the occasional
import<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>NME</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>or<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>Melody
Maker</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>or
(get ready...)<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>Smash
Hits</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>which
I paid fortunes for on road trips to cities more worldly than my own. I learned
that Kate was<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>just
a girl</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>when
she wrote and recorded<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The Kick Inside</i>, just around<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>my</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>age
when David Gilmor discovered her and gave her the chance to sing about
"The Man With the Child in His Eyes," just about<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>my</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>age
when she was able to kick out of her Kentish environs and enter the world of
London and music and<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>life</i>. My heart pounded faster—<i>there
was hope for me, too</i>!<o:p></o:p></div>
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I kept up with Kate Bush
obsessively, bought her entire back catalogue as soon as my record store could
special order it for me. I remember the day I bought the first new album she
released since I knew of her—it was<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>Hounds of Love</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>and I
purchased it the first day it was available in my town via import after getting
drunk on<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>schnapps</i>(so
classy!) with another misfit friend after school. I was fourteen years old that
day, draped in rhinestones and combat boots and a Nina Hagen souvenir concert
t-shirt (believe me, that's another story...) But time passed. Kate matured,
and so did I. By the time I heard "Never Be Mine" from<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Sensual World</i>, we had both been screwed over by love, but the change was so
subtle that I didn't recognize it. You never notice yourself become jaded, it
merely manifests itself in new soundtracks. Somewhere along the way I stopped
listening to<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>and
filed it in the midst of the rest of my personal vinyl archive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The other day I pulled it out
and listened to<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>for
the first time in years. Within seconds I was slack-jawed and on the verge of
tears. I was back in my youth, back in my moments of longing for something<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>more</i>,
something pure, and something innocent. Now I know too well that life and love
are not as I imagined them when I first heard<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The Kick Inside</i>, nor are they as Kate
Bush wrote about them when she put her childish dreams to analog tape, either.
Listening to<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>this
time 'round showed me that Kate Bush was as much an isolated girl struggling
for something more as I was. The songs that I thought were so worldly when I
heard them at age thirteen were, in fact, the feeble hopes of someone who had
yet to experience real love, someone who had just been dreaming as much as I
was about it. She was just better at recording those dreams, and I was there to
confirm them for her. Her art was the mirror for me and, I imagine, countless
other girls in the isolated world of suburban adolescence, a place to rest
until we could find a more worthy locale for our aspirations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But listening to<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>now
gives another kind of pleasure. To hear what innocence actually sounds like,
the thrill of the uncorrupted twinging heart, desires for literary lovers to
sweep you off your feet, the belief in fate and "Strange Phenomena,"
and, at the same time, the bittersweet disappointment in the incestuous
"Kick Inside"—all of this bound up in the sweetest and most
unsophisticated little girl warble imaginable—it is pure and simple magic. It
means nothing, what came after in the career of Kate Bush—the more complex
concept albums, the refusals to tour, the apparent lack of intentions to
release more material, the holing up in her infamous family farmhouse—none of
that is relevant to a new spin of<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The Kick Inside</i>. In fact, I hope Kate
Bush never makes another record. I think I love her too much to hear it. I know
what it's like to be an adult, I don't need her latest contribution to<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>that</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>reality.
What I need is to reminded of what it means to be a girl.<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i>The
Kick Inside</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span>is
enough for me. </div>
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(Copyright Nancy L. Stockdale, 2001-2015, All Rights Reserved)</div>
futurowomanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04772755069537635296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4644798130305183346.post-64532277007870124912015-01-11T10:49:00.001-08:002015-01-11T10:51:26.748-08:00Archive: Star Shine: A Talk with Blixa Bargeld (published at Deep Mag, late 1999)<h3 style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">[I conducted this interview with Blixa Bargeld in London
during the summer of 1999. We published it in <i>Deep </i>later that year. I
caught up with Blixa while he was performing several solo pieces in London, as
part of Nick Cave's <i>Meltdown </i>at the Southbank and in tandem with the
Cubitt and Sadie Cole galleries. The photo, by Ali Kepenek, was one we used in the original piece, and was part of Bargeld's press package at the time.]</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">star shine: a talk with blixa bargeld</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">by nancy stockdale</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Blixa Bargeld borders on the Shivaic. For nearly twenty
years now the intellect and voice fronting Einstürzende Neubauten has used
pun-ridden poetics, retrieved scrap objects, and a distinctly urban sensibility
to brutalize his audiences' inclinations and give birth to moments of horrific
magnificence in substitution. Now, with the release of their new EP <i>Total
Eclipse of the Sun</i>, Einstürzende Neubauten tear apart their own tendency of
filling up a track with a myriad of sound levels and have produced instead
three spare, minimalist meditations on the principles and effects of the most
awesome of natural occurrences. "All I really really really really really
really really really really want to see is the total eclipse of the sun,"
Bargeld sings softly in the title track. The man notorious for his shattering
screams and explosive stage presence is nearly silenced by the astronomical
event to hit Europe August 11th. He's so excited about the eclipse that he
plans to record it, capturing for eternity the ephemeral transience of the
universe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">What goes unnoticed in much of the English-language press
about Bargeld is the host of projects that he consumes himself with. When he's
not working with EN or playing guitar as one of Nick Cave's infamous Bad Seeds,
Bargeld is a performance artist of admirable dedication. In London to take part
in Nick Cave's <i>Meltdown </i>Festival at the South Bank Centre earlier this summer,
Bargeld performed his solo Rede/Speech and produced and led the first
English-language installment of his world-wide project <i>The Execution of
Precious Memories.</i> Coinciding with all of this was a gallery opening featuring
his <i>serialbathroomdummyrun </i>photo exhibit at Sadie Cole's Gallery in
Soho, a spoken word <i>Philosophical Tournament</i> at Islington's Cubitt
Gallery, and a one-night-only stint with the Bad Seeds at the Royal Festival
Hall. I sat down with Blixa Bargeld to talk with him about these
lesser-recognized projects, as well as the latest Einstürzende Neubauten EP, in
the cool of the basement of the Cubitt on a stifling hot July afternoon.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: large;">memory</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">Nancy Stockdale:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Regarding the <a href="http://www.blixa-bargeld.com/blixa-bargeld-en-projects-02.html"><i>Execution
of Precious Memories</i></a>, I was wondering first about your inspiration for it?
Because it's a very huge undertaking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Blixa Bargeld: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Yes. Sometimes we have to say something
bigger. It happened very much by chance. There was a poetry festival in Berlin,
probably 1992-93, and they wanted to do something with a Polish composer called
Zbigniew Karkowski, and to have a composer at a poetry festival requires
poetry. So I was approached and ....I think suddenly I just met him and talked
with him, and in whatever he was saying he suddenly used the word
"memory" in some connection, and that somehow triggered it off for
me, and I just said "hmmm, maybe I should do something with
memories." And my particular interest at that time, in that year, was
working with forms--forms as in forms to be filled in--and so I developed a
form to be filled in and did it as a pseudo-scientific survey working with the
precious memories of people. And then I just continued doing that, and it took
a different shape every time. The London performance certainly was different
than, say, the one that I did four months ago in Yaounde, Cameroon; that was
African musicians, African memories, African voices. And in September I do it
in New Delhi and it will be entirely different again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What were some of the African memories like that
came out that really struck you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> There were quite obvious differences between all of
these performances so far, in the results that I got. Quite obvious in the
African ones was that the idea of nature--because one of the questions is, Do
you have any precious memories in connection with nature?--it was very obvious
for a westerner that the idea of nature as we perceive it is entirely different
from the African idea of nature. For, on that question you would expect to get
a lot of answers from people in Cameroon--many of the childhood memories having
taken place in the villages and in the bush--and you would hardly get any
answers. That was certainly nothing that had to do with any of our plans. This
idea of nature needed the separation from nature, which is typical for a
western person; to look at nature you have to have some distance, and as long
as you are in it all the time you don't really perceive nature. So, you would
get answers like, "the death of my grandmother," and after a while I
just noticed there's more of a concept of bigger circles in it, that nature is
basically everything that has to do with being born, living and dying, and the
whole circle of generations, and winter, summer, whatever circles you want to
name. That was the kind of obvious thing in the African memories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Obvious as well was that everybody had a lot to say about
religious and mystical memories. But, "religion" was always the
Christian religion or, in a few cases Islam, and
"mystical"--translated to "mysterious"--was anything that
had to do with animistic and nature religions, marabous, and medicine men in
the village; they were classified as "mystic"...mysterieux. It was in
French most of the time. And everything "religion" had to do with
Sunday School or the nuns, or "my circumcision" most of the
time...."circumcision"..."circumcision"...lots of
disciplinary measurements from teachers and parents, that was kind of obvious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">And in Japanese memories you had them predominantly talking
about insects, all the childhood nature memories are very much focused on
insects. But I talked to the people I was working with in Japan, and they
agreed, there's a much more friendly, friendship kind of relationship between
humans and insects.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">I know they keep insects as pets in Japan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, that was appearing in the memories quite
often. Going collecting insects in the underground with Grandma, and then
keeping them in a shoe carton till the next spring, things like that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I thought it was striking that last night even some
of the nature aspects of the British memory were about importing things from
outside nature, like pornography, for example.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, well, they were very western memories. Nature
is the place once you've left the city, or even if you go to a park; you know,
these little resorts--everything was kind of resort feeling, the secret
beaches, or the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in Australia. And you could see as
well, that, of course, in the melting pot of London, a lot of people didn't
come from London, they had memories connected with totally different places.
While in Japan you can guess that most of the people are talking about Japan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So the<a href="http://www.blixa-bargeld.com/VKESF/page1.php?button=Continue+to+Questionnaire"> questionnaire </a>doesn't
change from country to country?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> No.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">: So, in Cameroon, for example, how did the questions
about sexuality get answered?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Well, I was expecting to not hear very much, but I
did hear a lot. The least amount of answers to that we got in Japan. "I
didn't have any sexual memories yet but I plan to do some in the future."
Or, "He touched my knee under the table in a soba noodle shop."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I'm interested in the questionnaire; when I was
filling it out it became quite an ordeal...but, I enjoyed it, and you are
definitely affecting peoples' memories by having them fill it out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yes...that's why there is the last question,
"Do you think telling your memories has actually affected the quality of
them." That's why it is called "The Execution Of Precious
Memories," you actually change the level of what memories are. Memories
through narration become something else, they become a piece of literature, and
once you actually make these pieces of literature public they become
something else again. I'm full of memories of people that I haven't even met, I
know all these things by heart from all these performances. I know there's this
story and there's that story, and I can tell them like they were my own.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> As I heard something that I had written read out in
the performance I thought, "Oh my god, this is a text, this is a
totally different piece of literature now then when I wrote it, and when I
thought of it before I wrote it." There seemed to be an emphasis on the
sensual, though, more than an emotional level.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yes. I had the interest of how much smell is
involved in it, that was something that I was just presently interested in.
There is a theoretical text that I didn't read yesterday, which I have read at
some of the performances, which is called "Smell Is The Key Of
Memory." You know, memory has a lot of functions and consciousness is very
much necessary to create metaphors. And smell is not creating metaphors. That's
why it is more of a direct key. A smell of freshly mowed grass is triggering
off something directly without you being able to assign how freshly
mowed grass is smelling, except for what it is, your personal memory. You say,
"this smells like when I was with Grandma when I was six years old, and
Grandfather mowed the grass." Or, you have other, more specific memories
with it, but there is no metaphor to go along with that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Would I be correct in saying also that you have an
emphasis on positive memories in this?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, I wanted precious memories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So, can you have precious memories though that are
negative?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> But you don't really want to explore those in the
performance?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> In Argentina a lot of the memories were everything
else but precious in the true sense of the word; people were talking about the
military dictatorship and how Father was arrested, or somebody put a gun to the
head of their parents and things like that. And they still considered them
precious memories. There seems to be a matter of interpretation with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> How do you find the people that are going to take
part in this, the other artists?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Well, I leave that up to my muse, really. I just
see whoever and whatever gravitates to it and so far that has worked. I like
the tension for me for the week or ten days before, I don't actually know who's
going to be with me. It could happen as well that I'm just going to be alone on
stage and just do it all by myself. But so far it worked that there were other
people getting involved with it, and then I'm able to make them a unified force
within a couple of days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What are your expectations when you go into it? Or
do you try to keep those expectations at bay?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Yeah, I try to not really expect anything in
particular. Let me say, it has a big self satisfaction element to me. I do this
because I want to do this, and it's a project that's very dear to my heart. You
know, if there were only ten people there I would have still done the same
thing, I don't really care. I mean, usually, artists say that very often:
"I don't care if anyone likes it or not." Of course I do care if
somebody likes it or not, and of course I'm flattered if somebody says that was
great, or all that, but I do not try to come in with any expectations
in this. It is self-sufficient as it is. Even if I just end up with a text, and
I take a whole box of text home with me, that is satisfying enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So, how does the language affect your experience of
it, as a performer?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Apart from the first performance in Berlin, the
London performance was the only one where I had the direct access to the
language. I have to admit that I did understand the languages much better, and
learn much more about a language doing this, but my Swedish is nil and my
Japanese is very rudimentary, and I guess you get a different quality of
somebody performing in a language that he doesn't know. Laurie Anderson used to
do that, perform even in German. It works. You could understand her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What about the States? Do you have any plans to
bring it to the States at all?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I have to have North America in it...but
it's just a matter of organizing it. It's not like a rock band, it's not an
easy thing to do. It requires a couple of months of work, and it requires ten
days of rehearsal time. I'm working on it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Do you know where it might be in the States?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Well, I can imagine it would be one of the major
cities, Canada or United States, wherever I get any help from the Göethe
Institute. This one was one of the few performances I have done without the
help of the Göethe Institute. The Göethe Institute is supporting this whole
project, and I guess they're going to support it even more, the more I go along
with it, the more they see it works. But the Göethe Institutes do sit in all
the major cities, so...I could a combination, East-West coast. I think that
would be all possible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: large;">words</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">About the <a href="http://www.blixa-bargeld.com/blixa-bargeld-en-projects-01.html">Rede/Speech</a>...I
was wondering if you have plans on releasing any of it, or is it just too
ephemeral?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I will release something somehow, but I don't know
how...I don't know! [laughs] I don't know, I enjoy the fact that I do something
outside the normal consuming mechanisms, like what I do tonight as well
[the <a href="http://rad.spc.org/blixa/cubitt.html">Philosophical
Tournament</a>]. The performance I do tonight is technically not much different
from what I did at Speech, the one point is that I burn CDs of it at the
same time and I sell these original CDs, and they're not going to be repeated,
they're not going to be duplicated. I've done that before [<a href="http://www.blixa-bargeld.com/blixa-bargeld-de-projekte-04.html#cd">Temporäre
CD-Brennerei</a>] and I only burned one CD of each performance, I performed one
piece after another one, and I burned 68 CDs and sold the single CDs,
which are the masters. So, you can own a composition that is only
existing in that form, full stop.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> This project is obviously reliant completely on
language, as you are making songs out of words, and I found that really amazing
because they kind of ceased to be words to me after awhile...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> ...But for you, as a performer, does that happen to
you as well? Or does the word always have to have its significance? I mean,
tonight at the Philosophical Tournament you're going to be taking
words and pitting them against each other based on their meanings...how do you
experience it yourself?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I try to forget about myself in the whole process.
I just try to open up a channel and let something flow through me, in the true
idea of a medium. I don't really want to get myself mixed in it. I am somehow
there, but the best for me is when the things just happen without my real
control over it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So you see yourself as a channeler in a way?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah...in the true sense of the word, without the
new age undertone to it. And the other word, in the true sense of the word, as
a medium, as the thing in between something.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> How was it doing Rede/Speech in English
compared to in German? Obviously your English is impeccable, but it must be
different for you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, well it's a different feel, but it's probably
even easier for me to lose control in a language that I don't master. It's
probably harder to lose control in a language that you do master.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: large;">meaningless rooms</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">I want to ask you about <a href="http://www.blixa-bargeld.com/blixa-bargeld-de-projekte-04.html#serial">serialbathroomdummyrun</a>,
because I'm fascinated by this whole idea. Why bathrooms, as opposed to other
parts of the room?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Usually a hotel room has only two rooms, the
bedroom and the bathroom. The bedroom has a metaphorically-charged quality to
it, the bathroom hasn't. That's the reason. I didn't want it to mean anything.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">You just started doing it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I didn't want...photographing the bed in a hotel
room, it's just metaphorically charged. It would mean something. It
was a place where somebody slept, it was a place where somebody fucked, it's
metaphorically charged. But the bathroom, it's kind of neutral, it's full of
unimportant details, it doesn't mean anything.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So, do you do this now just out of habit, or is it
an obsession with you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> It's not an obsession, it's a game. It's a game and
I follow the rules.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What are some of those rules?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">You start the game and then you discover the rules
one after another. One clear element in every of these bathrooms is, it always
has a mirror. So, I always photograph the mirror first. And then I photograph
all the details that seem to be interesting for me in that very second, and
that's it. And I don't really care what's on the photos; I don't care if
they're out of focus, in focus, if they are black, if the flash works or not. I
develop them and I just put the name of the hotel and the date on them. Then I
arrange them as text. They're text for me, you know, they have horizontal and
vertical formats. The formats are very similar to the ups and downs in a line
of poetry. So you have one bathroom making one line, and a whole segment would
be sequencing bathrooms in that time period, so you have 16th of April, 17th of
April, 19th of April, 20th of April, 21st, 22nd. And they either become a piece
of poetry, or they become a litany, in the monotonous output of what is written
there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> And do you ever walk into a bathroom and just get
really excited because it's so interesting, or are you kind of beyond that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> It happens, yeah, well, sure...you can do that for
several years and then suddenly it's, "Wow! Now I'm in a hotel and the
bathroom is incredible! It's all checkerboard tiles and all black and white and
there's bright orange curtains on the window!!" And you think, "Wow!
This is gonna be a great series. It's gonna be fantastic!"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> And where's it all leading?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I don't know....that's the one rule I haven't
discovered yet...how to end this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: large;">totality</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What about the total eclipse on August 11th? You
are doing sound recordings of or the eclipse...Are you just waiting
to see what happens?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Do you know where you are going to be?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I am going to be in east Austria, that's in the
belt of the totality. [Laughs] I get emails from people about that from New
York saying, "How can we participate?" I say, "You can't, it's a
European thing."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, I'm very sad I'm missing it myself. But you
are soliciting for people to get involved. What's your larger project with that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Well, I basically just want to see the total
eclipse of the sun. That's what I want to see. That's why the actual refrain
line of the single is, "All I really really really really really really
really really really want to see is the total eclipse of the sun." And I
just thought that everybody's doing public photos, videos--this will be the
most world-wide, most well covered ever visual thing happening. And I just
thought maybe I should just make sound recordings of it. I want to hear what
happens a) to the sounds of nature, how and if they change; I want to hear as
well what happens to my surroundings, all the "oh"s and
"ahh"s of the people, I want to hear that, and I wouldn't mind having
that covered by large numbers of other people in other surroundings. I don't
know! Maybe it's not going to be anything, but I'll just try it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So, the <a href="https://neubauten.org/total-eclipse-sun">Neubauten EP</a>, is it attached
to an album coming out?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> No, it's not attached to an album coming out, it
just stands by itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> And Neubauten have a tour coming up of South
America.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What can people expect from that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Same as ever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Similar to the tour of the States last year?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I would assume so...with more new material in it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What were some of the conditions of recording
"Total Eclipse of the Sun?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">The basic tracks were recorded in our rehearsal
room, in one take fashion...everything played together including the vocals.
And then over that some reworks have been done at Conny's Studio.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> And how would you describe it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Slow, melancholy, beautiful, all circling around
the Sun--all the three tracks are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> How does your environment affect what you are
doing? I mean, Neubauten was founded on tools from the environment, but your
environment is a lot different now, and your work has gone into so many
different directions since then. How do you find your environment affecting
your work now? Say, for example, Berlin: in the last ten years it is a totally
different world than it was twenty years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, but basically it's still a city and it still
has the city debris, that has not really changed. But of course we are not
going to the inside of hollow highway bridges anymore. But I guess we've
developed a particular love for materials, for things. You have to
actually like these objects as you play with them. It's not really a
protest statement, you have to actually like...you have to have a certain
affinity with these things, and you can still have that even if you don't play
in hollow highway bridges. You still have to tickle out of a particular piece
what is in it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So what are some of the instruments, or tools, that
you have used in "Total Eclipse of the Sun?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Are there any? [thinks for a moment] I don't think
anything new. Just the same old Neubauten rubbish that we've had for a long
time...Oh! Helium! The substance that the Sun is made of, I sing on helium on
one of the tracks. It was an interesting experience, but I thought it would
shift the voice to a different pitch, which it does, but your range gets very
narrow too. It doesn't transport the whole range to a higher frequency. Whoop!
sums it all up, on this small great wave of energy, and you can hardly control
it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> And it's very short, it doesn't last very long.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> One breath.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> What about the <a href="http://nickcave.com/">Bad
Seeds</a>? Do you have any plans to go back into the studio?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I hope there are plans, but I don't know anything
about them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: large;">projections</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS: </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Last night at your performance I had a weird
experience. I was sitting in the audience, waiting for your show to start, and
I was surrounded by people that were very obsessed with you, and talking
obsessively about you, and I was just wondering about your experience of fame,
and how you really experience that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Well, I don' t even know if it is connected to
fame. Fame has certainly made it more, to avoid to say "better"
or "worse." But as long as I remember myself in connection with other
people, as a social force, I always triggered obsession. So, I don't really
think it is something that has entirely to do with fame. I truly believe this,
that it is just something within my personality that triggers obsession. I know
that people might be obsessed with me, and I didn't have necessarily a lot of
good experiences with that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> No, it seems very frightening to me. So, what do
you think it is about you that gets people obsessed?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> A quality to present myself as a blank surface on
which you can project something. That's what triggers obsession. I don't in
particular try to do this, but as much as I can analyze myself, that's what I
am doing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS</span><span style="font-size: small;">:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So you are a tabula rasa for the people
in a way?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">: Sometimes. I'm a projectional surface.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> It kind of gets back to the precious memories as
well, in the relation of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yes. I know you get things, and famous
people...there's always a following that is somehow obsessed with them. But I
know just from my childhood and my puberty that I always had people obsessed
with me. So I don't think it was necessarily something that had to do with
fame. I just think fame made it worse, or better, made it just more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Stalkers are really frightening me. It seems to be the same
person always, the same kind of person, coming in. Just imagine I am
standing in a sphere. Within this sphere everything I do and everything I say,
I punctuate like a needle a little hole in this sphere. This hole makes the
star shine. Sometimes these holes even become bigger, they become cracks.
Through these cracks people leak in. Through these cracks people leak in and
come to the inside of that sphere, and that's the point that gets frightening.
And what leaks in there, it seems always to be the same substance, that same
substance of what surrounds the sphere. They are always made from the same
material. And the people look at themselves, and essentially can just see
myself. I can't see what it is that I create in their minds' eye to be. I just
see that they have something relative with me, they have something to do with
me, they see something in me that is within them, or the other way round. But
it is the crack that I have created in the sphere at first that makes it
possible for them to leak in. And once that happens, you know, the whole
firmament is shattered, and the whole firmament is endangered to fall into
pieces, because the crack's getting wider. So, I have to be careful with
everything I say because all I should do is just make punctuating needle marks
where the star should shine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> So what drove you in the beginning, going back to
early Neubauten time, to make music, or to get involved in public performance
and the culture you were in at the time, in a public way?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> I don't think I had much choice, really. I don't
have any background of money, and I don't have any profession that I could
possibly do. I'm a school dropout. And at that particular time, in that
particular place, meaning West Berlin, end '70s, there were basically only two
things that I could possibly do: either become a painter or become a musician.
And it happened only by chance that I became a musician. I never wanted to be a
musician. It just literally happened with somebody coming up to me and saying,
"Would you like to perform?" on that day, and then I founded a band.
And I performed on that day. And I wouldn't have thought that this band was
still going on after twenty years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> But did you have a background in music before, or
play an instrument or anything?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> No. I have no musical education, I didn't own any
instruments...no background.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> That's very punk, I mean, it's classic kind of punk
in a way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> That was the one fascinating aspect about punk,
breaking the rules of that. Yesterday, the man that I worked with inPrecious
Memories that I didn't know three or four days ago, Richard [Sanderson],
he's the one that played all the little toy percussions...at some point in the
rehearsal he said, "I didn't fight the punk wars to do blah blah
blah..!" I thought this was a nice thing to say. What did I actually
fight the punk wars for? I fought the punk wars for a very similar thing, that
I don't have to be dictated to anymore to own an amp, a guitar, or to do this
or that. I like to be closer to the basic breakdown, to break open into a
myriad of possibilities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">NS:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Yeah, I think that's why I liked Rede/Speech so
much, because you were just using your voice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">BB:</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> Well, that was another going back to the roots kind
of thing. I just wanted to do something that doesn't require anything. I mean,
to the maximum of it I would love to be not even there. Or even reduce it even
more...not even have a microphone. Just announce that I'm going to be at a
certain place, and everybody could come and we could have a nice time together,
and that's all. That would be a nice end point for the whole thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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(Copyright © Nancy L. Stockdale, 1999-2015. all rights reserved)</i></span><br />
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Archival writings will be labeled as such. Original links may be gone, but I will add some new links, when appropriate. Perhaps I'll start interviewing people again. I still need to share my 2003 FM Einheit interview, which was, if I may be so bold, an outstanding one.<br />
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Thanks for visiting. To be continued...futurowomanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04772755069537635296noreply@blogger.com