Klangkrieg Interview
By Deshizatsuon Zine (1999)
Questions:
1. When did Klangkrieg start the activity, what was the motivation?
2. The early works (1st CD) have been musical approachs but recently, works have been more "experimental". Did anything change in your situation?
3. How do you create/record Klangkrieg sounds? Your sounds have always been recorded in high quality. Also, what kind of equipment do you use? Have those sounds been created by digital or analog processes?
4. Klangkrieg have done interesting conceptual works. What is your basic subject? i feel it's like something about breakdown of technology/systems. Also, do you have new interesting concepts you want to realize?
5. Have you played in any other bands/projects before Klangkrieg?
6. Could you tell us about "Radio Gagarin", "Hörbar" and "Gagarin Records"?
7. We really enjoyed the 1st LP of "Felix Kubin" and the press release about him. It seems that "he" is a trained musician....
What do you think about "him"? Did he have any influence on Klangkrieg?
8. What is the experimental/noise scene like in Hamburg? And what is the relation between Reznicek and Mariola Brillowska?
9. What elese do you enjoy apart from making sounds? What other kind of music are you listening to?
10. Anything else?
Answers:
1. Tim Buhre and me know each other since school. I was the extrovert maniac guy while he was the introvert distant guy, always dressed in black. But as we were both psychedelic existentialists listening to strange music we started Klangkrieg in 1987. Because of our diametrical tempers you can find both slow and maniac elements in our music. Apart from that we were both interested in cut-ups and working with texts. Tim had some jobs at the theatre, so we could get easily in contact with professional actors/speakers. one of our earliest works was a sound piece using a text called "Bing" by Samuel Beckett. In 1994 we presented this work with several loud speakers hidden in reading desks at the Goethe Institute London during the Soundworks Exchange 1, a festival of German and English sound artists including Asmus Tietchens, Andrew McKenzie (Hafler Trio), Ben Ponton (Soviet:France), Christina Kubisch, Kurt Dahlke (Pyrolator/Der Plan) and others. This work was interesting for us as there were no real persons speaking but only "ghosts" hidden in the desks. The text is constructed in a very rhythmic way, full of associations. These kind of texts serve our purpose perfect.
Another text work was "Einsame Lemuren" by Jürgen Ploog from Frankfurt, Germany, a cut-up writer in the realms of W.S.Burroughs.
In 1992 we founded our electronic studio "Klangkrieg Manufaktur" in Hamburg, where we produce and master everything for releases and works in charge. We share the studio with our friend Reznicek.
From the beginning on we were interested in multiphonics (using several speakers and channels) for tape concerts. this enabled us to put the audience "inside" the music we created. Some of the concerts have been combined with video projection. We call this system "Konzertante Installation", something between concert and installation because we want to include the conditions of the room, as well. As the set ups for this kind of tape events are quite expensive it was only possible to present them at art exhibitions, festivals or with support by cultural institutions. One of our favourite works was the piece "38 cbm" at the Centre for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1993. The title describes the volume of a freight container. A certain amount of people was allowed to step inside such a container that was completely closed during the 15 minute concert. Inside we installed 4 speakers, from outside two deep subwoofers supported the deep frequencies, which were so loud that we had to hide them under 200 sand bags (the ones you normally use against floods or other kinds of catastrophes) - otherwise they would have disturbed the whole exhibition. The interesting experience about this work was that people were not able to leave the container before the end of the concert. In the container it was completely dark, so many of the visitors lost their orientation. Only once we had to open the doors because someone got panic. It was good to create an artificial situation of force because people had to decide for the total or nothing at all. They were a bit frightened but also more concentrated which is very important in these times, I think. The piece has been released on ND records in Austin, USA.
A new tape work that has just been put out on the label "Audioview" in Belgium is called "The Fever Of The Human Voice". The original recording is an 8 track work for 6 speakers and flying video screen that was premiered at the ArtGENDA festival in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1996. The piece makes exclusive use of voice sounds that we "atomized" in very small fragments until they became mechanical and unrecognizable as "human sounds".
The most important motif to found Klangkrieg was the futuristic idea to create music out of environmental and artificial noises. It's interesting that now, 80 years after the Futuristic Manifest, the result of their radical vision has definitely been accepted by the audience, especially by the "pop audience", which for me is most important as of course there has been electroacoustic music already in the late 40'ies. On the other hand, the fact that they accept it doesn't mean that half of the world is really listening to this kind of experimental music. It's still much to unconventional and "stressy". But the way of listening changed, the way our brains work change, anyway - according to new technology and social circumstances.
2. I think, we're working more conceptual, now. This seems to be a matter of economy. The more I hear and learn and the more events I record in my brain, the more I have to throw away, get rid of, focus on special subjects. This will be the most important problem to cope with in the near future: to invent a system to get rid of the information overload in times of Internet.
Poor collectors! They will drown in a huge stream of facts and items, even if it is all of high quality. I have never been a collector, so I don't have this problem. I hardly buy any records any more, only if they "stand" for something, like a symbol, representing a certain way of how to face the world in a poetical way that really touchs or surprises me.
My early influence in music was strange electronic pop music like "der Plan", "Residents", "Palais Schaumburg", "the Wirtschaftswunder", "Kraftwerk", "Asmus Tietchens" (yes, he made pop music in the early 80'ies!), but also more experimental stuff from Berlin like "Frieder Butzmann", "die Tödliche Doris", "Sprung aus den Wolken" and of course well known Industrial groups. Apart from that I was always keen of 20th century classical music like Ligeti, Penderecki, Strawinsky, Varese, Stockhausen and last not least Bela Bartok, my definite hero.
On the first Klangkrieg CD you can still hear the influence of pop and classical music, albeit in a quite abstract way. Our later works became more experimental and conceptual. We started focussing on certain topics, like for example analog/digital distortion or sounds of pipelines/mains/gas.
But our approach to electroacoustics has always been very "musical". I'm not a fan of pure sound aesthetics. I find this boring. It's like the difference between design and art. And I hate static sound design, in my eyes it's decadent and decorative. Sound is just the tool to make music. I can easily hear the difference between experimental music made by sound technicians or real musicians. So many CD's consist of poor ideas stretched over 20 minutes, although the basic essence would last for not more than 2 minutes. I feel close to the narrative structures of French school like Metamkine, INA GRM but also to conceptual artists like Ralf Wehowsky and Ryoji Ikeda who definitely create their music out of a certain "necessity" and with a musical mind.
I don't want to repeat myself all the time, therefore Klangkrieg released only few CD's so far, of which every single one should sound different or focus on a different subject. For me, CD's are a document of an artist's development, not a way to flood the market with one's name.
A good way to surprise the listener is to use hard cuts or make the pieces short and essential.
3. We have different ways of recording sounds. Usually we create them ourselves electronically or we record them with good microphones. In earlier days we stole sounds from other works, especially of 60'ies electronic music or music of totally different directions. But the problem of doing that is that you don't have discovered these sounds by yourself, you don't share your own history with them. By now, we only sample other people's work if we clearly want to "quote" them - or if we twist them in order to play with the listener's expectations and things he/she is used to hear. We basically do this with text fragments that we take out of trivial contexts like soap operas, mainstream radio, psychological tapes etc. It's like painting an alien picture but drawing a sweet little house in the corner, something everyone knows.
We also resample our own sounds again and again and we allow coincidences and desasters to influence our work. Our equipment ranges from samplers to hard disk recording, KORG MS 20'ies, digital mixing desk, all kinds of microphones (including "Kunstkopf" 3D recordings) and really cheap gear with fast approach and surprising results. Very common, I think.
4. Our working methods depend on the subjects we chose. Technological breakdown and chaos is definitely one element because it has to do with our daily life. I like anarchism of machines which go crazy, although there is no obvious reason for it. The problem with machines is that they are never "guilty" if anything happens. This is very unsatisfying. So, against all rationality, I tend to personalize them: I talk to them, shout at them, hit them and stroke them - it's not that I'm insane, I just consider this a more poetical and satisfying way to emotionally communicate with machines. They seem to have their own "minds", so why not start to react on that and co-operate with their moods. If they go crazy or fuck up we use the results for new works. I plan to write a book called "Punish your computer" and initiate abuse training meetings of mind-liked persons.
For our live gigs we use a lot of analog distortion but in the studio the technical medium and processing is totally due to the concept we focus on. For our recent CD "Das Fieber der menschlichen Stimme" - the second track is a stereo version of the live piece I described above - we totally focussed on voice sounds. As I've worked in the surgery of the university hospital in Hamburg for a while, I am very interested in cutting and slicing up things. The same we did with our voice sounds. For the track "Anormales Geräusch" we made extreme EQ filterings of one sentence and experimented with the results. It was like cutting a bread in slices and shift the pieces against each other afterwards, something totally new for us. A friend of us, Bernd Schurer from Switzerland, also contributed a track to the CD. He processed the voice of a girl that we had sent him. He used granular and re-synthesis for that and the result became completely abstract, like grains of voice sounds.
In the future Tim and I would like to realize an experimental radio play (in Germany we call this "Hörspiel" = listenting play) in co-operation with a public radio station. There will be a vague narrative structure but the whole story is absurd and twisted. Of course sound is an important element in such a project and we'd like to make the noises not only part of the atmosphere but also part of the context. This would be a perfect combination of our obsessions for voices and experimental music.
Another concrete project is a multiphonic concert tour with Artificial Memory Trace. We will present two 8 track pieces with several loud speakers in cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Kopenhagen etc.
5. Yes, I was rather succesful as a teenager in a band called "Die Egozentrischen 2" (the egocentric two). I got a KORG MS 20 when I was 11. It's still my favourite instrument. At age 12 I was on stage with my own music - squeeky and disharmonic Electro Pop I would call it now. Alfred Hilsberg, one of the first independent label managers (ZickZack, What's So Funny About...?), discovered us and organized concerts. I think he liked the absurdity of our shows. The pieces were very short and hectic and as we had no programmable synthesizers it took us just as long as the songs endured to adjust all the sounds. Sometimes the pauses in between were even longer than the pieces. I think we really got on everybody's nerves, always leaving behind confusion. The good thing about it was that I never experienced euphoric cheering. In those days we played in front 500 people, nowadays it ranges from 8 to 150...
6. Radio Gagarin started in 1993. First it was Thomas Beck, the manager of the vinyl label Wachsender Prozess, and me, later on Reznicek joined us. Now we have 2 shows per month on an uncommercial broadcasting station that covers the area of Hamburg. There is also Asmus Tietchens and Jetzmann doing a programme for Radio Gagarin. Our intention to start the radio show was the same as the reason to launch our fanzine ODRADEK: All kinds of post-industrial, experimental, noise, unconventional pop music were completely ignored in- and outside of Hamburg. I don't know what it is like in Tokio but here it took us a lot of energy and aggression to convince the media that there are many interesting things happening which a part of a growing anti-culture. Hamburg is a melting pot for this kind of electronic music; the central point is Uli Rehberg and his Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien label (he was the first to release stuff of T.G., S.P.K. and Laibach in Germany) which he is doing since 1978. Back then he was the most famous shop for this music in Northern Europe, some people travelled more than 1000 kilometers to buy records there. Since mail orders came up his business went down but still he is one of the very few living Bohemiens in Germany.
Our first idea was to inform people about electroacoustic music, in all media we could occupy. Now there are quite a lot of experimental programmes on our radio station FSK 93,0 working with tape loops, noises, voice experiments etc. The same happened with "Hörbar", a meeting point for people interested in unconventional music. It took them 5 years to establish their name and attract audience. Hörbar is a small cinema connected to a bar. Once in a week noise fans meet there to exchange ideas. Every last friday of a month there is a live concert. Artists like Illusion Of Safety, Carl Stone, L@N, Noise Makers Five, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, John Duncan, Jim O'Rourke, Pita & Fennesz, Maeror Tri, C.M. von Hausswolff, the Frank Chicken and many others have played there and made this place well known.
Gagarin Records is named after our Radio Show on FSK 93,0. I founded this label in June 98 because I was fed up with the slowliness and boredom of other record labels who didn't dare to decide for something new and unknown. There is quite a lot of new electronic pop music going on in Berlin and Hamburg and I thought it's important to release that. I'm not interested in earning money with it, I will stick to editions of about 500 copies, only vinyl because it leaves more space for cover artwork. I want to destroy the hierarchy of names, I'm only interested in quality, no matter if the artists are known or not. This is a maxim of our magazine ODRADEK and generally of our work over here: to stop name fetishism and respect only good work. Too much shit has been released of well-known artists (who might have been brilliant in the past), too much daring work is ignored. Gagarin Records stands for futuristic psycho pop, the sad buzzing of protons, hydrogen poetry, the anarchy of phantasm.
7. All I know about Felix Kubin personally is that he claims to have telepathic connections to outer space intelligence, especially to Jurij Gagarin and his humming protones. The music I released of him is a film score for animation movies by Polish artist Mariola Brillowska. Kubin is a trained organ player who left his classical background for more obscure activities. There is no influence of his music on Klangkrieg. In fact, he's afraid of that group. But Felix is also fascinated by eerie sounds, he started to use them in his compositions when his mother died. I wouldn't want to share a room with him but I respect his music. Concerning music he is "ok", I think.
Mariola Brillowska is also co-operating with Reznicek, another elecronic Enfant Terrible in Hamburg. They do a show called "Las Vegas", a mixture of atonal music, spoken poetry and films. Reznicek plays his guitar with magnets, it looks like a doctor curing a female neuro-patient. Mariola is the Diva, he is the Troubadour. Actually Reznicek is a woman, his sex was changed in 1995, he is a transsexual and calls himself "Bambi", now. He and Mariola have a lesbian relationship.
8. See answers 6 and 7.
9. Actually I'm trained in drawing, animation film and video. I've made some experimental cut-up videos whose structure is based on sound - not on pictures. The videos deal with itching, scratching skin, hammering my head on the table - quite neurotic stuff. They ran on some international festivals and will now be shown on Dutch TV.
At the moment I'm drawing my first animation film. It's a co-operation with Mariola Brillowska, a 5 minute film about two technosexual women who are working in a laboratorium on a planet called Nietzsche.
Apart from experimental music I listen to all kinds of unusual pop, especially when I am fed up with the noise audience. Many of those people seem to have no blood in their veins and little humour. But most pop music lacks dynamics and fine structures, plus it's always bound to 1-2-3-4 rhythms. I also have a lot of classical records, especially 20th century Hungarian music, early electroacoustic stuff, film music.
The releases of Hot Air (Stock Hausen & Walkman, Dummy Run) are real good contemporary pop music, also the Finnish scene is very interesting - a group like Aavikko has invented a new mixture of distorted casio songs with computer and real drums mixed into each other; very energetic! In Berlin there is a scene of very young cyber punks who sound like Lydia Lunch put in a digital meat-chopper, good to listen to before you go to the post office. Actually, all kind of non-conformist music I find worth listening to, especially when people give a shit about trends and fashion...