Interview by Dirty website magazine
By Dirty website magazine (2002)
Sorge Guillaume: You have studied drawing/comic, video, animation film. Why did you decide to get more involved in the music field ?
Felix Kubin: I have been involved with music since I am 8 years old. I was trained on piano, organ (home organ, with foot pedals), Glockenspiel and Ashtray Drums. Actually, I even started composing very early. There will be a release on SKIPP and A-Musik in Sept/Oct. of my early tape works (4-track cassette) that I made in between 1981 and 1985: "The tetchy teenage tapes of Felix Kubin". There will be two different selections: the A-Musik release will be vinyl and more experimental and odd, while the SKIPP release will be on CD and focus on the more poppy side. All in all very nervous stuff with annoying/haunting texts. Many of the tracks I have made in collaboration with my brother Max (4 years younger than me) or other friends of my age.
Later on I didn't want to study music because I felt that it was too holy for me. I also promised Juri Gagarin not to do it. Instead I studied something that I didn't know much about: drawing. In my family tree there have been some painters (landscapes, press drawings, pseudo surrealist) but I actually never really understood how to draw. For a while I had the idea to become a comic artist. I made a series called "Morpheus Panoptikum" for a little magazine which dealt with a kind of unpopular humour. The series had about 5 (big) fans, so it had to be stopped. When I got to know Mariola Brillowska at my art school I started to draw and compose music for her cruel and bizarre animation films. Two like-minded ghosts met and this was the beginning of Felix Kubin & the humming protones.
You were part of the electroacoustic band Klangkrieg. What did you get from this experience ? Could you explain us the notion of "electro acoustic music"?
Klangkrieg still exists! We just released a split-LP on Staubgold with Gunter Adler from the Groenland Orchester. My main musical background is experimental music which includes electro-acoustic, noise, early industrial, free jazz and any kind of improvised music as much as modern classical academic approaches. My love for strange and twisted pop music comes from my teenage time. I grew up in one of the most fruitful and lively periods of German Pop history: I witnessed the rise and fall of Neue Deutsche Welle where groups like Einstuerzende Neubauten, die Toedliche Doris, Minus Delta T, Frieder Butzmann, Der Plan, Palais Schaumburg/Holger Hiller, DAF, Kraftwerk, The Wirtschaftswunder and many others regenerated the ether of our poisened radios. That was an incredible time and I still keep the core of its energy inside me.
So, if I work with rhythms, harmony and melodies it's like closing a circle from here back to my youth. But on a long term I will be more concerned with crippled beans than with "pop". In a certain sense I do fake pop. Because my approach is an artistic/experimental one. 80% of the music that I own and listen to is "difficult". Sometimes I am desperate when I try to find anything harmonic and calm among all the weird stuff I have.
A definition for electro-acoustic music? Reciprocal to popular music it would be defined as non-rythmic, non-harmonic and non-melodic music. On the other hand, there is a lot of dynamics and a notion of time and suspense.
Socially spoken, it's a kind of musical reservation, a last island for people who don't want to be adapted or integrated by the music industry.
An it's the best way to learn how to listen to your environment as music.
Could you tell us more about the "Kommunistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" you were into between 92 and 94 ? Is Dadaism important for you?
The KED was a fake political party that became quite popular in certain circles and combined a lot of spontaneousness with very well planned and designed actions. It grew a network of activists whose intentions were nearly impossible to define but constantly attractive to the media. The effect of the KED and Liedertafel Margot Honecker is something difficult to understand for Non-Germans because it relates to our history and to the neurotic German way of how to cope with it. Just like Laibach, we experimented with borders, ideology and authorities, and we built up our own language. The dadaistic element was the playful, serious yet self-ironic and provocative way we did it. Everything was put in scene. We confused the audience. For me, the most interesting aspect was the way how people reacted and started to have arguments about it. The recipients were the real actors in this play, especially the press and media. When we got too much attention by big TV stations and magazines like "Der Spiegel" we had to stop it.
What I love about Dadaism is its punk energy. Bringing things back to the ground. Look serious, act subversive! Putting on a police uniform and sending people into the wrong direction.
I've seen you playing @ Oblique LU night festival in Nantes last year, a guy was screaming at you in the audience. You stopped playing music and said "I'm just a technician". Do you really think that ? What is the part between sonic processing and musical composition in your music?
Oh yes, I remember the guy. He was quite annoying. Maybe he took the wrong medicament. He stood in the first row, really close to me and screamed "He does not play the KORG, you idiots, it's all fake, everything is playback." But even the "idiots" could see that I played my keyboards live because it was transmitted via video on a big screen. I must have been quite a genius to play all the keys exactly out of time in synchronicity to a playback.
Next to him stood his "friend", obviously a former security man, shouting things at me like "now you go to bed". They were quite a couple, haha. one phenomenon about such hamsters is that they always stay. They could easily leave the show if they don't like it. But they feel somehow attracted.
Once I played in a rough club in Paisley, near Glasgow. The area was so criminal that you had to go there by car and then park very next to the club and run inside. After my first set half of the audience was screaming things like "fuck off! Get yourself a job" etc. and the other half was screaming the opposite. I never had such a schizophrenic reaction on my music before.
I don't see myself as a technician. I hate reading all these owners manuals. But I like the fact that electronic instruments give you a total freedom of creating sounds - which of course doesn't make a piece of music yet. Many sound technicians succumb to the illusion that they create music while they're actually creating sounds. That's why a lot of present "experimental" music is really boring. You don't have to plan every split second like many of the classical pioneers from Nono to Stockhausen but you should have a feeling for structure, timing and transitions which are still the weakest points of contemporary abstract music.
Your shows are quite more "energic" than traditional electronic live acts (guys behind laptops). do you find them boring ?
The music can be great and I think we had to pass a point where the action on stage was becoming so minimal that the only way to gain something out of the performance was to fully concentrate on the music itself. But a live performance is always a visual and spontaneous thing and some people just ignore this. If you want to play just tapes of pre-recorded material, don't pretend to fumble around behind a screen. It looks totally autistic. Just press play and leave the stage.
I mean, it's quite difficult to perform electroacoustic music live. With Klangkrieg we created most of it with synths, filters, live loops and processed pre-recorded material. We used surveillance cameras that magnified our instrumental actions on a screen. This is not totally satisfying, either. On the other hand, showing a film can draw the attention from the music quite easily because light is much faster than sound.
I like the idea of "Hoerkino", cinema d'oreille. It makes a difference, if you listen to a piece alone at home or in a collective of people. The latter is a social event. For non-visual event, people should sit comfortable and the light should be dim. Or they should be able to see what the laptop performer is really doing behind his/her screen.
Your work / attitude makes me think of the residents. do you feel close to them ?
Apart from their music of the period 1972-83 I like their visuals and texts a lot. A poem like "Lizard Lady" is a masterwork. Their music videos are high standards by which every comtemporary shit video should be measured. They also have been quite political in their best time.
Even more bizarre and musically surprising than the Residents is the British like-minded group "Renaldo and the Loaf" that is rather unknown, unfortunately. I was lucky to meet one of the two musicians at the Ether Festival in London in May 2002. I worshipped him like the pope and he told amazing stories about how all the incredible titles and songs came to existence. Can you find any group in the world where one member speaks a text backwards on a tape, gives it to the other one who then plays it again backwards (so that the words appear forward) and writes down phonetically what he understands in order to sing it afterwards with a rubber in his mouth and wrapped around his head? These guys were just beyond.
Everyone who played at that night on the Ether festival belonged to this guarde of characters: Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), the Evolution Control Committee, Matt Wand, Wobbly. Brilliant people.
It's hard to find rich characters in the electronic scene, anyway.
You have made music for films (released on A Musik). could you tell us more about this experience ? Is it easier / more difficult to work with on a visual basis ?
Depending on the film, it might even be easier. I find it very inspiring to compose music to films. The soundtrack should be seen as an additional means of expression. Most Hollywood scores just underline what's happening in the pictures, using always the same orchestra kitsch. Boring shit. In general I have the feeling that a lot of commercial culture is getting more and more standardized. I cannot bear this amount of stupidity any more. Film soundtracks have the power to re-define the visuals and give them a certain unexpected twist. It's an art form by itself. That's so great about film: that it comprises many different art forms. But so little of the many possibilities are experimented with in cinema. All the linear structures could be broken up to provide a more demanding and lively way of perception.
All the music/art I create is linked to my social life. Therefore it reminds many people of a (non-existing) film. Every song has its own history and acts - even aesthetically - in its own world. For me it's essential not to end up in abstract nothingness or decoration. Or, as someone else put it nicely: to create music not suitable for restaurants.
I am now preparing my first theatre music for a play written by the German punk rock musician Schorsch Kamerun. A play about Hanns Eisler's life in exile. Before Eisler became one of East Germany's most famous composers he lived in Hollywood together with other exilants like Bert Brecht. This play is a nice metaphor about leading a life in a "wrong" evironment and all the conflicts that appear when you have to make compromises about your inner convictions and political values. All us anti-globalization protones feel that every day.
Next year I want to continue producing Hoerspiele (radio plays). In this domain all the rules are much more open than in cinema. I don't know about France but in Germany my generation is very influenced by spoken word and radio plays. It's a beautiful discipline where your head is creating the film by itself. I think that on a long term basis people don't want to be served pre-cooked meals on all 7 floors at the same time anymore. It's about time that we claim our material and immaterial territories back to get us out of the 21st century cultural uniforms.