PRESS
Space Age Bolshevik
By The Wire (Issue 247)
"I write songs," declares 34 year old electronic space-popper, radio playwright and animator Felix Kubin from his home in Hamburg. "Songs guarantee a certain structure and timing. My understanding of a song goes very far. Structure and a feeling for good transitions are lacking in a lot of so called experimental music and laptop music. Even all the masterpieces of modern classical music - like Ligeti, or Stockhausen's Gesang Der Jünglinge - work like good pop songs," he elaborates. "I wished a lot of electronic music was less carpentry, less decorative. Even if it is abstract, it is also often lifestyle Muzak."
Though he has been part of noise unit Klangkrieg since 1987, Kubin is better known for his quirky space-circus music. He released his debut album Filmmusik on his own label Gagarin Records in 1998. Since then he has made numerous 7"s and EPs, and contributed to a host of compilations on labels such as Diskono, A-Musik, Meeuw Muzak and Ski-pp. Yet his newest release, Matki Wandalki, is only his second album of all new material. Cast as schizophonic pop injected with horror soundtracks and Sun Ra space travelogues, it sounds somewhere between Tipsy's quirky merry-go-round mantras, Devo's playful pastiche and Xenakis's sound architecture. Last autumn saw the release of The Tetchy Teenage Tapes Of Felix Kubin, a compilation of youthful experiments from 1981-85. "In my youth I was trained on piano, electric organ and I taught myself to play litter box drums," Kubin says. "The Korg MS-20 synthesizer changed my life. I got it when I was 11. The cultural climate was very encouraging. I recorded DAF's hardcore track "Nachtarbeit" when I was 11. I listened very early to disharmonic music. At age 13 I was into Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle." So how does a pre-teen German get into playing DAF and TG? "My father is a rational atom physicist and my mother an irrational translator who is fighting with microwaves," Kubin explains. "So, I could combine these two inherited sides of my mind in a synthesizer. Giving the possibility of synthesis helped me to force my brain to collaborate and make bodyless explanations become physical." That's me told. Matki Wandalki is not - as some might deduce - a reference to Stock, Hausen & Walkman's Matt Wand. "It is Polish and means Vandal Mothers," Kubin clarifies. "For me it was an answer to The Mothers Of Invention, like The Mothers Of Destruction. Dangerous German flocks of mothers spraying graffiti, robbing people and destroying subway stations." The album runs the gamut from high energy hyper hits such as "Hit Me, Provider" to the retro funfair waltz of "Fernwärme Wien" - co-written with German new wave electronica pioneer Holger Hiller - which would have made a perfect soundtrack for a Karl Valentin short, had it been written 70 years earlier. The album ends with a hilarious deadpan take of Lionel Ritchie's "Hello": "Hello is it me I'm looking for, I wonder who I am and I wonder what I do." "Humour is essential," Kubin emphasises. "It is non-rational cultural communication and it transports a lot of your cultural background. Humour is a poetic form of philosophy, for me even a Weltanschauung [worldview]. I stopped thinking about irony because in Hamburg a lot of culture is based on sarcasm where people are trying to take distance from what they say but after some years you find out that the things they try to make fun of are getting real. So, I save some time and take everything seriously. For the same reason, I like ideologies. They make life more interesting. I always had difficulties with the postmodern 'all points of view' thing. I want to invent, not to quote." As a leading light of Hamburg's militant dada-socialist party Kommunistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands in the mid-90s, he fronted the group Liedertafel Margot Honecker, dedicated to playing songs of the former East German Republic. The KED party was headed by Dr Kurt Euler who gave "speeches in a very idiosyncratic language with terms and idioms derived from DDR terminology, old philosophers, Donald Duck and modern business talk", Kubin explains. "We did a lot of performances which consisted of films that we shot, speeches, some rituals and music. We were interested in breaking the German neurotic way of coping with its history: they always want to make things disappear. We got very strong reactions at our shows, some people screaming, fighting, crying, having nervous breakdowns. We saw ourselves basically like mediums, like catalysers." Kubin's sample-heavy electropop is often racked under 'plunderphonic music', along with artists like Negativland and People Like Us. "My music is not plunderphonic music," he protests. "When I use samples it's mostly samples of my own music and sounds, or of something that I refer to in my musical history." But he does share plunderphonic artists' interest in politics. "The plunderphonic movement tried to be political simply by taking voices of others and not commenting themselves," argues Kubin. "Their comment was the context. Since politics have totally left the realm of visions by becoming a management of economics, culture has to replace politics by taking its visionary spirit. That's why art is so important today. Artists have to take the responsibility to change unified minds and to give them back a visionary feeling of politics in the original sense: the matter of the singular citizen in correspondence to society's interest. Culture is not luxury, culture is the new politics in opposition to pure economics." Kubin's interest in surreal dream logic, poetry, broken narrative and noise coalesces in his experimental radio plays. "My first radio play in 2001 was called Syndicate Of Counter-Noise, produced for Deutschlandradio Berlin," he says. "It explored a syndicate of noise musicians and theorists who organised in a sabotage ring worldwide. A mixture of documentary, travelling report, pseudo-science, sound collage, manifesto platform. It got quite a lot of airing, which encouraged me to go on."Recently he premiered a play with Polish artist Wojtek Kucharczyk. "It deals with the German-Polish relationship and takes the piss out of each other's prejudices and pathos," he concludes. "I like to combine fiction and reality/documentation because I think that nowadays the truth lies - a great double-meaning of the word in this context - in between facts and poetry." • Matki Wandalki is out now on A-Musik.
Anne Hilde Neset for thewire.co.uk