Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 1/2012 by Telekom Electronic Beats

N° 29 · SPRING 2012

W W W. ELECTRONI CBE ATS . NE T

CONVERSATIONS ON ESSENTIAL ISSUES N° 29 · SPRING 2012

ELECTRONIC BEATS · DILLON · LITTLE DRAGON · BOUILLON CHARTIER · STEVEN LEVY · CHRIS DERCON

YO U R DIG I TA L D A I LY

ELECTRONIC BEATS

ANOTHER SIDE OF

Dillon

LITTLE DRAGON LUTHER CAMPBELL METTE LINDBERG CHRIS DERCON

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Electronic Beats SLICES â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Electronic Music Magazine. Presents insights into the electronic music world through portraits, interviews, features and videos. Reports on electronica and dubstep via house to techno.

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EDITORIAL

“We invent the future out of fragments from the past” Max Dax: Hans Ulrich, in this issue

of Electronic Beats you recommend the film Walden—Diaries, Notes and Sketches by Jonas Mekas. The Lithuanian filmmaker shot Walden in 1969 and since then, the work is considered to be a pioneering example of diaristic filmmaking. This seems particularly apparent when comparing Walden to, say, blogs and YouTube video diaries. Contrary to popular belief, the Internet didn’t make public diaries possible—it just made personal narrative and information easier to produce and distribute. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Yes, Mekas is a

true pioneer, and he was the reason I started in 1995 to record interviews on a daily basis and to make a filmic diary of my conversations with artists. MD: Walden was released by Re:Voir

on DVD in 2008 after a decade long delay. Since then, it’s almost completely sold out. Now, rumor has it that all of Mekas’ diaristic films—including Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania and Lost Lost, Lost—will be rereleased on DVD in the course of 2012. Here at the magazine we had a long discussion about whether to include a recommendation that’s so difficult for readers to get their hands on. But then we remembered all the positive feedback that we got from your recommendation of Édouard Glissant’s La cohée du Lamentin last summer. The book hadn’t been trans-

Dear Readers, Some people claim our minds are geared towards understanding the world in narrative form. Storytelling is everywhere. In this issue of Electronic Beats Magazine, we explore not only the extent to which the medium is the message, but also how new mediums have created new messages. Is the core of our communication still people exchanging thoughts and ideas in conversation? Have new forms of digital literacy revolutionized not just how we communicate but what we communicate? For many of the artists, curators and visionaries featured in this issue, the answer is a resounding: “It’s hard to say . . .” We’re proud to present their perspectives on musical and literary narrative, without consensus, and in all of their seemingly infinite shades of grey. Best wishes, Max Dax Editor-in-Chief

lated from French to English yet, but our readers embraced the fact that you ignored the conventions of release schedules, opting instead to lobby for a book you believe in. HUO: Glissant touches another

important issue of our time: How do we archive and contextualize information? I have an archive of more than two thousand five hundred interviews, and I’ve been working together with the Institute of the 21st Century and the University in Karlsruhe to find ways of making them accessible and browsable. For example, I have twenty hours of interviews with the pioneering architect and influential writer Cedric Price. We’re currently tagging all key words and names that appear in these conversations, something I’ve been working on together with Armin Linke. When we’re finished with that, we’ll be able to browse the interviews, digitally speaking, in a completely new way, and the reader will be able to recombine the interview content very intuitively. Ultimately, we’ll end up of with a map of tags that invisibly connects all of the interviews with each other. I like the idea that protagonists who have died can—via the tagging system— still contribute to discussions we lead today. MD: In this issue, we feature an

interview with Chris Dercon, director of London’s Tate Modern, and a conversation between hacker-ethicist Steven Levy and

the British poet and blogger Rick Holland. In both pieces, new rules of narration in the digital age are central topics of discussion. In your recommendation, you emphasize the importance of documenting these developments because the Internet does indeed massively change one of life’s most basic activities: the way we read. HUO: The English artist Ed

Fornieles makes art out of Facebook archives, showing that online profiles and networks often are situations where the individual tools to create and frame reality are not only refined but also habitual. As Fornieles told me: “This is why character and narrative are the great frontier for me. Playing with them opens up the potential to make art on a new scale.” MD: You mentioned artists who

continue to contribute discussions even after they’ve died. This is important, because in the past, magazines like ours used to ignore the thoughts and ideas of the old and wise. All printed matter seemed to focus on youth. I think balancing the two is key when it comes to thinking about the magazine of the future. HUO: The art historian Erwin

Panofsky said we often invent the future out of fragments from the past. We have to find new and intelligent ways to filter and sort through what we have to read and what not. ~ EB 1/2012

IMPRINT ELECTRONIC BEATS MAGAZINE CONVERSATIONS ON ESSENTIAL ISSUES Est. 2005 Issue N° 29 Spring 2012

Publisher: Burda Creative Group GmbH, P.O. Box 810249, 81902 München, Germany Managing Directors: Gregor Vogelsang, Dr.-Ing. Christian Fill Head of Telco, Commerce & Utilities: Christine Fehenberger

Editorial Office: Electronic Beats Magazine, c/o .HBC, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 9, 10178 Berlin, Germany www.electronicbeats.net/magazine magazine@electronicbeats.net Editor-in-Chief: Max Dax Managing Editor: Thomas Walter Duty Editor: Michael Lutz Editor: A.J. Samuels Art Director: Johannes Beck Photography Editor: Corinna Ada Koch Copy Editor: Karen Carolin

Cover: Dillon, photographed by Eva Beth and Torsten Oelscher

Contributing Authors: Chris Bohn, Luther Campbell, Chris Dercon, Dillon, Rick Holland, Daniel Jones, Gerard Joulie, Franz König, Andreas Lange, Steven Levy, Mette Lindberg, Arto Lindsay, Billie Ray Martin, Yukimi Nagano, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pantha du Prince, Thomas Schoenberger, D. Strauss, Terre Thaemlitz, André Vida, Detlef Weinrich, WestBam

Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Johannes Beck, Eva Beth, So-Min Kang, Luci Lux, Torsten Oelscher, Hans Martin Sewcz, Andrea Stappert, Miguel Villalobos

Electronic Beats Magazine is a division of Telekom’s international music program “Electronic Beats” International Music Sponsoring / Deutsche Telekom AG: Claudia Jonas and Ralf Lülsdorf Public Relations: Kruger Media GmbH—Public Relations & Brand Communication, Torstraße 171, 10115 Berlin, Germany Rebecca Gürnth, rebecca.guernth@kruger-media.de Subscriptions: www.electronicbeats.net/magazine Advertising: advertising@electronicbeats.net Printing: Druckhaus Kaufmann, Raiffeisenstr. 29, 77933 Lahr, Germany, www.druckhaus-kaufmann.de Distribution: VERTRIEB MZV GmbH & Co KG, 85716 Unterschleißheim, Germany, www.mzv.de

Thanks to: Karl Bette, Ben de Biel, Robert Bovenius, Martin Hossbach, Nino and Pieter, Stephan Rothfuss and everybody at .HBC Berlin, Serge Verschuur © 2012 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited It’s time to redefine the term “failure”.

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CONTENT PICTURES TO THE EDITOR ................................................................. 8 RECOMMENDATIONS ............................................................................. 18 Music and other media recommended by Chris Bohn, Daniel Jones, Franz König, Billie Ray Martin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pantha du Prince, André Vida, Detlef Weinrich; featuring new releases by Carter Tutti Void, Drexciya, Jonas Mekas, John Talabot, Stabil Elite and more ABC The alphabet according to WestBam ............................................... 30 MRS. STYLE ICON Terre Thaemlitz on Akihiro Miwa ......................... 34 COUNTING WITH . . . Mette Lindberg .................................................. 36

“I like the moment in video games when you discover undefined areas for which no rules exist” Max Dax interviews CHRIS DERCON ...................................................... 40 “What gives you the right to talk to a woman like that?” D. Strauss interviews DILLON ................................................................... 48 “I might be Muslim—hell, I might even be Jewish” A.J. Samuels talks to LUTHER CAMPBELL ............................................ 56 “I’m drawn to music that takes me to another place—a place I can escape to.” Arto Lindsay talks to YUKIMI NAGANO .................................................. 62

Staring into the mystery of life itself: STEVEN LEVY in conversation with RICK HOLLAND ..................................................... 70 Dinner in Paris: THOMAS SCHOENBERGER and MAX DAX dine with GERARD JOULIE .................................................. 76 A day in the life: 24 hours in Rotterdam ................................................. 82 NEU: ANDREAS LANGE on virtual pacifism .......................................... 98

Three of our featured contributors: Luci Lux

Terre Thaemlitz

Steven Levy

(* 1979) is a French-German photographer and chef. Since 2010, Lux has been shooting portraits of classically trained waiters and delectable food in restaurants all over Europe. This issue features her photos of Bouillon Chartier in Paris. Photo: Max Dax

(* 1968) is a computer musician and gender activist. He is currently finishing up the thirty-hour audio/literary work Soulnessless, to be released on an 8GB SD card. In this issue, Thaemlitz talks about style icon Akihiro Miwa. Photo: Self-portrait

(* 1951) is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats. Previous issues have included his musings on such URLifestyle topics as bitcoin and digital archives. This issue he’s joined in conversation by English poet Rick Holland. Photo: Miguel Villalobos

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PICTURES TO THE EDITOR Send your photos to pictures@electronicbeats.net

We like to show things from a readerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s point of view. So please, send us your pictures from all corners of the cultural cosmos. If your image gets chosen, you will receive two free tickets to an Electronic Beats concert or festival. The irreproachable shoe-sock-pant combination pictured above belongs to Mr. Bryan Ferry, onstage at the .HBC in Berlin a day before playing the sold-out Electronic Beats Presents concert series. Photo sent by W. Herzsprung, Berlin

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In Naples you can find every kind of handpainted ceramic figurine imaginable, from Barack Obama proudly holding the severed head of Osama Bin Laden to the more conventional miniature produce and outdoor market scenes. Come Christmas, nativity scenes dominate the shelves. One manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s candy castle is anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sweet and low. Lucio Di Luce, Naples

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Contrails or chemtrails? Streaks of water vapor or chemical agents used for government mind control? Conspiracy theorists are like philosophyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s straw man skeptics: in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence and rational argument, they boldly opt to disbelieve. But often their explanations of everyday phenomena are way more interesting. Photo sent by Ksenia Mikhalchukk, Prague

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For Maria Grazia Cucinotta, the knife was not enough. Here, the former Bond-girl and Il Postino femme fatale looms larger than life after going under the Photoshop brush. Why? To make her already exagerrated features look even more titillating. While businessmen struggle to keep their glances inconspicuous, businesswomen squeeze past the larger than life Italian actressâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seductive gaze on their way to catch the red-eye to Frankfurt. Photo sent by Gustav Maria, Paris

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What can’t a stone do? The projectile of choice for protestors during the Arab Spring, these ones keep Morocco’s free press from blowing away from a Casablanca kiosk. Unlike its neighbors, Morocco has largely been spared violent political turmoil. And if recent concessions to the pro-democracy movement are any measure, King Mohammed VI seems to know which way the wind blows. Photo sent by Siri Kondé, Casablanca

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Few Berliners admit to liking today’s streamlined, Starbucked Potsdamer Platz, but if it has any redeeming qualities, this view of the main intersection’s confusing traffic lines is surely one of them. You might think it‘s a G(erman)thang. Wrong. Accidents galore. Photo sent by Volker Roloff, Berlin

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RECOMMENDATIONS “Nothing if not transportive” Billie Ray Martin recommends John Talabot’s fIN

(Permanent Vacation)

Billie Ray Martin has been preaching the gospel of dark, vocal house since fronting the legendary Electribe 101 in the late eighties. Her most recent release is a remix album of The Opiates’ Hollywood Under the Knife, appropriately titled Hollywood Cuts, and featuring remixes by Terranova, Chris and Cosey and Aérea Negrot.

My first thought when I put this album on was that this is a Spanish artist, and that’s without knowing a thing about John Talabot. I don’t mean this at all in a belittling way, but it has this whiff, this hint, of “Café del Mar” in it somewhere. It’s an air of smoothness, and I can’t really say much more than that on why I knew. But somehow I did. That’s also actually what became one of the most endearing aspects of this album for me; you can’t file fIN under “easy listening” or “chill-out music”, even though it’s definitely not hard to listen to. During the first few minutes of the first track, “Depak Ine”, I still wasn’t sure what I was listening to, or if I liked it. But almost as soon as I started deliberating, I was swept up in the passion that drives the song forward. I immediately started listening more closely and getting excited about where each new track would take me, because fIN is nothing if not transportive. From “El Oeste” on, it’s clear that Talabot is doing something very personal and not developing musical themes to fit

a specific genre. And the ending of that track is pure genius. His keyboard riffs are so creatively developed that the melodies, which initially sound very poppy, morph into something much more exciting and unpredictable, almost Brian Enoesque. I mean, I write pop songs, so that was really rocking my boat. It’s not easy to make such whistleable melodies without them becoming gooey and saccharine. But even more interesting is perhaps the idea that he’s making electronic music that looks to the past, but in no way sounds dated. I often had to think of Moby with some of the vocal samples. Not in a sense that it sounded ripped off. It was more like a gentle and respectful nod, especially on “When the Past Was Present”, which is such an amazing track, and definitely something I’ll be DJing in the future. Maybe my only real criticism is the way Talabot occasionally cakes some of the vocals in reverb, like on “Journeys” or “Destiny”. My attitude is: If you want to write a song with a vocal, do it. But don’t do it half-assed. The singing

here was just too wishy-washy for me; you can’t be sure if the voice is really any good, or if Talabot was trying to mask something. You know, vocals are making a big comeback in house music, but not everybody is so used to dealing with them production-wise. I realized that most recently when I was dealing with artists’ remixes of tracks from the last Opiates album. Mixing vocals is kind of a lost art. When I first started with Electribe 101, the first thing that we did was figure out the vocal, and then we built the music around that. Singing was the focal point, never an afterthought. I’m not saying that’s the case with this album in general, but this whole instant-atmosphere reverb thing I can’t really understand. All in all, I wouldn’t call this a house album. It’s too slow, too explorative, too complex, too bold and too unique. I’ve kind of stopped understanding the logic of today’s tastemakers, but it makes sense that there seems to be a consensus on the importance of what John Talabot’s doing. ~

“Speaking to their influences both past and present” Detlef Weinrich recommends Stabil Elite’s Douze Pouze

(Italic Recordings)

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When I first met Stabil Elite two or three years ago, it was something of a surprise. Düsseldorf is a very small city, and it’s not very common that you have these young kids with such open minds about music. This open-mindedness, this diversity in taste is what makes them feel like such a refreshing project. When we met at my bar, the Salon des Amateurs, my program was a very eclectic mix of unknown and rare dance-friendly

sounds, and I think that’s what impressed them. You can hear it clearly in their music; “Gold”, for instance, has a more modern new wave sound, while “Milchstrasse” feels rooted in the experimental synthesizer work of Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk. Krautrock and new wave as genres are pretty well established, but the potential to create new variations from the old is enormous. Maybe that’s the point of music anyway, to

bring together similar minds with compatible yet diverse ideas that advance music somehow; or keep it fresh and exciting. As a whole, Stabil Elite’s new album Douze Pouze can be described as very elegant pop. I think that the challenge of all young artists is to create something that sounds contemporary, speaking to their influences both past and present. When I listen to this album, it creates a connection for

Between his work with post-krautrockers Kreidler and prototechno solo productions as Tolouse Low Trax, Düsseldorf-based Detlef Weinrich stays busy running the bar and performance space Salon des Amateurs.

Previous page: PA Magazine, John Baldessari, Naomi Shohan/ JRP|Ringier, Zurich 2012.

Right: Serial art in (but not of) the age of digital reproduction. Céline Duval and Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Cahiers d’image.

me to my city, and to my own history as a musician. Certain parts of Douze Pouze are very typical of the Düsseldorf sound, and some have their roots in the more eclectic sorts of things you might hear played at the Salon. This familiarity is charming; it makes their music feel like an old friend that you haven’t seen in a while. Suddenly you find yourselves together again, with so many new things to talk about. It’s somewhat startling to hear such a connection of self in a debut album, but then I’ve felt this connection to the band since the day we met. We’ve played together as well, but it’s maybe even more of a pleasure to watch them create their concentrated blend of guitar work and synthesizers, especially live. It’s a different generation with a different approach, but still something recognizable at its artistic core. The music is timeless because the music is free. That’s one of the most important things a band can realize: when making music, there are no rules. ~

“It’s like the analog version of the photo blog that you just started to follow” Franz König recommends Toiletpaper, Cahiers d’image, and PA Magazine Franz König is managing director of world renowned publishing house Buchhandlung Walther König, which focuses on the publication of select works in the areas of art, art history, design, fashion, photography and film.

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I’m a passionate reader of both artists’ magazines; unlike books, they’re much more easily accessible for the reader. These days, it’s interesting to notice the new wave of highly collectable magazines published by artists as opposed to journalists. As a matter of fact, it’s never been so easy to design, print and distribute low-circulation magazines as it is today. Three in particular stand out: Maurizio Cattelan’s Toiletpaper, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Cahiers d’image, and the latest issue of PA Magazine, curated and edited by John

Baldessari and Naomi Shohan. You could consider Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, the Berlinbased mono.kultur, Avalanche and the Canadian File as well, but I’m not as interested in publications that take a conventional journalistic approach. For me, artists’ magazines function in a completely different way. Actually, in more way than one. But first and foremost, they blur the line between magazine and art. Of the three, Cattelan’s is probably the most interesting. He’s always explicitly prohib-

ited the publication of books on his work or catalogues of his exhibitions. Instead, he’s released his own books, as well as Toiletpaper—which is the followup to Permanent Food, a magazine Cattelan used to put out with Paola Manfrin. There, Cattelan and Manfrin would deliberately steal pictures and images from other magazines, simply ripping the pages out and combining or inserting them into their own. By doing so, they displayed their penchant for appropriating without bothering about approvals or copy-

rights. With Toiletpaper, however, Cattelan goes one step further: instead of just using or quoting from found footage, he creates the original images together with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. With incredible effort the two have invented an extremely powerful visual world. The photos were done with a remarkable attention to detail and lighting. The result is often, well, eerie; they mirror images that we’re constantly confronted with, but in a way that’s more surreal than familiar. When Cattelan recently announced that he’d stopped working as an artist, he made sure to announce that there would still be further issues of Toiletpaper. It seems that he considers the magazine his new medium . . . at least for the

moment. And to make an even bolder statement, he doesn’t exhibit or sell the photos as art in its own right; all the images were exclusively made for Toiletpaper. In other words: Cattelan has created an entirely new distribution channel for his art. Céline Duval and Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Cahiers d’image is also impressive. In this case, the magazine underlines the fact that Feldmann works serially. It all started with his Secret Picturebook in 1973 and 1967-1993 Die Toten, in which he reproduced images from newspapers of deaths due to the violence and terrorism in contemporary German history. In Cahiers d’image, he now focuses on assembling beautiful photographs without any sort of written narra-

tive. The magazine is thin, but the production quality is very high. For me, Cahiers d’image is one of Feldmann’s best works to date, because, amongst other things, it subtly reflects the narrative of sharing private photography on the Internet—especially social media like Facebook, for example. John Baldessari and Naomi Shohan are the focus of the recently released third issue of PA, a thicker and generally more massive magazine. To quote publisher Cristina Bechtler: “John and Naomi play visual ping-pong across the pages of the magazine with both images and ideas.” Undoubtedly, they do an impressive job with their contrasting approaches to photography and narrative. They manage to bring together the outsider’s view—the artist’s take on Hollywood— with film stills from the set designs of American Beauty, The Replacement Killers or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I was actually convinced that Baldessari’s collages would easily outshine the film stills, until I learned that the stills were very carefully chosen and even more carefully composed. They go together symbiotically. What do all these magazines have in common? They’re serial products. And that’s the main difference to magazines with a more conventional journalistic slant. Artists’ magazines can deviate from the given subject matter—or deal with it over a longer period of time. Shohan, Baldessari et al deliver coherent products that look and function like proper magazines, even though they’re essentially a collection of photographs. You could even call them exhibitions, curated by the respective artists. But these are exhibitions of ideas in which, as a reader, you can dive directly into the artist’s thoughts. It’s like the analog version of a photo blog that you just started to follow. ~

Sea, the light: Cahiers d’image, # 6

Where’s the ace? Toiletpaper, November 2011

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RECOMMENDATIONS

“It’s beyond good and evil, or good and bad . . . which is where anything approximating art should start” Chris Bohn recommends Oren Ambarchi’s and Thomas Brinkmann’s The Mortimer Trap (Black Truffle)

Chris Bohn is the longtime editor of British avant-garde music magazine The Wire. For the last issue of Electronic Beats, he recommended The Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72 box set.

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The Mortimer Trap is the name of a series of chess moves—the kind of trap you’d have to be a real schmuck to walk into and lose the game. If I played chess, I’d be that schmuck. But more importantly, you could read the album title as a statement about ambient music, about the fine line that runs through the genre between the utterly banal and astonishingly moving or beautiful. As a genre, ambient music is full of such traps and disguises. This record may say something about those traps, but it certainly doesn’t contain, much less fall into, any of them. It’s seventy-eight minutes of straight, unadulterated, modulated tones of indeterminate origin that hover, shift in volume, hit you, and carry you along towards the unknown. Well, until about thirtyeight minutes into it, when a very basic techno rhythm appears, though still in the background. It’s a drum pattern that you would expect to hear from somebody like Thomas Brinkmann or from Berlin. And it’s completely captivating. The rhythm softly nudges everything forward only to eventually fade away to inaudibility and place you back in the realm of an unsettled, unresolved and seemingly infinite modulation. For me, these qualities are the closest connection to For Bunita Marcus, the solo piano composition by the American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, which Brinkmann and Oren Ambarchi state the album is loosely based on. Like all ambient music, how you hear this album depends on: 1. Your own mood and 2. Hearing

things in the background that are independent of the recording. For me these are usually the sounds of the bus or train, or the rhythm of my walk and the way my legs brush against the side of my iPod. As its creators, Brinkmann and Ambarchi must be aware that listeners are not just hearing the music when they play the album. Also, it’s entirely unclear who’s doing what here. Brinkmann is known for both a minimal techno sensibility and his more experimental performances and compositional approach to electronic music: turntables with multiple arms, manipulated vinyl and unconventional re-edits. Ambarchi is a guitarist and a drummer who hovers between free rock—such as his collaborations with Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke and Stephen O’Malley—and the art world. He’s one of a new breed of musicians/ artists who don’t stay in one place or play one thing. He also performs a lot in galleries and art related events, and that has definitely had an affect on the way people hear his work. I drift in and out of the sounds of his various projects through the filter of my own world—like I would in a gallery space. And The Mortimer Trap in particular is not just about pure musical structures. It’s about the perception of music and has little to nothing to do with the disco, the dance floor or the stadium. In a way, I’m at a loss of words for why I think this is such a good record. I’ve been listening to it over and over again, and I just can’t seem to crack it. Maybe it’s because over the last twenty-five years and

working at The Wire, I’ve heard so many boring, tedious records pretending to be ambient or atmospheric. Somehow this album neutralizes such crap with its complete indifference about where it fits in, musically speaking. This is not a bunch of field recordings; there aren’t any tweeting birds or obvious “ambient” elements. This is about discrete changes in tone, changes in oscillation, changes in volume, beat entries, beat exits. From Stockhausen through Kraftwerk to techno, electronic music has always been about looking forward and never backwards. At least before the digital age, that is, which has triggered a nostalgia for antique tape and analog tools. This record is all the more exciting for its lack of concern about time or place. Sometimes you wish more artists would do the same. Given how little happens over its seventyeight-minute duration, it’s not the easiest thing to listen to, and I’ve heard from one person that the lead modulating synth tone actually makes them nauseous. Well, perhaps that’s a good thing? I mean, when was the last time you heard something that made you sick to your stomach? For me it must have been Throbbing Gristle in 1978. Or maybe The Residents. I wish I liked The Residents but their songs are so crap. Alas, I digress. More than anything else, this album makes me feel other. It makes me feel not there. It’s beyond good and evil, or good and bad . . . which is where anything approximating art should start. ~

DOPE ON PLASTIC

RECOMMENDATIONS

“It’s DIY pop music, and it gives us freedom. Be thankful.” Daniel Jones on Evian Christ’s Kings and Them

(Tri Angle)

Daniel Jones is a staff writer for electronicbeats.net

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I love to reconceptualize ideas and cultures, and I’ve always been drawn to sounds that are less than straightforward. Accordingly, London label Tri Angle has offered an excellent selection of diverse sounds for me to cram into my already overstuffed earholes. Evian Christ is probably one of my favorite new signings specifically because of this sort of bastardized musicianship: the souls of other songs lurk in his beats, making their appearance known through a snippet of chopped vocals or hidden beneath a skittering 808. It’s more than a sampling: it’s a haunting. Of course, reformatted ideas are thick within the eye of the public, and the reuse and recycle ethic has gone beyond its application in real life to extend into the realm of URL ideology. The idea of the mystery musician has become a tired one, so the young producer Joshua Leary has outed himself as the man behind the Evian Christ moniker, and is supposedly surprised that others are interested in his work at all. We all love to see humbleness, so we smile and say, “So young. So fresh and unpretentious.” Meanwhile, the ADD nature of our listening habits is already awaiting the next thing. But, in the case of this sort of music, the idea of authorship is irrelevant. Nobody really cares that Burial is Will Bevin, or whether iamamiwhoami likes cheese on her burger or not. We’re crafting our own internal Teen Beat these days. What we want are worlds—big ideas to lose ourselves in. Like his rostermates Balam Acab and Holy Other, Evian Christ draws you into a

world of mutated, liquid beats that echo our own ideas back to us in new ways. Kings and Them is old ideas made fresh, Top 40 through dark glass. I love the feel of mainstream ideas being run through a DIY filter and then released back into the collective consciousness. Ease of access and home production equipment dissolves the barrier between pop and underground ideology every day. When I was a kid, I had big Nick Cave hair, skinny black jeans and pointy boots, and I spent a lot of time listening to Fad Gadget and Cocteau Twins . . . alright, not much different from now. But I was also playing tons of TLC, Aaliyah and Biggie, and my pissy, post-punk peers were always busting my balls about it hardcore. I’m fond of the idea that there isn’t a real underground anymore, no limitations for a new generation. This is the main emphasis of my own blogging project Gucci Goth: to take away or reconceptualize these limitations and make them more open. In twenty years, when some post-seapunk kid is codeinesurfing ScannerJammer and they stumble across Evian Christ’s music, what will they warp it into? Hard to say. Who knows what kind of cool-sounding future shit they’ll be listening to. I don’t even want to venture a guess, because speculating about the creative future is futile. Humanity always ends up making some crazy-ass whatever that we usually could never even think of. Leary says that a lot of the tracks on Kings and Them are so sparse because he’s made them with a vocalist in mind, but I

think a vocalist would be distracting. When I listen to the mixtape, I’m totally absorbed in it. It’s like diving into a pool; the repetitive nature of the juked samples takes my mind to a post-physical trance state. The vocals are treated as part of the music rather than the focus. When Night Slugs/Fade To Mind artist Kingdom dropped his That Mystic EP a few years ago, it was on repeat twenty-four-seven at

Media simulacrum: Toiletpaper, November 2011; Concept and image by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

my house. It’s a towering, pulsing collection of sinister instrumentals, and it too treated vocal samples as just another song element, which made it all the more powerful. Kingdom’s latest EP Dreama seems less focused simply because emphasis is placed on vocals; it lacks the raw power of his earlier work. I can spend hours talking about the effects of the dissolving

lines between mainstream and underground culture, but the truth is that this is music for online culture. It speaks to the impermanent state of Tumblr feeds and everchanging tastes, and to trends that are remade and released. But is that something to lament? Nobody will ever be the next Janis Joplin or the new Beatles. As a collective, we’ve moved beyond that idea. Even the Madonnas and the Gagas

are irrelevant outside the context of drag queen karaoke: we have toppled the idol, and any cameos in reality are just fading ghosts waiting to be forgotten. We’ve given ourselves the tools to ascend to something else, and we’ve created a culture where you can release your visions online and in a couple months you could have a record contract. It’s DIY pop music, and it gives us freedom. Be thankful. ~ EB 1/2012

RECOMMENDATIONS

“A mythology they needed to survive in the streets of Detroit” Pantha du Prince recommends Drexciya’s Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller I

(Clone Classic Cuts)

Pantha du Prince, whose latest release Black Noise is neither black nor noise, defines his hard-hitting style of cross-genre electronics as “sonic house”. For the last issue of Electronic Beats, he spoke at length to Dan Snaith about the importance of sound design in making electronic music.

Currently, NASA’s budget for one year could fund sixteen hundred years of oceanographic exploration. One of the things I like most about Drexciya’s Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller I is that it draws your attention to this unknown world. The Detroit duo’s engaging mythology combines two of the most ignored subjects in modern history: slavery and deep-sea life forms. They seem to be pointing out the fact that we don’t even know our own planet, but we’re trying to explore the universe. For those who don’t know, the name “Drexciya” stands for an underwater colony populated by the unborn children of slaves who were thrown off of slave ships. The world is imagined as a kind of a neo-Atlantis, except the protagonists are millitants who’ve learned to adapt the acquatic environment by breathing in their mothers’ wombs. Drexciya’s sounds are, in a certain way, very harsh. Yet they’re also qualified by a submarine stillness. 808 kicks, snares, and claps are the funky and sometimes industrial-sounding framework for the repetitive, staccato sequencing and morphing arpeggios—the most classic examples being tracks like “Wavejumper” or “Aquarazorda”. I hear the dense, oceanic pulse of

their beats as an essential transformative device. That is, Drexciya pretty much always maintain the connection to the acquatic mythology in terms of sound design, be it through synth bubbles bursting, filters opening and closing in a wave-like fashion, sea life darting in every possible direction, or an underwater vessel rhythmically pushing towards its docking stations. Music isn’t just about the joy of listening, the joy of dancing, or the physical impact it has on your body. It’s also part of a fantasy. For me, in every work of art there has to be some sort of escape—a critical distance from reality that provides you with the power to survive it. For Drexciya, maybe this was a mythology that they needed to survive in the streets of Detroit, which is a tough city— especially back in the nineties. But it’s also an uplifting place, because it represents the downfall of a system and industry that was full of nonsense and injustice. If you ever go to Detroit, you can see the skeleton of a particular era of capitalism all over the place. It’s the perfect breeding ground for utopian visions, because it’s so dystopian—which is something I learned from Mad Mike Banks the last time I was there.

If you don’t know Drexciya, then this album will still make complete sense to you. It’s a compilation of both their early and later tracks, as well as some lesser-known material. Clone did a good job in respecting the work of the group and not simply doing a “best of” album. Journey gives a new generation access to music they might not know, as well as old fans a chance to rediscover B-side material they’ve forgotten about— like me for example. I first learned about Drexciya in Hamburg in the nineties, so listening to Journey is like revisiting a formative time in my musical development. But beyond the music alone, you have to see Drexciya as a larger, more complete mythological phenomenon. Explore the music and the information behind it. The song titles are metaphorical and can be the key to unlocking their universe. And that’s why I don’t feel any need to talk about the duo’s personal histories. For me it’s more interesting to look at the phenomenon itself than the supposed biographical connections. I just really, really respect these guys, and I understand why they felt the need to remain anonymous, and what it gives the music. I have a hard time thinking about listening to Drexciya in any other way. ~

“While watching, you become aware of its prophetic approach to storytelling” Hans Ulrich Obrist recommends Jonas Mekas’ Walden Jonas Mekas isn’t just a filmmaker. He’s someone who reproduces the reality of the world we live in. From 1968 onwards, he’s 26

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shared his own life with his audience. I stress this because I always believed in generosity and in sharing things and experiences. That’s

probably why I became a curator. I will never forget when Agnes B. introduced me to Jonas in 1995. We all met in Paris, at a small

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café near Les Halles. While I was conducting my first interview with him, he kept on filming me and the people in the café and the life on the street. He persuaded me to film my interviews as well. That was the moment when I understood that never stopping to do interviews and never stopping to film is, literally, to be working on a never-ending, non-linear narration. I saw the continual effort of interviewing people like a huge polyphonic novel. The next day, I bought my first small digital camera. Without him, I would still have my audio archive of spoken interviews, but I wouldn’t have my twenty-five hundred

filmed interviews. When Mekas started shooting his non-narrative films in the late sixties, it was pioneering work. Walden (1968/69), along with Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971/72), are films without any conventional narration. Yet none of these films are narratively random, as they consist of hundreds of scenes that were taken by Mekas on a daily basis with his Bolex 35mm camera. They’re like filmed diaries. I asked Jonas what had led him to creating the blueprint to diaristic cinema. Interestingly enough, he said he

was most influenced by the late nineteenth century Italian novel Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis. It tells the tale of a young boy from the perspective of his diary entries, mostly detailing his experiences at school. It’s fascinating to me that Walden, a milestone of non-narrative cinema, was so strongly influenced by De Amicis, but Mekas’ broader connection to the experimental novel, or nouveau roman, is clear. When Alain Robbe-Grillet “invented” the nouveau roman at the end of the fifties, it was a similar situation in literature. RobbeGrillet considered the classical novel a “dead” medium, particu-

S N O I TAD N E M M O C E R

larly its narrative dogma. In Mekas’ films, only time progresses linearly, but not the story. I chose to recommend Walden because I have the feeling that now is the perfect time to rediscover it. While watching it, you become aware of its prophetic approach to storytelling.

Recently, Mekas asked me to do a new interview with him, this time for his own book. During our conversation he announced that Potemkine Films would be releasing all of his diaristic films for the first time on DVD later this year. He confided, “I consider my diaris-

tic films to be basically narratives, only they are modern narratives. Me and my friends are the main protagonists and really, it’s very conventional. There is no one story. There are hundreds of little stories […] and you can tell everything about me from them.” ~

Hans Ulrich Obrist is an archivist and curator of contemporary art. For the last issue of Electronic Beats, he interviewed Carsten Nicolai at 4 a.m. in the artist’s Berlin studio.

“Like a really comfortable coffin” André Vida recommends Carter Tutti Void’s Transverse I’ve been listening to Transverse mostly on the train between Manhattan and New Jersey, where my parents live. It’s been a pretty practical way of listening, because this isn’t music that has a totally dominating presence, even though it keeps and demands my focus. For me, it kind of exists like a piece of furniture, a love seat or a really comfortable coffin, carved and painted over with some indiscernible code. It’s more part of your surroundings, as opposed to totally taking them over; it’s music that has a function beyond strict, heavy listening. That said, Carter Tutti Void make really, really driving and cathartic stuff. With every listen, I keep coming back to how strange the sound sources are— that is, the ones on top of the subtly shifting, four-four techno-ish beats. Neither the album nor the individual songs provide any linear dramatic form. It’s as if the underlying rhythm freezes time and the chopped and distorted vocals and guttural guitar noise happen almost independently, not within any sort of “progression”. The space in the music just hangs there and then when it’s filled—which happens relatively sparingly—it’s done so to maximum effect. Living in Berlin, I’ve been endlessly exposed to incredibly boring electronic music—repetitive beats that are just heinous

crimes against social culture and humanity. Needless to say, I get completely turned off within that sort of rigid context and certain types of digital production. I often ask myself, “Am I being used as a place holder for somebody to sell cappuccino to?” Exactly what is going on in this situation, here, in this coffee house, that demands such ridiculous repetition? Not that I go to coffee houses that often, but the music is almost impossible to escape. It’s the constant backdrop of the touristical rape of Berlin. In contrast, with Transverse, the repetition is really organic. And the fact that it’s live electronics only adds to the “natural” feeling or atmosphere it exudes. I’m still trying to imagine how people dance to this music. The polyrhythms are so intricate and unexpected and wild. I have this vision of people intuitively moving to secrets their bodies have been hiding for centuries. Hypnotized into a confrontation between their pre-sexualized beings and the linguistic entrappings of commerce. And when you compare the first four live tracks to the last one, “V4”, which is actually the same as the fourth but done in the studio, you can hear how Carter Tutti Void are dancing with the audience. Endlessly feeding back into each other, coveting one symbiotic breath. Grunting histories into and out of each oth-

ers mouths. There is just so much more intrigue live. And that, for me, is an exciting way of capturing electronic music: dirty, spontaneous, and ancestrally imperfect. As a trio, Carter Tutti Void seem not only locked into the unpredictability and complexity of their tools, but also into improvisation and interplay with each other. There’s a breaking point with playing any instrument where you start using the instrument more than it’s using you. And that’s not an easy thing to achieve, because the instrument isn’t just a material thing. We’re talking about the entire history and industry surrounding the object and conventions for how it’s supposed to be used. The body, the syntheziser, the voice all cracking under the pressure of an overabundance of options. Released from any obligation to sound out a definitive answer. Floating between right and wrong like the lost angry taunting love cries of a distant goddess. To my ears, the five tracks on Transverse sound like an extremely cybernetic take on sound manipulation. Carter Tutti Void are on a search for hidden ghosts, convincing them out into the open, and etching them into the bodies of a chosen few. I will definitely be coming back to this record and cooking some of those mysteries into my near future. ~

(Mute)

Hungarian-American saxophonist and composer André Vida is co-founder of the NYC collective Creative Trans-Informational Alliance and a frequent collaborator with musicians as diverse as Oni Ayhun, Anthony Braxton and Kevin Blechdom. His most recent release is the three-volume retrospective, Brud, put out last year by PAN Records.

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ABC

The alphabet according to WestBam

as in ANTHEMS: My anthems are programmed hymns and they’re an integral part of my work. They’re made to express the feelings of a community, like “The Mayday Anthem” at the end of 1991, “Sunshine”, and the more recent anthems I’ve done for the Love Parade. In retrospect, I’m extremely glad to not have contributed to the hymn for the last tragic Love Parade.

as in BERGHAIN: Just as Planet represented Berlin nightlife in the early nineties, Berghain represents both the city and the global scene in the twenty-first century. After all their battles, this club got its act together in the world of post-modern techno and has consistently followed a clear concept. Suddenly, clubbing was no longer about exploring new worlds but rather about what’s undeniably excellent. The incredible space, the Panorama Bar, the dark rooms and cash machines in the corner— it’s where the best DJs have played the best tracks on the best sound system in the best location for the best clubbers. But somehow, it’s still pretty bleak, isn’t it? 30

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In the early nineties, Maximilian Lenz, alias WestBam, helped usher in an era of euphoric, postreunification revelry in German techno, one that redefined the country’s image abroad. Move over philosophy, fascism and fussball—make room for the Love Parade. Named after his role model Afrika Bambaataa (cf. Westfalia Bambaataa), the Münster-born DJ and producer was never modest about his musical contributions. But he was also never content to rest on his laurels, either. Westbam’s continuing collaboration with Zulu Nation co-founder Afrika Islam has once again reshuffled the joint deck of European techno and New York electro funk. So pay attention, you could learn something.

Right: WestBam photographed in Berlin by Andrea Stappert.

as in CDs: I feel at home on turntables, so I stuck with vinyl for a ridiculously long time. The main reason that I’ve been using CDs since 2007 is that after fifty years of being able to perform on turntables in clubs, it seems that the knowledge required to set up the decks without the needles continually jumping has been lost. I love vinyl, but I hate skipping records. It drives me mad. Also, these days ninety percent of the tunes that I would love to have on vinyl don’t even get pressed. Not even my own releases.

as in DIGITAL DJING: The first time I came across digital DJing was not in a hip, high-tech location but in a huge abandoned disco in Rügen, Germany, where the DJ used his hard drive to play everybody’s requests—from Herbert Grönemeyer to The Village People. At the time, it seemed unbelievably boring, but in fact, digital DJing has revolutionized DJ culture like no other development in DJ history. And everybody seems to have access to everybody else’s playlists too. But you still have to know what you’re doing to really rock the floor.

as in ECSTASY: The first time I was offered ecstasy was in 1982. The guy’s name was actually Dr. Drug, believe it or not. Real incognito. He told me, “I’ve got this new pill and it’s incredible. The CIA tested it on a thousand American families on Christmas day, and they all said it was the best Christmas they’d ever had!” This is before I’d taken any drugs, so I was like, “Sounds interesting. How much?”—“Seventy deutschmarks”, he told me.

as in FUTURE: I can’t predict the future of dance music. However, something that’s always interested me is how house and techno will be looked at in the future. For example, in three hundred years time, will it have the significance of, say, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach? I have my doubts.

as in GLOBAL PLAYER: I have already played all over the world, and over the years, my desire to travel has significantly decreased. You really have to come up with something special for me to feel tempted to travel to faraway places.

Read more ABCs at electronicbeats.net

as in HIGHLANDER: The audience stands under the bright lights, the image of eternal youth. The Highlander stands at the DJ booth and says, “There can be only one.” He looks around and sees only a sea of young faces. He goes to the bathroom, looks in the mirror and is startled by his old, aging face.

as in IRRITAINMENT: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” There is nothing worse than when I go to a club and hear three minutes of music and then know how the rest of the evening will proceed. An essential feature of playing music is the spirit of adventure and the joy of surprise. Whenever there is new kind of fun to be had, then this is good fun. I call this concept irritainment. All good entertainment is also irritainment. All bad entertainment is just food for the masses.

as in JAPAN: When some people think of Japan, they think of cherry blossoms or minimalism or whatever. I always have to think of my man Mark Spoon. Back in the day, he would arrive at Narita International and then ask to be taken to his five star hotel by helicopter. At the end of the night, he’d usually end up in some brothel, but none of the prostitutes ever wanted to serve him. He actually got stuck in the shower there once because it was so tiny and he was so huge. 32

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as in KING TUBBY: Everybody loves King Tubby if they have a brain. Noble studs like him did it all before us, so eat your heart out dubstep. Everything we know about the deconstruction of sound, delay and bass he did in the sixties and seventies. He is our teacher. Jah bless.

as in LOVE PARADE: The image of the Love Parade with a million people dancing around Berlin’s Victory Column truly characterized Germany in the nineties. In my opinion, it even contributed to the country’s post-postwar reinvention.

as in MINIMAL: The success of minimal in the last decade is, in my opinion, strongly connected to the need to retreat into privacy after 9/11. But its ongoing success also has gastronomic reasons. At, say a Skrillex concert, you’re bombarded with jittery rave signals and check your watch after five minutes. At a minimal party, ten hours slip by as if nothing happened—which means more turnover at the bar. as in NINETIES: I used to think that my destiny and what I became in the nineties was a result of my achievements. But the truth is that it had everything to do with historical circumstances and very little, if nothing, to do with personal achievements. Either way: the music we made became the soundtrack for a decade of great awakening. People were drunk with joy—it was a naive and emotional time, and people thought that the West had won forever.

as in ODEON: The Odeon in Münster was the first club that I ever played. I was the “warm-up” DJ there in 1983. I still remember that I started my set before the doors were even open, and it was almost over when they finally were open. The last record I played that night was Sid Vicious’ “My Way”.

as in PURISM: As a DJ and an artist, I am the opposite of a purist. I am a universalist. The purist enjoys stripping everything down to the bone and clarifying everything. He enjoys bringing even greater clarity to things that are in no need of explaining. In contrast, my strengths lie in accepting the chaos of certain situations and grabbing the dancing star at the right moment.

as in TECHNO: Kraftwerk’s Computerwelt is, in my opinion, the best and perhaps only real techno album ever made.

as in QUO VADIS, RAVE CULTURE?: Who knows where science will take it? Back in the day, everybody was so optimistic about the direction of rave culture. They thought that technical advancements would carry it into the future on its own. WestBam reads more books than you.

as in UNDERGROUND: Underground is a collective term for anything that opposes the mainstream. There wasn’t really much of a dance music underground in the mid-eighties in Germany, though gay hi-energy culture came pretty close. Today, I feel most at home in underground venues. I prefer makeshift locations to fully done-up, glitzy disco temples.

as in ROCK AND ROLL: I have always believed that techno is a continuation of rock and roll but with new technology.

as in SPONSORSHIP: Money does not create culture, but it does act as a catalyst. Without money from the Catholic Church, the ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, and indeed the Chapel itself, would have been inconceivable. Broadly speaking, this captures the essence of sponsorship. It can be a blessing and a curse. And in our case, I would say that it was a blessing. I’m glad that companies sponsor DJ culture and events. After all, it’s better than a lot of the nonsense they could be spending their money on in the name of culture.

as in V-2: The rocket scientist is the paradigm of scientific progress, and there are few rocket scientists of greater repute than Wernher von Braun. OK, he made evil rockets too. But they didn’t work very well. He took the Americans to the moon.

as in WEST: I am a child of the Western world, and I still think, perhaps somewhat naively, that Western culture has a lot to offer humanity. Maybe it’s just a European delusion of grandeur.

as in X-CHROMOSOME: “This is a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothing without a woman or a girl.” This has always been true, even in the worlds of house and techno.

as in MR. Y: For our project Mr. X and Mr. Y, Afrika Islam always attached great importance to being Mr. X. I never really understood why, because if you call yourself Mr. X and Mr. Y, outsiders won’t know exactly who’s who anyways. Anyhow, he was fascinated by European dance music, and the idea of the project was to combine the interesting sides of hip-hop and European dance music for the techno/electro world. Today, this fusion has taken a different direction entirely. When David Guetta and the Black Eyed Peas collaborate together, you can safely say that this is the worst of both worlds. as in ZEROS: The zeros at the beginning of the twenty-first century did not signify my decade as such. Not that I didn’t enjoy myself. Honestly, the feeling of swimming against the tide is something I’ve known well. Actually, it’s kind of my attitude towards life in general. It was like that in the eighties when nobody paid a thought to DJs, and it was the exception in my life when, in the nineties, the tide turned and swam with me. The 2000’s were marked by 9/11 and a general feeling of fear. I would say that Osama bin Laden influenced phenomena like minimal techno, Berghain and the withdrawal of techno culture into smaller and more hidden locations. It was a decade of deep uncertainty. We realized that other people hate us, are willing to die fighting against us, and electronic music could only provide a small niche, a temporary respite. We became withdrawn. That’s the difference between techno culture in the nineties and the noughties. And now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the cards have been shuffled once again. ~ EB 1/2012

TERRE THAEMLITZ ON AKIHIRO MIWA

Mrs. Style Icon

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call Akihiro Miwa my personal “icon”, if only because I’m not into all the social power behind the making of icons. And I actually really hate fashion, because it’s so rooted in gender and class divisions. But Miwa can’t be reduced to a fashion icon in the conventional sense anyways. She started out singing French chansons and doing cabaret in Tokyo’s Ginza district in the sixties, and today you couldn’t find a single person in Japan who doesn’t know who she is. It’s pretty remarkable considering how left-leaning and openly critical she’s been of the Japanese government and political status quo in her stage shows and on TV over the years. On stage, she always goes into monologues about social issues between songs. Being a survivor of the atomic blast at Nagasaki, she’s always been quite outspoken—not only against the broader theme of war, but also against the government policies that led to the war and the unjust treatment and care of survivors. For better or worse, I think a lot of her initial pop success had to do with just how femininely beautiful she was in her youth. She also had some edge, which was clear from her first hit in the late fifties, “Meke-Meke”. That song used a lot of “dirty words” that had never been spoken on record, and this was thirty years before hip-hop started doing the same. I first became aware of her in the late eighties after seeing an underground New York screening of her 1968 film, Kuro Tokage (“Black Lizard”). The film is based on a play by Yukio Mishima, 34

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Famed actress and singer Akihiro Miwa grew up in Nagasaki, where as a child she survived the city’s nuclear attack to go on to become one of Japan’s most celebrated transgender personalities. Here, activist, computer musician and Comatonse label owner Terre Thaemlitz pays respect to Miwa’s critical voice and uncompromising self-image. Right: Tokyo, 1955. A portrait of the artist as a young dandy. © Kyodo News.

a famous gay author who committed suicide while still quite young. Mishima has a little cameo in the film, and there’s a really nice “outing” scene where Miwa kisses him, then turns right to the camera and says, “So now you know…” It really made an impression on me because even up into the eighties, that was something you just didn’t see in Hollywood cinema. Unlike many countries, the non-transitioning transgender scene in Japan is pretty visible—especially in terms of media presence. And that’s rare, because in so many other places the media only focuses on the immaculate, perfectly passing, post-op, maleto-female ideal. That’s exactly what Miwa isn’t, and she shows that being transgender doesn’t always have to be equated with hormones and operations. A small part of the Japanese acceptance of these ideas is cultural, since Japanese people are traditionally not that into body alteration. With all of Japan’s social emphasis on fashion, many women still don’t have pierced ears. But it’s not about being conservative; it’s just not how most people approach their bodies here. Personally, I knew from a pretty early age that even if I wanted to medically transition, it just wasn’t financially possible. Class and economics are at the heart of the concept of passing, which is ironic given the poverty most transgendered people live in around the world. Miwa, for me, stands for the potential for transgendered people accepting their own body and growing old with it. And resisting becoming simply “male” or “female.” This

is a bit unconventional . . . and for me, very, very important. Musically, I can’t identify with what Miwa does, because I actually hate chansons and French pop music in general. As a non-performative computer musician, one of my main goals is to offer an alternative vision of the transgendered stage. Glam is just not my cup of tea. Also, as she’s gotten older, Miwa’s taken a sharp spiritual turn. She somehow got mixed up with fortune tellers who do color readings of auras and energies emanating from the body, which is why she now dyes her hair bright yellow. Talk of auras is standard in a lot of eastern religions—but it’s ultimately a swindle. She actually hosted a weekly television show about it. I mean, I despise religion and spirituality, so that was a pretty upsetting change for me. For several of my friends, too. We all admired her for her focus on social issues over the decades, because aside from the fact that it was always unwavering, it was also grounded in political realities people can change. And I think it’s sad when people suddenly preach faith as they start worrying about death. But unwelcome spiritual themes are always lurking about in transgendered communities, if only because the dominant discourses on the subject revolve around a perceived split between the physical body and the “inner self.” It’s a metaphor that lends itself all too easily to metaphysics. Her changes are a bit disappointing, but not surprising. I’m thankful she’s still here, showing the world that being transgendered is not only about youthful beauty. ~

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COUNTING WITH

Mette Lindberg memorable line in a film or song: As a teenager I used to watch Pulp Fiction over and over again, counting toilet scenes, coffee drinking scenes and listening to the soundtrack with the dialog intros: “Who’s motorcycle is this?” “It’s a chopper baby.” “Who’s chopper is this?” “It’s Zed’s”. “Who’s Zed?” “Zed’s dead baby, Zed’s dead.”

found out that it was “Bang, bang Maxwell’s silver hammer . . .” and had to do with bloody murder.

hours ago . . . I was on a plane from Vancouver to London, coming home from our North American tour for the new album. Right now I’m on the plane from London to Copenhagen, thinking about how impossible it’ll be to carry my heavy suitcase up the many stairs to my apartment.

decisions I regret: I wish I had gotten a piercing in my nose or lip as a teenager. It’s something I don’t think I would ever do now. And I wish I would have been more of a punk.

people that should collaborate: Jay-Z, The Asteroids Galaxy Tour and Damon Albarn.

things I haven’t done yet: I’ve yet to become a mother, and I don’t know how to drive a car. Otherwise: been there, done that.

records everyone should own: David Bowie - Heroes Adele - 19 Michael Jackson - Dangerous The Beatles - The White Album Bob Dylan - Planet Waves The Human League - Dare Depeche Mode - Exciter

After

I start to wake up after being kind of tired all day. I live for evenings and nights.

My things I used to believe: Only one comes to mind: As a child, not knowing English so well, I thought that The Beatles were singing “Bang, bang Max go on banana split”, to which I would dance happily in my living room. Later I 36

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p.m. . . .

lives . . .

I’m not a cat.

I wouldn’t touch it with a

-foot pole . . .

A rotting corpse. Photo: Hans Martin Sewcz

PICTOPLASMA BERLIN 2012

Image by Mark Gmehling

FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHARACTER DESIGN AND ART 11–15 APRIL BABYLON, .HBC & 20 GALLERIES EXHIBITIONS, ARTIST TALKS, WORKSHOPS AND SCREENINGS

BERLIN.PICTOPLASMA.COM

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I R E

INTE RVI EWS

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MAX DAX INTERVIEWS CHRIS DERCON

“ I like the moment in video games when you discover undefined areas for which no rules exist” Chris Dercon has a vision: One day, the endlessly exploited creative class, previously divided by the supposed “uniqueness” of their endeavors, will unite against the hydra of the creative industry in protest against the insecurity of their freelance future. This might sound like the unrealistic musings of a particularly masochistic union organizer, but Dercon happens to be the director of London’s Tate Modern, one of the largest and most important art institutions in the world. In 2010, the British museum boasted some five million visitors—more than New York’s Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art combined. Since arriving in London, the former director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst and Rotterdam’s Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art has boldly recast the Tate’s focus towards dialogue with its extremely eager public. And while his anti-establishment talk might seem to contradict his very establishment walk, Dercon’s efforts have resulted in an exciting new trajectory for the Tate Modern, and a balance between big-name exhibitions like Gerhard Richter: Panorama and curating as civic discourse. Left: Chris Dercon photographed in London by Luci Lux.

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Mr. Dercon, as I was walking across the Millennium Bridge on my way to the Tate Modern to meet you, I got hungry and decided to stop off on the other side of the Thames for a quick sandwich, which turned out to be this ridiculously processed piece of food. I didn’t want to eat it in the convenient store, so I decided to sit down on a park bench facing a busy street. And then I noticed a sign on a nearby tree saying that the bench and the tree had both been sponsored by an investment bank! It was a bizarre experience, as if the simple act of eating a sandwich on a bench next to a tree was impossible without food processing plants and corporate sponsorship.

Welcome to London! Sitting on that bench, I wondered what you would make of this new reality of sponsorship. I know you curated the federally funded Haus der Kunst in Munich before you became director of the Tate Modern, and now a huge part of your work is fund-raising, correct?

You should have walked more around the area after the bridge. Have you heard of Rem Koolhaas’ phenomenal new building for the Rothschild Bank that was built in the quarter just behind Millennium Bridge on the North Bank? Lots of people have asked me how to find it, and I always tell them how to get there, but only up to a certain point. They end up walking through streets that are documented in a normal city map, and these streets have proper street signs. But sooner or later they’ll have to stop because certain streets are private property now. In the center of London! It’s almost impossible to differentiate between private and public property in parts of this city. Rem plays a lot with this idea.

I am completely aware that broaching sensitive topics like that is probably not something that’s expected from the director of a major art institution. A director’s job in the twenty-first century is not only to assume responsibility of a space for art, but also, and maybe even more so, to supposedly create a “time-slot” for art. That’s not my interest and never has been. I want to institute an institution, and this means to really create a space, to establish the conditions that fulfill particular needs and allow for certain experiences, and to make possible events in the future. This shouldn’t be equated with simply celebrating art’s “time-slot” within the larger scheme of socio-political events. I think most politicians see art as entertainment, as an expression of consensus of thought and taste, not as a form of critique. To make the impossible probable, and to celebrate the demos—that’s what I see as my task at Tate Modern, and that’s why this job is so intriguing. The Tate Modern is both sexy and democratic. You see celebrities and famous thinkers, but also groups of school kids and tourists who just arrived in London with the Eurostar . . . not to mention the twenty million visitors who use our online tools every year. And they all want something different. An exhibition like Gerhard Richter: Panorama is just one thing people want to experience amongst a host of other offerings. Curating exhibitions, selecting artists and art works; that’s one thing. Getting a message across is another. That’s why I like talking about small-scale organizations and what they can achieve. OK, let’s talk about it. How do small-scale organizations fit into the picture?

Well, one of Rem’s intentions was to kick off a public discussion about private and public property. This city is in a precarious social and financial state at the moment. I honestly have no idea how things will turn out.

Enthusiasm about being creative is a key aspect of self-exploitation nowadays, and that’s one of the biggest issues in an era where millions of people are freelancing. Today’s inequality is indeed unbearable. The art world is an ecosystem made up of art schools, art fairs, auction houses, galleries, museums, art publications, et cetera. And within this ecological mix, small-scale organizations become more and more important because they’re forced on the one hand to deal with so many other parts of the ecosystem and to adapt, while on the other hand still being absolutely unwavering about their mission. Most of them operate under almost impossible—I would even say unbearable—conditions. And yet they continue to operate.

Maybe the London riots were a kind of response to that conflict?

You mean they are forced to operate in the face of failure?

Actually, I think the London riots were first and foremost materially driven. People wanted plasma TVs. Coming here from a relatively cohesive society like Germany, London was a shock. The system here is built on inequality. Of course, inequality is healthy for the art market; markets prosper most in places where you’re confronted with the most perverted forms of inequality and the biggest gap between rich and poor. In a recent article in Texte zur Kunst, Andrea Fraser points out that the art market is strongest in places where incredible wealth is concentrated, like in London or in Dubai. By the way, the article got rejected from ArtForum.

That’s exactly why I’m interested in them. This reminds me of you, Max, because the idea of failure as an integral part of journalistic practice was a central aspect in your lecture when you spoke at the Haus der Kunst in Munich two years ago. You were stressing the idea of limitations and how to use and eventually overcome them. This was during the time when you were editor-in-chief of Spex Magazine in Germany.

Actually, it seems like you’re thinking similar thoughts in regards to the Tate Modern, no? That is, in terms of conceiving of the institution as a social sculpture.

You’re known for using interviews as platforms to make people aware of such societal developments. To quote you: “There are millions and millions of people [...] who don’t know what social class they belong to and who can’t identify with any particular political agenda. And they’re becoming more and more. Those in power are hoping they don’t realize how many they’ve become; they’re hoping that they just continue to exploit themselves . . .” Do you think the art of modern governance lies in the skill to make the millions of members of the freelance “precariat” believe they’re only struggling for themselves individually? 42

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That’s true. I also wasn’t getting enough sleep. I remember in an interview you said that sleep is like a currency. When you’re asleep, you can’t be exploited.

When you don’t sleep, you can become seriously ill. But when you don’t sleep, you can also enter into a trance-like state that can trigger ideas or solutions to problems that wouldn’t have come to you otherwise. But of course, I agree that it’s important for your health.

In London, I formed a habit of sleeping more than I used to. Hans Ulrich Obrist has the opposite approach: he’s totally against sleep.

But I think he’s missing something important.

Would you say that you’re running such a large institution in a new way by letting museumgoers participate?

Dreams?

For example. It’s interesting to me how children often don’t distinguish between dreams and reality. Sometimes, the best ideas result out of accidents or dreams. For me, accepting that failure is one of the conditions of working within smaller organizations was extremely important.

It’s time to redefine the term failure—that’s what consulting agencies will tell you. The critic Jan Verwoert quotes Lacan’s interpretation of the phrase creatio ex nihilo: “To give what you don’t have to people who don’t want it.” An interesting notion in this context. When you asked me to do this interview, I immediately thought of one of your theses: “Small-scale organizations can turn into established brands”. And we’re not talking about the underground or random artists meeting and emailing project ideas from cafes around the world, because the underground doesn’t accept failure. “Underground” is just another term for enthusiasm. But take a group like commonpractice.co.uk—they explore new key performance indicators in order to measure the success, as well as the artistic and social value of small-scale organizations. But after you realize what these small-scale organizations are capable of and the potential advantages of being forced to work with limitations and set backs, how do you then utilize that knowledge?

Knowledge of the redefinition of failure is like gold for management consulting firms like McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group or Roland Berger. They now need us because they want to understand “other” ways and criteria to measure and judge the world, especially in order to tell their customers that there are millions of potential clients out there who don’t exactly know who or what they aspire to be or what kind of new products they need in order to find their identities. It’s not just about the placement of products, but about redefining what a product can be. We are talking about understanding future experiences, future events and future needs. And that’s why they want to “consult” us—the Tate Modern—pro bono. They’ve kindly offered us new tools to measure our success and prestige, not to mention the breadth of our knowledge and capabilities. But why? Because they want to use our information to help realize the goals of their real clients. In your case Max, I think Electronic Beats Magazine could be like a think tank: not just providing creative content for the readership, but also indicating new ideas and directions for Deutsche Telekom as well. There’s a lot of research that goes into directing the Tate modern? How do you do it all?

I have no other option than let others do the research. Of course, I try to read a lot. One of the best publications on this topic was recently put out by the fantastic Sternberg Press—it’s called Circular Facts and it’s a kind of guide for nonbureaucratic ways of working and getting things done, in the art world and beyond. It’s really helped me to understand and to talk about the problems and possibilities of smaller organizations, which, in return, might increase the credibility of the Tate Modern’s position.

We are currently trying to redefine the rules of how to run a space like this. One of the funny new things I like to promote is what I call “lyrical voyeurism”—museumgoers watching each other look at art. Dare do this in a train station or an airport and you’d be arrested in a heartbeat. That sort of observational interaction in public is getting more and more difficult these days. Tyler Brûlé, the editor-in-chief of Monocle, says that he doesn’t like the iPad because you can’t see what other people are reading anymore.

Exactly. One thing we’ve observed is that even though we have millions of real visitors, we have even more visiting us online and using our digital tools and combining them with social networks. Don’t forget: we’re now being confronted with Web 3.0, and an institution like the Tate Modern has to explore these possibilities. This is a huge challenge. If we don’t do it, others will, and most likely in a much more aggressive and commercial way. In light of the digital freedoms of tomorrow, what does the future hold for the art world?

We are about to lose control, and I love the idea. For decades, the art world was based on the control of information. Now, information is everywhere. I like the moment in video games when you discover undefined areas or objects for which no rules exist. Like trees that remain blurred even though you’re “standing” directly in front of them, or a house you can’t enter. These moments are the unprogrammed “spaces” in the game. But they aren’t just digital enigmas; they might hide a completely different world that has yet to be explored. It makes me think of when a child receives, say, a Lego helicopter as a present, but then tries to build a train with the pieces instead.

You can be sure that those children are the ones with interesting, new ideas, because they create a game within the game, independently of rules or written programs. Apply these ideas to a space like the Tate Modern and everything becomes very new and exciting. I think learning in a museum should ideally be about understanding and enhancing decision-making processes, and that’s the difference between a conventional authoritarian form of pedagogy and a constructive one. Would you say the main challenge lies in answering the questions that are being asked by the visitors?

People ask us all kinds of questions via Twitter, via Facebook or through other social media. For example, we were asked why we didn’t officially “react” to the London riots. Two weeks later, our film curator Stuart Comer put together a film retrospective and started a public debate about historical disturbances in the City of London. We see a great responsibility in taking these questions absolutely seriously. So how do you go about answering thousands of questions?

Next page: Gerhard Richter, 1024 Colours, enamel on canvas, 1973. From: Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota (ed.) Gerhard Richter: Panorama [London: Tate Publishing, 2011] Courtesy: VG-Bildkunst

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We maybe get to work with around ten percent of the questions. But even such a low percentage already makes a difference. At the end of a month you maybe have a thousand perfect questions. And, of course, science is about asking the right questions. What was a question that made you rethink your position on something?

“Is curating linked to the Latin term ‘curare’, i.e. ‘healing’ or is it linked to the term ‘taking care’?” I loved this question. That is, curator as healer of society’s ills versus somebody who cares for society because they’re part of it?

Exactly. In Circular Facts, the same question also comes up. Anthony Huberman writes that his “small” institute no longer practices curatorship in the form of “I know and you don’t know”, opting instead for: you should take care. Thus, “how” one does things becomes the most important part of the curating process. And the very moment we begin talking about care and responsibility, we enter the world of ideas, and we go beyond the “selector selects” or “decider decides” conception of curating. But it goes without saying that we still need curators to select things in order to deal with the sheer accumulation of art. Maybe there should be a “pre-selection” process. Aphex Twin famously titled one of his records I Care Because You Do . . .

When you take the questions of your audience seriously, you start to realize that an art institution can be an ideal place to get people who know something to meet people who know something else. . . Do you remember some of the questions that were asked by visitors during the last Gerhard Richter exhibition?

Damien Hirst exhibition? Does this mean he makes bad art?” Good question. What’s your answer?

We decided to exhibit a lot of Hirst’s early works. We want to ask ourselves and the visitors if we’re still aware of the social constellations that formed the basis of their creation. We soon realized that most people barely know Hirst’s work at all; they only know photographs of the original works, reproductions. But important aspects of his work are missing when reproduced, like smell for instance. The glass box with the rotten meat and thousands of flies indeed looks and smells absolutely dreadful, yet we’re undeniably fascinated by something so revolting. These days, his early works remind us of reality TV, but these were done years before I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! Today we’re able to experience his work on many different levels, but these levels very much depend on the visitor’s imagination, his or her questions—not just on the artist’s intentions. Let’s talk for a minute about your daily work schedule . . .

First, I should let you know that I don’t occupy the office that was used by the director before me, which was on the same floor as the curators. I preferred to move to the floor with the Visitor Experience and Learning departments. Today, the move makes perfect sense. I need to be in the epicenter of the interaction with the public. What exactly do those departments do?

They deal with visitor’s needs, reactions and questions, as well as with education and community relations. They’re pretty big departments, actually, and they take great care in what they do and how they do it. Have you ever worked before with such a big team?

“Why did Richter want to have more children at his age?” was one. The best was: “Why are older artists like Gerhard Richter so much better than most younger artists?” Of course, the vast majority of questions don’t have that sort of philosophical depth.

No. This is my biggest so far.

Did anybody ask what Gerhard Richter thinks about the banking crisis?

No. The big picture can only be understood by analyzing its component parts. And if necessary, its atomic particles. I would say the bigger the institution, the more important it is to take care of the invisible aspects that form an organizational cloud—a semiotic chain or a rhizome—around a particular work or an exhibition. It’s the same in media and in other fields—even investment banking. The big picture is unthinkable without the smaller pieces. We are totally aware of the fact that the interactions we have with our visitors affect hundreds of smaller-scale initiatives with their own similar organizational issues. But this is the new direction of the Tate Modern, redefining the space between the visitor and the institution.

Another good question. He actually whispered into my ear at the press conference in London a few months ago: “Why is nobody asking about the bank crisis?” I’ve often wondered if he would be able to paint such a crisis, and how he would do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already working on an Atlas of the Deutsche Bank. I’m also extremely curious how Gerhard Richter would paint Alfred Herrhausen, Josef Ackermann or Anshu Jain. Or Christian Wulff and his wife, for that matter. I would also like to see more of Alexander Kluge collaborating with Gerhard Richter, like with the book they did together, Dezember. I get the impression that you’re also using this interview to encourage our readers to ask questions.

Absolutely. And let me tell you this: magazines should make sure to answer their readers’ questions, because when people understand that their questions are heard and taken seriously, it increases both the publication’s reliability and sustainability. Everything starts to grow and to blossom. And questions open up other unexpected and interesting subjects, like “Why hasn’t the Tate Modern done a 46

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Does your special interest in small-scale organizations ever clash with the massive structure of an institution like the Tate Modern?

What happens to all the unanswered questions you get from visitors? Are they deleted or do they get archived?

It’s funny, because one of the key aspects of the digital age is that nothing ever really gets deleted. It’s all somewhere, and it’s a problem of massive proportions. Surely it’s one of the most significant problems of contemporary culture. How do we deal with the fact that everything is traceable? I suppose you could ask a similar question about art. What happens to all the art that never gets picked up on society’s radar? ~

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D. STRAUSS INTERVIEWS DILLON

“What gives you the right to talk to a woman like that?” It’s been a remarkable progression for twenty-three year-old singersongwriter Dominique Dillon de Byington, from teenage YouTube phenom to her theatrically intimate debut This Silence Kills, a record forging instinctual composition to the exquisite electronic production of her collaborators Thies Mynther and Tamer Fahri Özgönenc. Dillon, the germ of your songs is usually built around whatever comes out of your mouth when you sit in front of a piano. It’s as if you’re attempting to capture sense memory—the physical sensations of emotional events. Within the German songwriting landscape, that’s pretty uncommon.

Well, I am Brazilian. And not very confident in my Portuguese. I was talking to my mother this morning and I told her that if I had felt the need to clearly give shape to all the events that took place in my life, I would have become a writer. But what I do is very abstract. I’m just speaking my memories out loud, and that’s all I am doing. Very often I have fragments of lyrics or two word lines in my head and I don’t write them down. I just let them swim around and see if they sink or come together to form a whole. Your parents are proper Brazilian or shady German Brazilians?

They’re just Brazilian Brazilian. I mean, I think I know my great, great, great ancestors came from England and Ireland, which is why I have a humongous British surname that no one understands. But my first name is French but I am living in Germany and everyone is pissed off because I’m writing in English. I was surprised to learn that you did most of your schooling in English.

I didn’t really speak English until I was eleven, just a little bit. But I

went to a British school in Cologne, so I did my A-levels and I learned everything from algebra to biology to physics in English. And I don’t know it in German. But I would have never even dreamed I would actually be thinking or dreaming in English. That sort of early mixed linguistic exposure can lead to unusual connections in one’s brain.

My brother is dyslexic. He doesn’t look at words and see how they’re written—he remembers the shape of them and from that, either knows how to spell it or he doesn’t. He struggled the moment French came into it: it was English and German at the beginning and then in third grade you start learning French, so if you’re dyslexic, actually, you’re kind of screwed. There’s a great experimental film by Hollis Frampton called Zorns Lemma in which he spells out the alphabet, a word for each letter. The words are eventually replaced by images which ultimately resonate back as letters.

That’s exactly what I remember before we knew that he was dyslexic: He was in first grade and I would go, “Come look at the word, you have to remember it.” And he would look at the word and close his eyes to memorize it, and I would go, “Are you kidding?” He is literally memorizing tens of thousands of words in three languages.

Left: Dillon in Berlin. All photos by Eva Beth and Torsten Oelscher / black flamingo.

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Following in a tradition godmothered by Björk and Tori Amos and midwifed by Bat for Lashes: Dominque Dillon de Byington.

Your songs appear to be rooted not just in specific experience but also in the physicality of your perceptions. They have a exceptionally strong non-verbal element.

I haven’t been able to do it yet.

I always think of my music as a monologue; basically, I’m talking so I can hear myself. I know that I didn’t have any actual inspirations when I first started making music because it was very irrational. I just sat down at the piano one day and it burst out of me. I had to write it down because I wanted to understand it, so I would write it down and then I would read it. And then I had to sing it so I could hear it. I don’t think you can do much more with words. I mean, you can eat them—you can eat the paper—but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them. And now I can listen to a song and still identify with it without necessarily having to think about why I actually wrote that song.

To write a happy song? I guess I’ll know when it happens.

So you encounter your music the same way a listener might?

What process do you think will allow you to get there?

Don’t you ever sit down and think flowers and clowns and jelly beans and . . . nothing?

I can enjoy humor and I love being light and everything but when it comes to my art, it just doesn’t work. It’s not so much about the world, I guess, but more about interpersonal relationships: how people treat each other. But I am absolutely not interested in writing any political songs. It’s definitely something that does concern me but I guess I am more private about my political views than about many other things. Political art is often one-dimensional.

Well, when I sing, yes. Every time I perform that’s basically what I’m doing. I turn into myself and I listen to myself. When I played in Paris in November it was during “The Undying Need to Scream” that I was screaming and . . . I just continued screaming. And then I broke down crying. I don’t know what happened but obviously something happened. I mean, I have no problem with crying if something moves me, or with getting very angry or even smiling and laughing—which I think many people have problems with when they’re trying to be the sad, depressed musician. But I was shocked by the power that it had on me in that second. People were like, ”What the hell is happening?” And I was, like, “What the hell is happening?” and Tamer who plays with me was, like, “What the hell is happening?” Is there more pressure on you on these days? When you started out you were posting on YouTube just to let people know what you were doing, and now you’re on Ellen Allien’s label, BPitch Control and selling out venues left and right.

I don’t feel more pressure in that aspect, no. I think I have always been an angry person, an angry child with a lot of rage. But that’s why I need to find ways to vent and channel it. Otherwise, I just get sick. I listen to angry music. I’m really into Death from Above but also older bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and Atari Teenage Riot . . . I used to run in the streets to them, and bike too. I like some Japanese noise, like Merzbow. I also like being in the mosh pit. Would you say you were a serious child?

It’s just if you want to make a statement you should one hundred percent know what you are talking about. When somebody starts talking about the clichés, say, about gays in Turkey, and you’re not Turkish. I mean, what the hell do you actually know about that? In my experience, in Germany, when people are attacking the way gay people are treated in Turkey it’s more about attacking the Turks than defending the gays.

Exactly. And I think it’s like that with many, many things. We’re in liberal, anything-can-happen Berlin, but do you think there’s a hypocrisy here in the way that people are more conservative than they let on?

I think a lot of people are. A lot of people say they are very openminded and they are very respectful of everything and then five sentences later you hear, “Oh, but normal people, not gay.” And it’s just five seconds earlier they were talking about equality. Really? Because one thing I haven’t seen too much of here is homophobia.

Not necessarily homophobia; any sort of sexism, racism. I mean, you have to be very sensitive. But there are certain words I would never use, even if my gay friends use them, because I’m not gay. Like what?

Um, yes. Very angry at times and serious. It’s just that when it comes to art or music or writing, it’s never that light side of me that feels inspired. It’s not something I choose.

What is it in German? “Schwuchtel”? It’s like “fag”. I would never say “fag”.

So you’re saying you can’t write a happy song?

Is there a lot of sexism and racism in Berlin?

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Everywhere, I guess. As a woman, there’s always a difference between the way men talk to women on the street and women would talk to men on the street, for example. I mean, what gives you the right as a man to talk to a woman like that? Just a look or a whistle or click-click [clicks back of teeth] is enough sometimes. Gender plays a role in the power dynamics of two people talking to each other.

I’m sure in certain places more than others. The social environment that I was brought up in and the friends I have are just totally open-minded and supportive of each other’s existence and sensitive to each others insecurities. Then I wonder where this anger comes from.

Well, I’ve seen a lot of things, been to a lot of places. One of the subjects I’m continually discussing or trying to process is a sense of isolation and a sense of loss. We’re sitting here right now—this is a situation. The moment you leave, am I going to meet somebody else or should I also leave? Are you going to be open to different encounters because somebody has left a space? Most people make the same mistake again and again and don’t take any time to process anything. People are continually disappointing you.

No, but I do have a very, very, very select few people around me, those who are really close to me. And they’ve been close to me for years now. I don’t exactly let people come close to me so easily. Well, Berlin sometimes seems based around the social sideshow.

Isn’t that just the world? I mean, the world is so bloody small. You will meet people here from New York because they lived with your ex-roommate’s girlfriend. I don’t even know why it still surprises me, that if you end up getting to know somebody from around the corner, you’re obviously going to meet them in the desert in India. If they can afford to get there. One thing about Berlin is that everybody is on the dole and everyone works for free.

You’re not fond of it or you’re just not good at it?

I’m not really interested. So you’re not really into doing the whole KaterHolzig/Berghain thing with your friends and associates?

Sometimes, but rarely. It’s not like it’s a routine. For some people it is a routine, like going to the office. Partying is their job. You think then that people aren’t really wasting their talents because if they had the talent then they’d be truly doing something with it.

It’s not necessarily about having the talent, it’s about recognizing what it is. I didn’t start writing music or singing until I was eighteen. Before that you were dealing with the non-verbal language of photography. I know you shot the cover of This Silence Kills, which, again, suggests a more elaborate image of you than your YouTube videos.

Yeah, everything is coming from me. I shot the cover myself and I shot the press photos myself. I mean, you also hadn’t seen me two years ago. I’ve looked like this for years, it’s nothing new. I think it can be confusing because, all of a sudden people are watching me and they have this idea of what I look like. Well, should I live up to that idea? If I want to play on the piano without a drop of makeup and a striped t-shirt then that is also what I do. Because for me, it is very important to keep honest to myself because I think otherwise you feel ridiculous in a couple of years. You don’t want to turn into a caricature of your own character, you know? But the glamour of the cover certainly doesn’t suggest your dayto-day.

Well, sometimes it does, absolutely. I mean, when I went to art school I would have one day of the week when I would paint myself as an animal, as a fox. You’d go to class painted as a fox?

It’s difficult to actually pursue your original plans, I guess, for many people. I’ve seen a lot of people come here and leave again because they weren’t doing anything but going out, socializing, taking drugs and just getting lost. They weren’t experiencing things to process and consider. They were just drowning. Interesting, creative people often seem to tighten into a spiral.

Yeah, my girlfriend used to paint me. What was the general reaction?

There wasn’t one. Did you become “the fox girl”?

I’m not that sort of person, but I also haven’t been since I moved to Berlin. I’m not that social and I’m not that good a drinker. 52

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No, because actually the fox was only, like, once. And then a

month later I did it again as a different animal, a mouse.

like a real-time description of the action in an anime film about pirates. It comes across as absolutely psychedelic.

Were you trying to work through different identities?

It’s just a certain lightness sometimes I’m lacking and I’m trying to make up for it. At times I want to be light and I just can’t. That sounds like depression.

Maybe not clinical depression, but something very heavy inside me. When you came here were you still primarily interested in being a photographer?

I never consciously switched over until today. I was always just trying to do what fulfilled me, which I guess is very contemporary. A lot of people my age are doing that, not really limiting themselves to one sort of medium, but instead to a state of mind.

I love pirates. I also have pirate tattoos, like I got them when I was out at sea. Somebody did them with a knife. Well, not really, but it looks like it. I have a few of them actually. Here’s a crown, and this one on my finger is a comma. It’s actually this typography [points at her album cover]. Now you’ll be stuck with the same font for your entire career, like Phil Collins.

My little brother thinks the comma is a seven. The comma implies a pause. Your ring finger is your pause finger.

Hopefully not when I’m engaged or married. Well, the ring will just cover it up.

Who are your photographic influences?

Again, I don’t think I have many and I haven’t actually taken a photo in months, but Wolfgang Tillmans I adore. I think he’s my favorite. Jürgen Teller I also absolutely love.

Or I won’t get married. You could do that too. Then your life would be on permanent pause. But tell me more about “Hey Beau”.

Both photographers that have a certain glamour but also try to isolate the personal in their subjects . . .

What am I supposed to tell you? That I was on drugs and wrote this song? It’s based on Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky.

Oh, and Nan Goldin too. This is what I am drawn to: what’s reality and what isn’t? Just because I take a picture now, it’s real. But then the moment changes and it stops being real? I think it’s the same with writing music and writing lyrics. I try to change as little as possible, but if I look at it again later on, there’s always the chance I’ll say “No, no, no, wait . . . ” And then of course I’m going to change it.

What is it about pirates that you find so appealing?

And by concentrating on the specifics of physical sensation, like in “Tip Tapping” for example, you don’t actually have to say anything specific about yourself or the world. You get to reveal and conceal simultaneously.

Yeah, but if I went to the movies yesterday and had a really lovely time, and I wanted to keep the memory alive of that experience, I’m not going to write about the film that I saw, because then, next time, I won’t be able to identify with it; it’s not the same film that I watched. And that’s what it’s about for me: to revisit that place and, on a broader scale, deal with the primal emotions and identify with that. Because I will definitely find myself in the same situation again one day, at least emotionally, even if it’s not with the same person or in the same place. To make the metaphor more concrete: Your song “Hey Beau” is 54

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In my mind, I like the roughness of it all. Man, woman, humans are not supposed to be on a piece of wood out at sea. At least, that’s the idea I have in my head—I have never actually met pirates. Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates also aligns the pirate trope with feminist liberation.

A pirate is both someone who is against society and apart from society. You have two choices: you can fight against mainstream society or you can just get on a ship and float away, and the pirate combines those two impulses. Although, I mean, the Somali pirates aren’t so cool. Three hundred years ago, the regular pirates probably weren’t so cool.

I could be a pirate someday. On the Spree?

I would just stay in my apartment in the bathtub. ~

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A.J. SAMUELS TALKS TO LUTHER CAMPBELL

“I might be Muslim — hell, I might even be Jewish” As 2 Live Crew’s hype and front man, Luther Campbell was the face of one of the most controversial outfits in the history of hip-hop. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Miami native led the band’s numerous battles against state and federal obscenity laws after authorities in Florida arrested record store owners for selling 2 Live Crew’s breakthrough album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be. The band’s success made them unlikely first amendment heroes—a role further bolstered by winning a landmark copyright case in U.S. Supreme Court for the right to parody. With songs like “The Fuck Shop” and “Throw the D”, 2 Live Crew’s highly explicit, comparatively up-tempo and misogynistic booty bass not only infused hip-hop with a new form of smuttiness, it also influenced generations of bass music producers. At this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, A.J. Samuels caught up with Campbell to talk about his bid for mayor, the Occupy movement and the art of mastering vinyl. Over the past decade or so, a number of bass music sub-genres have emerged with roots in Miami bass—dubstep, ghettotech and juke come to mind. How do you see your contributions to the Miami bass sound with 2 Live Crew?

Well, part of me is from Jamaica and the other part from the Bahamas, so I was always into reggae, dub and calypso. And, you know, Miami is a serious melting pot—it’s not like the more segregated American south. And the influences here are much more from the islands, from the Caribbean. Musically, that means first and foremost: very heavy bass, congas and high-hats. With 2 Live Crew,

it was always important for us to have our own sound. When we were coming up, hip-hop was all about East and West: New York, Run-DMC, Mantronix, N.W.A., and all that L.A. and Oakland stuff. Those guys really had a sound that was connected to where they were from. It was cool to sound like where you lived and where you grew up—but not, like, in a provincial way. So when we were writing, we asked ourselves: what are we all about? And the answer was: we were Latin, Caribbean, Jamaican, and African-American. And the common thread there was undoubtedly bass. What were you doing musically before 2 Live Crew?

Left: Luther Campbell lounging at the Delano Hotel in South Beach. Photo by So-Min Kang.

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I was a DJ, so speakers, cabinets, sound systems—that shit was always incredibly important to me. At parties, we had sound systems with, like, forty speakers for the floor, and thirty-five of them were bass cabinets. And that shit wasn’t just for the club; you needed it in your car too.

which were, like, invented for the shoot.

So you had experience figuring out how to achieve the heaviest bass sound specifically for the heaviest sound systems?

2 Live Crew drove me to politics, as strange as that sounds. We constantly found ourselves dealing with different municipalities in Florida who wanted to censor us—and then later on a much larger scale all over the U.S. Of course, censorship is political, because it’s about understanding your rights and understanding the constitution. When you start understanding laws, you also start understanding the difference between a good lawmaker and a bad one. And sometimes you have ridiculous politicians who try to tell you what you can and can’t say on a record . . . just to get some brownie points from his or her constituents and show how they’re fighting “immorality” and “obscenity”. As an artist, you have to know how to deal with that.

Damn right. But believe me, it’s not just about the instruments or drum machines or the mix. With 2 Live Crew records, I would go to the mastering lab where they were cutting the vinyl. You know, there’s only so much bass you can put on vinyl before the needle starts skipping, because eventually the grooves will be too close together. I would always make sure that the cutter would make the separations between the grooves a tiny fraction of the size of the needle, right? You know, on the very edge of skipping . . . as thin as possible. At one point in time, we always made a certain batch of records that you could only really play with diamond needles, like for DJs and true bass heads. It was for the heavy drop. You don’t just take an 808 or 707 and 303, program some shit and then have a good sound. Would you say understanding bass music in general is a matter of experiencing it on a proper system, like a tricked out car stereo or in a club?

No doubt. I mean, back in the day you’d put on a Run-DMC or LL Cool J record, and after that my record, and, shit—the difference was crazy man. It was a whole part of the sound spectrum that our music opened up! But even if you didn’t have crazy-ass bass enhancers you could still feel it. And if you did, as soon as you pop on a button to get the bass pumping, shit would just rumble, because our records were literally cut different. What do you think today’s digital production possibilities bring to the table?

For me, not a whole hell of a lot. Digital bass will always sound tinnier to my ear. You know, next year we’re actually getting ready to relaunch Luke Records, and for all the real bass music we’re going to put out, most of it will be done analog. Plug-ins won’t do the trick. I don’t listen so much to all this juke or dubstep, but dudes have been paying homage to me, telling me what an influence 2 Live Crew was and all that, so it’s all good. When I ran for mayor last year, I went to a party for the Winter Music Conference and people, like, freaked the fuck out when I walked in. But the connection to electronic stuff was there from the very beginning, because when we toured England or Germany for example, we’d play acid parties, not just hip-hop venues. 2 Live Crew’s lyrics were at least half the equation for your success. Was there a natural connection for you between the music and the sexual nature of your rhymes?

Hell yes! Sex and bass are a match made in heaven, which became even more obvious for us when we’d watch people dance to our music—especially outside of Miami. In the clubs in L.A. or New York, it was all about grinding, people grabbing each other and just getting freaky. They were practically fucking on the dancefloor in an attempt to recreate the dances we had in our videos—some of

Last year you ran for mayor of Miami and ended up coming in fourth place. Were you always politically active or did the band’s civil liberties cases make you political?

Lots of people remember 2 Live Crew fighting Florida’s obscenity laws, but actually your biggest civil liberties battle was in the U.S. Supreme Court over copyright infringement and the right to parody Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”. Which of your court battles was more important in shaping your political trajectory?

Obscenity, no doubt. It just seemed bizarre that you could have The Playboy Channel and Penthouse and all that, but you couldn’t have “Me So Horny” or “Face Down Ass Up”. In the beginning, what was considered “obscene” was different from district to district, because depending on where you were, it was or wasn’t enforced. Like, in one record shop it was OK to sell As Nasty As They Wanna Be, but a couple miles down the road, it wasn’t. The whole thing was like a litmus test for how progressive or conservative the individual municipalities were. But before the obscenity cases went to court, it was just some cop or county sheriff saying what was right and wrong. I just couldn’t wrap myself around the idea that Andrew Dice Clay could get away with his act and people were being arrested for selling our records. At first I thought it was because stand–up comedians had a history of defending what they do, and musicians hadn’t done it yet. But then I realized . . . That it was racist?

Absolutely. And it just got more and more political when Tipper Gore came out with that “Focus on the Family” shit and the Parents Music Resource Center. It was a blacklist . . . pun intended. 2 Live Crew just became a pawn in the censorship game. In my opinion, Al Gore was actually a better candidate for president than Bill Clinton—he just had all this baggage from his wife. It’s ironic that one of the most conservative censorship campaigns would be spearheaded by somebody so close to America’s self-styled progressive poster boy.

Go figure. But 2 Live Crew’s parody case was also pretty important too, no?

Well, it changed the whole landscape of sampling and allowed people like Weird Al and Saturday Night Live to continue doing their thing without getting sued by Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson. Right: Uncle Luke, ready to bust. Photo: Michael McElroy/© 2011 Miami New Times, LLC, All rights reserved.

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DILLON THIS SILENCE KILLS

So, yeah it was. It’s no exaggeration to say that some politicians and fellow artists conspired to stop us from doing what we do. There are few cities in America where the gap between the haves and have-nots is as visible as in Miami. Ferraris and Lamborghinis seem to be constantly rolling through South Beach or barreling down U.S. 1 past some of the area’s poorest neighborhoods. You grew up in Liberty City, which has one of the highest unemployment and crime rates in the city. Did that have an effect on you politically speaking?

The disparity in Miami is fucking unbelievable. I mean, we’re talking about two different worlds with rich and poor, and little to no mobility. The middle class is almost non-existent. City hall here is just full of elitists. Their job is to continue to make certain people rich and take advantage of other people’s communities. Black people don’t have jobs and suffer serious police brutality, especially in the Haitian neighborhoods. Everything black just gets treated like garbage. It’s that bad. If you’re Cuban, it’s different. It’s easier to get a job downtown and all that. But they take care of their own, you know? Don’t get me wrong: a lot of Cubans are good people, but everybody’s got their own interests in mind. Who voted for you when you ran for mayor?

It was all over the place—black, white, Jewish, you name it. I was the only candidate who really won at the polls. I’m telling you, it’s such a tricked-up system here with buying and selling votes and absentee ballots. You’d think there would’ve been a clamp-down on vote-rigging in Florida after the Bush-Gore debacle in 2000 . . .

You would, wouldn’t you? But things don’t change here. Liberty City looks exactly the same as when I grew up there. And, politically speaking, it’s not a party thing. I’m a registered Democrat, but that’s all just a bunch of bullshit. I’m two seconds away from going independent. The Democrats didn’t do anything for me when I was running my campaign. Maybe it’s because I don’t look like them. Do you think the Democratic Party has become too conservative?

Absolutely. It’s not what it used to be. But the funny thing about the Republican Party is that the real republican Republicans—the ones we always had a problem with; the ones who are, like, two seconds from being KKK—they all joined the Tea Party. The racist motherfuckers are all there, and I think it’s actually making Republican leaders more moderate. In one of your recent columns for the Miami New Times, you came out in support of the Occupy movement. What’s the protest landscape like in Miami?

It’s happening in Miami, but not as much as in other places. Personally, I think the movement is incredibly important. When I was a teenager, they held the Democratic National Convention down here in 1972, which brought out all the hippies and zippies. They took over the park at the beach but they weren’t active enough, you know? The Occupy movement gets it. They are out there with all their fury fighting against the goddamn propaganda machine.

in a blue suit with a certain haircut and a certain look, and people will listen to what the guy has to say. They’ll believe it. They’ve done, like, a million studies on it. That’s some key shit. And when this guy tells you “Nancy Pelosi is a rapist! She rapes men!” people believe it before she even gets her day in court! So when people say America’s broke and shit, I know they’re juggling the numbers. Wall Street’s not broke. They’re fucking with our investments, our retirement funds. And the protestors understand that. They know that this is what’s fucking the country up. We live in a heavily propaganda-driven society with major mass manipulation. Do you think there have been any major improvements under Obama?

Let me tell you: I voted for Obama the first time and I’m going to vote for him again, but only because all these other guys are so fucked up. To be honest, I expected more. When Bush was in power, he took care of his constituents. Obama gets elected and he talks about saving the world, but he should take care of his fucking people, because we’ve been getting fucked for the past eight years. We’re like fucking first graders compared to the rest of the world. I mean, America’s got guns and some nuclear shit, but that’s about all these days . . . Oh yeah, megachurches, too. Are you religious?

I guess so, but it’s not like I run to the church every day. I pray at home and read the Bible, but I try to study other religions as well. You know, when I was growing up, my mama told me I was Baptist and a Democrat . . . so when I was young, I didn’t explore. But who knows? I might be Muslim—hell, I might even be Jewish. In the past, you’ve dabbled in the adult entertainment industry as both a producer and director. Are you still involved with that at all?

No, and I don’t miss it either. For me, that was really about making money and filling a market niche. When I decided to get into the business, there was practically no tasteful African-American porn. It was always some grimy Motel 6 shit. I wanted to make some classy urban stuff, you know? I only did one hardcore movie, but to tell you the truth, I just didn’t like the whole experience. Internally, I just couldn’t deal with it. It wasn’t me—even though it sold like crazy . . . You mean morally you had problems with it?

Yeah, it just wasn’t right for me. I do think some porn is art, but it’s just not my art form. Sex, for me, is more personal. It’s not a business. It’s not work. When I sing “I want some pussy!” it’s more like I’m celebrating it by telling people to go out and get some. But not when it’s all cold and impersonal. Nevertheless, I respect porn stars. They put a lot of time and energy into what they do. Art Basel is on now. Have you checked out the main show?

No. Even though I’m an artist, I’m not really the “artsy” type. But Art Basel is great for the city. I’ll probably go with my wife and check out some of the public stuff. I like paintings, but when I look at a sculpture or some shit, I don’t get it. I won’t lie.

What do you mean?

Have you been to any of the parties?

Look, for the average American, if you put somebody on TV

I haven’t been invited. Artsy people getting loose? Interesting. ~ EB 1/2012

EB 1/2012

ARTO LINDSAY TALKS TO YUKIMI NAGANO

“ I’m drawn to music that takes me to another place— a place I can escape to.”

Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano has a voice both commanding and unique, a heady rush of audio that grabs your ears with soulful pop hooks and doesn’t let go until the music stops—not that you want it to. She’s also never succumbed to a mold, opting instead to reject any conventional labeling the music press has applied to Little Dragon’s output. In a similarly rebellious vein, Arto Lindsay helped define a new generation of brutal, primitive noise music in the late seventies with legendary no wave pioneers DNA and continues today to push the proverbial envelope as both a producer and consummate guitar nonconformist. Together, Nagano and Lindsay in conversation are not as strange a pairing as you might initially think, as they seem to meld perfectly with dissolving barriers between mainstream and underground. Their conversation was both awkward and refreshingly obvious: today’s avant-garde musician challenging yesterday’s, the oddities of influence, the need for escapism, and the frustration of limitations. Are we the only ones daydreaming of the collaborative possibilities? Left: Yukimi Nagano in her hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden. All photos by Hans Martin Sewcz.

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When I listened to Ritual Union, I really liked the way that you mixed electronics with conventional acoustic instruments from the very beginning. You’re also using music software and techniques that you can identify when you’re a musician, and you use them really well. It’s an exciting record, and it sounds like the band has a lot of pent-up energy. When the singing stops, the music just kind of bursts out sometimes. Like the band’s playing the song, and then suddenly there’s all this music, if you know what I mean. It’s a different kind of energy than what comes out when you’re singing, and that makes it feel like a strong band and not like tracks made by a producer for a singer.

The guys make a point of sampling all the sounds we have, so we can play them all live. We aren’t dependent on any kind of backing track; when we’re onstage we have the freedom of changing the tempos and changing the form. Not that we necessarily improvise to that extent, but I think that kind of openness is really what keeps it alive when you’re playing in front of an audience. And that’s really important, but it’s also frustrating because it takes a lot of time. If you only had guitars, you could learn whatever you need to learn and just play it. Now it’s a couple weeks of sampling all the sounds and learning to arrange it on the queue so you can actually play it live.

then he had a track that I sang on. It was more a collaboration. You recorded the track “Empire Ants” with Gorillaz too.

Yeah, that was real cool because we went on tour with them, and we got to experience the whole Gorillaz madness. It’s a huge outfit, the Gorillaz thing?

It’s like a traveling circus. You’re from Sweden—but were you also born there? I’m from New York, but I grew up in Brazil. When I came back to New York I saw the city with fresh eyes. Do you still live in Sweden?

Yes, we all live in Gothenburg. My mom has been living in Sweden for fifteen years, my dad for over thirty. But neither of your parents are Swedish . . .

My mom’s American, from Orange County in California. My dad’s Japanese. And tomorrow’s my birthday.

But it sounds much better that way. I’ll tell you, it does.

You’ve been friends with the guys in your band since high school?

I think a lot of electronic “bands” these days have gotten lazy in terms of using a backing track. It makes everything sound and feel a little bit flat.

I’ve known Erik, our drummer, since I was fourteen. The others I’ve known forever too. We’ve grown together and become sort of a little family.

I absolutely agree. It sounds a bit karaoke. Like it’s shrinkwrapped; like there’s plastic between you and the song somehow. People really do get lazy. You see a lot of big bands like this where the drums are coming off a computer and the drummer’s playing on top, but he’s just playing the hi-hat or something. So it looks like there’s a drummer, because audiences love to watch drummers, but . . .

Since 1996, right?

There’s not much going on.

Yeah, that’s when we met. What kind of places did you play in Sweden?

Little jazz clubs. Student venues. There wasn’t much at the time. We’ve played much larger shows since then. Do you write the songs together?

Singing is kind of an explosive job. You have to be able to explode on cue.

It’s good therapy, actually. That way I don’t have to do it offstage. What about this famous temper of yours when it comes to performing live?

It definitely helps. Is this, like, an old story that you’ve already discussed in dozens of interviews?

I don’t think it’s that bad anymore. It’s certainly not healthy to have a temper.

Pretty much. I mean, it usually starts with me coming up with a beat or lyrics or some beginning of the song and then everybody just takes it from there. Occasionally the guys will come to me with something they’ve done, and I’ll write lyrics for it. Do you play an instrument and write the chords too?

No, but I still feel very involved. Even though I don’t play anything, I’m still able to throw musical ideas around. Sometimes when people are jamming, they have a hard time saying what’s good and what’s not. I’m like the person on the outside who says, “Stop! That was good—can you play that again?”. I’m not so different myself.

I also read that you recently worked with Big Boi.

What do you play?

Yeah, that’s right. We’re huge fans of his music and the last OutKast album, so we were really excited about collaborating.

I bang on a guitar, mostly noisier stuff. And I sing. With other people, I write pretty straight songs. Sometimes it’s me writing the melody and coming up with the chords, other times I just write the lyrics. Have you ever heard my music?

What does he do? Does he make beats and play an instrument, or does he just do a verse on one of your songs?

Well, this was for his album. We gave him one of our tracks, and 64

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I’m not sure. I know you’ve been around for quite some time now, though.

Check it out afterwards. I’m also a producer, and maybe this allows me to hear things in abstract ways. Anyhow, one cool thing I’ve noticed about Little Dragon is that live, everybody in the band mouths the lyrics. I think that’s pretty neat. It would be great to watch you guys on stage with a giant video screen and have the cameras not on you but on the rest of the band lip-syncing while you’re singing. Like they’re your fans or something, singing along. For me it comes across as a sign of people who’ve really grown together.

Absolutely. It’s intense. Music is really the force that keeps us together. What were you guys listening to when you first started?

Erik was listening to a lot of older hiphop—A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes. Håkan was more into various synth wizards, Kraftwerk and stuff like that. We were all listening to a lot of soul as well. We’re all avid listeners, so we’re always showing each other stuff. But you write all the lyrics?

Yes, and the vocal melodies as well. Your lyrics are pretty literate. You must read a lot during the long Swedish winters, no?

Not as much as I’d like to. I have my phases where I’ll read everything I can get my hands on. Then I’ll stop. Usually it’s because I’ve read a bad book and I just get turned off from reading for six months or something. That’s strange to get turned off from reading in general by a bad book.

I always feel like it’s not fair to not finish a book, so I feel guilty if I give up. It’s like if you go jogging, and then you stop in the middle. Do you read a lot? I do. But I’m also the kind of guy who’ll just stop jogging if I’m tired. Are you sporty?

Little Dragon (left to right): Håkan Wirenstrand, Fredrik Källgren Wallin, Yukimi Nagano, Erik Bodin

No, I wouldn’t say that. I like yoga, but I’m not really the sporty type.

How personal are your lyrics for you? They sound personal to me.

I wonder, do you do these interviews all the time?

I try to mix it up and not make it too obvious, but yeah, they’re very personal. I like a little ambiguity, you know?

I haven’t done interviews for a while now. We’ve been home for a month just writing, being in the studio, you know—trying to write new material.

I like ambiguity too. I think that one thing that makes a very good lyric is that you can hear it different ways at different times, and you can find new meaning in it, you know? You start to notice EB 1/2012

things that you didn’t notice the first time. But your lyrics sound good on first listen, which is also really important. They sound natural. They don’t sound . . .

Pretentious? Well, yeah. And they don’t sound formal.

Cool. Did you ever write about your temper?

You mean aside from the band name? Yeah.

Maybe not directly. More in terms of writing about the many different sides of personalities within yourself, that kind of schizophrenic feeling. The good and the evil, the angry and the calm. All the different contrasts. A temper-tantrum sounds like a good subject for a song. You wouldn’t have to have one; you could just talk about it.

I think I’m a very emotional person. I deal with a lot of ups and downs, and that becomes very present in my mind. That can become an easy subject to start working on. When you started out, did you consciously model yourself on any particular singers, like soul singers or anything, or did you just get going?

I think both. I had different periods where I really dove into one artist. Prince, Faith Evans, Jimi Hendrix, Depeche Mode . . . I wouldn’t necessarily say the classically “good” kind of vocal bands, but more singers that I loved, I guess. Yeah, Prince is a super interesting artist, right? He’s so, I don’t know . . . It just seems to flow out of him. I don’t know if you know this, but supposedly he goes into his studio, he writes the song, he records the song, he mixes the song and then he goes home. So other people—musicians, technicians—just fall away. He needs a couple engineers, but eventually they can’t stand it, so they leave, and then somebody else comes in and he just keeps going. Twenty-four hours at a time. I worked with a couple of engineers that worked with him, and they had crazy stories. But he seems like a fairly tortured guy. There’s the classic kind of sex and religion thing going on there, you know?

Right. And the Black American thing. Or just the American thing, really. You mentioned Hendrix before. Tell me a bit about him as an influence.

I like the psychedelic, otherworldly feel of Jimi’s songs. I’m drawn to music that takes me to another place—a place I can escape to. In my teens, I listened to so many of Hendrix’ albums, and forgetting the world around me is definitely what his music did—it helped me escape everything. I’d just put on a song really loud, and just, well, escape. I had that same experience. I also love his rhythm. It’s so relaxed, and his feel is so loose but still so strong and confident. 66

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Do you work with music software yourself, or do you just listen and work with other people?

I like to work with people, bounce ideas back and forth and be able to develop ideas that way. I’m certainly not one of those do-it-allmyself artists. I think a lot of people have that confidence and that skill, but my confidence is in working together with my band, and with the people I make music with. Can you tell me a bit about some of the other guys in the band, like what they’re good at?

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Erik has a certain sound, obviously all the songs he starts out with almost always have live drums on them. I can hear in a second who did what, who started what idea. Most of the music on Ritual Union was written by Erik. The first album was more a mix of everyone. There were also a lot of songs that we didn’t intend to release at all, that were more like demo songs. When we signed to our former label Peacefrog, they gave us a little advance that we spent real fast, and then they said we had to use our demo material; it’s either the demos or nothing. So that wasn’t a very positive experience for our first album release, really. Everything got so blown up and sensitive, you know? It was a really big deal that we didn’t get to mix the songs, that there were a few songs that we didn’t intend to have on the album. That was difficult. But at this point, in retrospect I think it’s still us, at the end of the day. We made the songs, and of course we make a lot of songs that we wouldn’t want to share with the world. At the same time, that first album stands for a specific episode for us as a band, and the second album is more electronic. We got labeled with the first album as a bit “neo-soul” or even trip-hop; words that we don’t really like at all. We didn’t think of our music like that, and we didn’t want it to be like that, so for Machine Dreams I sang more minimal. It was more dancey and electronic. We wanted to play songs that people would dance to and not ballads that people would fall asleep to. The second album was more “do everything right” as a contrast from the first, and the third album is, I think, a little more confident in that we’re just doing whatever. Did you switch labels after the first record?

No, actually we had a three-album deal with Peacefrog, unfortunately. We were basically stuck with a label that had no budget and no real marketing plan. They did the bare minimum and we did everything else. We just started from scratch, started playing places live and building it from there by word-of-mouth. We started touring in the US without an album out, and without any press. But we had support from KCRW on the West Coast. They had our first album as the second-most played after Radiohead that year, so that kind of showed us the power of radio. Los Angeles was the first place we ever had a sold-out show, and it was a shock. So you guys had to do this whole thing on your own, almost despite the record company.

Yeah, absolutely. And now you’re free for your next record?

Yeah, we’re so excited. We’re completely out of this deal and talking to different labels, looking at all the options and trying to make a smart decision so that we feel like we have full creative control and, hopefully, some budget to actually make some of our visions possible. ~

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STEVEN LEVY SKYPES WITH RICK HOLLAND

“I thought I was staring into the mystery of life itself ” RICK HOLLAND: Steven, in antici-

pation of our discussion, I’ve been writing down ideas non-stop on how new forms of digital literacy have changed conventional literary narrative. After a lot of brain bashing I’ve reached the conclusion that writing poetry or novels these days hasn’t changed all that much, but the process of amalgamating things to write about has changed enormously. The ideas we collect and how we collect them—where we cull them from—seems to me the domain of real evolution. STEVEN LEVY: I agree that writ-

ing a book or telling a larger story hasn’t changed all that much in the past few years. But the daily forms of communication and storytelling have changed drastically, and I think that affects how we think. I think our brains are hard-wired to respond to narrative and storytelling, so it’s not surprising to me that we construct narratives out of all possible forms of communication and expression, and that’s why platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and instant messaging have become such rich wells of ideas: because they each present different forms of spontaneous narrative. It adds a lot of adrenaline to the production process when you know how quickly you can reach a massive audience by posting something in one form or another. And posting or tweeting doesn’t benefit from careful rewriting—which is otherwise key for a

In the jungle of digital communication, user generated content has become increasingly designed for temporary consumption; here today, gone (or irrelevant) later today. That is, until the posts, tweets and streams of digital consciousness are turned into books—a somewhat bizarre measure of the literary value of new media. For British poet and blogger Rick Holland it‘s clear that as users become innovators, the content of their digital narratives isn’t just becoming more complex, it’s also being taken more seriously. Fresh from his musical collaborations with Brian Eno, Holland took time to skype with author and new media expert Steven Levy on the development of electronic storytelling and the relationship between digital literacy and digital literature.

certain kind of written excellence. RH: Your last sentence about rewrit-

ing is particularly interesting to me. When I was growing up, I always thought that anything in a book or recorded on a tape or CD had reached this level of authority that was so removed from the world that I lived in. I never imagined I could reach that world. These were musical or literary narratives I could access but I could never really take part in. In the past few years that barrier has come down dramatically. For me, there’s a real kick in publishing and posting things in their imperfect form. Somehow the world is starting to understand that maybe being wrong, and being wrong publicly, isn’t such a bad idea. And while some get their knickers in a twist about privacy, slowly people are also starting to understand that there isn’t so much about them that is so unique or so important to protect. SL: I grew up in a lower middle

class section of Philadelphia and the idea of breaking into the world of print and public storytelling seemed just as unrealistic for me as it was for you. The thing is, I actually can pinpoint the moment for me when that barrier between “authoritative” media and what I could produce at home completely burst. As a kid, it was always the concept of italics that got me. I couldn’t produce them on my typewriter, and even later when I started writing for

newspapers, I would still have to underline stuff for the printer to know that it should be in italics. But only a professional typesetter could really do that. Then I saw the Macintosh computer while writing an article about it for Rolling Stone. I remember we all gathered around this thing in the office and were blown away by how you could set something in italics with a simple mouse click. And that, to me, was the first step towards more professional self-publishing. Now the tools are all accessible, but they’ve become harder to master. RH: I would never say I’ve been able

to “master” any aspects of digital technology. I’m still very much a consumer in that sense. But what I have been able to do is use the technology that other people have developed and refined to air my own ideas in a way that remains . . . live. At least in terms of the editing process. SL: I think you’re being modest

here, Rick.

RH: New forms of digital literacy

basically help different people with different skill sets to get together far more easily than in the past . . . and produce hybrids. For me, that’s the single most interesting thing to emerge from new technology. Although my last big collaboration with Brian Eno came about from meeting in person, not from trolling online. EB 1/2012

SL: Brian Eno casts a big shadow

in the digital world, as well as in music and art in general. I was involved early on with the Whole Earth Catalog and Eno was good friends with editor-in-chief Stewart Brand, so our paths would occasionally cross. I remember his participation in this thing called the Cyberthon, which was put on by the Whole Earth people around 1990. It was a twenty-four hour virtual reality happening, so it had this media-art bent. These days we’ve become far more interested in augmented than virtual reality, but back then all things “virtual” made a big splash. RH: What’s the difference between

augmented and virtual reality?

SL: Well, virtual reality implies that

you’re tricking your senses to think that you’re in a different world. You’re putting on a helmet and gloves perhaps and replacing your sites and sounds with an artificial environment. Augmented reality is more like adding a layer of digital content to the existing world, like holding up an iPhone to the street and seeing Yelp reviews floating in front of restaurants. It’s interesting that virtual reality never really caught on all that much. I guess people don’t really want their senses completely hijacked. RH: No, they want their say, too. I

recently spoke to somebody who’s developing technology for interactive music, where your environment, heart rate, and personal input all affect the piece you’re listening to—not unlike Eno’s Bloom app or Björk’s new album, actually. It seems like technology is really pushing the consumer towards creating. SL: It is. But that’s balanced out by

other inane forms of digital narrative like LOLcats. RH: What’s that? SL: Trading pictures of silly cats

with bad captions.

RH: If I had to choose, I would say

that first-person-shooter games would be my least favorite form of 72

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Previous page: Steven Levy is a senior staff writer for Wired and the author of numerous award winning books on digital culture, including Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government - Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. His most recent book, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, explores the infrastructure and “creative disorganization” that’s led to Google’s unparalleled web dominance. Levy is also a regular contributor to Electronic Beats. In this issue he was photographed in New York City by Miguel Villalobos.

digital narrative. And I don’t care how interesting it is that you can play online against people from all over the world. I just don’t understand the romance in everybody blowing everything to hell. SL: Rick, I’ve read quite a bit of

your poetry on your blog. Do you feel like reading a poem on a screen is different than reading on the printed page? RH: I don’t think the process is so

different, really. But you’re probably more likely to be in a relaxed brain state when you’ve happened upon a poem in a book, which seems like a more private moment, one which potentially allows for a deeper experience. But with tablets and e-book readers, it seems like that difference is disappearing as well. I mean, people are so completely unselfconscious about using technology wherever they are that it’s become the most normal thing in the world. I’ve always been most interested in presenting poems where they’ll be found very easily. I tend to write short poems that are very condensed and contain lots of imagery. I’d like to compare it to writing code. The idea of saying a lot with few words or not much code is an attractive one. SL: I think we’re in sort of a tran-

sitional state at the moment. We’re still figuring out ways to adapt older media formats to newer ones. I do think that new forms of digital literacy will change the way we express ourselves in the analog world. RH: It might seem almost crude

nowadays, but when I first saw Memento I was really intrigued by the fractured narrative. I think these days people are ready for narratives to become even more fractured and multi-sensory with poetry and other art forms moving together. But maybe we’re not there yet. Maybe new forms of narrative are still getting in the way of experiencing something on a deeper level. SL: In the very beginning, film

was still searching for its narrative voice. It took a few years before the camera could tell the story with-

out the need for conventional text appearing on the screen or spoken by a narrator. Little by little people discovered the grammar of film: quick cuts, fast forward, fades. And this stuff, which is now conservative, was radical when it was being developed. And it went on to transform literature, too. RH: Like all of us, I like to imagine

what “radical” new forms of narrative we’ll encounter in the future. I know you’ve written extensively on neuroscience as the next frontier. I can see the presentation of poetry and art tapping more into what’s happening in neuroscience, although I think it’s starting to happen already, with the interest in pre-lingual activity, that is. The poem has moved from the page to the screen—I can only imagine the more abstract forms and different representations it will assume in the future. SL: Yeah, but there is generally

still a significant divide between how digital media is consumed as opposed to print. Most new forms of digital narrative, metaphorically speaking, are like rivers or streams. Think of the flow of tweets or Facebook posts, which people usually only read once. You don’t step into the same river twice. Print these days is more lake-like, more static. But deep. RH: I think that’s a wonderful way

of explaining that. Actually, I read Hackers recently and my brain was just exploding with ideas. SL: That’s a good “lake” example. RH: Yes, especially because you

wrote it years ago and it also took you years to write, didn’t it? SL: Yeah, it did. It had rereading

written into it, in a sense.

RH: I needed a good day of just

thinking to process the experience. Luckily, living in Dorset, I had a chance to do that down by the sea. I think the hard part of consuming media these days is doing it in a river-river-lake fashion, to use your metaphor—to temper and balance the different experiences

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with different media. Information burnout is a real and regular danger, however sophisticated we are at processing many threads at once. It’s just so easy to get excited by the immediate gratification of digital media. SL: That’s actually a really impor-

tant discussion these days: whether constantly consuming temporary media and never having to memorize anything because you can look it up online is affecting brains and changing the way we think. I think it does, but I also think that combining digital literacy with lake-like knowledge will give people evolutionary advantages. RH: Steven, I have yet to read In

the Plex, but I’m very curious to know what you make of people’s concerns about the ability to “independently” navigate their way through the web using a Google search engine. There are fears that Google has too much power to direct a user’s interests towards or away from a certain direction. SL: Well, Google has stepped up the

personalization of searches. These days, if you let them know you’re vegan, then when you search for restaurants in your area, you won’t find anything that serves meat or dairy. Google knew that this would be a big step for a lot of people, so they’ve created a toggle switch that allows you to turn off the personalization. But in my opinion, when we’re checking out publications in a newsstand, we tend to focus only on the things that interest us and block out the stuff that doesn’t. So somehow it seems like asking Google to keep all options open for searches isn’t just impractical—it’s also something we tend not to do in real life anyways. RH: People think they’re being led

down and trapped in ideological or informational cul-de-sacs . . . I think they’re afraid. Would you agree? Do you think that’s a legitimate concern? SL: Absolutely. But if you want to

find things online you don’t agree with, it’s never been easier than today. I think the enemy is still our74

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Previous page: Rick Holland’s recent spoken word collaborations with Brian Eno have been likened to Eno’s previous work with David Byrne: joyous, experimental, and distinctly melodic. Their double LP Drums Between the Bells and the recent EP Panic of Looking were both released on Warp Records in 2011. In this issue, Rick Holland was photographed in London by Luci Lux.

selves. You know, you get an idea of just how broad Google’s reach is and all of the things it encompasses just by looking at the history of your own searches—or even better: the history of thousands of other people’s. In Google headquarters there’s actually a stream of endless searches that’s on display in the lobby. It doesn’t include people’s names, but they have everything else. The associations are incredible. It’s like some sort of beat poetry . . . or a probe into the psyche of the world. When I was doing research for In the Plex, they told me that a third of all searches were completely unique, totally virgin. RH: I never would have guessed it

would be that many. That’s quite promising for the human race. Sometimes I get the feeling technology is very much inspired by fiction. SL: I think science fiction is espe-

cially inspirational for tech people, but I think it’s really a question of mutual influence, because obviously writers are strongly influenced by new technology. In terms of the former, Andy Hertzfeld comes to mind. He’s a classic hacker who worked for Apple and is now over at Google. He actually designed the circles for Google+. Andy’s an avid and very sophisticated reader and every time I talk to him, we’re always going back and forth about fiction. I have the feeling that one day, if he ever stops coding, he’ll write a great novel. RH: As a writer, you’re endlessly

fascinated by documenting technological and computer-related leaps forward. That necessarily involves the meta-narrative of describing new formats of digital storytelling and representation. In a sense, you tell stories about new ways to tell stories. What other things inspire you aside from technology? SL: Well, one of the most inspiring

things that have ever happened to me was rediscovering Einstein’s brain, which, in and of itself, was kind of technology independent. Well, not entirely, of course . . . RH: I beg your pardon?

SL: Like, his real brain, in a jar.

I had an editor at the New Jersey Monthly who told me that Einstein’s brain had somehow disappeared after it had been removed from his head for the autopsy. Strangely, there was nothing ever published about the disappearance. Mind you, this is around 1979, almost twentythree years after Einstein’s death. So my editor told me to go find it, and I did. Einstein’s estate denied knowing where it was and nobody really wanted to help all that much, but eventually I ended up contacting the guy who conducted the original autopsy and, lo and behold, he had it in a jar in a cardboard box in Wichita, Kansas. It was just sitting around his house. RH: No way . . . SL: Yes way. It was pretty incred-

ible. The thing is, you’d think that maybe it wouldn’t be so incredible just looking at a brain. I mean, take somebody like Steve Jobs: I’m sure his brain doesn’t look that much different than anyone else’s. But he was such a unique and powerful person, so people obviously wonder what maps out to that. And when you’re staring at the thing itself, the feeling is pretty overwhelming. Looking at Einstein’s brain, I thought I was staring into the mystery of life itself. RH: Believe it or not, I had a

similar experience staring at the bodies on display at Gunther von Hagens’ exhibition in London. I actually had no plans of going, but then a friend of mine convinced me with some free tickets and I ended up being absolutely amazed and inspired by the mechanics of the bodies. There is this massive, untapped field of potential that emanates from the physical objects that produce such complexity. How to represent the mind’s prelinguistic, unfiltered consciousness is what constantly pushes me forward, artistically speaking. SL: Sometimes it can feel like a

wild goose chase, no?

RH: Absolutely. But on good days I

prefer to think of it as my own personal search for the Higgs boson. ~

Image Movement

Film still: hobbypopMUSEUM, Drama, 2000 (Courtesy of the artist group)

Image Movement is a concept store for artist films, films on art and artist records, based in Berlin. You will also find us at art fairs and film festivals, e.g. Frieze Art Fair or International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Visit us in Berlin, and at our online shop: www.imagemovement.de MOVIES We offer more than 600 DVDs: Artist films, experimental and avant-garde films, e.g. by Kenneth Anger, Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren, Fischli & Weiss, Kurt Kren, Chris Marker, Jonas Mekas, Dziga Vertov, or Andy Warhol. Silent movies by Georges Méliès, D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton et al. Documentary films about architecture, design, or art movements. Labels like BFI, Artificial Eye, Index or Lowave are fully available... MUSIC We feature artist labels including Lucy McKenzie’s Decemberism, Tim Berresheim’s New Amerika, Albert Oehlen’s Leiterwagen, Mike Kelley’s Compound Annex or David Lieske’s Dial. We provide LPs, CDs and K7, e.g. by Kai Althoff, Lothar Hempel, Jutta Koether, or Emily Wardill; limited editions by en/of or Fieber, and historical recordings about Dada, Bauhaus or Fluxus... MOVES We present an ongoing series of film screenings, concerts, performances, talks and lectures. Guests so far have been: David Maljkovic, Wolfgang Müller, Oliver Laric, Kota Ezawa, Momus, Theo Altenberg, Michaela Meise, Rosa Barba, Jeremy Shaw, et al... Oranienburger Straße 18, 10718 Berlin, Germany Mo – Sa, 11 am – 7pm Tel: +49 30 308819780 info imagemovement.de

Artist Films, Films on Art, and Artist Records

THOMAS SCHOENBERGER AND MAX DAX DINE WITH GERARD JOULIE

“There is absolutely no room for experimentation”

Max Dax: Monsieur Joulie, the

Bouillon Chartier opened its doors in 1896 and legend has it that the menu’s never changed . . . Gerard Joulie: Well, day in, day out,

we serve strictly traditional French cuisine. This includes classic dishes like the steak frites or pot-au-feu— classic French beef stew. But still, the menu changes slightly here and there on a daily basis. It depends on the assortment of what we get wholesale. Sometimes you can’t find a certain vegetable in the necessary quality or quantity. Other times, a product might be too expensive. And last but not least, we’re constantly analyzing the daily statistics. Dishes that aren’t selling well are replaced by others, ones that fit better to the season or better complement the rest of the menu. It might sound like a paradox, but you have to improvise and continuously make minor changes every day to guarantee consistency over a long period of time. We’ve only really made one major change in the last decade—that is, we completely modernized the kitchen. But for the customer, it’s a change that remains invisible.

Usually, judging a restaurant by its menu is about as reliable as judging a book by its cover. But at Bouillon Chartier in the heart of Paris’ ninth arrondissement, what you read is what you get. And what you get is what patrons at the historical bistro have gotten for the past one hundred fifteen years: delectable, unpretentious and affordable French cuisine. Max Dax and Thomas Schoenberger broke bread with owner Gerard Joulie, who, over a plate of steaming calf’s head and a bottle of Sauvignon blanc, explained the art of serving slowcooked food fast.

Waiter: Bonjour messieurs. What

would you like to order? GJ: Sauvignon? Alsace? Do you pre-

fer white or red wine? Allow me to choose one bottle each. We’ll have a bottle of Pays du Val de Loire Cépage Sauvignon and a bottle of Touraine Marionnet. Have you two

Left: Bouillon Chartier’s mouthwatering menu. All photos by Luci Lux.

already decided what you’ll have for lunch yet? Thomas Schoenberger: I’ll have a

dozen escargot and the entrecôte saignant avec frites [premium cut of beef with french fries], s’il vous plaît. MD: I’ll have the escargot, too. And

the tartare de boeuf [beef steak tartare]. Merci. GJ: And for me the oeuf dur mayon-

naise [hardboiled eggs with mayonnaise] and the tête de veau [calf’s head] please. We’ll decide on the cheese and the dessert later on. Waiter: Got it. Merci. MD: Interesting—he wrote the whole

order on our paper tablecloth. He didn’t take any notes for himself . . . GJ: Writing the bill on the tablecloth

is, like the recipes, an age-old French tradition. In Paris, the Bouillon Chartier is probably the only remaining restaurant that’s still allowed to do it. We had to fight hard for an exemption, though. The tax authorities are very strict when it comes to keeping up with handwritten bills and our accounting in general. And, of course, we only employ waiters with very good memories. TS: How do you keep your books? GJ: We have a fail-proof system. It

goes like this: Our waiter will place our order in the kitchen. When our

appetizers are ready, he has to go to the cashier to enter his waiter’s number, the number of our table and the appetizers. He may have to wait in line for a few minutes with other waiters when it’s busy—carrying up to ten, twenty hot plates at a time mind you. After everything’s been registered, he’ll rush to the tables and deliver the food and then take new orders. But as guests, all we get to see is the handwritten order on the table. And the escargot, of course. MD: The main reason why we wanted

to meet you to talk about your restaurant might seem obvious, but I think it has larger implications. One of the things we’ll never be able to digitize is food. And yet, all over Europe people are less and less able to relate to basic traditions, traditional food or communal seating. Unfortunately, it’s a mindset that the majority of restaurants accommodate these days. Try asking a waiter about the ingredients of a given dish—I’ll bet they have to call a factory to find out. GJ: I agree. And the funny thing is:

We can be faster than McDonald’s! The tourists who come here love our system. They realize that they’ll get their food fast, but it’s not fast food. TS: What would you call it instead? GJ: I’d describe Bouillon Chartier

simply as a relatively cheap cafeteria in the heart of Paris. Here, you could invite, say, ten people for dinner and you’ll pay maybe three hunEB 1/2012

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dred euros. This is something that you won’t find in the rest of Europe anymore, and certainly not in Paris. In fact, “bouillon” is the historical French term for a simple workingman’s tavern. Back in the day, regular customers could rent a little drawer here where they’d store their personal napkins . . . as long as they were able to memorize the drawer number, that is. Some of the walls are still covered with these huge old chests full of drawers, as you can see. In fact, the restaurant is actually a national monument. MD: How many meals are served at

Bouillon Chartier daily? GJ: The most we ever served in a sin-

gle day was exactly 1,939 dishes. Our yearly average is around 460,000. When you run a place with numbers like this, there is absolutely no room for experimentation. TS: In other words, when it comes to

tradition, creativity is a mortal sin? GJ: This restaurant would lose its

reputation if we’d start to vary the way we serve the food. Creativity in the kitchen is something you can have in smaller, more sophisticated restaurants, frequented by customers who can judge and value the little changes. And afford them. But more often than not, I’m disappointed when I eat in a fancy restaurant. At Chartier, we have five cooks and twenty aides. And our book of recipes is law—it’s our constitution. No cook is ever allowed to change a dish. Ever. [spotting the food from a distance] Ah, here come the starters! Just imagine getting your escargot lukewarm and without the herb butter. Some regulars have been coming here for decades now. And it’s because they don’t like surprises. They prefer reliability. You might have noticed the long line every evening here at dinnertime. All kinds of people eat here and they usually know what to expect. TS: Here it’s the waiter’s job to seat

you. And if you’re alone, you get seated at a table with strangers—also a time-honored custom. GJ: Indeed. But we couldn’t offer the

low prices if we didn’t use the space

Above: Preparing the boeuf bourguignon in Chartier’s basement kitchen takes patience and lots of stirring. Changes to the restaurant’s time-honored recipes are strictly verboten. Left: Gerard Joulie stands at the helm of a veritable Parisian restaurant empire. Aside from Chartier, Joulie owns ten other historical restaurants in the City of Lights, including the famed L’Européen and Montparnasse 1900.

we have to full capacity. Custom is born from practicality. MD: When do you put together the

menu? GJ: Every day, very early in the morning, two buyers do all of the shopping from our wholesaler. Usually around ten o’clock someone will update the menu according to the supply and then print it out. This place is organized around a very strict time schedule. Indeed. The mayonnaise, the boeuf bourguignon, the pot-au-feu—every dish has its own timeline. We prepare a lot of them in advance. The tête de veau, for example, is slowly cooked overnight so that it’s always ready by lunchtime. Waiter: Attention! Entrecôte! Tête du

veau! Tartare de boeuf!

Previous page: Waiters queue up to enter their orders at the cashier before bringing the food to the table. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre described the classic French waiter’s precise and mannered movements as a form of self-deception—an over-identification with their job. At Chartier they just call it service.

GJ: The tartare is made on the spot,

of course. That’s strict law in France because it’s raw meat. MD: Would you say dining at

Bouillon Chartier is educational? It seems that if you’re a regular customer, you’ll automatically learn about the history and traditions of French cuisine. GJ: I suppose you could call the

restaurant a living museum. When we renovated it two years ago, we only painted the walls and polished the mirrors and the wood paneling.

Nothing else. And in terms of food, what you can eat here is prepared the same way it was a century ago. Take, for instance the dorade au choucroute de la mer [seabass with seafood sauerkraut], a dish we offer regularly. In France, it’s an old tradition to eat fish and seafood with sauerkraut. I know that you don’t eat it that way in the rest of the world, but if you’re open-minded, you come here and give it a try. Who knows? Some people even get addicted. TS: So really only some of the logis-

tics have changed. GJ: Exactly. Nowadays we type up

the menu on a computer whereas we used to use a typewriter. But the waiters and most of the staff—some of them have been here for decades, doing the same job every day. As time goes by, they’ve become specialists. You just can’t internalize that kind of routine in a week, you know? And tips are divided amongst all staff members. As for the regular customers, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of recognizing the familiar face of “your” waiter. Everything at Bouillon Chartier is built on sustainability. And this is a big part of our formula for success. At the end of a regular day, almost every dish has been sold. Week after week, month after month, year after year. The system works. Waiter: Cheese and dessert? Coffee?

Cognac? ~

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A DAY IN THE LIFE

24 hours in Rotterdam INTERVIEWS AND PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHANNES BECK, MAX DAX, LUCI LUX AND A.J. SAMUELS

There’s something positively Blade Runner-esque about Rotterdam. The Netherlands’ second largest city is unabashedly shaped by ultra modern, futuristic architecture— an urban landscape of oblique angles and form-follows-function aesthetics. It’s a utopian spirit of spatial experimentation impressively woven in and around decrepit port buildings, the Nieuwe Maas and various multiethnic neighborhoods. Previously known as the “City without a Heart” (after the Germans bombed it to smithereens during World War II), Rotterdam today boasts nothing less than a visionary artistic soul.

09:12 am DEFNE AYAS - DIRECTOR, WITTE DE WITH, CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART I’m the new director of Rotterdam’s Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art since January 2012. One of the first things I did was cross the street and introduce myself to the people who run Rotterdam’s grassroots experimental and avant-garde music venue, Worm. To me, it’s no less a cultural institution in the city, so I thought it was important to say hello and to discuss possible collaborations. When I met 84

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the director, he told me that I’d been the first head of Witte de With in the last twenty years to do so. I found this quite strange. Immediately it became clear that one of the challenges of the Witte de With is to relocate itself in Rotterdam, as in recent years the center has mainly excelled in the international discourse. I think the days in which an art institution can just focus on being international are over. It’s equally important to respond to the local needs and conditions. The question I always ask is: Can we see Rotterdam as a case study for the European condition? A big percentage of Rotterdam’s inhabitants are ethically non-Dutch. There is also a twenty-two percent illiteracy rate in this city. Many people haven’t finished high school. I think there are many places that could benefit from the insights we generate here—that is, in treating

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art as a conversation generator and a debate instigator. Art should generate awareness and insight, not be some exclusively leisurely activity. The future demands a more comprehensive take on things; we have to share resources, and we have to open collaborative platforms. This is urgently necessary, especially due to the heavy fiscal cuts that the new right-wing government in The Netherlands has decreed for cultural institutions in general. I have only catalyzed collaborative platforms in the past, and I already see that a sense of camaraderie has been forming here by our initiatives on the Witte de Withstraat. For the arts, it’s absolutely clear that we have to broach the issue of how and why culture shouldn’t be dependent on private sponsorship and to explain to the people the dramatic shifts that will follow the budget cuts. Still, I’m an optimistic person, and I think these times of crisis are intellectually far more interesting and fertile. I lived in different parts of the world before I came here. I’m 86

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originally from Istanbul, and most recently I’d been commuting between Shanghai and New York. Previously I was director of programs at the Prince Claus Fund’s network partner Arthub Asia, as well as an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai. I was also a curator at large at New York’s Performa biennial of visual art performance, where I coordinated some eighty plus cultural institutions across the city. Coming from these dynamite cities, Europe really seems to be an exotic and slow-paced continent. Especially in Rotterdam, you have this Calvinistic basecoat that seems to define everything: efficiency, hard work, striving for perfection, and a clear division between working hours and leisure time. At least these are the characteristics that immediately come to mind when comparing it to the other places I’d been before. On the other hand, Rotterdam is kind of like the China of the Netherlands, especially the port, which is so underrated in terms of the city’s cultural ecol-

ogy. These are some of the most productive people in the world. Starting from our deputy director and our general coordinator, there is a priest-like dedication to getting things done. This seems to be the city’s leitmotif—within the usual Dutch thirty-two-hour workweek, of course. ~

11:20 am PETER FENGLER - DE PLAYER, POLYMORPHIC PRODUCTION PLATFORM

I would say DE PLAYER is somewhere between a black box and white cube, so to speak: what we produce and give a voice to isn’t exclusively music or art. Our aim is to present sound and sound related objects, and that means we focus not only on ordinary label stuff,

“Perhaps an architect has an obligation to have a utopian vision and at the same time an equal obligation to be realistic about the futility of these utopian ambitions.” — Rem Koolhaas

but also very much on the packaging and the politics involved in music publishing and art production and presentation. I see the artists we work with—people like No Bra, Goodiepal or Felix Kubin—as artists, not just musicians. It’s not a “higher” distinction per se, but it’s one that allows us to think about their work in broader terms . . . as a more complete package. These are also people who, in my opinion, work more autonomously—that is, largely independent of promoters and pushy labels and all that. They’re conscious of using their medium as a message, not just some unreflected vehicle for musical content. I think this kind of autonomy allows them to delve deeper into sound and music, as well all other media. It’s research and practice that’s conscious of the past and of the future. The music and sound installations we present—live or recorded—is art. Unsurprisingly, I’m a visual artist, and I work a lot with sound, but I wouldn’t call myself a musician. I’ve never mastered any

instruments or anything like that. I use sound more as an abstract element of sketching out ideas and combining these with visual elements. I also work a lot with PM handmade records, mostly cutting them, molding them, and reproducing them in different materials and packagings. But what we do at DE PLAYER is not about high fidelity or perfectly reproducing songs or “albums” in vinyl, but rather about creating an object that would allow the recording to evolve; maybe to crackle or even to eventually disappear. I like the idea that the more you play a record, the more the sound disintegrates. I mean, that’s the case for normal vinyl too—but we really try to radically incorporate that into the design of lots of our records. For example, we recently made 8-inch records designed like big bars of chocolate that you had to break in order to even put on the record player. It’s interesting to me how some people will take one of our records and hang it on their wall as a purely visual object,

Above: Some of Rotterdam’s finest organically grown and locally harvested barbed wire.

Next page: The Rotterdam Terror Corps have an eye for graphic design. Their merch sells like hotcakes, especially the scarves.

while others will have the courage to fuck them up and really use them. I like the idea of vinyl as an unfinished sculpture, because it also works against them being these exclusive objects of fetish. DE PLAYER started out as a sort of performance based “club” for artists—something as intimate as a sex club, but focused on art. Eventually the performances and sound happenings were so incredible that we felt the need to document them for those who couldn’t see it live. But we have and always will see the documentation—a record, an essay, a sculpture—as an extension of live art, not just a catalogue. That’s why you could compare what we do to a happening, or some sort of Dada salon, but with more possibilities of preserving the art. It’s all handmade and usually in limited editions of around ten to fifty pieces, which mostly the art collectors and vinyl freaks go for. We’re mostly funded through grants, pretty generous ones from the City of Rotterdam. The interesting thing is that the EB 1/2012

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city grants weren’t even specifi-AM cally oriented towards the arts, but rather were created for the revitalization of south Rotterdam, which used to be pretty run down. It was the asshole of the city, and in the beginning, people didn’t think we could make it work, because we were so isolated, artistically speaking. But it did work—the city gave us a space and they gave us money and our audience was greedy. They wanted more. We had to stand firm on our position that they wouldn’t get involved at all in what we produce—that is, the content. It was surprising to me not to have to confront some sort of art council agenda here in Rotterdam. It’s ironic, but that’s actually allowed us to work more autonomously than, say, having to run a bar or a disco to help fund the art. We’re just hoping it stays that way. With cuts in cultural funding, there’s no telling about the future. ~

01:46 pm

SERGE VERSCHUUR – CLONE RECORDS I grew up on an island off the southern coast of Holland called Schouwen-Duiveland, which is a hugely popular tourist destination here. It’s kind of like the Dutch version of Rimini, where loads of Rotterdammers have their vacation homes. There was and is a pretty big party scene there, with the island’s six clubs open, like, five months a year, pretty much every day . . . even though there are only around two thousand permanent residents. But before I could really go out, it was radio that got me hooked on electronic music. As you well know, in the pre-Internet era, it was easy for things to remain underground and obscure. And the only way to really hold onto what you heard on the radio was to tape it. Believe me, I taped almost everything. I mean, back then, you would often only hear a song once, and if you didn’t hear the DJ say

who it was by, it was gone forever. And if the song was good, that was a minor tragedy. I always, always felt drawn to the things on the radio I didn’t hear very often. During brakes in school, the teachers would allow us to play music over the school sound system, which was piped through the hallways of the entire campus. Fridays were the best because the night before I had recorded Ferry Maat’s now legendary Soulshow, and he always spun the latest American imports—mostly a really exquisite mix of soul, hiphop, R&B, and disco. This was stuff that wasn’t even going to be released in Europe until, like, two months later, so it always had for me an air of importance. We’re talking the early eighties, which is really when dance music started in Holland. Initially it was all about Chicago house. But back then, there weren’t all of these different sub-genres of electronic music. When you went out, you really heard everything. ’91 is when we started hearing the first harder techno stuff coming out of Detroit with Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance and all that. And then immediately the Dutch variations on hard techno began, which is really how gabber first came about. It was never really my thing, but I used to include it in my sets, because it was just so damn popular. I’d spin Robin S. on forty-five, mix it with some gabber, and then both the girls and guys would be happy. Eventually, it developed into a kind of rivalry between harder styles like gabber and more mellow stuff like straight-up house. Mellow vs. hard. I never liked the genre split, so I always just played whatever I wanted—B12, Evolution, Planet E stuff, good obscure US house . . . I managed to get away with playing whatever sounded good, regardless of stylistic consistency. Even at Parkzicht, which is where gabber was born here in Rotterdam, the DJs started out playing all Plus 8 acts, Richie Hawtin, and lots and lots of Detroit stuff with aggressive 909’s. That’s really how the divisions began. It wasn’t until the early nineties here when people started going to EB 1/2012

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clubs to hear only gabber or only mellow. When gabber and hardcore techno started getting bigger, other electronic music automatically became more underground. I started Clone because I saw this huge gap in techno that needed to be filled. Stuff that was good but wasn’t so obviously “hard” or “soft” didn’t get released here, and that’s where I came in and started putting stuff out like, say, Theo Parrish. In my mind, there’s also a natural connection between cities like Rotterdam and Detroit—as well as Berlin. These are cold, dark and harsh places, and to me, that’s reflected in the techno these cities generate. Also, when I have artists visiting Rotterdam from Detroit, they always tell me they feel at home because there are so many people of color here. It’s perfectly normal not to be white in Holland, and that’s something most Dutch people feel proud of. When I’m DJing abroad and I tell people I’m from Holland, they always tell me how much they dig Amsterdam. When I tell them I’m

from Rotterdam they just kind of nod politely and continue talking about Amsterdam. I suppose that’s understandable, because Amsterdam is a place where it’s easy to feel comfortable wherever you are in the city; it’s just so damn beautiful. Here, it’s easy to end up in a neighborhood where you don’t feel comfortable—that is, if you’re wandering around without a clue. The city has an edge, and it has so many different faces. After the port started expanding and shipping and transportation switched from unwieldy packages to containers, a lot of the warehouses and storage spaces were left abandoned, which created this eerie emptiness in the middle of the city. That’s now starting to be filled with more residential areas and cultural institutions, which is, in my opinion, an excellent development. This isn’t the kind of ugly gentrification people complain about in other cities. This is people being able to live comfortably in the city center instead of flocking to the suburbs. ~

Above: Cruising the A15 towards the Maasvlakte on the North Sea, the port’s industrial landscape feels endless.

04:10 pm FRANS SWARTTOUW - AM+D CREATIVE COMMUNICATIONS

Next page: The city often feels strangely empty. Even stranger, then, to see new buildings being built all over the place.

The city and the port in Rotterdam used to be a single entity, but these days, the port is becoming more and more removed from the city center, while it continues to be extended towards the coast. It just keeps getting bigger, and you can drive for miles and miles towards the North Sea and not see the end of it. I remember when the container terminals used to actually sit smack in the middle of Rotterdam and you could watch the cranes twisting, turning and transporting all day long. I would say their absence has certainly had an aesthetic or social effect on the city—you know, the seaman’s bars, EB 1/2012

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the merchant culture . . . That’s all still here, but it doesn’t dominate like it used to. But this is still the third busiest port in the world after Shanghai and Singapore, and Rotterdam is, was, and always will be a hard working, no-nonsense kind of place. My job is to help companies in Rotterdam, particularly those related to the port, establish their corporate identity through social media and public relations. I grew up here, so preserving and distilling the image of industry central to this city’s identity is something I take extremely seriously. I want people to understand how the port functions—the oil terminal, the container terminal, the tugboats, the ship captains. I think it’s kind of a Dutch thing to want to have the mechanics of an operation exposed—the details of a machine’s function visible for all to see. It’s a practical beauty; it’s form follows function. It’s also one of the most basic aspects of world trade. This is where essentially everything in the entire world is trans94

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From the inside looking out: DE PLAYER HQ

Frans Swarttouw sees the port as the key to upward mobility for the city’s “New Dutch”.

ported to everywhere in the entire world. Believe me, it’s not easy to represent the port in its entirety. These days I work a lot with social media to help people understand what’s going on at the ports, because, believe it or not, companies are having a hard time filling jobs. A lot of people have the impression that working in the port means hard, manual labor, and a lot of the immigrants in their twenties and thirties, or “New Dutch” as we like to say, are turned off by the idea. They want to move up in the world like everybody else. I mean, their parents didn’t move here so they would stay working class. They don’t know that since so many jobs at the port have been taken over by machines, most of the work is about using your head, not your hands. We’re talking about computer skills and good pay. Social media—especially Twitter—is an excellent platform for communicating this. Facebook, on the other hand, is bullshit in my opinion. Things are changing in

Holland: the power of the unions is decreasing, society is more open and people are better educated. Rotterdam also has over one hundred sixty different nationalities living side by side, and this mix is also a reflection of the port as an international hub. Because of idiots like Pim Fortuyn or Geert Wilders, Holland has gotten a bad rap in the rest of the world about our attitude towards immigrants. But if you ask the average person here, immigration is actually going incredibly well. It may sound clichéd, but Holland is a melting pot, and Rotterdam especially. We’re all about incorporating elements of other cultures into our own to make something even better. We still have a ways to go, and the Dutch media and everybody else here tends to criticize, say, young Moroccan kids—which of course results in them feeling like they don’t have much of a future. That has to change. But with second and third generation Dutch Muslims, integration is really, really working. ~

06:28 pm MARK RITSEMA – NIGHT PORTER, MUSICIAN Being a night porter is, for me, an ideal way to earn money, because I’m also musician and a writer and I have lots of time to pursue artistic stuff when I’m on the job. In the dead of the night, when the rest of the hotel is sleeping, I read, write or even play guitar. And I have all the peace and quiet in the world. The Hotel New York is also a gorgeous space, so there’s something very romantic about what I do. But it’s not like I have nothing to do: I check people in and provide room service and all that, but otherwise I can play and write as I please. I feel kind of like the hotel’s artistic and liter-

ary mascot, which is fine by me. I mean, Hotel New York is just nicer than most places with its Art Nouveau interior and its history . . . This is the former headquarters of the Holland America Line where literally millions of Dutch and other Europeans left to start a new life for themselves in New York. For better or worse, the American dream started for many people right here. In the past, I tried working for a while at one of the Novotel hotel chains, but I just couldn’t do it. It felt more like working in a McDonalds: nothing romantic, no intimacy and not a glimmer of history. I was more of a security guard, sitting in this big, glass building checking in, like, Albanian gangsters and random businessmen. But since being at Hotel New York, working as a night porter has had a pretty significant effect on what I do artistically. I mean, I actually gig under the name Nightporter . . . though the film The Night Porter with Charlotte Rampling and Dirk

You aren’t here.

Mark Ritsema began his musical career writing songs in a Rotterdam mental hospital with his fellow psychiatric nurses.

Bogarde was also a huge influence on me. Mean movie—very dark, but very elegant. I would say in general, my music is about the night—that is, unless things are going really bad for me. Then my songs take place in the afternoon. I hate afternoons. Night people are just different from day people, I guess. As a night porter, you have to be discrete. People who are polite and on their best behavior during the day can turn into animals if they’ve had too much to drink. They’ll do things they’ll regret. You notice it especially with large groups of business people. They get braver and braver with each scotch, but I try to make sure they don’t go too far over the edge. I mean, I will not judge these people. That’s not my job. Although I admit that sometimes it’s hard not to do. I occasionally get requests for all sorts of things, mostly cocaine, hash and prostitutes. Coke I don’t do, but for softer stuff I send them to the coffee shop around the corner. And of course, EB 1/2012

Top to bottom: Serge Verschuur of Clone Records; the Witte de With’s Defne Ayas; Annemiek Engbers & Peter Fengler of DE PLAYER.

Right: The smoker’s lounge at gabber legend Paul Elstak’s birthday extravaganza. Even though the music at gabber parties is hard and agressive, the dancing is anything but. It mostly involves a rhythmic shifting from foot to foot and small, controlled hand movements—not unlike knitting or crochet.

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prostitutes are easy to arrange. Some escort services even give you a bonus for bringing them business. I’m not squeamish about it. I’ll sometimes have a chat when the women come back downstairs. They’re just normal people like you and me, trying to make a living. But I suppose that’s obvious to most people. And if it’s not, it should be. Anyhow, in my position, you can’t really have taboos, because you’ll see it all. Generally speaking, the Hotel New York is a pretty quiet and civilized place. According to some of the staff, we have ghosts in the hotel. I don’t believe in ghosts and have never seen one myself, but some people avoid certain rooms because they can sense an aura, an entity. I do have plenty of experience dealing with visions of the supernatural. I’m actually trained as a psychiatric nurse, and I formed my first band, Spasmodique, together with a couple other nurses from the mental hospital where I worked. We actually started out by jamming with the patients in the hospital. The doctors all thought it was great, because this was in the late seventies in Holland at the height of the whole anti-psychiatry movement, so anything that wasn’t shoving pills down patients’ throats was more or less accepted. And that’s really how I started making music. These were the latter days of punk, so it didn’t matter if you could play. At the time, we were strongly influenced by the sounds of the port of Rotterdam—the noise of industry. The music was hard like the city— in contrast to, say, Amsterdam. We were also taking lots of speed and generally considered Amsterdam to be a stupid hippy town. Eventually, when Rotterdam started becoming increasingly multicultural, I put together a more world-music oriented project called Cobraz with a big African-influenced rhythm section. It was all about entering a trance-like state through music, and about the different kinds of cultures and musicians we met in this city. Everybody in the band was from somewhere else. The irony was that we actually split up because of “ethnic” differences: we had endless fights about food. ~

10:45 pm DJ DISTORTION – ROTTERDAM TERROR CORPS I would say that in Holland, the real boom in electronic music can be traced back to our infrastructure. Everything is really close here and public transportation is excellent. In fact, you can probably go by bicycle to most parties. That combined with incredibly tolerant drug laws helped to create a booming scene. Also, twenty years ago, if you needed a license to throw a party in some public space, you just asked politely and you almost always got it. That was then. These days, things are a bit different. The police demand twenty page descriptions of exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it. I suppose it’s somewhat understandable, because there have been deaths at gabber parties . . . but that can happen anywhere. One guy actually committed suicide at a Rotterdam Terror Corps party, but that had nothing to do with the music. At least that’s what the police said based on the note he left. Gabber is homegrown, but our biggest market is currently in Germany. And we’ve sort of stopped calling it “gabber”. That became a bad word in the late nineties, because it was so closely connected with advertising and commercial bullshit. When companies started using gabber to boost peanut sales or whatever else they were selling, it stopped being cool. Now we just call it “hardcore”. But really, anything can be hardcore. Speed is not the issue at all—it can be 96 BPM or 300 BPM. Naturally, some people start giving it different names the faster it gets, like terrorcore, splittercore, or speedcore . . . but really it’s all derived from the same thing, and that’s house. I can’t deny that speed and BPM played a role in the beginning though. One of our first tracks was “I’m a Gabber Baby”, which was

the hard, tough boyfriend of “I’m a Raver Baby”. At the time we were like, “’Raver Baby’ is cool, but it’s only 120 BPM—let’s go for 200!” Boom! Boom! Boom! We wanted to make our friends smile and our parents cry. As soon as your parents like it, you’re doing it wrong . . . even though my parents learned to like it because I’ve been doing this for so long and my father’s pretty open-minded. Back in ’95 gabbers were all over Rotterdam with their Kangol training jackets or bomber jackets, shaved heads, and Nikes. It was like a uniform for them. These days, gabbers just follow fashion. I mean, we stopped selling Rotterdam Terror Corps bombers in 2006. In general, the whole hooligan connection is pretty much a thing of the past. Of course, what we do is completely apolitical and the hardcore and gabber scenes were always mixed in terms of race—Rotterdam Terror Corps especially. One of our DJs is Surinamese. But there are some black sheep, tough guys who can only identify with fascism because they’re total meatheads. But they’ve pretty much disappeared. I would say the scene in Holland in general has also gotten a bit smaller. We used to play three or four nights a week in Rotterdam alone. Now there are maybe three gabber parties a week in the entire country, though the worldwide gabber scene has gotten huge. Paris, Tokyo, London, New York, South America, Mexico, Ecuador Hardcore. All over the world, gabber is very much connected with images of terror and horror, like all the flyers and posters with devils, skulls, evil clowns, guns, knives . . . It’s an image thing, and it’s pretty strongly connected to metal too. Rob Gee, Delta 9, the Industrial Strength guys in America—they’re all really into metal. And hardcore parties, like metal concerts, are also eighty percent male. Surprise, surprise. This isn’t a Katy Perry concert. But the girls that do come get treated with total respect. After I convinced a friend of mine to go to her first gabber party, she was shocked: “I thought I was ugly! I looked great and nobody touched me or even looked at me!” ~

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NEU

on to blow somebody’s head off, you’re hardly a pacifist. However, there is a pretty long tradition of pacifist games, or at least ones that reward nonviolence. I believe the first was Balance of Power, which was a Cold War simulation created by designer Chris Crawford. There you got to decide whether you wanted to be the American President or Soviet General Secretary, and from there on out, it was all about diplomacy. I mean, technically you could nuke your enemy, but that wasn’t the point. More recently we’ve seen “serious games” brought out by organizations like UNESCO or the Red Cross, which are designed around conflict resolution, mediation and nonviolent peacekeeping. The problem is that most people find them incredibly boring. AS: A few years ago, the artist Illustration: Max Dax

Virtual Pacifism A.J. Samuels: How long have people

been trying to win violent video games by nonviolent means? Andreas Lange: I think the first

examples of “pacifist” runthroughs can be traced back to the eighties. In the seventies, games didn’t have the complexity to allow for alternative ways of playing, much less alternative ways of winning. The programming just wasn’t far enough. But as soon as so-called “jump and run” games came out—Super Mario Bros. being perhaps the best example— people realized they could decide on their own how they wanted to win. Some opted not to trample the Koopa Troopas or the Goombas, even though they knew it would cost them points. Others tried 98

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Recently, reports of pacifist gamers revolutionizing the virtual first-person shooter landscape have been making the media rounds. According to the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio, winning expressly violent games by running away, hiding, or bringing fallen comrades back to life with a defibrillator has become all the (anti-) rage. But as Andreas Lange, director of Berlin’s Computer Game Museum tells us, there’s nothing new about virtual pacifism.

beating the level as fast as possible in “speed-runs”. I see both more as an act of rebellion than anything else. Ultimately it’s about knowing how and rejecting to play by the rules. AS: So playing games like Deus

Ex or The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim without killing anybody is less about pacifism and more about defying the order established by the game’s creators? AL: Absolutely. It’s first and fore-

most a challenge to the system. Look, if you’re playing a firstperson shooter game on a team, and all you do is sneak around to avoid conflict, or help bring injured team members back to life as a medic, and then they go

and activist group Third Faction Collective started staging game internal “interventions” in World of Warcraft, demanding the right to “. . . reflect on the underlying code and architecture on which a game environment is constructed,” and promoting democratic thinking and player sovereignty— essentially a progressive code of ethics. Why do ethics matter in an imaginary game context? Isn’t the whole point of video games having the ability to do things virtually that you can’t do in real life? AL: That’s certainly an important

aspect of gaming, but not the only one. The larger and more interactive video games become, the more game-external ethical conventions apply. This is where the borders between games and real life start to blur. Think about it in comparison to a “normal” game: A soccer match doesn’t go for longer than ninety minutes, and out of bounds is out of bounds. In World of Warcraft, you can build up a character for months or even years. You can spend so much time, energy and love in creating this . . . thing. So when it dies, it’s a big deal. And it feels like much, much more than a game. But is it life? Not really. It’s something in between. And that’s exactly the sort of thing that artists are there to point out. ~

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N° 29 · SPRING 2012

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CONVERSATIONS ON ESSENTIAL ISSUES N° 29 · SPRING 2012

ELECTRONIC BEATS · DILLON · LITTLE DRAGON · BOUILLON CHARTIER · STEVEN LEVY · CHRIS DERCON

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LITTLE DRAGON LUTHER CAMPBELL METTE LINDBERG CHRIS DERCON