serial consign

Last fall I posted about espaceSONO, a sound art show at the SAT in Montreal curated by Tobias c. van Veen. Tobias is an old friend who is active as a musician and DJ, curator and critic and in his spare time he plugs away on his Ph.D in communication & philosophy at McGill. I have wanted to interview Tobias about his creative practice for a while, but we have held off having this dialog for several months so we could specifically address his new turbulence-commissioned project, 'til death do us a part. Tobias will be performing this piece and participating in the Programmable Media II symposium in New York City tomorrow at Pace University.

[tobias in the mix at noplacard feb. 2008 / photo: cato p.]

Your recently launched turbulence piece 'til death do us a part is decidely lo-tech. Not only is underlying reel-to-reel technology slightly archaic but even your references are coated with a fine layer of dust. Listening through the piece, it feels very much like an autopsy for "dead media." Could you talk about the inspiration for the piece?

Only in the 21C would recording technology scarcely dated -- the magnetic tape, still in use, of course -- be called 'archaic'. Yet perhaps 'archaic' & 'inspiration' traffic together at this moment when using reel-to-reels to call forth the voices of the dead. If a reel-to-reel is dead media, it is because when, at the height of its use in the 1960s, it was already being used to conjure the spirits of the dead by Konstantin Raudive. Blank tapes, a kind of virgin media, thought Raudive, could capture the transient souls lost on their way across the River Styx. He called it Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVP. Raudive devoted volumes of research to the recorded phonemes of dead spirits that had to be intrepreted & deciphered from the background wash of hiss & hum that make up the line level noise of virgin media. This virgin media of the blank reel was, even at this time, in the 1960s, already dead, or rather infused with the dead. So perhaps dead media has been with us since its virgin birth.

Inspiration, then, for this project, 'til death do us a part, came from Raudive, but perhaps it was breathed into me from the start -- from Latin 'inspirare', to breath upon, already means to be guided by divine influence, to communicate with the otherworldly. If there is a muse to the 21C soundpoet, perhaps it is with the inspiration of technics, then -- the secrets that technology whispers gently into our ears while caressing our fingers with delicate wires.

Wires is perhaps where it all began in any place, when called upon by Turbulence.org to create a piece that addressed the theme of the 'network', in terms of the ongoing investigation of technological networks by Turbulence with their blogs & events dedicated networked sound, networked performance, and networked arts. From 'network' led me to two propositions:

• that any network is a relationship of reciprocity between machines, i.e., that of love, wherein love contains all the gamut of affective responses from anger to eroticism;
• that if, as a human partially wired in the network, I must be able to engage in this affective economy of reciprocity, that is, to love the machines, and be loved back.

...and frankly I am no coder nor programmer; for me, artistic practice is anti-WORK, it must not be WORK, it must be PLAY... which is not to say that there is no thought nor investigation to the practice (on the contrary); rather, I sought to set-up a network of machines in such an intimate setting that their subtle frequencies could be touched, literally, in the crossings of wires & bent circuits, caressed to gentle joys by organic hands. Thus (and art never produces 'logical' conclusions, nor conclusions, for that matter): the reel-to-reel machine diptych, or wiring of two R2R machines into each other, with a small mixer, and a Roland DSP to spatialize monophonic signals.

Keeping art-making as PLAY-based as possible is commendable, that is no small task. To provide counterpoint to this statement, could you talk a little about your WORK (i.e. your academic research) and how that relates to and informs your creative practice?

I would like to continue living under the illusion (please excuse me) that life itself should press PLAY. We all know work is unavoidable. If I may rewind an old tape from the late 1940s: "Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again" (Adorno and Horkheimer, _Dialectic of Enlightnment_, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, p. 109). My illusion is such that I cannot discern if my work is an escape from the reduction of art to entertainment or vice-versa. If artplay is mere catharthis, then perhaps workplay serves as a reset button so I can try again *not* to entertain people.

The lines between PLAY and WORK are not only blurred under the 'production of labour' but under two further factors: (1) what Derrida saw as the play of the text -- which is to say, of all meaning, framing, context -- that nonetheless operates by way of a 'certain' (which to say, calculable) economy (which is to say, a 'certain labour') and (2) that any art which demands of me to once again remain seated in front of my screen, fingers on the keyboard, reduces any radicality of its content to the repetition of mechanized eye-hand coordinated movement indistinguishable from the gestures of research. Hakim Bey has something going on when he calls on the occult forces to disrupt the wires & lie once again breast-to-breast. 'Reach out and fuck someone'. The computer-screen interface reduces much of the differential play to be found between WORK and PLAY into a rote repetition wherein the content is subsumed to the constraint of the same movements. ART must interject at the level of affect, which is to say, it must replay the body, but only if the brain also slips out of gear and into the great roaming state where one is irrevocably drawn to what Hunter S. Thompson called 'The Great Magnet'. Given that onscreen re-presentation somewhat taints the affective force of the exhibitionist machine-love that is a performance, the dead sound itself is the last hope in tearing through the barrier from the zone of the dead to the last living alive. Which side 'we' are currently on is unclear.

To bring to bear all that would fall under WORK to this PLAY would be a challenging task. Some would say it is philosophy of technology. 'It' encompasses texts on turntablism and sampling as a practice of upsetting the force of the 'proper', thus deconstituting the limits of property law; ontological anarchy and strategies of disappearance in rave culture, preforming the conditions under which any 'exodus' (such as in Paolo Virno) must be thought (or Zizek's 'act' of alternative society); the question of technoculture, or rather what AfroFuturism has to teach 'Western' philosophy (a lot); deconstruction as a kind of graffiti, or rather, graffiti as tagging up of Derrida (RAMM:ELL:ZEE and Derrida have some throwing-up to do); the question of technics -- is it not the 'essential' supplement to humanity, that which is excluded to render us (more human than) human? It's all a lot of noises from the dead too.

In terms of providing an arena for exploration, how would you compare reel-to-reel machines to turntables and DJ culture? Given your background in the latter, I'm curious as to your perspective on what each of these tradtions offer.

Turntables were never meant for the production of live remixing, the collapse of conductor to studio producer in the performative realm. The Technics SL1200 was taken as an object & accelerated into an interface for gatherings of flesh, facilitated by rhythm. This was done by tilting the deck sideways for scratching, weighting it down for tracking, laying it with a felt slipmat, and conjoining it at the hip with a mixer capable of contouring the eclipses between the grooves -- vinyl. The hands had to learn a new instrument in the caress of technics: the drifting finger on the rough spinning platter to slow the tempo, the sharp intake on the record label to accelerate, the delicate dance of fingertips on the vinyl to scratch the needle. The turntable-record-mixer apparatus is a tactile instrument requiring the ears of a violinist, the focus of a conductor & the inventive approach of a jazz player. The ears had to relearn how to hear: the headphone in one ear, the mix in the other, the blend in the hands on the knobs & the cut. Of course it falls prey to the formulae present in all of these domains and more; it is too easy to become an addict of START/STOP, the slow fade, and the dull choice in beats. But once challenged, the turntable opens itself to a new language -- which can be, and has been, put into symbol.

It is my intent to seek out combinations of machines that open themselves through touch, machines never designed for the performative intervention on their surfaces or intimate interiors. The R2R machine, this performing network known as EAROS, to hear the erotic life of machines, in the attempt to listen-in on the voices of the dead, this is the urgency of 'TIL DEATH DO US A PART. This urgency is such that I am performing this improvisational tango with the mechanical as the TACTICAL TAPE LOOP DIVISION (EVP-UNIT) on several occasions, including as official entrant in the World Telekinesis Competition in May 2008. On my team are Konstantin Raudive & William Burroughs (both deceased, respectively).

[william burroughs poses for andy warhol / photo: bobby grossman]

Well then, from bent-circuit to beat poet. What specifically caused you to "draft" Burroughs to your team? His tape loop experiments with Brion Gysin? The cut-up method in general? Any specific moments in his fiction? Beyond that, and on the topic of "dead voices on air" did you ever see The Ghost of William Burroughs? Perhaps it is a distant cousin of 'till death do us part...

Burroughs asked to be on the team. That polite yet persistent junkie kept drifting across the blank media demanding a piece of what he (along with Gysin) sought. Via a cut-up that took some time to decipher, Burroughs revealed something of the erotic to be found in cutting-up the dead. Jouissance through cut-up is something of a scarcely erased technecrophilia. Raudive was already drafted, though he keeps insisting that telekinesis has little to do with EVP. He's stuck in the Reel, though, so its tough titties for him.

Since moving to Montreal in 2002 you've been quite active promoting sound in a variety of forums including events, radio broadcasts and sound art exhibitions. Montreal has slowly developed a mystique quite similar to that of Detroit, where people in other cities have a romanticized perspective of the "local scene" in the city based off one or two festival visits a year (i.e. Mutek, Elektra, etc). As an insider, and something of a outspoken statesman, what are your thoughts the local audience and cultural infrastructure for adventurous listening in Montreal?

A city deserves to be tasted on foot: drunken staggerings from the bar, eyes rolled back in the sockets, feet on fire, hailing cabbies in poor, broken Quebecois gleaned from failed attempts at late-night love. This is Montreal. Montreal seduces you, embraces you with tropical warmth, then buries you under 8 months of glacial winter. And what is a 'scene'? If a 'scene' is a series of physical spaces, havens of culture, then Montreal remains a vibrant, if not one of the most vibrant, places for arts experimentation in North America. It is a city of venues and festivals. But, alas, things are changing: rents are going up; lattes are coming in; SUVs are zipping by; a few venues are disappearing (RIP, The Spectrum). The physical infrastructure of a vibrant arts scene has been stamped with its due date. New neighbourhoods will break out (the shift is on from the Plateau and Mile End to St. Henri) and perhaps old politics will intervene (if the pro-separatist Parti Quebecois gets in, the economy tanks -- which is good for artists), but world economics is intervening now, and the City of Sin won't last as the City of Cheap.

But let's talk about the most significant component of a scene, as other cities, from NYC to Toronto to Vancouver to SF, are expensive yet produce good art. What is necessary for a scene is a collective of people supporting each other, or rather, lines of fracture that connect various kinds of people to each through informal networks. This kind of scene existed for adventurous techno & house when I moved here in 2002: it was personified when I attended a lazy-afternoon BBQ, listening to unreleased tracks on the stereo while the smoke from blunts mixed with the friendly talk of three dozen of the city's artists, DJs and promoters... mutually supporting remixes were struck; wax circulated; invites to play granted; articles partially written in the heads of the scribes present. This is a functioning scene.

The breakpoint for me was in 2003-2004 when many musicians began fleeing to European climes (read: Berlin). When Force Inc.'s Montreal office folded the writing had long been etched in the run-out groove. Montreal is a great festival city, but it simply isn't self-sustainable for many performing artists in the electronic arts: there's not enough places to play, and the places that exist are controlled by rather short-sighted cliques. What I say here doesn't hold for every kind of music; some forms fare better than others (such as musique actuelle, noise, improv, and so on). But electronic musicians don't fare so well here, and for the most part, the myth that Montreal is all about avant-garde beat-driven techno and house is exactly that, a myth. Toronto and Vancouver both have far more engaged scenes that support local events. Most clubs here remain entrenched within the logic of 'beer & broads' -- both at cheap prices.

But this is an old story... and yet the story could have been different: if some festivals had accepted DJs into their line-ups earlier on, recognising the historical role the DJ has played in disseminating electronic music, but also as an artist in their own right (and at stake here is a much-needed education in techno-turntablism: the electronic scene could learn from hip-hop here, most techno DJs being glorified jukeboxes); some festivals could have opened themselves to collaboration and a diverse approach to events rather than aiming at a brand-name monopoly; and connections to the AfroFuturist heritage, much lacking in the popular culture though omnipresent among the producers, needed to be rendered explicit.

But Montreal never understood the music that came from Detroit -- Montreal is all about what I call 'poutinehouse'. The galaxy-to-galaxy mythos of the offworld futurist, the political wiring of Underground Resistance, the cyborg of sci-fi: these are not the imaginaries of Montreal, though they be those of electronic music's most challenging, innovative and politically inspiring aspects. Thus there often remains a profound disconnect between the moods & atmospheres of interplanetary electronic music (and its politics) and the cozy, neighbourhood feeling of Montreal and its quartiers that somehow leads to a barricading of the status quo. The exodus imparted the unfortunate effect of leaving behind the detritus that now defends its 'hometown hero' status. More significantly, the threads that once connected the improv-experimental scenes and the beatculture are almost severed. Is it any surprise that under these conditions the experimentalists look upon DJs with disdain? In Montreal, being a DJ means being affiliated with beat-driven music as a cash-drawn culture. Very few aesthetically radical & skilled DJs exist, and those who do are shoved aside to the margins.

The indie scene fares better here, whether it be home-taped noise music or the post-rock scenes that continue to trammel the globe. In the indie scene, collective situations, from living to recording to playing, are more or less the norm. And for a time, I'd say this collectivity infiltrated the electronic scene here too, with VJ and DJ collectives (mix_sessions comes to mind, as well as tri.phonic), particularly orbiting around SAT circa 2002-2004. But this is no longer the case in the electronic scene, where the remaining DJs compete tooth-and-nail for bottom-of-the-barrel slots playing music to people who, high on coke, prefer a persistent stream of regurgitated electrotrash, and where, for the most part, DJs who have control of the clubs defend them for the petty fortresses of irony they are. Montreal is all about irony, in this regard -- ironic retro-fashion, ironic microhouse music, and ironically disastrous abuses of coke. Detroit's AfroFuturist mythos, Berlin's bunker jouissance and the West Coast's technoshamanism are all far too transcendental for Montreal's urban hipster.

What this city needs is someone to come in & shake some shit up. But why should anyone expend the energy when Berlin continues to thrive? I have hope for Montreal, but it comes from all the other vibrant music scenes that are too busy incorporating the innovative sounds and techniques of electronic music into their palette to give a damn about the petty politics of the clubs and festivals. The global culture has shifted too: the Dionysian rites of rave culture are long dead, and technoculture no longer thrives alongside a rebellious counterculture; these are all factors in the wasteland that is the 21C. The time is nigh to regroup & rethink what a 'new music' might mean, today, and how the experiences of jouissance that *do continue in great festivals all over Montreal* can be expanded to mean once again a general infection of everyday life with the renegade spirit, rather than just a weekend catharthis that keeps the wheels of the machine grinding down this fragile sphere...

What have you got in the works for the rest of 2008?

The art of disappearance.

Last year I had the pleasure of inviting Jan Jelinek to Toronto to perform at the Music Gallery's X Avant festival. Jan delivered an incredibly visceral, droney set which was largely comprised of material from his Tierbeobachtung album. I'd be hard pressed to name another musician who has released as many groundbreaking and ambitious recordings over the last decade. Some artists define genres, but I think others destroy them by pushing them to their logical conclusions and breaking through stylistic conventions into uncharted territory. Jelinek cracked open minimal house with his Farben project, and the full lengths he has released on ~Scape have served as essential documentation of his ongoing experiments.

This interview was originally published in Vague Terrain 05: Minimalism in December of 2006

[image: jan jelinek in the mix / 2006 - from pil01's focus:berlin photoset]

Lets start out with your musical roots, and try to move through your body of work semi-chronologically to try to get a good sense of your development as an artist. In describing your Farben work, you’ve talked about "trying to make house music, but failing." Could you elaborate on this quotation and contextualize this ongoing musical project?

To be honest I don’t even know if Farben is still an ongoing project. I haven’t thought about it in the last two years, which means also, that I had no idea, how to continue with the Farben-moniker. I tried as Farben to produce techno, because this genre placed as a disposal a minimal formula, which allows non-musicians and dilettantes to compose. I Guess that I felt attracted to this and still do. Also I still love the idea of abstract reductionism, somehow a technological version of funk and house music. But I don’t know, how to add something further on to this idea, how to add something to the idea of Farben. Farben was something like an attempt at making post-techno and post-house music. Techno was already defined, was working with fixed sound-paradigms so I tried to generate everything on a digital-platform, with a digital aesthetic. Guess that this idea became at the same time a aesthetical canon called “clicks and cuts“. Anyway, while I tried to expand the sampling-idea of Farben – not the sample source, the sampling process as the audible subject – it was causing at the same time an implosion of my sampling-machine. A self-referenced idea of sampling, a kind of audible emphasising of the machine’s operating-system instead of the sample-source: When you try to establish that, you don’t have any prospective options with the sampler anymore. At least I felt so. I thought that I have to do a radical turn: house music as a conservative genre, referring well defined styles and codes, creating historicism. The Farben Presents The Presets ep was an ironic take on that, but I think other producers are more talented at this.

Several years back, I remember reading an interview where you stated that you considered your Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records album as an “aural translation of op-art Moiré paintings.” Are you still making auditory op-art? If not, what?

I don’t think so. Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records created an audible flickering, which made a comparison to op-art appropriate, it generated a certain a kind of hallucination, that’s why I referred to op-art. While I was thinking about the idea of Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records I didn’t had the intention to transform visual aspects into sound. I realised that this concept, which was ostensible based on technical aspects, is much more clear, while I’m explaining and comparing it in items of optical-art. So this metaphor became helpful, even to myself. Maybe in general the reference to art is helpful in getting closer to the idea of digital music than the traditional parameters of music do. Computer based composing does have a strong visual component. The software-interfaces are set up like this. So audio collages do have a double meaning. In general the composing process is an audible and visual creative act, the computer is visualising the compositional parameters, and the composer is working with the visualised interface of his/her composition. So in that sense I would say that I was doing audio-collages. The working process of graphic-design and music are not that far apart from one other.

I think it is safe to say, that in terms of sound design you wear your influences on your sleeve. Your earlier work, say up until Kosmischer Pitch, positively glows through a constant referencing of old soul and jazz through sampling and the overall mood of the mix. The lushness of your work sets you apart from the stark formalism of many other electronic musicians whose work could be described as minimal (i.e. Pan Sonic, Carston Nicolai). Could you address the mood that you are looking for when you are making music and how that relates to your working process. Does one emerge from the other?

I’m not interested in transporting a special kind of mood while I’m starting to compose a track. I don’t think that I would be able to do that if I wanted to. Everything emerges in the working process. There is no intentional decision of sounding "moody“ or “noisy,“ but the sound-character reflects the mood I’m reaching while I’m producing. Unfortunately its hard to channel the creative process in a certain kind of direction. At least in my experience.

Could you share a handful of older recordings that changed the way you think about sound design? I’m not so much inquiring about wonderful records but interesting or innovative recordings – could you talk a bit about your choices and their significance to your work?

Concerning contemporary electronic music, I would say, that there are two components, which are important to me: On one hand, there is the idea of creating emotional, lush music, which can transport intense feelings without falling into the trap of kitschy pathos and alienation. Music which can transport universalized frames of mind while sounding as abstract as possible at the same time. In my opinion no one does this better than Oval (still!). On the other hand I like the Idea of absolute reductionism, especially in dance orientated music. A modulation of two tones for instance, which can create a deep concentration, and which restates the listener as an active recipient, hallucinating their own musical events. The Electro Music Department records are really good for this.

I know you’ve made a break in your work over the last few years where you are no longer exclusively harvesting and processing samples but have embraced creating your own improvised sound and music as sample material. Could you speak about the tension between collecting and creating samples? Beyond that, is there a friction between the loop and improvisation?

There is actually no difference between collecting and processing samples. A sample, taken from an existing piece of music is always involves a process of editing. Beginning with the decision which special moment to extract and how to set the start and endpoints to a more complex editing, where loops and modulations can be created: Sampling itself is always a creative process. I actually make no distinction between my own, self-produced, sample sources and foreign material. As for friction between the loop and improvisation, I think that this proposition includes a more traditional, jazz-orientated idea of improvisation, which is good, but doesn’t apply to my idea of improvisation. I understand loops not as such firm events, which distinguish themselves as a unbreakable and musically constant. Loops are a more soft in nature. Sound and time code modulations can deform their shape, without losing their steady character. That’s where I see the chance to improvise.

I appreciate your care in dealing with the idea of improvisation. Your identifying loops as being soft suggests a more “incremental“ improvisation then the dexterity or encyclopaedic knowledge of scales associated with virtuosity in jazz. This is probably as good a time as any to ask you about your collaboration with Trisok. Could you tell us a little about how recording 1+3+1 impacted the way you work?

Actually, I was not really improvising with Triosk, while we were making that record. I started to work on very simple one-track loops, which I sent to them. They were improvising to these files and after sending them back to me, I was manipulating the results of these improvisations in a very discreet way. My role was focusing on drafting some sound sketches, drafting a musical base, which Triosk was using for additional compositional ideas. So the fact is, that we were not improvising together, but after the album was released and a joint tour was planned, we decided to turn the project into a collective improvisation, which I think was a good decision. It was my first experience in joining a “non-loop-orientated“ music collective, so I had to think about creating loops, which weren’t tied to a strict time code, or which had a nearly non-audible time code. I tried to create these sort of loops on Tierbeobachtung as well.

Your newest album Tierbeobachtung sounds like a step forward from the suite of experiments you’ve conducted through your albums on ~scape. What has changed? Where does this album sit in relation to your other work?

Tierbeobachtung works more like a live-record. All the tracks are based on the idea to do one-take-tracks, which are not reproducible anymore. They were recorded with very small, basic setup, focused on outboard gear, like guitar pedals and a loop player. The reason why I decided to work with such lo-fi equipment is because I was getting really tired of working with the sequencer, and with the graphical aspect, as I mentioned before. I was tired of seeing a graphical translation of my sound, I wanted to concentrate exclusively on the audible experience. Looked at that way it was also an experiment on myself, seeing, if there will be a notable difference between this album and my older work. Also I tried to work really fast, finishing one or more compositions on one day and leaving all the mistakes and bad moments just to underline a sense of fleetingness.

Stepping away from the graphic representation of composition and arrangement is bold, and an interesting decision to make considering how much artists fetishize the visualization of information and interface at the moment. It sounds like this new working methodology is as much about control as perception. How do you find working with more lo-fi technology effects your creative process?

I think both ways are effecting a creative process. Working with lo-fi technology gives you the chance, to concentrate on the audible experience. Everything is a bit more vague. It is more easy to construct layers on unclean, incorrect statics, while everything seems to drift apart and comes back into a tight settlement again. On the other hand this construction doesn’t allow you to add clear rhythmical events, which is also the reason why there are no such events detectable on Tierbeobachtungen.

What can we expect from you in the near future?

Right now I’m working on totally different material, limited on three old analog synthesizers, without using a sequencer and effects. Everything is about synthesizer-modulation.