You've been doing music for several years, but it's quite rare to have you playing alone... What is a solo album for you?
I made several solo albums and they are all different. There was “Inside-piano”, a double CD and a vinyl with additional material, dedicated both to the orchestral aspect of my acoustic piano playing. But playing literally inside the piano on the strings. There was another solo release on Warsaw based Bocian records, called “mutanza”, dedicated to the classical pieces for inside-piano, and the latest release was Golden Quinces Earthed, that features a spatialized Neo-Bechstein, the first amplified piano ever. What all those solo releases might have in common is, that they do not serve the idiom, that piano needs to be something intimate, romantic. This instrument is able to leave its old-fashioned history and can become a real sound and noise instrument, orchestra-like and even spatialized as in the case of “Golden Quinces”
"Golden, Quinces Earthed" is something very different from many of your previous releases... What was it on your mind before it definitively took shape? And what is its place into your artistic path?
I worked on this project for several years and I wanted to find a music that is adequate to this incredible instrument. As you know, it has no sounding board and only one string per note, but it has 19 humbuckers for amplification. This amplification system changed my whole playing as you do hear only the sounds of the strings – the acoustic sound of the objects used to play the strings is not amplified at all and so almost unhearable. This gave me the possibility to really concentrate on getting this incredible string sound, you never get with any normal grand piano. The second point is, that the nature of the instrument invited me to spatialize its sonic output: there were18 humbuckers! So it is very natural to differentiate them in a sophisticated automated spatialization. I accepted this invitation and conceived all those simultaneous movements in the space, realized on eicht speakers surrounding the audience.
What about the title? What could it suggest regarding the album's "features"? There is a known piece using silver apples in the title, I felt, that this music is the answer from the earth. Do you know golden quinces?
I have a Turkish market around the corner where you can find some of the best quinces, you can get – and I could quote you some really great Persian recepies usings quinces. But I also have a very old friend who produces one of the best schnapps in Germany, made from Quinces…
"Medium is the message". What's the message in playing a very old electronic piano and turning it into a sort of inconscious meaning?
I do no see any special meaning of doing so, but I think it’s very obvious that we should have a huge respect for all those people who already started out almost hundred years ago to research those new sonic and technical possibilies to spread music. Perhaps I discovered something inherent to their invention, they did not see themselves at that time.
How much, and what does "Golden Quinces Earthed " represent in your carreer?
On a practical side it was a huge success in two senses: it was commissioned by the Berlin Contemporary Music Festival MaerzMusik and ZKM Karlsruhe, one of the leading electronic music studios, and also by the San Francisco Media Lab. So I could really work seriously on all the single issues: amplification, spatialization, etc… The second thing was, that I had the chance to become a friend with David Balzer, a Berlin bayed piano constructor and the owner of probably the single Neo-Bechstein worldwide, that is not secured in a museum. That gave us the possibility to tour the project in a lot of different places in Europe, and for the first time in my life, to travel with “my own piano”… Furtheron, I got the chance to produce “Golden Quinces…” in the Studio for Electronic Music of the Technical University in Berlin, with the necessary facilities. So in my career this project was something pretty special: it started out with a little idea, to follow the inherent idea of an old instrument, to make new music with it, and I could find all those support! Including Sukandar Karthadinata, the great programmer, who realized not only the software for the spatialization, but is also the best guy for brazing and soldering I have ever seen.
Is your "inside piano" technique connected with an artistic aesthetic? And which one?
Yes. Inside piano means to try to make a piano sing! The cliché in every very piano lesson til the 19th century was: “let the piano sing” – for sure it does not. So what I tried ot to approach this problem where physically and I succeeded to get those singing sounds out of this old furniture and it became a real orchestra.
Bounding to this, what's your relationship with piano? Do you think it is an instrument that can have several different kind of expressive power?
Yes. It’s an incredibly great instrument: the strings put a tension of more than 20 tonnes on the metal frame inside – that’s the same power a jet needs to take off! You can play so different kind of great music on this instrument and it even sounds stupefying well, if you just burn it.
I think you've always given much attention to this, for example when you play piano with Zeitkratzer... But in my opinion, you do it there in a very different way. Do you agree?
No. People just don’t realize, that zeitkratzer can even be looked at as an extension of my inside-piano. The problem is, that most listeners are not able to recognize in a zeitkratzer recording, which sounds are coming from the piano, as it does normally not sound at all, like a piano played normally on the keys. And it’s really difficult to hear that. I remember working with Lou Reed on the mix of our version of Metal Machine Music, and he was kidding about me, that we do not need the piano, as there is none. But the next day, he asked to make some sounds louder in the mix, and had to realize, that those sound were the inside piano sounds. So it’s hard to hear… And you have this effect in a lot of the zeitkratzer releases.
And instead, what about Piano Inside-Out's idea of using this instrument?
Piano Inside-Out was a trio: three grand pianos! The idea came from a wonderful composition made by the Italien composer Mario Bertoncini – he was together with Franco Evangelisti and Ennio Moricconi a founding member of the Italian improvisation group Nuova Consonanza in the 60ies. Bertoncini was a close friend of mine, when he lived in Berlin, and he wrote this piece called “Cifre”, introducing a lot of new inside-piano techniques, he invented! It’s the bible of Inside-piano! Imagine to play three grand pianos on one stage with all those rich sounds – it was hilarious, I loved this trio. We played in different places, an airport in Italy with six grands, a piano manufacturer in South Germany, a festival in Berlin, but preobably you can imagine how difficult it is to find played with three or more grand pianos.
Zeitkratzer is, however, one of your main projects. How did you came with the idea of a chamber-classical organized noise-ensemble?
zeitkratzer was founded in the late 90ties. I hat made some experience in an electronic music studio in Marseille, and was just back from a longer residence in Rome. Berlin at that time became really interesting, there was a new curious generation, leaving behind the frontiers between improvisation, composition, interpretation, etc… So I asked a trumpet player, whith whom I played, to found such a group together and invite all interesting open minded musicians, who are also developing extended techniques, working on sound, etc… The trumpet player was Axel Dörner. We already played noise-music at that time, I wrote a piece for Axel. Whre he uses nothing than amplified breathing sounds. One real topic of zeitkratzer was to work with and on amplification of the acoustic instruments – and I think still today zeitkratzer is the only group to work in such a defined and sophisticated way with the possibilities of microphones. Not only to make things louder, but to microscope the instrumental sounds. In that period classical contemporary music started to become a little bit exhausted, academic, mannered. As I came to know Japanese noise music and a lot of other interesting music, that did not come from an academic background – I just thought: let’s also work with these guys (there were almost no women around at that time, what fortunately changed now), we know how to fix scores etc. , and that’s how it came up. I called Merzbow and told him: use us like a mixing board and Carsten Nicolai did the same, and they all composed for zeitkratzer. The idea was: let’s go for interesting music, independently from where it comes from. Let’s finish the abuse of music as social distinction: why not work with great noise musicians in the same way as with young composers or electronic avant-garde musicians?
And what's the internal dynamique of the ensemble? How you and the other musicians involved manage to have such a shared artistic dialogue?
I’m the director of the group. Democratic aesthetic decisions tend to prefer the mainstream – more or less by definition. If you want to do radical work you need somebody who in case of failure takes the responsibility and that is me. This enables the other musicians to really contribute, to propose project and also criticize whatever. On the other hand, it is really important that zeitkratzer was never intended to be a full-time ensemble. The group profits so much from all the different musical and artistic life of its members!
I often readed Zeitkratzer's experiment as a strong demonstration of the equation between noise and music. There, you play real and classical musical instrument, and you create noise-music (the opposite of music in its classical meaning, in some way) only using them, without any electronic help. Do you have a similar idea? What is, for you, music? And what is noise?
First: zeitkratzer plays mostly amplified and that means: WITH electronic help. We do not use electronic treatment beside this, but amplification is clearly a treatment. For example the incredible breathing sounds Hild Sofie Tafjord or Hilary Jeffery are producing with her horns, can only be produced by covering the microphone with the bell of the instrument. Noise so, should be looked at as a very normal musical material. There is a huge tradition of this, starting perhaps with Varèse. Pierre Schaeffer of the French group GRM wrote a 600 page book about who to categorize sound objects, than you had Iannis Xenakis and also the Polish composer school, including Witold Szalonek, who was teaching in Berlin. I had the pleasure to work and to tour with him. So noise was nothing now. New was, that some people in contemporary music tried to re-establish distinguished material: notes! “Soy beans”, as some Korean friends called it… One clear statement of zeitkratzer always was: don’t misuse music for social disctinction! It’s allowed to play different music, its allowed to think about social forms of concerts, sitting, standing, smoking, drinking, dreaming, … we made all-night concerts etc, but also acoustic listening concerts. And noise is always there and always has very different forms.
As an opposition to this "conceptual" side, I think you've always given - with Zeitkratzer but also in your solo works and in some other collaborative projects - a great importance to the "istintinctual" side of your music. The great majority of your works really doesn't sound as "calculated" or "studied": instead, they seem to be really spontaneous... Do you agree?
Sometimes I wish it would be like this! Unfortunately I have to work really hard to get the concepts, the methods how to realize them, and the instructions etc… But I’m happy to hear, that our music can evoke those impressions.
How much of what you play is written down and how much is improvised?
Music is an allographic art, as Nelson Goodman pointed out. And that means, there is no music, if it is not played. It’s not like being a painter: I can do a painting by my own, with no help from somebody else, and fix it on the wall. Music needs to be transmitted. So the question about the author is never really clear and that is one of the hugest qualities of music. I once condensed it to the following story to break it down to the materialistic side: Imagine, I play in a concert a composition of you. Imagine, that you tell me after concert, that I played the piece so badly, that is was not your piece anymore. Will I then be paid for the author rights? But answering more concrete: zeitkratzer never played what we call free improvisation, but we used almost every other thinkable kind of fixation. Most often we play timeline based scores and use synchronized watches, especially constructed for us, to realize them.
By the way, are you going to play any show in the following months of this year? Any chance to can have you play in Italy?
I think there are some plans for Milano and also Bologne, Rome and Sicily, but nothing is conformed yet. We would love to do a tribute to Giacinto Scelsi and are working on this.
What other projects are you going to work on these days?
There are two main projects at the moment, we are preparing and working on. The first one is called Kriegslieder /war songs: we will readapt in the very zeitkratzer way – like in “Neue Volksmusik” for example - war songs of the first world war, including Serbian war songs. And we will cooperate with the incredible singer from Belgrade Svetlana Spajic and a friend of her, very old folk singer, who still sings a song, made by his father about the assassination in Sarajevo. Pretty brutal music and texts, raw, shocking, … The other project is a cooperation with the performance group She She Pop and focusses on all the questions you normally never put in a concert situation: about yourself on stage, about the audience, the relation between us, discussions with people,… - This will include a longer research on the role of the musicians, the structure of zeitkratzer, and take all that as inspiration for musical performances. I’m really looking forward to this dangerous project, where we do not know, where it will take us, but hopefully we will realize it in 2016.
