Thomas Brinkmann - The microhouse alchemies of the great extremist

To Sunweare, who introduced me to Brinkmann's music 

Already by the end of the Seventies the young Thomas Brinkmann was hard at work forging his own deeply personal musical vision; the composer from Mönchengladbach (West Germany), born in 1959, applying ingenuity and genius in equal measure, worked by selecting sound fragments lifted from vinyl records, multiplying them with a fastidiousness indifferent to paying homage to minimalism, whether American or German. His research continued in the following decades, drawing on sounds and rhythms derived from house and techno – under his own name or the monikers Ester Brinkmann and Soul Center – always intent on pursuing the path of extremism with a monastic rigor that yielded artistically thrilling singles, collected starting from the Nineties onward into albums that are far from easy listening, yet essential. And when the albums channeled the many variations of a single idea – as with “Klick”, in 2000 – some, with good reason, hailed it as a masterpiece.

Thomas, which song was the first to catch your attention as a child?

Maybe some Christmas carol. Then I remember that at nine years old, in a contest run by an instant coffee brand, I won the 45 rpm single of The Move's “Fire Brigade”. And finally, thinking back to the time I spent at my grandparents' house enduring their exhausting radio listening sessions, Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 3, better known as the “Rhenish”.

I understand your first sonic experiments date back to 1978…

…even before ’78.

But your recording career only started in ’97: did any of those very first experiments end up feeding into your Nineties work?

All the cut-and-paste you hear on the album “Klick”, for instance, actually began back in 1979.

I read somewhere that Jaki Liebezeit of Can gave you drum lessons.

I have to deny that. It's true that I like his style, though. But when I was a kid, what really grabbed me was the sound produced by some mechanical looms I used to hear echoing around my neighbourhood. They were even better than Liebezeit's drumming, both in terms of timbre and because they went on to shape my future music.

Your first release was “Studio 1 – Variationen” in 1997. Given how precocious you were, why did you wait so long to debut?

Easily explained: who would ever have put out material like mine during the eighties? You mention “Variationen”, well, like most of my catalogue, I actually made it well before ’97, as a reaction to the boredom the Eighties were causing me. Back then I used two turntable tonearms at once to work on vinyl, a method that produced great results when applied to Stravinsky's “The Rite of Spring”. Besides, I've never liked the idea of being tied down in a band. Because what is a band, really, deep down? Three or four attention-seeking egotists. In my case, I've always thought one egotist was more than enough. Though I admit I have sometimes enjoyed taking part in the occasional outside collaboration.

You named your label “Max Ernst”. Which visual artists shaped you?

Yes, Max Ernst… which, if you translate it from German into English, comes out as “Maximum Seriousness”. On one of my records you'll also find the name Gerard Juge. And in Düsseldorf, among others, I studied under Jannis Kounellis.

From a music-business point of view, what's the best decision you've ever made?

Selling Depeche Mode 1,500 copies of the 12” “46 Valentino Ep”, which contained the remix of “I Feel Loved” I'd made specifically for Depeche Mode. Mute asked me to destroy the edition put out on Max Ernst because they wanted to release it themselves. I put it out anyway after reading an interview with Martin Gore in Groove magazine where he said they weren't going to release the track. So I took matters into my own hands and released an Ep dedicated to Valentino Rossi, who in 2001 had just won what would turn out to be the last 500cc World Championship, replaced the following year by the MotoGP class. Four weeks after it came out, I get a call from Mute: “What the hell have you done?” they ask me, pointing out that we had no contractual agreement whatsoever. Well, the problem was that the 1,500 copies were already all sold out. Mine was actually meant to be a test edition, of which they'd sent back around a hundred copies because the records had come out warped, but Mute still asked me to destroy everything. I refused, replying that, if anything, another 1,500 copies were on their way to me, and that if they wanted them, they could buy those off me instead. And they did buy them, at a price that was very good for me too. So I told the company that pressed my records, Mpo, to ship the new copies directly to Mute's London headquarters. Afterwards, though, Mpo demanded that I return the first batch of records, insisting I send them back to France.

Since Mpo kept pushing the issue, I called up the people at Mute to ask what they were doing with the copies I'd had sent over, and they complained that the records were just sitting there clogging up their warehouse; so I suggested they hand them over to Mpo to have them pulped. Win – win – win! In the end everyone was happy, and I ended up with 1,500 free copies, sold 1,500 copies to Mute, and Mute released the new edition of “I Feel Loved” with Umek's remix on the A-side and mine, which is clearly the better one, on the B-side. Now that's what I call revenge.

Aren't you worried your music might come across as cold, like some of Steve Reich's minimalism?

Don't think about Reich too much. I certainly never do. That said, I'm not automatically against him, nor against the possibility of sounding cold myself.

Speaking of minimalism, what does the concept of repetition mean to you from an intellectual standpoint?

From a perceptual standpoint, the act of repetition places the subject in a context that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze dealt with brilliantly in his work "Difference and Repetition." A thing repeated identically 10 times is no longer the same thing as when it's repeated only once.

What were you aiming for in your remix work on Richie Hawtin's material for “Concept 1 – 96:VR”?

It followed the same path as “Studio 1 – Variationen,” where I worked on material from Wolfgang Voigt's “Studio 1” series, but in a different way. I could say it's a conceptual work in which, as I just mentioned, repeating something twice makes it different from its occurring just once. And then, whatever medium I'm using, I'm always fascinated by the concept of multiples and twins. In short, it's something more than mere redundancy.

How did you arrive at the masterpiece that is “Klick”?

Literally, through endless clicking and cutting. And keep in mind it came out 5 years late because no label felt confident enough to release it. And I'm talking about the likes of Force Inc or Profan… it really was a genuine paradigm shift.

What does the 2021 album “Klick Revolution” add to its predecessor “Klick”?

The problem is that for a long time I tried experimenting with setups to process the “Klick” material live, but I couldn't manage to avoid certain feedback loops. In the end I had to opt for a laptop-based configuration. This second mode, which I've only used live a couple of times, is the basis of “Klick Revolution,” which, in my view, has a more symphonic and “Rhenish” character than the work that preceded it. I consider it one of my essential works.

Aren't you afraid of missing the mark through excessive rigor?

No. But that doesn't mean I always hit the mark - in fact, sometimes that's precisely the most important part of the game. For instance, when I perform “Klick” live I fail constantly.

What advice would you give your younger self today?

Listen to your mother, but then do whatever you think is best.

What were your references for the sung album “When Horses Die”?

I'll mention two names: Trent Reznor and the Brian Eno of “Another Day On Earth.”

Nothing from the Neue deutsche welle?

A genre that never inspired me. But I can name you my favorite track from those years: “Bingerbrück” by singer-songwriter Manfred Maurenbrecher, from the 1983 album “Feueralarm”.

The most underrated composer of the 90s.

Daniel Bell. I'd also mention TBA (moniker of Natalie Beridze), if it weren't for the fact that, at a certain point, she was noticed and understood by people like Ryūichi Sakamoto and filmmaker Adam Curtis.

What do you think microhouse actually means?

I wouldn't know. People drive in nails just for the pleasure of hanging something on them.

Has your approach to noise changed over the decades?

At one point I wrote “Lovesong”, included on the 2004 album “Tokio+1”, a kind of declaration of war against the hedonism of the club scene at the time, which nonetheless used the very language of the dancefloor. As far as I was concerned, I had no intention of swallowing the same old soup over and over.

Had the language of techno worn you out?

Techno was over. And the party, at least for me, was over too. Maybe I just hadn't taken enough drugs to want to stay inside it.

Which artists from the past did you draw on to shape your style?

I can tell you this: I've gone through other people's misunderstandings, disappointments, amusements, all kinds of exploration, failures, chance events, empathy, excitement, boredom, aggression, misfortune, learning things and then forgetting them again, and so on and so forth. In short, I've experienced all the things that each of us inevitably has to face before leaving them behind. When I was living in Perugia, an Italian friend told me that we Germans want to overcome the father figure by “killing” it, whereas Italians learn to live alongside that archetypal figure instead. There are times when you feel like you're standing on the tip of an iceberg, with no idea what's dragging you under. Right now we're witnessing a widespread crisis, and it's precisely in times like these that it's worth remembering the founding values our lives are built on. In my case, I owe a great deal to Kounellis: what he proposed was a kind of new Renaissance, poised between classicism and modernity.

Recommend me the one essential dance album.

Okay. It should be an album that mixes Trouble Funk with the Bar-Kays' “Holy Ghost”. Or just go with Russell Haswell!

What's the deepest meaning of improvisation?

You play something you couldn't possibly play, but you try anyway, and you do it alongside other people who couldn't either, but who give it a shot all the same.

What do you think your musical legacy will be?

Nothing special, but enough.

What do you miss about Germany when you're abroad?

Same as above: not much, but enough.

Just one current-affairs question: how do you see the situation of the German federal government, following the complicated election results back in February?

That's not current affairs, that's already old news. Anyway, the situation is very much of its time: it could be better, and it could be worse.

Not much is known about your life. Among other things, you lived in Italy for a while.

Before Italy I spent some time in Paris. I stayed in your country from 1991 to 1993; I'd enrolled at the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, but I dropped out after three days.

What is Italy?

A permanent disaster paired with a permanent redemption. Definitely a fascinating disaster, full of decent people. In fact, some of the best people I've ever come across, I met in your country.

In '96 you were expelled from the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which sparked a legal dispute between you and the academy. What happened?

What happened is that by the time I enrolled, I was already too old for that sort of thing, and maybe I pushed the faculty too far. The fact is, I won the final appeal and, in 2001, I was able to re-enroll. But by that point it was more of a performance than an actual attempt to go back to studying.

What's the most extraordinary aspect of being an artist?

Being an art ist. (a wordplay that's hard to translate into English and German, which could be read as “the most extraordinary thing about being an artist is that you are one,” ed.).

I almost forgot to ask you about the future: how do you picture your sound in 10 years?

In ten years I'll be dead, and it'll be great.

(August 24, 2025)

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