MUTEK is an intersection. It’s where music and digital culture from all angles of North America, Europe, and Asia meet, greet, and permeate. Seeing as how this is one of the more valuable and celebrated impacts of the annual Montreal-based festival, we thought it might be necessary to come up with a way to cover the festival in a more appropriate manner, one truer to the ritual of meetings at crossroads.
Rather than simply having a journalist conduct interviews, we asked several MUTEK performers to sit down and interview each other. These pairings include Karen Gwyer and Paul Dickow (a.k.a. Strategy), and Uwe Schmidt (a.k.a. Atom™) and Tyondai Braxton. Having these artists play questionnaire ping-pong enabled more candid and fun focus on their works and personalities. They displayed their own study and fandom of the other artist and, in turn, revealed more about themselves by performing the role of the interviewer.
The following conversation is between Uwe Schmidt (Frankfurt) and Tyondai Braxton (New York). Schmidt’s last release as Atom™ was the Ground Loop EP on The Bunker New York, while Braxton released his first album in six years, HIVE1, back in May on Nonesuch.
[Go here for the back-and-forth between Gwyer and Dickow.]
Braxton: Having gone through group projects that you were in for a long time, and now focusing on your own work, what is that trajectory? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Schmidt: I realized maybe seven or eight years ago, or less, when I turned 40, I had to look back at my catalogue and what I had done. And then I realized I had abandoned a lot of things. My musical interest has always been about leaving things, doing things and pushing away and going somewhere else. I had been very uninterested in techno music or that “pure” electronic music that I started with and that I was interested in at the beginning, because I had the feeling it had gone in the wrong direction in the mid-90s onwards. It didn’t feel like I wanted to have anything to do with it. It’s a very personal thing, but everything I did from 94 and 93 had to do with that looking for different possibilities, and different ways for combining things. It was in sync with where history was…
Braxton: It was the conversation at that point.
Schmidt: Yes. It’s always a micro/macro kind of thing, a personal and subjective feeling I had. And then I had to look back at my stuff, and that cycle I found with Senor Coconut, I felt like I had said everything I had to say… And I had the possibility to go back to that initial moment. Usually when you look at a trajectory you have that image that time is like a line, and you’re on a trip that is that movement. And then I realized that it was a spiral, or a helix kind of thing, and you had to do all these twirls, and you slowly move upwards and at the same place but on the other side… I had the feeling that that’s how history happens… It’s not like I’m here, and society is here… It’s more like we’re constantly going somewhere, abandoning it, coming back, abandoning it, and then suddenly, looking back, yes, it has moved, but it’s very different…
Braxton: I think the thing that is interested is that you do have these projects that are very different from each other, at least on the outside looking in. You’ve talked about the Atom TM part, but where did the Senor Coconut element come into play? Going from minimal techno, where did that come from?
Schmidt: There was various stuff that went into it, I would say. When I started off making electronic music, before it was called techno, I was suddenly part of that. Now it’s called techno, OK great, whatever… What I always disliked, especially about techno, and in a general sense, the kind of relationship techno had to progress. There was always that vibe to it, that it was very progressive.
Braxton: And you didn’t like that?
Schmidt: I liked that, until I had the feeling it was not progressing. Around 94 or 95, it became commercial. Nothing happened.
Usually when you look at a trajectory you have that image that time is like a line, and you’re on a trip that is that movement. And then I realized that it was a spiral, or a helix kind of thing, and you had to do all these twirls, and you slowly move upwards and at the same place but on the other side… I had the feeling that that’s how history happens…
Braxton: Once it got to that level, it begins to regress?
Schmidt: Everybody was talking about how futuristic it was. What do you mean futuristic? Futurism is an old concept. I really wanted to play with that concept of timelessness and proposing different types of futurism, so to me, making artificial cha-cha-cha, I found it more futuristic than repeating the techno formula. It was like a friction had happened, because it felt old fashioned but was not. There was kind of a futuristic thing about it, like about simulation, rather than the old idea of progress.
Braxton: Well the problem with a lot of electronic music is that, these instruments that a lot of us are using, there’s not too much context to derive from. It’s all very self-referential. When you do something like Senor Coconut, when you’re injecting these cultural references to it, there’s a depth… There’s a cheap reference to the future if you just add a ‘beep boop boop,’ but the interesting thing that you did with Senor Coconut is the injection of these recognizable forms or identities that you play with in this way that feels new, that feels progressive.
Schmidt: I didn’t use the term itself for almost 20 years because it stopped describing anything. People say, ‘Oh, you make electronic music,’ and then everybody basically means something slightly different. You know you’re off topic, but you kind of want to talk about the same thing, but you don’t, and it gets fuzzy. In the 2000s, people talk about electronic music but they meant techno, house, and you assume that that’s what they meant, but electronic music in itself was a different thing, but then it became twisted into this common place. I couldn’t use that term for a long time because of that complication, because it would not describe what I was doing. But then six-seven years ago, I had decided to claim that back. I was like, ‘Why did the world spoil my term?’ And I had abandoned it because I didn’t want to deal with it. But after those 20 years, with EDM and all these other things, it has anyway gotten out of hand, because people don’t talk about it anymore, it’s not as difficult anymore.
Braxton: When people coined IDM in the 90s, and there was this movement, and then this whole popularized, more commercial dance music takes off, and the changed that that made, was like, “Let’s take off the ‘I’ and make less not intelligent music…” To take off that term and consciously evolve the music to be stupider… Someone is cynically adapting that term.
I was worried about the idea of something live versus something prerecorded. Was I tricking someone by doing that? While I was struggling with those things, you watch people who aren’t struggling with those things killing it, and maybe philosophically moving the conversation a little further down the road while you’re struggling with sense of identity or whatever, and I found that now, as someone who just wants to hear something that’s inspiring, and I’m more interested in that than someone dancing around on stage.
Schmidt: Absolutely.
Braxton: So you have the remnants of all of these projects that you have done, when you return, it’s not returning.
Schmidt: Exactly. With all that knowledge and experience, I think I am able now to go back to something that’s more fundamental in music, and what I realized within the realization, what I really found interesting when I started making music were very basic things: sounds, sequencers, basic rhythm, and not necessarily all these very baroque and cha-cha-cha things. I had listened to electronic music again in the club environment, and I had the feeling for the first time in 20 years that that was what I had imagined in 91…
Braxton: It caught up!
Schmidt: This is the bit of the future I had in my head! That was very inspiring and I grew very enthusiastic about it. Now you have very good PA systems you didn’t have in the 90s, and you have a much more open audience. Even the stupid audience is in a way closer to the open audience you had 20 years ago.
Braxton: Do you find that that’s the case globally, or is it just in certain countries?
Schmidt: I think it is, yeah. It always comes down to taste, but I would say that 20 years ago, there had always been that been that discourse within the community, with people saying, “Well, that’s not actually music,” just because you’re standing on stage pressing buttons. The 2000s and late 90s were all about that. I remember some MUTEKs where everything was about electronic artists actually doing something, which I thought was a bit unnecessary. Just standing behind a laptop, you can do the most incredible stuff that nobody sees….
Braxton: It’s funny, though: coming from doing live performances must of my life, I started to have these hang-ups as I got deeper into electronic music. I was worried about the idea of something live versus something prerecorded. Was I tricking someone by doing that? While I was struggling with those things, you watch people who aren’t struggling with those things killing it, and maybe philosophically moving the conversation a little further down the road while you’re struggling with sense of identity or whatever, and I found that now, as someone who just wants to hear something that’s inspiring, and I’m more interested in that than someone dancing around on stage. If anything, I’m realizing that the passive experience of showcasing an idea is in some ways more powerful than, ‘Cleveland! Are you ready to rock!?’ and it’s like, ‘No! We’re not!’ [Laughs]
Futurism is an old concept. I really wanted to play with that concept of timelessness and proposing different types of futurism, so to me, making artificial cha-cha-cha, I found it more futuristic than repeating the techno formula.
Schmidt: I think electronic music had this period where it really had to prove that it was real music, like a string quartet or great jazz player or whatever. In fear of not being virtuous enough…
Braxton: Someone was saying that electronic music is the modern folk music of the world, and I kind of agree with that, being that it is accessible and anyone can take part in it. It feels in some ways like essence of basic creativity can be explored through it, for anyone, and that’s kind of like the model of folk music. So you’ve gone through your projects and ways of your working, and you’ve revisited elements that you liked early on in your music, but as a big fan of Liedgut and Winterreise, I’d like to know where your head was when you did those records. What was the driving force behind making something like that?
Schmidt: It had to do a lot with living in Chile. Maybe eight years or so… After a 10-year period in Chile, and maybe at the time when I realized over the distance between Chile and Germany, I had achieved a different kind of perspective on the culture, specifically of the language. When you’re speaking a language, you are involved, and the language is part of you. Suddenly German words started to appear, after 10 years in Chile. It sort of popped out, and I was like, ‘That’s a word!’ And they have these weird meanings and connections and a couple of layers. My daughter back then had turned seven or eight and I was speaking German to her, and then she was asking stuff, and was like, ‘Daddy, that’s a weird word!’ And suddenly all this German came back, and all these implications in the words themselves. A couple of words I found really inspiring, and they turned into little obsessions, and I started investigating around that word. For example, for Liedgut the main trigger was noise, which in German is rauschen. But rauschen also means when you’re so drugged, you’re zoned and in that craziness of being very drunk or drugged. So it has all these different meanings, and I like that connotation or double sense of that word. And it relates to science, and there were many Germans who had worked on the concept of noise. Leading from Romanticism into Modernism, which is exactly where electricity was created, that kind of became that air….
Braxton: It’s an amazing record. It sounds very romantic, and hearing you talk about the science part of it, it makes sense because it has its own logic and way of working. It struck me though because it wasn’t trying to be seer, it just was. As someone who has a deep love for orchestral music, the bridge between romantic and modernism, that’s what I heard in your work. It made me think that you were thinking about structure and texture and form.
(SWITCHING)
Schmidt: What’s your favorite waveform?
Braxton: Hmmmmm…