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Vague Cities

2010-02-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

Look for changes in the next month or so. This site will be revamped, materials archived and searchable. We will also be launching walterwasacz.com, a home for all things Walter. For now, here are some photos from the Vague Cities release party at Motor Burger in Windsor

Download Chris McNamara's "Vague Cities" on Overlap here.

Walter talks to Klimek and reviews King Midas Sound for XLR8R.

In with the new

2010-01-03T10:02:00.000-08:00

It's official. 2010 is here and it finally feels like we're living in the future, the ideal setting for Chris McNamara's sublime innerspace travelog Vague Cities, issued late last year on Christopher Willits' San Francisco-based Overlap digital imprint. Listen to the five-track EP and buy it here.

Now it's time to celebrate. nospectacle presents a release party for Vague Cities Saturday, Jan. 23, at Motor Burger (formerly Noi), 888 Erie St. East, in Windsor's Little Italy. Excellent food, full cash bar, good times. Original music by McNamara plus combo live-DJ sets by nospectacle.

Admission: free. 8 p.m. - 1 a.m.

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Walter's best of 2009 column and blog from the Metro Times:

All signals -- analog, digital, auditory, sensory -- lead to and from Detroit. No other city remains so dedicated to the connectivity of mind, body and 4/4 beats. Go ahead, name one: London? Berlin? LA? NYC? All filled with sexy or rad club life. We humbly grant you that, and more. But for sheer day-to-day local inspiration and global influence, this vast, post-industrial, near-mythic place is the space for electronically-enabled music creation. It is what we rhapsodize about this time of year, when we scan our feeble memory banks, and all our stacked vinyl, CDs and little blue compressed MP3 folders looking for the best music of its kind of the last 12 months.

What else could make us so giddy (frozen lemon-flavored vodka helps) as an otherwise bleak 2009 -- threatened with economic collapse, escalating war and the sobering realization that one half of the country cares little that the other gets basic health care -- thankfully disappears into history? We have our sonic visionaries. They produce on a grand scale. They walk among us, one foot in the present, the other in the future, largely undetectable, immeasurably cool. Micro-attentive critics in the music sub-genre blogosphere are noticing, as they have since the 1980s, sprinkling Detroit respect in liberal doses on best-of lists across the planet. For such nuggets of gratitude we are overcome. We offer you a toast, all the young dudes, glammy girls, lovers and dancers with impeccable taste in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Paris, San Francisco and, yes, Williamsburg. We reciprocate by throwing our own picks -- including recordings, performances, labels on the upswing, noteworthy emerging trends -- atop the fire, straight outta the mighty fucking D. We've reduced it to an essential three categories. Remix the order anyway you like. May their contents burn in your hearts and souls forever.

Detroit theatricality. Surprised? You needn't be. While most of us were worried about getting paid, artists here were paying it back. Exciting new projects were started locally: Macho City, a smart discoid duo (Mike Trombley and Scott Zacharias), brought fun, forbidden colors and international talent (Nancy Fortune and the retro-futurist rediscovery of the year, Bernard Favre's late-1970s Black Devil Disco Club) back to an impoverished creative club scene. Aaron-Carl, one of the godsons of funky-dirty house to whom young producers around the world owe an increasing debt, launched W.A.R.M.T.H., a D-based collective that aims to go where no man or woman has dared go before: crossover peace, harmony and good times in the ego-driven, fiercely independent techno and house scenes. Carl  Craig was re-established as artistic director for the Movement Festival, an inspired move by promoters Paxahau, who continue to impress with growth and business savvy after a dozen years of formal promotions. Ditto for Adriel Thornton (aka Fantastique) and his 13 years of Family (and other FreshCorp-related) party productions. Another sweatbox institution, Funk Night, only got better with the addition of live big-band jazz courtesy of Will Sessions and support from the emerging Few Records imprint. Dethlab and Haute2Death reminded us monthly, if not more frequently, that art and design, guitars and synths, and jet boys/jet girls dressed in black will never go out of fashion.

Detroit hyperreality. No surprise here. Detroit producers worked their asses off all year, making original tracks, remixing others, touring the world, making intuitive connections and inspiring new scenes. Let's start with the ornery brilliance of Omar S, who refuses to play in Detroit, but draws lines around buildings at 5 a.m. in Berlin and London. His (real name Alex O. Smith) audacious Fabric 45 mix CD included only his own tracks from his homegrown FXHE label (based in the Conant-8 Mile area). When told minimal global all-star Ricardo Villalobos had recently done the same for the same series, he responded: Ricardo who? We love you, Alex, you crazy bastard. Underground Resistance techno original Robert Hood put out the massive Minimal Nation comp; and perpetually off-the-radar house music prince Rick Wilhite had two classics re-released by The Netherlands' Rushhour, 'Soul Edge' and 'The Godson,' featuring remixes by Theo Parrish and Moodymann (aka Kenny Dixon Jr.). Also making the interplanetary rounds: Scott Grooves' 'Detroit 808' on his own Natural Midi label and three platters on Kai Alce's NDATL Muzik celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fabled Detroit Music Institute: the artists were initially listed as unknown -- in anonymous, Detroit white label tradition -- but have been revealed as Mike Huckaby, Derrick May, Parrish and Alce himself. The busy, ever productive Parrish could also be found remixing DFA's '45:33' and Dixon (call him KDJ) released the soul/jazz/funk full-length Anotha Black Sunday. Ann Arbor's Ghostly International/Spectral Sound powerhouse rolled closer toward world domination with stellar releases by the Sight Below (Tip: the 'Murmur' EP, including heavenly remix by arctic Norway's Biosphere), new wave shoegazer Deastro (Sterling Heights' Randolph Chabot) and various digital only comps (featuring School of Seven Bells, Matthew Dear, Dabrye and the grossly under-appreciated Dykehouse).

Detroit soul & inspiration: No, not everything great about the ninth year of the bloody new millennium came with a Detroit fix. The fertile and increasingly funky dubstep scenes in Bristol, London and in the north of England largely remain outside the magic circle. For those not familiar, we push hard the virtues of King Midas Sound (the latest project of the Bug/Techno Animal's Kevin Martin); nearly everything on Kode9's South London's Hyperdub label, which released the sweetest, wonkiest love-dub single of the year, Darkstar's 'Aidy's Girl is a Computer.' It included a b-side by Detroit's Kyle Hall, qualifying it for our category built of phenomenological essences on top and bass vibrations below. Also hot and D-inspired: 'Ghosts Have a Heaven' by London's Actress; Berlin-based Redshape's The Dance Paradox LP; the dark, dubby, bewitchingly entertaining releases by Manchester-based projects Demdike Stare, Pendle Coven and Millie & Andrea (pay attention fans of Basic Channel and Deepchord); London-to-Berlin transplant Scuba's 'Speak/Negative' sides; and A Made Up Sound's 'Rework/Closer' and 2562's full-length Unbalance, both projects fronted by low-flying Dutchman Dave Huismans. And two for the househeads who think they've heard everything: Joy Orbison's 'Hyph Mngo' and Pangaea's 'Memories.' Free your stuck-up asses, divas, your minds will follow.

We would be remiss to end the year without a Happy New Year shout out to all the artists we support and admire. We wish you prosperity in the studio and raging love on dancefloors everywhere. 2010, like it or not, here we come.

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Chris McNamara & Markus Guentner in Ann Arbor

Gilded Eternities

Without spoiling too much of the current thrill-a-minute Subterraneans column, which puts to rest a bloodstained year in a fractious imperial democracy and looks ahead to even stranger days ahead, I thought I'd jot down some essential tunes to take with you to the island of your choosing, when you need to get away from it all. Here is the best of what I've returned to again and again in 2009, shared in some random kind of lyrical disorder. Jams that made my mind and body turn and twist and shout. Crossing genre borders, including comps, singles and re-mastered and reissued stoner-approved classics.

Hyph Mngo (Hotflush) - Joy Orbison. Ecstatic funky legit house-dubstep blender that gets better and better before your virgin ears. A young talent (Pete O'Grady, 22) to watch. Good pairings to seek out: Hotflush label owner Scuba's two side-sided powerhouse ('Speak/Negative') for Naked Lunch; and Hessle Audio co-head Pangaea's one-sided 'Memories' released on (our favorite) label unknown. Next up, freaks: flame out to the Dark Knight's highly combustible 'My Bitch/Mutant Funk' sides. We're dancing to it right now, in a bass haze, in case you want to join us.

Exploding Head (Mute) - A Place to Bury Strangers. Heavy, mysterious, loud, mumbled psych-punk poetry. Yes, the Jesus & Mary Chain comparisons are apt, but it has me reaching further for my Loop reissues, A Gilded Eternity (Beggars Banquet) and The World in Your Eyes (Reactor), each filled with hypnotic drone pop and proto-ambient metal, initially released in those golden years, 1987 to 1990.

5: Five Years of Hyperdub (Hyperdub) - Various Artists. Sexy greatness is all over it, beginning with the sublime modern poptones of Darkstar's 'Aidy's Girl is a Computer,' Cooly G's 'Weekend Fly' and Ikonika's 'Sahara Michael;' reprising a Burial track (a beefy 'Distant Lights'), finally losing its temper on 'Fukkaz' and the Specials' 'Ghost Town,' the latter two grindcore dubs courtesy of Kode9 + Spaceape. And there are close to 30 other gorgeously-produced tracks. Rock!

Tracks and Traces (Gronland) - Harmonia & Eno '76. Trance rock of epically-beautiful proportions, matching members of Germany's Cluster and Neu! with new wave Brit synthesist Brian Eno. The original 12 songs are plenty to digest, but plan to add smart remixes by Appleblim & Komonazmuk ('By the Riverside') and Shackleton ('Sometimes in Autumn') issued by the Amazing Sounds label.

Great Lengths (3024) - Martyn. Almost everything he touched turned to hipster gold. One of the first to build bridges between Detroit techno, Chicago house, LA hip hop, UK jungle, drum 'n' bass and rave, this debut shows off the transplanted Dutchman's (from medieval Eindhoven, now living in suburban Washington D.C.) skill at shaping dub desire into coherent, universal pop.

Fever Ray (Rabid) - Fever Ray. Karin Dreijer Andersson's (The Knife) unchallengeable synth/goth/pop masterpiece, now in special three-disc edition including live tracks and video. Dead sad exquisite northern beauty. Here's your chance to surrender, slave. I did.

Self-Assessment and Symbiosis (both Modern Love) - Pendle Coven and Demdike Stare. Two LPs, two separate Manchester, UK projects connected by the presence of warehouse techno-house/evil dub producer Miles Whittaker, Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering studio wizardry and kinship with Detroit otherness and self-mystification of artists like Rod Modell and his Deepchord and Echospace crews.

Waiting for You (Hyperdub) - King Midas Sound. Narco-dream dub from London space-bass producer Kevin Martin, who doubles as the man behind the Bug, featuring acid-dread vocals by poet/MC Roger Robinson and Hitomi. The lovely voices float over waves of melodic sub-bass and crazy effects all pitched down to a junkyard crawl. How low can you go?

The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre (Lo Recordings) - Black Devil Disco Club. Amazing recordings from 1975, revived and re-worked for instant groovy dancefloor reaction by the now 63-year-old Fevre. Ripping French disco basslines meet German space rock elements, suggesting a careful listening to Can and Faust. If you like it, and you will, also dig around for another more tragic re-discovery: Wolfgang Reichmann, who was knifed to death in a bar brawl in 1978, the same year his Wunderbar debut was issued on Hamburg's Sky Records. Big, ambitious recording (re-released on Bureau B) will make you shiver if you like 'Man Machine' era Kraftwerk or even Tangerine Dream. Say you will.

Until Then, Goodbye (Smallville) - Lawrence. What's the most quietly consistent house-techno combo player in the world, Peter Kersten (Lawrence/Sten), been up to lately? Pristine productions, as usual. The new one is for you, closet Emo girls and boys, pure melancholy danceable 4/4 pop for now people. Don't bother dressing up, the party is at your house tonight and we're coming over.

Also riding the year out on a high: the Netherlands' Dave Huismans, whose A Made Up Sound ('Rework/Closer') and 2562 (Unbalance LP) projects continue to impress; Detroiter Omar S went to the plate swinging and went yard on Fabric 45, a mix that contained all original material; Berlin-based Redshape's The Dance Paradox, was pure Detroit love in all the right ways, as was Actress' (Londoner Darren Cunningham) stomping 'Ghosts Have a Heaven' and Quantec's Basic Channel-Deepchord flavored Cauldron Subsidence. Moodymann (Westsider Kenny Dixon Jr., lusty and re-invigorated at 42) stayed chic in the global underground with Anotha Black Sunday, and contributed tracks, along with fellow Detroiters Theo Parrish and Rick Wilhite, to 3 Chairs' Spectrum LP. LA funk was re-born (sounds a lot like Seven Mile and Ryan neighborhood to us) on Dam-Funk's massive, soul-stirring Toeachizown. More good dubs from the UK came via Untold's 'Dante/Sweat,' Millie & Andrea's 'Spectral Source/Ever Since You Came Down' and Ramadanman's 'Humber' and 'Justify' (with Appleblim). Mordant Music developed hauntological kitchen sink surrealism as a new sub-sub-genre on the monochromatic SyMptoMs LP; Blue Daisy somehow made shoegaze and wonky-funky space-disco riddims work on the 'Stings Detached' four-track EP; and Klimek continued on his alternately grimy, haunting and beautiful journey through the ambient ghetto of the imagination on his Slavoj Zizek/Van Dyke Parks/Brian Wilson-inspired Movies is Magic LP.

Bristol's Peverelist dropped a tasty full-length bass bomb, Jarvik Mindstate; Deastro (early-twentysomething Randolph Chabot of Sterling Heights) produced the kinetic Moondagger, for Ghostly International; Matias Aguayo put another stake in the heart of boring elitist minimal with the populist South American-European street party-club music hybrid, Ay Ay Ay on Kompakt. From the vaults, we were digging the Soul Jazz collection Can You Dig it? The Music and Politics of Black Action Films 1968-1975 and the Kill Rock Stars reissue of the stunning Mayo Thompson-produced Raincoats debut, originally out on Rough Trade in 1979. We raise a toast to 30 years of post-rock relevancy with a glass of champagne that tastes just like Cherry Cola.

The hits kept on coming: Editors' In This Light and On This Evening, the Depreciation Guild's In Her Gentle Jaws and The Mary Onettes' Islands brought pop poetry to club life, shaking fists at God, nature and human failure. Thanks to the marvelous ears of Pop Ambient visionary Markus Guentner, those LPs are on heavy rotation on various iPods, iPhones and computers all over the house. As is yet unreleased material from Dresden's Malory (Pearl Diver, out in early 2010), though it has been galloping in my head since November. That's when the digital A/V trio nospectacle (Chris McNamara, Jennifer Paull and yours truly) performed with Guentner at a special event called Collapsing Borders on the University of Michigan's North Campus. I mention it partly because I have a great picture posted here of McNamara (mixing live video, left) and Guentner (right) playing sublime live original material for the first time -- anywhere, ever. It's one of many secret best moments of a pretty great year in Detroit music. You missed it, but the afterlife in the blogosphere is made for eternal second opportunities like this. Enjoy! Not to mention vicariously experiencing other rare live appearances by Move D, Scion, Faust, the Sight Below, Flying Lotus; and less rare happy hours and hours by local mischief makers Macho City, Disco Secret, Aaron-Carl, Kevin Reynolds, Wolf Eyes, Aaron Dilloway, Jamie Easter, the Wolfman Band and, of course, all the discerning music lovers in Detroit that kept it all kicking like a sleep twitch in 2009. Stay safe and don't dare lose your fever knife edge in the new year.

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Words: Walter Wasacz Label: Modern Love XLR8R Rating: 9/10

Miles Whittaker has been a bewitchingly busy fella of late, releasing warehouse techno under his MLZ moniker, playing dubby doubles with Gary Howell in Pendle Coven and Andy Stott in the cheeky Millie & Andrea, and now teaming up with Sean Canty in the earthy, neo-pagan Demdike Stare. Spread too thin on the dark side, you say? Not by a long shot. "Suspicious Drone" gets the (witches') ball rolling rudely with an effects-treated gong and sustained subsonic bass tremors, "Haxan Dub" is a slo-mo 2-step march, and "Jannisary" samples world-beat strings and riddims to come up with something deliciously otherworldly. Sneaky, sinister, and sick in all the right ways.

more features and reviews found here: http://www.xlr8r.com/contributors/walter-wasacz

Nov 20 afterglow

2009-11-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

Collapsing Borders - Einstürzende Grenze

2009-10-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Markus Guentner (Regensburg)

nospectacle (Detroit)

Video and Performance Studio
Duderstadt Center, University of Michigan
2281 Bonisteel Blvd

November 20
6 - 9 p.m.
Free

This special audio-visual live electronics presentation features a North American exclusive: an appearance by Markus Guentner, a German artist known as an innovator of the pop ambient sound for Cologne's Kompakt label, with Detroit-based digital dub stylists nospectacle.

The performance, Collapsing Borders - Einstürzende Grenze, at the University of Michigan's Duderstadt Center will include composed and improvised music and video, mixed and sequenced by the artists. The point of focus is to show how art and entertainment technologies play a crucial role in transcending political, cultural and psychological borders. It is part of a series of events at the University of Michigan this fall commemorating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Guentner is best known for his work on Kompakt, which released his full-lengths In Moll (2001) and 1981 in 2005, and various single tracks on its annual Pop Ambient series. He has also released minimal house and techno music (Audio Island, Lovely Society) on the Ware label, also based in Cologne, and has a new LP, Doppelgaenger, released this fall on the Dutch Sending Orbs label. He has produced soundscapes for Ambient Works, a comprehensive workstation for creating cinematic atmospheres for feature films, documentaries, commercials and new media project applications. Guentner's only other area appearance was at Movement, Detroit's Electronic Music Festival, in 2006. He lives in Regensburg.

nospectacle is an electronic music, video and DJ hybrid project based in Detroit. The group is made up of Christopher McNamara, Jennifer A. Paull and Walter Wasacz, and performs original works by McNamara, a founding member of the Windsor-Detroit laptop group Thinkbox, re-shaping the source material into drones, dubs, disembodied voices, subsonic bass immersion and streaming images. McNamara's new release Vague Cities includes a remix by Guentner.

The group has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), the Detroit Institute of Arts and at the Movement Festival. In 2008, nospectacle hosted Klimek, another German pop ambient artist, at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Listen to nospectacle live at Cranbrook 2008 here.

Check out Chris McNamara's track "oooohdear" on the Lend Me Your Ears blog.

RSVP or add event to iCal on Facebook.

LIT

2009-05-18T15:45:00.001-07:00

Virgil Moorefield, Merge and nospectacle in Live in Time, May 21, Detroit Film Theatre, @ DIA, 5200 Woodward Avenue. Doors 7 p.m. $10.

Live in Time - May 21, 2009

2009-04-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

Subterraneans Best of 2008

2009-01-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

Call me old-fashioned, but I actually like most of the music I write about, making each year-end, best-of list I do a delight not a chore. Sure, there’s lots of bad stuff out there, horrible shit, in fact, but the good work that makes it through the din of mediocrity makes it all worthwhile.

And looking back over a year’s worth of tunes gives the period some weight it didn’t immediately have. In techno, it’s 1995 that brings meaning to memory, when Berlin’s Basic Channel (and everything associated with it: the artists, the label, the brand) morphed into Chain Reaction, and 1996, when it launched the murky and immersive Burial Mix imprint, still the most compelling template for all pitched down, digital dubs to follow.

Instead of the individual works themselves, I’ve listed the top dozen labels that kicked out the most incredible product of the year. Nothing revolutionary, just pure techno investigation; you follow the label, find the sound you like, identify the artist (or sometimes not, with so many hiding behind bewildering pseudonyms and akas) … and just crank those knobs to the right.

As always, the list is built on a foundation of subjective imperfection, and leans heavily toward dub and dread techno sounds from the UK, where the current action is. Minimal, in case you care, is over, in rapid freefall into institutional narcissism and increasing irrelevancy. We feel sad for the loss, but spill whisky and dance gleefully over its not so pretty corpse. It was nice while it lasted, baby. Now, in order of achievement, on with the new and improved show:

Skull Disco – The undisputed princes of an organic movement that brings techno and more roots-based music into low-end unity are Sam Shackleton and Appleblim (Laurie Osborne) of London and Bristol-based funky bass project Skull Disco. They destroyed everything in their path with badass black jams like “The Rope Tightens,” “Death is Not Final,” “Grit” on the brilliant Soundboy’s Gravestone Gets Desecrated by Vandals double CD and double-12-inch remix pack that ended a four-year run of venturesome soul-dub partnership. Plus: degenerate cover art by illustrator Zeke Clough is mad as hell, authentically hardcore.

Hessle Audio – Tight, house-inspired dubstep with warm, layered vocals and wild effects on top of junglist shimmer ‘n’ shake — and hard and deep bass thrusts for good measure. Ooh, ahh. Pangaea’s “Router / You & I” is both romantic and tough, musical kin to similarly out (there) local producers KDJ and Piranhahead. Tracks by Ramadanman (one of the label co-owners), Untold and Romania’s TRG (featuring remixes by Martyn, who also had an incredible year on his fledgling 3024 label) are true bad blood, like sex in your soul.

Echospace – Rod Modell and Steve Hitchell have been on a serious skyward trajectory since 2007 and even speeded up production activity in 2008 by releasing a CD of remixes of Juan Atkins’ classic “Starlight,” side projects by Intrusion and CV313, and a reshaped/re-mastered/re-engineered version of DeepChord’s 2002 Vantage Isle sessions. Combustible, brooding techno art without beginning or end.

Modern Love – Manchester label affiliated with Boomkat and Pelicanneck Records had another sweet year with new groovin’ dubs by Andy Stott, Claro Intelecto, MLZ and Move D. But what really gave the label weight was its release of limited edition white label dance 12s by Unknown / Hate, freaky-fractured mind/body beat music said to be from anonymous hardcore tapes recovered from ’93 or thereabouts. One of the sides contains the best title of any single this year: “Pretty Boys Don’t Survive Up North.”

Hyperdub – Still hot after two straight years of releasing what were the smartest, loveliest full-lengths in ambitious global clubland (the self-titled Burial and Untrue LPs), Steve Goodman’s South London power center contributed Zomby’s double 12-inch pack, King Midas Sound (featuring the Bug’s Kevin Martin and including a remix by Ann Arbor’s Dabrye) and his own Kode9 productions, one of them (“Konfusion”) with longtime psychotropic audio/visual collaborator the Spaceape.

Smallville – Hamburg-based label had probably the most spectacular debut of the year, Move D (David Moufang, who has been releasing records since ’94) and Benjamin Brunn’s Songs from the Beehive LP and the duo’s follow-up, the New Horizons EP. Sophisticated techno also influenced by the pillow talk of (Detroit) house music and mind games found in space jazz. Oh, so nice. Hamburg homeboy Sten (Peter Kersten aka Lawrence) also kept his elegant grooves rising with the Squares EP.

Echocord – This Danish imprint puts out heady, danceable deep techno, rough stuff like Detroiter Mike Huckaby’s remix of Mikkel Metal’s Peaks and Troughs and suburban spaceman Quantec’s Berlin-Detroit, greyscale-glamorous Unusual Signals LP. Score an extra point for colored vinyl releases and classy graphics.

Mule Electronic - Japanese label with just the right touch marries techno, house and ambient tones to create crafty new electronic world music. With contributions by Sweden’s Minilogue, Japan’s Koss, the ever-present Lawrence and the electoacoustic find of the year, the Imps, a real time band with electronics that creates tasty dream-jazz vignettes as if for a surrealist ballet.

Tectonic – New releases from Bristol by Skream, Peverelist, 2562 (aka Dave Huismans, who also records under the name A Made Up Sound) and RSD gave dubstep the swift kick in the ass it needed by building sexual heat on the bottom end and letting the high end drift into radiant abstraction. The hits were everywhere, especially the mighty “Techno Dread” (2562) and the rankin’ “Midnight Oil / Joyride,” the latest single by label owner Pinch (Rob Ellis).

Ghostly International / Spectral – A year of renewed pop energy for the Ann Arbor-based label celebrating 10 years in the fast track next summer. Colorfully adorned millennial newbies included Michna, the Sight Below, the Chap and School of Seven Bells. But the best record to come out on the franchise this year was by Spectral pillar Todd Osborn, whose “Osborne” debut full length went deeper into the mind of the Detroit night then all others combined.

12K - Taylor Duepree’s inventive Brooklyn-based label project never fails to sound weirdly pristine, as on his own re-mastered Northern solo effort, on Sawako’s Bitter Sweet or especially the violently beautiful Ocean Fire, a collab between legendary modern classical composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra; Academy Award winning soundtrack work on The Last Emperor) and the planetary Max/MSP/Jitter-guitarist Christopher Willits.

Caravan – The future of body music takes another turn through Bristol, where culture on the ground is apparently not afraid to trade in multiple inspirations and creative file sharing. Crossover dub, 2-step garage, grime, house, techno, rave and seemingly every underground sound worth re-imagining can be heard on new records by Emptyset, October (tip: “Houston / Listen, Move, Dance”) and TG’s Feign EP, which includes a remix by Markus Guentner.

And we would be remiss not to include more than honorable mention to the sounds found this year on Anticipate, Barge, Meanwhile, Millions of Moments (which released Modell’s sublime remix of local treasure Aaron Carl’s Crucified), Punch Drunk, Tempa, Touch, Type, Vakant, WerkDiscs, and International Freakshow, not just because we love the name but for the fact that the criminally under-regarded minimalist Jens Zimmermann dropped four hypnotic drumzzz-driven jams (the C30 double EP) on the label this summer. Happy New Year, freaks everywhere, and much weird love from Detroit.

By Walter Wasacz

nospectacle DJ set Wednesday in Hamtramck

2009-01-04T17:09:00.000-08:00

Video from Cranbrook and Photos from Broadcast

2008-12-31T10:42:00.000-08:00

Photos by Walter Wasacz and Jennifer Paull from live radio broadcast

Video from Cranbrook Art Museum shot by Sherry Gaines, edited by Jennifer Paull

nospectacle to broadcast from MOCAD

2008-12-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

Curated by Irene Hofmann and co-organized by ICI, New York,
and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, the Broadcast exhibition
runs through Dec. 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Broadcast explores ways in which artists since the late 1960s have
engaged, critiqued and inserted themselves into official channels of
broadcast television and radio.

On Dec. 18, nospectacle and Paris '68 present Holiday in the Sun VII
as part of the series of special live transmissions from the museum at
4454 Woodward Avenue, Detroit. Guests include nosoul, noscene and
nofuture.

Music and conversation, 4 - 8 p.m.

nospectacle in Famzine

2008-12-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

Our friend John "Billiebob" Williams was kind enough to interview Walter for his excellent blog, Famzine. Here is the interview reprinted in its entirety.

nospectacle combines music and video into a mind melting live performance. The trio consists of Walter Wasacz, Jennifer Paull and Chris McNamara. On Friday, November 28 at Cranbrook Art Museum, they performed a set loosely based on “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” the multimedia experience created by Andy Warhol in the mid-1960s.

Walter collaborates with several other folks around town and hosts paris68.org with Carleton Gholz. He writes a column for Metro Times called The Subterraneans, which is devoted to Detroit dance culture. He talked a bit about performing with his multimedia collective.

nospectacle played some shows this year that have had good publicity. How did those feel, being a fairly young group?
Well, it’s been great. We’ve able to do pretty much what we’ve wanted, which is to bring a Detroit-inspired electronic music and video group project into a variety of venues, exposing it to lots of different people. From the beginning, the idea was to include as many people as possible in what we do, and not do some kind of exclusive, elitist, bullshit artistry thing. We’ve played in clubs, bars, coffee houses, art galleries, museums, colleges, the Movement festival — I’d like to play on the sidewalk one day, just set up and perform for passersby. As long as we could get cords long enough and some sound with a little ooomph…

The members of the group have roots in melding sound, art and visuals. How do you keep this element fresh in your shows?
Chris McNamara has been making original sound and film productions for the past decade as a member of Thinkbox and as a solo performer. He’s had films screened in film festivals and has done sound/visual installations here and in Europe. He also teaches in U-M’s Screen Arts & Cultures program. He’s a really accomplished guy, but totally humble and down to earth. It’s a privilege to play with him. Jennifer Paull is starting to make her own animation pieces and does some digital video editing, as well as audio production and editing. I use a turntable and work the 3-channel mixer, so there is always an element of DJ performance to what we do. It’s all live and in the moment, and we try to turn any glitch or human error into something that works to our advantage. The streaming video is also mixed live, with three projections often going at once. The effects can be trippy or totally calming, depending on how we feel.

Is your studio setup mostly laptop and a couple controllers?
Yes, two laptops (both MacBook Pros), two audio controllers (one M-Audio Evolution, one FaderFox), some audio and video interface hardware, three mini-DVD players, a Technics 1200 … and waaaay too many cords, wires and lines in, lines out. We’re not gearheads at all, always grumbling and fumbling about the equipment.

What is your interpretation of the (literal/ figurative) space between artist and audience?
I love that question … When I was a kid, a long, long time ago, I learned that the ideal distance between artist and audience is almost none at all, a sheer, almost invisible veil is the best image I can think of, where the expectation is that the artists provide the content for the performance but its expression is shared with the audience. It has to be that way. Everyone present participates in making a show a magical event. I hate that artificial separation between producer and consumer that is too often imposed. You know, ‘we’re up here, and you’re down there,’ that kind of thing… Everybody should contribute if a performance stands a chance of being great. Kids, especially kids, should leave a venue believing a part of their lives has changed, and for the better. The world should tilt ever so slightly on its axis, the cultural landscape should be re-shaped. That’s the goal, anyway…

When performing in art settings, do you find the audience may not understand what you are doing?
They seem to understand it pretty well, maybe intuitively grasping that what we’re trying to do really is art, that it’s like a living, breathing installation … one that you can dance to if you feel the urge.

You have worked on music and art projects with other individuals?
Carleton Gholz and I started Paris ‘68 in 2002. We brought DJ culture to Indian restaurants and libraries, we invited an artist to paint canvases in front of Detroit Threads while we played in the display window, we did some fashion shows, did a thing at the Detroit Science Center for the launch of a new brand for an advertising company, tried to bring social change politics to the dance community … and failed miserably. But that failure was absolutely a good thing, for us anyway. Carleton is now a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, doing very well, and nospectacle is getting a bit of attention for breaking its own unconventional way, so that’s good …

How do the members of nospectacle jam/collaborate?
Well, we start with some good food! Chris and Jennifer are awesome cooks and we try to always eat well, and cheaply...Jamming is the right word, really breaking it down to some serious dubs, spatial ambient tones and some deep Detroitish grooves, putting them all into a digital blender and hoping they all get along together. It’s a bit of trial and error but you can’t be afraid to make mistakes. Some of the motivation to make interesting, innovative new sounds and pictures comes from a fear of being a bore. Who needs to hear the same stuff over and over again, no matter what kind of music you make? Listening to techno can be the most boring experience imaginable if you just recycle what someone did way more originally in ‘86, ‘96 or ‘06. Make something fresh, I say, or do something else.

I also work from a premise that you have to hurt somebody when you perform. Really give them a good whacking. You need to, figuratively speaking, punch it up and engage the audience so that they want to respond in a physical way. Or they need to. I was taking pictures of a performance by the Fall a few years ago and knew singer Mark E. Smith had a disdain for photographers or fans that got in his way while he was on stage. I thought he might hit me if I got too close, but I thought that was great. I was ready to hit him back. That’s the kind of tension you need.

What is your favorite Warhol work or genre?
Love it all, but I think his paintings from photographs of cultural icons like Marilyn, Che, Mao, Elvis and others are timeless …

What other artists do you like?
Visual art? I have a soft spot for some real bad boys, Francis Bacon, Caravagio, Max Ernst, Duchamp …In film, I really like the French New Wave and people that inspired those guys, like Jean-Pierre Melville, Hitchcock. I love Bunuel and 21st century surrealists like David Lynch and Guillermo del Toro. And David Cronenberg, ahhh …

In music, I was schooled by the Rolling Stones when I first heard ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ and the Velvet Underground’s ‘Waiting for the Man’, that kind of dark, literate rock poetry you can dance to … I loved the glam era (T-Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music), the first rush of disco, the way punk attitude turned music on its head in the late ’70s, then bands like the Birthday Party, Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, the Fall, Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine. All great. Then came electronic dance music from Detroit and Berlin’s Basic Channel and Chain Reaction in the late ’90s that put me straight on (or is it off?) course. But everyone probably says that. It’s still the best techno ever made …

Local favs?
Rod Modell and all his projects, deepchord, Echospace, are wonderful. Mike Huckaby is doing some exciting work, the best I’ve heard from him ever. Aaron Carl is still crucifying himself for his art and bringing it strong, Carl Craig’s newest stuff is as good as he’s ever done … Colin Zyskowski and Alvin Hill are taking music and video work to another level. I think we’ll hear more about their projects in 2009. There’s also some great noise and experimental music in this town that people take for granted. Still lots of good stuff to get excited about locally, just got to get the next generation kids to produce and promote something that stands apart from what’s been done in this city’s past. I like what the Proper | Modulation gang is doing, bringing in some sweet stuff from Europe and building their own scene with local DJ and other artists. It’s not easy. It has to have that Detroit vibe, something elusive and mysterious, filled with confidence and power. Maybe you can’t find it, it has to find you….

Wholly Love

2008-11-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

On Friday, November 28 at 8pm, Cranbrook Art Museum will welcome nospectacle for a program loosely based on "Exploding Plastic Inevitable," the multimedia happening organized by Andy Warhol in the mid-1960s and first performed at a dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. The show will include reinterpretations of music by The Velvet Underground, visual elements that recall the milieu of Warhol's Factory and original sound and video material by Chris McNamara.

Formed earlier this year by Walter Wasacz, Jennifer Paull and McNamara, nospectacle performed at the Movement Festival, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's 8 days in June Festival and with dubstep innovator Kode9 at Pontiac's Crofoot Ballroom, as well as at Cranbrook Art Museum during the exhibition "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future." Walter Wasacz is writer/editor/photographer and co-founder of the sonic collective art Paris '68; Jennifer Paull is a sound/visual artist; and Chris McNamara is a sound/visual artist, founder of the electronic music group Thinkbox and professor at the Screen Arts and Cultures Department at the University of Michigan.

The event is free for members and included with admission for non-members. A cash bar will be available.

Dandy Andy in FilterD
Event Info on Detroit News calendar

Upcoming Fall Events

2008-10-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

Something wicked this way comes...

2008-06-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

Based in London, where he works as an artist, DJ, and owner of the influential Hyperdub record label, Kode9 makes his first Detroit-area appearance with support by nospectacle.

Dub specialist Kode9 (his friends back home in Glasgow call him Steve Goodman) studied rave culture, cybernetics, postmodernism and afrofuturism at the University of Warwick in England, where he got his Ph.D in philosophy. In 2004, he founded Hyperdub records. The first release was a dance 12 by Burial, who went on to release two stunning full-lengths in 2006 and 2007.

nospectacle is a Detroit laptop/turntables/video trio featuring Chris McNamara, Walter Wasacz and Jennifer A. Paull. The group recently performed at the 8 Days in June Festival at Detroit's Max Fisher Center, on the Main Stage at Movement '08 and during the Eero Saarinen Shaping the Future exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum.

The show is July 3. Doors are at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10. For more info and tickets go here.

Live at Max M. Fisher Music Center - 8 Days in June

2008-06-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Paull and Chris McNamara, The Prisoner

nospectacle at DEMF 2008

2008-05-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

nospectacle, an electronic music/video group made up of sound/film producer Chris McNamara (Thinkbox), and Jennifer A. Paull and Walter Wasacz of Paris '68 DJs, will open the VitaminWater Main Stage Saturday, May 24 at 2008's Movement: Detroit's Electronic Music Festival. The live audio/visual-DJ hybridized performance is 2-4 p.m. and is directly followed by the highly anticipated Detroit debut of Deepchord presents Echospace. nospectacle was founded in Detroit in 2008 and debuted in March at the Cranbrook Art Museum during the exhibition, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future. Drones, dubs, subsonic bass immersion and video projections all come alive in nospectacle's dream machine discotheque.

Photos from DEMF by Marvin Shaouni

Say hey to the 'Ambient Pimp'

2008-04-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

Klimek interview by Walter Wasacz

Sebastian Meissner has been making strange, beautiful music since the early- to mid-1990s, when he began collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers on their Autopoieses project for the Frankfurt-based Mille Plateaux family of labels. He also worked on solo projects under the intriguingly mysterious names aUTOkoNTRasT, Bizz Circuits, Random Inc and Random Industries before scoring worldwide attention for his lush dreamscapes produced as Klimek. In 2002, Kompakt released his "Milk & Honey" 12-inch, which was expanded two years later into a full-length Klimek CD containing 10 tracks. More of his dense, melodic instrumentals have been featured on Kompakt's Pop Ambient comps, beginning in 2003 with "Milk & Honey" and "Sun(Rise)." The next year, "Standing on the Beach (Gun in My Hand mix)" was the lead track on Pop Ambient 2004; and for Pop Ambient 2005, Meissner contributed "Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death." Both wonderfully rich tracks with some of the most cheeky titles ever. The following year, his remix of "Milk" was selected for the series, then it was "Ruined in a Day (Buenos Aires)" on Pop Ambient 2007 and "The Ice Storm" for the most recent comp, released in November. For Kompakt, Meissner has also produced a 12-inch, "Listen, the Snow is Falling," in 2005 and the full-length CD, Music to Fall Asleep, in 2006.

Late in 2007, New York-based Anticipate Recordings released Klimek's newest full-length effort, Dedications, which continues Meissner's sonic dissection of those tiny spaces that exist between light and dark, somewhere and nowhere. Made up of tracks he produced over a three-and-a-half year period, Dedications possesses a grayer, more industrial tone without sacrificing any of the slow-motion beauty of his earlier recordings. Resident Advisor critic Carl Ritger calls it "a collection of perfectly realized drifting tones, humming drones and rustling static ... arranged with a painter's touch and awash in milky reverb." That sums it up perfectly.

I met Sebastian when he performed at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (or Movement, if you will) in 2006. He was part of a Kompakt showcase that included Markus Guentner and Mikkel Metal. All three live performances remain among my favorite memories of that festival. A week later, Klimek was my guest at a weekly residency that my DJ collective, Paris '68, held at a Detroit cafe. What did Klimek play that night? Bottoms-up dubstep, classic dirty funk and soul, hip hop and jazz classics: an amazingly diverse selection of tunes that he rolled out as his Ambient Pimp alter ego. People who were there watched and listened with eyes and ears (and minds, I trust) wide open.

We've kept in touch since then. This interview was done on email over the last month, with edits and re-edits sent back and forth and back again across the Atlantic.

Hello, Sebastian. We met in Detroit in 2006 when you performed at the Movement Festival. Do you have some memories of that event or any lasting impressions of Detroit?

Oh, definitely! I have lot of formative memories of Detroit. I visited the city for the first time in 1995. It was just one year after Robert Hood’s “Minimal Nation,” which was for me one of the deepest music experiences to date. The Motown/soul heritage was in the background of my perception, but still it was and is the Motor City. During that trip, a friend and me landed in Detroit’s suburbs, while missing an exit to downtown. Well, OK, I had already experienced the streets of poor and devastated U.S. suburbia in New York and Washington D.C. before.

But being confronted with the only American city to my knowledge where downtown was as much devastated as suburbia in other cities, a city where downtown was the “ghetto” was a highly influential experience for me. After some time of cruising we found our way downtown and there it was: this big Caribbean music festival (don’t remember the name), where people were gently grooving and having a late afternoon barbecue (that was the same area where DEMF is happening now). I don’t think that I expected anything that the city would look or be like, but this trip to Detroit definitely encouraged me later on to focus on U.S. urban/culture studies.

My last visit to Detroit was a big pleasure. My friend Amir Husak was living at that time in the city and I stayed more then one week at his place having lot of fun together, having him showing me all the cool and secret places of the city – like sneaking into the old train station. Going to a Perlon party at the Masonic Temple and other abandoned building and warehouse parties, sightseeing the residences of former soul legends, eating shawarma and chlorinated Diet Coke on ice in Little Lebanon (in the suburb of Dearborn), having bad Polish food in a 3rd generation after immigration restaurant, a trip across the river to Windsor, Canada. … You are very welcome to check out my pictures from my Pixel Travel series on www.autokontrast.de, which I took during that visit. Definitely it was one of my coolest trips to the U.S.

I remember you identifying yourself to me as the Ambient Pimp! Where did that name come from and are you still doing Ghetto Ambient tracks?

Well, actually the Ambient Pimp thing started during that trip to Detroit. It was kind of a joke. Cruising with Amir through the city, listening to rock and hip-hop and performing later that day a Klimek set at DEMF. I mean: I never took that “ambient” thing for real myself. Ambient Pimp is maybe the Marilyn Manson or Jello Biafra of the down (or no)tempo electronica! A character big enough to leave space for letting two different worlds clash into each other.

Once I was invited to a festival called “Ambient Picnic,” on a Sunday afternoon, in a park – I wanted to record the sound of barking dogs for this event – but had to cancel the gig because of schedule conflicts. Having such dilemmas some people maybe would advise to start doing noise (music) straight away (and I am still waiting for the right moment when I will be ready to record a noise album), but I find it more communicative to reflect on music genres from the inside and not from the outside. Like all those artists who have developed and devoted their life’s work to one specific aesthetic. Today I am using the Ambient Pimp alias when I am DJing deep house and techno.

The name “Ghetto Ambient” has a similar background. I never really knew what this thing “Pop Ambient” means. For me it was little bit like this “grunge” term, symbolizing so many different things to so many different people, but in fact being just a fashion word, which was easy to sell to a growing target audience.

What is “ambient” anyway? It's a terminology same as "rock," describing a huge genre that means so much and yet blurs everything at the same time. Of course, I still love “Chill Out” by KLF. Ambient seems to symbolize dreamy worlds between relaxation and science fiction. Myself, I am interested in art, by that I mean discussing the world around me. “Ghetto Ambient” is about places at the edge of our “globalized world.”

These are non-places - but not like the French anthropologist Marc Augé used it: places such as airports and malls. But instead forgotten or ignored places in our fat society like Gaza, East Jerusalem, Algeria, or simply like the part of the neighborhood just around the corner where you live. I have composed a lot of Ghetto Ambient tracks, which shift between post-dubstep and darkly-drone atmospheres, but wasn’t able to find an appropriate label to release those tracks.

Give us a brief background of your life and travels. You were born in Czestochowa, Poland, right? I know you've lived in Vienna and now live in Berlin. Where else have you lived?

Are you joking? I am supposed to give you a background of my life? I am 38. This is too much for this format. I am born to a half Polish and half Polish-German (Upper Silesian) family. I spent the first 12 years of my life in socialistic Poland. In 1981, my parents took the train to West Germany. So I left my childhood, quite abruptly, behind me and landed in the middle of my adolescence in the (still) happy capitalism of 1980s Germany. Szombierki - a former working-class neighbourhood of the Upper Silesian town of Bytom - is the place where I spent my whole childhood.

From the end of the 19th century it was one of Europe’s most busy industrial areas - coalmines and huge steel works. Decay of industrial buildings was a natural part of the landscape; those buildings that couldn’t be maintained anymore were abandoned, leaving behind exciting playgrounds for kids like me. There were so many things to explore, digging holes and finding those unidentified objects.

In my early 20s, when I started to get busy with photography, one of my favourite places turned out to be the port in the east end of Frankfurt (my former hometown). Friends were asking me why am I taking pictures of all those ugly places. This was maybe the first time that I realized that other people might find those places ugly. It is how I started explaining to myself my fascination for cities like Detroit. Especially the old central train station, where I could luckily and illegally climb inside during my last trip to the city. Beside that – and especially after many other travels to North and South America - I lost a personal bound for places, lost the idea of home defined by geography. I also lived in Vienna for 2 years and in New York (or better say New Jersey) for one year.

Tell us a little bit about your work as Random Inc. and Autopoiesies for Mille Plateaux in the late 1990s. What was it like working with Ekkehard Ehlers?

First of all there are not that many connections between my work as Random Inc and Autopoieses. I started to fool around with my first PC in 1994: recording distortions, clicks, the hiss of records and other regular/abnormal sound events. But the biggest fun of all was sampling my records and cutting them to pieces. Ekkehard Ehlers started to call me at that time the "DJ Premier" of the microsound, a distinction, which (immodestly speaking) I have kept somehow until now.

Autopoieses started for the two of us by sitting on leather couches late at night listening to John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, Iannis Xenakis and chain gang blues records and drinking bottles of whiskey and beer. We were friends at this time, and without this friendship, I guess I wouldn’t make my little hard-drive world public so soon. So working between the two of us depended on close and positive human relation.

So what happened?

At that time two coincidences occurred, which changed the paths of our music careers: one was when he was drunk, Ekki smashed the bathroom door at a party at (founder of Mille Plateaux/Force Inc.) Achim Szepanski’s apartment; the other was that our first record La Vie A Noir was discovered by William Forsythe dancer Stephen Galloway (who at that time shared the same apartment as Markus Weissbeck, who had designed the artwork of our albums).

He introduced our rework of Roberta Flack’s “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” to Mr. Forsythe, which made him use it for his ballet peace “Endless House” (actually a one minute track, which was looped – to what I have heard - to more then half an hour). I didn’t even get a ticket for any of those “Endless House” shows (and of course didn’t even see a penny, although this specific composition used there was indisputably done just by myself – as sampled from Ekkehard Ehler's Roberta Flack record) because EE was too busy manoeuvring himself toward spotlights.

On “Music For William Forsythe” Ekkehard has attempted to rework my version and I am using sometimes my own extended version as the opening track for my concerts. I have put my alias Random Inc on hold. It symbolized for me too much what is past for me: my time at Mille Plateaux, and my so-called “Jerusalem project," which then transformed into Intifada Offspring and the release Bizz Circuits play Intifada Offspring.

You began recording Klimek tracks for Kompakt in 2002. When did you meet Wolfgang Voigt? Were you a fan of his Profan/Studio 1 tracks?

Of course! Besides Detroit there was Wolfgang! Studio 1, Profan, Love Inc and all that great shit. I knew Wolfgang’s work from the Force Inc/Mille Plateaux days very well, and his Mike Ink alias was one of my favourite techno acts at the beginning of the 1990s. The Klimek - Kompakt connection started with a simple and anonymous demo, which made Wolfgang call me some days after its arrival and offering to me to release those two tracks as the “Milk & Honey” 12-inch. Those were the two first tracks, which were marking a new production level for me.

And Voigt's denser, more atmospheric work in the later 1990s ...

Wolfgang’s Gas project was surely very influential for what some years later turned out as a new wave of bedroom produced ambient music. The Gas project is rooted in a time when this so-called “ambient music” was very close to techno, it was an integral part of this culture, and it wasn’t just a pure functional music genre, allowing ravers to come down after exhausting dance escapades. Out of Gas came a lot of producers who developed very distinguished styles of slowed down/beatless music.

You have a new Klimek track, 'The Ice Storm,' on Pop Ambient 2008 and a critically-acclaimed new full-length, Dedications, on NYC-based Anticipate Recordings. How did Klimek find his way unto a U.S. label?

Don’t you think “critically-acclaimed” is a very funny and dubious word? Depending so much who those critics are… he he. I really haven’t expected that feedback to the Dedications album, since it started for me as a clean-up process of my hard-drive. Most of the tracks are very old (for me). In some cases 4 years old. Well, again it started in Detroit during DEMF 2006, where I met (Anticipate label founder) Ezekiel Honig. From this moment on we stayed in touch, and after some time he asked me for a remix of one of his tracks, which then again was the starting track for the Dedications album. This Klimek remix, which initially was entitled “For Ezekiel Honig” was supposed to be included on a 12-inch for (Honig's) Microcosm label. At the same time I wanted to get rid of my old Klimek tracks, re-gaining virtual space and also room in my head for new productions.

So, one by one I started sending tracks to Ezekiel, leaving us with 12 compositions or solid drafts. Somehow I always thought they were too deep and departed too much from the “Pop Ambient” territory, so I never bothered offering them to Kompakt (some of them were also part of my “Ghetto Ambient” sessions). Listening to them all together we realized that they had a good substance for an album. Unfortunately by accident the Klimek track entitled “The Ice Storm” didn’t end up on the Pop Ambient 2008 compilation but instead as “For Steven Spielberg and Azza El-Hassan” from the Dedications album on Anticipate. That’s all right for me, so now I can save the original track entitled “The Ice Storm” for the next Klimek album, Movies Is Magic, on which I will focus on the relationship between music in and for movies.

The titles are intriguing: You make references to Marvin Gaye, Michael Gira, Eugene Chadbourne, Mark Hollis, Ezekiel Honig and others. Can you explain how you decided on these dedications?

Dedications turned out not only as a perfect album title for this selection of tracks, but is also to some extent very programmatic to the whole Klimek project. Based on samples I am using to compose the tracks, where the initial sound/music sources haven’t a pure functional meaning. In a recent interview in the German magazine Spex, Einstürzende Neubauten were comparing the Dada movement to sampling culture, way before sampling existed. Slice it up to pieces and compose something with a new meaning out of it.

Within my own method I dissect those sound fragments from other works I love, respect or which simply fascinate me. In my sample libraries they “grow” sometimes over very long periods of time. Those are the precious things I want to gather around me to become part of my world. In the same interview Blixa Bargeld said that for him Dada needs to be an elemental part of the understanding and creative practice of every artist he wants to take seriously - an attitude I highly sympathize with.

How did you apply this to your most recent productions?

On the last Klimek album Music To Fall Asleep there are two other tracks that have a similar background as "For Ezekiel Honig and Young (pan) Americans" – the track that initiated the Dedications release. As with "Yuppies with Jeeps/Working Towards Independence" and "Accompanying Guilty Thought of Unauthorized Candy (a reference to Chris Ware's comic book character Jimmy Corrigan) /Homeless," it started with remix requests by fellow bands: Yuppies With Jeeps and The Notwist. All my attempts at remixing their songs ended up in creating something, which was a bit far away from a classic remix. And it was The Notwist who pointed this out for the first time by offering me the writing credits for my treatment (remix) of their "Solo Swim" song. So when I am using all those transformed samples from my libraries and creating my own compositions out of them, I am somehow dedicating myself to the work of those composers, musicians and sound designers – spending lot of time studying by slicing their tracks to fragments. The namedropping on the Dedications album is of course not that obvious, where every title bears sound samples from the repertoire of that particular composer (and actually seven of those people are not involved in music production).

As on Music To Fall Asleep – I was trying to pay attention to the difficulty of giving a composition a single title, as I felt that compositions (in general) consist of so many different contexts/fragments/influences and are perceived by its listeners in so many different ways – I am dedicating my tracks to two different individuals and I am trying to put people from two different worlds in a mutual context and discuss their (symbiotic) relationship. Maybe my favorite pairing of dedications is Steven Spielberg and Azza El-Hassan and goes back to my work “Presence/Absence ::: Into The Void” (coming out of an installation, my collaboration with the Israeli artists Ran Slavin and Eran Sachs, two concerts and a music composition which was released on Sub Rosa in 2006), which I have created for the XIIIth edition of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Poland, where I have used parts of the Schindler's List soundtrack to point out a specific aspect of virtual Jewish places and virtual Jewishness. Klezmer nostalgia meets concentration camp tourism meets visiting the spots of film-shots, while dressed-up Poles in traditional robes of orthodox Jews are serving semi-kosher food to the sound of second-hand klezmer. The Palestinian-Jordanian filmmaker Azza El-Hassan is urging Spielberg in one of her films to finally start working on his movie about the holy land which his production company announced some years ago and which supposedly will address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So those “Dedications” on Dedications shouldn’t be understood as simple obeisance to those people’s bodies of work, whose names are cited on the album, but as an attempt to take a look at when two worlds collide. Sometimes it can mean pointing out similarities in biographies of people who lived in different time periods. Like for example the track entitled “For Marvin Gaye and Russel Jones” – even though I am a big admirer of Gaye’s and Ol’ Dirty Bastard's works – the focus of this specific selection lies in their very tragic characters. Both of them reached a level of media popularity, which couldn’t be topped anymore, making them so-called living legends, but they struggled with heavy cocaine addiction the last years of their lives.

Further pairs of names deal with relationships between artists surrounded by love, hate and creativity (like Grant Hart and Bob Mould, the Lennon-MacCarney of the post-punk scene), also about working and making art about work (Michael Gira versus a Russian seaman Vadimir Ivanovich, whom I met during my trip to Kirkeness, Norway while preparing my work "Business Never Personal") and about real and staged loneliness, hopelessness and despair (my grandmother Zofia Klimek versus Gregory Crewdson).

What kind of equipment are you using? Do you have a studio at home? You play several instruments as well, yes?

At the present time I am producing mostly on a purely virtual level. Besides my mixer, a midi-controller and my microphones, which I am using for outdoor recordings I have three computers I am working with. I don’t play an instrument. I mean, of course I have used and recorded instruments abused by myself to create sounds and tones, but it would be highly pretentious to call myself a player of a classic instrument. This is a point at which I sometimes feel very seesaw-like, sometimes wishing so much that I would have started to learn classical music composition and also mastered a classical instrument back when I was younger, something which right now would demand too much time and concentration from me.

But then again I realize that avoiding this time consuming exercise, which demands an unconditional focus and plenty of discipline, has allowed me to do those things a classical musician couldn’t do and see during his career. High level of virtuosity is rarely reached, has a high price and can become a curse - making you a prisoner of yourself and slave to your once developed/established/marketed/style/aesthetics. It’s very intriguing for me to see the shift, changes and development in the performance of electronic music and the recent mixing of classical instruments with computers and computer music.

On the one hand, I see the role of computer software being reduced in live settings to an effect device (for example recording and looping the played sound) and on the other hand, I am observing a high output of new hardware and software opening doors to a new dimension of virtuosity for computer music performers, but who mostly are missing the opportunity to practice and master a device properly. I still can’t help listening to Terre Thaemlitz’s “Super Bonus,” for me one of the biggest pieces of computer-produced music to date.

Can you tell us about some of your future projects?

I am trying to shift with my work to forms less focused on music and sound. I feel that those issues I have tried to address in my releases so far are rarely of interest in the music world I have travelled through. I have prepared three works about the Upper Silesian region in Poland, which will be a mixture of participatory art projects, installations, music events, historical excavations, documentations of oral history and social work. The next Klimek album will be ready soon, and as mentioned above it will deal with soundtracks, pathos and the relationship between storytelling and “real life” (an alternate title for this album is True Lies).

I am in the middle of working with a vocalist/chanteuse, which is very exciting to me. She has a beautiful voice and I hope we can find a productive way of working together. The “Ghetto Ambient” project is still open for me and I will have to think more about a comfortable home for tracks from those recording sessions (and start to record even more tracks) – preferably in combination with my own photo-based visuals.

Klimek will be performing with Murcof at the Club Transmediale Festival on 30 January. The event will be at the Carl Zeiss Planetarium, Prenzlauer Allee 80, Berlin.

Sine of the Times

2008-03-08T07:30:00.000-08:00