This will be your first chance to hear the Bristol MC’s latest record in full—its official release date isn’t until May 28th. Like all Tricky releases, there’s a heady air of anticipation surrounding this work and its creator has even claimed that False Idols doesn’t just meet the standard of his masterpiece Maxinquaye, but betters it. What do we think? We say it’s almost as good as Angels With Dirty Faces—but that’s our favorite Tricky record. Of course you’ll be able to make your own mind up tomorrow at 2 pm. However, we have to emphasise that this stream is only for residents of Germany, Austria and Switzerland—we’re sorry about that.

Don’t forget, Tricky is also playing Berlin’s Berghain tomorrow, where EB Editor-in-Chief Max Dax will also be DJing along with hosts Martin Hossbach and Jens Balzer. We’ll see you there.

“I am pushing the envelope myself. I can’t create anything new based on anything old”

Watch our video feature on Juan Atkins, taken from Slices DVD 1-13. Subscribe and watch more Slices features and live videos on our YouTube Channel, or order the DVD online.

Los Angeles-based beatmaker and multi-instrumentalist Madlib is widely regarded as one of the most original producers in hip-hop. Born Otis Jackson Jr., the Stones Throw label vet and former Lootpack member has honed a jazz-tinged, sample-heavy sensibility that defined the genre’s underground offshoots in the late ’90s and early ’00s. An avid crate digger and a vocal proponent of sample source eclecticism, Madlib’s path has rarely strayed from the groove-related, and his most recent work with veteran krautrockers Embryo is no exception. In a rare conversation, the notoriously reticent musician opened up to Thomas Fehlmann of The Orb and Palais Schaumburg about collaborating with the late, great J Dilla and the joys of discovering German music. Main portrait of Madlib photographed in San Francisco by Mathew Scott, Thomas Fehlmann photographed in Berlin by Luci Lux.

Madlib: Thomas, just so you know: I’m a man of few words.

Thomas Fehlmann: The last big interview I read with you was in The Wire a few years back. My good friend and former fellow band member Moritz von Oswald was on the cover just a few months before that. Back in the day we played together in Palais Schaumburg. Have you heard the new album Fetch he did with his trio? It’s really impressive, very jazzy, electronic, and very eclectic.

M: No, I haven’t. I actually don’t know much about new music, really.

TF: Well, Palais Schaumburg is old school. And pretty experimental. Early ’80s. We started playing live again last year for our 30th anniversary. I played—and still play—live synth and trumpet through an echoplex. The lyrics are all in German and very Dada.

M: Oh, I’d love to hear it. Trumpet through an echoplex, huh?

TF: Yes, it’s pretty free, apart from an occasional riff, although our music is mostly structured around a danceable beat. It seems to me that generally speaking, European music is obsessed with rhythms in 4/4, particularly today’s dance music. Do you think this is a continental phenomena or what’s your take on straight rhythms?

M: Well, funk is 4/4. It’s so you can dance to it. Although, shit, I could dance to 5/8. It’s all music.

TF: I hear you. What have you been up to since coming to Berlin?

M: Just drinking wine, chilling with Embryo and relaxing. I’m sure you know that Embryo is a musical collective from Munich that started out in the ’7os. They make pretty eclectic krautrock, working a lot with jazz musicians and world music and whatnot.

TF: Have you guys been rehearsing?

M: No, just listening to some of the stuff we recorded last time, around five hours of tape.

TF: But you’ll also be playing a show in Berlin later this year. I actually penned that into my calendar before I knew that I would be meeting you for this conversation.

M: Hey man, bring your trumpet to the show.

TF: How did you know about Embryo? Crate digging?

M: Actually from touring. I’d been coming out to Berlin since 2001, and I’ve been learning about different types of music. Krautrock is certainly one of my favorites.

TF: Have you checked out Can’s Lost Tapes?

M: Yup, I picked it up almost immediately when it came out. There are some absolutely brilliant tracks on there. Honestly, Can are one of my all-time favorites. I actually played with Jaki [Liebezeit] with the Brasilintime cats.

TF: He also has this brilliant project with Bernd Friedmann. It’s so cool that Jaki’s so persistent about working with all types of artists.

M: Yeah, he’s very open-minded.

TF: Have you gone record shopping in Berlin yet?

M: Actually, no. Nobody’s told me where the stores are at.

TF: Well, you should start with Hard Wax. It’s not your average shop. The people who work there and run it have very strong opinions about what they carry. There’s also a legendary cutting room there where they master the records for lots of international producers. Unfortunately, they don’t carry that much hip-hop anymore. . .

M: I never buy hip-hop records.

TF: They also have quite a selection of African music, which recently started to blow up a bit. This grew out of the whole reggae and dub wave, and it sits quite well with the broader stream of contemporary releases. I find some of it is very psychedelic.

M: I love psychedelic stuff. That’s my era.

TF: Is that what you grew up listening to with your parents?

M: My parents were incredibly open-minded. They had everything from James Brown to Kraftwerk, and I had a record player in my room, so I would always steal their stuff and listen to it on my own.

TF: You’re lucky. I had to fight with my parents to play what I liked and to get my turn at the record player. Eventually when they got a stereo, I was allowed to set up the old mono system in the basement for my use.

M: That’s how I first learned about music. Back then music was a different feeling. These days everybody follows trends. I honestly think things were far more open-minded back then. People tried harder, and there was more of a spiritual aspect involved . . .

TF: It’s maybe surprising, but I think music with a spiritual angle is the music that really endures.

M: I also like my music loose. Quantized is cool, but I also like that human feel.

TF: I think the humanness is what separates your productions from things done within the grid . . .

M: Well, I like that stuff too.

TF: I remember when I picked up the first Yesterdays New Quintet record—one of your many aliases—I was so impressed. I mean, a lot of people say they like jazz, but actually doing it is another thing. Of course, I’d been listening to you since back in the day with Lootpack.

M: It’s an honor for me to hear that. Actually, Yesterdays New Quintet was my first shot at jazz. Sometimes, I kind of feel like a musical schizophrenic, to be honest. But I think that’s probably not a bad thing.

TF: I know what you mean; trying to absorb all the magic stuff one is passionate for. The new Orb album we did with Lee Perry, The Observer In The Star House, was also a first for us in many ways. He actually spent a week with us in the countryside near Berlin. We had to be ready when he was ready to flow and that was basically always. He had a tremendous hunger for new beats. We needed to be fast, have all the machines and beats ready at any time. Lee also had a buddy with him, and he told us that usually after around two days, Lee gets bored with whatever he’s doing… but he stayed for the full week. This is the album [shows cover].

M: [turning it over] Ah, Steve Reich samples.

TF: Had to get permission for those.

M: Of course!

TF: As I mentioned before, I’ve been following you for quite some time. I decided to take a picture of all your records that I own. [showing collection pic] I’m not as prolific as you are but there are similarities, I also make lots of my music from my record collection, mostly older stuff.

M: Got to come back to stuff that people missed.

TF: I tend to treat my samples quite a bit, but it’s a similar flow in that existing music is the foundation and main source for the artistic result. That’s not to say that some of it can’t get pretty radical…

M: Even if it doesn’t sell, right? That’s some of the best stuff!

TF: When I see your work, I can look at it as if the idea of using your record collection to make music is a kind of conceptual art: the cultural output of society as the source material, put through the filter of your mind and your sampler. What about the other cultures that you explore in your music—non-Western conceptions of pop?

M: It’s all music that was done through records I bought—not visits to India or the Middle East or whatever. But I did manage to pick up the records from all over the world. The internet for me has been a help in finding material, but it’s actually something I just started using. I’m not constantly listening to streams or anything like that. We used to have tons of record stores where I live, but they’re disappearing one by one.

TF: Tell me about it! How important is the artwork for your records?

M: Well, it has to fit. A lot of the artwork just comes from pictures in my room or whatever. Like the Quasimoto album with the Frank Zappa bubble… This is stuff I look at all the time and surrounds me. I was living with Jeff Jank who does all the artwork, and we just listened to tons of Zappa.

TF: When I was a teenager I used to go to Zappa concerts when he was playing with Ruth Underwood and George Duke.

M: You got to love Zappa and Beefheart, The GTOs, Wild Man Fischer and George Duke… Zappa made me study all that stuff even more.

TF: Don’t forget Varèse! That’s the direction Zappa pointed me in.

M: You got to pay your dues.

TF: I think in Europe, there’s been resurgence in vinyl, amongst DJs, of course, but also people who love the object and its special sound quality. I see the whole numbering and signing thing as a part of that, which I know you’ve done. Is there a vinyl resurgence in the US?

M: Not that I know of. I mean, it’s still around and some people buy it, but not enough.

TF: You did it with the Medicine Show, too. Labels are becoming more like art galleries, encouraging their artists to put out stuff that’s really personal and unique, visually and sonically.

M: I think the art is as important as the music, to be honest. I don’t just download things. I want to know who played on a record, who produced it, where it was made… This stuff is important to me and always has been.

TF: So you don’t listen to contemporary music at all?

M: I do, but I don’t buy it. I’ll hear it when I’m in a club or whatever, but I don’t search it out.

TF: But there are musicians these days doing great things you just can’t hear in a club. It’s stuff that’s spiritual too but too experimental for the dancefloor, like Jan Jelinek or Daedelus, for example.

M: I like Daedelus, that’s my boy. But I have so much old stuff to discover I don’t know when I’ll have time to get to the new stuff.

TF: I remember reading in your interview in The Wire that you have all sorts of “future music” that’s unreleased. When are we going to hear that?

M: I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m ready to hear it. There’s a lot of music I’ve done that’s gone unreleased: dubstep, synthesizer records, all types of different things, Cluster-like and beyond. I would say I’ve released around thirty percent of the music I’ve created.

TF: One thing I’m really curious about from a musician’s point of view is how you find the time to be in the studio and make so much music and still take care of, like, domestic stuff?

M: It’s not balanced. I’m mostly working in the studio. I mean, I have one at my house, but I’m usually in my bigger studio. I do what I need to do to feed my family, so they understand. It’s not really a balance yet, but I don’t see it as work. It’s music. Doing construction is work. What about you?

TF: I have to be able to let go to make good work. Forget about what’s going on in music, forget about my to-do lists. My mind and my environment have to be relatively in shape before I go into the studio.

M: Yeah, it’s easy to ignore everything, when your head is in the music. Even your health. It was the same thing with Dilla.

TF: Tell me about that. He’s regarded as one of the most important producers . . .

M: When he was alive, so many people seemed inspired by what he was doing. I heard Dilla everywhere, in so many different kinds of music. His influence was immense. He could do any type of music. I heard all sorts of stuff he didn’t release—electronic, Kraftwerk stuff… He was deep. I was lucky enough to kick it with him here in L.A. I guess he had to die for everybody to, you know, find their own way. It’s a weird way to put it, but that’s how it is. The music is so warm, precise and soulful. That’s how he lived. He’s like Bird and Coltrane, like Doom and… Doom.

TF: You’re one of the few people who’ve gotten access to the Blue Note archives, which you waded through to make Shades of Blue back in 2003. I always wanted to know what that was like.

M: It was fun. They have way too much stuff they should have released. The best records are still in the vaults.

TF: There are so many new things coming out of Los Angeles. I really like your brother’s work too, Oh No.

M: We actually just finished an album together.

TF: Really? That’s great news. I can’t wait to hear it. I’ve seen Oh No live a bunch of times. I actually just picked up his new record, Dr. No’s Kali Tornado Funk.

M: He’s a little beast. Both of us like looking all over the place for sounds. Really, you can find good things in every kind of music. I mean every kind, you know? You just have to look hard enough and have an open mind.

TF: In Germany we have a very broken relationship towards our cultural identity. Classical stuff here is more bourgeois. Then there’s the real folk music with accordions and all that. Some of it is impressive.

M: Everybody is one, we just live in different places. I’m ready to sample some Martian music, aliens and what not. I’ll perform for all Martians, you know what I mean? ~

See this article as it appears in our print magazine via Issuu.com below: 

David Mayer‘s trip from south Germany, where he was born, to Berlin took something of a detour over the years. After spending his youth in Norway he headed to Lanzarote’s warmer climes before finally settling in the German capital. Likewise, his music doesn’t exactly take the straightforward route, released via Keinemusik his take on house and techno is boisterous and funked out; always weird but without sacrificing any of its rollicking dancefloor charge. “As I often like to do in my mixes, this one hour show includes some new favorites and some of my personal evergreens from the past as well as a few yet unreleased tunes from around my crew, many of them taken directly from the context of our “The Party Is Over” tour 2013 we were on this spring,” explains Mayer, of this exclusive EB mix. “And, of course, I’m especially happy to feature two of the great tracks from the newest release on Keinemusik “Our Fate” by Adam Port (release May 17th)… Enjoy listening!”

Tracklist:
01. Michael Mayer – “Baumhaus” (Robags Paavo And Veita Rehand) [Kompakt]
02. Cassy – “Night To Remember” [Perlon]
03. Wigbert – “Incredible Dream” [Roots And Wings Music]
04. Jai Paul – “Crush” (AP Edit)
05. The Draughtsman – “Codicil” (Remix) [Marketing Music]
06. Marc Antona – “Trio Tree” (Original Mix) [Dissonant]
07. Ralph Falcon – “Every Now Then” (Ralph Falcons Instrumental Dub) [NRK]
08. Jerome Sydenham, Sylvie Foret – “1000 Knives” [Ibadan Records]
09. Adam Port & Here Is Why – “Our Fate” (AP Club Version) [Keinemusik]
10. Terranova – “Endless Summer” [Kompakt]
11. Hot Chip – “One Life Stand” (Carl Craig Remix) [EMI UK]
12. Radio Slave – “N.I.N.A.” (Âme Remix) [Rekids]
13. Here Is Why – “Tonight” [Keinemusik]

Michael Aniser (Contributing Editor)

Mark Broom – “Acid Dik” (Preview)

The latest release on Power Vacuum comes from legendary British DJ and producer Mark Broom and is a hard-edged floor destroyer. Also check out the video on YouTube. The 12-inch will be out on June 6th.

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Louise Brailey (Deputy Online Editor)

Mount Kimbie (featuring King Krule) – “You Took Your Time”

I first saw King Krule supporting Young Montana in 2011 when he was known as Zoo Kid. Low level hype was perceptible even then (well, half the NME office was there), and it’s been thrilling watching Archie Marshall’s stock increase, particularly through the strategic alliance with Rinse (sorry NME, he’s one of ours). Here his resonant, beyond his years weltschmerz finds interesting contrast in Mount Kimbie’s brittle percussion and gently carbonated pads.

Planningtorock – “Misogyny Drop Dead” (Holly Herndon Remix)

The combination of Holly Herndon and Planningtorock is delightflly apt; both artists are masters of composition, both seek to question conventions of artistic practice. Herndon’s remix sheers out almost all traces of the vocal (bar accents of eerie gasps and breaths) and moulds the queazy, unstable angles of the original into cleaner lines. However, the track’s refigured spine still buckles and spasms, mapping the original’s confrontational evasiveness onto the forward thrust of broken, eerie techno. You can read an interview with Janine Rostron as part of our New Sounds Battling the Fear of Queer series.

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Michael Lutz (Magazine Duty Editor)

Peter Gordon & Factory Floor – “Beachcombing”

Peter Gordon is a former Arthur Russell collaborator and founding member of Love of Life Orchestra. Factory Floor do hypnotic post-industrial electronics and noise. This collaboration once again cements FF’s status as one of the rad-est contemporary acts in the wide field of electronic music to come out of the UK. Signed to DFA, we’re all waiting for the release of a proper album. Expected for this summer…

André De Ridder has done much to bridge the divide between classical and pop. His work with Damon Albarn on the operas Monkey: Journey to the West and Dr. Dee marked the beginning of his longstanding relationship with contemporary figures from pop’s outside edge (Owen Pallett, Mouse On Mars, Matthew Herbert). His most recent work is for These New Puritans—a band who aren’t shy when it comes to scoring music for orchestra—on their much anticipated third LP Field of Reeds. Through his stargaze collective, he is helping to nourish networks between perceived “high” and “popular” arts by providing a platform for these future focused projects. This Sunday, 19th May sees a show take place at Berlin’s Volksbühne in concert with the project, and features Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire) and Magnetic North, the new project from Simon Tong and folk guitarist Erland Cooper. Here André De Ridder speaks about his goal for the project and why he believes Berlin lags behind when it comes to fostering a dialogue between generations old and new.

Max Dax: I find it very interesting that curating a concert series is a format that’s becoming increasingly common. We recently reported about a concert series being curated by Schneider™ together with Jochen Arbeit at the Berghain Kantine. Do you have the feeling that a kind of evolution is going on in this regard?  

André: Absolutely. I think this actually stems from classical traditions, the idea of thematically linked series of concerts or evenings. It seems ironic that it’s been announced that one of the great artist-curated festivals, ATP is coming to an end. Their events were great and immersive experiences of certain scenes and sites of musical reference, exchange and cross-fertilisation. One of the last ones, in December, was curated by The National whose members collaborate with a vast number of artists. Not just from rock and electronica but classical ensembles and composers such as Kronos Quartet, Calder Quartet, So Percussion, Nico Muhly, Daniel Bjarnasson and Steve Reich, to name a few.The festival became a melting pot of all current music. I mean, you had those audiences listen in absolute silence to these chamber pieces by Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire, with strings and winds, wearing stethoscopes to listen to their heartbeats—using them as the beat. There’s incredible scenes in Brooklyn and Montreal or wherever, where all this is happening.

Of course, Berlin has this very much in the field of electronic music, but maybe we can widen the scope. I hope ATP is resurrected in some form. For now, we’ll just do our own version and expand into contemporary classical.

Tell us a bit about your collaborations in the field of contemporary classical music.

In 2007 I led the opera Monkey: Journey to the West with Damon Albarn and since then I’ve been increasingly active in this area, doing another one with Damon as well as working with These New Puritans, Owen Pallett, Mouse On Mars, musikFabrik, and Matthew Herbert. I wouldn’t call this “contemporary classical” but contemporary full stop. With stargaze, our newly founded collective, we’ve already recorded tracks on the forthcoming These New Puritans album Field of Reeds and I also hooked the Dutch classical composer Michel van der Aa up with the band to collaborate on one song, too. We have also performed a new version of Terry Riley’s seminal work “In C” and we’re premiering a work by Lee Ranaldo at the Holland Festival in June. We’ll be at Haldern Pop basically opening up a laboratory for instrumental collaborations.

At the same time I have a sense that this whole movement and its value has not reached the German and Berlin cultural institutions. Or that it’s developed without us really having grabbed it, without having real platforms to show these international projects. Again, you can read almost daily about projects that are going on in New York such as the Wordless Music series or the Ecstatic Music Festival, where I noticed that Julia Holter’s performing together with Laurel Halo, a musical ensemble and electronic composer Daniel Wohl. There’s a platform for such events in London, New York or even Amsterdam. Series such as these take place in major concert halls, and are even sometimes initiated by them. To me, that seems to be missing here in Berlin.

But there is a growing awareness here. I mean you can’t make a general accusation against all German institutions can you? 

There are certain festivals, such C3—“Club Contemporary Classical”—where they seek to bring classical music into the club, or to mix club culture with classical music. I find that to be, in a way, focusing on the “packaging”; how the music is presented, whereas for me it should really be focusing on the music and not the fact that the concert is taking place in an unusual location. Here the so-called institutions of high culture—the concert halls—that are so well-financed that they could afford to support these projects (and usually spend a lot of money bringing international orchestras here anyway) are content to play the same symphonies over and over. They haven’t reached the point where they see ambitious pop culture as being of equal worth. Whereas this shift has happened in major institutions such as the Barbican Centre or the South Bank Centre in London, the Cité de la Musique in Paris or the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.

What seems to be the problem? Is it a question of highbrow versus lowbrow?

Here in Germany “contemporary” music means academic music being made at the moment, however in the English language the label contemporary can be used for all sorts of music: pop, folk, electronica, jazz and classical. The head of contemporary music at the Barbican Centre doesn’t have a classical music background, but has worked in pop music (and happens to know his Stockhausen and classical contemporary repertoire as well).  It’s the same at the Southbank Centre too. There really has been a paradigm shift in these institutions over the last 20 years but in Berlin that simply isn’t the case. When I think about the two major institutions in Berlin, the Philharmonie and the Konzerthaus, there’s nothing like this going on. Maybe Sting or Elvis Costello have played there with their own symphony orchestra, but that’s not what we’re talking about and there hasn’t been collaboration between the orchestras that are based in those institutions. Look the London Symphony or the BBC Symphony, both of which are resident orchestras at the Barbican Centre or the London Sinfonietta at the Southbank (working with Aphex Twin and Micachu). They don’t take on these projects because they’re forced to, instead they value such them. In my opinion there needs to be a change in the way the funds are allocated within Berlin’s concert halls.

There are efforts underway. There are big discussions regarding the Volksbühne or HAU, both of them in Berlin, who receive extra funding to put on their own concert series and undertake demanding projects but who are criticised for essentially putting on normal band concerts. 

I have collaborated with both of these institutions, and thank God they and their openminded programmers exist. But when it comes to booking orchestras or instrumentalists the cost of realizing such a concert is prohibitive. Despite the extra funding they get it just isn’t affordable to do these sorts of projects especially if they’re more obscure. That means that we have to find other ways. This is part of the reason why we founded stargaze—not just to organize our own concerts but to build new networks, too. With our knowledge and our relationships with people who work in classical as well as in pop we can play the role of bringing them together and acting as translator. In England I have played this role, sometimes literally; there are cases where somebody from the pop world wants to speak with the director of an orchestra but there are actually language barriers. You first have to build up a mutual understanding before they can really work together. It’s funny, you can have these people who are big names in pop, who are incredibly in demand but the orchestra have never heard of them! There needs to be someone who can play the role of go-between. As a conductor I always have to play the of the intermediary between the composer, performers and the public and now I want to expand this to a wider group of people who have a similar outlook and musical inquisitiveness. It’s a kind of political work that must be done and it involves lobbying, building networks and convincing people, because you can’t just dream about amazing projects. When it comes down to actually making these projects happen, it can be quite difficult.

Like, how difficult?

I spoke about the Volksbühne and Christian Morin. They put on an interesting and ambitious music program anyway, and we cooperate now but we had one particular, critically acclaimed project fail because the orchestra was too expensive or didn’t want to offer their services in what was not their home venue. The new series that we’re curating and presenting with the Volksbühne and Christian is really the beginning. But this isn’t just about Berlin. I’d like to use this international platform to work in other cities in Germany that are doing more in this field. The Cologne Philharmonie cooperates closely with c/o pop Festival and now there are two evenings that take place there. And their contemporary music festival Acht Brücken does too. In fact it sort of goes on all year. The New Year’s concert was performed by Uri Caine and his jazz experimentalits from New York.

Does this stem from the tradition in Cologne with the Studio for Electronic Music, Karlheinz Stockhausen and this interest for new music?

I think that’s probably part of it. Looking at it in a purely geographical way I can see how close the Philharmonie there is to a vibrant art scene. For example there is Museum Ludwig, that organizes musical events, some of which the Cologne Philharmonie is directly involved with. One of the program managers of the Cologne Philharmonie doesn’t have a background in classical music either, but in art. There has been a traditional connection between art and pop culture, between artists and musicians from Cologne and other cities, particularly New York. Sonic Youth worked together with artists from Cologne very early on. I ask myself why this isn’t happening in Berlin. Why isn’t there cooperation with, for example, the Berlin Music Week, where they do an evening in the Konzerthaus or the Philharmonie? I think they’ve been to Admiralspalast. Maybe sometimes orchestras buy in because they sense an opportunity to be “cool” but hell! That’s not why they should do it! They must invest in the future of the genre of orchestral music and take interest in the audiences that are young and I believe totally prepared to dig all kinds of music. They love orchestras.

It does sound like a case of having limited horizons. There are however initiatives in Berlin led by people such as Christian von Borries or yourself so there are efforts to reach audiences here with these types of performances.

Projects such as those by von Borries are certainly contemporary classical music and art projects that take place in spaces where such performances can work. The difference for me is that I am less interested in contemporary classical than I am giving a platform to artists from well known bands who also work as composers. The “well-known” factor may just help initially to alert people, then they might be quite surprised at what they are hearing

Such as Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead?

Yes, Jonny Greenwood, or Bryce Dessner from The National (you would never be able to equate their music with Bryce’s own pieces), or Richard Reed Perry and Sarah Neufeld from Arcade Fire, who is actually part of our first concert. These are all people who make very different music from what’s possible with their band. We want to show the work of the bands in a different light by showing what their musicians can do. In principle this will be first and foremost a pop series that is about music rather than art or installation or “classic in the club”. We are offering a way of connecting openminded, young, classical instrumentalists that have grown up with this type of music with international bands or solo artists to do workshops and to experiment. It doesn’t always have to lead to a big performance. A year ago we went into the studio with the German band 1000 Robota and a whole choir that we sourced here in Berlin and tried out a range of different things. stargaze itself is a workshop. We are searching for—and already know about—a pool of musicians that we can bring together to work on projects that will suit their interests and talent. We’re also looking for sources of financing this, because Volksbühne can’t by itself.

So when does this program begin?

On the 19th May, at the Volksbühne in Berlin. That will be with Sarah Neufeld and Magnetic North, the new project from Simon Tong and Erland Cooper from the UK who made a whole album about the Orkney Islands. That is a really beautiful project that brings together elements of folk and electronica with instruments and a choir. We also just had this other project that took place in the Cologne Philharmonie as part of the Eight Bridges Festival, which we were opening with two evenings. The first evening was with Nicholas Jarr, and the second one was an interpretation of Terry Riley’s “In C”, one of the groundbreaking pieces of minimal music that has become so important for electronic musicians in terms of the use of loops and pattern-based processes. Both were performed by a unique group of instrumentalists and musicians together with Matthew Herbert and a colleague of his who sampled patterns and mix them live to accompany the acoustic musical ensemble. ~

Cologne. A metropolis on the edge of oblivion, where the sewer grates ooze steam and on whose night-shrouded streets criminals perform their troublesome tasks… Actually wait, that’s Gotham. Cologne is the rich, very clean German city where each year one of the Electronic Beats Festivals takes place, and I’ve just entered her. No time for sightseeing, however, as I find myself rushing to meet up with two friends who run the essential CLUB KID store in nearby Dusseldorf. I find it far more satisfying to roll up to an unfamiliar location with a crew; it takes the edge off, and nothing says “professional music journalist” like a trio of black-clad, platform-shoed weirdos. In a flurry of hugs, kisses and a gifted LONG beanie it’s time to head to E-Werk, the location for tonight’s festivities.

Popnoname

Stepping into the venue, I first take stock of the bar’s location, where legal tender is replaced by the internal glow of alcohol’s kiss. The Telekom photo booth nearby grants me a nice visual souvenir. Headshot, drink. Satisfied in both mind and liver, I’m now ready to be music’d at. It’s a good night for it, too: the vibe is definitely weirder than your usual EB fest, with plenty of prettily depressed young things slouching about in fashion-black. After a warm-up set from locals Popnoname that alternated between rather vanilla indielectro and banging techno with an almost industrial vibe, Copenhagen-based Reptile Youth took the stage. While their bassist did his best Rowland S. Howard impression, grinding his instrument with gusto, vocalist Ian (essential name for any aspiring post-punk band, I reckon) alternated between a coo and a scream, shaking the crowd into tribal panic. Can’t you just see them on the next NME cover? Better yet, can we have a S.C.U.M. reunion tour already?

Reptile Youth

The last time I saw Dan Deacon he was opening for Devo in Brooklyn, shuffling the crowd through a routine that was like a human version of aerobic musical chairs. It was sweaty, hectic nonsense and I loved every second of it. Tonight Deacon was in even finer form, blasting the room with shattered electronics and leading the crowd through love-themed nonsense calisthenics at 777 BPM. At one point he split the crowd right down the middle, picking two “captains” to lead them in synchronized dance. While it swiftly transformed into chaos, it was of the extremely fun variety. By the time James Blake took the stage, most people seemed to be whipped into frenzy. Blake took them further; with a deft sweep of his fingers he made boys and girls gasp, clasp hands and brace themselves for the delicately booming power of it all—or a sudden crushing bass. The emotion in Blake’s voice balanced the manic chipmunk energy of Deacon nicely, slow dances and slow chants.

Dan Deacon

Trust was the perfect ending to a night, Robert Alfons bouncing onto the fog-shrouded stage  like a beautiful angel. If you’ve never experienced Trust live then you’d never know that almost all the vocals on his debut TRST, be they high and feminine or low and gothic, are performed by him. Seeing Alfons hit that chorus perfectly on “The Last Dregs” is strangely thrilling, but that might also be because I was (to the dismay of the tweens to my left) singing along in a rather falsetto-ish shriek myself. Kids’ World no more, this big-boy journalist wants to bellow and wail with his favorite tunes and you’d better pray there’s no encore (there wasn’t, sadly.)  Pretty sure that at one point I caught a wink from Alfonse but that might have been the sweat blinding my eyes. ~

Trust

If you happened to miss Electronic Beats On Air last night, what were you doing? Ok, there was the small matter of the live stream from Electronic Beats Festival Cologne in which case, free passes all round. Anyway, as always we have the mix from the show’s second hour fresh of the airwaves and last night’s was a good’un. It features Electronic Beats’ very own Online Editor Lisa Blanning packing an eclectic collection of tracks which sees her paying respect to her US roots, while bringing some distinct UK flavor the the proceedings. Trust us, this isn’t your regular, off-the-peg dance and rap. No tracklist, but it’s more fun that way.

In Perfect Reality we will become post-physical, but until then it sometimes becomes necessary to engage with other humans. A future glimpse of We-B 8.0 shows that our generous existence allows us to interact through the medium of media: our sounds, what moves us. The illest flows supply the death of prose, get all the eloquent hits at Target, “You’re on Target” as I like to bellow whenever I see the Target commercial, which is often because I have them all taped. You can answer most of your lifeneedz here but there are still questions without answers: why do my tweets so often go unanswered? Why are neo-primitivists sneaking into suburbia to steal theremins? Why is the elbow the most painful place to get hit? I’m in my garage clutching my theremin and praying, hayya’alal falah, let me date Drake on Twitter.

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Sacred and profane have no meaning here, only the constant flow of change and information exist. Perfect Reality is at hand as Perfect Raveality begins (sweaty gropez seems a bit unchill on dancefloor, RavePrism is for everyone not just couples). I woke up and my skin had turned into a drug rug. My hands are now pan pipes, my hair an infinite forest. It’s made life on a day-to-day basis very difficult; in fact you may be wondering how I’m even typing with my pipe-fingers. The truth is I’ve become so mutated that I’ve evolved the ability to communicate via computer keyboard using only my mind and a short, slightly bendy rod. Heat gives way to rain and rain gives way to noise until the mind arranges it into the true words behind the sound. Listen to what it’s saying:

EYE

NEED

U

Next year it’s our turn to die forever (word on the street is that nobody stops being dead) and I hope nobody comes to my funeral and then before they fill in the grave a car full of drunk horny teens drives by and one chucks an empty Bud bottle out the window and it lands on my coffin with a ‘clunk’ as hollow as a rave. Turns out I was never dead in the first place. Nobody was, and now maybe you’re confused. “Ruddy heck, bruv” you’ll say in your thick Bristol accent, “What’s this rubbish?” But I’m here to tell you now… death is not the end.

Dan Snaith has few musical allegiances. The Canadian-born DJ, musician and front man of London-based Caribou is a fearless, if contemplative, champion of the idea that hybrid forms best serve aesthetic functions. For Snaith, hybridity isn’t just a sign of the times; it’s a vision of the future. Max Dax spoke with the globetrotting futurist in his apartment in London Holloway. Photo: Luci Lux

In ancient Greece, a pharmakós was a ritual human sacrifice exiled or killed by a “healing sorcerer”, referred to as a pharmakon. This act was believed to lead to purification and social catharsis in times of local distress, famine, and plague. Had our modern Pharmakon, the alias of 22-year old Margaret Chardiet, existed at the time, catharsis would have certainly been less deadly… though considerably nosier and involving some fucked-up paradoxes I’d prefer not to contemplate.

People often make the mistake of assuming noise music is easy to make. Making noise is easy; you buy some effects pedals, grab a thing and hit it, or use it to hit other things. Maybe you scream a bunch or just go hog wild while wearing army boots because at that point people stop calling it an onstage temper-tantrum and start calling it power electronics. To turn all of this into music, however, takes not only talent but charisma as well—something Chardiet not only possesses, but which possesses you the second her voice hits your ears. Chardiet’s Sacred Bones debut Abandon wastes no time, with the shrieked opening of “Milkweed/It Hangs Heavy” shifting into a single shrill tone over which metallic percussion and diseased heartbeats are overlaid like shrouds of bondage: this is musical enslavement, antagonistic terror given aural form. What sets her apart from fellow death industrialists is the sense of severe philosophical stateliness she can impart into her throat-rending screams and instrumentals. Chardiet can make a well-timed silence more startling and frightening than any blast of harsh static, and that lends a level of intensity here that makes each track feel relentless.

In the puncturing beats of “Ache” and the crushing stomp of “Pitted”, we find the coldness of the mechanical, the fear-stink of lurching beast and the imperial nature of mankind, the combination of which inscribes a hypnotic and drilling testament into the very fabric of the soul. The latter finds Chardiet excising her vocal demons to heights of power that echo that of precursors such as Diamanda Galas and Jarboe, yet even in this grandeur there is something of the element of frustration as well, looped waves dissolving into the ether of healing loathing—physician, kill thyself. “Crawling On Bruised Knees” envelops you at the last, descending buzzsaw bass and visceral verbalizations. The pounding majesty of it all will either leave you writhing in the agony of psychic defeat or prostrating yourself in ekstasis at her feet.

Pharmakons no longer exist; they have been replaced by pharmacists, to whom we travel to to avoid death rather than accept it, who mask our ecstasy with artificial nullity. The medicines many of us take every day are our own illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. Abandon rejects the poisons of immortality, the deception of ego and its upper-tier trappings: the false light of religion. Yet it does so in a way that feels intelligent and (an odd word to ascribe to such a harsh record, I know) somehow subtle. It’s a sacrament that transcends holiness, a primer for self and post-self. Sacred Bones? After hearing this, they just might be.~
Abandon is out now via Sacred Bones.

Andreas Henneberg is a DJ and producer based in Berlin and the founder of Voltage Musique Records. He’s been active within the scene since the mid-90s and his experience shows in the fluency he pulls together tech house, minimal and house and his productions for IDEAL Audio, Confused Recordings, Herzblut and AREAL. The mix that he’s put together for Electronic Beats is big, roiling dance music straight out of Berlin for the strong of body and mind.

His debut album Mountain is out in June, making 2013 something of a milestone for Henneberg—his label’s ten years old this year.

Tracklist
01 Richie Dane – “Carabu”
02 Andreas Henneberg – “Wating In The Weeds”
03 Hennon – “Heart To Ear”
04 Kiko – “Wallio”
05 Faray – “Anger” (Andreas Henneberg Remix)
06 Gunnar Stiller – “Open You”
07 Andreas Henneberg – “Nicoteen”
08 Pele & Shawnecy – “Roomers”
09 Roy Rosenfeld – “Hot Sex Scene” (Ron Costa Remix)
10 Compact Grey – “Bane” (Ron Costa Remix)
11 Sammy Jarrar & Worda – “Put It”
12 Andreas Henneberg fest. Fabian Reichelt (No Place To Hide)
13 Roy Rosenfeld – “Fucktard”
14 Da Fresh & Maverickz – “Free Your Mind”

He may have come up through grime’s murky underground, but a lot’s changed for Dizzee Rascal since the early 2000s. This is Dizzee ver. 2.0—the popstar. Watch Dizzee power through three songs from his frenetic live set “Bassline Junkie”, “Dance Wiv Me” and “Bonkers” in this HD video taken from our recent Poznań EB Festival. Hold tight!

You can find more live videos by hitting up our YouTube channel or read our review from the night here.

Photo by Lukasz Jaszak.

Kode9, aka Steve Goodman, is well-known as a producer, DJ, and the founder of leading electronic music label Hyperdub Records, but his talents and interests have seen his operations expand far beyond. Tracing his history from his youth outside of Glasgow to key rave introductions in Edinburgh and PhD studies with illustrious British philosopher Nick Land at Warwick University—where both were part of the now recognizably-seminal thoery/cyberpunk/pop culture cooperative Cybernetic Culture Research Unit—Goodman’s subsequent move to London only stoked his already deep engagement with British dance music.

In 2006, the year dubstep broke, Kode9 was at its forefront while Goodman also held down a full-time job as a lecturer in sonic culture at University of East London. In 2009 the “sonic research collective” of which he is a member, later to name themselves AUDiNT, had their first installation in Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, and the following year he published his first book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear—a theoretical text based on the politics of frequency. In 2011, a commission from Poland’s Unsound Festival resulted in Her Ghost, an ongoing collaborative reinterpretation—with video artists MFO and theorist/performer Ms. Haptic (Jessica Edwards)—of Chris Marker’s groundbreaking 1962 science fiction film La Jetée.

Tell me about the first proper party you went to.

I think the first proper thing would have been the first time i took ecstasy, 1992 I think, club called Chocolate City in Edinburgh. They were playing Herbie Hancock, Jbs, etc. I particularly remember the synth on Fred Wesley’s “Blow You Head”. Anyway, the next day I bought turntables. I had some vinyl, but properly started collecting after that night: funk, jazz, hip hop, house, and early hardcore like SL2 “On a Ragga Tip”. I also used to go a club called Pure in Edinburgh occasionally, which was my first exposure to extreme glow stick, hardcore nosebleed techno, and a big rave near Edinburgh called Rezerection.

What’s the significance of the “k”? Because Mark Fisher/K-Punk uses it as well and didn’t you guys choose these monikers at around the same time of the CCRU?

K—it was a melting pot of Ks. Josef K from Kafka, K from the german spelling of cybernetics, K from K-waves in Kondratieff theory in economics, Ko from the I Ching, etc etc. K was in the air.

What was the impact of the CCRU in your life?

Well, my early experience was seeing [noted writer, theorist, artist, and lecturer] Kodwo [Eshun] and Mark talk about dance music culture using the kind of theory I was into, but hadn’t yet bridged into using it in relation to music. so CCRU fused my interests in philosophy and jungle into one. That must have been around 1995.

What do you think it is about British dance music that lends itself to theory?

Intensity. Where the words you have available are unable to capture the intensity of experience you are undergoing, so you have to fabricate a new language, a new conceptual schema to catch up with the sonics. Of course most philosophy is not engaged in anything so interesting.

Intensity could be a word used to describe rave culture in general. Is this specific to British dance music, or a general rave thing?

There have been various moments of psychedelic theorizing in conjunction with music. i think mid-’90s UK was one of these theory/music singularities, just like the late ’60s was for the acid explosion.

Both of these seem to be tied to drugs?

Yeah, the conjunction of drugs, sonics, electronics, and concepts against the backdrop of socio-economic upheaval.

Is this something you feel you can tap into now or any time after experiencing it, or do you wait for it to come along?

Well, right now I’m trying not to theorize very much around music. I’m trying to empty out and focus on simply making tracks, because when the conjunction doesn’t work its quite destructive of music making. Zen and the art of making beats.

Before you were an artist, there was Hyperdub. Hyperdub was a party and a webzine before it was a label. Can you talk a little bit about those early days?

Hyperdub started as a web mag in 2001 in Brixton. I wanted to collect together my favorite writers such as Simon Reynolds, Kodwo, and Mark alongside coverage of late UK garage as grime and dubstep were starting to wriggle out of the carcass. We also did some nights at the Bug Bar in Brixton with Darren [Cunningham aka Actress] and Gavin [Weale, co-founder of Werk], and had Benny Ill from Horsepower play at one of them. This was in 2001, before [seminal UK dubstep/grime club night] FWD>> started. We called the night Hyperdub 130 because I was playing garage, broken beat, and early dubstep, Darren was playing techno and house, and Gavin was playing electro, breaks—so really the only thing that held it together was a rough tempo. We also did a night at the ICA called “Speed Tribes” where Darren performed live, and Mark, Kodwo, etc, gave talks, and we showed [Black Audio Film Collective's essay-film on Afro-futurism] The Last Angel of History.

Weren’t you a resident at FWD>> in the early days?

Yeah, I played some of the early ones. There was around 12 of us on rotation.

You also used to have a regular slot on [former pirate, now licensed London-based radio station] Rinse, which is now operated by the same posse as FWD>>. You’ve DJ’d and had artists like Wiley on the mic.

I was on Rinse from 2003-2008 hosting the FWD>> show. At that early point FWD>>/Ammunition were separate entities—they only became the one entity later on, I think.

I guess your earliest known tracks were on the Rephlex Grime 2 compilation?

Well, I had a release on Tempa with Benny Ill and the Culprit around 2002/3, and then the first Hyperdub release in 2004. the Rephlex Grime compilation came after that. Before all that, CCRU had a label called Katasonix that did one release in 1999—I had a track on that, so did Mark.

Who still has that??

Don’t know—I still have a copy of the record somewhere. It think 90% of them are under someone’s bed somewhere.

Collector’s item.

That’s one way of putting it.

Kevin Martin [The Bug/King Midas Sound] once told me that he had urged you to start Hyperdub to put your own tracks.

It’s Kevin’s fault I started the label. I went to interview him for XLR8R in 2002, I think, and gave him a CD with “Sine of the Dub” on it. He linked me with a distributor and suggested I start a label to put it out.

At what point did DJing become as big of a concern, something more than a hobby, as big as your academic career?

Well, I’ve been DJing for over 20 years, but maybe only seriously since around 2003 when I was only playing brand new, unreleased dubplates of a scene that was still congealing. And then a couple of years later, when we actually started getting bookings, etc. It’s been a gradual increase, really.

I was really impressed by your life a few years back. It seemed like you were juggling three full-time jobs: teaching/lecturing, DJing, and running the label.

I found it slowly became unmanageable juggling all of these things, and doing them to a standard that didn’t constantly feel like you could be doing everything much better. Teaching got the chop last year—it was becoming a bit of a rut, teaching the same thing every year.

Has working on your own music taken the place of teaching?

Thats the intention. It’s been good the last few months. I remembered how to finish tracks again, but I’d been away from it for a couple of years, so I kind of had to go through the same process as back in the mid ’90s when I started dabbling with sampling, etc. I had to teach myself from scratch again. The hardest thing is learning how to disconnect from communication devices from long enough to create something instead of RT’ing. Twitter is full of producers just twiddling their thumbs in between presets

I’ve seen you DJ literally dozens of times. You’re one of the few DJs worth seeing that often because you keep it fresh. What does that kind of drive as a DJ mean for your work as a producer? And how will you know if you’ve mastered the art of producing to the same level you’ve mastered DJing?

Thank you, that’s very kind. Well, I’ve never really played much of my own music. DJing like this sets the bar very high as a producer, and my own productions rarely fit into my sets for various reasons. I’m rarely happy with the technical side of my production, in terms of playing it in a club. Some of the things you have to do to make your tracks really bang in a club are also some of the things that make tracks outside of that context dry to listen to—like isolating every sound, avoiding too much clashing of frequencies, etc. I’ve got a lot to learn on the technical side of things. I will know I’m there when I’m happy to do a DJ set of all my own productions. I’m a long way off that. It may never happen, but it’s about the thrill of the quest.

In his own words, Kode9 on key Hyperdub tracks and artists.

Cooly G – “Narst”

It’s such a hard question because we’ve released so much stuff now. My head is in a spin just thinking about it. Cooly G’s “Narst” and Scratcha’s “Natty” are two amazing tracks that bring back good memories of when funky was exciting. Except Cooly was never a UK funky artist, really. Her tracks weren’t that important to the scene as such, but maybe like a lot of Hyperdub artists she was on the periphery doing her own thing—dark yet soulful. Her stuff is generally much more minimal than most of the funky that was floating around; really tracky, yet slinky. Both myself and Marcus [Scott, Hyperdub's label manager] had heard some of her stuff on MySpace, and we reached out to her on the strength of the tunes she had on her page. I think I just had a screw face when I heard “Narst” for the first time [laughs]; I think that’s the appropriate response.

The Bug, featuring Killa P & Flowdan – “Skeng” (originally released as a 12″ on Hyperdub)

He’s a free spirit, Kevin Martin. After the initial push he provided, I was just really happy to release him and Warrior Queen on the label. I don’t think the “Money Honey” release was their best work by a long way, but at that moment it fused grime and dub techno with a dancehall flavor, and that was where our heads were at in 2004/5. We would share a lot of tracks we were both making and I enjoyed what he had been doing with his Rephlex releases at that time. Enjoy isn’t really the right word, actually. I respected their intensity. I remember at the launch party for the first Rephlex Grime compilation at The End where his sadistic obsession with mid-range frequencies actually made me collapse in the club. I got carried out by the bouncer and came to in the gutter. That was a personal highlight, obviously. “Skeng” is probably the track I’ve had the most fun playing over the years—I had an amazing trip to Japan with Kevin that led to my “Skeng” remix where we went around getting taxi drivers, school girls, and pretty much everyone we came across to say “skeng” into our voice recorders. You can hear that in the intro to my remix.

Darkstar – “Need You”

The first Darkstar release was pretty emotional. “Need You” just fused my obsession with synthetic speech and vocoders with garage, 8bit sounds and a sad song. It came in a run of tracks that started with the computer game sampling I did on “Find My Way” and ran through Quarta 330, Ikonika, Zomby, and that generation of artist releases from 2006 to 2008. But Darkstar had their own path they wanted to follow, and while “Need You” and “Aidy’s Girl” are amazing tracks, it’s probably good they didn’t rinse that sound—because if they did, we wouldn’t be looking back so fondly on those tunes.

Burial – “South London Boroughs”

Burial used to send me letters with drawings and CDRs of tunes from back in 2002. There was quite a few CDRs, actually—I noticed in 2004 that I was still listening to some of them, and was playing “South London Boroughs” in my sets, and was listening to “Broken Homes” a lot. And I got the idea that the label should not just be for my own stuff. He was a fan of the website and the stuff like El-B that we were featuring. The writing was like a magnet, or to use a Burial-esque image, it was a searchlight into the darkness that picked him up. We sent out the troops to capture him, interrogated him, and then locked him up.

His music has a weird, intoxicating, obsessive effect on his fans and some writers—there was one Belgian journalist who really, really took offence to the Hyperdub robot woman who used to grace our promos. We’d sent him the Burial album, and he was so disgusted that we’d drawn a moustache on the Mona Lisa that he refused to review it. We get a lot of abuse generally for not providing 24/7 access to Burial’s hard drive.

Hype Williams – “Bad Mind”

Kelly Price W8 Gain Vol II, what a fuckin’ record—thats the kind of record that makes me happy. Like, if you don’t like that record, you can just fuck off [laughs]. The Hype Williams and Laurel Halo stuff were less surprising for me than for most people, I suppose. For me, I was just reconnecting with where the label started, which wasn’t really a dance music label in any conventional sense. The timbre of both the Laurel Halo and Hype Wiiliams albums fits quite comfortably into our back catalog. Hyperdub is not a group of friends that decided to start a label. It’s not a clique like that. It’s the other way around really whereby the label has forced a lot of artists from very different music backgrounds together, and helped them find connections and musical friends they didn’t know they had.~

Kode9′s new single Xingfu Lu is out now via Hyperdub. His new Rinse mix CD is out on May 20th. This summer, AUDiNT publish their book Dead Record Office—which charts the history of the weaponization of sonic hauntology from World War II to the present day and catalogues their 2011 installation in New York—through Art in General Press.

There’s been much speculation and heated debate regarding The Knife’s current live performance, with some celebrating the dissection and reconceptualization of what we perceive a live show to be and others lamenting the extreme use of playback and lack of live instrumentation. The stakes are, of course, high; Shaking The Habitual is the Swedish duo’s first album since 2006, and only their second tour in their 14-year history. With a sold out venue of rabid fans facing you, most bands would want to bring their A-game. The mistake that people make, however, is thinking of The Knife as a band, when in reality they’re closer to performance artists.

As I stood in a crowd of 3,500 people becoming increasingly agitated by the delayed wait, a picture of the plan behind the scenes began to come into focus. That was then upgraded to HD as openers D.E.E.P. Aerobics appeared—to the left of the stage, which meant that only a portion of the crowd had any idea who was suddenly trying to lead them in a ballroom-themed R&B workout. It was borderline parody, equally ridiculous and amazing, and not at all what anyone expected. I felt a ripple of dissent make its way through the stoic German crowd, who seemingly wanted nothing more than to hear the entirety of Silent Shout and be on their way. Amidst shouts of, “Put your hands up!” and, “We’re all in this together!” I could make out mutters of, “Was ist das?” and even someone complaining about “black music.” As much as I appreciated the outlandishness of the whole thing, the rather straightforward attitude of the audience toward what should be fun made me wonder if this was also part of the plan: to not only engage the audience, but also to enrage them in the tradition of musical agitators such as Whitehouse and Einstürzende Neubaten.

When The Knife finally did take the stage (after an even longer delay) it was amidst a wall of fog, cloaks, and heavily droning electronics, the antithesis to the brightly colored crowd before them. As the throb of bass gave way to the discernable beats of “Raging Lung”, the restless crowd began to finally move, shaking the residual angst from their limbs even as the performers on stage—of which there were about eight—began to play their instruments. Or did they? The line between illusion and reality was blurred as multiple people took the mic to unleash Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice from their lips. Fantastical instruments were shifted about the stage as often as the performers, and it was impossible to tell what (if anything) was really being played. At several points the pretense of live musicianship was abandoned entirely in favor of strange props (a drum machine obelisk and a large screen featuring Karin in Olof drag simply bobbing her head to the beat being two of the most captivating) and glittery synchronized dance performances set to backing tracks. For at least half of their stage time, the performers evoked bouncing choreographed fervor and summoned a vast amount of energy into the room, almost swallowing the crowd in its ecstasy; Godspell evoking the Godhead.

If a mood could be ascribed to the whole thing, I’d settle with ‘brilliantly cheeky’; at times the band would actively taunt the audience’s expectations, disappearing offstage entirely for “Networking” (of which I did a bit with my neighbors as I waited for them to return, so perhaps that was the point) to huddling on a corner of the stage for 2/3rds of “Full of Fire” before breaking into interpretive dance. By the time they’d skipped offstage, smiling toothily like Britney amidst a wall of rainbow lasers and the ending notes of “Silent Shout”, the crowd (myself included) was ready to collapse—not only from exhaustion, but also from trying to process the various levels of what we had just witnessed.

That, in essence, is what Shaking The Habitual is about: examining our devotion to the spectacle, deconstructing our ideas about where music comes from, how we listen to it, what it can give us and what we should give back. With the live version, The Knife have shattered our ideas of what a live show can (and perhaps should) be, moving effortlessly and seamlessly between genres in a way that few artists can. In the space of two hours, I was present for a Greek tragedy, a Broadway musical, a pop phenomenon, a post-modern rave, and an eye-searing light show, and at the end I was soaked in sweat and actively challenged about what I’d just seen. How often do you get a chance to say that?~

With their European tour now in full swing, last Friday night Depeche Mode played at Terra Vibe Park in Malakása, just north of Athens. Terra Vibe Park is a beautiful location for gigs of this size, surrounded by stunning forests and mountains; while the day was blessed with ideal outdoor concert weather—slightly overcast and cloudy. As 35,000 excited fans made their way inside, the atmosphere was nothing but electric. The last time Depeche Mode were scheduled to play in Athens in 2009 the gig was cancelled after Dave Gahan fell ill and was taken straight to hospital. There were many fans here that missed them in 2009—all especially excited to finally see them play.

The evening started off with support act F.O.X, also from Depeche Mode’s hometown of Essex. F.O.X’s electro pop sound complemented the headliners perfectly and prepared the crowd of adoring fans for what was about to ensue. Depeche Mode’s incredible performance was a feast for the senses. Dave’s voice was nothing but perfect throughout the whole set, interacting with the crowd and his band mates playfully. It was almost as though Dave was giving his performance everything he could to make up for the cancellation in 2009. The screen displayed live feed of the concert as well as beautiful imagery for the songs that were played. Everything contributed to making the performance one of a kind.

Their set took us through a mixture of songs off their new album Delta Machine as well as a selection of classics from their discography. The show kicked off with “Welcome to My World”, and later featured classics such as “Enjoy the Silence”, “I Just Can’t Get Enough”, and current single “Heaven”. Martin blew the crowd away with his lead vocals on “Higher Love” and “When the Body Speaks”, and “Halo” was welcomed by the hardcore fans, as well as “Barrel of a Gun”. It was Dave’s birthday on 9th May, so halfway through the set the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to him, a touching sight to see so many adoring fans honoring their hero.

The energy overall was overflowing with a flurry of emotion throughout. Fans were either smiling or crying and ecstatic to be in the presence of such an iconic band. A monumental performance from Depeche Mode!~

In 2009, San Francisco-based singer and guitarist Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips teamed up with partner and then-school teacher Sanae Yamada to form a trance-rock two-piece with minimal gear requirements and maximum DIY touring capacity. One EP and two LPs later, Moon Duo’s sound has evolved into a master class of how much more less can be. The band’s repetitive drum patterns, hypnotic organ/synth lines and bursts of fuzzy, halled-out guitar riffage function as discrete parts of a single engine, driven by the elegant simplicity of Johnson’s songwriting.

And while they’ve managed to avoid the pitfalls of over-identification with any specific genre (self-imposed or otherwise), Moon Duo still proudly wear their influences on their proverbial sleeves; from the pulsing rhythms of Martin Rev and Klaus Dinger to the rock and roll heart of bubble-gum pop and the Velvet Underground. Their most recent release, 2012’s Circles, was recorded in psychedelic pseclusion in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, where Johnson and Yamada honed their trusty formula of stretching catchy, three-minute radio zingers into ultra-stoned, ten-minute searches for truth. Lucky for us they’ve managed to grab the torch from the hoary old bands of yester-millennia—even thought they’re far too modest to admit it.

Where are you guys right now?

Sanae Yamada: We’re in sunny Florida by the pool.

Jealous. I thought you guys were in Portland?

Ripley Johnson: Yeah, but we’re visiting family now, mostly Sanae’s, but my mom is here too. Portland is where young people go to retire.

Like Berlin.

RJ: We actually came to Berlin thinking we could live here. We wanted a place where we didn’t have to make a lot of money to live. We looked at Detroit, Miami, Berlin and Portland. And we ended up in Portland. People talk about Detroit like it’s going to be the next Berlin, but it’s not that advanced yet. Portland is there, already established. There’s a good music scene and food scene and all that. There’s cheaper real estate than anywhere on the West Coast. That said, in Detroit you can buy a house for $2000. It won’t have plumbing, but you can do it.

SY: The cool thing about Detroit is that it’s just so wild. Such vast areas of the city are abandoned and if you have a notion to create a massive sculpture garden in some abandoned lot, nobody’s going to stop you. You can kind of do whatever you want. Which was the appeal for us in the first place. But the downside is that we travel so much, so any place we’re living would be extremely vulnerable to petty crime, which is rampant there. Portland has creative opportunities but more stability.

I don’t think you guys are Berliners.

RJ: No, I’m a morning person, so socializing late nights is tough. There’s too much partying and we could never get our gear over there. Americans have lots of stuff, so we’d need a big place for it.

So you’ve had quite a tour so far, huh?

RJ: Last year we did three weeks in the States, then a month in Europe and then a few weeks on the West Coast. We’ve just gotten back from China, New Zealand, Vietnam, and Japan.

Was this your first time going to Asia?

RJ: Yeah, but we knew it would be amazing. When we played Bristol there was a guy from China who was texting his friend in Beijing asking him about about the Psychic Ills show. His friend told him there were, like, 500 heads at the show, which is amazing, because I know they’d never been over there either. He said the scene is really happening there right now, and he’s right.

The market is opening up. Well, you’re lucky you’re a two-piece. All you guys have is a drum machine, a couple of amps, a guitar. It’s not like you need a big bus, right?

SY: That’s the whole point of our thing: to be able to fit everything in a car.

Ripley, funnily enough, I was turned on to your music by a guy who did sound for Wooden Shjips a few years ago at West Germany here in Berlin. From what I remember, he said there were only, like, 20 people at your show. Now, you’re selling out venues left and right with both Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo. How did that happen in such a short time?

RJ: That’s a good question. I don’t think it was 20 back then. But anyhow, I remember that the show was really good and attendance has ramped up. It’s one of those things you don’t have any control over. As a musician you have control over your songs, hopefully over the recording process, over the mixing and mastering. But when it comes to touring, you show up at the venue and just hope that people are there. It’s like throwing a party. You just have to have hope—and make sure that Thee Oh Sees aren’t playing the same night around the corner. And in Berlin there’s always so much going on, so we’re just praying.

Yeah, Berlin is pretty saturated and there’s a lot of competition.

RJ: I tend to tune out everything that doesn’t have to do with music. We have a manager now, which has changed a lot. For the album’s release, we relied almost entirely on the record label. Probably too much. And we rely on booking agents. You have to trust people to a certain degree. Because with the business side I really can’t be bothered. I don’t look at statement sheets, I don’t think about money stuff. It’s too distracting.

The best bands are almost always the ones who can focus exclusively on their art. Otherwise you become like Mick Jagger. I caught three of your shows in Germany recently and each time I found myself increasingly drawn in to this special kind of hypno-groove you create. I could see that everybody around me was hypnotized too. Do you feel entranced when the crowd is? How do those energies feed off each other?

SY: Personally, I try not to think too much about the crowd when we’re playing because it distracts me and makes me self-conscious. But I do think there is, for lack of a better word, an energy that comes from a crowd. And when people are into it, you perceive it. It helps. And it snowballs. It becomes a reciprocal thing.

Do you need people there to be into it? Or would you just be goofing off to your music anyway?

RJ: A lot of crowds don’t want to give away too much. They just want to play it cool. And I go to plenty of shows myself and I’m not necessarily jumping around, even if I really like the music. And I know that going in to playing our shows. But when you’re playing trance-y kind of music, you’re not going to get people flipping out every night. So we just try to do our thing. If it’s a really bad crowd and you want them to move or do something and they’re just not at all, then I get energy from that too. You just think, “Fuck it.” You make more feedback; it gets louder, a little bit more aggressive. You want to feel like the crowd’s on your side, like they’re moving with you. And sometimes you don’t feel that. I feel a disconnect every other show. But maybe it’s because I’m not such a sociable person. I play tricks with myself trying to get into a space where I can feel free. Maybe it’s imagining things or thinking about things. For me it’s always about the concept of “No Mind”. I play a lot of improvisational stuff and I need to get lost. I don’t want to overthink things. That’s why I try not to pay attention to the audience: because if they’re not doing what I want them to, it’s going to bum me out.

SY: Provocation. There’s nothing wrong with provocation.

It would be different if you were, say, Nick Cave or Sonic Youth because they’re very engaging and interact with the crowd. You guys use visuals instead. But I don’t even have to watch. I just have to let go.

SY: The visuals are important for us. Our concerts should be multisensory. And we’re not super extroverted, so it’s nice people can focus on other things.

The name Moon Duo is great both graphically and in terms of the images it conjures up.

RJ: Well, the “Duo” part was us really planting a flag, you know? It always surprises me when people ask us at venues how many people are in our band, how many musicians we are on stage. I’m always like, “Uh, two.” The “Moon” part comes from the idea of twin moons, this cosmic sci-fi imagery. There’s also something about the moon that’s part of every culture.

According to David Ike, the human race and the human mind are being controlled by reptile overlords living on the moon. Is there any truth in that?

RJ: Um, I doubt it.

Could Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth be part of this larger masonry family?

SY: Anything’s possible.

RJ: We’re true agnostics. We’re open to anything. But I don’t think we’re part of it. But who knows? Maybe we’ll be invited to play a lizard ball on the moon.

David Ike is a fascinating madman conspiracy theorist from the UK. After being a football commentator for years he went on a TV show and claimed he was the son of Godhead, whatever that means. He’s as wacky as a scientologist, but sometimes what he says makes sense. Like the stuff about the elite few controlling the world. But I supposed that’s another conversation.

SY: Maybe it’s just a metaphor…

How comfortably can you live from what you do? When did you quit your day jobs and what were you doing before being full-time musicians?

SY: Some times are tighter than others, but we get by pretty comfortably at the moment. I have no complaints. Ripley worked in the tech industry until 2008. I was a schoolteacher until 2010.

What was the last new thing you heard that you got excited?

RJ: We just picked up Kurt Vile’s latest record and I think it’s great. He’s cultivating his own sound. His records manage to be classic and fresh at the same time, which is very hard to do.

Maybe. Do you guys pick your support bands?

SY: When we were in Germany we really wanted to play with Camera! because we’d seen their videos. Sometimes it’s nice not knowing who the support is and then you get really positively surprised by a great local band. I try to always see the support band. It’s important to me.

RJ: We like touring with another band and seeing the same people every night, especially if they’re good and they inspire you to play together and you feed off each other. So, yeah, we love doing that.

I know Ripley is usually emailing while the opening band is on, but that’s another story. Do you have a formula for writing your songs? Do you work with explicit restrictions?

RJ: Not really. The restriction is the band itself. We play with repetitive beats because we don’t want complex backing tracks. It’s just a sampler playing basic beats. Rhythmically it’s very minimal and repetitive. We just think about how much noise we can actually make with two people and how we make it work. That said, we’re thinking about trying out a drummer, though less can be more. We wrote the last album Circles in, like, ten days.

Circles was also recorded in isolation in the Rocky Mountains and is named it after a quote by one of philosophy’s most famous hermits, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Why was it important to work in seclusion?

RJ: We were based in Colorado for a couple years, in a house that was tucked away in the woods up in the mountains. We worked on the record at home, so the seclusion was just a serendipitous byproduct of where we were living. It was a wonderful environment to work in—there were no distractions, and the natural splendor of the area was very meditative. Emerson’s prizing of the natural world was definitely something we could relate to.

You write the songs together?

RJ: No, I write the songs and then I show Sanae and let her come up with the keyboard parts. Usually I write on guitar and program the beats too and then hand it off. But that process is very quick. We don’t want to belabor the point. Whatever your first idea is, that’s probably your best one anyway.

SY: This is the first record I’ve ever sung anything. But it’s fun.

Ripley, you look not dissimilar to the second coolest man in rock and roll. Can you guess who that is?

RJ: Is it Warren Ellis?

Yes. If you had a suit jacket you would be him. You just wear t-shirts. Somebody told me you were thinking about shaving off your beard, but I think that would be the end of your career, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

RJ: Maybe I’ll start a country career. Just a moustache then.~

Moon Duo’s Circles and Circles Remixed are both out now via Sacred Bones Records/Souterrain Transmissions.

“You see a lot of the veterans are just really trying new things and they’re really stretching out…”

Watch our classic video feature on Alan Oldham taken from Slices Issue 4-06.  Subscribe and watch more Slices features and live videos on our YouTube Channel, or order the DVD online.

“It’s Called a Heart”, t-shirts/merchandise from the UK, 1985

The “Speak & Spell” series of electronic handheld, educational toys created by Texas Instruments consisted of a speech synthesizer, a keyboard, and a receptor slot to receive one of a collection of ROM game library modules, and was the inspiration for Depeche Mode’s first album title.

The Depeche Mode Fan Exhibition is taking place in the following locations and online at fan4fan.com:
Zagreb: 09–23.05.13, Galerija Klovicevi Dvori
Budapest: 11–23.05.13, Design Terminal
Bratislava: 15–25.5.13, Telekom shop in Polus City Center
Berlin: 6–20.06.13, Warenhaus Jandorf

View the first look from the Zagreb exhibition here.

Lisa Blanning (Online Editor)

DJ Nate aka Bakaman – 13 The Mixtape

DJ Nate’s was one of the first footwork records I heard, because it came early in the Planet Mu onslaught. I loved it at the time, and now three years later this DJ Nate mixtape (free download here) surfaces. It’s not at all the footwork he made in the past; now it’s all about Chicago drill—but it still sounds good.

Walton – “Homage” from Keysound Allstars 2

This Manchester-based producer has a few Hypderdub releases, but this track on Blackdown‘s Keysound label (from the Keysound Allstars Vol 2 EP) is pretty different from the rest of his output. Instead of breaking out, he slips right into an old-school vibe with a tantalizingly classic-sounding jungle riddim.

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Louise Brailey (Deputy Online Editor)

These New Puritans – “Fragment 2″

And so TNPS return, and what a place this world is without them. “Fragment 2″ is an incredible opening sally, featuring less percussive attack than Hidden and thus heightening the classical influences and textural micro-detail. As always Jack Barnett pulls together the diffident (precisely offbeat drums, typically sparse piano) and melodic (the trumpet refrain towards the end of the track). Oh, and he claims to have been influenced by Sondheim, Weill and Hammerstein... Suck that up, pretty much any band operating in May 2013.

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Daniel Jones (Contributing Editor)

Taylor Swift – “Red” (Teen Witch Fan Club Edit)

Remember when everyone was mad for weird pop edits a la NIKE7UP? I do, and I miss those times. Finding tracks that make mainstream pop palatable for weirdo ears is extremely my shit, and Teen Witch has often been my go-to guy for this sort of thing. Now that summer is finally here I plan to spend a good amount of time with my old friends from the Top 40, and I wait in anticipation for further edits to make them actually listenable.

Animal Bodies – “Lies in Your Eyes”

On the opposite end of the sound spectrum, Canada’s Animal Bodies have covered Snowy Red for _ever Alive, a new compilation in tribute to the underground minimal wave artist. It’s set to drop around the end of May/early June on on Weyrd Son (not to be confused with Wierd Records) and also features tracks from the likes of //TENSE//, Bestial Mouths, Led Er Est and loads more across two LPs, served up in a glossy deep black gatefold in only 500 editions. In other words: seeeeeeeex.~

In western pop, it’s been a minute since the classic protest song has worn anything but the musty perfume of canonization, wafting a relevance more historical than contemporary. But don’t blame it on apathetic youth or lack of international example. While music became one of the most important platforms of protest during the Arab Spring of 2010 and Occupy movements went global in 2011, 2013 has seen a revival of music with a message in the unlikeliest of forms and in conceptually less charted waters. The predominantly instrumental domain of electronic music has become a medium for topical songs on queer culture and the destruction of patriarchal norms in the context of broader social change. Recent releases by The Knife (Shaking the Habitual), Planningtorock (“Misogyny Drop Dead”) and Terre Thaemlitz (Soulnessless), connect the morphability of sound synthesis with thoughts on the fluidity of gender identity, albeit in very different ways and to varying degrees of reflection. Here, in three parallel interviews, a conversation emerges on the virtues of inauthenticity, gender equality, and finding the political in the personal.

2012’s Soulnessless is a hydra of different kinds of political critique. Can you explain how you connect the (superficially) disparate issues of gender-identity, the devaluing of musical labor, anti-religiousness and immigration policy? Would you say that conceptually, one of these issues is more important than the other in terms of the focus of Soulnessless?

For people where those issues collide, how do you disconnect them? That demand for thematic singularity is very tied into Western notions of individuality and the singularity of the self, and it didn’t emerge from monotheistic cultures by chance.  This is what I attempt to dissect, first and foremost, within myself. And giving visibility to everyday multiplicities, hypocrisies and contradictions is a part of my strategy. It becomes a strategy in itself. I would say the umbrella theme of Soulnessless is a critical rejection of spirituality and religion, but my hope was to do it in a way that did not simply boil down to Liberal atheism. My model of atheism is very much attuned to the fact that I do not believe the oppressions of religion and spirituality, including secular spiritualism, will ever disappear or be overcome. Globally, most non-believers are forced into closets and left without language to process their disbelief. Specifying one’s religion on a job or housing application is not that uncommon, globally speaking. Even in the US, in a poll asking people who they would not want their daughter to marry, atheists outranked both African-Americans and Muslims.

Even beyond atheism, I think the main form of “disbelief” revolves around inter-faith disputes and how someone who does not believe in your god becomes a non-believer, even though they may actively practice some other religion. Like when my Catholic parents relocated our family to a radically Baptist town in Missouri, I recall my mother having real difficulty finding work because she was Catholic. So a kind of conventional and non-disparate approach to the theme of disbelief doesn’t really make sense to me, in the same way a discussion on “gay men” is very different from a discussion on “men who have sex with men.” The latter includes many men who may not identify as gay at all—which may seem superficially disparate at first, except the global reality for sex between men is more likely to involve at least one person who does not self-identify as homosexual. I find that what at first appears disparate is, in the end, sometimes what is most crucial to facilitating a different discussion on seemingly old or familiar themes.

Do you consider your music—both the electroacoustic stuff as Terre Thaemlitz and house stuff as DJ Sprinkles—to be protest music? How does it compare to, say, Pete Seeger or protest music of the civil rights movement in the sixties?

“Protest music” conjures a very specific image. I probably think of what I produce more as analytical discourse. I would say the biggest difference between my approach and a political folk music approach is my criticality towards musical mediums themselves. Folk is very much infused with a kind of “anti-industrial authenticity”. Perhaps in the same way musique concrète is inseparable from the political complications of futurism and constructivism, so is the American protest song inseparable from the political complications of the various reform movements back in the early 1900s. It’s very tied to a specific brand of patriotism. It also involves a very different and idealist concept of how music and community function. I don’t share that generic optimism about music “bringing people together.” I mean, a big part of my “protest” involves taking constant issue with the cultural mechanisms of music itself.

So, why is it important for you to address issues of gender-identity in your music?

Audio is simply a form of language, so I feel like anything intended for an audience should address some issue. My primary relationship to music is economic—both as a consumer and producer. My affinity for audio production as a strategy, especially sample-based and electroacoustic audio production, is because I feel the act of sampling audio has a metaphorical connection to transgenderism as a form of cultural sampling gender models. I am only really interested in audio and music that is not rooted in authenticity, authorship, “coming from the heart” or “soul,” etc. I think of audio sampling as a way of establishing reference points, like footnotes in a book. Unfortunately, the cultural climate around sampling legalities makes it impossible for producers to be open about the connections we wish to make. Even if someone has the budget for clearing samples, there are also thematic restrictions upon usage.

We really live in an era where we are taught the only socially acceptable and legal relationship one can have to sound is that of ownership. But at what point do we, as consumers subjugated to an endless barrage of pop crap, come to “own” our own cultural experiences and relationships to those songs society will not allow us to escape from? This is not so different from the ways in which we are unable to escape prescriptions of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, etc. And music is so often a part of how we construct identities, especially in our youth. So I think it’s already a familiar medium for dealing with something like gender identity. It’s just about escalating the directness and depth of discourse. Basically, turning it up!

How and why did you become an atheist? Is it an identity, too?

I don’t feel I “became an atheist” as much as deprogrammed my relationships to faith and spirituality. So for me it’s more about an “unbecoming”. I am not interested in atheism as an identity. To define oneself as atheist is more about a strategy of disassociation from dominant religious and spiritual ideologies and practices. I appreciate the expression “Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” Personally, my relationship to atheism is one of hopelessness. I am definitely not of the “we shall overcome religious ignorance” variety. Even if religion fades, such as in contemporary Europe, the specter of secular humanist spirituality remains. Humanism—a belief in a shared human experience—is the reified god of contemporary Western cultures.

How good of a vehicle is music in conveying political ideas?

It’s awful.

But it’s been a pretty good way for you to express your contempt for authenticity in music and art.

Well, this ties back to the sampling issue I talked about earlier, for sure. Authorship, individualism, creative ownership—these are things that stop us from discussing, or even conceptualizing, more complex relationships to the social and cultural functions of audio and other media. The notion of authenticity also has a very particular relationship to patriarchy, and the processes of being “named” within patriarchy.

Are there other musicians whose work is political that you appreciate? What about musicians whose political stances you have a problem with?

When people ask me that, I always mention Ultra-red, of course—even though they are not specifically doing much audio production in recent years. Otherwise, I have to pull out rather old references like early Laibach or Test Dept., before both of those bands went industrial-techno. And Nina Simone, of course. Realistically, if you’re really interested in culturally critical content, music is a pretty bleak landscape. That includes not having many people whose political stances are open enough to have a problem with. The biggest problem I see among audio producers is our general passivity with the ways in which audio industries function, and how our works are distributed.

Like the “cleansing” of house music’s queer roots? How does that happen?

Pretty much in the same way disco was cleansed, right? I mean, any non-mainstream genre that gets marketed to a broader audience becomes decontextualized and transformed, usually to the disservice and alienation of those earlier contexts. As a genre becomes more established, everything becomes repackaged to appeal to the sensibilities of who it is being marketed to, as opposed to who is producing it. And over time, if the marketing is successful, those become the same thing.

Do you remember the first time you were attacked for your sexual identity? How did you defend yourself?

I think most people would hear that question and think about physical attacks and bashing, and whether or not I physically fought back. But if you ask about my first memory of such a thing, it’s actually more sublime than that. My memories of being harassed and ostracized predate any sense of sexual identity. There are so many subtle forms of violence we deal with every day, starting the moment we are born. I was given this Spanish woman’s spelling of my name “Terre”, which is my legal birth name, not a stage name or French for “earth” or anything artsy. My parents are not feminists or particularly gender sensitive, so growing up I never had any reasonable explanation for why I wasn’t given the usual US male spelling “Terry”. I think it was really just their crazy Catholic way of referencing that they named me after St. Therese of the Roses, and not after St. Terrence, without giving me the standard US female spelling “Terri.” They probably felt that was neutral and safe enough. And the fact that “Terre” rhymes with “fairy” didn’t help either. For the first twelve years of my life I was “Terre the fairy.” Then the name calling got more sophisticated as my classmates’ vocabularies expanded.

As for defending myself, I was strictly into passive resistance and non-violence. I never physically fought back with punches. This also had something to do with naming, since my middle name is “Martin”, after Martin Luther King, Jr. So I was raised to honor that idea of non-violent resistance. At the same time, my parents’ response to my problems with bullying was, “Just ignore them and they’ll go away” which is a tactically similar, yet ideologically inverse, way of passively engaging with oppression. [Laughing]

But I fought back in other ways. In my teens, that had a lot to do with appearance, freakishness, gender-fuck… It also had to do with studying the best I could in school as a way of getting myself a ticket out of my hometown through out-of-state college scholarships. So much of education is utter bullshit, but if a young person can muster the strength to think of it as a way to create options in life—as limited and stupid as most of those options will be—it’s better than nothing. But that’s hard to fathom as a young person with such limited life experience. A lot of my friends were not able to study because the insane social dynamics of school life in the US preoccupied their lives. Some friends even joined the military in that typical “lost American teenager seeking direction” kind of way. I always found that devastating. How could anybody apply for a job where one of the requirements is that you might have to kill another person? It was heart-crushing to see people who were dear to me and who I know shared pacifist beliefs feel they had no other options or directions in life. Pacifism and anti-militarism are almost as taboo as atheism, when it comes down to it. Especially after 9/11.~

In western pop, it’s been a minute since the classic protest song has worn anything but the musty perfume of canonization, wafting a relevance more historical than contemporary. But don’t blame it on apathetic youth or lack of international example. While music became one of the most important platforms of protest during the Arab Spring of 2010 and Occupy movements went global in 2011, 2013 has seen a revival of music with a message in the unlikeliest of forms and in conceptually less charted waters. The predominantly instrumental domain of electronic music has become a medium for topical songs on queer culture and the destruction of patriarchal norms in the context of broader social change. Recent releases by The Knife (Shaking the Habitual), Planningtorock (“Misogyny Drop Dead”), and Terre Thaemlitz (Soulnessless) connect the morphability of sound synthesis with thoughts on the fluidity of gender identity, albeit in very different ways and to varying degrees of reflection. Here, in three parallel interviews, a conversation emerges on the virtues of inauthenticity, gender equality, and finding the political in the personal.

How do you define misogyny?

It’s the act of hatred of women and girls, that’s basically what it is. But of course it has all these layers and all its manifestations.

Why is it on your mind now?

It’s more that it’s something in my life. I brought out a track last summer which was the beginning of my being more direct in how I feel, and also experimenting with being more political, or bringing my politics into my music… which I’d never really done so literally before. But this time I just thought “Fuck it, I want it because it’s in my life so much, and I can’t keep those things separate anymore. Why should I?” I brought out a track last summer called “Patriarchy Over and Out” and that experience, as well as getting into dance music and discovering the beauty of dance music, was really a great vehicle for me to communicate really intense messages—although I don’t think these messages are actually that intense at all. Actually, they make absolute sense. But for a lot of people they’re just like “Wow, that’s really direct”. It was the beginning of an experiment where I was really thinking a lot about how to deal with these topics without people feeling under attack. So I just started to think about really just dealing with the subject itself; that patriarchy and misogyny are just these inventions that the world should try and get rid of. We could do without them, to say the least.

Not all the recordings that I’m doing are the same nature and set-up because I still want to have fun with music and be flexible with it. But so far I’m really enjoying it, it’s kind of a liberating experience to bring these topics into your work and also educate yourself and instigate discussions with my friends and my community here in Berlin, which I really depend on, to be honest. Yes, it is very topical but I think that’s also because it’s something that’s really affecting our lives, it’s always affected everybody’s lives. Also I think the birth of a new generation of young journalists, female journalists, people finding their voices within journalism, feels like—and I might be wrong—a change in the last few years, which is really exciting. I get a lot of feedback, which is really helpful for me and really rewarding, from a lot of new female journalists. I think it is in the air.

Do you think misogyny exists within queer spaces, too?

I would say misogyny exists everywhere. You’d actually be surprised how many people don’t even know what the word means, and have asked me. That’s the other thing about language: even if they’ve needed to engage with that as a reality, they won’t know the word for it. It exists everywhere in all shapes and forms.

I know you’ve worked together with The Knife in the past, who’ve also taken a similarly political turn in addressing issues of gender prejudice. Have you been mutually influencing one another?

It’s difficult to say because we are old friends, we’ve known each other for eight or nine years now. I must admit we’ve had our conversations… But the thing that’s informed my thinking the most was just making and touring with the last album. I’m very proud of W and I still enjoy performing that album, but I came to a bit of a crisis point where I was like, “What is the purpose of my music?” There is so much music out there… not that it determines what I do, but it does affect me. I was wondering what else I personally can get from this. And also touring with an all female band played a role: even in the coolest places you can have quite horrible experiences being all female, sound technician included. After a while it was like “Gender politics are happening to me twenty-four-seven!” I needed to deal with it in a constructive, creative way. For me to stand on the stage with Hermione Frank and Joy Lee Joseph as women and then me actually sing about issues that are actually happening to us right before we go onstage, really helps me deal with that topic.

What sort of things were you encountering?

You can occasionally come across male technicians who just sabotage you. They don’t want you there, and they have big problems with the fact that you’re a professional. Or you play at festivals and then another band will come onstage and completely erode your soundcheck. I still find it shocking that even now it still actually happens. There are so many amazing female producers and DJs, but it is rampant. And also a lot of the times I’ll play at festivals and be the only female act, which I find unacceptable. It feels quite rad to be able to say, “Patriarchy, fuck off!” Having played for so many years, I’ve been full circle in the sense that I totally understand now that in order to create or achieve equality there has to be separatist movements where we as female producers and performers and creative people have to cut out an alternative because it won’t automatically be given to you. That’s also the reason why I started [record label] Human Level: to support female producers. There’s so many amazing female producers doing great dance music who need to get their music out. It’s also important to do events that are predominantly female rather than trying to convert festivals that are so male dominated and also run by men.

One thing that’s always annoyed me about how people have approached and written about your music is how often it gets called “gender bending”.

I know. It’s such a limited language that people use about it, that I’m trying to sound like a man. For me my voice is an instrument. I just like to be playful with it. It’s more of a musical decision. Of course, I’m playing with gender, yes, these old fashioned terms…

How does the music relate to your lyrics? You mentioned the pitched down vocals. There’s a deliberate evasiveness in terms of identity within the music itself.

I use how one deals with transgender issues but in vocals. Now that feels massively cheesy, but it’s kind of how I am when I’m making music and recording, because of how I identify myself as a queer person. That comes through my vocals and my music production. I have to say I feel so fortunate to make music because it’s such a great language to explore and to express yourself and also communicate. You can communicate so much with it. My recent tracks are quite direct, but there are other tracks that I’m working on that are a bit different to that. Certainly, being playful with vocals is something that feels like it’s really happened in the last two or three years, like the famous remix of Destiny’s Child “Say My Name” where the vocals have been completely pitched down. People have really caught onto it. It’s exciting, I think, that people have stopped being precious about vocals and seeing them only as a direct, truthful representation of whatever. It is a form of musical expression and it can be pulled around in many ways.

I always feel your music seeks to go beyond male and female. There’s a manifesto that comes with The Dirty Diaries, the film Marit Östberg [director of The Knife’s “Full of Fire” video] was involved with: “We don’t believe in a fight between sexes, we believe in the fight against sexes.” I find that very pertinent to your music.

I’m really glad about that. Doing this track about misogyny, I mean, I don’t believe in men and women, but when you’re dealing with a topic like misogyny you have to deal with it within your own world, within your own community, dealing with this topic, living this topic. When it’s about your life you can be very articulate, you are very aware of it. But the bigger picture, totally not. It depends on who you’re talking to and what particular elements of gender topics you’re dealing with. I would say I don’t believe there is a male or female, but in a sense, when I deal with this topic I’m going to have to talk in these terms.

Are you afraid the conceptual and discursive nature of your music might make people think the message doesn’t apply to them and ignore your music?

To be honest, when I’m making music, I can’t think of what people will think of it. If I’m excited about it and I’m feeling good about it, then I’m doing it. As a listener I completely understand that sometimes artists go through periods of making a kind of music that’s not your cup of tea and that’s totally fine. But luckily there are people really into it and I can share that with them. I played at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for the Meltdown Festival that was organized by Antony Hegarty where I performed “Patriarchy Over and Out” for the first time there and that was just incredible: people standing on their seats, dancing in the aisles, sharing that moment and that message. It was just like, fuck, yeah, we’re all on the same page. We’re dancing and enjoying this and the message is pretty clear. Again, that’s the nice thing about music, there might be a bunch of tracks that are extremely direct and not beating around the bush, and then there are other tracks like, “What the hell is she talking about?” and I’m happy to have both. Right now I’m really enjoying communicating how I’m feeling quite clearly on a political level. It does feel a bit risky; it’s either take it or leave it. But on the other hand I thought, who would disagree that misogyny shouldn’t fucking drop dead? Who would disagree with that? ~

In western pop, it’s been a minute since the classic protest song has worn anything but the musty perfume of canonization, wafting a relevance more historical than contemporary. But don’t blame it on apathetic youth or lack of international example. While music became one of the most important platforms of protest during the Arab Spring of 2010 and Occupy movements went global in 2011, 2013 has seen a revival of music with a message in the unlikeliest of forms and in conceptually less charted waters. The predominantly instrumental domain of electronic music has become a medium for topical songs on queer culture and the destruction of patriarchal norms in the context of broader social change. Recent releases by The Knife (Shaking the Habitual), Planningtorock (“Misogyny Drop Dead”) and Terre Thaemlitz (Soulnessless), connect the morphability of sound synthesis with thoughts on the fluidity of gender identity, albeit in very different ways and to varying degrees of reflection. Here, in three parallel interviews, a conversation emerges on the virtues of inauthenticity, gender equality, and finding the political in the personal.

You’ve said you were both influenced by political texts when putting together your new album, Shaking the Habitual. Can you elaborate on that?

Karin Dreijer Andersson: When we were making this album, we wanted to find an equal base to make it since we hadn’t been working for so long. And we also thought it would be fun to combine our political interests with making music. Olof had been doing gender studies at the University in Stockholm at the time, and his courses had a great literature list. There were texts by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, as well as Swedish writers writing from a post-colonial view about Sweden’s colonial history.

The title of your new album is taken from a quote by Michel Foucault where he argues that the role of the intellectual is to “re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking”. Applying that to the role of the artist, how do you see the connection between the album’s more explicitly political lyrics and the way these are expressed musically?

Olof Dreijer: For us there is a connection, but for others the connection might be more far-fetched. I think we’re playing around with authenticity and the way we’re doing that is by trying to make sounds that are difficult to pinpoint where they come from—acoustic, electronic, an animal, a voice. We record acoustic sounds and try to make them electronic, and we record electronic sounds and see if they can pass as acoustic. This can be one way where I think we can provide a world of sound where we don’t think one sound is more “authentic” than the other. And I think that is one way where it connects to what we’re doing conceptually. I also think it’s the result of the process of long jam sessions this time, as opposed to constructing the songs with the computer.

So in a way, how you’re playing with concepts of identity and authenticity in sound mirror your thinking about identity and authenticity in gender. Does a progressive political message have to be communicated in progressive musical formats?

OD: I think it all depends on what you’re trying to say. If we try to make something with a certain political content, we try to think about the best way of communicating that with instrumentation and sound. In some cases that should be an easily consumable pop hit, in other instances it should be more emotional.

KDA: At the same time, we’ve been making music together for a very long time now and we need to do things together that are challenging. To do a Deep Cuts album again wouldn’t have been any fun for us. I mean both of us think that it’s fun to learn new instruments and techniques and give yourself challenges.

Your video for “Full of Fire” includes various androgynous characters, handicapped FTMs, public sex, and women peeing in between parked cars. The song ends with you shouting the lyrics “Let’s talk about gender!” What do you want to say about it?

KDA: Well what you see in the video aren’t things you see everyday, and we wanted to show ideas and thoughts that need to be discussed. We wanted to question why it’s like that.

OD: I think there are so many things going on in the video, but I think it mainly shows people that are searching for things that feel right for themselves to live their lives. They are finding ways to live life. It sounds vague, but it’s important in a society in which heteronormative ways are so heavily promoted. And showing these different parallel and subjective experiences is important.

As background info for this interview, I received a comic strip about aid-workers humorously discussing the capitalist compulsions of the extremely wealthy. The characters discuss, amongst other things, how to heal the rich by redistributing their wealth and planting trees. What does this have to do with your album?

OD: To give a little background of the comic, we were thinking about how to go about the album cover and we thought about this comic writer Liv Strömquist who does great feminist, socialist comics. We met and discussed the issues that we address on the record and found common interests and we both wanted to do something about feminist analysis of finance, and I think her initial idea was to move the focus from presenting poverty as the problem to showing wealth to be the problem. And this is the comic strip you received separate from the album. The irony in the comic strip for me is always the parallel response of the European aide workers in Africa. This is the way that it’s close to us—thinking, for example, that planting a set of trees would solve any serious problems. I think that, sadly, the cartoon is a bit humorous.

Is this an album of protest music?

OD: I think it can be seen as that. That’s our past, we grew up with these Swedish protest songs. I think we were wondering how to adapt the idea of protest music to today.

KDA: I think it’s an interesting question—how music can be protest music now a days.~

All fashion from all times is terrible. If you like fashion from 100 to 30 years ago, you’re a damn fool. But if you like fashion from 20 years ago? You’re on top of the game, my friend. That’s probably why you walked in, to check out some of the most up-to-date style reporting based around rising trends formed around the opinions of what the 13 year-old you saw on the subway this morning thinks of what his friends’ Instagram feeds think about fashion. Sit back and enjoy the in-clinic soundtrack while I present the latest in what’s to come in stores, your teen’s closet, and the runways (which I like to call funways, loudly and frequently and usually in a Beavis voice).

STAR POWER

Everyone loves a celeb, right? Nothing to do but look cool by the pool, hork on some hoggs, and star in sick films like Mrs. Doubtfire. This summer, all the best fashion cues will come from the best fashion spews—that’s right, mom and dad, your rowdy youth will be looking to actively void their stomach on their clothes after the projected success of the upcoming Mrs. Doubtfire Returns. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and render unto your teen a line of oversized floral dresses based on the one Mrs. Doubtfire (played by a shockingly alive Robin Williams) wore in the now-viral vomit scene. You’re a good parent and you care about your child.

THE DIAPER TEEN

It’s not any more complicated than that, really. Teens are going to wear diapers. Change my gross teen.

COOL COLLARS

I’ve seen the future of buff+tough fashion, and it’s beautiful rose-petal name is multi-collar. Remember the confusing entity that is bunches of collars, like you see on guys who look like they were grown in vats behind Armani? Guess what, that Jokémon is back and it’s evolved into even more collars. Picture this, asshole: It’s Monday morning. You have a bunch of shirts but only one ripped chest to slam ‘em on. You splash your pits with some incredibly abrasive cologne called Zeus Juice that comes in a bottle shaped like a heavyset man jacking off into a sink. Damn, brother. Who’s the baddest guy with the most sex? Now picture strutting into your office and popping your collar.. then popping the OTHER SIX?!?! Unspeakable game.

SKATEBOARDS

The verdict is in: skateboarding is not a crime, but being caught dead without one is—a fashion crime, that is! School officials have made it legal and also fun to bully anyone caught in class without their wheels and a general idea that Thrasher exists. You think math was hard before, try doing it while you’re ripping sick grinds on teach’s desk and supine body. Caught so much air on that last triple-kickflip that now I can’t stop kickflipping or looking insanely cool. Very hard to type.

INDUSTRIAL TERROR

Speaking of bullying, the hottest retro-buzzword on the playground lates is EBM—or should I say EFM (for “Fashion”)! The only way to rep the illest wards and sigils is to go straight to the source: you gotta harass and beat up those old musicians and take their trousers. Slap Boyd Rice’s belly ’til it’s swollen and inflamed, sloppy tears run down his cheeks all, “Ungh. Please stop slappin’ n whackin’ my tummy and guts.” What Pink Boyd doesn’t know is that he’s dealing with the roughest customer of all: an informed one. Next dinner with meemaw and peepaw you can point at your camo-clad kinder and say they joined the army—and you’d be right.

VAMPIRE YIN-YANG BEANIE

What if Dracula… went to a rave?!?! Hahaha that would be pretty **random**—well, think about that for a while.

We’ll be bringing you more of the fre$hest fa$hion tips in town next week, just as soon as we get our new website up and running. We need to find more flashing UNDER CONSTRUCTION .gifs before the secrets can be spoken, however; already maxed out on the bandwidth usage of jimcarreysaysmoebodystopme.gif.~

Fresh off the airwaves comes this hour long mix by The Cheapers, as heard on Electronic Beats On Air last night. For all of you who didn’t catch the show on FluxFM (we have no words), we hope you waste no time in getting acquainted with this slinky mix of melodic house and techno, steeped in the mood of Berlin. “Why is that?” You wonder. Well, The Cheapers are none other than techno don Ruede Hagelstein and DJ and music writer Fraenzen Texas. The duo are more Berlin than currywurst, basically.

Tracklist
Rone – “Beast”
Ali Love – “Jungle” (Brigante_s_Mix)
Tiefschwarz – “Outline”
Gel Abril – “We Live”
Hugo & The Prismatics – “Le Mystere”
Adam Fierce, Dan Van – “We Rise, We Fall” (TacoMan & Jose M Remix)
Danilo Cardace, Elia Perazzini – “The Last Time”
Odo Oda
Baikal – “Just You and Me” (feat. The Drifter)
Hector – “Born In the You Essay” (Joeski Remix)
Thomas Gandey, Blond:ish – “Voyeur Feat. Thomas Gandey” (Jay Shepheard & Martin Dawson Remix)
Fabio Giannelli – “Maintain” (M.A.N.D.Y. Remix)
Pfeiffer – “Step for 7 Minutes”
Ruede Hagelstein – “Detuned”

Hundreds are a brother-sister duo from Hamburg who had the distinction of opening up proceedings at Electronic Beats Festival in Poznań with their glitchy, piano-led dream pop. Of course, we captured it 1080p HD video in all its minor key, gently transcendental glory. Watch them perform the slow building “Happy Virus” and the melancholic “Grab The Sunset” above.

You can find more live videos by hitting up our YouTube channel. Read our review from the night here.

Photo by Lukasz Jaszak.

Summer festival season is fast approaching, and we’re kicking things off right with our own stage at Lighthouse Festival on the beautiful Lanterna peninsula in Croatia. Led by Vienna’s Pratersauna, Lighthouse boasts a wide variety of electronic artists and bands, many of them near and dear to us, including EB family members Hercules & Love Affair Soundsystem (featuring Andy Butler, pictured above, plus MCs), Wolfram, 7 Citizens, and Modeselektor. Also on the bill are Âme, HVOB, Jimpster, and Round Table Knights, but we recommend checking out Lighthouse’s artist page and following their Facebook to keep abreast of it all!

What makes Lighthouse such a unique festival isn’t just the music—the whole experience is treated like a luxury rave resort for the most discerning electronic music fan. You can spend the early evening at sunset boat parties, practice your tennis game with the Vienna-based Dish Crew (register for that here), watch the Champions League Final, discover new music with label showcases, and experience some of the best local cuisine with fantastic restaurants as well as a Friday/Saturday grill and BBQ session, located directly at the EB arena. Best of all, the ticket price includes accommodation of your choice and budget, so there’s no hassle with hostels! Tickets are now on sale but they’re limited and the booking deadline is May 20th—bungalows and hotels are already sold out, but there are some apartments left, so we suggest acting fast.~

To get you warmed up, here’s a new video from HVOB:

Some Great Videos Japanese laserdisc

Music for the Masses t-shirts and tour merchandise

bootleg cassettes from Poland

The Depeche Mode Fan Exhibition is taking place in the following locations and online at fan4fan.com:
Zagreb: 09–23.05.13, Galerija Klovicevi Dvori
Budapest: 11–23.05.13, Design Terminal
Bratislava: 15–25.5.13, Telekom shop in Polus City Center
Berlin: 6–20.06.13, Warenhaus Jandorf

View the first look of the Budapest exhibition here.

As if it weren’t enough that we are bringing James Blake, Trust, Reptile Youth, Dan Deacon, and Popnoname to Cologne and gave away tickets for it, we can now announce that for everyone who can’t make it in person, we are streaming almost all of this event for you live right here and fan4fan.com. Streaming starts at 9:15pm when Reptile Youth take the stage, continues for Dan Deacon and James Blake, and ends after Trust finishes. DJ Anja Base will be handling all of the changeovers in-between, bringing you a continuous video stream of the action as it happens live. Find the set times on the poster below, and return to this page on May 16th to watch Reptile Youth, Dan Deacon, James Blake, and Trust from the comfort of your own home.

Get ready, all the action starts right here starting at 9:15pm CET on Thursday, May 16th.

As we gallivant through the venerable streets of the Prague’s Little Quarter after a tragically bad black metal concert, my friend “skateboarding” on what appears to be a street sign, I fall in love with the mighty Bohemian capital—albeit very briefly. Some street fracas and a wave party later I find myself walking home at dawn to my beloved “ghetto” Palmovka, the music in my ears completing my early morning walk. I’ve heard so much good music lately, and one of the sonic surprises to catch my ears of late is an archive recording of a Czech project called Quarantaine, who recorded their post-punk/proto electronics during the early ‘80s, a particularly stifling period in the Czechoslovak history following the quashed Prague Spring of ’68, a “normalized” cultural wasteland at the time. The tracks are now released digitally via CS Industrial, a Facebook page that tracks Czech and Slovak industrial, EBM and electronic archeology. Lichtempfindlich offers an authentic account of Quarantaine’s recording sessions and comes rough around the edges, in a good way. The rawness of the material breathes in a similar way to Smersh and their ephemeral recording processes.

A few weeks later I find myself in Bratislava, the capital of my abandoned motherland. I do like Bratislava in some sort of retro-utopian way. It reminds me of these ‘70s and ‘80s Slovak films soaked in melancholia and nostalgia with stark visual aesthetics mixed with the almost comical post-turbo capitalist ethos of 2k13: a concrete dystopia of one of the largest council estates in Eastern Europe, Petržalka, coupled with a receding grandness of Austrian-Hungarian heritage, über-ambitious yuppies, some very vague and weird sense of Slovakness and a semi-Balkan style of flaunting their questionably obtained riches. I DJ at YMCA on a Saturday night at the A4, one of the few havens of experimental music, while next door there is a Meshuggah concert. Two great Polish musicians, Piotr Kurek, whose album Heat was released by Foxy Digitalis and Lutto Lento, proprietor of the amazing Sangoplasmo Records, play in the basement. I play upstairs, tracks by Ugandan Methods, TM404 or Parris Mitchell. A guy walks past and gives me a thumbs up, saying “You play like a man.” Is that a compliment these days? Guess we in the East have a strange attitude towards gender roles.

As I’m writing this, I’m back in Budapest again, a city I have spent an increasing amount of time in recently, observing the hermetic and claustrophobic societal and political atmosphere on one hand—most recently 12,000 people have turned up at the nationalist Jobbik party mayday “Majális” open air including children, soundtracked by all of the popular “Nemzeti rock” bands—and the sprawling underground music scene on the other with labels such as Last Foundation. Their releases include Ekoplekz and Russell Haswell, and Farbwechsel, whose maitre d’ S Olbricht has a new cassette on Opal Tapes. You can read more about Budapest in the latest issue of the EB magazine or on the EB site here.

And last but not least, some shakey footage from our travels across the wild East.~

Easterndaze from easterndaze on Vimeo.

Interested in more obscure and exciting music from Eastern Europe? Head to Easterndaze.