article on VITAL WEEKLY 38S
article on VITAL WEEKLY 40S
interview for HALANA, usa [or download .pdf file 120k]
interview for XERXES, tokyo [or download .pdf file 68k]
interview for IMMERSE, uk [or download .pdf file 68k]
interview for WIRE, uk [or download .pdf file 80k]
interview for REVUE ET CORRIGÊE #29 [or download .pdf file 112k]
article on PERFECT SOUND FOREVER [or download .pdf file 16k]
interview for BLOW UP, italy [or download .pdf file 20k]
DISCUSSION ON VITAL WEEKLY 38S
A few months ago I had the pleasure to meet up with Bernard Günter and Ralf Wehowsky, two of the most interesting composers around at the moment. From our talks I got the impression that neither of them really cared much for noise music. Nevertheless, Bernhard Guenter obtained a copy of a THU20 cassette (reviewed in VITAL 37) released by GROSS. Like most of the GROSS releases, this tape is quite noisy. Much to my surprise I received a fax some time later, in which Bernhard Guenter said he quite liked the music. Of course this came as a surprise to me, and I asked him to explain this. What follows is the letter I received. This serves points of discussion about the state of composition and improvisation. You are free to respond. Please send your letters directly to Peter Duimelinks, Postbus 19049, 3001 BA Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Or e-mail
"Dear Peter, So you're wondering why I could like the THU20 "Live in Nancy" tape despite it's very noisy character? Well, there are a couple of criteria for my perception of noise music: to start with, I like to HEAR something, which means I have to be able to hear all noise strata individually in their superposition, so I can determine their contrast or blending with other, their combinations and so forth. In the Nancy tape, this is easy to do; very often the different sounds are spread in the stereo spectrum, which helps a lot. Then, there is a lot of dynamic variation and change in the frequency contents, which keeps the music interesting to the ear (You can easily deduce from this what noise music I DON'T like: it would be mono, same loudness and same frequency spectrum all the time, with mushy sound making it impossible to figure out what's going on - add a constant,blurred, wavering delay to it and you can be sure I'll really hate it!). I always defined a composers job very basically as giving people something to hear, so if I can't really hear anything, I figure somebody isn't doing his job. (I recently had a conversation with John Duncan about this and he said that for much of the real hard-core noise music it can be said that one does not hear details at first, but then starts to make them out like objects in a fog. I think he's probably right, although I suspect some of that stuff to include only fog, no objects, and my aesthetic bias is just more oriented towards transparent than opaque sound.) From these basic requirements as to the overall sound we then get to the FORM of the piece, which is the means of turning a couple of sounds into a piece of music, and hopefully into a work of art. In the case of the Nancy tape we're talking about improvisational work. I generally think that there are three basic approaches in improvisation one encounters all the time:1) the EXPLORATION approach, which has the musicians explore the possibilities of a given set of instruments and/or machinery,2) the CONVERSATION approach featuring some kind of communication thing between the musicians, which works by using imitation and contrast of the sounds and/or musical phrases produced,3) the QUASI COMPOSITION approach, in which the musicians try to put down statements that build some musicalobject similar to a composition, trying to keep the overall form of the piece in mind all the time.The EXPLORATION approach I generally don't like too much, because exploring the possibilities of a given equipment seems like a necessary preparation for musical work, trying to obtain a usable material - doing this at the same time as the musical work itself does not seem right to me, and will create enormous formal problems in any event. The CONVERSATION approach is too similar to language in my opinion, and tends to reduce art to communication alone (also, since improvisation is a pretty difficult thing, if taken seriously, there's always the danger of falling into stereotyped behavioral patterns of reaction to each other. The QUASI COMPOSITION approach is the one I prefer, because it tends towards objectivating the form of the piece into a musical work of art. I think this has to do with the first two approaches stressing the local time (each of the moments in which sound is created), while the compositional approach gives priority to global time (so that the individual moments become part of an overall time structure). I would consider THU20's work on the Nancy tape as of the QUASI COMPOSITION type; now of course it is EXTREMELY difficult to do this for half an hour, and I think there are moments when overall form starts to crumble, when parts become unfocused or lengthy and it becomes difficult to keep up the tension. This is, in my opinion, normal/inevitable and one of the drawbacks of any improvisational approach (which is why, among other things, I have chosen composition has my method). Another drawback of improvisation is the fact one can only develop the formal consequences of what is happening in the direction of linear time, meaning you can't go back to the beginning to modify something to make it coherent with the structure that has developed (in this sense, an improvisation always has the form of a document, even if it's not documented, because things are related as they happen.....) during the course of the improvisation. Composition, for me, starts when the form I use to expose the material I have obtained by exploration of various instruments/pieces of machinery, begins to take up a life of its own, have its own demands and to interact in a dialectical fashion with the material - the material needing a particular form to unfold, the form in turn needing specific material to develop according to its own logic, until the whole thing crystallizes into a musical work of art. The work is really good if all moments of it integrate into the whole, without loosing their individual value as a moment (since this is never completely possible, there will be moments and parts that indicate the complete /harmonious unity of a work as an utopia). By the way, this is one of the reasons why I am strictly against the ideas of combining noise music (as an art form) and ambient or house, (like they are discussed in VITAL every once in while) in order to reach a larger public: if we consider music as art, the relation of material and form has to be a living proces and we cannot see the form of ambient or house as a tin can we can just pour our musical content into, so that everybody will have access to it (By the way, the audience knows/feels the difference between art and entertainment very well - and for the most of them, it's entertainment they want, let's not kid ourselves! Because figuring out a work of art is work, it's not brought to you like fast food for instant consummation/gratification....). As far as I can see, all attempts of creating a popular art have turned out to be either not popular or not art. I believe that (especially for talented musicians like yourself and the other guys in THU20) TIN PAN ALLY is a dead end street!
All the best, Bernhard Günter.
P.S.: I realize that some people will consider my concept of a work of art rather old-fashioned, after all the attempts that have been made to modify that concept by introducing the notions of the "open work", the "work in progress", "works with variable structure" and so forth. I consider most of these concepts as an extension of the classical "work" concept (which generally makes creating these forms more complex/difficult), kind of an displacement along the same vector, since these types of art-works have an identity or identifiable GESTALT. I may very well work in any of these forms, if the artistical necessity to do so presents itself.
[This article appears by courtesy of VITAL WEEKLY]
article on VITAL WEEKLY 40S
interview for HALANA, usa [or download .pdf file 120k]
interview for XERXES, tokyo [or download .pdf file 68k]
interview for IMMERSE, uk [or download .pdf file 68k]
interview for WIRE, uk [or download .pdf file 80k]
interview for REVUE ET CORRIGÊE #29 [or download .pdf file 112k]
article on PERFECT SOUND FOREVER [or download .pdf file 16k]
interview for BLOW UP, italy [or download .pdf file 20k]
DISCUSSION ON VITAL WEEKLY 38S
A few months ago I had the pleasure to meet up with Bernard Günter and Ralf Wehowsky, two of the most interesting composers around at the moment. From our talks I got the impression that neither of them really cared much for noise music. Nevertheless, Bernhard Guenter obtained a copy of a THU20 cassette (reviewed in VITAL 37) released by GROSS. Like most of the GROSS releases, this tape is quite noisy. Much to my surprise I received a fax some time later, in which Bernhard Guenter said he quite liked the music. Of course this came as a surprise to me, and I asked him to explain this. What follows is the letter I received. This serves points of discussion about the state of composition and improvisation. You are free to respond. Please send your letters directly to Peter Duimelinks, Postbus 19049, 3001 BA Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Or e-mail
"Dear Peter, So you're wondering why I could like the THU20 "Live in Nancy" tape despite it's very noisy character? Well, there are a couple of criteria for my perception of noise music: to start with, I like to HEAR something, which means I have to be able to hear all noise strata individually in their superposition, so I can determine their contrast or blending with other, their combinations and so forth. In the Nancy tape, this is easy to do; very often the different sounds are spread in the stereo spectrum, which helps a lot. Then, there is a lot of dynamic variation and change in the frequency contents, which keeps the music interesting to the ear (You can easily deduce from this what noise music I DON'T like: it would be mono, same loudness and same frequency spectrum all the time, with mushy sound making it impossible to figure out what's going on - add a constant,blurred, wavering delay to it and you can be sure I'll really hate it!). I always defined a composers job very basically as giving people something to hear, so if I can't really hear anything, I figure somebody isn't doing his job. (I recently had a conversation with John Duncan about this and he said that for much of the real hard-core noise music it can be said that one does not hear details at first, but then starts to make them out like objects in a fog. I think he's probably right, although I suspect some of that stuff to include only fog, no objects, and my aesthetic bias is just more oriented towards transparent than opaque sound.) From these basic requirements as to the overall sound we then get to the FORM of the piece, which is the means of turning a couple of sounds into a piece of music, and hopefully into a work of art. In the case of the Nancy tape we're talking about improvisational work. I generally think that there are three basic approaches in improvisation one encounters all the time:1) the EXPLORATION approach, which has the musicians explore the possibilities of a given set of instruments and/or machinery,2) the CONVERSATION approach featuring some kind of communication thing between the musicians, which works by using imitation and contrast of the sounds and/or musical phrases produced,3) the QUASI COMPOSITION approach, in which the musicians try to put down statements that build some musicalobject similar to a composition, trying to keep the overall form of the piece in mind all the time.The EXPLORATION approach I generally don't like too much, because exploring the possibilities of a given equipment seems like a necessary preparation for musical work, trying to obtain a usable material - doing this at the same time as the musical work itself does not seem right to me, and will create enormous formal problems in any event. The CONVERSATION approach is too similar to language in my opinion, and tends to reduce art to communication alone (also, since improvisation is a pretty difficult thing, if taken seriously, there's always the danger of falling into stereotyped behavioral patterns of reaction to each other. The QUASI COMPOSITION approach is the one I prefer, because it tends towards objectivating the form of the piece into a musical work of art. I think this has to do with the first two approaches stressing the local time (each of the moments in which sound is created), while the compositional approach gives priority to global time (so that the individual moments become part of an overall time structure). I would consider THU20's work on the Nancy tape as of the QUASI COMPOSITION type; now of course it is EXTREMELY difficult to do this for half an hour, and I think there are moments when overall form starts to crumble, when parts become unfocused or lengthy and it becomes difficult to keep up the tension. This is, in my opinion, normal/inevitable and one of the drawbacks of any improvisational approach (which is why, among other things, I have chosen composition has my method). Another drawback of improvisation is the fact one can only develop the formal consequences of what is happening in the direction of linear time, meaning you can't go back to the beginning to modify something to make it coherent with the structure that has developed (in this sense, an improvisation always has the form of a document, even if it's not documented, because things are related as they happen.....) during the course of the improvisation. Composition, for me, starts when the form I use to expose the material I have obtained by exploration of various instruments/pieces of machinery, begins to take up a life of its own, have its own demands and to interact in a dialectical fashion with the material - the material needing a particular form to unfold, the form in turn needing specific material to develop according to its own logic, until the whole thing crystallizes into a musical work of art. The work is really good if all moments of it integrate into the whole, without loosing their individual value as a moment (since this is never completely possible, there will be moments and parts that indicate the complete /harmonious unity of a work as an utopia). By the way, this is one of the reasons why I am strictly against the ideas of combining noise music (as an art form) and ambient or house, (like they are discussed in VITAL every once in while) in order to reach a larger public: if we consider music as art, the relation of material and form has to be a living proces and we cannot see the form of ambient or house as a tin can we can just pour our musical content into, so that everybody will have access to it (By the way, the audience knows/feels the difference between art and entertainment very well - and for the most of them, it's entertainment they want, let's not kid ourselves! Because figuring out a work of art is work, it's not brought to you like fast food for instant consummation/gratification....). As far as I can see, all attempts of creating a popular art have turned out to be either not popular or not art. I believe that (especially for talented musicians like yourself and the other guys in THU20) TIN PAN ALLY is a dead end street!
All the best, Bernhard Günter.
P.S.: I realize that some people will consider my concept of a work of art rather old-fashioned, after all the attempts that have been made to modify that concept by introducing the notions of the "open work", the "work in progress", "works with variable structure" and so forth. I consider most of these concepts as an extension of the classical "work" concept (which generally makes creating these forms more complex/difficult), kind of an displacement along the same vector, since these types of art-works have an identity or identifiable GESTALT. I may very well work in any of these forms, if the artistical necessity to do so presents itself.
[This article appears by courtesy of VITAL WEEKLY]