Where you already interested in sound research as you were the drummer of STOL or as you were a percussionist in free jazz ensembles ?
stephan mathieu : definitely. the way i played my drums was very much about the richness of sound deep inside the instrument. i used to prepare my instrument with selected materials and developed my own playing techniques.. also my drums and cymbals have been custom made for me because i had my very own ideas of how i wanted them to sound. speaking of making the drums sound there were always two ways for me to do this - playing them very loud or very quiet and soft. shortly before i quit playing drums i started working with cheap electronics like piezo mics and so on.
What changed your interest, from analogical to numeric ?
this was when i spend some days in a harddisk recording studio for the first time back in ’96 and was introduced in producing and also heavily changing my instruments sound through software. after a couple of days i was able to do things on my own and thought to myself that its stupid to go for a work like this into an studio. i wanted to be able to do this at home. in the end it took me 2 more years to finally have my first setup at home but since then i stopped playing the drums, mainly because learning to work with a computer was eating up all my time. when i was setting up my drum kit recently for the first time in years and hit one drum i absolutely couldn’t deal with this very direct sound. It’s not the time right now but i’ll definitely will go back there.
What created your interest in music ? Have you learnt music composition or history ?
my parents have been music collectors ever since and i grew up surrounded by music from records, the radio and tv. i started playing drums (selftaught) when i was 10. in 1981 i got introduced to the music of einstuerzende neubauten, throbbing gristle and so on which certainly changed a lot for me. then i discovered jazz, free jaz, improvised music and soon after contemporary or so called "new" music. besides this i’ve always been a big pop music lover. i’ve never studied music or history in an university or such, just from life itself. in general my approach is being selftaught, learning by doing, a cultured dilletantism. for me this is important in order to stay autonomous and develop my own language.

How did your collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers happen for Heroin (Brombron 2001) ?
we’ve been friends since a while, visiting each other every now and then but we never really sat down and worked on an cooperative project. instead we listened and discussed music and so on. while touring together end of 2000 i was invited by frans de waard to do an project with a guest of my choice at extrapool, an artists house in nijmegen, holland. so, this was our chance, i invited ekkehard and soon we spent a week there working together around the clock. a very productive time, beside the complete heroin thing ekki also produced his "plays robert johnson" 7" and i did several tracks for "frequencyLib".

i’ll paste another description of heroin here -
>
Heroin was recorded and produced on seven days between christmas 2000 and the dawn of the year 2001 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I was invited to produce an album with a guest of my choice in residency for the Brombron series, a newly founded collaboration between the Staalplaat label, Amsterdam and the Extrapool artists’ house in Nijmegen. I asked my friend Ekkehard Ehlers to join me. Extrapool has a rehersal studio (the rock’n’roll way - the usual gear crammed in a dimly lit humid room, no windows, trash & beercans full of cigarettes all over the place), a small harddisc recording studio, two guest rooms, the Knust stencil printing workshop (where the CDs packaging was produced) and a performance space. We decided to use the recording studio mainly to scan the instruments we found in the rehersal room and set up my own monitors and mixer in Ekkehards room (which was also pretty trashy, so thats where the title Heroin comes from, along with the fact that the very first pieces we made there were sounding like blood rustling in your ears). As the whole house is equipped with a fast ethernet network I spent the first few days down in the studio making experiments with microphone setups (i.e. working with controlled feedbacks between drums and the monitors, see the Blue Baby pieces track 5 and 12 on the CD), recording nd processing soundfiles and sending them immediately to Ekkehards desktop in his room upstairs. That way we were able to work quiet effectively and with a lot of fun surprising each other.On new years eve I recorded the fireworks from the little wooden hut’s window on Extrapool’s rooftop where my wife Katja, our daughter and I lived. In the morning Katja played the organ for us and Ekkehard and I knew that we’d be finished soon.
>

I have the impression that Ehlers and you have many in common like curiosity, open minded way of thinking, harmonic research...
although we’re very different persons we share a lot of common thoughts and the love for music, art, fashion. also we both have very conceptual aproaches to our work. and yes, a big love for beauty in music. sadness, that is.
What do you think of his work, of his Whatness label releases and of the work you did together for Heroin ?
especially the work under his own name ("betrieb", "plays" and the upcoming "gute politik braucht keinen feind") is among my favourite "contemporary" music. whatness is a cooperation by ekki and markus weissbeck, a great graphic designer from frankfurt. i like the all over concept a lot although i dont like all of the releases really that much (but i’m picky in general*). i think the liam gillick pieces are wonderful !

in this heroin week end of 2000 i guess we both learned from each other. the most important thing for me was to accept and leave sounds the way they are. i gave ekki a lot of things i thought of as "material" but he said "what do you want ?! its finished, its great !" and i said "well ... oh, you’re right.". in the end 80% of the music on heroin is by me but ekki produced it with his methods and made it sound wonderful. he’s a great producer and i’m very proud of this album. we definetely will have to do something again soon.

Do you feel close to artists like Oval or Microstoria or do you feel closer to older works like the ones by Brian Eno or Steve Reich ?
i cant say so. in fact with my work i dont want to be close to anybody, i’m really interessted in doing my own thing. there are of course so many things catching my attention and giving me inspiration but this can be anything - architecture, situations in real life, design, movies, landscapes, reading, paintings and art in general, clothes, dreams, people. i sometimes feel like a sponge and dont know when i should ever digest all those impressions. thats certainly a reason why i’m so productive with my music. i’m always full of ideas and thoughts and put it into music. i often feel that i have to shelter myself from impressions. so i dont listen to music coming from a similar field like mine too much. ok, its getting more again but in the last 3 years there have been weeks where i have not listened to any music at all. since a while i enjoy listening to some of the great masters like charlemagne palestine, phill niblock, elaine radigue, walter marchetti. very clear and digested stuff.
Can you explain us what interest you in sound, so well illustrated by your release frequencyLib (= liberation of frequencies) ? Does it mean decomposing the sound so as it to be dense and aerial, almost sparkling (what everybody calls in your work your "sound signature") ?
hmm, frequencyLib stands for me for the library of sounds living somewhere in the back of our heads. the songs the radio were playing when you were a baby, a child, or the radio clock played to wake you up when you went to school. personal evergreens or pieces which were simply there ever since. i’m full of this stuff (and i’m more or less a walking music library*) my main interest for this project or merely the initial question was "why does this and that tune (say : "albatross" by fleetwood mac) have the power to bewitch so many people ? whats in this combination of frequencies ? what makes it so magical ? those little loops going "boo-boo-boo-do-boo" in your head when you are walking in the street. in the end for frequencyLib i was looking for those little private things and took my chance to turn it into my own material to work with. its not about cover versions or an hommage but about faces, places, a private view. in general i want my sound to conquer the space where it is played back. my ideal with most of my things is to have it played back at fairly high volume on a good system.

For the volume of the En/Of Series (Bottrop-Boy) how did the work with Tobias Rehberger happen ? How does the final artwork look like ? What interest you in this series ?
robert meijer who runs the bottrop-boy label invited me for this project and i liked this idea of a cooperation imediately. i just got familiar with rehbergers work very shortly before that because tobias and i where invited to make (seperate) works for an cultural heritage in germany close to my hometown. so we met 2 weeks before robert came up with the idea and i had the impression/feeling that we somehow work with a similar language. i thought it was a good chance to introduce us musicians/composers who work very art related to the classical art audience. in fact i dont know if this ever really happened with the series ?!
i have to say (and i’m usually not too loud about work i’m involved with) that in this entire series so far, the coop between t.r. and myself is a standout. we didnt communicate with each other, the label acted like an agent. i visited a room he made for the museum in strasbourg and when i came in my first thought was "sesamestreet !". at that time i was working on a birthday present for my daughter who was going to be 3 years old soon. as a sort of a conclusion to frequencyLib i was reworking four of her favourite sesamestreet songs for her and deceited that this would be my en/off thing. robert meijer told this rehberger (who actually watched sesamestreet with his little daughter as well) and he finally designed a cover for an imaginary 10" vinyl release by an imaginary artist. so its an empty 10" cover and i think its a perfect couple. a second edition for en/of with british artist darren almond should be finished very soon (En/Of 011)..

What bring you the release of Gigue, artistically speaking ?
i simply liked the recording and thought it also worked without the whole live experience. more important, chris murphy/fallt loved the piece and wanted to put it out.
How do you approach lives, do you consider them as performances ?
yes, i do. i spent a big part of the 90s as a live musician (even a live "composer" which an improviser always is), sometimes playing 3 or 4 times a week, so in the end i guess i know what i want from a live situation for myself as a performer and for the audience. especially when you perform with nothing but a computer its definetely the music and quality of sound that counts. so especially during the last year i got very picky with concerts i do. the whole technical aspect is very important for me. as i’m not on stage i’m working with a projection which is there instead of me. a flickering image of slowly changing colour to give people something to stare at a good performance of my work should be like going to the cinema.

Where did the ideas of making a collection of remixes under the name of Full Swing come from (talking about the format, the numbers of volumes) ?
after i made the "full swing EP" for orthlorng musork (kit clayton own’s label) they invited me to make an album. i just finished a remix for laub, two for autopoiesis and one for my friends of raumgestaltung eins which joshua (joshua kit clayton) and sue (sue costabile) liked and wanted to release. i liked the idea to release a collection of remixes as the remixers album instead of the artist being remixed. the original idea to make it a series of 5 10" records came from the aspect that i was thinking of the remixes i made until then as black, black holes so i wanted to have them release in "small doses". vinyl was important to me because i love the material as a filtering media to make these digital creatures more human and down to earth. also the idea that you have to stand up and turn the record (hmm, i hope this doesnt sound too blunt now ...) when this music was still fresh for me i absolutely could not imagine to have this on a cd. i really thought after 20 minutes people would be asleep. at a certain point it was obvious that a cd would be "good" to help covering the vinyl costs and finally i’m very happy with the cd (not at last because stefan betke (aka Pole) mastering works, funny, much better on cd).
What have been your criterias concerning the bands and the songs ? Do you have something like a typical process as you start realizing a remix ?
i was asked for a remix by most of the people involved. the pieces were made between ’99 and the end of 2001 and during this time my methods changed quiet a bit. for the main portion of edits i deceited to work mainly with one software tool. with this tool i would create seperate voices from the original sources, voices which should serve as bass, rythm, melody, little add ons, very band-like. also i was looking for those tiny bits in the originals which promised a little pop appeal (which was also an aspect that led me to use real pop music for frequencyLib).

What brings to you, musically speaking, the fact of learning students Digital Music at the University of Fine Arts & Design in Saarbrücken ? With the same idea, what brought to your music those works you did for dance & theatre ?
both is about exchange of ideas and, for myself, about proofing my work in different contexts. working with students (all of them are design students) is such a great thing, probably its me who learns the most.

In all those activities, considering the artistic choices you did and artistic ideas you followed, what made you create, what is the common vector ? Is it only a story of "extracting sounds from homeopathic vibrations at their sources" ?
haha, no, certainly not. thats where i started with the computer, a method which fascinated me for a while. in fact i believe in homeopathics as a medicine a lot and more and more i’m thinking that i have a big heart for esotherics in general* - m a y b e ... maybe thats the common vector. i love things that cant or merely dont need to be explained and live up only through their presence. since a while i’m very interessted in musical processes that cant be really controlled but which are executed by software i know and rely on. so my basic tools are like living organisms, they are (at least for me) cryptic but once you’ve made friends with each other they do marvelous things for you. also i want beauty in my musical work. at the moment i curiously find a special beauty in some extremely noisy things i made recently. on the other hand i’m doing things you could probably also sell in the pharmacy. i’m a libra and i’m always between the extremes.

Today, how do you judge your whole work of art ?
still, i’m happy that there are no things i released once and dont like them anymore today. also i feel my work is constantly changing and i’m glad about this aspect.

Considering this evaluation, how do you presage of your future artistic evolution ?
i will certainly move more towards "making things" - carpets, tials, curtains, dishes, design as an continuation of my sound installations. next step seems to be creating rooms without real sound but more with things, shapes, light and colour. on the other hand i really want to make an album with beats, strings, vocals, accoustic instruments. probably this year but i’m not sure. maybe without a computer ?

interview by stéphane
photos akira rabelais
via email
2003, march