Altered Zones

John Maus
I see politics and art as separate trajectories. There's a political dimension to music, to the extent that it would be a disruption of the regime of the sensible... but it certainly isn’t collective mobilization against the state in the name of radical equality. The protest lyric is a poor substitute for radical political thought or a new idea of politics.

James Ferraro
All of these things operating in synchronicity: like ringtones, flat-screens, theater, cuisine, fashion, sushi. I don’t want to call it “virtual reality,” so I call it Far Side Virtual. If you really want to understand Far Side, first off, listen to [Claude] Debussy, and secondly, go into a frozen yogurt shop. Afterwards, go into an Apple store and just fool around, hang out in there. Afterwards, go to Starbucks and get a gift card. They have a book there on the history of Starbucks-- buy this book and go home.  If you do all these things you’ll understand what Far Side Virtual is-- because people kind of live in it already. --Interview with Emilie Friedlander, November 2011

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FORMA's George Bennett
I remember during the [Harald] Grosskopf panel at Unsound Festival, Laurel Halo said something interesting about grappling with a world that is completely and totally inundated with technology. There's something about dealing with period technology that makes us feel more human or more relatable. Something about getting the whole machine purring feels very cosmic and brings technology back in harmony with art. --Interview with Daniel Gottlieb, June 2011

The problem with the first Moogs was that they were so out of tune. You didn’t just have the up and down key; you had octave scaling, which was controllable, and if it wasn’t exactly there, it sounded horrible. It was so unstable that after ten minutes, it was out again. So I would record for ten minutes, and then I would start the second sequencer, and after five minutes there would be this horrible scratch. I had to do every piece over and over again. And we had to use a light bulb to keep it warm. It was miserable. It was the Middle Ages.

AZ: It’s funny that there are indie bands coming up now that would kill to use the equipment that was frustrating to you back then.

I like the idea of it as well, but there are too many problems! --Interview with Blondes, Emilie Friedlander, & Ric Leichtung, May 2011

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High Wolf
People like to ask me where I live, and sometimes I give different answers. There is a new 7” coming on Baselic records, and the label guy asked me what city I was from. I was with a friend, and we were talking, and he said I should say I was from Djakarta. So I did, and then it was on many websites. On the High Wolf MySpace, it says that I am based in Brazil. Many times people think I’m from Los Angeles. When you hide something from people, they really want to know it. --Interview with Samantha Cornwell, March 2011

I hate Twitter. It has nothing to do with being in a band. And it has nothing to do with being a person either. Because the way so many people spend so much of their time giving each other useless information, talking shit, it’s just depressing. It’s not a way people should communicate. --Interview with Ric Leichtung, June 2011

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Cleaners From Venus' Martin Newell
I’m very flattered that people like my old stuff so much but really, it was me and Lol [Elliott, from Cleaners] in the kitchen! We were broke but inspired and enjoyed listening to it. But I think the biggest pleasure we got out of it at the time was that I used to make homemade beer, and Lol used to make these candles, 'cause he didn’t have enough money to pay his electricity bill. So I used to swap some of the beer for some dope that someone else used to grow, and we would make our own music on cassettes that Lol stole. And I thought one night-- stoned, drunk, listening to music by candlelight--, "We’ve thoroughly enjoyed ourselves tonight, and it’s cost nothing!" That was sort of the epitome of anarchy for me: generating our own everything. It was fantastic. --Interview with Richard MacFarlane, June 2010

Prince Rama's Taraka Larson
The core concept of now age is we're living in “ghost-modernism.” It's not really like post-modernism; it's beyond that now. It's gotten to a point where the past is just recapitulating itself through kitsch and nostalgia. Every new gesture is just an imprint of an old gesture. We're haunted by so many other past styles and tastes in so many ways. I'm interested in the creation of a new relationship to time, where it's not being recapitulated, but instead looking into the present moment and really seeking out music, materials, structures, people, fashion, and whatever is within this lens of the present. --Interview with Ric Leichtung, November 2011

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NNA Tapes' Matt Mayer & Toby Aronson
Matt: With harsh noise in general we both noticed a shift in the mid '00s. Like Toby mentioned, a lot of the dudes doing the harder noise started doing ambient, which seems like a total 180 shift. It created a lot of interesting results, where the noise influence would rub off on the ambient and vice versa, creating this cool hybrid. And now where we are in 2011, it's all become smeared together.

EMA
I feel like the pendulum has to swing back at some point. I’ve always really liked lyrics, and I’ve always really liked vocal stuff, and playing a lot and going to noise shows, I’ve felt in some ways unwelcome. There’s this unwritten rule saying, "You can’t use lyrics that people will understand." I thought there were supposed to be no rules. [Noise] turns into the most codified, regimented form of music, which is not what it should be at all. When Gowns first started off, some people didn’t know how to take us. They were like, "This band might be cool if they didn’t sing." I wonder if it's something about the idea of masculine, abstract sound experiments, and not allowing a range of emotions to come through. For a lot of people who are doing experimental music, at some point it becomes like, "I built this Max patch that does this." It's about the experiment, and the set of parameters. You’re supposed to be tuning out everything but your ears. --Interview with Samantha Cornwell, June 2011

Emeralds' Mark McGuire
We have always somewhat embodied our surroundings and our heritage in our sound. In Ohio, there’s a huge middle class, and a lot of people work their whole lives... there’s always a feeling of struggling, and the feeling that Cleveland's like the joke of the world... We're not a cultural mecca; it's not where all the big stuff's happening. There’s definitely a lot of people out of work, and there’s poverty: it makes people, it's a tough city. But people from Cleveland are proud that they’re from there... It's this kind of tense, dark, and industrial place that has a lot of hidden beauty and a lot to offer, and that comes across in our music. --Interview with Ric Leichtung, February 2011

By Emilie Friedlander

MP3: Harald Grosskopf: "Synthesist"

Perhaps best known as the drummer for Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel (with Manuel Göttsching), and Cosmic Jokers, Berlin's Harald Grosskopf was a German electronic music pioneer in his own right. Recorded in the Summer of 1979, his debut solo LP, Synthesist, was the euphoric, arpeggiated culmination of a two-month struggle with a finnicky Minimoog and a Revox reel-to-reel. The record, released the following year by Hamburg's Sky Records, was all but forgotten until Brooklyn label RVNG Intl. decided to re-issue it, along with a bonus disc of remixes by a handful of analogue synth revivalists, including Blondes, Oneohtrix Point Never,  CFCF, Stellar Om Source, Arp, and James Ferraro. In April, Harald flew out to New York with guitarist and longtime collaborator Axel Manrico Heilhecker to perform Synthesist live for the first time ever at Manhattan's Le Poisson Rouge, with guest appearances by Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp), Laurel Halo, Julianna Barwick, and other millennial admirers. The AZ editorial linked up with Harald, Axel, and Sam Haar and Zachary Steinman of Blondes the night before the show at a restaurant in Greenpoint to talk synthesizers, Timothy Leary, and the origins of the term "krautrock."

Sam: Is it weird playing your old stuff again?

Harald: Actually, in the beginning, about four months ago, I was so over this old stuff. My idea was to take the original tapes [from Synthesist] and cut samples from it. So I was trying to hold of an 8-track, half-inch tape recorder, which is very hard to get. And I got one, but the machine was fucked, so I found some dude who was able to fix it. I tried to reconstruct it, but then I started falling in love with the music as it was. I hadn’t heard the record in 15 years. And suddenly this interest-- it was very nice. And being able to reconstruct it and improvise with it was really satisfying.

Sam: How did you get in contact with RVNG Intl.?

Harald: You know Manuel Göttsching? He put us in contact. Everything was arranged via the Internet; it’s fascinating. In the old days, it was like 500 envelopes with tapes. Everybody can do it now, and it’s faster. And free, basically.