why fata morgana?, etc.

Three fragments on German electronic music, from c. August 2017

 

Why Fata Morgana?

 

‘Oder ist es vielleicht doch nur eine Fata Morgana?’

-Asmus Tietchens

‘Or is it perhaps really just a fata Morgana?’ It is precisely because our experience of music – and perhaps particularly the experimental electronic music to which Tietchens refers here in his sleevenote for Cluster’s LP Qua – is so evanescent, that I seek to substantiate it by defining its social meaning.

‘Fata Morgana’ is the name of a track by Conrad Schnitzler and Wolf Sequenza, a piece whose jaunty yet constricted rhythms earn it pole position in an album (Consequenz) in which – so Tietchens wrote – ‘little musical motifs are played without really becoming melodies capable of underpinning bona fide songs.’ The style is sketch-like and packed with contingency; Schnitzler was always (as Théo Lessour noted) ‘portraying his own vision of a new urban Germany that was fascinated with electronic modernity and improvised expression’.

A fata Morgana is a fairy, which meaning brings to mind Klaus Schulze’s early masterpiece Irrlicht. The noun ‘Irrlicht’ can be translated as ‘will-o’-the-wisp’. Another meaning of ‘fata Morgana’ given by the OED is ‘a kind of mirage’, recalling the image of the musician dematerializing amidst trees on the back of your Irrlicht CD.

Tietchens wrote of ‘this art of vagueness, these elusive sketches’. For him, in Qua ‘outlines sharpen, contours take and immediately lose shape and again new images arise’. It is unsurprising that the remix supplied by techno artist Fata Morgana (William Brunner) for Pantha du Prince’s XI Versions of Black Noise should have been the version of ‘Lay in Shimmer’.

To figure my experience of music in terms of the fata Morgana is to emphasize aesthetic illusion. OED cites a certain R. Jamieson in 1818: ‘In mountainous regions, deceptions of sight, fata morgana, &c. are more common.’ Mark Prendergast suggested music’s ability to generate a state of collectively experienced illusion in The Ambient Century, when he juxtaposed his description of Schulze’s ‘uncannily intoxicating’ album Mirage to Schulze’s view of his music as ‘a dream without the isolation of sleep’. The title of the third movement of Irrlicht, after all, references Sils Maria – the Upper Engadine mountain village beloved of Friedrich Nietzsche and (in his wake) a host of other writers. What Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy had called ‘the artistic middle world of the Olympians’, ‘the Olympian magic mountain’, was precisely aesthetic illusion in dramatic or musical form. Music’s redemption of suffering is effected by ‘the most powerful and pleasurable illusions’. ‘The Greeks knew and felt the fears and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live at all they had to interpose the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians between themselves and those horrors.’

-August 2017

 

 

 

The Human in Krautrock and After

 

Hans-Joachim Roedelius and an assortment of other early Krautrockers placed the question of the status of humans within music at centre stage, when they erupted into West Berlin’s Zodiak Free Arts Lab as the collective Human Being. Writing in his book Future Days of this epochal moment (a moment recorded on Live at the Zodiak – Berlin 1968), David Stubbs implied that it can be understood as an assertion of human self-expression in the face of a confining education system:

‘Ensembles like Human Being were an implicit reproach to the Hoch academies whose standards were imposed on young Germans as a matter of cultural course, as if musical training was a way of being bound to the state at the highest level, rather than a means of individual expression’.  

Yet we should be slightly wary of viewing the emergence of Krautrock in terms of an opposition between academic training and individual expression. For whilst Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler, for example, were certainly – as Stubbs notes – ‘untutored’ (2014: 334), commentators on Krautrock (especially Stubbs) and on later electronic musical styles show these musical forms consistently questioning precisely the idea of human ego-expression.  

An important summary of Krautrock’s musical mission provided by Stubbs lays down that ‘the real “business” is in the structures, the ambience, the flow, a larger ideal, a collective energy, rather than ego-driven individualism’ (2014: 37). In his The Ambient Century, Mark Prendergast reinforces our sense that a critique of human individualism was fundamental to this music’s self-identity, when he comments on Ian MacDonald’s pioneering 1972 NME articles ‘Germany Calling’. The ‘roots of new German rock’, Prendergast writes, were traced by MacDonald to ‘a rejection of all previous forms, an acceptance of open improvisation, with “no leaders”. Hence guitar heroes and singer-stars were out, group instrumental expression was in.’

Prendergast notes that MacDonald described this music as ‘tonally free sound improvisation’ (2003: 279). A connection between a freeing of sound and the musical critique of human individualism is made again when Stubbs observes of Schnitzler that he was ‘hostile to the idea that his music was in any way autobiographical. “It is pure sound that I make,” he told David Keenan. And I’m not expressing myself in any way when I’m making it.”’ (2014: 295) The impulse in Krautrock’s electronic wing and its progeny towards a creation of sound distinct from the self, is found again by Stubbs in Kraftwerk who (in their The Man-Machine) are seen to eschew – and ‘in sympathy with the post-punk movement’ – the ‘open-necked, open-hearted, autobiographical indulgence of the over-Americanised, histrionic rock star’. Such non-macho ‘emotionlessness’ (2014: 194) relates to what Stubbs calls the ‘sheer, static cool of Kraftwerk’, a cool in contravention of the capitalist norm ‘in which every mission statement must boast of a “passion” for whatever commodity or service it is providing’ (2014: 207).   

Schnitzler again proposed ‘free sounds’ in the sense of sounds freed from human subjectivity, when he suggested (in conversation with Stubbs) that such sounds might be those inassimilable to, or unincorporable by personal memory or a discrete consciousness:

‘“All these people making music with the drums and flutes, I hated it – and melodies that were like worms in your head,” he said, shuddering at the spirit of the age in which he came of age. “All day long, rattling in your head. I wanted something that was in – and then you lost it already. Only if you can’t play instruments can you really make free sounds.”’ (2014: 283)

Just as Schnitzler’s nonhumanism refused melody, the kosmische sound of Tangerine Dream’s ‘Nebulous Dawn’ (on Zeit), for Stubbs, supplied a nonhumanist evasion of rhythm. ‘This is a music that fails to settle into any sort of rhythm, or easy pictorial representation – it vaguely conveys the remote workings of a universe utterly indifferent to human beings and their own little timelines.’ (2014: 306) In an essay genealogizing Germany’s kosmische musical aesthetic, Ken Hollings cited the famous quotation from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason : ‘“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily they are reflected upon – the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”’ In this saying, which is inscribed on his tombstone (2009: 21-2), Kant pairs outer space with inner space, and so dialecticizes the cosmic non-human and human subjectivism. This dialectic is split apart in Krautrock. Stockhausen had already aligned the cosmic with nonhumanism, describing the shift in post-WW2 music as ‘an orientation away from mankind. […] Once again one looked up to the stars and began an intensive measuring and counting.’ (Davis 2009: 37) Stubbs writes that ‘as reflected in the grim, static expanses of works like Atem, Tangerine Dream’s view of the universe is gloomily reminiscent of the philosophy of Schopenhauer or Spinoza – vast and indifferent to human concerns, cold and neutral’ (2014: 395). If kosmische Krautrock does have rhythm, as Harmonia’s ‘Sehr Kosmisch’ (from Musik von Harmonia) so memorably does, for Stubbs it signifies only a denigration of humanism. ‘Somewhere in the background, a chugging rhythm labours at low wattage, deliberately subordinate in the mix, putting human activity in its place in the universe.’ (2014: 342)

Referencing Einstürzende Neubauten, Théo Lessour noted that ‘in the early 80s ego was king’. ‘“Fütter mein Ego!” (‘Feed my ego!’) demanded their 1984 song Yu-Gung.’ (2012: 220) Yet by 1989 John Cage could signal a new development of nonhumanism in post-Krautrock musical culture, pronouncing that ‘people will often opt for quiet sounds. The awful presence of intention in music makes the non-intentional Ambient sound more useful.’ (Prendergast 2003: 44) Moreover, and whilst the Krautrock groups rejected Führer-like figures in the 1970s, electronic music’s characteristic refusal of performer-figures dates right back to the immediate post-war period. As David Toop pointed out in his Ocean of Sound, ‘by 1951, electronic music experiments were taking place in Germany and America, eliminating the musical performer almost entirely’ (2001: 125). In fact, as Brian Eno observed, such dehumanization is built into the very era of mechanical reproduction – the modern recording process – itself: ‘it was recording which really liberated music from the moment of performance and from the performers themselves’ (2003: xi).

Of course DJ culture concretized the shift from human performance to machine expression which was displayed in early Krautrock such as Kraftwerk. Toop quotes Ralf Hütter recalling the 1971 party at a Düsseldorf arts centre during which Kraftwerk set a drum machine ‘“going with some echo loops and some feedback and we just left the stage and joined the dancers. It kept on going for an hour or so.”’ (2001: 201) Listen to contemporary dub techno such as Echo Delta’s ‘Muv’ (from the fine Blu Eon LP) – the machine-driven practice is unchanged from Kraftwerk’s in 1971. Toop saw how ‘disco mixing, the merging of records by a DJ, denied the musician as performer, denied the integrity of any individual performance’. This meant that ‘communication, the human problem, could take place in the machine: first, record decks and tape editing, then samplers, then hard-disk drives’ (2001: 43). Toop records the charges customarily made against the phenomenon of what Neil Tennant called ‘machines playing live’ (2001: 53): that such music is faceless and lacks spontaneity. ‘One of the frequent criticisms aimed at new ambient and electronic music is that the music lacks stars, focal points, magazine-cover fodder, dynamic performers. By definition, a computer-driven, pre-programmed performance is pre-determined.’ (2001: 48-9) Yet by conceiving of the DJ or electronic musician as a sort of transmitter, analyst or seer of machine communication, Toop reinvested this music with an element of human expression. In Biosphere’s set at the Melkweg in Amsterdam in October 1993, Toop discerned a musician who ‘with visuals and a keen sense of how to pace the music, […] conjures real excitement, mystery and tension from digital information’ (2001: 49). Precisely the pacing or rhythm analysis is Biosphere’s performance.

The concern with a potential rehumanization of our dehumanizing involvement with technology is notable in Stubbs’s account of the legacy of Krautrock. When Stubbs points to our current alienated condition of post-space age conservatism, our state of being both unexcited by technology and too cynical to question its encroachment on our humanity – what he calls ‘our present age of sophisticated fatalism’ – he goes on to cite Amon Düül 2’s ‘mission statement’ on their website, which emphasizes ‘“the vision to escape the cosmic loop of stupid recurrence […] and still free minds before they could be hypnotized into fatal despondency”’ (2014: 88). Stubbs also quotes that group’s John Weinzierl: ‘“I think it’s an industrial thing and a media thing. You’re sitting in front of the television, this boombox and you’re dependent, you can’t switch it off. You feel helpless, unable to influence anything. But you can.”’ (2014: 87)              

References

Davis, Erik (2009) ‘Kosmische’, in: Nikolaos Kotsopoulos (ed.), Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy (London: Black Dog Publishing), pp. 32-39.

Eno, Brian (2003) ‘Foreword’, in: Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby – The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (London: Bloomsbury), pp. xi-xii.

Hollings, Ken (2009) ‘Background Radiation’, in: Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy (see E. Davis 2009), pp. 20-31.

Lessour, Théo (2012) Berlin Sampler, trans. by Sean Kearney (Berlin: Ollendorff Verlag).

Prendergast, Mark (2003) The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby – The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (London: Bloomsbury).

Stubbs, David (2014) Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (London: Faber & Faber).

Toop, David (2001) Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail).

 

 

 

A Brief History of Chill

 

In Berlin Sampler, his excellent history of music in the German capital from Schoenberg to techno, Théo Lessour addressed the global social context of ‘The New Left’, neo-Marxism and the 1960s protest movements. He observes how the writings of C. Wright Mills (who coined the term ‘The New Left’) ‘questioned the inherent value of work itself’ (2012: 163), before noting that ‘pop music would rapidly evolve to become one of the protest movement’s most potent modes of expression’ (2012: 164). Within the German context, from 1967 on militant hippie communes such as West Berlin’s Kommune 1 (K1) set out to ‘battle against the society of work with its “terrorism of productivity” (Leistungsterror)’ (2012: 177). Lessour’s foreword to his book hints at how pop’s critique of work emerged in the context of mid-late 1960s West Berlin: the city’s ‘alternative’ musicians ‘were expressing in their music a broader quest for an alternative to life in a capitalist world, to the consumer society and the “terror of productivity”’. ‘[West] Berlin’s low cost of living and minimal rents meant it served as a main stage for these issues from the start of the hippie movement in 1965 to the last throes of punk and new wave in 1989.’ (2012: 6).

By way of an ironic coda to Lessour’s account of this laid-back German musical climate, we could of course remember how Ian MacDonald, in his 1972 ‘Germany Calling’ articles covering Krautrock in the NME, described pop musicians’ working conditions at the time. MacDonald pointed out that (in Mark Prendergast’s summary) ‘the Arbeitsamt (Labour Exchange) did not allow any musician to be unemployed. If he or she was kicked out of a group, its officials quickly found another group to take them on.’ (2003: 279) This requirement of unbroken musical productivity may well explain why the Krautrock personnel could shift from band to band so readily. Wolfgang Riechmann’s varied employment history is illustrative here. In the late 1960s he started in the Spirits of Sound with Michael Rother (later of NEU! and Harmonia) and Wolfgang Flür (later of Kraftwerk). The 1973-76 period saw him in Phönix; then he made two albums with Streetmark, before finally working on his solo album, the beautiful Wunderbar (Tietchens 2009). A certain musical Leistungsterror was hinted at by Kraftwerk themselves, when they opened their first LP with a track entitled ‘Ruckzuck’ – a term which translates as ‘at the double’.

Nevertheless, the critique of work is clear in the German context from the mid-1960s, and a reaction to productive frenzy is also apparent in American minimalist musical culture. In his Ocean of Sound, David Toop cites Claire Polin’s essay ‘Why Minimalism Now?’ which, when comparing minimalist music to minimal American painting such as Ad Reinhardt’s and Jules Olitsky’s, invoked ‘a weariness of the human spirit, a desire to escape into an enfolding quietude from the pressures of a frenetic, discordant world’ (2001: 12). The serial utopian prescription that is Terry Riley’s sleeve-note for his 1969 minimalist release A Rainbow in Curved Air, ends with the pronouncement ‘the concept of work was forgotten’.

Prendergast’s The Ambient Century quotes Philip Glass likening ‘the birth of rock ’n’ roll’ – ‘the birth of a new culture’ – to ‘a kind of hysteria’. ‘Popular music became mass media with Elvis Presley.’ (2003: 133) Prendergast holds up Brian Eno’s evolution of ambient music as a necessary corrective to such pop hysteria. ‘Into a popular–music market high on brash excess and short attention spans, Eno brought space and time, time to think, time to reflect.’ (2003: 115) Eno is cited as himself viewing his early-1980s video work as an escape from the ‘hysteria’ of pop video (2003: 126). Yet in the early 1980s figures such as Eno or the bohemian West Berlin punk were unusual in popular music. More generally, the original hippie or minimalist idea of music as a way of expressing a desire to escape our work-centred society, had been replaced by a conception of music as a means of thriving or just surviving in this society. The hippies were ageing or entering a second generation, and popular music was becoming a yuppie lifestyle accessory or therapeutic prop. Prendergast recalls the New Age music of the mid-1980s – ‘instrumental, relaxing and soothing the listener with innocuous washes of synthesizer and acoustic guitar’ – as being ‘aimed primarily at overheated executives who needed to unwind after a Wall Street-style day at the office’. His description of the buyers of this minimalism-turned-muzak captures the combination of false leisure and unrestrained material greed that continues to characterize the faux-ethical strand of our capitalism (think Facebook HQ), for which musical experience can only be a mere respite from work. ‘The better product picked up a constituency among New Age hippies (who had neglected the workaday lifestyle without ignoring the profit motive)’ (2003: 144).     

One could say that if New Age was the mid-1980s sound of fake leisure, ambient music developed as the late-1980s respite from leisure. The overheated dance beats of techno and (acid) house – themselves reflective of late-1980s social hysteria, as manic neoliberalism burnt itself out in social protest – triggered ambient electronic music as a therapeutic reaction. Marc Weidenbaum’s account of the birth of chill-out club music suggests moreover that whilst late-1980s ambient may have incorporated earlier ‘new age’ sounds within itself, it also enabled the emergence of the new genre of intelligent techno or IDM, such as Aphex Twin’s:  

‘Rave concerts – both in their large-scale form and in smaller clubs – pulsed with a music felt and heard, and a place to recover from overexertion became necessary. […] Chill out catered to those in need of respite. As David Toop recounted in his foundational book Oceans [sic] of Sound, new music by such acts as Mixmaster Morris […] provided soundtracks to these therapeutic spaces, often heard along with such chill-out precedents as progressive rock and new age. […] In time this chill-out music attracted its own audience – first came the needy, later the aficionados. […] If that first collection [Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92] was recorded in search of a venue, then Volume II can be thought of as having been recorded with that venue [‘the chill room’] in mind.’ (2016: 35,36)

It is notable that ambient electronica represented a more generous response to rave’s manic species of leisure than that offered by Stockhausen’s more academic electronic music. Robin Maconie dates Stockhausen’s Freitag, the fifth opera in his LICHT cycle, to 1991-94: the same period as the two Aphex Twin collections referred to by Weidenbaum (2005: 493). Following on from the ‘acknowledgement of rave music’ in the earlier Dienstag aus LICHT, the electronic music of Freitag aus LICHT, if ‘heated’, is – Maconie conceded – ‘considerably more nuanced and certainly less hazardous to listen to than acid house party music’. Yet Maconie remained concerned to emphasize that ‘this is Stockhausen, and the medium comes with a message’: that Friday is ‘the day of contemplation of the idea of freedom, and freedom for Stockhausen implies all of those behaviours […] associated with a lifestyle without God and without self-discipline, including acid house music’ (2005: 491-2). Where early-1990s ambient offered respite from the leisure of the techno generation without attacking it, Stockhausen in LICHT impugned acid house as electronic hysteria, as part of a moralizing critique of ‘excessive’ social freedom in the godless contemporary world.

This outline has sketched a historical movement across three stages: from a consciousness of music as a critique of (over)work, to a sense of music as affording mere respite from (over)work, and on to an identification of music as a respite from leisure. But is it possible to recover today a conception of music as being in some way oppositional to our prevailing culture of overwork? That is, can music help us to conceive of – to think – a saner form of leisure – one less overheated than acid house (say), but also more vigorous than our dulled, exhausted working life? Here it may be worth recalling an early note of Nietzsche’s from the time of his Unfashionable Observations, in which he imagined ‘the philosopher as the brake shoe on the wheel of time’ (1995: 7). Placed alongside this conception of philosophical activity, Eno’s approach to music-making can be identified as itself philosophical. For – as Weidenbaum wrote – ‘the ambient music that Brian Eno defined’ has taken a ‘neutral space of slow-burn stasis’ as its ‘starting point’ (2016: 37). The point I want to draw out about ambient in the post-Eno tradition is that its practice of philosophical stalling, or the neutral leisure it installs, is itself a launchpad for motion, for reinvigoration. Prendergast quotes Eno in 1986: ‘I want to make music that has that condition of being almost but not completely static. I want to make it so that it constantly changes but it never really goes anywhere.’ (2003: 126) The combination of chill and reinvigoration reappeared in Eno’s version of the chill-out room, as described here by Prendergast:

‘The various Works Constructed In Sound And Light, which were seen all over Europe in 1986, spurred his ambition to create a “quiet club”. The hushed darkness of slowly changing light sculptures accompanied by unpredictable Ambient clusters had all the flavour of an Orthodox or Catholic church and was thoroughly in keeping with Eno’s dislike of traditional clubs designed, he felt, “to speed up what is assumed to be otherwise an average existence”.’ (2003: 126-7)

Instead, it seems, the quiet club was set to slow down what is reconceived as already being – in its very everydayness – a more-than-average existence. Ambient music and its natural environment could bring us to a sense of a less frenzied everyday life within which we have also located a new vigour. This brings us back to Krautrock and its relation to the consumer society. The album Musik von Harmonia, after all, supplied – as Lessour pointed out – ‘a blueprint for all of Brian Eno’s or even The Orb’s future output’; Eno introduced Harmonia to David Bowie as ‘the best rock band in the world’. Lessour explains:

‘Musik von Harmonia is representative of that German electronic aesthetic that flirts with the banal and repetitive while still being at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. It doesn’t attempt to knockout or seduce the listener, instead remaining rooted in a kind of dreary everyday routine (take for example the bottle of washing liquid on the album cover) that, paradoxically, can induce ecstasy.’ (2012: 207) 

 

References

Lessour, Théo (2012) Berlin Sampler, trans. by Sean Kearney (Berlin: Ollendorff Verlag).

Maconie, Robin (2005) Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Lanham, MA: Scarecrow Press).

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1995) Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, trans. by Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Prendergast, Mark (2003) The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby – The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (London: Bloomsbury).

Tietchens, Asmus (2009) ‘Silvery Sounds’, in: Riechmann, Wunderbar (Bureau B), no pp.

Toop, David (2001) Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail).

Weidenbaum, Marc (2016) Selected Ambient Works Volume II (New York: Bloomsbury).