Since the mid 2000s, the media such as video, the use of the internet etc become a part of composition for many composers. How can we explain that?
In the 2000s digital production tools become accessible to everyone who owns a computer and almost everyone owns a computer then. Software for audio and video production are based on the same idea – arranging, cutting, glueing, layering of virtual bits of tape. Both media are not very different in terms of producing. Most modern audio softwares allow basic video editing and vice versa.
The generation of digital native composers are socialized in the 80s and 90s. MTV music videos make both media forms merge and become an art form of itself. In the mid 2000s YouTube takes over. Open to everyone, the online streaming platform accepts video uploads exclusively. Even if you just want to upload your music, you have to come up with a visual component as well and know how to merge them. Through YouTube and its billions of uploads, creators have an endless resource of material at hand. Video can be sampled, just like audio. You don't need a camera anymore to make videos.
An ongoing trend since the invention of the computer is intuitive usability. Just compare the crafting of punch cards to using a modern smartphone app. You don't need to be a scientist anymore to do that. You just go for it. A good app is expected to work almost by itself. Composing a piece through an app on your smartphone is basically algorithmic composing, just that you're not necessarily aware of it. You're not composing the algorithm, you're composing through the algorithm. The result incorporates the internet naturally, big data, machine learning, it's all in there. You're conducting the process by pressing a few buttons. Don't get me wrong. Of course this is still composition.
Does it imply an aesthetic turn?
Yes. Although it's rather a reaction to the commercial developments than a deliberate aesthetic movement. It wasn't the artists who invented digital technology in order to create digital artworks. They adopted standards set by the industry.
How did you approach these media? Altogether, or were you first a musician, a composer?
I started making videos before making music. I used my dad's Video 8 camcorder and filmed myself and friends. I reenacted talk shows and James Bond movies. We invented Jackass long before it came on MTV. (Give kids a camcorder and that's what you'll get.) At some point I got my guitar and went into music and bands. It took me a while before I got back to making video.
Do you still consider yourself as a composer, exclusively, primarily, as well?
I never liked the word "composer". It sounds a bit tacky. "Artist" also has a ton of kitsch glued to it. I prefer to call myself "space trader" or "paper boy".
Is order of media important in your work process?
My best pieces are ideas. They don't need any media. They're perfect... so so perfect. I can take them for a walk or whisper them into someone's ear. They only get bigger and more beautiful. When they become physical, they need to be chiseled into some kind of medium, any kind of medium.
how do you consider the two media?
I'm don't see colors when I hear music (neither do I when I smoke weed) but I think I'm synesthetic anyway. I think we all are. At some point all senses had been neurologically connected. Isn't it really hard not to see anything while listening to music? Try closing your eyes and, even if you manage to suppress fantasy images of epic landscapes and unicorns, you probably end up with something looking like an early experimental movie with abstract geometrical shapes and flashing fuzzes. We can't fully cut the connection of senses inside our brains.
Stravinsky for example hated it when the audience closed their eyes to dwell in their own fantasies. He wanted people to look at the musicians on stage who he thought were the most direct representation of his music: muscles, tendons moving, pulling, bowing, plucking, breathing bodies.
Seeing a mass by J.S. Bach being performed live also is a massive visual spectacle. Or imagine L. v. Beethoven going wild on a piano.
In the early years of cinema, filmmakers were super skeptical about the use of sound/music in their video when it became technologically possible. Some were afraid that music might disturb the rhythm of the images and distract the viewer. If you watch nowadays music videos on mute they can seem way more complex than accompanied by the music. Fast cuts, visual rhythm, intense images are tamed by the music.
What is Telefonzentrum episode 1 guitar?
This video is a continuation of my business model "Neue Musik 24" where I'm selling sound ideas, pure concepts of sounds, sounds without audio, you know? They're immaterial, they slip out of the customer's hands, leaving nothing less than an imaginary musical experience. This sort of masquerade is something I like to work with a lot. Teleform Centrum is using semantics of TV shopping with an exaggerated imagery, a feverish carnival. They are trying to sell you a tooth brush as a guitar for an extraordinary price before they themselves completely lose their minds. It's not so different from the art market. Artists are modern charlatans selling you useless objects to make a living. So do my pieces, only that they're trying to sell you a fake product in order to masquerade the fact that they are (like all artworks I dare to claim) selling themselves.
what would you do if somebody would commission you a string quartet?
I would sell that client a fake string quartet.
what is a fake string quartet?
It's either a piece pretending to be a string quartet while it's not or pretending not to be a string quartet while it is.
In 2016 I made a quartet for Fl, Cl, Acc, Vc, «Salary Music». Imitating office workers in suits, the musicians infiltrated public places like trains, busses, restaurants, where they played little pieces without their instruments, only coughing, sneezing, turning book pages, falling asleep in a choreographed rhythm, musically slurping ramen noodles etc. The pieces were meant to be hardly perceivable as music. Only those who became aware of the music, perceived music.
My fake string quartet would be the inversion of that idea: only those who listen to the quartet think that its a fake quartet. Those who don't listen to it think it's real.
