Very excited that for the fifth year in a row, Musikfestival Bern will, at the invitation of Tobias Reber, be collaborating with the Disquiet Junto music community. The Junto will engage in a series of three different music composition prompts. The first begins this coming Thursday, April 20. All three projects will engage with the work of Éliane Radigue, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2023 festival. Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects may be played and displayed throughout the festival, which will be held in Switzerland from September 6 through 10.
Instructions should pop up at disquiet.com/0590 (powers of automation willing) shortly after 12:10am Pacific Time on Thursday, April 20. (I’ll be asleep at the time, or so I hope.) The email containing those instructions will go out via tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto later in the morning (after I wake up), and then I’ll post them here, on the Junto Slack, and my Mastodon account, and Instagram, etc.
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Junto Profile: Andreas Winterer, aka Krakenkraft
From Munich, Germany: breaking rules and making "boring" music
This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s your name? Andreas Winterer aka Krakenkraft aka Etherkraken. Kraken-, because I always loved Krakens. Just look at this video! And -kraft for a mixture of many reasons … Ether because … I don’t remember. These are just names that had to be unique.
Where are you located? I have lived in Munich, Germany, for 34 years or so. My flat is near the Isar River, which is nice for walking, and five minutes to the Viktualienmarkt, which is a mixture between a fruits and vegetable grocery store and a tourist hell. The musical influence of Munich is zero, as Munich is a very small town and poor in underground culture, compared to Berlin or Vienna. But in the late ‘90s there was a secondhand synthesizer store in a neighborhood called Haidhausen, and without that shop and a used, cheesy Kawai K4 I once bought there, I might never have started making music.
What is your musical activity? I grew up in the 1980s in a small town and all I had was a Telefunken reel to reel tape and a clumsy Philips cassette recorder, and I made noise collages with them, and sci fi audio dramas (that mainly spared the dialogue parts). All these were bad. But I think there is a straight line between this time and the music I do as “Krakenkraft” today.
I’m simply enchanted by all kinds of sounds and noises, and this magic is usually more important to me than a formal musical structure or than serving expectations. I’m doing music primarily because I want to hear this music. For example, for years I’ve been searching for an eternally lasting, hardly (but still) changing sound, with which one can somehow become one (may sound esoteric…). But I’m also addicted to other peoples music and Bandcamp is a cornucopia of musical expression.
On the other hand there is my love for sequenced music in the style of Klaus Schulze’s Mirage, Michael Hoenig’s Departure from the Northern Wasteland, Peter Baumann’s Romance 76, or Michael Garrison’s In the Regions of Sunreturn, and I cannot stop myself from wanting to do more traditional music like this, and that’s what I try as “Etherkraken.” I sometimes think this is backwards nostalgia, but on the other hand playing blues and swing cannot be bad just because people already played it decades ago.
My primary income comes from creatings words. Music always offered me the opportunity to get along without words, to think completely without words, and it can’t really be explained in words why this or that is and must be. If I could reboot I would become a professional musician; maybe then I would write for fun …
What is one good musical habit? If you want to be successful (clicks, reach, sales), you have to study and follow the rules and break them only if you have a good idea about what you are doing.
If you just want to make music, you can make all the music that you want to and not give a toss about any expectation anyone could even think of.
But even then rules are important, because creativity, imho, comes from restriction, and that’s why I like the Disquiet Junto: It’s a weekly nonsense restriction you can follow voluntarily — or ignore it at all.
What are your online locations? Soundcloud and Bandcamp (Krakenkraft, Etherkraken) are my primary hangouts, because most of what I have to say is sound. I’m just lacking the sense of mission you really need to be successful on media like Instagram. I did some videos on YouTube, but I have not made something very interesting yet; ”Another Wound” and “p-brane transition” maybe best define the direction I want to go.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto Project? I like to remember all my Disquiet contributions, especially the collaborations. An example of a solo is disquiet0451: music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea: “For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before and after,” which led to “A Tentative Approach to Silence,” in which I actively sought for silence. When I hear this piece, I can’t believe I made it. (In some way Marc made me make it.)
Regarding your earlier comment about knowing and breaking rules, could you share examples of rules you have broken — perhaps successfully and unsuccessfully? It all depends on the rules that surround you, or the genre labels and how you interpret them. When I was young, “new wave” meant something completely different in my peer group than what Wikipedia defines today. And for years I thought I was making “ambient” music, but today I think I never really stuck to the original ideas (of Satie? of Eno? of me?), and I don’t even understand what is meant by that label anymore.
Supposedly, Vangelis once said that new age gives “untalented people the opportunity to make very boring music.” (My favorite Vangelis is Soil Festivities. If this ain’t new age, I don’t know…) And the general rule of music (writing, art) says: don’t bore the listeners (readers, viewers). But I like making boring music as much as I like listening to it. A few weeks ago I was invited to play at a sleep concert, where musicians play all night for sleeping people. I took that as a compliment. On the other hand, these are just new rules; no musician would put a loud kick drum in there at 3:23 in the morning just to demonstrate his independence.
I consider “Waking Up in a Strange Room” very traditional Berlin School (again a questionable label), but I don’t think most fans would agree, as it lacks many rule ingredients. The same goes for “Watering,” a bonus track to a mostly sequenced album, which is free from synths at all, but ( I swear!) totally inspired by Edgar Froese’s Aqua (and I almost broke my neck recording the water), so how more Berlin School could one go?
Ultimately, I believe that there is no such thing as failure when it comes to breaking rules: rule breakers always win from the rule breakers’ point of view. (That should make us a little suspicious, though.)
Today we seemingly have a lot of freedom and can make the music that we want. Even if we do not strive to be heard and find an audience, we want to hear what we decided to hear. And the “genre” label/tag is (besides the artist’s or publisher’s name) the only navigation we have. (One could argue that we should always listen to unknown genres, but I’m not into thrash metal, even if I can respect whatever they do.)
But does it work? I struggle a lot with these things. On the one hand, rules are important because they define what I as a listener can expect or what I as a musician want to give the listeners as a helpful context. But, of course, they are also a prison that restricts, and who wants to be restricted? But if no one adheres to genre conventions, then genre labels itself become worthless as a navigation tool. (I have no way out, and I’m afraid what I’ve just said has surely already been said by 50 others, talking about genres like “triple-plugged psystep.” As an electronic musician I don’t even have the time to learn the rules for all these electronic genres.)
Given that rules are a key part of how the Disquiet Junto functions, do you regularly break the rules that form the weekly assignments? The easiest way to make music for Disquiet Junto would be to just send in what you made yesterday and cleverly explain that it follows the rules (because complicated blah) or breaks the rules (because more complicated blah). Betrayal, and I may have sighted such (even from me), but no one would complain.
Personally, I usually try to start seriously with the project idea. Sometimes at least integrating the idea into something that’s only half done. So the challenge in Junto for me is really to follow the rules and not break them, and that’s what makes it so interesting for me.
I broke the rules intentionally with project 0525, Magic Number (1 of 3). One had to record the first third of a trio. Normally with collaborations I try to do something where other people can easily add something. I would consider that an unwritten rule, because you want to collaborate, it makes no sense to undermine that. In “Nine-Eight” I intentionally made something very difficult, knowing no one would complete this track and yes, nobody did, not even the usual suspects. Such a shame, I was so curious what other people could make of it … I think I may not break this rule again.
“Functional” “Dangerous” “Wedge”
A distinction in AI anxiety
In a Bloomberg opinion piece on AI-generated music, writer Lionel Laurent posits a question: “whether functional music is the thin end of a dangerous wedge.” By “functional music,” Laurent says he means “whale song, white noise, anything designed to play in the background.” By “dangerous” he means an existential threat to non-AI (né human) musicians. By “wedge” he suggests that once AI has conquered this ambient realm, it might threaten what must, by contrast, be considered “foreground music” (my term, not his). This would include hip-hop, rap, pop, country, and anything else that music fans pay (putative) attention to rather than merely play in the background. I use the word “putative” because regular old music has long served as background music. The rise of streaming playlists and the decline of liner notes has already done its fair share of damage to music’s place in the so-called attention economy.
Earlier this week, Anna Nicolaou in the Financial Times cited the same corporate anxiety expressed by the Universal Music Group that Lauren mentions in his article. “The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology,” she wrote. Laurent catches one irony that Nicolaou didn’t note: an album collaboration between James Blake and the music AI firm Endel, Wind Down, was released on the label Republic Records, which happens to be a UMG subsidiary. As Laurent explains: “While Wind Down carries Blake’s name and face, and was mixed from his ingredients — he provided individual ‘stem’ tracks featuring drumbeats and melodies — Endel’s technology generated the final product.”
Then again, that example may be less an irony than it an opportunity to draw a distinction. UMG expresses concern not for a threat on musicians so much as for a threat on the property it manages for musicians. From that vantage, the Blake/Endel team-up isn’t an irony or an anomaly, but a model.
Positive Influence
This is the full text of my review, from the March 2023 issue of The Wire, of Stand By for Failure: A Negativland Documentary, directed by Ryan Worsley:
If you know anything about Negativland, then you’ll giggle when you see the FBI warning about copyright infringement at the start of Stand By For Failure, Ryan Worsley’s new documentary film about the band. Few artists have logged as many hours on the battlefield of fair use, let alone questioned as persistently the associated legal constraints around intellectual property, as Negativland, whose sonic, visual and performance appropriations and parodies have challenged eyeballs, eardrums and moral standards alike since the late 1970s. The FBI insignia here feels less like a pro forma admonition, and more like evidence from an active crime scene. And even if you know nothing about Negativland – members of the band debate the extent of their fame in the film – you’ll still have an immediate sense something is up. The FBI warning label is depicted in a sickly green, vibrating as it gets layered below rapidly cycling footage.
Something most definitely is up. Worsley directs her documentary by embracing Negativland’s own “helter stupid” collage techniques. Much of the film layers eviscerated visuals into a vaudevillian media kaleidoscope. Some of this material is drawn from the band’s own work, while other portions simulate the Negativland plunder-drunk ethos, drawing from the group’s favourite resources, such as televangelism, advertising and TV news.
No zone is safe, not even the home that David Wills shared with his mother. We first meet him as a precocious boy when he starts broadcasting his recitation of the weather report in 1959. As he matures, so does home technology. Soon he’s filming and, later, using video recorders to capture daily life. Worsley frequently reproduces segments of Wills’s home movies in split-screen. The message is clear: even the most mundane aspects of human existence are technologically mediated and surveilled – and thus raw material for the madcap minds of Negativland.
Wills befriends other tinkerers and Negativland is born. We see gleeful Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons self-release the group’s first record in 1980. Later member Don Joyce brings a dramaturg’s clarity to their self-awareness. The longtime KPFA DJ says Negativland doesn’t merely copy existing material; their parodic use is antithetical to its initial purpose.
Some sourced interview footage is by William Davenport, who directed an earlier documentary, Media About Media About Media: The Negativland Story. Much is from the members themselves, often filming each other filming something. In one of the film’s many touching moments we see Wills record an emaciated Lyons, who is dying in bed.
Stand By for Failure proceeds chronologically but the antic presentation may confuse those lacking foreknowledge. The story of how Negativland’s song “Christianity Is Stupid” got associated with a murder was a hoax they themselves perpetrated, a point touched on in a manner that could be misunderstood. A U2 parody that nearly cost them everything culminated with Negativland interviewing The Edge – which, again, may elude some viewers. Confusion, of course, comes with the territory. Jon Leidecker aka Wobbly, the group’s most recent member, talks about how when he first heard Negativland at age 15, he thought he had tuned into three radio stations simultaneously.
If you know nothing about Negativland, you may still be confused at the film’s end, but you’ll have another kind of knowledge. Worsley successfully depicts the mix of buffoonery and consciousness-raising that define Negativland. To have told the story straight would have produced the worst sort of parody: unintentional.
Scratch Pad: Fog, Sloppiness, Sing-along
From the past week
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Some material appears here earlier in one form or another.
▰ Wakes wondering why it feels so warm. Then almost immediately hears the foghorn.
▰ Opened a book on collage that I hadn’t since probably 1996, and inside was a bookmark, on which I had written the following in tiny lowercase letters: “beastie boys: doctrinaire in their sloppiness”
▰ If you enjoy hard music, enjoy it while it’s hard, because 20 years later it’s going to be soft; it’s gonna be sing-along time. (Thought while walking to the ocean and back listening to early Battles.)