Dear all,
my book "Now and Forever: Towards a Theory and History of the Loop. A
Secret Acoustic History of the 20th Century" has just been published by
Zero Books.
I use this opportunity to send an interview that Geert Lovink did with
me when the German version of the book came out in 2016 for the magazine
"Dancecult".
Enjoy and send me a mail if you want a review copy.
Yours,
Tilman
https://networkcultures.org/geert/2016/11/23/dancing-to-the-loop-interview-with-tilman-baumgartel/
Dancing to the Loop: Repetition in Contemporary Music. An Interview with
Tilman Baumgärtel
Geert Lovink
Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.10>
Since the late 1980s, the German media critic Tilman Baumgärtel has
developed an interest in sound loops, recently deciding to write the
analogue part of its history. In his 2015 monograph Schleifen (Loops)
Tilman describes early tape recorder experiments and their evolution
over the past decades into a basic cultural technique. Arguably,
Schleifen is the first book on the history of electronic music that is
solely dedicated to loops. Besides detailed stories on how individual
artists and producers technically defined the language of loops over a
period of thirty years, Schleifen also touches on the philosophical and
strategic question of why repetition has become so prominent in today’s
culture. Due to my own involvement in radio and my passion for German
media theory, I asked Tilman to do an email interview.
As a German journalist and (new) media critic, Baumgärtel is known for
his work on net.art and his film writings, such as his PhD on Harun
Farocki and publications on South-East Asian cinema. Baumgärtel’s latest
anthology, A Reader on International Media Piracy: Pirate Essays (2015),
was put together on media piracy with comparative case studies. After
having lived in South-East Asia for a long time, he and his family
returned to Germany where he became a media theory professor at the
Polytech in Mainz.
Despite several philosophical remarks and numerous references to Adorno,
who’s known for his devastating critique of numbing repetition,
Schleifen is not German hermetic theory. Tilman is a gifted writer and
journalist who chose to tell stories. The book starts off with the
experiments in the 1940s of the French musique concrète composer Pierre
Schaeffer. Tape recorders were not just capturing musical performances,
they were used to alter and enrich music as such and create tape-based
compositions. For this he developed special hardware, the phonogène, a
forerunner of digital sampling software. We then move on to Karlheinz
Stockhausen, who studied with Schaeffer in Paris and created tape
experiences in 1953 in the West-German WDR radio studio in Cologne.
However, all his life Stockhausen would remain skeptical about the
artistic potential of an endless repetition of the same.
In that same year, Sam Phillips reached a historical breakthrough with
his Sun Studio recordings of the young Elvis Presley. The delays, echo
effects caused by tweaked recording and display heads, produced a
revolutionary sound in which the “original” was treated as raw material
that could be manipulated, delayed and distorted. No longer was the aim
of recording to catch a clean and pure version of the “real” sound.
It is only during the 1960s that an explicit Will to Repetition was
being celebrated in the works of Steve Reich. A relative unknown early
chapter has been dug up by Tilman about the Frankfurt am Main artist
Peter Roehr, who died young at the age of 23 in 1968. Roehr produced
film tape-loops and other “serial formations” that became so familiar a
few years later in conceptual arts. We then encounter the rise of
minimal music of La Monte Young and the classics of Terry Riley and
Steve Reich, who all get special attention in the book. Wikipedia
describes minimal music as a style “marked by a non-narrative,
non-teleological, and non-representational conception of a work in
progress, representing a new approach to the activity of listening to
music by focusing on the internal processes of the music, which lack
goals or motion toward those goals.” Tilman takes us from artist to
artist, through Andy Warhol’s films, into Ken Kesey’s magic bus, to the
well-known experiments of The Beatles, ending with a dedicated chapter
on Donna Summer’s 1977 disco hit “I Feel Love”, assembled by the Munich
producer Giorgio Moroder.
It’s not hard to see how repeating patterns can invite one to go on a
spiritual journey and is utilized as a technique to open up one’s “doors
of perception”. Whereas modernists are supposed to be critical of
repetitive motives, it is seen as a post-modern feature to quote and
repeat. As Tilman writes, minimal music and techno refuse to follow “the
unfolding of the motif” and other narrative forms of development in
composition. Instead of a linear timeline there are cyclical forms,
which have been looked at with suspicion in the West. Moving away from
the arrow, the goal-oriented approach of progression, we experience a
periodical return of elements that slowly mutate and assist us to
transform into otherness.
I encountered the magic of the loop in the second part of the ’80s when
I participated in the Amsterdam pirate radio scene (Radio Patapoe and
Radio 100) with groups such as Rabotnik and DFM and theorized their
William Burroughs-style cut-ups and loop techniques (Lovink n.d.). At
the time, loops were already so self-evident that they needed no special
attention and melted into a general theory of (re-)mixing, in which
loops were seen like one of many ingredients. My radio chapter was
followed by the collaboration with the graphic aesthetics of Mieke
Gerritzen, who’s still using the Warhol copy-paste style, showing how
bold and seductive the repetitive elements in visual culture can be, for
instance in her 2004 video Beautiful World.
Needless to say that Gilles Deleuze’s “repetition as difference without
a concept” has had a profound influence on the generations, even though
in this case theory did not anticipate events but more reflected—and
embodied—the contemporary culture of its time. For DJ and techno
producer Richie Hawtin, loops assist in finding an internal balance, as
a response to information overload and all the crazy events.
Repetition can also make the viewer or listener aware of issues and
bring aspects of the daily technological existence to the surface. In
that sense, loops can function as an awareness machine and should not
just be condemned as a symbol of silly numbness (these days projected
onto hardcore rave parties). However, as Steve Reich warns us, loops as
such are meaningless. “They are not cool, they are simply silly,
complete uninteresting. If you just let them run, one is either mad or
stoned. It really depends what you do with it”.
GL: The motivation to write this book was your astonishment about the
mass popularity of techno and similar loop-based music. Could you say
more about what exactly keeps on surprising you?
TB: I learned to play the guitar, when I was a kid. And of course, we
had music lessons in school. But apart from canons like “Frère Jacques”,
this repetitive type of music was not part of the musical education I
received. This type of music does have a rich tradition, of course, if
you think about African and Latin-American percussion music, or
Southeast Asian Gamelan, or Indian Ragas. But it’s not really part of
the Western canon, or at least it wasn’t part of it, when I got my
musical education.
Western music might contain repetitive elements like the rhythm, but it
typically has a teleological harmonic structure, that leads to an end,
the harmonic resolution. Loop-based music, on the other hand just goes
on and on and on, and it is easy to mistake that for a lack of
structure, if you are not clued in to the workings of this kind of
music. The listener does not have to follow a harmonic progression, but
is confronted with these cyclic, repetitive patterns. (By the way, it
was the book American Minimal Music by the Flemish Belgian composer and
musicologist Wim Mertens, that first made me understand these musical
structures as a serious alternative to Western music.)
When I first encountered techno and house, I was quite stunned, because
this type of music was so different from the music I had grown up with.
In fact, at first I hated it. I thought it was some kind of marching
music. When you grew up in an intellectual milieu in Post-War Germany,
strongly rhythmical music was always tainted by the Nazi past. It wasn’t
just me. Stockhausen’s music has no simple meters for the same reason:
He heard military music as a child during the Third Reich, so he later
vowed to never make use of this method to organize his music.
Unfortunately that kept him from appreciating the popular music that he
partly inspired, like krautrock or techno. Whenever he was asked about
this type of music, he cruelly slammed it as music for drug heads,
precisely because of its repetitive nature.
GL: In the book you map a debate, that always pops up but never quite
became a debate, on pros and cons of repetition in music and visual
arts. You are quoting Steve Reich saying that they are a silly effect.
He says loops in themselves are not cool, they are simply stupid and
completely uninteresting. It maybe be nice when you’re stoned but its
not art. It all depends what you do with it. We’re still in debate with
Adorno, nearly fifty years after his death. Ever since Minimal Music
there are producers who resist the development of motives and narrative
development, delving into the depths of rhythmic sounds that refuse to
come up with a memorable melody line. The rational Western subject, you
write, is afraid of repetition and circular time. It is not done to
repeat one’s self.
TB: Steve Reich talks about the loops that other people are doing. These
are stupid. His loops are genius, because he is a conservatory-trained
composer, and he eventually turned tape loops into orchestral works. ;)
But seriously—what I learned to appreciate about loop-based music was
how it can create complexity out of something deceptively simple. Steve
Reich’s early tape compositions—like “It’s Gonna Rain” or “Come Out”—are
perfect examples of that: very short loops that slowly run out of sync,
that will mess with your mind. In the book I have this great quote from
techno-DJ Ricardo Villalobos. He says that techno “is ideal for a
totally strung-out state of mind in which you do not know anymore who
you are or who your father is”. I think it can be very healthy to
pulverize your ideas about who you are occasionally, about how identity
comes about from time to time. Freud’s Thanatos, the law of the father,
the Ego—techno can turn all these concepts into a source of joy.
GL: In the Sixties, minimal music that used a lot of loops was
criticized as outlaw culture, crypto-fascist and empty, lacking any
passion, as soundtracks of the machine age that merely reflects the
boring perfection of consumer society. We’re no longer provoked in such
a way. For us, the subversive elements of rave culture are always,
potentially, there. Are techno and dance, in essence,
anti-authoritarian, or is this an outdated approach all together? Many
of my friends are still searching for even the most miniscule signs of
dissent at festivals. Why is this so important?
TB: I don’t think any style of popular music is inherently
anti-authoritarian or liberating. Today, I cannot imagine a more
narrow-minded and reductive music as punk rock. Yet this was considered
to be the most revolutionary type of music by many in the late 1970s—and
at that time for good reasons. On the other hand, not everybody in the
Sixties thought that loops were “crypto-fascist”: the music that Terry
Riley developed out of tape loops was popular among hippies and “heads”.
A certain kind of music and more particularly certain songs—like “Street
Fighting Men” by the Rolling Stones, “Keine Macht für Niemand” by Ton
Steine Scherben, or even that old chestnut “I Will Survive” by Gloria
Gaynor—might provide the soundtrack for individual self-liberation
because of their message, or even for concrete action like occupying an
abandoned apartment building or finally kicking out that useless
boyfriend of yours. Music with no explicit message like techno might
have served similar purposes for the Reclaim the Streets initiative, or
even the Love Parade, the Fuck Parade etc.
But I think what these unstructured, anti-narrative and “aimless” types
of music can do when played in clubs, at parties or festivals, is to
create these void spaces that leave room for the self-expression of the
audience. That goes for psychedelic rock as well as for techno and other
styles that came after. If the point of the music you enjoy is to yell
“We will rock you”, it forces you to decide who you are and who these
other people are that you want to rock/dominate. If the music is just a
repetitive, never-ending pattern of electronic farts, on the other hand,
it leaves you with this wide-open space that you can use to understand
yourself or to express yourself.
Not so long ago, as a male person in Germany you could not wear a skirt
on the streets. But you could do that in a techno club. Now you can do
it on the street (even though you might still run into trouble in
certain places...) But generally, techno clubs were laboratories of the
self, where you could try out new identities, and it helped that the
music did not impose a narrative or an identity on you.
GL: Coming from Amsterdam I can’t really see that marijuana, cocaine and
ecstasy produce an avalanche of interesting art works, or even a
creative environment, for that matter. They open doors of perception
that provide a different view but lead nowhere. You write about the link
between Warhol and his Factory, and the use of amphetamine, in a period
when he was very productive and produced famous art work. What’s your
position of repetition and drugs? For instance, you do not mention the
spiritual direction in which the movement also took off, for instance
with Goa Trance.
TB: I am not against drugs. I think without Ecstasy techno would not
have taken off the way it did. Again, this type of repetitive music was
very alien to Western sensibility at that time, and many “got it” after
somebody put a pill on their tongue and dragged them into a club, a fact
immortalized in many early rave tracks like “Everything Starts With An
‘E'” by E-Zee Possee & MC Kinky or “Ebeneezer Goode” by The Shamen.
The early Ecstasy apostle psycho-pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin
advocated the use of the drug in the 1970s in a Timothy-Leary-type “set
and setting” situation with soft music and in a comfortable environment
for psychological sessions. But as soon as the drug made its way on the
black market, you have these blissed-out dance parties, for instance in
Texas around 1980, where an outfit called the Texas Groups started to
sell it in large quantities. This is described in great detail in
Matthew Collins’ Altered State. From there, it made its way to the East
Coast, New York and eventually to Europe, and was accompanied by a new
kind of club culture and dance music.
You can actually hear that for instance on Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing, a
remix album by Soft Cell that was produced after the band encountered
Ecstasy in New York. The new versions of their songs, especially
“Memorabilia”, have this fluid, pulsating and techno-like quality that
is notably different from their earlier, robotic electronic music, and
there is even a rap by a “Cindy Ecstasy”. At that time, Ecstasy was hard
to get in Europe and very expensive, so it did not lead to a new kind of
club culture yet. But when it became easier available around 1990, it
did its part to launch rave and techno.
However, I do not advocate drugs. I know that many people from Amsterdam
have an extremely negative view of drugs, probably because they have
seen the damage they can do. Ecstasy seems to be a drug that can be used
recreationally, since it does not create addiction, and simply stops
working if you used it too often. But I do not want to diminish the
danger of drugs, especially meth, which is also popular in the techno scene.
These drugs help to open your mind to the simple patterns and these
minuscule deviations from these patterns that lead to complexity. But
many people got into that without any chemical help. Deleuze in his book
on repetition and difference quotes David Hume over and over again:
“Repetition does not change the subject of repetition, but the mind of
the observer”. And that’s what I like to think was the greatest
accomplishment of techno. It might take drugs to open you up to this
experience, but it is not a prerequisite and in the long run it might
lead to a lowering of standards. Goa is horrible and seems to be an
example for just that...
As for Andy Warhol and his diet pills: There is a very long chapter on
him in the book, which in my opinion is the best, but also the most
challenging chapter in the book. I cannot summarize it here, but the
detachment and the “coldness” that is characteristic of his art, his
films and his persona certainly had to do with his use of amphetamine.
So I do not agree that drugs lead nowhere. Artists have always used
drugs to come with new ways of expression. I guess the important thing
is to know when you do not need them anymore. In any case, alcohol is
the worst drug of all of them.
Interestingly, despite the easy availability of drugs in the techno
scene and the generally very taxing lifestyle of DJs and producers, you
have almost no techno-versions of Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin
or Syd Barrett, who ruined themselves with drugs in the Sixties. There
might be the occasional Ron Hardy or Mark Spoon, but DJs like Robert
Hood, Jeff Mills, Westbam, DJ Hell or Sven Väth have been at it for over
three decades. They are all well into their 50ies, and they are still
going strong, produce music, run companies and tour internationally.
Alexander Shulgin died aged 88.
GL: The last, brilliant case study in the book deals with Donna Summer’s
disco hit from 1977, “I Feel Love”, produced by Giorgio Moroder, with
its orgasmic loops, which echoed through our squats in Amsterdam in the
late seventies. Why did you stop there? Would this require a Part II of
your studies? What defines electronic dance music these days? Is it
still the loop?
TB: Wait a minute—“I Feel Love” was a hit in the squats of Amsterdam?
That would have been such a triumph over “Es geht voran” by Fehlfarben,
which was the German squatter’s favorite! Anyway, there will never be a
second part of this book. It is about how loops became an accepted part
of the aesthetics of Western music and of contemporary art. Around 1980,
all the elements are in place, and if you would want to trace the
further development of loops after that date, you would have to write an
encyclopedia, that might contain the names of countless new artists, but
not a lot of additional insight into the subject.
I think the strengths of the book are these select “case studies” of
individual works and oeuvres that range from the late ’40s to the late
’70s. Deep readings of these pieces were more important for me than
trying for completeness. There are a lot of excellent studies of
electronic dance music from the ’80s onward, many of which came out in
the last couple of years, and I felt I could not add anything new to
this body of research. If I should ever have the time to research and
write another work of that scope, I think it would be about feedback,
which is a similar topic as loops in terms of socio-cultural relevance.
Repetition of course is still the most important element of contemporary
techno, but I should leave it to younger people to come up with more
nuanced opinions on the contemporary situation of techno...
GL: In a short concluding chapter you note that techno’s aim today is
“to stay in the rhythm”. You emphasize the collective experience of the
dance floor. The perspective is not the one from the composer or the
attentive but passive recipient. Maybe this was Adorno’s failure after
all: the lack of embodiment that made this type of critique
insusceptible to the “small differences” that Deleuze recognizes in the
seemingly monotonous repetition of the beat. You also mention that
techno is used to find an “inner balance”.
TB: My intellectual upbringing was shaped by the concept of the “media
apriori” that Friedrich Kittler drummed into our heads in Germany in the
’80s and ’90s: the idea that media basically have a hard-wired logic of
their own, and that culture was a result of these technological
apparatus and givens (I did not read a lot of Adorno during my time at
the university, because I was turned off by his arrogance vis-à-vis Jazz
and mass culture in general. Walter Benjamin was what I read from the
Frankfurter Schule; I only really started to appreciate Adorno much later).
For techno, the idea of the “media apriori” seemed to make perfect sense
at first: Repetition was native (or, as Kittler might have said, “built
into”) the analog and digital instruments that were used to produce this
type of music. In techno, the medium—the sequencer, the sampler—seemed
to become the message. And the first rave parties I went to seemed like
this total “rise of the machines”, where the repetitive logic of the
machine, the assembly line, took control of a defenseless audience. But
at the same time it created a social context and a culture in its own
right—with its own language, fashion, graphic and interior design.
Journalism, later even literature, and Kittler’s teachings did not help
much in understanding these processes.
In a way, the book is my attempt to find a balance between the media
materialism of Kittler and the analysis of the cultural and social
results that media technology can trigger. Here the Birmingham school
and those who applied that type of thinking to understand the agency of
the audience (like John Fiske and Henry Jenkins) were very important,
even though I hardly refer to them in the book. Media technology is
important, yes, and was often unfairly ignored by the sociological
writing that dominated German media theory in the ’70s. But the machines
aren’t everything, it’s what people end up doing with them. This kind of
research interest also got me to work on net.art. With the net, you also
had a technology with seemingly self-evident “rules”, and then the use,
abuse or contradiction of these rules by artists and hackers.
As far as the embodiment is concerned: both humans and machines are
repeating creatures. The difference is that humans repeat with slight
variations (in the heartbeat, breathing etc), whereas machines repeat
with machinic precision. Works like the early minimalist tape loop
compositions by Reich or Riley or even “I Feel Love” show that you can
get machines to produce this kind of organic, not completely regular,
slightly off repetition too. I like the term “Electronic Body Music”
from the ’80s much better than “techno”, because it is a more fitting
description of the merging of the machinic and the organic that this
type of music is ideally capable of.
John Miller Chernoff, in his seminal study African Rhythm and African
Sensibility, explains how minuscule variations in West-African
percussion music produce the aesthetic phenomena of the “funk” or
“groove”. Mark Butler, in Unlocking the Groove, adds to that research to
show how techno uses beat boxes, samplers and sequencers to create the
same type of slight irregularities, that make something, that at first
seems totally rigid and in-sync, quite flexible and “funky”. He has tons
of examples of how producers manage to have their technology run
slightly out of sync and produce metric dissonances, despite being
MIDI-connected machines, that should function in perfect unisono, for
example Carl Craig’s “Televised Green Smoke” or James Ruskin’s
“Connected” (He could have referred to a lot of krautrock, especially
Tangerine Dream, who became experts in having sequencers run slightly
out of sync in the 1970s). So that shows that “I Feel Love” is not a
singular example of how two types of machinic repetitions are used to
create precisely a non-machinic type of repetition that is so complex
that it probably could not be notated and that even confused Donna
Summer herself.
So machines can come up with their own type of “différence”. You just
have to use them differently. Making machines repeat in a slightly
irregular way as part of an art work invokes another type of technology,
one that does not exist, but should exist, one that does not have these
oppressive features such as robot-like precision—“soft machines”, if you
will.
GL: A cultural technique that is not so often used these days is the
delay. We know the echo effect. The Merry Pranksters built a Delay
Machine inside their bus using tape recorders that produced real delays
of several seconds or more. The philosophical dimensions of delay are
different from mere repetition: it points at the possibility of slowing
down, it invites us to reflect on what we just expressed.
TB: In the end, it is all about perception, isn’t it? But you are right:
the tape echoes that Kesey or Terry Riley produced with the help of
loops are aesthetically very different from the metric patterns, that
Steve Reich and—again, in other works—Riley used tape loops for. That is
what I wanted to demonstrate: how working with loops can lead to very
different aesthetic results. They can produce new types of sound, as in
the early work of Pierre Schaeffer, Stockhausen, even Elvis, which is
what the first part of the book is about. Only the second part is about
metric, pattern-based types of music. I wanted to show how flexible
loops are as an artistic tool. But as far as echoes in pop music are
concerned, there is no way of beating “Echo and Reverb” by Peter Doyle,
so I did not even try.
GL: In the acknowledgments you come up with an impressive list of all
the clubs and festivals you frequented over the years. How does the
history of the loop play out into these party environments?
TB: My understanding of loops was shaped by going to clubs regularly. Or
rather: I only discovered that subject, because I found myself on the
dance floor and all these ideas came to my mind that were the starting
point of the book. I think it is important to expose yourself to what
you study, but of course I did not go clubbing just “for science’s
sake”. It was great fun, too. Again, it is “Electronic Body Music” and
to do anything to your body that music has to be loud, the bass has to
be kicking and you have to be ready to give yourself up to it.
I don’t think that techno has changed fundamentally since the advent of
this style, even though the fact that most electronic music is produced
with computers these days has lead to more nuanced music. And of course,
there are all these sub-styles that developed out of the basic
parameter. But only a couple of weeks ago I went to the Berlin techno
club Tresor when it had its 25th anniversary, and it felt like nothing
had changed in a quarter of a century. In a way, loops have created this
“time-less time” in club life. They have produced a very stable
aesthetic, with only minute changes to the basic modus operandi, even
though the club fashion might have changed.
My kids find rock old-fashioned, probably because of the suffering
singers, the narcissistic guitar-violators, the general pathos and the
self-serving aura of authenticity. But they are still shocked by techno,
which has seeped only via EDM-type of breaks and sound effects into the
pop music they listen too. So, in a way, techno is still the music of
the future.
It might seem vain to mention all the parties and clubs I have been to.
(I actually just noticed that I completely forgot the ones in Amsterdam
and Rotterdam that I visited in the 1990s. ;) I mentioned it to show
where proto-raves took place in the 1980s, before techno became this
stable aesthetic—the Italians were always ahead at that time and if you
listen to the mixes by Cosmic-DJs from that period, you will find most
of what contemporary DJs do rather simplistic and lacking! And I wanted
to pay tribute to all the people who made these places possible, and
that includes the barkeepers, the bouncers, the cloak lady—I love these
people, and I wanted to express my gratitude to them.
Club life is such an ephemeral thing, that has rarely been described
well. I did not spend a lot of time in my book trying it myself, but I
wanted to acknowledge the fact that electronic dance music would be
unthinkable without that context.
GL: Readers can easily notice that most of the research for this book
was done around 2004. Was the work on this book suddenly disrupted
because of your move to South-East Asia? Did you start to look at the
material in a different way because of this break of about a decade?
TB: I finished the book around 2006 and then I didn’t do anything with
it for a couple of years, because I was living in Asia. I felt that if
the book was published I should be back in Germany to be able to promote
it. And I was worried all the time that somebody else would come up with
the idea for such a book, because I thought it was such an obvious
topic. But fortunately, that did not happen. ;) I thoroughly revised the
book before publication and took the latest literature into account. And
I think that the book is absolutely up-to-date and will age rather
gracefully.
GL: Imagine if Alternative für Deutschland, and Farage, Wilders and
LePen would all instrumentalize electronic dance music and techno into
their populist right-wing movement and would get 30–40% of the votes.
Would that change your position? I know this is not the case... perhaps
with the exception of some “identitarian” neo-Nazi groups in Germany
that have incorporated the rave aesthetics and lifestyle into their
approach. Michel Foucault countered such rhetoric with the “non-fascist”
notion and proposed certain lifestyles and strategies that were neither
anti-fascist nor fascist. Can we say that the current techno is
non-fascist music?
TB: The current populist movements in Europe and the US that you mention
thrive on being AGAINST something. Against immigration, against Muslims,
against immigrants from Mexico, against the Burka, against Merkel,
against Hillary etc. The loop-based music I write about seems to thrive
on blurring the dialectic oppositions between “them” and “us” and
ideally make them obsolete. Dance music is about celebrating the
brother- and sisterhood on the dance floor, not about creating conflict
between different races, identities etc. As Heaven 17 said: “We don’t
need this fascist groove thing”. It might be naive to assume that
loop-music could never by hi-jacked by populists or Nazis. But as far as
I can see, it has not happened yet, and there must be reason for that.
GL: Without becoming nostalgic, do you believe in a comeback of the tape
recorder? The cassette tape lasted quite long, well into the 2000s, but
then also disappeared. Storing data on tape still happens. Would that be
a starting point? What attracted you in the first place, the material
aspect of the tape in general or the magnetic technology? To create a
loop on a computer is now damned easy. But how about reserving the sound
direction, for example?
TB: Working with tape is very time-consuming and quite difficult. Most
people who did it have very little nostalgia for this method. I show in
my book how the sequencer was developed partly by people who were tired
of splicing tape. Working with synthesizers or with digital instruments
makes it much easier to work with metric, loop-type of repetition. Some
might say: too easy. There is something to the claim that loops make it
incredibly simple for anyone to produce music. It is very instructive to
play around with a small Kaos Pad or a Korg Volca Synthesizer. They are
really cheap, but after just a little bit of fumbling around with these
gadgets you will get something that does not sound so different from
“real” club music. And that is to a large extent due to the fact that
they have these sequencers that just keep on repeating. That has led to
the emergence of bedroom producers with no formal musical training who
can cobble techno tracks or hip-hop beats together in no time. And that
in turn has led to a flood of releases that nobody can keep track of
anymore. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, there is something
very democratic and empowering about it. This type of music has a
different raison d'être than a Schönberg symphony or a chanson by
Jacques Brel. A lot of these tracks are just “tools” for the dance
floor. And of course, some of the most brilliant electronic music—from
Pierre Schaeffer to Phuture—has been produced by people who were not
professional musicians and used very simple means. But as writers such
as Jaron Lanier or Andrew Keen have reminded us in connection with the
internet, this kind of technologically supported creativity can also
lead to the leveling of culture with very stereotypical and conformist
results. I don’t want to say that they are right as far as electronic
music is concerned, but I can see where they are coming from. I am not
sure if a “return to tape” would be a way out of this, though.
Tilman Baumgärtel, Schleifen, Zur Geschichte und ästhetik des Loops,
Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin, 2015. <http://www.loopsbuch.org>.
Author Biographies
Tilman Baumgärtel (PhD) is a writer. He lives in Berlin and teaches
media studies at Hochschule Mainz. Previously he was a professor at the
University of the Philippines in Manila (2005–2009) und at the
Department of Media and Communication at the Royal University of Phnom
Penh (2009–2012). He has written or edited nine books on various aspect
of media culture, including internet art, computer games, the aesthetics
of loops and the director Harun Farocki. Schleifen. Zur Geschichte und
ästhetik des Loops is his latest publication.
Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic, and director of the
Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.
References
Baumgärtel, Tilman. 2015. A Reader on International Media Piracy: Pirate
Essays. Amsterdam University Press.
Lovink, Geert. n.d. “The Theory of Mixing: An Inventory of Amsterdam
Free Radio Techniques”.
<http://www.mediamatic.net/5750/en/the-theory-of-mixing>. (Accessed Oct
10 2016).
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