Manuel Göttsching: E2-E4 live in NYC

Friday, August 15, 2008 7:00 PM
Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Damrosch Park Bandshell
free, no tickets required
As part of Wordless Music: 800 Years of Minimalism - The Spiritual Transcendent.

Super excited for this. Göttsching is an inspiration and E2-E4 is one of the most important pieces of electronic music ever. Nuff said.

Here's Manuel talking about E2-E4 to Japanese website Higher Frequency

HRFQ : “E2-E4” was originally released in 1984 despite being recorded three years earlier. What were some of the reasons behind the delay?

Manuel : Because there was no interest to release it then, it was obviously too early for this kind of music… Some of the German music papers (e.g. the Berlin based famous magazine ZITTY) even wrote that there is no excuse for this composition which is not to be called music at all but a sin. It was the American Larry Levan (who ran the Paradise Garage in New York) who discovered it and made it famous all over the world. Then ZITTY wrote another article apologizing.

HRFQ : Where did the concepts and sounds for this album come from? How did you manage to create a sound so far ahead of its time that electronic music producers and DJs still admire today?

Manuel : I worked with synthesizers a few times at Studio Dierks but it was not significant at that time. After my very influential album “Inventions for Electric Guitar”, and since I founded my studio 1974, I started to work on producing and composing this kind of music with sounds from drum machines, keyboards, synthesizer and sequencer seriously. Around 1974, I also began to listen to US minimal musicians like Steve Reich, Phil Glass and Terry Riley. My first albums based on my studio experiences and may be on the influence of the mentioned minimal music but also my old influences from the 60ies like Peter Green led to “New Age of Earth” and “Dream and Desire” and to compositions that I performed solo live for fashion events (to be still released!). There were tree of them: “No 1” was in 1976, “Laufsteg” 1978 and “Big Birds” in 1979. So New Age of Earth and the music for the above mentioned fashion shows led straight to “E2-E4”.

And here from Remix Magazine is a list of equipment Manuel used to make E2-E4 - a Sequential Circuits Prophet 10 for chords, two Moog Minimoogs (one for bass and one to trigger drum sounds on a noise generator), an ARP Odyssey for melody, an early punchcard-coded EKO drum machine, an EMS Synthi A for noises and a Pearl Syncussion triggered by the sequencers. E2-E4 was played and recorded live - no mistakes, no overdubs !