Minimal Hood

Robert Hood explains the development of minimal techno to RA-

RA: did minimal techno - as evidenced by (your classic albums) "Moveable Parts," "Internal Empire," and "Minimal Nation," all of which were released in 1993/94 - come about by accident or design?

"I would say it was by design, I had minimal ideas before I even learned how to turn on a drum machine. Around '92, everyone was just grabbing onto technology, everyone was big on tone generators. Rave was everything in techno then, you know, the gabba sound and stuff. I wanted a more humanistic approach. So I just focussed on what felt good to Robert, and not what the latest trends were. I knew it was the chordy, organistic, really stripped down minimal sound that was natural for me, so I embraced it and went for it."

On The Ranch with Riley

Question : Basically tell us who you are.

Terry Riley : Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time. No one had done anything like this before were you just had a piece built all out of patterns and the first concerts of 'In C' were kind of big communal events where a lot of people would come out and sometimes listen or dance to the music because the music would get quite ecstatic with all these repeated patterns. Although repetition is a major force in music it was never used in this way before. So, essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns. In the nut shell that was my own introduction into the world of western music.

Q: What were you doing before 'In C' came out?

T.R : I was working with Anna Halprin's Dance Company. I was working with tape loops, sort of primitive technology. This was in the late 50's early 60's. I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had. Everything was mono. Using these machines I would take tapes and run them into my yard and around a wine bottle back into my room and I would get a really long loop and then I would cut the tape into all different sizes and I would just run them out into the yard and I would record onto one machine just sound on sound. I would build up this kind of unintelligible layer, almost like some of these things you have been playing. It was like primitive sampling. I would take things like Junior Walker and his All Stars and would cut it up and play it backwards and stuff like that. Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.



Q: What kind of instruments were you playing at this time?

T.R : I was mainly playing piano.

Q : Your first record was called "Reed Stream"

T.R : That was on an old organ harmonium that I had a vacuum cleaner motor blower blowing into the ballast's. The vacuum cleaner motor kind of had a drone, so I played along with that. Talking about the all night concerts, I did some of the first all night concerts back in the 60's with this little harmonium, and I also had saxophone taped delays. I was asked to do the first all night concerts. I did a solo all night concert which started at 10:00 at night and ended at sunrise. People brought their whole families and they had their sleeping bags and hammocks. It was in one of the big rooms in art college. It started out a career for me doing all night concerts which I did for a couple of years.

Q: How did you prepare for these all night concerts?

T.R : I really didn't have a plan, I just went in and started playing. one of my specialties was to be able to play for a really long time without stopping and I would play these repeated patterns for hours and hours and I wouldn't seem to get tired. I guess I have a lot of energy. Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone. And a lot of people didn't even wake up to know the difference because a lot of people just slept all night.

Q: I heard in a lot of your concerts you used lights shows?

T.R : I traveled with an artist, Bob Benson, he used to have strobe lights and we built these mylar screens. He was a painter essentially. His paintings were stretch color fabric on canvas, then he started stretching reflective mylar. Sometimes I would have troops of girl gymnasts doing cartwheels during the night shows just as a passing. Then we would have these mylar things so the audience would see themselves and they would see me. They looked quite distorted because the mylar, as it bends, distorts the reflection kind of like the mirrors at the circus.

Q: When people talk about minimalist music the lineage seems to go ( according to media ) La monte Young, you, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and I was wondering when you first came across La monte what went on between you. I know you've played concerts together, I always got the impression that the influence went both ways.

T.R : Well, he was certainly a big influence on me when I met him, he was the freakiest guy I have ever met in my life. I met him when I went to school in Berkeley. He was in one of my classes and we struck it off as close friends from the beginning. I think he was a much more sophisticated musician. He had lived in Los Angeles and been a jazz musician, and I was coming out of the sticks of Northern California and I hadn't heard nearly as much music as he had. He has a superb conceptual sense about music, I think his sense about music is what spawned minimalist music, even though he didn't do it the way Glass and Reich, who where more inspired by me because of the repetition. La monte's idea was just to have this one big form that was just long tones, I think that was the real essential heart of minimalist music.

Q: How were those pieces live?

T.R : He wrote one for me, that I've never performed yet, but maybe I will someday. It was where I was supposed to push a grand piano into a wall and keep pushing until the wall fell down.



Q: Could you talk a little about your encounters and development of your relationship with Pandit Pran Nath?

T.R : I met him through La monte Young. La monte had brought him over in 1970 and La monte had been one of the first people in America to recognize how great he was. He had been underground figure performing in India on the radio. He wasn't considered by the Indian public at large as one of the great superstars, like Ravi Shankar. But in effect, he had all this great knowledge of Indian classical music and really performed it in a true sense. I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tabla before I met him. I was sort of going in that direction because my own music was very similar to Indian music. When I met him [Guruji] he said 'You must become my student.' So I said, 'OK.' I cried the first time I heard him sing. He hit some bell in me that had never resonated before. It was so moving I wanted to go back to India with him right away and start studying with him. I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India. So I just went to India to study with Pandit, and he said no you have to do your own music too.



Q: Tell us about the music-theater piece you are working on now?

T.R : It is based on the works of Adolf Wölfli. He was a Swiss peasant who was born around 1864 and had a terrible childhood. He was neglected, his father was an alcoholic, he was a ward of the state, his mother died when he was very young and he was sent out as a hireling around the farms in Switzerland. He wandered around Switzerland like this for about thirty years as a laborer and stuff. Around the age of thirty he was caught molesting a young child in a cradle. He actually had been involved in other cases before too and had been put in jail because of one of them. But when he was thirty, they had diagnosed him as schizophrenic and was put in a mental institution, and spent the next thirty-five years almost in solitary confinement. In this mental institution and after about five years he started drawing and he had the most incredible ability to draw and conceptualize art considering he had never been to art school and knew nothing about what was happening. He was a very visionary artist. His art is always about vision of something. One of his hallucinations he said people would visit him and tell him what to draw and then they would argue about what he should draw and then he would argue with them. But he turned out thirty thousand or something drawings and stories about travels through space, travels throughout the earth, places he had never been too, because he spent his entire life in a mental institution. He described New York and Canada in great detail and gave them really fantastic names, with great plays on words. When I first discovered his art, it was like a revelation. I had never heard of him, I couldn't believe it, he was such a great artist and nobody ever heard about him. But now outsider art is beginning to get known. After I saw Wölfli's work, I wanted to do some piece on him because he really set off something in me when I saw it, I felt like I had to deal with it. First I was going to make it purely a musical piece and then it looked like it had to be a theater piece because a lot of Wulfi's writings are so imaginative and his words are so imaginative, I thought they had to be spoken in each piece so we sort of developed this woven fabric of music and narrative dialog. We would mix it all together with video images and slides. Then the actors were speaking and telling stories.

Q: Are the words sung or spoken?

T.R : Some of them are spoken and I've written some songs for the scripts. Some of them are in German and others are in English. Some of the ones in German are just based on sounds which are really interesting, they are not even sounds common to Germany. They are sounds Wölfli had made up. You know there is this language of schizophrenics called Glosserlallia which is a secret language that only they understand.

Q: So schizophrenics can talk to each other in this language?

T.R : No, they can only talk to themselves. Most of them have many people dwelling within themselves, and they all speak Glosserlallia. They probably each have their own version of the language. I found that to be fascinating though. The big part of art and music is imagination. The thing that grips us is imagination of the artist, and schizophrenics are some of the most imaginative people. It makes you wonder what is the real heart of art and music. What are we really trying to get at? I think what happens to them, their ordinary filters for reality somehow open up. They experience things we can only experience in very altered states, but they experience this all the time.



Q: Did you see music in Wölfli's pictures, and did you develop themes to certain pictures?

T.R : I did. A lot of his drawings also have music notations in them. He developed his own system of music notation and no one has ever been able to decipher it. It is very cryptic and enigmatic notation. When I saw a lot of those I really thought it sounded like great music just looking at it on the page although I would never know how to decipher it, so I decided to compose music just in a spirit of what he is doing. I wanted to write music that was influenced by my studying his drawings. So I spent a lot time this summer just gazing at the drawings. The music has come out kind of interesting, it almost sounds like music that could have been composed in the 30's and 40's around the time he lived. I haven't really wanted to do anything modern. It's general substance is older sounding.

Q: What are your thoughts on where the world is going?

T.R : It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people. Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control. Acceleration is finite, I think according to some laws of physics. It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking. We are either going to dissolve as a human race or we are going to break through into a new understanding of what it is to be a human being.

Q: So what part is music going to take in this transformation?

T.R : This morning I was practicing raga, and at one point I was singing a long tone and I became very peaceful and still. I thought this is really the highest point of music for me is to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, wanting to do anything else, just to be in a state of being to the highest point. Then you get a little meditated, you get to a place that is really still and it is the best place you have ever been and yet there is nothing there. For me, that is what music is. It is a spiritual art. It is a form to that place. There are many ways to do that, many kind of ways to get there. Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness. For me, it is the reason for doing music because you are always trying to get there, but we live in this big cloud of illusions, so we sometimes go about it in the wrong way. We think music as being as a highly skilled activity, virtuosity. To me it's important that you achieve the state. Listening to music is as high as singing or playing it. If a great singer is singing and you think gee I would like to sing like that, you are being foolish because you are listening to the thing you really want anyway, so why think you want to do it. It is the thing, the thing itself that is really important. Although I have a personal greed about playing music, I really enjoy the tactile thing of playing an instrument, but I'm coming from back in 1935, when that was the way you made music, there was no other way to do it, so I have a lifelong habit of doing music this way. But if I was 20 years old today, I might not have that orientation, I would probably be out sampling music like everybody else.

Interview conducted at Terry Riley's home - Shri Moonshine ranch (California near Nevada) - October 1995

Check out the new Terry Riley album - The Cusp of Magic

Do Right

Brooklyn's best film maker Spike Lee discusses how he made "Do The Right Thing" in NY Magazine, in the process admitting he didn't know what he was he doing on She’s Gotta Have It / School Daze and revealing that Robert De Niro turned him down. Spike also reveals his feelings on the democratic race

"The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That’s not misspeaking; that’s some pure bullshit. I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with. These old black politicians say, “Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!” Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins—they have to understand this is a new day. People ain’t feelin’ that stuff. It’s like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean."

Murakami runs

February 20, Spiegel, Germany - 'When I Run I Am in a Peaceful Place'
INTERVIEW WITH HARUKI MURAKAMI

Mr. Murakami, which is tougher: writing a novel, or running a marathon?
Murakami: Writing is fun -- at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage. But running 42.195 kilometers (26 miles) all at once is tough; however it’s a toughness I seek out. It is an inevitable torment which I deliberately take upon myself. For me that is the most important aspect of running a marathon.

Why did you start running?
Murakami: I wanted to lose weight. During my first years as an author I smoked a lot, about 60 cigarettes a day, in order to be able to concentrate better. I had yellow teeth, yellow fingernails. When I decided to stop smoking, at the age of 33, I sprouted rolls of fat on my hips. So I ran; running seemed to me to be most practicable.

Why?
Murakami: Team sports aren’t my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don’t need a partner to go running, you don’t need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers. Judo doesn’t suit me either; I’m not a fighter. Long-distance running is not a matter of winning against others. Your only opponent is yourself, no one else is involved, but you are engaged in an inner conflict: Am I better than I was last time? Exerting yourself to the limit over and over again, that is the essence of running. Running is painful, but the pain doesn’t leave me, I can take care of it. That agrees with my mentality.

What kind of shape were you in at the time?
Murakami: After 20 minutes I was out of breath, my heart was hammering, my legs were trembling. At first I was uncomfortable when other people saw me jogging. But I integrated running into my day like brushing my teeth. So I made rapid progress. After just under a year I ran my first, though unofficial, marathon.

You ran from Athens to Marathon on your own. What appealed to you about that?
Murakami: Well, it’s the original marathon, it’s the historic route -- though in the opposite direction, because I didn’t want to arrive in Athens during the rush hour. I had never run more than 35 kilometers; my legs and my upper body were not particularly strong yet; I didn’t know what to expect. It was like running in terra incognita.

How did you get along?
Murakami: It was July; it was hot. So hot, even in the early morning. I had never been to Greece before; I was surprised. After half an hour I took off my shirt. Later I dreamt of an ice-cold beer and counted the dead dogs and cats lying along the roadside. I was furious with the sun; it burnt down on me so angrily, small blisters formed on my skin. It took me 3:51 hours, a passable time. When I arrived at the finish I hosed myself down at a petrol station and drank the beer I had dreamt of. When the petrol pump attendant heard what I had done, he presented me with a bunch of flowers.

What is your best time for a marathon?
Murakami: 3:27 hours by my watch, in New York, in 1991. That’s five minutes per kilometer. I am very proud of that because the last stretch of the course, which leads through Central Park, is really hard. I have tried a few times to improve on that time, but I’m getting older. In the meantime I’m no longer interested in my best personal time. For me it’s a matter of being satisfied with myself.

Is there some mantra that you recite while running?
Murakami: No. I just tell myself once in a while: Haruki, you’ll make it. But in fact I don’t think of anything while I’m running.

Is that possible, to think of nothing?
Murakami: When I am running my mind empties itself. Everything I think while running is subordinate to the process. The thoughts that impose themselves on me while running are like light gusts of wind -- they appear all of a sudden, disappear again and change nothing.

Do you listen to music while running?
Murakami: Only when I’m training. And then rock music. At the moment my favorite is the Manic Street Preachers. When I go jogging in the morning, which is the exception, I load Creedence Clearwater Revival into the minidisk player. Their songs have a simple, natural rhythm.

How do you manage to motivate yourself again every day?
Murakami: Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn’t go running, I wouldn’t go the next day either. It’s not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one’s body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn’t do that. It’s the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn’t become disaccustomed. So that I can gradually set the literary yardstick higher and higher, just as running regularly makes your muscles stronger and stronger.

You grew up as an only child; writing is a lonely business, and you always run alone. Is there some connection between these things?
Murakami: Definitely. I am used to being alone. And I enjoy being alone. Unlike my wife, I don’t like company. I have been married for 37 years, and often it is a battle. In my previous job I often worked until dawn, now I'm in bed by nine or ten.

Before you became a writer and a runner, you owned a jazz club in Tokyo. A change in life could hardly be more radical.
Murakami: When I had the club I stood behind the bar, and it was my job to engage in conversation. I did that for seven years, but I’m not a talkative person. I swore to myself: Once I’ve finished here I will only ever talk to those people I really want to talk to.

When did you notice it was time for a fresh start?
Murakami: In April 1978, I was watching a baseball game in the Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the sun was shining, I was drinking a beer. And when Dave Hilton of the Yakult Swallows made a perfect hit, at that instant I knew I was going to write a novel. It was a warm sensation. I can still feel it in my heart. Now I am compensating for the old, open life through my new, closed life. I have never appeared on television, I have never been heard on the radio, I hardly ever give readings, I am extremely reluctant to have my photograph taken, I rarely give interviews. I’m a loner.

Do you know the novel “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” by Alan Sillitoe?
Murakami: I wasn’t impressed by the book. It’s boring. You can tell that Sillitoe wasn’t a runner himself. But I find the idea itself fitting: running allows the hero to access his own identity. In running he discovers the only state in which he feels free. I can identify with that.

And what did running teach you?
Murakami: The certainty that I will make it to the finishing line. Running taught me to have faith in my skills as a writer. I learned how much I can demand of myself, when I need a break, and when the break starts to get too long. I known how hard I am allowed to push myself.

Are you a better writer because you run?
Murakami: Definitely. The stronger my muscles got, the clearer my mind became. I am convinced that artists who lead an unhealthy life burn out more quickly. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin were the heroes of my youth -- all of them died young, even though they didn’t deserve to. Only geniuses like Mozart or Pushkin deserve an early death. Jimi Hendrix was good, but not so smart because he took drugs. Working artistically is unhealthy; an artist should lead a healthy life to make up for it. Finding a story is a dangerous thing for an author; running helps me to avert that danger.

Could you explain that?
Murakami: When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don’t have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It’s like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic. My stories are located in a dark, dangerous part of my consciousness, I feel the poison in my mind, but I can fend off a high dose of it because I have a strong body. When you are young, you are strong; so you can usually conquer the poison even without being in training. But beyond the age of 40 your strength wanes, you can no longer cope with the poison if you lead an unhealthy life.

J.D. Salinger wrote his only novel, “Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32. Was he too weak for his poison?
Murakami: I translated the book into Japanese. It is quite good, but incomplete. The story becomes darker and darker, and the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, doesn’t find his way out of the dark world. I think Salinger himself didn’t find it either. Would sport have saved him too? I don’t know.

Does running give you the inspiration for stories?
Murakami: No, because I’m not the kind of writer who reaches the source of a story playfully. I have to dig for the source. I have to dig very deep to reach the dark places in my soul where the story lies hidden. For that, too, you have to be physically strong. Since I started running, I have been able to concentrate for longer, and I have to concentrate for hours on my way into the darkness. On the way there you find everything: the images, the characters, the metaphors. If you are physically too weak, you miss them; you lack the strength to hold on to them and bring them back up to the surface of your consciousness. When you are writing, the main thing isn’t digging down to the source, but the way back out of the darkness. It’s the same with running. There is a finishing line that you have to cross, whatever the cost may be.

Are you in a similarly dark place when you are running?
Murakami: There is something very familiar to me about running. When I run I am in a peaceful place.

You lived in the United States for several years. Are there differences between American and Japanese runners?
Murakami: No, but when I was in Cambridge (as a writer-in-residence at Harvard), it became clear to me that the members of an elite run differently from ordinary mortals.

How do you mean?
Murakami: My running route took me along the Charles River, and I was constantly seeing these young female students, Harvard freshmen. They jogged with long strides, their iPods in their ears, their blonde ponytails swinging to and fro on their backs. Their entire body was radiant. They were aware that they were unusual. Their self-awareness impressed me deeply. I was a better runner, but there was something provokingly positive about them. They were so different from me. I was never the member of an elite.

Can you distinguish a beginner from a veteran runner?
Murakami: A beginner runs too fast, his breathing is too shallow. The veteran is at rest. One veteran recognizes another just the way that a writer recognizes the style and language of another writer.

Your books are written in the style of magical realism, reality blends with magic. Does running have a surrealist or metaphysical dimension -- quite apart from the pure physical achievement?
Murakami: Every activity acquires something contemplative if you perform it long enough. In 1995 I took part in a 100-kilometer race; it took me 11:42 hours and in the end it was a religious experience.

A-ha.
Murakami: After 55 kilometers I broke down; my legs would no longer obey me. I felt as though two horses were pulling my body apart. After about 75 kilometers I was suddenly able to run properly again; the pain had vanished. I had reached the other side. Happiness surged through me. I reached the finishing line filled with euphoria. I could have gone on running. Nevertheless, I will never run another ultramarathon.

Why not?
Murakami: After this extreme experience I went into a state that I have called “Runner’s Blue.”

What is that?
Murakami: A sort of listlessness. I was tired of running. Running 100 kilometers is terribly boring, you are on your own for more than eleven hours, and this boredom gnawed at me. It sucked the motivation out of my soul. The positive attitude was gone. I hated running. For weeks.

How did you restore your pleasure in it?
Murakami: I tried to force myself to run, but that didn’t work. The fun had gone out of it. So I decided to try a different sport. I wanted to try a new stimulus, and so I started on the triathlon. It helped. After a while, my desire to run returned.

You are 59 years old. How long do you intend to go on taking part in marathons?
Murakami: I will go on running for as long as I can walk. You know what I would like to be written on my tombstone?

Tell us.
Murakami: "At least he never walked."

interview conducted by Maik Grossekathöfer.

Seize The Time

January 2008 interview with former leader of the Black Panther Party Elaine Brown. I was lucky enough to meet her when I lived in Oakland and she signed my copy of her book "A Taste For Power" with the inscription "Find The Power In You." Words to live by.

We should make architecture like Michael Haneke makes films

Architect Peter Eisenman interviews Filmaker Michael Haneke. Haneke's "Cache" was a favorite of mine (and many others) a couple of years back.

Much to fascinate here including the reminder that one of the joys of Antonioni films is how he filmed architecture because he was trained as an architect. More proof that all the arts bleed into one another.

I can't say I've paid close attention to Eisenman's architecture before reading this piece but this made me a bit more interested in him so here's one of his theoretical buildings - the "Moebius Building."

Industrial Relations

"the thing about England is that there’s a culture of the village idiot. There’s always somebody where you live who’s outside. It’s acceptable to be an outcast, an eccentric"



TG interview from Frieze April 2006.

’whenever we encountered confrontation, we would attempt to embrace rather than fight it’

Carl discusses his plans for a new restaurant

The unstoppable Niemeyer

Almost missed this article from January 1st on one of my favorites - the world’s oldest practicing architect Brazilian Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho. It's a shame, and sad reading, to see the writer attempt to attack Oscar and downgrade his work - a cheap shot when Niemeyer who just turned 100 on December 15th is still busy working and continues to receive great respect from his beloved Brazilian people. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, recognized his legacy by recently proposing legislation that would confer special landmark status on all of his buildings in Brazil and declared 2008 the year of Niemeyer saying "Niemeyer has never let himself be dazzled by luxury, power and fame. He continues to rebel against injustice." In Sao Paulo the city celebrated his birthday with the erection of a giant 100 hung on the side of his Copan building. Niemeyer told a Brazilian newspaper that his 100th birthday was meaningless, and that he does not feel older than 60. His recipe to stay young, in his own words - "Modesty and tolerance."




Here's a picture of the model (below) for Niemeyer’s latest design - a cultural/arts complex for the Spanish city of Avilés which he unveiled just before his birthday and described to the Tapei Times as "the most important work in my life." Niemeyer is also working on renovations to Planalto palace, the seat of the Brazilian government in Brasilia, a cultural center in Kazakhstan and a new government center for the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, as well as contemplating designing a new capital four times as big as Brasilia for Angola.



In the US, Niemyer's only projects are the 1947 United Nations Headquarters which he worked on with Le Corbusier (which he discusses briefly in the video interview below) and the much lesser known Strick House (below) at 1911 La Mesa Drive in Santa Monica that was recently threatened with destruction then saved. The Strick House was also recently documented in Michael Webb's book Modernist Paradise.





Download a video interview with Oscar Niemeyer (produced for RIBA, Fall 2007) from BDonline