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Tim Blechmann & Klaus Filip
pinna
Tim Blechmann & Klaus Filip
Featuring: Klaus Filip Tim Blechmann
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Taus:
Tim Blechmann laptop
Klaus Filip laptop
One track 51:00
Recorded live in Vienna, July 2010
Interview with Tim Blechmann
Why 'Taus'? What does it mean?
Klaus and me first played together at the fund-raising concert for the klingt.org webserver. Dieb13 (who runs klingt.org) asked for a name and suggested `Taus' as a combination of Tim and Klaus. A similar name was used by the duo of his girlfriend Billy Roisz with Silvia Fässler, who performed as `Silly' before renaming to `Skylla', and Dieb13 and Billy sometimes use the name `Dilly'.
Pinna sounds very different from your earlier duo on L'Innomable. Can you describe what you see as the differences between the two discs?
Our first release `The Organ of Corti' was a digital studio recording. We spent a few days at Kleylehof, Klaus's atelier/farmhouse on the border between Austria and Hungary, playing and recording every night. The sound is very clean, because everything is digitally generated and recorded.
`Pinna' was a recording of a concert that we played in a small church in Vienna. It is a microphone recording of a ‘real’ sonic space: we used 5 or 6 speakers distributed in the space, e.g. one speaker was laying on the gallery facing the ceiling. The microphones captured the sound from the speakers, the reverberation of the space ... and all kinds of environment sounds like birds, audience movements, people passing by, etc, which cannot be separated from the music.
Yes, I really like the fact that you hear the space in Pinna; it seems to me that any improvisation is specific to the context in which it was played, and it's often good to hear something of this in a recording. But could you tell us more about the instrumentation for this church concert? What exactly were you both playing?
Klaus and I were using laptops. Klaus uses only sine waves, while I am playing noise textures and crackle sounds. These sounds are very easy to distinguish, because they don’t mask each other. We always hear precisely what the other musician is playing, so we can react very directly to the situation. However, the computer itself doesn't produce any sound, so we need loudspeakers to transform the electrical signal into vibrations. When playing a concert, it’s always a question, which speakers?, how many?, and where to place them? For Klaus's sine waves, it doesn’t really matter where you place the speakers, but he always likes to have a subwoofer to be able to play very low-frequency sounds. But for my noise textures, the placement of the speakers matters a lot because they are very easily locatable, and I try to play different sounds on different speakers.
Musically the piece is mostly very quiet, and yet the sound seems really full and rich. I suppose that comes from the spatial aspect. Was it evident to you at the time that the set you were playing was very strong, or did you only think it was worth releasing on disc once you’d heard the recording?
It was probably one of our most relaxed concerts. As it was a rather hot weekend in July, not so many people came to listen to the concert and therefore the situation was very concentrated. Bob Ostertag once wrote that John Zorn refused to play for too many people because it ruined the music. He has a good point there, as it is much more inspiring to play for an attentive audience. Playing with Klaus in such a situation is almost a form of meditation.
We actually didn’t think of a recording, but Thomas Grill, one of the organisers, brought a mobile recorder. When I heard the recording, I was pretty surprised that it really captured the atmosphere of the concert. There were actually some rather loud parts towards the end of the concert: in fact I had to reduce the volume of the final part for the CD to avoid listeners having to adjust the volume themselves when the quiet part is too quiet or the loud part is too loud.
You say that playing with Klaus is almost a form of meditation, and that really hit home today when I was trying to select a short extract from the piece to use as a taster on the label website. It was really hard, because the pace at which the music moves is glacial. It’s like waiting for New Zealand to bump into Chile. This isn’t so evident when you’re in the flow listening to the whole piece, but picking out a 2 or 3 minute extract feels meaningless; it tells you next to nothing about the music in its totality.
To quote Morton Feldman: "All we composers really have to work with is time and sound - and sometimes I'm not even sure about sound". I suppose this applies to almost any music. When the music is performed, it is always in a context: a specific event does not come on its own, but it is preceded and followed by other music. When taking a small snippet, this context gets lost.
Could you say a little about the improvised music scene in Vienna? You’ve mentioned Dieb13 and Billy Roisz, as well as Thomas Grill – and Katharina Klement and Angelica Castello are credited on the sleeve – all musicians who I rate very highly. There seem to be a lot of active and interesting players. Do you think there are any distinctive features about the scene in Vienna?
There are quite a few interesting musicians in Vienna, although I am not sure if they consider themselves mainly as `improvising' musicians. However one common aspect of many Viennese musicians is the use of electronics. One reason might be the electronic music course, `Elak', that many Viennese musicians attended in one way or another, and where Austrian computer music legend Günther Rabl taught for many years. It’s also where Thomas and Katharina are currently lecturing. At the moment all my regular collaborators from Vienna use electronics: Klaus is using a laptop, Manuel Knapp plays analogue feedback devices, and Conny Zenk uses a computer to do video projections.
Could you tell us how you earn your living? Is it possible to make money from musical activities in Austria?
I am definitely not able to make my living from music. And I know only very few musicians who can make their living from their own music. I mainly earned money from developing software. Some of my projects are somehow related to music, although it doesn't happen very often that they are related to my own music. Currently I am looking for a way to do a PhD somewhere in the field between computer sciences and computer music.
In general I suppose it is really hard to make one’s living from music, unless the music is suitable for the mass, institutionalised or you are extremely lucky.
Yes, it’s the same in the UK, but I suspect there’s even less state support for this kind of music here. But then people like Seymour Wright argue that in some ways it’s better if your music is totally separate from the business of earning your living, because that way commercial factors don’t affect your aesthetic choices at all.
One can probably distinguish between making a living from arts, making a living from something related and doing something completely different. However it is double-edged: if you try to survive with arts it is possible that you adapt it. Or even worse: you could change the focus from developing your work to promoting it. But on the other hand you have much more time to focus on your own works, if you don't have a day job. When doing something related to arts, you at least use the same tools/techniques and it is not completely detached.
Personally, I like to have the distinction between my work/research which is more of an intellectual challenge for the brain, and my music/art that is for the heart to make life worth living.
Reviews
“I have been admirer of the work of Tim Blechmann, the German (but long time resident of Vienna) laptop improviser and very much enjoyed the CD he released a few years back on the L’innomable label as one half of the duo Taus alongside Klaus Filip, also from Vienna, and also a laptop improviser. I was then, exceptionally pleased to hear that the duo were to release their second album on the Another Timbre label. Pinna is that album, a fifty minute long unedited live set recorded in July 2010. Both of these musicians have always impressed me for their singular, very focussed vision for their music. Both work with a very minimal palette, Blechmann usually with a finely tuned array of muted grey fields of fuzzy white noise, Filip most commonly with sinetones. They both also are completely comfortable with the technology they use and their music is rooted entirely in the discourse of the laptop as instrument. They make no attempt to mimic other instruments or to throw firework displays of technological possibility. For me both of these musicians utilise a methodology in their playing as simple as someone like Radu Malfatti (with whom Filip regularly plays) or Sean Meehan. They make powerful music with very simple gestures.
From the outset of Pinna another key element to the work of these two is apparent, the presence and feel of the room in which they perform. I had never managed to see Blechmann play live, though have seen Filip a few times, but both musicians I think it is fair to say seem to feed off of the tone of the room around them. Their music seems to grow out of the hum of air conditioning, the murmur of an audience trying to be quiet, the city outside of the recording space, the murky, featureless detritus that we leave behind as a human race. The first hiss of Blechmann, the first honeyed swell of Filip rise out that familiar sound of a hushed concert space, the early sounds they make, at very low volume and almost inseparable from the sounds of the room. The duo’s sound grows into a dense swell, as happens often throughout the album, but somehow dissipates in ways that seem almost imperceptible. One minute we are hearing a deep grey rumble and a rich tone, the next both have slipped to vitally nothing, or Blechmann has moved to small, nearly inaudible prickly sounds and Filip’s glassy tones may had become transparent. The music is constantly shifting, glacially slow, to the point that when things disappear you don’t notice, and often only when there are sudden dilations of the sound as one or the other musician might expand their contribution. Brilliantly, in an interview with Tim Blechmann for the Another Timbre website, Simon Reynell describes the pace of the music as “like waiting for New Zealand to bump into Chile”. Despite the way the music seems to become a natural, if very gradual flow out of the environment the interplay between the two is still apparent, and there is a tension to the way the two sounds come together, often mushrooming together into deathly slow motion drama. Listening closely to the music, the interconnections between the two musicians, as I have quite often over the past week or so is greatly rewarding, you can get lost in the clouds of grainy tone or you can follow their threads through each other and hear them as two conversing voices.
Pinna is great. It appeals so closely to my own personal preferences in music, a lightness of touch, a sense of restraint rather than busyness, the strands of musical conversation left open on the surface and yet all done with an understated humility. The inside sleeve of what is maybe the nicest example of Another Timbre packaging yet also sums it up, a dense mass of scribbled lines, at first seemingly chaotic, but at closer inspection neatly distributed and containing some sense of order, albeit perhaps only a perceived one. Lovely, lovely music then.” Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
“Pinna is the outer part of the ear, by the way; fine title. And a fine recording. But fine in a way that always causes me to be at pains to quantify. Two laptops, a live 50+ minute performance of the general type that I think of as "steady state" rather than drone, though don't ask me to differentiate. It does take the shape of a crescendo though it's long enough in coming that the dramatic effect is felt before consciously perceived. Although on the one hand there's an evenness here, a "smooth" shifting of planes, a continuity of action, I sense grain everywhere. It may be fine-grained (!) to the point of sublimation but it's there.
It idles beguilingly for a good bit at the start, several layers biding their time, gathering energy; it's very much like standing near an extremely subtle motor, gradually realizing how much stuff is happening, how well integrated it is to fool you into thinking, for a moment, that it's one thing. It gestates for a good while, circling, softly rumbling, high, sine-like tones coasting atop, splitting apart, isolated bangs heard in the distance. Those keening tones almost take on a melodic aspect at points, quite beautiful. Second gear doesn't kick in until some 4/5 pf the way through but it's timing feels just right. Gentle, sonar-like blips manifest, the whole thickens and grows woolly. The crest is mild, not overblown, the subsidence relatively quick.
In sum, just a very, very satisfying experience and a seriously enjoyable hunk of music.”
Brian Olewnick, Just outside
