Part 1
Name: Marie Wilhelmine Anders
Nationality: German
Occupation: Producer, composer, sound artist
Current release: Marie Wilhelmine Anders's Frozen Music is out via Broque.
Recommendations:
Music: Heiner Goebbels: "A House Of Call". Recorded by the Ensemble Modern and accompanied by an extensive „Material Counter“, an accompanying book.
The music is a fascinating work combining sound recordings and a very transparent ensemble sound. The special thing about it is that Goebbels scientifically researched the way in which the sound recordings were made, and he made the results of the investigation the subject of the compositions. The sound recordings were demanded by coercion and force in the German colonies by German colonial officials and ethnographers from the people living there in a kind of collecting mania. Nowadays the sound recordings are in the German "Lautarchiv".
There is a certain contradiction in the fact that the German composer is allowed to add a valued work to his ouvre on the basis of these sound documents - with which he refers to the circumstances under which these recordings were made - and that, however, the recordings are still not accessible to the descendants of the creators living in the former colonies. (I thank Mèhèza Kalibani for pointing this out).
Art: Ana Bilankov - Her book Spaces, Stories, Geographies. This is the first comprehensive monograph and artist’s book of the works of the multi-media artist, who lives in Berlin and Zagreb. Her minimalist, atmospheric videos and photographs move thematically in the interstices of documentation and fiction and make visible the points of contact between private and public, politics, history and society. She makes unknown things visible in a way that they are no longer strange and shows the familiar in a way that one thinks one does not know it.
Perhaps my enthusiasm also has to do with speed. Or rather: the slowness of the movements. Surreal and random things get contexts. Her art touches me deeply.
If you enjoyed this Marie Wilhelmine Anders interview and would like to keep up to date with her music, visit her on Instagram, and Soundcloud.
When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?
I like to listen to music during a walk or even on the train. So, inevitably, I have my eyes open most of the time. Listening to music always encourages me to move.
Nevertheless, music has a strong visual component for me. I see it in my mind's eye while I listen. It has a certain representational quality through its different textures and its density. I always hear colors. And the mix depth has a strong visual, spatial quality to me.
Maybe all this is why I don't really need music videos. Although there are very good videos, also to my music, which add something new that didn't exist before in the music. But my inner film actually wants to run without additional images.
What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?
My first steps in music were perhaps the steps on the stairs of our old apartment building when I was three years old and ran up there and sang. The hallway had such great acoustics. Everyone knows these beautiful-sounding environments that we encounter by chance in everyday life.
Then first instrumental lessons with the violin from the age of 5. Music theory from the age of 6 was also part of it back then, but I didn't get it. I was too young. Luckily I avoided playing in the orchestra. I much preferred to learn the piano and taught myself when I was between 6 and 9 years old.
And I always invented music. All the time. The music just came out of me. In the beginning, my mother wrote it all down for me. Later, after a small interlude as a drummer, I studied composition at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (today Universitiy of the Arts). But it wasn't an academic path that I took at all. I always pursued my own ideas too much. My teacher was desperate because I was doing a sound installation instead of writing scores.
The experiences you make cannot be overestimated. I'm really grateful for that. Even if it was very hard at times. It was a very long journey with many different stages before I learned how best to achieve the musical results I was striving for: classical training, the love of progressive rock music, playing keys in a punk-band in the East-Berlin underground scene, the time in experimental music as an improviser, then the short phase as a songwriter, from which my current electronic music production developed organically.
You need talent and the inner need to express that talent gives you that certain perseverance without which you can't do it. There is a saying that you have to learn to become who you are. I would say that corresponds to my personal experience.
According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?
Music was everything. Really everything. And absolutely nothing changed since then.
What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?
Curiosity! Creating is something that happens all by itself. Music has always been an independent world for me and I move within it. It's like a second life. But that's not entirely true, because I often feel like it's like real life. So, what motivates me to breathe, to move, you could ask exactly that. For me, making music comes as naturally as breathing.
With my music I can express a certain type of freedom, flow and energy that is important to me. And also I can express attention to detail. I notice many different shades and details in everyday life and I would like to implement these experiences in my music. But at the same time I want my music to be exhilarating and on the other hand to remain interesting on the second, third and fourth listen.
To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?
Does that make a difference? It is often the case that when you think you have invented something, it was already in the air. Think of Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone technique, and if I remember correctly, Josef Matthias Hauer had developed a very similar method at the same time. To be honest, I don't know exactly how it is with me.
For my albums I usually have non-musical sources of inspiration. So far these have been sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, poems by Robert Louis Stevenson; and for my album She’s Leaving, it was Thomas Lutz’s Polaroids on the subject of homelessness that hung on my wall and gave the album its extra-musical reference.
These sources are a kind of "idea production machine“. I deal with the content of the sources and pick up on their moods. Then I usually mix these with further, completely different ideas.
The ideas evolve over time. When an album is finished, there's always something left over, and that's already the start of the next album.
Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?
I agree with Simon: the overall sound and its colors are what I first hear in my imagination, mostly long before I even start producing, and if I don't hear it at the end when everything is finished, then I have missed my goal.
But that happened to me more in improvised music. That's why I stopped doing it. Because what I wanted to hear rarely came out.
My personal sound? I hope that it is always evolving. Warm and bright at the same time. Rich in detail. I always want depth. I find that the most difficult to achieve. But I'll keep at it.
Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?
In the time before I studied composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, I started to collect field-recordings. I had this high quality Sony Walkman recorder and the OKM-2 microphones from Soundman, which are the ones you put into your ears and get a super stereo image with. I walked around with it all the time and recorded everything. At home I listened to the recordings and realized that I was hearing the sometimes very long recordings in a musical way: that little rhythms and motifs were emerging and they sounded to me like music.
The idea arose to process my sound objects in a sound installation. When I cut together the material for the installation in the studio, my ears began to completely switch to ambient sounds and the "musical hearing" of these. I became unable to hold a conversation in a café or restaurant at that time (I still am, actually).
And once I was sitting in the suburban train and there was this typical rhythmic sound of the wheels on the rails. And suddenly this ryhthm, which the wheels on the rails played, separated in my perception completely from their origin and I heard for some moments only the sound, like a drum loop, without knowing anymore this came from the train in which I sat. This may sound trivial, but it was quite a magical experience.
And yes, in my opinion it is not the nature of sounds that makes them "musical" but their arrangement and our way of hearing them that makes them so. Just think of techno. How noisy techno is!
My sound installation, by the way, was about this very question you are asking me now, "To what extent do visitors hear the field-recordings as musical elements, detached from the source of their creation? And what does it take for them to perceive and interpret the sounds in this way?" Visitors passed through light barriers as they walked through the space, triggering small sequences of sounds lasting a few seconds.
Since there were multiple sources in the space, visitors soon discovered that they could play with the installation and also with each other, and began to consciously trigger something and explore and create the space with each other. After visiting the installation some of the visitors were interviewed and so I got a very accurate and detailed feedback.
