Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

I feel like I can’t really answer this because since immigrating to the US things have been everything but a steady routine.

In the last two years I have hardly worked creatively on a daily basis and that is okay. I don’t think you loose the title of ‘being an artist’ because you don’t work on creative stuff daily or make it your sole occupation. If there is an idea that I find interesting I work on it and if not, then not.

When I started with all those sound projects, I was trying to do as much as possible and as constantly as possible. That worked well for five years. But now I feel happier to stray away from it completely, sometimes even for months, and come back to it when I feel like it. Working various jobs and finding work took up most of my time in the last years - not easy as an immigrant.

Otherwise, I drink my coffee in the morning, walk my dog Wednesday, putz around the house and listen to music or German and American radio. I enjoy cooking and baking and love watching soccer on the weekend.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Let’s go with room 135 or strife of permanence.

5% of these are creative work and the rest is execution. Developing an idea worth pursuing is the creative part - sometimes painfully slow and sometimes surprisingly easy when an idea just comes to you. You never know. Then you tinker around with it. Probe it with a hammer to figure out the fragile elements until you end up with a solid core. That leads into production were I follow that idea’s framework and gather material.

I like recycling old material I have or record new material - mostly found sounds - when necessary. Germans say Handwerk (hand work). It is a very hands on process to create a piece from that idea. Then, when you feel like it could be considered done, I take a break from it. And revisit it in ‘listener mode’. Then changes might be made according to the initial idea for the project.

And that’s it.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I like both. Though when I think about it, I like working by myself a bit more - even in a collaborative setting. Then again, I like to switch between phases of private and collaborative work. The result really depends on who it is you work with and less on the mode.

While private productions allow you total freedom, you can learn from and share your ideas with other people. So I think in the end it needs to be a healthy balance.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I don’t know to be honest. Maybe that would be something interesting to ask the listeners. If I had to guess, I would say: Each individual is completely immersed in the world and engaging in a reciprocal process of influencing in varying degrees. And despite being immersed, we are thrown back onto ourselves, completely isolated. We interact, but we are very limited perceptively and in our communication.

That is to say, you sit next to someone and you listen to the same piece of music and ‘share the moment’. But the individual perception of a piece and the way a person understands it, built on their eduction, upbringing et cetera, can lead to completely different experiences of the same perceived thing, giving each individual their own impression of the thing that might not be true to the actual qualities of how this thing really is. If we experience the same things differently since we are perceptively isolated individuals, that brings up the question: Are we actually capable of sharing a moment?

Then again, this isolation is something that we share as individuals. And we learned to share thoughts by use of references trying to overcome that perceptual isolation. In this context, music is one of those other things between all those individuals that they can use to create a connection to others or other things like thoughts et cetera and perceptually reach beyond one’s own perceptual limitations. This seems to be working for us, but it also means, we might interact with the world we are immersed in, in a way that is not true to its actual qualities.

Oh boy, that was philosophical. To close up this question: I am not too concerned with the importance or role of my work in this. It comes and goes. It is just a fun way to use your time that you have in your life and it can - at times - make you happy. What happens afterwards, oh well … let them decide what to do with my stuff.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Interesting take. I immediately think more about accompanying than dealing with.

There are so many key moments in life that are connected with music - meeting your future partner in a Berlin club, crying at your grandmother’s funeral as they play her favorite piece of classical music, the teenage bliss of seeing your favorite band (at the time) live, driving through New Mexico alone for hours and a song comes on the radio that perfectly fits the mood and the environment.

I think in all these instances it has contributed to how I lived through these experiences. How those experiences truly are for us as individuals is naturally private. That is a soothing and at times devastating thought. But if you choose so, creative works can shape your life and be a point of reference for each individual to perhaps share a moment.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

That part of music was never my cup of tea. There are artists like Valerie Vandermeulen who creates sound pieces from NASA data et cetera. I have listened to pieces like that for my radio show Rummage Radio on WQRT and was surprised to find that I don’t dislike them. But it is just not that interesting to me.

To answer your question: I guess music or art can be a non-scientific access point to come into contact with and maybe even understand something technological. There are plenty examples in sonification for instance.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Just humour me on this one: Reading this question I imagine a Berlin-based artist group planning, organizing, making calls, rehearsing to the point of exhaustion, and frantically making last minute changes just to make one great cup of coffee. Oh, Berlin …

But to answer your question, I think art is a task. And many of the artistic tasks are well within the realm of the mundane. Mundane tasks allow for moments when you can also think about projects or come up with ideas. It all mixes together so I can’t really make a clear differentiation between the two.

I feel, oftentimes I do make pieces like I make a cup of coffee: I have my tools, I know what I want to do and how and then you get to work and do it. Though, I prefer to have a coffee first.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I don’t want to go all Shannon-Weaver (or any other name of a communication researcher) on you all here, but I think it is far less magical, esoteric, mystical or grand. It’s vibration of air molecules and contextual generating of meaning.