Names: Martina Berther, Philipp Schlotter
Occupation: Composers
Nationalities: Swiss (Martina), German (Philipp)
Current release: Martina Berther and Philipp Schlotter's Matt is out via Hallow Ground. Oder physical copies from bandcamp.

If you enjoyed this interview with Martina Berther and Philipp Schlotter and would like to stay up to date with their music, visit Martina's official homepage and Philipp's Instagram profile.

We also recommend our previous conversation with Martina in our Ester Poly interview. For the thoughts of one of Philipp's other collaborators, head over to our Anna Aaron interview.



There are many potential models for collaboration, from live performances and jamming / producing in the same room together up to file sharing. Which of these do you prefer – and why?

Philipp Schlotter: I am open to all sorts of collaborations. But I’m maybe a bit more comfortable and used to being in a room together rather than sharing files and bits of work with each other.

How did this particular collaboration come about?

Martina Berther: Philipp asked me if I would be interested in working together on drone music.

What did you know about each other before working together? Describe your creative partner in a few words, please.

Philipp: I knew Martina as a musician and bass player from other bands in Switzerland.



I perceive Martina as very open-minded and interested in new forms and styles of making, playing, and recording music. She has a profound knowledge of different music styles and can create her own artistic language, regardless of which instrument she plays.

Martina treats another person's ideas with great respect and seriousness.

Martina: I knew Philipp from his band Me&Mobi. We shared the stage when I was playing with my band, Ester Poly.



I perceived Philipp as a driven musician in the Swiss music scene, always searching for unique sounds and pursuing his own style. In the few short conversations we've had, I've always felt heard and seen.

I perceived him as a very interested and open-minded person.

What do you generally look for in a collaborator in general and what made you want to collaborate with each other specifically?

Martina: It's important to me that I feel inspired by my musical partners and their music. I need to feel comfortable around them because if you collaborate, you'll spend a lot of time together and need to communicate.

Working at eye level is important to me too. If I don't feel seen, or if I feel that I have to fight too hard for my ideas, I prefer to work alone.

Philipp and I had an appreciative relationship right from the start. We have different strengths, and we complement each other well.

Tell me a bit about your current instruments and tools, please. In which way do they support creative exchange and collaborations with others?  

Philipp: I often use analog synthesizers from the ‘80s. On this recording, I used a Roland Juno 106 and a Roland JX-10. I like their simplicity, but I use pedals, filters, and amps to avoid the plastic '80s sound these synthesizers would normally produce. The "hands-on" feeling is important to me because it allows me to react and interact quickly in a collaboration.

[Read our feature on the Roland Juno 106]

Martina: I mainly used preparations and effect pedals on my Fender Jazz Bass. The sounds I produced on ‘Gallia’ and ‘Frachter’ are action and pulse-orientated with an open form.

On this record, I played the organ with the approach and style of my bass playing. Which means that I prefer to play less notes but with a lot of attention and focus on sound.



Before you started making music together, did you in any form exchange concrete ideas, goals, or strategies? Generally speaking, what are your preferences when it comes to planning vs spontaneity in a collaboration?

Philipp: In this case, we both felt the urge to make drone and ambient music. We talked about this idea, and that was the starting point.

From then on, there was a good mixture of planning and spontaneity. The music was more spontaneous, and the organization around it needed to be planned.

Describe the process of working together, please. What was different from your expectations and what did the other add to the music?

Martina: In the beginning, we met to improvise. After we got to know each other a bit better musically, ideas for concepts and compositions emerged, and the sound aesthetics also became clearer.

I basically had no expectations of the project, so nothing turned out differently than expected. The only surprising thing that happened was that we integrated the organ into the recordings. But even that happened organically.

It was on the drive home from the recording when I thought, "Okay, wow, we just recorded something like an organ album." And that felt very good.

Decisions between creatives often work without words. How did this process work in this case?

Philipp: All the pieces on this record require interaction between the players in a very attentive way. Therefore, many intuitive compositional decisions have been made without words.

We are both experienced in listening carefully to the other player and anticipating what could happen next.

What are your thoughts on the need for compromise vs standing by one's convictions? How did you resolve potential disagreements in this collaboration?

Philipp: The creative environments I am looking for should not bring up feelings of standing by one’s convictions or compromises. If it does, then it is often a sign for me that something is not quite right or that it hasn't been clearly communicated whose interpretation should be involved in the outcome of this project.

But in this particular collaboration, it didn't feel to me like there was any of this. Martina and I had a lot of discussions, but the foundation was always the pure interest in music and finding a solution together.

Was this collaboration fun – does it need to be?

Martina: I would rather use the word joy. Working on our music together has brought a lot of joy – yes. That is important to me. I don't want to waste my time on projects that don't bring me joy. I don't see any reason for that. Outside of making music, we are exposed to enough things that bring less joy.

So, if I can choose, I choose to collaborate with people who make me feel good.

Do you find that at the end of this collaboration, you changed certain parts of your process or your outlook on certain creative aspects?

Martina: This collaboration showed me once again that you can make good music if you don't get stuck fixating on prescribed visions and trying to control things. I tried to be present and let the music happen, and very beautiful things came out of that.

It's not a new insight, but I've also had collaborations where the trust and flow got lost along the way, and everything got caught up in ideas and expectations. In this sense, the collaboration with Philipp has strengthened my trust in intuition – an important tool in music.

Philipp: We recorded this record with two microphones on the other side of the church. The music was processed through the whole room when it left the organ as well as our amplifiers, until it reached the microphones.

The recorded music sounded very different from what I heard while playing it in terms of colour, intensity, and density. This fact definitely changed the way I see myself in the context of a recording and showed me once more that my perception is just a tiny dot of the whole picture.

To trust and accept that an "impersonal" object like a room becomes part of a creative process was new for me, but it felt very calming and good.