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Again, Sherburne and his current view of future of techno:
| quote: | Between (or beyond) the poles planted by "Ribcage" and "Heater", of course, lie other options. (I should note that I think Samim has produced some brilliant music-- and I'm not even sure that "Heater" doesn't rank in that category.) A few weeks ago, I had the chance to spend a few hours in the Berlin studio of Tobias Freunde and Max Loderbauer, aka Non Standard Institute (or Nsi.), and whatever doubts I may have had about the future of techno-- a born doubter, I seem to go through these funks on a monthly basis-- vanished over the course of the recording.
Nsi., in case it's not obvious from the name, isn't your standard techno outfit. For starters, its members have history: Freund has been recording since 1980 (under the aliases Tobias and Pink Elln, among others, and as a member of Sieg Über Die Sonne and a frequent collaborator with Atom Heart), while Loderbauer, also a current member of Chica and the Folder, helped kick off ambient techno with his group Sun Electric back in 1990.
Nsi. haven't yet recorded much-- one 12-inch single for their own Non Standard Productions label and two CDs, for Ostgut Ton and Sähkö, respectively. (Freund and Ricardo Villalobos also recently released a collaborative single for NSP under the name Odd Machine.) But watching them at work was enough to make me wish for a world in which theirs were the only "techno" recordings available-- at least for a month or two, during which time other aspirants might be given a chance to play catch-up. No matter that most of nsi.'s work isn't banging enough to meet the amphetamine standards of most club publics; theirs is a vision of what club music could be.
As opposed to the thousands of producers banging away at the plug-in of the month, nsi. know their setup intimately. Loderbauer sits in front of a fairly mammoth bank of modular synthesizer components connected to a vintage-style step sequencer. Cables dangle dangerously; the array brims with knobs and excitable LEDs. Freund focuses his attention on a Roland TR-808 and TR-909, the definitive drum machines of techno. Joints are rolled, the audio software Logic is set rolling, and the two proceed to improvise. Loderbauer's sequences begin normally enough, mapping out the groove in generous bass lines and taut arpeggios, but as he begins to twist the dials, and as the LFOs of his synth begin to modulate, well, everything in sight, from waveforms to the pitch and step-lengths of the sequence itself, everything becomes malleable, mutable, liquid.
Repetition, the cornerstone of techno, is a constant presence, but an unstable one, like a drunk uncle who keeps slipping off to the kitchen for nips of eggnog at the holiday party; the groove is always crumbling into one-off sonic events that thrill and disappear. Across the room, Freund stands in front of his racked machines, taps at keys and twists at knobs, dropping beats in and out, tripping the kick over its own shadow. From what I understand of their process, only Loderbauer's synth work is being recorded into Logic; later, Freund will go back and re-improvise his own drum-machine sequences over the top, and the two strands will finally be edited together. The idea that any of this is not being recorded-- is happening and being lost, unrecoverable-- is incomprehensible. They play for perhaps an hour, barely communicating by any means other than musical. (At one point, Mambotur's Argenis Brito arrives from his own studio downstairs, clearly bored, trying to engage the two in conversation, but the most either will do is flash him a grin and hand the joint his way.) At the end of it all, I feel as though I've been through something. This is techno not as product, but as process-- an active practice whose end never eclipses the means used to attain it.
The realist in me knows that it would be foolish to imagine a world where nsi. were the standard-bearers for club music; their output is too eccentric to provide the rush required by a public in search of dependable arpeggios. It rewards primarily active listening, even if it doesn't require it. And very few artists can turn stuff like this out. That's both a drawback and a blessing in techno's headlong rush of a scene. The market needs more beats-per-minute, and, quite simply, more minutes of music, than the Non Standard Instituts of the world can turn out. There's churn to be churned-- a thought that has been depressing me a lot, of late. But a few hours spent with someone like nsi.-- or a few hours spent listening to their records, or any records that take you outside what you thought techno, or indeed any kind of music, was supposed to sound like-- is enough to make a whole year of music, at its most fertile and its most fallible, look worthwhile. |
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"All revolutions are the sheerest fantasies until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities."
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