Hassoun
October 26th, 2006, 11:08 PM
German techno pioneer brings his music to Beirut
Thomas Brinkmann's workshop teaches young artists a different approach
http://www.dailystar.com.lb//admin/storage/articles/zoom/20061025214810.10-B.jpg
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Thursday, October 26, 2006
BEIRUT: Day three of his week-long trip to Beirut. Black jacket, black jeans, black boots. At rest in the cafe of his hotel overlooking Beirut's less than aesthetically inspired port. Dead time before the start of a three-day workshop, during which some 25 young musicians will experiment with fusing the sounds of their city into electronic beats and inevitably, in the process, ask a million questions or more.
In one hand, Thomas Brinkmann stirs the froth piled onto his second cup of coffee. In the other, a hand-rolled cigarette, long since extinguished, rests between two knuckles.
"I didn't read books on Beirut or study the history but I know a few things," says Brinkmann, who arrived late last week.
His trip to Beirut comes courtesy of the Goethe Institute for the purpose of leading a workshop and then spinning a set at Basement, the cavernous, subterranean club slammed up even closer to the port.
"On the surface the city is open but it's a total illusion," he says, nailing an observation that even the most cynical of Beirutis still struggle to grasp. "The f***ing contradictions are so rich. Yet it's so isolated. There are all these guys who put money in, and make money back. The intellectuals don't trust the youth anymore." He shrugs. "I'm not surprised."
Brinkmann is expecting a full class of students on the first day of his workshop. He imagines that number will be halved the second day, and halved again the third.
"I will be tempted to tell them to just go home and work," he says with a rueful smile. "A consumer attitude, this is what I expect, for people to come with an open bag ... and a lot of questions."
The idea of the workshop is this - each participant brings samples recorded somewhere in the city, along with some basic editing skills. The most interesting sounds are then taken apart in sequences, processed and rearranged. Laptop, headphones, additional hardware, equipment or instruments are all optional. The point is not so much to master new or costly technologies but rather to provoke new and invaluable ideas.
"This world of sound is like a world within a world," says Brinkmann. "You can move one side into another but you need sensitivity. The ears are not well trained. Usually people perceive with their eyes.
"In the 20th century, a much more open idea about art came about, and about music. In talk there is melody, in talk there is rhythm ... [To make music] you don't need expensive machines or software from Apple or Windows," he explains. "Probably you can use it but much more important is here," he taps his left temple, "your own ideas. And the best ideas you have usually come when something you want is absent, when it is not there, so you invent it."
Thomas Brinkmann is considered one of the foremost pioneers of minimal, dub-inspired techno, and a crucial link between the genre as it developed in Europe and the US, or more precisely, in Detroit, where techno was born more soulful and sultry than anywhere else. His musical output varies radically from one project to the next but if there are any constants, they are Brinkmann's soft but steady beats, slow build-ups and his resolutely artful deconstruction of sound. He also has unrivaled dexterity when it comes to throwing in totally unexpected wildcards - an unabashedly sexy baseline on "Mit Sugar" from the 2004 album "Tokyo + 1" or a Django Reinhardt-esque swing on "Charleston," from last year's "Lucky Hands."
Brinkmann first came into renown with his remixes of - or as he calls them variations on - tracks by Wolfgang Voigt (aka Mike Ink, Studio 1, Love Inc and Gas, among other aliases) and Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman, Circuit Breaker and Hard Trax, also among other aliases). Brinkmann's intervention with their material involved custom-building his own turntable with two tone-arms.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
Within the tiny but nonetheless influential subculture of brainy dance music, he became something of a legend when he devised a system by which he used a knife to cut scratches into the last groove on a given record - the locked groove - in geometric patterns.
Though he has been actively producing and releasing albums since the late 1990s, his sonic innovations started nearly 20 years earlier. "It was the late 1970s. I didn't want to play in bands anymore. I played percussion. I didn't like to practice. And I figured out that there were people who were better than me. So I had to invent these substitutes," he says.
Coming from a small town in Germany - which one doesn't matter, he says, they're all the same - there were times when he had coveted a synthesizer and a sequencer, which his friends had but which he couldn't afford. In such a situation, he says, "there are two ways to go about it - either you work like hell or you invent."
Brinkmann chose the latter.
Later on, he studied at the venerable art academy in Dusseldorf, where everyone from Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke to Joseph Bueys to Nam June Paik has taught. The professor Brinkmann remembers best, however, is the lesser-known Oswald Wiener, who made him suffer through nearly two years of machine theory and mathematics.
"He taught us very strange computer programs," Brinkmann recalls. "As an art student, mathematics is very strange. I didn't get the point of what he was doing. It took me about a year to understand why." All this may explain how Brinkmann came to be hacking into his records with excruciating precision based on 33.3 revolutions per minute.
Like Hawtin and Voigt, Brinkmann has produced music under numerous aliases, including Soul Center and Esther Brinkmann. The later is a searing homage to his sister, who died when Brinkmann was a child.
"It's a myth I created for myself," he says. "My first ability to remember was of her in the hospital. She had glass bones. Every move she made something broke. The sounds you remember, they leave something. It's a bit abstract, but for me this was my sister, because I wasn't allowed to have one, because my parents could never speak of it.
"It's a personal projection wall," he adds. "It was a way to handle trauma, though it's a very little trauma with respect to what other people have." He gestures out the window. "The little kids running around the Dahiyeh, they see these holes everywhere and they have to handle it somehow. Even the holes on the buildings around here - to see them every day leaves something. It's a disaster."
Though the likelihood is high that his workshop participants will come armed with the sounds of this summer's war, Brinkmann isn't entirely convinced such direct references will make meaningful music.
"When I was in art school, there were a lot of students from Yugoslavia who were making work about the war. It was very personal, but art is public. Here [in Beirut], in these surroundings, where everyone understands, it's therapy. But I'm not sure it works, unless you are willing to be so radical in your approach, unless you are willing to really hurt yourself for it, or unless you are willing to do it over and over again."
Thomas Brinkmann's workshop teaches young artists a different approach
http://www.dailystar.com.lb//admin/storage/articles/zoom/20061025214810.10-B.jpg
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Thursday, October 26, 2006
BEIRUT: Day three of his week-long trip to Beirut. Black jacket, black jeans, black boots. At rest in the cafe of his hotel overlooking Beirut's less than aesthetically inspired port. Dead time before the start of a three-day workshop, during which some 25 young musicians will experiment with fusing the sounds of their city into electronic beats and inevitably, in the process, ask a million questions or more.
In one hand, Thomas Brinkmann stirs the froth piled onto his second cup of coffee. In the other, a hand-rolled cigarette, long since extinguished, rests between two knuckles.
"I didn't read books on Beirut or study the history but I know a few things," says Brinkmann, who arrived late last week.
His trip to Beirut comes courtesy of the Goethe Institute for the purpose of leading a workshop and then spinning a set at Basement, the cavernous, subterranean club slammed up even closer to the port.
"On the surface the city is open but it's a total illusion," he says, nailing an observation that even the most cynical of Beirutis still struggle to grasp. "The f***ing contradictions are so rich. Yet it's so isolated. There are all these guys who put money in, and make money back. The intellectuals don't trust the youth anymore." He shrugs. "I'm not surprised."
Brinkmann is expecting a full class of students on the first day of his workshop. He imagines that number will be halved the second day, and halved again the third.
"I will be tempted to tell them to just go home and work," he says with a rueful smile. "A consumer attitude, this is what I expect, for people to come with an open bag ... and a lot of questions."
The idea of the workshop is this - each participant brings samples recorded somewhere in the city, along with some basic editing skills. The most interesting sounds are then taken apart in sequences, processed and rearranged. Laptop, headphones, additional hardware, equipment or instruments are all optional. The point is not so much to master new or costly technologies but rather to provoke new and invaluable ideas.
"This world of sound is like a world within a world," says Brinkmann. "You can move one side into another but you need sensitivity. The ears are not well trained. Usually people perceive with their eyes.
"In the 20th century, a much more open idea about art came about, and about music. In talk there is melody, in talk there is rhythm ... [To make music] you don't need expensive machines or software from Apple or Windows," he explains. "Probably you can use it but much more important is here," he taps his left temple, "your own ideas. And the best ideas you have usually come when something you want is absent, when it is not there, so you invent it."
Thomas Brinkmann is considered one of the foremost pioneers of minimal, dub-inspired techno, and a crucial link between the genre as it developed in Europe and the US, or more precisely, in Detroit, where techno was born more soulful and sultry than anywhere else. His musical output varies radically from one project to the next but if there are any constants, they are Brinkmann's soft but steady beats, slow build-ups and his resolutely artful deconstruction of sound. He also has unrivaled dexterity when it comes to throwing in totally unexpected wildcards - an unabashedly sexy baseline on "Mit Sugar" from the 2004 album "Tokyo + 1" or a Django Reinhardt-esque swing on "Charleston," from last year's "Lucky Hands."
Brinkmann first came into renown with his remixes of - or as he calls them variations on - tracks by Wolfgang Voigt (aka Mike Ink, Studio 1, Love Inc and Gas, among other aliases) and Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman, Circuit Breaker and Hard Trax, also among other aliases). Brinkmann's intervention with their material involved custom-building his own turntable with two tone-arms.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
Within the tiny but nonetheless influential subculture of brainy dance music, he became something of a legend when he devised a system by which he used a knife to cut scratches into the last groove on a given record - the locked groove - in geometric patterns.
Though he has been actively producing and releasing albums since the late 1990s, his sonic innovations started nearly 20 years earlier. "It was the late 1970s. I didn't want to play in bands anymore. I played percussion. I didn't like to practice. And I figured out that there were people who were better than me. So I had to invent these substitutes," he says.
Coming from a small town in Germany - which one doesn't matter, he says, they're all the same - there were times when he had coveted a synthesizer and a sequencer, which his friends had but which he couldn't afford. In such a situation, he says, "there are two ways to go about it - either you work like hell or you invent."
Brinkmann chose the latter.
Later on, he studied at the venerable art academy in Dusseldorf, where everyone from Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke to Joseph Bueys to Nam June Paik has taught. The professor Brinkmann remembers best, however, is the lesser-known Oswald Wiener, who made him suffer through nearly two years of machine theory and mathematics.
"He taught us very strange computer programs," Brinkmann recalls. "As an art student, mathematics is very strange. I didn't get the point of what he was doing. It took me about a year to understand why." All this may explain how Brinkmann came to be hacking into his records with excruciating precision based on 33.3 revolutions per minute.
Like Hawtin and Voigt, Brinkmann has produced music under numerous aliases, including Soul Center and Esther Brinkmann. The later is a searing homage to his sister, who died when Brinkmann was a child.
"It's a myth I created for myself," he says. "My first ability to remember was of her in the hospital. She had glass bones. Every move she made something broke. The sounds you remember, they leave something. It's a bit abstract, but for me this was my sister, because I wasn't allowed to have one, because my parents could never speak of it.
"It's a personal projection wall," he adds. "It was a way to handle trauma, though it's a very little trauma with respect to what other people have." He gestures out the window. "The little kids running around the Dahiyeh, they see these holes everywhere and they have to handle it somehow. Even the holes on the buildings around here - to see them every day leaves something. It's a disaster."
Though the likelihood is high that his workshop participants will come armed with the sounds of this summer's war, Brinkmann isn't entirely convinced such direct references will make meaningful music.
"When I was in art school, there were a lot of students from Yugoslavia who were making work about the war. It was very personal, but art is public. Here [in Beirut], in these surroundings, where everyone understands, it's therapy. But I'm not sure it works, unless you are willing to be so radical in your approach, unless you are willing to really hurt yourself for it, or unless you are willing to do it over and over again."