Experimental Sound Textures and Rhythms

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Hi folks,

The mix series is back after a small break and we're kicking things off again with English Sound Artist, Musician & Composer Janek Schaefer.

Schaefer was born in England to Polish and Canadian parents in 1970. While studying architecture at the Royal College of Art, he recorded the fragmented noises of a sound activated dictaphone travelling overnight through the Post Office. That work, titled ‘Recorded Delivery’ [1995] was made for the ‘Self Storage’ exhibition [Time Out critics choice] with one time postman Brian Eno and Artangel.

Since then the multiple aspects of sound became his focus, resulting in many site-specific installations, exhibition & dance soundtracks, albums and concerts using his self built record players with manipulated found sound collage. The ‘Tri-phonic Turntable’ [1997] is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the ‘World’s Most Versatile Record Player’. He has performed, lectured and exhibited widely throughout Europe [Sonar, Tate Modern, ICA], USA/Canada, [The Walker, XI, Mutek, Princeton], Japan, and Australia [Sydney Opera House]. In 2008 he won the Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers Prize, and The British Composer of the Year Award in Sonic Art. The Bluecoat Gallery exhibited a Retrospective of his 20 year career in 2009. He lives and works in Walton-on-Thames.

Janek tells me that his Symbiosis mix is a "kind of lofi live mix with two acoustic record player and an edirol recorder. It sort of sounds shit quality on purpose – like the fidelity of a cassette tape, a mixtape for a mate. A diary show reflecting on the early 90’s dance music and other bits.. Who does it play for you...?"

I love the fact that Janek's mix shows us another side of his musical interests. We had a chat by phone a couple of weeks ago and you can read the q&a below.

Enjoy this episode of Symbiosis!

Cheers,

Simon

Janek Schaefer interview - 6/8/2010

Symbiosis: Hi Janek

Janek Schaefer: Hi. How are things in Australia?

S: Good - it's about 9pm here. How are you doing?

JS: It's midday here and I went to bed at 6am, so I'm just getting up! (laughs)

S: Are you a night worker usually?

JS: Yeah, yeah. That's when all the inspiration hits and all the distractions are all asleep.

S: You have three children now right?

JS: Two kids.. 4 and a half, and one.

S: Excellent

JS: Yes they are. (laughs)

S: So, what are you working on at the moment?

JS: I have just got home from running my installation 'Asleep At The Wheel' in Milton Keynes. That's a new city in England that was planned around roundabouts and straight roads in the sixties and seventies.

I actually grew up there as a child, on the edge of the village.

I was the artist in residence there. They invited me to do a piece about cars in the city of roundabouts. I had six months and I didn't know what I was going to do and it turned out to be - well how do you define success? - an extremely rewarding and surprising experience.

S: It's very hard encapsulating sound art isn't it?

JS: I can't describe to the lay person what it is that I do succinctly or intelligently without feeling like a bit of a buffoon. (laughs)

S: Well I know a lot of sound artists like yourself are installation artists more than they are recorded music artists. How do you decide what to encapsulate on a record or what to release?

JS: On a record? Well limitation is good - you have stereo and about an hour. That's usually quite helpful. I've never had a problem translating installations into records. People always mention how it translates when they write about these things. But if I am doing a piece for a record then it's a piece for a record. It may be inspired by an installation but try to mix it as a composition.

S: I guess it's a bit like a live recording and capturing it at a point in time.

JS: Well, I've never done like a sixty minute walk around. I have always taken the material and tried to develop it into something that is satisfying on a disc.

S: Your first Room40 recording was a live recording in a church right?

JS: That's right. Well, it was a live composition. I composed it as a piece to be performed to a structure but performed it live with recorded elements - I knew it would last an hour and have four movements. And then I diffused it and played it, and messed with it, live in a hall. So that was a hybrid. Everything's a hybrid really.

S: I love that record - it's probably my favourite release by you.

JS: Well I always say that every record is my favourite as I've go through my career. (laughs) But that one is the one I would currently say is my favourite record. It encapsulates the installation, the live element, the source materials, the slowness, the intricacy, the atmosphere, the 'site specificness', and all those things. It came out well and I like it a lot too, thank you.

S: Would you say that there is a philosophy that encompasses your work?

JS: I definitely have a set of rules that I make and/or break. The first thing that came into my head when you said that question is serendipity and context. Those are the two things that inspire me.

I can't do anything unless I have a deadline and context, a reason to do it and who it's for, what it's going to be, the purpose of it. I generally don't just sit down and make tracks. I'm not a studio artist - I always have to have.. how much money is it, who's going to be there, what's the kind of space, when, what time of night. All these things narrow what I'm going to achieve. So I always try to think first, 'What's my audience?' and then make it for that.

Apparently that's what you should never do - you should never make work for your audience, you should make it because you want to make it. But I have to know who it's for first.

S: It sounds like you're a person of context and that you work best creatively with limitations.

JS: Absolutely. Limitation breeds creativity - I've always said that. It's what I enjoy…

S: I know when we spoke previously on Symbiosis we looked at your architectural background. I won't go back there again - it's fairly well established. But how would you see your work as having evolved since 1995.

JS: Yeah, well the first work I did was for that self storage building, it was Recorded Delivery. I posted a tape recorder through the post. It was very much defined by the fact that it's a building full of boxes that move around space. So I posted a box to the space and it recorded its journey.

And, where am I now? I just finished Asleep At The Wheel. That was in another architectural space which is an old supermarket and it was 100 metres long, 40 metres wide. An epic space. And I put this ghost road of cars through it. And I did this piece that ended up being all about our consumerist situation, our consumerist culture, and where we are heading in the next five, ten, twenty years on this more,more,more/foot-to-the-floor/fast line of life with our head in the clouds in a day dream, thinking the road goes on forever. It's about how we think we can have everything but we're on a finite planet, ripping stuff out of the ground as fast as we can and burning it; in the last generation we've burn half the fossil fuels on the planet and things are going to change for my children. It's a reality.

So the site, the space, was where people in Milton Keynes used to go shopping for their blueberries from South America and their lamb from New Zealand, and the came in with this road of flashing cars in the distance. (laughs) It was very eery.

The site played a big role in it. Actually, I didn't complete the story of Asleep At The Wheel earlier.. we had 7,500 people through in 10 days which, for an experimental person like me, is a little off the radar!

S: That's huge!

JS: Yeah. Michael Jackson sells that many tickets in an hour.

S: Yes, but it's about context.

JS: It was shocking - it was full.

There were 10 cars and you could sit in the back of each car and it played a new soundtrack to you. It fed you sentences about research I had been doing with people who know what's going to happen in the imminent future. So it was very much an information art piece.

It's a very tough subject that people don't like to talk about. I mean, I find it hard at home raising these issues! I get called an evangelist and a dinner party bore and all of this kind of stuff. It's socially difficult to talk about this really, really pertinent, socially important subject.

So when I chose it for the installation I didn't know what response I was going to get. I had a woman crying at the end because she recognised that she had done nothing about this issue in her lifetime. She felt a tremendous amount of guilt and she had tears rolling down her face. It was incredibly powerful. And apparently people were having a bit of light sex in the back of one of the cars so I had it all - from birth to death. That's what Facebook says anyway! (laughs)

S: It's good to know that it connected with people - emotionally and sexually it seems!

JS: Yeah, and how do you define success? The numbers were fantastic, my wife says it is the best piece I have done, but the amazing thing was that people came back three times to see this - what I thought would be a difficult experience. But I wanted to make it memorable so that they took on information. And the comments book is just - I've got 250 photographs of a bunch of the comments in it and it's just a book of goodness. People lapped it up - it's was very moving.

S: It's great to hear.. So now that's done, what's coming up for you?

JS: I have two releases coming up. Room40 is releasing my project National Portrait - The Last Transmission which is a 24 hour composition. I'm releasing it in an audio file format - an audio file album as I like to call it - as a usb/download thing. It's an installation that I did at Christmas, when they stopped transmitting analogue television across the city of Liverpool where I did my retrospective at Christmas last year.

We had five television channels that are being shut down and we are starting to switch to digital. So it was kind of this switching point between analogue and digital culture. And it's another thing about how 'more, more, more' is how we want our society to go by having a thousand channels rather than five. Are we better off? No, I don't think so. No one seems to be able to find anything on the telly any more, even though there are a thousand channels!

So I recorded the last twenty four hours of each of the five channels. I cut each of those up into little sound bites and played them on five tellies. On the random playback system that I often use all of the sound bites ricochet around the room and make new contexts for the audience that are walking around them. So for the release I have mixed all of that together into a thousand mp3s that last twenty four hours.

S: Those sort of ideas really stick with you I think. That concept of the end of analogue television being an epoch.

JS: What's interesting I think.. I did Recorded Delivery which lasted an hour and I did it with analogue cassette tape on a sound reactors tape recorder dictaphone. Now fifteen years later we have the means to make a twenty four hour album and to record it, you know. I did five twenty four hour recordings - one hundred and twenty hours of audio that I had to chop up! (laughs)

So it was pretty scary. When I was two days from opening the show I had to take on board that I had to edit one hundred and twenty hours of audio in a day and a half. We got a team of volunteers in the morning because I was panicking and by the evening they had edited the whole lot into short chunks using contemporary software.

And I have just been commissioned by the London Sinfonietta, which is an avant-garde orchestra that started in the sixties. My brother-in-law, John Tavener did the first piece by them called The Whale that was released by the Beatles. And because of Asleep At The Wheel this orchestra has commissioned me to do whatever I like.

They told me, "Janek, you can do anything!" which is always very hard for me. I have to define my boundaries. But you know, they said, "you can do a piece that lasts two weeks if you like!". And I was like, "Okay! Let's move up from a day to two weeks!" (laughs)

Not sure what I'm doing yet.

S: At least you have that freedom. It sounds like Asleep At The Wheel will be a great springboard for you.

JS: The wonderful thing about Asleep At The Wheel was, as an artist-in-residence at an international festival, not far from London, waves of people who are influential in the art and music scene coming through. I got to give a ten minute lecture to them. So I definitely hit a few nails on the head there and then off the back of it came the commission for the London Sinfonietta.

So it seems to be a nice step up to the next level. It's exciting.

S: Yes it is.

JS: So my other cd is coming out on Spekk in Japan which is called Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns which is my concert for radio transmitter and sound PA in a concert hall setting. I don't perform on the stage and I have speakers in front and behind the audience, and little portable radios dotted around the audience. And I mix a live acousmatic concert - it's very dynamic, strong and powerful but also quiet, tender and fragile because of the transmitter technology. That's coming out on Spekk soon.

S: Excellent. It sounds to me like one of the evolutions in your work is the sheer size and scale of the canvas. It's wonderful to know that your vision can be writ on such a large basis.

JS: Yes.

S: My last question today relates to your children. As an artistic parent, how do you see your children growing up in that context. It's a very unconventional context and I wondered how you are passing knowledge on to them.

JS: Well, kids as you know.. I'm addicted to innocence and the purity of youth is divine. They get clouded with realities as they get older. Scarlett is only four and a half but you know..

When I was talking to her about energy and usage, on the very domestic level of light switches, she just got it one hundred percent. And obviously I give her a framework that is a bit wider as an artistic parent.

And I sit in the car with her and discuss 4x4 cars and sports cars because I don't really think they're the way to go. And she says, "Daddy, daddy.. is that because they only have two seats?" (laughs) But she gets it!

The kids get it and what's incredible on a down-to-earth basis… My local primary school have a very head teacher and it took a lot of work to get her in there. And we went to the opening meeting where the headmaster gave a speech and he said, "blah blah blah.. we won the first prize for being the most sustainable school in Britain because we reduced our energy use by eighty percent in the last few years, and we ran the whole school off the national power grid for a couple of weeks recently."

I was like "Wow!"

So I went and interviewed him for Asleep At The Wheel. Well someone came up to me after going to Asleep.. and they talked to me about this guy who talked about this school they ran and they found it really inspirational!

"Be The Change You Want To See In The World" said Gandhi. I stuck that on the mirror in one of the cars and someone came and wrote a comment, "It's a bit sixth form philosophy!" (laughs)

I try and live up to that quote in my own little way. I'm as hypocritical as anyone. I mean, my whole career is as an 'international sound artist' - yay Janek! That means I have flown around the world on cheap energy in the last fifteen years, with cheap electronics, cheap laptops. The only reason I can survive as a sound artist is because of the cheap energy and materials that we've been using more and more in the last decade.

I don't want to do that any more. I want to focus on being more local so it's been great being the artist in residence.

S: Janek, I'm going to let you go and enjoy your day. I'm very happy that we can feature your mix on Symbiosis.

JS: Yeah I hope people enjoy it because it's the type of music I used to listen to before I became an experimental artist. All the early nineties dance tracks when I lived in Manchester. And I started the Lucky Dip Disco because of Scarlett to educate her about sound and dance music from the last sixty years rather than just contemporary cds they make now and most children get fed on.

The tunes I have chosen make you dance and my own music just makes you dance in your head. And I love people dancing! These are the tunes that got me off the sofa and onto the dance floor at the Hacienda on a Wednesday night.

Janek's website is at Audioh.com

Forthcoming

Phoenix and Phaedra holding patterns CD - Spekk [Japan] Summer 2010

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50 Inner Spaces [for JG Ballard]
Split 5” vinyl release with Stephan Mathieu
Cronica [Portugal]
http://www.cronicaelectronica.org/

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‘Exposure’ CD Summer 2010
Cronica [Portugal]
http://www.cronicaelectronica.org/

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Desert Island Discs radio show with Philip Jeck
http://www.audioh.com/information/Desert%20island%20DIscs.html

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‘Sound Art’ Retrospective Exhibition 2010
http://www.audioh.com/projects/soundartretrospective.html