| Music
Technology: What has been the most significant development during
your career? |
| Ralf
Hütter: I think this must be the availability of the first
monophonic synthesizers, because before that it used to be these big machines
from Bell Laboratories or government radio stations. Being able, as an individual
musician - an independent musician - to get your hands on some of this electronic
gear. I think that was the most significant change, around the late sixties.
And now the next phase, the digital technology, everything becoming more
modular, this is the next big step. |
| Music
Technology: Did you yourself have any access to synthesizers
before that? |
| Ralf
Hütter: No, And I remember the first monophonic synthesizer
I bought was the same price as a Volkswagen. So that was the choice to make.
I think that's a very good comparison, because the synthesizers were giving
freedom of movement to musicians. |
| Music
Technology: Did those machines offer more freedom than today's,
in that they were free of presets? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, they would give you just a three-page typewritten
guide, saying "this is the oscillator, this is the filter" - and that was
it. Then you would go home and fiddle around and turn knobs, there were
no pre-programmed sounds in it because it was all analogue - the whole range.
I don't like today's pre-programmed sounds so much; we always work on them,
if we use them at all. We never really find anything that comes from other
people's ears that we keep. We always turn knobs, that has been a continuing
priority. We used to design our own synthesizers as well. In those days
we had sequencers built, because they were very rare. Only the very big
Moog modular systems had sequencers. And then we would take drum boxes and
re-design them with our engineers and electricians into a playable form,
and adjust these with the sequencers, and those to tape, so that everything
was synchronised. |
| Music
Technology: Is Kling Klang in a state of constant change? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Sure, we call it the electronic garden, because
it is continually regenerating, and is now completely modular so that we
can pick out certain units and replace them. And what we did was we kept
all our old synthesizers from all the different phases, in storage, because
they were of very little value once they were superseded, but today we have
all this old analogue equipment back in place! It's really very good. Moving
over to digital has in no way superseded analogue, specially as very often
digital technology is only used to sample analogue resources, whether it's
resampling old sounds off the original tapes, or from sound sources. We
have always considered any sound source, It's just sound. Kling Klang is
the german word for sound, so we have always had a fascination for sound. |
| Music
Technology: Where do the themes of travelling and movement stem
from - as in "Autobahn" and "Trans Europe Express"? |
| Ralf
Hütter: That came from the early years of touring in Germany.
We would be continuously moving. We live in this big industrial area on
the Rhine-Ruhr, and we would be going to the next city to play these and
coming back at night, travelling through that landscape at night. From this
came the idea of doing a song, and so we would tune the synthesizers to
sound like motor horns. Also on the artwork we would have road symbols,
or a Volkswagen. So it was personal experiences, worked into the music. |
| Music
Technology: Apart form movement, much of the imagery you employ,
specially on the video screens on stage, shows a vision of the future from
the past - from the 40s and 50s, not a contemporary futurism... |
| Ralf
Hütter: Well, what we were very much considering was the
simultaneity of past, present and future today. I think visions and memories
sinchronise together, and I think certain things from a little way back
look more towards the future than things which are pseudo-modern today.
The real modernism may be somewhere else, a different way to what we think
is modern. |
| Music
Technology: Did you have any early training in improvisation? |
| Ralf
Hütter: No, we were trained in classical music, but we left
that behind and got into the whole situation in post-war Germany, asking
"what is our music, what is the sound of post-war Germany?". That was the
question. Then I met Florian at some improvisational courses in the late
60s, at a very open time when people would meet on university music courses
and quickly get into improvising. From there we set up our Kling Klang studio
in 1970, to have a base, with a little Revox machine and echo loops - very
simplistic equipment. That was a time, in the late 60s, when everything
came into question, specially in Düsseldorf. We would see people like Fluxus
and Josef Beuys on the art scene, and we were fascinated by happenings and
specially the music involved with them. So we worked with a couple of independent
artists who wanted sounds, creating sound patterns. It was a very open scene,
with nothing really decided. We took it from there. There was no music industry,
like today, no structure and so there was nobody to tell you which way to
go. |
| Music
Technology: A lot of the british "progressive" bands of that
time were interested in new sounds, but didn't seem to know exactly what
to do with them... |
| Ralf
Hütter: I think that was the situation here, there was already
too much marketing and merchandising put into a structure through the music
business. There was nothing like that in Düsseldorf, it was non-existent.
It was a completely anarchic situation. And as you probably know, we did
it in the Düsseldorf area, while in Cologne it was Can, other bands in Munich,
Tangerine Dream in Berlin; it was all happening with different aspects coming
from the different cities. We would meet at festivals, there was some knowledge
of each other, but we came clearly from the Düsseldorf scene. |
| Music
Technology: Technology has come to a point where it's not only
creating sounds, but also a kind of space - a virtual space... |
| Ralf
Hütter: Sure, when I read about this a couple of years ago,
it was like a big development in the visual arts - but we have been doing
it for 20 years, and specially when you see the show, you'll see that it's
a virtual reality. We are real, but with the images we create other realities.
There are no actual cars involved, but you can see them, hear them, maybe
you can smell them, or trains or whatever. So music is a virtual reality,
it comes to you and you actually enter a different space. Just walking around
wearing a Walkman completely transforms your reality. That's where musical
developments were very much ahead of the optical. Music is in advance on
this level because you don't have things across your eyes, you are still
alert to your environment. That's also why music is so important in today's
society; over the last 20 or 30 years its importance has been enormous -
maybe even over-important, although it's hard for me to say that! Maybe
music should just be one part of life. |
| Music
Technology: It was, perhaps before the gramophone, and even after
it, while it was still a limited luxury - but now everybody hears music
all the time, everywhere... |
| Ralf
Hütter: That's why when someone asks me about my top ten
records I always include silence - turn off the record player and that is
one of the most important sounds. And I hate all this zombie-like tranquiliser
music, conditioning people in stores and in lifts and in all kind of places,
it's just pollution. We always call it pollution music, and it has to go,
because we want to hear the real sounds - I want to hear the sound of the
escalator, I want to hear the sound of the plane, the sound of the train.
Good-sounding trains, for themselves, they are musical instruments. That
muzak that uninteresting music from uninteresting people, we have to stop
it. Whenever we can, in America, we have these little wire clippers, so
we can clip the cables wherever we see them... We want to make people aware
of reality, by bringing out in our compositions the sounds of cars and trains,
and ideas of the beauty of the sounds themselves. |
| Music
Technology: There is a real sense of three dimensions on "Electric
Cafe", for example... |
| Ralf
Hütter: You can make it three-dimensional with your imagination,
and electronics are just perfect for this because of the sounds they propose.
Rather than coming from a traditional instrument, which is always located
in one place, you can place them in the mix and have them moving, and when
that happens things like spatial alterations occur in your head. There is
panning and there is also reverb for depth. You stablish dimensions, something
like a short reverb to sound very close, and something like a cathedral
reverb to "fool" yourself that it is very far away. Stockhausen has built
this round building with speakers, where the audience sits in the middle
and there is sound all around. There has always been panning and other devices
in Musique Concrete, also. |
| Music
Technology: The sounds themselves seem to have changed over the
years, somehow becoming less "noisy"... |
| Ralf
Hütter: We've always used noise - music is organized noise
- we haven't changed our attitude towards noise, but maybe with today's
computer-generated noise and things like that, it's getting more "bleepy",
whereas before it was more physically concrete. But this is not intentional,
it has just happened and it could easily change back... People always responded
well to the "noises" we used from the beginning, we always created an interest,
whether locally or in the next city. So that was never a problem. In those
days, I think the time was ready, people wanted to hear new sounds. Everybody
was interested; we couldn't even do all of the things people wanted to hear,
it was such an open-minded time. We definitely could have done more than
we did. |
| Music
Technology: What are the significant differences between tape-splicing
and digital editing, apart from the new technology being faster? |
| Ralf
Hütter: It's not necessarily faster. But you make final
decisions when splicing, you cut the tape and that's it. When editing on
the computer you can always go back. And with tapes you have so many splices
and bits of tape you can't always remember where your piece of music is!
It gets over-complicated. With computer programs it's all in the memory,
and the machine lets you recall instantly. It's like an expansion of your
own memory, whereas tape is an expansion of your memory but you can't always
remember where your memory is! Philosophically that's very interesting,
I think. |
| Music
Technology: Everyone has the idea that you spend all your time
working in the studio, but your actual output is not that prolific... |
| Ralf
Hütter: No, only when it's finished, when we actually want
to make new steps or developments. We'll put something out only when it's
possibly relevant for us or for other people. "The Mix", for example, was
old material but it was working to digital for the first time. The last
album was from the mid-80s and was half and half - still recorded on analogue
tape with a couple of pieces of digital equipment involved. And now the
recording is completely digital, with the studio set up for a modular console
and re-programming, and putting all our sounds onto digital media. Everything
was working OK, and we thought "let's do Autobahn" - right, how does it
go? And we listened to the record, which we hadn't heard for a while, and
we said "no, let's do it differently". So we mixed it around, digitized
the recordings - the original tracks - and as a documentation of this part
of the work in the studio we put out "The Mix". It's a mix of our developments
- then and now - with a lot of literal studio mixing involved - channels,
sequencers, tracks. That's how we remember the music, also - we never write
anything down. We read music, but not very well, and we don't really care
because you can't write down our music anyway. Notation is a restriction
on music. It's for the museum. I was always bored when I had to read these
notes; it's nothing, it's just paper. Notes on paper. The sounds is what
interests me. And how we do it. Very rarely we would make a little motif,
to denote a certain sound, but that's it. Just so that we would not forget,
not for others to read. And sometimes we forget anyway, which I think is
also very important, because if it comes back to you from the different
stages of memory, if it reminds you of itself, then maybe it's something
very strong. |
| Music
Technology: On stage, how much is pre-recorded, to the extent
of being unalterable? |
| Ralf
Hütter: It's not pre-recorded, it's in digital storage.
There's no tapes, it's all run from the computer. Effectively we can change
as much as we like, cut off tracks, add tracks, mute, double. That's what
we do - complete access. We can make any track longer, according to the
gig. Certain things are written, but certain compositions can have a start
point and be totally open-ended, with the programming running into a loop
function. It can be however we want it. The only thing that's really written
from start to finish is "The Robots", with output from the computer to synchronize
the actual robots on stage, so that their movements are all computer-controlled
and they are always identical - very robotic. All the other compositions
are just written as basic sequences. There is something similar to jazz
in that regard, I think, like where they play any song, whether Miles Davis
playing Cindy Lauper, or in the old days any silly Broadway song, and just
take it as a "flying carpet" for improvisation. |
| Music
Technology: It's interesting that improvisational music really
grew in significance as recorded music became available. |
| Ralf
Hütter: At the same time as the magnetophone, yes, an important
historical coincidence, perhaps, as the dependency on written music receded. |
| Music
Technology: The magnetophone was invented in Germany before the
war, yet not really used for music until after, and I've always been amused
by the fact that it was Bing Crosby who introduced that technology to America,
paying for these Telefunken models to be taken over there and put into research
studios to see what could be done with them - effectively starting the modern
recording industry... |
| Ralf
Hütter: Probably his greatest achievement. Much better than
his singing... |
| Music
Technology: Has the wide availability of recorded music helped
to make it less policed, more politically subversive? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Well, it's not allowed in all areas, and not allowed
in all countries, despite the technology. For example, we were not allowed
in East Germany, and I can only assume it was because we were using their
technology in a different way - because they had the technology, they had
tapes, radio, cameras, but they used them for state security. They had to
secure the state from their own people. A very strange concept, very Orwellian.
We've haven't played there yet, hopefully this year. But we played Poland,
for Solidarity, and in the the end it does show the subversive character
of electronics - it's uncontrollable. |
| Music
Technology: Instead of there being one central broadcasting station
transmitting to every citizen, it's kind of the other way round, with several
stations for each person...or at least that's the potential. |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, in the first place it's a possibility, so let's
use it. But if they all play the Top 40 then it's the same situation again
- although I don't think that's going to be the case. |
| Music
Technology: Was it a surprise to you that your music was so successful
in, for example, Chicago and Detroit? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Yes, but we always had a strongly favourable reaction
from black audiences in America, even before house and techno. I remember
somebody took me to a club in about 76 or 77, when "Trans Europe Express"
was out, and it was some loft club in New York, after hours, just as the
DJ culture was starting, when the DJs began making their own records, their
own grooves. And they took sections from "Metal on Metal" on "Trans Europe
Express", and when I went in it was going "boom-crash - boom-crash", so
I thought "oh, they're playing the new album". But it went on for ten minutes!
And I thought "what's happening?". That track is only like two or three
minutes! And later I went to ask the DJ and he had two copies of the record
and he was mixing the two, and of course it could go on as long as people
were dancing... This was a real development, because in those days you fixed
a certain time on the record, under twenty minutes a side in order to get
the print into vinyl. It was a technological decision to say how long the
song would last. We always used to play different timings live, but there
we were in this after hours club, and it was ten minutes, twenty minutes
of the recording, because the vibe was there. |
| Music
Technology: Do you consciously go from one "concept" to the next
with each album? |
| Ralf
Hütter: Not really, we sometimes have several concepts,
loose ideas to work on, but we never have very much unreleased material,
just a couple of test tapes maybe; not really like somebody sitting on a
song collection. It's only recently that we've realised that we have a catalogue,
we would just go into a concept very deeply and then put it out. They're
done over quite a short period of time. The rest of the time we work on
the studio, or on visuals, getting things together. We're now involved in
the multimedia aspects of music, very much. We've always "seen" our music,
but in those days we couldn't do anything about it. Now we can put words
on a screen, create images - like on "autobahn", just a simple signpost
- any way to illustrate the music. |
| Music
Technology: You were in the right place at the right time, but
is it harder now for bands to get into a position like yours, where so much
is available to you? |
| Ralf
Hütter: I think we predicted that electronic music was going
to be the next phase in popular music - volksmusik - and people said it
was crazy, very elitist, intellectual, and we had to say no, this was everyday
music - cars, noises, microphones picking up music for everybody. In those
days everybody had tape recorders for parties, to record your own sounds
from the radio. But with today's technology you can do more, with little
drum machines, synthesizers, basic computer programs. At Kling Klang we
have a lot of technological side would be easier, I think. But it's still
down to ideas, to deciding what are we going to play, what are we going
to do with this stuff? |
| Music
Technology: And what are you going to do next with this stuff? |
| Ralf
Hütter: What we're doing now is on diskettes, the music
is not even fixed. We send it over to here, or to friends in New York, and
what we are doing is also music from different places at the same time,
by hooking in and syncing up by modem. Data transferring between computer
workstations - when this really happens the music will come pouring out,
I'm sure. |
 |
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Interview to Mark Sinker
|
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