Perfect Sound Forever

The Tyranny of Text:
The Paul Schütze Interview

Paul Schütze portrait

Interview by Gary Bearman (December 1997)


Paul Schütze is a man of interesting paradoxes. For someone who claims to not be much of a skilled musician, he comes up with some of the most brilliant music this side of the seventies. For someone who spends only a month or two of the year in the studio, he's amazingly prolific, releasing 9 CD's in the last 3 years alone. His music is very hard to classify; ranging from very deep, dark ambient to almost free-form jazz, and all the bizarre uncharted territory in between. His music is held in extremely high regard by both critics and fans alike, at least those lucky enough to have been exposed to him.

Speaking with Paul, an Australian living in London for these last few years, for a couple of hours in early December 1997 with the assistance of the transatlantic phone lines, and in conversing with him since then, I find him to be very modest, friendly, deep, intellectual, intense, humorous, and a person who actually seems to care - just a helluva nice feller, actually. He puts a lot of time and effort into recording, packaging and releasing CD's precisely the way he wants them to be released, and the results show in the work.

In this rather lengthy interview, we discuss some of his landmark releases like "Regard: Music By Film (on Tone Casualities), New Maps of Hell, The Rapture of Metals, and more recent works like the collaboration with Andrew Hulme of O Yuki Conjugate, Fell, Nine Songs from the Garden of Welcome Lies, the Phantom City releases, and his most recent rather enigmatic release, Second Site on Virgin UK. He also shares his thoughts on, among other things; Can, Yes, Tangerine Dream, recording film music, sacred sites, how talking about music isn't really where it's at, Bill Laswell's finger warm-up exercises, "dark" music, even metaphysics. We also get a clear view on the inner workings of what the process of creating music is like for him…


PSF: What made you want to be a musician in the first place?

God, that's interesting. I'm not really sure. I think just a very deep interest in sound and music from an early age. I had always as a child been obsessed with painting. I used to paint and draw a lot, and it was always assumed that I would continue to paint. Concurrent with that was a great interest in listening to music, but I didn't have the means to express myself with sound. Then we got a piano when I was about 13 I think, and that single thing may have been the point where I realized I could express myself as well as enjoy listening. So then a transition from painting to music happened over the next couple of years. That was it really.

PSF: What are some of your influences? What are some of your favorite groups or musicians or albums?

Well, there are lots of things. There are things which have influenced me hugely which you wouldn't necessarily hear in my work. Things which have influenced me in the way I think about music perhaps more than the way I compose music. I'd have to say the most formative influence on the way I thought about music was definitely the German group Can. Simultaneous with that was a very strong interest in a lot of the jazz that was happening in the late 60's and early 70's - Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Julian Priester, Eddie Henderson, Tony Williams - that sort of stuff. Beyond that the influences are really too numerous to mention. There are certain albums that are very important to me that would always be in my top 20 discs, amongst those would be things like Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing, Future Days by Can, In a Silent Way by Miles Davis, Tabula Rasa by Arvo Part - it's a mixed bag of things really. I'm very keen on 20th century French piano music - Satie, Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc, and also very keen on a Spanish contemporary of theirs called Frederico Mompou. These are influences which will not be obvious in my composition as my skills completely preclude them in being introduced literally into my work.

PSF: Well, I can definitely here the Can influences, at least in terms of the rhythmic part of it. A lot of your work has a lot of rhythmic feel to it.

And that's one of the great lessons of listening to Can - just rhythm. I don't think anyone's ever come close to exploring rhythm in the way they did. To me the best lesson you can give anyone about rhythm is just to give them the entire Can back catalogue and tell them to listen to it closely. I think unless they were pretty stupid they would have got an awful lot of information about rhythms out of that.

PSF: They were pretty damn innovative.

Well, yeah. I was talking a friend recently, and he was asking what were the worst things about this year, and one of the worst things was that anytime anyone asks you what you're listening to, you have to say old stuff, the things I come back to when I'm wanting to be stimulated are 20 years old. I'd really like to say that I'm listening to this fantastic new thing, but I do find myself going back to those records a lot, and it may be that I heard them initially in my adolescence, and invariably anything you hear in your adolescence takes on a profound importance as part of the way your mind works.

PSF: A lot of the music I was listening to when I was an adolescent was heavy metal, but thankfully I managed to get past that.

Well, I used to listen to heavy metal music as well at that time. I used to listen to a lot of prog rock, and a lot of heavy metal, everything from Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple to Yes. At the same time I listened to Stockhausen, Coltrane, Allah Rakhar, Faust and Weather Report. There is an interesting phenomena at the moment where certain musicians and writers systematically rewrite the histories of thier own musical taste so they will accord with whatever ephemeral trend prevails at the moment. It's quite craven really, and shows a grim lack of conviction. I mean you look at a band like Yes, and this band sold hundreds of thousands of records, and yet it’s extremely difficult to find anyone alive who will actually admit to having bought one. Now, someone’s got to have bought these records.

PSF: Well, I’ve met a lot of people who will admit to that, at least in the States.

I’m quite happy to admit to liking listening to their old recordings. I lost the plot after Relayer, but there was a time when that music was tremendously important to me, however naff it might seem now. I think it’s a strange kind of betrayal of self to not have the strength of your own convictions.

PSF: How did your career start - Laughing Hands and before that?

Well, I don’t think you could really call Laughing Hands a career in the sense that I’ve only been able to make a living making music from the point when I started writing film music which was about 1984-85. Prior to that it was a passionate hobby, and Laughing Hands was preceded by a couple of very very early experiments. Also there was a free improv jazz band in which I used to play percussion and electronics. We played around a bit in Melbourne where I grew up. That was interesting, but not ultimately satisfying because the jazz players in it obviously had an existing and partly developed language which was the history of jazz, the history of improv, to draw on, whereas I felt I was starting from scratch which put us in fundamentally different situations creativly. By the time Laughing Hands had gotten down to being just two people, myself and Ian Russel, we had got to the point where we felt we did have the makings of a language that we could use comfortably and that was very interesting. It became difficult for us to continue because we got very badly ripped off by a couple of distributors. We actually sold quite a lot of records, particularly in Germany, but we had one German distributor who really took us to the cleaners. Because it was all our own money it just became impossible.

PSF: In talking about that, how do you find dealing with the music business? Is it mostly a pain in the ass, or do you manage to find people who you trust and are happy with? I’ve noticed you move around a lot with labels.

With very few exceptions, it’s a huge pain in the ass, yeah. I mean the thing that always surprises me, and which I’ve mentioned before in interviews, is that contrary to the popular misconception that large labels are mercenary and manipulative, and small labels are idealistic, havens of reason and humanism, I found it very often the opposite. The worst treatment I’ve had consistently, and the most fantastically unethical and immoral kind of exploitation I’ve seen has largely been at the hands of small labels, and the bulk of time I’ve been treated reasonably has been by larger labels.

PSF: Like Virgin?

Virgin being definitely the best case scenario. So it’s very interesting that turned about to be the case really.

PSF: Well, I also have heard many horror stories about people in smaller bands with smaller labels, so I’m not surprised. It must be an interesting challenge to maintain your artistic integrity and just try to get the music out there, and have to deal with the red tape of the industry.

I never have any trouble doing that. The trouble I have is in ever getting paid for what I’ve done, and the bottom line is you cannot continue to produce and release work on labels which for some bizarre reason neglect to ever account to you, or actually pay you, or will only pay you when you’ve spent almost as much money as they owe you in trying to chase them up, not to mention fantastic amounts of time and energy. It is definitely the downside. There are some very serious weak links in the chain between the artist and the audience, and labels, distributors, press and retailers are all evenly culpable I think.

PSF: On a different note, what does it mean to you to make music?

What does it mean to me? That’s kind of a big question...

PSF: How important is it?

It’s hugely important. It’s so important I don’t really think about it if you see what I mean. I couldn’t really not do it. Although, having said that, I don’t do it that much in terms of my total time. I actually spend very little time in the studio making a piece. I spend a great deal of time trying to get the pieces released the way I want them released. With all of the peripheral administrative stuff - I spend a huge amount of time doing that - which is very dull, actually. But then the upside of that is that I have a lot of time to think about what I'm going to do next and really consider it. Perhaps if I were in the situation where I could go into the studio any time of the day and night and just work, I may never quite get the critical distance that I need.

PSF: And yet you’re very prolific, releasing 17 albums since 1989, 9 of those since 1995.

I know it looks as though I do a lot of work, but the thing is I work very quickly, and I never spend more than two months of any year actually working on music. This year I don’t think I’ve spent one entire month working which is appalling. A lot of what came out this year was recorded last year. The only thing I’ve done this year is Second Site. It’s weird, it really does look as though I do a huge amount of work, but I think it’s because I worked on film for such a long time. Filmmaking is a really manic process. Everything has to be done yesterday. It really teaches you to focus your mind and work in a very economical and speedy way. I find it quite difficult to work slowly.

PSF: For myself in terms of creativity and inspiration, I think a lot of people kind of think of it as a limited thing, like it’s something that visits you every once in a while if you’re lucky. For me, my experience is that there’s this infinite pool of creativity, and really you can just dip into it as much as you want to. What is it like for you in terms of inspiration and creativity? What is that process like for you?

I’ve never thought much about this until recently, until someone asked me a similar question. Someone was saying to me, "Don’t you ever get terrified of getting writer’s block?" It’s never happened. I mean, at the moment I’ve got 6 projects I have worked out in my head that are ready to go. Any one of them could start tomorrow. I have no doubt that they will develop and that there won’t be any serious problems. There will be all kinds of challenges and things along the way, and there will be problems to solve, but they are solvable. I’ve never worried about my muse drying up or something. I don’t know, it’s just never occurred to me. I suppose it could happen, but at any given time I always feel that I’ve got a lot of things that I need to do quite desperately. Perhaps I’m being silly in assuming that this will always be the case. I have felt recently the need to expand some of the work across several mediums, introduce images and movement. Recently I started to paint again.

PSF: Have you ever considered using that on artwork for your CD’s?

I co-design all the covers.

PSF: Including the Tone Casualties re-releases?

Well, especially the Tone Casualties re-releases, actually.

PSF: Those have beautiful artwork.

We’re very pleased with the way they came out. I mean, I wasn’t too pleased with the way they were printed, but yeah, I think that worked quite well. The restriction there being that they had to relate to one another so they were visibly a set. There had to be generic grid to the whole design, but I’m very interested in design generally, two-dimensional and three-dimensional design, architecture particularly is one of my passions, and I’m starting to have ideas now that involve three-dimensional design. The natural progression there is that the pieces perhaps be exploded into installations or sight specific explorations of sound. That’s something I’m starting to develop.

PSF: Like multimedia?

Yeah.

PSF: I know you’ve done a little bit of that before.

A little bit, but I’ve never been clear about how to unite all these different elements before, and now that’s starting to come together. The time is feeling right to develop these ideas, and that’s quite exciting.

PSF: There are songs of yours that I would call beautiful in an uplifting way, for example "In the Absence of Angels," which is one of my favorite all time songs by anyone from Regard: Music by Film, and "Sleep II‚" from Apart, but much of your music seems to me, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, very emotionally detached - I kind of see it as not necessarily music that touches my soul, but kind of skims the surface of it.

That quality that you’re talking about is something which is conspicuous in most of my favorite music. I find a state of almost breathless suspension and unresolved emotional narrative extremely seductive, and it’s something that I constantly return to in my own work. "In the Absence of Angels," just to take an example, is the final piece of music from a film that I scored, and so it was tremendously important that it emotionally resolve an extraordinarily complex character’s dilemma. It needed to have slightly spiritual overtones. There was an interesting conflict because the filmmaker who is a very good friend of mine had clear intentions in terms of a philosophical message for the character in question, but these intentions conflicted with my own personal philosophical positions. So what I had to try and do was create an ambiguity there which I found satisfying, which he would also find satisfying, and that I think is why there’s a sort of tension and resolve in that piece at the same time. He has a strong Christian agenda, and I have all sorts of problems with that, and so calling it "In the Absence of Angels" is a quiet dig at the circumstance in which the character found herself, but the filmmaker saw it quite differently. This was not an unspoken dilemma, it’s something we talked about a lot, but it was a very satisfying way to resolve the film for both of us.

PSF: This is "The Tale of Ruby Rose?"

Yes.

PSF: Throughout your work, you have songs that are less than a minute, and songs that are over 59 minutes. What makes you decide the length of a piece?

Well, people ask me this all the time. To me, the piece tells me how long it needs to be. I work in a way where a single sound can dictate all other characteristics for a piece. That first sound requires a context which best serves it. Each successive layer or event relates back to that first seed so pieces have very organic lives. The end comes when it needs to, and I have no inclination to force a piece into what would seem an unnatural shape to suit some external consideration about ideal duration. The thing is that anything which has a proper, if you like, internal lexicon, or a proper internal structure, it takes on it’s own logic, and once it takes on it’s own logic it pretty well determines its own shape and size and duration. Obviously when I was writing film music I was constrained by the structure of the film, so it was actually the film’s structure which would determine this, but when I’m not writing for film they just are as long as they are. It’s why when someone says to me, "I want you to write a piece that’s 10 minutes," I cant do that. I have to write 15 pieces and hope that one of them ends up being 10 minutes long.

PSF: It’s a very fascinating contrast when you have an album with 3 or 4 minute songs, and then a 14 or 15 minute song. It has a nice balance, I find.

The biggest trick with those albums has actually been programming the track order when the album’s finished. That’s the point where I really have to make these variable durations have some kind of overall structural effect. I think its tremendously important that I spend time working on the overall shape of the album because I don’t just think of an album as a collection of tracks. It may start life as a series of discrete pieces, but I have to address the fact that they are being presented as a whole to the listener. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of stuff. I think an album must have an identity, which is why I’ll often omit tracks which were written at the same time because they don't actually make sense in the context of an album.

PSF: That’s interesting. Well, your albums do have a very nice flow to them, I find.

I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that they do. I’ve actually gone in and paid to have a whole album re-mastered because after a couple of listens I realize it’s just not flowing, it doesn’t make sense. I’ll go back and re-order everything. I do think it’s very important.

PSF: One thing I’m very curious about - you have some of the most interesting song titles I’ve ever heard, for example, "Sites of Rapture on the Lungs of God‚" "Eyeless and Naked," "Topology of a Phantom City." How do you come up with your song titles?

Well, I’m an avid reader, and I used to think, ok, I’m no writer, I’m no wordsmith, what I should do is take inspiration from people who are really good at it. So for the first few albums, I often used the titles of books which had a feeling to both the title and the book itself that I felt was sympathetic with the music. TOPOLOGY OF A PHANTOM CITY, for example, is the title of a book by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French novelist, but after awhile I discovered there was a way of getting into the piece and finding the title within the music. If I spend enough time listening to the pieces just free associating, then something can come to me that really connects with the music in a way which, I hope, predisposes the listener to the piece. I think it was round about New Maps of Hell where I actually came up with some titles myself that I was really pleased with. Not all of them, I think about half. From then onwards, I’ve made all of them up myself.

PSF: Like I’m sure "Visions of a Sand Drinker‚" was not a novel...

No, all the titles on Apart came from the same narrative ideas I had for the music. Apart is a curious one because the whole album is basically about the photograph on the cover as a window, if you like, into a self-contained world. All the pieces were about that region that you glimpse through the picture. So the more I thought about that, little scenarios, little stories, came to occupy the space because it was a vacuum, and all of those titles are about what goes on in that world; quite ritualistic, dry, starlit desert with this beautiful eerie light. And the other thing - I have another 25 photographs in that series. Unfortunately we couldn't afford to have more of them on the cover. I guess ultimately I had a bit more information with which to fill out this world than the listener.

PSF: Was that album in any way kind of a breakthrough album for you, the first one on a major label? It seemed to get a lot more reviews.


Interestingly, I don’t know if it was a commercial breakthrough. I think it was a breakthrough musically. I’m very very fond of that album. I think it was one album where I felt really comfortable, where it made complete sense as a self-contained object. I’m very concerned that all my work is part of an ongoing developing language, which is one of the reasons I’m so keen to insure the back catalogue is always available. There are some parts of the catalogue I feel are dependent on the albums that come before and after them, but that one does really stand on its own as a self-contained series of ideas.

PSF: And you also got the opportunity to make a double album that you didn’t get a chance to with New Maps of Hell and The Rapture of Metals.

Well, that was meant to be a double album, and it was very galling that it wasn’t, but the label just wouldn’t do it. Virgin really has indulged me way beyond the call of duty. I mean, the idea that Virgin would release Second Site is, I think, quite bizarre.

PSF: The photograph on the front cover, a couple of photographs off Second Site, when I first saw them, and then read along with as it was being played, it seemed as it was a real place, a real series of events, but as I read it more it seemed it was too bizarre and too outlandish to be reality. How did you come up with that?

No, it is real. It is an extraordinarily real place. It’s an18th century observatory, one of five built by the Mogul Emperor Jai Singh the Second, or is it the third, I think it’s the second, and they’re all in Delhi, around Delhi. That one’s in Jaipiur. They are highly sophisticated astronomical observatories. The angles, sites and calibrations enable the user, over time, to establish accurate relationships between the earth and various heavenly bodies. Jai Singh used these "engines" to improve upon what were, at the time, the best available charts on earth made by the Portuguese. What is also interesting is the idea of a structure which has it's form dictated by something as remote and poetic as the movement of the heavens. A rare influence on the architectural form you must admit. Nearly all the lines in the text are actual physical descriptions of the physical site. There are a few lines which are more attempts to get into the head of the person who built the site, or someone who’s using the site, so there are a couple of lines that are overtly poetic.

PSF: Like, "Here is a room to divide the sun like an orange."

I guess that was me succumbing to the almost metaphysical element of the whole thing. The text is made up around first-hand accounts of the space. I’ve only ever seen photographs of the space. I’ve only ever read text about it. I haven’t actually been there, and it was very important to me that because this project, the Site project of which this is only the first part, is all about memory and ideas of the ways in which spaces are actually created in the mind. There is a lot about the way memories are formed in a three-dimensional space. I could talk about this idea for hours. It’s probably not the right time to do it, but I was very keen in this instance to completely construct a sense of this place without ever having been there. That was quite important. The next one I’m going to do in this series, I will actually go there, and I’ll do very extensive documentation of the space itself.

PSF: Can you tell me what that place is?

There are several possibilities, but I’m inclined to keep this next one a secret till it gets a bit further down the track.

PSF: That’s fascinating. I’ve heard the great pyramids, for example, are like a bible in stone, in that once we have evolved enough, we’ll be able to read the information that’s written in there, in all kinds of sacred sites.

I think it goes beyond just information in text or in pictogram or whatever. I think there is actually information within the structure itself. Not hidden or arcane, but formed of the structure. We are just too concerned with verbal mediums to deal with it. I think it’s information that we can’t assess verbally. One of my pet hates is that we seem in our culture to regard discussions via text or words as the ultimate means of dialogue about any other medium or art form. I think this is insane. Frank Zappa (ED NOTE – allegedly) said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Over-quoted for the wrong reasons, but an acute observation none the less. I think most of the really significant discussions, dialogues and developments on particular generic languages, i.e.; dance, architecture, building, design, painting, whatever, don’t take place in text. They do not take place in the region of critical discourse, which fundamentally needs to believe that all things have to be reduced to text in order to be dealt with intellectually. For me, the only consequential conversations that happen about music happen within music. The only real conversations about painting happen subsequent to the appearance of painting A. The ideas in painting A are tossed around, and expanded, and extrapolated to develop in paintings B, C and D, and they are to me the important dialogues. I think it’s actually a great shame that we feel this need to reduce, and I do think it’s a reduction in most cases, we feel this need to reduce everything to text, because text is a fantastically inadequate way of dealing with a lot of the ideas which are so important in these mediums. I think actually our senses generally have really been kept in check by this - the tyranny of text.

PSF: For myself, in terms of my spirituality, my spiritual life, for me it’s a very experiential thing, and it’s like you can talk about it all you want, and it can be very interesting, and very useful for the intellectual information of it, but really it’s the experiential part that we want in life.

Definitely. I’m not advocating the dumping of all verbal discussion. What I am suggesting is that it should be put into an appropriate perspective, that it should not be regarded as the preeminent means of exploring any medium really other than text.

PSF: I love talking about music, and playing music for people. I love introducing it, and telling things about the musician, or the artist, or the genre, or whatever, but then I want to PLAY the music.

A conversation punctuated by actual music is an entirely different thing, but you can’t have that in a magazine or a 300 page treatise. I mean strangely, these things usually come unaccompanied by what might be entirely appropriate, which is a CD of examples of what exactly is being discussed.

PSF: Which you could do on a radio show.

Radio I think is a hugely neglected area.

PSF: You have some albums that are just you playing solo, but on many of your albums you have other musicians working with you - do you have a preference of working alone, or working with others? Is there a particular piece that calls for something like that?

If I’m being honest, I do really prefer working alone, but I’m increasingly discovering that there are areas I want to explore that I simply can’t without help. I never collaborate with people for the joy of working with someone else. I collaborate with people because I have to. You know, I don’t hate it, but I really rather would work on my own. I’m a bit of a control freak.

PSF: That’s honest. I tried creating a piece of music with somebody one time, and in one respect it was fun, but on the other it drove me completely insane because I wanted to have complete creative control over the whole thing, but I didn’t know how.

When I do work with people, it’s usually on the understanding that I have complete control of what happens to everything, and I’m fortunate in that there are a lot of really really good people who are happy to work with me that way.

PSF: Do you seek people out, or do people seek you out ever?

No, I think people don’t seek me out anymore because they know that I’m not that interested in collaborating as such, that’s not something I do.

PSF: Except Fell was a collaboration.

Fell was a collaboration, yeah, although Fell was unusual in that Andrew (Hulme of O Yuki Conjugate) who I worked with had edited my last 6 albums. As we have worked together a lot, we have developed an almost intuitive communication. He knows what I want and can get to the heart of a problem quickly and precisely. This keeps the process fresh and spontaneous. Fell was like a live extraordinary mega editing session where he operated the editing computer, and the two of us just kind of, I don’t know, it’s a very hard process to explain, but that’s a unique sort of relationship. I’ve never worked with an editor like him, and I can’t imagine there are too many around. We just happen to have a very good rapport, so I knew when we talked about doing Fell that it was going to work. It’s incredibly rare to get such a seamless line of communication going.

PSF: It seems to have a lot of a mixture of your work, and O Yuki Conjugate work. I can hear both elements of it very strongly in there.

The good thing about it is it is genuinely something other than my work or his. It’s more than the sum of its parts in a way. What happened was we both independently generated a huge amount of material which we brought to the editing session, and we then combined all of this material in an almost live way. We did it so fast, and very intuitively. It took two days to put together, which is not very long considering how many edits there are.

PSF: I think it would probably shock me, and a lot of people in terms of a lot of electronic music in how fast it’s put together - things that sound like they took months to come up with.

I think again it’s because we had a very strong working relationship before we did it, and you can’t just choose to have that sort of rapport with someone. It either happens or it doesn’t. We’re just lucky that it did. The album grew out of the rapport rather than the other way around. I think if we hadn’t had the rapport, we wouldn’t have decided to do it.

PSF: You don’t seem to play live very much. Do you enjoy playing live?

I didn’t used to, but I’m really starting to enjoy it a lot. We’re doing more and more live stuff. I had to find a way of doing it, I mean I’m not interested in trying to duplicate albums, and that’s not possible because my albums are very heavily post produced and fiddled with. The process of making them can’t be emulated live. I feel like I’ve now kind of found several different ways of performing in a really satisfactory way, so it’s quite exciting to do it now. I’m actually doing a lot of live playing. There are different configurations, playing live with Phantom City is one thing which is terribly exciting, but very hard to do because it’s so expensive to get us all together.

PSF: Yeah, you’re all over the place.

Well, yeah, everyone lives in a different country. Just the airfare is prohibitive before you even play a note.

PSF: How is it playing with Bill Laswell?

Great – it’s brilliant to play with Bill, I mean it’s brilliant to play with everyone in Phantom City. The real luxury about Phantom City is that for someone like me who has no musical training and is a complete cretin as far as music theory goes, I can’t play with someone who’s just a bit good, because they’re gonna want to know things like what key we’re playing in, and what tempo it is, and where the time changes are, and I can’t tell them because I don’t have the language. All the players in Phantom City are so good, they don’t even need to know. They can just lock into it without thinking. So someone like Bill, or Raoul (Bjorkenheim), or Dirk (Wachtelaer), they just know what you want. They just get there instantly, and it’s the most extraordinary luxury to play with people like this. They instinctively hone in on what I’m trying to do.

PSF: Regarding the Site Anubis cd (by Phantom City), I read one review where it said, "this mad CD goes furiously everywhere - simultaneously." With that you had the different musicians create their parts, and then send them to you, and you put it together. Is this how it worked?

Yeah, more or less. All of the parts were created were in response to a basic track which I sent out, a backing track, like a rhythm track which had some elements of pitch incorporated into it, and say Bill, for example, just got that. He had very little to go on so he played bass over that. The drummer then got to drum over both the bass and my electric rhythm track, and from that point onwards people got different combinations of things. Some people would get three tracks, but not the other tracks, because we weren’t able to mix the whole lot down every time we sent it off to the next contributor. So eventually we rounded up all the parts, and then I had to put them all together, and edit them, and chop them around and try to make some sense of them which was a nightmare, because I’d never done it before. I really did get to a point where I was completely despairing. I thought, "God, I’m gonna have to give all the money back to the label because I don’t have an album here, I just have a collection of really disconnected crappy sounding messy rubbish."

PSF: Well, you seem to pull it off. I love it, and it seems to get really very good reviews from everything I’ve read about it.

It’s had really good press. I went through hell trying to figure out how to put it together, and eventually I did put it together. I am really happy with the way it ended up, but it was a nightmare, mainly because I had never worked with so much material before. I hadn’t been able to think it all the way through. We ran into some incredible technical problems. When we finally got all of the parts together from all these different people, I realized that we hadn’t actually kept the time code on the A DATs concurrent across all of the different contributions, so beat 1, bar I, track 1, was a different time code number on every tape we received. I don’t know if you understand the gravity of that, but it was a total fucking nightmare. We had to manually re-sync every single track, and there were 24 or 25 tracks, and try and figure out what the contributor was actually playing along to when they played this or that phrase. Now, quite often once I knew definitely what they were playing along to I might have moved it anyway. I did juggle a lot of the playing around, and reconstruct the tracks. In two instances I removed the original backing track to which everyone had been responding. In some cases, I edited the playing very heavily. I mean, there’s one track where I edited out one particular drum sound on the kit from an entire track, so every time the drummer hit that drum, I removed it digitally from the mix because I just didn’t like that drum much.

PSF: Is this the way you’d like to make albums in the future, or is it something that was too much of a nightmare to go through again?

I think I could do it again, and it would’t be so much of a nightmare. There were fundamental common sense things that I did wrong that caused huge grief that was entirely my fault. I now know. It was a very steep learning curve. It was a bit stressful, but it worked in the end, and I’d love to do it again. I’m dying to do another Phantom City album. I really feel ready to do another one, and everyone involved is keen, but I want to do a studio one, and there’s no question of getting everyone together in the studio because it’s too expensive, so it’ll probably be done in a similar way to Site Anubis.

PSF: And Shiva Recoil (the other Phantom City release) was performed live at the Tampere Jazz Festival in Finland?

Yes, Tampere. That was completely different - everyone in the room at the same time. No rehearsals. No one had heard the backing track. It was just improvised live.

PSF: And it’s called live/unlive?

It’s called live/unlive. I did that purely to acknowledge the fact that I had done some editing, and I fiddled with it a bit, although nowhere near as much as I had originally intended to. There were two parts, and I reversed the order of them. I just thought I should acknowledge that it was principally live, but there was also some post-production done.

PSF: Regarding the Site Anubis CD - are you familiar with the CD by Last Exit called Iron Path?

Oh yeah, very.

PSF: To me, that’s the closest, maybe it’s just because of Bill Laswell’s inclusion on it, that’s the closest I’ve heard to evoking the spirit of that, which is a fantastic album.

That’s very interesting. Yeah, that was one of the albums which, when I was talking to Bill about the kind of sound I wanted, that I cited to him as the bass sound I was hoping for.

PSF: Yeah, and I mean I’ve never heard anyone play the bass quite like that. It’s like an all out attack!

Yeah, yeah, an extraordinary thing with Bill is he really hides his light. He’s very very prolific, but technically as a bass player he’s just extraordinary. I think very few people fully realize just how good he is because he’s not a flashy player. You really have to push him to cut loose. He won’t do that unless you ask him to, and Bill’s warm-ups, Bill’s finger exercise warm-ups have to be seen to be believed, and I’ve never seen him play like this. He doesn’t tend to play this kind of thing live, but his finger warm-ups which he does quietly in a corner when no one’s watching is like the most incredible speed riffing you’ve ever seen in your life. He’s an extremely good player and very intuitive, and he has a very diverse sound palette, as do all the players in that band really. I mean, Raoul. I saw Raoul playing live in a duet yesterday in London, and it was just awesome. I really think he’s one of the greatest guitarists on earth, but again, you know, a very very humble approach to what is a quite awesome skill.

See Part Two of the Schütze interview


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