My friend Marutani Koji has asked me to write an essay on the topic of in what way and for what reasons my music has changed over the years for his new website. His request comes at a very appropriate moment: ten years ago, I started the process of becoming the composer you know today – I was working on the music that one year later would be released as my first CD ‘Un Peu de Neige Salie’.

I had taken to working with the computer in 1987 after having at last realized that my instrument, the electric guitar, would never be the appropriate means of expression for me, and that composing was more important for me than playing my instrument. After a period of working with synthezisers I had chosen to work with samples in order to obtain more a more concrete sound world. My tools were an Ensoniq EPS 16+ sampler, an Atari 1040 computer, the Steinberg Cubase sequencer software, and a Tascam DA-30 DAT recorder to which I recorded everything in direct stereo recording.

My aesthetic views were very influenced by the world of contemporary classical music, as during my living in Paris from 1981 to 1986 I had been very interested in the musical work of artists connected with Pierre Boulez and the IRCAM Institute. I already had certain ideas of what my music should be like: I wanted a balance between sound and silence, I wanted sounds that would not be imitations of instruments, but could stand for themselves, and that these sounds would be given the time to be perceived in detail. It was also clear to me that the sound coming out of the loudspeakers would have to be the sound itself, not a representation of an imaginary or real world sound.

My choice of very low volume for my music was due in part to the fact that I was working in a large music store, selling electric guitars and basses, amplifiers, and effect units, which constantly exposed me to very loud volume levels, so in my own music, I wanted a different approach. On the other hand, my Ensoniq EPS 16+ sounded best to my ears at very low volume, and finally, I did not want to impose my music onto a potential audience, but just offer it, so that it was easy to ignore for those who did not want to hear it. I found that we are constantly forced to listen to music we do not want to hear in shops, supermarkets, train stations, an so forth, and I did not want to be part of these ‘forced listening’ phenomena.

So in my work I spent long periods of time listening to sounds and choosing the ones that would fit my ideas for a given piece in process. Very often I could not find the right materials and the process of creating my music was very slow. I also experienced long periods of ‘writer’s block’, when I could not go on, and was deeply frustrated. I finally managed to complete the music for ‘Un Peu de Neige Salie’ and it was released in 1993 on SELEKTION.

This CD was very unusual, as it did not (consciously) refer to any other music and was more silent, sparse, and austere than most anything had been before, but, to my surprise, was praised by many people – first and foremost by Jim O’Rourke, who went as far as saying in an interview in The Wire that it was ‘the first good computer music’ and told everybody he knew about it. He was responsible for spreading the word about my music more than anybody else.

As time went by, I got better tools: an Ensoniq ASR 10 and an Atari MEGA 4, along with Digidesign Sound Designer II, and Steinberg Avalon sample editors, used on my second CD ‘Détails Agrandis’, then changed from the Atari to an Apple Macintosh LCII. At the same time, my interest in Zen Buddhism and classic Japanese culture and aesthetics became stronger and stronger, gradually taking territory from Western aesthetics and philosophy in my mind. I found that Japanese concepts like Wabi and Sabi somehow better expressed what I was looking for than the terms of Western aesthetic. The Buddhist interest in small things also corresponded very well with my views. I little by little dropped my habit to start from clearly defined ideas of what a piece should be and to more go in the direction the sound material pointed to. As a result, my ‘writer’s blocks’ became less and less frequent, indicating that I was on the right path. I did a few collaboration and remix projects during the years 1995/96, but no full length CD of my own. I added a Windows PC based hard disc recording system to my tools in 1996, but soon dropped it to go back to a Macintosh, because I didn’t like either the handling of the Windows PC, or the sound of the HD recording system and its sound card. So in 1997, the type of tools I am still using today was defined by my getting an Apple Performa 650, a Digidesign Audio Media II sound card, and Digidesign ProTools 4.0. The first piece I realized using ProTools was ‘Impossible Grey’, released in 1997 on French label METAMKINE’S ‘Cinema pour l’oreille’ series. In 1997 I also released one collaboration and one compilation piece (‘the ant moves / the yellow carcass / a little closer’, w/John Hudak, released on the TOUCH compilation ‘A Hole in the Nothing’, and ‘un lieu pareil à un point effacé, 1^ere partie’ released on a CD accompanying the US magazine HALANA – this piece had a second part that was not included, together of a total duration of about 30 minutes). I then started working on a new piece, ‘Buddha with the Sun Face / Buddha with the Moon face’ that went new ways by combining a field recording (of a performance of my friend Jeph Jerman) with treated sampled sounds in a kind of ‘Musique Concrète’ context.

‘Buddha with the Sun Face / Buddha with the Moon face’ was the last thing I managed to complete before in May 1998 I was struck by the outbreak of a very serious illness that kept me in a neurological clinic for almost seven months, followed by two weeks in a rehabilitation clinic. During this time, my physical self just barely escaped destruction, and my self, my personality disappeared over a long stretch of time. I don’t doubt that without my companion Heike’s unconditional solidarity and help I might not have survived. When I finally overcame my illness by the end of 1998, feeling like I had been re-born, I went into a kind of creative rush: I mastered ‘Buddha with the Sun Face / Buddha with the Moon face’ that was then released by my friend Marutani Koji’s DIGITAL NARCIS label in 1999, re-worked and re-composed several pieces (‘un lieu pareil à un point effacé, 1^ere partie’, and ‘un lieu pareil à un point effacé, 2^eme partie’, ‘the ant moves / the yellow carcass / a little closer’) and composed a new piece from parts of a ballet music I had made in 1997, ‘Vertige Hasard’. These pieces became my first release in 1999, ‘Univers Temporel Espoir’ on TRENTE OISEAUX, my own label. I then re-constructed a piece called ‘Deceptive Likeness’ into a new work, ‘Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (For Heike)’, my second release in 1999.

Working on these pieces (now using ProTools on an Apple PPC7200 AV and having dropped the Ensoniq ASR 10 completely) I gathered an enormous amount of experience and skill of using my digital tools – learning seemed so much easier now that the illness, that had been present in my system years before its outbreak, was overcome. My way of working became more and more intuitive as I spent long hours with my work and came to know my digital tools so well I did not have to think about them much any more while using them. I also tended more to just ‘go with the flow’, rather than to conceptualize things. ‘Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (For Heike)’ turned out to be the preparation for the peak of my working process during 1999: the composition of ‘Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko)’ – in this work, I was finally able to embrace my cultural background as a European artist. Harmony and melody became re-discovered possibilities, reminiscences of Maurice Ravel’s work were clearly audible in it, and I felt that many, many doors had opened. Some fellow artists said that the piece was ‘too beautiful’, ‘too melodic’, and even ‘too musical’, while I was happy to have overcome the paradigm according to which beauty has no place in modern art, and harmony and melody are things of the past. I had finally been able to get rid of all prejudice and do what I felt was right. The importance of ‘Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko)’ is absolutely equal to that of ‘Un Peu de Neige Salie’ in my view.

In 2000, when ‘Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko)’ had been released, I had to compose follow-up to it - quite a difficult task after I had invested so much of myself and my energy in this piece. I finally came up with the idea of composing a piece about slowness, and the notion of time passing. The basic idea was that the piece would slow down continuously over time. Once I went to work on it, I felt that I could freely follow the tendencies of the sounds I had chosen (I had sampled and treated string quartet and Shakuhachi sounds as basic material), and to let the piece grow almost all by itself. The result was ‘Time, Dreaming Itself’, very calm(ing), and maybe the most accessible work in my catalog so far (this time called ‘ambient music’ by some... I prefer to stick to Morton Feldman’s expression ‘beyond categories’ – categories and genres are only for people who don’t trust their ears more than their cultural prejudice). ‘Time, Dreaming Itself’ was followed by ‘Then, Silence’, a piece using the most varied sound sources (all samples of musical instruments, including a clearly recognizable piano) of all my music so far. It is dedicated to Morton Feldman and Luigi Nono, artists whose influence on my work cannot be overestimated. It’s formal structure is quite radical, as the ending takes about one third of its entire duration. It is on one level with ‘Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko)’ as an extremely personal statement. It clearly breaks all taboos of ‘experimental correctness’, using melody, harmony, and instrumental sounds to a great extent, but only because once again I just did what I felt was needed and right.

In 2001, my Macintosh PPC 7200 AV died in battle, and I bought a used Macintosh G3 266 beige mini tower, a Digidesign Audio Media III sound card, and ProTools 5.0 LE. Having worked with just four tracks until then, this change in equipment, saving about 80 percent of the time I needed to do things before and giving me 24 tracks to work with, led to a kind of explosion of productivity. I composed two more long pieces intended to combine the different kinds of sound sources I had used before (i.e., noise sounds and instrumental sounds): ‘Crossing the River (Night Music)’ in which the ‘noise’ and ‘instrumental’ are present in about equal parts, and ‘Redshift’, in which the ‘noise’ sounds are dominant. For release, I combined ‘Crossing the River (Night Music)’ with a re-worked version of ‘Haiku for Mu’, a kind of Musique Concrète (that I had composed for a compilation, featuring our dog Mu) and ‘Redshift’ with ‘Abschied’ a kind of mourning piece I composed at the death of Heike’s aunt Erika. ‘Abschied’ uses instrumental samples only and is based on a kind of loop construction – my first exploration of loops, and at the same time, an extremely personal statement again.

In between 2000/2001, I composed three short pieces for compilations: ‘Elliptical Entropy’ for the Japanese label effe, ‘Kernel Panic’ for the US label LINE, and 00.09.57.046 (For Richard Chartier) for the Japanese MU label. Finally, I composed four pieces, all based on the same material of clicks, hiss, and glitches from a CD-R of the British Duo Inmedia, all of the same length, 44 minutes, and that can all be played at the same time, in an eight channel sound installation, for instance. These four works, ‘Monochrome White’, ‘Polychrome w/Neon Nails’, ‘Monochrome Rust’, and ‘Differential’ have been released on the LINE label in two 2CD-sets.

As you see, the last two passages alone present a large variety of types of music – and here is where we get to the center of the answer to Marutani Koji san’s question: why does my music change in this way?

In my earlier days as an artist, I believed that there had to be something called ‘Kunstwille’ in German (i.e., the will to create art) and a specific gesture (I called ‘the art gesture’ in my own terminology) to turn a given material into a work of art. This can indeed bring about excellent results, but there is also an inherent danger in this when the will to create and the ‘art gesture’ become the masters, and artistic sensibility is lost.

Nowadays I have come to distrust the ‘artness’ in art, and feel that I should do without the ‘will to create’ and the ‘art gesture’ to create art just the same way one eats, sleeps and breathes. I’m thinking of the descriptions of Kendo practice Mishima Yukio has put in some of his works: the real master has to forget the sword, the enemy, the will to kill the enemy, and the wish to be a master. Following the intuition that tells me what a certain sound material wants to do, where it wants to go is the Way for me. By doing this, my music is always and never the same (a phrase used by Calvin Klein to promote his perfume Contradiction – I see no contradiction in there, quite the contrary): it is always me who reacts to the material present, generally in the direction of a certain preconceived concept, which has, of course, to remain flexible and is constantly adapted. I thus find myself in all the music I create, no matter what ‘genre’ it may seem to belong to, it changes as I change, and I think this is the only way not to become sterile as an artist over time: each new project must be a new thing to learn from, a new territory to explore.

Let me end this text with two quotations:

‘The art object is what psychologists call a cognitive map, which reveals more about the artist than he would ever care to reveal.’

Bruce Chatwin

From the Hagakure

bernhard günter, March 2002