In conversation with Roxane Bovet [RB],
Mathieu Copeland [MC] and Laurent Schmid [LS]
Geneva, June 24, 2017 and March 13, 2018
JA Many people have come to Geneva because many forms of music were present here — experimental music inspired by classical music, improvised music, etc. There was a venue in Geneva called the New Morning, which is no longer there. It was a jazz club that also dab-bled in other genres, located near L’Usine. I believe Peter Gordon did a concert there which was organized in part by Eric Frank and the Centre d’Art Contemporain [in Geneva].
MC Who was Eric Frank? You have mentioned him sev-eral times.
JA He was a gallery owner from Belgium who had a gallery here in Geneva. I think he has passed away. He was also the gallerist of Charlemagne Palestine.
MC What was Charlemagne Palestine like when he lived here? He stayed a long time, didn’t he?
JA I couldn’t say because he came and went. However, he did remain for a long time at Eric Grand’s place. He performed in several concerts with Adelina von Fürstenberg and later, with Guy Issanjoux. When Gustave Metzger began doing art again, since Charlemagne was there, he decided to do an immense wall. I never really knew what it was.
MC Recently, when I met with him, Charlemagne Palestine said that he was sure he had done an exhibi-tion with you. Do you remember it?
JA Actually, he did do one. It was during the time when he was often seen in Geneva. He made murals with collages. When Ecart moved to the center, there was a fairly large room on the ground floor and he made use of the back wall.
stole the show. Between the pieces, her performances got longer and longer. She would announce the pieces and add commentary.
RB Was this the first time that Stephan Eicher and you worked together?
JA It was the first time that we had done a show together. Before that, we had done several TV appearances. Once on the radio, based on me, and one show based on him with Frédéric Mitterrand, who had tried to do something at a theater in Paris. It was a “fake”
live performance, it was terrific. There was this really serious Swiss philosopher and writer, whose name I can’t remember, who real-ly liked Stephan. Sylvie Fleury was with him, with earrings like chandeliers. The guy was next to her and was talking. He was to-tally covered with reflections from them. It was all really bizarre.
Stephan adores Joseph Cornell, so we showed one of his films. Do you know Stephan Eicher?
RB Actually, it’s funny because, before I dis-covered Grauzone and its experimental pe-riod, for me Stephan Eicher represented the Swiss pop my parents listened to, which we sort of made fun of.
JA I knew him before his hit Déjeuner en Paix, when he was mak-ing experimental music with Grauzone. Once he did a concert with a dictaphone. I wanted to do it again. When he was very young, Stephan attended an art school called F+F [Form und Farbe, School for Art and Media Design, Zurich]. That’s where I met him for the first time. There was an artist who was producing his work at the time called Martin Heller — he is from my generation. I went to see them there. It was experimental music, fairly low-key but experi-mental just the same.
LS Artists’ records are also of interest to us. Where did the idea come from? How did it develop?
JA In the beginning we would just put albums at the Ecart stand, then Lionel [Bovier] was invited to do his own stand. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to contribute something. I think the first year we did books. The second year, we did a retrospective. We redid part of it with Stéphane Kropf, who had constructed album display containers.
LS Elisabeth showed us the Mary Harding cas-sette, which had been co-produced by their own production house.
JA At the time, she was the partner of an artist named Barry Machelion. We did a little book. It was very complicated because we had printed it on tracing paper. It was the same image which each time was slightly turned. We rediscovered it and we’re going to bind it. Actually, it had been added to an envelope which we had printed.
LS Is that more or less the only production of a cas-sette that you had done?
JA That’s a good question… I did cassettes with other people. We did an exhibition of cassettes with Ruedi Schill, who had a gallery in Lucerne called Apropos. I think that we made cassettes for the occasion, but I don’t remember if we really produced them. There were about fifty of them, or perhaps a hundred cassettes of artists’
productions. There was also Claudia Gould, who was at the Jewish Museum in New York, who had been making cassettes before that.
Also, Audio Arts by William Furlong in England. Claudia and I partici-pated in anthologies. I performed a piece by Georges Brecht: it lasted one second! Christian Marclay performed one of my pieces, whose title, Sixteen Blow Pieces, might seem a bit outré but it really isn’t. I don’t remember who produced it, but Claudia created that cassette.
I also did another one with Paul McCarthy.
LS You never made a vinyl album?
JA We did one at Villa Magica, with the students of my class at HBK Braunschweig. It was a concert of microwave ovens. I was the or-chestra conductor and there were around ten different models of mi-crowave ovens.
JA Did you attend the concert I did with Stephan Eicher at MAMCO? We invited a famous ventriloquist, who could not come. Finally, we came up with a woman who was a ballerina and an amateur ventriloquist. It was totally bizarre. She did ventriloquism, but without any dummies or people. So she would talk but you couldn’t tell to whom the voice corresponded. She was supposed to announce each piece. There were people who said that this was the only thing they liked. So, on the third evening, we told her to just do whatever she felt like doing. She totally
cassettes, this was not the case. However, with albums, you had to find someone who could press them, then you had to make the album cover. But we loved that, because they were also beautiful objects.
LS That’s also why albums are back in vogue.
JA That is for two reasons — because all the rest has disappeared, we make everything like that. At first, Villa Magica made vinyl re-cords and CDs. People would buy CDs to put them in the car and who knows what else. Today, CDs are pretty much done.
We repeated the exploit three times. It was at the invitation of Lionel, who managed that space.
We began to make albums with Sylvie [Fleury] and Stéphane [Armleder], my son, when I was at the Villa Magica. That’s why the album has that name. But we had already done an album before that, with Christian Marclay, which is this album without grooves. It was produced by Ecart. Later, we made another album with Christian for Villa Magica — the album without grooves with a gilded jacket cover.
We made very few of those.
MC If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t the beginning of Villa Magica based on the idea of Christmas albums?
JA Absolutely. At the Villa Magica, we did those Christmas “mega-dec-orations” with Sylvie. If you look back at the history of commercial mu-sic, especially in English — and rather more specifically, American — when you sign with a major label, the contract mentions the obligation to release a Christmas song, or even an album. We said we would do the exact opposite. We did not share the same ambitions! It is true that certain artists had more success with their Christmas album. Our idea was to play off that.
LS We had one last question, regarding your rap-port with other producers and album sellers.
JA This medium, which was available, grew very quickly. Like mail art, everyone knew everyone. There was this idea, that I really liked, of the abolition of certain criteria of quality. At the time, recording systems were a bit cobbled together. As far as albums were concerned, it was a bit more complicated because you had to find someone to press them. But we quickly hooked up with all the people who did that. In the beginning, there weren’t a lot of people involved.
MC Tell us about your ties to people like Philip Corner.
JA I met Philip Corner through the people at Fluxus.
MC But he has always presented himself as a musician above all.
JA Many members of Fluxus were musicians. The problem [with the albums] was that their production was complicated. Naturally, with