In conversation with Roxane Bovet [RB]
and Laurent Schmid [LS]
This interview took place in May 2019 at Karl Holmqvist’s stu-dio in Berlin. It is a summary of two discussions we had over the past year, the first during the recording in Geneva of Staircase Mystery and The Man Who Sold the World, both of which are featured on the record album produced by A-sides. The oth-er intoth-erview took place right aftoth-er the recording of the sound pieces Declare Independence and Addition, Addition, Addiction which will appear on the B-side of the album.
RB Earlier this afternoon, we mentioned The Man Who Sold the World, and whether it was inspired more by [David] Bowie or Nirvana. Can you explain more about your use of citations and earworms?
KH I like the idea of covers, of different versions, but actually these things are about memory and the way I remember song lyrics, and also when someone is listening, the way a listener remembers them as they hear them, as I read them. There’s a moment, I guess, at some point where people think, “Oh, I know these words from somewhere,” and then it takes maybe another couple of minutes before they remember where they know them from. So, it evokes a kind of traveling back and forth between being in the moment and hearing something and remembering something. I think of that as a sort of time travel that takes place between the now and the then.
Also, songs are special because they often get stuck in your head.
So, it’s sort of like you possess them, and you can carry them around with you in that sense.
LS Is that the reason why you mix your own texts with these song lyrics?
KH Let’s just say it’s meant to imitate the way the mind and our thoughts work… The way the mind is constantly slipping, trying to focus, trying to concentrate on one thing but shifting constantly
KH I know John, yes, also from the early 1990s when I was living in New York. I was actually working as a gallery assistant at Daniel Newburg Gallery where John was exhibiting at the time. He would arrive with just a few ideas and I would spend time with him going around New York sourcing the materials for his installations that would all be done in situ with a few improvised elements picked up on the way. I remember being very impressed by how easy it all seemed and how it added this other timeline and performance aspect to the gallery exhibition.
LS Charlemagne Palestine also lived in Geneva for some years.
KH I’m sure he has, he has lived everywhere [laughs]. Of course, he was in New York forever and now he’s in Brussels. I guess we all have a nomadic element in our practice.
or if they are doing the dishes or making the bed or whatever. It doesn’t have that kind of intensity in the moment, the intently fo-cused listening that I consider to be part of the performance, but it’s good that it exists as an object. It’s something you can go back to and listen to. John [Armleder] is in his seventies now and mak-ing his first record. He is actually a performance artist but he also does a lot of other things. I also haven’t done a lot of records in my life for this reason. I think the kind of live performance situation is maybe more interesting to me, for what it is I’m trying to recreate somehow.
RB You were speaking about live performance as a plat-form of exchange. Do you think that, currently, making records can become a platform of exchange with other people even though you’re not on stage?
KH Yes, I agree.
RB We are also interested in the whole scene and the net-work of artists and the importance of just being friends, eating together, hanging out, which is often at the start of everything. Mathieu asked what your link with the conceptual scene was at the moment.
KH He probably knows better than I do [laughter]. I don’t know. I’m friends with some of them, but I would say I’m more connected with the art world than the performance or music scene, and I don’t real-ly know anything about contemporary poetry. I guess it was mostreal-ly during the early 1990s in New York that I was hanging out with art-ists and going to spoken word readings. Then I began participating in them, and thinking that this form could somehow be presented in an artistic context. It became some kind of performance art that was, for the most part, presented in galleries or perhaps at a friend’s opening, in a museum lobby or something like that.
It somehow became contemporary art rather than contempo-rary performance, or poetry. Other than that, I don’t know. We also invited Fia Backström and Sophia Le Fraga to perform in Geneva. I also like to involve other people in what I do, but there’s no system or special structure to get them involved.
LS You already had contacts within the Geneva scene? You mentioned John Armleder…
John Cage once exhorted us to break all LPs. For him, possessing a record album did not represent the possession of the music but rather a mere participation in the game of capitalistic consumerism, regardless of the release or the number of albums made. Was it the same for cassettes? In any case, he worked with tapes, that is sure, but what did he think of the tape as a “commercial” medium?
I would like to ask him this even if I suspect that his answer would be the same as it was for records. Like Cage, I have a thing for mushrooms, these living organisms that burst forth from rot.
Cassettes are like rot. The poor parents of “taped” media in 2019.
I buy and consume mushrooms. I love, purchase and consume cassettes. I purchase and consume the music of John Cage. I am a capitalist. A capitalist when it comes to cassettes and rot, and LPs and computer files, and music in general. Whatever the medium, what matters is that I have access to music, sounds and noises (it’s all the same to me), and, of course, delicious plates of mushrooms too! There’s nothing better than listening to cassettes while eating mushrooms. So let’s buy cassettes and mushrooms and enjoy ourselves like the good little capitalists we are. Bon appétit, happy listening and Make More Cassettes! Yeah!
Sixto Fernando
environments for the collective expression of individual voices through the use of musical instruments, poetry, theory, paintings, sculptures, costumes, etc. I met a lovely cluster of artists, musicians, and theorists like Angela Fette, Philipp Schulze, Markus Karstiess, Detlef Weinrich, Michael Hirsch, most of them living in Düsseldorf. It started as a very friendly circle of like-minded people, which keeps on growing living connections into the US, the UK, Paris, Sweden, India. Jendreiko calls this the “Generative Assemblage.” Sharing is an important factor here and slowness is also a very important factor. I always compare