Markus Reuter: recording music across space and time

Markus originally joined us for Episode 130 back in November 2022. He joins us now to discuss his project Sea of Hopeless Angels (Unsung Records), which began as several unedited studio solo improvisations by Markus on his electric touch guitar. Those recordings were turned over to mixer Stefano Castagna, whose sonic wizardry included not only mixing but fully collaborating with the recordings, adding new sounds and instruments as inspiration struck, including his own voice, various samples, bass, synthesizers, and other electronics.

There are other inspirations at work in this project, but we will leave those to be revealed in the course of our discussion. It is important to mention the final collaborator for Sea of Hopeless Angels, though, and that is Aldo Grazzi, an Italian painter and video artist, who, back in the early 1980s, made visual experimentations interfacing a video camera with a cathode ray TV screen. The resulting video retains every imperfection of what was then state-of-the-art technology. All of the pieces on Sea of Hopeless Angels feature video accompaniment drawn from these videos, which are in the Grazzi archives, with two of them also accompanied by studio footage of Markus’ original performances.

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: Markus, how are you?

Markus: Hey, so good to be talking to you again.

LP: Yeah, likewise. It is great to see you. How are you? Are you well?

Markus: I am well. I am a little bit jet-lagged. I came back from the USA to Europe on Friday. It is the fifth day of being back home. I am still very tired during the day, which is normal for me, but I am still complaining.

LP: You have to reserve the right to complain. Are you in Berlin?

Markus: Yes, I am in Berlin, at home, spending a lot of time with my daughter, which is very nice. I have been away for seven weeks on this recent tour. It is a long chunk of time, especially for a four-year-old child. I am in my studio though, this little studio room I use for all sorts of things, not just for music but also for video and as my office. I love the solitude. If there is one thing I have learned over the decades, it is that solitude fuels me. Having a family makes it hard to have solitude, so sometimes, even at night, I go here just for an hour to do nothing.

LP: I have a very similar setup: an office studio with keyboards, podcast equipment, a sitting reading area, and a working area. The time in this room is very important. It is interesting that you say you thrive in solitude, given that I think of you as such an artistic collaborator.

Markus: I love collaboration. I am very convinced in what I do. I do not have many doubts about my artistic output. But I actually prefer collaborative work because I believe it has even more value, as people are coming together and finding something bigger than what I could do alone. I am more interested in what happens outside of me than inside. It is strange, but I am always looking for something that surprises me. My habitual patterns do not surprise me that much. That is why the external surprise, the unexpected happening, really floats my boat. That is also what collaborators do.

LP: It is interesting that you talked about consensus because I did some professional work with someone who taught me that consensus is not what you are looking for when working with others. He framed it as alignment: I can tell you what I need and want, you can tell me what you need and want, and we can harmonize our needs and wants if we choose to go forward together. There is a lot that goes into that, right? I have to be empathetic to your point of view and willing to be vulnerable, but that is where you get a real connection with another person in any context—in a relationship, in work, in art.

Markus: It is true, and the questions are: alignment of what and in which context or direction? I think the most important alignment is the alignment of goals. When I say that, I am not talking about your goal having to be the same as mine, but that the things we are doing to get to our individual goals align as something that creates something useful to both of us.

LP: Yeah, because we could have different goals for a project. I could want to have this project be something where I get to show off a new skill, and for you, it could be that you need this piece to submit for a grant application. That is okay. We could have different goals as long as it is in the service of what we are doing together.

Markus: Exactly. The funny example I always bring is maybe a trio band working together: the first guy wants to make the most emotional music in the world, the second guy wants to finally learn to play a beat in 4/4 properly, and the third guy wants to meet his girlfriend. But what comes out of it rarely has anything to do with the motivation that goes into it. It can, but that is also the element of surprise I mentioned. The idea is that maybe you want to do X, but you end up at X prime or even at some other letter of the alphabet.

A friend of mine, Bernhard, who I work with in the band Centrozoon, studied art at university and conservatory. He said he had a professor who talked about the "creative angle," meaning you never go from A to B. Once you start, there is an angle, and you end up somewhere else. But that is your B, even though it was not your original B. So, there is an angle between the original B and the B you end up in. This is also where, when we are talking about collaboration, our individual paths—but it is not a path because that angle creates a plane—kind of intersects in interesting ways. This is where several people working together can create an amazing piece of art, and nowadays, we do not really see where it originally comes from. We do not know what the motivations were of the people involved, but it has gathered some universal meaning by being part of culture. I am thinking of bigger names in the art scene or in music, like The Cure, for example. For me, The Cure is a great example of a band that started a whole scene, a whole look, a whole way of living and being. At the same time, they have made albums that could not be further away from each other in terms of style and lyrical content.

LP: Yeah, incredible band.

Markus: They have been going for almost fifty years now, forty-five years or something. But collaboration, yes, I think I hope I know why you mentioned that. (laughter)

LP: Yes, yes, you do. In fact, there are some other themes that came up in that part of what we were just discussing that I want to come back to, but the last time you and I spoke was, I believe, just turning into winter in Berlin at the end of 2022. So it has been, let us call it, roughly a year and a half. And as always in the life of Markus Reuter, an eighteen-month period is incredibly packed with work and output. There is so much to talk about in the context of Sea of Hopeless Angels, which is a project new to us. It is not new to you. You have been sitting with it for a while. It is new to us in the outside world. I am very curious, as a way to begin talking about that, how you talked about intentions and A to B and the creative angle. When you were creating those improvisations in that one afternoon, I assume, from what I read in the material, were you thinking that they were going to leave you and go to Stefano? Did you already have that intention? Did you know what you were going to do with them?

Markus: I think so. The way that this worked out is that it was basically a year or so before I had gone into the studio with my band Anchor and Burden, actually before I had the name for the band, and I did the same thing during the sessions. I decided to also record some solo music while the instruments were set up and let it be filmed. So two years ago, when we went back into the studio with Anchor and Burden to repeat the process and record more albums of music, I repeated the idea because I knew it would take forty-five minutes (it was really only forty-five minutes, not a whole afternoon) around noon and just play. The only reference point I gave myself in those recording sessions was that I had a click in my ear. Just before I started playing, I asked the engineer to give me 60 BPM for this track and 77 for that track. I wanted the pieces to have very different tempos. I was being filmed by two cameras at the same time, improvising those pieces.

So what could I have done, because up to that point, it was just a repeat of the session we had done two years before—but then I was thinking, okay, what can I do differently with this material now? This is an amazing opportunity because there is music that is already there, the original improvisations. I could have released them just as they were, but I was thinking, what happens if I ask a genius producer like Stefano to build something around this? The only parameter I gave him was that you are not allowed to change the timeline of my improvisations. You can mute something, put a treatment on it, put your own parts to it, whatever you want, but do not change the timeline. This was my idea, so that when we sync up his work on the music, on our music, with the video, people would be saying, "How is it possible? How is it possible that Markus can play this kind of complex, non-repetitive music?" Because it would be impossible to do it the other way around. That was the idea I had, and it turned out to be a great idea. I like to use technology and processes in interesting ways to create something surprising.

Stefano did just an amazing job with that. Going back to the fact that I used a click track, as I was preparing the files to be sent to Stefano, I was thinking, should I actually tell him which tempos I played?

LP: I am curious about that. Did you include the click track?

Markus: I did not.

LP: That is great.

Markus: In some of the pieces, he got very close to what I felt to be the pulse. For example, there is one called "Ghost World," track six, in which you can hear that the tempos are off. It is nice, though. Stefano does not even experience it as that, but I hear my pulse and what he added to the track is in a completely different tempo. It is fascinating to me. I love it.

LP: Your one requirement of not tampering with the timeline or the structure also speaks to the idea that in this world with near-magical technological tools, if you do not impose some kind of constraint on yourself or on a project, you can often get lost in the tools. It is useful to have something taken away so that you can—almost like a forcing function.

Markus: Exactly. And that is what I have been doing all my life. I have been aware of this all my life: If you have access to the Horn of Plenty, you might not be concerned about trying to find a tree that has honey in it.

LP: I am just going to sit here and get fat. (laughter)

Markus: But if you are really hungry, that hunger, that is what I am interested in. I have to say, I am really happy to report at my age—not that old, but still—I am as hungry as ever. And I love that. Yes, imposing restrictions or certain limitations where you actually have to create—and I have to use this word twice—creative solutions. That is what inspires me. To me, it is not something that comes from the head; it is something that comes from the heart. The joy of discovery, the joy of surprise, the joy of being tactile, going down to something that is really physical. So, as you say, technological tools, as great as they may be, should always add a certain texture—dirt and grit—to the piece of art. If it is a painting or something that you build with your hands, or if it is music that you are making on the computer, there is always something wonderful about it: acquiring a new texture. That is what music technology traditionally is about.

LP: Yeah, that is right. Distortion.

Markus: Distortion, exactly. People may not have been aware of that back when they were inventing microphones, but maybe they were because they realized that the voice they are hearing in the room is the real voice. But if it is recorded, it is never going to be real because it is a recording. So what we need to do is find a magnifying glass or whatever metaphor you want to use that makes the voice sound good, whatever that means, in the recorded format. But we know it is never going to sound natural. This is something that audiophiles sometimes get wrong, where the idea is to get the natural sound from a stereo system. But I do not think it works like that. They would be surprised that the acoustic bass they think sounds really natural is actually distorted to sound natural in the stereo system.

LP: It is interesting you bring that up because I like stereo equipment and nice-sounding music reproduction. But where I abandoned that as a pursuit was every few years, you might change a component—a different turntable, receiver, new speakers, whatever—and it completely changes the sound. You could change one component, and it completely changes the sound reproduction, which led me to believe there is no transparency, no exact duplication, and no naturalness here. This is, as soon as the signal, the vibration, the audio, the physics of it leave the performer, just all various degrees of manipulation, interpretation, flaws added, flaws taken out. It is a silly pursuit because the fun is in the processing and the transmutation for me.

Markus: I totally agree. Talking about Sea of Hopeless Angels, Stefano still has an analog studio with tape machines and an analog desk. On the one hand, I would say I can work totally on the computer, in the box as they say, and create something beautiful. But if I do, then that is part of those limitations you talked about. Then, I accept that I cannot get the exact sound that somebody else has gotten at some point. It is not a tool for replication. It can be, but for me, it is not.

This is why I love this collaboration with Stefano so much. I work totally in the box. Everything is digital: the recording, the looping, the effects. Everything was recorded in headphones with a click, in a pretty much dead environment. Then I give it to him, and he makes it breathe. He puts it through speakers and re-records with microphones, using his analog desk. He is putting whistling on it, his voice, all sorts of strange, interesting sounds. I think it is a pretty great-sounding record, but he is not afraid to also use distorted elements.

For example, the very first sample you hear on the first track sounds like something breaking—I do not even know what it is—that sample distorts a little bit. To me, it adds to the flavor. It is something where people would say, "What is that?" It is unexpected. I like that inthe process of creation, we get these imperfections. For example, there are certain moments when I hear a string noise that is dissonant, which was not intended as I was playing. Again, as I was handing the material to Stefano, I was thinking, should I edit this out? It would have been easy for me to edit it out; it would have taken 10 seconds to do that. But I said I was going to give it to him like that. And if he does not take it out, then it is meant to be there. Even though when I am listening to the album now, and I hear these moments, I am still going, "Uh, that is right." I am still hearing it as something that I did as a mistake. But I think it is part of the texture, part of the musical expression.

LP: The humanity. It is part of the humanity of it.

Markus: It is part of the humanity for sure.

LP: In the show notes, we are going to link to the video. We will link to several of the videos that are out around this project. But you mentioned his analog desk, and when I was watching that part of the video of Stefano working, for whatever reason, what came to my mind was a grand piano with him sitting there sort of in the octave of middle C, in the middle of that desk. He was playing the desk. I am sorry; I know it is a banal metaphor, but he was playing his studio.

Markus: And he is that kind of person, the kind of music producer who plays with whatever is necessary for music to happen. That means he is also playing the musicians. I have experienced him in the studio quite often with other musicians around, and just his way of making a suggestion or putting up a new microphone—he has really supple ways to play the material that is the musician himself or herself, which is really special to see. The understanding of music-ing goes much beyond the idea that it is like pressing a key on a keyboard or striking a string on a guitar, where it is really about the situation, about creating the situation for the music to happen. It is wonderful, and I have to say, I am pretty grateful that I have come into a position where I can experience this kind of creation.

LP: It was really a treat that you guys chose to include the videos of each of you working separately because it is just a different way to experience the final product, the finished music. Seeing you—but when he was working, he was working the faders and the equipment. Then there is another cut where he is at a microphone, and he is doing those vocal pieces. Then he plays the bass. I mean, I would have been surprised if there was a tuba and a xylophone. He is just grabbing stuff. It was so fun to watch. But then you talked a little bit earlier about the technology and the flavor—I think I forget the exact language you used, but basically how the technology has its own character or its own characteristics. And I think that is really illustrated and exemplified in Aldo Grazzi's videos.

In preparation for our time together, I really spent some quiet moments watching the videos and listening to the music. The recurring thought I had was I would love to be in an immersive environment with these videos projected and this music sort of all around me, loud. A few things occur to me: one is these almost forty-year-old videos being so relevant to this modern music and the way they are so sympathetic, but also this notion of collaboration across space and time. There is a very metaphysical element to this that should not be ignored.

Markus: Exactly. Ever since music was recorded, we have had this because of the preservation or conservation of sound. Now that we have digital media, we can listen over and over again without degradation of quality. That is also why when the first digital samplers started happening in the early 80s and mid-80s and hip hop and rap music started happening, you had a track or a bassline from a Chic track that was five years later or even only three years later used in a hip hop track that became very famous. There, we already had the smearing of space and time.

Recorded music makes it possible to reference, and not only to reference but also to reuse musical phrases and musical recordings. With the tools that we have available nowadays, they can be completely recontextualized. You can auto-tune Luciano Pavarotti singing an aria that is originally in minor; you can make that major if you want. Nowadays, there are no limits anymore with modern technology. I do not think that it potentially can get much worse than it already is because the possibilities are already endless.

Yes, Aldo Grazzi's work—Stefano worked with Aldo back in the 80s and had seen the videos. He was already, I think, back then making sounds to it, but it really clicked for him with the project we did together, with this album Sea of Hopeless Angels, that now there is finally the right companion to Aldo's videos from the 80s. I remember that he did not have them readily available. He had to find the videotapes, he had to go buy a video player to actually play them back and then find a way to digitize them. It was a whole ordeal of getting them revived.

At that point, Aldo was already very ill. I think Stefano had a hunch that Aldo may not be around forever. Unfortunately, Aldo died a few months ago. You know that moment when you have a little bit of a déjà vu like you are sitting somewhere with somebody, and there is just the flash of "I have seen this scene before" or "I have heard those words before"? In a way, that is what the combination of Aldo's videos from forty years ago—actually, they were from the early 80s, so maybe already forty-two, forty-three years old—in combination with our contemporary music is like. It is a match made in heaven, as they say.

LP: Yeah, I've noticed something very interesting as a recurring motif or aesthetic, which is that late 70s, early 80s visual look.

It was almost like digital in an analog context. They were just getting computer motion graphics and things of that nature, where it's just starting to become more, they were moving out of academia and into commercial settings. That aesthetic is very attractive. It kind of reminds me of what futurism was in the 50s and early 60s.

You know, there's that mid-century aesthetic of what the future looked like back then with rounded corners and a lot of plastic and, but this was what the future looked like visually in the early 80s. But it's, I don't know, I find it very attractive and resonant.

Markus: If we look at technology, I think it's the transition from analog to digital, where this, I think that's what you're talking about. It's that where both were happening at the same time, where it was like just the marriage of the two worlds, let's say. Then, in the mid-80s, when things were like 90 percent over on the digital side already, things were sounding different, and things were looking different. That's like the age that sounds super dated. Right? Or looks super dated also in terms of like video technology and stuff like that. But I think it's mostly when worlds meet and we're kind of like back to the idea of collaboration there.

So, in a way, it's the analog equipment or the analog way of doing things combined with, okay, now I can program my drum machine here, my Linn drum, to have a kick and snare and like a hi-hat that sounds like a mosquito, right? But I still have to record it onto analog tape. And that's where the marriage of the media kind of happens and it creates something really beautifully deep and rich and something that you can't replicate easily.

LP: I'm having a little bit of an epiphany here at hearing you say this because what's occurring to me is that you think about this era, let's call it even the early to mid-70s into the early to mid-80s, where you have music like even Pink Floyd or Kraftwerk, or if you fast forward a little bit later, Human League or New Order, that early synth-pop from the UK was that marriage of analog and digital.

And that music is much more interesting than what was happening even five or seven years later. Not more interesting, but it's, we go back to that, The Cure, we go back to that much more now because it was straddling those lines of analog equipment, nascent digital equipment, still people playing analog instruments, still making mistakes, not this perfection or this precision.

And I think that's something that's interesting to me right now. I talk about it a lot with guests here. There are musical movements popping up a lot in Western Europe and Germany in particular, where this electroacoustic marriage of improvised music meets electronic music or jazz people playing with beats-oriented people. And I think I find that music so attractive because aesthetically it has that same feel. I recognize that feel. I've been struggling to articulate that for a while, but this helps, it helps me make sense of it.

Markus: It goes a little bit further, even. And I think it moves away from the medium or the music itself. Also, I'm in Berlin now, and Berlin is one of the places where techno music was born. It was not really invented there, but like maybe Detroit and Berlin or something, right?

LP: There was a dialogue.

Markus: There was a dialogue, but what was happening really is that, okay, it's one thing to have a setup of two Roland machines like a bassline and a rhythm computer, and you listen to that, you sit there and listen to that, that's one thing. In a room, and maybe you have a bass amp that you're running it through, so it has, like, already there, it has that sort of like a visceral quality. But the visceral quality then is that people started dancing to it.

So really, the color, all the grit, the dirt, like that music used to carry with it in the 80s, late 80s, early 90s was not necessarily just the sound of it. It was also the sweat of the people that were dancing to it. It's the context, the cultural context, and the actual people experiencing it. So that's why, to this day, when I listen to a classic techno track on my computer, it doesn't work that well. Listen to it on vinyl; much better. Okay. But listen to it on an original tape that my friend Bernhard again made in '89, listening to it from that cassette tape. That's where I get the real feeling. That's where, sort of like, the sweat and the dirt are burned into the tape with the sound. You know what I mean?

LP: Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Something else that strikes me about Sea of Hopeless Angels is that, now I didn't see the films that sort of influenced the work, Wings of Desire and Far Away So Close.

Markus: Yes, yes.

LP: My understanding from the themes is, and it seems even more poignant with Aldo's passing, is this dialogue between our material plane and the sort of other dimension where there are, you know, whatever metaphor you use in your tradition for the departed or the transitioned. And this project is, it's an odd mirror to that, and again, added to that with Aldo's passing. How does that feel as someone who was in the midst of that creative process?

Markus: The interesting thing is that in this case, with this album, like, the names for the pieces and for the album didn't come last, but it wasn't certainly not there before the music was there. I came up with the title, Sea of Hopeless Angels, and it just came to me just like this. It's not necessarily with a meaning attached to it yet, but a vibe, but a vibe. So there's a vibe that is sort of like, you could say between the lines, but this is since there's just one line, it's between the words or between the letters.

This is the creative angle again. It is the creative angle, exactly. And so, like the idea of a sea, right? And hopelessness and the angelic and in a way it's sort of like another, I mean that like in hindsight, like I didn't think about that before. In hindsight, it's just another metaphor for what it feels like to me to be a creative person in this world where there is a vast sea, right? And there is like the hopelessness of like, can I share this discovery? I would call it that. It's like my act of opening myself up to be inspired by something that's greater than myself. How is that going to communicate? Or is it even going to communicate? Is it important? Is it only for me? Obviously because it was done with Stefano, but like even at the point where I only had the improvisations, I felt that way about it.

For me as an artist, I'm creating basically into the void. Like for the void, you could say. But then, that's not where we stop, right? Because when we record, when we make that product that people can repeatedly listen to, then there is this other layer of almost feeling as if you had given birth. And that's sort of like what is in those titles for me.

This void or this space where you go from total joy to depression or hopelessness and love. It's all there, it's all always there, and it's a melting pot of those things. It's not that you have to go northeast to find love, no. Like it's everywhere. That's sort of what music means to me. And I think this is a metaphor that David Lynch used. Like you're basically just fishing, just fishing the things that are there. You're fishing them out of that void, out of that space. And you're presenting it. You're kind of like a gardener or whatever metaphor there.

LP: A channel.

Markus: Yeah. Yeah. It's a channel, but it's more than just a channel because a channel does not have to be active. A channel can just channel without attaching anything. But the idea that we're attaching, that I'm attaching myself, say emotionally, to complete a project, to bring it to an end, to have that final product, that's what really is the creative act in the end. It's not so much about the original inspiration, let's say, it's about like birth again, you know, it's not that you're giving birth, like at least we humans, and then it takes twenty years, I'd say, until you can let that being go out into the world on its own, right? So, it's really more about the bringing up of the child than the making of the child. That's for me, all of these connotations are in those titles and also in the emotions I'm getting when I'm listening to that music.

LP: You can sit on top of a pretty expansive body of work at this point, with much more to come. But as you survey your work, do you recognize recurring themes? Is there a philosophical through-line in your work?

Markus: I guess the thing that we've been discussing the last forty minutes, that's sort of like the philosophy. I wouldn't call it that. It's not a philosophy. It's just an expression of who I am in this world. I wouldn't even say that it's really who I am, but it's what I do, actually. You know, it's, and then that's not the same thing. But musically, there are certainly themes. But I don't see it as like that I'm repeating.

I can just sit down and do something in the style of, in the style of what Markus did in 1998. I can do that. But for me, it's about acquiring an extra level of awareness or facility that makes it interesting for me to maybe do something in the style of what Markus did. The feedback I'm getting from my listeners is that they don't feel that there's anything different. And maybe those people who find what I do repetitive don't tell me. But, anyway, like, I wouldn't really make music if there wasn't a need for it. There's always a why. In most cases, I can tell you why.

LP: I don't know where I stumbled across this notion. It may have been reading something else about you or a quote that you said, but could you talk to me about the role or the importance of experimentation to you and your work?

Markus: It's a good question because the word experimentation can be defined in many different ways. I studied sciences and psychology, and I know how to design a proper experiment that gives scientific results. So, when I'm talking about experimentation, I may have a completely different definition than other people.

I find that I hardly ever experiment. What I mean by that is that the experiment I do is not designed to fail. The experiment is always designed to be successful. And so now I said, how is that possible? It's possible by accepting the outcome. So, no matter which experiment I'm running, rather than trying to correct its outcome, I just accept the outcome for what it is.

For example, I left some wrong notes in the mix for Sea of Hopeless Angels. They're not wrong. I accept that I did that. And I think that's really the challenge that most people who are actually creative people, but who haven't found a way to get their creativity out there, that's where they struggle with. It's the self-censorship.

And so, really, I'm running experiments and before—there's one album which comes to mind just now. It's Oculus, it's called. Nothing Is Sacred, I called it. It's tongue-in-cheek, "nothing is sacred," because I did create something that is absolutely wrong, given all the things that people will tell you what music actually is and how music should be made. Rather than saying, okay, we've done the session, it sounds kind of like wacky or strange, and can we fix it? I say, no, we're not going to fix it. We're going to just present it exactly the way it is. Because this was not an experiment. This was a process. It was a process to create something. So that's where you go. That's my answer.

Experiments don't really exist for me. It's all process and acceptance of the outcome.

LP: That's very interesting, though, Markus, because obviously, I'm not going to argue with you about your interpretation of your work, but it's fascinating to hear you say it that way because that's almost a description of at least how I understand a scientific experiment. First of all, just to draw analogies, the idea that you would take out some of the mistakes is analogous to tampering with the data. A scientific experiment doesn't succeed or fail. It either proves or disproves the hypothesis. So, the result is not a failure or a success. It's an outcome, and you live with that outcome, and then you choose to iterate or not.

But it's very interesting that you're distinguishing between an experiment when it sounds almost exactly like—

Markus: You know, the reason why I said it this way is that you're talking to me as an artist right now. And that's the difference. And that's also what I was saying. Usually, the hurdle for a lot of people is that the acceptance of the outcome is the problem.

For me, an experiment is a scientific experiment. But for me, using a new effects pedal or changing the process of my looping in my laptop is not an experiment. It's process. I'm changing the process of making music or manipulating sound. Just like the question or the statement that a lot of people make that music is a language, for example. To me, it's absurd to call music a language, but for somebody it may be exactly that because they're thinking about the thing very completely, completely differently.

And anyway, the word experiment or experimentation, I would say, does not apply to what I do. At least not from my perspective. It's just process.

LP: Yeah. When you talk about the word process, that has some very specific meanings. Again, we could play around with it a little bit linguistically, but do you create process music in the definition of a Steve Reich or a David Lang? Is process music what you make in certain projects?

Markus: I think in most projects, I'm making process music, yes, but with very loose parameters, let's say. Even going on tour with Pat Mastelotto and Trey Gunn as Tuner, we go on stage, and we improvise one-third of the show. One-third of the show is process music because we define the process. We say we're just going to play, but it's a very loose process, obviously, but it's a process. It's a restriction. You could think of it as a restriction rather than the opposite, right? "Play freely" is a restriction.

So no, there is a project—actually, there is more than one, but I'm only talking about one publicly—which is called Kid Arrow. Kid Arrow is on Bandcamp, and it's a project that I started in Osaka a couple of years ago. I discovered a musical generative process in my laptop that I designed and discovered. And I have since created about, I don't know how many, sixty pieces now, sixty pieces with that process or like, obviously the process always evolves. It's total process music. So, there's no intervention whatsoever. I'm setting it up, and then I'm bouncing it out, and it's a piece of music, and it's very fascinating. It's actually the project I'm most interested in and that's closest to my heart at the moment. It's Kid Arrow. And I really encourage you to check it out.

LP: I will.

Markus: It's very special. It's because I'm very much coming from a background of, as I said, trying to discover new things. Some people say, oh, everything's already been done, or no matter what you do, it's just a recombination of something that some other people have already done. I still don't believe that. I think we have so many ways to discover new sounds that we should also go after them. And Kid Arrow is one of those, one of those empty canvases where I go for like new harmonic material.

Also, I'm working a lot with rhythmic stuff that other people are not doing. For example, all twelve parts of the piece progress at different speeds, and each part has a different tempo. But then make sure to turn that into a coherent musical statement and not just cacophony. It's very close to my heart, right? It's kidarrow.bandcamp.com.

LP: I will make sure that I listen to it immediately after we hang up and link to it from the show notes. So, Tuner is up next. You're going to be hitting the road again. I'm going to see you in a few weeks. You're going to be here.

Markus: Yeah, we're going to be starting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And we're going to slowly go over to California and then slowly go all the way up to Seattle and also to Vancouver. That's going to be the last show in Vancouver, I think. And that's going to be in May. Yeah, May 2024. And we're really looking forward to doing that. It's always an adventure and it's really special music. We sort of have three things we do. As I said, one-third of the show is improvised. Then we play some of the more complex King Crimson music from the early 2000s, really demanding music to play as well as to listen to, I think.

And then there is music from Trey Gunn's and my back catalog that we interpret as a trio. It's a wonderful thing. Actually, I don't know if you remember, but Robert Fripp, Trey Gunn, and David Sylvian made an album in '93 called The First Day. It's really highly recommended. It's also largely improvisational.

We have taken some of those themes and improvise around those also in that show. So again, this idea that there is sort of a way to reintegrate the past into the now. In the arts, I see it slightly differently. I see it as if I'm here in the, you know, here and now, and I can build a bridge that starts in the past.

So it's almost like time-traveling, right? I can build that bridge, but I do not build it starting from here in the present and then start when it goes back into the past. No, I actually, I'm here, and I start building the bridge in the past, and then the bridge reaches over into my present moment. And that's sort of like how I see lineage, like as a composer and also like tradition.

I love musical tradition. I think it's very important for a musician to know musical tradition because that's where you're drawing your energy from. It's not really that you're, like I say, you're repurposing musical phrases or ideas or something. No, it's an actual, intangible energy that you can activate by being creative yourself. And it's that bridge building that I'm, that I'm interested in as an artist.

LP: I would argue the deeper ongoing familiarity with the lineage actually helps the artist find their voice.

Markus: Oh, for sure. And for me, it's fascinating to sometimes see how, you know, like this game of what does it call, six steps with a famous actor with Kevin Bacon, I think, like how many, how many—

LP: Six degrees.

Markus: Six degrees, exactly. Like the six degrees thing. As I get older and as I get more, become more aware of my lineage and my influences, I can now see that it's way less than six degrees for me to almost anybody. I can trace who I am as an artist in one or two steps to almost anybody whose work I enjoy.

LP: In that metaphor, I think Brian Eno is the stand-in for Kevin Bacon, and everybody ends up six degrees from Brian Eno. (laughter)

Markus: Exactly, exactly. We can easily end up with strange things like that. For example, in mid-May, Bill Bruford, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, and Mike Oldfield were born within three or four days of each other. And there are many more. I've always wondered, like, why is that? Right?

LP: It had to have something to do with the end of World War II. (laughter)

Markus: Yes. But why that month? I mean, I don't know. I personally don't really believe in anything as something that you should really believe in, but I believe in the power of oracles. And we as human beings have the freedom to create ideally our own oracle or we can use any oracle we like.

So, we're allowed not to act as if we're machines, and as we know, it's going to become even more important that we're going to act as humans and not as machines.

LP: That we master the tools, and the tools don't master us.

Markus: Yeah. Yes.