Simon Berz creates art with drums, sound, and trash

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: Thank you so much for making time to do this.

Simon Berz: I'm very excited to speak with you. It's a pleasure. It's quite emotional for me with this release with Kondo Toshinori, who is not here anymore, and to do this in this cave in Switzerland in a wonderful landscape. But it was good too. And I'm super exhausted right now because I am organizing three or three festivals. I had the single exhibition last week and the release.

LP: The life of a modern artist!

Simon Berz: Yeah. And self-made a lot of stuff. And I appreciate that very much, especially with this recording so that it's getting more international because it's very difficult in my environment, which is my school and stuff, to explain what I'm doing with my music. And I'm super excited that you give attention to this and I'm very happy. Thank you.

LP: There's a lot I'm hoping to discuss with you, but we can start with Breath versus Beats since that's so timely. When you first created the tracks for this work, what was your approach? Do you improvise? Are these composed percussion pieces? It's very difficult as a listener to understand if these are compositions or improvisations that you later edit, et cetera.

Simon Berz: There is a very nice expression of James Singleton from New Orleans, which is also in the film Liquid Land, which I did 11 years ago. And in this documentary film, we are talking about improvised music. He has a statement in this film, in which he explains the improvised music scene in New Orleans, which I joined 14 years ago. And he said in this film, what you can learn is that improvised music should sound like composed music, and composed music should sound like improvised music. And this statement hits me a lot because if I improvise, I try not just to play around.

So I tell the story that if I improvise, I'm always playing in the moment as good as I can, not thinking but playing an internalized idea of songwriting. And this was where I was in 2017 in New Orleans, and in the Marigny Studios, I rented the studio for myself. And the plan was to record a solo record, which I play absolutely freely, a solo record, The Rocking Desk. That's my title. So I went to the studio, and I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. I just played my ass off in this way, and I let go. There was no MIDI stuff; completely analog electronics live played out of the moment. And so I had about one-half hour of good stuff, which I thought, "Yep, I can work with that."

And then, Kondo Toshinori, I played with him at a festival. I did a soundcheck with my rocking desk, and he came in direct from the airport from Tokyo to Zurich. He was standing on stage and tapped me on the shoulder, and I saw this guy for the first time in my life at the first word Kondo told me, "Recording. Recording."

That was the moment when I was very blessed and surprised that the first word from Kondo was "recording." So we went with Nils Petter Molvaer and Superterz, this band, on a Japan tour. And after this tour, we had some duo shows. And then we went to Tokyo to Kondo's studio. And I showed him this solo recording. He was really into it. And I said, "Yeah, let's work with that. That's cool." He plays over it, and then he improvises two tracks, sometimes one over my improvisations. That was very funny because the recordings were not properly edited. I had played one song, and then the sound guy just let it go. I wanted to create a new atmosphere for each song. And I work just with analog stuff. So, for example, the bass drum, which goes through effects and whatever, I have to pump the bass drum and trigger the bass drum to make new sounds.

And Kondo makes crazy stuff. It's absolutely not in rhythm because I try a hammer, and to the heart now, "bing, bing, bing, bong, bong, bong." Oh, that's cool. But Kondo used this stuff also to play over, and I was really shocked. I said, "No, it's not, it's impossible."

And then the funny thing was with Bill Laswell, that both of them, they used this track also, and they played over it and said, "Oh, that's cool." For me, it was a healing situation. The mindset of Kondo and Bill they are really into expressing one's self, and the sound of you is interesting. In the end, we did just the editing; we made five pieces: the emptiness, the fire, the water, the air, and the earth, and that's it.

LP: It's fascinating to hear you relate that piece about Kondo playing over essentially your prep work or your tuning or your non-intentional music. Something I wanted to talk to you about was my perception of you, just from listening to your various projects.

My perception is that you must hear music everywhere. I was listening to the Stone Slab recordings. First of all, I love landscapes, soundscapes, and ambient music, so it wasn't a stretch for me to enjoy this. Still, it left me thinking that it must be interesting to be inside your ears to hear everything as potential. And so to hear that you were a bit surprised by Kondo and Bill's approach, it seems that they were turning this on you.

Simon Berz: Yeah, there were a lot of doubts. Finally, it led me to create my music school in a way that the curriculum of the music school is sound as you are. And we start from that, even if it's wrong, it's true. It's very influenced by John Cage. I love the book For The Birds by John Cage.

So, in improvised music, you start from even the error or a disaster, and then you work. So it's also very spiritual, with an example in the philosophy of Krishnamurti. He talks about taking the pain as the raw diamond. And the pain and the suffering, this is what you have to keep in you. This is the essence, finally, which you have to work on. So you make these raw diamonds into brilliant jewelry. I think this is a wonderful metaphor for how I work.

My deepest inspiration is perhaps when I was a seven, eight-year-old kid and had to do homework. And I had to color the sky blue or the grass green, a very stupid thing. I had my pencils and started to play on my lamp on the desk because it had strings, and they sounded so nice. I could move the strings, and they got higher and lower. At that moment, something happened to me because my brother was six years older than me. I was six or seven, and I started to listen to Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. Normally, I'd listen through my parents to perhaps jazz, standard jazz, and classical music. And then I heard Jimi Hendrix. If this feedback or Hot Butter came on the radio, I was freaking out. I knew it was something different. And since then, I think I was all time perhaps listening and freaking out with them and also with electronics because there was, to me, a ghost inside, which makes my music, perhaps also today, very cinematic.

And I work with my microphones on the drums. For example, I have contact microphones on the cymbals, and James Singleton also once told me, "Simon, you make the people sound better." And it was a very big gift from him to me. I start to understand what I'm doing because, as a drummer, you are the heart of the band who keeps the stuff together. And if you work with an open microphone, it's like the singer holds the microphone to the audience. So, you include the soundscape in your sounds. And then I have these electronic weapons, which I can work with delays, with distortion, with reverbs, with harmonizers. To add to the existing improvising, something cinematic or electronic.

This is quite hard to play in different improvised music scenes, especially. I work in Berlin, and if I go there with my electronics, I'm suspect because you don't improvise a snare drum just with that. So I extend my drumming through analog electronics, and to me, it's just fun, and it's just how I want to make this cinematic thing somehow.

LP: You were present in Japan recording the trumpet parts. Were you present with Bill, or did he do that remotely?

Simon Berz: Kondo did it by himself. And then we went to his studio, and he already did the recording. We just decided together which parts were really cool, and we did some editing. But finally, 90 percent of the whole recording was made by myself, then Kondo by himself, and then Bill Laswell did it by himself. I was very impressed by how fast and how accurate it sounds. I have talked now to many people, and they said it is very organic sounding. For sure, Kondo and Bill are highly professional musicians. It's also a very interesting thing, but I also learned a lot for the future. If I have a connection, for example, right now in Indonesia with Gamelan players or with musicians I have played for 14 years in New Orleans, to say, we have to be together if we have an idea, if you have a concept. And, for sure, it's much more fun to stay together in a studio and develop this together. But the pandemic time showed us that it's also possible to work digitally and remotely on the music.

LP: Yeah, it's exciting. Some people need to think of it as a binary either-or proposition, whereas it's just another set of tools, techniques, and opportunities. It gives you the whole globe as your palette as opposed to where you can get within a day's flight.

Simon Berz: Exactly!

LP: One of my favorite credits on the album is "everyday objects." And I would love to know some of those objects, but if you prefer to keep it a mystery, that's fine. Again, it goes to this idea of finding musicality all around you. And it takes me back to that story about you and the lamp. Can you talk about that? About the notion that every object might unleash a sonic territory for you?

Simon Berz: I can make some examples. You're talking about the stones, which are also right now in the Drop. I was on holiday 14 years ago in the French Alps, South Alps. I was going for 2000 meters on my mountain bike and cycling home. And then I suddenly realized there was a stone field under my bicycle. It sounded like Steve Reich! So I stopped, and I was super fascinated by these 220 million-year-old slide stones. I picked up 30 kilos of stones and put them in my backpack, took them to Switzerland, and started to experiment. And I made this sound installation, which is Drop.

The thing is to be alert in every moment of how things sound. And there are certain techniques, which an object that you have three fingers and you put it on that it's not really dumped, and you try to play on it, and then suddenly it makes crazy sounds, and then it happens.

The one big inspiration was Nic Collins from Chicago. He wrote this wonderful book about DIY electronics. It's a bible of self-made electronics. And he showed me simple stuff like a loudspeaker that works with a nine-volt battery and two paper clamps. I just played in this workshop one day, just with paper clamped to the loudspeaker, and made feedback. And I realized, wow, electronics are so haptically interesting. This loudspeaker, if I put a lot of trash inside and start to play and that the little drum set on my desk, and that, that leads me to all different materials than with piazza microphones, with single coils.

You can dig in the material like a microscope, and then it's going to be really interesting. This led me later to start workshops with children and also adults and musicians to learn to amplify his instrument, perhaps, but also the body, the voice, different materials, and especially trash. This leads then to the environmental disaster we have through listening to, for example, an empty trash can. You can make thousands of sounds with a piazza microphone on it, and you can use it. As a drum tool, or you can make sounds with that. So I teach this also to uplift or upgrade the trash material to great instruments in this way.

I did this project with Kaspar König called 10X10=>11 in Berlin. We were invited by a gallerist who told us to make an exhibition there. And we told him it's difficult because I use my instruments for my shows. I cannot put them in a museum or a gallery. But we had the idea to say, let us be the exhibition, just the presence of two sound artists in the gallery. And we start from the first day on to build instruments out of the environmental trash. And we made a call in Berlin: bring us your stuff you don't use anymore, but you think can be something that sounds good. It was so funny what the people brought us, and we started to build up in the gallery, making crazy stuff. In the evening, we started to play these innovations, and they showed up: composers, crazy improvisers, and it was getting really interesting. That leads us to this project also in Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

It was very interesting to analyze the trash from people in Zurich. For example, there was a pharmacy next door. We went there and asked them, do you have trash? We want to build instruments out of it. And they said, "No, we recycled everything yesterday." Okay. Then Switzerland is very high in recycling and stuff. The next day, one employer came to us and brought us a new scanner for 500 euros, and she told us, "Yeah, we found this. We cannot use it. We have another system. We don't know what to do with it. Use it." It was brand new in the package and cost 500 euros. And so we start to hack this new model. And it was very funny because I can make music with barcodes. So we went to the grocery store and weighed potatoes, two grams, potatoes, five grams, potatoes, five kilos potatoes. Each time, there's a new barcode. And we put that on a notation score, and I could play five grams of potatoes, three kilos of potatoes, and stuff like that. And it worked. And I thought, "Wow, that would be very cool to have a symphony orchestra playing just vegetables." But the problem is if you make DIY circuit bending stuff, it's all the time a risk, and during a show if it dies, it's gone.

This is also something that is not safe. In our world, everything is supposed to be safe. But nothing is safe, so this is a very nice experience. I also did the project in New Orleans, the same thing. Then we made the film Liquid Land out of it because we want to focus on this disaster of global warming, trash, and social behavior. And this was incredibly deep, yeah, this experience was very deep to see these people working together, playing music together, and also to see the impact of music, the social impact of music.

LP: Do you see regional variations in the trash that you get for source material?

Simon Berz: Extremely. Right now, I have my single exhibition, in which I show my works, some of them, and I have a telephone and a wooden stand, and I found an old rotten sofa on the streets of New Orleans. We took the springs out, and I fixed the springs on it. And then, I applied a microphone to the strings. What comes out is very magical.

In Berlin, somebody brought us these candles, these electronic candles you have in restaurants. They go "blinky, blinky," and they have a battery inside. And I thought, yeah, come on, that's very difficult to make sound from. But my friend Gaspar had the idea to take out the lamp. And in the lamp, there are for sure two channels, and we just put two microphone channels in this lamp, and you wouldn't believe there were Chinese children's songs that came out. So, very cheap Chinese stuff in Berlin, then the rotten beds in New Orleans, and new high-end scanners are trash in Zurich. That's meaningful, I would say.

LP: I saw a video of a sound artist. I'm going to get the technical word wrong, but they were probes and inserted into different fruits and vegetables. He had them connected to inputs into a computer, and the sugars or the alkalines in the fruits and vegetables generated different tones. And they were beautiful. As source sounds, they were absolutely beautiful.

Simon Berz: I was part of a very nice sound art exhibition in the Swiss Alps in Appenzell. Carlos — I forgot his full name — he's a biologist, and he works with lasers. They can detect the nanometer vibrations, and he used them in the fields and they put them on the leaves where insects are. He records the sex calls from the insects and makes them hearable with an Octavizer because they are high frequency or low frequency, and it was mind-blowing. I was sitting in this rotten little house in the middle of the fields, and he had subwoofers. You hear these tinder sounds of the insect family, and it's like a composition. It's like improvised music. And these are the sex calls of insects. And right now, in this experimental sound art world, through the new technologies, we're starting to understand how nature works. But I'm not in the biological world. I'm more in the geological world, which is also living, but it's much more difficult to dig in there a sound, but it's possible.

There is another friend of mine in Switzerland. He listened to mountains with high-end microscopes, like a sound microscope somehow. And he can really listen to the mountains. There are sounds if you have the right device. But I don't want to dig so deep into digital hardware to detect sounds.

All of the time, there needs to be somebody who listens to the sounds. They're in the world, but nobody's there. Nobody can talk about it. So, for me, it means if I do sound art, I show that I am there, and I listen. It's like a composer, like Bach, he wrote his songs, and I say, I write my songs in this way in the French Alps, if I found the stones and I improvise there, that's my way to do it.

LP: Could you talk about the difference, such that it exists between a sound artist and a musician?

Simon Berz: Honestly, to me, it's just branding to give the people an idea. I studied transdisciplinary fine arts, and since then, I've been completely lost because explaining to somebody what this means as a transdisciplinary artist is already very difficult.

I worked as a drummer. That's my thing. Then, for sure, with electronics and sounds, but then also on spaces, mountains, caves, whatever. And then the very important thing is the social environment. Finally, after 14 years in New Orleans, it's clear. You are all of the time in the social feedback in the city.

This also leads me back to this transdisciplinary approach; we have to create something new together, and we don't know where we are going. And Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble is also a very nice way to explain, perhaps, my thinking that, yeah, we stay in the problem. It's a very difficult situation for humankind, and we have to deal with that. And I say. "Yeah, it's fucked up, but what I'm doing now?" This is the general question all the time. Also, if I see the art world, I ask myself, is there hope in art, or should I use this disaster to make more smoke? The ice is melting, and you make an ice block melting like Olafur Eliasson did in the French art piece. And for sure, it's very intense, and the people start to think about it, but I try to point out the problem, but then also to make something wonderful out of it or something scary. Otherwise, I wouldn't work with children and with my school because this is the future, and we have to give them trust and hope and a way to express themselves.

LP: It speaks to a little bit of intention, but it also speaks to the art as it relates to environmental catastrophe. It can raise awareness; it can suggest paths or raise consciousness so people take action or choose to learn more. But there's also another side of it that you briefly alluded to, which is there's a nihilistic potentiality where you're just using the catastrophe as source material. And I can't point to examples of that; it's more theoretical, but it's possible if the artist feels no sense of humanity or obligation.

Simon Berz: They live in a very capitalist world, and it's very easy. If I see Hollywood, for example, it's very easy to frighten people. And it's also soundwise very easy to use a metal bang and a contact microphone, and a subwoofer and an Octavizer, and I make a BOOM. And it seems like the T Rex is coming in Jurassic World. This is the easiest way. It's very nice with children. I may play T Rex, and I can make an example with just this. The music I hear in these blockbusters is so overloaded, mostly with no silence, and it could be more frightening if it's getting really silent. It's too much of a boom and all the time. I make a lot of boom, and I like it, but in between, you need a dynamic but it's easy to frighten people, and it makes a lot of attention. And if we see right now in the media also, you don't talk about good things. You're talking about disasters because it's more difficult to create hope than irritate and frighten people.

LP: And do you feel a sense of responsibility to make hope?

Simon Berz: Perhaps it's my catholic education, which is what I hate. (laughter)

LP: Let me interrupt before I let you answer. Do you feel that responsibility in multiple ways as an artist, as a citizen, as a Catholic …

Simon Berz: Ex-Catholic! (more laughter) I studied handicapped pedagogics first before I started playing drums. So it was a long path. I began to play drums very early, but it's different than in America, where you have many more possibilities to gig early to show people, "Oh, I want to be a professional drummer." It took me until I was 28. Finally, I studied with Joshua Meyer in New York, made the Drummer's Collective, and stuff like that. And I became a drummer. But I was also very happy that I had this psychological and pedagogic didactic knowledge.

Right now, if I think about it, it leads me to want to tell that story and also to work with children. So you see these eyes of a five-year-old boy or girl sitting the first time on the drum, and you say to them, "Let's be birds." And we fly around the drums, and it's just beautiful how the kid is playing the first time instruments completely free, and it takes me five minutes. Suddenly, we are elephants, and we play elephants, and we have already quarter notes, and then we have the "jumbo," we have the backbeat, the "jumbo," and stuff like that. And then you have all these animals. We play just like animals, and that leads me to hope in this way. To see if you are free as a kid or as a human kind anyway, the creativity, what we have leads us to new ideas and leads us hopefully also to learn to live together peacefully in this world. In this way, I'm absolutely enthusiastic. I believe in humankind in this way, yes.

LP: That's beautiful. It doesn't surprise me, both as a drummer and as someone interested in environmental concerns, that you would end up in and have a connection to New Orleans, where a lot of these threads come together. But could you tell me the story of Simon in New Orleans? It's not immediately obvious how you would end up there.

Simon Berz: It was crazy for me because New Orleans has Ascona, a jazz festival, which is just trad jazz; traditional and older people go there and listen to this trad jazz. And so I had all time, this very branded image, New Orleans is trad jazz, and it's boring. But I also played in a wedding band once, in which we played Louis Armstrong stuff and trad jazz. And this was very funny because the people loved it. And then I end up on a tour with a duo, highly experimental. I just had a table full of children's instruments and effects and also circuit bending, and it was noisy. And the bass player, Klaus Zornig, played the bass through Ableton Live. And so it was a big mess of noise.

Andy Durta is an extremely good connect organizer with Scatterjazz in New Orleans. He booked us three times in one week in New Orleans. We had the first show in the Hi-Ho lounge, and for the first time, I played with Aurora Nealand and Helen Gillet, two crazy, extremely good musicians. We had a lot of fun, and people were screaming at this improvised music. That never happened to me. If you come from Europe, if you play this music, the audience drinks a glass of wine, and after the show, they come to you and say, "Yeah, it was very special." But in New Orleans, I found a second hometown or a second birthplace. I realized this place led me to who I am.

The curriculum of The School of Bada Boom, my school, is deeply influenced by the energy of New Orleans. First of all, it's the beats and the birth of jazz. You can finally explain the whole musical history through this city. It's also very interesting to explain the danger, what it means to live in danger of the ocean, of Lake Pontchartrain, of the Mississippi, of the violence and the suffering, the terrible story of slavery, and also of the natives. It's such a rich content of the history of music. It's fantastic.

LP: How much time do you spend there?

Simon Berz: Before the pandemic, I went mostly once or twice for three months to explore and produce music and films, which we did. Then also exhibitions I made, right the last two times, I start to show my fine arts, which is also very interesting. It's after many years that I suddenly realized I am also inspiring the New Orleans scene. Usually, it's the inverse, but it starts to feedback in a very nice way. Daily, I miss New Orleans. Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? That's really a thing.

LP: Tell me a bit about your solo exhibitions. First of all, what mediums or media do they span? And when it's specifically in the sound art realm, is it like what you described earlier that it's always you in performance? Or is it ever like installation?

Simon Berz: The Drop is there right now. So that's an installation, a sound installation. It just started running. What I realized, especially during the pandemic, is that the main energy or the main meaning of visual art is prints. I put my chopsticks or drumsticks in ink and start to play on paper. This is also the cover of Breath versus Beats. It's made by myself and Yota, the son of Kondo. So I started to think about what happens if you take an inspiration, an improvisation, composition, reading, printing, and recording all together. This was finally coming up to me during my studies at the art school in Zurich. We have so many new music production tools that you can, in Fruity Loops, for example, download a beat or sounds, and you're able to create a proper song in five minutes. If you are used to it, you can really make "da, da, da, da, da." And it sounds like, "Woohoo!" That leads me to an idea. Okay. What happens if we play everything in the same time? So, I amplify my drumsticks. I have certain kinds of effects, modular stuff, and I start to beat on paper and make music at the same time. And then I see it, and I see that staccato or stuff like that. And I can read it. That was fun, but the social interaction was missing. Why do I not take that?

Then I had the idea to play this piece on 100 meters of paper, on the paper roll, and a very highly professional dancer, Gabriel Obergfell, pulled my paper in front of me. I watched him and how he danced, and I played the score for him. So I made the music, and he was dancing with my score. Right now, we have a score of a hundred meters, and at the end of my exhibition, we do a festival. I will pull out this hundred meters again on the street, and the people can stand around, and they have another musician, an improviser, and another dancer; they interpret this score again.

So this is one piece, but that's a performance. Another drawing, a print, is made with Skúli Sverrisson in Iceland. The record is called Shifted Eruption, which is a very deep drone. Again, I thought that producing this would cost me a lot of money, and it was a pandemic, so I started to improvise with this recording. I had the old bass amp with a loudspeaker. I just put a paper on the bass amp, the loudspeaker, and had some ink, and put an Icelandic stone on this paper. Then I started to play the record, and the stone started to chomp through this vibration on the paper, and it made extremely beautiful eruptions of splits of ink. Still, I didn't expect the paper to weaken and the stone to fall during the vibration. After 10 minutes, the stone fell through. And the ink was going in the loudspeaker, so I thought I shouldn't do that. But after it was dry, it looked so beautiful because it looked like a falcon because the paper was three-dimensional, and it looked like a falcon that exploded. So, I made a series of five pictures, and each time, I used the same procedure. So these papers hang in the exhibition.

And another thing was that I, with this recording, with Skúli Sverrisson, I thought, "Okay, let's do ten records." I went to a highly professional recording studio, Central Dub in Bern, and I told them the idea: can you direct cut ten records? And they say, "Yeah, we can do it, but it costs a lot." I said, "Fuck it, do it." So, I had ten single printed records for the performance in the Alps, where I made an exhibition performance for ten days. So, beginning at six o'clock in the evening, I just played in a cave, very dark with nice light, again, the same thing, but not with ink. I did it with graphite. And so I had ten graphite prints of this recording, and then I put them together in the front is the print, and in the back is the record.

In Berlin, I work with a highly professional company that frames pictures; they frame for Art Basel and everything. So it was quite funny to come there as a musician, to say, "Hey, I want to have a cover, but it should also be a picture." He was very creative and made a very nice and expensive cover, which you see in the artwork. You can turn it, and then behind is the record. And so it's a three-dimensional art piece somehow. And the cool thing is that you don't release it digitally. So, this record is only on vinyl. I am selling it right now as an art piece, and it's like an analog NFT for me. (laughter)

LP: There's something that you've mentioned multiple times that I wanted to ask you about, which is what is behind your affinity or preference for analog?

Simon Berz: I feel it. I work a lot with loudspeakers on the drums, and I have an amplified stick, and it can just go inside. There's also the recording you hear, stuff like that, or amplifying a cymbal, and you touch the cymbal, and you make feedback through the cymbal. It's just I feel it on my skin. For sure, you can do this, all electronics, also digital. There are reasons right now to think about. To change my system to the digital world. But the thing is, first of all, I don't like to watch even more on the computer. I think the energy is on stage. If you have a computer on stage, it's a difference. The screen is like a person or, even worse, not a photographer or filmmaker. It can be very irritating. And I do not like, finally, to see shows which people are watching on screens. It takes some soul from the people.

That's perhaps very esoteric shit, but the analog stuff I can better repair than the digital. If I have a guitar effect and I see there's something rotten, I can open it and perhaps solder the contacts. If I have a problem with my computer and I'm on the road, you don't have a show. And you have to do it anyway; all my work is on the computer. And if I want to practice, I prefer to avoid dealing with the computer also. It's a little bit old school, perhaps.

LP: Well, it's interesting because as an audience member, when I go to an evening of, I'll call it experimental music — but not confined to that — when I go to any performance, and I see, for example, an ambient musician with a bank of old synthesizers and mixers and doing their thing, I find it very intriguing. There's a wizardry to it. When I go to a performance of that same music, and I see someone with a laptop, I find myself trying to figure out what's going on in a way that I'm not preoccupied with when I see analog instruments. I don't necessarily have too much qualitative judgment, but I notice it. I notice it, and I don't know what's happening live versus what's being generated. And I find that I care.

Simon Berz: Yeah, exactly. That's what we talked about before. It's not black or white. There are so many great musicians. They make fantastic music with electronics, just digital. And there are incredible innovations right now with AI and stuff like that. But even with that, I realized that I want to stay really because, as a dinosaur in this AI world, why not? You have to find your language, and it's very dangerous that as an artist or in general in the art world, you are not focused on the content. You are focused on the media. I don't like to go to a show to see the focus on new media or a new VR camera. Then it's like going to the NAMM show, and then it's very fancy what you can do.

Part of me does like it and wants to have that, also. But what is the message of the person who plays a show? What do you want to say? Are you happy? Or are you angry? Or do you want to protest? Or do you want content to tell a story? It's a dangerous thing with all this new media we have that we forget the psychological inner motivation why you do it. The destruction of technology is so heavy on our brains that it's very dangerous that we forget what we want to express. I see that often. If I teach workshops for students, they are much better than me. Musicians, whatever. But in the end, if I see the work, it can look great or insane, but I feel an emptiness.

I saw the video right now of Peter Brötzmann. He died some weeks ago. I was really impressed that he said the same thing in an art school: be yourself. There are so many better saxophone players than Peter Brötzmann, but Peter Brutzmann was a monolith of incredible, inspiring, free jazz music. So my roots come from there somehow. Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, all this, they are unique, absolutely unique. B. B. King, you hear in the first note, "That's B. B. King." And this leads me to my school, also to myself, and I hope later some people hear that about Simon. That would be the biggest compliment.

LP: To bring it back to the Breath versus Beats project, I've long felt that way about Laswell. Like when I hear his bass sound on a project, it's so recognizable. As a bass player, he's so minimalist, but it's so effective.

Simon Berz: Yeah, and the story is very cool. I was 16, and I listened to Material, Bill Laswell's band. So you cannot imagine how happy I was that Bill did this, that when I was a teenager I was a fan of his music, and now I'm here, and that makes me happy.

LP: Yeah, it's incredible. He's a perhaps under-celebrated musical treasure, but his fingerprints are on so much important music in the last 40 years or so.

Simon, thank you so much.

Simon Berz: I'm very blessed to be on your show.

LP: Well, it's a joy to have you.