We’ve been hiding & kind of quiet for the last few months choosing to spend the summer mostly locked away writing, self-producing some songs and occasionally collaborating with Jacques Renault at his home studio and getting help from The Rapture’s Vito Roccoforte. We ended up with a stack of tracks and used those self-produced recordings as the basis for working on finished mixes and additional production with Eric Broucek in his Brooklyn studio, Chris Zane and Alex Aldi at Gigantic in Manhattan and now, here in London with Richard X.

We’re halfway through two-weeks of recording in London with Richard and this means that we’re roughly halfway through making our debut record!

It’s a beautiful June evening in Brooklyn and word just broke about Michael Jackson’s passing. I saw the report and had to run across the street to top-up my phone and text Eleanore the news. The Spanish radio station at the bodega was telling the story, three cars went by with MJ songs playing.
“What!? How?!” Eleanore wrote back.
“Heart attack.”
We’ve been locked away writing songs for the past month. It’s a strange process, sometimes really difficult and challenging going deep into words and sounds and it’s funny the games you invent to try and unlock the ‘secrets’. MJ had the key, and there’s been more than a few times recently that we’ve both sat around listening to his records trying to dissect what It was.

I’ve always thought that just humming the bass line to ‘I want you back’ will put a smile on your face. That bouncing line descending around that high vocal is one of my very favorite moments in music. Like Stevie Wonder, doors were first unlocked for MJ at Motown. There, at the feet of some of the most talented songwriters and musicians the pop world has ever seen, the young boy learned. His childhood might have been lost in a sequined whirlwind of James Brown moves sliding across the stage from one side of America to the other but, along the way, MJ was absorbing. By the time he went solo, he was ready to unlock the kingdom.

Both ‘Off The Wall’ and ‘Thriller’ are still so mind blowing it’s almost supernatural. “It’s magic,” Eleanore said one night as the first woo broke open the tight clap and boom of ‘Don’t Stop.’ And it is, something of alchemy and conjuring a whole universe in sound. Both records are the product of two absolute geniuses. MJ and Quincy Jones were touching something that truly comes around once in a lifetime. The production is so staggeringly complete. Every space and frequency filled with instruments and parts that combine to perfectly frame the rhythm and melodies. Quincy knew exactly how to bring it all together but the brilliance, the inspiration, and magic was all there in Michael evidenced by the svelte production on his home taped demo version for ‘Don’t Stop’.

MJ’s later life was of course plagued by controversy as his eccentric behavior began to overwhelm his gifts. Now, in his passing, let’s hope that madness can recede and instead we can remember how incredible his music really was.

So, here I am. Back in London for a few days on my third week in a month long tour of DJ booths, airports, hotels and the skies between. It began in Paris then Paris became London and, just as suddenly, London became Berlin…

It’s typical of berlin that I would bump into friends Heidi and Rolf at the airport. We all share a cab to another mutual friend Robin’s flat to hear stories of what I missed over the Berlin weekend. Yikes. The Berlin weekend. But really, Berlin doesn’t stop for the mid-week. It’s Tuesday and I head off to the infamous Cookies and do a set with Robin David Gilmour Girls and James ‘Fucking’ Friedman and when that gig ends, I head back to the airport and onto a flight back to London so I can catch a 24 hour flight to Australia. 24 hours. Yikes. I can’t sleep. There’s a fat man leaning way back and the seat’s cramped and I can’t sleep. I wobble off the plane in rare form. But the weather is perfect. It’s winter and the weather is perfect! I forget the fat man and I start dreaming up ways to get myself back for their summer. I’ll go sailing. I’ll escape New York and the ice and wind and dark and go sailing in Australia!

Five shows. Four cities. But I get a needed break after the first two and I’m able to spend the bulk of my time with friends in Sydney where I even manage to see some sights and make some music in between a few interviews and radio appearances. And Australians actually seem to listen to the radio! No one I know listens to the radio in America. Here, even when I arrive at the hotels they know who I am. That doesn’t happen in America.

The next two shows throw me to Brisbane and back. Maybe I’m just suffering a few minor psychological derailments I think finding myself on another long, long, long flight between hemispheres and then, now, here I am. Back in the present.

I’m now staying with my good friend Ali in his flat just outside of London. For a minute, things are calm. I’ve a few days off again so I can enjoy this town in daylight for once and catch up on a few emails. But in between the friendly hellos there’s business and the emails, happily, are already leading to more shows here in the future. The dates on the calendar are getting cluttered again. Tomorrow, Athens. The next night, Warsaw and then, Bank Holiday weekend in London. I’m given the impression it’s going to be mental. A big party weekend and I’m with Mock & Toof, Gerd Janson, Nightmoves, Reverso 68 and Warm Residents. Meanwhile Holy Ghost!, House of House and Lovefingers will all be playing in the area so I think there will be bouncing around for sure. It’s going to be my last show and night in Europe.


But I only head back to New York for two days and then I’m crossing the equator once again. Brazil! My first trip to South America and I’m looking forward to it. I have no idea what to expect other than the promise of a potentially scary flight over the Amazon. It’s not only the water in the sink that’s swirling one way and then the other. The stamps are adding up and as soon as I get to New York, I have to have pages added to my passport in time for the start of festival season in a couple of weeks when I’m back at it all over again! My friend Gavin shows me his passport. It looks like a brick. It’s a heavy reminder of planes and the lack of sleep and hotels and drinking all of it running you down. Despite it, I think I’ve managed to take care of myself. The swine’s haven’t got to me yet! And this trip was the long one. All the rest of the shows this summer are short hops broken up with enough days off and chances to get back home and to work.

The traveling is fun. It’s exciting of course but I’m so ready to be in my studio working on things. There’s big ideas and remixes waiting and collaborations and maybe, just maybe the chance to actually spend time with friends in the hot muggy light of Brooklyn.

 
Representing NYC is an ambitious new initiative from Sam Hillmer that tries to empower the youth of East-New York by building stronger ties between them and the producers and indie-artists now beginning to live in their community. Hiller plays saxophone with Z’s, a New York band self described as No-wave/Brutal-prog/post-minimalist, but he’s also a teacher working in the New York Public School system and that experience lead him to create Representing NYC. Backed by several youth organizations, Hiller hopes this alliance of local kids and artists will “create connections in the rapidly changing neighborhoods of east Brooklyn, and give youth a much-needed opportunity to represent their New York.”
The first RNYC release, “Da’ Bratz From Da’ Ville” pairs Brownsville 8th graders Tamera and Ameena, aka ‘Angel’ and ‘Sophia’, aka The Fly Girlz, with Excepter’s Nathan Corbin AKA ‘Zebrablood’. The result is a super cool LP sliding between a spooky experimental noise pop and an urban Alan Lomax field recording, somewhat like what a Gang Gang Dance remix of ‘Buffalo Girls” might sound like: grizzled synths and crushed beats swirling around impetuous young voices perfect for a sticky urban spring. But, it would be impossible to think of this record without also thinking about the larger context it appears in.

Like other folk music traditions, the roots of rap are based in part on self-empowerment. At it’s beginning, rap was a reclamation and reinvention of ‘Community’ emerging from out the disintegrating structure of Bronx neighborhoods pushed to the brink by the spiraling decline of New York in the 1970’s. That music, the music of hip-hop’s first wave, was capital EEFF Fun in the face of an abrasive and corroded environment. The music was the sweat and heat of re-imagined disco, Rn’B and minimal break-beats. MC styles usually came in two varieties of sexy laidback braggadocio or up and anthemic party leading gang vocals. The Bronx may have been burning but that fire lit the party and carried down the line in the mazy trails of subway graffiti.

All the while, in the East Village and SOHO, self-empowerment took on a more hedonistic bent in the clannish no-man’s land of the downtown art scenes. No-wave and punk attitudes swelled with the boastful romanticism of a latch key generation still wistful for their A.M. radio. It may just have been Wendy and the Lost Boys playing cowboys and Indians, but their escapist fantasies also percolated with the self-promotional skills of Buffalo Bill and they were savvy enough to marry their bleak ethos to the other more ‘high’-minded art venues, galleries and performance spaces first beginning to open in and around SOHO.


What’s often now overlooked is how openly and immediately those two scenes interacted. A great citywide exchange of ideas and styles was taking place in late 70’s and early 80’s New York. Right from the start, while the godfather DJ’s were cutting up continental fare like Kraftwerk, a certain Krylon attitude was mixing with the ripped mannerisms of the downtown scenes. By the early eighties, Basquiat was all the rage and Liquid Liquid’s mutant disco was coalescing in ‘White Lines’. In The Bronx, in Manhattan, Artists’ eyes and ears were open to the changes and exchanges going on around them. Those participants of that New York were of their place; migrants and recent transplants maybe, but just as often, the children of the boroughs and they all carried with them an affection for their community and a sense of belonging to the people who came from those shared neighborhoods.

Now, more than a decade after New York’s 90’s rebirth, as once forbidden areas grow more Hollywood-like, sunny in disposition and laidback temperament, it’s easy to forget that despite the back-lot perfection of the L.E.S set, the integrated lineage of that New York isn’t as easily adopted as the clipped haircuts, vintage high-tops and Voidoid lean. It’s no secret the neighborhoods have been changing and as long as the change has been going on, the ‘G’ word has been flippantly tossed about like a cuss by the very same middle-class moving in. Gentrification and expansion has brought with it the swelling numbers of aesthetes and intellectuals self-aware enough to be embarrassed enough to see themselves as outsiders, and that’s part of the problem. “It’s their neighborhood, I just live here,” is the oft-tossed cop-out, used to justify a sort of cultural tourism, as if to belong is to co-opt.

Hillmer clearly see things different. He’s approached the kids he works with in the schools with absolute respect. It’s his opinion that he has as much to learn as to teach. “We see New York through the lense of Hip-Hop on the street level, in the lunch-room, on the stoop,” he writes on RNYC’s myspace. Really, it’s a perfect confluence of events. An artist embedded in the neighborhood who has connections, the self-reflexive desire to do good and the ear to recognize the value in what others might wrongly call unsophisticated.

On the debut RNYC LP–hopefully the first of many more–Ameena and Tamera avoid the pitfalls and pressures of their environment by learning to move deeper into it and re-approach their lives from a different angle. “The best thing about Brownsville is, like, to stay out of trouble and have fun. The worst thing about Brownsville is, like, the shooting and the trouble and violence around here,” one of the girls said on a recent WNYC interview. It’s a rough place but these girls voices sound unbroken and the tracks reflect a real hope and strength in the face of extreme chaos. The girls catalogue the hardships of their neighborhood but they also go off on ordinary teen tangents rapping with a totally fresh energy and spark.

And Corbin’s production stays free of pre-conceived ideas of what modern rap music is and also avoids the trappings of what could have been nothing more than old-school revivalism. Instead he approaches it on his own, indie/noise, terms and this, sometimes abrasive, production leads to something utterly unique. On that same WNYC interview, the girls admit that at first they didn’t know what to think of some of the sounds their collaborator made for them. It’s certainly hard to imagine them or any of their peers quite knowing what to do at a Z’s or Excepter show. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine most of Z’s and Excepter’s peers knowing quite how to move beyond their familiar and comfortable loft party affectations. Representing NYC is a mutual push into unexpected territories. It’s a gentle shoving in hopes of engendering even more ambitious experiments somewhere down the road from Brownsville.

Dear, THITH,
I’m writing this from within the confines of our dimly lit, incense-scented, makeshift studio at Erika’s house in Williamsburg. It’s a crappy, rainy, cold day outside, but we’re warm and happy in here. Annie is knitting a scarf, as per usual, and Erika is sitting on a pillow on the floor, typing away on her laptop. Our producer extraordinaire, Thom Monahan, is sitting at Erika’s desk, manipulating audio files in Protools. We’re listening to the tracks out of some nice studio speakers bought exclusively for this phase of the recording process: the intensely listening, pre-mixing, overdubbing part.

ANNIE KNITTING. KEYBOARDS WAITING.

We’ve been going about recording this album in a more nomadic fashion than we’re used to. First we did pre-production at our practice space and at Annie’s home studio in Greenpoint, but she has cats so I couldn’t spend that much time there without having an asthma attack. Then we did a few days of tracking at a studio called ‘Salt flats’ in Dumbo, which was, incidentally, down the hallway from our old Boggs practice space, Ah, memories. We did a bunch of tracking at Amber Studio in Manhattan and at Erika’s house, before moving to L.A to do ever-more tracking (mainly vocals) at Thom’s studio. After L.A., Annie, Erika, and I took a two-week break, giving Thom time to do plenty of re-amping, comping, and finessing-in-general. He flew back to NYC for Thanksgiving because his wife’s family is here, and so we took that opportunity to set up a studio at his mother-in-law’s house on the Upper West Side. But we didn’t want to overstay our welcome there, so we moved to Erika’s house about a week ago, and have been hanging out here in her living room ever since. She baked a pumpkin pie this morning that we’ve all been thoroughly enjoying. She also makes good coffee. That’s pretty much all we require of a studio.

We’re going to be here until December 22nd, after that we’ll take a two-week holiday break then start up again in L.A at Thom’s house. We’ll be there for a just few days before moving on to an undetermined location to do mixing. We’ve got a mastering date set for January 20th at Golden in Ventura, so that’s our deadline, but we still have four songs to record, so that’s a bit stressful. Two of those songs were written a while ago, but we never got around to tracking them, and the other two were written during our November break. Hopefully no one will have any new songs pop into their heads until February.

We’re all thrilled about how things are going though. Thom is an amazing gear-head synth-geek genius, so we feel truly lucky to have found him, although we didn’t really find him, Bjorn (the B in P.B.J) actually suggested Thom for us, so we’re indebted to him for that tip. None of us could imagine making this particular album with anyone else. We were looking for someone who had the ability to find a way of expanding our sound while continuing to honor our imposed limitations of being an all-keyboard band. We still don’t have guitars, we still don’t have a live drummer, but Thom has managed to help us make yet another entirely keyboard-driven album without it ever sounding tedious. At least, I don’t think it sounds tedious! Our keyboard sounds came from a long list of vintage synths that we either owned or borrowed from friends, our beats are all from vintage drum machines again. I don’t think that there is a track on the whole album that hasn’t been tweaked in some way through re-amping, pedals, or whatever else it is Thom is doing when we’re not looking. A magician never reveals his secrets. We also spend a lot of time listening to Suicide, which seems to have become more of an influence on this album than we ever imagined it would be, but there is something about Suicide’s powerful simplicity that resonates with the kind of aesthetic we’re going for, which is a much different aesthetic than our last album.

With ‘The Bird of Music’, we struggled with trying to reconcile our desire to hear a sense of space with our greater desire for everything to sound lush and layered, and when that confusion was coupled with our inability to effectively articulate what we wanted, the consequence was finding ourselves with an only half-achieved goal. It was our own fault though, we’re still learning as we go along obviously, and the forming of a cohesive idea about who we are, what we’re trying to say, and how we want to sound never fully jelled until we went out on the road for two years and were exposed to the world. Not that we were sheltered or something, but both of our past records were conceived and produced from within this little world that we created where any whimsical fancy of ours was explored and included. Like, we wrote a song about horse races, about calculators, teenage Mexican boys, etc. And its not like we don’t think those songs are great, but we were kind of stylistically all over the place. We’d have some emotionally evocative song like ‘Through the Backyards’ on the same record as ‘The Disco Song.’ And for me, our live shows always felt almost schizophrenic because at one point we’d be playing a song like ‘Lark,’ which has all these gothic moments, and then play an 808-laden dance song about media politics the next minute.

ERIKA ON FORTUNE COOKIE BREAK

This album is much more introspective, but I mean introspective as a group as opposed to individually. The three of us have become so close these past few years from constantly being together that we’ve become more similar people as a result. It would be impossible at this point to not write songs which all complement one another’s because we’re all coming from the same place emotionally, and since we’ve all shared the same experiences, we naturally are expressing similar things in our music. It’s also become impossible for us to hide what our songs are about from one another. All new lyrics are always met with an interrogation starting with ‘that’s about so and so!’ with knowing smiles, finger-pointing, and blushing. In the past, I felt slightly embarrassed about recording our music and publicizing it before because I wasn’t sure if I felt comfortable with opening up our private world to people who would judge us, but this is even worse! This new album is like our shared diary, so we’re very protective of it, and are being very careful with it.
I just asked Thom to describe this album in five words and he says:
‘pulses, gust-of-wind, gossamer, rustling leaves, minimal’
That was not what I expected to hear! Also not five words.
But I like that description. I think its kind of hilarious that what I would have described as ‘loud’ and/or ‘powerful’ he would describe as ‘gossamer.’ Shit. I guess we don’t really know how to rock.

Another big difference for me with making this album is that for the first time I’ve been able to put forth 100% of my effort into doing just music. During this point in the process with TBOM, I was still trying to juggle my astronomy studies with my music, which was stressful for me. Consequently, I feel that both suffered from my inability to choose one. This time, I’ve decided to dedicate all of my time to the album, and put science aside for the time being. But I still feel a deep longing for it-studying science gives me a much different feeling of excitement than getting to play music does–I guess because its much more challenging for me than writing music–although the high that I get from suddenly understanding a physics formula is actually quite similar to the high that I get from writing a song. Both produce a sense of accomplishment. But I miss my friends at Columbia, I miss being in class and going to lectures…at the same time, I also realize that reaching the goal of this album turning out how I want it to requires that I be nothing less than fully present, and fully participating. I can’t be daydreaming about life on other planets if I want the album to sound good. I know this because there are so many decisions that were made on TBOM that I don’t remember being present for, and I know that I would have been more thoughtful about those decisions if I hadn’t been so freaked out about finals. Being able to do nothing but concentrate on our album has been good for me, and good for the album, but alas, bad for research.

We’ve been watching a lot of Youtube videos at the end of each night. Thom is a big fan of Juana Molina and Imogen Heap and after watching their videos I’ve started to obsess about doing more on stage now, despite the fact that this album doesn’t call for real-time sampling or vocoders. But I’m smitten by these talented one-woman-bands and secretly fantasize about what we would sound like if we all did as much. Imagine a band of three Juana Molinas!

Besides even that, I’m just smitten by musicians who are actually good at their instruments. I’m not even trying to be funny or cynical or something, its just that there is a lot of amateurish stuff out there, and I know I’m personally guilty of contributing to that. I saw Marnie Stern recently and though I’m not a huge fan of her music, I left the show being so impressed with her undeniable talent at playing guitar. I want to be like that, better at playing my keyboard, better at programming drum machines, better at doing more on stage, better at singing and though that seems like a pretty obvious thing for a musician to want to do, for me, its not. Up until we started touring all the time, I’ve regarded being in this band as a kind of highly involved excurricular activity or as an after-work lady’s club, one that gradually took over my life until suddenly I found myself managing my own record label and writing ‘musician’ in as my profession on my landing cards. But five years later, I think the imposter syndrome is finally wearing off, which probably means that the album will tank.
I’m ok with that too though. I’ve finally made something I’m proud of that isn’t lasagna.
xxH

HEATHER D’ANGELO’s band, AU REVOIR SIMONE, followed the 2006 release of the ‘Verses Of Comfort, Assurance & Salvation ‘ E.P. with a debut full-length,The Bird Of Music’ in 2007 for which they toured extensively throughout Europe, North America and Japan. A student at Columbia University, Heather also keeps a science blog called ‘Hello, Poindexter’.
ARS
HELLOPOINDEXTER.COM

Adaptation is a quality inherent of human beings. for that matter, it’s true for most of nature. So, to assume that attribute should cease to become relevant in the 20th & 21st century is to disregard the essentialness of ‘the human approach’.

for approximately 2,000 years, surfing has been the archetypal example of humans adapting to their environment, not modifying the environment to suit their needs but instead to conform themselves to its pre-existing structure; the ability to look at the rolling of water over the great vastness of the sea and interpret it into a canvas for personal movement is an exceptionally deep thought process not to be taken as a simple act of recreation.



The unrestrained boom of civilization brought with it an expanse of fabricated surfaces, an attempt to cover up the natural surfaces with a controlled substance: concrete.


Water and concrete may seem to have little or no similarities at all yet, when viewed from the eye of a surfer, there is an essential commonality between the two: a surface that, while not intended for the purpose, is perfectly capable of becoming a vessel to express ones self; the paintbrush of this urban canvas is none other than a skateboard.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that skateboarding is essentially just a mindset. It’s the appreciation for what’s there, it’s the balance of creation and destruction, it’s the masochistic act of engaging in something you know you’ll be hurt in, it’s the expression of personal style, it’s the combination of introspective meditation and camaraderie with others, it’s the lack of requirements other than your own, and it’s the elevation of seemingly banal and vernacular things into objects of value and worth.

Skateboarding is more akin to fine art than to a recreational activity or a sport, as it has been labeled by countless forms of media, mostly due to its athletic component which is hardly the primary thrust of skateboarding.


Sports require a structure that one must adhere too and almost entirely rely on others: the team and the coaches (who are the only ones allowed to be ‘creative’), these factors coupled with the need to be athletically superior are the essential components of a majority of sports. Concurrently skateboarding, at its forefront, holds self-creativity to be its pinnacle. It has none of the objective requirements like sports do, it lives in a world of subjectivity, there is no good or bad, only satisfied or not. What only matters is you, not the judging of others.

The fact that skateboarding has been taken into an arena, into video games, into reality shows, into the world of advertising and appropriated by such menial things as ‘Snakeboards’ and other such derogatory skateboard modifications (see: skateboardingsucks.com) is really quite a sad state.

The feeling one gets when landing a trick is a rush like nothing else, it’s a feeling of satisfaction that, because of factors internal and external, you landed something that had a sense of worth. It’s redeeming to accomplish something you try to do. The mindset is something that cannot be truly commodified, no matter how hard individuals may attempt to do so; there is an inherent contradiction in the attempt to sell things not able to be sold, you can’t package up the feeling, only the tool in which to gain that feeling. What their selling you is not actually skateboarding, it’s the attempt at a symbol of skateboarding.



Skateboarding has become a fraud, but what hasn’t? Everything that at one time seemed to have some sense of honesty and truth has since been exposed, from religion to government to art to skateboarding. Perhaps humans have gone to far in their quest for ‘progress’ and have instead found themselves in a place where they can no longer adapt. Imagine that, no more adaptation.


JESSE HLEBO IS A PHOTOGRAPHER, FILMMAKER, WRITER, and the editor of Commonism, “an online art/music/culture/collective zine who’s purpose is to promote positivity in the san francisco, los angeles and orange county scenes with the hopes of creating a closer unity and sense of community between them.” See more here. and here.

LIARS DOING A PHOTO SHOOT WITH JOE DILWORTH IN PLANET ROC AT THE FUNKHAUS  

On the outskirts of East-Berlin there is a cluster of factory-like buildings that make up one of the most unique recording studios ever built; a colossal studio compound called the Funkhaus.

The German ‘funk’ translates as ‘radio’ and beginning in the late 1950’s, in the years just before the Berlin Wall went up, the newly established East-German government the GDR built this massive complex to be the center for broadcast recordings in the east. Comprising recording studios and administrative offices, here, any conceivable demand a broadcasting network would need was located. The architect, a former student of the Bauhaus named Franz Ehrlich, designed each of the recording studios with a specific purpose and with a precise acoustic aim. Every live-room was planned to maximize its space and yield the greatest acoustic response. Perhaps the most striking of the many studios is the recording hall in building B, an enormous curved room meant for orchestras complete with a built-in pipe organ.

    

From 1956 through to the final days of the GDR, radio stations broadcast directly from the Funkhaus. Every program was administered and produced right there within these buildings on Nalepastrasse. More than three thousand people worked there and at one time, the East-Berlin Funkhaus housed a clinic and a kindergarten to accommodate this considerable work force. The now dusty and empty hallways are lined with cubbyholes where tape reels were once stored and exchanged. Elaborate staircases wind to yet more empty hallways. In winter, the snow quickly covers the pathways. Large wall-sized windows overlook the banks of the quietly flowing Spree.  Once a bureaucratic army administered over the thoughts of a nation here. Now there is an odd silence in the halls and the feeling of being surrounded by ghosts and secrets. 

   

The GDR was perhaps the largest secret-police state the world has ever seen. Contrasting it with some other rather infamous police states, Anna Funder points out in her fantastic book Stasiland, the KGB had one informer for nearly every 6,000 Russians under Stalin, under Hitler the Gestapo had roughly one informant for every 2,000 Germans, while, astonishingly, East-Germany’s secret police, the STASI, had one informer for every 6.5 East-Germans.

Most of these informers were just ordinary citizens persuaded to spy on their neighbors and colleagues with the promise of getting access to expensive medical drugs, travel-visas or political favors. To defy the STASI was to risk being refused good jobs or admission to the best universities. The STASI controlled and watched every aspect of people’s lives. Books, music, plays, the STASI viewed these as potentially dangerous elements. Thought and culture had the potential to secretly spread propaganda from the west and in the GDR’s view, this meant that even the most seemingly benign use of culture needed to be controlled. East Germans learned not to speak openly even in their own homes for fear someone might be listening. Even the ostensibly innocent ears of children couldn’t be trusted for, teachers were often recruited to coax children to rat out their parents. So then, in a place in which some 3,000 people were working, and administering and broadcasting and receiving radio signals and disseminating information, news and culture to the entire population of East-Germany, what would one suppose the percentage of STASI to non-STASI was among the workers at the Funkhaus? The likely answer seems to be that it must have been almost entirely STASI. Most assuredly, there is almost no chance that STASI agents weren’t constantly and meticulously supervising every single operation and employee at the Funkhaus.

Erich Mielke (center) the head of the STASI with his inner-circle.
“But I Love… I Love all… all people,” said a tearful Erich Mielke six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To which the crowd began to laugh.  

Further up the Spree and over the wall in Kruezberg, David Bowie,Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed were recording their seminal works while living out a 1970’s broken down vision of Weimar Berlin. Kruezberg proudly holds a claim to this bit of music history, but it’s on the city’s ripped back side, back in the Funkhaus, in this once overly offciated, orderly, micro-organized and perfectly compartmentalized village, that perhaps the future of Berlin’s storied musical history will unfold. Walking into the place today, it’s impossible not to get the feeling that great and impossible works should be made here. It’s the sort of place where a band should hunker down to deconstruct and re-invent and come away with something that sounds like the kind of future Jules Verne or George Melies imagined.

   

In the 1990’s, after the collapse of the GDR, the offices at the Funkhaus fell into disuse. There are now, as yet derailed, plans to radically revitalize the remaining facilities at the Funkhaus to accommodate a number of business, housing and public cultural spaces and a few of the studio’s were sold into private ownership and are now in operation.

One of these private studios is Planet Roc which operates out of the rooms where GDR radio once broadcast it’s live theater productions. Within this one building the most elaborate stagings took place. It’s rumored Radiohead had originally wanted to record ‘Kid A‘ here but the studio wasn’t ready. True or not, it’s an anecdote that seems immediately believable when entering the place

Planet Roc’s rather large control room looks out into four separate live rooms. The largest boasts ceilings some thirty feet high. In the middle of this room is a staircase leading to a brick wall. The stairs are divided into sections of wood steps, stone steps and carpeted steps to capture the different sounds footsteps make. When Liars recorded their third album ‘Drum’s Not Dead‘ here, Angus Andrew would sing from the top of the stairs to a microphone below. As one would imagine, there’s a stone barrel-vaulted dungeon beneath the stairs, because, well, why wouldn’t there be. The dungeon is another thing Liars made liberal use of.

The smallest room at Planet Roc is called the ‘dead-room’; a reverb-less room with spiraling gravel paths hidden beneath floorboards. The air immediately sucks inward around one’s eardrum when entering the ‘dead-room’, it’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling but yields a perfect close-mic’d dryness. While actors acted out their scenes in the neighboring rooms, expert foley artists simultaneously supplied the accompanying sound effects from there in the ‘Dead Room’. These days, it’s is mostly used to catch the spit of aspiring German rappers often seen skulking around the hallways dressed hilariously in head to toe Lakers gear.

Recording The Boggs’ ‘Forts’ in Planet Roc with Liars’ Julien Gross     

I recorded four tracks for The Boggs’ album Forts at Planet Roc. I couldn’t use the control room because a young German pop idol was mixing so, Holger Muller, in-house producer at Planet Roc, built me a makeshift studio there in the middle of the big room. Mek Obaam, who played drums on Forts used the walls and sound barriers to record the flickering stick patterns. To get the ambiguous heartbeat for the track ‘The Passage’, we had all the lights off in that cavernous room, all of us sitting quietly in the dark, listening to the gentle bomp bomp of the mallet. It’s that kind of place; a place where you want to improvise and re-invent wheels and find new and interesting ways to approach things and rip it up and start again.

A view of one the Funkhause’s now unused buildings ripped up and waiting. 

In Part two of this two part series, Walkmen/White Rabbits/Asobi Seksu producer Chris Zane and Rakes‘ guitarist Matthew Swinnerton talk about recording together at Planet Roc.
Read Pt.II Here.