Alexander Hacke and Gareth Jones

Hanna Bächer

Please welcome Alexander Hacke and Gareth Jones.

Gareth Jones

Hello.

Alexander Hacke

Hello.

Hanna Bächer

This here has actually been the very first time, this song has been the occasion for the very first time that you were in this room. Is that right?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah and the first time that... At least as far as I remember, the first time that we met was in this room.

Gareth Jones

Yeah that’s as far as I remember as well now. It’s become the official story. That’s the story, right? We met in this room. We think we really did. It’s quite funny because obviously the occasion of us meeting was when I was working with Frank Tovey, now dead of course, rest in peace Frank, and this song called “Collapsing New People” was inspired by Berlin and Eintürzende Neubauten. We invited them to come and play on the middle eight. We think now that they’ve been cut out of the radio edit.

Alexander Hacke

It’s the so-called radio edit.

Gareth Jones

Because obviously that’s the video. That’s the short version. Anyway. We were hoping to hear the Neubauten bit, but it’s not there, not on the video. Anyway...

Hanna Bächer

The artist is called Fad Gadget. We should probably mention him with his artist name as well. You had been working with him in London already, right?

Gareth Jones

I don’t know. I think we did the whole album here. The album was called Gag and the cover of the album is Fad wearing that feather suit. It’s an Anton Corbijn photo, actually. That’s the first I met Anton Corbijn as well. That was a wonderful experience. It was wonderful meeting you guys and having you come in and set up and play on the middle eight. I guess that was the start of a... I think I might have already met Blixa [Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten], because I think he came to visit Daniel on a Depeche Mode session. Then I had the very great pleasure of making some records with...

Alexander Hacke

I think also the Birthday Party were recording in Hansa while you were mixing Depeche Mode upstairs or something like that.

Gareth Jones

The Birthday Party, I don’t think I was mixing Depeche, but I was mixing something else upstairs. I was mixing something else upstairs and Daniel was here with the Birthday Party for sure. I said, “Look man, come and look at this studio.” Anyways, a lot of history and it’s a long time ago. It’s a very important space for me personally.

Alexander Hacke

Yes we spent the formative years of our youth in this room.

Gareth Jones

Yeah we did. Yeah we did.

Hanna Bächer

You grew up in Neukölln right? Or, you were born in Neukölln?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Hanna Bächer

Which was part of West Berlin for anyone who might not know. I did not know it to be honest, until very recently. Were you aware of Hansa Studios existing as a teenager or was that a totally different world that you thought you could never enter?

Alexander Hacke

Yes, I was aware of it. I had an older cousin, she’s like four years older and she would listen to those David Bowie records. Also, she would scare the hell out of me with Roxy Music. As a little kid, I was afraid of Bryan Ferry’s voice.

Hanna Bächer

How is that possible?

Alexander Hacke

I couldn’t stand the vibrato. It would give me the creeps. “Mommy, Katherine’s playing that music again!”

Hanna Bächer

I think it’s a really funny story that someone who would continue to make music that is as scary as Einstürzende Neubauten would be scared of Roxy Music. Fair enough.

Gareth Jones

I don’t know if Neubauten is frightening music. I thought of it as having dark edges and melancholy, but I never thought of it... I don’t know. It’s not for me to say what the group was trying to do. I never had the impression the group... It was trying to shock people, but not frighten them necessarily.

Alexander Hacke

Let’s say it’s passionate music and that can be frightening.

Hanna Bächer

Is there such a thing as a frightening record to you, then, Gareth?

Gareth Jones

I’m not frightened by music, no. Music doesn’t frighten me.

Hanna Bächer

That’s a very good thing because it has been your job for many years now. To go back to that, in the late ’70s you started working in a few studios in London. When did you first become aware of Hansa Studios or when did you first get invited to move to Berlin and to work here?

Gareth Jones

I wasn’t invited to move to Berlin. I kind of pushed my way in. I worked with another Neue Deutsche Welle band in the early ’80s or something. The manager was a guy called Connie and he said to me... I was a very nervous young guy and I wanted to go back to London to mix the record that I’d recorded with this band, because I just wanted to mix it somewhere I felt safe and confident. Then Connie said, “That’s fine. But let me show you the Hansa mix room.” I was very young and impressionable and it was awesome. I said, “OK, well if I have to I’ll go and look at the Hansa mix room, all right, Connie.” I kind of walked in the door and I was like, “Whoa, this is amazing.” The same with this room, more importantly actually. First of all I worked in a high-tech mix room upstairs, but then of course very quickly I discovered they had this incredible room. Just to say to everyone here – I can’t see everyone, let me have a look – oh yeah, there’s quite a lot of people here, that’s nice. Thank you for coming everyone. When we used to make music in this room, it was pretty scummy, right? Now it’s like quite...

Alexander Hacke

They cleaned it up nicely, but basically the important parts like the wooden floor and the paneled ceiling and all that, that was already there...

Gareth Jones

This stage was already here pretty much, wasn’t it?

Alexander Hacke

Absolutely.

Gareth Jones

I think the stage was a bit more echo-y. I think they firmed it up. I remember the stage being a bit bouncy.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, probably there’s more risers.

Hanna Bächer

Was this Neue Deutsche Welle band that you first mixed, was that Ideal?

Gareth Jones

Ideal, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

Was that somehow in the similar scene as the things that you were doing back then, or was that a completely different world?

Alexander Hacke

Well, we all knew each other. We would all frequent the same nightclubs, like the Jungle and stuff. The Jungle is mentioned in “Ich stehe auf Berlin,” you know. We knew each other and you know, we would make fun of Ideal basically, but Eff Jott Krüger [Ideal's guitarist] who also passed away...

Gareth Jones

Sadly.

Alexander Hacke

Sadly, many years ago. We became good friends too, but in the beginning it was just, you know, like this chauvinist thing. “You pop tarts,” you know.

Gareth Jones

Yeah. That’s what it felt like to me, like a different scene for sure. Berlin was very small-scene then, wasn’t it? Of course you guys knew each other. It was unthinkable that I would meet Blixa Bargeld through Depeche Mode, but I did because of Daniel Miller, really.

Hanna Bächer

Could you even have imagined to not meet those people? Did it feel as that size of a city where you felt like you could maybe not find an entrance in a certain scene? Or was it really just those few bars where you went and if you went often enough on a Thursday then...

Alexander Hacke

I think it was inevitable if you were moving about a certain scene. If you were having certain interests then you would meet other main people because it was just this little village, this little island, basically. Then of course, if you weren’t interested in this kind of music or in music in general, of course you could go completely different ways. In Berlin, you didn’t have the army, for example. There was no draft to the army. All of my classmates that wanted to play with guns, they joined the police force. Of course, they never met the people that I met.

Gareth Jones

Except in a different way.

Alexander Hacke

Except in a very different situation, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

That’s very interesting of you saying that, because I always hear the stories of people who did not want to be in the army and then moved from West Germany to Berlin because then you didn’t have to be in the army, and never considered that obviously there were people in Berlin who really wanted to be in the army.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, you know, basically wanted to be tough and play with guns. Yeah, they would join the cops.

Hanna Bächer

Back to when this video, or maybe not this video, but the song for the video was recorded, which I think was late ’83, probably, you had been with Neubauten, kind of following them for like three years, but not all the time as an official band member. Is that right?

Alexander Hacke

When I first started playing with them in 1980, I was 14 years old. At one point it was decided back then that I should learn about other things of life. They basically put me on vacation, or “ich war beurlaubt” [German euphemism for getting temporarily laid of]. I know what you’re going to play now... Yeah, but I played with them in the very beginning and then I didn’t play with them for a while, for a short while. Then I came back as an engineer basically. I decided, influenced by the whole industrial music scene out of England, I decided that I rather wanted to manipulate people than to be like a showgirl for them. And so I decided I wanted to be at the mixing desk instead. So I would do the live sound for Neubauten and very selective engineering. If somebody played something I didn’t like I would play a cassette instead, and then at one point I got bored onstage and I made my way back up on stage.

Hanna Bächer

So basically you were so bad as a live sound engineer that they just had to make you part of the band.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, it was... Gareth made his way into Berlin. I made my way back into the band and I was just like...

Gareth Jones

That’s interesting to hear that actually because I remember you. Now you’ve flagged it up as being very interested in the recording process.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Gareth Jones

And that’s why. I knew that history but I’d forgotten about it, so thanks for sharing that, because now I’m going back there and I’m remembering just how involved and interested you were in the recording process. In a way, for instance, that Andrew [Chudy AKA N.U. Unruh] wasn’t particularly.

Alexander Hacke

No.

Gareth Jones

Andrew was very interested in building instruments [rather] than hitting them. But he wasn’t that interested in the recording process I don’t think.

Alexander Hacke

No.

Gareth Jones

So, you know. And you obviously were.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Hanna Bächer

I want to play a video that is from your very, very early days, but before that, could you say about the other band members, how interested was everyone in technology? Because I think it’s quite interesting in regards to what they actually played.

Gareth Jones

How interested were... What, the Neubauten members and technology?

Hanna Bächer

Yes.

Gareth Jones

Well, I don’t know. It was a different set-up then. I remember Alex being interested in the recording technology for sure. Mark [Chung] wasn’t interested at all. Mark very much had like a management role in the band and a super important bass player.

Hanna Bächer

And still kind of has.

Gareth Jones

Obviously.

Alexander Hacke

And the sportsman. You wanted to have Mark on your team if you played table football or something like that.

Gareth Jones

OK. Obviously lead vocalists being what they are, the lead vocal had to sound right for sure. I mean, I love Blix’s poetry anyway, so for me that was a joy. So he was kind of interested in the whole vibe, because of course that’s supporting the lyric. Mufti was also, I remember him as being pretty interested in...

Alexander Hacke

Very, very interested. Yeah yeah. With Mufti, with F.M. Einheit, I experienced for the first time music without a rotating medium. With Mufti, with you we experienced for the first time that DAT tapes, and also the, what was it? The format before that, on beta cassettes? These PCM tapes or something. That was the first digital recordings. But with Mufti I remember, he was the first person to actually play me his new music coming from a hard drive, so you would walk into a room and there was no rotation whatsoever. Nothing was rotating. Not a tape, not even a small cassette...

Gareth Jones

The hard drive was spinning, but you couldn’t see it.

Alexander Hacke

You couldn’t see it, and suddenly there was music. And also with digital technology you wouldn’t hear the hiss, the mandatory hiss that [with] everything else you would. Everything would announce itself. You know it’s like, “Oh, watch out, there’ll be music in a minute,” and then digital music would just come. “What the hell’s going on?” And so Mufti was always into technology.

Gareth Jones

I agree with that. That’s very much my memory of Mr. Einheit as well. Because when we made a track called, a 12" called Yü-Gung, I had an analog sound player that was made in Berlin called Mr. Lab. Do you remember Mr. Lab? Had little buttons on it. And I had a very powerful, but very simple early digital sampler that we were triggering from the Mr. Lab, and Mufti was on it immediately. And I didn’t know if he would be because I knew him before that as a very muscular beat-maker. A physical player. That’s how I knew him before that. Hitting drums, playing beats very powerfully, and so I was a bit nervous bringing the sampler and the sequencer. But he was on it straight away because his mind moved to another level. A deep musical level. He got it. I mean, I think the whole band got it, but I was nervous. I thought, “Well, I’m going to share this. Maybe they’ll hate it,” but he was great. It was awesome to see, because basically I thought he was a bit like a caveman or something. And then he turned out to be this total programming nerd as well.

Hanna Bächer

You should meet some programming nerds, they can be cavemen.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, absolutely. Many of us are.

Hanna Bächer

It’s not really a contradiction.

Gareth Jones

No, exactly. But there are some live percussion players who don’t like sequencing. I know many great–

Alexander Hacke

Or click tracks for that matter.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, for instance. There are many, many, many great percussionists who were not interested in sequencing at all. Why would they be? Because they can play anything. But he was very interested immediately.

Hanna Bächer

That’s a different thing though, because that’s time based, and I think Mufti is interested in sounds, so he liked the sampler as he liked unusual instruments.

Alexander Hacke

Well we were, also that the idea, it came up... It’s a completely different philosophical concept as to play music with instruments. If you play samples you are playing events. Actually, events in time. You see what I mean? Like, before that with a synthesizer you would try to imitate the sound of breaking glass. With sampling you could just break the glass and then sequence that actual event. And that was a completely new thing. You would have this God-like delusions of grandeur because you could rearrange events in time more than just playing music.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, no I completely agree. And also we were... In all the work we did together and all the work I did with samplers it was very much about capturing real events from the real world. I, personally, was never interested in playing an oboe in a sampler or a violin or something. It’s quite big money now. It’s quite Spitfire [Audio], and there’s loads of big samplers. It’s a big thing now to have a bass, Scarbee and Spitfire and loads of real pianos. And that’s all kind of whatever. It is what it is. I think it’s... I’m not interested, personally. I was always super excited by the idea of taking a sound from the real world.

Alexander Hacke

And also it would give you new possibilities in terms of size. See? We would work with these, we had these tables that would tell us the exact tape speeds for different keys, right? You knew how to slow down a tape in order to transpose the music to a different key. And with sampling you could do the thing where, like a tiny instrument. Like a tiny glass, if you play it back at a slower speed it would become larger, and the other way around. So you could make giant things tiny, or tiny things, turn them into giant objects.

Gareth Jones

It’s magic, isn’t it? Everyone’s got a recording studio now because everyone’s got a laptop. But one of the magic things about recording sound for me is that you can make the quietest real sound the loudest sound on the track if you want to. You don’t have to. But if you want to. I’ve done that. And that’s amazing. So you can record a really loud sound, and it’s really quiet in the mix. And then you can have a really quiet sound and make it really loud.

Alexander Hacke

But Gareth, and you’ll never get to play that video if we go on like this.

Hanna Bächer

That’s all right, this is actually really interesting and I love how enthusiastic you are about the fact that you can do those things because you’ve sat behind mixing desks for like four decades and you still think it’s a miracle.

Gareth Jones

I’m a bit slow.

Alexander Hacke

Also what Gareth used to do is, particularly in this room, what you could do in this room very nicely is, we would sit in the middle of this room on the floor and record very tiny sounds, but Gareth would put microphones through really heavy compression in our headphones. So we would sit in here with the headphones on and record tiny, tiniest dropping the tiniest objects on the floor and stuff like that. And we had to move very carefully because the headphones were so compressed and so loud that if we went like this [stomps foot] we would have blown our ears out.

Gareth Jones

I had that experience the first time I went to the far east in the ’80s with a recording Walkman. And this is really obvious, right? But I put the headphones on, and then turned up the volume of the microphone, and then it was exactly... Not exactly. It was pretty much like the real world, only louder. It was great! It was just really great! “Listen, it’s like the real world.” It blew my little mind.

Hanna Bächer

I’m going to play a bit of this video, because it blew my mind.

Alexander Hacke

OK.

Hanna Bächer

And then we’re going to continue with those stories.

(video: Sentimentale Jugend Live)

Alexander Hacke

Wow, that...

Hanna Bächer

You were 16!

Alexander Hacke

I was 16, yes. That’s me at the Tempodrom, which was actually right over there on Potsdamer Platz. [applause] Thank you. That was from the Grosse Untergangsshow, Das Festival Genialer Dilettanten at the Tempodrom, which that festival spurred kind of a fake musical movement called Genialer Dilettanten where it was also imperative to misspell the word “dilettanten.” And that was Christiane F. playing guitar there with me and...

Hanna Bächer

Who was your partner?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Hanna Bächer

You didn’t say partner when you were 16, you said girlfriend.

Alexander Hacke

No, she was my first girlfriend. Yeah.

Gareth Jones

That is a bit scary, I must say. I was a little bit frightened. I was boasting before, but I was a little bit frightened seeing that.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah. And I was 16 and I was wearing her leather jacket. That tells you how skinny I was.

Hanna Bächer

1981, fourth of September. 1981, we even have the exact date here. I wanted to play that because I think Neubauten to me has always been a band that you’ll want to see live. Did you see Neubauten live before you worked with them?

Gareth Jones

Probably not. I might have done, I can’t remember. The thing is, I didn’t go out much. I was very obsessed with being in the recording studio. In fact for me, a lot of... Most of my musical experience has been listening to records and later CDs and whatever, streams and shit. So I’m a kind of headphones guy, or sitting at home with the speakers. That’s kind of how I’ve experienced music in my life. And it was hearing music on speakers that made me want to get into recording studios and help record records. Because I was obsessed by it and I thought it was just incredible. So, in other words, I never came to recording trying to capture some kind of live... It wasn’t that I thought, “Oh, these bands are great live! I must get them in the stu...” I kinda saw the studio as a whole separate thing, you know. I never cared how difficult it would be to make the recording work on the stage. That was never my problem. And I was never that interested in it. But I mean, having said that, I saw Neubauten... I have seen the band many times live and I just saw them recently in London, at the Forum, and it was an incredible, incredible gig. So if anyone’s not seen the new... I don’t know if it’s out ... Is Berlin hemmed already?

Alexander Hacke

We’re looking into Berlin for the fall, so we might.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, yeah. It’s a long time since I seen the band live, and it was a great show. So I do love live music, but it was just for the... And also when I was young, what I’m trying to say is I was learning how to make recordings, and a lot of that seemed to be staying in the studio all the time, all hours, and just working all the time in the studio. So, stupidly, some bands, I would never work with a band now without meeting them and going to the rehearsal room and hopefully going live and even getting to know them. But sometimes, back in those days, I would kinda meet the band in the studio, on the first day of the recording session, you know. So, different life, different times.

Alexander Hacke

I can relate to that. Also for me, there’s the one aspect of, you know, like the performance, and the excitement of seeing bands live, but also what I was really interested in, was really magic for me, and still is really magic, is when you have a pair of really nicely aligned stereo speakers, and you sit in the sweet spot between two speakers, like you do in a studio between your near-field monitors. You actually don’t hear the music coming out of the speaker. You cannot point at the direction anymore, it kind of materializes, like right in front of you in this space between the speakers. And that for me, that still is about listening to music on stereophonic equipment that still is the most amazing thing. You know that suddenly you hear this wonderful sound in the middle of the room. Even though you have those two speakers there, it’s like right there in front of you.

Gareth Jones

And that’s an experience that’s very repeatable now when we’re working. If you turn the computer screen off, because we have the privilege of having the magic of that experience in pre-digital technology. The music’s on tape. So you’re not looking at a screen, so if you want to have a really amazing listening experience, you might turn the lights down and press the tape machine and I can only get that now, in my little workroom. I’ve got like a button on the side of the screen.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Gareth Jones

And I turn the screen off. And then I can kinda see it. Because when my eyes are focused on the screen, it’s harder to have that magic experience.

Alexander Hacke

Absolutely. Yeah, you listen differently when you look at a computer screen. That’s definitely true. And also, still when we work with Neubauten, we insist on being these five mooks in a room who do not look at computer screens. You know, so we do have the engineer that takes care of editing and stuff like that later on. We assign him to, you know, like tasks, chores, that he needs to do. But while we play music together, we don’t look at computer screens.

Gareth Jones

Right on.

Hanna Bächer

But you talked about this hard drive earlier, right? When you first started working together, there was no computers involved.

Alexander Hacke

No.

Hanna Bächer

Like, the hard drive that was much later...

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, the hard drive was much later. I was just telling that story to illustrate how technology-savvy Mufti was. No, no, when we were working here, it was all 24-track tape machines, which also were amazing. We kind of worked our way up from four-track to eight-track to 16-track, and then here you had two 24-track machines synced to each other, which was amazing. Earlier, we were talking about that there’s a loop actually going on in “Collapsing New People,” which is like a printing machine that Gareth recorded somewhere in Berlin. And in order to do that, he made a loop of it. And a loop back in the days meant an actual, physical tape loop and I was talking about this for another thing, about the Hansa Studio recently. And we would have these tape loops going across from... The control room was over there, where the bar is right now, and we would have these tape loops, you know, like supported by microphone stands going all the way through the whole length of the hallway, you know, in order to get like really long tape loops of things.

Gareth Jones

Yeah. Because we’re a bit crazy.

Alexander Hacke

We would do things with Neubauten, we would cut little holes with, a what do you call ’em? Like a hole puncher? We would cut little holes in it while it was going by, or burning it, burning the tape while it was going by, and stuff like that.

Gareth Jones

Tape loops. It’s a thing, isn’t it? It’s like with, you know, with analog technology, like that, anyone’s who’s got guitar pedals or anything, you know, with analog technology and wires and amps and tape loops, it’s much easier to make a creative mistake, or to make a new discovery that you weren’t planning on making. I find it quite difficult with a computer to make a mistake. I mean, obviously I can open the software synth that has a sound that I wasn’t expecting. But the kind of creative mistakes that you can make with analog technology are really awesome.

Alexander Hacke

Mistakes on a computer are dreadful. It just means that you have to reboot and that the show kind of stops at that moment, it’s like, “Oh, what’s going on?” You get these [grinding noise] glitches.

Gareth Jones

Mistakes with analog can be hugely creative.

Alexander Hacke

Wonderful. And the whole thing about analog is also that it’s an actual physical thing. There is this convention here once a year called the Superbooth where all these guys meet that work with the Eurorack with us. There’s a whole community of people that build little synthesizer modules in a certain format and it’s great because these guys, aside from the fact that it’s just like, you know, like nerds meeting for their miniature model trains, just, “Oh, I need to get a new steam engine!” But the thing about that fascination and about analog, working with actual tape and stuff is that it’s an actual physical process. It’s not like moving this glass from here to here means a certain combinations of zeros and ones. But I actually moved the glass.

Gareth Jones

You actually moved the fucking glass.

Alexander Hacke

You actually moved the glass.

Gareth Jones

I know. And on the computer, it’s all imaginary. I mean, you hear melodies and shit, I’m not knocking it. I get it. I get it. We all use computers. It’s awesome fun, but it is actually not real. And every once in a while you have to say to yourself, “It’s just a fantasy behind a glass screen what I’m doing” Which is different. I just want to follow up what you were talking about, because I borrowed a little modular for those who are coming to the bass camp. I borrowed a little modular from Schneider’s, from my friend Andreas Schneider.

Alexander Hacke

Which is the church of modular geekism.

Gareth Jones

And very important in my life, as well, this guy. But that might be another story. But I borrowed the modular and I have, so I’ve got, all the devices in this module that I borrowed I have in London, OK? So I know it pretty well. So I’m sitting in the back room, in a little studio down there, and I’m plugging it up to make a noise before you guys arrive for the Bass Camp. Because I thought, “I want to have a bit of a noise on it,” just for a vibe you know? And then it starts making this incredible noise, and I’m thinking, “They must have changed this module, because I have this module and I’ve never heard it sound like this!” And then I look at it, and I’ve plugged something in wrong. But it sounds incredible, and I had exactly that kind of discovery just this afternoon. And I thought, “Oh! That’s interesting. If I plug that in there, it does that.”

Alexander Hacke

And that’s the whole magic about places like this, and working with analog technology and stuff. I find, in my opinion, it’s the ritualistic aspect of that, because of that, because you are making a conscious decision to do something, physically. To do something, rather than having the assumption of an actual event, which it is in the digital world. Basically the digital world is just the bus map, or the schedule. The digital world is the bus schedule. But the analog world is to take the actual bus and go from A to B.

Hanna Bächer

M41.

Gareth Jones

That works for me, because I’m very interested in process, and part of what we did together, in this room, when I had the great pleasure of working with Alex and the band, was to embark upon a process, where we didn’t really know how it was. We knew we might, you know, Mr. Bargeld might have had the lyrics. Mr. Einheit might have had a beat. Mr. Hacke might have had a guitar riff or an idea. But more importantly, almost, was we all committed to a process. Which was to come in here, build some shit and see what happened and choose the good bits. That’s so important, I think. I’m not the kind of person who, I can’t imagine what a record’s going to sound like, but I do like going on a process. And saying, “Well look, if we all get together in a room, with some amps and some guitars and some musicians and a tape recorder, a recorder, we’ll probably make something awesome.” And we did.

Alexander Hacke

And also, in the physical world, you have to make the conscious decision of when to not play, much more than in the digital realm, you know?

Hanna Bächer

Let me tell you, maybe, what I find the hardest to imagine, when talking about recording on tape. It’s that when you delete a thing, or you destroy a thing by burning the tape, it’s gone. Today you have a back-up, and you have a back-up of your back-up, and then maybe you have a cloud, or whatever. Or maybe you don’t have all of these things, but then you’re a bit stupid, probably. But then you have 24 tracks, or 48 tracks, maybe, and then when they were full and you wanted to do a thing again, it meant getting rid of the thing that was on the tape before. And then, it’s gone.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, that’s, in Algeria, I think it is, where the whole music industry worked on cassette tapes. The recording studios where they worked at, those Algerian Cheb, Mami and all these different Algerian musicians, they only possessed one single 24 reel, and the entire music of the country for 20 years was recorded...

Gareth Jones

One reel at a time...

Alexander Hacke

...on one reel of tape. You know, it was just like, recorded over and over.

Gareth Jones

That’s the model now. If you’re lucky enough to work on tape now, you find an old bit of tape that’s been used before, because it’s so expensive, you know?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Hanna Bächer

But I mean like more in the actual writing process, the process you talked about earlier. You had to like, as a band, you know, one maybe liked the guitar sound, and guitarist didn’t, or the other way around. And you were saying it’s great, and then you have to come to a decision of re-doing it, or not. You couldn’t keep every copy.

Alexander Hacke

Yes.

Gareth Jones

That’s the bonus. That’s what’s good about it. I mean that’s what makes it so powerful. We’ve all been there with a full reel of tape, and someone, let’s say the guitar solo, you know, and then the guitar solo player says, “I can do better than that.” And then everyone looks a bit nervous, because they know exactly what that means, and then you have to step up and do better. That’s incredible.

Alexander Hacke

Or if you would drop in, you know, “I think that was a really good tape – take – except the first two bars. I fucked those up, I wanna re-do the first two bars,” and then you would have the hotshot engineer who just goes like, “pop-pop,” and just get that spot. That was sportsmanship, you know?

Gareth Jones

Exactly, it was exciting. It was sportsmanship, yeah.

Alexander Hacke

And also...

Gareth Jones

A lot of trust

Alexander Hacke

Oh yeah!

Gareth Jones

Because the engineer has to trust the guitarist, and the guitarist has to trust the engineer. It’s team building.

Alexander Hacke

And you could have real life-changing, traumatizing, catastrophes. At one point we had an entire string ensemble, was in a studio in Belgium, we had an entire string ensemble coming in, and working the whole day with them, on a certain piece. And then the engineer or tape operator at the time, he was just clearing the slave tapes. If you work with two reel-to-reel tape machines, one would be the master and one would be the slave. He was just doing some rearranging, clearing, but basically what happened, he thought the slave was the master, or the other way around, and he erased the entire string session, with these musicians that came in from Brussels into the sticks. And I have never seen the man in such distress before. After he just stood in the doorway, and he was like completely pale, and just like, “I have to tell you guys something.” And I felt so sorry for him, and this is something that only can happen with tape. We had to get the entire gang of musicians back in and reschedule the whole thing, and basically he worked the whole session for free then.

Hanna Bächer

I mean, that’s probably a situation that you would not want to recreate, but you’re saying it had some advantages to be able to actually delete things, in terms of decision-making. So, when working with people now, how do you − I mean both of you, in each of your positions − how do you get to that point of decision-making, if you can keep, like, 80 million versions of everything?

Gareth Jones

You can’t.

Alexander Hacke

It is very hard. I mean, you can humiliate your client into the position that it is very important what they are doing at that given time. But it won’t make you very popular as a producer. But you can, I think, you know what I’m talking about.

Gareth Jones

I do. And we still get great performances and you, I mean I loved your last record with Danielle [de Picciotto], and it’s full of great performances. And it’s still possible to get great performances. But you cannot do the same thing, because it’s the difference between walking across the Grand Canyon on the high wire, without a safety rope, and walking with a safety rope. Both journeys are mind-blowingly incredible, you know. And we’ve seen Red Bull do videos of extreme sports. Some are protected, some are not. The achievement is the same, if you can walk across the Grand Canyon with a safety rope, and you don’t need it on a high wire, that’s an amazing achievement. But it’s different from walking across without a safety rope. It’s just a different thing.

Alexander Hacke

Even though I think it is possible, and it also is a possible goal in the creation of art, to put that same urgency, or to put that same danger in your given performance, you could. But it’s a different mindset. If you just go like, “I’m gonna play along, I’m gonna jam on this for a while.” Basically, that’s the whole thing, that also changed since digital. You know back then there was jamming, and we knew it was jamming, because nobody could afford to record that whole crap. Now you can record, you know, like...

Gareth Jones

Every little thought.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, like the most ridiculous jams, and I hate that word already. And somebody will have to listen to that crap and there’ll be hours and hours and hours of it. Basically I think it actually is necessary to put yourself in that mind state to a certain degree where everything you do or say or sing or play is precious at that moment.

Gareth Jones

Your energy is precious and your time’s precious and you get that, and I get it, and we’ve both worked on that level where you invite a musician to play something on a track or they want, and they don’t play it 100 times. They maybe play it once and you go, “Oh, thank you Alex, thank you for coming in and playing,” whatever he played, “Thank you, that’s great,” or, “Thanks for playing that organ,” and it’s amazing. Then there’s many great artists who do that because, like Alex, they’ve learned that basically, if they’re in the right state of mind and they’ve done their morning meditation and they’re at peace with the world, they play – or not – they play their solo or their piece in one take. And if they do another 25 takes, it’s not going to be any better. You short-circuit the whole thing. You play it once, and everyone goes, “Awesome!” What a huge time-saver that is already, right there you’ve saved like three days of listening to “jams.”

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, or there were people like that, like the late, great Chrislo Haas who was the analog synthesizer player for Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and Liaisons Dangereuses, this wonderful music. He had a sense of this immediacy, this magic thing. Which basically meant if he would play his synthesizers and you told him, “Oh Chrislo, that’s great,” he said, “Yeah, really? boop.” Gone. Erased. You know he would just take all the cables, as soon as you told him. Whenever I worked with him in his later years, I had to record him secretly, because I knew if he knew that I was recording him, he would just do, deliberately do crap because he wanted to keep exactly that kind of…

Gareth Jones

That special live moment.

Alexander Hacke

That danger, that danger to it, that unpredictability.

Gareth Jones

Unpredictability, yeah, yeah.

Alexander Hacke

Yes? All right.

Hanna Bächer

I think we should listen to another track that was done I think many years before either of you started doing morning meditation. It’s not going to have a video, you can leave that off if you want to. Should we go for [Einstürzende Neubauten song] “Seele Brennt” because you’re saying we can...

Alexander Hacke

Absolutely. Let me explain first, “Seele Brennt” was recorded in this room and we recorded it like a theater play and also like a painting. Basically, everything we did, the whole song was recorded in one take without any overdubs. It’s recorded in this room as the room is. That’s the theater play part, and the painting part is that all the microphones were placed in a way that, like Blixa singing, his whispering and his screaming and stuff he actually had to, like in the olden days, he had to move closer and further away from the microphone in order to get different levels. So basically you know if something is louder it’s actually coming closer to you. It’s a great track and you really hear that room.

Hanna Bächer

From your 1985 album, Halber Mensch.

(music: Einstürzende Neubauten – “Seele Brennt”)

Alexander Hacke

There’s one more of course. Never mind.

Gareth Jones

I want to say something about that as well because the, I love the, I grew up loving, I still love, well classically music’s a very broad thing right? Obviously, but anyway, but I love dynamic in music and one of the awesome things about the Neubauten gig that I saw last Thursday is the huge dynamic in it. And for those people who attend, I mean everyone’s got their own geschmack, you know. Everyone should do what they want. But I really enjoyed hearing some of the participants’ music in Nalepastrasse this afternoon, but the thing that was missing for me in the big picture is dynamic. I’m just flagging it up − if you like dynamic, build it into your compositions. These guys, are building it into the composition back then, and they are still using huge dynamic live now. To me that’s fantastic.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Gareth Jones

You know, I love, I fucking love that shit man.

Alexander Hacke

Thank you. Thank you. No, I think dynamics is very important because it’s about the spectrum and then, you know, we all know about the loudness wars in mastering, now that people just try to make the loudest possible records and the mastering engineer of Metallica apparently refused to have his name on the record for the way they wanted the music mastered and stuff like that. I think dynamics are very important and I love the time when the CD was invented, remember the first CDs? Particularly classical music CDs came out and they had to put a warning, warning stickers on the CDs, remember that? Saying like, “Careful, high dynamic range,” or something like that, because people were used to the dynamic range of a normal vinyl record and then the CD came and particular with classical music it would be the, like the overture would be very quiet and stuff like that. Then the actual first, you know movement would come in and would come in at a volume that would just kill people’s stereos.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, blow your speakers up, yeah.

Alexander Hacke

That was great, that time. I mean that’s the good thing about digital, is that you can conserve a much higher dynamic range.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, there’s lots of awesome things about digital. Our esteemed colleague, fellow worker, Mr. Brian Eno, says that anyone who romanticizes working on tape never did it. What we’re talking about I feel is the analog process. Which can be a room, like you’re working with Neubauten now, a room full of people and effects and amps and instruments. And another thing about dynamic I wanted to say is its interesting because in film dynamic is really big still. Even in mainstream Hollywood film. You know, if you watch Star Wars, sometimes it’s really bright. I’m not talking about the sound, I’m talking about the image. Sometimes it’s really dark. Duh. You know, because they have a really dark bit for ages, for like five minutes and then it goes really light. That’s really commercial and really exciting. It’s kind of got a bit lost in music because everyone’s trying to make it slam out the fucking iPhone. Don’t get me started actually.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah, yeah. No, but also I would add if you romanticize working with tape, you never worked with tape with a hangover. You know because that was the whole thing about, like if you had to − and again the danger of the medium. You know, if you would rehearse, if you would re-arrange music. You would first record it on a quarter-inch tape, on a schnürsenkel [German for shoelace], and then you would rehearse your edits there and then later on you would do the edits on the actual quarter-inch tape.

Gareth Jones

No, on the actual…

Alexander Hacke

On the actual two-inch tape, which on one hand was easier to edit because it was two inches, that thick, and not like the quarter-inch, just that thick. But it would be the real deal, and if you fucked that up, then you would be in trouble. And basically I remember when I had to cut tapes, and I did that for quite a while before actual sampling was invented. That we would cut tape loops and stuff, and it could be a very shaky business. I also did a lot of tape editing for cassette tapes. I would open cassette tapes up and actual edit the tape in a cassette too. There’s nothing to be romanticized about that.

Gareth Jones

There’s nothing, no. There’s not, no, and that’s not, that’s really super challenging and that’s one of the joys of two-track. I mean, now any edit is possible, right?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Gareth Jones

Any edit is now possible, which is incredibly invigorating.

Alexander Hacke

Well yeah, and you would do cross-fades by actually cutting the tape diagonally. Right? Which was difficult too.

Hanna Bächer

It’s good that you mentioned the hangover, because there’s another kind of dynamic that I want to talk to you about, and that is sort of the dynamic in a group, playing in a band, and also between the producer and a band. Because the track we just heard, “Seele Brennt,” is on this album, I think usually refer to as being an album about a night on amphetamine and the hangover that goes with it, which is sort of the track that we just heard. How would you, as a producer, have stepped in that dynamic of a band who has been on drugs, as it's no secret either. Would you set up certain times? Would you think about that at all, or do things just happen? You laugh, which makes me assume that things just happened.

Alexander Hacke

You tell them, Jonesy.

Gareth Jones

No, I’m not laughing at… The idea of telling Neubauten what to do is absurd. Do you know what I mean? It’s just absolutely absurd. Anyway, I’m not that kind of producer. We were all a lot younger, OK? Don’t do drugs, kids, okay? I have to say that. Do not do drugs. But when I worked with, I don’t know who, I remember working with Neubauten very long hours, and I would like to work very long hours as well. I was already through my… I had a heavy amphetamine phase in London, which was not good for me. I was already through that. I had stopped using amphetamines because I thought, “Fuck, I’m never doing this again.” I nearly died, probably. So it’s not good. Because I’m excessive, you know? Anyway. I was working with them. There was some stimulants being taken, for sure. One of the really super positive things about it was, we’d work very late at night, and then usually, with a normal production, you’d work very late at night and the next day you’d rock up to studio at two in the afternoon or something, or one in the afternoon. And you’d wait around for hours for the band to turn up. But I remember working with you guys, and then, we’d work until three in the morning…

Alexander Hacke

And you were still there.

Gareth Jones

Yes! You were still there! Waiting at the studio door the next morning, at ten o’clock. Because you’d been on the town all night. That was incredible.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah. Let’s put it that way. You know, like that album, is not about amphetamine. It’s about never going to sleep and delusions of grandeur. Which boils down to the same thing, but let’s put it that way.

Gareth Jones

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously it’s super challenging. And you have to remember that it was a time when there was a lot more money available for people like us to play about in spaces like this, which is awesome privilege for us. Huge growth experience for us. We learned so much. We formed lifelong friendships as well. So it’s incredibly important to our personal story. But there was − because people still bought music, and music’s obviously now free, because people still bought music − there was more money available, even for a bunch of weirdos like us, to be able to have to work in a space like this. All I’m saying now, is a lot of the younger groups I work with now are very focused on getting the most out of a studio time. In a way we just thought, it was self-evident we could have three weeks in Hansa to make a... You know what I mean?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah.

Gareth Jones

It’s kind of different vibe. Then if we hadn’t finished after three weeks, someone would phone the record company and say, “Oh, can we have another week, please?,” or something. And they’d go, “Yeah, no problem.” That never happens to me now.

Alexander Hacke

And also, I cannot emphasize it enough that ritualistic aspect of things. Not only working with analog, when we talked about earlier, but also in general when you produce music, or when you produce art. As it is in drugs, you have to have the set and the setting and the same counts for making art, I think. You have to have the right setting, the right people around you, and it’s that ritualistic aspect where you say, “I do this now.” And in order to do this now, I prepare myself in this and that way. There can obviously be great substitutes for drugs that also give you that same sense of the presence or the present. Like, nowadays, I light some incense. I know, because I have lit that incense, this is the time when I am going to do certain things. I set the occasion for that. I remember Gareth fixing a masala chai for us in a different studio, in the Tritono Studio. You know? Back in the day. That was a preparation. Masala chai is Indian spice tea, and it needed to boil or cook for hours or days or something, you know? Gareth would put on, prepare this tea for us, and boil it for hours and hours. I remember feeling that this was appropriate preparation for something great to happen. It’s very similar. The drug culture might give you an entrance into this way of thinking, without necessarily having to stick to those stupid substances that make you do stupid things.

Hanna Bächer

I spoke to a musician the other day, a jazz player called [inaudible] Smith. He’s Muslim. He told me that in his belief, he’s taught to step out of the house in the morning with his right foot first. What he actually does when he goes on stage is stepping onstage with the right foot first, for the sole reason that that means he’s doing it intentful. He is being aware of like, now he is stepping onstage. We compared a lot like, the technology back in the days and nowadays. Would you think that that is maybe posing a problem for people who work in bedroom studios? It’s kind of hard to step from your bed to your desk intentful, if it’s right next to each other? How do you create intentfulness?

Gareth Jones

Through physical and mental preparation. It’s perfectly possible to do. To me, a recording studio is still a wonderful space and a great privilege and you need a wonderful space. You’ve got a great space in Berlin, haven’t you, with Boris? If a bunch of people want to play together, you need a space. For me, a recording studio is like a state of mind now, where the laptop is the recording studio. There was a transitional moment in my life where my laptop became as powerful as the hands and mix room. I remember it quite well. I thought, “Oh, look. Everything that I had in the hands and mix room is now on my laptop.”

Hanna Bächer

When was that?

Gareth Jones

Four years ago, maybe. That was kind of mind blowing in some way. Studios exist everywhere. The only thing we can take responsibility for is ourselves now. And say, “Am I in the right space to enter my studio and do my best work?” I can do that sometimes in my bedroom. I can do that sometimes somewhere else. In my little shed that I work in in London, or in a recording studio. I did a piece recently where we collaborated remotely with Hamburg, Berlin and London. On the final day, everyone was working and feeding into the final mix. That was incredible. There was no studio involved on my end. I mean, there was, my laptop. I was in a bedroom, essentially. I think physical and mental preparation is hugely important. That can be different for everyone. I write a journal. I do it almost every day. It’s kind of my meditation. It’s here, actually. It’s pretty precious to me. It’s kind of part of my life. Recently, I’ve started lighting a candle. So in the morning, I take my green tea − and it’s just old hippy shit really. Sorry. Anyway, I take green tea and I light a candle, and then I go deep into myself and my journal, and then magic happens. Then I emerge and then I go to my day, and then magic happens.

Alexander Hacke

Yeah. I mean, after all, magic, imagination, you know we’re just picturing the things. You know? Like we do that with a certain preparation. Yeah, also that laptop thing, a few years ago in 2003... That’s not a few years ago, that’s many years ago now. Anyway, I decided that I didn’t want to work in a studio anymore. I decided to make a road record, like a film director makes a road movie. There’s certain parameters for a road movie. A road movie doesn’t have a fixed script or a script with no fixed ending, mostly, oftentimes. It is done during a journey, obviously. And, it is done involving the people that you meet on that journey. I decided to make a record that way. That was a very similar process or a very different process like that also, that one has to apply in modern times. Because now I could work with all kinds of very different musicians that I would never get into the same room into Berlin because they were from completely different genres of music, or they would live in completely different corners of the world. But I could have them play all the same music and also, I would record something. That means I would collect something, pick up something at one end of the world and while I was carrying it to the next place, I was, you know, fucking about with it. Processing it. Turning it. So it would turn the actual event during the journey into a different event and present the next person with it, who would then add something to it. Which again, would process during the journey. And that all happened, obviously in my little piece of digital equipment.

Gareth Jones

That’s a really interesting way of working. And it’s one way of tricking yourself. I made a record with my friend Nick Hook last year, which is called Spiritual Friendship, and we realized very early, it started off as a complete experiment and it stayed in experiment. We realized very early for us, that time in our life, he lives in New York and I live in London. The only way we could do it was by being in the same room. So we committed to the process, and our time is very precious to us because we had no money basically and every day we spent working together we were not generating any money, and so we didn’t waste each other’s time. We constantly tried to be hugely productive, focused, centered, present. Phones off, please. Internet off. Please. Be present. And that worked for us. We heard the final track from the album in Nalepastrasse earlier on, but it wasn’t anything loud enough so don’t judge the record from that.

Hanna Bächer

I want to listen to one other track that we spoke about earlier, actually, “Kein Bestandteil sein,” off another album, the second that you did together, Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala.

Gareth Jones

That’s a snappy title.

(music: Einstürzende Neubauten – “Kein Bestandteil sein”)

Alexander Hacke

I can shortly explain what you are hearing. This was an experimental set-up that we did in this room also. Mufti is drumming on one of the Hansa chairs that they used, if you know old school chairs. He’s drumming on a chair, and we had set up an array of plastic tubes, maybe like 16 different plastic tubes, long plastic tubes that you get in the Walmart, in the home improvement store. And each with a microphone, and Gareth has leveled everything nicely, and Blixa was sitting at the mixing desk, turning the faders of each on and off, switching on the different plastic tubes and of course, every tube every different length has a different key. So he was actually playing a melody on the mixing desk while Mufti was just playing on the same chair. That’s what you’re hearing.

Gareth Jones

This is happening live in real time?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah. Some classic sociopath drumming there.

Gareth Jones

Of course, the lead vocal is not being done live there. We’re just talking about the tuning of the pipes.

Hanna Bächer

I remember a story that involved a gun. Is that actually on this track?

Alexander Hacke

No, that was… That’s on another track. There is a really funny story about when we recorded “Yü Gung,” feed my ego, or the track that involved... That was about, feed my ego, delusions of grandeur, staying awake, that kind of stuff. And it was the first track that involved sampling and a sequencer. So we recorded all these different... We recorded the blades that we use to edit the tapes before. We recorded the blades on different surfaces. Basically in the bathroom or the toilet, on the top of a toilet bowl, on cassette covers. We wanted this particular sound for the recording, I don’t know why. Andrew had a gun. He brought a gun to the session that would shoot blanks. As we were in the bathroom recording the blades, I thought it would be a really fun idea to shoot that gun, to give everyone in the control room a jump.

Gareth Jones

Because we’ve got the microphones on really loud, because we’re recording...

Alexander Hacke

Something very quiet.

Gareth Jones

Tiny sound, you know?

Alexander Hacke

Yeah. And I thought it would be such a great idea, just to shoot the gun. And so I thought, it might be even better if I open the toilet bowl and then shoot into the toilet bowl, which is... If you know something about acoustics and physics is the most stupid thing you can possibly do, because the sound of the bang gets bundled in the toilet bowl. It gets amplified, bundled and thrown back at you at least 10 times louder than the actual gun is already. So basically I shot in there, and my hearing just went off like that. And I couldn’t hear anything. The day was done for me. And the guys in the control room didn’t even notice that I was doing it because their equipment just shut down. It just went [click]. They didn’t even hear the bang. I was just coming in there and said like, “I know that was really stupid and I can’t hear anything.” And I walked out of the studio and I remember walking down Köthener Strasse to Anhalter Bahnhof and crying, thinking like, “I’m so stupid.” And I was so happy when the next day my hearing came back, finally.

Gareth Jones

We still experiment all the time. This is not just about the past. We still experiment all the time.

Alexander Hacke

Yes, let’s emphasize that.

Gareth Jones

Otherwise we can’t do anything new. And we never wanted to repeat ourselves. I never want to repeat myself. Alex, I think most... All the artists I know don’t want to repeat themselves. They constantly want to try and do something new. So we’re always experimenting. It’s kind of self-evident with the pipes, we’ve dreamed up a new experiment. The guys made an awesome installation in this room; there are some photographs somewhere. It was like a gallery of hanging metal and all kind of... It was amazing. And that was the process. No one knew exactly how that was going to turn out. But it is all about experimenting and I feel that’s really, it’s important to underline. Our lives have been lives full of creative experiments. Which means many of them turn out to be not usable. But that’s alright.

Hanna Bächer

Do you still approach sessions like this? Would you try to add experiments to a recording sessions even if you felt that the band wouldn’t be in a too experimental mood?

Gareth Jones

I don’t seem to attract artists who don’t want to experiment. Since we worked with people who are very interested in experimenting. Because that’s what keeps you fresh. It could be anything. It’s just a new experiment for a new team. Sometimes that can involve using three ideas that have been used in a different location by someone else. Then you put together and you go, “Oh look, if we did that and that and that and that. Wow, we’ve never done that, let’s try that!” I thought lots of the work that I did earlier in my career was completely original, but it probably wasn’t. It was just built on something that someone else... But it was new to me. And new to the people I was working with, and that’s super important. Because if you feel that you’ve made something truly new, that’s a wonderful thing. It’s like a new life, a little life is emerged into the world.

Hanna Bächer

You’ve talked about this building quite a bit with this being used as a recording room, and then sort of a mixing room somewhere. If we think about these last two Neubauten albums that you did here, how many people were actually involved? Like how many people had to work on this for it to work with so many different rooms?

Alexander Hacke

See, that’s the difference between those days and nowadays, too. Back then you had all these people involved that had to bear with us in a way. Nowadays, when I do things or when I go into a creative mode or when I work with Danielle or something like that, we have the ability to lock ourselves away and get deep into some experimentation and we don’t have to apologize to anyone afterwards. Back in the days here, it would be the poor tape operators that we tortured and once in a while I meet some of the old guys that used to work here. It’s like, “Oh yeah. I remember you.”

Gareth Jones

They love you, man. They love you.

Alexander Hacke

That’s the difference but that’s also what makes a great studio like this or like Conny’s studio, Conny Plank’s studio in Wolperath near Cologne, im Bergischen Land. There was also one of these cult places and I consider these places − and please forgive me for these semi-religious references − but I think this actually is a temple. This is what it was for us. And there are a few studios nowadays that are still around that would qualify, by my book, to be a temple of creation, like this place used to be. And therefore, I think it is important and this is what Gareth is trying to say, I believe, by reminding you all of the fact that these stories from the past are the stories from the past, but then what we do today is to transport that energy that we had back in those days. That we try to achieve that same intensity with different tools on different levels and we should never stop trying to do this. As soon as we start to work with any sort of formula and as soon as we start to not take any risks, we might as well do something else.

Gareth Jones

Yes!

Hanna Bächer

Because what you did a few years ago, it’s like you embarked on a journey. Well, a continuous journey a few years ago with your partner and your musical partner as well, Danielle. And you don’t have a home anymore, so you work from on the road. Do you do that to create that intensity, to create from that?

Alexander Hacke

Absolutely. I mean that was a transformational process, because in order to do that, it started out that we rented this house here in Berlin that contained our studios. We lived there in that building from 2003 to 2010, for seven years until we realized, this is ridiculous. We have this wonderful building that we rent, it even has a garden and everything. But we can’t have animals, we can’t really take care for the garden, and we can’t really enjoy the house because we travel all the time in order to pay the rent for it. Berlin was just not happening for us at the time. And we decided to go on an eighteen-month journey in order to relocate. In order to do that, we had to get rid of all our material belongings. That means we divided everything in three. One part went into the trash or we sold it. One part we sold, one part went in the trash, and one part we put in storage. But basically we had to get rid of everything, and that was a very transformational process. That’s a really great. I can recommend it. Try to get rid of your stuff and the truth will set you free, I tell you. Because you start to realize all the time you spent in earning the money to purchase the stuff that you then have to take care for, you’re responsible for that stuff. Once you get rid of it, you feel a lot better. But anyhow, we didn’t find anything after eighteen months − this was seven years ago − so for seven years now, we’ve been traveling the world and we learned a lot about the world and we learned a lot about our creative process and abilities by living that way.

Gareth Jones

I want to say something about connection, because you said, “How many people were involved in some of this work that we were privileged to do?” So that’s a big question. Because I think in society, there’s an idea that we’re disconnected from each other and we all live in selfish little worlds, right? So we worked in this room. Now this room was built by 200 guys, maybe? In 1920? I don’t know how many people built it.

Hanna Bächer

1913.

Gareth Jones

Whenever it was built, it’s an old room. That’s a lot of people already. People grew the food that we ate whilst we were making the album, people delivered strom und wasser [electricity and water], and people took the shit away from the toilets. So that’s a lot of people already. Someone made the mixing desk that we worked on. A big team of people, Neve in the seventies, probably 250 people in the company. Someone shipped the mixing desk from London to Berlin. Someone cabled it in. Someone built all the microphones, and on and on and on and on, man. It’s a huge network of human collaboration in each of these pieces. Now someone will say if you run Gamer you will say that the right of copyright belongs to the person who wrote the chords or the lyrics. But there’s a massive human endeavor goes into all this. I heard a wonderful spiritual teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, speak where he said when he wakes up in the morning and he washes his face in the basin... He’s a very present man, he’s ill now, he’s very present. So he’s aware of the fact that the water that he’s washing his face has fallen from the cloud, into the mountain and come all the way to his hand. So I’m just very aware of that. It’s a very big question. So how many people involved in recording “Seele Brennt”? I don’t know, 25 million or something? I don’t know. A lot of people were involved. It wasn’t just me and Alex and the band and the assistant.

Alexander Hacke

It’s a professional hazard. An occupational hazard, as you might put it, because we work in the field of vibrations. Music is vibrations. Science knows by now that we are all vibrations anyway so there’s no real separation between you or me or him or us. So we are all involved in the same thing.

Gareth Jones

Thank you. And I want to just amplify what Alex said, I did a similar thing. I have a little work room, studio in London that I did. Not the same thing as you did. It got too expensive for me. Same kind of time, maybe, 2005 or something like that. It just got too expensive. So I sold as much as I could and what I couldn’t sell, I put in the trash. Almost everything went, apart from some microphones that I bought in the eighties here that I thought, “These are beautiful, they don’t take up much space, I’m still making music, I’m gonna keep these.” Everything went. And then I rebuilt my toolkit with what I felt I needed. And that’s changed the vibrational energy in my workspace massively now because everything now in my workspace, I use. And before, a lot of it I was just like working to keep it repaired. So that if I wanted to use it, it would be working, you know what I mean? Everything changed. It was a really great process getting rid of shit and kind of rebooting.

Hanna Bächer

Before we maybe open it up to questions, in case there are any, I thought it would be nice to briefly speak about Diamanda Galás because this is an artist who’s gonna play here in Berlin in two days and who both of you knew in the ’80s and you, Gareth, worked with. You look shocked. You’re trying to get in there to change over to the… Who you I think must’ve met around the same time as Neubauten, is that right?

Alexander Hacke

Diamanda came to Berlin on a DAAD grant in the ’80s, which is Deutsche Akademishe Austauche Dienst. That means she actually got funded to live here for a while and to write music, and that’s how we met her and struck up a bit of a friendship during that time. And she worked with Gareth. We were also label mates. We are all on Mute Records at the time.

Gareth Jones

And that is still a thing and that’s a family thing. Being on the same label means something, even on a label as diverse as Mute Records. I think people are aware of the fact that… In fact, I met Diamanda because her brother, who’s now dead, was a gay man and she had struck up a friendship with another gay Mute artist, Andy Bell from Erasure. And Andy had said how much he enjoyed working with me and how sensitive I was to capturing the human voice or whatever. Something very nice. I love Andy, he’s a dear friend. So Diamanda thought, “Ah! That sounds interesting. Maybe that’s the dude I need to work on my next album.” So I met him. In fact, I met Diamanda through the label so that’s all I’m saying, underlining that, what you said. And obviously, she’s an awesome woman and I heard her play. The first time I heard her play in Berlin, I was like at the back of the hall somewhere and tears were just running down my cheeks because it was so emotionally cathartic, I suppose. It was very, very powerful. And we had the great, it’s just a pleasure and a privilege… This temple has been a bit desecrated actually, because now it’s turned into like a corporate meeting space. I know we’re all kind of artists and musicians here, so we’re not feeling too corporate. We’re feeling pretty cool. But, I’m sorry, but I feel the temple’s been desecrated. This is no longer the temple of sound.

Hanna Bächer

And one question, regarding that. Does it matter to you or did it matter to you that you were at one point not able to see the wall anymore from here? People refer to the studio and David Bowie said it in so many interviews that you could actually see the wall separating both parts of Berlin from here and that it mattered to him. Did it matter to you when it came down? Were you feeling that this space lost something?

Gareth Jones

Me personally? No. It didn’t matter to me, I don’t think I was working here. I think I’d moved on somewhere else. But also it was very desolate, wasn’t it? Potsdamer Platz was very empty.

Alexander Hacke

A wasteland, there was nothing there out there. You could watch... It went on for miles. There was nothing there. Which obviously was a great kind of view to have, like upstairs there’s these balconies and you could take a view.

Gareth Jones

It beats looking at the Sony Building or something, for me anyway.

Alexander Hacke

Absolutely. Even though I don’t think it’s too bad actually, that Sony Center. I think I kind of grew to like that architecture. And it’s the only cinema that plays only original version of movies.

Gareth Jones

There you go, that’s probably why I went. OK, I take it back.

Alexander Hacke

But the thing is, it obviously and we knew at the time when that happened, not when the reunification happened but when the wall came down that it would obviously be a game changer. It would obviously change our lives forever. And it did. And the city that I was born in and raised in does not exist anymore. I mean that’s just an incredible thing to be able to say for yourself. “Well, the city I was born in doesn’t exist anymore. No, it’s not there anymore, it’s a different city now.”

Hanna Bächer

Nor does the country, in a way.

Alexander Hacke

Nor does the country. That’s a thing. I was born in the West so the country does still exist but the city doesn’t exist. If I was born in the East, then the country wouldn’t exist either.

Gareth Jones

But that’s − and I know you get this − that’s a kind of thing ... Everything is change. Everything is change. I am change, you are change, she is change, we are all change. Life is change. So in a way, the city’s changed is all we’re saying. Of course it’s not the same. London’s not the same city that I was in. No way is it the same city. I guess West Berlin’s changed more, somehow. At this stage of its development. But you know, the British changed Dresden profoundly in the Second World War. Cities are change. The Germans changed the East End of London massively. It’s not the same city as it was, but then once you accept that life is change, we could say, “Well, actually, it is the same city.” I’m the same person that I was when I was two years old, but I’m not. But I am. Life for me is paradox, so I embrace paradox as I’ve got older. I’ve understood that it’s not black or white, its black and white. It’s not yes or no, very often, the most important things in my life, it’s yes and no. Particle and wave.

Alexander Hacke

Rock steady.

Hanna Bächer

Should we give these two a big round of applause?

[applause]