Manuel Göttsching

Jeff Mao

Today, we welcome a German music icon. He is a musician, bandleader, producer, and his work spans some of the most important and influential areas of modern music making. So won’t you please welcome Mr. Manuel Göttsching.

[applause]

Thanks so much for being here today.

Manuel Göttsching

Thank you.

Jeff Mao

Thank you. We heard a little bit of music in the background as you guys were entering the room. This was a recording from 1976 by Manuel, entitled “Shuttlecock.” It is an 18-minute version of this composition. This is by no means the longest piece of music that he’s worked on or recorded. You have music that is 18 minutes, 30 minutes, very famous piece which we’ll get to later, which is a little bit longer. I just wanted to ask you firstly, what is it about very expansive pieces that is so appealing for you as an artist and musician?

Manuel Göttsching

The length of the pieces, you mean?

Jeff Mao

Yes.

Manuel Göttsching

That’s very simple because my biggest aim in music is to improvise, so I just start playing and there’s no end. I start as long as I want to and as long as I think it has an expression or feeling or a red line or something. Then some moment, I think, ‘Well, it’s okay or it’s over,’ then I stop it. Yes, I had a lot of pieces recorded or played.

The first, Ash Ra Tempel concert here in Berlin, we played sometimes one hour, two hours. There’s a funny picture in this book; maybe some of you know it from Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler. There’s a picture where you see us, my partner Hartmut Enke on bass, me on guitar with long hairs like this — you don’t see anything. Maybe my nose is out. And Klaus Schulze on drums. There’s the line written under the photo is, “Ash Ra Tempel could play for hours without looking at each other.” We played sometimes, yes, three hours, four hours without talking or without stopping.

We had problems then to record, of course, because the length of a vinyl was 20 minutes per side or maybe 30 sometimes. If it’s not too much dynamics, you can do it. I did it with E2-E4. I had to do it. I started also to compose and to construct shorter pieces. I think the shortest one is less than three minutes that I did, and the longest one is one hour.

Jeff Mao

There’s a point at some point where you realize, the expression, ‘It’s complete.’ How does it start, then?

Manuel Göttsching

It depends what you do with it. Sometimes I compose pieces, then I know exactly what it is. Then I see... I decided after the possibilities of the composition of the tonality, of the chords, the harmonies — and sometimes I don’t do it. Sometimes I just start playing on and I don’t think much about composition. Improvisation is standard basic thing, and then of course there’s no time limit.

Many pieces I did are a mixture of both; There’s a structure for composition, but as a possibility to improvise over this structure, over this some harmony or some cords or some rhythms and then sometimes it’s longer, sometimes not.

Jeff Mao

I wonder if you could just take us back a little bit to your beginnings. Where did you grow up, and what were your early musical memories?

Manuel Göttsching

Well, I grew up in former West Berlin, in the western part of the city of Berlin. My first of very early influences were of course, through the radio. In the 1950s, there were the radio station by American Allied forces, Brit Allied Forces, BFBS, AFN, also the French ones. When I was a child, of course I listened to that. I got somehow the radio. My mother was interested in music; she loved operas, so I listened to Italian operas: Verdi, Puccini. I love those Bel Canto style.

Of course, I was a bit too young in the ’50s, so I didn’t get so much of rock & roll. Of course, I remember a little bit, the first Elvis and so, but the more influences came in the 1960s. When I also started to be active in music, I started studying classical guitar, so I became interested in classical guitar pieces. Of course there was the pop music; started with American music, like Motown sounds. I listened in the radio, but this was also the Rolling Stones and the British blues bands and British guitar players, so I switched from classic guitar to electric guitar. In the beginning, I didn’t know anything about electric guitar. I really had to learn it as a new playing, because it has not very much to do with classic guitar playing. Yeah, that were the early...

Jeff Mao

When you started your first band, what was the main influence? Was it blues or was it American rhythm and blues, or what?

Manuel Göttsching

The first band was at school; this was just for fun. We started to cover some songs that we liked. We were 13, 14 years old, but this was already with my later partner, with my partner over the years with whom I finally founded Ash Ra Tempel, Hartmut Enke. We played some Rolling Stones, we played some Beatles, we played some Who, some what was the popular music and that was just for fun. We played at some school parties.

The funny thing is, I was the singer in the band I didn’t play guitar. I convinced my mother to give me a guitar for Christmas, an electric guitar, to buy one. I really couldn’t play anything with it. I wanted to become the drummer because I liked to play drums. My partner Hartmut said, “No, you have to play guitar. You have to.” I said, “No!” The compromise was, I’m the singer.

The problem was, I didn’t know any very much English at the time, so I tried to make sounds that sounded a little bit English, like that what I heard on the radio. [laughs] Well, it was fine and nobody cared. Later, sometimes I was really shocked when I read the original lyrics, and what I understood at the time was completely different. [laughs]

Jeff Mao

When did it transition away from doing something that was so heavily influenced by the UK bands that were blues-inspired, toward something more of an original creation, the things that were coming out of this country, in particular?

Manuel Göttsching

That was very, very soon after one year. We just were tired of playing cover songs. It was just a little boring. We had a choice, either to make it more professional... we really didn’t want it, and so we really thought about how to play our own music or our own style or just how to create music.

One important thing was the 16th birthday of Hartmut. He got a vinyl from Blue Cheer playing the “Summertime Blues,” which was more hard rock than blues in a way, and we were fascinated by this. We thought, ‘Oh, we try this type of style.’ At the same time, another influence, which was an influence in Germany and in German music, it was free jazz. Although we didn’t like jazz, the impact was free, to make free music. This could be free rock, free folk, free whatever. Free classic, maybe.

We were fascinated to create sounds and to make free music, freestyle without any structures of music rules, just starting and playing. That was in 1968. We found a third member for it. We made one concert. I remember we had to leave the stage after 10 minutes because the young kids, they wanted to hear some cover bands who play The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and not this. We were a bit too early at 14, 15.

We switched a little bit to playing blues themes, but trying to improvise at the same time, trying to combine composition and improvisation a little bit in the style as group Cream were doing it on some legendary albums where they play short blues themes and they start improvising for a half an hour, and then finally back to the theme. Yeah, we liked that.

Later, the time was right to switch again to completely free improvisation, and we founded Ash Ra Tempel. We played exactly like the thing before, we called ourselves before, Steeple Chase Bluesband, [but] we didn’t play blues. We used some elements of it but tried to keep the freestyle of improvisation and using some blues themes. For starting to compose or to build up your own ideas with music, blues is a fantastic start because it’s very simple and you can... For a start, it’s a good thing. Then you can develop something else out of it.

Jeff Mao

Just out of curiosity, what free jazz artists or compositions were you listening to at that time as an influence? Or was it just the idea of free jazz as a concept?

Manuel Göttsching

It was more the idea because we didn’t like jazz. Jazz was for me, it was old skiffle bands, or people playing some swing at brunches on Sunday morning. [laughs] We didn’t like that, we thought it’s completely outdated. But there was a nice place in Berlin called Jazz Gallery, a small club. We quite often went there and saw people. There were also blues musicians coming there and playing, so we got a little bit influence, but not really from the free music, free jazz scene. I think, I don’t hear records or I don’t remember that, but the idea was fascinating.

Jeff Mao

It’s more of a conceptual thing. That’s interesting, though, because African American identity is associated with free jazz; this is very revolutionary music. But what you’re creating with Ash Ra Tempel and all the other bands that are emerging at this time was also something that had very specific roots in that era in coming out of what you’ve described as a vacuum. I wonder if you could just elaborate on that a little bit. What were you guys facing culturally? This cultural vacuum that you’ve referred to in the past? Can you describe what that is for everybody here?

Manuel Göttsching

You have to go back to Berlin maybe in the 1920s. 100 years ago, Berlin was a quite lively city with very interesting cultural scene with music and theater, cabarets and literature, and very experimental. There were some people from the Dada movement, there was Walter Mehring and George Grosz for example, they composed a piece for a knitting machine, and a typewriter that performed it.

There was another composer, [Stefan] Wolpe. I found out he worked with 10 gramophone players with different speeds. He played Beethoven symphonies. So, nothing new in the ’90s! [laughs] It’s been there. It was really interesting and very lively thing. All this was cut down, all this was killed and gassed and some people who were lucky could flee or emigrate.

After 1945, there was nothing left; there was this what you call vacuum. Berlin was not only... the houses were ruins, but the culture was ruined. It had to be built again. People were very careful because people felt guilt and, ‘I don’t want to be too loud ... ‘ they started with German schlager again. This was, of course, German schlager, maybe German songs, very simple text lyrics about love and about somebody that is in Italy.

Jeff Mao

It was the popular music of that day.

Manuel Göttsching

That was the popular music. But there still was jazz, so the jazz scene was very lively in Berlin before the war, and jazz was of course forbidden during the Nazi time. Or they tried to Germanize jazz in a way, which was ridiculous. Of course, people wanted to listen to the real jazz or swing or what was popular. After the war there were also some new younger musicians who tried to keep up with the jazz scene and try. But there was a gap; they couldn’t listen, they couldn’t follow the jazz development for five years or even more. It was a bit outdated.

Then there were orchestras, big bands, the radios. Every radio station had his own or several big bands and dance orchestras. This was the music scene, and not very progressive or creative or inventive.

Then came the ’50s. The rock & roll, there were three, four singers in Germany, like Peter Kraus, Ted Herold, who played a very shy version of rock & roll, which was also not so attractive. It was German Schlager, and it was only in the ‘60s, it started, beginning of the ’60s, of course with influences from America, from Britain. It started with protests and folk music with Bob Dylan, and then protest and folk music in Germany grew in the first half of the ’60s.

And pop music. There came the Rolling Stones. This was also new, this was protest, this was not nice lyrics, this was, “Satisfaction, I can’t get no... ” This was new. Probably inspired the new generation, the young generation in Germany to create something new. There was German protest, folk music... There was a complete new scene developing, and very experimental; there was an audience, people wanted to hear that. So it was concerts and welcome and it was a very creative lively years, I think.

Jeff Mao

Well, let’s hear a little something from the first Ash Ra Tempel album. This is a track entitled “Amboss.” We’re not gonna play the whole thing, but we’ll play a little piece of it. This is from 1971, Ash Ra Tempel.

(music: Ash Ra Tempel – “Amboss” / applause)

Jeff Mao

That was “Amboss,” from Ash Ra Tempel’s first LP, 1971.

Manuel Göttsching

That’s a perfect example for what I tried to explain with freestyle, free music. That’s how we improvised for hours. My biggest fear was to record or to make too much record production, so I wanted to keep it as much as possible I would like, this is exactly like we played live our concerts. We only had to reduce it for 20 minutes. We just played and we took some parts. But it’s quite close to that how the live concerts had been at the time.

We had problems, technical problems. Not with the music but to record it, because we couldn’t find a proper studio for that. We tried. The company we started with. It was a small label, Ohr music production, we can maybe talk later about this. The owner of the labor was working together with a very popular guy in the schlager [scene] and they had a small office within a big building of the schlager company, Meisel. They had a small studio there, demo studio for schlager singer. We went there and put all our big huge amplifiers and cabinets there and we played 10 minutes and then we had to stop because the whole building was shaking. The secretary said, “Oops, with can’t work anymore.” [laughs]

We went to another studio, to a quite professional studio at the time in West Berlin called the Audio Studio. There was an engineer who didn’t understand anything. He just put the faders in some position and then he left the control room and usually we started quite low. Then it became louder and louder and louder, and of course, after 10 minutes it was so loud that everything, the company tapes were only distorted, and the producer said, “I don’t pay that.”

Finally, we had to go to Hamburg. We were lucky to meet the legendary engineer, Conny Plank. At the time he was quite young, and he later became a legend in music producing and engineering in Germany. He was the right man, he loved it and he said, “Wow! Yes! We need some fades in here and we need here and yes ...” he added this. He was really playing as a fourth member with us when we recorded it. That was really a fantastic production.

Jeff Mao

This is music that was created to expand one’s consciousness, or that’s how it’s been described. Was that the intention?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes, that’s... well, no. I wouldn’t say so. This was the common promotion in that time because music had to have some meaning and you had to explain, why do you make music and what’s the reason and what do you want to express with your music, so you had to find something. It as my partner Hartmut. He was great in that and he explained to everybody that we find new consciousness and whatever. [laughs] I didn’t care, I just wanted to play music!

Jeff Mao

But I mean, this leads to an interesting point as far as just how people, like you say, are marketing or labeling music. Even in a place like Berlin at the time, it was a fledgling industry? It was an industry that was building back up? You had said that there’s no music industry really when you started here. And yet, there’s still this compulsion, this need to have to be able to market something or make it tangible in a way for people because this is so experimental.

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. Yes. You’re right. That was ... the industry was schlager music. That was a big industry, but for that type it was nothing compared to Britain or England or America where there was a complete industry for the beat music, for the rap music. There was an agent. There was a manager. There was a label. There was a publisher. And in Germany these bands or groups and musicians at the time, they were completely doing all by themselves. Officially, the management was forbidden in Germany. You had to ask to go to the state department to ask for a job as a musician. It was crazy.

Jeff Mao

So, you couldn’t actually have a music manager?

Manuel Göttsching

No. Nope. We had to do it ourselves. So, it was a road manager, manager or graphic design or the photographer was at the same time the manager. You did it all yourself. So, this was very unprofessional, but on the other hand a very creative atmosphere was happening. Because people were so ... There was a lot of crazy things happening. A lot of things were completely stupid, but some really nice things emerged because of this nonprofessional behavior.

There were a lot of reviews. Especially, about this first album that people said this is music. Like for example, Iggy Pop would have loved to do at the time, but he couldn’t because the industry would not make it possible to record something like this. That’s probably true. That’s why some strange things happened in Germany. [laughs] But, because of the social and political situation at the end of the ’60s, of course, everybody was highly politically, how to say it, I don’t know the word now.

Jeff Mao

Motivated or?

Manuel Göttsching

Motivated, yes. You had to have your opinion. You had to have a statement. That’s also in music. It had to have a meaning and it had to have a social meaning and a social, political meaning. This was very important. There were many political groups like Ton Steine Scherben or Floh de Cologne. There were protest songs. On the other hand, there was the hippie movement and which also came to Germany. The Kommune, Amon Düül for example, emerged at the time.

Jeff Mao

Were you a part of this commune scene at all?

Manuel Göttsching

No. I wasn’t. [laughs]

Jeff Mao

Not trying to live that way? No.

Manuel Göttsching

No. I was a bit to young. I mean I was 16. I was 17. I was 17 when we found the band Ash Ra Tempel. I was 18 when we recorded the album. The first album. I still went to school. I lived with my parents. Hartmut was the same. So, we still made it, yeah, for fun. We didn’t really think of making a musical career. We loved the music. We had success. Of course, we liked it. So, we continued. But, we didn’t think very much of the next 10 years or so.

Jeff Mao

OK. So, speaking of like labels and genres and what not, so there’s a term you mentioned before. It begins with a K. Ends with autrock When did you first hear this term that was this genre name that was assigned to bands like yourself, Ash Ra Tempel, Can, Kraftwerk. Did you reject this name, this grouping or did you just think...

Manuel Göttsching

Which name?

[laughter]

Jeff Mao

I’m not going to say it. Because I know that it’s contentious for some people. So...

Manuel Göttsching

No. No. No. It’s funny. So, of course. Do you mean krautrock? No it’s a funny name. I think it’s quite appropriate a name. Because, yeah, it has something German and kraut is also something mixed up. So, it’s not really organized. So, it has something and it’s not really rock. So, of course, in the beginning many musicians, especially musicians in Germany who took it very serious, to play serious rock music, they were of course, offended. But, I think if you look at this. Who is now or when you remember the time. When you remember the bigger names, this is not really... this is so diverse this music. There’s Amon Düül, this electronic scene. There’s a jazz scene. The free jazz scene, for example. There’s some like Embryo. They played some early world music. There are folks songs like Witthüser & Westrupp and Hölderlin. All these bands that were... Can was a kind of jazz rock band. So, it’s...

Jeff Mao

Quite diverse.

Manuel Göttsching

Quite diverse and so it’s not ... Yeah, I think it’s quite appropriate today to call it like that. And so, I don’t have any problems with it.

Jeff Mao

You recorded an album with Timothy Leary. How did that come to happen and can we show image number five, please? So, this is you guys in studio.

Manuel Göttsching

This is not me, no. [laughs] That’s Tim Leary. That’s Sergey Golovin, that’s Walter Wegmüller and that’s Brian Barritt.

Jeff Mao

OK. So, there is Timothy Leary. How did this project come in to being?

Manuel Göttsching

We we recorded our second album, Schwingungen and we wanted to include some lyrics for the next album, as well. We had a crazy singer for the second album, Schwingungen, which was nice experiment. It was a bit, yeah, very adventurous. [laughs] So, we used a text we had on the cover of our first album. We had a text from Ginsberg from “Howl,” an excerpt-

Jeff Mao

Allen Ginsberg? OK.

Manuel Göttsching

Allen Ginsberg. Yeah. So, we thought maybe we could... It was difficult with text. We had to make something in English because we thought of being an international music or musicians. And so, we didn’t want to make something in German. So, we thought maybe we can win Allen Ginsberg to work with him or something. But, Allen Ginsberg was no where to find. Nobody knew where he was. And our producer, the label, owner, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, he came one day and said, “Well, Timothy Leary is in Switzerland. We can make a contact.” I didn’t know at all who was Timothy Leary. I had never heard of him before. [laughs] But, my partner, Hartmut, was really enthusiastic, “Wow, Timothy Leary. That’s great.”

Jeff Mao

He’s a fugitive at this time, right? He’s a fugitive at this time. He’s escaped the United States and escaped from prison.

Manuel Göttsching

He escaped from prison. Yeah. He was ... Tim was working as a experimental... He did experiments with LSD as a neurologist and a psychotherapist at Harvard University. This was the time when LSD became very popular. Not only as a party drug in the United States. And so, he was thought of being a very dangerous for the youth and I think it was Nixon who called him one of the state enemies number one and they tried to get him out of business. And so, he was caught because the rules of the laws of the drugs are different in each state in the United States. Differ very much. I don’t know if... maybe it’s still today. But, it was at the time. But, there’s no really border between, I don’t know, Ohio and Nebraska. You don’t know when you leave one and so. They just found a simple trick. He went somewhere across the country and he was caught with 10 grams of marijuana or so. But he was sentenced to 10 years.

To get him out, yeah, to get him away. He escaped from the prison. That’s a funny story. The prison because when they had to choose he was going to, they had to make a test with him. How dangerous he is? How big is he? Danger of escaping or whatever. So, Tim Leary was very amused when he went to the test to find the paper. He read the questions. Then he found out that he developed this test as a neurologist, as a psychotherapist. [laughs] So, he knew exactly what to answer. And he came to a relatively open prison. Then his former wife managed somehow to get in contact with the Black Panthers to free him and to help him to escape. And they helped him to leave the country. He went to Algeria, where the leader of the Black Panthers was resident.

Jeff Mao

Eldridge Cleaver.

Manuel Göttsching

Eldridge Cleaver. But, they didn’t get along together because Tim Leary was a very easy guy. He was not interested very much in politics. And Eldridge Cleaver was a very hard liner and military. They were not really good together. And Tim Leary felt a little bit like another prison there. And then somehow he moved. I think he found this guy. The English guy, Brian Barritt, and they moved somehow to Switzerland. Because in Switzerland he had some friends. Political friends who cared that he was not delivered, how to say it, to the United States. So, he lived there for about one year. And in that time, we met. Hartmut went there with a producer and they made a concept. And funny thing, by the way, Switzerland was, of course, in Switzerland LSD was invented...

Jeff Mao

So, he went to the motherland basically.

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah. But the record is not about LSD. Tim Leary was writing a book about seven levels of consciousness. That is something that ... a theory. I don’t even know if it’s his theory. Maybe it’s an older one. But, he wrote about it. And theory of different stage of levels each human being is passing through. More or less. So, we took this idea of the seven levels, as a basic structure, as a basic concept for the album. And, then we went back to Berlin and we had some more guest musicians for the album. And then, we recorded. And somehow we went to Switzerland and recorded for some days.

Jeff Mao

And you still perform some of this material today with other musicians?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. That’s another story. That’s a funny story.

Jeff Mao

Well, let’s hear a little bit of Ash Ra Tempel with Timothy Leary. This track... Well, it’s a space side and a time side. So, it’s a piece of space side from 1973, I think it is?

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah. The recording was in summer of ’72 and released in ’73.

(music: Ash Ra Tempel & Timothy Leary – “Power Drive” / applause)

Jeff Mao

OK. So, you still performing this material today with different musicians? And that’s Timothy Leary on vocals though, right?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. Initially, he was supposed only to write the lyrics and to speak some words. Then he was so enthralled by this happening that he just started to sing. He could sing. It worked. And we left it like this. It was a quite chaotic production in Switzerland. We went to the studio. The most modern, advanced studio in Bern, in the small city of Bern. At the time, we brought the engineer from Cologne, from our other studio. He started to rebuild the studio completely and to install the monitor was different and to make this. We were only hanging around. We lived all together for some days in a nice house up the hills. Yeah. It was nice thing. So, we recorded some material. But we went later in the studio to mix it again and in Cologne.

So, Tim, he was not allowed. He couldn’t come to Cologne. So, he sent his assistant, Brian Barritt, to Cologne. And Brian was always playing it over the phone to Tim in Switzerland. “Yeah. Great. We need more synthesizers. We need more sound. We need to hear more space. More cosmic.” So, it became, well, in the end, very chaotic. But, it was a nice experience and after all I think musically, it’s well maybe not so inventive. But I liked it very much that it finally happened. And that’s a good thing.

And the funny thing now is, is that some years ... three years ago, 2015, I was invited to Melbourne, Australia for a festival to for a solo performance. And the woman who created the festival proposed that I would probably play with some other musicians to perform some session or some workshops or so. I don’t like those kind of sessions. So, my wife proposed, “Why don’t you play some old Ash Ra Tempel?” I just said, “Great idea.” And they looked for some, they proposed some musicians, this was Ariel Pink from Los Angeles, Shags Chamberlain who played with Ariel Pink, and Oren Ambarchi, who is Australian. He’s well-known for his solo work, solo experimental guitar. And he also played with Keiji Haino. And he’s doing a lot of things.

I didn’t know any of the three. And so, I thought, “OK. Let’s try.” I got in contact with them by emails. And I wrote, “Well, do you know some? Do you need some material? Do you know some scores? Maybe some lyrics?” They said, “Hahaha we know it. We know everything. We are so familiar with this album.” I proposed maybe Timothy Leary for singing with Elliot. And some of the second album, Schwingungen. So, we made a mixture of a one hour program of these two albums. And, yeah, we met only one day before in Australia. We had one day rehearsal and it was perfect. It was like if we had played it the day before. And later, we brought it out as a record last year. When I heard the recordings, I thought it sounded perfectly like the original. It could be some lost demo tape or something like that. [laughs]

Jeff Mao

Well, I mean this is a recurring theme for you in a way because you are constantly revisiting, even though of some of this material is older, you are reinventing and re-performing and re-presenting this material quite a bit in recent years. I actually want to skip ahead a little bit because I want to get to some of your solo recordings. And yesterday, this idea of reduction came up in terms of just stepping back and maybe having less being available. Having things less available to you in simplifying and how that can be an effective tool as a creative person. When you did the first solo record, Inventions for Electric Guitar, Ash Ra Tempel had dissolved. Did you feel that that was a necessary thing to do something entirely on your own?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. It was not immediately, but it developed within one year or so. Ash Ra Tempel was basically a project from my partner, Hartmut, with me for many years from the very first school cover band until, yeah, Timothy Leary and then we made a nice fourth album called, Join In, which is also a improvised album from the beginning to the end. But, very soft and a bit relaxed and it’s not aggressive at all. It’s very different from the first one.

And then he quit. He didn’t want to play anymore. He didn’t want being professionally a musician. He wanted to keep his mind free and he wanted to play when he wants to play and not because it’s a record production and not to make concerts. It just didn’t work anymore. And so, I thought of continuing... I like the idea of a band or group. I tried with various musicians. But it didn’t work that much in this way. And I was not so happy with it. And somehow one year later, I came up with the idea of a solo album. And a little bit I was influenced by the... I found out about minimalism, minimal music, which became popular the beginning of the 1970s in Germany. And I heard some Terry Riley and Steve Reich at festivals in Berlin. And it was, especially Terry Riley, influenced me as a musician. Not so much maybe as a composer, but I saw him playing and I was really attracted how he performed and how he played. He was very fluent. Very great keyboard player. And just with a simple tape delay, he made incredible sounds and all this minimal structures, he played and played. He could do it very simple, technical equipment. And so, I thought why not. I think I can play a little guitar. So, why not? I should try it with a guitar. [laughs] I took that what I had, which was just one guitar. And I used a tape recorder for a delay. And I used the minimalism. I used the structure of the delay as to keep with this rhythm, to keep the structure of the repetitive patterns.

Another idea was to use the only guitar as a sound source. But this is also a minimalistic approach in a way because you’re just reduce. You take one, two, three, elements and concentrate on this and don’t do anything else. And don’t have to overdubs and more drums and more whatever. I tried to make the best out of these elements.

Jeff Mao

Well, let’s listen to a little bit of a track called, “Echo Waves,“ from Inventions for Electric Guitar.

(music: Manuel Göttsching – “Echo Waves” / applause)

Jeff Mao

So, that’s just the electric guitar, multi-tracked with delay and that’s it?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes.

[laughter]

Jeff Mao

You mentioned to me in an email recently that you’re re-presenting this with an orchestra or you have presented this with an orchestra, as well. So, it’s scored. How much of this was scored going into this? How much of this was just, you know, improvisation?

Manuel Göttsching

No. The original is for four guitars. So, I’d have four voices. And I performed it once in Japan with four guitar players with Elliott Sharp from New York, with Steve Hillage from England and a good old friend of mine from the Virgin days. And a young Chinese player, [unintelligible] who is very popular in Beijing with several groups. And just now, I’ve found, for some years, I’ve found a great band in Denmark. Six young musicians. Guitar players, experimental players called Circlen. They play experimental guitar music. They used to play in a circle and the audience is in the middle. So, they have a kind of surround effect. Very interesting idea. And they were fascinating. Of course, they knew the piece and they liked it and I invited them for a concert at the Szczecin Philharmonic, there’s a great new philharmonic. We performed it there. So, it’s not an orchestra. It’s just a group of guitar players because it’s a guitar piece. Of course, I can not play it alone to have the four voices, so we can play it with maybe six voices.

Yes, I wrote down the scores. I have here the actual album, the new album, the vinyl album. We have made some two years ago. I put on the backside the original score that I had written for it. I had to try. I tried to find a solution to write down the delays. The initial note, the first, the second, the third delay in a kind of three dimensional way. So, yeah, that was a funny idea. So, of course, I had written it down. But, I wrote it down later. So, at first I played it and then I wrote it.

Jeff Mao

Is there something that you want to show us with...

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah. I can demonstrate it probably a little better on the guitar. For the delay I used at the time, I used a tape recorder: Reworks A77, which was a state of the art tape recorder. And the length of the delay was produced by the speed of the tape and by the distance between the recording and the playback hat. So, it was a fixed delay. Later, I got a modified model of this tape machine where I could change the speed and then I could change the delay time. But for this at this point, I had just a delay of 370, around 370 milliseconds. I make just a little demonstration for it so that you hear how it has been done.

[picks up guitar]

This is just, that was delay and then I used two different tempi for two different pieces. The first, “Echo Waves” is in a triolic tempo and the second piece Pluralis is in a straight four-four tempo. This is like the first one.

[plays guitar]

That’s the initial part. The first guitar starts with that. Then, there’s a second guitar, which plays a bit more and on the higher level.

[plays guitar]

Then, I add a third, which was more bassline and then one voice is more, how do you say it, it’s more sound. I used a volume pedal, nothing more. That was it. I created this first piece, the second piece, all the other piece and the other tempo. This is slow. This is like this.

[plays guitar]

This played for, this is the basic theme, this was played for, I had to play it for 20 minutes. There’s no editing. I prepared it in realtime because I didn’t want to cut the tape. It was the first recording I did in my own small studio with a tape recorder. I had to work for it for a while to get it on tape because technically, it was not so easy. You have to concentrate for 20 minutes and if you have some scratch or some thing at 18 minutes, you start again from the beginning. [laughs]

I had some problems with my refrigerator in the kitchen. He was producing clicks from time to time when he switched off and on, so I had to turn it off. [laughs] That’s how I managed. It took three months or so, the whole thing, to record it all in all. It’s a very meditative thing. You get into a kind of trance maybe when you play that for 20 minutes.

There’s another nice thing that I can show you because I wanted to make every sound just with [the] guitar. I tried something with, to show it to you. [reaches in his pocket] This is a piece of metal that I used. This is originally from a slide guitar, from Hawaiian guitar and I used it as a kind of bow or like, playing the strings like this. To get a kind of, yeah, how to say it, string sound or not the percussive sound of a guitar. The one thing you can do is you work with a volume pedal. It’ll take the attack away. This was the other one that I tried for the second piece, “Quasarsphere,” which is the shortest piece. It goes something like this.

[plays guitar]

That’s an example.

[applause]

Jeff Mao

You mentioned Terry Riley and minimalism and that being an influence on you, especially with “Echo Waves” and obviously with things that we’re going to talk about next. I wonder if just African-American music and this sort of repetition being a thing, an innovation of James Brown and other people, was that an influence on you at any point?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. We had a review from the first Ash Ra Tempel that somebody has written, “Ash Ra Tempel sounds like the James Brown Band on acid.” [laughs]

Jeff Mao

They were on acid too actually, at various points.

Manuel Göttsching

Of course. Over the years, everything, but it goes back from all my music. It goes back to my studies in classical guitar. What I love to play from these old ancient composers like Cavalli, they all wrote pieces called “Etude,” which is just pieces for rehearsal. They’re not really considered as big compositions, but they’re just for rehearsing your fingers, you right fingers, your left hand and you can, more or less, you can improvise with these passages. You just play very simple chords. You change from one chord to the other one. It’s just for, yes, for rehearsing in a way, for rehearsing your physical training. There, you can start, yeah, you can start. It gives you possibilities to improvise because you can interchange it, exchange it. It doesn’t matter. It’s only for training and it’s also a repetitive thing. It’s just small patterns that you repeat and repeat and repeat to train it. Maybe I was already in that part, influenced.

Of course, it was the music, the popular music like Motown. Especially the long pieces, I always loved. I remember I was fascinated from this piece by the Rolling Stones, “Going Home,” which was crazy, about 11 minutes long. Nobody at the time made pieces of 11 minutes. I really liked that idea.

Jeff Mao

Alright. We’re going to play something now. I guess I should introduce it, but actually I’m not going to introduce it. This is something that we’re going to talk about a little bit, but for now, we’re just going to play some of the music.

(music: Manuel Göttsching – E2-E4 / applause)

Jeff Mao

Okay. That of course was E2-E4, recorded in 1981. Sound pretty good, right? Sounds okay?

Manuel Göttsching

Mm-hmm. [laughs]

Jeff Mao

Apart from the music itself, there’s obviously, there’s a legend involved in how this was created. Maybe some of the people in this room know the story behind it. Maybe some of them don’t. I think it might be a good idea just to retell a little bit of that and how it came to be.

Manuel Göttsching

There are five, six, seven years between Inventions and E2-E4 and a lot of things happened in between. The next step after Inventions was that I had enough of guitar sounds. I always want something new. I do it only once and then, when I’m happy with it, I don’t want to repeat it. I think of something new or different. I started working on keyboards and composing for keyboards and that was my next solo album then, New Age of Earth, which gave me also a worldwide contract with Virgin Records in England. It was a good...

Jeff Mao

This is a very warm recording, ambient in places and using the synthesizer as you said.

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. Partly. It’s very much composed as the first track, “Sun Rain” is very much minimalistic composed, kind of a rondo. The second is more kind of a blues, but electronically. It was with synthesizers and different things.

At the same time, I started to build more in my studio. I got more equipment. I got more synthesizers. I got a mini Moog. First, I got a ARP Odyssey and sequencers and mini Moogs. Yeah, just the studio equipment grew. But I also recorded some, I worked again with two musicians under the name Ashra. I wanted to keep that up. I recorded two albums, Correlations and Belle Alliance with these guys. I recorded another solo album, Blackout in ‘77.

Then, I started performing with, not playing guitar, but as a soloist only with sequencers, synthesizers and keyboard. A good friend of mine at the time, she was a very well-known figure in the fashion business in Berlin, and she made very interesting shows at the time, very multimedia shows, which was something special that nobody else did with performance art, with films and of course, electronic music was something very new.

I started performing to the shows, playing just live, improvising for 60, 70, 80 minutes. So, I got a good training as well in this. Yeah, this finally led, then to the recording of E2-E4 in way. I was on a tour. I was invited by my old partner Klaus Schulze for a guest on his tour and when I came back, I was a little bit in a live feeling, so some weeks later, I just recorded it, in the same way as I have had recorded over the years many, many times, but this time, somehow it was something special and it worked with no problems, technical problems, no crackles, no I don’t know.

In fact, I didn’t intend to record it as a new album. It was just a session and I recorded, just on a two track machine. In the beginning, there was something. The rhythm was somehow different from what I tried, so I nearly wanted to stop it, but somehow I said, “No, no. Let’s see what happens.” I’m lucky today. [laughs]

Yeah, it sounds very easy, so it was very relaxed and maybe this is what it sounds like, but in fact, it was some years’ work to come to this point and some years’ experimental training at concerts and performances. It was just a great moment.

Jeff Mao

But, when you’re recording this, this is December of ‘81 when you record this, what, I guess my question is: What is the emotion that’s fueling it, because you can talk about being in a trance-like state and maybe that is emotive in some way, but I feel like the reason this piece of music has lived on and transcended genre and places in the world is because there is something very emotive about it and I just wonder if there was, besides just sitting down and playing if there was some emotion that was behind this that you recall?

Manuel Göttsching

No. No. Just playing. I wanted to play and so I did it in the same way I did many sessions in my studio before and I had many recordings of 30 minutes. Sometimes, it’s only 10 minutes and something was happening and I stopped it. This one just worked for one hour. No, not really a special mood. The only thing is that I felt in a bit, yeah, I thought it’s a kind of live atmosphere, live, me alone live in my studio without audience. [laughs]

Jeff Mao

I guess maybe that’s what it is, is just the feeling of intimacy that’s still there.

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah. I didn’t change anything afterwards. I didn’t do any overdubs. I didn’t do any edits. I didn’t change any, not even equalizing or something like that. I just left it as it was. I was a bit surprised actually when I finished and then I said, “Oops. What was this?” I listened to it and thought, “This is quite perfect.”

Actually, I was working on another program. I was working on a new solo album. But my idea was to make something more orchestra, more composed. Then, suddenly, I had this tape and thought, “What to do?” All my friends said, “You must release it and you must ...” Yeah, OK.

I went to London. I still had this contract with Virgin Record, but it was open. There was an option to continue or not to continue. Virgin, at the time, had developed from a very small independent label to a really big company, so I thought they would’ve made it maybe. They would’ve bought it, but it would have been thrown in a corner and forget it. Two chords for one hour and not even formatted a for a record, for vinyl, so what to do with it? I thought it’s not the right thing. I played it to Richard Branson. I remember when I was seeing him at his houseboat and he had a new baby in his arm and the baby was falling asleep and he said to me, “Manuel, you can make a fortune with this record.” [laughs]

I said, “Okay. Thanks for the advice.” Though I left it for two years and then my old friend Klaus Schulze came up. He wanted to create, again, a new label, a small label just for some friends and for himself. He called it Inteam Records. He asked me if I would join him or if I had some music, so I said, “OK, why not take this, try this?” I thought it’s a small label, so we can see how it works.

The initial reactions were very not, 50-50. There were some strange reactions here in Berlin. Some people wrote, “There’s nothing, there’s no excuse for this record.” I had “missed everything in the actual development of electronic music. [laughs] ‘I should better listen to Depeche Mode,” they wrote.

OK, 10 years, 15 years later, they had to excuse for themselves.

Jeff Mao

How did that feel though at the time? It’s not like you had high expectations.

Manuel Göttsching

No. It was not the right time because the high period of the experimental electronic music was over at the end of the ’70s because there was such a huge boom of equipment. The first of the ’70s, they were really experiments from bands like Tangerine Dream, the early Kraftwerk, because before they became pop musicians in a way, electronic pop musicians. Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze, my experiments. [Hans-Joachim] Roedelius and [Dieter] Moebius with Cluster. This was really interesting.

Then, there was really suddenly a mass market for instruments coming from Japan especially with the companies Roland, Yamaha, Korg. They all produced synthesizers, synthesizers, keyboards, keyboards. They got more and more and more. End of the ’70s, it was nothing. Everyone used it and nobody was talking about electronic music anymore because it became a mass market and it became standard in popular music. Everybody was using and nobody was talking anymore about some experiments in electronic music.

The old bands, musicians, the older ones, they were not really, nobody, yeah, they were not so interesting in the beginning. The first of the 1980s, there was a new generation. There was a new wave in Germany with German lyrics. First came punk music, then there was this new wave in England, there was synth-pop bands in England like Orchestral Manoeuvres [in the Dark] and Human League, for example. They had chart success and nobody wanted to listen anymore to Tangerine Dream. This was ’70s music.

It was only end of the ’80s or beginning of ’90s was what I call “techno period, that this came again into the mind of musicians and producers. They remembered, it became again interesting and was played and used and there were concerts again.

Yeah, it took a while with E2-E4. In the first years, nothing spectacular. It was a very slow growing success. It came, I think, first from Detroit. In New York, there was a club, Paradise Garage, where Larry Levan [DJed]. I didn’t know anything about him before. I didn’t know it at the time. I heard it many years later that it happened like this, that he played it at full length and that he even wanted it to be played at his funeral.

There was, in Detroit, DJs who played it. They sampled or remixed it. I only found it out in 1989, when it came somehow to England. A English DJ played it and then there were Italian DJs. There were several groups of DJs who wanted to make remixes and versions of it. There was this version of Sueno Latino and they asked me. They came to Berlin, the label manager so I was surprised. He showed me all these bootlegs and mixes that I didn’t know anything of before.

Jeff Mao

Until then, you had no inkling that this was a record that was being played in a dance environment?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes, I heard of it, but it was middle of the ’80s that I heard that it was played in New York in some clubs and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘It’s not produced as a dance music, so this is not a heavy bass drum. This is, of course, this is rhythm and this floating and yes, you can maybe,’ but I couldn’t imagine.

Jeff Mao

I think it adds to the legend of this recording that this a remnant of the time when one of the things that’s so special about DJ culture, at least from that era is that you didn’t have to be, you didn’t have to have made a dance record for it to be embraced by somebody for a dance audience. This was a perfect example of that.

I wonder if you feel that there’s any kind of parallel with even this being repurposed as something for a different audience with you using any of your own equipment, studio equipment, instrumentation and taking those elements, whether it be guitar, delay, keyboards, whatever it might be, and repurposing them in a way. Is there any kind of parallel there between what you’ve done to create the music and how this music that’s been created has been suggested?

Manuel Göttsching

No. For me, it was just a state of the time, what that was, what possible. That’s how I played with different analog equipment sequencers. That’s how I used it, how I played it. My minimal influences and... When I compose and when I record, whatever, I don’t think about how to call it or what might be the audience. Of course, I have my experience, so I know in what direction it could go, but it was no intention like that. So, of course, I just accepted it and I thought it’s a kind of transition from the classic what I call, so-called “classic minimalism” from the end of the ’60s, beginning ’70s until the techno time or whatever, however you may call it, modern electronics. That’s a kind of bridge between in between. That’s what I think.

Jeff Mao

When you’re re-presenting this music because you’ve performed this live many times in the last 15 years, whatever it might be ...

Manuel Göttsching

Not so many times. [laughs]

Jeff Mao

You have performed this though.

Manuel Göttsching

I perform it, but I started ...

Jeff Mao

Not in the club, but in different environments.

Manuel Göttsching

Yes. But I didn’t perform it for many years because I thought it’s impossible with all this equipment to bring it or to carry it and then to install it and to tune it because in my studio I use mixing desks, I used a tape records, all the delays, the drum machines, the synthesizers, and so on. I thought, “It’s just the studio recording that I would never perform,” but the technology has changed and I was interested, of course, in very first computer technology. In the beginning of the ‘80s, I used an Apple II Plus computer. I used the Commodore computer. But these were very rough and very simple computers. Of course, it was not possible to work with them, not even to play these computers like an instrument. It took another 20 years until laptops got technically so fit that with the appropriate programs, like Ableton, it was fantastic. You can use it on stage and play with it, play with it like you plan an instrument.

From 2002, I started to think about performing again, solo performance with a simple equipment. It gave me the possibility to perform in Japan, to perform in Korea, to perform in China, to perform in Australia, perform in the United States. I just take a laptop and a small keyboard, my guitar, and that’s it. I had to work out a little different version of it, because I used original sounds, so I didn’t have any separate tracks of it. There’s only this two-track existing, because I didn’t have recorded it on multi-track. I used parts of it, many, many small parts of it to keep up with the original sound. As a second way, I used the internal computer sounds, synthesizer sounds, plug-ins, to rebuild the bass lines, the chorus, the solo melody, the drum set. I used drum samples from my original Echo drum computer. I have the old melodies and I have the new, and I can play with both. That’s attractive. I played first concert in Japan in 2006. Since then, I think I performed every year once or so, like around that.

Jeff Mao

Do you hear the music in a different way now after all this time?

Manuel Göttsching

No, I don’t hear it different. I try to keep as close as much to the original when I perform it, so I always perform it quite exactly to 60 minutes and in the same structure. No, every time different... This is my favorite way in music to use what I explained before, sometimes I have basic structures, but with these structures, I begin to improvise.

Jeff Mao

I want to open this up to questions in a moment. You’ve obviously been working on a lot of other things in addition to re-presenting this music. Composing, doing scores, and whatnot. I wonder just in terms of what we started this conversation off with, in terms of talking about context and the context in which you started, what do you think all of this has taught you, if anything, in terms of how a context can fuel creation of something? Yet, that thing that comes from that very specific set of circumstances, being the Germany, the Berlin of your youth, now creates something that people who have very little direct connection to still have this attachment to, still have some feeling for, and some connection to. I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts at all about that.

Manuel Göttsching

This is a very complicated question. [laughs] I can only repeat that in the beginning, for me, that was all more free playing with it. I didn’t intend, very much, to become very professional. I was interested in music. What is music? How is music existing? What is it? How to play it? How to ... Why does it sound like this, like that? When I listen to something in the radio, how is it made? When I play the guitar at home, it sounds completely different, so how does it work? I was interested in this side. I was interested in music. Yes, music structures. What’s the difference between a major and a minor chord? If you put in this order or that order? How did old composers, popular composers, how did they compose their symphonies, their pieces? How did Bach do it? Yeah, formulas and trying that out. That’s from my own experience.

I’m very happy when something that I play or that I made or that I release, when this is a success. Or, when people like it, and when people like the music. Last time I played in Copenhagen, there were people entering the stage and began to dance. Yeah, I like it.

Jeff Mao

Well, I thank you for exploring ways to express yourself, pursuing that freedom of expression within your music. And, I thank you for being here today. We’re going to take some questions, but let’s say thank you to Manuel Göttsching.

[applause]

Manuel Göttsching

Thank you.

Jeff Mao

Does anybody have a question for Manuel? Please, participants only at this point. Thank you.

Audience Member

Hi. Thank you very much for all the sharing and the music. It has been very inspiring to me. Since you have a record called for Inventions for Electric Guitar, which I really like, do you think there’s still a chance for electric guitar to be reinvented?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes, of course. You can try. What I did is just an example of what came to my mind. This was the idea to produce every sound that I could imagine, or that I wanted, just with a guitar. To give it a form or structure, I’ve chosen this minimalistic approach to put it into a composition. That’s it. Yes, this is ... Of course, I didn’t follow this anymore, because for me, it was done. I have no intention to continue that. As you can hear in E2-E4, and second part, I used just a pure guitar sound. There’s no distortion, there’s no effect. There’s not even an echo, so it’s just a pure guitar cable into the mixing desk, and that’s it, so you have a beautiful sound.

I reduced it more to produce a sound with your fingers. It’s very depends on how you attack with your fingers, if you play with your nails, if you play with a small pick, how you move your fingers on the left hand. It can have a great variety of tonality or atmosphere or changing in colors of the tone. This enough. For my future, I found it more attractive. But today, there are so many effects, and effects, and effects, that’s good. I have to say that the echo, I didn’t use it as an effect. I use it as part of a composition. That’s a possibility. For example, if you use some kind of looper as a live samplers and to create with this a new style, or something, of loopings, put loops together and working with that with more than one, two voices, three voices, or so. Maybe.

Audience Member

Hi. Thank you for talking to us. Your music is very inspiring. I wanted to ask if you ever use any alternative guitar tunings?

Manuel Göttsching

I didn’t understand.

Audience Member

Alternative guitar tunings.

Jeff Mao

Alternative guitar tunings.

Manuel Göttsching

Tunings?

Audience Member

Yeah.

Manuel Göttsching

Yes, I had to for Inventions, because I wanted to play a bass, or kind of lower voice for bass lines, so I did tune the E string. I just tried something, yes, because sometimes, I have very special chords that are not easy to translate or to transform into another harmony. So, I tried some tunings with that. But, I’m used to the classic tuning, so I most of the time I return to that, because I’m used it and I’m trained with it. When I start improvising, I don’t want to think too much what’s now this note, and the rest. I would have to play too much with my head and not with just playing.

If I do a special composition, yes. For example, what I did, I made some tunes with Hawaii guitar. Not pedal steel, but Hawaiian guitar. There are different tunings that you can use for playing with chords. There are several possibilities that I tried out, yes.

Audience Member

Hi. Thank you. I was wondering how do you decide which recording like yours will be released, because you improvise a lot? How do you make this decision?

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah, that’s sometimes not is easy. At the beginning it was very easy, because there was no time. We had only one recording, and that we had to use. [laughs] The studio time was over. Of course, it started with the old studio, but when I started with my old studio... With Inventions, for example, I was lucky. When I finished with a track, and when I had two tracks, and then the fourth track. So, there was a limit of technology, and my own limit. Then I said, “Okay, this is enough. I don’t have to do any more. I don’t have to add more instruments or whatever.”

It was a danger in later years when the technology getting bigger. You had 8-track, 16-track, 32-track. This was terrible, because musicians were really thinking they had to fill all these tracks, and, “There’s still some space, and you can do this...” Yeah, I was never into that, because I reduced it to eight tracks. But what Jeff said before that to find minimalism, that is a way that you reduce it to some elements. That you don’t put another drum track, another violin, another piano. Just reduce it, and you concentrate on for what the composition should be.

Think of classic, older composers that composed piece for a cello. They compose piece for one violin, and then you have only one violin and not a big orchestra. So, you have to express everything in this one voice. It’s a matter of self-control.

Audience Member

I think the excerpt you played from Inventions for Electric Guitar, it sounds incredibly fresh and not really dated at all. I think you can see a lot of relevance in it in the kind of contemporary post-rock. I was just curious about the approach that people would take with making that kind of music now would be very much based with loop pedals. I was wondering how you made this composition that’s 20 minutes long, and you’re saying you have to just sit there and play each part. Did you have a vision for what each of the parts are going to be? Or, does it start with just this one layer, and then the improvisation builds it? Or, did you have the picture in your head beforehand?

Manuel Göttsching

Well, I had the 4-tracks, so I could use four tracks and four voices. I think I had the basic themes that I try to play or to explain. I just recorded that, and then from then on, I started developing the other voices. Sometimes I used a kind of second voice, the bass or something, and then some more in contrast to the first or the second voice. I think it was a process step by step, and so I just started with it. Later I did it where I had to have a basis of some minutes to get into the mood, and then to think about it, and then to test it and try it.

Today, it’s very easy. You just put in some notes, and you have a basic sequence. Then you try out as long as you want. At this point in those years, I had to pre-record the basic [sequence] in a way, and then rewind the tapes, start from the beginning. As I have shown, I did some kind of diagrams that I thought, maybe, “Here this one, then another part.” It’s divided in some parts that’s changing. There’s a change of harmony in some part. There’s some very atonal parts. It goes back to a more rhythmic, rocky part in the end of the first piece. So, yeah, there’s a structure. Step by step, as far as I remember. I think so.

Audience Member

Could I ask one small other thing? You said about notating it afterwards for live performance. I was curious because of the way you say that you use the delay not as an effect, but as a part of the composition. How did you notate that delay as a part? Because, it’s not a classical convention kind of a thing.

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah, that’s not so easy to explain, because echo or delay was nothing special at the time. It was used by Pink Floyd, by all the big bands, Jimi Hendrix, and in all the studios. They never really worked with it. What I did was to play exactly in sync with the echo. That means that the echo or the delay was controlling the tempo of the piece, which was also a great help when I played it, because I had to keep up steady in this temp. I wanted exactly the amount of echo or of the first delay, the second delay, the third delay, because it gives a new combination of notes. It gives a new harmonies, it gives new intervals, when the third note meets the third one, or something like this.

Jeff Mao

Like phasing.

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah.

Audience Member

Hello, and thank you. I’m just wondering, as somebody who’s inspired a lot of contemporary artists and musicians, if there’s any newer music or artist that you’re interested in at the moment or inspired by?

Manuel Göttsching

Not particular. Actually, I don’t listen so much to music. What I try to find is ... and, that’s what I do myself... to work on something new, new structures or styles, or... this is not only electronic. This could be anything. What I’ve found a bit sad was that electronic music became a little too much like being dance music. It’s either dance or it’s chill out. I think there are many, many more possibilities for electronic sounds or music or for what you can do with it. Very fine and very precise. Working to make it everything which makes it different from the acoustic music or from the old music, and to use that.

What I’m a bit missing is something like what happened in the ’60s, ’70s with this minimal music, which was it was not depending on the instrument. This could be electronic. For example, the orchestra, the Steve Reich Ensemble was playing completely acoustic classic instruments, but it could be also electronic. So, it’s a style of music, it’s the structure. Yeah, I think something like this should be reinvented in the next years, by one of you maybe.

Audience Member

I agree.

Jeff Mao

Yeah, I think so, actually. Anybody else?

Audience Member

Hi. Did you ever have the chance to jam with Terry Riley?

Manuel Göttsching

To jam? To jam?

Audience Member

Jam. J-A-M. Play music with Terry Riley.

Manuel Göttsching

To jam with Terry Riley?

Audience Member

Yeah.

Manuel Göttsching

OK. No. No, I didn’t. No.

Audience Member

Did you ever have a chance to talk about his music and your music or share any ideas?

Manuel Göttsching

Yes, we did. I met him briefly at one of his last concerts here at the... Where was it? Former congress hall. Today it’s Haus der Kulturen. Yeah, we spoke a little bit. What should I say? I always said, “Musicians don’t talk very much, they play.” [laughs]

That was our basis for when we founded Ash Ra Tempel. Klaus, Hartmut, and me, we didn’t talk about it. We just met, and we didn’t talk what we are doing. We didn’t talk about what we played now, we just started. We began, and the only discussion was, “Who begins today?” When we had a concert, backstage, we thought, “Oh, you start today.” “Oh, no, not me. You’ll go.” That was all. But, we didn’t discuss the tuning, or we didn’t discuss the chords, or we didn’t discuss... sometimes, we discussed, “We start slow. We start, maybe, a bit more fast,” everything was ... No, we didn’t talk very much, and somehow it worked.

We spoke in music, so we spoke in playing. So, maybe a good idea to do it. That’s what happens in a jam, of course, yes. That may be a good idea. The last concert, Terry’s concert here, I didn’t see him. He played with... What was his name, an English tabla player, she played... Huh?

Audience Member

[unintelligible]

Manuel Göttsching

Yeah, yeah. He likes very much Indian ragas and performs this.

Jeff Mao

Anybody else?

Audience Member

Hello, Mr. Gottsching. I’m a big fan of E2-E4. I actually listened to in Larry Levan Plays from Paradise Garage. Well, basically, when I first heard it, I noticed just constant part of the repetition is a constant part in your music. I just wondered if, at the time, you had any statement or something against traditional music that constantly changes or that was your natural way of composing. Also, I want to know what the chess board means in the artwork of the E2-E4 record.

Manuel Göttsching

Well, the flow of the music is just how emotionally I played it. That’s completely improvised, so I just changed it how I feel. I don’t count to eight or to 10, or whatever. I think, “Now it’s the right time,” so I just ... The cover, that’s a long story. The funny thing is with the title, E2-E4, it was one of the only pieces of music where I had the title, the name, E2-E4, before I had the piece of music. I thought of a chess game. I was working with this Apple computer, Commodore, and I was writing small programs for graphics, for text. I was doing programming in the language, BASIC, and assembly. Then you start using letters and numbers for abbreviations. You have this hexadecimal code for not 1 to 10, but 1 to 16, and you have A, B, C, D, E. So, this combination, I found attractive as a title. Then it was the third influence, or the third idea came when I saw the first Star Wars movie with this little robot, which was called R2D2. I found it just funny, because, yes, it’s a machine, it’s a robot. So, this is a program. I thought, E2-E4, is the most common used opening in a chess game, so I thought, “This is a great title,” but I didn’t have any music, so I thought, “OK, I keep it in mind for years.”

When I recorded it in December 1981, I thought, “Well, this could be the right piece of music to call it E2-E4.” Naturally, I decided to use a simple chess board as a cover.

Jeff Mao

We can see picture number seven, actually, real quick, which is the album cover.

[album cover appears on screen]

Manuel Göttsching

I have something else here. This is from our last release is we have an inlay in the card. That’s what I found is it’s a chess board that my father had drawn himself, where every field of the chess board has a number at the appropriate letter and number, because he was teaching himself to play chess without the board. So, just remembering the number and the field. Then playing just out of his head with partners, and so without seeing the board. This was his training board. I found it 15 years ago in his archives. I thought it’s appropriate to use it for my cover. He would have been very happy, I think.

Jeff Mao

If you’re curious about the actual chess move, it’s picture number eight. Throw that up there real quick. That’s E2-E4. Anybody else with a question? Well, I guess, then the only thing left to say is thank you, once again, Manuel Göttsching, for being here.

[applause]

Manuel Göttsching

Thank you. It’s great. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure. I hope I could give you some interesting hints.