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Full text of "Henry Ivry interviews Chris Korda (transcript)
"
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HI: So first off | just want to thank you for making the time, and my apologies about
the scheduling, first COVID and then the Glasgow Fair Day, which was unexpected.
CK: So you’re not from Glasgow, | gather?
HI: No, I’m a recent transplant to Glasgow.
CK: From where?
HI: | grew up in Berkeley is where I’m from originally.
CK: Yeah, | was going to say, you sound unmistakably American, but | can’t place
the locale. You don’t sound Californian.
HI: Well, | spent the last 10 years living in Toronto.
CK: Okay. That’s very British.
HI: Yeah. So | feel like Toronto has tempered my California accent.
CK: Yeah, flattened it out a bit, taking off the hotspots. Normally the California
accent is quite pronounced, but you have to have an ear for it. Not everyone can
spot it. | can usually spot it. | have a totally different accent. I’m East Coast.
HI: Yeah, right. So let’s start chatting a little bit. | mean, just to give you a little bit of
background, right? Like Band Camp wants to do this as a real sort of overview of
your career, right?
CK: A retrospective, if you will.
HI: Yeah. I’d sort of pitched it as, as even just sort of going through some of your
best records, but they were like, no, let’s do a larger more robust piece covering
your career. So yes, | think retrospective is probably the right term to describe it.
And, with that in mind, | think it’s probably best to start really at the beginning. And
| know that that maybe is not super exciting, to rehash some biographical stuff, but
| thought that it might be useful here to just talk a little bit about, | think I’m
interested in your entrance both into music more generally, right? Well, electronic
music, and I’ve read a little bit about other interviews where you've talked about
this and also how that coincides with your entrance into politics, right? And sort of
the way that these two are very much, | think, entwined and indeed perhaps
inseparable across your career. So you grew up in New York, is that right?
CK: That’s right. | grew up in Midtown Manhattan.
HI: And what was your introduction to music? Was that from childhood? Are you
playing, listening to music? What was, what was the scene like?
CK: Yes. Well, | grew up during the hard rock period, meaning bands like Deep
Purple, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Pink Floyd of course, Led Zeppelin. My first
serious concert was Led Zeppelin. My first not serious concert, meaning just it
wasn’t as big a deal, it was a smaller venue, was Michael Jackson and the Jackson
Five, the Hues Corporation and Blue Magic at Radio City Music Hall, and though it’s
not politically correct to say so, I’m pretty sure that my school chums and | were the
only white people in Radio City Music Hall that night, and we got a lot of strange
looks. But nobody bothered us, and it was a great show. Michael Jackson was just a
little kid, of course. He did the robot, and it was pretty sensational. That would’ve
been about 1975 or 76. | saw Led Zeppelin in 76, and then again in 77 in Madison
Square Garden.
And so that really shaped my worldview. | was very influenced by Jesus Christ
Superstar. | knew it backwards and forwards, and still do. There’s a complicated
point here that I’m going to harp on a lot. There’s two parallel points that I’m going
to make. This is part of a project I’ve been working on. There’s an academic you
may have never heard of, called Joan Sera, who wrote a very interesting paper on
the decline of complexity in Western music. So we have the data now. | mean the
data looks pretty irrefutable to me. There’s just no question that complexity peaked
in the 1970s and has been declining ever since. And of course, the 1970s, if you
know your music history, was the all-time peak of odd time in Western music.
I’m saying Western music specifically in the sense of America and Europe, because
of course odd time has a long tradition in other parts of the world, and even in some
parts of Europe, for example, in Greece they routinely play in seven. There’s one
island, the island of Kalamata | believe it is, where the olives come from. They have
a dance called the Kalamatianos, and the Kalamatianos is in seven. So if you ever
go to a Greek party or Greek wedding, or a Greek festival, you'll see people dancing
in seven. And it’s a novel experience. You’ve never seen anything like that before.
In the Balkans and in other parts of Eastern Europe, again, odd time is relatively
common. And of course, we’re not even going to go into India and the Arabic
countries, where odd time has thousands and thousands of years of tradition.
But in the West, that was not true. The Western music musical tradition was very
strictly organized around four and sometimes three, and that all changed in the late
1960s. So by 1975, when | was a teenager, odd time was absolutely everywhere. It
was on the radio. It was on the TV, meaning TV show theme songs, like for example,
Mission Impossible, that’s five. There were so many other examples. It was on
Broadway. Jesus Christ Superstar was a huge hit, it ran for something like two
decades and had enormous cultural influence. More than half of /esus Christ
Superstar is in odd time. Big chunks of it are in five, other chunks of it are in seven.
And this was not unusual. Most of the bands that | admired and followed during that
time, not only routinely wrote in odd time, they switched time during the song.
For example the progressive rock band Yes, was famous for this. If you go back and
listen to Re/ayer, the big track from that, it’s half the record, is called The Gates of
Delirium. There are parts of it that even today with all of my musical training,
there’s parts of it that | find hard to count. I’m really not sure what’s exactly
happening there. But for sure there are big chunks of it that are in 15. There are big
chunks of it that are in 11 and seven and five and so on. And so it was just
enormously influential on my musical consciousness. That, and the fact that at that
time, though, | didn’t realize it, | heard the first examples of po/ymeter, which I'll
define since we'll need this definition a lot. Polymeter is the simultaneous use of
multiple time signatures.
And when | say simultaneous, | mean not one after the other, but running
concurrently, meaning 5/4 running concurrently with 3/4 running concurrently with
4/4, all running together. The first example of that I’m absolutely certain of was on
the very influential aloum by Yes, called Fragile. There’s a track called Long
Distance Runaround, and it unmistakably has polymeter in it. That’s very early but
there it is. So even though | didn’t know what polymeter was when | was a
teenager, | was too busy huffing glue or whatever it is that teenagers do, it had an
influence on my consciousness. And | feel also that that influence merged with
another crucial influence from the art world. So let’s not forget that the 1970s were
also an enormous peak of creativity in many other cultural areas, including that of
art.
So for sure it was the peak of pop art and op art, but it was also the peak of high
modern, well, high modern arguably is a little earlier, the mid 1960s, early 1960s,
but high modern was definitely still around. And my mother frequently took me to
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Not every weekend, but many weekends.
And one of the things that | saw there was the work of Thomas Wilfred. So he’s
unknown to almost everyone who’s ever going to read this interview, but he’s my
greatest hero. He is the patron saint of polymeter, because he did it first. He
actually was even more than that. He’s more innovative than that. He was arguably
the world’s first VJ, meaning visual jockey. He probably did the world’s first light
show. We're talking about 1910, when electricity was still very new.
And this is going to sound crazy, but at the time when electricity first became
available in major urban centers, first in places like London and Paris and New York,
and then it spread from there, obviously one of the first applications was street
lighting. That was one of the main things it was used for. Home lighting took longer,
but street lighting is relatively easy to do. But surprisingly, another very rapid
expansion of electricity was in theaters. And if you think about it, you’ll understand
why. Up until the age of electricity, theaters had to light stages. And they did. But |
have to tell you that the means they used was not very safe. They used flame,
literally. Very powerful flame, because spotlights have to be bright. If you want a
powerful spotlight on somebody from a distance, you need a very bright light.
And the only way to do that is by burning something like oil or gas. And so, let’s
take a step back here. We have a theater that’s made of wood, and we've got like a
thousand people packed in there, and only a couple of exits, and we’re going to
light the stage with fire. Does that sound like a good idea? No, it’s a horrible idea.
And so it led to many terrible accidents and disasters. And so theaters were very
keen to avoid this if they could. And as soon as electricity became practicable for
them, they adopted it. And they very quickly figured out that with a lot of ambitious
machinery that looks ridiculous by today’s standards, meaning it looks like
something out of the Frankenstein movie, you could actually dim lights. Big things,
you see sparks flying and stuff, but they had machines that could dim lights.
And so that was very, very helpful. And then on top of that, they also figured out
you could put colored things in front of the lights and make colored lights. Well, so
this was all just in the domain of regular traditional theater. But Thomas Wilfred
came along, he saw all this, and he said, wait, | have a better idea, | Know what we
can do with all this stuff. Let’s make a performance just of colored lights, changing
brightness. So basically a kind of light show, like something that they would have in
the Haight Ashbury, in the 1960s. Except that that’s 50 years later. So he thought of
it first, and it was popular. People lined up around the block to go see Thomas
Wilfred and his color organ. When | say organ, it basically was a ginormous console
with these giant rheostats on it.
The kind of thing where you have to grab it with both hands. And he’s fading. Bring
in some red, bring in some blue. He’s improvising, jamming on the thing. And
everybody’s standing there like they’ve never seen anything like it before, because
they haven't. It was new. And he rode that wave of popularity and became very
influential. And he spent the rest of his life—I’m getting to the point of this long
story—he spent the rest of his life trying to bring it to the people, because obviously
you can only sell so many tickets. So his idea was he was going to build boxes. This
is where it gets relevant to my life.
He was going to build these boxes, and inside the box... it kind of looked like a TV,
though they didn’t exist yet. It was a nice, really well-made wooden cabinet with a
kind of opaque glass—meaning glass that’s been sanded—on the front, and behind
it, there’s something you can’t see. Maybe you could hear it whirring a little bit.
There’s something in there. And what you see is these exquisite moving patterns of
colored light on the glass. You can’t see all the way through, because the glass is
partially opaque. And what’s inside the box is motors and little lights. Because
motors actually existed at this time, even though it’s so early. We think motors are
a later innovation, but no, in 1910, 1920, they were expensive, but you could get
electric motors. So he had electric motors and little reflectors and all this stuff that
he made by hand, little pieces of colored glass, and it was all kind of moving around
like clockwork.
And all you see is this mysterious pattern of moving light. Well, so those were called
lumia. These machines are lumia. You can read about them in his Wikipedia page.
He’s long dead. And so | saw lumia machines in the Museum of Modern Art. And the
reason that’s important is because Thomas Wilfred’s lumia are an early and very
concrete example of what | call phase art. Meaning art that depends for its
existence on the independent motion of several different, periodically repeating
things. A thing that’s spinning at one rate and a thing that’s spinning at a different
rate. To make a simple example, if you have a clock with two hands, and one of
them is spinning, actually we'll use the regular clock. One of them is the minute
hand, the other one is the hour hand.
It’s just obviously true that if they start both at noon, over time, they will diverge.
They will make a complicated pattern, and they will not actually line back up again
until it’s noon again. One is going around every hour, and the other is going around
every 12 hours. They have two different periods. So we have two things oscillating
at two different frequencies. And that makes a complicated pattern. And the more
different those frequencies are, like if one is just a simple multiple of the other, it’s
not very interesting to watch. If you have a thing that’s going around once an hour
and you have a thing that’s going around every half hour, it’s not interesting to
watch because after an hour you’ve seen the whole thing.
But Thomas knew that. And so in his early lumias, you sit in front of the box and
after a minute you think, it’s doing it again, I’ve seen the whole pattern. | know this
because | saw a retrospective of Thomas Wilfred fairly recently, in 2016 | believe it
was at the Smithsonian Gallery in Washington DC. And they somehow managed to
resuscitate about 20 of his lumia. | don’t know where they got them all, but luckily
they were preserved. And you had little benches and little plaques next to them.
You could sit on the bench and there'd be a little plaque next to the lumia. Some [of
the lumia] were smaller, some were quite big. And on the plaque, it would tell you
what the repeat time was. And it became very obvious that over his life, as he
experimented further with this medium, he figured out ways to push the repeat
time out.
So in the beginning, it was just a minute or 30 seconds, then it became a few hours,
then it became a day. By the end of his life, he built a machine that supposedly
wouldn’t repeat for seven years or something like that. Who knows, right? Who
would ever sit in front of it that long? But you know, if Thomas Wilfred said it took
seven years, | believe him. Well, so this is incredibly important to me personally,
and to my work, because | have pieces of music that won’t repeat for millions of
years. One of the tracks on Akoko Ajeji wouldn't repeat for 1.5 million years. So this
is clearly a reference to Thomas Wilfred’s work. I’m essentially taking him as an
inspiration, using his ideas. Actually, the truth is | hardly knew who he was when |
was first exploring polymeter, but somehow he connects to me, he’s one of the first
people to see this possibility, that we could build long-form patterns just through
aggregating oscillators of different frequencies.
Anyway, all a long way to explain that the seventies were a very interesting and
active time for experimentation in music. It was basically the period in which
classical musicians finally got off the sidelines and entered the rock arena in a big
way. Keith Emerson was a highly trained classical musician. Some of the guys in Yes
were highly trained. The kind of guys who played in that cheesy pop rock band,
Chicago, these were guys who could really play, these were studio musicians. Steely
Dan is another great example of this. Steely Dan basically wasn’t even a band. They
were just a rotating stable of top shelf, top flight studio musicians, the kind of guys
who literally can play anything. And so there was an enormous bump in
musicianship, in what | call craft, in the mid to late 1970s before the whole thing
went belly up with the advent of disco.
And so this is something | talk about a lot. It upsets people. But basically, I’ve lived
through the collapse of everything. I’ve lived through the rollback of the Great
Society. The Post World War Il consensus, politically speaking, collapsed during my
lifetime, starting with the election of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the
assassination of John Lennon. The whole thing just went down. One by one, the rich
people have been recapturing all the branches of government, taking control. And
now we’re back to where we were before the French Revolution almost. If you listen
to Thomas Piketty, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s getting very serious. It feels like
war is coming, and it probably is, and it’s a horrible thing. But while that’s all been
happening, there’s been a parallel collapse in culture. People have been getting
dumber.
The popular taste has been declining, and | have the data to prove it. It’s not really
open for debate. It’s obvious to anyone who is older and familiar with the patterns
of the older times. It’s just clear that the patterns are getting simpler. It’s becoming
more and more Aldous Huxley. People just want to be anesthetized all day, and the
music somehow reflects that. And so there’s a great tragedy that I’ve lived through,
and I’ve tried to change it by introducing more interesting patterns and ideas into
electronic music, but | think it’s fair to say that I’ve largely failed at that. And so |
have a lot of—I wouldn’t say remorse—but | just feel sort of tired. I’ve tried really
hard for 30 years to change this without all that much success, and kind of feel like
I’ve been shouting.
HI: But shouting brilliance. That was such a wonderful bit of insight here. And |
guess the question that comes to me—and | love the way that you’ve framed your
own experience and your intimacy with these various sort of collapses—and I’m
curious though, why has electronic music been the medium through which you’ve
wanted to explore these ideas?
CK: Easy. It’s not that | didn’t try other things. So I’m a trained musician. To get to
your original question, it’s quite normal for people who have innate musical talent
to show it at a very early age. As we all know, this happens. I’m not saying that |
was a child prodigy, let’s not overstate the case. But often, for example, if a child
shows a preternatural ability for rhythm, it’ll show up as them banging on stuff
rhythmically. That’s a sign. It’s like when a child is scribbling all the time and they
make beautiful drawings, you think, maybe we should send this one to art school.
Sometimes it happens. Sometimes the child is lucky, sometimes not. So | was not so
lucky. | had a wonderful child upbringing in many respects.
My parents were both very brilliant in their own very different ways. And so
certainly | was given a good heaa-start in life in terms of becoming inquisitive and
capable of critical thinking, being well-read and well-spoken, and all of those things
that mattered to my parents’ generation, and probably matter less today. I’m
grateful for that, so | don’t want to sound ungrateful, is my point. But neither of my
parents were at all musically inclined, though, supposedly my mother’s mother was,
she played the organ supposedly quite well, though | never saw it. I’ve seen photos
of her playing the piano, so | know it’s true. But | showed unmistakable rhythmic
inclination at a very early age. And unfortunately my mother’s response to that was
something along the lines of, “stop twitching” and if you keep doing that, we’re
going to send you to your room.
| was not encouraged in this, but | persisted nonetheless. | would do it in my room,
in private. | would attract the amazement and wonder of my classmates as early as
the age of whatever age you are in fifth or sixth grade, by beatboxing, before
beatboxing was even a word. No one knew what beatboxing was at that time, but |
instinctively figured it out for myself. And | would imitate the drumming of many of
my favorite drummers, such as Keith Moon from The Who or John Bonham from Led
Zeppelin and so on. | would imitate their drum rolls and their drumming just using
my mouth. And this is the kind of thing that impresses adolescent boys.
| was pretty unpopular in school. | was a nerd, and | was a sissy, and none of those
things made me popular, but my beatboxing was a saving grace. They’d often ask
me to do it. And so this all was a sign. | clearly showed a gift, some kind of gift for
music, certainly for rhythm. And eventually my mother finally submitted and
allowed me to take piano lessons and then eventually, because that didn’t work
out... They just wanted to make me learn something really stiff and square, like
Handel or whatever, and that wasn’t working. Learning to read music wasn’t the
right thing for me. | wanted to rock and roll, you know what I’m saying?
| had a gift for rhythm. | would’ve made a good drummer and probably could still
be. | have been a good drummer. | play the hand drum well. And so they finally just
let me have access to a piano. Not at school, but after school. And so | would bang
around on that, and that’s how | really got started. That led to me having a little
cheesy organ in the house, the kind of thing that only has, | don’t know, 24 keys or
whatever. It makes a kind of wheezing sound. They’re very, very cheap. But it was
still a big deal for me. And | played it, and | learned a lot from that. And eventually
at the age of about 16, | started seriously studying the guitar. | studied the guitar
firm seriously, for 25 years at least, closer to 30 really.
And | achieved what we could politely call a semi-pro level as a jazz guitarist. | was
good enough to play jazz. | dropped out of the Berklee College of Music. | was too
much of a mess to finish the school, but | learned a lot from it. | learned how to read
charts. | can read a chart. | certainly know my jazz harmony. And then | had a long
series of private instructors after that, including Jerry Bergonzi, who is a very
notable music instructor and music performer. He played with John Abercrombie. He
was an excellent, excellent tenorist, and he taught every instrument. So | achieved
over time a fairly high level of competence in jazz, and eventually switched to
piano, which | still play. And also in college, | studied harmony. So | don’t come to
the electronic music world, as most electronic musicians unfortunately do, ignorant
of the basic structures of music.
On the contrary, | have a very deep understanding of the structures of music and
have in fact taught music. | taught guitar for a while, mostly to children, but that
doesn’t matter. And I’ve taught music theory, usually on a mentoring kind of basis,
to other musicians. So that’s important. That’s a thing that distinguishes me from
most electronic dance music producers. But to really answer your question, the real
reason that | got into electronic dance music was totally accidental. There’s a bunch
of weird random life factors at work here. As | said, | started playing guitar in, let’s
say in 1977, and was playing it very seriously by 1980 certainly, and was still
slogging away at trying to become the next John Abercrombie as late as 1991.
That’s a long time.
That’s a long time to be unsuccessful at something. | played in some bands, I’d
done some jazz shows and stuff, but nothing ever really clicked. | even had a stint
as a street musician, and let me tell you, that’s a tough gig. You’re competing with
the homeless for spare change. None of that went real well. And so | was very
discouraged by that point. And | was also discouraged with my job by then. And |
was feeling a lot of other strange life pressures. And so at the age of about 30 |
basically had a drastic break. | walked away from all of that. | quit the guitar. |
moved out of my house, where | was living with all my roommates. | quit my job.
Oh wait, | missed a part of the story. I’m sorry. | left something out. So in October of
1991, we had a Halloween party at my house, as we often did. And | got the idea to
dress aS a woman. So you knew transgenderism was going to creep in here,
crossdressing | should say, because I’m a crossdresser. So | got the idea to dress as
a woman. And | don’t know how | got it. | really just don’t know. It was kind of in the
air a little bit in 1991. | might’ve seen RuPaul, who knows. Certainly | was aware of
this famous basketball player whose name | can’t think of right now [Dennis
Rodman] who’d been known to wear a dress right around then. It’ll come to me
later. But anyway, somehow or other it came up and | thought, that’s what I’m
going to be this year, I’m going to be a woman.
Except that it took on a life of its own, and it became a different thing. And by the
time the Halloween party actually came, and | came downstairs in my outfit,
everybody who saw me that night, it was clear for them that it was more than just a
costume, that | was really feeling it. | was in character, | looked like a woman. It was
spooky. It spooked the shit out of my friends. And in fact, | lost a lot of my friends
right around this time. Most of them. | had some friends who were more supportive
of it, including one in particular who was very supportive. And she encouraged me
to go to groups, to crossdresser groups and learn more about it, and get involved
and find other people who were into this. Because it was becoming a thing.
It was still very dangerous, very edgy. In 1991 you could totally get killed in Boston
for cross-dressing, but it was somehow entering the consciousness. And so there
were groups around, and | joined one. The Tiffany Club it was called, a very strange
experience. We'll get to that later. But through that, | did it more, and | started
doing it in public more, and | discovered a whole world that | had no idea existed:
the world of gay nightclubs and disco and techno. Because techno was super hot at
that moment. | kind of already knew about techno because there was an
experimental college radio station [WZBC] that | listened to then. And | had already
been moving in the direction of making experimental music, because | was ina
band. Boston was a hotbed of experimentation in music in the late 1980s especially.
The movie American Hardcore, big chunks of that are set in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts had a very strong punk hardcore scene, a very strong experimental
and noise music scene. And in the 1980s, and even in the early nineties, there was
a tremendous kind of downtown Chinatown punk all-night loft scene, where on the
weekend, you could just go from loft party to loft party, and there’d be bands
playing, and it was fucking awesome. It was influenced by RISD and Providence,
many other things. It was very vibrant. And | became part of that world through this
crazy psychedelic Motown reggae hardcore band that | was in, first called the Iron
Kilbasa, and then called the Oracles. Never mind, that’s a whole other long story.
But | was basically doing weird stuff in public already, playing my guitar and doing
feedback solos and screaming weird lyrics in a French accent.
You know, weird stuff. And against the background of what was going on in Boston
at that time, we weren’t even that weird. We would do stuff like throw hotdogs into
the audience, and everybody would be like, yeah that’s cool, what else you got?
We've seen that before. So anyway, we were trying to break through, and | had this
feeling of being involved in something bigger. And then | discovered the cross-
dressing thing. And so suddenly, holy crap, it’s all coming together. There’s
electronic music, and there’s this, and there’s that. And my roommate said to me,
why don’t you buy a drum machine and start really experimenting with this? Make
some electronic music, buy a drum machine. You could buy a 606 for like a hundred
bucks or whatever, used from an ad in the newspaper.
So | did that. And it was starting to be some motion. And then—we get to the point
of the story—in 1991 in the summer, | heard about a weekend in Provincetown.
Provincetown is a famous gay resort on the coast of Massachusetts on Cape Cod.
It’s at the very end of Cape Cod. Supposedly it was a big pirate town hundreds of
years ago, and it kind of feels like that. But you go out there and it’s kind of normal
during the day, tourists buying tchotchkes, except if you go out on the beaches,
you'll see men having sex, but at night, around eight, 9:00 PM the tide changes, and
suddenly the normals are all asleep in their hotel rooms, and the wildlife comes out.
Suddenly it’s just drag queens everywhere, and there’s John Waters standing at the
bar of the Crown and Anchor, and you're in a different world. You’re in gay land,
drag land, female impersonator land. And | got the idea to become a female
impersonator. And | did. It’s a crazy-ass thing to do, for some white kid from New
York to say, I’m going to be a female impersonator. Everyone’s like, yeah sure, good
luck with that. | actually did it, and | did okay. | never won first prize, but | won
second prize once at the A House. That’s pretty good, | was making an impression.
People knew who | was, and | had a lot of competition, and sometimes they were
real assholes too.
| remember one night at the Crown and Anchor, this queen comes up to me and she
says to me, why don’t you go back to your day job in Boston, bitch? It was really like
that. You realize who you’re competing against. You’re competing against people
from the ghetto, no offense, but people who don’t have other options in life. It’s
either succeed at drag or go back to hooking and selling drugs, so it gives the
performances an extra edge. So it was like immersion therapy. | had like an
immersion event where | was immersed in gay life, in drag life, the kind of life that’s
depicted in that famous movie, Paris Is Burning. | lived that. Those people would
come up from New York and hang out with us in Provincetown. And so these three
months of my life, after three months, | was done.
| learned a lot. | learned that I’m not gay. Not really. | learned that | don’t actually
have a future as a female impersonator, but that didn’t matter. None of that
mattered because by the time the three months were over, my whole worldview
was completely changed. | had seen something really special, and | had gone out
there asking to see something special. In my mind, | had been sort of praying to be
inspired, to have my life changed. My prayers were answered. A month after that,
the Church of Euthanasia was already underway. So it was like a month after that
that Pastor Kim, the co-founder of the Church of Euthanasia, took me out for dinner
at a Thai restaurant, and he said to me, Chris, | think you should start a church. And
that’s how it started. | mean, big things start small. In the beginning, all we had was
the Save the Planet Kill Yourself sticker, and not much else, some ideas.
And we went down to Harvard Square, it was really just me and Kim and a couple of
our friends, and we’re handing out Save the Planet Kill Yourself stickers. And we had
a sign, we were all wearing skull masks. The punks tried to beat us up. We ran
away. It didn’t seem like a big thing, but it had legs. It spread. More and more
people wanted to come. And before you know it, it got off the ground and it became
a zine. And you know the rest, you probably know the whole history of the Church of
Euthanasia. It went from nothing to us being on the Jerry Springer show in a matter
of just a few years. So big things start small. But anyway, | tell you this whole long,
crazy story, just so that you can see the influence of gay culture and the music of
that time, which was deep house music, C & C Music Factory and stuff like that.
Black Box was a big influence. That music had an enormous impact on me, because
amongst other things, it showed me that | didn’t have to be a jazz musician to make
music. This is really the point of the story after all, is that | found a way to make
music that would reach the people and accomplish what | wanted without having to
be one of those jazz performers competing with all the other jazz performers, all
trying to do the same thing. And so in this way, | outwitted the great puzzle of my
life. Kim had said to me once, he said to me, look, you’re making a mistake. You
trying to be the next John Abercrombie or whatever it is, it’s a mistake. Never stand
in someone’s shadow. If you stand in someone's shadow, you'll always be compared
to them, and probably always unfavorably. It’s not a good approach to making art.
Instead, you need to find your own way, do the thing, but do it in your own way, so
that you’re not compared to anyone. And in the end, | found a way to follow his
advice. It took a while, and it was really messy, and like | said, | lost almost all my
friends doing it, but | made new friends and they were much more interesting
anyway.
HI: So that is such a wonderful story, with so many unexpected aspects, it just
seems like such a “of the moment” type narrative too, that it seems almost
impossible to replicate now. So we’ve gotten up to 91 and the early nineties here.
When do you start taking the ideas that you are developing through the church, and
sort of this coming into an environmental consciousness. How do these two things
fuse?
CK: How do they merge?
HI: Yeah.
CK: That’s really complicated. So the environmental consciousness is actually really
old too. You probably know this, but I’ve lived through a doubling of the human
population. | remember a less crowded world, and it was better. It sounds
apocryphal and silly, but my favorite example of this is when | was a little kid,
sometimes on the weekends, my parents would bust out the old Volkswagen Beetle.
Normally you don’t need a car in New York City, but on the weekends, once ina
while, they would bust it out, and we would drive down to the village to have a
hamburger at their favorite hamburger joint, which was down by the west side,
down by like 11th Avenue or 12th Avenue or something, way downtown.
And what | remember is that there were no cars on the street. And not only that, but
we would park right in front of the door of the restaurant. Right there. There’d be no
problem. There’s no one, we have the place to ourselves. Just try to imagine that
today in the West Village. It’s out of the question. It’s like a dream from another
world. And so this is what it was like, on the weekends, New York was pretty much
depopulated back in the 1960s, and that’s because the overall population was less.
You just can’t double the human population and not expect there to be effects. You
can’t expect it to not become more crowded. It will. You will feel the pressure. You'll
feel like rats in a cage.
And we do. You can see population stress absolutely everywhere. So | was aware of
all this from the beginning, and | was aware of climate change long before most
people were. | was a very active reader, as | said, | was a nerd in Grace Church
School. But | won the book prize, the reading prize every year, so that didn’t make
me popular with my school mates, but it means that | had to read a hundred books
to win that prize. And | did, and | had a very, very high level of comprehension with
that. And | also read the newspaper, and one of the things | discovered in the
newspaper was there was a New York Times story—this would’ve been about, let’s
see, early 1970s—there was an article in the New York Times, it wasn’t the front
page, and the headline, I’ll never forget, it was, “Scientists Predict Global Warming
Irreversible.”
This is in the early 1970s. Okay, | saw that. And I’m like, wait, what? Mommy, look
at this. She’s like, yeah, what do you expect? My mother used to joke, much later in
life, that she thought the reason that I’d become such an environmental activist is
because when she was pregnant with me, she was reading Rachel Carson’s Si/ent
Spring. How’s that for a cocktail tale? Pretty amusing, right? Obviously not actually
likely, literally true. But what is true is that she was an enormous influence on me.
She’s no longer with us, but she is just a tremendous presence in my life. Let’s just
say she was a supporter of the Church [of Euthanasia]. Let’s just leave it at that, a
big supporter of the Church.
And she agreed with what | was doing, and she shaped it and influenced it in the
sense that as a child, many of her books were books about [environmentalism] that
in one way or another, shaped my future development. The best example | can
think of offhand is a famous photo essay book called God’s Own Junkyard. You can
find that still on Amazon. And it’s all photos of despoiled landscapes in America,
despoiled primarily by billboards and advertising, but also by litter. It’s incredible to
imagine, but when | was a little kid there were not really any laws against littering,
because highways were too new. And so the highways were a national disgrace. It
was horrifying. You would see literally bags of trash, on both sides of the highway,
because people would just toss stuff out of their window, not even think about it.
And it led to a very famous advertising campaign in which Iron Eyes Cody, the
native American activist, was featured in a campaign where he’s standing in front of
a littered highway, and he’s got a tear going down his cheek. And this was a very
effective campaign. The government paid for it, and it had quite an effect. It helped
to shame people, but probably the majority of the effect was accomplished by
instituting severe fines for littering, as in $500 or more. That probably also helped.
So there was a real change with this, but when | was a little kid, it was really
obvious that the landscape was being despoiled. And of course, much later | would
discover that it was being despoiled in much more insidious and frightening ways. |
grew up during the time that’s described by, I’m trying to think of the name of the
book...
There’s a wonderful book, | think it’s called Poisoning for Profit, about how
corporations got away with making deals with the Cosa Nostra, with the mafia, to
illegally dispose of hazardous waste all over the United States, leading to very
famous and horrifying incidents such as the terrifying fire which occurred in New
Jersey, in Elizabeth Port, which literally could have killed off the population of New
York City. The firemen said about that incident that if the wind had been blowing
the other way that day, there would’ve been mass death, because the mafia just let
the toxic waste pile up and pile up and kept saying to the government, you want to
tell us what to do? We'll set fire to the waste if you keep fucking with us.
And the government kept putting pressure on them, and they finally said, hey,
okay. We set fire to the waste, and then barrels are shooting hundreds of feet into
the air. It was like a fireworks display. This was the time when the EPA didn’t exist.
EPA literally didn’t exist until the Nixon administration. It started to exist in 1971,
but it didn’t really get any serious power until 1980. So | grew up during the time
when you really had a feeling like some things had gone out of control, the
population was increasing, the cities were getting more and more toxic. The
buildings were all covered with black soot, because we still had lead in the gasoline.
And so there was this very oppressive kind of feeling that things were going ina
horrible direction.
And so all of that influenced the Church of Euthanasia. It’s the emerging
environmental consciousness that starts at the very beginning. The feeling, | think,
is best characterized by a statement that dawned on me at a very early age,
possibly partially due to the use of psychedelic drugs. But it dawned on me that
humanity was overrunning planet earth, sort of like the inmates taking over the
asylum. America is the nation that most symbolizes individualism. So that goes all
the way back to the Second World War, the idea of, after the Second World War,
reshaping people to pacify them and make them into happy consumers so we don’t
fight the Second World War again, but this time with the hydrogen bomb. That was
a real danger.
That’s another thing | grew up with. | did duck and cover drills. Try to imagine that.
The hydrogen bomb was a real presence in my life. Dr. Strangelove was kind of
funny, but kind of not, you know what | mean? Industrial civilization was going to
pacify people, make us all into individuals, and of course, now we know it’s gone too
far. But at the time, it seemed like a good idea. There was good justification for
building the interstate highway system, giving everyone a car, at least people who
could afford it, and having us all be individual consumers. And this too is part of the
tapestry we’re weaving, this feeling of individualism gone wrong. But | was aware of
that from the beginning. | could feel that everyone had their own justification for
dancing their little funky dance and tossing their litter out the window or whatever it
is they’re doing.
But it’s not that they by themselves are intrinsically wrong or a disastrous problem.
It’s the sum total of all of us making those decisions. That’s the problem. And so
behind all of that are the giant engines of industry, the giant turbines that are
creating all the power from fossil carbon to supply us with all that good stuff. It’s not
that humans individually are necessarily bad. There are many individual humans
that | love who are wonderful people and brilliant and interesting. It’s our aggregate
behavior that’s the problem. And | was aware of that from the beginning too. And |
think the church is really fundamentally an attack on that, if you think about it.
Ultimately, the church is an attack on the ugliness of aggregate human behavior.
HI: Sorry, | just wanted to make sure | wrote that down, because that’s a great
phrasing there. So thinking about these things, you put out the first record in 93, is
that right?
CK: No, the first record is 95, and | produced it myself. I’m sorry, you’re right,
excuse me, | shouldn’t be correcting you. You said record, | was thinking of vinyl. |
put out a CD in 93 called Demons In My Head. It’s my environmental ambient,
whatever it is. | called it an industrial punishment in D Minor, and that’s pretty
accurate. It’s an interesting piece of music. It actually shows considerable
advancement if you listen to it carefully. It’s got atonal music on it. Even though |
wasn’t specifically familiar with atonal music theory the way | am now, | had
inclinations about it. | certainly heard it, | knew who Schoenberg was. And so there’s
some Schoenberg in it.
It’s a very ambitious work. We could talk about that another time | guess. | could
talk for hours about Demons In My Head and how it was made, but Demons In My
Head proved something to me. Remember, we’re talking 1991, 1992. This is really
the peak of the zine movement. It’s what Factsheet Five, the great bible of the zine
movement called “high weirdness by mail.” | lived that. And so the Church of
Euthanasia absolutely surfed the wave of high weirdness by mail. But even before
the Church fully existed, | was already using the zine movement somehow to
distribute Demons In My Head. And there was this idea that in the early days of the
zine movement and the peak of post-punk, we were trying to create an alternative
culture, outside the dominance of labels and huge magazines and media
corporations, where everything is just individual contacts.
You have people you send weird stuff to, and they send you weird stuff. You don’t
necessarily give them money. Sometimes somebody sends you a few dollars in an
envelope, always in cash. Sometimes they just send you some stamps, so you can
use the stamps to send them something back. It’s a lot of barter. It’s very punk. It’s
very DIY. This was a part of the idiom, the gestalt that Demons In My Head and the
Church and all of my later works emerged from. It’s an underground economy. And
that underground economy, by the way, is really gone. It didn’t survive in the form
that I’m pointing to. You could try to make a case that it transmuted into something
else. Except don’t forget that if you’re going to say it transmuted into Facebook and
YouTube and Google and all of that, those are all corporately controlled spaces.
It’s a huge difference. And let’s not forget that | got a letter from Facebook not that
long ago, where they said, it’s like this: either you remove every instance of “Save
the Planet, Kill Yourself” from the Facebook platforms, or you’re done. They can do
that. It’s against their TOS [Terms of Service]. They make the rules, and they’re
providing a free service, so you can’t ask for your money back. Well, that’s a huge
thing that’s changed in my lifetime, with the advent of social media and the
pervasiveness of the internet. But in the 1990s, that hadn’t happened yet. In the
1990s it was still mostly just people sticking weird shit in envelopes. And so there
was a tremendous amount of freedom, and | really miss that, | have to say. It’s off-
topic, but | am a child of the punk years. Even though technically | could maybe be
mislabeled a boomer, | feel Gen X.
A hundred percent of my sympathies are with Gen X. | lived a punk life. And so |
really miss the freedom of speech that | had, the freedom of speech that made the
Church of Euthanasia possible. People often ask me, why do you not do those things
that you did? Why haven’t there been any Church actions lately? And I say to them,
are you crazy? You have no idea how many laws were passed after 9-11 to make
stuff like that impossible. Even in progressive liberal Boston, you try and do stuff
like a Fetus Barbecue now in Boston, you’re done. The police will just show up and
say, stop immediately. We’re arresting you all for violation of the Homeland Security
Act, and you’re gone. But that wasn’t true in the early nineties. In the early nineties,
police absolutely didn’t care. Protest just wasn’t on their radar at all. They had more
serious problems, like people setting fire to buildings. There were a lot of riots in the
1970s. It was super wild.
HI: This sort of describes the part I’m trying to get my head around still, Boston. |
can see this sort of very post-punk culture that you’re describing, and this sort of
zine milieu or some like something like that, right?
CK: And goth and industrial, and don’t forget the SubGenius, right? The Church of
the SubGenius was an early competitor for the Church of Euthanasia. They were
also supplying weird stuff, but they weren’t necessarily off-brand for us. In fact, very
quickly we merged with them and we would start to gain some of their support.
Some of the people who liked the Church of SubGenius stuff also were fans of the
Church of Euthanasia, because it counted as slack. | got to meet many of the priests
of the SubGenius religion. So there was a lot of feeling... | guess what | mean to say
is that the 1990s had a much higher degree of solidarity and social cohesion than
you might expect. That by today’s standards, where everybody’s just in their cell,
updating their profile and pimping themselves for likes, it wasn’t like that.
There was a feeling more of building solidarity in the real world, where you actually
meet the people, and you know them, and they’re actual flesh and blood people
and you do stuff with them in the real world. That’s key to understanding how the
Church of Euthanasia got going, and also how my music career got going. | was
doing real things in the real world with people. That’s after all how Gigolo
discovered me. If | had not actually gone to the trouble to press my own vinyl at
great expense, and then drag it back from the pressing plant, some garage in
Brooklyn, and send it to people, and then pack it all in boxes and give it away and
send it to DJ pools, it would never have made it to that record shop where D) Hell
discovered it.
So in other words, there was a premium on doing actual things in the real world.
Whereas today, as things become more and more virtual, that’s no longer the case.
Increasingly today, action is occurring in this kind of padded global cell, this global
pleasure prison of the social media networks and all of their various associated
dungeons. There’s Second Life and there’s all the things that are like Second Life,
and Minecraft and online gaming and all of this. I’m not saying any of this is
necessarily wrong, I’m just saying that it’s very different from the kind of physical,
real world solidarity that was common in punk circles as recently as the 1990s.
And when | first came to Berlin in 1998, the wall had only been down for nine years,
and big chunks of East Berlin still looked more or less like they had looked in 1945.
The DDR didn’t have any money to fix the buildings, and West Berlin hadn’t gotten
around to it either, and so you better believe it was sketchy and it was as punk as
you please. There was squatting everywhere, and there was a feeling that you were
part of something big that involved real people doing weird stuff that the
government didn’t necessarily need to know about and probably wouldn't like if
they did. And that | think is the connection between all these things.
HI: Okay, so DJ Hell represses the record. And do you then move to Berlin in 98?
CK: | couldn’t manage it. | didn’t have the guts for it and | just couldn’t get it to
work. You have to remember—I’m not complaining—most of my friends back in
Boston, they were all in bands, and none of them amounted to anything. They
worked at it for years, sometimes decades, and got very little out of it. The typical
deal is you go and play in some bar and you get enough money to buy a couple of
six packs of beer, and then the drummer drinks it all. Welcome to my world. That’s
what being in a rock band is like. | mean an unsuccessful one.
There’s super successful ones who blow up and become a big deal for a
microsecond or two, but for most bands it’s just the endless parade of failure. And |
did better than that, a lot better than that. My metric is when somebody else is
paying to manufacture the product, you won. That’s the best you’re going to do. But
if you expect to live off it, then you’re really asking a lot. | Know very few electronic
musicians, even in the Gigolo days, who were able to just quit their jobs and do
nothing else. That was rare. There were a few. I’m not saying that Jeff Mills had to
have a day job. He probably didn’t. Good for him. Maybe Anthony Shake Shakir also
was able to make a living from it, but just barely, and not a particularly glamorous
living either. And that means Djing all weekend, every weekend. You understand?
That’s where the money was, even back then. The money didn’t come from selling
records. And this is at a time when even a relatively minor artist like me could sell
10,000 records. Basically at Gigolo, if you didn’t sell 10,000 records, they’d boot you
off the label. That was not a lot of records. A lot of records was 20,000 or 30,000,
which is just inconceivable by today’s standards. The point is that it wasn’t a
reasonable ambition for me to just move to Germany and make my living as an
artist, first of all because I’m not a DJ, and that was the only way there was any real
money in it. To make a living as a live performer was almost unheard of at that
time. Very few people managed it. Maybe Miss Kitten and the Hacker managed it,
but even they DJ’ed a lot, you know what I’m saying?
So it wasn’t that easy a proposition, and that’s a big part of the reason why |
stopped doing it in 2003. Even though | achieved a huge degree of notoriety and
sold a ton of records, the bottom line was | couldn’t pay my rent. | had to go get a
job. This is by the way normal. My favorite example is the great American author
who wrote—it’s going to drive me crazy now, help me here—he wrote The Sound
and the Fury. William Faulkner. William Faulkner is one of America’s most important
authors of all time, and he worked in a factory. He worked in an electrical
generating station. He would work there and then he’d go home and he’d work on
his books.
It’s not so unusual. | don’t feel that you have anything to complain about if you have
to get a day job to support your art. | never met an actor who didn’t, at the
beginning, at least, it’s just sort of part of life. | expect my art to cost money, and |
haven't been disappointed. | can tell you that it’s cost me a fortune. I’m sure that |
put in countless thousands. | can tell you for sure that the Church of Euthanasia
easily made a hundred thousand dollars in donations during its existence, if you
count all the merchandise, bumper stickers and t-shirts and stuff. We were 501(c)
(3), we were allowed to make that money, but you better believe it did not go to
buy me a fancy car or anything like that.
It all went into art. Every last dollar of it. And then some, you know, | was routinely
emptying out my bank account to pay for bigger and more exciting and more
interesting and more complex stunts. Because that’s what we were. Essentially the
Church of Euthanasia was like a theatrical company. At the peak of the street
actions period, we had probably 20 reliable players, of which five could really be
counted on to do the super dangerous stuff. We had a couple of guys who were the
commandos. There’s one guy in particular, James Brett, he always volunteered for
the most dangerous job. It was kind of a point of pride for him. He wanted to do the
thing that no one else wanted to do.
So we had a couple of guys like that. And we had a larger group of kind of hangers-
on, some of whom could be counted on to maybe hold a sign, some of whom just
came along to watch, or maybe they might take pictures and so on. It’s like
anything else, there’s degrees of participation. But on any given day, | could send
out... We had a kind of secret email channel on the internet. You had to know about
it to be on it. And we would send out the bat-phone signal, dada action at such and
such a time, be there or be square, exact time, this is what you have to bring, this is
what you have to do. Not that different than the Suicide Club in San Francisco, John
Law’s thing which eventually led to Burning Man, it was a little like that.
We had to keep it secret because we didn’t want anyone to know what we were
going to do, because if they did, they would’ve stopped us, right? It’s simple. So
we’d send out the code and then hopefully 20 people show up, and we’ve got
enough people to do the thing. So it was really this feeling of, you just never knew
what was next, but for sure it costs money. So | don’t feel bad about having lost
money on all of this. | consider that a point of pride. That means | was trying! You
have to put effort into it. You have to believe in your work. If you are stingy with
your art, then what kind of person are you? It’s the one thing you shouldn’t be
stingy on, you should be generous.
| give this talk about art recently, | gave it in Berlin here before, | gave it in France,
sorry, Switzerland, | gave it in Geneva, the essence of the talk... It’s called “Why do
| make art?” It’s all advice for artists, and it’s full of counterintuitive stuff. Things
like, don’t spend any time on publicity. It’s a waste of time. You should always
outsource that, because that’s time that you could have spent making art, which is
the thing that only you can do. It’s things like that. So people found it very
interesting. But there’s this idea that your art is your children, and who is stingy
with their children?
My works, these are my children. | want them to thrive. | spoil them. | want them to
have everything. | want them to go to Oxford. All I’m trying to say is that it’s not
surprising that | wasn’t able to really make a living as a Gigolo. What’s actually
surprising is, if you think about how extreme | was and how far out | was, what’s
surprising is that Gigolo gave me a platform. And the reason for that is actually
hidden. If you look closely, if you read the Wikipedia page on Electroclash, what
you'll discover... I’m one of the founders of Electroclash. It’s me and Hell and Miss
Kitten and the Hacker and a few other people. And one of the key things that Hell...
Hell gets some credit here, he saw something, he saw something quite brilliant. He
grew up during the time of the white labels, when almost all electronic music artists
were anonymous. You didn’t know who the artist was, and that was sort of a point
of pride. No one cares. They’re all white labels. Maybe something scribbled on it
with a Sharpie, but that’s it. No covers, nothing. But Hell saw that people were
getting tired of this, that there was a thing missing, and it wasn’t just that the music
was boring, though there was that. But what was really missing is the element of
glam, of celebrity, of there being something to see, something to watch, of being
entertained. And so his idea was, he was going to bring personalities back into the
electronic music business.
And he did that, and so that’s why he wanted me, because | was a larger than life
personality. | could definitely hold an audience. The first time | performed for Hell
was at Popkomm in Cologne. And the Gigolos said to me, so what do you need for
your show? You need a mixer, some turntables, what? And I’m like, what are you
talking about, mixer, turntable? | don’t do that, | don’t even own any records. | said
to them, | want a really big guitar amp, the biggest one you can find. Huge. And |
want a microphone. And they’re like, okay, that’s a pretty weird request, but we'll
see what we can do. And so | got off the plane, | marched down this parade of
broken glass. Popkkomm was a festival, there were a million drunks lying on the
street, broken glass everywhere.
We get to the place where the event is, and there’s a big stage with this giant guitar
amp. And | brought my guitar with me, and | plugged it in, and then | started
haranguing the crowd. | started giving a Church a Euthanasia sermon, in English.
Germans mostly speak some English, but still, it was pretty off-putting. People
started heckling me and throwing stuff and shouting. It was a Dada event, it really
was. And then when people had finally had enough, | twanged my guitar and |
launched into a guitar and vocals only version of Save the Planet, Kill Yourself, and
the crowd went fucking wild. There’s people who still talk about it today, they’d
never seen anything like it. And Hell was totally happy. He was like, that was great,
that was just what | wanted. He was that kind of guy, he was also a punk. He’s the
same age as me. He’s also from this time and has very similar influences. So | think
that will help to answer your question, to see this.
HI: One hundred percent. And | love that story. But you do stop releasing records for
a while, right?
CK: Not strictly. | released some, | feel, important ambient works during that period,
that supposed hiatus, let’s call it the hiatus. | released A/ Fasawz and /’// Just Die If |
Don’t Get This Recipe and Plasmagon during this hiatus. And not only that, but |
also developed the EKTA project during this time, which started out as helping my
girlfriend at the time with her final project for art school. What it was, was an EEG-
controlled algorithmic music and visual generator. So you could wear an EEG
[headband], and depending on your level of excitement, the generated music and
visuals would respond to you, creating feedback.
So it would amplify your state. If you were relaxed, it would become relaxed too,
and so you would become more relaxed. Or if you became excited, it would become
excited too, and amplify that. This was very innovative for that time. It was cutting-
edge technology, and it had influence. A lot of people saw it. We showed it a
number of times in Boston, and it got talked about some. That’s the EKTA project.
So | was involved in a lot of creative work at this time. | just wasn’t releasing dance
music records, and | wasn’t doing shows anymore, partly because | needed to focus
on other things to make a living. During this period, | spent 18 years working in the
3D-printing industry. I’ve had a 35 year career as a software developer, and by the
end, a high-level software developer, a consultant.
| was a consultant for 20 years. My specialty is parallel processing and protocol
design. I’ve done robotics, I’ve done all kinds of things. I’ve done a lot of stuff that
interfaces with hardware. Like firmware design, where you’re on the edge, you’re
working with electrical engineers every day. I’m not claiming to be an electrical
engineer, but I’ve worked with electrical engineers and with scientists routinely in
my career. And so those years that we're calling the hiatus, | was working for Z
Corporation first. | worked for them for 15 years. And with them, | helped develop
the world’s first full-color 3D printer, which was an astonishing thing to be part of.
By the end, it got so good. The machines got better and better.
There was a whole series of them, and | developed first the desktop software, and
then later also the firmware for them. It was a full-time thing. If you’ve ever seen
the Mike Judge TV show Silicon Valley, | lived that. It was a startup. | slept in my
cubicle. We lived on pizza and coffee. It was just like Silicon Valley. The same kinds
of maniacal characters came through, the guys who owned the companies, these
angel investors. I’ve seen all of that, but it was a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Towards the end, it got so good that if we had a 3D scan of you, we could make a
doll that looked just like you. It was freaky.
HI: It’s funny you mentioned that. My family for some reason, one year, we all got
each other 3D prints of one another.
CK: Yeah. It’s a thing you can do in the mall, right?
HI: Yeah.
CK: But believe me, when | started in 1999, this was just not the case. Nobody had
seen anything like this before. And some of the early adopters were all shoe
corporations, which is interesting. The reason shoe corporations and car companies
wanted this technology is because anybody doing large-scale injection molding of
plastic was interested in this. Because the problem is, you can’t do a small injection
molding run. There is no such thing. When you’re injection molding, you’re making a
million of whatever it is. And so it better be the right size and it better be exactly
what you want. Because you can’t say later, could you do it again?
So they were very interested in what are called concept models, where the idea is
that you make a model of it and everybody in the boardroom looks at it and signs
off on it and says, yes, this is exactly what we want. So the model better be really
similar to what you’re going to get, and it better have the right colors too. And
that’s where we came in, because we could make these color models. That was our
advantage. So anyway, this chewed up 15 years of my life. And then the last three
years after that before my reemergence, so to speak, the company got bought out.
Z Corp got bought out by an evil company. And so the founder of Z Corp, who also
was a very important member of the Church of Euthanasia, James Brett, the guy
who took [on] all the most dangerous duties, he’s also a genius.
An MIT guy. He founded Z Corporation. Then he left, he took his money and he left.
And he started a new company that was going to make large format stuff, large
format 3D printing. So here’s how that works. We’re going to make stuff the size of
a refrigerator, so then there’s no more printer. It’s too big for that. Instead we just
have a giant robot arm. And the print head is on the end of the arm. And we
program the robot to make print passes over and over, layer by layer, over 24 hours
or whatever. It builds up this ginormous thing on a pallet, so that later we can move
it. Because it’s on a pallet, right? If you build it on the floor, you would have a hard
time moving it afterwards.
Brilliant idea. It took forever to get it working. | spent three years on it, and it was
finally working by the time | left. Very crazy though. Very dangerous. | was terrified
the whole time. Because this robot arm, it’s the kind of robot you see in
advertisements for car companies. If this robot arm is mis-programmed, it could
literally throw you across the room like a football, and it has no idea that you’re
there. It’s not sentient or anything. It’s just a robot arm. So very dangerous. Very
stressful. | was glad to get out of there. So | had all that going on, and while | was
doing that, | was learning all the skills that | would actually need for my
reemergence, because there’s a crucial part of the story that’s missing, which I'll
just quickly fill in, which is that another reason...
It wasn’t just that | got tired of stupid smiles and autographs, although | did, that
was certainly a factor, hanging around in scuzzy techno clubs in the middle of the
night gets old after you’ve done it for five or six years, it can get old, that was a
factor. And the lack of money was a factor. And also, don’t forget that EFA went
bankrupt. That was a factor. Gigolo went down because EFA went down. And The
Man of the Future, which was my second album, was basically botched because of
that. A lot of the copies wound up destroyed because of failed consignment deals,
because the largest [electronic] music distributor in Europe [EFA] collapsed. So
there were a lot of factors, and it’s not just one thing, but a key factor that’s missing
from all that is that | had become frustrated with my software development tools for
making music. So of course, we have to back up a step.
Right from the very beginning, not from Save the Planet, Kill Yourse/f, but certainly
from shortly after that, | was developing my own custom software to compose
music with, because | was onto complex polymeter from the very beginning, and
you can’t do that with normal music production tools. It’s just not a thing. There is
no way. Most music production tools don’t support it, or they support it so horribly
in such a stupid way that it’s not worth the bother. So even on the Six Billion
Humans Can’t Be Wrong album, there’s complex polymeter all over the place. Go
back and listen to Buy, the first track. Buy is definitely in three and four and five and
seven, and 11 and 13 all at the same time. In fact, it’s more drastic than that. The
high hat part is literally in three different times. The closed hat is in one time
signature, the medium hat is in another time signature and the open hat is in still
another time signature. So in the beginning | had this kind of baroque explosion
where | discovered that | could juxtapose odd time signatures.
They have to be prime, of course, in order for you to get full phase shifting
behavior, they've got to be relatively prime. The mathematicians will appreciate
that, but it doesn’t matter right now. The point is that when | discovered this, | had
the reaction that any person would have when they discover something new. | want
to use it all the time. | used it really aggressively. And so to my ear, now, 30 years
later, my early compositions sound a little over the top. When | go back and | listen
to Buy, | think, wow, | really threw in everything and the kitchen sink too. It’s a bit
much in places, a little too relentless.
And so over the years, | developed methods for taming the inherent relentlessness
of polymeter juxtaposition, but | encountered a limit. By 2001, 2002, | had
encountered a limit. And the limit was that | was developing all my software under
DOS. Remember MS-DOS, this is very primitive technology by today’s standards.
Remember 64K and stuff like that. | literally just didn’t have enough memory to do
the things | wanted to do. And computers were just too slow to do the things that |
wanted to do. And so development kind of ground to a halt. And | knew that in order
to really get over these technological limitations, | would have to learn to use a
modern operating system. Because by this point Windows 2000 exists, but | don’t
know how to program for it. It’s not like you can just suddenly become a Windows
programmer.
That’s a really high bar. That’s actually really difficult. It can take years to become a
competent Windows programmer. And so there was no easy path. So one of the
fortuitous things about me having taken that job for Z Corporation was one of the
first things they asked me to do was learn Windows. Boom. And so within a year, |
had already written my first open source software. | wrote a wonderful program
called Mixere which was sort of like having an unlimited number of cassette decks,
each one of which could be loaded with one wave file. And every [deck] had its own
independent transport controls plus pitch and other things. And so you could
basically configure them all to play some crazy sound collage. Well, that was super
convenient because, let’s see, this was 1999, 2000.
That was definitely the peak of sound collage. The college radio station, WZBC, that
| was involved with, they were playing sound collage every day, every weeknight
from like 9:00 PM until whenever the DJs got tired. It was all Soviet France and stuff
like that. And so | was fitting in perfectly with that. | started doing live sound
collage, and that’s how | wound up making /’// Just Die If | Don’t Get This Recipe. |
used to do, let’s call it an irregular night at ZBC. | would get invited as a sub if the
regular DJ couldn’t make it. And | would bring my laptop and my little hard drive
loaded up with clips from all of my favorite movies, which I'd carefully edit. And
then | would start jamming with them.
And I’m not saying | invented this, | stole this idea blatantly from my favorite WZBC
Dj. It was a guy named Gary Geiserman. | don’t even know if Gary Geiserman is still
around, but he would show up at WZBC. He was the crank of the station. Everyone
hated him because he was constantly violating the standards on profanity and
playing Allen Ginsberg’s How/ and stuff, which you’re not allowed to do with FCC
regulations. He would do it anyway. They finally booted him off the air. But he would
show up at the station with suitcases filled with cassette tapes, literally suitcases,
and amazingly, he knew what was on all these tapes. And he would start doing this
crazy improvisation and he would start layering and layering and layering until he
had so many things going, 5, 6, 7 layers going, all somehow weirdly related.
He was an inspiration to me. And right around that time was when Orb became
hugely famous and popular, and they were doing this too. If you go back and listen
to Orb’s albums from the late 1990s, there’s a sample in one of those tracks where
they say, “layering different sounds, that’s what we do.” They do it in an English
accent. It’s more charming, layering different sounds, that’s what we do. And this
was the moment for that. Let’s layer different sounds. And so | got really into it, and
| developed the software tool for it, and that’s what led to /’// Just Die If | Don’t Get
This Recipe. \'m telling you this story just so you can understand that this was not a
fallow period, creatively.
This was in fact the period during which | really expanded myself out of the kind of
narrow shoes that | was in, where | had been an electro artist and electronic live
electronic music performer, and the Church of Euthanasia, and that was it. |
suddenly saw the opportunities to move into many other things that are still bearing
fruit today. | moved into visual art. | became a VJ for a while and VJ’ed at clubs. |
had written my own VJ software from scratch, another learning project. And so
through that | began to develop all kinds of other tentacles and branches and
became a richer, fuller artist. And so | feel that this period is so important and it’s
misunderstood. People think of it as a fallow period, but it really wasn’t. It’s what
made my current burst of creativity possible.
HI: So let’s talk about the reemergence then. So you do the boiler room in 2019. Is
that right? And does this feel like your coming out party?
CK: Well, yeah, but only from an external point of view. From an internal point of
view, the sprouting was well before that. The sprouting started in 2016 after my
mother passed away. That had a big shock. | had to spend a year of my life—with all
respect—cleaning up my mother’s life. I’m the only child. My father and my mother
split in 1976 or something, so that wasn’t going to be his job. There was only really
one person who could do it. Also | should point out that my mother passed away in
the apartment that | grew up in, so to say that it was very personal is understating
it. She still had a lot of my stuff actually. And a lot of it was hidden.
So there were many surprises, she was kind of a hoarder. But that’s very common
of the depression era, many of the depression era people became hoarders,
understandably, considering the experience that they had as children. If you were
born in the 1930s, you experienced deprivation and privation on a scale that’s hard
for us to imagine. Bread lines, rationing, all of that stuff. And so it’s understandable
that she would feather her nest pretty well, and she did. And so it took a lot of
energy and time to sort all that out, and in the process, | kind of came to a
realization. | felt the feeling of the sand going through the hourglass, if you will.
And | thought to myself, well, | suppose all throughout history, everyone has
thought this. When one of your parents dies, you think, I’m next. And that’s true, by
and large. Of course, there are exceptions, but by and large, that’s true. And so |
thought, you know what? It’s time for me to take a stand and devote the rest of my
life to art, and I’m going to make that possible. By then, I’d accumulated enough
savings, l’d squirreled away enough nuts from my 35 year career as a software
designer. [checks years with calculator] By then, | figured | had a shot at being able
to make this work. After all that time, | was still kind of living like a college student,
just to be clear. | rented a room in a big house. | had seven roommates or
something. And my furniture mostly was milk crates. | slept on a mattress on the
floor. | don’t have expensive taste, so it looked doable to me, and | thought, all
right, let’s make a stand. It’s time to stop talking about the Polymeter MIDI
Sequencer. It’s time to sit down and actually do it. Talking about it is cheap, but
doing it, that’s the thing.
And by that point, | no longer really had any excuses. | had the time to do it. | had
the skill and the knowledge to do it. And so | just thought, let’s get serious now.
Because by then, I'd already released four or five major open source softwares, so |
had a really solid grasp of the fundamentals of Windows programming, both the UI
and the multi-processing stuff, the thread space stuff. So | was ready to do it. And
so | did it. And it’s fair to say that Akoko Ajeji, my comeback album, evolved out of
that. Each track on the album reflects a new feature being added to the software. It
was like that. If you played it in the order that it was written, it would be a weird
musical history of the evolution of the modern Polymeter MIDI Sequencer, which has
many features that the original did not have.
It has all the features that the original had, pretty much, and hopefully none of the
bugs and, and none of the limitations, but many other features, new features. In
fact they were still being added years later, new degrees of freedom that | hadn’t
imagined when | first came up with the polymeter sequencer, because they just
weren’t possible, so it wasn’t worth worrying about them. But they proved to be
very important, and they led to a whole new class of music, especially my classical
music, which didn’t get much recognition so far, but | have to tell you, Passion for
Numbers is a truly radical aloum. Whether people like it is a separate question, but
it is structurally extremely radical.
HI: And so how do you, how do you go about finding, | mean it’s a different type of
audience that seems to be engaging with your music. How do you connect with
Perlon?
CK: It’s not so different. I’m always struck by how little Dj life has changed. In fact,
I’m primarily struck by the opposite. I’m struck by how nostalgic and backwards-
looking the DJ pyramid is. | call it that after this essay that | wrote for Ransom Note,
The Dj Pyramid, this incendiary essay which no doubt made me many enemies in
the music world, specifically in the minimal techno world. But the DJ pyramid seems
to me an apt metaphor. And we’re not going to name names. There’s no need to. |
think somewhere in there | said certain people are making boatloads of money from
the DJ pyramid, and they’re probably not going to enjoy reading this essay. That’s
probably true. It’s a critique.
| feel that in many respects, the electronic dance music world is extremely
conformist and closely tied to neoliberalism, to neoliberal capitalism. It’s a form of
standardization of markets. People are normally aware by now that the only legal
obligation of a corporation is to return a profit for its shareholders. That news has
mostly penetrated to the average person, but it’s not so obvious, and it’s less
commonly recognized that the most efficient and rapid way to achieve that goal is
by standardizing consumption. George Lucas was absolutely right to draw attention
to this in his classic film, THX 1138. One of the little infomercial breaks in THX 1138
was “for more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being
standardized.” That was one of the Church of Euthanasia quotes. We used that in
our propaganda.
So George Lucas knew about this back in the day, and it’s just true. The way you
generate profits is by standardizing consumption, because if everyone wants the
same thing, or a relatively trivial variation on the same thing, it’s much easier to
automate and mass manufacture whatever that is. That’s just obvious. To the
extent that everywhere across the world, everybody listens to really similar music
and takes the same drugs and wears the same kind of clothes and acts the same
way, that’s great for capitalism, that’s optimal. In fact that’s exactly the conditions
in which capitalism thrives. And so | associate especially the modern form of
electronic dance music with this kind of standardization and homogenization of
culture. And as | said, that view has made me many enemies, but | feel that I’ve
arrived at an age where | don’t worry about people disagreeing with me that much
anymore.
It’s not really a problem. People disagreed with me back then too. I’ve been
accused of way worse things than having unconscionable opinions about electronic
music. That’s sort of at the bottom of my list of crimes, if you want to put it that
way, right? Remember, we’re talking about a person who made a 9-11 music video.
Much worse things have happened. But | feel that I’m justified in saying this
because | lived through a much different period of electronic music. In the early
1990s, when D} Hell was coming up, it’s fair to say that the electronic music scene
was a lot more diverse. I’m not saying that everybody was writing in complex
polymeter. That’s not true. I’m almost certainly the pioneer of that, and that’s fine.
But there were a lot more rhythms going on. Drum and bass was big, breakbeat was
happening. The super-fast crazy rave music was happening in the Scandinavian
countries. There was jungle going on, and just all kinds of things were happening. It
was very rhythmically and musically diverse. And frankly, in terms of house music,
it was still really common for actual musicians to be involved. So back in 1991, if
you wanted to make a house record, you had to hire actual musicians. Who else
was going to play those piano parts? There’s no algorithm for that. You need a guy
who knows how to play the piano really well to do that. It’s not programming. You
need a guy to sit down and just play that. And then you also need a gospel singer.
Those don’t grow on trees either, so it’s still more closely connected to the root of
disco music.
The early disco music was done with orchestras. | always feel like it seems so
obvious to me, but that’s because I’m old. If you really want to see what disco
looked like, go back and watch Saturday Night Fever again and look at those dance
moves. And it wasn’t just pair dancing, it wasn’t just John Travolta and Olivia
Newton John [actually Karen Lynn Gorney]. No. There’s scenes where they showed a
whole crowd all doing the same move. And so there’s a connection between that
and the much older culture that John Waters is showing in his film about Baltimore
dance culture, Hairspray. Look at the dancing in that, like the Madison, for example.
If you go to dance the Madison, you better practice, babe. You better know what the
fuck you’re doing. If you’re in with a crowd and you're doing the Madison and the
guy says, do a Wilt Chamberlain layup, and you’re like, what’s that? You’re not
going to be dancing with those guys again. They’re going to boot you right out. The
point is that it’s social dancing, which means that success is not judged by the
success of the individual, it’s judged by the success of the group. And this ties us to
a much larger critical theme in my work, which is the critique of the collapse of
solidarity in Western civilization, and the collapse of not just Lyndon Johnson’s Great
Society, but the collapse of the whole post World War II consensus.
You could connect it to the collapse of the Soviet Union as well, and you wouldn’t be
wrong. Not that I’m a communist, by any means, I’m not. But you could make a
case that the period I’ve lived through—I call it the Age of Rollback—all of the great
social web connections have been rolled back systematically, because they
inconvenience the super wealthy. It’s all very literal in the end. It’s all about money.
Sometimes | ask people, what do you think the top nominal tax rate ever achieved
in America was? I'll ask you that question. What do you think the highest tax rate
that historically ever existed in America was?
HI: It’s got to be like 60, 70 percent maybe.
CK: 94.
HI: Okay. Wow.
CK: Yeah. In 1946, the top nominal tax rate was 94 percent. | think it was on
everything over a million dollars. It might’ve been much lower. It might’ve been a
few hundred thousand dollars, because that was a million dollars back then. [The
year was actually 1944, and the 94% tax applied to income over $200,000 which
would be 3.3 million in 2023 dollars. The top tax rate was reduced to 91% in 1945
where it remained until 1964.]
So the idea was basically above a certain threshold, the government takes it all.
Now, why would they do that? And why would anyone submit to that? You could
say, Okay, they needed to pay for rebuilding Europe, but that’s not really the point.
They did it in Britain too. The reason they did it is because there was a deliberate
effort to suppress oligarchy, because there was a feeling—justified | think, and I’m
sure Thomas Piketty would agree—there was a feeling that oligarchy led to World
War | and then World War Il in short order, that it was no longer practical to allow
such corrosive concentration of wealth and such desperate poverty around that,
and that it was necessary to redistribute wealth, for governments to actually get
involved in redistributing wealth, and that’s how come so many of the Gls who
fought in the war came back to America and got free houses and got to go to
college for free.
There was a tremendous spasm of largesse, if you want to put it that way. And the
United Nations is just a symbol of that. The whole high modern period is a symbol of
this idea that government is suddenly going to take an interest in people’s lives and
try and help people thrive, because it’s actually a good thing if there’s more social
cohesion, and there’s more equality between classes and less separation, less
concentration of wealth, then we’re less likely to have the conditions of failure, of
real deep societal failure and miseducation and social degradation that lead to war.
Because if you look at the history of how the first and second world wars got
started, it’s clear that poverty was a huge factor in those wars.
This is something that’s really changed during my lifetime, and I’ve been critiquing
it all along. I’ve been saying, look, we had the right idea. We were on the right path.
And then... Piketty says this was inevitable, and maybe he’s right. I’m not an
economist. | submit to his superior judgment on this matter. His point is that the
high modern period, we thought it was going to continue forever and just get better
and better. But from his longer view, the high modern period was just a bubble, and
now we’re back to the default rule that’s persisted throughout all of the history of
civilization, which in his view is that the rich get richer. But that’s horrible. That’s a
great disaster. And that’s what | was explicitly critiquing on Apologize to the Future.
The first line of Exit Game is what? Rich people are dumb. | hope they succumb, in
expensive cars and condos on Mars. There’s a lot of hostility towards the wealthy,
and even more so on Not My Problem, I'll Be Dead, which is really about them. I’ve
been expressing this consistently in my work, this idea that we’ve really lost the
thread here, that it’s starting to look like we fought the first and second world wars
for nothing. And that’s a scandal, because that’s arguably the most dramatic history
that’s ever occurred for humanity. Younger people don’t get it. They didn’t live
through it. But my godmother’s relatives died in the Holocaust. My father was
evacuated, because he was a child, from London during the Blitz. World War II was
not some kind of archaic thing, like the neolithic or something, to me.
| remember what a world that had more solidarity looked like. When | grew up in
New York City, most people had ordinary apartments, ordinary appliances. It looked
a lot like that American TV show, The Honeymooners, if you can imagine that. It
wasn’t the 1950s quite, there was something new happening, but there was still a
lot of... Let’s just say the middle class was a lot bigger and there was no shame in
being middle class. In fact, there was pride in being middle class and that world has
disappeared. And so that’s a lot of what I’ve been criticizing.
HI: That’s wonderful, and that’s such a helpful articulation of so many of these
concerns. And I’m curious then, my question, on the one hand is, you’re describing,
| think, accurately a homogenization of dance music culture, and offering a critique
of that. So | hear that and, and I’m curious about a, how you see your music
perhaps interrupting that, and b, sort of a second part to this is that—whether the
material conditions are actually true, whether, it’s actually reflective of material
reality, I’m not so sure, and I’m curious to hear your point—but there is now more of
a conversation around dance music and politics. And people thinking about politics,
thinking about solidarity, thinking about identity that comes from that. And I’m
curious, if you see that another facet of neoliberalism, sort of co-opting politics, or
whether you see dance music as becoming more politicized now.
CK: Well, | have to be very careful here, because I’ve already made so many
enemies already. | don’t think it’s constructive for me to give everyone a bloody
nose over something that’s not really their fault. | think that the societal currents
that are causing homogenization of culture are immensely powerful, and are far
beyond the control of individuals. | think individuals can resist it to some extent, but
Meta is too big. It’s not practical to resist corporations of this size. Google, if you
view it as an economy, has a GDP much larger than many nations. | think we’re up
against vast forces that were essentially unimaginable even 15 years ago. So | don’t
blame people for just doing the best they can and trying to adapt to this new world
that the internet has created, for all of its faults.
But | do think though, that there’s some careful distinctions that we’re overlooking
here. I’m anti-solipsism. I’m anti-unicorn. | don’t think that it’s a good thing for
humanity to get the idea that reality is just whatever you say. | come from a hard
science, engineering background. | understand what reality is, and | understand
what science’s role is in explicating that. | give a whole talk just about that. That’s
what’s summarized on the Apologize to the Future album, in the song, A Thin Layer
of Oily Rock. \'m a scientific pragmatist. Scientific pragmatism is the idea that our
explanations of phenomena will always be imperfect, but they can be improved, and
they have been improved greatly, and they will continue to improve as long as
civilization remains sufficiently organized. By now, our explanations of phenomena
are quite extraordinarily accurate, accurate enough to make cell phones that
contain parts which are literally just a few nanometers wide, a few billionths of a
meter.
Very impressive. That’s a lot of progress. A lot of it occurred just during my lifetime
too. When | was a little kid, integrated circuits were just becoming a thing.
Transistors were still the norm. When | was a really little kid, integrated circuits
hadn’t really happened yet. So in one lifetime, we went from discrete transistors to
the iPhone. There’s been tremendous technological progress, but there’s also been
tremendous social progress. When | was a little kid, racism was absolutely endemic
in the United States, even in progressive liberal cities like Boston. Gay people were
completely closeted. Most people who knew the band Queen literally didn’t even
know that Freddie Mercury was gay. Most people didn’t know that Elton John was
gay. In fact, he did everything he could to conceal it. He even tried to get married to
a woman.
Freddie Mercury did something similar, as we now know. It was a different world,
socially. So there’s been a lot of progress, and I’m not taking away from that. |
recognize that we’ve been struggling to overcome many of our handicaps, but that
does not give us license to escape into solipsism. Solipsism fundamentally is the
philosophy that each individual makes their own reality, and I’m saying that that’s a
part of the problem with neoliberalism, is that it encourages this. The internet
encourages this. Gaming and social media encourage us all to make our own rules,
to become detached from reality, and drift off into virtual space, like The Matrix,
where we’re all in our little pods and we can think whatever we like, because what
we’re actually doing is lying in a vat of goo.
| don’t think that’s constructive, | think that’s a disaster, and | think that if we
continue down the road of solipsism, then we’ll never solve climate change. In order
to solve climate change, we'll need solidarity. We’ll need the one thing that we can’t
seem to manage to do, which is to actually agree, and we'll need to agree about
something super important. We’ll need to agree about what the goal is. And not
only that, but the goal had better be humanity becoming a long-lived species,
because otherwise we won’t become one. We just won’t be around. That’s the
reality. I’m sorry to put it in such stark terms, but it’s really as simple as that. We’re
having a reality moment.
It’s a little like that moment in Blade Runner where [Leon] says to Harrison Ford’s
character, as he’s beating him up, he says, wake up, time to die! It’s just like that. If
we don’t snap out of it real soon and change human structures drastically—curtail
our consumption, curtail our population, stop burning fossil carbon—if all those
things don’t happen almost immediately, then you can expect real damage,
meaning we’re going to spend the next hundred years moving our cities inland.
Imagine that. That’s just the reality. And who knows what the effects of that, who
knows if civilization would even survive that? And that would just be the beginning.
Because if we get up to four degrees C then no one knows that that’s stable, or
whether that will automatically go to five or six, and for sure, then you're melting all
of the ice, and the last time all of the ice was melted, you’re talking 80 meters of
sea level rise, something like that.
Catastrophic damage. Earth will not be the same, not for us anyway. And so it could
be that then humans are gone, or at least civilization is gone, and it’s game over for
us. It’s that serious. And so this is not one of those moments when we can all just be
sort of hanging out, playing with our toys and being special little snowflakes. | know
that sounds horrible, and it makes me sound like some kind of right-wing ideologue,
but there’s an element of this that’s going on, where people are retreating from
reality, and | don’t blame them. This is what | was talking about when | said,
ostriches with fancy headphones, canceling inconvenient moans. | understand why
people want to escape from reality. | understand why people want to anesthetize
themselves, but it’s not constructive, and we don’t have time for it. It’s a time-
limited situation we're facing. | feel that that needs to be said, and I’m not going to
make any friends saying it either.
Nobody wants to hear this. But to answer your question, | don’t think that anyone
else in the dance music that | hear is saying this. Most of the dance music | hear
doesn’t have any lyrics, and if it does have lyrics, it’s something along the lines of,
hey, baby, dance, dance, dance. | don’t think that Kate Tempest counts, because |
don’t consider that dance music in the sense that we’re talking about. | consider
Kate Tempest to be rap music. One of the reasons that | decided to make a rap
album—which is basically what Apologize to the Future is—is because | was exposed
to Kate Tempest’s Europe /s Lost.
After | heard that, | thought two things. | thought, first of all, if Kate Tempest can
rap, then | can rap. | mean seriously, I’m not going to be accused of cultural
appropriation or anything. She wasn’t. So | felt okay about doing it, which | hadn’t
before. But second of all, | thought, it looks to me—I said to my partner at the time,
| want to do this, and she’s like, but you know nothing about rap music, and so she
made me a playlist, and after | listened to whatever it was, 50 rap tracks, and had a
kind of crash course in rap music, | thought—it looks to me like the torch of critique
of society has moved to rap music.
It used to be—back in the day, when | was a kid—it was held by rock music. Social
criticism came from rock bands. The Who is full of social criticism. Pink Floyd is wall-
to-wall social criticism. Roger Waters is still doing it today. Animals and Wish You
Were Here, these are really trenchant social criticism. But that all ended right when
the eighties started. It became all about Cindy Lauper, party, party, party and
Prince and stuff like this. Everything became reduced to hedonism and to a very
superficial level, and that didn’t change for a really long time. There were notable
exceptions. You have things like Laurie Anderson with O Superman, you have some
of Lou Reed’s work, his late work. There were a few interesting exceptions, but for
the most part, there was a drastic ascent of superficiality in musical culture
throughout the 1990s, and it was very dispiriting for me.
And so | really don’t see political stances coming from electronic dance music. If you
can find me some examples, I'd like to hear them, but I’m not seeing it. | think even
a band like Tool is way more political. | think metal is closer to being political than
electronic dance music. Electronic dance music for me, is increasingly associated
with hedonism, and not only that, but one of the symptoms of that is that
increasingly people feel completely empowered to just ignore the music, and party
and talk. That’s not a good sign.
Again, | feel like I’m coming from an alien planet, but like | said, the first concert |
saw—the first big stadium concert, in 1976—I remember being struck somewhere in
there—maybe when they were playing Black Dog or whatever it was—I remember
thinking, | could spend the rest of my life practicing the guitar and | would never,
ever, ever be able to do this. What | just saw is like watching the Olympics of guitar,
or the Olympics of drumming for that matter. It’s just superhero stuff. Your jaw is
[hanging down] like this, you are drooling, you scream at the end because you don’t
know what else to do. People all hold up their lighters because they’re just blown
away. They just can’t believe what they just saw. Well, if | soend an evening at
Berghain, | don’t feel like that. | don’t feel that | saw anything all that spectacular. It
makes me sound horrible, it makes me sound like some kind of angry old lady, but |
feel like | hung around watching a bunch of people drink and do drugs while some
guy spins some records. There was not much to see. It doesn’t feel like
entertainment. | get that it has a social feature. | get that it gives people a safe
space where they can be themselves and everybody can be the person that they
want to be, and there’s a LGBTQ aspect, especially at Berghain, but | don’t consider
that a substitute for a vibrant musical or political culture. You understand the point
I’m making? The fact that everybody talks through it is a bad sign. If it were that
spectacular, people wouldn’t talk. They’d be amazed.
They’d sit there and watch and think, wow, that’s fucking cool, | wish | could do
that, and maybe someday | will. But | don’t see that. I’ve never seen that. | mean,
actually | have, I’ve seen techno shows that were that amazing, but not in decades.
There were a couple of shows | saw in Munich in the mid-nineties that were maybe
that spectacular. But mind you, some of those were live acts too. I’m thinking of the
Chicks On Speed. There was the time when they came out with fake instruments,
that was pretty cool. They had all these fake drum machines and fake synthesizers
made out of cardboard. That was pretty spectacular. It was only a half an hour, but
it was a very entertaining half an hour. Nobody was talking. People were transfixed.
Being transfixed is a good thing.
If it’s that entertaining and that impressive and that emotionally moving, you should
be transfixed by it. You shouldn’t be chatting. And so this is what | said in the essay
after all, what | said in The D/ Pyramid was, if we’re going to have a revolution in
music, we’re going to have to stop partying to it, and learn to actually start listening
to it. And it better be worth listening to. That’s also part of the problem. It’s a two-
sided problem. It has two sides. Part of the reason people are ignoring it is because
it’s so ignorable. Now, if you print all this I’m going to lose all my followers, and
nobody will ever buy my records again.
HI: Don’t worry, it’ll certainly gain you whole new audiences.
CK: You think? What audience? Explain your strange customs. What audience is
going to admire that? | find it hard to believe.
HI: Yeah. But these are all wonderful and super important insights, and really
intricate points too, that | hadn’t thought about. If people are talking over the
music, what are we actually listening to? And how do you galvanize the politics from
that? If you’re just partying.
CK: Yeah. And what’s the connection between that and all the thousands of records
that come out every year that are so indistinguishable that it’s literally hard to tell
them apart? They get used as tools for a reason, because they’re so similar, and
that also suggests this element of homogenization. People constantly complain
about my records and how hard they are to mix, but | take it as a compliment.
[laughs] When somebody tells me that, I’m glad. That’s actually good news, that
means that my work was successful. | made something that was really different and
challenging. And if you can’t mix it, you can’t mix it, and | can’t help you with that,
but it’s a good sign.
Again, we’re into very dangerous territory, but there’s a new essay that | haven’t
published, and it’s about the elevation of DJing to high art and my critique of that.
And so one of the points that | make—it’s fair to say that The D/ Pyramid was the
polite version, this time | take the gloves off and it’s not so charming—and one of
the points | make is that when | was a little kid, there was no mystique about DJing.
DJing was just literally a thing that evolved out of record labels. Record labels
encouraged radio stations to play their records, and they actually, in many cases,
paid DJs to play the records. It’s called payola, and it was a big thing in the 1950s
that’s not technically allowed anymore, but it totally was allowed back then.
And that’s how record labels made certain records into hits. They would pay the DJs
to play it more often. It’s as simple as that. It was a job, like any other, and there
wasn’t a big mystique around it. The first time | went to a place that you could calla
dance club, what would today be called a discotheque—the French word literally
means a place where there’s music for people to dance to, that’s all it means,
nothing about the style of music, the word discotheque is much older, it just
basically means a place where people go to dance to music—so the first time | went
to a discotheque was in Switzerland in the seventies, and they played The Doors.
They played Light My Fire, and it was great.
They played the whole thing, all seven minutes. It’s a great song. | mean, sorry, but
that’s way, way more entertaining music than anything I’ve heard in a nightclub
lately. It’s extremely dynamic. It’s got a lot of ideas in it. It’s got those great Middle
Eastern guitar solos. It’s got the crazy organ music. It’s got Jim Morrison with that
deep voice. They didn’t even write this song [false, The Doors did write it,
apologies] but they brought it to life in a way that was just so powerful, and |
remember thinking, wow, this is perfect actually, who would want more? They
played other hits. They played 10cc and Deep Purple, Smoke on the Water and all
that seventies music. But the DJ | don’t remember at all, what DJ?
I’m sure there was one, there was some guy spinning the records, and when one
stopped, he’d play the next one, but nobody paid any attention to that. He wasn’t
even visible, | don’t think. He was off there somewhere in the corner in some little
booth with his turntables. What I’m saying, though it sounds horrible, what I’m
saying is that | remember before DJing as art, that’s a much later development.
That’s a post-eighties thing. It started in the late seventies in gay clubs, in 1975 or
whatever, but unless you were gay and living in New York at that time, you wouldn’t
have known about it. It became a mainstream thing in the late seventies, early
eighties. It soread to straight clubs and it became a worldwide thing, and suddenly
it became all about DJing, and scratch came, and it became something you might’ve
seen on TV, but that’s relatively recent from my point of view.
And even at the time, | remember thinking, why is this so special? What is the point
about this exactly? How is this a substitute, for example, for watching The Grateful
Dead for a couple of hours, which | did. Oh, so provocative. Yes, | was a deadhead.
The Dead were amazing, by the way, amazing. | mean, in terms of lyrics, right up
there with Joni Mitchell. They were a biker band, so of course they only wrote about
things that are important to bikers, they only wrote about drug addiction, death,
gambling, crime, murder, cheating on your wife, all that. It was very, very dark, but
wonderful. It really had so much emotional range. And yeah, on a bad night they
sang like sick cats, but on a good night, it was like nothing else you've ever seen.
The whole place, a whole stadium full of people on LSD and the Dead are playing in
odd time, half the time, there’s that! Go back and listen to Terrapin Station. Go find
the song—what’s it called?— Estimated Prophet. That is the slickest playing in 7/4
that I’ve ever heard. They make it sound easy. [sings the guitar line]. Seven.
Amazing. There really was a lot of competition for the DJ disco thing. It wasn’t a
simple battle, but those of us who saw it come, we knew there was trouble coming.
There was a year, 1979 was the year when the trouble really came and arrived at
the front door, and the symptom was that all the big progressive rock bands that we
knew and loved suddenly put out a disco single.
Why? Because they wanted to? No. They did it because their managers and their
record labels came to them and they said, listen, here’s the deal. Either you put a
disco single on your record, or the kids aren’t going to buy it, and we’re going to fire
your asses. So Pink Floyd released Another Brick in the Wall, Grateful Dead released
Shakedown Street, the Rolling Stones released, | don’t know, Miss You or one of
those other ones. There was a whole bunch of them. Suddenly we were awash in
classic rock and progressive rock bands playing disco, and we're all like, what the
fuck? What’s this? We liked it better before, no, oh my God, they all sold out, and
then they all disappeared because the culture changed. So what’s up with that? This
is all I’m trying to say, is how do we change something this big and this
fundamental? How do we make culture less superficial?
Well, the problem is, it’s not really within the power of any individual to change
that, because it’s unavoidably tied to how people are educated and therefore tied to
larger issues, social issues, like how is money spent, and who has it? Is government
in the business of enriching people’s lives or not? If we listen to the Republicans and
their equivalents in other countries, there wouldn’t be any government. That’s what
they’re always saying, right? They’re not shy about it. They come around and say,
we hate government. We want to destroy government. There shouldn’t be any
government. The government should only exist to make life easy for corporations,
and there shouldn’t be any regulations either, so we can dump shit in the water.
And we live in a world shaped by that ideology. In a world like that, people are going
to get dumber, because no one gives a shit about them. The rich people, they send
their kids to private schools. Yeah. That’s how it works. That’s how it worked before
the wars. Most people were dumb because they just didn’t have a chance to be
otherwise. This is all I’m saying. This is the real critique at the heart of the whole
shebang—the Church of Euthanasia, my music, my art, my everything—at the heart
of it is awareness of this collapse of solidarity, and the collapse of social cohesion.
Pretty glum.
HI: Glum, sure, but spot-on, | think. So thank you for that, Chris. We’ve been going
for two hours, so | think I’ve got plenty of material here, to get going at least. So
thank you so much.
CK: Oh, you’re so welcome. But | feel really bad, | feel like this always happens
when people interview me. | feel like | talk too much and | should’ve listened to you
more. Is there something, is there any question that you feel that | really didn’t
answer that you want me to answer? Something specific.
HI: | have so much, and this was just so generous and filled with a wealth of
knowledge and ideas, and lines of flight to follow, | think too. | have so much more,
and | think as | go to actually start to put pen to paper here, maybe | can touch base
if other things come up, or if | feel like | haven’t covered something properly yet, if
that’s alright with you?
CK: That is totally all right. | have no plans to go anywhere serious. I’m going ona
little trip this coming weekend, but just a short one, and other than that, | have no
plans to go anywhere until the Garbicz festival in early August, so I’m around.
HI: Cool. Well, that’s great. Well this has just been a real pleasure, and I’m really,
really happy we were able to make it work. And thank you so much for all your time,
Chris.
CK: It’s really my pleasure. | felt this was a delightful interview. It really was. We
really got right to the core of the whole thing.
HI: Yeah. We certainly did.
CK: And that happens only very rarely.
HI: No, | think we certainly, definitely got to the heart of something.
CK: We killed it, as we used to say back in the day.
HI: Yeah. So thank you so much, Chris. Thank you. | will be in touch, okay?
CK: All right.
HI: Take care. Bye.
CK: Bye.