Carsten Nicolai
««I want to stay in the core of the sound, as it were.»: Interview by Martin Pesch»

Carsten Nicolai
«I want to stay in the core of the sound, as it were.»
Interview by Martin Pesch


Martin Pesch: Can you tell us something about your background. How did your interest in music develop, leading to your own musical output?

Carsten Nicolai: Listening to the radio is something that had a lasting influence on me. We didn’t have very good reception and so we had to listen on short wave, and that was exciting. All that coded information that comes over on short wave. Russian radio messages coded into combinations of numbers, numbers often came through in Russian for hours, and that really caught my imagination. I recorded all that, and funny mixtures of language and Morse code as well, it was like a mixture of little finished pieces and mysterious finds for me. A record that was very important to me is "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Those two really created something then, and they probably weren’t fully aware what they were delivering. Another important record was Laurie Anderson’s first one. Then that went on to link up with Meredith Monk, and with the Minimalists. I listened to a lot of Steve Reich as well. It was always a problem getting hold of the records here. Anyone who had a record lent it out and it went round a particular circle and then some time or other you got something back, usually another record. My brother and I, we perhaps had about 30, 40 records from the West, and we put them all on tape, that was terrifically important. You had a huge tape collection, and it really mattered to have a machine that would record. I made my first experiments with the tape recorder I had. It was absolutely vital to copy all the records, and that quickly led to recording your own stuff. I started making loops very early, cobbled my own cassettes together. I bought the simplest Akai sampler as soon as I could, in the early '90s. I only needed a machine to make loops, not a music machine. I was never actually interested in modification, and I’m still not. I just liked the idea of making loops. There’s still one important influence from fine art and that’s Carlfriedrich Claus. He did a lot with language, but he did acoustic experiments as well, and what I saw him doing was breaking through categories, and that was always important to me as well. I didn’t realize till later that everything I’ve done is looked at in categories.

M.P.: And so we can say that your own music has less to do with today and Techno and more with electronic music in the avant-garde sense?

C.N.: These long traditions, early Bauhaus, Dada, Duchamp, Picabia are definitely important, but I am interested in both. Techno has opened up another field. Firstly because electronic music has become more popular, its discernible value has increased considerably. And then of course in terms of the connection between essentially traditional approaches and the up-to-the-minute scene. You can watch people like the Sähkö lot on this interface. The fact that the Techno scene has fragmented so much now shows that there are a lot of parallels with Musique Concrète or seventies stuff. Even though it has actually broken off, and perhaps it’s just happening subconsciously at the moment, but I think that this thread is being taken up again at the moment.

M.P.: Since when has the music that you publish on records also been part of your fine art?

C.N.: For a year at least. «Mikro Makro» is an installation, «∞» is the documenta work, the next has something to do with 18 sculptures, and so there are 18 pieces. And «polyfoto» is linked with drawings. It is about changing views of objects that shift, and I have tried to make this work by using polyrhythms.

M.P.: What equipment do you use?

C.N.: Sampler, recording equipment and mixing desk. Otherwise I have three large oscillators, those are more like technical measuring devices, sinus wave generators that I plug together and get my sounds out of them in long sessions. Those are my main pieces of equipment, measuring devices from the GDR, and a very fine machine from Russia and a very heavy one from Hungary.

M.P.: Does the difference between analogue and digital mean anything to you?

C.N.: So far I’ve only used analogue, but I’m not a great advocate of analogue, the digital idea has its own attraction, and you can do a great deal with it. But what interests me is working with pure sinus-wave sounds, I’m not at all interested in effects, for example. I want to stay in the core of the sound, as it were. That is my view.

M.P.: Everything you say suggests that the place where electronic music has its greatest public exposure today, the club, does not particularly interest you.

C.N.: What interests me about the club thing is the idea of mixing, the key to my thinking is that I make endless pieces, and so I am interested in how a DJ weaves something endless out of lots of different things. And I like the social aspect as well. And now there are these lounge-like constructs as well, where music is fairly important and there is a chance to experience it in a new, or a more intensive, way.

M.P.: How do you see the difference between the situation of the artist and the musician in terms of the public?

C.N.: It’s great that you can reach a lot of people relatively simply with a label, but that wasn’t my main reason for setting it up. The economic structure that music is distributed in is very pleasant in itself. As an artist I usually make a unique object that is dealt with in an élitist situation, and I actually see the music world as a more up-to-date form. But that isn’t the main aspect of my music-making, but more something that I observe.

M.P.: How do you handle your dual role: many people see you only as a fine artist, and others see you only as a musician and sound researcher?

C.N.: Actually people who know my music often suspect that there is something else behind it, that the music is in a different context. You can see this from the questions that come in. But I don’t make a great fuss about the fact that I am a fine artist or that music is a component of my installations or exhibitions. People who start to get interested in it soon find out for themselves and then they can make their own minds up whether it’s important for the way they look at music. On the other hand it’s rather odd how little professional people on the art scene know about music in general. Then I always find it difficult to explain that I am interested in other things. Architecture, theatre, everything influences me, and I would like these different aspects to be acknowledged. But some people have come into contact with a particular kind of music because they like my work, and have started to buy records. And it’s pretty well normal for younger colleagues to have a sampler at home or Cubase on their hard disk.

Nicolai set up the Noton record company (subtitle: Archiv für Ton und Nichtton), dedicated to experimental and electronic music and research into sound spaces. It publishes Nicolai’s own work, under the name Noto, and also the Finnish Panasonic member Mika Vainio or the Dutch Duo of de Waar and Meelkop alias Goem.

Interview printed in: Make it funky – Crossover zwischen Musik, Pop, Avantgarde und Kunst, Ulrike Groos/Markus Müller (eds.), Jahresring 45, Kulturkreis des BDI: Cologne,1998, pp. 325-329; translation by Michael Robinson.
Reprint in: Rudolf Frieling/Dieter Daniels, Media Art Interaction–The 1980s and 1990s in Germany, Vienna/New York, 2000.