An Interview With Stefan Goldmann on His Berlin Philharmonie Techno Takeover
stefan-goldmann-strom-festival-electroacoustic-philharmonie
February 11, 2020
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# An Interview With Stefan Goldmann on His Berlin Philharmonie Techno Takeover
The term "electro-acoustic doesn't limit your imagination the way
'ambient' or 'experimental' do," states [Stefan Goldmann][1]{:
rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Stefan Goldmann (opens in a new
tab)" target="_blank"}. Working in between the dancefloor and high art
institutions, the techno renaissance man toes the line between revering
club music's history and fearlessly pushing its forms into the future.
Goldmann is equally comfortable DJing and releasing his own productions
on imprints like [Perlon][2]{: rel="noreferrer noopener"
aria-label="Perlon (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}, Ovum,
[Innervisions][3]{: rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Innervisions
(opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}, Mule Electronic and his own
Macro label, which he co-founded with Finn Johanssen in 2007, as he is
lecturing in universities and penning the 2015 book on electronic music
aesthetics, *[Presets -- Digital Shortcuts to Sound][4]{:
rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Presets – Digital Shortcuts
to Sound (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}*. He's also concieved of
the legendary *Elektroakustischer Salon* at Berghain, a space which
explores a more boundless approach to electronic music and has become a
fixture in the experimental electronic scene. As Goldmann puts it, "The
music presented there tends to follow its own rules."
Goldmann's interdisciplinary approach to composition, production, and
presentation has led him to compose and perform site-specific concerts
at Kyoto's Honen-In Temple, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the
Centro Cultural Kirchner Buenos Aires. Tailored to the spatial
conditions, these performances provide a unique, irreproducible
listening experience---one that breaks the listener out of passive
listening habits.
With his expansive work as music scholar and techno producer, he was an
obvious front runner to curate *Strom*, the first ever festival for
electronic music that took place in the venerable [Berlin
Philharmonie][5]{: rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Berlin
Philharmonie (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"} this past weekend
February 7th and 8th. In the venue's pentagonal Grand Hall designed by
German architect Hans Scharoun, pioneering artists like [Kruder &
Dorfmeister][6]{: rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Kruder &
Dorfmeister (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}, Cristian Vogel, and
[Ryoji Ikeda][7]{: rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Ryoji Ikeda
(opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"} performed live, while Deena
Abdelwahed, KiNK, and Nina Kraviz played out under the futuristic
archways in the foyer. After the landmark event, we asked Goldmann to
dig deeper into the potential for cementing electronic music into
time-honoured music institutions and traditions.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/stgmn/
[2]: https://www.electronicbeats.net/20-best-perlon-tracks/
[3]: https://www.electronicbeats.net/muting-the-noise-feature-2017/
[4]: https://stefangoldmann.bandcamp.com/merch/presets-digital-shortcuts-to-sound-book
[5]: https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/concerts/calendar/details/52668/
[6]: https://www.electronicbeats.net/peter-kruder-on-elektro-guzzi-s-parquet/
[7]: https://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/the-physics-of-the-universe-in-digital-sound-art/
[Image: 55450001-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-1.jpg]
**Electro-acoustic
performance and composition plays an integral part in your work. What
about it
particularly fascinates you?**
Part of the fascination is in freeing yourself from meeting
external needs, like making music danceable or beat-matchable by DJs.
Dance
music producers sometimes mute the beat to check how other elements
sound on
their own, zooming in and working on details. But then most unmute the
drums
again, so you don't get to experience this outside the studio. From
time to
time, I opt to keep the beat muted and let those other layers blossom
on their
own.
**What are some pivotal
moments that opened that whole sphere up for you?**
A lot of 1990s drum'n'bass had fantastic sounds underneath the drums
which I kept noticing. People like Matrix, Optical, and Source Direct
wrote stunning intros but rarely bothered developing these parts into
their own forms.
Later, I discovered techno in which the bass drum was more of a
reference than a dominant sound---or it was missing altogether. Jeff
Mills' Axis
stuff, Plastikman's *Consumed*,
Wolfgang Voigt's work and Mika Vainio's albums Onko and
Oleva were all
eye openers, and I always wanted to travel further down this road.
Don't get me
wrong, though; I love beats.
**What exactly draws your
interest to commissioned musical pieces as part of art projects in
comparison
to your own more club-oriented productions?**
I get paid. Jokes aside, ever since I've been producing music, I
could have taken any track as a blueprint and rolled out another fifty
"soundalikes". But if you've been making music for a while and don't
want to
get bored, you begin to look left and right.
Now, if you produce music that falls into a functional genre such as
techno, there's usually also an infrastructure in place that brings it
to the people. For instance labels, DJs and clubs do that. If your music
doesn't fit there, that infrastructure is missing. Commissions provide
open settings where you're free from formal standards, where you can
bring forward other aspects of the music. They provide frameworks for
music that doesn't fit a preconceived form.
[Image: 55680003-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-2.jpg]
**In general, there seems
to be an ongoing conversation within experimental electronic and
avant-garde
music about its intersection with conceptual art and its presentation
in more
"highbrow" environments. Why do you think this is?**
I guess highbrow and lowbrow are a misleading pair of terms when we're
talking about music that's
either electronic or produced predominantly for the recording medium.
Historically, the difference between high and low used to be one
of social class. That's no longer the case. With audio recording,
everyone has
equal access to the archives, and it's up to what people want to pull
out that
determines what remains in there. And that often turns out to be
something
rather different from what cultural institutions had envisioned.
That might also help explain why aesthetics are spilling over from one
set of institutions into another. Clubs, labels, distribution channels
and the related press are one set of institutions and concert halls, art
colleges and academies are another. There used to be a contemporary
continuation of classical music called "new music", which inhabited
these institutions pretty much exclusively as far as contemporary music
was concerned. For a while, that new music stayed in lockstep with
avant-garde developments in the other arts. Stanley Kubrick used music
by György Ligeti in his films, [Gerhard Richter][1]{: target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Gerhard Richter (opens in a new
tab)"} did paintings referencing John Cage, Pierre Boulez used lyrics by
E.E.Cummings.
This network of mutual referencing has changed entirely with the last
couple of generations. There are almost no significant visual artists,
writers or playwrights under fifty who'd still consider the folks at the
local conservatory as their peers. The institutions grew aware of this
shift, and the next thing you knew [Kraftwerk was at the MoMA][2]{:
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Kraftwerk was at
the MoMA (opens in a new tab)"}, Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie and
the Kremlin. Twenty years ago it seemed highly unlikely that someone
like Robert Henke would be a professor of music at a German
conservatory, but my guess is we'll see much more of this rather soon.
**What have been standout
projects of that kind for you recently, as someone who is an observer
of that
field?**
Artists like Robert Henke, Ryoji Ikeda, or Carsten Nicolai have bridged
the gap between electronic and academic music for a long time, opening
doors for many to follow. There is still very little score-based music
for acoustic instruments and synthesis where I think the sum is greater
than the parts, but one notable exception is Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva
Noto's collaboration with Ensemble Modern, *utp\_*.
**On the other hand, how
often do you see such concepts failing, and what would be lessons to be
drawn
for a project like *Strom*?**
There appears to be an irresistible urge to create fusion.
People want to put a DJ and a drum machine in front of an orchestra.
Make people collaborate for the sake of
ticking boxes of how many media formats you can possibly cram into one
project. There has been an unabated flow of premieres where two artists
find themselves on stage together so a festival can write the word
"premiere"
on its program---while both would do better on their own and on their
own terms.
The somewhat radical solution for Strom was to approach the
Philharmonie as a space rather than as an occasion to interact
with given cultural content. Electronic music
artists hardly ever get to work with a space like the Philharmonie's
Great
Hall. I find this quite surprising, given that experimental electronic
music festivals and concert halls both exist in Berlin, but they rarely
seem to
come together. Instead of handing out commissions for
fusion works, we handed the artists the keys and let them choose how
they
wanted to deal with the setting.
[1]: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/richter-cage-1-6-l02818
[2]: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1240
[Image: 55440023-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-1.jpg]
**There is this
commonplace assumption that the context of creation is essential or at
least
influential to the outcome. Regarding your pieces that involve a
specific
listening environment, what makes the context so important to the
audience's
experience?**
If you view it the
other way around, it would appear rather odd that the same should work
equally
well across greatly different settings. Then the question is to what
degree you
want to take this into account. Since most of us work in the recording
medium
and then try to translate the sound of that entirely artificial space
into real
world brick and mortar settings, it's not most people's priority to
customise
all that much. Just the existence of standard tech riders tells you
enough in
this regard.
When I began getting opportunities to do site-specific projects, I might
have turned it a bit into a response to the commodification of
recordings due to digitization. While most artists I know chased every
channel available, throwing away their music in the hope of catching
some elusive audience, I felt I needed to give something special to
those who bothered showing up at some place to hear me.
**That's a qualitative
approach to presentation that surely requires a high level of
dedication.**
You can't invest that amount of time on research and customization when
you play 120 gigs a year, so it's also a matter of priorities. But it
felt worth my time to put in the effort. As far as I know, I played the
first ever electronic concert at LACMA, and I'll play the first at the
Philharmonie's Great Hall. I wasn't the first to play Honen-in, but I
had over a month to check out the place and figure out what to do there
before performing. On *Alif*, we had over a year to structure the
performance space together with Chiharu Shiota, Samir Odeh-Tamimi and
Jeremias Schwarzer. We did two versions: one for Berlin's Radialsystem,
and another for Nuremberg's St. Lorenz Church. This timespan allowed for
an entirely different depth compared to showing up at 6 PM for
soundcheck and hitting the stage at 8.
**Was there a key
experience that sparked your interest in the connection between music
and the
unusual spaces it is presented in?**
I had heard that there had been concerts at Honen-in. One day I
rode my bike up there and ended up spending five hours just sitting in
the
yard. It was getting dark, and I had planned to ride back because I had
no
lights. But the soundscape was changing so rapidly and intriguingly
that I
couldn't get myself to leave. By chance, I met a guy who had been in
touch with
some of the artists who played there, and I asked him if he knew who
could possibly say if
there's a chance to do something there. He basically took out
his calendar and was like, "Can you do June 29?" And that was that.
**How did you usually
approach these site-specific commissions in the past? What's the
workflow like,
from initial theory to execution?**
Looking at the space and taking it from there is definitely the
best approach for me. Some commission requests are all pre-determined
for
everything but the space. They'll say, "We have composer X's
anniversary, and
we'd like a live remix where you play with the orchestra over a
symphony."
That's usually where anyone who's not entirely desperate for work
should say
thanks but no thanks.
I like the ones that start with the space rather than with a grand
vision of the content. It's also kind of a cheeky experience, like a
child's dream of sneaking into a museum past closing time and roaming
around without supervision. Plus it's an excuse to do things in the
studio that you can't when you're producing something Ben Klock's
supposed to play.
[Image: 55660022-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-2.jpg]
**In the program details,
it notes the artists you've chosen have developed their sounds away
from the
scope of Western Europe and North America. Why was this important in
your
curation process for the Philharmonie, a distinctly Western venue, to
highlight
these talents?**
Berlin is a city where, in terms of electronic music, everything
there is to hear has been heard. There's no need to compete with the
city's
clubs, festivals and other institutions by repeating what they already
represent. Thus the main focus isn't on some demographic, style or
generation
but on doing what I think the venue stands for, which is presenting
peak
achievement at the individual level that is also relevant to Berlin.
There are artists with all sorts of backgrounds involved, but
we've also been witnessing a shift to where it doesn't matter where
you're from
anymore. If you wanted to be anybody in drum'n'bass in 1998, you needed
to be
in London or Bristol. Now you can come out of Dnipropetrovsk or Kwazulu
Natal
or anywhere else and make a really significant contribution to almost
any
genre.
I think this is where the world should be headed anyway. Since
electronic music's production tools have become widely accessible, we
see more
and more diverse backgrounds represented now, offering their own takes
on a
shared culture. Some of this first generation of artists from places
outside of
Western Europe and North America have "matured" to a degree that their
influence has been feeding back into the core, and that's really good
to show here.
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Strom
Festival took place at the Berlin Philharmonie this past weekend
07.02--08.02. *
---
id: 1e716045-ed1e-47a0-9451-51663d8ebc96
blueprint: article
title: 'An Interview With Stefan Goldmann on His Berlin Philharmonie Techno Takeover'
date: 2020-02-11T14:17:44+01:00
wp_id: '181985'
slug: stefan-goldmann-strom-festival-electroacoustic-philharmonie
teaser_image: legacy/stefan-goldmann-strom-festival-electroacoustic-philharmonie/55680001-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-2.jpg
contents:
-
type: text
text: '<p>The term “electro-acoustic doesn’t limit your imagination the way ‘ambient’ or ‘experimental’ do,” states <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Stefan Goldmann (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.facebook.com/stgmn/" target="_blank">Stefan Goldmann</a>. Working in between the dancefloor and high art institutions, the techno renaissance man toes the line between revering club music’s history and fearlessly pushing its forms into the future. </p><p>Goldmann is equally comfortable DJing and releasing his own productions on imprints like <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Perlon (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.electronicbeats.net/20-best-perlon-tracks/" target="_blank">Perlon</a>, Ovum, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Innervisions (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.electronicbeats.net/muting-the-noise-feature-2017/" target="_blank">Innervisions</a>, Mule Electronic and his own Macro label, which he co-founded with Finn Johanssen in 2007, as he is lecturing in universities and penning the 2015 book on electronic music aesthetics, <em><a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Presets – Digital Shortcuts to Sound (opens in a new tab)" href="https://stefangoldmann.bandcamp.com/merch/presets-digital-shortcuts-to-sound-book" target="_blank">Presets – Digital Shortcuts to Sound</a></em>. He’s also concieved of the legendary <em>Elektroakustischer Salon</em> at Berghain, a space which explores a more boundless approach to electronic music and has become a fixture in the experimental electronic scene. As Goldmann puts it, “The music presented there tends to follow its own rules.”</p><p>Goldmann’s interdisciplinary approach to composition, production, and presentation has led him to compose and perform site-specific concerts at Kyoto’s Honen-In Temple, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Centro Cultural Kirchner Buenos Aires. Tailored to the spatial conditions, these performances provide a unique, irreproducible listening experience—one that breaks the listener out of passive listening habits.</p><p>With his expansive work as music scholar and techno producer, he was an obvious front runner to curate <em>Strom</em>, the first ever festival for electronic music that took place in the venerable <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Berlin Philharmonie (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/concerts/calendar/details/52668/" target="_blank">Berlin Philharmonie</a> this past weekend February 7th and 8th. In the venue’s pentagonal Grand Hall designed by German architect Hans Scharoun, pioneering artists like <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Kruder & Dorfmeister (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.electronicbeats.net/peter-kruder-on-elektro-guzzi-s-parquet/" target="_blank">Kruder & Dorfmeister</a>, Cristian Vogel, and <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Ryoji Ikeda (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/the-physics-of-the-universe-in-digital-sound-art/" target="_blank">Ryoji Ikeda</a> performed live, while Deena Abdelwahed, KiNK, and Nina Kraviz played out under the futuristic archways in the foyer. After the landmark event, we asked Goldmann to dig deeper into the potential for cementing electronic music into time-honoured music institutions and traditions. </p>'
-
type: images
images:
- legacy/stefan-goldmann-strom-festival-electroacoustic-philharmonie/55450001-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-1.jpg
-
type: text
text: |-
<p><strong>Electro-acoustic<br>
performance and composition plays an integral part in your work. What about it<br>
particularly fascinates you?</strong></p><p>Part of the fascination is in freeing yourself from meeting<br>
external needs, like making music danceable or beat-matchable by DJs. Dance<br>
music producers sometimes mute the beat to check how other elements sound on<br>
their own, zooming in and working on details. But then most unmute the drums<br>
again, so you don’t get to experience this outside the studio. From time to<br>
time, I opt to keep the beat muted and let those other layers blossom on their<br>
own.</p><p><strong>What are some pivotal<br>
moments that opened that whole sphere up for you?</strong></p><p>A lot of 1990s drum’n’bass had fantastic sounds underneath the drums which I kept noticing. People like Matrix, Optical, and Source Direct wrote stunning intros but rarely bothered developing these parts into their own forms.</p><p>Later, I discovered techno in which the bass drum was more of a<br>
reference than a dominant sound—or it was missing altogether. Jeff Mills’ Axis<br>
stuff, Plastikman’s <em>Consumed</em>,<br>
Wolfgang Voigt’s work and Mika Vainio’s albums <em>Onko </em>and <em>Oleva </em>were all<br>
eye openers, and I always wanted to travel further down this road. Don’t get me<br>
wrong, though; I love beats.</p><p><strong>What exactly draws your<br>
interest to commissioned musical pieces as part of art projects in comparison<br>
to your own more club-oriented productions?</strong></p><p>I get paid. Jokes aside, ever since I’ve been producing music, I<br>
could have taken any track as a blueprint and rolled out another fifty<br>
“soundalikes”. But if you’ve been making music for a while and don’t want to<br>
get bored, you begin to look left and right.</p><p>Now, if you produce music that falls into a functional genre such as techno, there’s usually also an infrastructure in place that brings it to the people. For instance labels, DJs and clubs do that. If your music doesn’t fit there, that infrastructure is missing. Commissions provide open settings where you’re free from formal standards, where you can bring forward other aspects of the music. They provide frameworks for music that doesn’t fit a preconceived form.</p>
-
type: images
images:
- legacy/stefan-goldmann-strom-festival-electroacoustic-philharmonie/55680003-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-2.jpg
-
type: text
text: |-
<p><strong>In general, there seems<br>
to be an ongoing conversation within experimental electronic and avant-garde<br>
music about its intersection with conceptual art and its presentation in more<br>
“highbrow” environments. Why do you think this is?</strong></p><p>I guess highbrow and lowbrow are a misleading pair of terms when we’re talking about music that’s<br>
either electronic or produced predominantly for the recording medium. Historically, the difference between high and low used to be one<br>
of social class. That’s no longer the case. With audio recording, everyone has<br>
equal access to the archives, and it’s up to what people want to pull out that<br>
determines what remains in there. And that often turns out to be something<br>
rather different from what cultural institutions had envisioned.</p><p>That might also help explain why aesthetics are spilling over from one set of institutions into another. Clubs, labels, distribution channels and the related press are one set of institutions and concert halls, art colleges and academies are another. There used to be a contemporary continuation of classical music called “new music”, which inhabited these institutions pretty much exclusively as far as contemporary music was concerned. For a while, that new music stayed in lockstep with avant-garde developments in the other arts. Stanley Kubrick used music by György Ligeti in his films, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/richter-cage-1-6-l02818" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Gerhard Richter (opens in a new tab)">Gerhard Richter</a> did paintings referencing John Cage, Pierre Boulez used lyrics by E.E.Cummings.</p><p>This network of mutual referencing has changed entirely with the last couple of generations. There are almost no significant visual artists, writers or playwrights under fifty who’d still consider the folks at the local conservatory as their peers. The institutions grew aware of this shift, and the next thing you knew <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1240" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Kraftwerk was at the MoMA (opens in a new tab)">Kraftwerk was at the MoMA</a>, Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie and the Kremlin. Twenty years ago it seemed highly unlikely that someone like Robert Henke would be a professor of music at a German conservatory, but my guess is we’ll see much more of this rather soon. </p><p><strong>What have been standout<br>
projects of that kind for you recently, as someone who is an observer of that<br>
field?</strong></p><p>Artists like Robert Henke, Ryoji Ikeda, or Carsten Nicolai have bridged the gap between electronic and academic music for a long time, opening doors for many to follow. There is still very little score-based music for acoustic instruments and synthesis where I think the sum is greater than the parts, but one notable exception is Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s collaboration with Ensemble Modern, <em>utp_</em>.</p><p><strong>On the other hand, how<br>
often do you see such concepts failing, and what would be lessons to be drawn<br>
for a project like <em>Strom</em>?</strong></p><p>There appears to be an irresistible urge to create fusion.<br>
People want to put a DJ and a drum machine in front of an orchestra. Make people collaborate for the sake of<br>
ticking boxes of how many media formats you can possibly cram into one project. There has been an unabated flow of premieres where two artists<br>
find themselves on stage together so a festival can write the word “premiere”<br>
on its program—while both would do better on their own and on their own terms. </p><p>The somewhat radical solution for <em>Strom </em>was to approach the Philharmonie as a space rather than as an occasion to interact<br>
with given cultural content. Electronic music<br>
artists hardly ever get to work with a space like the Philharmonie’s Great<br>
Hall. I find this quite surprising, given that experimental electronic<br>
music festivals and concert halls both exist in Berlin, but they rarely seem to<br>
come together. Instead of handing out commissions for<br>
fusion works, we handed the artists the keys and let them choose how they<br>
wanted to deal with the setting.</p>
-
type: images
images:
- legacy/stefan-goldmann-strom-festival-electroacoustic-philharmonie/55440023-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-1.jpg
-
type: text
text: |-
<p><strong>There is this<br>
commonplace assumption that the context of creation is essential or at least<br>
influential to the outcome. Regarding your pieces that involve a specific<br>
listening environment, what makes the context so important to the audience’s<br>
experience?</strong></p><p>If you view it the<br>
other way around, it would appear rather odd that the same should work equally<br>
well across greatly different settings. Then the question is to what degree you<br>
want to take this into account. Since most of us work in the recording medium<br>
and then try to translate the sound of that entirely artificial space into real<br>
world brick and mortar settings, it’s not most people’s priority to customise<br>
all that much. Just the existence of standard tech riders tells you enough in<br>
this regard. </p><p>When I began getting opportunities to do site-specific projects, I might have turned it a bit into a response to the commodification of recordings due to digitization. While most artists I know chased every channel available, throwing away their music in the hope of catching some elusive audience, I felt I needed to give something special to those who bothered showing up at some place to hear me. </p><p><strong>That’s a qualitative<br>
approach to presentation that surely requires a high level of dedication.</strong></p><p>You can’t invest that amount of time on research and customization when you play 120 gigs a year, so it’s also a matter of priorities. But it felt worth my time to put in the effort. As far as I know, I played the first ever electronic concert at LACMA, and I’ll play the first at the Philharmonie’s Great Hall. I wasn’t the first to play Honen-in, but I had over a month to check out the place and figure out what to do there before performing. On <em>Alif</em>, we had over a year to structure the performance space together with Chiharu Shiota, Samir Odeh-Tamimi and Jeremias Schwarzer. We did two versions: one for Berlin’s Radialsystem, and another for Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz Church. This timespan allowed for an entirely different depth compared to showing up at 6 PM for soundcheck and hitting the stage at 8.</p><p><strong>Was there a key<br>
experience that sparked your interest in the connection between music and the<br>
unusual spaces it is presented in?</strong></p><p>I had heard that there had been concerts at Honen-in. One day I<br>
rode my bike up there and ended up spending five hours just sitting in the<br>
yard. It was getting dark, and I had planned to ride back because I had no<br>
lights. But the soundscape was changing so rapidly and intriguingly that I<br>
couldn’t get myself to leave. By chance, I met a guy who had been in touch with<br>
some of the artists who played there, and I asked him if he knew who could possibly say if<br>
there’s a chance to do something there. He basically took out<br>
his calendar and was like, “Can you do June 29?” And that was that.</p><p><strong>How did you usually<br>
approach these site-specific commissions in the past? What’s the workflow like,<br>
from initial theory to execution?</strong></p><p>Looking at the space and taking it from there is definitely the<br>
best approach for me. Some commission requests are all pre-determined for<br>
everything but the space. They’ll say, ”We have composer X’s anniversary, and<br>
we’d like a live remix where you play with the orchestra over a symphony.”<br>
That’s usually where anyone who’s not entirely desperate for work should say<br>
thanks but no thanks.</p><p>I like the ones that start with the space rather than with a grand vision of the content. It’s also kind of a cheeky experience, like a child’s dream of sneaking into a museum past closing time and roaming around without supervision. Plus it’s an excuse to do things in the studio that you can’t when you’re producing something Ben Klock’s supposed to play.</p>
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<p><strong>In the program details,<br>
it notes the artists you’ve chosen have developed their sounds away from the<br>
scope of Western Europe and North America. Why was this important in your<br>
curation process for the Philharmonie, a distinctly Western venue, to highlight<br>
these talents?</strong></p><p>Berlin is a city where, in terms of electronic music, everything<br>
there is to hear has been heard. There’s no need to compete with the city’s<br>
clubs, festivals and other institutions by repeating what they already<br>
represent. Thus the main focus isn’t on some demographic, style or generation<br>
but on doing what I think the venue stands for, which is presenting peak<br>
achievement at the individual level that is also relevant to Berlin.</p><p>There are artists with all sorts of backgrounds involved, but<br>
we’ve also been witnessing a shift to where it doesn’t matter where you’re from<br>
anymore. If you wanted to be anybody in drum’n’bass in 1998, you needed to be<br>
in London or Bristol. Now you can come out of Dnipropetrovsk or Kwazulu Natal<br>
or anywhere else and make a really significant contribution to almost any<br>
genre.</p><p>I think this is where the world should be headed anyway. Since<br>
electronic music’s production tools have become widely accessible, we see more<br>
and more diverse backgrounds represented now, offering their own takes on a<br>
shared culture. Some of this first generation of artists from places outside of<br>
Western Europe and North America have “matured” to a degree that their<br>
influence has been feeding back into the core, and that’s really good to show here.</p><p><em>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Strom Festival took place at the Berlin Philharmonie this past weekend 07.02–08.02. </em></p>
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# An Interview With Stefan Goldmann on His Berlin Philharmonie Techno Takeover The term "electro-acoustic doesn't limit your imagination the way 'ambient' or 'experimental' do," states [Stefan Goldmann][1]{: rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Stefan Goldmann (opens in a new tab)" target="_bla...
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He's also concieved of the legendary *Elektroakustischer Salon* at Berghain, a space which explores a more boundless approach to electronic music and has become a fixture in the experimental electronic scene. As Goldmann puts it, "The music presented there tends to follow its own rules." . Goldm...
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Goldmann's interdisciplinary approach to composition, production, and presentation has led him to compose and perform site-specific concerts at Kyoto's Honen-In Temple, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Centro Cultural Kirchner Buenos Aires. Tailored to the spatial conditions, the...
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In the venue's pentagonal Grand Hall designed by German architect Hans Scharoun, pioneering artists like [Kruder & Dorfmeister][6]{: rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Kruder & Dorfmeister (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}, Cristian Vogel, and [Ryoji Ikeda][7]{: rel="noreferrer no...
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[1]: https://www.facebook.com/stgmn/ [2]: https://www.electronicbeats.net/20-best-perlon-tracks/ [3]: https://www.electronicbeats.net/muting-the-noise-feature-2017/ [4]: https://stefangoldmann.bandcamp.com/merch/presets-digital-shortcuts-to-sound-book [5]: https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/e...
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**What are some pivotal moments that opened that whole sphere up for you?** A lot of 1990s drum'n'bass had fantastic sounds underneath the drums which I kept noticing. People like Matrix, Optical, and Source Direct wrote stunning intros but rarely bothered developing these parts into their ow...
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Jokes aside, ever since I've been producing music, I could have taken any track as a blueprint and rolled out another fifty "soundalikes". But if you've been making music for a while and don't want to get bored, you begin to look left and right. Now, if you produce music that falls into ...
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[Image: 55680003-Strom-by-Frankie-Casillo-_-Philharmonie-_-Day-2.jpg] **In general, there seems to be an ongoing conversation within experimental electronic and avant-garde music about its intersection with conceptual art and its presentation in more "highbrow" environments. Why do you ...
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With audio recording, everyone has equal access to the archives, and it's up to what people want to pull out that determines what remains in there. And that often turns out to be something rather different from what cultural institutions had envisioned. That might also help explain why a...
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For a while, that new music stayed in lockstep with avant-garde developments in the other arts. Stanley Kubrick used music by György Ligeti in his films, [Gerhard Richter][1]{: target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Gerhard Richter (opens in a new tab)"} did paintings referencing J...
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