Something Flaring and Shimmering, With a Quicksilver-ish Body To It

Composer Jan St. Werner on Polyarrythmia, his solo exhibition of nine audio works released through Feral File.

_{This conversation happened on September 16, 2021 between Jan St. Werner and Casey Reas.}

You were working on Polyarrythmia as a more traditional music release, and then life events interceded. Can you tell the story of bringing it to Feral File?

When I started working on these pieces, I started—to me, at least—a new method of working, with completely software-based generative modes of producing sound. I always start with the idea, then I keep listening to it and I start structuring, and I realize there’s a narrative or there’s a time signature. So it becomes more and more like something that we traditionally call music. Then I’m thinking about how to present it, or put it out. How does it get off my computer and out into the world, leaving this private space?

I started talking to Peter [Rehberg] from Editions Mego, an electronic music label I’ve worked with before. I said to Peter, “I want to work with you on this new thing” and he immediately said he would put it out. We started having talks about what it could be… then Peter had a heart attack a few months ago, and the label could not continue.

This news about Peter hit me really hard. Mego was much more than a label that would release records. It was one of the last existing outlets for artists to completely do what they have in mind and not get tied into a weird contract. It was still the same attitude you would expect from a punk label or a label in the ‘90s. It was artist friendly, you dealt with Peter directly. With the loss of that label, the whole idea of indie labels is, to me, completely in doubt.

You work on ideas that go further than a traditional record or even this idea of music, and then you still have to go back and release this stuff on a traditional, old-fashioned label that has a hard time distributing 200 records. And why do you do that? Why do you work on something on your computer, something that is potentially infinitely expandable and mutable, and then you walk all this way back and put it out on vinyl on some indie label? I don’t know, it all seemed weird.

So anyway, I sent it to you, and I just wanted to know what you thought. And now we’re here. It’s all an experiment.

You still had a hard time letting go of the vinyl with this release. What are your thoughts about that right now?

To be honest, I’m in a moment where I don’t really want to make music anymore. I'm still very tied to music and sound, but the projects that I’m involved with at the moment think of sound in a very different way. The idea of music as a commodity, as something consumable, having it in a three, four, five minute form. Presenting it as something that’s streamable and available everywhere. All these things changed my mind about how much I like music. I love the experience of hearing music, but I don’t like the way it’s distributed anymore. I don't like the way it’s made available. And I don’t like the way people talk about it, especially in reviews and articles…

It’s like making love. It’s not something you own. It’s not something you possess as an object. It’s something that exists as an exchange. I think the NFT format is maybe closer to this idea than any record or CD or tape. It’s also more honest than this idea of making a couple of minor records, then going on Band Camp, and the rest you stream via Spotify.

People will be collecting these compositions, and through doing that, they will be supporting the music that you make and supporting your life as a composer. The tracks will be available for anybody across the globe to listen to, outside of the Spotify, etc. ecosystem.

Yes.

I think of you as a performer: You improvise on stage, you create music with other people on stage, in front of an audience. Was this music meant to be performed live? Or is this a so-called studio album?

I think of it not even as a studio album—it’s direct interface music.

What do you mean by that?

Direct interface music. It’s the closest you can get to the tools you need to produce the music. It was the closest way I could get to the sounds. It’s basically really just a computer and the keys on the keyboard. And what it means for me, is that at some point I might not even use that keyboard anymore. I could think the music, I could imagine it. That’s the dream of making music.

I’m not a composer who thinks of an orchestra, and that the strings section will do this and then I hear the percussion over there. Instead, I think of sounds and then I figure out which instrument could make those sounds. That’s always my obstacle, that in the end, I have to deal with some kind of instrument that somebody invented.

So this record is very close to the sound, probably the closest so far for me. Some stuff on Spectric Acid is also completely generated and synthesized, but this record is much closer.

Is the sound unfolding, and you’re manipulating it as it unfolds, or is it more prerecorded, cut, and timelined?

It’s both. I’m improvising a lot even on the computer—I listen and then I shape while I listen. So I have, let’s say, a patch, and it’s running and then I listen and I try to figure out what it does and then I start shaping it while I listen. Listening is kind of interfacing. To me listening is very much composing. Composing is listening. The more actively you listen to something, you’re able to change the sound source, or at least your relation to the sound source...

Depending on your state of mind, and your consciousness-mode maybe, I think you can definitely read Polyarrythmia like a book. But you can also just take it as sound. Something that’s flaring and shimmering and has a quicksilver-ish body to it.

Where do you place your music within the tradition of electronic music? Whose ideas are you building on specifically in this set of compositions—Stockhaussen, Xenakis?

Well I’m like a sponge, Casey. I’m pretty promiscuous, I’m not very faithful to my idols. You play me a Cocteau Twins song and I’m like, “Oh my God, this is the best music people ever made.” And then I listen to Morton Feldman, or I love this whole range of Francis Poulenc, Federico Mompou, Manuel de Falla, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel—this whole kind of post-Romantic, early 20th century, symphonic, or even jazz-inducing music, is great.

And then I have these moments where I only want to hear something that’s completely abstract, like Selektion, a label from Frankfurt. Late ‘80s into the ‘90s industrial, electro-acoustic, cut up very dry, deconstructivist intellectual-German. And I’m like, “this stuff is just the best, no emotions, just hot cuts. Fuck expectations.” Un Peu De Neige Salie by Bernard Gunter was a record I put on and I thought there was nothing on the CD and that I’d have to return it, but it turned out the sounds were just so low volume and so subtle that the playback systems I had at the time couldn’t properly play it. Now I play it and hear all these subtle spikes and sparks.

And then of course yeah, I am a Stockhaussen fan. I would say from all these late 20th century composers, I think Maryanne Amacher is my hero because she was thinking in space and distance. For her, there was structure-born music. It could be vibrating matter—it’s something that gets activated and starts influencing its environment. So an object starts vibrating, and air molecules get absorbed and get diffused, and the air starts transporting sonic information. Eventually it hits something, a wall, a dog, or a human ear, and then this whole cognitive process starts. Even in the ear canal, a lot of interesting stuff happens.

On Polyarrythmia, there are quite a few sounds that might induce otoacoustic emissions—very strong resonances in the ear. And also micro tonal shifts that create remarkable responses from the brain. The brain adds extra frequencies or rotations because it doesn’t get very specific information about a cup dropping, for example, or a car passing by, or the violin being struck. It has to figure out what it is. So the brain is very actively participating in listening to this information. On Polyarrythmia, since all these sounds are abstract or somehow computer-based, there’s a lot for the brain to make of it.

Amacher was really taking into account that the brain is a big part of what we hear. The air, the distance, the space around us is what makes it all possible. What connects us or what we share. This whole phenomenon is based on this space of possibility. And she was very aware that sounds could come from any type of source. An instrument, a mash of real-world sounds. It could be electronically made. So she was the most forward-thinking and most gracious of those composers to me.

Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferarri, two French electro-acoustic composers, have been influential to me. But I also always liked people releasing 50 tapes of something they recorded at home; I have a lot of noise records or small editions with handmade covers. Then there’s what people might call sound art. Artists who don’t even think about music or sound. They’re artists, they invent everything from scratch.

And then there’s another category, which is the psychology of listening. So basically, you don’t judge anything you hear. It’s just exciting to listen as a phenomenon. Just the act of listening. The pure phenomenon of being able to perceive some sort of information that we might call sound completely without judgement. People like [psychologist] Diana Deutsch, who listen to how we listen—that to me is really interesting.

So, I was listening to these compositions as MP3s on my studio headphones that you sometimes tease me about. I thought they sounded great. But if I have your mastered WAV files for Polyarrythmia, what is a good way for me to listen to them?

Get some Campfire headphones, in-ear, low volume, and I think you’ll have double as much space in these tracks. That’s another great thing about being able to provide these maximum resolution files, which don’t have to be mastered to go on vinyl. With Zino [Mikorey], a guy I master with a lot, everything is highest resolution and super clocked...

When Zino usually masters a record, you get a whole range of files already in the right format for the algorithms of all the streaming services. He has the algorithms, so he already formats it the right way. So then when you give your master file to the label, and the label uploads it on YouTube, then YouTube doesn’t need to put its own data reduction algorithm on it. It’s already in the format that they need.

I played some of Polyarrythmia to Zino at an earlier stage and told him not to master it for Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, vinyl, or radio. To master it the way it should really sound—just really zoom into it, make it as big and as wide or as intense as possible. He was really excited about this possibility, because it never exists… Fuck YouTube, we don’t need any of that. The actual files that people will download when they collect these NFTs will provide the maximum resolution that people will be able to play back.

If someone’s never heard your music before, do you have any advice? Anything to listen for, or any sort of path to getting into your head?

It’s kind of a paradox because if you tell someone to not have expectations, that’s an expectation. If you tell somebody to not listen with prejudice, you create a prejudice, right? I mean, my preferred term for this is arsch bombe. That’s what Germans say when you jump into a pool and try to make the splash as strong as possible. That’s probably my preferred method of experiencing it. It’s very physical. It’s like swimming or dancing, or a club on MDMA, or hugging your dog. It tries to be as immediate as it can possibly be.