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August 24 |
August 25
Zürich Live Looping Festival Diary Part 2, August 25-26
Thursday, August 25th, Mathon, preparing for the Zürich Live Looping Festival
The festival begins tonight so we pack our gear and clean up Matthias's cabin and prepare to make the trip back to Zürich. We have been concerned that the flooding affecting all of southern Switzerland might prevent us from returning to the city, but it appears that one of three roads is open and one of two train tracks as well. I feel really sad to be leaving Matthias' wonderful cabin. Matthias's dad was a teacher and an inventor, and the company he worked for bought this cabin for him out of gratitude for the innovation that he contibuted. In the room I have been staying in is a very large wall size photograph of him in black and white...........in his lab coat with all of his test tubes and glass chemistry paraphernalia. It lends a strong ambiance to the room.
There are 8 of us, mostly musicians, and it is hard to get everyone organized to do all the tasks necessary to get on the road in a coordinated fashion. We all kick into high gear and get the place looking pretty good for the later arrival of Matthias' sisters later that day.
There is the further complication that there is only enough room in Rolf and Matthias' two cars for the 8 passengers and all their equipment.
I will have to go by train to Zürich by myself, which doesn't please me but someone has to do it and Per and Michael have to get there soonest because they have sound checks to attend to for their evening performance. I don't play until tomorrow so there is no problem with me arriving late. The trains threaten to be late because there is only one train track open for both outgoing and incoming trains to the city. No one knows where the venue is so Rolf loans me his cell phone so we can coordinate when we all arrive in Zürich three hours or so later... Amazingly, I have never used a cell phone before. For the amount of telephoning I do (not much because I have become an e-mail communicator almost entirely) it has always been too expensive to justify the cost. I also dislike how unpresent a lot of our culture seems because of the cell phone. People seem to feel like they are invisible it seems when on them. Driving cars dangerously and unconsciously; teenagers walking down the streets of Santa Cruz not interacting with each other but constantly on their cells. I'm afraid I must come off as old-fashioned and curmudgeonly but I don't like them. Of course, today, Im really grateful that Rolf lends me his, and for the very first time I consider getting one. My brother, who has also been a holdout, has purchased one for the trip I notice.
On the way to the train station we visit a five hundred year old church hundreds of feet directly below the village of Mathon, which hangs high up the mountain above us. Inside, Per turns to me and says, "I'm so glad we are alive now". We both agree that we live in an incredible age: one where relatively poor musicians eat really well and can even make enough to travel around the world occasionally. If the organist who played in this church were to see what I can do with a battery powered laptop computer in a jet flying high above his home he would be just amazed; no, freaked out! On the plane to Zürich I had a computer, a preamp breakout box and a tiny fretless bass. I could've made a record on the airplane if I had wished to do so. Just amazing.
Earlier we stood in front of Matthias' porch and I practised navigating the country codes of both Rolf and Per's cell phones (or "handies" as they are called here). I dial and the phone connects with a network in Germany, which then connects with a network in Sweden.......then forwards to Pers' phone (located by an impishly grinning Per five feet in front of me). The delay in the line from all of the travelling causes a noticeable delay in the sound of his voice answering and he jokingly puts his phone to my ear as he talks and I have triple delay.......his voice in real time, two feet from me, his cell phone receiving my call, and Rolf's making it. It is disorienting and a miracle of modern technology. Lucky to be alive now.......indeed!
All of us are musicians who have very little money and yet, we are using all of this cutting edge, sophisticated technology. I live, technically, below the poverty line in the US which is a ridiculous statistic, given my access to the musical tools that I have. A musician in 1500 A.C.E would have their minds blown by the gear in the electric jam room of Matthias' cabin. We are staying in a place where different dialects of Romansch (the ancient language of this region that is spoken still by very few people and looks more like written Latin than any language I've ever seen) are spoken in villages that are 30 miles apart and yet, here we are: making music with people who are from literally thousands of miles away from each other. Lucky to be alive, indeed!
Last night, everyone gave the memory cards from their respective digital cameras to Thomas who used a universal card reader to transfer them to their computers. Everyone's media card is a slightly different format. Per didn't even bring a camera. Instead, he uses a digital USB memory stick that he bought to load everyone else's photos.
Thomas sets up a wireless network upstairs in the music room and Matthias and I download the pictures from everyone's cameras. Matthias uses a program that sorts all the pictures by date taken and then we all go downstairs to sit in front a large laptop computer screen in front of the darkened and firelit front room and watch a slide show. I know that the young teenage kids that I teach these days would not blink an eye at the technology that would go into this fairly normal proceedure, but it is just blowing my mind.
I think about my father and all he has seen in his almost eighty years on the planet. This is a little miracle.
It also reminds me of a magical encounter I had with an old woman in the local UNICEF store. She is a volunteer and when I buy a little ethnic drum from her (I'm always finding very cool little instruments for very cheap at this one store) she asks me if I will count out the change for her because she can't see very well anymore. She is very old and wizened and I ask her respectfully how old she is. "I'm 84 years old", she says, proudly. I say, "Wow, you've seen so much in your life; so many changes...............do you mind me asking you what you think about the world today?" I am completely prepared to hear her tell of how bad things have gotten as seems to be the sentiment of almost everyone I know who is my age. "I have so much hope for the future," she replies, with a beaming and very beatific smile. I'm just shocked. "I didn't expect you to say that. Why do you say that?". She continues, "It is the internet. The internet is going to change the world for the better." Again, I protest, "But the world is overpopulated and the environment is in grave danger and the people who run the world are cynical power grabbers who seem to only believe in wealth and power and not human beings." She says, "Yes, but it is the children who are going to change the world, not this generation, and the children are now starting to talk with human beings from all over the planet. You see, all my life, I have worked with children, and when I see what they are doing on the internet now, it makes me very happy. We won't see it in our lifetimes, but good will come of it all."
I thank her for her insight and leave the store quickly because what she says brings me to tears. All my life I have been hopelessly idealistic and in recent years it has seemed that so much wrong is going on with the planet. In my own tiny sphere as an Art Commissioner in Santa Cruz, I have seen the arts take blow after blow from our economic climate, our city goverment, apathy of young people, etc. etc. It is the best thing I have heard from a human being in a long time; I find it inspiring, and I feel like it's okay to keep being angry about what's wrong, while retaining my hope and idealism about what can still happen to heal what's wrong with the world. LOL, but I digress............
Andy Butler is not only a wonderfully sensitive and expressive musician and an excellent music software designer/programmer (having worked on the EDP and co owning the company that makes the VST instruments Chopitch and Chopan), but he also loves acoustic music and seems the most "organic" of all of the assembled musicians. This says a lot as every single musician in this cabin is very bright and talented.
We had a final electric jam last night. At breakfast we had talked about the difficulties of jamming with sometimes as many as 7 musicians. When several people are looping as well and playing over their loops, we can easily become a 10 or 11 person ensemble, and our last electric jam was overfull timbrally and rhythmically and a little frustrating for everyone involved. It is a good talk and an open one, I feel. The jam we have tonight reflects the fact that everyone has really taken to heart what everyone has reflected. I enjoy it immensely, with the exception of one time when Matthias asks me not to play bass (unlooped) but to please play drums and be the person in charge of starting the UR loop; the loop that everyone else will synchronize to.
I'm really sensitive about this as I took a lot of criticism when I first started playing bass in a live looping setting, and for the only time in the whole trip I get angry and lash out reactively at Matthias, telling him to quit being controlling. I think it shocks everyone a little and i feel horribly embarrassed. I have tried to learn in my life to not hold anger in.......something I have done for most of my life. I have reasoned that when those feelings are on the table they can be dealt with in a healthy way. I also know that this is definitely not the style of say, the Swedish or the Germans or Swiss, necessarily. I sometimes think that I must come off as a really overemotional person to my friends in Europe: a drama queen, as it were. My outburst makes me feel really sheepish and self-conscious and I hope that they don't hold it against me.
But I truly love Matthias Grob. He sat shiva with me the night I found out my mother died at the very start of my first European solo tour at Per's house in Sweden. He has an amazingly generous spirit and I consider him to be like a brother. LOL, and like a brother, we sometimes can get "into it" with each other. The next day I walk up to him and put my arms around him and say, "I'm really sorry about blowing up at you yesterday in the jam. I was really sensitive to a person who used to be very critical of me years ago when I first started trying to learn how to play bass, and I felt ashamed and embarrassed to be asked to quit playing it. It really triggered me and I lashed out at you. You know I love you, don't you?" He beams back at me and hugs my shoulders and says, "Yes, yes!!" It is a close moment and I'm really relieved, as I really don't ever intend, out of unconsciousness, to be abusive .
Wednesday August 24th, Mathon, preparing for the Zürich Live Looping Festival
I've woken much earlier than I want to. The bright sun is shining through my window for the first time since I arrived in Switzerland. I look out my window and the view is literally breathtaking (I still have a spot of acrophobia from childhood). I am purchased high above the steep valley overlooking the beautiful small town of Mathon. Somehow I have scored my own room. The chalet is filled to the brim with loopers: Per Boysen (Sweden), Andy Butler (UK), Michael Klobuchar (USA), Matthias Grob (Switzerland), software and hardware designers ________ and Rolf _______ , and Andy's wonderful partner, Pita (sp?).
My room looks up the beautiful and dramatic valley through one window and across to the 3,000 meter peaks high above us on the other side of the valley out the other window. We are guests in Matthias's family chalet in the Swiss Alps.
The bright light and the insistent monotonal clang of cowbells has woken me up and I'm glad, because the last three days have seen the worst flooding, from highly unseasonal heavy rains, in a very long time in Switzerland. The city of Bern is underwater.........whole highways and train tracks have been washed out, leaving us in the unenviable position of being worried about whether we can make it back to Zürich for the big looping festival which begins tomorrow. Two out of the three major roads that we could take back are washed out, and one of two train tracks has been also. We nervously watched the television last night for reports of this 2 billion dollar disaster unfolding. I know the worried looks of the people being interviewed, though my ability to understand the thick German dialect of the Swiss is next to zero. I experiencd the huge Northern California storm of 1982 (which crippled the roads running out of Santa Cruz, left the people of the county without electricity for a week, with very few provisions being brought back into town, and also killed several people), and the devastating earthquake of 1989.
I marvel at how cheerful the Swiss workers are, being interviewed in the middle of the night, and I remember how similar it was back in those scary days. Disaster, oddly enough, really seems to bring out much of the best of human nature: people lend a hand.......they are, in their hearts, generous in nature. Despite the hardships, the attitude of the Swiss workers battling the torrents makes me feel happy and good about people in general.
Despite the nervousness about being able to get to the festival, which is my raison d'etre for being so far from my home, my concerns seem very small in the face of the unfolding events.
So waking up to the sunshine and clear skies makes my heart leap (after the initial irritation of being unable to sleep past 7 a.m. after a long group jam that lasted until 2 a.m.). People were praying that there would not be any more rain overnight, and it appears that there not only hasn't been more rain, but that the worst is finally over. Now, hopefully, the water will recede and people can start to rebuild.
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It is an amazing bunch of people that sleeps in this house right now: mostly live loopers that my wife Chris and I grew to love on our long summer tour two years ago. It is so good to see Matthias' huge grin.......Per's wonderfully funny and extremely dry sense of humor........Michael Klobuchar's (who is "Scoots Galore" to me) generally wacky and brilliant insanity. Andy and Pita are wonderul too. They are vegans and, consequently, we are eating wonderful vegan food for the duration of our stay...............We have long, excitedly talkative meals and we drink stupid amounts of delicious European coffee. I smile at myself as I realize that I promised that I would be good on this tour and drink lots of water instead of tons of coffee which I've ended up doing. Matthias has two German friends who are also a delight to get to know; Rolf and _______. They are both software and hardware designers and musicians.
Bernhard Wagner was also with us for a few days previously but he was forced to leave yesterday to attend to the myriad details of the impending Zürich Looping Festival. Because I have produced a few festivals in a similar style I know why he is nervous and wants to return home to make sure that everything is okay. Before he left we had one of the most fun jams I've ever had.
Downstairs has become the de facto acoustic music room with kalimbas, talking drums, flutes, guitars and myriad found objects. Upstairs is the hi tech room where everyone (except Scoots and I) has set up their looping rigs. The jam the day before yesterday was all acoustic, and the ingenuity and sheer creativity of all the people participating is really wonderful. Andy has become our official aural documenter, with a nice rig with a minidisc recorder and a good Sennheiser stereo mic. He got about half an hour of the jam, which we listened to last night before starting our electric jam.
I'm a little frustrated because a 220-110 volt adapter that Michael brought blew up my favorite AC chord, and I have no ability to do any of the testing of equipment that everyone else is doing (except Scoots, who also is unable to play because of the power conversion problem). Everyone is very generous however, and last night I played on Rolf's bass, _______'s keyboard rig, and Per's and Matthias' microphone looping rigs. The electric jam is not nearly as satisfying as the acoustic jam or the wonderful walk we'd taken earlier today, to visit a sound installation that was built into the side of the mountain by the next village up. I imagine today we will talk about what can be improved.
Everyone is so intelligent and so interested in learning that it is a fantastic creative and learning environment for me to be in. Per, Bernhard and Andy in particular have come up with beautiful new techniques for making music out of the house's myriad objects (pots, pans, etc.) Matthias is singing which is wonderful to hear. So is Per, and I am truly loving vocal improv these days myself since I first put out an all-vocal CD a couple of years ago.
Then there is the technology. Per's setup is the most sophisticated blending of software, hardware and multiple instruments of anyone's I've seen. Matthias has decided that he wants to go entirely software, which I am still considering myself, and is busy trying to put together a new system to do so. He has opted not to do a set in Zürich and I am really saddened by that, but he seems really content to be working on his new gear. Per really seems to be the expert on the combined looping rigs but ______ and Matthias have such a deep understanding of the root design of all the technology. I am having a deep crash course in computers, interfaces, midi, etc. It is deeply humbling and I feel out of my depth but also grateful that everyone is so generous with their time and expertise.
I only wish that I could stay here for another week with these truly amazing people. It might seem odd but I feel like I'm experiencing the future of this musical movement. Apart from having the most experience putting on large looping festivals, my only area of expertise is rhythmic in nature. I have immersed myself so deeply in computer music design and looping in the past five years---learning new instruments that I have no command over but am, nonetheless, fascinated to be playing---that I sometimes forget that I have spent 25 years of my adult life being a rhythmatist and rhythmic multi-instrumentalist. The musical events of the past year seem to be pointing me, karmically, back to embracing the fact that I am, at heart , a drummer. I had a similar experience in Japan listening to the Swiss artist Mimetic (who I, regretfully, don't have enough time to go visit in western Swizterland).
Well, the sun is really coming up and it looks like I can climb into my shorts(that I brought too many pairs of) for the day, which threatens to be warm for the first time since I came to soggy overcast Zürich. Yesterday on our walk to the sound installation I dropped one of my favorite drumsticks, one that had been hand lathed with my initials by a student of mine. I'm going to see what the temperature is outside and see if I can go retrace the steps of my walk to find it before the household wakes up.
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Hours later, I found my drumstick........yeah!!!!!!! The waters are receding and the sun has been out all day now. I got lost on a walk and ended up going up and down the hills trying to find Matthias's place for an hour and forty-five minutes. The day is beautiful and I'm exhausted.........lol. I'm listening to a fascinating piece by Michael Klobuchar on his I-pod that we have hooked up to a nice stereo. It's called "Hello, who is it". It's off of Tobo Goto. Go out and buy it, now!!!!
diary entries:
August 24 |
August 25
Zürich Live Looping Festival Diary Part 2, August 25-26