In conversation: Alec Empire on Shivers, Patrick Wolf, and Financial Meltdown
Written by: Hugh Platt
When I first interviewed Alec Empire, over a sterile exchange of emails, I mentioned that I was glad of the arms’ length distance - no-one wants to find out that a musical hero, once off the pedestal we make for them, turns out to be a bit of a cock. So it was with some trepidation that I found myself sat next to my phone, awaiting a call from the man himself to discuss his new mini-album, Shivers, and the career-spanning ambitions of his forthcoming The Past-The Present-The Future tour.
I needn’t have worred though. As an interviewee, Empire isn’t what you’d expect. He is neither the ice-cold Teutonic electro-pioneer as his recent stage manner would suggest, not the perma-snarled noise warrior that carved Digital Hardcore out of the dripping wounds of the music industry during the 1990s. Over the phone, he chuckles as he dissects - at no short length - every question we can think to throw at him. After over 15 years of pushing the musical envelope in directions it was never meant to go, Empire can barely contain the enthusiasm in his voice as he describes his current projects, or the derision for corruption and - not once do we not think that he still means it.
So here, unabridged, is Music Towers’ most recent conversation with in Alec Empire.
The new mini-album, Shivers - why release it, when you’ve got a full-length album coming out later in the year?
“The idea was to release tracks that didn’t or wouldn’t really fit so much on the album. One of the themes for the tour is this past, present and future theme. We’re going to play a lot of stuff from older records, and also very new material that nobody’s heard yet. While in past years we’re always touring an album or something, maybe through two or three singles, so we really want to approach the show in a totally new way. That’s why we compiled Shivers a bit in that direction. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but its very different kinds of material. ‘Control Drug’ is a bit like the direction of the Digital Hardcore sound, but it’s not really DHR like used to sound, but it’s a song that in a way taps into that area. The last track, which is the German word for “dead”, ‘Tot’, this goes back to way when I started, it has its roots in when I started making electronic music. I did a lot of acid house and electro records. I approached this track with that kind of mindset.
“Shivers is a collection of very different kinds of pieces, which kind of describes my history in a way, but I didn’t just want to repeat myself and just do something that I’d already done before [chuckles]. I think some people might get a little confused with that approach, but on an album I couldn’t have really done stuff like that. So this was really the idea to get something out and stuff that people can’t really predict. I think at the moment there seems to be some confusion - some people think I’m doing like goth-industrial rock or something, other people think I’m doing breakcore, and totally different people might think I’m doing…ambient stuff [laughs]. I don’t know. It’s very strange. I think people have to get used to the idea that you can’t really put me into just one category of something.”
You’ve mentioned the tracks on Shivers wouldn’t fit on the new record, and that the new material is going to be a progression from The Golden Foretaste Of Heaven. What can we expect from the new record?
“First of all I have to say, even though if I’ve said it was a progression from The Golden Foretaste Of Heaven record, for a lot of people they might find it’s a…huge step [laughs] forward, because basically what I did for this record, and because I’m already in the middle of making it, its kinda like almost an insane approach [laughs] - not insane for me, but for other people, that’s why I have to laugh a little bit.
Watch the video to ‘On Fire’ by Alec Empire
“I really went back to a lot of really German themes, Nibelung, and the Wagner-type of themes. I wanted to make a record which was completely disconnected from pop music or rock music as we maybe know it from the last century. I think of lot of music that’s been made today is so connected to that one recipe of song writing, and the way records sound, and I was just getting so bored with it. Some stuff is synthesiser pieces which maybe ended up fitting more into a film or something, as it’s very epic and very big sounding stuff, which I was just getting into. In Berlin there was a lot of that minimal techno sound around for years, and everybody was trying to simplify music more and more to make it maybe have a wider appeal, but I was just getting really bored with it.
“One thing that we tried - and we’re going to do it over the summer again - there’s outside of Berlin there’s an old bunker from the war, and we went in and recorded some stuff there. It had a really strange and weird vibe. I just want the next album to be more, not just a collection of a bunch tracks or something, but to be one piece that works…almost like, y’know, Intelligence & Sacrifice? It was always seen as one piece of work, rather than as a selection of tracks, and this is kind of like the mindset that I’m approaching the new record with. But that doesn’t describe the sound of it. At the moment I’m into very precise and more cleaner sounds, which also have a lot of punch of course, and energy. But I think most of the noisy stuff I’ve done…in my opinion, bands like Justice, even they even include digital distortion sounds now, so to me, I don’t really want to go too much into that field anymore.”
You mentioned disconnecting yourself from traditional song writing - how do you do that in a culture such as ours in which music is so ingrained?
“It really starts with the way in your mind…I think that’s why maybe the link to The Golden Foretaste of Heaven this record, as at that time I was really getting into these Russian synthesisers, and I was playing for the first time in St Petersburg and Moscow. That brought back a lot of memories from when as a child when I visited East Germany for example, where it was just such a difference in the way music was perceived. Maybe the most famous record would’ve been maybe a Beatles song collection, for a lot of people in the GDR. They were just looking at pop music or rock music in a completely different way.
“Because I grew up in Berlin, I was stuck in the middle of both of these two worlds, and over the past maybe 10 years or so the West has taken over so much of most of the Eastern Europe countries. With something like film scores, everything non-Western is very interesting for me. When somebody maybe does an electronic soundtrack in Los Angeles, for me is very predictable as I know almost what it’s going to sound like. While if someone from Japan or something scores a really weird film,even if they would use some of the same instruments, they would just have a different way of looking at music.
“The next very important step of course is to not even want to please anybody. At the moment I hate that atmosphere in the music industry where everyone is so scared of not selling records, or of not selling out shows, and things like that. People’s sense of themselves is almost being taken out of the music-making process, when it’s just about ‘how many people can I please with one thing’, or always looking to please the majority. For me, art and music, that’s not what they’re about. It’s almost at the peak of trying to make profits from music, while at the same time with the digital age and everyone just taking the music, it’s an important moment where we stand now.
“For myself, I’ve just made the decision, “okay, I can make music that does stuff for me”. Not just in the sense that I like the music, but that it challenges me too. And if that is commercial or if it’s not commercial, I can’t really make that decision”. The music scene is a reflection of stuff like Wall Street even, with the MySpace boards and everybody’s trying to fake their profiles, and make it appear on Last.fm like they have thousands of listeners. I just think, why even fake this appearance? For me, if I listen to music and only ten other people in the world understand it, that’s okay. Why do we have to always think about accepted by the majority? This plays a lot into writing music, how I approach music at the moment.”
Watch the video to ‘Too Dead For Me’ by Atari Teenage Riot
Do you not feel that an established experimental artist, you’ll always have a safety net of dedicated fans that will follow you regardless?
“Hopefully. The weird thing is that’s the feedback I keep getting. Even much later…sometimes we get emails, or people talk to me after shows, and they tell me that they now understand the record that I made ten years ago. They were angry - “why doesn’t this sound like Atari Teenage Riot…it’s so weird…is he taking the piss?” - but then they’ve said they see the structure and precision and the skill, if you want to call it that, much later. It’s almost like a language. It’s the same with books - you read a book when you’re sixteen, and then maybe read it again ten years later and understand it a whole lot more, and interpret it in a different way. I think with music it works like this as well, at least with my music.
“But I also know fans who hate that, and want me to make the same stuff over and over. One reason why I put this track, ‘Shivers’, on the EP was really to piss these hardcore genre-fans off! There’s some journalists over here [in Germany] once said to me [sneering] “I think the day you write a piano ballad, that’s the day which you should stop making music”. Of course, the next thing I put out, I put a long piano track on it! Of course it didn’t sound like a normal piano ballad - it was mainly in the sort of approach how maybe Cluster would have done it - but I feel really challenged when people try to tell me what I should do. And for myself - can I do it? I work a lot with piano when I write scores for films.
“It was the same when people in techno were telling me you can’t use guitars. And right now, it’s almost as if electronic music cannot live without guitar sounds, with that whole indie-dance thing. I think it’s very stupid to judge music or musicians in that way. We always try to go against that. I think it’s fun to see if you can pull it off. Of course, you also get a lot of shit for that [laughs] from these people who just don’t want to question you again. Some fans they would rather prefer that you always do the same thing so they don’t have to think about it again. With my audience, people like that fact, that it’s not always the same. I think that’s very different to other musicians somehow.”
Do you still feel like an underground artist?
“It’s very strange - I feel very connected to that way of thinking. I don’t see music in this sort of hierarchy, like this “person is more famous, that person is less famous” - to me it really only matters what it does at that point. I know musicians who are amazing but nobody knows their music almost. To me, that’s equal to something which is really successful at the moment. I really don’t think that matters for me.
“Of course if somebody says to me, ‘hey, what do you think about that project?’ or “do you want to get involved in that?”, very often I would say ‘yes’ to things where other people wouldn’t expect me to jump on to. I produced one track with Patrick Wolf that is not out yet, which is called ‘Together’, that is very melodic and very pop almost. Some people will think “why would he do that stuff?” Maybe that’s the underground mentality I grew up with all the time, when I started making records and playing shows. For me, to network with other musicians in very important. It’s not just a thing about thinking about combining forces to sell more records, or something like that, for me it’s really personal almost. When I meet younger DJs, they don’t have that mindset at all, but from the 90, you couldn’t survive without that way of thinking, of a connected world of other sound systems in other cities. You just had to be connected in that way, whereas at the moment a lot of people think “I’m gonna make money, I’m gonna get it from music industry. Make my money, take it out, then leave”. Which is very strange for me to witness that, but then I don’t really have to deal with that.”
You mentioned Patrick Wolf - it’s a strange collaboration, and a lot of people were shocked when it was announced you’d be working with him. How did that come about?
“Somehow he had come to an Atari Teenage Riot show years ago, which I then of course forgot. Years later, when we talked about it, about certain things that happened at the hsow, I remembered: “that was you?”. He had given me some music already back then.
“He played a show in Berlin, I think about two or three years ago, when The Magic Position came out. I got this message from Universal Records, which put out the record over here, and they were like “we have this artist who really likes you, and you music, do you want to come down to the show?” It was a bit strange, because as at the same time and in the same place, on another stage, Jon Spencer and Suicide were playing, so I was in the place anyway. I thought it was really boring that show there. It wasn’t the musicians fault - it was some kind of weird theatre kind of place, where the music just sounded kind of flat in my opinion. So I was going to see this other thing, and I was really blown away by the performance that he did. In this packed place, It was so alive. For me, the contrast couldn’t have been bigger, wider, compared to this other stuff which for me was the obvious show to go to.”
Watch the video to ‘Vulture’ by Patrick Wolf
“I saw Patrick without even knowing the music. I knew some of the early EP stuff that he had done, kind of programmed beats, almost like Warp or something, intellectual fucked-up programming. He would play strings on top of it and stuff like that. But the show that I’d seen was completely different, full of energy. And we talked about it, ‘yeah we should really do stuff’, and then it took quite some time - a year or something - for anything to happen. I sent him a track, and I didn’t hear back…. Then he came over to Berlin and we spent quite some time in The Hellish Vortex Studios over here. I think it was a really good collaboration as I think he wanted to push his sound into a new direction, and I think the whole Berlin thing was good. The way we approached a lot of the other material he was working on is that….there’s this kind of myth about Berlin, with Eno, Bowie, old synths and big reverbs and stuff…in a way it feels out of that tradition somehow. I don’t know why that is, but it’s maybe because that’s the Berlin I grew up in at the end of the 80s, middle of the 80s, where that kind of sound was really still around and important for people. The Patrick Wolf tracks, all the stuff that we’ve done are like very different from each other. ‘Vultures’ is more like a harder electro track that he really loved, but there’s also a track called ‘Battle’ which sounds maybe like what most people would expect from it, very hard guitars and very hard beats. It could’ve been an Alec Empire track, just with different vocals and I think that’s great.”
Talking about Past-Present-Future Tour - what made you decide to re-incorporate ATR material into the set?
“I really wanted to avoid that all the time. To me, it would’ve been…I just couldn’t. I felt with the Atari Teenage Riot songs, when Carl Crack died, and the way the whole thing ended, I didn’t really feel that I wanted to go back to that at that time. I think now, one reason, to be honest, the political situation made the decision for me. The past maybe six months, or even longer, I feel so angry about just about the banks and all that stuff. For me, I haven’t looked closely enough at the British situation, but the way people react in Germany it’s like…are they walking zombies? It seems like so many people don’t want to see where their problem is. A lot of these songs that we’ve written with Atari Teenage Riot describe it so well, what has been going on with the Iraq war, and they way the financial world is tied in with all that. To me it was “why don’t we play some of these songs?” I don’t even need to re-write new stuff, because we’ve had it.
“Also, what I quite liked about the idea was we have to re-work that stuff to see if it works now. The songs won’t sound so different that you can’t recognise them anymore, but it certain stuff had to be updated. I felt also distanced enough, it was the tenth anniversary of the May Riots, when we played the streets of Berlin, and it really made me think back about what has changed, how do people react to the political situation, and somehow I thought I can’t ignore this.”
Watch Atari Teenage Riot perform at the Berlin May Day Riots in 1999
“For example, a record like The Golden Foretaste of Heaven I would not have done this year, because it just not felt like it. I think the weird thing is that a lot of people at my shows now don’t really know Atari Teenage Riot so well. That’s the feedback I’m getting most of the time. People go ‘you played in this another band?” as they were just too young when it happened. Most people maybe when I started years ago, they started with Intelligence & Sacrifice. It’s kind of strange. We’ll see what the reaction will be, but we’re looking forward to doing stuff like that again.”
On the last tour, the vast majority of the set was the lighter, Golden Foretaste material. How do you marry the harder stuff up with your newer electro sound when playing live?
“I always remember when we once did a 3CD compilation called The Geist of Alec Empire, which was almost like a ‘Best Of’ from all Mille Plateaux albums I did in the 90s. I remember when we compiled it we were like ‘can we even do this? This might not even fit’. The weird thing is, when we compiled it, it made perfect sense. I find that very often with my music that even if one record feels to be so different from another one - maybe if you were to play them next to each other and you don’t know the context, it would be weird - but in a live situation, these things are much more linked together than most people would think.
“To give you an example, we played a show in Spain last month, and tracks like ‘New Man’ and ‘The Ride’ and harder stuff, completely was working very well next to each other. I think sometimes it’s much easier than some people think. And it wouldn’t like “now they’re going in one direction, then they’re going off like this”, it’s because there’s this signature on all of these tracks. I haven’t found this to be a problem so far to be honest.”
Watch the video to ‘The Ride’ by Alec Empire
On the subject of film scores, do you ever have difficulty in writing to someone else’s specifications, as opposed to following your own creative path?
How do you translate that into the performance of playing the instruments and stuff, it’s very complex. But I don’t find that a problem at all. I think its fun most of the time. I really like doing it. You can actually do stuff in films that you could never do in tracks that are supposed to be set to the radio or something. You can score a scene in a film which is very dramatic and very intense, something that even a more mainstream kind of crowd would think that it’s an exciting scene, while if [the score] would be played on daytime radio, they would all turn off the station. Maybe, that’s a theory. Sometimes the people run these things think maybe people are too stupid to be challenged, but I think films, even mainstream cinema, you can do stuff like this.
People thought with The Fast And The Furious when this Atari Teenage Riot song appears in this one scene…when we put [‘Speed’] out, most people were going ‘oh this is so crazy!’, ten years later it appears in a Hollywood film [chuckles]. Maybe it’s also got something to do with the way the images go with the music…but I really love doing stuff like that.”
So when is the full-length album out?
“We’re trying to really wrap it up as soon as possible. If we didn’t do the tour [laughs] then I’d say I’d finish it at the end of May (which is still the plan…), but the idea is to put it out the end of August, maybe early September. At the moment there’s no delay or anything, as most of the stuff is done.”
Apart from the upcoming shows, the album, subsequent tour…what’s on the agenda?
“There’s a lot of stuff! At some point Big Pink wants to come over to record more stuff here in Berlin. There is such a hype right now over them, they are always so busy that we’re always trying to figure out a date where we can all make it. [laughs]
“One project I really have to start working on, which might happen in Spring 2010 - but we really have to do all the work for it this year - is a theatre piece about Mozart. It’s going to be showing in Berlin. I don’t know if you know of the French performance artist, Costas, he’s slightly older than me, and performs very outrageous kinds of performances. There’s a very interesting screenplay that an author gave to us, which is basically a very confrontational story…you can’t really prove it, but there are certain signs that Mozart was abused as a child…so I don’t want to give too much of the story away, but a lot of people look at Mozart as a composer in that neurotic way, and you can’t really mention any negative sides, and it’s almost as if the bourgeoisie has completely absorbed that composer and that theatre piece is going to be insane. I’m doing the music for it and it’s going to be a really exciting project.
“Over here at the moment all the tabloids are so angry….there’s this film coming out, Chaostage - Days of Chaos - it this German punk film, and it’s starting this month I over 40 cinemas over here. There’s a very controversial scene where a cop gets shot. Now the government want to index the film already. Bild-Zeitung, it’s kind of the equivalent of The Sun in England, ran this really large article about how this kind of film should be shut down and stuff like that. I think at the moment it’s an exciting time as with certain statements people feel so provoked, they react in such an extreme way, it really feels almost like something is changing. People are so busy keeping things down, and to be active against so many ideas even, stuff like that. I’m working all the time.”
The new mini-album from Alec Empire, Shivers, is out on Eat Your Heart Out Records on May 8. Empire is also touring the UK before its release.
Alec Empire May 2009 tourdates
01 London Camden Underworld
02 Manchester Satan’s Hollow
03 Glasgow Ivory Blacks
05 Norwich The Waterfront
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