Tomas Korber
I nterview by email with Jesse Goin
December 2005
Tomas Korber is a 27 year old guitarist, composer and improviser from Zürich, Switzerland who has appeared on an impressive array of releases both solo and with playing partners including Toshimaru Nakamura, Günter Müller, Otomo Yoshihide, dieb13, eRikm, Jason Kahn, Keith Rowe, Dan Warburton and Mersault, his working trio with Christian Weber and Christian Wolfarth. I asked several of these collaborators what qualities stand out in making music with Korber. Kahn remarked on his listening acumen. Weber, the bassist for the past three years with Mersault, said he has “an uncompromising focus on the music,” and remains committed to “taking risks and the use of very different forms.” Korber’s work indeed has an impressive range and scope, characterized by both a high degree of malleability and the clear presence of recurring sonic elements, very much his own sound.
I was born
in 1979 in Zurich, Switzerland. My mother is Spanish, my father Swiss.
I've lived in Switzerland all my life except for three years in Spain
(we came back when I was about nine). I'm an only child. Neither of my
parents plays an instrument, but my dad is a passionate music listener.
Mostly classical – Mozart is God – and old-school jazz. My
dad listening to Mozart and Beethoven in the living room is possibly my
earliest musical memory. Both parents thought it would be "important"
for me to engage in some sort of musical activity as a child, so they
sent me to music school when we came back from Spain. I learned some theory
and played clarinet for a few years, then switched to guitar in my teens
because I was listening to rock music and rock hardly ever uses clarinets.
To be honest, I didn't enjoy music lessons, either clarinet or guitar,
but today I realise it was cool to be confronted with music so early on.
My parents were right and I'm grateful they took that decision for me
when I was a child.
While I was taking guitar lessons I got an electric guitar and started
a band called acid.lactiq with two friends. I played guitar and electronic
devices, Michal Holy (who's now a pretty renowned drum'n'bass producer/DJ
under the name Mijatoho) played bass and Don Tuggener played drums. We
stayed together for more than eight years. That was probably my single
most important musical experience, being confronted by the creative process
of composing and playing from about the age of 14 onwards. At the beginning
we played simple rock songs, but we gradually got interested in more experimental
forms, and as our listening habits changed so did our music. I'd say that
we were quite good, given the age we had. When we were about 17 (around
1995-1996), we won a few band contests. We sounded a little like Godspeed
You Black Emperor did later (Lift Your Skinny Fists era), and
we were even compared to Pink Floyd (yes, drugs were an influence!). Most
of the music was composed, but there were already improvised elements.
We used to incorporate extended sections of noise, sometimes as long as
half an hour, into our concerts. There are lots of funny stories from
that period of sound engineers turning our volume down in concerts because
they thought we'd blew their speakers. We recorded a lot of free noise
sessions at our rehearsal space, and I've still got tons of tapes lying
around. We had a great time, but we eventually drifted away from each
other, principally because of musical issues, so the band split up about
five years ago. I kind of miss it, though I know it wouldn't work anymore.
In any case, I'd already started recording my own music on a 4-track tape
machine around 1996, parallel to working with the band.
Back then I didn't know anything about the music "scene" or
what to do with that music I was making or who to send it to or how to
get in touch with other people (it's easy to forget that Internet hadn't
taken off yet). I'd never made music with anyone other than the guys in
the band. It took another couple of years for me to put together a demo-tape
and send it around to some people. It got me my first solo gig and improv
session at Zürich's WIM (www.wimmusic.ch), where I still play more
or less regularly. A key experience for me was walking up to Günter
Müller after a show he played about five years ago and asking him
if he'd play with me. He agreed. Meeting Günter was very important,
because he introduced me to a lot of people and helped me establish my
own network. A lot of the people I play with now I met indirectly through
Günter. For example he introduced me to the people from Dolmen, who
organize events here in Switzerland, and they invited me to take part
in one of their events, where Otomo [Yoshihide] and Toshi [Nakamura] were
playing. So that's how I met those two. Günter was also responsible
for my first visit to the US as a performer, at the Swiss Peaks Festival
in Tonic in 2003. Christian Marclay was looking for younger musicians
to invite, and Günter suggested me.
What was your early solo music like, and how did it differ from what you were doing with the acid.lactiq?
It was pretty dense guitar/electronic stuff, often with a psychedelic touch. There were some good ideas, but the tracks lacked differentiation and went on too long. I often played until the tape ran out. While acid.lactiq's music was still roughly based on melodic riff structures, my own used no melodies and there was no beat either (no drummer, and I had no drum machine). It was mostly laminar/plane "noise" music. Aesthetically it involved saying goodbye to the vestiges of song-oriented structure (though I think I've been coming back to that more and more recently) and exploring less static compositional forms. It was no longer possible for me to apply compositional methods within a group, so I tended to improvise when playing with other people and compose when working by myself. The lines blurred with time, though. I say "compositional" structures, though they can also be applied to improv – I see myself as a composer anyway, even when I'm improvising.
You jettisoned the baggage of most rock music, but it seems you did retain one element I associate with Godspeed!, the idea of starting extremely quietly, gradually building in volume and density and then returning to quiet.
Good point, but I don't know if that has anything specifically to do with Godspeed. What you're probably referring to are the big dramatic structures, and they've always been important in music, even way back – think Wagner or Beethoven. I'm definitely into big dramatic structures.
What is your basic set up, and how has it evolved over time?
I use a rather simple set up: guitar, mixing board and a few effects pedals (this can vary but most of the time I use an EQ, two different delays and a box with several different hall effects). Back when we recorded momentan def I had them connected to each other in a linear way. Nowadays I use fewer effects, but they're more interconnected via feedback loops through the mixer. Sometimes I also use a little sampler and/or mp3 player to do live sampling or feed in field recordings and other pre-recorded material. Lately I've also been using a contact mic.
You entitled your 2004 solo release Sediments Of Seclusion, which happens to be the title of a collection of poems by an obscure Australian poet of the 60s/70s, Walter Billiter.
Yes, that is a pretty weird coincidence, and something I was unaware of until you told me (though who knows, maybe I'd heard the title somewhere and it lay buried in the unconscious). It was just that at the time I was working in seclusion. I recorded that feedback session and came across it later. It was what was left of that seclusion, its sediments.
Another literary allusion, deliberate this time: you named your working trio with Christian Wolfarth and Christian Weber after the protagonist in Albert Camus's L'Etranger, Mersault. What was the significance of that?
It wasn't something we thought much about. We were looking for a name and this book came to mind. The music evoked some of the feelings I had when reading the novel, one of my favorites. It's austere and the pace is slow and yet there are feverish eruptions from time to time; the "dramatic" structures you mentioned in your question earlier are also present in Mersault.
How long and how often has Mersault been working together?
About three years. There are periods where we play quite often – maybe a couple of times a month – and others where we go without playing together for several months. I think it's also important that Christian Wolfarth and Christian Weber play together all the time in different projects, but all three of us see Mersault as a real "band", meaning not only that we work together on a regular basis but that there is a strong sense of unity, personally. We know each other very well and it shows in our playing, especially when it comes to "reading" the other's intentions and reacting accordingly. Of course, there's also the danger though of falling back on successful formulas all too often, which we try to avoid by taking unlikely decisions. That can sometimes screw everything up, but it's exciting. The most important thing is to try to keep things risky. It took a long time for that Quakebasket CD to come out, and musically we're now quite far away from where we were when it was recorded. We're hoping to make new recordings in 2006 and release them as soon as possible afterwards.
How much post-production is involved in the solo releases as opposed to group projects?
It varies a lot from project to project. With something like Effacement it makes almost no sense to talk of post-production, since it all melts together. Maybe I treated some field recording, which gave me the idea to combine it with some guitar sounds, so I returned to the "recording" stage, then back to so-called "post-production" and so on. In an improvised context the distinction is a little clearer: there's the recording and then everything afterwards. You could say I focus more on post-production than other people do in terms of editing, mixing and generally introducing more compositional ideas into the project, but I don't like making these distinctions very much. The notion of what's "original" and what's "post-production" is pretty irrelevant to me. I'm very result oriented – if I'm working on a record I want it to be as interesting as possible, and I'll do whatever is necessary to get it to a point where I'm happy with it. Sometimes it's nice to have it raw and somewhat chaotic and sometimes it's good to have it totally thought out. That also applies to different parts within a certain project. On Effacement, for example, there's "Fred Austere", whose first couple of minutes are just mono unprocessed guitar, the simplest thing in the world, and then there's "Thermo", which consisted of over 30 tracks and which was an incredible pain in the ass to put together.
Could you talk us through a few specific releases, starting with Brackwater?
Brackwater was obviously an important step for me. Recording with three great musicians – Otomo, Toshi and eRikm – for a great label – For4Ears – I knew it would gain some attention in the world of experimental music, so it was also a chance to present some of "my" work to a wider public (whatever that means – we're still talking about ridiculously small audiences). The recording took place in an old prison in the French part of Switzerland, and I think you can hear that the music was influenced by the somewhat oppressive atmosphere in the building. It was recorded direct to multitrack, which meant I had many possibilities when it came to shaping the mix. One of the most interesting things for me was being able to hear the tracks separately and study the individual playing of eRik, Otomo and Toshi and how they worked together. We each contributed to the music in very different ways, both in terms of material and compositional ideas, but it was a good fit. It's certainly one of my favorite albums.
Tell
us some more about the collaborative process involved in your other releases,
specifically Mistakes, Conspiracy Theory and Zirkadia.
Two of those involved file sharing, long-distance hook ups. Any thoughts
about that methodology, as opposed to working directly with the musician(s)
in real time?
Mistakes
isn't so much a collaboration as a split CD. Kazuya [Ishigami] and I made
our pieces using each other's material, but the composition was done individually.
It's an approach to file sharing/postal collaboration I've explored a
couple of times now, and I'm not all that interested in doing it again.
The reason for that is that the level of real collaboration is relatively
low: what results is basically a solo piece disguised as a collaboration.
I might as well do it all by myself then. What I'm really interested in,
working with other people, is exchange, a clash of ideas, tension. That's
when something emerges that's new to me, something that wouldn't turned
out that way if I'd it done all by myself. The challenge in making long
distance collaborations interesting is to find a way how to really work
together.
Conspiracy Theory [with Dan Warburton] was certainly more successful
in terms of finding ways of working together, or maybe I should say working
against each other, since that was what Dan and I were often
doing. Musically, there are sections I like more and sections I like less,
but it was an experiment and it would have been inconsequential to cut
parts out. It had to be released in its entirety or not at all. We had
specific rules defining how to proceed when making the pieces, which I
won't bother to elaborate on, the bottom line being sections were added
one after another in a linear way, and once a section was done there was
no way of reworking it. So we were confronted all the time with as-is
situations, facts. What was intriguing for me was trying to find something
to add that would make the sections already there as interesting as possible
and which could, at the same time, point towards a possible future
of the piece. The two pieces on Conspiracy Theory live from that
tension: make something that will give the other person enough room extend
into something interesting, but at the same time make the piece evolve
in a direction you find worthwhile yourself. It was an exciting experiment,
even if I like one track much better than the other (I'm not telling you
which one!).
Zirkadia was based on an improvisation by dieb13, Jason [Kahn]
and myself which was edited and mixed by Jason. This took place the day
after the recording with dieb13 and eRikm on Condenser, and I
love how different those two recordings are from each other! dieb13 is
definitely someone I hope to work with more in the future, he's great.
And Jason has his own way of doing the post production, which is very
different from mine, but I love what he does. When we talk about music
(which we don't do very often), I have the feeling that we're looking
for different things, and yet we work together very well. You can talk
as much as you want about music, but when you're actually making it, all
the theorizing and polemic and blablabla becomes pretty irrelevant. Sometimes
it clicks, sometimes it doesn't. With Jason, it mostly does. We're bringing
out another record in trio with Christian Weber on Longbox next year,
which I'm really excited about.
Any thoughts on your recent tour with David Daniell and Greg Davis and your appearances at the Erstquake festival in New York? Be honest!
The tour was
fun, and I think we got better from show to show. It was good to be on
the road with such nice guys on my first ever US-tour. Some of the recordings
we made might surface next year, we'll see. As far as Erstquake goes,
well, it was a good experience, all things considered. Music wise i think
I got off to a pretty good start with the duo with Keith Rowe. What we
played probably wasn't as good as the set he played with Mark Wastell,
but it was certainly better than what some of the reviews of the festival
would have you believe. The set with Tim Barnes was awesome: harsh and
intense, my favourite of the three I played. I had no clue what he was
going to do, really no idea. I'd never heard him with that set-up before.
I remember thinking at one point during the set "These people are
gonna lynch us!" And it did generate quite a bit of controversy;
I heard everything from "best set at the festival" to "totally
pointless". But the only thing that matters to me is that Tim and
I were happy with it. On the other hand, the duo with Julien Ottavi was
really bad. Maybe that was the worst set of the festival –
not because it was loud or harsh or because we blew a speaker etc but
just because it was totally predictable and therefore very boring. I accept
I'm partly responsible for that, too. I should have talked to Ottavi more
beforehand or maybe even refused to play with him. I've probably paid
the price for my lack of experience. I already suspected this would happen
after hearing Ottavi's other sets at the festival. In both of them he
got himself stuck in a way of rigid conceptual music making that just
doesn't work if you're supposed to improvise with people. We're
talking collaboration here, not solo work, and he showed zero flexibility
(unlike Tim Barnes or Mark Wastell, who were for me the most consistently
exciting musicians at Erstquake). On the subject of flexibility, there
are two factors that are crucial in making an improvisation interesting
for me: diversity and compliance. You always have to adapt to a certain
point to the "situation", which is determined by the other player(s),
but also by the room, the PA, the audience, etc. On the other hand you
want to create something fresh, which means that adapting is sometimes
not enough. You need to create diversity, search for new ways of doing
things, try out new stuff. There's always a trade-off between generating
new solutions, being innovative and complying with the givens,
exploiting the situation in which you find yourself thrown in. The best
improvisers I've heard are able to find that good balance. It's important
to understand that this has nothing to do with the aesthetics
involved. You can very well generate a radical aesthetic, go into extremes,
and still manage the trade-off, if the circumstances are right for such
an undertaking.
I heard some great music at Erstquake, and made some new friends, but
it also showed me how far removed I am from the so-called EAI scene, and
how happy I am not to be a part of it. I'm still learning, and that's
a good thing. I want to learn as much as possible about how music works,
regardless of its genre and context.
