PAUL SCHUTZE: Composing In The Modern Age

For most of us, computers in the studio are part and parcel of the digital revolution. Not from where avant‑garde composer Paul Schütze is standing. Paul Tingen discovers a new perspective...

The introduction of digital sound might have been a small step for man, but it has been a giant leap for musiciankind. Perhaps its greatest impact has been in bringing both music‑making and recording within reach of the home musician. As a result, many musicians now work in home studios, where a budget tape recorder, mixing desk, synthesizer, computer and sampler can all be had on a budget of less than £10,000. CD‑quality sound has become the province of the amateur, with even mastering and pressing costs now tumbling to astonishingly low levels.

Three cheers, then, for the brave new world of modern music making — or so you might imagine. The strange thing is that the chip‑centred revolution has been blamed for much bland and unimaginative music — even for the near‑death of British pop in the late '80s and early '90s. Champions of analogue retro‑gear are climbing out of the woodwork everywhere, making claims like, "all music recorded after 1969 sounds worse than anything that was recorded before." (Bill Bottrell, producer of Michael Jackson and Sheryl Crow). They claim that far from encouraging musical innovation, sampling and sequencing have reduced music to the lowest common denominator, and point to Brit‑poppers such as Oasis to demonstrate the renaissance of good, old‑fashioned, manual music‑making.

In these circumstances, it is inspiring to find a musician who is not only an unashamed user and defender of digital equipment, but who also manages to boldly go where few musicians, digital or otherwise, have gone before. Paul Schütze is regarded as a leading light in the fast‑spreading New Electronic music scene, which encompasses ambient, post‑techno, classical avant‑garde, experimental jazz and world music. A 37‑year old Australian, currently living in London, he's an occasional contributor to influential jazz journal The Wire. Like his electronic music near‑namesake, Klaus Schulze, Schütze is amazingly prolific. He may not have produced the 50 CDs that his German counterpart has over the last few years (see SOS Feb '96), but 12 solo albums in the last six years is still an impressive output.

New Directions

Initially intending to become a painter, Schütze switched to music in the late '70s, and founded the avant‑garde improvisational electronic band Laughing Hands in his native Melbourne, recording two albums with them. In 1983, he won an award for Best Score at the AFI (Australian Film Industry), and subsequently spent half a decade writing film music and lecturing in sound design at various film colleges. Gradually, however, he became disillusioned with the directors he was working with, coming to the conclusion that "if you have a good score with a bad movie, you might as well have a bad score." After writing around 40 hours of original music for about 20 films, he decided in 1989 that enough was enough, embarked on a solo career and released his first solo album, Deus Ex Machina.

Pieces of music that say: 'I'm a completely self‑contained, self‑referential artefact, take me or leave me' are to my mind very arrogant and moribund.

Since then, there have been 11 more solo CDs (see the 'Select Discography' box for some of these). The first half of 1996 will see a deluge of releases, largely on the Big Cat label, with re‑releases of Schütze's 1992 and '93 albums New Maps Of Hell and The Rapture of Metals; brand new work on a quadruple CD compilation called Stateless, with four contemporary composers including Schütze each filling a CD; a collaboration album with the help of bass‑master Bill Laswell and the famous jazz trombonist Julian Priester; and a live CD (entitled Watermaps) of an improvised concert Schütze gave at the Purcell Rooms in London during October last year, with David Toop, Max Eastley and Robert Hanson.

Talking in his central London home, Schütze agrees that his productivity is in part a by‑product of the digital revolution. Although he works very fast by nature (New Maps Of Hell took no more than five days to record), he explains that he can now produce and master his own recordings from his home studio. If small labels have proliferated over the last few years, it's because artists like Schütze are able to supply them with master tapes direct, offering previously unthinkable profit margins for low‑volume sales.

"I produce more work than one label can cope with," observes Schütze, "and also produce very different types of music. Rather than being tied down by a label that wants me to write a certain type of music and having to adjust my music to that label, I can adjust the label to my work. Many people work in this way now, and I think it is the way of the future."

Less Is More

If the balance of power between artist and record company is changed by this new‑found autonomy, it could be another giant leap forward for musicians. The pioneering Australian is, however, not only ahead of the times in the way he releases his material, but can be described as a prototype 21st century musician from other perspectives as well. Take his unbelievably compact and tidy home studio, for example. It occupies no more than a small corner of his spacious basement living room, yet squeezes in a Kurzweil K2000, a Mackie CR1604, an Alesis HR16 drum machine, a Yamaha TX7 tone generator, one rack of outboard gear, and a Roland MC500 hardware sequencer. There are no tape recorders, other than a Sony DTC1000 DAT recorder, no microphones, no 'spaghetti junction' patchbay/wiring, no abundance of flickering lights to impress visitors (or distract musicians): just one keyboard, a small mixing desk and some processing paraphernelia. It's exactly how we imagine the stereotypical 21st century digital studio to look. Schütze smiles when confronted with these observations.

"The way my home studio is set up is certainly the way things will be going more and more in the future. The only anomaly about my setup is the MC500, and the fact that I have no computer. But otherwise, it's pretty typical. I always come back to working alone at home, because it gives me a level of concentration that I just can't get when working in the studio or with other people. When I work here, every single note is the way I want it to be. Every other way of working is the beginning of a series of compromises, and beyond a certain point I find that unacceptable. It's very gratifying to work at home in my own environment, and have the time to make sure that everything is exactly right. I record almost all my music alone, and don't go out buying new equipment all the time, so unlike many other people who seem to be obsessed with acquiring the latest technology, I keep my costs down."

In A Silent Place

So, let's talk about the music. In Schütze's case, this is not easy, because his music is very varied and difficult to describe. Most of his pieces are highly abstract sound sculptures, and although there are many pitched sounds, there are usually no identifiable melodies; certainly not when Schütze plays around with the tuning of his K2000 and enters the land of microtonality.

Within these non‑melodic and microtonal parameters, the styles he employs range from psychedelic, dissonant space music, via gamelan‑influenced atmospherics, to collectively‑improvised mayhem. An interesting aspect of Schütze's ever‑changing, all‑instrumental music are the striking titles, such as 'The Rapture on The Lungs of God', or 'New Maps of Hell'. Together with his background in film, it suggests that much of the inspiration for his music comes from visual images. Schütze:

"That is true. For most of Apart, I had the photograph that I used on the cover in my mind. The music was inhabiting the place on that photograph. The titles are clues to what I'm thinking about when I'm making the music. I have often taken titles and inspiration from books as well: the title 'New Maps of Hell', for example, comes from a book of essays on SF by Kingsley Amis."

As well as images, much of Schütze's work is inspired by locations. For example, in the ambient track 'Sleep III', he tried to "re‑create the feeling of a place at the end of a pier in Melbourne. If you went there in the night, you would hear the dead‑sounding clinking of the boats that were moored there, sounding as if everything was a long way away from you. Like most of my pieces, this track is an attempt to define a physical space, and the feeling that place has. You put the piece on, and you're no longer in this room.

"There isn't a dramatic narrative in most of my stuff; it opens, just hangs there and then closes. It's more static than linear. I'm very interested in depth for that reason, and in layering things. I like to feel as if I'm looking through something, I like to know that there's a horizon line. That's why I think of 3D images when I mix."

Whilst some of Schütze's work exhibits an absence of both melody and dramatic narrative, the music that he has recorded with other musicians is an exception, especially the poppy danceability and near‑tunes of Vertical Memory, which are closer to more conventional music in their construction and in their use of time. Schütze himself calls Vertical Memory and More Beautiful Human Life his "fun, pop projects that allow me to be a bit cheesy or flippant. They're like comic relief, me indulging myself, which is why they are released under different names." (Seed and Uzect Plaush respectively).

Despite the poppiness of Vertical Memory, however, Schütze's music will never approach the commercial — his musical frame of reference is way too left‑field for that. He numbers classical composers like Ligeti, Satie, Varäse and Stockhausen among his influences, as well as Indian and gamelan music, Miles Davis, and the German bands Kraftwerk and Can: "Can is my all‑time favorite band, and their bassist Holger Czukay is probably my absolute musical hero."

Computers are like a vortex into which enormous amounts of creative energy get sucked, with very little return.

The other important element in Schütze's musical world is microtonality. Though unusual, it's consistent with his interest in Indian and gamelan music.

"I know that many people feel forced into tempered tuning when playing keyboards, but ever since I've had keyboards that I could tune microtonally, I've hardly used equal temperament anymore. Now, I just spin numbers around on my K2000 until it sounds right, and make up often modal‑like scales, with usually less than 12 notes per octave. The interesting thing about microtonal tuning is that it changes the timbre completely, because the harmonic interferences between the notes alter."

It's Less Fun To Compute?

Schütze's loyalty to just one digital keyboard may be unorthodox, but his fierce aversion to computers, which leaves him dependant on an ancient Roland MC500, is positively eccentric:

"I hate computers. All the inferfaces I have seen so far between computers and people are just intolerable; I flatly refuse to look at a screen. I don't think that anyone should have to work in the way that computers expect you to work, and the idea of putting up with it, rather than demanding that it meets your requirements, is perverse. Computers are like a vortex into which enormous amounts of creative energy get sucked with very little return.

"We now have a musical culture that is hell‑bent on adapting itself to a tool. It's mad. It means that you can tell whether someone is working with Cubase or Notator purely from listening to their music. The main thing that you hear is a vertical grid. You hear edits in four‑bar sections, you can spot edit points, and it's very rare that you hear things existing in overlapping levels. The other thing is that people don't experience whole parts. If there's a 15‑minute piece with a hi‑hat part throughout, they won't play the hi‑hat part for 15 minutes. They'll play two bars, and repeat it ad nauseum. It seems to me that you don't get to experience the parts like that. If you play them all the way through, you would understand the kind of variations they need, and why gradual changes are necessary.

"I think that computers have had a very detrimental effect on our sense of rhythm and musical development over time. It's bizarre that we're currently in a period of huge experimentation in electronic music, with all these different kinds of music being produced, and yet everyone is using exactly the same tools to produce them. That tool has a levelling effect on the possible results, because all software steers you in a particular direction. I may be able to go in 500 directions, but there are only one or two directions that are easy. There are very few composers whose musical ideas are so strong that they will be able to retain them in the face of the way the software works — so I think there's a very good case to be made for some software writers being as responsible for techno as some of the people who are composing it."

Schütze's answer is the MC500, which he uses as a tape recorder:

"I bought it in 1985, because I liked the idea that you could change and replace things, or change the speed or sounds after recording. I've written hi‑hat figures that I've later changed to a piano sound, for example, so you get piano patterns that you would never dream of writing if you'd heard a piano when you were writing. It's a way of tricking yourself into writing unexpected parts. The thing about the MC500, though, is that I don't do much note‑editing on it. Changing one note, or the velocity of one note, is a bit of a nightmare. I basically perform into it as if it was a tape recorder. It only has four tracks, so I have to bounce things down. It takes quite a bit of juggling, because if you combine tracks wrongly, you can't edit or un‑combine. It has all kinds of restrictions, but that's part of what's good about it."

Paths To Enlightenment

Schütze is clearly on a favourite hobby‑horse in his diatribe against computers, which sits oddly with his distaste for the way analogue diehards also blame equipment for bad music (see the 'This One Will Run And Run' box). According to Schütze, however, it's a matter of creating forms of technology and art that open our mind, rather than restricting it:

"We're surrounded by things that stop us from seeing clearly. By contrast, there are certain things that bring the real world back into focus. That, to me, is one of the uses of music. Music is like architecture, something to be used in co‑existence, and something that we move through. It's not just there. Pieces of music that say: 'I'm a completely self‑contained, self‑referential artefact, take me or leave me' are to my mind very arrogant and moribund. If something doesn't invite interaction, then why does it need to be there at all?"