First off, I want to just talk about Oiseaux now that it's been a few years since its release. The album has been very influential to many people in the IDM [Intelligent Dance Music] scene. I just wanted to get a few words on how you feel about it today.
Well, I still like those pieces, and I'm pretty proud of them. I feel like some of the productions I dated poorly, obviously, like my overuse of drum breaks. Especially the "Amen". It was a great idea at the time because all I wanted to do was listen to tracks with the "Amen" break in them.* And, a year later I completely changed my mind and got so sick of it. I still like the music. I liked the way everything worked together. It's really kind of magical, I didn't use any pitch or time correction at all... at all! Everything that fits together is just a complete happy accident. It's just loops, that when put in a sampler and sped up or sped down that way, completely lock in speed and key. Some of those tracks, like on "Ghatham", there were 6 or 7 different samples that just happened to be completely in time with each other and completely in key with each other. And they're all from different songs, and they're all from different kinds of music. It's kind of amazing that it happened to work out. Some of it is less of an accident, I had a nice sample and I played other instruments to it.
On other songs like "Routine Exercise" there's this brass orchestra, were those samples from other pieces?
That's actually a piece by this composer named Alois Haba who's a contemporary of Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. He traveled around Hungary and Transylvania in the early 20th century, making field recordings of folk music. He wrote a lot of music as well. Mainly the stuff that I'm interested in of his is his quartertone stuff. He wrote quartertone trombone quintets, and quartertone brass quartets and tons of quartertone piano pieces that are really interesting... a lot of the same quartertone stuff that Ives was doing, but has this neat Eastern swing to it. Kinda like weird tonalities, because he's using this kind of in-between-the-keys kind of notes, but kind of making this exotic music. That brass quartet specifically, I sampled the entire piece. It's 45 seconds long. It's only 8 bars.
And you just looped it in various ways?
Yeah, I just put it in the sampler and moved it around a bit so that it would fit. I think it's just called "Quartertone Brass Quartet" or something like that. But it's the whole piece. I got the score and I wanted to try and record it because there hadn't been a recording of it. And it was literally like, I was working on music, and then I walked into Tower [Records], and found the Complete Works of Alois Haba on a triple CD. I just freaked out. I bought it, went home and I made the track that day. It was this bad recording from the '70s. I did clean that one up a little bit. I ran it through some plug-ins like Finalator or something to synthesize some high-end because it was really dull. I used it straight out of the computer into the sampler and just worked from there.
Were there any other recordings of composers you had used or made for Oiseaux?
Yeah there's some. I mean that track "Atelier", the main hook is actually from a tribute LP of George Maciunas, who is the main Fluxus guy. It's this groovy track in the middle of the Fluxus tribute LP, so I sampled it. I thought it was interesting. And, also some of the slow piano. Not much else, but I kinda had that idea when I first started. I wanted to make all these tracks and sample 20th Century classical music. Just because it's a lot of what I listened to and I thought it would be a neat and subversive thing to do. To get kids to kind of have that vocabulary in their head. To know John Cage prepared piano music by hearing it in a drum and bass track. That was what the whole Hrvatski thing was.
How do you feel now, when you hear reviews, or people spouting in- fluences or similarities in under- ground D'n'B zines and IDM lists and they speak about you?
Its weird. I did it almost completely like this fuck off [project]... I just wanted to make it this complete exercise in subversion. I just wanted to construct poppy tracks out of avant-garde samples. That was my idea. But it's completely not that. I started getting into drum 'n' bass and programming, next minute I really like the music. So I couldn't be so sarcastic about it. I just began making tracks because I liked making tracks. Until I made those tracks, I wasn't ever into dance music. Then it was like [in a boomy, authoritative voice], "Ha haa! We'll teach those kids a lesson! Those crazy dance music kids! This will show 'em!" And I just got into dance music. It's weird, the influence thing, I occasionally still get emails from kids who just find the record. It's out of print now, and has been for about six months.
And then breaking away from Oiseaux, came the Raume 7"
Well yeah, it's curing that disease, so to speak. That's another thing — it was pure. I wanted to make tracks of just a specific room of my house. Going with a microphone and getting every sound out of a particular room. Not changing anything, not bringing anything in to either room. Just going into the kitchen and going, "Okay, what in the kitchen, as it is right now, makes sound?" The microwave, the pots and pans, the sink, the hum of the refrigerator, that kind of thing. Dropping a chair on the floor. I'm still working on a lot of that stuff. The three tracks came out as a 7" and there is another 7" coming out, that's the washer and the dryer in the basement. One track's just washer sounds and one track's just dryer sounds.
And you just cut them up and pitch them?
That's it. No DSP. It's literally just building kits in the sampler. The only processing I'll ever do is stereo. Everything in the kit is mono samples. I do all the recordings in mono then actually build it so that things fall into a stereo spectrum. Then, maybe pitch shift things up and down a bit. I am using a filter in the Akai, but no actual computer for processing — running it through processes on a computer, normalizing things, none of that. Just editing the sounds, building it in the sampler and mixing it through an analog mixer.
Talking about Planet-Mu, you have a full length coming out.
There's this full length, Swarming & Dither. It's all the stuff I've been playing live for the last two years. It's what I've done since Oiseaux and a lot of those tracks are from around the time of Oiseaux. It's crazy! Tracks I recorded in '97 are coming out on an album in 2002! Everybody has this opinion of electronic music being completely a flash in the pan and nothing's good a week after it's released. I think it's kinda cool that I can at least make something that sounds good 6 years later. There's one track that is kind of a 200bpm real blasted kind of gabber track that's all fast beats. I think it's an awesome track. It doesn't really fit on the album, but I made a point of putting it on there anyway. Because I thought, well, it's a track that I'm proud of, I like it. And it's going to have no other way of being released. With the Raumes stuff, I'll finish it one of these days. I have only three or four rooms left in my house. Then I'll do the hallways and the porches or something. And then I'll be done. That will also be a full length on Planet-Mu. It'll be nice. I like that approach. I was going to do that stuff under a different name, but Wolfgang (of tonschacht) who originally released the tonschacht 7" was like, "You should just do it as Hrvatski, you shouldn't make up some weird name." He was political about it. And as the label owner he is concerned that it is going to sell copies. Rather than I put it out as Alfred Bizzarro or whatever I was going to use [laughs]... I was going to kill off Hrvatski after Oiseaux.
So you just wanted Hrvatski to be like this one "Amen" break record?
One record. Just one thing and then just die.
You have also hooked up with Kranky records right? Is that release out yet?
Released in late October 2002.
That is a complete departure from what you had been doing previously, more guitar/DSP based stuff, correct?
Yeah. It's not that I have temporary feelings about music. I just like a lot of different things. I'm a music junkie. I'm like your classic guy who walks into a record store and out of any 10 records he can find one that's interesting. That's always the way I've been. I love that sort of hard, cut-up breakbeat music. But god, I never listen to any of that stuff other than when I'm making it. The stuff I listen to is a little world music, contemporary classical, a lot of art music. I listen to a lot of completely beatless ambient. Not even like ambient. It's much more tonal stuff. Sound research. I like to use that term. Even '70s krautrock type stuff, up to people that are doing contemporary DSP type stuff. I'm into computers and all that, so I think it's a logical step. I started doing these guitar concerts in like '99, when Invisible Cities was happening in New York. Invisible Cities was *[a performance where] every week somebody different was curating it. Kurt Ralske did his and he wanted me to come and play guitar duos with no computers at all. Kurt used to be in the Ultra Vivid Scene, a 4AD band. And I was a huge fan of his guitar stuff. So when he asked me to do this, "Yeah, we'll just bring acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and just play." Then, he got this idea, because he's into MAX and doing computer processing of guitars. So I started working on it more as well, and turned into basically the 21:30 EP, on Apartment B. I played those pieces live and recorded them the next week. That's what came out on the EP. It's basically just running pure guitar sounds through all sorts of either VST plug-ins or MSP type stuff. Like reconstruction type modules.
