After getting enjoyed by the 80 minutes-lasting sonic journey of “Ereignishorizont” (released by the end of May by Karlrecords) that was recently released in the guise of Schneider TM, we had the pleasure to exchange some words with Dirk Dresselhaus, the inventive (some of his nifty tools got used for the creation of this recent album) performer behind the curtains of this moniker. Besides titillating your eardrums and your mind with his tunes, while I write I know Dirk will play a gig in Berlin in November and four ones in Italy (Naples, Rome, Trieste, and Pisa) in December. If you’re around one of the mentioned cities, go and delight your senses.
Chain D.L.K.: Hey Dirk! How are you doing?
Schneider TM: As fine as possible, thanks! I hope you too!
Chain D.L.K.: I can reasonably guess that most of our readers already know you and partially your sonic arts, but let’s provide some words on your background and your path to arrive as you are by your awesome sonic explorations. How did you move your very first steps into experimental music (if you accept such a ‘label’) and electroacoustics?
Schneider TM: At first, I was told to have played noise on a metal bathtub with a wooden cooking spoon in my grandmother’s garden at the age of 2.
From 7-ish, I started playing acoustic guitar and drums (in the beginning, both poorly self-built from objects I found in my parents’ house), because I wanted to imitate the Beatles song ‘Revolution No. 9’ after it had blown my mind. I couldn’t believe that it was the same ‘Yellow Submarine’ band that I had been a fan of since I was basically a baby, and it certainly started a process of mentally trying to wrap up these two very different pieces of music under one and the same moniker.
That’s probably why I am still oscillating between experimental ‘pop’ but also improvised freeform and noise music under the same name, in search of the unification of opposing concepts and elements or something in this direction.
My interest in electroacoustics evolved when I got bored with the classic band structure (guitars, bass, drums) around 95 and started to send all kinds of things, like percussion instruments and objects with contact mics, but also synthesizers and drum machines through guitar effect pedals.
One initial moment was when I played a sequence of filtered bass tones on a synth through my stereo speakers at home, and the resonance made the carpet of a snare drum rattle in weird synch because it was located at a certain distance from the speakers in the corner of the room. I recorded this moment, and it resulted in a track named Roc.
Chain D.L.K.: What’s the origin of the moniker ‘Schneider TM’?
Schneider TM: Schneider has been my nickname since the late 1980s when I randomly introduced myself like this to people that I didn’t know just for fun at a party.
When I started doing solo stuff on a 4-track cassette tape recorder in the 90s, I needed a project name and tried to trademark my nickname, which of course wasn’t possible as it is one of the most ordinary names in Germany. So I just put the TM behind it for optical reasons.
Chain D.L.K.: Many music lovers keep on matching your name with that awesome cover of “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” you forged with KPT.michi.gan. Do you keep on performing it by chance? What’s the reason that cover got so appreciated in your opinion, besides the notoriety of the original track by The Smiths?
Schneider TM: I think I have performed it only once in the past 15+ years, but I might do a version on my upcoming Italy tour in December.
I am very happy about people liking “The Light 3000”, because originally Michael Beckett and I (partly) intended to annoy the indie rock scene as the minimal electronic/post-techno fundamentalists by doing this version at this particular moment in time because it seemed like one of the most ‘forbidden’ things to combine these two styles. We both have a post-punk/indie background and got more into electronic music around the mid-90s. So basically, this version is based on the love for different kinds of particular music, which wasn’t much accepted in the late 90s. You had to be into this or that. I was occasionally criticized by the media in reviews for the first TM album ‘Moist’ for previously having played guitar in rock bands, for example.
What they didn’t know is that a lot of those heavily processed electronic sounds on that album were also guitar or bass, just played with a different mindset but through some rather ordinary effects. Maybe this friction is appealing to some people.
We also had other reactions, like a guy who threatened to beat me up for ‘The Light’ because it would sound like the original song “being pulled through an ATM,” and I thanked him for his point of view as it was a reaction we had initially provoked. It was during a festival in France, and he destroyed his hotel room afterward, we were told.
Chain D.L.K.: One of the more impressive aspects of your activity all over your career is the number of collaborations you were involved in. Did you notice any remarkable differences in approaching the composition on the basis of your partner in crime? What’s the most relevant advantage of artistic partnership in your experience?
Schneider TM: It just happens very naturally, and on many occasions, it’s an extension of hanging out together.
It is communication through sound and every combination of people, as every situation is different because we have different things to say or play at different moments and locations. That’s why I like ‘instant composition’ on varying equipment as a communication tool. It never repeats itself, and it’s hard to ‘professionalize’, which I would see as a disadvantage in this context. It should always be fresh and naive so that intuition can reveal spirit as unbiasedly as possible.
The fascinating aspect of artistic partnerships is that there are more points of view and interpretations of the same situation, which sometimes give a glimpse of the bigger picture. 1 + 1 = 3.
Chain D.L.K.: I didn’t mention “The Light 3000” by chance, as I noticed references to light, darkness, and both physical and metaphysical dimensions of lightness and darkness mark many conceptual frameworks of your sonic explorations, including “Ereignishorizont”… quoting Professor Michael Kramer’s words perfectly sets the mood for its listening… do you have a passion for physics? If so, how does it influence your art?
Schneider TM: We as humans can’t ignore physics as we are physics, but not only that, it seems.
Music is a good platform to discover dynamics and structures between different aspects of life and to dig into the mysteries of the unknown.
When I read or watch documentaries about things like, for example, food, architecture, history, quantum physics, or the universe, I can sense analogies between everything, and that might be something I gained from working intensively on sound and music, which makes you get lost and suddenly find yourself on several kinds of meta-levels that are guiding the process.
I don’t really think about anything before starting to work on something, because, at least for me, plans rarely work out well.
Light and darkness seem to be obvious representations of opposing aspects. My work is influenced by observing the outside and inside worlds and stumbling from topic to topic, which seems to create a sort of synchronized magnetism. That is the experimental aspect, I guess. Or simply madness.
Chain D.L.K.: As we mentioned, it’s time to focus on “Ereignishorizont”. It collects solo recordings you did in Zone studio in Berlin between 2019 and 2022, right? How did the known pandemic situation influence those recordings?
Schneider TM: The album was recorded before (2 pieces in 2019) and after the pandemic, in 2022, at least before and after the lockdowns.
During the pandemic, I worked on ‘The 8 Of Space’, which was released by the late and dearly missed Peter Rehberg on Editions Mego in 2021, who had asked for the next Schneider TM ‘pop’ album already in 2010 after rejecting some of the more experimental material that I thought would fit better on Mego.
So there was not really a direct, but probably indirect, influence on the current album. Maybe the pandemic can be seen as the black hole in this context, as the event horizon (Ereignishorizont) is the area around it.
Chain D.L.K.: Personal curiosity on the track (J = 0). It reminded to me of the precondition of many incremental cycles (as you can imagine, I’m very into IT). The structure, the dynamics and I would say the progression of the tack seems to render an incremental track until the half of the track, where the breaking point is a kind of annihilation of the sonic input. Any word about it?
Schneider TM: The incremental structure might have been leaking subconsciously, but a physical fact is that I had the idea to play this piece by sliding an e-Bow on one string slowly from the neck, across the two pickups to the bridge, and back the same way on a Jazzmaster guitar, which happens to be the signature model of my friend J Mascis. I would use only a pitch shifter for modulation by de-tuning and two tube amps; that’s it.
As I recorded it on the first take, I didn’t know that the bridge pickup was defective, maybe because J himself was the last one before this recording who had used that guitar at a jam session that we had together with other friends during a BBQ party in our garden in summer 2022. His signature guitar must have had a shock being played by his creator and tilted, which created the sonic breaking point in the middle of the piece with its broken pickup. A good example of a happy accident.
After I found out that (J = 0) is the metric for a non-rotating black hole, I figured it was the perfect title for this piece.
Chain D.L.K.: I really enjoyed the plucky guitar digressions of “Pluralitt”. They reminded some stuff that an interesting German label, Frank Marks Art, keeps on silently spreading to a niche of lovers of their krautish sonorities… Have you crossed their path by chance? How did you forge that track?
Schneider TM: Unfortunately, I haven’t come across Frank Marks Art yet. I will check it out.
The track came about by actually just testing a new effect chain for a demo with the SPARK guitar, which was in process at that moment, and we had to do a short clip for the funding people. Sometimes the most interesting things happen when you least expect or plan them.
Chain D.L.K.: Is there any “narrative” structure that justifies the order of the tracks of their group on the four sides of the album?
Schneider TM: The first side (Ereignishorizont) and the first half of the second side (Schwarzschild-Radius) are basically the same piece and have been continuously recorded live in the same session. So it looks like it starts at the event horizon before it measures the black hole, then (J = 0), and from there it goes.
Yes, there is no other possibility than this order and titles, but it all came after the music. There was no concept beforehand, except to make an album.
A bit like Miles Davis said, “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.” / “Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.”
I truly believe in synchronicity when letting things flow randomly and seeing what information will be channeled through the arts. A simple idea as a starting point is helpful, but too much ego, peer pressure, and preconceptions can irritate that process.
Chain D.L.K.: In the liner notes, the album gets briefly described as ‘experimental guitar, technological innovations and excursions into musical territories beyond the usual’… what did you/they mean by ‘technological innovations’? Does it refer to the so-called ‘SPARK’? Any word about it?
Schneider TM: Yes. The SPARK and the FireSchneiderTM guitars, that I had the luck to develop together with Frank and Kora Deimel, long-term friends and luthiers who are curious and open to new concepts, offer various non-typical sound and playing possibilities in the form of miked-up sound chambers that can be filled with different materials and played as percussion instruments, etc., playable (reverb-) springs, contact mics all over the place, as well as an internally rotating LesLee that is connected to CV inputs and outputs to be combined with modular synths or whatever is CV compatible. Sound-wise, I often use what others avoid and try to find the glitches and mistakes in devices to let them do stuff that they weren’t initially designed for, but that’s kind of old news and has been done from the beginning of music. Think trees played as drums, etc.
Although my approach to playing this kind of processed guitar resembles more what others would do with modular or software-based electronics, I need the sound to be as substantial, physical, and deep as possible. That’s why I use old-school tube amplifiers with good mics and avoid sound-harming digital recording possibilities like Ableton and sorts, even if those have fascinating morphing possibilities. Even an ancient 4-track cassette recorder has better sound quality than those because it’s not a compressed, glitchy simulation that lacks a lot of important information that the brain then has to recreate in exhausting processes. A lot of people don’t know what damage they do to themselves by listening to, e.g., lo-res mp3, because they got used to it and don’t have experience with beautiful, substantial analog sound in which you can hear a whole universe in every moment.
Chain D.L.K.: That’s an appealing story behind the birth of that awesome sci-fi cover artwork by Sebastian Mayer, isn’t that?
Schneider TM: Yes, it kind of blew my mind because it was the very first AI-based image that I ever saw, which Sebastian had created in 2022 as a beta-tester for one of those text-based visual programs. First contact, so to speak. It subconsciously got stuck in my mind while I was starting to record Ereignishorizont and later became one of the triggers for the whole concept of the album. Luckily, Sebastian was up for providing a rework of the original as the cover artwork. Anything else wouldn’t have made sense, I guess. It stands for exactly this moment in time, in which we don’t know yet if the whole AI development will be a doom or an advantage for humanity, and this is certainly up to our own responsibility.
Chain D.L.K.: I’m not sure if you’ve already finished, or you’re going to start touring (I saw you’ll play many gigs in Italy as well). Any anticipation on what the audience is going to expect?
Schneider TM: In December in Italy, it will be a combination of my last two albums plus possibly some re-works of a few older tunes, song-based material, as well as improvisations.
The Ereignishorizont release concert in Berlin was an interesting experience, because I had planned it to be a rather deep listening event, also inviting the sound artist Crys Cole to join the evening, who does very quiet and delicate electro-acoustic stuff, but it turned out to be quite a ‘rock’ audience, cheering and yelling in the small and sold-out club (Ausland), which made me play totally different than I had planned. It was really nice, but unexpected feedback.
Chain D.L.K.: Any work in progress?
Schneider TM: Yes, there are always a few overlapping projects in process, but with Schneider TM, I would like to concentrate on playing live in the next few years and not do another album for a while, except maybe release some already done film soundtracks, etc. Generally, I am working a lot on the archives and occasional new music on MWM.
Besides that, we are just about to finish a new Faust album, which I produce and play bass on. The first one with this line-up was released in 2022 via EROTOTOX / MWM: https://faust-berlin.bandcamp.com/album/daumenbruch
Then I have a new band called Krautfuzz, with whom I have played loud and fuzzy improv sessions since last year. We just released one of the sessions as part of the MWM rough series, which features instant (rough-) mixes of diverse projects from the ZONE.
Visit Schneider TM on the web:
https://schneidertm.net/
https://schneidertm.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/schneider-tm/