Free range folk music
Will there be blood when Zeitkratzer play their versions of Norwegian folk music at Ultima? Zeitkratzer is a chamber orchestra consisting of Norwegian musicians from all over Europe. They play violin, cello, double bass, percussion, electronics, clarinet, saxophone, bagpipes and trombone. The pianist, German Reinhold Friedl, gathers all of them in Berlin at regular intervals.
Unknown fiddle songs
– We are playing in Norway, and it’s part of our Volksmusik project to always relate some pieces to local folk music! In a time when musicians are normally flying from one identical airport to the next, staying in all different places in almost identical hotels, playing the same programme, using the same microphones all around the world, a time of the pervasive late capitalist state of uniformity, we are able at least to have the illusion of having a tiny relationship with the places where we are and where we are going to…
According to Friedl, the pieces will for the most part be unknown songs from different musical archives.
– One will feature fiddling, another one the bagpipe, and one referring to incredible vocal traditions.
A Stalinist music scene
– Why have you chosen these particular pieces?
– Zeitkratzer has an approach to music which is strongly related to sound. That means, Zeitkratzer has a very special recognisable sound, which is even sometimes as rough as most of the old folk music, when musicians did not yet care about being recorded.
– Will you be altering the pieces in any way?
– We do not change the pieces. We make new pieces out of the old ones and hope that those old pieces are changing what we are doing!
In 2008, Zeitkratzer released the critically acclaimed album Volksmusik.
– The album includes references to Bulgarian, Romanian, Austrian and German folk music. One critic wrote: “if they would play that in a normal folk music festival, there will be blood”.
Anyway, Zeitkratzer is not a band to hold back on provocations. Friedl has described the contemporary music scene as “Stalinist”, referring to how the scene has reacted to their music. They have performed Lou Reed’s «Metal Machine Music». They feel that rock’n‘roll also is contemporary music and that this fact has been ignored in an arrogant fashion for a long time. They also strongly believe that acoustic instruments are more complex and vivid than pure electronic sounds. On the other hand, the band members can enter into hour-long arguments on how their instruments should be miked up during a gig. Besides, Friedl would also consider being more “fashionable”, keeping in mind what effect it would have on his bank account.
Constructive anarchism
Zeitkratzer embraces a lot of different genres, from jazz and pop music via improvisation to noise and folk music. Friedl states that he simply puts together good musicians capable of playing a lot of different music with an open mind. Not least, they need to work hard and be able to critique heavily as they practice.
“We normally work in a way I call a ’constructive anarchistic structure’. It means that, for each piece, one or two of us take the responsability, and also do the instrumentation if necessary. (...) Zeitkratzer is a composer-performer group, which means that all the members are able to think like composers too. So, the musicians involved normally propose more specific or differentiated sounds during the rehearsal work and really take care about what could make sense (and sensuality),” he told Entrevistas magazine.
“Nothing good after 1980”
– In what ways is folk music relevant to modern music?
– Well, folk music is probably almost over. There are some old recordings, but a friend of mine, who is a great collector of recordings, said that there are no good recordings anymore after 1980. Doesn’t matter if you think about Korean, African, Indian or whatever folk music. Probably as a result of the folk festivals and the world music movement, that came up a little earlier, the last living real folk musicians started to tour Europe and America and wherever and lost the purity of their folk music very quickly.
We are, Friedl continues, in a way holding onto something non-existent.
– We are almost referring to something that does not really exist anymore, only as a kind of poetic idea, like cowboys and Indians. As it is probably even relating to something that never existed, we could call it a fantasy or even a utopia. Perhaps a nostalgia. As absurd, as it sounds: this might sometimes induce real life to enter modern music.
By Thomas Berg
Photo: Christoph Voy