OLAF RUPP

Could you introduce you to the french public ?
Born 1963 in Saarbrücken, Guitarist, Improvisor, Instant Composer. www.audiosemantics.de , Berlin resident for almost 9 years now - strange city here - but I have been to Paris (Bateofar) and Milan once so I never will be completely unhappy in my life...

What are your first musical memories ?
As a baby I had a musical clock at my bed with a walz by Strauss. But  generally my family was not much engaged in music. Dull German middle class ... I specially liked the craws in the open fields, and I still do.

Who are the guitarists (or musicians) who influenced you at the start and now ?
In the 80ies I played Rock music in small bands (trashy Indy free hardcore stuff). Although we always improvised our program there was never room enough to put in my whole idea of what free music could be. It is extremely difficult to play loud and sensitive at the time. So I did a lot of research alone on the acoustic guitar. When STOL split up in 98 it was really a sigh of relief to me, because it forced me to put my solo work on stage. I am not a solo player by origin. I had to learn it. Free Improvisation is still an vast open field. There is still a lot to explore especially about the way how to organise the growth of the sound. So when I listen to what others play it is not so much in order to get "influenced" but just to see how they are doing and maybe find a friend.

On your website you use a text written by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Is poetry an inspiration for your music ? And more generally what are your inspirations ?
"Je suis un éphémère et point trop mécontent citoyen d´une métropole crue moderne, parce que tout goût connu a été éludé dans les ameublements et l´extérieur des maisons aussi bien que dans le plan de la ville. Ici vous ne signaleriez les traces d´aucun monument de superstition. La morale et la langue sont réduites à leur plus simple expression, enfin !"

"I am an ephemeral and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of the city. Here you will fail to detect the least trace of any monument of superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at last !" 
Rimbaud, 1871

These are wonderful words. I liked to read Rimbaud a lot. As well as Paul Celan. This text (take from "ville" of "illuminations") has struck me right from the first time I saw it. You might read it in many different ways but you can also read it as a perfect description of my situation as an improvising musician resident in the German capital. Berlin has taken a radical swing towards fundamental capitalism in the middle of the 90ies. Every demand of club owners and concert organisers for financial support was not even discussed but simply rebuffed with the one and only answer: "We have no money." Which is obviously a lie because at the same time the Government started an unprecedented activity to build new residences for the public bureaucracy and even the rebuilding of the Berlin "Schloss" (the castle, royal urban residence of the old Kaiser) was and still is discussed. Three opera houses are completely state funded, and stock exchanges are prospering ... Go to Potsdamer Platz or talk to the politicians and see: "La morale et la langue sont réduites à leur plus simple expression" Poetry is not really an inspiration to me - as you see - words rather frustrate me very quickly. Words show us the injustice so openly.

You live in Berlin an active place for creative music. Could you speak to us about this scene ?
Berlin is a cheap place to live and there still are a lot of wonderful (improvising) musicians here. I have a trio with Rudi Mahall and Uli Jennessen (we have been in studio this summer to record a CD for GROB), and another trio with Tony Buck and Joe Williamson, I play with Aki Takase from time to time. There is a guitar duo with Michael Renkel, we meet regularly and play and find a very interesting approach to improvisation in the field of classical guitar duo.  All of them amazing players! There is also a strong group of "minimalist" improvisors here. Great players but not very "curious" to wander outside of their narrow garden. Lots of sectionism here: East against West, Young (PrenzlauerBerg) against Old (FMP), ClassicalMusicOrientated against Jazzy. When I signed my first solo CD with FMP I was happy to have overcome one of these sectionism: I played a lot at these Prenzlberg clubs and was happy to publish on FMP. But that was the old FMP of Jost Gebers. Now it is sold to someone else.

You play in solo for some years now. Could you elaborate on your work in solo - what do you learn specially from yourself and your instrument ?
I am not a solo player by origin. Actually I was a very symbiotic ensemble player. People even complained I should not play too close to them (musically not in garlic!). Words don't always help in band organisation. I am not a band leader, hard to enforce my ideas into a collective. But I have lots of ideas. So one obvious way is the solo. But I love to have a band too - I enjoy the interactive part of ensemble playing. Actually solo and band playing is not so much different - if you do it with respect from your (and the others) unconscient, with distance to your own foreground emotions and theories. I practice ZaZen since my youth and I met a wonderful teacher here in Berlin. He taught me a lot about improvised music although he never heard me play - he teaches Zen. I is the concentration on the very moment here and now. Very simple things like breathing, calm focus and intuitive action.

Could you speak to us about your first solo recording "Life science" ? Is it the first results of your works in solo ?
In 1998 I spent a lot of time researching about how I wanted to go on in my solo performances: play the electronics set-up or focus on the guitar. I knew that I could not do both because the things I had in mind to play on each of these instruments needed the whole day to practice so I had to put one of them second. This resurch consisted of preparing and recording one work per month during the whole year (98). Some months were too busy so in the end I didn't come out with a whole twelve part cycle but these monthly recordings were not originally intended to be published. Just feedback, control for me to make the decision easier (And I decided to stay with the guitar). Yet two of them were published: one MAI, an electronics piece released as a 12" vinyl on Sieben, one of Frank Dommerts Labels at a-musik, and the other SEPTEMBER, a (electric) guitar solo released on CDr when Felix Klopotek started his label GROB with these first "tryout" releases of 200 copy recordable CDr. After this "basic research" there came a terribly cold Berlin winter and then in spring 1999 I took the energetic impulse from my solo at this wonderful UNCOOL festival in the Swiss mountains for Cecil Taylor´s birthday  and organised a room where I could record an electric guitar solo CD for FMP. Not really too enthusiastically in hope I gave the demo to Jost Gebers and then he said: "Lets meet and see which of these recordings we can take for a CD." I was really happy! We even took one piece from the recording of this festival.

"Scree" is very different. Could you explain the evolution of your play between these two recordings ?
With SCREE a lot of things have changed. I did all the steps from recording until the final mastering myself on my own computer - that was wonderful, you can take all the time you need. No discussions with recording engineer about how there MUST be a reverb on the recording and whether or not you MUST take compression and so on... I have a very clear vision about my music - and to know too good what exactly you want, can sometimes be difficult. I don't want to be too dominant but some people mistake this as undecidedness. The focussing on just one instrument was very good for my Guitar technique.  I went back to using fingernail attac. This is much better for the acoustic guitar sound. Fingertip touch is good for the electric, but you can't do both at a time... In the time since Live Science I could also find more experience in solo performances. To find the right focus for your nerves and to find your confidence in your music is crucial in solo playing. If you don't have fun - who else should? In these concerts I clearly preferred the acoustic guitar. I like the dynamic flexibility of this instrument. The electric guitar has a wonderful smoth yet strong sound but for solo performances I need faster and wider dynamic response especially in the low register. That's why there is no electric piece of SCREE. Still I am shure I will continue with the electric, especially in groups.

How did you approach the improvisation for Scree ? Could you speak to us about this moment ?
The recordings were always interrupted by live concerts so it was easier to hold a certain energetic continuity. My idea was to let the music grow on it's own impulse. To let it happen. I wanted to get rid of this attitude of "expressing your emotions" in music or even worse: "self realisation". To me the ego is just a tool that you use to be a person, like you use your eye to see and your feet to walk. The Expressiveness and this strong focus on individuality is what I don't like in free jazz. I don't like it when they call my music free jazz and many of the older free jazz players receive my music as strange. But actually I can not say too much about Jazz because I never played Jazz - so I won't mingle in a field that I don't know. Many of my musical ideas are still influenced by what I did earlier with the electronics. I mean the structures of composition and the approach to the material itself. It is a fractal sound, a dense tissue. The pointillists painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac made this with light. They used colour not as a surface but rather as a system of single points and strikes in a grid. Only the eye of the spectator "mixes" the colours to form images of surfaces and objects. I do this with tones when I hear music. The single notes melt into a new, "virtual sound" if you open up your focus. Just like the dots of a newspaper picture print melt into a real picture when you widen the focus. If you look from close distance with a sharp focus you see only single, boring dots. Same with my music. People who don't focus come to me after the concert and say: "But why do you play always the same?" It is difficult to see 3D pictures. Not everyone is synaesthetic. But to me it is like when you tell a writer: "But your book is just letters, 24 letters - so why so many pages ?"

I like very much the design of the cover. Could you speak to us about this work for the album ?
The artwork are sonographs which I took from one short sequence of one piece of the recording (sorry I forgot which one). It was just a fraction of a second. So the two halves of the cover photo show not more than eight or ten notes. The pictures are not these waveform diagrams, we know from all these sound editing programs (x axis: time, y axis dB) but sonographs (x-axis is time, y axis is frequency and the z axis (which is the colour here) is loudness: black=silence, lightblue=loud sound) So you have a three dimensional image of the flow of the actual music. This is normally important only for sound Engineers but I was just curious if this could make pictures that resemble my "virtual sounds". Well it couldn't but it can give a hint to it. The printing on the CD cover does not give all the colour quality so I put some of the sonographs on my website (www.audiosemantics.de or click directly on http://home.arcor.de/olaf.rupp/sono )

Do you think, in a certain way, your improvisations have an origin (subjective or not) ?
I think improvisation is not a "creation out of nothing" - you don´t reinvent the world from scrap. And yet you don´t just repeat an already existing composition either. You won´t get very far with these dualistic concepts of analysis. I don´t speculate about the "origin" of my music. I leave this to others. For me it is important to know the source, the fundamentals. I trust in my fingers, my guts, my body, I trust in the wood, my instument and I trust in my music itself. It is like a plant, it grows if you treat it right. That´s what I try to do: to create the right circumstances for it. And then it comes.

For you is it easy to offer the same emotions in concerts and in your recordings ? (When you recorded Scree for example)
I always play as if it was the last time.  But actually its not about "offering emmotions". When I play I try to be als calm as possible even in the most high octane action... I found out that the important process goes on not in the part of your conciousness where you project and feel your emotions but rather in a deeper hidden inside, where high emotional heat can even be disturbing.

Could you speak to us about THE SACRED MOUNTAIN PROJECT at uncool 2002 ?
UNO and FAO declared 2002 as YEAR OF THE MOUNTAIN to remember the importance of this habitat to the world and to show how drastically it is influenced by our lifestyle. See: www.mountains2002.org. The UNCOOL festival is located directly in a valley under some of the most beautiful mountains of Swizerland (Piz Palü). So there were a lot of activities of local environmental groups during all of 2002. Cornelia Müller decided to support these activities by putting the festival on the day of the "fire in the alps" tradition. This is a long tradition of making big bonfires in autumn up in the mountains and this year it was of course of special torch importance.
The idea was to enclose the whole process of setting up the woodpile for the fire putting it alight until the last embers into one performance. My part was to play my guitar performance during the last embers which I was looking forward to not only because the embers would warm my fingers a bit (2000meters altitude!) but also because I expected the sounds, the cracking and clicking of the wood fire to mix interestingly with my guitars music. Alan Silva had set up an orchestra which he conducted to form the first and largest part of the day. There was two butho dancers ( Gyohei Zaitsu and Maki Watanabe ) and Götz Rogge (my duo college from Beastieshopbeach) had the idea to film the performance and reasemble the material in an later internet live mixdown which took place on 30 nov and 1 dec. But I have to confess that the wheather that day was so bad, heavy pouring rain, that it was decided to move the whole performance into the local theatre room. That was a pity but maybe it was really too wet for all the music instuments and the digital video equipment.  

What are your projects for the future ?
Last month I had the opportunity to play a duo with Lol Coxhil. This concert was really wonderful and now there are even two record labels asking me for the recording of this gig. Unfortunately the club where it was recorded seems to be very complicated about handing out tapes of concerts to the musicians. That is really a shame and my first project will be to fight for that tape. I really enjoyed to play with Lol and would like to book some more gigs.
This autumn I recorded a CD with Rudi Mahall and Uli Jennessen, which will be out in 2003. Here I finally played the electric again on some pieces. I still do like the sound of the electric.
There is a duo CD with Joe Williamson coming soon on the Polish label musica genera, (http://rwert.art.pl ). And there is the duo with Aki Takase. We will certaianly continue playing and are preparing some recordings for a CD. 

Interview by Sebastien Moig