markus reuter – MICHAEL PETERS

Immediacy

I spent a cold February weekend in 2013 making music with Berlin based synth wizard Bernhard Wöstheinrich who at the time lived in rural northern Germany – near Gütersloh where he shared an office with our common friend, Markus Reuter.

We knew each other from Markus but hadn’t actually performed together often, except for a set on our „hyperfunction“ label algorithmic music evening in 2009, and an improvisation after my solo set at the „Gütersloher Polyphonie“ in 2011. A few months later in 2013, Bernhard would perform on the 3rd International Livelooping festival that I had organized in Cologne.

We set up and midi-synchronized our machinery to achieve a certain rhythmic coherence but beyond that, there were absolutely no plans or rules. We started in unknown territory right from the start. The music we created went beyond most preconceived ideas about style and harmony that musicians usually have when performing together.

Now, years later when I listen to these tracks, I really have no idea how they came about and how we found our way through them together. To me, the music often conveys a strong sense of immediacy, of boldness, even of danger. Sometimes we moved in a dangerous balance, sometimes we destroyed that balance deliberately, creating a more open situation again.

For some reason, both of us forgot about these recordings but we remembered them a few months ago. I’m very happy that these sessions with Bernhard finally get released, eight years later and on an equally cold February day.

Go to album page

<a href="https://bernhardwoestheinrich.bandcamp.com/album/immediacy">Immediacy by Bernhard Wöstheinrich & Michael Peters</a>

This strange midi controller called „ZTar“ belonged to Bernhard but he wasn’t entirely happy with it. I had brought my „Yourock“ midi controller which I wasn’t entirely happy with. We decided to swap instruments and were both much happier 🙂
I played the ZTar on track 3 („Iridescent Immediacy“), triggering many virtual keyboards with it – when you hear wild Hammond organs and distorted clavinets, that is me on the ZTar, and towards the end of this track, Bernhard and I both drown in mellotron sounds.

From the liner notes:
When you manage to get rid of all expectations and to surrender to true immediacy, there is hardly time to control or plan anything, but you also find that this immediacy can be trusted – in music and in life. It will take you to beautiful places you never knew before.

Musical Inquirer

I met my friend Markus Reuter 30 years ago on a Guitar Craft course with Robert Fripp. We played in a trio with Leander Reininghaus for a few years during the mid-90s, and together with Tobias Reber we even started a record label for algorithmic computer music at one point 🙂

Markus has become a world famous professional musician, composer, music teacher, and instrument designer in the meantime. I felt honored when he interviewed me for his new interview podcast series.

We chatted for more than 90 minutes about my music of course but also about my take on spirituality (and the meaning of ’spiritual inquiry‘) and my life.

Berlin Livelooping August 2016

I am in Berlin now for a week, on my way to the „Bohemian Polyphony“ event – more of this later. Of course I met my old friends Leander Reininghaus and Markus Reuter who both live in Berlin now.

I had met Leander and Markus on a Guitar Craft course with Robert Fripp in … 1991 I think, anyway, about 25 years ago. We played together as „Trio Gitarristik“ for a few years during the mid-1990s, performing various Guitar Craft tunes plus our own compositions, and also ambient soundscapes.

This week, because I came to Berlin, Leander had organized a livelooping concert for us at the Galiläa church, a beautiful abandoned-church-turned-into-performance-space, and we performed together again for the first time in about 20 years.

Leander framed the evening with a number of beautiful short pieces by Erik Satie (from „Musique d’ameublement“ – the first time I ever heard this music) and Philip Glass („North Star“).

I used analog vintage gear and my „Frippertronics“ setup based on tape delay. Even though my energy had been low during the day, it went up as soon as I was on stage, and I was pretty happy with my 20 minute solo set! As often, I had no idea what I would do until I started with the first note, and I felt carried and led by the music that slowly developed. How this works never ceases to amaze me.

I heard from someone in the audience afterwards that my music sounded autumnal to him, and at the same time, he sensed a dry kind of humour. I liked that. Interesting how the same piece of music can elicit such a wide range of responses in the performer and in everyone in the audience.

Markus created one of his amazing ethereal soundscapes on Touch Guitar and Ableton Live. I had occasionally seen him on stage over the years but this piece felt especially intimate and personal to me.

At the end, we improvised together on the chords of Eno’s „An Ending (Ascent)“. Leander had chosen this beautiful piece (that, incidentally, I had played on my mother’s funeral four years ago) to finish this thoroughly enjoyable „Berlin Livelooping Session“.

Thank you to everyone from the venue who made this evening possible!

Day Of The Hyperfunction

To celebrate Impossible Music, the first CD release on our own Hyperfunction label for algorithmic music, I had organized a mini-festival for algorithmic computer music at Cologne’s LOFT on Saturday, April 4, 2009.

We don’t know if the spring weather was too fair, the football games on TV were too tempting, or if the theme for the evening was not interesting enough to the Cologne audience, but only a few people showed up to see and hear the four computer music acts. Each of us played for roughly half an hour.

Tobias Reber from Bern (Switzerland) started with a laptop piece based on Max/MSP. Its shifting layers of electronic sequences and its microtonal electronic sounds reminded me of the magical and austere music of the early electronic pioneers.

Stefan Tiedje from Berlin had already presented his interactive Max/MSP based „Ondes Memorielles“ music system at the Loft when he performed at Cologne’s 1st International Livelooping Festival in May 2008. His new performance made use of two mobile microphones that circulated through the audience so that everyone could add their own sounds to the music.

Markus Reuter from Innsbruck played his new self-designed touch guitar through effect gear and Ableton Live algorithms and loops. His atonal music sounds sparse at the beginning but it eventually builds up to an enormous sound cloud, beautiful and at times menacing. The many variables going into a performance like this make the outcome unpredictable. On listening to his own set the next day, Markus wrote, „Is that really me? I’m surprised once again“.

Markus’s Centrozoon partner Bernhard Wöstheinrich had a strong feeling that my Impossible Music needed sounds different from the ones used on the CD, so when we played this evening’s last set, I was only responsible to generate suitable midi signals, and Bernhard translated them into sound with his synthesizer. Old technology met new technology – the Impossible Music algorithmic system is based on a fractal software called HOP that I wrote in the early nineties, and on this evening, it actually ran on a trusty ancient MS-DOS computer while the sounds were created using very recent synths and software.

I used a set of a dozen different fractal shapes to play with – the images, projected on a screen for the audience, were directly translated into midi signals, following some simple rules, and then into sound, so somehow what the audience saw corresponded to what they heard – not always in a very transparent way maybe, but nonetheless. Unfortunately, the images that look most pretty often turn out to create boring music, and some of the more boring images create the most interesting music, so sometimes the imagery that I used consisted just of a few dots or lines but they gave birth to surprising musical structures.

The HOP based algorithmic music engine will keep me busy for a while – there are so many interesting musical structures hidden in there. Here’s a short montage from the „rehearsals“ I did a week before the Hyperfunction evening.

The evening was an interesting experiment, demanding for the listeners at times, but also very rewarding (at least that’s what I was told by one excited visitor). And it was nice to see everyone again and to spend some time together.

Impossible Music

Algorithmic Music – music composed without human intervention, based on formal procedures, mathematical formulas, computer programs.

Gumowski and Mira – two CERN physicists who found an interesting mathematical entity, a new attractor – something not unlike a fractal – while researching into nonlinear dynamical systems. It was later called the Gumowski-Mira attractor.

HOP – a software that I wrote in the early nineties which created graphics based on this attractor. It was successful as a DOS screensaver. Then one day, I added a Midi output module, hooked a digital piano to it, and found that the resulting musical structures were very interesting.

Impossible Music – a collection of 16 improvisations with that Gumowski-Mira attractor based software. While the computer computed the attractor, I played with the constants and various other variables, and Matthias Ebbinghaus took care of the sampler, the digital piano pedals, and the live mix.

hyperfunction – a CD label for algorithmic music, launched by Markus Reuter and me, with Impossible Music being the first release.

Thanks to Matthias Ebbinghaus’s initiative, we finally have a beautiful CD with quite adventurous recordings that we had done 13 years ago, at this time not thinking about publishing them at all. The DAT tape had been sleeping in some drawer and I had more or less forgotten it but about three years ago, Matthias remembered it and suggested that we listen to it again, maybe for a potential CD release. So we listened to it again, found that we liked it a lot, selected the most interesting parts, remastered it … and then I talked to Markus Reuter about it and he suggested setting up a label for algorithmic music and publish it there.

Here’s what WIRE magazine just wrote about the CD (in the April 2009 issue). Maybe they have a point criticizing that we used familiar instrument sounds (mainly piano and percussion) for music that is so non-traditional. For me though, this music stands out because it is structurally interesting – maybe turning these strange structures into equally strange sounds would even take away some of the structural strangeness – I don’t know. (In 1996, I simply had no stranger sounds at my hands anyway 🙂

Michael Peters is primarily an electric guitarist with a long standing affinity for Frippertronics – last year he organised Cologne’s first livelooping festival. Now and then he’ll venture beyond the loop, as on this set of pieces for digital piano and sampler, recorded in 1996 but only recently edited and mixed for release. In a sense Peters here raises his enthusiasm for looping to a conceptual level: Impossible Music arises out of the zone of nonlinear dynamic systems, being based on a strange attractor discovered by physicists at the CERN nuclear research centre. By real-time manipulation of this fractal structure’s parameters, Peters and Matthias Ebbinghaus generate l6 algorithmically grounded improvisations.
Algorithms – essentially, objectified sequences of instructions – can, as John Cage recognised, produce results that personal taste might have precluded, and figures as diverse as Xenakis and Eno have used such procedures effectively. Limited interventions, such as those Peters makes, add an improvisatory aspect that can conjure up further structural variation and surprise. But beyond the glacial satisfactions of the concept and a sense of the abstracted structure, the pleasure of such music necessarily depends on the quality of the sound material. Most of the samples Peters uses are percussion. There are classical guitar-like timbres on „Alhambra Algebra“, synthetic pipe organ sonorities on „Blow Up Meltdown“, marirnba tones on „Woodenfall“. The digital piano often approximates a concert grand. It’s done well, but surely strange attractors cry out for wilder and less familiar sounds. (Julian Cowley)

We will try how this music sounds with more adventurous sounds on April 4 – there will be a CD release party at the LOFT in Cologne, and while I am in control of the attractors, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and his synthesizers will make them sound. Watch this space for a report if you can’t come.

More Gumowski-Mira attractors: