Perfect Sound Forever

The Tyranny of Text:
The Paul Schütze Interview, Part 2

Schutze/Laswell live
Bill Laswell and Schütze at Tampere Jazz Happening in '96- photo by Maarit Kytöharju

Interview by Gary Bearman

PSF: One thing I’ve read is that you don’t like your music being labeled, and while looking over reviews of your work, I’ve heard your music being described as ambient, jazz, acid jazz, new jazz, funk, trip hop, fusion, avant-garde, minimalistic, East Indian, electronic, industrial, world, ethnic, and even rock.

Well, there you go. I mean, I think you’ve answered your own question, really.

PSF: Do you like that it’s very hard to pin down your music?

Well, yeah, because I think pinning down music is sort of pointless. This in a way connects to what I was saying about the inadequacy of language. I mean, I can understand why it happens, because it’s necessary for marketing and it makes it easier to talk about things, but it also means you can stop thinking about it which is a bad thing. I think as soon as people find a comfortable label, they feel they don’t have to intellectually explore the music anymore because someone’s already done it for them. It comes pre-thought. On the one hand, there is a lot of pre-thought music out there that really has been pretty well defined by the label it was put on, but no, I am glad it’s hard to label. On the other hand, it does make it very hard to sell. A lot of record shops, if they can’t find a place to put it easily, they will actually just not stock it.

PSF: Yeah, right. The one good record store that I know of here in Los Angeles (Aron’s) has your music under the experimental section, which I like in that it’s very broad, and you don’t seem afraid at all in trying new things. For example, Nine Songs from the Garden of Welcome Lies, to me that’s the most atypical thing I’ve ever heard of yours. I mean, everything of yours seems to have a very distinct Paul Schütze sound to it, like you can tell it’s you, but if I heard that album without knowing it was you, I might have a very difficult time figuring out that was you.

Well, yeah, but remember it was recorded on a wooden pipe organ in a church in the Swiss Alps. It had no electronics on it, and yeah, you know it’s such a radical shift of sound palette that it’s almost inevitable it would not evoke the sounds of my earlier work. I would have been mortified if it had sounded like my other albums, really. If you’re gonna freeze your balls off in a church in the Swiss Alps, and have it sound exactly like something I can do at home, it would be very depressing. We did very little editing because we couldn’t really. When it was recorded it wasn’t overdubbed. We added some percussion sounds, but it is just really a document of my first exploratory frolic with a church organ. So it was made differently to any other album I’ve done. I was very sorely tempted to do heavy post production, and chopping up, and processing, and fiddling around with the sounds, and I really had to stop myself because that would have made it sound just like other albums.

PSF: Is there a reason why you switched the song titles, like there’s "Song 1‚" through "Song 9‚" but they’re not in order.

That’s just the order in which they were completed.

PSF: The way you put them is just to get the feel of it the way you wanted them to?

The way I put them was because in putting them chronologically it didn’t play right. The program just didn’t feel right to me, so I had to shuffle them for ages so that I felt like I was moving through something that had some kind of structure and meaning.

PSF: Interesting about that particular album, in telling friends, recommending to them to buy Paul Schütze albums, I say to them, "Don’t start with that one!"

I tend to agree. I think it wouldn’t be the one to start with because anything you bought after that would be a bit of a shock, really. And also it’s a difficult album. I think it is a document of an event. It’s not like a heavily worked meticulously considered piece of composition. It’s a recording of an event, and that’s a very different thing. I think one’s expectations are always going to be different. It’s like the difference between a live album and a studio album. You know, there are certain things you will tolerate from a live album that you perhaps wouldn’t from a studio album. I really like the rawness of it. I like the fact that it’s got mistakes, and it’s got awkward bits, and you have a real sense of the organ as a kind of a presence there, which I think if I’d been able to bend the organ more thoroughly to my will, you wouldn’t have had. I like the fact that it’s me doing battle with this great wheezing thing.

PSF: It took me a little while to get into it, it was just very different, not at all what I expected.

I think the label was slightly stunned when I gave it to them as well. I don’t know, I mean it’s probably not for everybody, perhaps, but I think it does need to be listened to differently, and I really think it’s important to make things... I hate the idea that everything I put out people would just take home, sit down in the same chair, in the same mood, in the same way, and get more or less the same kind of buzz out of it. To me, that means I’m not moving forward, or I’m not challenging myself or the listener.

PSF: Yeah, I mean I would listen to The Surgery of Touch in one mood, and listen to New Maps of Hell in a completely different kind of mood.

I would hope that’s the case, but I do worry sometimes that all of my stuff tends to blur into some kind of common area, and I’m trying very hard to push myself in different directions, because it’s the only way I can learn.

PSF: I think you succeed. I never know what I’m gonna get when you put a new album out. Second Site and Nine Songs from the Garden of Welcome Lies, I mean both of those are very unique from anything else you’ve done before.

I think with those two really, you’ve hit on the two that are probably the least predictable. I think also people were very surprised with Apart coming after both the Uzect Plaush album, and The Surgery of Touch which came before it, because it was much more precise and clipped and formal in a way than The Surgery of Touch, because The Surgery of Touch was just sprawling. It’s probably the most indulgent thing I’ve ever done.

PSF: But it’s a great album, and I love the story in The Surgery of Touch. The one about the sweat and the blood.

That was the first attempt to provide some sort of narrative context. Usually I use the titles and the album title to produce an environment into which to lead the listener so that they might perhaps be slightly more disposed to the music. And you know I think it is very important to consider the way in which something is named and packaged. It can create a subtle change in the mind set of the listener before they hear the work, and that can just help open the door slightly. With The Surgery of Touch, I wanted to extend that by putting the story in there. I remember very few reviews of that album that even mentioned the story, which made me wonder whether people had read it or not.

PSF: I like that album, and other albums of yours are very dark, not in any way evil. I consider myself a very ‘light’ person in a way, however that feel really appeals to me, it touches a very primordial place inside.

I’m very seduced by the idea of mystery, by the unsolved, almost unknowable metaphysical core of something, and I feel very keenly the absence of that in a lot of music and art. If I don’t sense that core to something, I find the artifact very unsatisfying, and that’s something I’ve really worked on for some albums like The Surgery of Touch and The Rapture of Metals, the ones that tend to be called dark. Yeah, I don’t think of it as dark so much as... I don’t know, it’s hard to describe really... it’s a very particular feeling in me that they express, and it’s one I come back to a lot. It’s not really present on Second Site or Nine Songs, which is another thing that makes them both different, but I can’t imagine it being really introduced into that context.

PSF: In one interview you said about your music that you hope people might find that this is the kind of music that would appeal to them when they didn’t think that they wanted to listen to any music.

What I meant is that a lot of people have a use for music in the way they live. Music has a utilitarian function; they listen to music before they’re going out to party, or they listen to music to psyche themselves up, or they listen to music when they get home from work, or they listen to music to mask the sound of the street, or their air conditioning, or whatever, and I think there are other uses for music that are far more interesting, and actually involve interacting with it a little bit more willfully. They’re the areas that I’d like to tap into. I think the point where a lot of people feel they want to listen to music is a point where they don’t want to listen as such, they just want to have sound, and I’m hoping that there’s enough in my work, that it does actually reward listening, which is something we, perhaps in the way that we live, particularly in an urban environment, don't do that often. It’s probably because we don’t ever have enough silence to consciously engage in active listening.

PSF: To me music is like the soundtrack to my life. I have it on as much as possible just because it kind of fills the spaces inside or accentuates life somehow, it’s very hard to talk about, but...

I know what you mean. The thing I find interesting is increasingly I don’t listen, increasingly I have silence, and this is an anathema to me even 5 or 6 years ago. I would just never have silence, and I’m finding now that more and more I’ll put 3 or 4 things on, and I’ll have them on for thirty seconds, and I’ll take them off, and ultimately I’ll opt for nothing as being preferable, but that’s possibly because of the medium I’m working in. Silence is in some ways the most fertile place to be if I’m developing something.

PSF: It’s interesting, because I’ve started listening to ambient music in the last few years. Recently, I’m fascinated with just ambient noise outside. Like the other day I was out in the forest, and there’s this creek, and this incredible water sound, and I was with a couple of people, and I just said "stop," and just listened. I could hear it coming from 3 different places, and I just listened for several minutes.

It’s wonderful - we get to go to this small island in Greece in the summer for a couple of weeks for holiday, and it’s very very quiet, and kind of a small population, and very few people go because it’s very hard to get to, and I never take music when I go on holiday. I don’t take a walkman or anything like that. One of the wonderful things about this is that for two weeks you only hear the sounds of the island, and they’re so extraordinary. I mixed Second Site when I got back from this last trip, and the sonic structure of Second Site is based largely on the soundscapes of that space in terms of where things are positioned, and the light and shade, and the sense of a very particular type of space being defined by where sound is. The fact that there is a horizon line that is always audible, and that I tend to use natural models as structural templates for mixing, because I think they’re so sublime and they have an integrity. They have a sonic integrity, a sense of cause and effect, which give them a great deal of strength as structures.

PSF: So basically you use the natural environment to inspire how you want to create music in the studio?

Not to create so much, to structure. It’s very specifically a structural thing. There’s a spatial quality, and a depth to a lot of natural environments, sonic natural environments, which is just so beautiful that it’s difficult not to want to emulate it when making an artificial sonic environment. To me it’s a far more beautiful, and to be aspired to as a structure than any man-made musical structure. It appeals to me far more.

PSF: That’s fascinating. Forgive me if I go a little out there with this one - for me, I belong to this spiritual group, and we talk about Light and Sound inside, that in dimensions inside of us there’s sound, and with me music seems to reflect an inner reality that goes beyond this life, beyond the physical reality. It’s very difficult to talk about, but for me it reflects that and it brings you inside, or it makes you yearn for something...

One thing I used to talk about is that I’d like very much that my work could create a "structure" or "region" for you in which you could have the space and time to think clearly, in other words it forms a kind of aural, and intellectual, and emotional refuge, or zone, in which the musical structure displaces the collapsing chaotic structures that are the consequence of living in an urban environment just for long enough that your thoughts might perhaps be able to gather in a clearer more satisfying way, and that’s something I’ve tried to do with the Sleep pieces. I think I know what you’re saying. I mean, it’s very interesting that there all these theories now that are being pursued by serious researchers about vibrations of sound on incredibly finely tuned levels being the future of real medicine, that in fact cells respond to certain frequencies far more efficiently than they respond to being bombarded with this drug or that drug, or some more traumatic large scale therapy. There’s a lot of very bogus flaky stuff about this, but there is some really hard-core interesting research that’s being done properly that has incredible consequences for medicine. In some ways it’s not dissimilar to the theories of homeopathy, that there are these subtle etheric levels upon which a lot of the system functions, and that sensitive manipulations of these actually results in very real and quite dramatic changes in the metabolism, and you know music is just vibrating air, basically.

PSF: I think individual people have very individual vibration levels, and that they are going to be attracted to certain kinds of music because it’s going to be more harmonious with their vibration.

I think also it’s a cultural thing. Anyone comes with an enormous amount of baggage. We’re bombarded by sound and music all the time, and as with smell, a lot of these sounds are gonna form all kinds of complex associations in people’s histories, and ultimately that’s that gonna really effect on an unconscious level the way they respond to any kind of sound in their later life. I think the problem with all of this, though, and where it starts to get very flaky, is when people say they know what kind of vibrations are gonna have what kind of effect on what person. That is clearly bogus and very open to abuse, but as a fundamental idea it goes right back to early Vedic text, the notion that the universe has a kind of sonic identity, the music of the spheres idea, and that’s cropped up in different cultures quite independently over the centuries. Clearly it’s an idea that has, if you’ll excuse the pun, that has a tremendous resonance for different sorts of thinkers in different areas, and I’m sure because of that there is some kind of truth in there that hasn’t been wheedled out.

PSF: Before you released Deux Ex Machina in 1989, you recorded a LOT of soundtracks throughout the 80’s, very little of which has been released, in fact you were quoted as saying you recorded over 100 hours of film music?

It would have been, yeah, it would have been easily that, I think.

PSF: Beside Isabelle Eberhard: Oblivion Seeker and Regard: Music by Film, will any of this be released in the future?

No, most of it was just awful. No, I mean most of it was, you know, awful music for awful films made under awful circumstances that I would not wish to revisit. I certainly wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone.

PSF: Was it you were you still finding your musical voice at that point?

I think there was an element of that, but the other problem was is that often I was working under extraordinarily difficult circumstances with people who had no interest in, or patience with, the idea of actually exploring sound in the films they were making. It ended up being a very unhappy experience. I don’t know why I stuck it as long as I did. I do think on the positive side that it taught me an enormous amount, but it was pretty soul-destroying.

PSF: If somebody approached you and wanted you to do a soundtrack, and you liked who they were and what they had to say, is that something you would consider?

Yeah, if I thought they understood the potential for music in film, and I thought the film was an interesting project and we could work together, yeah, I’d love to, but I’m not holding my breath.

PSF: The three CD’s: New Maps of Hell, The Rapture of Metals, and Site Anubis, you called the Pacific Unrest Trilogy?

Well, yeah, they were named that by the writer Biba Kopff when he wrote about them. His take on it was that they melded some of the apocalyptic technophobic notions that run through a lot 80’s cinema like BLADE RUNNER, BLACK RAIN and TETSUO with a lush Pacific Rim exotica from the various Southeast Asian influences in the music, and that this kind of tension was somehow illustrated by that area of the world. The whole notion of the Pacific Rim is quite exotic to Europe.

PSF: So those three titles are the titles of novels?

NEW MAPS OF HELL is the title of a book of essays on science fiction by Kingsley Amis. The Rapture of Metals was a title I made up. Site Anubis I also made up, and that was again connected by the little narrative which is written into the cover.

PSF: You said "we" before when you were talking about going to Greece. If you don’t mind me asking, are you married?

No, I go to Greece with my boyfriend. Living in England, marriage is not an option.

PSF: In terms of your boyfriend, is that something you don’t want published?

No, of course not. It’s actually something I mention in most interviews, but curiously most interviewers choose to leave it out, so I assume that it’s something they don’t want to think about. It’s their problem, really. We go there once a year, generally, and would like to live there I suspect, but that’s not an option, unfortunately.

PSF: Do you like living in London?

Yeah, I do. I prefer working in London. Obviously, it’s a fantastic place to work, and it’s a very stimulating place, also incredibly stressful and fantastically expensive, but, no, I do like it. I think I can imagine in a few years really feeling I want to be somewhere more peaceful and more beautiful. London is not really a place of kind of great beauty.

PSF: Well, at least you get to go places like that which is nice.

Well, that’s the really good thing, I mean you gotta remember somebody who grew up in Australia, which is miles form anywhere, being in London is extraordinary because I can go to most of the places I’m really interested in relatively easily and cheaply . The only place I really crave going to which is a bit difficult from here is Japan, but actually 7 Degrees (the record label which released Fell), which is Andrew, myself and Simon Hopkins are doing two concerts in Tokyo in January, so that will be that craving satisfied for the next 6 months.

PSF: 7 Degrees - when the Fell CD first came out, it seemed like it was a label that was gonna have other releases. Is that gonna happen?

Yeah, it is gonna happen, but it’s just a slow process because we’re very particular with what we want to put on it. We’ve had several things that we were gonna release and decided not to. Andrew and I have been so busy. It’s really quite difficult to run a label when he’s editing films in Germany and Scotland, and I’ve been working on so many things this year. I think we’re gonna be releasing an album by a band called Eardrum early next year sometime. They’re fantastic. I suppose if you use 23 Skidoo as a jumping off point, they’re like a meatier jazzier version of them, they’re really brilliant.

PSF: That’s great that you’re gonna release other artists on that label.

It was always our intention, but it’s rather difficult because the economics of it are hard. All the releases are limited editions. It’s ok if it’s us, because we don’t have to pay ourselves, but when we start recording other people we have to pay them, and having both been subject to such crap treatment on other labels, we’re fanatical that if we do release anybody else’s work, we must do the right thing by them, but doing the right thing by them makes it almost financially impossible when you do such small editions and they’re so expensively packaged. If we did a run of five thousand that wouldn’t be a problem, but we can’t really do that.

PSF: One thing I’ve been listening to lately is Stateless which finally got released on Driftworks (a four-CD compilation).

Oh, right, you got a copy of it!

PSF: I’ve been waiting for it, and FINALLY got it.

Well, we’ve all been waiting for it. I’ve been waiting for it since October, 1995.

PSF: You put ‘1995‚’ on the disc, and it’s 1997, and it finally got released.

Well, it was meant to come between Apart and Site Anubis. That album was designed to be a bridge between those two pieces.

PSF: I was listening to it last night and thinking of the word Stateless, and it feels like that. I get a very floating feeling listening to it.

Yeah, I like the fact that it has two meanings, because there's also the idea of leaving a country that you’ve lived in for 35 years . I will never really have a ‘state’ anymore, because once you’ve done that you know you can do it again, and I think the certain knowledge that you can move countries at will strangely prevents you from making the 2nd or 3rd or 4th country a home in the way that somewhere your born would be a home. So I oscillate between finding this incredibly liberating and quite scary. I don’t really feel as if I have a home anymore.

PSF: I just moved to California a year ago. It’s an interesting process trying to make it a home. It’s fascinating once you know you can go anywhere.

It’s brilliant. I know a lot of people in various places who are intensely unhappy with where they are, but the possibility of moving just does not occur to them. They can’t move in a way. Their personal psychology, or their history, or whatever just stops them somehow.

PSF: I think people feel stuck more than just in that, in their life in general -what they do for work, where they live, who they’re with, and it’s all their choice, but they refuse to do anything else because familiarity is comfortable.

Oh definitely, yeah, absolutely, I agree. It’s a very hard thing to do, but it’s fantastically liberating once you’ve done it once.

PSF: Is the Uzect Plaush album More Beautiful Human Life ever gonna be reissued?

I think it’s still around.

PSF: It’s very difficult to find.

As far as I know it’s still in print.

PSF: Do you plan on releasing anything else under pseudonyms like Uzect Plaush or Seed (the Vertical Memory CD), or is that just an experiment that’s done?


The reason I released those under a pseudonym (everyone knew they were me, it wasn’t a big mystery), was purely because I feel very strongly about chronology. I think it’s really important if you’re following someone’s work, and if the work is regarded as a part of a developing musical language, that chronology is very important. Those two albums to me were sideways steps. They were me just having fun. They were indulgent if you like, they were me just frolicking, but I wanted to make it clear that they were not the next step on from whatever came out before them. I think The Surgery of Touch came out before Uzect Plaush. It was a tributary, it was a branching off, it was not the next step forward. It was the only way I could think of to make that clear.

PSF: That makes sense. I hadn’t consciously thought about that, but once you say it, it makes a lot of sense.

I think it’s interesting when people talk about the order of which my stuff comes out, they do tend to remove those two albums from that chronologically, I think unintentionally. I don’t think they’re aware that they’re doing it, but that’s good, because it means that strategy worked. I’m very fond of both albums, I just wanted it to be clear that they weren’t the next step on.

PSF: Vertical Memory I really like. A lot, in parts of it, almost feels like Tangerine Dream, not exactly, but it’s got more of that 70’s electronic kind of feel to it.

That’s interesting. I was very fond of their first 3 or 4 albums. I really lost interest in them after that, but I think the early ones...

PSF: Zeit and Electronic Meditation...

Phaedra and Rubycon even I quite like. I just think after that they started repeating themselves.

PSF: I like a lot of their stuff, Force Majeure...

I can’t remember which the last one I listened to was. I know they’ve got hundreds of albums. I haven’t heard most of them.

PSF: Phaedra I enjoy – it’s got that wonderful long mellotron part.

Yes, but also the first use of that characteristic signature analogue sequencer that I think was probably on the next 15 albums. It was completely their trademark, and it was incredibly seductive the first time you heard it.

PSF: I believe in April, Tone Casualties is releasing a CD of yours called Green Evil, Stray Particles 1982-1996 - what will this consist of?

It’s a compilation. It’s rare tracks from compilations all over the place, and some unreleased material that was recorded to cassette. Just a strange collection of things. They wanted something to tie off the reissue series, really to complete this sense of retrospective. Originally, it was all meant to come in a box.

PSF: So it’s gonna be more than one CD?

No, it is just one CD, but it was originally going to have a quite detailed booklet in it which talked about all of the other things in the series, and had an essay about my work in it, and that was gonna round off that whole series of re-issues, because there wont be any more of those.

PSF: Will you still be releasing things on Tone Casualties?

At this point, I don’t know.

PSF: Do you have a bigger following in Europe than in the States? That’s the impression I get..

Well, it’s hard to say. I mean, sales in the States are in some instances better than Europe. Europe is weird because there are huge distribution problems. Virgin CD’s in Europe, for example, cost too much.

PSF: They cost even more here. To get Virgin UK CD’s here is very expensive.

Well, you’d be surprised how much they cost here in England. Second Site to buy in London, and remember it’s manufactured here, is 19 pounds. What would you pay for it there?

PSF: I found it for 30 dollars, and you figure with about $1.50 a pound, something like that – similar…

See, it doesn’t make any sense at all, it should be a lot more expensive there. We pay insane amounts of money for CD’s here as you probably know. An ECM CD here is 17 pounds for a single disc. I picked up ECM CD’s in LA when I was over there for 11 dollars. That’s the wholesale price in England, but I can’t understand why that is. So that’s something were trying to overcome in Europe, because there are a lot of people who are really into the music, but they either can’t get it, or it’s in the shop, but it’s very expensive and they can’t afford it.

PSF: I think mail order is the way to go.

I really think that’s the future of music.

PSF: We have the web now, so it’s so easy to find things.

Sometime early next year there’s gonna be a lot of my stuff available that way.

PSF: From a specific web site?

Yeah, from a specific site. I can’t say any more than that at this point, but it will be a really amazing site where you’ll be able to get anything you can think of.

PSF: Like you’ll have Paul Schütze pins, bumper stickers?

All that kind of stuff; bath mats, snow domes.

PSF: A Paul Schütze welcome mat with a little picture of you winking.

The sky’s the limit - a frightening thought, really.

PSF: What do you have in the works? What’s coming out next?

In the works right now is precisely nothing, because there are all these things waiting to start, but none of them started. There are several more "Site" pieces on the drawing board. That’s just gonna go on and on for years, the projects are just getting bigger and bigger, new Phantom City project, an album of piano music.

PSF: Solo piano?

Solo piano music, but it will be post-produced, it will be fiddled with, and a more jazz quartet album which will be Raoul, Dirk, myself and a bass player, probably an acoustic bass player. What else is there? There are several other things that are kind of bubbling away...

PSF: There’s a Bill Laswell project called Assassins that you did a piece for?

Yeah, you blink and you miss it. It’s very short, and very quiet, and it’s in the background with someone talking. It’s an interesting project, but my contribution to it is extremely minimal. There’s some very nice stuff on it. It was done ages ago, I don’t know why it’s taken so long to come out.

PSF: And there’s a CD called Solar that you did something on?

That was a compilation out of Scotland. It’s a music travelogue, and it’s got O Yuki Conjugate, and Stillpoint, and A Small Good Thing, Max Eastly. Its actually got "Sleep 5" on it.

PSF: What was "Sleep 4'"on? ("Sleep 1", "Sleep 2" & "Sleep 3‚"are on Apart.)

"Sleep 4" is on a really really interesting compilation called Statics, which is on the CCI label that comes out of Tokyo, and it’s run by the Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda. God knows where you would get it from.

PSF: You write for the English magazine "The Wire?"

Yes, off and on when I have time. I do some reviews, and sometimes I’ll write about film, sound, sound in film, just odds and ends really.

PSF: You used to be a film critic for Australian National Radio?


Well I did a stint on one of the afternoon programs, but it was basically just me coming off ranting on all the current release films. I got to see all the films on release which was nice.

PSF: Do you have any favorite directors?

Yeah, well, predictably David Lynch is one. Fellini, Pasolini.

PSF: I loved LOST HIGHWAY. Some people didn’t like it, but I just loved it.

Yeah, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. The only film he’s made I don’t like is WILD AT HEART. Everything else I love. I thought LOST HIGHWAY was fantastic, except the music which was almost uniformly awful. Atom Egoyan I’m a really big fan of.

PSF: Is he the one who did THE SWEET HEREAFTER?

Yeah, there aren’t many, I must admit. I’m a big fan of a lot of Japanese directors. They’re probably the only two that I would say unequivocally are brilliant.


See some of Paul's favorite music


MAIN PAGE ARTICLES STAFF/FAVORITE MUSIC LINKS WRITE US