Echtzeit@30: Q&A with Ignaz Schick

Ignaz Schick:
For me „Echtzeitmusik“ mostly is a community of similar minded musicians
who started arriving in Berlin in a particular time, from the fall of the
wall onwards, who were more or less from a similar generation and who were
asking similar questions, confronted with similar hardships, at a certain
moment of musical stand still within the first wave of European free jazz
and improvised music. A community who were researching similar musical
ideas or concepts and who often but not only improvised. For me
Echtzeitmusik never stood for a musical aesthetic or method, nor for a
style, …. What was new and maybe a key element was the use of extended
instrument techniques, instrument building, electro-acoustic sounds and
electronics, also the incorporation of formal/material elements inspired
from different streams of contemporary music (i.e. musique concrète,
minimalism, microtonality) but also a curiosity towards all kinds of forms
of experimental (underground) music like noise, ambient, song formats,
performance, sound installation. The development of course took its time
and over the years developed into a huge and fertile community with several
generations of musicians who quite soon started to be noticed worldwide, ….
But there is not such a thing like a typical sound or style, the musical
results are as diverse as its practitioners and characters. There is
sometimes still this cliché (mostly from outside of Berlin) that
Echtzeitmusik equals with „reductionism“, this has been attempted to be
propagated by a rather small group of players and influencers who pushed
into this directions in the late 90ies and early 2000s. There was an
extreme period of deep research into those realms, but at the same time
others were working into very different directions (i.e. new jazz and song
formats, noise, performance or even with techno and club music elements).

Is there something material – like demographics, affordability, or
cultural practices – about Berlin that you think makes such a scene
possible?



Definitely for the first 10 to 15 years it was the economic &
socio-political situation in Berlin in the time after the wall came down.
The city was financially broke, and had to re-organize after the collapse
of GDR system. The fall of the GDR system had created a vacuum mostly in
the East part of town, not only that there was an unclear real estate
situation, also politically all the beliefs and utopian hope of the left
were scattered, … There were tons of empty lots/houses/factories with
totally unclear ownership status, and people went into those houses and
squatted them, or rented them for almost nothing, or used them temporarily.
For us young musicians who were mostly ignored or not acknowledged by the
previous generation of aging free jazz heroes. Many of us were literally
kept out of the clubs and funded venues, but we could bypass this ignorance
and just create, experiment & explore and also perform concerts with
our new ideas in the squats. There was maybe not always excitement about
our music in such places, but a huge tolerance for our experiments as there
were new forms of living which were experimented with in the squats. We
didn’t make much money, but we also did not need much. The housing
conditions were often very rough (apartments with coal ovens, cold water,
no shower or toilet on the public stair case), but for me particularly as
for many others this did not matter, I grew up on a farm and I had a
similar childhood with little „confort“. Most important for us at the time
was: living costs & rents were extremely low. This attracted more and
more adventurous musicians and artists from all over the world. Rents for a
long time stayed extremely cheap, and as a result there were/are many spots
and venues were opened with no commercial pressure where musicians could
perform. And most improtant: nobody had to compromise his ideas and
concepts, we could be as radical as we wanted, we were in the underground
anyway, nobody told us how to play or adapt our music in a commercial way.
Musicians in this music want to perform, as often as possible, like in the
old jazz days, as we are developing a lot of our music live on stage. We
also always met and worked (…) on our music in rehearsals, but then it
really needs concerts to be able to evaluate your findings. In Berlin this
was always possible, in contrast to other cities also today you can still
play a lot, and this of course has always attracted a lot of adventurous
musicians and people from all over to move to Berlin. We have had an
amazing influx of fantastic players int he last 30 years, the whole range
from super young and unknown to also very known and established players who
want to be part of this amazing community…

In what ways do you think the scene has changed since your involvement
and what might have caused these changes?



Although that tendency started already in the 90ies it is way more
international now. The amount of musicians has probably trippled or
quadrupled. The level and the quality of musicianship has constantly been
raised. And the stylistic variety of the music is much more diverse today.
I think this happens quite naturally as all those people who moved to
Berlin also bring in their individual ideas, approaches and experiences and
they start merging and fusing with those already present. So the technical
quality is way more sophisticated and refined. In the early/mid 90ies the
sound of Echtzeit was more noisy and raw, in the meantime it went through
several phases of refinement but also through stylistic transitions.