Rhythm & Sound interview, The Wire 236, October 2003

I And I without a Face

As the faceless Techno pioneers behind the groundbreaking Basic Channel releases in the early 90's, Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald have ruthlessly preserved their anonymity, rarely granting interviews and never allowing their words to go on the record. In an exclusive Berlin audience with the duo, Will Montgomery teases out the inspirations behind their dub-infused Rhythm & Sound project.

Such is the clarity of purpose behind the music of Rhythm & Sound duo Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, formerly the producers behind Basic Channel, that I arrive in Berlin half-expecting a pair of musical ideologues. But their rigour is of a different nature: if anything they are dogmatic about their anti-dogmatism. Every time their remarks lurch towards anything resembling a large statement, one of them throws in a
qualification that causes the emerging position to unravel. They work hard at making music that sounds right to them, they say, but their responsibilities end at the studio door: finding the words to talk about it is up to others. Working on the material at hand and allowing a tune to develop along unexpected pathways, they point out, can be a good deal more complex than anything you can fabricate in advance in your head. It's
not about being on-message for journalists, but no-message. Their music, a private territory they've marked out somewhere in the no-man’s land between Techno and reggae, is built around working very slowly and listening very closely. Since the early 1990's, they tell me with crushing directness, all they've sought to do is to let their music happen.

We meet twice over the course of a hot August weekend at Basic Channel HQ — an office above the famous Hard Wax record store that Ernestus set up in Kreuzberg in 1989 (the shop moved down the road from the original small premises to the current location in 1996). We talk for quite a long time all told but how we talk is the first of our problems. Ernestus and Von Oswald have never done conventional interviews. No recording is permitted and they aren't about to break the rule for the man from The Wire. It's not an aggressive thing: they're courteous, careful to say what they want to say and generous with their time. But they won't bend on their ‘no quotes’ rule. So, never having mastered shorthand, I'm compelled to follow the conversation at a distance, getting my notes down as quickly as I can. In the erd I half-persuade myself that what I'm encountering s a variant of the single-mindedness that could conjure that extraordinary Basic Channel sound out of early 1990's Berlin. And, despite the restrictions on the interview, Ernestus and Von Oswald have come a little more into the open lately, bothered by the rumours and misconceptions that have grown up in the space opened by their media boycott. Their very invisibility has become too much of an issue in itself. As a partial corrective, the photographs that accompany this article are the nearest they've got to showing their faces in a magazine.

Their desire for anonymity has to be seen in the context of their grounding in early Techno. In the early 1990's, Basic Channel had close ties to Detroit's notoriously shadowy Underground Resistance collective, and like many others on the scene, Ernestus and Von Oswald developed a parallel antipathy towards presenting a public persona. It's also about diffidence: both of them admit to shyness, and our conversations grow more substantial when we've spent a bit of time together. However, as we speak, three shy men in a room, I find myself forming an idea of their work that is defined negatively — through what they say it's not rather than what they say it is.

Talking to them is like endlessly watching a washbasin fill up only for the plug to be pulled and the water to drain away again. The way that their points tend to fade begins to remind me of the play between substance and insubstantiality in the music. Rhythm & Sound recordings are often built on deep bass loops and simple insistent hi-hat patterns. But other elements — often processed middle-register synth — unsettle the music, as an ever-changing set of effects dissolves the fixities of the rhythm. Despite the spare, repetitive qualities of the work, the tonal warmth and the subtle sound processing give it a depth that rewards listening of an immersive nature. It somehow spans the divide between the physical pummelling of the sound system and the interiority of headphone listening. The plain card sleeve of the Basic Channel CD, a collection of the label’s 12" releases, urged the listener to “buy vinyl', but they've always addressed what they see as two distinct markets: one for vinyl and one for CDs. From the beginning they have issued series of vinyl singles followed by CD showcases that collect this material. The latest of these to emerge are two CDs of vocal tracks and versions released on the Burial Mix label, assembling Rhythm & Sound singles released since 2001.

One morning, in an effort to give me a glimpse of where he's coming from, Ernestus plays me some examples of inspirational tunes from the late 1980s, chosen rapidly and almost at random from the racks: Chicago House and late, Firehouse-era 'digital’ King Tubby. Something drops into place as he describes what he finds in the music. What he admires is the strange ambition of such records, a weirdness that grooves. It's a balance that, he feels, was soon lost in Techno as it marshalled itself into endless straitjacketed subgenres. That radical purity of vision can certainly be heard in the music of Basic Channel, Maurizio and some of the releases on the Chain Reaction label (made by various associates, many of them with connections to the Hard Wax setup). It's music made by Techno lovers who had grown impatient with Techno.

But to begin at the beginning. we have to move forward from the 1980s moment captured in the records I'm being played, for Ernestus and Von Oswald were “born’ in 1990. Or that, at least, is what they'd have me believe of their joint trajectory. As we speak, they repeatedly discount the relevance to our conversation of anything they were doing before then. Sure, many of their musical touchstones stem from before the 1990, when both were deeply immersed in music, but the significant background to their work together, by their account, was the big Techno bang that came in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall late in 1989.

The collapse of the Wall and the opening up of a hedonistic grey area in the no-man’s land between the two jurisdictions coincided with the increasing availability of the new dance music from New York, Chicago and Detroit (pre-Hard Wax, black music was very hard to get hold of in the city). At a time when the distribution of dance music was extremely patchy, Ernestus began to make direct contact with the people making this music in the US in his efforts to secure vinyl for the shop. Soon he was importing the music directly and changing the lives of many who walked through the Hard Wax doors. Ernestus recalls the year zero fervour of the period: customers selling their CD players and their entire music collections, and burying themselves in stacks of 12" singles.

Shortly after Ernestus had established, through Hard Wax, a conduit between the Detroit Techno scene and Berlin, Dimitri Hegemann began flying people over from the US to DJ at his club, Tresor, and, a little later, to record for the Tresor label. Tresor, Hard Wax and Moritz's recording studio in southern Berlin became the focal points for the Berlin-Detroit axis. Producers such as Blake Baxter recorded at the studio and, under the name of 3MB, Von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann collaborated with Juan Atkins (on the renowned “Jazz Is The Teacher") and Eddie Flashin’ Fowlkes for the Tresor label. Mark and Moritz met during that breathless early 90's period, beginning their series of collaborations in 1992. The first Basic Channel release contained a mix from a visiting Jeff Mills, and Carl Craig versioned Maurizio's “Domina”.

When Hard Wax moved to its current location in 1996, the Basic Channel studio was housed in the same building. Ernestus and Von Oswald have recently moved the studio to a quieter location nearby, though they absolutely refuse to let me have a look at it (a fear, perhaps, that I'll get round their equally determined refusal o discuss their equipment or working methods). The space above the shop now houses two operations, the Hard Wax office and the Basic Channel family of labels: besides the currently active Rhythm & Sound and Burial Mix, subsidiaries have included Chain Reaction, Main Street, the M outlet for the Maurizio releases, and the more experimental Imbalance imprint, set up by Von Oswald but taken over independently by Monolake's Robert Henke. Chain Reaction has another release slated but the others are now effectively defunct. Rhythm & Sound are also overseeing the rerelease of tranches of the catalogue of the pioneering New York reggae label Wackies, and they have set up a separate reggae reissue label, Basic Replay, which has released Keith Hudson's tremendous 1981 set Playing It Cool (which was mixed at Wackies). Ernestus, with too many irons in the fire. is currently negotiating the sale of his much in-demand Dubplates And Mastering record-cutting business, whose early engineers included Porter Ricks Andy Mellwig, Monolake's Robert Henke and Stefan Betke (aka Pole).

For all the evident clear-sightedness of the business activities, which appear to be doing well, the music of Ernestus and Von Oswald has always concerned itself with uncertainty and hesitancy. There was a blurred quality to the Basic Channel 12", for example, that drew the lateral, disorienting sensibility of dub into the rhythmic environment of Techno. With the advent of Rhythm & Sound and Burial Mix the make-up of the sound shifted towards a reggae-derived template but the basic concern with fashioning gradual movements over long, repetitive structures remained the same. Another continuity between the early and the post-Basic Channel music is its attachment to sonic debris: hiss and hum that would be anathema to most producers. Some relatively recent Rhythm & Sound tracks — “Imprint” and “Trace", for example are breathtaking exercises in textured atmospherics. I suggest to them that this is to do with their kinship with vinyl and also, perhaps, a means of taking a stance against the antiseptic qualities of the hard drive. That's only half the story, they tell me: there’s also an element of happenstance. The scratсhy atmospheres have never been added to the music on purpose. But then neither are such sounds taken out if doing so means watering down other parts of a track. Sometimes, they say, such ‘noise simply begins as a by-product of using old equipment and then gains other sonic qualities in the mixing and processing - as in the oddly spangling and elegantly panning hiss that can be heard in their production of Cornell Campbell's gorgeous “King In My Empire".

The attention they give to the overall sonic qualities of a track tallies with something Moritz says about his interest in the tonal breadth of classical music (he trained as a percussionist). When he stopped playing classical music, he remarks, he missed the three- dimensional nature of the listening experience, especially in concerts. He continues to have a close interest in the whole spectrum of sound in a piece of music. He talks about the work of Rhythm & Sound in terms of a ‘weave', working on it as a kind of texture. in which all the pieces closely lock in to one another. To kill hum or crackle, therefore, would be to unravel the whole arrangement. Mark, for his part, uses the German word ‘rund’ - “full’ or ‘round’ - to describe a quality he sees as a precondition of the Kind of sound they are after.

When discussing the early Basic Channel releases Moritz talks, gesturing, of their desire to add a horizontal layering to a genre: hat was motored by vertical' percussive jolts. The Basic Channel tracks added cavernous spaces and overlapping rhythmic patterns to the basic beats. With the Rhythm & Sound material, however, this quality of breadth is as much to do with the warmth of the sound as anything: the deliquescent effects bounce off the rock steady rhythms but the parts are tightly integrated. Sometimes it can appear that there are very few layers to their sparser mixes. But there are always other, more or less submerged elements knitting everything together. Their use, for example, of delay effects, from the Maurizio material to the most recent tracks, can be a beautifully percussive component of the overall texture.

The Burial Mix style was established with the series of records Ernestus and Von Oswald recorded with their main vocal collaborator, Paul St Hilaire (formerly known as Tikiman), beginning with “Acting Crazy", released in 1996 on Main Street (a sublabel associated with a more direct dancefloor approach). The records combined basic looping, Techтo-style patterns with Vocals that, with some of the strangeness of phrasing of Horace Andy, hovered delicately above the backing track, often paying scant attention to conventional song structure. The sound came into sharper focus with 1996's “Never Tell You". There the basic Burial Mix template was set: a deep bassline; effects used to create the feeling of motion; vocals with the freedom to roam.

The Rhythm & Sound sister imprint mainly explores instrumental pieces. Most of the label's singles output is collected on a 2001 CD. However, the recent "Aground"/"Aerial" single is one of the pair's finest moments: on “Aground” a simple set of chords carries the song along in a prim skank against thickets of late-Black Ark percussion activity; “Aerial” is given an aching quality by some beautifully eerie backing vocals. It's a wonderful single, perfectly capturing the respective forces of movement and stasis that animate the music.

While the parallels with reggae are numerous, the two are keen to point out that they are not interested in imitation. Although the lyrical content dots the music with Rasta motifs and the language of dub is everywhere, the sound they have arrived at is a distinctive adaptation of Jamaican music that is unmistakably inflected with Techno. The use of repetition sometimes threatens to tickle the boredom threshold, but the listener tends to bounce off it and sink into the ample folds of the mix.

Another curious aspect of the music is velocity. While the basic loops set up a rigid groove that makes no concession to verse/chorus demarcations, there’s an elastic quality that almost gives the effect of slowing down and speeding up. Often, with bass and hi-hats anchoring the two sonic poles of the music, the varying effects on the other sounds in the mix act as destabilisers, continually refocusing the listener's attention on different moments of the groove. The music can be almost unbearably still, and yet contain a time-wobble that makes it impossible to pin down.

Speed is also crucial to the vocal mixes. On tracks such as “Mash Down Babylon” and “Making History” by The Chosen Brothers (Lloyd “Bullwackie' Barnes's vocal alter ego) there is a real disparity between the gravity and pace of the vocal line and the zip of the percussion. Mark says that it was almost intimidating to work with “Mash Down Babylon” - he prefers to see it as another song entirely rather than a version of Barnes's original. Yet the Rhythm & Sound backing track, with fine horns, makes for a deep and powerful ‘accompaniment to Barnes's spine-tingling vocal, locking into place underneath it and giving it an unstoppable forward momentum. And over the mastodon groove of “Making History”, Barnes doubles up the vocal line with an intense falsetto. This is another trademark Rhythm & Sound device: singers are sometimes accompanied by recessed versions of themselves, giving the effect of a ghostly choir.

For a while, towards the end of our second conversation, we discuss their distinctive use of dub, which depends on quite subtle effects and avoids the baroque overkill favoured by many dub revivalists. They reject my attempts to characterise a refinement of the sound as Burial Mix and Rhythm & Sound have evolved, though they concede that these days a different type of attention is paid to the music in the studio. As the second conversation draws to a close I still feel that I've learnt most about their music through the feints and parries with which they've declined to comment on what they do. My notes close with a restatement by Mark that they have no particular message for the world.

That doesn't mean they think there's nothing outside the music, of course: it's just where they choose to draw a line. Their music took shape, after all, in musical crucible, the Berlin of 1990, which could barely have been more fired with extraneous determinations. In the end, their unwillingness to adorn their working processes with explication is heartening as well as frustrating, It suggests a commitment above all to the elusive physicality of the listening process and it turns the listener back towards the loudspeakers. There’s something reassuring about people who won't risk saying something that they're not absolutely sure they mean.