After Savenbergs releases on Haunter Records, aufnahme+wiedergabe, Hallow Ground, and Lux Records, Walls, Corridors, Baffles wants to resist a conceptual or symbolic treatment of sound, emphasizing its materiality instead. On the LP, unadulterated percussive force meets a precise vocabulary of electroacoustic sounds. Anna Froelicher met Savenberg in a quaint café in Lucerne before he would travel to Milan to play a gig at Macao. The record’s title offered the point of departure for a discussion about the spaces opened by the music and the generic classifications the artist seeks to avoid.
Anna Froelicher In one of her recent talks, the author Salomé Voegelin discussed the unique quality of sound that allows it to transgress walls. In contrast to images, sound and music can penetrate rooms that are potentially far removed from their sources. The title of your album—Walls, Corridors, Baffles—emphasizes walls, and spaces defined and delimited by walls. What’s behind this?
Samuel Savenberg Spaces are very important to me. For me, the spaces created by Walls, Corridors, Baffles are the kind you can walk through. I was less concerned with the fact that walls define a space and make it smaller, but wanted to see how they shape movement and circulation. I think the album is written in a way that makes it possible for the listener to move through it, and to move around in it. In this movement, a kind of narrative unravels in between the tracks. If you change the sequence of the tracks or listen only to individual ones, the narrative also changes. The final sequence was not the one I had planned for in the beginning, but it’s how it ended up thanks to the feedback of different people. It became something different, and I find that exciting.
AF How important is the space in which you compose and play music to you?
SS I produced almost the entire album in a vacation apartment in Andermatt [a popular vacation destination in the Swiss Alps]. It was in an ugly apartment block, and the central village of Andermatt isn’t really pretty, either. But I thought it would be good to work there and drove there just for that reason. It was summer and I spent most of my mornings hiking in the mountains. The entire thing was pretty spontaneous and I didn’t use any additional equipment to produce the tracks. So the space was fairly restricted at first. It was almost all happening on my laptop and earphones. Later, in the studio, things became bigger and I could use a system to mix it. That’s when you start fantasizing about how you would perform it live: ideally with surround sound in a cinema or a concert venue in which people can sit and have the opportunity to really listen to the music and all of its detail. However, I know from experience that the context will be different in 99% of the spaces in which I perform. It’s much more likely that it will be played in a cellar in front of 30 people.
AF But that’s not how you imagine the ideal listening context for your music, I assume.
SS It’s definitely important to me to think about how I want to present the album live, so that it can be performed the way I have it in mind. I wonder about what happens to a track if someone were to go into the room above the concert space, for example. How does that filter the sound and how does that change the meaning of the music? At the same time, I try not to pay too much attention to thoughts like that. If you focus too much on the spatial aspect of the performance, the immanent quality of the music can get lost. It also happens that boring compositions are blown up to such proportions and played with so much force that no one realizes how boring the music actually is. In the end, the question how and when my music is received, is not one that rests with me.
AF A few months ago, the BVG [Berlin public transport services] caused a minor scandal in the world of “Neue Musik:” they wanted to use György Ligeti’s music to chase people who appeared to be loitering out of train stations. If there had been an open call for such music, would you have submitted something?
SS No! For one thing, I don’t want my music to be used to scare anyone off. That’s also the reason why I’m bothered by the fact that my music has repeatedly been described as intimidating and terrifying. I get booked for a festival and the organizer is drooling with self-contentment because he’s put me on the bill in the middle of the afternoon between two folk-rock acts. Because he thinks that’s the way it has to be, that there has to be this element of shock. For as long as I’ve been making music, I’ve had the feeling that others tought of my music as shocking, from the punk bands I played in at the beginning until today when I perform as S S S S. I find this ascription incredibly boring. I’m not interested in being edgy. And it doesn’t work as a concept, neither for established institutions nor festivals nor curators. If you pay attention and listen closely, you can hear that experimental electronic and avant-garde music has been processed in pop and are omnipresent. I also think that in a time in which there is noise everywhere, and you can’t even really hear a lot of what’s happening, you can play Ligeti over the loud-speakers of a train station without it making any difference.
AF Listening to Walls, Corridors, Baffles, I got the impression that you might have a fascination with dystopia. Is that true?
SS “Dystopian” is another term that is often used to describe my music, and it usually comes with the question, where that impulse comes from. When I make music, I don’t do it with the conscious intention to create a dystopian atmosphere. I generally don’t think that music reflects the attitude or mood in which it was created. It was different with this album, for the first time. I wasn’t so sure anymore if that holds true. Maybe you can hear at which points my own demons overtook me.
AF I get the impression that you tackle people’s expectations in your music environment with a lot of humor, regardless of whether you hear that in the music or not. I made a note when listening to the penultimate track, “And All of This Can Be Broken,” that it was funny somehow. How do you see that?
SS I never had much interest in humor in music. That tends to get trashy or absurd rather quickly. But just because you perform in a boxing ring doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be convincing. Of course, humor is an art form, and I love good American stand-up comedy, for example, but if the music is not taking itself and anything else seriously, then I think that’s a pity. I’m a friend of seriousness, and the music that touches me most deeply isn’t the kind I find funny . . . this really would be the place for a free jazz joke, but I can’t think of one [laughs].
S S S S – Walls, Corridors, Baffles appears on Präsens Editionen on June 28, 2019. It can be pre-ordered here.
This interview was translated into English by N. Cyril Fischer.