Music Artist
KENNETH KIRSCHNER - YEAR 2000
Year 2000
We hereby bring you 50 minutes of pure noisy brilliance by Kenneth Kirschner. It’s piercing and blaring yet very (!!) beautiful and highly mesmerizing. The pieces are – as stated in the interview below - entirely made out of fields-recordings. Kenneth has remastered the pieces, which means they sound better than ever. This is a release you shouldn’t miss. Download!
Composed, Mixed and Mastered by Kenneth Kirschner
Cover by Jannick Schou
All work(audio, tracks, cover, text) is licensed under a creative commons license.
Interview with Kenneth Kirschner
KK: I thought I’d first say a few words about the pieces collected here. Just before the year 2000, I went through a very severe crisis in my life and work, with the result that I was unable to write music for nearly a year. And I found myself facing that terrible question that any artist in any medium must surely face at some point in their life: Am I done? Am I finished? Is that it? Will I never write again? It seemed like it might be over. But then, one day – May 13, 2000 – I went to the window of the apartment I was living in, a small apartment in the northernmost reaches of Manhattan, and I opened the window and put a microphone in it. And I said to myself, if I can create something from just the sounds that come through this window today, I can get through this, I can survive. And the result was the piece you hear.
It's a raw, brutal piece, like getting hit in the face with the full unleashed forces of nature. Birds, wind, cars, airplanes – anything that came through the window gets caught up in the machinery; perhaps the most disturbing moment is the voice of a crow. But it worked, and I kept writing. And from there I began carrying a little portable field recorder out on walks through the city – just a low-tech little cassette recorder with a tiny lavalier mic. “August 6, 2000” and “September 4, 2000” are further pieces in this series, constructed out of sounds from the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, and from Midtown Manhattan, respectively.
DC: Was it a coincidence that you started composing electronic music – I mean, could it have been any other genre…?
KK: It was really a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I encountered electronic music for the first time at a critical age (12 years old), and was immediately drawn to the freedom and independence it offered; I’m not sure that any other medium would have had that exact effect. I really needed a medium where I could do everything myself and push myself as hard as I wanted to – particularly after years of playing in, well, let’s just say, less than successful bands. And it was the right time in the development of the technology, too: my first real polyphonic synthesizer, a Roland Juno-60, was one of the last synths made before MIDI was standardized, which was of course a huge step in the evolution of electronic music. Plus there was the pop music of the time, the 1980s, which was all about synthesizers. So while I probably could have worked in any medium that offered a similar degree of autonomy (like being a writer, for example), I was very fortunate to find just what I needed at just the right moment.
DC: Who were your main influences at the time you started (producing music)?
KK: It was hearing Gary Numan’s “Cars” that started everything for me.
DC: How do you go about composing from a technical point of view – has it changed since you started? How much is improvised and how much is digital editing?
KK: My methods are always changing and evolving, but there are a few consistent themes that run throughout my work – with one in particular being this exact division between improvisation and editing. For me, almost any piece is broken up into two parts or stages: a free, fun, spontaneous, chaotic, improvisational period of “writing,” and a long, difficult and often quite painful process of “editing.” The writing or improvisational stage of things will often be done in a day or two; the editing usually goes on for a couple months. And both are necessary, really: the writing is about having fun and enjoying the creative process, while the editing is all about discipline and hard work. And unfortunately, you really need both.
DC: What DAW are you currently using?
KK: I’m a long-time Digital Performer user, since back when it was just “Performer”; I started with it in 1988. And while I do use some other programs for writing (e.g., Ableton, recently Numerology), I always assemble and edit everything in DP.
DC: Obviously, you’ve got a very “open source” approach to your music, in the sense that it’s being freely distributed on your website and, on top of that, you even encourage people to “take these old sounds and find new uses for them” (post_piano project). Undoubtedly, music shouldn’t be all about money, but isn’t it unrewarding to give away music you’ve spent hours producing?
KK: Well, in the literal meaning of “unrewarding,” that’s certainly true – I don’t make a lot of money! And so I have to work to survive, at much less interesting jobs, when I’d rather of course be doing music all the time. But before this all sounds too noble and idealistic, I should confess that giving my music away for free doesn’t really lose me that much money – because there’s not that much money in this sort of music to begin with! The truth is I’m not really giving up that much: if there’s a way to make vast fortunes doing avant-garde music, copyright or no copyright, I certainly haven’t found it. And I do think that the small amount of money I may lose by giving my music away for free is more than balanced out by the great opportunity and exposure that comes from letting it proliferate freely online, which is a wonderful and exciting process to watch happen. And this is where we get to the other meaning of the word “rewarding,” which is something that is deeply satisfying and meaningful, in a philosophical or emotional sense. And of course, in this way, giving away my music for free is very, very rewarding for me.
.contemporary would like to thank Kenneth Kirschner – it’s been a true joy working with him.
