Text: Bulat Khalilov
Pictures: Marcus Luigs & Andreas Schiko
Originally published on 3/4.sk
Stefan is best known for his work with the post-rock trio To Rococo Rot, which received significant acclaim and whose music was recorded by the legendary John Peel Sessions. Following this, he joined the kraut-pop band Kreidler and has delved into various genres, including free electronica, near-jazz music and field recordings.
Stefan runs his own label, TAL, which can be described with the phrase “widely known in narrow circles”. TAL is a multi-genre international platform that promotes musicians from a diverse array of genres, cultural contexts and geographies. Starting with field recordings of traditional music from Kenya, the label has expanded to include Japanese art punk, experimental electronica, archival recordings from Venezuela and more.
Despite this diversity, TAL’s catalogue still isn’t a mosaic, but rather a curated selection that’s interesting to follow. Each release here is an unexpected twist.
I spoke to Stefan about how this “dramaturgy of releases” is constructed, about colonialism and exoticisation, and also about Germany’s regionalism in the past and the centralisation of art.
Bulat Khalilov:
Tell us about the earliest stages when you got into music. What was Düsseldorf like back then? Were labels a significant phenomenon? How different was the scene from those in other German cities?
Stefan Schneider:
I guess it must haven been in 1975 when all of a sudden there was a song called Silver Cloud by a band named La Düsseldorf playing at a local radio program. I remember that moment so well because I was totally shocked that there was a band that chose the name of the city I was living at. That meant that this band must be from Düsseldorf. They must live somewhere nearby.
Before that epiphany I never thought in terms of geographical locations for music which got played on the radio. T.Tex, Slade or David Bowie was not earth music. It was coming from far away places through magical airwaves to my curious ears.
I was listening to radio programs a lot when I was a teenage kid. Düsseldorf used to be the headquarter of the British Rhine Army which meant you had fluent access to English BFBS music programs. It was quite an entertaining way to learn the language and also the music they played felt more interesting and contemporary than the stuff you would hear on WDR (public Radio station in Köln) Specially the programs of John Peel were hugely important to me as he always used to play totally different music styles in quite unconventional but well conducted combinations.
In the late 70’s, when I started going out in Düsseldorf I would constantly run into art students who played experimental or electronic music or I would meet musicians who had something to do with fine arts.
Apparently, there seemed to be very close link in Düsseldorf between the fine arts and the experimental music possibly already since the late 1960’s. Düsseldorf and also Köln had huge art scenes. There was the prestigious Art Academy in Düsseldorf and i guess, that Köln back then had even more fine art galleries than New York. In 1980 i started playing music in a local Punk band. Punk was definitely the force that brought me back to life. All of a sudden it was possible to form a band without any musical skills. I could never really understand the No-Future aspect of Punk. To me it was opening all doors to the outside world. It certainly gave me a reason to become an active social person.
In terms of labels in Düsseldorf in the early 1980’s, there were Atatak and Pure Freude. Pure Freude also had a great record shop between 81 and 83. A few years later there was a fantastic but short lived record shop called Heartbeat which existed barely for two years in 85/86. Hearbeat quickly became a meeting place for a small group of young musicians who would gather at the shop, in order to listen to new music but also to exchange tapes with their newest cassette recordings.
In 2018 i did a compilation on that particular scene which is called Sammlung – Elektronische Kassettenmusik aus Düsseldorf 1982-89.
When I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s all bigger cities in West Germany had a very distinctive and also original music scene. Roughly speaking: Munich was the „Disco City“ and also the city where the film industry was at home. Hamburg was a place for Guitar Music and Rock. Wuppertal was an important place for Free Jazz. Berlin was more dark, druggy and DIY. Frankfurt and Heidelberg was the region where the US Army had their headquarters and I guess that had a tremendous influence on the music scene there as well as on various political underground movements. For certain time there was even a „White Panther Party“ in Frankfurt formed by German students to help American GI’s to escape the Army and the Vietnam war. Düsseldorf and Cologne had a lot of electronic music. That is all very well documented, I guess.
All these differences don’t seem to play a big role anymore as nowadays anything is potentially coming from anywhere and art activities in general are not so much connected to certain cities anymore.
BK:
How did you come up with the idea to start your label?
SS:
In late 2014 we decided to stop playing together with to rococo rot. By then we were together since 1995 and after almost 20 years of traveling around the world and doing so many records and projects together, it felt that the partnership had come to an end. At the same time in 2014 I also stopped working at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf where I was the co-curator of a series of events called „Enthusiasm“, which seeked to bring theatre, music, fine arts and politics together. I really loved doing that and it felt like a big loss when we had to stop Enthusiasm with the arrival of a new intendant in early 2014.
On the other hand it gave me time to start something new.
Between 2011 and 2015 I was traveling to Kenya a lot in order to do field recordings of local music in different rural regions of Kenya. That project was part of a program initiated by the Goethe Institut Nairobi and I was invited to be working together with George Odhiambo, a music producer from Siaya (a region in West Kenya, nearby to the borders to Uganda). We did a lot of recordings together in Siaya, predominantly of the wonderful music of the Luo people. These recordings came out very nicely and we were looking for a label who would be the right partner for a release. After some not so good experiences with Honest Jon’s in London, I decided to rather work on the release of these recordings myself.
Ogoya Nengo and The Dodo Women*s Group – ON MANDE became TAL01 in 2016. Through the release of the record, Ogoya and her band got invited a few times to tour extensively in Europe. That was quite a good start for the label.
BK:
What does the name mean? How would you describe the music released under TAL in a nutshell?
SS:
First thought best thought. When I was about to start the label, I was looking for a name that had no connotations to music.
Next to my former studio in Düsseldorf there is a road called Talstrasse which I had to cross everyday. It is kind of an in-between street but an important passage way that connects different routes in the centre of the city.
BK:
On your website, you state that you avoid labels like “niche” and “boutique”. What’s wrong with those tags in the context of independent music?
SS:
Good to hear that someone noticed that.
On from the beginning TAL was meant to be an internationally operating label.
Through the medium of digital files the music being released on TAL is potentially available to everyone. TAL is simply part of the world where the small and the big, the young and the old, the digital and the analogue are all in conversation with each other.
It is a small label with limited capacities but the music is not confined to access only a small circle of smart connaisseurs.
Also, the terms niche, boutique and independent seem to be categories of business thinking in the first place and I wanted to avoid it for that reason too.
BK:
You’ve already said that you avoid labels in music and positioning. But still, after To Rococo Rot and abstract electronic works (sound art?), how would you describe your approach to music in general?
SS:
I would not consider myself a sound artist. At least I never felt part of that genre if you would like to call it like that. I guess, that I am totally useless for mainstream „Sound Art“ curators as I was never particularly interested in working with self build, manipulated or mistreated objects and instruments or self programmed softwares. I clearly wanted to neglect that „special effects“ approach as much as I do not use any kind of visuals at my concerts.
I certainly do appreciate simplicity and directness a lot. One concert that impressed me recently was a live set by Keiko Yamamoto from London. She would use only her voice, two cassette players and a small array of hand held percussion instruments. It was quite magical what she was able to do with that tiny set up.
My approach towards electronic equipment is quite unspectacular (and therefore not attractive for Sound Art curators). Usually, i prefer to be working with electronic instruments which are accessible to everyone. Like a Novation Bassstation, an Elektron Analog Rytm or a Dave Smith Evolver.
I like limitations (limitations of myself and also of my equipment) and therefore i never wanted to be able to control the music i was playing. Quite often after my concerts guys (boys!) are coming around to check out my equipment and mostly they seem to be quite disappointed by what they see and say things like „I have the same box but how did you get these sounds out of it ?“.
BK:
You’ve been releasing quite a lot of traditional and local music, among other sounds. What place do these releases occupy in TAL’s catalogue? How did you reach people from Kenya and Venezuela?
TAL follows its own route. When i started the label I knew that I did not want to do a label that is devoted to just one particular sound aesthetic or a certain music genre. (f.i. Music from Kenya or Punk from Japan) my idea was rather that TAL should gradually become a genre in its own right and after almost 40 releases by now, inwould like to think this idea is slowly coming across to audiences.
Therefore, I also knew that TAL could not work with a dominant graphic design language like ECM , Faitiche or Principe – as much as I like those labels.
Even after nine years of working with TAL there isn’t yet a proper logo for the label.
Every release on TAL is supposed to create its own identity and its particular individual language according to the content of the music amd the ideas of its producer.
When I released On Mande by Ogoya Nengo and the Dodo Women’s Group as the first release in 2016, I literally had no idea yet what the catalogue number 2 would be. That is how it was meant to be. You do not follow a pre written script. You would rather trust things to grow gradually step by step.
One idea about the label which i had in the beginning was that the catalogue of TAL should be as diverse as a John Peel radio show in which the host brings all kinds of very different sounds together in a way, that they start to communicate with each another.
The OSWALDO LARES- Musica de Venezuela 1969-1981 LP is probably one of my most favorite releases on TAL. In the first place because of the music but even more because of the process of how this record was coming together. That process was as exciting as the music of Oswaldo Lares. Guillermo Lares (the son of Oswaldo Lares) works on the heritage of his fathers recordings and we had coincidentally met in Berlin in 2017 at a concert of Ogoya Nengo. He introduced me to the work of his father which is quite unbelievable in the sheer number of recordings Oswaldo Lares did within 30 years but also in the quality and depth of his research as an amateur ethnomusicologist. Guillermo and myself spent hours listening together to these recordings at Guillermo’s apartment in Berlin and it certainly was a big honor for me that I was basically allowed to putting this compilation together without having ever met Oswaldo Lares in person or without having been to Venezuela myself.
BK:
When a Western label starts working with non-Western cultures, there are always questions about resource allocation, appropriation and colonialism. How do you navigate these questions?
SS:
It was quite interesting to me to hear that Oswaldo Lares had become aware of the music from Venezuela while being in New York as a student of architecture. He was listening to music from Venezuela for the first time at a local radio station in New York. I strongly believe that foreigners do have a very special sensuality or attentiveness for music that might differ a lot from the perception of locals. To me the best book on Japanese underground music was written by an American writer who used to live in Kyoto since the early 1980‘s. Dokkiri by David Kato Hopkins. I think that there are many examples for that phenomenon.
Very recently we have been to Accra in Ghana to visit the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archive. Nketia is considered the first African ethnomusicologist who did systematically examined recordings of local music in Ghana. The whole history of his work and also the history of the archive is deeply connected to the history of colonialism which still plays a huge role in everyday life in Ghana. Judith Boateng, the director of the archive, was talking about decolonizing the archive and how important it is to make the archive accessible to young people.
When we were doing our recordings in Kenya in 2011-2015 we (as Europeans) had a very different perspective on music from Kenya and it matters a lot when you are going there as a European to record music. You automatically become a part of the history.
For instance in 2013 we were coming back from a recording trip from Siaya County and we played some of our recordings at a KBC radio show in Nairobi. The host of that show became really serious and said :„Hey guys, we did not play that kind of music here since 15 or so years. How come that you are so interested in the traditional music from the countryside and obviously you are not interested in the contemporary music from Nairobi ? Why don’t you allow Kenya to be modern ?“ That question was certainly an eye opener to us.
BK:
In one of our conversations, you said that it’s a bit of a pity that everyone tends to go to Berlin and it’s just overflowing with curators, artists and musicians. By contrast, other cities in Germany aren’t as saturated with cultural environments. Why is this the case, and what do you think should be done about it?
SS:
Unlike France or England who both had very dominant capitols, Germany rather is a decentral country with a number of approximately equally big cities who each of them had something special when it comes to culture. See above. Around 2000 there was certainly a huge wave of young people who moved to Berlin from all different parts of the world. All of a sudden there was a unified Europe without borders and (almost) one and the same currency. Berlin was still cheap then and the east part of the city was under construction in large parts. To foreigners it probably came across like a big playground where you could extend your student life to forever. Yes, at a certain point, perhaps in the early 2000’s, it had become a cliche to be a „musician based in Berlin and Barcelona“ and I resisted against it as it seemed to be the new mainstream.
A real pity about that was that some people who were important key figures in the cultural life of other cities also moved to Berlin around the same time. For instance there were fantastic activities going on in Belgrade around the mid 2000s. When the main curator there decided to move to Berlin, Belgrade kind of disappeared from the map of experimental music soon after. I guess the same happened in other cities as well. In a fast paced global world things have changed quickly in the past couple of years and I think it does not matter so much anymore where you are actually based at.
On the other hand I can see that cities like Düsseldorf are not doing enough to support young artists on a political level. There is a huge cultural potential in the city only because of the art academy but artists studios are extremely rare and expensive. Galleries in Cologne have lost their former importance for sure and so it does not come as a surprise that young artists are moving away from here.
BK:
You say that cities, which used to be centres of specific art, have ceased properly supporting young people. So it turns out that reunification and the transfer of a unified centre to Berlin isn’t a natural process, but a failing agenda of institutions?
SS:
Uf… The reunification of Germany is too big a topic here. I was just saying that the city of Düsseldorf (I mean politicians and also curators, museum directors, etc.) is constantly failing to support young artists. It would be so easy and not particularly expensive to offer better studio spaces, for instance. Also, it seems that the city isn’t aware of its immense musical heritage.
BK:
If the boundaries of global music have been erased, what place do regional, so-called folk genres have in contemporary music?
SS:
Difficult to say. When Ogoya Nengo was on tour in Europe, I went to see a number of her shows. It seemed that audiences witnessed some “purity” (hand-made wooden instruments played by hand) in the music that they seemed to be sorely missing in Western contemporary music – which to their mind had probably already been corrupted by electronic instruments.
It was quite dreadful to face those reactions as it declared (better: romanticised) the music of Ogoya Nengo to be some kind of old-fashioned regional exoticism.
BK:
How does independent/experimental music survive in Düsseldorf? Is it easy to be a musician today who doesn’t have to release hits for streaming and TikTok?
SS:
Young people keep having new ideas about what they want to listen to and how they create new sounds – digital, analog or in live concerts, DJ sets, Videos. Es wird immer weiter gehen. Musik als Träger von Ideen.
Mukunguni – New recordings from Coast Province, Kenya
Ogoya Nengo and the Dodo Women‘s Group – On Mande
Oswaldo Lares – Musica de Venezuela, 1972-81
Dokkiri book on Japanese underground music by Kato David Hopkins
This article is brought to you by 3/4.sk as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthening the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union (EU) or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the EU nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.