Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn’s contribution to the electronic community is immense, as well as having signed releases on labels such as Industrial Complexx, we must also thank him for his important work at the head of Create Digital Music (CDM), however, we take advantage of the release of his latest album to know more directly his impressions about this release and above all his work.

Create Digital Music will be 20 years old in 2024, where does your vocation for writing about music technology come from?

I had gotten into writing through an unexpected route. I was teaching Sibelius music notation to school teachers around the New York area, and that led to writing gigs at Macworld, Keyboard, and others. Create Digital Music was going to be the name of a book I was working on at the time; the site was a blog for the book. The book was renamed Real World Digital Audio and mostly flopped, and the site is what took off. What I discovered at the peak of the blog age – alongside the blog Music thing (now the modular maker) – was that it was the left-field, esoteric stuff that really caught fire, and not the vanilla news at the time. That’s even more important to say now than then, maybe, in the midst of the rise of the algorithms and big platforms. (The book by the way was somehow translated into Polish and Russian, and I’ve meet people even in Ukraine who got introduced to a lot of synthesis and sound concepts, I think often by pirating it – which actually I kind of love!)

But that’s the accidental beginning. It’s staying with it when you run out of that kind of luck that I think defines things. And so for me what I always come back to is some simple ideas. It’s the belief that how you make instruments and tools is itself a creative and compositional act, that unusual sounds and ideas deserve some place, and that there can never really be too much music or too many instruments, like there can never really be too many different people.

Create Digital Music was born in the middle of the 2000s, a time when the use of software was expanding and most of the producers were forgetting about hardware. Is the opposite happening nowadays or is software still very much taken into account?

Oh, I’m not sure I’d agree with that. The big thing in the 2000s was just that we were first starting to get really interesting computational power, first in laptops and then in mobile devices.

The software/hardware line has really blurred, in a way that makes both more useful and flexible, and it will continue to blur as we figure out how to design around that. One Eurorack module now often has a ton of computational power. And it’s conversely possible to take software and make a plug-in, and run in a browser, and run in embedded hardware.

I think maybe the biggest change over the past decades – especially if you look back to the 70s and 80s – is how much opportunity there is for individual and small shops, especially as costs have come down.

Do you think that recently there has been a growing interest in synthesizers and the different devices used for music creation?

There is absolutely an explosive interest, and it’s fantastic. There was a time when you had to find your way to expensive academic institutions to make weird sounds or even find anyone who wanted to hear them. Now there are incredibly experimental sounds even in the mainstream. I mean, who would have ever thought you could build whole businesses around, like, waveshapers?

Because of your publications, you had an altercation with Behringer, what do you think about the adaptations of old synths by this and other brands?

I’m not overly concerned about finding ways of remaking old gear; there’s obviously a demand for that. And I’ve always loved and advocated cheap gear, free stuff, and open-source tools. As MeeBlip, we’ve even been making low-cost synthesizers and products since 2010, and you’ll see more stuff from this collaboration between me and engineer James Grahame.

What I do believe in is crediting and supporting the people who work on ideas and come up with new ones. And we can’t only remake old stuff, obviously; that’s just boring. We had a really great few years of remakes across the industry, but we also can’t just keeping going back to that well. I think the same is true with going back to old records. You need some balance. It’s a good exercise to go back to the past and even try to recreate it exactly; it’s also a good exercise to get away from that sometimes.

Although you have been involved in music technology for a long time, it is only a few years ago that you started to publish your music. Possibly you will have to correct me, I ask you based on the information on discogs.com, why didn’t you release anything until 2020?

Heh, let’s skip this and let me update my discogs… (but even discogs has earlier than 2020, no?)

If you want to rephrase the question, I can say this –

I was working in music before I was working in music technology. I played the piano literally since I could reach the keys as a toddler, studied piano and composition, and studied and taught graduate-level music. I wasn’t really engaged in the club scene until after I arrived in Berlin in 2011, though, and I think probably first and foremost I’ve been an improviser. So a lot of music I made in the 90s and 2000s, apart from some concert music (vocal and instrumental), was lost to time. But I like it that way some of the time. I actually got into electronic music through composing and improvising for modern dance, and even moved onstage sometimes. Viola Farber our dance teacher, a Merce Cunningham veteran, was a huge influence on me. And she famously talked about loving that dance would essentially vanish once it was over.

I don’t really believe in immortality coming from art – even recorded albums. It’s a fundamentally time-based art so it also exists in these relative moments in time. A recording itself doesn’t change, but its surroundings and how you hear it even do. And like us, eventually it will be gone and forgotten – but that’s part of its essence and our essence.

We have in mind 4Q246, album released last year on Industrial Complexx with an experimental and industrial sound, however, the style of Pandemonium Architecture is completely different, do you usually adapt your music to the style of each label?

Pandemonium Architecture’s style is wide although we could define it as hard-techno, what motivated you to choose this kind of energetic techno?

You release Pandemonium Architecture on the Berlin label Dark Carousel, what can you tell us about this record project?

I’m always exploring different sound worlds – especially as I’d come from collaborations with other media, too; you’re used to finding a sound that embodies something. But yes, in this case, I absolutely adapted to the label, as Dark Carousel has this distinct hard sound. I think what’s special about Akua (Femanyst / Lady Blacktronika) is that she really commits to pushing forward these harder, faster sounds. She’s completely rooted in that history but also pushing all of us to add new and experimental elements to this media.

The tracks on Pandemonium Architecture, I was finding a lot of traditional techno was feeling just sluggish to me, especially my own productions – nothing against what other folks were doing. I was feeling this energy and needed some way to get it out. And those track sketches were I think all born in the pandemic, so I was alone, living alone, exhausted, isolated – and in my head, I was imagining a dream nightclub that was just going off. Friends like Ana Laura Rincon (Hyperaktivist) and OCD had always been pushing music to this out-of-control powerful energy, and their parties had that abandon. Then I know someone sent some iPhone videos of an epic illegal rave outside Odesa – this being before the full-scale invasion – and someone was playing Femanyst’s remix of mine, “Vampyr on Speed,” our shared horrorcore outing. I was alone in the dark in Kreuzberg and was hooked.

I think if you listen closely, though, you will hear some common threads.

I think it’s necessary to ask you about the machines you used to create Pandemonium Architecture. We would also like to know the setup you used to compose 4Q246.

Oh, ha, that’s a lot for me to remember now. I only recently got into hardware modular, but there’s a ton of software modular there. 4Q246 I recall I used a lot of field recordings, sound design with physical modeling, there’s some Sculpture in there, AAS Chromaphone maybe or definitely some of the AAS physical modeling stuff. Pandemonium Architecture is a ton of things, I think some VCV Rack patches. I’m also a big fan of D16’s distortions and their PunchBox kick; that’s a great Polish maker. I honestly don’t remember, other than I got carried away with a lot of synths and effects.

The electromagnetic hum on the one track on 4Q246 some people will probably already recognize as the BVG. It’s recorded with the LOM Label Elektrosluch, a stereo EMF mic by Jonaš Gruska.

The voice synth on Pandemonium Architecture I know is from Plogue; David Viens does beautiful chip modeling.

At some point I remember hearing someone describe French cooking as being “taking something, and doing something to it, and then doing something else to it” in repetition and some of my production winds up being that way. You’re layering on processes because you’re finding some organic sound life that’s beyond just the immediate sound of the instrument. I do think if you listen closely to the two albums, you’ll hear some common threads, though, even if the form or genre reference is different – well, even more so on the more beatless tracks on Pandemonium Architecture, but either way.

I really approach music as building instruments and orchestrating as well as arrangement – some mix of composition and improvisation. So I tend to construct sounds first, often from scratch with synths, found sounds, effects, and then try to approach those sounds like playing an instrument – even if it’s one that was just invented. There are big elements of that on the Industrial Complexx release, but often on the techno tracks, too – even in the sense of constructing a machine that grooves. And yeah, I enjoy hardware, but a lot of it is with software, because it’s great having it being open-ended. Even on the modular these days, I’ve been using the Befaco Lich to load some Pd patches, just to have that blank canvas and then patch and tweak knobs and discover.

The next stuff will be different; now I am working more with the hardware modular, for instance. I should take notes sometimes.

CDM, besides functioning as a webzine, also operates as a record label, although we don’t have too much information about this project, do you plan to give it continuity?

Ah, the label is Establishment. You’ll be hearing more from us shortly; there’s a killer project by Betty Apple we’ll release this fall, and some other projects I can’t announce yet. Yes, continuity is the main aim.

How do you translate your facet as a producer and review writer to the stage?

I remember I had a jazz improvisation teacher at a summer camp in high school who talked about “woodshedding.” The idea is, you head back to the woodshed and work on skills. I’m still learning how to do this, but I find the less I think about what music project this is for, the more creative I can become. You really learn something inside and out, and then you can apply it. Some people find that studying the manual helps; I guess I’m the sort who learns best if I also write.

Then onstage, you’re really as un-technical as possible. I love sets that are as radically simple as possible in tools, knobs, whatever.

Even albums and production, at some point it’s similar – forget everything. Disrupt the thing that’s in the clips or timeline. Improvise. Throw some paint on the canvas, scrape away at it, whatever. Then apply a little science and call it done.

In the short and long term, what are your plans for the future?

I think I’ll just be honest on this – the pandemic and war(s) caught me unprepared and disrupted projects and cut ties. And I’m comparatively lucky.

So the short term is – ship, ship, ship. Watch for some news soon on the MeeBlip project. I know I’ll be pushing CDM hard through the fall, both the artistic and tech/instrument side.

I’m really grateful to have been working on collaborations with Ukrainians and our Ukraine Resistance Radio endeavor, highlighting more experimental music from the country. Another highlight for me was again getting to work with Lebanon, to play Beirut, and I can’t wait to go back. My family has Lebanese heritage, but despite embracing the food and culture, we disconnected from the language and didn’t go back to the country – as happens in the USA and with multiple generations. But so I have gotten the chance, with outside support, to go do something. People from Beirut and the region have become some of my biggest inspirations and I feel lucky just to get to talk about their music; I’m sure we can do more. And Betty Apple has this incredible album – having met her in Manila through CTM festival, getting to have a Taiwanese crew put on a party here in Berlin and having Betty as a mermaid and – I don’t even know how to describe that sound and energy.

So the plan next is definitely more music and more collaborations, short-term and long-term. A lot of who I am I can only express through solo art and solo performance – maybe more than people realize if they only read CDM. But it’s also important not to do that in a vacuum. So much of that input comes from writing, taking in what other people are doing, from all these connections. We live in an increasingly fragile and hostile world that in many ways is breaking down, which was the essence of what 4Q246 and Pandemonium Architecture were about – apocalyptic visions. The long-term plan is always to figure out a way to build something to withstand all this entropy – even if only for a while. So as always, that is something I can’t do alone. Now is the time we have to figure out how to make that happen together.

Pics by Garfunkala / FLASH Recordings.