A forward. I was first introduced to the work of experimental noise musician Dave Phillips during a drive through the Hoh Rainforest in Washington with a friend. The inside of my car became teemed with a cruel biological soundscape of bellows and yelps, inappropriate silences, slamming objects, sounds from the deep cavities of earth, hives and throat. It unveiled a story for the mystery of the woods that we drove by. The solo works of Dave Phillips blend extreme listening and harsh noise with the practice of musique concrete. It can only be listened to with the same precision required in watching a film. The complete oeuvre of his work includes 80 solo releases or more than 308 releases if including collaborations and singles. He has been involved in many projects including 1980s grindcore band Fear of God, 1990s experimental ritualistic performance group PK, the Viennese-Actionism-inspired performance noise group Schimpfluch Gruppe, OHNE, and today in Perverts in White Shirts.. He is a true artist, an activist and a dear friend.
When Dave and I began this interview after the Covid pandemic was declared in 2020, I never suspected it would take 6 years to complete—a stretch that extended before and after the length of my doctorate program—nor did I think that this would become a nod to the dimensional orbit of the ear and human connection, and a sort of retrospective of Dave’s relationship with sound. The interview is divided into three sections: Part I: Now, Part II: A series of conversations that took place between 2020 and 2024, Part III: A retrospective. It is a weaving of several letters sent back and forth between Dave and I over 5 years when the human world became quiet in solitude and fear.
The interview was created as part of the series “What do you hear here” – a series of conversations held between various musicians and Stephanie Berzon during the worldwide lockdown and quarantine in 2020.
Part I: Now
Stephanie Berzon: Where are we now?
Dave Phillips: In my studio in liestal.
SB: What do you hear here?
DP: A window’s open in the next room, voices drift in, wind in trees, birdsong, churchbells, distant motors passing…earlier there was thunder. i’ve been listening to dissecting table.
Part II: A series of conversations that took place between 2020 and 2024.
Stephanie Berzon: Where are we now?
Dave Phillips: Standing by the lake of zug, looking south towards the alps.
SB: What do you hear here?
dp: the sound of small waves licking the man-made embankment. the repetitive calls of black coots swimming nearby and occasionally a great crested grebe sounding in the distance; the quiet swish of ducks paddling along the embankment and the watery slurp of them diving for food. the hum of traffic a dozen or so metres behind my back, and then my steps as i move towards the old town.
SB: Are you watching birds?
dp: nope.
SB: Do you ever?
dp: yes. my favourite spots to record in the field are national parks, nature reserves, jungles, deserts, forests, those sorta places, and birds are usually part of that. so i see them, i watch them, like i watch other animals, but i watch with my ears rather than with my eyes.
SB: In a sense birdwatching is practically a misnomer since the act at any level of expertise requires listening; ears tend to bring a depth to an ecology that often escapes the eye. What’s the story behind your favorite or most important field recording?
dp: there’s a prologue to my “favourite and most important field recording” story here. a good while after that initial impact i visit the khao sok national park. on the second or third day there, as the sun starts to set and as i’m slowly making my way out of the jungle, i hear something like this. it blows my mind. i still struggle to find words. and it’s not just about sound. my experiences around recording in the field in thailand’s wilderness led to a shift in me. it includes lots of angles. it’s existential in a sense in that it relates to all, not just human life, as a unity, and it involves re-evaluating culture, particularly its elements of trance and celebration. the reasons often attributed by “the sciences” to soundings and vocalisations of non-human animals—usually it’s “territorial” or “mating” calls—leave little room for the idea of culture, or an extension of the idea of “language” or “language skills” or maybe a broader understanding of what communication involves and language is and how culture is at the heart of that. this in turn puts our rather anthropocentric way of perceiving and relating to the living world into perspective. it’s good to question human exceptionalism; it’s a myth.
hyperconnectivity/interconnectivity—which some call chaos—is part of this too. as in the clarity one experiences on psilocybin or lsd. the experience was humbling in broadening my understanding of what it means to be part of a bigger whole, of an ecosystem and of ecosystems, and of the relationships humans have to them, and subsequently to themselves.
Dave Phillips at Lake Bao Sao, Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam, December 12th 2007, photo by Thala Linder.
SB: I too believe that one inherent flaw in human exceptionalism is that the perspective was born in the bedroom of language and anything that begins from such tapestry can really only be in servitude and beholden to its owner. It excludes the perspective of other intelligences that we share planet earth with and this seems oppositional to the idea of a universal reality or truth. It’s more of a strategy and limiting belief system than it is a well-substantiated theory. Perhaps then hyperconnectivity might present as a type of interspecies communication?
dp: the idea of human exceptionalism has a lot to do with our supremacist anthropocentricity. a lot of it is born of language and its underlying categorization of life. it’s understandable that we “measure” the world according to our tools, but the limitation of some tools should be evident. humans do have amazing skills, but that doesn’t mean that the tools we are currently using are adequate. perceiving things mainly rationally and/or logically offers but a fraction of a much bigger picture. the idea that our “language” is superior or even unique is plain blind. organised religion has a role too in this play, do not underestimate two millenia of “subdue the earth, and have dominion over it”, a profanation of the living world in favour of the supernatural, and the use of fear to elicit obedience and unhealthy dualistic views conditioned into our belief– and value-systems... the damage sits deep. all that said, i could also argue that human exceptionalism is very real ‘cause every species is exceptional. but that should lead to a non-hierarchical relationship to life, which is the opposite of what human exceptionalism usually implies.
we have other senses and some might be under-nurtured. maybe there are senses we’ve yet to discover: i like saying “most dimensions are yet to be explored.” hyperconnectivity is an interspecies thing for sure. i would say it has to do with vibration, of all living organisms, or maybe more. sound is vibration too. and how do we define living organism anyway? with senses open, antennae out, to expand the idea of language and of communication, beyond the realms of rationality and even beyond sound. it also has to do with the present moment, the here-and-now, and immersion; being part of something.
Dave Phillips at Tempting Failure, South London, 2018.
Dave Phillips in Schimpfluch Gruppe, Taipei, 1996.
SB: Composer Pauline Oliveros considered listening to be consciousness, or supremely close to it, and sound in any given moment to include vibration from the entire space/time continuum, not just from the one noisemaker. Listening as consciousness instead of merely an act bound to consciousness. On my drive yesterday to a trail in between the Pacific Northwest mountains, I tuned into some talk show radio, while the hosts were discussing an end-of-the-world scenario in which both nature and machine ally to wage war against humans; positing that there is more in common with nature and artificial intelligence than there is between nature and humans. The abrasiveness of this Western lens struck such a nerve with me that I felt a cellular urge to apoptose and wish for a full species resignation—I too can fall for exceptionalism after all, ha.
dp: “nature” or “natural”, eh. one of them words innit. an exploited word. i exploit it too. and a watered-down word. mmh… “humanity has been detached from nature too far too long” and “of course humanity is nature, it is the epitome of it” seem like opposing views, yet i can find merit on each side of the argument. is organic food flying from other states or countries to reach your local supermarkets natural? is the royal age many old people reach nowadays natural? is the way humanity overpopulates the planet natural? are capitalism and industrialisation natural developments? nah, natural is an ambiguous word at best. how about “healthy”? hm, it’s kind of a yuck word too. or “balanced”—eugh. same goes for “normal”. but let me use those knowing i will find myself wrapped up in contradiction sooner or later—which is natural in my books, heh. maybe living in urban environments as 60% of humanity does is natural by 21st century standards, but is it healthy? is it balanced? i think not. it causes detachment. severe detachment, and it desensitizes us—especially towards the “natural” world. that said, i see goodness in the human species. but not in this civilization.
“that there is more in common with nature and artificial intelligence than there is between nature and humans” seems far-fetched at first. artificial intelligence is designed by humans and responds, basically, in binary code. the aspects of human intelligence that have to do with the binary, rational, logical, categorical, systematic, “male” side of our intelligence (which many still believe to be “intelligence” per se) are merely a fraction of what human intelligence, life, response ability really is and could be. so nature and ai function largely according to rather different parameters. however, i can imagine both may conclude that the human presence on planet earth (at this stage) is a destructive force better done without.
anyway, is thinking evolution out of its anthropocentric box natural? hm. is it healthy? aye.
evolutionary trends generally lead to increased biodiversity. due to human activities, however, currently many species are gone before we even know of them. the rate at which this happens nowadays is unforeseen. in effect, as we decimate species through our lifestyles, we are experiencing devolution; turning back the clock on biodiversity. it’s a slippery slope towards ecological collapse. the interconnectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our peril.
looking at how the ecosystem works, any species whose population grows too rapidly and falls out of balance will meet a reaction by an ecosystem—by a healthy ecosystem—to re-establish a balance. not so the human population; well, not yet anyway... we seem to believe we’re outsmarting mother nature… we are talking of a species, arguably the only animal that hasn’t worked out yet how to live sustainably, that is vastly overpopulating this planet, causing more toxic pollution, climate harm and ecological destruction than any other species; is causing habitat destruction and severe population-losses for most other species on this planet. this has a lot to do with the continued human detachment from the biosphere; the place we grew up in. we’re out of balance. the extinction of the human species would definitely be a good thing for planet earth. a perfectly natural reaction if you understand “natural” as something that has to do with all of nature, not just with humans. ;o)
in the study of nature, since long, what we’ve been seeing in animals and plants, in the natural world, is informed by our projections. it’s not “knowing” but rather educated guess-work. an article about a female anthropologist comes to mind where she basically said a lot of our anthropological history needs to be rewritten ‘cause it’s based on what male anthropologists projected from the perception and interpretation of their times and values. let’s take that out of the anthropocentric box as well.
what we know is dwarfed by what we know we don't know, and what we know we don't know is dwarfed by what we don't know we don't know.
human awareness of death and the knowledge of suffering informs our intelligence. isn’t awareness of mortality a main drive of life? emotions cannot be coded. so we are teaching homosapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. just look at how many humans have their mobile phone seemingly permanently stuck to their hand. we are degrading humans to binary beings. and even though this is not the cause of our detachment, it is its consequence, and certainly furthers our detachment from things “natural.”
i like the pauline oliveros quote. listening, as opposed to hearing, nurtures consciousness—“close to consciousness” sounds about right. listening nurtures our understanding of languages beyond human or even verbal formats. focus matters. the immersion that happens through deep listening is tuning into the environment; it nurtures the idea of being part of something, being part of a bigger whole, and not its master, as many humans wrongly thought for millenia, and many still do.
SB: I would like to sit with this topic of mortality for a moment. You released an album this year called “To Death.” I am curious as to the reason behind this elegiac title?
dp: the title’s main inspiration is the journey i’ve been on with my parents, as their carer from march ‘20 until june ‘21. both parents were in fairly poor health, my father more than my mother, and they couldn’t live at home independently anymore without help. when the pandemic broke out and all my gigs and tours were cancelled, i moved in with them—somehow just at the right time. my father’s illness ate away his personality more and more. he wished to die at home; a wish my siblings and i were able to grant. in june of 2021 he finally found his peace. “to death” is the music that poured out of me during that journey of me accompanying my father “to death.” that journey turned out to be a most demanding experience, but also a most profound and enriching one.
but there are many readings of the title. other related topics play into it. the ode/hymn “to death” is certainly in there, poking fun really—a hint at demystifying death—which the experience with my father certainly did. the title also addresses what we’re doing to planetary life, to eco- and climate-systems, to flora and fauna and base elements such as air, soil, water and thus also to ourselves. on a global scale my father’s disease is a common cause of death nowadays. the main harbingers of death of our times—cancers, depression, dementia and alzheimer’s, heart diseases, pulmonary and respiratory diseases, et al—seem clear enough indicators of how sick our allegedly “civilized” way of life makes many of us. there are so many “unhealthy” people and so much human waste. we are “civilized to death.”
what is all this doing to us emotionally and existentially? we largely function and follow rules (eh, “choices”). the slow death of the human potential via our educational systems, via all the restrictions of modern life, mediated by an imposed “normality”. the numbing of our senses and alertness through electronic gadgets that are supposed to “make life easier/better” or just be “fun” are also part of that decline. our medical systems are for-profit-businesses catering to that. doesn’t that make you wonder? the death of freedom through increased control as per recent developments. i mean, life is uncertain, unexpected, surprising. isn’t that the exciting part? all our puny attempts at “safety and security and predictability” would be laughable if they weren’t so devastating in what they actually do to us. they make us dysfunctional. welcome to the human zoo. we’re domesticated animals born into captivity. the prevalent capitalist systems are a major force leading us to death, destroying life around us, and crippling senses within us, all for the supposed “good life”. and the political dimension just plays into all that … it seems obvious: an economy that functions linearly is just inadequate for a world that lives and happens in cycles. infinite growth? earth’s treasures aren’t infinite. or maybe we’re mistaking growth with evolution? to make matters worse, there is no “democracy” once corporations are more powerful than governments… boy are we stuck…. so… there are many paths and pointers “to death”. it is the way our civilization is heading.
the album was sent off to press early june 2021, when my father found his peace.
SB: What do you believe happens after death?
dp: i don’t know. talk of souls or the afterlife usually tries to posit a deeper level to existence. that beneath, or above or outside... this world full of things we can touch and name… lie more dimensions ... i believe that a deeper level to existence is real—and that there is more. and that all that is mostly in the here and now. at least for now ;o).
SB: As a soothing therapy during times like these, I find myself fantasizing about alternative courses of history through the lens of a non-abrahamic or godless society. I often run into the same query in identifying the new shape of faith; where does the body of it begin and end. I am curious as to how faith or reverence exists in your world.
DP: faith, or belief for that matter, is an interesting field. to me it’s like a power, a force, that each of us can generate, and that we can project towards something, a source or an object— be it an idea, a cause, a system, a place, a person, an idol, a myth, a deity, or an ideological, religious or personal construct; real or imagined, chosen or imposed or conditioned into us. some believe that the object onto which they project their faith is the source of strength. i believe [ha!] that we ourselves are the source of strength as long as we generate that moment of energy consciously—the focus of praying or wishing for example— to “live” and honour that conscious intention. we may project as individuals or as a group or as ecosystems. a group sharing the same “object of projection” can be a source of energy too.
i used to identify as an atheist, but even that now feels too sectarian for me.
it is said that “faith can move mountains” and i’ve experienced it. but what moves the mountain really? to me that’s a force each of us can generate.
i don’t go for “deities.” i don’t believe there are “higher” sources of energy or power beyond the living beings in this ecosphere and all that happens between them. but yeah, “living beings” might require defining too… regardless, i believe we underestimate not just what happens between living beings, but also the force and the extent of it.
a “godless” society seems a great idea, but what is god nowadays? for many god is science, technology, money, material and status, related to and believed in with religious zest and fundamentalism. “religious” gods came with a set of morals that had or have certain merits—merits that no doubt have misled and been abused too. what i mean is even if “godless” would seem adequate for a species that is growing up, it doesn’t mean that we only function on secular, rational, physical or practical levels. nah… mind and body are one thing. i believe every living being is “spirited” to an extent, and if we don’t cater for that part of us we lose balance.
if godless can mean non-superstitious, non-materialistic and understands coexistence then that seems like a good start.
some who know me have said that “nature” is my god... i’d rather say nature is where we come from. it’s our mother. she is the source of all life and deserves our respect and stewardship. nature for me is also not just an entity, an existence or an ecosystem, but a history that brought her to today and us too. all these processes, developments, organic life exploding—we are connected to nature so much more than we seem to realise or acknowledge. her evolution has given us the chance to experience existence. we should take care of her at the very least. we should not exploit her or hurt her as we do. we depend on her, yet sadly we don’t seem to grasp what that means. and we belong to her. it’s not the other way around. nature doesn’t need us… to me this is common sense.
SB: Do you have a hiking practice or any other outdoor rituals?
DP: i go on day-long hikes a few times a year and walk in natural environments around where i live twice or more a week. there’s a forest just uphill from my home and the river beneath it flows through protected nature reserves. it is barely a quarter of an hour away and i often walk an hour or two. in the summer months i swim in the river or lake every day and i bicycle.
there is a little ritual i’ve developed since i moved. a piece of fairly wild land is attached to my current home just above the river, and i stroll through it barefoot every morning and around midnight, in any weather. it’s addictive. i miss it when i’m not home. i notice the effects. “touching ground” has a positive effect on my mental and physical wellbeing.
SB: Do you walk alone and are you listening to music?
dp: mostly and preferably alone, and never with music. there’s so much to listen to already!
Dave Phillips on Sumba, 2010, photo by Viviana Druga.
Dave Phillips in Rome, 2013, photo by Ilan.
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Part III: A retrospective
SB: What is your first sound memory?
dp: a song is what first comes to mind. in fact two songs, and i can’t say which one was first: stan freberg’s “the world is waiting for the sunrise” and the goons’ “ying tong song.” i was three or four years old. i remember.... something happening in me. my dad was a music aficionado who played old jazz at home, crooners, lounge music, swing and dixieland, so i know i heard stuff earlier than these two pieces—but that moment, those pieces, sitting in front of the speakers, listening and being catapulted in that way by those sounds… that stuck.
SB: These songs must have chimed a psychedelia inside the ears of a 3-year-old! What jazz was being played at home and what sounds were you attracted to thereafter?
dp: my dad liked it smooth—frank sinatra, ella fitzgerald, sarah vaughn, eartha kitt, tony bennett, dinah washington, some swing, some dixieland, the carpenters, doris day… i remember loving matt monro’s “born free”; a title song of a series and film. i got into abba at age five. they had just won the european song contest and i bought my first vinyl. my mother had to lift me up to reach the shop’s singles rack. i liked boney m. too. i would listen to the charts on sunday afternoon radio and dance in our living room. when i was eight, i was given “alive i” on tape by kiss and that changed my life. i played that tape over and over on my little mono tape player. i heard but a row at first – and i was utterly entranced by it. kiss was my first musical obsession.
SB: What happened after Kiss?
dp: i was excited by extremes. heavier, faster, louder. sabbath, priest, motörhead, the nwobhm, and later, venom... i met tschösi, the only other kid in the village listening to metal and punk. he was a year older—a big deal when you’re nine or ten— had more pocket money and more records. we’d spend school-free times listening to music and eventually playing music together. he had a guitar and drums. we would form bands together: messiah, fear of god... his parents took us to our first gig when i was eleven—kiss with iron maiden opening in 1980. around the age of twelve i discovered discharge, the dead kennedys, hardcore-punk and that you can make that kind of high energy music while addressing more relevant issues than dungeons, dragons or satan. again, that changed a lot for me. punk and hardcore tuned me into topics that i would research about, which influenced my perception of the “civilized” world. going to gigs became a regular thing. after one, can’t remember which, i was maybe fifteen years old, a bunch of kids and i ended up crashing in some band’s rehearsal room, where someone put on a tape of non’s “‘blood and flame”... that opened yet another world of sound for me; another paradigm shift... being into horror films as a teen, i discovered ligeti and penderecki through the shining and exorcist soundtracks, carpenter’s films and music, and the wide world of soundtrack music. at 18, on my first job at the recrec distribution for independent records, a whole bunch of new doors opened to all sorts of “different” music[s]…
SB: I am so curious as to what your first performance looked like?
dp: as part of a band, it looked like this. feb 1988.
Dave Phillips with Fear of God, Live at Reithalle Bern, 1988
my first performance with schimpfluch-gruppe in 1993 looked like this.
Schimpfluch-Gruppe at Milvus Zürich, 1993.
the four of us stood side-by-side on stage, each with a tape-recorder in hand, picked up by a microphone. rudolf was at the mixing-desk and gave the racket we made his treatment.
my first solo live performance didn’t look like anything. it was an acousmatic concert.
SB: How does it feel seeing yourself at this time in a suit and what was the intent behind the business attire?
dp: the schimpfluch group attire used to be a suit and/or just a white shirt and a tie. these clothes are stage outfits and as such felt fine. i don’t think i wore a suit offstage more than twice in my life and it always felt odd. i reckon this typical office worker's attire was chosen for its eliciting anonymity, uniformity, seriosity and maybe also a sort of moral “righteousness.”
SB: Schimpfluch-Gruppe is one of my favorite performance art noise projects of all time. Can you introduce the project and your involvement in it?
dp: schimpfluch is different things. first it was a label initiated by rudolf eb.er at the end of 1987. marc zeier and joke lanz found a home there and me too some years later. we all lived in zurich and spent time together, were close; kin with our ideas, sentiments, outlooks, responses and ambitions. i met joke [lanz] first at gigs in the mid/late eighties. from the late eighties onwards i worked for recrec distro, which is where rudolf turned up one day with his first release looking for distribution. it was love at first sight. we all had our own musical projects but we’d also group together for performances or radio-shows in whatever constellation was good and/or available at the time. this then became schimpfluch-gruppe. others like daniel löwenbrück or alice kemp participated later on.
schimpfluch was defined early on as “therapeutic and/or actionistic. dealing with psycho-physical tests and trainings“ including audio, actionism, bruitism, performance, musique concrète, painting and installation-work, and deals with therapeutic and analytical actions and reactions of the psyche, the body, and of senses and realities of both the performer and the audience; in a radical, critical, but also liberating way; an attack on the mind as well as a stimulation of the senses.
schimpfluch-gruppe or schimpfluch commune int. is the name used for this collective in whatever constellation it chooses to appear, in public, in front of audiences or on record.
Schimpfluch-Gruppe in London, 2006.
Schimpfluch-Gruppe in Taipei, 1996
Schimfluch-Gruppe & Ganga Tzul rehearsal, Taipei, 1996
SB: What inspired the formation of the group and the performance work?
dp: joke and rudolf were quite inspired by viennese actionism, rudolf schwarzkogler, otto mühl, günter brus, nitsch, that lot. we were all inspired by the early industrial and punk/hardcore subcultures. underlying all of this, for me at least, was this wish to break free, to break out, to liberate, to be free from the confines and restrictions of what we call “civilization” or “normality.” creative expression as a response clearly has to do with the sociocultural/demographic surroundings one grows up in, and growing up in over-regulated switzerland certainly plays a role here, where a lot of control was exerted, freedom negated, life restricted and an unnatural stiffness prevailed. some topics were simply taboo. to respond to such a social austerity as the vienna actionists or whitehouse did is understandable to me. i mean, at this point of domestication the human being is quite like an animal born in captivity. civilization is a prison, a zoo. we feel this inherently as kids. our schooling system takes care of making that freedom seem like a distant dream and teaches us strategies that we might need to navigate these man-made prison systems, but not more. and so many easily forget or dismiss this freedom and ideology when they grow older, they think it’s a “childhood thing”, this then is mistaken as “growing up” or becoming an “adult.”
anyway, sentiments as these informed schimpfluch gruppe, and the “psycho-physical” tests and trainings we conducted had a lot to do with addressing/breaking down/transgressing such boundaries/restrictions in different ways.
we were all avid readers and a lot of literature played into this as well: burroughs, huxley, dick, hakim bey, desade, lavey, leary, chomsky, anarchists, dadaists, feminists, re/search, and the fanzine subculture were surely part of the picture—as were streams of philosophy, performance art, painting, photography, plastic arts, poetry, history, oriental wisdom, mythology, martial arts, meditation, music biographies etc. plus we were all networkers and tape-traders corresponding through mail with the world, which sure nurtured us too.
in schimpfluch performances such ideas were presented in concrete or abstract forms, depending on circumstances, and usually, but not always, included performance, sound, and a lot of humour.
SB: Was Fear of God and PK before or after this early period of Schimpfluch-Gruppe?
dp: fear of god existed from 1987 to 1988 so for me that was before. by then i knew joke. rudolf i met a bit later. i first participated in schimpfluch in some early ‘psychic rally’ radio show around 1989 or 1990. the first schimpfluch gruppe gig was in 1993.
pk included my friend tschösi, who was also in fear of god. he lived in the ägeri valley i grew up and lived in until 1988. pk was active from 1991 to 1993. we are still looking for some lost DATs that might result in a release one day...
SB: “Spaghetti Action” is a powerful Schimpfluch-Gruppe performance in 1996 for Experiences Festival in Paris. Can you talk about what happened here?
Link to video HERE
dp: rudolf and i sit at a table. we each wear a white shirt and black tie (and pants). an amplified mechanical clock is ticking for about 15 minutes. helena stands behind us holding a violin and makes it sound like a wounded animal every once in a while while we just sit still. on a table in front of each of us is a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce. under each plate there’s a button connected to a tape-player with pre-recorded schimpfluchian noise, which is triggered by pressure. after about 15 long minutes of sitting at the table, clock ticking, the occasional violin howl, us staring at the audience… i slam my face into my plate of spaghetti. triggered sounds burst out. the crowd cheers. i sit up straight again, face dripping with red sauce. the clock continues ticking; helena’s violin screeches. after about a minute or two rudolf slams his face into his plate of spaghetti. another schimpfluchian noise is triggered. and thus we continue, taking turns hitting plates with faces, the pace increasing with each slam. at some point we insert mics into our mouths to amplify our breathing.
so we have two guys slamming their heads into plates with spaghetti covered in tomato sauce like a game of ping-pong that is picking up speed. at some point rudolf falls over sideways off his wooden chair. the chairs have contact microphones all over them so it makes a racket. i then fall off my chair onto my side. so now, next to the forward movement of face-on-plate, is the sideways movement of butt-on-floor. all at an ever increasing tempo. witnessing this after 15 excruciating minutes of tick-tocking nothingness, the crowd goes crazy and starts participating. rudolf and i are slamming and falling away and before we know it, plates and spaghetti and chairs are flying all over the place. we had never quite worked out an ending to this piece. it was thought of as an endurance kind of performance where you repeat some movement until you can’t any more. it ended perfectly, in chaos and mayhem - i think it was all over after about 25 minutes. after we get off stage, catching our breaths, grinning from ear to ear, this guy walks up to us with a big bloody gash across his forehead. rudolf and i look at each other briefly in an alarmed “this is not what we wanted” kind of way, but then the guy grabs our hands, shakes ‘em, offers a huge smile and says something like “thank you, this is the best performance i’ve ever experienced!”
SB: Is it unusual for a Schimpfluch-Gruppe performance to unharness a political relationship between the audience and performer?
DP: a relationship is usually initiated—after all, a main trajectory of schimpfluch performances is to conduct “psycho-physical tests and trainings” for both the performers and the audiences. whether you call it political or existentialist, philosophical, inquisitive or otherwise engaging, is just a question of semantics… there’s often some form of social commentary involved...so, no, it’s not unusual to unharness a [...] relationship with the audience. it’s intended. audience participation or at least an invasion of the audience space has long been a part of the schimpfluch live experience.
Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Tokyo, Setagaya Art Museum, 10 oct 1997
SB: What other “psycho-physical tests and trainings” did Schimpfluch-Gruppe initiate?
DP: there was this one piece rudolf and i did in tainan, where in that particular time and space we experienced an... intense energy. to my mind it was very much a psycho-physical training. the energy was almost tangible; us and these people in that space at that time. but what did we do? and what exactly produced that “training”? i‘m not sure but a description won't suffice. loosely put, there was an intention of ours that we wanted to tickle the audience out of its comfort zone and passive role as “the audience”—trying to initiate participation of some sort.
there was an opening part that involved facing and staring at selected audience members close up, which didn’t work in the expected way–-it rarely does–but it did do something... there were our mouth-mics and the breathing, a piano played with the forehead, some eating, munching... but i think those details matter little. i recall rudolf and i arriving at the performance space in the afternoon and immediately feeling like we had to rework our plan for the performance. we were very inspired and excited. we followed a fairly detailed performance “composition”, but what happened there was much more than that plan, than those surface motions; more than our intentionality, more than just an audience not just being present but responding... i know this sounds corny but it was pure magic.
i’m reminded of the last gig on our australian tour, at the spectrum in sydney, where a comparable magic came together. one in adelaide three weeks before too. don’t ask me what we did. i know we had a plan; and a mono PA in adelaide, which at first enraged us— but... it’s this relationship with the audience and the space and the energy that comes together at that time; it is not down to the piece we perform or volume or time of day, though all these things matter too. it has to do with presence of performer and audience, intimacy [small spaces], trust, curiosity, excitement, open-mindedness, humour, tension, anticipation or whatever else is in the air, energies submitted by people embracing an experience/challenge, exchanging “something”; an immediate present freed of preconceptions, wanting to participate in an experience and willing to leave behind comfort zones and standards and maybe a certain level of sanity… and probably more…. these performances cannot be repeated…or described. it’s a celebration of life in a way. it seems somehow ungraspable in rational terms.
Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Bradford ‘1 in 12 club’, 15 nov 1996
SB: Were there any tendril projects between the members of Schimpfluch at this time?
DP: yes, vehikel & gefäss was one. schnäbi gaggi pissi gaggi was another involving joke’s then 4 year-old son, celèste. psychic rally felt sometimes like a band, although it was a radio show, but like schimpfluch-gruppe it had revolving members.
SB: Where did the road take you after this mid to late 1990s period of Schimpfluch?
DP: it started promisingly with schimpfluch tours of taiwan and japan, but then in 1997 i had a serious health issue, a back injury, and that changed a lot for me. during the long healing period i dove into making my own music more than ever. but i didn’t go on stage again until 2001, but then solo, for the first time. i’ve been pretty much focused on my solo stuff since. collabs and bands were always part of the journey but to a lesser extent. schimpfluch-gruppe continued existing, but by the time i played live again both joke and rudolf had left zürich and were living abroad.
Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Kyoto, 1997
Schimpfluch-Gruppe with Masonna, Osaka, 1997.
SB: Where did Joke and Rudolf go?
DP: joke was in london first for a while before relocating to berlin, where he still is. rudolf left for japan in 1997 and after an initial [visa-related] period commuting between japan and taiwan, eventually settled in osaka.
SB: Okay, I want to jump back in time to 1988 when you were in Fear of God. How would you describe this project and the early grindcore music scene?
DP: hm. maybe i start by describing ourselves. we were young and angry kids disenchanted with... many things... growing up in affluent, privileged and hypocritical switzerland in the 80s, many things that our society considered normal seemed restrictive to us, unfree, false, dishonest, taboo, stuck-up, pretentious, masked or otherwise... wrong... we also felt strongly about “change”; about being active and contributing somehow to that change. we loved music... in fact, we wanted to destroy music…
the word “grindcore” at the time didn’t exist yet and we were the only band in that style in our area, but there was a strong sense of community amongst befriended bands, labels, organizers, zines and fans; plus we were connected worldwide via tape-trading and networking. it was the time of “crossover” — so metalheads, crusty punks and straight-edge hardcore kids mingled in that scene. it all felt very fresh and open. the musical development of both metal and hardcore-punk at the time was very exciting too!
i recently wrote this in a preface for a spanish book on the history of grindcore:
“grindcore is as every genre-label, rather broad in musical expressions, there are diverse intentions, different stylistic choices, there's various roads that lead to it, and it is perceived in multiple ways. to me, grindcore is also about high energy, intensity, high tempo, over-the top-sounding voices and instruments, and precision, tightness. these elements combined create a kind of high, and it is a source of energy. the practice of high speed or short songs or other forms of concentrated intensity has to do with reaching, touching and crossing limits, exploring how far one can go – there's playfulness in that, insofar, an avantgarde spirit was naturally part of this movement, at least in the initial explosion that pathed grindcore. the high energy of grindcore can be understood as life-affirming/constructive, but also as destructive/nihilistic - as in reaching the end of music and in fact destroying it, as some acts wilfully exclaimed, which in turn can become constructive again as in to "destroy to build new.” often, in beautiful contradiction, it is a mix of both.
grindcore is born of a societal and/or political and/or existential disenchantment and a longing for a kind of grace or release or elevation, a way to turn negative input (of a restrictive society, or of disagreeable social or existential circumstances, i.e.) into something constructive, so it becomes in a way liberating, causing relief, even balance.”
Fear of God at Rote Fabrik, Zürich, 22 oct 1988.
SB: What are some ways in which Fear of God tried to destroy music?
DP: when fear of god got going the hardcore-punk and metal worlds were exploding and pushing into new areas, faster, deeper, gruffer, more extreme, more radical etc., and that nurtured in us the idea that music would soon meet its end: the end of music, as in “un-music”, “anti-music” or when it reached a “maximum.” we wanted to help music reach its end and go beyond it. pretty naive, especially considering that we were playing standard “rock” instruments and furthermore were hell-bent on playing “tight”... well, we were 16, 17, 18 years old then... the flyer to our first show read “is this the end of music?”... hahaha…
in our rehearsal barn, when we’d deliver a particularly ferocious version of one of our songs, we’d be tingling in awe as to its sheer brutality and somehow imagined that this could hardly be topped. when we recorded our first 7” we tried to go beyond any known rights and wrongs and create something musically utterly malevolent and repulsive. listening back to it, it’s pretty brutal for its time. not saying that we thus destroyed music... when we selected recordings for our live album called “as statues fell”, we chose the most atrocious and horrendous recordings we had to further make our point. i guess that kind of backfired, as, looking back, it seemed only to further our reputation...
SB: Fear of God formed as Erich Keller on vocals, Franz “Osi” Oswald on drums, Reto Tschösi" Kühne from Messiah on guitar and you on bass and backing vocals. Was the tape trading circuit at all responsible for this formation?
DP: no. tschösi and i played music together since i was 14 years-old. we met erich at gigs in the mid 80’s. switzerland’s small and the crowd for extreme music was small too at the time. you’d meet the same couple dozen faces at gigs all across the country. though we were into these subcultures and tape-trading and live-music and networking, we met and interacted in the flesh. it was 1986 that the spark happened that eventually led to fear of god.
the first line-up was not quite the above. the first incarnation was called “bunch of lies” or b.o.l. and consisted of tschösi, erich and me, plus nasty from exxor. there was an earlier incantation of “b.o.l.” too with thomas mölch, who founded record labels with erich. we played at least one gig under that monicker. basically we were learning how to play. the first fear of god line-up also consisted of tschösi, erich, nasty, and me on drums, opening up for napalm death in zug in 1987. soon after we met osi, who took over drums. i switched to bass and backing vox. and so the definite line-up of fear of god was born. i’ve recently published a recollection of those times, here: https://www.fearofgod.ch/stories
SB: Were you field recording in the late 80ss, early 90s?
DP: i can’t remember my actual first field recording, but i was recording “outside” from the late 80s on. since the audio cassette was how i was listening to music in the 70’s and 80’s, walkmen became a standard thing for me, and once recording-walkmen became available, i got one too. field recordings weren’t a main interest though until 1994 when i took my recording-walkman to thailand’s rainforests. that experience changed a lot.
SB: Can you talk about Fear of God’s performance in Hanau, Western Germany that hardcore fanzine subscribers voted as “the biggest disaster of 1988”?
DP: i wonder what fanzine that was...“trust”?, and i wonder how “disaster” is meant. if it’s meant as a “force of nature” or something akin, it goes well with my personal memory of that gig. that gig was a blinder, total annihilation, pure destruction... but maybe it was a little too much too soon for some...
SB: I first heard of it in an interview with Erich Keller published by Decibel Magazine and figured it came from ZAP or some other zine that never made it online. I like the idea very much!
Can you introduce PK and talk about its formation?
DP: PK consisted of tschösi, roger drein and myself. roger was a then-neighbour of tschösi’s. those two had been playing with ideas and other people, then i joined and things started developing… the act of creating, of playing, was central yet also subject to chosen parameters. releases weren’t considered, but documentation became an integral part of the project. parameters were topical—we’d choose an instrument type, or a mood, and a specific location for each session. a tape from the previous session being played back was part of the soundscape. within our chosen parameters, musical movements were never discussed. it was a ritual. a session usually lasted one side of a 90-minute tape
the tape being played back during our sessions never really sounded good on the recordings... but our sonic rituals fulfilled their functions just by having happened….i started digitizing our tapes a few years ago. let’s see if a document appears...
SB: What would happen during these ritual performances?
DP: internally a lot happened... session/recording locations were a cave, a kitchen, inside a driving car, a teepee, a concert venue with three grand pianos, a church, by the lake and so on. we’d use horns, pianos, kitchen tools, acoustic guitars, our voices, percussion, whatever. in the warm months of 1992 we did this nearly weekly.
we also did some studio works, we’d call ‘em “hörspiele” [radio plays]. one major studio work had us in our rehearsal space at the end of 1992 or 1993 for three consecutive days and nights, for a project called “tonkneten”, which translates into tone-kneading and clay-kneading (“ton” in german means both tone/sound and clay). we made six 10-minute pieces, three mixdowns each. the following year we got hold of 100 kilos of clay that we then shaped to our music. we had a friend photographer document it all, but no idea where those photos are. tschösi has his past boxed in storage all over switzerland. it seems near-to-impossible for him to find old tapes or photos—i’ve been hassling him for a while already.... haha…
SB: I would love to go through Tsoöchi’s storage piles! Was body movement a component to these performances?
DP: the rituals were expressed through sonic actions. we agreed on where we’d go and the instrumentation, and usually set off from there without further words. the aspect of ritual and trance within a chosen sonic language and setting was central to our idea of improvisation— soaring and reaching altered states of consciousness, creation in the here and now, and with physical instruments it becomes bodily. it did end up feeling magical quite often. but that didn’t necessarily translate to tape...
SB: Since PK was born just before you joined Schimpfluch, were there any other influences at play to inspire these earlier performance rituals?
DP: pk and schimpfluch-gruppe overlapped actually; the development of those worlds happened alongside. my collaborative efforts with joke and rudolf started around 1990. pk were from 1991 to 1993. my work for recrec from 1988 to 1994 was a major schooling in that sense, got me in touch with a lot practices of ritual, body art and performance; it’s where i acquired two lovely volumes on viennese actionism [we distributed books too, also re/search]. i remember the first marina abramovic vhs tapes i saw in those years. they blew my mind, as did the survival research lab videos. coil, psychic tv and other more ritualistic approaches to industrial and experimental music were fascinating to me. we were definitely inspired by the intimacy, social reflection and commentary that went with some of those notions. in pk we loved classical music. not just modern stuff but also late-romantic heavyweights such as wagner, bruckner, prokofiev, shostakovich and lots of film music. both schimpfluch and pk loved the high energy of extreme metal and of blasting hardcore punk, they played a role too....as did the wide world of cathartic noise music we were exploring... not forgetting fanzines... but what actually is an influence if not probably everything that reaches and touches us in one way or another...
SB: Which of Marina’s works did you watch on VHS?
DP: there were a few. i recall one in particular that touched me deep. she was brushing her hair forcefully and repeating “art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful” until her scalp bled…