Music underground

Tonight is eXperimontags, a popular event at Berlin's small bar and venue, Madame Claude. It takes place every Monday, featuring improvised and experimental music. The furnishings of this former bordello are inverted - upside-down clocks, coffee tables and boxes of records nailed to the ceiling. The disorientating arrangement seems right for this evening, where in one corner a fellow with a Rasputin-like beard is hunched over a laptop. Sound artist and composer Thomas Zung, plays woodwind scores wrapped in the shivering tones of a Theremin, interspersed with retro sci-fi sound effects.

Madame Claude is one of a cluster of Berlin venues that supports experimental, improvised music - the original pasture of jazz. Jazz has enjoyed a strong tradition in Berlin, becoming wildly popular in the 1920s, just as the scene across the Atlantic was also beginning to jump. Persecuted under National Socialism, jazz in Germany was forced underground, only to re-emerge with a vengeance in the post-war period. By the 1950s, Berlin was hopping with bebop as jazz fans strove to catch up on the movements they had missed out on.

East German jazz musicians and fans were again struck a blow with the construction of the Berlin Wall, being separated from audiences and influences in the West.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 meant a wealth of new real estate was there for the taking - an incredible boon to the already thriving squatting community in the city's West. The abundance of space and next-to-nothing cost of living fostered communities of artists and musicians of all disciplines - performers, punks, jazz, techno, noise artists and beyond.

Berlin's thriving experimental scene may have its philosophical roots in the attitude of avant-garde jazz - but today, its artists' backgrounds take in all of these influences of the city's more recent cultural history.

Berlin's meta-underground

Tonight's main act at Madame Claude is the duo Cookie Wookie, which is improvising a set using a vintage drum machine, an abused turntable, and a homemade tape guitar - a device hammered together from a four-track tape machine, with a fret board of wood and bent nails that controls the speed of the machine's motors. Their sound is a hallucinogenic mash of woozy pitch-shifted tape loops, clashing samba beats and static-frosted orchestral samples, punctuated with harsh stabs of analogue noise.

Klaas Huebner, owner and creator of the only tape guitar in the world, I'm told, is 32 and has lived in Berlin for the last 10 years. Educated in pork agriculture, Huebner says that Berlin's creative history attracted him to the city. He describes Berlin's experimental underground as a vibrant and inter-disciplinary community where industrial noise artists rub shoulders with classically trained jazz musicians, and venues and audiences support new ideas.

"I had an interest in, let's say - 'strange' music anyway, but where I come from is a small village and I didn't get any input. It's like if you want to ride a skateboard and no one else does - no one is going to show you stuff. I was interested in that stuff before - but here I was doing it," explained Huebner. "And people gave me a space to play; they gave me attention. Now I also do music for theater pieces and without that experience I never could have done that."

Making money or art

The Berlin state government has recently announced a proposal to remodel the existing system of funding for music. While funding is currently decided on by panels of artists and journalists, it would in the future be in the hands of a broader popular music panel comprised of industry representatives. A coalition of jazz and experimental musicians has founded the non-profit organization IG Jazz Berlin to find out more about this nebulously defined proposal, which they say would place a much greater emphasis on commercial viable music projects, to the detriment of art projects that may not sell to the mass market.

As a self-taught and sporadically collaborating duo, Huebner and his Cookie Wookie partner, Ludwig, have never sought state funding for their work. But Huebner recognizes that larger, more ambitious projects in the improvisation scene may lose out if a new funding panel prioritizes efforts that are already financially independent.

"If we talk about the jazz or avant-garde scene, I think for them it's hard," he said. "For me, everything I learned I taught myself, so if people say my music sucks, I don't care. I never thought anyone would like it anyway. I do it for fun, but if I succeed with it and people like it, that's great. If you take it as a job and you see yourself as a serious musician, then I understand that they have problems."

A snake shedding its skin

Free jazz saxophonist Ignaz Schick, who relocated to the German capital in 1995, is deputy chairman of IG Jazz Berlin. He stresses that IG Jazz has been founded to lobby for the interests of independent musicians while a restructure is being proposed, not to fight an existing plan or oppose any changes.

Schick sees the influx of international musicians in Berlin as a welcome by-product of the city's reputation for supporting underground art and music - a reputation he feels should be matched by state support for larger-scale projects. While for most of his career he has supported himself and his collaborations, he has also been involved in larger projects that have needed funding in order to be realized.

Yet the saxophonist is generally positive about the ability of Berlin's creative community to adapt to new challenges, noting that the jazz and experimental community managed to regroup after some 400 squats were closed in 1998 and 1999. Gigs were moved to living rooms until new spaces to play were found.

"In this period there was more dogmatism between the scenes - you were either free jazz or you were an electronic musician, or a reductionist or a singer-songwriter," he explained. "So there were all these kind of drawers, and it was harder to move between these drawers."

But, added Schick, these days you can play jazz one day and noise the next - "there's much more tolerance and interaction between those different drawers."

And since it's had plenty of experience adapting, the experimental music scene will make it through the current funding discussion.

"Berlin is like a snake which is always taking off a layer of skin and growing a new skin underneath," said Schick. "At the moment, it's a phase of trying to make sure that all these kind of non-commercial art music have a space, and are still thought of in terms of art - not in terms of economics."

Schick and his non-profit organization look forward to contributing to the proposed restructure when the Berlin Senate meets in January 2012.

Author: Daniel Bishton
Editor: Kate Bowen