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On:
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Sunday 17th August 2008
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At:
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Love N.Y.C (US) [map]
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From:
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6pm-4am
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MANUEL GOTTSCHING (LIVE)- JOE CLAUSSELL - SLOW TO SPEAK
Love N.Y.C
179 MacDougal St.
New York, NY
With Manuel Göttsching's return to New York City's Club Love this August 17, 2008, the division between live performance & club programming will be challenged with new zeal as the founding member of Ash Ra Tempel & musical pioneer will perform alongside DJ's Joe Claussell and Slow To Speak, representing the cutting edge of NYC's DJ community. Under the auspices of a revitalized assault on the divisions of cultural production that have comfortably settled like dried concrete in every dividing line of modern social fabric, these three have taken it upon themselves to liberate music from the dungeon of irrelevance in delivering it back to its rightful throne of social transcendence & communal social property---a commodity only in its participation in the production & exchange of passions and dreams. Recognizing escapism as one of the last truly revolutionary acts of our time, Göttsching, Claussell & Slow To Speak share a common conviction, albeit arrived at from three radically dissimilar paths: that psychic journeying through sound must be undertaken with underlying purpose, lest it stink of the putrid smell of indifference; that with the convening of this event, at a club no less, the intention, the care in realizing this intention, must be especially unyielding, careful not to perpetuate the very separations of society that would, in this particular context, only reach perfection with the centralizing and accenting of these under the setting of false communal ritual. If the very obstacles that make it so difficult to establish real connection are gathered together & collectively delivered up to the heavens, would not the promised land become just another wasteland of alienation?
Thus, resolute in overcoming these challenges in carefully crafting a night of psychedelic exploration and musical risk-taking, these three pillars of truth and righteousness in sound prepare to converge in challenging the very dynamic of performance and art, spectacle and participation, in hopes of demolishing the established division between performer and audience. A meaningful experience guided by the careful hand of musical adventurism is what Manuel Göttsching, Joe Claussell & Slow To Speak have always strived for independently of one another, sharing a common goal that lies at the heart of any sincere proprietor of music. As the hierarchy of spectator and spectacle must be demolished in our society, so too must these men with whom we entrust our experience resolve to abolish this separation, beckoning their audience forward into the free space of festival & participatory dialogue, communal interplay & social transcendence. Come forward, not as you are, but as you desire to be; but more important than anything, translate this desire into reality.
MANUEL GÖTTSCHING :
Born in 1952 of an educated middle-class family, Manuel Göttsching grew up in the strange cultural milieu of post-WWII industrial West Germany. Training at an early age in classical guitar, whose formalist rigidity he would soon abandon, he soon developed an intense fondness of the broadly appealing and unprecedented sounds of 1960’s counter-culture music, rock mostly. At the age of 15, Göttsching joined with classmates Harmut Enke & Klaus Schulze in conceiving the musical collective Ash Ra Tempel. While it appears their original intention was to produce in a similar vein as much of the contemporary psychedelic rock popular among youth at the time, their aesthetic composure, methodological precision & theoretical foresight (and at such an early age) gave birth to an entirely new edifying enterprise whose roots spread across the German and international cultural landscape, a sound and aesthetic we now know as “Krautrock.” What made Ash Ra Tempel so remarkably unique at the time was it’s purifying effect: the ability to appropriate elements of rock, avant-garde, classical and jazz and sonically channel their most entrancing elements into the common stream of individual, collective and social release: a sort of musical ablution that testified to the dialectical sublimation of vastly eclectic traditions only conceivable in the vacant, uninhabited cultural space of a nation still hesitant to even utter the words “national identity.” The personality of Göttsching, his quiet, reserved and complexly theorized approach contributed to the formulation of early landmark releases “Ash Ra Tempel” (after which Klaus Schulz left the band), “Schwingungen,” and the psychedelic staple “Seven Up,” featuring, among other guests, the stream-of-conscious ramblings of psychedelic godfather and pioneer, Timothy Leary.
Acting as the central anchor for a number of different collaborations throughout the mid-late 1970’s and 1980’s, including the establishing of his own loosely centralized group, Ashra, Göttsching established a musical form that embodied the sporadic and unmapped expanses of the subconscious territories of the mind, stretching out a specific chord structure or melody and elevating it into the domain of the indefinite, repeating and refining the notes until they no longer held isolated significance, that only in the performing, reworking and experimenting with these melodies did the actual act, the performance and the lived experience that comes before the composition of music be embedded and embodied in its form. With quintessential releases such as ‘Shuttlecock’ & ‘e2-e4’, the latter of which became a cult classic among underground dance music circles in the United States and abroad, Göttsching built a legacy of music that had a mission as much as a sound, a theory as much as a practiced expression, a definitive, sophisticated aesthetic that framed and structured the free-form expressionism of his technique. That Göttsching remains a humble shadow in the backdrop of the indulgent panache of modern musical stardom and personality cult demonstrates that the man behind the Ashra has never been much interested in the fame and fortune that comes along musical popularity. To this day, Göttsching continues to perform his psychedelic form with equal enthusiasm as the early days of his career, eager to disseminate his music to as many willing listeners as he can reach, confident that his sound wields the same unique power to the willing listener as it did close to 40 years ago.
JOAQUIN JOE CLAUSSELL :
In the vibrant multicultural landscape of the 1970’s & 1980’s New York club culture, a time when records were legitimate cultural capital and when the relation between DJ, producer, dancer & club enthusiast were blurred beyond recognition, a young man by the name of Joaquin ‘Joe’ Claussell was just beginning to come into his own. Intrigued by the eclectic range of dance music being championed by the legends of New York club programming, the Brooklyn native subsumed himself in the niche of record amassing and DJ culture, and it was in this circle that he quickly made his home. By the early 1990’s, Claussell had linked with the owners of the East Village record store Dance Tracks in forming the early NY House outfit ‘Instant House’, which went on to gain international acclaim and stood at the forefront of cutting edge deep house productions of the time. The approach Instant House took was advanced further into maturation by Claussell as partial owner of Dance Tracks, determined to remove dance music from it’s self-imposed stasis in resolving to compliment it’s own specific sophistication with aesthetics ranging from the organic structuring of African folk music, the intricate orchestration of Salsa & Latin Jazz, other-worldly dabblings of avant-garde & ambient electronics to the hardened, minimal funk of Detroit & German techno, breathing new life into the soulful house circuit in revitalizing the unrestrained eclecticism of early NY dance music.
By the mid-1990’s, with the closure of clubs such as Club Zanzibar & the Sound Factory, institutions that seemed to carry the torch of the Garage & Loft era onwards into the new decade, NY club culture seemed uncertain of its future and seemingly exhausted in its range and diversity. Just as the trivializers of dance music seemed to have won an exclusive audience, Claussell linked with legendary disco-era DJ’s François Kevorkian & Danny Krivit in founding the Sunday weekly Body & SOUL, resolved in continuing the forward-pushing trajectory that has always comprised the life-blood of NYC musical cultures. Simultaneously, Claussell established the exclusive label Spiritual Life Music, releasing his own productions as well as a vast range of others and legitimizing the (other)worldy aesthetic of the new generation of house productions, following the simple guideline that every facet of the musical spectrum should be given equal voice under the all-inclusive banner of the dance aesthetic. Both enterprises were a massive success, attaining unrivaled status among NYC party people as the embodiment of the new aesthetic, and with Claussell’s worldly palate, the landscape of underground house music has been rearranged and re-cultivated permanently. With the eventual closure of Body & SOUL and Spiritual Life Music came sadness, but also new beginnings. Sacred Rhythm Music has been established in the latter’s wake to continue highlighting the increasingly abstract organics of Claussell’s productions, while he continues to DJ globally while never abandoning his true home of NYC. His passionate disposition and radiance in playing the music he loves continues to be the torch in the darkness leading those of misconstrued perception to the truly honest enterprise of authentic musical appreciation.
SLOW TO SPEAK:
Born of founders and exclusive creative overseers Paul Nickerson & Francis Englehardt, NYC-based collective Slow to Speak was created out of a shared & resolute philosophy: that within the very medium of sound, and exclusively within this medium alone, holds the lost key to social and spiritual transcendence. Recognizing the absolute necessity of self-determination in creating a truly independent institution of creative consolidation and exposition, ‘Slow to Speak’ has established a connected autonomy that allows them to operate outside of the uncertain tide of transitory taste while avoiding self-relegated isolation and unaffecting obscurity. It is in this balance that they have settled, and from this launching-point they have birthed ventures ranging from their exclusive label & production outfit ‘Slow To Speak’ to the establishment of Brooklyn’s own occult bookstore & esoteric record haven, Dope Jams.
In a time when lived experience seems to be increasingly supplanted by the domain of the abstract, as the surprise, the unpredictable, the funky is stamped out by the harsh foot of a prewritten script whose story seems easier to follow by the day, ‘Slow To Speak’ fights for the spontaneous, the mysterious, all those elements of the unknown that makes discovery and rediscovery the lifeblood of any cultural enterprise. ‘Slow To Speak’, far from a simple institution of musical creation and exposition, is a social movement, one that aims to reshape the very conceptualization of music and sound. Music is not a backdrop, a side-thought, a separate, isolated sphere of inconsequential affect that sits conformably alongside the other divisions of culture: this is a chief lie of our age, one that needs to be combated with absolute militancy and resolute determination.
And so, in silent, calm composure, the keepers of chaos sit, quietly meditating upon the metaphysical while their feet sit firmly planted on the warm ground, awaiting the right moment to act: the revitalization of communal ritual, social transcendence through sound, the synthesis of intellect and emotion that maintains the proper balance of human Spirit. There was once a time when speech & music weren’t differentiated, when the song told the story and when the word hummed the most sublime melody…this time has not come and pass, it remains, calls to us as we walk through the crowded street, beckons us as we stand alone in the club, whispers to us as we read the newspaper. It is this unification of the message, the social project, and its aural manifestation that ‘Slow To Speak’ humbly strives for, and it is in this mission that they are fully committed. The universality of common desire can only find wholeness under the banner of musical gathering and rejoicing, and in explaining our common fears, joys, plight, sorrows and aspirations through the language of music lies our most profound hope for social and spiritual liberation.
EVENT : MANUEL GOTTSCHING, JOE CLAUSSELL & SLOW TO SPEAK LIVE
DATE : SUNDAY AUGUST 17TH, 2008 : 6:00 pm
LOCATION : CLUB LOVE N.Y.C. 179 MACDOUGAL ST.
ADVANCE TICKETS : AVAILABLE @ DOPE JAMS. 580 MYRTLE AVE. BROOKLYN, NY.
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Flyer:
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Region:
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International
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Music:
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Psy Trance. Commercial Dance.
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DJ's:
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Manuel Gottsching
Joe Claussell
Slow To Speak
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