Hi folks!
Without much preliminaries, here's the rest of the interview, and two hours of music (please note that the ambione intro and the final two tracks of the radioshow are not by me...as far as I remember...maybe dear Timothy did confuse them...or just needed additional music (don't understand his Russian announcement...)
Who else…? I once imagined to send tracks to famous musicians so they can contribute, and then the whole thing is released completely anonymously (quite likely I will never do that…or if I did, no one would contribute, so I can tell here some of the people who were “on the list”):
Jan Garbarek, Kate Bush, Wolfgang Tiepold, Massive Attack, Mike Oldfield, Robert Fripp, Nils Petter Moelver…in other words: every musician I mention on my mypsace page…and actually still much more - I definitely have a big heart when it comes to music…
Finally, of course, I’d love to work with
Klaus Schulze, also: www.myspace.com/klausschulze, - as You know, among all those hundreds of excellent musicians, he’s my chosen hero and biggest inspiration (at least in the field of electronic music). For many years he had a side project named “Wahnfried”, where he did collaborate with different musicians, sometimes popular, sometimes rather unkown (Jörg Schaaf, for example, was one of them…). It would be the one big thing for me to produce another Wahnfried-album with him. Of course, this idea is on the same level as…I don’t know…becoming tzar of russia. Completely beyond my reach…but it’s still a wonderful dream.
AF: -Can you say that ambient is a music of underground, for some blessed people who understand this kind of music or it is a wide opened music style for anyone?
“It’s a narrow, but important part of human articualtion (or expression) and will in the first place be cherished by a limited audience with the corresponding sensibility…”
To my experience, this is completely true for ambient music as well. And in an interview,
Robert Rich said one year ago:
“I doubt that experimental music of any kind will ever have the chance to be a big commercial success…”
I know people who love ambient, people who enjoy to listen to it from time to time, people who think it’s boring and simplistic, and people who can’t bear it at all. Who’s right and who’s wrong?
If a person loves death metal, he might ask: “Is death metal only for some blessed people who understand this kind of music…”?
But I dicussed that already in question 8. I just like to add that an interesting inspiration while thinking about the reasons for different stylistic preferences is the theory of prenatal matrixes as suggested by
Stanislav Grof a psychologist and consciousness scientist from Poland, who later did move to the USA. But to intruduce that here would be far beyond the scope of this interview…
AF: -If you will have any chance to change your present situation in music, maybe to change your music preferences, what style will it be?
MB: -It would be wonderful to be independent in material matters and have the freedom to concentrate completely on art (but again, this is a wish similar to recording with Klaus Schulze or becoming tzar of Russia…). The first thing I would do were to buy equipment for live performances, to start to rehearse more and give concerts.
Since I already work in several “styles”, You could expect “more of the same” from me, just better - at least I hope so...
On the other hand, as I wrote above, I see a conflict between electronic music and my “green” ideals, so if I really had a lot of money, I would try to find a way to produce something like ambient with acoustic instruments like hangs, sound bowls, gongs, pipes, singing saws….but to really put that to practise I’d need some kind of ensemble, or even orchestra. Maybe in the end it would be something similar to a javanesian gamelan-orchestra, I don’t know…
But all this is far, far away, and to say the truth, it’s quite more likely that my poor equipment will collapse completely one day and I won’t produce any more music at all. Maybe then, I will turn back to writing (something I did earlier in my life) or painting or pencil drawings. Or finally do some sports, which would be good for my health.
Time will tell…
Interview taken by Tim Traum special for Ambione Foundation (2009)