OPERANT [IOD] Feature & Premiere.
PREMIERE: OPERANT _ DEAD REALITIES VIII
Berlin based duo OPERANT are renowned for their enigmatic and compelling live performances, self described as existing in a 'unique realm, passing between power-electronics, industrial, techno and dark ambience, exploring themes of gender, body morphology and its ability to be altered through violent reconstruction.' Their presence in the Berlin scene is irrefutable with their label Instruments of Discipline growing from strength to strength, with releases from UNHUMAN, Swarm Intelligence, Ryuji Takeuchi and Ancient Methods. Check out their most recent release on the label here: OPERANT 'HARNESSED TO FLESH'.
MOTZ catches up with the duo about the birth of OPERANT and IOD, their collaborations with Joey Blush, their gruelling tour schedule and what they're listening to at the moment.
Q1. Could you enlighten us about the formation of Operant and IOD?
A: Luna and I had been making sonic experiments pretty much since we met, we would plug in machines and try different configurations with them. When we started living together an intimacy developed that led to an atmosphere where you feel deconstructing prior ideas about sound, identity and composition. I come from a band/song-writing background, I know for me it was a strong intention to pull apart my notions of music in this sense while still trying to use my compositional skills to cajole these chaotic sonic experiments into form, trying to retain the important and potent ideas from an hour long recording that might be edited down to five minutes long. We recorded everything that we tried out, just having a lot of fun, plugging stuff in when we got home from parties and nights out etc. Through a process of collage and the improvement of production skills, things started to come together quickly. When you meet someone you have a musical connection with - in terms of taste - you tend to influence each other quite potently, you discover a lot of new music that inspires you and if you can harness that initial inspiration, music just flows out.
L: IOD started in Rome in 2014, I had been wanting to start a label for a while and around that time Luciano Lamana approached me with the Mai Mai Mai/Lunar Lodge EP, it seemed like a perfect fit and we decided to do a co-release together with his label Love Blast, I did the artwork for the cover and everything started from there. I moved to Berlin shortly after. When I got back from the U.S, I had been moving around Europe and I was having a hard time finding myself at peace in a city so I came to Berlin on a whim. Berlin is not the most beautiful or friendliest of cities but I felt a sense of freedom here; it is spacious and people give you space, there is an open mindedness about different lifestyles and people coming from different backgrounds, there is definitely more respect for women here than many other cities in Europe, and also, obviously, the music scene was unbelievable. So I stayed and this is where the label took form and began to evolve. I underestimated how difficult running a label was going to be, but so does everyone who starts a record label, otherwise they probably wouldn’t start one, being a woman, there is also the added difficulty of some people not taking you seriously and at times having to fight harder than other people to be heard, though there is still some underlying misogyny in the music scene it feels like things are changing for the better. August took on a more full-time role a bit later when things really started to get crazy. I’m super appreciative of all his help and it definitely makes it easier having someone to share the ups and downs with.
Q2. We had a listen to your sonically apt release out on 12th February, can you tell us a bit more about this release and your collaborations with Joey Blush?
L: The title is taken from a Susan Sontag book, it felt like an interesting perversion on BDSM thematics, I will often read and mash up sentences from books lying around at the time to inspire lyrics/vocals/mouth sounds, I ended up using some of her words for ‘Be A Boy’ which deals with the struggle of being assigned a gender at birth and the life you are dealt as a result. Since childhood, I always thought the gender moulds were bullshit, so these particular words from Sontag resonated with me, this also relates to the notion of being a piece of consciousness trapped in a body, this is a theme that definitely recurs in our work, a yearning to destroy these boundaries in a personal and a spiritual sense.
A: Each release is snapshot of a period of writing together, late night sessions or when we get the inspiration to plug everything in, each track starts out as one simple idea that is then massaged to fruition, to me these original ideas generally contain a shadow element within them and a lot of the writing process is about very subtly altering elements within a track until the shadow is revealed; with the first track it is the sci-fi pads in contrast to the live-recorded, distorted layers, with the second track it is the extremely contrasted industrial drums that, in a narrative sense, destroy the fragile intimacy of the first half of the song, this male element that wants to overbearingly assert itself, with ‘Dead Realities VIII’ it is the ‘Book Of Revelations’ - drone-outro attached to a bang-your- head-against- the-wall, rhythmic track.We have known Joey for years now and have had some fun adventures together, heal so helped us mix and produce ‘Zero Knowledge’. He’s always been very supportive and enthusiastic about Operant, he has a genuine curiosity and interest about sound, music and the perspective of other artists, but also has an ear for keeping things direct, vast and powerful. He contributed some modular sounds for the first track and touched up the mixes on the others for this EP and we spent several hours talking about conspiracy theories in his studio in Friedrichshain.
Q3. ZK-II_004 is a personal favourite of mine, intertwining visuals and sounds constructing extra dimensions. Described as “a short film scored by the Industrial Noise soundtrack which includes found footage depicting medical procedures, interstellar visitations—and violent military intervention drawing from abstract parallels between the unfolding of history and the balance of political hegemony.” What is the inspiration behind this ideology?
A: It comes from simply observing the world, this huge eruption of irrational forces through the global psyche, all the obvious things like Brexit and Trump really destroyed the consensus reality of a stable ideology, holding up the Western world. I like this Marx quote, paraphrased that ‘History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce’, it’s hard to believe how unbelievable reality has become, whether it springs from concerted disinformation campaigns by think tanks or simply a saturation point that is reached by every single person having so much access to information and so many conflicting points of view. It seems like we are living in a time when there is no linear narrative that we are sharing. The video switches between news footage of drone strikes to UFO sightings, to CGI surgical procedures and in a way, this is an allegory for experience but it is also the literal experience of most people throughout the day - our feeds/troughs are full of playful animals and violent trauma and they all follow each other seamlessly. This is so counter to any kind of evolutionary preparation, we are left swimming in this schismatic sea of information and while it can be terrifying, it can also be revelatory, because at a point, the person in charge, in your head, simply signs out, they have no method of making sense of what is going on, and there you are left with only pure experience, the video has no clear intention. It is the manifestation of this idea of Zero Knowledge, not creating the idea, but creating the space for the idea to manifest.
Q4. IOD has been around since 2015, has there been noticeable differences inthe current scene since then?
L: It was an exciting time when we moved to Berlin, the scenes were starting to merge a bit more with darker more obscure genres getting played in the bigger techno clubs. At the time Blackest Ever Black was one of my favourite labels based here, I think they influenced the club sound with a particular aesthetic of dark ambience. One of the first shows I saw here was Puce Mary at the closing of the eNKa venue, seeing her mix power electronics, hypnotic ambience and the intensity of her performance was extremely inspiring to me at the time.
Being in such a prolific and productive scene, a lot of the friends I made were starting their careers and were super open and inspired, everyone was feeding off each other and it all seemed very new and fresh, there was a great chemistry going around. The scene now I think lacks a bit of that fluidity, I think it has started to become a bit saturated, a bit comfortable, there is fetishisation of a certain sound that is hard to shake. It feels like ‘club commerce’ & DJ culture is homogenising things a bit, forgetting about the fragile nature of vision and communication, of music as art and expression, music as subversive imagining, as a raw and violent act.
It’s important to not get stuck in a rigid mindset or nostalgia. I’ve never been a genre-purist, I’m more drawn to innovation and adventurous sound, it’s important we keep experimenting and pushing boundaries, to keep the scene interesting, this is why I try to push live shows with the Instruments Of Discipline nights as for me live music can transcend the familiar and touch something more powerful, that can change the fabric of the mind, I am tired of hearing that predictable sound that we all recognise when we go to clubs, it needs to be, at least, perverted, or at best, destroyed and reimagined. This feeling is definitely shared by the people I respect, I think we’re at a turning point, or the end/beginning of a new cycle which is exciting, people are becoming hungry again for intense, live performance, not just dance floor oriented music.
Q5. I noticed that Operant had a gruelling tour schedule recently, how do youmanage touring alongside running the label and producing?
A: We were offered to play some shows with Kollaps who were coming over from Australia, Luna was super excited but I was a little hesitant as I was terrified of how we were going to juggle everything. We signed up for a few shows, then a few more, then it didn’t really make any sense to skip the last few, as logistically, it was going to be more disruptive to try and come home in between dates so we just decided to do the entire thing, all twenty five shows.
Berlin is the perfect home base for a van tour through Europe as you end through there often, that gave us a chance to send off a bunch of label orders once or twice, we tried to do as much work in the van as possible, carsickness permitting, you end up in these absurd situations that are marked in your memory for life, in the space of four days you can be playing a small show in Krakow that ends with someone’s bass guitar being smashed and an extremely drunk Swedish man rolling in puddles of beer and broken glass, contemplating the tragedy of the holocaust at Auschwitz, getting sodomized by the police at the Bavarian border, then playing again to an extremely passionate crowd in Bratislava, time and space take on a whole different dimension, you begin to feel the proximity of Europe in your blood, it’s no longer just a series of capital cities on a map, it’s a thread or a gradient that gradually shifts. While it can be a lot more difficult to make things work with money, it’s damn real.
Q6. Instruments of Discipline has an eclectic catalogue of artists ranging fromB 1 0 0 2 to UNHUMAN. What is your selection process and what does 2018 have in store for IOD?
L: There is no real order to it, I choose releases from friends, from artists I meet, very occasionally from demos sent in, I don’t follow genre specifics because I don’t want the label to be perceived in one particular way. We have a lot coming up, we just released a new EP from Ryuji Takeuchi, another more techno release from WarinD, a young Italian producer and friend and collaborator of BR1002, an EP from Iron Sight, Isak Hansen from The Empire Line’s solo project, Homo Agent’s second EP, a 7” release of noise-punk outfit Cunt roaches, who recently played at CTM, a V/A with a lot of cool artists that we are going to be releasing in collaboration with a friend’s fashion label Soderbergh for the packaging/merch and also if this goes live beforehand we are putting on a live night at Urban Spree to mark the release of Unhuman’s LP and a few more releases which I will keep hidden to retain some mystery. So, yeah, another busy year!
Q7. From listening to your music and also the label it appears the both of you have very diverse and intricate taste in music. Who are you listening to at the moment?
L: Of course a lot of the artist on our label. A lot of stuff from Posh Isolation, Opal Tapes, Total Black, Hospital Productions….Right now I’m into Moor Mother, Shacke ,Niki Istrefi,The Body, Stave, Giant Swan, Danny Brown, Headless Horseman theseare some of the many names that continue to captivate me with their unique approach to music. Occvlta and of course, Kollaps, who we toured with, are some of my favourite live acts at the moment
A: Just picked up Entertainment’s new EP ‘Club Liaison’ on Total Black, Halv Drom’sEP from last year ‘Petroleum Hydromancy’, Ciarra Black’s ‘Pendulum’, Viscerale putme on to some of the more industrial stuff from Speedy J, ‘Punnik’ & ‘Pannik’, SØS Gunver Ryberg’s ‘AFTRYK’ and ‘Diary Of A Taxi Driver’ has been and remains my Berlin soundtrack.
Make sure to catch the Instruments of Discipline who are holding a showcase tonight in Urban Spree.
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