EXCLUSIVE: Martin Birke interview

Martin Birke was one of the first artists that I interviewed when I started writing The Gonzo Daily all those months ago. Now his band, Genre Peak has a new ambient album imminent, and so, on the last day of May, I spoke to him again....

JON: Tell me about the new album

MARTIN: ‘9 Microspheres’….Basically in 2009 after I had finished Genre Peak’s second album “Preternatural”, which was big production, big electronic, big 24 track with percussion and bass and everything, I talked to my friend Steve about doing an ambient album because I said I needed a break from the constant programming and just the whole ordeal of doing a big, big  vocal album. So I just gotten a new Pro Tools LE studio system for my house, so as part of learning it – you know learning the engineering of it – we got together and basically started doing these ambient pieces. 

Steve is a former student of Robert Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists that I think happened around 1985,  and Steve is also a really talented  guitar synth artist and he can generate these incredible environments and loops with a midi guitar and what’s really nice about the guitar synth is that there is something about the midi tracking on strings that gives you more control and a lot more organic sound over the strings than you would with a normal keyboard synthesiser, so Steve being very good at what he does just kinda started recording these pieces and he would layer loops on loop s and it would be very ethereal and calming. 

And  we’d put on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and we would watch that with the volume turned down and we basically recorded for about a week watching various Kubrick  movies with the volume turned down, and we  found it really inspiring, you know, Kubrick being the master that he was.  And so each piece started to have its own unique sound to it.  Granted they are all kinda on the dark side, but each piece sounded quite different from the last and after about – I think we did about just under two weeks of tracking - I picked about ten of the tracks that I really liked and just kind of cut them, shortened them, played with them, added effects here and there, reverb sounds, clicks and groans and stuff like that and it just really turned out to be very great and magical and I was really proud of it.  So we released it under a different name and these were different mixes from the new album, and we released in 2009 on iTunes and that was that.  

We didn’t have a CD pressing, we didn’t really promote it and that was that.  But over the years I was looking back on it thinking “Wow these are really solid ambient tracks, I really like this and this was some of the most fun favourite stuff I’ve ever done”.  So I think about last year I told Steve let’s give this a proper release maybe Rob will release it through his label.  So I first went to my old German label which is an ambient label and they liked it but for some reason didn’t want to release so struck out there.  So I sent Rob a couple of tracks and said, “Look,  I know ambient music is really hard to promote and it’s even harder to sell, not a lot of people are into it, you know. Unless the hard core Brian Eno fans out there”. But we had the songs remixed and we had them mastered very properly.  It’s one of the loudest masters I’ve ever heard. At 20 dBs it is huge. There’s this huge headroom, I think it is because there is no drums or symbols or anything fucking up the headroom. So Rob said OK let’s do it as a digital release, which I was very surprised and I was like “Wow really?”  Nobody wanted to touch this stuff, but Rob is a good guy. A real patron of music. 

So I talked to my friend Dan and he designed the  artwork on the digital booklet and then we decided that we wanted to do a small CD pressing just to have a physical copy to hand out at shows, and to send out to magazines, you know, just on a small basis. And so we pressed up a couple of hundred, and they turned out really nice and it was very cost-effective. And we just got the CDs about two weeks ago and they’re up for sale on the Genre Peak website right now. And I think the digital release through Gonzo will probably  hit stores …. around July I think.

JON: I thought it was the end of June, but I can check.

MARTIN:  But, you know, sometimes it takes a while for the stores to get it. That’s just the way distribution goes.  But anyway it should be out digitally very soon. And that’s basically how it came together. And we decided to make it a Genre Peak album just to go along with the rest of the Genre Peak and showing that the idea of Genre Peak is no two albums sound the same so I thought that  by putting out an ambient album that would be a nice twist to – a nice contrast to – the rock and electronical stuff we have done in the past.

JON: Was this your first go at ambient music?

MARTIN:  Seriously, yes.  I had been in bands in the ‘90s.  I was in a band called Sandbox Trio where we toured Germany and we did kind of improvised ambient always with some type of mild rhythm to it.  This is the first time I said I don’t want any percussion on this record – no drums at all. It was really fun for me to find alternate sounds that would take the place of percussion sounds, like we would sample a fence being scraped by a stick,  put a big reverb on it and place it in the background, you know, all washed out. Record scratches I would stretch out really long and reverse them and put them really far back in the background. I have these back-rigged bells that were very silent and had this kind of "zzzzzzp" sound on the second track called ‘Lunar’ , which is like my favourite track, and it was really kind of fun doing sound design so yes this will probably be the first time that I really,  seriously did something purely ambient, because I am a drummer before I am anything else as a musician so doing something without drums was really fun. 

It was really challenging and I’ve always loved ambient music. I have a really big collection that I use to help me sleep with.

JON: I’ve just finished reading, about 15 years too late, one of Brian Eno’s books in which he talks quite a lot – his year’s diary with a lot of essays added - in which he talks about the philosophy of ambient music, and I found that quite interesting.

Yeah.  One of his albums is called ‘Neroli’ and I believe it came out in ’93 and from what I understand, it is basically a tonal exercise, I am not quite sure what the correct musical term is where you’re just playing the same seven notes over and over again over 15 minutes. And he plays them at different tempos so it’s not always the same da-da-da, it’s daa-daa-daa, but it’s the same seven notes and there is a science to it that I think composer John Cage came up with but it’s actually really fascinating. It’s very meditative, very relaxing.  I’ve read that they used to play it in hospitals where the new born infants were because it had a huge calming effect on them.  I’ve always really, really liked Brian Eno; I’ve really liked his ambient work and I really like the ambient work that David Sylvian did with Holger Czukay back in the ‘80s.  They did an album called  ‘Plight and Premonition’.  That was one of the best ambient albums, and one of the most exciting sample sounds I’ve ever heard. And that’s what really got my attention of how exciting ambient music can be. You’re working with these textures; you usually have the bass tone of some type that goes throughout the piece and on top of that you put short-wave radio and string samples, and loops and pianos, but it’s such a collage of sounds that for me it never gets boring. It’s always a different listen each time I hear it. Yeah, I’ve got a big, big love for ambient music.  Unfortunately, I’ve never marketed or tried to promote ambient music before so it’s kind of new for me to try to find out who to send it to, to just try to get airplay.  Or if there are communities out there – I am sure there are. But I’m just now starting to do that.

JON: I don’t know either, so it’s a  journey for both of us.  Tell me when you find these communities so I’ll be able to know who to send things to.

Absolutely.  I found a magazine called Relevant that does electronic and ambient only.  I think they are based in Florida.  I sent them a press kit and new album and a request if they’d be interested in a review and stuff, but I’m hoping to hear back from them.  But I’m just now starting to investigate on line all these ambient magazines and ambient communities.  And they are out there; I’m just trying to be selective to try to find out the right ones because ambient doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.  I found out that there are types of minimal electronic music with decent percussion that is also called ambient, or trans-ambient. Ambient means a lot of different things. When I think of ambient I think of Brian Eno. You know, I think of no drums, just environments and moods.

JON: But people like Aphex Twin his stuff is also described as ambient when it is, basically, dance music.

MARTIN: Yeah, I’ve got all of his albums and I noticed that on his Selected ambient work Volume 1.

JON: Which is fantastic…

MARTIN: It’s really amazing. This guy is just an amazing musician to begin with. But I notice that a lot of his ambient stuff is with and without percussion and sometimes it is very up-tempo.  Like I said, ambience is a broad blanket for what I would consider to be a lot of different types of music. I don’t really consider ambient music with drums and percussion.  That’s just me though.

JON: So what are you going to do next?  What’s the next thing?

MARTIN: Well right now I am working with Steve Jansen, who is David Sylvian’s brother, and we’re working on a remix of ‘Wear it Well’ which is a Genre Peak song I did with Tara C Taylor and the late, great Mick Karn.  And so I am very excited because I’ve always been  a fan of all the members of Japan and now I’ve got two out of the four that I’ve worked with.  I don’t think I’ll get to David Sylvian but it’s really exciting that his brother is so willing to work with me.  And he’s a monster musician. Steve Jansen put out an album last year, or a couple of years ago, called ‘Float’ that was just fantastic. I mean, this guy is not just a drummer, he’s just this amazing composer, he’s a computer programmer, he’s a designer, he’s an artist, he’s a singer, he’s really an amazing guy and I was really flattered that when I put the word out to him he was into it. So I’m very excited about that.  

And I’m working with a new singer called Charlie Woodworth who was popular in Germany in the ‘80s and ‘90s in two bands, one called The Guys the other one called Stinx  and Charlie, I think he also toured with La Toyah Jackson; one of the Jackson girls anyway.  But Charlie sounds just like Jon Anderson, I mean every time I hear his voice, I’m like ‘Dude, you sound just like Jon Anderson’, so with his high tonal voice we are working on two songs for the next Genre Peak album which will probably be the final Genre Peak album.  I’ve been doing this project for almost ten years and I get restless, but I think it will be really neat after having Percy Howard who is very baritone and after having Tara Taylor to have Charlie sing because his voice is so unique and it’s more of a soprano range. And I am a Yes man, I like Jon Anderson so I don’t mind that he sounds like Jon Anderson.

JON: That sounds great.  I look forward to hearing it.

MARTIN:  Yeah me too, we are going to start tracking two songs next week with my friend Chris Cooper who has  produced all the Genre Peak albums.  So that’s what we are up to. 

And we are doing our first live show in six years on June 21^st here in Sacramento so it’s going to celebrate the release of ‘9 Microspheres’ and I was lucky enough to get Percy to do all the vocals, Steve Sullivan to do the synth, I’ll be doing the electronic percussion and my producer Chris Cooper will be playing guitar. And that’s the best we can do considering the other half of the players are all spread around the world.  I never thought we’d be able to do a live show again, but I was really surprised they were willing to take time out of their schedules  to help me do this. That’s going to be a real hoot.  And of course we will get it videod and get lots of photographs.

JON: That’s what I was going to say.  Video it and get the best recording you can of it and then I will pimp it unmercifully on the weekly magazine.

Excellent.  I know this opportunity is not going to arise … you know just doing the scheduling for rehearsing, because everyone’s in other bands and very busy with work and everything that we can only do two rehearsals so it’s really up to me to get all the sounds and sequences and direct everyone so we can have something that is very cohesive an d tight and professional.  Some of these songs are just so complex that we have to pre-record a lot of the background instruments because I can’t hire all the people to come over here literally for a small show and its a small club where I play all the time that I play all the time - Luna's in Sacramento - where they play everything from acid jazz to electronica to ambience – it’s a really great place to play here in Sacramento and I love playing at Luna's so that’s going to be a real hoot and I’m going to – I’ve just this morning telephoned a professional photographer whose a friend of mine and also a videographer to see if she’ll come out and do us up good.