Electric Indigo - Techno

Hello and welcome to the sound on sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Cara C and in this episode we're talking to Electric Indigo, a DJ, composer and musician based in Vienna who has performed in 45 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Electric Indigo, aka Suzanne Kirchmeyer, represents an intelligent and distinguished interpretation of techno and electronic music. A key figure in the ecology of international techno DJs, Electric Indigo has been rocking dancefloors since 1989, as well as working at Hardwax Record Shop in Berlin. In 1998, she founded the Transnational Female Pressure Network, which is how I met her around the year 2000. For a taste of Electric Indigo's music to get started, here's Ferrum 7 from her album Ferrum, which was released on the highly esteemed Editions Meggle label in 2020. So, Electric Indigo, very excited to have you on the Sound on Sound podcast today. Thank you so much, Carol. I'm super happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Cool. Well, yeah, we've known each other for quite a few years via our work, um, mainly through the Female Pressure Network, which we'll talk about in due course. But I think we're going to have to start with the timeline, which actually, I don't think you've ever told me in detail. So how did you even start as a DJ and then composer, producer, artist, and so much more? Well, uh, it was back in the 1980s. Uh, I was young and I like to go out and I like to dance a lot and I was already buying records back then and exchanging tapes with friends and, uh, listening to music a lot and enjoying music a lot. And, uh, in one of my favorite bars in Vienna, um, called Trabant, I saw, like, the usual suspects of Viennese nightlife, obviously just playing their favorite records. And I thought, well, I would love to do that as well, because I already had like a record collection. And I just asked the owners and They said, yes, let's give it a try. And yeah, so this is how I, how I started, uh, out as a DJ. Um, it was under, uh, yeah, very, very low key circumstances, um, They didn't even have like proper turn. Well, the turntables were proper, but they were not proper DJ turntables. They were belt driven and there was no DJ mixer. And it was really just playing like one track after the other with, uh, small intervals in between for changing the record. Anyhow, I had a lot of fun and then I got booked for like a proper club for dancing people. And back in, in the days I was playing a, what we used to call. Um, so it was like hip hop and funk and jazz, and it was a colorful mixture of, of records and leading me to somehow a dead end because at some point I was DJing for, for a year or so. So I. I got a little bit fed up with playing only old records from the 70s and, um, or mostly old records from the 70s and the hip hop records that came out in 1990. I did not like them as much as the, uh, the older old school stuff before. So, um, at some point. Uh, a DJ who worked in a record store called Black Market, like the, the London record store, actually, he showed me a record by DJ Rush, um, Sabre Records. And I was like, wow, what is that? Never heard something like this before. And to me, it felt like the essence of what I liked in, in dance music before or in music. I, I loved it. to dance to before. And that was like funk and bass and drums. And, uh, yeah, shortly after I, I also came across through the same person, DJ Gable was his, his artist name, an early underground resistance record. And then it was like completely clear because I was already a fan of Public Enemy, for example, and there was. For me, there was a strong relation between, between that kind of hip hop and early underground resistance records. So I got, I oriented myself towards the German techno scene because I saw a lot more possibilities there. And also I saw the better parties and I saw the better DJs there. And, uh, as soon as I made my first step as a customer into the Hardwax, uh, record store in Berlin, uh, it, it was totally clear. Okay. This is where I want to be. And I want to work at Hardwax and, uh, this is my destination. So to say, I totally knew 100 percent what, where I wanted to be. And it took a couple of years, but finally in 1993, I came here. I got the call from Mark and Estos, the boss of Hardwax, if I could do like a holiday replacement work in the, in the back room, um, packing mail order packages. I was in Vienna when I received the call and pretty much the next day. Here I am. That's, uh, why and how I moved to, to Berlin in, in 93 where I stayed for three years. And in these three years, like, They, like this work at Hardwick's Record Store, um, and, and being in Berlin around that time in the, in the first half of the 1990s, very much coined me as an, as an artist. So these were really important years to me. Yeah, your most formative years and a very, um, fertile time for the genre as well, wasn't it? So you were working at the shop and then playing in clubs at the same time and obviously becoming embedded into the Yeah, a funny, a funny, uh, biographical side note is when I left for, uh, Vienna for Berlin, I had completely run out of money and, um, I had to cover a credit card bill and had to take, uh, had to go to, to my bank and, Tell them, well, I don't have a job, um, and I don't have any money left, but I need credit to pay the credit card bill. And they asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, well, I will become a DJ, you know, a successful DJ. So time will come soon that I can pay. pay you back from my income as a DJ. And somehow I must have been convincing because they gave me the credit on that word, you know, brilliant, brilliant. And it happened. It's happened. Yes, it happened. And then did you start to produce your own techno as well at that time? Yeah, it's, um, it started as soon as I got involved in the, in the German techno scene, like people were really eager to. release music by me. I think they thought it was quite, um, um, I had some sort of unique selling proposition, uh, being this young woman with bald head, playing hard techno. You know, they thought that was quite attractive as a marketing thing. Uh, so I was. very soon asked whether I could make some music or do some music. So people were, were very like supportive and inviting. Um, and I started out making music in other people's studios. So I went to I remember one of the first studio sessions was with Richard Barthes for Disco Bee Records. Uh, same people who were the first ones who invited me to, to play as a techno DJ in Munich. In particular, Peter Wache aka Upstart, the owner of Disco B and one of the main persons in charge for, for the parties and the clubs where I played in Munich. And I produced one of the very early tracks with Richard Bautz. It was a split EP with DJ Hell, whom I was very close friends with. back in the days, or, uh, other people I collaborated with were Patrick Pulsinger and Adam Tunakhan from Vienna. And, uh, we recorded a record that was put out, uh, in, I think in 93, um, Experimental, which was a record label from New York, Damon Wilde's record label. if I remember correctly. Yeah. So, so I also went to the studio quite often with, uh, the people who were from Frankfurt Cologne area, Dr. Walker, Uh, and his jungle fever camp, I would call it. Um, since I, I traveled to New York really often and I also played there quite often as a DJ. Um, I was working with Khan Oral, uh, several times and we, we invented all these project names. For example, the Lozada sisters , because Ka lived in the, in the lower East side and the Hispanic population there didn't call it Lower East Side, but made it like a short, uh, word, lozada. So we were the lo sisters and yeah, it was. Very, very easygoing, you know, jam sessions in the studio, I turn some knobs and press some buttons to, to program patterns on drum machines. And then, you know, long sessions were recorded on, on digital audio tape and maybe just seven minutes or 10 minutes were. taken to be pressed on the, on the record. So it was mainly hardware, drum machines, synths. Exactly. Yeah. And a DAT recorder. That was it. And most of the times I remember it was a Mackie mixer. All in the reds, with heavy distortion and we, I love that sound. And then I think it was the late 90s when you founded Female Pressure. Could you tell us what that is and why you felt there was a need for it? Um, well, touring as a DJ and, and I, I did travel a lot and I did play like several gigs every, every weekend. Um, I encountered so many comments about my gender and me being a DJ and people being astonished or. Uttering these, uh, backhanded compliments on the quotation marks. Like, oh, you're really good for a woman . And, uh, I noticed that every female colleague of mine has experienced, uh, similar reactions. Um, that was one side. The other side was that I was regularly asked. about other female DJs or women who are active as artists in electronic music and club culture. So I got a bit, uh, annoyed. By the fact that almost every time I played out, I had to name other DJs, uh, my female colleagues. And you must imagine it's like 3 a. m. and I'm shortly before a DJ set and trying to concentrate or Just like after it and, and a little bit exhausted and happy and want to party or whatever, and it's late and it's 110 DB and it's really not the ideal circumstances for, deep conversations, uh, and, and exact conversations. And oftentimes I woke up the next day and, uh, and, you know, when you reflect on conversations you had the night before, you think of something that did not come into your mind, like when it was necessary. And I was like, how could I forget? I don't know, Monica calls it when they ask me about other, other women in the business. Anyhow, I felt the need to systematize my answers and I wanted to be able to refer to a knowledge resource, uh, that, People can access relatively independently from time and space at the same time in the second half of the 90s. It became totally obvious that the Internet is going to be like a very important medium. And I thought, Ah, it would be ideal to have an online database. Uh, of course, it took me a while to, to realize this initial idea. When Femur Pressure first went online, it was just a simple HTML list because I did not know any people who could program a database, an online database. But still, that's how it started. And since then, a lot has changed, but nevertheless, since the beginning, for example, I wanted to include visual artists, because I think club culture and electronic music is really like very, very Connected to, to people who make graphic design or who, who make video art that is being played in, in clubs or for music videos, et cetera. So from the beginning, it was not only DJs. Actually, it was also not only women or let's say biological women. So there was. It's not as explicit as it is now and not certainly not as reflected as it is now. But for me, female pressure was never about the biological sex. It was more about the gender or it was only about the gender. The reason why I did it is because people did not know about other women or hardly knew about other women. But nowadays it is. Has become a network of almost 2, 900 people from 85 countries. Most of the people like three quarters live in Europe. And the next biggest part is, I think, about 17 percent of the people live in, in the USA and in Canada. Uh, we are not only DJs, I already mentioned that, and music producers, but now we also include other people who are important for the infrastructure or for, for the whole scene. Like booking agents or some journalists or, uh, researchers, and oftentimes members of the network actually. have several professions. They are DJs, but they are also researchers, for example. Uh, and this is reflected in the database. What else is important? Yeah. How to become a member of female pressure is, uh, Is, uh, quite easy. You just have to send an email to info at femalepressure. net. And then I will answer. This is the current process. We're working on an update, but currently this is how it has been for the past over 20 years. I will answer with an email that explains what female pressure is about and what it is not because some people expect it to be like a booking agency and This is not something I can deliver. It also includes a couple of questions that I need to be able to create the entry in the database. I create the entry in the database and I send a member a login info. So theoretically, the whole database could be up to date. But as a matter of fact. Everyone, including myself, often forgets about updating, uh, the entry. So, yeah, that, that is the idea, and, uh, it, it grew to much more, we, we started to do special projects, and one of the most important ones, uh, is, for example, our FACT survey, where we've been analyzing, uh, gender distribution in electronic music festival lineups, um, since, uh, 2012. So we can look at data from, for, uh, already 10 years and analyze trends. And we just recently, well, this year in March, we published our fifth, uh, report and, um, also a lot of other projects. But I mean, yeah, the landscape's changed so much, hasn't it? I think there's so much more support for women or gender minorities, non conforming genders Kind of rise up or to emerge or develop at the same time as, um, I remember how important it was. I think I joined about 2000, 2001. And for me, it was the mailing list, really. It was, there was something as I was emerging, I was a fledgling artist finding my confidence, finding my sound, just knowing that there's all these other people doing it in their own way. There was something, it must've been a kind of support for you as well. It's so great to hear these individual stories. I love that. Because I, most of the times, I don't know how people get to know, uh, about female pressure. Or, um, uh, how, um, The effect is that, uh, the network has, it's, it's rare that I hear it from firsthand experiences. Um, and you mentioned the, the mailing list and I forgot to mention that because I think it's our most important tool. So it's, uh, for internal communication and often it's only like, um, news about artists that post like, ah, I have a new record out or new mixes online. But, uh, on the, it happens also that we discuss things. And, um, it, it's a constant source for, of learning for me. Um, yeah. And, I also would love to mention that female pressure over the, um, more than two decades has become intersectional in the approach of feminism that we do. So we have a very strong, uh, anti racist aspect now to our network. And I think that's really important. Um, as well as Uh, trans inclusiveness, and it's not always easy, of course, uh, and because there are so many people with different backgrounds and in different stages of their development, seeing that we include people from 85 countries, um, there is a huge language barrier, of course. Not everyone is. confident in talking about, uh, delicate subjects in English because not everyone's mother tongue is English. Uh, so yeah, there are challenges, but I think we, we navigate quite well. Yeah. And I think you realize there's real. diversity. We've had discussions about topless DJs. We've had discussions about loads of different things, but it's really interesting to see all the different views as well. Indeed. Yeah. Am I right in thinking that you've gravitated more towards experimental listening music rather than making music for the dance floor these days? Um, I'd definitely say so, but I would even state that, um, as It happened often in, in my career and in my life that I circumstantially, uh, had some, some turns in my career or turns in my attention or activities. And I was invited, for example, for the first time to play live. I was invited for, um, Festival called Here I Am, uh, in Vienna and the curator of the program, she put me together with a improvisation experimental avant garde violinist called Mia Zabelka and that was the first time to play live and it was not for the dance floor, but it was in a improv avant garde kind of context. So only in the, in the past few years, I have the feeling that the two strands of my musical activities, one being like the club DJ and the other one being making weird music, are coming closer together. Both ways. So in, in my DJ sets, I changed the techniques. I don't play with vinyl anymore, but I love to play with, uh, CDJs and I prepare my, my tracks on the, on the flash drive and I'm really a huge fan of, of these machines. Uh, so I, I'm able now to add really quite experimental or noisy stuff at times in my dance floor DJ sets with these like new, uh, possibilities that opened up to me through the modern CDJs. On the other hand, I'm now more capable of making my experimental stuff a bit more danceable, I could say. I'm still not finished in that process, and I don't know if I ever will. But, uh, Um, I feel that there is more potential of combining these two things in an original and meaningful way, which makes me quite happy because before that, you know, uh, there was always the, the risk of disappointing every side, you know, the, side to know me as a DJ when I play live. Ah, that's not as she DJs. Potentially. I mean, I never heard that explicitly, but I can imagine. So tell us about what you're doing. what your, some of your current projects are. I know that you were saying you've gone more modular. You were quite into granular synthesis at one point. Yeah, I'm still very much in, into granular synthesis. Um, just lately I combine it with super cute, small modular rig that I, uh, assembled as a, as a new set of instruments, actually. And I think it, it works quite well in particular live. Um, I did a couple of live sets recently where I played a new work that was just released on Venture Records. Um, called Brittle, and it's a composition from, I think, 2020 already. Uh, it premiered as a online performance a while ago, and finally now it is released. It's, um, yeah, the, the newest release of mine. It's a 30 minutes composition, and it has four parts, and It's quite experimental sound explorations. And I played Brittle Live, uh, in an extended version where I combine it with a few modules. Uh, and it's surprising how well it works together and how much fun I have playing that live because I go back to, to improvise when I play live and that reminds me of the old days when I first used to play live with my old gear, uh, where you cannot save or mostly cannot save any presets. And you have to either remember or write it down, but now it's a lot more refined. And I think from the reactions I get, um, I think it's also quite original. That's a great thing to get as a feedback that even if. Some people are maybe a bit startled because they cannot put it in easily in a category. Um, it's, it's a great feedback for me to have because that raises my artistic value in my own eyes. And is that all linked? Yes, actually I, I use, uh, I use Ableton Live as a mixing tool then, and I have parts of my sounds coming still made with granular synthesis from Ableton, and I have some live inputs and outputs, uh, connecting it with, uh, with a modular. And I also. Mix a little bit on the modular itself, but just for the internal sounds from the rig. Yeah, just recently added another cable so that I can use one of the modular effects, the Emitter Versio from noise engineering, uh, as an, as an external effect, it goes back and forth and, uh, to connect, uh, Ableton with the modular and to sync it or to, to make it play when I want it to play, I also use the CV tool, um, pack that there is. So I can send triggers and modulations sometimes to my modular. It's fun. I love it. And in terms of multi channel work, I remember you telling me that you'd won a prize in Austria, which meant you could buy yourself a very nice I think Genelec multi channel setup. So tell me more about how you're working with that medium. Yeah, I've been, uh, creating multi channel pieces for quite some while. Um, mostly without hearing what I was imagining because I did not have the speaker set up at home in my studio. And I, I'm on the Kunstpreis Musik, uh, which is like, uh, the second highest art award that the Republic of Austria has to give away. And that came in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. Uh, uh, yeah, that was, of course. super uplifting to get it. And I bought, uh, I bought six small Genelecs in addition to my two bigger Genelecs and stands. So I can, I can actually have like a eight channel surround setup at home, which is great. And I use that to, uh, specialize, uh, Ferrum. And since then, yeah, it's quite absurd. Uh, Brittle, the new piece that just came out on Ventile Records, originally was supposed to be premiered at, uh, the university of, uh, Arts University in Graz, Austria, where they have a dome with, uh, a extensive multi channel setup. But due to the pandemic, that plan got cancelled and it was clear it's going to be an online streaming premiere. So I did not even compose it for multi channel. I find it quite difficult to adapt a stereo piece to multi channel. It often does not really make sense apart from it can be nice to add some effects. For example, to have like two pitch loop 89 effects and a route one to the front channels and. The other one to the back channels and they are similar, but not the same. So you have some, some trippy delay effects, uh, immersive delay effects. That can be really nice. Uh, but other than that, I think it's a completely different thing to compose something from multi channel or for stereo. So since Brita was not composed for multi channel, but for stereo. Now I don't. perform it in, in multichannel. And I have not been using my sweet Genelec, uh, surround set up, uh, since, since Ferrum, which was in 2020. So what sound card do you prefer for your multichannel work? I always use the, um, uh, Moto MK4 because it has so many outputs and also, uh, eight inputs. Thanks. And that's quite useful for my purposes. Cool. I wonder if we can finish with a bit of information about any projects at the moment that you're excited about, any kind of future directions that you're looking forward to? Yes, yes, definitely. Um, I think I've partly already mentioned, like, how much I'm enjoying, uh, to play with my projects. really small modular rig. Tell us what you got. Let me have a look. I have, uh, a lot of fun with the Ultra Random Analog by, um, SSL, if I'm not mistaken. Um, I have the mutable instruments, uh, And I love to, to connect these two. So, uh, to have like random changes in the, in the pitch and random triggers. Uh, in particular with plats, I love the, the plucked, uh, strings algorithm. and the chords algorithm. This is really nice. The chords algorithm, that's extremely sweet because it adds a dimension to my usually quite dry music. Uh, it adds a nice harmonic dimension that I did not have much so far, but in a, in a sophisticated way. So it's not the usual arpeggio up and down, uh, melodic thing, uh, but it's different and I love to play with that. Um, then I have my favorite, uh, dual filter, the Chorgasmotron. I already mentioned the Imitor Versio delay, and I also love to route Just the, the noises, uh, from the ultra random analog into the delay and play around with that. Then I have, uh, the famous, uh, Bersimilus Inheritus Alter from noise engineering as well. A Döpfer WASP filter, nice, uh, double, uh, dual, uh, CVA that I can also use as a, uh, sort of submixer. I have a submix six, which is very useful for playing live because I can route both the dry signal and the signal into the emitter version. And then I have a quadrux filter as well. And a couple of multiples. And this is, this is like my current life setup. And I got a very interesting request from a very sympathetic label if I wanted to make a new album. And since I lost my, my last label, Editions Mego, Because unfortunately, almost a year ago, Peter Rehberg suddenly died. Oh, so the label won't continue? Well, they will continue to, to, uh, sell the back catalogue. And they did the releases that were already in the pipeline, but they won't do any new releases. And this is a huge loss, not only for me, but for the whole music world, I think, because it was so unique what, what Peter dared to do and was able to do because of the thing that he had built up. Very, very special. But luckily there are some other, uh, sympathetic, nice labels around. And I recently got a request whether I was interested. To release an album with them. And I am very interested and I'm very keen to elaborate in with the modular setup that I have here and use what I have here as some sort of limitation to, to make an album out of it. Fantastic. We have to finish there, unfortunately. All the best with continuing to grow your sound world, balancing it with your international professional DJing, as well as your advocacy work, uh, for women in electronic art scene. Thank you. Thank you so much, Carol. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information, as well as links and details of other episodes. In the electronic music series, and just before you go, let me point you to sound on sound. com forward slash podcasts. So you can check out what's on our other channels. This has been a Karo C production for sound on sound.