The proliferation of minimal house and techno over the last decade has gone largely uninterrogated by majority of the communities currently consuming it. The wind shifted several years back and what began as hermetic exercises in reductionism for “those who know,” caught on as a popular aural aesthetic. One only need look as far as the expanded palette of numerous globe trotting DJ’s in recent years or the inter-continental proliferation of festivals such as Mutek which suggests the propagation of minimal electronic music has not been entirely tied to consumptive after hours economies. Most encouragingly perhaps, is the fact that locals as diverse as Argentina, Mexico, Canada, and Australia are all nurturing waves of distinct and sophisticated producers to compliment and challenge clichéd notions of German hegemony. It is certainly not the goal of this piece to determine if Berlin is the centre of this musical universe or not, rather to gaze back into the rearview mirror in an attempt to garner a better understanding of some of the undercurrents at play within the present. To a pair of uninitiated ears, minimal house or techno probably sounds like the bastard child of Steve Reich and Donna Summer. It is no accident that the majority of writing on this subject traces the roots of this style back to minimal or process musicians of 1960s New York1 by way of Detroit and Berlin as a ports of departure.2 Instead of digging back this far musically, this investigation will use two series of records from 1996 as starting point. These series are Cologne based Wolfgang Voigt’s Studio 1 and Windsor/Detroit’s Richie Hawtin and his Concept 1 records. Although other producers in America3 and Germany4 made significant contributions to the minimal “sound” by the mid 90s, these particular series of releases broke new ground as comprehensive projects and that is the focus of this article: these records considered as “sets” rather then strings of EP’s. These projects have had a lasting influence and considering the current popularity of minimalism in house and techno perhaps some insight can be gained by revisiting them. In the mid 90s Wolfgang Voigt earmarked a new alias, Studio 1 to join his myriad of project specific pseudonyms. By this time, Voigt had developed a roster of identities which included the densely orchestral ambience of Gas, and the drone-pop techno of Burger / Ink. Voigt had also nurtured outlets for more stripped down explorations of techno and house though his Profan label, which served as a parent label to the new Studio 1 project. The first of the Studio 1 records was released in late 1995, and it would set the tone for the entire series. Within these records, arrangements are spartan and focused on essentials. Discussions of rhythm, don’t do the groove generated by these tracks justice as on the right PA they seem to shimmer with a tangible pulse. Resolutely skeletal frames are fleshed out with voluptuous baselines that justify the nod to Kingston dub culture and provide a visceral foundation for jagged syncopated tones. As much as these tracks provide a perpetually relevant model for krautfunk, they seem to propose an alternate understanding of the spirit of Chicago; a distilled version of house music. The Studio 1 releases were Green, Blue, Yellow, Light Blue, Purple, Orange, Pink, Red, Silver, and Gold.5 They were released between the tail end of 1995 and beginning of 1997 (with two later releases attributed to the project moniker popping up on Profan and Kreisel). The tracks were all untitled, so they could only be identified as Blue 1, or Red 3, forming a polychromatic suite of modular music. By the mid 1990s, Richie Hawtin was already a household name within electronic music. The success of his Fuse and subsequent Plastikman project, and prowess as a forward thinking DJ had cemented his status as a global tastemaker. A late 1995 run in with US customs officials, barred him from performing in America for an extended stretch and Hawtin used the downtime to meditate on and refine his production, yielding the Concept 1 records. This project ended up acting as a diary of sorts for Hawtin, with a new release being issued each month, the twelfth of which included a box to house the entire set. These records were a vehicle for Hawtin to respond to the new-school minimalism prototyped through the Chain Reaction, Basic Channel, the M! imprints. As much as the Concept 1 records can be described as part of the ongoing call and response relationship between Detroit and Berlin, there is definitely something quintessentially motor city about the project. While listening to the Concept 1 releases one can’t help but imagine these spacious, delay soaked rhythms reverberating within the Packard plant. This feeling of splendid desolation saturates the entire body of work and it almost seems as if the Concept records infected the Plastikman project, as subsequent albums felt like they were recorded to be listened to in a transitory space like an airlock, or perhaps a moribund airport lounge in a monochromatic near future.
[Sol Lewitt / Incomplete Open Cubes (detail of 'index') / 1974] Now that a quick schematic impression of the Studio 1 and Concept 1 records has been developed we can look to visual art as a backdrop against which to read these key moments in defining a nascent style. Specifically, two projects by 1960s conceptual/minimal artists Sol Lewitt and Ed Ruscha will be examined and used as ciphers to reconsider these records. It is hard to initiate a historical conversation about minimalism or Conceptual art without invoking Sol Lewitt. Throughout his career he has managed to levy a sustained assault on notions of authorship, craft, and display in the fine art world. Lewitt emerged into the New York scene in the early 1960s with a series of skeletal wall grids and modular cubes. These works were their structure, skeletal space frames speaking of uniformly divided space, simple tectonics, and often dispassionately displayed on a flat two dimensional grid. Lewitt expanded this discourse with the Serial Project #1 (1966) where he began considering these objects as indexes of possible construction, articulating volume as wireframe structure or solid, and considering permutations of boolean intersections of these two states. Lewitt would begin a playful reconsideration of the systems of order he was exploring with 1967’s 47 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes and these investigations would be perfected with 1974’s Incomplete Open Cubes which catalogued all possible permutations of “incomplete” cubes. The project has been described quite succinctly by Pamela M. Lee as being devised by '...a paradoxically simple plan: a complete investigation into how one might not complete the form of a cube.'6 This work is displayed as a complete index of 122 incomplete cubes, each with an accompanying drawing, and each categorized in a schematic drawing which acts as a legend to the installation. Lewitt’s work is perpetually relevent and it has been recently re-canonized by digital artists/theorists Casey Reas and Lev Manovich.
[Ed Ruscha / Twentysix Gasstations - Self-Publication / 1963] The second project to be considered is Ed Ruscha’s 1963 artist book Twentysix Gasstations. The text is a linear sequence of documentary style photographs of service stations on Route 40 between Oklahoma City and Los Angeles. The book layout and typography is non-descript, and since Ruscha was not a trained photographer the images themselves had an unremarkable quality to them. Several thousand copies of this text were printed, and at three dollars each the endeavor certainly critique the commercial aspect of displaying and selling art. Ruscha weighed in on the project as follows: 'I am not trying to create a precious limited edition book, but a mass-produced product of higher order. All my books are identical.. what I really want is a clearcut machine finish.'7 Like the Duchamp championed readymade the work was an object of the world, one which spoke to alternative distribution methods and economies. Ruscha would produce several more of these publications over the following decade and these investigations would catalogue parking lots, Los Angeles real estate, his LP collection, and most famously, every building on the sunset strip. So how can we use Ruscha and Lewitt to read the Studio 1 and Concept 1 releases? Furthermore, what can be gained from this investigation? A good means of answering these questions is to turn to some of the criticism penned about (or by) Lewitt and Ruscha in which three predominant themes can be identified. These are reduction, materiality, and recomposition. |
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