Before the release of Eric Bauer & Carina Khorkhordina, Zhu Wenbo did an interview with Carina Khorkhordina by mail. Eric Bauer and Peter Cusack joined in some answers, too.
Zhu: I know that you were from Russia, playing trumpet and taking photographs. In 2018 you have visited China and we have played together. And I also know that Eric Bauer plays electronics but only that. Beside these I think I know very less about two of you. So the first question is, would you like to introduce yourselves?
Carina: I come from Kaliningrad, Russia, but I’ve lived in Berlin since 2014. I got very interested in free jazz and improvised music around 2009, in 2010 I visited some festivals (in St. Petersburg and in Nickelsdorf, Austria) and realized that I found something fundamentally meaningful and exciting (the music itself and the people who played it). I wasn’t a musician at all, only a listener, I never played any instrument in my life. Then it happened that I organized some concerts in Russia for Paal Nilssen-Love, Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark and other friends. I also bought a clarinet and started playing with my close friend in Kaliningrad because I felt that in order to understand the music better I had to try it myself. I didn’t have an ambition to be a musician and perform in public. Later in Berlin (I was already playing trumpet then) I regularly attended workshops with Joel Grip and Tristan Honsinger, and in 2017 Daichi Yoshikawa asked me to join the concert of the band Klub Demboh, which was my first public performance in Berlin. After that concert to my surprise and fascination different musicians kept asking me to play local gigs, so one thing was leading to another. That’s also when I met Eric and he asked me to have a duo session. And yes, I still do photography which is also the background for the site-specific outdoor video pieces we made together later.
Eric: As my second name suggests (farmer) I’m from a small village in Germany, roughly between Frankfurt (Main) and Cologne, and am located in/around Berlin since 2016. I come from various music backgrounds, started as a kid with turntables, tapes and radio - then guitar, drums, later piano, mostly self taught. Daring to play solo was just in 2014, which actually was the first time I concentrated on electronics exclusively and with compositional approaches only. My practice of Improvisation got an extensive schooling in the Berlin music scene, in many ad hoc encounters, more steady formations, but also workshops with Tristan. Carina and I met in a big ad hoc ensemble of danish and berlin scene, where Tristan and Emilio Gordoa conducted each one set of the ensemble, I think after that I asked her for a session. Besides my various music backgrounds I work as a social worker, primarily in the field of autism, and studied politics, sociology and philosophy. The reason I mention this, is that I feel strongly that those fields inform my artistic work and vice versa.
Zhu: You and Eric started these site-specific out-door performances in 2020. Why did you start this project? How many events did you do til now, and how often did you do that? Is this project still going on?
Carina: Initially I wanted to do a collaboration with Axel Dörner and Burkhard Beins and it was connected to my photographic series about Berlin that I’ve been working on since 2016. I invited them to play outdoors in the locations where I took certain photos. In this case I wasn’t going to play because to be honest, back then I didn’t feel ready to perform with them in a trio. It was in 2018, we made one video where the two of them play in the forest in Berlin (it can be found on my website). Then we tried to apply for state cultural funding to continue, but we didn’t get it. By 2020 I was more confident and had more experience as a musician and I also got a new digital camera which I could use for filming. In October 2020 Axel, Burkhard and I got together again and played in an abandoned swimming pool. This was the first piece, soon after that Eric and I recorded in Grunewald, a beautiful forest in the west of Berlin. There are 9 published pieces and two more are coming (filmed in two very different waterfalls).
The reason why I started doing it is that I felt the need to connect my different activities - photography and music, I didn’t want to always keep them separate. For a while I wasn’t happy as a photographer (it is different now, but it’s been a long way), but I didn’t want to abandon it and only do music. So I was trying to find ways to bring these practices together. I’m also working now on solo concepts for live performances which involve my video work or photography and playing the trumpet. The first solo performance happened just two days ago here in Berlin and I thought it worked very well.
Zhu: Could you tell us the process of a normal preparing for a site-specific event? Will you spent a long time on choosing the place or doing some test before? What kind of place will you choose? During an event, how long time will it take? And would you public the event and call for audience?
Carina: In most cases I had a location in mind that I discovered on my walks in different areas in Berlin (for the photographic series I mentioned earlier). In case of Mercedes Platz piece Eric suggested the location (which I loved). I never did any tests before. Sometimes there are 2-3 takes in slightly different positions in the same area. With the lake video it was kind of ideal, we only filmed one take of 5 minutes.
I had an idea to invite audience at some point, but it never happened. Maybe it’s not the best idea in the end. It takes a while to set up the equipment and find the right way to film, adjusting a lot of details. Then everything has to be done relatively fast also because of people around and potential complaints, changing weather and things like that. There’s not really much room to take care of the audience and make sure they feel comfortable. I feel it’s more intimate without audience and maybe I prefer it in this case.
Getting to a location might take more than an hour. Walking around and figuring things out could be another hour. Performance itself another hour, and then getting back…
Zhu: I think I know these site-specific performance for some years. I think it is very funny and friendly to normal audience, which is different to most of the other ‘serious’ improvisation concert. How do you think about the sense of humor from it?
Carina: Humor is definitely very important in most of these pieces. Also in the duo’s work (our “normal” performances on stage, too) it’s quite crucial. The band I mentioned earlier, Klub Demboh, and especially working together with Tristan Honsinger (who unfortunately died recently) and Joel Grip gave me a lot of inspiration in this direction.
Zhu: I’ve also noticed that, your video has very good sound. What kind of recording and camera gears do you use? Is there someone specially focus on recording and film during your performance? And do you have some tricks on microphone setting to out-door recoding?
Carina: Thank you for the compliment! In most video pieces Axel Dörner recorded the sound. He used a pair of Neumann microphones and an older digital recording machine Nagra until last year when both of us bought the Mix-Pre recording machines from Sound Devices. They work really well. I have exactly the same Neumann microphones and together it just produces amazing sound, to my ears at least. To be honest, I don’t have that much experience with recording but normally I followed my intuition and the results have been mostly good. On this tape, I recorded the Mercedes Platz piece and the Peter Cusack soundwalk piece.
My camera is actually not ideal for video. When I bought it I was confident I would never get into video, I was only interested in making photos. So I didn’t even check the video specifications. There were some technical issues that I had to overcome, which led me into buying wonderful manual focus Minolta lenses from the ’70s which produce amazing color.
Zhu: The side B is your performance of Peter Cusack’s piece. Maybe you do not know that Peter has visited China nearly 20 years ago (maybe 2005) and his projects in China opened the ears of some experimental music and field-recording lovers in that days. Would you like to introduce Peter’s work that you were performing?
Peter: Hi Peter speaking. Carina and Eric played during two soundwalks (not really a piece) in the Bornholmer/Pankow neighbourhood of Berlin created, together with Czech artist Dagmar Šubrtová, for the Parallels Festival in October 2022. The idea of a soundwalk is to specifically listen to the environment where you walk. These walks (entitled The New Wilderness soundwalks) focused on the sounds of three different green spaces located next to each other. One is a garden area, another a cemetery and the third, Das Nasse Dreieck, a wilder place, formally part of the Berlin Wall, almost surrounded by busy railway tracks. It is very local, used by dog walkers and neighbourhood kids plus a few homeless people. Nature is allowed to find its own way. Plants are a mix of original and invasive species and there is a good variety of wildlife, particularly birds. One hears trains, wildlife, children, dogs, wind in leaves, people’s voices and the sounds of Berlin in the distance. I asked Carina & Eric to play here as a sonic surprise for those on the walk and those passing by anyway. They played while hidden amongst trees and sometimes in the open. People really appreciated it and the way their music affected listening to the environment as a whole.
Zhu: Do you think if the site-specific permanence brought any influence to your performance/recording in room?
Carina: Absolutely. The idea of working with space and including the space in which I’m performing - through movement, actions and sound - is very present now in my concerts.
The core idea is the transformation (of the perception) of the space through the music and the transformation of the music through the space. So there is now an ongoing feedback between my outdoor site-specific performances and the “normal” concerts in the room.
在准备 Eric Bauer & Carina Khorkhordina 二重奏专辑期间，朱文博和Carina进行了一次邮件采访。Eric Bauer 以及 Peter Cusack 也进行了补充
朱：我知道你是俄罗斯人，吹小号，也是一位摄影师，2018年来过中国，我们曾经一起演奏。Eric是一位电子乐手，除此之外关于你们我不了解更多了。所以第一个问题是，你愿意介绍一下你们自己吗？
Carina：我来自俄罗斯的加里宁格勒，但从2014年开始住在柏林。我在2009年开始对自由爵士和自由即兴发生浓厚的兴趣，然后在2010年去了一些音乐节（圣彼得堡和奥地利的尼克尔斯多夫），发现了一些在本质上很有意义并让人兴奋的东西——音乐本身以及演奏音乐的人。那时候我还不是乐手，只是一个听众，这辈子从未演奏过任何一样乐器。后来我有机会在俄罗斯组织了一些演出：Paal Nilssen-Love, Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark还有别的朋友。我也买了一支单簧管，开始和加里宁格勒的好朋友一起演奏，因为我觉得要更好地理解这种音乐就得自己来上手试试。那时候我并没有野心想要成为一名乐手做公开表演。
后来在柏林（那时候我已经开始演奏小号了）我经常去参加Joel Grip和Tristan Honsinger的工作坊，然后在2017年Daichi Yoshikawa邀请我加入Klub Demboh的乐队演出，这是我在柏林的第一次公开表演。这场演出之后，很让我惊喜的是，很多人会邀请我去不同的地方演出，然后事情就一个接一个地发生了。也是在这时候我认识了Eric，他邀请我做一个二重奏。我也在拍照，这也是我们后来做的户外特别地点的视频项目的背景基础。
Eric：就像我的名字的中间名（Farmer）所暗示的那样，我来自一个德国的小乡村，在法兰克福和科隆之间，2016年开始在柏林那边住。我有很多的音乐背景，小时候捣鼓唱机、磁带、收音机，后来是吉他和鼓，再然后是钢琴。主要都是自学。2014年鼓足勇气演了独奏，这也是我第一次专注于电子设备与作曲的方式。我在即兴方面的实践来自于在柏林音乐场景里的广泛的学习，包括各种临时组合、固定组合，还有Tristan的工作坊。
我和Carina是在一个丹麦/柏林的临时大乐队认识的，当时Tristan和Emilio Gordoa指挥他们的作品。之后我邀请她一起演奏。在我的音乐背景之外，我还是一名社会工作者，主要领域是自闭症方面的工作，并学习政治学、社会学和哲学。我之所以提到这一点，是因为我强烈地感觉到这些领域为我的艺术作品提供了信息，反之亦然。
朱：看介绍说，你和Eric是在2020开始了这个在特别场地的户外演奏的项目。你们为什么会开始做这个项目？你们做过多少次，大概的频率是怎样？它还在继续吗？
Carina：起先是我想做一个和Axel Dörner与Burkhard Beins的合作，并且和我从2016年开始的关于柏林摄影系列有所连结。我请他们在一些我之前拍过照片的户外地点演奏。我没有想要演，坦诚来说那时候我没有做好准备与他们做三重奏。那是2018年，我们做了一个视频，是他们在一个森林里演奏，视频可以在我的网站看到。之后我们想去申请国家文化的资助，但没有成功。
到2020年我更有自信了一些，做为乐手有了更多经验，有了一台可以用来录像的新数码相机。2020年10月，我们三个一起在一个废弃的游泳池演奏，这是我自己参与的第一个作品。后来Eric和我去Grunewald演奏，那是柏林西边的一片美丽的森林。现在我的网站上已经有9段录像作品了，还有两个待发布，都是在瀑布录制的不过是不同的瀑布。
想要做这件事的原因是我觉得我需要将我的两个领域——音乐和摄影——进行连接。我不想让它们一直是彼此分离的。有一段时间我做摄影师做的不开心（现在不这样了，但曾有很长一段时间是这样的），但我又不想放弃它只去做音乐。所以我想要找寻一种方式将这两种实践连系起来。我现在也会做一种独奏现场，我吹小号，但也会有我拍的照片和影像。两天前这个项目在柏林第一次演，我觉得演出很不错。
朱：通常，这样的一次活动你们会有怎样的准备流程？你们会花很长时间来选择演奏的地点，预先进行考察，然后为演奏进行准备吗？你们会选择怎样的地方来演奏？每一次的演奏活动会持续多久，会有观众来看吗？
Carina：通常我会对地点先有一些想法，因为我在柏林的很多地方走路（前面也提过，我有一个关于柏林的摄影计划）。梅赛德斯广场（注：收录在磁带里的一首）是Eric建议的地点（我也很喜欢）。我不会提前去做考察测试。有时会在同一个地点换几个不同的角度录好几个take。在湖里的那个视频是比较理想的，就录了一个take，5分钟。
我曾想过邀请观众呢，但没有实现过。可能总的来说这不会是一个好主意吧。架设备还有选择正确的拍摄方式都要花很多时间，会有很多的细节调整。然后整个过程都比较快，因为旁边可能会有人抱怨，天气会变化之类的。不太有能力还去照顾一下观众，让他们也感觉舒服。没有观众会让我感觉更亲密，我比较喜欢这样。
通常要花一个多小时去一个地方。然后再花一个小时在那走一走，准备一下。演奏录制本身又是一小时。然后是回程……
朱：我很早就关注到你们的这个户外演奏项目了，我觉得它很有趣，有时有点好笑，很让人亲近。这和很多的即兴音乐项目不一样。对于这其中的幽默感，你们怎样看待的？
Carina：在大多数视频里幽默感毫无疑问都非常重要。在我们的二重奏作品里（包括那些“正常的”舞台演出）也是这样。我前面提到过的那个乐队Klub Demboh，还有特别是和Tristan Honsinger（前不久刚刚去世）、Joel Grip的合作都给了我这方面很多灵感。
朱：我也注意到，这些视频的录音都很好。你是用什么样的设备来录音/录像的？在演奏中，会有人专门来负责录音/录像吗？户外录音，你有什么麦克风设置上的窍门？
Carina：感谢你的称赞！大多数视频都是Axel Dörner录音。他用一对Neumann的麦克风和一个老的Nagra数字录音机，然后在去年我们都买了Sound Devices Mix-Pre录音机。它们特别好。我也用同样的Neumann麦克风，这些设备加在一起就是很好的声音了，至少我听着是。坦诚来说，我没有很多的录音经验，但通常我会依照自己的直觉，结果通常也都不错。在这张磁带里，梅赛德斯广场还有B面Peter Cusack的作品都是我录的。
我的相机其实不适合拍视频。我买的时候觉得自己不会踏足视频领域，只是想拍照片。所以我没有去了解它的视频性能。其中有一些细节问题需要克服，最终我买了一支70年代的美能达手动对焦镜头，带来了特别好的颜色。
朱：B面的曲目是你们演奏彼得·库萨克的作品。可以给我们讲一讲这个作品吗？你可能不知道，彼得·库萨克在将近20年前，好像是2005年的时候，来过中国的，做过一些挺棒的项目，对当时中国的一些实验音乐/田野录音爱好者带来了很多的影响。
Peter：Hi, 这里是Peter。Carina和Eric在两次声音漫步 (soundwalk)中演奏，是在2022年10月的Parallels Festival，但这并不能算是一个音乐作品。活动是在柏林的Bornholmer/Pankow这个地区，还有捷克的艺术家Dagmar Šubrtová。声音漫步的想法是，努力去听你走过的环境的声音。这些漫步（在艺术节里名字是“新荒野”声音漫步）集中三处彼此相连的绿地区域。一处是花园，一处是公墓，还有一处更野一点儿，叫Das Nasse Dreieck，之前是柏林墙的一部分，几乎被繁忙的铁路包围着。特别local，去的人都是遛狗的，附近社区的孩子，还有流浪汉。大自然会有它自己的方式。植物是本地物种和外来物种，有很多种野生动物，特别是鸟。你可以听到火车，动物，孩子，狗，风吹动叶子，人的声音，还有远远的柏林的声音。我邀请Carina和Eric在这里演奏，给参加漫步活动的人还有日常经过的人一些惊喜。他们的演奏有时藏在树丛里，有时候是在开阔处。参加的人很喜欢他们的音乐以及聆听整体环境的方式。
朱：你觉得这个户外演奏的项目，是否在某种程度影响了你的室内演出与录音？
Carina：绝对是这样的。通过移动、动作和声音与空间的合作——包括我表演所在的空间——现在在我的演出中非常明显。
核心想法是通过音乐改变空间（感知到的空间），以及通过空间改变音乐。因此，现在我的户外特定场地的表演和室内的“正常”演出之间存在持续的反馈。