Rrose. Photo: Press.
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Rrose is one of the most prolific US-american electronic artists – within and outside the realm of club music. Before taking on the name Rrose, Seth Horvitz originally started releasing music under the moniker Sutekh in the San Francisco Bay Area scene of the late nineties. Compared to earlier Techno generations, Horwitz and his peers seemed to persue a rather critical and intellectual approach to dance music. They wanted to discard the neon-colored flippery of the raves of the nineties employing new technological options approaching Techno in a rather stern fashion to unleash the uninhibited liveliness of the music.
Using new software like Max/MSP he developed a tumbling, multilayered dance sound that was more volatile and vivid than anything heard before. In the early 2000s, Horvitz left dance music for a couple of years. Working with the music of classical and modern composers such as György Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow or Johann Sebastian Bach he treaded academic water. Returning to the club scene as Rrose, Horwitz merged his music into a gender bending performance act inspired by Marcel Duchamp. In the email interview our editor-in-chief Alexis Waltz digged deep into his interest in classical and modern music, the ideas behind the Rrose persona and the legendary dance music scene of the bay area of the 1990s he grew into as an artist.
In November you released your first Rrose album that is not a collaboration. Why is now the moment to do that? What did you express on the album that you didn’t express in your previous work?
I’ve been working on this album off and on for several years, but I kept changing my mind about which tracks to use, adding new tracks, taking away tracks, second-guessing whether it’s good enough. With a helpful push from some close friends, I finally accepted that it was done. For me, an album must feel like a complete statement, a kind of symbiotic whole where all the parts speak to each other somehow. I try to do this on a micro-level with each track I create, but it is a much greater challenge to apply an entire album’s worth of material. I obsess about the beginnings and endings of tracks, the transitions. I tried to be faithful to the ideas and techniques that I explored in previous work while also refining those ideas and hinting at things to come. It’s a delicate balance.
You collaborated with 20th century vanguard musicians such as Charlemagne Palestine, you perform compositions James Tenney, at the same time you produce straightforward techno music which can be mixed into DJs sets without understanding the context of your work. What’s the relationship between one line of work and the other?
Sustained concentration and attention to the physical qualities of sound are themes that run through both my techno music and my collaborations and interpretations. Tenney and Palestine are very different composers, but they both cherish patience and show a reverence for the subatomic elements of sound, overtones and the harmonic series. I share that reverence and try to incorporate it in the techno I make.
„I honestly thought I was finished with techno and moving into different areas.”
EP and track titles such as „Merchant Of Salt”, „Artificial Light (1969-1909)” or „A, With All Faces Bleached Out” suggest some kind of narrative. What do you think of as you make them up?
Some titles are references to Marcel Duchamp or other artists that I love. „Artificial Light (1969-1909)” and „A, With All Faces Bleached Out” references a film by Hollis Frampton. I want the titles to form a sort of constellation of meaning. There is often a specific source, but my hope is that the titles, when taken together, will generate new combinations of meaning that I haven’t intended. I run pretty heavily with the themes of water, liquid, transformations of material, perception.
Before Rrose, you made music as Sutekh. Why did you feel you needed to come up with a new alias and performative concept? How did you originate Rrose and her personal aesthetics? Why the interest in Marcel Duchamp’s body of work?
This is kind of a long story. I took a break from dance music in the mid-2000s in order to study 20th and 21st century experimental music at Mills College. Prior to that, I became obsessed with learning piano and classical music theory for several years as I had no formal musical education in my early years. I honestly thought I was finished with techno and moving into different areas, but I was challenged by composer, improvisor, journalist, and cultural critic Bob Ostertag, who held a workshop at Mills College while I was there. He spoke at length about the influence of technology on contemporary musical preferences and listening habits. I interpreted much of it as a thinly veiled criticism of electronic dance music and more generally, any music built around an electronic pulse. I suddenly felt the need to defend techno, even though I myself had gotten bored with it. Bob felt challenged to try to make pulse-based music that he thought was interesting, using the Buchla 400E analog modular system. He sent the material to me asking if I thought people would dance to it or consider it techno. My answer was “probably not, but I bet I could remix it and make it into techno.” This became Motormouth Variations, my first project for Sandwell District. After I created the material, it was clear that this was the start of a new project, a return to techno. But I wanted to keep it separate from the rest of my work. I liked the idea of referencing something outside of techno, something from the past. I’ve always loved Duchamp’s work and the name Rrose just popped into my head one day. I had a list of possible project names, actually. I sent the list to Juan Mendez aka Silent Servant from Sandwell District and he instantly chose Rrose. I had no idea at the time that Rrose would become such a major part of my life, but here we are!
What exactly did you learn during your electronic music studies at California’s Mills College that you couldn’t develop through producing, performing and collaborating?
I’ve always felt most inspired by experimental and avant-garde music, more than dance music, but there’s only so much you can learn just by listening to it. I wanted to understand the underlying history, philosophy, and techniques behind the 20th century composers that I admired – Cage, Stockhausen, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, James Tenney, Conlon Nancarrow, Györgi Ligeti to name a few. Mills is one of the best academic programs in the world for this kind of thing – the faculty at the school is unmatched. The program functions as a kind of utopian bubble where creativity, ideas, and collaboration can flourish without thinking about money, sales, and popularity. Those two years were honestly the most creatively inspiring of my life. I was having mini-epiphanies on a weekly basis.
The computer-controlled piano provided the perfect bridge between my experience in electronic music and my obsession with piano.
Why are you excited about composers like György Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow or Johann Sebastian Bach?
Each of these composers is unique. Of course Bach is a household name and needs no introduction. His music just sounds so perfect to me, like a fact of nature. I’m addicted to Glenn Gould’s renditions of his works, which are clear and precise, almost to the point of being mechanical, and yet they convey so much emotion. I love this paradox. Ligeti’s work is expansive and diverse. I’m especially drawn to the works that build masses of sound from acoustic instruments rather than the ones with more identifiable “notes” but I also love the innocent, child-like fascination he retained throughout his life. Nancarrow’s obsessiveness and reclusiveness is interesting to me: he created a whole new way of utilizing time and tempo in music and he spent decades developing the work with very few people around to hear it.
Back then, you released one album under your civil name, Eight Studies For Automatic Piano. Why did you want to work with the automatic piano?
In 2003, around age 30, I became obsessed with the piano. I had never learned an acoustic instrument growing up, and after making electronic music professionally for a while, I decided I needed to study piano and traditional music and understand how it works. I spent about five years taking piano lessons and studying harmony and counterpoint before entering the Masters program at Mills. By that time, I was mildly proficient, but no where near good enough to compose the work I envisioned. The computer-controlled piano provided the perfect bridge between my experience in electronic music and my obsession with piano.
With your work as Sutekh your develop a hyper-kinetic dynamism, yet your music wasn’t solely about beats and drumming. The soundscapes create a life of their own beyond the readability of 1990s techno. Back then I felt you wanted to strip away the cliches of the music that was supposed to be entirely new and modern, but failed to achieve that in so many ways, some kind of modernism after modernism. How did you think of your music back then?
It was a time of exploration and rebellion. I don’t think I every fully found my voice. I was more heavily influenced by the people around me like Kit Clayton and Safety Scissors. I have always had this tension between my interests in techno and non-techno music, but at that time it was much messier and more unpredictable (intentionally so).
You seemed to be part of a well-connected scene, collaborating with Kit Clayton, Twerk, Theorem, Geoff White, Safety Scissors or Ben Nevile among others, releasing on labels like Orthlorng Musork, Cytrax, Delay, Source, Klicktexture and your own label Context. How did you meet the others and what did you share?
I was part of a close-knit community of artists, musicians, and freaks in the San Francisco/Bay Area, which extended south to Los Angeles. This included Kit Clayton, Twerk, Safety Scissors, and Jasper (now Silent Servant). We organized events together, collaborated, and sort of built the California Techno-scene together. It was an exciting time. After we started releasing records and touring, we began to meet other like-minded people around the world, including some of the others you mentioned. But we were also closely connected with more experimental artists in the Bay Area like O.S.T., Blectum from Blechdom, and Kid606, which kept us on the fringe of the techno scene.
„We were some of the first techno artists seen performing with laptops and so the press coined the term „laptop techno” around what we were doing. The funny thing is, I did not even have a laptop when this term was coined.”
The software Max/ MSP seam to have play a significant role for the whole scene. Is that true? If so, how did technology impact the way you made music?
Kit Clayton was the one who started this. He got really obsessed with Max/MSP and eventually started working for the company (Cycling ’74). He created a patch that could time-stretch and sync loops together in real-time, which was a fairly new concept at the time. I believe his patch even influenced the original creators of Ableton Live. And we all know how influential that has been! I was never very good at using Max/MSP, but I was good enough to use the patches that my friends were creating and modify them somewhat. Programming has never really been my thing. We were some of the first techno artists seen performing with laptops and so the press coined the term „laptop techno” around what we were doing. The funny thing is, I did not even have a laptop when this term was coined. So I think the influence of specific technologies was exaggerated to some extent. But the ability to process digital audio in real-time was new and definitely influenced our approach to sound.
The first music of yours I listened to was Periods.Make.Sense. How did got in contact with Achim Szepanski and Force Inc.? What was it like working with them? What were they looking after?
Several of us went on tour in Germany together in 1999, and we met a lot of people from German record labels, Achim being one of them. He expressed interest in what we were doing and asked many of us to make music for his labels. Achim always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of emerging scenes and wanted to be the first to showcase them. He was especially obsessed with the “Clicks and Cuts” or “glitch” aesthetic which many of us in California were interested in.
In the mid-2000s the scene in Northern California seemed to dissolve and most of the artists stopped making music. Why?
People just went their separate ways, I guess. Most of the artists are still making music, actually, but not under the same umbrella. Safety Scissors has done a lot of work for video and art installations. Twerk has become a well-respected mastering engineer, so he is still heavily connected to the scene. Kit Clayton is now one of the most important employees of Cycling ’74 (and continues to make music in his spare time). Jasper is still heavily active as Silent Servant. So they are all still influencing the music world in their own ways.
How did get into techno and electronic music in the first place?
I hated electronic dance music while growing up in Los Angeles. Or at least I thought I did. I was probably just trying to be rebellious. I loved The Cure and Depeche Mode but didn’t think of them as dance music. I disliked the “club mixes” and was more interested in the songs. Then I got into punk and industrial and noise, which made me hate dance music even more. But when I moved up to Berkeley to study at the university in 1991, the rave scene was just starting, and I got swept up in the excitement. I remember discovering Underground Resistance and Aphex Twin at around the same time, both were mind-opening experiences. I was also a DJ at the university radio station for many years, and I often cite that as the most important component of my music education (prior to studying at Mills). The radio station allowed me an outlet to mix and present the electronic music and techno I was discovering, but just as important, it exposed me to all kinds of other music that influenced me, like dub, free jazz, noise, avant-garde composition, African tribal music, Indian classical music, Javanese gamelan, the list goes on.
At what moment in your life did you realize electronic music exists and you find it exciting?
Back in the 90s, I had a line in my bio that said “Sutekh hated electronic dance music until he was struck by the “V.U.E.” (Violent Unknown Event). This is a reference to one of my favorite films, The Falls by Peter Greenaway. I’ll leave the rest up to interpretation.
