Interview: Martin Gretschmann aka Console

Martin Gretschmann spreads his talent widely. An integral member of groundbreaking German bands The Notwist and 13&God, he also pursues several electronic projects, most notably under the monikers of Console and Acid Pauli. Softly spoken, Martin welcomed iCrates into his new studio in Berlin, where he has recently become a permanent resident for the first time. The studio is as unassuming as the man himself, hidden away on the top floor of Kater Holzig, the offspring venue of seminal Berlin nightclub Bar25. The room is small but peaceful, and but for a series of samplers and synthesizers which line the left hand wall, all it contains is his desk, placed in the middle of the room in front of two paneled windows that look due east across Berlin, out over Treptower Park and beyond. The sky grows large in the ambient glow of the western sunset as the conversation drifts from samplers to spacemen and off into the night. Welcome to the cockpit of the Console voyager.

Martin Gretschmann has always tended towards the solitary life of the electronic music producer. He began his musical career as the archetypal bedroom DJ sucked into the world of punk rock by a burgeoning scene in his home town of Weilheim in Oberbayern and the promise of a new bass guitar. However, Gretschmann persevered with electronic production and released his first LP Pan or ama as Console in 1997. Console’s warm synth-led indie electronica has of course evolved since then, incorporating some fascinating work with radio playwright Andreas Ammer, but this understated and instrumentally articulated sound alludes to the side to Gretschmann’s personality with which seems to fit most comfortably. His other prominent solo project, the techno and dancefloor orientated Acid Pauli, is the pressure valve which allows Console to remain serene.

However, there is another side to Gretschmann, whose musical complexity defies simple categorization. In 1997, he joined an ever-evolving outfit called The Notwist who were gravitating towards electronically-informed indie music and needed a programmer. The now critically acclaimed band have grown and grown in popularity and Gretschmann’s continued involvement suggests he still hasn’t forgotton those first outings with the bass guitar on the punk rock scene in Weilheim in Oberbayern…

The music scene in your home town was particularly influential in your early development as a musician, but what lay behind your decision to begin working solo?

First of all, when I was playing in these bands, I always wanted to play more than just one rehearsal per week, [but] because everybody was at school, it wasn’t really possible to do more than once a week. I always wanted to do more, so I started to buy electronic instruments because they gave me the ability to do something on my own. I had always been very much into computers and electronics so it was kind of natural again to start working on electronics.

What did the electronic scene look like at this time, in the 90’s? Was it dominated by techno for you too?

Yeh, but also when I started doing my own stuff there were bands like Mouse on Mars, they just started, and Aphex Twin became kind of popular. So the first tracks that I made on my own, this bandmate of mine, when he listened to them he was like “oh, that sounds like Aphex Twin” and I was like, ”who the hell is Aphex Twin?” So I still had to discover all these things. There were some friends of mine who always went to Munich to buy records, but I was always in my room working on music so other people brought me to all this music.

You say you were interested in computers as objects themselves, but in your early recordings you also show an interest in the sounds they make. What attracted you to this?

Well, my main instrument has always been a sampler, so that really fascinated me; to record something or take a sample of a record or a cd or even a printer, and to be able to play it on a keyboard, to tune it or pitch and transpose it and to create some music with these samples.

And you would go out and take samples of the world around you. Was there any selection criteria or did you just record anything and everything?

Anything that sounds somehow good or interesting to my ears can be used, so it doesn’t really matter. You can create beats out of anything you can imagine.

Considering your interest in the world around you, what role does space play in your music? Does it influence you beyond the names of tracks and albums?

Yeh… kind of. I mean space is something mysterious and something yet to be discovered for a lot of people. Also for me it’s like everything that has to do with space is somehow mysterious and interesting… but I don’t really have a total fetish for space.

You made a record in 2005 with radio playwright Andreas Ammer, which samples recordings made in space by German cosmonaut Reinhard Furrer. How did this collaboration come about and what’s the story behind the Spaceman 85 record?

It’s always like one of us has an idea for a radio play, mostly it’s him and then we discuss what we can do and we start working on it and in this particular case with the Reinhard Furrer tapes, we were working quite a lot with an editor for the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) and she somehow found this tape of Reinhard Fuller in the archives of the WDR, and she gave it to us, and we were like instantly excited about it because it’s a really unique thing.

For example Reinhard Furrer died some years later and it isn’t really clear how he managed to do these recordings, because in those NASA expeditions every thing than you take on board is controlled and restricted. And also there was this rule that you’re not allowed to speak any other language but English on board, but [for] most of it, he speaks German. So nobody knows exactly how he managed to do this recording without getting into trouble.

Besides all of this, there’s no other document like this, and when you listen to it… in the beginning he’s talking in this very scientific language, and like he’s really cool you know, “Yeh, 8 hours to go and I’m feeling fine” and then the more time he spends in space the things he says get more and more poetic. It’s really amazing to listen to this tape.

It gives an impression of loneliness of space – your music has often been described as having an element of loneliness or melancholy. What do you think the connection is?

Well I think there’s this kind of loneliness that is shared maybe. I spend a lot of time on my own here for example, or working on music and it’s really spaced out in a way. For instance, when I work several hours or a whole day by myself, and then someone calls [on the phone], it’s hard to start talking again, because I’m so used to not talking, to just sit there and listen. So it’s maybe like being in space and then coming back down to Earth with the gravity and decompression.

How does your work with The Notwist fit in to all this?

It fits really well together, the only problem is time. It really opens up your mind because you have to work with different people, and you work on different kinds of sounds and the whole process of recording in Notwist is completely different because it takes a lot of time. We take the time to let the things settle down and we listen again and we change stuff.

As Console or Acid Pauli I like to work on something and then to finish it and even sometimes after some time I don’t really like it anymore, but somehow I really like this intuitive way of working also because it’s different to the work we do with Notwist.

How do you feel about it now that it’s been almost a year since your last release Herself? Do you still feel positive about it?

Yeh, I’m totally happy with this one.

Herself is very much an “album” in so far even as the track names form a sentence. Is it important for you that the album survives as a medium/concept for music?

Um… I don’t know, I’m trying to not stick too much to traditions and I’ve tried to be open for the changing world, so I don’t know. What I experience is that there are all these podcasts coming out which have approximately the same length as an album, about 1 hour more or less. I don’t think that this format will completely vanish away and I think it’s important to have things which last for an hour or two. At the same time everybody is also experiencing that people, especially the younger generations have problems concentrating for a longer time. I think it’s nothing really new.

Where are the new frontiers for you in this changing environment?

Actually there’s going to be an Acid Pauli album, like 45 minutes maybe, which will hopefully come out in January and we just finished a soundtrack with The Notwist for a German movie by Hans-Christian Schmid, and in January we will start recording a new album with The Notwist as well. Beside that I’ve been living here for three months and I’ve just started to do collaborations here in Berlin which is really cool.

For example one thing that we are working on at the moment is a musical kitchen [with Hayk, the chef of the Katerschmaus restaurant, whose idea it was], which is with Nu (DJ/producer from the bar25/Kater Holzig set-up). It’s him and me and we put microphones in the kitchen downstairs while Hayk is cutting vegetables and cooking. We record this and make loops and just play it again and try to make beats out of the cooking noises. And so the idea is that you go there, and there is the music made out of the cooking noises and at some point the first course is served and then the music is like more relaxed and quiet and people eat and then it starts over again. So this is something really funny and interesting at the moment.

You also do a lot of remixes. Do you enjoy it as much as producing your own work?

Yeh, if you don’t do too many of them, then it’s really relaxing, because you have all this material you can work on and it’s easier maybe, because you already have some stuff. And normally I only do remixes of people or of other music that I like.

What is you relationship to records, do you DJ with them, and will they continue to exist?

Actually I’ve never really DJed with vinyl, I always had a different approach to the whole DJ thing. I don’t even used Traktor or anything. But I really like vinyl and I buy vinyl, and it won’t die in the next couple of years because there are so many reissues. Where I see a dramatic change is in the DJ business, which is funny, because you know for a long time we thought the vinyl would survive because of the DJ’s, but now I rather have the feeling that it survives because of the vinyl lovers and audiophiles. But in the DJ business so many people who played with vinyl (or Traktor with timecode vinyl) tell me that in a lot of clubs they don’t really maintain the record players anymore. Because of this there are surely a lot of people who say they cannot play them anymore.

What was the first record you ever owned?

Michael Jackson – Bad. It was a present from a school mate of mine.

Do you have things which you enjoy listening to at home which you wouldn’t necessarily play in a club?

I think it’s rather the other way round. There’s music that I don’t listen to at home but that I play in clubs. I would very likely put the music that I like to listen to at home into one of my DJ sets as well, simply because I like it. And because my DJ sets are very diverse there’s not really anything I wouldn’t want to play as long as I like it.

Do you feel like your attitude/tastes have changed over the years that you’ve been involved in the music industry?

Not too much actually. I mean my attitude is kind of still the same. Nobody was interested in the music that we did when we started so it always happened that there was no label interested, so we made our own label. There was no distribution so someone made a distribution. It was a lot like DIY; that’s how we grew up with the music and this is still very strong.

Since we’re in your studio, I’d like to finish by asking you about what equipment you have here…

There are a few synthesizers, like an old Roland mc202, the very classic machine the 303, but I don’t use it very often. And then the Depfer 404, I used to use it very often, especially as Console… actually I’ve got 4 of them. And then this one on the picture [top]; it’s an old Oberheim module, which sounds really good, and then this mixing desk, it’s from some broadcasting station. [There are] especially a lot of samples; that’s always the most important thing.

Photos by Sebastian Marggraf.