SOGAR
GROOVES (US)
SOGAR
by John Gibson
The
pace at which Taylor Deupree's Brookklyn-based minimalist label
12k is putting out records seems to be accelerating in tandem
with its reputation as a leading light of cutting-edge electronics.
One of the most recent artists to benefit is Paris-based electronic
musician Jurgen Heckel, who records under the name Sogar and
whose recent album Basal has been compared by some to
that of label-mate Shuttle358. One of the more melodic of the
stable's releases, the record glows with the same sort of lovely
crystaline sheen as French droners Tone Rec and has a sprinkling
of guitar effects to boot. Sogar's music merges an underbelly
of clicking minimalism with a foreground of dense, glistening
textures that hover eerily like a will-o-the-wisp.
Like others who wind up on the network of micro-music labels
spanning Europe and North America (12k, Mille Plateaux, Fallt,
Mego), Heckel started out playing in "proper" bands. "I come
from Nuremberg," he says at the start of our telephone conversation,
"And there I started to make music as a guitar player in several
bands. We played stuff like Sonic Youth, Slint, and stuff, this
kind of music." Finding the going heavy in his home city, he
decided to relocate to Paris a few years ago and try again,
this time with Herve Boghossian as Ion+. "Both of us were trying
to expand our background a little bit from guitar rock and punk,
and we listened to a lot of modern music -- contemporary composers,
jazz music," he says. "It gave us new influence and what we
did was very, very experimental."
After Ion+ had gained the attention of a small German label
called Beau Rivage, which released the band's sole 7-inch ("it
was very, very experimental -- minimalist, just one or two notes"),
Heckel's increasingly leftfield approach was galvanised. "I
started to do music with other things than normal instruments,"
he says. "I started to use a mixing desk, cables, and amplifiers."
A new, solo project began to take shape that would congeal as
Sogar. The name itself was something of a random choice. "Like
when i come to Paris, there is no special reason (behind the
name)," he says." In fact, it is a german word meaning "even."
"I just saw the word in a newspaper, and it really means nothing,"
he says. "But now i think 'Sogar' is a good name, because it's
very objective and open to interpretation. I like my music to
be the same -- open to interpretation."
Sogar started out as an audio-visual collaboration with video
artist Thomas Einfeldt, and the very first demo recording as
Sogar (a 3-inch MiniDisc entitled Relais) was taken from
a live performance that included substantial visual content.
"I thought the set was quite good, and I sent it to a l ot of
different labels," Heckel says. One of those was 12k, which
was immediately impressed: "Taylor deupree, who seems to me
to be so serious and confident, gave me the absolute liberty
to do what I wanted. He just said, 'Give me 20 minutes more
and I'm satisfied we can do a full record.' It was a surprise."
The new project accrued much of the guitar and mixing-desk technology
of Ion+. "In Sogar I still use all the old equipment," he says.
"It's just modified and processed by a computer -- guitars and
bass, mixing desk, MiniDisc, this kind of stuff, and I process
all these sounds into the computer, mixing them extensively.
What comes out is very different from the original songs." The
45 minutes that constitute Basal lend a few clues as
to the precise nature of what was processed, being grainy, guite
foggy series of flickering passages that seems at times quite
emaciated. However, there is certainly more of an emotional
hue to the record than on several other 12k albums.
"I think when you are doing music you always have a big emotional
part that you put into your music," Heckel says. "I can't imageing
how you could exlude emotion, although I'm not trying to make
it sound happy or anything. I try to get it in the middle, because
happiness or love, it's a secondary statement, and the primary
statement [in my music] is quite objective. It's not
as expressive."
Heckel considers the idea of working as part of a band again,
but enjoys the freedom that recording as Sogar brings. "I don't
really see myself in a group-type environment again," he says.
"Maybe I'll collaborate with different musicians, different
instruments other than the rock style. I also see myself with
a guitar on stage... it's not very interesting to see the man
sitting in front of his laptop dong something on his screen
that nobody knows. I think that's why many people do videos
or somethign else with photos set to the music. Maybe it's not
the future for me to always work with computers. I'd like to
integrate instruments."
Heckel says that thoughtful, impressive music of any grenre
interests him. "I think it's quite easy to do experimental music
with computers," he says. "Just a few plug ins, a filter, something
like that, and it sounds very experimental, and you expand the
sound to about 50 minutes, do a live set and you say 'OK, this
is experimental electronic music.' It's very easy and I think
many, many people abuse easy work on the computer."
In the coming months Heckel will be quite a busy man. Not only
is he the first 12k artist to feature on the label's brand new
MP3
section (available at 12k.com), he
will be doing some remix work for a French Warp-like artist
called Shinesei. In addition, he will be revisting the theme
of audio-visual collaboration by writing the soundtrack for
a web-based film piece on Italian internet label Tu m'. He has
also contributed a track to a compilation on new French electronic
label List, along with other 12k artists, and will release a
3-inch CD on the same label later this year. Finally, he says,
"I'm always working on tracks so i can have a full record ready
for 12k."
