Not much to add except: love this band, love this interview. Well worth a quick click-through if you haven’t heard of them before. From Plan B #25 (clearly a vintage issue). Here’s a link to the original layout. As ever, thanks to Andrew Clare for his excellent design. (Incidentally, the photograph I’ve found to run with this article is the first photograph I’ve seen of this band.)‘We are an array of thoughts all at once,’ proclaim Ništa Nije Ništa, four women from four countries creating mischievous, idealistic DIY art music from the depths of Faust’s studio in Scheer, Germany. ‘We attack. We stop. We are indecisive. We continue.’ We like…
This music is marvellous; unfettered, spontaneous. A battery of female voices sing in disharmonious unison over cascades of dissonant saxophone, the odd splash of piano, a sewing machine and skittering beats. Amplified heartbeats (the better to express nerves and excitement before a performance), scissors, chains, circular patterns and beautiful, beautiful voices that remind me of avant pioneer Maggie Nichols, linger and meander fitfully before sparking off again in entirely unexpected directions.
This is a Faustian pact, perhaps; or a sound in Fluxus. The vocals switch from German to English to skittering babble; a voice lights up, admonishing and then playful, serious and then enticing.
How did you all get together?
“Well, we all met in Vienna, studying at the University of Applied Arts. We were all very curious about sound in some form or another and that is how we came about to form a band – a performance group, rather. We felt the urge to create our own playground, to define an experimental space in art and sound.”
This music is marvellous: anonymous, bewitching. I send entreaties into cyberspace and discover much. In 2000, four female students from Serbia, Austria, Germany and Australia decided to set up a performance group – which they gave the working title of Ništa Nije Ništa. (It’s Serbo-Croatian for nothing is not nothing.)
I discover the following salient facts from Klangbad: Rebecca Harris, now relocated to Australia, is responsible for the more lyrical singing. Ute Marie Paul plays saxophone, while Hemma Pototschnig, who was born in the region of Austria known as Carinthia, plays computer and organ. The fourth member, Natalija Ribovic, contributes the more eruptive spoken word – and singing – parts, and thus is a sort of vocal counterpoint to Rebecca.
“We are very thankful that the zero was discovered,” they inform me collectively. “It helps us to get along with definition.”
This music is marvellous: weird, unsettling. Two albums have been issued on Klangbad, the label set up by Faust’s Hans-Joachim Irmler – Nee Niemals Nicht (2004), which was described on the Village Voice website (by me) as, “Channelling the spirit of dada, Faust, early Raincoats, proto-feminist improvisers Julie Tippett and Lindsay Cooper, anti-globalisation and a whole mess of humour into one glorious whole”; and this year’s 4 Wolves Attack which is way more playful, and of which Plan B’s kicking_k wrote, “This record feels not like the song-as-machine, collaborative artwork, but four processes feeding on each other, branching over, together and through, weaving ever denser like undergrowth”.
Sure, 4 Wolves Attack reminds me of Faust’s second album So Far, that seriousness of purpose underpinned by a refusal to take convention too acutely, but the first was made by men, the second by women. This matters.
“We wanted to rehearse for our first concert in Vienna,” they say, “and Ute-Marie invited us to practice in [Faust’s] cellar. One day Hans-Joachim started to set up his studio equipment to record us. It was an experiment. Perhaps he was amused by our unmusical approach. It was all built on theories at first. But for some reason he took us seriously and we continue to learn from him enormously.”
What’s it like to work with Faust?
“It is very refreshing. They have a much better routine and are not as hysterical. We playfully quote them sometimes, in our naïve way, for example by using plastic construction chains – they use metal ones. It is a joke.
“It gives us more strength and focus in believing in what we are doing. It is funny that it is always artists or musicians who feel the need to justify themselves and their work – never bakers or lawnmowers. Faust is an objective point of view for us and on our temporary chaos. Sometimes it is necessary to have such a critique. The work together is very open; we are pushed to find ways of breaking rules and conventions, habits and mechanisms of sound. What is new is not necessarily better. Sometimes it really sucks,” they laugh.
This music is marvellous: as refreshing as the slam of a door after your nephews have departed, as comforting as the juxtaposition of author Walter Moseley and the drowsiness that comes as relief to the roaring silence, as life-enriching as Russian constructivism, conceptual art, film, installation, new media and video art, philosophy, music, speech,
slam poetry, architecture, feminism, Wiener Aktionismus and literature. It’s the sound of four cultures colliding, and celebrating their uniqueness and togetherness: it’s the sound of music as factory floor, working hard towards an end that can never be resolved, because resolution is never the aim.
You wonder how these ladies communicate when they’re all in the same country, the same city…the same room.
“We speak mostly German but also some English together. Rebecca’s German now is probably better then ours! It was funny as she was learning she repeated everything we said, like a parrot! We were often quite irritated having to decide which sentences were a contribution to our conversation and which were her practice. Maybe that was why our first album had so much to do with communication.”
What attracted you to the form of music you play?
“The noise. The improvisation. The memory. We understand Ništa as a movement from art to sound and back again. We are creating a network of different cultural perspectives, a hybrid space for experiment – a kind of utopia. Sound is our main form of expression. It also includes noise, clichés, text, drawings, videos, language and non-language. There is curiosity in compositions that have no conventional methods. The performance is very important. We understand it as a living sculpture or drawing of multimedia. We are staging our fragility as we choose not to draw a line of conventional experience or representation on stage. We do not offer comfort in a thread of rhythm. We offer contrast. We are an array of thoughts all at once. We attack. We stop. We are indecisive. We continue.
“We wanted to fill an unfilled gap by making music that didn’t exist. A form we wanted to hear. It is a music that would include uncomfortable and restless talents and emotions. Well, that’s what we are trying!”
This music is marvellous: experimental but never intimidating. Confrontational and compulsive, sure, but it has soul and a totally female sensibility. One of Ništa Nije Ništa wears a fur tail on the cover of 4 Wolves Attack – “It’s a trophy from a fight she had,” they explain, solemnly. The sax is entirely to the fore, but there’s also an air pump, a wardrobe, coat hangers, a washing machine, a jackpot machine for kids, water bottles, an iron shelf and a baby phone. “Education isn’t commodity on shelf like perfume,” they chant. “The music wants to answer!” What can these brave women’s motivation for creating such exacting, stimulating, organic music be? Communication, expression, depression, excitement…?
“Communication, expression, depression, excitement, improvisation. The main point for us to make music is to canalise content, which we have saved in our brain and which is not possible to explain in words or pictures alone. We go to another level to deconstruct and reform it into music. The ears are our tools.
“We want to collate our collective feelings, experiences, fears, and knowledge and materialise it into Ništa, translate it into art or sound or performance or whatever we may come up with in the future.
”We have much to share and exchange as we all live in different cities all over the world. We only come together once a year, for a very intense period of time. It is like a textured family, where we create for ourselves a space abroad from our everyday experience. It is a way to look at our own lives, to inject contrast, to generate an alternative perspective. We need each other very much. Even though we have frequent disagreements, we respect difference and tolerance. You wouldn’t believe how much we theorise… people around us run away and think we are spoilt, crazy, depressed wannabe philosopher-artist-musician-feminists. Ha ha!”
This music is marvellous. Full stop.
“Our utopia is a place where we can project a collective identity and ways of being we cannot realise in the world we are living, because of the materialistic pressures. It provokes the mundaneness, which encourages us not to do the things we are made for – an around the clock curious artist – and not a functional machine. It is a kind of dream where everything is possible without rules and restrictions. It enables us to be an intuitive human with feelings and with faults. Utopia is shining everywhere, you just have to prove if the door is open or not… It is wonderland and freedom – a land where you can swim in tomato juice.”
What other musicians/activists/artists do you look to for inspiration?
“The neighbour who scrapes the road with his iron broom every morning.”
What do you despise about life and music?
“In music, we despise the industry. The mainstream industry feeds the people with junk. This junk nature, it is so influential that we sometimes feel paralysed. It capitalises on the laziness of human nature to comfort with easy patterns and volume.”
Where do you hear harmonies?
“We make no difference between clashing sound or harmony – it depends on the adequate situation of the day.”
