Efdemin’s Avant-Garde Influences
The German producer explains how John Cage and his studies in Vienna have contributed to his house and techno productions
Phillip Sollmann is a gleaming wanderer between dissimilar worlds. A graduate of computer music and electronic media in Vienna, he also studied Berlin’s hedonistic club life as a regular jock at Berghain and learnt the ropes running his arty yet straight-to-the-point record label Dial in Hamburg. As part of the wider Dial collective under the alias Efdemin, he conjures romantic techno and condensed house for those dancers who dare to dream, preferably released on good old polyvinyl chloride.
Upon the release of his new album, Decay, RBMA Radio caught up with the Berlin-based DJ/producer discuss his entire musical universe. In this edited and condensed excerpt from the conversation, Sollmann expands on the importance that John Cage and avant-garde music have had on his productions.
My first really deep moment with abstract music was at Kassel’s documenta exhibition. I was six or seven years old, and there was a John Cage installation in a church with about 20 loudspeakers with different voices coming out of the different speakers. I didn’t want to go home. I was just like, “I want to stay here forever.” My mom said that this was the starting point for everything for me, in terms of falling in love with amplified music or sound.
[Years later] I was studying in Hamburg and working part-time. I had always tried to stay away from combining music and money. I tried to keep it free from any economic pressure. Then, I realized somehow that this is bullshit. I decided to make only music, because that’s the only thing that I wanted to do in the end. So I left Hamburg and went to Vienna, as a kind of reset to focus on the music.
Being out of this stream of music was quite nice, because I could focus on my vision of music.
The little institute where I went to study in Vienna is only part of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, which is very conservative and old school. It’s basically teaching violin playing to people that practice 23 hours a day or something. The little institute for electroacoustic music is like a relic or a leftover of a time where it was a bit more progressive. It’s struggling a lot. It’s very hard to maintain its existence.
The people that worked in there, though, have nothing to do with the big university. It’s quite free and very open-minded. They come from a background which is more orientated to musique concrete and tape music. I think you could place it between Paris and Pierre Schaeffer, and the American tape music. There were modular synths and tape machines, and it was quite nice to have all these really old school techniques to play with. That’s what I really liked: cutting and editing tape.
I stopped buying records in Vienna because I was so broke. I had no job the first time, and really had to take care of what I spent. So I stopped buying techno records. I had no idea what was going on for nearly three years until I met my friend Oliver, AKA RNDM, who was very much up to date, and he played all the interesting music to me. Being out of this stream of music coming every week was quite nice, because I could focus on my vision of music, completely free of all of these influences. Still, today, that’s one of my biggest problems. I cannot make music when I DJ too much because I lose my vision somehow.
In Vienna, I was very influenced by listening to abstract and avant-garde music. I went to many improvised music concerts and events, and met many people who worked far, far, far away from techno. For them, techno is the devil’s song. My professor is still like … We like each other very much, but whenever I meet him he’s like, “Are you still in this techno circus?” “Yeah. It’s all right.” He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, but you’ll come back one day.”
