You are here to rehearse with your group Death Ambient, with Fred Frith and Kato Hideki, so you are giving a concert ...

Ikue: ... in Halle on Sunday.

Just one gig?

Ikue: It's the first time we're playing with Fred, in this group ... also we recorded two years ago. We never had a chance to play, the three of us.

You were playing with another guitarist. [James Plotkin]

Ikue: We did a tour with another guitarist in this group.

But you made the record with Fred.

Ikue: With Fred, yes, that'sthe original group

Fred Frith: Actually, Ikue and I have just been working together with the Ensemble Moderne. Ikue was the soloist with the Ensemble along with Zeena Parkins, and we had four concerts - Köln, Frankfurt, Berlin and Wien. So this is like a little bonus present of the end of the year Ensemble Moderne work.

Fred: You wanted to ask about the Knitting Factory.

Yeah, because in the Eighties it was quite important as a kind of melting pot, perhaps, and you too were there with many different groups, and my question is, what has become of the Knitting Factory now?

Fred: That's a very good question. We don'tknow, reallly.

You don't know?

Fred: The musicians are not very happy. It's a long story. But, what you should know, of course: all of the musicians that have played in the Knitting Factory in the Eighties didn't suddenly drop out of the sky when the Knitting Factory opened. We were all playing for many years before in many different places. What was interesting about the Knitting Factory in the beginning, was that the guy who ran it knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about music, and had no interest in fact in this kind of music. It wasn't a place that ... normally somebody who loves the music will open a club and try to attract the things that they like, but in this case the guy was running a tea-shop, and Wayne Horvitz walked past it one day and thought it would be a nice place for a gig, and he offered a series of gigs, and persuaded him with some reluctance to make gigs on thursday nights for a month or something. And the first gig was Butch Morris and myself, and there were a lot of people there, and he had never heard of either of us, and he certainly never heard of any of the other people Wayne booked in the place, but he realized that there was an audience for it, so he started to try to attract more of the same musicians, but he dindn't know who they were. So usually the first or so year of the Knitting Factory everybody's name was mis-spelled. But what he did do, that was revolutionary for New York at that time, was that he brought together everything, purely because he didn't know about it. There was no rule in his mind telling him that he couldn't do black and white music in the same place, or that he couldn't do dance and poetry in the same place, and I think the positive thing about the Knitting Factory was that he did just put everybody in there and created a different kind of ambience from what was there before. But all of the people playing in there had played for many years, so it wasn't that he discovered them, it was that they more or less discovered him. In recent times the Knitting Factory is not doing so well, because I think the owner had a misunderstanding about where he stood in relation to the music scene, and because there was so little alternative to the Knitting Factory, it became a kind of power thing. Because he was the only alternative, he imagined that he
discovered everybody, and that he owned them. And now, I think, there's a very strong movement in New York to open other places, so that there's not only the Knitting Factory, so that he can actually have a little competition. It will be healthy for him.

Fred: When did DNA start, 77 ?

Ikue: 77, when I moved from Tokyo to New York, that's when we started DNA.

Fred: And how long did the group go on for?

Ikue: Five years.

Fred: Five years! Tja, I remember meeting DNA in San Francisco in 1979. And did you enjoy it, DNA?

Ikue: Yes, very much. I was young, the first time I ever played the drums, in this rock band, it was all very exciting, and everything was happening in New York at that time, in 77, it was a very exciting time, to be in New York the first time, it was really great to be there.

Fred: Why did you stop playing the drums and start playing the drum machines?

Ikue: I didn't really stop playing the drums and the next day start playing drum machines. It really took about five years of overlap times, and in the course of these years I was developing more the drum machines and gave up the drums eventually, but it took probably more, like ten years.

Fred: I have a very strong memory of seeing you playing with Zeena a duo in Switzerland, at a festival, which was ostensibly featuring women that year - it was the Taktlos Festival - it was a women's festival, and I saw you getting on stage and approaching a shiny drum kit that was on the stage for you to use along with your drum machines, and the organizer of the festival ran towards you saying: don't touch it, don't touch it, it's for a real drummer ... which in the context of a women's festival was particularly entertaining.

Ikue: I will never forget that...

Fred: Did you have much of that problem at that time?

Ikue: Not just that time, but ... not from musicians, but usually from organizers or technicians.

Fred: Now it was very nice to work with the Ensemble Moderne and see that they were taking you seriously.

Fred: I noticed that the word Death crops up in an awful lot of your projects, not least of which the one that I'm involved in called Death Ambient. I there a reason for that?

Ikue: No reason. Death Praxis, the title of Death Praxis was Tenko's idea, and Death Ambient is another idea, but mostly because it's really not ambient music - our idea of Death Ambient ... And also the death for me is the end of one cycle, and means the beginning of a new thing

Fred: Is that a buddhist idea?

Ikue: probably ...

Fred: Hmm, very interesting ...

Do you have a special affinity to guitar players,because you played with Arto Lindsay, Fred Frith, Derek Bailey, ...

Ikue: I like to play with guitar players. It happened. I looked for - probably from the beginning - drums and guitar and some kind of strings. I like this form, I don't know why ...

I thought, maybe the energy of rock music might be the momentum ...

Ikue: Yes, maybe, I also like to work with just a voice, voice and drum machine. If I work with another instrument, yes, guitar is maybe my choice.

Fred: It's interesting to me, I mean DNA was obviously a pretty important, revolutionary group at the time, it was very influential, as you were saying before. But it's interesting that a lot of people who were involved in the rock scene at the end of the seventies, are now kind of firmly crossed over to what'ssomehow contemporary music, and that actually what seems to be the most exciting area of new music right now involves people from the rock scene, infiltrating into what has previously been the domain of serious composers, as it were. Have you had that experience too, I mean, you're the soloist with the Ensemble Moderne, I find this in its way just as revolutionary as DNA was in the seventies ... I wonder if I can go farther, would it be interesting to you to compose for the Ensemble Moderne?

Ikue: I don't know. I'm probably too intimidated to work with a professional group like this. I'd rather work with my level of musicians.

Fred: You think you're low level?

Ikue: No ...

Fred: Nobody I know has any idea about how you produce the sounds you produce. It's a standard instrument, it's something you can buy in a store, but when you play it, it doesn't sound like what anybody else does. You're so far more sophisticated than any drum machine player. So in this sense you're just as much of a virtuoso as the members of the Ensemble Moderne.

Ikue: Thank you very much. I'm composing, I'm doing my pieces with my musicians, which there are in New York, and share my vocabulary of the way we develop composition from improvisation, but I'm open ...

I think one difference concerning your playing is ... in a group like DNA it's just a kind of steady rock rhythms, and since you're using the drum computer, you've turned it around against the way it designed - drum computers seem to be designed to produce steady dance rhythms, you are using them in quite another way ...

Ikue: My goal is ... I'm trying to work with drum machines as my instrument, so it's more spontaneous and lyrical work with real time and response with other instruments. I think I consider the drum machine as my instrument.

Fred: Rather than something that you program ...

I'm curious about, how can you improvise with a machine which is designed for programming? To program, as I see it, is to pre-organize the sound you want to repeat later, and if you improvise, you have to act in the moment ...

Ikue: Yes, that's why I'm working with three drum machines through a mixer and a processor. All goes through a mixer, you can use repeated patterns and go in and out ... it doesn't necessarily have a synchronized rhythm, it's all different speeds, so it creates a kind of rhythm, so I can bring it in and out, and control in real time ...

You also do the graphics for the Tzadik label. How did this come together?

Ikue: The Tzadik label had an original designer, but he didn't get along with John [Zorn] - and he asked me ... I was always interested to do graphic work in computer and so he asked me, why don't you do it. He's the designer, actually,it's his idea, I just realized his idea in the computer, that's how it started. And then of course I've done it for many different artists, it's a process of learning and producing at the same time.

But you're no graphic designer, you didn't study ...

Ikue: No, I'm not a graphic designer, it just started that way

Fred: So now you're gonna be a designer and give up drumming?

Ikue: No way!

We were wondering about this in another program: do you see any specific relation of what you're doing to japanese culture?

Ikue: Hmm ... probably I can't help what I have in me to come out, but I'm not really conscious of that, like that I try to bring in specially the japanese part, I mean, when I was in Japan, all I listened to was western music, and I was interested in western culture so much, that I totally ignored the japanese traditional thing, when I was in Japan. I just discovered it, when I was in America.

You're playing with japanese musicians

Ikue: Tenko, yes, and Kato Hideki, ... but they're all living not in Japan, they moved from Japan.

You're not going to Japan very often?

Ikue: I go to Japan once a year to see my parents.

Not for musical projects?

Ikue: It's very difficult to have a concert organized in Japan.
Maybe once in three years I play.

Doesn't an impovised music scene exist in Japan?

Ikue: There is a big - not really big, there is a strong improvisation scene there, but why I don't play there, I don't know, I wasn't invited.

Fred: No, but I mean, most of the japanese musicians that I know of, who are involved in exciting, creative japanese scenes spend far more of their time playing over here, oder? As you were saying, a lot of you are living abroad, which in the case of women
in particular is kind of significant. I think it's significant that fairly creative japanese women find it harder to stay in Japan than to do what they wanna do outside of Japan, is this true?

Ikue: Yes

Fred: And so creative japanese women are often expatriots, but I mean it's also true of someone like Otomo [Yoshihide], who was obviously very fahionable and busy, but he's mostly busy outside of Japan. Why -

Ikue: I don't know why, in New York, there's an improvisation scene, but there's no money involved, so it's all local gigs, and in Japan also, it's all small gigs that are happening, but they can't afford to bring me to Japan mostly. So I have to happen to be there when there's some concert, that's why, it's all very dificult to organize ...

Fred: I think it's often true, that the place where you're living creates a mythology only in other places. So people's idea of what the New York scene was like in the beginning of the eighties, the improvised scene, romanticizes it very much. They assume that it was a big, fantastic scene with hundreds of people going to the gigs, while we know we were playing in our appartements in front of ten people just like everybody else. But because it's New York and it's exotic it creates an idea which then sells itself, and I think Tokyo is no different. I think, people have to work incredibly hard to
get a concert together. I mean, whenever I play there, the people who organize it are going to every improvised concert in the Tokyo area for three months before, giving out flyers, hoping that with all of that activity maybe a hundred people will come to the concert. You have to really commit yourself trying to find an audience for this kind of music. But for people elswhere they see a Tokyo scene and they imagine something very different. But in reality it always involves hard work. There's no escape from it. I've been through the streets of New York at night, putting up flyers for concerts, you know?
But this is the side that people don't react to so much ...

I suppose drum computers are always evolving, so it's offering always new possibilities...

Ikue: I'm always using one type of drum machine, Alessi's, they don't even make drum machines any more, they're making studio recording equipment, but I still really like this older drum machine, so I'm using this. I'm not really looking for
new technologies for the drum machines. I'm rather looking for maybe a processor or different manipulation, to manipulate the drum sound ...

Do you listen to Drum & Bass or Techno, or some electronic music very important for the pop scene in these last years?

Ikue: Not really ...

Fred: They probably listen to you, though.

Ikue: I'm really not familiar with this scene.

What plans do you have for this year, next year, what projects?

Ikue: I'm working - after I go back to New York, I will finish recording a new CD with Tenko. We are making a new CD dedicated to all great female mystery writers. So that's gonna be finished this summer and will be released in the beginning of next year, hopefully. And I'm workin on another project that got commissioned by Roulette, to write a chamber work with electronics and voice. And that's what I'm working on the rest of the year ...

Fred: Roulette is a performance space in New York that also has a program for commissioning new work. It's one of the most long-time places that we've all been playing at. It's been there for 25 years, so it's really a much important place in New York, but it's less heard about than the Knitting Factory. But it was there long before the Knitting Factory.

Ikue: And so we're gonna rehearse with Death Ambient for two days, of course for the concert, but also for the next CD, hopefully, there's gonna be material for the next CD.

Fred:The Ensemble Moderne are also very anxious to keep going with this project that we've just been working on, so hopefully at the end of this Year and some time in the spring there'll be more concerts with the Ensemble Moderne and Ikue and Zeena and I

... and ...

and a recording eventually, yes, although this is not yet clear exactly how and when, since it's obviously quite a big undertaking to record 20 people, wether to do it live or not, how to do it ... there are questions to be answered.