Negative Space Ritual: The Experimental Recordings of Klaus Leere

Posted on | April 23, 2010 | No Comments

“You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.”

Thus spoke John Coltrane, and his words are etched above the heavy double door that now confronts me, deep inside undisclosed redwood country. I’ve come to interview one of experimental music’s most controversial figures—German-born “sound-sculptor” and performance artist Klaus Leere—and, for the front door of a man who made his reputation with the aptly-titled “Shoestring Symphony in EEE Flat,” the quote seems a little too on-the-nose. When he greets me at the landing, I ask Mr. Leere if he ever regrets this unsubtle tribute to his earliest triumph, especially in light of the darker years that followed. I am given, in return, an icy stare that would wither the Garden of Eden. Klaus Leere, it seems, is nothing if not sincere.

Mr. Leere’s light-blue eyes radiate from the pale cylinder of his skull, his ear-length, Johhny-Winter-blonde hair starting to go silver and gold. Dressed in a black suit with a Nehru collar, Klaus Leere looks something like David Bowie minus 50 pounds, which is to say, he appears to be two-dimensional. I’m afraid that, if he turns to the side, I might lose him. He is also a man of few words, and my questions about his numerous love affairs, his brief initiation into a Tongan cargo cult, his world-class collection of rare pants—in short, about anything other than his music—are met with impatience and scorn. If pressed, he unleashes under his breath a torrent of densely compounded German that describes in what I can only imagine to be rigorous detail the depths of my journalistic ineptitude. Or something he’d like to do to my mother. Or both.

So my visit begins to follow a pattern. One by one, in chronological order, Klaus Leere plays me his collected works, never speaking, as if the music sufficiently, even entirely, explains the man. All the while, his quick avian eyes search my face for some sign of understanding. I try to look appreciative, nodding sagely when it seems appropriate and hoping to convince Mr. Leere, with this charade, that my ancestors did, indeed, walk upright. At the end of each album, when his sharply arching eyebrows ask me if I have anything to say, and my slack-jawed lack of higher brain function dictates that, naturally, I do not, those eyebrows quickly fly together, flitting through subtle gradations of resignation and disappointment before again coming to rest in an attitude of bemused contempt. Klaus Leere has amazingly expressive eyebrows—if they had been knitting any more fiercely, his forehead would have been wearing a sweater.

That our interview has become, in some way, the absence of an interview is fitting for an artist whose most famous recordings have dealt with the absence of sound (although the meaning and nature of that absence are the source of much debate). When a reporter asked Mr. Leere—regarding his seminal two-record set If a Tree Falls in the Forest, And No One is There to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?—why the piece was three hours of silence rather than three hours of birdsong, forest noise, and so forth, the artist snapped back: “If there’s no one there to hear it, there certainly isn’t anyone there to record it!” This response, of course, raised the question of whether Mr. Leere had actually created anything at all, a matter upon which he had no comment.

“Klaus Leere Presents The Sound of One Hand Clapping” was met with similar skepticism by critics, who argued that much more sound could be made with a human hand than was indicated therein. When the piece was unveiled, like so many of his works, playing on a single phonograph placed in a white room at London’s Tate Modern, the audience, perhaps unnerved by what the Times’ I.M. Factice called “the total lack of acoustic effort on the part of Mr. Leere,” revolted halfway through the second side, filling the air with spontaneous, single-handed slapping noises. After this startling but revelatory shared experience, many attendees declared the event a success. Others (Mssr. Factice among them) were not convinced.

Ironically, Klaus Leere’s greatest commercial success is perhaps his least understood. Upon receiving the Grammy Award for Best Novelty Record as the executive producer of Chap Hazard’s hugely successful Music For Dogs LP, Mr. Leere remarked (in a prepared statement read by actor Ted Lange):

“I don’t understand why we’ve been given this particular award, and neither does Mr. Hazard. We worked quite hard on this recording, and we believe it to represent the highest standard in music for the canine companion. While we are happy to accept this Grammy Award in order to raise awareness about dog music in general, and about the benefits of our rapidly-developing Canine Audio Therapy program, we feel that there may have been flaws in the category selection process, as the album is entirely incapable of being heard by human ears, and therefore could only be judged objectively by its intended audience—dogs—to whom this record would have been anything but novel.”

Following the incident, Mr. Leere became a much more public figure. Bumper stickers reading “Only dogs can judge me” were seen in major cities all over the world, and sales of Music for Dogs skyrocketed as it became a favorite holiday stocking stuffer, the humorous audio equivalent of an unwanted fruitcake. In fact, the album has performed well ever since, and in 1988 Alabama adopted Music for Dogs as its official state gift. But its eccentric producer, Klaus Leere, was by then merely a footnote in music history. It is easy to believe that Mr. Leere’s too-brief affair with mainstream success eventually broke his heart, leading to the well-documented years of drinking, drugs, and Cambodian sex tours that followed.

I can see no trace of that man as I sit beside the current incarnation, his body and mind cleansed by long hours of therapy, counseling, and bizarre juice fasts; his purity of vision so focused that it raises the hair on your arms. He is playing me his newest project, the album that he hopes will revive his career. After years of being a punchline, he’s been adopted by the creative vanguard as some kind of outsider saint. It’s that hard-to-earn credibility which landed him his current day job: scoring Spike Jonze’ upcoming adaptation of Goodnight, Moon.

“There’s a moral ambiguity there, a subtext that I’d really like to explore when I’m sculpting this soundtrack,” says Mr. Leere, in what, for him, amounts to a monologue. Before he plays his working cut for me, I ask him about the concept. He mentions that all of the sounds used in the score have been recorded by special microphones sent via satellite into the vacuum of deep space and, with typical Leere literalism, pointed at the moon. When I tell him that I find this interesting, since I understand there to be no sound in space, his eyes light up abruptly, crinkling at the corners, as if to say, “Exactly!”

I feel like the child of a proud parent. After spending nearly 24 hours with Klaus Leere, a period during which I saw him neither sleep, nor eat, nor drink a thing, I finally “get it.” As I nod in and out of consciousness, sipping bottled water and trying to stay awake, he sits serenely next to me, going through the ritual over and over: removing the next record from its jacket, sliding off the sleeve, placing the platter on the turntable, cleaning the surface, lifting the arm and setting the needle down, seductively turning up the volume and hearing only a swelling nothing whose increase is measured not in decibels but in psychic density. It is an absence I can feel in my fillings, something primal that once existed everywhere and is now in danger of dying out. It is an elemental Silence, the sound before sound, the Music of the Spheres; the pre-Big-Bang, unimaginable, voice-of-God anti-tone. And Mr. Leere’s mission in life is to preserve it.

There is some secret Truth ringing hidden there inside the empty, and Klaus Leere is its prophet. He is, I realize, a spiritual beacon like a burning bush, some kind of human halo. His presence is electromagnetic, both attractive and repellant. Being in a room with Klaus Leere is like standing next to a lightning rod in a rain storm. And daring to take him seriously makes for some powerful mojo, packed with all the strength of his unshakable conviction. Mr. Leere makes you want to testify. The man has taken a colossal practical joke—an entire career’s worth of blank records—and given it meaning through the sheer force of his own will, the singular power of his sincerity. Klaus Leere’s work is not a joke because of one simple fact: He means it. Klaus Leere believes. And because he believes, the thing he believes in exists. As John Coltrane knew, in art and in life, sometimes sincerity is enough.

Epilogue:

I wake up in a bus station not far from Klaus Leere’s sylvan estate, pain behind my eyes and a feeling like cotton balls where my tongue had been. The contents of this article, just as you’ve read them above, are scrawled in my own handwriting on three sides of an empty pizza box beside me. It is 48 hours after my initial arrival at Mr. Leere’s estate. I have no visible injuries, but my pockets have been rifled, and my chewing gum has been replaced with a note containing the conditions under which this “interview” might be published. These range from the ridiculous (“The article must be printed on 100 percent recycled bee’s wings”) to the mundane (“Mr. Leere may be referred to either as Klaus Leere or as Mr. Leere, but not simply as Leere, and never, EVER, as Klaus”).

In publishing this piece, I have tried my best to meet Mr. Leere’s conditions wherever possible. But one that I have chosen to ignore is the following, which was the primary cause of my concern as I came to my senses on that bus bench:

“Your time with Mr. Leere has been enhanced by the use of certain medicinal elements known to cause hallucinations, euphoria, and heightened states of awareness. These elements were administered in your drinking water, and have by now passed safely through your system.”

I look down with grim comprehension at the damp stain spreading across my crotch.

“This information is confidential. Please do not discuss your experience with anyone other than your doctor, who in the present case is considered to be Mr. Leere.”

Come again? Sorry, pal, that ship won’t sail. Reading over the article, it’s clear from my closing remarks that I not only drank the Kool-Aid, I supersized it, and I’ll be damned if I ain’t tellin’. I won’t be pressing charges—I’ve done worse things to myself on purpose—but, in light of what I now know about the experience, allow me to revise my findings. Sure, you can play a shoestring if you’re sincere. But, with the utmost respect to Mr. Coltrane, it helps to also be a universally-acclaimed genius and towering figure of modern culture. Mr. Leere is, at present, neither of those things. And while his work is not without merit, his entire artistic output could be duplicated by a record-pressing machine turning out blanks for twenty years—which, in the case of the machine, would be considered both a massive error in execution and a tremendous waste of time. So you can take that however you want to…Klaus.

Gabe Winogrond is a super-talented wordsmith (as you now know), with a knack for combining lyrics and beats. To hear his music and read more of his words, check out www.gripgrand.bandcamp.com
and www.routinefly.com.

Category: Culture, Fiction, Music
Tags: experimental music > Fiction > Gabe Winogrond > Klaus Leere > Negative Space Ritual

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Negative Space Ritual: The Experimental Recordings of Klaus Leere

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