A duo of techno producers who describe themselves as “ambitious, driven, earnest, energetic, hungry, skillful, versatile, and modest” have breached a new frontier of minimal techno to explore. That frontier is silence.
“Silence is the only direction we could think about going in,” says US ex-pat Rob Coppola, who with partner Wolfgang Kundtz, has been working on a project dubbed after their respective last names.
In 2013 they released the “Art And Simon Silent” EP on the Gusto Bonn label and took the techno scene by storm, albeit a quiet storm like a gentle breeze or the fart of a woodland creature such as a vole.
“We left a glass of water in the studio, recorded the room for 500 hours, and then spent 75 days sculpting three tracks of breathtaking silence,” Wolfang says. “When my girlfriend came to the studio one morning after being up for four days at Berghain we played her the first track, ‘Bridge Over Rippled Watt Hertz,’ and she said couldn’t hear a thing even when we played the silence for her really, really loudly but that even still it was probably the most profound silence she’d ever had heard and she reckoned that if a tree fell over in the forest and no-one was around to hear it then that’s the sound it’d probably make.
“We knew then that the glass of water had been a good idea and that it had nothing to do with the fact she was completely off her head on pills,” he added.
“For years we heard people talking about the space between notes, but we wanted to explore the space between spaces, and enter into an entirely new paradigm,” continued Rob. “So we bought an iMac, got a crack of Logic 9, an Eventide Harmonizer and set to work recording. The resulting one-sided, off-white, marbled vinyl 10 inch EP became a staple in Ben Klock’s very early morning sets and has been described as “vacuous”, “nothing” and that it makes Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence” appear like a “bullshit charade”.
It is evident from this story of innovation that current minimal techno artists might find themselves on the margins if this new wave of silence takes over. Though this new approach belongs to Wolfgang and Rob at the moment we are hoping that some established producers, such as British Canadian German pioneer Richard Michael Hawtin, will adapt the form and whole-heartedly embrace silence as a core element of their production projects and dj sets. We raise a glass of water to that; so let the silence begin.
