Michael Fakesch
(also: Funkstorung, Musik Aus Strom)
december 1999
by Eric Mast

The thing is, at that time Chris had a lot of things to do, because he launched his own record shop. I had the studio at my place and I had more time to do more tracks, and we agreed that we shouldn¹t release tracks under the name Funkstörung if we had done it on our own. So I did more tracks than Chris and I just said to myself, yeah come on, why shouldn¹t I release it? It would be too sad if I just keep it on a tape and that¹s it. And so I did tracks and more tracks... and then I released the 3 Demon EPs. After that I decided I should put it on CD and make an album out of that. It just compiles my favorite tracks. That¹s it.

It wasn¹t planned to do an album. It all happened accidently. I quite like the result, but there¹s no plan behind it. Now that we had the chance to release it with K7! and before that we wouldn¹t have been able to because our distributor wasn¹t able to sell CDs properly. So I waited, now we¹ve had the chance and it¹s ready. No big deal, you could say.

It¹s still a big a deal for me, they¹re just not new for you.

Actually, the more important thing is the Funkstörung album, which is coming in April or March. We are now recording that and that¹s why I said that I don¹t want to do any interviews or any promotion because I¹m too busy recording the Funkstörung album. I wanted people to give more attention to the Funkstörung album than on my album because my album is just for fun. That¹s it actually.

Well, the album seems pretty cohesive for being over such a long period of time...

Thank you. Some of them I did the original like four or five years ago and then I did kind of remixes, or put it into the computer again and did some special effects on that. That¹s perhaps why it sounds more homogenic. It¹s okay, a fun album.

Did you use mostly the same process making them all along?

No, most of them are made just with a small hardware sequencer (I don¹t know if you know it), but the Alexis MNP-8. It¹s a really small sequencer and I use one drum computer and one small SMPTE and that¹s it. Afterwards I put it through the computer and so on, just like three tracks. The newer ones, like the Œ99 tracks, they are done only by computer. All the other tracks are done with a small hardware sequencer, so it¹s actually really complicated to do that music, but you can¹t hear it as much...

Most of the equipment you used then is like the setup you used for the live shows?

Yeah, exactly. That¹s the equipment I used for doing the tracks because at that time we had no computer. We just bought a computer one and a half years ago, so before that we only worked with drum computers and hardware sequencers, that¹s it. We now take the same effort in doing the tracks, but they come out a lot more complex and a lot more hi-tech or whatever. But we still do it in the same time because we have a lot more possibilities, a lot better equipment.

You can break things into smaller pieces.

Yes, actually. (laughs) We can control everything a lot better. We¹ve got so many possibilities because we get all these software effects and like now 1000 times more possibilities than we used to have with the small equipment. So do you use Cubase on the computer? Yeah, Cubase and some other normal things like everybody uses. We have no absolutely special equipment.

Do you record at home?

We have a studio now at Chris¹s place. He¹s got‹or his parents have got a house and in the basement of this house we¹ve got a small studio. That¹s how we can make music as loud as we want to do it. It¹s really good. It¹s a really nice place. There¹s a lot of people that think of a big, big studio if they hear Funkstörung tracks, but it¹s small stuff. It¹s a small computer and three synthesizers and that¹s it. Some people are really disappointed after seeing our studio, but it¹s okay.

As long as it¹s comfortable.

We don¹t like if we have too much equipment because you get lost easily. You¹ve got too many possibilities already and you think, I got this $2000 synthesizer, I have to use it even if it doesn¹t fit in this track. But you have to use it because you spent so much money on the synthesizer, so it¹s really stupid. If you¹ve got less equipment and it¹s okay, then it¹s better I guess. We¹re quite happy with our studio. Not too little, but not too much.

I hear that you¹re also into hip hop these days.

We are, definitely. On the new [Funkstörung] album we did a lot of instrumental hip hop tracks already and a track with an MC. It¹s really proper hip hop, but in a very electronical way, like totally fucked up. But it¹s a real MC rapping on top of our track and we¹re really happy about it. I think we¹re going to do another track with him. We¹re also really influenced by pop music, you could say. We did three tracks with singing and we¹re probably going to do another track with singing. I think a lot of people might be surprised by our album. It¹s hip hop and it¹s pop music and it¹s totally fucked up. There¹s so many sounds in it and it¹s not really pop or hip hop because it¹s too fucked up for everything. It¹s a lot more complicated, a lot more than our remixes. A lot more sounds, a lot dirtier, and a lot harder. In no way is it easy music, but that¹s okay.

Would you say that wanting to incorporate the pop and hip hop influences came from doing those remixes?

Definitely, especially the Bjork remix. It opened something for us, because we never thought... We never liked voices that much. Okay, we liked Bjork, it was okay, but we never heard tracks which we really liked with singing. Then we did our remixes, we did our beats and put the voice of Bjork on top of it and we said, ³That¹s it. That¹s our future! We have to do tracks with singing.² It¹s so much more if you have a really good vocal in your track. Wu Tang was the second single. We did our beats and everything and then we put the raps on top of it and we were really surprised ourselves because it fit and it was really cool. The remixes was like the beginning. We started doing that and now with our album we improved all the ways of working with singing, working with raps and all that stuff. I figure our album will be a lot better than any of the remixes we did so far. We¹re quite happy so far.

You can hear the hip hop on the newer tracks on your solo album too, like ³Demon-Stration². It¹s blurry, deconstructed hip hop, but if you take a step back it comes through.

Yeah, I think in the last two years the best music that came out was hip hop. We weren¹t that happy with all the electronic stuff that came out.

What hip hop stuff were you into?

For example, the Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr, Mos Def was really cool... I don¹t know, there¹s really too many to name, but like the most famous were Tribe Called Quest and like all the Q-Tip stuff was really cool. It¹s pop music, but it¹s good. €Did you hear the new Old Dirty Bastard? To be honest, we don¹t like Wu Tang. (laughs) Yeah, I was never the biggest fan, but the new ODB has some crazy stuff on it. Oh yeah, he¹s absolutely crazy. It¹s cool. I just know the single, that¹s it.

Well, you don¹t necessarily need the entire album.

(laughs) Okay. Rawkus is a very good label. All the Peanut Butter Wolf produced stuff is really good. It has to be fat, massive hip hop, or like Tribe Called Quest, very cool, but it has to have a certain type of groove or coolness or whatever and then we like it. €Hip hop is kind of a deconstructural from of music anyway. They¹ve been chopping up beats, in a simpler manner from it¹s incarnation. Yeah, that¹s our thing. What we like is the groove, but like the production is so simple and so boring sometimes. They always use the same drum loops and same musical loops. It¹s like hmmm... it could be better, and that¹s what we wanted to do with the hip hop track on our album. You have to listen to it before I tell you everything, but we¹re very happy about it.

The drums on that song ³Jazdrive² on Marion sound more live rather than most of your other stuff.

Yeah, it is live. It¹s actually the first beat I¹ve ever stolen from any record! (laughs) The thing is I totally fucked it up and edited it in a new way. It¹s taken from an old jazz record. It was a drum solo. I just took one loop out of the drums and I fucked it up and made a new beat out of it. You wouldn¹t recognize that I took the drums out of this jazz track. It¹s fun, I like playing around with beats. The way we do music is, like imagine two kiddies playing around with our toys. We have fun doing that. It¹s no big strategy, like we have to do the most complex beats or whatever. We just have so much fun doing these beats and that¹s it. We just want to have fun doing it. We don¹t want to achieve anything special, to shock the people, or I don¹t know...

Just develop your individual sound?

Once you go back to all the old records and listen it¹s good to see the progression. Yeah, I think our friends who listen to our new tracks all say it¹s really cool to see how far you developed the new tracks. Like Matt from Designers Republic who did our design and is doing our new design. He¹s like, ³Wow, it¹s really unbelievable how far you developed,² and the K7! people. It motivates us a lot that the people see the progress. We ourselves don¹t have the distance to see it. We think that we improve, but you don¹t have the distance to your own tracks because you listened to it a few hundred times while doing it. €Sometimes you can¹t hear it from a fresh angle anymore. You don¹t know if it¹s good or bad! (laughs) It¹s good if you finish a track and then you take a few days break. And then you listen back and you know if it¹s really good, or if it wasn¹t that good. It¹s good to get a kind of distance or to speak to people who have got a distance.

Well, you guys have been very prolific over the last few years. You¹ve kept really busy.

We have fun doing that. It¹s like a hobby. You don¹t want to stop doing it. It¹s like if you are totally interested in sports or whatever‹you do sports every day. For us it¹s the same. We don¹t feel very good if we can¹t do music. It¹s not like a job. Yeah, we are busy doing that and sometimes it is like a job if you have to do all the interviews and stuff. But the music is not like a job, it¹s really our hobby, our pleasure, what you want to do everyday.

Did you like the US tour? Um... We liked the gigs very much, like all the people were so interested, so into our music and we met so many nice people. That was very, very nice. We really loved the nights themselves, but the whole flying around, not sleeping, no hotels anywhere. Like we slept only two hours and then we had to get to the plane for the next seven hours. Then we stood in Chicago for seven hours in one plane, trapped in the airport. It¹s like, oh my god, that was not very good. We want to change it for the next tour so that we always have one day off after one gig, an easier schedule. Actually, we can¹t complain because we just had maybe six gigs in America, which is actually not that much. We¹re lazy people. We don¹t like travelling around that much. We like doing tracks in our studio and that¹s it. Actually, we want to tour as well because it¹s always good to meet other people, to speak to people who listen to our music, to play in different places. It¹s good. It¹s not the most important thing for us though. The most important thing for us is doing music.

Do you play out that often in Germany? No, not at all actually.

What we¹re probably going to do is start our own club in Munich, but we are not sure about that at the moment. Perhaps we¹re going to start it. People are interested in our music, but the thing is they don¹t want to have us live at their clubs because we are too strange for them. They can¹t dance to our music. We never had any agency to take care of our bookings and everything, so we don¹t take care about playing live. But if we play live, then we put a lot of care into our actual live set. It¹s always so complicated, too much work.

Did K7! help you out with that US tour then?

Yes, they organized everything. They do all the promotional work. I think also that we¹re going to get a new agency in America, in Germany, in England, in France and everywhere... I think we have to do a massive tour in March or April, around then. We definitely are going to come back to America soon. We want to play Portland, or San Francisco, or wherever...

So is K7! going to do the manufacturing and distribution for everything Musik Aus Strom puts out now, 12²s and the CDs?

As Funkstörung we are signed exclusively to K7!. They are our label now. For my album, that was released on our own label Musik Aus Strom and K7! just helped us out with distribution, manufacturing and promoting. That¹s it, so it¹s still a MAS release and they had nothing to do with the track listing or whatever. It¹s all my decision.

They do all the busy work then?

K7! is a very good partner. They are really nice people and that¹s what we love the most. They are doing a very good job. We don¹t like all their release that much. But they are doing a good job for us, so that¹s okay, and we can do what we want. The tracks that we have are stranger than our last ones and we didn¹t know what K7! would say about these tracks, but they really loved it. They really freaked out and that makes us happy as well. But we wouldn¹t have changed the tracks if they¹d said, ³Oh no, we don¹t like them.² But they liked them and everyone is happy and that¹s good.

So I heard your friend from Designers Republic was working on a video for you too?

Oh, we¹re not sure about that. Actually, he was supposed to do one for my own album, for the first track, but everything had to be cancelled because of time problems. They had no time and I had to release it before Christmas this year, otherwise the schedule would have been too full. Everything was really confusing and it would have been too complicated to do the video, so we said, ³Aw come on, cancel it.² And for the Funkstörung a video is planned, but we ourselves are not sure about it anymore. I think we are more of the opinion to spend all of the money you would have to spend on a video, to spend it on T-Shirts or all the other merchandising promotional stuff. Because we¹ve never had any Funkstörung T-Shirts, we never had absolutely massive Funkstörung posters, so we¹re going to have all these toys. I¹m not sure if we get a video, or a cheap video and all of these other promotional stuff as well. We¹ll see after we finish the album and that¹ll be in January. Then I can tell you more.

One of the first things I have from you guys was one of those old Acid Planet 12²s...

Oh yeah, that¹s really old!

Some of those are still floating around here in the US.

Yeah, I know, they repressed all of them. I think they¹re going to release them as a CD as well. I don¹t know what they¹re doing! Because our name got bigger they now can sell them easily. And that¹s good for them because they¹ve got no money, so it¹s cool. €What were you doing before that? The Acid Planet records were the first records we did. Like all the Acid Planet and Bunker records, there were six LPs and one single. I think 53 tracks all in all and that was the first stuff we did. It was really minimal, distorted techno. After that we did our own Musik Aus Strom EPs, like the first two 12²s, then we did two Compost EPs, a Chocolate EP and an EP on Inter-Ferred Communications, which is the label of I-F. €I¹ve never seen that one. Yeah, I don¹t know if they¹re going to repress this record, but it¹s pressed from the same guys like Bunker and all the stuff, they all belong together. It was our first record, so we had a very good progression, because the first records were acid techno tracks, very distorted. Then we did like very easy intelligent [idm] tracks, I don¹t know the name for that. And now we are doing, I don¹t know what to call it. You can¹t say hip hop and you can¹t say electronica, or intelligent, or whatever, because it¹s different. Anyway, you have to listen to it. It¹s a hard thing to say when you think about it before you have a listen.

You are covering new territory then.

Yeah, it¹s not like that you can¹t hear that it¹s Funkstörung anymore. It¹s still absolutely Funkstörung really, but in a lot more high tech way, a lot better sounds, with all these hip hop influences, with vocals, and that gets us to the next level. €Do you use Mac or PC? We want to buy a Mac, but we¹ve just got a PC. We¹ve got a very cheap computer and a very cheap sound card actually. Like the Bjork remixes and the Wu Tang remixes we did with the AWE Soundblaster 64 sound card. That¹s the cheapest sound card you can get for PC. It¹s okay for that. You spend like $100 and that¹s it! Now we¹ve got a better one which costs about $300. We use PC, and we like PC because I think there¹s more software available for PC. But for Mac there¹s different software available, which is also very cool. I don¹t know, different plug-ins for Cubase and all that stuff. So we have to get a Mac as well, but for the moment the PC is okay and for the next album, we¹re going to use a Mac. That¹s what we plan to do, but we will see.

I use the Mac for recording, but have never really gotten into sequencing on it.

The old Mac is quite cool I think, but with the new Mac it¹s really hard to get all these midi interfaces and all this stuff in Germany. It¹s not that cool actually, so that¹s why we decided not to buy a Mac. And we will buy it next year, if we¹ve got more money. I hope. Computers are so much more expensive in Germany. The new G4 costs like $2500/$3000. I don¹t know what it costs in America, but as far as I know they cost about half of that.

On the other hand though, you can do so much on a computer that¹s a couple years old and half the price.

You don¹t have to have big and expensive equipment. It can be cheap, there¹s all possibilities with cheap equipment. You can have a 500 MHz processor, it doesn¹t cost anything now and it¹s super fast for musical things. It¹s really perfect.

It¹s cheaper than buying most ³musical² equipment.

Of course, a cheap computer for $1000 and you can do everything with it. Everything.

A nice sampler will cost you more and has less options for expanding.

We don¹t use any sampler. We just use our computer as a sampler and that¹s not really a sampler. We edit all the wav files. We don¹t use a sampler, you could say, it¹s all wav files where you change the start points and end points all the time. It¹s not really sampling what we do.

And you can¹t send email with a sampler either.

No. (laughs) But for that I¹ve got a different computer.

[end]

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