Bonus: Peter Baumann Talks About Conrad Schnitzler

Following on from my chat with Peter Baumann about his solo album Romance 76 and his work with Tangerine Dream, I spoke with him about his working relationship and friendship with Conrad Schnitzler. Two of Schniztler’s albums – Convex and Control – have recently been reissued.

You worked fairly extensively with Conrad Schnitzler. He was briefly a member of Tangerine Dream, but had left some time before you joined. How did you come to know him?

He was in the scene where we were hanging out. I always loved Conrad; he was such an oddball! He always said, “I’m not a musician. I just make noise. I let the other people do the music, and I destroy it.” That’s literally what he would say.

Yes! His work is, shall we say, much less rooted in melody than yours. What appealed to you about what he was doing that made you want to work with him?

Oh, I just thought he was a great character. And it was fun. There was a little record company in France, Egg; I had a contract with them to produce three records. Joachim Rodelius [Jardian Au Fou, 1979] was one of them, and Asmus Tietchens [Nachtstücke (Expressions Et Perspectives Sonores Intemporelles), 1980] was one of them, and Conrad Schnitzler.

I just enjoyed Conrad as a person. And I liked to work with him in the studio because I was part of it. There’s a lot of the pieces where I just said, “Hey, let’s start with this.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, that’s great. Now let me destroy it.” The record I did with him, [Con, 1978] was much more coherent than a lot of his other work. And that was because I produced it. I gave it a little bit more of a commercial bent than a lot of his other work. But we just had a ball hanging out and joking about the world.

Bureau B – the label that has reissued Romance 76 – has also just reissued two of Schnitzler’s records: Control, which is one of eight(!) albums he made in 1981, and Convex from 1982. Those two records are not commercial titles at all. When you worked with Schnitzler, did he ever discuss the emotional or thematic underpinnings, if any, of his compositions?

He was a renegade; that was just his personality. As I say, he was an oddball. And I loved that, because I’m not quite that much of an oddball; I’m kind of half between what you understand and what you don’t understand. He’s all the way and you don’t understand.

I don’t think Conrad ever thought about what he was doing. This was fascinating: he had a whole box of cassettes with different sounds on them; the most weird sounds. Sometimes when he was performing live, he had two cassette players. He would put different cassettes in each of these, haphazardly mixing together. So he was basically improvising just by which cassettes he would put in.

In the times that you worked with him, what kind of equipment was he using? For the most part, he wasn’t using synthesizers that had keyboards, was he?

No, not really. I had a recording studio in Berlin, and we were renting it out. So there was all sorts of percussion, and really odd things that made noises. And he just said, “Oh, let me do this. And now we’ll turn the tape over upside down and see what happens.”

My big synthesizer, the custom-made one, was in the studio as well. So we used that for a couple of tracks. But it was very spontaneous. What I really liked about Conrad was that he made no bones about it. You know, he would even think, “Why would anybody listen to this!?” It was very entertaining.

You mentioned “understanding and not understanding.” In the new liner notes for Convex, Asmus Tietschens asserts that “no one has the authority to interpret” Schnitzler’s music. That said, what does it mean to you?

I’ve always loved instrumental music of all sorts, because you didn’t have a story about it; there was no concept behind it. And that was true for Conrad, certainly.

Interpretation is always a dicey business; I’m not much into interpretation. I’m more into “Let’s see how that feels.” You listen to a lot of music; you know that you can listen to the same track again, and it feels a little bit different. Depending on your age, how often you heard it, whether you slept well last night, it’s just slightly different. So there is no interpretation. You can make up any story you want, but what matters is in the moment that you listen to it. And then: how does it affect you?