Returning with the long-awaited follow-up to 2002’s ‘Zoomer’, Schneider TM’s creator Dirk Dresselhaus spoke to Clash about the highs and lows that spawned his latest album and how he found lyrical inspiration – in prison.
Dirk Dresselhaus is back doing what he enjoys most: taking the fruits of his life’s passion on the road. Under his Schneider TM guise and on a series of projects with co-conspirators touring has opened up wildly different scenarios, from meeting kindred spirits during an exhausting stint in the States to bemusing onlookers in the deepest reaches of Eastern Europe. All good material, it seems, for pouring into his evermore kaleidoscopic musical creations.
“When we played Eastern Romania and into Moldavia, that was really bizarre. It was a total culture clash – they looked at us like we were aliens,” he says, recalling time spent on the road with Berlin-based experimental audio-visual electronic artists Rechenzentrum. “The set we played was quite noisy with drones between songs and more electronic stuff. It proved it’s not just good to have big applause and shows where you feel like a rock star, but also to play music to confront people. The reaction might be negative, but at other times it’s positive because they are listening. We made quite an impression, even if it was one of confusion. It gets the brain working anyway!”
As he recalls six “mind-blowing” weeks in the States outside his Berlin studio, it’s clear Dirk is one of music’s philosophers. Among the tales of fucked-up parties and 80-hour stretches without sleep, his conversation is littered with references to the spirit within music, the energy it can create, how gigging new places “enriches the mind and soul”. “It’s a great gift,” he says. Perhaps that explains why after years spent gorging himself on what the world had to offer, returning home hit him hard. Listening to ‘Skoda Mluvit’, there’s a sombre mood running through much of the album. The album’s original working title, ‘The Most Beautiful Pain In The World Vs The Caplets And The Damage Done’, while offering a nod towards the influence of
Neil Young’s ‘Trans’ record, suggests inner turmoil.
“It wasn’t supposed to come out that way but I wrote the songs during quite a difficult period of my life,” he says. “After two or three years touring and playing so many shows and living this totally different lifestyle, to come back home… it caused a couple of problems in my private life. It wasn’t depression, but it was like I fell back down to the ground. A couple of sad things happened, but sometimes you wonder why the world turns like it does anyway. Maybe I’m a melancholic person in my heart cos I’m a quarter Czech and they’re like that – maybe it’s in my genes?”
The writing of the album became something of a recovery process, one that was ultimately successful, hence the positivity among the darker moments. ‘Skoda Mluvit’ is his most imaginatively constructed, yet essentially song-based record to date. Within the vibrant, occasionally disconcerting electronic soundscapes are found simple – pretty even – songs tinged with folk and country. This from a man who emerged from the rhythm section of indie bands and professes to listen to traditional African music and the most intense noise and drones in equal measure. “My brain doesn’t want to think in one way, it’s the spirit of music I’m interested in. When the spirit is strong it could be any kind of music,” he says.
The spirit has rarely been stronger than when he was enlisted to produce tracks for a German radio play with young prisoners, eventually working with two men from the Juvenile Prison Berlin Plötzensee and two girls from the JVA Lichtenberg.
“It was very interesting,” he says. “I’d never been to jail! They wrote really incredible stuff, like gangster rap, but much deeper. It was a really big inspiration and made me feel a little bit ashamed about my own lyrics, because what they were writing about, it really had to come out somehow.”
Maybe I’m a melancholic person in my heart cos I’m a quarter Czech and they’re like that – maybe it’s in my genes?
That can be traced to ‘Skoda Mluvit’, where Dirk’s words are often less surreal and more rooted in experience than before. The sense of childlike wonder remains, however, unsurprising from someone who professes to have started out making music by banging cups as a child, a practice still likely to crop up in his music today.
That innocent approach is one he is keen to maintain; when making waves with his remix work and acclaimed covers such as ‘Light 3000’, his take on The Smiths’ ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, he was suggested as a future producer for the likes of Madonna, but he’s happy to remain untainted on the fringes.
“Money can fuck up everything very, very quickly,” he says. “When I made the new album I didn’t play any songs to the label until it was finished so I didn’t have to deal with their comments. I just want to fuck all those thoughts about money. It has nothing to with music and what music can do. Music is there to give energy. When you can hear that money is involved music sounds so weak and uninspired.
“The first two records anyone makes are always brilliant and then they get famous and it fucks them up. When I started playing I swore to myself that I didn’t want to get past the point of the first LP all my life. Of course that doesn’t happen because you learn a lot, but in terms of the spirit I try to stay that way.”
