ETTORE SALATI

This month's Artist in Spotlight is Ettore Salati from Italy. Ettore is a sought after session guitarist by many prog musicians not just in Italy but all around the world. He started playing piano at a very young age (mostly classical music) but when he became a teenager and discovered the world of Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Genesis and 70's rock in general, he was immediately fascinated by guitar... more

KAT EPPLE (Emerald Web)

KAT EPPLE, flautist and composer, is our interview guest this month. She has won 8 Emmy awards, was nominated for a Grammy and she has released 18 albums internationally. Most of you know her as the other half of the legendary ambient/new age duo EMERALD WEB. She has a very large collection (over 200) of flutes that she gathered from all around the world during her travels. Kat composes original New Age/Jazz/World/orchestral music and has produced film scores and television soundtracks for National Geographic, Nova, CNN, Carl Sagan, Another World, The Travel Channel, Turner Broadcasting System, History Channel, HGN, The Guiding Light, PBS, and NASA among others, and was Music Director for the feature-length film, Captiva Island. She also owns a record company and works on both sides of the music industry as a musician and as a business woman... more

New Grass Revival / On The Boulevard

New Grass Revival are one of the pioneers of progressive bluegrass. Formed in 1971 by Sam Bush (mandolin/vocals), Curtis Burch (guitar), Ebo Walker (bass) and Courtney Johnson (banjo), they immediately got the attention from the industry both in a good and bad way. First of all, they were often told that their music was not bluegrass, and they knew it wasn’t “bluegrass” in its traditional sense, and it wasn’t what they were trying to achieve anyways. They were blending rock, soul and blues rhythms with the traditional bluegrass music. They were not wearing suites, but instead they had a more casual style along with long hair... more

Interview with MARKUS REUTER by Hande Burdg

TPF:Hello Markus! Thank you very much for being so kind to accept our interview request. We feel very honored.

MR:You're welcome!

TPF:First of all, we read on Tuner's blog that your new CD "POLE" was listed among the top 50 prog recordings of all times by the Modern Drummer magazine. Congratulations! Could you please tell us how TUNER was formed?

MR:Thank you. Pat (PAT MASTELOTTOof King Crimson) and I were very delighted to find our album in the list. We knew we'd done something special, but we didn't expect anybody to acknowledge it this soon.Pat and I met on a train from Munich to Bonn (Germany). He was on tour with King Crimson at the time. We exchanged CDs and are friends since. He invited me over to record with him once he had his own recording set-up at his home in Austin, Texas. We composed and recorded our first CD TOTEM in one week in April 2005. The second TUNER album POLE was produced in about 8 weeks, but those weeks happened over about 1 1/2 years. It was a long but wonderful process. The great side effect for me was that I got very confident as a producer, a musical role that I will and do already explore more.

TPF:Compared to your other projects, both as a solo artist and a member of Centrozoon, Tuner's sound is really very different. Could you please tell us a little bit about Tuner's sound and how you and Pat work together?

MR:The projects I am in all have a different flavour. That's what seperates them from each other basically. My solo music, for example, is improvised in a very controlled way. CENTROZOON however is wildly free and supposed to challenge both the musicians and the listener. TUNER is a very different animal as it combines Pat's vast musical experience in a number of styles with my vision for a music of the future. We're progressing from album to album. The first album occasionally stretched over into new territory by acknowledging the musical tradition that got lost from public view about 100 years ago. The second album does stretch over all the way through, but we managed to present it in such a light that people do not easily recognize it as such. The concept for the 3rd album is already in place, but although it's very restrictive, we have no idea what the music will sound like.

TPF:Some musicians who want to dive into the depths of "experimental music" often focus too much on the sound itself ignoring the "emotional" side of it. However you build a great balance in your music in this sense. How can you describe the relationship between you and the "sound"?

MR:Thank you for the compliment. This topic is indeed very close to my heart. I'll make it short: Recorded and live music has progressed greatly in terms of many aspects including sound, but the most important part of music has been mostly stagnant for a long time: Harmony, that is pitch simultaneity and it's structure. To simplify a bit, this is where emotion is located in music. Polyphonic application of free-tonal harmony is the field that needs to be tackled in order to push things forward in progressive music and even popular music, I believe.

My relationship with sound is getting better and better. I am slowly getting to a point where I have an opinion about sound. Some time ago sound did not matter to me at all. I was captivated by music, ignoring the sound. But still, I am glad that I have confidence in my abilities to create music that can exist without a "sound".

TPF:Music that can exist without a "sound"... Could you please elaborate on that one?

MR:A fleshly answer is that you can write down a series of pitches, not specifying the sound/instrument to play those pitches. This collection of pitches can be highly musical, no matter which player and instrument plays them. You don't even need to play them. Just looking at the score, it's structure, the ideas it is using and developing, is a musical experience. There is conceptual music as much as there is conceptual art.

A "metaphysical" answer is, some say that music is the highest form of communication, which in turn means that communication follows musical principles. Communication is music. People communicate just by looking at each other. Where's the "sound"? What I am trying to say is that everything has a vibration/pulse/timing, a musical essence. The process of structuring and working with these vibrations is what I consider making music. It is also what I consider existence.

Some practical advice for the musician in the world today: Integrate rather than separate. Improvise the composition. Generate the composition. Perform the process. Improvise the performance. Compose the improvisation. Speak before you think.

TPF:We have listened to the commentaries on your website about the new Centrozoon album "Lovefield". One of the things everybody was agreeing on was that this album is very different from the other Centrozoon albums. Could you please tell us a little bit about this album, and what do you think makes it different from the other ones?

MR:From a technical point of the view the difference is that Bernhard and I are playing in the studio with just a guitar and a keyboard. No sequencers or digital delays were used. But coming from the "sound" perspective discussed above, I think the music manages to reach over to the unknown constantly while still sounding quite good in a traditional sense, which our earlier releases failed to do. We can and maybe should go down this path further, but I doubt it's going to happen in a way that we can foresee.

TPF:Independent musicians today sometimes face great deal of difficulties to reach their audiences. From a sociologist's point of view, do you think there is light at the end of the tunnel as far as standing against what mass media offers us to consume goes?

MR:I believe that artists in general will need to re-individualise (I made up this word, meaning that one should find one's self rather than trying to be part of a group or fashion) in order to survive in the future. There's "bad music" that nobody wants to hear and there's "good music" that nobody wants to hear.Strangely enough it's still the "bad music" that is being courted by the industry, but this will have to change rather soon. One way to prepare for the future is to use the old-fashioned means of marketing (that is: money) and apply it to an unlikely product. In the end the unlikely product will generate lots of positive repercussions for a very long time.

TPF:When you were growing up, who were your most favorite musicians?

MR:Mike Oldfield was my definite number one. I saw him in concert when I was 10 years old and the energy left a big impression that I still compare every music to, I believe. I also enjoyed English bands like New Model Army and Level 42. Then there was J. S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, but also Klaus Schulze ("X") and guitarists David Torn and Robert Fripp.

TPF:Will there be any US dates in the near future for Tuner or Centrozoon?

MR:Nothing's planned for the near future. We're really dependent on interested people to set things up for us over there. We got too much to look after already. TUNER is playing three dates in Estonia at the end of October and Bernhard, Pat and I are opening as an improvising trio for The Flower Kings on their European tour in November.

TPF:And lastly, what bands / artists are you currently listening?

MR:I still listen to most of the music that I've been listening to in the past 20 years, adding to it as I discover new artists. Most recently these have been Don Li (Album "Out Of Body Experience") and Nik Baertsch.

We thank Markus REUTER a lot for taking the time to answer our questions. If you would like to purchase Tuner or Centrozoon albums, you can go to:Burningshed.Com