“I Follow Them, They Follow Me”

In Conversation with 3Ddancer, the electronic free jazz trio formed by Rachel Lyn, Volruptus and Alex the Fairy

The Beauty of syncing so naturally to stumble together into hypnotic improv sessions for the dancefloor.

Interview and Text by Sophie Kübler

3Ddancer, the ensemble formed by Australian Rachel Lyn, Reykjavik-born artist Bjarg aka Volruptus and Berlin-based artist Alex the Fairy, released an album titled "New exciting Toys," a 42-track live extravaganza spanning nearly four hours of their improvised performances. With their individual origins in modular music, improvisation and electronic dance music, they became 3Ddancers, developing truly powerful combinations of hard rhythm styles. They found each other musically and personally in a very organic way giving 3Ddancer’s experience and musicality a solid ground. Rachel Lyn, already known in Berlin as the mother of the 'Modular Gang', Volruptus, who brings in explosive soundscapes with releases on bbbbbb records and trip records, and Alex the Fairy, a Berlin-based experimental artist with a focus on electronic and concrete methods.

"Embrace some chaos and unpredictability" is what Bjarg calls it, and that's what it looks like at first when you check out their Boiler Room at Funkhaus Berlin 2018.

But then it's not that simple, after all these are improvisations between three different characters, each with their own sound. The fact that the album is a live recorded improvised performance makes it difficult to remember the pieces, and yet so exciting to archive them on an album. Because what is not improvised is rehearsed. I argue that improvisation has an important quality, where music becomes a language on a deeper level, replacing words for communication, and must be learned just like speech.

I ask, "How did you find your own style?" and Bjarg replies, "By fucking up so much."

Owning your own creativity to stumble over a note and let yourself fall into the creative flow doesn't require words, but the confidence to fail, make mistakes, and move on until you are in tune and can navigate organically.

As digital and technical as their setup may look from the outside, when I talk to Rachel, Alex and Bjarg about the inner workings, we go back to the origins of music making, where methodology and emotionality mix within people, only to emerge in the form of creation. "It's an intersection between two very different fields: one is the very technical, mathematical and pure idea of layering ratios, the interplay of sequences of numbers and relationships between them, etc., and the other is the emotional, aesthetic, subjective side, completely non-technical and indefinable." Now, to find one's own style between two disciplines, one must allow oneself to make mistakes and "control the uncontrolled.“ says Alex.

27.06.2022

IN CONVERSATION:

There are three of you in a dark room, cables all around, little light, sweating people. Synthesizers are instruments you have to know inside out, as well as your creativity. How do you keep the overview in the atmosphere of a club?

A: there's so much going on I rarely have time to take in visually what's going on, so generally I'm going on auditory cues, the sound of the room and the Soundsystem and how they’re interacting together and the crowd, I think you can get a lot just from that. It's a sound thing anyway, I think I’d find looking too much distracting.

R: I think coming from a DJ background and having experience in opening through to closing a club I’m hyper-aware of what works in what moments when selecting tracks but in this Live improvised sense it’s not so much about that actually it's very different. I follow them, they follow me, sometimes I'm telling the guys let's go harder or let's do more of this and that. I’m pretty sure our audience is up for the journey.

B: By turning that stage fright into stage might! Also, I wouldn’t say I have a complete overview, rather that I go with the flow and embrace some chaos and unpredictability

Image source: 3Ddancer

The description of the new album is: 42 magic moments of spontaneity ... can you tell us some magic moments you can remember and the songs that were part of them?

A: I don't think I can remember where any songs were made in particular but the final few hours from when we played Saule/CTM were definitely surreal, and daylight at Hard Trade was great. Oh and the ending of Herrensauna at RSO was ridiculous, felt like being reborn after the whole 20/21 thing

R: After a show or rehearsal it’s really a blur. I think because we are so present and focused with what’s happening in the moment and the good stuff just keeps on coming. It’s hard to remain fixed to one moment. I have to say our track ‘Harpsichord’ is a track we keep reworking and it’s always one of my favorite moments in a club. I call it our anthem. We have listened and cutting sessions where we listen to recordings of shows and rehearsals and start cutting tracks out. It’s always surprising and likes listening to something brand new and honestly, I’m not even sure how we made it sometimes.

B: Remembering a piece of fleeting music after a few hours of jamming is a bit difficult, at least for me. But sometimes upon hearing the recording It rings some bells and tickles some emotions from that moment.

When did you decide to form a trio?

A: I had had this idea of doing a communally patched interconnected improvised thing for a while and saw an opportunity to do it at the end of a show, so after a little persuasion I convinced Bjarg and Rachel and someone else to just try it at my studio. we tried and it went a lot better than everyone expected, so we did it a bunch of times at Rachels's parties. it kind of solidified as just the 3 of us from the beginning, so we decided to give it a name and that was that

R: I started my Modular Gang party back in 2017 and for the first event we just thought of doing a jam together for the closing. I can still remember how good the jam and vibe was that night. We synced so organically that we just had to keep playing after that.

B: Several years ago after a very spontaneous jam. Basically, we were all nerding out over modulars and just decided that we should jam on them together rather than just talk about them.

How do you dive into improvisation? Rachel, I've seen you have objects that put you in a weird mood to be creative. It's a mushroom, right? What other objects do you have and when the three of you work together, either live or in rehearsal, how do you get into the mood to improvise?

A: Finding the first sound by experimenting, everything follows from that for me.

R: I would say the mushroom is more for my solo Live porthole. For 3D, the aesthetic is different. I don't have a specific object for 3D, I'm more inspired by having the best dance ever, creating an experience like no other, dark lights, strobes and lasers…

B: Well if you just start, It usually doesn’t take long to stumble upon something very inspiring that you can take further or twist around in cool ways, you kinda have to give in to the music.

How did you find your own style?

A: by fucking up so much. And being confident enough to fuck up that much.

R: We never tried to sound like something or someone. Together we just bounce off each other without really trying, of course we have a lot of rehearsals and we try a lot of stuff out but I know it’s rare to find 2 others that you can sync so naturally with.

B: Through action and not thought, and to be kinda cheesy It found us (✿◠‿◠)

Image source: Boiler Room

I took this from one of your interviews/features on electronic beats: “Why can’t experiments and [errors] be [considered] intelligent?” Alex questions. He argues that the primitive logic of club music in the front end doesn’t exclude it from being rigorous or innovative, to which Rachel adds, “It’s about feeling and aesthetic rather than songwriting.

B: Haha, yeah also my answers were all cut out from that interview. Their questions were kinda offensive and clueless and I didn’t hold back lol. Maybe Alex’s answer was a bit more civil, but they kinda called our music stupid.

Can you explain that to our readers from the perspective of a musician? Maybe young people who are into synthesizers and your musical style and trying to find their creativity, what do you mean by that, and how that freedom from error can lead to great creativity?

A: Music is tricky because it’s an intersection between two very different realms: the one being the very technical, mathematical, and pure ideas of the layering of ratios, the interplay of numerical sequences and relationships between them etc., and the other one being the emotional, aesthetic, subjective side, completely untechnical and undefinable. When you make music you have to walk around in the intersection of these two. Stray too far into the technical and you’ll fail to be original, become too conformist, and get sucked into mathematics. Stray too far into the creative and you’ll never record anything, won’t be able to use your tools to get them to do what you want, and be hindered by technical issues. The idea of an error only really exists in the technical, mathematical realm. In the creative realm, it’s just a form of expression. Music is sequential right? Every time one could define something as a “mistake”, it can only be defined as a “mistake” in the context of what came before and what comes after. The creator is in complete control of what comes after “the mistake”, so how they interpret it dictates what follows, and what meaning is given to it. What it says to you and where you take it is completely at the creator's discretion. I said before that we found our style by fucking up so much. The way I meant that is that we allowed ourselves enough freedom to make those mistakes. Our setup is complex enough to allow for freedom to do most things but robust enough that it can be abused. We allow errors to creep in and we grab hold of them and interpret them in our ways and make them our own. To be innovative and create something new and worth creating you have to be pushing some boundaries, and you have to be happy dancing around on top of those boundaries. You have to be able to control the out-of-control. But control it too much and it’s not out of control, you’re just guiding it - like holding a bar of soap, squeeze too tight and it’s gone. You need to have the ability (intelligence is such a horrible word) to make mistakes, be comfortable with them and toy with them, to really interpret them for yourself.

This answer is getting a bit long, and of course, this is all a complete romanticization, most of the time we’re just trying to keep the train on the tracks.

R: Personally fear held me back for a while but it also made me work on music 1000+ hours more. Don’t be afraid to go at it alone as the DIY approach gives you all of the options to be 100% of your own thing. Like we have self-released all our music so far. Waiting for a stamp of approval from a label is really unhealthy and it's really nice knowing we have managed to do everything ourselves at this point. You have to believe it yourself and just go for it… and how do you do that? Well, you will know if you are being honest. Being vulnerable and honest in your art and vision is a powerful thing and good for the soul. That is the unique part. Get to know your instruments, experiment, being curious, and experiencing helps, it takes a lot of dedication. And I must add being around Alex and Bjarg I have learned so much. If you have like-minded people around you, share the experience or seek some.

B: Try not to be a perfectionist, there is no such thing as perfection in art, and often the imperfections are what make it appealing or beautiful.

Image source: Boiler Room

What are the three biggest improv mistakes that have served you the most?

A: I can only think of one and I’m not sure it necessarily serves us: with midi you send note start and note stop messages, and if one of those note stop messages gets interrupted or doesn’t arrive, the note continues until it receives a note stop message, which it never will because you cant send only a stop message, a start message always gets sent first… at least that's how I understand it. So, because our midi routing is probably sub-optimal, as a result, I often get these infinite notes and the only way to reset them (because no one seems to value midi panic buttons anymore) is to turn the synth whole system off and on again. So for a few seconds, the system shuts down all my sounds cut out, and then slowly come back. (free break down) it does work sometimes – but what it also means is that I sometimes get these moments of overlapping notes that wobble around in a sort of legato/slurred way which at times works really well, at other times it just makes everything muddy. Pretty quickly when this problem started turning up I realized I should try and time when I turn the system on and off so that it works within what everyone else is doing, in a way, the power switch has become a compositional tool, and it helps to stop you getting to sucked into the synth too much, a little mental reset when you turn it off, which can be quiet useful depending on how long you’ve been playing. Mainly though it’s just fucking annoying.

R: I think that’s the beauty of 3ddancer, we clash for a moment then we land to something epic.

B: In this music, a mistake is only a mistake if you try to cover it up. If you treat it like a feature and adjust the context around the sound then you end up with this wild cool thing no one was expecting.

Which people are inspiring you?

A: people that create stuff with conviction

R: I try not to focus on someone in particular but like-minded people, dreamers who create outside the norms

B: Open-minded people that are full of life and wisdom

Is there something you are looking forward to discovering or trying out next in this project?

A: Improving how we record so we can tidy up the recordings afterward. Everything we released so far was just the master stereo out, so there wasn’t much we could do to improve the mix in post-production, up till now…

R: I can’t wait to play more shows abroad, and release more records.

B: I agree with Rachel, and I always look forward to the next happy “accident”.

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