Herb Sundays 74: Thomas Fehlmann
The pioneering Berlin-based artist and producer in ocean-mode... "swimming and there are waves and drifts and undercurrents. all merging together to produce one big vital flow.”
Herb Sundays 73: Thomas Fehlmann (Apple, Spotify, Tidal). Art by Michael Cina.
“i like the ‘when no one is looking’ approach [editor’s note: I ask for a perfect Sunday mix for ‘when no one is looking’]. picking up from the time 20 years ago when gudrun and I had our weekly oceanclub-radioshow in berlin where we had lots of spots for taboos. still my favorite kind, mixing up and down left and right. having the ocean as an allegory to blend all imaginable currents. you’re swimming and there are waves and drifts and undercurrents. all merging together to produce one big vital flow.”
Some people are force multipliers. They just can’t help but make things better. They hold you to a higher standard, often uncomfortably, but it’s cause they love when things are right and they see potential in you and the moment greater than you can see.
It’s impossible to write this today without thinking of Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose passing arrived in our newsfeeds this morning, so let’s just get that out of the way. But there is indeed a kinship to today’s guest that is abundantly clear to me. Both are pioneering spirits who have innovated across multiple genres. Both are apexes of modernism and collaboration. Both have made everything they touch, remarkably better.
It's rare that an artist is at the starting line of 3 major movements. Fehlmann is one. In 1979, after decamping from Zurich to Hamburg for university, Fehlmann swapped fine art for music, got his first synth, and joined forces with Holger Hiller to co-found post-punk band, Palais Schaumburg. Speedrunning the bio here: “They were known to freely connect disparate extremes as they threw art, disco, minimalism, schmalz, jazz, and funk in the cooking pot. His formative years in Palais Schaumburg were also the occasion for Fehlmann to start his artistic relationship with Moritz Von Oswald (Basic Channel). After the band disbanded in 1984 they started to work as a production team in Berlin and collaborated with Blake Baxter, and Eddie ‘flashin’ Fowlkes and founded the legendary 3MB (3 Men in Berlin) with Juan Atkins for Tresor.”
I had forgotten about this page of Fehlmann’s CV. As my friend Heiko Hoffmann reminded me, Thomas is part of only a handful of artists that made a successful transition from post-punk to techno (alongside Moritz von Oswald, Fehlmann’s partner Gudrun Gut, and Gabi Delgado of D.A.F.). After the wall fell in 1989, Techno as a global endeavor found root in Europe most impactfully in Berlin, thanks in part to club and label Tresor. Detroit artists like Blake Baxter moved to Berlin and others thrived there with a more receptive audience and club culture. The 1992 3MB album includes “Die Kosmischen Kuriere” (also released as “Cosmic Courier”) is amongst my favorite Detroit Techno songs. A perfect slice of skyward melancholy soul, a paragon of the Berlin-Detroit alliance. In Ben Cardew’s recent review of the album he gets at its loose, pure essence:
“For such an important moment in techno’s global creep, relatively little has been said about the record’s origins. Atkins has spoken of meeting von Oswald in the early ’90s when the latter came to Detroit to buy musical gear; Fehlmann has said the album was produced in von Oswald’s Berlin studio, “all hands-on jamming, with no real plan.”
Fehlmann himself would become a resident at the Tresor in 1995 with his and Gudrun’s Ocean Club weekly residency which informs this mix to some degree. With the cascading of styles and influences, it’s the ocean mode made flesh. It’s impossible not to hear Fehlmann in “A Parade” by Huerco S. alias, Loidis (one of the finest dance 12”s of the last decade for this guy here). It’s also cool to feel how Hall & Oates become more effervescent in this mix, weirder, more springing, and more alive.
This barely covers his breadth as to so many Fehlmann is known as part of The Orb, one of the most seminal electronic acts ever, and one that still continues to evolve. I like this video of him and Dr. Alex Patterson tweaking about. It shows Fehlmann as the consummate collaborator.
I can’t help but see the painter in all of this. Some of Fehlmann’s work feels like pulled paint, like a Gerhard Richter pulling it and squeegeeing til it achieves uncertain but cosmic aims. Seeking something celestial out of earthy means, it is indeed timeless.
Early in Ghostly’s adventure Berlin became a place where our artists found a public, and some would spend more time there than in any other city, honing their craft. Fehlmann developed a special collaboratory relationship with Tadd Mullinix who appears on this mix in his Dabrye alias. I asked Tadd for a quote.
“Thomas Fehlmann's music is at the apex of all my favorite kinds of music. He proved his mastery at every step of his professional career. What a great inspiration and friend he's been to me over the years.. Be it post-punk, techno, ambient, downtempo, and so on... he's made all-time greats across the genres. It was so meaningful to me, to be brought into the fold on some of his projects. I cherish the memories--our conversations in the studio and over dinner in Berlin and Sternhaget.”
There has been a lot of conjecture about what is "real" dance music as it completes another dalliance with the mainstream with last year’s Beyoncé/Drake projects, etc. Great dance music of course is always about the body. But in the Detroit-Berlin canon, the enterprise demands that the body, the mind, and the spirit need to excel. This techno tradition finds its way into all of Fehlmann’s work and like his Berlin and Basic Channel brethren, Fehlmann trades on the vicissitudes of dub to achieve dance music transcendence. The winding motion of his best work is perhaps his trademark.
As friend-of-the-Herb Andy Battaglia shared in his review of the magisterial Honigpumpe album (Kompakt, 2007):
"It's when that hiss hits hardest that Honigpumpe finds its prime, in part because Fehlmann is so good at his brand of deep-focus production that even a banging beat skews as just one part of what's going on-- as a texture, a riff, a sign...Within the same track, you come to recognize one mood, then another, and yet another-- only to realize then that all had been there all along, lurking in the wrinkles that repetition smoothes."
Indeed “T.R.N.T.T.F.” slinks like a Violator-era Depeche Mode cut, building steam with each rotation, an impossible dream. The album is indeed another ink to his fine arts background as the press release tells us: “Dedicated to Joseph Beuys' 1977 installation ‘Honigpumpe Am Arbeitsplatz’ ('Honey Pump in the Workplace'), in which the equally material-obsessed artist pumped honey through a museum, ‘’Honigpumpe’ ('Honey Pump') is as treacly as Fehlmann has sounded yet….Fehlmann's work is denser, viscous, more ambivalent: like dancing in quicksand.”
There is beauty in age, and in wisdom. There is a way to become looser with time and to continue to refine your voice and craft. Creativity is an indomitable practice and spirt, and we need people like Fehlmann, and Gudrun Gut, and Mr. Sakamoto to remind us of this, every day.
From the field.