The Brag

Apparat
Loner No Longer
By Chris Honnery

“For most of my life I’ve been a nerd,” admits German musician Sascha Ring, otherwise known as Apparat. Ring has just come offstage from a performance and is kicking back with his band, swigging beer and conducting our interview on speaker phone – a scenario that undoubtedly lends itself to self-deprecation. Regardless, it’s a good jumping-off point to discuss Ring’s steady gravitation away from any auteur theory of DJing and dance music production. Since the release of his debut album Multifunktionsebene a decade ago, Ring has moved towards a more collaborative ethos, as exemplified by his latest album, The Devil’s Walk.

It was renowned German techno producer Ellen Allien, the founder of the BPitch Control label, who first succeeded in coaxing Ring out of his solitary production cocoon. “She’d approached me and I said, ‘OK, we can do this thing, but I’m going to do it in my studio and you’re going to do it in your studio and then maybe we’ll exchange sound files.’ She just said ‘No’ and came over, and suddenly she was sitting next to me,” he recalls.

“At the beginning it was very hard for me to adapt to having that other person there and accepting that other person’s opinion,” Ring admits, “because I was so used to being [in] control. Then I slowly learned by being a little more patient that if you give other people a chance, you might get something back in return.” The outcome of their collaboration was 2006’s Orchestra of Bubbles, an album that rightfully attracted considerable plaudits upon its original release for its distinct and spontaneous contrapuntal interpretations of electronic soundscapes. (Some of the tracks approached dubstep, at a time long before that became a buzzword.)

After collaborating with Allien, Ring’s outlook changed, and the idea of working alone began to seem more prosaic. “I made part of my 2007 Apparat album, Walls, with Josh from Telefon Tel Aviv, and it just brought me closer to the idea that it’s really, really cool to allow other people to enter my headspace somehow; somehow it just makes the result richer,” Ring affirms. “I’ve been making electronic music for ten years now, and it’s hard to be inspired the whole time. It can be so much cooler if someone else adds a little spice to the whole process.”

But it was Ring’s collaboration with German duo Modeselektor, as Moderat, that was to have a profound influence on his approach to both performing and making music. “There was a slow change and urge to make more organic music. But it was only after doing Moderat that I felt like I had to do something completely different.”

The Moderat project was the result of years of discussions between the trio. “We were always talking to each other and talking about making a record together. I thought it was going to be complicated [with three of us in the studio] but all that it needs is a little patience, and you need to open up. Now that I’ve learnt that, it’s hard to make a record on my own.”

Through Moderat, Ring found himself on support duties for Radiohead, which introduced him to a different kind of large-scale band performance. “I didn’t even know about Radiohead until seven years ago,” he admits. “Hail To The Thief was my first Radiohead experience, and I instantly fell in love. They’re coming from the exact opposite direction; they’re coming from rock and they embraced electronics, and I’m coming from being completely electronic and embracing all these other influences, so it totally made sense to me. It was a really big honour to be asked to do the support; suddenly you play in front of 30,000 people and it’s a little bit of education, and I think that’s always important.”

Similarly, Ring points to his experiences touring with Moderat as a catalyst for his changing production outlook. “There was three of us and the visuals guy on stage and there was lots of interaction – it was not pre-programmed. When I started making The Devil’s Walk I was really sure that I wanted to recapture that feeling when I performed the album live. I just wasn’t sure how this was going to happen.”

Ring escaped what he calls “the whole over-civilisation and information overkill” and headed to Mexico to record The Devil’s Walk, a title that references the classic poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“There’s too many rules and laws for everything, it doesn’t really feel that you’re free to do what you want. That’s why I wanted to get really far away with this album, to be in a completely different area,” he explains. “The best possible situation is to be completely disconnected from all kinds of expectations. You want to be free, and not think about the audience or what’s going to happen.”

The subsequent album is the result of a musical progression ten years in the making, away from solitary digital programming, towards genuine ‘songwriting’ as part of a collective. “We got kind of crazy on recording a lot of live instruments and making everything more organic. Then it turned out that the way to play it was as a band without computer backing, with people doing organic looping themselves on stage.”

Ring is also enjoying the wider scope for improvisation that comes from playing with a band. “Suddenly we’re able to adjust way more to special settings,” he explains. “At the Subsonic Music Festival, we’re going to play the closing set, and of course the band is not going to play a rave show – that’s not what the band is about – but we can play more energetic, or more laidback…

“Personally I really like outdoor parties,” he continues, “because sound-wise it’s really open, and you can play more ‘epic’ [sets], so hopefully that’s what we can do there. To be able to come to Australia with my band and present what I’m dealing with right now is a really good feeling.”

Who: Apparat – full live band
With: Chali 2na, Tiki Taane with DJ Sambora, Thundamentals, Resin Dogs, Opiuo, Minilogue, Phil Kieran, Max Cooper, Egbert, Frivolous and more
Where: Subsonic Music Festival @ Riverwood Downs Mountain Valley Resort, Barrington Tops
When: December 2-4
Sideshow: Thursday December 1 at The Standard with Max Cooper