SCHALLFRONT presents

SCHALLFRONT: Tim, how did you come to be involved in experimental electronic music?

TIM PAULI: I started playing the electric guitar as a teenager and at one point I was more interested in the FX pedals through which I would send my guitar than the actual guitar playing. Then one night I got to play around on a Korg Microkorg synthesizer of a friend (Nicolas Berge) – I was instantly hooked. After some time I got a copy of the Digital Audio Workstation Ableton and discovered that you could do even crazier things than with the guitar FX pedals. This was also accompanied by finding a lot of music in the internet. Going from stuff like Sonic Youth to Aphex Twin, and also discovering composers like Cage and Xenakis.

When we asked you for three words describing your artistic work, one of them was ''Failure". We hear a critique of the general failure of pop culture in several of your pieces. In our perspective though, there is never a true musical failure in these critiques, rather a positive reframing of failure into the aesthetically pleasurable. How would you describe your usage of failure and its relationship to your work?

TIM PAULI: First of all I would like to clarify that I would never use material that I just want to criticise. I would rather say that, at the same time, I always try to embrace aspects of it that I like. Apart from that I use the concept of failure more as an idea giver. I like looking at objects which might be of technical nature (like a sound synthesis algorithm) or something of aesthetical nature (such as a certain musical genre), and change little bits of them until they fail but at the same time somehow still work. For me, the desire to find such opportunities to apply this concept stems from hacking culture. Perhaps that’s connected to my background in computer science. I started to use the term failure for my own work after reading the article "The Aesthetics of Failure" by Kim Cascone. Maybe I should move on from this word because now I realise that it is never about complete failure for me. [laughing]

To what degree would you understand “pop” as the object and/or form of your work? In other words, is your musical practice placed outside or inside the sphere of pop? Is there a sphere outside of it at all? Does your music aim for a specific perspective on, or specific transformation of that sphere?

TIM PAULI: These are really tough questions. Cultural codes and connotations are definitely the object of my work (shout-out to Roman Pfeifer). And pop has a lot of really great ones. Therefore pop is the object of my work. Regarding form, I am further away from standardised pop formats, but I think I tend to go into that direction to a certain degree in the future. Which makes also sense from a capitalist point of view. [laughing]
I think somehow deeply inside I would like to be part of the sphere of pop (not that I am yet).

Apart from that I think on the one hand I aim for the perspective to take pop seriously and on the other hand I try to transform that sphere by breaking standardised tropes of pop. If A. G. Cook’s PC Music label is about subverting pop and maximising its characteristics to its fullest but for most of the time still managing to stay within the framework, maybe I am more about subverting pop, making it explode, and breaking the framework. I think it is also hard to answer these questions for my work as a whole, because I tend to do quite different projects (at least I think that they are quite different …)

The theme of our concert series is “reverie(s)”. This relates to a certain dreamy characteristic, how does this play a role in your music?

TIM PAULI: Maybe it is a quality that I want to involve more in my music in the future. Maybe I just want to involve it to break with it at the same time. Or maybe I just want to leave it on its own.

I should listen to more Vapor Wave again (shoutout to Daniel Lopatin). Maybe also not.

As we have experienced in the last years with our extraordinary situation, art can often be used as a pleasant escape from reality. On the other hand, art can be used as a medium to bring reality into a more understandable and relatable form. The analysis of the dream itself can be used as a way of understanding and processing our struggles in a safe and non-real environment. Do you use either of these methods in your music and how might they be used?

TIM PAULI: When you open up this duality of art as an escape versus art as a reflection on reality, I would put myself more on the escape side of the spectrum. Because that is the part that still resonates more with my everyday real life. But as we all now most of the time thinking in binarities does not make sense because they are an oversimplification of the world (except for computer processors!). So on the other side I really like to work with concrete materials that are rooted in this reality (shoutout to M. Marcoll,  H. Seidl, M. Schüttler), but tend to choose materials that try to escape reality on their own. I think where it gets interesting is when you combine these qualities. So in the end I try to aim for art in which you can get lost but art that at the same tells you something about our world. I think the opening scene of the film "Spring Breakers" by Harmony Korine is a good example for that (shoutout to Lilli Sund).

How does interaction with artists and listeners, either directly through collaboration, through conversation, or by attending concerts influence you as an artist?

TIM PAULI: Experiencing art in general influences me a lot. I am always in search for new cultural codes I can abuse. But often I also visit concerts or other sort of art events and think to myself "That was a nice idea, but the execution was really bad. I can do that better or push it even more to the extreme." That may be the starting point for a new work of mine or influence one that is in the making. 

Conversations with people are always important just for checking if your perception of your work somehow correlates at least a little bit with others. Furthermore the communication with people is important for psychological support, because I tend to be not so self confident about my works. Shoutout to my friends.

What is your vision for your artistic development?

TIM PAULI: Try to find good balance between all my interests. At the moment I’m in a sort of back-to-the-roots-phase. Because of my studies I delved into notated music, but I am not sure if I see myself on that path in the future. But I still want to take these lessons and transfer them into my own place, the one between all these spheres. I am still in search for this spot. We will see how that turns out. Gotta endure contradictions!