Gudrun Gut breaks down Baustelle

For three decades, Gudrun Gut has remained a pivotal figure in Berlin’s underground music scene, from 1980 as an early founder of Einstürzende Neubauten, to her role as multitalented member of Malaria! (just one of her many bands and collaborations), to the long-running Ocean Club radio show with Thomas Fehlmann, and now, her new project in collaboration with Antye Greie (AKA AGF).

Greie Gut Fraktion‘s debut album Baustelle is out this week — you can buy it direct from her label Monika Enterprise — and she recently sat down with me at the Monika headquarters in Berlin to talk about the record’s conception and execution, the history of Berlin’s music scene and how it has changed over the last 30 years, and the double standards facing women in the record industry.

Expatriarch: I’ve read that the BBC commissioned the cover of “Wir bauen eine neue Stadt” between you and AGF. That was the first time you worked together, right?

Gudrun: Yes, but it was a little bit different from that. BBC commissioned Antye Greie to work with a Berlin artist for their show Late Junction. She picked me and they agreed that it would be a good collaboration. We got to choose the subject, and we immediately had the idea of the Baustelle [“construction site”]. We did three original tracks and one cover. I picked the cover because I thought it fits really well with our subject. We really liked working together and decided to make a whole album out of it.

Did you already know Antye personally, or was that your first contact together?

I had known her a little bit as a musician, and I know her from Laub, because they played together with [Monika Enterprise duo] Quarks in the late 90s, and I saw her perform solo in London once. We finally really got to know each other in December 2008, playing at the same festival in Moscow. We spent some time together and really got on with each other.

With the construction of a building, with architecture, everything has to be planned out and precise. So with this music, was it like that, or was it more of an organic, go-with-the-flow approach? What was the creative process?

Well, it’s not only the architecture, it’s the whole process of building something, which is chaotic. So we worked pretty free-flowing, one of us had an idea and would send it to the other. And we didn’t want it to be focused only on a construction site, we wanted to abstract the idea a little bit. For example, “Drilling an Ocean” is a mixture, more an idea that you can do something that’s impossible, and at the same time it’s a love song.

Greie Gut Fraktion live at Maria, Berlin – more photos by Barbara Mürdter at Popkontext

You mentioned you were sending tracks to each other – Antje lives in Finland – so most of the collaboration was done virtually?

Yes, mostly via internet. At one point I played at a festival in Helsinki and visited her in Hailuoto, an island where she lives. We had about ten days where we were putting down ideas and listening to music and talking about what we were going to do. There we put down most of the tracks, as rough ideas. Then I went back to Berlin and worked on it, and she worked on it, and we finished it via email. She came to Berlin rehearsing and putting the live show together. It was really interesting for me to work with her, because she is very technically skilled, and it was very much of a one-to-one collaboration. I did some other collaborations, but mostly it was, for example, I did the music and the other person did the lyrics, but here we both did both. For mixing, I started to mix some tracks and she mixed some others, and I realized they sound really different. I thought hers sounded better, so in the end she did all the final mixing.

I was also wondering about “Wir bauen eine neue Stadt” [“We’re building a new city”], and that was written in the early 80s, several years before the fall of the wall. So what did the song mean in the context in the early 80s in the Neue Deutsche Welle scene?

Oh, that’s a different meaning from today. It was more a song meaning, we do our own stuff, we build our own city.

Was it an East versus West [Germany] thing? Or not really?

No, that was West. I lived in West Berlin. Palais Schaumberg came from Hamburg. But the cities Hamburg, Berlin, Dusseldorf were connected music-wise, with Der Plan, Abwärts, Palais Schaumberg, Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria!… it was not really NDW, it was before that, singing in German for the first time, finding your own language. With Antje and me, we do have the East/West thing. She comes from East Germany, and I come from the West. At one point, with “Baustein”, one of the last tracks we did, she came up with the lyrics, “Bau auf, bau auf, bau auf für eine bessere Zukunft” [“build up, build up, build up for a better future”]. And I thought, oh, Antje, are you sure about the lyrics? It’s a bit, you know, too much! And then she said, no, it’s an old East German propaganda song. And I didn’t know that! Then we realized we had very different upbringings. I realized too this whole building up for a better future was a real communist statement. So I really liked that.

Yeah, it’s funny to recontexulize it a bit. Since you’ve been in Berlin for over 30 years, I’d like to know how you’ve seen the underground scene and independent music change over the years. I’ve heard some longtime Berliners say that it’s getting worse and more gentrified and more commercialized, but I’ve also heard some say that it’s never better or worse, but just different. What’s your perspective?

Yeah, both are right. Right now in Berlin we have this party tourism going, which I can’t stand. People coming just for the weekends just to blast themselves, because it’s cheaper than going out in, Spain or whatever. This is a bit annoying. But on the other hand, Berlin is big enough to have this place and that place. And I like the international mixture, artists from all over the world living here, and that’s cool. But I have always thought, for me, the real Berlin, or the interesting Berlin, started in the twenties, the roaring twenties, when it was really wild. It was always a little edgy. Through the years, I had this question if Berlin is getting commercial or not. The nature of the city, there’s a long tradition already that it’s edgy, so I don’t think it will get boring. There are a lot of creative people living here. I’m hopeful for the city.

Good. It’s nice to hear an optimistic viewpoint. So, along the same lines of the scene in the 80s and 90s, I’d like to know if there was a strong involvement with women? I’ve heard, for example, with London punk, that it was a bit genderless, and that women were accepted equally, not just accessories on the side, being sexualized, but active parts of the scene. Was that also true in Germany in the 80s too?

Yeah, definitely. I have the feeling that at the beginning of every such movement, there are lots of women involved. It’s an exciting and playful time. We had the same in Berlin, Germany, all over Europe. There were a lot of female artists, and it was all equal, and I never thought, we have to fight against the men or something. But when it comes to professionalism, there are not so many women anymore. Making money and making a career out of it.

When you started Monika Enterprise in the late 90s – the logo is the head of a woman and there are quite a few different female artists on the roster. Was that a conscious decision to make this a platform for women, or was that just kind of how it happened naturally?

It’s both. Because I’m an artist myself, I really like to see and listen to other women. It’s interesting for me, because it’s closer. I think it’s ridiculous when you look at label rosters or festival rosters, how many males there are! There are labels with no female artists in their catalog. What is that? That can’t be! I thought I would just do it the other way. I have one or two male artists as well, but the majority should be female. Strangely, I always get asked, but the other ones don’t get asked!

It’s definitely a double standard. My perspective is that we haven’t reached a point of true equality, so there has to be someone keeping the balance, like you. Hopefully in the future we won’t even have to think about such things, but I think it’s still relevant today.

Yeah, it looks like it. For me, I approach the label like it’s the same. For me this approach is normal.