PRAXIS RECORDS:“VISIBILITY IS A TRAP!!#!#!” By Siobhan M.

PRAXIS RECORDS:“VISIBILITY IS A TRAP!!#!#!”

Praxis Records from London isn’t one of those usual hardcore labels which you can find alright, really nice, okay, and that’s it! The label and the sister label Sub/version stand for a more intellectual idea in electronic music - the records are never a final statement... they’re always subjects which can be discussed... An essential interview with label owner Christoph Fringeli after five years work in the worldwide electronic underground.

By Siobhan M.

When did Praxis Records start?

“In 1992, towards the end of the year after I moved to London - I wanted to start a new label.”

Why did you want to start your own label?

“I had actually been releasing some records before, more of an experimental, industrial/punk nature when I was living in Switzerland at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. But when I moved I wanted to make a new start, also in terms of the content of the music.”

Praxis has tons of releases [twenty-five], how do people become involved with the label?

“Usually it’s people I know personally, friends of some description from London or other cities, or people whose music I really appreciated and then got to know. So it doesn’t operate like a label where you send a demo tape and you might get a contract. I never make contracts - it’s based on trust.”

Is there a co-operative atmosphere to the label?

“Obviously it’s been going for quite a while and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the scene in the meantime. At the beginning, like in ‘92, the whole, then, techno scene was completely different from what you see now. It seems to continually change, but recently there has been a good co-operative spirit between different labels that associate with each other, that help distribute each other’s releases and the DJs play at parties together and stuff like that. But that is also true of other labels in France and a bit in Germany, that we’re in touch with and swap records.”

“...I certainly would like to see what we do in the context of resistance against mind control culture that we are exposed to by the mainstream, where everything is controlled by money and not by creative ideas...

Is there any sort of concept or ideology behind Praxis? It seems quite political and I was wondering what you thought about how music and politics intersect.

“I definitely think that any cultural output is in some social context and has a function in certain contexts. And I think to deny that is kind of foolish - obviously people are trying to think that what they do is completely abstract and has no political implications, but I think that in itself has political implications. Then there’s different approaches; I see Praxis as an experimental label in general so we try different points of view out. But generally what I’m interested in is pushing boundaries, challenging notions of sureness. And in the context it is set in there is a lot of different levels. For example, distribution, how do you organise the production and distribution of music? It is important that we produce the things ourselves and distribute them ourselves, to a large degree, and hopefully create a network of like minded people to help each other out. And then it also has a context in terms of the sort parties where this music is being played. That is also a reason for me to release twelve inch vinyl because in a way I don’t necessarily see twelve inch records as finished products or in the general consumer context. I think they should be used as a tool where DJs can mix those records and create something new with them.And the context for that is certainly not clubs or raves and not art either, in general it’s mainly been free parties or teknivals and squat parties. Which in itself, again, has political implications, directly or indirectly or has psychosocial implications, I don’t know if political is the right word. But in that there are events that happen outside of the normal commercial consumer culture industry, thereby challenging the mechanisms and the hierarchical set up of mainstream culture.”

Could you explain what is meant by Teknivals because alot of people might not be familiar with the history of it.

“Teknivals - obviously is put together techno and festivals -have had, well actually not that long of a history, it goes back maybe four or five years. Essentially, they gradually came out of the festivals that happened in the early nineties in England, where people would come together and get equipment together, big amplifiers and speakers, and go with those sound systems often to traditional hippie and traveller festivals and play hardcore techno music at the time; we’re talking 1990, ‘91, ‘92. This is after the acid house and the big warehouse parties and it kind of got inspired from that idea but actually got out into the countryside where these festivals would happen. And then what happened was, what really mushroomed that scene, a particularly big festival happened in ‘92 at Castlemorton with the consequence of people from Spiral Tribe got arrested and taken to court for serious offences. They all got acquitted in the end but the laws changed as a part of the new Criminal Justice Bill in 1994, which has a lot of infringements of civil liberties. And it became pretty much impossible to do these sort of things in England. For a lot of people it had become part of their lifestyle to do parties in the city, in warehouses or in the countryside in the summer. Some sound systems went to Europe and to France, that’s where the teknival thing actually started in ‘93 or ‘94, which certainly influenced a lot of the French hardcore techno scene which was about to start; France has a completely different history of dance music than England. That has continued up until now despite certain repressions. But basically Teknivals are free festivals in the countryside, involving anything between three and twenty different sound systems coming together, sometimes over quite big areas, playing music for twenty-four hours a day from anything between three days and two weeks.” [laughs]

As far as parties and live stuff, what’shappening with the type of stuff you do or Praxis does, what would you be playing or where would you be playing?

“I play quite a lot and so do the other DJs who are involved with a group of labels, Praxis, Ambush, Audio Illusion and a few others, mainly at free parties in London. I personally play in different countries as well. But the normal venue for this sort of stuff at the moment is parties in London in squat warehouses that are happening every weekend. You shouldn’t imagine that they are totally playing our sort of music there; most sound systems in London are playing quite commercial sounding, boring acid trance crap and then there’s a handful of that are more adventurous and do things for the right reasons as well - for the music and for the culture surrounding it.”

Do you play live, dj or both?

“I personally don’t play live at the moment. I have played live with different projects in the past and I might do so in the future, but the last couple of years I mix records or other sound carriers. Right now I’m working with a desktop system and I don’t see the point of putting that on stage and just playing the tracks and tweaking buttons sometimes. If I was doing something live I would do it on a different system, a more modular system where I would have more influence over the elements of the sound.”

What were the ‘Dead By Dawn’ parties that you did?

“The ‘Dead By Dawn’ parties were a series of parties that went over two years, we did 23 parties I think, which were on a monthly basis in a small anarchist squat in Brixton, South London. At the time they were really important as a meeting point for the scene because it was a very small space and we never could do much promotion because we couldn’t do much flyering, we really depended on word of mouth and network promotion. So a lot of people got to know each other quite well and it was an important place to interact and to exchange ideas; the way it was laid out, it was ideal for that because it had a very small basement where loud music could be played all night, but then it had a ground floor where you could hear the music quite well but you could just sit around and talk, which was a good forum for that. And they had stalls for records and magazines and then we had a bar where we had noise, sound collage and industrial stuff, which was also quite loud but it was more to sit down and listen to rather than to dance or jump around.”

Sounds cool, how come they stopped?

“We did it for quite a long period and it took quite a lot... particularly my energies because I had to put a lot into it...at some point after fifteen or sixteen parties I just suggested to limit it while it was really good and not wait until it was past its peak and sort of peter out, which I believe happens even to the best regular event. And I think I can say those last parties got madder and madder and in a way better and better, probably because we announced it would be stopping and did some kind of countdown -now it’s another five parties and so on. People would come and really appreciate what was going on because it was not like anything else that was going on. It was not strictly speaking a free party, it was more programmed and controlled. We also had talks before the music would start, between nine and eleven, we’d invite people of different groups or political stuff or cultural stuff or literature to talk or show their work, and cause some kindof discussion which would put the whole thing into a cultural context; we were quite interested in putting that point across and not only have party music and dancing. We had this concept of making it an experimental pool for ideas and activities. It certainly was not the only thing that spawned what’s going on now, but I think it was quite crucial in bringing certain people together that are still working together a lot.”

...I was interested in certain aspects of the new dance music at the time. For example, the focus was not on the performers or individuals on a stage but was onto everybody in the crowd or on the crowd itself, rather than looking up to someone on the stage and pay for that and go home...

With Praxis’ Records there seems to be a lot of images of, not so much terrorism, but images of resistance or subversion, and a lot of different labels laud “the revolution”, I was wondering what you think of this idea of “revolution”?

“I certainly would like to see what we do in the context of resistance against mind control culture that we are exposed to by the mainstream, where everything is controlled by money and not by creative ideas. That’s just one side, I’d have to say different people who put out records on Praxis would have different opinions and I would certainly respect that. I would say the world revolution has been used by advertising so much by now that it is a difficult word to use. But what it originally means, a fundamental change in the cultural, political structure of a given system, I think that is a valid aim to go for. I think there’s too much control by corporations and by big money. There’s too much based on a neo-colonialist world wide system where the west is just exploiting the rest of the world. I think that is a time bomb, one way or another.”

How has Praxis musically evolved over the years?

“The concept is in a way still the same, but the way it formulates itself is continually changing and will continue to change in the future. At the beginning I was interested in certain aspects of the new dance music at the time. For example, the focus was not on the performers or individuals on a stage but was onto everybody in the crowd or on the crowd itself, rather than looking up to someone on the stage and pay for that and go home; you would go into a space where a DJ would be mixing somewhere but the DJ wasn’t really the centre of attention, except for some trainspotters who always existed trying to see what records he was playing, but generally the focus of attention was different. In terms of production, all these white labels that came out at the time, I thought that was quite exciting because of all the pseudonyms and the anonymity of the output - destroying the hierarchical pattern or structure of entertainment. Praxis was not necessarily to be totally a part of that but also a comment on it. I was always interested in taking those elements that were around at a particular time but distorting them and making them more extreme, and feeding them back again into that pool of collective output. Of course you can say in the meantime DJs became stars...that’s why five years ago I would have said Praxis was a techno label but I would never say that now because I think that whole techno system has become its own little hierarchy. We were never going to be a part of that and we’ve moved on. The initial ideas are still valid though. Praxis went through hard techno through gabber even, to more noisy experiments and recently more breakbeat influences.”

How does your sublabel Sub/version differ from Praxis?

“Sub/version is a label I’m doing with DJ Pure from Vienna. For me the difference is that Sub/version is a genre label; it’s suppose to be a tech step label. The three releases, again, are inspired by that idea of taking something and distorting it, but definitely within the limitations and within the language of a particular genre. On Praxis I would do maybe a record with no beats at all if that is what I felt like doing - with no hesitation. With Sub/version I would not do that, it has to have a certain code.”

Explain your logo “Visibility is a Trap”.

“It’s actually a quote from Foucault, from ‘Discipline and Punish’. It refers to surveillance, ie. being controlled through being visible to the authorities. So it has that meaning from the original quote but it also has what I think is important, that what I do is part of a collective and there is a certain degree of anonymity, so that it’s an invisible situation.”

Can you explain what you mean by “hardcore”.

“Hardcore that’s another difficult one because a lot of people understand different things in it. I see it as more of an attitude and not necessarily a description of a particular music style. But if I used it as a description of a music style then I’d use it more as what I see coming out of that particular attitude, rather than as a stylistic thing. And the definition would have changed over years, a lot probably.”

In Praxis Newsletter 12 you discuss the liberating or resistant potential of music and technology and the way the two intersect, how do see this concept operating?

“It’s difficult not to say this old, banal answer, it empowers people to have computers. But I think it is much more possible now with communications technology to talk to people world wide on a similar level and also find those people, communicate with them and organise a system of distribution or a medium that is independent from big money media. I think it’s an important aspect because otherwise you can’t really get these ideas to people; they have to mediated somehow and it’s not going to get very far quickly, especially if you’re up against a system that is totally using all available technologies to its own advantage.”

You also publish and edit the Datacide zine, do you deliberately take up different media to disseminate ideas - the record label, the magazine etc.?

“Yeah definitely. I see music as a language and I see words and images as a way of putting things across. And you can always say certain things better in one medium than the others. Music is a veryphysical and abstract medium, at the same time, whereas words are much more concrete and intellectual. Of course you can intellectualise music and put words into noises or something, just as approximations. I’m definitely into using all means to get ideas across. And Datacide is quite an important project for me, as much as the label; to have a medium for that sort of music and culture or subculture, but also bring in different elements into it that aren’t necessarily connected. There’s enough ‘zines that cover records and DJs but I’m more interested in mixing things up and intellectualising things and theorising things rather than just reflect them. I’m quite interested in the theoretical aspect of Datacide more than as a news carrier, to theorise music and culture. I think it is better to do that yourself than to let some academics do it, and also it becomes a forum for discussion if it is done in a magazine form. Datacide isn’t necessarily there to say this is true, it is more important that you feed into a discussion, again that should happen collectively.”

That’s what I thought was so cool about Datacide, the Praxis Newsletter and Praxis, they all seem like discursive sites. Datacide also seemed co-operative and international too. You are doing some kind of musical installation outside of the Vienna opera house?

“It’s actually going to be done as ‘Society of Unknowns’ because I’m going down with Jason Skeet (who I did Praxis 24 with, which is the title of the ep). And apart from having our separate things to do there, my thing is not connected to music it’s a talk about information war and terrorism, we’re doing an installation in front of the opera house which is going to feed back certain elements. It is going to be a big box with a sound system in it, that is going to be connected to a transmission system, to a studio in the place holding the talks, it’s called Public Netbase. It’s in the centre of Vienna, where there is studio equipment and computers. I see it as a psychogeographical feedback device, where we try to sample things from the everyday reality of the place and feed them back into the actual public space again. So it is not going to be music as such, a noise thing. You’ll also be able to email to the Netbase as it’s happening and the email will be translated into midi language and it will be triggering sounds, that people can upload to the website at the same time. We’re trying to get everyone who wants to be involved, involved. We are also going to have a workshop which will mainly consist in giving people recorders and sending them out into the city and hopefully they’ll come back with interesting recordings. But we’ll see how successful that is, that should be interesting.”

You have various project names?

“I use different names all the time. Base Force One is me, Society of Unknowns is me and Jason, Metatron was me. Then there’s some other names as well, and a concept we call the Jackal or DJ Jackal. It is a multiple name concept that basically anyone who relates to the fundamental ideas behind what we are collectively doing can use, produce or play [laughs] and use that name for whatever they are doing in that context. Which is not an original idea in that sense, and it is not suppose to be; the idea of multiple names has been used by other people coming from this sort of neoist movement in the eighties. I think it is mainly a neoist related idea, they had multiple names like Karen Elliot, and had hundreds of people doing artwork as Karen Elliot. Luther Blissett is probably the most used and powerful multiple name concept at the moment, which was instigated by a group of radical Situationist inspired people in Italy. So DJ Jackal is the multiple name for the radical Situationist inspired people in the hard-core scene [laughs]. So that’s an invitation for everybody to use it - to be the Jackal. There is a responsibility in using the name as well.”

All these things seem to be rather Eurocentric, is there much happening in North America?

“I would say it is mainly happening in London and in some places in France, which has a very young and up for it scene and is relatively big as well. Then there’s people in Germany and Austria and outside of there it’s just isolated groups of people, little pockets, I think everywhere, including North America. But there is not as many productions coming out of North America yet, but there are some people doing some stuff. I think there will be much more in the near future. I think it is just a geographical gap because a lot of this particular music is just getting exposed to it in the right way, which is in front of big sound systems - really, really loud. I think most people who are involved with it, including myself, are inspired from going into a space or in an open field and exposed to frequencies; the experience which is a physical experience as well, is difficult to have if you only hear the stuff at home. There’s a lot of bass frequencies that do things to you.”