On Saturday, January 15th, I had the pleasure of attending Burkina Electric's performance at the Southern Theater. The band is comprised of Austrian-born, Brooklyn-based composer Lukas Ligeti, German electronic musician Kurt "Pyrolator" Dahlke, singer Maï Lingani, guitarist Wende K. Blass and singer/dancers Zoko Zoko and “Vicky” Idrissa Kafando. The last four musicians all hail from Burkina Faso in West Africa. Live, Burkina Electric combines West African strains of Afropop and griot vocalisations with club-informed electronic sequencing. There is also a great deal of dancing. I had the opportunity to speak with Ligeti about the group, his musical pursuits and his artistic and social vision. Here's what he had to say.
Did you start on drums?
I had a few piano lessons as a child, but soon gave up. When I started making music again, I began with drums, and I regretfully haven't practiced the piano in many years. I'd like to play the piano more, but I don't have one at home. I'd like to get one, actually.
When did you start playing drums?
When I was 18. I wanted to play something that was easy to start with, where you could make mistakes and it wouldn't be so obvious. I started in music really really late, but you don't really have to start early. At 22, I started practicing drum set systematically.
You mentioned wanting to get back into piano. Do you find that your education with piano helps playing the Marimba Lumina?
Sure. It's modeled after a marimba and it's a mallet instrument, so it does have that keyboard paradigm or template. In Burkina Electric, I sometimes use it as a keyboard/synthesizer, but in my solos I don't use it in a mallety way. I was not trained in mallets at all. Playing Marimba Lumina, I am now becoming a little bit of a mallet player. Something I'd really like to do is play the vibraphone, and I think playing the piano a little bit and playing the Marimba Lumina does give me a bit of an advantage. The technique with sticks coming from the drums and the technique with keyboards coming from the piano makes it easier to play mallet instruments, sure.
Is the Marimba Lumina running into a laptop?
Yes. In this case, we have both the Marimba Lumina and the, both Buchla instruments, running into one laptop. We use Ableton Live in our concerts and we have sequences programmed into Live, but we alter them using our midi controllers, both sonically and rhythmically.
What is the Lightning?
The Lightning (played by Pyrolator) is also built by Don Buchla, and regarding software, it’s quite similar to the Marimba Lumina. Hardware-wise, and as far as the playing techniques, the two are quite different. The Lightning consists of two wands that communicate with a central unit using infrared. The idea is that you have space which you can divide into eight regions. To each one of these regions you can assign various gestures. There's a vocabulary of gestures, and you can assign various midi commands to these gestures.
The Marimba Lumina works with magnetic fields. Every one of the keys contains an active coil and each of the mallets contains a passive coil; when they come together, a magnetic field results. There are four frequencies of magnetic field that can be set up so that it can be programmed differently for each of the four mallets. They're both sensitive and sophisticated midi controllers.
You started working with Pyrolator before the inception of Burkina Electric?
Yes. I started working with Kurt in '94. Shortly after getting into music, I became exposed to African music. So, in that sense, I can almost say I'm an African musician. From some of my earliest compositional attempts, I used African concepts in my music. In '94, I was sent to Côte d’Ivoire by the Goethe Institut, which is unusual as I’m not German. They contacted me and I actually hung up on them, because I thought they were playing a joke. Then they called me back. I wanted to use electronics on that trip, but I just had started getting into electronic music. In high school, I was very into electronics and built my own computer and things like that. When I started getting into music that whole thing fell by the wayside. After getting into music for a couple of years, I thought it would be nice to reunite those two things. So, I wanted to try to do that, but I felt I had no experience. So, I wanted to take someone with more experience with me to Côte d’Ivoire. The Goethe Institute said ok as long it was someone from Germany. I didn't know anyone from Germany, so they recommended Pyrolator. That's how we met.
When did you meet the others in the group?
Maï and Wende we met two years later in '96. The two dancers we
met later in Burkina Faso.
What brought you to Burkina Faso?
I started a group named Beta Foly in Côte d’Ivoire together with Pyrolator and local musicians. It was a very experimental, intercultural ensemble, very crazy. I often went to the Côte d’Ivoire for residencies; the members of the group were from all over West Africa but lived in Abidjan. Some of the members, including Maï and Wende, were from Burkina Faso, and eventually Maï moved back there, and later, Wende did, too. Beta Foly came to Burkina Faso for concerts, where we hooked up with Maï again. Burkina Faso is very poor and Côte d’Ivoire is comparatively rich, and people often go from Burkina Faso to Côte d’Ivoire to make money, so everyone in Burkina Electric has spent time in the Côte d’Ivoire. One of the dancers, Zoko Zoko, is more unusual: he was born in the Côte d’Ivoire and moved to Burkina Faso.
Music and ceremony seem to occupy an important position in African culture and musicians an important status, or is that a romanticized idea?
That's a myth. Musicians there occupy a very difficult position in society. In the Mandé cultures, where there are griots, families of musicians and storytellers, they have a very clear place in society. That does not mean they are rich or very well respected, but they are a very integral part of society. In most other regions, that is not the case. Musicians are as marginalized as they are here in the States. Another thing is that, if you are a musician who wants to do something that's very unusual, you will find very little support form local society. You might also find very little support from institutions outside of Africa, which promote African art that presents a certain image of Africa for Westerners. There are African musicians who really fall into the cracks between all these different worlds, who maybe don't have a traditional role in society and are not palatable to the Western image of Africa. So there is a lot of undiscovered talent in Africa.
How did you first become interested in African music?
I was introduced to Ugandan music from a seminar with the great Austrian ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik at the University of Vienna around '87. At first, I was interested from a musicological standpoint, but I was not exposed to West African music, which is what most people start with. I initially heard more about music from East and Central Africa. West African music came years later for me, when I started spending time in Côte d’Ivoire.
How does African music influence your drumming?
In many ways. Based on Ugandan music, I developed a motion-pattern-based drumset technique that allows me to play very long, polymetric patterns. And another way, for example, is that I’ve had to play on lots of old, run-down drum sets in Africa, and because of this, I learned to focus more on the movement of my playing rather than the sound.
Could you talk more about what you mean by movement and how does it relate to both music and dance?
In most African languages there is no separate word for playing music and dancing. To me, music and dance are just a reversal of cause and effect. Playing instruments requires movement, and it produces sound; in turn, the sound produces dance. It's like two sides of the same coin.
What is the musician or artist's place in society?
Musicians relate to their community differently than other people. I think artists in general develop visions for where society and mankind is going, while politicians are more concerned with the day-to-day administrative aspects. But it's really up to artists to develop concepts and ideas for politicians to realize. Of course, the significance of the composer has changed over time. They used to work as court musicians in the old days, for example. More recently composers find themselves in academic settings. It's hard to say if creative music has lost its ground in society or whether it had any ground to begin with. Beethoven's later string quartets were by no means popular.
Now, there is also the problem of idiom. With atonality, the common idiom of Western concert music was gradually deconstructed and there was no common language with which musicians could address other musicians or their audiences. There's also the question of whether you can do something socially relevant without being popular. The avant garde is the r & d of music, developing the ideas without getting much credit or money while pop musicians get the credit and make the money, often using concepts experimental musicians had developed long before.
What are your personal goals as an artist?
I'm interested in cultural exchange and would mainly like to make people think in unconventional ways or inspire them to try something new and unusual and to think outside the box. Not only about music. I would definitely like to make Westerners think differently about Africa and vice versa. I would also like to make Africans think differently about their own music and the same for Westerners. There are prejudices and naïve impressions on either end. Musicians generate concepts, food for thought.
What would your utopia be like?
I am very concerned with justice and democracy and am very anti-bureaucracy. What is my utopia? That’s an overwhelming question. Are we talking about a state 20 years from now or something completely conceptual? In America or elsewhere? I still believe in America. We have democracy, at least supposedly. Unfortunately, the main problem with democracy is the people, because their will has to be respected, and the will of the people is not always good. Remember, Hitler was elected. On the other hand, what better system do we have than democracy, despite its pitfalls? Imagine if we could do away with money. Capitalism is human, however. In America, as well as Africa, there is a one to one, money equals power equation. In Europe, with social democracy, there are intermediate mechanisms which slightly uncouple power from money. In America and Africa, the relationship is more linear. Of course, every place has its advantages and disadvantages.
