Ekkehard Ehlers
[Auch, Autopoieses, Betrieb]



Ekkehard Ehlers has released works under a variety of guises, most notably as Autopoieses and Auch. With recent works on Achim Szepanski's Mille Plateaux, Ritornell, Force Inc., Ehlers' has explored the minimalism of early twentieth century work of composers like Schoenberg and Ives Routed seemingly through an array of broken processors which saturate familiar themes with the sound of discarded machinery. His first release on Fallt, 'this' (subtitled 'Betrieb files') revisits themes first explored on Mille Plateaux's 'Betrieb'.

as Ekkehard Ehlers:
Betrieb (CD) Mille Plateaux 2000
Full Swing Edits 3 (10") Orthlorng Musork 2001
Heroin (CD) Brombron 2001
Plays Albert Ayler (12") Staubgold 2001
Plays John Cassavetes (12") Staubgold 2001
Plays Robert Johnson (7") Bottrop-Boy 2001
White Cube Jazz (LP) En/Of 2001
Music For William Forsythe (CD) Whatness 2002
Plays (CD) Staubgold 2002
Plays Cornelius Cardew (7") Bottrop-Boy 2002
Plays Hubert Fichte (12") Staubgold 2002
Heroin + Remixes (2xCD) Orthlorng Musork 2003
Politik Braucht Keinen Feind (CD) Staubgold 2003
Soundchambers (CD) Staubgold 2004
A Life Without Fear (LP) Staubgold 2006

as Auch:
International Breakfast EP (12") Force Inc. Music Works 2000
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (CD) Force Inc. Music Works 2000
Krautrock (12") Audio.nl 2000
Laptop Ethics (12") Force Inc. Music Works 2000
Remix Tomorrow Goodbye (12") Force Inc. Music Works 2001

as Autopoieses (with Sebastian Meissner)
La Vie Á Noir (CD) Mille Plateaux 1999
Full Swing Edits 2 (10") Orthlorng Musork 2000
La Vie À Noir Transposed (2x12") Mille Plateaux 2000
Live A Noir (CD) Ritornell 2000

as Betrieb:
Balthus EP (12") Klang Elektronik 2001
Harmolodic House (12") Klang Elektronik 2001
Schlechte Vörbilder (12") Klang Elektronik 2002
Bubifunk EP (12") Klang Elektronik 2003
Mapstation (12") Combination Records 2003
Sekt (12") Klang Elektronik 2003

with Sebastian Meissner and Thom Willelms - Music For William Forsythe - Whatness

from ''Le vie en Noir'' compact disc cover: black does not reflect, it is clandestine. in the physical sense black is not visible, it is that which is not perceived, that which is not been; obscuritas, black is not substantial, but attracts substance. black is connected to another form of energy, it is dangerous, obscene, lost, doomed and not least attractive.since the start of modernity, even perhaps since the period of german romanticism, black or metaphyisically noir, has been the source of the heterogeneous. the end of logic, the leftovers. the blind spot; such the theories were developed to explain rationally that which represents the abyss in man. there were many attempts at such explanations. today, in the production of theory, noir is to be found in the nothingness which is defined as such by it. here we find a fear of trading on ground on which theory and practice lose their seemingly infinite dominance. noir is a possibility of deterritorialised life. in our sense noir explores greater areas than that plotted in literature by lautreamont, george, goodis and raymond. classical music relied until recently upon the abandoned dichotomy between sound and world which prescribed its dicourse and theories. we think of bataille in noir we are concerned with the actual. being hidden (we are unidentifiable) thought (we can know, but not viceversa) truth (we are your shadow, a second substance) we are attempted to map frequencies. to recode acoustic fields. to remove discursive interfaces, we have discovered the city, the ocean, pendercki and billie holyday, we did not have to look for moondog and new orleans, Albert ayler and ernst busch, as they were closer to us than we are to ourselves. the individual components are edited like films (because of our choice of software) and have been transposed out of themselves in their milieu, we grouped our samples together embedded in haphazard broken frequencies, raw files, in order to rediscover the locations of noir, to draw it into the binary-coded world. we click, scratch and roar our music pulls things into themselves, we want to flow and to taste. whether micro-internal clusters, brotzmanns saxophone or stochastic music - they all become blank through the filtering. as if they wanted to return there. the connection to (lost) afroamerican music and literature which in the sense of noir seemed close to us formed a part of this production. both ''hard boiled'' and jazz have been according to our understanding of their discursive fields of meaning, decapitated, ultimately we are reappraising their decline here, the prison songs, funeral marches and king oliver have not been incorporated into a new cultural aggregate which is aware of its own blood stains, this music of otherness has been perpetuated in the cogs and wheels of economic reality. this century has given us techniques of recording and storing with which we reconstructed the music of the street, of the rabble, of the old comic theatre as multifunctional and multimedia discourses, the musical universe will lose nothing else. new and newer technologies of digital production are producing a huge archive, a part of which is autopoieses, but which we nevertheless wish to criticise form its parameter, digital production is a part of the world, not the other way around we are concerned with what is not mentioned, with things and conditions which are lost or made invisible in the further devolopment of synthetic music. roaring and clicking belong to the same real order as classical orchestral music. in fact the musical of the second viennese school has not yet abandoned. we do not these either-how could we? for that we would need a new form of hearing, hearing which does not comprehend any more, hearing devoid of sense and purpose. as desidered by John cage. hearing is far too much a business to rid itself of its present founding principles but we are concerned with the limits to what we can hear today. our experiment here lay in the task of combining classical music and the aporia of popular production and its history our aim consisted in the hope that we could present a reorganisation of digital space related to the ritornello, but beyond motif and counterpoint dissonance and dissidence from this one can see our intention to repoliticise digital music. noir stands, not least, for a feeling we can see it in John cassavetes. we have it sometimes at night or after too much to drink it is always wiht us. it is in the air media discourses deny the exstance of the abyss. just as does the greater part of contemporary crime-novels in the cinema, one is irritated by tarantino. hong kong is history only hip-hop seems still to want to draw on noir. here one could examine the geto boys or wordsound as interfaces our production is dedicated to this feeling. we hope this can be sensed. www.autopoieses.de