WE CREATE TOMORROW

An interview by Robert Meissner from www.satt.org translated from the original German, September 2008.

Hugo Race on the current, extraordinary True Spirit album "53rd State", songs with a double meaning and the impossibility of escaping from the present.

Hugo deliberately chose the café with the worst service in all of Prenzlauer Berg. That's a good thing and better for concentration. satt.org did not want to taste specialty coffees and spatula baked goods (not that we would have anything against it in principle), but to meet Hugo Race, Australian, Noam Chomsky reader and occasional member of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. From 1985 to 1988 Race played dazzling music somewhere between post-punk and avant-blues with The Wreckery, which used for the cover of "Yeh My People" (1986) a painting by by none other than Pieter Brueghel the Elder. (»Triumph of Death«, approx. 1562-1563) and learned from William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski that health is only relative. After that, Race went to (West) Berlin for a long time. One of his first Berlin recordings under his own name is a version of Lee Hazlewood and Duane Eddy's "Rebel Walk", made in 1989 with Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) on guitar. At the end of the eighties he founded The True Spirit, less a band than a collective of sound researchers and multi-instrumentalists, who were one of the first western independent acts to tour deep Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and who still venture back and forth between blues and various electronics.

53rd State, released this spring on Glitterhouse, is their fourteenth studio album. The whole True Spirit is on it plus Soteria Bell, a female duo from Melbourne, well versed in Mongolian, Tibetan, Estonian and northern Japanese music, who lend the country opener “We Create Tomorrow” their angelic voices. There are two ballad-like songs ("Sorcery" and "Before The Flood"). Race’s daughter Violetta sings on Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra's immortal duet "Sand ". Chris Hughes (drums, percussion, electronics), Michelangelo Russo (wind instruments, electronics, vocals), Bryan Colechin (bass, vocals), Nico Mansy (keyboards, guitar, electronics) play delirious dub (»Sodium Run«) and sleek funk ( "When Midnight Comes"). Marta Collica (Sepiatone) is on the microphone, shakes maracas and operates the organ. "53rd State", ends with a spoken word ambient track ("I Wonder" with Larry Walsh) and a hidden track, which would fit very well on a Nurse-With-Wound album. Race speaks enthusiastically about Mark Stewart and Pantaleimon, the project of David Tibet's wife Andria Degens, and how he doesn't expect the rest of the music business to develop as adventurously as his True Spirit. He is currently in Melbourne, has revived The Wreckery for a tour and CD retrospective ("Past Imperfect"), in a word – he works a lot and carries his own suitcases.

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RM: You almost think that when you hear "53rd State" for the first time, peace and lightness have broken out. But only if you ignore the themes of the album. Agree?

H: Well, there is something to it. When we were thinking about our next album after »Taoist Priests« (2006), we wanted to pursue the same direction, but go a lot further. In fact, we felt relatively at ease as we were familiar with our starting point. Then I looked for a serene way of singing myself. I wanted to sing casually about things that worry and upset us all. Almost like in a conversation when you meet an old friend and talk about the really important things unaffected, without the need or compulsion to have to impress someone.

RM: Actually, records cannot be compared with one another at all, but Leonard Cohen's "The Future" (1992) manages it very well.

H: "The Future", without saying that it is Cohen's best, is very important to me. Hence: a popular comparison!

RM: "The Future" starts apocalyptically. "53rd State", on the other hand, begins quite optimistically, only to become progressively darker in tone, song for song. “Before The Flood”, track number four, is one of those pieces. And the music is actually quite friendly. Until you realize the lyrics and ask yourself: What's going on here?

H: Many of the songs do several things at the same time. "Before The Flood" got a lot of comments, people were like, oh, now he wrote a folk song. Anyway, the backing track of the whole song is a recording from a NASA capsule that crashes through space and finally hits the ocean. So, the electronic subtext is the sound of a falling object that we can hear because the capsule has been equipped with a video camera. “Before The Flood” tells of an apocalypse on water, similar to a tsunami. There is also talk of love, of its eternity and greatness, how it can heal everyone and everything juxtaposed against this almost kamikaze-like feeling. "Before The Flood" is a love song, an apocalyptic track, a folk song and science fiction music, all rolled into one. And so it is with the whole record. "53rd State" is a concept album like "Taoist Priests", describing the intersection of the personal and the political. By the way, not all of it is dark, a whole lot of wonderful things have happened. It is true, however, that the lyrics in the last third in particular, on “Sodium Run” and “Mystery World”, get very tricky.

RM: "Mystery World" sounds like a single vortex, a vortex, a very classic true spirit track. But the vortex is also in the story.

H: We move into early True Spirit terrain, with the guitars and that classic Chris Hughes drumbeat. "Mystery World" wrote itself within two days of my father's death but instead of speaking directly about him, I talk about someone who is leaving or who has left us because we will all go one day without knowing where to go and the awareness that the only thing of value we will have in the time until then are our relationships with one another, while the material things that we accumulate in our lives are of limited durability. This is the story the song developed into, even though it started with a very individual experience. I myself always see my Dad in the audience when I sing "Mystery World"… If I think about it, the whole album is a family work. My daughter Violetta sings on "Sodium Run" and "Sand". And my son Ruben painted the cover. We're going to be a family business like the Carter Family, the Partridges…

RM: ... the Handsome Family ...

H: ...definitely. We should keep everything in the family. The future of rock 'n' roll lies in the family.

RM: Speaking of rock 'n' roll: "53rd State" has a mighty compact version of "Girl Called Sunset". It doesn't have much to do with the electronic track on “Ambuscado” (2005).

H: On the long tour for “Taoist Priests” we experimented with “Girl Called Sunset” every evening as a hypnotic, breakout song to get people dancing. When we got off the tour, we immediately started recording before the group disbanded in Berlin and recorded Girl Called Sunset, Will The Circle Be Unbroken and Lou Reed's Kicks at the same time as Coming Clean and When Midnight Comes. Later, the more we worked, the longer the album got. It's still a double album, but unfortunately we had to part with some songs. We were on the verge of deleting "Girl Called Sunset" until some True Spirit members named it one of the best on the album. And the song has a long history. We covered ourselves once, so to speak.

RM: "When Midnight Comes" is extremely funky. Is the funk back?

H: Funk is never wrong and always there when True Spirit play live. When Midnight Comes lands where soul, blues and social commentary meet, like with Bobby Womack or the Last Poets, for example, artists who are just as influential on our work as Son House or Howlin 'Wolf. Of course we're not African American, but we're big fans.

RM: I was trying to find something about Larry Walsh, the Aboriginal activist who did the story on "I Wonder." I wasn't very successful.

H: He is a hard man to find indeed. Larry Walsh isn't someone you just call for an appointment. Each time it takes me several days to find him. The best option is still to go to Melbourne city center and check out the parks where he might be hanging out. Larry Walsh is a fascinating Aboriginal man and storyteller whose people lived where Melbourne is today, which many Melbourne residents, and probably more from the rest of the world, cannot imagine, because you see few indigenous people in the city. Today's Melbourne was one of the most densely populated areas in pre-colonial Australia. Larry leads tours through Melbourne. He calls it "Secret History". Specifically, he leads the visitors in front of one of these gigantic skyscrapers and says: This is where they held this special ceremony. Or he shows them the shipyards, the docks and says: This is where they buried their dead.
My first encounter with Larry came through a radio station. He's also a DJ and plays, as it should be, absolutely cool African American sixties soul. One day I came across his show and couldn't help but record it straight away because he simply tells brilliant stories. That’s where his voice comes from on "I Wonder". Now I was faced with the problem that I had to find him personally to get his approval to use his voice and story for the song. So I made my way to the radio station. You know, this is a left-wing alternative, kind of pirate radio. Initially they thought I was the CIA and didn't even want to give me Larry's name at first. After a lot of persuasion, they finally came out with it. Then I began my search through Melbourne for an older, storytelling Aboriginal gentleman. I struck gold and we've met several times since then.
The story on "I Wonder" is admittedly taken out of its context, so that it is not immediately clear what it is about. Larry is talking about the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, how months before the Games even started, the police pulled First Nations people off the streets and out of sight. Larry's story is a very well-founded observation that hits the heart of the whole racism debate: how the powers-that-be evicted indigenous Australians from the city in order to meet public relations requirements. By the way, they did the same thing for the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

RM: But you didn't set the daily news to music after all.

H: Let's put it this way: "53rd State" is not a record about philosophy or geopolitics, but like all my albums a personal one, an album about what it means to live in 2007 or 2008.

RM: My impression is that the crisis is back on the agenda.

H: I think our generation has inevitably been politicized since the beginning of this decade. You can’t ignore what's going on. I would not automatically speak of a crisis, but rather a point at which many of the people who have obtained information, especially via the Internet, have developed a kind of collective memory without even knowing it themselves.

RM: Assuming we had a time machine standing in front of us: Would there be a decade in which Hugo Race would rather live for historical or artistic reasons than now?

H: Definitely no. We live in the most fascinating and exciting time that can be imagined, in a unique, new moment. Freedom of information and the Internet have made us perhaps the most thoroughly informed generation in history. Twenty years from now, our possibilities will be taken for granted. Our lives in the nineties and the new millennium have shown us how history is being rewritten. We have seen how corporate culture has now undermined democracy; it has become clear to us that the supposedly inevitable by-products of geopolitics such as the Cold War, the arms race and the militarization of space were the projects of elitist minorities. We have only a few illusions left when it comes to the authenticity of our culture, the justifications for the global rule of unrestrained capitalism, for NATO or the coalition of the willing in the Middle East. That is precisely why I think nostalgia is dangerous.
Of course, it would be great to experience firsthand the euphoria of the Woodstock generation in the sixties, hit the clubs when the first Motown singles came out, or hear and see how psychedelic got its start. Imagination is tempting. Only people didn't know what we know now. We have an incredible responsibility to accept and seize our opportunity. In the next five or ten years we are going to see things that are far more challenging than 9/11. Of course, this will also turn into media events, and our task as artists, as journalists, will be to react to them, to enable conclusions to be drawn. Perhaps it is also no coincidence that we are part of a generation that is looking for a way to end the hypocrisy of the elites that was the dominant ideology of our childhood before the mass media finally saw itself as its agents. We have to take care of the present. Otherwise the future will fail.

RM: Hugo Race, thank you very much for talking to us.