by Stefan Nazarevich

September 30, 2019

As my solo musical practice is primarily focused on electronic music, I was enthralled by Stefan Maier’s captivating synthesizer-based performances. After he substituted for a professor in one of my classes, I was eager to talk with him to learn more about his practice. Beyond just our names, there are parallels between me and Stefan: we attended the same music festivals at similar points in our lives, we both perform live electronic music, and have experienced the shared struggle of not knowing exactly where our artwork fits in. I quickly learned that Stefan’s animated raw energy is not limited to his performances. He approaches life and conversation with that same intensity and vigour, and what resulted was one of the most memorable conversations of my life. I left our conversation feeling like my understanding of art had been blown into a new dimension, with my expectations for our interview completely exceeded.

Stefan Nazarevich: Did you start as a composer for acoustic instruments? Or did you start as a composer of more electronic music?

Stefan Maier: Hmm. Neither. I started playing in bands in high school. Like a noise punk band, a metal band, and a grindcore band. Then I kind of stumbled into the doors of the conservatory at [The University of Victoria], and became somewhat immersed in instrumental composition. I did that primarily from when I was 18-24, which was about four years ago, and then I got into electronic music after that. I still write for ensembles, but as you suggested in the question, I’m primarily focusing on electronic music.

So that’s a recent thing

I didn’t even know how to make a sine tone (1) four years ago. I had never opened up Max MSP or anything. I just didn’t focus on that in my undergrad, I was doing mostly instrumental stuff.

Do you feel the work you did in bands still has a voice in your work?

Yeah, totally! These days, I’m often playing in electronic music festivals, and I’m a little bit too academic for those people. But then perhaps I’m too Rock ‘n’ Roll for "New Music" (2) audiences, on account of me bringing that energy from playing in bands. I’m also a fairly intuitive artist, I guess, and yeah, I always want this exciting raw energy, which... that kind of permeates everything. Even if it’s subtle. I always want it there. So yeah, I would say that for me there’s a very clear through-line, despite the fact that if you play all the music side by side, their styles are very different. Nevertheless, there are compositional principles in my work which come from hardcore, noise, and punk styles.

I always want this exciting raw energy... which permeates everything. Photo Courtesy of http://stefanmaier.studio/

Performative aspects too! You’re very animated when you perform.

Yeah! Definitely! I am quite animated, I’m very gestural and I get into it. It’s something that comes up a lot, because I really play it like a [traditional acoustic] instrument. I guess I just don’t really know how else to play it. Like, when you have a modular synthesizer and you can marshal these massive, tectonic sounds... I can’t politely turn a knob while heterodyning (3) sine tones at 30hz start to rattle the entire room. When that happens, I need to have a physical gesture that goes along with it — and that’s completely involuntary, it’s not something that I’m thinking about. It often gets in the way, because it draws attention to the instrumentality. That’s an element of the work, but I feel like it becomes overly highlighted by my excessive physicality when I’m just turning a fucking knob, or flipping a switch to re-route a voltage. The physicality is somewhat emergent, and I guess what I’m saying is that it’s something I'm still reconciling.

I played piano for years before I got into composition, and I remember watching famous pianists. I noticed that somehow there is a tangible difference when you play a note in such an animated way, as opposed to not being as animated.

Yeah absolutely! But I think there is something that’s a little bit different due to the action mechanism of the piano — it will sound slightly different. Take [Glenn] Gould, for example. He had totally ridiculous mannerisms when he played, and it sounds unequivocally personal to him. When I twist a knob [on a synthesizer], if I put my shoulder into it, or just my wrist, that doesn’t change the sound at all. There’s also a really big difference between the way that I play a synthesizer, and how other people do. When I [am being animated], it’s because I’m feeling the energy of the composition which is propelling the piece forward, as opposed to a more casual approach, like, “oh let’s see what happens.” Which isn’t a value judgment! That’s cool! I

have friends who are a lot more loose with their synth-playing. It just reflects different approaches to a compositional sensibility.

I think it’s interesting that you’re referencing the potential for instrumentality in synthesizers. Almost putting that mask on the synthesizer, perhaps?

Well I don’t have as much guile as you suggest! As I said, it’s completely involuntary. There is something to be said for how it looks, but as I said, it’s unreconciled. I’m still a hopeless beginner with this stuff.

Prepared piano, field recordings, and synthesis, are all elements of Maier's diverse palette of sound.

As you’ve gotten into electronic music, what role has analog hardware played in your practice? Do you work with any digital means?

The last year or so has been preoccupied with different forms of artificial intelligence. Last year I did a piece at a museum in Berlin called Haus der Kulturen der Welt based around a piece of software called The Arranger. It’s a machine-listening software, built by myself and my programmer collaborator. It listens to a live composition that I’m performing on the synthesizer, and based on its idiosyncratic training it re-arranges the composition in real time and then that’s played over radio headsets. Everyone in the audience could either listen to me playing over the sound system, or listen [through headphones] to what the AI was doing. There’s often some sort of algorithmic thing, which in the last year has been AI, operating as a collaborator within the work. It’s a hybrid thing. I use analog and digital. I like combining both because there are different forms of agency, I guess, that machines exhibit, based on their internal constitutions. Digital systems, especially this AI stuff, you can design how they behave, which is super interesting to me. There are relative degrees of autonomy that you just can’t get with analog. But then again, analog feedback behaves in all of these interesting, nonlinear ways. Creating nonlinear systems that affect my decisions as a composer is always present in my work. I think about the instrument as having a sort of material intelligence, or an agency within the work.

In my own work I’ve experienced that when working with materials such as piano wire, I’ve tapped into material intelligence! It feels like a collaborator. It really does influence your decisions! And without that influence, I feel lost in the process of creation.

You get option paralysis. I’m the same way. I feel like I can’t do anything unless I have a real-life collaborator, or some sort of system or technical apparatus that gives me that material; that unruliness. I think I'm a fairly bad composer if I’m left to my own devices. I only start to really be creative when I have something that is making a lot for me, and then I can start to create an ecosystem with the material that arises from that.

It’s almost like curation; if something is giving you an array of sounds, then it’s up to you what is harvested from that.

Yeah exactly! Or, alternatively, something that I’ve been trying to do especially with AI, is that sometimes [the AI] gives me stuff that sounds like shit or I’m not immediately interested in, but I think it’s important to become immersed in the formal language of this system. So maybe the speech synthesizer creates a profusion of dada-esque phonetic material, but then it starts stuttering—which it does in this piece! I became drawn to this grotesque stuttering. For me it’s really important to not only curate what I like, but also things that I don’t like, so that it affects me, and it affects my taste. I become a node; a collaborator in an ecosystem. I don’t want to be the puppet master, because I get bored with myself and my decisions. I become a better artist by denying my own compositional proclivities. Because if I’m not doing that, I should just make house or techno, and have more fun with it.

Prepared piano, field recordings, and synthesis, are all elements of Maier's diverse palette of sound. Image source: Youtube

Speaking of that, you mentioned being too punk for one audience, and too academic for another. Do you struggle to find where your artwork fits in?

Yeah, well, I’m in the lucky position where I basically have a patron from this festival in Norway, named Thorbjorn Hansen. He's been throwing me bones for years. So I get to do pretty much whatever I want. But for example, at the Gaudeamus [Award Ceremony], the judges said “Your work is good, but...it’s kind of stupid.” [laughs] And I agree with them! From a purely compositional perspective it’s not masterful work. But I mostly get booked in Europe. I rarely get booked in North America. I’m between worlds, and it doesn’t always work, but, whatever, I’m figuring it out! That in-between zone works better in Europe than in North America. There’s The Lab in San Francisco, and The Issue Project Room in New York, but being in between the “Academy” and the club, that sweet spot, it’s tricky to make that happen.

That sweet spot you mention reminds me of another artist Eli Keszler. He plays solo concerts, does art and sound installations...

And he tours with [Oneohtrix Point Never] now! At Gaudeamus this summer, Eli and I played a bill together, and we went to grad school together; he’s like my compositional older brother. His path is interesting, because he was deep into the New York free improvisation world, then he started getting booked for his solo shows and doing more visual art stuff. He’s in a league of his own, for being someone whose work doesn’t fit neatly into any one scene. He’s very inspiring to me.

I was listening to your electronic set that you did at Deep Blue, when you opened for Eli Keszler.

Yeah the last time that I played with Eli! That’s an example of me directing my work toward a particular scene.

So if this set is tailored for a certain audience, how does it differ from your work if the audience is not a consideration?

Audience is always a consideration. I have no ideal audience. I try not to compromise what I’m interested in. One thing I learned from my main compositional mentor, Marina Rosenfeld, is that the reception of the audience is important to the work. She’s interested in what social situation a piece of music succeeds or fails in. I’ve started to take that question very seriously.What is assumed to be a “given” for a certain audience, and how different demographics have different “givens.” Different groups engage with music in different ways, and what is alienating for a New Music audience might not be alienating for a club audience, and vice versa. With that specific electronic set, I worked with pitch as a compositional element, and that might have made it sound “better,” as I focused on sound design, rather than gestural morphology. But I’m still getting better at that. I’m probably not answering your question.

It was a GOOD non-answer! Deep Blue is one of my favourite venues in Vancouver. Do you have a favourite venue here?

Deep Blue is a good one. 333 has a good sound system, and I really like the Red Gate sound system. Vancouver New Music books some really unique stuff. I’m very pumped to be playing with Okkyung Lee in about a month at the Roundhouse. But honestly, I don’t perform that much in Vancouver. I sort of fly under the radar here. My favourite place to play in the whole world is Mayhem in Copenhagen.

So. I’ve asked you a lot of career and practice-related questions, but I also have a few for my own curiosity. Tell me, what music does Stefan Maier listen to for enjoyment?

Oh, I’m a total sicko man. There’s no differentiation between my serious music and my pleasure music. Well, I love Joni Mitchell, and then I’ll listen to someone like Dimitrescu, someone really fucked up and harsh. Right now, Morton Feldman’s works for soloist and orchestra have been blowing my mind. I listen to a lot of early music as well, I have a season pass for Early Music Vancouver. I also love club music. M.E.S.H. is one of my favourite producers. It’s really all over the place. I love early 90’s house. Bach is someone I grew up listening to, and I find his music to be perhaps the most moving. I listen to Eli Keszler as well, and his music was sort of a catalyst that made me realize I didn’t just have to do “New Music.” I think it’s important to be open to a lot of different sounds. I try to find the sensuality in everything.

Who, What, and/or Where is your “aesthetic”?

[Iannis] Xenakis/David Lee Roth. Either a sub-oceanic thermal vent, or a data centre. Black obsidian stone. A weird piece of mutating flesh that is either becoming human, or was once human.

Who would be your dream collaborator?

This month? Jeff VanderMeer. That shitty movie Annihilation was based on one of his books. If I could write music for any filmmaker, it would be David Cronenberg.

We continued to chat, and Stefan showed me some of his recently-premiered work, involving machine listening AI, integrated with film and animation, touching upon contemporary anxieties of how we interface with new technology, and how the human body can act as a node in a much greater, more complex system. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Stefan, and look forward to seeing his unique take on all things music and technology continue to storm the art world, both in Vancouver, and abroad. Stay updated on Stefan's musical endeavours on his website, listen to his solo electronic music here, and watch his captivating performance at Gaudeamus 2019 here.

1. The simplest electronic audio signal, consisting of a single frequency

2. Refers to music that could be considered the contemporary evolution of traditional Western concert-hall music, sometimes referred to as "contemporary classical".

3. two similar audio signals "clash" with each other, creating a new signal which has a "beating" effect.