Interview with Cedrik Fermont

 

Cedrik Fermont (aka C-drík, Kirdec, Cdrk) is a Berlin-based Belgian-Congolese composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host, concert organiser, independent researcher and label manager (at Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic and experimental music since 1989.

His compositions and installations vary from sound art and electroacoustic to noise, to industrial to more conventional “dance” music such as electronica or acid and so on ; solo and in collaborative projects (as Axiome, Tasjiil Moujahed, Ambre, with Marie Takahashi, Luong Hue Trinh, Yan Jun, Mick Harris, Dora Bleu, Periklis Tsoukalas, Mark Spybey, Gülce Özen Gürkan and many more artists).

He has toured extensively in Eurasia, Africa and North America, and his main research focuses on electronic,electroacoustic, experimental and noise music from Asia and Africa. He composed music for sound installations, theatre and choreographies, including collaborations with Robyn Orlin, Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC) and Dao Anh Khanh.

In 2017 he released together with Dimitri della Faille the book Not Your World Music about noise music in South-East Asia, winner of the 2017 "Golden Nica" Prix Ars Electronica in the "Digital Musics & Sound Art" category. In 2005, his soundtrack for the experimental film Atalodz directed by Gisèle pape won the best prize at Côté Court festival, Paris/Montreuil, France.

 

1.       How has been your musical path leading up to where you stand at the moment? Throughout a career, you have probably walked through trial and error – acquiring knowledge, getting rid of the elements that you deemed not useful. How did it work in your case?

 

That is a very long story, so I’ll try to shorten it : I studied diction, declamation, theatre improvisation, music theory, orchestral drums and electroacoustic music, silkscreen printing, art, among many things but finished none for voluntary and involuntary reasons.

Even though I enjoyed theatre and literature a lot, my first love is above all music and sound art in general.

I’m happy to have had to use my imagination as much as I could when I started my first bands (Crno klank in 1989 and Axiome in 1990 or 1991) and solo projects. I was still a teenager, had very little money and used what I could to play music : cassette tapes that I would open, cut and loop, walkie talkies used as distortion, headphones used as microphones, metal junk or even big courgettes and whatnot to create rhythms and sounds.

A lot of what I did back then sounded amateurish but the fact that I didn’t have any so-called “professional” gears forced me to use my imagination.

 

My biggest mistake was to sometimes release some recordings too quickly, especially when I was young, tracks that I should have improved and some that should have not been released but it’s OK, I learned from my mistakes – I’m now often too slow to finish a track, ahah.

 

I think that the main way I worked and learned was to play, compose and record every day with practically no exception. It’s been only about a decade that I can’t find enough time to play or compose all the time, which I find frustrating but the main reason for it is that I travel so much for playing concerts and doing my never ending research about electronic and experimental music in and from Asia and Africa, so it’s not bad at all – I became an independent researcher, hence I need to focus on that too.

 

2.       What has left an inspirational imprint on your work in a way that you still feel has been a turning point, something you cannot overlook?

 

I presume my first concerts and tours outside of the so-called Western World (from 2003).

 

3.       How improvisation with others influences your own workshop: skill set and a push towards discovering new territories?

 

Improvising with other artists allows me to explore new techniques and also music genres that I would possibly have never made if I were alone, some friends like Dora Bleu or Marie Takahashi proposed me to play with them and what they do is extremely different from what I usually do, I accepted the offers, not only because I like the music they play but also to rise to the challenge of performing something entirely new to me. Also, when one performs with other musicians, they/she/he have to compromise, which I find very interesting. So, indeed, I discovered many new territories thanks to all the people I collaborated with, not only on a technical level and the way of listening to the others but also music genres I would have maybe never played.

 

4.       Music has been under the influence of many factors, especially how is it been distributed – how does it affect your publishing activity?

 

I have seen several changes since the 1980s of course. From the DIY tape trading to the publication of vinyls and CDs directly sold by labels, distributors and/or record store to the current (almost forced) digitisation of music and more.

Right now,  most of what I release even physically is available online, it is easier and quicker to reach people who are interested in this kind of music.

So after sharing a bit of music on Archive.org a long time ago (and of course MySpace an event longer time ago), I dove into the digital distribution world, via Bandcamp in 2012, not believing in it and I have been proven wrong, this was a right move. But most of what I release on Syrphe is still published on CD because I like physical formats and when it is possible, I try to print the covers by myself : silkscreen, cyanotypes, stamps or else.

It brings me back to the time when we had to make cassette covers by ourselves and also it turns the object into an art piece that is often more interesting and valuable than a mass printed one.

I may also decide to include one extra track on a CD version that is not included with the digital version because I believe that people who buy a physical object deserve more and I don’t think it is a necessity to publish everything online.

I don’t work with streaming platforms, I dislike them, almost all of them rip artists off and I find it disappointing to see that so many people just stream on their phones, the generalisation of muzak seems to be at its peak, I don’t want to be part of this. People streaming whatever playlist and even not knowing the artist’s or band’s names.

Nowadays, I work less with distributors than in the past and the digital distribution allows me to reach listeners and artists almost instantly anywhere but one has to be very active for this, it’s really time consuming, as well as promoting on various social networks to be at least a bit visible.

That said, due to the increasing shipping costs and taxes imposed by states, I’m slowly working with more distributors again.

 

While the internet allows us to spread music almost everywhere, many governments, like the EU where I live, are just crushing us, small publishers and artists (not only in the music industry) by imposing insane taxes that were most likely meant to prevent cheap Chinese goods to enter the EU or other products not made in the EU but none of the decision makers cared about the fact that we would be badly impacted. I also think about people in the UK who lost most of their customers as their primary market was the EU. Who wants to pay 20 or 30€ extra for buying a book or a record ? And speaking about records, when we see that more and more of them are being sold between 20€ and 40€, if you add all shipping costs and taxes, one album may cost up to 80€, this is pure insanity and elitist, therefore I think we are more and more being pushed to consume digital goods that are also taxed.

These goods also stop the accumulation of wealth, no one will buy your “second hand” audio files at a discounted price. And if we were not living in a capitalist world, I wouldn’t mind, maybe (we could speak about the environment impact of streaming and cloud storage…) but we live in a capitalist society and the little “wealth” that some could accumulate (I don’t speak about speculators who buy several copies of the same item in order to sell it for thrice the price six months later) and pass through generations or sell one day or another for various reasons is not possible of we all turn into digital artefacts (and then comes the NFT debates, some great ideas, regarding copyrights, payments to the artists and ownership but a lot of nonsense as well – I still don’t know what to think about this).

 

We live in a time of big changes and challenges and it’s very interesting, sometimes hard and confusing, of course.

 

In the end, I decided to lower the prices a bit and also offer some digital releases for free or pay as you wish as I think that anyone should be able to access culture.

 

5.       When I listen to your work – there is a specific sense of intimacy between you and your instrument, your set up. How does it work to get the best out of this relationship?

 

It really depends on the project, this intimacy doesn’t always exist. I have quite a few projects like Axiome or Tasjiil Moujahed that are more beat-oriented and in which I even use my voice, so in that case, I or we externalise more.

But regarding this intimacy, it’s probably due to the fact that I not only like the instruments I use but, especially for the acoustic ones, I enjoy exploring their sonic textures, including those that are usually deemed to be undesired. I often set the microphone very close to the instruments or objects in order to catch these vibrations that we usually can’t hear or don’t hear with such great detail, a bit like making a macrophotography to see an insect in great detail that the naked eye would not catch.

I have a cello. I don’t only like the sound of its vibrating strings amplified by its body, I like all the sounds I can create with this object, with or without strings, or I like to catch these almost imperceptible resonances produced by a cymbal or a gong, I almost stick the microphone to the instrument and record what somebody sitting a few metres away from it wouldn’t hear.

 

6.       I love how you open listener’s eyes and ears to new territories of music outside the ethnocentric boundaries of Europe and English speaking world. How did it enrich your own musical experience?

 

I must tell you that I used to work in a media library in Belgium and it had a huge collection of music spread across Wallonia (the French speaking part of the country) and Brussels. The collection included everything one can imagine and there were thousands of CDs  and vinyls from all over the world. Thousands of traditional music CDs and vinyls for example, so before starting to travel around, I had already acquired a substantial knowledge in folk, traditional and non-Western classical music.

This knowledge has obviously been reinforced more and more each time I’d travel outside of the West. This and meeting contemporary composers, artists and musicians in or from Asia and Africa as well as from Latin America opened my eyes even more and performing with some of them, carefully listening to their music, traditional or contemporary, taught me a lot. Even if we may use similar instruments and tools, especially in electronic music, our various cultural backgrounds have an impact on the way we listen, compose and play, sharing and exchanging are important.

 

On a side note, I think that above all this enriches my life experience more than the musical one.

 

7.       What is the ultimate challenge for you at the moment in terms of composition and achieving things within and without what you do?

 

In terms of composition, I think that my current biggest challenge is to avoid making something that bores me to death. I often try to innovate but it’s not always easy. So much has been done, hence I try to explore new composition techniques in order to make music I haven’t done before, at least for some projects. And I’m not sure if I will succeed in this.

 

8.       Plans for the future

 

Too many as always and some that will probably not see the light but it’s fine.

This month (December 2022), I’m in Lebanon again, and we (Jawad Nawfal and I) will record some new material with the project Tasjiil Moujahed, I will then spend two month in Mexico, Colombia and Peru if all goes well, in order to play, collaborate, do field recordings and also write and take a lot of pictures as I often do.

 

I also started to interview artists from Asia and the diaspora for about a year now, the video interviews will soon start to appear on my YouTube channel, so far, artists from Bahrain, Sri Lanka, China, Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, South Korea, the Philippines, India and soon more to come from Africa too and also perhaps from Latin America. I make the video interviews only if I can meet the people, I don’t do that online.

 

Earlier this year, I helped curating Geiger Septemberfest 2022 in Sweden in Spring with a focus on Africa and the diaspora (with Duma, Robert Machiri, Aurélie Lierman, Farida Amadou, FRKTL, Cobi van Tonder and myself) and following this, there will be a smaller festival session in spring 2023.

I’ve been composing and performing live music for a choreography by South African choreographer Robyn Orlin and we will present more performances in 2023, most or all of them in Europe, as far as I know.

 

Next summer AGF (Antye Greie) and I will do a two weeks workshop for the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in Germany, the project is not fully defined yet but we will most likely collaborate and play with musicians from various Asian and African countries as we did last year.

 

And I’ll, of course, play and record and publish more music, solo and with other projects such as Tasjiil Mouhahed, Axiome, Dora Bleu/Periklis Tsoukalas/Cedrik Fermont.

I keep writing about electronic and experimental music from Africa and the diaspora, so hopefully, I’ll manage to finish some writings and publish them.

There’s more than that but let’s see this step by step.