BY MAGNUS NYGREN
Photo by Ira Aaltonen (We Jazz Festival 2023)
Published in print in We Jazz Magazine, issue 17 (Winter 2025)
In the summer of 2025, Sven-Åke Johansson passed away. His contribution to the European experimental and avant-garde music scene is tremendous. As a drummer, composer, conceptual artist, writer, photographer, or, in his own words, ”a musical artist who invents things,” his recorded heritage is fortunately extensive. Among the things he did was to participate in the recording of Peter Brötzmann’s famous Machine Gun in 1968, develop his own ”dynamische schwingungen” in the 1970s, and take a major part in the evolution of the Echzeitmusik in Berlin in the 1990s. Curiosity was his driver, and he wrote music for ensembles of tractors, fire extinguishers, wind generators, and whatnot, always to discover how they sounded.
In 2016, Swedish writer Magnus Nygren visited him in his studio in Kreuzberg, Berlin.
Sven-Åke Johansson: I started in Mariestad as a schoolboy playing dance music. There was no academic education there apart from the wind orchestra, and that wasn’t much to write home about. So I sought out the opportunity with the dance orchestra. There were advanced musicians who played jazz and similar styles. Later, in the 1960s, I moved on to Västerås with Gunnar Fors Quartet, with Bobo Stenson, and Ivar Lindell. We played advanced neo-bop and made a recording in 1965 at the library in Västerås, which has now been released at the same time as a recording from 2004 with Bobo Stenson, Ivar Lindell, and me, when we played jazz at the Västerås New Music Festival. On the album, we have put those two things together, 40 years apart.
MN: Did you play at dances in the 1960s?
SÅJ: Yes, people danced. And then pop music came along, and the bandleader hesitated to play the advanced numbers, choosing simple pieces instead. The advanced dance music was transformed into a concert form. That was typical of the time everywhere, not just in Sweden. We wrote our own advanced pieces and arrangements. Then I moved to Paris with the band, and we played for a couple of years. After that, I came to Cologne and played for a year with Peter Brötzmann in various combinations. Then, I went my own way. First, it was free jazz, where expressiveness played the most significant role, and then you removed parts of the expressiveness and took advantage of the parameters you found, created new patterns, and wrote small instructions, arrangement-like things. You picked out the parts that you thought were important.
MN: What were they?
SÅJ: They were reshaped rhythms, that is, non-rhythmic wave rhythms, as they say. It went back and forth in time, and it was the sound levels, as well as the sound itself, that is, overtones and their intersections that played a major role. I wrote a lot and performed on stage, where the drum kit I played on was turned upside down. I had replacement parts for cymbals made of other materials, and sometimes people thought it was fun. The gesture has a lot to do with music. In the past, people used to make gestures with the saxophone when they thought they were very hip, a gesture in the air to show that they were modern. And later, they made the gesture with the guitar in the 1970s. And that’s why the gesture is very important, and sometimes, when you remove the sound, the gesture becomes more important than the music. That’s how it can be.
MN: Going back a bit, when did you arrive in the Cologne area?
SÅJ: It was in the mid-60s, 1966, 1967, but that’s in all the books, so we won’t talk about it too much, because everyone knows that I started with [Peter] Brötzmann and [Peter] Kowald. What I’m doing now is more interesting.
MN: But I have to ask you something that isn’t in all the books: for a period, you played with Tangerine Dream?
SÅJ: Yes, that was during my time in Berlin. That’s when Tangerine Dream started to form. We had a place called Zodiac, where people experimented. They played modern music, including a lot of avant-garde free jazz, as well as German rock and avant-garde. I was with Tangerine Dream and traveled to different places in Germany and did performances, but it was for a short time. It was too loud for me.
MN: So it wasn’t the music that was the problem; it was the volume?
SÅJ: Yes, basically. It was during that time that I formed my MND group Moderne Nordeuropäischer Dorfmusik, with which I have made many recordings, Norbert Eisbrenner, and Werner Götz. There is still some hidden material, but we have released quite a few albums with that group. Both of them were also active at Zodiac. It was a short-lived period, much like the Voltaire club a hundred years ago in Zurich with the Dada phenomenon.
I performed my first big composition there, which has sheet music but no recording. I think it was called Circle Music for Large Ensemble. I think it was 1968 or ‘69. There’s detailed sheet music, so it could be performed if needed. That’s where I started to put my ideas into practice, partly in the big band I was in at the time. I often played in Globe Unity in the early years with Alexander von Schlippenbach, and that’s where I used my ideas. I was in Berlin and had many musicians around me who wanted to develop new ideas. You could make such big contributions. In 1970, I was in Sweden and did something quite important for all improvising musicians in Sweden. It was at the ABF House that we were experimenting, and then I recorded Rotationer for Large Orchestra. It has now been documented after a very long time. I was in Sweden for a short time. I’ve never had a particular attraction to Sweden, except whe I’ve been invited to perform in concerts there.
MN: It’s only when you’re playing that you go to Sweden?
SÅJ: I don’t have any siblings, so I don’t have much reason to visit Sweden to see my family.
MN: When you started developing these ideas about removing expressiveness and finding other ways, how was it received? The free jazz scene was very expressive at the time.
SÅJ: Yes, some people frowned upon it, and some thought it was necessary, as is always the case when you change things. Then, for reasons I don’t know how to describe, I picked up an accordion. I’m not an accordion player, but I used the accordion because I knew its qualities from when I was a drummer in an old dance trio in the early 1960s, late-50s in Mariestad. So I know how skilled accordionists use the attack, and I brought that out and used it in my music and improvisation, as well as the tonal focus. And many people thought it was fun, but others thought that you were betraying the whole thing by making funny things. But that wasn’t my intention; I was just expanding the tonal potential.
MN: I was here in Berlin in 2010 when you performed Harding Greens. Symphonie für Kartonagen. And I must say that at the beginning, I had to find a way to relate to the fact that 22 people were playing on cardboard boxes, which is not something you see every day, but something very unusual. It was fascinating that after just a few minutes, I had gotten over it. It was only then that I felt I could appreciate it purely on musical grounds. How do you think about things like that?
SÅJ: I think the same way I always have, that I have an idea, that it’s something that appeals to me, that I don’t know how it sounds, and then I have to, if it’s in a larger context, write notes to coordinate. I’m currently writing a composition, Mono für 12 Trommeln, that will be performed in Geneva. It features four snare drums, four timpani, and four bass drums that only play rolls at different volumes and in different places on the drum. It makes a difference whether you play on the edge, on the edge together with the sticks, or in the middle. There are so many parameters to switch between. You can spend hours varying these types, as the snare drum changes not only in volume but also in character. It will be exciting to hear this. But that’s how it works, I think of something that I find interesting, and then I write it down. I’ve done this not only for what you would call ordinary instruments, but also for tractors and wind generators. I’m drawn to it because of my own interest in listening to it.
I drum a lot myself. I perform in various contexts and practice on my drum kit here every day. That’s the essence of it all: being ready.
MN: It’s fascinating that there’s such order in what you do; it almost feels pedantic.
SÅJ: Yes, you can see that here [he says, pointing to the tidy studio and laughing].
MN: But on the other hand, there’s also improvisation, which is something else entirely, where you let go of order. How do you reconcile that?
SÅJ: I don’t combine them daily. Mostly, I improvise in small groups, and sometimes I’m an interpreter, and then I have different patterns. For example, I use many of the American standard melodies as an interpreter in the classical mode. So it alternates between the new compositions, interpretation, and improvisation that I do on a daily basis.
We recorded an album with the trio Bertrand Denzler and Joel Grip, Neuköllner Modelle, at a club called Sowieso, where the second part features Schlippenbach, who was also present. So my work with Schlippenbach hasn’t completely disappeared; it’s just sporadic. Denzler is Swiss, and he’s not very expressive. He plays long arcs on the saxophone, and that suits my Schlingerland style, which is undulating. So it’s not really a soundscape, but more of a systematic operation with increasing speeds and volumes.
MN: What you do in Cool Quartet is exciting. As you say, you are interpreters of jazz standards, but what is fascinating is that, unlike many others, you don’t play them in a slick and somewhat bland way.
SÅJ: That’s the magic. I can’t explain it, but there’s an approach, a way of relating to the interpretation or the source material, that makes it different. If everyone is on form, there’s this so-called swing feeling, which is like extra icing on the whole system of harmony and rhythm. When you get the swing going, it becomes irresistible in a way.
MN: What makes you want to play jazz standards?
SÅJ: Well, I started with this, so why should I stop?
MN: How long have you been working with Cool Quartet?
SÅJ: For twelve years, we had the Night and Day dance orchestra. It performed at art parties, artists’ gatherings, and other events. We never played jazz clubs, but rather events where people danced. We developed this in Berlin with my colleagues, for example, skilled jazz trumpeter Axel Dörner and various bassists and pianists. We have performed these songs from my earlier career as a jazz performer and musician at jazz clubs. I find them interesting to perform.
MN: How did you come into contact with Axel Dörner?
SÅJ: He showed up here in the late 1990s, coming from Cologne. He sometimes appeared when I occasionally played jazz with Schlippenbach and a saxophonist who played in the Berlin radio orchestra. He joined us once as a young trumpeter, and it turned out that he knew all this stuff; he had studied with a jazz trumpeter in Cologne in the 1980s. Even though he came here as a free-form player, he was involved in this from the beginning. Then we developed it with his friends, who also knew jazz from the ground up. Then I recorded these songs, too, where I sing them in my dry way, with bass and accompaniment from Rüdiger Carl and some other pianists. I’m doing this at the same time as my modernist sound exploration and arrangements.
MN: With all these projects you’re working on, do you give yourself any kind of label?
SÅJ: I’m basically a musical artist who invents things. I’m a trained drummer, and I’ve also been involved with words, words that come from music, and I draw and write things down and publish books. But I’m not an all-around artist, I’m a composer-artist, and I do what’s necessary for the whole thing, like I design the covers with the help of my current friend, Teresa Iten.
For example, I performed at artist Martin Kippenberger’s place, where I played the accordion and made up and improvised lyrics about various European situations. I worked a lot with artists here in Berlin, especially in the 1980s, including my friend Kippenberger. Another friend from that time, the artist Albert Oehlen, is coming here. He has built a kind of rhythm machine, and we are going to perform at an Electronic and Drums festival early next year. He has set himself the challenge of making the regularity of the drum machine seem irregular when I play my irregular, fluctuating rhythm. It will be exciting.
Then I’m going to Møn in July, where I’ve been invited by the gallery owner Bloch. He and his wife, Ursula Bloch, ran the legendary Gelbe Musik record store in Berlin. He has an exhibition space on Møn in Denmark. There, I’m going to perform a piece that I performed last year in a small context here in Berlin. It’s called Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America. I use a 1950s recording from a mono record, Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America, where one side is the rainy season and the other side the dry season. If you play these on the right and left channels separately, you get an incredible stereo effect when the two seasons are played together. It’s incredible, surrounded by monkeys and frogs. It ends with a big yellow moon rising. The sounds slowly fade away, and the light goes out. Then there are two secretaries sitting there typing. Noting down the sounds they hear. Typewriters.
MN: Is there any way to explain how you get your ideas?
SÅJ: Pretty much everyone who attends lessons here and comes here from time to time wonders about that. They’re not so interested in the technique itself; they can handle that, but motivation is a matter of interest. And how does it work? Well, something pops up, something exciting, something I wonder about. And then I get curious. My curiosity has played tricks on me many times, brought me to my knees and knocked me on the head, but it’s still there. It has to go so far that I have to realize what I have in mind. In this case, I had an assignment to create a piece. They had a kind of series at a club here in Berlin, where you would go there and listen to the people playing, and then you would think of something, reshape what you heard into a new composition. Two ladies were singing and playing instruments. They used some kind of bird sounds; they didn’t sing any melodies or lyrics, they basically chirped. And then I thought, I’ve had that record for many years. So I experimented. I played one side on the computer and the other side on the speaker system. And lo and behold!
MN: You have frequently collaborated with Swedish pianist Per Henrik Wallin. Tell us about that.
SÅJ: It went on for many years, but it was very sporadic. However, we wrote to each other frequently, sharing thoughts on philosophy, music, and other topics. I think it started in the 1970s. We started playing here on early FMP, the earliest recording is on a box set Per Henrik Wallin & Sven-Åke Johansson: 1974–2004, released by Umlaut.
MN: But what was it that brought you and Wallin so close together?
SÅJ: We actually started during his school days in Skövde, where he was still attending Skövde High School, and I was spending a couple of months as a Swedish soldier. I was living there at the time, I had a place to stay, a warm basement where I had my drum kit, and there was a piano that a lady had donated. He would come there during his lunch break, and we would play. We also played in the evenings and at events, but we didn’t have a dance band together. Instead, we often showed up during the breaks when dance bands and jazz bands were playing, and we would go on stage and play our jazz set. We asked, of course. He was 16, and I was 19 or 18. That’s how it started. Then we went our separate ways. But we met up from time to time and continued playing. We didn’t even play jazz tunes; we played freely from the beginning, pretty much.
MN: You talk about jazz, which you grew up with, about tractors you did a concert with, Mariestad, and the farming community. Is there a nostalgic element to what you do?
SÅJ: No, not at all, I don’t think so. It’s mostly memories and childhood pranks that we used to do, joking with people, and trying to scare older people that still stick with me. I’ve been through many different schools, through the jazz idiom, free form, and stylistics that you seek out, but basically, it’s what’s been with you since childhood that you’re looking for. If you find your way back there, you’ve probably come to the right place.
MN: In recent years, you’ve released several box sets with recordings from throughout your career. One could almost think that it’s some kind of final reckoning.
SÅJ: Well, yes, maybe, for some things. I have a lot of audio material lying around, and I think it’s better to release it even in small editions and sell it through my shop. There are requests from all over the world to hear about the work that has been done here in Berlin and Europe. But there are no record companies that want to do this kind of thing nowadays. It’s very rare.
MN: Another thing I’ve noticed when looking at the pictures you use is that there seems to be a fascination with East Berlin.
SÅJ: Yes, they have different patterns that come from travels in Europe in general. Some were taken in the East, and not just in East Berlin, but in East Germany. I took a lot of photos during all my travels, especially here in Berlin. I’ve used my photos on covers, in books, and so on.
MN: It’s interesting to see music as a bridge between East and West in the 1970s and ‘80s. For example, FMP, which released records with Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky and others, where you were playing in East Germany. There were few opportunities for them to leave the country, to come to the West.
SÅJ: They were invited if there was something special. Then they were given official assignments to come here. We even had early assignments in West Berlin for those who were in my orchestra. We played a common composer who could not be divided, Paul Linke. He was active in both the East and the West, a cabaret artist and operetta writer in the 1920s, so there was a kind of underground connection that allowed us to play his melodies, “Berliner Luft,” for both sides.
MN: What was the thinking behind working with musicians from East Germany? Was it undramatic? Did you want to work with them?
SÅJ: Yes, pretty much. We were invited. They wanted us to play there. They wanted to raise their profile by playing with free thinkers from the West. They paid well; it was state funding. You got all the money even before you played a note, but you couldn’t leave with it and convert it into Western currency. Some guests got some in Western currency, but that didn’t apply to us.
MN: In the 1990s, so-called Echtzeit music emerged, along with many younger musicians with ideas similar to yours. It seems like you all blended very well.
SÅJ: Yes, some of the playing techniques and even ideological approaches I had developed were compatible with many of the new musicians who came here. I’ve been involved in three generations of music, first with expressive free jazz, then with the Zodiac Berlin style that emerged in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, as well as the broader avant-garde movement, and then with Echtzeitmusik in the late 1990s.
MN: You’re probably the only one who’s been involved in all, although there are probably a few others.
SÅJ: Yes, from the older generation, I don’t know who was involved. AMM from England became very popular and were often invited here to play with the younger musicians, especially pianist John Tilbury. They thought it was a different style than jazz, and it probably was.
MN: But what about the Barcelona Series, your group with Axel Dörner and Andrea Neumann?
SÅJ: We’ve been going for 15 years, the longest-going group I’ve ever worked with.
Everyone thought that I’d played with the Wuppertal group for 20 years, but that was actually a very short time, just one year.
MN: How did the Barcelona Series group come about?
SÅJ: We knew each other here in Berlin. I played a lot with Dörnner. He was going to Barcelona to meet his girlfriend at the time, Andrea Neumann, who was playing for a ballet company. I went with him because I was meeting my daughter, who was studying architecture there. And then we met at a couple of clubs and played there together, Andrea Neumann, Axel, and I. And we thought it went so well that we continued and recorded here in my studio, and later once more, the recording where Albert Oehlen did the cover.
MN: When you started, how did you do it? Did you discuss anything?
SÅJ: No, not at all. We had opinions about how we should come together, and we often reduced, we paused. Pauses are an important part of music. We tried to remove the unnecessary, start from zero, volume zero. It’s difficult. When you start playing live, you start somewhere around mezzo forte, and then you might get to zero. But if you start at zero, then you have a completely different reference in terms of volume. Each of us has our own repertoire that we improvise together, so we get a special sound from the different opinions we have. And it changes next year or the next time we play because of each person’s experiences. So it evolves. But we don’t decide how we’re going to play before we start. We remember, of course, the brain has a kind of unconscious memory. When you start playing, you know in the back of your head how it was last time and how it could change, and what happens when you do something in a certain way, so some answers are clear.
MN: It’s easier to understand memory when you’re an interpreter; it almost becomes muscle memory, but when it’s improvised music, what do you remember?
SÅJ: You remember sounds, movements, temperatures, and speeds. You try to be curious, not to repeat yourself, but to let the repetitions emerge as distant memories that you try to change. That’s the basis of improvisation, not reproducing yourself, but trying to find new openings and make it exciting. Everyone thinks: let the other person play and be quiet yourself, come back when you think it might be exciting to add a counterpoint or some other rhythm. Your absence in the music is more of a presence on stage than you might think. You have to know that beforehand, it’s a kind of concept, but we don’t talk about it; everyone just knows.
MN: We have now discussed both the past and the present. However, is there anything more important to you at the moment?
SÅJ: Yes, especially my assignments as a constructive composer for large ensembles. I am currently working with twelve drums, and the performance in Møn. And my central place is here in this studio in Kreuzberg, where I practice, increasing rhythms, decreasing rhythms in this way. When I perform as a soloist, it may not be so interesting just to perform this technique that I’ve been working on since the Schlingerland era, where you do a kind of free-form drumming. Often, they want me to be a lone traveling salesman in my performances. I start with this historical, little box [howling sound from a so-called crackle box he got from Michel Waisvisz]. Then I sing aaoooo, I imitate this, and sometimes I sing counterpoint to what it can do. Then you’re a soloist and a duo at the same time!
And then I perform with the drums, but I don’t hit them; I demonstrate different speeds. I prefer to make the drums sing in ways other than with sticks. And I usually finish by showing how to use brushes on the snare drum. Then it becomes classic jazz style. And I sing a couple more songs there. I have a whole sound repertoire with the drums, and the jazz idiom at the end, too, which is singable and entertaining.
MN: Do you think about humour in music?
SÅJ: No, not at all. But I know that certain things cause a particular kind of humour, that people find it funny, like when you turn sentences around, turn things around, do the opposite. Yes, I think there is a humorous streak. I enjoy joking around with people when I’m on stage. It has nothing to do with exaggerating anything; you’re pulling something away rather than exaggerating. Then it can be funny too.
MN: When I saw you perform for the first time, at Kulturbro in Ystad, Sweden, in 2000, you hit the cymbals with cucumbers. That was funny.
SÅJ: Yes, it was basically a case study, it’s a comedy of errors, because the cucumbers, at first they’re drumsticks and everything is normal, but then the cymbal becomes a household instrument, a cucumber knife. And the cucumber gets its function as a cucumber. You cut it, it’s not used as a drumstick. So you see how the sound takes off, and hear how it falls and strikes off, you see the whole process. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and it smells too.
MN: There is a legendary performance at Harald Hult’s record store Andra Skivor in Stockholm, where you were shooting peas. For many years to come, these peas were found in the store.
SÅJ: I had a rebirth of those movements I did back in the 1980s and ‘90s. I had a gig in Munich last week where I used only the pea shooter. I had a ten-minute piece where I only used the room’s resonances and two small hi-hat cymbals that lay like bowls on the ground. It was very successful because the room became completely silent, they wondered what I was going to do, and then, of course, people laughed. It was the first time I used chickpeas, and they fit perfectly in the pea shooter, so it became very powerful when I blew. Previously, I had used regular peas, which are small and didn’t go very far.
MN: You also collaborate with the musician Rüdiger Carl.
SÅJ: Yes, for many years, since the Berlin days when he lived here. Then we had BBQ, the Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett. It was Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky from East Berlin and Hans Reichel. We made some recordings. We also had BBBQ, British-Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett, which included pianist and singer Steve Beresford from London.
MN: Although you can read about it in several places, I’d like to talk a little about the recording of Machine Gun.
SÅJ: The most interesting thing is a photo. It appears in the film Blue for a Moment, which was made about me. The filmmaker, Antoine Prum, found it, and it’s from a restaurant in Wuppertal, an artists’ restaurant called Palette. We gathered there in 1967, and someone took a photo. It’s from the earliest days. Prum claimed that the others were deep in thought and mostly looking in the direction where Brötzmann was sitting, and I was the only one looking in another direction. Even then. That’s what he claims. It’s very poor quality, but there is Brötzmann, there’s Kowald, there’s Evan Parker, I think, and there is Christa, Brötzmann’s wife, Fred Van Hove, Bennink, possibly Willem Breuker. I think that was during rehearsals for the Machine Gun performance. We rehearsed in Wuppertal at one point and then recorded in Bremen. I don’t know who took the photo. I don’t remember the situation either.
MN: When you played, how did it work?
SÅJ: Brötzmann came up with some concepts, Van Hove wrote a few short notes, and I think Breuker did too. It was just divisions, ensemble, and soloist, and then we got going. It was all about expressiveness. It was about distancing ourselves from all metrical and harmonic constraints, which for us at the time were patterns of constraint.
MN: When you played this in front of an audience, what were the reactions? It was remarkably early for such extreme expressiveness.
SÅJ: People were into it, and some went home.
MN: It was either one or the other?
SÅJ: Yes. A lot of students came; it was a time of revolution, rebellion, and they thought it suited them in a way. They weren’t necessarily musical connoisseurs, but rather rowdy people who liked the fast pace. As chamber music, the trio album, For Adolph Sax, is probably more interesting than Machine Gun, but there are a lot of us on the latter, and it’s structured in a way that makes it more famous than the trio album.
We drove all over Europe, and there were no drums to borrow. We lugged all 80 kilos with us, along with everything we needed, especially for the drummer. And the bassist had his bass, but it wasn’t easy to travel by train back then, so we traveled by car. I was often the navigator; I knew where north and south were.
MN: But you were only a member of Brötzmann’s band for a few years.
SÅJ: Yes, it was a very short time. Then I moved to Berlin, and we pretty much ended things, because he was in a different area, and I had my new trio. Then he hired another drummer, so it was a short time. The interesting thing is that I actually came to Wuppertal with ideas about free jazz even then. With the Gunnar Fors Quartet, we had practiced a lot and come up with certain things. It’s interesting that in 1965, at the library in Västerås, we played a very early form of free jazz. We played certain standards, and Fors was also a skilled composer in the harmonic system. But we took our first tentative steps with free form, which was quite unusual in Sweden at the time. So I didn’t arrive in Paris in 1965 completely unprepared, where we played standard jazz in the spirit of Coltrane, with soloists from the US. Then I came to Cologne and played with these guys, who came from the art world, Brötzmann and Kowald. They weren’t professional musicians and didn’t have a whole bag full of harmonic tunes like I did as a dance musician. I brought that experience with me, mixed it up with Brötzmann, and I was the only one who stayed in Europe from Fors’ group. The others stayed in other places.
MN: One more thing. The very beginning. When did you start playing? When did music become interesting? Was there anything like that with your parents?
SÅJ: No, my parents didn’t play music. There were no instruments. But some members of my family did New Year’s revues. They wrote poems, sang, and performed at various family gatherings. They took me with them and always sang. They wrote new lyrics to well-known melodies. Then, at my father’s 50th birthday party, my mother’s younger sister, who was a pretty good singer, sang and danced, and there was an accordion player. “Hey, who has a car? Go and get Sven-Åke’s homemade drums, he’s going to join us now,” she said. My parents thought it was strange, but they did as she said. I got to set up my homemade drums and joined in during the evening, playing with the accordion player. He looked at me and nodded approvingly.
MN: Homemade drums?
SÅJ: Yes, they were made from tin cans and a grape barrel that I stretched a waxed cloth over. Grapes came in wooden barrels back then.
MN: Another early development is the record label SAJ, later known as SÅJ.
SÅJ: I started it early on. Schlingerland was the first album, SAJ 01. Then FMP took over these letters; they made a lot of releases under SAJ, but I wasn’t directly involved. I came up with this name first, and then Jost Gebers took it. When he stopped his production, I started again with my self-produced records, and the SAJ number continued.
MN: You were started your own record label early on. This existed in jazz and free jazz, but it was probably with punk rock in the 1970s that this do-it-yourself culture really took off.
SÅJ: I actually started with the first record with MND, Moderne Nordeuropäische Dorfmusik, West-Berliner Stadtmusik 1969 on the record label Edition Mariental.
MN: But when you did it, was it a conscious decision because you wanted control over the production, or was it out of sheer necessity to get the music out there?
SÅJ: It was out of necessity. No record companies, like Deutsche Grammophon, wanted to get involved in that kind of thing, for example. So, we had to do it that way.