The Hafler Trio - Biography
Secret societies; occult rites; shadowy figures; mysterious texts: A number of so-called Industrial bands of the 1980s and early 90s draped themselves in these and other cloaks of intrigue and obfuscation, conjuring overarching projects that went far beyond the simple notion of sounds on a record. Some, like Psychic TV, aimed to be greater than the sum of their parts. For one, The Hafler Trio, the math was more extreme, a subtraction of sense and reason yielding an inscrutable negative integer. Its vast multimedia output leads the way into a bewildering aesthetic maze, in which one can easily stumble across philosophical flotsam, bizarre humor, arcane religiosity, technological inquiry, and obscure regalia — all while searching for an exit that might not even exist.
The brainchild of Andrew M. McKenzie, The Hafler Trio’s (H30 to fans) kaleidoscope of confusion starts here: It’s not a trio. Formed in 1982, H30 did have three members at one time, but one of them was imaginary. In reality, H30 is an ongoing collaborative undulation between the notoriously testy McKenzie and a constellation of artists. To list even a fraction of these names is to muster a roll call of the avant garde’s most elite stormtroopers: Psychic TV; Nurse with Wound; Z’ev; Jim O’Rourke; Anne Sprinkle; Zoviet France; Blixa Bargeld; David Tibet; Michael Gira; Jon Mueller; filmmaker Peter Greenaway; Autechre; and most recently a three-part collaboration with Jónsi Birgisson of Sigur Rós.
The music itself is a bewilderingly diverse stew: musique concrete; electro-acoustic; tape collage; industrial clangor; mash-ups; minimalist drone; ambient cooings and poundings; environmental soundscapes. They’re all in there. Equally prominent are textual and graphic elements. These are the key ingredients in the H30 conceptual tar pit. McKenzie traffics heavily in the realm of pseudo-science, and the releases are replete with charts, graphs, diagrams, dubious studies of all sorts, and lots and lots of essays. Quasi-religious and philosophical texts also abound. The cumulative result is like the schooling effect: Get enough thousands of mackerel spinning together in a mass, and the shark meanders off, disoriented and unfed.
Then there’s the discography. To say that it’s vast is an understatement; McKenzie himself probably doesn’t know how many records he’s made. It’s a lot, well over a hundred, for an array of labels, including Touch, Important, Crouton, Korm Plastics, Soleilmoon, and many, many more. Most are in decisively limited editions, e.g., 300, 333, 500, and McKenzie is militantly set against mp3s and all things digital. There are just dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of these things, and almost all of them are impossibly difficult to find. That said, here’s a run-down of a few.
Well, first: the origins. (With so much deliberate obfuscation and chicanery, it’s impossible to completely discern fact from fiction. McKenzie has referred to himself as being a “novelist” when discussing his work with H30, so maybe it’s best to assume it’s all fiction. Maybe even the hulking discography is fiction. Why not toss that suggestion into the mix?) We do know this: Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire was an original participant. The two met in 1981 shortly after Watson left CV. The teenaged McKenzie was in an arty punk band, but wanted to expand his horizons. Together, they acquired a number of tape machines and began making sound collages. When an opportunity arose to do an hour-long program on a pirate radio station, they needed a name. Taking one from the inventor of an esoteric speaker system, and adding the fictitious Edward Moolenbeek, the Hafler Trio was born.
The avalanche of releases began with Bang! An Open Letter (1984 Double Vision/Mute). Unlike many later H30 works, it is comprised of numerous, brief tracks that demand sharp attention from the listener. The material falls into two broad categories. On one hand there is ambient noise, more linear than fragmented; on the other, audio collages using somewhat recognizable source material, including heavily processed human voices, bird songs, and television and radio broadcasts, all stacked, layered, and looped. It’s a rigorous listen, and many still consider it The Hafler Trio’s best.
Bang! also introduces many of McKenzie’s elaborate fictions. The entire record is presented as part of a pseudoscientific study on perception, conducted under the auspices of ROBOL, a Swedish research institute. At one point on the record, a member of ROBOL answers a telephone. Scientist and psychoacoustic researcher Dr. Edward Spridgeon is interviewed by H30 member Edward Moolenbeek, now promoted to Dr. Edward Moolenbeek. A list of some of the track titles gives you a feel for the thing:
Sound and Color Analogy
Acoustic Lens Facsimile
The Morality of Sound
The Location of Detached Sounds
Psychophon Installation Test Tape
Location Screening Exercise
The Limitations of Silence
Echoes in the Body
Robolised Atomium Dawn Chorus
A Demonstration of the Non-Medical Use of Microphones
Dizzy yet? McKenzie describes the hall-of-mirrors effect this sort of thing kicked up — while still remaining halfway in character:
“Next to the Western Works in Sheffield, the studio of Cabaret Voltaire, as it were, was a small terraced house. In it was a man claiming to be German and Scottish, who had several businesses there. He had three or four women sewing jeans and stuff in there, and he used to sit around the ‘office’ wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes. This was utterly ridiculous to start off with. There are some promo photos of Cabaret Voltaire with him playing the bagpipes in the background.”
“So, he was named Robert Sprodgeon (or something close to that), and one of the companies named on the blue plaques on the door was "Robal Nuclear Fallout Shelters.” So we had to use this. So we changed the name a bit, and used it. Later, I started receiving letters from a guy in Manchester who had books by Spridgeon, as we had called him. Then he started send me xeroxes of them, which was really creepy. You see, people always used to be annoyed when they couldn't find his books in the library, but we said on the insert of the first LP ‘all material by The Hafler Trio’ and we never lied.”
After Dr. Moolenbeek, the deluge.
The next few recordings, also with Watson, continue the pattern of aggressive fragmentation (or is it fragmented aggression?): Alternation, Perception, And Resistance: A Comprehension Exercise (1985 Laylah Antirecords); Seven Hours Sleep (1986 Laylah Antirecords); Three Ways of Saying Two: The Netherlands Lectures and Dislocation (1986 Charm). However, once Watson left after a 1987 row with McKenzie, the sound opened up and became more linear and spatial. Intoutof (1987 KK Records) is mesmerizing, and even perhaps a tad lovely. Throughout, the barrage of disinformation continued.
In the late 1980s, The Hafler Trio collaborated with some fellow industrial provocateurs. First, it was Nurse with Wound on Nurse With Wound and The Hafler Trio Hit Again! (1987 Staalplaat). They also released their first CD just in time for the end of the decade, a pairing with Genesis P-Orridge’s Psychic TV. It’s a mouthful: The Hafler Trio & Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth Present Brion Gysin's Dreamachine (1989 KK Records). It’s an eyeful, too. The packaging is elaborate even by H30 standards: The accompanying 72-page book dis- and re-assembles into a Dreamachine, the stroboscopic, self-hypnosis device originally designed by Beat-era poet, ex-pat, and druggie-mystic icon Byron Gysin. (You create a three-foot tall, twelve-inch-diameter cylinder, cut shapes out of it, put it on a turntable, drop a light in the center, let it spin around, and stare at it with your eyes closed. Purportedly, @#$% happens. The 80s were hard on a lot of people.)
The 1990s were especially productive years for The Hafler Trio. An outstanding trilogy of releases — Kill the King (1991 Staalplaat); Mastery of Money (1992 Touch); How to Reform Mankind (1994 Touch) — explored a bowel-churning, low-frequency alternative to traditional long-form drones; think ambient music as sonic weaponry. In One Dozen Economical Stories By Peter Greenaway (1994 Sub Rosa), a project with the elegantly incomprehensible filmmaker, H30 used spoken word as electro-acoustic source material; similarly, Fuck (1992 Touch) uses recordings of actual sex acts, with performance artist and pornographer Anne Sprinkle.
Says McKenzie of the latter: “We spent an afternoon where Annie made all sorts of sexual noises (not faked, but on her own), and I recorded these sounds and the sound of her skin being rubbed, breasts slapping together, hair rustling, et cetera, and put these together. By this time, she had triggered some sort of ‘sexual evolution’ in me, and so, if I was going to do this properly, I had to make sounds myself. And I spent an odd evening doing just that (everyday ways of avoiding MTV).”
Despite a nasty split with the Touch label, which McKenzie helped co-found, and McKenzie’s well-publicized difficulties with hepatitis B and auto-immune hepatitis, The Hafler Trio has continued with a prodigious output, releasing over fifty lavish titles since the year 2000. Musician Jon Mueller published No One Remains (2005 Crouton), a pairing with Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder that was packaged in a ten-inch wood case. Perhaps the most prominent items to date feature Jónsi Birgisson from Icelandic megaband Sigur Rós (McKenzie expatriated to Iceland years ago). The trilogy, comprised of Exactly As I Say (2004 Phonometrography), Exactly As I Am (2005 Important), and Exactly As I Do (2005 Important), is a series of long-form compositions in which Birgisson’s lilting vocals are stretched, squished, and transmogrified into epic drones.
Through it all, the misdirection, confusion, and sheer Jabberwockiness continue unabated. How far through the looking glass has McKenzie fallen? Just review the contents of Exactly As I Say: Special Edition (2004 Phonometrography). It’s a boxed set, limited to 111 copies, and comes with a CD and a DVD. And the following:
» Packet of Fjallagrös (Icheu Islandicum)
» 'Standard' edition of "Exactly As I Say" wrapped in either one of two kinds of catfish, or salmon skin
» Small piece of lava from Rauðarfjall, Iceland, wrapped in cloth used at Hafler Trio performances
» Signed and numbered print of construction by A. M. McKenzie
» Signed and numbered DVD with Dolby 5.1 and DTS versions of a piece not included in the 'standard' edition, and two videos, all of which is not released elsewhere
» Booklet of texts
» The negative ions from outside a certain window
A few decades on, even Andrew McKenzie may not know how to find the exit to the maze that is The Hafler Trio. When asked to describe H30, he has this to say: “I've been trying to answer that question for about twenty years, in about four different languages, but I haven't succeeded yet.”
In fact, he might be so engrossed in his own conceptual snipe hunt that he doesn’t even know there is a maze.