Markus Reuter by Hajo Müller
This is a continuation of my Georgia Straight article on Markus Reuter and Stick Men. If you haven't read that article, start here. Event listings for the Nov. 30th show are here. Stick Men website here. If you like King Crimson, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, or progressive, virtuosic instrumental music tangentially connected to the world of rock, but vastly more complex and ambitous, check this band out.
There's a video interview with Brian Eno, somewhere, where Eno expresses frustration that apparently people contact him to ask questions about working with David Bowie. Ironically, the very interviewer who he tells this ends up, by a circumlocutious means, also coming round to asking him David Bowie questions, which Eno gets predictably steamed about. Even if you genuinely believe that Bowie is a greater, more important musician or artist or 20th century arts figure than Eno -- I don't, but a case could be made -- it's just in poor taste to use an interview with one artist as a means for scrounging for tidbits about another, regardless of questions of status and importance. When I spoke to Tad Doyle, I didn't ask him about Kurt Cobain at all, because I figure he's probably had his fill of that; he barely even wanted to talk TAD. I did ask Steve Turner some Courtney Love questions, but she wasn't the reason I did the interview. And yes, I pestered Steve Shelley about Doc Dart more than he wanted, but I also had plenty of questions about Shelley's own artistry and trajectory and other people he'd played with. It's one thing to want to know about colourful characters someone has encountered, to ask if they've got stories, but it's an offense to do it if you are not also genuinely interested in the person you are speaking to.
I am genuinely interested in Stick Men--I certainly love their music; my go to remains Tentacles, if you're curious. But still, I was a little bit sheepish about asking Markus Reuter any Robert Fripp questions. I did feel like I had to ask a couple! My first question, after he mentioned that he had studied with Fripp (as mentioned in the Straight article) was the act of asking permission to delve deeper.
Commence interview:
AM: Do you mind if I ask you about Robert Fripp? Do you get asked a lot about him? Does it get tiresome?
MR: No, it’s not like a get a lot of Robert Fripp questions. Not really.
AM: Tell me about him as a teacher? He has a reputation for being a difficult guy when fans approach him...
MR: He was super nice with me always, but I had an advantage. First off, I was very young when I met him; I was 18, and he was maybe 42 or something. [I did the math; this would be around 1990, so Fripp would have been 43 or 44] And it was just a great, very simple relationship with him. Like, I had no idea he was a guru, let's say, for so many, no idea that he had issues with the audience, or even about his personal issues. I don’t know, I never cared, I never knew. So we just had a great relationship. I was there in order to learn from him. And he gave me just that! It was great.
AM: What was the context of your studying with him?
MR: At that time he was offering courses, seminars called Guitar Craft. I had seen the touring ensemble of Guitar Craft, which was called the League of Crafty Guitarists. I had seen the band in a venue here in Germany and I found flyers for the seminar on the table, and I signed up and that’s how I met Fripp and all the other people there. It was really straightforward. And he was a really good teacher for me. Just what I needed, really.
AM: Can you give me an example of something key you learned from him?
MR: He basically showed me and convinced me, let’s say, that practicing works. That if you have an aim, you can work on it, you can take steps towards achieving the aim. And he gave me some tools for that; like, the way that he was thinking about the exercises, it was very much not about the music. The music was not the first concern when learning to play, because in order to be able to feel good about producing a note, you have to be physically able to play the note. And I think a lot of bad stuff happens to people who try to play music but they don’t feel comfortable with the instrument. They kind of give up, because they don’t have the strength, let’s say, to hold the chord on the guitar or something. So that’s why Fripp would never give you a chord to play. He'd say, “One finger, one note.” It was more modular, coming from the real basics, y'know? And that’s something that was really fascinating to me. Without him I would never have become a performing musician, and I never would have become, like, a virtuoso, which I guess I am. Like, I never intended to, but it’s just the result of decades of practicing. So...
AM: You've also composed generative music [connected to the composition strategies of Brian Eno]; if I can ask, what does Todmorden 513 mean?
MR: First of all, that word, Todmorden, is a place in the north of England. The word is funny because "Tod" is "death" in German, and "Morden" is murder, so for a German-speaking person, it's a bizarre word. And I find these kinds of words going across languages, I find them super-inspiring and funny. Because music works the same way: it's up to the "ear of the beholder," right? And that's why I love that word. And that kind of emotional word, for me, combined with a number, is even more absurd, and the number represents the number of chords of that piece: 513 chords.
AM: How did you encounter this location? Did you tour the north of England?
MR: I read about it. I don't think I've been there. I've been close to it... but I've never been there. I just came across it and liked it. I think it's famous for some UFO stories. And also, Keith Emerson is from there! Heh. But I didn't know that at the time!
Markus Reuter with his Touch Guitar by Hajo Müller
AM: While I'm asking about obvious influences, is Brian Eno someone you've met?
MR: I have not met him, no. But he played a short tour of Europe two years ago, and I was there, and it was amazing. One of my good friends is Brian Eno's assistant, and he was onstage playing keyboards. I've never met him in person, but I love his music. My all time favourites, if you want to know, are
Another Day on Earth and
Nerve Net. Later ones, actually! I love the guy, big inspiration, and I've seen the live show, which was incredible, so beautiful.
AM: I saw him in Japan in 2001, touring material that would become the
Drawn From Life album, with J. Peter Schwalm, which was material that was meant to be played live, that was being developed into a record.
[I do not tell the whole story to Reuter, but I was on 'shrooms, which were then, due a loophole, semi-legal in Japan; the package, bought at a headshop, came with the disclaimer that they were for "scientific use only, not for ingestion." Tool was playing on the other stage, but I didn't care. I remember an old Japanese hippie and I talking in our fractured versions of each other's languages about how amazing it was that we were going to see Brian Eno perform. The hippie had long hair, the dried brown skin of a sun-worshipper, shorts and a surfy shirt, and a huge grin at what was about to transpire; then when the music started, I was dancing happily next to said hippie at the front of the field, visualizing that I was in a tunnel leading upward to an explosion of light, and my wriggling body became the tail of a human-sized sperm on the way to a promised ejaculation -- the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. I remember, too, that Eno gave a phonetic and really quite good short speech in Japanese about his
atarashii ongaku ("new music"), but that he also used "konban wa" ("good evening") both at the beginning and end of the performance, which I don't think a fluent Japanese speaker would do, usually reserving it just for greetings; it was a mistake I'd made myself, so I deduced he didn't actually speak Japanese, which made his articulate little speech seem all the more impressive: if he'd been fluent in Japanese, speaking for a few minutes to the audience in their language would not have been a big deal, but NOT being fluent in Japanese and still doing the same suggested painstaking special effort and practice, undertaken for the occasion. Most other people I saw over there -- Joe Strummer, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Neil Young, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth and others were luckyif they could pronounce "arigatou" correctly; only Eno made a speech. [This was the same three-day festival where I saw Patti Smith do a "Babelogue" prayer to beautiful Mount Fuji, not having received the memo that the festival was Fuji in name only, and we were in fact on Mount Naeba, hours away]. Oh, and besides the material he was developing for that album, Eno sang "
No One Receiving" -- I think twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of the show. An awful audio recording of the whole night is
on Youtube, which as far as I could tell comes minus Eno's introduction and maybe one of the "No One Receivings," but does have an un-interesting 18 minute soundcheck. Really, it is so far from doing the show justice that I can't listen to it]
AM (continued): So is that similar to what you saw?
MR: It was basically a selection of his songs, but he was accompanied by an improvising orchestra (seems like
this show). So the orchestra was interpreting, let's say; they had an idea of what the songs were, but within the framework, they were improvising, so there was this generative, in the sense of improvisation, aspect, but it was the whole orchestra that was improvising. It was incredible.
AM: What did he sing?
MR: It was mostly the album
The Ship, I think it's called, and then there was something from the most recent vocal album he did (
Foeverandevernomore), "
There Were Bells." He did only one piece from the 70's, but still it was amazing!
AM: What was the song from the 1970s?
MR: "
By This River." And you know, the Japan show that you mentioned also is important for me as well, because
Drawn from Life is also one of my top five Brian Eno records, and I made a record with Jan Peter Schwalm, the other guy, which
you should check out, because that guy is awesome.
AM: Okay, I will. But let's talk about guitars. One of the challenges I have with
Tentacles is trying to figure out who is playing what. Tony is credited both with Chapman Stick and Touch Guitars, and you're also credited with Touch Guitars, and both instruments have an expanded range of sounds and presumably can do similar things. There are portions that sound like basslines, which I assume are Tony's, but I don't know.
MR: First of all, it's intentional that the compositions are sort of, like, interlocking [Markus illustrates on the Zoom screen with his fingers. He will later explain the symbol on his toque, so I hope he doesn't mind the screenshot!]. The instruments are interlocking. And this also goes for the drums, in terms of the writing, that there is a dialogue with what Tony and I do.
MR (continued): But Tony, on the Tentacles album, he's playing all the bass parts on that record, and I'm mostly the lead player 90% of the time. But in the live show, you will see there are moments, especially in the newer pieces, where the roles switch, even within a phrase. In the verse, it will be me on bass, and in the chorus, it will be Tony on bass, and stuff like that. We switch roles, and that's what's so great about the instruments we play, because they are full-range instruments. So they really have a bass and guitar register combined. Yeah.
AM: I've watched Tony play Stick, but I haven't really watched you play Touch Guitars. They're similar, then?
MR: Yeah, it's the same idea. It's just that the Touch Guitar... the Chapman Stick kind of like, comes out of... the way it's designed, it's trying to neglect tradition, let's say, where the Touch Guitar instruments -- there's also the Warr Guitars, which are also Touch Guitars, and the Touch Guitars which I designed -- they are meant to connect more strongly to guitar tradition, in terms of what they feel like, what they sound like. And so there's a sonic difference between the Chapman Stick and the Touch Guitars, for sure, and also an ergonomic difference. The Chapman Stick is pretty awkward, I have to admit. It looks awkward, too!
Tony Levin on Chapman Stick, Mexico, 2022, by Germán GarcÃa
MR (continued): But the touch guitar is sort of, anybody can pick it up, and it feels okay, it feels good, because there's sort of like, the tradition of how a guitar should feel that's in the instrument. With the Stick, that's not a given.
AM: How many strings?
MR: I only use eight strings, and my instrument is tuned in fifths, so that means the distance between the strings, the pitch distance between the strings, is larger than on a regular guitar. So with eight strings, I can cover the full spectrum of bass and guitar. Tony has an instrument that has two times six strings, so it's a 12-string instrument, but it's two regions, so they have quite a bit of overlap, tonally. So it's quite a complicated instrument.
AM: I know that you've designed these guitars. Are you hands-on in the making of them?
MR: I used to be. I wanted to know how it's done, because I wanted to start a business, and I have a very clear vision for what I wanted, and I got together with a luthier in Austin, Texas for this; a real, traditional electric guitar luthier.
AM: His name, please?
MR:
Ed Reynolds. He's an amazing guy. So it was fantastic: I said, "I have this idea for an instrument that's meant for this style of playing, so in order for this to work, it needs to be able to do A, B, C, D, E, F, G... I gave him a list of things. And then I said, "On top of all this, I want it to be a traditional guitar instrument. I want you to make sure it looks like a traditional guitar, it feels like a traditional guitar. I wanted to remove these hurdles that people have with the Chapman Stick". There are these huge hurdles, just because of the way it looks, right? Which can be a good thing, sometimes. Overall, I like the idea of this touch-style of playing, but for over a decade, I had seen people struggle with it so much. So I was like, "The instrument that I'm going to build for the technique is going to be purely for the technique, but it's going to be a traditional guitar instrument. It's going to be more familiar when people pick it up. I want people to be able to start making music right away." And fortunately all that turned out to be true for the instrument that I designed. I'm very happy about that!
Markus Reuter on Touch Guitar, Mexico, 2022, by Germán GarcÃa
AM: Okay, so--I am not a guitarist, but based on what you've said, if I were shopping for an instrument, I would buy your guitar, and not a Chapman Stick. It sounds like the superior instrument. But Tony still plays the Chapman Stick!
MR: Absolutely.
AM: So are there things he can do on a Chapman Stick that he can't do on one of your guitars?
MR: Yeah. There are two factors at play. So first of all, he always complains about the instrument, okay? It's true. But he's been playing it for 50 years, it's part of his iconic look, and it is his sound. And, this is the most important thing, we're not talking about some guy, we're talking about Tony Levin, and Tony Levin can make the Stick work in ways that nobody else can. That's also why I am so glad that I'm in a band with him and I get to experience his genius on that particular instrument, because I'm still learning so much from him as well. And the Stick has a unique sound. It only has one particular sound, which you can say, for a professional instrument, that's kind of strange, that you can't really change the timbre of it much. But that's also the sound that Tony is known for and uses. He also has one of my Touch Guitars, and he plays it, and he plays it on the track, "
Tentacles," if you want to hear the difference...
With Stick Men in Chile, 2022, by Guillermo italiani
AM: I think actually really understanding the differences would just frighten me more. I think for this music, I prefer the subjective experience of just listening to the music. Really knowing how it is made... it seems like it is a doorway to a very deep rabbithole.
MR: (Laughs) Yeah, absolutely. And I wasn't joking. Like, the reason the music is the way it is, is because I spent over 30 years working on my playing technique, and what is it, 35 years after having had my first contact with Robert Fripp and learning how he was composing that kind of stuff, so the rabbithole is incredibly deep. I absolutely agree, but I also think that's, like, magical. You know, sometimes I see people at shows that look at me in a very specific way. It could be some sort of attraction, but it's this musical attraction. And these people end up with me as my students, and I can see that there's this incredible power in kind of, for lack of better word, this knowledge that I have, and people do want to have a piece of that. It's great. Again, the word "lineage" comes to mind [this refers to something Markus said in the Straight piece, about carrying on in the mode of Robert Fripp and King Crimson].
AM: Do you take students who are not in Germany? Do you do Zoom sessions, or...?
MR: Yeah, most of my students are actually in the USA. I used to have a couple of Canadian students as well, but for me, my main market is the USA.
Pat Mastelotto Mexico, 2022, by Germán GarcÃa
(Note: I didn't ask any questions about Pat, but the one I had in mind was,
"Do you guys tease him about his time in Mr. Mister?"
So it might not have been appreciated anyhow.)
AM: Well, thank you, this was great, and I have more than enough, but I have a final question: any Vancouver stories?
MR: Yes! Yes! Vancouver stories, there's only one, but it's pretty amazing to me. You know this hat that I'm wearing... have you heard of
Devin Townsend? [
The image is his "lotus logo."]
AM: Yes!
MR: That was a magical happening in my life. I got to know Devin at a dinner party; he didn't know who I was. He didn't even know I was a musician. And we quickly became friends that night. And three weeks later, he asked me to join his band. And that was a 10-piece band that toured Europe in 2019. And he lives in... Gibsons, is that a place?
AM: Yes!
MR: At least he used to live there when I met him. So he was my gateway into the city, and... the amazing thing about Canada, for me, coming from Germany... Germany's a big country, in Europe, but Canada? Insane. And even the fact of people from Vancouver and Toronto, big cities with... 6000 miles between them or something like that? [
It's actually half that, but... that's enough!]. For me, my first experience in Canada was working in Toronto with
David Bottrill, who is a famous record producer there. And so for me, just kind of like getting to know a country that is so big, where you guys are united under the name Canada, but you are so far apart... it's something that, for me, I can't grasp that. Maybe you could explain it to me.
AM: Not likely!
MR: But let me tell you something: the other night I played a show here in Berlin. It was a relatively small show, maybe 40 or 50 people were there, in a small theatre; really nice, a great, energetic performance. And after the show, I started talking to a lady. It was a festival we had played at, and she said, in a couple of weeks she was going to play at the same festival. She was a dancer, she was doing a dance performance. And I was talking to her, and I was thinking, "Is she maybe Canadian?" Because I heard some words that sounded familiar to me in the pronunciation. And to me... It's kind of a cliche, but it was fascinating to see, as a German who started out learning the Queen's English in school, and then hanging out with Americans, and having to learn to roll my R, and stuff like that, that now my English is good enough that I can hear the subtle differences between pronunciations! Anyway, it turned out, I said, "You're from Canada, right?" And she was shocked, because she didn't think I would be able to tell.
AM: What were the giveaways? What sounds? I actually teach ESL, so I might know about this...
MR: It was the most cliched word, it was the "about": "aboot." Even though it was very subtle, I was able to tell.
AM: There are jokes about how we say "aboot," but most Canadians don't. But there's a phenomenon known as "Canadian raising" [
very ably explained here; you may also want to skip to the 3:00 mark of this video, as well -- the Youtuber's eye contact is a bit disconcerting but his diagrams are great. The short version is, it involves our raising the starting point of certain vowels before voiceless consonants. If I understand correctly, Americans will say "white" and "wide" with the same vowel, but you can hear a clear difference in how Canadians say the vowels between these two words; we raise the starting point of certain vowels before voiceless sounds. The guy in the first video offers "house" and "how's", made with a voiced "Z" sound at the end, as his example; Canadians start the first part of the vowel sound, the "ou," differently, but apparently Americans don't]. I can barely detect it, myself, so congratulations!
MR: For me, it's a new thing, to be able to tell the difference in a language that is still foreign to me. I mean, I've been speaking it for over 30 years, but still... I have to admit, I'm pretty proud!
For more information about Markus Reuter, including information on lessons, this is his website:
https://www.markusreuter.com/
People wishing to share this article can use this hyperlink:
https://alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.com/2025/11/markus-reuter-interview-part-two-of.html
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Stick Men event listing here:
https://rickshawtheatre.com/show_listings/stick-men-3/
