Their new album is called No Hassle. Fittingly enough, this is always the approach that Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber have taken to making music. They’ve always refused to follow trends, not really because they hate the mainstream, but simply because they like making music their way. Richard took a few minutes of his time to discuss the concept of No Hassle and the future of electronic music.
Tosca is the name of an opera, were you guys raised on that type of music?
When we started doing music around ’94 or ’95 there was one old record lying around in the collection, which was an obscure sort of classic recording of Tosca, the Puccini opera, and for some weird reason we just chose Tosca [as our name]. We’re not actually opera fans at all. It just came up and we took it without thinking too much about it really. It was a strange sort of coincidence in a way.
So it doesn’t have any influence on your music at all?
No, it was more of an obscure thing, and I think that’s the guideline to our music anyway. We love to find accidental little snippets here and there and pick it up and put it into our music – like we did with the title of the band – things come without a logical reason sometimes. But that’s what makes it so exciting at the same time. We never know what we’re going to end up with.
What kinds of music do you enjoy that people wouldn’t expect Tosca to listen to?
Well I think we’re influenced by almost every kind of music. We worked our way through rock and blues and funk and reggae up to the more experimental stuff from Stockhausen. But I think somehow we picked up our own parts and generated our own style over the years by listening to so much music. I think the love for the music is still there. People are looking for new stuff all the time and just loving it.
When I listen to artists like you guys and Boozoo Bajou, I hear a lot of funk and reggae dub influence – much more so than other electronica artists.
I think with the dub thing… I’m not looking so much for the typical Jamaican style of dub. For me dub just means to enhance the original into something new – to give it another dimension. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the typical Jamaican dub idea.
Is there a specific direction that you intended to take for the new album?
This time we tried to get away from the concept we had for the last album, which was more song and vocal oriented. This time we went more into the ambient instrumental [direction] and just used vocals as instruments. We kept the vocals quite low. The beats this time are more percussion oriented. It’s one focus but not the main focus. We did a lot of tracks and picked out the ones which seemed to be going in this direction – that fulfilled the “No Hassle” purpose. It’s hard to explain why we went there. We just felt it, that’s why we did it.
Do you think there’s more freedom in not gearing your music toward the dancefloor crowd and just going for a more ambient sound?
Absolutely, I just talked to Rupert about this… you know I’m deejaying almost every week and I’m comparing the dance music and the uptempo energetic stuff all the time, so what we talked about is how the 4/4 rhythm and the house beats and the bass drum thing is like a format which is like a cage as well. You never leave this rhythm. With Tosca we actually try to get out of this thing, at least a little bit – to leave [the format] and generate more artistic freedom. It doesn’t matter if it works on the dancefloor, it matters if it works as an opposite trend.
I think that what’s wrong with electronic music in general is that a lot of artists go for this really minimalist approach that’s intended to only please the people in the clubs. Everything ends up sounding pretty much the same.
Well there are some people who are really able to mix different things. Dance music consists of so many things… but there are definitely some people who are better. But you’re right; most of the stuff is just sounding more or less the same. The Tosca thing never was intended to go in that direction anyway. I’m happy that we generated this little corner for ourselves. It’s good to have this freedom with it.
Where do you want electronic music to go from here? Do you think it can go anywhere that hasn’t already been explored?
I think it’s always the crossover things that make people interested. For instance, the guy from Gotan Project did some kind of country project last year which sounded interesting. It wasn’t really electronic, but he went into this whole sort of country thing to explore some new fields. I think a cool step to take would be to either go completely ambient – without beats – or to go into another field and combine it with our style. Like maybe to go a little bit more into the independent music scene with more blues influenced themes. We’re really concerned with the electronic music scene, but I think at this point we would like to explore something that we really haven’t done before – like to go there and combine it with some more dub oriented things… something like that. Something has to change now because [everything is] tending to repeat itself.
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