Name: Johannes Schmoelling
Occupation: Producer, composer
Nationality: German
Current release: Hydragate, Johannes Schmoelling's new release with S.A.W., also featuring Kurt Ader, Andreas Mertz, and Robert Waters, is out via M.i.G.

[Read our Kurt Ader interview]

If you enjoyed this Johannes Schmoelling interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Soundcloud. For updates on everything S.A.W., head over to the band's Facebook page.   

Between 1980-85, Johannes Schmoelling was a member of pioneering German electronic formation Tangerine Dream.

[Read our Tangerine Dream interview]
[Read our Tangerine Dream interview about Improvisation and Collaboration]
[Read our Paul Haslinger of Tangerine Dream interview]
[Read our Steve Jolliffe of Tangerine Dream interview]



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

In my case it is quite simple: I learned to play the piano at the age of 8, and even then I was superior to my older sister in piano playing. This talent of mine continued later with the change to church organ and later music studies, until today.

A manual instrumental training is the basis for creativity. That sounds old-fashioned, but I don't care.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what was it like to look back to the past as a source of inspiration on Iter Meum and, to a certain degree, Hydragate?

When I was about 16 years old, I took up my second organist position in a church in Wilhelmshaven, 1966.  In the years before that, during my training as an organist in Delmenhorst, I had become acquainted with the music of old masters, baroque compositions by Italian composers and, of course, the fugues and preludes of J.S. Bach.  

My friends at school in Wilhelmshaven listened intensively to English pop and blues music at that time. And so I became familiar with the popular music of the 60s in addition to the classical music of the organ literature. And in this field of tension of these two different music worlds I stand until today and draw from it also my inspiration.

It's the same with my last solo album ITER MEUM and as well as with SAW's HYDRAGATE .



Hydragate continues your long-standing collaboration with Kurt Ader. What role does sound design play for your music and how does Kurt's work in sound design (besides his obvious qualities as a producer and musician himself) concretely influence your creativity?  

Here I would also like to mention Robert Waters, with whom I have had a long collaboration since 2010, as well as Andreas Merz, whom I have known and come to appreciate since 2020. The four of us created HYDRAGATE and so each of us is equally involved in this work with his talent.

Concerning Kurt Ader, I met Kurt in June 2017 at the electronic festival Synthfest in Nantes.  Here he introduced me to his sound design specifically for the Korg Kronos 2 workstation, as well as his KApro Sound Libraries.  We quickly became close as we found great agreement in judging sounds from both of us.

Back in Germany I started the first drafts for a new solo album , so full and rich of new sounds and ideas from our meeting in Nantes. I called this solo album DIARY OF A COMMON THREAD and finished it just 4 months later after our first meeting in 2017. So inspiring were Kurt's sounds for me that I was able to finish this album so quickly.



For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? If we take a piece like “Matjora is still alive”, which has a very clear arrangement and development, what does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

Often my ideas come when I'm sitting at the piano playing, either improvising or working on a structure such as a progression of chords. This was the case, for example, with the first chord progressions to “Matjora.” They triggered something in me, something emotional, and I knew I had to work on that. Only later did the melody come.

The daily work, the daily concentration on the previously created to push it forward, that is essential for me in the creative process.

In this regard, I'd be curious whether the longer pieces from your time in Tangerine Dream, such as “Mojave Plan” were originally composed as shorter segments or whether they were always written with a more epic arrangement in mind?

The idea for “Mojave Plan” was already to compose a long epic piece to fill, as an example, a whole LP side, so about 23 min.



But I completely agree with you that we - I count myself among them, as well as other composers of the EM known to me - do not have skills in compositional terms to compose in large contexts, but instead to produce shorter pieces, in order to assemble them finalizing.

On the other hand, I listen to classical composers such as Gustav Mahler, whose movements of a symphony last more than 40 minutes or longer and sound as one, then I realize my limitations in composing with the deepest humility.  I don't even want to talk about the ability to write a score for an orchestra with all its instruments.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

No, it's quite simple. Like any craftsman or worker, I have to go to work every day, in my case to my  studio, listen to the result of the previous day and then continue to work on it.

Only in this way I can move forward and only in this way I can be open to inspiration, wherever it comes from or whether I should call it divine inspiration.

Melody, for many years, was absent from a lot of contemporary electronic music – not so for you, however. Can you tell me a bit about how you see the role of melody for your music? 

I am firmly convinced that in the development of man from his birth, the voice, the sound and the one-dimensionality, for example, the mother, when she sings to her baby to make him feel good, is the most important thing in his life.

The early Christian chants, the Gregorian chants, were monophonic. Only hundreds of years later did polyphony develop.

My criticism of contemporary early electronics (Berlin School) was precisely that the musicians could not compose melodies, but concealed their inability by calling their playing "improvised", and thus made it to be free of any kind of criticism that one demands of a melody, namely structure and recognizability - and repeatability.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control over the process or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

It is both: I need the control over the creative process as I mentioned above through daily work. But I also love the surprise of the "coincidence" that leads the project in a completely different direction, which I could not think of before, it was not presentable in my cosmos.

“Matjora is still alive” is a piece that still, almost two decades after I first heard it, deeply moves me. Does it ever happen that you are affected emotionally by your own music while writing it as well? Or is this emotional affection, as Björk once called it, “selfish”?

Music always has to do with emotions, and if it doesn't, it doesn't interest me.

As I mentioned earlier, the chord sequence, its inversions and of course also the electronically generated timbre in "Matjora ... " appealed to me from the beginning.  A feeling of longing for something lost, something past, something like that … all of this, these chords express for me and the melody as well, of course.



At that time I was reading a book by Valentin Rasputin called "Farewell to Matjora". It is about the Siberian village of Matjora, which has to give way to a dam, and is flooded. That's how I came up with the title of my piece: "Matjora is still alive."

A village can be flooded, but it still exists, not only physically but also in the minds of the inhabitants and in their hearts.  

Tell me a bit about the experience of interacting with other musicians, from Tangerine Dreamn up to S.A.W. How did the work in different groups compare and how does it compare to your solo work?

Well, working together with other musicians is first of all an enrichment. By exchanging ideas, suggestions or even hints new creative processes can be initiated. And music is created that I would never have thought of or been able to produce on my own. So it is a positive synergetic process.

However, compromises are often necessary, because in a band with several people there are often different opinions, but if there is to be a result, they must be brought together. And compromises don't have to, but can also weaken a piece of music, perhaps make it too arbitrary, make it too smooth without edges and corners.

I don't have that problem with my solo works, but there I am my own critic, I can't offload the responsibility for the result onto several shoulders.  

One of the stand-out tracks of Hydragate, to me, is “Surface of Illusion,” which has incredible sensuality in its sounds and this gentle, yet insistent melodic and rhythmic pull. There are so many details here and especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a piece like this?

The structure of "Surface Illusions" is actually classical, i.e. it started with the A part, followed by the B part, then the recapitulation as a kind of variation of the A part. This is followed by the coda, the finale.



Sometimes these finales arise logically from the composition, sometimes it is simply chance that helps to determine how a piece ends.

Speaking of endings, most of your pieces don't fade out, but have actual endings. That final chord of “Matjora is still alive” actually has a really surprising one. Can you talk a little bit about putting a full stop behind the music?

In "Matjora is still alive" I feel the last chord as a question mark rather than a period. There is a term in classical music called the fallacy. It acts as if it is over and yet it is not. That's how I see it with Matjora. The piece is over but it lingers, it remains open.

Perhaps it is this uncertainty, this emptiness that remains and that is also intended by me.

After the music has been released, many consider it fixed in time. You, however, have frequently returned to music from your past. Some of these new interpretations are more deconstructive, others, like “White Eagle” are more faithful to the recorded version. With regards to “White Eagle,” what attracts you to this piece after so many years and was there perhaps a performance which captured it best from your perspective?

It is the simplicity in the structure of the piece that attracts me to this day. It's a continuum, built like a loop with the sequences on top of which 4 harmonies alternate, repeating themselves over and over. The whole thing could also be a perpetual motion machine, once started it runs forever and yet never gets boring. In addition the simple melody … that's all it needs, nothing more.



And then this piece reminds me of the performance, how Christoph Franke and I during my time with Tangerine Dream had produced this music in his studio in Berlin-Spandau, in a night session around 1982. Each of us knew exactly what to do, each had shared his talent with the other without much explanation or discussion.

Such moments are very rare and there are only a few people with whom such a thing is possible. Christoph and I could.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Anyone can make a good cup of coffee if he is not completely stupid, right? But composing music?   

I earlier in this interview described my musical career at the beginning. This is not meant to be a blueprint, but the process of composing requires a lot of knowledge, practice and dedication over years and decades.

It's always a challenge to have a blank page in front of you and have to fill it somehow. It can be a very painful process, or sometimes just the opposite. But always you are in criticism with your ego, with yourself, having these strange dialogues.