Four years ago, bassist Beate Wiesinger released Aliens On Board, the first album with her band E C H O Boomer. Since then, her work with projects like Duo 4675 and Luchs have made her a fixture in the Austrian jazz scene. This summer saw the release of E C H O Boomer’s second album on JazzWerkstatt Records, Timeless Warrior; Michael Ternai recently sat down with Beate Wiesinger to talk about inspiration, her love of exploration, and the future.
E C H O Boomer is musically different in many ways from your other projects. What’s the idea behind it?
Beate Wiesinger: The basic idea is that anything that captivates me, that moves me, is allowed. There are different ways to write music: one way is to focus on one style and really get deeply into it. Another way – the one that E C H O Boomer takes – is not limiting yourself to a particular style, but to combine elements from various different areas and try to connect them, ideally in a way that hasn’t been done before.
It’s difficult to put a label on the music; the sound is made up of elements from a lot of different genres. How do you create a piece?
Beate Wiesinger: One part of it is that I’m always searching for melodies and motives that are catchy, at least to me personally – things that offer me a starting point. On the other hand, I’m particularly interested in rhythm. I usually start with a basic riff or idea, from which I develop any number of variations. And then I work on whichever variation interests me the most.
“THe musicians aren’T replaceable”
The great thing about the new album is that, though the individual songs are very diverse, everything sounds like part of a whole. You don’t constantly feel like it’s a new album at the beginning of every song.
Beate Wiesinger: I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I thought carefully about who I wanted to work with on this project. You have your own signature style when you write, of course, but what the other members bring to the band is just as important; they have just as much to do with it.
Would you say that E C H O Boomer is a kind of musical playground for the others as well?
Beate Wiesinger: E C H O Boomer’s goal is to give musicians the opportunity to express themselves, secure in the knowledge that they aren’t replaceable. Just like in a relationship, I think people need the feeling that they’re part of a unit, that they’re working together. There are stumbling blocks here and there, of course – but that feeling of belonging together should be the motivation. And I hope very much that the people I work with feel the same.
Does that mean that when you’re writing the pieces, you never know what direction they’re going to go?
Beate Wiesinger: I left a lot open with about half the pieces on this album – probably to the dismay of our producer, David Furrer. Working like that was probably really on the edge. (laughs) For one piece there was just a basic fragment, and I let everyone improvise to it and then tried to build a piece out of the material. Of course, there’s a danger working like that, that you think, “oh my God, this is going in a terrible direction.” But on the other hand, you arrive at totally different ideas and you can highlight the musicians’ personal styles more. And sometimes you just need a process like that to get to the essence of a piece. Naturally, there were other pieces where the idea was more concrete.
“It’s usually my love of exploration”
What are your main sources of inspiration for the pieces you write?
Beate Wiesinger: That’s a good question. They vary a lot. At the moment, I feel like I need more external stimulation to bring something out of myself. But at other times I don’t need that at all. Naturally, something can be inspired by a feeling like sorrow, but for me it’s often an interest in specific musical things, like working with a specific rhythm or specific sounds that give me ideas. It’s only rarely that emotional processes inspire me to write – it’s usually my love of exploration.
E C H O Boomer is your “poppiest” project, in any case.
Beate Wiesinger: Definitely. With E C H O Boomer, anything can happen; that openness is very important to me. When you study jazz like I did, there’s a danger that you remain trapped in the jazz perspective. My roots aren’t actually so much in jazz, though. When I was younger, pop music was always a big part of me, just like improvisation. I see improvisation as the possibility of looking at things from different perspectives. For instance, a piece of pop music doesn’t always have to be structured the same way; you can break out of the form, dissect it. I’m fascinating by the way things aren’t always carved in stone.
You’re active in several bands. I’m guessing E C H O Boomer is the one closest to your heart?
Beate Wiesinger: In a perfect world, E C H O Boomer would be my only project and I’d be able to put all my time into it. I hope I get there someday. The structural conditions we musicians have to work with at the moment make that impossible. We all have multiple projects running at the same time, which of course requires very precise planning – and it means that less time remains to really devote oneself creatively to a single project. In the long term, I think it’s totally counterproductive. One of my most important realizations while making [Timeless Warrior] was how I actually want to work in the future. The project started during the COVID pandemic. It got interrupted over and over because we couldn’t record together, and everyone’s schedule was already full for the next year. I’m asking myself the very important question of how I want to realize my ideas in the future, how I want to work. The processes that develop while you’re working are actually the best part. The outcome is cool, too, but I’m just as interested in the processes for their own sake.
Michael Ternai, translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger